The Bounty Hunter's Trilogy: Chosen By Fate

Chapter 14. Books for Kindling

I spent the whole night with Paisley trying to figure out how in the world they could hide their entire camp. We looked at physical maps, digital maps of all sorts; we even checked every social website we could possibly think of. At this point my brain felt like mush. But it was buzzing mush because, like Paisley, I dug into the energy drinks. Neither of us had found anything for the past two hours.

I sat up from the computer I was sitting at, after reaching another dead end to a website. I rubbed my hands over my face in frustration and leaned back in my desk chair. "Paisley, I think we should call it a night."

"We can't. It's staring me right in the face, I know it." She dug through maps of all sorts, but found nothing. One by one, she'd look at a map and flip to the next one even more frustrated than before. "They can't just hide an entire island. It's impossible. We can barely hide our base." She shook her head, rubbing her temples. I took that into consideration. The maze out front would confuse them, yes. But if they still had an airplane, what would be stopping them from landing right back here? I knew there was a reason, I'd been told it before. I just couldn't remember it.

"Why can't they find us?" I was finding it hard to recall exactly why. I kicked one of the crushed cans that had missed the trash can by my feet.

"Uh, Alexia in the basement. She protects us and keeps us hidden. You can only see once you get close enough. After that, she mixes up GPS signals and makes a sort of force field around us to keep us off the grid. That's why we keep such a tight ship around here and take care of her so well. The last time we didn't, she started giving us bad karma and part of the building collapsed."

"Is there a possibility that they have the same kind of protection?"

Paisley snapped her fingers like she figured something out. Much like my dad does when he remembers something. "And since they aren't taking care of it the same way we are, then we can find them once we get in a close range." Paisley wheeled over to her desk in her chair, typing away at the keyboard.

"What makes you think that they don't take care of it? Besides us seeing them, of course. If you hadn't zoomed in, we still wouldn't know where they are." Paisley paused and leaned back into her seat, taking her hands off of the keyboard. She looked me in the eyes.

"I don't like letting people know this because they tend to hate me for it, but I used to be on their side. It was a long time ago and I got held here after an attack I was part of. I was shown mercy, and kindness, and how foolish I was. But people still find it hard to trust me. That's why I'm always up in here or in my office. It's like my own little world of peace. Anyways, they aren't the most careful people, in fact they're rather tasteless and disgusting. Not to mention tactless, pathetic cowards. They send out whatever recruits they don't really care about and if we don't come back, they don't come looking for us. The word selfish doesn't even put a dent in it." Paisley rested her hands on her desk and looked back to her computer screen. It was a lot of new information to take in. I can't imagine living with that kind of a story as my past.

"Well, does it help you to know that I admire you way more now than when I came in here yesterday?" She looked at me shocked.

"You do?"

"It takes a lot to go through what you have and to change the way you did. You're a tough girl, Paisley. I'm glad you're on our side now." She smiled and looked back at the computer screen.

"Okay so all we need to do is burn every other oak tree in the world and we'll be good."

"The NRDC isn't going to like that." She snorted at my joke. I looked at the island full of blips again, absolute distaste raging through me. They took something from the wrong people. And I wasn't going to let them get away with it.