"Glad you could make it..."
Bai Li brushed her hair behind her ear and glowered at 'Seven' for a moment.
"What's the plan?" she asked.
"Can't say as I have one at present," Seven said, taking a drag off his smoke.
"...excuse me?" Li asked. "You're supposed to be the best field agent we have, the one who thinks so fast on his feet! And you have no idea where to go from here?"
"Thinking on your feet, by definition, means going in without a plan." Seven attempted to blow a smoke ring above his head, failed, shrugged, and took another drag. "However, you are the analyst. I'm supremely confident in your ability to work something out."
"Exactly, Carmichael," Li said. "I'm an analyst. I do research. I may be field rated, but I don't go out into the field!"
"You used to," Seven said dryly.
"Yeah, well," Li's voice quieted, "I don't anymore..."
"As touching as this 'Very Special Seventh Heaven' is getting," Seven said, smashing his cigarette beneath his heel, "we've got work to do. You're an analyst... and not to mention the best hand-to-hand combatant I've ever seen. Analyze the situation... figure something out. I need to get on the horn with Scooter before we make our entry."
Li rolled her eyes and exhaled an aggrivated breath, skulking away to survey her surroundings. Meanwhile, Seven's Bluetooth found its way back into his ear.
"Call Scooter," he said into the earpiece.
Within moments, the sound of ringing filled his headset, followed by the nasally voice of Atticus Scottsdale, the resident computer expert of the Prometheus Initiative.
"This is Scooter. What can I do ya?"
"Scooter, Seven."
"Howdy-hey, Sev!" the cheerful voice of the young man echoed through his earpiece. "Did you get that intel on Nwanjoku I sent to Li?"
"I did, Scoots," Seven said. "Thanks for that. Was wondering if you had learned anything else from Shoemaker's files."
"Funny you should mention that. Just pulled an interesting little tidbit regarding Otto's business arrangements...."
"Continue..."
"Turns out Shoemaker and his associates were working under government grant - military, specifically - in an attempt to build a human weapon. Shoemaker called it the 'superslave'."
"Oh, bloody hell..." Seven said, rolling his eyes. "Figures. Another Aryan wanting to secure his place in the food chain..."
"We have no records after today, but Shoemaker said that the experiment was supposed to go down... just before this whole thing started."
"So, the experiment led to this," Seven said, gesturing at the devastation around him to no one in particular. "Still, it begs the question: how did a genetic experiment lead to the manifestation of a divine presence in the middle of Los Angeles?"
"Well, we do know that Shoemaker specialized in a rather obscure branch of genetics referred to as 'esogenetics' - which, broken down, is 'genetics within'."
"Basically, enhancing what's already there, yes?"
"More or less," Scooter replied.
"So, theoretically, the experiment should've done nothing more than enhance physical and mental faculties," Seven says. "That still doesn't explain how..."
"See, I get that... but I've been working on a theory. Our records indicate that Nwanjoku had only a Bible to his name on the transport from Nigeria, right? So... what if, when the experiments sought out to enhance his internal genetics... they enhanced something else instead?"
"Namely, his faith," Seven said.
"Exactly!"
Silence.
"Uh... Sev?"
"Scooter, that's gotta be the dumbest thing I've ever heard, mate..."
"Well, uh... like I said, Sev... just a theory... a, uh... a work in progress..."
"Well, keep progressing it until you find something halfway rational. I'll pass on this new stuff to Bai."
"Alright, Sev," Scooter said. "Be careful out there."
"Always," Seven said, pulling his headset from his ear.
"Hey, Bai-baby!" Seven said, jogging in the direction Bai had been going when he'd first gotten on the phone. "You have anything yet?"
Turning the corner, Seven caught sight of Li, crouched on the ground, surveying her whereabouts. A small tear trickled down her face.
"Bai?" Seven asked, approaching slowly. "What's wrong, baby?"
"All these people..." she whispered. "All these innocent lives..."
"Yeah, I know..." Seven said. "It's horrible... but it's not our mandate."
"How can you say that?" she looked up at him. "If we're not helping people, what good are we?"
"Too small a scale, love," Seven said, pulling her to her feet. "We get the bastard responsible for this... we avenge them. Then, we learn. We adapt. And we stop something like this from happening again."
"But, we're..."
"We're not the government, baby," he said, brushing her hair out of her face. "Let them handle that. Let us just do what we came to."
"Alright," she said, nodding as she turned her attention away from the wreckage around her.
"Now," Seven said, "y'got anything?"
"Depends," Li said, instantly regaining composure and hardening back into her cold self. "What'd you get from Scooter?"
"Military contract," Seven answered. "'Build-a-soldier' with esogenetics."
"That doesn't make sense, though," Li answered. "There's no way that those genetics could bring out..."
"Scoots has a theory," Seven said. "I'm loathe to even bring it up, but so far, I have nothing better. He thinks that Shoemaker, in addition to enhancing the genetics already in place, brought out something stronger - his faith. And that the... thing currently doing all this is a physical manifestation of Nwanjoku's faith."
Li furrowed her brow and bit her lip. Seven had to fight back everything in his being to keep from kissing her right there.
"Actually," Li said, looking toward the Shoemaker lab, "while it may be scientifically implausible... it's likely the best lead we have."
"So... what now?"
"We get to the lab and get Shoemaker," Li said. "He's still our best shot at figuring out for sure what went wrong."
"And if we run into 'God with us'?"
"Where were you during Religion 101, Carmichael?" Li smiled. "When in doubt, pray..."
