The name of their missing teammate reverberated around the boardroom, and Cody shifted uncomfortably in his seat as the weight of doubt pressed down around them, the air thick with unspoken suspicions.
Adam took a slow breath, scanning the occupants of the table before he said what they were all thinking. “If he’s with Maya, then he’s a threat to the JTT and the operation, and we have no choice but to treat him as such.”
Gray frowned. “It’s Tak, even if he does have a neural implant, he’d never hurt one of us, not on purpose.”
“We don’t know for sure if that’s true, baby.” His voice under tight control, Chase took Gray’s hand and interlocked their fingers in a silent show of support, or maybe he just needed to ground himself in the face of losing his best friend. “If he’s chipped, he may not have any will of his own, and if he isn’t, then he’s flipped and working for Johnson. Either way, we can’t take any chances.”
“Come on,” she scoffed. “He didn’t kill any of you on Big Diomede when he had the chance.”
“We weren’t his target,” Grant said, his cuts and bruises doing a good job of masking the pain he hid behind stiff movements. “If he’s working for Johnson, then Becca was his primary objective. Our presence on the island was completely unexpected for all involved, so he adapted, isolating Jay from the rest of us with a couple of well-placed warning shots. Although chip or no chip, I’m guessing he never anticipated stuntman-stupid over there to go full throttle off a cliff. Still, he knew any JTT fatalities because of him pulling the trigger guaranteed mission failure by way of a bullet to his brain.”
He shrugged, his slight head shake broadcasting his regret at being the bearer of bad news. “As a military-trained sniper and tactician, he knew pulling his punches kept him alive long enough to have another go at Jay.”
“But—” Gray hesitated, her mind clawing for a sound argument that didn’t put Tak beyond saving, and Cody understood her pain, because he felt the same way. “What about the research Doc’s been doing?” She looked his way. “You’re working on a way to remove the implant, right? If we can get him back here, maybe we can fix him.”
A tense pause followed, and Cody’s stomach flipped as he and the rest of the team looked toward Jamie for a scrap of hope and found only heartbreak instead.
His exhaustion showing, he rubbed a hand over his face, his heavy sigh confirming their worst fears. “I’m not sure removal is even possible, Gray. There’s no published literature, no case studies, nothing.” Jamie pressed his lips together, then puffed out a short breath before continuing.
“Based on the post-mortem images from the Boston shooters, if he is chipped, the damn thing isn’t just embedded in his nervous system—it’s fused with his basal ganglia, maybe even his prefrontal cortex. We’re talking about an invasive, synapse-rewriting device, not some geo-tracking microchip I can pluck out like a splinter.”
“So what’re you saying?” Her voice cracking with her emotions, Gray pulled her hand free. “That even if we get him back, he won’t be himself. That he’s just gone?”
“I’m saying, I don’t know what’s in the realm of possible. But trying to surgically remove the device without any empirical data could kill him, or worse.”
“Worse?” Adam repeated. “What could be worse?”
“Catastrophic synaptic misfire,” Jamie replied, rolling his shoulders to relieve some of his pent-up tension. “We’re talking permanent neurological damage leading to complete motor paralysis and low to zero executive functioning.”
“Sounds like a bad stroke,” Davis said.
“Yeah, bud, that’s a good comparison. He’d be alive but unresponsive, meaning he wouldn’t be able to move, comprehend, or communicate.”
Fucking hell. Cody shuddered. He couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped inside his own mind.
“What about leaving the chip in but modifying its programming?” Jay asked.
Jamie shook his head. “No idea. But if the implant’s integrated with his decision-making functions, we might not just be erasing external control—but erasing him as well—memories, personality, everything. And don’t forget the device comes with a remote-controlled failsafe. Even if we do manage to capture him, chances are he won’t make it three steps before someone flips the switch and fries his brain.”
“No,” Gray cried in protest, and leaning forward, she slapped both palms against the armrests of her chair, pushing it away as she stood. “We have to do something,” she choked out.
“We can’t just give up on him. He saved our lives, Adam. Yours. Mine. Grant’s”—she pointed her finger at the teenager sitting next to her brother—“Davis’s. We owe it to him to at least try. Please,” she begged. “Anything is better than abandoning him! We owe him. You owe him.”
In the wake of her desperate plea, silence pressed in, thick and suffocating, and the reality of Tak’s absence and the impossible choices ahead settled like a dead weight at the bottom of Cody’s stomach.
“You’re right. We owe him. But he deserves a hell of a lot more than a coin flip on a death sentence, Grace.” Adam’s expression softened, but it didn’t change the truth. Tak was a risk they couldn’t afford to take. Not without compromising the mission. Not without jeopardizing everything they’d worked for. Everything they’d sacrificed for.
“What if I can help?” Becca said, and all eyes turned to her. “Volkov had an army of super soldiers. I never saw any surgeries for implantation or removal, but if the neural chips are linked to the Imperium Council, maybe there’s something useful in the data I stole from his mainframe?”
“Holy shit,” Gray said, her voice infused with excitement as she dropped her butt back into her chair. “Score one for girl gang geniuses, I’m so fucking in love with you right now, I could kiss you!”
Becca snorted. “Is that all it takes? Nearly getting myself and everyone here killed after hacking into a douchebag oligarch’s cyber vaults?”
“Well, yeah,” Gray shot back, grinning. “That and not being an asshole and stabbing me in the neck.”
“Who needs to get stabby?” Becca’s grin matched Gray’s in pure evil intent. “Don’t forget, you did let it slip about the C-4.”
“Jesus Christ,” Cody grumbled, his spirits lifting with new hope as he looked back and forth between the two women. “You two make me nervous.”
