Superlative

EPISODE FOUR

"Lots of friendly faces?" She asked, as she received the flute of champagne Knox handed her.

"Roughly ten or so. There might be one you'd be particularly surprised to see here."

"Surprise me, then."

Knox threw a pointed look at the table the navy suited man kept giving his own share of furtive looks at, and Core discreetly followed Knox's line of sight. She wasn't sure if she was surprised that Dawn was there, or irritated with Eclipse for sending the girl in the first place. Dawn never usually did field work, even if she was Eclipse's assistant of sorts. It was usually intel that Dawn was in-charge of, and Core's gut twisted with what her presence here implied.

Knox pulled his cellphone out, glancing at the transparent glass for any notification of the bomb's activation. There was thankfully none, just the usual time blinking at him as if floating within the glass, but that might change all too soon. The switch to activate the bomb would have to send a signal in order to detonate it, and when that happens his phone would pick up on it. He had asked Sky to modify his phone to serve purposes like this, as Core often got herself into situations that involved remote explosives. His phone was now hard-wired to the same signal patterns explosives carried, and he thanked his lucky stars he had the foresight to ask Sky to engineer the thing ages ago.

And Core had even laughed at his "paranoia." Psh.

He was still watching Dawn from the corner of his eye, and he noticed the beaded purse the girl kept clutched close to her. It wouldn't have seemed so unusual, except she was holding it like...well, like the thing inside it was extremely fragile and about to blow up in her face. She held it by the edges, drawn to her lap but held away from her torso. Knox shot the navy suited man another glance, watching him rest his weight on one leg as a hand rested over a pants pocket.

Then it all clicked, and Knox was on the move. Time was of absolute essence.

"Her purse is quite lovely," Knox told Core, head titling towards Dawn's direction. He downed his own glass of champagne, setting it back down on the bar with a flourish. "I might just ask her where she got it."

Core nodded, acknowledging what he was really trying to say: Dawn had the bomb. Forcing a smile on her lips, Core clenched her champagne tighter. "I'll just go powder my nose, then."

Divide and conquer — Knox will handle the girl with the bomb, and Core will handle the man with the switch.

★ ★ ★

{ THE CONFEDERATE | DIVISION ALPHA, THE GRANDE HALL | COORDINATES: X-5182 Y-2348 | 6TH SUN, 10TH MOON | 8:16PM }

She just had one shot.

Make-or-break situations would have sent a normal person into a nervous wreck, but Core lived for that shot of adrenaline that got her focusing on one goal. Her mind cleared of anything else but her duty, and it got her thinking with startling clarity. She had a plan, and it was time to set it into motion.

Before it was too late.

The tricky part was that she wasn't on the Galactic Army's side, and she wasn't on the rebels' side, either. She was a neutral party that had her own sets of rules and ideas of justice. The rebels just kind of inducted her as an unofficial member out of respect for Nightshade's abilities, while the Galactic Army obviously detested her like a criminal for all her meddling.

While the army had a special troop devoted to hunting down rebels, it's been a while since the group had any breakthroughs or leads; that's why this extreme effort on Eclipse's part was both worrying and frightening.

She was slowly making her way to their suspect, walking purposefully as if she were headed to the door he was standing beside. She had been in this ballroom enough times through the years to know that the door opened to a narrow hallway that eventually led to the powder rooms. Core passed people who smiled and greeted her, to which she did the same to them, even adding a nod of the head or a raised champagne glass to their direction in order to acknowledge their presence. Nobody stopped her (which she was extremely grateful for), and when she was just seven steps away from her target, time seemed to slow down as her mind whirled into overdrive.