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hood of the car, leaning over the sketched out map of the building rising squat and ugly in the distance.
    ‘Guard towers are here and here,’ Bill said, stubbing his finger onto the map. ‘Razor wire, check points, inner wall, waiting room, guard room, security doors, second set of security doors, max security block and here,’ he stabbed down with his thumb, ‘this is where they’re holding him.’
    ‘The adjustment wing?’ Ryder asked, peering closer at the map.
    Bill grinned up at him. ‘Where they hold the worst of the worst, death row inmates and the ones that keep trying to escape.’
    Amber hugged her arms around her body. She was a waif of a girl, with red hair that blazed like a halo in the early morning light. I tossed her a cap, ‘Here, put this on.’
    She picked up my Raiders cap and stared at it. ‘This is my disguise?’ she asked. ‘You want us to break into a maximum security prison and rescue a death row prisoner and this is my disguise?’
    I liked her bluntness. She was a hard kid to fool. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not a disguise, it’s to stop you getting sunburned. We don’t need disguises. We have your boyfriend along for the ride. He’s going to sift everyone so we’ll be able to walk in and walk right out again without anyone remembering a thing.’
    ‘They’ll have security cameras,’ Amber said, arching an eyebrow at me.
    ‘I’ll handle it, don’t worry,’ I told her. Kids these days, they really don’t like to trust.
    She glared at me, chewing the inside of her cheek but didn’t say another word.
    A few times I caught myself wondering whether she and Ryder were too young, whether I should be dragging them into all this. Bill was an adult, battle-scarred and weary. He’d seen the worst the world could offer, but these two? They looked like they could be starring in a milk commercial.
    Bill on the other hand had the kind of face that wouldn’t be out of place on America’s Most Wanted. A paramedic in a past life he had useful first-aid skills, but that wasn’t what endeared me to him. No. What endeared me to Bill was that he could lift a pickup truck with just a glance in its direction and use it as a battering ram.
    Of course, you know now what I was doing gathering this ragtag crew of people together. I was collecting as many of us as I could find, that is people with exceptional skills, none as exceptional as mine, of course, but exceptional none the less. And I was doing that because it had become apparent that the only way of fighting this war against Stirling Enterprises and their newly-formed military-style Unit, was to gather my own forces and fight back.
    Amber and Ryder had been forced conscriptions to this army of mine, but after I had shown them the evidence; the photographs and the paper trail linking Senator Burns to the defence company Stirling Enterprises, after I’d shown them the government contract giving free rein to Stirling to research and develop new weapons and revealed to them that we were the weapons they were researching, it wasn’t so hard to convince them to stay of their own free will. Paint a world view that involves armies of genetically-altered soldiers able to move things just by looking at them, spies who can read minds and change the course of history by removing memories and most people will agree to stand and fight to prevent this from happening. The human spirit is indomitable like that. Outrage is an easy thing to harness. It would be dishonest of me to claim that I was just as outraged, however. I knew the way the world worked – I’d been playing the game longer. My principle motivation was not to prevent a terrifying new world order but something far more basic: revenge. Love had me damned.
    ‘Right, shall we go then?’ I asked, folding the map and putting it in my back pocket.
    We climbed silently into the car, each of us focused on the plan, the pencil-sketched map in our heads materialising into solid concrete and