Sapphire (Book One, Arrow)

chapter 16 ⚔ Dead to Rights

John and Felicity were training downstairs in the hideout.

I was upstairs, getting a drink.

Oliver walked in from crossing another name off the list, still suited up, pulling his hood back.

"How'd it go?" I asked.

"Badly for him," Oliver answered, walking past me into the basement.

I followed him downstairs. "Who him?"

"An assassin for hire with an affinity for knives," Oliver answered, putting his bow down, walking past John and Felicity. "I think I may have found your evil twin, Jill. His name was Guillermo Barrera."

"Was?" Felicity repeated.

"So we can't ask him about his intended target?" John asked.

Oliver walked toward the list, crossing the name off, turning to face us. "No." He took out his phone. "Which is why I need you to hack his phone. Barrera's world class. He kills high profile targets. And whatever job he was hired for isn't finished. We need to figure out who he was here to kill, and fast. They are probably still in danger. Okay?" Felicity nodded, no happier than I was about the kill, though it had to be done. Oliver turned to me. "We have someplace to be."

I remembered, nodding. "Right. Tommy's birthday. He wanted us over at Laurel's so we could think about throwing him a big birthday party at the club if it gets fixed in the next few days.'

Oliver nodded in amusement. "Right."

⚔

Flashback

In the wrecked plane hideout, Jill was kneeling next to Slade, making sure that his infected gunshot wounds were healed from the super herbs.

Oliver was nearby, using a pole in the ceiling as a pullup bar, though he wasn't nearly as strong as he was in the present, having a little struggle, falling down.

"Four," Slade told him.

"Well, I'm more of a runner," Oliver told them.

Slade stood, hopping up to the pipe, doing several pullups nearly effortlessly, and if it hadn't been for his wounds, it would have been effortless.

Jill stood. "Why the sudden desire to work out?"

"What else is there to do?" Slade replied.

"Well, we can try to think of another way off the island," Jill answered with honest sarcasm. 

"There is no other way," Slade told them. "If there was, I would have found it."

"We can't just sit here and wait for Fyers to come and kill us," Oliver told them.

Slade jumped down. "I did have on idea. If you go into the forest and gather as much bamboo as you can find..."

"Yeah?" Oliver asked.

"We could build ourselves a boat, like they did on 'Gilligan's Island'," Slade told them sarcastically. Jill rolled her eyes, walking toward a radio receiver, picking it up. "That's broken. It got busted during the crash."

"Did you try to get it to work?" Oliver asked.

"I'm better at pulling things apart," Slade told them.

Jill stood, walking around the radio to kneel behind it to look at the wires. "My father was a pilot mechanic and he used to do his own maintenance."