I had to be late for school again on Wednesday for my, hopefully, final doctor’s appointment. Mom had to take off work again to take me. I could tell she was worried about all the days she’d taken off over the last few weeks. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was worried by the ...
2021-04-03 00:20:59 +0000 UTC View PostIt took more than an hour for the fire department to okay anyone returning into the building. The fire damage was actually very limited and easily put out. The longest part of the delay was getting an engineer to confirm the building was still structurally safe. Several of their neighbors were al...
2021-03-17 15:54:44 +0000 UTC View Post“So, explain to me why we’re going to the post office?” Whitaker asked as they pulled away from the EEOB.
“Well, we’re not going to the post office, exactly. I need to see if some of the feelers I sent out have come back.”
“At some point, you’re going to stop being cut...
2021-01-15 17:00:52 +0000 UTC View PostWhen they finally tracked down Agent Cole and got him on the phone, the man sounded particularly annoyed to hear from them.
“We’re busy here, Agent Whitaker,” he said.
Taylor couldn’t help but notice how he usually addressed Whitaker first. It made sense. Even though she wasn...
2020-12-11 19:01:15 +0000 UTC View PostI was exhausted when Chef picked me up the next morning. We’d gotten home extremely late from the dance and Rhonda had been all over me when I walked her to her door. She got a little too enthusiastic, considering where we were, and we got the porch light flashed at us in warning.
Even on...
2020-12-02 18:32:19 +0000 UTC View PostRochester, New York
It turned out that the professor in New York was actually at a Catholic Seminary in Rochester, which was in upstate New York. It took a few hours to get travel plans set up, thanks to the layers of bureaucratic red tape, which were necessary to go throug...
2020-11-23 02:43:27 +0000 UTC View PostUnlike what you see on TV, forensic labs aren’t a single group of people that do everything. Different areas of forensic science required different areas of expertise. Taylor and Whitaker were directed to another area of the extensive laboratory complex which housed the FBI's chemists, who anal...
2020-11-17 19:54:10 +0000 UTC View PostBecause they weren’t sure what the gas actually was yet, Taylor and Whitaker couldn’t just walk into the crime scene. The entire EEOB was still shut down, which was probably causing all kinds of chaos in the White House, since the Secret Service was only a very small part of the expansive bui...
2020-11-13 18:27:26 +0000 UTC View PostWhile I knew it would take several days for them to track Mom down and schedule a parent/teacher conference, mostly because she worked so much, I didn’t want to put it off until they got a hold of her. While I was doomed either way, I knew that if she was caught off-guard by a call from the sch...
2020-11-05 22:50:39 +0000 UTC View PostTaylor and Whitaker walked out of the Senator's office, looking for the Secret Service agents who’d been with her previously. Taylor was readying himself for another fight, knowing how they would react to outside interference in one of their investigations. Taylor had dealt with a lot of the U....
2020-10-27 17:42:22 +0000 UTC View PostFriday I was back at school, and overjoyed. The last three days had been brutal. I worked the lunch and dinner shifts each day, which was okay since I was used to that work. Past that, except for two hours where I was to work on my homework before the dinner shift, Chef ran me ragged. He gave me ...
2020-10-20 21:56:56 +0000 UTC View PostAfter a great weekend, I was all prepared for something to derail my week Monday morning. I was surprised when I made it through the whole day and nothing bad happened. No run-ins with Coach Bryant, no bombed math quizzes, no more friends getting cyber-bullied.
By Tuesday afternoon, I was s...
2020-10-16 15:35:06 +0000 UTC View PostThe next day, Ky was up early again, consulting with the Emperor who had thoughts about the planned meetings with the disenfranchised senators, and the senators who represented Devnum itself who were backed by the city's merchants.
"If they have lost their lands, then do they still hold any...
2020-10-12 15:49:26 +0000 UTC View PostEisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C.
It was late, even by D.C. standards. Kris Mottern sat at his desk in the EEOB, taking a moment to stare out the window and reflect. Like most agents, his ultimate goal was to work in the bui...
2020-10-08 16:42:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I let Hanna go home, hoping she got a chance to put the day behind her. School had been bad enough, but Marcus’s reaction had been brutal. If I had to miss a day of training to let her recover, even a little bit from that, then it was worth it.
I made my way...
2020-10-06 18:28:56 +0000 UTC View Post
Thursday, I got to school late, which meant I would get to miss Coach Bryant’s class. It also meant I would miss math, which I really couldn’t afford to do; but today was a follow up on my foot.
The Doctor had decided to just put me in the boot, with ...
2020-10-04 20:31:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Even though I got home at almost midnight, I was up early to catch Mom before she went to work. I hadn’t seen her in days and she looked incredibly tired. Ever since we’d moved here, she’d basically worked seven days a week to keep us afloat except for a rare ...
2020-10-02 17:27:05 +0000 UTC View Post
I told Hanna that afternoon that I’d asked Rhonda to be my girlfriend. She said she was happy for me, but didn’t seem to think it was particularly earth-shattering news. I was probably taking it more seriously than everyone else, since I hadn’t really dated before and def...
2020-09-30 18:38:48 +0000 UTC View Post
The sun was streaming in through the slats in the window shutters of his room. Romans didn’t have glass, except for opaque glass used in mosaics, so any opening tended to have shutters that kept birds and other things from flying in while still allowing fresh air through. Hav...
2020-09-27 14:26:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Ky returned from the camps in the mid-afternoon and headed back to the rooms he’d been assigned. The days after the battle had been non-stop movement, as he met with key players and started making arrangements. After his early morning tour of the prison camp and &...
2020-09-22 07:27:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Rhonda about flipped the next day when I told her about the party. I’d sat with her group at lunch. While it wasn’t as painful as other times, I still found myself having to hold my mouth shut multiple times. Her friends, Camille especially, seemed surprised I’d get an in...
2020-09-16 19:05:54 +0000 UTC View Post
For the second week in a row, I'd managed to end up on an amazing high. Saturday night, when I finished my set, I found out Rhonda had convinced Hanna to keep Jordan occupied for ten minutes, so she could drag me around the side of the building and show me exactly how much she ...
2020-09-14 12:31:22 +0000 UTC View Post
In between lunch and dinner, I’d gone back out to check on the pig and found Chef there, already.
“Hey, Chef,” I said, walking up next to him.
“You did good, today. Keep it up like that, and you might become a damn fine cook one day.”
“I had a blast.”<...
2020-09-11 03:19:42 +0000 UTC View Post
After eating at Hanna’s house again, I made my way back across the creek to the trailer to wait for Mom. Lately, I’d been so tired after a whole day of school followed by an intense workout that I was asleep before she got home, so we hadn’t gotten a lot of chances to see...
2020-09-08 13:27:03 +0000 UTC View Post
I was still upset that afternoon when Hanna drove me to the Blue Ridge for my daily training with Chef. She picked up on my bad mood and let me vent to her the whole way up until we parked, talking about Rhonda and my frustration with the two versions of her.
It wasn’t ...
2020-09-06 03:14:09 +0000 UTC View Post
“Hellloo,” I said in a singsong voice as I slid my crutches into Hanna’s car the next afternoon.
I’d already annoyed mom in the morning before work with my mood, but nothing was going to stop how good I was feeling after last night's date. I wasn’t even annoyed ...
2020-09-03 17:33:45 +0000 UTC View PostWe’d agreed for Jordan to pick me up at Hanna’s house. The reasoning I gave them was that Jordan already knew where it was, so it made everything easier, but that wasn’t the actual reason I’d pushed for us to meet there. The real reason was, I didn’t want Rhonda ...
2020-09-01 21:24:49 +0000 UTC View Post
After fifteen days Taylor and Whitaker stepped out of the central Berlin police station, following their final round of interviews with the police and government attorneys.
They had almost never made it out of the storage locker. The responding officers saw all the scattered bo...
2020-08-25 02:41:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Taylor was focused as they drove. Since the last thing he wanted was to get pulled over and have a patrol officer look at the tied up guy in the back of the van, Taylor obeyed every traffic law, while still weaving through traffic to make up every second he could.
“So, ...
2020-08-14 19:36:44 +0000 UTC View Post
As soon as they were out of the elevator, the officers started yelling ‘hands up.’ Of course, Taylor and Whitaker’s hands were already up, but that wasn’t uncommon. People build up a lot of adrenaline during intense situations, which takedowns usually are. He’d seen it befo...
2020-08-05 19:47:12 +0000 UTC View Post