Finn wasn’t afraid to confront her first, “You feel better now?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Tessa would not lie or apologize. She already weighed the risks and justified her response.
Arica was concerned, “What did you do?”
“I removed Cheyenne Mountain from the playing field.”
“The whole base?” Sam seemed surprised.
“I don’t think there will be anyone walking away with their lives unless they made it to the Denver Airport tunnel.”
Finn shook his head in disapproval as he continued fiddling with his equipment. Stonewell and Melody stood in the room's corner. It surprised Tessa they were still around, but Stonewell wanted to gloat.
“Now you see why it’s so imperative we eliminate H.I.V.E regardless of the cost. There are no innocents when H.I.V.E is involved.” Stonewell couldn’t wait to tout his agenda.
“Wrong.” Tessa pointed at him, “I made a choice to take action on my own. No one manipulated me to do anything. It was my own free will. You really don’t know when to shut your mouth. Do you?”
“You could say that H.I.V.E manipulated you.” He was arguing semantics.
“They didn’t manipulate me; they forced my hand. There’s a difference.” It took every ounce of her will to not let lose her anger on him.
“Is there a difference?”
“I don’t think they planned to manipulate me into destroying one of their bases and killing all their people. H.I.V.E isn’t that stupid. They wanted to close our base and stop our rebellion, but they never planned I would retaliate. They knew we would counterstrike, but not that I would go alone or be capable of such extensive damage.”
Finn looked at Tessa with concern, “And it’s that amount of power that scares me. The fact that you alone can destroy an entire base.”
“Why should you fear me? I’m on your side.”
“For now, what if something changes? You just wiped out hundreds of lives.”
“Hundreds of lives that hunt and kill our kind. People who torture and experiment on us. Why should I show them mercy? You saw what they did to women and children here, and some of those victims were human. They have no regard for life at all, whether it be Evo or human.”
“There’s a line Tessa.” She could see the concern in his eyes.
“What line? They killed Evie.”
“A moral line. Once you cross that line, you lose a piece of your humanity. You might be Evo, but you still have a human side. All the Evo tyrants that rule territories and towns with fear; they lost their humanity. They can’t see themselves as mortal. They believe they are gods, and so they carry out horrific acts.” He paused, “They lost their soul. I don’t want to see that happen to you. Part of why I believed in you is because of your heart, Tessa. You can see the difference between good and evil, and you want justice and peace. Now it seems like you’re on the warpath.”
Tessa understood what he said, but the game changed, “But we’re at war. We might want peace, but H.I.V.E will never allow it. Look around. We will never see peace until they are gone.”
“I don’t disagree, but we need to find another way to fight H.I.V.E. If you continue down this path, then we’re no better than them.”
“And your suggestion?”
He cocked his head and gave Tessa a sideways grin, “We destroy them from the inside out. They won’t even know what happened.”
“I’m listening.” Tessa wasn’t opposed to a more subtle tactic if the result was the same. The end of H.I.V.E.
“Hear me out. We know that Cheyenne Mountain wasn’t the only base. The secondary base at Los Alamos Laboratory has more going on there than at Cheyenne Mountain. Plus, the projects at Los Alamos are top-secret clearance, so only the higher-ups in the organization know these projects even exist. I’ve confirmed the presence of a second arc, but they still don’t have the core which is why they raided our base to get our core and destroy us.” Finn pulled up a virtual map on the table. It flickered, but it was the best he could do with the damaged equipment. “Since Tessa destroyed their Colorado base, they’ll be looking to move whatever they can salvage from the wreckage, and my educated guess is they will transport to Los Alamos. They were working on an arc in Colorado, and they’ve got one in New Mexico, so the consolidation of resources is a natural choice.”
“So, you want to hijack the train?” Sam thought he was following the plan.
Finn had other ideas, “Not necessarily. I want to infiltrate the train.”
“A covert mission then?” Sam clarified.
“We have extra H.I.V.E uniforms. I can whip us up some fake credentials and marching orders, and they won’t even know we’re there.”
Melody seemed impressed, “So what’s the plan when we get to the lab?”
“We plant charges throughout the base and destroy them the same way they destroyed us.”
Tessa failed to see the difference between her response and Finn’s. “So the plan is to destroy the base same as my attack on Cheyenne Mountain. How is this different? I could fly in and take out the lab the same way?”
Finn elaborated, “But we would learn what they are work on. Plus, we wouldn’t pick soft targets like barracks or mess halls. Our targets are the projects and not the people.”
“But the people cause all the problems. If people survive, they will only continue their exploitation.” Tessa felt that if she spared any members of H.I.V.E, then the same problems would continue to resurface. She needed to eliminate them all.
“Maybe some of those soldiers or scientists don’t want to
