Page 88 of Tag (The Golden Team #9)

Tag

T he war room felt different now.

There was a pulse to it—urgent, primal. Everyone moved as if they had a blade at their back.

Faron stood at the whiteboard, organizing names and photos from the drive into clusters.

Raven and Gideon were checking weapons. Kaylie had her laptop open, muttering to Gage over comms as they ran scans across encrypted networks.

We all knew we had to shut this monster down and save those children, boys and girls.

And Aponi—she sat across the table from me, a pen in her hand, sketching.

The map she was drawing wasn’t perfect. It was fractured, fragmented from memory. But her hand moved fast, her brows tight in focus as she recreated the route from her childhood.

“I remember this switchback,” she murmured, tapping a jagged line. “There was a green sign with bullet holes. Half hanging off. The road curved hard around a cliff after that. And here—” she circled a shape “—was the compound. Chain link fence. One tower. Dirt bikes out front.”

I glanced at the digital map beside her drawing. “Nothing shows up on satellite.”

“Because it’s buried under camouflage netting,” she said without looking up. “They taught me how to disappear in plain sight. I wasn’t very good at it since I only stayed there three days before leaving.”

The way she said they taught us made my throat tighten. I wanted to reach across the table, pull her into my arms, and tell her she didn’t have to keep reliving her mother leaving her there alone.

But she wasn’t reliving it.

She was weaponizing it.

Why the fuck did she leave you alone with these people?” Faron growled. “She should have left you with me and our father. I will never forgive her.”

He leaned in, tapping the map. “This is good. Enough for us to land within two miles without alerting them.”

“I want a backup team ready to breach if we go dark,” I said. “And someone needs to stay behind to coordinate extraction. We get those girls out, then we bring that place down.”

Raven crossed his arms. “What about Chimera’s pipeline? If Graves was just a handler—who the hell's giving the orders now?”

I looked at Aponi.

She tapped her pen against the map again, then slowly drew a symbol in the bottom corner.

A symbol from memory. A hexagon with an eye.

“They always said the Eye saw everything,” she whispered. “It was how they kept us afraid. The kids wouldn’t run, because they were scared the eye would see them and they’d know . I used to think it was a metaphor.” She looked up at us. “But what if it wasn’t?”

Gideon stepped in from the hall, holding a burner phone wrapped in foil. “This was dropped off at the fence line five minutes ago.”

Faron stood. “Dropped off by who?”

“No clue,” Gideon said. “No prints. No footage. But the SIM was active. Kaylie traced a signal ping—same relay used when Graves contacted his crew.”

I took the phone and opened the screen. There was only one message.

“We see you, Isabelle. Come back to us.”

Aponi went still.

Fury roared through me. “They’re baiting her. They want us to come.”

“And we are,” she said, voice steady as a blade. “But this time, I’m not walking in as a lost girl.”

She stood, her spine straight, her eyes on fire.

“I’m walking in as someone who remembers.”