Page 69 of Trigger Discipline
“I need to know what you saw.”
Blake blinked. “What I saw?”
“Back on the street,” Gabriel explained. “The aliens. Everything.”
“You were there. I saw the same thing as you.”
Gabriel’s lips curled. “No. Not the same.” He pushed off the wall and walked toward Blake. “Definitely not the same as you. The things you notice? Incredible. No one can do what you can. You’re amazing.”
Phin snickered from the couch, but they ignored him.
Blake licked his dry lips. “You don’t know that. You’ve only known me for a couple of days.”
“Yes, but those were the end of the world, everything is scary, high adrenaline days. It’s like dog years. Feels like I’ve known you a lifetime.”
And it did. Blake didn’t know when, but at some point, he’d begun gravitating toward Gabriel. Leaning on him. Like an anchor, or a sense of strength. Gabriel had become this important figure in his life. One who saw the part of him he’d spent a lifetime trying to deny and praised him for it. That it made him special, not off-putting.
Swallowing thickly, Blake forced himself to look up at Gabriel. To really look at his tanned face—the stubble growing on his cut cheeks, the way his hair was so used to being rigidly gelled in place that even wet, it fell back into order. His ever-changing chameleon eyes and that mouth. The one that could say so much without making a sound.
And it hit Blake then that Gabriel was attractive. Not just objectively, but tohim.In a way that made his throat dry and his stomach erupt in butterflies. At first, Blake had thought it was his confidence, or the way he made him feel at ease in his own skin, but now?
The realization made him flush, and he looked away.
“Well, we uh—we established that the first set of aliens?—”
“Off Formers,” Judd called from the kitchen as he and Tommy came in with a load of food in his arms. He dumped the food onto the coffee table and began sorting the canned goods, bananas, bread, peanut butter, jelly, and a bag of almonds. Tommy popped the pull tab on a can of beans and brought them over to Phin with a spoon.
“You know,” he prompted, stuffing his face with a handful of almonds. “Like knock offTransformers.”
Blake couldn’t help but make a face. Apparently, he really was cranky when he was hungry, because he was infinitely less bitchy now.
“Jesus Christ, we give you too much freedom. Okay, theOff Formersare most likely not robotic but are wearing suits. They have a clear command structure and are impervious to almost everything except electricity. They’re comfortable with technology and use EMPs.”
Gabriel nodded for him to continue. Behind him, he heard Victoria shift in her chair, leaning in closer.
“But the second ones, the Monkey Cats, they’re completely different. They seem to be almost—” Blake thought back to what he’d seen, and something clicked. “Hive like. The antennas!”
Absently, he began cracking his knuckles. “One of their ears has that long strand of—what I thought was hair—but I think it’s an antenna. And judging by the way they moved, I think they’re being controlled by a single entity.”
Victoria inhaled sharply. “A queen.”
“Right. Which makes them almost like…workers. Not autonomous.”
Chewing on his lip, he tried to work through it. “At first I thought the shifting spots on their hides were for camouflage, but now I think it’s armor.” He looked over to see Gabriel lift an eyebrow. “Think about it? If your enemy shoots things, what’s the best way to ensure they’ll never get consistent, clean hits?”
Gabriel’s eyes widened. “Which is why our bullets did nothing.”
“Right, except the eyes.” Blake quickly explained what happened before they met up, when Judd and Victoria shot at one of the Monkey Cat’s eyes. “There’s always a weakness, and if any of my wild guesses are even close to correct, the Monkey Cat’s weakness is their eyes.”
The group absorbed what he said. “You think they’ve been fighting each other for a long time?” Judd said.
Blake chewed his lip. “I don’t know. But it makes sense. If your enemy used EMPs, wouldn’t you create a weapon that used teeth and claws? And if the Off Formers struggle with an accurate hit, wouldn’t they create a round that didn’t need to be accurate?”
Because why hit a vital organ when you couldburn throughthe entire body? Even so, it took a while to take aMonkey Cat down, which means all their major organs, blood vessels, arteries, and central nervous system are small. Buried deep. Which makes them not very intelligent, but disposable weapons.
“Holy shit,” Gabriel swore, raking his fingers through his hair.
“That’s not all,” Blake said warily. “I think the Off Formers set off a second EMP after the Monkey Cats broke through the shield.”