Super Intelligent

Chapter 8: Super Intelligent 

Sam’s POV

I rested my head firmly on the hard pillow, letting the cool fabric press against my bruised cheek. My eyelids were heavy, my body begging for sleep, when the sound of footsteps broke the silence.

Not just footsteps. Heavy, pounding, deliberate.

I sat up instantly.

The door burst open, and Gaston filled the frame like a shadow cast too large. His eyes locked on me, cold as iron.

“You’re needed,” he said flatly.

I frowned. “Needed where?”

“The intelligence department.” His voice carried no room for argument. “Get up. Now.”

Every nerve in me wanted to tell him no, but something in his tone told me I’d regret it. So I pulled myself off the bed, groaning as my ribs protested, and followed him out.

The corridors at night were different—quieter, sharper, like the walls themselves were listening. We passed guards, cameras, locked steel doors, until Gaston swiped a card and a new world opened in front of me.

The room was massive. Vast, humming with energy. Screens lined every wall, their glow bathing the space in cold blue light. Dozens of people sat at sleek stations, fingers flying across keyboards, voices low but urgent. Maps flickered, satellite images rotated, streams of code ran down glowing panels.

I froze at the entrance, stunned.

I’d known they were powerful, but this—this was something else.

“Move,” Gaston snapped, shoving me forward.

My eyes darted around as we walked deeper into the room. There was so much activity it was dizzying, but I caught fragments of conversation:

“They ditched the route at 02:16.”

“Signal lost near the coastline.”

“They had a tracker on the shipment, but it’s dead now.”

My chest tightened. The air was thick with frustration.

Finally, Gaston stopped beside a station at the far end, where a young tech’s fingers blurred across the keyboard. “Sit,” Gaston ordered.

I blinked at him. “What? Why—”

“Because Teddy said to bring you here,” he cut me off. “So sit.”

My pulse jumped. Teddy? He’d sent for me?

With reluctance, I slid into the chair, the glow of the screen reflecting against my tired eyes. Data spilled across it—numbers, coordinates, pulsing red dots over a digital map.

“Shipment’s gone,” the tech muttered. “We lost their trail about twenty minutes after they split off the highway. No pings since then.”

I stared at the screen, at the lines of code scrolling endlessly, and something tugged at my memory. A trick my brother once showed me back home, back when tracking a stolen phone was the most excitement we’d ever seen.

“Wait,” I muttered. My fingers hovered, then moved almost instinctively. I pulled up the last recorded signal, scanned it against the system logs, and bypassed the dead tracker’s signal through an auxiliary feed. The tech blinked, leaning closer as my hands worked.

A spark lit the screen. A faint blip appeared on the map—flickering, weak, but alive.

My chest tightened. “They didn’t kill the tracker. They redirected it.”

I rerouted the feed, piggybacking the signal onto another satellite, narrowing the radius. And then, there it was,bright, undeniable. A moving dot on the edge of a port city, tucked into a warehouse grid.

“Got them,” I breathed.

The room stilled for a moment as the screen zoomed in, revealing the exact location. The coordinates stamped in bold across the display.

The tech beside me let out a low whistle. “How the hell did you—”

“Doesn’t matter how,” Gaston cut in, though I swore I caught a flicker of annoyance in his eyes. “We have their location.”

He grabbed a phone and barked the coordinates into it. Voices rose across the room, orders flying, the quiet hum exploding into motion.

I leaned back in the chair, heart pounding.

I’d just handed Teddy his stolen shipment back.

And as the room came alive with movement, I realized something that made my stomach sink.

The falcon pin wasn’t just a promotion.

It was a leash.

And tonight, I’d proved I could be pulled exactly where Teddy wanted me.

___

I was about to finally breathe and head back to my room, exhaustion dragging my body like weights on my ankles, when Gaston’s phone rang. He pressed it to his ear, face as unreadable as ever.

“Yes… no… okay.”

He hung up, slipping the phone back into his pocket. His eyes shifted to me, sharp, unreadable, like he was weighing my very soul.

“The boss wants you to come with us,” he said slowly. “When we go after the guys who ran off with the drugs.”

I froze. My lips parted, but no words came out. For a moment, all I could hear was the thudding of my heartbeat, fast and uneven.

“Me?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper. “Why me?”

Gaston shrugged, but it wasn’t casual,it was deliberate, like he already knew the answer and just didn’t care to tell me. “Orders are orders. You’re the one who located them. The boss thinks you’ll be useful on the field.”

I swallowed hard, trying to mask the storm inside me. Useful. That word rolled bitterly in my mind. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t trained for this kind of thing. I was just… me. But refusing wasn’t an option. Not with Teddy watching my every move.

My throat was dry. “What exactly does he expect me to do?”

Gaston gave me a long look, the corner of his mouth twitching, like he was suppressing a smirk. “You’ll see when we get there.”

That didn’t help. If anything, it made my stomach churn harder. I rubbed my palms against my pants, realizing they were damp with sweat. My room felt so far away now, the thought of lying on that thin mattress almost laughable.

“What if—” I started, but Gaston cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand.

“Don’t overthink it, kid. Just be ready. The boss doesn’t like hesitation.”

The warning sank deep into my chest. I nodded quickly, though my mind screamed otherwise. The very air in the corridor felt heavy, pressing down on me, suffocating.

As Gaston turned and started walking, I followed reluctantly, every step echoing in my ears like the ticking of a countdown clock. My head spun with questions I couldn’t ask out loud. Was Teddy testing me? Was this another one of his twisted games, pushing me closer and closer to a line I didn’t even know existed?

I clenched my fists, forcing my breathing to steady. If I panicked now, I was done for. I had to play along, had to keep my head high even if my knees threatened to buckle.

When we reached the stairwell, Gaston stopped and glanced back at me. “One piece of advice,” he said quietly. “Don’t mess this up. The boss doesn’t give second chances.”

His words carved deep into me, colder than the night air that seeped through the cracked walls. I nodded again, though my chest felt like it was caving in.