To Be Like the Guardians

Part 2: The Protecting, Chapter 4: Losing

Beth didn't like the look Irene had when Beth told her what had happened at the headquarters. The corners of Irene's mouth were drooped, her eyes moist. It was a look of hopelessness, illuminated by the lights above the green couch in her apartment.

"D-do you think you could get a new phone?" she asked.

Beth shook her head. "I don't have enough money right now." She had spent her emergency fund when she had accidentally dropped her last phone in the toilet.

"How are we gonna expose Bennett now?"

"I don't know." Fear gnawed at Beth's chest, like a creature consuming her. "Could I please use your phone next time?" That was right, she tried to tell herself. There was going to be a next time. There was going to be a way out of this.

"Yeah. But what do we do now?"

"You'll have to spy again and find out what they're gonna do next. We can still stop this." Beth tried to breathe and calm herself. She was still going to live.

She might still live.

"We can still stop this..." Irene murmured.

"You'll have to spy again tomorrow."

"O-okay. I can handle that."

*}{/*}{/*}{/*

Mallory sat at his desk in the morning, smiling at the group in front of him despite the headache he had from his lack of sleep his extra work brought him.

"We did it." Graham handed over the sheet of paper with dark jagged lines all over it.

"How did Agent F. Garcia even get it?" Donnelly asked.

"It was part of the Guardians' records," Mallory replied. "They let her look at it once, and she copied it and some other things."

"Oh."

"There's something we need to tell you," Graham said in a bitter tone. "Agent B. Howard knows what we're doing. She tried to stop us."

Mallory furrowed his eyebrows.

"We think that maybe she had been spying on us before," Lyle added. With that, everyone went silent, as if they were trying to hear breathing on the other side of the door.

"I haven't seen her around," Mallory said in a lowered voice. Fiona had checked in with him a few times yesterday, but he had never glimpsed Howard. "Still, though, let's look to see if she's there. Open the door."

Lyle turned the doorknob and pushed it open, but only found a few people walking around, none of them Howard. He closed it.

"And she did something strange," Graham added, back at a normal volume. "When Agent C. Vaughn slowed her, she fell and said 'Down with the Guardians'."

"Huh." Mallory paused for a second, his thoughts spinning with possibilities of what that could mean, debating what all he should tell them. "This isn't the first time she's done something like that."

"It isn't?"

"No. She's done things like that before, when I wasn't a part of the L.E.R. yet. Before they even started building this place." He explained about the Indicator, the names on the wall, Haven's curse, and the whole disappearing theory. He and the others hadn't told their employees these things for obvious reasons, but Mallory knew that if he told this group in front of him, they would trust him more and be even more loyal to him. But he didn't mention the Indicator going crazy that one night with Howard. He hadn't processed that incident enough yet for him to talk about it. He still had to tell Matt and Haven about it first, once they returned, and see what they thought.