It had to have worn down by now, and he sincerely hoped it wasn’t completely gone, in which case it would take a ton of energy to get back up again, energy he really didn’t have yet. He looked over at Terk, and, although the energy humming around him was steady and pulsing strong, it wasn’t as full up as it normally was. Damon was getting worried about Terk expending too much energy in too many different directions and, therefore, being ineffective in all of them. But Damon also knew that talking to Terk wouldn’t do any good.
“He’s unnerving like that, isn’t he?” she asked.
Damon looked over at her to see she had pushed her chair back, stood, and was even now studying their boss. “It is, but it’s also reassuring in a way.”
She looked at him. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
“Well, you should, because he’s very good at what he does, and this is his ‘into emergency mode’ look.”
“Into emergency mode?” she repeated, shaking her head. “Somehow it doesn’t quite seem that way.”
“Ah, it’s just a paradigm shift,” he explained. “Look at what’s happened to us. He’s just trying to protect as many people as he can.”
“And how does he make that decision?” she asked quietly.
“Unfortunately it’ll be based on expediency. Who he can save and who is too far gone, and it’s a decision that I don’t wish on him. Chances are, he won’t break down and make a decision. He’ll try to keep everybody alive. But he isn’t God, and he can’t make those determinations.”
“It’s not fair though, is it?” she murmured.
“Not at all, but what will we do about it?”
The coffee had his mind churning with all that had just happened and the information she dug up. It was actually massive. He stood to stretch a bit, when she made a crow of satisfaction.
“Got that little bugger trying to hack into my system.”
“Did you find out who it was?”
“Nope, but I found his digital signature, and I’m tracking it back,” she said. “And I’ve reopened access to the government databases.”
“Is that smart?”
“Smart or not,” she determined, “we need the information that I can get out of those sources. Even just like this right now, it’s important. We wouldn’t have to access this if we didn’t find him in there.”
“In other words, we need it.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “we have no chance without it.”
“How long do we think it’ll be before you track this guy back?”
“I don’t know. He’s sophisticated, and he’s good, so it could take me days.”
“Which is not what we want to hear.”
“Nope, we don’t.”
“What worries me is if this hacker guy is just another hired gun, like our killer Peter, or if this hacker is part of their team. Like you are part of ours. Kinda makes me think they really are as good as we are.”
She patted his hand, then lowered her voice quite a bit and added, “When I had time during the night, I also did a little more.”
“Like what?”
She shot him a look. “I started hunting for Celia.”
“And?” he asked, his voice sharp but low. “Anything?”
She shook her head. “No, so either she’s operating under a different name, a nickname even, or a code name that she was given maybe.”
“It’s the name Terk used for her.”
“So, maybe that’s the name she thinks of herself as—potentially.” Tasha raised an eyebrow. “There are a lot of reasons I’m not finding the name. Anyway, so far I haven’t tracked down who she is or where she’s from.”
“According to Ice, Celia’s fingerprints aren’t showing any hits either.”
“So, where the hell did this woman come from?” Tasha shook her head as she yawned. “It’s pretty strange that, A, these bad guys found her. B, that they would use her. And, C, that she was even there for them to snatch.”
“But we also don’t know anything about it, so we have to reserve judgment,” Damon noted.
“Like hell,” she replied almost viciously. “We need answers, and we need them now.”
After a moment, he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Sure.” She shrugged. “But I didn’t show you something else that I think you need to know about.”
He looked at her in surprise.
She nodded got up, walked over to his side. “Take a look at this.”
Her shirt was covered in blood.
“Where’s that coming from?” he asked, immediately lifting her shirt, checking to see where her wound was.
“It’s not mine,” she said. She turned to look at Terk. “It must have come from him, when he had his arm wrapped around me, while he was trying to keep me under his shield of protection,” she murmured. “That has to be the way I got it.”
He stared at her in shock, then turned to look at Terk. Even as he did, Terk’s eyes opened wide. “Terk,” he demanded, “are you hurt?
“It’s nothing,” he said in a low tone.
“Jesus, man. You know that even the smallest of injuries can end up being a huge headache for us.”
“It could be,” Terk agreed, “but it isn’t this time.” Slowly, and using the wall for assistance, he pushed himself vertical and yawned at the same time. “I’ll sure be glad when this is over, but I don’t think it’ll happen anytime soon.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” Tasha cried out. “I’ve worked all night trying to find information.”
“Yeah, you were supposed to let us know when it was time to change the watch,” he noted. “That’s the problem with having green people on watch. They don’t follow the same rules the rest of us do.” Terk glared at her.
She glared right back. “No,” she argued. “You’re burnt out. You were injured, and you needed to be looked after. So, whether you like it or not, tough guy, that’s what I was doing.”
Damon almost choked when he listened to her reaming out Terk. Very few people had the balls to do so, but she was apparently one of them, and Damon appreciated that. He would go toe to toe with Terk himself, but sometimes it just wasn’t worth the fight. “Let me check out the wound,” Damon said, walking over to stand in front of Terk. Damon put his hands on his hips and glared at his friend.
“It’s nothing really. Just forget it.”
“Oh, hell no. None of that.”
Terk sighed. “You’re really making a fuss over nothing.”
“If it was nothing,” Damon noted, “you wouldn’t be arguing about letting me look at it.”
At that, Terk glared and lifted his shirt, so they could see a long funky scrape along his side.
“How’d you get that?” he asked.
Terk shrugged. “Honestly, I’m not sure.”
“That’s actually a little more concerning,” Damon said, as he pulled the shirt back up and glanced at it. “It needs cleaning and will probably be okay, but what I don’t get is where you got it from. It looks like you scraped against something at a hard angle.”