“Good,” came a disembodied voice from deep in several shadows at once.

“Great,” I countered. Rather than really engage, I tried to take better stock of the situation. Brian was conscious but totally out of it, the poor guy. His technical expertise had been invaluable in the past weeks, but he just didn’t have the stomach for the rough stuff. Evelyn was…

“You know what we want,” interrupted the voice, booming and echoing through the stark environment of the industrial complex. It had seemed like such a great base of operations at the time.

I hate when they say that, I thought, I never know what they want.

“Yeah, sure,” I tossed back into the shadows carelessly, “but let’s pretend I don’t.” If only I could keep them talking long enough for Evelyn to wake up, then she might…well, she might…

“The device, Mr. Red.”

“And I suppose you expect me to just hand it over?” That was actually quite unlikely, since I had no idea which device they meant.

We had a lot of devices.