Project 731 Read Online Free Page B

exist, but do.
    And right now, I feel like a pretty big failure.
    Or maybe I’m just being overprotective. We’re in the deep woods of Maine, at a fenced-in preserve with a halo of motion-sensitive security cameras. If Maigo had approached the fence, Watson would have called. And I’ve got two of the world’s best trackers with me.
    I turn to Lilly, whose acute senses can track most anything. “Find her.”
    She bounds off the Suburban’s roof and darts into the woods. It won’t take her long to search the entire preserve if she needs to. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
    Hawkins arrives, quickly assesses the situation and without saying a word, he goes on the hunt for a trail. While Lilly can instinctually track, Hawkins is a pro, teasing out details from the environment that even the cat-woman can miss.
    Collins and Joliet arrive last, looking a little too casual for my taste. “You could help,” I tell them, still scanning the vehicle for any hint of foul play. While no one, and I mean no one , knows about Maigo’s, Mark’s or Joliet’s true identities, not to mention Lilly’s existence, the very public nature of the FC-P’s past exploits has made some of us celebrities. We’re targets for conspiracy theorists, secret hungry corporations, rival governments and worst of all, fanboys.
    If someone took her... The thought stops me short. I glance back at Collins and Joliet, who are basically the yin and yang of feminine body types—Collins the Amazon, Joliet the almost boyishly figured sprite. I’m about to complain again, but I stop myself and turn to them. “What do you know?”
    Collins grins. “She’s a teenage girl who actually has good reasons to feel boatloads of angst.”
    “So...she’s what? Off brooding somewhere? She was alone here. She could have brooded in solitude without leaving.”
    Joliet actually laughs and sighs, but she might as well have offered a condescending, “Men.” She tries to hide the humor when she sees my annoyance, and slugs my shoulder. “C’mon, lighten up. Odds are she’s fine, and I’m willing to bet you can find her first. No one knows her or understands her better than you. Just take a minute to step out of your panic and think. Where would she go?”
    I sigh. I hate it when Joliet is right, mostly because she usually is. Collins, too. I’m surrounded by women who are better than me at everything, except, as Joliet has pointed out, understanding Maigo...and just about everything weird, whether it be Kaiju, Bigfoot, chupacabra or anything else supernatural. What started off as a dead-end job for a slacker agent has really become my life’s calling. “Fine,” I say, and I wander away from the Suburban.
    I don’t pick my direction for any other reason than it takes me away from the others. Think like Maigo , I tell myself. But how can anyone think like Maigo? Not only is she fairly silent most of the time, she also doesn’t share a whole lot. After me, she speaks to Watson the most, primarily because they like the same cartoons. But that’s all surface level. And...
    I stop.
    I’m standing in front of the burned out concrete rubble. It’s all that’s left of the lab where Nemesis, and Maigo, were born. I’ve looked at this mass of debris several times, remembering my visit here with Collins, when a young Nemesis nearly made a snack of us, and we faced off against Katsu Endo, aka, a pain in my ass who has gone missing.
    I’m about to turn away when I notice a gaping hole where there used to be none. Someone moved a large chunk of rebar-infused concrete to the side. “What the...”
    Ever prepared, I pull a small flashlight from my cargo fatigues and turn it on. There is a tunnel beyond the hole, large enough to crawl through, leading down. To the basement , I think, and then I remember what I found there two years ago—what I thought had been destroyed along with everything else.
    I know where she is.
    The tunnel’s rough surface assaults my hands,