Rebel - A Snowverse Novel

Chapter Seven - Gus

Alex wasted no time putting her plan into motion, dragging Gus across country borders, to the location of the base.

Or at least, the rough area where it should be...

That was the thing about the lost bases, no one knew their exact location. It had been a security measure, to make sure that if one was compromised, the others wouldn't be. Back before the timeline had been changed so that none of the Enhanced outside of the shielded facilities had ever existed, there had been communication between the bases that made knowing their exact location irrelevant.

But that communication had been decimated when the timeline had changed, decades ago. Gus and Alex had been barely babies when the war had ended, growing up in secrecy so that no magical being would ever find out that any of their number had survived.

They had been weapons for a war that had no longer happened.

A war that they were more than happy to leave behind in the alternate timeline. For the older Enhanced, however, it seemed to be a war that they wanted nothing more than to fight again.

Without knowing where the base was, the scouts sent by the Enhanced would have to find somewhere to set themselves up, as near to where they suspected the location to be as possible.

Usually, that meant a hotel. Inconspicuous, but still defensible.

Each generation of Enhanced was improved over the last, meaning that even though they were young, Alex being the top of their age group meant that she was considered the peak of what genetic enhancements could achieve. So, when they had needed someone to find the lost British base, Alex had been chosen, despite having never been out of their home base before.

That had been how she had met Freya.

Thanks to that experience, she knew the protocol well, and they quickly narrowed down the possible locations for the scouts to be working from.

They went to each hotel in turn, with Alex keeping an eye out to make sure no one spotted them, while Gus hacked into the security cameras.

The Enhanced were trained to avoid cameras, but in some instances, they couldn't be avoided. Not to mention, they were mostly trained to avoid facial recognition software, not someone manually looking through the footage for them.

"Found them," Gus said after half an hour searching through the footage from the third hotel.

"How many?" Alex asked.

"Two."

Alex smiled. "That's great. We should be more than able to deal with them if we're facing only two of them and we have the element of surprise on our side."

Gus frowned. "I'm not so optimistic," he admitted. "After you betrayed them, the Enhanced stopped sending out younger members as scouts. I recognise these two. See, that's Effie. She used to train us just after we hit puberty, remember? And with her is Jay, who was one of the top tech experts at our base. Do you honestly think we stand a chance against the people who taught us everything we know?"

Alex shook her head. "Not everything we know. Not anymore. They may have trained us as children, but we have real-world experience on our side now."

"So do they. And they are decades ahead of us. Not to mention, most of their experience is from an actual war, whereas ours is just from messing around playing spy."

Alex glared back at him. "If you think I earned these scars from just playing-"

"I'm not trying to invalidate what happened to you," Gus told her, shaking his head. Why was she being so stubborn? Did she have a death wish? "Facing your monitor like that must have been hard, but you didn't win that fight, Alex. Freya won it for you. And how many fights did you get in before that? I saw the reports, you fought a couple of Demons. Demons who had no way of anticipating an Enhanced soldier even still existing. I would be willing to bet that you won those fights by nullifying their magic to catch them off-guard. None of those Demons had probably ever had to fight without their magic before. But that tactic won't work against the other Enhanced, Alex. They've never had magic to rely upon; they have the same enhancements as us."

Alex shook her head. "Not the same. They had decades to perfect the genetic code between them and us."

"They did, but I don't think it will make that much difference in a fight. I don't think it will make up for our lack of experience."

"I do. I think you're underestimating us. If we catch them off-guard, we should be able to take care of them before they even realise what's happening."

Gus sighed. "I still think this is a bad idea."

"Your objection has been noted. You still coming?"

Gus sighed again before reluctantly nodding. "Yeah, I've got your back."