With an incredibly poor parking job out of the way, Adya steps out into the parking lot and slinks through the back entrance of the shopping center. Nate’s directions were a little lacking, considering he’s used to following them instead of giving them. Nevertheless, she made it unscathed-- even with her underprepared driving skills.

“How goes it, Cadet?” asks Nate, surprisingly chipper. He’s definitely in a hurry to get his hands back on anything and everything mission-related.

“I should be asking you,” Adya whispers into her wrist. She ducks behind a planter and eyes the emptiness of the mall. “How’d you get into the comms center without the lieutenant bothering you?”

“My trademark white boy charm-- which means I snuck in and sat at an open computer while everyone was too busy to notice. Now, tell me what you see.”

After narrowly avoiding a pair of security guards making a beeline for the entrance, Adya slinks upstairs and presses herself against the gate of a closed shop. “Dirt and toppled shelves everywhere. Whoever this guy was, he really wanted to put on a show.”

“Any civilians?”

A weak cry from around the corner, followed by a pair of shoes scraping against the tile. She slips beneath the half-open gate with only seconds to spare before a body collapses onto her.

Adya sets the woman back against the wall carefully. A touch to her forehead reveals a fever; Adya doesn’t need an organic sense of touch to feel that she’s burning up. She grips gently at the woman’s shoulder, meeting with another cry of pain. Adya notices the damp spot on her black shirt.

“I’m here to help, it’s alright,” she says, pushing up her sleeve and pulling a package of gauze and bandages that Nate managed to scrounge around the medical ward for. She can only hope no one’s missing it right now. “Tell me what you remember.”

“No...” she mutters through short breaths. “No, I can’t. I just want to go home. Please…”

“Everything’s okay, you’re safe.” Her eyes start to roll back. “Hey, hey, stay with me. Talking will help. Do you have a name?”

She grunts in pain, but not enough to shake Adya from dressing her wound. As the bandage packs tighter and tighter around her arm, she starts to relax, and so does Adya; timed exercises with Val are nothing compared to the real thing. She does her best to keep her hands from shaking. “Shannon,” she whispers.

“Nice to meet you, Shannon. I’m Adya.” She surveys the room and its toppled shelves. Metal tins and woven baskets cover the floor. “I assume you work at this... tea shop?”

She produces a wry smile and wipes a bead of sweat from her forehead. “What’s left of it, anyway. Are you an agent?”

“Something like that." She picks around her brain for Val's deescelation lessons. "Do you have any kids, Shannon?”

“A baby boy. Just turned three the other day. Been working double shifts because of that little monster.”

Adya smiles and shoves the gate further open with a recoil. She’s still not used to how easy it is to move heavy objects with these arms. “Terrible two’s don’t always make terrific three’s, huh?” She hoists Shannon’s good arm over her shoulders, walking her out to the stairs that she came up earlier. “You’re gonna go home to your boy and get some rest, okay? We’re gonna figure out what happened here and get the guy who did this to you. I promise.”

Shannon grips onto her arm and looks Adya in the eyes. Some of the color returns to her skin, but she still looks like she’s seen a ghost. “You can’t stay. It’s not safe. He came in and threw these… things into all the shops. Little round things that stuck to the doorways. Something that took out the power for a minute. Most people evacuated, but I wasn’t so lucky.”

“I’ll be just fine. Now, go. Be careful.”

Adya steps back into the tea shop and pockets the gauze, listening to the slightest shuffle from the back room of the store. Her wrist comm buzzes once.

“So much for the other agents going on a wild goose chase for this guy,” he says. “I just checked their comms. They’ve already lost him. Lieutenant is furious.”

When she does a double take, the door sits ajar. “I don’t think they ever had him in the first place, Nate.”

“Huh?”

“Do you know anything about little, round… things that can make the power go out?” 

Silence, followed by another shift from the back room. “Nate?”

“You need to get the fuck out of there, Adya.”

“What do you mean--”

Without as much as another step, Adya’s knees thump against the tile, among the topped tins and misplaced teabags. Every joint in her body locks up. Her eyes feel as if they’ll burst from their sockets and the electricity in her head buzzes with a deafening noise. She groans as her palms press deeper and deeper into the floor.

The shock lets up and she hoists herself back up to her feet, only to be met with the silhouette of a man in the doorframe across the room. She reaches at her hip for a weapon that’s not there.

“You must be pretty filled with metal for an EMP to bring your entire body down,” he says. Adya backs further into the half-closed security gate. 

“What does it matter to you?” she mutters.

Nate sighs a breath of relief when he hears her voice. “I lost you for a minute. Those little round things emit electromagnetic pulses. They take out power-- which means they can take you out, too. You need to go before another one goes off.”

There’s no guarantee that other employees like Shannon aren’t still scattered across the building. If Adya can’t get to them now, they’ll be far worse when the paramedics show up-- if they show at all. Val mentioned how her body can take harder hits. Now is the perfect time to test if it can truly throw them, too.

The man closes in on her, hand reaching for the back of his waist. He’s not much bigger than her, but looks a hell of a lot stronger. After sparring with Tristan enough, a built, young man under six feet tall against a teenager with a titanium skeleton are odds that she’s willing to take.

There’s hardly a second between the aim of his pistol and its collision with the floor. Adya sends a kick into the backs of his knees and throws him out into the open second floor of the mall. He scrambles to his feet with a grunt. A punch into her jaw causes her to stumble back into the balcony railing. He pins her there.

“You’re out of your depth, little girl,” he says, reaching for her wrists. “Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead, and I won’t drop you down to the first floor?”

A fall is no issue-- she can handle the impact, but leaving him up here alone gives him too much time to run. After seeing what he did to Shannon, she refuses to let anyone else become a victim of his.

Adya doesn’t even notice the tightness around her throat until her lack of a reaction garners a horrified face from her attacker. She’s been too busy trying to keep his other fist at bay. His iron grip at her neck loosens. “Jesus Christ. What are you…?”

She throws a kick square into his chest. His body almost floats for a second before crumbling onto the floor, hacking up a lung from the impact.

Adya slides over to his body and produces the leftover roll of bandages. The artificial adrenaline finally begins to subside, but she can’t get exhausted yet. She flips him onto his back and ties two knots into the bandage around his wrists.

“I know I came out here to help the wounded,” she says, “but, uh, Nate… I have the guy.”

“Can you go after him? How far is he?” Nate asks.

She tightens the binding with her teeth, keeping him against the ground with a knee against his back. “No, like, I have him. Six inches from my face.”

He spews a flurry of expletives in her direction. Nate hollers a little too loud for his liking, as his tone gets much quieter.

“Yes! Nice job. I can’t believe you. There’s a team en route, so hang him up somewhere and get out before anyone sees you.”

Footsteps come bursting in from the second floor entrance. They fan out at the utterance of a familiar phrase. Phrases that Val has been drilling into Adya’s head for weeks.

“I think it’s too late for that,” says Adya.

A young man with a red cross painted onto his shoulder pad comes to a halt when he’s within earshot of Adya. A look of recognition spreads across his face, but Adya’s remains guarded and unfamiliar. Their eyes widen-- the stranger’s out of surprise, and Adya’s out of utter terror when she notices the graying hair and square posture of the figure behind her.

“General,” she acknowledges, hiding her shaky hands behind her back. General Morales grimaces. She grabs hold of Adya’s arm.

“You better march your ass out those doors and wait in the transport,” she says through gritted teeth. A chill crawls down Adya’s spine. “Have I made myself clear, Cadet? You evidently need a better lesson on following orders.”

Adya swallows a lump in her nonexistent throat. “Yes, General.”