I ended up falling asleep in my chair for most of the journey. When I woke up, we were already descending. I gazed out of the window. The sun was close to peeking above the horizon and sprawled beneath us was a vast compound of square, steel buildings with tinted glass windows, surrounded by dense jungle. Kyle piloted us back to the shore which lined the edge of the jungle and we touched down on a deserted beach.
Kyle pressed a series of buttons and the aircraft transformed into a tank. We rolled across the beach, following a path into the jungle that had already been carved out by other tanks, until we neared the entrance to the compound—towering steel gates. It would of course be too risky to park here, so we continued along the wide path, deeper into the jungle, until we found a spot further out of the way, that still afforded us a view of the entrance.
Derek, Ben, Lucas and my parents sat behind me. I looked to them, raising my brows and wondering what was next.
Ben and Lucas exchanged glances, then stood up. “We will leave now,” Ben said. “Can’t say how long we will be.”
“Be careful,” Sofia said, hugging Ben.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“And you, too, Uncle Lucas,” I added with a smile, not wanting him to feel left out.
He smirked at me appreciatively and ruffled my hair before he and Ben thinned themselves and left the room.
“So… what are they going to do exactly?” I asked my mother.
“They will get an initial scope of the place and report back,” she replied.
Of course, I understood why those two were going. As fae, they were the least likely to be detected and set off alarms. The IBSI could detect witches in their vicinity. Fae were a species that they had much less experience with, because, thankfully, fae had not paid Earth much attention. It seemed that the main attraction the human realm had for them was for collecting ghosts to deliver to the ghouls. But that pact had been broken long ago. There had certainly been no sightings and no major natural disasters that we had reason to believe they were the cause of.
More of our group—including Brock, Arwen, Grace and Heath—came to sit with us in the control room and together we gazed out of the window, our eyes fixed on the headquarters’ entrance. This became pretty tedious after a while. Grace rummaged in one of the compartments and found a card game, which we busied ourselves with, but we got tired of that too as the hours passed.
After three hours, we were starting to feel anxious.
“Do you think something could have happened?” Sofia asked.
“I doubt that,” Derek said—the calmest of all of us. “Remember, this place is huge. It will take them a long time to look around thoroughly.”
And so we continued to wait and watch and fidget. Arwen and Brock slipped away toward the back of the vehicle after another half hour. Since Corrine was here, and it seemed Arwen still hadn’t told her about Brock, they were keeping things more low key. The rest of us lapsed back into conversation. Then, as I stood up to stretch my legs and gazed around the jungle again, something caught my eye through the trees.
“What’s that?” I whispered, pressing my face against the window to get a closer look.
“What?” my mother asked. Everyone shot up from their chairs and looked to where I was indicating, to the left of our vehicle. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d seen myself, but it had been movement. Something moving. “It could’ve just been an animal,” I began, before a group of five men in IBSI uniforms emerged through the trees. They were carrying a large metal case. We watched with bated breath as they passed us and walked toward the headquarters’ entrance.
“I wonder what they’re carrying in that case,” Rose murmured.
“And where exactly they’re dragging it from,” Grace added.
I frowned. Grace had a point. I had seen from the chopper that to the west was nothing but jungle for miles and miles.
The hunters soon disappeared through the entrance, and we were left with nothing to look at again. None of us could think of much of an explanation, so our speculations fizzled out and gave way to silence until Ben and Lucas finally returned. I could already tell from their expressions that their excursion had not been successful.