Two weeks later, we were in Cairo. Within the two weeks, Scott and his assistants continued testing, continued picking our brains apart. Which continued to give me pounding headaches and ill feelings. We worked our way through the crowded, narrow streets of vendors, tourists, and natives as we searched out our target, who, in an amusing way, was here on holiday.
I strolled along behind Alex, trying not to have a claustrophobia induced panic attack, while Jai followed behind me. Alex looked around, behind him, behind me, until he grabbed my arm and tugged me up beside him so he could talk quietly and still have me hear him.
He dipped his head so that his mouth was an inch away from my ear. "Nothing like Ghent, huh?"
Ghent was a beautiful city in Belgium, one that made me feel two inches tall and nearly as insignificant. It was marvelous, from the way boats floated along the waterways that ran between the buildings to the ancient-looking buildings themselves.
Although I would have loved to stop and sight see, we didn't have time. As much as I tried not to think of Ghent and the phantom pain that shot through my thigh as we walked through Cairo, I couldn't help but run back though the night in five seconds flat.
*****************
"You alright?" Alex whispered behind him.
I tried to stomach the nausea that had come with the brain monitoring, along with the headaches and sour moods. When Alex spoke to me, it took a while to figure out what he said. "Yeah." I stared at his silhouette in the dark light of the old, grand church we were in. Ghent was full of old Roman Catholic churches, so it took a while to find the right one.
The green stain glass windows cast an eerie glow on Alex as he passed in front of them, one by one, pistol raised. "That yeah doesn't sound very convincing. Need to take a break?" he whispered again.
I stifled a laugh. "You're kidding, right? We don't have time."
"I'd rather you take a break than puke all over me."
"I'm fine."
I pictured him nodding in frustration as we turned the corner in a large hallway, one that had religious paintings of naked people under apple trees with little angels flying around their heads.
"Would you like to come back here one day?" I asked him, sweeping my gun behind me to scan the area as we advanced. An unsettling thought crossed my mind. "Do you even know where you're going?"
"Maybe. What makes you ask? And yes."
"I don't know," I whispered back. "It'd be nice to have a vacation, you know? We shouldn't have to see the world this way. And good. Because I don't know where the heck we are."
He seemed to take my words in as we were ambushed. It was the first time we had ever been caught off guard, but what could we say? We were trained well.
A bullet grazed my right thigh. It happened so unexpectedly that I didn't have time to scream or yelp or do anything to let the world know that I was in pain.
It didn't matter. The fact that I'd been hit, or that Alex's eyes got wide when he saw the oddly high amount of blood seeping through my black pants, making the fabric even darker in the dark hallway we'd retreated around.
"I'm... fine!" I gasped. And that was the truth. I could tell from the location of the pain, how it was localized, that the bullet hadn't lodged itself in my leg. Even more assuring, I pulled the tight fabric away from my leg to show Alex where the bullet had torn it in a long line as it made its pass.
He nodded vigorously, trying to get his bearings.
The shooting hadn't stopped in the minute it took to assess my leg or the damage. I brought my bloody hands back up, pointing my gun at the hallway we'd came from, as Alex did the same. We listened to the gunfire as we thought.
"Why are they still shooting?" Alex asked me as he pushed me down the hallway, away from the gunfire.
"What are you doing?" I asked him, stopping, pushing my back against his hand. He brought his hand away from me to stare at me in annoyance.
"We can't take them all!" he harshly whispered. "We have to retreat for now." He put his hand back on my back and roughly pushed me forward when he saw the look of understanding on my face. He was right.
I felt his hand ease up as he looked back, which made me look back with him. No one was coming. No one followed us. Shots still rang out.
We turned another corner into a hallway with several large, dark wooden doors. Alex went past me and attempted to open one with no luck. They all ended up being locked.
"Shit," Alex mumbled when he tried the last door.
I put a hand on his arm and gently shoved him out of the way, then knelt down to inspect the door handle and the small hole under it. Then I reached up to my head and patted around, finding one of a few bobby pins I had to use to hold a few curls back into my long pony tail.
"Ahh," Alex whistled, amused. "See, this is why I like doing missions with you."
"Really?" I raised my eyebrows as I shoved the pin through the hole and wiggled it around. We had a few lessons here and there on useful skills like this: rock climbing, fighting tactics while submerged in water, and, thank the good Lord above, picking locks with hair accessories.
Alex answered me. "Well, that's not the only reason—"
I heard a click and the lock came apart. We pushed through, closing the door behind us and locking it again. I turned around and nearly fell. Not because I was losing blood, but because the room was so huge. At least two stories tall, way bigger than the hallways we'd went through. And books were stacked to the ceiling where a large circular sky light let in the rays of a full moon.
"Whoa," I said, moving forward to get myself lost in the thousands and thousands of books.
Alex caught my arm and, instead of spinning me around to him, walked in front of me so I couldn't get pulled any further to the mass amount of literature. "We need to get your leg looked at, first."
Alex planted me on top of a desk at the far end of the room and turned on a lamp so that he could see my wound better. When I saw the dark patch of blood in full light, I had to take another guess at the amount of blood I'd lost. Now, the patch was bigger, about the size of a football and running down towards my boot. The adrenaline pumping through me was enough to keep me focused on not passing out or going into panic mode.
Alex's face also kept me leveled out, swimming instead of sinking. He was absolutely confused.
"This is also why you're the medic," he said. "I think I might need to take your pants off," he said in a serious tone.
"I think not." I smiled at his plan while my mind went into overdrive. "I need a piece of clothing. Anything just to wrap around it an stop the bleeding," I told him as I pressed a hand harder into the wound, sending a sharp pain shooting through my hip. Thankfully, Alex had a shirt in his backpack, along with a few extra guns and knives.
A few hours later we'd be getting back on the plane empty handed, calling into Toronto to speak with Scott about our failed mission.
I lifted one of the armrests of the chair Alex sat in and pushed my good hip into his, forcing him to scoot over as Scott clicked onto the line.
His fresh face appeared on the computer screen in front of us, sitting on the table along with a few bottles of water we'd snagged and a first aid kit. I'd convinced Alex that my leg could wait a few minutes until we let Scott know about the status of the mission. Neither of us had wanted to video call him, but I honestly didn't know which would be more painful, telling Scott or having Alex try and stitch up my wound.
"You two look like hell," Scott immediately commented. I saw our faces on the bottom right hand corner of the screen and took a closer look. Our hair was damp with still lingering sweat, and our faces were both marked with soot and my blood. Alex's eyes looked wild, while mine were ringed with black from the blood that had left my system.
"Feel like it, too," I muttered.
"Something happened tonight during our mission to get the kid, Ossi. At first, we thought we were ambushed," Alex said slowly, his words laced with care. "It turns out that Ossi had protectors. Others knew what he was and what he was capable of, apparently."
"A seventeen year old had protectors..." Scott mused. I couldn't tell if he believed us or not, so I cut in.
"Yes. Maybe it was a religious thing, since they were keeping him in the church like sources told us. At any rate, we weren't being ambushed. As soon as we heard multiple gun shots, we retreated a little ways to rethink our plan of action."
"Multiple shots?"
"At least five, sir," Alex confirmed. "If we went further, we'd have gotten killed, or hurt worse."
"Worse?" Scott questioned, fear and surprised slightly evident in his voice.
"El was grazed on the leg by a bullet. We're going to patch her up as soon as we get off here," Alex told him.
"Alright. We'll make this quick, then. What happened after you retreated?"
I spoke up, suddenly weak. "When we heard the gunfire stop, we advanced again. The boy's protectors were on the ground, dead. The boy was no where to be found. We searched the area with no luck of finding him."
Alex nodded, "We think another party came and got the boy. That's the only explanation. We walked in on them slaughtering the boy's protectors."
Scott took in our words, stroking his chin. "Makes sense. Who cares, right now? Alex, get her patched up, okay? We'll figure it out when you two get back. Please, don't beat yourselves up. You two are excellent trackers and fighters, and you did what you had to do. It's my fault for not sending more people with you to match the number of enemies you found yourself with."
With that and a few uneasy goodbyes, Scott signed off, leaving Alex and I empty and confused.
"It's not your fault," I told him as we went into the bathroom, Alex carrying the first aid kit behind me.
"What?" he asked. "I didn't even say anything."
"You didn't have to. I can see it on your face, my friend."
"Let's not talk about it," he suggested. I set my jaw, still annoyed that he kept his feelings bottled up from me. "Up on the counter. Try to get your leg over the sink."
I nodded and undone the fabric tied around my leg then peeled my pants off while he set up the supplies on the counter. Blood began trickling down my leg again. When Alex looked back at me, his eyes didn't go as wide as they would have if I weren't wearing black Spandex undershorts.
"What?" I asked. "Everything's gotta stay in place. I hope you don't expect me to take these off too, buddy."
"Shut your injured ass up and sit on the counter," he laughed, a tad uncomfortable.
I sat on the counter, one leg hanging off, as I put my injured leg over the sink. "I can do this, if you want."
He shook his head, wiping a wet rag over the areas of dried blood. "I need the practice."
"In case?"
"In case you're not on a mission with me and we have no healing hands."
I laughed. My laughs soon turned into coughs, which made me dizzy. I put a hand up to my head, as if that action alone would stop the pounding.
Part of me didn't want to think about not not being on a mission with him, or him not being with me. We'd come to be partners, of sorts. We had each other's backs and we trusted each other, something that couldn't be said for some of the others back in Toronto. We were a good team, Alex and I.
"Okay?" he asked.
"Yeah." I suddenly wanted to change the subject. "So who do you think Scott'll send on these dicey missions with us from now on?"
"Honestly? I know you're not going to like the sound of this," he said, making me nervous, "but I think he'll send Jai with us."
I could feel the frown on my face. "Really? What about Deebo or Enzo? They're fully capable—"
He scoffed. "You're kidding, right?" He shook his head while he let a few drops of water slide into my wound and then out and down the sink, the once clear water now tinged with red as it disappeared into the drain. "Deebo can't be serious to save his life, and Enz... Well, Enz just needs some more practice. On getting meaner."
"I'm not mean," I pointed out, "and I do just damn fine."
"Give me a break. You're as nice as a kitten, sure, but when it comes time to make it or break it, you know where your priorities are and you know how to get the job done. And it isn't done with a pretty face."
"So, you're saying I'm mean and ugly?"
"Keep it up and I'll clean your wound with alcohol."
I hummed in disagreement. "At least if Jai comes along, he might get shot instead of me."
Alex stopped what he was doing and looked at me. "You don't mean that."
I thought about it for a moment and then felt my rising anger towards the new guy drop again. "Yeah, you're right."
Alex, of course, would be right.