Page 39 of Pressure Point (Lantern Beach Blackout: Detonation #2)

CHAPTER

THIRTY-NINE

Quinn saw everything happen in slow motion.

Hughes draw her gun.

Atlas push himself in front of her.

Then she heard the gunfire.

Her heart seemed to stop.

Had Atlas been shot?

She dared to pull her head up.

When she did, she saw Hughes slouched in her seat.

Blood covered her chest.

Atlas had managed to grab the woman’s gun and turn it before she’d fired on them.

Instead, she’d fired on herself.

Atlas put a finger to her neck, then looked at Quinn and shook his head. “She’s gone.”

Part of Quinn wanted to feel sorry for the woman. But she couldn’t.

Not considering the fact the woman had done this to herself.

But the woman had also held answers about Quinn’s past. Quinn hoped she could recover those answers from someone else.

But right now, she had other things to worry about.

She had to stop this storm. Now.

Atlas stared at the equipment in front of him.

The shelter was full of sophisticated electronics, all centered around a massive antenna array that hummed with power despite the storm conditions.

The setup was completely out of his depth.

He could handle weapons, tactics, and human psychology. But the banks of monitors and control systems might as well have been alien technology.

Gently, he pulled Hughes’s body from the chair. He dragged her until she was outside, and he left her on the ground.

They’d deal with her death later. Stopping the storm was their priority now.

He still couldn’t believe the woman had betrayed her country like this. But maybe she’d also thought she was working on the right side. Maybe Sigma had convinced her they were the good guys.

Right now, they needed her out of the way so Quinn could work on stopping the destruction Hughes and her colleagues had unleashed.

“Quinn.” Atlas turned to her as she approached the equipment with growing recognition in her eyes. “What do you need us to do?”

As Hurricane Delilah continued to strengthen with artificial enhancement, Atlas knew that everything—the mission, the island, thousands of innocent lives—now depended on Quinn’s ability to remember skills she didn’t even know she possessed.