Breakpoint - Part 14

Part Fourteen

Rin

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Mick grumbled as he slowly made his way through the jungle, Rin covering their six.

“Speak for yourself, old man,” Rin said with a laugh. “If I were any younger, I’d be listening to the Pussycat Dolls.”

They weren’t particularly worried about being followed, but still the idea that someone else could be keeping tabs on them made them feel a little uncomfortable. Len’s report from a few days ago about Lane and his men traveling to the far side of the island had sounded stranger and stranger the longer they’d let him talk, but at this point, they’d decided it was best to believe whatever they heard their teammates say.

Nothing about the island made any sense. Harry had pointed out to the rest of them a little more than a week ago that at least some of the cameras weren’t connected to anything, and since then, they’d been studying the compound as best as they could without drawing attention to themselves, or rather, any more attention than it seemed like they normally got. Their working theory was that only a handful of the cameras were online, those in key areas and mostly too high to be easily reached. Part of that they attributed to the fact that those cameras actually moved and could occasionally be heard whirring as their lenses adjusted to focus on something in particular. The cameras inside of the buildings were more often than not stationary and didn’t seem to have moving swivels, but that still wasn’t cause to count them as completely off, and in fact one they’d ‘accidentally damaged’ in order to test the theory had been replaced at some point in the night.

With one that did swivel.

The bastards.

Now they were doing their best to catalog as many parts of the island as possible without getting tailed or accompanied. It had felt like they’d all been trying to do that since they got to the island, except the island was actively resisting them.

“Son of a bitch,” Rin said, pointing up towards the sky. “That’s something you don’t see every day, now, is it?”

Mick turned to follow her gaze and frowned a little bit. “We’re hallucinating.”

“Hallucinating the same thing?” Rin asked him. “Seems bloody unlikely.”

“That can’t possibly be what I think it is,” Mick said. “Got to be some kind of bat.”

“Bats don’t have beaks.”

“If it’s what I think it is, I used to know the name for that specific one when I was younger.”

“You were into dinosaurs when you were a kid?”

Mick scowled at her. “What kind of kid ain’t into dinosaurs?”

“Posh boarding school gits,” Rin said.

“Well, you can tell Harry that we’ve seen a pterodactyl when you see him next, and if he doesn’t believe us, I’ll give him a punch up the bracket.”

“He’ll probably just start talking about his ruby waterfall again,” Rin sighed.

“Bloody show off.”

They kept quiet as they were trying to follow the general path that Len had dictated for them, but few of the landmarks he’d described had matched up, and overall, Rin was starting to wonder if the island had just changed layouts on them again, which was seeming more and more likely. The further they ventured from the relative safety of the village, the more divergent from what they thought the island looked like the island got.

As they reached a bit of a clearing, Rin scurried up a tree, trying to get a better vantage point so she could see the land in front of them before something caught her eye, her face turning into a frown.

“Do you remember where Harry said his waterfall was?” Rin asked down to Mick.

“The northside, why?”

“Well then, either we’ve found a different ruby waterfall, or it’s moved from north to south.”

“Bollocks,” Mick said as he started to trudge forward.

Rin slid down the tree quickly and sprinted to get caught up to him, the wide-open field almost unusual in the surface of the island, filled with long tallgrass that reached up almost to Rin’s shoulders and to Mick’s pecs. “If that’s what he says it is, I’m getting me one of those rocks.”

“He said he had to go diving to get one.”

“So I’ll go diving.”

“You brought your suit?”

“Jesus, Mick, what are you, my grandfather?” They scurried across the field and made their way up the hill so they could look down to the little cove that formed at the base of the waterfall before spilling down a second waterfall into the ocean. As the two of them moved as far as they could away from the main waterfall, it was easy to spot the dramatic shift in color, as the light refracted back at them was tinged with heavy shades of red and pink. “I’ll be damned. It really exists. It’s a real fucking ruby waterfall.”

“You think it’s the same one in a different place, or a different one entirely?” Mick asked her.

“I don’t know that Harry gave us much in the way of distinguishing features beyond ‘ruby waterfall,’ mostly because how do you notice anything else?”

“Yeah, fair point,” he said. “Look like there’s a path over on this side, cleared enough to at least let us get down and back up again without too much hassle.”

“That makes me think it’s not Harry’s waterfall,” Rin said. “He said they had a bitch of a time getting back up the bluff cliff.”

It took them a little bit of time to make their way down the trail to reach the basin before the second waterfall that dropped the water run off into the ocean, and it seemed like the area around the little catching pool was filled with loose rubies, varying in size from the smallest the size of dimes, the larger ones as big as tennis balls. Because it seemed like there was a steady churn of the loose sand at the bottom of the pool, most of the rubies had been polished, into balls or oversized seed shapes.

As they reached the lip of the basin, Rin set her bag down and pulled her shirt up over her head, leaving her in a sports bra, as she removed her pants, a pair of utilitarian dark panties beneath. “You’ve seen me totally naked, Mick; what’s the deal?” she asked him, noticing him looking away.

“The deal is Iris wasn’t around then, and I can’t imagine she’d enjoy me ogling one of my teammates,” Mick said, trying to keep his gaze looking around the area without looking at his partner who was down to her underwear. “And while you and I both know there’s an unspoken rule about not shitting where you eat, I don’t know that anyone’s given that memo to Iris.”

Rin moved to stand at the very edge of the basin, her toes teasing against the deep blue water that was tinged purple by the bright red refractions that glimmered up from below. “Are you saying fucking me would be like taking a shit?”

Mick frowned as he turned to look at her and said, “That’s not what—” But before he could get a clean look at her, she was diving into the pool, kicking up cerulean droplets back into the air above them, her body whipping through the water as she worked her way to the bottom of the elevated pool.

Once Rin had reached the bottom, she grabbed a couple of the loose, rounded rubies, one in each hand, then swam back up towards the surface, swimming towards the edge of the pool that Mick was closest to. “Focus your eyes on these beauties, Mick,” she said, placing the two stones up at his feet. “And I’m not talking about my tits.”

Mick crouched down and picked up the larger of the two stones, about the size of a cantaloupe, lifting it up into the light, where it caught a sunbeam and reflected the light in wild and interesting ways, giving him an entire red glow around his body. “You know, I didn’t think rubies of this size could exist until I saw that football Harry was carting around.”

“And now that you’re holding one of your very own?”

“I’m wondering exactly how rich we could be if we made it off this island with everything we’ve found here, between the Vatican gold and the collection of raw rubies,” Mick said, tucking the gem into his backpack, having to move things around a little to make space for it. “I’m more and more convinced that we should’ve called this place Hotel California.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“’Cause no one ever leaves.”

Harry

He’d been trying to rest but as it turned out, his companion had other ideas in mind. He opened his eyes to see Stella slowly running her tongue along the length of his cock in a long, lingering swipe with her tongue, lashing against the head of his prick, her brown eyes looking up at him with a smile as she saw him awaken, and then seized on that moment to shove her head down onto his shaft, burying the length of it in her throat.

After Callisto’s death, he’d figured the neurolink between himself and Stella would’ve been broken, but instead, if anything, it had grown stronger and harder to predict, spiking in odd and unusual ways, his nerves linked to hers, and somehow he knew she was enjoying the blowjob she was giving him as much as he was, as their biolinked sensations were giving her a feedback loop. The better she could make him feel, the better, in turn, she herself would also feel.

As such, he didn’t need to provide feedback, suggestions or even much in the way of encouragement, because Stella could interpret his sensations for herself, and as such, could find ways to make sure her oral skills were finding precision strike points and techniques she might have never discovered if she’d relied on his communication skills to tell her what was working and what wasn’t. In fact, when he felt his orgasm about to erupt, he was surprised at how fast she’d achieved it, but it was the intensity of the entire thing that truly caught him off guard, as the rush of it was like nothing he’d ever felt before, an intense searing, soothing rush of ecstasy, and it seemed his orgasm triggered one within Stella as well which only looped back into his, their orgasms feeding and fueling the other, until he blacked out, even if only for a moment or two, or maybe she had first and he’d simply followed suit. It was impossible to tell, but after a short recovery period later, he woke up with her head resting in his lap, and her arms wrapped around his thighs.

He reached down and stroked her dark hair, and a moment later, he felt droplets of water against his pelvis, as she turned her crying eyes up to look at him. “I’m scared, Harry,” she said. “You may be fine with all this weird science shit, but that’s not me. That’s not the world I grew up in. I’m used to spies and intrigue and all that kind of shit, but this? Mental neurolinks? Remote kill switches inside of brains? Nazis? Space-time displacement? I want the fuck out of this madhouse, Harry.”

“It’s not like anyone’s here by choice, Stella, unless you’re in Management, in which case you can probably just go to your handlers and ask them to pull you out.”

“How can you possibly think I’m in management after the shit I went through with Callisto?” she whimpered. “That was my life on the line as well back there. Maybe you’re Management, and the whole thing between me and Callisto was just to fuck with my head.”

“For what reason, Stella?” Harry sighed. “What do they gain? That’s the key question you always have to keep coming back to. For me, they’re trying to figure out who I work for, why we formed, what we do, who our clients are, why we’ll take certain jobs and won’t take others, and how to interfere with our daily working agenda.”

“And?” she said, scooting up to slide her body in against his, her slender frame tucked under one of his arms. “What’s the answer to those questions?”

“To almost all of them, it’s ‘how the hell should I bloody know?’” he laughed. “I’m in transportation, Stella, and I’m the FNG.”

“F-N-G?” she asked slowly, spelling out the letters as if trying to derive meaning from them.

“It’s short for Fucking New Guy,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Means nobody tells me shit, and when they do, half the time, it’s only like a third of the available information, or what I should be fucking told. I’m not the guy who typically puts a bullet in the target’s brain. I’m not the guy who typically gathers the intel for the op. My job is to get the team to and from the sites, and without so much as a hiccup going off anywhere along the fucking way.”

“How long does FNG status last for, do you think?” Stella asked him as she nuzzled her face up against his neck, snuggling in against him.

“Until someone else, someone newer comes along, I think,” he said, his hand brushing against the back of her shoulder. “Why, you looking to usurp my position?”

“I’m thinking I’m a woman without a country or a team at this point, so if your team is looking for new people, I’m thinking I could well be in. Assuming you’d have me,” she said, kissing the underside of his chin.

“It’s not up to me, but I can see about having a discussion about the matter.” He glanced up at the ceiling fan, which still spun on a lazy cycle. “It’ll be harder to do a background check on you here.”

“Even I don’t remember all my background, so I wouldn’t worry about it,” she giggled, her fingertips trailing along his chest. “Hey, you think if we went and found another partner if she’d link up with us, or we’d have to get Management to link her into our biofeedback loop?”

“I doubt that Management is taking requests, no matter how politely you ask them,” Harry said. “But if you know who they are, you could probably ask them.”

“I’m just a girl without a country, Harry,” she sighed, “or a team.” Her fingers smoothed along his stomach. “I could try and fuck an alliance out of you, I suppose, but I think I’m just going to keep fucking you anyway, so I doubt that has any real impact on the matter.”

“You’re not mad at me for not choosing you to be the one to keep alive?”

“You didn’t choose either of us, Harry,” Stella said softly. “And that’s okay. You saw the same message I did – you didn’t have any choice in the matter. They were fucking with you, trying to make you think that you could deal with an impossible choice when in the end the choice was illusionary.”

“This place is awful.”

“Really that bad?” Stella asked, her fingertips stroking along the length of his cock again, not for intent, merely for the light delightful sensations she knew it would bring to him.

“Alright, I’ll grant you, there are a handful of delightful bits.”

“I don’t have to just use my hands y’know.”

“Mmmm. We should definitely circle back to that, sooner or later, but for now, I think we need to go and see what’s happening out in the village.”

A few minutes later, they’d managed to pull on some clothes and headed out into the village, looking at the aftermath a passing storm had left in terms of leaves on the ground. At first glance, it seemed just like standard storm debris, but a moment or so later, Harry noticed there was a bit of red fabric poking out from underneath a giant palm frond. He moved over to crouch down and pulled out most of a Nazi flag, scowling as he balled it up and tossed it into a trash bin. “The longer I’m here, the more this island does to piss me off.”

Len

Since his encounter following Lane, Len had had a few strange ideas of his own that he’d wanted to investigate. The first of which was discovering what sort of weird magnetic things were going on within this island. So he’d tapped into his old Boy Scout training and made a makeshift compass.

It wasn’t all that hard to do – a small bowl of water, a cork and a magnetized needle were all the items it took. But at first, he was worried that maybe he’d done something wrong, because once he put the cork with the needle into the water, it slowly began rotating like a clock, never settling in any one location, just in a deadlock spin.

He wandered around the main areas of the village and found that the compass would spin like that nonstop no matter where inside of the village he stood. He was outside of Tex’s bar when Tex popped his head out, craning his neck to peer at Len.

“The hell are you doing?”

“I’ve got my asshole detector running,” Len shot back. “Some reason it led me here.”

“Hardy har har,” Tex said, letting the implied offense slide right off his back. “Wanna tell me what you’re really doing here?”

“Chasing magnetic fields,” Len sighed. “Except they seem to be going haywire something mad here in the village.”

“What about outside of the village?”

Len turned to look at Tex. “How do you mean?”

“You know there’s a buried border of copper running around the outskirts of the village, Len, so don’t try and play the fool with me,” Tex said. “We all find it relatively early on, and we know it’s got something to do with the village mostly remaining the way that it is.”

“You ever think about taking up the border?”

“And have the entire village kill me in response?” Tex scoffed. “Pass, pardner. You try sleeping outside of the borders of the village yet?”

“No, why?”

Tex grinned. “Might give you something of a little lesson about why we have the rules that we have.”

“Is it going to kill me?”

“Probably not, but I’d pack some food and water, like you were going out for a few days hike.”

“You’re full of shit, Tex.”

Tex shrugged. “People tell me that all the time. But then they try it and then tend to believe me pretty well from that point on. You could give it a go, if you’re feeling daring and bold.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Anyway, step outside of the border and see what happens with your little magnet,” Tex said.

Len looked at him with a frown, then moved a few dozen steps over towards the edge of the village, holding the bowl steady, watching the needle continue to spin around and around. Then he stepped outside of the border. The effect was immediate. The needle was still spinning, but it was moving much faster now, a constant spin around and around. “Well, it’s going faster. I suppose that’s something.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That means the magnetic field of this island is fubar.”

“Lovely,” Tex said.

“Hey, can you grab me a canteen and a handful of protein bars?” Len asked him.

“Sure.”

About an hour later, Len had found a perfect spot to take Tex up on his silly little experiment, a nook only about ten feet away from the village, nestled in a spot beneath some bent trees, and he draped a tarp over them, set up a sleeping bag. It took a few more hours, but eventually, he was able to drift off into a peaceful sleep, and when he awoke in the morning, he was fully convinced that Tex had been pulling his leg, totally full of shit, as he stepped out from underneath his makeshift tent.

Of course, that opinion collapsed within mere seconds, when he looked to his side and realized that the village was nowhere to be seen, thick tree foliage in every possible direction.

“Huh.”