Work Text:
Right after Children
“We’re being sent to Canada?!” Cara stared at the screen in shock. Canada was one of the countries that did not support WCKD and was very vocal and adamant about it. The group had gotten back to their mission briefing room and Jay had uploaded the information from the USB Teressa had given them. It had at first seemed like a normal clean-up mission. A WCKD employee had fallen into the wrong hands, and the Zetas were being sent in to take care of the problem before it got too bad. It was nothing they hadn’t done before. But sent into hostile territory? Been done. The Right Arm and other rebel groups were rather a pain to deal with. But being sent into a hostile nation ? This was new.
Awinita sat a little tense in her chair. It’d been two years, but she was still experiencing nightmares from their first mission. Any mission that involved death or killing put the young girl on edge. Jay was sitting next to the 8-year-old, letting her squeeze his hand. Natalia just glared at the screen. Cara looked around the room, just in time to see Thomas and Teresa walk through the door, Janson behind them. When Thomas and Teresa looked at the screen, neither looked happy about what they read.
“You leave in three minutes.” Janson didn’t seem to care about their reactions. “Get ready.”
Cara wanted to protest on behalf of all of them, but she knew better. All four stood up and walked to the preparation room. Awinita was a little slower than everyone else, but Cara stuck close to her. After a couple of months of playing around and working with the doctors in the lab, Cara managed to come up with a drug to help reduce the effect of trauma. It was able to target specific areas of the brain that dealt with trauma and suppressed them, so one could more easily go about life. Awinita was both a test subject and the only “patient” to ever use it. It seemed to do its job. Awinita didn’t seem as bothered after she took it, and one pill lasted for about three hours. Jay and Natalia moved to the weapons rack, looking over the mission details again, and deciding what would be best. Awinita’s tech bench was set up near Cara’s medical table, so the medic could keep a close eye on her. Picking up a bottle labeled ‘APTSDP’, the redhead glanced at Awinita before setting it a little off to the side and gathering any other medical things she might need into a bag. Awinita had finished all that she needed to, having downloaded any programs to shut down certain things like cameras or automatic doors they might encounter onto a separate USB. Now it seemed she was just mindlessly clicking through other programs on her computer. Cara picked up the pill bottle she’d set aside and grabbed a water bottle before approaching the girl. “We leave in a minute. Do you want to take one now, or wait till we get to Canada?”
Awinita looked between her and the bottle in her hands. ‘APTSDP’, pills made especially for her. To help ‘fix’ her for three hours at a time. Cara could see the looks in her eyes. She’d seen it when she’d introduced the pills to Awi for the first time. Cara knelt down in front of her friend and faux-daughter. “You are not broken, you do not need to be ‘fixed’. These are just to help you focus until we can get you proper help, or it goes away on its own.”
Jay and Natalia pretended they didn’t hear anything and went about their businesses, but Cara knew they’d say the same things, and they had said the same things on multiple occasions in the last two years. Awinita seemed a little less nervous and sad as she stared at the bottle. “I’ll take it once we get there.”
Cara smiled and stood up, putting both the water and pills in her medical bag. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”
Awinita nodded and stood up to help the others. Once everything was gathered, they made the journey to the hangar. Thomas and Teresa were waiting at the base of a Burg entrance ramp. Clearly, they were miffed at Janson who stood there with a smug smile. Jay led the line into the vehicle, not sparing Rat Man even a glance, but sending a nervous smile to Thomas and Teressa. Once the burg lifted off, all four settled down into silence. Five hours until they touched back down. Mutters from the pilots let the kids know the adults didn’t only disagree with right into Canada instead of touching down at the borders. Sending children , no matter how good they were, was also a source of displeasure. But that was the point of Project Zeta, wasn’t it? No one would expect kids to be doing all these things. And they were under orders to leave no witnesses if they were spotted carrying out their mission. Cara and Jay were sitting across from Natalia and Awinita. Natalia had put one of her hands in the other’s lap, letting the older fidget with it, while the mechanic just stared off into space. Cara shifted so that she was lying down with her head in Jay’s lap. Having been surrounded by girls for as far back as he could remember, Jay had been quick to ask Teressa and the adult women around him how to braid, style, and just in general do hair, as Cara, Awinita, and Natalia were always putting theirs up for missions or training if it wasn’t cut short. Quickly getting to work, Jay had put all three’s hair into braids by the time they touched down in the woods surrounding Fort Hope in Ontario, Canada.
Canada hadn’t been affected badly by the sun, given that most of the country was uninhabited anyway. Eabamet Lake, of which Fort Hope occupied some of the shoreline, had dried up significantly, now only a small pond. The woods where they’d landed the burg were nothing but a large field of barren tree trunks that appeared as if they would fall over in even the smallest of breezes. As the four kids started packing up, the pilots informed them they had only six hours to finish up. As soon as Awinita took the pill from Cara, the clock started.
It took them only a ten-minute walk to exit the woods and reach the border of the town. It looked as decimated as the area surrounding the complex back home. As the Zetas ducked behind a rock, Jay watched the guards pacing the border. It’d be tricky to get past them, and the longer it took, the less time they had to complete the mission. Natalia seemed to read his thoughts, as she pulled out a small flash grenade and threw as far as she could off to their left. Voices rang out, and feet could be heard running past to check out the flash. Quickly, the four jumped from behind the rock and dashed for the closest hiding place in the town.
Fort Hope Airport. That’s where their target was being kept. Some low-level maintenance worker from a facility in Cuba had caught one too many glimpses of severely classified information. The facility would be shut down, and reorganized, but the maintenance worker was to be killed regardless. WCKD didn’t even seem to know how he got from Cuba to Canada. Or if they did, apparently there wasn’t a need to inform the Zetas in case it might change the nature of the mission.
Not many people seemed to live in the town, making it easier to get to where the Zetas needed to be without worrying too much about hiding places. A simple one-room building with sun-bleached blue paint made up the majority of the so-called airport. Even more strange. What was a maintenance worker from Cuba doing being held hostage in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Ontario? Obviously, Janson and most likely Ava didn’t seem to think this information was important, but something in Cara told her it was. That there was more to this mission than met the eye. No guards stood at the door, and the man they were looking for was tied to a chair in the middle of the room, mumbling to himself in Spanish. There were no cameras, and a quick sweep of the room showed there were no traps.
Full well knowing it was still dangerous, but wanting to get back as soon as possible, Cara led the team into the building and straight to the target. When he heard their footsteps, his mutterings stopped but a new fear entered his eyes. Cara pulled out a bottle of cyanide pills and placed one in her hand as Jay pulled out a pistol. “We have maybe a minute to get out of here before we’re surrounded.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice, Jay.” Cara rolled her eyes and walked behind the man, wrenching his head back and holding his mouth open. The man struggled and tried to scream, but Cara just dropped the pill in his mouth, and let his head go. The pill got to work immediately, and foam had barely started to appear in his mouth before Jay’s pistol went off, hitting him right in the chest. Now, the Canadian military would have a confusing time. Cyanide and gunshot. Which happened first, and why would someone kill the man twice?
Once the pistol had fired, the kids booked it out of the building and took the long way back to burg, avoiding the guards that rushed toward the sound.
***
They’d been back at the facility for several hours now, but something about the mission was still bugging Cara. It felt too easy like there was something deeper going on. Like a cover-up. Cara took these concerns to Thomas, who didn’t really have an answer for her. Just suggested she talk to the doctors about it, and they could help. When Cara came back, she didn’t remember any of her concerns. Didn’t remember that she’d had concerns. It was all just one, big, fuzzy feeling. And she was strangely okay with that.