Gyrus

Chapter Eleven: The Raid

After discussing a basic plan of action, we fell quiet and considered our individual roles. It was not going to be easy, pulling off this plan with just three people. I was more concerned about the reliability of my team members. Wong did not particularly seem to care about Alyssa's wellbeing and Zoe had personal motives and could not be trusted. Wong eventually saved me the hassle of asking what her back story was.

When she was thirteen, she'd run away from her great uncle and his wife who she'd gone to live with after her parents passed. She joined a band of teenage runaways who travelled around looking for work to pass the time till they turned legal and couldn't be shipped of into the foster care system. Over the next four years, she travelled the country to worker towns where they let teenagers work without a social security card. Her great uncle and his wife were in their fifties and rich enough to look for her if they wanted and she didn't want to take any risk of being found, so she tried to stay off the grid: no passports and no computers. She came to Fortuna every year at the end of spring when they had their first range tomato harvests. Fortuna had a special section of canned goods that were homegrown and sold at a higher price than the batches that were canned from tomatoes harvested elsewhere. The work was tough, the harvest season was hot and they were paid fixed wages as opposed to being paid for the weight of tomatoes she brought in each day. So she could moose around and still get a decent pay off.

She'd been taken on her last day of harvest picking. Some guy she'd never seen called her away from the fields at the edge of town and told her someone had asked to see her at the cannery's personnel office. She followed him and he took her through a deserted street and after she turned her attention to a couple groping behind a trash can, he socked her in the eye with his fist. The force of the blow took her straight to the ground where a swiftly placed kick knocked her lights out. I grimaced, and then I remembered how she'd managed to render Father Roberto unconscious. Whoever the guy was, he'd taken no chances. Maybe he'd been told about her gifts. She'd met the girl and the man we'd rescued when she came to. They were collateral damage; they'd seen the man throw her unconscious body into the back of a truck and he'd had taken them at gunpoint to avoid complications.

Her story seemed plausible, though I noticed the parts where she subtly omitted telling us her surname or grand uncle and aunt's names or where they lived. Most importantly she'd completely danced around telling Wong and I about her telekinesis. Didn't make me all too eager to put my trust or our money in her hands. I took note of the information gathered so far. We knew that the people who'd taken Alyssa considered her valuable enough to use hired guards to keep her and other people like her hostage. We knew that they'd taken Zoe from Fortuna, which indicated that they were moving around. We also knew we needed a proper plan if we were to get into the cannery and out in one piece. We decided to wait until the day I'd seen in the vision, at least we were sure that no matter how we screwed things up, one of us would end up in that office. All we needed to do was wait.

Wong grumbled through the morning of the first day, peppering me with questions about St. Andria and groaning that he suspected Father Roberto was probably outside our hotel room in an unmarked van waiting for us to show ourselves, as he finished bar after bar after bar of chocolate. It infuriated me that he did that with absolute disregard for the ration system we had made so that the fast food would last us the three days and for the fact that I'd bought them from my pocket money. Zoe on the other hand was very quiet for the first day, and spent her time going through the 600-page marine guide manual Wong had insisted on bringing along. I found that to be really weird, but said nothing about it.

On the second day she woke up and announced she intended on completely disregarding our decision to stay indoors and avoiding observers. She had a quick bath, pulled on one of my jeans and slipped out of the motel to do some 'research', ignoring all my protests. My mouth was in my heart the entire fours she spent outside doing only God knows what, while Wong tossed about in bed complaining about the stomach ache he'd eaten his way to the day before and stinking up our small room with his frequent visits to the bathroom en-suite. He was on one of his more pungent bathroom trips when the door opened and Zoe walked in, carrying a small carrier satchel filled with papers and chocolate bars.