Chapter 41

                                    

                                          
Things after that progressed very quickly. Alex was put into the system even though she had denied the position and was then forced into one of the dorms. 
She had said a hotel would be fine but they had insisted they couldn't let Aliza Pierce's daughter stay in a hotel. Here she would have free boarding, meals and access to facilities, not all of them of course.
Potentia wasn't good at being subtle. It was plain that they harboured hopes she would change her mind, join them and maybe even reveal something.
She still didn't know what they would want her to reveal.
As soon as she arrived at her allocated room, she found her supposedly stolen suitcase sitting at the foot of her new bed. 
Not so stolen after all. Totally not suspicious.
She inspected the lock and was pleased to find it remained shut, albeit with a few scratches from attempted opening. 
Every day she would ask to speak to the 'man in charge', whoever the hell that was, but again and again she was denied and was told he had more important things to do.
Avoidance 101.
 All she wanted to do was demand that he explain why they were so adamant on keeping her here and then to let her go. This was bad, she knew that. It wasn't out of the kindness of their hearts she was here. No one did anything good for no reason at all. Every decision was made with selfish intent. 
This place was the worst. Every person she came across was robotic in their motions, following orders to the T and never digressing. Some had an insane amount of power, something that should have been impossible. It was inhuman. 
Everything here felt wrong, like the shadows she loved to hide in consumed everything to the point everything was hidden. There was no light here, the obsidian floors absorbing any that fought it's way into the basement headquarters.
 She didn't know why she hadn't packed her bags and found a way to escape as she had done before. It would have been best to get out now, run and find somewhere to hid. 
Then again, Alex wasn't good at running and hiding.
Alex still wanted to destroy Auxilium and now she wasn't sure if she should be destroying two agencies. Potentia had a dark secret, one she was determined to find, even if it meant endless fighting. Her curiosity was going to be the death of her, she just knew it. 
Alex had no help in this, no where to start. 
So she would do things on her own. There was only one place to start, and that meant tracking down the only lead she had - her man in black.

Hacking into the servers was a breeze, the USB port installed in her room allowed her acces to the mainframe. From there it wasn't hard to find a name.
Her only problem? Agent Calister was practically a ghost. Alex never saw him around the building on her brief walks with a guard right behind her (wonder why). There was no sign of him, anywhere. 
For ten days she searched; the halls, the employee of the month awards. The servers gave her no further information other than his basic employee records. There was nothing about his missions, his role in the agency, where he could be found.
She had all but given up when the person she was chasing once again came to her, much to Alex's annoyance.
Making sure the door behind her was locked, she sat on her bed and began to unfurl the yellow page that she found sitting on her desk. The next second there was a tiny tap on her window. She thought nothing of it. 
But then it happened again, louder than the first time too. And again. And again and again and again. 
"What in the world-" 
Alex ran over to the window, opened the curtains, the window and was hit, straight in the eye, by a pebble.
"Oh crap. Sorry Alex."
"Apology not accepted. Now, who are you?"
"Ah right, just realised I've never properly introduced myself, with words and stuff," came out in a drawl. "I'm James, James Calister."
"You sure aren't James Bond," Alex muttered. She peered down two stories out into the gloom. Now she had found something to focus on, she could make out the familiar figure. "Care to tell me why you are outside of my window, throwing rocks?"
"You didn't get my note?"
 "I did but hadn't had a chance to open it. So what did it say anyway, you may as well tell me."
"Just that first of all, I know you've been looking for me, I'm the one who stopped your hacking, nice work by the way, if you had just used another command and typed a bit quic-"
"Dude." What was with this guy? Where was the arrogance douche-bag she had the displeasure of meeting before?
"Oh, yeah, sorry. That tends to happen. I'll just be talking about one thing and then all of the sudden I'll start talking about a completely different yet slightly relevant topic that isn't really usef-" he was interrupted by a precise pebble to the face. "Yeah, I probably deserved that. Anyway, I thought I could help you. I need to talk to you about this place and, you know."
What is he trying to do here. "No, I don't know. What the hell are you going on about?"
"Can you come down, I really should not be saying this while shouting up the building with a whole load of security measures. That's what was in the note by the way, I was offering to give you information but you had to meet me down here."

 "And I should trust you why?" She didn't know this person, just his name. She had no substantial information about this guy, his apparent personality changes, and yet while her brain was telling her a thousand times no, her gut was going, yesyesyesyesyesyesyes. 
She didn't know him, but he was her only lead, the only chance she could find out about the situation she had somehow landed herself in. 
"You can't, shouldn't, but it should help knowing that you can beat me up, I mean I REALLY tried that time." A small smile passed across Alex's face as she recalled the quick victory. A few moments passed before she had made a decision. She knew it was stupid, really stupid, but she really really needed to know. 
Packing the most important belongings into her satchel - a pen, her phone and wallet cause who knew where they were going - she turned off the light, stuck some pillows under the duvet, not so gracefully stepped out the window, began climbing down the vine stretching across the wall to her window until the vine peeled off of the wall, sending her tumbling to the ground straight onto of Agent Calister. She fell onto of him, her face mere centimetres away from his. She could now see that his eyes were a bright vibrant, searing blue and what had seemed like black hair was dark, chocolatey brown.
"Well this is one way to get to know each other," Calister remarked before Alex quickly silenced his voice with a sharp elbow to the throat.