Chapter 231

Sarah POV

I almost passed out when I came back to the plane for the last time, but the feeling of Chloe and Grace cuddling up to me and a half-can of microwaved beans got me feeling better.

Zane was relaying messages to me as I scarfed them down.

“No indication what the signal is supposed to be?” Zane asked.

“No, and I hung around for several minutes after he said he’d blow everything up, but no one said a word.”

“We know it’s not our showing we’re taking them ‘seriously,’” Travis said. “Sunrise is a good thirty minutes before our deadline.”

I thought of those children on the leader’s phone again. Were they dead? Is that what had tipped him over into madness?

“A phone, you idiot,” I said aloud. Everyone was looking at me again. “He, the leader, he had a personal smartphone in his hand, and when I told you about him that first time, he was talking on it.”

“Could you tell the make?” Ted asked while getting her laptop ready.

“It was a Google Pixar.”

“And it was turned on?”

“Yes. I could see his home screen. Two pups were on it, I assume his children.”

“When did she report the terrorist talking on his phone?” Ted demanded.

“Forty-three minutes ago,” Travis said.

Ted’s fingers almost blurred over her keyboard. “All right, I’ve got the tower it bounced off.” We all waited, barely daring to breathe. “I’ve got the number.”

Zane looked over her shoulder and put the number in.

“Alpha,” Travis cautioned.

Zane held up a finger and put it on speaker.

“Who is this?”

“This is Alpha Zane Cavendish. You seem to have occupied my airport.”

“How did you get this number?”

Zane looked around at us, asking us with his eyes to trust him.

“Sarah Astor walked up to you on the astral plane and saw you had a Google Pixel and knew when you used it last.”

“You’re lying. I’m throwing this phone away.”

“And lose the photos of your children?”

There was silence from the phone.

“Both betas, right? A boy and a girl? Smiling at the camera. Did you lose them? Do you blame humans for the loss of your children? Is that why you’re doing this?”

More silence, then, slowly, “I would talk to Sarah Astor.”

Zane’s eyes asked me a question, and when I nodded, he handed over the phone.

“Hello, this is Sarah Astor. To whom am I speaking?”

“Back when I cared about such things, I was Nikolai.”

Following Zane’s lead, I pulled the phone away a bit to swallow heavily, and then I asked, “What’s the signal you need to get before sunrise not to kill everyone?”

I heard him breathe for a while.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Sorry. Can you give me a minute?”

There was only silence on the line, so I let my hands, including the one with the phone, fall to my lap and closed my eyes.

I opened them. “Three. Also, the alpha male standing next to you has a nick on his temple that has bled down to his neck.”

“A wolf is doing this. One of those omega Oracles. And they’re telling you what they see.”

“I can assure you that’s not the case, but I have no way to prove that to you.”

I listened to more silence.

“What is it, may I ask, that you want? Not those stupid demands, which you know we won’t fulfill. What is your endgame? What, besides death, will satisfy you?”

“Perhaps nothing.”

I looked around the cabin. Here were the people who made sense of my life, and I was talking to someone who put no value on those lives.

“I took an online class in negotiation recently,” I said. “It talked about the need to establish rapport. Do you know what that means? I don’t think I do.

“Rapport means sharing something, right? And in pretty much every aspect of my life, I don’t deal with humans.” I sent an apologetic look at Shotz, who just waved his hands.

“So,” I continued, “according to you, I’m almost completely alone, right? Humans are this lesser group of—”

“Humans aren’t lesser.”

“What? I mean.” I scrambled to think of something to mean.

“Humans aren’t lesser, and you know it. Or at least, you think you do.”

I looked around for guidance, but no one had anything. I saw Chloe and Phillipe were talking over in the corner while Grace and Jackie watched.

“What is it I know?”

“You want to destroy us. This action is just being proactive.”

“‘Proactive’? Are you from some sort of management background?” The second I said it, I regretted it.

“Is that some sort of joke, Sarah Astor?”

“No, no. I’m just.” I looked around, but there was still no help from the others.

“Look, if you blow up the terminal, it will be horrible. People will talk about how horrific the whole thing was, others will blame wolves, others will blame humans, but nothing, absolutely nothing of consequence will change.”

Zane leaned forward, and just like that, I was part of a team once again. “This signal can’t be from someone actually looking for change, not in a few hours,” he said. “What do they have over you?”

“We are in charge here!”

“Are they dead?” I asked. “Your children? Were they killed?”

“They live.”

Zane held up a finger. “And they’ll continue to live if you set off the explosives?”

“I told you that we are in charge. No one compels us to take this action.”

I was going to say something more, but he ended the call.

“Who puts their kids on their phone screen and then blows up hundreds of people?” Shotz demanded.

“None of this makes any sense,” Delia agreed.

“He said it would all end,” I muttered with the signal. “That’s an odd way to put it, isn’t it?”

“SWAT Alpha and Bravo are in position,” Travis reported with his phone to his ear.

I looked at Zane. “You’re going to go in?”

“I don’t see we have a choice.”

“But what he said about humans not being lesser, or my thinking that.” I shook my head, trying to think clearly. “If he really thinks that, blowing up the airport and killing a bunch of humans doesn’t make any sense.”

“Terrorism rarely makes sense,” Whitfield said.

“Yes, but it usually involves terror, right? If they’re just standing around until this signal knowing full well we can’t meet their demands, where’s the terror?”

“What are you thinking?” Zane asked.

“What’s more terrifying than blowing up the terminal?” I asked.

Everyone just sort of looked at me. “Think about it,” I urged. “You storm the terminal with SWAT and assault rifles, and you’ve lost control of the situation on inter-territorial television. Every casualty will be your fault, not theirs.”

“The bombs, you think all this is a bluff?” Travis asked.

“More like a trap,” Whitfield said, nodding at me. “They lure us into laying siege, then we kill humans along with the terrorists, and we look like monsters.”

“But you saw the bombs, right?” Alicia asked me.

“They looked real with electronic timers, but I wouldn’t know a fake bomb from a real one.”

“It’s about forty minutes to sunrise,” Travis told us.

For a minute, we all just thought.

“The human they shot in the back,” Zane said.

I felt a leap of excitement. “You’re thinking he’s not really dead?”

“I thought it was odd at the time that they didn’t take out the security officers,” he said.

“It was in the main terminal,” Ted said, turning to her laptop. In a moment, she had the image up. The man’s body had been dragged over behind the counter, I saw, meaning only his legs were visible on one of the cameras.

I took my seat. In a minute, I had my eyes closed and was falling down into the structure. I found the man quickly. Not only was he alive, he was scrolling on his phone, and I reported as much when I was back on the plane.

Zane dialed the number. It rang fifteen times.

“You will not stop us, Alpha Zane.”

“Just how fake are those bombs?” Zane asked. “And what do we have to do to bring this farce to an end?”