"What are you doing up here Zach?" asked Harry. "You supposed to be in a meeting with the Director about something?"
"It finished early," lied Shakkuri, glancing quickly out of the corner of his eye at Neeran.
"Oh, what was it about?" asked Brandon.
"It was about potential deployment to some battle field," covered up Shakkuri, missing a silent communication between Galen, Corben and Joel.
"So, why are you up here?" asked Galen.
"Oh well, I like to watch the sun set from up here and it's a good spot to train in peace," continued Shakkuri, hoping he'd convince them to leave.
"What kind of training do you do?" asked Joel looking around at the sparsely decorated roof. "There's not much to use for training."
"It's mostly just martial arts and parkour," replied Shakkuri, which was the actual truth as he and Neeran often practiced martial arts and parkour together.
"By yourself?" asked Corben, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah-"
Suddenly, something seemed to alert Shakkuri to another's presence. Hardly thinking, Shakkuri grabbed Brandon's gun and took aim at the entrance way to the roof.
"Who are you?"
Neeran suddenly appeared on top of the roof of the shed she'd hidden behind and jumped onto the other side and sprinted to the stairs as the female figure got up and sprinted down the stairs, shouting, "Shoot her, Shakkuri!"
Shakkuri acted a split second later and fired at the figure. The girl, who they then recognised as Savel, rounded the corner of the wall as Shakkuri's shoots hit the corner of the wall.
"Shit!" cursed Zach.
"Now, we have a problem," said Neeran with a stony kind of expression.
"Zach, what's going on?" demanded Joel. "She's the one you were supposed to find and turn over to the Director!"
Zach glanced cautiously over at Neeran at the mention of his mission. Neeran had just turned her gaze to him and asked the question Shakkuri had feared.
"He speaks the truth, doesn't he?"
Shakkuri gulped and said, "It was at first. But it's not the case now, Neeran, I swear!"
"I believe you."
Shakkuri took a moment to process what Neeran had said. "You... You aren't concerned?"
"Somehow, I learnt from your thoughts about two months ago when we first met and I tried to shoot you," replied Neeran. "I don't know what it was, but I could tell that you were changing as the days and weeks rolled by, so I never brought it up."
Shakkuri seemed to have a foreboding sense that something bad was about to happen.
"However," started Neeran as she drew the twin guns resting on her hips. "We have more pressing matters to address."
The five figures standing before Zach and Neeran all took a step back as Neeran turned to face them, saying, "What will you do? You're Zach's team members. Will you side with us and try to escape here, or will you side with the Director?"
YOU ARE READING
SWRC: Hidden Pasts (Book 2)
FanfictionThis Book 2 of my series, it's the book after SWR: Gaining Trust. Neeran began telling her family everything that had happened to her and Zach almost 26,000 years earlier at the end of the last book. This is her story from when she began on Earth to...
