Page 107 of Villains Series

FOUR YEARS AGO

EON

WHEN Stell returned the next day, Eli didn’t look up.

He kept his head bowed over the file he was studying, had been studying for the better part of the night.

“I see you’ve decided to cooperate.”

Eli gathered the papers back into a shallow stack.

“I need a computer,” he said.

“Absolutely not,”

said Stell.

Eli rose from the chair and carried the file to the fiberglass divide.

“I spent months researching my targets. Confirming their abilities. Tracking their movements.”

He let the file fall from his fingers, paper sloughing to the floor.

“You want me to do the same work from inside a concrete box, with nothing but basic information. This,”

he said, gesturing to the pages at his feet.

“is not enough.”

“It’s what we have.”

“Then you’re not looking hard enough,”

snapped Eli. He turned his attention to a photo on the floor.

“Tabitha Dahl,”

he said, scanning the paper.

“Nineteen. College athlete, young, social, active, adventurer. Suffers a massive cardiac event due to an allergic reaction while hiking. Friend is able to resuscitate her. She makes it to a hospital. And then—she disappears. Parents file a missing persons report two weeks ago.”

Eli looked up.

“Where would she go? How would she get there? Why is there nothing here about the friend she was with? How did she think and feel in the direct aftermath of her accident?”

“How are we supposed to obtain that kind of information?”

asked Stell.

Eli threw up his hands.

“She’s nineteen. Start with social media. Hack the texts she sent to friends. Get into her life. Get into her head. An EO isn’t just the product of their catalyst. They are the product of the person they were before. The circumstances, but also the psyche. I can help you find Tabitha Dahl. With the right insight, I can probably make a decent guess as to her power, but I can’t do any of that with five pieces of paper.”

A long silence followed. Eli waited patiently for Stell to break it.

He did.

“I’ll get you a computer,”

he said.

“But access will be restricted, and the system will be twinned. I will see everything you search, as you search it. And the moment you go off-book, you will lose more than just your tech privileges. Are we clear?”

“I could do more than postulate,”

said Eli, kneeling to retrieve the papers.

“If you let me out…”

“Mr. Cardale,”

said Stell.

“I want to make something very clear. You can help us from inside this cell, or from inside a lab, but you will never, ever see the outside of this facility again.”

Eli rose to his feet, but the director was already walking away.