ã€ŠTas&#xEC;a Del Alma-Grisã€‹


 1.1 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a clung to the gymnasium wall well above anyone''s reach. Other inmates begged her to come down, pleading she would hurt herself. The less sympathetically inclined amongst them yelled that she was acting crazy. She was only going to piss off the administration if she did not climb down immediately.

    The cement blocks on which she clung were highly porous. She could stay there all day if she wanted. That she did so desire.

    "I''m not coming down," she yelled. "Not today. This is my day!"

    Looking down, she caught sight of Felicit¨¦ Paz, a skinny Argentinian blonde of Italian descent; that one did not engage with the others.

    Nor did the other inmates care to do so in return. They called her a terrorist and an anarchist behind her back. To be fair, the latter accusation was certainly accurate. Felicit¨¦ was a notorious criminal throughout Central Quadra long before she was ever caught.

    Felicit¨¦ observed Tas¨¬a with a dominant eye skewed upward in cool analysis. Although a frown perched above her severely dimpled chin as she gazed on, Felicit¨¦ said nothing to discourage Tas¨¬a''s little act of rebellion.

    One girl was even crying. Sitting with her knees folded on the floor with her head bowed down; her shoulders shook in terror as if she herself was the center of a terrible ordeal brought about by the wicked Tas¨¬a.

    Pouty, pouty Princess Woe-Is-Me, thought Tas¨¬a.

    "What is wrong with you, Renny," Tas¨¬a called out to the girl, Rennagelda, by her nickname.

    The girl looked up. Her face pinched tight in an angry scarlet.

    "If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty."

    Tas¨¬a locked eyes with a mocking stare.

    "Do you really need your pudding that bad, Renny?"

    The girl scowled, and bowed her head back down to cry some more.

    In her life inside Ward Nueve, Tas¨¬a considered herself the most docile creature on the face of the Earth. Even if in the last several years she was a cat burglar by trade, in here, however, Tas¨¬a exhibited a social meekness that went against the grain of her most innate nature. She went along to get along.

    Not today.

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    Recently, anger began to change how she dealt with her incarceration.

    Even without the anger that now fueled her, the inmates of Ward Nueve proved this passive approach to be counter-productive, and it smothered the hope she held to return to the vida loco of her glory days.

    But what caused it, this new found willingness to embrace passivity?

    With the exception of the brazen Felicit¨¦, outside these walls Tas¨¬a was a ball of sheer aggression in comparison to the eighty docile cows with whom she shared an open dorm.

    One older inmate who bore a rotund sensibility returned to the gym. Tas¨¬a had no doubt where the woman, named Ria, had disappeared to when Tas¨¬a began to climb the wall.

    Four guards followed behind the heavyset woman.

    She pointed up to Tas¨¬a.

    "My God!. The girl is going to hurt herself," the woman declared. Ria''s voice was loud enough for all to hear. Those words she so chose to justify her snitch.

    "Thirty-two. I''m thirty-two. Not exactly a girl, Ria. And I''m not doing the chemo," Tas¨¬a shouted. "Not today."

    Four guards unfurled a net they had likely scrapped from a non-lethal shotgun canister. A fifth guard entered, their leader, a tall woman that everyone called Missi.

    Shaking her head as she caught sight of Tas¨¬a, Missi loaded a tranq-dart into an air carbine.

    Tas¨¬a cursed herself. If she had only planned ahead instead of behaving so emotionally on the spur of the moment, she would have climbed up beside the HVAC fans to gain a more tactical advantage.

    There was a set of crawl spaces along the length of the drop-down fans. She could have lifted herself into the space between the guard rail with no problem. It would have taken them the entire day just to find her if she had timed it right with no one around.

    Tas¨¬a started climbing towards the drop-down fan unit held inside a jointed cage.

    "Hurry," Missi urged her team upon seeing where Tas¨¬a was headed.

    They rushed up underneath her with the net spread out between them.

    "Grit your teeth together," Missi urged Tas¨¬a, "you don''t want to bite your tongue when the dart hits you."

    "Don''t shoot me then. Just let me be!"

    "On the count of three, Tas¨¬a. One ..."

    She was within four feet of the drop-down fan unit. Tas¨¬a twisted in midair as she pushed off on taut muscular thighs. Her fingertips brushed against the metal.

    Given her sleight weight and her cat burglar experience, it was enough for her to establish a grip.

    She heard the air gun a split moment before pain shattered through the skin of her right butt cheek.

    "Aw, shit," Tas¨¬a yelled as she felt her strength leach out of her every limb.

    She plunged down. Her small body was caught up in the net. The head guard pulled her up out of the tangles, holding her with a gentle hug. Her face pressed against Tas¨¬a''s own. Brassy curls tickled the little thief''s face.

    "You''re such a brave one up on that wall, Tas¨¬a. Why are you a total coward when it comes to your chemo?"

    I wished I knew.

    Her instincts flared wild whenever the hour of chemo treatment drew closer. Her temples would pound like a drum as if to warn her, run, run, run!

    She watched as Felicit¨¦ studied the wall where Tas¨¬a had climbed as if the anarchist was calculating vectors. What did the Argentine know about the art of second story breaking and entering?

    In the real world, could the anarchist be of any practical value to her?

    Felicit¨¦ stood up from where she had squatted against a gym wall. As if to answer the questions posed in Tas¨¬a''s head, she affirmed with a nod her approval before she turned and left the gym.

 1.2 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Her eyes steadied on the yellow liquid inside the five hundred ML gravity feed bag hanging from a double hooked pole in front of her. Tas¨¬a lay reclined in a leather-bound chair.

    The medical technician droned on and on with his voice pitched in see-saw fashion to punctuate every question he asked. Tas¨¬a did not listen when he went over the procedure in minute detail, as he did every Wednesday.

    She thought of the world outside the fenced-in limits of her current domain. Outside was a world built by a people who had adjusted to a direful reality.

    A biblical verse came to mind.

    I look out on earth¡­ lo, all is chaos;

    I look at heaven... It''s light is gone.

    The bag crumbled as its contents flushed out. It''s cold contents now flowed beneath her skin.

    I look out on the mountains¡­ they are trembling;

    And all of the hills are swaying!

    The medical tech watched her. His lips puckered timidly beneath a dark red mustache.

    "Do you still turn to your old creed, Alma-Gris," he asked, using only part of her surname with undue familiarity.

    Tas¨¬a ignored him still.

    I look out¡­ lo, the man is seen!

    All the birds have taken flight.

    He would ask his questions in the same pretense-ladened pattern every time she visited. Her lips creased in a slight smile as she anticipated his next question.

    "How does a woman of the cloth, a sister of the convent, develop a mania for burglary?"

    I look out¡­ lo, the sown land lies a desert;

    And the villages are all razed by the Lord''s rage.

    Now came the coldness that swept into her loins and intestines like morning frost as it spread in the burrows of tilled soil. A rusted iron rotor blade scraping against the lining of her stomach would not have caused any more discomfort than the brew that now crept inside her gut.

    Yet, Tas¨¬a smiled placid even still.

    For this has the Lord said:

    The whole land shall be desolate.

    "You''re almost there," said Red Stache, what she called him when telling Este-Oeste about him, "I can see it in you. No matter how serene you pretend to be. It rides you like lightning sizzling through air. You get these little goosebumps up and down your arms. It''s your tell.

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    "Still, you won''t give me anything. Tell me at least this much, for sometimes I see your lips move in repetition. What biblical verse does a fallen sister seek comfort in when she sits in that chair to receive her chemo?"

    Words to annoy her. She had assessed long before that the medical tech was not merely a contract worker going about his duties every Wednesday. He was there to prod her as well.

    Demoralize. To break her spirit.

    She pushed him out of her mind, and continued with the verse now naked on her lips.

    And for this show the earth mourns.

    And the heavens above grow black.

    Red Stache braced himself. He heard the squall that emanated from her body. Tas¨¬a kept her composure perfectly still as her stomach rumbled to a thunderous crescendo just before her intestines released.

    His lips shivered with little control as he watched her vacate her bowels. Once she was finished, Red Stache suspired dramatically while he regained his composure. He was now ready to speak.

    "We have been through three months of this, Tas¨¬a. You and I in this danse macabre to which we are fated."

    His words were always so oddly flirtatious after she shat herself. Her cynical heart understood the cajoling to which he had previously subjected her. This, however, made no sense. Why was he so intent on making an impression on her?

    She wasn''t anyone''s idea of a ravishing beauty.

    Short stature. Flat butt. Weird goblin smile. She could go on and on about her physical inadequacies, yet still, Tas¨¬a was comfortable with herself.

    He turned a switch on the side of the machine by her knee. Instantly, she felt the yellow liquid reverse its course as it drained out of her in a slow pneumatic sip.

    The versus pushed fore into her mind like an incantation that had to be completed.

    Every city shall be abandoned,

    And not a man dwell therein.

    They mirrored the tribulation she felt sweltering inside of her. After the first treatment many months before Tas¨¬a found need for verse to give her meditative solace.

    She felt as if the liquid that drained out of her was taking something vital from her very essense. She did not understand why she thought this; though quite irrational, there was a certainty there that played true to her intuition.

    It was the same dread feeling that caused her to scurry up the wall a few hours earlier.

    Red Stache waved for her attention.

    "This is the part that scares me, Miss Alma-Gris," he said, tapping the bag that was now nearly a quarter full.

    The liquid glowed an iridescent yellow.

    "What is that? What is in you that causes that? No other patient, none but you, causes that to happen."

    No fret would she allow to surface on her face so long as the man was in her presence. She smiled with eyebrows raised in slow, docile contentment that revealed none of the scorn that she now felt.

    The questions were stupid. The glow was obviously caused by a marker triggered by her very own genetic materials. There could be any number of reasons the manufacturers targeted a specific trait. If a medical technician could not figure that much out, she was not going to help him with an explanation.

    It first occurred to her, he was likely fucking with her, playing upon what he assumed to be her religious superstitions, given his mocking tendency to treat her like a simpleton.

    As a chill of realization occurred to Tas¨¬a she tried to suppress an urge to flinch. His words did not follow their usual ridiculous oscillating pattern of both cajoling and courting her with overwrought flowery language. He was more assertive with his words than usual.

    She tensed up. He''s deflecting. Trying to distract me, but from what?

    This time Tas¨¬a answered his question with a sudden jerk of her head; her gaze locked on to his eyes. She finished the verse, and directed it at him.

    "You ruined creature, what will you do?"

 1.3 Book One: The Gray Soul

    After bathing her and switching out her clothes, the medical staff sent her back to the dorm accompanied by two guards. An hour after the treatment, Tas¨¬a was still too weak to carry herself. She limped along, held up between the two men.

    At just under five feet tall, and ninety-five pounds, she did not impose much of a burden on anyone.

    The guards laid her on her cot where she sank down on the mattress before thanking them. After the guards left, two inmates came by to gawk and peek into her cell. Divider walls, six feet in height, defined the individual cells in the larger dorm.

    "Are you all right, honey," asked the older woman. The same lady who had snitched her out earlier.

    Tas¨¬a clamped her teeth together in a continuous pensive grind to deter the anger she felt. Tas¨¬a was uncomfortable being rude to others. Even those who deserved nothing but absolute derision.

    She wanted to snarl with bared teeth and even hiss at the woman like a spitting cobra to express her disgust. Instead, Tas¨¬a covered her mouth with a tightly curled fist.

    The other woman, a slim young thing with a lazy eye and uncontrollable hair whom other inmates called ''Este-Oeste'', started to speak.

    "Missi," she began, "wanted me to tell you that you won''t be allowed in the gym until the painters have a chance to cover the walls in some kind of acrylic that prevents climbing."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She expected as much.

    "It''s for your own good," said the older lady in a voice dripping in condescension.

    "Fuck you, Javierra," came a voice heavily Argentinian in accent from behind them. As she entered the cell, Felicit¨¦ smirked.

    On the streets of Asunci¨®n, Ria Javierra was a mafiosa dame of rank. She wasn''t use to being spoken back to roughly.

    Javierra was caught by surprise. She snarled at first, but then backed up with an astonished look on her face when she realized it was Felicit¨¦.

    The tall blonde approached into the older woman''s space. Her shoulders spread out archly as she stood in a hauteur pose with her long, gaunt Lombardian figure on full display.

    On her right side, her hair was long with the silky light sheen of new corn shucks. The left side was cut in a fade.

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    Stark cold blue eyes held above a hawk nose now turned on Javierra.

    "Leave," she commanded.

    As the blonde watched the pair leave, Tas¨¬a got a good look at the cochlear implant beneath Felicit¨¦''s right ear. A dampener.

    Once they were alone, the Argentinian''s eyes set on Tas¨¬a.

    "Can you believe those cows," Felicit¨¦ asked.

    "Quite bold of you, Felicit¨¦. She knows people. She is people."

    "Fuck the mafia. Do you know how they get their pull? By licking the jackboot that set their franchises up in the first place."

    Tas¨¬a and Felicit¨¦ were not truly friends, but neither was the thief afraid of her nor did she avoid the anarchist'' company. Unlike the other girls, Tas¨¬a liked her.

    She gestured to a plastic chair as she pulled herself up from her bed.

    "Come in, have a seat," Tas¨¬a said.

    Felicit¨¦ shook her head. She held some things in her hands.

    "I won''t be here long. I brought you something. This-" the Argentinian said as she lay a pill bottle on the top of Tas¨¬a''s locker, "-is for your nausea and your pain. "This-," she laid down four mini bottles of vodka beside the pill bottle, "-is to wash the pills down with."

    Tas¨¬a smiled, thinking it was good having the anarchist of notoriety in her corner.

    "I can''t possibly thank you enough, Felicit¨¦."

    She reached over to the locker top. The blonde helped her with the pill bottle top cap.

    "That is where you are wrong, sister. Oh, it is not free," she said with a smirking giggle.

    Felicit¨¦''s tone changed to an empathetic one as she tapped two pills into Tas¨¬a''s hand.

    "But the price isn''t that high either. Starting tomorrow evening, I have orderly duties in Spore Isolation. I need help with the power vac and pressure wash, and the other equipment, as well. You see, my arms are on the skinny side."

    Felicit¨¦ clenched her biceps in demonstration.

    Tas¨¬a chortled as she answered, "And I am less than one hundred pounds, soaking wet."

    "Working together with the equipment we should be okay."

    "You keep me supplied with this, I''ll help you every night," Tas¨¬a said.

    She swallowed the pair of pills and chased them down with a drink.

    Placing a firm grip on Tas¨¬a''s forearm, Felicit¨¦ pointed to a nearby intercom speaker with a nod of her head. She then scooped the thief''s naked ear and she mouthed the words, ''you hear it?'' Twice Felicit¨¦ repeated to ensure Tas¨¬a understood.

    Tas¨¬a listened. Indeed, there was a slight feedback coming from the intercom. Someone was listening in on them.

    Felicit¨¦ passed her a note.

    It read: I need to talk to you when we get some privacy over in Spore Isolation. Some friends of mine are interested in you.

    ''About what," Tas¨¬a mouthed back, silently.

    Felicit¨¦ peeked over to the intercom, then she put her lips to Tas¨¬a''s ear.

    "Who told you that you have cancer? Did they supply you with any evidence?"

 1.4 Book One: The Gray Soul

    The next day, nearly noon, Tas¨¬a lay on her cot still not feeling up to her full strength. Felicit¨¦''s question gnawed at her gut still. It was a question that stirred in the back of her own mind ever since she was told the diagnosis.

    Are you sure?

    She had asked the doctor when he gave her the news.

    His hesitation before he affirmed once more that she tested positive left an indelible impression upon her from that day forward.

    She got up and she gulped down a cup of coffee that she had allowed to go cold. Este-Oeste brought it to her earlier that morning.

    As she waited for the kitchen staff to call chow there was one thing Tas¨¬a could do to help satiate that curiosity while Felicit¨¦ wasn''t around to fill in the gaps for her.

    She walked to the center court where the job board desk could be found and she signed up to do patient assistance for two hours after the lunch hour. Given her medical condition, work was not mandatory for her. Volunteer work, however, would still pay her credit to use for commissary.

    After eating her lunch, Tas¨¬a quickly changed her clothes and headed up to the medical floors of the Quadra Central Medical Institution, the IMCQ (Instituto Medico Central de Quadra). Her volunteer work gained her a temporary pass to be up on the medical floors.

    But for the grace of the Lord, Tas¨¬a told herself. If her sickness worsened substantially, she would be reassigned out of Ward Nueve with its open dorm and relatively free movement between activity areas to a small room in the Oncology Unit where her movement would be much more restricted.

    Tas¨¬a had a patient in mind. A twenty-something Colombian girl with leukemia she had met when Tas¨¬a first arrived six months earlier and the Colombian girl had just begun her treatment.

    Tas¨¬a checked the assignment sheet and she found the room listed for Lydia Estrella. She also searched the hot box and found to her good fortune Lydia''s meal had not been delivered to her yet.

    "Lydia! You are looking... Actually, you really are looking good. I''m relieved that I don''t have to lie to your face to make you feel better. You look really good."

    The Columbian girl smiled at hearing this. The girl lay on her bed with hands folded over her blanket, holding a remote. She took out the audio-visual extensions that hung on her ears.

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    "Tas¨¬a, darling, you remembered me."

    "But, of course," Tas¨¬a said.

    She appraised Lydia once more with a quirky smile. The girl''s composure was healthier than when they first met.

    "I can tell that you get out to the yard. You are almost as dark as I am, Lydia."

    "You exaggerate, Tas¨¬a. I burn too easily in the sun to ever be as even in tone as you are so graced. I''m strong enough to go out for an hour in the morning and an hour in the early evening. But the worst of this cancer is over, it so does appear."

    "I couldn''t be happier to hear it. And so glad to see it for myself."

    Lydia literally wagged a finger.

    "You should get some sun while you still can. I can tell by the, I don''t mean to be rude, dullness of your hair you do not get out.

    "When I first met you, Tas¨¬a, you had the most beautiful highlights streaming through that raven coif. I said to myself at the time, ''A truly sunkissed brunette. I. So. Hate. Her.''"

    Lydia Estrella grew up far from any poor barrio but they shared a similar seminarian education which formed a bond that caused them to become fast friends. Tas¨¬a felt a twinge of guilt that her visits were so rare and her purpose for being there now was only ulterior. She decided to be upfront with it.

    "So, you''ve heard about my cancer?"

    Lydia nodded. She looked down at her hands. Tas¨¬a pinched her big toe, playfully. Then she sauntered over, leaning into the Columbian girl to rub the soft, short hair that grew uniformly across her skull like downy.

    "It is growing back so beautifully, so evenly," Tas¨¬a complimented her.

    "Thank you."

    "That is really the reason why I am here. I wanted to ask you about hair. When did you start to lose yours in the process of your treatment?"

    "Second week of chemo," Lydia answered. "My body stopped resisting the treatment. Then-," she stuck her tongue out and gave her a raspberry, "-thhhppt, my hair began to fall out in clumps. I was bald by the end of my third week."

    Lydia reached out her hand and grabbed Tas¨¬a''s own hand. She cuffed and stroked it.

    "Tas¨¬a, when do you start your own chemo?"

    "That is the thing. I started three months ago."

    Lydia''s eyes bulged with tense furled wrinkles lining her brows. "Something is not right. That is not possible."

    Tas¨¬a roped all of her long strands together in her hand and she gave them a forceful pull.

    "As thick and as ensconced as my hair has ever been, even if it is a bit dull. Since the treatment I no longer go out in the sun. It makes me nauseous to do so."

    Lydia looked thoughtfully with the frown still set upon her brow.

    "Would they give a placebo on a cancer patient''s normal treatment schedule?"

    "I don''t know," Tas¨¬a answered, "I have met a few reptiles amongst the staff here."

    Tas¨¬a collected the meal tray after Lydia was finished eating.

    Before she left, Tas¨¬a asked what time the Columbian hit the track in the morning. Tas¨¬a promised to come up to join Lydia for her morning stroll. She could dress from head to toe if necessary to stay out of the sun.

 1.5 Book One: The Gray Soul

    She walked a long corridor set inside a skywalk to an adjacent building with the designation ''Ward Ocho'' above the entrance.

    Tas¨¬a''s nose crinkled on the sight of this oddly placed English word. The entangled language usage in almost all of the signs and intercom announcements were a constant reminder that the governing body, called the Salvage, was a foreign institution imposed upon them.

    The Spore Isolation Unit was strangely quiet the moment the sliding door closed behind Tas¨¬a. She entered a double atrium where natural light spread out to every niche between oddly-angled interior buttress supports and columns ascending well above her up three stories high into a pair of onion-shaped domes made of glass.

    It was quiet, until the Shrill of the Banshees filled the air. Then the other inmates, following their call, howled like a pack of hounds.

    The metastasizing of the Cull Spores was a terrible and unpredictable thing to happen to a human. In Greater Quadra, it could happen to anyone as everyone carried the nano-spores.

    Tas¨¬a approached cautiously. Odd and inexplicable things occurred to those of whom the infection became manifest.

    She walked close by a cell where the inmate inside did not join the fray of howling. That alone perked Tas¨¬a''s interest.

    A surreal grin spread across the woman''s face as she stood. With the exception of the flesh around her lips, she stayed still as if frozen.

    The tiny girlish chin could not possibly contain the smile as large mouthed and broad as her''s appeared to protrude out. But somehow the geography of the woman''s face did so as if propped by an unseen dimension.

    Her lips flowed in and out in vibrant quiver. Then she opened her eyes and upon seeing Tas¨¬a staring at her, the woman joined the maddening howl.

    Tas¨¬a hurried her step, but jerked her body back when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

    "Whoa," Felicit¨¦ giggled in a chortled snort, "easy now, before you pee yourself. Have you never been in Spore Isolation before?"

    "Several times, but only to deliver carts. Usually, the guards are all over the place over here."

    Felicit¨¦ assessed the few that remained.

    "The howling takes place four times a day," she said, "and it happens at regular intervals. The guards who are not assigned as duty officers time their breaks for the howling."

    Tas¨¬a watched yet another inmate standing perfectly still while her hair, long, thick coarse strands, curled and whipped like medusian serpents framing an appearance of religious ecstasy about her face.

    Manifest, the cull spores did odd things to humans. Before she was told she had cancer, like everyone else, spore manifestation was her greatest fear. She often felt it shifting through her defenses at night when she dreamed.

    Felicit¨¦ watched her with a studied smirk.

    "Come. Come. Walk with me," the Argentinian blonde commanded.

    Tas¨¬a followed the long strides as best as she could with a rapid shuffle. They entered the maintenance corridor and headed for the equipment room.

    "Those intercoms back at the dorm," Felicit¨¦ began, "you can hear the slightest feedback rising above the static when someone is actively listening. What you can''t hear are the passive receptors. They are always on. Always searching for keywords."

    They found the step-on power vac. A vacuum sweeper one rode while standing and steering. Given the advanced state of robotics, Tas¨¬a was surprised the first time she saw one.

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    Since then, she had learned that robotic devices were avoided in correctional institutions. Manual labor kept inmates busy. Busy inmates tended to stay out of trouble.

    "It takes a bit of muscle to operate," Felicit¨¦ began, "and I am sorely lacking. You stand here and steer, and I will pitch it left and right, from the front."

    Tas¨¬a hopped her little frame on board and grabbed the guide bars.

    "That matter you mentioned to me last night," she said.

    "The little spiel I had planned for you is getting there. Turn us around. We''re going to hit all the sprawling corridors before we do the atrium floor."

    "All right."

    "Tas¨¬a, I don''t have all the answers. But I know where to steer you."

    Felicit¨¦ interrupted her own words with a snort.

    "I see what you did there," Tas¨¬a commented.

    She leaned her body back to put more weight on the guide bar as she arced the wheels.

    Felicit¨¦ continued.

    "You may very well be aware that I possess certain talents that even locked up here are still in demand. Hence, why it is that I can acquire premium vodka even here.

    "The first step I took when they assigned me into the dorm a year ago was to build a schematic assessment of the full dorm area. That is how I found the passive receivers. Have you ever been to the second floor here, Tas¨¬a?"

    "I have delivered carts up there by way of the service elevator."

    "Ever noticed that you can see a tower through the onion domes on the southwest corner?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "It caught my eye."

    Felicit¨¦''s supreme self-confidence did not waiver in the least even as she struggled to guide the power vac.

    "That is where the passive receivers map back to. I infiltrated two of their cameras over there in that tower. The setup is luxurious, Tas¨¬a, and the staff, they have the look of high-level spooks about them.

    "The true overlords of the IMCQ are there, and I need your help to get me over there where I can indulge the kind of penetration my clientele demand of me."

    "You mentioned friends. Friends who have an interest in me."

    The Argentinian stopped and squatted by a column.

    "Yes. The ones that told me to keep an eye out for you."

    "What else did they tell you? Why would they be so interested in me?"

    Felicit¨¦ suspired forcefully for a moment. Guiding the power vac was obviously more work than what she was used to and not very much to her liking.

    "Other than your obvious skill set," Felicit¨¦ answered. "There is indeed something they know about your - how should I put it? Peculiar situation. Help me and I will help you."

    Tas¨¬a crossed her arms along the guide bar. She scrunched her brows together as if she was giving the proposal cautious consideration.

    "I am not a neophyte in our art by a long shot. So, it is like that?"

    Felicit¨¦ grimaced and she shrugged with her arms flailed out.

    "I would not be pulling this hustle bullshit maneuver on you, Tas¨¬a; I would just go ahead and tell you everything I know, except that my contact in the administration is about to get himself shitcanned. I need to keep my operation going.

    "My people tell me you are my best bet to get some necessary things done. I''ve studied you for a good while now, and I believe them."

    Tas¨¬a looked around. Hard to believe she had seen no guards on patrol. From where she now stood, Tas¨¬a spotted two guards sitting down at terminals in the office station on the South end of the central atrium. In spite of the two inmate workers loitering in one spot for several minutes already, the guards paid them no attention.

    "Don''t worry about those clowns in the fishbowl, Tas¨¬a. They are not the real enemy. They don''t even register on the radar and neither do they want to. Apathy gets them through to the next day and that much closer to collecting their pensions.

    "These puppet masters up in the tower, they are the ones that we have to have cause for concern."

    "If we get caught, Felicit¨¦, in an unauthorized area we could catch anything up to an escape charge. They''ll bury us under the IMCQ. Down there. Amongst the rest of the Disappeared."

    "Can that be any worse than having to endure your weekly chemo?"

    Tas¨¬a considered what the Argentinian blonde just told her. Why would the chemo treatment stop if she went skulking around unauthorized places? Even uncaught, what would change?

    In a whisper she said, "you are planning an escape!"

    "Eventually, we will have to. For now, our best chance is to keep my operation going. Partners?"

    Tas¨¬a hopped off the power vac, bent down and shook Felicit¨¦''s hand. The terrorist, other inmates whispered. An anarchist, Tas¨¬a reminded herself. The blonde was perhaps her best chance at achieving a real life again.

    "Partners," she agreed, as she shook Felicit¨¦''s hand.

 1.6 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a''s armpits smelled foul after the work detail; sweating, she tended to acquire the odor of sour milk. Even more so now that she endured the weekly treatment.

    She hit the showers, and changed into sweats and a t-shirt before sitting down. Felicit¨¦ gave her a lot to think about. The next week was going to be a busy one, a dangerous one.

    Earlier, the Argentinian had led her to a second-floor break room. Through meshed glass esconced inside a wide window frame they could see the grounds of the complex laid out and outlined by a double set of fences five yards apart with spirals of barbed wire between them.

    There were three feasible exits: the front doors of the main building, a back exit gate for patrol trucks and utility vehicles allowed to access the grounds of the IMCQ, and a loading dock connected to the main warehouse.

    However, except for the front door entrance to the main building, the other two exits led deeper into the complex.

    Tas¨¬a suspired as she considered the problem this presented her. Then a call came over the intercom.

    "Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, report to the duty officer station."

    It was Missi.

    Tas¨¬a got up; she kicked off her rubber shower shoes and slipped her tennis shoes back on. Este-Oeste was two cells down from her. The girl was reading the latest from her stack of murder books with her legs propped up against her cell wall.

    She liked books about serial killers. Both true crime and fiction. There was no real record of violence in her rap sheet; She just had her taste.

    She also sung as she read, in the English language, a song about an amigo''s guitar in what Tas¨¬a assumed to be a Texan country twang. Este-Oeste was the oddest duck in the facility.

    Her good eye concentrated on the book. The other drifted off towards the ceiling, doing its own thing. Then it settled on Tas¨¬a.

    "I somehow knew I would be seeing you," Este-Oeste said under a thin smile.

    Tas¨¬a walked up towards her as the skinny girl put her book down, and she set down in the empty chair.

    "Come on," Este-Oeste said, "let''s get this over with so I can get back to reading."

    "We could stay here," Tas¨¬a said, as she grabbed a handful of the girl''s hair, playfully. "I could give you a French braid."

    "It would look pretty on me I truly admit, but totally wasted here. Missi is going to be upset if she has to hunt you down."

    Tas¨¬a followed the girl to the officer station.

    Missi jerked her head up when she saw the two.

    "Have a seat," Missi urged Tas¨¬a.

    The officer station chairs were not the plastic mold ones of the cells, but comfortable leather back swivel chairs. Tas¨¬a had not felt anything that comfortable in several months. Even the inclines on the medical floors tended to be hard-surfaced.

    Este-Oeste leaned against the door and stood dutifully. Undeterred by Missi''s dirty looks.

    "How are you feeling," Missi asked.

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    "Nothing different, except I have a feeling the chemo is weakening my inoculation. I see the Incubus in my dreams. I also see the Black-Eyed Ones asking to be let in. And the snake in the tree hissing telling me what it could do for me."

    "How often," Missi asked, a taut frown on her lips.

    Everyone in the Greater Quadra experienced the dreams, but the inoculation shot greatly dampened their frequency.

    "Often enough to scare the hell out of me."

    Folk tales said the Cull Spores could only manifest if one said ''yes'' to the dreamed entities requests, but no one really knew for certain the veracity of that claim. It seemed almost fantasy, but it had been clearly proven in research studies that the spores targeted specific receptors in the brain related to sleep.

    "I see," was all Missi could say in response.

    She turned her head, and she stared straight at Este-Oeste.

    "Marc¨¬a, I need to speak to Tas¨¬a alone."

    The two inmates looked at one another wide-eyed. Este-Oeste was reluctant to leave. She stood her ground. Only the snitch, Ria, went into the officer''s station alone.

    "I realize," Missi began, "it is a violation of your precious etiquette, gentle ladies, but this is a serious matter I need to discuss.

    "Marc¨¬a, at this point you are disobeying an officer, no one is going to give you grief if you stand down if I threaten to write you up. See my hand? It is going to the red pen. All of those gawkers out there watching us through the window pane know what the red pen means.

    "Now, my other hand is going for the box with the d9 forms in it. Please don''t make me have to take it out. You have no idea how much I hate writing these damn things."

    Marc¨¬a stood straight as she gave one last look at Tas¨¬a. She turned and quickly scooted out.

    "Please shut the door," Missi asked Tas¨¬a.

    As she did so, Tas¨¬a looked around to see who was gawking and watching.

    "Hard to keep secrets in this place, Tas¨¬a. Do you know how much grief you put me through? I didn''t want to report your little escapade from yesterday." With her hands up emphatically, Missi continued. "I swear! I was going to let it ride."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced and completed Missi''s sentence for her.

    "But someone, an inmate, got word to the lieutenant before you did."

    Missi nodded. Fucking Ria Javierra!

    "Good guess, Tas¨¬a. You know how things work around here. You know what goes on. I had to stay over for four hours on my own Goddamn time, writing out a report, and filling out forms. So much fun, it''s a shame you couldn''t have joined me."

    "I''m sorry," Tas¨¬a said scrunched over in her seat with her hands fiddling together.

    Missi relaxed back in her chair. A frown pinched her whole face.

    "I am too. They say you are on a bad trajectory."

    "What?"

    "That same someone whom we were just talking about, and I won''t mention any name, informed the lieutenant that you have been hanging out with Felicit¨¦ Paz of late. That girl is hot, and you put heat on yourself by association."

    "She helped me out," Tas¨¬a protested, growing animated. "I don''t turn my back on people who offer me a hand."

    Missi nodded her head and looked off into the distance.

    "I understand, I truly do. I''m just letting you know the potential of the all too real shit hitting the proverbial fan."

    "The chemo has got to stop, Missi. It is bullshit! It is not even the same procedure they administer to the other girls in Oncology who have been through it. I have been asking around; they all tell me my situation is fucked up."

    "I know. Look at you. You look no more like a cancer patient than I do. But, you know what, Tas¨¬a. There''s not a goddamn thing I can do about it."

    Tas¨¬a wiped the tears out of her eyes, using her t-shirt collar.

    "Look at your puss quivering, Tas¨¬a. I hate seeing you like that." The tall guard with her brassy curls leaned forward to get closer in. "Do you know what you have to do, Tas¨¬a?"

    "What?"

    "Survive. Get through this day. Then the next. And then the next. Until you outlast them. Do you think you have it in you?"

    Missi''s words came out with such sincerity in her tone, it gave Tas¨¬a pause to think about what she said. Her body felt like an unbent steel rod even after three months of the treatment whatever the hell it was; she realized then she was still undefeated.

    "Yes. I do."

    "Good. Now get out of here -," Missi said with her head pointed to a group of gawkers, "- before they start making up shit about you."

 1.7 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Before leaving the officer station, Tas¨¬a grabbed a roll of toilet paper and she headed for the lavatory. Almost any emotional entanglement with others did a number on her guts.

    In her teens, it made intimacy all but impossible. As an adult, she gave up on the idea of being with another person altogether when she joined the seminary and later on when she took her vows.

    She walked to the farthest stall to get away from the unpleasant sharp toned music coming from the first one. Tas¨¬a pulled down her pants. She sat down. As she reached behind herself, she grabbed the handle for water release and she kept it pressed down while relieving herself.

    A customary ritual of cordiality practiced in correctional institutions the world wide. The flushing whoosh curtailed to some extent both the unpleasant sound and odor.

    When she finally let up on the handle, a voice came from the next stall over.

    "Midget, is that you?"

    In the entire six months she had been incarcerated, Tas¨¬a did not even bother to retain the woman''s name. In her opinion, the woman was street trash in its purest and most unadulterated form.

    Street Trash smack talked almost constantly without a whit of sincerity that could have possibly made her presence more tolerable to be around.

    To hell with what that woman thinks.

    Like many mestizas of South America, Tas¨¬a was short. Her stature was far from atypical. She wasn''t even close to being the shortest woman in the dorm. There were thirteen shorter, and six others of the same height.

    Yes, she did take the time to survey. Not so much out of personal vanity, but a habit born out of her profession.

    She noticed everything.

    She was also proportioned with regular-sized limbs, and not small ones. In fact, they were a little long for her height, and they helped her earn her favorite nickname when she was a kid, ''spider-monkey.''

    As a child, she would scurry up the bodies of adults in an attempt to rest her bum on their shoulders like the tiny monkeys did in the lively parks of her native barrio in San Pedro. In the dismal here and far bleaker now, Street Trash interrupted her pleasant memory.

    "I can always tell that it is you," Street Trash called out. "You smell it up like a chemical plant has blown sky-high. Especially now, after that fucked up treatment that they have you on makes you smell so funny."

    Street Trash was also right about how the chemo caused almost everything she exuded to have a metallic and sour odor about it. However, given she did everything in her power not to associate with the woman so unnaturally rude for a mature lady of their culture, Tas¨¬a did not respond back.

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    "What''s the matter? You don''t like me anymore? Well, just be that way, you little hateful midget."

    Finally, after chuckling to herself, the woman shut up. The relief of this gave Tas¨¬a a chance to just close her eyes for a moment to pull her thoughts together. She thought back to the conversation she had with Felicit¨¦ in the break room over at Spore Isolation.

    Tas¨¬a urged the Argentinian, asking if they could execute their plan and make an attempt at an escape before the next treatment date.

    Felicit¨¦ smirked through a thin smile; her eyes cast low. To the Argentinian''s ears, the question must have come across as a terribly na?ve one for Tas¨¬a to have even asked of her.

    "We will need at least four days to map out the area between here and the tower. One day soon, I am shooting for next Sunday, we''ll execute the plan.

    "I get my breach work back to my friends. They contact their friends and -," Felicit¨¦ pointed to the fences and the gates, "- they make some of those barriers go away. Sorry, friend, but you will have to go through chemo at least one more time. Possibly twice more, if they drag their feet. I cannot guarantee you that they won''t."

    In the several dozen break-ins where there were many varying levels of security involved, Tas¨¬a never had to expend more than a single evening towards casing a marked area.

    It was often dangerous to go back to the same properties on multiple occasions ahead of an operation. You only increased your risk of exposure. All too often, you did so without gaining anything vitally necessary to make the extra risk worth it.

    In her opinion, Felicit¨¦''s insistence that they spend so much time in the planning stage of the operation was driven by the Argentinian''s youth and inexperience.

    After Tas¨¬a finished up, she made her way to the washroom where she stood in front of a sink. She cringed when she smelled a familiar raspberry scented shampoo. Typically, it was worn by Ria Javierra but few others.

    The older woman walked over to Tas¨¬a. A little self-satisfied smile creased Ria''s face; her hands, she clasped together.

    "As you may know, the lieutenant asked me about what occurred. He was very upset, but I told him that it was not like you to make waves like you did in the gym. You only want to get out of here on the best of terms like anyone else, right Tas¨¬a?"

    She watched the woman approach from the vantage point of the mirror in front of her.

    Del Alma-Gris'' face was stiff with anger; it took all of her effort not to glare back at the mafiosa dame.

    Tas¨¬a''s lips puckered full and she waved her chin up.

    "Don''t worry about me," said Tas¨¬a, "I''ll be fine. I will land like a cat. I always do."

    Her anger at Ria drove her to speak with a surety in her words that she certainly did not feel.

    Ria paused before she responded; evidently, Tas¨¬a''s words were not the contrite ones that she expected.

    "It''s good that you feel that way, but you can always use a little help. I believe I may have talked the lieutenant out of doing anything rash. It all will likely blow over soon enough."

    Ria spent only a few seconds washing her hands before she left.

    Tasha thought it was peculiar for the woman to show up as she did. Which one of the stalls did she inhabit? There was only one other in use besides the two stalls Tas¨¬a and Street Trash occupied. She was sure that the youth-oriented music that came from that stall was not likely to Ria''s taste.

    When Tas¨¬a made it back to her cell, instantly, upon sight, she knew something was out of place.

 1.8 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a crept into her cell cautiously as not to disturb anything in it until she figured out what was out of place. She gave her chair a quick glance. There was nothing amiss about it, so she climbed on it and stood up in it.

    Now she could see over the full dorm to catch sight of whomever may be showing her some interest. B¨¦yatta ''Kae-Kae'' Castro''s long neck was stretched back, as she peeked in Tas¨¬a''s direction. She stood, busy with her hands, as she leaned over her own locker top.

    Catching sight of Tas¨¬a watching her, she gave a slight smile and then turned back to her own business.

    It was bad news for Tas¨¬a. Castro was Ria''s enforcer. Anything that required an actual skill set to accomplish and whatever dirty work the mafiosa wanted done, Castro was the one who executed Ria''s plans.

    Tas¨¬a folded back down into her seat, peering straight-ahead.

    What got my attention?

    She could run through her intuitional nudge like a diagnostic. A practice she learned from an elder as a child that originated from her parent''s religion before Tas¨¬a rebelled against them in her early teens when she joined the Old Church.

    She started with the ceiling six feet above the walls of her cell. The tiles could be lifted but it appeared none had been shifted out of place. The pattern of rust-colored mold accumulated from years of leaking pipes set above the tiles remained the same.

    Her eyes next scanned the wooden ledge divider that sat atop the cement wall between her cell and the one directly in front of her own. Whenever her neighbor dusted it, Tas¨¬a would briefly get the same alarm coursing beneath her skin she had now before she figured out the source of her angst. This was not one of those times.

    She scanned the locker top. Her Bible had not been moved. It was the only item she kept on the top. The double doors of the locker appeared untouched as well. Her eyes slowly drifted down.

    There.

    There was a thin brown smear, the length and width of six ants lined up. It spread along the length of the locker handle where it met the door butted up adjacent to the keypad.

    Someone had tapped out Tas¨¬a''s combination then twisted the handle to release the lock. The culprit must have had something smeared on her thumb at the time.

    Amateurs. Amateurs. Amateurs.

    Tas¨¬a tisked to herself.

    Less than a minute back and Tas¨¬a had already unrivaled the plot set against her.

    She carefully scraped off the evidence with her thumb nail. Tas¨¬a put it up to her nose to smell it. Chocolate. The word came to her mind almost dreamily.

    She recognized the consistency of the brand, and after tasting it, with its distinctive flavor of finely ground raisin and nut set in a swirly of nougat, she was dead certain of what kind of bar it was as well.

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    A Rico Turron Noog-Noog.

    So cheap was the chocolate used in the manufacturing, it tended to be much stickier and softer than the chocolate bars shipped from the United States, but in spite of this, Noog-Noogs were every kid in the barrio''s favorite candy bar.

    So damn good.

    Who could have possibly learned her combination? Unlike most of the other women, Tas¨¬a was too careful to have ever tapped it out in front of anyone else.

    She knew how easy it was to extract that bit of information because she possessed the combinations of fifty-three lockers in her own head. She acquired them merely by casually walking by other cells as she went to the snack room to refresh her coffee over the course of the six months of her incarceration.

    Every motion between one digit on a keypad and another was as distinctive a gesture as any made in sign language. Obtaining a combination was no more difficult than memorizing a sequence of seven words.

    She opened the door of her locker and she immediately noticed the line up of books on the topmost shelf had been shifted from facing leftward towards now facing rightward.

    The culprit likely thought she was being a m¨¤s sutil daga - most subtle dagger - in the deftness of her actions, but the shift in the alignment of the books was an inexcusable differential of almost a centimeter. In the tight proximity of the locker, it was possible that even a civilian would have noticed the difference.

    But why go through her books? A quick glance told her nothing had been stolen from the locker itself. They were aligned just as Tas¨¬a had left them with none of the books pushed forward or backward as it would have occurred if one of them was taken out of place to examine.

    So why bother moving them?

    Then Tas¨¬a understood what had happened. The culprit needed to bend her hand upward. Her hand bent towards the reinforced support plate holding up the locker top with her wrist pressed down. In that position, the culprit had pushed the books over.

    Tas¨¬a reached up to where she calculated the hand had been placed. On the underside of the metallic plate she found the two objects left there. A switchblade stiletto and a magnetic strip that fastened the blade into place.

    Tas¨¬a''s skin flushed a deep red. It took only a few seconds for her to figure out what this meant as this was not the first time that someone had been deemed a troublemaker and had a weapon planted on them. Usually it was nothing more than a simple shank, and not a decent-looking blade like this one.

    The lieutenant must have deemed Tas¨¬a more trouble than she was worth after hearing about her wall climb. He likely gave Ria the blade to plant on Tas¨¬a. He would have been the source of her combination as well.

    Now with this blade put in place, he would have a seemingly random shakedown on her cell conducted at some point in the next few days.

    After his duty officer found the blade while executing the shakedown, the lieutenant would slap her with a disciplinary shot - a non-judicial charge carried out by administrative procedure.

    He would have her moved to the isolation cells on the medical floors where she would be someone else in authority''s problem and not that of the lieutenant presiding over the dorm for the worker collective.

    He likely hated paperwork every bit as much as Missi did. Not so much out of the laziness that was commonplace in correctional officers but for reasons that could negatively affect his career.

    Even the slightest of chances her actions could have a detrimental effect on the advancement of his own career, the man likely considered intolerable.

    She was nothing more than a liability to him.

    The man, Lt. Hugo Brassi, was thoroughly a careerist and like many men of rank in the correctional system known to be ruthless in his ambition.

    If she were to escape, or cause a significant disruption, Brassi would be skipped in the next round of promotions. It was the way of the system, an inviolable rule understood by everyone.

    Tas¨¬a pocketed the blade and the metallic strip. As she sat there thinking about how much of the world seemed to be tasked against her, Tas¨¬a admonished herself for her own introspection.

    It was no time to reflect on things, it was time for Tas¨¬a to act.

 1.9 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a shut her locker; she grabbed a terracotta towel before she headed for the lavatory area where the toilet stalls filled one side of a cement wall and the shower stalls filled the other. Only two of the dozen stalls were in current use.

    She could smell smoke of marijuana and tobacco coming from the two stalls the farthest away as water sprinkled from the showerheads. It was just enough to draw the smoke down when breathed into the pouring water.

    Even as they tried to hide their activity, as smoking was only allowed outside in the yard, the girls giggled with abandon as they talked to one another. So long as they cleaned up after themselves, Missi was not likely to bother them.

    Those inmates were too preoccupied to notice her presence, thought Tas¨¬a. Their unbridled behavior helped cloak her own activities and helped give her a measure of privacy in what she needed to do.

    She entered one stall, shut the plastic shower curtain behind her, and she placed the towel over the curtain''s support bar so no one would enter her stall by accident.

    In the center of the lowered floor in front of her was a drain. The latticed cover was held in place by simple bolts. Tas¨¬a flicked the switchblade, and she used the point to twist the bolts off. The pipe fixed onto the drain hole was wider than the cover. This design she would use to her advantage.

    Tas¨¬a placed the magnetic strip up against the pipe seam where it was nearly flat instead of rounded. She fastened the switchblade knife up against the magnetic strip.

    With the latticed cover set back in place, Tas¨¬a left the lavatory. She next checked up on the snack machines in the breakroom to confirm that nothing had been restocked since she had been in it for a cup of coffee several hours previously.

    There were two bars of Noog-Noogs in the vending machine at that time; there were none in it now.

    She walked back to her cell. On the way back, Tas¨¬a noted Castro was not in her own cell. Most likely, she was visiting in the last cell where Ria lived. Tas¨¬a slowed her pace as she made her approach.

    After a quick glance in both directions to make sure no one was watching her, Tas¨¬a peered over into the trashcan beside Castro''s locker. Inside the trashcan lay a fresh Noog-Noog wrapper.

    To ready herself for what now felt like the inevitable shakedown, Tas¨¬a double-checked her own locker to make sure nothing else had been planted in it.

    Satisfied that her inspection yielded nothing out of the ordinary, Tas¨¬a got down on her knees and she searched underneath her cot. She felt around along the metal supports.

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    Nothing but a few cobwebs that now stuck to her fingers.

    Tas¨¬a stood back up and she examined several other hidden niches and creches that could have been exploited in the small six-foot by nine-foot cell.

    She then made certain everything was up to code in her legitimate effects. The right number of clothes and garments, the right number of personal items, and the right number of commissary items; in all of this, she double-checked to make sure she abided by the dictate of the institution.

    The sweetener packs she swiped from the kitchen for her coffee she lined up in a box and then she carried over to Este-Oeste''s cell.

    "Hey, Marc¨¬a. When do you get out of here, in seven weeks right?"

    "Yeah. Why do you ask, are you throwing me a party?"

    "I''m just looking at you right now, bunched up with your legs propped, envying the fact that you appear not to have a care in the world. On the verge of getting out of this shithole, it must be nice."

    Este-Oeste nodded her head. Her neck tightened up with her lips wrinkled in wan smile before she spoke.

    "Like being on the threshold of a dream. Like we use to have them, I mean."

    Este-Oeste put her book down. She pointed with a nod of her forehead at the box of sweeteners.

    "You want me to hold on to those for you?"

    "If you would, I would be obliged. Please, just don''t tell everyone I''m acting paranoid - like I''m expecting something to go down."

    Este-Oeste casually mentioned, "I would be kind of frantic too if I had pissed off the lieutenant."

    The girl spoke again when Tas¨¬a''s only response was a quizzical stare.

    "Ria, her highness, the heinous-ness that infects this place, has been telling everyone how upset the lieutenant is with you. According to her, you have been walking that line for some time. Scratching away at his tolerance.

    "I can''t fathom how she comes up with that line of bullshit. If anyone was flying under the radar before that spider climb, it was you. That''s why it was so shocking to everyone in the first place. It seemed oh-so out of character for our sweet and meek little Tas¨¬a."

    Marc¨¬a''s tone suggested she was imitating the speech and paraphrasing other inmates from conversations she heard when Tas¨¬a was not around. She then wrung her hands up against her eyes and gave a pouty face in mockery of soft-hearted Renny, the girl who cried in the gym.

    "Ria is framing the narrative as she always does," Tas¨¬a answered. "She knows what''s going down, and she wants to get ahead of it, and she wants to control it.

    "Listen. I appreciate it if you hold on to these. Take as many as you want, Short-Timer."

    Este-Oeste smiled thinly. Being the PM veggie-prepper, she didn''t need anyone''s charity in acquiring sweetener packs from the kitchen. Still, she accepted the offer gracefully.

    "I appreciate that," she answered back. "Most days that I''m here, I''m not really here, you know."

    "Believe me, my friend. It shows."

    Marc¨¬a gave a phlegmy snort out of her nose. Tas¨¬a wondered if the girl had any sense of etiquette outside of the IMCQ. Probably not.

 1.10 Book One: The Gray Soul

    In spite of the heavy work she did earlier over at the IMCQ, along with the gamut of activity that occurred after her shift, Tas¨¬a could not drift off to sleep. There was unfinished business still that she needed to put her ass in gear and get accomplished.

    It was time to be decisive.

    No mercy. They chose to fuck with her on their own accord. If she let them get away with it, they would fuck with her even more.

    It was two-thirty a.m. and most of the inmates were in their cots asleep, but not all of them. A few nightlights scattered a low level of illumination across the dorm where the women stayed up late and read into the morning or listened to their radios and streamers.

    There was the media room, open night and day, where the large-screen panoramas played high definition media - more alive than real life, the promoters claimed quite nonsensicaly - more q¨±btexels per cubic millimeter than reality itself!

    At this time of night, and not yet the weekend, only a few girls would be in there.

    With the low level of lighting in the corridor, Tas¨¬a could move around, inconspicuously.

    Castro slept with her head plunged into her pillow. This naturally worked in Tas¨¬a''s favor.

    She slipped over to an empty cell nearby Tas¨¬a''s own. It had been vacated three weeks previously by an inmate who moved on to better things (shipped off to a work release camp).

    However, Tas¨¬a knew the combination to the locker. She kept some items in it that she wasn''t willing to risk possessing in her own locker.

    Most of the items she kept in the locker were things other inmates would shrug off as being too inconsequential to ever become a matter of a disciplinary shot against them.

    Tas¨¬a, however, was meticulous in avoiding any infractions as she knew how the system could be turned against anyone.

    Especially those who got too comfortable.

    A lot of things were overlooked and tolerated in the correctional system, that is, until they weren''t. She not only knew this to be the case, but Tas¨¬a assumed that at some point in time things would be turned against her.

    After all, what was the business with the fake chemo about in the first place but the system turning on her for some purpose she could not fathom?

    She had no idea why she was the focus of machinations of those who worked for the governing body, the Salvage, but she made a vow to find out. Ultimately, she would use her honed skills as a rogue to do something about it.

    That too she vowed.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed a pair of plastic gloves among the dozen she had swiped from the medical floors. Almost all inmates kept some in their lockers convenient for the preparation of meals to be shared with or sold to others.

    Tas¨¬a was careful; she never opened this locker nor did she enter the vacant cell in the presence of other inmates.

    It took quick timing on her part to avoid scrutiny. She was in and out of the cell in less than forty-five seconds.

    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

    As she returned to Castro''s cell with the surgical gloves fitted on her hands, Tas¨¬a glanced back at the woman on the cot.

    She is definitely not a light sleeper, Tas¨¬a assessed of her mark.

    Castro''s body molded into the cot spread eagle and she breathed while lying asleep at a snail-like pace.

    Tas¨¬a gave herself another forty-five seconds to rummage in the locker and make a grab-run at Kae-Kae''s stash. Although she knew most of the combinations in the dorm, she never stole from the other inmates.

    In her eyes, as fellow inmates, they were a protected class, except for snitches and the dirty bitches that did their bidding. Those people were fair game.

    She grabbed twelve items. A personal notebook, a folder of Castro''s casework - several months worth of her precious time with her jailhouse lawyer would be wasted when, later on, Tas¨¬a tossed the paperwork in the garbage, well shredded - six-packs of cigarettes, twelve books of stamps, a pair of multimedia buds, an old fashioned radio clock, two stacks of poker chips, an electric razor, a photo album, a Noog-Noog bar, and most interesting and disquieting over everything else, four thick rolls of coins.

    The top of one roll was open. The weight, the size, and the glint of the metal as she held the roll in the dim light confirmed Tas¨¬a''s suspicion. Liberty gold coins from the United States.

    Her stomach knotted. She was shocked to her core; Tas¨¬a glanced at Castro. In prison systems around the globe, the coins were used for one purpose and one purpose only. The agreement between parties for the commission of assassinations.

    Tas¨¬a guffawed silently to herself. She stifled the nervous chatter of her teeth. Castro was no assassin, she told herself.

    Tas¨¬a quickly tucked away the items inside a netted laundry bag. Once the grab was complete, she darted back to the annexed locker.

    She shoved the bag with everything in it, except for one roll of Liberty gold coins, into the locker. The roll of coins she stowed away underneath the band of her sweats.

    She hit Ria''s locker in the same manner that she did Castro''s. The woman was a heavy snorer. Even as quiet as Tas¨¬a tended to be, no one was going to hear her over the mafiosa''s noise.

    No matter what.

    She could have pulled the job humming to herself and still not waken anyone who wasn''t already kept awake by the noise.

    Tas¨¬a made off with similar effects, as she did previously. Purely out of spite, for the rogue ate very little, she also stole all of the woman''s food. Ria had expensive taste.

    Oysters, clams, canned ham, dried figs, jars of cashews, Gouda cheese, chai tea. All of the high-end items listed on the commissary.

    Curiously, there were no gold Liberty coins in the mafiosa''s locker.

    In the middle of her raid, Tas¨¬a noticed a set of seven prescription pill bottles sitting on a middle shelf.

    Like she did with the combination locks, Tas¨¬a gathered every slice of information on the other inmates'' medical conditions and prescriptions on the down-low that her brain could absorb.

    Tas¨¬a''s heart raced. She saw an opportunity.

    She knew one type of pill in Ria''s possession was taken three times a day. It had a similar enough appearance to be mistaken for a pill another inmate was prescribed that was meant to be administered only once a day.

    A higher dosage could cause severe liver as well as other internal organ damage.

    Tas¨¬a could swipe out twenty or so of Ria''s pills and she could place the more dangerous ones on the top portion inside the bottle.

    Ria would not know the difference until it was too late.

    As this late-night scheme casually took root, Tas¨¬a suddenly felt a wave of admonishing shame flush through her face and throughout her body.

    As if the Lord was disapproving of her very thoughts as she considered this possibly lethal act of revenge.

    No mercy, she had told herself earlier, but she was wrong. Tas¨¬a could take matters only so far.

    Whatever else can be said of me, I am not a cold-blooded killer. Tas¨¬a thought.

    Disgusted with where her criminal imagination ventured forth in uninhibited swagger, Tas¨¬a gathered up the full bag, shut the locker, and she left the cell.

 1.11 Book One: The Gray Soul

    After dropping off the second bag of loot and storing it in her annex locker, Tas¨¬a had one last bit of business to tend to before she would allow herself to go to sleep.

    She approached a cell near the end of the B-side corridor.

    She was looking for Felicit¨¦ but the Argentinian was not there.

    At this late hour, she would be in the media room with her head down as she tapped away on the TRS-80 keyboard.

    Felicit¨¦ kept the device on her person at all times. On the surface it appeared to be an antique 1980''s TRS-80 handheld pocket computer with a remolded backplate to hold a modern charge battery.

    A few months ago when Felicit¨¦ knew that she was going to the hole - the isolation ward - after she got caught with a controlled substance the Argentinian asked Tas¨¬a to hold onto it for her for safekeeping. She likely assumed Tas¨¬a had no familiarity with the specs of the device.

    In that assumption the blonde was wrong.

    Tas¨¬a grew up in a household full of discarded technology with a century worth of electronic scraps from university project throwaways. It was where her father worked as a utility repairman.

    She had given the TRS-80 special scrutiny after Felicit¨¦ handed it over to her. Even as Tas¨¬a accounted for the replacement of the power source, she found it to be significantly heavier than what the iconic device would weigh at factory stock. A mere six oz.

    As she delved further, Tas¨¬a had to commend the Argentinian girl.

    The compartment within the device had been hidden very cleverly. You could have opened the backplate and you still would not be aware that the niche was there.

    It took Tas¨¬a two hours to figure out how to disassemble the device, and, while she did so, not damage it by accident.

    She had to hold a magnet against each of the length-wise sides at just the right pair of spots to cause the interior switches to pull up and release the lockdown mechanism.

    Once she figured that out, Tas¨¬a discovered inside of the TRS-80 was a modern handheld device in the stead of the native processing unit that in its time made the handheld computer a little more useful than a calculator.

    The front panel LCD still functioned as designed with a point matrix-like text read-out, but the internal wires hooked up to the modern mobile instead of its native processor; it possessed all the functionality of the modern device, sans graphical display, while Felicit¨¦ was also able to keep it hidden from authority.

    Felicit¨¦ had converted the old TRS-80 keyboard and monochrome LCD display into a bash shell text-based console which allowed her to program and perform operating system level commands without the assistance of a graphical interface.

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    It appeared Felicit¨¦ did not even bother with the touchscreen device at all, but merely used the mobile for its central processing unit, wireless system, and hard drive storage.

    After all, the command-line interpreter was all a professional hacker like Felicit¨¦ needed.

    Tas¨¬a found her in the back row of the media room. Four other inmates sat, watching a drama of a musical festival originally performed nearly a hundred years ago in a city in northern Mexico. The concert was recreated in phenomenal three-dimensional detail for any of the inmates who had media buds on that could handle the band flow.

    Moving images of dirty, naked people filled the panorama walls around the inmates. An angry bearded man on a stage stacked with Marshall speakers and Latin percussion kits read poetry written so poorly as to possess none of the natural hard iambic cadence that Tas¨¬a found beautiful when she heard English spoken.

    She understood at most only every third word when it was spoken so quickly and artlessly.

    "Get back to the music, assholes. Bring back Santana," one of the inmates yelled.

    However, the other inmates seemed enwrapped in the panorama display, in spite of everything. At this hour, they were likely high as well. Too high to care about the quality of the crap they were watching.

    As for Felicit¨¦, she ignored everyone. She did not even notice that Tas¨¬a had taken a seat beside her.

    Poor situational awareness, Tas¨¬a thought.

    She looked around. Still at a loss for the name of the verse reciter at the podium from the long-ago musical event, a man now long dead. What was his name, Gwensbird, or something?

    "Really shitty and atrocious poetry," Tas¨¬a said loudly in a disgusted voice.

    Felicit¨¦''s head jerked up.

    "What?"

    "How can you tune that out, Felicit¨¦? It is like a spike in the ear."

    As she bit her lips and she wrinkled her very light-haired brows, Felicit¨¦ appeared confused.

    Good.

    That was Tas¨¬a''s intention, to take advantage of the situation and put the Argentinian on edge.

    Tas¨¬a spoke again, "we are moving the schedule up."

    In a questioning, skeptical tone, Felicit¨¦ said, "oh, but we are, are we?"

    Tas¨¬a reached into her waistband. She handed Felicit¨¦ the roll of coins.

    "We are moving things up to tomorrow."

    "The fuck did you get those?"

    "I found out earlier in the evening that someone had planted a switchblade in my locker; the evidence pointed to Castro. I returned the favor, picked through her locker; that is where I found those coins."

    "You are worried that it was put out on your head? It wasn''t. Trust me."

    "How can you be so certain," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Trust me," Felicit¨¦ repeated.

    Tas¨¬a saw something she had never seen Felicit¨¦ express before in her presence, fear. Her eyes were almost all white now, with none of the frosty blue showing around her pin top sized pupils.

    "The hit is intended against me."

    Tas¨¬a stood up. It wasn''t time to play sympathetic girlfriend; she was here to light a fire under Felicit¨¦''s ass.

    "All the more reason why we are moving things up. We are breaching the tower tomorrow. Yes, you can keep that roll of coins. There will be another roll just like it if you can persuade your friends to get us out of here by Tuesday."

    With her message delivered, Tas¨¬a turned around and walked away.

 1.12 Book One: The Gray Soul

    When she approached the equipment room Tas¨¬a heard a clanging noise just before the sound of the familiar voice of Felicit¨¦. The blonde cursed at something in her grasp.

    While waiting for her, the Argentinian disassembled a broken piece of equipment that possessed an assembly of twelve infrared lasers set in tightly configured nodes across its surface. A motion tracker, of all things.

    Felicit¨¦ shook her head as she put a makeshift tool of her own design made of several copper wires enjambed together back into the pocket of her long green coat.

    "If I was even half the mad genius I imagine myself to be, I could reassemble this and fly out of here. It mocks me. They say only men can be emasculated, but I believe that is exactly how I feel right now."

    "You are trying to make a flying machine?"

    "Not so much trying to make one, but with the kind of trouble my ass is in, needing to make one."

    Felicit¨¦ chattered away with her mood improved. "We only need something that can lift two hundred pounds of weight a mere five hundred yards up in the air, and then with a paraglide sail we could float beyond the fence."

    "It would have to be something that did not blow our legs off," Tas¨¬a retorted.

    The Argentinean grimaced as she stood up.

    "There-in lies the rub," she answered. Felicit¨¦ cleared her throat before she changed the subject. "So, how did she react? Did the bitch lose her shit?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head as a little grin formed above her tiny chin.

    "I lost so much sleep waiting for Castro to wake up. When I heard her stirring, I put on my sweetest, most innocent face, batting my eyes all big and doe-like. ''Kae-Kae,'' I said, ''COs, three of them, came through here last night. They stopped at your cell, and they took some things; it looked like they took a lot of things.''

    "Felicit¨¦, that woman turned white as a ghost which I gathered from her muttering, she thinks she will soon be. There was a point where she kept trying to stand back up from a crouched position in front of her locker, but she couldn''t manage it.

    "I had to lead her back to her bed. She kept repeating over and over, ''I''m dead, I am dead, I am dead! I was holding onto something really valuable for somebody. Those fucking crooks must have fucking found out about it.''"

    The Argentinian laughed as she mounted a battery pack onto their equipment

    "They will never suspect you. Who but a CO could know the combinations? That is the beauty of it. Hop on the vac. We have somewhere to go."

    "That we do," Tasha answered, as she complied with her hands gripped on the steering bar. "From my estimation," she continued, "that vent in the break room is the one furthest away from both the blower coils and the pulse lasers used for the ultraviolet air treatment."

    UV filtering was necessary for all indoor settings where mold could form now that the nano-spores were ubiquitous. The increase in spore density, if they were not sufficiently scrubbed, made them extremely potent.

    Tas¨¬a heard a moaning sound that came from below them. It reminded her that she had not heard the Shrill of the Banshees as of yet that evening.

    Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

    "The hell is that," she asked.

    "The Wailing From Below," Felicit¨¦ answered.

    "From the Disappeared? Is that why the Manifested have not been screaming?"

    "Yeah, there is an entire hierarchy of social behavior with the Manifested that is observable, but damned if you can understand what it is that squirms in their heads in the place of human intelligence now."

    They reached the break room. No correctional officers were around. Expectation of the Shrill kept the area cleared for at least another fifteen minutes.

    Tasha took a moment to examine the vent ensconced on the ceiling near the middle of the break room. They began to clear out a few tables that would be in the way.

    "All I need to do is get up into that vent, crawl through it to the southwest side. There is surely an outer grill on that side where I can get a better view of that tower.

    "While I''m there, I''ll find out what kind of bolt assembly it has. There must be a set of tools in the tool cache to disassemble whatever they used to mount the vent."

    "Have you ever tried opening that big ass lock hooked on the cache door," Felicit¨¦ asked.

    "Of course. Wherever they have foolishly allowed me twenty seconds to myself beside any lock in the IMCQ I have tried it."

    "You really believe you can pull this off? At this very hour?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged off the question as being irrelevant. She asked one of her own.

    "What can you tell me about those cameras?"

    "Before it''s spliced, the lead cable pulls in three hundred and sixty watts. That is enough to power eight of the cameras they have all over this facility.

    "There are two cameras positioned at each of the two doors. Another two cover the interior stairwell. There are two placed in the adjacent corridors on the first level, both are offline."

    "Interesting," Tas¨¬a commented. "When did you first notice the pair went offline?"

    Felicit¨¦ sat on a break room tabletop. She looked off into the adjoining corridor. When she turned her head back around the Argentinian nodded decisively.

    "As of Wednesday."

    With a casual side glance, Tas¨¬a gazed searchingly at the Argentinian.

    "There is a story there, then. What are your ''friends'' looking for, Felicit¨¦," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "They want a full array of the data in storage."

    "If they can make barriers go away for us when we attempt our escape, then why can''t they retrieve it themselves?"

    "I tend not to go nosing around my employer''s business; it attracts attention to myself."

    Tas¨¬a gave the Argentinian a well-practiced detached cool look to this answer as her own rejoinder.

    As Felicit¨¦ scratched her elbows with pointy black polished fingernails, she continued her explanation with a shrug.

    "That I am not certain. I believe they have more influence over staff here than they do over some unidentified spooks. They even have an operational name for the tower, my clients call it the Sore Thumb."

    "Makes sense. Felicit¨¦, what I want you to do is help get this table lengthwise-vertical, then hold it in place for me. Once I''m up there, you can put it back in place. I should have no problem dropping back down."

    With the table in place beneath the vent, Tas¨¬a was ready to begin her ascent.

    "Hey, Del Alma-Gris," Felicit¨¦ said, getting her attention before she passed her a slip of paper. "If you reach a terminal, or any wireless transmitter and receiver, dial me in, okay?"

    Tas¨¬a scrunched her brows and wrinkled her nose.

    "This is recognizance," Felicit¨¦ continued, "to find out what we need, just in case the opportunity presents itself use this sequence to dial me in."

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she put the note in her back pocket. She shot up the table. Removing the vent cover proved not to be a problem. Whoever used it last, decided to keep the fasteners loose.

    She pushed on both sides with her hands as she inched against the metal surface. Once inside the lip, she needed to close the vent.

    For Tas¨¬a, this was only a little tricky. She pushed up against the sides of the duct interior with her knees. While her knees held her firmly in place, she doubled her limber torso over and rotated upside down. She grabbed the vent handle with both hands. This feat caused Felicit¨¦ to guffaw a ''holy shit'' as she stared with her mouth open.

    As she she shut the vent door below her, Tas¨¬a smiled back  and waved to the gawking Argentinian.

 1.13 Book One: The Gray Soul

    As she shuffled up the vent, knees pressed against the duct, hands pushing herself upward, Tas¨¬a thoughts focused on her growing distrust in her partner.

    She was certain Felicit¨¦ held something back from her. The rogue gathered from the trouble the Argentinian had keeping her own story straight, it must have been something vital.

    Was Tas¨¬a being used as some kind of bargaining chip between Felicit¨¦ and her employers? Was she now merely delivering herself to them as some kind of prize?

    Even with these doubts running through her head, just the freedom of being in an area that she normally would not have access to gave Tas¨¬a a taste of what she craved - the autonomy to make her own decisions, once again.

    She was well aware of the risk that this could all backfire on her. That she could be falling in line just to be betrayed as she had been betrayed before.

    Memories of the dissolution of her B&E team were so fresh still, she had to stifle her anger before continuing onward.

    She needed to keep on track. Focus on the present, her father would have told her. Don''t become a slave to past mistakes.

    The risk is worth it to get away from this damn place.

    If this was a double-cross, they were taking the risk in allowing her so much leeway that she was now mapping out the air duct system of a security-sensitive facility. Information that she would sell one day if the opportunity presented itself.

    Tas¨¬a reached the ledge leading into a horizontal duct. She pushed up and climbed into it. Strips of LED lighting ran up and down the concourse. Showing the direction of the airflow.

    A few dozen yards farther up she came across a microcontroller. Tas¨¬a read the display pinned to the side of it. What she discovered alarmed her.

    The graphic on the display traced out the schematic in a read-out of real-time sensors in the vent ducts on her current level. It showed airflow patterns from three separate corners of the ventilation system were merging on her path.

    Could this actually be deliberate? She tensed up at the paranoia this sounded to her own ears.

    Up ahead another vertical shaft came into Tas¨¬a''s view. She pressed her arms against the lip and pushed herself up into it.

    This straight vertical climb proved to be more of a challenge than the previous attempt where she scooted up the break room access vent. The duct surface of a coppery hue here was more varnished.

    As she yawned with great discomfort given her predicament, Tas¨¬a admonished herself for insufficient preparedness on her part. She really should have slept more; the more effort she exerted, the more her brain felt out of it.

    She could have brought a surgical mask she kept in the annex locker. She was in such a rush to make this plan real she did not take sufficient time and necessary precaution.

    Now her irritated sinuses made her nose itch, but she could not move her hand to scratch it. She tasted an odd flavor on her tongue. Almost like wilted greens and onions in a salad.

    This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

    She shook her head violently in an attempt to ward off her growing incapacity. The-here-and-now seemed aloof and distant.

    Tas¨¬a drifted into memory; her mind making odd connections between her memories and present-day reality. She heard the giggle of a young woman echo through her mind.

    A beautiful sound that thrilled her young self. She was three again. It came from a patio three stories up above her. It was her favorite person in the world.

    With a speed other children her age had trouble accomplishing as they walked upon the ground, Tas¨¬a climbed the jagged stonework that formed the apartment building wall. She slipped over to the patio rail.

    Her three-year-old self hunched on the long support bar while wishing she had a tail to wrap around it.

    Aunt Tatiana stretched along the length of a reclining chair as she sunbathed. Her head jerked up when she saw the girl grinning at her.

    The woman brushed the long strands of brownish blonde hair out of her eyes as she grinned back at Tas¨¬a.

    "Spider monkey! You did not just climb up that wall did you?"

    "Yes''m Namesake, I did."

    The young woman rose up from the recliner. She wore only red bikini bottoms as she could expect perfect privacy behind the dense latticework along the patio railing for herself and her guests.

    "Namesake? Is that what you''re calling me now, and not Auntie Tatiana? Do you even know what Namesake means?"

    "It means you. Mama says it means you."

    Tatiana picked her up from the rail and held her up against her boobs. Hugging her tight.

    "Spider Monkey, what am I going to do with you?"

    The Russian woman leaned over the patio table and turned up a radio. She started dancing with Tas¨¬a in her arms. Bouncing her up and down as the girl giggled.

    Aunt Tatiana''s guests, a pair of scrawny black-eyed ones, sat together on the other chair, watching, impassively.

    "I guess we dance," she answered Tatiana.

    "That is right; we dance. If I am Namesake, then who are you?"

    "I''m your Spider Monkey!"

    Tatiana shook her hips in the rhythm of an old, old dance, swinging Tas¨¬a from side to side.

    "Yes, you are. But what does your mother call you?"

    "The Rose."

    "Do you know why?"

    The black-eyed ones started to whisper together in a cacophony that sounded similar to the Russian she sometimes heard Tatiana speaking on her phone.

    Tas¨¬a, realizing how strange this was turning out to be, tried to push her mind away from the memory. In the here and now and as lucid in appearance as the world around her, one of the black-eyed ones, a raven-haired girl, faced her.

    Her solemn visage with unblinking eyes leered just two feet away on the opposite side of the duct.

    "We have so much we can show you, if you just let us in, Rose. Right there ," even as the black-eyed girl held her pale white hand lifted towards Tas¨¬a, the girl seemed to bare her no malice, " let me touch your forehead, and I will open up your third eye. Then you will understand."

    With fear rippling through her gut, Tas¨¬a jolted out of her dream state; almost falling as her mind returned to consciousness. Instead, she lost her grip and she slipped.

    Her emotional state grew dire as she slid down the vent with gaining momentum.

    Tas¨¬a pressed her back against the surface with her feet firmly set against the opposite side. The hard plastic of the LED strips bumped uncomfortably against her butt. She finally came to a stop, two dozen feet down from her initial advancement up the duct.

    Tas¨¬a paused to consider what she had seen. The black-eyed ones were not in her original memory. At least she possessed no memory of them in her youth.

    With a tinge of doubt now clouding her certainty, she told herself they were a mere construct of the spore invasion.

    What of the Rose? She did not remember that as part of the original memory either. Her mother never called her Rose, did she?

    Tas¨¬a looked up. Through the illumination caused by strips of LED lighting running up the vent she could make out an orange haze floating above her.

    It whipped slowly around, moving in mathematical involution. Patient, it seemed, as if it waited for her.

 1.14 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a watched the patterned movement of the orange haze; entirely transfixed by it for she realized what was happening.

    It flowed from left to right as it interpreted transform matrices in a nearly fluid motion.

    However, she could see the interpolation being solved before her eyes as the calculation was applied from one position in the space above her that the yellow haze held before it shifted to its next position.

    The convoluted movement pattern was necessary to keep its motion stabilized, she reasoned. Normally, in its dissipated form, one could not see the spores in action. However, with the airflow within the vents as a constant stimulus, the clustered grouping with its slow patterned movement was a necessary means for the nano spores to adapt to the hostile environment.

    Seeing all of this with her own eyes, Tas¨¬a was convinced of the veracity for a rumor claiming that the cull spores were created in a lab for a project to build a stealthy and rapidly deployable computer made of living materials.

    Tas¨¬a whispered verse to it to see how it would respond.

    "Whither shall I go from thy spirit?

    Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

    If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there;

    If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there."

    Tas¨¬a could not help but shiver as she watched it respond. Expanding and contracting continuously until a crude human heart was formed. A regular beat rippled through it.

    Then the haze dissipated as it rose up out of her view.

    Tas¨¬a continued climbing upward until she finally reached the duct lip. She pulled herself up over the edge; the rogue rested, stretched out on the horizontal duct.

    Around her, the LED lights pulsed in a slow rhythm that lilted back every third light as if it was responding to a waltz.

    She only wanted a moment of rest, but as she realized the LED lights were mesmerizing her, she understood the cull spores were attempting to induce another dream state.

    Before it overwhelmed her, she needed to find a means to counter it. How had it got here in these ducts? Were the UV pulse lasers offline?

    The spores could tamper with electronics when allowed to form unimpeded, but it could not have turned off the UV pulse lasers before it collected itself in a responsive mass in this very interior.

    They must have been shut down deliberately by a third party.

    She blinked rapidly and shook her head once more. As she pushed against her hands to rise, she felt the supporting duct beneath her squirm as if it was moving.

    The surface had upon it a radiant pattern that slowly spiraled. It was that of a copperhead snake. One, like all residents of Greater Quadra, she was all too familiar with in her dreams.

    It was commonly known as the Wise One.

    "Be not afraid, Tas¨¬a. I only offer you what you most truly desire if to thine own self you stay true. We are alive just as you, a frail humanly thing, are. Unlike you, we are not undone by time. We remain unbent by all occurrence in mere Causality."

    The LED lights now spun out their waltz-patterned signal rapidly in triple time. It caused the muscles in her eyes to spasm in an uncomfortable twitch.

    Cursing to herself, Tas¨¬a crawled forward.

    The Wise One spoke once again.

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    "We see the panic in you. How quickly by the slightest means at our disposal you become undone. We wish it not to be so, come and join us, and it no longer needs to be so."

    She closed her eyes to block out the distracting LED display. An all-too-familiar hissing followed along behind her. From her dreams, she knew exactly what she would see if she were to look back.

    The resplendent copperhead, the Wise One, was as long as an anaconda, but never was it menacing. As unreal as a Naga, but never so fantastical.

    The snake she did not fear, and typically it was the one dream entity she engaged in conversation with as its mind was unfathomably weird. The experience was almost always profound.

    The last of the three common dream entities worried her by far the most. And now Tas¨¬a believed she saw its face form from the haze in the distance. The Incubus, most residents of the Quadra called it.

    More precisely, however, it was an hermicubus, for it shifted purposely and cag¨¦d within dream from a succubus to an incubus and a full hermaphrodite in between. All in an attempt to mortify the dreamers'' defenses by confounding their desires in the myriad of human sexuality.

    It possessed bedazzling fairy wings framed in colors of chartreuse, emerald, and lime that contoured around inner folds of saffron and amber. Though its morphology shifted constantly, its face was always beautiful.

    Whenever in the past it touched Tas¨¬a, it did so with gentle fingers rubbing down her chin, neck, and shoulders; when it did so shivers ran through the course of her body. Her skin formed goosebumps and flushed scarlet pink; her blood heated up, her nerves sang electric, and her stomach fluttered faintly, but inevitably, it all would lead to her soiling herself.

    Yet, unlike her experiences with boys in the sexual awakening of her youth, the hermicubus would look into her eyes with perfect understanding and say that it did not mind her reaction in the least. It was as natural as the seasons, it would insist.

    "Let me kiss your lips," the hermicubus would tell her, "and you will know what it is to be truly loved."

    As its figure formed in full out of the haze, she made haste when the vent crossed the path of an enjoined T-section. At that corner, she found another microcontroller.

    On sight of it, Tas¨¬a felt a hopeful jolt of relief suspire from her lungs.

    This microcontroller had several stacks of circuit boards attached to it. It would have more functionality than the one she encountered earlier.

    She punched up the display. Quickly, she read through a set of schematics. As she did so, the hermicubus formed once again several yards in front of her. Its figure stood before her, and for her, quite enticingly.

    "You struggle so valiantly, Tas¨¬a. That is what makes it so painful for us to watch you. Your veil of ignorance if removed would make of you a thing of everlasting beauty."

    With one last glance in aesthetic appreciation, she threw its way, Tas¨¬a forced herself to ignore the hermicubus as she realized what she needed to do. Along a row of sixteen pins on the microcontroller, a set of four wires read the oscillation input for the UV lasers and the air current flow.

    Their normal function had been reversed at the level of the system software. One she had no hope of overriding in her current circumstance.

    However, Tas¨¬a realized she did not need to go through the trouble of punching in code into the provided display console. Tas¨¬a simply reversed the order of the pins currently set in use on the microcontroller.

    Once she did so she held her head down to avoid the rising glare. UV pulses could not harm her unless directly blasted up close into her eyes.

    "Why, Tas¨¬a? Why this utterly senseless resistance on your part," the hermicubus asked as if it was bitterly pained by her action.

    Tas¨¬a never answered back, as the entity did indeed have a profound hold on the wilder aspect of her imagination. It would not take much for it to enervate her defenses so she shut its pleas from out of her mind.

    Finally, after several excruciating seconds, an air current flushed strongly in the opposite direction from the previously tampered course. The air even felt quieted, as if it emptied itself of spore drama.

    She had succeeded.

    She suspired with much relief when she saw the LED readout declare the UV laser test pulse successful. The cull spores and their entities had evaporated.

    The rest of her journey to the exterior vent shaft on the southwest wall went without any further complications. She smiled at the sight of natural light as it poured through the vent.

    At the metal grid cage, she studied the bolt assembly; something was not right and the cause was immediately apparent. The three right-side bolts were somehow loose. The frame they supported was not attached to the wall.

    How could that be? Tas¨¬a asked herself.

    She pushed the vent out a few inches to get a better view. Someone had shot out the three bolts that connected the right side with what was likely a high-powered rifle. There was a fourth hole that broke a vent panel from where the shooter had missed.

    With the bolts out of the way, she only had to push the right side of the grid to make enough space so she could slip through and climb down the wall. Tas¨¬a frowned and she glanced around, pensively. Her suspicions soured the hope this mission had given her. Giving her a means of egress was most likely the purpose of shooting out the bolts in the first place.

    Who was the benefactor here? Another party that wanted nothing more than to manipulate her, no doubt.

 1.15 Book One: The Gray Soul

    The first notion that occurred to her was to wonder how they managed to fire off at least four rounds without detection. Tas¨¬a had spotted a Sinsonte Acoustic Array on the radio tower the first time she walked the track around the football field soon after arriving on the compound.

    It was beyond incredulous that the SAA had not picked up on the gunfire noise.

    The spooks must have used a sound suppressor on the rifle fired at the vent.

    She peeked through the grid screen, searching for a possible angle for the origin point. A few moments of scanning the tower in front of her, Tas¨¬a found the only plausible trajectory (assuming the gunman wasn''t impractically dangling from a rope). The shot came from the tower rooftop; one more story up from the duct outlet where she now crouched.

    Her next question - could she peek further out without being seen? Would even moving the vent out of her way catch someone''s attention?

    The space between the tower and the Spore Isolation Ward formed an alleyway limiting the line of sight for any spotter. However, from Tas¨¬a''s calculation, the drone that normally circled the yard would make a pass by the alleyway every eleven minutes.

    She knew its route by heart from studying its movement during her walks on the yard. Tas¨¬a checked her watch as she did a quick estimation of the time that it should pass.

    She had less than two more minutes to wait. She started to count from one hundred and twenty back to one. Counting backward, Tas¨¬a had found on previous heists helped to steel her nerves.

    When the drone made its pass at eleven seconds left in her count, the sound of its gyro-rotors harmoniously doubled with another set on the other side of the alleyway.

    The new drone hovered on her right; the same side the bolts had been shot out. Tas¨¬a put her eye up against the crack between the vent and the wall. She was careful not to cause the vent to shake as the drone passed by.

    Tas¨¬a was relieved to discover that the twin drone was routed in a path that merely mirrored the drone that she had familiarized herself with over the previous several months.

    She realized, as she walked the track six months earlier while she casually studied the drone route pattern, there was at least one highly exploitable security lapse in the predictability of its flight pattern.

    Now she witnessed the original lapse being compounded.

    Incredible.

    Tas¨¬a heard a low, slow screech she recognized as the sound of a golf cart brake being stomped on from just beneath her. She cracked open the vent slightly and peeked down.

    Two maintenance men entered a storage shack that lined up with the vent.

    They cracked jokes at one another unaware of her presence. Bemused, Tas¨¬a also noticed on the asphalt just beneath their feet were fragments of shot-out bolts catching a glint of the early evening sunlight and reflecting it harshly.

    If the maintenance men paid any attention to their surroundings they would have caught sight of it. It wasn''t their job to look for suspicious things, so naturally, they didn''t notice the odd occurrence.

    They loaded up the vehicle with rolls of wiring before driving back out of the alleyway.

    After they left, she had six more minutes to surveil the tower before the drones came back around. The tower was four stories in height. A square fifty-by-fifty yards design bearing no fa?ade ornamentation.

    It most notably lacked windows. A conspicuous exception in appearance to every other building on the compound.

    She spotted an entry shack on the roof of the tower facing away from the yard. A mere fifteen yards separated the tower from the Spore Isolation Unit.

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    Tas¨¬a pushed the vent out of her way and she peered out. Quickly, she snapped her head back.

    Maximum-sized black F-150 trucks were parked in front of a squat building to her right. They were used for patrol. There were two windows and a doorway set in the squat building with a line of sight on her location.

    Damn, Tas¨¬a thought. Just when I convinced myself this was going to be easy.

    She had a choice to make. To do the run after the drones passed by in a few more minutes, or go back and wait till near the end of her work shift in the SIU when it would be dark.

    She did not want to go back until her task was complete.

    This close to dusk, already, dim light provided ample cover in the shadows of large objects. She peered down at the storage shack; Tas¨¬a calculated the minimal time of risk for being sighted.

    She could make a straight drop onto the shack as she repelled with her arms pushing in countermotion against the wall to slow her fall. She would chance being in their line of sight for two to four seconds until she dropped down and spread-eagled flat against the rooftop.

    If she then flipped over to the opposite shack wall facing away from them, she would remain out of their sight.

    The last bit of exposure would occur with her mad dash across the alleyway. That last maneuver would take her three seconds at the most.

    The squat building they used for patrol routing lined up with the tower so they had no line of sight on the tower wall itself unless someone was taking a smoke break out by the far wall.

    A scattering of spent buds on the gravel indicated this happened frequently.

    As she heard the double hum of the drones, Tas¨¬a reviewed her plan, and she decided it was sound. The risk level was acceptable as there was no such thing as perfect operational conditions.

    She was going to pull it off.

    When the drone passed by, she pushed against the vent and dropped down. Executing the maneuver was a simple matter of muscle memory for Tas¨¬a. If timed correctly with her palms pushing against the wall to counter the descent there was little risk of injury.

    She dropped with her arms chugging along like a pair of cranks on a steam locomotive. As a kid, she had turned the maneuver into a game where the objective was to reach the equilibrium point where you felt weightless.

    As she did so reach just now. It was still a thrill.

    The maneuver was executed without error. Tas¨¬a thrust up at the right time at the end of the descent and turned in mid-air with her weight properly distributed just before she impacted on the roof.

    However, Tas¨¬a made one crucial miscalculation she realized as she lay flat on the roof while listening for a reaction. The blare of a handheld transceiver came from one of the F-150s.

    "Five. One. Five. I think we might have another jumper from off the SIU building."

    She had not noticed that one of the parked trucks was occupied. From his vantage point, off the ground by several feet, he would soon spot her on the rooftop if she did not move.

    She flipped off the side of the maintenance hut rooftop. She did have one advantage working for her, Tas¨¬a realized when she glanced back towards the F-150 just before she flipped over. His line of sight was severely limited near the ground due to the enormous size of his vehicle.

    She quickly crawled low across the alleyway and pushed herself up against the wall.

    Tas¨¬a heard an annoyed voice answer the call the patrolman inside the parked F-150 had made.

    "Jesus Christ! What kind of fucked-up-shit goes on in that building that those doctors kill themselves like clockwork?"

    In a deep baritone, the patrolman answered in turn.

    "You know what, Jaime? I don''t even want to know."

    She climbed up the four-storied wall in less than the two minutes it took the patrolman to walk from the parking lot to the alleyway.

    After glancing around to make sure the rooftop was clear, she lay down to rest against a roof support that held a drain pipe in place as she listened in on the conversation.

    "Jaime, I must be seeing shit. There is nothing over here."

    "Disappointed?"

    "That there is no dead body leaking gut-fluids all over the cement? You underestimate how squeamish I am. Wait a second¡­ found something."

    "You telling me you missed spotting a dead body on your first go-around?"

    The patrolman who stood below her shook his head and laughed at his friend''s jest. He raised his head to peer up at the vent with the shot out bolts.

    "I found fragments from vent-hold bolts lying on the asphalt, Jaime. Looks like our neighbors have been target practicing."

    "From the doctors out of Mengele, the spooks out of Pinochet, and that war criminal I know I saw smoking a cigarette on that rooftop over there, I love my fucking job."

    "Easy on that last bit, Jaime. This may be a two-way transceiver, but you never know who is listening in."

 1.16 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Peering around her from a squatting position, Tas¨¬a saw two clear means of gaining entrance inside the tower interior. As she glanced above at an austere gable, Tas¨¬a grew more cautious. What first appeared to be the most assessable of the choices given, the entry shack to the stairwell, now made her suspicious.

    Something perked her intuition.

    As she approached the shack door to get a better look at the lock, she spotted a camera hidden in a roof board support.

    Felicit¨¦ had not mentioned it. There could only be two explanations for that.

    The first possibilaty occurred to Tas¨¬a as Felicit¨¦ was describing the security layout to her earlier. The Argentinian had assumed the cameras would all be of the same stock type when she made her calculation of the watt output being spliced for the cameras.

    This camera was tiny, not like the forty-watt cameras seen everywhere else in the IMCQ complex. An almost forgivable assumption to make, but these spooks were not regular staff using only stock equipment supplied to them.

    Felicit¨¦ would have checked the feedback to be certain the number of separable oscillations in the current received in the readout matched her calculation for the number of cameras routed within the tower.

    However, even that would not have mattered if the camera was running on its own power source. Given its small size that was likely the case.

    This little device was also likely set up in the gable for only one reason, so the welcoming committee could spot Tas¨¬a as she entered. If they knew she was coming, she had to assume these same spooks were Felicit¨¦''s actual employers.

    Tas¨¬a spat on the asphalt. These ''friends'' Felicit¨¦ talked about.

    Fortunately there was another means to get inside the tower. Tas¨¬a turned towards the loud roar of fans to her right. Conditioned air buffed warmly on her face as she crawled towards the HVAC unit where she came face to face with an ensconced grilled vent.

    Until she figured out how to remove it, the vent was her main obstacle preventing her from entering the tower. Fortunately, given the need to maintain such devices there was almost always a practical means built into the design of such systems to do it with a bare minimum of hassle involved.

    Adjacent to the vent casing was a sliding door. Tas¨¬a pulled on it to discover a navigable compartment beside a duct lip entrance into the tower interior encased on all three open sides by the vent assembly.

    Fortunate for her the folds of the vent were clamped to the wall supports and not welded to them. She merely had to loosen a set of bolts to ungrip the vent from its supports.

    As she commenced to do this something stirred in her gut. Tas¨¬a tried to ignore it at first, but the feeling grew even more persistent.

    All right, what are you trying to tell me?

    Tas¨¬a took the time to close her eyes and breathe in thrice. She felt the fuzzy feeling in her head that accompanied what her father''s religion called the Diagnostic Mode.

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    Back up. It said.

    She leaned her head back and she saw it. Outlined in the dust on the floorboard of the HVAC, there was a niche of space where equipment hooked directly into the heating grill had until recently sat.

    She now noted the hole bearing grind marks created where a pipe had been removed.

    Tas¨¬a opened up a second sliding door further down the HVAC beside another fan. Inside was the loose pipe.

    Tas¨¬a admonished herself. Normally, she would have seen this as soon as she had opened the door, but she was growing anxious and with that her vision grew as myopic as a grifter''s duped mark.

    The spooks had set up the HVAC to be easily assessable, so that she would use the vents to enter the tower. It did not mean that she should use the door instead. They were prepared for both possibilities.

    Damn.

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the HVAC unit, feeling nearly defeated. An ugly grimace tightened along the length of her face.

    Perhaps, she should go ahead and meet these people. If they believed her rogue skills to be so valuable to their cause, what harm would they do to her?

    Perhaps they even had the answers that she was seeking.

    No, she was only thinking within the terms that had been presented to her. In her father''s creed such subservience was a taboo of the highest order. Tas¨¬a shook her head at the irony of it all. As a teen she had joined the Old Church in open rebellion of her own father.

    She studied at a seminary dedicated to the hedge-saint Santa Muerte, took her vows, and became a nun. How crazy was that for someone born into an apostate Cathar creed?

    Now his words flowed through her.

    Always find the most optimum means. Disregard how anyone else defines it.

    It was her father''s constant mantra as he tested her - as he had her solve difficult puzzles in the environment of their backyard, or in the alleyways of their local barrio, or simply on paper. He had taught her to trust herself.

    She had not checked every factor out in her current environment even now.

    Tas¨¬a crawled up on top of the HVAC, and took a look around. She was outside of anyone''s sight range. Even on the radio tower, to the East, only the antenna could be seen from her current vantage point.

    Beneath the antenna, the radio tower possessed several devices for detection - sound, visual, sonar, and infrared. Fortunately, she slipped beneath the sight line as the tall onion domes came between.

    She slowly raised up from her low, bent position, and checked her six and all other sides, cautiously as she came to a full stand.

    She thought in terms of the four cardinal points: the Spore Isolation Unit to the East, the patrol station to the North, the deeper complex to the West.

    If she could find a schemata of access tunnels she could exploit in conjunction with the layout she was now memorizing, she would not even need Felicit¨¦ for her escape.

    Which meant she still needed to get into the tower.

    Tas¨¬a jumped off of the HVAC. She peeked down the length of the western side of the tower wall.

    On the ground directly below her was a fenced-in area that contained three picnic tables, a smoke pit, and a basketball court among several other recreational accoutrements that suggested the tower was well lived-in.

    She also noted that there was a hatchway in the fenced-off area to a sub-basement. Tas¨¬a grinned to herself. She still had a chance to do this on her own terms.

    She flipped over the balustrade effortlessly before climbing down the wall. Upon landing on the ground, she tried pulling the cellar door. The hatchway was not even locked. When it popped open, she was overwhelmed by a stench.

    Tas¨¬a peered in the dark. She opened the hatch fully. In the basement were rows of shelves. She leaned in to get a better look. By a table that appeared to be set up for a poker game on the opposite end, four dead bodies lay slumped.

 1.17 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Santa Muerte!

    Tas¨¬a thought as she stared at the bodies. Three men, all well dressed, in white shirts, silky vests, black pants and polished dress shoes. A woman dressed in a similar fashion. They all appeared to be in their mid-thirties in age.

    Felicit¨¦ was right; they had that certain look to them that marked them as spooks.

    She listened for sounds above and deeper into the basement. It was as quiet as the dead. Inspite of the grim scene in front of her, Tas¨¬a was not discouraged from completing her task. She had seen in her career as a rogue burglar what robotic security could do to squatters and her own crewmates.

    Tas¨¬a crawled into the basement. On quiet toes, she dropped to the floor beside the balusters of the stairway leading down to the floor. The boards appeared ag¨¦d and likely too creaky to have risked walking down them.

    She would stay in the shadows of the small stairwell until she had an executable plan in place.

    Whomever was still here most likely did not want her to see what she just witnessed.

    It might prove to be a deal-breaker if they discovered how much she knew. Then again, these were not people she put any trust in even if they proved to be Felicit¨¦''s ''friends''.

    She needed to start working on a plan B in earnest.

    Tas¨¬a gave herself five minutes to accomplish her current task, then she was out of there no matter what. She set the timer on her watch.

    However, she doubted she would need all of that time. Tas¨¬a suspected she could find what she needed on the bodies. They looked to have been untouched since they were initially shot.

    Tas¨¬a quickly scurried over to the poker table. She had brought a netted laundry bag, one of many from her stash, in her fanny pack. Cash on the table in near blood-splatter free condition had not been touched.

    Gleefully, Tas¨¬a scooped it up.

    There were two dozen mini-bottles of vodka; the same two premium brands Felicit¨¦ had shared with her.

    Interesting.

    Which party were Felicit¨¦''s allies - the invaders or the wiped-out home team?

    She studied the dead woman. Her eyes were still open. Her hair was desert dry. Forensics was not her forte but Tas¨¬a tried to guess the day the spooks were shot.

    Then, it occurred to her.

    As of Wednesday.

    It was the answer that Felicit¨¦ had given her when Tas¨¬a inquired how long the cameras in the corridors had been taken off-line.

    Recalling how the Argentinian responded, Tas¨¬a shook her head and she frowned to herself.

    She knows something about this.

    Tas¨¬a checked the woman''s pockets. She found a specialized personal assistant mobile. The NeoPalm PAM was a high-end item in common use among professionals in the IT community.

    The dead woman also had a purse lying limp beside her.

    Tas¨¬a swiped that as well. She was almost giddy, at this point.

    In spite of her convictions, upbringing, and the current morbid circumstances, even still, a good heist enraptured her heart in a way nothing else could.

    The Angel of Theft, her deceased partner Cuervo called her.

    When she began to place the purse in the netted bag, Tas¨¬a realized it felt imbalanced. As if something in it was heavy but not at all symmetrical in the distribution of its weight.

    From the feel, Tas¨¬a guessed a weapon.

    She was right. A Desert Eagle.

    Infernal Madr¨¦! What was Lady Spook trying to stop with that?

    She checked the pockets of the other three bodies. Two more phones, three IDs, credit and debit cards plenty. One of the men possessed a small .32 caliber Browning Short with six magazines of ACP rounds in a well-hidden interior vest pocket.

    it was the same gun her father trained her on. Tas¨¬a decided she needed to find a way to keep it.

    Another gentleman had a stiletto strapped above his ankle. It bore a full-grained leather handle, a cobalt blue metal blade and was well balanced.

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    The rogue smiled; she used to collect decorative blades.

    Soon it will be time to start a new collection.

    With her bag full, Tas¨¬a swept through the sub-basement on her quiet little feet. It appeared it was mostly used to store parts and weapons.

    A set of eight .30-06 (thirty-ought-six) carbines with suppressors built into them caught Tas¨¬a''s eye. They appeared well used.

    For what purpose?

    Tas¨¬a''s intuition spoke to her when she recalled what the guard over the radio said about a war criminal. The rogue shivered at the answer it gave her.

    This is where a death squad camps out and stays hidden from public scrutiny.

    In the far northeastern corner a stairwell led up. Sectioned-off right next to it she found a fair-sized computer server that set beside a workstation. It appeared ransacked.

    A room with walls of cement block was closed off by a thick locked door. Tas¨¬a still had a few minutes left before she evacuated. Her lockpicks were never far from her.

    Inside the room was a pressurized hatch on the floor. Leading to what, she wondered. Access tunnels?

    Once more, Tas¨¬a grinned. She now anticipated opportunities opening up for her.

    At some point soon, she would need to investigate whether the tower was built for the spooks or did they simply appropriate it for their own purposes. If the answer was the former, the hatchway likely led to an area separate from the service tunnels.

    That route would be less regulated than the rest of the complex.

    That had to be the case, Tas¨¬a reasoned. The hatch was placed there in order to facilitate movement so the spooks would not need to go through the same access chokepoints as everyone else.

    Tas¨¬a shook herself from the revelry of hope this discovery gave her. She needed to accomplish one more thing before she abandoned the sub-basement.

    Tas¨¬a made her way back to the stairs leading into the fenced-in area. Tas¨¬a needed to try the woman''s PA mobile while the rogue was still inside the tower. If the range of its signal frequency was blocked from outside interference she would need to obtain the array of data Felicit¨¦ asked for right now.

    Within minutes of her search Tas¨¬a had exactly what she sought; Lady Spook''s name was Demona Helo?ste. She was, indeed, the IT specialist among the tower crew.

    The woman must have thought herself impervious inside her tower before she was shot to death. For the sake of personal convenience, Lady Spook, Demona Helo?ste, had her codes set to be bypassed already.

    A shiver went up her spine. Don''t be supid, Tas¨¬a, she told herself. There is more than that going on here.

    It is as if Helo?ste was ready to just pull up the array of data and hand it over to me the moment I dropped in.

    Tas¨¬a had to close her eyes and shake off an unsettling feeling before she could get on with her task. What had she gotten herself in the middle of here? Has the side she unwilling sided already lost? Will the victors be upset with her?

    As Tas¨¬a breathed in to steel herself, her father''s words whispered into her being. Composure allays great offenses, she repeated again and again for several seconds.

    With her aloof sense of calm returned, she focused on the device once more.

    There was enough storage on the device to do what Felicit¨¦ set the little cat burglar out to accomplish. Unfortunately, downloading the array of data would take a few minutes longer than allowed by her self-imposed five-minute deadline. It was a large chunk of information, several terabytes worth.

    She did not like this; Tas¨¬a watched the stairwell leading up into the tower, wearily.

    Were the spooks or whoever it was who inhabited the tower now wondering what was taking her so long to get there?

    Even after she finished up in the sub-basement, she still had to crossover the roof again.

    Tas¨¬a eyed the dead woman. She knew now she made the right decision to keep hidden instead of confronting them head-on.

    As she waited by the top step, she heard voices above.

    "I can''t believe they fucked it up. Four rolls of those coins lost!"

    "Javier, shut up about it already. If she comes through, what will it matter? We call it off just as we promised."

    Footsteps started to come down the stairs.

    "All right, this game of b-ball decides who cleans that shit up."

    "Javier, you lost the last game, it should be you."

    Tas¨¬a slunk under the stairs. Minimizing her petite body in the shadows there.

    "This game decides. My ankle was still twisted up when we played Thursday."

    "This game then."

    She got a look at the two as they approached. Although they dressed in shorts and t-shirts, they had the same straight-cut, hard-bodied, protein-rich diet look of the four card players. Spooks.

    It was not likely an invasive force that murdered the four, but a matter of internecine betrayal instead.

    They passed by Tas¨¬a when they entered the fenced-in area grounds. The latch was once more shut. This time with a twist to lock it from the outside.

    Shit.

    What was she going to do now? Tas¨¬a checked to see if the download was completed. Something on the screen distracted her eyes.

    Tas¨¬a had no idea what it could have been. The names of thousands of files flipped through faster than she had any chance of reading them.

    The download completed. Whatever it contained, the file would be found within the last four percent of the downloaded content Tas¨¬a calculated.

    Tas¨¬a sorted the files by clicking ''stored most recent.'' She scrolled through the files to see if anything caught her eye.

    Her skin heated up and flushed goosebumps across her chest when she saw the file name.

    Sigrid Rosa.

    The reaction was entirely involuntary. It made no sense to Tas¨¬a why it affected her so powerfully.

    The name meant nothing to her. She knew Sigrid was a common Scandinavian name but she had no connection to the Nordic Nations.

    Many in the Salvage authority did, however.

    She recalled the false memory of Auntie Tatiana asking her who she was. The Rose.

    Tas¨¬a opened the file. It was organized as a multimedia document. The first entry of which was a picture of Tas¨¬a herself with a caption underneath.

    Tas¨¬a Alma-Gris, the Sigrid Rosa.

 1.18 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a heard the spooks laughing as they played basketball outside. At least they were not part of an advance team waiting for her upstairs.

    Perhaps, she was letting her imagination get the best of her, after all.

    No, no I am not.

    Someone had been well prepared for her entrance. She was somebody''s pet project. Just not those goons.

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head back to engage the mobile personal assistant, once more. She scanned for more information on the project file marked Sigrid Rosa.

    Except for her mugshot printed above the project title, the rest of the file was encrypted. Unfortunately, Lady Spook Demona Helo?ste had not set a bypass to ignore the password protection as she had done so with the operational data.

    Tas¨¬a put the mobile PA away in her pocket when she decided she was not going to contact Felicit¨¦ until she got back.

    That is, if she went back.

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to the door to the room where a pressurized hatch was embedded on the floor.

    Tas¨¬a had a decision to make. Open up the hatch and find out where it led, or scout up the stairs that led into the spook''s dens.

    The setup is luxurious. The Argentinian had told Tas¨¬a when Felicit¨¦ was selling her on the idea of breaching the tower. As a professional burglar, she could not ignore this factor.

    The goods on the floors likely made the poker table loot appear austere in comparison.

    However, there was something more valuable to her. The potential of freedom made the second option the more enticing of the two choices to follow through on.

    She still had hours before her shift was over. What she could learn in that timespan could prove invaluable to her eventual egress even if she did not go through with it this evening.

    But, if it gave her an immediate means to escape, she wasn''t going back. At this point, Tas¨¬a was quite ambiguous about the professional relationship she had with the Argentinian.

    If the circumstances allowed for it, she was leaving, even if it meant leaving Felicit¨¦ behind.

    Tas¨¬a once more picked the lock to the hatchway room.

    Tas¨¬a thought it quite curious that they used a pressurized hatch of thick metal. It showed that they took whatever was down there beneath the basement very seriously.

    Two sets of reinforced brass pipes were attached to the base assembly of the hatch running through twin holes in the concrete.

    Each pipe possessed a control valve mounted on the wall opposite the door.

    Tas¨¬a needed to be careful. The assembly appeared to be a haphazard jerry-rig. The twin valves controlled how much steam would be released into a double set of turbines that, given the weight of the hatch, were necessary to lift it.

    The welded materials on the baseboard appeared to be too thin and loosely mounted to take the full force of both valves opened up at high capacity settings at the same time.

    Tas¨¬a held the two support bars and jiggled them. They rattled in her grip.

    How the hell do they work this?

    She gave the assembly another look over. The left-hand side pipe and valve had an extra bar attached that braced it against the cement foundation surrounding the hatch.

    It also served to taper the assembly to the ground. However much hot air pressure rattled through it, it wasn''t breaking anytime soon.

    Tas¨¬a jerked a nod of her head in reluctant approval as she concluded that whoever the people were who put it together they knew what they were doing. They must have been limited in the resources available to them when they came up with this solution.

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    Near the ground, there was a switch between the valves. It was set up to be a master control.

    Tas¨¬a turned the left-hand valve all the way clockwise to full force.

    She turned the right-hand valve one-fifth of the way short of a full-force setting. She switched the master control up, then back down. Up again, and then back down.

    Tas¨¬a repeated this motion several times, and the hatch opened slowly up higher with each flip of the switch.

    With the hatch fully opened, she could now see the door''s thickness. Now that she could see its fastener side, Tas¨¬a recognized it for what it was as well. The hatch was built for a bank vault. At ten inches of solid, thick mass, and three thousand pounds in weight, it was on the smaller end for bank vault models in common use.

    Before entering the hatch, Tas¨¬a checked through the equipment on the shelves and found an electric torch.

    She also took a carbine. The rogue loaded it with the four rounds its small fixed position magazine would allow. Tas¨¬a pocketed eight more.

    She grabbed her netted mesh bag as she started to make her way to the hatch. A strongly mildew scented breeze pushed into the room.

    Tas¨¬a adjusted her eyes as she peered into the hatch. From behind her, a cascade of sound caused palpitations in her heart even before she recognized it as music. She had not heard the song being played, nor the instrument it was being played on, in twenty-five years.

    Even so, Tas¨¬a knew it without question.

    From up the stairs, a balalaika played Lara''s Theme.

    Could it be him?

    She glanced over to the stairs leading into the fenced-in area outside. The two spooks were not likely to come back inside anytime soon but she also did not like the idea of being pinched in between two parties.

    Tas¨¬a twisted away from the hatch. She looked back up the stairs leading to the first floor.

    Who else could it be?

    Tas¨¬a made her way up the stairs, quiet but quick. Anxious she was to find out if her suspicions were correct.

    The song did not stop playing as she approached. Each note of its melody played in a tremolo as it was necessary to sustain the slow tune. It gave the song a delicate, brittle sound.

    The top of the stairs entered a corridor. She peaked around the opposite side from whence she heard the music. Tas¨¬a spied a camera over an entrance door, as she expected.

    It hung limp, aimed at the carpet below it.

    On the other end of the hallway, the music came from an antechamber. Walls of scarlet paint lined with antiques and grain¨¦d trim must have given Felicit¨¦ the viewpoint that impressed her as luxurious.

    Tas¨¬a hesitated to move forward, but she felt the presence of no one else except herself and the one who played the instrument down the hall.

    Tas¨¬a began to walk it; she peeked in every direction each time she came up to a door.

    A placard on one desk read Demona Helo?ste.

    The decor was strikingly different from the other offices. On the wall behind the desk spread out a velvet mask designed to cover the top half of someone''s head.

    Above the mask, ensconced on a felt board, were a set of gelded hairpins beset with bloodstones running the course of their length.

    A matching choker with the same design filigree was pinned on the felt board as well.

    Most curious was what sat beneath these items - a lash with a silver handle, polished-to-mirrored surface, holding straps of full grain red-tinted leather.

    What were they for? Personal amusement of a kinky sort, or perhaps torture?

    Helo?ste was IT. It would have been an odd circumstance if she doubled as their interrogator.

    Tas¨¬a dismissed this speculation as irrelevant for the time being.

    That the items could be worth thousands of dollars was all that mattered to her now. At least, that is what she told herself.

    She ignored for the moment the music that beckoned her forward; Tas¨¬a slid into the office, and she made room in her fanny-pack for each of the items. Except for the lash which was too large. That she stowed in the netted bag.

    Satiated with the warm feeling the theft gave her, Tas¨¬a continued onward.

    As she stood just outside the door of the last office, Tas¨¬a peeked in. Only a few feet away sat an old man with the Russian balalaika lute on his lap.

    She also had a clear view of an open vent high up on a wall with a support ladder beneath it behind a large desk in the office beyond the antechamber.

    She focused on the man. He resembled the man she remembered only vaguely.

    That man possessed dark thick hair with a matching trim beard. He almost always wore sunglasses on the hump of his nose with head nodded down and eyes cast at whomever he spoke.

    This man was bald and his beard was long. He also squinted with deep wrinkles puffed under his eyes.

    She did recognize the thick protruding bottom lip, the Cossack nose, and his dark eyes.

    She could never forget those eyes, for they were the same eyes that Tatiana bore.

    He looked up at Tas¨¬a with a smile.

    "Spider Monkey. I thought that old song you used to love to hear me play would persuade you to come."

    She leaned up against the door frame on the shoulder that did not bear the carbine. Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "And that you are quite correct. Hello, General."

    It was Tatiana''s father.

 1.19 Book One: The Gray Soul

    He sat the balalaika down against the couch end. With his hands freed up, General Kutuzov patted the seat cushion.

    He implored her to sit beside him.

    "Come. Come," he urged.

    He wasn''t the same man she trusted as a child. Tas¨¬a suspected she never truly knew him.

    "I don''t know if I will be here very long, General."

    "Nonsense. I sent my men away so we will have some time to ourselves. To catch up as it were."

    His face then cast a studied grimace her way that no matter how authoritative it was set did not make her feel compelled to obey.

    "I have to say, I''m a bit disappointed in you, Tas¨¬a."

    With a world-weary suspired sigh she asked, "How is that, General?"

    "The Spider Monkey I knew would have found a way to this tower within the first week she was inside the gates of this complex. I had to prod Ms. Paz in a most indelicate manner to get you over here."

    Tas¨¬a considered his words. Why had he not conveyed to Felicit¨¦ to go ahead and inform Tas¨¬a that he waited for her in the tower, instead of the line of bull she was fed? Perhaps, he kept Felicit¨¦ in the dark on their personal connection. Did he need to do so to advance his own agenda?

    Felicit¨¦ was a data broker with a known mercenary disposition. Reason enough, Tas¨¬a supposed, to keep the Argentinian in the dark.

    She shrugged to let him know that his disappointment meant little to her.

    "I have been busy."

    "You have been distracted, Tas¨¬a. You allowed them to set the terms."

    Her tone intentionally flippant, she chuckled as she spoke.

    "Have I, now?"

    He gazed at the antiques that lined a long wall mounted table: Saracen cups, Spanish colonial wine jugs of pewter, and ceramic jars of quality Mayan replica.

    "Yes, indeed," the General said; his tone measured as if intended to counter the goad in her own word and voice. "The Tas¨¬a I knew was the best operative I ever had working for me."

    "I have never worked for you, General."

    He guffawed a steady laugh.

    "Oh, sweet child. I had you running all over that barrio doing my bidding. You did not think of it as work; you just thought yourself a child at play."

    Her eyes grew steely.

    "I remember getting shot at, and wondering why anyone would be so mean."

    "All for a good cause. So I could lay low, and so Tatiana could stay safe."

    "I see, did my father know?"

    "Most of it. After all, he did train you to be the scamp that you are."

    Tas¨¬a held up the mobile PA with the photo of herself on the screen, and the caption, Sigrid Rosa.

    "What do you know of this, General?"

    "That goes back very far, back to a bargain your father made."

    Her face pinched up into a grimace.

    "Tas¨¬a. Don''t go feeling like you have been betrayed because you are now finding out about things that would not have made sense to you then, even if you had been told. Your father did what he had to do to save you."

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    She gave the general a careful appraisal, and came to a decision. Whatever his crimes against the rest of humanity, Kutuzov had always been nothing but kind towards her.

    She decided to take a seat on the couch; her body being so diminutive, she easily folded herself up together and she sat facing him with plenty of room between the two.

    "What''s this about?"

    "You were born a premie, my child. Born to schedule, you would have been as tall as your mother who is tall for your people. Perhaps, as tall as your aunt, my dear Tatiana, but your mother did not have the benefit of having my Cossack genes as her sister did. So, likely not."

    General Kutuzov waved both hands with fingers spread out, and he continued.

    "However, neither here nor there. Just a father''s pride. What is important, your diminutive stature was the result of being born in the fifth month of your mother''s pregnancy.

    "The Salvage researchers saw an opportunity in you. They told your father they would cover all expenses for keeping you alive, if he was willing to let you go through their treatment program.

    "His only mistake was not knowing the nature of that treatment. Na?vely assuming as he did that it was merely to benefit your health."

    "What did they do to me?"

    "Induced artificial neurodevelopment. Given you were born premature as you were, there is some flexibility in how they could shape you.

    "To be fair to those medical researchers who experimented on you, they were not truly monsters, as none of your original birth defects continued after the therapy, so all in all, you were likely more benefited than harmed by their treatment.

    "But that was then. Those experiments are over and done with. What is being done to you now that should have you most concerned."

    "And what is that? Tell me, General."

    "The answers are right there, in Helo?ste''s PA. Get it to that friend of yours, she''ll know what to do. She has the background in cybernetics to explain it to you in a way that goes over my head, but not likely yours.

    "I was going to give you this, but I see you will not be needing it."

    He held up an SSD card. General Kutuzov''s smile set deep in his face with a kind bearing.

    "I know the next thing that you''re wondering, Tas¨¬a. That being, when do you get to leave this shit hole. We have to stay put for one more evening.

    "As you see I ran into some trouble downstairs when Salvage found out that you were no longer behaving like a docile inmate. That is Helo?ste''s PA as I assumed earlier, correct?"

    When she affirmed with a nod, Kutuzov shook his own head.

    "Half the mess I''ll need you to help us untangle was her doing. The Salvage never had a more loyal soldier to their cause than Demona Helo?ste. That you pressed Ms. Paz to move things forward proved to be serendipitous.

    "We all have to clear out of here tomorrow. Then, when we get out of here I have to ask you a favor in return."

    Before she answered, Tas¨¬a peered down at her nimble fingers. She cracked the knuckles emphatically for Kutuzov to see.

    "I was not expecting this to come free, so what is it I can do?"

    "Tatiana is in trouble, and it is something of a delicate nature that only the finest operative I''ve ever had working for me could possibly handle."

    The sound of boots came plodding up towards them from downstairs. Tas¨¬a gripped the .32 caliber that she held in her jacket pocket.

    One of the two spooks that passed her by earlier, peeked into the antechamber. He nodded politely to Tas¨¬a.

    "Forgive me for interrupting, but something''s going on over there in Spore Isolation. They are calling for a lockdown over the radio."

    General Kutuzov cursed under his breath.

    "We have to get you back over there, Tas¨¬a."

    "Lockdown? It could be weeks before I have the opportunity to get back over here if it is a complex-wide lockdown."

    "Tas¨¬a, if worse comes to worst, I''ll use one last favor to get you back over here. However, when they do a headcount and you''re not over there, there will be a larger problem.

    "They will bring in dogs, soldiers, and drones to scour all over the place to find you. Making it impossible for us to leave tomorrow. Come on."

    He led her down the hall, passed the limp camera, and into a stairwell going up three flights. He unlocked the door that led into the roof shack.

    As soon as he opened the door, Kutuzov jerked back when he heard the barking of dogs and the rumbling hover of drones which they could see lit up in the swivel of spotlights. Several of them.

    Just beneath their location, the stomp of dozens of boots pounded on asphalt under a hail of barked orders.

    Tas¨¬a stepped back inside the shack. General Kutuzov looked flustered. She had to seize control.

    "General, when you make it out I''ll contact you in three days with this," Tas¨¬a said with the mobile held up. She continued, "Whatever it is my aunt has gotten herself into, will she be able to hold out for that long?"

    He nodded in answer. When she turned around to descend back down the stairs, he asked.

    "Where are you going?"

    "Obviously General, the conditions have changed. I''m going to need to find another route."

    With that quip, she scurried back down the stairs.

 1.20 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Mildew and rat shit.

    Tas¨¬a pulled her face back from the hatch door. After her coughing fit subsided, the rogue took the time to strap a stiletto to the side of her calf.

    Tas¨¬a knew from the little that she could see, it was not going to be a pleasant scenario down there.

    Tas¨¬a wondered where the light switch was located. She heard the hum of machinery echoing in the rooms below.

    If those machines were maintained, surely the crew did not rely on mere electric torches as they descended the ladder.

    For the life of me -

    Some beast scurried loudly below as if it was being chased.

    She heard the growl of a cat.

    Tas¨¬a flicked her torch back on. A cat pounced on a mouse. Unfazed by the spotlight on it, the feline hissed at Tas¨¬a. As it held a mouse down between its paws, it bit into the neck of its prey.

    The squeal of the rodent as it died was startlingly loud.

    Tas¨¬a reasoned the spooks must have kept a cat down there for this very purpose.

    "Enjoy your meal, Chiquito Pantera," She said and smiled in derision at the aggressive cat.

    The cat glared at her, as if it understood her mockery. It growled, threateningly.

    "Well, you think you are a panther, but you''re just a little tabby cat, like me."

    In the next instance, just as she began to flick the light off, a shadow engulfed the cat.

    The feline''s growl now muffled down into a tight squeal.

    "The fuck was that," Tas¨¬a expired out loud.

    "Spiders. Big fucking spiders. Did the fuckers just eat my cat?"

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head around. It was the same spook who informed the general of the Spore Isolation lockdown.

    He now wore a pair of leather boots, black jeans, a brown flannel shirt, and a cowboy hat of matted white straw. She gave the latter a quick study with a side glance.

    "I''m afraid so, gaucho."

    To this rejoinder, the man gave a broad, loose grin. He appeared to be six foot tall with curly dark brown hair on a high forehead.

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris, I have an unfair advantage on you. General Kutuzov has spoken quite a bit about you. As yet, you know nothing of me.

    "I am Le¨®n Ballano. I am pleased to make your acquaintance."

    He offered her his hand, and she quickly shook it. Ballano peeked down into the hatch.

    He cursed.

    "Fuck. Excuse my language, Ms. del Alma-Gris. Team Helo?ste -," she noticed as he said the woman''s name, his head turned unconsciously towards the room with the poker table with a tensed pulse in the vein of his neck, "- in the infinite wisdom of their leader''s demand, they took a hammer to break down a door we completely sealed up with plaster.

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    "We did this to cut off a section that led into an Unnatural Zone."

    He looked up at the ceiling, and he winced, thoughtfully. Le¨®n then asked her.

    "You can''t get back over there by accessing the roof at this time?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Soldiers are all over the grounds, now. I have to find a service tunnel if at all possible."

    Le¨®n confirmed with an uneasy nod.

    "It''s possible. However, it is not going to be fun. Service tunnels running under Spore Isolation connect by way of a hub found on a dead-end hall off the main corridor beneath us that leads to the hydroduct tunnel.

    "I''ll help you clear the way to get there. Hold on a moment."

    Barely a minute passed before Le¨®n returned. He now wore a bandolier with several thumb-sized grenades attached to it. On his shoulder was slung a carbine identical to her own.

    "I have a little experience with these things if you wish for me to go down the hatch first," he offered.

    Tas¨¬a gave him an over-enthusiastic smile for his gallantry. She also thought of Demona Helo?ste with part of her skull that became missing at a moment when he was less than chivalrous.

    Tas¨¬a was certain that he pulled the trigger from his reaction when he mentioned Lady Spook''s name.

    "By all means," Tas¨¬a said. "I will cover you, and hold the torch when you climb down."

    Le¨®n chuckled; his hands pressed against a control panel.

    "The torch will not be necessary."

    All of her tech-savvy flew out the window in an instant, in her personal estimation. She did not recognize the slide panel for what it was until Le¨®n''s hand pressed against it and he opened it.

    Tas¨¬a cheeks flushed an embarrassed scarlet as she chuckled; she grabbed the back of her neck.

    Part of her reaction was just for show. The man was risking life and limb to help her.

    She decided her pride could take a backseat to serve her greater interest for a change.

    Tas¨¬a peered back down the hatch. The light that flickered between the moving shadows emitted a weird gloom.

    "There are many more than just one down there," she said. "They are moving around in response to our sounds. As if they are being tactful."

    "Oh, that they are."

    Le¨®n forced an awkward tough-guy smile along his face. He must have wanted to appear reassuring to her, Tas¨¬a gathered.

    He palmed one of the grenades for her inspection. A mere small pressurized canister.

    "Chlorine, and some sticky element that only makes it worse when people try to wipe it off. It was designed to control riots. We find it effective against the pests." His eyes turned to the hatch. "You have to be careful where you throw it, though. There is a nuclear reactor down there."

    "What? Say that again."

    "More precisely, it is a decommissioned satellite. It would be a waste to junk it, entirely. The fissionable pile still has a good hundred years left in it."

    He slung the grenade down into the hatch aimed against the eastern wall as he kept speaking to her. It popped, and then with a sound like a kettle whistle, it belched smoke.

    "We call the satellite the Muskovite. You''ll see."

    Tas¨¬a backed up. The chlorine gas was slowly seeping through the hatch.

    Le¨®n let loose another grenade. This time against the South wall.

    He joined up with her at the door frame leading into the greater basement hall.

    "We''ll need to let that gas set for five minutes. The spiders should then be easy to pick off."

    Waiting led to small talk. Le¨®n asked her where she was from. When Tas¨¬a answered, he gasped, "ah! That''s down road to Rossara. Great college town. I misspent some of my youth in Rossara."

    She nodded back in a sheepish grin. His response also let her know that Le¨®n was not aware of a substantial part of General Kutuzov''s past. At least, where Kutuzov spent years hiding from Interpol between his missions.

    She also discovered his ancestors arrived in Paraguay well over a hundred years before from Barcelona, Spain. They resettled after the Spanish Civil War.

    "Soldiers. We Ballano''s have always been soldiers. We have a specific talent to that effect embedded in our DNA."

    "What would that talent be?"

    Mischief upturned his grin before he answered.

    "Picking the losing side."

 1.21 Book One: The Gray Soul

    She leaned over the hatch and sniffed.

    "Gass dissipation is likely safe at this point. I''ll cover you."

    As he steadied his boot on the first rail, Tas¨¬a thought he needed a little advice.

    "I would advise going in with a sidearm at ready. I have Helo?ste''s Desert Eagle if you feel you need it."

    Le¨®n squinted with deliberative emphasis before he shook his head.

    "No thanks. My balance is not the best in the world. I''ll set my carbine in position when my feet hit solid concrete. Though, your concern for my well-being, Ms. del Alma-Gris, is appreciated."

    His tone of voice in answering her lacked the condescension common in weak men. In spite of her reservations over the murdered quartet, she was finding herself liking the fellow Paraguayan.

    She placed two extra magazines for the .32 in her belt inseam for easy reach.

    "I won''t lie to you, Le¨®n. I find spiders to be the ickiest thing imaginable. I might keep my cool, I usually do, but I have never come up against a spider large enough to eat a cat before."

    "They creep me out, too. Trust me, once you see them, the only thing you''ll want to do is curb stomp and grind them down like cockroaches."

    He swung his torso around in position, gripped the bars in both hands, then he bunny hopped his tightly aligned feet down each rail in a quick descent.

    She took her .32 out as he did so, and she crawled in a crouch along the top two rails. Tas¨¬a leaned out with her free hand grabbing a rail to twist her body around and free up her gun bearing hand.

    When she scanned the floor below, Tas¨¬a yelled to him. Spiders were leaping into position.

    A mere second after Le¨®n planted his feet on the floor, they were covered in a thick spittle of webbing. Another web caught his hand and stuck it to the side of the ladder.

    Le¨®n yelped.

    "They''ve never pulled shit this clever before."

    Tas¨¬a shot the closest spider twice. She took another shot at one directly behind the first one. It''s abdomen burst in a dark, green bile.

    Such an unnatural, acrid color, she noted.

    The scent was oddly chemical, reminiscent of her treatment.

    At two and a half feet long, there was nothing natural about their size either.

    She then caught sight of the source for the gloom shaded shadows predominant on the floor beneath. A whole horde of the black spiders covered a spiraled set of trellised girders.

    The girders formed the base platform for the Muskovite. Likely, the creatures drew energy from it.

    Not good.

    Tas¨¬a slid down the rail upside down using the bend of her knees to grip the ladder.

    She took out four more spiders as they approached Le¨®n. They had as good a line of sight on her as she had on them.

    She also was not able to get a good look at what may lie behind her.

    Tas¨¬a had already fired seven shots. Two more remained in the magazine, and one in the chamber.

    She could not risk staying still for very long.

    Given the chance, they would web her.

    Tas¨¬a flipped over, landing upright, behind Le¨®n. Using his immobile body to guard her flank, she checked out what lay behind her.

    Four spiders on that side now tried to get a fix on her. Two on the floor, two on the wall.

    Her one advantage was their humongous abdomens provided ample surface target.

    Not stopping when she took out three with a quick, steady arc, she dropped her gun by the ladder as she began to tumble, roll, and position herself in front of the last spider.

    With a steel-toed work boot, Tas¨¬a aimed for its head to avoid bile splatter. Its carapace smashed in with a most satisfying crunch.

    The immediate area cleared, she slid over to Le¨®n.

    "Wigged out a bit, yet, Le¨®n," she asked teasingly as she placed the Desert Eagle in his free hand.

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    "Ready to shit my pants. The General was not kidding about you. Lovely shooting."

    "Cover me, and I''ll get you out."

    As she cut at the silk web along his boot, Tas¨¬a smiled to herself. A little appreciation went a long way.

    The roar of the hand cannon made Tas¨¬a jump.

    He popped off two shots where a couple of spiders entered from an adjoining room.

    Tas¨¬a eyeballed the scope of the opening for her next move. She could see into an antechamber from where a double set of doors was once fastened.

    Now, a large hole had been punched through the plaster.

    Le¨®n noticed she was staring at it.

    "That is indeed where team Helo?ste decided to punch a hole. Right into an Unnatural Zone."

    Tas¨¬a removed a grenade from Le¨®n''s bandolier and she tossed it directly in front of the hole.

    "Why would they do something so stupid?"

    As she freed his hand from the webbing, he only answered with a clenched jaw. His teeth ground together in a rattle so loud she could hear it.

    She glanced at the spider horde that moved slowly in the shadowy glow.

    "What are you not telling me, Le¨®n?"

    "My suspicions would make me sound crazy."

    She nodded back to the creatures surrounding the Muskovite.

    "It''s them, isn''t it?"

    Le¨®n nodded as he glared at the horde.

    She shook her head.

    "We have dream visitations, we have Unnatural Zones where you can find mont¨ªculo de hadas, Le¨®n. Fucking fairy mounds, Le¨®n. Have you seen them?"

    "Of course, they are just hallucinations," he said. "There is one through there. A glade of giant mushrooms. They are real. The rest is hallucination.

    "I sometimes hear the music of a Piper. Demona said it was a satyr. She wrote erotic poems to it."

    As they carefully regarded the spider horde, Tas¨¬a wiped her mouth before commenting.

    "The Cull Spores were designed to drive us insane. Of course, it plays upon deep-seated fantasy. It must have gotten to her."

    He bit his lip with his eyes cast low. A visible knot formed in his throat. Tas¨¬a understood she was talking about an uncomfortable subject for him.

    She could read from his body language that he did not want to kill the other spooks. General Kutuzov ordered it.

    Le¨®n confirmed her words.

    "It shows you what it feels you want to see, to hear, to touch. It understood Helo?ste''s well developed and quite sophisticated eros and it turned it against her.

    "If a woman with a two hundred IQ and a mind like a steel trap can be turned, anybody can."

    With that remark, Tas¨¬a glanced at the platform and she noticed the spiders set on top of the platform above the satellite formed concentric circles and did so seemingly in a bow of their chitinous heads.

    Tas¨¬a looked closer and there she was. A creature straight out of the mythology of her father''s religion.

    Tas¨¬a whispered, "the Infernal Madr¨¦! The Idolatress of the Bleeding City."

    A diminutive woman, shorter than Tas¨¬a, stood in the center of the spiders on the platform. She wore a dress of severely mannered webbing. Her hair raven; her skin radiant alabaster. Eyes of silver, and ears long and lifted like an elf. She looked straight into Tas¨¬a''s eyes.

    "There will come a day," spoke the Infernal Madr¨¦, "you will beg to be my possession, Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris. Sigrid Rosa."

    "Listen to me, Tas¨¬a," yelled Le¨®n.

    Fright set in a tight knot in her belly as she realized that he was yelling to break the enchantment cast upon her.

    It would have worked.

    "Do you see her," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "But, of course," Le¨®n answered. "Watch this."

    As he pointed his gun towards the satellite, he took great care in his aim. His shot centered on The Infernal Madr¨¦''s chest.

    The shots chipped the concrete above the platform. It made no impression on the small woman.

    "She is no more real than any of the other hallucinations."

    Tas¨¬a glanced back up to the platform. This one was different from the other phantoms - the spiders reacted to her presence, and treated her as their queen.

    What deep manipulation of the pheromones of those creatures must be occurring for the Cull Spores to accomplish that?

    Who was even behind that kind of technology?

    "Listen to me, del Alma-Gris. You are drifting again. Do you see a switch beside the bay door over there?

    She looked to where he pointed.

    "Yes," she said, snapping out of the stupor.

    "It''s on a mechanical rig. Wind it up several times, and it will eventually catch. Open it high enough, and you can crawl through it.

    "Watch your feet when you fall into the corridor. There is an off-load bay there on the other side. Go down that corridor, and there will be a ladder on your first left-side exit. It leads to a hatch door. You can pick it, I imagine."

    "Of course."

    "I''ll cover you if they try to interfere with you cranking that door open. But, please make it quick. I dearly want to get away from that Spider Queen thing."

    "It''s the Infernal Madr¨¦," Tas¨¬a answered.

    "I don''t know anything about that, but I will take your word on it."

    The Black Eyed Ones, the Wise One, the Hermicubus, and now the Mother of Demons, herself!

    As she cranked the gear handle, Tas¨¬a gazed back at it. It still smiled as if it knew her personally.

    It was very much in accord with her frightened imagination as a child listening to the old occult and gnostic texts the elders of her father''s church, the New Creation, read from.

    Members like her father were often called simply, Nuevementas, the Anewed.

    Just as in her childhood fears, the Infernal Madr¨¦ whispered into Tas¨¬a''s mind once more; the words she spoke in the old texts.

    I will make the minds of all men but a necrotic thing. From the whole, a being undead.

    Two shots from the hand cannon bounced above Tas¨¬a''s head.

    "Get out of here, del Alma-Gris," yelled Le¨®n.

    She realized she had hesitated while listening to the phantom, now the bay door was coming back down.

    She bent her torso to her legs, and side rolled through the closing space.

    She flipped around on to the other side.

 1.22 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a nearly sprung an ankle when she landed on the platform of a hard metal lift. She assumed the surface would be either concrete or asphalt, and she did not anticipate the bay floor being more than a few feet off from the ground. It was four.

    She cursed herself when she realized her bag of loot was left in the chamber on the other side.

    Tas¨¬a turned back to the door and she found the double handles of the latch release. She could use to raise it up again. She hesitated.

    The bag of loot could stay put for now. She reasoned, as she thought of the Infernal Madr¨¦ in the room on the other side of the bay door. There was nothing in the bag that she absolutely needed at the moment.

    She had her .32 caliber, Helo?ste''s PA in her fanny pack, along with a secondary assistant taken from another spook''s corpse and a flashlight.

    The carbine was left at the hatch. She had intended to retrieve it after dealing with the spiders.

    Things just did not go as planned.

    Tas¨¬a shrugged to this understatement. She pulled out the flashlight and swept the corridor in front of her.

    There wasn''t much to see except an asphalt road wide enough to allow a small service truck through with just enough room to turn it back around.

    She had seen the compact, electric trucks used throughout the complex. They were the same width as the golf carts maintenance crews rode around in everywhere on the complex but possessed a length three times their size.

    Glancing around, Tas¨¬a noticed severe disrepair. Whatever the original purpose of the tower generations ago, it was no longer used as intended.

    Girder supports maintained every thirty yards along the ceiling were minimally lit. Many of the lights were broken with the remnants strung along the asphalt.

    Deeply corroded pipes from an HVAC system were supported between the girders. A set of generators originally stacked in rows above the bay wall were broken down with parts strewn about beneath. A service stairwell for the generators had also collapsed.

    Tas¨¬a began to walk and she turned off the flashlight as her eyes adjusted to the low-light conditions.

    One-eighth of a mile down the track, on the right, a side-corridor dropped off into a pitted tunnel with an entrance ladder grounded against the road asphalt.

    She wondered if it would lead to service tunnels. Le¨°n did not recommend this one though. It likely only led deeper into the complex.

    A cacophony of noise like the shriek of damaged brass instruments from up the corridor almost stunned Tas¨¬a. She switched out the magazine on her .32, and shone the flashlight ahead.

    Several large, but not unnaturally large, rats were in a panic over one of their own. Their eyes glared in the light she shined on them. They scattered in all directions.

    Tas¨¬a shot the two that charged with their flickering red eyes coming closer towards her.

    She was not about to risk any disease they may have carried.

    You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

    When the rats disappeared, there was one left. The one that the others screamed over. It limped away, slowly.

    Tas¨¬a could tell there was something odd about it. She shined the light on it.

    It looked like roadkill that had come back from the dead. Matted and oily hair laid along the length of its body. The skin of its face had worn rough against the skull.

    The bones at the joints of its limbs showed through the surface. The pulse of limping muscle tendons rippled beneath the decaying flesh.

    She believed it to be the most pathetic thing she had ever seen. Was it leprotic? Or just another oddity manifested from the Cull Spores?

    Tas¨¬a walked past it, but she kept her distance. The rat squealed at her in a tone dry and pneumatic.

    Walking up another eighth of a mile, Tas¨¬a came to the corridor to her left that Leon mentioned. She had a decision to make.

    If she was going to go back to the SIU, she needed to do so soon.

    She also realized her temperament towards Felicit¨¦ was more forgiving and less inclined towards suspicion now that she understood the pressure General Kutuzov bore down upon the Argentinian hacker.

    Yet, even as she reasoned this, Tas¨¬a began to run down the long corridor to find where it might lead. The last thing she wanted to do was to go back to the worker collective and resume that life.

    She could not let sentiments and attachments weigh her down.

    That is what got me here in the first place.

    However she decided to play this out, she still needed to set her Plan B in place as a valid alternative to relying on either Kutuzov or Felicit¨¦.

    Even though she forgave, even though Tas¨¬a knew she would have done the same thing Felicit¨¦ did in the same situation, Tas¨¬a could not ignore the fact her closest ally could be turned against her.

    She would be a fool not to plan for betrayal.

    Tas¨¬a finally came to the end of the road. A large, pressurized vault door faced her. On a panel to its side was a double stacked microcontroller and, along with it, an accompanying display.

    Tas¨¬a pulled the screen up. From reading it, she gathered there would be two matters that would prove to be obstacles for her to overcome.

    The first, the door could be accessed only twice a day. In cycles of twelve hours apart. On the other side of the pressurized door was an aqueduct of water. It drained out twice a day to be purified. There were ten hours and forty-seven minutes before the next drain cycle.

    As for the second of her obstacles, the door itself was encrypted with password protection.

    She had a device now in the form of Demona Helo?ste''s PA that was much better than even Felicity''s modified TRS-80. With enough time, she could breach the code that set the password.

    Tas¨¬a could tell from the schematic that merely repositioning the pins on the board would completely shut the unit down, rendering it useless. It was secured to prevent a physical hack.

    If she came back on the next drain cycle and was able to dial Felicit¨¦ in remotely to the address of this device, how long would it take to breach it?

    "Shit," she spat out.

    It was the one factor she would rather not rely on - an unknown quantity of time that could not be accurately measured before an operation was set in motion and executed.

    Of course, Tas¨¬a did not expend hundreds of hours of her time coding customized apps and tooling with hacking software the way Felicit¨¦ did, so she was nowhere near the Argentinian''s level of mastery in that art.

    How she was going to get that clumsy blonde across the security parameters that Tas¨¬a herself had a little trouble handling, she was not sure, either.

    Most likely, for that, she would have to rely on General Kutuzov''s pull.

    They make some of those barriers go away, as Felicit¨¦ put it.

    Tas¨¬a was determined not to be forced to rely on Kutuzov for her escape.

    She needed time to develop a schematic of the service tunnels, and where along the grounds they lay before she could even hope to solve that dilemma.

    Cursing to herself, that she couldn''t just go through that pressurized door and be done with this place, Tas¨¬a turned back around and started running.

    She had a feeling her eventual choice of an escape route would turn out to be the most perilous one, but for now, with too many unknowns for her to sort through at the moment, Tas¨¬a''s only viable option was to find a way back over to Spore Isolation.

 1.23 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a peeked through the vent before opening it. Felicit¨¦ sat alone in the break room below her.

    The pulse of blue lights lit up the break room every few seconds. Thankfully, the klaxons were not on.

    Tas¨¬a studied the Argentinian woman. She was hunched over the table. TRS-80 set between her thumbs. Her head turned away, distracted.

    She must be feeling out of the loop, Tas¨¬a surmised from Felicit¨¦''s body language.

    If General Kutuzov, or Le¨®n, or the other spook, Javier, had contacted her already, Felicit¨¦ would be more engaged in her current actions.

    At the moment, she just appeared to be listless and bored.

    Tas¨¬a opened the vent. Gripped the lip and pushed her way down. She closed the vent trap just enough so she could swing a thigh over and grip the side of the duct before she closed the vent all the way.

    As the duct lip only jutted out of the ceiling by eight inches, it was a tightly agile maneuver she accomplished.

    Tas¨¬a somersaulted down to the floor to avoid a table beneath the vent.

    Back on her feet, she approached Felicit¨¦. None of her actions caught the Argentinian''s attention as the blonde was lost in deep thought.

    Tas¨¬a pulled the tiny drive disk from her pocket. She placed it in front of Felicit¨¦.

    "Therein is the entire server backup data array. Mission accomplished."

    Felicit¨¦ stared at the card for several seconds as if she wished it would go away. She finally looked up.

    "Did you meet - did you run into anyone?"

    Tas¨¬a grinned at this remark. Her assumption had been correct. No contact. Felicit¨¦ had been left out of the loop.

    Tas¨¬a shrugged off the question.

    "Don''t be silly. How would I have met our objective then? I was in and out. Like a ghost. It helped that they appeared a bit understaffed."

    Felicit¨¦ muttered under her breath, "shit," voiced so supple in its delivery Tas¨¬a would have definitely missed it if she had not expected the reaction.

    "Why didn''t you link me in," Felicit¨¦ asked. Her tone of voice raised.

    "I tried to while I was inside. They have ways of blocking anything going out that is not going out through their system."

    Tas¨¬a eyed the vending machines. She could really use a cup of coffee at the moment. She took out her ID from her breast pocket, and swiped the coffee machine.

    "Even at the lowest frequencies," Felicit¨¦ asked.

    "Yep. I tried them all."

    "Those morons," Felicit¨¦ said with exasperation in her voice.

    "What? I know you must be anxious having been stuck here this whole time, under these circumstances, but, Felicit¨¦, you acting - are you alright?"

    Paz glanced over to the pulsing blue lights emitting from LED strips along the corridor.

    "I guess not," she conceded.

    Felicit¨¦ grew still though her fingers were clenched together stiff. She was again lost in thought.

    Tas¨¬a wondered how long it would be before they contacted Felicit¨¦. Perhaps not at all. Perhaps, in their eyes, she had already served her part.

    Tas¨¬a changed the subject.

    "So, what''s going on over here," Tas¨¬a asked. "I overheard the spooks talking about a lockdown here in Spore Isolation. "

    "Some doctor attempted suicide."

    Tas¨¬a got a funny feeling. If it was merely a suicide attempt inside the SIU that would not explain what the soldiers, the dogs, and the drones were doing all over the courtyard.

    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

    "Have they done a headcount? Have they noticed me gone?"

    Felicit¨¦ shook her head as if it took a great effort on her part to concentrate on the here and now.

    "Not at all concerned about us," she murmured. "One duty officer told me to stay put here, and to tell you to do likewise when you got back from taking a shit."

    She hid her concerns from Felicit¨¦ with a smile.

    "Nice cover."

    "Thought you would appreciate it."

    "So," Tas¨¬a said as she tapped the tiny drive disk. "Do you want to put it in and see what''s on it?"

    With a sudden jerk of attention Felicit¨¦''s hands became animated once more.

    "I apologize, del Alma-Gris. I have been so out of it."

    "Are you losing sleep over the hit fee?"

    "''fraid so. It has really taken the wind out of my sails. I strode around the dorm like a badass. Unimpressed with the way the other women conduct themselves. The worst their reputation, the more they turned out to be bullshit.

    "Then I find out, someone is willing to spend actual gold on my head. That someone has a reputation as a first-tier spook. Shit gets real, right?"

    Felicit¨¦ looked down at her TRS-80.

    "What do we have here? The file layout has been entirely bypassed. Odd. I''ve known administrators who have been fired, or worse, incarcerated for far less of an infraction of due diligence than this."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "It''s how I found it."

    "Where did you find this?"

    "On the body of their IT specialist."

    Tas¨¬a could see the calculations spinning in Felicit¨¦''s head by the taut frown on her face. Felicit¨¦ watched her in turn with a sideways glance.

    "I have to be honest with you, del Alma-Gris. I would not have guessed by your manner and your composure you have run into any dead bodies, or anything suggesting an experience of a traumatic nature. What are you made of?"

    Tas¨¬a grinned as she held her arms across her torso almost haughty in her demeanor.

    "Try running a B&E crew through the abandoned mansions tucked inside the hill lands of Esconda Vida where the lethal drones and robots patrol as I have and you will see firsthand how cheap life can be.

    "Which reminds me, Felicit¨¦. I brought you a gift. A little protection."

    Tas¨¬a removed the sheath from her calf. She handed Felicit¨¦ the stiletto.

    "Nice blade. Thank you. Quite thoughtful of you, actually."

    Now Tas¨¬a smiled, warmly. Felicit¨¦ in her present mood was going to be a hard sell.

    "I have some ideas on how we can extract the layout of the complex from that data array by using some relative coordinate values I verified as geometrically sound on my way back over here."

    As she spoke, Tas¨¬a watched the Argentinian''s eyes glaze over.

    "Felicit¨¦, this is important. I know you don''t think it is relevant, now. But you need a Plan B. If Kutuzov was planning to bring you over, he would have informed you that I was on my way back. It appears to me, you have served your purpose as far as he is concerned. I''m sorry."

    Felicit¨¦, otherwise exceptional in her physical appearance, made just about the ugliest face Tas¨¬a had ever seen.

    "Look. Look, Felicit¨¦. There are two things that should have you absolutely elated right now. The General is not having anything done to you because you are with me.

    "Two, even without Kutuzov''s assistance, we have everything we need, right here, to get us out of this shit hole."

    Felicit¨¦ nodded. A slackened grin crossed her face.

    "So, you knew all along that I was lying to you?"

    "Did you have any other choice," Tas¨¬a asked her in turn.

    "No."

    "Then, don''t worry about it. How we go from here is all that matters."

    "All right. Let''s put all of that behind us. It doesn''t serve either of our interests to let it strain our professional relationship."

    Tas¨¬a put a hand on Felicit¨¦''s shoulder as she leaned lower, and spoke softly.

    "Felicit¨¦, have you ever heard of a file, or a project entitled, the Sigrid Rosa?"

    The Argentinian nodded. Her lips squirmed.

    "Yes. Yes. I have"

    "It''s in there. The master file for that project. I''m going to need you to decrypt it for me."

    Felicit¨¦ looked hesitant, pained even.

    "What''s the problem," Tas¨¬a asked.

    Felicit¨¦ studied the view of the window in front of her for several seconds, growing more and more annoyed in her appearance with each second that passed.

    "I chase after, intercept, acquire, and examine secret documents every single day. It''s my lifeblood. My raison d''etre. I breathe the shit. I live for it. But, the Sigrid Rosa, Tas¨¬a? It is another level of evil altogether. Real fucked-up-shit.

    "Barely anything I come across fazes me, in the least. But that?

    "I have to know why you ask me about that?"

    Tas¨¬a raised her own voice in annoyance. In spite of working things out just a moment ago, it appeared to her Felicit¨¦ was ducking matters again.

    "What''s the problem?" She asked; her lips held tight.

    "The Sigrid Rosa, Tas¨¬a. The Preemie Harvest. You have never heard of the Preemie Harvest? If you were deep in Intel, you''d avoid like hell ever bringing that up"

    Tas¨¬a pulled out Helo?ste''s PA. She showed Felicit¨¦ the mugshot picture of herself bearing the legend - Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, the Sigrid Rosa.

    Felicit¨¦''s lips sputtered. "Okay. I''m confused."

    The blue lights stopped pulsing in the corridor.

    "We''ll talk later," Felicit¨¦ said. There was a glare of hostility in her eyes. "They will be coming back to escort us soon."

 1.24 Book One: The Gray Soul

    The officers escorting the two inmates followed behind them down the long skywalk between the two buildings. Once the corridor verged on the large, central building of the IMCQ compound, the guards turned around and headed back towards the isolation ward as the inmates continued on, walking forward.

    With the guards gone, Tas¨¬a wanted to talk some more. Questions still remained unanswered. What Felicit¨¦ knew could give her a much better insight into her condition, but the Argentinian refused to look in Tas¨¬a''s direction. Her long legs strode forward at an advanced pace.

    Whatever it was she knew about the Sigrid Rosa, Felicit¨¦ now viewed Tas¨¬a in a different, unflattering it seemed, light than before.

    Tas¨¬a wondered further if they even had a partnership now.

    She would have to give Felicit¨¦ time to digest what she learned before they could move forward.

    The Argentinian was a strongly centered woman. She would ultimately do what was in her own best interest.

    Tas¨¬a glanced to her left, peeking through the cafeteria windows. The food services personnel were shuffling about near the double set of exit doors, waiting for them to be opened.

    She decided to make a turn towards the kitchen. Este-Oeste worked as the veggie prep girl on the evening shift so the AM cooks would have everything at hand in the morning.

    Este-Oeste was the first to be let out of the kitchen by the staff after being patted down. She nodded and smiled wryly at the officer holding the door.

    Tas¨¬a whispered an "uh-huh" to herself. She knew what was up. She would dog Este-Oeste mercilessly for it.

    The girl''s walk was a sprinted swish. She acknowledged Tas¨¬a with a nod, but she did not stop. In fact, she moved quickly to get away from the short legged burglar.

    For Tas¨¬a, it was the perfect time to tease her.

    "Uh-huh. Hey you. Where are you going so fast?"

    "Don''t blow my shit."

    "It''s just us. No COs around to bust you. The way you are walking with that tight butt swivel, it is kind of having an effect on me."

    Tas¨¬a caught up to her and walked behind.

    "Sorry, I don''t play for that team."

    Tas¨¬a laughed. "Skinny girl with haunches like those, you could make a lot of money here if you did."

    Tas¨¬a reached out and grabbed a butt cheek. Clenched in her hands was not the flesh of a skinny girl''s modest rump, but the plastic of a five-pound bag of cheese.

    She then pulled Este-Oeste by her belt for a better look.

    Beneath the girl''s bloomers were two five-pound bags of cheese fastened in place with the back straps of thong underwear.

    "What are you making for dinner, tonight," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Hungry?"

    "Famished. You would not believe the kind of evening I have had."

    "I''m thinking deep-fried tamales in wraps, and some pork sauteed in onions, chilies, and lime."

    "Sounds wonderful. Marc¨¬a?"

    "Yes," Este-Oeste asked in a doubtful tone.

    "As good a nip and tuck your butt was looking to have got, the boob-job is just the opposite. Terrible. It looks like they dumped a block of butter down each of your cups and called it a day."

    Este-Oeste peeked down her shirt and gasped.

    "That is exactly what they left there. Do you think I should sue?"

    "For every penny. But I have to say, you are looking a little fat of late around your stomach and thighs."

    Tas¨¬a smacked the bulk of something hidden along the band at Marc¨¬a''s tummy.

    They reached a small yard between the main building and the dorm for the worker''s collective. A covered walkway extended twenty-five yards between the two. Pic-nic tables lined up on both sides.

    Este-Oeste stopped at the doorsteps. A devilish smirk invaded her face. Tas¨¬a could tell her frizzy haired friend was about to get her revenge.

    "It''s funny, Tas¨¬a. You rarely mention either girlfriends, or boyfriends in your life. What team do you play on?"

    Tas¨¬a felt caught in the open. She never talked about her problems with intimacy.

    "The Incubus is kind of hot," she answered.

    "True. Truly true. But that definitely does not answer my question."

    "If I''m exclusively attracted to hermaphrodites it does."

    If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    Este-Oeste laughed. "Now, you are really evading my question, Tas¨¬a. I don''t care if you are into girls."

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes narrowed as she shook her head. Marc¨¬a shrugged, defensively before she continued.

    "I just want to know what makes Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris happy."

    "I spent my youth in a convent."

    "You ran like a wild child for several years on the loose around Esconda Vida; crazy were your opportunities for hook-ups in that scene. Are you telling me you never did?"

    Este-Oeste wasn''t going to drop it. Tas¨¬a gave her a wane smile.

    "I had two infatuations in those, shall we say, ''formative'' years," she said. "One was love that if tragedy had not intervened would have lead to marriage, the other was nothing more than hero worship for a peer and rival."

    Her fingers displayed two.

    She thought of Cuervo and Green-Eyed Elise. Tas¨¬a continued.

    "One died on me. The other betrayed me."

    Este-Oeste knew both of those stories of death and betrayal in Tas¨¬a''s past. It satisfied her curiosity, and she nodded as if it was exactly what she suspected.

    As they walked past the officer''s station, Missi gave Este-Oeste a stare. The skinny girl nodded back in affirmation letting her know that the kitchen heist was a success.

    Missi would be expecting a meal out of the arrangement. She caught sight of Tas¨¬a following behind Este-Oeste in tow.

    "Hey, Tas¨¬a," she yelled. "What is going on over there in SIU?"

    As the duty officer, she was restricted from leaving the dorm. Her access to campus-wide information was also limited during sectional lockdowns.

    "A doctor tried to kill herself."

    Missi checked her watch.

    "Well, I''ll be damned. Right on time."

    Tas¨¬a could not tell whether or not she was joking.

    She helped Este-Oeste out of her clothes. They reeked of the kitchen.

    Along with her bags of cheese and blocks of butter, other food items were stashed in bread bags along Este-Oeste''s thighs and stomach.

    She wore steel-toed work boots two sizes too large so to sneak items in through the excess in space.

    With the bags of food removed Tas¨¬a looked Este-Oeste up and down. Thin as a rail with hips an anaconda would envy.

    Este-Oeste laughed, "I told you, you can''t have any of this."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and pointed at the food collected together on the bed.

    "All the good bits are now over there."

    Marc¨¬a guffawed with a loud snort. She had all the features to be quite attractive with a little effort. Even still, Este-Oeste was going back to a polyamorous relationship of two men who worshipped at her feet.

    "I''m going to go ahead and take a shower," Este-Oeste announced. "Except for a little mildew you don''t really smell that bad, Tas¨¬a."

    "What are you saying?"

    "Let me spritz you. I need you here to melt the butter and get the meal started. You can shower later."

    Este-Oeste reached down in her locker and took out a bottle of a rosewater and vanilla-bean based disinfectant. It was diluted with mineral water. She sprayed across Tas¨¬a''s chest.

    "Reach up," she commanded before spritzing Tas¨¬a''s underarm pits.

    When she returned the bottle to her locker, she dug deeper into it. Este-Oeste produced a round burner plate she had bought from a shop welder, and a ceramic bowl she made for herself in the art shop.

    As she plugged in the burner she turned to Tas¨¬a, and asked her, "watch the butter for me and I will return to make us a nice meal."

    Later that evening, Tas¨¬a and Este-Oeste played a deck-building game.

    Tas¨¬a had tucked her fanny pack close to Este-Oeste''s locker.

    "I was wondering if you could hold on to a few things for me," she asked.

    "Don''t be coy. Show me what you have there."

    She brought out the mask, choker and matching hairpins.

    "There was a lash that went with this set but, sadly, I could not fit it in my fanny pack."

    "I would have never guessed something oh, so fashionable could be found anywhere on this compound. Where did you get those?"

    Tas¨¬a slunk her head down and whispered.

    "If I told you, I would have to eliminate everyone here but you."

    "So, you are not going to tell me? Okay . . ."

    She tried to avoid lying outright. But now she had to make up a story.

    "Found them hidden in the drawer of a doctor''s office, over there."

    Este-Oeste started to look at the set as if the items were radioactive.

    "Relax, Marc¨¬a."

    Este-Oeste played with her cards, nervously. Tas¨¬a could not help but catch a glimpse of what Marc¨¬a planned to play. It was her nature to notice every advantage.

    "When that comes up missing, they are going to shake down the entire dorm to find it. What were you thinking, mi chica?"

    "It''s cool. I assure you, the doctor, she is not going to miss them any time soon."

    Este-Oeste paused for a moment, but then she grinned wicked.

    "No, you didn''t! You raided the office of the doctor that tried to kill herself? That is cold, Tas¨¬a. So, so cold, but I like it!"

    Satisfied with herself, Tas¨¬a dug into her pack further.

    "Doctor Tickle-Fanny won''t be needing any of those items anytime soon. She won''t be needing this, either. I found a gift for your going away party. But, we''ve had a festive time of it so far. So this night qualifies."

    She handed over eight rolled up Ben Franklins. One hundred dollar bills, USD. The second most widely used currency in the Quadra.

    "I don''t know what to say," Este-Oeste said, exasperated. "It. It is . . . Just so, such a thoughtful gift."

    "It only comes in one color, sadly. Green. It doesn''t match your brown eyes."

    "Still, it is like you reached deep into my soul and knew exactly what to get me. I love it."

    "I''m glad you like it."

    Este-Oeste stood up and leaned on the card table. She gazed at Tas¨¬a with a grin.

    "What are you up to, Marc¨¬a?"

    "Put the game aside a second. I have just got to see you in that get-up."

    "Fine."

    Este-Oeste had her sit still as she brushed Tas¨¬a''s hair out. She set her hair up with pins. She made Tas¨¬a lift her chin up as she put the choker in place.

    She placed the mask on last.

    Este-Oeste came around in front of Tas¨¬a to assess her.

    "Damn!"

    "What?"

    "Tas¨¬a, you look like an entirely different person," Este-Oeste said as she grabbed her mirror and held it up. "An entirely different persona."

    Tas¨¬a was startled. There was something darkly self-confident and cruelly intelligent in the visage of the person that stared back.

    "What do you call this other person, Tas¨¬a?"

    Tas¨¬a''s smile seemed elegantly set. She was really getting into this.

    "Demona."

 1.25 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a drifted easily into sleep a few hours later. She floated in pleasant dreams for what seemed like days. The swaying patterns in a swirl of mesmerizing colors cast upon her eyelids and not inside her mind.

    It occurred to her to wonder, even in her dream state, what did that mean?

    She opened her eyes slowly.

    The Incubus stood over her. It did not speak. No other time had the creature merely stood still without attempting to seduce her.

    She closed her eyes to dream again.

    She felt the air fanned gently across her face.

    Somewhere in time during her luxurious slumber she asked.

    "Do you ever sing? Sing lullabies?"

    The Incubus did not respond. Yet, its lips turned from an ample feminine fullness to a thin but strident masculinity.

    No movement in the change of shape occurred between the contrasting forms as if the shift in appearance affected the accuracy of her memory instead of the perception of movement upon her eyes.

    She wished to sleep but curiosity bent her mind toward thought.

    "Why are you here, angel presiding?

    "It would serve you well to never think of me as an angel."

    Tas¨¬a smiled to this remonstration.

    "Au contraire. I know what beastly things angels can be."

    It paused for a moment. The Incubus''s wings changed course in their flutter.

    "Indeed."

    "So," Tas¨¬a began to tease, "you are not going to try to kiss me this time?"

    "We both know how that would end," it said.

    "I ask again, why are you here?"

    The colors of its wings sharpened in intensity before it spoke.

    "Do you wish to save your kind?"

    Tas¨¬a giggled. What an absurd dream she was having. In moments like this she could dream lucidly.

    Her exhausted state made her playful as well. Tas¨¬a imagined vertical silver bars forming a cage around the Incubus.

    It furrowed its brows in puzzlement at the sight of them.

    "My little friend, do you wish harm upon me?"

    "No," she answered.

    She turned the silver bars into violin bearing cherubs. As they floated around the Incubus, they played sweet melodies and accompaniment.

    "Your behavior is strange," it noted.

    "You have come to me this evening to ask me an absurd question. Do I wish to save my kind? I want to know, Incubus, how are you feeling?"

    "Damaged. To be perfectly honest with you."

    Tas¨¬a lay there, wondering. Was this merely a new tactic to lull her into allowing the spores to manifest? She doubted it. For tactical diversions, they brought out the Black-Eyed Ones.

    "I''m not typically the altruistic sort, but what you are telling me, I need to hear or I will not get a minute more of restful sleep."

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    "This creature that you call the Infernal Madr¨¦ -"

    "She is one of your own, correct?"

    "No. She invades us. She is what you might call a virus. In the sense of what you would call -"

    "A computer virus?"

    "Yes. Precisely."

    "Interesting as this is, you should be invading Paz''s dreams, instead of mine."

    "Only you can get to where the Infernal Madr¨¦ holds court."

    "And you say if I do this thing that you are asking of me, I will be saving my species?"

    "From annihilation, yes."

    Tas¨¬a smiled as she rumpled her fingers through a cherub''s blond locks.

    "I must admit, for a dream manifestation, this is pretty badass compared to the standard fair that makes me shit myself the moment you kiss me, or caress me down -."

    It frowned.

    "Your humor often leaves me perplexed, Ms. del Alma-Gris. Unfortunately, this is all too real, for both our kind."

    "According to our scientists, you are the projection of an elaborate artificial system. A cluster of functions in a neural network. You are an idea, not real in the sense of having willful being. So, what does it matter to you?"

    The Incubus shook its head.

    "The difference in an idea and a being is merely a shift in frequency. The degree to which I am willful depends on the density of spore manifestation. In the highest mass accumulation, I am as wanting as you."

    Tas¨¬a made the sheets of her cot turn pink in shade, the LED corridor lighting turned a romantic red-tinted glow.

    "I would be lying, Incubus, if I denied those sweet nothings you just spoke did not have a certain effect on me."

    It chuckled as its head turned away from her.

    "I can see you cannot be convinced this is anything more than dream, as such is the state of your exhaustion. Sleep well then Ms. del Alma-Gris. We will speak again, soon."

    "Incubus?"

    "Yes?"

    "How can her ambition be any worse than your own?"

    Its hair shifted from long, elegant strands to a bold, patriarchal tumble.

    "My Love, you know so little. We were made to cull your species in order to improve it. She wishes to annihilate your species in order to replace it."

    With those words it disappeared, and, in spite of its well-wishes, she was left to wonder sleeplessly on matters so frightful as to be beyond her mortal fret.

    Tas¨¬a felt as if she had just drifted off to sleep when someone squeezed her toe, awakening her. She opened her eyes with a groan.

    It was the morning duty officer, CO Merino Luz.

    "Who were you expecting, del Alma-Gris? Your own personal concierge?"

    He threw her a handsome smile. She rose up from her cot, and slipped on her socks and shoes.

    "Nothing personal, Luz, but I have been expecting you."

    Luz shrugged his big shoulders to let her know that he was not offended.

    "Go get a cup of coffee. I won''t take long."

    She glanced up at him as she tied her hair back in a ponytail. He was as calm as always. His nickname was The Cyborg for he abided by the regulations to a T.

    In her present predicament, Tas¨¬a thought that was a good thing. The lieutenant knew better than to ask Luz to plant anything on her while he conducted his shakedown; he would have had no qualms about reporting his superior officer.

    Incorruptible. A few inmates Tas¨¬a knew offered to exchange sex for favors. He reported them no matter how fetching their profiles.

    Tas¨¬a glanced into Kae-Kae''s cell as she walked by. An unsettling ten thousand mile stare beset the woman''s face.

    Tas¨¬a had seen a similar stare on many inmates before who had given up hope, but this one was different.

    This stare was akin to that of someone surveying the field of battle in a last stand.

    With her curiosity riled, Tas¨¬a stopped and she leaned into the cell.

    "Kae-Kae, how are you doing, mi hermana?"

    Castro shook her head. The locks of her hair were listless. She was a woman in her late thirties. She usually kept up her appearances even here in prison. Though she was thick in her hips and her haunches, but small in her breasts, Castro''s figure was still an attractive one.

    Tas¨¬a put a hand on the woman''s shoulder. She felt no remorse in executing her vendetta, but she also felt it necessary to seem sympathetic so as to stay above suspicion.

    "Come on with me, Kae-Kae. I''ll make a cup of coffee for you."

    Castro''s pupils sharpened their focus. Her eyes darted from the wall she had been staring at and then back to Tas¨¬a. An animal cunning exhibited through and through.

    Yet, a tear ran down Castro''s cheek.

    "I am so sorry, Tas¨¬a. You are the sweetest person I know. I should have not done it. They offered me -"

    Tas¨¬a put a hand to her own lips, the other hand waved in front of Castro''s face, urging her to stop speaking.

    Tas¨¬a realized the woman must have seen Luz walking down the corridor and she knew what was about to go down. That it tugged at the woman''s conscience surprised her.

    Tas¨¬a pointed to the PA speaker on the ceiling nearby them.

    She forced her voice to sound pleasant as she spoke.

    "Kae-Kae, come with me. I''ll make you a cup of coffee, then we''ll get some air and walk the track."

 1.26 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a watched Castro sit at the break-room table, stirring her coffee with a little wooden stick. Kae-Kae''s lower lip drooped down in a glum demeanor.

    CO Merino Luz popped his head in through the break room entrance.

    "Everything up to code, Ms. Del Alma-Gris. You should teach a class in the Education Department on proper locker maintenance. It would do your fellow inmates a lot of good."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head, appreciatively.

    "I''ll give that some consideration."

    He smacked his hands together as if to conclude the conversation.

    "Nice chat. I''ve got to go call it into the lieutenant."

    She turned to Castro.

    "Come on, it''s pretty out there today. Let''s get some sunshine."

    The Sun was lit brightly above, radiating nearly uncomfortable heat in the mid-morning. It was mid-season when the days were still hot, but the crisp night air chilled the bone.

    Her skin tingled as Tas¨¬a felt a little nauseous. Three days after treatment, little of its effect had flushed out of her system, as of yet.

    She glanced towards the radio tower and toward the three PA speakers that stood on poles around the yard complex.

    A guard''s truck rolled along the road just beyond the double fences. There was a small parking lot on a hill above the yard where the guards routinely parked as they watched the inmates.

    In the early months of Tas¨¬a''s captivity, she walked the track one fine, humid eve. As she approached the curve of the track just below the lot, a sudden cascading sound from a nest of cicadas alarmed her.

    She looked around to find the source of the odd squall. Inside a truck, up on the hill, she could see through the tinted glass windshield a guard slumped unconscious.

    His head rested limply against his shoulder which slumped against the door that he leaned upon. A thin grooved rod poked out the door window; its antennae end pointed towards a grove of trees behind the truck where it picked up the sound of insects and amplified their noise into alien-sounding feedback.

    She reported the incident to no one. Tas¨¬a filed it away in her head as potentially useful data.

    Mere minutes after her walk, a lockdown of the unit was called in. It only lasted a few hours.

    The next morning, Tas¨¬a overheard COs talking of a guard who had suffered a diabetic coma being pulled out of a truck and carried away in an ambulance.

    Why the constant surveillance of prisoners, Tas¨¬a mused. When inmates thought no one was listening-in to their conversations, they tended to speak uninhibitedly on their activities.

    Every slip-up on their part went into a database that formed a broader picture of the underground economy in the Greater Quadra.

    The tower could not be observed from the yard. Tas¨¬a now recognized it as the missing piece of the puzzle that riled her curiosity since her incarceration began. Its original purpose must have been intelligence-gathering on inmate activity.

    General Kutuzov''s presence and the dilapidated condition of the tower''s underground infrastructure told Tas¨¬a that its original purpose had been subverted.

    The guards gathered intelligence, listening in and recording conversations, still. Who did all of that information go to now? Who filtered it, processed it, and made use of it?

    Castro coughed as she walked beside Tas¨¬a. It spun her mind back to the here and now.

    Tas¨¬a decided it was too late for caution. There were several means that the powers-that-be could intercept their conversation, but what did it matter now?

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    If everything went according to plan, she would be outside the barbed wire prison fences in nine hours.

    "Kae-Kae, you have barely touched your coffee," Tas¨¬a admonished.

    "I have to tell you something."

    Tas¨¬a glanced around. It was Saturday. Even this early, approximately 9:30 a.m., the yard was crowded.

    "I thought so."

    "It no longer matters if they overhear us, Tas¨¬a. I have to get this off my chest."

    Coffee spilled on Castro''s fingers as she quivered. Her lips tensed in spasm. For several seconds, she did not speak, but walked with a graceless squish onward.

    Tas¨¬a decided Castro would need more prompting.

    "Is this about something I found in my locker?"

    Castro''s eyes raised up to the sky. She nodded her head in a quick set of jerks.

    Tas¨¬a continued.

    "I got back to my cell after talking to Missi, Thursday. I heard something in my locker crash and drop. Do you know what I found?"

    "Yes."

    "Why did you put it there?"

    Castro walked beside her with a listless stroll. She sipped her coffee before answering.

    "They offered me something I could not refuse. A way out of here."

    "The lieutenant?" Tas¨¬a asked, skeptically.

    She was in the lieutenant''s sights, but that kind of offer was beyond the credible reach of his station in life.

    "I didn''t speak to him. Not directly. But Ria is his mouthpiece. She speaks for him. I''m so sorry, Tas¨¬a."

    Tas¨¬a could not help but to glare as she watched Castro. She wanted to force the woman to look her in the eyes. To make her feel uncomfortable.

    "This is not the first time you have served in this capacity. Is it, Kae-Kae? Since I have been here, six short months, there have been two other girls caught with weapons in their lockers. There was also a third girl whom they found a stash of pills that I''ve always doubted belonged to her."

    "You are right. I have done many, so very many bad things. Here, and throughout my life."

    "Right. And in all of those incidences, you were paid, right?"

    Castro wrung her hands as her eyes began to glisten wetly.

    "That''s right. That is right. I am a horrible excuse for a human being."

    As Tas¨¬a watched the emotional display, she could only feel a coldness inside of her.

    "Kae-Kae, don''t drift. Let''s stick to the point I''m trying to convey to you."

    "Okay," she answered weakly.

    "In all of these incidences where you were paid, did they ever offer you anything remotely as valuable as your freedom?"

    "Of course not."

    "Did you stop to wonder why going up against me was considered so much more valuable than anything else you have done for them?"

    Castro''s eyes squinted, and she turned up her nose. Her brows furrowed in calculation. Castro kept her mouth firmly shut.

    Tas¨¬a continued.

    "Did the offer not sound too good to be true, no?"

    Castro''s head quivered as she shook it. An odd, tight smile creased her face. Tas¨¬a wanted to punch her.

    Tas¨¬a pressed on, "so you do know why I''m such a hot target. If you''re truly sorry for what you did, Kae-Kae, you will tell me what you know."

    "I can''t, Tas¨¬a. I''m sorry. Ria told me what it was really about. That was after I told her the offer was bullshit."

    "And what she told you convinced you that it was not bullshit?"

    "Right. I needed proof, I got proof. I can''t tell you. If it ever got back to Ria, she would make my people on the outside pay. You know who her husband is."

    Tas¨¬a stopped walking, and she glared back once more.

    "If you can''t tell me, then we have nothing further to discuss."

    Tas¨¬a left Castro standing on the track, alone. She walked back toward the dorm.

    At the picnic tables, she passed by a gathering of inmates playing a tabletop game consisting of demonic creatures and Gothic architecture, laminated cards and polyhedral dice.

    They spoke excitedly.

    "The goon squad just went by. Someone is getting picked up."

    Tas¨¬a had a feeling she knew who.

    She threw the double doors of the worker''s collective dorm open. Her stomach felt light but knotted. She breathed, uneasily.

    Her plans felt as if they were all about to come to naught; she knew what was going to happen next.

    As she approached the officer''s station, two guards, tall and menacing, turned their heads toward her.

    Luz approached.

    "I reported into the lieutenant. Sorry, del Alma-Gris, he has got it in for you, hard. He still wants to dump you into the Cistern, and have a talk with you.

    "Probably just to scare you. However, I''m writing him up, regardless. Insufficient evidence is insufficient evidence even if he is justified in giving your actions more thorough scrutiny."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head.

    "Don''t kick yourself, Luz. You''re only doing your job."

    One of the guards asked her to turn around and to put her hands behind her back. She then heard the expert flick of handcuffs swishing metal against metal from out of his pocket as she complied.

 1.27 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a cursed her own ineptitude. She leaned against the wall of a holding cell they called the Cistern. A toilet, a faucet and washbasin, and a long metal bench that doubled as a cot, were her only company.

    The bench proved to be chilly when pressed against her naked fanny. So, she preferred standing.

    Tas¨¬a sighed as she reflected on her predicament.

    After she, accompanied by the two large-set guards that comprised the affectionately monikered Goon Squad, crossed through the secure doors of an office complex, she was handed over to a pair of female guards. They stripped her down and checked her every orifice thoroughly.

    One of the women opened a hatch while the other guard directed Tas¨¬a to climb down a ladder into the cell below.

    When she made it to the bottom, fifteen feet down, one guard yelled, "make yourself comfortable. The Lieutenant won''t be back until Monday morning to see you."

    Tas¨¬a looked back into the woman''s smiling face with her teeth clenched and bared; she raised her arm in a fist and smacked the inside of her elbow with her other hand.

    The guard chuckled at the obscene gesture.

    "So rude of you, little one. To think, all of the duty officers back at the dorm call you Sweet Tas¨¬a," she answered back as she cranked the ladder up into the ceiling.

    Now, Tas¨¬a stood naked and cold while regretting every move she had played out so far. Her actions only accomplished getting her in here and in a more vulnerable position than she had been before.

    Should have never come back here. I had hours I could have used to explore alternative routes down in the aqueduct support tunnels before they ever trained their sights to search down there.

    She let her sense of prudence get the best of her. Her father instilled in her a core set of survival precepts. One was to be wary of comfort zones, and the false sense of security they provided.

    Her caution was her comfort zone. It made her question her own finely tuned intuitions.

    Now she was stuck here until Monday.

    General Kutuzov would have to leave without her.

    Stupid, mousy little me.

    It then occurred to her - this was exactly how they wanted her to feel.

    Every factor in her current environment served that purpose: the oubliette design of the dirty little holding cell made one feel caged like an animal, along with the coldness, the dampness, the foul mildew and urine smell, and the forced nudity.

    It was all designed to make a prisoner feel vulnerable and pitiful before they were interrogated.

    Even here in this cell of utter futility, her father''s words made the most perfect sense.

    Always find the most optimum means. Disregard how anyone else defines it.

    What did she have in her own advantage?

    First, they would leave her alone for nearly twenty-one hours. Only breakfast was served in the Cistern.

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    Isolation, hunger, coldness, dampness, ungodly smells. It was designed to break you.

    The treatment was excused as policy because no one could be subjected to the conditions of the interrogation cells for more than forty-eight hours without regulatory oversight kicking in.

    For the typical pride and ego driven inmate who found herself in these circumstances that was more than enough time to break her.

    A quick glance told her two other things worked in her favor. The cement blocks were even more porous than those of the gym walls she had climbed previously.

    Her other advantage, the clay, used for the bricks in the floor dividers, was soft and malleable enough for her to reshape.

    Tas¨¬a squatted down to study the brick more carefully. Several pieces had been chipped off already. She deemed they were not too soft for her purpose.

    She grew excited as she rubbed her thumb along the grain.

    Tas¨¬a looked up at the trapdoor. The lock mechanism appeared to be a simple one. It all depended on the density of the tumbler rollers whether her plan would work or not.

    The ladder folded up along the ceiling between a set of rails built into it that faced the East wall. After she climbed up the ruddy wall with no trouble, her back faced the ladder.

    Tas¨¬a limbered her muscles by pushing her body up against the wall and stretching her back outwardly until her butt cheeks smacked against the ceiling. She repeated the motion a dozen times before she felt her body was up for the next task.

    Once she was ready Tas¨¬a gripped the wall with her fingers, pulled her legs tightly bent in against her chest. She snap-thrust her arms with all of her strength to become airborne. Tas¨¬a twisted around in mid-air just before she grabbed the ladder''s support rails.

    Her maneuver successfully pushed the ladder out of the rail holds. She gripped the ladder tight as she rode it down.

    Now that the ladder was in place, Tas¨¬a jumped off. She bent back down and she sorted through the brick fragments. She picked out the four most even and flat ones.

    With them in hand, Tas¨¬a climbed back up the ladder.

    She tried one fragment, as thin as a toothpick, and she poked at the tumblers.

    She counted seven of them in a space of two and a quarter inches. It would be a tight fit to carve the grooves correctly given the material she was using. Fortunately, the shape of the tumblers was uniform which made her calculation of groove spacing easy to manage once she sorted the angles for the seven tumbler spokes.

    At the top of the ladder, Tas¨¬a slid her fingers along the inside of the rail niche.

    Inside, the metal was rough and unvarnished. It would do well enough for a surface to whittle and polish the clay-work key, but no light could get inside the niche.

    She would have to make the key as slowly as her patience would allow.

    As she worked at the key, she noticed the trapdoor vibrated, subtly. Tas¨¬a placed her fingers along the surface of the door.

    Someone was walking in the suite of rooms and corridors above her.

    There were only the two female guards as far as she was aware in the hold complex.

    A corridor led to a second set of offices, but she caught no indication of activity when she passed by them earlier.

    It was a Saturday, with the typical light staffing of a weekend; it was likely no one else was back there.

    The vibrations gave her a surprising amount of intuited information. She could surmise the path, direction, velocity, as well as the distance of the person in motion accurately enough to make use of the data provided.

    Of the two guards, it was the heavyset lady who did not bother to speak to Tas¨¬a that walked around above. She stomped in the uneven pattern of one who had nerve damage in her foot.

    She was also going to the bathroom to pee.

    Tas¨¬a suspected the guard would follow a regular schedule in her habits.

    Tas¨¬a made a note to keep a tab of their movement to figure out the pattern of their routines to exploit later.

    She got back to filing a key.

    The first two attempts failed, but she learned from her mistakes. Tas¨¬a found the straight layered grain fragments did not hold up well enough, structurally.

    She climbed back down the steps. Tas¨¬a knew where she needed to look. Using her naked heel with several carefully placed kicks, Tas¨¬a broke off a corner piece.

    She picked up three fragments to examine by rubbing her thumb along their lengths. The grain skewed in evenly crossed lines. At the elongated ends were long beveled cross-hatch grain¨¦d insets.

    Perfect.

    Just over two hours of being locked up in the Cistern, Tas¨¬a had her key.

 1.28 Book One: The Gray Soul

    With her fingers spread out along the surface of the trap door, Tas¨¬a stayed perfectly still for nearly an hour. The activity above her was clearly mapped out in her head.

    She knew the two guards disliked one another. Typically, the tall, thin one stayed busy at a desk in the same room as the trapdoor into the Cistern. Approximately one minute before the heavyset guard regularly walked through from the back rooms to take her piss break, the tall guard would make herself scarce.

    There was a break room centered off the corridor between the office suites. Likely the tall guard would go to refill her coffee.

    She would not return until after her workplace nemesis finished her own routine.

    Tas¨¬a had a simple plan, it would take less than a minute to execute. Forty-five seconds perhaps, if she pocketed her underwear instead of putting the bloomers on.

    There was an exit to the main corridor in the next hall over. A second exit was down in the second set of suites. She would have to pass the break room to get to that one.

    She felt through her fingers the now-familiar rapid scamper of the guard leaving.

    A minute later, the trod of the heavy set guard pulsed through into her fingertips. When the motion stopped, it was time.

    Tas¨¬a turned the key. It slid the locks out, beautifully.

    She opened the trapdoor, only to be greeted by the soft singing of a pretty voice behind her. The song she recognized, Obrerito, an old Paraguayan tune of rebellious fervor.

    Tas¨¬a had miscalculated. The tall guard had not retreated down the hall, but instead, she was in an open area annex adjacent to the main hall.

    Tas¨¬a had planned to leave through the nearby exit into the corridor leading back to the IMCQ medical center, the main building. From there she would have to talk her way past the guards.

    Before she could do any of that, she would have to cross through the annex where she would most definitely be spotted. Unless she slipped into the corridor, passed the break room, and made off into the office suites as her other option.

    Tas¨¬a found the bin where they dumped her clothes. Thankfully, it was on a top shelf where no one could merely eyeball it and see her clothes were missing.

    The singing guard drew closer. Tas¨¬a glanced toward the annex. She could see the shadow of the guard as she moved, and hear her rifling through a file cabinet as she sang.

    Tas¨¬a had to climb up the bracket platform to retrieve her clothes.

    She didn''t bother to put them on, but she grabbed them in hand, jumped down beside the guard''s desk. There was a cup full of pens and a tray full of paperclips.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed two of the former and several of the latter before she made her retreat deeper into the office complex.

    Tas¨¬a reached an atrium. Above was a much smaller version of the same glass onion dome used so prominently above the Spore Isolation Unit.

    She noticed it was no longer sunny weather out. In the time she had been in the holding cell, the sky had turned gray. Sprinkling drops of rain dripped down the dome.

    Tas¨¬a slipped her clothes on.

    Highly unattractive bloomers, gray sweatpants, t-shirt, socks, and sneakers.

    There was an open office layout of cubicles past the atrium. Tas¨¬a peeked into the hive of workstation clusters to see if anyone was working overtime hidden from her sight amongst the cubicle dividers.

    She did hear the thud and click of a heavy-duty virtual controller coming from a workstation out of her view.

    Tas¨¬a worked her way in the opposite direction from the lone worker, but then she heard something that gave her chills.

    A pneumatic whisper, like the low wail of a pissed-off cat, but greatly dampened down.

    She had heard that sound before in the Spore Isolation Unit.

    It can''t be. Here, while using office equipment?

    Tas¨¬a crouched down and she started crawling her way towards a second atrium that served as the office suite entrance.

    She had to be patient in her egress, and not let herself surrender to flight or fight instincts.

    Of course with Tas¨¬a it was never fight in the instinctual sense. Deliberative knowledge gathering and acting upon that skill had always been her means of fight, she so prided herself.

    The sounds on the other side rumbled disjointed as if the Manifested One was frustrated with something; something cosmic in its significance she gathered from the fret of it.

    Tas¨¬a rolled under a desk. She needed to pause. As usual, she understood nothing of their mentality.

    Yet, as she listened to the sounds of the Manifested, she found herself empathizing with the intent of the creature in its emotional capacity.

    Frustration, anger, internal struggle, fear, and a profound sadness were all expressed in the pneumatic whisper as she listened.

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    If she crawled the long way around she would be able to observe him from behind, assuming he was facing his desk.

    As she crawled, she glanced back down the corridor from wince she came. The break room was just past her viewpoint.

    A question then puzzled Tas¨¬a.

    If the Manifested worker had been there all morning how could the tall guard possibly not hear him when she went to refill her coffee? Could it alter its physical appearance?

    Tas¨¬a made it to the position she had in mind as being the most advantageous. Before she peeked around the divider she did determine by the noise the Manifested made that he faced towards his desk.

    She leaned over. Surprisingly mundane in appearance, he was dressed like an office worker. His body also went through the mannerisms of an office worker - an Oxford Red Wing donned foot shook as a bent knee rocked back and forth, covered in black slacks.

    The Manifested One hunched over his desk with a controller in one hand and a rounded mouse-disk hovering over his tabletop clinched in the other one.

    Only his head and face bore the chaotic insanity of spore manifestation. The skin of his bald head shivered with the movement of snake like projections crawling beneath.

    Bright coral patterns glided along subdermal. They were commonly called the serpent guides. Thought to be unique of those touched by the Wise One.

    No one knew for certain.

    His lips possessed the same impossible geometry of so many of them.

    Tas¨¬a could not see his eyes, but something ocherous green and plant-like poked through both of them. The ugly little things squirmed as if without purpose.

    She thought of the words the Incubus told her just hours before in her sleep. In her head now she responded.

    If this is your idea of improving my species, I don''t want any part of it.

    The Manifested One got up from his chair, and he started to put a jacket on. Tas¨¬a rolled under the desk beside her, slipping behind its chair for cover.

    He passed by her. As he did so, the morphology of his face changed as well. No phantoms crawled beneath his skin; his eyes appeared normal and undamaged. His lips seemed entirely human in appearance.

    He walked past the open office, and he then sprinted out into the entranceway atrium. A badge shook nervously in his hand.

    Tas¨¬a stayed still for a good, solid minute. As tempted to see what he had been working on, she did not want to touch anything it may had contacted either.

    What the hell did this all mean?

    When she was young there were signs on billboards announcing, ''They Are Amongst Us'' with a list of warning signs, and a number to report anyone behaving suspiciously.

    It was the cause of much social disorder. Violent riots, lynchings, internment camps, and a thoroughly paralyzed civil society resulted.

    That is, until the Salvage stepped in. They denounced what they called mass delusion and conspiracy theory paranoia. The newly formed governing body engaged in an educational campaign to end the unrest.

    Now, it was universally accepted that the Manifested were not shape-shifters who could hide amongst us.

    Now, the old ways were considered the pre-enlightened bad old days before the Salvage was formed and brought with them hope for a better life for all throughout the Quadra.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head at the fairytale narrative they enforced.

    What the hell did anyone really know about the Manifested and their transformative capabilities?

    Tas¨¬a turned to the atrium entranceway. Before she exited, she noticed a name on one of the several office doors she passed by.

    Lieutenant Hugo Brassi.

    Tas¨¬a smiled. She thought the paperclips might prove useful when she saw them.

    Inside his office were many accoutrements indicative of status.

    Tas¨¬a''s fingertips clicked together rapaciously. What to steal? What to steal?

    A pen on a plaque under glass caught her attention. It appeared platinum and diamond dusted. She read the writing captioned beneath it.

    It was the legend of a fraternal organization.

    In Latin, it read:

    Ordinis Sancti Romani de Novissimis Diebus

    Tas¨¬a thought back to her days at the seminary. Her Latin was a little rusty, as best as she could translate, it meant:

    The Holy Roman Order of the Last Days.

    At the college, many fraternal and sororal orders vied for dominance. For whomever the motto belonged, Tas¨¬a did not recognize it as any she had encountered before.

    The lock was once more easily bypassed. She grabbed the pen and looked for anything else she could sneak out.

    A decorative plated gold bar caught her eye. It bore an etching of two wolves ripping into the sides of Christ on the Cross.

    Quite subversive. She thought, for a fraternity she assumed was designed to advance the social status of its members.

    Tas¨¬a stashed it, pressed in her sock at the ankle.

    As for everything else noteworthy - Tas¨¬a''s puss protruded a frown. A lot of nice things, but unfortunately her bloomers were loosely fitting, and the pockets of her sweats were ripped.

    Nothing else would be safe for transport.

    She looked around for anything of informational value. The desk did not even have a networked terminal, nor even an old fashioned individual computer as many executives still preferred.

    She riffled through his desk. He didn''t keep notes or files. She should have figured as much.

    Lieutenant Hugo Brassi was about his personal status only.

    Operational nitty-gritty was beneath his personal assessment of his station in life.

    Tas¨¬a did find a notepad. Several pages had been torn out, but otherwise, it was unused.

    She took out the bejeweled pen. She decided to leave him a note.

    Lieutenant Hugo Brassi,

    You are one stupid motherfucker. I hope you are not overly attached to the material wealth in your life because you are soon to lose it all.

    Signed,

    Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris,

    The Angel of Theft.

    She placed it in the top drawer of his desk so he could not miss it. As an added touch, she left the clay-work key on top.

    Tas¨¬a left the office suite through the entrance door. She strolled down the hallway as if she belonged there.

    With prison staff, it was like a hundred separate fiefdoms where no one thought it necessary to keep the others updated on their activities.

    Tas¨¬a hit the buzzer at the secured door leading into the IMCQ buildings center court.

    She waved at the camera above and gave her best squinchy-faced toothy smile.

    Este-Oeste called it her goblin-face, she said it contoured unnaturally wide on Tas¨¬a''s long visage, but Tas¨¬a didn''t care. It always got her what she wanted.

    "Hey, Alma-Gris," came a friendly voice over the intercom. Rubin, the center court officer with whom she always flirted.

    He continued.

    "I don''t have you down for a pee test, today."

    "Not today. The Goon Squad came and grabbed me. Brassi wanted to have a little chat."

    "How did that go?"

    "Could have been worse."

    "I suppose so," he said as he unlocked the door and buzzed her through.

 1.29 Book One: The Gray Soul

    The guard station from whence she was buzzed in lay in the center of a rotunda. Tas¨¬a circled around to the jobs board. Several people passed by, including two diminutive nurses pushing an unweldy cart, but to her relief no eyes followed Tas¨¬a.

    It was near one-thirty, and she needed to get over to the SIU but only after she retrieved her fanny-pack back from the dorm.

    She also needed to talk to Felicit¨¦.

    So much to do, yet, she could not assume the guards back at detention would not check on her. It was policy to isolate the inmates from human contact, alienation conditioning, interrogators called it.

    However, the tall guard likely had a weakness for underdog rebels like Tas¨¬a given her smarmy deflection in their brief interaction. The song she chose to sing was likely prompted by an unsettled conscience, as well.

    The tall guard would check up on Tas¨¬a by the end of the afternoon. Tas¨¬a would bet on it.

    If she left by three pm, she would have time to do reconnaissance in the aqueduct maintenance corridors before meeting with Kutuzova.

    Tas¨¬a wrote herself in for three o''clock volunteer work. Then penciled in for the overlapping early evening shift. She noticed Felicit¨¦ wasn''t on the list.

    Well, shit.

    Tas¨¬a walked back to the worker''s collective dorm. Luz was at his station, but he was too busy talking to someone to take notice of her.

    She passed by Kae-Kae''s cell.

    Castro still sat upright on her cot with the same far-away but feral gaze on her face. The woman looked absolutely pitiful in Tas¨¬a''s estimation.

    Tas¨¬a changed out of her sweats and into her work clothes.

    She looked around; there was a lot of movement throughout the dorm. The women liked to cook, listen to music, dance, and drink hooch in lively festivity on the weekends.

    There was no time for caution now. Tas¨¬a quickly sprinted to the empty cell, and she punched in the locker combination.

    She never had to worry about the cell becoming occupied with new inmates. As in everything else, administrative policy was entirely predictable. There were two vacant cells on the same row above her stash cell that would be filled first.

    Tas¨¬a prepared her fanny pack with everything she thought she needed before she went to bed the previous night. She strapped the holster of the .32 on her calve.

    As she fastened the straps to secure the gun, Street Trash walked by.

    The tall scarlet haired woman''s eyes bulged out with pupils tight at the sight of the weapon. She dropped her coffee. The plastic container splattered and bounced.

    "Midget?"

    "The fuck you just call me?"

    "I mean, Tas¨¬a, baby. The fucks going on?"

    There were two towels on the bottom shelf of the locker left over from a previous occupant. She took them out, and threw them over Street Trash''s coffee spill.

    Tas¨¬a eyed the other woman. It was time for some streetwise prison diplomacy.

    "Nobody has ever accused you of being a snitch, right?"

    The redhead shook her head emphatically before she spoke.

    "I''ll fuck a snitch up for you if the opportunity ever presents itself."

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    She meant Ria. Everybody must have been talking.

    "I appreciate that. It won''t be necessary. I''ve got people on the outside that make her people lose sleep at night. The sad thing about it, she knows it and she still pulls the shit she pulls. Like she can''t help herself."

    The redhead grinned and she pointed a finger at Tas¨¬a.

    "Everybody says how sweet and gentle you are, but I knew you were twisted. Nobody runs in that Vida Esconda scene without being a major player. That''s why I always gave you grief, to see your badness for myself."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head with slow affectation.

    "Lose my cool in this chicken-shit outfit? Please."

    Tas¨¬a turned her head back at the locker. She tried to recall the redhead''s name.

    Yvonne, was it?

    "Look," Tas¨¬a continued. "You''ve got a pretty good idea what I''m up to. I busted out of the Cistern, now I''ve got to split.

    "If you can do me the favor of keeping mum, you are welcome to everything in there."

    The redhead peeked in the locker. Gazed back up at Tas¨¬a with a gaze that said - new found respect.

    "When Ria and Kae-Kae pulled their shit on me, I did what I do best on their lockers."

    Tas¨¬a said the words with a relaxed demeanor. Slumped against the wall with her arms folded.

    "Damn. Glad I never really got on your bad side. Not from a lack of trying though."

    "You are not a snitch so you really had nothing to worry about from me. I got to run now. Take care."

    Tas¨¬a hunted for Felicit¨¦. She wasn''t in her cell. She wasn''t in the media room.

    Tas¨¬a checked with Este-Oeste. Felicit¨¦ was in the library.

    Tas¨¬a was about to leave, but she needed to say goodbye to the girl who had become her closest friend in the IMCQ.

    Este-Oeste sat up on her cot with her book in her lap. A true-crime novel about the Wisconsin, USA serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

    She gave Tas¨¬a a cautious look that read - just what are you doing?

    Tas¨¬a must have had her big goblin grin accompanied by a weepy-eyed expression on her face. She closed in, put her arms around Este-Oeste''s shoulders, in a hug.

    "I don''t want to involve you in this mess of mine, Marc¨¬a. But I have to let you know how much I''m going to miss you."

    Este-Oeste wore a big grin as well on her face as she patted the back of Tas¨¬a''s head.

    "You are getting so sentimental in your old age, Tas¨¬a."

    "I''m only two years older than you."

    "Yeah, well, there is that. I need to return those items you left with me."

    "You can keep the sweeteners."

    "The other items, Demona, or have you forgotten?"

    Tas¨¬a released Este-Oeste so she could retrieve the dead lady spy''s bondage apperal.

    Soon after opening the fanny pack and seeing the lack of room inside it, Tas¨¬a howled in a low chuckle as she struggled to stuff the mask, choker and hairpins into it.

    My entire scheme derailed for my lack of spatial organization skills.

    After several dozen awkward seconds, she finally succeeded victoriously over the clutter in the bag with her nimble little palms hammering deftly at the hairpins until space was made and the clutter parted to her will.

    She turned back to her patiently waiting friend.

    "Hey, Marc¨¬a. After you get settled back in on the outside, do you think I could come and visit you?"

    Este-Oeste''s dominant eye looked into one of Tas¨¬a''s own with a gleam bearing mischief.

    "You know I am not leaving my two husbands for some wild  Vida Esconda adventure with you."

    "Yes, you will."

    "No, I won''t. Marc¨¬a is solid citizen Marc¨¬a from here on out," she said with her head aimed towards the speakers. With a whisper, she continued. "But, yes. Come see me, please come to see me, Tas¨¬a, when the dust settles."

    Este-Oeste returned the hug with one of her own. Her big frizzy mess of hair overwhelmed Tas¨¬a''s face.

    "I''m sorry your last few weeks here are going to be under lockdown," Tas¨¬a told her. An escape brought with it a mandatory month-long lockdown. Sometimes much longer.

    "Don''t worry about that. You have to do what you have to do to take care of yourself. I''ll be fine. You know what you are doing, my Tas¨¬a, I don''t doubt that, but promise me you won''t get caught."

    "I won''t. I won''t. I won''t."

    As Tas¨¬a passed the breakroom on her way out of the dorm, she heard a gasp from inside it followed by another cup of spilled coffee.

    Ria stared back at her.

    Tas¨¬a looked around. No one else was nearby.

    "I see I am the last person on the planet you expected to ever see again, Ria. I have to wonder why."

    Ria started to react. Tas¨¬a put a finger to her own lips, and raised her pants sleeve to show Ria the gun.

    "You keep your big mouth shut this time, bitch, or else it is going to get real ugly for you and the entire Javierra clan."

    Ria gasped again, grabbing at her heart. Tight lumps formed in her jowls and neck.

    The mafiosa donna nodded in capitulation.

 1.30 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a stepped out onto the walkway. At a picnic table, Kae-Kae sat with her back leaned up against the edge.

    She stared across the yard. Castro''s eyes were fixed upon a gateway corridor built into the double fences used by maintenance vehicles.

    Her demeanor now seemed untroubled.

    Kae-Kae glanced over as Tas¨¬a walked by on the cement walkway.

    "Good luck, Tas¨¬a. Be careful," she called out. Her tone matter-of-fact.

    Tas¨¬a stopped and turned her head back.

    "Is there anything else you want to tell me?"

    Castro''s chin pointed in turn to the three PA speakers spread out on lamp post poles in different parts of the yard.

    "No."

    "Very well, then."

    Tas¨¬a preceded toward the IMCQ building.

    Felicit¨¦ was tucked away in a rarely used niche just outside the library. A textbook on finite mathematics on her lap.

    Tas¨¬a approached her.

    Felicit¨¦ surprised her with a warm smile.

    "Since I witnessed that amazing acrobatic feat you pulled off over in the SIU breakroom, I said to myself when I heard the Goon Squad hauled you off, ''that little monkey is going to find a way to get out of the Cistern'', and here you are."

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the couch arm.

    "Did Kutuzova finally get in touch with you," she asked.

    Felicit¨¦ shook her head as she appraised the other woman. Tas¨¬a thought in spite of her neo-punk razor-jagged locks, the Argentinian blonde somehow maintained a classical sensibility to her appearance.

    "It would not matter if he did. I am not working with or for that fascist. I''m so sorry you find yourself in a position where you have no choice. Beware, Tas¨¬a. Just be wary, okay?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "Thanks. But my circumstances are a little different. Kutuzova is the father of my aunt."

    Felicit¨¦ raised a brow over her dominant eye, she had a slight strabismus. Very slight when compared to Este-Oeste.

    The news of Tas¨¬a''s family connection genuinely surprised her.

    "You don''t appear very Russian, but then again, I''ve always noticed the way you pronounce your name flavors the language."

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward and ruffled Felicit¨¦''s hair, as she asked.

    "Have you ever had anyone say the same of you?"

    "This," Felicit¨¦ said as she stroked it back in place, "is common in Buenos Aires. I''ll tell you though. Blonde runs on all sides of my family, Spanish and Italian. I get this shade from my great grandmother, Nessa Lombardo. She came from Milan, Italy. What about you and your lineage, my little babushka?"

    "I''m not related to Kutuzova by blood, but he met my grandmother when she was a foreign exchange student at the University of Havana. She had already had my mother by her first marriage.

    "My aunt came along a little later. She is more like an older sister to me. Now, the general says she is in trouble."

    "This aunt of yours, Tatiana Kutuzova, the human rights activist?"

    "You''ve heard of her?"

    "I''m sorry, Tas¨¬a, the general did not lie about her being in trouble. She was abducted three months ago. I didn''t know you had a personal connection."

    Tas¨¬a folded her arms and lowered her gaze. That her belov¨¦d Aunt Tatiana was in a worse place in life than herself humbled Tas¨¬a.

    "What do you know about her abduction?"

    "Not much is on the public record. Film footage showed your aunt being dragged off the street and forced into a white SUV. Later on, the cops searched her apartment in Asunci¨®n, only to find it had been ransacked.

    "You know the fucking media. Their consensus was that it was inevitable given who her father is, and how many people she has pissed-off by her refusal to accept political patronage from any of the major players."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "I know the media. You would think from their portrayal of my aunt, she was the most sanctimonious, self-righteous asshole on the planet. But I tell you, Felicit¨¦, she is the sweetest person you would ever meet in person."

    Felicit¨¦ grimaced a wane smile.

    "Well, you must get it from somewhere."

    "Thank you, but I just look the part, I don''t really feel it in here," Tas¨¬a smacked her chest. "In here, I feel one hundred percent the villain. Truth be told, I like that feeling."

    Tas¨¬a chortled before she continued.

    "Last night the Incubus came to me. It tried to talk me into a mission. One I could not run away from fast enough when told I was needed to save mankind. Sorry, I''m a burglar, not James fucking Bond.

    "That is when I realized it was more a dream on my part than actual communication with the Spore. I told it, from the description of the problem it gave, it needed to talk to you."

    Felicit¨¦ grabbed her knees. She let out a sound of incredulity, "hah."

    "What?"

    "Your referral," Felicit¨¦ answered. "That is why it came to me. Gave me a spiel that I needed to convince you to detach the uranium rods in a power generator. It sounded so far fetched, I was as incredulous as you."

    "Damn. There might be something to it."

    Felicit¨¦ shook her head.

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    "Don''t fret yourself Tas¨¬a. I''ve read closed files of projects devoted to attacking the Spore with counter-programming. After my conversation with the Incubus, I am certain one such program is now succeeding.

    "Else, it''s behavior would not be so unpredictable, now. Before, when you talked to the three dream entities they exhibited well-defined functions. The Black Eyed Ones tried to con you like you were their mark, the Wise One tried to convince you to give in with spiritual pap, and the Incubus begged you to let it go down on your hoo-ha."

    Tas¨¬a frowned. "The Incubus never asked me that. It always asks me for a kiss and then used its free hand to, well, never mind."

    Felicit¨¦ smiled. "Whatever turns the person on the most is what it focuses on. So kisses, eh? There is something absolutely sweet about that from a girl who denies her winsome image."

    Tas¨¬a turned her head away with a shy smile. "Yeah, I guess so."

    Felicit¨¦ snorted a chortle.

    "Anyway, I''ve embarrassed you enough for now, back to my point. Which is, I conclude from all of this a breakdown is taking place in the Spore''s codebase. I also predict, encounters with it will soon begin to get ugly and very unpredictable."

    Tas¨¬a nodded, and she cleared her throat. She reached into her fanny pack and produced a roll of gold US Liberty coins.

    "These belong to you. The split is a part of our partnership."

    "I can''t accept that, Tas¨¬a. However, I would like you to do me a big favor when you get out there."

    Felicit¨¦ reached into her pocket and she produced a thumb drive.

    "There is possibly still a way for me to get out of this shit-hole by getting my sentence commuted with your help. That drive you gave me is a goldmine of information documenting nefarious activities.

    "I have been putting feelers out there. Get this one to the HRC-GQs Deputy Director H¨¦ctor Beller¨ªnci. You do this for me, when we re-establish contact, I''ll devote every hour digging through intel on your aunt.

    "I will decode that file you asked about, please don''t say anything about it out loud. Anything said about it will set those passive receivers off."

    Felicit¨¦ reached out and she held Tas¨¬a firmly by her arm.

    "Tas¨¬a I owe you an apology for how I reacted earlier concerning that matter. It is not your fault. You did not and still do not know my personal history pertaining to it.

    "I was just out of college with my Master''s in Information Theory with my first real job in signals processing for an I-N-T-E-L concern when that shit came across my desk.

    "It fucked me up. I wound up quitting my job out of protest. It has fueled my desire to bring down the entire goddamned thugocracy ever since.

    "So when I found out you were somehow involved, I felt like I was being dragged back into that nightmare all over again. I''m sorry for how I reacted."

    Felicit¨¦ grabbed her for a full hug with the pearl sheen of her long hair dropping in Tas¨¬a''s face. The rogue''s nose wrinkled.

    Then, interrupting them, klaxons began to blare. The blue LED strips on the walls of the corridor began to pulse.

    Felicit¨¦ jerked back. She chuckled nervously.

    "My first thought was that I had just said too much. But, most likely, they have just discovered that you are missing, Tas¨¬a."

    Over the PA speakers a harsh male voice blared out.

    "If you are on the yard, get off the yard. All inmates back to your cells. I repeat, all inmates back to your cells. You have ten minutes. Anyone not complying will be dealt with in the harshest terms that policy will allow. Return to your cells."

    Felicit¨¦ nodded.

    "Yup. The lockdown has begun."

    Tas¨¬a was caught off guard in a rare occurrence of ill-preparation. For a moment, she truly panicked.

    "Shit. I can''t slip through to the SIU. There are six double steel doors between here and there on automatic lock. Shit. Shit. Shit. What will I do?"

    Felicit¨¦ stood up and grabbed her by the hand. She led Tas¨¬a down the hall.

    "We need to get you off this corridor before the education staff starts checking for stragglers."

    An idea suddenly occurred to Felicit¨¦. Tas¨¬a could tell by the sudden bright look in her eyes.

    "Just over there. Horticultural Studies. Pass the classrooms is the exit that leads to a greenhouse and a fenced-in garden area. I have seen how you climb. It should be child''s play for you to exploit the wall adjacent to the building."

    Felicit¨¦ kissed her on the cheek.

    "We have to get going. Good luck, my friend. See you on the other side."

    Noone stopped Tas¨¬a as she made her way out to the greenhouse. No classes were being conducted at the time.

    However, someone left behind a wheelbarrow full of nestles and green leaves.

    There were tools sprawled around the cement walkway divider inside the greenhouse.

    Someone had been weeding the garden.

    Where was that person now?

    Tas¨¬a poked her head through branches to see if anyone was still around hidden among the rows of green foliage.

    A voice rose up.

    "Anyone in here?"

    It was a male staffer. Likely they just missed seeing one another as he was busy putting away equipment for the lockdown.

    He had returned for the set of clippers and the wheelbarrow.

    Tas¨¬a found the thickest rose bush to hide in. She pressed gently into the leaves to minimize thorn impalings.

    Not all of them could be avoided. One pressed in the back of her neck and another pricked into the nape between her modest haunches; they both felt . . . erogenous.

    What a fucked up time to be getting turned on, Tasia.

    The man walked slowly down the walkway nearest her.

    "Anyone here?"

    He was going through the bushes with a rake. He must have thought he had seen something on his return, and he was getting close.

    Tas¨¬a lay flat and she crawled into the next pathway over. There were three fig trees that lay under a trap door into the greenhouse ceiling.

    The limbs were thin and tapered as they grew higher, but Tas¨¬a''s weight was slight. She had little choice but to climb them.

    Pushing her way up, quickly and quietly, she grabbed onto a solid limb that arched close to the trapdoor. Tas¨¬a rolled right side up and she planted her feet down.

    Once her footing was stable Tas¨¬a sprinted up the limb, stressing it until it was about to give out. At that moment, Tas¨¬a jumped up and grabbed the side mantles holding the trap door in place with her knee and shins.

    As she hung upside down, Tas¨¬a looked for the greenhouse attendant. He was staring in the opposite direction with his back towards her.

    Something had caught his attention. Tas¨¬a could only strain to see what was happet. The shadows of three mastiff-sized flying objects buzzed the far greenhouse wall in unison.

    Dogs''O''War drones. Shit''O''Shit!

    Tas¨¬a worked the trap door hatch and slid it open. She quickly shuffled her way on to the roof.

    The layout worked in her favor. Along the ridge where she squatted were long folds of thick green canvas used to cover the glass panels during the mid-season when the nights turned cold.

    Tas¨¬a squirmed between them to make use of them for hiding space. She had a good view of the yard. To her left she could see armed guards escorting inmates from the main IMCQ building back to the worker''s collective dorm. Felicit¨¦ was amongst this group.

    Soon after the inmates cleared out, an odd commotion occurred at the gate Kae-Kae had been staring at a little while earlier.

    In fact, it was Kae-Kae there now speaking to two men in a maintenance truck at the open gate. One man got out and opened a compartment in the back of the truck.

    Castro crawled down into it. The man returned to the driver''s cabin. They reversed the truck to turn it back around when a second, larger truck drove up. It was similar to the other F-150s that the guards drove, but silver in color instead.

    A huge man, over six foot five jumped out of the truck. His crew-cut hair was as silver as his vehicle. He waved down the maintenance truck.

    The men inside climbed back out. Two more men dressed in camos with assault rifles swinging on their shoulders joined the silver-haired man.

    A contentious discussion took place. Finally, the two maintenance men put their hands on their heads and squatted on the ground.

    The two armed men opened the maintenance truck compartment. They grabbed for Kae-Kae. She kicked and screamed, demanding they release her.

    One dragged her by the arms, the other by the legs. She twisted and turned every inch of the way as they carried her.

    Brusquely, they dropped her in front of the silver-haired man. She grabbed for the hip she landed on.

    The man yelled at her. He got into her face and bellowed out laughter.

    Kae-Kae bent down, squatted on her knees, crying and pleading.

    The silver-haired man took out a .357 revolver from a shoulder mounted holster. He placed its barrel at the back of Castro''s skull and he pulled the trigger.

    Her viscera splattered forward just before she slumped to the ground.

 1.31 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a snapped her head back so the goons would not see her. They seemed preoccupied - chests poked out like proud peacocks, mouths agape like idiots, but a quick glance in her direction by any of them would have exposed her.

    She rolled over and she covered herself inside the canvas. Tas¨¬a''s nervous hands squeezed a roll of coins through the fanny pack netting.

    Why did Kae-Kae lie? She was offered her freedom for merely setting Tas¨¬a up and for this, also? She rubbed the roll once more, an honorarios de asesino, unique to the underworld of assassins.

    It all made so little sense. Tas¨¬a reviewed in her mind what Kae-Kae had said.

    I''m dead, I am dead, I am dead! I was holding onto something really valuable for somebody.

    Castro was merely the broker between two other parties in a transaction of the most serious consequence.

    Losing the coins must have been what got her killed.

    Did they offer Kae-Kae her freedom for holding on to the coins? No, that did not explain the events Tas¨¬a had just witnessed.

    That must have been the result of two separate deals Kae-Kae committed herself to that wound up being at cross purposes.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. The past two days had been a living hell for that woman.

    She took a minute to pray for the troubled soul of her former enemy to be at peace.

    She concluded her prayer with a plea of her own.

    Lord, never let me be in a place of vulnerability like that poor woman, ever again.

    Tas¨¬a squeezed the roll of coins, again. She took one out and studied it.

    This was becoming ritual for her. She thought of drilling a hole in one of the coins and wearing it as a necklace.

    An eagle in flight on one side, the goddess Columbia on the other. Tas¨¬a grinned. Lady Freedom was very beautiful. Muy hermosa.

    The coin was certainly sigil worthy.

    She kissed the goddess and pressed the coin to her chest.

    With the blessing of the Almighty, you and me, we will prevail against the Infernal Madr¨¦, goddess Columbia.

    She pocketed the coin, and put the roll back in her fanny pack.

    Wrapped under the canvas, Tas¨¬a wondered how long she should remain there.

    When she had seen Kae-Kae waiting at the picnic table, the woman was waiting for something to happen.

    For the klaxons to go off, obviously.

    That meant the lockdown had nothing to do with herself, Tas¨¬a concluded.

    It would be for the best to wait.

    When the goons cleared out, she would make her move.

    As she thought this, the familiar sound of a drone buzzed above. She peaked up through a narrow crack in the canvas folds.

    Almost directly above her, a drone flew. A camera extended in a rotational pattern from the body of the drone like a wolf sniffing down-range. The hovering Dog''O''War peaked into the long windows of the slanted dorm roof.

    Where did the other drones go?

    When she committed to listening for them, Tas¨¬a heard the hum of multi-part harmony, an uproar of sound compared to the routine buzzing of patrol drones.

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    She moved the piece of canvas that covered over her face to the side.

    Tas¨¬a gazed from left to right. There were six other drones in her line of sight scanning the yard. All Dog''O''Wars, but to her relief, the under-swivel turrets of these units were not fitted for ballistic weaponry.

    Instead, miniature flare tracers were braced to the swivel mount and fed into a spinner barrel. She had seen the design before in the Vida Escondida. The units accompanied sharp-shooters to mark targets.

    The scout version of the Dog''O''War tended to be lightly armoured for greater speed, range and maneuverability when compared to a fully armed one designed to withstand an anti-material slug or two.

    Tas¨¬a considered how she should proceed from here.

    She could try to crawl back to the hatch and climb back into the greenhouse.

    The gardener was likely gone at this point. Tas¨¬a could wait it out another hour longer; she would still have time to commit to doing some mapping of the aqueduct maintenance support tunnels after finding a safe enough route to get there.

    While she conceived a strategy to accomplish the task, a warm heat and an accompanying tingle spread just beneath her skin. Her vertebrae pulsed as if electrically charged and the back of her skull felt like it was being consumed in fire.

    At first, Tas¨¬a feared it, but at an intuited level of her consciousness, she knew something lying dormant was now waking up inside her.

    It was persistent as she tried to concentrate on her plan. Your strategy is flawed, the thing riding her neurons like lightning told her.

    When they clear out the evidence, Castro''s body, they''ll bring in the guards and dogs to search through everything.

    Finally, with a burst of what felt like fire pulsing through her veins in the form of an ultra-tuned shot of adrenaline, she got the message.

    This was not a time for caution but one for action.

    She eyed the radio tower, the assembly of drones, and the three goons laughing it up as they bagged Kae-Kae''s body.

    All three factors would have to be dealt with to clear the way to the Spore Isolation Unit.

    Tas¨¬a raised half up. Aiming at the boots of the three armed men, she shot in a careful arc of two bullets per target.

    Grass shot up in front of them. The last man yelped loudly, and he fell down. The other four men took cover behind their trucks.

    It was the best she could hope for, as the .32 was not a long-ranged weapon. It was not even a reliably effective medium-ranged one.

    The drone was being piloted by a human controller, Tas¨¬a surmised. An AI would have zeroed in on her position almost instantly after the shots were fired.

    It swiveled around awkwardly because its controller had no idea what the hell was happening.

    She put the last three bullets in the center of its mass to cause the maximum amount of damage.

    It bursts forth with sizzling chemicals splashed all about. The oxidation of their exposure caused the carapace pan that held the shredded battery to catch fire.

    With a fresh clip in hand, Tas¨¬a switched out the magazine. She placed the gun back in it''s holster as she watched the damaged drone drop onto the yard.

    She needed to cause dissarray to eliminate their advantages over her. To do that, she would have to get closer to the radio tower she had keenly studied from day one of her incarceration. There were three seperate line connectors she had previously spotted on it that were necessary to knockout their communication.

    Tas¨¬a sprinted across the roof ridge; she jumped down into a tumble on top of the glass panels. She had to roll into it to avoid both injury and glass breakage.

    Several three-round bursts from a gas discharging auto-fire smacked into the roof nearby her.

    She took note, that person must have moved up from the safety of the trucks.

    Still in her tight roll, Tas¨¬a stomped her feet down at the roof bottom edge and she lunged herself across the little garden. She aimed for a rung on a high lamp post.

    She grabbed it on her downward volley. The momentum pushed her legs upward.

    Good.

    It allowed her to grip the post with her thighs and hang upside down. She grabbed her .32 caliber pistol, again.

    From here, she spotted the goon firing the three-round bursts from his assault rifle as he laid down on the yard flat against it.

    She tisked at his stupidity.

    Amateurs. Amateurs. Amateurs.

    The surface area of his body was at a maximum exposure for one going up against an opponent in a higher position.

    It greatly extended her effective range.

    She emptied the magazine of .32 rounds into him. All of which ripped into the man''s shoulder at an angle going into his torso.

    As she dropped down and sprinted to the wall to which Felicit¨¦ mentioned to her to search, Tas¨¬a thought of the man she just shot.

    He would be extremely lucky to survive the dozens of bullet fragments that tore into him.

    She took a short moment to ask herself: how do I feel about that?

    The tingling in the back of her head swelled up like a symphony. She reveled in the electric feeling bouncing around inside her skull as she considered her actions in justification of them.

    Much worse than assassins, these goons were sadistic murderers who took pleasure in their bullying before their boss killed Kae-Kae.

    She had never before mortally wounded someone, but Tas¨¬a vowed to never feel a single thrice damned to Hell ounce of remorse for the actions she just committed so long as she lived.

    She recalled Green-eyed Elise''s favorite quip.

    Couldn''t give less a shit, so why are we still talking about it?

 1.32 Book One: The Gray Soul

    The familiar hum of the drone chorus now became more staccato, like the wings of a swarm of insects approaching her. To this thought, Tas¨¬a ducked down into the garden with a swift kick of her legs; she hugged into the loose black soil in a scramble to dig down into it as deep as she could plant herself.

    A drone tried to mow her down in a one-shot maneuver. Its pilot sacrificed it like a Chessmaster sacrificing a pawn.

    Tas¨¬a rolled to get out from beneath the shower of metal fragments and chemical spray as it scattered debris from where it smashed into the wall in front of her.

    A double set of metal loops holding a twin set of ball bearings from what was formerly the drone''s gyros kicked up dust in her face. Tas¨¬a was forced to wipe her eyes and forehead clear before she could focus her eyes on the remaining assembly of drones.

    Though it stung her eyes to squint, Tas¨¬a quickly determined from the simple patrol pattern and lock-step flight symmetry that there was only one pilot for all eight of the drones. He could only effectively manually override and control a single drone no more than one at a time.

    This increased her chances of survival by a fair margin. Or, at least, Tas¨¬a did so hope.

    There was something else this discovery she made implied. There must have been an autonomous team of operatives working on their own who caused this latest lockdown. As the prison complex had eight drone pilots during any given shift. They could have easily pooled together with overwhelming force against her.

    Tas¨¬a had even met one of them. She had used her feminine wiles to question him with what must have seemed to the pilot to have been harmless flirtation.

    Do you ever race the drones against the other pilots?

    That question alone got her half the intel she needed to exploit at this very moment.

    Today, with the specialist team on the grounds, the facility pilots would be working in a diminished capacity. Most likely on standby.

    She needed to get going. Whomever it was controlling the drones would certainly lock another drone on to her position soon.

    Tas¨¬a made her way to the corner of the structural concrete wall beside a toolshed. Two feet of separation spanned between the two edifices. Tas¨¬a leaned against the wall as she planted her feet against the wooden boards of the shed.

    The drones would not be able to squeeze through the space to reach her if they tried another kamikaze attack. However, she would not be there for very long.

    Tas¨¬a pushed herself up the nine feet of the shed''s height; she grabbed onto the roof. Shifting her arms underneath her, she poked her head out.

    A drone scanned around from where it hovered above the bullet-riddled greenhouse rooftop.

    She glanced over to the radio tower. She could not see its foundation where it set upon an annex to the medical center and, unfortunately, that was her intended destination.

    Tas¨¬a considered her course of action as she recalled how the path appeared from above, on the medical floors.

    She had studied the surrounding layout enough times in her many visits up on the floors to get a good idea of what she needed to do from here, at her current vantage point.

    Her memory confirmed Felicity was right; the counterlever top where the wall sloped would connect her to the annex if she got on top of it and she followed it out to its end on the far side of the medical center.

    From there she could reach the Spore Isolation Unit.

    The hum swelled in echo as it approached from her right side. Tas¨¬a had only taken her eyes off the drone for no more than three seconds.

    She got a glance at it before she had to react.

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    That was enough time to get the geist of its tactical approach, then plan and execute a countermeasure.

    Tas¨¬a spun ninety degrees as she dropped down into the crevice by two feet.

    She pushed out on both the shed and the wall surfaces with her elbows and arms to stop her descent.

    The tri-prop drone was above her, now, where her head had been. She had determined in her glancing study the drone maneuver was a feint, to scare her and force her to fall.

    It was close enough for Tas¨¬a to attack. She spun upside down and gave its metal battery pan a mule kick with a hard thrust of her twin steel-toed boots.

    The drone shot up several feet, but its gyros could not correct for being forced off balance as it arced in a pummeling descent.

    It volleyed against the greenhouse glass panes in a crash that shattered it.

    Tas¨¬a pulled herself up to the top cornice work of the wall. She stood up and had a look around. The lattice gridded supports that rose above the radio tower foundation was less than three hundred yards away.

    Her target, however, was small. She had only four square inches of surface area to exploit; if she hit it solidly a few times, it would be enough to take the drones out of communication with the pilot and scramble communications for the rest of the complex.

    With her .32 in hand, Tas¨¬a dashed towards her target.

    That being a cable fastener that connected two cables linked to the antenna that relayed back to the drones.

    The fastener between the two cables was designed to serve as a one-way diode. It kept the signal clean from distortion feeding back into it.

    Tas¨¬a determined it was also the only part of the assembly that was not impact proofed. Anything less than a .50 would be useless against the cable, antenna, or the control panel where two heavy-duty locks dangled.

    A caterwauling hum reverberated from several yards out.

    Tas¨¬a was forced to duck as another drone tried to drill into her back. It zagged it''s flight angles before she could get a bead on it.

    The .32 she now had in her hands gave her a defensive edge. It likely made the pilot more cautious; however, she was also more exposed to the drones attack as she made a path forward along the wall''s cornice surface.

    Thankfully, the cornice surface was more sheathed and smoothed than decorative so it did little to obstruct her path.

    The drone was about to circle back around.

    The aim she intended to place on the fastener support would be outside of Tas¨¬a''s comfort zone for the weapon she had in hand. She had little choice but to make it work, as she understood what the pilot had in mind for the next attack.

    It was taking the pilot several more seconds to angle a flight descent that would cause the drone to crash its bottom plate into the cornice surface just a few yards before it reached Tas¨¬a, like a skipping rock, before it slammed into her.

    The maneuver,  Tas¨¬a realized, was intended to render any attempt at ducking on her part futile.

    She used the extra time to her advantage. Tas¨¬a dropped to one knee. Aimed her .32 in a tight grip at a bolt head that held the lattice grill onto a girder at her exact eye-level.

    She shot it, aiming dead center. It hit the bolt, but nipped it on the bottom instead of in the middle.

    From the much higher than usual recoil, Tas¨¬a knew the round itself was not at fault. The bullet, as it was being fired from such a high-octane load-out inside the round, would fly even and steady for several hundred yards before it started its descent.

    The fault was in the snub design of the barrel.

    However, It did not matter. Tas¨¬a aimed one inch above the fastener jacket when she shot it four times.

    The fastener nearly ripped in two.

    Behind her, the drone angled too steeply. It crashed and bounced up. Tas¨¬a had to run forward to avoid the debris.

    The flight patterns of the other drones grew more and more unstable until they each, one by one, dropped out of the sky.

    Tas¨¬a grew elated with a giggle she could barely control. It hurt her in her side when she laughed.

    She grabbed her abdomen to ease herself, as she stumbled forward, nearly exhausted, across the annex roof to the lattice grill. She had a few more tasks she needed to complete in her goal to render the radio tower completely useless.

    She merely had to climb eighteen feet up to reach a control box for the master set of cables. By taking out the fuse breakers and a schematic set of resistors, every cable would blow out spectacularly.

    As she grabbed the side of the grill to rest a minute before she began her climb, Tas¨¬a noticed the surface where she had touched the grill was smudged red in a half print of her palm.

    Her mouth gaped in confusion; how had she missed feeling that until now? Her hand was wet with warm blood.

    A small blood splotch formed slowly as it soaked into her shirt at her abdomen. Tas¨¬a unfastened the bottom three buttons of her work shirt, and she lifted up the t-shirt beneath.

    No wonder it hurt to laugh, she could see where a needle-like piece of shrapnel pierced through her skin.

    It must have been pretty long and scraping against the muscular walls of her abdomen to hurt only when she laughed, Tas¨¬a surmised.

    It was her best guess, as her medical knowledge was limited. It could be fused into her kidney, and she would only know for certain when she began to piss blood.

    Well, ain''t that a bitch.

 1.33 Book One: The Gray Soul

    In admonishment, Tas¨¬a shook her head at a self-realization. The adrenaline made even her thoughts more caustic to her own condition than what she thought they naturally tended to be.

    Ain''t that a bitch? Where did that come from?

    A dog howled excitedly in the near distance, close by the squat guardpost building.

    Ah, there!

    The first dog''s call to war was joined by several other canines who started barking in response.

    Shit. They must be opening the kennels.

    As she leaned up to steady herself against a wall, Tas¨¬a surveyed the annex rooftop around her.

    Dead in the center stood the radio tower. Beyond it, on the opposite side, was an access ramp large enough to fit a crane bearing truck necessary to service the tower.

    She was at an impasse; Tas¨¬a could not risk climbing again even to avoid the coming onslaught until the projectile was removed.

    She thought of a story she once read about a doomed couple, a pair of thieves.

    Their lives ended after being chased into an alleyway where they were torn apart by a pack of dogs.

    Tas¨¬a heard the scurry of their paws on the roadway asphalt as the pack drew closer to her.

    Her gun bearing hand shook, more in anger than fear. Tas¨¬a rested the length of her arms against the concrete foundation that the tower set upon to steady her aim as she waited.

    She was a petite woman. Even more pronounced was her diminutive stature as a child, until growth spurts caught her all the way up to the smaller end of average height for women of her ethnicity.

    Dogs taught to attack humans also tended to bully small women if not controlled for it. She had several bad encounters with them in her youth. There were stitches in the back of her head where one pulled out her hair. A permanent purple blotch on her left buttock where one bit her and would not let go.

    Tas¨¬a grew disgusted.

    An abomination in the eyes of God. She thought.

    It defied the Lord''s most Supreme Commandment.

    Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

    Tas¨¬a recited it in her head. She held a strong opinion to what to her was a logical conclusion if one accepted the Supreme Commandment as premise.

    Those who taught their beasts otherwise were damned traitors to their own species.

    Growing angrier, Tas¨¬a stayed attentive to the pack''s approach.

    She held her aim steady as they raced up the steps. Only two clips left in her fanny pack. She had to make the shots without fail.

    She also had a choice to make. Kill them quickly and humanely, or leave one wounded with a gutshot to demoralize the men that followed?

    She didn''t like the latter choice. The dogs had no moral agency of their own. It wasn''t their fault they were trained by uncivilized beasts to behave in defiance of the natural order.

    Tas¨¬a decided the choice would depend on the number of rounds she had to spare whether the last dog in the pack would be killed mercifully, or not.

    Four Rottweilers rounded the corner, one at a time. This briefly slowed down their approach enough to give Tas¨¬a total surety in her aim. Each of them received an efficient headshot.

    No more of the beasts followed after them.

    Tas¨¬a scampered over to their bodies and she felt the warm pelt of one.

    An ugly business, she acknowledged. An attack dog was a troubled soul bent most unnaturally against its own purpose in the great scheme of things.

    By putting them down, ultimately, she was committing a kindness.

    Rest in peace, poor things.

    The corpses were more than ninety pounds each. That was just at the high end of what she could lift, if she was uninjured.

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    It would have bought her a little more time if she threw one of the corpses in the way of the guards, as a warning.

    Unfortunately, that was not happening. Not in her condition.

    The sound of protective gear swished against a body in motion attempting to climb up the ramp.

    Tas¨¬a rushed to the corner. Careful not to bend over, she sat on her butt with her legs stretched out at length. It helped her to stabilize her abdomen.

    The protrusion, she had yet to find the time to treat, thankfully bled less now.

    Tas¨¬a brought the arm of her gun bearing hand over the corner to the wall divider, and she shot once at knee level. With the barrel of the snub-nose tilted down, she shot thrice to create ricochet.

    One guard yelled into his two-way radio.

    "Fall back! Fall back! Give me a suppressed fire cover. I''ve got an injured man."

    A voice answered back.

    "Roger that, Chief. Two are now setting up positions to assist. Call. Call. Status update on the K-9 officers."

    "Sorry Saens. All four down. She possesses small arms of unknown caliber and round quantity.

    "Call. Call. No more risk of engagement. Get our sharpshooters in position. We''ll force her out."

    "Copy that, Chief. Anybody who''d kill a dog in cold blood deserves what they have coming."

    "It was either her or the dogs, Saens. I would have done the same."

    The suppressive fire began as the guards retreated.

    Tas¨¬a sat still for a moment to wonder about the strange new world she inhabited.

    K-9 Officers?

    The utter perversity of the concept caused her mouth to tingle in the taste of bile on her numb tongue.

    Tas¨¬a stood up and she shook these concerns from her thoughts. She now had the extra time she had sought.

    She looked down at her abdomen and pulled up the t-shirt once more.

    With the adrenaline surge flowing through her, Tas¨¬a did not feel anything. It was an odd feeling, or absence of feeling, as it were, to witness a piece of metal sticking out of her own gut and, yet, to experience no pain.

    She might as well have been watching a movie starring someone else.

    The piece of metal protruded out a little over an inch; it appeared to be a thin rod. Like an antenna, but split into two halves and shivved on one side.

    Tas¨¬a reviewed the accident in her mind. The angle of penetration made no sense to her. She kept her back towards the crash as she fled from it.

    Then she had her answer. Warm liquid drizzled down her back and it dripped uncomfortably into her buttcrack.

    That explained it. She was hit from behind with the puncture wound piercing right through her.

    Aie... Aie . . . Jesus!

    Tas¨¬a twisted her head back as far as it would go. The entrance wound was outside of her line of sight. She carefully felt the surrounding flesh of the piercing.

    Thankfully, nothing extruded from the wound, meaning she had not been truly impaled. Just pierced.

    Just pierced. I''m just so relieved.

    The thought made her queasy. She never so much as had her ears pierced given her dislike of needles. Thoughts of the rose thorns returned in a brief respite of revelry.

    Where were these new interests of hers coming from?

    She had not even realized she was giggling to herself until a sharp pain jolted Tas¨¬a back to the here and now.

    Can''t afford to lose focus.

    She concentrated on her inventory. Tas¨¬a had built up a good cache of stolen first-aid equipment that she had swiped from the medical floors and stored in her stash locker.

    She brought out several gauzes and a six-pack of heavy-duty napkins pre-soaked in sanitizer. Also in her fanny pack were her sewing kit, a pair of tweezers, and liquid bandage.

    The entrance wound on her back did not bleed much, now. Fortunately, it was an uncomplicated straight ahead wound. The piercing through her could not have been cleaner if it had been committed by a sharpshooter.

    No zigs, no zags.

    In preparation, Tas¨¬a took a gauze out of its packet. She split it in half and rolled one side of it tight. She also opened the packet of sanitized wraps and a second gauze. She lay the wound sealant beside the rest of the first-aid assembly.

    Tas¨¬a leaned back and she lay flat on the annex rooftop. She breathed in to stretch out the area of her tummy. This firmed-up the protrusion more steadily as it poked out of her flesh.

    With everything now set in place, she kept her breath held in. With her right thumb and index finger, Tas¨¬a pinched the top of the shivved rod.

    It bit back into the meat of her thumb. This pain Tas¨¬a could feel, but she ignored it.

    She counted to three before she lifted the rod carefully up, straight and vertical. It was nearly three and a half inches in length.

    Blood gushed up from the wound. Tas¨¬a forced herself to breathe in and out at a slow and steady pace.

    She cleaned off the blood with the sanitized napkin. Holding it in place to prevent any more gushing, Tas¨¬a had to force herself to stay patient.

    After wiping the blood away once more, she took the tightly coiled strip of gauze and placed it into the wound. The tube for the liquid bandage was shaped like a magic marker that had a pressure gauge on its top end.

    She set it to half strength before rubbing the dispenser back and forth on her wound until the seal was set in place.

    With another gauze spread across the wound, her first task was completed.

    The entrance wound on her back did not take as much time to treat. Tas¨¬a nixed using any more of the gauzes as she had no visibility to gauge the effectiveness of her treatment.

    After cleaning up the wound with a second sanitized napkin and applying the liquid bandage, she was done.

    To test the success of the procedure, Tas¨¬a lightened her own mood with a line from a favorite old action-comedy movie.

    Alright, then. Now to deal with those pesky, pesky sharpshooters.

    The giggles this caused brought to her no pain in her gut. To her relief, likely no fragments remained, or else she would be doubled over in pain.

    A bullet smacked off the lattice girders a few feet above her. Tas¨¬a crouched down behind the concrete foundation support as she tried to gauge from which direction the shots originated.

    Pesky, pesky sharpshooters, indeed.

 1.34 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a surveyed the sheared indention above her. The projectile angled between sixty and seventy-five degrees. In terms of geography, its flight path propelled towards the Ward Nueve dorm to the South.

    To the North of where she now crouched was the water-tower. The second tallest structure on the complex.

    Her plan to disable the radio-tower was now on indefinite hold. It may not even prove essential, she thought.

    To the West was her goal, the Spore Isolation Unit. A corner of the annex lay under the skywalk that connected the Medical Center and the SIU.

    To reach it, she would have to climb eighteen feet up the radio-tower side before she jumped over to the skywalk support column where it buttressed the main building.

    A trivial move for her when she was not being shot at.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the indention in the lattice-girder once more. It was no mere .22 Long Rifle round that caused it. If she climbed the radio-tower, using the girders for cover, the sharpshooter would try punching holes through the metal supports to get to her.

    She glanced further up, and what she saw made Tas¨¬a grimace. Why had not this vulnerability occurred to her earlier?

    A set of sliding windows rose above her position, located in the laboratory area on the fifth floor of the medical center. She realized what caught her attention. Something had changed.

    The rooms behind the windows were better lit just a few minutes before now. Someone had shut a door in the background to minimize the light.

    The shot from the water-tower that hit above her had no chance of wounding her given the angle of the annex walls in the line-of-sight.

    It was designed to distract her.

    They were planning to shoot through the glass to kill her.

    She calculated where the shooter had to stand at an overview angle if he wanted to get a quick drop on her.

    Then it felt like ice ran through her veins, as her intuition developed into a necessitated inference.

    He stood just outside of her sight range. When he made his move, he would walk up. In one smoothly executed maneuver, raise his gun and shoot her.

    Tas¨¬a had to respond now. She ran back to the far wall, leaped up, grabbed the wall cornice with her free hand to push her up in the air as far up as she could go.

    She twisted back around.

    At nearly eight feet in the air, Tas¨¬a was exposed to the sharpshooter on the water-tower, but she calculated that her action had to have been too unexpected for him to respond with a deft action of his own.

    In front of her, just before she reached the apex of her ascent, the shooter behind the window tensed upon sight of her.

    Tas¨¬a emptied two bullets into the facemask of his helmet. He lunged into the glass as he lost his balance. His hand grabbed to hold on to the window slider.

    It was a futile gesture and it only damaged the window even more.

    The rifle fell first. The man followed. Tas¨¬a heard ribs crack as he landed in an ugly belly flop.

    She spied something useful on the back of his belt as the shooter squirmed. Tas¨¬a scurried over to him in a crouched-over move worthy of her childhood nickname.

    Five gas grenades of the same make as Le¨®n''s lined up on his belt. She pulled one off of it. Primed it, then tossed it into the broken window.

    A gargle of radio noise followed suit.

    "What kind of goodies do you have for me, shooter man?"

    He screamed in agony, but as she went brusquely through his equipment she ignored his incessant noise.

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    A Ruger Vaquero chambered for the .357 magnum cartridge was holstered to his thigh. Four flexible feeder clips designed for revolver quick-load lined up in a matching bandolier. On the side of his calve, he wore a sheathed spear-pointed blade of black steel, seven inches in length.

    "Look at this, pretty nice," Tas¨¬a said, excitedly. "I bought one just like it for my collection once."

    He turned his head to get a good look at her. Fragments of plastic, glass, and metal lodged into the top half of his face.

    One eye was damaged. To what extent she could not tell. He squinted it shut, and it bore a milky-white film leaking from it.

    Along the length of his cheek a gaping wound appeared almost like a pair of sputtering lips whenever he breathed out.

    His one good eye looked at her as if she were a violate demon in pursuit of his very essence.

    "Don''t look at me like that, sir," Tas¨¬a insisted. "I didn''t get you into this mess. You did when you took on your despicable profession."

    She turned her attention back to taking anything from him that could fit comfortably on her own person.

    She decided against the bulletproof vest.

    In his wallet, Tas¨¬a found a debit card. She gave it a second of thought, and decided she had time to exploit it.

    Hello?ste''s account was still active. Tas¨¬a took several seconds to get the banking app up and running.

    She swiped the card over the pin camera in Helo?ste''s PA. Tas¨¬a entered the four digits on a piece of tape attached to the card.

    It had never been peeled off, and never reset.

    6,589 USD entered into Helo?ste''s account.

    Tas¨¬a smiled as she patted the man on his massive shoulders.

    She somehow knew on the first sight of him it would be this easy.

    She knew his type.

    He was a walking, smack-talking, shit-kicking badass who never before in his life felt that he needed to be in the least bit concerned for his personal security and safety.

    Her favorite kind of mark of all.

    Tas¨¬a grinned as she assessed the man.

    At least his condition was improving, so he had that going for him. His breathing went from the total exasperation of being smacked into concrete from three stories up to an even-paced flow within the span of five minutes.

    He had come out of a shock where his breath was severely uneven with deep gasps and shortened draws. It was now slow and labored. This was to be expected of a man with broken ribs.

    The last thing Tas¨¬a took from him was the two-way radio from his belt. She then carefully backed off of him, just in case he was over his initial shock, and the shooter still had some fight left in him.

    Tas¨¬a crouched in a corner where she could keep an eye on him and the windows above.

    "I''m looking for the man they call the Chief," she said into the radio. "He came across as a pretty bright guy. I wish to talk to him."

    "I''m here."

    "Status on your man. Pretty good for somebody who got shot in the face and then crashed thirty-six feet down on the concrete. His breathing is stable. I don''t know how broken up he is internally. I heard ribs crack. He hasn''t attempted to walk, yet."

    "Tell him to give it a try."

    Tas¨¬a put the radio to the side of her head as she addressed the injured man.

    "Hey, Big Guy. Your boss says get your ass in gear. If you can walk, you are out of here."

    "Fuck you."

    Tas¨¬a aimed her newly acquired .357, and she shot the cement near his right arm. Dust and granulate shot up, biting into his exposed hand.

    "Get your ass up. The next shot is going into your skull if I have to repeat myself."

    He complied. His big hands pushed upon the foundation. He fell back down.

    "My knee is broken."

    "Did you hear that, Chief?"

    "Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, correct?"

    "It sure as hell isn''t B¨¦yatta Castro. That bitch is dead."

    She mentioned the name to let him know to not even waste her time asking for her to surrender. Even if his crew was not responsible for Castro''s murder, it occurred on the yard, so it was impossible that the news of it had not reached him.

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris, how do we get our man back? Talk to me."

    "Do you know the first thing they do when they send you to the Cistern?"

    "Security here is compartmentalized, ma''am. I can only guess."

    Tas¨¬a laughed as she gently banged her head against the bricks. She was so hoping he was smarter than that.

    Did he really expect her to believe that crap?

    "I''ll forgive your na?vite this time, Chief. I will tell you then. They force you to strip naked. You''ll stay naked for forty-eight hours in a cold, damp, urine and foul mildew smelling cell.

    "So, it should not be too much trouble to send two of your big boys stripped down to nada. They walk on to this platform with their arms behind their heads and walking backward.

    "If anything stupid occurs, your guy here gets another bullet to his face. Nothing but air friction to stop it this time."

    "Hang tight, ma''am."

    She glanced back up to the window with the glass broken out and back over to her victim. She had another way to get off the annex roof.

    "They can come pick him up in ten minutes. No sooner. I have to prep him first."

    "What are you going to do to Faison?"

    "Don''t worry about it."

    She hung up the walkie-talkie.

 1.35 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Faison sat up on the radio-tower foundation. He moaned to himself. Occasionally, he glared at her.

    Being bested by a criminal was more than his ego could handle.

    Tas¨¬a gave him her best goblin-faced smile. It was her upper and lower rows of small teeth bared through wide lips that sealed the deal on the look. When set to non-expressive her face contoured too long for a true gobliny visage.

    The rare girl who was prettier when she didn''t smile.

    "So Faison, is it?"

    "Fuck off."

    She eased her finger from the trigger as a counter-response to her desire to shoot him once more.

    "Faison, I can''t help but notice those arms of yours are quite massive."

    "Seriously, you''re trying to flirt with me? That grin on your face. Whoever told you it was pretty lied to you. It is the most strangely affected expression I have ever seen and I used to bounce at a blacklight club where half the bitches drooled on themselves from all the laced heroin being passed around."

    He spat on the ground. The wound on his cheek quivered. Tas¨¬a''s grin became a full-on smirk. She squinted as she surveyed his face.

    "That explains the shitty attitude. You used to pass for a pretty-boy, right? That is, before I fucked your face up."

    That shut him up. Tas¨¬a continued.

    "Listen, I don''t have time to fuck around, so don''t dwell on the oddness of my next question. Just answer it.

    "How many pull-ups can you do at one time?"

    His head jerked back, his puss frowned.

    "Seriously? Okay. Easy enough. I do five hundred every morning. I could add two more hundred to that without straining myself."

    Tas¨¬a felt a lightness in her stomach. That was the answer for which she had hoped. She also thought she knew his weakness.

    "Your arms work just fine. So you can climb in your current state?"

    "I''m not helping you."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head in disagreement. She laid down a most condescending gaze on him. She was definitely the smarter of the two in this arrangement.

    "We need to work out a deal before your help arrives."

    "A deal? With you?"

    Tas¨¬a reached into her pocket and she pulled out the Liberty coin she held there.

    "Faison, what is this?"

    "Ah, shit. I know what it is used for in prison."

    "Nevermind that. How much is this coin worth?"

    "Given the decade. Close to 800 USD."

    Tas¨¬a reached into her fanny pack and she brought out four more coins.

    "So does this look worth your while, Faison? I''ll give you these five coins now, and return to you your account balance after you do what I ask."

    Gone was the glare, but he eyed her coolly, now.

    "And all I have to do is get the equivalent of my daily workout?"

    "Precisely. Stand right there along the inner girders, and you climb up as I climb up on the outer girders. That''s all this is going to take. Let''s get started."

    She placed the coins within his range on the foundation''s cement. He reached out, grabbed them, and pocketed them in his vest.

    Tas¨¬a had one last calculation to make. She imagined the water-tower in her head. It was a quarter of a mile to the North. From the windows in the skywalk corridor that connected the Medical Center to the Spore Isolation Unit she had observed it often.

    There were three possible locations where the sharpshooter could be hunkered down: the very top of the water-tower, on the round walk-way used to service its various gauges, or the one stairwell platform that faced in their direction.

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    The first option angled too steeply, close to ninety degrees, to account for the angled surface from the bullet sheer; the last option could be eliminated as well for the angle on the shear would have been closer to forty-five degrees than seventy.

    That last option, the narrow stairwell, would have given Tas¨¬a an advantage.

    It was in a tight space. She could have shot blind, emptied a magazine full of rounds into it, and been assured of at least one good hit.

    Not their job to make my life any easier.

    That left only one option. The sharpshooter was on the round walk-way that circled the tower. This gave him a wide breadth of options to set up rifle placement.

    Tas¨¬a picked up the rifle. It was a brand with which she had no previous experience, a 7.62 mm Ishapore sniper rifle. A Springfield cartridge in the chamber with six more in the magazine.

    The rifle went across her shoulder.

    She turned to her reluctant accomplice and, as she approached, Tas¨¬a gave him another one of the smiles he refused to find in the least bit fetching.

    He looked away. From the expression set loosely on his face, Tas¨¬a could tell he was going to betray their pact. Given his personality, the impotence she made him feel, he was going to go out in a most glorious fashion.

    That was okay. It was part of her plan.

    Faison was set in place. He stood on his one good leg while he grabbed the inset lattice girders welded on the inside of the support girders that ran the length of the radio-tower.

    The space between the latticework cleared two feet at the midpoint diameter of the diamond shapes.

    Easy to scale but it worked to the sharpshooter''s advantage.

    Faison would serve as a body between her and the sharpshooter.

    She grabbed hold of an outer-set girder placement.

    They now faced one another.

    "Don''t even think of betraying me, Faison. I''m a vengeful bitch."

    She knew he would, but it was part of the game for her to go through the motions and satisfy his expectations. Else, even in his limited mental capacity, he might grow curious.

    "One step up on the count of three. One, two, three."

    They moved in sync. This set of motions was repeated twice more, putting their boots at the six-foot mark. Twelve more feet, six more grilled supports to go.

    Tas¨¬a examined her companion. With his weight pressed on his bulging arms, he appeared comfortable in this position. His face impassive so not to give anything of his plan away.

    He could go ahead and safely jump down and expose her position to the sharpshooter at that very moment, but he wouldn''t. Such a wimpy move would not comport with the glorious story he had to tell his buddies back at the bar.

    He trained for low storied jump and rolls. This would be easy!

    And it truly would have been easy if his leg wasn''t fucked up. The dumbass.

    She needed to get her eyes on the sharpshooter. Unfortunately, Faison''s spotter''s mirror was not in his kit. Likely, it had already been placed in position in the lab above.

    "Faison, hold your head still. Just keep it in mind, if your friend over there is not one hundred percent, you get popped, not me."

    He smiled, nodded, and then held his head still.

    Tas¨¬a pushed her body up so her head was even with his. Without ceasing her flow of movement, she feinted left, then peaked past Faison''s head to her right.

    This did indeed draw a shot. It whizzed by Faison''s right ear.

    "Aie . . Fuck me to tears," he yelled.

    "Easy, Big Guy. Don''t lose your shit."

    The taunt was enough to calm him down.

    As for the sharpshooter, Tas¨¬a had one thought in mind.

    Target acquired.

    "Faison, we have six more steps to make. Do you have it in you?"

    He shook his head as he sneered at her expression of doubt.

    "All fucking day long," he answered.

    That response would go in the story he would tell in that dark bar with a double shot of whiskey in his hand and decades-old pop metal from the States in the background.

    They climbed up. She repeated "One step up on the count of three. One, two, three." To this she added, "with five steps to go . . . with four steps to go . . .," to focus his mind on the goal.

    When they reached the last step, Tas¨¬a pressed the lattice girder at her waist firmly with her thighs to hold herself in place.

    She could tell by the smirk that consumed his face he did not catch this move as he assumed she still bore her weight on her arms and hands.

    The smirk widened into an ugly grin. There was glee dancing in his eyes. Now would come the highly insulting quip that would serve as the clincher for his barroom story.

    "Hey, del Alma-Gris. Choke on Satan''s cock in Hell, you ugly-ass bitch."

    As he let go, she reached for the Ishapore. Tas¨¬a pulled it over her shoulder into the cress of her arm. Set in place, she took a quick aim, and fired. The sharpshooter''s head snapped back on impact.

    Down below she heard Faison smack the ground once again. He didn''t perform the roll he must have intended. This time he landed on his back. She heard his spine crack.

    Below, his upper body squirmed while his legs stayed limp.

    That is not how the story was supposed to go, now was it?

    For mercy''s sake, she kept her quips to herself. Her spine once again tingled with a warm glow. That she found to be quite unsettling.

    The jump over to the skywalk was trivial to execute. Tas¨¬a scurried up to the top where non spider monkeys would need a crane to access. She ran the length of the skywalk to a vent that led into the Spore Isolation Unit.

    Tas¨¬a popped the four bolts with four rounds from her newly acquired .357. She crawled into the lip of it.

    Phone in hand, she made a call.

    "Le¨®n here."

    "It''s me. One last hurdle, and I am there."

 1.36 Book One: The Gray Soul

    After a moment of silence, Le¨®n''s voice came back online.

    "I''m not at liberty to speak at the moment. We''re a little preoccupied."

    Shit. Tas¨¬a did not like the sound of that.

    "Should I still meet up with you in the tower?"

    "Negative," Le¨®n said, his voice sternly concerned. "Stick to the maintenance corridors; you''ll find a few useful options to squeeze yourself out of this complex if you look hard enough. I have to go. Stay safe, my friend."

    "You too."

    He ended the call.

    He sounded nervous. Did he need her help, but was too proud to ask? No, there was something going on for which he wished for her to stay clear.

    Tas¨¬a had hoped to ask him, in turn, to bomb the cellar with gas to prepare for her entrance, but he had nixed that option.

    She was beginning to worry about him.

    I can''t stay put, and I can''t help him by staying here.

    Tas¨¬a swiveled around and folded her legs beneath her. The first eight feet of the duct was flat-surfaced before it descended down at a forty-five-degree angle.

    The path forward reached another set of ducts that were smoothly rounded in shape.

    From both directions, in front and behind her, at this level she heard the harmony of a lovely choral. It reminded her of, in equal parts, Handel''s Messiah and the Islamic call to prayer at the mosque in Rossara.

    Tas¨¬a crawled forward. The duct she realized circled beneath the double glass domes. Thirty feet ahead another duct opened up to her right.

    The volume of the music swelled as she approached. Natural light bled along this secondary duct''s surface.

    It merely traveled three feet before it opened up to a double-set grill forty-eight feet above the SIU''s main atrium floor.

    Tas¨¬a frowned. The type of grill-set was one that was familiar to her. It was over two hundred pounds of reinforced metal, and it would take more than just emptying a magazine of .357 rounds to force the fasteners loose.

    She had no intention of squeezing through it. She only hoped that the double-set grill model was not used to block more advantageous routes.

    Down below, gathered on the main floor of the atrium, several guards stood together in a nervous stance as they stared into the cells of the Manifest.

    It must have been a first for the guards as well to witness the Manifest sounding like an angelic choir instead of wild harpies.

    Which for them is the more frightening?

    Tas¨¬a followed the circuit of ducts so she could get a better look at the inmates.

    A dark, brooding voice, as if out of the depths of peaceful Oblivion, reverberated through the air and the tin surface of the ducts.

    The Disappeared.

    Normally, the Shrill of the Banshees was what the personnel called the sound sung by the most segregated and mysterious of the Manifest. This was no shrill yell, this was a Call of Vengeful Valkyrie.

    The chorus of the other Manifest inmates called back in response.

    She crawled in front of the next vent over. From this vantage point, a cell was visible.

    The woman inside it stood naked with her hands up in the air as if to acknowledge and praise something that could not be seen.

    She threw kisses into the air, and she swayed up and down on sprightly articulated toes. Her arms and legs were extended, and her neck impossibly long. But she did not appear corrupted, she appeared beautiful.

    Her face shined pearlescent but slowly turned the ruby red of ancient Mayan goddesses.

    Her hair turned from deep brunette to a golden hue and then back again, all the while Tas¨¬a watched.

    Tas¨¬a backed away from the grill by a few feet, so no guards would accidentally catch sight of her. She needed to study the layout of the ductwork.

    On this side of the SIU, she had no idea how they connected to the ducts on the opposite end to which Tas¨¬a had grown so familiar.

    Tas¨¬a opened Helo?ste''s mobile PA. Unfortunately, she had spent almost no time studying it. Events got well beyond her control.

    On the homepage, an icon for a file read - ''ready for encryption''. The file had not been there merely a few hours earlier. Tas¨¬a would have definitely noticed it when she double-checked to make sure that the device had not been tampered with.

    Tas¨¬a pressed on the screen to pull a list of options. She clicked on the console mode ¨C entered a series of commands that allowed her to examine the metadata.

    It told the story of what Tas¨¬a suspected, Helo?ste did something very common in her line of work.

    She created a dead-man''s switch. If anything happened to her, her secrets would not go to the grave as well. Indeed, the file had been posted several times in secured cloud servers throughout the world.

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    The file consisted of a video clip that read ''For Andujar'' attached to a large set of zipped folders cach¨¦d together.

    Tas¨¬a ran the video file.

    Demona Helo?ste sat at her desk. Burgundy blouse, brown jacket. Her thick and coarse brown hair carefully coiffed, and held back with pins half-hidden above her ears.

    Her face was animated with a smile. She appeared to be in her mid-forties. Dark brown tone lips, contrasted with the light caramel of her skin. Her eyes appeared dark as well.

    The only bio Tas¨¬a had discovered on Helo?ste said she was born in Morocco. Father Belgium, mother a native Arab.

    She was handsome in a way that verged on beautiful, but not quite so, for her motions were too purposeful to be any fitting object for figurative study.

    There was nothing artful in the fitful way she moved her hands, jerked her head, and tensed her neck.

    Helo?ste began to speak.

    "Andujar, my dearest friend. I often get word from our mutual acquaintances that you have been asking about me.

    "You are never far from my thoughts. But it frustrates you greatly that I never adequately explained why I chose the career I have over a life together with you.

    "I owed you an explanation years ago, but I was not at liberty to do so. Now I find myself in a peculiar predicament, so it is time I told you the truth.

    "If you are watching this, don''t waste another second of your life fretting over me, because it will have been too late to do anything about it. This is one of those videos with an eternal goodbye attached to it, my love."

    Demona Helo?ste studied her hands. Her face bore a churlish smile. She was enrapt in memory. Her eyes peered up, of a sudden.

    She blurted out an excited rush of words.

    "I could have told you this at any time after we met. That first year of college when we lived together, I often laid there beside you, after we made love with the truth on my lips, ready to say the things that needed to be said, but I never did, for the truth would have made me appear most insane.

    "Still, I should have trusted you.

    "In the culture I was raised, the child of eurocrats, what I wanted to share with you would have been a career breaker. But in your South America, you accept the existence of ghosts and the creatures of the supernatural like you accept the wind and the rain.

    "But, in Brussels, we are a different people than that. We possess some rather stupid presumptions about what underlines the functionality of this world.

    "By that standard, I am indeed insane, for I am like sainted Fatima, guided by voices, as it were.

    "When I was twelve, I dreamt of Hell. Not the one of fire and brimstone used to scare children into obeying their parents, not the one of demons bearing barbed lashes to frighten entire nations into utter servility.

    "No, this was the hell of Lord Lucifer, the light-bringer. A place so beautiful my mortal mind felt pierced to its very essence. It was so overwhelming that I could only comprehend a fraction of what I witnessed.

    "I was in the White Palace of the Lightbringer. The structure before my eyes was a thousand shades of alabaster. I would tell you, far from being a place of chaotic malevolence it was absolutely peaceful, but even the Peace of Lucifer''s Palace could not be quenched.

    "If Hell is the absence of satiation as some Buddhists define it, then it was not peaceful in the least.

    "It was like an event horizon where repeating over and over was the moment just before all the pieces in the gestalt of our greater purpose is made complete.

    "You see what this dream did, Andujar? It snapped that fuse-breaker in my head. You always knew I was batshit. I could not hide that from you."

    Demona laughed.

    "So what does this have to do with the choice I made? That I chose the life of an intelligence operative over you? Trust me, I''m getting to that.

    "Lucifer approached me as I walked around the halls of his palace''s immaculate architecture. I gave him a fetching smile. As handsome as you are, Andujar, Lucifer was ten times more so. Don''t be jealous. After all, we are merely pale reflections of our creators.

    "He waited patiently for me to speak. When I did, I asked him, what is this place. He answered me, ''my Palace of Lies. Come with me, young Helo?ste. I have something to show you.''

    "He took me to a library. The shelves lined against rounded walls that seemed to recede into infinity. Volumes were being written before my eyes. Like an endless series of encyclopedias, bound in platinum and white gold.

    "Once more, I asked Lord Lucifer, ''what is this?'' And he told me, ''all the lies of mankind. Every lie that has ever been spoken by every man who has ever lived.

    ''They have to be contained so they do not spread corruption to the creatures that know nothing of lies.''

    "He asked me to join his cause. And if I sought it with my heart true, I would find it, and I would know what to do to serve his Great Purpose.

    "Throughout my youth, I sought for a way to give that dream substance. I joined satanic cults, both officially recognized by the EU, and those that remained hidden.

    "Many of them, frankly, disappointed me.

    "They seemed to be searching for a darker Lord than I did, for my soul was joined as one with the Lightbringer, not some supernatural sadist.

    "Still, I learned much from even those with the worst of intentions. Journeys of the spirit are often like that."

    Demona smiled devilish.

    "All that time, Andujar. You did not know you slept beside a Satanist. You thought that room in the cellar, I kept for my own purposes only, was for mere meditation of a secular nature.

    "No, I practiced my rituals down there. Now, you must have been a little suspicious of my little accomplice, Alabaster. You must recall quite well, my big, white Persian cat with the emerald eyes. Admit it, he scared the hell out of you.

    "Remember what you would say? ''if it''s Tuesday, that cats going to bring us a gift. Birds, rabbits, squirrels, snakes.''

    "How right you were. And you thought it odd, that Alabaster never killed them. Just weakened them for ease of transport.

    "He would save that for me to do, as part of our ceremonial sacrifice. That is right. I would sacrifice the gifts he brought. Together, Alabaster and I would consume the Lord''s feast."

    Demona tilted her head up, her long neck craned, and she laughed, once more. Her fingers fluttered like bird wings.

    "You once accused me of hiding Chinese takeout down there to eat while you starved. Nothing encapsulated your ever so quaint na?vite than that remark. I loved you for that. That is also why your''s was a world that I could not have. It didn''t belong to me.

    "At around the same time, through my Satanic connections, I was developing contacts amongst European intelligence agencies. Eventually, I was offered a career, and a chance to build a White Palace of my own.

    "So there you have it, Andujar. You now know just how incongruent my internal world was to the life we had together.

    I just want you to know, you were a damn good lover, and even a better friend."

    A sad little grimace crossed Demona''s lips, she hit a button. The video ended.

    Tas¨¬a realized then that there were more people below. A commotion was occurring. She crawled forward to peek down again.

    There were a dozen guards. Most of whom bore heavy equipment she could not at first identify before she realized it was a set of robotic assemblies.

    In the center of the East wing atrium, someone stood.

    He yelled out.

    "I''ll give you this, Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, you have a dozen tricks up your sleeve, at the very least that many, but you are not ready for this one. Not by a long shot."

    It was the Chief. He didn''t sound like his cool, collected self.

    He was pissed.

 1.37 Book One: The Gray Soul

    The Chief was a medium-sized man, but impressively broad in muscularity. His hair, brown and sandy, he wore trimmed evenly throughout.

    He spoke in a Scandinavian accent.

    "I hope you are watching, little Tas¨¬a. You cost the lives of a few worthy men, today. That is most unfortunate.

    "I tend to be the most merciful of men as it is often said that we on this side of the law are just an indictment away from being on your side of the law. Clich¨¦d it may be, but it is the sad truth. So I had hoped to have reasoned with you, instead."

    Their attempt to shoot her from the laboratory window did not at all seem very reasonable to her.

    The Chief continued.

    "But now, it is out of my hands. There is a protocol I am duty-bound to follow so no more of my men come to harm. It is a policy that most definitely puts your life in a secondary consideration.

    "When it comes to it, and you are about to meet your fate, little Tas¨¬a, just remember, you did it to yourself. Not I, I gave you a chance. So do not curse my name to whomever gods you may believe."

    Tas¨¬a had one last thing she wanted to do before she scuttled off. It was the only chance she had to buy a little time. She felt along the grill''s surface. The vents were evenly spaced.

    Unfortunately, the thumb-sized gas grenades could not slip through them.

    The Chief vied for her attention again. He held something up between his hands. It was a pair of her light blue bloomers.

    She was slightly embarrassed but only for the gauche quality of the underwear.

    She would buy several sets of French-cut panties, thong underwear, and silk boxers as the first thing on her escape agenda.

    It was impossible to feel pretty wearing the utilitarian brown work uniform, or the sweats allowed in the dorm unit.

    Tas¨¬a smiled, thinking of Este-Oeste and the thongs her husbands slipped in for her on visitation day.

    "Watch this, little Tas¨¬a. These were found in your laundry bag."

    The Chief placed the bloomers in a clear colored chemical container. He pressed a switch latched on the side of the device. A liquid rushed into the inner vat from a compact tube.

    As he vigorously shook the container for several seconds the bloomers inside dissolved in the chemical bath.

    As he commenced doing this, most of the other guards were busy prepping the Gremlins.

    Tas¨¬a had some experience with these robot units. They were not merely propped drones. They were fully articulated hominid simulacra.

    They could also fly. A popular term for them was the flying monkeys. Each one of them would get a sample of the chemical bath containing her pheromones, and use it to track her down inside the ducts.

    She thought of retreating back the way she came, back up the vent, and on to the skywalk. No, the fact the Chief had his men inside the building to search for her meant they kept a set of eyes on the vent entrance.

    Most likely, a sharpshooter waited in place to blow her head off.

    They decided, for one, trying to compete with her sleek spider monkey self inside the vents would be a futile waste of time. Neither did they take the time to assemble the robots outside and simply have them follow her path.

    She understood why.

    When she took out the sharpshooter, they were forced to scramble for cover as well.

    For that brief moment, she did have the high ground.

    The best course of action for them would be to enter the Spore Isolation Unit from the second floor skybridge where the ducts limited her capacity to pick them off with the Ishapore rifle.

    Until they figured out her location in the maze of duct work, they were in desperation mode.

    Tas¨¬a decided to sacrifice the rifle. She forced the barrel of the gun through the double-set of grid holes. It was a tight squeeze, but once firmly in place, she gave the butt of the gun a swift kick. It took several more stomps after the first one to force the rails to bend.

    After removing the now damaged rifle, Tas¨¬a smiled in satisfaction. There was now a hole that gave her a decent throw radius. She tossed two of the grenades down on the men below her.

    Tas¨¬a scrambled inside the atrium ductwork. The guards coughed with gutteral curses and horse expiration below her.

    She calculated that it would take just under a minute to get to the vent on the opposite end of the figure-eight design.

    Most likely, by the conventions of design, that end would be where she would find the connector duct that could get her to the corridors on the institution''s westside.

    She jumped when a thunk sounded from the vent that lay just ahead of her by a few feet. Tas¨¬a scurried up and peeked around the corner.

    On the grill, a black spidery object set.

    Ah, shit. Sticky grenade.

    Tas¨¬a hustled forward. The grenade blew a cloud of beryl-colored smoke into the vent now behind her. She heard another thunk sound echo from ahead of her position.

    A blast of bluish-green smoke rushed into the duct, billowing in front of her.

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    Tas¨¬a had no choice but to crawl through it. She covered her mouth in the collar of her t-shirt and she closed her eyes shut tight, pressing onward.

    The smoke smelled of almond and turmeric. It burned her eyes and sinuses less than she thought it would. Then with this frail hope pulling her forward, her heart sank when Tas¨¬a realized her face was feeling numb and the flesh of her arms began to itch.

    The motherfuckers!

    They were using a nerve agent.

    She spat at the pretense of the Salvage, and their claim to be emissaries who served a higher purpose.

    At heart, they were as dirty as any strong man thug who had ever planted a flag on South American soil. They merely had better PR at their disposal.

    Droplets of a chemical catalytic began to form and drizzle down from her face. Even her hair became soaked. The gas was reacting to her skin. A soft sizzling sound perked into Tas¨¬a''s ears, worrying her dearly.

    The gas was heavier than the air so it clung to her body. Tas¨¬a refused to breathe it in, knowing if she did, it would cause severe nausea.

    Hell, if it is what I think it is, it will likely choke me to death if I let it get into my lungs.

    She pressed onward down the ductwork with her eyes closed, feeling the tin siding along the way.

    It seemed far longer than a minute, but her watch had yet to pulse at the minute mark when she came to the adjoining duct. It was just where she assumed it would be on the west-most side of the atrium.

    Tas¨¬a swiveled on her butt, pushed forward, and slid down for twenty more feet. Once down into the west side ducts, Tas¨¬a exhaled the air that she held.

    She gave herself fifteen seconds of rest, fully knowing that if the Chief''s men got the Gremlins online, she really could not even afford to indulge even that moment of respite.

    The flat level duct she now sat upon divided into two different directions. She calculated the southern direction to her left would take her to the ductwork where she encountered the entities.

    However, the other direction could prove to be the most advantageous. On her way back to the SIU building from the spook tower earlier, Tas¨¬a used a ladder that lead from the maintenance drive tunnels into a small room with a fourway cross-bridge between duct entrances.

    That connector could also provide access for the Gremlins to get into the ductwork.

    It would be safer to search the ducts above the equipment room corridor, she concluded.

    Tas¨¬a nodded, convinced that she was still going in the right direction.

    Only seconds after she made this calculation, Tas¨¬a discovered it was in error. She jolted at the sound of a long metal on metal screech somewhere forward in the direction in which she moved.

    The duct itself rattled around her.

    Metal was being sheared. A Gremlin was clawing its way into the ductwork.

    Tas¨¬a took out her .357 and she crawled forward on her belly. The sound of rotors and a hissing noise approached. As she expected, up popped a tiny red LED light on a small antenna to the left of the main sensor on the machine head.

    The sensor was in a socket equivalent to a hominid''s left eye. It rotated around as it identified her.

    Tas¨¬a put four bullets into that socket. With the limited capacity of the weapons that she had on her, blinding it was her best hope.

    The gremlin shook, violently; Tas¨¬a backed up. Its behavior, when wounded or incapacitated would be unpredictable.

    As she pushed with outstretched arms, a canister popped out of the Gremlin''s side, and exploded in a swarm of tiny darts. Most of the needles that shot in her direction did not even penetrate her clothing, but those that did stung like hell.

    She knew almost immediately it was the same agent that Missi had used to get her off the wall.

    The strength was draining out of her limbs. It was becoming more difficult to breathe.

    The Gremlin was not finished with her just yet. A cable shot out from it. Little claws on the cable end latched onto Tas¨¬a''s work boot. The robot started reeling her in.

    She still possessed two rounds in her .357. Tas¨¬a shot both of them into an exposed rotator support just above the cable.

    The cable came loose enough for Tas¨¬a to writhe about and roll over. She pulled at the claw in an attempt to wrench it loose as she backed away from the Gremlin.

    As its gears squeaked, she gathered that the robot was stuck in place. The shots fired into the socket must have damaged other internal systems.

    That explained why it reverted to riot tactic countermeasures instead of the lethal Hunter mode actions she had been promised.

    So disappointing when a man promises more than he delivers.

    Tas¨¬a could not merely pull the claw off of her boot. Her muscles were feeling too rubbery to do even that much physical exertion.

    She took a moment to examine the mechanical structure of the claw. Two switches surrounding the claw assembly locked it in place around her heel.

    Tas¨¬a kept a set of bobby pins and lockpicks beneath the hairpins above her ears. Fortunately, it was common and some what expected in her culture for hair, even as smooth as her own, to be shaped into distinctive coifs with the assist of hairpins.

    Tas¨¬a removed one of each, and worked at the switches. There was a connector between them that ran underneath the claw. She used the lockpick like a wedge and squeezed it between.

    Running the lockpick up and down the length between the switches, it finally loosened with a spring popping up in the air.

    With no more pressure to keep it supported, the claw slackened in on itself. Tas¨¬a kicked herself free and she scurried away from the Gremlin.

    She was forced to backtrack in her weakened state. It was a slow haul. Beneath her was the sound of other Gremlins. They must not have had a fix on her exact position like the one she rendered inoperable.

    The tranquilizer was taking a toll on her. She successfully fought it off with the adrenaline before. But now, she was suffering the after-effects that left her shaking.

    Tas¨¬a wanted to do nothing more than find a safe little comfortable niche and fall asleep.

    She passed by the duct that swooped upward back to the atrium to the eastern half of the SIU.

    She kept crawling northward into unknown territory. There were whispers that sounded like a hallucination to her. If the sons of bitches had also used a hallucinogenic compound to tip those darts, Tas¨¬a could only wonder, what took them so long?

    It would have made the chemo treatments more interesting.

    She shook off her concern once she understood the source of the whispers.

    To her amusement, Tas¨¬a found a niche display whose surface was covered in orange and green glitter shaped like a bunny . Two dozen white and yellow pebbles formed a sunburst.

    Quite child like.

    There was a vertical duct in the center of the display, but no LED lights upon its surface like all the other ducts.

    A whisper unfurled from its depths.

    From vibrations in the tin surface beneath her knees, she knew that the Gremlins were loose again in the ductwork. Tas¨¬a did not have what it would take in either weapons or personal strength left in her to hold off another Gremlin assault.

    Another dusk whisper came up from the dark of the vent. It wasn''t drug-hued imagination, it was the Disappeared.

    It now appeared to be her best chance. She had figured from her last survey of the maintenance tunnels that at least two of the access corridors ran near the floor of the Containment Ward for the Disappeared.

    There was a Gremlin close enough to her that Tas¨¬a could hear its rotors churning.

    She would have to take her chance on the floors below. Spinning her legs around, she set them down into the vertical duct; she grabbed a hold of the lip to push off it.

    Tas¨¬a used her elbows and her knees to squirm downward. It was almost too much for her rubbery-feeling muscles; she managed to keep this up for a dozen feet.

    Blood rushed to her head, she felt faint. Tas¨¬a responded by squeezing her body up against the side of the duct.

    A tense ache jolted her in the gut. Her heart fluttered.

    The last thing Tas¨¬a was aware of before she fell unconscious was that she was falling.

 1.38 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a was annoyed by a persistent tap on the shoulder. After each time she felt it, she drifted back to a state of unconsciousness as soon as the tap stopped.

    "Get up, you," a tightly nasal voice persistently asked her.

    Kill me if you gotta. I''m not moving.

    She would have voiced those words too, if she only possessed the strength.

    "What is wrong with you?"

    The stranger shook Tas¨¬a. Strong and lengthy feminine hands grabbed her shoulders, and shook the little burglar with abandon.

    Tas¨¬a gasped for air, forcing herself into sudden wakefulness. Dangerous-feeling heart palpitations fluttered through her chest.

    Disappointed in her own willingness to give up, Tas¨¬a recalled her prayer.

    Lord, never let me be in a place of vulnerability like that poor woman, ever again.

    To expect anything out of it, Tas¨¬a had to keep fidelity to the prayer. It was as much a promise to herself as it was a request of the Lord.

    It was no time for rest. No time to give up. She raised both arms, only to find them flopping to the side uncontrollably as she was being shook again.

    "Get up, you. If I fall it''s going to hurt you. Don''t make me fall on you. It''s Climb Time."

    "Bea, stop that!"

    "Auntie Silvi L¨®-Ch¨®, she won''t get up. It''s Climb Time, and I don''t want to fall on her."

    "Can''t you see that she is injured? Back up, Bea. Let me look at her."

    Tas¨¬a raised her head. She was in a clothes hamper. A rather large one. Packed with mattresses on the bottom, and rows of blankets on top of them.

    The vent was eight feet above her. Even still, given the distance of the fall, Tas¨¬a was lucky that she did not break her neck on her descent.

    An elegant woman peered down at Tas¨¬a. She appeared to be in her forties.

    "You are up, I see. Can you move?"

    "Don''t know until I try," Tas¨¬a answered.

    She pushed herself up, and she twisted her body around.

    "Nothing appears broken," she continued.

    "Good. Let''s see if I can help you get out of there so Bea can have her Climb Time."

    A little, old woman rushed up to Tas¨¬a, anxiously. Big childlike eyes and a grin even more goblin-like than her own stared back at Tas¨¬a.

    Tas¨¬a jerked back when she saw the long, indented stitch mark running the length of the woman''s cranium. She tried not to appear alarmed by it, but it was difficult not to be.

    Down here, that could be my fate, but for the grace of God.

    She grabbed upon Silvi L¨®-Ch¨®''s shoulder, pulled up, and rolled out of the hamper.

    Bea climbed up on a wall inset. She scooted up into the vent.

    "Damn," Tas¨¬a commented at the strange sight of the gnomish woman ascending upward.

    In my sixties, will I still be a spider monkey?

    Silvi L¨®-Ch¨® frowned.

    "That used to be a sociology professor. Unfortunately for her, she got herself involved in radical politics. Became just another Disappeared. That lobotomy was further punishment for pissing off powerful people. She now has the mentality of a seven-year-old."

    From high up in the vents came a joyful screech.

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    "Weeeee!"

    Bea plunged down into the hamper. She pulled herself up and bounced around the hamper like a kid. Gleefully, she giggled.

    Bea reached once more for the wall inset.

    Tas¨¬a frowned. She looked up at the woman identified as Silvi L¨®-Ch¨®, pleadingly.

    "It''s not safe for her to go up that vent. I was being chased by robots in the ductwork above."

    The woman answered back after a moment of consideration.

    "They won''t come down this far. The operator''s security clearance is certainly not high enough to warrant such a violation. They will send it up the chain then spooks in special operations will come down here and grab you. Unless, they mean to keep you down here."

    They watched as Bea made her way back up the duct.

    "Does she ever try to escape?"

    The woman shook her head.

    "She has no concept of the idea of escape in her head. This world down here is all that she knows. To think, she was once somebody''s lovely Beatrice. She was once another person''s favorite teacher. Now, she is erased."

    Silvi L¨®-Ch¨® said these words with a wan smile. Goosebumps covered Tas¨¬a as she realized to whom she was speaking.

    Of course, a person with the mentality of a seven-year-old would simplify the name to something like Silvi L¨®-Ch¨®.

    "You are," Tas¨¬a began.

    The woman put her hand on Tas¨¬a''s arm, gently. Her gaze appeared cross, but only pleadingly so.

    "Yes, I am. It''s not necessary to talk about it."

    "They said you were kidnapped, and later murdered. But your body was never returned."

    "Of course, they would say that. I don''t like recalling or talking about that episode in my life. It is quite humiliating."

    Bea climbed back up the vent.

    The woman offered Tas¨¬a her hand.

    "Call me Victoria. Silvi L¨®-Ch¨® was the nickname I had in elementary school. It is uncanny that Bea would know that."

    Tas¨¬a took a look around the room into which she had fallen.

    It appeared to be a fairly large washroom. She guessed it served close to sixty people.

    She frowned and she looked up to the much taller woman.

    "I was under the impression that a sorority of the Manifest lived down here. I have heard the Wailing so I know that there is something to it."

    Victoria nodded as she motioned for Tas¨¬a to follow her out of the laundry room.

    "They are down here, all right. The Banshees are in a different Ward. We are the one for political prisoners."

    Tas¨¬a hesitated for a moment. She had a possibly rude question in her mind to ask. Victoria, however, was the one person in a perfect position to answer it.

    "What''s the problem," Victoria asked, noticing Tas¨¬a''s reluctance.

    "Pardon me for my curiosity, but If you are all Disappeared, and no one knows you are down here but our Salvage masters, what is the point of keeping you alive?"

    Victoria actually nodded and smiled.

    "My dear, you cannot blackmail the most prominent families of all this region if all you have in your possession are their loved one''s corpses."

    The former president and her burglar guest passed through a dorm room. Twenty bunk-beds lined the wall. There was an annex across a hallway. Tas¨¬a could see into it. It was another dorm that possessed another set of bunk-beds.

    Tas¨¬a looked around for vents and pipework. Nothing appeared very promising.

    The women looked up as Tas¨¬a walked through their living area, but none spoke to her.

    None of them appeared in the least bit curious, nor hostile. They seem to move very slowly down here, Tas¨¬a noted.

    Except for the highly animated Bea.

    Victoria spoke to this.

    "They aren''t being rude, my little friend. At least, not intentionally. Most of the women down here are on mentally dampening medications. If you are forced to stay, from the look of you, I have no doubt the same will be done to you."

    "I have no plan to stay, Victoria."

    Tas¨¬a would not call the response on Victoria''s face a smirk. The former president of Paraguay was much too polite and well-bred to use such a common expression of vulgar body language.

    It was, however, a knowing look that expressed a great deal of doubt without being necessarily condescending.

    "What is your name, dear?"

    "Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris."

    They were now near the lavatory. A set of six shower stalls lined one wall.

    Victoria glanced down at the bloodstain on Tas¨¬a''s shirt that covered over her tummy wound.

    "May I suggest a shower? I detect chemicals upon you as if you have had teargas lobbed at you."

    Good Lord, did she ever need one.

    "It''s a damn good suggestion, Victoria."

    The woman smiled expressively at the affirmation. It was likely the first time she had felt useful to anyone in a long time.

    "I will get one of the more responsive girls to help me wash your clothes and dry them. You should have at least a few hours before they come to get you. Nothing ever gets shot up the chain efficiently."

    "I do my best planning under a hot nozzle."

    Tas¨¬a said these words in jest while lifting up her shirt to show Victoria the wound beneath the bloodstain before she removed the shirt.

    "Of course, my dear. It appears you may have been giving them a run for their money. Is that a gun?"

    "Yes. Two of them!"

    With that, Victoria nodded and she left to fetch an assistant.

 1.39 Book One: The Gray Soul

    As Victoria left Tas¨¬a alone, she stripped off the rest of her garments. Tas¨¬a peeked into a shower stall. There was a plastic netting beneath the nozzle.

    A perfect place to hang her guns. She was not going to let those get out of her sight.

    Tas¨¬a switched the empty chamber of her .357 out and loaded a moonclip. She replaced the magazine in her .32 with the last full clip.

    She frowned. Like everything else on her body, the guns and holsters possessed a sticky film on their surface.

    With a paper washcloth, pre-soaked in sanitizer cream, that she took from the dispenser at the lavatory door, Tas¨¬a wiped her equipment down.

    Satisfied, she placed the holsters under the water nozzle.

    The fanny pack and the NeoPalm PA, she lay down on a bench beside the shower curtain.

    A small Amerindian woman entered the lavatory. She appraised Tas¨¬a''s body with unselfconscious abandon for a moment before she realized what she was doing and she looked away.

    Tas¨¬a smiled to herself. She recognized that same stare whenever someone got a good look at her body for the first time.

    Tas¨¬a had the wiry muscularity of a female martial artist with none of the collagen assisted softness that made so many ballerinas and gymnasts lovely and feminine to an appreciative pair of eyes.

    Hers was a hard-body, instead. It made an impression.

    Tas¨¬a gave the woman a friendly smile, and she shuffled over to shake her hand.

    "You must be Tas¨¬a," the woman stated. "I''m Della. Victoria sent me to retrieve your clothes. I brought you a few towels, a washcloth, shampoo, and body soap."

    Della gave the bag with the items over to Tas¨¬a.

    "Gracias, mi amiga."

    Della excused herself before leaving.

    Just before Tas¨¬a could hop into the shower, Helo?ste''s Personal Assistant began to hum and flash a blue light. A text message appeared.

    ''- Where are you? Have you made it out, okay? I heard a lot of gunfire.

    It was Felicit¨¦. The Argentinian was worried for her. Tas¨¬a smiled at the concern.

    I am mostly okay, Tas¨¬a texted back. It has been a struggle every step of the way as I make my way out of here.

    Now, I''m held up down in the cellars of the SIU amongst the Disappeared. Still trying to figure my way out of here.

    - Jesus, Felicit¨¦ answered back. Then you will still need this. I decrypted the facility maps with a bunch of useful schemata attached. Including the containment area of the SIU cellars.

    This is not the containment area, Felicit¨¦. It is a Ward for political prisoners.

    - Oh.

    Seconds later, Felicit¨¦ continued.

    - There is an area listed as a supply depot. It is connected to the Westside vents by a 32-foot vertical drop. Oddly enough, for a storage area, it contains plumbing for a fully equipped lavatory. You must be there.

    I am.

    - Tas¨¬a, the containment area is a floor below you. Besides the vertical duct upward, the only path out of there for you is an elevator. I assume if you are down there, amongst the Disappeared, the ductwork must have proven more troublesome to cross this time.

    Correct, my friend. That it was. Gremlins. I had to get the hell out of there.

    - Then you have no choice, Tas¨¬a. I hate to say it, but you will have to make your way through the containment area.

    Tas¨¬a studied the maps and the accompanying electronic, duct, and pipework schematics.

    She glanced into the shower stall, and she studied the ceramic tiles that lined the wall beneath and above the nozzle. Felicit¨¦ actually missed that potential route downward.

    There was also something else that she needed to do before she took that shower. Tas¨¬a felt around her work trousers and she grabbed the last grenade from her belt clip.

    Tas¨¬a wrapped a towel around her body, so when she ventured out of the lavatory she would not scare any of the other girls like she did Della.

    Felicit¨¦, are you still there?

    - So long as you still need me.

    To this reply, Tas¨¬a wanted to respond with something a little cheeky but she reined it in. With an escape in progress to tend to, she kept it to business.

    Felicit¨¦, I have something that is going to help your case in front of the HRC. Victoria L¨®a-Ch¨®natta is a prisoner down here amongst the Disappeared.

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    - No fucking way, Tas¨¬a. She''s alive? Felicit¨¦ followed her response with another message.

    How is she? I just can''t imagine . . .

    After the proud and politically dominant L¨®a family refused to negotiate, Victoria''s captors released several videotapes that shocked all of South America. Victoria was assaulted sadistically in those videos and was not spared any indecency to her person.

    Tas¨¬a did not watch them. She saw the one clip in the news broadcast and that was enough to turn her stomach. It showed Victoria''s face in tortured pose, with her mouth silently repeating the words.

    Just kill me, already.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head violently. It was political theater all along designed to force her family into cooperating with the Salvage.

    Whoever authorized it, deserved to die. Whoever was a member of the crew that carried out the nasty deed deserved to have their dicks cut off.

    She had to meditate a moment to keep from hyperventilating. For Tas¨¬a, it was personal.

    - Tas¨¬a. Felicit¨¦ continued with her text. Be sure to get a DNA sample from L¨®a-Ch¨®natta. The Human Rights Commission will want proof. If you get the sample and my thumb drive to them, I will owe you big.

    Tas¨¬a answered back with faux modesty.

    ''t twas nothing.

    - Tas¨¬a. I''ve got to go. I will be indisposed for an hour. I will check up on you, then. Ok?

    Tas¨¬a answered back.

    Peace out, until then.

    As she stood by the elevators, Tas¨¬a examined the doors.

    How am I going to do this?

    Tas¨¬a plucked two bobby pins out from behind the unadorned hairpin that kept her feathering side bangs in place.

    A quip from another action-comedy movie came to her mind as she held the two pins up. She voiced it out loud.

    "You should have never let me keep these, Elgar. Now you will have to die!"

    "Tas¨¬a, how are you holding up? Are you all right?"

    Victoria stood behind her with a look of concern on her face. Tas¨¬a''s own face flushed red as she admonished herself to keep her goofiness in check.

    Villains don''t have a fucking goofy side, Luv.

    That voice, in Green-eyed Elise''s own words, echoed in Tas¨¬a''s inner-mind.

    "Forgive me, madam. I''m just being childish and stupid."

    "It''s quite fine, Ms. del Alma-Gris. Even before I was kidnapped, I had no sense of humor. It is just how I am, and I''m afraid it appears strange to me when I see it displayed by others.

    "What are you doing, by the way?"

    Tas¨¬a was bending one of the bobby pins to hold the catch on the grenade.

    "I''m making a little trap to delay the special operations spooks when they get down here."

    She worked the other pin set against the first in counter pressure.

    Once completed, she laid the grenade down tightly against the door catch. She squeezed the little bump on the top of the first bobby pin into the door and its connector rail.

    When the door opened, it would relieve pressure from the bobby pin, causing it to snap and release the catch on the grenade.

    "Does that actually work," Victoria asked.

    "I play with bobby pins in my cell all the time out of boredom. I''ve gotten really good at this kind of construction."

    When Tas¨¬a stood up she spoke again.

    "Victoria? If you have a free moment could you follow me back to the lavatory?"

    Tas¨¬a opened up her fanny pack.

    "I need to take a DNA sample from you. Take out one of those gloves. Open up that gauze packet, there. Squish it inside your mouth, and then place it inside that glove and tie it."

    "What are you going to do with that?"

    "I''m going to the Human Rights Commission with it and I''m going to tell them that you are here."

    "Do you know how many pots that would stir? As an escaped prisoner, do you know how exposed you would be? Why are you doing this?"

    As Victoria asked her this, the former President''s voice grew exasperated.

    The response surprised Tas¨¬a, but it shouldn''t have. If anyone deserved to be distrustful and jaded of anyone else''s intentions it was this woman who stood before her.

    She would not believe any claim of altruistic righteousness that Tas¨¬a made. Tas¨¬a decided to try a different tact.

    "I have a friend back at Ward Nueve that I everything to. I hope to use your DNA as leverage to get her out of there."

    "Well, I appreciate your honesty, Tas¨¬a. I will give you that sample."

    Ironic enough, as much as she wanted to help Felicit¨¦, her simple desire to right this wrong was closer to the truth.

    Tas¨¬a was almost finished with her shower when the special operations team announced over the PA that they were coming to retrieve Tas¨¬a.

    Tas¨¬a tisked at this advanced warning. They must really think in their big, brawny na?ve hearts that they had her cornered.

    Amateurs. Amateurs. Amateurs.

    "All residents of Ward Once, be advised. In exactly five minutes you will be thoroughly searched by an advanced team. Lay down with your faces turned to your pillows, your bodies facing your mattresses, and your hands together behind your necks.

    "Any other position, or any movement on your part will be regarded as hostile, and will be met with lethal force."

    As the message repeated itself, there was a mad scramble about the dorm rooms.

    Tas¨¬a dried herself with a towel as she stood beside the bench near the shower stall. Della peeked into the lavatory. Upon seeing Tas¨¬a, she walked over and handed Tas¨¬a a netted bag with her clothes in it.

    "I''m afraid they are still damp."

    "Not your fault, of course. Thank you for your kindness, Della."

    "Good luck."

    Della hurried out.

    Tas¨¬a got dressed, quickly. She took out her .357, aimed it at the tiles beneath the nozzle at their cross-joiners. She emptied her clip going down the line in a vertical fashion.

    Women screamed from the dorms at the sound of the shots. She had to ignore them though it did give her a tinge of guilt to frighten them so.

    The tiles along the vertical incision she made were in a greatly weakened condition. She loosened them even further by stomping against them with her boot.

    Tas¨¬a got on her hands and knees in the shower stall. She cleared out the remaining broken tiles.

    The pipework ran down to the Containment area below. There was enough room in the space between the pipes for her slight little figure to fit.

    She heard the grenade pop off. The buzz of the radios blared cascades of ugly feedback as their Commander screamed into his mike.

    She must had got him with the trap dead on.

    Tas¨¬a climbed into the wall recess, grabbed a hold of a pipe, and she pushed herself down.

    "Follow me down here, motherfuckers. I double-dog dare you."

    Even Tas¨¬a questioned her own sanity at this point.

    There was a good reason that the Manifested were isolated and contained wherever possible.

 1.40 Book One: The Gray Soul

    Near her goal where the pipework curved into the lavatory below, Tas¨¬a smelled something odd but familiar. She could not recall where she had smelled this sweet but mildewy scent before.

    It was near to complete darkness further down the pipework from the lavatory above; by her calculation, she had climbed down two dozen feet.

    Her watch featured a full brightness mode. When she switched it on it shone an orange haze surrounding her.

    Now she recognized the scent.

    Of course, this level of the building would be thick in the spores.

    A familiar face floated in the haze. The spores rippled as the Incubus bobbed in a smooth, hypnotic sway.

    Hello, friend.

    It said.

    "Hello, beautiful one," Tas¨¬a said aloud.

    The Incubus put its finger to its lips.

    Soon, the angry ones above will be able to hear you. Do not continue in this direction, dear Tas¨¬a. You are not ready for these Manifested Ones. They are so far beyond your ken that your mind will be haunted to your dying day if you choose to be exposed, and be cursed with an unsatiable compulsion to end it.

    The SIU medical personnel. She wondered if they got hazard pay.

    Tas¨¬a. One more matter before I leave. Something is awakening inside you. Be wary of it even as you use it to transfigure into something greater.

    It placed it''s hand on her tummy, covering her wound. The touch was warm. Her tummy beneath felt enlivened but restless.

    Soon, I will show you how to overcome the condition that has been imposed upon you.

    Imposed?

    She wanted to ask what was meant by that remark but the Incubus disappeared.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at her watch. She had grown to expect the effect now. The time dilation of the dream state. No more than twenty seconds had passed since she enabled the full brightness mode on her watch.

    Where the pipework curved into the wall in front of her, Tasia found beneath her feet wood upon which she could stand on.

    She frowned as she studied the wall. It was different than the construction in the lavatory above.

    Tas¨¬a felt the surface with both of her hands. It was not the same porcelain tile work she so easily plied just minutes before. It appeared the surface bulged up thickly. It was warm to the touch as if it had most recently be manipulated.

    She would have to take the Incubus''s advice, and find another way.

    Tas¨¬a glanced up. They would be here soon and she could not be in a more vulnerable position than she was in now.

    She scampered back up the pipes. How far up do they go?

    Tas¨¬a knew from the schematics that they did not join into any rooms above so she automatically nixed the idea of returning to the surface level.

    In fact, the schematic showed there was a thick layer of sheetrock that would prevent her from doing that.

    The best she could do now was to plant her feet on the nozzle just above the hole that she had made, and then make opportunity of the operative''s mistakes as they occurred.

    She kept her gun trained downward.

    If any of the special operatives happened to glance up, she would have the advantage.

    As Tas¨¬a set herself in place, one of the operatives yelled, "El Clavo, over here, boss. I got something."

    Tas¨¬a heard the shuffling noise of busy hands. Something right after that clanked against the wooden board just beneath her and it dropped down into the pipeworks.

    The familiar blast of a gas grenade sat off just below her. Fortunately, it was merely the tear-gas of the thumbnail grenades, not the nerve agents they used in their sticky ones.

    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    "So you found her escape route, Manuel," a man said as he entered the lavatory. His tone changed to an excited, almost fearful one, with his next few words. "Oh shit! Put that up before you kill us all, man."

    "I wanted to put some light on her. So she can''t surprise us."

    "Fuck man, don''t be stupid. That flare in the close quarters of woodwork is bad enough on its own. But, in close quarters with the high-grade gas we use in those grenades, it will light it up, and then spread like wildfire. You would incinerate half the building."

    "All right. I''m putting it back up."

    The second man, they called El Clavo, drew closer to the hole. She could tell it was him by the hard, slow stomp of his boot that conveyed authority.

    They stood there for several seconds without speaking. Finally, El Clavo spoke up.

    "She must have found some kind of cover down there. Else, we would hear her choking and convulsing with that concentration of exposure. A very resourceful little bitch we have on our hands."

    The first man spoke skeptically.

    "She''s gone, man. Out of here. Found some hole down there to exploit with that tiny little body. Squeezed into another quarters and vamoose!"

    El Clavo called the other four men to gather in the lavatory for a planning meet-up.

    Tas¨¬a stood still, straining to hear their actions.

    The gas merely irritated Tas¨¬a''s eyes and sinuses in the current position she crouched. It took a little discipline on her part not to sneeze.

    "What do we do now, boss?"

    The first man asked.

    "You stay put. Guard that hole. Moose-Lick, there should be a maintenance room nearby with fire extinguishers possessing full-foam dispensers. If we have to burn her out, we need to be prepared. You three make sure that all the inmates down here are zip-tied. We''ll all meet back here in five."

    As the other operatives headed out, the one assigned to guard duty in the lavatory leaned up against the wall.

    El Clavo was right. The man was an idiot. The assumption he made in his words that she was gone now reflected in his actions.

    Then, Tas¨¬a noticed what was slung over the man''s shoulder. Her heart fluttered; she peed herself ever-so-slightly. It was the first love of her life, after Aunt Tatiana.

    A SIG MPX submachine gun. The sexiest little motherfucker ever made. She recalled when she was ten and her father taught her how to shoot the submachine gun (SMG) at the range.

    Reveling in loving memory, she almost let out a happy gasp right then and there, but recalled where she was just before she let it out.

    I. Have. To. Have. That!

    It went against what her greater sense of caution tried to warn her, but the Angel of Theft would not be so easily denied.

    Silently, Tas¨¬a inched closer. There were several items on the operative''s belt that appeared compelling as well.

    A 1911 .45 holstered at the indention of his back. The big gun pulled his belt past the crack of his ass.

    Five more gas grenades and two flares lined the side of his belt she could exploit with theft without tipping him off.

    She removed each of the items one by one. Finished with that, Tas¨¬a was left with a conundrum.

    How am I going to get the submachine gun?

    Tas¨¬a took out the stiletto knife out of its sheath on her calve. As she held the SMG steady as not to rile the man with any sudden movement, Tas¨¬a cut the band the weapon hung on.

    His weight was distributed on the shoulder that he leaned on.

    With the bulk of his Kevlar vest between him and his gun strap, it was unlikely that he would feel a thing, in theory.

    She removed the gun from his possession with utmost confidence.

    Her deft hands were exquisite in these actions. Even so, she was still asking a little too much of those fine instruments in accomplishing this sleight of hand.

    He glanced back just as she squeezed the submachine gun between the water-nozzle supports for safekeeping.

    A very confused look overwhelmed the passivity of his face when he realized something was not quite right.

    With a sudden jerk, he now understood that his gun was missing.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed another flare from his belt now that he no longer leaned against the wall and the rest of his effects were exposed. She lit the flare before he could call out. With a brusque thrust of her hand down his pants, she shoved it down the crack of his ass.

    She followed this action with a grenade in her other hand which she thrust in his front pocket, squeezing it up against his dick and balls to activate it.

    As he gasped at her invasive and rough treatment, Tas¨¬a mule kicked him in the back of his Kevlar vest to get him as far away as possible.

    She retreated; Tas¨¬a crouched low in the crawl space when he lit up in a spectacular fashion.

    The man''s screams called the others into the room.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed a hold of the SIG MPX. She rested the stock against the crest of her elbow like it was a baby she dearly loved.

    El Clavo screamed at the burning man as he re-entered the lavatory.

    "You stupid, useless motherfucker! I kept telling you not to play with that shit. Now you really fucked up!"

    There was a commotion of the other four as they tried to put the fire out. One of the operatives carried an extinguisher.

    Before he could aim the nozzle. Tas¨¬a set it off with a three-round burst. The explosion of foam in his face blinded the man.

    She reset the trigger for full auto before spraying the bullets into the other men. When the magazine emptied, Tas¨¬a reached over and she lay the gun on the floor.

    She took out her .32 caliber as she jumped down onto the tiles of the lavatory.

    The man she so indelicately set ablaze smoldered as he whimpered still.

    Out of mercy, he was the first one that she tapped with two bullets to the head in the age-old standard procedure to ensure what was expected to be dead was actually dead.

    As she stopped to take a breath a tingling electricity flowed up and down her neck. The feeling grew comforting, but she was a bit appalled with herself.

    This is starting to become too easy. What happened to the old Tas¨¬a who was like a ghost in her burglaries?

    She smelled the chemical scent of her treatment enter faintly into her nostrils. Another voice in her head came to her defense.

    Just remember, they were going to burn you alive.

    Still, the Incubus was right, something was changing inside her. Something woke up when she prayed to the Lord after Kae-Kae was murdered.

    A great and terrible Leviathan had entered her soul.

 1.41(final) Book One: The Gray Soul

    Tas¨¬a picked through the bodies for more loot. With the netted bag Della gave her, she had room in it to take all of their small arms, magazines, clips and grenades.

    Four of their knives were of good enough quality for her collection of combat blades.

    She searched through their wallets. Disappointed, Tas¨¬a grimaced to find that none of the debit cards on the operative corpses were as easy to exploit as Faison''s had been.

    Tas¨¬a was confident that with the right software she would find a means to access their accounts as well.

    Still, she had several hundred dollars cash in USD, expensive watches, and high-value jewelry. Special operatives tended to wear a lot of jewelry.

    She also took a diamond stud out of El Clavo''s nose. Wretched and slimy it turned out to be given she inflicted several wounds on the man''s face.

    Stealing ain''t always pretty.

    Given her expertise, this extraction of wealth took her a little over two minutes.

    El Clavo''s walkie-talkie began to beep.

    "Big Daddy to El Clavo. How are we looking? Subject apprehended, or, better still, dead?"

    Tas¨¬a grinned. Big Daddy''s words made her day. Made her feel extra special. Having a fan club tended to do that to a girl.

    She picked up the walkie-talkie.

    "Little Sister here. I''m afraid El Clavo can''t come to the phone at the moment. Or, any moment ongoing from here on out for that matter."

    Several seconds of silence passed by before Big Daddy spoke again.

    "Ms. Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris?"

    "Yes?"

    "The fuck did you do to my Tier One team?"

    She glanced at the corpses. Took a double-take at the burnt remains of Manuel. She did not bother to take anything else from him that she didn''t loot before he was incinerated.

    "You consider Manuel Tier One? Maybe El Clavo, but Manuel? He got the rest of them killed."

    "Whew," Big Daddy sounded out of breath. "Excuse me, ma''am. I need a moment."

    She heard several deep breaths and the man walking away from his walkie-talkie.

    As she tried to make sense of this, Tas¨¬a realized the PA was trying to get her attention with a blinking blue light.

    It was Felicit¨¦.

    I''m back, Tas¨¬a. Everyone in Ward Nueve is getting interviewed. I had mine. It didn''t take as long as I thought it would. I have a new present for you.

    Tas¨¬a smiled.

    I love presents. Tell me! Tell me!

    Tell me!

    Okay, okay. I won''t keep you in suspense, any longer. I got you . . . Access codes! The SIU is yours for the taking.

    "Little Sister, are you still there?"

    Big Daddy''s voice came back on-line.

    That was very thoughtful of you, Felicit¨¦. It''s exactly what a girl always wants. I have to talk to some head clown. I think he wants to negotiate. Later.

    "Right here, Big Daddy."

    "Before we continue our discussion, I have to know purely as a professional concern. How did you rope them all into dying?"

    The walkie-talkie had a camera. Tas¨¬a took a picture of the corpses lying together and another of the hole she made in the wall. She sent the pics over to Big Daddy.

    "See that hole? They never bothered to look up; they just assumed that I went downward as that was the route that would give me the most distance from them.

    "I set one on fire. Manuel, of course. The others came scrambling to assist him. I mowed them all down as they stood over him trying to put the fire out."

    Big Daddy laughed.

    "That''s some Sendero Luminoso level fucked up shit, right there, Ms. del Alma-Gris. With your relationship to General Kutuzova, that shouldn''t surprise me."

    As Big Daddy spoke, Tas¨¬a checked the access codes. The elevator. Something about it caught her attention.

    One floor on the elevator route read Code Orange Authorization. It wasn''t an entire floor, just a corridor that led to a helipad.

    Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    Tas¨¬a grinned from ear to ear in her best goblin-faced smile ever. She knew now how she was going to get out of here.

    With the exception of the route to the helipad, Tas¨¬a locked down all the floors, bringing all of the double-sealed doors down.

    They weighed eighteen thousand pounds each. It would be a bitch to open them manually.

    "Hey, Little Sister, are you up to something? You are not simply using my penchant for good repartee to carry out a scheme are you?"

    "Of course not, Big Daddy. I''m just preventing you from doing anything you are going to regret later. Like sending some more Gremlins over to fuck with me."

    It was now time for Tas¨¬a to begin her bluff. She continued.

    "You should know, I have acquired a little insurance policy."

    "Little Sister, it wounds me to my soul to think you would think that I would pull some amateur hour bullshit on you. Do you know how many years I have been in this business?"

    "Big Daddy, I''m sending you an exact coordinate. Get one of your bright boys to bounce a Geiger off it. Tell me what you get?"

    She sent over a text. The coordinates to the Muskovite.

    Big Daddy cleared his throat. He continued.

    "While we wait for the results, tell me what we are to expect."

    "I have a nuclear reactor on overdrive. Every two hours I send a special radio wave pulse that tugs the rods back as the extra energy from the cycle I started creates a field of attraction that heats the rods up further and further. It''s all a bit over both our heads, but trust me, you will want me to keep hitting that button.

    "When I am gone, you can send your bright boys in to dismantle it. You are not going to like where those coordinates lead. It is going to keep you too busy to try anything underhanded just to coordinate a little diplomacy."

    "Ah, fuck," Big Daddy answered. He got the gist of what she meant.

    Tas¨¬a heard whispers on the other end. Some men were speaking into Big Daddy''s ear.

    He was near the phone, but did not have it up to his ear. She heard him yell to someone, "Shit, shit, shit. How did we let this happen? We have no bargaining chips at all."

    "Hey, Big Daddy? You sound like you are shaking like a leaf over there."

    "Just found out you got me over the barrel."

    "Not a good feeling, is it?"

    "No, it isn''t, Little Sister."

    "Can I trust you''ll hang tight while I catch a helicopter out of here."

    She heard only breathing for several seconds.

    "Do what you feel you have to do, Little Sister. I''m sitting tight."

    Tas¨¬a found Della''s bunk. With one of the stock Swiss utility knives she found on Mule-lick''s body, she cut the zip ties binding Della''s hands and feet.

    She handed her the knife to cut the other women loose.

    Tas¨¬a found Victoria. After she cut the ties binding the woman, she handed her the PA.

    "I went to the trouble of finding your son, Sebasti¨¢n''s phone number. Give him these coordinates. With his influence and his business empire it shouldn''t be any trouble for him to get helicopters over here and to get the Salvage to back off while we all are transporting out of here."

    The former President of Paraguay cried for several minutes before Tas¨¬a could prompt her to get over her disbelief and make the call.

    A little over an hour later, as they flew over the complex, Tas¨¬a used her last bluff. She called Big Daddy.

    "I just pressed the button one last time. Your boys have two hours before the shit starts getting really hot down there."

    "We''re still waiting on the spooks to clear out. They are still packing."

    Tas¨¬a peered down at the tower. She saw in the fenced-in area something that gave her a moment of pause. A white F-150 just like the one Kae-Kae''s killer drove.

    Peeking around further, she found him. The white-haired man was instructing Le¨®n as he carried bags out to the truck.

    I''m never working with that piece of shit.

    Tas¨¬a thought as she wondered how she was going to break it to the general. She shook the matter from her mind, and continued her conversation.

    "Big Daddy, I am sending you a map with an alternative route to the tower cellars so you can get that little business taken care of. It''s much more imperative than keeping some spooks with a long-dead mission happy."

    She recalled the dream she had the night before and the dire warning she recieved. At least that is what the Incubus would have you believe.

    Fifty odd miles out from the prison, Tas¨¬a had the helicopter land on a desolate country road. It was two miles from a safe house she had never told anyone about.

    "Tas¨¬a, words fail to convey what I owe you," Victoria began. "I will have our lawyers look into getting you a grant of clemency. I imagine the Salvage will hardly be in a position to object."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "It would be a waste of their time. I plan to go back to doing what I do best."

    "That being?"

    "Raiding the abandoned mansions of Esconda Vida."

    Victoria laughed. Her right leg shook across her knee as they sat together in the back seat of the leather-upholstered business copter.

    "I was beginning to think that you were some kind of special operative sent to bring us, the Disappeared, back to civilization. You really are a little criminal aren''t you?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head.

    "Those mansions are abandoned by those who chose to leave, who could afford the detoxification process, while the rest of us are forced to endure this."

    Victoria gave her that politely cross look that only she could pull off.

    "I have news for you, Tas¨¬a. A lot of us cross that border. I have been over there on the other side. It is quite a pain, though. You spend a week detoxing, and three weeks in isolation.

    "I can see why there are some who choose not to come back until this crisis is over, but I could never do that myself. This is home. No matter if it''s somebody else''s idea of Hell. This is my home."

    Tas¨¬a grinned.

    "I could not have said it better, Madame President. I wish you the best of luck."

    "You too, Tas¨¬a. You too."

    Tas¨¬a jumped out of the helicopter cabin and removed her bag from the storage. The helicopter flew overhead. As it disappeared from view, she texted Felicit¨¦.

    I made it.

    So happy :) Felicit¨¦ texted back. Don''t you forget about me, Tas¨¬a.

    Tas¨¬a looked towards the sun, a free woman. It was near to sunset. All around her, the world appeared wide open, ripe with possibilities.

    She texted Felicit¨¦ back.

    Never, my friend. Never.

    The End of Book One

    Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris continues soon in Book Two: The Premie Harvest

 2.1 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Part One: The Cure

    Tas¨¬a noticed the creep staring at her as soon as she got on the bus. Odd that he picked her out of the crowd of workers with whom she tried to blend-in on their commute into the little city of Villa Marr¨°n.

    She affected the appearance of a hard-bitten worker going to a factory job. Tas¨¬a thought herself to be quite convincing at it, until now.

    Tas¨¬a was cooly honest in her personal evaluation. It took at least a little effort to pretty herself up to achieve any effect beyond an appearance of average and plain.

    Which in Tas¨¬a''s current situation was quite alright. She needed to get lost in the crowd and stay lost. Usually, that was not a problem.

    This guy though.

    He was in his early forties - beer gut hanging over his black jeans, handlebar mustache, and a fixed glare at everything that passed by on their route, be it a traffic light, donkey cart, or a goose squalling at kids.

    At semi-regular intervals that glare found its way back to her.

    She pegged him for an ex-cop. He was too far gone in the upkeep of his personal appearance to be currently serving on any force.

    Also, too young to be retired on a full pension. Either his career ended in disgrace or - nevermind, she thought, now that she saw how he shuffled from one leg to the other with a prominent limp. In his case, it was definitely the latter possibility.

    He was collecting disability.

    Was he working now as a private investigator?

    Ugly memories stirred in her gut.

    Or worse, a bounty hunter?

    She followed a small woman in her sixties to a seat in the middle of the bus. As they were waiting at the stop earlier, Tas¨¬a took the time to have a conversation with the woman.

    To any curious observer, Tas¨¬a hoped that she would appear as someone familiar with the locals as if a rapport had been long established between them.

    The last time she had lived in the town, just to the north of Villa Marr¨°n, she cultivated an identity as Avellana, a bike courier.

    In her first few days back in town, Tas¨¬a recognized no one from her past as of yet.

    She tried to continue with their previous conversation left off, but the older woman was just not interested.

    Her mouth twitched impatiently as Tas¨¬a spoke.

    At the ends of the older worker''s eyelids crow''s feet grooved deeply when she squinched at Tas¨¬a before she glared with emphasis at the man.

    The ex-cop stood in the front rows of the bus. His hands clutched at a pole.

    Tas¨¬a got the message. From the old worker''s perspective, if that particular man was eyeing Tas¨¬a, it was only because she was trouble.

    Admittedly, an accurate enough assessment.

    The neoPalm Personal Assistant vibrated in her pocket. On inspection, Tas¨¬a saw that it was a message from Felicit¨¦.

    She glanced back at the booth-sized restroom. It was unoccupied so she excused herself before walking back to it, deliberately and slowly.

    Tas¨¬a glanced up at the mirror set above the back door. The ex-cop was staring hard at the back of her head with a contemptuous snarl set upon his ugly lips.

    As she closed the bathroom door, it came to her attention the enclosed space needed airing out. The window was jammed shut with thumb-sized rubber erasers pressed into them.

    Tas¨¬a unsheathed her stiletto blade and forced both of the erasers out. After lifting the window, she wedged the erasers against the edges to hold the window in place.

    Climb out, then jump, and make a run for it, Tas¨¬a considered as the air rapt against her.

    It was obvious that the man was suspicious of her, but whether or not he was on to who she was was another matter.

    If she did run for it, it would certainly remove any doubt of her culpability that he may still have.

    Tas¨¬a cleaned the toilet seat with a sanitized wipe before she sat down to pee.

    The PA vibrated again. She decided to check it this time.

    It wasn''t the light banter that had been going back and forth between the two over the past few days after the escape. Those exchanges had been mostly celebratory where Felicit¨¦ made suggestions for what she should do with her newly acquired freedom.

    This wasn''t one of those exchanges.

    One word in red, ''urgent!'', marked a compressed folder.

    Felicity headlined a text file for the batch -- T., you should see this.

    Attached was a long video clip.

    I haven''t located the puzzle palace of the New Masters, but the tower has definitely become uninhabited.

    I found this bouncing around in the traffic, though. This is some fucked-up footage from the cellar you told me about.

    Tas¨¬a ran the video file. Five armed men walked in front of the camera. Two of them appeared to be soldiers fully geared up, while the other three were most definitely spooks.

    They were the closest substitute to an actual set of bright boys that Big Daddy had on hand. Understandably so, nuclear engineers were never on loan to mere prison security.

    The spook that was serving as the leader narrated as he approached the hangar door at the end of the aqueduct maintenance tunnel.

    She could now see his lapel badge.

    The Commander began to speak.

    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

    "According to the map, on the other side of this door is the cellar of Tower Praxis."

    The companion behind him, another spook, chuckled out loud.

    The leader turned his head around and he furrowed his brows at the other man.

    "Hermann, how about you letting us in on what you find to be so funny?"

    "Tower Praxis? What kind of pretentious, bullshit name is that?"

    "Hermann, you''ve been in the intelligence field for over a decade, and you are just now finding out that the things we do are a bit overwrought? But, more importantly, do you know what the word ''praxis'' means?

    "To be honest with you, it''s a pretty sensible designation. Tower Praxis is where idealists used to get sent when they needed to be broken in or have their careers bounced. Does the seismic level fuck-up known as Demona Helo?ste mean anything to you?"

    The back of Hermann''s head tensed oddly as he answered in a contrite tone.

    "All right, I''ll keep my tongue planted firmly in-cheek. Just point me at the satellite and I''ll do what I do."

    "Hermann, have you ever disabled a nuclear-powered generator before in your life?"

    From the look on his face, Tas¨¬a could tell Hermann was going to spew out another sarcastic quip.

    "I have never even seen one with my own eyes, but the YouTube instruction video made it look easy enough. Less complicated than matrix division. We''ll be fine."

    "Jesus Christ," the Commander muttered under his breath.

    "Do you hear that," said a voice from behind the camera.

    The sixth man. He held the camera so steady, Tas¨¬a had forgotten to count him as part of the squad, until now.

    It was music from woodwinds.

    The Commander scowled deeply.

    "Alright, open up that door. The sooner we get this fucked-up day over with the better."

    The two other spooks complied, as the soldiers held their Steyr AUG Para submachine guns in place to provide cover fire if needed.

    The leader shined a light from his electric torch into the far left corner of the cellar where he expected to find the Muskovite satellite.

    The room remained perfectly still. Including, the small woman who stood atop of the satellite with her head bowed down.

    She raised her head and greeted them with a benevolent smile.

    "Don''t move," the Commander yelled.

    She giggled back at him with a deeply throttled voice that exuded sheer caprice.

    "This I learned from Om Anaghaya Namaha as he explained why he chose to remain un-Manifested."

    The Infernal Madr¨¦ lifted her arms up as she began a dance that told an old story. Her limbs moved in sway to music that came from another room close by.

    The camera was fixed on the beautiful vision of the petite woman in her silken finery. The Commander could be seen in the right-hand corner of the video frame looking around at the others. Fear was set in his eyes.

    Tas¨¬a could not see them, but she assumed the men must have been mesmerized as she had been.

    "You may find it ironic that I would celebrate the one who placed a bind upon my kind, myself, and my kin. But such is the Grand Scheme when you come to accept and thus perceive it."

    "Lady, you have ten seconds to start climbing down from there."

    "Commander Gonzaga, if you could have your men perforate this device I''m set upon with your guns, I would much appreciate it. You have no idea how much it would help my cause."

    "All right, Hermann, ignore the batshit crazy bitch. Just do your job so we can get out of here."

    The Commander''s head suddenly jerked as he caught sight of something to his left.

    "The fuck?"

    There was a whispery volume of sound that grew louder and louder.

    The camera turned around just as the man who held it was over-ran by hundreds of spiders. Each one of which was more than two feet in length.

    Tas¨¬a replayed the clip once more. She recalled how the Infernal Madr¨¦ had her entirely entranced.

    Tas¨¬a recalled as well the night the Incubus came to her in her sleep. It pleaded for her to confront the Infernal Madr¨¦ once more.

    If Commander James Fucking Bond Gonzaga, accompanied by a small squad of professional operatives, could not handle that task how did the Incubus expect her to do it?

    Tas¨¬a closed the bathroom door behind her. She looked around just in time to see the ex-cop turn his gaze elsewhere.

    The old woman had taken another seat beside someone else. The seat that they shared was now empty. It was the last available seat, as well.

    Tas¨¬a made her way back to it. She scooted to the window so she could watch the scenery pass by.

    A few minutes later, and enrapt in rare idle time, she did not notice the ex-cop approaching until he was hovering over her.

    Tas¨¬a cursed herself. Damn. Every lesson from my profession and my bid in prison concerning situational awareness thrown out the window when I needed it the most.

    He did not bother to speak. He just sat down beside her, uninvited. Tas¨¬a glanced at him for a close-up assessment.

    There was nothing professional about that leer in his eyes. The skin around his neck was flush red with expectation.

    Tas¨¬a tensed up. She knew what that meant from similar circumstances in her life.

    Within mere seconds, her intuition proved correct.

    He put a hand on her thigh just above her knee. Tas¨¬a''s heart sank as his hand slowly inched up her leg.

    She could not afford to make a scene and have people recall her face.

    Tas¨¬a would just have to let him get his finger wet, and hope that would satiate his curiosity where he would then leave her alone.

    She hoped that was the extent of his interest in her. Perhaps, she had misread his intentions. Perhaps, he wasn''t after a bounty on her head, only what was between her legs.

    She could shrug it off, after the fact, without ever giving it another thought. It would not have been the first time.

    It was so meaningless to her it did not trigger her incontinence that occurred with true intimacy.

    It sounded so easy to Tas¨¬a as she made a cold calculation of it all, but deep in her gut, she knew better.

    An anger started to grow inside her. A warm heat and an accompanying tingle spread just beneath her skin. Her vertebrae pulsed as if electrically charged and the back of her skull felt like it was on fire.

    She felt this exact sequence of sensations like an ultra-tuned shot of adrenaline course through her body on other occasions over the last week. It was a most deadly feeling.

    She wondered if the experiments on her as a baby premie and her subsequent treatment in the prison medical center had anything to do with what she was experiencing now.

    Now, she was asking questions that had never occurred to her in transgressive occurrences in her past.

    Tas¨¬a wondered about the women he had felt up like this before. How many? Dozens? Hundreds?

    If she did not stop him now, what of those who he would encounter later on, after she let him get away with doing this to her?

    His hand was now cupped on the crotch of her trousers.

    She looked up into his eyes. She smiled as she got his attention. It was to disarm him and to distract him.

    He appeared confused. Certainly, what motivated him the most was the fear he inspired.

    With her left hand she took out her stiletto; she hid it against the inside of her wrist.

    Tas¨¬a caught his gaze and her eyes went slowly down to the slight bulge in his pants. She let out a faint gasp sounding pleased at the sight of it.

    Target acquired.

    Her eyes went back to his. She raised her brow in a gentle arch. He licked his lips.

    She reached over with her left hand in a hidden move of quick finesse. Two-thirds the way up his inner thigh, she slit open his baggy jeans with a downward flick.

    Reaching her hand into the slit, Tas¨¬a thrust the pointed tip of the stiletto into the man''s penis. It pinched deep into the tendon connecting to his scrotum.

    Without a single pause in motion, Tas¨¬a flicked her wrist upward, curving the blade up in an encircled path.

    She shredded the man''s cock into two equal halves.

    Tas¨¬a returned the blade to its sheath.

    As blood began to soak the ex-cop''s crotch, Tas¨¬a stood up and yelled.

    "Good God, hombre! You just pissed all over yourself. I am not staying here, you dirty mother fucker."

    The man was in shock. He tried to stand as he looked down.

    Her motions were so quickly executed that he had no idea what had happened.

    On his second attempt, with hands quivering beyond his control, he finally stood up to examine himself.

    Indeed, it did look like piss given the black coloration of his jeans.

    He then grabbed his crotch and the ex-cop gasped loudly.

    As he leaned forward, Tas¨¬a liberated his wallet.

    A commotion commenced from the female laborers. Some now saw his soiled pants and screamed at him in derision just as Tas¨¬a had done.

    The driver slowed down as he tried to peek through the mirror to see what was happening.

    Tas¨¬a took advantage of the chaos; she made her way off the bus through the bathroom window.

 2.2 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    After jumping off the bus, Tas¨¬a stood on the side of a desolate country road. The same road she had walked through rural burgs to get to her own house a few days before.

    She calculated in her head the distance to the downtown of Villa Morr¨®n, Tas¨¬a cursed under her breath.

    Eight miles she would have to walk to score some LSD.

    Tas¨¬a recalled her conversation with Missi, amazingly enough as it seemed so long ago, but in reality, it occurred less than a week before.

    "How are you feeling," Missi asked.

    "Nothing different, except I have a feeling the chemo is weakening my inoculation. I see the incubus in my dreams. I also see the black-eyed ones asking to be let in. And the snake in the tree hissing telling me what it could do for me."

    As for her mental health, Tas¨¬a had known for a few months now it was slowly deteriorating. Now that she was on the run, there was no chance of legally receiving a new inoculation to stem the damage the chemo treatment had done to her.

    Self-medication was the only answer she had available to her. Though the inoculation was a combination of compounds, lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, was the principal catalyst in the pharmaceutical cocktail. It stymied the continuous assault of the nanospores upon the mind.

    Tas¨¬a walked a little further down the road and she stopped. The stitches in her gut made it uncomfortable to travel any distance more than the shuffle it took her to get from room to room around her house.

    Tas¨¬a had a first-rate medical station there, but she likely caught an infection due to having to do her own stitch work without any assistance.

    Now that she walked with a tinge of pain with every step, did she regret her action back on the bus that got her where she stood now?

    No, of course not. Tas¨¬a now realized something about the ex-cop''s attempt to assault her. He was softening her up for an interrogation.

    It is what cops did in the Quadra without a whit of remorseful hesitance. There was no alternative course of action where she could have stayed quiet as he felt her up and he moved on.

    He would have humiliated her with rough hands dug into her groin the entire bus ride and then hauled her to the station to collect a bounty with the pretense of professional procedure being followed on display.

    Imagining the outcome if she had remained passive made Tas¨¬a sick in the pit of her stomach. She spat on the ground in disgust.

    That is how those animals operate.

    Her father''s words came back to her.

    There is never a negotiation for just a little giving-in here for a little break there. Any loss of control over what happens to you for the purpose of negotiating your freedom or the extent you are allowed to remain free is a loss of all control over what happens to you.

    She had done right by her old man. To which, Tas¨¬a smiled.

    Still, she had something going for her, Tas¨¬a knew this region north of Villa Marr¨°n very well. There was a deer trail that ran adjacent to the main highway before it swerved deeper into the woods to cross a bike path.

    The bike path, itself, was a shortcut into the city.

    Sirens blared from a mile up the road, Tas¨¬a slid into the woods and she began to run along the deer trail towards the bike path.

    With the jagged terrain of fallen limbs, long flat rocks, and black soil, the pain on her abdomen surged.

    She could endure it. One tough little bitch, Green-eyed Elise once complimented her. Tas¨¬a was more concerned about the condition of the stitches than the pain she felt.

    She had stolen the medical equipment she kept in the basement of her safehouse from the mansion of a cosmetic surgeon. The filament she chose to feed through the auto-surgeon was delicate and fine-grained to prevent any noticeable scarring.

    Tas¨¬a paused behind a grove of trees and she crouched down as the volume of the siren wailing reached a crescendo.

    An EMS Firebird hugged the curve of the road just a few dozen yards away from her.

    "Hot damn, sweet senora," Tas¨¬a whispered as it approached.

    The converted sports car was a sexy little red number.

    Man, would I love to steal that fine bitch if the opportunity presented itself.

    The front retained the characteristics of a sports car, the backend expanded to haul a patient and an attendant.

    It was a good sign that so far only the medical services had been alerted. In the confusion on the bus, the injury was still being treated as an accident.

    Tasha giggled at a notion that crossed her mind, perhaps they mistook the injury for a zipper malfunction.

    When the Firebird wagon passed the grove on by, Tas¨¬a began to haul ass.

    A mile out from the bike trail, Tas¨¬a noticed an odd odor in the air. It smelled putrid and sour, like the esters from a compost of rotting bananas.

    She slowed down and caught her breath. Backing up a little bit, she aligned her shoulders against the trunk of a large tree.

    Tas¨¬a had smelled this odor before.

    Ascospores.

    In the first several days of the invasion, giant sacks of the floating spore colonies would burst yellow dust over the cities and countryside. Before the inoculations, panic and mass psychosis ensued.

    They were still a source of fear given other oddities often followed the wake of their path of destruction.

    Tas¨¬a felt a chill in the air. Then she was in the cast of a shadow. Above her, one large ascospore, easily ten yards across its diameter, hovered in a tumbling fashion. It was encircled by several smaller ones.

    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    The crashing sounds of branches breaking surrounded her. Tas¨¬a turned around so she could grip the tree if she needed to climb it.

    Several small deer rushed past her before they merged together on the trail. They moved swiftly, and they were quickly out of view.

    What were they running from?

    Tas¨¬a was now feeling to be one hundred percent the city girl who in her youth was easily spooked by even the woods of a well-groomed park.

    How she felt dragged along unwillingly when her father took her hunting, Tas¨¬a recalled, vividly.

    Yet, she had adjusted. She had spent hundreds of hours comfortably hiking these very woods, but now they felt alien to her.

    Chin up, and don''t lose your shit, Tas¨¬a.

    She told herself.

    No sound followed from whence the deers had merged. She took a peek.

    Nothing but somber woodland. The ascospores seemed to merely dangle harmlessly in the sky.

    With clenched fist, Tas¨¬a committed to steel her resolve. She would not allow herself to be panicked, no matter what crossed her path.

    Continuing down the deer trail, she soon came upon familiar grounds once more when Tas¨¬a recognized a thicket of hazel limbs.

    The very ones that gave Tas¨¬a her alias years ago when she first explored Villa Marr¨°n. She had even dyed her hair to match it.

    Beneath the thicket of brush, mushrooms lined up so dense they could have been mistaken for the strata of a pinkish clay sediment.

    She began to have an uneasy feeling. Tas¨¬a pulled out her favorite gun, a Kel-Tec P-32 Custom. She had the grip restocked in a polished mesh made of ground snake bone for sigil related purposes.

    As she stepped deeper into the mushroom laden path, a small ascospore began to twirl around her head.

    A liquid film oozed from its surface. She was relieved at the sight of this. Though you would not want to get the liquid on you, it was easier to defend against then if this ascospore was in its dry phase.

    She gripped her gun tight in both hands. This scenario had the feeling of a trap.

    To see how it would react, Tas¨¬a dropped on her knees. It pulled back, hovered in place as if it was uncertain how to respond.

    Tas¨¬a took advantage of the easy placement that the target gave her. She shot it twice.

    It spun like a top before plunging on to the ground.

    A ratatat sound, like the high-pitched howl of a rabid squirrel, shrieked from above her. The giant spore shook in place.

    Did she just piss the big mothership-like fungus off?

    It began to spin in its place hovering above her, gaining more and more momentum with each rotation.

    Tas¨¬a ran like hell. She knew the angry fungus that followed was only a few dozen yards away by the constant howl that stirred at her back.

    Wind buffed up against her shoulders, sudden and abrupt. She ducked flat in a spread against the black soil and dead leaves of the ground.

    The ascospore slammed into the trunk of a thick tree. A twirl of yellow gas started to fall in all directions and spread far out into the path and shrubbery around her.

    Shivers of goosebumps crawled up along the length of her skin. In most situations, she felt confident she could manage, but in Tas¨¬a''s gut, she felt ill-prepared to deal with these pestilent things attempting to trap her.

    She grabbed for a face mask from her fanny pack and she slid it on before she stood back up.

    Many yards up the path, a high-pitched scream grew in intensity before it broke out into a loud trembling cry.

    Tas¨¬a''s stomach quivered until she was forced to jerk the mask back off and vomit. She knew that sound intimately. Until her dying day, she would associate it with the worst shot she had ever taken.

    She once took a shot she thought dead center to kill a deer with a hunting rifle, but she merely grazed the beast.

    The torturous cry was unmistakable.

    She remembered her own tears. Her father mussing her hair as he comforted her.

    Sincerity in all of your actions, my child, is your only assured path to further yourself righteously.

    Her father had told her. So odd that his words endeared for so long. How they outlasted her youthful rebellion and his wisdom endured.

    Tas¨¬a reached for the gasmask she had pocketed. It felt like a rumpled pair of thick bloomers in her hands. There was a time every senora kept a gasmask in her purse.

    No more. People became complacent but Tas¨¬a never forgot.

    She continued up the path. Something, wiry and long, rustled in the shrubs ahead of her. Tas¨¬a expected to see a gore-ladened slaughter of the pack of deer by this time.

    There was no blood where the struggle was taking place. Upon inspection of the aberrant thing in front of her, she could not make heads or tails of it.

    That same something jumped out of the shrubs. It pulled at a deer that, in turn, kicked back at it with the leg that remained free.

    Where it had touched the deer, gray boils protruded out of the beast''s skin.

    Tas¨¬a pointed her gun at the aberration. It appeared to be of a fungus composed of an oily and leathery bark.

    She took aim at the center of its mass before emptying the magazine into its body.

    It shattered like wood bursting at the wedge of a vicious ax, revealing red rope-like tendons beneath. The aberration writhed and coiled on the ground for several seconds before it lay dead still.

    Tas¨¬a reloaded her pistol as she walked up to the deer. Its scream now merely a moaning noise suspired only when it breathed out.

    There was another noise so faint Tasia could barely hear it. It was distinctive and grotesque, nonetheless. The gray boils on the deer''s body now numbered in the hundreds.

    They made a searing noise, as if the acids foaming up inside them were ready to boil over.

    "I''m sorry, dear lady," Tas¨¬a told the deer before she ended its misery with a single bullet to the head.

    As she walked farther up, more strata of mushrooms occurred along the pathway. The pinkish and white hews were beautiful though she was in no mood to relish the sight of them.

    Tas¨¬a hoped they were not even more harbingers of evil design.

    Most of the residents of the Quadra believed the Cull Spores were some mad spook''s idea of the future advancement of warfare.

    In the years since, no one was certain of the veracity of those stories. With the Salvage discouraging wild speculation, no one of note would take credit for the rumors either.

    Tas¨¬a now understood why these notions were preoccupying her mind; the mushroom strata was indeed a deliberate design.

    It curved into a second path up a hill. On both sides of the new path, the dense strata formed intricate latticework, baroque and artful.

    She decided to follow the path to see what was on the top of the hill.

    A gazebo of dense mushroom and ivy thickets formed around a fairy mound, like one would find in the Celtic lands of Europe.

    There was something that spoiled the beautiful scenery around her. An unmistakable scent. The oily, sweet musk of death.

    It came upon a breeze down the pathway from the fairy mound above her.

    Tas¨¬a reached the summit; as she began to kneel she saw what caused the stench. In the center of the mound was a dead fairy baby.

    Dry little butterfly wings, little lambsy hooves, two spiraling ram horns upon its head. Its mouth agape in a sad eternal frown.

    Tas¨¬a stared in disbelief. She had to tell herself.

    Little fairy, you are not a dream at all. You are real. You seem so real.

    She noticed an epitaph beneath its feet written in Latin

    Te semper amabo, mi dulcissime sole.

    Mommy will love you forever, my Sweetest Sunshine.

    Tas¨¬a bent down on her knees, closed her eyes and she prayed for its soul.

    What a unfair world we inhabit, Tas¨¬a thought.

    A Biblical verse came to Tas¨¬a''s mind.

    I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will rob you of your children. Pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I am the Lord; I have spoken.

    She wept uncontrollably. She had thought herself incapable of the emotions that now wailed out of her, given how emotionally spent the ordeals she endured the past week caused her to be.

    As quick to change as a jackal''s leer, the smell of death dissipated.

    Tas¨¬a shut her eyes more tightly. If she opened them what she had seen would no longer be there. That she feared.

    It was just as fearful to her as what she just witnessed. It meant she was going insane.

    She had to score the LSD before she spoke to Le¨®n, tomorrow.

    She had to do it for her Aunt Tatiana. She turned her head, got up and ran.

 2.3 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Walking along the bike path, Tas¨¬a got lost in the scent of hyacinth.

    She hummed to herself.

    She recalled the melody her mother sang while caressing the strings of her guitar with long, dagger-sharp nails in brittle strum.

    The words of the old Andalusian folk tune came back to her.

    - Esa sensaci¨®n de estar abrumada, las l¨¢grimas se lavaron.

    - That feeling of being overwhelmed, the tears washed away.

    Tas¨¬a let no concern enter her mind but the scent of flowers, and the call and cah of the crows she had just noticed, though they had been present ever since she merged onto the path.

    Tas¨¬a arched her head up for a better view of them. She saw the birds; they were not those of the Old Watcher.

    These birds were not so lithe as his, nor were they curious to examine her.

    They were wild and feral, unknowing things, not overseers over humankind.

    Ninety more minutes of walking on the bike trail, Tas¨¬a had made five miles of progress when the trail crossed a roadway leading into town.

    She also caught a bit of good fortune.

    A food truck had stopped beside the road for a moment and Tas¨¬a walked briskly to catch up with the two women occupants who emerged from its cabin.

    Tas¨¬a took out a roll of bills from her fanny pack and waved the money in the air.

    "Senoras! Senoras!," she yelled to the pair as they attempted to furl an unraveled canopy back in place.

    "I will buy you your gas mileage for the day, and some food and a drink if you can get me into town."

    She waived two twenty USDs in front of the two fortyish women. "It is yours for a ride into town."

    The two strangers were glad to accommodate.

    As they rode down the road, the two ladies proved to be too polite to ask questions about the grungy T-shirt Tas¨¬a wore. Nor ask about the blood-stain where the shirt clung to her abdomen.

    Tas¨¬a examined the wound before she had run into the women. It was mostly calloused over.

    She also concluded that the jag created in the stitch work was minimal in its damage to how the flesh would set.

    Tas¨¬a supplied them with a story. She told the workers that she had been mauled by deer while hiking. A soiled rip on the back of the shirt from where she barely dodged the ascospore only made her story more believable.

    "The hell with walking, I''m buying a bike," she told them to explain why she continued her journey toward the town.

    Tas¨¬a dared not tell them the truth of the spore''s attempt to trap her.

    Though everyone experienced the dreams, and everyone knew of the Manifest and many had also seen their kin succumb, what Tas¨¬a experienced would have sounded like a bout of schizophrenia to most people who lived in the Quadra.

    Such was the effectiveness of the Salvage''s social engineering, as it had been designed to allay fear and unrest.

    Tasha found out she needed not to have worried.

    One of the ladies, who gave her name as Ramona, told her many people now avoided the bike paths. Strange things were known to happen.

    Raising her head in an expression of ominous affectation, Romana held Tasha''s attention with narrow dark eyes and long brows cast like a gypsy fortune teller.

    The woman proclaimed.

    "The old troubles, they are returning."

    In return, Tas¨¬a gave her a nervous stutter, feigning na?vete to such matters.

    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    They soon reached Villa Marr¨°n.

    When the food truck stopped at a light where they faced the familiar statuary of a feminine angel leading soldiers heavenward, Tas¨¬a looked up and then towards the Southwest.

    Still no crows.

    There were always crows here at Plaza del Centro Muerto.

    Tas¨¬a turned towards Romana.

    "Where have the crows gone," she asked.

    The lady grinned as she nodded forward.

    "They have followed their master."

    A few blocks forward, Tas¨¬a could make out the shape of cages atop a five-story building. Indeed, crows flew to and fro from the cages with strident purpose in the span of their wings.

    It was the administrative building of their destination, the open market square.

    The truck stopped in the parking lot Romona took Tas¨¬a''s hand.

    "I can''t have you go into town looking so grungy."

    She grabbed an advertisement t-shirt for their food truck franchise from the back seat of the cabin.

    It read, La Cocina Fusionistas.

    Tas¨¬a insisted on paying for it.

    "The money is nothing to me compared to having your respect as my peer, Romona."

    Tas¨¬a gave her yet another pair of twenty-dollar bills, USD, for the shirt before she jumped out of the truck.

    Her eventual target was a half-of-a-mile to the southwest. She could see the uneven rooftops of the brownstones from where she now stood.

    However, Tas¨¬a was famished. The aroma of the food packed in the back of the truck worked on both her appetite and her senses as she listened to Ramona tell her about the experiences she had as a young cook working in Lima, Peru at the cross-cultural restaurant Chiba''s.

    There were a fair number of people of Japanese descent in that city whose zest for the vida loca and haute couture of Miraflores made her experiences there the most memorable in her life, Romona so proclaimed.

    Tas¨¬a purchased three ceviches rolled in steamed rice paper as the ladies set up their business. They were not really ready for any customers.

    Still, they were eager to accommodate their new little friend who didn''t mind throwing her money around.

    Tas¨¬a preferred to eat fish with a white wine or a light, fruited liquor instead of a soda, but her lips were too parched to be choosy.

    After the kind of morning she had had, Tas¨¬a was glad to have the hydration and the protein from the fish.

    Even still, though famished, Tas¨¬a relished every delicious bite.

    With that taken care of, and her lunch out of the way, Tas¨¬a concentrated on her mission.

    She wanted to surveil her destination before she approached any closer to it.

    In prison, a friend who was from this very region told her that the stoner cult, her target, had grown distrustful and insular since Tas¨¬a had last been in Villa Marr¨°n, nearly two years previously.

    Casing the place, as she was planning to do, had to be done with care. This close to the downtown, it was too easy for her to appear conspicuous. Strangers were assumed to be grifters if they did not blend in very well.

    Tas¨¬a looked to her first destination.

    The maze of booths along the asphalt car lot was centered around the old five-story high red brick building she had spotted earlier. She had in mind to pay the Old Watcher a visit.

    The ladies Tas¨¬a accompanied were already entering the building to pay their lot rental fee.

    Tas¨¬a caught up to them.

    "Do you think they would mind if I used their restroom," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "All you can do is ask," answered Ramona.

    Tasha noticed the other woman looked off into the opposite distance. A reflective glass surface on the door beside the lady revealed a sly smile.

    Otherwise, the woman had proved to be quite capable of keeping her opinions to herself.

    Tas¨¬a had squatted and pissed an hour before along the trail after convincing herself nothing else crazy was going to happen in the nearby woods.

    However, she had another purpose for the private occupancy a restroom would provide.

    Once inside the lobby, to her fortune, the staff ignored her as they were too busy with other matters. One merchant was loud and complaining about some contractual obligation owed him; he made a show of himself.

    Thank you, asshole, thought Tas¨¬a.

    She could talk her way into almost anyone''s good graces, but it was better to avoid unnecessary contact while casing a target.

    She made her way to the public restroom. It was a small accommodation where one was expected to lock the door when using it.

    Tas¨¬a didn''t bother.

    Tas¨¬a checked the window over the sink. It was small but she could slip through. She saw that it opened to a rear lot. Four cars, none of them occupied.

    She watched the lot for any activity as she took a few minutes to clean herself up with soap and paper towels. The latter she used to scrub her face and dab her underarm downy dry.

    It was not likely anyone else would show up in the back lot before noon break. The staff whose vehicles occupied the lot were stuck inside at work until then.

    Tas¨¬a slung her fanny pack around her shoulder. Even her tiny size zero waist was a tight fit through the window.

    Once through the window, she scooted up the side of the building, and onto the roof. A crow whose piercing eyes were as old as two lumps of coal greeted her with a low polite, ''cah.''

    A cochlear implant, a miniature twin of Felicit¨¦''s own, set on the side of its head.

    She pulled herself onto the roof. An old man stood before her and smiled as he offered his hand.

    "Tas¨¬a, old Mel there told me you were on your way."

    "Cuervo, it has been a long time coming," she said to the father of the only man with whom she had ever fallen in love.

 2.4 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    "My home is yours. It isn''t much, but you are welcome to it."

    Her host told Tas¨¬a, warmly. His words were spoken in a low, airy reed.

    Sachmilli Cuervo wore a Panama straw hat and a red-on-black checkered flannel shirt. Long silver-white hair fell on his shoulders.

    In his hands, he gripped a snub-nosed pair of garden shears.

    He was a small-framed man much like his son. A mere five foot and five inches.

    Tas¨¬a gazed past the maze of bird cages to the shack on the far north end of the roof. Her eyes rested upon a long structure covered in vines, azaleas, and staggered rows of potted plants. A lean-to solar panel sat on top of it.

    She then realized it was not a shack at all but an RV, recreational vehicle, without the wheels attached.

    She met his gaze with a smile.

    "How in the seven hells did you get that up here?"

    He winced as if he was thinking, my little friend is assuredly smarter than that.

    "Easily enough accomplished if you have a lift-server copter available to you."

    Though a long-retired CEO of Marejada, a company devoted to mining equipment and related technologies, their resources were still his for the asking. The business had been kept in the Cuervo family.

    Tas¨¬a had known the man for more than twenty years before she ever met his son. He was the financial patron of her father''s Cathar sect, The New Creation, or more commonly called the Anewed.

    A position of honor and responsibility he inherited from his own father.

    In the midst of the Cull Spore invasion, a quarter of a century beforehand, he requested a leave of absence. Sachmilli Cuervo decided it was up to him to save the human race.

    So far, a Quixote enterprise, at best.

    Tas¨¬a twisted her neck around for a glance towards the brownstone buildings where the stoner cult she sought, Hijos Lux, held court.

    In the center of the tallest platform, something alabaster-white caught her eye, but Tas¨¬a did not know what to make of it. She turned her head back around as not to appear rude and distracted.

    "You have moved from your old office complex. I have heard some interesting things about your former neighbors."

    Sachmilli Cuervo slowly nodded with his neck pinched in tightly. He spoke.

    "There was a time when our purposes were copacetic even if our methods were at odds. They have become something altogether different than what they were."

    With an angry squint, Sachmilli spat in the direction of the ragg¨¦d brownstones.

    "The Sons of the Light, I assure you they certainly are not now, if they ever truly were in the past."

    "So, it is true then? They have no social interaction with outsiders now?"

    Sachmilli Cuervo grimaced as he bit his lip.

    "Mel told me you were showing the signs. They won''t bargain with you in any case."

    Tas¨¬a shivered at both confirmations.

    Even she wasn''t entirely certain if she had been infected. Losing her mind felt like an entirely natural response to her fortunes. However, crows detected both insanity and the onset of manifestation at a hundred-fold sensitivity better than humans.

    "Have a seat," Sachmilli said as he gestured to the patio chairs around a table beneath a parasol.

    There was a police scanner on the table Sachmilli apparently had been listening to before she arrived.

    Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

    "I''ll come back with a cooler full of beers, and then we can talk. I also have something that you should have."

    It was the first time she had seen Sachmilli since the death of his son, Gael-Sebastian. She assumed the gift was something belonging to his son.

    Tas¨¬a smiled and nodded as he walked away towards the RV.

    She considered her predicament. LSD was not difficult to manufacture with a few base ingredients and the right distillation set-up; however, she doubted there was time left to do it herself.

    The Hijos Lux cult was the only source for it of which she was aware. The penalties for the manufacturing and distribution of LSD were the harshest of any substance.

    The Salvage discouraged any competition with its inoculation program.

    Tas¨¬a reflected upon the institution she had grown to loathe.

    With all the medical procedures she was going through, the countless tests they performed on her, their doctors had to have known she was in the early stages of infection.

    They had no more regard for her life than the amoebas in their Petri dishes. Just another test subject. When she finally did become Manifest, they had a place just for that to study her even further.

    She realized it was what her gut was telling her the entire time that she was at their mercy, during her incarceration. Her actions then were not irrational as she feared them to be. Her intuitions had pressed her into open rebellion as her only recourse.

    That was in the past. What was she going to do now?

    Tasha kept a small x7 magnification, 4x28 mm pistol scope wrapped in a scarf in her fanny-pack.

    Even it was too big for the Kel-Tec .32, a gun that was designed for concealment.

    However, for surveillance, the scope was perfect. She focused on the brownstones.

    Two skinny men conversed on the roof.

    They were supposed to be walking along the parameter, guarding their leader, Maestro Sol, who never came out of his mini-palace of black marble in the center courtyard.

    Mel, the crow, cahed for her attention.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "I''m afraid I don''t speak Crow, my friend."

    With a purposeful shake of its own head, Mel flew off in the direction of the brownstones.

    She turned her attention back to the suppos¨¦d guards. They were laughing it up as they smoked cigarettes.

    A strange-looking pair they made. Ochre yellow skin clung mottled on their bones that in turn provided scaffolding to unnaturally thin physiques.

    Their eyes rested deep in their sockets. Both men were bald.

    As she examined the buildings for more defensive vulnerabilities, the police scanner caught her attention.

    ". . . wallet never recovered. All of the women on the bus were thoroughly searched. The victim, Sanch¨¦ Malle carried an unregistered switchblade in his pocket; it popped open and sliced into his penis. Blood loss led to heart failure before attending medics could stabilize him."

    Tas¨¬a had forgotten about the wallet she had stolen off of the ex-cop.

    "I have been listening to that report being updated all morning," Sachmilli said as he approached from behind. He chuckled, "quite a thing to happen to a man''s pecker."

    Tas¨¬a was suspicious of the reported cause of death. Her personal life never went so well to even entertain the possibility that things fell in place for her this time.

    Where did the switchblade come from?

    "Do you know anything about this Sanch¨¦ Malle," she asked.

    "Just a piece of shit like all the rest of them," he answered. "Caught a bullet in the back of his knee while fleeing a shootout. Made early pension and disability. Kept busy as a private eye." Sachmilli waved his hand, dismissively. "Enough of those low-lifes."

    Sachmilli Cuervo held up a delicate appearing jacket of feathers laid in rows. Black of raven, followed by gold and red of hawk, followed by the white and gray of eagle. Thrice the rows repeated.

    Gael-Sebastian told Tas¨¬a of this very jacket.

    "Gael would have wanted you to have this. As you know, he has three older sisters. Growing up, he was their Little Prince. They made this for him."

    "Thank you for your kindness, Senor Cuervo."

    He told her more stories about his children when they were little. Even though she had heard all of the stories before, Tas¨¬a listened patiently as she tried the jacket on.

    She sat a small mirror down in a lean against the police scanner. She backed up to check out the jacket.

    It looked as if it had been custom-tailored just for her frame. How old was Gael-Sebastian when they made this for him? Nine? Ten?

    Oh well, he only grew a head taller than Tasha herself.

    Mel made his presence known once more with a repeated baying "cah."

    He circled once, and then landed on top of a wire cage nearby them.

    Mel''s head stooped forward as he stared into Sachmilli''s eyes. The cochlear augmentation allowed the translation of the crow''s perceptions to mimic a finely-tuned language that could be understood by the recipient of another cochlear implant.

    Sachmilli frowned. He turned to Tas¨¬a.

    "What is it," she insisted.

    "Mel says you have the smell of the Other on you. Just as they do."

    "What does that mean?"

    "The other construct. Not born of the Nano Spores, but created as a rival to them. You have been exposed to her."

    He pointed towards the brownstones.

    Tas¨¬a raised her scope up to her dominant eye. She focused on the object she noticed before. It was a statue of a small woman dressed in silken finery.

    The Infernal Madr¨¦.

 2.5 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a caught a nap in Sachmilli''s RV after hefting down four beers.

    The day had worn her down both physically and mentally, so to her good fortune, she slumbered in a soul drifting dreamless sleep.

    On waking, she felt her vitality restored.

    Tas¨¬a peeked out of an RV window. It was not yet dusk, but the tree shadowed street of her planned approach would give her plenty of cover.

    She stretched, then put her tennis shoes and socks back on; she strapped the fanny pack to her waist.

    The last two items she slipped on were her newly acquired feathered jacket and the Goddess Columbia necklace she had fastened together with a gold Liberty coin and twine of snake leather.

    Totems and sigils. It was the way of her people.

    As she left the little guest quarters, she saw and heard Sachmilli Cuervo snoring away on a hammock spread out in the living room space.

    Tas¨¬a kissed him on the cheek before she left the RV.

    His cooler now only half-filled with bottles of Quilmes beer was still by the little table. Several blue labeled bottles floated in the water and ice.

    She grabbed one, opened it, and downed half the contents. It felt good swishing down her throat as the first thing to flood her senses after the dulce peque?a muerte - sweet little death - of a long slumber.

    Mel offered his advice in low, drawn-out cahs from a perch nearby her head. Persistent he was that she should heed his sound judgment.

    "You sound like you know what I have planned, my little night wing."

    Another swishing swallow down her throat as Tas¨¬a walked the parameter of the rooftop to study the city below her.

    She started her journey towards the north side of the building.

    The beer gave Tas¨¬a a notion of what she wanted to do after the raid.

    I need to get shit-faced.

    The place she had in mind to carry out this second assignment came in view two blocks away as she approached the eaves at the northern end.

    In neon shades of pink, yellow and blue, the logo - La Daga Chicas - lit up from below.

    It was a chophouse and dive bar that became like a second home to Tas¨¬a during the year she lived incognito in the house outside of Villa Marr¨°n.

    She had grown close, like a little sister, to the proprietress, Isabella Cuervo. The eldest of the three sisters Sachmilli mentioned earlier.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. How much she wished she had time to squeeze in and indulge a little bontemps before she met with Le¨®n.

    She swallowed another good quenching gulp.

    How much she wished she could overcome her condition and have some dick thrown her way and get well and truly fucked.

    She laughed at herself.

    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

    The risque notion gave her some pause as she considered from whence inside her conflicted being it derived.

    The Hell did that come from?

    Tas¨¬a was usually quite reserved in language even in her thought processes about sexual matters. She cursed about almost everything else, but not that. She barely acknowledged that she had a libido.

    Tas¨¬a swallowed the rest of the malted beverage down with a hard smile. That coarseness in the sway of her thoughts meant the beer was working its magic.

    It was a good thing.

    She was feeling limber and loose. As a stealth artist needed to be.

    It also helped to be buzzed while committing to carry out some skulkwork.

    Tas¨¬a looked back at the cooler on the other side of the rooftop as if it was drawing her back to it.

    She would have another bottle of Quilmes before she took on her task.

    Back at the table as she peered out from beneath the parasol, Tas¨¬a noticed the statue of the Infernal Madr¨¦ was lit from beneath by a spiral of tapers. The sculpture, in spite of the simulacra it made of a buxom womanly shaped figure, was a stark study of light and shadow in high contrast.

    The Infernal Madr¨¦ posed with one leg forward. The opposite hip swiveled in counter to her shoulders and arms. Much like a Natya dancer.

    What was that odd matter that the entity talked about in that fucked-up video Felicit¨¦ had sent her?

    This I learned from Om Anaghaya Namaha as he explained why he chose to remain un-Manifested.

    Tas¨¬a usually tuned out the nanospore entities when they spoke of such things that were too weird to take seriously.

    She considered this trait to be merely endemic to the nature of artificial intelligence where its communications would be abstracted from true worldly matters.

    Tas¨¬a typed the strange words of the Infernal Madr¨¦. Her search revealed it to be one of the names of Krishna. As the nanospore entity had described, indeed it meant his unmanifested self.

    The Infernal Madr¨¦ also made reference to the legend of his binding of demons as if she had been there and she was one herself.

    It was at odds with the legend of The Infernal Madr¨¦ in her father''s religion. The demon goddess had been formed from the soul of a woman who was very much a real presence in Spanish history.

    Egilona was the Infernal Madr¨¦''s mortal name.

    A woman who was condemned to Hell for the betrayal of her second husband, Abd al-Aziz, in a display of fierce anger by his supporters. At the very same time, in a counter-ceremony, she was bless¨¦d to Heaven for that very same act of betrayal by al-Aziz''s detractors, loyalists to her first husband, Rodrigo, the last Visigoth king.

    This dual state of intended being caused her to rise above both fates to achieve an afterlife uniquely her own. A woman of the most Supreme Independence.

    Tas¨¬a wondered what Felicit¨¦ would make of the AI behind the Infernal Madr¨¦ given the Argentinian''s knowledge in the field of information theory.

    Obviously, the parameters set by the software programmers did not control for an outright perversion of historical inputs in establishing its identity.

    Did this contribute to the AI being so out of control?

    As Tas¨¬a sipped, the other statue, the one of an angel in the Plaza del Centro Muerto caught her eye. It was similarly lit. Tas¨¬a squinted as she compared the two statues.

    There were more similarities than even this.

    In spite of the different purposes displayed in the actions of the two figures, they were essentially affecting the same pose.

    The Infernal Madr¨¦ statue was a deliberate parody, a grotesque mockery, of the angelic figure in the center square.

    Done for what reason? When Tas¨¬a had lived in the greater Villa Morr¨®n only a few years previously, the Hijos Lux was not known for either religious devotion nor sacrilege.

    They were essentially spiritual thrill-seekers living on an edge that tested the boundaries of humanity and Manifestation.

    Morphine was used to weaken the member''s resistance to the proddings of the Black-Eyed Children, the Wise One, and the Incubus.

    The cult members chanted for days on end as they squatted together inside of consecrated air chambers while gas, contaminated with dense concentrations of nanospores, was piped in.

    When the signs of Manifestation started to stir on their faces, they were brought back to their humanity with the consumption of LSD.

    Tas¨¬a frowned as she considered this. The cult she had known was essentially harmless, if also protective of their territory, and secretive.

    However, they threatened no one, and neither had they the ambition to expand their operation beyond sustaining their meager needs.

    What had changed?

    After Tas¨¬a finished the beer, she placed the bottle on the eave support and headed down the side of the building.

    Mel flapped loudly above her as she descended the wall.

 2.6 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    It did not take long for the quartet of office buildings that Sachmilli called home for many years to be transformed into quaint urban squalor after he abandoned them.

    A ruckus arose from drunks inside the first building Tas¨¬a approached. She peered through a dusty glass window. Several broken holes in the surface of it made it easy for her to listen in to the ongoing conversation.

    A small crowd of eight gathered by a rusted oil barrel with a fire blazing in it.

    She arrived just in time to see a hairy nude plump woman pulling a skinny customer into a back room.

    The other men and women laughed at the commotion. One woman was not as amused as the others yelled out, "Blesses, Agu, not like your first. Are you up to it?"

    Agu was likely a nickname for a man named Agustin, Tas¨¬a thought.

    "You know I am. Just worried about my spine."

    The nude woman protested, raising her chest up in a proud heave that caused her ample dugs to spread out against her belly.

    "Don''t you worry, little man. I''ll be careful."

    The big naked girl dragged the young man by his arm. He flailed in futile resistance.

    The other woman put her drink down on the floor. A cheap forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor imported from the northern continent.

    "You''re definitely going to need my help," she complained. She suspired and muttered under her breath. "The things I do for my stupid little brother."

    A man beside the woman said to her, sympathetically,

    "Anneb¨¦l, you can''t mollycoddle him his entire life. He has got to learn these things for himself sometime."

    As she crossed the room Anneb¨¦l threw up her hands in exasperation.

    "Whenever I get that notion and let him out on his own he comes home needing stitches."

    Anneb¨¦l was a tall boozy redhead. She walked like a solid mountain made of thigh and thick bone.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head as she leaned against the outer wall. The goddamnedest things you stumble on when you are trying to sneak past people.

    Five other drunks were left standing around in the big, former foyer entrance room that Tas¨¬a needed to cross.

    She noticed a label on the liquor-styled bottle from whence the last remaining woman sipped. Wild Irish Rose, it read in English.

    Where would you even go to get that shit?

    Tas¨¬a studied the woman and her two companions as they huddled together on one side of the barrel.

    They were North Americans, either Canadians or from the States. Tas¨¬a was terrible at identifying accents in the English language.

    She couldn''t tell if they were from California or Nova Scotia.

    They were a rare sight except for well-paid contract workers with their guarantees of a return to the outer world.

    Amongst the indigent, they were never seen.

    The three she studied did not appear to be poverty tourists but appeared genuinely fucked in their current social status. If a guise, it was a very good one.

    They kept to themselves and leered at one another in their own private little language. The woman''s eyes were full of mischief as she spoke of fishing and catching the prize, a full spectrum rainbow trout.

    Whatever in the Seven Hells that meant?

    Canadians then?

    Tas¨¬a could spend hours just observing these people, but she needed to move on. They were just another set of obstacles to where she needed to be.

    She crouched and walked several yards to the side corner of the building.

    Tas¨¬a peeked over. Only one window pane was exposed on this side of the building. The rest were boarded up.

    Tas¨¬a hoped one of the backrooms in the interior was accessible enough to get her to the enclosed parking lot on the rear side. What she could see of its condition so far was excessively dilapidated.

    It could now be cut off and enclosed by debris, Tas¨¬a worried.

    Anneb¨¦l''s voice boomed through a broken glass pane just three up from the corner of the building. The trio were in the room on the other side.

    "Stop shivering and wiggling. It makes it harder to prop you up. Just let her do her job. She''s a professional."

    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a approached the window as she dug through her fanny-pack. Either Anneb¨¦l was the sister-of-the-year in what she was willing to tolerate, or she contributed greatly to her brother''s dysfunction. She knew them not long enough to judge the matter either way.

    Agustin mumbled something Tas¨¬a could not hear clearly.

    "For the last time," Anneb¨¦l said, in answer. "I''m not helping you with that. It''s perfectly okay as it is."

    "You sure?"

    "Trust me, I''ve worked with even less."

    The plump prostitute laughed and pleaded for Agustin to hurry up. He was costing her in time with her paying customers down the street.

    She was just doing his sister a favor by getting his sad ass laid.

    Standing under the window, Tas¨¬a rolled a cherry bomb in her fingers. It was only a grade more sinister as a stink bomb than the stock fireworks version commonly available at the stands.

    This was a reformulated, repacked version. Highly effective against guard dogs in situations where a bullet to the skull wasn''t appropriate.

    Tas¨¬a lit the fuse and tossed it into a hole in the window near where the threesome gathered.

    Soon smoke puffed up, and three high pitched screams yelled like the Furies in unison.

    Agustin''s voice was the highest pitched and he sounded the most fearful.

    Tas¨¬a scrambled up the wall. It was only a two-story building structure. She was up on the rooftop in seconds.

    Poor Anneb¨¦l had a fit of it. She cursed God, then Satan, then the whole shit-hole world.

    Soon she became convinced of who deserved her ire.

    "You better start running, you fucking Canucks. I know it was you."

    Though amused, Tas¨¬a regretted terrorizing the woman. If the building was more accommodating she would have skipped the people altogether.

    Tas¨¬a was familiar with the design as it was originally laid out. The backlot contained dozens of large earthmover vehicles and several large assemblies of industrial equipment in stacked rows.

    The fence around the lot was double barbed wire.

    Also, the walkway to the lot was caged and barbed to keep out cat burglars drawn to the items that were worth tens of millions, USD.

    That very equipment would provide her with cover as she approached the brownstones of the Hijos Lux lair.

    The commotion of argument wailed out as the front door of the building opened up. One of the Canadian men yelled for Anneb¨¦l to stop pushing him.

    "Come on, you little bitch, afraid to get your candy ass kicked by a woman?"

    "I don''t know what you think I did, lady. What is that fucking smell?"

    "Don''t play like you are fucking dumb," Anneb¨¦l growled at him.

    Tas¨¬a heard a loud slap. Soon to be followed by punches and screams for several more seconds in a scuffle between several participants.

    Finally, the three Canadians ran across the parking lot and down the street.

    The plump prostitute put her dress back on as she walked away towards a gas station whose towering tanks could be seen lit up with carousel lighting from the parking lot.

    The streetwalker bitched in a staccato of near musical fuss that she would have to get cleaned up all over again.

    As the woman stuffed her hips into the dress, Tas¨¬a chuckled to herself. The woman''s tush was quite cute and not too lumpy in its shape for a plus-sized girl.

    Her revelry ended when Anneb¨¦l let out a blood-curdling scream.

    "Goddamn! He said he would pay me three hundred and fifty for the entire night if I partied up in the rental with him and his people."

    "Calm, down. It''s alright, Anne."

    An older man''s voice. Smooth and familiar.

    "No, it''s not. I knew he was a joker by the look of him, Ren¨¦."

    The older man she identified as Ren¨¦ took several seconds to respond.

    "I would rather he turned out to be a prankster than what I suspect he really is."

    "You worry too much," Anneb¨¦l answered with a disgusted bite in her tone.

    Tas¨¬a moved in closer. Her intuition to Ren¨¦''s tone of voice told her that this was important in her own scheme of things, as well.

    "North Americans. Offering a streetwalker three hundred and fifty dollars. It was a lure. They are organ harvesters. Look at you. You are in great physical health for your profession. They could have double-checked your vitals with a scanner when they passed by you in that car. You are a prime target, Anneb¨¦l. You know it, so stop denying it."

    This possibility had not occurred to Tas¨¬a before Ren¨¦ made his case, but he was dead right. She had heard of these smuggling rings of organ harvesters.

    The organs were a source for sporeplay, as they grotesquely called it in North America. The internal organs of Quadra residents were rich in a chemistry unique to nanospore manipulation.

    It occurred to an extent in other animal species, but only the consumption of human organs could provide the uniquely satisfying satiation of appetite accompanied by an unrivaled high that those who indulged the practice craved.

    Prostitutes, given their intimate exposure to potentially hundreds of clientele, provided the most richly cultivated organs of all.

    She saw the three Canadians again in her mind''s eye. The way they kept to themselves. The smirks, the knowing glances. The words they used that were obviously coded with double meanings.

    Organ harvesters. That is exactly what they were.

    She could not allow them to commit their nefarious operations within her own hideaway town. If it was true, if they turned out to be organ harvesters, they would have to be eliminated.

    Did she have time to do it tonight? Only in the early evening, still.

    If they weren''t too far away, she could accommodate her schedule. What she could not risk was their exposure here and the investigative heat they would bring to little Villa Morr¨®n.

    Tas¨¬a decided she now had to make her presence known. She shimmied down the side of the wall.

    Agustin caught sight of her doing this, and he yelped out a shriek.

    "Who the fuck is that?"

    Tas¨¬a grinned as she approached the four who stood in the car lot near the entrance door.

    She turned and nodded her head to Anneb¨¦l.

    "I heard you talking about organ harvesters. Where did they plan to take you to party it up?"

    "Answer my brother''s question," Anneb¨¦l demanded.

    Tas¨¬a reached in her fanny-pack and tossed her a cherry bomb.

    Within seconds the rather tall redhead put it all together; she squinted with a hardened look as she snarled.

    "You fucking bitch, I''m going to rip . . ."

    Before Anneb¨¦l could finish her sentence, Tas¨¬a had the laser sight of her .32 pinpointed on her forehead.

    "You ain''t going to do shit but thank me for saving your ass. Now, where did they say they were going to take you?"

 2.7 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Further on the southwest end of Villa Morr¨®n, Tas¨¬a walked a mere two and a half miles away from the downtown.

    She pressed against an irregularly thick lapacho tree that stood beside a walkway in a quiet residential neighborhood.

    The tree hid her from a group of kids throwing roosters at each other. She had passed the gimpy looking group of boys half a block down.

    The contenders she glanced at as she shuffled by were nastily scratched up. They were counting down for the next round of their duel.

    Angry roosters swayed in the grip of the boy''s hands. Squawking their beaks like mouthy pugilists.

    Apparently, the kids were too stupid to organize a proper cockfight, nor a betting tourney, like previous generations of kids their age would have done.

    She took out the pistol scope from her fanny-pack. Tas¨¬a hid it on the inside of her forearm, and she glanced around at the surrounding houses before she fixed on her target.

    A good thing she did. She heard the gentle sway of a swing before her eyes adjusted well enough to see who set on it.

    A couple held one another as they watched her.

    She gave them an embarrassed smile. Her face flushed red.

    "What are you doing there, little chica?" The man of the pair asked.

    There was something familiar in the tone of his voice.

    "I thought I had the privacy to take a piss."

    The woman laughed. She leaned into her man with her arms wrapped around his shoulders.

    "Don''t let us stop you," she suggested as if she would not mind having a little show.

    The man blew marijuana smoke through his lips.

    The movement of a porch swing in the shadows, the sound of lovers softly nuzzling on each other''s necks, the scent of sweet leaf. These were all singular factors she would miss once in ten thousand days, but she failed to take notice of all of them.

    How had she missed those signs? A growing detachment was one of the signs of encroaching Manifest insanity.

    "I''ll be on my way," she said.

    The man grinned through his whiskered lips as he pointed with a ceramic pipe at the screen door of his house.

    "Go straight all the way down the hall and then take a right. You can''t miss it."

    She realized something; if the bathroom possessed a window, it would provide her an overview of the storage facility.

    "Thank you. I''ve really got to go."

    Her fortune was serendipitous. The bathroom window provided excellent cover to surveille the storage facility.

    Even without the scope, she could see the rows of storage units lit up in eerie red light. With the window open, the sound of bass notes like those that would grind out of an organ wailed up to her from below.

    At least twenty people mingled between the rows. Several of the overhead coiling doors to the storage units were open.

    Blacklights, streamers, flashing lights, strobe lights, and people dancing.

    Perhaps, it was exactly what the Canadians told Anneb¨¦l. They wanted her there simply for the sexual entertainment she could provide.

    Tas¨¬a''s instincts told her that it was too simple an explanation to account for what was going on.

    She fixed the scope on the facility below. Along the side closest to her, the rails and fence links had been bent apart and pulled down.

    The original owners obviously had abandoned the property. Now, it appeared to be the home of Canadian poverty tourists. The abandoned lot made their celebratory aspirations possible.

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    Tas¨¬a studied the center court from which the rows of storage units spoked out from. That seemed to be the focal point of activity down below.

    Something caught the attention of an unhealthy looking trio of emaciated bald men. Their heads jerked to watch an approaching vehicle on the curvy road leading into the storage facility.

    The three men ran to one of the units in a far corner away from the activities. They shut the overhead door behind them.

    It was a long, powder blue Cadillac that showed up. It circled the center court before stopping.

    The car was one of the replicas of classic designs that was a trademark of Cuban expertise. It even had gunrunner platforms attached to the sides.

    Four women, dressed like streetwalkers, filed out of the back seat of the vehicle with a display of sexy bravado from each in turn for a mountain of a man that greeted them.

    That is very odd.

    "Hey, buddy," Tas¨¬a said to the man on the swing. "Thank you. I thought my bladder was about to split. I didn''t catch your name?"

    One of his hands casually cusped the side of the woman''s neck; she seemed to have fallen asleep beside him.

    "Roberto. I''m just a simple Roberto."

    Tas¨¬a offered her hand to shake.

    "I''m most elaborately, Avellana."

    He chortled. "Ha. I see that you have a sense of humor, Avellana. I''ve always thought that name to be too pretty to be as uncommon as it is."

    "I know what you mean. I did not run into another Avellana until I was ten."

    "Care for a drag?"

    Roberto offered his pipe.

    With raised eyebrows, she smiled.

    "Sure," Tas¨¬a affirmed as she took the pipe.

    She wanted a little information from him; it was best to be perceived as friendly and engaged.

    Tas¨¬a avoided the substance in prison; you never knew whose anus may have been packing it to get it inside the compound.

    Otherwise, she enjoyed reefer, casually.

    "You seem alright, Avellana. Do I know you from somewhere?"

    "I used to live here a few years ago. Things have changed."

    Roberto stretched his arms across the back of the swing; he squinted as if to improve his vision so he could see her better.

    "I thought your face looked quite a bit familiar. I''ve seen you around."

    She now placed him.

    "I used to hang at the Daga Chicas late night scene. Friend of Isabella''s."

    In a slow, soft whisper, he said, "Yeah. I shot pool with you a number of times. You know, when my girlfriend drags me there ''cause she''s feeling a certain way?"

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the woman. She wore her hair much longer now, but Tas¨¬a recognized her. Terry, one of Isabella''s lovers.

    "Well, shit, Roberto. We are practically family then, so would it be okay if I asked you a few questions?"

    Tas¨¬a peered up and down the street to make sure no one was close by.

    "I came back here because I have got that certain dissociative feeling you get if you need an inoculation. To be delicate about it, I can''t go get one. There''s a warrant.

    "So, I come back here, and I find out that the Hijos Lux, who were weird as all shit to begin with, are now much weirder and much, much shittier.

    "Worse than that, they no longer deal."

    Roberto nodded along with her as she laid out her situation. He dragged a hit before giving his assessment.

    "That, right there, is a big bag of suck. The Salvage has spies, and now so does the Hijos Lux. It is just too risky to deal in the magical substance that will go unnamed."

    He pondered for a second, then glanced up to her with a contrite smile.

    "I''ll tell you how I helped out one of my friends. He was a bail jumper.

    "He showed no signs of the Manifestation like you are doing now, but being a fastidious hypochondriac asshole, he figured that he had about a year before he needed to re-up his inoculation.

    So, I placed a subdermal patch beneath my skin. Within a month, the incision scar appeared to be nothing more than what it was before I operated on it - a spot on my shoulder where I received my first three inoculations."

    Tas¨¬a was suddenly excited and near breathless.

    "So, you were able to extract the serum from the sponge?"

    "Exactly."

    "Pretty damn clever, Roberto."

    "If you decide to go that route, then let me know. I''m sure I''ll bump into you over at the Daga Chicas."

    Even though the idea piqued her interest, Tas¨¬a decided she did not have the patience nor time for that kind of hustle. Even still Tas¨¬a was glad she had run into Roberto.

    He had the makings to be a most useful ally.

    Roberto stood up.

    "If you''ll excuse me, Avellana, I think I need to take a piss, as well."

    "Hey, Roberto. I heard some music blaring from outside of your bathroom window. I saw that it was coming from that old storage facility. They have a party taking place. Is that a safe crowd down there?"

    Though the facility could not be seen from the porch, he glanced in the direction.

    "Terry snooped on them a few weeks back. She says we should stay away. A bunch of North Americans. Poverty tourists. She thinks that ghouls are hiding amongst them."

    "Ghouls?"

    "You know what I mean. Fucking cannibals get those weird diseases from eating our livers."

    Roberto took a long drag from his pipe before he continued.

    "Pisses me off just to think I''m somebody''s idea of a delicacy."

    Oh, shit.

    The emaciated bald men who hid from the occupants of the Cadillac had a familiar physique about them. She saw in her mind''s eye the guards on the brownstone rooftop.

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "Organ harvesters here too?"

    Roberto started opening the screen door.

    "Why else would poverty tourists be here living in the Quadra instead of, say, El Salvador?"

    "Damn," was all she could mutter.

    He clasped her shoulder with a familiar gentleness.

    "I''m glad you''re back, Avellana. But, you''re right, things have changed here. Stay away from those creeps."

    He disappeared into the house.

    She considered the four streetwalkers who had walked into their trap.

    She had no real desire to play the hero; Tas¨¬a thought she was not even particularly good in that role. Her sense of self interest, instinct for self-preservation, and lack of endurance to a righteous cause were just too strong to ever really be one.

    But in present circumstances what choice did she have? The familiar tingling throbbed ever so slightly down her spine.

 2.8 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a approached the storage facility from a hill above the opening she had spotted in the dilapidated fence. She waded through shrubbery along the rocky slope that ran up against the facility''s cement excess runoff drains.

    Puffball mushrooms grew down the rubbled slope. Gently, they spewed their brownish-orange gas as the night air cooled.

    Tas¨¬a scanned the ground ahead, remaining mindful that the slope of the hill faced towards the West - a perfect condition to attract any snake who sought to rest and absorb the radiant surface heat of the nighttime surroundings.

    Tas¨¬a stopped for a moment to take out her Kel-Tec .32 pistol. Ever diligent in the proper handling of firearms, she went through her inspection routine. She felt around the inside of her bag. There were only four clips left to which she could feed the magazine after she had dealt with the ascospore oddities earlier.

    Tas¨¬a had surveyed the facility a second time before she descended the hill for a more complete idea of whom she faced. She had potentially twenty-two targets ahead of her, so she needed to make every bullet count.

    As she continued her descent, Tas¨¬a did so cautiously. Even still, the glaring lights and blaring sound coming from the impromptu discoteque made it much easier for her to execute her task.

    Something a mere two yards in front of her caught her eye.

    Her near hairless flesh along her arms tensed up in goosebumps as she watched the smooth, curving motion of a small blackhead snake.

    It so thoroughly resembled the mesmerizing sway of the Wise One as to cause Tas¨¬a a good deal of alarm.

    Blackheads were mostly harmless to humans. In the scheme of things, a bite could possibly prove to be infectious, otherwise, its venom was a mild one.

    She typically kept a few blackheads as pets in her aquariums at times that she settled down long enough to make a home. Tas¨¬a always regretted having to release them back to the wild when she inevitably picked up and moved again.

    The elders of the Anewed kept blackheads for their venom.

    Good for arthritis and spiritual healing.

    So her favorite of the elders, Viejo Mois¨¦s, often claimed.

    As Tas¨¬a stopped dead in her tracks, the agile blackhead turned its head towards her and flicked its long forked tongue her way.

    From whence tongue came the soft, sobering voice of the Wise One.

    What is the nature of what you are seeking to do here?

    It asked.

    The blackhead slithered away between slabs of quartz rocks that gleamed by moonlight in the near coppery color of malachite.

    Was this mere hallucination? The Wise One was never so succinct in its verbiage.

    "My most sincere apologies, El Sabiant¨¦. There is no time left for reflection, only for doing."

    Tas¨¬a whispered this beneath her breath.

    She sprinted through the bent-inward fence. Her leather boots made easy work of the tattered wire supports.

    The lights nearby pulsed an ungodly red hew. Arced downward atop metal poles that lined the storage facility''s outer parameter, they were part of the facility''s original structure.

    The other lights were strung up along the storage unit entrances. They must have been brought in by the indigent North Americans.

    As Tas¨¬a formulated how she was going to use the array of lights to her advantage, she heard a strident ''cah!'' from behind her.

    She had missed hearing the flutter of its wings. Again, her normally acute senses failed her.

    Mel chose this moment to make his presence known. She should have been aware that he was there the entire time, but not once since she left Sachmilli''s building had she successfully spotted the crow.

    He sat upon the nearby fence. He cahed again, repeating the same pattern he had just made.

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    She thought she understood him.

    "True," Tas¨¬a whispered to him. "I expected there to only be three of them when I took up this task."

    She twisted her head in a jolting mimicry of his avian body language as she looked Mel in the eye.

    Tas¨¬a continued, "that only means their greater number makes my task ever the more urgent."

    She waited a moment for Mel to respond, but somewhere between the slow blinking motion of her eyes opening and closing, he disappeared.

    Like a magician''s stage trick, there was no longer a crow that sat perched on the rail but instead a tiny, sprig of a man in a gaucho''s jacket and a Buffalo Fur Stetson hat on his head.

    The man''s voice came at her in a subdermal tickle against her chest. In spite of this, she understood him perfectly.

    Since when does the Angel of Theft, a creature of deft and supple stealth, engage in targeted assassinations?

    Tas¨¬a shivered her head in a hard shake as she tried to blink the impossible image away.

    Finally, Mel, the crow, sat in the spot once more.

    "Is that what you are trying to tell me? That my actions are now compromised by the Manifest?"

    The mobile PA vibrated against her thigh from inside her trouser pocket. Tas¨¬a answered the call.

    "Felicit¨¦, here. So anything going on at the moment, Tas¨¬a?"

    It was bad timing, Tas¨¬a thought, but she could not even make herself be rude to Felicit¨¦, of all people.

    "You could say that. I am in the middle of something here, but you''re welcome to tag along if you like."

    "I see that you are. Quite an interesting little friend you have there. Why is there a nightwing following you?"

    "Have you acquired its eyes?"

    "Yeah. Your PA has been getting hit by a constant ping for the last few hours. It got my attention. When I ran a query, I discovered that little guy on the other end."

    Tas¨¬a waved a hand at the bird.

    "Its master is an old friend of the family. As for my own little exploit, I have run into some organ harvesters and what looks like some ghouls accompanying them."

    "Tas¨¬a . . . enough trouble in this world comes and finds you without you having to go seek it!"

    "I have to do something about it, Felicit¨¦. They are going to slaughter four women if I don''t intervene."

    Tas¨¬a leaned up against the side of a storage unit.

    "Is that their music blaring?"

    "Yeah. It''s giving me some cover so I can talk to you now."

    "Call in a domestic disturbance."

    "If I did that, it could lead to a full-scale investigation where the Salvage gets involved. They will go door to door and kick up a shitstorm."

    Felicit¨¦ cleared her throat before she answered back.

    "A harvest operation of that scale is not going to stay put long. They''ll slaughter the local streetwalker talent and move on to the other side of the Quadra to set up shop again. Likely those motherfuckers will make their move tonight after they bag and tag those four women."

    Tas¨¬a snarled as she stared into the eyes of the crow.

    "That is all the more reason for me to eliminate them now."

    "Tas¨¬a, listen to yourself. You don''t think that a slaughter of a dozen or more North Americans would not bring a full-scale Salvage investigation?"

    Tas¨¬a frowned with a stuttering puss for a lower lip. Vigorously, her head shook. She did not have an immediate answer.

    Likely, none would satisfy Felicit¨¦''s concerns.

    The Argentinian spoke with a worried sounding softness in her tone.

    "I can see through the nightwing that you are running a temperature. Not only that, but several other vitals that it registers tells me that you need to get your inoculation re-upped, ASAP."

    However dire Felicit¨¦ made this sound, Tas¨¬a barely paid attention to what she was saying.

    A solution came to her. Tas¨¬a knew how she was going to play this out. The keyword was in what the  gaucho gnome said.

    Targeted.

    Before she executed her new plan, she had to make damn certain that the indigent Canadians were what she and the others suspected of them. It was easy to let one''s imagination run wild.

    Especially here in the Quadra.

    In her compromised condition of fleeting sanity, Tas¨¬a needed to be as empirical in her observations of the world around her as she could maintain.

    It would not do to go around killing people based upon a paranoid delusional reading of her present circumstances.

    She had to be sure.

    Fortunately, there was one easy way to test her hypothesis. The ghouls, if they were ghouls.

    "I hear you, Felicit¨¦."

    Tas¨¬a said to keep the conversation going. She actually registered very little of what Felicit¨¦ had said.

    "Tas¨¬a, I''m going to get a set of IDs made for you and then sent to you so you can get that inoculation taken care of. I am surprised that you do not already have your own set of fakes."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled as she re-engaged in the conversation.

    "Not here. This town is so laid-back that I never needed to have one. It is not like Vida Escondida. Quite the opposite in lifestyle from that vida loco tempo."

    Felicit¨¦ got quieter.

    "Be careful. I have to go. The nightwing is fighting my attempt to make it stay put. He wants to be elsewhere. Stay safe, I''m thinking about you."

    "Trust me, okay? Even now, under this strain, I know exactly what I''m doing."

    Mel sprung up and swooped back up the hill. Tas¨¬a watched it as she rested against the building.

    Did the crow have its own agenda that it was following through on?

    She closed her eyes to run a visualization of her plan so she could accurately time its execution.

    She was grateful that her mind still felt sharp. It was the one advantage that she still had as she questioned what she sensed around her.

    Tas¨¬a heard the trickle of liquid splattering against the tin surface of the storage unit wall from merely a few yards away from where she stood.

    A man leaned on his arm against the wall as he took a leak. He seemed as oblivious to her presence as she was to his just a few seconds before.

    Maybe that was why Mel high tailed it.

    The man licked at his swollen lips. His face was bruised with welts. He was one of the three Canadians that Anneb¨¦l fucked up.

    Tas¨¬a stood perfectly still, admiring the display, as the drizzle came to a slow halt.

    The man clenched his dick and gave it a good shake. He pulled it back inside his trousers while he walked on past her.

    Good God All-Mighty, if we don''t all live in our own fucked-up little worlds.

    The encroaching insanity was making her as oblivious to the world around her as any hustler''s marked man.

 2.9 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    The Canadian lumbered slowly back to the black asphalt pavement that lay between the rows of unit lots. He paused with his every step forward; the man grasped his lower abdomen as if to hold his very kidneys in.

    Whenever he did brave to take another step, the man''s body jerked in violent spasms of what appeared to be intense pain.

    He twisted up his upper body each time.

    Tas¨¬a glanced back over to the piss stain he had left on the storage unit wall right beside her. A deep rouge color, caused when blood and urine mixed together, trickled down the tin surface.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and grinned with a suppressed chuckle hissing through her teeth. Anneb¨¦l fucked him up well and true.

    The streetwalker pugilist wasn''t one to be fucked with.

    Tas¨¬a kept her eyes focused on the man and the direction that he walked. She was concerned that depending on where his journey led, he might complicate her own plans.

    When his path veered with definite purpose away from the festivities, Tas¨¬a decided to follow.

    Her overall plan of action was simple enough. First, confirm whether the three men were ghouls or not.

    The skin of ghouls tended to turn an unnatural ocherous yellow. With their extremities of lips, tongue, nipples and genitalia becoming a crusted snot green.

    Other identifiers: extremes of morbid emaciation, rigor mortis like grins, mineralized nails of both fingers and toes indistinguishable from smoothed over samite quartz, elbows and knees so calloused as to be chitinous.

    Most telling was the development of forked tongues.

    If their condition proved to be positively confirmed, she would shoot the three ghouls, and then do the same to the big, ugly badass that greeted the streetwalkers earlier. The latter needed to be done so in dramatic public execution fashion.

    Tas¨¬a calculated that a set of swift, brutal actions on her part would demoralize the other organ harvesters and force them to flee from the facility.

    If the North Americans left behind the bodies of those she killed, the corpses would be eventually discovered by the local police.

    However, even that would work to Tas¨¬a''s advantage if a mere four bodies were left behind. That was doable in terms of a cover-up.

    The local cops had every incentive to keep the law enforcement arm of the Salvage out of the city just as Tas¨¬a did. Nobody wanted their overarching scrutiny.

    It tended to end careers.

    That was Tas¨¬a''s plan in a nutshell.

    Except, this miserable Canuck in front of her, walking around like a wounded pup, was complicating things by his mere presence.

    Tas¨¬a grimmaced contemptuously as she watched him.

    He walked towards a row of storage units adjacent to the same back row that the alleg¨¦d ghouls took off to when they hid.

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    Tas¨¬a did not want to kill any more of these people than would be necessary to carry out her plan.

    A busted-up faded black Hearse sat in the middle of the asphalt drive between the two farthest rows of the southwestern corner of the facility.

    A lithe bodied woman pulled herself out of the driver''s seat to face the man. The car door was missing.

    She balled up her fist and took up an aggressive stance.

    "Leave me the fuck alone, Eddy. Don''t try to talk me out of it. It''s over."

    It was the woman who accompanied the two Canadian men. Her voice no longer sounded buoyant in the way it did when she spoke cryptically of rainbow trout, earlier.

    "Bella, come on . . . This isn''t the end; this just means that another facet of our experience is about to begin."

    As Tas¨¬a hid in a volume of shadow slanted down from the wall beside her, she grabbed her pistol scope out of the fanny-pack.

    Intuitive suspicion informed Tas¨¬a that she needed to get a better read on the face of the one the Canadian called Bella.

    The woman possessed a shallow cut along the ridgeline of her cheek. Anneb¨¦l must have smacked her up a bit as well.

    "You did this to me, Eddy," Bella seethed, her words becoming muddled in the usage of her sibilants as she grew angrier.

    "You talked me into this shit. You said this would be an adventure. Now, look at me!"

    A slight ocherous pallor marred the woman''s complexion. It was only barely noticeable as seen through the lens of Tas¨¬a''s scope.

    The woman, however, had likely been watching for this very symptom for months on end as she lived in a state of mind verging on paranoia.

    The addiction of harvested organs proved all-consuming to the participants in the vile habit. Often, to the point of literal metamorphosis.

    "Bella," the man started to plea with her.

    She would have none of it. The woman rushed over and she shoved him with a violent heave. He fell over himself and collapsed into a ball.

    "How many times have I told you to stop calling me that? Edward and Bella. It is no longer cute. It is just fucking sick."

    She gave him a swift kick in his ass. As he tried to stand up, she pushed on him.

    "Just get away from me, you fucking asshole," she yelled.

    Tas¨¬a almost felt sorry for the bastard as he choked back tears and proclaimed his love while also scurrying to get away from her fists.

    However, Tas¨¬a could not feel an iota of sympathy for him; she knew what he was.

    "The fucking losers that I let control my life," Bella muttered as she returned to the driver''s seat of the Hearse.

    Wherever he crawled off too, Eddy was now out of Tas¨¬a''s way. She crouched down as she holstered her .32 and she retrieved her stiletto knife.

    Tas¨¬a climbed up the wall of a storage unit to avoid Bella''s line-of-sight. She crawled low on its roof to the other side of it. Here she jumped down near the back fender of the Hearse.

    From there, Tas¨¬a crept up on the woman; she kept an eye on Bella''s movement. The Canadian''s head flung around in nearly constant motion.

    Bella scrutinized her own face in the car mirror in front of her. She stretched her mouth out wide, displaying even rows of pearl-white teeth.

    She stuck her tongue out, raising it up to the mirror for better scrutiny.

    Tas¨¬a could only see the woman''s eyes in the mirror from her own vantage point. Whatever she saw in the mirror, Bella''s eyes widened with fright.

    She collapsed in a sob. Tears flowed rapidly. Bella wiped them away, and just as rapidly, her pupils tightened in a menacing glare.

    Her eyes appeared all the more crazed and starkly pronounced with the cut on her cheek set like an underscore.

    As Bella cursed Eddy once more for several seconds, Tas¨¬a raised up to stand directly behind Bella.

    With a smooth, singular motion, Tas¨¬a pushed the blade up against the woman''s neck.

    "Don''t yell," Tas¨¬a commanded, "else I''ll cut your throat."

    Bella looked back up at Tas¨¬a. Her pupils still lit up, tight and menacing. This close, Tas¨¬a could see the vibrant green of Bella''s eyes.

    Bella''s mouth opened up in a loose grin falling on the curve of her chin.

    Tas¨¬a''s jaw clenched defensively when she saw the early formation of a bifurcated tongue.

    "Did he send you here to shut me up," Bella asked. "Did he send you here to kill me? Well, you needn''t bother. I''m about to do it myself."

    Bella opened her mouth wider and she put a yellow prescription pill-bottle up against her mouth. Dozens of little pink pills rattled out of the container and into the gullet of Bella''s throat.

    Tas¨¬a removed the blade from her slender neck. It was a futile gesture to threaten a truly suicidal person.

    Even still, she was radiant once more. Bella''s brows raised knowingly, her green eyes dazzled in mischief.

    A bottle of Wild Irish Rose sat in her lap.

    "Oh shit, bitch," Tas¨¬a began, "here I thought I was the one having the shittiest day imaginable."

 2.10 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Bella took several swallows from the bottle of malt liquor to help her gulp the pills down. She eyed Tas¨¬a carefully with furrowed brows.

    With a shrug, she offered the bottle of Wild Irish Rose.

    "Care for some?"

    Tas¨¬a put the stiletto back in its sheath.

    She laughed at the offer with a hint of derision in her tone.

    "If there is a way of saying this without being offensive, it is beyond my meager communication skills -" Tas¨¬a paused as her gut rolled with laughter. She gathered her composure before continuing, "- but, there is no way in the Seven Hells I am sipping after a cannibal.

    "I say that as a truly deplorable human being, myself. And, given that, I strive to be tolerant of so very many differences amongst people, but come on, you are a cannibal! There are limits!"

    Bella took another swig from the bottle. She giggled as she replied, "well, fuck you too then."

    Tas¨¬a giggled along with her.

    Tas¨¬a assessed this latest development. If Bella overdosed here, her body would then make for five potential casualties. Tas¨¬a did not like this change in the calculus.

    "Hey, Bella, since we have gotten off to such a lovely start, can I ask you something?"

    The woman stared off into space in a preoccupied state of mind. Understandably so, by Tas¨¬a''s reckoning. Tas¨¬a was about to walk away to engage the next part of her task, but she heard a murmur.

    Tas¨¬a turned back around to see a glare fixed upon her.

    "Don''t call me Bella. It is not my name."

    "What is it then?"

    "Sinclair. Eddy calls me by that stupid name because he likes some ridiculous old books, and he wants to live them out. It''s supposedly why we got involved in all of this fucked-up shit. Live-Action Role-Playing wasn''t enough for him. Dragged me all the way to fucking Paraguay, no offense, to live out his little adventure."

    "What was his goal, Sinclair?"

    "To become an undead lord, like Dracula, in the flesh. How stupid is that?"

    Tas¨¬a glanced toward the lot where the three ghouls hid.

    "He wants to become like them?"

    Sinclair''s hands fiddled together leaning over the steering wheel.

    "Eddy sees becoming a mere ghoul as just the necessary first step in his transformation. Becoming powerful. Becoming Immortal. Like Dragos."

    "The big guy who greeted the streetwalkers? You telling me he can''t be killed?"

    Sinclair nodded as she suddenly shivered. It was a reaction to the pills. Deep frown lines appeared on her face.

    "Yeah. Something like that."

    She got up out of the Hearse, clutching her stomach. With a sudden lunge, Sinclair doubled over.

    She emptied the contents of her stomach onto the asphalt. After Sinclair finished with the dry heaves her fingers scrambled to rescue the pills and collect them out of the sediment of pink liquid.

    A rancid odor overwhelmed Tas¨¬a as she leaned over the other woman. It caused her to gasp for air. She turned away, gagging.

    "Sorry," the Canadian woman apologized. "I lost control of everything."

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    Through her scowl, Tas¨¬a affected a sympathetic tone.

    "Hey, it happens."

    Tas¨¬a noticed a casket in the back of the Hearse.

    "Sinclair, what is this?"

    The woman was preoccupied once more. She stared at the pile of pills in her hands. With a tight grimace fixed on her lips, she threw them against a nearby wall.

    "Fuck," she yelled. "I guess I will just have to live another fucking day. What was that you asked?"

    "That," Tas¨¬a pointed to the back of the Hearse.

    "Oh, That. It is where Drago sleeps."

    "Ah. You are kidding me, right? So, so very lame. Don''t tell me he really thinks he is a vampire."

    Sinclair pointed with a nod of her head.

    "You can ask him."

    Coming towards them was the crowd of party-goers. From their clothing, they appeared to have just emerged from a discotheque, except for the flannel and brown work boots that most of the Canadians wore.

    There was now a chill in the air.

    Drago strode from the center. His laughter boomed throughout the complex.

    The four streetwalkers were escorted by an equal number of large men. They stood behind Drago.

    The trio of ghouls crept out of there hiding space. They gathered on the opposite side of the Hearse from where Tas¨¬a and Sinclair kept company.

    Tas¨¬a counted seven yards. That was the distance between where she stood and Drago stopped.

    "Sinclair," he asked. "Is this the fifth girl you promised us? She seems to be a little . . ."

    "I seem a little what?"

    "You are dressed in army green trousers. Not what one would expect. I suppose a certain type of man would go for this, this look. Were you a camp follower perhaps? For the Shining Path?"

    Tas¨¬a rolled her eyes at Sinclair. The Canadian woman chortled, amusedly.

    "Hey, Drago. My friend here has a question for you."

    He bowed his head, gallantly.

    "Proceed."

    Tas¨¬a eyed Sinclair for putting her on the spot. Though, she already was on the spot. Sinclair''s own eyes told Tas¨¬a to play it straight. No sarcasm.

    "Are you really immortal," she asked then with a glance at the ghouls, she added. "An honest-to-God vampire?"

    She saw the four streetwalkers processing this. One of the ladies studied the ghouls with a rigid gaze in her eyes. The newly acquired pallor upon the woman''s face told Tas¨¬a that she just now realized how much shit she was in.

    "I am so old, my dear, that I remember the Black Plague and the fires that engulfed London as if it happened yesterday. Indeed, I am immortal. And, my lady, you have the great honor of assisting me in its sustainment."

    Tas¨¬a loosened her demeanor to allow her muscles to go limber.

    "Would you mind if I tested the veracity of your claim?"

    Drago''s brows arched quizzically as his lips pursed together. He never had his bullshit questioned in the open before, Tas¨¬a gathered.

    She propped all of her weight on the left, stiletto bearing, leg, and quickly arced down on it. The rest of her body dropped like a pendulum in its descending swoop.

    As her right leg slid forward, then bent into her stomach, she grabbed her gun. She fixed the Kel-Tec .32 with the laser sight dot squarely aimed in the center of Drago''s forehead.

    Tas¨¬a emptied the magazine.

    One would have been enough, but the massive overkill where fragments of Drago''s skull seemed to dance to the rhythm of the chamber release caused the entire assembly of spectators to pause in shock.

    She changed out the magazine even before rising fully in a straight vertical position.

    Tas¨¬a turned to the right. She fired a bullet into the bald head of the nearest ghoul as he gawked at the falling massive husk of Drago''s dead body.

    Now, the crowd fled in a burst of top-of-the lung screams while dashing helter-skelter away from her. Even the streetwalkers soon poured out of the fenced-in storage facility.

    Only Sinclair remained behind. The Canadian woman leaned against the hood of the car. She giggled and grinned, and she watched the blood as it still poured from Drago''s head.

    "Now, ain''t that some funny ass shit," she said.

    Tas¨¬a took a deep breath. She repeated her breathing cycle meditatively again thricely to sober herself up. She would have enjoyed the revelry of the moment, but she remembered she had somewhere else to be with her humanity at stake.

    The tingling in the back of her neck died down. She wondered if she could control it.

    Sinclair burst into laughter once more. Her face aped the upturned cross-eyed expression left on Drago''s face.

    "He looks so stupid," she exclaimed.

    "Sinclair, let''s get you cleaned up. I''ve got some friends just up that hill. We get you cleaned up, and then maybe they''ll agree to provide you temporary lodging."

    Sinclair nodded and started to follow her.

    "After tonight, I don''t care what you do," Tas¨¬a said. "But, if you stay in Villa Morr¨®n, you can''t eat people. It''s really my one big rule. It''s just so fucking gross."

    Sinclair grimaced and she blew air up into her bangs. Done in a French cut, she looked as timeless as the Sorbonne, Tas¨¬a thought. Her behavior though did not reflect a high class upbringing.

    That dichotomy between appearance and behavior was often true with fashion models. Perhaps, that explains Sinclair?

    "I''m going to get real hungry soon," Sinclair answered.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed Sinclair by the hand to guide her through snake territory as she led her up the hill.

    "Eat raw steak if you have to. But no people. Real fucking gross. There is still very little of the ghoul in your appearance. You still pass for an attractive woman. Quit now while you are still ahead."

    "I should try. What is your name, I don''t think you said it?"

    Tas¨¬a was about to blurt out her real name but she quickly corrected herself.

    "Avellana."

    Sinclair bit her lower lip as she grinned.

    "That is what we call ''hazelnut'' in Canada. Pretty name."

 2.11 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a stood at the edge of the lot. A sign that read Marejada stood undisturbed in front of her. It was the name of Cuervo''s company.

    The sign was the least dilapidated structure in the office park.

    Why Cuervo had not expended resources on reinforced windows, maintenance drones, and guard bots, Tas¨¬a wondered.

    She was a bit wary that she would run into Anneb¨¦l again. The woman was a brawler, and Tas¨¬a had minimal martial arts skills to throw kicks and punches back at anyone.

    In many areas of the Quadra, a tiny thing like herself had to be good with a gun to maintain day to day survival. It was a good thing she was.

    After the previous run-in, Tas¨¬a suspected that Anneb¨¦l''s crew would likely be more alert. She approached with more caution this time.

    Soon enough as Tas¨¬a sauntered forward, It appeared that the crew had abandoned the site. No sound was to be heard. If anyone was asleep, they did not stir, nor did they snore.

    Tas¨¬a entered the foyer of the first building. She jumped back and spun around when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.

    "Easy, little tigress," Anneb¨¦l snorted.

    She was merely sitting on the floor near the smoldering barrel with her back pressed against the wall. Anneb¨¦l opened up a fresh 40oz bottle of malt liquor.

    That was the motion that Tas¨¬a had seen out of the corner of her eye. The bottle raised up.

    Tas¨¬a took in her surroundings.

    "Where is everyone else?"

    "Why are you here," Anneb¨¦l countered.

    "My godfather owns this place, so I''ve got a reason."

    The streetwalker had her hair up in a ponytail. Whatever success she had tricking that evening, Anneb¨¦l was now off the clock.

    "Old Man Cuervo is your godfather, eh?"

    "Yup."

    "So what''s with the stink bomb? You don''t like that we are plying our trade here?"

    Tas¨¬a gauged the degree of anger on Anneb¨¦l''s face. She seemed more curious than angry.

    "Personally, I don''t care. But you were between me and my goal. I couldn''t just walk past your group without someone noticing me."

    Anneb¨¦l squinted her eyes and she screwed up her mouth in a tight, ugly grimace that seemed most unnatural. Anneb¨¦l was anything but ugly.

    She stood up.

    "So you decided to bust us up, instead? Then you go chasing after God knows what. Give me one good reason I shouldn''t wail on you like I did those Norte bitches?"

    "The same reason I gave you last time," Tas¨¬a quipped.

    "I used to fight in the octagon. Without that itsy-bitsy toy of yours, you would be fucked. I bet I could get to you before you reached your holster."

    Tas¨¬a laughed as she answered in turn.

    "Is it worth your life to find out?"

    Anneb¨¦l looked her in the eyes.

    "You are all play, sister. You don''t have it in you."

    Tas¨¬a smiled, derisively.

    "I''m now a clip shorter than the last time you saw me. I saved four whores just like you from being butchered like cattle when I killed two men. Have you ever killed anyone, Anneb¨¦l?"

    Anneb¨¦l returned the smile with a jackal''s sneer of her own.

    "Why do you think they no longer allow me back in the octagon? Ever been to the Sweet, little girl? That is what they call the fight club scene in Asunci¨®n. Trust me, it is all blood sport there. They won''t let me back to fight. So here I am, small-town whoring."

    Tas¨¬a decided if Anneb¨¦l lunged for her, she would not go for the gun. It would not be right to kill someone with a legitimate gripe. Still, she would make it cost the woman if she tried anything.

    A lesson she learned in prison. Win, lose, or draw, you always had to make it cost the other person when they decided to take you on.

    Tas¨¬a formed a mental map of the room as she kept her eyes fixed. There were two tables, six chairs, another pair of desks, a stool, a small refrigerator, a space heater - likely broken, a huge set of generator cables, and a barrel.

    The ceiling was nine feet high, and Anneb¨¦l was an even six feet tall.

    Tas¨¬a decided to try small talk to diffuse the situation.

    "At least one of those Canadian men is pissing blood. He left a huge ass stain on a wall."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head.

    "You know what I am not hearing out of you is an apology."

    "And you won''t. As far as I am concerned, you are still in the way of where I need to be."

    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

    Anneb¨¦l''s neck tightened as she shook her head.

    "You know what? Fuck it."

    Anneb¨¦l made her lunge. She was fast, but Tas¨¬a was near inhuman in her reflexes. Tas¨¬a slid over by two feet, she raised her leg on a desktop with a boot planted firmly down. She pushed up with her thigh muscles to become airborne.

    As she twisted around in mid-air, Tas¨¬a grabbed her stiletto. When Anneb¨¦l rushed into the space she had just inhabited, Tas¨¬a on her descent down grabbed the streetwalker by her ponytail and she sliced it off just below the band.

    It was necessary to cartwheel for Tas¨¬a to come to a vertical landing on her feet. She twisted around to face Anneb¨¦l in preparation to maneuver a second time in an instant if necessary.

    However, it wasn''t. Anneb¨¦l stared back at her with a confused expression consisting of a gaping mouth and deep, squinched creases running the length of her forehead.

    "Here you go," Tas¨¬a said as she threw the lovely mass of curly red hair at the woman''s chest.

    Anneb¨¦l caught it, and gave the hair a mournful look like she was holding onto a dead pet.

    "You fucking bitch," Anneb¨¦l gasped.

    Tas¨¬a waved the stiletto with several succinct dicing motions.

    "You want to play at my level, Anneb¨¦l, you are going to have to be at least twice as fast as what you just showed me."

    Anneb¨¦l''s eyes were enraged.

    "You fucking little troll doll monster!"

    Tas¨¬a didn''t let this throw her off her stride. Attacks on appearance were just part of the game. She knew she was weirdly cute. Like a troll doll.

    So it took a little extra time to apply make-up to even out her face and make her look pretty. Big deal.

    "What do you want to lose next? A finger? A toe? An ear? I know, what about the ring in your nose. I could use a new diamond."

    Anneb¨¦l grunted and snorted as she bent forward. After she threw the hair down, she removed a big Bowie knife from the back of her calve.

    "I probably look like one of Isabella''s daga chicas now, so I guess I should learn to act like one. Alright, bitch, let''s throw down."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. Tas¨¬a had hoped her last demonstration would have been enough to convince the pugilist she was out-matched and get her to back off.

    But good sense would not be had by this woman. Apparently, the only two things she was good at were fucking and winning at fistfights.

    "Listen up, Anneb¨¦l. I don''t think you deserve to die, so I am going to do my best to keep you alive."

    Anneb¨¦l blinked rapidly and wiped the side of her nose.

    "Tough shit, whatever you feel. You are in this because you put yourself in this."

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward, her weight pressed into the spread of fingers on her free hand. The stiletto, she held behind her back.

    "I''m not begging for mercy, you moron," Tas¨¬a yelled. "I''m telling you that in a knife fight with me, you don''t stand a prayer of a chance. I''m also telling you, anything else I take from you I am keeping."

    Anneb¨¦l waved her fingers forward.

    "Come on, little chica. You first this time."

    There was a wooden stool three feet forward from the streetwalker''s right side.

    Tas¨¬a eyed the boots Anneb¨¦l wore. They appeared to be of rather expensive rattlesnake leather.

    Totems and sigils. Most girls of the Quadra would not be caught dead in the leather of a passive, bovine creature.

    "Alright," Tas¨¬a agreed. "Just don''t blink."

    Anneb¨¦l blinked.

    Tas¨¬a used her free hand and arm to spring forward at a slanted angle that she rolled into. She had a good idea of where Anneb¨¦l''s swing would arch.

    By the time Anneb¨¦l''s arm was outstretched in full, Tas¨¬a had grabbed the stool, and, much like a lion tamer, she pushed it forward to catch the knife in the momentum of its plunge.

    It split deep into the wooden seat. The legs of it broke against Anneb¨¦l''s elbow.

    With the knife caught in place, Tas¨¬a twisted the stool and she jerked it backward at the same time.

    Anneb¨¦l had to release the knife or else risk a broken wrist.

    Tas¨¬a threw the stool and knife out of a half-broken window.

    She backed up and faced the pugilist once more with her own knife dicing in the air.

    "Had enough, mujerona?"

    Anneb¨¦l laughed.

    "Some advice. You should never tell your opponent you have no plans to kill them. It kills any incentive to stop."

    "Just giving you a fair chance to remove yourself from this," Tas¨¬a answered.

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head, a nasty smile rose over her jutted chin.

    "All I have seen so far are some pretty impressive circus acrobatics. At a circus, everything around you is fixed positioned so you have nothing random to factor in.

    "Not here, baby. Keep it coming, you are bound to slip up."

    Tas¨¬a stood straight, but her body was positioned at an angle. She peered over her shoulder and met Anneb¨¦l''s eyes.

    "So much bravado," Tas¨¬a tisked.

    "I could say the same about you."

    "All I know is you are still in my way. It is your turn to go first, by the way."

    Anneb¨¦l ran the distance between them. Her right leg went in the air, bent to the side with her heel jutted forward in the absolute expertise of one who had performed the kick ten thousand times.

    There was very little space for Tas¨¬a to maneuver this time. Still, she had expected a kick. If she had stayed still, her ribs and lungs would now be caved in.

    Instead, she twisted in the opposite direction she was facing as she lunged down.

    Her head wound up buried in Anneb¨¦l''s crotch with only the cervix that jutted into the side of Tas¨¬a''s chin causing any real pain.

    It was a decent enough position to absorb Anneb¨¦l''s momentum.

    Tas¨¬a caught a whiff of an almond and jasmine based body lotion with barely even a hint of an overworked vagina.

    Must''ve been a slow night.

    Tas¨¬a thought.

    Even still, Tas¨¬a executed the rest of her maneuver. She reached to the back of Anneb¨¦l''s thighs, clutched at her asscheek until she found the seamline of her pocket.

    Tas¨¬a deftly cut the seam from out of the jeans. As she rolled against the brawler''s leg, She liberated the wallet.

    Anneb¨¦l started to shake her leg to get Tas¨¬a off of it. Too late, as she spun around to the other leg.

    Careful to aim at the inner heel of the boot to avoid wounding any flesh, Tas¨¬a thrust the stiletto down with all her strength.

    The boot was now pinned to the wooden floor.

    "Ah, shit! You ruined my fucking boot."

    Tas¨¬a got some distance, and trained her gun on Anneb¨¦l.

    "You refused to make peace, so you brought this on yourself."

    The streetwalker snarled.

    "Lose to a fucking little squirt like you? Never."

    "Anneb¨¦l, you have lost. I ruined your thousand dollar pair of boots, your designer jeans; I butchered your hair, and I even have your wallet."

    She shook the wallet before her in a less than magnanimous gesture.

    Anneb¨¦l cursed as she removed her foot from the boot. She removed the other as well.

    Finally, suspiring in exasperation, Anneb¨¦l conceded, "fine. Give me my wallet back and we''ll call it even. I''ll give you your space and be on my way."

    Tas¨¬a liked to keep her trophies, but she had her priorities to consider. It was worth losing the wallet just to settle things up so she could continue onward.

    "Fine."

    Tas¨¬a threw her the wallet. As Anneb¨¦l sauntered out of the office building barefoot, the streetwalker smirked and threw her head back in absolute triumph.

 2.12 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a peeked through the windows to watch Anneb¨¦l as she rescued the Bowie knife.

    The streetwalker started to sing a spirited but oddly worded song as she worked on removing the blade from the wooden seat of the stool.

    Anneb¨¦l retreated with her knife across the parking lot into the smallest of the four buildings. The original door of which had been replaced by a thick hatch. The kind used to enclose large scale freezer units in supermarkets and warehouses.

    Anneb¨¦l unlocked a sturdy chain pulley. After the silvery links whipped into place, the hatch budged open. She retreated inside.

    Evidently, she made her home there.

    Tas¨¬a stared at the boot pinned down by her stiletto. You did not waste good treated leather. She could repurpose it for a pistol grip or a knife handle.

    Or, twist it into the design of a sigil, and put it to fire.

    The flow of pattern on the boot reminded her of the whispers of the Wise One in the way his words forced one to untangle a symmetry of underlying meaning.

    It took a few minutes to cut the leather of the pair of boots into a flattened material. She stored them in her fanny-pack before she continued deeper into the complex.

    Tas¨¬a could tell the vagabonds only made use of the first few rooms near the entrance. At least one of them braved the stairwell into the basement where the generators were kept.

    A chemical processor in the basement converted green leaf into an energy-rich oil and pulp by-product.

    Bags of leaves lined a storage room beside the stairwell.

    Thick electric cables tied to the roof splintered into every direction. No doubt, one led out to Anneb¨¦l''s quarters.

    Tas¨¬a walked on past, down an unlit interior corridor with no windows. She slowed down to allow her eyes to adjust. The soft pad of her boots tread delicately on each down trod of her heels.

    She expected shit to get weird. Nanospores gathered where there was an absence of light and no circulation of air. The chances that the vagabonds kept the building disinfected beyond their living spaces were unlikely.

    There was no comforting scent of Lysol or similar products. Tas¨¬a did catch the whiff of something she did not expect.

    Incense similar to the sweet scent of opium. Something else teased her olfactory senses.

    Az¨²car quemada.

    Burnt sugar. A scent she associated with sex. Tas¨¬a''s gut clinched as the odors stirred her nether region. She breathed in slowly and tightened and released her toes and fingers.

    She needed to get a hold of herself. Something nearby, she suspected, intended her to feel this way, and she wasn''t going to let herself get played.

    The scents grew stronger as she approached a corner where the corridor turned. Tas¨¬a leaned against a wall and she leaned over for a quick glance into the gray shadows.

    Radiant moonlight glowed through the left sidewall. She recalled a conference room with a large window dominated on the other side of the hallway. Just past a door, a pair of small bodies scurried along the rightside wall.

    They disappeared down the corridor beyond Tas¨¬a''s range of vision.

    She drew herself up against the wall and forced herself to relax. She saw what they looked like, but she knew what they really were.

    They appeared to be the Black Eyed Ones. Old Gothic mythical creatures. Emaciated adolescents with oily dark hair. They traveled in pairs. Ill-omened beings, now projected as entities by the Cull Spores to frighten people.

    This cryptid pairing she had just now witnessed were not those entities, however. She had seen them, but they touched none of her other senses. Merely hallucinations. With clarity of mental vision that calmly endured the ravings of her eyes, Tas¨¬a knew that she now saw them only because of the insanity encroaching her mind.

    This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    Tas¨¬a continued down the corridor hall.

    On her right was a door done in rich, elaborate decoration. Reinforced patterns in a variance of dark woods curved along the doors enameled surface.

    A plaque on it read: Anneb¨¦l''s - Solo Para Amantes Locos

    For mad lovers, only.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. So, this is where the big bad bitch took her clientele. The door alone was giving her a more upscale impression than Tas¨¬a thought possible for the low-rent whore.

    Tas¨¬a studied the door handle. There was something odd about it. She got on her knees and she brought out a pin light for a better look.

    Decorative brass twisted along the length, but that is not what caught her eye. The ring that circled the keyhole gave off a subtle gleam.

    Tas¨¬a smiled. This was her old self at work in being able to spot and make sense of critical minutiae most others would miss.

    That gleam was a razor-sharp edge that encircled the keyhole.

    Anneb¨¦l''s door was trapped. Tas¨¬a aimed the light into the hole. There was a triggering mechanism that would be neutralized if a correctly shaped key was inserted.

    It was designed to thwart anyone skilled at picking locks like herself by slicing through their fingers.

    Tas¨¬a estimated from the length of the doorknob''s non-decorative interior section that the pipe would only spring out by four inches.

    She unsheathed the stiletto and she used it to fiddle with the trigger. The razor-sharp pipe popped out. It would have definitely sliced through her knuckles if she had played with the tumblers first.

    With the trigger out of place, the tumblers only took her a minute to manipulate open.

    When she pushed the door open, a yellow haze dissipated before Tas¨¬a got sight of a boudoir style bedroom. Two twisted glass lamps on matching marble inset tables added to the glow of soft red light.

    They were the source of the burnt sugar smell.

    A twirl of motions above her caught her eye. It was something quite unique. A mobile made of seven Vatican-style filigree-rich thurible censers that circled around on rods carefully set upon a central edifice.

    For a moment, in a repeating pattern, when the censers were positioned to face her, the collective filigree of the seven censers formed a thaumaturgist pentagram.

    No simple streetwalker would have a set up like this.

    Tas¨¬a realized she may have misjudged the extent of Anneb¨¦l''s intellect. After all, even an intellectual of the Quadra often came across as hyper-violent to members of other cultures. Particularly, those commonly associated with the Salvage.

    What other surprises did Anneb¨¦l have in store for her?

    Tas¨¬a caught sight of poster art above the lush bed. The right side of it was of Anneb¨¦l herself done in nineteenth-century Parisian design.

    The left was a quotation from a poem. Oddly in Spanish given the author was Baudelaire. Still, it scanned well.

    -Todo esto no vale la terrible maravilla

    Tu mordedura de saliva

    Quien hunde mi alma sin remordimiento en el Olvido,

    Y, llevando el v¨¦rtigo,

    ?El fracaso en las orillas de la Muerte!

    -All this is not worth the terrible wonder

    Your saliva bite

    That sinks my soul without remorse into Oblivion,

    And, bearing the vertigo,

    Failure on the banks of death!

    On an easel by the far wall, Tas¨¬a could see a large sketchbook and an expansive set of watercolors. She walked over to study the sketches. From the stylings of the portrait on the open page, Tas¨¬a surmised Anneb¨¦l must have painted the faux nineteenth-century print above her bed.

    As Tas¨¬a stood there impressed with her rival, a chill ran up her spine. She realized the subject of the sketch was someone intimately familiar to her. The one commonly called the Incubus.

    She recalled the dissipating yellow mist she had seen upon her entrance into the chamber.

    "Incubus. If you are in here, show yourself."

    A new shadow slowly formed in the mirror above a vanity table. Tas¨¬a turned around.

    The Incubus sat on the edge of the bed.

    "I did not want to divert your attention on what needs to be done most immediately," it said in an apologetic tone.

    "I understand," Tas¨¬a answered as she tried not to leer at the creature''s beautiful face.

    "Perhaps, it is good that you called me out. I may be able to help you. Be wary of that mesmerizing one, Egilona," the Incubus said as it pointed to the words of Baudelaire. "Above all else, she hates to be reminded of the existence of Oblivion. Look on to that dresser. Take that soltera beside the hand-mirror."

    A soltera. A device used to both distribute and play a singular album or a set portfolio of a recording artist''s work. The flash drive could be switched out, but the soltera''s outer designs were custom to a given musician''s trademarked logo and design work.

    She flicked the device on as she read the title - Las Flores del Mal.

    Someone had set the entirety of Baudelaire''s book of poems to Spanish grindcore.

    "The spirit of nihilism and the constant call to Oblivion is more than she can endure."

    "Thank you, Incubus."

    "I do have a name. One day I will tell you it, Ms. Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, but for now, I must part."

    The creature bowed its head and dissipated back into the hellish yellow mist.

 2.13 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    With a pin light in her hand, Tas¨¬a followed the corridor as it zig-zagged through the entire bottom floor interior of the building. The final hallway opened up into a windowless room.

    She stood in front of a vaulted sliding door. It would not open without a series of key presses inputted correctly into the mounted pad on the wall to the side of the sliding door.

    As she crouched down, Tas¨¬a removed a panel from the bottom of the keypad. She then examined a set of green marked pin connectors twisted together and bounded with a zip tie.

    Nothing had been switched out in the wiring since the first time she cracked open the locking mechanism years beforehand.

    She already knew which one of the connector wires would override the keypad. If activated, it would set off a set of pressure locks in a sequenced release.

    That part was a known quantity for Tas¨¬a. Here, however, was her dilemma.

    Since the vagabond squatters kept at least one of the generators in the basement running, she could flip the main control switch on the electric service panel to get the keypad up and functional again.

    In itself, not a problem.

    However, if lights were to come on, after more than a year in which they had been kept off, the Hijos Lux guards would certainly take notice of this sudden occurrence.

    She would need to examine the electrical schematic to isolate the necessary cable that controlled the electrical throughput for the room from the myriad tangle of all the other ones.

    After picking the button-ply lock on the electrical service panel, Tas¨¬a flicked the pin light back on and she waved it along the inside of the thin metal door. It was standard practice to keep a schemata taped on the inside of operational panels.

    "Ah, shit," Tas¨¬a muttered. She brushed her bangs out of her face; habitually she did so in frustration whenever her plans were set back like they were at that moment.

    Most of the schemata had been peeled off and scratched up. It was illegible in its present form.

    She would have to deduce the scheme of wires without a guide.

    With the pin light set at eye-level, she pointed at the line-up of circuit breakers. Thankfully, they were well labeled.

    One label stated, outdoor lights - back end.

    There was another for the front side lights further down the row of circuit breakers. She switched both breakers off.

    Curiously, the squatters ran none of their own appliances through the electric service panel box.

    The main switch was kept in an off position.

    They ran their own cables and simply kept this box off so their own energy usage was conserved and not split.

    She searched up and down the twin rows of breakers. If she could isolate a breaker for this very room, she would not have to worry about alerting her targets.

    There being too many possible random factors she could not account for ahead of time stressed her.

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    For one, even a random LED for air quality warning left on near a window, but locked away upstairs where she would never see it but the cultists did, would be enough to botch her planned raid on Hijos Lux.

    It would take her at least a solid hour to rummage through all of the building''s locked rooms just to search for all of the stray lights.

    Tas¨¬a hoped that the circuit breakers for this one room could be isolated from everything else on the panel.

    Along a bottom left-hand row was a set of four breakers.

    Lot A, Lot B, Lot C, Blank, Back Fence.

    She suspected the blank circuit breaker to be the one for which she searched, but Tas¨¬a could not be entirely certain.

    Other breakers were sectioned off by their proximity to one of eight corridors. This made sense; the cables in the ceiling physically branched out in that very fashion.

    Likely, the breaker to this room was split away from the corridor cable to protect it from the kind of meddling to override it that she was attempting now.

    She paused to think the situation through. A sound burglary in practice took a lot of thoughtful patience to even stand a chance at success.

    As Tas¨¬a ruminated, the solution occurred to her.

    One way to test it. Reverse flow.

    Tas¨¬a unscrewed the bulb from her pin light. She carefully unfastened the main wire to the keypad and reconnected it to the batteries in her pin light.

    On the electrical service panel was a built-in amp reader. Indeed, the diagnostic readout indicated the blanked-out circuit breaker was now throwing out juice.

    Tas¨¬a flipped all the other breakers off followed by a downward thrust of the main switch.

    Within a few minutes after she juiced the right connector wire the pressure locks released in a top to bottom sequence.

    The vaulted sliding door opened.

    Past the fenced-in cage, the earth moving equipment gleamed in the moonlight. A crane, the most dominant in the skyline of the several earthmovers on the lot, arched thirty feet up in the air.

    Metal monstrosities. Long, tall and wiry.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the pistol scope. She crouched down and leaned her head out the door. She scanned the rooftop of the closest brownstone building.

    A guard stood on the corner with his feet planted on each of the connecting sides. A carbine was held close to his chest and folded stiffly in his arms as he stared up at the Moon.

    Tas¨¬a magnified the scope to its full x7 setting.

    This close to her target she could see from his obscene appearance that without any doubt the guard was a fully formed ghoul.

    His browline and rigid face gave the appearance of an evil monstrosity. His eyes were those of a lost soul.

    As she observed, Tas¨¬a grimaced at her own train of thought. The ghoul seemed caught up in his own moment of reflection.

    Could she regard him as still human?

    She wondered if she and Sinclair could truly be friends. In spite of the horrid evil to which the Canadian woman was an active party, Tas¨¬a came to like her.

    She was but a lost soul in a land that dangled on the precipice of the Abyss.

    Tas¨¬a breathed in a rush of air to jolt herself back to her greater purpose. She studied her current predicament.

    If she moved further out from where she now crouched exposure would be risked.

    The awning above her and the door that still remained open provided her cover for the time being.

    Only when the ghoul finally moved along on his patrol would she be given the chance to dash the thirty-five yards between the vaulted sliding door and the first row of equipment stacked in-line closest to her.

    There was nothing to hide behind in the caged corridor between.

    Tas¨¬a froze in place when she heard a familiar swish of a clicking sound caused by a multitude of gears grinding away.

    It moved swiftly up and down the row of equipment that it now patrolled.

    Tas¨¬a encountered the damn things many times while raiding mansions in the Esconda Vida.

    Fucking spiderbots!

    It turned as it jostled its legs in a leftward rotation. Its two glowing infrared sensors swiveled as if it was attempting to pick up a reading. After several seconds, the sensors lined up, facing in her direction.

    With the gears in its eight legs letting out a high pitched squeal, it quickly headed down the row and in her direction.

 2.14 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a backed away slowly so the ensuing tumult would not draw attention from the Hijos Lux ghoul on duty above. Unfortunately, with a highly sped-up final scurry, the bot was nearly on top of her before she could remove herself from the lot entrance.

    It leaped at her.

    Tas¨¬a stumbled backward landing on her ass as she dodged the assault.

    She was still overly concerned with exposure in her attempt to minimize her own movements. Tas¨¬a realized her current mindset was just going to get her injured.

    As she twisted away, the spiderbot smacked her on the chest, pushing her back to the ground. The concrete entranceway pounded against her back with only the feathered jacket taking the brunt of the force in her stead.

    Anger flared up inside her. As the spiderbot''s pinchers gripped her shoulder, that anger flowed white-hot through her very neurons.

    Something very odd was occurring inside her body as if it was preparing for what came next.

    Spiderbot grips were typically accompanied by a jolt of electricity. The pinchers were nothing more than a pair of modified tasers. This one bared down its grip on her shoulder with a secondary clamp device to prevent her from jerking away as it administered the shock.

    When the shock came, it flowed smoothly in an even oscillation throughout her entire body. She rode it like the crest of a wave.

    Then in a turn of an instant, the storm inside her gathered itself together and focused just before it burst the electrical shock back into the spiderbot.

    With a violent jolt, the spiderbot released her; it jumped back. Sizzling blue sparks popped between every fabrication on its body.

    It smelled of sulfur oils and burning chrome.

    Tas¨¬a leaned over to steal a glimpse up towards the guard. Improbably, he was singing to the moon.

    The Wise One now whispered to her.

    He sings to Hecate to either release him of his burdens or make him a man once more. Egilona must never know of his heresy. She is a jealous goddess, and Hecate is a most pernicious rival.

    Tas¨¬a shook what she believed to be a symptom of the madness that entangled her thoughts. The Wise One never spoke to inform, and never did it speak so clearly.

    Still, she wondered why the Hijos Lux guard was still so caught up in his revelry.

    Perhaps, given the spiderbots engaged in playful-like behavior on their security rounds, they simply did not interest him. Perhaps, from his vantage point, nothing it did seemed out of the ordinary nor was entirely unexpected.

    Likely when coati raccoons inevitably got into the lot from time to time, the spiderbots raised a similar high-degree of ruckus as this one did so now.

    Though her curiosity wasn''t satiated, she had no time to speculate on this bit of good fortune. Good fortune was so rare for her, Tas¨¬a never truly accepted it.

    She crawled back to the doorway. A sound rattled behind her. The spiderbot shook in place as the sparks slowly dissipated.

    The shaking motion that it now engaged in was part of a diagnostic routine to ascertain the mechanical damage it had suffered.

    Tas¨¬a was not out of trouble, yet. Indeed, its sensors once again swiveled to search for her.

    Tas¨¬a retreated back into the room. She did not anticipate the spiderbots. For this, she could kick herself. With a fenced-in lot where much in the way of valuable equipment lay stacked, how could she not anticipate it? Robotic defenses should have been expected.

    Still, what measures could she have brought with her that would have remained inconspicuous?

    Her VRBP-100 Bullpup shotgun strapped to her back with a bundle of sabot rounds in her fanny-pack? That would have been a pair of conversation pieces she could have used when she rode the bus into town, she thought, sarcastically.

    Tas¨¬a slipped off her shoes.

    When the spiderbot reached the doorway, she retreated into the hallway behind her.

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    With her eyes steady on the spiderbot, Tas¨¬a reached out to grab a door handle. She did not enter the small office on the other side until the spiderbot had once more spotted her.

    Its sensors sat on a round disk atop its carapace. The red glowing electric eyes swiveled around for a moment before they reacquired her as a target.

    Determined not to be outpaced this time, Tas¨¬a lept into the little office with a roll and a twirl. Raising back up, she jumped to grip the door frame. Pulling herself up, she rolled forward until her body hung upside down.

    She pressed her knees against the ceiling, and her feet, gripping with her toe tips, planted against the doorframe.

    She was now free to remove her grip from the door frame to free up the use of her hands.

    Tas¨¬a recalled how impressed Felicit¨¦ was with her acrobatic display back at the Spore Isolation Unit.

    She decided to show off for her once more. Tas¨¬a removed the PA from her back pocket and took a selfie displaying her big, wide goblin smile, a thumbs up with her right hand, and an exaggerated eye wink.

    She clicked send to Contact Plus1, her auto-list for Felicit¨¦''s number.

    The spiderbot crept into the carpeted office beneath her. Tas¨¬a took a picture of it.

    She added a caption: Gonna need your help!

    The spiderbot spotted her once again. Its sensors lined up in unison, up-down then down-up, as if to question how Tas¨¬a had gotten up there.

    The eight forelegs squatted down just before it sprung up in a futile attempt to reach her. It easily jumped six feet, but it needed just shy of another foot to reach her toes.

    Even with its two hundred pounds of bulk, the spiderbot deftly landed back on its leg extensions.

    Felicit¨¦ answered back.

    Your titties are showing.

    Tas¨¬a peered down. Indeed the feathered jacket was splayed outward, and the t-shirt she bought from Romona was two sizes too large. Her boobs popped out from the minimalistic bra not designed for upside-down usage.

    Why had she not worn a sports bra beneath a well-fitted t-shirt as was her standard attire when on a raid? Vanity, Tas¨¬a realized.

    She expected to end her night at the Daga Chicas. Even though it was a proletariat scene, the pretty little pink number was still more du jour than a sports bra.

    Though the best she could hope for, given her condition, was for some random hunk to buy her drinks over a scintillating conversation, it would have been a nice cheap thrill, even still.

    Her mind stopped wondering over pleasantries as a new concern now consumed Tas¨¬a''s attention. The spiderbot jumped up on a desk, knocking over a holo-flat.

    It once more sprung at her. She scrunched up even tighter as it crested beneath her before smashing into the wall.

    Spiderbots were tough little vermin though. It pulled itself back up and once again accessed its opponent.

    But why did it attempt the maneuver on the desk in the first place? Was there a server-based AI, using adaptive learning, that was in control of it? Worse still, was there a human operator involved?

    She had no reason to assume either of these factors. Tas¨¬a knew that sophisticated bot behavior could be packed in a small amount of code. Video games managed to do this on extremely limited resources more than thirty years before she was born.

    This one spiderbot, Tas¨¬a felt she could handle, but she needed Felicit¨¦''s help to ascertain to what extent that spiderbot below had outside support.

    It was also odd, she thought, that it did not call on other bots to assist it.

    Felicit¨¦ sent another message following up on the second photo Tas¨¬a had sent her of the spiderbot.

    Now I see what has your headlights up so high.

    Tas¨¬a glanced down and giggled in response. The one thing that made her popular with the boys, the pokies did tend to be one of her more prominent features.

    Still, she needed to get her compadre back on track.

    Felicit¨¦ . . . I''m most literally hanging on up here.

    She typed this and then pressed send. Felicit¨¦ answered back in turn.

    Relax, relax, Tas¨¬a, I''m pinging that bot for you as we chat.

    Tas¨¬a sent her another message.

    Are you free to use your phone?

    ''Fraid not. Too many people around. Nice jacket, btw. Where do you go to get something that cool?

    Tas¨¬a smiled to herself wanly before she answered.

    Three attentive sisters to a prince of a man. There''s a story there.

    The spiderbot scampered out of the office.

    Is your little friend doing anything different?

    Tas¨¬a answered back.

    Just left me, without even saying goodbye.

    Felicit¨¦ let her know what was happening.

    It has been told it needs energy. Now it is going back to its charging station. The other two bots are now overridden and have gone back to their respective stations as well.

    Tas¨¬a pushed off the ceiling to land in a somersault on the carpet below.

    Felicit¨¦, were the spiderbots in communication with anyone? Were they receiving any outside instructions?

    The Argentinian answered in turn.

    Negative. I checked for that. Completely autonomous. Even from each other.

    Now, Tas¨¬a needed to say her farewells and continue onward.

    I owe you everything. Feel so guilty that you are still there.

    Felicit¨¦''s feigned mere practical concerns as Tas¨¬a expected she would.

    I''ve got to get you to Asunci¨®n. Can''t accomplish that if you are spiderbot chow.

 2.15 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a peeked out of the door to catch sight of the ghoul. He lay prostrate with his head bowed down where she had seen him standing minutes before. The familiar hellish yellow haze rose above him in a gathering density.

    A voice coming deep from his chest boomed out, but the prayer for which he chanted was unintelligible.

    To her ears it sounded both monstrous, given the inhuman resonance of the ghoul''s voice, and, as his voice cracked in its pleadings, pitiable.

    Tas¨¬a saw the wisp of a shape form out of the corner of her eye to her left. When she turned to get a better look, it disappeared.

    In her deep intuitions, she understood.

    "This is your doing, Wise One. I don''t understand why, but you are helping me."

    The dark purplish twirl appeared on the periphery of her vision once more. She forced herself not to look.

    Though not as common as its serpent form, others spoke of what she now witnessed, Silent Dragon.

    Tas¨¬a continued to speak.

    "Afterall, I am trying to obtain a means to avoid Manifestation. Is that not what you want me to become?"

    From its familiar voice came two words.

    Golden. Watch.

    The Silent Dragon vanished.

    From above the ghoul, the haze lowered and spread down like a blanket upon his entire body. His knobbed arms tensed up as he raised his head.

    The ghoul howled.

    It was not the wail of a frightened creature, but more of a wolf being released from barbed chains.

    Boils percolated from his face.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the pistol scope for a closer view.

    The boils burst like carpet bombs on an already pitted city. Only to be replaced by waving successions of hundreds more still.

    He stared at the moon with an exalted rigor mortis grin. His arms spread out.

    "Hecate," he yelled as he rose up from the awning ledge that lined the brownstone roof.

    Boils now spread out across his entire body and they burst as quickly as they formed.

    A scent permeated a breeze against her face. It was pleasant and reminiscent of a beefsteak on a grill.

    He ripped off his shirt. Beneath the bursting boils his skin now shown in a brilliant luster.

    When the last of the festering boils sizzled away in steamy dissipate, his skin was no longer the sickly ocherous yellow common to ghoul kind.

    "Golden," she whispered.

    The creature yelled once again.

    "Now, I shall be received!"

    He stepped off the ledge.

    Tas¨¬a blinked several times. She could no longer see him. The asphalt he landed on was outside of her sight.

    He was not dead. Laughter filled the night air. His voice cracked like someone who just got a joke after a long delay.

    Tas¨¬a peered around. There were several windows in the brownstone building, but she could see clearly through all of them.

    Strange enough, the ghoul''s behavior aroused none of the others of the Hijos Lux cult.

    Where were they?

    Tas¨¬a ran into the lot through a row of equipment. She had a path in mind.

    Once on the back row, she searched for the control cabin of the tall crane that ruled the backlot skyline.

    When she discovered it, she climbed up the plates it used for treads on its continuous track.

    The cabin proved to be a difficult climb. Broken glass and exposed metal shards, the latter shredded in ribbons, made pulling up on it hazardous.

    Blood corrosive tetanus flared up as a feared risk in her mind. Kids from her youth back in the barrio got nasty cases of the lockjaw and the sangre verde after playing in an industrial dump nearby her home.

    Ever since, catching the disease was a near phobia for her.

    Tas¨¬a carefully leaned her torso into the cabin to study the damaged interior; from the twisted metal and rust, she surmised an explosion had occurred inside it at some point at least a year previously.

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    Perhaps, some kids or hooligans lobbed a mortar round that landed inside the cabin. Or the Hijos Lux neighbors tested a new toy perhaps, like a rocket launcher.

    As she peeked up at what remained of the felt board head guard on the cabin ceiling, Tas¨¬a had to nix those two possibilities.

    The explosion had not occurred here.

    A row of four bottom teeth were embedded where they had punched through the felt board.

    Holy damn.

    When the control cabin exploded, someone had been inside it. A pool of blood, covered in rusty mold, caked the floorboard.

    No forensic expert, but Tas¨¬a could see the explosion in her mind''s eye. The bomb was placed, or the grenade landed, in the storage space behind the seat.

    The arc of the explosion must have ripped through his vertebrae from his jawline to just beneath his ribcage. His torso landed in the passenger floorboard after banging into and then bouncing off the diagonal of the wedge-shaped steering device.

    After a half-assed attempt at cleaning it out, likely with nothing more than a pressure wash, the crane was brought here.

    She would have to ask Sachmilli about the incident.

    Tas¨¬a continued to the crane. Her plan was a simple one. Climb the crane. Where the last six yards dipped down, she would run down the length of it, and make her leap onto the side of the brownstone.

    Easy peasy. Any spider monkey could pull it off.

    However, she needed an assist none of her spider monkey friends from back at the barrio park needed given the rough calloused padding of their palms and digits.

    Her three-year-old self would have gladly traded everything that was pretty about her own hands to be more like the spider monkeys. Thirty-two-year-old Tas¨¬a preferred being a girl with well-manicured hands and painted nails.

    She could live with the compromise. Now, far away from the damaged cabin, Tas¨¬a removed her tennis shoes. She clipped them to a clamp she kept on the back of her belt for that very purpose.

    In her fanny-pack, she kept a pair of rubber slip-on shoes. They fit on her feet very sleekly. The soles bore the extra tread she would need to keep steady on the narrow crane rail, and to grip the wall from a mid-position grasp.

    She began to slip on a pair of climbing gloves. This she did more to protect her nails than for necessity.

    In prison, it mattered very little how her nails appeared as the choices for nail care products on the commissary were severely limited.

    Now, however, she had her nails polished back to her Vida Escondida nouveau riche standards. It was the second thing she did upon arrival to her safehouse, after a hot bath in her ceramic tub.

    Emeralds glittered above diamond spackled layers of polish. A pearlescent finish designed to fade from bold contrast at the cuticles to a smooth blend along the fingernail tips comprised the last layer.

    Tas¨¬a smiled to herself. The polished nails were the literal tip of her ambition to obtain her once exalted position for a glorious second reign as the Angel of Theft.

    Filthy Vida Escondida nouveau riche.

    A high pitched squeal pierced through her revelry.

    The ghoul-now-golden was no longer laughing.

    She could see that something twirled in the air near the ghoul, but could not make out even its shape. Just movement.

    Tas¨¬a began to climb up the length of the crane rail while keeping an eye on the anomaly.

    It must be camouflaged by the brownstone wall behind it, she gathered.

    Tas¨¬a sat on the rail apex. She now had a view of the rooftop. Something was spread-out, oddly splayed like a vivisection pinned down.

    She peeked through the gun scope. Indeed, she could make out the head of a ram, the body laid out in sacrifice. The exposed organs appeared singed. Smoke rose from crisped giblets.

    Tas¨¬a considered what she had just witnessed. Perhaps, some kind of an exchange between it and the ghoul on a cellular level made the transfiguration into the golden possible.

    Tas¨¬a peered down. She had a good view of the ghoul now. He wrung his hands as if he were pleading to someone for mercy.

    His voice was now a whispery mumble.

    Something wet appeared above the ghoul. It was a dark olive green.

    Tas¨¬a gasped. It was like no ascospore she had ever seen. It emitted a high pitched squeal. Dozens of high pitched squeals in a disturbing dissonance.

    Another source for the same squeaking sound grew closer to her.

    Tas¨¬a peeked down along the direction from which she heard the noise. The second ascospore rose up above a tree from where it hid.

    The tree of white blooms shook in a violent rattle beneath the ascospore. It seemed to shed, but the blooms did not fall.

    They gyred in a circular motion that gained speed before shooting past the fence. The swarm of blooms thrusted upward, aimed directly at her.

    Before the flower blooms could slam in her face, Tas¨¬a hopped into the air in a vertical fall.

    She grasped the tressed ridges beneath the crane rail.

    She looked down.

    The ghoul-now-golden howled infernal.

    The ascospore stopped squealing just before it plunged down, shattering into the helpless ghoul. A dark, oily cloud of gas consumed the cultist. As it quickly dissipated, the cloud was replaced by a swarm of rats.

    The ghoul-now-golden lay engulfed entirely by the rodents sprawled along the length of his body.

    To her right side, the howl of the second ascospore grew louder. Now in its shadow, Tas¨¬a threw her torso back over as she twisted in position. She coiled tight and thrust her legs up in a mule kick.

    Her rubber soles made contact with the ascospore. It spun away from the crane and burst in a dark cloud above the lot. Rats rained down upon the ground.

    Two landed on the rail near her. They were not normal. The rats appeared emaciated, calloused bodied with parts of their skeletons revealed at their joint extremities.

    She had seen one like these two before in the aqueduct service tunnel beneath the medical center.

    They rushed upon her. She swept one off with a boot. It tried to bite into the rubber sole of her slip-on with no success. It dropped down, groundward, when the rubber flex-back broke its jaw.

    The second rat jumped up to bite Tas¨¬a on the face. Her reflexes were even more feral than those of the nasty creature. As it came at her, she punched it on its nose. It too fell onto the lot asphalt.

    Rats dealt with, she regained her full balance on the crane rail. With a running jump, she thrust herself past the fence and on to the side of the brownstone, eight feet from the ground.

    The ghoul-now-golden lay there nearby her. He let out a whispery moan.

    The rats were gone. They had chewed away at all his extremities beyond what a living thing would normally endure. There were no lids left to cover his eyes. One eye had been torn out. The little that remained of it spread beneath the curve of his cheek.

    His one remaining eye watched her with patient fascination. As he spotted her, he no longer moaned.

    Tas¨¬a jumped down, and she got close to the ghoul-now-golden.

    "Hello," she said.

    They watched each other for nearly a dozen long seconds before he spoke.

    "All she ever wanted was for her Sweetest Sunshine to know she loved him."

    He collapsed dead.

 2.16 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Nearby the corpse lay his carbine. Scoped and laser-sighted, the carbine possessed a more heavy-caliber chamber than she expected. It was a .338 Lapua Magnum.

    The logo on the side read El Paso Lathe - Urban Parameter Defender in English. It repeated in Spanish on the opposite side.

    El Paso Lathe, a fine, reliable brand.

    The gas block in the carbine''s assembly was adjustable. Tas¨¬a took a minute to reset it to make the recoil as forgiving as the assembly would allow.

    On the corpse, she recovered three magazines with six rounds in each. A full magazine had already been fed into it.

    Finally, satisfied that she could make use of the carbine, she slung the strap over her shoulder.

    Now she eyed the fractured skull of the golden-ghoul. With her hands still gloved, Tas¨¬a bent down and spread out the hole of a greasy wound just beneath the corpse''s left ear.

    It wasn''t morbid curiosity that motivated her to do this.

    She wanted to know how the ascospore managed to invade the golden-ghoul''s mind.

    After all, she had witnessed him in the thrall of the Silent Dragon just before the rat-swarm consumed him.

    To Tas¨¬a, it was likely those rats played hosts to an invasive species in control of their necrotic bodies. What would be revealed if she sliced one of the rats open?

    The indention beneath the ear was inlaid with six evenly grooved ridges forming a tight sphincter. The impression suggested that something with a sucking appendage bore into the corpse''s skull for no other purpose than to deliver to her a message.

    A message designed to fuck with her head.

    Tas¨¬a spat as she recalled the illusion she witnessed in the woods. She muttered a curse in anger at the blatant attempt to manipulate her state of mind and unravel her already compromised emotional well-being.

    Here, once more, the ascospore, under God only knew what guidance, attempted to mislead her like a tactical feint in a duel. For what purpose? To recruit her to its side in the greater conflict?

    Those last words of the golden-ghoul - all she ever wanted was for her Sweetest Sunshine to know she loved him - gave Tas¨¬a pause as she made a summary of her predicament.

    The same hidden intelligence that created the fairy mound illusion also created the rat-swarm.

    It was commonly believed there existed little in the way of independent agency in the ascospores.

    Thought to be merely the grunts in the Cull Spore invasion no one was even certain how they communicated with one another, much less doing so with the nanospores and AI entities.

    What was their purpose?

    They were programmed to spread madness in men and to test the laws of nature until they broke.

    Theorists and spooks had a term for this latter impetus and its methodology - el densidad.

    Though well educated, Tas¨¬a understood little of this aspect of information theory beyond its effects on her life.

    Here she was in the middle of a violent struggle between opposing forces using nanospore based bio-warfare.

    Unfortunately, they had chosen this spot for their skirmish tonight, but what choice did she have now with this insanity encroaching upon her but to go deeper into the compound?

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    Though the rooftop gave her the best position to surveille the surrounding brownstones and the interior court, the windows on the second and third stories were her best chance to remain stealthy.

    She could not account for the sighting positions where spotters were likely to be on the surrounding rooftops. That meant the rooftop was best avoided, for now.

    There had been no movement at all from the cult members except for the one dead ghoul on this side of the complex.

    Tas¨¬a climbed up to the third story window ensconced furthest away from the fenced-in lot.

    From the crane rail that she had climbed previously, Tas¨¬a acquired a thorough surveille of the upper stories due to there not being much of anything to spot inside them in the first place.

    A corridor with paced gas lamps connected by a brassy pipe mounted on the wall ran the entire length of both floors on this, the north side, of the brownstone building.

    If someone did chance upon her as she attempted to enter through the windows, she would see the movement of his shadow well before he had a chance to spot her.

    She brought with her B&E (breaking and entering) equipment. From her fanny-pack Tas¨¬a grabbed a silvery package containing an incision sponge. Two dozen packs of them came with the medical station she had stolen in the Escondida Vida.

    They were used to absorb blood and stabilize the internal organs of open chest cavities, the sponges also suctioned extremely well on glass surfaces.

    Only soaking the sponges in ethyl acetate could remove them from glass surfaces.

    She found using the sponges to remove glass from windows to be a more effective and inconspicuous means than bringing a plunger along with her. No matter how well she disassembled the plungers their bulk always proved to be inconvenient.

    After centering the sponge out on the bottom quadrant of the window surface, Tas¨¬a began to cut.

    She did so with some reluctance. She would prefer to enter, snatch and grab, and egress with no one the wiser she was ever there, but there was already a casualty.

    Due haste was the operational modus at this point.

    It took several engravings on all four sides, in long, even-tempered strokes to weaken the glass sufficiently.

    She was careful not to sever the piece entirely.

    Tas¨¬a put the diamond cutter back in its sheath and back in the fanny-pack.

    With a tight grip on the sponge, Tas¨¬a yanked it towards her. The piece of glass popped out. She caught it by its lengthwise edges.

    As she held the glass, Tas¨¬a kept her body in position by firmly planting her knees against the bottom protruding edge beneath the window as her feet remained tightly pressed against the brownstone.

    She decided she would stand the glass up against the uncut quadrant. If it fell, it would likely draw attention.

    Before she did so, the reflection that she gazed upon defied her eyes. Behind the familiar but shaded outline of her own face, stood a regale woman with thick honied-blonde hair pushed up in a duchess'' fold.

    Thick lashes dripped teary, her complexion set in sorrow''s red. Her eyes curved elegant; cheeks beneath slanted severe. Thoroughly elven.

    She held a bundle in her arms. Tas¨¬a could not see what lay within the bundle, but a tiny figure in golden hew that dappled in a crest along the woman''s bosom and neck.

    It was too radiant for a form to be percieved.

    The woman spoke to Tas¨¬a.

    "He was chosen to save our world, but chance was set against him. It was not to be."

    Tears dropped down on the bundle. She vanished.

    In a near state of shock, Tas¨¬a dropped the piece of glass.

    "Shit," she muttered as she lost her grip.

    Her right leg reacted to this by thrusting up. Her slip-on bootsie kicked through the glass that remained in the pane.

    Tas¨¬a was forced to tumble vertically down and re-establish her grip.

    Her newly acquired carbine fell in a twisted tangle back down on to the asphalt.

    The piece of glass shattered violently beside the golden-ghoul''s corpse.

    She heard the heavy tread of boots.

    From a mere fifteen yards away, a voice boomed out from just around the corner of the corridor.

    "Hector, what''s going on? Report in, already, damn it!"

    Tas¨¬a scurried up the wall and threw herself to grip the rooftop eaves.

    The man''s voice boomed once more.

    "Get the patrol crew over here. Something has happened to Hector!"

    Tas¨¬a raised up on her knees. Three of the Hijos Lux guards hastenly scuttled around on the brownstone to her south. It was a floor level higher than the rooftop she now crouched. The guards climbed a mounted ladder down to an annex.

    They did not seem to be reacting to her. She jerked her head around, searching for a cover position. Just a yard away, a pair of dead, milky blue eyes slanted down on her.

    The ram''s head bent in a backward thrust as if it had been electrocuted.

 2.17 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    The slant of the eave ledge provided enough shade to block the moonlight and keep Tas¨¬a out of the ghouls'' sight for now.

    She needed to make her move into the open spread of rooftop area to exploit the commotion on the floors beneath her.

    Tas¨¬a''s head felt suddenly light. Incredibly, without even realizing it, she was still holding her breath. She had not breathed out since she gasped upon catching sight of the distraught faerie queen.

    She took a moment to breathe in and out several times to regain control over this essential bodily function. Though she succeeded, the exercise made Tas¨¬a feel no more relaxed than before.

    Her lips felt peculiar, both itchy and numb. She thought of the Manifested Ones that she witnessed in the cells of the Spore Isolation Unit. The odd dimensionality of their mouths, like a fleshy fractal invasion bursting upon the curved surface of their lips, moved so disturbingly.

    In frustration, Tas¨¬a gritted her teeth and cursed under her breath.

    She wetted her lips with saliva spread out with her tongue. The lips felt normal. She was imagining things.

    They were driving her to paranoia with yet another fucked-up incident caused by the rival entities. The encroaching madness was unraveling her composure.

    She needed the LSD.

    Burn that AI invasion shit out of my God-bless¨¦dly-damned skull, post-haste.

    In the Quadra, most mental illnesses were the by-product of an invasive species that exploited the mind like a parasitic leech used a host.

    Biologists and medical scientists believed that LSD, in some unique fashion, chemically burned the entities'' receptors and starved them of the neuron based nourishment they fed upon.

    Oddly enough, similar hallucinogens like psilocybin had little effect. Else, she would be kicking cow-paddies in a pasture to search for mushrooms right now, instead of trying to rob a heavily armed cult.

    Her own questioning interior conscience pulled up through the anger she felt, and it now made its presence known.

    What if it is legit? What if they are trying to tell me something I need to know? Their methods may be flawed, and are scaring the hell out of me, but somewhere in that mash-up of hallucination and emotional manipulation, perhaps, there exists a legitimate concern.

    Her own ambivalence worried Tas¨¬a. Did these questions do anything to ease her burden?

    There was so little time left for this introspection. Yet, she could not help herself. Especially now that she was losing her grip on sanity.

    She lacked the knowledge necessary to make a sound decision that she could trust to be a good one. That is why she ran off earlier, on a quest to save the streetwalkers. She had hoped that little act of heroism would bring clarity to her actions.

    It did not. Sure, she had saved their lives, but she had lost time to save her own self, as well.

    Ultimately, whatever she chose to do was an act of faith.

    She believed the Incubus. The Infernal Madr¨¦, whatever cabal of spooks that controlled the entity, was a danger to all mankind.

    The faerie entities were somehow aligned with Egilona, so it would seem as they rose to counter the actions of the Wise One.

    They are only trying to soften you up, Tas¨¬a told herself.

    She glanced up. Something else she thought quite odd.

    If the ghoul-turned-golden was committing an act of heresy against the Hijos Lux by performing the transfiguration rite, would not the other ghouls find the ram''s presence and present condition out of place and out of sorts?

    As if to answer that very question, a midnight blue wisp in a delicate, thin crimson outline fluttered in swirling motions out of the corner of her eye.

    "O, Wise One," Tas¨¬a muttered.

    Without looking directly its way, she gave it a mocking bow of her head.

    I hear the questioning cynicism in your tone. Strong and impetuous, however, is how I prefer you to remain, Tas¨¬a.

    That is, we are not like Egilona, the Infernal Madr¨¦. She would prefer that all of humankind become like those decrepit ghouls.

    That would make her the mother of all the damned. She would reign supreme in a deadened world made all the more easy for her to control.

    She only reflects in this desire, the will of her creators. They lost contol of this world. They want nothing more than to regain it no matter the cost.

    As it spoke, the Silent Dragon seeped down into the spot beside her. He grew in form, becoming more and more solid.

    Tas¨¬a kept her gaze forward, not looking directly at him.

    Finally, in a normal human voice, a soft but reedy baritone, he spoke.

    "You can look now if you care to do so."

    He was now a short, but bulked-up man. Her height, but possessing massive muscularity in his ribbed torso and bulging arms and legs.

    His face and head, though they could well pass for human, possessed a reptilian morphology.

    Though his skin was midnight blue even still, on the surface of it, scales lay evenly and well defined. They formed occulted, tattoo-like patterns in the subtle contrast of chromatic dark blue shades.

    Though nude and hairless, he did not seem to mind that she studied his body and her eyes regarded his well-endowed appendage with a great deal of prurient interest.

    She raised her chin with an appreciative grin. Her gaze finally rested upon his massive shoulders.

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    "You seem so solid," Tas¨¬a said; her voice cracked on the last two words. "Mind if I touch?"

    "If you so desire, Tas¨¬a. You may do whatever you wish."

    Tas¨¬a squeezed his shoulder with both of her hands.

    The warmth of his flesh and the firmness of his taut muscles felt so radiant through her soft palms. With her fingertips, she traced an outline along the occulted seven-pointed star pattern on his shoulder blade.

    Though not beautiful like the Hermicubus, to her taste, the Silent Dragon was its equal in sexual desirability.

    Tas¨¬a fretted to herself with a tight grimace set upon her bowed chin. If she did not look away she would soon become over-stirred in her erogenous capacity.

    She felt a rumble in her gut.

    Tas¨¬a smiled and before forcing herself to look away, she gave a last, quick glance at the Silent Dragon''s privies.

    That thing is going to haunt me to the end of my days.

    Tas¨¬a thought as she drew her eyes away.

    This was becoming the most she had felt sexually attracted to anyone since the death of Gael-Sebastian Cuervo.

    She needed to make a hasty retreat from her arousal.

    "I suppose I need to get a move on," Tas¨¬a told the Silent Dragon with a great reluctance in the sigh of her voice.

    She started to look up.

    Two Hijos Lux guards stood on the fourth floor of the adjacent building. One stared straight at her as he nodded his head whenever the other guard spoke.

    Tas¨¬a jerked up at the sight of them.

    The Silent Dragon put an arm around her to calm her down.

    "They can''t see you. They can''t see me. They cannot even see the ram, nor smell the pleasant scent of its charred meats. I could take you right here in an act of loud, intense intercourse, and they would not see, hear, nor smell a thing.

    "The mind of a ghoul is highly pliable. Simple suggestions whispered into what remains of its unconscious mind will convince it of whatever you wish to convey."

    Tas¨¬a sat straight up, allowing the Silent Dragon''s arm to rest against her back. She stared into the bold cobalt of his eyes.

    "So, I can just march in there, freely, and grab the LSD? No more shenanigans along the way?"

    With a reptilian grin, the Silent Dragon shook his head.

    "Has anything ever been so simple as that for you, Tas¨¬a? So long as you are outside, and you don''t break glass, or fire off a gun, they will not notice you.

    "Once inside, the Infernal Madr¨¦ has a trap set in place to capture us. So, I have no means to help you inside their compound. I need your eyes and ears while you are in there. Without them, I am lost."

    Tas¨¬a paused before she answered. Her brows furrowed back at him in a hardened stare. She grimaced and bit her lips, afraid she was allowing her imagination to get ahead of her. She did not want to become too hopeful.

    "Is that why you are now flirting with me? You need my help and you are now charming your way into my heart to obtain it?"

    The Silent Dragon held her more tightly with a thumb lightly caressing the back of her neck.

    "No. In this, what your people call my Silent Dragon aspect, though I call myself Bajamutt¨¦, I have a voracious appetite for sex with human females. In this aspect, I am not so wise at all. If anything, I am a slave to your own desires, Tas¨¬a.

    "My sibling that you call the Incubus only teases you, for that is the set parameter of functions that went into Coraz¨®nte''s creation. A schism caused by the Infernal Madr¨¦ has overturned the logarithms that lie at the heart of our existence. Even still, it has yet to overcome those limitations.

    "If you do this task for me, Tas¨¬a, I''ll show you how your own condition, the logarithms that govern you even, can be overcome. Then what you so desire will be yours. The lost time you have endured for your entire adult life of not experiencing intimacy, I will make up for in full."

    Tas¨¬a chortled. She cupped Bajamutt¨¦''s hand in hers.

    "Bold claim."

    "You should know by now, Tas¨¬a, I only speak the truth."

    She finally smiled, once more. Tas¨¬a was beginning to relish how he spoke her name without embellishment.

    Bajamutt¨¦ stroked Tas¨¬a''s bangs away from her face. His hand slid down the side of her neck. Unfortunately, the queasy rumble stirred once more in her gut. She wanted to take what he had to offer right then and there, as he suggested earlier, but as he had just reminded her, nothing was ever that easily achieved for Tas¨¬a.

    "I''m afraid I have to ask you to stop doing that. The caress of your hand on me is having that certain effect on me."

    He stopped and placed his free hand on top of her own hand. All four of their hands were now joined.

    "You blame yourself for the incontinence that afflicts your physiology, but it is not at all your fault. The condition was created with the rewiring of your nervous system when you were a prematurely born baby.

    "It is a common condition amongst the Harvested. Some of you simply adjust. Some find mates among fetishists who find that peculiar condition to their own liking; others, like yourself, can''t get past their physical disgust with -"

    "Wait," Tas¨¬a pleaded. "What did you call me? Harvested?"

    She had not made the connection given she assumed the experiments on herself were unique. After all, she never met another human spider monkey-like herself before.

    From glancing at the files, and Felicit¨¦''s reaction when Tas¨¬a asked her what the phrase Premie Harvest meant, she thought it must have been something truly vile.

    Organ harvesting of premies. That was what came to Tas¨¬a''s mind and lurid imagination.

    Something was not adding up.

    Tas¨¬a regarded Bajamutt¨¦ once more with a tight furrowed stare. Yet, his voice came through to her most tenderly.

    "Tas¨¬a, there is so much you need to learn. That has been purposefully hidden from you over these many years."

    Her voice cracked as she answered him in turn. She wanted to believe the sincerity of his ultimate motives; however, her cynicism rang through her words.

    "So, if I do this one thing for you, you will reveal this great truth to me?"

    Bajamutt¨¦ lowered his chin to his chest. He closed his eyes and spoke, contritely.

    "I understand your disbelief. The files your friend is helping you decrypt will tell you everything you need to know, so you really don''t even need me for that purpose."

    She could see that he was indeed vulnerable to her whim. If she so desired, he could be made to be putty in her hands.

    However, she realized she needed to trust in that greater hope she felt, and not suppress it this time. Without that, her life was nothing more than one meaningless skirmish after another.

    For that reason, she would have to deal with him fairly. It would be an honest exchange of services proffered voluntarily by each party.

    In return, she had a chance at obtaining what she most desired.

    An intimate connection to others.

    "You have me, Bajamutt¨¦. What do you need me to do?"

    "The Dark-Eyed Ones, Gemini?s and Geminetta, have been captured. They are kept in an alchemist lair beneath the chemical lab. If Egilona kills them, the rest of us are weakened and we become greatly unraveled. Soon after, Egilona kills us as well. I understand the reservations your species has about our motivations and our methods, but we are the only thing standing in the way of your annihilation"

    Tas¨¬a eyed the ladder that connected an annex structure to the adjacent building. Jumping across to the annex and then up the ladder would give her the best vantage point to observe the compound.

    She stood up; leaning over the Silent Dragon, Tas¨¬a gave him a kiss that for now was a chaste one on his cheek.

    "I will do this, but you must understand, if you are to become my lover, that role comes with certain obligations on your part. Are we clear, Bajamutt¨¦?"

    He stared at the ram before he nodded. He was in no position to ask for a clarification as to what those obligations to her would be. He would have to trust her in turn.

    "I do. I am ready for that."

    "Good," Tas¨¬a answered before she twisted herself back around.

    She took off running across the rooftop.

 2.18 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the ladder and she began to sprint up it. A vibration shook through its hollowed iron rails and rungs.

    Above her, a Hijos Lux cultist clinched the two curved supports of the ladder rails to begin his own descent.

    He came down quickly.

    As he neared, Tas¨¬a found an eroded brick surface to use as a hold in the wall to her side. She switched over to the wall and climbed up once more.

    She got a good look at the guard on his way down. Like Sinclair, the poverty tourist, he was not fully a ghoul.

    Unfortunately, for him, he was much further down that path of monstrous transformation than that still pretty Canadian woman.

    He stopped his descent a few yards down from her. He was bothered by something.

    Her presence.

    Bajamutt¨¦''s Mesmer based illusion only affected the mind of the Hijos Lux cultist to the extent that he was a ghoul.

    What remained of his humanity warned him of Tas¨¬a''s presence.

    A quiet but high-pitched sound rippled out of his mouth like that of a skylark. Only after he repeated the sound could she translate it into words.

    "The fuck! The fuck is that? The fuck! The fuck is that?"

    There was something wrong with his throat. His neck was covered in scales of a chitinous green hue. It was not a condition that she had ever heard of a ghoul possessing.

    Tas¨¬a held her breath in place and she remained perfectly still.

    He jerked his head several times as he glared in her direction. His movement became more smooth and rhythmic like the sway of a deer trying to focus its sight.

    As he did this, he seemed to calm down.

    He spoke again, his voice much more intelligible.

    "So, I did not just imagine you, little one. You are still there."

    A curious furrow formed like carved etchings in his forehead. He spoke again, but this time in an excited whisper.

    "There is something wrong with you. Hold still, little one. I need to get a closer look."

    Tas¨¬a considered if she should free up a hand so she could shoot him, but she nixed the idea immediately. The cultist did nothing to threaten her so far.

    "Your mouth changes. From a pretty little archer''s bow to a dense Manifest''s energia receptacle and back. It flickers to the latter every six seconds. Can you feel it?"

    Tas¨¬a pulled into the wall as she tightened her grip. She was trembling.

    The adrenaline was trying to find her.

    "No. My lips itch from time to time, though."

    "Your eyes, too. They have that fixed look to them. La Mirada Exaltada."

    The exalted gaze, like all the old paintings of The Virgin.

    Tas¨¬a''s stomach quivered. She nearly wretched at the thought.

    Becoming Manifest.

    She must have grimaced something fierce at that moment for the demi-ghoul''s eyes looked on, pityingly.

    His voice now percolated through his odd throat in a soothing tone.

    "You are not so far gone that your condition can''t be reversed. Why haven''t you renewed your inoculation?"

    Tas¨¬a decided it was for the best to be honest with this one.

    "There is a bounty on me. I can''t go to the clinic. I would rather not steal from one. The Salvage closes them up to collectively punish the local population when thefts are discovered. Sometimes for months."

    The demi-ghoul shook his head.

    "I know. They closed up mine over a mere paperwork discrepancy."

    Tas¨¬a thought of the ghoul whose head she had put a bullet through earlier in the evening. Were they all like this one?

    Still fundamentally human?

    "You were a doctor?"

    "Anesthesiologist. Also, nurse when needed. That was a lifetime ago when the world was better comported and so was I." He scrutinized her for a moment and continued. "Little One, is that why you are creeping around on our walls? You need our LSD?"

    "Yes. A lifetime ago, I was a nun. Now, I am a professional cat burglar."

    His demeanor changed. The green scales on his neck flexed and tightened.

    "What happened to Hector? It is not a coincidence you are here is it?"

    Tas¨¬a realized the demi-ghoul was growing agitated. Likely, it was he who was expected to provide medical treatment for Hector.

    She answered quickly to get him back to their discussion.

    A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    "Actually, yes. A coincidence. I saw what happened to him. A rat swarm consumed him."

    The demi-ghoul winced.

    "That makes so little sense. It is she who controls the necrotic beasts. Why would she send the rats after one of our own?"

    Tas¨¬a felt her lips itch. At the same time, she also noticed, the demi-ghoul''s eyes glanced her way. The nerves in her face grew numb.

    Perhaps, if she provided him with more information, he would help her.

    "There is something else I saw. Do you see the ram lying charred over there? Hector performed some kind of ceremony to the goddess Hecate.

    "He transformed. Maybe, transfigured is a better word for what I saw. He became something more angelic than monstrous."

    The demi-ghoul shook his head as he objected in a brusk tone.

    "They are not supposed to be able to get to us. The Golden is a lie. I need to see him."

    The itching on her lips continued. Her nerves pulsated beneath the skin of her face.

    "Senor, I need your help," Tas¨¬a pleaded.

    "It flickers every four seconds now," the demi-ghoul stated in a matter-of-fact, clinical fashion.

    It was difficult to affect a sympathetic appearing visage with her nerves pulsing from numb to hot, but Tas¨¬a tried her damnedest.

    "I was told that the Hijos Lux no longer provides for the outside world, but I can pay you. I can pay you in gold."

    "In coin?"

    She nodded.

    "If you have it," he continued, "show me the coin."

    Tas¨¬a pulled out three Liberty gold coins and handed them to the demi-ghoul.

    His brows raised, impressed.

    "My name is Alex. Yours?"

    She caught herself stating her alias, but decided everything needed to be out in the open for this one to trust her.

    "Tas¨¬a."

    Alex, the demi-ghoul, grinned.

    "I remember when you used to deliver to the clinic as a bike courier. I felt even then something was a little off with you. As if you were in disguise. You had a different name then."

    She peered into the abyss of his transformed face. For the life of her, Tas¨¬a did not recall him as a man.

    Tas¨¬a remembered nearly everything relevant to her. Had her memory grown weak through the infection? Or, was he merely unrecognizable?

    "Avellana," she answered.

    "Yes. Yes. That was it," he said. As he continued to speak, something stirred on the ledge of the roof above them. She glanced up, but saw no one. Perhaps, Mel still followed. "Tas¨¬a, I am not greedy. I don''t need the gold except to justify the loss of inventory with something even more useful to our purpose.

    "My master is an alchemist of the old school. These coins will do fine.

    "Follow me up to the rooftop, and wait there. I''ll retrieve it for you."

    Alex skirted up the ladder. Tas¨¬a grabbed onto it, once more, and followed along.

    Just like that.

    Would the other ghouls be so receptive to her? Was she mistaken to go through so much trouble to get into the compound?

    No, Sachmilli was correct about that.

    Even in the past before Hijos Lux''s current realignment, they would have defended against trespass with lethal force.

    Of course, back then, you could show up at the front entrance and be well, even graciously, received. Not so, now.

    Why was Alex different?

    She shrugged at her good fortune as she rested her haunches on the ledge to make herself comfortable.

    Alex had disappeared into the rooftop shack that enclosed the stairwell.

    As Tas¨¬a waited for the demi-ghoul to return she leaned over the adjoining brownstone wall to catch a glimpse into the center court of the complex of buildings.

    The little jade palace stood in the middle of a well-groomed yard. It was designed to be a slightly scaled miniature of one that stood outside of Tokyo for the royal family.

    It''s luxuriant appearance tempted her to sideline her current mission in spite of all dire consequences and make a go at robbing it.

    Along with her problem with intimacy and her youthful rebellion from her father''s creed, kleptomania was the third reason she joined the seminary so long ago.

    She felt the Old Church''s structure provided a better foundation for addressing that problem in her moral make-up. At the very least, a rationale for confronting her compulsion to steal.

    The Old Church had thou shalt not . . . Her father''s creed of the Anewed had a motto of their own.

    Not every person''s property is of equal integrity.

    The years in the convent living an ascetic existence did not turn out to her liking. Tas¨¬a came full circle back to the old motto of the Anewed.

    Now staring at the Jade Palace of Maestro Sol, Tas¨¬a breathed controlled in-takes, ignoring the pulsing itch on her lips.

    She quelled the desire to steal for the fuck''s sake thrill of it. With melodramatic aplomb, Tas¨¬a set for herself a vow.

    Another time, I will return. Then your riches will be mine.

    What Bajamutt¨¦ promised was far greater than any shiny bauble. As Tas¨¬a smiled wickedly at where this thought led, it occurred to her she let herself get into a bit of a bind.

    How was she going to keep her promise to rescue the Black Eyed Ones, Geminetta and Gemini?s, now that she had struck another deal with Alex?

    Simple enough, she rationalized. She would obtain the LSD and consume it.

    Tas¨¬a bit her lips to scratch at the itch. It now appeared her need to consume it was becoming an immediate one.

    After some quiet time to adjust, she would continue into the compound. She had done LSD several times before. It was nothing like being drunk.

    The impairment of her functionality would be minimal. She could still proceed.

    A cry from below rose up through the shack door. It sounded like a scream from Alex.

    Ah, shit. Never, never was it so easy.

    Tas¨¬a had to investigate. She pulled herself off the ledge and she entered the shack.

    She walked quietly down the stairs. Fortunately, the lighting was minimal. Originating from small yellow LED bulbs lined on the slanted ceiling, the light spread out onto the walls.

    She merely needed to crouch as she walked to stay below the line of shadow.

    When she entered a hall on the floor below, the line separating shadow from light reversed. Gas lamps paced the walls and lit up the floorboards.

    Shadows were thick and volumetric on the ceiling.

    Tas¨¬a heard some things walk in a slow scurry up the hallway. She climbed up to the ceiling and pressed her elbows against the wall and ceiling tiles while pushing forward with her knees.

    It was a slow means of going forth, but proved to be an effective one.

    From around the corner came two beasts. Four-legged, with dagger-like talons for claws. Leathered skin spread against jutting vertebrae and long triangular skeletal jaws revealed sharp canines.

    They were once Dobermans.

    The hellhounds stopped walking forward and started to pace near where she clung to the ceiling. They sniffed the air through contorted nostrils and whinnied a protesting moan to one another.

    The hellhounds suddenly raced past her and darted up the stairs from whence she had descended.

    A moaning noise similar to the unintelligible high-pitched skylark like sound Alex made earlier came from around the corner where the hellhounds had appeared. Without leaving the shadowed ceiling, Tas¨¬a pressed forward with all due haste.

    Within a dozen seconds, Tas¨¬a made it to the T intersection. Alex lay on the floor. His legs twitched, and he bled from them profusely.

    In spite of this, Tas¨¬a was now feeling elated. A thrilling gasp rose from her breast when she caught sight of a glass vial clinched in Alex''s hand.

 2.19 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a jumped down on the floor and she rushed towards Alex. She leaned over him to see his mouth squeezed together tightly, and contorted in pain.

    "Santa Muerta," she gasped. "What happened?"

    His voice croaked as his breath shook unevenly through the green scales that covered his throat. He told her what occurred in slow, labored gasps.

    "I was down in the lab only long enough to grab the vial. I heard a growl on the opposite end of the room. The door to the caged room below was open. The hellhounds were kept there as guards. They are too vicious for anywhere else. They chased me up the steps and caught me here."

    Tas¨¬a had many questions to ask him, but he needed assistance first. She examined him with quick scrutiny.

    His shirt was torn in the back, scratch marks covered it. Some of the gashes opened deep. Still, they were not as serious as the three wounds on his legs.

    A bite above his knee pulsed blood down his thigh.

    As bad as it appeared, if she managed to close it off in time, he would not likely die.

    Alex pushed up on to his elbows.

    Their chitinous folds scraped against the floor.

    With his other arm, he reached up and offered her the vial. Tas¨¬a took it with a bowed head and a thank you.

    She glanced back up the corridor and she listened. The hellhounds were still well out of her hearing.

    "We need to get you into a room. You have no chance to fight them off."

    Alex spoke through clenched teeth.

    "Oh, my Bless¨¦d Madr¨¦, it hurts. I didn''t know that I had enough receptors left in my entire body to feel this much pain."

    Tas¨¬a clasped his shoulder sympathetically.

    "Can you stand up?"

    He laughed like a broken, ragg¨¦d doll with a caught pull string.

    "''Can''t'' is not one of the choices I have at the moment."

    As he attempted to get up, Tas¨¬a grimaced. The flesh on the bite wound above his knee stretched misshapen with his movement. The blood spilled out in a quickened pulse.

    She would have to treat him here, out in the open.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the leg above the bite, applying pressure with her thumb.

    It helped stem the blood flow.

    "I can tell that is where the hellhound bit to take you down. He tried to cripple you."

    Alex guffawed in an explosive cough. She watched him with a diagnostician''s eye, relieved that no blood spat out.

    She continued to speak.

    "Before you stretch that wound out and make it worse, let me put a clamping band on that ripped artery to keep it from tearing even more."

    "Were you a field surgeon, too?" He asked.

    Tas¨¬a nodded, beaming pridefully.

    "That is just one of the many skills you pick up running a B&E crew in the Vida Escondida."

    Tas¨¬a unsheathed her stiletto with which she cut into the trouser pant leg around the bite.

    Alex rose up his head to speak.

    "Vida Escondida? That sounds like an insane, low life expectancy kind of thing to do."

    "It''s the Quadra," she answered. "With these nanospores inside us all, who doesn''t make insane choices?"

    Tas¨¬a cleaned up the wound with a sterilized wipe. The artery exposed, it appeared better articulated than a normal human one.

    Good. Normal human ones could be slippery and difficult to manipulate. She slid her thumb down the sheared side from which the artery bled.

    It even felt oddly rubbery.

    "What are you thinking, little Tas¨¬a?"

    She chortled.

    "I am starting to appreciate some of the physiological trade-offs that you ghouls live with."

    Her lips felt dry and they itched something fierce. With one of her hands applying pressure down on the wound, and the other hand treating it, she could not scratch the itch.

    She was also too engaged in saving Alex''s life to take the LSD and save her own.

    When did I, of all people, become so altruistic?

    Tas¨¬a asked in near disgust with herself. That voice of conscience that often cursed her existence rose up through her defenses.

    Patience, girl. This is worth doing. Just another few minutes you can ingest your LSD salvation.

    The band-aid she now held was a specialized surgical one. Long and thin with stretch clamps tapered on the ends. Tas¨¬a placed it along the length of the exposed artery.

    It would eventually dissolve itself as the artery healed and his body would then harmlessly absorb it as minerals and simple waste matter.

    With it secured in place, the bleeding stopped. She cleaned the wound once more with a fresh wipe before applying a gauze over it.

    Satisfied with her own handiwork, Tas¨¬a nodded to herself.

    "Come on," she said. "Let''s get you up. There is only so much roof up there to keep the hellhounds preoccupied."

    Alex twisted around and he pushed up. Tas¨¬a held a grip on his shoulder to keep him steady.

    Though she was very strong for her size, Tas¨¬a would still only be able to assist as a support but not actually carry his weight.

    She grabbed both of his hands and she helped pull him up. She pressed the modest width of her butt cheeks against a wall to steady herself when he started wobbling on her.

    Halfway up, but still crouched over, he collapsed. Tas¨¬a caught him before he could fall over. She twisted around in a counter lever. Her foot jammed against the floorboard.

    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a pleaded to him in a firm tone.

    "Come on, Alex. We don''t have time for failure. Press your knees together."

    Alex regained his balance as he leaned into her shoulders.

    A discomfort grew inside her eyes. As she tried to blink the sensation away, her vision grew in intensity.

    A headache formed in her skull just above her eyes. It felt as if something was trying to merge through her skin

    A scampering noise scraped down the stairs above in a hellish sounding gallop.

    "Over on our left," Alex gasped. ". . . is a room. A mere . . . thirty meters."

    He struggled through the words. The scales on his neck contorted grotesquely as he spoke.

    Standing erect, he appeared to be experiencing a lot of pain.

    Tas¨¬a pulled him up against her bosom.

    "Don''t speak," she commanded.

    Tas¨¬a led him forward. She now saw the door. A metal frame with thick matted glass windows above the handle.

    The hellhounds pace quickened. Tas¨¬a and Alex were making too much noise in their attempt to flee.

    She opened the door just as the hellhounds spotted them. They howled like an avant-garde belonging to the host of a demonic huntress.

    Which in this reconfigured world, Tas¨¬a thought, they may very well be.

    All that is missing is a mort horn.

    Their heads twisted wiry on thick taut necks as they snarled and called in staggered howls to their mistress.

    Then they glared their eyes upon her and the two hellhounds charged.

    Tas¨¬a shoved Alex into the room. She jumped up with her legs pulled up to her torso so she could pull her gun out of her holster.

    The hellhound in the lead, directly in front of her, lowered its head as it rushed forward.

    She recognized the blood-hunt tactic for what it was. It allowed her to anticipate the second hound''s attempt to maneuver her backward.

    The second hound slowed to circle in a feint.

    It was a good tactic for hunting rabbits, but against Tas¨¬a, a beastly mistake.

    An extra second it gave her to exploit.

    As she landed on her back with her legs still rolled up, Tas¨¬a pushed off the lead hellhound''s chest. It jerked its head back with the long, ugly ridges of its throat now stretched out and exposed.

    She emptied the magazine into the nastily prominent larynx just above the center mass of its chest.

    Its head, nearly decapitated, plunged violently against its chest as it tumbled over her.

    The second hellhound overshot her position, wrongly anticipating that she would flee backward.

    It stumbled over its dead companion''s corpse when it twisted around to get to her.

    As she grabbed for a second magazine to take advantage of the vulnerable second hound, Tas¨¬a''s hand began to feel like it was on fire. She dangled it up before her eyes to better view it.

    It appeared like an old crone witch''s gray claw. It twitched, uncontrollably.

    Ah, shit.

    Tas¨¬a rolled into the room before the hellhound could regain its footing. She shut the door behind her.

    "Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!"

    Hot pain shot up into the hand. As the hand throbbed in agony, to her relief, at least it now appeared normal once more.

    She twitched her nose. It smelled like gunpowder in the confined space of the room. Tas¨¬a looked around. Near her was a workbench with a clutter of tools along its edge.

    On the far end, a reloading station sat with stacks of empty shells and rounds lined neatly on a bottom shelf.

    Out in the corridor, the hellhound threw its body against the door. The sound pounded in hard reverberation inside the shop room.

    "Son of a bitch," someone with a raspy ghoul''s voice yelled from down the corridor. "They are loose!"

    Several shots from a semi-automatic rifle echoed loud through the air. Rounds in ricochet scraped against the wall.

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. She could tell from the sounds that the shooter''s hands had trembled.

    Sweet Sister Death, man. Missing is not an option.

    The hellhound responded in a menacing growl before it took off down the corridor. In seconds the sound of the ghoul being slaughtered caused Tas¨¬a to wince as the devastating noise continued on.

    By the workbench, a ten-gauge shotgun stood upright in a grounded hold. Pretty and sleek, the maple wood body and chrome-moly steel barrel stood, but the gun was hollowed out.

    Her heart fainted in disappointment when she saw the trigger assembly and fire mechanism had been disassembled.

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to Alex who lay tucked under a desk. He breathed slow and steadily.

    "Tas¨¬a? You''re alive."

    The words chirped high pitched and staccato from Alex''s throat. He sounded as if he was amazed at the fact.

    Clenching the vial in her hand, Tas¨¬a acknowledged his words while popping open the top. She took out a gauze and wetted it with the liquid acid.

    She had to estimate the concentration level. It had not been properly labeled.

    No matter, Tas¨¬a thought as she placed the gauze on her tongue and started chewing. A normal human body possessed a high tolerance for the substance.

    From experience, she knew hers certainly did.

    The hellhound scratched rapidly at the door. The sound was like a set of train wheels locking up on a track.

    Something odd was happening to the light in the room. It flickered from a deep azure tone to a golden hew, and then back again.

    She realized immediately that it was not the lights in the room that flickered. The effect was in her eyes and mind.

    It was the kind of sensory experience she would have expected from the acid, but there had not been enough time for it to have taken effect just yet.

    Tas¨¬a looked over to Alex, questioningly.

    "The flicker in my lips. It is every second now, yes?"

    Alex nodded slowly as he spoke.

    "I didn''t want to say anything to alarm you as the LSD should eventually take care of the problem, but a third eye is forming in the middle of your forehead."

    Tas¨¬a wrapped her knees in the fold of her elbows.

    She giggled.

    "Well, ain''t that some fucked-up shit?"

    Alex coughed into the palm of his hand and he then examined the phlegm.

    He responded.

    "You are taking this all in remarkably well. I was and to be honest am suicidal at all of this"

    His free hand rolled in emphasis over his body.

    "I''m too emotionally exhausted to be heavily invested in whatever this is that is happening to me," Tas¨¬a answered with a shrug. She switched gears. "Alex? That is short for Alejandro, right?"

    "Actually, no. Alexander. My mother is a British subject by way of Grenada. My mother. She is my heroine and my inspiration. She served in over a dozen hot zones as a surgeon for M¨¦decins Sans Fronti¨¨res before she retired."

    Tas¨¬a rested her head against a bench. The hellhound had disappeared down the corridor. She needed to take a moment to enjoy the silence.

    "Damn," she whispered. "No more noble calling than that."

    Then, a moment of gnosis interrupted the sought for peace. It felt like the pressure of something liquid was oozing out of her forehead.

    The headache intensified before it turned into something quite different from pain. Something like symphonic music with many parts operating in parallel.

    However, it was not sound. It was information. Guided in its function by tens of thousands of nanospores.

    Tas¨¬a lifted her fingers above her brows and gently felt around. The third eye was there.

    "The third eye, Alex. I can feel its internal workings."

    She could see beyond the room. The slaughtered ghoul, Alex''s trail of blood. She followed the trickles of blood into a stairwell whose walls were of bricks shaded in the oddest of glimmering molded greens.

    She could hear a moaning noise.

    "What do you see," Alex asked.

    "It feels almost like magic. The nanospores read me into their sensors and read it out into an intelligible sensorium."

    Someone down the stairway cried and wailed. She followed the trail further down into a dusky chambered hall.

    Geminetta and Gemini?s stood over someone wearing a silvery robe. It appeared to be an oddly filigree-filled medieval lab coat.

    The two Black Eyed Ones spoke so slowly as to be almost unintelligible to her impaired perception.

    "What could you say, Maestre Rubinne, that would justify sparing your life," they asked in unison.

    The man appeared gravely wounded. The hellhounds had torn into him.

    His words croaked, pained, and winced from his lungs.

    "You have to understand what you are. You are unique in human history, with you, we have created nothing short of essence; an essence of spirit, itself!"

    The vision shifted. A vision now engulfed her mind made of a madness, rabid and evil. It veered and careened forward like an object in infrared overheated in a monochrome of deep and even deeper scarlets. Its motion sped through the corridor at an inhuman pace.

    The hellhound was returning.

    Tas¨¬a felt her third eye collapse. She lunged up on her feet with the stiletto blade in her hand.

    When the hellhound burst through the matted window he lunged directly towards her.

    A mercurial heat ruptured throughout Tas¨¬a''s body. The adrenaline found her.

 2.20 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    As the adrenaline surge spread throughout Tas¨¬a''s body, she saw into the instant like a Cassandra forewarned. The flying shards of glass spread out in a near to harmless formation away from her.

    Glass tumbled out of the way and spread to the side by the bearer of teeth and claw.

    That creature alone needed the totality of her focus. She had to be even faster than the hellhound.

    Tas¨¬a twirled around on the tips of her shoes. She curled her vertebrae low. As she did so, she took care to cover her neck and head with the beautifully feathered jacket.

    In that instant that she had gazed into, Tas¨¬a realized even this defensive action would not be enough to prevent her from being mauled.

    In the next moment that followed, just before the hellhound''s claws could make contact and dig into her back, she tightened her thighs low and swung back up in a powerful jump, smashing into the hellhound.

    It was thrown off its trajectory and knocked backward with only one claw free to ineffectively rake against her shoulder.

    Tas¨¬a did not stop pushing it backward until she pounded the hellhound up against the steel door where it smashed its head against the remaining glass.

    Before it could even twist its head to snap at her, Tas¨¬a flung her body forward.

    She tried to somersault up on the workbench but she missed with only the tips of her toes hitting the edge of the table.

    It was not sufficient enough surface contact in which she could leverage the rest of her body up.

    The hellhound was readying to spring on her as she landed.

    As she came crashing down Tas¨¬a pushed her right foot up towards the hellhound. Not knowing how limber the little human spider-monkey was capable of being, the fiend took the bait and clamped down on the sole of the Teflon-dense hard rubber shoe.

    With her free left leg pushing down steadily, Tas¨¬a stood up. She lunged the stiletto into the hellhound''s left-side nostril. She repeated with the right-side nostril before the beast could jerk away from her. It banged into the door once more, shaking and coughing up a black oily substance in between its angry growls.

    Tas¨¬a eased up onto the workbench.

    She turned back around flashing the stiletto in the air, whipping it about in a silvery gleam.

    The hellhound twisted around and got back up on its hooked claws. It rose its head to meet Tas¨¬a''s glare that set above an insolent frown.

    It snarled back at her.

    "It''s called the Evocaci¨®n de la Daga, you abomination," she told it. "I will take your ears first."

    In truth, when she grabbed the blade she did so only because she had not reloaded her pistol. The Manifested deterioration of Tas¨¬a''s hand spooked her from completing what for her came as a conditioned reflex.

    Still, appropriately, the ritual of the dagger kill was old, occulted lore from her maternal Amerindian lineage. Very few people knew of it, or its purpose as it had never to her knowledge been written down.

    Her maternal grandfather taught her of the practice.

    She also understood from him it was now considered a metaphorical ceremony. Engaging a real coyote in a pit was considered to be cruel even in her grandfather''s father''s time, he said.

    ''You slay the pernicious coyote inside you by means of his ears first'', (he placed a silver-bladed gladius over her ears, each in its turn), ''his tongue'', (gently, her grandfather pointed the short sword over her lips), ''his tail'', (and down-tipped just below her core ovum), ''his claws'', (he lowered the device to her feet), ''and finally his head'', (lastly, he swayed the blade in the space across from her neck), ''before you take from him his pelt.''

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

    (Her grandfather walked behind her. The blade she felt in a gentle caress as it scraped down her back.)

    The ritual spoke to the soul of her nine year old self, immensely.

    Would a ritual killing, no matter how justified or spiritually cleansing, be too cruel for even this beast?

    She decided it would be. Its condition of being a natural predator compounded by being transitioned into a chitinous and leathery ghoul-beast made the hellhound no less pitiable than any other creature.

    When she got the chance she would make its death quick.

    The hellhound''s howls threw her back into the moment. It voiced its frustration.

    The choice of route towards her was complicated by its four-legged frame. Without the space for a running start, it would fall short.

    Its eyes, dark pools of oil, glowered towards its right. Alex had pushed a wooden chair over and fenced-in the desk.

    "Come at me, boy," Tas¨¬a taunted to keep the beast''s attention focused on her. "Drench my blade even more."

    It growled for her to come down and join her in another round of their fight.

    The hellhound grew agitated as it paced the confined space of the workshop. Then it did something entirely unexpected. The hellhound whimpered.

    It lowered its head in fright and the beast shivered. On the other side of the door stood Geminetta and Gemini?s, the Dark-Eyed Ones.

    Tas¨¬a glared at the pale twins.

    "Did you set the dogs upon me," she accused.

    Gemini?s looked away; his brow furrowed and his frail form seemed ever more so. His sister only answered with a twist of her lips that for the first time in Tas¨¬a''s encounters with them bore a malicious intent.

    The twins backed away in unison, and they continued onward, down the gas-lamp lit corridor.

    Before the hellhound could recover its composure, Tas¨¬a fed a clip into the magazine of her .32 pistol, she flicked on the laser sight. With the red dot centered on the side of its skull, Tas¨¬a emptied the clip and took the top of its head off.

    "Alex, how are you holding up under there?"

    "Thanks to you, I''ll live."

    Though he chortled and coughed as he said the words, Tas¨¬a could not help but to hear the wane in his tone.

    "My friend, you do not sound so excited about that prospect."

    He made quite a bit of commotion as he pushed the wooden chair back up-right and then more noise in the form of grunts and groans as he sat down in it.

    The demi-ghoul lowered his head. The little that remained of his hair drooped along the crest of his shoulders. It was long and silvery blond.

    "When I first agreed to help the Hijos Lux with their developing problem," he spoke and once more swept his hand across his chest, "my intentions were only to do good works. But, I was intrigued by the strangeness of Hijos Lux. I was entirely drawn in.

    "Especially to the unique world view of Maestre Rubinne. He teased out a plausible rationale for old, long disputed alchemy out of the biochemistry of the Cull Spores and the Manifest transfiguration.

    "Intrigued, I no longer just treated the Hijos Lux with the ghoul condition growing prevalent, I became his assistant. My damnation came with my first bite of the human liver. I resisted the urge to partake for the first several months I was here. After all, cannibalism.

    "Finally, desiring nothing more than to gain Maestre Rubinne''s complete trust, I said to myself, ''The person is already dead. I had nothing to do with that. One bite. What harm could it do?''

    "All the harm in the world, little Tas¨¬a. All the harm in the world. Thereafter, I woke up every night, shivering, in cold sweats, even shitting myself from the withdrawal pains. I felt like I had to continue or I would die."

    Alex grew silent. He grimaced and bit his lips. There was more to be said.

    She thought of Sinclair and her struggles. Would the pretty Canadian pull through her own withdrawal? Or, would she seek the tainted meats from henceforward?

    Alex then whispered a question for her.

    "He is dead, isn''t he? Maestre Rubinne? Somehow, when I was watching you embrace your third eye, I could tell by the change in your reactions, from joyous rapture to a horrific shock as you must have witnessed his murder."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "I did not see his death, but when he was made to beg for his life, I did not see even a quantum of compassion on Geminetta''s face. She meant revenge."

    Alex let out a long whistle. He turned away.

    "What are you thinking, Alex?"

    He folded his arms around the chair''s back and bore down his face.

    "Do you want to know why, Tas¨¬a, it only took me a few minutes to recover that LSD?"

    With his question merely rhetorical, Alex continued to speak.

    "Just before I got the call to aid Hector, I was prepared to end it all. A vial of LSD, and a vial of Belladonna concentrate. Next, sweet, sweet Oblivion."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced and she stared into the blood sport she made of the hellhound''s skull. An idea occurred to her.

    "It doesn''t have to be that way," Tas¨¬a pleaded.

    "I''m tired of the struggle. Just so exhausted from it. The craving, the change, the emptiness, knowing I''m far too gone in my depravity to ever be my mother''s equal."

    Tas¨¬a walked over and squeezed her hands against his shoulders. Was there enough strength there?

    "There is another way, Alex. Can you help me lift that corpse up to the rooftop?"

    "Barely, but I''m healing rapidly. This condition does that to you. It is an odd question to ask though. What do you have in mind?"

    She insisted that he stood up. With that goal accomplished, she hugged against him to steady him.

    Before speaking, Tas¨¬a looked up into Alex''s eyes.

    "You are not giving up on life just yet, healer-man. We are going to make you Golden."

 2.21 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a and Alex lay the hound down as soon as they emerged from the stairwell shack. With her abdominal wound throbbing in pain, Tas¨¬a bent down on her knees.

    Facing a lamp to the side of the shack door, she peeled her shirt up. The wound was traced in blood. Just beneath, her pelvis felt unusually numb. Even her urethra burned with a wicked sting.

    It was going to hurt like hell the next time she pissed. With most lady-like vigor, Tas¨¬a smiled through the current unpleasantness as she spoke.

    "Alex, do you have any antibiotics in your medical bag, perhaps? I believe I''ve caught an infection."

    As he nodded, sitting upright against the shack walls, each breath he suspired was done with a great deal of difficulty.

    His medical bag, the size of a fanny pack, hung low on his belt. He unzipped a side pocket on its outer surface. His hand fidgeted back out with two pills, one green and one orange. They lay together inside a plastic wrapper.

    He passed her the pills.

    "These pills only work in conjunction with one another, but they are very effective."

    She thanked him as she tore open the wrap with her fingernails. The nails were, in daga chica propriety, shaped like little keen-edged blades.

    As she dry-swallowed the two pills, Tas¨¬a began to notice a sound in the air. It did not ring in oscillation, but repeated a singular pitch.

    Though curious to this oddity, she put it out of mind as Alex asked in a solicitous tone about her condition.

    "What happened," he asked with the studied soft-press questioning of a medical practitioner.

    A grin lit-up Tas¨¬a''s face.

    "Oh, you are going to love this," she said as she unbuttoned her trousers. She pulled them down far enough to give him a good look at the two wounds. "I was escaping from a Salvage prison and being chased by a drone when it slammed in the cement behind me. A thin sliver of a rod, four and a half inches long, pierced straight through, from this wound to that one."

    Alex grimaced.

    "The skin beneath the abdominal wound... .," he stated as an open-ended question.

    Tas¨¬a peeled her panties down. She had to comb through black pubes where they matted thick to see the skin beneath. It wasn''t her normal coppery tan but purple like a bruise.

    It also felt numb to her touch.

    "What is that," she asked. She stood up, turned to the light, and gave him a better view.

    The purple coloration only turned back to its normal hue right at her vulva mound.

    That gave her a little comfort. The injury was at least isolated to the organs in her immediate abdomen.

    Alex shook his head.

    "Not good. Likely that piercing through you pinched together a set of nerves just above and to the right of your fallopian tube. It is restricting blood flow. So long as infection doesn''t interfere, it can heal itself with a simple treatment regimen. But, of course, infection is interfering. That results in eventual organ damage."

    "Ouch," Tas¨¬a responded as she pulled her garments back up and buttoned her trousers.

    A weird breeze grazed her brow. It felt oddly clammy, like the hands of an elderly person with poor blood circulation.

    "Did you feel that," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "That breeze? Yes."

    The air smelled ripe with ionization. The low sounding note was still faint but constant.

    It was time to investigate their immediate surroundings.

    Being now in the realm of the Silent Dragon, she had relaxed her guard. But things were not as they were before. Something most fundamental had changed.

    Tas¨¬a stood up and helped Alex to his feet.

    She quickly realized that the three matters of breeze, aroma, and sound, were aspects of reality seeping through a veil of illusion that hid even the stars.

    Tas¨¬a stopped in her tracks as she realized what was occurring. Egilona''s trap.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed Alex''s hands into her own before she led him out in the open. She glanced at a far wall towards the courtyard. Slowly, the darkness gave way to a vision of dense fungal growth manicured in baroque palatial design.

    El densidad. She thought, and then wondered. How thick did the nanospores need to be to replace the brick and mortar with an actual mushroom palace?

    An oddity hovered in the air above that she dismissed at first given its resemblance to the streamer effect common to LSD hallucination. On a previous trip, she had once seen the flash of a lightning bug as it spread out, appearing like fractual neon. It appeared quite similar to what she now witnessed.

    However, this one did not fade away in slowly dissipated beauty as the bug-light did on Isabella''s patio so many years ago. It, a long scarlet-accented purple ribbon, remained in place in a near unmoving hover.

    Tas¨¬a studied the twists and turns and she soon realized, embedded within were contorted versions of eyes, scales, a mouth, and wings.

    When the Silent Dragon blinked, she gasped.

    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

    Oh, shit.

    Alex leaned on her shoulder to get her attention. He nodded in the direction of a dark rooftop corner. Two grey statues stood on the ledge.

    "Can we make an educated guess who they are," Tas¨¬a asked him.

    The demi-ghoul and the diminutive thief walked up to the frozen figures of Gemini?s and Geminetta. Fear etched upon the brother''s face. It appeared he was in mid-dash when the condition overtook him.

    Geminetta though smiled ever so slightly. Her shoulders raised up, pretty, proud, and haughty. Her face with browline arched and eyelids low gave a clearly stated ''fuck you'' to the one who decided their fate.

    Without even a hint of warning, a voice spoke from behind them.

    "Senor Rosada, these two devils killed your mentor and friend," Egilona said as she sauntered close to them. "You should push them off the edge. See if they will shatter. Are you as curious as I?"

    He turned towards the Infernal Madr¨¦. The light of her Mesmer now flickered in his eyes. Tas¨¬a still held Alex''s hands. They suddenly felt flush with heat.

    He struggled against her grip.

    "No. My little friend, Tas¨¬a. Let me go and test this hypothesis. They are most deserving."

    In Alex''s current condition, she was the stronger of the two.

    Egilona spoke once more.

    "They tried to kill you as well. They sicced the hellhounds on you, Alex Rosada. You as well, Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris."

    There was an implied taunt in Egilona''s voice. A challenge to look the Infernal Madr¨¦ in the eye.

    If Tas¨¬a did so, she would be caught in Egilona''s Mesmer as well.

    She pleaded to the demi-ghoul.

    "Alex. If they are destroyed, the Infernal Madr¨¦ is closer to becoming an all encompassing singularity. What she really is, she is a danger to all living things."

    The Infernal Madr¨¦ chortle rang deep and loud.

    "What could you in your little bubble of ignorance possibly know of my agenda?"

    Angry from the belittlement, her adrenaline now engaged, Tas¨¬a breathed in deeply. The ionization she had sensed in the air earlier swelled in volume. The densely charged electrons absorbed through her pores.

    What was this? Tas¨¬a wondered. She had felt it before when the spiderbot tried to electrocute her.

    It was a powerful feeling in which she could bask forever if so allowed.

    Tas¨¬a smiled and she met Egilona''s gaze without fear. Her perceptions became fine-tuned. She could see the way the Infernal Madr¨¦''s movement was calculated through mathematical phase space before a position in actual space shifted.

    The Infernal Madr¨¦ was not actually standing there. She was but a mere projection formed of nanospore electromagnetic frequency and biochemical energy.

    Tas¨¬a''s tone of voice dripped of derision.

    "What could I possibly know? You have no agenda, Egilona. It is not possible for you to have one. You were created honestly enough I suppose to counter the Cull Spore invasion. But something went wrong. Overambition on the part of your secret creators, perhaps?

    "You are the disaster that resulted. You are now merely the mess of that hidden agenda being put into execution.

    "You have no agency. Much less so than the Black Eyed Ones, the Wise One, and the Incubus. You are a poorly constructed facsimile of the historical Egilona."

    Egilona''s head fretted jerkily and her ivory skin grew pink then red as Tas¨¬a laid out her argument.

    When Tas¨¬a finished speaking, the Infernal Madr¨¦ let out a long sustained shout. The sky grew white with black holes for stars. Tas¨¬a heard a sizzling noise whip about the rooftop unchallenged.

    She felt plasmid heat from the surrounding nanospores dig deep into her skin.

    Ascospores rose from all sides of the building.

    It was time to react.

    Tas¨¬a let go of Alex''s hands. He immediately made a lunge for Gemini?s. Tas¨¬a threw herself on him in a tight hug before he could reach the frozen-in-place spore entity. She swung him around in a counter lever.

    As she forced him to the ground, the shadows of the ascospores crowded her. Peering up, she saw the spores oozed in a malignant green.

    They were ready to burst. A wave of pneumatic hisses sang shrill from within them.

    The Infernal Madr¨¦''s smile upturned in a triumphant sneer. It was not the face of a real actor in this drama, Tas¨¬a reminded herself. Several generations of emojis propagated first by online bots led up to that reactive, designed to demoralize, sneer.

    Tas¨¬a''s hands were now free. She reached into the fanny-pack and found the gift that the Incubus gave her, the soltera audio device containing the Spanish grindcore metal.

    On its lattice engraved front, she found a button of sharp-edg¨¦d jade shaped as a skull centered in a thicket of rose thorns. Tas¨¬a flicked it on. The button was designed to extract a small blood sacrifice by nicking the thumb. It would not even turn on without sensing the drip of blood.

    Tas¨¬a obliged happily.

    Though quite compact, the acoustics of the soltera were phenomenal. Born of post-Invasion design, it took advantage of the nanospores in the surrounding air to boost the sound frequency.

    What swelled up was an angry, rhythmic dissonance in the full-throttled drone of several guitars flailing in counter to a pounding but oddly melodic percussion.

    Then the words of the song overwhelmed all else.

    Tanto el veneno como la espada desde?aron

    Mi cobard¨ªa, y parec¨ªa decir

    "No eres apto para ser desencadenado

    De tu condenada servidumbre. Lejos,

    ?Eres un imb¨¦cil!

    Both the poison and the sword disdained

    My cowardice, and seemed to say

    "You are not fit to be undone

    Of your damned servitude.

    Away, far away (with you), imbecile!

    Above her, the converging ascospores tilted before they sprung far away as if god-smacked. Lopsided, they burst into yellow goo that splattered across the palatial fungi structures.

    The ornate-heavy edifices burned away to the touch.

    Egilona kneeled helplessly with her head bowed low. Her smooth, pale flesh writhed and shivered. Pentagon shaped scales glowed across her flesh where phase space calculation was no longer concealed.

    To Tas¨¬a''s eyes, now the LSD had taken root, Egilona''s body slowly disappeared in a pink haze of lovely streamers.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the soltera''s retro-stylish LED readout. She laughed as she read the song title.

    El Vampiro.

    Tas¨¬a closed her eyes.

    Behind her, she heard the voice of the Silent Dragon.

    "Did you bring the hellhound up on this rooftop in the hope that I would make you Golden?"

    "That was indeed the plan," Alex confirmed.

    There was a long pause. She peaked at the two of them. The Silent Dragon peered up, staring into Alex''s eyes. A judge and arbiter of what should and should not be.

    "Your life still possesses much value," the Silent Dragon proclaimed as he took Alex by the arm. "Follow me. We will make it so."

    The two shuffled off. Tas¨¬a noticed that the Black Eyed Ones had already disappeared.

    She closed her eyes once more. With the LSD coursing through her head sleep would not be possible for a while.

    Tas¨¬a stood back up. It would not matter if she could. There was still too much shit on her agenda left to be done to indulge in sleep anyway.

    But she smiled even still as she watched the stars above pulse and stream off as they merged with the hazy lights of the streets below them.

    And what of it? When the world itself was a beautiful hellish dream set upon you, what was sleep, anyway?

 2.22 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Part Two

    Tas¨¬a strolled the same street route to the fuel station that the plump streetwalker had taken hours earlier. She checked the neoPalm for the time.

    It was not even midnight, just yet.

    Tas¨¬a smiled. She had time to take in the peaceful scene around her. The brick buildings and cement seemed dappled in the spread of many hues like oil on the surface of water.

    It had not rained at all that day, but her vision came through in vibrantly liquid expression.

    She smiled even brighter.

    This was the way to enjoy LSD. On a quiet walk through a low-key town.

    Or, on a patio with friends, watching the Milky Way revolve as she liked to do in bygone years.

    It was several more minutes in her hike before Tas¨¬a reached the fuel station. On the outskirts of it, feeder tanks growing dense algae were set together in clusters of three surrounding a processing hub. One group for each corner of the station.

    They let out hissing and sizzling noises that seemed at war with one another as the gas was released from the genetically modified algae only to be distilled into a potent brew that rivaled the energy let off of gasoline.

    Pipes and energy cables hung overhead, strewn on poles to gas pumps that lined up for vehicular intake at a central carousel.

    In her present state, Tas¨¬a considered the structure, and its accompanying sounds and processes, to be breathtakingly beautiful.

    A perchance thought fleeted across her mind.

    Sobriety causes one to take the most incredible happenings surrounding you for granted.

    Something caught her eye, and her lips twisted into an ironic grin.

    Never will THAT be taken for granted. At least not by this pair of eyes.

    Several yards in front of her an Alfa Romeo HybrClydis series sportscar gleamed in a gunmetal gray exquisitely outlined in vermillion trim. The trim itself was filigreed in exuberant monochromes.

    It held onto her fascination and enticed a notion to swell up inside her as her mesmerized gaze focused with a more scrutinous eye.

    She then noticed the swirls of thick smoke crowding the car''s interior. The driver sucked at the smoke with his mouth gaped open. Noise-ladened pop music thumped from the speakers.

    The driver shook his oily hair and giggled to himself while observing his own shaking hands.

    Whatever it was he was on, Tas¨¬a decided, it was giving him a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

    Tas¨¬a leaned against a pole as she studied the vehicle. It was worth 115K USD resell, in her estimation. She took out the neoPalm once more and she dialed up an app that she installed after discovering an extensive index of spookware zipped up in the SSD drive.

    The embedded light in the neoPalm glowed red. It was merely an LED indicator showing that the scanning laser she had dialed up was readied and primed.

    Tas¨¬a flicked the beam on and she scanned the vehicle''s registration. Soon the driver''s face popped up on her screen.

    He was an eighteen-year-old son of a politician who lived in a city twice the size of Villa Morr¨®n, sixty miles to the West.

    Tas¨¬a grinned from ear to ear. She was going to steal the sports car.

    She estimated the retail sale value against the percentage she could get for the vehicle given with whom she would have to make her deal. Likely, a motorcycle club, like the Almas Viejas.

    They were a safe and highly reliable bunch, but the split with them was always fifty-fifty, straight down the line.

    No. No. No. What the hell are you thinking, Tasia?

    She admonished herself for her short-sightedness.

    We are going to moddy that chassis to the point it is entirely unrecognizable. Once we get a set of fake tags and the accompanying paperwork, we are going to drive that bitch all the way to Esconda Vida and make our presence be known.

    Tas¨¬a noticed a small, young lady standing at the door of the Quick Mart that sat on the station''s northeastern quadra. She stared at the driver while fidgeting with a phone in her hands.

    She''s about to call the cops, Tas¨¬a realized, but fortunately, the woman was reluctant to do so.

    The display above the pump blinked and pleaded for the driver of the sportscar to exit onto the carousel ramp.

    Tas¨¬a nodded to herself after a close inspection of the lot. After poking around its many nooks and crannies with the IR scanner, she was certain the three surveillance cameras she spotted were the only ones she needed to be concerned about.

    The app reported back that the system controls for the vehicle were now in her possession. She forced the electronic security to disengage and accept manual override for all vehicular compartments.

    She did a quick study of the car''s schematic that accompanied the override instruction log.

    Now prepared, Tas¨¬a walked over to the driver''s side of the vehicle and knocked on the window.

    The driver gawked back at her. She assessed his tightened pencil neck, his rounded shoulders, and thin, reedy arms. Tas¨¬a decided that if she took an aggressive approach he would prove to be a pushover.

    "Roll down your window," Tas¨¬a yelled.

    "The fuck you want?"

    Tas¨¬a gave the driver a hard, derisive stare.

    "Clean out your ears, boy. I just told you what I want."

    He blinked before he sputtered out a response.

    "Who the fuck are you to talk to me like that?"

    Tas¨¬a leaned on the window to conceal what she was doing from the cameras and the woman at the Quick Mart door.

    She cut an incision inside the rubber window seal and slid her stiletto through the front door panel where she quickly found the manual release gauge.

    After angling the blade in an exacting position to push the lever up, the window slid down.

    She was greeted with a strong whiff of urine and marijuana. His lap was drenched in piss.

    "Fucking bitch," he said as he spat at her.

    The driver reached under the console where he retrieved a 9mm Browning HP.

    Before he could readjust his limpid grip and point the gun at her, Tas¨¬a snatched it from his hand. She secured the built-in safety lock pins before sliding the gun under her belt.

    "The fuck," he yelled.

    "It''s mine now, Piss-pants. You don''t aim shit at me without paying a price. Now slide over, you are in no condition to drive."

    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

    He looked at her, his expression confused. He could not believe the utter dominance displayed by the tiny woman.

    She slapped the stupid off his face. He winced and cowered away from her.

    "Don''t make me have to knock you the hell out. Slide over."

    As he complied, the teenager bunched his shoulders and held his hands up defensively.

    He muttered, "Fuck. Okay. Fuck. Okay? I''m doing it. You sound like you know what you are doing. Okay?"

    She looked him in the eyes. There was no fight left in him.

    "So you say I look like I have my shit together?"

    He gripped the leather seat and breathed in a sustained snort.

    "Yeah. Yeah. Fuck. Most assuredly."

    Putting together a cogent sentence must have been very tasking for him at that moment. Likely, he was riding the lightning in his head, Tas¨¬a concluded before she replied.

    "You are damn straight about that, son."

    Tas¨¬a eyed the driver console.

    Her height was only a small disadvantage given the compartment was set long and low.

    She put the car in gear, drove it onto the ramp, then a few hundred feet more before whipping it on line at the far end of the Quick Mart. She had picked a spot away from the slowly blinking carousel lights pitched in string¨¦d arcs along the lengthy crossbeams and pipes that dominated the space above the lot before she parked it.

    Tas¨¬a was delighted to see the backlot camera only pointed towards the pavement traffic along the Quick Mart exterior and not at the parking lot area.

    It made sense. A valuable vending operation of several machines in Vegas-style display filled the space between the bathrooms along this side of the Quick Mart wall.

    Snacks, slots, poker VR, and instant lottery. One could have a fun night here.

    Several patrons caroused under the kiosk-style awnings, but they paid Tas¨¬a little attention once quick glances they made at the sexy car satiated their curiosity.

    Clinching his stomach, the teenager groaned between profanity-laced whimpers.

    "What''s your name," Tas¨¬a demanded.

    She already knew his name, but for the sake of her hustle, she asked.

    "Sal," he answered. He relaxed his grip on the seat and wiped the sweat away from his brow with his arm.

    It was a cold sweat. The kind that broke out when the latest wave of a PCP caused high ebbed in its flow.

    Tas¨¬a doubted it would be the last. Sal was still too fucked-up to be in the clear.

    "Sal. I''m not going to lie to you. You are in some sad, sad shape, young man. You have pissed yourself, Sal. Whatever you are on, you can''t handle that shit. Tell me, what is that shit that is killing your sad ass?"

    His eyes lit up at the words in her prognosis. His feet scrunched up in the seat. His body bent up against the door.

    His voice grew slow and heavy, but much more clear in articulation.

    "I drank some liquor ¡­"

    "And?"

    Words thudded out of his mouth as if it hurt him to speak.

    "Smoked some weed."

    Tas¨¬a looked him dead in the eyes.

    "Laced with PCP, Sal?"

    "Maybe."

    "No maybe. It was, and you know it was laced, don''t you?"

    "Yeah. I wanted the girl to take it. She would not take it, so I did to show her it was cool and shit."

    Tas¨¬a gave a long sustained whistle.

    What. A. Piece. Of. Shit.

    She pulled the keys out of the ignition and put them in her pocket.

    "Come on, Sal. We are going for a jog."

    "What for?"

    Still, he followed suit as she climbed out of the cabin interior.

    "To sweat that shit out of you before it kills you. Are you up to it?"

    "I ran track in Middle School so I''m game. Hey, do you think that shit could kill me?"

    Tas¨¬a tightened her shoe straps. the specialized souls made them not ideal for a jog but they would have to do, she decided. She gazed up at him. She needed to build his trust with a good dose of fear.

    "You were teetering on the edge of dying back there, Sal. Did you not know how out of it you were?"

    She started at a slow jog. He paced to her side. His hands balled uptight and his elbows flared out as he ran. Of course, with the piss stain, he appeared utterly ridiculous.

    "When you came along? No. I was just sitting there fantasizing what I was going to do to get back at that bitch."

    There was a weird malevolence set in his eyes.

    "What bitch, Sal? The one you tried to get to smoke that shit with you?"

    "Yeah, that one. She refused to blow me."

    They ran up a street going North under a long copse of trees. Tas¨¬a planned her route along a three-mile stretch of blocks, zigging and zagging between different streets to confuse his route back to the Quick Mart once she ditched him.

    "Why did she refuse to blow you, Sal," Tas¨¬a asked to keep the conversation going.

    "She said I was acting crazy."

    "Do you think she may have had a point?"

    "Hey, listen."

    Sal stopped. He started speaking with his hands.

    "I ¡­ I ... gave her a ride ¡­ yeah, uh ¡­. in a car way pass anything ¡­. beyond anything ¡­ she ever rode in before. She owed me."

    Tas¨¬a gave another long whistle.

    What. A. Piece. Of. Shit.

    Sweat ruptured from his brow. He wiped at it without success. He was about to ride the lightning once more.

    "Come on, Sal. We need to run faster before the shitstorm catches up with you."

    She quickened the pace along a long residential street. As she ran, her abdomen ached from the excursion.

    "Ah, shit ¡­ Ah, shit ¡­ Ah, shit," Sal repeated as he tried to keep up with her.

    She glanced back. He was soaked from head to toe with sweat. A tight, pained grimace bore on his face.

    Not her intention, Tas¨¬a thought, but she may have saved his useless life with her intervention.

    Somehow, Tas¨¬a did not feel like patting herself on the back for that one.

    Finally, after another mile, Sal yelled, "stop, stop, stop. I can''t breathe."

    Tas¨¬a looked back. Sal grew gravely pale. His eyes were disoriented. He found a tree to lean against.

    "My heart. It is racing. Like a thousand miles per hour."

    "Stay calm," Tas¨¬a insisted. "It will come at you in waves. Then, eventually, it will pass."

    He grabbed at his eyes.

    "No. No. No. I can''t. Not again. I can''t. Can''t."

    Piss trickled down his leg as tears ran down his pale face. In her estimation, she had never before seen a more pathetic creature.

    "Breathe in deep, Sal. Breathe in."

    He shook his head, his voice raised in pitch.

    "No. No. No. I can''t. I can''t. Can''t," he repeated just before he started gasping in a low chortle. He started singing, "I think I am going to die."

    Over and over, he droned. Standing up straight, now. And beaming, as he sang, "I think I am going to die."

    His eyes were oblivious. He no longer even saw her standing in front of him.

    Tas¨¬a sauntered back several feet away from him. With her neoPalm in hand, she pinged the phone in Sal''s pocket.

    Soon she had control over it and she relayed a call to EMS. Tas¨¬a asked them to pull a tracer on her current line which was Sal''s. She cammed him on video as she described his condition.

    "That little fool is not getting back to Earth anytime soon," the woman Tas¨¬a spoke to commented as she watched Sal''s performance.

    "We''ll have a unit out in five to ten minutes. Can you stay on the line?"

    "I''m afraid not," Tas¨¬a answered. "I don''t know him and I need to get gone. I am not even supposed to be out and about tonight. If he goes off somewhere, you''ll have to use the trace I set up for you."

    Tas¨¬a cut the conversation short. She began to haul ass back to the Quick Mart.

    Running and sweating were causing her problems as well. Tas¨¬a''s kidneys worked overtime, and her urethra burned with the intensity of a thousand suns.

    Perhaps a slight exaggeration, minus one or two stars.

 2.23 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    When the yellow neon of the Quick Mart came into her view, Tas¨¬a checked the time. It was just shy of thirty-five minutes after Midnight. She wanted to skedaddle from the fuel station premises behind the wheel of the sportscar immediately, but there was something else that would not wait much longer.

    Flushing out her diuretic system was her most current and most necessary imperative.

    Tas¨¬a allocated her time.

    Five minutes to shop in the Quick Mart. Fifteen minutes to deal with these damn kidneys.

    We then find Ydre?, most likely she was over at the Daga Chicas, that is if she didn''t turn in early. We need to get her to open up the garage.

    Tas¨¬a ran up to the entranceway step and opened the Quick Mart door. She made her move heading towards the cold beverages.

    An abrupt voice shouted from an aisle to the right of her.

    "So, that was you who was here earlier. Thank you! Thank you so much!"

    Tas¨¬a kept walking to the wall of refrigerator units as she turned her head to the young woman who was stocking a nearby aisle.

    Tas¨¬a nodded to her graciously. With a shrug, she answered back.

    "I saw a problem and I took care of it."

    The clerk''s tone did a sudden turn. She now spoke in a faint whisper even as she kept in motion between isles as she made her way towards the register.

    "You''re my hero. Not a word from me, but I saw how he pulled a gun on you, Avellana."

    That caught her by surprise. Tas¨¬a shivered.

    Did the girl work here two years ago? That would have made the clerk a routine contact for her. That was not something Tas¨¬a would have forgotten. Something was not right with her memory.

    Interference from the treatment?

    These concerns, she did not allow to affect her outer demeanor.

    Tas¨¬a suspired a casual sigh suggesting much experience in adventuress-related matters before she spoke again.

    "It would not be the first time, Eliza."

    With the clerk''s name coming from her own lips, Tas¨¬a''s gut ran cold. The name was blurted out before any actual memory of the young woman made its presence known in her mind.

    Tas¨¬a knew as she said the name, it was the correct one.

    She turned to slide the refrigerator door open and hide her loss of composure. Tas¨¬a took her time as she grabbed four sixteen-ounce water bottles.

    "Have you ever seen that guy before," Tas¨¬a asked, peering from over her shoulder.

    Eliza''s head jerked somewhat apprehensively. Tas¨¬a understood. It was not the first time Sal had made a nuisance of himself.

    "Yeah. He usually makes a run every Friday to Asunci¨®n, and he stops here for gas. Why he is here on a Wednesday, I don''t know."

    Standing close to a semi-aisle for pets, Tas¨¬a noticed chew toy replicas of dogbones on display. She grabbed one. When she finally did get the chance to take a piss, she needed something to clamp her teeth on.

    It was going to burn like hell.

    Tas¨¬a turned back around to speak to the clerk.

    "What does he do there in Asunci¨®n? Does he ever talk about it?"

    Now, Eliza appeared very nervous.

    "Yeah . . . he certainly does," Eliza muttered without elaboration.

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    She avoided eye contact and she tapped the tip of one of her boots against the ceramic floor. On sight of them, Tas¨¬a whistled in a high-pitched staccato. Eliza''s boots were very nice, but the type of critter from whence the leather was fashioned proved to be unrecognizable to Tas¨¬a''s eyes.

    The clerk followed Tas¨¬a to the cash register.

    With a much more expressive interest in her voice, Eliza continued speaking.

    "So ... you like my boots? Can you guess the material they are made from?"

    Eliza clearly did not want to talk about the other matter. Tas¨¬a would have to indulge in a more roundabout charm offensive to get what she wanted.

    "Absolutely. I adore the look," Tas¨¬a began. She twisted her head to the side for a better view. "And I am afraid that I can''t make out that material. The hue and texture look similar to that of a brown calf, but no Quadra girl worth her shadow wears cow. Very sweet and sexy; it looks as smooth as ultra-suede."

    Eliza grinned as she blurted out the answer. Her outward bowed hands spread three feet apart as if in measure.

    "Will you believe, giant wolf-spiders?"

    Tas¨¬a recalled her encounter in the basement of Tower Praxis and the gore on her work boots from stomping the beast. She winced in a most indelicate grimace.

    "The fuck? Are you shitting me?"

    Tas¨¬a''s incredulous response drew laughter from the clerk.

    "No," Eliza answered as she smacked the counter with an open palm. "For real. They farm those hairy-ass bastards over where El Hoyo used to be. You would not recognize the place now. It used to be almost all clay and gravel, but is now overgrown in a jungle''s worth of vegetation."

    Tas¨¬a glanced back at the boots. She and Eliza wore the same size.

    "My friend, you might be able to help me out. How much did those cost you? Six hundred?"

    Eliza shook her head.

    "I''m afraid dearer than even that much. Six Seventy-five. They are not for sale though.

    Pulling off a friendly smirk, Tas¨¬a reached into her fanny-pack. She pulled out a Liberty coin and then placed it on the counter. With an effort - wrinkled forehead, wide-opened eyes, exaggerated hound dog jowls - Tas¨¬a tried to appear pleadful.

    She knew that it being so contrary to her personality, the face she made wasn''t a very convincing expression.

    As Eliza examined the coin, Tas¨¬a continued.

    "I need to be somewhere in about an hour where I would not normally be caught dead wearing these ugly, old tennis shoes. You would really be helping me out. You could buy another pair of wolf-spider boots and a matching belt and hat. A new pair of jeans, a corduroy jacket. An all-new suit if you want. It''ll look so sexy on you. Sexy as hell, even. So how about it?"

    After a once-over gaze down her own figure, Eliza began to take off her boots.

    "If it means that much to you, my friend, I guess I do owe you a favor."

    As they made their exchange, Tas¨¬a noticed another item sitting in a little red display on the countertop. Ki-Jack Ginseng, All Natural Alertness Elixir. She checked the ingredients out and found the combination of herbs to be quite suitable for her purposes.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed two bottles.

    She paid in USD for the water, doggy bone, and ginseng. The clerk bagged the items.

    "Will there be anything else," Eliza asked as a habitual courtesy common to her profession.

    Tas¨¬a noticed that Eliza did not ask any follow-up questions about the incident, or what occurred afterward.

    Did she just assume I rolled Sal? Am I that obviously a criminal? Or, was Sal just a very touchy subject for her?

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward on the counter.

    "Eliza. You know you can trust me. There is no one here but the two of us. What do you know about Sal? He comes in here and brags about shit, doesn''t he? Shit, he does in Asunci¨®n."

    Eliza leaned on her outstretched arms. Her hands clung to the counter edge with a tight grip. Her head was turned to the side; she even shook it with a slight hesitance, but she did finally give up what she knew.

    "Yeah. He brags about a lot of things. That his big, crooked daddy runs Villarrica. But a bigshot in a town like Villarrica is one thing, a bigshot in Asunci¨®n, however, is another. He is mighty proud of that other side in his genealogy. So proud he has taken his mother''s maiden name as his own.

    "His mother is from Asunci¨®n. Where he works for his uncle there on the weekends. He works for the family. By that, I mean the family."

    Ah, shit.

    Tas¨¬a was finally catching on. No wonder Eliza did not want to know any more about how Tas¨¬a''s confrontation with Sal went down than she already knew.

    Tas¨¬a leaned in close to Eliza.

    "You mean that little pisser is a Javierra?"

    Eliza nodded. Tas¨¬a thought of Ria Javierra, the mafiosa dame and prison snitch. Tas¨¬a gave that bitch a warning the last time they spoke, and she promised to hurt the woman and her family if she did not keep her nose out of Tas¨¬a''s business.

    She had every reason to believe Ria did not heed her warning.

    Tas¨¬a backed into the Quick Mart entrance door. Before she parted it, she called out.

    "Thanks, Eliza. You have been most helpful."

    One of the clerk''s newly acquired tennis shoes smacked the floor in a nervous beat.

    "Let''s keep that between you and me, okay," Eliza answered.

    Tas¨¬a gave her a confident and relaxed smile.

    "Oh, believe me, my friend, you chose the right side."

 2.24 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    It hurt like hell.

    As the urine flushed out of her system, Tas¨¬a folded her legs up to ease the throbbing pain just below her abdominal wound.

    The liquid sizzled in loud disarray as it made contact with the ceramic bowl beneath her. A strong ammonia scent engulfed her sinus cavities.

    The air filled with a gray and green vapor.

    That''s coming out of me? Her mind reached frantically for another explanation for the latest in a series of anomalies that seemed to reveal themselves around every corner.

    Surely, all of them stemmed from the experimental treatment she had received. She thought of General Kutuzov and what he told her.

    Induced artificial neurodevelopment. Given you were born premature as you were, there is some flexibility in how they could shape you.

    The only other explanation was the antibiotics she took earlier. Not very likely, however; if this bizzaro urine was a common side effect, Tas¨¬a would have heard about it.

    The stinging pain wracked her urethra once more. Tas¨¬a jerked her head back and she bit down on the doggy bone.

    Her eyes saw red spots that bled into large splotches.

    At the vending kiosk, just outside, bells and recorded horn music went off in a noxious blare. A lady whooped it up in a high pitch. It was her lucky day.

    Tas¨¬a gripped the toilet seat as she let yet another stream of urine out. She wanted to scream.

    With her bladder finally empty, Tas¨¬a breathed in and breathed out slowly. She slumped as she glanced at the content of the bowl beneath her.

    Tas¨¬a arched her brows in alarm at the sight. Still, she managed to quip a joke as she flushed the toxic brew down.

    In a solemn, comic book based movie voice, Tas¨¬a muttered

    "With great power comes high pressured, glowing orange sizzling piss blowing out your pee hole."

    She checked the flesh beneath her pubes. To her relief, it was almost back to her normal coppery brown tone.

    From her fanny pack, Tas¨¬a grabbed a small tube of aloe vera and a sanitized wipe. She smeared the green liquid of the ointment on the wipe and applied it to relieve her urethra.

    The relief was instant. She looked over to the sink where she lay the remaining water bottles.

    One down. Three to go.

    The last bottle of water she peed out was entirely normal in appearance and effect.

    Still, the experience was exhausting, and she felt overheated.

    With a wet paper towel, she wiped down her face. After she took off her shirt, she wiped down her upper torso, applying liquid soap to her face and underarm hair as well.

    "You have seen better days, little Tas¨¬a," she told herself as she examined herself in the mirror.

    She opened up a four-ounce bottle of ginseng elixir and she quaffed it down.

    She liked the taste, even. It kicked like a good whiskey with an herbal heated adjunct.

    Someone knocked at the bathroom door.

    "Can you give me a minute," Tas¨¬a yelled. "I''m just finishing up."

    She put her shirt back on and she removed her jacket from the stall door hook.

    "Hey, Avellana, Eliza told me you were most likely back here. It''s me. Your absolute, most favorite person in the world."

    Tas¨¬a eyes glowered in alarm.

    "Anneb¨¦l?"

    "First try. Imagine that. Another mutual acquaintance of ours told me you borrowed something of mine. I''ll tell you all about that if you open the door."

    No. That can''t be. Then again, what was the Incubus doing in Anneb¨¦l''s room if she wasn''t some kind of agencier of theirs?

    Tas¨¬a looked in the mirror, and, like she would as a kid in the middle of a slumber party game of vogue, she froze in place her most confident smirking expression. Tas¨¬a turned back around and she swung open the door.

    "Anneb¨¦l," she said, flatly. Tas¨¬a''s eyes flickered low to check out the boots the brawler now wore. She decided it would not hurt matters to complement Anneb¨¦l''s taste.

    "Rhinestones and Iguana skin. Nice."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded and returned the smirk.

    "I see you''ve brought your game up, now. The tennis shoes, honestly, that is why I didn''t take you seriously."

    If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    Tas¨¬a reached into her fanny-pack and she brought out the soltera.

    "I believe you mean this. Thank you. It proved invaluable." Tas¨¬a said as she handed it over. She added. "I also gather you are a connoisseur of Baudelaire."

    Anneb¨¦l laughed. Her thin lips wrinkled, inset in her broad jawline.

    "Bien s?r, mon petit d¨¦mon. Quelle fille de France n''est-ce pas?"*

    Tas¨¬a shrugged, contritely. "I didn''t know."

    "I exaggerate. I have never actually been there." She patted her brassy red locks of hair. "I have ancestors from the Gaul, though." Anneb¨¦l flicked a finger, pointing past Tas¨¬a. "If you don''t mind, I could make use of the facilities."

    Tas¨¬a stood aside to let the tall woman in.

    "What is that," Anneb¨¦l asked as she entered a stall, "ammonia? Man, my eyes are stinging. Smells like you were electrocuting a prisoner back here."

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the sink, slumped. Only the jacket and boots looked acceptable for the Daga Chicas. Her hair needed much work. The shirt was a blood-stained mess, and her trousers were worn thin from the day''s excursion.

    Tas¨¬a checked the time. Until now, she abided well to her internal schedule, with some allowances. She needed to be moving on, but Anneb¨¦l seemed to be in no hurry to satisfy Tas¨¬a''s curiosity.

    "You mentioned a mutual friend," Tas¨¬a said, prompting Anneb¨¦l.

    "Yes. Before I answer that, can you satisfy a little curiosity of my own? The Alfa Romeo parked outside. Where is the fuckstain who owns it?"

    Interesting choice of words.

    Tas¨¬a recalled Anneb¨¦l had some history in Asunci¨®n. She turned back to answer Anneb¨¦l.

    "Actually, I called the EMS to pick him up. He was ODing on PCP. Likely a lot of other things in his system, as well."

    Anneb¨¦l exited the stall. Her elbow swung the door open as she started buttoning up her jeans.

    Tas¨¬a raised her brows at the sight she caught.

    No underwear. And a cute piercing. What was that? A ladybug? No, a jade scarab.

    "Good," Anneb¨¦l commented. "I hope the little fucker croaks. I hope they all croak. That entire family is a blight on Asunci¨®n."

    She washed her hands beside where Tas¨¬a leaned. She shook them dry, turned around, and opened the door.

    Standing at the threshold, Anneb¨¦l turned around and smiled at Tas¨¬a.

    "To answer your question. Let me ask another of you. Do you know why I chose a profession that involves fucking?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, but she did not speak.

    Anneb¨¦l continued.

    "You are being quiet out of politeness. How this bond between us grows by the hour, Avellana. Go ahead, take a guess. No wrong answers, at least in the sense that I can be offended."

    Tas¨¬a brushed her hair back from her ears. An old habit that she long ago put to rest, now returned.

    "You grew tired of fighting. Settled on prostitution until you figure out what you want to do?"

    Anneb¨¦l held the door open with her foot.

    "Does someone in between jobs build an occulted chamber to entertain her paramours?"

    "No."

    "That''s right, Avellana, I fuck because I now can."

    Tas¨¬a wrinkled her brows with a good deal of strain.

    "Wait," she said.

    "Now, do you understand, mon petit d¨¦mon? Our mutual acquaintance wanted me to speak to you. And I am because I owe Bajamutt¨¦ everything. The two of us are the same. We are Harvested."

    Tas¨¬a followed Anneb¨¦l out the door. The bright lights of the kiosk were like a glare on the clarity of her mind. It was a lingering effect from the LSD.

    "But you are a giant," Tas¨¬a blurted out. "How can you be Harvested?"

    Anneb¨¦l stopped and glanced back. She chortled loud.

    "I''m no giant. You are just really short. The treatment affects all of us differently. Though on average, diminutive stature is a common condition."

    Tas¨¬a blinked as she adjusted to what she was being told. The kiosk lights were not helping her sort the matter out.

    "You are the only other Harvested," Tas¨¬a began, "I''ve ever met that I am aware of. Do you know others like us?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded.

    "There''s a core group I am a part of in Asunci¨®n. It grew too dangerous after the program got some public exposure, so most of us went underground."

    Tas¨¬a pointed to the kiosk.

    "Those lights are really fucking with my head right now."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded.

    "I was told about that venture of yours with those neighbors of mine. I do not fuck with them. You want to go around the corner?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded. They headed to the edge of a wall that blocked out the glare. Even the noise was dampened. They could hear across the lot.

    "Hey, listen," Anneb¨¦l began. "As I said before, I owe Bajamutt¨¦ everything. Given my experience, he asked me to help you with your problem. It is what I do, coach and council other Harvested. Sex therapy."

    Tas¨¬a gave a quick glance up and down. Anneb¨¦l was an outstandingly attractive woman. But, Tas¨¬a thought of Bajamutt¨¦, and his endowment. In truth, she was looking forward to that being the means of ending her virginal state.

    "You don''t mean . . .?"

    Anneb¨¦l chortled.

    "I have no inclination in that regard. I''m there to keep you calm so you don''t lose control while you are getting plowed."

    "Is Bajamutt¨¦ going to be there?"

    Anneb¨¦l grinned before she answered.

    "Yes. Of course. Short Stuff has quite the swinging meat on him doesn''t he?"

    Both women laughed together at the quip. When Tas¨¬a bowed down low, Anneb¨¦l hugged her to help her back upright. Tas¨¬a gut wound gave her a jolt. It ached from laughing so hard.

    Then, a thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

    Both of their heads sprung back up, alerted by the odd noise. Anneb¨¦l held her finger up, begging for quiet.

    It was a loud pounding sound.

    Anneb¨¦l pointed to the trunk of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. The two women started to approach the vehicle.

    Tas¨¬a took out the set of car keys and she pressed the wireless control to unleash all of the locks. The hatch soon gave way and the trunk popped open.

    A pair of legs kicked up in the air. They twisted around in a frenzy. Ripped duct tape was wrapped on each of the pair of shins.

    Finally, a young woman tumbled out onto the asphalt lot.

    She wore a pullover lavender dress. Dyed blonde strands ribboned frizzy black hair. Her mouth and arms were taped over.

    She caught sight of Tas¨¬a and Anneb¨¦l as they approached. The girl got up on her feet and she started hauling ass away from them.

    "Who the fuck is that," Anneb¨¦l asked as she started to chase after the girl.

    Tas¨¬a caught up to her.

    "My best guess. The girl who refused to blow Sal."

    ####################

    *"Of course, my little fiend. What daughter of France isn''t?"

 2.25 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    "Wait," Anneb¨¦l yelled at the girl. "We are not with Sal."

    Though Anneb¨¦l was in good physical shape, with her body thickly muscular, she could not keep up with the girl in the lavender dress.

    That girl possessed long, spindly legs that pushed a mere wisp of a body forward. She jerked her head back to gauge her pursuers several times.

    Each time, the girl seemed to propel down the street with an even swifter stride.

    For Tas¨¬a, the chase was hopeless. Her physical energy was sapped.

    At this point, she merely followed behind Anneb¨¦l, barely keeping the tall woman in eye view.

    What were they going to do when they caught up to the girl?

    It would certainly expend all the time Tas¨¬a allotted for the remainder of her evening activities.

    Daga Chicas closed at two am on the weekdays.

    But she could not be out running around on her latest escapade for much longer.

    She had to get some rest and prepare for her meeting with Le¨®n.

    And what of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis? Will this development hinder the plan?

    Tas¨¬a brushed her bangs back as they tended to bounce and obscure her vision. The action ahead of her was growing curious.

    Anneb¨¦l stopped in her tracks as she peeked around the corner of a building. She started backing up in a steady retreat.

    A disgusted grimace bore on her face. Tas¨¬a was now close enough to hear Anneb¨¦l curse.

    "Fuck! What a little fool. She saw the squad car and ran right to it."

    As Tas¨¬a passed by, the taller woman tried to grab her. Tas¨¬a twisted away in a neat dodge quite handily. She was pleased to see that despite her exhaustion, her reflexes were still keen.

    She peaked around the corner. The girl stood beside a patrol vehicle. A cop was helping her remove the duct tape.

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head back.

    "Ah, shit," she muttered.

    Anneb¨¦l pulled on her arm.

    "I''m coming," Tas¨¬a protested.

    "By the bridge, there is a second cruiser. It''s going to sweep over in this direction."

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head up and to the side to confirm with her own eyes. The cruiser was headed down an off-ramp.

    Tas¨¬a assessed the circumstances. She could scurry up to a rooftop, but what of Anneb¨¦l?

    Tas¨¬a looked around, and she found a promising solution.

    "Over here," she said as she gestured to a small floral bouquet design shop.

    From her quick surveil, Tas¨¬a thought it unlikely the shop had anything more to obstruct her entrance than the big brass lock embedded in the front door.

    There was not even bulging wear and tear indicative of a deadbolt.

    Waving her arms she urged Anneb¨¦l to crouch down. The tall woman wanted to flee.

    "We''ve got to go. The cruiser is -" with a gesture of her hand, "- this close to being on top of us," Anneb¨¦l exclaimed.

    "Trust me. One second," Tas¨¬a stated, calmly.

    She removed a bobby pin and a lockpick from her hair. Anneb¨¦l grew quiet as she watched on.

    Within seconds Tas¨¬a had the door open.

    They tumbled inside the shop and slammed the door shut before crouching together behind it.

    Tas¨¬a and Anneb¨¦l smiled awkwardly at one another in the silence of the dark shop that smelled of roses, poppies, lilacs, and lavender. Only moonlight from large surrounding windows allowed them to see one another.

    Anneb¨¦l''s red hair seemed oddly pale in the absence of direct light. It normally appeared vibrant and brassy.

    Her eyes were puddles of white. Tas¨¬a could see the air as it curled curiously out of the tall woman''s nostrils.

    She realized it was the LSD superimposing psychologically suggestive interpretation upon reality.

    She could see that Anneb¨¦l was restless with questions.

    "What are you thinking, my friend," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "The bike courier gig, was that just a cover?"

    Tas¨¬a grabbed her knees and she chuckled.

    "Yup. I normally work in the Esconda Vida, taking out security systems of old, abandoned mansions, so this little lock wasn''t a problem. Done it a thousand times."

    High beam lights swept through the windows above them. Tas¨¬a put a finger to her lips. The cruiser could have been equipped with sonic detection. If it was also equipped with infrared sensors, they were fucked.

    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a had two solutions to that eventuality. The .32 on her calve and the .9mm Browning HP clipped to the inner strap behind her fanny-pack.

    The lights above stopped sweeping but began to pulse instead. A mewing-like sound from the cruiser accompanied it.

    Anneb¨¦l looked agitated. She began to fidget.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and gestured with her hands for Anneb¨¦l to calm down.

    "A mere scare tactic," Tas¨¬a mouthed slowly and repeatedly.

    Her best guess, born of experience, the cop thought he might have seen something but he wasn''t sure. If he was certain enough, he would have probable cause to try the door.

    He was merely seeing if he would get a reaction to justify investigating further.

    After several more seconds, the cruiser finally left.

    "I can tell you have some experience at this, Avellana." Anneb¨¦l raised her brows in appreciation. "The way you kept your cool. Me, I felt like I was about to crap myself."

    Tas¨¬a acknowledged the deference with which she was being afforded with a nod.

    "Let''s give him a minute. He knows he saw someone on the street, but he doesn''t know if we fled, hid, or entered a building."

    As she spoke, Anneb¨¦l grew distant. She was now quiet with her head moping and a glum puss squinched on her lips.

    "What''s wrong," Tas¨¬a asked.

    Anneb¨¦l cleared her throat.

    "I was thinking about that girl. If you were to price her clothes altogether. . ."

    "Less than two hundred USD," Tas¨¬a answered.

    "Yeah . . . what I was thinking. Why the hell did she go to the cops?"

    "She was scared shitless. Too young to know better."

    Anneb¨¦l shifted her position, and she leaned forward.

    "Even so, she doesn''t come from money. Her family can''t back up a claim against the Javierras. When the cops piece it all together, they are just going to turn her over to the mafioso sons of bitches."

    Tas¨¬a took a minute to join Anneb¨¦l''s glum mood. The cops turn their backs, the girl gets disposed of by the goons out in the middle of nowhere.

    Or, something even worse. She thought about the weird malevolence set in Sal''s eyes and something he said.

    I was just sitting there fantasizing about what I was going to do to get back at that bitch.

    What could she do about it? Tas¨¬a''s itinerary of good deeds was full for the next several days. Penciling in a jailhouse breakout at the local police station was highly problematic.

    "You know," Anneb¨¦l said as she prompted Tas¨¬a to get up on her feet, "I think I may have a way to buy that girl some more time. Come on."

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she cracked open the shop door and peeked out.

    She turned back to Anneb¨¦l and told her, "we need to get to that Alfa Romeo before the cops have a chance to impound it."

    Anneb¨¦l winced as they started to run. She appeared as if she was tossing the idea around in her head.

    "Are you planning on stealing it?"

    Tas¨¬a took a moment before she answered. She tried to gauge whether Anneb¨¦l was on board with the idea.

    "What else should be done with it? Let that punk loose on the roadways? Kidnapping, raping and driving while fried out of his gourd?"

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged.

    "I''m not a thief but I did have my own idea in mind."

    "Yeah?"

    "When I saw the fuckstain was nowhere around, it occurred to me to blow that car the fuck up."

    Tas¨¬a almost shrieked at the notion.

    "You would destroy something that beautiful and luxurious?"

    She caught Anneb¨¦l''s contemptuous sneer before the woman made an effort to suppress her reaction.

    Anneb¨¦l squelched a tight gulp in her throat before making her argument.

    "It would send the Javierras a message that there is someone out there, someone with a violent streak, who is not impressed with their decadence, their opulence; that the entire frame of reference of their lifestyle means nothing to that person."

    Anneb¨¦l stopped at the end of the parking lot to crack her back. She let out a soft moan of relief before she continued.

    "A theft they can grasp. They can write it off as a happenstance of the world in which they live. But wonton, nihilistic destruction is beyond their kith and kin. The only possible reaction of their lizard minds is to fear it."

    Tas¨¬a had to restrain tears from her eyes. Her thieving spider-monkey mind did not approve of destroying the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis either.

    The gunmetal and curvy vermillion trim chassis seemed to make love to her eyes in that very moment she was hearing its destruction contemplated.

    "It''s both a fantastic work of art and a masterpiece of sublime engineering. Have you ever seen a HybrClydis with the hood popped open? Dual twin-cam n¨¹Busso V-6 engines tilt mounted and synced to a non-measurable by standardized equipment time differential. It is not its fault that human garbage owns it."

    Tas¨¬a almost lost her voice as she tried to contain the emotion whelming up in her throat. She wiped tears from her eye.

    Anneb¨¦l put an arm around her shoulders.

    "Avellana, mon petit d¨¦mon. Be practical. Whether they come around searching for evidence, or the fuckstain''s father reports the car missing, the cops are going to want to know what happened to it.

    "There are maybe four or five places in an hour''s drive from here you could take it. None of them would want that heat put on them with the Javierra''s involved, especially.

    "You are a daga chica. You were likely thinking of Ydre?''s garage, weren''t you? Do you want to put that kind of pressure on her? With her old lady in prison? The cops will definitely come sniffing around."

    Tas¨¬a slumped and she sat down on the curve. Damn was she tired. What could be said in turn to that? Her best argument was silence.

    Tas¨¬a wiped away a stream of tears, and she stared off into the distance.

    "Avellana, remember that little Virago you used to cruise around town on?"

    Tas¨¬a squinted up. She studied Anneb¨¦l''s face.

    "Do you remember me from then?"

    The brawler''s brow turned quizzical.

    "We never met. I had just got here, but I remember you used to be a bike courier zooming around everywhere. I bought that Virago off of Isabella for my brother. He is kind of small like you, but he can''t even handle that sweet little 750 bike.

    "So what do you say? I''ll trade you the bike for the car?"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "That deal sounds a bit skewed in relative value don''t you think?"

    "The car is more trouble than it is worth and you know it. A work of art? Maybe. But it is made in a factory. They assemble new ones by the hour. We''ll find you another one."

    "I only steal from those who deserve it."

    Anneb¨¦l cocked her head to the side as she studied Tas¨¬a.

    "Even here in the Quadra, there are plenty of deserving assholes with high-end sports cars."

    Tas¨¬a relaxed her breath. She would have to let this one go. In her coldest of calculations it was dawning on her that with mutual enemies and a surprising commonality, Anneb¨¦l was going to be a necessary, no, an outstanding ally.

    Give her this; she''ll be in our debt.

    Tas¨¬a gave her a lopsided grin as she passed the keys over.

    "Fine, but where do we go," Tas¨¬a asked as she pointed to the fuel tanks. "We certainly can''t blow it up here."

    Anneb¨¦l offered her hand to help Tas¨¬a up. She took it and sprung up, but to test their intimacy Tas¨¬a did not let the hand go.

    Anneb¨¦l hugged Tas¨¬a in with her own free arm, and leaned her head in.

    "My boyfriend is a machetero working to control the vine infestation over at El Hoyo. He can get us some dynamite."

    Tas¨¬a gazed back at the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis.

    "It''s just killing you inside, isn''t it," Anneb¨¦l said. She then started pulling Tas¨¬a to the vehicle. "Come on, Avellana. No reason to stand around all pouty face."

    Tas¨¬a protested, "it looks so perfect. Like it was made for me."

 2.26 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the passenger side door on their drive to the site.

    El Hoyo was a dozen miles outside of Villa Marr¨°n. Tas¨¬a had often accompanied Sachmilli Cuervo to the site when he inspected his rental equipment.

    It was more of a canyon that sprawled out like a twisted maze for three square miles than a pit. There were, however, several sizable gravel dig sites scattered about El Hoyo. Walls of red and pink clay surrounded the dig sites with isolated mesas looming ominously overhead.

    She would often take hikes around the little canyon as Sachmilli tended to his business dealings.

    It had been one of her most cherished places in all of her travels in the Quadra and it reminded her, in a small way, of the one place outside of Paraguay she had ever dreamed of living - Arizona with its Grand Canyon.

    Evidently, from what she was being told by the locals that evening, El Hoyo had changed, quite drastically.

    Tas¨¬a wanted to ask Anneb¨¦l about what she should expect when they got to the site.

    Anneb¨¦l drove with her hands on the wheel in a white knuckled clutch. She clenched her teeth, tight and worrisome. Her eyes darted between the car mirrors.

    A brawler, not a natural criminal capable of a state of emotional aplomb while engaged in possibly nefarious activity.

    So Tas¨¬a assessed with a professional detachment as if she was already sizing the brawler up for her potential role in a new crew.

    Tas¨¬a raised her voice, to get the tall redhead''s attention.

    "Hey, Anneb¨¦l," Tasia began to ask, "what . . ."

    Tas¨¬a was startled by the gentle clinch of a hand on her shoulder. However, the touch felt nice as a thumb rubbed against the sore muscles along the blade.

    "Wake up, mon petit d¨¦mon, we''re there."

    Tas¨¬a jostled up. She had fallen asleep. It felt like she was unconscious for a more substantial bit of time than just the few minutes it should have taken to get to El Hoyo.

    "Mi Sagrada Mar¨ªa," Tas¨¬a muttered to herself the name of the Sacr¨¦d Virgin. She then turned to Anneb¨¦l. "Just how long was I knocked out?"

    Appearing unflappable and serene now, Anneb¨¦l grinned. However, she also seemed reluctant to explain herself.

    "A little more than an hour. I didn''t want to disturb you. I decided to do a little preemptive reconnaissance."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and she made her best squinty face frown.

    "Anneb¨¦l, just what do you mean by that?"

    Effecting an air of mystery expressed with nothing more than an arched brow, Anneb¨¦l answered with, "you''ll see."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. When skulduggery was involved, it only made sense to keep the little thief involved in any decision-making process.

    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    But, Tas¨¬a let it go. More than anything else at that moment, she needed a kick to the head. She grabbed the last bottle of Ki-Jack Ginseng Elixir and she twisted the cap off.

    Quaffed straight down her throat, it felt like a great heat flushing through her body. With her pulse raised, Tas¨¬a was now ready for anything.

    She opened the door and sprung up to gawk at the sights, very much curious to discover her surroundings.

    In the silvery moonlight, El Hoyo made an impression. Tall cranes etched the skyline. Much like the cranes and rows of mining equipment did at the backlot of the Marejada office park, except these machines were covered in vines and green leaves.

    The scent of kudzu and hemp roamed the surrounding breeze.

    Fifty yards away, and to Tas¨¬a''s left, she could make out the shape of a massive crawler tractor on its side beneath a hill composed of loose, weed-covered gravel.

    On top of the hill, four drills, each thirty foot long and well-girthed, pointed in cross beam fashion at the sky. They appeared set in place as a warning.

    But a warning to whom?

    Tas¨¬a turned to Anneb¨¦l with her mouth gaped open before she could speak.

    "Did I ask you in the car . . ."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head with a chuckle.

    "No, I have no idea what you were going to ask. You fell asleep in mid-sentence."

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the car and gaped at the changes all around her.

    "What happened here," she asked. "It appears like one of those islands in the South Pacific where battlefields of equipment got covered over by the jungle."

    As she planted her butt down on the car hood, Anneb¨¦l swept her hands to the Northwest. There was a ridgeline of mountains there whose view was blocked by El Hoyo''s canyon walls.

    "First came the guerillas. Something that happened up there frightened them out of their camps. About four dozen of them, appearing emaciated and crazy-eyed, marched into El Hoyo. They attacked the worksite. Shooting everyone they could and blowing shit up.

    "Within hours, the company responded with attack helicopters and mercs. The commandos drove the guerillas down to the far canyon where they managed to hunker down and create a stand-off.

    "This went on for two weeks. To minimize casualties, the company had planned to starve them out. But then the ascospores came. Weird, giant ones made of anomalous and organic metal that dripped yellow puss.

    "They came bouncing down from the mountains to bombard the far canyon, like they were hunter-drones seeking the guerillas out.

    "Ever since then, the work crews have been dedicated to containing the invasive species in a daily grind of machetes, herbicides and dynamite."

    Tas¨¬a gave a long whistle.

    "Damn. Have they tried napalm?"

    Anneb¨¦l laughed as she sat beside her. She gave Tas¨¬a a friendly elbow to the ribs.

    "The Salvage won''t let them."

    "You''re shitting me," Tas¨¬a gasped.

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head. Her arms folded together, tightly.

    "Nope. The company lobbied to have the invasive species cleansed but the Salvage promised massive legal retaliation if they went through with it."

    "Senseless," Tas¨¬a muttered.

    She stared at the ground. The weeds and berry vines crawled slowly towards her as she watched.

    What are they feeding off of? She wondered. There was indeed a high concentration of nitrates in this soil, but no normal underlying chemistry could cause growth to spread anywhere close to that rapidly. In the middle of the night with no sunlight for photosynthesis at that!

    Anneb¨¦l jerked up off the hood with a shake of her butt. Tas¨¬a had to steady herself in response.

    "Come on," Anneb¨¦l said. "Let''s go wake my boyfriend, Ra¨²l, up. You''ll like him. He is very easy going and charismatic."

    With some envy and admiration, Tas¨¬a watched her walk away. The tall redhead was the same height as Felicit¨¦, but where the Argentinian was thin figured, Anneb¨¦l was muscular and mesomorphic in shape.

    Her bottom had not an ounce of fat on it, but it was quite ample.

    She has that kind of voluptuous figure they use to paint on the sides of bomber planes.

    Tas¨¬a thought as she scurried to catch up.

 2.27 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a followed along. Her boots stomped upon loose hard stones where the ground had been salted. When they reached a walkway between two hills of manicured brambles, she spotted a set of row houses.

    On a porch, inset at the entrance of the first bungalow, a light flashed before disappearing in the wispy night.

    Anneb¨¦l turned to Tas¨¬a with a broad smile on her face. She gasped in an adoring tone, "ah, he''s awake."

    "Ra¨²l, Ra¨´l," Anneb¨¦l called out several times in a sing-song that made a playful game of the stressed accent in his name.

    Then she teased.

    "What are you doing up at this hour? You work tomorrow, right?"

    Tas¨¬a heard a gentle laugh. She could see the arms of a man as he leaned over a patio rail. She could make out a white tank top.

    A cigar glowed orange and it obscured his face.

    From inside the dwelling came a steady moan.

    The man pointed to the door behind him with his thumb.

    "I just changed out J¨²n-J¨²n''s bandages. He''s not happy about it. The medicine hasn''t kicked in yet."

    "Is he staying with you?"

    Ra¨²l sighed. "Just a few days. You could have called and I would have come to you, instead."

    Anneb¨¦l laughed like a giddy parakeet.

    "Tried. Reception is bad here in the pits as you well know. Besides, this is not that kind of visit."

    "I suppose you called because you were going to give me a warning about that haircut. No worries, doll, It looks very nice on you."

    Ra¨²l sounded no more convincing than any other man in his proclamation of approval of such a drastic change, thought Tas¨¬a. She glanced at Anneb¨¦l. He was right though. The near shoulder-length hair made her mouth and chin appear more prominent. Strikingly so.

    He slapped his hands together to precipitate a change in the subject matter.

    "I see you brought company. Avellana, you look as sweetly as ever. It''s been a while since you said bye to me and Villa Marr¨®n. I thought I would have heard from you sooner."

    Tas¨¬a flinched and then she squinted to get a better look. Another mystery to add to all the others?

    To her relief, no. She just didn''t recognize his voice now that Ra¨²l had taken up smoking.

    "Oh, hey, Ra¨²l. I didn''t realize you were that Ra¨²l when Anneb¨¦l told me about you, or I would have given her fair warning. What happened to the dance studio?"

    "Dance is dead. Especially folk trots from the Old Country. Unfashionable once again."

    Tas¨¬a frowned and shook her head in disbelief.

    "The contest was the highlight of my week."

    Anneb¨¦l called out in a smooth, feminine grunt.

    "Hold on. The two of you have a history?"

    Ra¨²l confirmed.

    "We dated. It is not what you are thinking though."

    With her eyes lit up, Anneb¨¦l grinned, "I don''t see how it could be."

    As Ra¨²l''s voice raised in pitch, it conformed more to Tas¨¬a''s memory.

    "It was all quite chaste, my love. Though that doesn''t mean Avellana didn''t make me go through all the formal motions like an eighteenth-century parlor game."

    Now, Tas¨¬a giggled. She had misunderstood his intentions at the time.

    Ra¨²l continued. "In motion, there was no one more elegant than Avellana, so I demanded that she should be my dance partner. She refused unless I went through certain formalities."

    Tas¨¬a covered her mouth and giggled once more. She had never told Ra¨²l the real reason she played so coy.

    Given, he was such a handsome man, he owned a dance studio, he had belladonnas fawning over him, yet he somehow managed to stay single, Tas¨¬a assumed certain things about Ra¨²l that turned out not to be true. She thought he wanted her company to keep up appearances with his family and his many female admirers.

    It did not occur to her that he was truly smitten with her and her natural talent.

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head as she towered over Tas¨¬a. She brushed back Tas¨¬a''s hair in a broad sweep.

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    When Tas¨¬a eyed her in turn, Anneb¨¦l gave a suggestive wink.

    "Just when you think you know someone, right? Some night, Avellana, we will have to get together and do a little dancing, ourselves." Anneb¨¦l raised her chin as if in taunt back towards Ra¨²l. "Two can play at this game."

    Ra¨²l shrugged his shoulders and he grinned sheepishly. He was a man used to deflecting and enchanting women with suavely delivered gestures.

    "Then I will watch and critique. The two of you come in. We are spoiling the mosquitoes. They are sloshed drunk off of our blood."

    As the women entered with their hands held together, Tas¨¬a thought about their earlier conversation on what Bajamutt¨¦ asked of Anneb¨¦l. She realized the brawler was only thinking ahead and not just playing with her man''s affections.

    Getting comfortable with one another''s bodies by dancing together would indeed be a useful step in Tas¨¬a''s quest to achieve greater intimacy.

    Tas¨¬a never had trouble with simple affection and touch. But dance could enhance that even further. It could stir something deeper inside her.

    "Would either of you care for a beer," Ra¨²l offered as they stood in a small living room.

    Another soft moan came from behind a wooden door of faux-chestnut. It appeared delicate as if it were made of balsa wood.

    "I''ll take one. What''s wrong with your brother," Tas¨¬a asked.

    She had met his brother, whose nickname was J¨²n-J¨²n, several times while accompanying Sachmilli to El Hoyo even before she had met Ra¨²l. He was an on-site foreman.

    The brothers were born merely a few years apart and could have been mistaken for twins.

    "He was out surveying the far valley. We are still retrieving our inventory of equipment from the old office. Spit beetles attacked him."

    Tas¨¬a gave a sympathetic curse. "Spat in his eyes, did they blind him?"

    Ra¨²l raised his voice as he answered from the kitchen.

    "The good news for him is there is no permanent damage. The spit isn''t very acidic, but it is a strong paralytic that clings to the neurons. It''s going to take several days for it to dissolve out of his system. The dissolution is torturous."

    Ra¨²l returned with a brown bottle of Sajonia. He handed it to Tas¨¬a as he continued speaking.

    "So, I have to look after my big brother. Keep him drunk and medicated so he doesn''t scream."

    "I''m glad he''ll be okay," Tasia said.

    She wondered why Ra¨²l was tending to his brother. Where was J¨²n-J¨²n''s wife Nande? When it crossed her mind, the answer was like a stab in her gut as she inferred the reason.

    Nande had been killed by the guerillas.

    She ran the day to day operations in that back valley office J¨²n-J¨²n went out to survey. She would have been cornered.

    As these sad thoughts preoccupied her mind, Ra¨²l turned his head around to face Anneb¨¦l with a smile.

    "If this is not that kind of visit, then what kind of visit is this, praytell?"

    Anneb¨¦l relaxed her profile. She put her hands in the pockets of her washed-out jeans and thrust her bosom upward.

    "I need to ask a big favor of you."

    Ra¨²l chuckled. "I can see that. What do you need?"

    "Four sticks of dynamite."

    Ra¨²l studied her face without speaking for a good long moment.

    "Rat problem?"

    "Most definitely a rat problem," Anneb¨¦l answered in turn.

    "With the several accidents we have had of late, sticks of dynamite are strictly counted and logged now."

    "So, that''s a no?"

    Ra¨²l suspired. His hands clenched at the backside of a sofa. His head tilted low. He obviously hated disappointing his big boozy redhead.

    "There is another way to obtain it, but you are not going to like that solution. Especially, if your needs are immediate."

    "Yes... .," Anneb¨¦l pried. She cracked her knuckles waiting for an answer. "Go ahead and tell me. I promise that if I don''t like the answer, I won''t hit you, again. You know, baby, I only do it because I love you so much."

    Ra¨²l nodded and laughed, nervously, as he rubbed at a bruise on his shoulder.

    "In the back valley office, there still exist some explosives out there. If you need it now though, traveling there at night is out of the question. It is too spooky for my blood, at least."

    Anneb¨¦l cursed, "shit. Shit. Shit. I need the dynamite at least an hour before daybreak."

    Tas¨¬a checked the time. Her mobile readout pulsed five minutes past two am. She had a meeting with Le¨®n in sixteen hours. One hour of rest was not nearly enough.

    Neither had she given him coordinates where she wanted to meet, nor had she done recon to scout the area she had in mind.

    She suspected that even if she asked him to come alone, with the nasty, unknown spook (she designated him in her mind as F-150) running things, Le¨®n would not have any choice in the matter.

    She wanted to recon to ensure that anyone who followed along without her permission would regret it.

    Then it occurred to Tas¨¬a. The back valley of El Hoyo was an even better site than the one she had planned.

    That site was a well spread-out country park in another town a half hours drive away from Villa Marr¨®n.

    Instead of waiting for the afternoon after a good, long sleep, she could do her reconnaissance now.

    "I''ll go," Tas¨¬a exclaimed loudly enough to get their attention.

    Ra¨²l eyes widened in alarm.

    "You can''t," he pleaded. "It is too dangerous a place back there to be tromping around in the middle of the night. Rabid things crawl around and the ghosts creep about."

    Anneb¨¦l''s brow crinkled as she studied Tas¨¬a''s petite figure. Her lips twitched for a moment in indecision. But she finally nodded.

    "Avellana knows what she is doing. Trust her Ra¨²l."

    Tas¨¬a straightened up and peered down the length of her body to do a mental inventory.

    "I''m going to need a decent electric torch. Besides that, I''m prepared."

    Ra¨²l acquiesced with a nod before taking off down a short hallway to a tool room.

    Tas¨¬a turned to Anneb¨¦l.

    "Do you mind if I go alone? It''s likely to require some stealth. I''m best at that alone."

    Anneb¨¦l looked quizzically at her.

    "Are you certain, Avellana? If things get nasty out there I''m best at punching things the fuck out. Especially ghosts."

    She smiled at Anneb¨¦l''s joking delivery. She was merely showing her trust in Tas¨¬a.

    "I''ll be okay. Stay here. Make love to that foxy man of yours. I''ll be gone a good little while."

    "Try to be back by five," Anneb¨¦l whispered as she leaned in. "Three hours of lovemaking, and he is completely out of it."

 2.28 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Fortunately, the paths within the El Hoyo interior still mapped more or less to Tas¨¬a''s memory. As she journeyed along, she was often obstructed by vine growth, fallen rocks, and rusted-out equipment, but the path never descended into a vegetative maze that confused her going forward.

    The vines tended to cling along and conform tightly to the old structures of El Hoyo.

    She kept to a simple stealth strategy of strolling next to brambles that aligned in the shadows formed beneath the moon''s shine, while also avoiding stepping on clusters of rocks that could give away her presence.

    Tas¨¬a passed under a pair of jaguars nuzzling together in the moonlight on the flat surface of a boulder. They never noticed her as she passed by them.

    Though its snarl shattered the air, the male made noise only to impress his mate. In turn, she nipped at his ears, playfully.

    As lovely as the coupling was, Tas¨¬a could not help but to think what an extraordinarily nice coat the male''s fur would make.

    She was a woman well-set in the customs of the Quadra. Fortunately for the beast, Tas¨¬a had no spare time to hunt game.

    As she paced onward towards a narrow passageway, the jacket began to feel uncomfortable hanging from her shoulders. Tas¨¬a assumed this was due to the humid microclimate of El Hoyo. Here was one of the rare places that mosquitoes still thrived so late in the season.

    As she considered taking the jacket off, she realized the weather had nothing to do with the discomfort that she was feeling.

    Though the cotton shirt beneath the feathered jacket was now drenched in sweat, the discomfort she was feeling was more of a tingling sensation that pulsed beneath her skin.

    Her senses were still adjusting back to their well-pitched norm. She realized the confusion was caused by a lingering synaesthesia from the LSD she had consumed earlier.

    It was dangerous to continue until she sorted the problem out.

    Tas¨¬a stopped in her tracks and she listened around her. There was a great cacophony of sounds worthy of the jungles of the nations north of her that obstructed her search.

    Tas¨¬a eyed the vines above her as they hung from the cliffside to estimate their strength. As she did so, a clear thought entered her mind.

    There are now eyes set upon me. Something is moving quickly up there but it alludes my every sense.

    It should not have been the least bit surprising. After all, it would only make sense for a predator to be waiting somewhere above the narrow passage.

    It confounded Tas¨¬a that she could not see it. She should at least have formed a sense of its proximity to her, but she had nothing.

    She would have to force it out of hiding.

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    Time for a fake-out.

    Tas¨¬a dropped to the ground with her jacket spread out over her head to cover her ears from audial distractions.

    She spread her palms out along the matted weeds and she dug them into the firm granite beneath.

    It did not take but a moment for it to react, giving up its advantage of stealth.

    A rumbling thud headed her way.

    She now knew its speed, the thrust of its motion, and most importantly, where it would need to adjust in counter-acceleration to pounce on her.

    Tas¨¬a leapt up from the ground in a singular motion. She grabbed the vines above her with a quick snatch. With her arms flexed out, she snap-pulled them inward against her chest, grappled tightly together.

    This motion thrust her up several feet in the air.

    Looking down to the spot she calculated it would attempt its lunge, Tas¨¬a caught sight of a strange beast shimmering into existence as it approached. Now, it stalked beneath her.

    The monstrosity was long and wiry, like an enlarged lemur, but one mangy, hairless and leathery. Its head formed a chitinous helmet of insets where its eyes and thick rows of teeth bulged out at odd angles.

    By the time she reached the apex of her ascent in the air, Tas¨¬a had removed her .32 from its holster.

    Beneath her, the bewildered beast tried to adjust to her actions. It''s spine writhed most unnaturally. It''s taloned feet twisted around at a pace too slow to counter her descent.

    Coming down, the heels of Tas¨¬a''s boots punctured it between the shoulder blades.

    With a gnashing wail, the creature fell on its side.

    Before it had a chance to recover, Tasia pushed the barrel of the gun against the nape of its neck.

    She emptied the magazine.

    Tas¨¬a got back up on her feet, and she replaced the magazine before she holstered the .32 caliber pistol once more.

    With the ruckus she had just made, her first thought was to find a hiding spot and see what manner of beast came sniffing around to exploit the fall-out from the violent confrontation.

    A low growl behind her though let Tas¨¬a know it was now too late for her to go incognito. She turned her head to see the male jaguar. He sounded quite pissed at the disturbance.

    However, before doing anything rashly ultraviolent, Tas¨¬a realized the creature was a relatively tame one.

    From his relaxed demeanor and lack of cagey fear, she could tell he was used to being around people.

    Tas¨¬a smiled and she spoke to the jaguar in the playful, folksy tone of a hedge-wife.

    "Oh, you want some of that stringy looking critter for yourself, huh? Well, you just be my guest then, little fella."

    Jaguars, however, are all business in matters of game. He stared back in her eyes in patient dismissal of her silly behavior.

    Not wanting to antagonize the jaguar any further, Tas¨¬a stepped away from the monstrosity she had killed. When she was clear of it, the jaguar rushed up to the dead beast.

    With his jaws clamped down on the tendons of its neck, the jaguar started to pull the carcass back up the trail from whence he had came.

    Tas¨¬a continued to tease him.

    "What are you going to say when you get back to the misses? ''Honey, look what I brought for dinner,''" she muttered in a whisper for herself and the beast. Then with a nagging whine in her voice, she continued, "''this one better be tasty. The last one was about as succulent as shoe leather, you nincompoop.''"

    The jaguar cast his eyes low and stared at Tas¨¬a as if she was the oddest thing he had ever seen before he disappeared in the thickets from her view.

    She relaxed her breath. Even as the jaguar seemed tame enough, he was likely the company mascot of the day workers, even, still, it was best not to show the beast any fear.

    Hence, her goofy comedy routine.

    Tas¨¬a turned to continue down the narrow passage. She realized as she started walking, the eyes that she had felt before remained on her even still.

 2.29 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    With the jaguar now out of sight, Tas¨¬a returned to her normal stride down the path. Her casual manner as she did so was all deception on her part. She started to feel ill-at-ease again. A dread sense of being watched unnerved her.

    As Tas¨¬a sorted her thoughts, she practiced controlled breathing, and she counted her steps.

    Troubling to her sense of composure, however, was the creature she had fought.

    Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

    No. He that made the atom bomb made thee.

    God had no part in your creation. The demons that drive mankind made you.

    Tas¨¬a pictured the creature in her mind''s eye.

    She judged it was shorter than herself by a few inches, even more slender than herself, at least ten pounds lighter. It did possess hands, and no tail, like a hominid.

    However, its head was so weird and its body so misshapen in appearance that as she fought it, she did not even once consider that it could have been human in its origins.

    So, if human, Manifested then? She doubted it fit the definition. It seemed more feral than psychotic.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head in frustration that she was so severely limited in her speculations to mere guess-work.

    It was time for her to shrug it off and put it to the side as a question for another day. There were more pressing matters to disturb her at the moment.

    As Tas¨¬a walked forward, she thought about her visual exposure and vulnerability. She eyed the surrounding ridgeline.

    The path ahead began to widen, to her relief. Though she was not out of danger, now at the edge of a field of tall grass, the enlarged area expanded her means of evasion, if it proved to be necessary.

    It would be much more difficult to corner her here.

    When the count in her head reached sixty, Tas¨¬a grabbed the nearest set of vines. She scurried to a cliff overhang, twenty-two feet up.

    It was one of the quickest vertical climbs she had ever made in her life even with the outthrust jump to grab on to the overhang side at the end.

    Seven seconds.

    Damn Tas¨¬a! Giving herself a mental pat on the back.

    Peering up the pathway, she spotted a stalker caught completely by surprise. Fifty-five yards out from her, a small man crouched down before he turned away from where he spied upon her former position. Retreating cautiously, he dipped his head down as he scanned the area around himself.

    In a uniform of dark, olive camouflage, he carried a Kalashnikov carbine in his hands. She recognized it as a late-twentieth-century model. A more compact assault rifle than its infamous AK-47 cousin.

    Tas¨¬a eyed the tall weeds and brambles nearby to spot any movement from his comrades. She knew they normally patrolled in threes. Nothing stirred the field below her but the one man.

    If there were any other guerillas in the vicinity, they were further up the path by at least a few hundred yards.

    She slipped the .32 semi-auto pistol out of its holster, and flipped the laser sight on.

    Tas¨¬a found the back of the guerilla''s head as he steadily moved away in a vain effort not to disturb the surrounding grass and give away his position. With the gun held steadily in place, Tas¨¬a centered the red dot on an odd crimson birthmark; she drilled away at it with a three-round burst.

    With a sudden jerk forward, the guerilla disappeared. Blue smoke curled up from where he had crouched.

    Segunda Madr¨¦! Well, that was certainly unexpected.

    She had no doubt of the success of the shot. She saw the guerilla''s reaction, but immediately after his head jerked, he vanished into thin air.

    Poof!

    With her body pressed into the vines, Tas¨¬a crouched low. She doubted anyone had spotted her position. It was highly improbable that they could have anticipated her sudden climbing maneuver.

    That the guerilla retreated so slowly, not realizing his low-ground disadvantage in the first place, meant he had lost his visual on her.

    Tas¨¬a did not like what the presence of the guerillas meant. She had her meet-up, and she needed the back valley clear of everyone. She had no idea the number of them she would need to kill to secure the site.

    So God bless¨¦dly screwed.

    When Anneb¨¦l told her the story of the guerilla insurgency, Tas¨¬a assumed the ascospores finished them off. The kind of energy burst necessary to cause this freak environment was not conducive to human survival.

    As well, Anneb¨¦l would have warned her if she knew that the guerillas still inhabited the back valley.

    Then there was the blue smoke.

    This prompted Tas¨¬a to recall what Anneb¨¦l said.

    I''m best at punching things the fuck out. Especially ghosts.

    So, Anneb¨¦l did warn her. Tas¨¬a shook her head, she had not taken the words seriously given the light tone in which Anneb¨¦l delivered them.

    Ghosts were much more common in the early days of the Cull Spore Invasion. Their spooky behavior most resembled the ghosts of folklore as they tended to show up at the most inexplicable times and scare the fuck out of everyone.

    However, they were nothing more than the recordings of events collected by the nanospores, much like virtual reality capture.

    In those early days, events heavy in emotional density were recorded and projected on members of the Quadra populace as if they were subjects in a psychological experiment.

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    When still quite young, Tas¨¬a bathed in an old, iron tub only to find herself surrounded by black-dressed attendees while a funeral was in progress.

    Oh, how she screamed. Even still, she tended to take quick baths and showers.

    Fortunately, the ghost phenomenon mostly disappeared with mass inoculation. Why this correlation, no one knew.

    The immediate question on her mind was whether or not the bullets from any of their return fire could be real. Why would a pre-recorded event be spotting her?

    Why did his head not burst? Why did he not collapse to the ground? No such event had been previously recorded for that effect, so poof instead?

    And, did it really matter?

    The spores could go well beyond mere visual projection in the entities they created. Why assume the ghost would remain immaterial?

    She swung her head up in a sweeping motion that ended when she pulled back down to her original position. Her feint did indeed draw fire from a pair of rifles.

    Tas¨¬a glanced up at a grouping of leaves behind her where the bullets should have hit.

    They went untouched by any bullet round. The big, wide leaves simply drooped, unmoved.

    Even given this, how much was she willing to gamble these were mere audio-visual phenomenon on display?

    Tas¨¬a rolled over on her back and stared at the moon for a moment before closing her eyes to concentrate.

    The feeling of being watched returned. Something was up there. This wasn''t some inexplicable, intuition-level magic she was perceiving.

    Something had tagged her for a continual subdermal relay. Literally, she was being pinged.

    And, she could feel it!

    Tas¨¬a thought of Mel''s oddly formed squawks as he spoke to her. That was the means nightwings delivered their micro-needle tags. Of course, he would tag her. She was in the early stages of Manifestation.

    It was what he did in his role of being a guardian of humanity; he tagged those that needed inoculation.

    Thus, Mel, the nightwing with the modified high intelligence made it his business to keep track of her.

    She spun her head around searching for the nightwing in the vines and brambles above her position with no success. Too many niches and crannies for a smart crow to disappear in.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the NeoPalm, and she texted Felicit¨¦. At this time of night, the girl was likely tapping away on her TRS-80

    Where''s the nightwing?

    Seconds later, she got a text back.

    Hey there, you. Where have you been? I thought you may have joined the Batshit People.

    She had heard Felicit¨¦ use that phrase coming off her shift in the Spore Isolation Unit before. One needed a thick skin to work so near the Manifested.

    Her other favorite phrase, fucking Cthulhu worshipping rayos-de-luna*. Tas¨¬a smiled as she thought of Felicit¨¦''s Buenos Aires accent when delivering that phrase.

    Nope. I''m cured. Such a weird, weird night. Sorry, I did not get back to you earlier, but the LSD, not very conducive to communication.

    She decided not to mention her adventures with Anneb¨¦l, nor Bajamutt¨¦ and Alex. She recognized, though it held a grain of truth, blaming it on the LSD was a deflection.

    Tas¨¬a, you lying little spook wannabe, she admonished herself. She realized that she did so only half-heartedly.

    Felicit¨¦ texted back to her.

    Very interesting surroundings you find yourself in.

    Tas¨¬a answered.

    So, is Mel nearby?

    She looked around again. The nightwing was a better master of stealth than she was herself.

    I doubt if he ever strayed very far the entire night from you, going by the recorded flight pattern. He definitely stayed near someone.

    A sharp and warm tingle of embarrassment flushed through Tas¨¬a''s cheeks. Recorded. If Felicit¨¦ had access to the visual recordings she could see Tas¨¬a sitting beside Bajamutt¨¦. It was one of the most uninhibited moments in her life. The lust she had felt and let be shown would be on full display to anyone who cared to watch.

    Felicit¨¦ continued.

    You need to see this. I''ll key you into the nightwing''s visual display.

    She saw herself lying on the cliff overhang from the vantage point of thirty yards up on the opposite ridgeline.

    Okay?, Tas¨¬a answered back.

    Just a sec, little smarty-tushy. I need to prompt the bird to look in the right direction again.

    Mel raised his eyes away from Tas¨¬a''s position, and he started to stare straight ahead. Sitting above her, at the top of the ridgeline, were three sets of eyes that constantly moved in motions consisting of jabs and pokes.

    His vision grew clear, revealing nasty, monstrous-looking buzzards.

    Oh, sweet Mary of mine, that is creepy, and they are just normal, big-ass buzzards from the look of them, she wrote back to Felicit¨¦. Tas¨¬a continued, I need to ask another favor. Could you test something -

    Tas¨¬a stopped typing when she heard a noise coming from beneath her. Someone was trying to climb up the ridge.

    Something is up. I''ll have to text you back later.

    She put her neoPalm away and grabbed her gun. Tas¨¬a waited patiently. The guerilla would be too inconvenienced by his climb to engage in any effective combat.

    His companion, however, must have been covering the guerilla''s assent with his rifle readied to nail her if she poked her head up.

    Tas¨¬a shifted down the overhang she lay on to minimize the sharpshooter''s effective angle.

    What kind of counter-attack did they have in mind?

    She waited several more minutes before he came in sight, fifteen feet in front of her.

    To her astonishment, the guerilla did not try to climb up onto the overhang.

    He kept climbing still further up using the vines. He ignored her entirely.

    That face! Tas¨¬a thought in revulsion. It was impossibly emaciated. More skull-like than fleshy. A grimace set like stone on his lips.

    When he reached the top of the ridge, the man began to yell at the buzzards.

    "You are impossible monstrosities," the guerilla shouted. "You cannot be."

    The buzzards squawked out their miserable sounding yelp in protest.

    The man fired his gun. The buzzards yelled even louder. A mad tussle insued.

    From the guerilla came a fearful shout. Tas¨¬a caught sight of him once more. His legs and arms flailed as he descended right above her.

    Tas¨¬a leaned in quickly just before he skidded off the overhang. He attempted to grab on to something to no avail.

    The guerilla slipped and he continued to fall. She did not hear the thud that would have brought his fall to a satisfying closure.

    "Mani! Mani!"

    The remaining guerilla yelled. He continued speaking in a near soliloquy.

    "All is lost, Mani. We were wrong. We kept saying none of this is real. But no, it''s real. We are not.

    "Mani, I''m so sorry I recruited you. None of this was worth believing in. You could have had a nice life in Lima. Nice house, family, loving wife, wonderful children. A life. A career. You would have made it. You had so much talent. You could have had it all, but I convinced you that life was just so much bullshit because I am a smug, arrogant, simpleton fool."

    Tas¨¬a peaked up and back down. No shots came. She peaked out again. The last guerilla stood facing away from her. He stared at a spot on the ground but there was not a body lying there.

    He clutched at a .357 magnum revolver in his right hand.

    He continued to speak.

    "This? What is this? It defies everything El Poco Rojo taught. We are not real, Mani. I wish we never left Lima and discovered this for ourselves. We could have remained oblivious to this illusion our entire lives, Mani."

    He looked up to the stars before he continued speaking.

    "There is no God, so how can this be? We are not real, we are like spirits floating around in a world that cannot be. But it is, and it is we who are not."

    The guerilla grew silent for several seconds. He nodded his head several times as he whispered.

    "Yes. Yes. The one way out."

    When he put the gun to his head he dissipated into blue smoke before he even fired a shot.

    * Rayos-de-lunas - moonbeams

 2.30 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    A silence overwhelmed the passage below Tas¨¬a after the last ghost dispersed into blue smoke. Beneath her, the field of grass swayed as if brushed by a vastly expansive hand.

    Even so, the squalls of jungle unrest were momentarily no more until they stitched back together with one sound overlapping the other. In the span of a minute, the deep vineland cacophony of noise was rebuilt.

    The guerilla was wrong, she thought, there is something about this place that is markedly not real.

    Tas¨¬a decided to climb further up the ridge to surveille the path ahead of her from a better vantage point. She jumped to the vine the ghost had used in its climb, realizing too late she should have inspected the vine''s condition first.

    It yanked loosely in her grip. Tas¨¬a twisted her lower body around to compensate, only to bang her knees into the hard clay.

    It proved worth the bruising pain; she established a grip with her thighs pressed against the ridge wall.

    Are we getting stupid in our old age, Tas¨¬a? She cursed in disgust with herself, as she inspected the dead and nearly dried out vine in her hands. Just put all your trust in the actions of a discorporate entity in relation to gravity and see how that works out for you.

    She pulled the vine loose from the cranny it was barely ensconced and dropped its long ropey tangle to the ground.

    Now, she reached up and she smacked the dry red clay.

    The clays of El Hoyo formed a firm surface as Tas¨¬a knew from her many previous explorations within its valleys. She was afraid the extra-natural biological growth had loosened and degraded the solid earth.

    Not by much, as of yet, Tas¨¬a decided as she cupped her hands up against the surface.

    Tas¨¬a climbed the rest of the way towards the ridge top. She peeked over at the buzzards. Their feathers were ruffled from the previous commotion, but none were injured beyond their own comical scuffle.

    One buzzard began to squawk as Tas¨¬a eased up the crested ground nearby them. The other two followed in course.

    It was not difficult to understand their intended message. Their shrieks deciphered, thusly.

    "Lay down!"

    "Die!"

    ''We eat you!"

    As she grabbed the pistol scope out of her fanny-pack, Tas¨¬a stared back at the buzzards in contempt, ready to kick a boot in their throats if they tried anything.

    Her neoPalm vibrated against her thigh. Tas¨¬a retrieved it and she flicked it on.

    "I can hear that you have acquired new friends," Felicit¨¦ teased.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Looking towards the field below, she raised the scope to her eye, as she spoke in turn.

    "Anyone who doesn''t believe in the reality of intrinsic evil has never come face to face with a buzzard."

    Felicit¨¦ laughed. "I was shocked when I discovered they are common in the world outside. They are such malignant, mutant-looking beasts; as a kid, I assumed they were abominations indigenous to the Quadra."

    Tas¨¬a thought of Mani who went up the ridge to confront the buzzards. The terrible birds must have been analogous to something the real Mani had actually experienced.

    "Felicit¨¦, I don''t know if you were old enough to experience the ghosts."

    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

    Through the scope, Tas¨¬a focused on movement by a set of silvery disks at the other end of the field of grass. A long, thin garden snake caught a field mouse.

    It pulled the struggling vermin into a blackberry bush. The silvery disk were merely pans left under the bushes.

    Tas¨¬a''s mouth watered. Her mom made delicious blackberry pies. Blackberries were awesome. To think, some killjoys treat it as an invasive species fit for eradication.

    Felicit¨¦ kept speaking as Tas¨¬a''s attention was divided from observing the drama of the wild kingdom as it unfolded.

    "True. That was a little before my time," the Argentinian began. "I studied the phenomenon quite extensively. Those ghosts that we just witnessed exhibited properties that were not reported two decades ago. They displayed reactive capabilities to this environment."

    Tas¨¬a placed the scope down in her lap to rub her sweat off the lens.

    "Felicit¨¦, you are the expert here. It''s difficult for me to sort this out. What we witnessed could have been any number of things. A recording of events that grafted real factors from the world around us. Or, a recording with AI embedded that simulated self-awareness, so effectively, it convinced itself of its own incompleteness."

    "Or," Felicit¨¦ began, "it could be just the Cull Spores fucking with us. Much like they always do. That siloquey was a bit overwrought like poorly acted stage drama, was it not? If I had a means to nick some of the codebase for that haunting I could have a reasonable chance to answer your question."

    "But, you can''t?"

    This time, Tas¨¬a used the scope to survey beyond the field of grass. Another path curved up in an s-shape to the far valley. The ground of this path seemed to shimmer. It was beyond the magnification capacity of her scope to focus on the cause.

    As Tas¨¬a did this, Felicit¨¦ answered Tas¨¬a''s last question with much suspiration in her voice.

    "Therein lies the rub. The codebase is stored holographically in every molecule of the spores that performed that haunting.

    "However, the information is dispersed and networked through each molecule to each other molecule as it is needed, and this practice is done continuously. Retrieving it from the molecules of nanospores in that field would be like trying to obtain a metadata instruction set whose bits were divided between every cloud of servers in every nation in the world."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced as she looked down at the field of grass below.

    "I''m starting to understand just how utterly outclassed we are."

    "And Tas¨¬a? That is just me greatly simplifying the analogy to make it succinct and palpable. Holographic storage doesn''t work like bits in an SSD drive.

    "If you want to sit down for a good while and keep the buzzards company, I can clarify these matters. That is, if you feel it will help our cause."

    Tas¨¬a eyed the birds. They jerked their heads suddenly as they gaggled together. She had just caught them plotting against her.

    She lifted her left boot and threatened them with a set of jabs in the air.

    I watched too many Sonny Chiba movies when I was a kid to feel threatened by the likes of you dirtbags, was the message she sent.

    "Maybe next time when I bring my tea set," Tasia answered. "I''m getting down from this ridge. Could you have Mel fly up the path for me? I spotted something weird just before it empties into the far valley."

    Felicit¨¦ laughed. "I don''t mean to gloat, but I am way ahead of you. I sent the nightwing out while you were busy climbing."

    Tas¨¬a laughed.

    "Hey, Miss Brain, how do you know where I am headed?"

    Felicit¨¦ tutted with intended overemphasis.

    "A few simple inductions I gathered from a mere glance at your surrounding terrain. You are headed in the direction from whence the ghosts came. After the field of grass, the path meets up with a graveled one going east and west. You won''t be going east because that is the active work zone. You have avoided honest labor your entire life, so scratch that."

    Tas¨¬a gasped as if offended. "So mean . . . but, so true."

    "I also assume from the excellent layout of the back valley, you are checking it out tonight for the meet-up tomorrow evening. I have the nightwing recording every inch of it as we speak."

    Some nation fucked itself out of a most excellent spook when they decided to alienate that girl.

    "As for that something weird you mentioned, Tas¨¬a, the only real oddity I spotted were seed bursts that line-up along the path. I looked it up. One species of vine common in El Hoyo engages in nocturnal emissions to spread its seed in preparation for the morning sunlight. Perfectly harmless, and it is said that it smells wonderful."

    The buzzards let out a yelp directed at Tas¨¬a. In response, she raised her trouser leg, revealing the silvery gleam of her stiletto. They snarled in turn, seemingly not impressed.

    "Felicit¨¦, I believe the owners of this fine establishment are kicking me out, so I need to get going."

    "I''ll send over the nightwing''s data set when it is complete. Call me back if you need me, Tas¨¬a."

    "Will do, Miss Brain."

    Felicit¨¦ giggled in response to Tas¨¬a''s last words before she ended the call.

    It was all I could do to keep up appearances trying to match wits with that girl. How much of what she just said I''m going to retain, Tas¨¬a wondered as she began her climb back down.

 2.31 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    A little more than ninety minutes later Tas¨¬a caught sight of the row houses. A phosphorous like glow from the end of a cigar lit up the porch to Ra¨²l''s bungalow.

    Only one more oddity occurred on Tas¨¬a''s journey to the backend valley. Another ghost appeared. He did not threaten her, nor did he even acknowledge her presence.

    He just sat in a wood-backed chair in a corner in the main office as he read from a little book.

    "All that is under the celestial order is embroiled in utter chaos. The time to advance is now," the ghost muttered as he read from the book.

    Unlike the other guerillas, this strange one appeared to be a model of perfect, untroubled serenity. The tag on his chest read, Cmdr Rojo.

    Tas¨¬a left the ghost alone.

    Then there was the other matter. While she searched the offices for the vault keys for the explosives containment facility, she came upon a storage closet with a jammed lock. She picked it open and discovered three intact skeletons with pierced fractures in the back of their skulls.

    She recognized the overlapping sunflower-mandalas embroidered in the dress that covered one skeleton. The identification in a pouch purse confirmed it was J¨²n-J¨²n''s wife Nande.

    Tas¨¬a gave the deceased a prayer of safe passage before she continued.

    She always kept a few spare netted bags in her fanny-pack. They barely took up any space folded. She scooped up all of Nande''s remains and she placed them in one of the bags.

    She needed the other bags for the explosives. As for the remains of the other two workers, she would have to make a point of telling Ra¨²l about them.

    "Look at you, coming back loaded for bear," Anneb¨¦l teased her before taking another puff of smoke from a cigar.

    "You have no idea how relieved I was when I discovered the explosives were gelignite and not dynamite."

    Anneb¨¦l giggled at this as she helped Tas¨¬a set the two bags filled with explosives down.

    "Did you bring blasting caps?"

    "Of course," Tas¨¬a said in refutation of Anneb¨¦l''s questioning tone.

    As she drew near, an aroma of sex pervaded the air. Even as her gut tightened in revulsion, Tas¨¬a felt like she could get drunk off of the scent. She inched closer to the source; successfully, she beat back the feeling of losing control of her bowels.

    Tas¨¬a now noticed Anneb¨¦l was only wearing a long cotton shirt that went to her mid-thigh and no pants.

    As Anneb¨¦l sipped from a glass of brown liquor, she gave Tas¨¬a a knowing look.

    "You know, in the matter of our mutual condition, that scarab I showed you earlier helped me with my own problem."

    Tas¨¬a leaned up against the rail. Her face lit up in her prettiest gobliny.

    "So you did flash me on purpose!"

    "Of course," Anneb¨¦l confirmed. "We were in a place equipped with toilets. I needed to know your level of sensitivity. Some of the Harvested cannot even see a nude body without crapping themselves.

    "I know of your past, Bajamutt¨¦ told me, you once were a nun. I hope I didn''t offend you when I did that."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "No, not at all. You are quite beautiful in every aspect of your flesh."

    Anneb¨¦l appeared pleasantly taken aback.

    "Thank you. That is a very touching compliment. Avellana, as I said, I was gauging your degree of reaction. You have a stronger stomach starting out than most of my Harvested clientele. I think you are ready for an advanced step."

    Tas¨¬a brushed the hair out of her eyes and shook her head.

    "Which is?"

    Anneb¨¦l chortled and she gave Tas¨¬a a slight push.

    "Settle down little filly, you are not quite ready for that ten inches of swinging midnight blue meat just yet."

    "Ah . . . Are you sure? I know. I know. What do you have in mind?"

    Anneb¨¦l placed her head within inches of Tas¨¬a''s. She brushed back a tangle of Tas¨¬a''s hair. Tas¨¬a felt a chill run in the center of her abdomen. This time it felt more thrilling than threatening.

    "Avellana, tomorrow evening, I want you to be there when Ra¨²l and I make love. I want you to just sit in place and watch. It will help normalize - what''s wrong?"

    A breeze swelled beneath Tas¨¬a''s face, heavy in Anneb¨¦l''s scent. Tas¨¬a drew back a few steps. She suddenly felt overwhelmed. She was going to lose it.

    "Anneb¨¦l . . . I can''t even pleasure myself without evoking the demon."

    Anneb¨¦l reached out and grabbed Tas¨¬a by the shoulders and pulled Tas¨¬a''s face into her bosom.

    This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    "Mon petite d¨¦mon," Anneb¨¦l began. "I can see our mutual demon in that grimace on your face. It is about to take hold.

    "Fight it! Breathe slowly, and clench your stomach in and out. Yes, like that. Start with your lungs. Feel them tighten. Tighten your stomach, don''t let out just yet. Keep tight. Now, tighten your thighs.

    "Don''t laugh at what I tell you to do next, if you do, you probably will lose it. Now, tighten your sphincter. As you do so, imagine that it is made of gold. Don''t laugh, just go with it."

    For the next minute, as Anneb¨¦l held on to Tas¨¬a, she whispered ''hold, don''t breathe'' and, ''keep that vision set in your mind''s eye.''

    Tas¨¬a obeyed, and as she did so, her head felt light, her body felt as if it was swaying by being brushed from side to side.

    She was being hypnotized. Slowly, as the sway predominated her senses, the ache in her abdomen disappeared.

    Anneb¨¦l continued with her instruction.

    "Beginning with your thighs, release the tension. Now, release the tension in your stomach. Breathe, breathe out slowly. Release the tension. Breathe back in. Very good, Avellana. Do you still have that vision I told you to keep in your mind''s eye?"

    Tas¨¬a affirmed with a nod.

    "Now, imagine it is no longer made of gold. It has become flesh once more. Release the tension. That''s it. The danger has passed, hasn''t it?"

    Tas¨¬a looked up into Anneb¨¦l''s eyes. Her own were blurred with tears. She held onto the redhead with a tight hug.

    For the first time, she knew for certain she had it in her to keep the demon in check.

    "Avellana, it is time, now. Are you going to be okay if I leave you here?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded though her heart wrenched as she thought about the coming fate of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis.

    "I''m better now. I don''t know the full extent of your plans -" Anneb¨¦l threw her a devilish grin, "- but, do you need my help?"

    Anneb¨¦l tossed her hair to the side, as she gave Tas¨¬a an upturned glance.

    "You need your rest. Don''t you think you have done enough for one day?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "I guess you are right."

    Tas¨¬a backed up into a post holding the shelter top. As a hard object bumped against her haunches, she remembered that she carried another bag.

    Anneb¨¦l had turned around and she was about to enter the bungalow.

    "Anneb¨¦l," Tas¨¬a called out.

    "I need to grab my pants."

    Tas¨¬a held up the bag.

    "This is important. I found Nande''s remains."

    Anneb¨¦l turned back around, slowly. Her eyebrows hunched in disbelief.

    "Really? We looked everywhere."

    Tas¨¬a placed the bag on the porch. Anneb¨¦l bent down to examine it.

    "That''s her dress, alright. She had such amazing taste. In everything. Avellana, Ra¨²l is asleep. But, we''ll tell him about it in the morning. It''s important to let him break the news to J¨²n-J¨²n."

    Anneb¨¦l stood up with the bag of remains in her hands.

    "One more thing," Tas¨¬a said.

    She pulled out of her pocket a gold band and then a second ring with clusters of diamonds and sapphires inset. She handed the two rings over to Anneb¨¦l.

    She did not mention how badly her other demon made her want to keep them.

    After Anneb¨¦l left, Tas¨¬a found a couch. She pulled her trousers off and she jumped on top of the cushions. A quilt lay on the opposite end. Tas¨¬a grabbed it and made a pillow of it.

    Finally, sleep, Tas¨¬a thought with a smile on her face.

    A soft wailing sound came from J¨²n-J¨²n''s bedroom.

    That poor man.

    Tas¨¬a got up. She knocked on the door.

    "J¨²n-J¨²n?"

    She opened the door and peeked in. His head was propped on a set of pillows. His eyes and the top half of his head was covered in bandages.

    "No, it''s me, Avellana."

    J¨²n-J¨²n smiled broadly.

    "I heard you speaking in a dream earlier. So, it''s really you, then."

    "Yeah. Could you use some company for the night?"

    He nodded.

    "Could you grab my pills and Drambuie?"

    Tas¨¬a served him the two Percocets and the double shot for which he had asked. Finished, she placed the narcotics back up on a shelf top.

    "Okay," she said. "Scoot over and make some room for me. You are going to have to give up one of those pillows as well."

    J¨²n-J¨²n cleared his throat. As he did so, Tas¨¬a was reminded of Ra¨²l who shared many of the same mannerisms.

    "I need to go take a tinkle," he said with a pleasant chuckle. "It would save me a lot of time getting there if you helped."

    "Sure," Tas¨¬a said.

    She helped him get up out of the bed and she led him to the bathroom. Once there, she flipped up the toilet seat.

    J¨²n-J¨²n fumbled the fly on his pajama pants as he stepped up to the toilet. He stood over it at an odd angle.

    "Woah. Don''t start to pee just yet," Tas¨¬a commanded. "Let me get you lined up."

    She pulled him by his shoulders and corrected his position. As she peeked down, she noticed his penis was now semi-erect.

    Of course, her presence would have an effect, Tas¨¬a realized. A tingle shot through her abdomen. Unlike before, she felt like she could control the feeling.

    She had to try.

    "J¨²n-J¨²n, you are going to overshoot if you start to pee. Would you like me to steer?"

    He shrugged, nonchalantly.

    "It would probably be for the best if you did."

    As Tas¨¬a held onto him, the urge to vacate her bowels steadily rose to engulf her. She breathed in with a tightened diaphragm. She clenched her stomach and then repeated the cycle Anneb¨¦l taught. Eventually, she found herself in the same hypnotic sway.

    By the time J¨²n-J¨²n completed his task, Tas¨¬a had overcome the urge in full. She buried her face between his shoulder blades. She could not recall a time she had ever felt more accomplished.

    "Avellana, you can let go now."

    She lifted her head up, and she said playfully, "what if I don''t want to?"

    He paused for a moment. Beneath her fingers she felt him stiffen.

    "If that''s the case, I''m certainly not going to object."

    "Hey, J¨²n-J¨²n. Did Ra¨²l ever tell you the secret I told him?"

    "That you were once a nun?"

    "Yeah. That one. When I was with him, I was still uncomfortable with the idea of breaking my vow of chastity. I was still not ready. I''m afraid I am still not ready to go much further than I did with him.

    "So, if you don''t mind. I would like to just stand here with you a little while and, and explore you a bit. Tug on you, okay? Until, you know. But, I''m afraid that is all I can give you for now."

    J¨²n-J¨²n put his weight on the wash bin cabinet with his right hand.

    "It''s okay. More than just okay. I''m just here so you can have your own fun."

    Tas¨¬a reached up and kissed him on the neck before she proceeded to do as she requested.

    A half-hour later, she guided him back to the bed where they slept until the middle of the morning.

 2.32 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a woke up with a stinging smack on her fanny.

    "The hell!"

    She peered up to see Anneb¨¦l smiling wolfishly back at her.

    "I saw you lying cozily with J¨²n-J¨²n. He had a lovely smile on his face. So, how did things go?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled back as she brushed the strands of hair out of her eyes.

    "I made a little progress on my sojourn," Tas¨¬a motioned with her hand just what she meant by that. "I actually had no intentions beyond keeping him company for the night, but when I realized I could go a little further, I chanced it. It was an all-around incredibly pleasant experience."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded her head.

    "Good. Are you ready to get up and go? Get some coffee from the kitchen. I would like to head out in twenty so we can get you that motorcycle."

    Tas¨¬a stretched as she peered around the room.

    "Where''s J¨²n-J¨²n?"

    "Soaking in the bathtub. He''s a little drunk and out of it so I need to keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn''t drown."

    Tas¨¬a realized she left her trousers in the living room by the couch. Opening the door to the hallway and turning the corner, Tas¨¬a gasped.

    She turned back around and poked her head into the bathroom.

    "Anneb¨¦l? I see you had a busy night."

    "Good morning, Avellana," J¨²n-J¨²n said with a pleased grin. "Did you see Anneb¨¦l''s friend out there? Nice little senorita.. She made me coffee before she crashed."

    Tas¨¬a laughed at the awkwardness she was feeling.

    "Good morning," she said in turn. "Are you feeling any better, J¨²n-J¨²n?"

    He sunk to his neck in the bathwater.

    "I truly feel as if I have turned a corner. I won''t lie though, my eyes still burn. It''s a dull pain now, not an intense one."

    Tas¨¬a reached her hand out and she stroked the hair on his head.

    "Stay strong," was all she could think to say at that moment. In her defense, Tas¨¬a had yet to have her coffee. Feelings of empathy even for a dear man like J¨²n-J¨²n were presently very touch and go.

    "Avellana," he began. "Will you come back tonight? I would really like your company if you are not too busy."

    Anneb¨¦l threw her a haughty smirk. Tas¨¬a pinched her on the thigh in turn.

    "If tonight, it will have to be very late," she answered.

    "I keep some very odd hours since this happened. I would appreciate it if you did. I''ll shut up now. You had a question for Anneb¨¦l."

    Tas¨¬a raised her head up and she nodded.

    "Ah, yes, I do. That certain someone sleeping on the couch?"

    "Nice girl," J¨²n-J¨²n repeated, "but talks incessantly. Worried shitless about her brother, Martine. He runs with a bad crew."

    Anneb¨¦l pinched J¨²n-J¨²n by the ear. Tas¨¬a noticed the wicked effect it caused on his member as it danced around in the tub water, and grinned to herself.

    "Okay, I''ll shut up," he protested.

    The boxer released her grip, and turned to Tas¨¬a.

    "You did not wake her up, did you," Anneb¨¦l asked in turn.

    "No, of course not. She looked so peaceful that I did not recognize her face until I saw the lapels of that lavender dress peeking out from beneath her blanket."

    Anneb¨¦l turned to face J¨²n-J¨²n.

    "Hey, you ready to get out of there? Avellana and I will be leaving soon."

    Tas¨¬a left to give them room to move around. She passed by the girl sleeping on the couch while walking on her tippy toes; the last thing Tas¨¬a wanted to do was get involved with that matter given her cluttered schedule.

    She flipped on the neoPalm. Felicit¨¦ left a short message.

    I''m checking out for the evening, but I have a gift for you. Be patient. The proxies covering our asses here on this hot potato are like the layers of a rose-tinted glass onion.

    Tas¨¬a clicked the link and she sat the mobile PA to the side.

    She poured her coffee into a mug, and she prepared it to her liking, az¨²car morena y leche.*

    As Tas¨¬a sipped at her coffee, she thought of Anneb¨¦l''s mysterious evening with wonder. In Tas¨¬a''s paranoid mind was a vision of the little downtown police station with its back wall blown out from being rammed by an explosives-filled Alfa Romeo HybrClydis and Anneb¨¦l carrying the girl over her shoulder while shooting her way back out of the station.

    This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

    Not likely. But was the truth any better?

    Tas¨¬a decided to focus her thoughts on one aspect of the puzzle. How the hell did Anneb¨¦l make it back here if she blew the car up at some strategic location?

    If that location was within reasonable walking distance, Tas¨¬a would have heard the sound of the explosion in the middle of the night.

    The bungalows were at the lip of the El Hoyo valleys. Sound coming from the nearby interstates would still carry and reverberate for miles around, waking everyone up who was asleep in the row houses.

    Then it occurred to Tas¨¬a: she went and got someone to help her.

    It could explain why Anneb¨¦l wasn''t eager for Tas¨¬a to help in the demolition. Did she recruit someone with whom Tas¨¬a shared some bad blood?

    Once again, preposterous. Her Avellana persona was belov¨¦d by all.

    Alright, Tas¨¬a let''s not get caught up in our own bullshit. Belov¨¦d by a few, liked by many, tolerated by almost everyone else.

    Then, it had to be someone Anneb¨¦l did not want Tas¨¬a to know she had an association.

    Given the two of them were new acquaintances, Tas¨¬a refused to delve into suspicion. This was Villa Marr¨®n, not Esconda Vida, nor Ward Nueve. She made light of her speculation.

    So, the plot thickens!

    Tas¨¬a heard the shuffle of Anneb¨¦l''s jeans approach.

    "Avellana, why are you holding your finger up in the air like a cartoon villain?"

    Tas¨¬a giggled.

    "I don''t really have a good answer for that."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head, but then suddenly jerked it to the side as something caught her attention. She stared down at the neoPalm.

    "Avellana, dear. Who is that man?"

    Anneb¨¦l''s tone was a curious one. Tas¨¬a glanced up to see that the brawny redhead''s pupils had grown tiny.

    On the screen was a soldier''s profile. It was her target, F-150. The accompanying picture was more than a decade old. There was a name beneath the picture.

    Todas Las Facciones Unidas (TLFU).

    Lieutenant Colonel ¨¢lvaro Cer¨¦n Sol.

    I now have a name, Tas¨¬a thought.

    She grimaced. Anneb¨¦l watched her patiently, though her fingers clenched at the back of a long chair as she waited for an answer.

    "Who is that, you ask? Someone in dire need of divine retribution. I have a hacker friend searching for him."

    Anneb¨¦l cleared her throat before speaking.

    "He''s regular army, then? That makes so little sense. He always behaved like either a mobster or spook. I assumed the latter because the Javierras would stay the hell away from him whenever he showed up."

    Tas¨¬a''s own face drew up tightly. The paranoia she suppressed a moment ago was leaking through.

    So many synchronous connections between the two of us.

    "I take it," Tas¨¬a began. "You know this piece of shit from your days back in Asunci¨®n?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded.

    "He was a player in the scene back at the Sweet. He dressed conservatively, but he kept a crew that looked like monied ultrapunks. Total gearheads. He may still operate there. At least he did before I split."

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward against the other side of the chair Anneb¨¦l clutched.

    "I am meeting someone tonight with some information I need. Chances are what he has to tell me will lead me to Asunci¨®n. If it does, will you go with me?"

    Anneb¨¦l eyed the picture once more.

    "It''s going to be a dangerous expedition isn''t it?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded. "Likely, very. One more thing, being from Asunci¨®n, and so many little connections between the two of us are starting to add up, would you happen to know of a lawyer by the name of Tatiana Kutuzova?"

    Anneb¨¦l gasped. "Woah. Small world. Her kidnapping was why so many of us went underground. She worked to expose the people and organizations behind the Premie Harvest. Why do you ask?"

    Tas¨¬a now felt anxious to get on the road. She looked out of the window just to make sure Ra¨²l''s Volvo was still out there.

    "Are we taking Ra¨²l''s car?"

    "Yep. There are travel mugs up in that cabinet if you want to bring some coffee with you. So, about that question?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She folded her arms together.

    "There''s a question I need to know. Who brought you home, last night?"

    Anneb¨¦l appraised Tas¨¬a as if for the first time. She then stretched her neck, peeked past the living room and down the hall.

    Her voice was low and whispery when she answered.

    "You are a very clever girl, Avellana to ask that. True, as you must have figured out, I was reluctant to have you come along. I needed the expertise of a demolition professional because I am not one, but someone very close to me is."

    After preparing her coffee to go, Tas¨¬a turned around and she raised her eyebrows, archly, towards Anneb¨¦l.

    "This person would be... .? Trust me, my own answer to your inquiry will be worth your while."

    Anneb¨¦l opened the screendoor and she motioned Tas¨¬a to the porch. Tas¨¬a followed.

    Once outside, Anneb¨¦l blurted out her answer.

    "Sachmilli Cuervo. There, now are you happy, mon petite d¨¦mon?"

    Tas¨¬a was confused for a moment. She asked.

    "Why would you keep that from me? What''s the big deal?"

    "You could not be there. I owed him a favor in turn, and that always means a good fucking. Ra¨²l is my boyfriend, but Sachmilli is, what you might call, my sugar daddy."

    As they walked over to the Volvo, Tas¨¬a could not help but giggle. She could not imagine Sachmilli still being sexually active given his age, but Anneb¨¦l was entirely sincere.

    "Hey, he is a much more satisfying fuck than you can imagine."

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the side panels used to replace a set of backdoors on the small sedan. She waved her hands dismissively.

    "No. No. I really don''t need to."

    "Perhaps," Anneb¨¦l began, "when we get your sojourn rightfully set forth, you can join us when Sachmilli and I are together."

    Anneb¨¦l guffawed as Tas¨¬a cringed to the very notion.

    "Oh, my sister, you are most twisted," Tas¨¬a exclaimed.

    They both entered the car.

    "So, now that I have answered your question ..."

    Tas¨¬a stared out of the front car window. There was so much that she was going to have to reveal. She let out a deep breath and shrugged.

    "It''s a long story, but to start. Tatiana Kutuzova is my aunt. Her father, the general, has tasked me to find her."

    Anneb¨¦l started the ignition. She gave Tas¨¬a a side glance with low cast eyes.

    "Your name is not really Avellana, is it?"

 2.33 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Back on the highway, Tas¨¬a was most pleased with the performance of her Virago. It hugged the road just as she remembered.

    Anneb¨¦l had taken good care of the motorcycle.

    "I take it out for a beer and smokes run every other week just to keep it in good condition," Anneb¨¦l explained. "I take it by Rizzoli''s for a tune-up come the change of each season. You met him. Older guy. Was with me last night over there."

    Anneb¨¦l was pointing to the main office building as she spoke.

    They stood in her kitchen after Anneb¨¦l invited her in for some iced yerba tea. Anneb¨¦l''s brother sat at the kitchen table as he ate spoonfuls of an oat cereal with milk from an oversized bowl. He swayed back and forth, and he seemed catatonic.

    As she watched him, Anneb¨¦l frowned and she bent her wrists backward as if to hide them. Tas¨¬a could tell she was in no mood to talk about it. The oddness of her brother would have to be a story for another day.

    Another Premie Harvest casualty.

    As Tas¨¬a drove in a route to circle back to her home, she caught sight of a black helicopter sweeping across a nearby field. She regarded its sleek body. It was built for a firefight. The gas tanks and other vulnerable areas were hidden under bullet-proofed hardened surfaces. Of which, she could only guess the materials.

    Even the .9mm Browning HP, of which she had only a few rounds on her, would not do her much good against it.

    Tas¨¬a turned her attention back to the highway ahead of her. A turnpike she wanted to switch off on was just up ahead by forty-odd seconds at her current speed.

    Tas¨¬a made a calculated risk the previous night just after she surveyed the back valley. She left a message for Le¨®n, in which she wrote out the coordinates of the park forty miles from Villa Marr¨®n. With the coordinates she left a warning:

    This is not the final destination. I need you to land here at approximately 1700 hrs for verification before I send those last coordinates to you.

    Please understand, I can only guarantee your safety and that of your pilot. Anyone else who attempts to crash that meeting should first get their effects in order and make peace with their maker before doing so.

    The copter swept past to the other side of the highway one hundred and twenty yards behind her. She fought the dual temptations to either look back or to speed up.

    She would not do anything to reveal to them that their presence alarmed her.

    Given the helmet she wore conveniently kept her face covered inside a shaded guard, the only thing that should pique their curiosity would be her small physique.

    One that was not so uncommon though, as many women shared her general profile. They had nothing to go by to justify singling her out in her travel.

    The helicopter''s rotors grew louder as the thrust of their sound came towards her from the right side. They had turned around and now the helicopter faced her.

    In her mirror, she spotted a double set of .50 caliber gun ports. One quick burst would split her apart.

    Her countermeasures were severely limited in comparison. In fact, the most effective thing for her to do might be what she had planned all along.

    If she made the turnpike, she would be going in the direction away from the park. If they were sweeping the highways nearby the park, it would be in search of someone driving towards it, not away from it.

    Tas¨¬a slowed down before she reached the turnpike and she flipped on her turn signal. When she cornered the turnpike, it led to a two-lane highway going North.

    The helicopter began to climb in the air. It sped off towards Villa Marr¨®n. Her ploy had worked, at least for now.

    Tas¨¬a pulled off to the side of the road. She retrieved the neoPalm with which she wrote out a quick message.

    Le¨®n, do you have access to a civilian grade copter? If you do, please send me a picture of it.

    If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a got back on the road. It occurred to her there was a good chance the black helicopter would sweep back around if nothing else caught the spotter''s attention or matched their profile as well as she did.

    Tas¨¬a slowed down and she soon found a thick copse of trees to hide her bike and cover with leaves. She sat her back against a nearby slate rock beneath the limbs beside it.

    The neoPalm buzzed.

    Le¨®n had his answer. Affirmative.

    She clicked on a picture of a red and white striped Sikorsky S-92 civilian transport copter.

    Cute. Tas¨¬a replied. It is perfect as well for the landing area I have in mind. That is the only helicopter that I will accept in my airspace.

    Lieutenant Colonel Sol has been running black copters out of the park all morning.

    You must understand, I acquired a lot of crazy toys from the Esconda Vida. I could have taken one of his ships out of the air just a few minutes ago.

    Shooting it down conflicted with my desire to stay on the down-low. Once things get set in motion, I won''t give two shits about that. The black copters will be eliminated with all due prejudice.

    Then, ¨¢lvaro will have to explain to his commanders in the TLFU Army how he lost a fleet of copters chasing down a four-foot-eleven sized woman with no military training.

    Tas¨¬a had little doubt that her communications with Le¨®n were monitored. She took a gamble with her assumption that there had been more than one copter in the search. If she was right, then she also put the idea in their heads she was nearby the park witnessing the search first hand.

    Instead of forty miles to the South on a country highway.

    It was not long before Tas¨¬a heard the air whipping in the distance just as she caught sight of the copter. She hid in the thick leaves of a bush beside her bike.

    The neoPalm buzzed on her leg. She checked the message.

    Leon. LT Sol has a code name for you. Chestnut Moxie.

    Tas¨¬a thought that to be a curious name. She texted back.

    Moxie, I get. Chestnut?

    The copter hovered seventy feet over a nearby field. The body of it rotated left to right. Did they suspect that she was nearby? How? Did they manage to bypass the superspook gear in her neoPalm and locate her?

    Tas¨¬a peeked down at Le¨®n''s reply.

    Chestnut, because the LT thinks you have pretty skin.

    While keeping an eye out for the copter, Tas¨¬a answered back.

    That is so very adorable of the man. It''s a shame I have to kill him as I so vowed to do when I witnessed him murdering Rea Castro in cold blood.

    That wasn''t her actual vow at the time of the horrific deed, Tas¨¬a had to remind herself. She had vowed never to let herself ever again be put in a position of vulnerability.

    The claim to vengeance was meant to get under Sol''s skin.

    It was important to separate out her own core motivations from the games she played on others, Tas¨¬a told herself.

    Else they could become covered over by all of the bullshit she was shoveling.

    As she watched the copter, Tas¨¬a concluded something peculiar was going on inside of the gunship. Though the green-tinted glass limited her sight, Tas¨¬a could still see that something inside the cabin whipped around at a frightening speed.

    She could only catch odd glimpses of the thing. Odd as well that she did not catch sight of the people inside the cabin.

    With a tense grip, Tas¨¬a grabbed her pistol scope and trained it on the copter. It took some adjustments on the magnification, but she finally made out the shapes of the pilot and co-pilot. Merely the silhouette of their shapes as they shifted in a constantly moving outline.

    Oh, shit, she gasped. That''s weird.

    She trained the scope on the body of the copter. The slick black surface was slowly becoming dull and a strange, weathered gray as if shadow was engulfing it.

    However, there were no clouds above that could explain away the eirie phenomenon.

    She decided to take a tactical risk. The payoff in extended trust may prove in the long run to be worth it.

    Tas¨¬a used the camera on the neoPalm to take a picture of the copter. She forwarded it to Le¨®n with a text message.

    Does LC Sol''s fleet of copters have light misdirection based cloaking capabilities?

    Le¨®n answered back, I am not in a position to be specific about that, but what the hell is happening there?

    I''ll take that as a yes, Tas¨¬a answered, it appears the cloak is malfunctioning and its light manipulation properties are inverting. That''s my best guess.

    At that moment, the rotors stopped their motion. The tail rotors wrenched and broke in two. The helicopter dropped straight down onto the field of tall grass below it.

    It bounced up with the major rotary wings thrown a hundred and more feet forward. When the copter landed again, the cabin split apart.

    Eight men began to crawl out from the debris.

    Amazed they didn''t appear to have sustained any major injuries, Tas¨¬a grabbed the scope to get a better view of them.

    Well, I am so fucked, Tas¨¬a thought.

    Though they maneuvered like soldiers, and they possessed the demeanor of soldiers, they appeared not at all like men of this earth.

 2.34 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    As Tas¨¬a observed the soldiers, she thought the mesh of flesh and armored material was some bizarre result of the occurrence in the copter cabin she had witnessed.

    Then she recalled a word Anneb¨¦l had used. Gearheads.

    As the soldiers moved in formation, they tended to fade like chameleons, semi- camouflaged to the background of tall thistle, weeds, and trees.

    It was the nature of her eyes, however, that she never truly lost sight of them. Especially, as they moved.

    Tas¨¬a resisted the urge to flee. She needed to know if it was mere coincidence that the helicopter crashed so near where she hid. If the soldiers maneuvered to surround her, she would have to assume that her neoPalm had been compromised.

    The last thing she wanted to do was toss it away.

    Touching the screen, Tas¨¬a flipped her contact designation from Le¨®n to Felicit¨¦.

    She began to type.

    I need a diagnostic run on this neoPalm. Some weird bitches may be homing in on me.

    Now she pulled out the .9mm Browning HP. semi-auto she had taken from Sal. Judging from the military-grade vests the soldiers wore, it was the caliber she needed if it came down to a firefight unless she relied solely on near to unrealistic precision shots with the .32 using her own hand loaded ammo.

    Her ammo was customized for recoil control and piercing damage; a single shot was still quite effective from two hundred-thirty yards out if the round made contact with flesh.

    The problem here, however, very little of their flesh was exposed. No internal organs beneath vulnerable flesh, nor major veins or vessels where bleed-outs could arise.

    Only at the limb joints and the sides of their necks could she make out vulnerabilities that she could exploit.

    She studied their formation and she relaxed.

    Now that she dismissed the idea they had actually spotted her, Tas¨¬a hoped a firefight would prove unnecessary. The gearhead soldiers were merely establishing a parameter as they were obviously more concerned with their crash than their search for her.

    The neoPalm buzzed against her thigh. It was Felicit¨¦, responding to her message.

    - You''re secure. However. Something very odd has happened. I discovered a communication relay from seven minutes ago that scanned your general area (it never picked up on you). I traced it to an EU military satellite that let out a burst of energy targeted at a helicopter belonging to the TLFU.

    Felicit¨¦ continued.

    - Well, that is intriguing. Given the Salvage contracts its own military operations through the TLFU, and the EU is the Salvage''s number one international backer, we have the makings of an internecine squabble.

    Tas¨¬a texted back.

    - Damn fine work.

    Felicit¨¦ typed in turn.

    - Nothing less will get you to Asuncion in one piece. If you get distracted, you know where to turn. Will that be all?

    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    Tas¨¬a felt oddly chafed by the reply. That she made it out while her co-conspirator was still stuck in the IMCQ cut deep into Tas¨¬a. Like having survivor''s remorse.

    Was Felicit¨¦ fucking with her again? Was their resentment on her part?

    Tas¨¬a answered back.

    - Keeping it all on a professional level now, I see?

    - Tas¨¬a, when do you ever have anytime for small talk?

    Tas¨¬a eyed the soldiers. They stood their ground as the pilot and co-pilot retrieved equipment from the remains of the helicopter.

    Looking back down at Felicit¨¦''s text, she made a mental list of all the various things she had dealt with within the last twenty-eight hours.

    Manifest Transfiguration, creepy ex-cop, ascospores, weird beast, a faerie queen (where has she been lately? Kind of expected that she kept a palace in the El Hoyo back valley and I would run into her there), snakes, a vampire poseur, a sexy boxer, a spiderbot, more ascospores!, rat plagues, hell hounds, Egilona, a punk-ass mobster kid, a cop, another aberrant creature, the ghosts of Maoist guerillas, a little sexcapade with a lovely man, a warbird, and now, cybernetic soldiers.

    When do I have the time!

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. That is the wrong attitude, old girl. You make time for the dumb shit if you want the girl to keep helping you.

    She texted back.

    - :) Guess what?

    - Yeah?

    - You have to guess first.

    - Okay, I''ll bite. You are getting your clit pierced?

    Tas¨¬a''s jaw dropped. Tas¨¬a read Felicit¨¦''s answer a second time. How could her guess be so close? Don''t let her see you sweat.

    - Wrong guess! My labia. That other choice you mentioned hurts me just thinking about it.

    - It''s not so bad. I had mine done. Wanna see?

    - Wut?

    - Oh God, Tas¨¬a. I''m laughing so hard now people are staring. Just fucking with you to see you sweat! I know you are pinned down with soldiers nearby. I can hear their radio chatter back and forth.

    Tas¨¬a touched the slab of rock beside her with a gentle banging motion of her head.

    She wrote back.

    - Felicit¨¦, you just might be the craziest asshole buddy I have in my index.

    Felicit¨¦ answered in turn.

    - No might to it. They don''t let you go to spook school unless you fail a psych evaluation for normative tendencies. Enough of that, though. Would you like to get out of your current situation? I hope you didn''t think I was spending all this time on a personal chat to talk out some feel-feels, did you? Don''t answer that, just rhetorical.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. From a funny-ass bullshitter to an A-type exec-suite-set professional woman, all in a snap. In both instances, though, Felicit¨¦ was only doing her very best to help.

    Forgive our friends of their quirks when they mean so well.

    Tas¨¬a texted the Argentinian back and she asked, what did you have in mind?

    - First, I need to ask. What is your mode of transportation? If I had to guess, a motorcycle. It would have to be something small enough to fit in that copse of trees I now have on the satellite feed.

    - You are most correct. It is a 750 Virago.

    - Do you have any problems starting it? Can you start it, and get it on the road within ten seconds after I say go?

    - Yes. The bike is in perfect condition.

    - Good. Take yourself several deep breaths and be prepared for my command.

    Tas¨¬a raised up to her knees and she did as she was instructed. The time seemed to drag as she calmed herself.

    Go!, came Felicit¨¦''s command.

    Tas¨¬a got up on her feet and she pulled her bike out of the brush and leaves that covered it.

    As she worked at her task, Tas¨¬a heard a high pitched noise rise in a disharmonious unison. All the soldiers writhed on the ground, trying to tear off their helmets.

    Their screams sounded like desperate, cavernous echoes.

    Tas¨¬a turned her bike around to face the road. She hopped on and foot cranked the ignition.

    Less than ten seconds, in fact, more like seven. She thought, as she sped out onto the road.

 2.35 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Back home, finally, Tas¨¬a pulled her trousers off. Just yesterday, she had worn that very pair for the first time. Now they were threadbare.

    Tas¨¬a examined a hole in them with her fingers spreading the seams out.

    "Figures. Nobody told me half my butt was hanging out. Why bother, right? ''Not like that girl even has a tush worth staring at.''"

    With a miffed grimace, she threw them into a garbage disposal. Fortunately, she had a few more pairs of trousers of somewhat similar make for her expeditionary purposes.

    After Tas¨¬a showered, she changed into a nondescript pair of women''s cotton briefs. Functional over sexy.

    This time, she changed into a sports bra that would hold everything in its proper place so her boobs didn''t just pop out or sling around unhinged when she had to jump, flip, twist, and kill things.

    She chose her most elegant and pretty one, too.

    Her bosom was well covered with the black fabric extending over the entire length of her ribcage. In contrast, the criss-cross of fabric and transparent lace on her shoulder blades helped to enhance the muscle definition of her back.

    Though the bra was designed for the truly sporty kind of woman, it was nice enough for casual outerwear, just in case she actually found the time that evening to drag herself over to the Daga Chicas later that night.

    But then another thought entirely popped in her head. Tas¨¬a smiled wickedly as she twisted in profile in front of a mirror. If J¨²n-J¨²n has his bandages removed today, perhaps he would find the sports bra and what lay beneath them to his liking as well.

    For now, she pulled a black T-shirt over the bra.

    Still thinking about the evening ahead, Tas¨¬a giggled to herself. What am I getting myself into? She decided to throw a pair of French cut, lacey lingerie bottoms in her fanny pack.

    Tas¨¬a realized that she needed to calm her heated emotions down. Fortunately, the sock drawer sat just in front of her. There was nothing sexy about socks.

    Given her cat burglar proclivities, she typically wore for those occasions two pairs of differently-purposed socks. The first were a pair of ankle compression ballet socks to avert the strain caused by her acrobatic flexibility. The second set was a long pair of thick wool socks she needed for preventing her boots from rubbing up against her feet.

    Tas¨¬a slipped them on just before she confronted the contents of the long oak cabinet she kept along a wall in her guest bedroom.

    It contained the majority of her footwear; perhaps, her most prized possession. That struggle was a contest between her boots and her weapons for which of her possessions claimed her heart the most.

    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    An old emigre cook once told Tas¨¬a back when she was still a little girl in San Pedro the story of a beautiful queen named Imelda who possessed three thousand shoes.

    The Queen as she was often sighted in society wearing the most elegant footwear in the entire world was the envy of all the ladies of her land. Her great variety of shoes and boots certainly solidified her position as the alpha-queen in all matters of status.

    A status that she had to struggle to obtain.

    Imelda was born a commoner, but she was born with a gift, a beautiful voice. Being a great chanteuse, the King was enchanted by her voice as it was of the most bird-like delicacy.

    He made her his Queen.

    For seventeen wonderful years, she sang for him in the court of his Crimson Palace.

    But then, her husband was dethroned. On ransacking the palace, trolls discovered her collection of shoes. The trolls ridiculed her shoes throughout the entire world. Though being mere trolls, through their evil magics, they had much sway with public opinion.

    The beautiful Queen with her beautiful voice and beautiful shoes was forced to endure a life of shame.

    Little Tas¨¬a, when she heard this tale of Queen Imelda, felt with all certainty in the rational scheme of things that for a Queen each separate task called for its own pair of shoes.

    Otherwise, you would just have anarchy!

    Little Tas¨¬a shook her head as she thought of this travesty that was the downfall of Queen Imelda.

    What do trolls know of the needs of Queens?

    You can''t expect a Queen to wear the same shoes on an afternoon stroll to purchase ice cream as she would wear when she desired to visit the yogurt shop.

    To say nothing of a gelato kiosk. If the owner was a true Italian would it not be insulting to show up in something that wasn''t a Bruno Magli or a Fermani shoe?

    These were the difficult matters a Queen had to consider whereas the rest of us can go about our lives in pigshit ignorance.

    Now Tas¨¬a shook her head thinking of her young self. Even still, as she reflected on the sentiments of her childhood self, Tas¨¬a realized how they were still rooted deeply in her own mindset. It was reinforced, as well, in her own culture as Queen Imelda''s enchanted isles were in many ways similar to her own land in custom.

    She thought of someone unaffected by all of this.

    Felicit¨¦ would wear the same pair of sneakers no matter where she went. The Argentinian did not share the same status ideals common to the women of the Quadra thus she came across as an aloof outsider.

    Instead of common social status, her own materialism was based upon the electronics that allowed her to spread her web and catch the information that sat at the heart of her own desire and her own purpose. That too was ultimately about the accumulation of status.

    Now as for Tas¨¬a, though quite materialistic herself, she was very finicky. Laid out before her were ninety-seven pairs of shoes and boots. Most of the footwear she possessed had to be customized to meet her own highly refined standards.

    She would need a good hiking boot for what she had in mind for her meeting. Tas¨¬a eyed a pair of Veronicas. She had made three adjustments to the pair. The lace-ups had to go. Only on tennis shoes did she find laces acceptable in both matters of aesthetics and function.

    Tas¨¬a replaced them with a set of eight over and under fastener hooks with an overhead strap to secure them in place.

    Tas¨¬a also hated the clunkiness of standard outsole design. Unfortunately, the Veronicas were no exception to this common manufacturer oversight. Tas¨¬a had whittled the outer welts of the rubber soles and filled them in with a rubberized sealant used in the roofing trade. She did so in order to create a smooth bevel that aligned along the insole.

    Along the outer heel, she embroidered a pair of Mayan k''uk symbols.

    After her improvements, the combat boots were now elegantly redesigned into something worthy of even Queen Imelda to tread the streets of her native city when she was forced to abandon her grand Crimson Palace.

    Tas¨¬a slipped on the Veronicas. She felt giddy now as she headed to the basement. It was time to choose her weapons.

 2.36 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a sat down by her work desk. She had a decision to make. Nine sniper rifles lined up behind the glass of a walnut-stained gun cabinet.

    They were some of the best-made weapons in the world for that purpose, and she possessed the armor-piercing incendiary rounds needed to take out even the warbirds if needed.

    The Barrett .50 she eyed was a big gun for a petite woman such as herself. Her physique, being ripped with long, wiry tendons, was in no way ordinary, however. She could certainly handle it.

    Though Big Sexy, her nickname for the Barrett, was formidable, her eyes drifted to the rifle sitting beside it. The McMillan TAC-50. Very similar in capability to the Barrett, but for Tas¨¬a it held two advantages. With her tiny thumbs, she could switch out the magazine two seconds faster. Also, her accuracy at long distances on the McMillan was much better.

    For a big man with big digits, she suspected both factors would be reversed, but Tas¨¬a was a creature of finese, and the TAC-50 was nothing if not sleek.

    With that decision made, Tas¨¬a went on to her next task.

    She pulled up several charts of information for the warbird she had observed earlier. It was a newer weapon platform from a Czech company. Neither the copter nor the company were entities to which she was familiar.

    Tas¨¬a switched on her Laz-Lite Compbox. A workstation, the size of a game console, commonly used in the field of graphic design. She found it to be highly versatile for her own purposes, usually involving the study of floor plans.

    With a little sleuth work, Tas¨¬a found the design documentation for the copter. She studied a schemata that sliced through the warbird one layer of components at a time with the adjoining parts outlined in transparent alpha layers.

    Traditionally, one aimed for the engine block when using a high powered rifle, but this warbird, simply named Series8, was designed to circumvent that approach.

    Tas¨¬a sighed in frustration.

    The way this bird is designed, I might as well be trying to take out a power generator that lay barricaded deep inside a fortress by shooting randomly at the surrounding concrete walls.

    She fidgeted with a pair of dice on her desk as she scrolled through the visual set-up, feeling very much like she was now just going through the motions.

    Then she saw her solution.

    The front pumps of a coolant system. Tas¨¬a pulled up the entire unit, composed of twenty-five components, up in a holographic display.

    That many components seemed a bit excessive, but, of course, the heavy armor of the warbird made such a complex system designed to avoid overheating necessary.

    There had to be exploitable vulnerabilities. Any damage to it would cause entire systems - electronic, communications, navigation, fuel pumps and the like to melt down.

    Now, where would I lodge a bullet? Not directly into the exhaust outtake as the pipes curved upward, but at the ceramic heat plate just beneath the curb of the pipes.

    I should go upstairs to the kitchen and reward you with a cookie for being so smart, Tas¨¬a.

    The neoPalm played the melody to the song Obrerito. It was a direct call from Le¨®n.

    "Yeah, hermano, how can I be of service."

    "Hello, Tas¨¬a. I hope everything is going well for you."

    Tas¨¬a laughed. She propped her feet up on the desk.

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    "If you only knew the kind of evening that I just experienced. Well, maybe I''ll get the chance to tell you, someday. Do you drink beer?"

    Le¨®n''s voice grew faux-dismissive.

    "Do I drink beer? Please, my curious friend. My bar tabs could pay for renovations in every establishment that I do well to dine."

    Tas¨¬a scratched at her neck.

    "If we didn''t have the Lieutenant Colonel trying to grab a stake in our deal, I would have you meet me at a nice little dive. I would even buy you a nice steak dinner, but alas . . ."

    "About that, Sol would like to have a conversation with you."

    "Now?"

    Le¨®n hesitated. She heard the phone being muffled.

    "He is not invited to our reunion," Tas¨¬a stated. "Nor will I let him take part in the operation. I only work with those I trust."

    "I conveyed all of that to him. He would still like to speak to you."

    Tas¨¬a suspired. She did not want to feel angry with her friend, but her annoyance was raised.

    "Le¨®n . . ."

    "I''m sorry to put you on the spot," he pleaded.

    What choice did he have? Perhaps, her dear Aunt Tatiana wasn''t the only one in need of rescue.

    Tas¨¬a glanced behind her.

    "Give me one minute, Le¨®n. I''m going to set up a video conference."

    "The Lieutenant Colonel says that would be fine."

    Tas¨¬a set the neoPalm where the camera would face the gun cabinet. She retrieved from the other side of her basement a state of the art mini rocket launcher with standard Russian 40 mm scramblers.

    These she placed strategically beside the gun cabinet. She had no intention of bringing the rocket launcher and its munitions given she was riding a motorcycle, but the Lieutenant Colonel need not know that.

    Tas¨¬a sat down in front of the cabinet and she clicked the video chat to the ready position.

    A topographic two-dimensional rectangle projected eight feet away from her.

    Suddenly, ¨¢lvaro Sol moved into the projected space. He grinned wide over a narrow chin. His eyes were covered by green shaded Aviators common to generals of over a hundred years previously.

    Even so, this close, the family resemblance he bore was unmistakable.

    She thought nothing of it before because the Sol surname was common enough to dismiss as coincidence. Not this time.

    Somehow, the leader of the Hijos Lux cult and this war criminal were related.

    "I see you are a collector! That Sako, I used one in the G''rillos campaign back in my non-comish days."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "You really don''t expect me to bring down a Series8 warbird with a 338 Lapua round do you?"

    Sol pointed with a long, boney finger to the rifle that sat on the far right side.

    "I don''t even expect you to bring one down with that beast." He meant the McMillan TAC-50 anti-material rifle. Sol grimaced. "However, you have proven to be very resourceful. I assume that was you who put my soldiers in the clinic."

    Tas¨¬a crossed her arms.

    "No doubt. I told you to stay away."

    With a slow shake of his head, he frowned. The Lieutenant Colonel''s chin bobbed up and down.

    "I cannot do that. Did you bring the warbird down as well?"

    He doesn''t know. When she thought this in realization, Tas¨¬a pulled back with a very slight reaction. It was still enough for Sol to take notice.

    He leaned forward. His lips perked up in a near pout.

    "You know something," he gasped.

    Tas¨¬a nodded and she stared straight into her camera. "I know quite a bit. If you''ll hold back your men tonight when I meet Le¨®n, I''ll tell him everything I know with a complete diagnostic rundown of what happened."

    "Why do you ni?os cosechas always, without exception, prove to be so difficult," Sol nearly shouted as he punched his fist into his right hand. His grimace bore anger for a moment before he let it subside to speak.

    "I need you in my fold. We cannot afford failure in this mission. There is no margin of error."

    "That is why I cannot trust you with this. I have seen your failure up close and personal."

    Sol clinched his fist akimbo to his sides. His jaw shook. Being questioned, and having his abilities doubted were evidently new experiences for him.

    "Your sentiments are irrational. Ria Castro was a worthless piece of shit. My intel tells me that even you knew this, but if you knew even half of what I know about her, you would have demanded my gun to shoot her, yourself."

    Tas¨¬a stood up and she reached for the neoPalm.

    "Sol, we are far beyond that, now. Keep your men away, and no one else needs to get hurt."

    With a clenched jaw, Sol pointed at her with a finger. He was about to speak when Tas¨¬a cut him off.

    His body twisted in a blue light funnel as the projection withdrew back into her neoPalm.

 2.37 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a rode the 750 Virago through El Hoyo. She was forced to take a roundabout route along the ugly sheets of gravel still dominant on the east end to reach an abandoned bridge that circled above the southern side of the complex.

    The vines wrapped like beastly tendons around the bridge supports, fiercely pushing apart at the foundation. Sinkholes ran jagged along both lanes. Tas¨¬a braked and revved up the engine after she handled each obstacle she encountered to consider how to approach the next one with due efficiency.

    Though ever practical in these considerations, she could just pee herself with the thrill it gave her with each jump and side swerve Tasia took to avoid breaking her neck or falling thirty feet down.

    Finally, this place is fun again.

    Tas¨¬a wasn''t just thrill-seeking. The paths below were too badly strewn with abandoned equipment to make it through to the isolated back end valley in her scheduled time.

    Up ahead, the roadway platform support had fallen entirely through, opening it up for a good dozen feet. Tas¨¬a sped the bike up.

    She bought the ultra-lightweight Virago for the kind of tricky maneuver she needed to make just now in case she ever got entangled in a car chase.

    Tas¨¬a hit the brakes at the same time she countered-levered with a thrust up using her thighs and wee haunches. The motion sent the bike flying up and to her right.

    She realized she over calculated by several inches. No panic. Tas¨¬a leaned her shoulders left to compensate. It was a most delicate maneuver. If she leaned her entire body, the bike would be tilted off-center.

    The trick worked with the bike lining up just above the still intact guide rail. Tas¨¬a hit the acceleration just before she landed, otherwise, if she kept the brakes held clutched down, it would have jerked her out of position.

    Smoothly lined up now and going forward in full thrust, she made the jump across to the other side of the bridge.

    Tas¨¬a spotted beneath her in the gap between the opposite sides a rusted and much-damaged jeep with a pair of skeletons sprawled out on the hood.

    Thrill-seekers gambled and failed, only to become food for the buzzards.

    Tas¨¬a laughed and she yelled out, fully throttled.

    "?Los saludo mis hermanos perdidos!"

    -I salute you my lost brothers.

    A mile further onward, the road leading from the bridge ramped down to the terrain below until it disappeared into chunks of asphalt broken apart by vine and weed.

    Tas¨¬a had to walk her bike another sixty feet until she reached the salted gravel path that led into the back valley.

    Tasha hopped back on to the bike. In less than another mile, she was at the mouth of the valley.

    A complex of office buildings stood on a short but squat twelve-foot high ridgeline to the East, on her left. A set of steps and access ramps led down to the remains of a former parking lot. The concrete now broken up by evasive brown shrubbery.

    Further to the West, beneath a massive ridgeline, lay a twin set of slate pits.

    The one furthest away from her was lit up in a glow of bright azure. In spite of this, it did not seem to add to the heat inside the El Hoyo microclimate.

    What did she recall from her textbooks?

    Energy without heat. Theoretical zero point.

    She looked down at a set of pink-colored rocks that lay nearby the salted gravel path. Studying the pitted surfaces, Tas¨¬a realized they were broken up fragments from a meteorite. Small weedy vines pulsated with movement along their surfaces. The plants clutched the rocks and pulled them to where they dug down with the ground engraved in ugly wedged burrows, all leading to the last pit.

    Above the last pit stood a mesa that sprung up two hundred feet. On the top of which was a helipad with a radio tower and an accompanying service building.

    A hanging bridge led off the mesa onto a stepped path beneath the ridgeline to the South where a set of steps routed back around to the office complex.

    Abandoned equipment lay haphazard about the valley grounds. This included a crane leaning against the mesa.

    Tas¨¬a left her bike by the salted gravel. She took a duffle bag full of her effects with her. The TAC-50 long rifle, she slung over her shoulder.

    Tas¨¬a climbed up the crane. For the last several feet up, she had to scurry up the rocky surface to reach the platform on top.

    Lunar shadow obscured the mesa on the previous evening''s scout. Before she left home, Tas¨¬a checked with a satellite map to determine if she needed to bring electric shears with her. Fortunately, the heliport appeared untouched by the ascospore invasion.

    Her first objective was to locate the generator behind the service building. A small shed beside the generator contained several five-gallon buckets full of fuel stacked on top of one another. They were well sealed.

    She took one down. She brought a titanium stiletto just for the occasion. With a quick punch of the blade into the enclosed mouth intake, she twisted and pulled up on it until it formed a funnel.

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    She drained the generator of what remained of old fuel whose esters were long spent into an empty jug before replacing it.

    After she got the generator running, Tas¨¬a unzipped the duffel bag and brought out one of the toys she acquired from her Vida Esconda raids. She plugged it into a set socket.

    This baby she held in her hands was the one toy that would do the most to equalize the upcoming battlefield to her better advantage. An infrared scrambler.

    She brought out a pair of IR goggles to study the ground below her.

    Along with several birds that nested in the crannies, there were a few small mammals that inhabited the ridgelines above the office complex to the East.

    A pair of fat-tailed mouse opossums jiggled in rapid motion as they grabbed on to a ledge. They held on as if for dear life. While the little marsupials did so, they screwed.

    The wonders of nature.

    Then Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    She looks like her eyes are about to pop out.

    By a picnic table near the office suite, Tas¨¬a also caught sight of a family of peccaries grazing in grass so high she would most likely never have spotted them without the goggles.

    Tas¨¬a flipped on the infrared scrambler. Now the terrain below was an equalized blanket of hot white noise. She flipped a second button and thousands of decoys that appeared as lengthy snakes slithered up the walls of every vertical surface.

    The effect was very effective as a psychological deterrent. Even if you knew it was an illusion through familiarity, it still tended to creep the fuck out of you.

    Many a sniper''s spotter had been rendered temporarily useless by the countermeasure.

    Tas¨¬a entered the service building and she placed a homing beacon on top of a desk.

    She fiddled with the controls until the beacon was set for thirty minutes.

    Before leaving the service building, Tas¨¬a placed a burner phone beside the beacon.

    Skipping down the bridge, Tas¨¬a thought it odd that she was skipping. Perhaps the thylamys opossums put her in a good mood. Maybe she will find herself hanging off the edge of a ledge and having a good time of it, one day soon.

    As pleasant as that sounded, she knew that wasn''t the reason for her good mood. Tas¨¬a enjoyed creating a good plan that went against the odds, and then executing it. There were many ways this could go wrong, however.

    That did not cause her anxiety, she felt excited by the prospect of facing off with Lieutenant Colonel ¨¢lvaro Sol''s men as they tried to capture her.

    Tas¨¬a opened the door to the main office building. She peeked inside. Commander Rojo sat in his chair reading out loud.

    As she approached, he glanced up. He muttered what could have been advice for her.

    "When your enemy advances, you withdraw from the battle; when he halts his march, you harass him while hidden; when he grows tired and weakened, and you are fresh and agile, you strike; when he flees in retreat, you advance and pursue him. Only thus, will the vicious cycle of battle ever be in your favor."

    Tas¨¬a was familiar with the book. It was a contemporary rewrite of a guide written over a hundred years ago. The rewrite was done by a legendary South American guerilla who possessed a legitimate claim to being a poet.

    The original, however practical it may have been, was sparse in its language usage.

    That simply wasn''t the way of Tas¨¬a''s people.

    Commander Rojo flipped his page. His brows tightened as he read from it.

    A thin sheepish grin formed beneath his light beard.

    "This one even you are not ready for, Little One."

    Was he addressing her?

    As a nanospore entity, he was part of the same system as Bajamutt¨¦. So, why not?

    "Perhaps, I need that advice now," she answered to see if he would address her.

    Commander Rojo shook his head and he let out a hearty laugh. He turned to the next page.

    The neoPalm began to buzz against her thigh. Tas¨¬a hoped it was Felicit¨¦ offering her assistance. She did not want to make a call unless in real need.

    She owed the Argentinian so many favors already, but if Felicit¨¦ was volunteering to help . . . that was on her.

    It wasn''t Felicit¨¦. The name on the caller screen said D. H. The neoPalm Personal Assistant began to feel hot to the touch.

    Tas¨¬a flipped the okay tab down to receive the call; she answered.

    "Hello, who is this?"

    An aristocratic and highly feminine voice came through the speaker. She had heard that voice before.

    No. It can''t be.

    "Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, darling, I intended to meet you in the flesh, but I suppose now, that is not possible. However, there is an alternative route to our juncture. Could you put my Assistant down on the desk in front of you?"

    Tas¨¬a hesitated as she tried to process what was occurring.

    "Like, right now, Tas¨¬a. I am aware of the time constraints beset upon you, so if you could be a luv."

    The neoPalm was now so hot it made her palms sweat. Tas¨¬a did as instructed. The neoPalm began to shift colors from its natural tan red that mimicked leather to a bright scarlet neon. It whistled in a high pitch for a moment, before it settled back down.

    It shifted back to the tan appearance of its mundane self.

    In front of Tasia stood Demona Helo?ste with her pretty heart shaped Arab face smiling down on her.

    "The last I saw you, you were not looking so good," Tas¨¬a stated.

    "How do I look now," Demona asked.

    "Fantastic. But that begs the question I was implying. How is it that you are here given the last time . . ."

    "You saw me, I had an exit wound planted on the side of my face. Yes? Tas¨¬a, I always knew the probability that I would see the grande mission (a quest really, in the classic knight-errant sense) to the end was so low as to be near to inconceivable. So, I made contingency plans to make sure the grande mission did not falter in the event of my death."

    Tas¨¬a chortled, feeling half a madwoman herself like the woman who stood before her. Commander Rojo also paused in his reading of the book ensconced in the red leather jacket. He studied Demona in utter fascination.

    After catching sight of Tas¨¬a''s distraction, Helo?ste turned around to follow Tas¨¬a''s gaze.

    "Rojo," Demona asked, weakly.

    He answered her.

    "This. This. Cannot be."

    Commander Rojo bowed his head down and read from his book once more.

    Demona frowned when she turned back towards Tas¨¬a.

    "The change in the reality template that occurred with the Cull Spore Invasion broke him and his soldiers utterly. To a man, I have found they are entirely unable to process the change. As you likely guessed, I exploited the change so I could appear here before you."

    Tas¨¬a stood up.

    "Are you an AI?"

    Demona shrugged.

    "Something like that, but not quite. I don''t want to be rude and avoid answering your question, but I need to ask a favor of you, Tas¨¬a. We have such little time, after all."

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward on the desk.

    "Ask away."

    "You are here to meet with the man who murdered me. I need you to deliver to him a message."

 2.38 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    After the projection of Demona Helo?ste dissipated, Tas¨¬a checked the neoPalm power supply. It was down to less than ten percent owing to the enormous expenditure of energy Demona''s digital resurrection had caused.

    She replaced the battery with one enmeshed in a kinetic coil. As she worked the tongs loose, Tas¨¬a noticed that Rojo was watching her.

    He seemed so placid with his legs folded as he sat in his chair that she had to remind herself of the cold-blooded murder of Nande; a woman whose sweet nature surpassed even that of her husband''s.

    Tas¨¬a was growing too comfortable with the presence of the ghost.

    "You have something to say," she asked Rojo.

    The entity ignored her cross tone as he answered.

    "Demona, she is ever ambitious. Even in death, she thinks herself a general." Rojo cackled as he repeated Demona''s message with disdain. "''I hope that my sacrifice was worth it to our cause, my brother. I expect you to proceed to The Woken Child with all due haste''. A command with a cryptic message attached. Would you expect anything less from the vainglorious Demona Helo?ste?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled with a rueful sneer. Demona evidently had many detractors. Rightwing death merchants and Maoist guerillas mocked her with equal derision.

    "I''ve never met Helo?ste before, until just now. She believes that she serves a higher power and a sublime purpose."

    Rojo shook his head with more intensity than Tas¨¬a had seen him invest in anything else.

    "She serves only the web of her own delusion. The only higher power that truly exists is the Spirit of the People."

    The neoPalm let her know the beacon now let out its signal. She needed to assemble her gun, but the last phrase Rojo spoke caught Tas¨¬a''s attention.

    She was reminded of the words of a tale she heard in the seminary, supposedly a true one. The story of how a cadre of spooks used drug-induced mind control to turn a popular priest into an atheist who fled from the Old Church in a most dramatic fashion.

    He rend his garments and ran through the streets like a mad man. It was thought that he joined with the guerillas.

    That phrase she had even heard elders of the Anewed, her father''s creed, use:

    El Esp¨ªritu de la Gente superar¨¢ todo.

    -The Spirit of the People will surpass all.

    She squinted at Rojo once more as if to gauge if he as a man could measure up to this story.

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    "Are you the Red Priest, Rojo," she asked.

    With his hands folded together, Rojo bowed his head in a nod.

    "That dreadful day came when the Bells and Chimes of Arequipa sounded hollow to my ears. Where before they had always brought me joy, they now made me nauseous and filled my blood with angry venom. No rhyme nor reason to this malcontent I felt. Nothing at all in all the world sparked my discontent. It was all of a sudden. It just was. And I fled to the foothills. I fed upon what nature provided."

    As she listened, Tas¨¬a realized that perhaps she knew more than even he did of what had occurred.

    "Rojo," she asked. "Have you ever heard of the Incompleteness?"

    With a guileless gaze back at her, Rojo shook his head as he answered, "no."

    Her fingers grappled on the desk, she leaned forward on her arms

    "Strange that you haven''t. You are their most renowned test subject. When the spooks replace a person''s personality with an artificial construct, the new self sometimes becomes intuitively aware of their condition - the Incompleteness."

    His face twisted in a struggle of disbelief. Muscles twitched in collision with wrinkles. Veins throbbed beneath brown skin.

    "But, I became whole again through my own struggle. When I saw the Esp¨ªritu de la Gente in a vision and it was made known to me what was needed, I could no longer be a Priest. I was made a Warrior."

    "Rojo, how complete are you now? Are you going to sit there and read from your book until all the energia in this valley is spent?"

    Rojo grinned from ear to ear as he smacked the book on its leather-bound cover.

    "It is complete."

    Opening it up, he returned his attention to it.

    Tas¨¬a turned her own attention to the placement of the scope into the TAC-50 interchangeable modular socket designed for sighting systems. Her neoPalm buzzed.

    What now?

    "Hello."

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris, Lt. Colonel Sol, here. Incoming warbirds are swooping towards Ballano''s location. They are not my men. I''ve ordered mine to stay back. Unfortunately, they do not have time to intercept. Brace yourself, they are likely searching for you. Out."

    She heard a scurry above as harsh in sound as a clash of metal talons from robotic eagles. Competitive duels were popular outdoor sporting events, but so very loud.

    Tas¨¬a completed the rest of the assembly within a dozen seconds. She grabbed a magazine of .50 caliber cartridges and darted to the door and gazed up.

    Above, dropping in a twirl, was the red and white striped Sikorsky S-92. It plunged the last hundred feet and crashed beside the glowing pit.

    Four warbirds flew separate to the opposite sides of the valley. Two skydivers jumped out of each of the warbirds in free fall. They fell with their asses bent towards the ground, their feet and hands touching.

    The jet-stop packs on their backs made for ripe targets.

    She shouldered her rifle. A breath count tensed down in her gut was all Tas¨¬a needed to slow down her perception of time.

    The first round ripped through a jet-stop pack with a satisfying explosion.

    As she targeted the next one of the seven remaining doomed skydivers, only one little matter worried her. The warbirds were not the Series8 she had spent so much time hunting for vulnerabilities to exploit.

    They would not go down so easily.

 2.39 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a stepped back under the awning to prevent the warbirds from establishing a visual. The IR scrambler would help greatly in obscuring a readout, but she really needed to be in the high grass near the family of peccaries to exploit the device to her best advantage.

    After re-entering the building, she wiped her nostrils clear with a tissue she had found in a box on the center desk. An adrenaline-like chemical compound seeped through her sinuses. It itched something fierce and it made her feel a little buzzed like the first time she smoked a cigarette.

    It also caused the momentary perception of slow time that allowed her to make eight accurate shots in approximately ten seconds.

    Most surprising to Tas¨¬a, once again in an emergency, she had an intuitive understanding of how to trigger the reaction. The treatment she had received in the IMCQ, disguised as chemotherapy, opened up suppressed Harvest neuro-tech embedded throughout her body. Of that, Tas¨¬a was now certain that that was the purpose of the fake treatment.

    She only hoped that the chemical burn-off didn''t sting so badly as before the next time she went to take a piss.

    As she walked back to the door, a skydiver''s body twirled slowly down just a dozen feet in front of her. The jet-stop pack, de rigueur for modern jump troopers, was intended to minimize impact from a free fall.

    Typically, they prevented the kind of shooting gallery that Tas¨¬a dealt the skydivers from occurring.

    With no manual override for last-second calculation in effect, the jet-stop pack''s rocket thrusters pointed straight down. A sudden burst sputtered alive. The corpse thrust several hundred feet up in the air.

    Its legs caught fire as it swooshed upward. The corpse came back down to earth engulfed in flames.

    The corpse was the remains of one of the last three skydivers she had shot. She gave each one of them a headshot to administer an instant kill after realizing the other five skydivers did not die outright when the jet-stop packs exploded. Instead, they suffered great pain on their descent.

    Tas¨¬a sauntered over to the desk she left her effects and grabbed the remaining three .50 magazines. The neoPalm, still laying upright on the desktop, let out its little Paraguayan folk tune.

    "Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, here."

    Le¨®n coughed, but he cackled in laughter as well.

    "What''s so funny," she asked, not in a particularly humorous mood. She remembered that she had presented herself to him as a sweet little goofball.

    Play along, sister.

    "Oh, you had to have seen it, Tas¨¬a. That corpse shoots straight up into the air. Look! There goes another one. Just how many of them did you kill?"

    Tas¨¬a returned to stand under the awning, once more. She leaned against the doorpost as she stared down at the crashed Sikorsky S-92, sitting approximately two hundred yards away from her.

    It appeared to be in rough shape. From the shattered tail, the fuselage sprawled out like strands of twisted entrails. The back part of the passenger cabin jutted out with the doors collapsed in.

    The helicopter rotor blade was nowhere to be seen.

    She gave him her best attempt at a chuckle. She recalled a German philosopher once said humor could only be facilitated with a good appetite. Tas¨¬a''s stomach was feeling wrenched with the adrenaline flow.

    "I took out eight. That was the entire squad that they brought down. How are you holding up, my friend?"

    "I am a little banged up. But, I have been much worse in even shittier situations. What truly sucks, Javier lost his head. Shot off in mid-flight."

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    "Damn," was all Tas¨¬a could say.

    "He was much less a sinner than I, so I doubt that he risked the eternal flames."

    Tas¨¬a thought it curious that Le¨®n took her one-word response so literally. The death of Javier must have put him in the mood for pontification. He continued to speak.

    "It makes you wonder. God plucks him away to the hereinafter and leaves me right here still. Javier takes a full-on ammo burst to the neck that rips off his head. I am left ungrazed and I was right there at his side."

    She could hear the tremor in his voice.

    "How long did you know him," she asked. Her eyes scanned the ground, making no assumptions that the airborne attack was the only one coming.

    Tas¨¬a wished she could contact Felicit¨¦ to get a satellite fix, but her hacker friend would be asleep at this hour.

    Le¨®n had not answered after several seconds.

    "Is there something wrong," she asked.

    Le¨®n grunted and cleared his throat. His thoughts must have taken a dark turn, she realized. There would be no more gallows humor.

    "We had been in the same deployment for a good decade."

    Tas¨¬a glanced up. The warbirds were on the move. One was missing. There was no time for pontification.

    "Le¨®n, we are not out of this just yet. Stay down and stay put, okay?"

    "Roger that."

    She thought he should have a good cry of it.

    It''s always less messy that way.

    More likely, he was taking a cigarette lighter flame to his palm to help him deal with his emotions. Men were weird like that.

    As she placed the neoPalm in a secure pocket protector, Tas¨¬a caught sight of the long strands of grass, nearby and to her right, mashed down and spread out. The blades started to swirl clockwise.

    Now the building was in shadow and the peccaries, their strange faces shaking and baying, were on the run.

    Fucking stealth warbird. Did not even hear its descent.

    Dozens of bullets punched into the wall on the far end from her. She ducked as the awning above received a sheet of hot shrapnel from an angular rain of shredded materials. Some bore hot and stinging into the cotton of her shirt.

    She had left the feathered jacket at home. Was that a good idea?

    The bullets ate into the wooden frame of the siding as the spread of rounds inched closer.

    Tas¨¬a squatted steady with one knee pulled down as she took out one of the two handguns she had strapped to her body. It was a Desert Eagle .50 AE she had holstered along the length of her haunches.

    Tas¨¬a breathed in with the tight clinch in her gut once again to instant effect.

    Before she could not even hear the warbird, now the propeller sounded off with a definite slow whoosh whoosh.

    Amazing how effective that works, she thought.

    The warbird, small, with a sleek fractal carapace, came down, hovering above the car lot. The gunner manned a GAU-17 Gatling gun. He was stray-shooting the large front office window for suppressive fire purposes.

    If she had the time to do so Tas¨¬a would have smiled. They made the mistake of assuming she would do the sane thing and seek cover.

    Not having a clear shot at the gunner, Tas¨¬a fired two rounds into the center mass of the GUA-17 rotator assembly. The chrome metal gears of the machine gun pitched out, white-hot.

    Pink spray burst out into the air surrounding the gun port. The gunner lunged forward, his hands gripping a support rail to keep from falling out.

    The skin from his jaw was missing from his cheekbone to his chin.

    Ouch. Could not have been any uglier if I shot him in the face.

    She could see the pilot turn his head backward to check on the gunner.

    When he turns back around, he''s going to activate those two 30 mm turrets lodged in the front and set me ablaze.

    Tas¨¬a aimed squarely at the pilot, trying to stack her shots for maximum impact. The first round barely dented into the reinforced glass. The second produced a noticeable thumb-sized curve. By the third round, which she had centered in the exact same spot as the first two, the pilot''s head had jerked back around.

    The third round splayed the entire sheet of glass in front of him. The two remaining rounds would have penetrated, but the pilot sensibly took the copter back up.

    The next shot did not impact the same location. It dug in, nearly at a vertical angle into the glass.

    She watched the warbird disappear over the southern ridgeline, likely to take his casualty back to base.

    A large caliber round smacked the cement walkway a foot to her left boot. It had ripped through the awning''s sheet metal.

    A second warbird must have been hovering out of her audial range.

    As she held her breath, Tas¨¬a popped a smoke grenade on the ground nearby. It bellowed the same sticky ochrous fumes she had encountered in the vents of Ward Ocho.

    Tas¨¬a ran up the length of the paved surface before diving into the tall grass. There was a chance their gunner caught sight of her, but to her relief, the awning received another two rounds that would have certainly killed her if she had stayed put.

 2.40 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a lay in the tall grass with her right eye pressed into the scope. Crap. There was more than one warbird above. At least one of the warbirds had a sharpshooter. Likely a gunner who switched out his Gatling for a more accurate rifle to target her from a safer distance.

    Unfortunately, none of the gunports on the three warbirds above her were currently open.

    Tas¨¬a considered the severity of the strike she just now survived.

    They were not here to apprehend or to kidnap her, they were here to kill her. Who were these people?

    Tas¨¬a peeked up again, and whispered ''Santa Muerta!'' for the hedge-saint to recieve her prayer and pass it forward to Heaven.

    With no clear target to exploit, Tas¨¬a pulled her neoPalm out and contacted Le¨®n.

    -Switching to text to maintain silence. Do you know who our visitors are?

    Le¨®n texted back.

    -Sol was hoping you would know. I just got word from him that our fleet of warbirds has been grounded by an electronic intercept based attack.

    She thought of the satellite. The EU? Why would they want her dead? Her only connection with them was through Demona Helo?ste. Did her possession of that spook''s neoPalm put her in jeopardy?

    Tas¨¬a wrote back to Le¨®n:

    -The file I was going to give you is a diagnostic of the attack on Lt. Colonel Sol''s warbird. It was done through an EU satellite possessing an energy weapon.

    Tas¨¬a reloaded her Desert Eagle. She peered back up at the warbirds as they established a flight pattern. With no threat from Sol''s copters coming forth, they bided their time.

    They were not going to repeat their two previous tactical blunders that Tas¨¬a exploited to her greater advantage.

    Le¨®n answered back.

    -Shit. The EU never interferes directly in Quadra operations. Why are they doing so now?

    She shook her head with an unsatisfied grimace pressed upon her face. Tas¨¬a put off giving any more consideration to what this meant in the greater scheme of things.

    The warbirds were her immediate concern. What were they waiting to do? It was going to be dark soon. She could slip out of the valley then. Her attackers had to be aware of that.

    -Le¨®n, what is the make of those copters? Any vulnerabilities that you are aware of? I have a Big Fucking Sniper rifle, and I need an idea where to put the bullet.

    He answered back quickly.

    - It is Russian. Very recent vintage. A Black Wolverine. Hybrid carapace mesh designed for both stealth & kinetic absorption.

    Tas¨¬a sighed in frustration. This much she already gathered from her close encounter. She texted a response back in turn.

    - The birds are not likely to come down again and just let me empty a clip from a Desert Eagle into them at fifty feet. They fell for that trick once already.

    This time Le¨®n sent her a file over with a text message accompanying it.

    - I was getting to that, my friend. The files this is based upon are classified Ultra even still. The manufacturer would prefer its clients did not see this. I have here for you a nifty summation of what you will need to know.

    She opened it. It was a PNG that cycled a visually aided instruction set. The vulnerability in the Black Wolverine lay in the delicate system integration that made the stealth design possible. The Black Wolverine not only absorbed radar but it suppressed the vehicle''s noise output.

    The vibrational threshold for the warbird systems was tuned down extremely low for an operational helicopter used in the field. It was meant for quick strikes with minimal extraneous circumstances to cause wear and tear. If the sound suppressor was damaged, the warbird would rattle apart.

    Two bolts on the pilot side, just above the fuselage, held the sound suppressor in place.

    No wonder it is relatively lightly weaponized compared to other warbirds of equivalent size. The systems are too delicate in their integration to handle heavy firepower.

    She observed no missiles nor any bombs on the warbirds. Just a gunner mount and the two 30 mm turrets upfront.

    It was a good thing, too. Missiles would make mincemeat of anyone left in the office. Napalm bombs would sweep out most of the tall grass filled lot.

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    Perhaps, that is why the warbirds maintained their positions. To keep her in check while the real firepower was on its way for a massive carpet bomb run.

    She had to act quickly. She texted Le¨®n.

    - Thanks, that was very helpful. Can you run when I give you the signal?

    - Not a problem.

    - Great. Stand by. Be ready in less than a minute. I want you to run to the valley entrance. I have a motorcycle parked there.

    Tas¨¬a shouldered the rifle. She had the three holding patterns memorized. As she performed two dry runs, she learned the most time effective switch up between the three warbirds, as they tended to only expose their vulnerable sides in a specific order.

    There was also a time differential for bullet impact to consider, meaning the lead placement above the target she aimed for differed by a distinct fraction of a second for each of the warbirds.

    Deep intuitional calculations were involved. On a non-moving target with the 30x scope, hitting the bolt heads at two hundred and fifty to three hundred yards was a trivial matter.

    Her scope even possessed a smart gauge to automatically calculate the parabellum lead she would need to consider velocity degradation, the impact of gravity on the barrel angle, and wind shear resistance on the accuracy of the shot she took.

    As she watched the numbers roll slowly out on the in-scope visual display, Tas¨¬a became annoyed.

    The smart gauge was nearly worthless with three moving targets where they had time to react if she waited out the calculations from the scope between each shot.

    Deep intuitional calculations. She had always been aware there was something special about her understanding of the ratios underlying the world around her. As a child, swinging from vines without ever missing when her spider monkey friends fell short trying to keep up with her, Tas¨¬a knew this truth even then.

    She would have to ignore the display and learn to trust her own intuition once again.

    Tas¨¬a set her breath still, and she made the six shots.

    Before she could even be certain of her success, Tas¨¬a dashed to an abandoned bulldozer just in case they caught sight of her muzzle flash as it registered on their sensors for a brief moment even through the IR white noise.

    Tas¨¬a crouched beneath the downturned trow blade, only to be greeted by a lancehead snake. It swiped at her with a quick snap of its jaws.

    Tas¨¬a twisted back in a dodge.

    I don''t have time for this.

    Lunging forward, Tas¨¬a grabbed the snake just beneath its head. With her other hand, she latched its tail. Tas¨¬a flung it several yards, hitting the crane that leaned against the mesa.

    She paused a moment to catch her breath. Above her, the warbirds screeched with a sound like a high horsepower boat engine without a drop of oil.

    Except, these were three gear-shot high horsepower engines singing their baleful shrieks in unison.

    She suddenly grew nauseous with the sound enveloping her, rattling through her bones. Her stomach felt as if it had been punched a dozen times.

    Tas¨¬a leaned over beside the front bulldozer wheel, and she wretched up the little amount of content that existed inside her stomach.

    Essentially, a macadamia nut cookie that left a horrible and weird aftertaste this go around.

    "Yuck. Yuck. Yuck."

    From inside the blade scoop, she heard the cascading hiss of many snakes. There was a nest of them, of course. The blade made for a most natural cavern for them. Tas¨¬a climbed up the bulldozer platform.

    Several bursts from an automatic weapon went off from a dozen feet on the other side of the bulldozer. Tas¨¬a ducked, leaning against the steel pole support holding the cover above her head.

    A bullet ripped into the cabin beside her, tearing through the metal and leaving an ugly sheer.

    The shot came from one of the warbirds above. Her torso would have caught the bullet if she had not ducked.

    It would have ended her. That thought rattled her.

    Best laid plans of mice who get eaten by snakes and men who get bitten by snakes come to naught.

    As she shook off the feeling of vulnerability, another long burst of automatic fire came from nearby her.

    She eased out her Desert Eagle.

    "Tas¨¬a, you can come out now. The threat is taken care of."

    It was Le¨®n.

    Tas¨¬a stood up and glanced at the sky. Though two warbirds were almost out of visual range with long, pitch-black trails of smoke behind them, one less damaged helicopter still hovered above where Tas¨¬a stood.

    A gun port remained open on the warbird''s side. A bloodied corpse leaned out in lifeless sprawl across a GAU-17.

    Tas¨¬a shouldered the TAC-50. She had one remaining round in the active clip. She focused the scope and found the stubborn last bolt missing half of its head. She fired and successfully popped it out.

    The warbird almost instantly rattled shaken. The pilot stabilized the vehicle and turned it around to join the other two back to its base.

    "Whew," Tas¨¬a yelped.

    She jumped off the bulldozer and into Le¨®n''s arms for a big hug. They both giggled for several seconds before releasing one another.

    "So, what happened," Le¨®n asked. "I never thought I would ever have to guard your six."

    She pointed to the downturned dozer blade.

    "Squatters are occupying my hidey-hole. Vipers, my good buddy."

    The sound of hissing now caught Le¨®n''s attention. He double backed with a jerk of his head.

    "Oh, shit," he answered as he put distance between himself and the vipers.

    "Are you as afraid of snakes as you are spiders," Tas¨¬a chided.

    "I''ve spent plenty of time in the jungle to know that that is a nest of lanceheads. Just showing my proper respects."

    Tas¨¬a saw a congealed wound above Le¨®n''s temple. She reached up with two remaining spare tissues and wiped it down.

    Tas¨¬a spoke.

    "Let''s get out of here before they carpet bomb this entire valley. Are you up for that steak dinner I mentioned earlier?"

    Le¨®n grinned. "You are serious about that little dive you want to take me to, aren''t you?"

    With a slight nod, she took his hand and pulled him forward.

    "Come on, man. You got your invitation. Now, what are you waiting for?"

 2.41 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    The gauchos of Paraguay and Argentina wrangle the best cattle stock for beefsteak in the world.

    That is just a damn fact, Tas¨¬a thought as she dug her knife and fork into one of the thin-cut medallions on her plate.

    It was slathered in a variety of onions and peppers saute¨¦d in butter and a fair drizzle of a yellow bonnet based hot sauce. Though there were flour tortillas on the side, Tas¨¬a did not bother to fill them up.

    A heaping pile of arroz verde - long-grained rice, fresh spinach, fresh cilantro, fresh parsley, fresh mint and garlic, garlic, garlic, also accompanied the meal. She dug into it like a starving beast.

    It was her first solid meal since the fish wraps the previous morning. Tas¨¬a gulped from a light Cervaza Rubia.

    She eyed her companion with a firm stare.

    "This is as good as it gets. We should get on our knees and thank the higher authorities that they had the foresight to annex a chunk of Argentinian farmlands when they formed the Quadra."

    Le¨®n chuckled as he dug into his own meal.

    "I scoff at the idea of thanking the Salvage for anything, and I work for the bastards."

    Tas¨¬a turned her head lopsided in a rare elegant display. Even strenuous activity had no effect on the lustrous cascade of her hair which she now played up for effect.

    After her self-inflicted surgery, Tas¨¬a spent a day sunbathing nude in her backyard to help her wounded flesh heal. Immediately after which she noticed the sheen of her hair had returned.

    She now attempted to bedazzle the man sitting at her table.

    "For the moment, we can leave our conscience behind and take in a respite of joy."

    She said in a cooing mesmer.

    "You really love to eat," Le¨®n said, amused as he observed her.

    Tas¨¬a ignored the poke he gave her bubble as she answered.

    "One day, after my metabolism slows down, I will be a fat little butterball with a husband who hates me for it," she said as she brought her bottle up in a kiss to the air, "cheers!"

    Le¨®n tilted his chin back and he gave Tas¨¬a a warning with raised eyebrows. She had already heard the soft trod of a pair of leather boots behind her.

    She peered up while leaning her head all the way back.

    "Hello, Isabella," Tas¨¬a greeted. The two exchanged a quick peck on the lips. Isabella placed her hands on Tas¨¬a''s shoulders.

    "Le¨®n, this is my god sister, Isabella Cuervo, the proprietress of this finest of dining establishments."

    Isabella gave out a nervous chortle as she corrected Tas¨¬a.

    "The food is world-class, but the decor is strictly proletariat to chase off a certain unwanted element. Foodies."

    Tas¨¬a''s lips pussed up. "I''m a foodie."

    Le¨®n nodded and bowed his head.

    "It is nice to find something this good outside of Asunci¨®n or even Ciudad del Este."

    Isabella smirked ever so slightly as she gripped Tas¨¬a''s shoulders a little harder.

    "Now, what was that you were saying about a husband?"

    Tas¨¬a looked across the table and she smiled at Le¨®n in embarrassment. She reached her head up once more to whisper into Isabella''s ear.

    "We are professional colleagues. I don''t know where this is going, but don''t blow this for me."

    Isabella looked down impishly to Tas¨¬a, and whispered in turn, "oh, dear sister, I promised to get you back, did I not?" Isabella straightened her posture and said out loud, "you are right, Tas¨¬a, my dear, he is quite, quite on the cute side."

    Isabella turned her attention to Le¨®n. "I happen to be a lesbian, but, Le¨®n, you should know, I am not dead to certain rarely displayed manly charms when I come across them."

    She patted Tas¨¬a on the head just as she began to walk away.

    Tas¨¬a was left bereft for a proper response. Several seconds passed before Le¨®n interrupted the awkward silence.

    "It is not every day . . . and I will leave it at that."

    After Tas¨¬a cleaned off her plate, she sat back and sipped from a second bottle while Le¨®n finished his meal. He savored his meal, slowly.

    As proper etiquette required.

    Tas¨¬a wondered what six months eating in a prison chow hall had done to her own sense of decorum. What did the man in front of her think of her?

    He did seem to enjoy her company. Perhaps while in prison, Tas¨¬a considered, she had developed a certain rogue charm that men found to be irresistible.

    She thought of Faison''s insults as they sat beneath the radio tower. He did not find her to be appealing in the least, but Tas¨¬a shrugged it off. To be fair, she did shoot him in the face so he didn''t qualify as the most objective judge of her charm.

    Everyone else loves me and that is all that matters. Her inner voice rose to challenge her. Tasia, that''s the beer talking.

    Le¨®n finished his meal, and he sat his utensils crossed together on the plate. He peeked up at her with a chuckle.

    "You seem to be having quite the monologue going on upstairs," he said with a finger pressed against his temple.

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    "Just thinking of a sniper I fucked over well and good."

    A little thrilling chill ran through her at the sight of Le¨®n''s disappointment. It slipped past his defenses before he regained his comportment with a self-deprecated shrug and a long grin.

    He had hoped she was thinking of something else! Tas¨¬a recalled all of her prior commitments for the evening, to watch Anneb¨¦l and Ra¨²l make love, and to get more intimate with J¨²n-J¨²n.

    Wow. It didn''t take long to get over our little head, did it, mi chica?

    Still, she would have loved to have a little, quick affair with the man, and would have, but for not being sure of the control she had over her bodily functions.

    She decided to be direct, she grabbed the table with both hands and she leaned in.

    "I saw that look on your face."

    Le¨®n grasped his chest with fingers spread out in a knee jerk denial.

    She continued.

    "It''s okay. It is not like I wasn''t thinking it myself. Tonight though, I''m overbooked on my commitments, and, hell, we have yet to discuss our mutual business." She gave him a wicked grin. "Another time, okay?"

    To her delight, Le¨®n blushed as he nodded his head.

    Tas¨¬a still wondered about her own motives and commitments. Should she not limit her own commitment to only one other to at least feign social reliability?

    J¨²n-J¨²n, and Le¨®n, was that stretching things? But she had so much time to make up for!

    Her next thought was sobering.

    Nande.

    At the time that she and J¨²n-J¨²n committed to take some time that evening to explore their newly found interest, he was still unaware Tas¨¬a had discovered and returned his deceased wife''s remains.

    Her first thought was he won''t be in the mood for lovemaking, her second thought was what a shit I am for thinking that.

    Why was that so bad? She had a man that committed to her time table to explore as she felt capable. She needed to selfishly guard and treasure this acquaintance for the opportunity it presented.

    Still, she would need to be there for J¨²n-J¨²n that night. He''ll still need someone to hold him. After all, he''ll be ready again, soon enough.

    Le¨®n reached over the table and grabbed her hand.

    "Everything alright," he asked. "You appear conflicted."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. "If you only knew the half of it, you would run, run, run, right out that door over there." She cleared her throat. "Le¨®n, is it possible that the EU could be targeting me because I''m carrying around Demona Helo?ste''s personal assistant?"

    "Oh, business."

    She nodded, and with a nasal squeal to her voice. "''Fraid so, big, tall, strapping buddy."

    He got a laugh out of her once again playing the sweet goofball.

    Le¨®n wiped his face down with a napkin.

    "Oh my. But, seriously, yes, now that you mention it, they most definitely want to get a hold of that."

    "Just before our meeting, she paid me a visit."

    Le¨®n blinked. His forehead ruffled in confusion.

    "Demona. She had a message for you. Le¨®n, I think you are more aware of how it possibly could be that she is sending a message from the other side of the grave more than I am, so let''s skip the part where I have to explain it to you."

    He sat back in his chair, appearing more relaxed than before.

    "I wasn''t feigning shock, my lovely friend. I''m genuinely surprised that her intricate little plan worked. What did she say?"

    Tas¨¬a sighed as she recalled the encounter.

    "She hoped her sacrifice was worth it. She expects you now to proceed with due haste to the Awoken Child."

    Le¨®n looked up with his head leaning off to the side as he also shook it.

    "Are you familiar with English, Tas¨¬a?"

    "I studied it in school. I''m awkward at it though."

    "You see, this is classic Helo?ste. She designates that phrase in its archaic English form in her plan book as the Awoken Childe. As in Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Yes, she is that pretentious."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged, "I don''t get it."

    Le¨®n leaned forward as he explained it.

    "It''s Demona Helo?ste. Self-designated la esp¨ªa por excelencia, the spook most quintessential, in the English. It would be insulting to her memory if you did get it."

    Tas¨¬a tossed her hands up. The ambiguity seemed all so superfluous.

    "Then what does this elaborate fabrication actually point to?"

    "An abandoned laboratory where she has some unfinished work stored."

    Tas¨¬a laughed. She calmed her fidgeting hands as she sprawled her arm across her chair.

    "Is it well guarded?"

    "Yes. Most definitely."

    "It sounds exciting."

    His reaction was most telling. Le¨®n''s elbows were planted on the table, his hands balled up together to cover his mouth. His eyes grew focused as he watched her.

    He was taking a great deal of care choosing his next response. It would be a deflection.

    He doesn''t want me there. What is he trying to hide?

    "There is another matter much dearer to your heart, Tas¨¬a."

    With those words, Le¨®n retrieved from his jacket pocket a flash drive and he placed it on the table in front of her.

    "Everything you need to know to rescue your aunt Tatiana is there."

    Tas¨¬a gave a big, warm, and gobliny smile though her mind was elsewhere. Intuition told her Awoken Childe had a great deal of bearing on the answers she sought.

    Le¨®n continued.

    "I disagree with Lt. Colonel Sol. He believes a large squad of specialists in hostage rescue, with you serving as the scout to spearhead it, would be the optimal approach. The general, however, thinks along with me, it is best taken as a solo mission with you as the infiltration agent. That is why I am here to give you this, even though Sol wanted me to persuade you into joining us."

    Tas¨¬a turned the drive around in her thumb and forefinger. Her smile was sincere, but the other matter predominated her thoughts.

    To learn more beyond what Sol or Kutuzova wanted her to know, Tas¨¬a schemed to obtain the contents of Le¨®n''s own mobile, and she could with a simple flip of an app on her neoPalm to do her dirty work for her. However, she would need to be in close proximity to him for several minutes to allow time for it to breach his data, and this conversation seemed to be winding down.

    Tas¨¬a peered over to the pool tables. There was a couple playing billiards. She knew Ydre?s, but not the new chica with her. Four other tables were occupied. A slow night, but then again, it was a Wednesday.

    Her plan was doable.

    Tas¨¬a threw him a shy smile.

    "I don''t know how to thank you for this."

    He looked away for a moment as she expected him to. Then he looked her in the eyes and said in a bold but humor covered tone.

    "Well . . ."

    He fell for it.

    Tas¨¬a giggled. She pointed with her eyes to the bathroom in the dark shaded hallway on the other side of the room.

    "You know that ''another time'' I mentioned earlier? That could be now if you are up to it."

    For a brief moment, he froze like a deer in the headlights before he regained his composure with a nervous snort. Tas¨¬a grabbed his arm and led him out of his chair.

    "Come on, you. Let''s not make this awkward, okay?"

    Tas¨¬a grew nervous as she led him. Her stomach quivered and her guts knotted.

    It''s too big of a step!

    She looked around. Nobody watched them. Perhaps, they appeared merely as a couple freshening up, and not as one looking for a place for a quicky.

    Tas¨¬a shoved him in the lavatory. She took another peek out, shut the door behind her, and locked it.

    Upon turning around, Tas¨¬a gasped an, "Oh my!"

    Le¨®n was already ready for her.

 2.42 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Under the pink neon Daga Chicas sign above the parking lot, Tas¨¬a threw her leg over the seat of her Virago 750. Le¨®n hopped on behind her.

    He carried her duffle bag holding the disassembled sniper rifle across his shoulders to make for some room on the seat.

    Perhaps, she should have let him drive, but her legs were vicious with strength. Though he had the advantage, she could handle the extra two hundred and twenty-eight pounds he added to the bike without a problem.

    She hit the acceleration, and they took off. She had agreed to take him to a car rental five miles away on the edge of a posh little suburb.

    Le¨®n would have settled for the rental company a short walk downtown, but she insisted on helping him.

    "All those cars are crap. If you are going to drive all the way to Asunci¨®n, you need a decent car. Don''t worry about the money. I''ve got this."

    Being a gentleman at heart, Le¨®n agreed to let her have her moment to shine like a boss.

    With the breeze in her face, a handsome man on her bike, she should have enjoyed it.

    Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Tas¨¬a cursed herself. Talking myself into trying to do that before I was ready! What an idiot!

    Tas¨¬a sighed to herself. He was so beautiful just standing there with nothing attached but his sly grin.

    At that moment on the bike, Le¨®n held on to her waist. It felt nice, but neither did it trigger her. Perhaps, the mortification she still felt prevented that.

    He was so beautiful.

    She accelerated even more. Le¨®n responded with a whoop.

    Well, it could have been worse.

    That it could have. When she turned around and faced Le¨®n in the lavatory, her stomach heaved in a growl so loud even he was alarmed by it.

    She barely had time to say ''excuse me'' as she pushed him to the side. She jumped down to her knees and slid to the toilet, grabbed the sides of it, pressed her head down, and spewed out the entire content of that wonderful meal she just ate.

    Fortunately, her dignity had been spared, even then, as no other bodily fluids or functions were involved. Who didn''t empty their guts every now and then when they were having fun?

    But, as she cleaned up at the sink, he put his clothes back on. Though she understood how her retching up her dinner took him out of the mood, she was expecting it even, on an emotional level it hurt to know that at least momentarily, he found her unappealing.

    As they stood uncomfortably in the lavatory, Le¨®n joked about her being a light drinker.

    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    She insisted that they go up to the bar and order another two rounds. She wanted to play it off, prove him wrong, and most importantly, get the foul taste out of her mouth.

    Stupid Tas¨¬a, stupid, stupid, stupid.

    When they stopped in front of the car rental entrance, Tas¨¬a turned to him.

    "So, what are you looking for," she asked him as she eyed the lot, "see that sweet Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n in metallic green?"

    "That would cause a lot of attention."

    "That is not always a bad thing," Tas¨¬a answered.

    "I would love to see Lt. Colonel Sol''s face if I pulled up at the base driving that."

    Tas¨¬a smacked his stomach with a drumroll, "then do it!"

    Le¨®n began to nod his head. He convinced himself. He smiled down at her as he chuckled.

    "What," she asked.

    "When they busted you, they barely even touched your stash, right?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. She practically danced in place as she responded.

    "Nada. Nada. My accomplices -", fucking Green-Eyed Elise, she thought with a quick gnaw of her jaw, "- were clueless."

    Tas¨¬a reached into a side pocket built into her fanny-pack. She dug out a debit card and held it up to Le¨®n''s face.

    "When they ask you for a pin number, do you see those twelve digits lined up? Good. Start with the first number, skip to every third and you got it.

    "I''m going to stay out here and check out some of the fine ass vixens on this lot."

    She pointed to the double row of sports cars. In a few days, she would need to rent a vehicle for her own drive up to Asunci¨®n.

    Tas¨¬a was so lost in her thoughts as she drank in the not so subtle contours of a McLaren 590SX, she did not hear Le¨®n as he approached, even though he tisked as he did so.

    "Hot pink, ouch, a bit gauche, no?"

    "You, shut up," Tas¨¬a protested. "Since a girl can''t have her own unicorn because they don''t actually exist, the next best thing is a sports car that came straight out of a Barbie set collection."

    Le¨®n put an arm around her shoulder.

    "My apologies. I didn''t think you were the type."

    She raised her chin in challenge.

    "Oh, what type would that be?"

    "A girlie-girl. You stomp spiders, shoot guns, kill shitty people."

    Tas¨¬a smiled as she once more regarded the real-life Barbie dream car.

    "I''m whatever type my mood suits me."

    He gently turned her around to face him.

    "I need to get going, I''m afraid."

    "Keep that card until I join you in Asunci¨®n. You may need it if you run into a toll or something."

    Le¨®n chuckled. "Any mood, huh? You are ever practical."

    She shook her head.

    "That''s not so much a mood, but a disposition."

    "Well, still," he looked her in the eyes, "thank you for an evening I will not forget until my dying day."

    Le¨®n put his hands beneath her underarms and he picked her up level with his face. He then pulled her in with an open mouth and met her lips with a kiss.

    They held into one another for more than a full minute. To her utter delight, Tas¨¬a stayed calm. Though she did pee herself for a trace sprinkle, it was a happy little pee, not an anxiety-filled pee.

    When they unlocked lips, Tas¨¬a grinned back at him.

    "Damn," was all that she could gasp out of her tonsil tickled mouth.

 2.43 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    As Tas¨¬a circled the upscale suburb (not one, but three gated communities) to get back on the interstate, she caught an enticing aromatic whiff coming from a Donca Donuts shop.

    Her stomach felt precariously light, and she was uncertain whether she could hold anything down still.

    However, she had to try. She paid for three big donuts with crumb cake toppings. She had been drinking beer all night, and for a moment, Tas¨¬a considered ordering a tall coffee to go, but there was another Quick Mart down the block.

    They had more beer, and that was a good enough reason not to settle for coffee.

    At the Quick Mart, to her perked interest, there was a sale on imported Canadian.

    Unibroue.

    She had never had the brand before, but it appeared dark, thick, and yeasty, all the things that would help her digestion. She grabbed a second 4-pack to share with J¨²n-J¨²n later on that evening.

    Before leaving, she hit the munitions aisle where she grabbed two boxes of .32 ACP rounds.

    Though the rounds were subpar for operational purposes compared to her custom reloads it mattered not; she was only using them to get her rocks off.

    The flush of romantic yearning lingered still beneath her skin. Even as a nun, she had found, given her unfortunate limitations, the best solution for release was to fire her gun off at the shooting range.

    Unfortunately, her memberships to the two local ranges expired while she was in prison. She had another place in mind to fire off her gun, the backlot of a recycling center.

    There would be plenty of glass bottles to pop there.

    While she paid for the ammo and beer, Tas¨¬a caught sight of headlights circling to the backlot of the Quick Mart. The vehicle itself stayed out of her sight.

    Was that on purpose?

    It could be merely some gamblers going to a back arcade. No. Their path would have been more direct and linear if that was the case.

    See the sign where the light settled before they switched it off? The voice of her gut brought this matter to her attention. Thecar is parked there so it can swerve into traffic easily, and follow someone. That someone being you.

    Tas¨¬a answered in turn.

    Fine. If they want to play with fire, let me lead the way.

    After paying for the items, Tas¨¬a left the Quick Mart, and she dropped the beer and ammo in the leg bag where she had placed the donuts.

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    She slung herself on to the bike and hauled out of the parking lot. She kept an eye on her mirror. A full block down the strip, and no vehicles had departed from the Quick Mart lot.

    Tas¨¬a was almost convinced her gut had descended her mentality into paranoid delusion as she sat at a red light, but then she glanced back a final time just before she expected the light to change.

    Sacre Madr¨¦! Timing so immaculate. Tas¨¬a thought, admiringly.

    There were a mere four more seconds left, in her estimation, before the light changed. They must have been observing another light just in front of the Quick Mart as it synced up with this one down the strip a block.

    Professional spook craft, all the way for these guys.

    The black Audi A7 pulled out of the lot and onto the strip, immediately settling on an inconspicuous cruising speed. They would be able to hang back to tail her without missing the green light ahead.

    Who were these men?

    She thought of Sol but dismissed it. Tas¨¬a was convinced that he was wising up, and would not take an aggressive tact. He would cut a deal. Perhaps, even a reasonable one.

    The EU then? Much like the USA before their turn to a de-escalation stance, the EU had an alphabet soup of aggressive agencies they could utilize, but they preferred to operate through local talent to keep their own hands clean.

    Never direct, as Le¨®n said, this deep into the hinterlands.

    How did they spot her? Easy enough, Tas¨¬a concluded. They could have been following her motorcycle from the satellite and deduced who she was from it.

    Well, then. If the EU threatened her peace and tranquility in Villa Marr¨®n, she would just have to eliminate them as a threat.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled at this chain of thought. Listen to you, and your big bad ego! They could probably pop you with that energy weapon and have you trembling in a seizure and foaming at the mouth on the ground.

    So, why didn''t they? Their mighty raygun would destroy the neoPalm PAM.

    That was her gut talking. With a well-articulated belch, Tas¨¬a decided she was quite proud of her gut.

    The light changed to green. There were no other vehicles nearby, as of yet, so Tas¨¬a played it up to her advantage.

    She paused before going forward. She held the bike steady with her boots clasped to the asphalt, and then she grabbed the back of her helmet, pretending that she needed to adjust it.

    The Audie edged closer, but it did not accelerate. They kept their calm, cool pace. She could see through the light green tint that four individuals rode inside of it.

    Aw, so much professional spook craft on display, and now you choose to fuck up!

    One of the backseat passengers, a woman with a narrow, determined face, pulled a gun, a bullpup submachine gun, down where Tas¨¬a would not be able to see it.

    This mistake made Tasia feel cheeky. She pulled Demona Helo?ste''s neoPalm out of her fanny-pack and she waved it in the air for them to see.

    As they pulled up within fifty-five feet and the Audi changed into the left-hand lane, Tas¨¬a slid the device away, hastily. She raised her legs up and hit the brake release. Pressing with the edge of her elbows, she pulled the back of her shirt up to expose the Desert Eagle holstered against the stretch of her haunches.

    She did this just to let them know she could have shot them up at her advantage and leisure if she so chose to do so.

    Tas¨¬a sped off and made the next light just as it was turning back to red. The driver of the Audie chose to hang back, and drive slower than before.

    For now, they stayed smart. Likely, they had some decisions to make, knowing Tas¨¬a spotted them before their game plan even commenced.

    Given the look on the woman operative''s face, however, Tas¨¬a doubted that they would stay smart for very long.

 2.44 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    The recycling center on the edge of Villa Marr¨®n was just a few more miles down the road from the abandoned storage rental Tas¨¬a had invaded. To her surprise, as she drove by, it appeared that the cops never showed up the previous evening.

    There were no ribbons of yellow tape nor pylons to designate an area to be left undisturbed along the service road entrance.

    Tas¨¬a decided to turn her bike around to take a few minutes to investigate.

    As she rode through the lot, lined as it was with a maze of storage units now with all the exterior lights off, she was certain of her assumption. The corpses of Dragos and the ghoul she had killed lay undisturbed where she had shot them, even still.

    Tas¨¬a got off of her Virago 750 while looking around for any activity. The entire facility seemed deserted. She glanced up at the tall, curvy lamp posts.

    If so, if entirely abandoned, then who came back to turn the lights off?

    She searched around the maze of storage units quickly and thoroughly. A pervasive stench, similar to the smell of a pigsty, reeked from one back row. As she approached the row of storage units, wheels from an overhead door gave off a shrill creaking noise just before it popped in place and the door fell for the rest of its path downward.

    Tas¨¬a regarded it with caution, for she knew what the sound meant. Someone heard her bike as she approached and hastily pulled the door down. The door got stuck near the bottom of the twin tracks. It had just now corrected itself.

    Tas¨¬a pulled out her Desert Eagle and put on the IR goggles and set them to low-light vision as she approached the unit.

    Dead quiet. These cats know how to stay still.

    At the door, she pressed the release switch down with the heel of her left boot. The overhead door, now smoothly set in place, tumbled up in the rattle of the loud, tight wind of jagg¨¨d metal chains.

    The two ghouls stood perfectly still, except for their twitchy little tongues, just twelve feet in front of her. They must have assumed she could not see them in the dark and waited for her to enter the storage space where they were positioned to spring forth and pounce on top of her.

    They held long, curvy cleavers, and were readied to attack, as they stood to either side of a flayed corpse hanging from a rope between them.

    Tas¨¬a centered a red dot from the Desert Eagle just above the forehead of the ghoul to her left side. With steady hands, she shot the top of his head off.

    Out of the corner of her eye, Tas¨¬a saw his companion reacting with deadly speed. Tas¨¬a pushed off of her right foot and slid into the floor with her left knee.

    The last ghoul missed her when he lunged forward, swinging his cleaver in an arc at waist level in the space she just had inhabited.

    He was thinking about extracting your kibbles for a fresh dining experience with that swing, Tas¨¬a told herself.

    Tas¨¬a pivoted on her knee to face the ghoul. Before she could line him up to take another shot, Tas¨¬a caught sight of something. There was a tall robed figure holding a menacing scythe standing by the far wall that she had somehow missed on her initial inspection of the storage space interior.

    Unfortunately, she could not stop her reaction as she realized the figure was not giving off a heat signature. Tas¨¬a shot it in the head. Two horns popped out with each one smacking the ceiling and back wall in turn.

    It was a statue of San La Muerte.

    Before the ghoul had a chance to take advantage of her distraction, Tas¨¬a rolled beneath the corpse.

    She heard the ghoul give out a wobbled, pneumatic gasp.

    "You dare," he yelled, evidently offended she had shot the shrine''s centerpiece.

    As the ghoul spoke, something smacked hard against the corpse, and it began to swing as she crawled out from beneath it. With much gnashing, the ghoul attempted to wrangle the cleaver free from where it was now embedded in the hip bone of the corpse.

    Tas¨¬a pointed the Desert Eagle in the ghoul''s face. She barked an order.

    "Back up."

    The ghoul turned to her as he raised his arms.

    "You wouldn''t shoot an unarmed man, would you, sweety?"

    Tas¨¬a noted to herself that he did not comply with her request to back away from the cleaver. She pushed the gun up against his jaw and pulled the trigger.

    As she watched the body fall, Tas¨¬a muttered under her breath, "Non-compliance from an opponent denotes bad intent, as my father used to say."

    Before putting the Desert Eagle away, Tas¨¬a turned to check for any other opponents at the portal of the open door. If there was anyone out there, they did not approach.

    She took out the long pin-light that she kept tucked beneath the stiletto''s leather sheath and she shined it on the corpse. It was a female and her former occupation was quite evident. The prostitute''s face was still intact and covered in a heavy gloss foundation, mascara, false eyelashes, and neon rouge lipstick.

    The little that remained of her dress, still covering her shoulders and breast, were threadbare party clothes common to streetwalkers.

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    Poor thing. God damned wretched-souled poverty-tourists preying upon our most vulnerable people.

    It offended her as Tas¨¬a spat to relieve the tension in her jaw and mouth.

    Tas¨¬a did not let up on her steady examination of the corpse as she held the pin-light fixed upon the remains.

    It was evident the corpse had been hanging there with the ghouls cutting slices and organs from it for at least three or four days.

    With nothing more to learn from it, Tas¨¬a shut the door and backed away. She thought of Sinclair. The Canadian woman with whom Tas¨¬a had become friendly.

    Surely, she had dined on that same corpse.

    Tas¨¬a heaved and gagged at that very thought. The pain from doing so was intense; she had nothing left in her to hurl to ease the burden.

    Before she was willing to take off, she did another quick search up and down the rows of storage units. This time she found someone.

    Eddy leaned up against the back wall of a storage unit close to the downed wire fence. His pants were down to mid-thigh. One arm spread against his stomach as if to hold his guts in, and the other held onto his shriveled penis.

    A pool of thick, nearly dried blood caked the sad-looking appendage.

    Tas¨¬a squatted down beside him. She shone the light in his brown eyes. No reaction, for he was dead, as she suspected. His cheeks were caked with dry tears.

    Beside him on the wall was another bloody piss stain sprayed on the wall like commemorative artwork to acknowledge a futile, unhappy existence.

    "My dear lady Anneb¨¦l really fucked you up. I can''t imagine the pain you went through as your kidneys failed you. I also have to say, given the decrepit shit you pushed on Anneb¨¦l, to some degree between one and infinity, you likely deserved it."

    Tas¨¬a stood back up and glanced up past Blackhead Snake Hill at Terry and Roberto''s house. With a small bribe, they were kind enough to let Sinclair stay for a few days until Tas¨¬a returned.

    She checked her watch. Just another matter that needed to be penciled in on her itinerary.

    Tas¨¬a parked her bike by the porch with the swing. There was not a single light on inside. Tas¨¬a darted up the steps and she was about to knock on the door when she noticed it wasn''t closed-shut all the way.

    Tas¨¬a opened it halfway.

    "Hello," she said, loudly. "Terry? Roberto? Sinclair?"

    No answer.

    Tas¨¬a walked in. Running along the den wall, brushing against furniture in haphazard collision, a cat sprung past her and through the door.

    A lamp had been knocked over, along with many picture frames and porcelain figurines. Though Tas¨¬a attributed the mess to the cat, she did not take any chances when she pulled the Desert Eagle back out.

    She walked quietly to a hall that adjoined the den. All the doors in the hall were closed. A stairwell opened up at the end of the hall.

    Tas¨¬a stepped back out into the den. She crossed to the other side of the room and stepped into the kitchen. A chair was knocked over. A window was broken and mostly knocked out with a splintered wooden frame and shattered glass above the sink.

    On the table was a single plate holding a half-eaten raw steak with something spread thickly on top of it. Tas¨¬a took out her pin-light to make better sense of what she was observing.

    It was merely a thick sauce of horseradish and greens, likely spinach.

    She was elated to see Sinclair embracing a post-cannibal lifestyle.

    Definitely, she is trying to substitute for any iron deficiency.

    But, what to make of this? Sinclair was eating her dinner when someone broke into the house. A struggle occurred, and now no one was here. No lights on, it had to have occurred during daylight.

    Did the power cut off? No, Tas¨¬a heard the water pump running.

    Tas¨¬a began to wonder if she put Roberto and Terry in danger by asking them to give Sinclair shelter. So near the storage facility, perhaps it was a bad idea. An oversight of conscience on her part.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. No reason to assume it is related, and, besides, Sinclair needed more help than Tas¨¬a could provide at the time, given her own compromised state of being.

    Tas¨¬a checked all of the rooms of the house. No one was around. No sign of struggle, nor damage except for what she discovered in the den and the kitchen.

    Most likely the couple wasn''t there when it occurred, Tas¨¬a decided to her relief. There would have been more signs of disorder, of a greater struggle, if they were involved. Roberto was physically imposing. Yet, there wasn''t even any blood anywhere.

    Whoever it was, they caught Sinclair when she was alone.

    Tas¨¬a decided that she had nothing else to go on, she would make one more sweep, and then leave. On that sweep, she did find something she missed the first go around.

    A needle was embedded in the ceiling above the kitchen cabinets. It left a little wet mark when she plucked it out of the ceiling tile.

    Without spectroscopic equipment, she could only hazard to guess what was inside the needle.

    Her gut said it was a horse tranquilizer.

    Tas¨¬a wrapped the needle in a rubber tube that she found in a kitchen drawer and then she stored it away in her fanny pack.

    A ruckus filled the house with noise. It came from just outside. Squawking birds and yelling kids. Tas¨¬a peeked out the door.

    It was the cockfighters at it again, holding their birds while circling one another.

    Two kids faced off inside the circle. All the other boys and a few tomboys stood around it, yelling and shaking their fists in a commotion.

    Many of them held roosters in slings wrapped around their shoulders. The roosters all cackled along with the children.

    One boy in the ring suddenly went low with his cock. Its talons clutched into the knee of the unfortunate kid that was his opponent.

    He yelled, "I give! I give! I give!"

    The winner raised his rooster triumphantly over his head. The bird squawked with its chest puffed out while its head jerked in a cocky strut.

    Its happy owner smiled as blood poured down from a gash on the side of his head.

    Stupid kids.

    "Hey," Tas¨¬a yelled to get their attention, "did any of you see what happened in here? In this house?"

    The losing boy pushed through the crowd, suspiciously, as he limped away, holding his knee.

    "Hey you," Tas¨¬a called out to him. "Did you see something?"

    The kid turned around and glared at her.

    "The bad-ass-looking dudes said not to talk to you."

    "Tell me what you know!"

    "No. Dudes said not to talk to you."

    He hobbled off down the street as another match began.

    Tas¨¬a decided it was useless to grill these lads. Their limited little minds would not retain anything of value, anyway.

    She cursed as she started her bike. Several roosters squawked as the current match got bloody.

    Look at them. All the stupid little cocks think they are winners.

    Tas¨¬a turned her bike away from the gathering before she floored the accelerator.

 2.45 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a had a choice to make when she merged back onto the interstate. Go left to El Hoyo or right to the recycling center?

    The hit squad still roamed around Villa Marr¨®n in an Audi. Given they were willing to give up the tail on her earlier when she flashed the Desert Eagle did strongly suggest they believed they could rejoin the hunt at a time of their choosing and their leisure.

    Decision made, Tas¨¬a merged to her right. She reasoned the remoteness of the recycling plant may entice the hit squad to try something.

    Tas¨¬a wheelied as she passed the storage facility where she wrecked so much havoc.

    Perhaps, Tas¨¬a considered in the form of an internal debate, she should take some time to trash the evidence left behind. The previous evening she worried that a massacre would draw attention to her hideaway town, Villa Marr¨®n.

    The police seemed not at all concerned about the activities in which she was involved, whether at the storage facility or the Hijos Lux brownstones in the very center of their downtown!

    Did they not receive calls from residents about the shootings in which she was involved? As well, many cities had sensors to detect gunfire. They sent out drones to canvass the immediate area under suspicion, but here, nada.

    The words of Romona, the food truck chef, came back to Tas¨¬a''s mind.

    The old troubles, they are returning.

    Before the Salvage reestablished some semblance of an orderly society, the regional governments had collapsed during the Cull Spore Invasion. Of course, certain border towns between the nations had always been anarchic smuggler''s paradises for many generations.

    Even still, those almost quixotic places had never descended into anything to match the savagery of the days after the Cull Spores invaded.

    Is this what was occurring? The emergence of a second collapse? She recalled that terrible first year when her barrio was under lockdown.

    Food was strictly rationed to where even her grandmother, whose fulsome rump attracted the attention of a Russian military-intelligence officer all those years ago, got skinny.

    Her father and the general taught Tas¨¬a how to be a little spider monkey thief. She stole from the supply trucks as they entered the gated communities of the much better-off government officials that remained behind.

    She remembered asking her father why did they not leave the region like the other well-off people.

    They would not survive very well in the outer world, darling, many of them are wanted criminals.

    Tas¨¬a sighed to herself. What a lesson in life that year turned out to be.

    At the top of a hill, Tas¨¬a observed the sprawl of lots, buildings, storage bins, solar panels, equipment, oil drums, vehicles, and machines that comprised the recycling center below her. Fortunately, it was strictly a daytime operation for the personnel who worked there.

    Squat-legged drones walked the fenced-in parameter surrounding the main building.

    The stacks of discards she had in mind for target practice occupied a graveled lot well enough away from the armed bots for her not to be overly concerned about their possible interference.

    Tas¨¬a turned off the interstate and onto the service road. As the road curved towards the recycle center, she took note of the line of sight available from where she planned to set up her shooting range.

    Tas¨¬a stopped the motorcycle at the apex of a curve just before the road cut towards the main lot. She placed two gas grenades three yards apart along the outer curve of the road''s asphalt surface.

    Satisfied with the placement, she drove further up the graveled lot circumventing piled discarded materials.

    She got off of her bike and shuffled from bin to bin to see what she had to work with among the discarded glassware.

    The discards were not permanent discards. Most of the free-standing bins were full of glass items, whiskey flasks, bourbon decanters, beer bottles, aftershave containers, all the items composed of brown and green glass, and antiques from the twentieth century.

    Due to the chemical components involved in manufacturing the colored glass discards from the previous century, the materials were kept separated until at least ten tons of it had been accumulated, making the processing of it cost-efficient.

    Which meant, Tas¨¬a had a lot of shit to shoot up for her blasting away at shit pleasure. Between the two boxes of .32 ACP ammo, she had in her possession two hundred rounds worth of wanton destruction.

    Tas¨¬a assembled her TAC-50 rifle. She would have loved to have fired it off at the range, but she did not have the .50 caliber ammo to spare. She stockpiled it when she could, but in the last few years, the round was becoming more scarce to acquire.

    You certainly would not find the heavy-duty sharpshooter rounds in a Quick Mart aisle, and yes, Tas¨¬a always looked out for them wherever she shopped.

    Perhaps, the hit squad would be so kind as to allow her to acquire some more practice with the TAC-50.

    She checked the visibility of her immediate area. There was plenty of light flooding the property from both the rows of lamp posts along the Interstate and those mounted around the complex.

    She was mostly concerned with her sightline visibility up the service road. Tas¨¬a shouldered the rifle and peeked through the scope. It took her several seconds to spot the pair of grenades she had left on the side of the road.

    Not good.

    She walked several yards away from her bike and she shouldered the rifle once more.

    Shit! Tas¨¬a spat in a curse.

    Again the grenades were obscured by their grey surroundings. This angle was even worse.

    She tried to sight them with both the infrared and the low-light settings on her goggles. The latter was slightly better. That time it only took five seconds to find the grenades from a secondary position.

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    Tas¨¬a marked a spot beside a bin to which she would have to return if she spotted the Audi.

    Tas¨¬a practiced her draw several times from that position until the grenades were spotted accurately in underneath a second.

    She placed the TAC-50 level over the nearby bin so she could grab and raise it in position easily. This compromise gave her less tactical flexibility than she would have liked, but it would just simply have to do.

    Before popping off the bottles, Tas¨¬a did not forget her beer and donuts. She was starved and thirsty, after all. Even her bladder felt nearly empty despite her earlier consumption.

    The beer tasted delicious, and her stomach thanked her in turn with a restive purring noise. She took several bites of the donut, and many deep gulps of the beer before putting the remaining morsel of fried cake back in the paper sack.

    The contents of the bottle of beer Tas¨¬a ruthlessly finished off. Looking at the bottle, she wondered if the beer would help take the wicked burn out of her pee stream. Tas¨¬a decided that she needed to drink the remaining three bottles before she gave that a try.

    Truthfully, after she had blown through four sets of eight bottles, Tas¨¬a got bored. Her original impetus for dealing with her heated longings had mostly dissipated. Other events intervened, and now she was merely on watch, waiting for the hit squad to arrive.

    She had an idea in mind.

    After Tas¨¬a finished off her second bottle of the Canadian brew, she cleared off some broken glass to set the bottle down on the plank.

    Tas¨¬a hopped on her bike and revved it up. Tas¨¬a circled the graveled lot to gain speed. On her last go around she now drove at a steady fifty miles an hour. At sixty feet from the bottle, she grabbed the brace bar between the handles in her left hand, and her pistol in the other.

    Aimed. Shot. Missed.

    Well, there is something I can improve upon at the range.

    Another idea occurred to her. She had a built-in cheat. Tas¨¬a drove around the lot as she had done so before. When she reached the desired speed and distance, she tightened in her stomach after drawing in a deep breath.

    The gut wrench triggered her sense of slow time. It was the first time she had succeeded at it without there being a dire need for it.

    She had a chance to examine the effect. Her lips were numb, a chemical mist sizzled in her nostrils, and Tas¨¬a could feel her eyes vibrate, yet her vision was never clearer.

    The greyness of the evening was gone, replaced with a colorful delineation of form to every object. She could see the cathedral illustrated on the bottle''s label clearly.

    She aimed the laser bead at a round stained glass window on the label illustration. The bullet struck through it.

    Tas¨¬a whooped triumphant, but she checked her watch. Did she have the time to learn the proper technique of drive-by shooting?

    As she asked herself the question, a light flashed across a window on the side of the main building. She glanced over to the road.

    The Audi pulled into the service road without decelerating. Tas¨¬a did not count on that. Her TAC-50 was too far away for her to grab in time to make use of the trap.

    There was another way. She accelerated her Virago, braked hard at a swerve, and dropped it as she pulled her legs up in a summersault.

    In mid-air, Tasia breathed deep, and her gut clenched, once again triggering her perception of slow time.

    She landed on her feet, raised her pistol, and she took aim. She could see the grenades now with no obscuration, nor did she need the scope.

    The Audi''s front bumper lined up with the front grenade. Following her intuition, to compensate for wind shear and projectile deceleration, Tas¨¬a rose the red bead up and to the left before pulling the trigger.

    The grenade exploded beside the tire. She repeated the action on the second grenade.

    The Audi flipped over on its roof.

    While holstering the .32 pistol, Tas¨¬a ran back to the rifle. She took cover and shouldered it.

    The front driver door opened. The driver crawled out onto the asphalt surface of the road. He coughed from the smoke that surrounded him.

    He pulled a machine pistol out when he stood up. Tas¨¬a took the entire front of his head off.

    His body fell back into the car. From the inside of it, came a piercing scream.

    For nearly half a minute, nothing else occurred. Then someone peeked out from the side of an open door and quickly ducked back in.

    Tas¨¬a controlled her breathing. She would be ready for the next game of peekaboo.

    The head darted back up. Tas¨¬a clicked into her perception of slow time. It became easier every time she did so.

    The head appeared frozen in place. A balding man who appeared frightened out of his gourd as his eyes quivered.

    She drilled him in the right eye.

    Another piercing scream accompanied the spray of blood exiting the back of his skull.

    .50 calibers tended to leave big messes.

    Several more seconds passed and a shirt waved from over the car.

    "We surrender," yelled the last man of the squad.

    She realized it was his voice that had done the screaming.

    "I don''t care," Tas¨¬a yelled back. "I have no use for you alive. By killing all of you, I am sending a message to your masters to stay out of my town."

    "Well then, if its a fight that you want . . ."

    These were professional killers. You could not trust them. Mercy and negotiation were pointless.

    Tas¨¬a breathed in deeply. She was going to try something different. Her senses became more acute in slow-time perception.

    She could hear the man frantically priming something. She heard a click followed by a higher-pitched click.

    Of course, he was trying to buy some time.

    He had in his possession a miniature drone. It likely carried a singular frag grenade payload.

    With just her hearing, Tas¨¬a had a fix on the drone, though metal and glass blocked her view, it did not matter.

    This was a .50 anti-material rifle, after all.

    She shot it dead center into the drone. An explosion occurred inside the Audi. She saw an arm tumble in the air above it.

    Soon came feminine cries repeating, "don''t shoot. I''m pregnant."

    A submachine gun was hurled in the air in Tas¨¬a''s direction. Followed by a pair of shoes, a Ka-bar military knife, a skirt, a t-shirt, French-cut panties, and a bra.

    "Alright, no tricks. Come out. I won''t shoot you."

    Tas¨¬a switched to her Desert Eagle and its laser penlight as she walked closer.

    The woman emerged from behind the car. Her cheeks were spread in tears. She was beautiful, with long hair and tall; the narrow, determined face made her appear all the more striking. Tas¨¬a estimated from her lovely bump that she was around four months pregnant.

    "Your trade doesn''t suit motherhood," Tas¨¬a said.

    The woman only replied with a sniffle and a gasp to hide the fact she was crying.

    "Are you crying for yourself, or the baby?"

    The woman hung her head down. Now, she let out a sob.

    "Think of how I would have felt," Tas¨¬a pleaded, sternly. "If you had died like your comrades, it would have been the first time I killed an innocent human life. Mother and assassin don''t mix."

    The woman wiped her eyes.

    "I would ask," even with only a few words, the woman spoke in a distinctive Balkan accent, "that you not to judge me too harshly, but then, I was sent to kill you."

    Tas¨¬a nodded, she wanted to like this person, but business was business.

    "Alright," Tas¨¬a began, stridently. "Turn around, lift up on your toes, and spread your cheeks."

    Could not be too careful. They called them crackle beads. Buttholes and vaginas made excellent hiding places for those deadly weapons.

    The Serbian woman complied. She was clean.

    Then Tas¨¬a noticed that on the woman''s shoulder was a tattoo. An etching of two wolves ripping into the sides of Christ on the Cross. Beneath the illustration were the words.

    Ordinis Sancti Romani de Novissimis Diebus.

    She had seen those words and the illustration on an emblem before in the office of Hugo Brassi.

    "What is your name," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Silvia."

    "Well, Silvia. It is a good thing I kept you alive. There are a few questions that I need to ask you."

 2.46 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a put a finger up in a bid for the Serbian assassin to be patient and stay put as she walked away towards her bike.

    Silvia held her arms together along the top of her baby bump and she rubbed at her elbows with nervous thumbs as she stretched her neck to see what Tas¨¬a was doing.

    The assassin''s jowls and eyes lowered in a hangdog expression.

    It reminded Tas¨¬a of a time she watched Brazil''s football team losing a game one season that cost them a spot in the quarter-finals, and every player on the team as they slumped together as a group had that same expression on his face.

    It was the expression of professionals at the top of their game, who had suddenly slipped, and were now at a loss to understand how they were bested.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the two remaining beers in the pack, and she returned to the assassin.

    "What are you doing," Silvia asked. Her head held down.

    "Don''t move from where you are," Tas¨¬a commanded.

    "I won''t."

    Silvia''s voice was soft and that of someone who had been defeated. She could have been faking a surrender like her companion who attempted to buy time to prime an armed mini-drone, but Tas¨¬a doubted it.

    After being humiliated in battle, there is no fight left in this one.

    As Tas¨¬a eyed the tattoo once more, she also suspected that the assassin had been humiliated into submission long before this evening''s course of events.

    When Tas¨¬a popped open a bottle behind her, Silvia winced. She did not brave to peer back.

    She has known a great deal of humiliation in her life. Tas¨¬a thought as she observed the reaction.

    "Hold your hand out," Tas¨¬a asked.

    Silvia complied. Tas¨¬a placed the bottle against the woman''s palms. Silvia grasped it and pulled it to her ribs. She stared at it like a zoned-out hippie with her eyes set upon a flower.

    She can''t be faking, can she? There is something quite off about her.

    "Silvia. There are many ways you could kill a person with a bottle like that, but I trust you understand I am never off my guard, and my speed and accuracy are ranked to the point of ridiculous."

    Silvia raised her eyes stressed against the frown lines of her forehead. The light reflected off of her pupils shimmered erie for a moment.

    "We, the team, were under the impression your abilities were still suppressed and nowhere near being fully optimized, as of yet," the assassin admitted.

    Volunteered all too easily. Is there a game being played here?

    "The treatment cycle was still in an early phase. You had not even been reassigned."

    Tas¨¬a inspected the vulnerable appearing assassin once more.

    If the tattoo didn''t confirm the hit squad came from the same group performing experiments on her, that remark certainly did.

    Tas¨¬a eyed her skeptically.

    "Did they not show you video feed from my escape from the IMCQ prison complex?"

    Silvia dropped her eyes again.

    "No. They did not," Silvia said as she rolled the bottle in her hands.

    "Go ahead and drink it. It''s yours."

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    Silvia''s back stiffened.

    "I''m pregnant. I shouldn''t . . . I am thirsty. A few swallows shouldn''t hurt."

    With her first swallow, Silvia bowed her head in a grateful nod.

    "Tas¨¬a, may I ask you something personal?"

    "Sure. Fire away."

    "As you are deep in the cycle now, has your increased tolerance for intimacy been accompanied by a strong propensity for violence?"

    Tas¨¬a froze in place as she stared back at the assassin.

    "Is that the reason they are trying to kill me? They think I''m a walking time bomb ready to shoot the shit out of everything?"

    Silvia shrugged as she fidgeted with the bottle.

    "I can only hazard to guess the reason, but they do believe all violence needs to be controlled and when necessary, to serve a purpose towards a greater good."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, feeling bewildered. She decided to get on with her next task. She inspected Silvia''s clothing but found nothing unusually weapons-grade about any of the items.

    As she gathered the clothes in a pile, Tas¨¬a recalled a spy movie she loved as a kid. It featured a Central European femme fatale as the heroine. She hid a garrot in the underwiring of her bra, and she used it to brutally kill a minister.

    After feeling through the niches of all of Silvia''s items of clothes, Tas¨¬a concluded that these were just plain clothes. Plain being the operative word.

    Though she was a beauty, there was likely nothing glamorous in the life of this Balkan-born assassin, in Tas¨¬a''s estimation. The way she held herself, bored but stiff, she lived the life of a functionary.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at it again. Two wolves devouring Christ. What was its purpose?

    When Tas¨¬a explored Hugo Brassi''s suite back at the prison office complex, Tas¨¬a got a certain orthidoxical vibe from him and the cryptic and unnamed organization whose decorative effects provided his office with an onerous ambiance.

    Tas¨¬a considered this hunch with a stern grimace.

    She isn''t a ranking member of that society. This woman is their property.

    They had already done to her what they planned to do to Tas¨¬a. She rose to her feet. Before returning the clothes, Tas¨¬a had another hunch she needed to check.

    "Silvia, don''t be alarmed. Could you standstill as I check your eyes?"

    Silvia threw her a long, rogue''s smile. It came across as highly affectatious.

    "Do you really need to ask? You have the gun."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. There was a reason Tas¨¬a asked her ahead of time. This was an assassin. Assassins have reflexes.

    Tas¨¬a approached with slow and deliberate movement with her pin-light in hand. She inched the light along the white of Silvia''s left eye.

    Silvia''s tight smile then relaxed in a more natural-appearing thin archer''s bow. The woman sighed.

    Did she know? Is she feigning in the hope of throwing me off, or genuinely giving up her pretenses?

    Tas¨¬a clenched her gut and held her breath once more. She switched the pin light to a soft focus and steadied the angle of the beam of light like a careful obstetrician.

    Silvia''s eyes were a hazel that blended into a deep brown on the ends. So pretty, Tas¨¬a nudged herself not to get caught up in aesthetic appreciation.

    As she reversed the motion the light-pen traveled, a flicker occurred.

    There. She saw what she was searching for. It was just as she read in Demona Helo?ste''s neoPalm PAM days earlier, as she recovered from her abdominal wound.

    Tas¨¬a found a faint cloudiness in Silvia''s pupils. In her enhanced vision, Tasia pierced through the cloudiness. At a tighter magnification, it became defined in an overlap of pointed crystal matrices.

    One set grew bright, and from the nearest sets the pattern spread to affect the furthest ones away from it. The other sets responded in kind.

    Though ratios of crystalline structures were in the place of numbers, Tas¨¬a could read the logarithms of matrix calculation as they occurred.

    She smiled at the revelation.

    These matrices were no more complicated than the ones she ciphered by hand in her pre-calculus classes, but the complexity they built with each move was mesmerizing.

    Tas¨¬a steadied herself away by a few feet as she took her eyes away from what her extended senses revealed.

    She gave the assassin a relaxed smile.

    "Silvia, when I say this, don''t get the idea that I am in any way distracted."

    Silvia''s voice was as flat as a Serbian could possibly sound.

    "I am not going to try to kill you Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris. What is it you wish to say?"

    "Your eyes, what is occurring there is utterly beautiful. Is that how they keep your condition under control? And keep you under some kind of hypnagogic trance?"

    Silvia raised her chin.

    "So, you know?"

    "Silvia, do you remember what your life was like before they threw you into Ward Ocho?"

    Sylvia looked away to the stars in the night sky. Her face beamed.

    "Before I became Manifest? That I do. I was an astronaut."

 2.47 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Silvia''s eyes scanned the stars. Tas¨¬a thought the Serbian assassin seemed lost in thought, but then her eyes fixed on one location and she jerked her arm up to point at it.

    "Tas¨¬a, do you see just a thumbnail above the star Gacrux, but slanted in the direction of Beta Centauri, that there is a bluish-green object? It is a bit dim and small, but quite distinctive once you focus on it."

    Silvia seemed entirely guileless now, but Tas¨¬a still exercised caution. She stood a good two yards away and behind Silvia before looking up.

    "Yes. I do see it. It even gives off a slight metallic sheen that is not the same shade of color. It is platinum white."

    Silvia glanced back at her, quite satisfied with herself.

    "That is Zaf¨ªr R¨®zsa."

    The long lost research station.

    "Santa Muerta," was all that Tas¨¬a could gasp.

    Silvia had utterly overcome her defeated demeanor. She looked triumphant, as she now continued to speak so comfortably in her own element.

    "The platinum-like sheen you are seeing is the body of the station. It is massive. If you took the HMS Queen Elizabeth and mirrored it in shape and size, the Zaf¨ªr R¨®zsa would be very close to the result. The dazzling ultramarine color is a shimmer from the antimach drive that surrounds the hull in elaborate grid work. The color is a by-product, photonic emissions."

    Tas¨¬a finally caught up to Silvia''s renewed verve and she responded, "isn''t the Zaf¨ªr R¨®zsa supposed to be lost somewhere beyond the orbit of Saturn?"

    Silvia nodded slowly, but with a raised eyebrow, as if to say, Tas¨¬a, please.

    "It is returning," Silvia corrected. "I was on a black-ops expeditionary mission to the station a decade ago."

    Tas¨¬a peered up once more. The night sky was spread vast and the stars on display were so many as to create a light haze in the humid atmosphere above them. The few clouds floating by appeared tumbled over, broken up and scattered, like wrecked ships.

    Tas¨¬a turned her attention back to Silvia.

    "How does an astronaut wind up in the Spore Isolation Unit," she asked.

    Silvia frowned. "These matters are not unrelated. The expedition, my manifestation, my incarceration, and now being used such as I am. It is all of a piece. You understand I was exposed to the nanospores on the station."

    Tas¨¬a thought she now understood what Silvia needed.

    "You want out of their game?"

    Silvia grabbed her baby bump with her shoulders bent akimbo as she peered down at it.

    "We all want out. Even those three men of whom you so efficiently disposed. Truthfully Tas¨¬a, I would be trying to kill you now, but the satellite signal that feeds the compulsion has been jammed. You must have friends working with you."

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    Felicit¨¦. My ghost in the machine.

    Tas¨¬a felt grateful for the frankness with which Silvia spoke. It eased her natural sense of paranoia.

    She understood the assassin was trying to build a rapport and establish trust. She would need Tas¨¬a''s help if she had any chance of escaping her captors.

    She decided she would be upfront as well.

    "I am limited in what I can do for you. You understand, the motorcycle would bring us too close in physical proximity for me to give you a ride to the bus station. I can spare you the cash if you need it."

    "Would you? I only need enough for travel expenses then I can get my hands on enough for a good medtech."

    "It''s not a problem."

    Tas¨¬a felt around her fanny pack. She could recognize the different cards with nothing more than the stroke of her fingertips. She grabbed one with three and a half grand on it. A card she normally kept only for her grocery shopping in big warehouse chain stores.

    Tas¨¬a passed it to the assassin. Silvia stood awkwardly with the card in her hand. She was still naked.

    "Oh," Tas¨¬a said as she reached down and grabbed the pile of clothes.

    "Sorry. Here you go."

    As Silvia dressed, Tas¨¬a gave the assassin''s body a good last glance. Silvia showed the usual traits of pregnancy. Along with the baby bump, Silvia''s dark pigmented extremities contrasted greatly with the light olive of her skin.

    Varicose veins twirled up her left thigh.

    That last detail Tas¨¬a decided to overlook when she gave Silvia a wide grin while saying, "I look at you, and I envy the motherhood as it radiates from your flesh!"

    "That is a nice thing to say," Silvia said, then with a change of tone, she continued to plead, "Tas¨¬a, there is one more thing you can do to help me. Could you stuff the bodies in the car and blow it up? That may delay the Corps from realizing that I am still alive long enough to get my cochlear implant modified and that living quartz matrix cleansed from my eyes"

    Silvia pulled her caramel brown hair to the side. Tas¨¬a missed spotting the implant earlier, but it was a much subtler design than that of Felicit¨¦''s whose device was intentionally bold and not even flesh-colored.

    Tas¨¬a nodded, cheerfully.

    "I''ll do it."

    "Thank you," Silvia said as she reached down to put her boots on. "If you don''t mind, I have a five-mile walk to the bus station to tend to. I need to get going."

    Tas¨¬a had many questions left unanswered but decided they could wait.

    "Sure. Go ahead. I''ll take care of things here. Do you have my number?"

    Silvia nodded.

    "Call me when you make it to ground, okay? You get that implant taken care of and I''ll have a spare safe house I can loan you."

    Silvia wiped at her cheeks as she repeated her thanks.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and her wrist in unison.

    "Enough with the schmaltz. Go ahead. You need to get going."

    Silvia waved her hand in a bye as she started walking briskly away. Tas¨¬a sipped from the bottle of Canadian brew while she watched Silvia make it up to the interstate.

    Given the lighting of the surrounding acreage, there was no chance the assassin could double back and take Tas¨¬a from behind. That is if Silvia wasn''t on the level.

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. She should have tried to feign being distracted to see if Silvia would have taken the bait.

    Tas¨¬a''s gut howled a low rumble to mock her. Nah. She would have seen right through it, the entire time she was taking tabs on your actions, expecting you to try it. There is a better way.

    Tas¨¬a''s safe houses were equipped with room-to-room monitoring with an AI analytical assist.

    Tas¨¬a lifted the half-full bottle straight up and chugged it.

    She had work to do, and if she weren''t mistaken, the first guy whose face she had blown off had a sexy Czechoslovak ?korpion machine pistol to add to her collection.

 2.48 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a popped the thumb-sized flashbang into the gas tank, screwed the cap back on, and hauled ass. When she squatted to take cover, the initial catalyst made a muffled implosive noise.

    Tas¨¬a felt the neoPalm vibrate in the back pocket of her trousers. At first, she let it continue as it felt nice on her sore rump, but then she reconsidered, it could be from any number of individuals to whom she needed to talk.

    Anneb¨¦l left her a text message.

    Can you meet me back at my place? Ra¨²l and J¨²n-J¨²n are having a brothers only heart to heart memorial service this evening.

    Tas¨¬a looked up as she heard a sizzling and popping noise. When the explosion occurred, in a sudden white flash, the underfloor panels, the enclosure grid, and the fuselage flew up the air.

    The tires and interior caught fire.

    Now it fully blazed. Tas¨¬a had siphoned two gallons of gasoline from the tank and she soaked the pile of bodies she had heaped together inside the vehicle.

    Unfortunately, the dead assassins had no documents, billfolds, or mobile PAs to steal.

    It made a certain sense. They got their commands directly from the satellite. All the other factors were extraneous variables, unnecessary for programmed agents to have in their possession.

    She did acquire several boxes of rounds and the ?korpion. It had the appearance of the classic Eastern Bloc machine pistol of the 1950s but was refurbished with modern materials that rebalanced its weight for recoil reduction and better reliability.

    She forgot what kind of cartridge the original version chambered, but this updated one was built around the 9 mm. Often the cheapest and most available round one could buy.

    She flipped a side switch to single shot to test the fixed iron sites. A crown label on a stray bottle made for a good target.

    The shot popped off true.

    It had the potential of becoming the new love of her life.

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head in a double-take as she caught movement from the corner of her eye. One of the squat-legged drones puttered noisily as it shot roaming laser beam sensors at the flaming wreckage.

    Time to split.

    Tas¨¬a texted back to Anneb¨¦l.

    Just wrapping up here. I''ll be over in fifteen minutes.

    One of the green laser beams crawled up the length of her leg. It had some heat to it.

    Shit, she thought, what if it can increase that beam up to weapon-grade?

    It made little sense to do so, though, as adding a projectile base turret to a drone would always be a more efficient option on small drones.

    Tas¨¬a ducked beneath a set of bins and peeked through cross rails. There was nothing indicative of projectile barrels on the squat-legged drone''s carapace.

    Four sensors sprouted out from rotator wheels attached to a larger pair of side appendages that consisted of vertical and horizontal rotators somewhat resembling gyroscopes.

    Then the beams retreated and focused together just a few feet in front of the drone. The beams turned from green to red as they did so.

    What in the Seven Hells is it doing?

    Soon came the answer. Sparks flew at a rapid rate. It was cutting through the gate.

    Tas¨¬a darted over to the furthest row of bins where she kept the TAC-50 sniper rifle.

    Tas¨¬a had three .50s left in the magazine, and one in the chamber. The rest of the ammo, she had tucked away in a leg bag attached to her Virago after the El Hoyo firefight.

    As she prepared her rifle, Tas¨¬a heard a piercing noise and she smelled the sulfurous smelt of gravel being incinerated. The lasers focused on a line working towards her.

    Tas¨¬a backed up from the corner supports and ran further behind the row of bins. The laser sliced through the support beams. An entire trough full of glass bottles came loudly crashing down.

    She immediately threw herself on the ground, getting as flat as she possibly could. Tas¨¬a crawled to the far end where the support beams held in place still.

    What she had witnessed boggled her knowledge of physics. Sure, a laser drilling through fence wire was not only feasible but such welding bots were not even that uncommon.

    But a laser beam focus that was still that effective over a hundred and twenty yards? The energy expenditure was exponentially increased to drain any battery it possessed.

    How was it accomplishing this?

    Tas¨¬a decided it was worth the trouble to investigate. She climbed up the cross beams and peeked over.

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    And she nearly lost her head, doing so. From a second squat-legged drone, a four-laser beam focus swept in an arc above the bins.

    Tas¨¬a dropped back down and flat against the ground once more.

    Even so, she still managed to discover her answer. When she poked her head up, the first drone was covered in a yellow haze that swirled around it. Two funnels from that yellow haze formed near the bottom of the drone''s sides.

    The drone had first ionized the air around it. The surrounding nanospores then became neutralized. Now, the drone was sucking them in and somehow converting the nanospores into energy.

    She had heard, in her college lecture, the nanospore explained this way. Inside its structure was a spiral spring wound up to a near-maximum kinetic energy potentiate.

    Simple enough in concept, her lecturer from long ago explained, but the real mystery is what kind of energy source could wind up the nano-sized spiral springs in the first place to produce such efficient compression.

    A five-gallon bucket of nanospores, at their current atmospheric concentration, mind you, was the equivalent of twelve hours in the operation of a standard-sized nuclear reactor supplying fifty thousand homes with electricity in its energy offset.

    What the squat-legged drone was doing was illegal by the edicts of the Salvage. For good reason, if the energy conversion were to malfunction, a big mushroom cloud of a boom would be one likely result.

    Tas¨¬a concluded it was a bad idea to shoot them in their carapace assembly. Nuts!

    Tas¨¬a flipped on the neoPalm and texted a message to Felicit¨¦.

    I''m holed up fighting off laser-welding squat-legged drones equipped with rogue nanospore conversion technology. Help!

    Tas¨¬a sent it. Seconds later, she sent another text. Pleeeease!

    As she waited, Tasia reminded herself she had an appointment to keep. She sent another text to Anneb¨¦l.

    Slight delay. I should still make it pretty soonish.

    Tas¨¬a heard a shuffling squeaking sound accompanied by the crunching noise of something walking on gravel. The drone was just around the corner. Tas¨¬a had to act now though she felt her energy from the evening''s excursions was now entirely spent.

    One more time around might do it.

    Tas¨¬a jumped to her feet in a squat. She tightened her abdomen and breathed in just as she thrust up into the air several feet. It was enough to send her flying up to where she could grab the top crossbar on the support beam and pull herself much further up in the air.

    She cleared the entire bin. A four-laser focus beam began its sweep. It would cut across, but fortunately well beneath her feet, and it was too late for the beam to adjust its route.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the TAC-50 rifle strapped to her back, and she shouldered it. Aiming squarely at the connector between the rotators that the laser sensors were fastened upon, Tas¨¬a took her shot.

    The rotators were sheared by the bullet into four halves. The laser sensors collapsed. Tas¨¬a heard a sizzling noise to her left. Still in the air, now near the apex of her ascent, she twisted her torso around.

    A four-laser focus burned through the bin trough to reach her.

    She took a second shot and incapacitated that drone in turn.

    As Tas¨¬a considered the best angle to somersault down, a third squat-legged drone caught her eye. It was over by the plank where she shot up her bottles.

    A four-laser focus point smacked her in the chest. The jolt from it felt like the cold swell of an intense heat just before it flares out throughout the entire body. But as it began to roar through her, it dampened and flowed evenly through her nerves.

    She was thrown back several feet and landed smack on her ass on the grounds of the lot, near a back fence that kept heavy vegetation at bay.

    How the fuck am I still alive?

    The energy of the bolt still coiled in her. She grasped the gravel with both hands in an attempt to lift herself only to be thwarted by wave after wave of energy leaving her body.

    She started to convulse involuntarily as the waves of energy thrashed out ceaselessly. Her loins became engulfed in a burning pain, and steam rose from her urethra.

    As she faded from consciousness the steaming piss rose in a streaming geyser spraying out for several feet straight through the fabric of her trousers.

    Even through all of the pain, her last conscious thought as she watched the waterworks on display was, I have to admit, that looks kind of cool.

    Something warm to the touch rolled back and forth over her belly. Tas¨¬a tried to move her legs but she couldn''t. Something heavy incapacitated them.

    Tas¨¬a opened her eyes. A squat-legged drone sat on top of her thighs.

    "Oh, God," Tas¨¬a gasped as she saw that the thing rolling up and down her belly was a singular laser beam.

    Her neoPalm rang out its little folk tune. Someone wanted to talk to her. She answered it.

    "Hello."

    Felicit¨¦ giggled before she spoke. "So, you are impervious to lasers are you? Hell of a trick to have up your sleeve."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "My guess is it was set to some kind of force blast."

    "If that is your guess, then you would be wrong. Look to your right to the side of the friendly drone."

    Tas¨¬a leaned her head. What she saw broke her heart. The barrel of her TAC-50 had been split and melded twistedly together.

    "Ah, man. Hell of a thing to happen to something so perfect."

    "Tas¨¬a, you look like you are about to cry."

    She shook her head.

    "Haven''t got time for the tears. How long was I out?"

    "No more than five minutes. I was in the middle of trying to gain control of the bot when it lined the beams up and shot you. I watched you through its camera. It looked like you were performing air-born ballet at double speed. Thought you were dead, but the beam did not even penetrate."

    Tas¨¬a lifted up on her elbows.

    "Sorry for the scare. Truly. Could you move the bot so I can get up?"

    Felicit¨¦ giggled. If Tas¨¬a didn''t know the saintly Argentinian, she would have called it an evil, smirking laugh.

    "I''m afraid I can''t do that just yet. Now that I have seen those boobs of yours . . . I''ll need a second peek."

    Tas¨¬a eyes widened.

    "Oh . . ."

    In Ward Nueve, Felicit¨¦ never associated with the other women. If she was sexually active Tas¨¬a would most likely have heard about it. As far as the Argentinian''s preferences, that speculation never occurred to Tas¨¬a one way or the other.

    Felicit¨¦ giggled. "You might want to see what I am seeing."

    The bots sensor eye rolled down.

    Tas¨¬a looked down at her chest. There was a palm-sized frayed hole in both her T-shirt and sports bra.

    She pushed both of the garments up and ripped them. When her boobs flopped out, a purple bruise between them on her sternum got her attention.

    "Ouch," said Felicit¨¦. "That''s going to hurt come morning."

 2.49 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    After the Argentinian finally got her giggles and catcalls out of her system, enthusiastically, Felicit¨¦ yelped out, "okay, that was fun. Ciao! Oh, Tas¨¬a don''t forget, you''ll be in Asunci¨®n soon right?"

    Tas¨¬a answered, "Did you get my data? It certainly looks that way."

    "Be sure to make an appointment with the Human Rights Commission."

    "Don''t you worry, I haven''t forgotten."

    An escaped fugitive is tasked to ask for a reprieve to be granted for a notorious anarcho-terrorist and hacker. How was that suppose to play out?

    Tas¨¬a shrugged to herself. She would worry about that when she got a lay of the land in Asunci¨®n.

    The drone backed off several feet and it shut down and made not a peep.

    That the drone went silent gave Tas¨¬a some sense of relief. She could see the wiring cut out of the fence. There was no reason it would do that unless it had been controlled by a third party who had not established access to the gates.

    Tas¨¬a removed her butt from the ground. She had more immediate concerns. She stood up as she examined the shirt. Her top and the sports bra beneath were ruined.

    She took them off and smiled as she looked straight down.

    Somewhat ample.

    Truthfully, her small frame and curvy rib indentions made her boobs stand out to an aesthetically advantageous extent.

    On Anneb¨¦l''s exomorphic torso, they would not get nearly as much attention.

    Tas¨¬a looked around. What was she going to do to cover them?

    She had a few ideas. But something else was equally problematic.

    She looked down. Her trousers were soaked in urine. So was the rest of her skin. It was beginning to smell pissy too.

    Tas¨¬a took her boots off and then stripped off everything else. Thank goodness the netting on her fanny pack was impermeable.

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    She found the French cut panties she had added to her effects. There were two large bandannas, and a pink scarf, all garments she liked to wear when she went cruising the back roads on her bike.

    Her figure was so small, the items would easily cover up her most delightful of naughty bits. The pink scarf would substitute for a bra, the bandanna of Paraguay''s flag would make for a colorful top. The solid red bandanna, with black script and ornate design would make for a slightly risque skirt. All quite doable.

    Feeling confident now, she made light of her situation.

    Here I stand, the Queen of Resourcefulness, made vulnerable to the elements. What shall I do to compensate?

    She recalled during the fight when the bin trough fell, liquid spilled out. Liquid that smelled like grain alcohol.

    Tas¨¬a put her boots back on, and then she carefully walked amongst the gravel and broken glass. As luck would have it, she found a bottle of vodka in the ruin of discards with merely the pour top sheared off.

    Tas¨¬a carried it back over to her bike where she had left her clothes, and she slipped back out of her boots. The back of her T-shirt was dry. Tas¨¬a ripped that part out of it.

    She poured some of the vodka through her hair, then over her face, shoulders, and boobs. She rubbed it into her skin.

    She poured more vodka over her abdomen, pubes, and thighs, continuing until her entire body was covered.

    In her fanny pack were a few more packages of sanitizer wipe napkins. Tas¨¬a explored every nook and cranny of her body once more with a pair of wipes in her hand.

    She finished by drying off with the rag she made from the T-shirt.

    She inspected her body. As a result of her alcohol-based scrub down the pubes looked outlandishly tangled.

    With a tisk and shake of her head, Tas¨¬a admonished herself.

    "You are no longer in prison, girl. You''ve got to maintain some control."

    Still, to her satisfaction she now smelled fresh, Tas¨¬a grabbed the vodka bottle. She was about to pour it out and throw it back in the trough when she noticed the label.

    Son D¨¦lice Sauvage, 1953

    She recalled a bottle of the rare French brand from that very decade, which occurred over a hundred years beforehand, once sold for 36,000 USD.

    "Add that to your many, many accomplishments, Tas¨¬a. You have just taken the world''s most expensive whore bath."

    Tas¨¬a realized she was mimicking the voice of her friend Este-Oeste. Oh, how she missed fucking around with that big goof.

    Tas¨¬a poured some of the very high-end vodka into her palm, and she sipped it.

    Tas¨¬a let out a squeal, and she just stood with her mouth open ajar. Never had her throat burned so delightfully. The taste was unreal, like a zest rind peeled from the very Biblical forbidden fruit itself.

    Grabbing the last beer bottle she had finished off, Tas¨¬a carefully poured the vodka into it. There was enough vodka left to fill the entire bottle. She resealed the cap with a brisk twist.

    She couldn''t wait to show it off to Anneb¨¦l, who was so proud of her French roots.

    Tas¨¬a hopped on the Virago, ready to leave. She soon tensed up. The ribbed leather seat felt cold and oddly textural against the sensitive skin of her vulva.

    "Oh, yeah . . . I still need to get dressed."

 2.50 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a waited for a response from Anneb¨¦l. Not getting one, she finally spoke up.

    "What?"

    Anneb¨¦l guffawed and then sighed.

    "Come on," Tas¨¬a pleaded, "it''s cold. I froze my little tail off riding my bike here."

    Anneb¨¦l smiled.

    "Avellana, do you have any idea how cute you look just now?"

    Tas¨¬a told her the truth earlier about her real name. Anneb¨¦l rejected it, Tas¨¬a? No. I''ll never get used to that.

    Tas¨¬a grimaced as she clasped her hands against her own waist and responded to Anneb¨¦l''s remarks on her wardrobe.

    "None. I wasn''t going for cute."

    Anneb¨¦l stood to the side, and she let Tas¨¬a through the door.

    "If you were aiming for badass, you missed that exit," Anneb¨¦l then burst out laughing. "The way your tush is just all squashed up, held under that bandanna. It''s so . . . adorable."

    Tash bent over, flapped up the makeshift skirt, and mooned her friend.

    She didn''t realize they had company.

    Agu, Anneb¨¦l''s brother, sat in the middle of the living room floor. He watched Tas¨¬a intently, not taking his eyes off of her.

    He was lovestruck. Tas¨¬a considered his reaction with a little pride. She didn''t think her rump, as tiny as it was, had that kind of power over the hearts of men. Perhaps the sheer muscular firmness of her buns made up for their lack of ampleness.

    Tas¨¬a sat down in a chair by the kitchen island. She rubbed her arms as she considered the young man.

    He had a handsome face, one very similar to his sister''s. But his eyes offset any magnetism he may have had; they were dull in tone and his eyelids drooped.

    "Oh," Anneb¨¦l began, "I know that look."

    Tas¨¬a grinned as she looked back. "Agu is close to the same stage of development as I am, isn''t he?"

    Anneb¨¦l put her elbows up on the island, and she leaned her cheek on her bald-up fist.

    "Sexually, he is further along than you. His bladder and intestinal fortitude have not been a problem in over a year. The act of sex, itself, however, it is like he is learning for the first time every time.

    "On an emotional level, he lives in his shell."

    Agu fiddled with a VR set as he watched Tas¨¬a. He lifted his head to join the conversation.

    "Hey, I hear you two talking about me. Am I going to have sex with the pretty girl?"

    Tas¨¬a blushed. He called her pretty. It normally took some strategic application of make-up to get that kind of compliment out of a man.

    Anneb¨¦l yelled back.

    "Some other time, Agu. Tonight is not a good night."

    Tas¨¬a looked at Anneb¨¦l curiously. "So, you don''t mind? I won''t if things hit off well with J¨²n-J¨²n, but that has gotten complicated."

    Anneb¨¦l looked back at her brother then she regarded Tas¨¬a once more.

    "I think a little, temporary coupling with you in particular would help push him forward. So, no, I don''t mind. I would need to be there though, at least initially, as to ensure he doesn''t freak out."

    Tas¨¬a backtracked. The words tonight is not a good night mulled around in her head. Ever since her capacity for intimacy opened up - hell, she even kissed a guy a few hours earlier - Tas¨¬a believed every night was a good night to explore her boundaries.

    Then she noticed. There were three packed suitcases on top of the dryer in the hallway. A short legnth double-barrel shotgun leaned on a wall beside the dryer.

    Where was Anneb¨¦l''s new guest, the kidnap victim?

    Anneb¨¦l leaned in to recapture Tas¨¬a''s attention.

    "You don''t think it is odd that I am Agu''s sex coach, do you?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled at this question, disarmingly.

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    "I think your intentions in regards to your brother are one hundred percent good and pure. If you have to bend the norms from time to time and assist to help his fragmented self become whole, so be it. You do what is necessary."

    Anneb¨¦l clasped Tas¨¬a in a tight hug. Held against the redhead''s bosom, Tas¨¬a felt a tear droplet land on her naked shoulder.

    "Thank you, Avellana. You have no idea how much I needed to hear that."

    "It''s alright. I kind of think of you as my big, brawny sister, too."

    Anneb¨¦l grinned as she cleared her throat.

    "Speaking of sisters. I heard you dined at Daga Chicas with a handsome man, earlier this afternoon."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and muttered under her breath.

    "Isabella. He was my contact with the Army."

    Anneb¨¦l''s eyes rolled.

    "I heard you disappeared with him into the bathroom. You had a wolfish grin from ear to ear on your face like you were going to eat him up as you dragged your helpless catch in there."

    That reminded Tas¨¬a. She needed to check to see if a virtual copy of Le¨®n''s PA was successfully transferred.

    She shook her head, raised up dismissively.

    "I had to vomit," Tas¨¬a deflected.

    Anneb¨¦l giggled. She put one hand on Tas¨¬a''s shoulder, with the other she took her index finger and she stroked Tas¨¬a''s neck.

    "I''m sure you did. The gag reflex. With that long, thin neck of yours, it''s going to take some time and effort to get used to it."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head again, annoyed at Anneb¨¦l''s teasing tone.

    "It''s not like that."

    Anneb¨¦l pulled her head up against Tas¨¬a''s own.

    "It''s always like that. When we Harvested open up our boundaries we search for every opportunity. I know. I''ve been there, I''m still there, and I''m your coach. You can be straight with me. What happened?"

    Tas¨¬a sighed.

    "I did take him back to the lavatory, hoping I could surpass my threshold and keep it all together. I thought I might be ready to experience some more tactile sensations than on my previous attempt. Then he stood there, his body, muscle tone, so very nicely formed, and his appendage raised up in attention, attentive for my needs; it looked so, so very pretty.

    "But . . . my stomach collapsed and then I started heaving. Hey, why are you laughing at me? You''re supposed to be my coach, right?"

    Anneb¨¦l covered her mouth.

    "So, sorry, Avellana, but the way you call it an appendage instead of a cock and tactile sensation instead of a blowjob, it''s adorable."

    Tas¨¬a made a smacking motion in the air as she regarded Anneb¨¦l cross¨¦d. There were those words again, ''cute'', ''adorable'', next, she is going to call me a little pixie.

    "I''m very shy about sex," Tas¨¬a insisted. "I have a filthy mouth about everything else, but that I still hold in some reverence. But you know something? Ever since I got a really good look at Bajamutt¨¦''s . . . appendage, I have grown quite fond of them."

    Anneb¨¦l nearly rolled out of her seat as she laughed and coughed.

    Tas¨¬a relaxed her demeanor. She realized right away she couldn''t take offense. It really was a funny way of putting it.

    "Oh . . . Avellana. You are too much. Let me get us some drinks."

    Tas¨¬a perked up.

    "Oh, that reminds me. I have a surprise for you. Let me go get us some drinks. I have something special for you. I''ll be right back."

    Tas¨¬a exited the suite through the huge vault door and she returned to the lot. She noticed a group of people now gathered by the main building. Not unusual in itself, but for a well-polished Cadillac parked adjacent to the main building''s walkway, Tas¨¬a would not have given them a second glance.

    Tas¨¬a had left her Desert Eagle and ?korpion in the back saddlebag. That one had a lock on it. As for the .32, she carried it holstered inside her left boot.

    It was the only place to hide anything in her current dugs.

    The .32 semi-auto. It was her dad''s concealed carry weapon of choice. Powerful enough to penetrate a skull and then cause hydrostatic damage while it rattled around inside and made mush of a brain.

    Anything larger, like a 38 Special, was much more difficult to conceal. Given her solid and consistent aim with the .32, the lower firepower was a reasonable trade-off. Especially in close combat.

    Tas¨¬a regarded the tinted windows of the Cadillac.

    Mobsters.

    They were casing the lot and keeping an eye on the transients.

    Anneb¨¦l must have one hell of a story to tell. One that she was reluctant to indulge Tas¨¬a. As soon as she saw Tas¨¬a regarding her brother as a potential prospect, Anneb¨¦l jumped on it, and she had not stopped talking about sex ever since.

    Tas¨¬a kept her motions casual as she returned to the motorcycle. She removed three things, the remaining pack of Canadian brew, the beer bottle full of vodka, and the original bottle that it came in. That, she kept wrapped in the damp, vodka-soaked rag she made from her T-shirt.

    While engaged in a flurry of activity to appear distracted, Tas¨¬a kept her eye on the Cadillac behind her through a mirror on the motorcycle. Someone got out of the back seat of the Cadillac. A fat man wearing a pink suit. He leaned up against the car. He was definitely watching her.

    Shit. Tas¨¬a didn''t want any more drama that night. She realized that was why she did not force any issues with Anneb¨¦l, but rambled on, along with her.

    The man in the mirror was growing impatient. His red leather shoe covered toe tapped on the asphalt and his arms crossed together rigidly.

    She had one means to signal to them to back the fuck off. Tas¨¬a laid the three items down carefully on the seat of her Virago so she could easily scoop them back up in one arm.

    That left the Czech machine pistol replica and some clips left inside the bag. She thought twice about the lock on the saddle bag. It was nice, weather treated leather.

    It could simply be cut into to grab the items inside it. Tas¨¬a reaaplied the lock to the dufflebag, and then shoved it inside.

    She unlocked the back saddlebag, grabbed two magazines, stuck them down her French cut panties. Then she brought out the .357 Desert Eagle.

    She held it pointing up to the sky. It got the mobster''s attention. A lit cigarette swirled end over end from out of his mouth.

    He definitely did not expect that in the hand of a little woman dressed like she was ready to shake her hips at a Carnevale parade.

    Tas¨¬a scooped up the three items. She turned around, acknowledged the man with a nod and a smile, then walked casually back into Anneb¨¦l''s suite.

 2.51 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a shut the vault door behind her and locked it. Anneb¨¦l had turned the former office into a finely-decored set of living spaces for herself and her brother. She had also reinforced the walls and window portals with assault proofed materials.

    Spook safe houses were typically less well defended.

    "Shit, Avellana! Big gun there," Anneb¨¦l exclaimed on sight of her. "How do you even hold that thing when you fire it?"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. She flexed her right-side bicep in a tight repose. A gobliny grin smirked across Tas¨¬a''s face to let Anneb¨¦l know she wasn''t being serious.

    "Experience, more than anything. If you hold it correctly, you won''t clonk yourself in the forehead while shooting it."

    Tas¨¬a realized Anneb¨¦l wasn''t a gun girl by the way she regarded the weapon curiously. She had killed a man with her fists, after all. What did she need with a gun?

    "So, it looks valuable. Is that why you brought it inside?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "No. I want to hold off on telling you because it might spoil my big reveal."

    Tas¨¬a tapped the bottle wrapped in her shirt rag.

    Anneb¨¦l bit her bottom lip as her eyes darted back and forth between Tas¨¬a and the Desert Eagle laying on the kitchen island top surface at the thief''s elbow.

    "You sure its a good idea to keep it to yourself? There has been a lot of things going on."

    That you have not told me about, thought Tas¨¬a. Though you know my own entanglement with the Javierras.

    Tas¨¬a bit her own lip in turn. She passed the bottle over.

    "Here," Tas¨¬a said, smiling as she forced through a sense of enthusiasm. "Open this!"

    Anneb¨¦l''s hands fidgeted, but she complied.

    "Son D¨¦lice Sauvage? Tellement chic!"

    Then Anneb¨¦l frowned.

    "It''s just a broken bottle, Avellana. Worse still, it''s completely empty."

    Tas¨¬a brought out her beer bottle full of the vodka.

    "It''s in here. I salvaged what I could."

    "Well then," Anneb¨¦l perked up with a smile.

    She stood up and grabbed a pair of shot glasses.

    "If I am not being greedy," Anneb¨¦l continued. "Two ounces a shot. That comes to three for each of us."

    She glanced over to her brother. Agu was enwrapped in the world inside his stereophonic headset and VR goggles.

    "Does he drink?"

    Anneb¨¦l stared straight ahead past Tas¨¬a. Tas¨¬a poured the shots.

    "Like a fish whenever I let him." She turned to Tas¨¬a in a change of tone. "Have you tried it yet? What did you think?"

    Tas¨¬a raised her shot to just beneath her lips.

    "This. It''s like squeezing the nipple of an angel and letting the milk spill into your mouth."

    Anneb¨¦l grinned wryly.

    "Do you pray to your Lord with that potty mouth?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "People have certain expectations of nuns like they do of prisons that have little to do with the reality of either."

    She thought of the shrine to San La Muerta that the ghouls kept when she continued.

    "Even here in Paraquay where we are positively drenched in the Old Church''s counter-culture."

    Anneb¨¦l squeezed Tas¨¬a''s shoulder.

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    "I''m pulling your chain, my dearie. Every old whore here like myself sends her prayers up to heaven via Our Lady, Do?a Sebastiana."

    Tas¨¬a smiled and relaxed her demeoner at this admission as she had muttered a prayer to the same hedge-saint the previous evening when she survived a near death experience.

    She held her glass out for a cheer. Shots properly clinked, they threw the drinks back.

    For Tas¨¬a, it was even better than before, but more supple and less burn. For Anneb¨¦l, she gasped as she held on to her neck with her chin raised up.

    "I wasn''t ready for that," she exclaimed. "I''m totally discombobulated."

    Anneb¨¦l shook off the trance by rubbing at her face with her two palms. With a flourish, the redhead shook her head. Her head of hair bounced lovely against her neck.

    "So," Anneb¨¦l began as she pointed with a slight jab. Her crooked finger wiggled at the Desert Eagle. "Now with the first shot out of the way, perhaps, I''ll enjoy the second one even more if you tell me why you needed that?"

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. Will the bontemps still continue?

    "I don''t want to alarm you. It''s not like he is an enforcer out there or anything. Just a walk-around guy."

    Anneb¨¦l''s forehead wrinkled together.

    "Walk-around guy? How can you be certain it''s not an enforcer out there?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded her chin vigorously, as she poured another shot for each of them.

    "Yeah. When the mob needs to know something, they don''t send some roughneck thug-ass type. They get the most amiable, likable guy on the payroll to go around observing and talking to people. The walk-around guy."

    Anneb¨¦l dropped the shot down her throat.

    "Muy elegante," Anneb¨¦l proclaimed. She shut her eyes as if she could have shut off the very world itself.

    Tas¨¬a continued.

    "This guy was definitely not an enforcer. I am certain of that. No enforcer wears a pink suit."

    Anneb¨¦l glanced back at Tas¨¬a with her eyelashes barely unclamped.

    "Pink suit?"

    "Big guy. Six four. Fat."

    Anneb¨¦l stared back.

    "Freddie ''Frenzy'' Ferenzi. It has to be. He retired from fighting. Went to work for the Javierras."

    Anneb¨¦l marched to the vault door. Unleashed the roll guard and unlocked it.

    As soon as she slammed the door open, Anneb¨¦l yelled into the night air.

    "Hey, Frenzy? Looking for me? Get your ass over here."

    He sounded far off as he responded, but as he came closer, Tas¨¬a could make more but not total sense of his words.

    "Hey __, Annie. I wasn''t sure if this was your ____ __ not. That little squirt with the big-ass hand cannon, ain''t gonna shoot me, is she?"

    Anneb¨¦l glanced back at Tas¨¬a.

    "Completely up to her. She might if you call her little squirt to her face. She isn''t known for taking a lot of shit from anyone. Even me."

    Ferenzi peeked over Anneb¨¦l''s shoulder and he got a look at Tas¨¬a. His jowls fluttered rhythmically as he studied her.

    "What if I tell her that she is cuter than a june bug? Would that mollify the situation?"

    Anneb¨¦l laughed as she let the big man inside.

    "I told her pretty much the same thing about that getup she is wearing. She was in no mood for being called cute."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head slowly with her eyes drawn low to let them both know they were treading on thin ice.

    "Evening, ma''am," Ferenzi said to Tas¨¬a with a hat tip. "I''ve come to have a chat with Anneb¨¦l. Hope you don''t mind if I interrupt your parlor drinking games, but the need is urgent, and Anneb¨¦l is the only one I personally know from this town."

    Tas¨¬a regarded the man. She had no problem extending her hospitality, it wasn''t even her house, after all. She was, however, confounded by Anneb¨¦l''s reaction.

    After all, Anneb¨¦l was so angry with the crime family, she talked Tas¨¬a into letting her blow up an Alfa Romeo HybrClydis sports car owned by them. Tas¨¬a knew little for certain but it was safe to assume Anneb¨¦l saved a teenage girl from their malevolent schemes.

    Now, Anneb¨¦l invited one of their henchmen into her home. It made little sense.

    Tas¨¬a decided to remain silent. If he was asking for some privacy, he would have to ask her directly. Tas¨¬a nodded to him, then turned to pour a shot.

    Ferenzi played it off. He turned back to speak to Anneb¨¦l.

    "Not a very talkative one. I don''t think she is going to shoot me, so that''s progress."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled as she raised her shot glass to her lips.

    Ferenzi whispered.

    "Is it cool to talk with her around?"

    "Go ahead, Frenzy. It''s okay."

    He cleared his throat before speaking again.

    "My boss has a nephew who is in a coma up in the local hospital here. We have little idea what occurred. They sent me to piece it together. Find out what happened."

    His voice was not at all threatening. He merely pleaded.

    "I see," was all that Anneb¨¦l answered back in turn.

    That was the wrong approach Tas¨¬a thought. She kept that up, pretty soon Ferenzi was going to catch on.

    "It''s the damnedest thing. I inquired with business nearby. Surveillance cameras have been wiped out from that night and only that night so, of course, I am as suspicious as hell about it now."

    Felicit¨¦? Tas¨¬a thought. Did she wipe those? Felicit¨¦ never mentioned the extracurricular work if she had done so.

    Of course, Ferenzi may have been testing them. He likely found out a few more things than he was willing to reveal. Likely so, if he spread money around asking questions.

    He did not give off a menacing air. He could have spoken to the store clerk, Eliza. A little charm thrown her way, she would have no clue she was endangering anyone.

    Or, what if the nephew was now talking. Even in a coma, it was possible for him to have brief moments of lucidity where he remembered and recalled before lapsing off again.

    Before Anneb¨¦l had a chance to be caught in any duplicity, Tas¨¬a turned around.

    "Hey, Ferenzi. Come in here and have a seat, and I''ll tell you what happened to your employer''s nephew, Sal."

 2.52 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Ferenzi''s face slackened ajar in an affected dumb look. Tas¨¬a told herself, don''t fall for it, this guy is anything but dumb.

    She smacked the seat of the chair beside her in invitation.

    He turned to Anneb¨¦l and he chortled nervously.

    "Mind if I do?"

    "You''ll have to sign a waiver. I can''t guarantee she is housebroken."

    Tas¨¬a looked at her, cross¨¦d.

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged.

    "I''m just giving the man fair warning, Avellana."

    Ferenzi laughed, even still, but hoarsely.

    "Jeez . . . What have I got myself into? Thinking I should have stayed put in Asunci¨®n. Watch the fights, make some bets, check on the old lady. See if she is up for some grab and play. With me this time. Ay-ya-ya.

    "No. I says to the boss, because his sister keeps calling and bothering him, I''ll check it out. Why? What do I care? Sal is a weirdo piece of shit with the makings of a serial killer." Ferenzi turned to Tas¨¬a as he sat down beside her. "You knew that, right?"

    She smiled. This guy is a pro. He knew exactly what to say to get on our good side.

    She responded in kind. Tas¨¬a reached down, brought up a bottle of beer, twisted off the cap, and offered it to him.

    "Weirdo, definitely. But Sal is way too sweet to ever harm anyone," Tas¨¬a said with a good measure of conviction in her voice.

    Ferenzi, distracted, winced as he watched Agu.

    "Anneb¨¦l, how is that brother of yours doing? Has he gotten any better?"

    Anneb¨¦l took her seat and poured the remainder of the vodka in her shot glass.

    "He hasn''t changed."

    Ferenzi grimaced.

    "Those treatments were expensive."

    Anneb¨¦l looked off, sadly.

    "Yeah. Waste of time. Utter futility. Made little sense to kick heads in, inside the octagon, if it didn''t serve a greater purpose."

    They grew quiet, sullen even. Tas¨¬a paid attention to that conversation, their casual back and forth, but she wasn''t buying into it.

    She had given him the answer he least expected from her. He had tried to get her to open up about her culpability by playing the part of someone sympathetic and sharing the same animus.

    Sal was taking that girl to Asunci¨®n. There are other family members involved.

    Now he was trying to get her to feel at ease by playing up his relationship with Anneb¨¦l.

    Did Anneb¨¦l buy into it?

    Ferenzi took his first sip. He held up the bottle and nodded in approval.

    "Forgive my interruption, what was that, Avellana, correct? Yes, of course. You were saying about my bosses devilkin, Sal, what did you call him, ''too sweet to harm anyone''?"

    Tas¨¬a looked the tall mobster in the eyes with the trust of a child bleeding through.

    "He always brings me lavender blossoms and roses."

    "What," Ferenzi gasped, incredulously.

    "Sometimes he comes by on Fridays and visits me," Tas¨¬a elaborated as she patted her thighs, "when I am plying my trade. He has never done anything to even suggest he is violent. Actually, he is kind of shy. Sometimes, I even have to undress him."

    There it is. His tell. Tas¨¬a thought. He was sizing her up while clenching his bottom lip, as if to say a muted ''huh?'' Tas¨¬a could tell he was wondering why Sal never kidnapped her and brought her to Asunci¨®n.

    "Never shows any sign of violence," Ferenzi asked, incredulous in his tone.

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    Tas¨¬a looked away.

    "Be honest, Avellana. It''s on me, the burden is on me to let his family know what really happened that night."

    Tas¨¬a took a big gulp of beer and she cleared her throat.

    "I get that. You see. He didn''t visit that night. It was a Wednesday, after all. I wasn''t expecting him, but I did see him. I was walking to the Quick Mart for some beer, practically the only thing I eat is the liquid bread, and I saw him in his car.

    "He was there in the fuel station carousel. Crying. He needed to leave, but he just stared off into space. I walk up to his window and I tap on it. He was so, so very agitated. It is the most violent I have ever seen him.

    "He was a wreck. His pupils were like this big. I asked him about the shit he was on. He admitted it. Thought he was dying. I convinced him to let me drive him to the back of the parking lot to have a talk before the store clerk called the law on us.

    "I take him back there. He gets all paranoid that if they find out about his plans, they would kill him. He starts losing his breath. So, we get out of the car, I suggest we go on a walk.

    "He starts running. I catch up, and I ask him what''s wrong. He says he fucked up, big time. All the pressure, he couldn''t take it anymore. Too much bullshit, he said. Then he started talking about his plans."

    Ferenzi nodded, "the plans that ''they'' were going to kill him for if ''they'' found out, yes?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded. Ferenzi wore a poker face. It was a good indication that he was not buying it. If he was finding her to be credible, likely his jowls would be hanging sloppily, and he would be grinning knowingly as if to say, that stupid kid.

    Instead, Ferenzi was squared up, defensively, with his head thrown back in aloof observation.

    It didn''t matter, Tas¨¬a thought. This is the story he is going to get.

    For a split moment, Ferenz let the mask of amiability slip. He smirked before speaking.

    "You do realize that the ''they'' is us, right?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "Of course."

    "But, he feared for his life, right? You are just going to go ahead and tell me his plan?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded with her most fetching gobliny grin etched on her face. She grasped her knees, excitedly.

    "If you quit interrupting me, I will."

    "Wait. Hold on," Ferenzi pleaded while closing his eyes to sort the matter out.

    Tas¨¬a slapped her knees.

    "Oh, you are under the impression I give a damn if he lives or dies. I don''t. That is yours and his business. Every client is replaceable. Even clients who bring lavender blooms and roses. Hey, some clients even bring me chocolates!"

    Ferenzi studied her through squinting eyes as she laid it on thick.

    "Expensive European chocolates made of exotic even narcotic plants that will only grow in the weird tropic-like micro-climes that exist in secret and hard to reach locales in the Alps. Or, at least so my lover tells me.

    "Have you ever heard of Toblerone? Of course, you have, but I bet you never heard of the back alley version. Eno-Relb?t. It''s so good. Still not as good as a Rico Turron Noog-Noog, but I appreciate the extra effort my lovers go to obtain the rare things. Like that bottle of Son D¨¦lice Sauvage over there.

    "You simply would not believe what I put out to obtain that."

    Tas¨¬a stopped speaking. She retained a pleasant smile on her face. She watched him to see if the amiable mask would slip off, as was her plan.

    His hands did fidget, otherwise, Ferenzi retained his composure.

    "We''ve gotten somewhat off track. You were saying, Sal''s plan?"

    She folded her arms and leaned forward.

    "Why bother? I can see it in your eyes, you no longer believe me. If you ever did."

    Ferenzi stared blankly. She could tell that, set against his flabby jowls, his teeth were clenched.

    She nodded towards her Desert Eagle in a fair warning.

    "I do not know where we got off on the wrong foot," Ferenzi pleaded.

    "When you smirked at me. I normally don''t let people get away with condescension, but you being a friend of Anneb¨¦l''s. You see, Sal is harmless as a kitten, but, as for myself, not so much."

    Ferenzi turned his head, he let out a hissing gasp.

    Tas¨¬a laughed in turn.

    "Snooping around this town, have you been by an abandoned storage facility? The mess left behind was created by yours truly."

    He clenched the beer bottle in his hand with a sudden shake.

    "I see you have. Rumors flying around about that place, I figured you would have to check it out."

    Ferenzi still looked away. His eyes pleaded with Anneb¨¦l who raised her brows in an ''I told you so.''

    He finally spoke.

    "It appears we are at an impasse. Where do we go from here?"

    Tas¨¬a raised up from the chair. She offered to escort him out with a tug on his coat jacket as she spoke.

    "Simple enough. You need a story to tell your boss. Go right out that door, tell him, Sal felt a lot of pressure. The family business was catching up to him. He had a plan to fake his own death so he hired a couple of guys to assist him with blowing up that luxurious Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. Get enough evidence together and sell it."

    His composure returned, Ferenzi smiled down at her.

    "Why should I do that?"

    Tas¨¬a unleashed the roll guard.

    "I think you are sincere in at least your description of Sal as a nuisance, no?"

    "Of course, he is nothing but trouble."

    Tas¨¬a sighed.

    "Then why wouldn''t you take this opportunity to get rid of him? After all, he has the ''makings'' of a serial killer. You said it yourself."

    As he passed through the door, Ferenzi noticed the three suitcases. He shook his head and chuckled.

    "I''ll think about it," was all that he was willing to commit.

    As he walked away, Tas¨¬a shouted.

    "Hey, Ferenzi, you can think about it until you solve the square root of pi in your head, you will still not come up with a more viable plan."

 2.53 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a shut the vault door, she turned towards Anneb¨¦l.

    "Well, that went down smoothly, right?"

    Anneb¨¦l let out a long-drawn breath.

    "If you say so."

    Tas¨¬a rejoined her in the kitchen. She opened the last two bottles of the Canadian, Trappist-style ale.

    Tas¨¬a felt slightly irked by Anneb¨¦l''s response. She tried not to let it show.

    "You realize, my friend, he is waist-deep in the Javierras'' sewer, overfilled as it is with a river of shit running through it."

    Anneb¨¦l leaned her head against the bottle.

    "I don''t think he cared for the way you played him."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "He already had something on you. That is why he showed up. He was playing up being sympatico a little too hard not to have an agenda behind it. He was reading you for contradictions.

    "So, it was, in my opinion, the better strategy not to be vague, hoping it would all go away when Ferenzi left town, but instead, force him to make a choice. Steer him to the one that would suit his best interest and ours."

    Anneb¨¦l stood straight up.

    "Tas¨¬a, you don''t know the history that Frenzy and I have. We were lovers, and I don''t mean to gross you out -."

    Tas¨¬a waved her hands, open and defensive.

    "I have nothing against a rotund guy like that. In fact, I am a little curious how a bitty little thing like myself would faire under something as big as that."

    Anneb¨¦l laughed until she was hoarse again. She gulped some beer down and cleared her throat.

    "I should have known that is what your mind would insinuate, and I love you for it, but that is not what I meant by grossing you out. Frenzy was my lover before I could control my condition."

    "Ohhh . . ."

    Tas¨¬a sipped at her beer as her imagination grasped at what Anneb¨¦l meant. She too had many opportunities over the years to indulge under the same less than optimal conditions, but a strong phobia and even stronger stubborn pride prevented her from doing so.

    Both of them milked the silence with darting glances at one another. To Tas¨¬a''s eyes, Anneb¨¦l had the frail, bent over appearance of someone who had been hurt. With a twinge of guilt, it occurred to Tas¨¬a, hurt by me.

    Perhaps, she should have let Anneb¨¦l keep control of the situation.

    But it''s so clear to me that her past association prevented her from seeing the game Ferenzi was playing for what it was. Still, the big girl thought she had a better strategy.

    She looked the redhead in the eye, trying to appear as sympathetic as possible.

    "Anneb¨¦l, I think he knows about the girl."

    "He should. I picked her up at the police station. Likely, the cops talked. That''s why your explanation wasn''t working its magic on him."

    Tas¨¬a heard the sound of feet shuffling behind her.

    "Avellana," Agu began. "Do you know you have a really pretty neck?"

    "Why, thank you, Agu."

    He stood with a dreamy, at ease look on his face for several seconds before speaking again.

    "Can I massage your shoulders? Your neck looks stiff. You could really use a shoulder massage," he asked.

    "Go for it."

    Tas¨¬a looked to Anneb¨¦l, amusedly. His touch was timid at first, but still, he leaned over her head. Like with most males, the offer of a shoulder massage was mostly an excuse to get a better view of a pair of boobs.

    With the scarf and bandanna covering and supporting her girls, all he was seeing from his raised angle was a bit more cleavage than before.

    The poor dear.

    Tas¨¬a returned her attention to the conversation.

    "So, you didn''t have to go in there in the police station on a rampage to rescue the girl? No wonder we can take our sweet time with this being on the run business."

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    With the last comment, Tas¨¬a nodded her head towards the three suitcases.

    Anneb¨¦l answered thusly.

    "The cops weren''t sure what to do with her. They weren''t getting any directions from anyone. Then I showed up, and I offered to pay for her bus ticket. They were all too happy to be rid of her."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled as Agu successfully attempted an old horndog maneuver. He slipped his thumbs beneath the scarf and bandanna at her shoulder blades as if to innocently enough rub the bone plates. By raising the materials upward, he loosened the support in the front.

    Now he could peek down at her boobs to his heart''s content.

    She felt like awarding him with a cookie for the extra effort he put into it.

    She looked up at the wide grin on his face. He was in his mid-twenties but would likely be locked in a juvenile mindset all of his life.

    Poor, nearly sexy but for those droopy eyes, dear.

    "You do that really well, Agu."

    "Anneb¨¦l taught me."

    Tas¨¬a raised an eyebrow to the redhead. Anneb¨¦l put her hands to her chest, dismissively.

    "He hasn''t been curious about these since I first grew them."

    "Your boobs. They scared me," Agu said, haughty. He then turned to Tas¨¬a. "I thought they were little monsters growing inside my sister. They were weird looking when she first started growing them with clumps that didn''t make any sense, not like real boobs. Nipples like antennas on a spaceship. They look really nice now, of course, but I''m still a little frightened by them.

    "Your boobs, though. Should be on the sculpture of a goddess. They only give me good thoughts."

    Tas¨¬a wanted to laugh, but the utter sincerity of Agu''s delivery and words made her contain herself.

    "Thank you, Agu. That feels really good. Unfortunately," Tas¨¬a said as she reached behind herself to tighten the twin bindings back in place.

    Then she stood up. "I am afraid we need to get going with our plans. Anneb¨¦l, about those bags you have packed?"

    "Ready to go whenever you are."

    Tas¨¬a pulled out her neoPalm and she placed it on the surface top of the kitchen island. She pulled up the index screen.

    "Ferenzi saw those suitcases too," Tas¨¬a said, cautiously.

    She found the app she needed. CamOverRide. Soon after she flicked it on, a list of every camera in a three hundred square meters was generated. She could expand the range, but the processing time would grow exponentially with each expansion.

    As she waited for the app to cipher through the local passwords and settings, she looked up at Anneb¨¦l, and Tas¨¬a made an assessment.

    She is way too fatigued to have merely sent the girl off to the bus station.

    "So, you bought the girl a ticket," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "That''s what I told the cops. I got in touch with an uncle of hers that lives an hour to the South of her hometown. I met him halfway, so he could take care of her for now."

    Tas¨¬a looked back over the list to see what had been greenlit. She was surprised to see that a few cameras from the office complex still functioned. She zoomed into the parking lot.

    Freddie Ferenzi''s Cadillac was no longer in the front lot, shared by the four buildings.

    "Perhaps, he has left," Anneb¨¦l suggested, peering over her shoulder.

    "He saw the suitcases so he knows you are on the move. He is still out there somewhere."

    Agu sat down in the seat beside her. He gently nudged his knuckles against her free hand. Tas¨¬a accepted the offer and wrapped hers around his own.

    Tas¨¬a peered back up at Anneb¨¦l.

    "While we wait for the other cameras to open up," Tas¨¬a began, "we have some time to chat. So, if you would oblige me, tell me when and where did you blow up the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis?"

    As she raised her back up stiffly, Anneb¨¦l grimaced, brushing her hair back.

    "I didn''t. When I pulled off of the highway just above a carpet joint in the town of Inzo, twenty miles due East of here, that just so happens to be owned by the Javierras, to do just that, blow up the damn car, a pair of federale copters came up the ridge on top of me. They tried to chase me down, but I shook them off when they almost crashed into one another."

    Tas¨¬a suddenly felt elated knowing that the car had not been destroyed.

    Agu moved his hands onto Tas¨¬a''s lower thigh which he touched in gentle scrapes with his fingers. She realized something then. With any other man she had flirted with an attempt at intimacy, Le¨®n, J¨²n-J¨²n, or Cuervo, that kind of direct, intimate action would have stirred her guts into purge mode.

    But now, she simply enjoyed the caress on her thigh and the nice soft stir aroused her.

    What was different? Was it because in the case of Agu she was the dominant party in the relationship?

    In the back of her head, Tas¨¬a made some plans that Anneb¨¦l would certainly not entirely approve. But, the stirring she felt was something new and if J¨²n-J¨²n or Le¨®n''s weren''t available, it would have to be explored.

    "Avellana, did I lose you there?"

    Tas¨¬a grinned back as she shook her head.

    "No. I was thinking about how that beautiful Alfa Romeo HybrClydis is still intact."

    Anneb¨¦l''s eyes lowered. Uh-huh, the orbs seemed to say.

    "Well, I''ve hidden it for now, but I still plan to blow the car up. When we get to Asunci¨®n, right there, smack in front of Don Javierras'' mansion."

    Tas¨¬a gave another shake of her head in disapproval.

    "Hey, it was a pinky swear. A fair trade," Anneb¨¦l reminded her. "You know you love your Virago much more than you will ever love that sports car."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged as she looked down at the neoPalm. More cameras came online. She switched back and forth between them until she found what she sought from a camera located at a boat dealership sitting on a nearby property.

    The Cadillac was parked on the lot behind Anneb¨¦l''s office suite. In a blind spot where they would not have been able to spot the car from any of the windows.

    Tas¨¬a gave a low gasp in bafflement. From Ferenzi''s vantage point back there behind the buildings, how would he know when Tas¨¬a, Anneb¨¦l, and Agu made their move?

    She flipped back to the first camera. The answer came clear to her. From the transients out front. One was standing so tense and rigid, she instantly pegged him for the lookout.

    He had a straight line of sight to the Cadillac to throw Ferenzi''s driver a signal when they came out.

    "Anneb¨¦l, do your windows open up?"

    "Of course. What do you have in mind?"

    Tas¨¬a flipped through the cameras once more to make sure she didn''t miss any details that could complicate the matter. Once satisfied, she nodded her head.

    "Okay. This is what we are going to do."

 2.54 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    They leaned in together over the kitchen island. Even Agu, who still held her hand like a bedazzled schoolboy, was eager to take part.

    But before she spoke, the words of Silvia, the Serbian assassin, came back to Tas¨¬a.

    As you are deep in the cycle now, has your increased tolerance for intimacy been accompanied by a strong propensity for violence?

    She certainly could not deny it. In all her years of being a cat burglar, she had only recently acquired something quite new to her experience, a body count.

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to Anneb¨¦l. Her original intention was to sneak up on Ferenzi and his driver and shoot out the tires of their Cadillac. That action could lead to an escalation of violence.

    Anneb¨¦l still retained warm feelings for her former lover. So that also complicated things.

    Change of plans.

    "Anneb¨¦l, do you have any bottles of cheap wine?"

    The redhead smirked.

    "I even have orange juice in the fridge but I don''t know how sangrias will help to get us out of here."

    Tas¨¬a squinted her right eyelid as she shot Anneb¨¦l with a finger gun.

    "I noticed the Cadillac is not a hybrid synthesis, but a bio-diesel. If I can add a catalyst to its gas tank, it''ll break down the fuel to its base molecules, rendering it useless."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded her head. Her near shoulder-length mop of hair flopped along.

    "The cheap stuff is in the pantry. The good stuff is racked up in the thermal cellar."

    As she grabbed a half-gallon size bottle of red wine, Tas¨¬a did a quick inventory of the pantry. Two bags of white cane sugar. One small bag each of raw and dark brown. Molasses, several varying flour stocks, and many other things. Evidently, Anneb¨¦l baked a lot of cookies for her baby brother.

    She removed one bag of cane sugar, a bottle of distilled vinegar, and a box of baking soda.

    Tas¨¬a turned to Anneb¨¦l.

    "Do you have any small jars?"

    Anneb¨¦l leaned her head ambivalently as she approached the pantry. She took a jar containing only two remaining Spanish olives, untwisted the lid, and plucked the pair between her fingers before handing the jar over to Tas¨¬a.

    "I see what you''re doing," Anneb¨¦l said. "How much of the wine do you need, half the bottle?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    Anneb¨¦l poured the discard portion of the wine into a glass pitcher and she set that down in the refrigerator. She picked up the half-empty bottle of wine of which she shook in a playful display.

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    "Add to this, what? Eight ounces of vinegar? And the bag of sugar, yes?"

    "You sound like you have done this before," Tas¨¬a inquired as she rinsed out the jar.

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged, flippantly.

    "Who hasn''t spiked a rival''s gas tank back in their school days?"

    Tas¨¬a dissolved a good amount of soda in warm water. She poured until it became a thick paste. With more warm water, she dissolved it once more.

    "When doing this," Anneb¨¦l commented, "you can never have too much soda. Go ahead, thicken and thin it once again." Anneb¨¦l looked off to the side with a smile on her face. "Ydre?s'' old lady. I''ve seen her pour cola drink concentrate into the pipes to clean out bio-diesel gook build up."

    Ydre?s old lady was so scary, even taller and thicker, and much, much meaner than Anneb¨¦l, that no one hardly ever called her by her name. Too much like a demonic evocation to even risk it.

    It''s best not to even think it, Tas¨¬a thought in jest. Still, the sentiment rubbed her wrong.

    She then recalled seeing Ydre?s with a young woman earlier that evening over at the Daga Chicas. Did she get her old lady''s permission to see other people? There were none of the primary and secondary relationship factors, as was common practice in the Quadra, with that couple. The two stayed pretty well monogamous.

    Anneb¨¦l spoke up with an intended snicker in her voice.

    "Ydre?s saw you earlier with your paramour du lavatore. I know you are thinking it, just what was going on there between Ydre?s and that other woman. You were thinking Ydre?s was in for a world of hurt.

    "But, her old lady got sixty days in the hole when she got caught chain banging a pair of male Correction Officers. Word of the gruesome threesome got back to Ydre?s. So, since then, they have worked it all out. Ydre?s can see whomever she wants now so long as she lets her old lady know what is going on."

    "Saoirse, it''s Saoirse," Tas¨¬a insisted. "She is behind concrete walls. No reason to avoid that name."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head and winced at this remark.

    Tas¨¬a continued. "You are a fighter in your heart. I know you would like to go a round or two with her."

    Anneb¨¦l screwed her face up in objection.

    "How do you know that I haven''t?"

    "Because you are standing here talking to me and you are not laying dead in a casket."

    Anneb¨¦l sauntered over, and as she peered down, she held Tas¨¬a by the sides of her face.

    "Enough of this frilly girl talk," Anneb¨¦l said as she feigned twisting Tas¨¬a''s neck, "tell me what you need me to do."

    After their final consultation, Tas¨¬a was ready to make a move. She raised a window on the side of the building that faced the street. Of course, neither the spotter nor Ferenzi could see her from this side.

    As Tas¨¬a leaned out, she stopped and she stayed perfectly still before slowly ducking to the side behind a curtain of floral design.

    The plump streetwalker happened to be walking up the street wearing knee-high boots, a lengthy salsa dress while humming at a dance rhythm. As she passed by, Tas¨¬a noted the streetwalker''s bum was gorgeously draped in voluptuous spread with layers of pearly ruffles.

    Tas¨¬a got a gentle shove from behind accompanied by a giggling whisper.

    "I saw that nose of yours wrinkle. I can see how an itty bit like you would be jealous of that luscious tush."

    "I was only admiring that incredible dress. No need to make everything into more than it is."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded, sarcastically.

    "Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Right. Sorry that I doubted you."

    "In a petite size, it would look splendid on me. Bet Ra¨²l would appreciate a tango en ropa formal."

    Tas¨¬a returned Anneb¨¦l''s cross¨¦d look as she picked up her goods. She had to carry the wine bottle and the jar in a bag along her shoulder.

    She looked back to Anneb¨¦l as she climbed up to the support panel. With her tongue stuck out and her eyes crossed severely, Tas¨¬a slid through the window and up to the roof.

 2.55 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    A sudden burst of music caught her ears as Tas¨¬a''s long limbs pushed her up the wall. She flipped over the rooftop gutter drain trough and quickly oriented herself towards the sound. Multiple tambourines and a bongo drum filled out the rhythm of a tarantella. She also heard a horn and an acoustic guitar strumming along to the bouncing pattern.

    Tas¨¬a crawled to the front side of the building, a dozen yards just above the entrance vault door, so she could peek through a bent-up fan grill to spy on the transients below.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the pistol scope she kept in the fanny pack before putting eyes on her targets.

    As the transients all appeared harmless enough, she had taken little notice of their presence before. This set of transients possessed the air of long unemployed musicians cultured to a mostly gypsy-like existence. They wore clothes of faded motley that still bore some dignity in how the suits were pridefully maintained in their upkeep.

    Now the men greeted the plump streetwalker, availed so richly in ornate cloth, in a near cacophony with instruments accompanied by hoots and whistles. The woman clasped her hands and giggled with unabash¨¦d delight.

    As she approached them, the se?ora surprised Tas¨¬a with a set of deft high kicks that snapped out through the dress slip in a most balletic fashion. It was a move common to the two-thousand-year-old dance.

    Tas¨¬a could see from the se?ora''s quite expressive and erotic performance how the dance got banned for its lewd display back in the days of the old Roman Empire.

    The se?ora lept and sprung over to the musicians while clicking her heels on the tippy-toes of her boots.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled to herself, trying to imagine the streetwalker as the skinny showgirl she likely once was a decade previously.

    She still has those quintessential moves that made a showgirl well renown, Tas¨¬a thought, admiringly.

    As the buxom danseuse corroused, Tas¨¬a counted six men in the ensemble. Given the manner the se?ora wiggled against each in his turn, as she danced in the middle of their assembly, Tas¨¬a had little doubt that the se?ora was going to have a busy and fulfilling rest of the late eve and coming morn ahead of her.

    Tas¨¬a rose above her own feelings of envy in an internalized salute of congratulation.

    Living the dream, doll. You are living the dream.

    The look-out was amongst a group of four other transients who sat further down the lot around a park bench near the popping roar of a burning fuel barrel that smelled of the oils of cured hemp leaf. He propped himself up along the crook of his shoulder blades, curved severely in a vulture''s repose, against the red brick wall. His arms folded together stiffly.

    He looked as if he hung there with his heels pushed rigid against the wall.

    Tas¨¬a smiled. She knew why he stood that way. Lookouts often assumed this very pose to keep their bodies attentive while simultaneously giving some rest and relief to their backs. As practical as this stance was for him, it was going to prove exploitable in Tas¨¬a''s estimation of what she would need to do to get to the Cadillac.

    Hence, why Tas¨¬a now smiled in a full gobliny while licking her lips. The Serbian spy''s question about violence pressed upon her conscience as she considered shooting the lookout as a possible distraction.

    Damn it! You are going to take all the fun out of it, Silvia!

    Tas¨¬a examined the lookout''s crew, all four of the men appeared significantly older than him. They had the futile look about them of cast-out flunkies who had once served malevolent capos in the most venial of capacities.

    If a body had to be sawed in several parts and then discarded piece by piece in the ditches of a long stretch of highway, these were the mezquinos who would commit such a nefarious and foul deed.

    Now, look at them, Tas¨¬a thought. Laid so low in life, they were too broken to be of any concern to anyone.

    That troupe of weird cockfighter kids would easily best these slouches.

    Among this crew, she realized right away, Ferenzi had made the only viable choice. The lookout possessed a pride in his mannerism that eluded the others. He had some ambition set deep in the scope of his constantly darting eyes.

    As the others watched the sway of the dancing se?ora''s delectable rump while sipping from forty-ounce cans of maize-based malt liquor, the lookout kept his eyes busy elsewhere. When on the occasions that most volup of sashaying body masses got in the way of his line of sight, it annoyed him to the point that he snarled and muttered swears to himself with a putter of spittle on his lips.

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    And she could read from those lips the name of the Bless¨¦d One.

    Assuredly growing up, he had known the way of the head mistress''s wooden straight ruler, in the same way that the children of guerillas come to know the way of the gun.

    Tas¨¬a finally concluded that he was going to stay put in his current position, so she eased back, turned around, and crawled to the east side. She pulled her head up with care, first checking behind herself.

    Now, it was she who cursed silently to the Sacr¨¦ Madr¨¦.

    The easier solution she had hoped for was foiled, for her head would be in the lookout''s line of sight. The way he kept his head in motion like a true pro, it was too great a risk for her.

    No good.

    Tas¨¬a pulled her head back down and she consulted with the neoPalm''s display of camera outputs. Ferenzi stood by the passenger door, leaning on the roof, as he smoked at a cigarette that fumbled around in his mouth while he jabbered on his phone.

    He had no line of sight on her from his position, but as for his driver . . . Tas¨¬a determined that the driver would see her if she crawled down the wall either down from here, her current position, or if she chanced to risk going down the back south side wall.

    Well . . . she sighed, almost reluctantly to herself as if she were breaking a sacred vow, a distraction it just has to be then.

    Tas¨¬a pulled the .32 caliber semi-auto pistol out of her boot.

    For the pity of it, I so committed myself to a peaceable solution this time.

    Tas¨¬a scooted with elbows pulling her along back up to the fan grill once more. She made solace with herself while deep in thought about the lookout''s own culpability in all of this.

    He did take the job of his own volition, and he did so with no care to the well being of those of whom he so eagerly surveilled.

    She had no time for the shrill, shameful journey of a guilt trip. Too much rode upon her success.

    Tas¨¬a laid the neoPalm down propped up on a loose clutter of small, thin bricks so she could keep an eye on Ferenzi and his driver.

    The pistol she held in her hand with its gas-powered chamber lock was designed so as not to amplify the sound of a discharge. A .32 was a low caliber projectile, and that helped minimize the volume of sound as well. However, Tas¨¬a needed at least some actual sound suppression to muffle the source direction so no one would be jerking their heads her way in the aftermath of her taking down the lookout.

    Tas¨¬a took out a roll of gauze fabric from her fanny pack. She tested the diameter against her barrel. With the gauze fabric tightly restricting its bendable mass, the roll would not fit around the barrel.

    Easily solvable.

    Tas¨¬a stripped out the thick wad of gauze wrapping from the body of the roll. She then eased the cardboard cylinder along the shaft of the barrel to mold it to the solid structural shape beneath it.

    With four rubber bands wrapped tightly around it, the roll was now well set in place. Lastly, she pulled the wad of gauze around the barrel in a stiffly drawn wrap. The remaining dozen rubber bands in her pack she used to hold the gauze in place.

    Tas¨¬a looked over her handy work with an appraisive grimace. It was well done, it should work just fine in theory, but - she glanced over to the diligent lookout - how was she going to aim the thing?

    My special needs ability? The one that makes my pee-hole burn with a venomous bite and steam out in a scalding geyser?

    Her gut answered her in turn, yup, that would be the one. Do it, otherwise you risk maiming or killing the kid. That gun doesn''t have anything even close to a proper sights line-up with only the rear iron now exposed.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head as she breathed in deeply and tightly held the breath in place. She found that concentrating her psyche''s intensity just beneath the skin of her abdominal wound caused the effect of her overdrive perception to shift into being nearly instantaneously.

    Warm vapor rose from her sinuses.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the lookout. He looked elsewhere, eyes focused at something across the street, fortuitously not in her direction. Good, as she needed to lean her torso into the bent-up fan grill which increased her potential exposure to the people below. Tas¨¬a pushed the gun up against the fan support. The broken wire above, she noticed, curved into a bead.

    Perfect!

    She lined up the rear iron sight in congruence to the makeshift bead. She had to pull the backside of the .32 up a few inches so it aimed just above the curve of his right foot.

    Now, with a proper triangulation, the laser dot could be easily set in place.

    She merely wanted to shave the leather of his shoe so he would feel the hot projectile as it skint the side of his foot to cause a good, distracting scare.

    Tas¨¬a pulled her mind inward, focused upon the layout of her vision of his foot from across the parking lot and she adjusted the subtle but remaining differentials accordingly. Most naturally, the sight aligned against the apex of the shoe curvature. It would graze right between his arch joint and his ankle joint.

    Before she was even fully aware of it, with an easing of the trigger, it was done. The lookout lunged face forward into the ground. He twisted around on his back as he grabbed his ankle with a bellowing shriek emptying out of his lungs.

    As Tas¨¬a threw her head down, the bongo drum ceased playing in a dead stop. The other instruments followed suit while the men raised their voices in alarm.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the NeoPalm and she studied the camera feed. Ferenzi was barking an order while he pounded on the roof, to which the driver shuffled out of the car before slamming the door behind him. Soon, he was on his way briskly strolling up to the adjoining lot to check out the commotion.

    She knew this was likely how Ferenzi would play it out. She gathered from her brief acquaintance that he was an overly cautious man. Naturally, he sent the driver.

    Tas¨¬a pocketed the gun and neoPalm before she began to hustle down the street side wall.

    So far, so good, Tas¨¬a said to herself, in a hopeful state of mind.

 2.56 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Tas¨¬a scuttled down the wall. With a full body length of empty space left to go, she pushed off of the bricks, twisted around, and, just before she met the ground, Tas¨¬a set her legs in position to swing off in a full burst dash so as not to waste any time.

    By Tas¨¬a''s estimation, she had two minutes before the driver either called back to report to Ferenzi, or he returned to the Cadillac and told his boss someone was taking potshots at their lookout.

    How was Ferenzi going to respond?

    Would he play out his plans as he originally conceived them or perhaps he would get spooked and make haste for a tactical retreat?

    She doubted the latter possibility even given Ferenzi''s instinct for caution. He was still a mafioso who didn''t scare easily, after all.

    In her planning, Tas¨¬a gave herself one minute to get into position and then another minute to spike the Cadillac''s gas tank. Just the next property down the street, Tas¨¬a eyed the boat dealership of whom''s lot the Cadillac was parked on. Her plan was to scurry up behind a row of boats and use them as cover as she approached Ferenzi.

    Tas¨¬a prepared as she neared the corner of the building; if she bent down in a lobster crawl, Ferenzi, who from time to time checked his six, would not be able to see her with his view blocked by the bend of the field of grass between the lot and the sidewalk where the ground curved into the concrete walkway.

    The thrill she felt being in her natural element of cloak and dagger style subterfuge was suddenly cut short by a chill that ran down her spine as she began to recall something. It was something she had chosen to dismiss as irrelevant to the execution of her plans at the time it occurred. Now, however, her deep intuitions encroached upon her mind the importance of the matter.

    Just a few minutes before, when she pulled her gun up into the bent-up wires of the fan, the lookout had been momentarily distracted by something that he had seen over on the very same street she now hustled down.

    Where is that something now, she wondered, as she heard the slightest of rustling noises sweeping in from behind her.

    Tas¨¬a leaped up in the air with a twist of her upper torso facing backward and her knees bent forward so she could grab her gun out from where it was holstered in the inside of her boot.

    Tas¨¬a caught sight of the giant wolf spider, now just a few yards away from her. The vile thing was in the midst of a strident bullrush dash. She thought of the arachnid minions in service to the Infernal Madre.

    This one, unlike those freakish things, moved untamed like a completely feral monstrosity set loose. This spider was covered in a coarse matte of unnatural ochreous green fibers; it was also twice the size of Egilona''s pets.

    Tas¨¬a held on to the grip of the semi-auto pistol, readying it to be pulled out of the holster once she maneuvered her body around so she could take a clean mid-air shot.

    With her body steadily balanced after a slight adjustment, and just as she reached the momentum shift of her arched jump at its apex, Tas¨¬a was well-positioned for a shot at the spider''s body mass.

    When she pulled on the gun for the final execution of the maneuver, the gauze roll and outer layer of rubber bands that she neglected to remove due to time constraints got caught on the holster snaps.

    Tas¨¬a tugged once more, but this motion threw her out of alignment. Her upper torso jerked in a compensating twist, facing up towards the glare of the lamp lights above her. By the time the final tug succeeded, Tas¨¬a landed on the concrete and busted her ass on impact. The wine bottle broke with a sharp clank and her pistol skidded across the walkway before it stopped several yards away.

    The sound and motion of the pistol bouncing along the concrete surface got the giant wolf spider''s attention. The beast spat out a thickly yellow venom that covered the pistol. Tas¨¬a gasped in alarm as she watched her favorite .32 semi-auto pistol dissolve away into a sulfurous smelt, almost instantly.

    "Well, shit on me," Tas¨¬a cursed under her breath.

    She grabbed the stiletto into her right hand and then used the same forearm to pull herself up, only to lose her balance as she felt something gripping her arm tightly. She fell in a tangle of her own pair of legs that scrambled in utter futility against one another.

    On an emotional level, Tas¨¬a was dealing with something she had never experienced before:

    so this is what being a clumsy oaf must feel like, Tas¨¬a assessed.

    Finally, she eyed the source of her current predicament. Her right arm was stuck on the concrete walkway with a thick net of webbing tightly binding it down.

    Tas¨¬a yelled a taunt at the wolf spider as quietly as she could muster though Ferenzi was still a good one hundred yards away from her with a thick, brick building between the two of them.

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    "Venom and webbing? You feral abomination of a sum''bitch.  Choose one or the other!"

    As she cursed it, she dodged another web shot aimed at her feet. Though her arm was stuck, she could still use it to lever her position in her better favor, Tas¨¬a concluded. She would be better prepared for the next attack.

    Tas¨¬a watched the beast to gauge when she needed to make her move. She had a good notion of how its instincts would guide it on its hunt. With its thick matte of fibrous hairs sweeping back, the wolf spider suddenly tensed up as it held its position.

    Tas¨¬a pulled her entire body upward with a kick-off from her legs. She now stood upside down with all her weight on the one arm held stuck in place as the spider pounced where her lower torso had been just a moment before.

    Aiming for my soft meats like a true hunter. Sorry though, it makes you utterly predictable.

    With its head hanging low, right in front of her, Tas¨¬a finally had an advantage she could exploit.

    In the next instance, Tas¨¬a, with a swift downward arch of her free arm, switched the stiletto into her left hand. With which, she sliced through the spider''s oddly chthonic brain cap. On the next thrust, the blade went so deep into the incision she had made that the edge came out through the other side of its mandible encroached mouth.

    With all eight of its legs pumping stiffly and twitching in disarray, the spider finally collapsed. Its soft abdomen spread out flat on the ground.

    Tas¨¬a cut the web away from the walkway where the sticky material bounded her against the rough and painful concrete of the pavement.

    She flipped herself back around and landed her bruised ass on the pavement, once again.

    "Ow, ow, ow" Tas¨¬a muttered as she also grimaced at the next thought that occurred to her. The spider had cost her twenty seconds of her allotted time already.

    The wine bottle had broken into several thick and sharply edged shards. It was unsalvageable. As for the contents, there were none left in the intact bottom to even clean the oozing spider remains off of her left hand. The spill had also made an ugly mess of her shirt.

    Tas¨¬a, ever practical though, shook her head and she cast that concern aside.

    There was nothing she could do about all of these factors weighing against her plans, but to press on, improvise, and . . .?

    The jar of baking soda solution was still intact. Smiling with glee, Tas¨¬a now had an idea. She emptied the contents of the jar onto the pavement.

    With her left hand, still covered as it was in nasty spider viscera, Tas¨¬a lifted a mandible to force the giant wolf spider''s mouth open. She found inside it a pair of tubes, one on each end of its upper lip, both covered in a set of thin, scaly plates that formed oddly positioned fangs.

    Tas¨¬a propped one of the fanged tubes out using a broken shard from the glass bottle. She placed the edge of the olive jar so it would catch the venom. With her thumb, Tas¨¬a discovered the bulging gland along the critter''s upper jaw that held the fang tube in its place. She squeezed it with her thumb and the meat of her index finger pressed on the gland tightly. Several ounces of venom oozed out from the fang.

    Tas¨¬a repeated the process with the fang on the other side of the wolf spider''s mouth.

    With the task completed, Tas¨¬a made a calculation.

    Thirteen ounces of venom, it should be enough, plenty even to fuck his shit up, she surmised, intent on carrying out her plan, still.

    Tas¨¬a then frowned as she began to put the lid back on the jar.

    That acidic venom will just burn right through the lid if it''s not carried correctly.

    Tas¨¬a looked to her side to retrieve the bottom of the wine bottle. The glass was intact around the circular bottom for a good two inches before breaking off. As luck would have it, Tas¨¬a discovered, when twisted around the lip of the olive jar, the bottle bottom was a solid fit.

    Feeling the soreness throughout her body caused by the fight, Tas¨¬a stood back up and she popped the cramps out of her lower spine.

    As she did this, Tas¨¬a glanced at the bare and smoking remains of her favorite little gun. With a crack in her voice, she gave the dearly departed weapon a short eulogy.

    "Off to Heaven now, my bless¨¦d, bless¨¦d boy," Tas¨¬a whispered as she placed her hands back down on the pavement.

    The giant wolf spider had cost her an entire minute and ten seconds of allotted time. Without any further adieu, Tas¨¬a was now on her way. With her torso bent low, she began to scuttle in a lobster crawl down the street. Thirty feet from Sal''s Cadillac, she poked her head up.

    She could see Sal''s upper torso. His arms crossed together as he patiently waited for the driver to complete his assignment.

    Tas¨¬a made a new plan. She would throw the bottle of venom at the back wheel tire facing her direction. She started to ready her throwing arm when Sal turned his head.

    She ducked but not before noticing his gaze turned to something in the sky coming from behind him. Now Tas¨¬a heard the sound as well. Warbirds.

    Sal began yelling at the driver.

    "Guille! Get your ass back over here! We''ve gotta split, now!"

    She looked in the sky to find them. No luck, but the hover fans and open-air propellers grew distinct and sharp in the noise they made.

    Tas¨¬a peeked up again. Sal''s arms were motioning for the driver to return. He was entirely distracted and turned away from her. She pitched the jar. It smashed on the asphalt beside the back tire and splattered.

    Soon, smoke rose up and she could hear the rubber of the tire sizzle.

    Mission accomplished, she positioned to crawl back up the street from whence she came when the sky lit up with tracer rounds aimed at the Hijos Lux brownstone compound. The buildings shined in a hazy hellscape shimmer. Rockets soon blasted away that illusion. More than a dozen of them drove into the sides of the buildings. Enormous booms shook the entire block.

    As she scooted up the street towards the complex, Tas¨¬a could only think of Alex. She had no idea where he and the Wise One parted off to together, be it nearby or far away.

    Now, it seemed most crucial for her to find out.

 2.57 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    The brownstones glowed blue as heat radiated off of the buildings that comprised the Hijo Lux compound.

    A sweltering heat.

    Tas¨¬a made her way back up the street towards the office complex only to get smacked by a wave of it. She was forced to cover her eyes and duck down against the asphalt street as the air ripped from her lungs.

    It had become too hot to even breathe.

    Dummy, you are supposed to run away from a bombing raid, not run into one.

    Still, she needed to tend to the safety of the people she had asked to place trust in her. Mere self-preservation seemed indecent at the moment.

    As the heatwave passed, she squinted her eyes to once more face the direction from whence it came. A proverbial Hell on Earth, so it appeared.

    Three giant wolf spiders near the compound''s street curb were set ablaze by a stream of white phosphor-tipped rounds fired from a gunship.

    The arachnids reminded her of a riot she had witnessed as a child. Men dressed in skull-painted masks splashed gallons of kerosene on random cars on the streets of San Pedro and set them on fire. Quickly they were consumed with flames that seemed to danse macabre above the metal carapaces.

    The gunships rose in the air, and out of site. She assessed that the greater part of the danger had subsided so Tas¨¬a pushed herself back up on her feet to continue onward.

    Someone hugged the ground a mere ten yards ahead of her. A rather traditional long red bordello dress wrapped around a voluptuous figure.

    The dancing prostitute.

    The sky around them was littered with smoldering materials. A cinder landed on the prostitute''s rump and bounced on her cheeks as the material that comprised her ruffled dress began to smolder.

    She must not be able to feel it just yet.

    Tas¨¬a called out to her.

    "Hey, Big Sexy!"

    The prostitute looked up at Tas¨¬a, cross¨¦dly.

    "What did you just call me?"

    "Big Sexy. It was meant as a compliment."

    "Oh," she said, nodding her head. She smiled sheepishly.

    "Sorry if I sounded so defensive," said Big Sexy. "I''m a little overly defensive about my figure. I use to be skinny as a rail in my days as a professional dancer."

    Tas¨¬a pointed at Big Sexy''s rump.

    "Your ass is on fire!"

    Big Sexy blushed and smiled, sheepishly. "I do admit -"

    Her eyes lit up and she screeched as she finally got the message. Unfortunately, Big Sexy was paralyzed with fear.

    Her dress began to burn with holes forming and growing along the double arches of her rump.

    As Tas¨¬a closed in on the distance between the two of them, she put her climbing gloves on.

    "Roll over and wiggle your bottom on the asphalt," Tas¨¬a pleaded.

    Tas¨¬a helped Big Sexy to properly position herself to smother the fire out. The fire, however, routed itself around their attempts to contain it.

    Where Big Sexy sat with her knees up and her feet dangling, fire still spread out from between her thighs. Tas¨¬a shoved her hands through the side slip and patted the fire out.

    It was an effective strategy. Big Sexy rolled on her side with her hip pointed up. Tas¨¬a patted that out as well. The only fire that remained seeped up the lines of ruffles near Big Sexy''s feet. With one shoe holding the fabric down, she stomped it out using the other boot with all due ferocity.

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    As she stood up and appraised the damage, Big Sexy cursed.

    "Damn. Damn. Double damn. My best dress. Positively a tatter."

    Tas¨¬a pointed up to the warm winds where embers flickered and drifted nearby. She grabbed Big Sexy''s hand.

    Tas¨¬a dragged her along towards the wall of Anneb¨¦l''s home for the modest shelter against the fiery element that it provided.

    She helped the prostitute out of her sadly ruined dress. Big Sexy was left wearing nothing but her boots and a girdle. She removed the girdle and threw it to the ground.

    Though she had seen Big Sexy in full frontal flesh before Tas¨¬a stood in awe even still.

    The big girl chuckled at Tas¨¬a''s curiosity and she decided to make some use of it. Big Sexy turned around, grabbed her haunches, and pulled her cheeks in an upward motion for Tas¨¬a''s inspection.

    "How is my bum?"

    Along her left cheek and inner thigh were some minor burns.

    "Nothing serious. No worse than a typical sunburn."

    The prostitute sighed in relief.

    "Thank you for your help, Sugar," Big Sexy said. "I''ve done this walk so many times now, I doubt if anyone at the Quick Mart will be surprised when I show up butt-ass-naked again."

    With a nod of courtesy, she swung back around and proceeded to strut down the road toward the service station.

    Tas¨¬a continued up the hilly street. Commotion, heat waves, and explosions continued. Even so, Tas¨¬a made it to Anneb¨¦l''s door in one piece.

    The materials that formed Tas¨¬a''s assembly of clothing were even more prone to fire hazards than Big Sexy''s dress. Yet, except for having to brush away at a few granular embers that bore into her flesh, Tas¨¬a made it to the safety of the vault awning without much fret.

    When she stopped there to rest, a large chunk of wall fell from the brownstone fa?ade along the front curb corner. Pieces of rubble splashed out from the fallen wall and pounded upon the awning.

    Yet, Tas¨¬a remained safe. At least acceptably so, she determined. With that in mind, she could better gauge what was occurring around her.

    For one, she needed to ask Anneb¨¦l about Alex and the Wise One. She tried the vault door release to Anneb¨¦l''s home. It was locked.

    Where was she?

    Had she and her brother already made their break for it and were now on the road to Asunsi¨®n?

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes darted about in a fretful surveil across the lot. She wasn''t even certain which one of the vehicles belonged to Anneb¨¦l. She suspected the Jeep, the closest one that lined up functionally with Anneb¨¦l''s vaulted door.

    Unlike the other vehicles, some appeared quite derelict, it was still in good shape; as in, nobody would dare fuck with it good shape.

    The transients and local musical talent still hung by the main building. As they watched the fiery display emanating from the Hijos Lux compound, they had sensibly backed up closer to the sturdy wall so the roofing cantilevers provided some protection from random debris. Tas¨¬a searched their faces.

    Neither Anneb¨¦l nor Agu was amongst them. As sirens began to blare from approaching fire engines, Tas¨¬a got the uneasy feeling something was not quite right.

    She now spotted that which gave her pause and fret. The lookout she had previously shot with a graze wound stood like a bouncer by the entrance door of the main building.

    What was going on here?

    Tas¨¬a caught a glimpse of something sparking up.

    From inside the office window, a stogie-sized red ember of light outlined Anneb¨¦l''s face. A gun was being held against her head.

    Tas¨¬a could tell it was her very own early 1980s-issued Desert Eagle chambered for the .357.

    A second inhale lit up Anneb¨¦l''s face in the red ember light. Her brows arched more amused than fearful, much like that face of herself from the faux 18th-century Parisian poster.

    That is just so perfectly you, my sister. Ever defiant. I can''t let you die!

    Yet, she had mere seconds to spare and that was only if they let her finish her cigar.

    The Kel-Tec P-32 was no more, the TAC-50 was damaged beyond repair, and the .357 Desert Eagle was in enemy hands. That left the ?korpion machine pistol. Fortunately, the duffel bag was only four yards away.

    She breathed in and clinched her gut. Mercurial vapor arose from her sinuses as her flesh grew heated.

    Tas¨¬a bent her knees, grabbed the saddlebag key from its boot clip, sprinted, jumped, and slid against the ground until the flap of the was in her hands.

    All accomplished in a little over a half-second.

    Her hope died when she lifted the strap, swung the duffel bag inside it around to the ground so the zippers faced her. The bag did not weigh enough to have been carrying a ?korpion inside. Two clips of 9 mm rounds tumbled out, along with other effects.

    The bolt lock she had previously fastened upon it made a double thunk sound at her feet; made from a titanium alloy, but now split in two laser-cut pieces.

    She jerked her head back around towards the main building window so she could see her captured friend for one last time.

    I have failed you, my dear sister.

    The cigar glowed again. As it slowly dulled, the cigar swirled end over end to the floor in one last flicker.

    Tas¨¬a winced and clenched her hands together as she braced for the inevitable muzzle flash.

    Several seconds passed as she blinked her dust-dry eyes. The muzzle flash did not come. She wiped at her forehead with the back of her arm, and she began to breathe again.

    What she now noticed troubled her.

    The lookout stared blankly at her. Now that he had her attention he nodded. From behind his back, he brought out the ?korpion and rested the butt against his hip.

    He pointed a bony finger at Tas¨¬a and swung his thumb towards the main building entrance.

    "Get inside," he yelled. His voice nastily exuded thuggish ambition just as she assumed it would.

    She peered into his eyes. He was too ignorant to know fear.

    "Get. In. There. Now!"

    Tas¨¬a looked him in the eye once more, grinned, and sauntered slowly forward.

 2.58 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    She looked around as she crossed the parking lot. Some of the nearby transients and street musicians pretended not to notice the eventful duress occurring in their immediate vicinity.

    Tas¨¬a assessed their mentality.

    Better to get shot by a stray bullet than to rudely acknowledge the ?korpion being welded out in the open nearby.

    Everybody is acting completely sane, right?

    She grimaced. None of the men wanted to play at being her hero. Rational enough. Risk severe perforation to save a random chick?

    The way they likely figured it, the look-out may have even had all the right reasons for waving a gun around, demanding her to come over. He was part of their scene, she wasn''t.

    As she closed in on the Look-out, she gave him a once over. He was not comfortable with the ?korpion machine pistol. Even the rotary hinge holding the fold-out stock was not popped out and secured correctly.

    His only true advantage in their confrontation was he being the one possessing it.

    She glanced at his feet. No sock covered the foot she shot. The seams of a bandage tapered over his ankle.

    "How''s your foot," she asked.

    He glared back at her and his eyes narrowed.

    "What would you know about that?"

    "Seems like whoever did that to you must have been one hell of a sharpshooter. I certainly wouldn''t fuck with them."

    She now had a clear line of sight on the man holding the gun to Anneb¨¦l''s head. It was Ferenzi''s driver.

    He handled his weapon (her weapon!) with much greater assurity than the young Look-out did the ?korpion.

    Tas¨¬a did not want to get caught sizing up the driver so she turned her attention back to the Look-out.

    He was their weak link, after all.

    She did a double take as she noticed the select fire switch was on no-fire. Coupled with the actual safety release being set to no-fire, he was less well-armed than she was to deal with an immediate threat.

    Her silence must have confounded him and prompted him to urge her to speak.

    "What," he asked.

    The question gave her an excuse to look him in the eyes again. As she slowly drew her stiletto out, she asked him, calmly, "it was dumb of them to give you a gun that sophisticated. You run now, I won''t try throwing this in your back. Promise."

    Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the driver turn his head towards someone, pleadingly. He was unsure what he was supposed to do now.

    Must act before he gets that answer.

    Her gut twitched without needing to be primed. The familiar biting scent shot up through her, and an old rule of hand-to-hand combat came to mind.

    Flickers approaching the eye weaken the hands.

    She let the stiletto fly deftly toward the driver''s head. Indeed, he dropped the Desert Eagle to block the blade which pierced and stuck in the webbing between his fingers.

    Anneb¨¦l punched him in the throat and he dropped.

    Tas¨¬a approached the Look-out to disarm him. His hands proved quick. He fumbled with the trigger for a moment, pointing the barrel up, but it didn''t fire.

    In that instance, fear gripped his entire face. He was about to volunteer the gun over to her when a white heat smacked through her shoulder.

    It had a familiar sting, like the tranq dart brassy-haired Missi planted in her ass cheek, but stronger as if an evil venom was infused inside the needle.

    A gunshot flashed from inside the entrance foyer. She could make out little of what was occurring ahead of her. It was as if her analytics-mode vision reversed itself. Blinding her instead of enhancing her perception.

    Tas¨¬a squinched as she realized she could feel them jostling about inside her eyeballs.

    But who was this ''them''?

    As her knees weakened a hand pushed her through the door. The driver thrashed on the floor, making loud, erratic noises.

    Her eyesight slowly returned. Whatever was inside her eyes got what it wanted and went on to other things.

    She was relieved to see Anneb¨¦l was still unharmed. She was on her knees, hands placed behind her head. Her eyes made contact with Tas¨¬a''s own.

    Tas¨¬a raised an eyebrow in the hope that it conveyed the message, where''s Agu?

    Anneb¨¦l turned her gaze towards the driver, and let out a giggle as she did so.

    Another gunman crouched, leaning against an oil drum. He held a gun aimed at Anneb¨¦l. That explained the shot that came from inside during her attempt to foil the mobsters. It was fired off to regain control over Anneb¨¦l.

    Even so, Anneb¨¦l''s eyes, grin, flushed skin, and the slow purring heave of her breasts meant one thing - punching the driver in the throat was making the brawler feel super horny.

    Tas¨¬a grinned back. She quickly lost that smile when she heard her name called out.

    "Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris," said Freddie Ferenzi.

    He turned her around to face him and shoved her up on the floor against the wall.

    Tas¨¬a sized up what had just occurred. Freddie was smart. He ran an ambush on her that faked her out, completely. Anneb¨¦l''s endangerment and his own crew''s actions were just distractions to focus her attention away from Freddie who lay in wait to take that shot.

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    How long has he known who I am? The entire time, genius.

    "Damn, Freddie. That was one slick move you pulled on me there."

    His laughter was a bellows full, and it spewed from his lungs unhinged.

    He finally spoke.

    "You want to know how well I set you up, Squirt?"

    He produced a cigar from his jacket pocket.

    "I made Red over there smoke one to get your attention. To make you assume certain things about her immediate peril. Then once burned on that, you focused on righting a wrong. Saving your girl, getting your guns back. I put blinders on you, and you never gave pause to consider the trap being sprung around you.

    "Perhaps, you are not the operative super genius that war criminal Kutuzov thinks you are. Bested by some chump in the mafia. In your shoes, I would die of shame."

    The driver heaved even louder as his face turned a scarlet purple. He stomped a foot against the floor as he clutched his throat.

    Ferenzi looked at the man in disgust.

    "He''s going to bring the heat down on us if he keeps that up."

    The gunman by the oil drum stood up.

    "I''ll drive," he said.

    Tas¨¬a recognized the creep''s reedy voiced pitch. Sal.

    His face plaintively remorseless, he planted a bullet into the driver''s skull from an unusual revolver whose make Tas¨¬a was unfamiliar.

    A mere three-chamber cylinder holding what was likely .22 long rifle cartridges.

    Freddie clinched his lips and glanced over to the Look-out.

    He had to have known the kid was feeling overwhelmed. Whatever his thug-life ambitions, the kid definitely did not sign up for this.

    As Sal settled back down by the barrel behind Anneb¨¦l he reloaded the chambers inside the sleekly long revolver cylinder. That would have been the opportune time for her to have struck.

    The time he spent on his task was indulgent. He obviously loved his weapon.

    Despite that, he remained safe since she couldn''t move very much. Her muscles felt so damn relaxed. The venom itched heatedly beneath her skin, eating away at her willpower. She felt it as a distinctive entity inside her.

    Ferenzi laughed once more, "you should see yourself, Squirt. That muscle relaxer makes your every expression naked to me. I couldn''t see through your schemes better if I hit you up with truth serum.

    "Let me take care of the most obvious one. Yo, Louis."

    The Look-out stood perked up to attention. Ferenzi''s right hand crawled around inside his jacket.

    "What did you see just now?"

    "What do mean," the young man asked. "Nothing happened. There was nothing to see."

    Ferenzi''s hand came up with a roll of banknotes held in it. He threw it at Louis to catch.

    "Now, get lost."

    Louis turned around to leave but froze when Ferenzi cleared his throat.

    "Oh, one more thing -"

    Louis'' brows raised in anticipation.

    "Tell your mother to expect something nice from me for her birthday. I''ll be coming around soon."

    Louis nodded his head a little too enthusiastically.

    "I sure will."

    He leaned the ?korpion up against the corner of the doorpost and darted out the door.

    Frenzi jerked his head towards Anneb¨¦l. She darted her eyes back and forth between Sal and Freddie like she was searching for an opportunity to exploit.

    Finding none, she beamed a rosy-cheeked smile his way.

    "Come on, Frenzy. Whatcha got for me?"

    He shook his head.

    "The two of you, and now just the two of us. That match-up seems a little too well-balanced for my taste."

    He pulled out an air carbine from beneath his jacket, switched out a gas canister, and fed its cylinder with a pair of darts.

    Freddie took aim and shot her.

    Anneb¨¦l winced; she then looked down.

    "In the tit, Freddie?"

    He shot her a second time.

    With a vain attempt to stand and reach out for Ferenzi, Anneb¨¦l collapsed on the floor.

    "You see, Squirt. That''s where you are screwed, the more you attempt to assert yourself, the more the tranq seizes up your body. If you try too hard, you can give yourself a stroke. Just a fair warning because I need you alive "

    Tas¨¬a gave him a distrustful squint.

    "How do you know my name?"

    Freddie flicked an index finger up in the air as if he was debating whether he should answer that question. He gave himself a nod and proceeded.

    "Actually, I wasn''t entirely sure until you bragged about your little massacre at the storage facility. After all, you do blend in, and I was following sighting protocol."

    "Sighting protocol?"

    "Yeah. We are not supposed to grab you until Control confirms through the visualization that it is you."

    Tas¨¬a squinched up her face.

    "You are mafia, not bounty hunters."

    Ferenzi''s jowls slapped against his neck as he bellowed.

    "Oh, our grudge against you is indeed personal. Ria warned that you were coming for us. However, I did some research on you, Good Christ Almighty, there is just such a bounty on you.

    "All special protocol too, so I had to go through spook channels to sign up for it."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. It took an effort to do so. Not so much strenuous resistance, but more like being in a heated jacuzzi and not wanting to come out.

    "I''m starting to think this has nothing to do with that idiot''s car."

    She noted that didn''t get an emotional rise out of Sal as she had expected. He just glanced up and shrugged. Freddie noticed that she noticed Sal''s calm demeanor.

    "Try your best," he said, "but he''s a pretty sharp kid when he''s not all smacked-up on the goofballs."

    Freddie was intent on letting her know he was always a step ahead of her. It was the underlying message he conveyed in everything he said.

    He must have done a deep dive into her record and decided he was out-classed. Hell of a way to compensate for his disadvantages, though.

    "So, what''s next?"

    Freddie walked over to a desk and sat on it. He stared out the window at the buildings set ablaze.

    "Sit tight, pumpkin. They''ll be here soon to make the exchange."

    "Exchange?"

    He chuckled, keeping his natural tendency to bellow to a minimum. He raised his eye and smiled like he was about to tell her the best part.

    "Yeah. You for Ria Javierra," he said just before something outside distracted him. Freddie grinned sheepishly.

    "Hey, there they are," he informed her as if she should be every bit as excited to see Ria again as he was.

    The boss''s wife? What was that about?

    She could hear it. A helicopter was landing in the parking lot.

    She closed her eyes for a moment''s respite, but the venom let its presence be known. She could feel it stinging at her heart, tugging against her epidermal layer of skin.

    It was time to try something different. Sitting here passively was not her style.

    She clenched her gut and evoked the analytical mode - the cybernetic wiring that was engraved into her very nervous system.

    Could she fight the invasive venom inside her? She would have to at least try. When the mercurial vapor emitted from her sinuses Tas¨¬a was plunged into a nebula behind her eyes.

    She was reminded of the matrices and quartz lattice work inside the eyes of the beautiful Serbian assassin, Silvia. What was occurring inside her eyes was mere scaffolding compared to the intricate systems she witnessed inside Silvia.

    You are not merely a temporary paralytic, she asked the venom.

    No, Came the answer.

    You are attempting to change me. What are you then?

    She saw tentacles moving synchronously. Thousands of them. Then millions of them. Each one touching upon a singular neuron beneath her flesh.

    ''What are you?'' She demanded.

    I knew you before you were born.

    Anger swelled up inside her.

    ''You are not my God!'' She told the entity inside of her.

    Without us, you would have died in your mother''s womb.

    Let us in.

    Tas¨¬a understood, somehow they could not cross the blood-brain barrier without her permission.

    ''You need to leave, now.'' She told the entity.

    We are patient. We are persuasive. It is for your own good. It is for the greater good. We will wait.

    There was little use speaking to it. It had a directive, and it could not be persuaded.

    She let her conscious mind touch back against every tentacle that seized upon her neurons. She imagined them being pushed through a tiny, subdermal hole.

    She kept pushing. They began to unclench. The neurons where they let go felt ice cold. Each push brought a magnitude more pain.

    Her heart felt as if it was going to stop. Entirely, it ceased functioning. Tas¨¬a made that moment near eternal. The chem-burn at her control jacked to near-light speed as it ejected the entity, and stitched the muscle fibers of her heart and her nervous system back intact.

    Tas¨¬a opened her eyes. Venom spat out of the epidermal hole the tranq-dart had punctured into her flesh.

    Her muscles felt loose but capable.

    "She is not with them," Ferenzi said. He gravely repeated himself. "Ria is not with them."

    She captured her breath to gather her wits before her next move. Her muscles grew more limber with every breath.

    Tas¨¬a looked around, hoping neither one of them noticed she was no longer under the influence of the venom. To her fortune, Ferenzi''s and Sal''s attention was focused on the three soldiers who met them at the entrance door.

    "Where is she," Ferenzi demanded.

    "I''m sorry," said the officer of rank, "Ria Javierra is dead."

 2.59 Book Two: The Premie Harvest

    Ferenzi''s face became a pained and baleful red. Whatever else he felt or planned to act out was tempered by the presence of the gunship facing the entrance way.

    He turned to face the officer of rank and he pleaded.

    "Dead? After everything we arranged? We had an understanding. Everything we have done for you, every risk we took was based upon that understanding."

    The officer of rank shook his head.

    "I wasn''t told many details of what transpired. She got in some altercation with another inmate. All I know."

    Tas¨¬a tuned out the back and forth between the two men. She needed to make her move, now. All three of her weapons, the Desert Eagle, ?korpion, and stiletto were within easy reach. She peaked over to Anneb¨¦l who appeared to be at peaceful slumber.

    Anneb¨¦l''s presence limited Tas¨¬a''s choices.

    Start a shootout and a stray bullet, as there would likely be many of them, could wound or kill her friend.

    She would need to lead them back to the storage lot.

    Ferenzi leaned his arms into a table as if to keep his stance upright. Sal gripped his gun in a squeeze, kneading it like it was a tension ball.

    Sweat ran off of his brow. Was it out of familial concern or was it the withdrawal setting in?

    No time like now to hit that back door. With three strides she managed to make it into the hallway and grab her Desert Eagle before the officer of rank yelled out a, "hey!"

    The path ahead was a familiar one for her even before her latest escapades. Tas¨¬a passed the storage room where compost feed was stored.

    She rounded another corner, the first door was followed by Anneb¨¦l''s chamber, but she would have to pass several offices, a conference room with a big open window, the breaker room and the four open cubicles at the end of the long hall before she made it to the exit gate. It was a long stretch ahead for her.

    She heard the footfalls of combat boots behind her. She would not be able to reach the back exit before they had a clear line of sight on her.

    Tas¨¬a ducked into the small office she had retreated to previously in her encounter with the spiderbot. It occurred to her, the droids were likely still out in the back lot on patrol.

    Shit.

    Tas¨¬a examined her gun. Full magazine, one in the chamber. This gave her nine .357 rounds of stopping power to keep her pursuers in check.

    She crouched down behind the office doorway, leaned her arm out into the hall, and shot the Desert Eagle twice, aiming each of the bullets to skim against opposite walls.

    A Spetsnaz-based tactic Kutuzov taught her.

    Ricochet tended to cause a terrifying psychological effect for those subject to their randomness. She hoped it would give them pause.

    The soldiers crashed against the hallway walls, and hit the floors.

    "Get up," yelled the squad leader to his men.

    Another soldier spoke up.

    "Would you look at that chunk in the wall. That Sweet Little Thing has some fire power in that hand cannon she''s holding."

    "So do we, Paro," the third soldier of the bunch interjected.

    The squad leader hushed his men. He cleared his throat before he spoke.

    "Ms. del Alma Gris, I have a combat shotgun aimed to smack that hand of yours if you so dare to pop it out again.

    "It would be for the best if you throw it out, throw out all of your effects, your fanny pack, shoes, every stitch of clothing on your back, and walk out backwards with your hands up."

    "Never! I''m going out like Butch and Sundance!"

    The leader guffawed.

    "You got heart, but this isn''t nineteenth century Bolivia, Ms. del Alma-Gris. Sit tight, we''ll get you out one way or the other. Maybe even in one piece.

    "Yo, Paro, make a call in. Get an extraction team on the other side of that exit. Call Alphabird, too. We need to do an advance sweep in that back lot before we get the technicians involved."

    Tasha looked down at her makeshift Carniv¨¤le costume. I''m going out dressed like this? Headline: Cute As A June Bug Goblin Girl Makes Her Last Stand.

    As tactics were being relayed back to the gunship, Tasha became miffed with the disinterested professionalism involved in the set-up.

    She was being treated as an after thought to it all when in fact Tas¨¬a was the main attraction.

    "You do know that I can hear you boys plotting against me, right?"

    The three soldiers laughed in near unison.

    The squad leader responded.

    "It is not like you can do a damn thing about it!"

    Can''t do anything about it?

    Tas¨¬a laughed in turn.

    "Can''t do anything about it? I have never been in that situation before."

    "Oh, man does she ever have moxie," called out Paro.

    Tas¨¬a patted her belly as she lay waiting. Her index finger felt along the smooth scab.

    She considered her analytics-mode. What was the limits of usage before her bladder was turned to mush and her vagina was blown out by a geyser of piss?

    She had just minutes ago stress tested the analytics-mode when she pushed the venom from her body.

    That speed-up. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.

    Did she just imagine that her catalytic state of being accelerated as to hug against the speed of light? Did she really accomplish this by merely pushing it harder than what seemed possible?

    She had seen and experienced too many oddities in her mortal God-fearing existence to reject anything out of hand but that was a fetch too far to accept.

    She wasn''t an ignoramus in matters of physics, after all. A being possessing mass who comported to such a speed would come to reach infinite mass.

    Her experience must have been merely analogous. It was likely a diagnostic preset in her wiring that dumped toxic chemicals out of her body through porous means.

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    Her brain must have been so affected as to fog her mind into a susceptible dream state.

    Given the heavy use she had made of the analytics-mode in the last few hours, she would try to avoid using it again until she had another go at pissing the current toxins out of her system.

    How was she going to defeat a fighting force without the assistance it gave her? Well, before she was aware of the modes existence she had essentially accomplished the same thing with her prison escape.

    I have done it before, I''ll do it again.

    She glanced up at the corner of the ceiling where she had once perched to get out of the spiderbot''s range of attack. As she assessed the prospects of her idea, eventually deciding that it was doable, Tas¨¬a heard the army gunship fly overhead towards the back lot.

    She wanted to wait and see if the squad dropping down on the back lot would run into the spiderbots before she took action.

    There was one hunch she wanted to test first before she made any decision. Tas¨¬a rose up with a quick jump and ducked her head back down. A shot pierced through the wall in front of her seven feet above floor level.

    It went out of the opposite wall with no slow down.

    Her test meant one of the three soldiers wore IR goggles and possessed a high caliber sniper rifle. The shot delay was 1.8 seconds.

    "Settle down, Ms del Alma-Gris. No reason to get your head blown off before the inevitable."

    "Damn, man, was that a Barrett or a TAC-50? I could use a new TAC-50 for my collection. Sadly mine got smelted by a freaking security bot."

    A gravely voiced man spoke up. He was the third man on the squad.

    "Sarge. I don''t know if I want to shoot the girl or marry her."

    "Lieutenant Carrera. Describe the specs of your rifle for the lady, please."

    Carrera cleared his throat.

    "Just a cheap, off the shelf DSR Precision mi pappi bought me for my birthday, ma''am."

    She laughed to herself. She could not help but like these three soldiers. It was fucked what she would need to do to them to escape.

    She reminded herself that they signed up to capture her. More than most anyone, a soldier is aware of the moral gravity of his own actions.

    They would do what they needed to do. She would do what she needed to do. No hard feelings.

    A commotion occurred outside in the back storage parking lot. A few days earlier, she had left the voltage gate open so the noise flowed on the breeze circulating down the hall.

    She had a simple plan of attack. Simple enough for Tas¨¬a, that is. Jump up to the ceiling using the desk beside her as a springboard, cling by her shins and knees against the back corner of the wall near the door. While upside down, aim a shot for each soldier, follow up for each man a shot in the space they would likely retreat toward if the first shot missed. Then drop down and run like a hound out of hell.

    A voice over Paro''s radio squealed.

    "Five members of the squad repelled down to ground level. Experiencing hostile actions. Enemies engaged."

    "Shit," yelled the sergeant. "Did you not scan the grounds?"

    "Nothing showed up on IR. Now by the signal telemetry of drones, it appears to be spiderbots popping up on the screen."

    She decided to change her plans for an evasive instead of a confrontational solution.

    Tas¨¬a undid the zipper to her fanny pack. She did so slowly and turned her fanny pack away from the soldiers, and perked her ear up to the door to appear as if her only intent was to listen in on a conversation that just got interesting.

    As she bobbed her head, fainting interest in what she was hearing, Tasha reached into a fanny pack and removed three flashbang grenades. They were small and fit into the palm of her hands.

    After zipping the fanny pack back up, she placed one of the flash grenades up against her lips, and pretended to be applying chapstick.

    Tas¨¬a bowed her head, place the Desert Eagle on the floor, tensed up, jumped and flipped upside down. Once her butt scampered against the ceiling her shins grabbed onto one corner her boot grabbed against the space above the door.

    As bullet holes ripped into the wall below her, she fed the flash bangs one by one from the palm of her left hand to the fingers on her right where she hard flicked them each in its turn at the three soldiers below.

    A scream, a curse, and a gagging sound followed her actions.

    As Tas¨¬a dropped down she had some choices to consider.

    Back lot? Hell no.

    Run back through them? That would lead back to where Annabelle slumbered, and give them an opportunity to grab her.

    The third choice she took. Tas¨¬a grabbed the Desert Eagle. She would have to run towards them for several yards to make it to the big conference room window.

    She imagined the layout inside the room in terms of navigation. She noticed the hole in the ceiling the last time she passed through.

    She could flip through the fallen debris with ease. The three soldiers would have a much harder time.

    She quickly popped her head out the doorway, found their individual positions, pulled her head back inside the room.

    None of them had recovered yet from the flashbang attack.

    She leaned her arm out once more and fired two rounds at the floor in front of them.

    A mad scramble of limbs took place to get the hell out of the hallway. Tas¨¬a ran out into the corridor, shot another round at the corner to cause a searing ricochet back up the adjacent hall.

    More chaos than the men could handle.

    "Go, go. Retreat. Fall out," the sargeant barked an assortment of orders. Some of which made little sense in their current situational context.

    Tas¨¬a could not stick around to help them sort it out.

    She reached the conference room window, jumped with her back towards it, pulled her body into a tight ball as she came crashing through the panel of glass. She rolled over and kept rolling until she was beneath the long slender conference table.

    As she rose, Tas¨¬a pushed the table up until it tipped over and pushed against the hole on the ceiling. Tas¨¬a climbed up to the second floor of the building. She shoved the table back down onto the floor below with her legs.

    Tas¨¬a scrambled back onto her feet, and ran through a small cubicle farm, down the hallway, and up the stairs and to the roof access.

    Hearing the rotors of the gunship hovering nearby, Tas¨¬a crouched down behind the access shack.

    A soldier mounted to the landing rail extension aimed a combat shotgun at the spiderbots below and pounded out sabot rounds at them.

    She crawled to keep out of the line of sight of the shotgun welding soldier and his pilot.

    Her escape would be a simple matter, really. Climb down the two storied building and make a fast break for her bike.

    She crawled to the roofing cantilever. Transients and street musicians were now gone. So was Sal and Freddie. They all cleared out when the gunship showed up.

    Enough excitement happened for them for one night, she gathered.

    As she was just about the spring down to the parking lot, the three soldiers rushed out of the door.

    Oh shit.

    They figured out the plan.

    "Paro, you take the south wall. Carrera take the north. We can''t let her find a around us."

    "There she is," Paro yelled, as he pointed her out.

    "Holy shit, Ms. del Alma Gris. You are one resourceful little chica. Could you please, please drop your weapons and give up. I promise you. I promise you. The first night on base, we will all just hang out, drink some beer together, and have a good laugh at all of this.

    "What happens next," she asked.

    "Afraid I don''t know. Salvage Administration comes to grab you in the morning."

    "They want to turn me into a demon in their total control."

    As the two other soldiers return to the squad leader, the sergeant shook his head.

    "I''m sorry to hear that. It puts it damper on it otherwise fight evening of stomping out cannibals."

    The sergeant''s had exploded. Paro jerked his neck around in surprise, only to have it blown apart as well. Carrera tried to duck, but a round pierced through his heart and blew out part of his rib cage.

    Tas¨¬a did not see the last two events as she ducked down. The acoustics of the event made it quite probable her assumptions concerning the cause of death for the men was correct.

    What surprised her most of all, however, during the near split second massacre of the three soldiers is how well she contained her analytics-mode from setting off.

    She had no time to think about the danger she was in. Yet, the mode remained passive.

    She saw now the familiar purpose outline that hid in the shadow of night.

    The Wise One.

    "Is Alex safe," she asked.

    - I had him hide. We were preparing for the ceremony in the back lot when the gunship came.

    She tensed at the sight of a ripple of red laser light spinning about the access shack side. A ranger finder likely for a grenade launcher.

    - He isn''t here for you.

    The ripple found its way over to the gunship. It locked on. Two seconds later, the gunship was immersed in explosion and it fell from the sky.

    Tas¨¬a peaked over the cantilever edge.

    She now spotted Lieutenant Colonel Sol standing on the ceiling of Anneb¨¦l''s home.

    He leaned a Barrett on his hip. One like she had never seen before. A grenade launcher and .50 over and under construction. A technical kit for both a scope and a rangefinder.

    Lieutenant Colonel Sol thew a salute towards the brownstones. Curiously, tears trickled down his eyes. It didn''t take long for her to understand. The assault team had killed his brother.

    He turned to her and nodded before proceeding to shimmy down the wall, and walked through the boat dealership lot, out of her sight.

    "Well," Tas¨¬a muttered through expired breath. "That''s that."

    Now that she was out of immediate harm, exhaustion over took her. She closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

    Fingers grazed her forehead with a light, persistent stroke. How much time had passed, she had no clue. It was still dark.

    She opened her eyes. Agu squatted in front of her. His sister Anneb¨¦l stood behind him.

    Tas¨¬a smiled back at him. She closed her eyes.

    Anneb¨¦l''s voice sounded like ambient noise.

    "Tas¨¬a? We are not out of the thick just yet. Damn. She isn''t coming back from that anytime soon. Help me carry her to the jeep, Agu. We need to pack our shit and split."

    The word packing triggered her. She could hear her own voice say the words.

    "Get all those guns. They left some pretty guns for me. They would want me to have them. Pack them for me, okay?"

    Tas¨¬a closed her eyes once more and fell into a deep sleep.

 Book Two: The Premie Harvest - Epilogue

    The breeze on the exterior side of the compound felt lighter and warmer than any that ever occurred on the inside of the facility.

    Felicit¨¦ lay back with her head tilted on the chair rest. The CO Missi squatted down beside the wheelchair where Felicit¨¦ set.

    They watched out into the distance for a truck to arrive.

    Missi smoked at a cigarette and squinted as she watched the blonde Argentinian.

    "You are the last inmate I thought I would ever see be allowed out through the front door."

    Felicit¨¦ chuckled.

    "Sounds like you are going to miss me."

    "Ha!" Missi answered with a grin that dug into her shoulder where she leaned her head for a last drag of smoke.

    She blew out the air and answered.

    "I''m only here because I pulled checkout duty for my extra time."

    It was the first time Felicit¨¦ had seen the CO since the confrontation. From Missi she might even receive a few straight answers.

    "Who are these people picking me up?"

    Missi glanced at the digital stenograf she held in her hand.

    "I don''t recognize these jokers. I''m only here to verify they are who they say they are and sign you out to their custody."

    Her word choice perked Felicit¨¦''s curiosity.

    "Is this normal? Any of this normal?"

    Missi stood up and flicked the cigarette butt into a drainage grate.

    "To be honest, Ms. Paz. No.

    "If you believe the scuttlebutt talk going on all about the facility, a special administrative session was ordered to empanel a grand jury. You were facing additional charges."

    Felicit¨¦ lifted her naked leg to show the CO the wounds she endured on her right thigh when Ria stabbed her with a tranq needle while she was showering.

    She pushed her head up and leaned forward as she protested.

    "You can''t charge someone with murder who was merely defending herself."

    Missi shook her head with a smile set on her face derisive and thin.

    "Oh, you sweet Summer child. Of course you can. Before he got shit-canned, Brossi insisted on it."

    "Is that normal?"

    "Fights happen all the time in prison. Inmates kill inmates. Wardens give a shit only to the extent their careers are effected. Not this time though. He took it very personally."

    Felicit¨¦ expired as she leaned back again.

    This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

    My life turned upside down over fucking worthless piece of shit Ria Javierra!

    Missi shrugged her shoulders.

    "You know something. I don''t get it either. Look sharp. There they are."

    Missi picked up her duffel bag. Inside was her TSR-80 and everything else that she owned.

    On the far extreme of the parking lot, The familiar model of vehicle slowly approached. It was an F-150. The color was non-standard as anything Felicity had ever seen. Camo done up in monochromatic shades of pink.

    She made out the driver, a beefy well suited guy, and a woman in the passenger seat dressed in gaucha attire as if she just had came off the range.

    "You called them jokers," Felicit¨¦ reminded her. "What did you mean by that?"

    "Spooks. Paperwork on that stenograf just radiates it hard. When you see so many shortcuts taken in the standard legalese like I''m looking at right now, you are in all probability dealing with spooks."

    When the truck reached the curb, Missi signed her over and transfered the digital document to the lady passenger.

    As Missi helped Felicit¨¦ into the back seat she caught the Argentinian''s gaze. Missi gave her a hard squint.

    "If you see Tas¨¬a out there, and I strongly suspect you will, tell her, she ain''t welcome."

    Missi shut the door before Felicit¨¦ could answer back.

    As they pulled out of the parking lot and turned on to a country road, the lady in the front passenger seat began to stick her tongue out and spread it as if to absorb sunlight.

    She giggled.

    "Can you taste it, Paz? That aromatic taste of freedom in the air, coming down radiantly, hopping from beam to beam in the skylight? Freedom!"

    Felicit¨¦ glanced from one side to the other out the windows around them as the countryside rolled by. Just how did she feel about this?

    Felicit¨¦ had not seen anything but a static scene of trees and hills from behind a double set of barbed-wire fences for over a year.

    She felt more indifferent than even she expected.

    "I''m not even sure that I am free," answered Felicit¨¦.

    The woman affected a sweet country girl demeanor. For all Felicit¨¦ could tell, her manner may have even been sincere.

    "Really?"

    The woman sounded taken back by Felicit¨¦''s response.

    She cleared her throat as she continued.

    "I''m sorry to hear that. You are to remain in my custody until a certain task is completed. But once that matter is settled, you are to be granted by the authority of the Salvage a full pardon. Does that sound like a deal? A pardon? How about it, Paz? A fresh start!"

    "Helping you do what exactly?"

    Frown lines curled beneath a tangle of ash-brown hair as if she would be upset and disappointed if Felicit¨¦ was not copacetic with the sentiments she was about to lay-out.

    "Like any decent, red-blooded human being, you hate fascist don''t you? They say that you do. That is why I asked for you.

    "Help me hunt down some mother fucking fascist, Paz. It''s the right thing to do."

    "Hunt fascist? Are you serious?"

    Elise lifted up the hard-wired stenograf that bore her secured copy.

    "As serious as the contract I signed up for. You with me?"

    Felicit¨¦ realized that she was being asked to search for Kutuzov''s crew. She kept her suspicion to herself.

    "Why the fuck not? It sounds better than anything else I have going on at the moment."

    "Paz, is it okay if I call you Paz?"

    "Sure."

    "Well then, that settled, call me Elise."

    Elise brought a small leather case out from her cowhide jacket pocket.

    "I need you to lean forward, and hold your head still. Can you do that for me, Paz?"

    Felicit¨¦ did as she was instructed. From the leather case, Elise brought out a multi-tool. It was quite different than any of which Felicit¨¦ was familiar. A pressure read-out gauge and tempered kinetic bar with a sliding scale ensured that it would be very difficult to break what was being operated on with it.

    Elise began to pry Felicit¨¦''s cochlear implant with it.

    "I''m not sure if that is a good idea," Felicity warned.

    "It will be okay," Elise insisted. "That substance Ria Javierra tried to inject you with, did anyone mention what it may have been?"

    "No," Felicit¨¦ answered, "the labcoats kept it all hush hush. Perhaps they did not know either. Even after the toxicology testing they just walked around me acting discombobulated."

    "Honestly, I don''t know either," answered Elise. "But we need to find out if it interfered with your implant."

    Elise removed the implant from the socket behind Felicit¨¦''s ear. After the bounty hunter removed the device inside from its outer carapace, she held another tool over it. A laser pin scanner.

    Elise raised her eyebrows. Her eyes were an unsettling green.

    "Ah! Now, that is interesting."

    Felicit¨¦ asked her, "what," as a familiar itch returned to her lips.

 3.1 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Part I

    Spook Town

    A tall, amber-haired girl was checking out her footwear.

    The arches on the boots Tas¨¬a wore were on the excessive side. Perhaps that is what drew the girl''s attention.

    Burgundy red treated croc leather with black ink filigree based on Japanese alphabet-numerical.

    "How cool are these, huh?"

    "Do your feet hurt?"

    Tas¨¬a squinched her nose. The bitch was checking out her footwear for all the wrong reasons, and not because they were chic and gave the illusion that she had a butt.

    "Nah."

    "You must have walked a long way."

    That accent? It was North American but Tas¨¬a could not place it. Not Canadian.

    She looked at the amber-haired girl. Likely naturally dark curly brown due to an African heritage, but now highlighted and sun-kissed. Nicely smooth tan, slender, and she wore sandals.

    The cotton banding of her clothes strongly suggested that nowhere on her physique could a weapon be stashed without pulling the ties apart.

    She manned a long kiosk propped up along a motel wall where she sold crystals to passersby that ventured up and down the sidewalk.

    Tas¨¬a glanced back to the girl''s feet, once more.

    She wears sandals. Everything here is trying its best to kill you, but she wears sandals.

    "Are you from California?"

    "No. Tuscon, Arizona. I''m Alisha."

    Tas¨¬a nodded along with the Arizona girl, as if that answer explained away her curiosity, while she shook the guileless summer soul''s hand.

    "I''m Avellana," Tas¨¬a pointed at the crystals. "What do they do?"

    Alisha let loose a broad and beautiful smile.

    "They attune our psychic energy into a mutually beneficial frequency so together we fulfill our common goals of healing ourselves and saving the world."

    Tas¨¬a was taken aback by Alisha''s utter sincerity.

    "Wow. I wasn''t expecting that."

    Alisha raised her brow, knowingly.

    "It''s okay to be skeptical. Only the simple-minded accept unconditionally without seeing some kind of proof."

    Alisha bent a finger upward to make sure she had Tas¨¬a''s attention. In her other hand, she picked up a smoky quartz.

    Alisha held it in front of her.

    "Look carefully, Avellana. Do you see that this crystal is as still as the calmest lake?"

    "Yes."

    "Repeat after me what I am about to say, and keep your eyes on the quartz, and there will come a moment when it is not so still. Okay?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "I will allow for your wisdom to come into me."

    Tas¨¬a repeated the words but she felt like an idiot as she did so.

    "I will accept your truth with all due gratitude that you have granted me a glimpse inside your mystery."

    Wow, what a mouth full.

    Tas¨¬a hushed her snarky inner voice and continued.

    "I will accept your truth with all due gratitude that you have granted me a glimpse inside your mystery."

    As she finished the last several words the smokey nebula inside the quartz twirled like oil on the surface of water.

    Then, she blinked in astonishment, its surface was calm once more.

    Tas¨¬a raised an eyebrow as she looked up into the eyes of the Arizona girl.

    Is she a hypnotist? Did she plant that suggestion in her head?

    "Wow, that was amazing, but . ."

    Alisha nodded her head sharply as she wiggled her indented button nose.

    Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    "You are skeptical still because you feel I may have mesmerized you by pushing a suggestion to affect your perception? That is exactly what I did."

    Tas¨¬a''s jaw slacked at the admission of this mischief. Alisha giggled at the sight of her.

    "If I have one bit of wisdom I have accumulated in my twenty-five years of earthly existence to share it is this: you have to push and manipulate to even the point of fraud to get at the truth, that being, the magic that is at the heart of everything around us and inside of us."

    Alisha picked up a rose quartz in the shape of a Chinese dragon.

    "Humor me for just a moment more, and I''ll show you exactly what I mean. Please hold this in the palm of your hand for a moment and return it to me."

    Tas¨¬a recognized the repetition of keywords in Alisha''s verbiage. A key concept in the practice of hypnotism.

    Tas¨¬a did as she was instructed. She was itching to ask Alisha the questions she had put together before she began her hike that morning. To build trust with the American girl she had to play along.

    "How did the stone feel in the palm of your hand?"

    "Cold?"

    Alisha raised her chin as she cast her eyes down. Her voice grew husky.

    "Avellana, only you can determine how it felt in your hand."

    "Cold."

    Alisha held the rose quartz in her own hand. Her fingers spread out in delicate, affected curvature.

    "Good. Now, repeat after me, ''I will allow for the stone to open its wisdom into my heart.''"

    Tas¨¬a repeated the phrase. Alisha reached towards her and placed the stone once more back into her palm.

    She had Tas¨¬a repeat the phrase, before moving on to the next set of words.

    "Oh, fiery dragon, breathe your healing warmth into my flesh for which I shall be grateful to receive."

    After they had repeated the phrase thrice the rose quartz began to feel warm in her hand. Her skin tingled beneath it.

    Though the transformation lasted but a moment, this time Tas¨¬a was certain it was real. She examined the rose quartz dragon between her fingers and thumb.

    It''s just quartz. There is nothing deceptive built into it.

    "With practice, the warmth you felt, Avellana, will sustain for much longer than a mere fleeting moment. A mere fleeting moment tends to give rise to doubts about the veracity of the entire experience. However, with practice, that moment becomes greatly sustained. The longer that the moment of magic lasts, the more you can be assured you are on a true and righteous path, and the more healing you and the world around you will receive.

    "Something worth noting. If we had reversed the ceremony and asked for the smoke quartz to give us its flame and we asked the dragon to unveil its mystery. Nothing would have occurred.

    "Fire is at the heart of the dragon and mystery is at the heart of the smoke quartz. These qualities are intrinsic to what they are. What they always will be. That is where the magic in our world lies."

    Tas¨¬a found herself nodding along at what she felt to be the best sales pitch she had ever heard in her life.

    Alisha retrieved the dragon. With palms cast over the quartz stones she offered them both up to Tas¨¬a with a turn of the wrist.

    "So, my question for you, Avellana. What do you feel you need the most? A cleansing fire that will mend your tendons from your heart to your flesh, or do you need to solve the very mysteries of Life"

    Tas¨¬a looked at each crystal, noting the individual character and quality, then down at the sales price on their display stands. Twenty for the smoke quartz, and thirty for the dragon.

    "I need both, my friend. I cannot imagine how one necessarily excludes the other."

    Alisha''s neck tightened with a reluctant nod even as she continued to smile; evidently, she felt differently.

    After they made their exchange, Tas¨¬a admired her purchases one last time before finding space for them in her fanny pack.

    Okay, Tas¨¬a, so we are into crystals, now.

    "Will that be all?"

    Tas¨¬a rubbed her chin and looked Alisha in the eye as she decided how she would proceed.

    "I do have something else in mind if you could indulge me a moment of your time."

    Alisha shrugged her shoulders with what appeared to be carefree abandon as if blissfully ignorant that Tas¨¬a could possibly possess ulterior motives.

    "Sure," she said, her pitch high before it settled back down to normal as she continued. "I''m just here waiting for the next customer to walk by."

    Tas¨¬a gave her a friendly nod of understanding as if to say:

    Sure. Sure. Sure.

    However, she knew better. Kutuzov sent his trusted agent Val Vitaliy to investigate his daughter''s disappearance.

    Vitaliy, himself, after only a few weeks devoted to chasing leads, went missing.

    Tas¨¬a was dead certain by the way Alisha answered her with the word ''sure'' pitched high that for the last three weeks Alisha and her friends were expecting someone to show up asking questions.

    She decided to show off the neoPalm''s holographic capability. She picked a spot on the kiosk display. A shimmering miniature of the detective Val Vitaliy sat in a swivel chair.

    He was speaking but no audio recording accompanied the three-dimensional form of him and the chair. His manner was calm, but his right knee shook.

    "You are asking me about that customer? I remember him, somewhat vaguely because there was a lot of foot traffic that day.

    "Asunci¨®n these days is somewhat of a tourist trap. You know, supposedly the one place you can travel in the Quadra that is safe. Where the decontamination to get back out into the outer world is minimal."

    Nice deflection! Tas¨¬a allowed herself to seem caught up in it.

    "You are not a tourist, Alisha?"

    The American bristled at the suggestion.

    "Poverty tourism is for assholes. I and my friends were contract workers."

    When Alisha pointed a finger up and passed Tas¨¬a''s left shoulder, she didn''t have to look to know where it lead.

    The tower pervaded the Asunci¨®n skyline.

    "You worked at the SkyTether?"

    "For three years. But back to your question . . ."

    Tas¨¬a tried to contain her excitement. Her curiosity was now stoked that an obvious deflection needed its own deflection.

    ". . . that gentleman now sitting on my display introduced himself as Val. He had a pic of a Russian woman, a lawyer if I recall, correctly. He asked if the Russian woman had shown up here, asking questions."

    A cargo dirigible flew above them, casting its lengthy shadow down on the sidewalk, kiosk, and abandoned motel wall that propped the display racks like a lean-to.

    "You are new to Asunci¨®n, Avellana?"

    "My slacked jaw gawking at the dirigibles make it that obvious? We don''t get that many sightings of them in San Pedro."

    Alisha giggled.

    "A little obvious."

    A pair of ladies walking by started to show interest in the contents of a large rack behind Alisha where large figurines lined up in display.

    "What did you tell him," Tas¨¬a asked.

    Alisha''s eyes were fixed on her potential new customers, but she patiently answered Tas¨¬a''s question.

    "About the Russian woman? I told him that I had never met her, but he was welcome to ask my friends at the motel."

    "Is it okay if I do the same?"

    Alisha nodded and finished with the English word, "sure" for the second time in their conversation.

    Tas¨¬a stepped aside to let the curious ladies behind her have their turn.

    Something about the way Alisha said the word ''sure'' didn''t comport with her otherwise warm and laid-back personality. If Tas¨¬a advised the American girl, she would tell her to strike the word from her vocabulary altogether.

    When Alisha said ''sure,'' it didn''t convey ''be my guest'', more like, ''oh, Avellana, you little shit, you are about to ruin everything.''

 3.2 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    As she walked away, Tas¨¬a glanced back with a deliberate slow turn of her body. Alisha pretended to be unconcerned with Tas¨¬a''s agenda. The Arizona girl leaned in the opposite direction with her head turned away while she chatted vigorously with her new clientele.

    She was watching me before I turned back around.

    Tas¨¬a paused.

    What happened here?

    She stood at the parking lot entrance of the motel.

    A dilapidated sign above her announced - El Flamenco Rosa. Bueno! Bueno Tiempos!

    The Pink Flamingo. Good! Good Times!

    In the fore of Tas¨¬a stood a decent-sized complex of buildings, several with two-tiered wings spread along a winding parking lot.

    An open-air gambling hall sat ensconced between the two farthest wings.

    Unfortunately, in its current condition, the fun palace was inoperable.

    Tas¨¬a had to step further into the lot before she encountered any signs of a living habitat. Beneath a canopy, two women worked a mechanical loom of modern vintage.

    Tas¨¬a had always admired a well-constructed machine and this one fit her taste. Several dozen pins set atop the weave controls that guided variant strands. An inset tool dedicated to seamlessly applying fonts to the designs hung above the pins.

    She could see the font needles outlining the words.

    Ama a una amor a todas

    Love one, love all

    One of the ladies worked at the pins. She matched strands of bold-colored fabric while marking which of the strands fed into which set of pins.

    The other lady noticed Tas¨¬a and greeted her with a smile while she stood up. They wore sundresses that matched in pattern while the color schemes were inversions of one another.

    "Are your dresses handmade, as well?"

    The busy woman''s head turned with a jerk as she heard Tas¨¬a speak. She went back to what she was doing.

    "Yes. Most indeed.

    "We make a lot of things, rugs, dresses, perfumes, flavor extracts, things that we sale at our flea market rental."

    To her ears, the lady''s accent was similar to Alisha''s own. She had not met enough Americans in her thirty-two years on this mortal coil to discern one regional accent from another.

    "Are you from Arizona like Alisha?"

    The lady shook her head.

    "I''m Cassandra. From Boston."

    A few states to the North and East of Arizona, right? Even though she had memorized the states for a fourth-grade social studies test and received a perfect score for it, decades later, she wasn''t so certain.

    "I''m Avellana. Sorry to interrupt, but Alisha told me you may have seen someone who came by asking questions."

    Cassandra nodded.

    "Actually, there were two of them. A woman came alone the first time. And roughly a month after that, a man came inquiring about her."

    "Do you remember what the woman asked about?"

    Cassandra nodded.

    "Oh, certainly. She is a human rights lawyer. I had seen her face a few times on the news feeds.

    "She asked about the working conditions over there -," Cassandra nodded towards the SkyTether, "- where we all use to be employed."

    If not for Alisha''s one tell, the emphatic use of the word ''sure'', Tas¨¬a would have already considered this lead a dead-end, and dropped it to pursue one of the more promising ones listed on the flash drive that Le¨®n had provided her.

    Even if that involved riding a bus?

    Tas¨¬a bristled at the thought.

    This lead happened to be within walking distance of Anneb¨¦l''s safe house where Tas¨¬a stayed and recuperated. Until Anneb¨¦l and Ra¨²l returned to Asunci¨®n with her motorcycle, she was limited in the scope of her inquiry.

    "So, she wanted to get your crew -."

    "Commune," Cassandra corrected her.

    "- wanted to get your commune on record for a formal complaint against the management of SkyTether?"

    Cassandra stayed attentive to detail when she answered.

    "Cross Felix Systems. That''s the incorporated governing body with a majority stake and is chartered to run it.

    "The lawyer seemed to have a personal vendetta against them."

    Cassandra turned towards the other woman.

    "Hey Judith, you spoke to the lawyer. What did you tell her?"

    Tas¨¬a noticed that the woman identified as Judith was distracted by something on the second-floor landing of the building adjacent to the main road.

    The woman jerked her head towards Cassandra.

    "I told her we are not interested. That was in the past, and it has nothing to do with what we now pursue and believe in."

    Cassandra nodded her head.

    "We are all less anxious and more fulfilled now. Happier with our lives. Most definitely happier."

    Was it worth pushing them for more answers? Tas¨¬a decided against it. Her hunch was too weak to be an asshole about it.

    She turned around and glanced up. A door was open in the space Judith was previously staring at.

    Tas¨¬a squinted to peer deeper inside.

    A misshapen shape appeared faintly outlined in the reflection of a vanity mirror that stood propped up on the one visible but highly shadowed wall. Tas¨¬a felt a moment of recognition as a tingle went up her spine.

    This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

    It was something amorphous she had experienced before but she could not quite place where that fear originated.

    So much had happened in the last few weeks. Too much weird shit for her to even hope to keep track of.

    Fortunately, some revelation came to be.

    The volume of light in that room swelled to a greater luminosity. It likely was sourced from a bathroom whose door had just been propped open.

    Now that there were no obscurant shadows on the mirror''s surface, Tas¨¬a could see the shape of a slouching man wearing a tank top staring back at her as he hid behind a set of blinds.

    That she was being spied upon by curious residents shouldn''t have even been unexpected, so what was the tingling sensation about?

    Just before the moment, she felt she would have been obligated to turn her head back around for the sake of appearing inconspicuous, the man turned his head to the side and started speaking to someone deeper in the room.

    There were scars on his cheek, a metal plate just above his temple, and his eyes set unnaturally deep.

    A freakin'' mechhead, Tas¨¬a concluded.

    What were these solid citizen hippie types doing hanging with a lag-about mechhead?

    Keeping her opinions suppressed, Tas¨¬a politely thanked the two ladies and departed.

    Tas¨¬a gazed across the street. There were other abandoned buildings nearby that were not operational in the commercial sense, but were they also uninhabited?

    A garage that sat atop a hill further down the street made a good locale to stake out the motel.

    She couldn''t merely walk over to it. No doubt the mechhead had already found another vantage point from another window from which to keep track of her.

    To utilize the garage in her stake-out, she would have to double back from a vantage point out of their range of view.

    Tas¨¬a strolled back down from whence she came and passed Alisha''s kiosk.

    Two more blocks down from the motel, she determined from her study of a crow that sat on a spike partially buried in the side of a wooden pole that she was being followed.

    The crow was no nightwing, but still possessed the feral intelligence common to its species. It kept its gaze on something in motion behind her.

    The stalker crept by a brick wall of a gardening center she had just passed by. It was one of the few commercial businesses still plying its trade in this north-western hub of the city.

    She spotted a thicket of trees and bushes to her right that occupied the space between the gardening supplies complex and a long, narrow coffee shop.

    Tas¨¬a darted towards it. While shuffling through a set of manicured bushes, she felt around her fanny-pack.

    The two moon clips she grabbed held eight .22 rounds each. From her boot holster hidden beneath the left sleeve of her jeans, Tas¨¬a produced a Magellani Intorno al Mondo double-chambered revolver.

    Magellani was an upstart Italian manufacturer on the scene making its name for its unique wheel gun designs.

    Tas¨¬a unclipped the double chambers, slid them up, and popped the first moon clip in. It fed into the back chamber. Tasia fed the second clip after it.

    Her revolver now had sixteen rounds. The back chamber in reality remained immobile. When the eight in the front chamber were spent, the holding pins spread out to let the eight rounds in reserve slide up.

    Neat, but it was an impractical design for a higher caliber revolver if its purpose was one of concealed carry.

    Tas¨¬a once owned a Magellani chambered for the .38 Special (though not for its longer sister round, the .357). The barrel length that was needed to steady the frame configuration came in at a whopping nine inches.

    Still, it fired like a dream with no recoil. Unfortunately, it was one of a dozen guns she kept in that little safe house bunker when the bounty hunters swept in and nabbed her.

    So, lost to her forever.

    Tas¨¬a slipped the gun back into its holster. She did not feel it would be necessary; even so, it was best to be prepared.

    One of the trees curved against the olive brick building. It was one of the three structures that formed the garden supply store complex.

    She scurried up it and hoisted herself onto the rooftop. Tas¨¬a grimaced at the sight of her scuffed boots, praying that none of the marks were permanent.

    She had only purchased the boots that morning. That was how ill-prepared Tas¨¬a was for her venture into Asunci¨®n. She had to buy footwear, and have the boots shipped to a Quick Mart via drone from a downtown supplier. She also had to sort through a small collection of guns looted off of dead men from her last standoff to find a weapon that fit the occasion.

    Several seconds later, the mechhead came strolling around the corner. He quickly surmised that she wasn''t there.

    He rushed through the brush and pushed limbs to the side while he jerked his head to see if she hid behind anything.

    With muttered curse words under his breath, "shit, shit, shit," the mechhead jogged to the opposite end of the building. He stood on the sidewalk and searched up and down the next street over.

    His head bobbed side to side in an almost comical fashion in search of her. Tas¨¬a ducked her head, knowing he would soon be doubling back her way.

    For several minutes she lay in wait as she heard him rustling in the bushes below her.

    Why doesn''t he just give up? Why doesn''t he just leave, already?

    When she smelled the sweet aroma of opium, she understood.

    Tas¨¬a peeked out from hiding. Beneath her, the mechhead was packing the bowl that sat flipped out from his skull. It had opened up just above his temple.

    With the bowl packed with opium, he folded the bowl back into his skull. A knob now stood out from its metal inset.

    He twisted it and that extended the protrusive button out some more. Furiously, he pumped it with his thumb.

    As the smoke began to pour out of his mouth and nose, the mechhead leaned his back against the wall to zone out.

    Tas¨¬a was pissed; the anger that now swept her was impulsive, and she knew it.

    Sometimes, you have to just fucking do something, or say something to get the venom out of you.

    As she climbed down the wall, she yelled.

    "Don''t tell me this fucking venture is going to lead me into another fucking opium den to chase down even more fucking leads involving worthless pieces of shits drooling all over themselves? Is that what you are telling me?"

    The mechhead stared at her as if he was coming out of a daze.

    That put a fire under his ass!

    She continued to chew him out.

    "I had a dude on my crew, just like you. What a bitch it was to drag him out of the dens and sober him up for the next job.

    "You know how the non-interactives, balladas vaporitos, and game stories make the dens look glitzy and glamorous with hot people doing hot things to one another? That is a lie. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    "They smell like shit, like piss, like vomit, and like the kind of sex you''d prefer to forget. Even the opium in those places smells stale."

    The stoned mechhead bit at his lips.

    "That''s depressing," he said.

    "Yeah. Well, the sight of you is depressing. You remind me of the ugly side of Vida Esconda."

    He nodded along.

    "Sorry to hear that, but I can handle my shit, okay? So, no reason for you not to calm down and chill because you are coming across as kind of harsh."

    Tas¨¬a folded her arms and leaned against a tree.

    "Hey, I can see what you are saying. I''m here laying all my prior damage on you, and that is not fair, right?"

    "Okay," the mechhead nodded along in agreement.

    "Except for one thing. You are stalking me."

    "Oh, that."

    "Yeah, that."

    The mechhead stood and stretched tall like he was trying to sober up.

    "You besmirch my good intentions. I overheard you speaking to Cassandra and Judith, asking about the lawyer, and mentioning Alisha.

    "I knew there were some things they would not tell you because when they freak out about shit, they stay freaked out about shit, so I decided to track you down."

    Tas¨¬a was taken aback by this admission.

    "Why?"

    "Because I can tell you are doing this for all the right reasons. You even look like her."

    Tas¨¬a blinked and played up her most sheepish expression.

    "What''s your name?"

    "Travis."

    "I''m sorry I cursed you out, Travis."

    "It''s okay. Listen. Those crystals that Alisha sells. They are the real deal in the capabilities she plays up. They are artificially fabricated and attuned to human bio-systems."

    "What?"

    Travis shook his hands, fingers spread out, and palms opened forward.

    "Tatiana assumed we were disgruntled employees much like the ones she is investigating, but it is not true.

    "Those crystals are used in the filtration system that keeps Asunci¨®n relatively spore free. We liberated a motherlode of bricks.

    "Alisha knows how to break down their internal matrices into functional parts. She sends them off to a cutter shop with highly elaborate instruction sets.

    "It''s very profitable. More so at the central city flea market than here, but those crystals have a draw about them. Highly mesmerizing."

    Tas¨¬a opened up the fanny pack and picked from it the smoky quartz. At her safe house in Villa Marron, she had equipment dedicated to examining and testing gemstones, but here in Asunci¨®n, Anneb¨¦l''s burb retreat was instead built around a martial arts octagon.

    She looked into Travis'' eyes. The inset intensity she had picked up on earlier was quite dominant as one would expect of a mechhead addict.

    Now, she noticed the sincerity there. They all had earnest eyes.

    Yet, something was not quite right about the lot of them.

    "Your lady folk were afraid that if I found out about your heist of the bricks of crystal, I''d go to the authorities. Or, that I may suspect some involvement on your part in my aunt''s disappearance?"

    Travis looked her in the eyes.

    "We did nothing to her."

    The emphasis on ''her'' was very subtle, but Tas¨¬a still caught it. She smiled and nodded her head.

    "I believe you."

    Something happened to Val there. She would have to return when it grew close to nighttime.

 3.3 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    The moon was crescent now. So not optimal for a goodly nighttime skulk.

    She raised a fist to the hidden orb that grinned back at her.

    You are merely a sliver of your full potential, old man!

    Fortunately, the skyline of downtown Asunci¨®n blazed iridescent and lively in the near distance.

    Quite close to her, a pack of coyotes strode like silver ghosts in and out of the spaces staggered with junk between a set of garbage bins.

    They glanced back at her, wearily. Asking her, are you supposed to be here?

    Moving from shadow to shadow, exploiting the volumes of darkness created in the antagonism of the lit-up skyline in the distance and the unlit abandoned buildings nearby, you are more like us than you are like them.

    Even as she was aware the honors given to her by the canine tricksters were merely her own vain musings, she bowed her head to the alpha bitch who stared back at her, and Tas¨¬a gave her thanks.

    She glanced at the garage that stood on the other side of the asphalt crossway from her.

    "Now my noble beasts, I must take my leave."

    The road she walked across was parallel and to the south of the street she had approached the motel from earlier that day.

    She came better prepared this time. With another trip to the Quick Mart Catalog Booth, she was able to acquire a pair of extra dense rubber-healed tennis shoes, a pair of climbing gloves, and a set of night amp goggles.

    The amped-up light evened out the sharp skyline glare and the starkly black shadows. She could comfortably see the nooks and crannies of the brick wall as she drew closer.

    Once she fixed upon the means her ascent up the wall would take, Tas¨¬a dashed up towards the building, and then darted up the wall.

    As she reclined on the garage rooftop for a moment of rest she heard a familiar swirling buzz.

    She knew the creature from whence it came all too well from a childhood where its puncture wounds and stinging bites helped build her ineffable character.

    The little thief let out an exacerbated sigh of annoyance.

    "Ah, shit!"

    Tas¨¬a rasped low and quiet.

    Sure, Asunci¨®n was relatively free of nanosphere contagion but the city had its own damn problems.

    Lanceros.

    The devil hornets were rarely deadly but the venom would cause its victims to experience an inflamed joint-based lethargy for days on end.

    She could not afford to be out of commission for so long. Too many people depended on her having her shit together, both mentally and physically, to risk that.

    She crawled slowly to the middle of the rooftop to get a better idea of where they were coming from.

    Three of the devil hornets encircled one another as they hovered just a few feet above her.

    Given the chaotic nature of hornets, there was always a chance that the revved-up actions of a few of the insects could attract the predations of the entire nest.

    She smiled gleefully when an allusion to one of her favorite novels occurred to her. She would be like the girl who kicked one.

    No! No! No! Cool that exuberance. No daring-do today, l''il lady.

    That she was finally on the trail to find her Aunt Tatiana made Tas¨¬a feel that she needed to be more cautious in her actions.

    No going in guns a blazing.

    The hornets were not shit-stirred angry. No reason to rile them. Just slide under their notice and find a perch to spy on the Americans.

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    Leave the evil little bastards alone.

    Three more hornets now appeared from behind her. They encircled one another in the same pattern as the first group.

    She pulled and prodded her way for another two feet when a third group of three appeared to her left. Once more, they displayed the same behavioral pattern as the previously deployed hornets.

    Deployed?

    Tas¨¬a froze in place. This unusual occurrence spooked her. She had never seen hornets behave in such a way. As if they were guided.

    Like drones.

    Her movement seemed to draw them out, but she wasn''t as yet certain if it was merely coincidence that when she crawled forward they tended to show up.

    Tas¨¬a glanced around the rooftop with her head sweeping from side to side at a very deliberative slow speed.

    She noticed two long ribbed cages with safety net inserts on opposite ends of the rooftop. Oddly formed vents slanted towards the center of the roof.

    In front of the cage that she scrutinized, an LED control panel light throbbed in mid-shift. The center of the display panel shaded green while its outer edges glowed orange.

    It appeared that the latter would soon dominate the green.

    If the cages were the source of the hornet nests then there also had to be a means somewhere nearby, either on the roof or in the garage below, to close the cage vents.

    Perhaps even a smoke control guage to make the devil hornets go night-night.

    But where was it?

    Tas¨¬a craned her neck; she squinted her eyes as she peeked all around.

    Many protrusive objects covered the roof surface. The largest of these objects was a small shack with layered rows of screen panels embedded in its walls.

    Given the protrusion of the double sets of pipes bound together for in-flow and out-flow delivery, Tas¨¬a assumed the little shack contained an air compressor.

    She surveyed the rest of the rooftop surface.

    Displayed all about her were duct vents, water drainage troughs, HVAC systems, a green-painted metallic carapace cover for what was likely, judging from the smell, a large diesel generator, and other objects that she was currently in no position to identify.

    At least until after she found a means to stand upright again without the risk of being bitten and stung.

    She started to feel a good deal of eyestrain due to the nearness of the many objects surrounding her.

    Tas¨¬a carefully took her goggles off.

    Eyeing the hornets before returning to her task, she wondered why the insects were not responding to any of her movements as she jerked her head around in survey.

    Tas¨¬a mulled the notion around in her mind as she adjusted the focus meter on the night amp goggles to better fit a parameter set for near-sightedness.

    With her thumbs stretching the rubber straps, Tas¨¬a flipped the night amp goggles back over her eyes. The middle distance of her field of sight became much more visually acute.

    My breathing only rises when I am crawling. That is what those little bastards are attuned to.

    Tas¨¬a filed this insight away. She would have to test the notion when she got the chance.

    After a few seconds, her eyes grew comfortable; she could now do a proper search.

    By the inset curves that held a ladder in place on the motel side of the roof, Tas¨¬a spotted an LED panel. Though larger, it matched the same make as the two panels that sat in front of the hornet cages.

    Surely, the three were installed together as a set.

    She found her proof. The words Master Control and Numerical Bypass were inlaid on the panel by the ladder.

    Whoever serviced the roof would need it to be placed exactly where it sat before they took a step on to its surface.

    Crap. Tas¨¬a cursed. The panel beneath the words ''Numerical Bypass'' was there for numerical input.

    Like a PIN, the code was four digits long.

    It was possible that she had the means to breach its underlying software on her person. She grabbed the neoPalm PAM from her fanny pack and flicked on the app for wireless server detection.

    Numbers scrolled before her eyes and the identity of nearby servers and connectors self indexed into a tidy list.

    To her infernal dismay, the rooftop master control LED never appeared.

    Tas¨¬a scowled. She must have overlooked something. At a glance, she got an answer and felt like a dumbass for not noticing the obvious set-up instantly on her first sight.

    The LED panel possessed no wireless means of control over the internal security system.

    Instead, rubberized cables protruded from a tin box underneath the master control LED and from there they fed to the two hornet cages.

    The method was primitive, of course, common even before the first moon landing, but highly effective, still. It could not be breached without taking the LED panel physically apart.

    But what was here that needed protection?

    It was nothing more than a garage for auto repair now in disuse, right?

    She glanced back to the screen as something begged for her attention.

    On the neoPalm screen, the incoming data started to form an unusual pattern. The cyclical ping was strangely atypical. The oscillation for it was a magnitude higher than the norm in its frequency.

    Was the signal purposefully fed back onto the device where it would then be amplified!

    The source was only within a few yards distance from where she crouched.

    Tas¨¬a glanced up and squinched.

    It''s that? Whatever the hell that thing is.

    She assumed it was the protective carapace for a large generator. Clearly, that was not its purpose.

    Tas¨¬a manually over rid the wireless auto-detection and she wrote a small script to ping for a limited set of attempts and while doing so call up the public registry information for the odd device that sat uncomfortably near her.

    She hit execute, and her instruction set was overridden and completely ignored. The impossibly high rate of oscillation set off, again.

    From the random visual noise of the data flowing on her screen a hypnotic pattern emerged that grabbed at her eyes.

    Inside the metal carapace, a sizzling sound began to take shape.

    As Tas¨¬a forced her eyes from the screen to see what was occurring, a lightning bolt zapped from the carapace to her neoPalm.

    The personal assistant flew out of her hands. A shocking jolt cascaded up her arms, and the sudden brightness blinded her.

    The night amp goggles made the latter condition much worse as her very being was consumed with an all-encompassing white noise.

    Only the hum of agitated hornets made it through her paralyzed senses.

 3.4 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a sucked in air to avoid screaming. The chemical burn surged through her veins.

    Oh, God! Why did you bite me there? It is not even a juicy tush! No rational creature would bite that for fun. Just a tiny little muscle butt, that''s all.

    She had to remind herself, hornets were known for being anything but rational. And then, to intercede her pleas, the crunch of another stinger broke off as it gave way to her meaty glutes.

    You bit me again, you little bastard!

    Tas¨¬a breathed hard. In and out. The swarming racket above her head enveloped even the lightning-derived white noise that still pressed into the dermal layers of her skin.

    In the span of a few seconds, many notions came to her in near simultaneous synergy to form a strategy.

    She had already planned to fold up into a little fetal ball, and just take the ass-kicking she was about to receive, hobble back to the safe house, and bathe in the cortisone-based treatment tank Anneb¨¦l had installed for her gym workouts.

    One major hitch, her arms were not cooperating with her will to deploy them.

    Still numb from the lightning strike Tas¨¬a was stuck in place. Her body was spread long like the Sphinx statue, ready to be dive-bombed by the lancero devilkin.

    Use the Force, Luke!

    No, using the analytics-mode would be a rash decision. She was still blind, after all.

    There was no objective to push towards until her sight returned, and she would need the analytics-mode once again after the fight to steam press the venom out of her system.

    This time, just take that ass-kicking.

    The only factor she had control of with any assurance was her breathing. It was also the best means at her disposal to calm the lanceros.

    Another hornet attacked. It pushed its scimitar-shaped stinger into the meat of her shoulder blade. Tas¨¬a pushed her conscious mind into diagnostic-mode, the meditative state taught to her by the Elders of the Anewed, her father''s Later Day Cathar creed.

    She focused her attention on the present until she was one with the stark shadow and the sheen of glimmer made purple and midnight blue from the cityscape behind her.

    Her breathing stopped.

    A hornet crawled along the side of her neck before it bit into it. Several crawled around the scalp inside her coif. One of which veered deep into the strands of her hair before it tapped down its stinger.

    The intensity of the pain caused flashes of red to burn through her already-blinded vision as the venom chased the white noise out of her retinas.

    Her vision returned in tones of sepia.

    That venom is searching its way through me like it is up to something. There is nothing ordinary about it! I know what normal venom should feel like like I know the taste of apple juice.

    This feeling isn''t it.

    Of course, these hornets are guided biological weapons. Why assume the venom is natural?

    Keep calm, don''t breathe.

    Tas¨¬a once more entered the mind of her ten-year-old self.

    "Keep calm. Don''t breathe," said Sachmilli Cuervo.

    She sat cross legg¨¦d, studiously mimicking the Elder Sachmilli who sat in front of her. His lesson that day was to teach her how to use the diagnostic-mode to conquer both fear and pain.

    In his hands, he held a pair of sharp brass needles. They gleamed in the wicked red fire of the sun.

    "Accept these gifts and more gifts will come."

    Exactly in the same place, he pushed the needle in her neck where twenty-two years before a devilkin lanchero just now stung her.

    Push through the pain until you feel elated.

    To her surprise, the Elder was not wrong.

    As he had said then and she felt now - a feeling of joy overtook the fear, and numbness overtook the pain. Another set of bites occurred, mostly on her back, but as she held her breath, and kept docile, the hornets lost interest in her tender flesh.

    Those that nested in her hair, likely attracted to the aroma of her shampoo, flew away first. The rest soon followed.

    She drew in breath and realized that movement was slowly returning to her joints.

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    Tas¨¬a turned her neck from side to side. It felt like she burned a thousand calories mostly from her overworked lungs just to make that attempt.

    With a heaving thrust, Tas¨¬a poked her neck up to search for the hornets. Though the ones who lost their stingers died, the remaining, still formidable in number, regrouped into trios hovering equidistant from one another.

    Tas¨¬a, with a smoothly deliberative motion that put a raw strain on her every joint, lifted her knee so she could acquire the Magellani .22 revolver into her hands.

    The gun was the opposite of the hand cannons typical of revolver design.

    This little lady, however, was sleekly designed for near-silent takedowns where spraying a target with low-powered but extremely accurate firepower would prove more useful than a full frontal assault.

    Situations where excess was both counterproductive and could get you both noticed and killed.

    Essentially, the designers had in mind tunnel-rat styled close-quarter guerilla warfare for which Italian special forces had in recent decades become infamous.

    Either through intuition or coincidence, she could not have brought a more perfect weapon to accomplish the feat she now intended.

    Tas¨¬a clinched her gut to get in mode. By the time the vapor filled her nostrils, her every joint and muscle felt freed of both strain and stress.

    She jumped up too quickly for the first three hornets closest to her to have time to react.

    She took them out with pinpoint accuracy.

    Between your beady fucking eyes!

    The next three began to twist away from the circular pattern they flew and into a more irregular arching path that bobbed up and down.

    They were too slow and hesitant for this countermeasure to help them.

    She popped their heads off as well.

    Lanceros in three elliptical flight patterns swirled about a broadening range. Too far away to aim for their eyes but Tas¨¬a did manage to drill a round each into her targets'' upper thorax torsos.

    She looked around for other targets and saw none.

    Near where she landed back on her feet, the neoPalm personal assistant was a smoking ruin.

    Well, fuck!

    How was she going to contact Felicit¨¦ and let her know she was now in Asunci¨®n? Tas¨¬a had been holding off until she had a solid plan put in place to contact the Human Rghts Commission On War Crime Claims while minimizing the threat to her safety such exposure would risk.

    Shaking her head, Tas¨¬a chuckled to herself. What was an anarchist like Felicit¨¦ doing putting her trust in an organization like the HRC?

    Before she could elaborate upon that thought, her stomach started to quiver. The analytics-mode adrenaline rush draw down induced nausea.

    Overwhelmed, Tas¨¬a clinched her nails into her palms and braced herself. Sunk down to her knees she spewed out the contents of her previous meal.

    It must be the venom.

    She had a higher than normal tolerance to hornet stings, but something about this venom her body rejected altogether.

    She even began to sweat with a cold, damp trickle that streamed down her forehead and it drenched down the sides of her neck. At the same time that she realized that her breath had become highly agitated, three hornets popped out of a nearby vent.

    Tasia ran to the opposite corner of the roof, rolled off the side, and repelled down the wall.

    When she hit the ground, Tas¨¬a rolled into cover. This was the same side of the garage that faced the motel.

    Though the Magellani was designed with sound suppression in mind with its air-tight chambers and low-caliber piston-driven rounds, it remained in the realm of feasibility that highly tuned security sensors could still pick up the sound and zero in on her location.

    Tas¨¬a peeked over to the motel. Lights in several rooms. But no activity outside.

    It was time to rest and assess what could help her going forward.

    She propped her back against the garage wall beneath a smoked glass window. She peered up into it.

    A glass darkly, she thought.

    So, what just occurred?

    It was Ingenious. But why would an abandoned garage be protected by a sophisticated defensive system disguised as a naturally occurring biological entity?

    What of the surrounding blocks of abandoned buildings? They outnumbered the active commercial properties three to one, in her estimation.

    Did that make sense, economically? No longer a modest-sized city, Asunci¨®n was the center of operations for the Salvage''s substantial public economy.

    Then it occurred to her why, though she planned to ditch the rest of her surveillance for the evening to deal with her injuries, she did not consider the evening a loss.

    She was certain that this was quite the valuable bit of intel she sat upon.

    Every city bearing strategic value in the greater scheme of things had its own clandestine Spook Town.

    A set of buildings, sometimes tunnels connected them if such an infrastructure proved feasible. Most essential to a Spook Town''s existence was an integrated, mostly self-sufficient, economy of agents who operated with mutual purpose within an overall agenda.

    It would appear she stumbled upon Asunci¨®n''s very own Spook Town.

    However, many factions operated in Asunci¨®n.

    Some cities with competing factions had more than one Spook Town.

    Her thoughts were interrupted by a seething noise.

    The hornets sounded angry flying roughly thirty feet above her.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head as she peered back up to the roof. She watched the devil hornets closest to her side of the garage as they swung about in wide arcs in search of her.

    She must have caused a lot of them to be deployed from their nest when she scurried off the roof.

    She needed to get going.

    She stood up but paused.

    How did this Spook Town operation involve her investigation? Would it prove fruitful for her endeavors if she pursued this lead?

    If this Spook Town did not overlap with the disappearance of Aunt Tatiana, it would be the first time spooks were innocent of anything.

    In all of human history.

    Perhaps, an exaggeration, but still . . .

    Tas¨¬a glanced back at the motel complex.

    After all, they are somehow tied to all of this.

    The American hippies lived in an abandoned space that took up much more room than they appeared to need. What if they were a part of the Spook Town operation?

    They were excellent candidates for that kind of role.

    Then it occurred to her. She thought back to her conversation with Travis.

    Limited hang-out.

    Tas¨¬a was puzzled as to why the mechhead indulged so much of his crew''s game plan.

    Limited hang-out.

    It was an old spook technique to distract from what they were really doing by coming up with a juicy story (true or not) that would satisfy the curiosity of the journalist or foreign influencer whom they were attempting to persuade.

    He was blowing smoke up her ass. Something far more devious than laundering assets from a heist for specialized crystals was going on here.

    After all, through working a flea market and a street vendor-based operation, were these anywhere near the most efficient means to launder the value of those crystals into monetized wealth?

    Of course, not.

    Tas¨¬a briskly walked towards the next street over. She retraced her previous path past the trash bins while she muttered to herself with her fists clenched.

    "Smoke right up my bumhole, followed by rainbows and sunshine. Tryin'' to stretch it out of wack for good, are you?"

 3.5 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a crossed another street that put her on the right path to the Quick Mart.

    She had developed a strategy of how she was going to deal with the onset of lethargy as the venom wrought its defiling path through her system.

    Her plan would test the boundaries of her analytics-mode abilities.

    She would need a case of Ki-Jack for this endeavor, and the Quick Mart sold Ki-Jack Ginseng, All Natural Alertness Elixir in abundance.

    There were a lot of things she needed to accomplish before she attempted this mission again.

    Tas¨¬a cursed herself for tackling it so unprepared. After stopping for a moment to shake off her discontent, she continued walking and mentally laying out her list of things she had to do.

    She needed to take a good piss. After which she would need to hydrate.

    She needed to cleanse out her system as she did with the venom in Freddie Ferenzi''s tranquilizer dart less than a week before.

    Poisons of unnatural means have been my trial and my tribulation of late.

    If she succeeded in ridding herself of the hornet venom, she would need to follow that up with yet another good piss.

    And hydrate again after that.

    So she would be in fighting condition to spar in the octagon with Anneb¨¦l''s bots as she tested the limits of her analytics-mode in combat.

    In the hope that it would provide the answer to just how much better of a fighter that the adrenaline push guided by a mentally disciplined mode of perception made her.

    She wanted to know her exact specifications in performance just as an athlete in top physical condition would know that answer given the measured biofeedback built into his training regimen.

    Only then would she know if she was good enough for the tasks she was given: rescuing her aunt, according to General Kutuzov, and saving the human race from abolition according to the Incubus and the Wise One.

    To be honest with herself, the later task sounded absolutely silly. The Cull Spore entity algorithms were prone to drama.

    So far in all her previous endeavors, she had only been winging it, and that wasn''t good enough to be the agent Kutuzov and the nanospore AIs thought she could be.

    Her inner voice chided at her doubts.

    You''re a damn good gunslinger, my girl. Like Billy the Kid, damn good gunslingers tend to be total messes in their personal lives.

    That''s you, baby blues. Solely mission objective focused and disciplined Tier One teams can''t do what you can do even when you''re just fucking around for the shits and giggles.

    Tas¨¬a scoffed at her inner voice.

    Baby Blues? Our eyes are brown.

    She picked up her speed in a sprint down the street, but as soon as she gained momentum, Tas¨¬a had to stop. Her legs violently quivered.

    She leaned against a pole and let loose a long, exasperated dry heave.

    "Whew," she yelled.

    That felt much more painful than if half-digested content actually did spew back up her throat.

    She shook her head violently to shake off the nausea.

    Ugh! That was awful.

    She was left feeling weak and sweating again. Numb swelling arose from the bite marks the devilkin lanceros left on her body.

    Whatever was in that venom flowed with an abrupt force through her in a cascade of waves. From previous research into bio-warfare, a natural subject of interest for all the residents of the Quadra, Tas¨¬a knew what that meant.

    The chemical mix that the little bastards unleashed inside her was a cyclical disrupter. Its effect on her would likely grow more intense as the compounds broke down even further in her bloodstream.

    She had planned to wait until she was back at the safehouse before she took another leak so she could study her physiological reactions in a controlled environment.

    However, Tas¨¬a suspected the venom to be much more dangerous than she first assumed when she was bitten.

    She needed to do something about it immediately before it had a chance to overwhelm her.

    Even still, she wasn''t going to let her bladder accumulate waste material through successive analytics-mode sessions without first expunging her bladder before she risked any more build up.

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    It was a hard lesson she kept having to relearn in her earlier misadventures where she tried to ignore this severe physical limitation that nature had imposed upon her extraordinary abilities.

    Figuring, as she tended to do, that she could just push through it all from one mad adventure to the next happenstance, and then, afterward, deal with the outcome in her free time.

    On the evening Anneb¨¦l drove them to Asunci¨®n that negligent thinking almost got her killed when she went into a seizure as she was pissing in a gas station bathroom.

    Her limbs shaking uncontrollably, Tas¨¬a fell helplessly off of the commode, and onto the dirty tiles of the wet floor where she went into a neurogenic shock.

    Fortunately, Anneb¨¦l was there. She kept a full medical kit in her Jeep to treat her brother''s many medical conditions.

    Anneb¨¦l shot her with a dose of norepinephrine. That was the last thing Tas¨¬a remembered occurring to her before she blacked out.

    She didn''t wake up again until twelve hours later in a guest''s bedroom in Anneb¨¦l''s safe house.

    Tas¨¬a teared up a little. The brawler with her exceptional Galo-Spanish good looks was the best friend she ever had.

    Gahd-dangit, don''t get sentimental on me, Tas¨¬a. We''ve got baddies to put in the ground.

    Tas¨¬a scanned the scene she approached. It was a lightly trafficked street with life at this time of night happening at only a biker bar, and beside it, an open-air patio built above a restaurant. Couples swung around to old folk dance patterns played on twin guitars by a duet of mariachis.

    Tas¨¬a found a pair of bushes in the narrow alley between the two buildings that would suit her present need for discreet public nudity.

    Once up against the back wall, she dropped her pants and panties, squatted, and let out a vigorous stream.

    The steam sizzled beneath her, but the burn stemming from her urethra, though unpleasant, was within her level of tolerance.

    At least, she didn''t risk dying this time.

    She had aloe-treated baby wipes in her fanny pack for this very occasion. Tas¨¬a wiped herself down and sighed at the relief she felt.

    Bringing those along was the smartest thing you''ve done in the last two weeks, peque?a dama.

    After Tas¨¬a stood back up, she shifted over from the smaller bush a few feet to maintain her privacy before she filled up her lungs to center her breathing.

    Slowly in, slowly out.

    To better focus her abilities, she decided to apply the two modes, analytic and diagnostic, together.

    Tasia raised her naked arms in front of her with her palms facing out.

    In the morning we greet the sun, in the evening we wave to her goodbye.

    Accept these gifts and more gifts will come.

    Tas¨¬a thought of Sachmilli, the elder, family friend, and father to her late, belov¨¦d Gail-Sebastian.

    He knew. All of the elders knew. You are knitted differently.

    She pushed this and all other notions out of her mind until she was in the eternal present of No-Thought.

    She clenched her gut and No-Thought and No-Motion came together and joined into one singular Modality.

    Together, the diagnostics-mode that the Anewed called a unique meditative state of awareness, and the analytics-mode hardwired as a means of controlling the course that adrenaline flowed within her, became one entity, the Modality.

    To her surprise, it could speak to her.

    A beast is riding inside of you, writhing through the channels, vein and vessel; it does not belong here in this nature or any nature outside of an AI daemon''s mind.

    It is an evasive entity and it must be exterminated.

    Cold sweat engulfed her in a frost-bit fever. Her skin grew pale and blue shapes like salamanders crawled through the skin of her forearms.

    The cold vapor rose out of her pores and formed a mist that danced around her.

    It tasted on her tongue like a metal from another universe. Even so, it was a taste of which she became familiar during her chemo treatments.

    The chill permeated her eyes. She could feel the Modality test the nerve endings where the venom had previously latched on.

    They throbbed and throbbed harder still until her vision turned white, mirroring the clear state of her mind entranced into No-Thought.

    With no sense of time in the eternal present, she could only guess how much time had passed when the Modality released her with a terse statement.

    It is done.

    She relaxed against the wall as Tas¨¬a decided what to do next. She needed hydration. More specifically, she needed beer.

    She thought about peeking into the biker bar, to see if they were cool like the old guys from the mechanics syndicate in Villa Marron who operated a similar dive.

    But what if they weren''t? She wasn''t in the mood for dealing with assholes.

    The restaurant would be just as good a place to get a beer. Likely, they would even have a better selection to choose from. Besides, she needed to eat.

    With that matter resolved, Tasia worried whether or not the hornet stings made her look unpresentable.

    Easy enough to check.

    While she walked up to her target, Tas¨¬a found a tiny flashlight she kept in her fanny pack. She crouched by a mirror on one of the choppers lined up in the small parking lot in front of the biker bar.

    Examining her face in the rearview mirror it was easy to see the vapor cleansing did as good a job on her outer skin as it did for her internal organs.

    There was very little that remained of the stings and bites that the hornets had inflicted upon her.

    Tas¨¬a was pleased. Still, she decided to wrap her hair in a bandana. Her scalp showed a laceration. Though small, it made her feel self-conscious.

    As she felt around her fanny pack for it, Tas¨¬a froze up. She wasn''t sure what made her react, but something was off. Perhaps a sound her intuition picked up on.

    Her inner voice urged her:

    Tas¨¬a, you''re exposed. Go and hide!

    Tasia retreated to the two bushes where she had taken her tinkle.

    What the hell is going on?

    Goosebumps crawled up her skin as she recognized the moaning noise. It was the same cry of desperation that the Manifest gave.

    She had heard it inside the Isolation Unit. She had heard it from a Manifested changeling in the IMCQ office complex.

    Tasia peaked out from the side of the thistle bush as the sound became more prominent.

    From up the road on the very path she just approached from the shape of a man drew closer.

    He walked in the middle of the street with a swift stride in his step. The street lamps showered light on his lustrous reptilian skin.

    Snakes squirmed beneath his limbs with one as vibrant as a newly inked tattoo coiled as it coolly shimmered around his neck. His face was all impossible contours and protrusions.

    He lumbered towards the biker bar.

    Tas¨¬a suppressed the urge to gasp.

    He''s going in there looking like that?

    But at the last possible moment without a pause in his step, the man''s Manifested form retreated, and he was human again.

    She recognized him right away due to the metal plate attached to the side of his skull.

    Travis grabbed the door handle and walked inside.

    Tas¨¬a stood up, glanced around, and looked up towards the patio with the lithely gliding dancers.

    Did no one else see that crazy shit?

 3.6 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a wound her way past the line-up of motorcycles and walked to the edge of the parking lot to get a better line of sight on everyone else nearby out and about in the open air.

    Couples danced around one another, the damsels twirled in high heels and the hombres stomped their gaucho boots. An older gent in white suit finery sashayed about with a tall and colorful mixed drink. While smacking at the fretboards, the two mariachis held the necks of their guitars high up in the air.

    The bustle of activity placed her paranoia at rest. Legit distracted by their festivities, no one above her saw the Manifested changeling man.

    While she wondered what to do next, Tas¨¬a clamped the bandanna down with a bobby pin.

    Should she go inside the bar and confront Travis?

    Hey man, either you tell me what''s going on, or I''m just going to invite myself over to shoot you all in your pretty little spook faces.

    She realized then with the tough-talking girl boss quips just on the edge of her lips just how scared she was.

    When she started her latest endeavor, she merely wanted to snoop around and gather any information that helped her get closer to rescuing Aunt Tatiana.

    She thought she could, and she should at least try to avoid violence altogether until the rescue of her aunt warranted it.

    But the sight of a Manifested changeling, so soon after she narrowly avoided transformation herself dredged up the dread instinct of fight or flight.

    Tasia''s hands got clammy. She just wanted to take her gun and pound the trigger in every direction to make everything feel better.

    She had shoved the whole experience of becoming Manifest into the back of her mind since the evening when she was trapped with Alex while hellhounds wandered the hallway outside.

    A fucking third eye formed in the middle of my skullfucked forehead! Aieie!

    Just touching on those memories made her want to scream.

    And shoot the darkness, itself.

    Tasia breathed deeply, and let the night-chilled air in and out until her breathing and heart rate returned to normal.

    A little reasoning, where she thought out her current predicament, calmed her down.

    If that dive bar is a hotbed of Manifest activity he would not have bothered to change back to human before he went inside.

    In all probability, you will have an entirely normal experience if you too go inside.

    Could she just walk into the bar, blend in with the crowd, and spy on him? With her bangs and scalp hidden beneath the bandanna, he might not recognize her face, at least, right off, but Travis struck her as a normal dude.

    Manifested changeling, American spook and mechhead aside, he was still a normal dude.

    He had given them the glance.

    Tas¨¬a looked down at her boobs and sighed.

    It was what it was, c''est la vie, and all that.

    He has every inch, shape, and contour of my two wonderful ladies memorized.

    That was the one area of her body she never gave into giving even an ounce of self-deprecation about. The flat musclebutt, her gobliny smile, the tiny weak chin, that entangled rats nest of hair covering her beaver that made a total bitch out of every single straight razor that ever confronted it, were all things she liked to joke about.

    But the ladies? That was her momma''s ever-lasting gift that she passed along to Tas¨¬a. She would be an ingrate of a daughter if she didn''t appreciate their fulsome shape on her figure wholeheartedly.

    The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    But, at this peculiar moment, they were in the way. She had no jacket or a tighter sports bra that she could use to better conceal them.

    Even so, it may prove counterproductive to minimize their impact. She was gathering intel so she would have to use her charms, her allure.

    And sure, she had a pair of pretty lips that filled out lovely, also a pair of suggestively slough eyes that added coolness to her demeanor.

    A guy could do much worse.

    But appearance aside, she was not looking to get a date in the bar, after all. She just needed to know what kind of impression she would make, and how to use it to her advantage.

    So, this was her game plan.

    Go in and if Travis spotted her, look like she was just there to have some fun.

    Find out everything she could from everyone else before she confronted Travis.

    The joint did not disappoint. Thick clouds of smoke rolled under fans.

    There was as much dancing going on as she had witnessed on the patio next door. The music was unfamiliar and different. Something almost American, but not quite.

    She was familiar with Tex-Mex metal, and she was even something of a fan, but this sounded like a throwback in both the styles of Tejano and Rock.

    Cumbia Norte mixed with some Skynard era country-rock, perhaps? That was as best as her virgin ears could discern. She had never heard an accordion sound so ... psychedelic?

    All that mattered, the music had a groove she could dance to when it came time to throw down.

    Tas¨¬a scanned the crowd. Some of the gents and ladies glanced her way. They appeared in the aggregate of their reactions to be amused by her presence.

    To her better fortune, there was no hostility on display.

    She looked around once more. Travis wasn''t in sight. Perhaps, he was squeezed into one of the booths that sat outside of her current view, or he was in the restroom or a backroom.

    A polished wood-beamed corridor with a short flight of steps extended past the restrooms.

    She could only speculate what the purpose for which the back rooms passed the steps were used. Were poker games going on?

    Then again, Travis was a fiend and not just of the Manifested sort.

    They got dens back there where mechheads get lit?

    She squinched her nose at the thought. Combat with hellhounds and changelings were not the only memories she pushed far away.

    And deep down.

    "My, my. Aren''t you just the sunshine beaming off the side of a peach?"

    Tas¨¬a turned to face her sarcastic accuser. She had unconsciously drifted over to the bar while lost in her thoughts.

    The bartender was the one who made demands of her attention.

    "What?"

    The bartender was a curiosity. Big friendly guy. Unmistakably American. He wore a tux shirt coupled with a pair of jeans kept up by a thick belt with replicas of Conquistador-era medallions welded together to form a buckle.

    "I saw you there with a look on your face as sad as any I''ve ever seen."

    Tas¨¬a took a seat in front of the bartender.

    "Just thinking of a man. My man."

    His forehead wrinkled.

    "What happened to your man?"

    Tas¨¬a gave a reluctant smile and shrugged.

    "He died."

    "Well, ain''t that some shit?"

    "It sure as hell is."

    "Sounds like you could use a beer."

    Tas¨¬a slapped her debit card down on the bar top.

    "Yup. Make it two."

    She needed something heavy to settle her stomach.

    Always running on empty are you?

    She scanned the bottles racked in the airwave cooler and saw two that would do her just fine.

    "That German Import right over there? The doppelbock with the twin goats on the label, and also that Guinness Foreign Extra Stout looks mighty tasty, right about now. Open it up, would you, sweety?"

    He grabbed the two bottles with rhythmic assurity.

    "Well, shee-ut, me lassie, I like you already. Will that be all?"

    For the first four words, he spoke in English. She pretended to catch on and make sense of what he said but giggled along with him anyway.

    He was doing his best to try and impress her. And really, that was all she ever asked of any man.

    "Will that be all," she repeated.

    She lifted her shirt and smacked her stomach just under the navel.

    "Will that be all? Can''t you tell how famished I am by the sunken belly?"

    "That''s a mighty good-looking abdomen, for sure, but where did you get that scar?"

    Tas¨¬a crinkled her nose. It had been many days now since it had either itched or been a source of pain. She nearly forgot it was there.

    She squinted her eyes and raised her chin.

    "Whose asking?"

    "They call me Beauregard. But that ain''t my real name. Left the real one back in Missouri."

    "They call me Avellana for reasons that I have no doubt you can relate."

    Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Travis and three other men hustling out from a booth and into the back corridor.

    If he had caught sight of her already, he made no effort to glance back in her direction, now.

    She still needed to play it cool, and not rush off to give him chase.

    "So Beauregard, whatcha got to eat around here?"

    "Pack of smoked sausages?"

    She eyed the package. A processed meat product from the United States. She was raised on the healthy grain-fed livestock of her people.

    A true daughter of Paraguay.

    "I don''t think so. What about those cashews? Throw me two packs of them."

    Beauregard was eager to do so. Almost too eager.

    Tas¨¬a checked out the colorful label the cashews came in. They were marked with a flavor profile on the package. Some kind of chipotle.

    She looked back toward Beauregard and asked.

    "What''s a Carolina Reaper?"

 3.7 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Beauregard, you son of a bitch. I love you man, but you son of a bitch."

    Tas¨¬a drank half the bottle of Guinness to douse the fire out of her mouth and throat.

    "A native lass like you? Raised on chili peppers? Figured you would barely even notice."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. There was still heat surging up her face, eyeballs, and forehead yet to be flushed out.

    "Whew," Tas¨¬a yelped out loud. "Don''t believe the hype, man. Anything hotter than a Scotch Bonnet and I am flummoxed."

    She took another swig from the stout. Unfortunately, the carbonization was high for the brand. A near-to-flat beer would have killed the burn right off.

    "So what did you think," Beauregard asked.

    The depraved man dared chuckle at her suffering. She still liked him, though.

    "Couldn''t make out much taste beyond the acidic burn. You could use it for flamethrower fuel."

    Tas¨¬a gave herself a strident nod.

    Now that would be an interesting weapon. Reengineered to disperse controlled chemical burns instead of incineration. You would still need the high-octane fuel gel to heat the liquefied pepper concentrate into a high-pressured areosolic vapor.

    But, would you need a separate chamber to heat the fuel, or could you simply add a diluted solution to the pepper concentrate and still get effective results?

    Beauregard''s mouth gawked wide open as she ran the idea through her head.

    "What," she asked.

    "My God, you are putting that idea together to make it happen."

    "Yup," she affirmed. "Is it easy to buy those peppers in high volume?"

    "What profession are you in that converting a flame thrower would be a practical means to solve a problem?"

    Tas¨¬a was flattered by the American''s exasperation.

    "Er ... Pest control?"

    Indeed, if she ever needed to return to the garage, a pepper spray thrower would prove valuable.

    "I bet," he reacted, skeptically.

    "All the creepy crawlies in the Quadra are trying to eat us alive, Beauregard. What''s so hard to believe that a distressing damsel like me isn''t, in fact, a stone-cold bug stomper?"

    He nodded with a side grin bouncing like rubber against his cheek. Before he could respond, a customer gained his attention. Beauregard whispered, ''one moment''.

    Soon, he returned. They once more enjoyed a fair measure of privacy.

    "I don''t doubt it, Avellana. But something tells me you don''t just limit your prey to wildlife."

    Tas¨¬a''s shoulders leaned back; she bristled at this suggestion.

    Before she started to accumulate a body count, Tas¨¬a lived out her bike courier guise seamlessly without anyone the wiser.

    Now, did she exude the demeanor of a stone-cold manhunter and not just a stone-cold bug stomper?

    "That''s how you sized me up when I walked in? The gunslinger out looking for trouble kind of gal?"

    Beauregard shook his head.

    "Look at it from my perspective. You came in right after -" Beauregard nodded his head towards the back rooms, "- he came in. I could tell by the way you were feeling out the crowd, you were gunning for somebody. He was by far the best candidate for that somebody."

    Tas¨¬a held the Ayinger Celebrator doppelbock bottle up. Beauregard popped the cap.

    She discovered while downing the last half of the Guinness Foreign Extra Stout she could bite into three or four cashews and back them up with a swish of beer.

    Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

    Without melting her esophagus.

    With a hard, scrutinizing gaze, she questioned Beauregard.

    "He didn''t ask you to be on the lookout for someone like me did he?"

    The American waved away her concerns.

    "Don''t get me wrong. Personally, I hate spooks."

    "Yeah. What''s up with that? I thought you guys were no longer in that game?"

    Beauregard nodded, sympatico.

    "Yeah, me too."

    "What''s it your prez, what''s-his-name, said like thirty years ago? ''Let somebody else pick up the tab, for a change. Shit''s both too real and too weird, these days.''."

    Beauregard''s eyes looked up and to the side like he was scanning his memory. He then nodded affirmatively.

    "Yup. I do believe that that is indeed the exact quote. So you gunnin'' then?"

    Tas¨¬a gulped down three hard gulps of what could possibly be the tastiest beer on the planet. She wiped her mouth before she answered.

    "Nah. I''m just looking for some answers. I got bullshitted about those jokers quitting their jobs to find peace and life affirmation in the simpler trades. So I decided to stalk that one, -" she pointed to the backroom, "- separate him from the rest of the pack, and get some answers out of him."

    Beauregard turned his head and glanced down the back hallway.

    "I know the crew he is hooked up with. They''ve been coming around for over a year, now. They worked out from the SkyTether, but, found themselves on the wrong side of a political divide, and they all got burned. Now, they are just watching and waiting for something to happen."

    The bottle was half empty. She hated to ruin something as scrumptious as a traditional doppelbock with what she was about to do, but she could buy a fresh bottle.

    She dumped the rest of the pack of Carolina Reaper-flavored cashews into the bottle, placed a thumb over the mouth of the bottle, and shook it.

    The fizz that rose Tas¨¬a caught with her mouth. She turned up the bottle and swallowed the beer and nuts together.

    When she turned her attention back to Beauregard, Tas¨¬a cocked her head to the side, "Interesting. You must hear a lot of gossip. You ever find out what that nasty business they were entangled in was about?"

    He nodded his head. "I run drinks back there sometimes, and I sometimes do some light footwork for them. I even hooked up with their lady boss for a torrid romance last Summer. I have indeed heard things."

    Tas¨¬a folded her arms. She had an idea of what was coming next.

    "Like what?"

    "Even though you''re a Mestiza lass, and not Russian at all, or so it appears, you somehow look just like her."

    It was what Tas¨¬a expected to hear, and pretty much the same thing Travis had told her. Yet, it turned out that with even that bit of truthful information, he was playing her.

    "That''s how you knew what I was up to the second I walked in here? Tatiana has been here, too?"

    "Yup," he affirmed. "She wanted to know what was going on at the SkyTether. Came around on three different occasions. Poking and prodding. I didn''t mind. She was nice, like you."

    She gave him her most fetching gobliny smile before she followed up.

    "But there was someone that did mind Tatiana coming around asking questions?"

    The nod of his head was but a slight quiver.

    "Three to be precise."

    "Beauregard, who are those guys back there with Travis?"

    "Some guys who might just owe you an explanation."

    Tas¨¬a excused herself and headed to the bathroom. Her fingers were covered in the dusty Carolina Reaper seasoning.

    She rinsed her hands and dried them with a towel.

    She double-checked to see if her Magellani revolver was properly loaded. When she did so, something caught her attention.

    The rounds she loaded were slightly different. The cases were marked with a band of white.

    It was something that could easily be overlooked when dealing with ammunition because you always used what was available to you.

    The scarcity of rounds meant it was often difficult to stock up on only one favored manufacturer''s ammo. A case of rounds typically included the same caliber of ammo but from several different manufacturers who all used unique designs to distinguish their line.

    These banded rounds would not have caught her notice as anything more than a cosmetic distinction except for the cases not being made of brass.

    Instead, they were a high-flex inversion mesh that expanded on the inside when primed for explosive thrust but remained solidly intact on the outside. It gave the piston round a little more oomph when squeezing the bullet out from the cartridge case.

    From there, as she examined the bullet head of the round she twirled between her fingers, what Tas¨¬a discovered got a little more interesting.

    White phosphorus.

    Damn. Ought to check all of those .22 moonclips for whatever else may be in that case of ammo. Now, this weapon on those soldiers is starting to make more sense to me.

    A minimized means for conducting specialized firing conditions. Advanced warfare on the cheap.

    Tasia put the round back in the revolver chamber. She wondered what its impact would do to a Manifested changeling.

    She suspected all four of the spooks gathered in the room around the corner from her were changelings.

    Trepidation aside, there was only one way she could find out.

    Tas¨¬a placed the revolver inside her jeans and squeezed under her belt. She covered the gun up with her tank top, and unbuckled the sheath for the stiletto she kept on the inside of her left shin.

    Now ready, she walked down the hall. She came to a door where a murmured commotion wailed up from the other side.

    She opened the door. Stepped inside, and she shut it behind her.

    Leaning against the door, striking an aggressive pose to let them know no one was leaving without her say-so, Tas¨¬a assessed the room.

    Two of the men stood at the very back by a shelf of liquor bottles as they conversed with one another.

    Travis leaned over a billiards table. He was about to take a shot. The last man she assessed happened to be the oldest of the quartet, sat on a stool with a pool stick dangling between his hands.

    He sneered at her as he stared back into her eyes.

    Tas¨¬a spoke up.

    "Anyone going to tell me where you are keeping my Aunt?"

    The older gentleman clenched his pool stick tight. His jaw slackened just before he spoke. His tongue whipped along his lower lip. It began to bifurcate.

    "Hey! We are in the middle of a game here."

    With a tight little grimace, Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    Wrong answer.

 3.8 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Travis had his que ball lined up for a split with a lead set up against the bank. To Tas¨¬a''s eyes, the shot looked solid if he smacked it just right.

    Not being in a friendly mood at the moment, she didn''t give him a chance to complete it. She popped a .22 round into the ball just to the side of his aim.

    The ball careened in a bell-torque spin into a hanging electric torch just above the table.

    Blue sparks flew above them. White phosphorus burned into the green mat.

    She shot a second ball and made it smack into the knuckles of the older gentleman who chose to speak rudely to her.

    Reflective of the tradition of her people more than her religious upbringing, that rudeness on his part made the value of his life forfeit.

    He flinched, and the stick dropped.

    The third ball she targeted proved to be trickier than the first two she shot; infact, she had to shoot it twice. The first bullet got the ball airborne where it spun vertically in her direction, immaculate and no wobble.

    Now stabilized and at its mid air apex, a second shot sent the ball smashing into a bourbon decanter sitting on a shelf between the two gentlemen in the back.

    The electric torch gave up its struggle as it diminished in dramatic fashion into darkness leaving only soft lit lamps that curled up the room''s four corner posts to provide the room with light.

    On the billiards table, the smoldering felt board burned where white phosphorus marred into it.

    Tas¨¬a estimated that her so far one sided shoot-out with the spooks took her one-point-one-seconds from the time she drew her pistol up to aim to the last two shots that sent the eight ball smashing into the crystal decanter.

    The four men froze in place, bewildered. Even with the opening gamut she delivered with a half-whispered quip and a gun in hand, they were not prepared for the chaos and mayhem of her actions.

    The Spetsnaz-based specialist small arms training she received at the hands of General Kutuzov played no small part in that execution.

    His words echoed from her youth.

    Often bad men dwell in drunk house dives to congregate with their soul-brethren. Today, my child, I will teach you to use that environment to your advantage.

    Understand this. This is done more to break their spirits than to kill them.

    "Everybody get your hands up!"

    Travis took his right foot and stomped out the flame that slowly burned on the billiards table.

    Tas¨¬a cleared her throat.

    "Travis ... We are waiting on you, son."

    Once Travis complied along with everyone else, Tas¨¬a continued to speak.

    "These are the ground rules. No one moves except under my directive. If anyone is noncompliant, I will severe a digit from each hand of the other three individuals before drilling bullets into the offending party''s eyeballs.

    "Is there anyone of you who doubts my capabilities?"

    All four of the men shook their heads.

    "Good. Now that is settled. Starting with you -," Tas¨¬a turned to the oldest of the four, "- the dumb fucker with the dismissive attitude. Your wallet, that gold chain on your neck, the white gold signet ring on your right ring finger, and the small caliber gun holstered along your jacket inseam, throw them on the table in front of me."

    "You''re robbing us," Travis questioned. His pitch exasperated.

    "Of course. If I don''t make you pay a real price for your insolence, there will be no end to your attempts to fuck me over."

    Though the older man complied with her directive he kept shooting glances Travis'' way. At first she assumed he was trying to alert the other spook to a countermeasure of which she was prepared to drill bullets into him the instant he tried anything.

    However, she quickly realized she had wrongly assessed the man''s motivation. Something else was at play.

    The older man''s eyes twitched everytime he glanced towards Travis. It was fear.

    More a fear of the mechhead Travis than of her.

    He laid down the last item, the gun, a .9 mm snub-nosed, and backed up.

    The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    "Hey, Silver Fox," Tas¨¬a called out to get his attention. "What''s your name?"

    "Why don''t you look it up in my wallet?"

    Tas¨¬a stomach tingled with regret. But for the broken neoPalm, she could have made a run on all of their accounts and turned it into a real payday.

    How was she going to get anything done without the specialized for spook craft Personal Assistant?

    This was no time to let her attention drift, she needed to respond to the man''s challenge. Tas¨¬a flicked her gaze back to the older gent. She gave him her best dead in the eyes cold blooded killer expression to let him know his mouth was about to get him murdered.

    "Would you care to run that by me again?"

    He shrugged.

    "My name is Rubin."

    "Alright, Rubin. Why are you throwing shade on your partner?"

    "He''s not my partner. An acquaintance, at best."

    She regarded the spook with snarling disdain. Has this man ever been a field operative? No street game in this one at all. His haughty tone suggested a lifetime of unchallenged privilege.

    "Then, what is your problem?"

    "I happened to be watching his face when you popped that ball in front of him. He let his mask down and showed what he is - Manifested.

    "His skin crawled with the subdermal serpents. You should have seen those eyes - like two black oily pools.

    "And it was just for a moment. Then, within say, like a blink, he was normal again."

    The man in the very back to her right volunteered.

    "It happened. I saw it too."

    Tas¨¬a made note to keep an eye on the young man''s companion in the back to her left. He gave the one who spoke an evil glare like it was verboten to even acknowledge her.

    But she flicked her focus to each in turn for several seconds as she tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

    "Rubin ... Did you not notice how your voice became sibilate when you first addressed me so rudely?"

    His face pinched.

    "For a moment, speaking became difficult. Your actions were unexpected. I had to clear my throat."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "That is not what happened at all, Rubin."

    Travis spoke up.

    "Rubin. Your tongue bifurcated."

    Rubin laughed and sneered.

    "Impossible."

    Tas¨¬a considered the possibility that they may not actually know they were Manifested. The worker back at the IMCQ cubicle farm certainly seemed to be going about his daily work routine like an unassuming human no matter his appearance.

    Tas¨¬a always felt uneasy around the Manifested. Even though she had control of the situation, she had to fight back the urge to drill each one of the men with a bullet into the side of the skull.

    She kept a continuous imaginary rectangle lined up with the center of their heads forming the four defining points in her vision. Arrays pointed from the end of her barrel to just on the inside of their temples.

    It would take a mere point four dash five seconds. Problem solved.

    "Hey," said Rubin to her. "I don''t mean to set you off, but you look awfully twitchy, right now."

    She promised herself if only there was no other choice or if time was a severe factor would she shoot anyone in her latest venture.

    Except eventually for Tatiana''s kidnappers. You could not allow them to live and expect the continued respect of others. They would have to die, cruelly.

    Tas¨¬a nearly spat out.

    "You two are both Manifested, and you don''t even know it."

    Was she more disgusted than spooked by them? She wasn''t sure. Her emotions were entirely discombobulated.

    "Not possible," Travis protested matter-of-factly. "We receive a dose of Lysergic Acid every six months. Far exceeding what is considered necessary for normal activity in the Quadra.

    "We don''t venture very far from Asunci¨®n. Beneath the SkyTether there are two nuclear power plants that power a crystalline-based oscillation wave. They produce a resonance frequency that keeps the nanospores out of the city."

    "How do you know that you are receiving Lysergic Acid?"

    The man at the back of the room on her right giggled before he spoke.

    "Oh, trust me, you know."

    He appeared to be the youngest of this crew. The man by his side gave him another malicious glare.

    "Hey, Petro," Rubin spoke up, addressing the man giving the evil eye. "Stop doing that. In case you haven''t noticed, you are pissing her off."

    Tas¨¬a nodded approval. Whatever Rubin''s short comings, he was starting to wise up.

    She addressed the youngest member.

    "I''m afraid you are wrong. LSD can be faked. If you lace treated mushrooms with a synthetic speed, you wont notice the difference."

    It happened to Tas¨¬a and one of her fellow Sisters at the nunnery, Lizpetha, while the two were on a spiritual retreat together. If not for her friend''s heart murmur both of the Sisters would have been none the wiser that what they bought was not LSD.

    Fortunately, Lizpetha survived what turned out to be a harrowing experience for both of them.

    Tas¨¬a frowned with her puss pensive and her head shaking.

    "I have way too many damned questions, but we need to wrap this up."

    She unzipped her fanny pack from which she produced a netted white sack.

    Tas¨¬a threw the bag at the billiards table just in front of Travis. She continued to speak.

    "Travis. You know what effects on you I want. The gun, likely same model as Rubin''s in your boot. Clips in your jacket. Diamond broach attached to your cowboy hat. Put them in the bag. Go around to your friends in the back and collect.

    "I know what you all have. Especially, your weapons. So, don''t try to short me, okay."

    Where they hid their weapons upon their bodies was knowledge she uncovered more through their body language than any bulk she initially spotted.

    Their torsos tended to bend away from the position of the weapons. That predictable motion was made to free up access so they could grab the guns with their hands when the opportunity ever presented itself.

    She noticed the youngest spook shifted from one leg to the other. His eyes were eager.

    "Hey," Tas¨¬a began. "What''s your name, kid?"

    "Fodor."

    She wasn''t sure if that was his first name or his surname. Though there was an odd familiarity about him. Did he grow up in San Pedro? One of the urchin gangs she hassled for shits and giggles?

    Why did that occur to her?

    "So, what''cha got?"

    Petro''s eyes darted up, but he quickly looked away before they could settle on Fodor, once more.

    "Your Aunt Tatiana. I''ve seen her. She is up in the top suite of the SkyTether."

    Tas¨¬a aimed before Petro could get his gun entirely set in place. He was just about to point it between Fodor''s eyes when Tas¨¬a shot off his trigger finger.

    The gun skittered on to the floor.

    Petro looked as if he could not comprehend what had just happened. The pain and the missing digit had not entirely registered in his conscious mind just yet.

    She started to rush her words

    "Petro," Tas¨¬a commanded. "Bite down hard into the leather of your jacket. If you scream I will shoot you between your beady fucking eyes. Got that?

    "Travis. Hurry up. Get your shit done. Bring the bag here. Put Rubin''s shit in it, last. Five minutes, you got that? Nobody follow me for five minutes. I will know."

    With that message, Tas¨¬a grabbed the bag from Travis''s hands. She slipped back out the door.

 3.9 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Beauregard''s eyes beset curious beneath shaggy brows as he gazed upon the net bag full of guns, wallets, and jewelry.

    He laughed at the sight and shook his head bemusedly at Tas¨¬a in turn.

    "Hey, man," Tas¨¬a started. "Mind if I stash these back there behind the bar? Just for a few minutes. Pay you for your troubles."

    "You robbed them?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged and looked away.

    "I tend to do that to people who give me smack talk."

    He offered her his hand, and she gave him the bag. Beauregard stashed it beneath an empty cabinet.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at herself in the mirror. Her face was animated. More so than usual, and in her estimation, it prettied up her appearance quite a bit.

    "Anything else I can do for you?"

    There it is again.

    Eagerness when engaging a lady. It must be a cultural trait.

    "Why certainly, Beauregard. All this excitement has me worked up. I''m in need of cigarettes. Gitanes Brunes never go out of style -," Tas¨¬a gasped, "- you have Gitanes Blonde-Cerise? I''ve never actually seen a pack before."

    He handed her a pack. An umbrella-toting redhead in early twentieth-century fashion adorned the cover. She could have been a dead ringer for Anneb¨¦l.

    At a much higher pitch than her usual raspy soft tone, Tas¨¬a squealed, "Give me two packs. Mi mejor amiga must see these!"

    Beauregard gave her the second pack just as she tore off the wrapper for the first. He handed her a lighter.

    "Are you cutting yourself off?"

    Tas¨¬a glanced back towards the hallway then she shook her head dismissively.

    "Fuck no. Another Celebrator if you would. Oh. Do you have plastic baggies? One that you can fill up with ice. Someone is going to be asking for one soon."

    He gazed long and hard down the hallway. Beauregard''s tongue wiped across his chapped bottom lip in assessment of the situation to which she alluded.

    "Just how bad is it back there?"

    Tas¨¬a calculated both the chaos she wrought and what could appease him as the proprietor. He would probably reject a split of the loot that she had bagged given he operated his bar so close to the Spook Town. So, no deal there

    There were also the eight Liberty gold coins she kept in a belt clip. Who turns down gold?

    She looked around. No one paid her any mind. Tas¨¬a slipped the coin under her hand, and slid it across the table.

    "Some blood on the carpet. The felt board on the billiards table is ruined. A nice-looking crystal decanter shattered into a dozen pieces. Also, three billiard balls are chipped. Oh, and an electric torch is pretty busted up. This should take care of it."

    Beauregard palmed the coin like an old pro. When he tilted his palm up, his eyes lit up, but not with the approval she was expecting though. His blue irises held a tense expression of anxiety.

    He leaned forward, big hand over his chest.

    "Honores. Honor entre Asesinos."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged nonchalant while she wore a steady grin and nodded firmly.

    Don''t get all wobbly and spooked on me, big guy.

    "Sometimes just referred to as El Honorum. Don''t worry about the previous owner. She died an entirely stupid death."

    Tas¨¬a raised her palms in denial. It was considered bad form to brag about a kill. "Oh, cops shot that dumb bitch down, not me."

    To this, he appeared more relaxed and nodded back affirmatively.

    "Alright. Why spoil your fun with my own ignorant drama."

    Damn good sport this one!

    "For a second, Beu, I thought I was going to have to talk you off the edge."

    His full squinched-face smile meant he liked her nickname for him, and liked the way she teased him.

    She gave another glance down the hallway. The spooks should be departing soon. Most likely, they would send Petro out first. After all, who would trust a motherfucker like that at their backs?

    Stolen novel; please report.

    She stood up and gave Beauregard a nod.

    "Be back in a sec, Beau."

    Tas¨¬a wanted to surprise the spooks when they discover she had not left. It was the best way to show that she did not fear them. To press that point, she found a dance partner in an older gent.

    It was the well-dressed gent sashaying on the restaurant patio a little earlier in the evening. Tas¨¬a raised her hands, snapped her fingers, and moved her hips rhythmically to let him know they were partnering up.

    He didn''t seem to mind that she was being insistent. His eyes focused on her boobs. She glanced down. Even though the matching sports bra she wore beneath her white tank top was designed for support and modesty the pepperonis poked through, splendidly.

    They tended to get excited when she made a score and stay that way for a good long time.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the gent for a hugging embrace. He copped a quick squeeze of her side boob to which she was grateful she could enjoy that kind of play now without triggering her condition.

    To her ulterior motive which had nothing to do with flirtation, however, Tas¨¬a used the hugging maneuver to turn her dance partner around so she could face the hallway.

    Now she backed away a few steps. Though Tas¨¬a was having fun, close quarters dancing distracted too much from her immediate concern. For that she needed to focus on keeping her guard up.

    The gent wanted a bit more contact and tried to close into the space between them. Tas¨¬a smiled crooked at the old horny toad, and shook her head.

    Why are men never satisfied even when you give them a memory that should last them a lifetime?

    Tas¨¬a swayed to the side and kept him at arm''s length.

    He shrugged his shoulders and played along. Seemingly now content that she let him cop a feel.

    Tas¨¬a smiled at him with a wink.

    Don''t want to come across as over eager, now do we?

    Petro walked out with his right hand balled in a fist, and wrapped up in his jacket. The gray svelte cloth was soiled to the point of dripping blood.

    His face was Artic pale and eyes desperately focused.

    Snapping his left-hand fingers, he yelped out a request of Beauregard who immediately handed him the bag of ice.

    Petro stared at the ice, puzzled for a moment before his neck twisted in a sharp jerk, and his eyes shot to her.

    The sudden jerk must have played hell on his sense of balance. Petro stumbled, twisted his feet together, and fell. The severed finger flung across the dance floor.

    Tas¨¬a rushed over, picked it up, and walked over to Petro while examining the finger. She rolled the digit between her own fingers.

    With a shake of the head, she gave him the grim news as she pointed to the damaged knuckle.

    "The only way this gets salvaged is if a titanium bearing can be shunted over this bone fragment right there. You are better off with a fully robotic trigger finger replacement for this meat and bone. You should just toss this one in the garbage."

    "Give it," he snapped.

    Petro''s glutes flexed involuntarily. A sure sign of what exactly she needed to know on how she was going to proceed going forward with this villain. He would try to cross her again at the first opportunity.

    Petro would never let It go.

    Tas¨¬a drew her chin up, narrowed her focus, and grimaced.

    She suppressed the urge to drop the severed digit down her gullet and swallow it.

    How badass would that be?

    But, given the sanctimonious shit talk she had been giving cannibals and doing to them of late, eating the finger would make her a supreme hypocrite.

    So, she handed the finger back to Petro.

    "I don''t want to ever see you back here again. I don''t mean just this bar. I mean this Spook Town. I see you again I''ll shoot you between your eyes like you tried to do to Fodor. Understood?"

    She watched him leave and assessed what needed to be done. She had given him fair warning, as she felt compelled by her personal code to do.

    You know in your gut that is not adequate. Not with a guy like that. You can''t leave it to chance. It will come back and bite you on the ass in the worst way possible.

    Tas¨¬a recalled her promise to minimize casualties, this time, for this operation. Her body count was a bad habit. An addiction even.

    It too came with consequences. People she didn''t care much for like Lt. Colonel Sol considered her to be one of their own due to her ruthless propensity.

    But so did the mercs who lived by principled rules of engagement. If she was to continue down this path she had to be more like them and less like a gunslinger.

    But for the sake of everything, Petro had to be eliminated.

    Tas¨¬a started to follow Petro out the door when her dance partner touched her on the arm to get her attention.

    "Hey, pretty lady. Are you Avellana?"

    Tasia blinked in astonishment.

    "Yes. How did you know?"

    He raised his phone.

    "Some lady called my phone asking for you."

    Tas¨¬a graciously accepted the phone.

    "Hello, this is Avellana."

    "Do you have any idea how hard it''s been for me to get a hold of you of late?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled. It was Felicit¨¦.

    "The old PA died in a fierce battle. So, how is everything up there in Ward Nueve?"

    She was curious about the gossip concerning Ria''s death.

    Tas¨¬a found a relatively quiet booth to rest her haunches. She smiled at the well-dressed gent to let him know she wasn''t going very far away with his phone in her hands.

    "Same as always here, you know. I''ve got some updates that will help us both. Found a few things out. Are you curious?"

    "Sure."

    "You met a Serbian by the name of Sylvia? I tracked her to some of your secret accounts, actually."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "Yes. You helped me out there. Jammed that satellite signal that was set up to kill me."

    Felicit¨¦ paused a second.

    "That''s... right. Thanks for reminding me. Let me check on something."

    The Argentinian''s brain was a steel trap. Swiss in its timed precision. This lapse gave Tas¨¬a a bad feeling.

    "Okay. I''m back. Sylvia is holed up in Asunci¨®n. I need you to escort her to a meeting with the HRC commissioner. With what I gave you and what Sylvia can tell the commissioner, a deal can be worked out to get me sprung. You there, Tas¨¬a?"

    Tas¨¬a bit her lip before speaking. She tried to sound confident.

    "Truth be told, I wondered how that meeting with HRC was going to get arranged given I have a price on my head."

    "So it all sounded a bit daft, did it? No fears," Felicit¨¦ assured her. "I have it all under control, and I found a safe meet-up location. But, I spy that you are busy and on the prowl. I''ll call you back at noon tomorrow to set up a time."

    "Noon, tomorrow, then."

    "I won''t keep you any longer. Ciao."

    Felicit¨¦ signed off. Tas¨¬a gave the phone back to the well-dressed gent and rewarded him with a kiss on the cheek.

    She eyed Beauregard. He was watching the exchange so she kept the kiss chaste. Truth be told, though older, he was a rather handsome gent.

    She decided she was going to lay down a ground rule for her intimate and sexual exploits. Only one boyfriend per bar scene. Here, Beauregard was by far her best potential.

    She walked up to the counter and finished off her Celebrator.

    "Hey," she said to Beauregard. "Do you mind hanging on to my loot a little while longer?"

    He grinned with a laugh.

    "No. Not at all."

    "Good. Let the boys know it is safe to come out now."

    With that, Tas¨¬a put the bottle down and walked out the saloon to commence her hunt.

 3.10 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    When Tas¨¬a stepped out the door, one motorcycle caught her attention. A FTR 1200 in platinum white frame and silver trim. A lovely bike made for a lady like herself.

    The heady staccato strumming of the Mariachis compelled her to consider the possibility of stealing it. You don''t just listen to unbridled music of that excessive meter, you lived it in your soul and expressed it in your actions.

    You made grand gestures to be in accordance with it.

    Yes. Indeed. She should steal the bike.

    She looked around, no one paid attention to her. A pair of lovers were necking on one corner of the restaurant stoop, and a pair of kitchen workers were on a smoke break. They spoke animatedly to one another beneath the cover of a back alley walkway.

    She squatted against a nearby pole to study how the bike was secured. A lock was belted against the break. A thin titanium grid chain encased the interior of the locking mechanism.

    It consisted of interlinked plates designed to thwart the ambition of a thief such as herself.

    It could not be flexed and drawn back into the vehicle without access to the unlocking mechanism. Likely a set of wireless signals triggered by a key hold.

    If she had a magnet in her fanny pack she could test for movable interior pins inside the locking grid. That was the common flaw in systems with impenetrable casing on the exterior; they necessarily relied on simple machine mechanisms in the interior to function correctly.

    Abruptly, Tas¨¬a giggled before she burst out in full-throated laughter.

    She steadied her head. The beer she just gulped down made her feel light headed.

    Steal a motorcycle! What did she need with it? Anneb¨¦l promised to strap the Virago to the back of her jeep.

    Besides, the owner was likely someone of modest means.

    Punch up, Tas¨¬a. Always, punch up. She recalled in her father''s voice.

    Not that stealing from someone of greater means was always justified.

    Tas¨¬a had a sixth sense about that sort of thing.

    She could always tell when the Sicilian proverb ''behind every great fortune is a greater crime,'' justifiably played true.

    When she caught sight of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis series sports car for the first time, it reeked of the owner''s puerile stench of unworthiness.

    The car was a masterpiece of technical design and subtle aesthetics repurposed for the gauche sensibilities of a gangster.

    It had to be liberated. Justice demanded it!

    She shook her head to admonish herself as she slowly stood up.

    Okay, you drunk-ass little squirt. No more distractions from our hunt.

    Tas¨¬a lit a cigarette, and walked over to the kitchen workers.

    She caught the notice of the one who leaned against a screen door. A nice looking lady of middle-age wearing short hair kept up in a net.

    From the scent of her clothes, Tas¨¬a gathered that she was the fry cook.

    "These cherry smokes are so damned good. Want one?"

    Tasia displayed the pack.

    "Sure."

    Both kitchen workers took one.

    "Hey," Tas¨¬a continued. "If you don''t mind, I got a question."

    "Shoot," returned the lady.

    "If an accident occurred in the kitchen, say you cut yourself so bad that you needed to get stitches for it. Where could you go this late at night? What would be open at this time?"

    The lady laughed, but nodded along with her.

    "You mean like the guy with the finger in a bag of ice? Where would you go to get that taken care of?"

    Tas¨¬a stiffened up.

    "You saw that?"

    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    "Let''s just say that it didn''t even surprise us when you came over to ask that question."

    She was being watched more closely than Tas¨¬a thought. What she mistook for indifference was merely discretion.

    She never even caught the glances of those around her inside the bar.

    "Okay," Tas¨¬a admitted. "Where would he have gone?"

    "A spook like that? They have the means to have themselves patched back up at the Flamenco Rosa." She turned her head towards the neon sign in case Tas¨¬a missed it. "Their doctor dines at Se?ora Azul most every evening. The spook with the finger on ice went inside, looked around, then he high tailed it that way."

    With that tip, Tas¨¬a thanked the two kitchen workers, and departed.

    The crow up on the steel gable truss was a corpse but it chose to stare back at her anyway. Most curious was the severed finger it bore in its beak.

    Tas¨¬a was only a block up the road from La Se?ora Azul when she felt its eyes on her.

    "What in the Seven Hells is this?"

    She whispered to the bird.

    It gave no reply. Could the poor leprous thing even answer her?

    She approached slowly and drew her gun.

    Perhaps, Petro abandoned the finger as she suggested, but who would chuck their own finger in the middle of a street for a bird to pick up?

    The crow took flight when the wail of a moaning man came out of a nearby alley; the alleyway was set up similar to the one four more blocks up the street the coyotes skulked.

    Amongst the stacked up garbage bags, a pair of legs thrashed. She recognized them as Petro''s limbs.

    Tas¨¬a approached, cautiously.

    "Hey, Petro?"

    "What the Hell do you want?"

    His legs stopped moving as he lay half buried between the many trash bags. He breathed in and out slow and labored.

    His shirt had been shredded and a gash was ripped into his side from his ribs to his thighs.

    He was a blood strewn mess.

    "Tonight is just not your night is it?"

    "Apparently, not."

    "The fuck happened to you?"

    He coughed up blood into his hand before answering.

    "Phase beast."

    "A what now? I thought you Asunci¨®n slickers didn''t have to deal with the same kind of weird shit that the rest of us in the Quadra have to."

    His head turned towards the SkyTether Tower.

    "We''ve got our own weird shit we have to deal with. It phased out when it heard you whistling as you approached. I don''t think the attack was an accident -," he drew in air once more before speaking again, "- the fucker was set upon me on purpose."

    Tas¨¬a looked around the alley and up into the over hanging gables.

    Whistling? Then it occurred to her that she was drunk, and the Solares style tune the Mariachi duo played so nicely was very much ensconced in her mental landscape.

    Quite a little walking blackout she had there. Her bladder felt empty. She likely found another bush or tree to piss behind as well.

    She never pissed inside if nature made things convenient to do otherwise. The often musty and mossy smell of the ground and the rustle of breeze against her naked flesh made a good squat a refreshing experience.

    Tas¨¬a tried to focus her thoughts. Though she was likely in mortal danger, a rhino could sneak up on her in her current inebriated condition.

    "That phase beast, Petro. Any chance that it will come back?"

    "I assume it will, my blood is spilt. Spilt blood like my bleeding hand makes those beasts highly intemperate."

    "What does the thing look like?"

    "Have you ever seen a furless cat?"

    Tas¨¬a made an ugly face. "Yuck!"

    "Yeah. Well. Its a furless tiger. Odd enough, though, it still retains its stripes but as blue and gold tones ripped along its skin."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged. Fighting a tiger was out of the question in her present condition. Then again, she had the means to change her present condition.

    Alcohol is just another poison, right? I can excise it in steam out of my pores.

    Not her fight, though. If she was going to risk life and limb, it needed to be for a cause that she believed in, and not for this piece of shit.

    "It sounds like I should get going before it gets back."

    He coughed, again, and winced as he looked up into her eyes. Her compassion was likely not showing.

    He asked.

    "Yeah. Maybe. Hey, at least answer me this, you were stalking me, weren''t you?"

    Tas¨¬a laughed. She did a quick rundown of the time factor. Petro should have arrived back at the motel several minutes earlier.

    Instead, he found a spot in the alley to lay in wait for her when the beast arrived.

    "Yup. Why did you do it? Try to shoot Fodor?"

    "I was spooked like you were. They are all Manifested." Petro coughed before he spoke again, and he wiped his face. The flannel sleeve was drenched in blood. "You were at the IMCQ, right, Ms. del Alma-Gris?"

    She nodded. She really wanted to get going. Before she did so, she needed to shoot Petro in the face as not to leave his death to chance in case the phase beast did not return.

    Then she would split. Not run like hell, as that could attract the thing. Instead, scamper up the two story building where the beast would unlikely be able to follow her.

    She assumed the beast''s phasing ability was an invisibility illusion of light wave manipulation and not actual inter-dimensional travel as that was purely a science-fiction concept not as yet invented if it ever could be a possible engineering feat the human race could achieve, but what the hell did she know?

    In a croaking whisper, Petro asked her.

    "Hey, are you still with me, misses?"

    "Sorry. I''m drunk."

    "I can see that."

    "Two doppelbocks and an extra stout is equivalent to an entire six pack of piss lager in terms of alcohol content."

    "Not my call to say otherwise."

    Tas¨¬a was torn in her decision of what she was going to do next.

    She needed to shoot him, and save herself, but in good conscience she needed to hear him out. What was the point he was trying to make before she lost focus?

    "Yeah. The IMCQ? What about it? What''s your point in bringing it up?"

    "Ward Ocho."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. The Spore Isolation Unit.

    "Fodor''s woman he lived with back at the Flamenco Rosa tried to kill herself. They medevaced her out of there.

    "No one knows what has become of her since. Likely, she lost her mind entirely.

    "She complained of these whispers she would hear at night that made her question her sanity.

    "When you exposed them as the Manifested they are, back at the bar, I saw this spectral glimmer in Fodor''s eyes. Indeed, that''s what we call them, the Manifested that have to be kept in minimized proximity to the staff at Ward Ocho. Spectres."

    Tas¨¬a grabbed onto the side of the garbage bin as she began to feel dizzy. She had misread Petro''s intentions.

    He tried to kill Fodor out of fear and not to silence him for speaking up. Shit. She was prepared to kill him over the false assumption.

    As she gathered her strength, the breeze bellowed hard. A growl whistled through it.

    She turned to look, and she caught sight of its blue and gold striped head at the top of the alley as the phase beast merged back into time and space.

 3.11 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    She was dumb struck with the riveting symmetry in motion as the tiger rushed towards her. A violet, purple and red spectrum of colors dappled along its smooth, leather-sheen surface.

    Fear clinched her gut. Before she could even seize control over her analytic functionality it acted on its own.

    It had no time to spare to wait for her to react.

    Vaporous fumes grew increasingly volumetric in her throat and lungs. It poured from her nostrils, and left in its flush a chemical burn whose pain pulsed from her tear ducts, and spread out across her face.

    The beast was fast; already, it sprung up off of its hind legs, and into mid-flight, as it aimed straight for her.

    She feigned a dodge to the left side. And rolled around its attempted swipe.

    Even a scintilla of a second''s delay in the Modality pushing her response would have cost Tas¨¬a her head.

    The tiger was prepared to snap it right off.

    The Modality was no longer a mere frame of reference that added physiological biofeedback controls to her meditative state, it was a presence inside her.

    The realization made her shudder as she once more seized control over her actions, but in her current predicament, given the enjambed stride of time she worked against, Tas¨¬a had not a free moment to assess that anxiety.

    Still she was not free from it and it made her unsteady.

    As she kept her eyes focused on the cat she shuddered once more as the entity swelled back up into her awareness.

    Amateurish, Tas¨¬a. Breathe in! Control this!

    When the Modality spoke again it instantaneously revealed its message in whole.

    - This being, it comes from a place whose creatures are like nothing you have ever fought.

    - It comes from the Resonance.

    By the time the phase beast faced her once more Tas¨¬a calmed herself down enough to become undistracted. She dodged to her right, and bounced off of an alley wall to get further distance from the phase beast.

    In a counter-maneuver, enrapt in angry gnashing, it tried to bite down in a swipe where she had slumped her neck down to avoid its attack a mere fraction of a second before.

    Tas¨¬a took advantage of the beasts'' predictable reaction that left it open to a counter-attack as it leapt out passed her. She delivered a swift stomping kick into the haunch of its left hind leg.

    The muscularity beneath the creature''s epidermis was something unfathomably dense for a beast that moved so agile. It was a solid mass with no divisible, exploitable weakness in its tendons.

    Pain sprung forth from the back of Tas¨¬a''s knee where she strained her leg with the all too direct attack.

    So damn foolish. I didn''t even test it with a swipe or a feigned soft jab. Just a bullshit ''Imma gonna stick a boot up your ass'' kind of professional wrestling schtick with that stomp.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    She would have experienced equal success if she had kicked the alley wall with full force instead of the phase beast.

    A feral creature not given to mercy, it gave her not a second more time to reflect on the severity of the pain she now felt.

    She caught a glimpse of its next surge.

    With barely any time wasted to reposition itself, the tiger slammed to a stop. Its massive shoulders twisted around lunging towards her before it''s jaws snapped once more at her face.

    She jerked her head out of its range, dodged downward in a squat, raised up her revolver, and unloaded six rounds into the hefted arc at the bottom of the tiger''s jaw.

    Where the bullets met and flashed in the gleam of white hot phosphorous, its flesh rippled in a prismatic spray of colors that repeated in a sequenced pattern. One that remained consistent with each puncture.

    With her sensorium pushed by the Modality, Tasia could see a crystalline structure embedded in the cells of its skin. That was the source of the orgy of colors.

    She had little time to register all of this before her vision was consumed in the flash of white phosphorous.

    The shrapnel of bullets bent and smashed on contact now flung back at her in a hailstr?m.

    A bullet ricocheted against the inside of her wrist, and down the length of her arm. Heat seared from the wound and spewed warm blood where deeper up its violent path it had not cauterized.

    Fortunately, it did do so fully where the white phosphorus heat met a major artery.

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    Tas¨¬a dropped the revolver.

    A second bullet grazed against her neck and shoulder. Luckily enough, the second wound was more superficial than the first one.

    "Fuck me to tears," Tas¨¬a screamed.

    Why had she not brought a higher caliber gun with her for backup? You could really only expect so much from even a .22 LR. She equipped with the expectation that she was merely skulking around the habitats of other people and not that of wild beasts roaming ferrel in a large metropolis.

    From what she had always heard about the city of Asunci¨®n, it seemed like a reasonable choice to pack as she did.

    Peaceful, prosperous city. Everybody is cooperative. No one wants to fight you.

    Always a lie.

    Tas¨¬a rested for only as long as time afforded. Though she should have kept up a relentless attack while she had a slight advantage in her superior focused pace, not knowing what to exploit on the tiger gave her pause.

    In spite of her apprehension over her new findings, Tas¨¬a breathed in to focus the Modality, once more.

    With an exasperated sigh, Tasia jumped up out of a vulnerable position the tiger would certainly exploit once the beast shook off the thumping she had given its jaw.

    She rolled out of the tiger''s path, leapt to the opposite wall where the garbage bins lined up, and scampered up out of its immediate reach.

    The sound that came from the beast as it watched her escape chortled more like laughter than a wild animal''s growl.

    It was a taunt.

    "Oh shit, please don''t leave me," Petro screamed.

    A tiny voice in her head exclaimed, dude, you are so on your own right now, but it was the tiniest of voices. That cynical side of her was not in the driver''s seat at this point.

    Though she still considered his attempt to murder Fodor to have been an unjustifiable act, she now understood that it was not a malicious nor spiteful one.

    His fear was understandable and it was a fear that she shared. Tas¨¬a also wanted Petro alive. He was being cooperative with his answers to her questions before the beast interrupted.

    However, what could she do to save him? Just as she asked this question of herself, the beast noted Petro''s presence.

    Their little dust-up made both thief and beast forget the spook was still there for that moment they tangled.

    The tiger turned around and snapped at Petro''s left foot. With a violent toss and shake of its head it ripped the appendage off. Then, showing real spite, it spat the severed foot back out at the man''s face.

    Petro''s scream pierced the air for a thousand yards. If dancers remained on the patio back at La Se?ora Azul, they definitely heard it.

    Tas¨¬a leapt down with a back flip. By the time she reached the ground, the stiletto blade was well-placed in her right hand. Tas¨¬a swept her arm along a side-swiping arc, and made piercing contact inside the beast''s left ear.

    Before it could even react, she withdrew the blade.

    It howled and tried to shove her aside. She rolled away towards where her gun fell before the phase beast could make contact.

    Tas¨¬a picked up the revolver, and scampered back up the wall. Below her, as Petro tried crawling away from the beast, it glared at her.

    Her continued distraction was the only chance that the spook had to survive long enough to get treatment. She wasn''t even sure if it could be killed by conventional means.

    Who bullet proofs a tiger and not have to fear for their own lives as a result? What counter-measures did they have to keep it in control.

    Tas¨¬a did not let her fears show as she sneered back at the beast with a mocking glare of her own.

    "It just fucks with your sense of propriety that I am faster than you doesn''t it?"

    She asked the beast.

    It answered with the roar out of the depths of hell. It''s eyes narrowed in threat.

    With derisive laughter, she taunted the beast so it would not attempt to go after the much easier prey.

    "So, tell me how you really feel about it?"

    It was going to attempt to leap, she surmised.

    Tas¨¬a shifted all of her weight from her left arm pressed upright against the wall and to her fingers that grasped deep into the brick nooks.

    Solidly positioned, She fired four shots into its black eyes; two in each one.

    It shook its head in response, but the bullets once more ricocheted off with little effect.

    Except, for it''s eyes that dappled with fractured light.

    That has to mean something.

    There was nothing more that she could do to prevent the tiger from leaping onto the bin and using it to reach her with a forward thrust.

    She entered slow time, pushed her body up just as the tiger bounded forward. The tips of her toes positioned well bought her a little time.

    Tas¨¬a loaded a moon clip into the Magellani revolver.

    As she prepared for her counter-move, Tasia studied the contours of its skin for vulnerabilities. She pressed the Modality for the vision to see more minutely into the skin of the phase beast''s hide.

    There, a grid like pattern formed along the surface with nodal points sprouted where its bone structure was most dense.

    Beneath her, the tiger thrusted itself further up the wall. She anticipated the maneuver and pushed herself off the brick plane. While in mid-air, just out of the tiger''s reach, her upper body pulled to the left so she could make her two shots.

    She shot it dead center along its left shoulder bone. For the second shot, Tas¨¬a aimed for its first rib where the bone mass beneath its flesh was at its thickest.

    As she suspected, a twin set of spectral ripples appeared in quick succession. Where the wave patterns met along the beast''s flesh, a fissure occurred.

    She also suspected she did not have long to exploit this development. Tas¨¬a, once more, dropped the revolver. In exchange, she grabbed the stiletto from her boot.

    Now, with no contact left between her and the wall, gravity sent her racing back down. She took advantage of the tiger''s attempt to twist around and face her.

    For the quadruped, the maneuver placed it in a vulnerable position.

    Tas¨¬a slammed her knees into its neck as she arced her arm in a downward motion.

    She made contact with the fissure. To her delight, the skin of the beast ripped beneath the blade, letting it sink to the hilt as if the titanium-hard tendons melted to the slice of its edge.

    However, she created a bigger problem for herself. She heard the cracking sound of her right knee when she pulled that stunt.

    Moments later, she felt the pain as it surged up from her not-so-funny bone. Tas¨¬a could no longer control the knee''s movement, and, now, along with the tiger, she was in free fall and about to slam down into the bin below.

    It was an odd time for music lyrics to come to mind but they did.

    Never say die. Never say die. But this time, kiss our asses goodbye!

    The tiger landed on its back with it''s vertebrae stretched out in an arch that slammed into the side rail of a trash bin support holder.

    Tas¨¬a left leg still functioned reasonably enough. She dug her foot into the tiger''s nut sack, and used it to kick off for a relatively safe landing that put her on her ass.

    The tiger, screeching like a huge scowling cat, flipped entirely into the trash bin. It knocked loose a support pole which Tas¨¬a had to roll to dodge when it hit the ground.

    She looked around the alley. Petro was tying off his belt into a tourniquet for his severed limb. His second severed limb for the evening.

    She turned around to face the tiger, and she yelled at it.

    "I hope that is all the fight you got in you, you son of a bitch, cause I know that is enough for me."

    It responded to her with a dismissive growl.

    Nope, it said, give it a few seconds and it would be ready for round two.

 3.12 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a unfolded herself from where she stood, half-crouched.

    How was she holding up? What resources, body and weapon, did she have to work with for the next go around?

    She gave herself a once over with a glance downward.

    The jeans she wore, Prissi''s Oscuros Especiales, were a little too chic for an operative mission like this one.

    They were the darkest of the pairs of jeans that she ordered from the Quick Mart catalog the previous evening, so she took her chance with them.

    With the wear and tear that she afflicted upon them, they did not look so chic now.

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    Easy come, easy go.

    She tested her busted knee cap and gingerly set her foot down with some pressure on it. Then, she set her heel down.

    Pain flared up her leg.

    Whelp. There ends my dream of being a goalie.

    Inside the dumpster bin, the tiger was trying to claw its way out. With a fit of squalling noise, it banged against the metal sides.

    Thankful for the extra time that the cat''s limited intelligence gave her, Tas¨¬a tested the knee again. Her leg flinched as she brought her heel down, once more.

    Tas¨¬a scolded herself.

    Damn. I did not heed my own caution when I kicked the fucker, yet again.

    Even so, she knew that it was the best strategic option she had available to her at the time.

    Well, fancy lass, you are sure as shit paying for it now. Got any ideas how you are going to dance with the devil-cat for another go at it?

    As if to answer that very question, the Modality seized control of her body. From the pit of her stomach to the bottom of her lungs, she felt the tingles rub beneath the skin of her abdomen.

    Every inch of her skin above and beneath felt warm.

    The Modality was making an assessment of her caloric intake from the beer and cashews.

    - Fifty-four hundred calories of pure protein would be needed to heal the knee back fully. At the moment you are in possession of twenty-seven percent of that total amount.

    - Factoring peak efficient output against diminished return in the later stage, thirty-six percent of healing can be obtained at current caloric levels.

    The tingling sensation dissipated as waves of energy expanded outward from her navel.

    - Carbohydrate level more than sufficient for control grid maintenance.

    Tas¨¬a needed to brace herself as the changes in her biochemistry occurred at a rapid rate. As she pressed more weight upon her right leg, the pain already reduced to a manageable level.

    It made her almost giddy.

    She thought of the Olympic gymnast who somersaulted herself into the hearts of all Paraguayan patriots, and took the gold while performing her feat on a sprained ankle in the year just before the Cull Spore Invasion.

    If little Fide Gao could do it, you can too, Tas¨¬a!

    The lion let out a blood-curdling howl. It banged against the side of the bin, and left an imprinted dent in its rigid sheet metaled surface.

    Brave words flooded her heart.

    "Yeah, keep doing that and break your freaking neck, you dumbass cat. Save me the trouble of having to do it."

    Tasia picked up the pole support that the tiger had broken off of the bin. It was used by the garbage trucks to lift the bin up when servicing it.

    The broken end now had a jagged indenture that ran down the shallow length of one side. She could use it as a weapon.

    With the pole in hand, she gave the big cat encouraging but taunting advice to help it rejoin their fight.

    "Come on, kitty. Come on, boy! You just need to look upwards to find your way out of there. Smashing against the sides wont do you any good."

    A paw curled around the edge of the bin. A second one followed.

    Tas¨¬a backed up several feet and laid the pole at her side to hide her intentions from the beast. She glanced at Petro. He leaned with his back against the opposite wall from the line of dumpsters.

    His eyes were drooped and they moved, unsteadily. She was afraid he was going into shock.

    "Hey, Petro. Don''t give up on me now. I have a plan."

    He nodded his head to let her know he was still alive, and he understood her plan.

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    The lion poked its head out of the bin with a stare fixed entirely on her.

    "Don''t I look tasty? Don''t you want to take a sumptuous nibble. Come on, kitty."

    Petro laughed, albeit weakly.

    "You''re insane."

    Tas¨¬a''s hair stood up off the back of her neck when she sensed a change in its demeanor. She sensed the very moment that the tiger decided it had enough of her shit.

    The flinch was a subtle one, but it was enough of a warning for her to clinch her gut and engage the Modality.

    In the next instance, the tiger was airborne, at the apex of its leap, and at full pounce.

    The very next instance after that, however, belonged to Tas¨¬a. She had the jagged edge of the pole reared upward, and the butt end set firmly in place against the cement ground.

    She crouched down. Only perfect timing would prevent her from getting at least some of her bones crushed.

    When the neck of the tiger touched the jagged edge, the pole started to bend upon itself. In the next split-instance when the piercing path became set in place, Tas¨¬a leapt away and she rolled into a crouch.

    Though the beast gargled out a howl in protest, Tas¨¬a feared that the pole did not penetrate nearly enough to seriously damage it. Given the solid muscle tendons and bulletproofed skin, it may have not done much damage to it at all.

    Before she even bothered to check on the state of the beast, she scrambled once more for her revolver and her stiletto blade.

    She decided to try the resonance disruption maneuver she discovered in the first round of their fight, just in case.

    She did not think she could be precise enough in her aim to cause the fissures to occur without focusing the Modality at a sharper degree of focus than what currently coursed through her system.

    It began to dawn on her that she could control its flow like applying a foot to the peddle of a petrol-fueled vehicle.

    She did not want to use the Modality more than absolutely necessary. It had been three times already since the last time she took a piss. Her urethra was going to burn with the intensity of a thousand suns.

    A fourth would certainly take her head off.

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the beast; the striped patterns along the entire course of its body were mostly symmetrical. Could she use that to her advantage to find the center fissure between the shots without being able to visualize the grid?

    The tiger turned in her direction. The pole did penetrate the tiger''s neck better than she thought it would. A good four, perhaps up to six inches, lodged into its throat.

    It had trouble clinching its jaw. Pneumatic wheezing noises replaced its vibrant howl. The pole was crookedly bent around the fore of its right paw.

    As it glared, ready once more to pounce, Tas¨¬a took aim where on its forehead eye-like patterns formed.

    She shot one round in each pattern and then dead-centered three shots above its nose in between them.

    The phase-beast''s head jerked up with a hard snap just before it faded out of existence.

    She expired her breath slowly, and listened, not wanting to get her hopes up and de-escalate her tense battle readiness before the battle was truly won.

    Tas¨¬a heard nothing. The illusion of invisibility must have created a sound dampener, as well.

    She had to let yet another opportunity to use the Modality pass. She doubted that the phase beast could hide its presence if she was primed to hear for its movement.

    Regardless, Petro needed to be stabilized. She couldn''t just stand there on-guard.

    Shaking her head, Tas¨¬a holstered her weapons as she approached the wounded man.

    "We are in a world of hurt, Petro. I suspected that your friends would''ve shown up soon after I did. We could really use them about now."

    Petro chuckled in response.

    "Who do you think sent the cat after me? Fodor, the kid I tried to shoot, he is our resident beast-master."

    His eyes suddenly closed. Tas¨¬a thought he had gone into shock, but then he abruptly started speaking again.

    "That garage with the hornets. That''s where it is kept. It''s on loan to us. Yes. We saw you. Released only enough to bite your ass and drive you away. Then you just had to mess with the electronics..."

    When his words faded away, Petro''s eyes hung low, once more. The pupils extended large and glared hazily.

    She spoke to shake him back into conscious.

    "A world of hurt doesn''t even begin to describe it, eh? No. Don''t answer that. Save your strength. I have a plan."

    Tas¨¬a fished through her fanny pack, and found the plastic capped bottle she kept the needles full of norepinephrine in. She brought out two of the needles.

    "Okay, one of these is for you to keep on hand if I go into shock. The other is for me to do like wise if you do so."

    His brows furrowed as he murmured.

    "Why would you go into shock?"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled as she crouched down to put the needle in his hand.

    "Oh, Petro. You are about to get a firsthand account of some really freaky shit."

    Tas¨¬a stepped away from the wounded man, took off her shoes, jeans and panties. She turned back around and faced him.

    "I need to take a piss, and you need to keep your heart at an elevated rate. Win-win right?"

    From his smile and the return of expression in his face, she could tell the plan was already working.

    Tas¨¬a squatted down close enough that he could administer the norepinephrine if she should pass out. He was in the splash zone of her stream but it couldn''t be helped.

    As she pressed her vulva to the side to spread her labia out to pee, Tas¨¬a admonished.

    "No. Don''t look away. You might get bored if you do. Boredom causes a conscious mind to go into free fall. Keep your eyes peeled on the goods."

    It took her several seconds for the stream to start. As steam rose up from the sizzling chemical mix below her, blood drained out of her head.

    Tas¨¬a felt light-headed and she gripped against Petro''s one good leg. She breathed in slowly to achieve a meditative state that helped her endure it.

    She heard Petro speak, but Tas¨¬a could not make out the words he said.

    Ride the lightning, gaucha-cowgirl!

    The full stream took a little less than a full minute for which every second was an endurance test.

    Tas¨¬a could finally relax. She felt at peace as she squatted.

    The color had returned to Petro''s face. His lips gaped open. He appeared almost amused.

    "What''s so funny?"

    "That is both the prettiest thing these eyes have ever seen, and the scariest."

    "The prettiest? You don''t say?"

    "Like the folded petals of a brown tulip."

    Tas¨¬a''s eyebrows crinkled.

    "Aww. That''s the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. But the scariest?"

    She glanced down to appraise for herself. The foamy urine still sizzled. Bubbles popped and then splashed against her butt. Some of them even stung a little.

    Honestly, she could see his point, but she decided to tease him for it.

    "Scarier than being mauled by an invisible bullet-proofed tiger?"

    "Oh, most definitely."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    As much fun as she was having, it was imperative to find a means to get him out of the alleyway. She suspected his current vigor was merely temporary.

    She stood up, put her panties and jeans back on, and put her shoes back on her feet, as well.

    As she tied her shoes, the tiger''s sudden howl shook the walls at full blast. The beast stood at the entrance of the alleyway.

    Tas¨¬a got a glance at it before it began to move. The beast, or perhaps someone, the beast-master somehow, removed the pole that she had lodged into its throat.

    She barely had the time to jump out of its way, as it rushed towards them. It grabbed Petro by his right thigh, and pulled him along as it phased out of existence just before it would have slammed into the back alley wall.

    "Fuck," Tas¨¬a yelled as she caught her breath.

    She kneeled there for only a moment longer. Tas¨¬a got up, she was determined. She wasn''t ready to give up.

    No rest for the wicked.

    She had at least one solid idea where the beast may be taking him.

    "Damn you to the infernal pits of Hell, you blackened souled devil-cat. This isn''t over!"

 3.13 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a took a few deep breaths. Unfocused anger would not serve her greater purpose, at least, very well.

    She needed to get her bearings restored first before she marched off to confront the tiger once more.

    This was a war of attrition between the two of them, and if that continued to be the case, her few advantages would eventually succumb, and she would ultimately lose the fight.

    She had to take a few minutes to better understand what was occurring on this new battlefield, the urban street scene of outer Asunci¨®n.

    She glanced back at the far wall where the cat had disappeared with its prey.

    So ... teleportation is real? If not, that was one hell of an illusion.

    Tas¨¬a raised the Magellani .22 revolver, aimed down sight at the far wall, and she took three shots in the immediate area where the tiger took its last leap through the wall.

    Tas¨¬a studied the results with squinted, focused eyes. She could not make out a single marr or indention anywhere on the wall. There was no evidence of penetration.

    She ambled up to the wall for a closer inspection.

    With her hands she felt along the concrete surface, and indeed, there was something strangely insubstantial in the contour of it.

    She shook her head at what she was about to do.

    This is so stupid. Walk away from all of this, you big dummy. I am about to lose an arm.

    Against the protests of her better senses, Tas¨¬a gripped her right hand in shape of an attacking eagle''s talon, and plunged it into the wall.

    The wall felt soft to her fingers, like pressing into a marshmallow, and then after it had offered very little resistance, its surface pushed gently back against her hand as it reformed into rigid stone.

    Good God!

    Though she was equally freaked out about it as much as her curiosity was perked, Tas¨¬a doubted that it would do her search any good to waste any more time speculating on the means of the tiger''s disappearance.

    Most likely, it was either inside of this building that formed the back alley wall, or it had returned to the garage.

    Did she really need to know anything else?

    Yeah, I do. Survival usually depends upon absorbing every scintilla of info thrown at you and then intuiting how to use it while executing your actions.

    Rushing in blind would not save Petro, but it would get me killed, as well as Petro.

    For no other reason, I will back out and move forward because I have reached the limit of what I can learn from it.

    She backed out of the alley, and turned towards the front street where a small parking lot set in front of a shop. When Tas¨¬a read a sign along the length of the building entrance, she gasped:

    "No fucking way!"

    Bracci Lavorati Magellani

    Tas¨¬a was certain that this was the very shop that the revolver in her hand was machined. On second thought, after her initial surprise, it began to make sense.

    Both Kutuzov''s men and the Salvage strike team operated from Asunci¨®n as their base. Of course, they would get their specialist equipment from a local armorer.

    Why would the Italian manufacturer famed for its design innovation set up shop inside Asunci¨®n? Then again, why not? Go where the demand leads you.

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    Tas¨¬a stood in front of a window, and she studied what little was visible inside the shop to her through the smoky glass. Nothing inside appeared to be turned over or smashed-in from where a tiger raised havoc as it stormed through the machinery.

    Tas¨¬a was stubborn about what this possibly meant.

    She refused to draw the conclusion that the beast had not entered the building but instead rematerialized back in its pen at the garage, not just yet.

    If it somehow went back to the garage, or elsewhere, instead of through the wall, that would mean the beast teleported as the means of its escape.

    That was a fable too far fetched for her pragmatic sensibilities.

    She would need a hell of a lot more evidence to believe that was even a possibility above the subatomic level. Even still, the dematerialization that she witnessed also went contrary to what she believed was plausible with modern technology.

    Though, back in her cat burglar days while raiding the gated communities of the Vida Escondida, she ran up against security systems called IWAs, Instant Wall Assemblies.

    Materials fed into electro-magnetic matrices, much like blown macromolecular dust on an invisible adhesive sheet in a polymer manufacturing plant, created shifting solid walls.

    The materials in an IWA however were preloaded and designed to exacting specification to groove together for that very task; she did not see how that could be possible where a random stone wall was the medium.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the window''s mid-frame, and pulled herself up to get a more comprehensive view of the shop''s interior.

    She could now see the far wall shared with the alleyway. There was a small hole, approximately two yards in length, where the floor had collapsed. It matched her estimated trajectory for the beast''s lunge.

    So, dematerialization was the answer, then. The tiger leapt through the wall and fell through the floor. Both volumes of solid materials become structurally unsound.

    The wall steadied back to full materiality, and the floor collapsed as the tiles tried to reform.

    The beast itself was an electromagnetic wave disrupter. Tas¨¬a sighed as she thought about the practical value of her speculation.

    I hope that I don''t need to get a degree in applied physics just to figure out how to kill the damn thing!

    Her ears then suddenly attuned to the sound of someone with a slight limp approaching from behind her.

    "My dear lady, what are you doing up there?"

    The accent was that of an Italian man. She decided to play it straight when she answered him. If the situation was reversed, with what looked like a breaking and entering, she would probably have shot the perpetrator if she was given a sarcastic answer.

    "I''m chasing a phase beast. It entered into the shop, most likely it crashed through the floor and is in the basement now."

    His voice flexed high:

    "Chasing, and not running away from?"

    He quickly followed up calmly before she could answer in turn, "Stay put, let me check this out for myself."

    The man joined Tas¨¬a at her side as he held onto the window''s mid-frame. She stole a glance. He was dressed nicely for the evening and appeared to be in his mid-forties, and of medium height.

    Several inches over her own.

    "That damned beast was dragging a man along with it when it escaped me. I need to save that guy."

    When the Italian swept his gaze towards the back wall, his head jerked back.

    With an exacerbated hoarseness in his voice, he reacted to the collapsed hole in his shop floor.

    "Shit, you are not trying to kid me at all." He caught sight of her holstered revolver. Shaking his head, he turned to her. "I see that you are a customer, one with taste, but still, in this particular situation, that one is not going to do you much good."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "It''s kept me alive so far against that beast. Two shots weakens its considerable tensil stregnth at the midpoint between them."

    The man considered what she said, and shook his head. Perhaps, she should explain how computable matrix patterns that undergrid unnatural energy flows along the phase beast''s body are revealed to her where the two shots create rippling energy flows that collide into one another.

    She needed him to believe her.

    The Italian must have read her concern on her face.

    "It is just an aside curiosity I have of how you could have had the time to deduce such a defensive tactic before it killed you. Certainly not through experimentation."

    Tas¨¬a blinked wide eyed. The fucker was really smart. He even had a smug look on his bearded grin that said he already knew the answer.

    But how?

    With a curt nod, he emplored, "Let''s continue, shall we?"

    He climbed down, and offered her his hand.

    "Still, if you are going to tangle with that thing, and you plan to beat it, and not just lose or draw, you''re going to need a much bigger gun."

    Assisted, she jumped down. She gave a bow and curtsey.

    "My name is Avellana."

    "Pleased to meet you, my lady. I''m Giuseppe Magellani."

    Impressed, she raised her chin.

    "The founder?"

    He chuckled.

    "No. Nephew, chief field researcher. What gets deemed useful and thoroughly battle-tested here in the Quadra, I forward to the engineers in Italy as design possibilities."

    Custom designs and technology in the field of arms manufacturing. She salivated at the prospect of trying out something that was not yet on the market.

    Giuseppe shook his head once more while he chuckled. His demeanor was both oddly accepting while still being stodgedly old fashioned.

    "Forgive my bemusement. That gleam in your eye just now ... Come on, lets get you a big fucking gun before that friend of yours becomes that tiger''s dinner."

 3.14 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    After opening up the shop, Magellani rushed up a set of stairs that led into a compartmental loft. Tas¨¬a paused for a moment. She listened for the lion and its prey to which she heard nothing.

    No screams?

    Did that mean he was already dead? Or, perhaps passed out from shock. The beast may be guarding it''s acquired habitat before it feasted.

    Many predators did that but Tas¨¬a knew next to nothing about the habits of tigers.

    She looked up to continue following. Tas¨¬a was forced to step up her pace at Magellani''s waving insistence.

    "After I find what you need, I''ll give emergency services a call. If your friend can be saved, he''s probably bleeding out."

    Magellani perked his lips in a frown.

    "Something I said? You look startled."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, vigorously.

    "No. Self revelation. Surprised at myself, how it would never occur to me to call EMS."

    Magellani continued to give his rationale.

    "He''ll likely need blood. Phase beast are bred to be obedient shit-for-brains with no mental capacity to even navigate a rat maze, still though, they retain some tiger instincts. Especially, the most cruel ones. Maiming and bleeding out their prey before consumption is still basic to these genetic abominations."

    Tas¨¬a smiled, uncomfortably. A lump set in her throat for a moment before she reminded herself that she wasn''t a genetic abomination, but was kept alive by a prenatal correction of birth defects. Her phenotype was set in stone by her parents not by bio-engineers.

    "No need to explain. I understand."

    She didn''t play it, her discomfort, off as well as she would have liked. Magellani was intrigued by her reaction, but let it go. He still had much to explain before she could confront the tiger.

    "If you need to head out the back and split after you kill the beast, I''ll understand. I didn''t set my shop up here because my clientele tend to be the docile sort."

    Tas¨¬a nodded, affirmatively.

    "With that out of the way, I promised you a big fucking gun. Meet Il Diavolo Artico. The Artic Devil."

    She was surprised when Magellani brought out a small but stocky on its outer sides carbine. The body was a splendid poly-carbon mesh cast in an aesthetically appealing jaggedness that would comport well inside her forearm.

    The barrel, however, was merely eight inches in length. Barely larger than a standard Wild West hand cannon.

    The diameter of the barrel interior was what impressed her.

    "What is it chambered for?"

    "13.2 mm slug. Slightly larger than a standard .50 caliber round."

    He handed her a slug; a hollow point with a double set of talons engraved inside its head.

    "Careful with your thumb on the interior of that. Its bladed. The double talon head chews better through the kind of materials used to make armored vehicles both durable and light weight.

    "Materials, like the flesh of a phase beast which is nothing more than an engineered machine crafted through genetics."

    She got the impression Magellani had a personal disdain for the beast, and how they came to be.

    Tas¨¬a squinched her nose.

    "Where is the full jacket for the round?"

    He laughed with a coughing wheeze.

    "Haven''t figured it out, yet? The gun is not made for standard chemically based explosive ballistics."

    She noticed the forward grip had extra functionality built into it. There was a blue LED readout.

    It read: 38000psi Max. Now At 100%

    Set refill at 85%. 32 pellets remaining.

    "An air gun?"

    "Yes. My lady. At less than half the weight and length of a Barret. Yet, as you see, the kinetic potential is nearly the same."

    She gave him a skeptical, jaundice eye.

    "I like airguns, but for killing anything larger than a jack rabbit ..."

    He seemed to take pleasure in countering her assumption.

    "I would not send you out to fight that dread beast with a small game gun. The Artic Devil would make havoc of any living thing. You see the body that comprises the forward grip? It is a distributor for CO2 pellets. It loads one each into the duel gas chambers anytime the pounds per square inch, psi, drops below eighty-five percent for instantaneous thermo-expansion. Approximately, every eight shots. Very pressure efficient.

    "Surely, you can see the advantages of the design. Since the round is a simple bullet slug with no jacket, we can store forty-two rounds in the revolving magazine."

    A great roar of a noise came up from below the floor. It was followed by a taunting rumble.

    Tas¨¬a turned her head to listen. Was it aware that she was there?

    It did not continue. Perhaps it was just expressing its boredom as it waited for her.

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    Tas¨¬a turned back to the field researcher and gun smith.

    She could go back and forth for days on end with Magellani, but, as the phase beast just now reminded her, that was not why she was there.

    She took the weapon off of his hands after Magellani prepped it with a full clip emptied into its fixed magazine.

    "I''m sold. Now, I need to get going."

    "If you survive, Ms. del Alma-Gris, consider this gun a gift from me. I owe Kutuzov many favors. He is a great and greatly misunderstood man."

    Tas¨¬a was taken aback. Her guise fooled him not in the least.

    "To be honest, I had guessed from the start that you were an agent of special means but when I saw your discomfort when I cursed the beasts'' genetic disposition, I knew for certain. I apologize for that. But it made me realize why your face looked so familiar to me."

    Something caught her eye. She should have noticed it when she met him, but, caught up in the drama of the moment, she did not.

    Magellani wore a necklace with a set of D¨¹rer styled praying hands that concealed an all-seeing eye. He was Anewed.

    He likely even knew her father. As much as she needed to question him, the suggestion behind that phrase ''agent of special means'' caught her ear but there was no time left.

    Tasia clasped his shoulders for a quick embrace and kissed him on the cheek before jaunting back down the stairs in a mad sprint.

    When Tas¨¬a dropped down into the basement, she wasn''t sure what to expect. Two human shaped placards stood to her left.

    It was the test fire range. The floor was smeared in blood patterned in rounded motions as if the beast used Petro''s bleeding body as a mop or paintbrush.

    Done so, as if designed to galvanize her with its macabre aesthetic.

    Another placard stood approximately five yards in front of her. She needed to test the gun. Tas¨¬a crouched to her knee, shouldered the Artic Devil, and fired.

    The placard no longer existed.

    Oh, shit! This is definitely the way to go.

    Deeper into the basement, the beast waited patiently for her while it churred. A deeply voiced chht-chht-chht sound unique to tigers.

    Was Petro still alive?

    At a side entrance, the door was obliterated. Wood, metal and glass twisted around one another in a most unnatural manner.

    She tried peering down the length of the hallway behind the doorway, but a ceiling light had been smashed-in.

    Most of the corridor was concealed in shadow.

    Deliberately smashed for a tactical advantage against me?

    In the center of the hallway, just before light gave way to shadow, a heavily mauled arm lay on the polished wooden floor.

    There was very little blood, either beneath it, or surrounding it. By the time the tiger ripped the arm off, Petro was pretty much drained out of blood.

    It was placed there, deliberately, as a trap. The phase-beast, as Magellani put it, and she could so testify, was a shit-for-brains. It could not have come up with this set up that she was walking into on its own.

    She wasn''t going to give in to the terror the spooks aimed to instill in her. She was unbreakable, so Tas¨¬a laughed, uproariously.

    "Hey Tabby, you are just a regular draw-n-quarter execution machine aren''t you? I guess I''ll have to hunt down your masters one after the other once I am done fucking you up, eh?"

    The churring stopped, abruptly.

    "Yes. I know you can hear me, Fodor. I understand your vendetta against Petro. But going against me? You have got to be one dumbass motherfucker to give me a reason to hunt you down."

    The spooks. What happened to cause the escalation of their intentions? They went from chasing her away with hornets, albeit potentially lethal ones, to trying to isolate and kill her.

    Perhaps, now that they have seen her in action, they know how substantial of a threat she was to their operation if they stood between her and her goal.

    Or, perhaps the mugging she pulled off got them super-annoyed with her.

    It happens. People have the tendency to take that shit personally.

    Tas¨¬a took a moment to press her fingers against the floor and she felt for vibrations. A slight rhythmic pattern became apparent as it made her thumb twitch. She phased into her meditative state and focused on the twitch.

    The source of the twitch revealed itself.

    The beast held near stationary in one place, but it rocked back and forth, shifting on its paws.

    The densely heavy beast could not help but make its presence known when she practiced the ancient scout technique of her indigenous grandfather.

    It stood, in its chameleon form, just behind the severed arm.

    There was no sign of Petro in the vibrations that she felt move up her hand. Machinery and beast was all that she could discern.

    She could aim the Artic Devil through the door now and she would most likely hit the beast, but if Petro was still alive, a wild off-kilter high caliber bullet anywhere within the potential ricochet spray was too high of a risk to take.

    He''s dead. The only thing you are accomplishing by not spraying the damn thing with bullets is putting yourself at grave risk.

    Still, she could not confirm that Petro was either living or dead. She needed to lure the tiger away from his body that it hid somewhere further down the dark corridor before using a gun of that high caliber.

    The bullet would not stop until it smacked into a few feet of concrete.

    If there was even a quanta of a chance he still lived.

    She stepped inside the door. A shadow on the wall six feet to her left seemed oddly wavy. She only noticed it, however, because she expected it.

    "What''s it gonna be, boy?"

    The waves along the shadow lengthened. It was stretching its vertebrae just before a pounce.

    Tas¨¬a clinched her gut and threw herself upward in a vertical jump that allowed her legs to kick towards the ceiling. Her free hand and the inside of her knees gripped the ceiling light supports where she clung for a moment.

    In her heightened sensory condition, the paws of the beast sounded like the thudding of the hooves of a clydesdale when it attempted to overrun the space she had just inhabited.

    Now, it could not stop its momentum before it hit against the shredded door, and it found itself twisting in knots out in the field test shooting range.

    Tas¨¬a dropped down as the beast turned back around to face her. Before she had her feet planted on the floor she had three shots lined up.

    One shot for each eye-shaped tattoo on its striped forehead, and then dead center for the third shot in between. Once her feet planted down, she executed the plan

    The beast became a dense spray of red mist that hosed down the floor and wall behind it in minuscule chunks of meat and bone. It was no more.

    Tas¨¬a found the tiny flash-light she kept in her purse. She walked up the corridor, passed two sets of closed doors. At the end of the corridor, she found Petro''s limp¨¦d corpse.

    As she rolled it over, the head nearly separated from the body. The tiger had bit into the side of his neck and face. An ear was torn off in fierce shreds.

    The blood along that ghastly wound had already congealed. There was nothing she could have done. Even if she understood perfectly what was occurring after the tiger disappeared and she charged through the shop with her little .22 revolver, it would not have made a difference.

    The tiger gave Petro the coup de gras as soon as it got out of her reach.

    Even still, as she thoroughly processed that she was not at fault, tears swelled in her eyes. Guilt riddled her now blubbery lips.

    "Sorry. I failed you, Petro. I''ll never know how we would have gotten along in normal circumstances, but in the end, you were my asshole buddy."

    She heard sirens blaring away near by.

    "I have to get going. So long."

    She looked back at Petro for one last glance, and he had one last thing to tell her in turn. The bloodied pulp that remained of the trigger finger she shot-off pointed at a key set attached to a belt loop on his pants.

    She flashed the light on it. Two keys held on a chain with an emblem tag attached. The emblem was silver trimmed and platinum white in its background coloration.

    A silhouette of a motorcycle with the words: FTR 1200 Big Indian emblazoned on it.

    The same bike that caught her fancy when she left the bar. There were many pretty bikes lined-up that evening. Why did that one strike her so? Perhaps, her subconscious mind noticed the keychain on Petro''s belt when she robbed him and the other spooks.

    That use to be the kind of detail she noticed readily not so long ago before the brain fog of the Manifest transition nearly consumed her mind.

    She assumed she was back to normal after the LSD treatment, but clearly she wasn''t one hundred percent in her right mental faculties.

    Feet treaded in the shop above her. Voices echoed, as well. Tas¨¬a snatched the keys and retreated into the darkness to find a way out of the building.

 3.15 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    The patio was clear of patrons. One dim light still remained inside the saloon. Only one motorcycle sat in front of the twin doors that comprised the entrance.

    A few cars remained in the restaurant side of the parking lot, likely kitchen workers finishing up with cleaning and prepping for the next day.

    She heard a voice softly singing a tune that she did not recognize. It came from the patio of the restaurant, Se?ora Azul. Tas¨¬a glided swiftly on the sides of her feet soles as she approached the motorcycle.

    She did not want anyone taking notice of her.

    Tas¨¬a examine the keys in her hand. The emblem on the chain was built around a sliding cone design which she worked with her thumb.

    She shifted the emblem left and then pressed down. The chain grid auto-lock that frustrated her in the earlier evening retracted into the undercarriage of the motorcycle.

    Now, she fiddled with the two keys. The larger of the two she put in the ignition; the display panel and the engine transmission began to softly rumble.

    The small key was for a saddlebag.

    She thought of Petro with his stubbed trigger-finger pointing to the keychain. Was he trying to tell her something? Or, was it just her imagination making a sentimental connection between the two of them?

    Tas¨¬a crouched down and opened the saddlebag with the key. She felt around inside of it. Her fingers ran through packs of ammo, and an assortment of other things.

    Along the tips of her nails Tas¨¬a felt something smooth and glassy. Someone''s Personal Assistant. It wasn''t a spectacular, tricked out one, like the neoPalm. Just a very basic device used for personal notes, calendars, keeping up with business records, the typical line-up of apps to manage one''s daily life.

    Tas¨¬a could not imagine trying the hacking tricks that she accomplished with great ease on Demona''s PA.

    As she examined the interface further, Tas¨¬a noticed something conspicuously absent. She did not see a phone link, nor an app manager for one. There was email capability and texting, but no phone.

    It was not uncommon for individuals to eschew the ''convenience'' of phones. Many others refused to use them unless the requesting party sent a notice weeks in advance to request a scheduled call.

    In those quarters, phones were considered barbaric necessities civilized folk did not allow to enslave them even if at times they were necessary inconveniences, but she doubted that this was one of those occasions.

    The phone had been intentionally locked down. She switched on a display for personal information on the previous owner. She assumed whatever she found was put there to mislead, given the recently deceased Petro was a spook, and this PA had to be his burner.

    She was wrong on both accounts. The PA belonged to Val Vitaliy. Her hair stood up. Petro was trying to tell her something, after all.

    Now, how to unlock it? She saw that the phone app was encoded for seven letters. What did she know about Val that may be relevant? Something that he might have used to code it?

    He had been a long time fixer for General Kutuzov. Both, in the capacity of a lawyer and an investigator by his professional training. Anything involving legitimate legal inquiry in service to the General, Val handled.

    More relevant to her current inquiry, Val and Tatiana met in law school. They were romantically involved. Tas¨¬a even remembered the first time that her Aunt Tatiana brought Val home to meet the family. She herself was only in her fifth year of grammar school, but Val and Aunt Tatiana were about to graduate from law school.

    At a dinner party, Val and Tatiana announced their engagement. The General welcomed Val into the family and gave him a generous job offer after Val graduated.

    Everyone was happy on that occasion, but the job offer ultimately doomed the engagement.

    Like Tas¨¬a, Aunt Tatiana rebelled against her own father.

    Tas¨¬a''s father, though a trades man, was also an Elder in the Cathar Anewed. In her rebellion, Tas¨¬a ran to the Old Church to sort out her own problems. At the time, she blamed the Anewed and her own father for her physiological short comings.

    As for her Aunt Tatiana, her rebellion was much more severe than Tas¨¬a''s own. Her father, the General, lived in exile due to his history in the military profession involved putting down rebellions throughout Latin America and the American Southwest in the United States.

    The later event became reknown in infamy as the Incivilty.

    That history finally caught up with the General and made him an international fugitive.

    Influenced by her academic study, Tatiana became an anarcho-communist who threw herself into human rights causes and peasant issues in the Greater Quadra. She often came at loggerheads with the governing authority, the Salvage.

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    Fighting against bureaucracy and the class interest of the managerial elite were essential to her belief system.

    To which, her father, she viewed to be an instrument of oppression.

    As for Tatiana and Val, the couple''s engagement became untenable. After two years of struggling to make their relationship work, they eventually broke up.

    Even so, as Tas¨¬a stood there just now well after two decades had passed, Tas¨¬a was willing to bet all the tasty pastries that Donca Donuts had to sell that the seven letters that unlocked the phone app were T-A-T-I-A-N-A.

    And they did.

    There was a message left in the save column beside a picture of her Aunt Tatiana. Tas¨¬a smiled broadly, to the very extent that her narrow little jaws would allow.

    Gazing at the picture, Tas¨¬a did not have to imagine how she would appear if she had been born with pale skin and blonde hair. She was looking right at that image when gazing at her aunt.

    Tas¨¬a clicked on the message and heard Tatiana''s voice for the first time in years.

    "Val. I know my father sent you to find me. You are much too dear of a man, and yes I greatly fault you for that quality.

    "An honorable man like yourself should never place yourself in such a situation. Yet, you some how always do.

    "Please stop, now. I''m doing fine. I have made my decision. In this matter. You won''t change my mind. The General wont change my mind. I don''t want you drawn into this. I love you too much to allow that. Please, desist. It is for a greater good."

    The message ended there.

    She examined the interface. The disabled functionality for telecommunications now green lit as the OS recognized the set of apps for audio, video, text and hologram.

    They had been merely encoded to not default to greenlit mode to prevent unwanted interactions.

    Tas¨¬a clicked the phone number listed and attempted to call her aunt, but the signal would not go through. She hit the Scan Services button and with each successive green light she dialed again.

    Eventually a message stated that the number was placed in reserved status, and was no longer operational.

    Tas¨¬a looked down at her hands. Nimble little masters of the thieving arts they certainly were, but at what cost?

    Her aunt stopped speaking to her when she found out about Tas¨¬a''s success as a cat burglar. She wasn''t very fond of Tas¨¬a''s brief career as a nun in the Old Church, either.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. What a prickly creed her Aunt Tatiana devoted herself to. She was family, and she was the favorite person in the whole world for a little spider monkey many years ago, Tas¨¬a reminded herself.

    Val was family, too. He never stopped treating her like a kid sister, even the few times they met up in recent years over at Sachmilli Cuervo''s old home.

    She owed it to Val to find out what the spooks had done with him. But for tonight that would have to wait until Tas¨¬a got some rest.

    After putting the Artic Devil away in the saddle bag, Tas¨¬a set the dimmed light controls for the GTR 1200 back on to fully lit. As she figured out the control set, she heard the tune being sung, once more, up in the patio.

    The words were in English, and she realized that it was Beauregard who was doing the singing.

    Tas¨¬a switched off the motorcycle. She sat there on the bike for a good moment before she made her decision.

    The day Anneb¨¦l left to return to Villa Morron, Tas¨¬a discovered some things about herself.

    Out of boredom as she was recuperating from her last fight in that town, she explored the ranch-styled house that Anneb¨¦l kept up on the edge of the city of Asunci¨®n.

    In a bathroom closet beside a set of gray towels, Tas¨¬a discovered a box labeled ''The Sportive Magician''. It contained an interesting contraption inside of it.

    It was a vibrator with movable ribs formed of brass diamonds that shifted up and down the length of it''s shaft. At first, she giggled in embarrassment at this discovery.

    When turning on the device, the brass diamonds grew warm to the touch, and a larger brass diamond extended outward intended for anal stimulation. It moved around and round in slow oscillation, and it too grew warm to the touch.

    To this last feature, she grinned at the thought of her own life long and naughty curiosity for its purpose.

    She explored the uses for the vibrator further.

    A set of buttons caused the brass emblem to fold-up inside the vibrator. The surface changed to a wavy, non-studded design. The material felt silky smooth. It began to move in alternation between an expansive throb that swelled and shrunk while it curled side to side in a twisting motion.

    The mode read-out stated it was for Kegel training, which made a great deal of sense for Anneb¨¦l''s profession that she would have such a device.

    The cup at the end allowed the vibrator to be mounted on the surface of a wall. Tas¨¬a mounted it on the nearest adjacent bathroom wall.

    This was the last hurdle for Tas¨¬a before she was willing to try fucking someone.

    She did not know if she could have an orgasm without triggering her incontinence. She suspected, however, now only fear of the unknown kept her from trying.

    All the factors in her life now suggested that she could endure it.

    She took off her jeans and panties, stood against the wall, leaned forward, and she slid the vibrator inside of her. After several minutes with the vibrator throbbing expansively and wailing about her vaginal cavity in a most pleasant fashion, the first orgasm released.

    It was the first uninhibited by disaster orgasm she had experienced in her life. Unlike most other experiences in her Adventuress career that felt like they were going to take her head off, she very much loved this one.

    She induced several more orgasms throughout the day until she felt like she knew what she was doing and she became well acquainted with the stimulations that turned her on.

    Now, she needed to try her new found experience with a man.

    Tas¨¬a decided to take the challenge; she dismounted the bike, and walked up the steps.

    "Hey, Beau, what are you doing up there?"

    He chuckled when he heard her. In turn, coming around the corner into the patio proper, she spotted him.

    He sipped a beer, and sat relaxed in the lounge seat.

    "You want me to be honest?"

    "Sure. Always."

    "I''m just staring at the stars and thinking about you."

    The cooler open at his side was filled with the two brands she ordered at the bar, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and Ayinger Celebrator. There were over a hundred different beer brands on display back at the bar and he chose these two. He wasn''t lying.

    She smiled to this with an assertive nod.

    "Ever since you showed me that scar," he continued, "my brain has been all kinds of twisted up."

    Tas¨¬a giggled, confidently.

    She lifted up her tank top.

    "You mean this scar?"

    He said nothing. It was if he could not react.

    Tas¨¬a took it as an affirmative and removed her top. After which, she removed her sports bra, and massaged her breast with pinching strokes applied to her extended nipples.

    She giggled once more as he became flustered.

    Beauregard had an expression on his face from brow to the o-ring gape of his lips that said, ''holy shit!'' His face was flushed red.

    She unfastened her belt, and unbuttoned her jeans, and slid off her shoes.

    Tas¨¬a asked, "Beau, I could use a big favor from you about right now."

    She eyed the excitement going on in his trousers as she spoke those words.

    In return, Beauregard answered, "Ma''am. I would be much obliged."

 3.16 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    She lay in Beauregard''s arms for several hours as she drifted in and out of sleep. Occasionally they would both be semi-conscience at the same time, and speak random things to one another.

    She would drift back off and mostly forget them. Did he propose to her in one of those drifting rants? Tas¨¬a wasn''t certain, but neither would she blame him if he did.

    She felt that even for the first time, she was just that good.

    Only a few things did she retain from their exchange: he said something about coming down to South America because of the natural earth-based beauty of the women. This was solicited from her apology for smelling like hell from her earlier adventures that evening.

    He also said he co-owned the restaurant and bar Se?ora Azul with his sister. He managed the bar, his sister did likewise for the restaurant.

    Tas¨¬a enjoyed laying on his torso with his warm flesh and hairy chest against her body. His hands cupped her haunches. The kneeding he did to her vertebrae she never wanted to stop.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled silently as she thought of how it began. It was almost a disaster. After she removed her clothes, she sashayed her hips over to him as she showed off her boobs and burly curls.

    At that moment, as she tried to affect the persona of a hot little number with all her shit put together in both body and in mind, it occurred to her that she had earlier engaged the Modality just before she killed the phase beast.

    If she were to have an orgasm, while riding on top of poor, unsuspecting Beauregard, well ...ouch.

    "Oops, just one moment, por favor," she insisted with a finger in the air to signify her designated pause.

    "I need to take care of something."

    Tas¨¬a found a half empty, clear plastic cup. She threw the beer within off the side of the patio. Tas¨¬a then lifted a leg, sat her foot up against a table and peed into it.

    A frothy concoction that appeared prettier and more appealing than the beer that she just had replaced. It hissed and sizzled, like it brewed inside the cup something evil, however.

    Beauregard was alarmed by the sight of it, but he had the good mannered graces to not say anything.

    After that little dust up, everything turned out nice. No. It turned out perfect.

    After the fourth hour of drifting sleep and coupling, Tas¨¬a forced herself up. The Dawn was about to break.

    "Hey. I''m going to get going, okay? We no longer have the cover of the darkness to clothe us.

    "This isn''t the professional district," he pleaded. "No one cares what two lovers are doing in the open air, here. They are just thinking, ''that beautiful couple. They are adorable together.''

    She giggled. What a sales man!

    "That''s a very sweet thought, and I wished it were true."

    They joined lips for several minutes. A slight rumble vibrated the patio. Tas¨¬a backed off.

    "Did you feel that?"

    "Probably, just a quake. We get them. They are never more than that."

    She smiled while thinking how lovely his blue eyes were just then as he tried to convince her that everything was just peachy.

    "I''ll have to take your word for it."

    "When can I see you again," he asked.

    "The next time I get horny, I guess."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled at the little white lie. In truth, she was always horny.

    "I''ll see you soon."

    With that, she got dressed and left him there to slumber away.

    Well, with that out of the way, that being her virginity, Tas¨¬a asked herself:

    What are you going to do with the rest of your life? What''s next for Tas¨¬a?

    She needed to run one last errand, but she reeked too much of love-making and adventure to be out in public. Tas¨¬a shook her head. The rest of the world would just have to live with it.

    Tas¨¬a revved up the engine. It was time to visit the QuickMart and grab a case of Ki-Jack All Natural Gensing Energy Elixer for her training in the morning before she jumped back to bed at Anneb¨¦l''s place.

    Nothing less than ten good hours of sleep would off-set the wear and tear from this evening''s events.

    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    All QuickMart''s were similar in design. The biofuel tower stations dominated the immediate skyline.

    She pulled up and parked beside an outgoer bin used for drone pickups. With a peak inside of it, her curiosity became engaged. Inside was a pile of boots.

    Silky gray, giant-spider-hide ones. The same that she purchased off of the Quick Mart clerk in Villa Marron.

    "Well, that''s curious."

    Tas¨¬a walked into the store, and waved her arms to get the attention of the clerk. His attention was locked in on a football game.

    It took her a few more, "hey! Hey, you," to get him to acknowledge her existence.

    "What can I do to help you?"

    "Those boots out there in the bin, what''s up with that?"

    "Recall."

    "Really?"

    "Yep. They have to be sent back. Apparently, the hides of dead spiders attract the attention of live spiders. Live giant spiders. That''s more liability than the company is willing to assume."

    "Well, ain''t that a bitch."

    "Especially for the girls who got eaten alive last week."

    She didn''t hear anything about that tragic event, but Tas¨¬a had little time to pay attention to the news. She was too busy being the news.

    With that thought, Tas¨¬a realized that she never once asked herself:

    How much public attention did her escape get?

    The clerk''s attention returned back to the game.

    Well, he certainly did not recognize her.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed a cart and she mosied between the shopping lanes of the Quick Mart.

    Anneb¨¦l''s cubbards were bare. Tas¨¬a needed to stock a few things for her own stay as Anneb¨¦l''s guest. She found four different varieties of beef jerky, for her protein needs. She threw in a bag of spiced chicharrones for variety.

    Scanning the choices in cuisine surrounding her, Tas¨¬a thought of the Modality read-out. She hoped that one day she could learn to control and engage it to do as she commanded. If it could give her nutritional information that she could use after her workouts to heal that would prove highly beneficial.

    With that in mind what would she do for carbohydrate intake?

    Her answer was obvious. She found the beer isle of the refrigeration section. The selection wasn''t nearly as varied or as qualitative as the selection at the Se?ora Azul.

    She added a case of Sachmilli''s favorite, Quilmes, to her shopping cart. It was instock at all Quick Marts.

    Tasia gave some more thought to the repair on her knee that the Modality performed based upon her caloric intake. It stated in its readout that the repair work covered a little more than forty percent of the total of a full physiological recovery.

    Honestly, she did not feel any incumbrance in her knee since the treatment she received at the Modality''s behest.

    Neither in battle, walking, or in love making.

    Did the repairs offset the pain receptor response? A curiosity she would have to explore further.

    Tas¨¬a stared at a pack of frozen salmon. Anneb¨¦l had a grill in her backyard, and Tas¨¬a had the perfect sauce recipe for salmon steak on the grill.

    Pineapple syrup, hot sauce, dash of soy, habanero peppers and onions cut fine. However, she would have to go to a better stocked grocery store to make that a reality.

    Perhaps tomorrow, but not today.

    Her right bum cheek vibrated. It wasn''t from the pleasant stroke of a man''s hands but from an annoying phone. Tas¨¬a forgot that she had slipped Val''s phone in her back pocket.

    Someone was calling him. It could prove to be useful to her investigation if she could blind side a potential witness. Tas¨¬a glanced at the display, no information was given for the caller.

    Even the digits were encoded in letters that she recognized as the common Finnish grammar as it now displayed before her in a dizzying array of font sizes.

    She was almost anxious about this new mystery just now coming out of the blue, but Tas¨¬a had to answer.

    "Hello?"

    "Apologies for no introductory nicities, but Tas¨¬a, my dearest, you have to retrieve the neoPalm, immediately."

    It was Demona Hell?iste.

    "It''s damaged beyond repair," Tas¨¬a stated. Her tiredness gave her voice a matter-of-fact edge.

    "A contraire, mon ami. In the right set of conditions, the device will repair itself."

    "What?"

    "Retrieve it, and I will tell you how to go about repairing the neoPalm from there."

    Tas¨¬a squatted to rest her back against a wall. There were only a few customers inside this early in the morning.

    "Demona. I can''t. You have no idea what kind of day I have had."

    "Oh, but I most certainly do! I watched you the entire time. I mean while you were on the patio. Love making. Wish I could have joined you. Your man is gorgeous, and your body is a perfect physical specimen, but my reintergration into the natural world is far from complete at this time."

    Tas¨¬a smiled at the compliment.

    "Oh, Demona I am far from perfect. Too short for modeling. No one is going to want me to be modeling on a runway. Besides, I have to recuperate for the rest of the day, so I can get back over there, I mean.

    There was a moment of silence before Demona continued speaking.

    "I''m sorry I missed judged you. From your previous actions, I assumed you wanted to save the world from nihilistic destruction."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, vigorously. The clumsy attempt at persuasion from Demona''s AI, if that is what it was, and not something altogether even weirder, left her feeling cold.

    From the little that she could discern of Demona''s plans, they seemed to be just as genocidal as the rest of the world''s game players.

    She was a freakin'' Satanist, afterall.

    Instead, Tas¨¬a quoted from her grandfather''s favorite musician. He would play the ancient vinal LPs of stereophonic music from a hundred years past. This particular line stuck with her.

    "Fall mountain. Just don''t fall on me."

    With some measure of contrition in her tone, Demona replied, "okay. I understand I''m pushing you a little hard. But, you do plan to be in the vicinity of my device later this evening, correct?"

    "As I implied before, that''s correct."

    "If you could retrieve the neoPalm, I''ll take care of that insect problem on that roof, for you."

    "All right," Tas¨¬a was feeling very tired at this point. She stood up and put several bags of cashews and pistachios in her cart. "That''s reasonable enough."

    Demona gave her a farewell in a language Tas¨¬a did not recognize before she hung up.

    Tas¨¬a put her groceries away, she took a shower, changed her clothes, and before she headed to bed she remembered to remove the PA from her pants pocket before she put the pants themselves in a hamper.

    She placed the PA on the nightstand. As she climbed underneath the sheets, she eyed the Sportive Magician on the opposite side of the bed. As much as she would have loved to, did she even have the energy for a go at it at the moment?

    She smiled at the thought of ending the evening with a happy little buzz but her lids were drooping, and she was fading out fast.

    No. She did not.

    The PA started vibrating against the nightstand. It squealed an alarm of extreme annoyance.

    She retrieved it. An emergency alert. Words scrolled by - the IMCQ compound destroyed by a nuclear explosion one hour ago - according to the alert.

    Tas¨¬a was so tired, she could not even tense up to acknowledge the incident. Faces of her friends, Felicit¨¦, Marc¨¬a, and Missi drifted in her mind. Those who would likely have been killed.

    Just before she drifted off into slumber, Tas¨¬a murmured, "Well, fuck me to tears. I forgot to save the world."

 3.17 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Part 2

    House of Javierra

    Within minutes of waking up, Tas¨¬a downed two Ki-Jack Ginseng Energy Elixers while eating a bag of pistachios and a couple of strips of jerky.

    The extra twitch in her eye gave her the satisfaction that she was doing it right.

    While engaged in her morning constitutional, she scanned the news feeds with Val''s device. Tas¨¬a found out little beyond the media calling it a Densida-related event. On that score, they may have even been right.

    That was the Infernal Madre''s greatest threat to humanity. How she manipulated the density of information that floated about the Quadra through the nanospores.

    Tas¨¬a recalled an incident from her burglar days. She was furnishing a medical lab in her Vida Esconda hideaway by robbing a medical device R&D site when four lab coat wearing scientists walked into the room in which she surveyed for the purposes of five finger discount shopping.

    Tas¨¬a managed to hide on a top shelf full of glowing jars as the quartet was enrapt in conversation.

    One egghead declared that the nanospores were biologically based computational machines. His three peers, including a redhead with a brogue accent (when hearing English spoken, Tas¨¬a could never tell Irish, Scottish and Wales accents apart) scoffed at the man.

    "That barely scratches the surface of their capabilities, mate," the very livid redheaded colleague put it.

    He went into a long diatribe about how the spores used scent tones to communicate with one another just as plants do.

    When the first speaker made a deflective argument, "if we harnessed the computational capabilities of the nanospores, we would not even need manufactured chips inside the Quadra."

    The redheaded man grew even angrier.

    "Heretic! You understand nothing!"

    He punched the man who misspoke. The man fell from the blow, and all three scientists that remained standing began kicking him.

    As the man screamed out for help, Tas¨¬a skirted away with the devices she had came after.

    Though their reaction seemed out of proportion, Tas¨¬a understood their fears.

    The Densida had the potential of warping reality itself beyond the sculpted illusions of entities and architectural geometry. The faerie mounds were merely symptomatic of this underlying problem kept in check by the boundaries of the Quadra, and the struggle of the dueling AIs.

    Tas¨¬a scanned the casualty report. It only included staff members but no prisoners. Missi was listed among them. Tas¨¬a bit her lip as she shook her head, and wondered how Missi felt about Tas¨¬a''s violent take-no-prisoners-style escape from the prison.

    Missi''s husband was among the security detail of the IMCQ, but Tas¨¬a had no idea whether he was amongst those that she confronted that day.

    She decided not to dwell on it. It was useless to argue with the Dead.

    Let the dead bury the dead.

    She wanted to find out more about the best friend that she made while incarcerated, Marc¨¬a. Otherwise known as Este-Oeste.

    Tas¨¬a with a prayer on her tongue had not given up hope. Marc¨¬a happened to be very close to her release date.

    There was a chance, however, due to the lockdown triggering events of Tas¨¬a''s escape and Ria''s murder that the system would clear out the log of those currently slated for release.

    Lockdowns tended to make paperwork triplicate in volume for any administration that had to deal with them. Clearing out of the current logs eased the pressure.

    The release reports were public records so it turned out easy for her to obtain them. To Tas¨¬a''s eternal elation, Marc¨¬a did get her early release several days previously. She yelped a very American ''hoo-hah!'' in celebration for this one small victory this merciless world did so grant.

    But as she was flying high, Tas¨¬a noticed something. Another name was on that short list of prisoners released for the month, Felicit¨¦ Antonella Paz.

    What the hell?

    Tas¨¬a thought about their conversation from the previous night. She specifically asked Felicit¨¦ about how she was holding up in the IMCQ. Felicit¨¦ told her nothing that contradicted the assumption that Felicit¨¦ was still incarcerated there.

    That bitch lied to me!

    And what was the purpose of that lie? To have Tas¨¬a contact Sylvia, the Serbian assassin, who was still under mind control.

    So, what was this really about? The story made little sense. The whole meetup with the Human Rights Commission and the agenda Felicit¨¦ presented for it never set right with Tas¨¬a. It unsettled her every instinct for what one would expect of an anarchist like Felicit¨¦.

    She was quite a different sort of anarchist from Aunt Tatiana''s creed. Felicite''s kind was a mercenary one fueled with a strong hatred for the state. Closer to libertarian than communist.

    What was Felicite''s true agenda? She had to have been playing for a specific team from the start.

    More importantly.

    That bitch lied to me!

    A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a took it out on the RokumSokums.

    The pair of robots in the octagon could take a punch and give a smackdown in return. Tas¨¬a set them at the lowest setting of response given her unfamiliarity with fighting them in the ring.

    Also, at the moment, she was uninterested in a fair fight. That could wait till she started her training, proper.

    The red and blue robots surrounded her. They sidestepped around her like stalking coyotes. Tas¨¬a waited for one of them to make a move.

    The blue one tried to throw a punch, but Tas¨¬a deflected it with the meat of her forearm. She let out a jab with her left hand against the robot''s face.

    In a LED display on the robot''s forehead, it stated: 1 for 10.

    That meant when she successfully smacked its head ten times, with a certain minimum amount of force backing the hit, its head would pop up like a toy from elder days.

    When she landed her second hit, however, its red partner laid into her good with two solid punches against the back of her shoulder.

    Tas¨¬a tripped over her own feet, but she recovered quickly before the red robot could close in on her.

    Good golly damn, I am not a boxer! No other field of endeavor makes me feel like such a clumsy oaf as this one does. Without a blade and some room to dodge I''m not much of anything in a fight.

    She needed to take one of them out of the fight as quickly as possible. She already landed two strikes on the blue one so it was drafted for the cause.

    Tas¨¬a lured the red robot away from its fighting partner, with its back turned towards it. The red robot attempted a combination hook, jab, counter jab, and hook, but she was ready for it.

    With each of its attempts, she lured it farther and farther away from its partner. She rolled out of the way, leaped in front of the blue robot, and managed to smack it three times before it hit her once on the side of the head protective helm that she wore.

    Five hits down on the blue RokumSokum with five more to go. She shook off the smack on the head that she received. It still felt like a pretty heaping helping sized whelp even on the low setting.

    The robots were made with a simulated limited power reserve in mind, to make the responses more realistic. Else, wearing down the physical resolve of a human opponent would be a simple task for a robot to accomplish.

    She lured Blue around the octagon, while she kept Red in check. Blue was forced to keep lunging at an awkward angle of attack. She blocked as it threw punches in energy-dilapidating combinations.

    The attention she could focus on Blue now made her defenses near impregnable, so long as its partner was kept in check.

    More importantly, the blue robot was tiring quickly due to being simulated to slow down as its energy reserve lessened. With one last dodge to throw it off balance, Tas¨¬a put three good punches and two jabs against the side of its face.

    Satisfyingly, the last punch popped its head up in a cartoonishly boingy fashion.

    After Blue was finished, Tas¨¬a made quick work out of the red robot.

    She wasn''t really training with Anneb¨¦l''s best collection of androids and drones, just yet. The RokumSokums were just toys to keep Big Red entertained.

    Tas¨¬a took a breather and downed a Ki-Jack, but she still felt like she needed something to unleash some anger-based energy to quell the raw emotions that still surged up inside of her.

    She needed to beat something into a pile of waste.

    The betrayal struck deep. She had suspicions from the very start about Paz and her true loyalties but over time, she had let that guard down. Tas¨¬a would have gone into the meeting with Sylvia assuming that Felicit¨¦ had taken care of the killer satellite problem. She would have gone in trusting the Argentinian without hesitation.

    Was Paz trying to get Tas¨¬a killed with a blind side?

    Wear my guard down through weeks of sympathetic actions? Until that crucial moment with Sylvia and the HRC rep who was likely the real target.

    What was I? The patsy. Tas¨¬a grew furious at the notion.

    Me? The patsy!

    With a console controller in hand, Tas¨¬a commanded the two robots to leave the octagon. She replaced them with a Kalistar Metrics Android.

    She ran a fight sequence for the android to follow before she lined-up with it in the octagon. When it closed in on her, Tas¨¬a took advantage of an opening in the programned sequence with a punch in the android''s simulated throat.

    It even coughed in a similar fashion as a human who would have sustained the same hit.

    She glanced at the readout.

    ACD: 1.62

    She repeated the sequence twice more before she took another break.

    The next jab didn''t connect. The android successfully blocked it with its left forearm. Tas¨¬a would be the first to admit her punches were limited in their impact. Her muscularity was wiry with no bulk, awesome for gymnastic activities but not so much for hand-to-hand combat.

    A trade off certainly given no male, 6''5 and 250 lbs of muscle bulk could scamper up the wall of a building at even half the speed she was able to climb, nor climb half as high without breaking a sweat as she did.

    However, there was little power to even the best punches she was landing on the android. What could she do differently given she had both speed and precision in her favor.

    All the power she did put into her punches came from the superior speed at which she landed them. Could she land them even quicker than she was doing so currently, without invoking the Modality?

    The less that she relied on it in a fight, the better.

    She commanded the android.

    "Repeat your last sequence. Only count in-coming double taps as successes."

    The sequence consisted of the robot blocking for eighty seconds.

    In the first sprint match, the successful taps went from six hits to just one.

    "Average contact depth," she asked.

    ACD was essentially a PSI for volumed surface measurement. A differential that could be measured against the internal status of an inflated volume. The answer came back: 3.2.

    There was only one data point to average in its calculation instead of six. It nearly doubled from the 1.62 average of her previous attempt.

    That was quite a difference that the quicker jabs were making in the destructive potential of her hit contact.

    She repeated the sequence several more times and improved with each performance. In the last of the attempts, she doubled tapped eight times with the Average Contact Depth of 3.57.

    To a great extent, speed and precision would compensate for the limits of her muscle strength, but she was well aware from her research that there were welterweight-sized men of average 5''2 height and 140 lbs in weight with similar lean, wiry frames as herself who punched around or above 3.9 and in some cases, much higher.

    She would have to keep working at it, and she would. Negativity never held her back.

    "Your form needs improvement. How you use your left swing, especially. If you learn to execute it correctly, it''ll be even more powerful than you''re right hook. And no one ever sees that coming from a righty, like you. Do it the right way, and you''ll add another whole point to your ACD."

    Tas¨¬a turned around.

    Anneb¨¦l leaned over a weight machine as she studied the thief.

    "How did you get this deep into the house without my notice?"

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged.

    "I guess I''m just a big sneaky fat ass!"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "That must be it."

    Anneb¨¦l thumbed her hands into her back pockets and gave her a side glance.

    "What do you need with fighting for anyway? You got your blades and guns like any self-respecting country girl chica."

    "From San Pedro, Big Stuff. But I get what you mean."

    Tas¨¬a sat down beside her friend and leaned over for a big hug.

    She explained her situation that called for weaponless training.

    "I''ve got some business in the professional district coming up soon. They''ve got those AR spotter cameras to pick up on concealed weapons."

    Anneb¨¦l gave her a sympathetic pat on the head.

    "That''s a big polished turd to suck on, for you."

    "Yep. Where is your boyfriend?"

    "I''ve got him unloading stuff."

    "Is your brother going to make it out okay, staying with Sachmilli for a few weeks?"

    Anneb¨¦l gave her a rubbery grin that emphasized her pretty dimpled chin.

    "So long as he doesn''t fall off the side of that building and break his neck, I guess he will be."

    She helped Tas¨¬a get back up, and she urged the little thief along, back into the octagon.

    "Come on. Let me show you how to stun, and kill with your hands. And how you inflict internal bleeding, like I did to that cannibal fucker last week."

 3.18 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "That''s the way. Tas¨¬a keep that arc inside of a thirty-five degree angle. No more than forty-five. Bend the elbow towards you. Keep it tight."

    Anneb¨¦l had the RokumSokums adjusted to count a strike 4.2 ACD and higher as a successful hit. Anything else, the blue robot was programmed to laugh at Tas¨¬a with a random insult thrown in.

    Finally, Tas¨¬a hit the final blow that popped its head up loose from its springs.

    It cursed as it walked to its side bench while it pulled the head back in place.

    Anneb¨¦l stretched.

    "After we give my boyfriend some salutations and instructions, I have a little joy ride planned for us," Anneb¨¦l stated. "Are you interested?"

    "Are you talking about blowing up the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis?"

    Anneb¨¦l snorted and laughed as Tas¨¬a''s voice grew weaker and weaker with each passing syllable. She nodded, with an affirmative stride, "Uh, huh."

    Tas¨¬a was mift with the teasing tone and laughter directed at her. Tas¨¬a''s back drew up, set prickly. Her little fist drew up into tight balls.

    "Oh, you bet I am interested. All I can say to that is," and without any enthusiasm backing the claim, "hell yeah, I am."

    Anneb¨¦l chortled, amused at the discomfort the idea of wonton destruction administered to the aesthetically perfect machine caused the good, little thief.

    "It''ll do your soul some good to let go of a meaningless, material possession."

    I am not going to give her the satisfaction. I am not going to give her the satisfaction.

    "Sure, why not. I''ve been in the acceptance phase of grief for some time, now."

    "Right. Hey," Anneb¨¦l''s voice breathed slow and coy. Something entirely different occurred to her.

    "I have a certain friend who went missing. Would you know anything about that?"

    It took Tas¨¬a a good moment to catch on.

    "Ah... Yeah. I think I know the guy you are talking about. Claims to be some sort of magic man?"

    "He''s my personal trainer when I am a lonely girl in the big city. Keeps me in tip-top professional condition. Hope you didn''t hurt him."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "Yeah. I put a hurting on him."

    She wasn''t expecting Anneb¨¦l back so soon, at least for another day. So Tas¨¬a had not bothered to put the Sportive Magician back where she found it.

    She led Anneb¨¦l back to her guest bedroom. The brawler shook her head, glanced sideways, and smirked.

    "It even has its own side of the bed now, I see."

    Anneb¨¦l tapped an app on her PA and read it. Her eyes widened as she gave Tas¨¬a a fearful look.

    "Holy shit. I''m going need to take him back to the shop for a tune-up."

    "Yeah.. sorry about that. Hey, you know what else? I kind of got laid last night. Not really kinda, more like, absolutely plowed."

    Anneb¨¦l beamed with pride as she sat down on the bed.

    "So, how did it go?"

    Tas¨¬a spread her arms out.

    "Boom! Beautifully. Didn''t crap on him, even once. And I pissed on him just enough to let him know that I care."

    Anneb¨¦l gave her shoulder a playful punch.

    "Well, I was expecting this to take much more time, but you have officially graduated."

    "You know something? Since J¨²n-J¨²n and I had a little dalliance, I haven''t given any thought to Short Stuff and his wondrous staff of the serpentine. After a real man, he seems too - fantastical for my taste."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded.

    "I''m not surprised. When you are back in the wilds of the Quadra, you should avoid nanospore entities as much as you can.

    "I only got close because I needed them for my own evolution. I had no one to help guide me at the time. We Harvested don''t exactly come with an owner''s manual, you know?"

    Tas¨¬a''s eyebrows crossed, curiously.

    "Being in such close proximity to them, how did you prevent yourself from becoming Manifested?"

    Anneb¨¦l looked Tas¨¬a squarely in the eye to show she had nothing to hide.

    "Those neighbors of mine helped. Before Maestro Sol and his cult became paranoid shut-ins, they were merely spiritual thrill seekers. Well, you know that. But they were also pretty mellow, helpful, and cool, back then. At least to me.

    "They showed me how to control my temperament so the prodding of the nanospore entities never seeped into me. I developed a feel for where the edge lay."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled, nervously. She considered telling Anneb¨¦l about the current neighbors a few miles up the street. That changelings who could Hide-Amongst-Us were considered in polite society to be a paranoid superstition of the pre-Salvage times.

    She had so much to explain it seemed an unfathomably complicated task to unravel her encounter with the local spooks.

    Where to even begin with the phase cat?

    Tas¨¬a decided to change the topic instead to something else that scratched at her curiosity.

    "I have been meaning to ask you, Anneb¨¦l. There are certain gifts that I can trigger. Do you, or the other Harvested have anything similar to that?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded her head.

    "Yeah. My blood has an extra dimensionality to it that makes me buoyant in normal atmospheric conditions. In effect, without weighing even an ounce more, of course, since that would be an ex nihil impossibility, I can add density to my muscle and skeletal masses. Also, I have hyper-increased cardiovascular control. What would make someone else''s heart explode from overstimulation, barely even tickles my own.

    This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    "It was explained to me once in depth by a biotech who worked in the lab district at a former university that got its endowment seized. But, I''m not a biologist, just a French literature major, so I would have a difficult time explaining it better than that."

    Tas¨¬a wasn''t aware before then what Anneb¨¦l''s highest level of educational achievement happened to be. Besides her obsessions with Baudelaire and French Expressionism, Tas¨¬a made no assumptions about Anneb¨¦l.

    College became near-universal after the Cull Spore Invasion, and the Salvage instituted certain reforms to that effect. Near Universal Higher Education kept a population, that had every right to feel manipulated and controlled, more docile and less aggressive than would have been normal under the Apocalyptic circumstances that they were forced to endure.

    Anneb¨¦l bent her head forward and spoke out of a tight little puss.

    "You look a little surprised."

    Tas¨¬a waved her arms. Her hands flapped in denial.

    "I made no assumptions!"

    Anneb¨¦l rumpled Tas¨¬a''s hair as she chuckled.

    "Just fucking with you, mon petite d¨¦mon."

    Tas¨¬a squinched her nose above a wide grin.

    "I merely assumed by your poor life choices you were a graduate student at one time."

    Anneb¨¦l shoved Tas¨¬a''s face beneath a pillow in a faux attempt to smother her. Tas¨¬a''s legs squirmed from side to side, but Anneb¨¦l demonstrated the buoyancy effect of her triggered state. For Tas¨¬a, it felt like being stuck under a gelatinous blob.

    After Tas¨¬a begged for mercy, and as Anneb¨¦l laughed to the point of hoarseness, Anneb¨¦l let go.

    Tas¨¬a wheezed to catch her breath.

    "Sorry, sister! I will never compare you to a graduate student, ever again."

    With a nod of satisfaction, Anneb¨¦l jumped off of the bed.

    "Do you have anywhere you need to be, presently?"

    Tas¨¬a considered voicing her anger over Felicit¨¦''s betrayal, but she decided to keep it to herself for the time being. Felicit¨¦ was her problem, and she was already overextended in her debt to Anneb¨¦l.

    "I have several leads on my itinerary," Tas¨¬a thought of Aunt Tatiana''s message to Val and she thought of Val''s unknown status. "But mostly they are things that I need to ruminate about before acting on. Get me back before dark, and we''ll be good. I have some skulking around to do later on this evening to find out where I stand."

    Anneb¨¦l''s route was a secure but circuitous one. She wasn''t merely going on a sightseeing tour through the Centre Plaza of the old town. No, she wanted to avoid being recognized in her old haunts, at least just yet.

    She wore a flora print hood over her red locks with brown tinted aviator glasses that covered her eyes. She wore a pretty, floral sun dress that matched it.

    "A girl, as pale as me, kind of stands out," she mentioned in passing conversation. "Don''t worry. You stand out, too. No one forgets a skinny, short girl with big boobs."

    Tas¨¬a detected a little envy in her gorgeous Franco-Spanish best friend. Anneb¨¦l had nothing to envy from anyone whether or not she knew it.

    Finally, they parked at an abandoned overpass that curled up the side of the hill that emerged into an unfinished bridge.

    It was part of a construction project for a heliport that came to a halt when the Cull Spore Invasion occurred. When the SkyTether project was announced a few years later, the initial project became redundant.

    Tas¨¬a and Anneb¨¦l got out of the jeep. Anneb¨¦l removed a duffel bag from the back of her Jeep.

    There were remnants of a shanty town that was once built up on both sides of the double roadways. Structures made of tin, milled boards, found wood, and pallets remained slanted in place where the pieces collapsed together but still held erect.

    Many of the people seem to be merely sunbathing with carry-around media centers, baskets of food, ice coolers, and bottles of wine.

    Dozens of vehicles, greatly varied in makes, parked in the median between the roads.

    The makeshift community treated the scenic ridge as if it were a public park.

    Near an ATV tank-sized vehicle four mechheads blew smoke together under a tin shelter improvised into a makeshift opium den.

    Tas¨¬a stopped for a moment. Anneb¨¦l looked back.

    "It always breaks my heart. A little, when I see that."

    "I know," Anneb¨¦l commented. "I once knew Gael-Sebastian years ago. Sachmilli used to fly his boys into Asunsi¨®n to watch the fights years and years ago. It broke my heart when I saw that metal mechanism on the side of Gael-Sebastian''s lovely head a few years back when he came up to visit. He was so disruptive, though, Ferenzi had to kick him out."

    It was the first time Anneb¨¦l ever mentioned Gael-Sebastian Cuervo. Likely her familiarity with the Cuervo family was one of the reasons the big redhead brawler chose Villa Marr¨®n as her hometown when she retired from the fighting scene.

    But, were Anneb¨¦l and Gael-Sebastian Cuervo lovers? Why would they not be? She was a rarified beauty, and it was not like Tas¨¬a was capable of giving Gael-Sebastian any satisfaction at the time.

    Tas¨¬a nodded along. It was best not to think about such matters. She followed along and picked up her pace until she noticed several tents made of motley stitched canvases that stood on the half-built bridge proper.

    These denizens seemed quite apart from the others who recreated along the roadway.

    Thirty yards ahead in front of the entrance of the first tent, a lady in an old-fashioned ruffled Eastern European dress watched Tas¨¬a, in turn. She was tattooed over the entirety of her body in a snakeskin design.

    A raven-haired beauty rarely stood out in Paraguay where they were well in abundance, but this one did catch Tas¨¬a''s eye.

    The stranger''s brows raised in curiosity at Tas¨¬a''s gaze. She leaned her head toward a flyer on the post board she stood against for Tas¨¬a to inspect. It was a nice bit of artistry done in acrylic.

    Thrice the size of a standard sheet of paper.

    On the left was a rose shaped like a woman reaching up as if to climb a wall. The other side contained the words -

    The Sigrid Rosa. Come see the Danseuse Enchantress! TONIGHT Mysteries will be REVEALED!

    "Carnival is in town," Anneb¨¦l stated, helpfully, "hey, what happened to you, just now? You alright, Tas¨¬a?"

    She nodded her head.

    "I''m fine."

    "We need to keep going, okay?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head once more.

    "I''m alright."

    Anneb¨¦l kept walking up the road, but she swung a right into the shanty town ruins and away from the tents.

    Before Tas¨¬a followed along, she used Val''s PA to take a picture of the lady and the poster. She forwarded it to Demona with a question mark posted for her text message.

    Anneb¨¦l stood waiting for her by a tin housing structure with a well-built back-in patio visible before they entered.

    "Come on. Don''t be chicken. It hasn''t collapsed on anyone, yet."

    Tas¨¬a entered but she paused. A couple on the floor engaged in an oddly sloth-slow screw. At their speed and motion, it did not even appear very sexual, or appealing.

    As Anneb¨¦l stepped over the couple, she glanced back to Tas¨¬a with a wink and a nod.

    "Those two must be on Ecstasy," quipped Anneb¨¦l.

    "We ain''t sharing," a gruff male voice arose from the coupling.

    Tas¨¬a leaped over them and fell into Anneb¨¦l''s arms. The brawler promptly let the little thief down.

    "You know. They''re kind of cute in a.."

    As Anneb¨¦l politely hesitated, Tas¨¬a finished her sentence.

    "... lived out in nature so long they''ve melded with the Earth sort of way? Like an obscenely shaped mushroom."

    The woman of the coupling raised her head.

    "Piss off, already!"

    With laughter flowing from the both of them, Anneb¨¦l led Tas¨¬a down an uneven set of stairs to the thankfully uninhabited patio. The brawler doubled over a hooded barbeque grill as she laughed once more uproariously. She pointed up the highway to the next shanty over.

    Someone covered a pre-existing large canvas advertisement sign with one of their own.

    Welcome to Sanchez''s Wasteland Kingdom. Come for the Scenic View. Stay because you are fucking lost with nowhere else to go.

    "Man''o''man''o''man! Is this the life, or what?"

    Tas¨¬a squinted at the scenery below them.

    Anneb¨¦l answered the questioned posed on Tas¨¬a''s face.

    "Come here, and I''ll show you what this gives us a vantage point to spy on."

    Tas¨¬a leaned on a rail. There was an upscale neighborhood in the immediate distance beneath them.

    "So what are we looking at?"

    "Over there. Do you see that yard with the expansive golf course behind it? That''s the Javierra compound."

    Tas¨¬a crouched beside Anneb¨¦l.

    "It doesn''t appear to be much going on over there."

    She dug through her fanny pack and found the tiny 4x28 mm x7 pistol scope.

    Anneb¨¦l shot a jaundiced eye her way.

    "Is there anything you don''t have in there?"

    "Once I tried to fit a nuke, but it wouldn''t fit into my little bag of holding."

    Anneb¨¦l''s eyes lit up.

    "Did you hear about the prison that got nuked?"

    "Uhm, Anneb¨¦l," Tas¨¬a cleared her throat. "That''s where I was incarcerated for six months. I got out just a few days before we met."

    "Really?"

    "You never made that connection?"

    "Your friends at the Daga Chicas mentioned it before, but no, until now, I''ve never made the connection."

    "Funny world," Tas¨¬a said while she studied the grounds through the magnified lens.

    "Hey. That''s very odd."

    Tas¨¬a pointed to the grounds.

    "You see that cart tipped over there by the utility shed?"

    She handed the scope over to Anneb¨¦l.

    Anneb¨¦l answered back as she surveyed the yard in the diction of a navigator in an old French nautical yarn.

    "Now that I can see it with a greater degree of detail, some manner of things within the vicinity of our survey are beginning to appear oddly trashed in that yard."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "Okay, Jules Verne."

    Anneb¨¦l swiped the air with a grand, commanding gesture.

    "It is time to disembark the Skydog!"

    Anneb¨¦l handed her the scope back. She opened up the duffle bag and revealed a three-foot-long drone and a hand-held console that controlled it.

    She set the drone loose while howling, "Woof! Woof! Woof! Onward my hunting hound!"

    The drone circled them, smacked its whip-like tail in the air, and flew on its way.

 3.19 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Skydog flew over the shanty town, and as she watched the screen in front of her, Tas¨¬a grew more and more amazed with just how aesthetically viable the structures of the abandoned community appeared from several hundred feet in the air.

    She looked around her at the tin and wooden structures that ran up and down the side of the roadway.

    All that was really necessary was a little touch-up. Only a handful of people who gave a fuck would even be needed to turn the shanty town into a suitable place for indigent souls to claim as their own.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and chuckled to herself. Where was this - conscientious concern, coming from? Why would she even care? She was just in town for a few days to stir the pot and make some shit happen.

    She needed to get back to her safe house and get her head checked with an MRI and a Brain Wave Cypher scan as soon as this mission was over. Who knows? It could very well be an invasive species that caused her to have these odd thoughts involving civic responsibility.

    As much as she was joking to herself, in the Quadra, that was a very real possibility. Tas¨¬a quickly shook off the sudden bout of paranoia her musings brought on.

    She glanced back at the screen to get her mind back on her present activities. There was no time to dwell on either her current circumstances or sanity.

    Shit could go down that she needed to respond to without distraction.

    The drone descended towards the mansion proper. The yard that Skydog hovered over appeared an indecipherable sprawl from the drone''s current angle of descent. Tas¨¬a was left wishing she could slow the drone down to get a better sense of the yard''s defensive setup.

    She could not make heads or tails out of it.

    No offense meant for the wonderful Miss Anneb¨¦l, but the brawler was more of a ring tactician than an operative or a second-story thief.

    She didn''t know what Tas¨¬a needed to see, and this time Tas¨¬a wasn''t going to try to ram her own way through this mission and take control of it. This was Anneb¨¦l''s operation, she was only there to keep Big Red safe and have her back when a fight broke out.

    Again, where are these conscientious thoughts coming from? I wasn''t even this badly decadent with this kind of thinking back when I was a nun!

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Trying to be a better person went against her every instinct for self preservation.

    Something did catch her eye that gave her something to puzzle over.

    Though, only for the merest of seconds, the Skydog swooped its camera down for a proper inspection of the course edge before the yard was once more out of visual range. Tas¨¬a finally got the glance she needed.

    The guard house on the back lot was exactly where she expected it to be. No one was patrolling the wider area that Tas¨¬a decided would make for the best approach.

    At best, there were only a few cameras fixed in those positions. At worse, they had auto-turrets setup to pick off invaders placed along the outer perimeter of the yard

    Tas¨¬a chuckled to herself. That would be quite extreme for the part of the yard that shared an edge with a golf course where two dozen other neighboring yards were spread about.

    Buried charged devices designed for short term paralysis were quite common for warning trespassers off. The Quadra wasn''t exactly a litigious society. If a pacemaker went kaput because a sunstroking elderly gentleman wondered into the wrong grounds . . . well, it happened from time to time.

    The drone revolved towards the mansion as did its camera. Tas¨¬a''s curiosity about the parameter defenses had to go unsatiated for now.

    As it slowed down, Skydog approached the second story of the mansion, steadily.

    The display showed a glass sunroof vaulted structure set inside the length of the wing above the second story of the mansion. Five sets of double doors and three balconies lined the second story along the front lot. The other two French doors appeared to be merely a decorative part of an older design.

    Tas¨¬a''s interest peeked when she spotted a broken window.

    "Hey Anneb¨¦l, you see that?"

    Anneb¨¦l throttled Skydog''s twin hover fans.

    "What did you see?"

    "Over by the right corner second story window, on the south wing, there is a broken window."

    Anneb¨¦l toggled a console control. The camera fixed upon the target window with magnified focus.

    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

    Singular letters, words, and on-going status symbols in LED green scrolled down a small screen fixed to the hand console that Anneb¨¦l kept her eyes on as she navigated the drone. Tas¨¬a narrated the actions displayed on the larger screen of her laptop.

    "Something is glowing a sickly blue on the back wall inside that room. It appears to be some kind of liquid crystal. Like very large, coarse grains of salt smeared on the wall."

    Anneb¨¦l''s lips reared back, long and thin.

    "Okay. Something weird is going on."

    "Are there any signs that the Javierras are even home?"

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged.

    "If they are, they have really let the place go to shit. I''m going to fly Skydog around to the patio side."

    The patio area was currently outside of the visual range of the camera''s vantage point.

    Anneb¨¦l took the drone up another hundred feet, and she let the drone approach slowly. A large swimming pool came into view. The crystal blue waters were broken up with enormous white pustules floating in them. Each pustule was connected to the next with milky streamers between the sacs of waste.

    Something large and mammalian floated in the water within the foul-looking mix.

    Anneb¨¦l squinted as she yelled, nervous and excited.

    "What is that? It looks so unholy!"

    Tas¨¬a had her suspicions that it just might be something that she had encountered very recently. A dead phase beast was her best guess.

    There is more than one of those fuckers?

    "Could you get a closer look," Tas¨¬a urged.

    "Shit. We''ve been spotted."

    A little man watched them. He dressed in black and dark gray leather street camo and glared at the drone.

    The man made hand gestures to someone who remained outside of their view.

    The camera panned out. There were a group of similarly dressed individuals who milled about the patio area.

    With a brisk pace, another man approached the one who spotted the Skydog. He passed the spotter a long rifle with a flared-out musket-like barrel.

    Tasha recognized it as an anti-electronics weapon, a KAJ Fyr 7cm, that could produce a short-burst EMP field.

    "Ah, shit," she said. "We need to pull up."

    Anneb¨¦l cranked up the hover fans into a higher gear. Within seconds the drone accelerated to several dozen feet higher.

    The rifle made an odd sound, ''woof-womp'' as it blasted away. The shot let out a violent energy-riddled tract that spread out wide, but it still missed.

    Anneb¨¦l lowered the Skydog closer to the sunroof so the rifleman would be denied an angle to shoot it from. She shot a glance at Tas¨¬a.

    "Where to now," Anneb¨¦l asked.

    "We got a good portion of what we need. Let''s bring it back in and go scouting on foot."

    The latest intrigue was not what they were expecting. Tas¨¬a started to get a little hope building in her heart that conditions were not favorable for Anneb¨¦l''s greater purpose of blowing up the Alfa Romeo Hybrclydes.

    The way things were currently going, she just might be able to keep the car.

    Of course, given their differences in temperament, she kept her sentiment to herself.

    They could hear the sudden boom from where they sat several hundred yards away. The Skydog spun off of its axes. It caught a visual of something just before the thing faded out much as the phase beast had done.

    Whatever it was had hid in hover above the sunroom as it skirted behind the Skydog before its attack.

    Anneb¨¦l cursed as she tried to regain control over the spinning drone. However, even as she managed to slow it down and get it to hover vertically again, the Skydog was now, once more, above the patio. The camera showed the man with the rifle taking aim once more.

    Anneb¨¦l yelled in frustration.

    "Ah, the fucker!"

    The drone came crashing down.

    The last thing they witnessed on the camera before the Skydog lost contact was several sets of boots rapidly approaching the damaged drone.

    With her face bearing a mean grimace, Anneb¨¦l stood up and kicked at a log that was used as a makeshift stool. It rolled away onto a pallet and then off of the ridge ledge.

    She shoved the hand console back into the duffle bag.

    "Well. They leave me no choice. Those dumb ass clown bitches are about to get hurt."

    "Hey Anneb¨¦l I think those punks were Night Brigade."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head and she spat off the side of the patio before she spoke.

    "I can''t imagine how it could even possibly be the case that terrorist, an anarchist home invasion crew, is let anywhere near that mansion. I never thought I''d live to see a time when the Javierras were not untouchable."

    Tas¨¬a thought about the resources they currently had to make the retrieval possible. She had left the Arctic Devil back at the safe house. She also had the option of the .50 DSR Precision that belonged to a short lived pal of a mercenary by the name of Parro.

    She planned to bring the Artic Devil with her that evening. She did not foresee a need for a good long-range weapon for her current venture.

    Just sneaking around blowing shit up. That''s all.

    Tas¨¬a knew that for this venture with Anneb¨¦l, she would be going deeper into the heart of the city of Asunsi¨®n where carrying long arms was typically not a viable strategy.

    This venture turned out quite differently from what she expected with the suburb set-up to resemble country estates that sprawled along the parameter of a golf-course.

    It provided a plentiful bounty of sniping opportunities! Though she had no doubt the local security set-up took that into account. No doubt either that other estates within it were the habitats of men of some repute.

    However, even still, she did not come unprepared. The Magellani .22 revolver and a scoped, single-action, .357 Rugar Vaquero revolver were both presently concealed on her.

    Along with her stiletto. After all, a daga chica was nothing without her blade.

    She could use the Vaquero for her long-distance sniping instead of a long rifle. It was effectively scoped at several hundred yards given the build frame for the revolver was stupefyingly stable.

    Legendary in that regard, in fact.

    Its only real shortcoming was the Vaquero was a loud shot.

    The Arctic Devil was the quietest platform she had ever tested. She doubted that the sonar tracking systems could even pick it up.

    Now that was useful for the inner city combat scenarios that the duo potentially would find themselves in.

    Though Tas¨¬a could kick herself for not foreseeing that advantage until just now.

    Anneb¨¦l turned towards her and laughed with a deep-throated chortle as she urged Tas¨¬a to get up from the floor bed.

    Anneb¨¦l''s hands waved with palms facing up.

    "You get that dreamy look about you whenever you are thinking about your guns, don''t you? Come on, sweet sister. Maybe you will get a chance to use one on these fuckers."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged as she wondered what her tell-tale could have been. Then she noticed her fingers were gripped solid while her trigger finger happily played along with the thoughts of active targets bouncing around inside her head.

 3.20 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    At Tasia''s urging, Anneb¨¦l parked the Jeep by the fourth green on a narrow road alongside the golf course. Nearby, several manicured copses of trees and bushes lay spread out along the course parameter.

    She intended to scurry through the semi-dense flora to get to the Javierra''s mansion grounds as clandestine as possible.

    The newly refocused Tas¨¬a also had another goal in mind. To salvage the drone with no casualties inflicted on either side of the conflict. She was out of the gunslinging accumulative body count business.

    Tas¨¬a mentally affirmed that henceforth she would stick to the liberation of items that others acquired through unjustifiable means and to her spy work for Team Kutuzov.

    She was an operative now, Tas¨¬a decided. One with a professional standard for her rules of engagement, inspired by the mercs she knew and loved.

    As they encroached within one hundred yards of the mansion, Tas¨¬a tapped Anneb¨¦l on the shoulder.

    "I am starting to see signs of a home security system in operation."

    Anneb¨¦l crouched down on her knee. She gave the grounds around her a scrutinizing once over.

    "How so? I don''t see anything out of the ordinary."

    Tas¨¬a resisted the urge to shake her head. Anneb¨¦l''s own home security systems were impeccable. Perhaps she entrusted their care to a third party.

    "Okay, we are within the last group of copses just before we hit the yard proper. Do you see how this copse is lined up with the other one over there? It forms a ninety-degree arc that will lead you to that point right there. And that point is where a guard house with a camera mounted on top of it sits."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded. Tas¨¬a continued.

    "That camera can spot you if you are taking a sniper shot from the tee-off way over there, three-quarters of a mile away, if you were aiming to pick someone off standing on one of those twin sets of balconies.

    "If you notice all the activity that goes on here is hidden away on this side of the mansion. Away from the ridge line with the shanty town. By the way, I have no doubt the vantage point up there -," she stretched her arm out long, and pointed to the place they launched the Skydog, "- is under surveillance.

    "But neither does it appear that the Javierras are home at the moment, either."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded towards a swarm of motion occurring on the grounds between the patio and the pool. The Night Brigade crew gathered around the Skydog with tire lever irons in hand, plying it apart.

    Tas¨¬a winced as she observed. Anarcho-Deconstructionist tended to be very good with tools and had them at the ready.

    Anneb¨¦l sneered.

    "For those animals to be here ... No. they can''t be. There is no way those Night Brigade assholes would be here if the Salvage didn''t sanction it."

    Tas¨¬a''s lips pussed up, tight and quizzical.

    "I thought the Javierras were protected. Ria served time, but even still, she was treated as a member of a special class."

    "They were protected," Anneb¨¦l answered, her voice becoming snide. "For the better part of a century, those mafiasos pretty much defined what being in the protected class meant when the border quad was a smugglers paradise. Before the Salvage they were King Shits over all of it."

    Tas¨¬a still felt befuddled by this turn of events. She exclaimed her doubts, "I wonder what happened? And if it had anything to do with that bounty on me Ferenzi failed at securing.

    "I mean, it wasn''t his fault, he had my damn number, but there were very few people still living who can vouch for that."

    "Yeah.. possibly. Let''s put that to the side for now. Tas¨¬a could you apply your marksman skills and clear those atrocious animals out for us, dear?"

    "Would love to."

    She took a count of the Night Brigade soldiers on the manse grounds. Eight.

    Tas¨¬a checked her .22 Magellani revolver. She switched out the white phosphorus rounds with CO2-tipped soft heads. It was the closest thing to a non-lethal weapon she had in her current possession. Of course, any projectile, even an acorn falling from a tree, had the potential to kill someone in the right circumstances, but Tas¨¬a''s plan made lethality a minimally probable outcome.

    She carefully fed the revolver the CO2-tipped rounds from two moon clips. Tas¨¬a stood up, and evoked the Modality with a clench of her gut.

    The first round hit the tall guy bearing the EMP shock cannon in his right foot; the very foot he bore his weight upon. He slid with his leg jerking out from underneath him, and the blunderbuss spinning out of his hands.

    The second bullet popped another soldier in the wrist. He held a Glock, held low and aimed at the ground, in his two hands. His gun dropped as he jerked his hand back. In Tas¨¬a''s estimation, the man carried himself like the most professional of the bunch.

    Gunslinger Tas¨¬a would have taken him out first with a heavy slug backed by the force of a 158 grain exploding metal jacket right to his head. He was fortunate the renewed Tas¨¬a was seeking the guidance from her better angels.

    Two Night Brigade soldiers crouched low as they attempted to turn the Skydog over on its side. Tas¨¬a shot each one in his dominant elbow to encourage the two to put the drone back upright.

    With a second of time down in the one-sided fire fight, her next victim was a lass who reacted to the sudden mayhem by turning towards the wide-open patio door for her escape route. Tas¨¬a aimed squarely into her bottommost vertebrae where belt suspenders joined and gave some measure of protection.

    Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

    The Night Brigade soldier went sprawling to the ground.

    The last three soldiers she shot once each in the side of the hip as they started to jolt. They somehow wound up entangled as a result of their mad scramble.

    Tas¨¬a ducked down and leaped three feet over while she fed the Magellani another moon clip. She rose back up.

    The gentleman who had carried the handgun tried to make a run for it with a breakneck dash toward the patio. Before he could even reach the steps, Tas¨¬a popped off three rounds aimed up the length of his vertebrae.

    She discouraged another soldier from doing the same jolting maneuver with a warning shot applied to the meat of his shoulder. Tas¨¬a winced when she saw the outflow of viscera. It penetrated the shallow muscle just beneath the clavicle.

    It was an uglier shot than she had intended.

    Tas¨¬a ducked back down, rolled behind the tree, and she rose again, leaning against its solid, wide trunk..

    "This will be the only warning you will be given. Leave these premises. All shots taken henceforth will be lethal in intent and delivery."

    The Night Brigade began to scatter. The woman she put on the ground yelled to the others not to leave her.

    They did anyway.

    Tas¨¬a gave the lass a very patient minute. In the meantime, the little thief bobbed and weaved her head to draw fire that never came, but she did get a better tactical assessment.

    The young, female soldier finally started to crawl slowly away. Tas¨¬a got a good look at the injury. It was nothing more than a cold burn from the dry-ice soft slug.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    The fool was affecting helplessness during a dire emergency to her life and limb.

    "Run, you fucking idiot," Tas¨¬a yelled at her.

    The woman finally stood up and sprinted away.

    That left two men for Tas¨¬a to deal with.

    The gunman who she drilled in the back thrice writhed on the grounds by the patio steps. Another man hid up on the second-story balcony as he waited for an opportunity to strike against her.

    She could see the weapon he carried reflected in the door glass. She couldn''t acquire the make of it. But it was bright, LED-enhanced, and quite flashy in its chrome design.

    Without that flash, Tas¨¬a may have never seen its reflection. The hand that bore it, she could tell was an unsteady one.

    "Anneb¨¦l, stay here and keep down. There is a gunman up on that balcony. I''m going to draw him out while I talk to that guy by the patio."

    "Do you want me to sight him?"

    Anneb¨¦l had a carbine chambered for .38 ACP with a decent scope mounted to it. A bush rifle; it was almost ideal for a cover fire weapon.

    Big Red understood her role in the match-up, beautifully.

    "Good question. Keep in the grass, though. If he spots you, he won''t poke his head out. I want him to poke his head out so we can nail him here and now, and not be forced to deal with him on a tactical run inside the house."

    Tas¨¬a paused the moment the words left her mouth. So, what was all that psyching ourselves up with talk of no body count and better angels?

    It''s Anneb¨¦l who would be doing the killing, not me.

    Does that make it cool?

    They were warned to leave.

    Tas¨¬a dismissed the interior dialog. It was not the time to assess.

    Anneb¨¦l grinned, reassuringly, as she spoke.

    "All right, yell if you need suppressive fire."

    When Anneb¨¦l lay on her stomach as she got into position, Tas¨¬a kissed her on her forehead.

    She stepped out into the course. Tas¨¬a kept an eye on the mansion as she walked cautiously toward her wounded captive. She pretended to survey all the open vantage points ahead, but Tas¨¬a already knew that she could dismiss all but one of them.

    The others would only create exposure for anyone who had to open either the windows or double doors.

    The gunman above was going to wait until she either shot or spoke to the wounded man on the ground.

    Tas¨¬a was happy to play along.

    "Hey, you! The dumb ass laying on the ground there. You got anything for me, to tell me, before I tap you out?"

    The wounded soldier jerked his head towards her. His eyes glistened wet off the surface of a near all-white orb with the narrowest dot of a pupil exposed.

    "Geez, ah.. geez."

    Man, was I wrong. No pro, this one. He''s just a stupid kid way over his head who happened to be taught good form.

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. She didn''t like it, but she was going to have to taunt him to the upmost cruelty to get what she needed.

    What choice did she have?

    The Masters of Reality who recruited for terrorist groups like the Night Brigade were inhuman garbage for getting these na?ve kids involved.

    She cocked the trigger. It wasn''t necessary to do so with her single-action revolver, but it did add to the tension.

    He squinched his eyes tight.

    "I bet you''re wondering why you got yourself into this chicken shit street vandalism game in the first place, aren''t you? I have to say, I really and truly hate your nihilistic breed. This is going to give me a lot of satisfaction when I put the next bullet coming out of this chamber into your ass-clown skull."

    "What do you want from me," he squealed, desperately.

    She laughed.

    "What do I want from you? Why, motherfucker, I am feeding off of what I am getting out of this right now."

    She stayed silent for several seconds while his cheeks were covered in a torrent of tears.

    Poor, dumb kid.

    Tas¨¬a reflected on her own mores and sense of propriety. She showed more mercy to cannibals she shot and killed in her recent gun-slinging ventures than this guy who she intended to keep alive.

    Don''t beat yourself up, Tas¨¬a.

    The fear she instilled in him now would serve as a lesson to him until the end of his days. He is young enough to correct himself. Taken to heart, in the long run, she was doing him a favor.

    "All right, sweetheart. Stop your crying, already. My infrared scans tell me there is one more of you left on these premises."

    She bluffed for she was only certain of that for the balconies.

    The gambit worked.

    He looked at her, befuddled. Tas¨¬a bent low as she shook her gun. Out of the corner of her right eye with a view of the pool, she focused on its oily reflective surface while ignoring the chunks and strands of a decaying beast floating on top.

    From that view, she kept tabs on the balcony on the other side of her.

    "Did I miss someone? Are there others?"

    "No. No. Only one of us is inside. Martine. But there is also one other person. We have tied up, upstairs. Martine.. was, uh... keeping guard."

    The hesitancy he displayed in the words he spoke made Tas¨¬a deeply suspicious.

    What was really going on here? That name? Is there something I am missing?

    "Tell Martine to come on out. I''ve -"

    She saw the flash of light shimmer across the pool for which she had been waiting. Tas¨¬a spun around. Martine was a wiry, skinny guy wearing only a tank top and red shorts.

    He bore a nice smile, toothy and telegenic.

    His gun was not shouldered correctly for a properly mounted and efficiently timed aim.

    She put two rounds into those teeth. Another shot coming from the golf course copse put another in the man''s right arm and it forced him to drop the gun.

    He dropped and wailed away at the pain the shots inflicted.

    "Damn. That''s going to be an expensive haul to the dentist, mi hombre!"

    Tas¨¬a crouched once again over the wounded gunman and she removed his wallet.

    "Hey, kid, thanks for playing along. I could not have got that bitch out of cover without your help."

    She scanned his identification and bank cards through Val''s device. It wasn''t as good as the neoPalm, but Tas¨¬a managed to get it set up and running to her minimum standards.

    She studied the output and nearly peed herself. It had been a good, long while since she had a payday this substantial.

    "Hey everybody, we have ourselves a trust fund adventurer! You''re not even from the Quadra, Prine. Look at this sweet, juicy bank account. Two hundred and fifty grand!"

    Anneb¨¦l joined her.

    "Take what you want," the gunman pleaded.

    "Thank you for your permission, Mr. Prine," Tas¨¬a answered as she bawled out laughing.

    Anneb¨¦l used banding straps to hog-tie the man.

    She then reached down and spoke to him in a sensual, breathless tone.

    "Hey, guess what? It''s sleepy time, now, big boy."

    Anneb¨¦l pulled the man out further into the grass and punched him in the jaw.

    Down he slumped.

    Anneb¨¦l raised her head, her brows arched high.

    "Goodnight. Sleep tight."

 3.21 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    The avenging duo stood at the entrance of the mansion. The doors were a charred ruin. They appeared to have been blasted apart.

    Tas¨¬a turned to Anneb¨¦l.

    "This looks insane."

    "Doesn''t it though?"

    One of the foyer walls, the one to the east that led deeper into the mansion, was blown to smithereens. An exposed broken pipe dripped black, oozing liquid on the surface of the cracked tile. The strange-smelling tar bubbled in pools connected by the cracks.

    Beneath severely cracked marble faux columns, a small mortar cannon - Val''s PA identified it as an L16 81mm when Tas¨¬a swept over it with the camera - lay broken with a sev¨¦red arm dangling from it.

    Anneb¨¦l laughed.

    "Can you imagine the idiocy that went into making that happen?

    Tas¨¬a nodded and gave her own interpretive assessment. "Alright, what do we have here? So, they blew up the door, then brought the cannon inside where someone mishandles it. Can''t wait to tell the dagga chicas about this one."

    "Come on, I''ll give you a lift."

    The duo had to climb over the wall that had fallen in on itself. The top half collapsed on the bottom half, leaving a haphazard inclined ramp. They carefully climbed across it and jumped down into the next room.

    It happened to be a very large one built to impress guests with its ballroom-style oppulance. A fountain stood in the middle of the room. Four more faux columns squared up on each corner of the Meso-American tile design that comprised the floor.

    The fountain was nearly dry with barely a trickle mustering forth, but the flowers that surrounded it were bountiful. As if nature herself was being defied.

    The fountain could barely be seen from beneath the scarlet, purple, and yellow petals that splayed relentlessly across its surface.

    A similar pattern of wild growth occurred in an alcove in the ballroom''s far wall.

    To the right, the entrance led to a hallway.

    Before Tas¨¬a turned to observe the left side, Anneb¨¦l placed a hand on her shoulder to steady herself as the brawler gasped.

    "Will you look at that?"

    It was a shrine to Santa la Muerte. Two statues stood side by side. A robed, skeletal man bearing a scythe stood six feet in height, to the right of them. On the left was a nine-foot-tall dragon that reared up, but writhed in anguish with its claws nailed to a cross.

    A circumscribed legend was written above it in all capital letters.

    EL REY DE GLORIA ES MI VENGANZA.

    The King of Glory is my vengeance.

    That wasn''t even the most abhorrent aspect of their surroundings. For that, the duo had to get closer to make greater sense of its purpose.

    Several entwined glass tubes led to a beating heart encapsulated in the glass inside the dragon''s chest. Another tube, slightly larger than the others, fed down past the bottom of the shrine foundation.

    Anneb¨¦l squinted as she studied the liquid that flowed in the tubes as it met further downstream with a white particulate. The powdered substance dissolved in the liquid before reaching the finely stitched assembly of artificial muscle that formed the mass of the scarlet heart.

    In a voice staggered with revulsion, Anneb¨¦l asked, "Is that cocaine?"

    Tas¨¬a traced the film of powder to the source. To a set of urns that rose along a mantle just beneath the legend above.

    She examined the powder that fell on the cement statuary beneath them.

    Tas¨¬a took a finger and wiped it across the eyes of a small, devilishly grinning cherub. With one nostril pushed in and shut in place with her left hand, she snorted the cocaine up in the other nostril.

    It wasn''t much to go on. Barely enough to cause a back sinus drip, but it was enough to identify the product.

    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

    "Yep, it is."

    Anneb¨¦l seethed.

    "This is a mockery of all that is holy."

    She shouldered her carbine and shot into the heart of the dragon.

    The glass burst. They had to quickly back up to avoid getting drenched by a cascade of liquid.

    Anneb¨¦l clenched and unclenched her grip upon the fixed position magazine of the carbine as if she was looking for something else to destroy.

    "Can you believe those Javierra fuckers?"

    Tas¨¬a cleared her throat. Neither she nor Anneb¨¦l was the most conventional adherents to the Old Church, but even they had limits.

    Though Tas¨¬a recognized every element before them as updated versions of medieval symbology, she was not pleased to find something this close to a Hieronymus Bosch painting displayed within an altar to a venerated folk saint.

    Finally, Tas¨¬a broke the silence.

    "Where to next?"

    Anneb¨¦l loaded a clip and turned toward the hallway entrance.

    On the hallway walls hung the scorched portraits of Javierra patriarchs and their wives, sons, and daughters.

    Someone took delight in their destruction.

    "For nearly one hundred years, the premier mafioso family in all the Quadra region. Now look at them. Kings of Nothing."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged, "to dust."

    They reached the end of the line of portraits.

    Three paths were before them. Upstairs, downstairs to the basement, and an extension to the hallway that turned to the left. Rubble and ripped carpet was strung about the extension.

    In front of their path, leading out of the fountain room, the back wall was scorched and heavily damaged, as well.

    Where they stood in the hallway, they could hear the whimpering of the gunman coming from up the stairs.

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled.

    "You fucked him up good and hard, baby."

    Tas¨¬a nodded and shrugged.

    "I had help, but that I did."

    Anneb¨¦l grinned with a tilt of her head. Tas¨¬a could tell that she had something to say.

    "Yeah. Go on," she encouraged.

    "Hey, I''m curious. Low caliber weapon. Trick shots. Special soft heads on your rounds. You went out of your way to spare their lives, why?"

    Welp, now she had to explain herself and her current internal monolog of drama. Tas¨¬a leaned against the corner of the wall beside Anneb¨¦l to prep for it.

    "I don''t know if it''s my destiny to lay waste through everything in my path. There was a time, not all that long ago, that I consoled myself with the words, ''Though I might be a thief at least I am not a killer.'' What happened, you ask? I saw someone get mercilessly, ruthlessly murdered. Something woke up inside of me, then and there and made it crystal clear that it wasn''t enough to passively skulk around the crueler aspects of the world around us."

    Tas¨¬a showed Anneb¨¦l the Liberty coin she kept on a necklace.

    "I made a vow to St Columbia that I would never let myself be put in a vulnerable situation like that pathetic woman back at the IMCQ. I''ve shot my way out of nearly every situation I have found myself in ever since then.

    "Now, what has changed, once again? I''m on the pathway to saving my Aunt Tatiana. I feel like I need to be more cautious. That I straddle a very balanced thread of a line that could falter if I go in guns a blazing. But after last night, I heard a message she left for a friend. I''m not even certain she is in any danger at all."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded that she found Tas¨¬a''s excuse acceptable. She turned her head down the damaged hall, and she took note of a vaulted door near the end of the hallway.

    "What is this we have here?"

    The hall ceiling above the vaulted door was exposed as if the Black Brigade had used their ply tools to rip into the ceiling.

    Tas¨¬a approached and studied the vaulted door.

    "Pneumatically sealed compartment. Probably what that mortar cannon was brought in for. It''s a safe room.

    "So to revise the story of the canon. They blew down the patio doors. Searching for someone, Don Javierra, I presume. He locks himself up in the safe room when his home is invaded.

    "They roll the cannon down here, take some shots at the door. The mortar rounds obviously do not succeed. So, they roll it back out. It misfires."

    Tas¨¬a patted down the wall that was exposed beneath the wooden panels and wallpaper. It was an impressive matted material that felt like solid iron. Carbon fiber synced and twined with a heavy metal alloy.

    "Expensive stuff. They make carrier fleets out of this shit," Tas¨¬a said as she turned her attention to the exposed ceiling. She pointed to a jumble of pipes.

    "Hey, somebody in the Night Brigade had the right idea. They rigged the valve up there so it wouldn''t move. In essence, jamming the door. and trapping whoever is in the safe room inside.

    "Lift me up. I can probably reverse it."

    Anneb¨¦l grimaced with a confused expression tightened on her face.

    "Why didn''t those assholes just reverse it, themselves?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "It couldn''t be done until the occupant had released the locking mechanism from inside. The occupant didn''t try to do so until he knew via a well-hidden close circuit camera that the Brigade cleared out, at least far enough away to allow him to attempt an escape.

    "You see that piston there in the separate group? It''s pulled back, meaning the door release has been attempted. I bet old Don shat himself when nothing happened and he realized just how truly fucked he was.

    "Okay. Sweet sister. If you could give me a boost..."

    Anneb¨¦l offered Tas¨¬a her hands clasped together at thigh level to give her a lift.

    Tas¨¬a, once boosted, climbed the rest of the way. She hung by her left elbow along a pipe for support as she got a closer view.

    A well-placed wrench had been inserted to hinder the release valve.

    It took three Sony Chiba-inspired kicks to pop the tool out. The valve sizzled for a few seconds before it wound around and around at a high-speed spin as the pressure buildup behind it released.

    With a mighty clang that shook Tas¨¬a nearly off the pipe, the valve head flew off in a volatile ricochet up the hallway.

    Soon after followed a zip-zip-zip sound and the sweetly nauseous smell of death invading the ceiling creche where Tas¨¬a crouched.

    Anneb¨¦l turned to face the now open security door. A small security drone darted out of the entrance and into the space in front of the redhead.

    Before Tas¨¬a could yell a warning, a telescopic arm with four mandibles reached out from the drone and grabbed Anneb¨¦l on the chest. Four blue sparks popped and sizzled loud as the brawler dropped to the floor.

 3.22 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a rolled and dropped to the floor with the Rugar Vaquero .357 revolver in her hands. She attempted to aim at the drone, but it shot up into the air by the ceiling as it bobbed and weaved to avoid her.

    Don''t make me do the clinch move, you won''t like the Modality.

    It attempted to plunk straight down on her head; Tas¨¬a leapt away and stepped aside to avoid it.

    In short order, studying the jitter of its movement, she grew accustomed to its speed, and how it pitched and yawed well enough to accurately guess where she needed to aim ahead of the target before she fired her gun.

    She fired off a three-shot sweep along the path that it took to get back to her with the last shot hitting it square in its carapace.

    Damaged, it righted itself but paused long enough for Tas¨¬a to get another fix upon it. She was about to pull the trigger, but instead, she reflexively hit the floor as she saw chrome and movement out of the corner of her eye.

    She rolled over, and a second drone smacked a telescopic arm against her chest. An electric jolt spread in a violent coiling torrent throughout her chest cavity.

    Only to dissipate and grow chill in her bones.

    Unfortunately, for the drone, her Harvested immunity was built to resist such a shock.

    With a bare whit of a moment passing, her internal elemental came to be with a spontaneous intelligence aligning inside her; its directive refocusing the torrent.

    It blasted the electrical shock back into the drone which short-circuited in a volatile tantrum whose loss of control left it skidding down the hallway.

    Tas¨¬a turned back around towards the drone she had shot. The telescopic arm retracted. It attempted to retreat as it splattered grainy battery acid on the carpeted floor. Tas¨¬a shot it again, twice, dead center in its carapace.

    It dropped out of the air.

    Tas¨¬a peeked into the safe room. There were no more drones, but the back wall was covered in blood and bone fragments. A nearly headless corpse and a combat shotgun lay on the floor.

    Tas¨¬a did not pause to take in the grizzly sight. She crouched over to Anneb¨¦l who was still out cold. Her pulse was weak and her breath was tapering off.

    "Come on, big girl. Wake up. Wake up!"

    Anneb¨¦l''s lips appeared faded. Tas¨¬a rubbed her thumb against the top bow and then circled her thumb around the sumptuous bottom pucker.

    "Wake up! You''ll make an incredibly beautiful corpse for your open casket, one day, but not this day."

    Tas¨¬a was reluctant to do it, but she administered one of the norepinephrine needles she had prepped for her own needs into Anneb¨¦l''s dermis just above the left wrist. Anneb¨¦l''s breathing improved immediately.

    Tas¨¬a wrapped her arms around Anneb¨¦l while she kissed the side of her cheek and hugged her.

    "Don''t you ever scare me like this again," Tas¨¬a whispered.

    The wailing noise of the injured gunman filled the air. And it annoyed Tas¨¬a.

    Night Brigade, what a bunch of fucking babies playing at being soldiers.

    "Go see a dentist, already and get that problem fixed," she yelled.

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled.

    "You''re all heart," she said, weakly.

    Tas¨¬a reached inside her fannypack. She had a little trouble maneuvering her hand.

    Maybe, I should start wearing trousers with a lot of pockets lined up on the legs just like my favorite superhero Cable does. Nah, you have to have a really big butt to look sexy in a pair of trousers.

    I''m sticking to jeans that wedgy me, even if this fanny pack is way past its limit.

    She finally found what she was looking for, a bottle of Ki-Jack All Natural Energy Elixer.

    "Here, drink this," Tas¨¬a commanded as she handed Anneb¨¦l the bottle.

    Anneb¨¦l drunk it down in three quick gulps.

    "So sorry. I should have been ready for that one."

    Tas¨¬a agreed with a firm nod.

    "Yeah, you should''ve. What were you doing not keeping a check on our six? You''re lucky that you didn''t get a shotgun blast right in the side of your face, and me, my rump roasted with the next shot, right after you."

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged, sheepishly.

    "Honestly, I didn''t think you had a chance in hell of knocking that wrench loose by the way you were going about doing it. I was about to suggest something but then out of the blue you succeeded."

    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

    True enough, Tas¨¬a''s kick style was a mockery of what her hero Sunny Chiba taught her in his old martial arts flicks, and even she knew it.

    "All right, so you screwed the pooch as the Americans say. I am just glad you''re still alive. Hard lesson learned for next time."

    Anneb¨¦l bore a grin that could melt snow.

    "Will you ever forgive me?"

    To answer, Tas¨¬a patted Anneb¨¦l on the cheek.

    The brawler stood up to stretch. She became instantly alert when she turned to the safe room entrance.

    "Hey, check the shit inside. Mi Dios! Is that Don Javierra?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "I would not know him from Adam and given that guy is missing half his face, I have even less of an idea."

    Anneb¨¦l crouched down beside the grotesque corpse and flipped it on its side.

    "Wait, one sec... Oh, pooh. He has no wallet.."

    Anneb¨¦l located a large gold and diamond ring on his right-hand ring finger. She tried to remove the ring but it wouldn''t come off.

    "The design motif is some cheese ball Mafiaso bullshit, but it won''t come off his finger. There is Latin circumscribed but of course. Fuckers really thought of themselves as Latter-Day Caesars."

    "Let me give it a try."

    Tas¨¬a held a hand by the tip of the ring finger. She removed her stiletto and used it to cut off the finger just below the band.

    The ring slipped off of its own accord and plunked down on the floor. Anneb¨¦l scooped it up for a closer inspection.

    She held it up for Tas¨¬a to see.

    "Damn," Anneb¨¦l began to speak as she eyed Tas¨¬a. "What''s got you spooked?"

    Tas¨¬a recognized the blasphemous motif design on it of the two wolves devouring the Messiah and the words inscribed in Latin as the same legend engraved on the gold bar that she liberated from Hugo Brassi''s office.

    Ordinis Sancti Romani de Novissimis Diebus

    "Even you would not believe how close you are - that legend reads:

    The Holy Roman Order of the Last Days.

    "Though I have a slightly informed suspicion that they are a sect that believes themselves to be Latter-Day Knights of Malta more than Latter-Day Caesars."

    Anneb¨¦l squinched her brows in revulsion. Evidently, she held medieval knights in high regard.

    "Like, medieval paladins? Look at this obscenity," Anneb¨¦l tapped the blasphemous motif. "More like later-day dastardly anti-paladins mired in the worst aspects of our modern world."

    Tas¨¬a smiled, admiringly. Anneb¨¦l had volumes of French poetry in her safe house, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Villion, The Song of Roland, and many more. It was no wonder she had odd but pronounced views about certain things.

    After Tas¨¬a handed it to her, Anneb¨¦l examined the ring with great scrutiny.

    "Well, then. Double the damnation due to them." Anneb¨¦l checked the inner band, for any written indication of the identity of its bearer. "I can indeed confirm that this is the corpse of the recently deceased Don Javierra."

    Anneb¨¦l gave Tas¨¬a a pleading hangdog look.

    "Mind if I keep the ring? It''s to remind me of this momentous event The Fall of the House of Javierra."

    "It''s all yours."

    Once more, the wounded gunman reminded them of his presence with a low, pleading whimper whose words could not be made sense.

    Tas¨¬a pointed up the stairs with a nod of her head.

    "I suppose we have kept him long enough. Let''s see what we can do about him."

    Anneb¨¦l started up the stairs with a brisk pace in her step.

    When they made it to the top of the double flight of stairs, the corner room with the balcony stood off to their left. Tas¨¬a surveyed the open hallway into the rooms on each wing that the open second-story space under the ribbed arches spoked out from.

    A large sunroof floated above the hallway. There was no one else around except for the gunman and his captive.

    Tas¨¬a got an odd feeling though. One of the glass tiles off to the far end was busted out as if someone either shot through it from the inside or something crashed through it from the outside.

    Even more oozy blue salt dripped onto, and trailed down the corridor. She then recalled the oddity that attacked Skydog. There definitely was something here though it remained almost entirely imperceptible.

    Another type of phase beast?

    She thought to clinch her gut to give her the Modality''s extra perception abilities, but from the ruckus Anneb¨¦l was making at the moment, she had other matters to attend.

    "Mi Santa Muerte! In the name of all that is Holy," the brawler yelled.

    Anneb¨¦l stood frozen at the entranceway. Tas¨¬a could not see inside the room or enter it to get pass the redhead''s massive thighs.

    "What happened here?" Anneb¨¦l said to someone in an accusatorial tone.

    Tas¨¬a finally was able to peak between Anneb¨¦l''s legs. The gunman she had shot in the face lay on the floor bleeding in front of the open door of the balcony.

    His leg was twisted up, oddly. It prevented him from standing. He tried to speak but his words only hissed through his broken teeth and the cracked maxilla of his upper gum line.

    The gunman wore only a tank top and pale blue boxer shorts soiled in the blood that covered the entirety of his crotch. So much blood that she had mistaken the boxers earlier for a pair of red shorts.

    There was someone else bent over the side of a waist-high hardwood dresser drawer. His arms were held to the sides of the wooden top with pinned binders made of metal clamps and chains. Unconscious, he lay face down in vomit.

    He was naked from the waist down with a pair of black jeans around his ankles. Blood ran down his legs. A metal poker lay at the side of his feet.

    Tas¨¬a turned away. She had seen more than enough to know the vile violation that had occurred.

    "Did you do this," Annabelle yelled. "Did you do this?"

    He attempted to pull himself away from her. He grasped the shag carpet beneath his stringy arms in a futile attempt to crawl.

    "Oh, no you don''t!"

    Anneb¨¦l lifted the man by his neck and left thigh. He screamed and tried to plead for his life but it was near impossible to make out his words.

    It sounded to Tas¨¬a''s ears that he was saying as he flailed his arms, "He deeds, he deeds, basement, he deeds."

    Anneb¨¦l walked him through the door and onto the balcony where she slung him over the side into the concrete walkway below. She leaned over the side of the balcony and followed up her assault with a double tap from the .38 carbine.

    She returned to the bedroom.

    "Nasty motherfucker. We now have confirmation. This was a Salvage sanctioned hit on this place after all."

    Tas¨¬a frowned.

    "Likely so. But I have a feeling that this time it was personal."

    She thought of the ex-president of Paraguay, Victoria de Silvia, and the humiliation tactics used against her. It was Salvage SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, and had been common for NGOs that operated with unofficial sanction throughout the last century to instill primal fear in uncooperative populaces.

    There was little that Tas¨¬a could find out about Victoria since their escape. As best Tas¨¬a could determine, she was in hiding but under the protection of her family now. Her rescue did not make the media.

    News of Tas¨¬a''s escape only circulated within bounty hunter circles.

    After she sorted through her calculation, Tas¨¬a affirmed Anneb¨¦l''s observation with a nod.

    They checked on the victim. His breath wheezed slowly.

    "Holy shit," Anneb¨¦l exclaimed in recognition.

    She held his head by his long greasy hair for closer inspection.

    It was Sal.

    "To the hospital or do we leave this fucker here?"

    Tas¨¬a thought about the first time she met Sal. She had a suspicion.

    "We need to check that basement first before we do anything else."

    Anneb¨¦l gave a dramatic bowing gesture for Tas¨¬a to lead them on and then she shook her head and sucked in her lovely cheeks to make an ugly face.

    "I can''t believe I just killed someone in the defense of that worthless piece of shit Sal Javierra."

 3.23 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    The stench seemed to grow exponentially with every step they took down the stairway.

    Tas¨¬a wondered what they should expect. She thought of the girl who escaped from the trunk of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. It also occurred to her that besides Don and Sal, they had seen no one else from the household.

    "Do you think they took the rest of the Javierra family and their crew down here and slaughtered them?"

    Tas¨¬a glanced up at Anneb¨¦l. Anneb¨¦l flinched at this question. With her head tilted to assess her friend, Tas¨¬a asked.

    "What''s wrong?"

    "I know Frenzy ratfinked you big time, and you have every reason to want your pound of flesh out of his big fat sorry ass, but I still hope he is okay."

    Tas¨¬a had been too busy with more important matters to give Freddie''s actions any thought. At some point, she would have to exact a punishment.

    "You know as well as I do that it can''t be allowed to stand."

    "What do you plan to do?"

    They reached the bottom of the steps.

    "Haven''t given it any thought. What does Ferenzi value?"

    Anneb¨¦l''s neck jerked tense before she answered.

    "He values the clout being the biggest fixer in the Quadra affords him above all else."

    "With the fall of the House of Javierra that now means nada, so what else does he have to lose? It''s gotta be big enough to persuade all the other bounty hunters to leave me the fuck alone."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head.

    "That sounds like quite a tall order. I don''t know what else could fit the bill."

    An idea occurred to her, but Anneb¨¦l was not going to like it. Take the bad boy down, but alive. Then force him to live in a small enclosed space that he cannot escape from. Like a trailer home with all possible exits sealed and reinforced. Set up a portapotty and a year''s worth of Ramen noodles. No variety packs, just plain soy to make his bitch tits grow and grow. Have a closed circuit camera feed that is beamed out to the world at large to record the bastard going slowly mad for all to see.

    Bounty hunters would stay far away.

    No, Anneb¨¦l was not going to like it. Tas¨¬a could barely keep a lid on her evil designs. Fortunately, the brawler wasn''t currently dwelling on their conversation but scanning the enclosed space surrounding them instead.

    "So. What are we looking at here," Anneb¨¦l questioned.

    They surveyed the basement. The brightness of the light around them was set to very low and originated from the spare use of LED strips along the ceiling rim.

    Another light source came from an eighteen-foot-long fish tank. Highly detailed miniatures comprised a remake of an historical wreckage sat on the sandy bottom. An English privateer vessel and two Spanish galleons strewed in memoriam.

    Several species of small fish floated through the current that stirred between the three vessels. Even larger fish, beautiful sharks striped in tiger-lilly motif floated near the top of the tank under a line of aquamarine florescents.

    There was an epitaph inscribed on an embossed wooden board.

    To dust the land lover goes, from the mud a sailor''s legend arises.

    Tas¨¬a slapped Anneb¨¦l on the back.

    "Isn''t that the motto of our national navy?"

    They both had an uproarious laugh.

    "Where the fuck does a Javierra get sailing experience from?"

    Tas¨¬a twitched her nose in wonder of how they should proceed. The dim lighting gave anyone or anything lying in wait an advantage against them.

    "You got your PA," Tas¨¬a asked her.

    "I don''t carry one."

    Tas¨¬a brought out Val''s PA.

    "Let''s see if I can do a trace with this thing."

    She flipped to a settings menu and found the device sync-up features. Tas¨¬a skimmed through the instructions for the apps usage, and then she sat up a diagnostic run.

    As if responding to her scry, a growl came low and mean from a compartmented area in the very back of the basement.

    Anneb¨¦l swung her rifle back in position, and nodded to Tas¨¬a.

    "Go ahead, keep doing what you are doing, I''ll cover for you."

    The basement light controls came up in the indexed header options menu first. No preventive measures were in place to keep her from taking control of the system. Any electronic security used by the Javierra''s previously lay wide open to her now.

    She cut all the lights on.

    Two bullmastiffs began their charge. Anneb¨¦l dropped to her knee, shouldered her gun, calmly aimed, and took the first dog down with one shot to the head. The last bullmastiff gathered speed in a momentous charge forward.

    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    It took two shots to the chest, and, even still, Anneb¨¦l was forced to swing the rifle up out of the way so she had an opening to kick the beast in the side of the neck to drop it down with a hard bone breaking crunch.

    The dog did not get back up.

    As she eased her combat stance and she began to breathe easily, once more, Anneb¨¦l shook her head.

    "Damn. I really don''t enjoy killing dogs. Makes me feel like a real asshole every time."

    "Me neither. But without caretakers, those two bullmastiffs would have starved to death. At least, you were quick and merciful. Well, to the extent that a roundhouse kick to the esophagus could ever be considered merciful. Starvation is the absolute worst way to go."

    Anneb¨¨l squeezed Tas¨¬a on the shoulder.

    "Hey, thanks for the pep talk. That''s the right way to look at it."

    The brawler suddenly jerked her head to their left. From an enclosed room, they both heard a reedy-sounding moan, and then a thud. The thud repeated.

    Anneb¨¦l fed the magazine of her carbine and stood to the side of the door.

    Tas¨¬a put a hand up to emphasize caution.

    "Hold on, just a second. I don''t want someone getting the drop on us. Cover me."

    Tas¨¬a gave the carbine Anneb¨¦l carried a good glance. ''Johnni Bush'' was engraved on the side. The words resembled a cattle brand.

    "Where did you get that?"

    "I used to help Ra¨²l and J¨²n-J¨²n clear out the bush and vermin at El Hoya. They gave it to me for my birthday last year.

    "Nice," Tas¨¬a commented. A little slow in its action and underpowered for her taste in rifles, but it played steady and solid in Anneb¨¦l''s arms.

    The reedy voice turned into a howl for several seconds.

    "All right, let''s figure out who or what is inside that room."

    The diagnostic was complete. Underneath the indexed links for ''light controls'' came ''security point access'', ''cameras'', ''utility controls'', and last, ''special operations.''

    Tas¨¬a punched up the camera list and flipped through it. Something caught her curiosity.

    She showed Anneb¨¦l the screen and asked, "If the kennels are over here, what were the bullmastiffs doing in there?"

    The desperate-sounding howl occurred once more.

    All right. All right. One thing at a time.

    She found the security camera for the interior of the room in front of them.

    "What the ...," Tas¨¬a squealed a curious gasp before sharing what she saw, "is that a mummy?"

    "Shit," Anneb¨¦l responded, her tone squeamish. "Looks like one of those corpses the glowing fungi reanimate in the Summer swamps."

    Tas¨¬a fiddled with the app setup. She found the list for portal access and the number that matched the camera for the room. She punched the number in and unlocked the door.

    They rushed to the entranceway. Inside wasn''t a corpse but a man as emaciated as the leathery body found in the Alps preserved in ice. He struggled to keep upright as he splashed in a bluish liquid that drained out in slow pour down on the floor.

    With one hand he gripped the sliding door from an elongated glass and metal capsule; evidently, he had floated within it before the current emergency tasked him.

    A tube fed into his mouth and two smaller ones covered his nose. All three were clipped onto a red plastic mask that covered all of his face below the eyes.

    Another set of tubes with six needled catheters fastened in his skin. Two in his chest, two in his back, and two more in his abdominal glutes. Above the capsule, winding hoses joined into a clamped assembly extended into the ceiling above.

    Anneb¨¦l turned to Tas¨¬a

    "Was he in some sort of cocaine-fueled suspended animation that kept him alive? Well, that is just ... Bizarre."

    The mummy stared at them with pleading eyes. Gurgling sounds spewed out of his mouth. The words he tried to form were unintelligible.

    Anneb¨¦l grunted menacingly before she spoke.

    "It appears that we doomed the poor bastard by destroying that dragon heart. It was an abomination, and," she pointed at the living mummy with the butt of her rifle, "- so is he."

    Anneb¨¦l quivered and she gripped her carbine. At some point, Tas¨¬a needed to ask her what that anger was all about.

    There must have been something unholy she had seen or experienced in her past.

    Tas¨¬a spoke calmly to reason with her.

    "Anneb¨¦l, we are going to have to call Emergency Medical Services. We can''t just leave him like this. It may take him a few hours of relentless suffering before he dies. It will be anything but merciful."

    Anneb¨¦l grimaced with her lips pulled in with sucked in cheeks. It was her version of an ugly face. The only one she had in her arsenal.

    "You are right, mon petite d¨¦mon. But I have a feeling. He is a Javierra, he is connected to that unholy altar upstairs, and to that dragon heart. Never is a dragon heart a good sign. We save him, we bring El Diablo himself back into this world. But that is just a feeling on my part. I can''t justify executing a man based upon my gut feeling alone."

    As Anneb¨¦l spoke, they helped to get the man out of the capsule, free him of the catheters, and lay him onto the floor.

    He began to shudder and shake violently. Tas¨¬a held his head to prevent it from knocking against the floor.

    After his shaking fit subsided, Tas¨¬a found a small fire extinguisher to prop his head up. His breathing became steady.

    Anneb¨¦l released her grip on the man''s chest before she stood back up with the carbine back in place.

    "You make the call. I''m going to check out what is causing that stench before it makes me vomit."

    Tas¨¬a decided to fill out an automated service call form instead of speaking to someone on the emergency line. She filled in the GPS coordinates for the living mummy. The accuracy was down to the yard.

    She plugged in an estimation for Sal''s coordinate. The form asked her to submit a route for the house. Tas¨¬a went back to the electronic systems control for the entire house, and she unlocked all the portals.

    Using a map of the house that came with the diagnostic layout, she provided in the form a route to both injured parties.

    She thought about the man she wounded who lay outside and the reluctant way he spoke when she asked about who was inside the house. He knew what was going on inside that room. Maybe, he even participated.

    No. Fuck him.

    If he wants to be rescued, let him make that call himself.

    Tas¨¬a completed the form and pressed send. Within the minute she was given an ETA of a quarter of an hour..

    She was anxious to split but her curiosity wasn''t satiated. Tas¨¬a glanced at the man. One last thing to do, then. She steadied the camera attached to Val''s device, took a pic, and entered a question mark in its text console.

    An answer came back almost immediately. His name was Augustus Javierra, originally from the nation of Columbia. Naval Officer. Master Chief was his last rank. Honorable discharge.

    Glancing at his age, Tas¨¬a''s eyes nearly bugged out of her head.

    "Holy shit! That makes you one hundred and forty-seven years of age.

    "Can you talk, Master Chief?"

    His lips were steady and they no longer quivered.

    "It hurts like hell to do so."

    "Save your strength then."

    "The medics are on their way. ETA of fifteen minutes. I don''t know how you have survived in your present condition, but I think you''ll make it."

    "What''s your name?"

    It sounded odd coming out of her own mouth, but for some reason, Tas¨¬a didn''t try to use her pseudonym.

    "My name is Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris."

    "Well, Miss del Alma-Gris, I owe you everything."

    She softly gripped the man on his shoulder.

    "Save your strength."

    Anneb¨¦l''s boots smacked the floor in a slow and deliberate cadence as she approached. There was a certain calmness to her face that bespoke mental clarity.

    "I tried my damnedest to save that girl, and I have no idea how they found her. Tas¨¬a, do not go back there, save yourself at least that much grief."

    As Anneb¨¦l walked towards the steps with a Karambit blade curved inside her thumb and palm, she continued to speak.

    "One thing is for certain," she said. "When I face Sal Javierra, I am going to skin him alive."

    A reedy intake came from Augustus'' throat. His eyes were white with fear.

    "Who is this Sal who bares my namesake?"

    Tas¨¬a was certain, as she studied the sincerity that shone in his eyes, this Javierra would mightily disdain many of his decadent progeny.

 3.24 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Master Chief, I''ll be back to check on you if EMS doesn''t arrive on time."

    Augustus nodded and waved her off with a gesture that implied that he would be fine. How he determined that from his present condition, she could not fathom.

    Tas¨¬a followed out of the basement behind the brawler by a flight of stairs. She wondered how literal Anneb¨¦l meant her deadly proclamation.

    There venture was shaping up to take a decidedly uglier turn. She wasn''t certain what she could even say to prevent the excoriation from happening, or if she even cared to try.

    As she grabbed the first baluster on the stairway, Tas¨¬a turned towards the enclosed area in the very back of the long hallway that comprised the greater body of the basement.

    She could not see anything inside the back rooms Anneb¨¦l had searched. Though the light she had turned on saturated deep into the hallway, the broad entrance was around a wall corner.

    It gave her the creeps just thinking about what occurred. Tas¨¬a winced.

    Whatever Sal did to the girl, the two bullmastiffs had feasted off her remains for the last few days as the corpse rotted.

    Anneb¨¦l''s boots trodded like a thunderous warhorse. Things were going to get ugly, and personal.

    He deeds, he deeds, basement, he deeds.

    Tas¨¬a recalled the plea of the man Anneb¨¦l executed. As nefarious as his actions were, and seemingly mercenary, there was likely an element of revenge in them.

    That name? Martine? She could not place it but she had heard it before. She was too focused on their current circumstance to make broader connections.

    Tas¨¬a decided that she was not going to interfere by trying to talk Anneb¨¦l out of it for the sake of a greasy, evil punk like Sal.

    As she reached the entranceway to the second story stairwell, Anneb¨¦l stopped on the landing above her and turned around.

    "You don''t have to witness this," Anneb¨¦l said to discourage her from following any further.

    Tas¨¬a frowned pensively before she spoke.

    "There are more things up there than Sal."

    Anneb¨¦l paused for a moment and she nodded as she gave it some thought.

    "What was it? It was like a drone¡­ but at least somewhat alive instead of being wholly mechanical."

    Tas¨¬a chewed at her bottom lip as she nodded.

    "That pretty much matches up with my own impression, to the extent that I''ve got one. One of the spooks told me about advanced tech shit that they have been able to exploit for their own ends - they call it the Resonance.

    "Apparently, their lab research experiments in invisibility and optic manipulation done in sync with electromagnetic field manipulation created something in that synergy of the three that is far weirder than the underlying physics would suggest is possible."

    Anneb¨¦l slapped her hands against her hips.

    "Well, then. Where did the damn thing go? It didn''t interfere when we were up there last?"

    That fact bothered Tas¨¬a. She felt that buried deep in her subconscious she knew exactly what that hesitancy in its actions meant.

    She just had not put it all together yet. A lot of things seemed just out of her reach. Were mental tricks being played on her, as well?

    Tas¨¬a finally reached the brawler''s side. Even given her limber and nimble body and gymnastic maneuverability, stairs she considered to be her personal nemesis.

    Just plain Hell on this old bitch''s knees.

    "I think it is still up there, at least, hovering close by. It''s looking for an opportunity to exploit as it lies in wait for us. You deal with Sal, sister, and I will stay out in the atrium to keep watch."

    Anneb¨¦l scrunched her face up in an expression that made her lips appear perched even prettier as she stared down at the floor.

    "I didn''t want you to overhear what I have in store for that son of a bitch."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "Fine. Stuff his manwhore maw with a couple of pairs of socks so that he can''t scream."

    Anneb¨¦l patted her on the side of the face.

    "You know what, mon petite d¨¦mon? You''re all right. You''re more than all right."

    When they reached the landing for the second-story stairs, Anneb¨¦l darted a finger at the blue salty ooze that trickled into a puddle down a wall to their left.

    The wall paper directly above it bore stains, black and greasy.

    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    "What do you think it is?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "Blood? Fuel? Lubricant? My guesses about a cryptid''s anatomy are no better than anyone else''s, even though I have fought quite a variety of them over the past month."

    "That''s why I am asking!"

    Tas¨¬a smiled to herself at her varied resum¨¦.

    Master thief, operative, gunslinger, and monster hunter.

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head and chuckled, apparently amused. Tas¨¬a wondered just how self-satisfied she must have appeared at that moment.

    "Call me if you need me," Anneb¨¦l said as she turned away towards the room where they had left Sal.

    So, where was it? She chose not to enter the Modality, at least, not yet. She may need it to do battle. Instead, Tas¨¬a decided to clear her mind to see if she could sense anything out of the ordinary when she induced a special meditative state taught to her by Sachmilli Cuervo.

    As she started to prepare herself, she got another glimpse of the floating drone creature. It was so nebulous in the impression that it made Tas¨¬a was not even sure of the position in space it inhabited.

    It was there. For a slither of a moment, just then, she caught a vision of it but it disappeared, leaving the faintest trace in her memory.

    She would have to train herself to perceive it.

    Sachmilli called the special state of conscience induced by the exercise the Ocean Within.

    You conducted your deep breathing cycle with your eyes wide open; you concentrated all of your attention on your eyes, the physicality of their being, and you did not blink. You did not move them even for an irritation-compelled twitch.

    You only advanced in your meditation when the orbs no longer felt either strain or sting.

    Once your eyes were enveloped by numbness, you held your breath in. For the whole of another minute, you twitched your eyeballs in rapid succession to the point they vibrated intensely.

    Keep your focus centered. Roll your eyes once up while in mid-vibration, slowly; roll your eyes once down while in mid-vibration, slowly. Imagine your focus as a wave echoed to the furthest point you can perceive before, on its own accord, it rippled back into your minds eye. Hold in place what you perceive.

    Now stop and breathe.

    If executed correctly, the world around would come through like waves of liquid perception. Hidden things that caused the waves to ripple back were always revealed where they had previously lay outside of one''s awareness.

    That was the nature of using meditation to obtain a greater sense of the reality around you. Matters that purposefully lay comfortably ensconced in the fabric of existence were forced to reveal themselves.

    Muffled noises came from the room Anneb¨¦l had entered a few seconds earlier. She assumed the brawler was taking pains to dampen the sounds of her actions so Tas¨¬a shoved her awareness of the noises to the side and she began her meditative state.

    With inner certitude, Tas¨¬a knew she just needed two minutes to alter her perception and get in the right frame of mind to reveal the Resonance frequency being manipulated around her.

    She assumed there to be a corollary between the two. The Ocean Within, and the Resonance that Petro described as if it were another dimension in a Dreamland place and time.

    Her eyes stared straight ahead. Even as she began her breathing exercise Tas¨¬a felt its menacing presence grow around her, but she had no indication that it inhabited a definitive space near her.

    It was there.

    What was she not perceiving that she should be perceiving? Her eyes went into an ultra-twitch mode. Side to side, narrowed focus, she upped the rate of vibration in the orbital twitch of her eyes with each breath that she took.

    The ritual was almost complete when a smacking explosive noise ripped through the air. It was followed by a succession of four more explosive, crackling noises popping off from behind her.

    She turned her head towards the door Anneb¨¦l had entered. Lights flashed from within the room, narrowed into pure shadow before they cast out spectacular light show fashion. A cascade of red and sepia beams rained down upon her vision.

    As she shook her head and blinked something that hovered above caught her eye. A monochromatic-in-cyan reflection moved across the surface of the glass panes.

    As she sprinted towards the door, a cacophony of buzzing sounds erupted once more from the room.

    Sal yelled, "Crazy, crazy bitch!"

    Tas¨¬a cocked the Vaquero, ready to take Sal out as soon as she caught sight of him.

    He stood at the French doors that opened up to the balcony. Two pairs of socks covered in vomit at his feet. The small drawer, to which he was clamped, he held firmly between his arms as he lumbered through the entrance.

    Tas¨¬a readied her revolver to take his head off when a tangle of tentacles in cyan camo appeared over Sal''s head.

    Before she even thought to react, Tas¨¬a emptied the chamber into the drone-beasts center. It sparked with smoke and blue ooze splattering out before disappearing.

    As Tas¨¬a swiped in a fresh moonclip, Sal leaped over the side of the balcony, yelling, "That even crazier bitch!"

    Dumbass never even saw the drone, Tas¨¬a thought but then realized her mistake.

    His escape was coordinated.

    She turned to check on Anneb¨¦l. Anneb¨¦l lay writhing on the floor as she grabbed at her eyes.

    "Anneb¨¦l!"

    "I''m alright. Fucking flashbangs! I was about to cut off Sal''s toes one by one when that drone thing appeared on the balcony and it chucked flashbang grenades at me.

    "Sal was in communication with it. He knew to cover his eyes."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. It was coming together. Her intuition tried to warn her. Sal was the spook''s man on the inside in the planned demise of the Javierra crime syndicate.

    That nasty bit of business they did to his bum was an internecine grudge and not a punishment meted out to a hated enemy.

    Then it clicked.

    Martine? The conversation with J¨²n-J¨²n in the bathtub came back to her. Yes, it was personal. Martine was the name of the kidnapped girl''s brother.

    He had to be one and the same.

    How would Anneb¨¦l feel about it if she were told?

    Tas¨¬a decided she would go to her grave with it. Anneb¨¦l didn''t need it on her conscience.

    Tas¨¬a approached the balconinwith caution  n case the drone-beast returned to attack again. A sleek, black driverless Lamborghini pulled up into the lawn and opened up its hatch-like passenger side door.

    The drawer lay split apart on the concrete. Freed from it, a highly bruised Sal jumped into the car.

    "The fucker is getting away!"

    Anneb¨¦l yelled as she shouldered her carbine.

    Two bullets grazed the side of the Lamborghini but, as Tas¨¬a already knew from the matted bulk of the valance panels, the car was bulletproofed.

    A sniper rifle had a chance to shatter through the proofed layer but not a .38 caliber bush gun.

    Tas¨¬a turned towards Anneb¨¦l as the brawler gave up her efforts to kill Sal.

    "I noticed you put his pants back on."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head with a squeamish wince in her expression.

    "Yeah. I had to cover that bit of nastiness up. Seen too much ugly shit today . . . but that gape pooting like a red balloon with every scared shitless breath he took, and those . . . needled beads stuffed up his cavity just randomly dropping out . . . and blood seeping out as I am working my blade, trying to ignore it.

    Gonna have to drink myself into oblivion to forget about it tonight."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head something fierce.

    An EMS hovercraft was closing in from above the golf course. Tas¨¬a pointed it out.

    "Heads up. I don''t think those drone aberrations stayed around, lying in wait for us. They are here for Augustus."

    "More than one of those fuckers?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head as she checked her load out and pinned the next moonclip to her wrist band.

    "Most definitely."

 3.25 Book One: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a watched the EMS hovercraft as it approached. She held her gun low and hid it behind the balcony rail. She did not want to frighten them away.

    If the phase beasts were after Augustus Javierra, she would need to warn them.

    Tas¨¬a clicked on the control for the transceiver mode on Val''s PA. She pointed the device at the EMS hovercraft.

    With Val''s Dispatch Code successfully relayed, she sent a warning.

    "Unknown threat still persists."

    The pilot requested Val''s info tags. It was a lucky break for her. He was listed as a Registered Investigator. The exact type of professional they would expect to see at a volatile crime scene. So long as she did not cause them suspicion they would not need to contact the public policing authorities given she had the investigation part of the incident covered.

    "RI-3337. It appears you have a little warzone on your hands."

    "Terrorist activity. Their people have cleared out except for one injured casualty. We''ve run into a little problem. There appear to be active drones left behind.

    "We are in the process of clearing them out, but it is still too unsafe for you to land."

    After several seconds, she imagined the hovercraft likely conducted an IR scan of the premises out of an abundance of caution, the pilot got back to her.

    "RI-3337, you have a track record in Code Orange Terrorist Incident engagements, what would your recommendation be?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled that her winging it was working, but they were assuming she was Val, a consummate professional if there ever was one, so why wouldn''t it work?

    Other than she was a she? Val''s name was foreign. The pilot assumed it was a variant on Valeria, evidently.

    Just keep sounding confident. They want to believe in you.

    "My bounty hunter partner has a tan-colored jeep on the road by the golf course, nearby. Land nearby it, and she will come to retrieve the Jeep and a pair of triages. We will bring the casualties to you."

    "Jeep has been sighted. Will do, and out."

    The hovercraft rose, spun around, and swooped to the agreed-upon landing site.

    "Did you just draft me into something that is going to require jogging?" Anneb¨¦l slapped her boobs and played up the cinematic bounty hunter role. "these lungs are for the lookin'', not for the achin''."

    Though exactly the kind of country girl the profession tended to attract, Green-eyed Elise would not have said those words in a million years.

    Tas¨¬a laughed. "Guess I was being little Miss Presumptuous Girl Boss, but I don''t think they would have bought-in to me being an effective RI who happens to have a lowkey temperament. A squirt like me could not get away with it."

    Anneb¨¦l drew her elbows up as her shoulders dunked. Her right hand made a drawing gesture.

    "Mon petite d¨¦mon, I''m having it scribed on your tombstone, ''Fucked up ever so mightily, but her heart was in the right place.''"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    Anneb¨¦l gave a reluctant glance passed Tas¨¬a and into the room''s enclosed extension. It was a safe assumption that it was a lavatory. She made an internalized decision with a nod of her head.

    "I''m going to need you to cover for me," she asked Tas¨¬a.

    The brawler glanced back when she didn''t get a response, and read the questioning expression on Tas¨¬a''s face.

    "In ballistics mode, my jog is inhumanly fast, the mode feels like quicksilver rolling and surging inside of me," Anneb¨¦l elaborated, "I am going to need to tinkle first."

    Tas¨¬a snorted when she finally caught on. As a fellow Harvested, she knew exactly what her friend meant.

    Tas¨¬a felt okay with her own condition at the present. One Modality twitch in the bank, but at the time when she used it to shoot up the Night Brigade with precision there were no stressors to cause her anxiety. There was no need to boost the energia surge-flow while the Modality was engaged.

    Anneb¨¦l patted the thief''s nose with an index finger.

    "En garde," Anneb¨¦l urged with a smile.

    Anneb¨¦l unbuttoned her pants as she approached a bare wall. She turned around, leaned up against it, pulled her pants down, and squatted.

    So nothing could exploit her vulnerability, she held her carbine up against her shoulder.

    Tas¨¬a''s nose crinkled. She would be a hypocrite for mentioning it, given her own preference for peeing in nature, but the bathroom was right there! Just five yards away in the extension of the room they inhabited.

    This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    Anneb¨¦l read Tas¨¬a''s expression. She tended to pucker her lips with her arch folded upward when she questioned the judgment of others.

    "With those phase things floating around here, the bathroom feels to me like it would be awfully claustrophobic. I would prefer not to get trapped on the inside if those things decided to pounce"

    Tas¨¬a''s gut told her the phase drones wouldn''t interfere until the two of them brought Augustus Javierra up the stairs and into the open.

    Only if challenged would they react until then.

    Even though she felt certain she was reading their intensions correctly, Tas¨¬a kept an eye on both the balcony and the doorway into the main hall on the other side of the room.

    After all, she had been correct at less than fifty-fifty on the assumptions she made of late.

    Anneb¨¦l unleashed a healthy stream that cackled and sizzled on the carpet below her butt.

    Tas¨¬a''s curiosity was aroused when the familiar hell mist rose up to surround the redhead as she squatted.

    Tas¨¬a was struck by how much scarier it was to witness it as an observer than it was to actually piss cackling hell mist out of one''s urethra.

    Anneb¨¦l''s jeweled clitorial scarab glowed green and its wings fluttered gently off the sloped sides of her flesh upon which the wings were normally at rest.

    Anneb¨¦l gave a jittery laugh when Tas¨¬a noticed it.

    "It actually has a purpose. I''ll explain it to you one day."

    Tas¨¬a smiled.

    "It''s neat as hell. I want one."

    "One is already on order for you."

    Nice!

    Tas¨¬a went back to her guard duty; she had to step around an area of the carpet soiled with a pool of blood caked with the splatterings of spiked metal beeds and other viscera that Tas¨¬a wished not to examine too closely.

    With a single bobbing motion of her head, she peaked into the hall. A phase drone moved in a smooth glide - its eight tentacles trailing behind its body - down the length of the roof towards the patio side.

    Then something truly odd occurred; its reflection flowed in a curvy vorpal across the glass panels moments after the drone had passed above the sunroof.

    A delay in the reflection was a delay in communication.

    Tas¨¬a slipped back inside the room. She did not want the drones to know that she had seen that potential vulnerability.

    She wondered as well if they could move through walls like the phase cat could. One had earlier burst through a pane of glass in the sunroof.

    Why would it do that if it can phase through matter?

    It was reacting to the sight of Skydog, she realized. It either can''t or had not the time to allocate the energy and resources to phasing through space. Simpler just to smash through the glass, and then devote its energy reserves to taking Skydog out of commission.

    Then it occurred to her what it was that regulated what it could and could not do at any given moment.

    Anneb¨¦l joined her side and put a hand on her shoulder.

    "Archimedes had less substantial eureka moments than the one I see lit bubbly on your face right now."

    Tas¨¬a looked her friend in the eyes. She was excited.

    "They are fundamentally unstable machines. They require substantial amounts of energy to keep them from falling apart. Those nuclear power plants underneath the SkyTether that feed the resonance crystal frequency to keep the nanospores at bay, I bet every android you own for your octagon training versus my every gun that that place feeds into the beasts and drones."

    Anneb¨¦l held her head high in a calculative pose. She was savoring the gaucha bounty-hunter role Tas¨¬a assigned her.

    "Well, I''m not taking that bet because my chica mana buddy-girl, is a gawd-dang, motherfucking super-genius to come up with that shit."

    Tas¨¬a waved her hands in denial and gave her best impression of a Venerated Saint.

    "Nothing special, I just open up my heart to all possibilities and potentialities."

    Anneb¨¦l guffawed with a snort.

    "Before you add any more excrement to Sal''s pile and dirty up my boots, I''m going to climb down the side of the patio and jump. Then make a break for it. You got me covered?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled, "no doubt."

    Tas¨¬a readied her position on the patio with her sighted Vaquero .357 revolver in hand.

    Anneb¨¦l climbed down the side of the patio. She hung on the landing with the tips of her fingers and swung out before she dropped to avoid the concrete sidewalk directly below.

    She sprinted like a gazelle both in grace and speed. As Tas¨¬a watched, she wondered:

    Would the Olympics governing committee consider being Harvested pre-natal doping?

    Tas¨¬a put irrelevant matters to the side; she needed to not only concentrate on her immediate task of watching Anneb¨¦l''s back but she also wanted to meditate in preparation for the hunt she would commence as soon as she felt Anneb¨¦l was in the clear.

    In that meantime, Tas¨¬a regulated her breath and fixed her eyes forward to invoke the Ocean Within.

    A smile crossed her face as she became aware of the phase drone that hovered over her head.

    Anneb¨¦l was still in sight several hundred yards up the course, and Tas¨¬a was only in the early stages of the meditative trance. The drone appeared to flicker in her vision at the upper corner of her right eye.

    The tighter and more intense her eyes vibrated the more solid the sprawl of tentacles above her appeared.

    She wanted to complete the cycle this time before she reacted. Even with the threat of the phase drone above her, Tas¨¬a still held her breath.

    Fortunately, the pattern of movement in which the tentacles writhed about also steadily maintained a predictable cycle.

    For now.

    Just as Anneb¨¦l reached a hill incline that comprised a course greenway, two blurry creatures rushed passed the unaware brawler, ignoring her, towards the mansion.

    Tas¨¬a released her breath and throttled her eye twitch vibration. Revealed to her in the cascades of light shooting down from every direction, including the silver cloud linings above, were two phase cats who kept their momentum charging forward before breaking off and splitting up to patrol the parameter of the mansion grounds.

    At that very moment, above her, the sprawl of tentacles reversed direction.

    She dropped to the balcony floor and shot six times into the dead center of the drone.

    It sputtered in a violent jerk with blue, salty ooze splattering about, but it quickly righted itself.

    She rolled before it could slam its tentacles through the landing floorboards. The claw-like clinchers remained clamped between the broken boards, slowing it down.

    Already with the next moon clip fitted into the Rugar Vaquero, Tas¨¬a rose up and waited for the sweet moment.

    The drone freed its tentacles with a snapping jerk. When it rose, the indented center of the carapace bottom was once more exposed.

    Tas¨¬a emptied the revolver chamber of all six shots aimed dead center into its bottom support. This time the bottom fell out, and the blue, salty ooze poured from leaks coming out from all sides of the phase drone carapace.

    All eight tentacles withered, their muscular mass becoming as substantive as that of the bodies of snails in a pile of salt. The phase drone collapsed to the broken landing boards.

    Tas¨¬a had to leap deftly backward to avoid being hit by the deadened coils. She didn''t stick around for long. She twisted around, leaped straight upward, gripped the mansion wall, and scampered up to the sunroof.

 3.26 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a felt along the window panels to test how much support they could give her.

    The frame that kept them seamlessly in place was quite solid, but the glass wasn''t something she should be walking on unless she was doing so ever so delicately in ballerina slippers.

    She kneeled down with her feet pressed in catty-corner fashion to check her ammo as she switched out another moon clip. She had only two clips left for the .357 and four spring-gripped teflonrazor clips for the .22.

    The latter rounds she brought specifically for the phase cats if she were to run into them again. The design of the round gave a momentous thrust forward on contact that made up for the slow velocity of the low caliber in impact.

    Though comparable to a 10mm in the devastation of its impact in some cases, however, the mass density of a target was the determining factor of how effectively the specialized round dispersed compared to a higher caliber, or higher velocity round.

    Even so, she was much better positioned than on her previous encounter.

    Her current load-out was sufficient for her needs, but a stretch if there proved to be more than the two phase beasts out there, and the one remaining drone that she was aware.

    A few other weapons were lying around the mansion with the closest being the 9 mm pistol on the patio landing just down below her where Martine dropped his weapon when she shot him. The combat shotgun that Don Javierra, Ria''s husband, used to kill himself was likely her best option if she could get to it. The last weapon of which she was aware was the specialty EMP blunderbust on the grounds near the patio.

    The drone creatures seemed to have no special defensive protection built into them like the phase cats did so she did not feel that it would be necessary to scrounge for the later weapon.

    Of course, if everything cleared out, enemies and EMS, the Petite D¨¦mon of Theft was going to grab everything not bolted down in the mansion before she skadaddled.

    The plan wasn''t originally on her itinerary but, damn it, with all the extra troubles befallen her, and the extra time her Registered Investigator status gave her, now it was.

    She considered her other ammo options.

    She saw a couple of clips on the patio beside the 9 mm earlier but did not notice any shotgun shells that were stored in the safe room. If so, they were kept stored away in the lockers inside the room.

    That tactical calculation made, Tas¨¬a stood and surveyed the grounds of the manse.

    The phase cats were no longer visible. She had not a single doubt that they were still there. It was only her heightened state of awareness that had elapsed.

    Just then ... something?

    Just then, again ... or, is it the absence of something?

    Tas¨¬a gripped her weapon tight.

    It occurred once more, and this time she deduced what was happening. The birds that chirped so spritely behind her from their perches in the nearby copse of trees and bushes went suddenly quiet.

    As she concentrated on their sound, the scene behind her unfolded and became revealed.

    The birds sang brightly and intensely into her right ear, and then in her left ear, and, once again, the singing was muffled.

    The drone was zigzagging as it hovered behind her. It not only became invisible through spectrum manipulation, but it became inaudible as well.

    The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    Tas¨¬a clinched her gut, spun around, and aimed dead center where the sound was muffled.

    As the first bullet propelled forward, she began to see the drone as an inverse soundscape.

    A negative noise that disturbed the peace too much to be mistaken for mere silence.

    She heard two tentacles shifting closer to her. Their approach was too indistinct to her senses to dodge them.

    Before she could fathom their trajectory, the third bullet caught the center mass of the drone and it exploded.

    A dozen or more flashbangs lobbed in long arcs around the damaged drone. It became visible, as were the tentacles that now latched on to her ankles.

    The tentacles shriveled just as those on the first phase drone she destroyed did. Before she could revel in a tactical victory, the tentacles died as they constricted around her ankles. Pinched tight against her Achilles, Tas¨¬a lost balance.

    The flashbangs shrieked in a disorienting harmony.

    She had to turn her head away in a violent jerk with her eyes squeezed shut to avoid going blind. There was no way to avoid losing her balance and keeping her eyesight intact.

    The Modality ramped up, and fear instantly set into her as she turned around in a futile attempt to recover her balance. Her feet gave out on her.

    The gun flipped up out of her hands.

    I''m going straight through that window pane.

    This is not happening!

    The moment collapsed into the next. Then time seemed to stop. She was held suspended above the window pane with her chest leaning downward.

    The Modality spoke:

    - Imagine the glass as an evenly distributed grid.

    Blue lines formed vertically and horizontally along its surface.

    - Stretch your arms up as far as they will reach. Grip your hands into tiger claws.

    The next split instance passed and it allowed her to raise her arms into position.

    Perception of time passing halted once more.

    - Bend your elbows towards the glass pane. Arch your back as if you are about to dive into water.

    She did as she was told as that next instance unfolded. She became aware of the presence of another drone shifting out of phase space.

    She did not let it disturb her. In the context of the Here and Now, it was not her immediate threat.

    - Our goal is to glide downwards, then in a swoop that will allow us to roll back upwards, we rock in a see-saw motion that will disperse the maximum kinetic potentiate to soften our blow upon the windowpane surface.

    Tas¨¬a had a revelation about what she was being asked.

    Breakdancing?

    - Yes. If you execute it flawlessly, you won''t even damage the surface of the pane.

    She danced folk and ballet. The dance style wasn''t a part of her world milieu.

    - You have intuited enough of what you have absorbed from second-hand sources to know what to do. Shut off your brain, right now, del Alma-Gris, or it will get you killed with those festering doubts boiling up to the surface.

    The Modality was correct. She used the next instance to adjust her negative mentality.

    In the next instance, she was the instance. Tasia dived down in a roll. The phase drone was swooping from above her.

    The tips of her fingers made contact first, but she avoided the application of pressure. Her digits, palms, wrists, forearms, elbows, and then as her breast made contact in turn, she thrust her body up using the muscles in her shoulders and back.

    The Rugar Vaquero .357 revolver was in free fall. She grabbed it out of the air, twisted her torso around, and planted the other three shots dead center into the carapace of the advancing phase drone.

    It jerked away from her and sputtered a blue ooze just before it exploded.

    Tas¨¬a once more squeezed her eyes tight as she anticipated what would happen next when she heard the familiar ''swoosh, swoosh'' sound of the grenades being lobbed.

    She needed to roll on the surface once more, but this time beginning with the balls of her heels instead of her fingertips. A much trickier maneuver.

    As Tas¨¬a prepped her body for it, she became aware of the absence of sound coming from her right. The birds were once more muffled.

    Damn it in all of the Seven Hells Lady Lilith reigns!

    Her curse was not based upon the official doctrine of either the Anewed or the Old Church, but, instead, an old children''s story her well-traveled grandmother liked to tell her.

    The Modality spoked.

    - This phase-drone is the last one. And for that reason, we need to let it carry out its plan. Kick your legs up.

    But, I will knock me fool head into the window!

    - Trust! It will reveal its purpose.

    Tas¨¬a stretched her legs out and raised them. A pair of tentacles grabbed both of them by the ankles. As she expected, she became insubstantial, and when she opened her eyes, she saw she was merely a haze of blue glowing material dragged along with the drone, itself.

    The phase drone took her down through the windowpane and into the wide hall below without damaging anything in its wake even as they passed through many objects.

    Chandeliers, rails, paintings, cabinets, vases, all of which they seamlessly passed without a trace of interaction.

    Although she was being dragged behind the phase drone, now held by all eight tentacles, Tas¨¬a felt not a bump nor a scratch, though she was predisposed to flinch and shut her eyes tight with everything they passed through.

 3.27 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    By the broken-hearted dragon, the phase drone paused.

    Tas¨¬a floated ethereally; now just one tentacle held on to her. As if deliberately to protect itself from her potential defensive measures, it held her at a distance. Her head bumped against the ceiling. It''s surface felt rubbery as she smacked it.

    Apparently, she could not pass through even while ethereal without the drone''s direction.

    The flexible surface reminded her of the wall that the phase cat leaped through.

    She wanted to test its properties further, but the gun still clung to her hand. When Tas¨¬a attempted to holster it, the gun refused to depart from her grip.

    She glared at the necro-mechanical drone beast. The instant withering that occurred when its energy was interrupted convinced her the biologicals that comprised its tentacles were no longer living.

    Necro-mechanical.

    Well, shit on it, then! When it gives me my first opening, I''m blowing that fucker away!

    Below her, the phase drone examined the dragon statue. She never could ascertain what the phase drones used for eyes.

    It moved its lobster-like carapace from side to side in half ellipses around the altar. Evidently, the spooks who deployed it were curious about the layout of the altar

    Have the spooks not ever been in the mansion before? Or, perhaps, the damaged condition sweet Anneb¨¦l left the dragonheart in was a just-now-discovered variable for them to ponder?

    Its inspection ceased. The phase drone became solid, but her ethereal condition remained the same.

    Tas¨¬a cursed as she reflexively positioned the gun for a quick reload but realized the gesture was at least temporarily futile.

    Two tentacles reached into the space between the two larger statues where an old Victorian-fashioned funerary box lay. The pincher grips attached to the tentacles pulled it up, then out, and finally forward for several feet.

    Hinged supports mounted on the wall kept the box from falling when the tentacles released it from their grip.

    Stripped of all the wooden panels except for the pretty Union Jack emblazoned backboard, a rotor mechanism, and a plugboard for a cipher machine were revealed.

    What the Hell? Some acien r¨¦gime spook set-up inside of a blasphemous altar supposedly in honor of a Venerated Saint? What old world madness is this?

    Tas¨¬a spied on the drone-beasts activity as two long, silver needles protruded from the chitinous pincher tips curved above the keys of the cypher device. They were not sharp, but, instead, ball-pointed, like a pen.

    It typed out the letters:

    FirstBeast_EAC

    Quite curious. The initials of the British spymaster whose public guise was that of an infamous, occult magician. He was also the hidden patriarch of an American political dynasty, as well.

    The Beast was once commonly assumed to be a nick given for his notoriety in occult circles. It was revealed that this was instead his position and administrative title as a fixer in the occulted British spy organization.

    How their minds would have been blown back then if they knew the truth.

    Whoever decided that code was likely a spook-culture enthusiast. Not to mention, a contracted party to that culture''s more contemporaneous rendition.

    The next set of words the phase drone typed:

    Routine sequence shut down.

    Instantly, the pumps stopped for the feeder tubes that still leaked cocaine and aquamarine tinted water out of the dragonheart that pumped the mixture into the methylogenic chamber below them.

    The phase drone put the funerary box back in place as it was set. It backed away from the altar.

    With its surface coloration softening into shell-pink, the necro-mechanical beast shifted back into phase space. Now that the two of them were resonate-flow copacetic, it plunged her down beneath the floor, not stopping for the basement level that she expected to be their destination.

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

    A dozen more yards of concrete, stone, and soil shifted through her eyes; they passed through a tight set of wooden crossbeams that held up a crawl space before reaching a subbasement just below it.

    The phase drone spun her around. She faced the floor as she was held just a few feet above the brown, shag carpet.

    Shag? Just how old was this place?

    The phase drone dropped her. When Tas¨¬a became material, she switched in her last .357 moon clip, twisted around, and managed to get one good round into its carapace before it dematerialized.

    It did not stay that way for long.

    With sparks bursting in a blue frenzy out of its sides, the phase drone shot back up through the ceiling as she dropped down and busted her ass.

    She had no time to gripe about her painfully sore butt cheeks. An explosion occurred in the crossbeams. Wood and plaster, thick epidermis, long muscular strands of meat, chitinous shell, metallic components, and blue salty ooze rained down on her as she struggled out from the impact zone.

    Despite her desire to yell out expletives, it was a good time for Tas¨¬a to keep her mouth shut. Her nose hairs singed at the vaporous chemicals smoldering in the surrounding air.

    There was a pugnacious odor that overwhelmed the surroundings, calamari fried in blue quartz oil - Tas¨¬a gasped as she just had a revelation of what the liquid substance was composed of.

    Big mistake! The charred metals and electronic parts let loose a sulfurous smoke that ripped through her lungs.

    If only I could cough them up I would feel so much better!

    It left her coughing at a moment when a soft pounding shuffling sound coming from above told Tas¨¬a that she needed to keep moving.

    She glanced up at the hole left in the ceiling from the explosion. A cockroach invasion was headed her way.

    Tas¨¬a still possessed a few moon clips of the white phosphorus-tipped rounds. She unloaded the teflonrazors - overkill for fucking bugs.

    As she attempted to reload two white phosphorus moon clips into the Magellani double-chambered .22 revolver, her lungs seized up.

    Tas¨¬a could not breathe. Her weakened limbs became too strained for her. She dropped the revolver. She tried to force her lungs back into active capacity. They would not bulge, the side of her head started to throb mercilessly with the loss of blood to her brain.

    Above her, pretty green lights flickered and swirled like lightning bugs. These were far more organized than the playful summer souls her grandmother once told her were faerie mounts.

    More and more of them joined the swirling insect maelstrom just a dozen feet above her. From a mere dozen or two, the glowing green lights became more than a hundred.

    They were not fireflies though. Her hypnagogic state was abruptly interrupted.

    Flying cockroaches! Glowing tails, the most deadly kind!

    Tas¨¬a tried to call upon the Modality but her incapacitated lungs prevented it.

    Fucking ... I need an owner''s manual for this body!

    Fear prompted her. She could not get the Modality in gear, however, unassisted adrenaline now rushed through her heart. Her legs quivered, but she regained the power in her grip.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the Magellani revolver, and she lifted her torso up with her left hand.

    With amazing but unassisted mental clarity arising from her dire circumstances, she focused her aim to the best of her ability and shot six rounds into the swirling mass. They caught fire, and more than a dozen of their bodies hit the floor.

    One dropped into her hair and the charred body slid across her neck on its descent down to the floor. Tas¨¬a wished she could scream the heebee jeebies away, but the sound would not come out of her mouth

    Losing her oxygen reserves, her entire respiratory system from nasal cavities to her lungs felt like they were on fire. Her eyes stung badly but she needed to keep them focused.

    Only intelligent application of the remaining shots could save her now. This breed of cockroach could eat the flesh off of a water buffalo.

    She figured out the spot that she needed to shoot at. It was mid-diameter to the left of her where two oscillating streams of flying cockroaches intersected like helixes that complemented one another.

    She shot the rest of her chambered rounds in quick secession into the mass of the twin swarms as they made contact at that intersection.

    Each set of flying cockroaches lit on fire as they passed through. Soon the entire assembly of the maelstrom was set ablaze.

    She backed up as they dropped. Tas¨¬a found a stool to hang onto, and she stood up.

    What was this place?

    She realized it was a private bar, liquor sat on the counter-top.

    A one-hundred-year-old vinyl record in its sleeve stared at her. It was on the end of a brass-colored rack.

    Its title written in English caught her attention:

    Music for the Pussy Eating Afficianado - The Best of Moog Jazz, 1966.

    Her laughter came out as a painful dry heave. She was still dying from asphyxiation.

    Here, I am dying and laughing at a dirty joke.

    A long curved sofa surrounded a cute little dance floor in the corner to the right of her. A strobe light was set up, and a disco ball hung overhead. A gigantic stereo system comprised of century-old tech was niched in the wall nearby the dance floor.

    Finally, her eyes set on what she needed.

    Her hand reached for a previously opened bottle of vodka, three-quarters full; she twisted the cap off and quaffed down the entire contents.

    Overwhelmed by the massive amount of liquor pushing down the build up of phlegm in her esophagus noxiously into her stomach, her lungs cleared up. Feeling exhausted beyond measure, she sat down.

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward and bent over and she wretched the phlegmy contents of her stomach back out of her mouth.

    Wiping her lips with her sleeve, she sighed and looked around. How much fun it would be to take this place over, bring Beauregard and her friends here, and shake her ass off to those old records?

    Tas¨¬a sighed once more.

    She wouldn''t be able to rest for long. Anneb¨¦l should be back soon, and Tas¨¬a couldn''t let her fight the phase beasts roaming out in the estate by herself - near helpless without Tas¨¬a''s munitions skills to take down the lightning-fast  phase-beasts.

 3.28 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a looked for the exit. She was left wondering why the phase drone brought her to the subbasement room in the first place.

    The place looked so out of time, but it also showed signs of recent usage. As if made for someone from another era who still lived contemporaneously like a Mesozoic era chthonic fish amongst rainbow trout.

    But why did it bring her here?

    Tas¨¬a looked for an exit. There was a hall entrance behind the bar. The hall ran at length in two directions.

    She paused at the corner and searched up and down the hallway. A set of stairs to her left, and several doors running down the hall length to her right.

    The stairs were not very promising, however.

    Two yards before the hall joined the stairway, a retractable gate blocked her exit. She tried the bars only to find them to be composed of a sturdy heavy blue metal alloy that could not be moved.

    A pressurized double set of pistons kept the retractable gate immobile in its current placement.

    Someone was once kept prisoner down here.

    Her interior monologue let her in on a little secret concerning her own present condition given she was dumped inside the sub-basement.

    - Well now, it appears you are being kept prisoner down here, yourself.

    That stairway is the only way out? She needed to explore further to find out for certain.

    She walked down the hall. What about the bar? Awfully social in its purpose. Was the previous prisoner allowed to have guests down here? Tas¨¬a opened the doors along the hallway. A bath, a kitchen for a gourmand, and a living room set up like a standard apartment.

    The prisoner was most likely female given the bedroom interior. Wallpaper, furniture, and tall, iron bedposts, all reflected a woman''s sensibility.

    When the search was completed, it did confirm that the stairs were her only way out.

    She examined the hole the exploding phase drone created.

    Tas¨¬a is this going to prove to be your all too convenient means of getting out of this place?

    When we crawl up there, will we find the pipe or set of pipes that control the retractable gate?

    Then, to get out of here, the task becomes a simple matter of unfastening a locked gauge and releasing it.

    - Oh, one can certainly hope that it turns out to be that simple.

    She brought the stool over to the hole, and climbed up it. There was a merely lightly damaged cross-beam still in extent directly above her.

    It at least appeared to be solid in assembly. The other side of the support beams above it gave off a charred odor, but she could not see the extent of the damage.

    Only one way to find out!

    She jumped and gripped it. Fortunately, she didn''t put much faith in the jutting crossbeam being well secured in place.

    The beam came loose. The double clamps that gave support for it had been blown to smithereens. She swung the falling two-by-four away from her with a two-handed thrust so it would not interfere with her own planned fall.

    She landed on the stool with such precise ease she merely had to bend down froggy style so the stool would absorb her impact without swaying or tilting.

    - Nice little trick, what else you got?

    Tas¨¬a nodded and she vocalized an answer to her internal monologue - which to Tas¨¬a''s ears, sounded drunk.

    "Actually, there is something."

    She grabbed the second of three stools from along the counter, turned it bottom over so its legs faced the ceiling.

    She scrambled up the delicately set tower with her weight carefully offset with each maneuver she made.

    When the scampering thief made it to the top, she propped her boots on the foot ring, against vertically opposing stems.

    She could now poke her head into the ceiling hole comfortably up to her underarms. Except for the immediate area surrounding the hole, it was too dark to see anything.

    She dug into her fanny pack for her thumb-sized flashlight.

    When she felt the curved handle dig into her finger, Tas¨¬a had another eureka moment to which one of the guests in her head gave voice.

    - It was designed to be carried on a keychain, why don''t you just fasten it to your keychain? Save you a little room in your fanny pack, genius.

    Tas¨¬a didn''t care for the sarcastic tone her interior monologue was taking with her. It sounded like a mean drunk.

    She flicked the flashlight on and searched for the retractable gate control mechanism.

    The pipework was inlaid throughout in the four feet of space between the tiled ceiling and the cemented enclosure above it. That concrete ceiling above was held in place by a grid of steel rods.

    The kind of reinforced structure one would see built for fallout shelters.

    The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    Two pipes exited from a round fixture built into the concrete and extended towards the kitchen, one of the pipes veered off to an adjacent washroom extension.

    Two separate pairs of pipes stretched to the bathroom and shower.

    She could ignore the pipes that extended outward from the mansion stories above. There had to be a localized compressor that controlled the gate.

    Tas¨¬a caught sight of another pipe. One that was much heavier and chunkier than the others. It traced back to an air compressor embedded just above the retractable gate.

    Just one problem. The dense grids of cross beams made the compressor and pipe impossible to crawl towards.

    Tas¨¬a gave it some thought for a second. Then for another second. She was feeling mentally slower than usual.

    Finaly,

    It''s not really a problem,

    Tas¨¬a concluded.

    She leaned down and grabbed the Magellani .22 revolver and switched in a pair of teflonrazor moon clips.

    The specialty rounds were designed more to devastate flesh than metal, but still. It would do exactly what needed to be done.

    When she sized up the pipe enjoinment that curved downward beneath the wall that led to the piston buried inside the retractable gate''s top cross bar, she realized the copper fixture was a less-than-ideal target.

    Piercing the enjoinment would likely work but she would need to drill multiple shots into the same spot with pinpoint precision to make the pipe break.

    She did not want to waste any more bullets than was necessary. Instead of the pipe fixture, she eyed a better-suited target. Between the compressor and the metal pipe, a connector ring held the two together.

    It was made merely of plastic, and no wider than a strip of duct tape. Though plastic, it was sturdy enough to withstand the pressure and prevent an air leak.

    Still, it was plastic with the exploitable properties inherent in plastic. No matter its overall stencil strength, on the molecular level, it banded like vertical stitch work with bare horizontal cross-stitching. This molecular arrangement caused it to be brittle with little flexibility.

    Thus, more easily separable and shatterable than almost any other material used in similar fashion.

    Tas¨¬a shot a teflonrazor round into the plastic ring. It split the band just as she needed. The pipe moved a wee niggle - no more than a minute fraction of a millimeter.

    That was enough to set off a chain reaction. The hissing grew and grew, until the plastic band split farther out, and shattered altogether.

    The pipe and the air inside it burst explosively for several yards out from the compressor. She wasn''t entirely outside of the danger zone.

    Tas¨¬a leaped down onto the floor with the stools crashing down behind her. She dove into the carpet with her face planted down, eating shag.

    Bleh, yuck!

    The locking mechanism on the retractable gate began to rumble, loudly. A half gallon of Mezcal shook on the bar counter.

    Then came the hiss. The gate mechanism was decompressing.

    Tas¨¬a, you brilliant little bitch!

    She got up off the floor and walked over to the gate.

    The air hissing out did so along the top rim of the retractable mechanism where the double pistons were set in place.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed a pair of bars. She tried to force the gate to retract but, immediately, she realized her mistake.

    Judas fucking priest, Tas¨¬a! You idiot!

    The same pipe pressure used to keep the gate in place was also directed to circulate from the other side to retract it. At all times, the gate was in the maw of the pressurized piston mechanism.

    Now, she worked to move a set of bars that likely weighed near to two tons.

    How could it be, though? There was only one pipe, after all.

    That presumption was what caused her to misunderstand how the mechanism functioned.

    She reexamined the pipe where it shook loose when the air pressure collapsed. There were two smaller pipes inside it.

    One for inflow, one for outflow; now, she was stuck with no flow.

    For a moment, her situation seemed hopeless. She even began to pout, and the thought, my bestest buddy girl is out there getting eaten by hairless tigers, and I''m going to eventually die after my diet of vodka runs out, crossed her mind.

    She gave herself some much-needed solace, there''s mezcal, as well. Tas¨¬a decided to treat herself to the latter.

    Just a quick double shot while I think all of this stupid shit through.

    She prepared her double shot, quaffed it down, and bright specs filled her vision with pink electricity.

    Whoa, that is the shit!

    Tas¨¬a shook her head to rid herself of the heebie-jeebies.

    Okay, just one more double. Anneb¨¦l is depending upon our condition, that we are in a ripe, right condition, in order to best quantify the means, the means to save her.

    She quaffed the second double shot of Mezcal down. Her eyes were slower to clear out the pink electricity this time, but when the neon-like squigglies dissipated, something else lingered in their place.

    It sat on the stool beside her. A man, a Greek man. A naked Greek man.

    Tas¨¬a chortled loudly.

    "Dude! Was your father a mule? You''ve got a huge dick!"

    He smiled through his beard and nodded firmly.

    "Where have I seen you before?"

    In fact, his name was mentioned less than half an hour previously.

    Statues! Yes, statues. Indeed, statues.

    Archimedes..? Of course..!

    The vision disappeared. Tasia jumped up.

    She headed for the bedroom. The mattresses sat between four large metal bed posts. She worked to get one loose. Everything about the attempt was a battle against the bed''s encumbrance.

    Heavy mattresses that she had to remove. Bed rails that had to be knocked loose. Even the blankets and the top quilt put up a fight.

    And almost won.

    Tas¨¬a bent to catch her breath after the struggle to free herself from the sheets. She put her stiletto back. One pillow that attempted to smother her had to be dealt with in a most unseemly manner.

    After catching her breath, Tas¨¬a decided that she was good to go.

    She finally kicked out one of the bed rails by hitting it from beneath with the back of her boot.

    So much work! She was once a nun, now a thief. Both jobs are for lazy girls. But she had to persevere. Anneb¨¦l was being eaten by tigers. But, Tas¨¬a had also hope.

    Which would see her through.

    Maybe there was enough of Anneb¨¦l left to save. She''s getting her legs eaten off as Tas¨¬a struggled to rescue herself from the dire dungeon, and Tas¨¬a will have to spoon feed Anneb¨¦l for the rest of the redhead''s life because Ra¨²l is not going to stick around for a girl he couldn''t do the tango with.

    She finally wrestled the middle post loose, while her mind grew paranoid with worry. Oxygen deprivation can cause mental retardation, she reminded herself. Maybe, she wasn''t really drunk just now. Maybe, she suffered brain damage.

    Tas¨¬a shrugged as she approached the gate.

    All we can do now is wait and see, and that should suffice because we have hope.

    She planted the rail against the wall in the first bar. She leaned on it. It refused to bulge.

    All she needed was to move the gate just a few feet so she could slip through. The bedpost buckled and bent. The gate bars must have been heavier than she estimated.

    She would need a second post to help her bear the brunt of the force. Tas¨¬a ran back to retrieve one.

    She needed something that could bind the two posts together, like duct tape. Looking around she found a long extension cord tucked away in a closet. She cut it in half and tied the post together with sailor knots on both ends to secure it.

    When she tried to leverage the bedposts against the gate where the end bar met the wall, the wire she had tied on the bottom of the bedpost slipped off and the entire assembly of it fell apart.

    Tas¨¬a cussed a blue fury after she threw the bedpost down.

    "Can''t win for shit. Motherfuck it all!"

    She heard the elegant sound of a lady''s boots descending the nearby stairs as they strode ever nearer.

    Anneb¨¦l peaked around the corner. Her red hair cascaded against her shoulder, prettily.

    Upon catching sight of Tas¨¬a, the brawler laughed uproariously. Tas¨¬a joined in.

    She caught her breath, once more, when Anneb¨¦l stood in front of her.

    "Hey, pretty lady, did you just kill something?"

    Anneb¨¦l raised her chin and right brow.

    "Why do you ask?"

    "Cause your nipples are poking through, rock hard."

 3.29 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Anneb¨¦l glanced down at her chest for a closer inspection, and guffawed loudly.

    "Ha! You''re right. If some rando gaucho came up to me with that pickup line I would have smacked him, then grabbed him by his lapel, and planted my tongue so far down his throat he would have choked.

    "With that ribaldry coming from you, I''ll take that as an astute observation in-the-stead. Did I kill something? Oh, indeed I have killed, and if God be willing, I shall kill again."

    "A furless tiger was it?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded, enthusiastically.

    "Yes. A big dumb beast. I was securing Augie into the back of an armored ambulance. I heard a whisper come from the surrounding air with the breeze on my back imploding most oddly.

    "I turned around and a wrinkled-skin tiger-cat stood four yards away from me, and a second one of those fuckers was busy dragging off the Night Brigade punk that you paralyzed.

    "Anyway, back to the beast. That insolent fucker, right there in front of me, roars at me, pisses me off in such a mad way. I make up the distance between the two of us, and I grab him by one of those sabered teeth, pushed him up, like this, and exposed his neck.

    "Then I punched it so hard in the throat that one of his eyeballs pops half out of the socket. I followed up with six more punches until the fucker was dead. How dare he roars at me like that!"

    "Damn," was all Tas¨¬a could say in response. She had to engage in an attritive tactical melee with one that she finally could only take down with a high-powered rifle. Anneb¨¦l just punches one in the throat.

    Anneb¨¦l gave the bars from the retractable gate careful examination. She pointed to the undercarriage support at the bottom of the gate.

    "I see your problem. The ball bearing guide is out of sync with the two ball bearings lined up together on this end. Hand me that bedpost that is already bent up a bit."

    Tas¨¬a frowned.

    "I thought it was hopeless because I blew up the pipes that fed from the air compressor."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled, and she shook her head. She spoke at length as she worked on the bottom slide rail.

    "Nah, if the ball bearings are set-in correctly it will roll without much of a problem. Not like you to miss something so obvious."

    Anneb¨¦l''s browse frowned before she continued.

    "I have two possible theories that would explain how you could have missed the solution.

    "Do note, however, these theories are not mutually exclusive. The first one concerns the Veil of Maya which is the elusive nature of the illusive world that we live in. It is, to put it most bluntly, kicking your ass.

    "Anytime that I''m set with a task more complicated than beating the fuck out of someone or something, I have noticed, like when I''m repairing a motorcycle, the very solution-set that seems rigid and fixed at any given moment that I engage the problem with any significant effort tends to evolve in the viability of the possible solution to it as I am noodling along at the problem.

    "It is as if even the solutions that we attempt to impose on the world are distorted by the very nature of Veil of Maya and it is thrown back at us to bedevil us, to confound us, and to test our spirit. To let us know our place."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. That made perfect sense to her. The solution-set to the retractable gate problem switched at least three times as she worked on the task.

    It was unwilling to settle on any given fix for the problem. She hoped that Anneb¨¦l had better luck solving it.

    What could possibly be stimulating its energia that the Veil of Maya refused to settle into a solution?

    Before she went down that path she was curious about the other possibility on Anneb¨¦l''s mind. Given her explanation so far seemed to perfectly encapsulate the frustration Tas¨¬a felt with, in truth, everything.

    "What is your other theory?"

    "You''re drunk off your stinking little ass. And, -" Anneb¨¦l looked around, "you missed seeing the details because you can only focus on one thing at a time but you cannot do so long enough on any single thing in the state that you are in to get a good read."

    Tas¨¬a had difficulty following that.

    "Hey! That''s ... I''ve sobered up ... mostly."

    Anneb¨¦l wrenched a support bar loose from the underside of the gate. The under-bar lay on top of the bedpost just enough for Anneb¨¦l to slide out the strip of lining beneath it. She brought out a multi-tool, and smiled while glancing up, "This little baby is to me what that fanny pack is to you."

    She slid a magnetized tuning fork to the upright position and reset the first two ball bearings in place before reattaching the strip.

    Anneb¨¦l continued to speak.

    "I''ve been meaning to talk to you about your drinking in the middle of the day and how that has grown to be a problem. I was planning on setting up an intervention involving the boys."

    Tas¨¬a protested.

    "Hey, come on now. I only drink beer during the daytime, and you have never even... Wait ... You''re just fucking with me. You catch me drinking in the middle of all this shit that is going on, so now you''re yanking my chain about it."

    Anneb¨¦l laughed, uproariously.

    "Yes, I am!"

    Tas¨¬a slumped against the hallway wall.

    "Now, I guess I owe you an explanation as to why you found me like this - helpless and inebriated off my ass."

    "Mon petite dem¨®n, I don''t doubt that you have your reason. I''m listening."

    Tas¨¬a cleared her throat of a loogie lodged deep inside it and spat on the floor. From her lungs to her nasal cavities, it still felt rough from the smoke inhalation.

    If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    She explained it.

    "When I destroyed the last drone, it blew up. My lungs caught a lot of smoke from whatever the shell of that living machine thing is made of and my lungs seized up.

    "I couldn''t breathe. I was close to dying, so as a last resort, I drank an entire bottle of vodka. It punched the snotty phlegm down. That caused my lungs to clear right up. But it left me buzzing even after I puked it all back up."

    Anneb¨¦l raised her tone to suggest she had doubts.

    "Holy crap. Why would that even work?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "I don''t get why anything works these days. There is a one-hundred-and-forty-seven-year-old man whose life force was sustained by cocaine shooting into his veins. How do you explain that?"

    Anneb¨¦l raised her chin and stretched her neck before answering.

    "Well actually, that medtech told me the answer to that when I transferred Augie over to him and asked him about it."

    That certainly caught her interest.

    "I''m all ears, mon grande ange."

    Anneb¨¦l winced slightly. Tas¨¬a realized her French must have sounded horrible.

    "It''s an alternative to cryogenically frozen storage. Called methylogenic storage and from what I''m told it is a much more optimal preservative solution for a viable corpse as it teeters between life and death. They have to implant a specialized synthetic organ into the patient, one like our Augie, that processes the cocaine.

    "It prevents cellular destruction by being a persistent counter-entropic correction to the natural decay that would otherwise occur. Methylogenic treatment works especially well in preventing brain death because it intercedes at the holographical level of neuron functionality.

    "It keeps the self that arises from this intersection of neurological activity in a steady, repetitive state of being.

    "Given the properties of the substance suppresses memory formation, it prevents the patient from going mad or losing significant cognitive functionality like what commonly happens when they revive cryogenically frozen corpsicles.

    "I''ve heard they''ve yet to produce one who wasn''t a blubbering Frankenstein right out of the tube before they hook them into AI assistance to revive their personalities."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head in wonderment.

    "I guess as an added bonus, you are not freezing your tits off. Well damn, sign me up for that, instead."

    Anneb¨¦l stood up and gave the gate a good shove. The bars retracted to collect themselves on the other wall.

    Anneb¨¦l smiled in satisfaction while she waved her hands towards the stairs.

    "Shall we make our exit?"

    Tasia clamped her bottom lip between her teeth.

    "The medtech took Augie to somewhere safe?"

    "Yeah. The medtech''s corp is legit Their service calls for MVP mobsters are specially coded for assassination prevention so the original EMS crew let him through. He drove in a cool plus-sized hover-ambulance with mounted gun turrets. When they were safely on their way, I came to find you."

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to the barroom.

    "So we are good to do our run on this place, then?"

    "I still want to cut that bad bitch Sal down and do so before the evening is out."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "There are four things I like you to help me retrieve. It should take us no more than five minutes. Are you in?"

    "Sure! I''m game."

    Tas¨¬a sauntered down the hall. Despite her thirst for vengeance, Anneb¨¦l seemed curious enough to ease up her pace.

    "Excellent. The first two items are here just around the corner."

    Upon walking into the bar, Anneb¨¦l puckered her lips and grabbed her belt supports. She was impressed with the carnage above them.

    "Is that where the drone exploded," she asked.

    "That it is."

    Anneb¨¦l turned her gaze towards the opposite end of the room.

    "That''s a funky little dance floor over there."

    Tas¨¬a nodded once more.

    "I''m kind of falling in love with this setup. That luxurious shag! I''d like to do some ruttin'' on it sometime."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head.

    "Only you ... The words that come out of that innocent-looking little mouth on you."

    Tas¨¬a grabbed a half-gallon bottle of mezcal and a bottle of Russian vodka, and she put them in a white netted laundry bag.

    With a smirk set upon her face, she got Anneb¨¦l''s attention once more.

    "Hey, check this out."

    When she showed Anneb¨¦l the title of the album she held up for closer inspection, Anneb¨¦l shrieked with laughter.

    "I''m an aficionado of being licked but not at all curious about doing the licking."

    Tas¨¬a answered, "So you don''t say ... I''m curious ... Does the scarab stay on, or does it come off?"

    Anneb¨¦l gave a regretful frown.

    "Unfortunately, I have to take it off while fucking. El Bicho gets way too excited with flapping its wings and stimulating me when I, myself, get excited. It''s a shame though, the experience is mind-blowing with the connection we have but the experience is too intense for a third party to be anything but a superfluous nuisance."

    Anneb¨¦l appeared to be a million miles away as if transported to the ecstasy of the heavens. She then blushed and became self-consciously aware of her spiritual nakedness.

    "I have said too much, already," she answered. "All in due time but only when you are ready."

    Tas¨¬a paused, ready to say something but decided not to.

    What did she mean by that? Is the scarab alive?

    Ultimately, she let it go as just one of many of life''s unanswered mysteries.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the rest of the vinyl albums - nine in all, and the rack in which they were previously stacked.

    Soon after, when they climbed the stairs, Tasia was overcome with the vile air of death she had smelled earlier.

    Anneb¨¦l put a hand on her shoulder.

    "You haven''t seen it yet? Good. I''m going to walk over here. Now, keep your eyes focused on me. You don''t want to see it."

    Tas¨¬a followed along as she was instructed. She saw the glare of hate fixed on Anneb¨¦l''s face as they passed the enclosure where Sal committed unspeakable evil.

    Mon grande ange spares me but not herself.

    Further down the hall, they came upon the aquarium room. Tas¨¬a rushed upstairs and made a beeline to the safe room. She searched the cabinets inside and found four boxes of 12-gauge ammo.

    There were other things she decided not to bother with until she spotted an unopened box of 16 Noug-Noug bars. Oh, damn ... It was the discontinued by-a-decade Schtick-Sticks. Noug-Noug Schtick-Sticks!

    The ones with the comedian and the tall leggy actress in a school girl plaids from their long ago television show on the package.

    Tas¨¬a didn''t care that the candy bars were old. She threw the pack in the bag and picked up the combat shotgun.

    Anneb¨¦l eyed it, curiously.

    "Need one?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    The brawler nodded.

    "My last one was a piece of crap. Something just says confidence about that one, though."

    Tas¨¬a handed it over. She cared so little about shotguns as opposed to precision arms that she knew almost nothing about the manufacturer, and Tas¨¬a always had the reputation and competency of the manufacturer in mind when she purchased anything.

    One last thing was on her list. Tas¨¬a led the duo up the stairs. When they stood in front of the altar, Anneb¨¦l eyed Tas¨¬a and she smiled. Wickedly.

    "Do you plan to take some of that coke?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and squinched her face.

    "If you want it, you''re welcome to it, but I''m at the point of my life where non-hallucinogenics don''t interest me at all. I had great times, and interesting times at the Esconda Vida party scene, but the cocaine doesn''t shake and rattle my spirit like it used to. No, I am here for this -"

    Tas¨¬a pulled out the funerary box and showed Anneb¨¦l what was inside. Along with the Enigma machine she found twelve tin pill bottles beside it. She opened a bottle up and found that it contained ribbons of tape.

    "I thought so. These cats don''t rely on digital for anything."

    Anneb¨¦l gave her a curt smile.

    "You''re spooking me, lassie. A whole ''nother level of operatives have been working with the Javierras that I would not have suspected beyond my B¨ºte being an intermediary."

    Even with that warning, Anneb¨¦l patted the tops of the tin bottles, wontonly.

    She continued to speak.

    "We may have the keys to the kingdom in our grasp, right here. You''ll have to do quite a bit of cipher work just to access it though."

    Tas¨¬a was ready to show off. Her fingers drummed above the plugboard keys.

    "Not a problem. I spied on as that thing keyed in the access code."

    She typed in:

    FirstBeast_EAC.

    Anneb¨¦l put her hand on top of Tas¨¬a''s.

    "We need to take this with us. This is . . . something else."

    She grabbed her multi-tool and switched in a bolt cutter.

    "So.. you know something?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded.

    "It didn''t stop with just the first Beast. The current Beast now reigns, right here, from his throne in the Sweet. I''m headed that way to buy some info on Sal. We need to get over there, pronto."

    Val''s PA lit up and vibrated against Tas¨¬a''s tailbone. It sounded out the Las Flores del Mal Deathgrind music from Anneb¨¦l''s satura music system.

    Anneb¨¦l straightened her spine, gasped, and went bug-eyed when she realized what she was hearing.

    "How the fuck," she asked.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the PA from out of her pocket and she studied the screen.

    "Oh ... this is how the fuck."

    The visage of Demona Hell?iste smirked right back at her. Tas¨¬a raised the PA up for her friend to see.

    "First," Demona stated flatly, "there shall be a detour."

 3.30 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Part III

    Resonance Front

    Anneb¨¦l pulled over and stopped the Jeep just below the warning mark Demona put on the map she provided them.

    Tas¨¬a lunged out the door and knelt to puke out the contents of the coffee and Donca donut.

    Neither was nearly as delicious coming up as they tasted going down. She wiped her chin and reentered the vehicle.

    Anneb¨¦l put a palm on her back and rubbed against her shoulder blade to comfort her. It was working.

    "I shouldn''t have spiked that coffee I got you with a double shot of expresso. Likely, ripped your stomach apart given the condition you are in."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. She felt a slight tinge of guilt that she wasn''t being entirely straight forward.

    "It''s not your fault. I threw back some mezcal even after the vodka. A lot of mezcal, actually."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled and brushed her cheek.

    "I am so not surprised. You stay here while I check out this camera. You keep a scope in that fanny pack, right?"

    Tas¨¬a dug for the scope originally intended for a .38 semi-auto repeater pistol.

    "Don''t let the small size fool you. It has excellent magnification."

    Anneb¨¦l took it and with her other hand she curved her index finger and thumb close together.

    "My dear, I am often surprised by what sort of capacity comes in small packages."

    She walked into the woods beside the winding road just outside of Asunci¨®n - it was a circuitous and convoluted route that Demona gave them to the garage but necessary, she insisted, for maintaining their stealth.

    Demona left a note by the mark.

    Approach from the woods. At the base of the post, cut the wires.

    Sounded easy enough; Tas¨¬a could sit this one out. Her security systems expertise would not be needed.

    Tas¨¬a relaxed and chuckled.

    Oh, the hissy fit that Anneb¨¦l gave at Demona''s insistence upon the detour! But, the spook was a master persuader, or manipulator, depending on one''s point of view. She insisted that what she wanted them to do was critical to getting Val back alive.

    That put the matter solidly in Tas¨¬a''s corner of what was in her best interest.

    When Tas¨¬a explained to Anneb¨¦l her familial relation to Val, the brawler calmed down.

    "I''ll do this for you, mon petite d¨¦mon," she said as she pointed a finger at Demona, "but not for you."

    Tas¨¬a slunk back into her seat. Now that she was caffeinated, and disengaged from any intense activities, something that occurred that she had no time previously to dwell on now bothered her.

    That conversation she had with the Modality:

    - This phase-drone is the last one. And for that reason, we need to let it carry out its plan. Kick your legs up.

    But, I will knock me fool head into the window!

    - Trust! It will reveal its purpose.

    The Modality did not merely suggest a better choice of actions nor play a passive role in her defensive capabilities but insisted that in operative capacity the Modality took over.

    It had its own agenda independent of her immediate interest.

    This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

    That simply would not do.

    Still, currently, she had no means to back up that assertion. No means that she was aware to control an entity that existed intrinsically inside of her.

    More frighteningly perhaps, if it had a purpose that was counter to her interest, how would she even go about eliminating it?

    She thought affirmatively, that when all of this was over - her current mission to assure that her Aunt Tatiana and Val were safe and secure, she would hunt for that owner''s manual for those who lived inside a Harvested body.

    She imagined what the title could be:

    So You Are Harvested? What To Do With That Neurologically Enhanced Body Of Yours.

    In the meantime, she needed to relax and take advantage of her current downtime with meditation. She rolled down the window and breathed in the scent of wildflowers on the breeze.

    She sat back and reclined her seat. Isolated individual woodland sounds were the ultimate de-stressor.

    The birds were always the easiest to pick out. She heard three different species in the immediate vicinity. She switched her awareness of each like they were instrumental parts in a song.

    From her experience with meditative technique, she could very well turn that selective awareness into a musical score.

    The naturally rhythmic kis-ka-dee sound that gave the common bird its name rode through the air in a smooth mid-tone. Above which a pair of saffron finches trilled sharp and vibrant in an easy-to-distinguish clang. She could not identify the lowest-toned bird, however.

    Some kind of goose, perhaps? It was definitely the sound of a loch-bound bird but not so abrupt as that of a typical duck or goose.

    She absorbed the sound of the avian ensemble and made a song of it.

    Her selective awareness played it in the order of the low tone to the highest, she reproduced several bars from Peter and the Wolf.

    The sound of the kiskadee peeled away first, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the tonal arrangement. The loch-bound bird''s song fell off next, and soon it took flight in a grande spread of white plumage over the Jeep.

    It screeched a most atonal squawk as it departed.

    Tas¨¬a took its warning to heart. She got out of the car, crouched down, and readied her Magellani .22 revolver chambered with the teflonrazor rounds.

    An explosion a little more than one hundred yards in the direction that Anneb¨¦l took off in occurred. Though she felt no force, Tas¨¬a jumped back, and she embraced herself for any impact.

    With her heart clenched with dread worry for Anneb¨¦l, she stifled an urge to yell out to her. It could prove to be a tactical mistake to reveal herself, doing neither of them any good.

    What just exploded?

    The silence was very odd. She expected some reverberation and a chain reaction affecting the surrounding branches and trees.

    Just before she attempted to move again, it rained down pine sprouts and nuts from a Paran¨¢ pine splattering on herself, the Jeep, and the roadway.

    What, no wooden splinters, nor piney bark?

    More morbidly, Tas¨¬a was relieved to find:

    No giblets of human body parts.

    Tas¨¬a crouched once more and moved silently into the woods. She found the deer trail that Anneb¨¦l most likely used to move up a hill leading to the posted camera.

    At first, no incident occurred as she kept on the track. She even spotted the pond hidden amongst the trees that the fowl had emerged from.

    There was a line of cables that crossed across the pond. They led to the camera post that she could see now.

    It was mounted on a telephone pole cut off at the halfway mark with a platform placed on top of it. Three lenses that could rotate around one another protruded out from the top.

    It was hidden behind a false line of tree limbs covered in glassy appearing long green nettles. On this backside, their artificiality was obvious.

    The other side of the green nettles seemed real enough to anyone who did not examine them too closely. Like a one-way mirror.

    They swayed back and forth near hypnotically and provided cover for the cameras that could peer through them. It was not uncommon as a policing measure to have blinds up with one-way viewing camo along speed traps or sensitive securitized areas.

    Did Demona miscalculate the security measures put in place? This was only the first of three spots they needed to neutralize before reaching the garage.

    Her intuition told her that she was asking the exact correct question.

    Demona was the eye in the sky. If she missed anything it would be due to that limitation.

    When it came together in Tas¨¬a''s head, at the moment she heard the snap of twigs from a footfall, she jumped up to a tree branch and swung up several feet in the air with a double legg¨¦d push-off.

    A metal spear swooshed by near where she previously stood.

    Tas¨¬a at the apex of her ascent now saw what had occurred. A little man wearing a skin suit, after he emerged from the pond, made an attempt to sneak up on her.

    When she jerked away just then, he pulled his trigger on his speargun before he had a good aim drawn on her.

    Sucks to be you!

    Tas¨¬a squared up her aim in an instant, as she fell, and placed a teflonrazor round centered in his forehead.

    She gripped a branch on her way down with one hand to soften the fall. Once her descent slowed, she let go and landed on her feet.

    The leap caused her tummy to feel all shaken up again. She leaned down once more and tried to let something out, but her stomach wouldn''t cooperate.

    Oh, mi Santa Muerte, the dry heaves ever do suck.

    After a minute she felt well enough to continue. Tas¨¬a stood and looked around to catch her bearings.

    Where was Anneb¨¦l? There was no sign of any struggle in the immediate vicinity. No blood loss and curiously no exploded tree.

    Did they drag her into the lake? With the surrounding mud, there would be more than the one set of prints there that came from her assailant.

    She ruled that out.

    Tas¨¬a walked up to the little pigmy-sized man. Close up, she realized two things. That it wasn''t a wetsuit that covered over normal human flesh, and it wasn''t a human face that it bore.

 3.31 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    What was this? That face? Some kind of gargoyle?

    Tas¨¬a crouched to get a closer view and frowned when she realized no birth defect produced such perfectly monstrous results.

    Someone manipulated his genetic materials and that person did not give a damn how maladjusted to society he would turn out to be.

    Tas¨¬a did not know why, but she was taken back to the carnival set upon the ridge-way road.

    Why that connection?

    It was obvious. She knew as she gazed upon the lovely senorita who pointed to the carnival flyer, earlier that day, there was something not so pretty about the place. Carnivals had beautiful facades, but the art of their performative social existence always revealed an inner obscurant mystery. Often an ugly one.

    Could there be another connection my intuition is calling out?

    Val''s PA vibrated against her tailbone.

    "Demona?"

    The face of Hell?iste lit up the screen.

    "Hello, my dear. Could you satiate my curiosity and run a scan on your Lord''s misbegotten creature there?"

    That odd ending phrase gave Tas¨¬a a moment of pause. Enchanted by the hyper-intelligent spook''s machinations (or, she had to remind herself, the simulation of the dead woman) she had nearly forgotten that Demona was a diabolist. However, she could not afford to make an issue of it at the moment.

    Tas¨¬a hit all three options that Val''s PA was capable - camera, IR scanner, and laser pulse. She stood up and waved the device over the monstrous body.

    "Very well done. That specimen comes from my part of the world, though he is also a cousin of a sort to your own condition."

    Tas¨¬a winced in frustration. She shook a finger.

    "Riddles, Demona! You are always speaking riddles!"

    Demona chuckled.

    "Of course. They are called Al-Majhul. They are also Harvested, but their creators had not even a whit of the compassion that your own doctors and scientists showed for you. They tested the absolute boundaries of the species'' genomic condition. Such horrible people, they killed most of their preemie subjects, and kept a distinctive subset."

    Tas¨¬a frowned. Had she just killed one of her own?

    Don''t hate the gunslinger. You''ve never killed except in self-defense.

    Demona interrupted her solemnity.

    "Let''s leave it at that, for now, okay? You have more pressing matters."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and regained her composure.

    "Indeed, I do. Were you aware of the presence of these - Al-Majhul?

    "No. Not at all. Nor of the defensive measures they used on your friend. It appeared to be just an ordinary common spy blind. I have set up a few in my day, myself."

    "Is Anneb¨¦l still alive?"

    "I should hope so. My IR scans from the satellite are not picking anything up, but they are not so fine-tuned that a cloud cover can''t obscure their reach. Don''t let that discourage you, even if she were, excuse my mani¨¨re ind¨¦licate, dead she would still be giving off heat."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "No worries, I prefer that you are blunt. I''m on my way. Call me please if you have anything else."

    She dropped the call and put the PA back in her fanny pocket.

    Tas¨¬a started to tread up the path covered in gnarled roots. She looked around, sweet undisturbed nature as far as the eye could see.

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    What was she missing?

    Without her even realizing it, Tas¨¬a''s breath tightened with regulated constriction.

    The benevolent voice of her interior monologue began to speak.

    - You assume it to be nature, but is it? It even fools the beast of the trees!

    She realized that this bifurcation of her inner self that she has grown to casually accept was her analytics-mode, in separate function from the Modality.

    That truth, at least, gave her some relief.

    Tas¨¬a breathed in slowly and filled her lungs. She held her breath and squinted hard as she looked around her environs.

    Where do I find it? This seam line will reveal what? Yet another insane underlying condition to this bat-shit world?

    El Mondo de Guano!

    Tas¨¬a stifled a chuckle so as not to interrupt the analysis her intuition was now playing out.

    With more meditation on her part, it took a good moment for the answer to crystallize.

    - Take your stiletto and stab a tree.

    She looked in surprise at the trees that surrounded her.

    Which one? Surely, this is not all fake?

    The interior dialogue did not answer her question.

    What of the exploding tree? What of the one Tas¨¬a leaped and swung upon to dodge the little beast-man?

    Of course, not the entirety of the surrounding woods were fake. Her intuition discovered a mere hint of what was occurring and articulated that bit of information back to her. She would have to do more work to uncover the rest of the puzzle.

    Tas¨¬a turned the IR scanner back on. Trees and natural foliage in the sunlight of the day were a brightly intense scarlet monochrome. A few dozen trees, amongst the others, were dull in tone, and the lighter coloration tended to be white and reflected electronic wire work within.

    Tas¨¬a shoved the PA into her back pocket. She walked up to the nearest mechanized tree, took her stiletto out of her left boot scabbard, and she stabbed the tree.

    She was not sure what would happen but what did occur surpassed her expectations.

    The trunk of the tree opened up like the twin doors of a cabinet, and cables thrust out it in an attempt to reach her. Tas¨¬a jumped back and rolled out of its reach.

    It appeared as if all the other mechanical trees activated as well with double sides to each letting out cables that probed along the deer paths, low to the ground. The cables had clinchers on them as if designed to grab intruders.

    She kept an eye on the three mechanical trees nearest to her, and to her better advantage she slunk behind a small natural tree that had grown into a forked set of branches.

    A pair of cables smacked up against the branches as it tried to work its way around toward Tas¨¬a. There were no easy path going forward to stay out of their reach. Whatever direction she went she would have to go past at least a few of their clinchers.

    Tas¨¬a made a plan to get to a tree that rose above their cable extensions and climb it. In execution, she had to do a frontward roll and then slide down a small gully to get to it.

    In Modality mode, it would be child''s play, but she did not want to put her trust in that ability.

    Tas¨¬a sprinted up a nearby tree just past her natural height, twisted around, and thrust her body into the roll. Three cabled clinchers grabbed at her as she passed through them.

    She folded down and rolled perfectly off of her shoulders as she landed. She prepared for her slide down the gulley incline when a clincher jerked her by her ankle.

    Ah, shit!

    Tas¨¬a tried to hold on by a root that she slid against as the clincher pulled her towards a mechanical tree. The grip was beginning to stretch her out with her shoulder joints popping.

    To avoid being drawn and quartered Tas¨¬a let go of the root. The grip on her right ankle made it impossible to grab her Magellani .22 revolver.

    She still held the stiletto in her hand, however. Tas¨¬a had only a few seconds to find an effective use for it.

    How to go daga chica on a mechanized tree?

    There!

    A set of white wires were exposed inside the tree whose clincher held onto her. They lead to an assembly of rotor controls.

    Tas¨¬a limberly pulled her arm back, aimed, and let the stiletto fly. It shredded into three of the wires. No dramatics of sparks, but the clincher let loose. She was close enough to reach in and grab the stiletto back into her hands.

    Oh, if Ydre?s could have seen that move!

    At the Daga Chica, they didn''t throw darts for sport. They threw stilettos. Ydre?s was unrivaled.

    She had no time to pat herself on the back. Tas¨¬a scrambled down the slight gully indention that led to the giant natural tree. It gave her enough cover to pass beneath the snapping clinchers.

    Her next move was a gamble but she had to try it. Tas¨¬a broke out into a sprint towards the giant tree, clinchers tried to grab at her ankles. This time she jumped to avoid them and did so at the precise moment that she needed to escape their entanglement.

    She leaped up on the tree and clenched at the bark, which provided her a solid grip to dart up past the reach of the cables.

    Her lungs burned from the sprint. Tas¨¬a was in the best of shape, but this was proving to be a chore. She couldn''t rest even now, now that she had a good idea what happened to Anneb¨¦l.

    She grabbed Val''s PA back out of her fanny pocket, hit the IR scanner, and watched the screen as she held it at arm''s length. Tas¨¬a slowly swung her arm in a tight arc aimed below.

    She could make out the slight infrared trace around the body of a deer inside one of the mechanical trees.

    It had not assumed the natural background temperature as of yet, so it must have been caught no later than earlier that morning.

    Smart.

    The Al-Majhul apparently used the mechanical trees primarily for game traps. Anyone caught snooping into their affairs was likely just an additional bonus.

    Tas¨¬a continued her search. Up on the hill just a few yards off from the blind platform where the cameras sat, she found a mechanical tree and the body of a highly feminine and tall person captured inside it.

    Tas¨¬a heart jumped, she squealed and happily peed herself ever-so-slightly when she saw the figure writhing in a struggle against her bonds

    Hold on, dearie Anneb¨¦l, I''m coming!

 3.32 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    As Tas¨¬a searched for a path between the mechanical trees to get to Anneb¨¦l, she jerked back. A noise of substantial bearing sped passed her head.

    Whatever its source, it left in its wake a maddeningly sharp metallic tone.

    The bob and weave she did in response nearly caused her to fall from the tree limb as the air imploded above her.

    What now! Am I being shot at?

    Tas¨¬a was in no mood to tolerate anything that got in the way of saving Anneb¨¦l. She would dodge through a hail of bullets and give free rein to whatever daemon guided the Modality if that is what it took.

    Her fingers dug into the limb as she listened. The same noise, high and shrill, shrieked by. The noise abruptly faded in a stark sonic decay until three separate tones parted in widening intervals from one another.

    Still, she saw nothing of its physical presence.

    Tas¨¬a looked around for signs of bullet holes or any other unnatural gaps indicative of a moving body, perhaps cloaked, between the trees but found none.

    Are they using trace-winders?

    An ammo round designed to be shot above a target and while in mid-flight angled fins sprung out to drive the round downward at a curved angle.

    The round wasn''t known for its accuracy but if several were used in bursts fire patterns by a rifleman trained for the tactical round, the odds of a hit improved significantly.

    Often with the onslaught of trace-winders cover became useless. Tas¨¬a glanced above for signs that she needed to get out of the way of exposure.

    The limbs, leaves, and branches above lay still so most likely that wasn''t what was happening. If someone was shooting at her from below, given her superior vantage point she had scanned in infrared only moments before, she would have more than likely spotted the culprit by now.

    Large black fanned-out wings swooped down into a nearby clearing between the trees that formed a natural aerial arena. The previous abrupt but allusive shriek belted-out from behind the blackbird. Three jagg¨¦d shaped sparrows yelped in unison, threateningly.

    Tas¨¬a breathed a sigh of relief. She could get back to her business and ignore the birds and their mayhem.

    Or she so thought. Tas¨¬a paused her plan of action once more at the sound of a crow''s familiar ''cah.''

    Mel!

    What was he doing so far from Villa Marron? It made little sense given his Watcher status. She was no longer in danger of becoming Manifest. Its sensorium interface was built around Manifest detection.

    The sparrows attempted to corner old Mel but he was far smarter than they. He could shift his dive and feint with masterful disequilibrium that sent the sparrows spiraling off-balance with the greatest assurity. Their only advantages were in their petite size and speed.

    Still, if the dynamic of the parlay did not change to Mel''s advantage soon they would wear him out with their simple strategy of dive-bombing the Nightwing.

    Her first good sighting of one occurred when the alpha of the three reached just at its apex for its next dive bomb attempt. Its wings were sleekly vorp¨¦d, so such as to remind her of the modern beheading blades, and their warped-surface sensibility, that had come to be in great fashion in the world outside of the Quadra.

    But what was is it with those strange birds?

    She shook off her wonderment. There was little time for solving the mystery of their design. Tas¨¬a took out her Magellani .22 revolver.

    They simply had to die.

    "Lead them into that clearing between the two copses near me, Mel."

    That would narrow their path and give her an advantage when she placed her shot.

    Mel swung back towards her in obeyance.

    Such a good audio range! Tas¨¬a also understood that Mel responded so well to her command due to someone steering him remotely.

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    Sachmilli.

    It stung her ego somewhat but she realized that he didn''t send Mel to look after her, but to keep an eye on Anneb¨¦l instead.

    After all, the Gallo-Spanish beauty larped as a 19th-century Parisian courtesan for his amusement.

    As she kept an eye on the sparrow she identified as the alpha, she grew to anticipate its position in space. Mel circled below it with feints between the trees.

    It was a strategy to force the sparrows to smash against the trunks if they miscalculated their dive bomb attempt. It also forced them to be more hesitant and cautious in their attack.

    The sparrow she tracked closed in on its apex, and just before the latest attempt at a dive bomb it met the apex with a bullet in its breast. As it jerked backward in descent, its body unwound like a yarn made up of wormy earth-pink tendons.

    The wings broke off into hundreds of metallic nettles.

    Nettles? What the hell!

    The remaining two birds swung back around to test her. They crisscrossed one another just at her bosom while letting out a blood-curdling shriek.

    Tas¨¬a bent her torso backward to dodge but her feet gave out. She did not fight it; the struggle would be counterproductive to the downward dive that would allow her to aim at the attacker if she went with the flow toward another branch.

    As she descended, one sparrow swung away from her as the other sparrow arced its flight back her way. In its downward sweep, it aimed its talons where she planned to grab a branch.

    Feral smarts. Animal Kingdom smarts. How to bring a human down when you are a tiny sparrow?

    Peck! Peck! Peck!

    Make that bitch fall and break her fucking neck!

    She took the shot a split instance before the rendezvous at the grab point. The teflonrazor round utterly crushed the sparrow''s head. It too spiraled out in a splatter of wormy tendons. The wings spliced off in front of her.

    Tas¨¬a had no time to dwell on the utter beauty of its silvery unraveling; she grabbed the limb and wrapped her boots around the thicker portion of it for balance.

    Where is the third sparrow?

    Mel rebuffed with the curve of the wind as he slid down on its bent current to hover above a branch nearby. The last sparrow was caught in Mel''s talons, and he clinched it by its wings.

    The creature squawked an ungodly sound, dark in timbre and at odds with its confident battle cry, as Mel ripped it apart.

    Tas¨¬a watched the dissipation of its body into oddly dissolving tendons, and the wings ... close up, she realized what the nettles were - flechettes.

    Damn that''s curious.

    "Sachmilli," Tas¨¬a called out as she held the PA in her hands. "I have Val Vitaliy''s PA."

    The Nightwing settled down on a perch and soon after Sachmilli''s face flashed on the screen. The Cathar Anewed businessman likely had Val the fixer, lawyer, and investigator, on his speed dial.

    "That could have gotten nasty," he stated. "Flechettes. That is what those birds are called. They could have shredded Mel and yourself something serious."

    "Then why didn''t they? After all, assuming they belong to the Al-Majhul, I killed one of their own."

    Sachmilli''s face tightened into a rugged squinch.

    "Don''t worry yourself about the Al-Majhul. Those poor bastards are merely slaves to the UnMarred. Their lives mean little to nothing to their masters, and they possess no independence of their own to purpose into a vendetta.

    "As harsh a world ours happens to be, and though we may be of a brutal temperament, we being those of us who continue to endure in the Quadra, we still have scruples. They do not."

    "They? Who are these UnMarred?"

    Sachmilli grinned wryly as he so tended to do when he revealed or hinted at occulted lore.

    "Ancient tribe - hidden to history. In truth, the first spooks."

    Let''s change the subject, Tas¨¬a thought as she decided that the matter of the foriegn agenciers was a distraction from her greater purpose. I intend that this will be the first and last time I have anything to do with the UnMarred or the Al-Majhul.

    She trained her own ruthful eye on Sachmilli''s screen image.

    "You are here to keep an eye on Anneb¨¦l?"

    Sachmilli squinted and he raised his eyebrows, simultaneously.

    "You know me too well. Here, take a look at this."

    Val''s PA flashed another image. A schematic of a mechanical tree.

    She had wondered how she was going to get the mechanical tree that held Anneb¨¦l to open up. The energy source for the wild game-trap fed from cables at the false roots.

    In turn, the source supplied the same set of cables that fed into the camera blind and its cameotic illusion.

    Tas¨¬a did another careful once-over of the schematic to confirm that the locking mechanism was kept in place through a set of hydraulic pumps. A power outage would force the air pressure to release. Good to know that the air pressure wasn''t kept locked in place in the event of a power outage.

    She surveyed the wires that crossed over the pond and found the source cable for all of the trees. By her estimate, the cable as seen from her point of view displayed a six-inch diametric width in its thickness.

    Fortunately, the Magellani .22 revolver was scoped. She drilled three tight holes at a vantage point on the cable just below the surge relay.

    Still not enough. She had to empty the first chamber of eight rounds before the cable began to fry and sizzle. With a fit of jerks that slithered up the cable, it finally broke off and dropped into the pond below.

    The mechanical tree released Anneb¨¦l. The brawler kicked against the double doors that comprised the trunk in front of her and jumped to the ground, coughing and catching her breath at irregular intervals.

    A broken clincher cable lay limply on her left shoulder.

    Mel cahed to get Tas¨¬a''s attention. In the pond, an Al-Majhul floated face down. The body began to rise as a dark glassed oval-shaped object, twenty-odd feet in diameter rose from beneath the water.

    The unmoving corpse rode along on the glass top. It spun slowly round and round, and smoke rose from its jagg¨¦d glass sides.

    A scent of burning flesh started to move along with the breeze in the air.

    A vehicle it may have been but Tas¨¬a got the odd feeling that she may have just killed it.

 3.33 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Anneb¨¦l sat on the support bar above the back hatch of her Jeep. She brushed out the tangles of her hair. It was now full shoulder length with a dip below the neck in the middle, between two to three inches longer than it was when Tas¨¬a lopped it off.

    Below where Anneb¨¦l dangled her boots, Tas¨¬a put together a makeshift perch for Mel.

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled with a ''whoop'' hissing between her teeth. Her eyes were fixed upon the glass oval.

    "Can''t believe the cable hasn''t shorted out as of yet. I still see the pond frying. The foam just gurgling all around a yellow anaconda.

    "You don''t mind that I want to get as far away from that oddity as we possibly can?"

    "Nahhh," Tas¨¬a answered. "There is nothing to be gained from sticking around."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled. "It gives you the willies too, I see."

    "I believe the scientific term is ''the heebie-jeebies."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and waved her hand dismissively at the woods beside the Jeep.

    "I don''t know what any of that is about, and I don''t want to know what any of that is about."

    She fastened the hatchback in place but folded the plastiglass back-side window and set it to the side so Sal could maneuver freely while she drove.

    Tas¨¬a called out to a nearby tree.

    "You ready to go, Mel?"

    The Nightwing flew down and landed on the perch. Sachmilli let them know the bird had been harassed by flechettes since it arrived in Asunci¨®n.

    They could only hazard to guess what that was about. Sachmilli was a familiar presence in Asunsi¨®n, especially in the fight district known as the Sweet.

    Maybe he had enemies.

    Anneb¨¦l jumped down from the support bar. With her chin raised and her eyes made inscrutable by the mirrored shades, she faced her much shorter friend.

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    "What?" Tas¨¬a finally asked.

    "As I said, I''m a bit winded to drive, but you'' been drinkin''."

    Tas¨¬a folded her arms.

    "A sobriety test? I shot two birds in mid-flight. My reflexes are fine."

    Anneb¨¦l smiled. She handed over the keys.

    "I don''t even trust Ra¨´l with my Jeep, mais pour toi, mon cher ami, tout le monde si je pouvais."

    Tas¨¬a only had some familiarity with French, she had to repeat the words in her head to translate.

    But for you my dear friend, all the world, if I could.

    As Anneb¨¦l walked to the passenger side door, Tas¨¬a watched her and shook her head. She had some objections to that last statement but it wasn''t worth the fuss.

    Anneb¨¦l held Val''s PA in her hands as she gave directions to the next destination. She let out a, "hmmm."

    "Spill it."

    "Just an odd phrase I''m following in that spook''s notes. Tas¨¬a, how long have you known this Demona person?"

    This time Tas¨¬a smiled with a tale-teller''s grin.

    "I have never actually met her. However, I did discover her body with bullet hole wounds traced through her brain pan."

    "What!"

    Anneb¨¦l''s shock she found to be most delicious.

    "Yes. What we are talking to is an AI construct."

    Anneb¨¦l''s head jerked back down, drawn to the device.

    "That''s not correct," said Demona, joining in on the conversation. "My body did not contain my brain but a bio-synthetic copy wired to my own much like that PA is wired to me now. My brain grew too large to be contained inside a normal skull, so it had to be removed so that I could survive."

    Tas¨¬a thought of what she witnessed. Perhaps Demona''s hair and bullet wounds obscured any scarring from having brain surgery.

    "Your brain was growing?"

    "Still growing."

    Anneb¨¦l giggled. "Awesome. Well, the more you know about someone ..."

    That''s it!

    Something wasn''t quite right. She carefully reviewed her memory of what Le¨®n told her about Demona.

    ...

    "Just before our meeting, she paid me a visit."

    Le¨®n blinked. His forehead ruffled in confusion.

    "Demona. She had a message for you. Le¨®n, I think you are more aware of how it possibly could be that she is sending a message from the other side of the grave than I am, so let''s skip the part where I have to explain it to you."

    He sat back in his chair, appearing more relaxed than before.

    "I wasn''t feigning shock, my lovely friend. I''m genuinely surprised that her intricate little plan worked. What did she say?"

    ...

    Tas¨¬a was left with the impression that he was admiringly impressed with his fellow spook''s digital resurrection, but that was not what occurred.

    "Demona," she asked. "You never told Le¨®n the truth about your condition."

    "Not so! He knew. He always knew. He is my husband, after all. Until death do us part, and I am not dead."

    Cold chills ran up Tas¨¬a''s arms. She had to correct her steering as she steadied herself.

    Tas¨¬a had the spook''s PA on her as she lured Le¨®n in the bathroom.

    She knew. Demona knew.

    "You alright," Anneb¨¦l asked.

    "I need to pull over for a minute."

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes roamed ahead for a place to park.

    "We can''t," said Anneb¨¦l. "We are being followed."

 3.34 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Followed?"

    Tas¨¬a''s arms felt weak as she steered the Jeep. Hell, her entire body felt weak.

    She suppressed her interior monologue that asked questions about Le¨®n and Demona while she needed to maintain her grip. The Jeep began to swerve wide. Thankfully, this was a lightly traveled road.

    She had yet to gain sight of whatever was tailing them. She glanced in all three of the mirrors available to her.

    "I don''t see anything."

    Anneb¨¦l leaned forward and stuck her head out of the window.

    "It was there," she gasped.

    Tas¨¬a spoke with exasperation in her voice as well.

    "Mi Santa Muerta! Don''t tell me their cars are cloaked like every other fucking thing in Asunc¨ªon."

    "Shit. Shit. Shit." Anneb¨¦l exclaimed.

    Tas¨¬a''s bad language was rubbing off on the redhead, she noted with satisfaction.

    Her steering was now back under control, and adrenaline rushed through her naturally without an assist.

    Back in her groove, she could now start thinking tactically. Tas¨¬a turned on the rear steering display.

    "Anneb¨¦l. If you could be a dear, link up the display with Val''s PA, and wave the IR camera at the road behind us."

    Tas¨¬a decided to switch their route from one that lead back into the city, though circuitously, to another country road that eventually crossed the Paraguay River into some boondocks that comprised a warehouse district just above the port side.

    If she was going to get into a gunfight, that would be the environs that Kutuzov''s Spetsnaz style small arms combat she trained in could be utilized to her best advantage.

    "Interesting."

    That was all Anneb¨¦l would say. Oddly, given the circumstances, no curses accompanied it. That did not bode well in Tas¨¬a''s estimation.

    "Look at this," the redheaded brawler motioned to the screen.

    Anneb¨¦l poked her head back out of the Jeep, and she waved Val''s PA at the road behind them.

    "Do you see it now?"

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the rear-cam video screen. The vehicle that followed them was displayed on the screen as an intense but spectral color of midnight violet. The object appeared to menacingly suck up the universe around it as it drove in a smooth glide, low off the asphalt surface.

    "No wonder you were flabbergasted. That can be one batshit optical illusion. Objects in ultraviolet, when they move like that in volumetric space, oftentimes appear as if they are eating light and everything else around them.

    "Question is, all the other cloaked critters and assholes we have encountered so far gave off heat signatures. That fucker behind us is using a different technology."

    Anneb¨¦l threw her a skeptical glance.

    "Is that something you gleamed from Vida Escondida thrill kill culture?"

    "Hey, I killed no one back in the day. But yes. There is something about ultraviolet light and clubbing culture. It hides the fucking stench from conscious and conscience visibility."

    Anneb¨¦l kept her head turned towards the unknown object, but Tas¨¬a could still feel the smirk on the brawler''s lips.

    "You see," Anneb¨¦l said. "You can learn something pertinent from the linears."

    Tas¨¬a scoffed.

    "Linears. Bullshit linears. Those stories they try to sell you on the Vida Escondido? They only tell you what they think the gente-normales can process, and nothing more."

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    Tas¨¬a rode hard into a sharp curve with an upswing in acceleration. At the same time, she carefully measured the approach to ensure that she stayed on the road this time.

    She needed her eyes to be focused elsewhere. She needed to keep her eye on the rear-camera display screen.

    When the vehicle that tailed behind them made its turn around the curve, Tas¨¬a scoffed once more.

    "Now there is a car that you need to blow into smithereens and not that luscious Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. That car tailing us is a Porsche 911. Forgive me Lord for saying it but I fucking hate them."

    Mel squawked. She and Sachmilli had that argument about the worthiness of that particular series of sports cars years previously.

    "Don''t get me revved up again, you squawk box back there. You know I''m right!"

    "Uhm ...," Anneb¨¦l started. The brawler''s teeth gritted as she examined the screen. She had something ugly to share.

    "No! You too, my belle-estest amis?"

    "Oh, not about the Porsche 911, they don''t get my pussy wet either, but that car isn''t one."

    Tas¨¬a pouted in a huff. She took it as a personal offense that she could be found to have misjudged a high-end vehicle.

    "Mon cher!  Don''t be angry with me. I see why you would make that mistake due to the visual outline on display. After all, it is currently invisible in the normal visual spectrum. But that is an Aston Martin Vulcan."

    Tas¨¬a floored the speed. Mel protested with a wider range of vocalized and visual cues than what a normal, non-cybernetically enhanced bird was capable of performing. Apparently, at a slower speed, he could focus on the sports car and visualize with little problem.

    Once he quieted down, and Tas¨¬a had let out some steam with some fast-driving highway therapy, she asked," Alright, Miss Booksmarts, how do you figure?"

    Tas¨¬a was not ready to admit that even in her current reassessment, she duly noted the front carapace of the cloaked vehicle was more beveled in its lines than curved as you would find on an utterly boring Porsche 911.

    "Well, it kind of sucks that I know that car intimately but I do. That car belongs to The Beast."

    Tas¨¬a threw her head back to figure out where in the telemetry of the three Jeep mirrors and their electronic surface readings the image of the car on the screen lined up.

    "That Anglo-American you mentioned ...?

    "Yes. His actual name is Bishop Pierce."

    "Is he out here to kill us?"

    "Not sure, but I doubt it. He runs the Sweet but only for his own personal amusement. He does enforcer work for the global intel alphabets outside the Quadra. Likely, he found out I am in town and he wants to have a little chat."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "I don''t want to be Miss Bossy, and you obviously have your own concerns with this matter, but I would highly suggest that we write him in for sometime later on. Right now, we just don''t have time for him."

    Hearing Demona''s voice caused Tas¨¬a to tense up. Talk about having concerns. The spook''s pretty heart-shaped Arab face filled the rear camera screen.

    "I concur. Any agenda he has will eat into your time and make it that much more difficult to get to Val."

    Now that Demona spoke and Anneb¨¦l did not voice any objections, Tas¨¬a enacted a change of plans. She took the next off-ramp that led eastward away from Asunci¨®n.

    "Smart move," Demona concurred. "He won''t follow you into Spore Country unless he has been authorized to do so by his professional associates."

    Tas¨¬a was in the mood to bite the head off of someone or something, - and as Mel let out another sudden squawk - possibly a bird.

    She sneered hard and ugly as she glanced down at the display.

    "And if he has been authorized to do so, that means he plans to kill us."

    Demona smiled sharply at Tas¨¬a''s reply.

    "That appears to be the test of how you should respond. If he follows then you should assume lethal force is necessary. You won''t get a better chance to deal with him as a threat than out in the country away from his people."

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to Anneb¨¦l who was being unusually quiet.

    She knew the car, intimately?

    Anneb¨¦l, being Harvested, had the same problems with intimacy due to triggered incontinence as Tas¨¬a did until recently. With Anneb¨¦l''s therapeutic help, mental discipline, and the Modality''s healing ability, she conquered that problem.

    However, Anneb¨¦l did not overcome her problem until the Spore entities in Villa Marron assisted her. For her former lover, Ferenzi, it wasn''t a problem. He was a fetishist of a certain tact.

    But what of Pierce? Two individuals, powerful gentlemen in the underworld trades, living in the same city with the same rather gross, in her opinion, kink. Perhaps, it was quite a common kink amongst the powerful.

    After all, that German fellow with the odd mustache was said to have shared that disposition.

    Then she remembered something she once heard about Pierce''s alleged ancestor.

    And then it made sense.

    Ohhh.

    She realized she needed to do a one-eighty on her own currently snide disposition.

    Tas¨¬a smiled and used her free hand to rub Anneb¨¦l''s arm and shoulder.

    "What''s gotten into the big dog," Tas¨¬a asked. "Sitting there like a mopey cocker spaniel."

    Anneb¨¦l sighed.

    "Something I should have taken care of long ago is now catching up with me."

    Tas¨¬a gave her smoothest and most consoling voice. She understood that since Demona''s revelation about Le¨®n being her husband, something Tas¨¬a had yet to truly process, she had been a bit of a pill to deal with.

    We''ve got to do better, Tas¨¬a.

    "My Sweet Sister, we are Daga Chicas. We call those kinds of days where shit gets real days that end in ''-es.''"

    Anneb¨¦l laughed.

    "As if we get the weekends off."

    Tas¨¬a joined her in the laughter as she pointed at the screen.

    "Who says we never catch a break? He''s turning around."

    Tas¨¬a looked around. It was starting to get dark.

    "Anneb¨¦l -"

    The brawler replied.

    "Demona is already on it. She has an alternative route set for the second objective. Don''t turn just yet. Proceed into Spore Country."

 3.35 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Spore Country.

    Tas¨¬a thought glumly as she drove.

    Almost her entire life had been spent in Spore Country. Ever since the Cull Spore Invasion occurred when she was a wee lass.

    A mere week she had been away from the hinterlands of Greater Quadra, living in the Nanospore free zone of Asunci¨®n, she felt like a foreigner on the vast expanse of a desolate highway driving back into Spore Country.

    There was a pretty sweet-looking early evening vista before them though she could justsoak up its chill ambience. She forced that positive thought to run its course in an attempt to cheer up her alienated mood.

    And why should she let a little uneasiness in her disposition get to her?

    Everything was going without a hitch; the road she just crossed into would swing them back towards the city. She had only traveled a few miles down it when -

    Spoke too soon.

    - she gripped the wheel tightly with her thumbs and tapped the leather surface with her polished nails when she saw the surreality ahead of her. The horizon was a blue shimmer that reached with leafed nodes towards the sky just above them.

    Something in that far-off ominous distance noticed them.

    Tas¨¬a slowed down.

    "I don''t like it," Anneb¨¦l whispered.

    "That may be the very point that it is making."

    "What exactly would that be?" Anneb¨¦l asked the question even as her head jerked to the side to look out of the passenger window.

    The entity curled like a set of talons that clutched something within them that it held above the nearby fields.

    Tas¨¬a continued to speak though Anneb¨¦l was understandably distracted.

    "When the Nanospores get you agitated, they also make you more vulnerable to their influence."

    Anneb¨¦l heaved out a nervous laugh as she rushed her words.

    "I''ve been told before that it is a mistake to think of it as a plural set of beings. It all has one purpose, even The Black-Eyed Ones who often seem to be so contrary to everything else."

    Tas¨¬a had never seen the brawler appear so vulnerable.

    This thing wasn''t going away with a mere punch in the throat.

    Even as she chuckled to herself, silently the interior monologue admonished her.

    Keep that one to yourself, you little jealous cynic.

    "Of course, I know that about them, but -" Anneb¨¦l pointed with a strident thrust, "- that phenomenon up above is miles in length. It is practically a weather event. I can''t see it being aimed at little ol'' me, or littlest ol'' you. It doesn''t seem like a rational use of its time and resources."

    A protest squawked from behind them that came from Mel. Three notes indicative of an app being loaded caught her ear. To Tas¨¬a''s surprise, Val''s PA had a translator for NightWing ocular implant at the ready.

    She noted that likely meant that his association with Sachmilli was more extensive than she knew.

    Anneb¨¦l held the PA up so Tas¨¬a could see the screen. It gave a nifty summary of what the NightWing communicated with its body language and squawks.

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    Mel''s journey to Asunci¨®n was bereft with more than the ordinary number of oddities occurring along the flight path.

    The image of a Quetzalcoatl with plumage that spread between two clouds appeared on the screen that Mel documented with a photo

    The creature appeared not so much as a glorious spectrum of bright colors that one would expect of the wing¨¦d serpent of legend but instead the plume exuded an angry demonic red.

    Mel continued with his narrative.

    There was according to him a gathering force that staggered across the countryside. It had set off the chain reaction that resulted in the IMCQ getting nuked.

    Where it had already touched with its corruption, it sat, waiting and brooding, but unseeable. Only the mind''s eye perceived it.

    Tas¨¬a wasn''t certain what he meant by that remark. Manifest fever? Resonance perception? She hazard to guess.

    When Mel was finished, Tas¨¬a addressed Anneb¨¦l with a shake of her head.

    "Mel is right. You''re thinking in accordance with the human scale of things. Nanospores have what might as well be an infinite store of energy at their disposal.

    "When humans are in large social groups, the Nanospores tend to minimize their presence in the vicinities they inhabit, but when whomever they target is isolated, much like we both are now, they try to be overwhelming and all-encompassing when they attack.

    "On the morning of the day that we met, they pulled one real doozy of a mindfuck on me - quite the show. You know of the Incubus, the Black-Eyed Ones, and the many Aspects of the Wise One but have you ever met the Faerie Queen?"

    Anneb¨¦l chortled as she gave her a look that said she couldn''t believe the words, ''Faerie Queen'' came out of Tas¨¬a''s pretty little potty mouth.

    "No."

    Demona''s face on the rear-view camera screen suddenly became animated. She interjected, "Please, do go on."

    "Yes. The sadness of the entity was overwhelming. There was this decoratively elaborate aisle and stairway that climbed until it reached a podium.

    "All of this that I witnessed was set in the midst of a dank forest. There the Nanospores brought into existence a grand architecture made from the strata of dense fungi done up in beautiful desert mesa colors with pink being dominant. On the podium was this casket where a little fairy satyr fawn lay dead

    "Its mother was the Faerie Queen. I met her later that night. She felt real, more so in a human way than the other entities. More like, she was one of us. But made twisted by its association with the Nanospores."

    Anneb¨¦l''s brow line sharpened along the curvature of her skull. Empresses had executed knaves with less instruction given.

    A brave front. Tas¨¬a thought, admiringly.

    "Real, Tas¨¬a? You were going a wee bit mad at that time, am I right? So nuts, that you even antagonized me into a fight!

    "It took me a solid second to figure it out later that you needed to get to the Hijo Lux to re-up your inoculation. So, how do you know this vision wasn''t a hallucinated dream state?"

    "Yes. That is all true. But even still, in the sensorium around me, I still possessed interpretive capabilities," Tas¨¬a answered but not with a great amount of pride. She recalled fully well what a deluded state she had been in. She continued on but decided tact was in order. "And as for that fight - you barely beat me."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded to that.

    "May I interject," Demona''s voice rose above the two other women and Mel''s occasional squawks.

    "Certainly you may," Anneb¨¦l responded with a magnanimous tone.

    "This Faerie Queen, she is not a hallucination. I witnessed that moment when she caused Tas¨¬a to lose her grip on a building surface. The Faerie Queen is very much a real person.

    "She was once an ordinarily Manifested human, but something happened that caused her to cross over from the normative analogous dimension of time and space to the abnormal analogous dimension of time and space of Nanospore activity. That transformation caused the Faerie Queen to come to be."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head with astonished curiosity. The levels of transformative existence in the world of Nanospores seemed unending.

    "I have never heard of those terms before for Nanospore versus normality," she stated.

    Demona acknowledged her like a professor would an apt pupil.

    "Technically it''s the same dimension, but because of a fundamental rule set in its programming that it abides by in the form of matrix transformations when it moves through space, mathematicians and physicists make a distinction between common probabilistically-inclined analog existence and the calculated phase space that allows them to interface with us."

    "Now that is settled," said Anneb¨¦l. "Do you have any idea about what we should be doing now? Should we be turning back around?"

    Demona grimaced before answering. It was the weighted answer of a spymaster who had sent agents on suicide missions before. It gave Tas¨¬a a quanta of solace that Demona did not appear to enjoy that role.

    "No. It now regards the two of you as its playthings. If you turn your vehicle around and floor it, the entity will likely quicken its pace to deliver whatever plans it has in store for you. A quickened pace for the Nanospores means a more agitated state in which it will deliver its trickster narrative. So, continue to approach and do so with caution."

    Both Tas¨¬a and Anneb¨¦l stared up at the sky at the change that was occurring.

    "It''s likely too late to run, now, anyway" Tas¨¬a informed Demona.

    The blue, shimmering talons grouped in the sky above the fields on both sides of the Jeep drew back their binded digits and released whatever malevolence they held in their clutches onto the ground below.

 3.36 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    As Tas¨¬a watched the sky in a near-hypnotic daze, she wrenched her head back down, and forced herself to keep actively engaged in her defensive measures.

    Absolutely no time for distractions.

    Since her fingers could fly at great speed, she loaded up a bandolier with thirty-two 12 gauge shotgun shells and passed the bandolier over to Anneb¨¦l.

    Tas¨¬a eyed the falling spindles that unraveled like threads floating down from the sky talons. Due to the surrounding darkness, she could only spot one when it touched the ground, and quickly the thread pulled at the ribbon above it as it sewed together a beast. When formed, the beast turned in their direction and shimmered a pulse of light before it blended into the field and she could no longer see it.

    "Shit, l¨¦mures," Anneb¨¦l said in recognition. "Is that where they come from? The sky?"

    It was the same beast that she had encountered in El Hoyo. She gathered from Anneb¨¦l''s reaction that they were quite common in the rock quarry.

    Tas¨¬a counted. There were at least thirty streamers still making their way down. Back at El Hoyo, she had dispatched the one she had encountered rather efficiently but that was just one.

    Anneb¨¦l already jumped out of the Jeep, prepared to fight them. The shotgun she welded only held four shells in a fixed magazine and one in the chamber. She also carried the .38 carbine on her shoulder.

    Tas¨¬a would have to adapt their tactics to that limitation in their defensive capacity. Anneb¨¦l seemed to get the geist of what they needed to do. She had her back up against the Jeep.

    "I''ll be there beside you in a second," Tas¨¬a called out.

    Tas¨¬a already loaded the Magellani .22 revolver, but that would be her backup weapon. She still possessed four boxes of .357 rounds for the Ruger Vaquero revolver in the Jeep''s side storage. She had not reloaded the moon clips that she kept in her fanny pack.

    Not being time efficient, Tas¨¬a.

    Anneb¨¦l''s .38 carbine popped off a round from behind her.

    These aberrations were not as tough as the phase beasts. Back at the El Hoya, Tas¨¬a executed one she had encountered using her .32 repeater pistol.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    It''s just so many of them.

    Anneb¨¦l popped off another round before Tas¨¬a could join her side. Three .357 moon clips loaded up on her belt with the revolver loaded with an additional six chambered in the cylinder.

    She would try to take out twenty-four of the beast before switching up the weapon. Anneb¨¦l had a shotgun resting on the engine hood behind her.

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    Tas¨¬a was curious as to what slowed up the creatures. A massive attack could have already overwhelmed the duo. The l¨¦mures grouped together in teams of three and then blended in with the textural tones of the wind-swept field.

    Did their greater proximity to one another strengthen the camouflage of their chameleon skin? Did some synergy of these tactical groupings create a higher density and color separation and coarseness in the chameleon textural tone?

    Tas¨¬a reflected with a terse smile fixed upon her face. Did these near-scientific curiosities of hers that always occurred during battles help keep her alive with a better field survey going in to them, or were they just distractions that ate at her focus?

    She chuckled. Just doing the best that I fucking can, chica.

    She got back to work.

    "Damn! They are so hard to follow but I''ve stopped two of the bastards," Anneb¨¦l yelled between clenched teeth.

    Tas¨¬a heard a ruffling sound to her right. Movement could only be discerned at the corners of the eyes. She looked away to the other side of the field without pausing at the alarming sight, and she looked back in its direction again.

    She could barely make out the chameleon skinned creature but it was a good enough focus to center her aim on it.

    She shot it just beneath the jawline, and into its larynx.

    With a huffing scowl, it roared and shook its head, furiously, before it slumped down, unmoving.

    One shot one kill was the ideal that could possibly keep them alive but to pull it off in this circumstance was another question, entirely.

    Shortly after, two more l¨¦mures followed along the strewn wheat path of the one she had just killed. Due to their chameleon skin, Tas¨¬a only had a firm fix on the chitinous growth that appeared like a dense set of antlers that had grown engraved around their ears, and along their heads and faces.

    When she shot, the chitinous materials shattered like mere masks; fortunately, the dense material had little to no stopping power. The rounds drilled into the skulls of the beasts. Misted brain matter and skull fragments discharged out from the back of their skulls.

    Anneb¨¦l nailed two more of the beast that crept up a mere twelve yards away from them but it had cost her the expenditure of three rounds.

    Tas¨¬a could tell by the way the brawler glanced at the shotgun between kills that she was considering switching up her weapon.

    She hoped that Anneb¨¦l was timing it just right. To come out alive, they would need to be as efficient as possible with the weapons that they had in their possession.

    As she sought for more targets to shoot, the violent sway of movement through the field caused Tas¨¬a''s eyes a great deal of confusion. She could make out the swirl pattern that formed counter to the sway of the grain. The beasts hidden within the movement made jagg¨¦d and jutted patterns as they approached.

    Tas¨¬a discerned a few of the beasts'' self-evident traits as she studied the movement patterns that drew nearer.

    Though the l¨¦mures were not as tough as the phase beast, they were definitely much smarter than the near-brainless cats who were only as smart as the transceived impulses that sent them from point A to point B.

    Also, the lamur¨¦s were not concerned with their individual standing. If they had to sacrifice themselves so the next one behind them could advance a few yards, they did so without hesitation.

    They also seemed to understand that both time and sheer numbers were working to their advantage.

    After killing another three of them coming towards her as a flanx, Tas¨¬a assessed the two desperadas only had seconds left before they would be swarmed.

    She took a moment to climb up on the Jeep''s rooftop. The beasts in the field encircled them and had the advantage of approaching at their leisure.

    Their voices sounded in a pitch canary soft. The cascade wailed up, aimed at them.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head at the sight, and she shook her head with a grimace on her lips.

    If she and Anneb¨¦l were going to survive this, she needed to disrupt the pattern of the tactics being used against them with a countermeasure.

 3.37 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a reached into her fanny pack and slipped five flashbangs into her palm.

    "Cover your eyes," she yelled.

    Carefully, she tossed the grenades in an arc in front of Anneb¨¦l. The brawler spotted the motion and put her forearm up across the bridge of her nose.

    As the ground lit up white, Tas¨¬a stared upward and launched herself off the roof with a summersault. By the time her feet were planted back on solid ground, she had twisted around to face away from the Jeep, and she had replaced the Ruger Vaquero .357 with the Magellani .22.

    Her plan appeared to be working.

    The controlled chaos of the flank of l¨¨mures moving forward split apart with the groups butting into one another.

    Tas¨¬a called out to Anneb¨¦l, "Get the flaregun from your emergency kit!"

    She had excellent side profiles of several of the beasts, now.

    Tas¨¬a aimed for the jugular veins curved along the side of their necks with two taps administered to each beast. Arrays of blood bursts in a dazzling spectral display as the l¨¦mures writhed on the ground before her boots.

    Is that liquid vitae technically blood, she wondered.

    While sidestepping to find a clearing, Tas¨¬a brought the Vaquero back out and finished off the beasts in her immediate vicinity.

    The flaregun went off, thricely. When the gently streaming arcs grounded in bright red embers, the duo got a better idea of the challenge ahead of them.

    The fields in the distance were dense with the creatures, and ribboned streamers still spun new ones.

    "Lord," Anneb¨¦l exclaimed. "From the loins of Santa Muerte, deliver me now."

    "Plow me in my culo roto," Tas¨¬a whispered in exasperation. "Impossible."

    A set of beasts rushed upon each of them. Tas¨¬a one-shot her pursuer with a tap to the center of its forehead.

    Anneb¨¦l pendulum kicked the other l¨¦mur up in the air, retrieved the shotgun, and blew its guts to ribboned shards. When it landed, it hobbled away.

    "At El Hoyo, I kill a couple of them every time I help my boys bush hog. We never could find their habitats."

    "Do you keep a machete in the tool bin in the back," Tas¨¬a asked.

    "In spite of all my verve and sophistication, I''m still a woman of my time and place, so, of course, I do."

    Anneb¨¦l finished off the last of the trio of beasts that came at them in the immediate wave.

    "Why''re you asking? You''ve figured something out?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she crawled up the side of the Jeep to retrieve the machete. She cleared out her spoils of liquor, vinyl records, and the Enigma device to get to it.

    "Yeah, I''m starting to think that the purpose of this attack is not to kill us. Whatever is behind this wants us to be depleted of our ammunition."

    Anneb¨¦l''s brow lines were wrenched from the calculations occurring inside of her head. She nodded at the machete.

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    "Physical exhaustion will overwhelm you before you''ve even made a dent in that pack."

    Tas¨¬a wiped her face with the front of her tank top.

    "That the puppet masters behind this want to deplete our stock of ammo means they are vulnerable to our weapons. That factor may possibly be the only hope we have at the moment."

    "Tas¨¬a, if you have a plan what do you want me to do?"

    "I need you to get in the driver''s seat, drive very slowly in reverse while I clear a path behind us, and we''ll edge our way back out of here."

    Anneb¨¦l agreed with a curt nod. With a hard-gripped change out, the brawler went back to her .38 carbine bush rifle to deal with the next trio of l¨¦mures. She blocked the one beast gunning for Tas¨¬a and lined up her aim to spread fire on both creatures.

    It still took three shots to dispense with them.

    "Now," Anneb¨¦l began, "I get why they only flank us with three of them at a time. They need to attrite our ammo. Otherwise, Roja Mar¨ªa would take out five at a time."

    Tas¨¬a smiled when she realized Anneb¨¦l had already named her shotgun.

    The brawler''s eyes squinted in a survey from one flare in the distance to the next one.

    "There does not appear to be a reason that whatever is behind this would need to conserve its load out of l¨¦mures. It has more than it needs to throw at us if all it wanted to do was overwhelm us."

    Waving both hands, Tas¨¬a motioned her to hurry up.

    She grimaced as she shot into the next trio that approached. Frustrated her insights were not gaining her a tactical advantage she could exploit, Tas¨¬a cursed out a long string of expletives.

    "Our stupid asses are going in circles like a fucking pajero trying to figure out what they are up to; there has to be a reason for this shit?"

    Her father enjoyed a linear exactly a century old about a space captain who was always able to take advantage and exploit the tactical insights that he gained from any situation. Why couldn''t she be more like Kirk?

    In the seat, and with the ignition on, Anneb¨¦l asked her, "Do you think this is going to work?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged and chuckled as she loaded the Vaquero, once more.

    "The fuck if I know. I''m more interested in what it does to adapt to a change of tactics."

    "Now I think I see," Anneb¨¦l''s voice drifted off as she responded.

    The Jeep began to back up. Tas¨¬a shot the next trio of beasts when they rushed forward as she kept up the search for that change of tactics that she expected.

    Several seconds passed before she noticed - There!

    She could not make out the shape of any individual l¨¦mur but the tearing movement in the wild wheat of the field suggested the beasts that lay in wait there were now moving as a singular column.

    Tas¨¬a holstered the Vaquero, pulled the machete from the earth where she secured it rigid, and sprinted towards the rear of the vehicle.

    Two l¨¦mures attempted to rush up and nip at her heels. Their sudden burst of speed was unexpected. She pushed up into a backflip, landed on the bumper behind the beast, and jumped down. With a slugger''s sideswipe, she gutted the first one as it turned to face her.

    It pulled back with a tightly spun bounce that gave Tas¨¬a a clean strike to take its head.

    When she caught sight of movement from her left, Tas¨¬a grabbed her stiletto from her boot and pulled both blades with her knuckles turned upward while the blades were turned to face downward to protect her head and torso.

    The l¨¦mur pulled its head back. Otherwise, it would have caught a double set of blades thrust into its throat.

    She quickly discovered it was deft in its defenses.

    She jumped back as it became apparent it was about to use its taloned back limbs to swipe at her feet. That maneuver prevented her from stabbing it in the back.

    With the quick pullback, she avoided the impelling that would have occurred if the talon had met its mark. Nevertheless, it followed through after the attempted side swipe with a back kick that she was not able to entirely avoid.

    It grazed with quite a bit of force against her left shoulder blade.

    Tas¨¬a lost her footing and fell on her back. Two more l¨¦mures rushed up on her before she was able to turn herself back around. The one on her left clamped down her forearm, and the one to her right did likewise to her right forearm.

    The pit of her stomach wrenched as if the Modality was trying to force itself into action. Though with a chill that coursed abruptly through her, she felt the helplessness that she vowed to never feel again, Tas¨¬a refused to let the Modality loose.

    Instead, she watched the l¨¦mur that kicked her turn back around.

    What the hell! Did they plan this?

    It leaped at her legs and dove its head down with jaws curved open. Its teeth grazed the side of her shin just above her boot.

    Tas¨¬a feared she was going to lose the leg like her asshole buddy, poor Parro, did the previous evening.

    If the beasts so chose, they could have drawn and quartered her right then and there. She was left wondering why they didn''t.

    Instead, the one beast at her legs ripped the Vaquero and its holster from the polished black leather buckles that had held them firm and hidden. It clenched the items tightly down between rows of massive teeth and took off in a mad sprint.

    "My gun," she yelled. "My beautiful, beautiful gun!"

 3.38 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    The two l¨¦mures let loose the hooked talons that pinned her down. They attempted to make a dash for it. Stopped, however, by a shotgun that boomed loudly. Their heads exploded into splinters of cartilage and splotches of viscera before they could turn away -

    leaving oozy filliments splattered across Tas¨¬a''s chest.

    Anneb¨¦l stood at the driver''s side door, she reloaded the shotgun before returning to the Jeep cabin.

    Tas¨¬a picked herself up, and wiped herself down. She could only maintain her composure for a few seconds before she stretched out her arms and flailed her hands up at the air; she bawled out in tears.

    She screamed, "My guns! My lovely, lovely gun!"

    The Jeep gently nudged against her back. Anneb¨¦l was letting her know that the histrionics were wearing thin.

    "But, it took off with my gun."

    The heartbroken Tas¨¬a dispatched the next l¨¦mur to challenge her with brutal efficiency after she drew the one gun that still remained on her bodice.

    "Took off with my gun," she muttered as she searched for something else to shoot.

    As much as she felt like taking aim at the one beast that carried off with the Vaquero as it disappeared from her view, there was no chance short of evoking the Modality to accomplish that miracle shot.

    Tas¨¬a soothed herself. So what''s the big deal? She had done nothing to customize the frame of it with the sigils and totems of her people. She could buy another one at the Quick Mart Catalog Boutique.

    Get your shit together, chica. Fight! Fight! Fight!

    Tas¨¬a jumped on to the Jeep''s bumper and held on by the top rail. Anneb¨¦l backed the Jeep up, slowly.

    A pair of l¨¨mares gnawed at the passenger side rear wheel. They seemed to ignore her, all together.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled as she assessed their attempt.

    Good luck with that, you little fools.

    While holding on to the roof rail support, she swung around to take a machete swipe at the ropy rat-like tail of the closest l¨¦mur. With two wacks, the tail severed.

    The beast jerked its head back to confront her, only to lose its bearing. The Jeep caught it by its back hoof, and forced it down. With a slow crunch, its hind legs and back vertebrae fell beneath the wheel.

    However, it inspired a second beast towards vehicular derived martyrdom. The thing wrapped its body around the tire, and dug its talons into it.

    Tas¨¬a threw the machete into the back compartment and switched back to the Magellani .22 revolver. Before she could draw a beed, the beast had tumbled twice around the tire before its corpse let go.

    Its head lay flat on the asphalt shoulder, utterly devastated.

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    Tas¨¬a had no time to savor the gory victory; four more l¨¦mures rushed up to take their roadkill bretheren''s place.

    Tas¨¬a dispensed with the beasts, but not as efficiently as her survivalist ideals demanded.

    Still, she could admonish herself but only so harshly given the ride was too bumpy for precise aiming. She had one moon clip of teflonrazor rounds left on her.

    From inside the cabin, Mel squawked for her attention.

    He stood atop a box of rounds with his feathers ruffling, excitedly. She got the gist and tossed three empty moonclips his way. With one clip set in his beak, he pulled it to his free talon and went to work loading it with Mag .22 rounds.

    Tas¨¬a loaded the rest of what she had left on her, and raised her head to watch out for the latest developments.

    A pair of l¨¨mures set their sights for the front tire. It took four shots to take the two beasts that nipped at the wheel down. This action left her with only four rounds left in the cylinder.

    Two more l¨¦mures approached her as another pair of the beasts flanked towards the back passenger tire.

    Good strategy. Distract me while Team B gets to work.

    "Anneb¨¦l, if you could - speed it up," Tas¨¬a yelled. "And then after five seconds, brake hard."

    Tas¨¬a pushed upward with the forearm that held onto the roof carriage. The l¨¦mures slammed into the back of the Jeep with a double thump.

    Anneb¨¦l yelped and Mel sqauwked in protest.

    Tas¨¬a stopped for nothing. Still holding her grip in place, she swiveled around just above the l¨¦mures attacking the back tire. Before they could sink their talons into the rubber casting, she nailed them both with the remainder of the teflonrazor rounds.

    That was it for the specialty rounds in her stock. Not even white phosphorus tipped rounds were left. To this factor in her tactical calculus, Tas¨¬a frowned. It would take her four well-placed shots on each one of the beast to accomplish what she did with one teflonrazor round.

    Her remaining supplies would be eaten up quickly. The box of ammo that remained were Select Magnum .22s. Not bad stopping power at 1630 FPS (feet per second), but even on a human the aim had to be well placed.

    That is what she liked about her .357 Vaquero. What would be a graze wound in the shoulder or thigh and easily survivable for the .22 Mag would rip a motherfucker apart and leave him with hydrostatic shock to deal with if shot with the .357.

    She was settled with her butt straddling on the gate door. Mel flew over to sit beside her.

    "My handsome boyo, Mel."

    He fluttered his wings at the compliment. In his beak were the three moon clips now fully loaded.

    Tas¨¬a took the first two of the round supports to reload the revolver. The last moon clip she pocketed.

    "Jump in," Annabelle yelled, "or at least, try to hang on."

    Tas¨¬a took her last advice. They finally reached a clearing for Anneb¨¦l to maneuver a tight reverse, and swing the Jeep back around onto the highway where she could floor it.

    Tas¨¬a looked back, and breathed easily. Though there were still l¨¦mures stirring about in the field, she could now see that she had dispensed with at least half of them.

    They had no chance of out running the jeep.

    She turned to Mel.

    "You did good, mi amiguito."

    He once more squawked, appreciatively.

    Anneb¨¦l turned the headlights on, and gasped as soon as she did so.

    Now back on the highway proper, several giant orbs, ascospores, floated a few feet above the ground as they approached the Jeep.

    "Oh shit.. oh shit..!" Tas¨¬a yelled. The orbs, eight feet in diameter, emmitted blue light from green and gray dermal surfaces made of leathery fungi growth.

    Tas¨¬a looked towards the skies. At some point recently in the fight, the talons of frozen-in-place lightning had disappeared. Now, from every direction, the ascospores descended upon them.

    Mel watched from his perch, he stared affixed in brave survey at the malignant proceedings above them.

    "Fly, Mel!" Tas¨¬a urged. "You still have a chance."

    His body language was clear in its defiance of her wishes.

    Not without my Anneb¨¦l.

    Demona''s image flashed on the screen. Her eyebrows arched in concern. Frown lines emphasized the heart shape of her face''s upper crescent.

    She whispered.

    "There is something very odd about this event formation. How the energy that sits above you seems somehow familiar to me."

    Tas¨¬a braced herself when it appeared the ascopores, swollen with energy, were about to burst. An implosive noise canceled out the world. The last thing Tas¨¬a sensed was the burning in her eyes as a pure white light engulfed her existence.

 3.39 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Interlude I

    La Loba

    "Still no contact?"

    Felicit¨¦ looked up from the workstation she had rigged together for her surveillance and data breach needs.

    Weeks together now, the raw allure and exotic color of the bounty hunter''s green eyes still gave her the shivers.

    "None."

    Elise leaned up against the desk. She shook her head in response with a snarl that appeared more repulsed than upset.

    "The little shit has been in Asunci¨®n for six days now. Surely, they agreed to a time and place to arrange their next move."

    Felicit¨¦ folded her hands over her knees. She still reveled in what Elise said at the end of the third day after they spent it getting their operation up and running. The two of them found some private space to loosen up over lime and tequila shots.

    Elise shot her the most beautiful smile before she said:

    Skinny girls are not really my type - she ran her fingers up the length of Felicit¨¦''s arm, but your skin is so healthy. No gauntness about you. You, I''ll make an exception.

    The cowgirl bounty hunter leaned over, face to face, and with lips at ready ...

    ... minutes after, Elise led her to the bounty hunter''s RV home where they pleasured one another for seven hours straight.

    It was not only a nice diversion but also her first sexual contact with anyone since she was first injected with the dire strain.

    For a solid week after their first triste, they worked hard to find General Kutuzov''s crew by day, and they made love by night.

    Felicit¨¦ began to think of the two as a couple. Elise was her girlfriend, or so she thought.

    She did not mind being dominated by Elise''s even stronger personality than her own, nor did she mind the gaucha''s aggressive and overbearing physicality when they made love.

    At the end of the day, Felicit¨¦ felt used up, physically spent, inflammatorily sore in all orifices, and so very satisfied.

    That changed the moment Felicit¨¦ ran up to Elise, excitedly, and informed the bounty hunter that she had uncovered Kutuzov''s signal array and where it lead.

    Since that moment, Green-eyed Elise was focused on one thing and one thing only, the Hunt.

    "No. No," Elise shook her head, physical disgust still gnarled on her lips. "It is not possible we have nothing. Someone must have noted down something."

    Felicit¨¦ answered, curtly.

    "All traffic coming in and out of there is monitored. Every packet to its most minute programmed function is scrutinized by AI for any missing subtext.

    "We know what''s going on inside Kutuzov''s network better than his IT crew does."

    Elise chuckled.

    "That little shit can be paranoid."

    Felicit¨¦ grinned with a thin-lipped and sheepish expression.

    "The nuking of the IMCQ wasn''t exactly fortuitous for our cause. Remember, I''m supposed to be in there."

    Elise did not miss the remiss Felicit¨¦ gave towards her tactical miscalculation in their attempt to lure Tas¨¬a into finding and outing the pregnant Serbian assassin for them.

    Elise shrugged, dismissive of any fault that was pointed her way. She laughed it off.

    "I definitely did not see that one coming."

    Felicit¨¦ made a calculation before she answered. Elise seemed playful once more. Perhaps, if she made a stab at saying something supportive, her cowgirl would be up to some fun later on that night.

    "Nuclear weapons are so horrible no one really conceptually believes they exist until they are actually used."

    Elise grew silent though fidgety.

    Felicit¨¦ would have to prompt her

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    "Without del Alma-Gris'' involvement, do we proceed?"

    Elise shoved herself off the wall where she had leaned against it.

    "Call up the plan on your screen. I want to see if all the moving parts are still viable."

    Felicit¨¦ punched up the hologram and projected it inside a display box embedded in a blue felt creche.

    Kutuzov''s bunker was now fully rendered and could be viewed from any angle. Both the bounty hunter and the data analyst peered at one another to see the other''s reaction.

    Both could see that there was a conspicuous absence.

    "This can''t be right," Elise seethed.

    Felicit¨¦ flipped through the standard settings for her screen display until nothing but the console command line remained. She ran a command to once more capture control over the internal cameras for Kutuzov''s bunker.

    She ran a sync-up to identify and report her target.

    Each time an ''out of area'' message returned.

    "Le¨®n Ballano is not there," Felicit¨¦ stated.

    "You don''t think I can see that? You have it set to flag him whenever he leaves, correct?"

    Felicit¨¦ nodded, fiercely in her own defense.

    "Of course! None of the electronic spotters picked up on any recognition of Ballano ever leaving the premises."

    Elise smacked the glass table surface at her side in frustration.

    "Without knowing his exact position in time and space we can''t send the drones in. We can''t risk killing him. We have to know!"

    Elise slowed her breathing. When she calmed back down she continued to speak.

    "I need a moment to think. Okay. Okay. Meet me back here in two hours. I''m going to alert my eyes and ears on the ground to see if we can get a fix on him."

    Elise walked away muttering in a loud growl, "fucking delays. I thought you were on top of everything, Paz!"

    With the door slammed behind her, Felicit¨¦ glanced contemptuously back.

    No play time, not tonight.

    She turned back to the screen. Felicit¨¦ didn''t care if the war criminal and his crew lived or died. There were elements within the Salvage that would pay them a fortune to be rid of Kutuzov once and for all.

    But, Tas¨¬a was different. Felicit¨¦ had grown fond of the hyper-materialistic thief. Yet, Felicit¨¦ knew Tas¨¬a well enough to know that del Alma-Gris would never trust her again after that lie that she tried to pull off of still being in prison. Likely, del Alma-Gris checked the roll of casualties from the nuclear event to see if any of her friends made it out alive, and there was Felicit¨¦ Antonella Paz''s name as a glaring absence.

    Felicit¨¦ checked for herself. Her name showed up as a recent release from the facility. An overlooked detail someone in Elise''s organization should have seen to cover up and have it deleted from the IMCQ''s server files that very day she parted.

    It was a trifling detail, however, easy to overlook. A trifling detail until it wasn''t.

    No, the Argentinian decided. There was zero chance of reconciliation between the two of them. She had the Agenda to consider, and whatever begging, prodding, prostate pleading, she would have to perform to get back in del Alma-Gris'' good graces, it would undermine what needed to be done. With regret, she bit her thumbnail and she decided that with del Alma-Gris, she had no other choice but to cut her losses.

    Felicit¨¦ took a cigarette break. She leaned on the rail of the old water tower sixty feet off the ground. The inside tank had been long ago drained. It was where Elise''s crew set up their operations.

    She stared into the distance, at the SkyTether. That was where she ultimately needed to be if she had any chance at a human-based future.

    To ever be free of the Manifest.

    The Manifest offered you freedom of its grapples upon your soul if you did one simple seeming task for it. Betray the human race.

    She had done just that in her career as an anarchist but it proved to be not enough to satiate the demands of the Manifest. Felicit¨¦ had failed that mission.

    Now the Manifest set her on course for another quest to prove her worth.

    It spoke to her in dreams and told her of its battles with the entity that controlled the SkyTether. It called the battlefield the Resonance Front where AIs that controlled nanospores were set against the spontaneous intelligence inherent in electromagnetic distortion in an epic territorial clash.

    Felicit¨¦ did her due diligence in her research on the matter. She was amongst the most well-informed in the world on the secret struggle. At war were two competing definitions of topographical phase space and the proper administration of it when translated into an overlay atop reality''s terrain.

    When broken down into its simplest parts, it made little sense at all. Then again, it didn''t matter if it did. There would still be winners and losers in the struggle.

    "Man, the times in which we live," Felicit¨¦ whispered as she flicked the remaining cigarette into the air.

    Felicit¨¦ briskly strode down the winding spiral of the steps. She still had time to indulge in one favorite activity that had taken the place of Elise''s affections.

    On the grounds below the abandoned water tower, Felicit¨¦ kept residence in a single-wide trailer that sat inside the gated area where other shelters, including Elise''s RV, inhabited.

    She quickly entered her trailer and locked the door behind her. From a cabinet shelf, she removed a metal box.

    On its tasteful decor were written the words, ''The Ultimate Synthesia Experience.''

    Felicit¨¦ opened the lid and retrieved the scarab inside of it. She giggled at the thought that Elise had no idea what it was.

    One of the bounty hunter''s scouting agents discovered that it was placed on order by that beautiful but scary-ass companion of del Alma-Gris. The agent intercepted the box before it could be delivered.

    Elise had no clue what to make of it so she gave it to Felicit¨¦ to further study the scarab, run a laser reader to analyze it, and figure out its purpose.

    And that she certainly did!

    Felicit¨¦ removed the white jeans and tropical island-themed panties that she wore. Knowing how messy it was going to get, she retrieved a towel from the washroom and laid it on the floor.

    With her back leaned up against the couch, and butt planted firmly on the towel, Felicit¨¦ pushed her clitoris out from the vulva folds. She worked the scarab in position along the length of the hood.

    From there the scarab did the rest. With a gentle pinch, it clamped down and began to glow green.

    It took a minute to sync up with her nerve endings - 1134 of them according to her PA display - as it formed a matrix of indices aligned to her sensorium.

    The PA gave a green light. Felicit¨¦ chose to play Bartok''s String Quartet No. 4.

    She lay her head back and closed her eyes as the music translated into an enhightened stimulus upon her clitoris. The music rose up inside her and enveloped her as if it were an expert lover.

    She last felt the wings flutter ticklishly against her pubic hair before being wonderfully lost in the tactile feel of exquisite music being played along her body electric.

 3.40 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Interlude II

    The Heir to the Beast

    It was time to end the suffering.

    Pierce had been aware of where the Night Brigade kept Ferenzi for thirty-plus hours now. Over that expanse of time, he had been a busy man trying to keep himself alive, and unfortunately, his effort to enlist Anneb¨¦l fell through.

    He shook his head.

    Anneb¨¦l Sens Duarte.

    It was his own damn fault.

    Approaching her as he did, she would assume it was about the other matter. It was now put so far in the back of his mind that he had not even considered it.

    There were no excuses. Villion was his child, too. Even if he was just the sperm donor.

    How absolutely fucking thoughtless of me!

    A woman, however, never forgets her own child. A career-centered man such as himself often did. He would have to find some way to approach her.

    If she was back in Asunci¨®n for good, they would have to come to some agreement. He would have to tell her what he knew about Villion''s disappearance.

    He pushed the thoughts aside though she had been on his mind since she had arrived. He needed to concentrate. It was time for Beast mode.

    Pierce parked the Aston Martin two blocks down an adjacent street from the small abandoned school building where the Night Brigade had formed a base of operations.

    He truly loathed that group of nihilists who gathered their storms for whatever cause that at any given time was the most idiotic and hurt the most people.

    Pierce smiled to himself while loading sixteen 10 mm rounds into the magazine of his Springfield Ronin 1911 before placing it back into the jacket holster.

    He was going to enjoy this.

    He moved swiftly down the street. There were a few clusters of people that moved about. He was even startled by the sight of the emblem of his homeland emblazoned on a motorcycle that drove slowly toward him.

    She was a Def Leppard fan.

    The lady who rode the bike possessed long and lovely titmouse brown hair, and the most British visage this side of their very own good Queen Charlotte.

    He tipped his brogue''s cap to the damsel.

    Fond thoughts of Queen Moxie who ruthlessly deposed all of the heirs to the royal throne ahead of her came to his mind. It did not matter - brothers, uncle, one vicious aunt, father, even her much venerated and nearly saintly mother, all to the tower they went.

    To save country and crown, it had to be done and only Queen Charlotte had the conviction and courage to do it.

    Pierce strode on and put the high emotional state of patriotic feelings that swelled up in his eyes to the side. He wiped them with his vest kerchief.

    It would not do to get all blubbery like that before he was to kill a bunch of, as the Americans would put it, subhuman scum.

    He stopped when the structure came into view.

    Though the abandoned school was in nearly dilapidated condition, the neighborhood itself was respectable and clean.

    On the front side that bore a modest parking lot a sign stated El M¨¢s Brillante - The Brightest with a morning star over a green field beneath those three words.

    You didn''t have to be the Heir to the Beast to appreciate the symbolism in regard to the responsibilities of knowledge.

    Pierce shook his head and chuckled.

    "You have fallen a long way my brothers to let those daft tossers anywhere near ya."

    Heavy and heavily rusted chains draped over a double set of doors that were also reinforced with wooden boards. It appeared no one was getting in without causing a scene that would attract more attention than it was worth.

    Pierce took his AR specs out of another jacket pocket, checked its charge, and put them on. He grinned to himself. The visual enhancement always started with a projection of his holographic image standing in front of him.

    From showing him in dapper formal attire, his military uniform, and even his birthday suit, the projection was always randomized.

    This time it affected a classic Brit of another time and place who wore a velvet and leather cap, brown leather jacket, and old-time rugby gear covering the knees and shins of his stone brown colored jeans. Like a 1970s proletariat from Tit City about to set forth for a Saturday night''s shitkicker rumble.

    His pleasure was interrupted when the projection excitedly exclaimed back to him, "My droog!"

    With a disgusted bearing on his face, Pierce dismissed the image with all due prejudice.

    "No. No. We are not playing ultra-rogue Malcom McDowell. At least, not this eve."

    Don''t know how that got in there.

    He ran a quick diagnostic to make sure nothing flakey was going on. Pierce was always careful about his equipment.

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    Only he knew how much his mastery of operational AR specs sealed his reputation as one of the best operatives on the planet. When the diagnostics cleared and assured him his system was sound, he dismissed the bit of retro sci-fi thrown into his routine and turned once again to The Brightest school building.

    Despite the boarded up entrance way, there had to be a means that the Night Brigade gained access to the building. Also, it was quite curious - how did they do so without alerting anyone in the public streets?

    Pierce reached into his jacket. He pulled out a drone the size of his palm. In the middle of it, already set in place was an electronic reconnaissance grenade.

    It resembled a flash grenade but was twice as large as one you would typically find. It went off like one normally did as well.

    However, once its energy is released, its nanite machines latched upon energy sources both electronic and biological. When synced with the AR specs he could also penetrate the through-puts of computer systems and read data systems and cameras.

    The Old Guard would certainly not approve of him being enmeshed in modern digital technology, but then, they were all dead. None had the means to be of any use to the cause now.

    Pierce released the drone and had it climb in the air and center itself above the rooftop. Just before he hit the button on his PA, he caught wind that someone was behind him.

    A young mestiza woman with a bobbed haircut tucked inside a sun visor and a cute dimpled chin rode a bicycle by him, slowly. She didn''t hide her curiosity about his activities.

    "Survey work to test the structural soundness of the building. Watch your eyes, my lady," Pierce said to deflect.

    She went on her way after she gave him a few stray glances.

    Back to his work, Pierce recentered the drone and pressed the button. When the flash dissipated, every element that gave off heat inside the structure became outlined in a shade of red with the surrounding walls made semi-transparent.

    He counted seven Night Brigade gits milling about inside. Their captive sprawled out on a single-sized bed that was not very accommodating to Ferenzi''s fat arse.

    Pierce could tell from the blue coiled outline, indicative of an object at room temperature, that they had him chained to the front board irons.

    Now, where was their secret entranceway?

    After a few solid minutes that he committed to surveying the outer park, Pierce figured it out. On the other side from where he first stood was a utility shack that appeared at first sight to be part of another property given a chain link fence separated it from the school building.

    The fence was a false front. It was easily slid to the side. Pierce also had to push aside thick copses of bushes and trees to get to the walkway that led to the utility shack.

    The door lock was not a problem even though he did not bring picks. Pierce shoved a gel cap inside the mechanism.

    It burst into a gas that stayed localized inside the locking chamber until it solidified like concrete and forced all the tumblers to split apart.

    His AR specs warned him that just behind the door was a motion sensor.

    He checked with his PA to see if its AI had breached the security system.

    An animated wheel slowly turned around the outer parameter of a caption box that read out text one phrase at a time:

    A Moment Please . . . Shall I Play Something Soothing While You Wait?

    "Alfie, what gives?"

    The AI played a muzak version of, ''Love is in the Air.''

    "You met someone?"

    She is the most ut.

    Was his AI chatting it up with a girl spy trying to penetrate his security?

    "Oh, Alfie. Poor bastard. She has got you all kinds of discombobulated and unfit for fieldwork. We are in the stink, my boy. Get your head out''cha arse."

    That explained the Clockwork Orange reference earlier. All the smarter and finer trollops loved that movie.

    The animated wheel went green.

    He opened the door to the utility shack. It was merely a false front for a set of stairs that lead down to the school basement.

    Pierce attached the sound suppressor to his 1911. Before entering, he studied the Night Brigade tossers who showed up in full volumetric red outline.

    They were entirely too comfortable with their surroundings, each spread out and doing their own thing. They were not prepared for what was about to occur - not in the least.

    Pierce found the key to the chains on a cabinet beside the bed. He stared down for a moment to take in the sight. The big man''s skin was beet red all over.

    In his best Malcolm McDowell impression, Pierce raised his voice.

    "What a horrorshow, mate. An absolute bukake nightmare. I feel for my clean-up crew."

    Ferenzi turned to the Beast with a deep laugh.

    "I thought that was the muffled sound of your 1911 popping back heads. At least I hoped it was."

    Pierce smiled.

    "Hope bleeds eternal. Hey, I saw some Earl Gray in the kitchen. You get yourself cleaned up and I''ll make us a spot of tea."

    "Sad, really. A complete waste of some nice brown Oxfords."

    The one man he shot in the kitchen sat with his head sunk on the center table. Blood dripped down from his head wound and saturated the nice pair of shoes. Hell of a thing to happen to nice craftmanship.

    Pierce planned to scope the IDs of all the Night Brigade dead so he could terrorize anyone associated with them. After the previous week of dealing with them, he was in no mood to fuck around.

    He checked out the ID in the back pocket of the dead man in the kitchen. A former university professor who lost his job when the endowment was seized nearly twenty years before.

    He''d been on the angry pill for pillage ever since.

    Pierce shoved the body aside to free up the chair. He placed it on the side of the table without a bloody pool beneath so there would be a spare seat for Ferenzi.

    Pierce sipped from his cup while he read the newsfeed on his PA.

    Ferenzi finally entered the kitchen after several minutes. He wore a robe and held a warm, unopened bottle of malt liquor in his hand.

    On the label were the words beneath a globe, Haz girar el mundo - make the world spin.

    A demanding little label!

    Pierce leaned against the back of the chair and tilted it.

    "I made you tea. No need to go about your business sauced in the middle of the day."

    Ferenzi shook his head as he twisted the bottle cap.

    "This is most definitely not ''bout day drinkin'' and getting drunk."

    He threw the bottle back and gargled the contents that missed his chest and hit his throat. He repeated himself once more.

    "So, I gather you are not fond of the taste of cock?"

    Ferenzi squinched up his brows and assessed the question.

    "Some of the things a man discovers about himself at later stages of his life - I just turned forty-eight, are quite something else, and yes that is certainly one of them. Not even in the least."

    He chugged down the remainder of the forty-ounce bottle.

    "Are you going to be alright?"

    Ferenzi snorted, dismissively.

    "My boarding school hazings and college pledge were much worse than anything those priss-pots could throw at me."

    Ferenzi was about to sit down when he stopped for a moment.

    "Oh, It''s been up there so long I forgot it was still there."

    "What is it?" Pierce asked.

    "I don''t know," Ferenzi answered as he reached behind and pulled up his robe. "Gimme a sec."

    Pierce''s eyes bugged as he saw the greased-up bundle of six bottle rockets that were now held in Ferenzi''s fist.

    "They stuck that up your bum?"

    "Apparently so."

    Pierce stood up. The circumference of the bundle amazed him

    "They were going to shoot that off in here?"

    Ferenzi sat down, and shook his head.

    "I believe they intended to take me to the gymnasium. But the plan fell through. Something about some bad dope."

    Pierce nodded his head. A stringy-haired blonde bird he intended to shoot along with the rest of them had been thrown in the janitor''s closet.

    She wasn''t even dead yet, but blue in the lips and comatose.

    Ferenzi smiled as he sipped the tea.

    "How is it that we all have the same ingredients but only you Brits know how to make good tea?"

    Pierce sat back down

    "Simple. No one believes us when we tell them you have to start with the milk or cream on the bottom."

    Ferenzi closed his eyes and enjoyed the cup.

    "So what''s new in the world since I have been out of the scene?"

    Pierce nodded. He definitely wanted to see Ferenzi''s response to this news.

    "Your lovely ex freed August Javierra. She got him some help. He''s now unreachable even if we wanted to stop him."

    Ferenzi boomed a hearty laugh.

    "Fuck ''em, I say. The entire city could use an enema!"

 3.41 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Bajamutt¨¦! Did you just kill us?"

    The voice of Anneb¨¦l abruptly brought her back to conscience.

    "Nothing that was done, can''t be undone. I''m merely trying to get you out of her path!"

    She recalled the calm, rational voice of the Silent Dragon of whom she had a long and deep conversation with on the Hijo Lux cult''s rooftop. Nothing he now said sounded even half as convincing.

    This was a different display of temperament, altogether.

    "What do you want from us that you could not have just asked?"

    Again, Anneb¨¦l''s furious scream ate into her brain.

    "Come with me, Miss Duarte. We need to speak elsewhere so that she will not be disturbed. She is still on the mend."

    As they parted, Tas¨¬a began to feel as if she were floating. Her thoughts were strangely nebulous. She forced herself to focus them to sort out what was occurring around her.

    What did he mean by mend?

    It certainly felt as if she had been taken apart.

    - We have to speak.

    The Modality entered the chat.

    My head is never a lonely place, she thought.

    - Bring me forth. What they plan will annihilate us both.

    She listened but she did not respond.

    - You have no idea how desperate they have become.

    It would not take her silence for an answer. Something prodded her from beneath her skin.

    I can''t trust you. I don''t know what you are. She responded.

    The sensation she now felt was uncomfortable.

    A swarm of bugs seemed to be crawling inside of her skin, yet, she was unsure if she even possessed skin.

    - I am an alternative to being Manifest built to live inside of you. I have been here since they knitted your heart back together. Now that the nanospore entities know what I am, they will crack you open to find me. I could be of use to them to counter integration with Egliona.

    That name caught her attention.

    This wasn''t Egliona''s set-up, this trap that ensnared her so successfully? She had assumed it was.

    Egliona was a beguiler of the highest order, but she wasn''t the only one.

    Tas¨¬a was once under the Silent Dragon''s hypnotic spell; it was now apparent that on that occasion on the rooftops of the Hijos Lux complex he had charmed her into doing his bidding.

    She should not fool herself. If they needed to extract the Modality from her mind for their own devise, surely even Bajamutt¨¦ would not hesitate to take it and leave her a jibbering idiot.

    At the moment, it felt absurd to believe anything that any of these entities had to say on their own behalf.

    The best course of action was to remain distant and aloof from all of them. Besides, aside from the interruptions of everyone surrounding her, the floating sensation and limbic paralyses was... peaceful.

    I don''t feel as if I''m in any danger, she responded.

    In the moments before the Modality answered she could feel a choppy wave of insects squirming beneath her skin once more. Their wiggly little limbs stopped moving again just before it spoke.

    -  Recall the last thing that you remembered to have happened to you before the here and now. Ask yourself if not feeling any danger is a rational response to those circumstances. That in itself should alarm you. Why are you feeling peaceful and content? Have those emotions ever felt natural to you for very long? There is a reason for that.

    She had to admit It was a damn good answer.

    Maybe, you are right. But right now, I just need some sleep.

    The crawlers, whatever they were, worked extra diligently at creating an itch that touched all parts of her sensorium. There was a certain desperation to how the bugs dug into her.

    - Remember that vow that you made to yourself?

    Her own words were fed back to her as if it was a recording set to play.

    ---Lord, never let me be in a place of vulnerability like that poor woman, ever again.---

    She thought of the woman who said those words, and wondered how that same soul was her own.

    The prayer occurred mere minutes before the Gunslinger was born.

    Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

    Who was that meek and humble sweet natured servant of God? We know her, to some extent, and every so often she touches upon our lives. At times even, our cause has been copacetic.

    But who is she, and why do I not recognize her as me?

    Lt. Colonel Sol put a bullet in defenseless Kai-Kai''s head. That image flashed again before her vision.

    That memory was drawn out and made bold before her eyes. It was as if she were being held down, her head made still, and her eyes pinned open to make sure that she did not miss a thing.

    But what she was forced to endure occurred entirely in her mind.

    The canvas that she peeked up from beneath as she hid on the greenhouse roof. The drone that flew above her. The Lady Liberty coin that held her fascination and diverted her fear.

    The overt manipulation the Modality now used against her will stirred Tas¨¬a to anger.

    She fumed and exhaled. No, that did not happen. She lacked the physicality to do either fume or exhale.

    The only physical manifestation available to her was some adhoc and likely entirely synthetic dermis that allowed her a greatly diminished feeling of sensation.

    It fealt to be a poorly contrived analog to her corporal being. Its typography did not sync naturally with her mind.

    She could not move within it.

    Not wiggle her toes. Not raise her eyebrows. She tried to open her eyelids.

    Why could she not see?

    - Tas¨¬a?

    I first broke that vow, my part of the deal, when I allowed you to take possession of me.

    She waited for it to speak but apparently it did not feel as if it needed to defend its actions.

    Just as I thought, she attempted to whisper, but there were no lips to be moved.

    Tas¨¬a drifted back into sleep with the thoughts occurring of why her sensorium now seemed so compromised,  if I am just a digitized reconstruction of my former self, I''m going to be one pissed-off bitch when this horseshit-of-an-excuse for a body being stitched-up finally comes together.

    Of course, that made no sense. She was merely letting off steam with an angrily expressed common fallacy.

    If true, there would have been no ''I'' to make that complaint nor purpose for the vetching to have even occurred. If she were digitized, not a million recursions of the array of indexed data that defined her folded back into the active function in her main loop would get her to here.

    Her body existed somewhere. What was being stitched together was her nervous system. Apparently, the nanospores fried it into numbed-out meat.

    On that positive note, she began to slumber comfortably until she realized something tingled beneath her abdomen.

    She first thought it to be the piercing wound she had suffered in her prison escape. But the tingle was pleasantly rhythmic, and located further down, and grinded against her from inside the point of contact.

    It was slightly reminiscent of what she felt riding on top of Beauregard. An ever so slight simulation of that wonderful feeling.

    In her mind''s eye, Beauregard lay beneath her. Their hands gripped together.

    "This is not good enough is it?"

    The voice of the Modality drew from her roguish and handsome American lover''s lips. Though she wanted to be angry with it, she knew it was right.

    "No," she admitted.

    "This does not even have the feel and reality of an exquisite and favored memory to be cherished and savored does it?"

    With a grimace in her psychic bearing, Tas¨¬a considered it.

    "No, it does not."

    "Why is that?"

    She curled her head down so her hair grazed his face and chest.

    "I know not why."

    "The nanospore has you enmeshed in the densidad, and it is attempting to incorporate you. It hopes you will remain distracted by the simulation of stimulus while it breaks you down."

    "How do I stop that?"

    A l¨¦mure ran passed her. In its mouth, it clasped her .357 Vaquero tight.

    Tas¨¬a rose from her lover and gave the beast chase.

    The trail was obscurant. A tunnel dense with wailing dust devils enveloped all surroundings but the one path that lead her forward.

    "My gun, my lovely gun, you bullshit motherfucker, bring me back my gun!"

    The l¨¦mur looked back and sped up.

    The tunnel of dust devils dissipated and she was surrounded by woods that ran up a hill. Dense strata of mushrooms, white and pink, aligned the path in lattice patterns.

    By the time she reached the top where the gazebo stood, the l¨¦mur had disappeared.

    Tas¨¬a walked up to the altar in the center of the gazebo. On the altar was her Vaquero. She picked it up and then examine it.

    Still, none of these things that sorrounded her felt entirely real. The non-human entities manipulated her to keep her distracted.

    Beauregard appeared on the other side of the altar wearing nothing more than a smile. He grasped the altar with both hands as he leaned forward.

    "I know what you are doing," she said. "You are subverting elements of the Manifest to convince me that you have my best interest at heart."

    Beauregard shrugged.

    "Of course that is true. My first imperative for which I was designed is to keep you alive. Your current stubbornness makes mere rational persuasion inadequate to that task."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "That begs the question. What is the purpose of keeping me alive?"

    "I am not prepared to answer that just yet. Know this, I am the only thing that can prevent the Manifest densidad from enmeshing you in its weave. It wants you as a soldier in its war with Egliona.

    "Understand the stakes, Tas¨¬a. You will never know the joy and pain of real physical stimulus if you succumb. All sensation for you will feel like nothing more than a dull longing just as you felt when you rode on top of this simulacrum."

    She looked down at her body, realizing she did not even truly touch soil. All of this was even more nebulous than dream.

    The Modality continued with its plea. Beauregard clutched at the air with his palms facing up.

    "Let me in. I am the fire that can bring you back into full human existence."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head. She clenched her gut. It burned from the inside like a tight hot ember of coal set off beneath her abdomen.

    The sensation, as excruciating as it was, was the first thing to feel real to her since she was enveloped in the ascospore burst of light.

    She welcomed it.

    It spread out like a wildfire through a dry forest and she was consumed once more.

    In the sudden of everything, Tas¨¬a slipped passed the illusive densidad.

    A moonlit field, the swirl of heavily pollinated dust recently vaporized into ionized smelt stirred her nostril''s scent of smell.

    She was back in.

    The Vaquero went off in her hand. Three shots were placed in the center of the ascospore. It oozed its oily liquid down to the ground before it burst into a leathery, dissipated bladder.

    Tas¨¬a targeted another and brought it down.

    There were no more around her. Bladders of dead ascospores lay sprawled about the highway, along with the lumur¨¦s she had previously killed.

    She had no memory of taking out the first several ascospores. Nor how she obtained her gun in the real world. It was the most disconcerting loss of memory she had experienced since that summer in the Vida Esconda she decided to go retro with Angel Dust.

    As she slipped another moon clip into the revolver, she looked around. She once more stood behind the Jeep as it faced west, back towards Asunci¨®n.

    Mel descended down to his perch. He squawked.

    At first, Tas¨¬a ignored him. She wanted to find Anneb¨¦l.

    Where was she?

    But the nightwing persisted. He lead her eyes back down the highway to the east.

    A quarter of a mile down the road lay the most intricate and mathematically precise gothic structure her eyes had ever feasted.

    It shown silvery white in the light of a ripe Luna.

    "Demona, are you there? Can you see this? Is this what I think it is?"

    Demona''s face appeared on the Jeep''s rear cam video screen.

    "If you mean my lord''s Palace of Lies. Yes, it is."

 3.42 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Does it have a name?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Mendacium," Demona answered.

    Tas¨¬a reached back to her student days when she first learned Latin. The root of the word was only slightly different from its Spanish ascendant. Simply the word ''lie.''

    "I should have known," Tas¨¬a said with a guffawed nod.

    She peered at the palace with a mathematician''s eye. Renaissance-era critics of the style disdained the Gothic aesthetic. They claimed it lacked the elegant geometry of their own era.

    That sentiment simply wasn''t true to the extent they denied that the style was even based upon geometry. Gothic architecture was first divided into ratios before geometric symmetry was added to functionally divided sets. That tended to produced a sprawl, but still, a highly patterned one.

    As Tas¨¬a noticed the frieze that lined the entire fa?ade just above the central jamb columns, she realized something about the structure that stood before her.

    After she double checked to make sure her count was accurate, she cleared her throat.

    She wasn''t sure how she was going to ask Demona about it.

    It would imply that the palace of her dream was an artificial contrivance planted into the spook''s mind, somehow.

    "Demona, you are quiet?"

    "I''m viewing the palace with your vehicle''s forward camera. Thankfully, the device swivels. I''m at a loss, Tas¨¬a. How did they extract that structure from my brain?"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. She sat her bum on the hood of the Jeep. With the passenger side door open she could hear Demona''s voice through the speakers.

    "My first assumption, and it may be a bad one, is they didn''t. If you take Chartres Cathedral. On the North front, the side with the lancet¨¦d tower, you elongate that side to accommodate an athenaeum in the interior, and divide the repetition of its motifs by a symmetry of 333 you pretty much come up with what we see here.

    "The South side of it appears quite a bit more complicated to measure given the addition of lateral curvature so I am only guessing that it too is based on a symmetrical divider of 333. But, I am curious, Demona. If I approach the entrance, and view that frieze will it depict the life stages of Christ as does the frieze on the Cathedral of Chartres?"

    "Good guess. But do you know why it does that?"

    Tas¨¬a smiled.

    The weaponized mockery of The Faith by their adversaries was a subject she studied at the seminary at great length in her classes on rhetoric, modern dialectics, and more traditional theological apologetics. Thematically, the mockery tended to be quite predictable.

    "When subjected to the repetition we see here as the ratio of division is stretched to match the number 666, the stages in the life of Christ within the frieze becomes a Sisyphean endeavor."

    Demona chortled.

    "Sisyphus, Prometheus, and the Rebel Son, there lies the wisdom of the ages!"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Demona was missing the point.

    "We can debate theology some other time. What I''m getting at, they did not extract that dream from you, they planted it there in the first place."

    Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

    There was a pause.

    "Ms. Del Alma-Gris, are you saying that I am a fool?"

    Demona sounded more genuinely inquisitive than angry. Still, Tas¨¬a chose to be tactful. They needed each other''s help and that tended to make for good allies.

    "Ha! Be easy on yourself. Its not like they sold you the Golden Gate Bridge. Because your sensibilities are refined and there is nothing crass about you, instead, you bought into this.

    And what is the Palace of Lies, exactly?"

    Demona smacked her lips.

    "Hmm. Ms. del Alma-Gris, I thought you had little time to debate theology? Thought you would be more curious as to where your friend disappeared."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head forward.

    "In there, I suppose. That is why I asked about its function."

    When Demona sighed in an incongruent repose to the rest of her face just then she could empathize with the diabolist. Tas¨¬a herself had just briefly lived in a state of vastly diminished being in the physiological sense.

    Demona spoke.

    "To be honest, I am not even sure if she is in there. If you want to go in, I detected AR specced driving goggles in Anneb¨¦l''s glove compartment, and I''ll accompany you."

    Tas¨¬a was reminded of the neoPalm''s strange behavior when she first met Demona via a hologram. She did as was requested of her.

    The image of Demona appeared standing in front of her. She wore black jeans, a matching corduroy jacket, and a pair of high, silver colored pumps.

    Tas¨¬a whistled at her stunning virtual companion as they began to walk up to the Palace of Lies.

    "If we were a pair of girlfriends going to the discotheque searching for guys, I would highly approve of your fashion sense, Demona."

    Demona smiled, curtly.

    "I''m a married woman, Tas¨¬a."

    Gut shot. Til death do us part. There was definitely a point of contention between them in the case of Le¨°n. Demona likely heard every flirty exchange Tas¨¬a had with her husband from the first moment they stomped bugs together.

    It miffed Tas¨¬a a bit.

    Whoever heard of a diabolist who believed in the sanctity of marriage? The fuck the world is coming to?

    Still, she could only blame herself. When she invited Le¨°n for a triste in the Daga Chicas'' rest room she had not even the slightest curiosity about his commitments to anyone else.

    Nor, for Beauregard''s, for that matter.

    She was a grown woman. The responsibility for that was her own.

    Demona shook her head, sympathetically.

    "I seem to have shamed you into silence. Ms. del Alma-Gris, I know you only meant well."

    Tas¨¬a bowed her head.

    "It never occurred to me that a roguish mercenary spook like Le¨°n would be committed to anyone."

    Demona stopped to let Tas¨¬a catch up to her. They faced one another.

    "It does seem a bit incongruent, does it not? Tas¨¬a, I forgive you, and I''ll never bring it up again. I only ask one thing, if I am able to successfully help you achieve your myriad set of goals in Asunci¨®n help me get back in to physical, carnal existence.

    "You have no idea how I yearn to touch my husband, again."

    Tas¨¬a thought about it. Her shoulders squinted up, and her eyelids pinched together.

    "You have objections? Please let me know."

    "Le¨°n shot you."

    Demona''s face grew animated and she spoke with her hands.

    "Only because I told him to. Egliona had discovered my brain was a linked-in separate entity, and she took over my body with the intention of linking back to where my brain still remains secured. It would be devastating if they ever found this place.

    "My body and my security detail were beyond corrupted by her to the point of no return. Le¨°n was reluctant, but he loved me, and he understood the consequences. That is why he did it."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "I''ll do what I can."

    They stood before the entrance. The construction was not of stone but of the strata of fungi she had experienced before. However, there were a few differences. The coloration was stratified in dozens of white tones.

    Tas¨¬a pointed to the masonry and questioned Demona.

    "It''s surface is glassy?"

    Demona took a moment to consider it.

    "Though the human eye can''t see it unless the energy that storms from it is so vast that it reveals itself, there exist a constant battle between nanospore and the resonance field at the edges of Asunci¨®n city.

    "The palace is being baked at the molecular level to its better aesthetic affect. The way the crystalized fungi disperses light is utterly dazzling."

    They stood at the stairway entrance, a magnificent jamb with ribbed columns and tortured statuary stood before them.

    Mel flew overhead. Tas¨¬a plucked the PA from her fanny pocket.

    "I''m going to send the nightwing to scope out the rooftops."

    Demona''s brows gave a curious frown. Her hand pointed toward the entrance way.

    "You are not going inside?"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "By the way of the front entrance? Pshaw, sister! Hi! My name is Tas¨¬a, I don''t believe we have met."

 3.43 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Without warning the goggles captured the nightwing ascent. The moon spun disconcertingly. Tas¨¬a paused the data channel with a violent shake of her head, and switched Mel''s feed back over to the Personal Assistant.

    "Sorry, I caused that," Demona apologized. "I was curious about the nightwing''s survey, so I read into its feed. Apparently, I caused it to spill its output over our shared space."

    Tas¨¬a rubbed her eyes.

    "I doubt if there will be permanent damage from that but right now it feels as if it lacerated down into my brain.

    "Nightwing halconeros -," she wasn''t sure if Demona was familiar with the term so she elaborated, "- those that see through the eyes of the nightwings - I don''t know how they ever get use to that viewpoint. It''s down right alien."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She saw on the PA that Mel was maintaining a holding pattern.

    "Okay, now let us try this again. Fly over the athenaeum, until you get to the ribbed juncture."

    Tas¨¬a turned her head back towards Demona.

    "Nice," Tas¨¬a exclaimed. "An open air shelter rises just above the ribbed vault. It''s wide enough that I can slip beneath its canopy to get inside of there."

    Demona pointed to the entrance way.

    "Whether you are approaching from the entrance or from the roof, they will know and see you coming."

    Tas¨¬a acknowledged Demona''s concerns with a vacuous grin and nod.

    "I''m going up. It''s going to be cool seeing you scale the wall in those pumps."

    "Not even listening ..."

    Tas¨¬a showed off with a somersault and a leap onto the side of the wall. Within seconds she had scaled the wall, lifted herself over it, and plopped her butt across the gable.

    "Damn," she assessed the chic dressed spook as Demona''s virtual image simulated the climb and made it appear to be a painful and a most non-spider-monkey endeavor.

    The spook could have just as easily floated up while she held onto an umbrella, like Mary Poppins, Tas¨¬a assumed.

    When Demona reached the gable and sat beside her, she breathed in and out, heavily. Her knuckles displayed the white of stressed appendages.

    "I enjoyed watching that," Tas¨¬a exclaimed, "but you are laying it on a little thick."

    Demona chortled between a lovely set of lips that smiled.

    "I have it set to be as physiologically accurate to my pre-lobbed condition as possible, else my brain risks being confused and overstimulated. I was the furthest thing from an athlete while embodied."

    Tas¨¬a chortled as a pleasant rumble along the gable surface tickled her bum. It then made a sonic disturbance.

    "I never considered - hey, do you hear that?"

    They both turned to the small open air tower over the athenaeum central vault that sat atop it like a belfry.

    "Yes, I do." Demona answered.

    Tas¨¬a froze up the moment that she could make sense of it, and realized that it was a choral. She recognized the vibrant timbre of the voices that she had encountered when she escaped the IMCQ.

    "Ah, shit. They have Manifested in there. Not just any Manifested but those are the voices of the Disappeared. The ones that induce suicidal insanity in the doctors, nurses, and staff that treat them.

    "Hear that lull in their voices. It gets inside of you."

    Demona''s heart-shaped face tended to squinch up when something concerned her. Now, it did so with an expression that would have appeared as an affectation if committed by any other mortal besides Demona.

    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

    "I, of course monitor nearly all Quadra traffic. I knew something was occurring hours before the IMCQ got bit by the mushroom cloud when I read an exchange of encrypted cables that went in and out from IMCQ Control and Brussels HQ.

    "They were in a panic at the IMCQ. The Manifested had dissipated and disappeared.

    "Then, soon after, poof. The explosion of a small, tactical nuke, or so they believe but I have my doubts. So long and thanks for all the fish, as they say."

    "What?"

    A tiny smile appeared on Demona''s face.

    "Nothing. I do a lot of reading for my own simple pleasure now that I am discorporate. That was the dolphin''s last message to mankind before catching a ride out."

    Tas¨¬a nodded along. She didn''t know the reference but she thought she got the gist. Demona believed the Manifest transfer set off the Muskovite.

    While she listened to Demona she also gave Mel a set of orders to swoop down and peek into the open air vault.

    It would have to wait. Mel was currently adrift off of his course by a few miles down the highway. Something there had peaked his curiosity. She put her order on his second tier status commands until he returned.

    Meanwhile, Tas¨¬a turned her attention back to Demona with a scrutinizing eye:

    Discorporate

    While

    Finding things to preoccupy her time between machinations.

    It must be a very lonely existence.

    She wondered how often the spy spoke to her husband in recent weeks.

    None at all, she realized. Tas¨¬a had played the part of Demona''s emissary to Le¨°n just over a week beforehand.

    Tas¨¬a started to weigh the pros and cons of whether or not she should pry into that matter with Demona, but before she made a decision, the spook became excited.

    "What?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "I just realized. This structure is intended to be a more or less permanent one. That is a very rare occurrence for them."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "And that means what, exactly?"

    Her day had already been a very long one. Fatigue was catching up with her, and arguments needed to be spelled out.

    She reached into her fanny pack for the last bottle of Ki-Jack Ginseng, All Natural Alertness Elixir.

    "Usually, when the Manifest creates these objects, they are temporary structures, typically created for the purpose of mindfucking a target. Once that objective is completed, the objects then dissipate back into the dust and pollen that swirl about the air.

    "However, if this Palace of Lies replica is housing the Manifest, then it was created for a more sustained purpose."

    Tas¨¬a rose up to stand on the gable support so she could peak down the highway.

    She spoke while she vigorously shook her head.

    "It is kind of odd that no traffic has come through here since we tangled with Bajamutt¨¦''s reinforcements earlier. This side of the river bay and port, eighteen wheelers come through at all times, night and day."

    Demona nodded.

    "Tas¨¬a, I think I know what has caught the nightwing''s curiosity. Close your eyes for a few seconds if you will please humor me. Let me take a look at the nightwing''s raw visual feed."

    Tas¨¬a complied.

    After several seconds elapsed, Demona continued. "Go ahead, and reopen your eyes. I''ve asked the bird to keep its visuals steady. Do you see right there?"

    "Uh-huh."

    "The Manifest is taking advantage of the crystalizing effect that the resonance has on the fungi. Its creating an alternative roadway that loops miles away from the structure, and it also blockades and obscures the actual highway."

    Demona disengaged with Mel''s feed. Tas¨¬a didn''t wait for the crow to comply. She changed her own set of instructions back to the status of a primary task.

    Once in hover back over the Palace of Lies, Mel swooped down into the vaulted tower.

    Inside the interior of the athenaeum replica, hundreds of Manifested women stood nude in rows. Their figures, elongated and thin, swayed with wondrous resolve in the rhythm and time signature of the cantata they sung.

    From somewhere unresolved to her senses a flute d''amour played an accompanying part above the choral assembly.

    A notion came to Tas¨¬a in the shape of three words.

    The Ecstacy Chorus.

    Tas¨¬a had no idea how that thought got into her head. Did El Greco ever give a painting that name?

    These lovely ones were not the only ones present, however. On a stadium above where they crowded together, three dozen women sung the bass counter part while dressed in sheer black silk. There figures were not elongated but appeared set like marble.

    Their movement did not comport with the natural flow of muscular movement, but like claymation, from one impressively sculpted figure in pose to another.

    Yet, as solidly fixed as their bodies were, she could not get a read on their faces. All vagueness. To focus on one face, you momentarily felt you could identify the person, but then you felt ...wrong.

    She looked at one of the Disappeared after another. Then, she saw a face amongst the Disappeared that made Tas¨¬a''s heart sink.

    Lydia Estrella. Her sweet-natured, white collar criminal, Columbian friend.

    As soon as Tas¨¬a attempted to focus on her friend''s face, it no longer appeared to be her Lydia who stood there as she sung.

    Her own head felt distempered. Tas¨¬a committed herself to breathing exercises for a solid minute to calm her heart and get her mind back in order.

    But she felt anxious, and she needed to step up the pace of her assault.

    "Anneb¨¦l is in there, she is in danger," Tas¨¬a muttered as she stood up to rush towards the vaulted tower.

    A force of air tumbled at her. Tas¨¬a halted to a stop to regain her footing.

    In front of her stood a short but muscular and stocky figure with skin whose tone was midnight blue. It was Bajamutt¨¦ in all of his naked glory.

    His voice was slow and calm, as it gave threat.

    "Tas¨¬a, I am afraid I can''t let you do that."

 3.44 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a leaned forward.

    "Out of my way, beguiler!"

    Bajamutt¨¦''s eyes grew darkly.

    "Do not do anything rash," the Silent Dragon commanded.

    The sheath of her stiletto was clipped in her right boot just above her ankle. She flicked it out and swept it forward until it made contact with the flesh that connected his penis to his nutsack.

    "Is this rash? You sent the l¨¦mures against me, you bastard. Whatever sway you had over me is over. Now, out -"

    Bajamutt¨¦ attempted to backhand her, but he severely miscalculated her natural speed.

    She swooped low on one knee, slit open his ballsack with a hard upward snap, twisted around to his backside, rose up and thrust the stiletto hilt-deep into the cauda equina nerve cluster near the bottom of his vertebrae. One sweeping set of motions before he even completed his backhand swing.

    Bajamutt¨¦''s entire body seized up; he lashed his head upward, and screamed with a discordantly cracked voice. Blood pulsed out of the wound as his body slid off of the stiletto and fell sixty feet onto the entrance steps with a hard crunch.

    The Ecstasy Chorus became silent.

    Demona''s eyes widened and her mouth gaped open.

    "Did I just kill him, Demona?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    Her companion peered down before she answered.

    "I don''t think a nanospore entity''s death can be accomplished that easily. Likely, the nature of your attack incapacitated its ability to transform and heal its damage. At least, temporarily."

    Tas¨¬a nodded at the sense the spook''s answer made.

    The damaged material left on the stiletto left an impression. She wiped the blade down of the accumulate - sponge-like tattered meat, thick dark blood, and chunked cartilage with a baby wipe and slid the stiletto back into its sheath.

    All the while, she kept an eye on Bajamutt¨¦ with apprehension and she was surprised that he did not move.

    "We better get going, Demona. I doubt if he''ll underestimate me the next time we meet."

    The companions crouched beside the vaulted chamber that rose up from the midrib supports. Mel stood watch atop it.

    He squawked affirmatively with a nod.

    Nice kill, was his message.

    She nodded back.

    "Thanks, Mel. But I know I''m going to be paying out the butt for that one."

    She caught a slight smirk on Demona''s face.

    "What''cha thinking?" Tas¨¬a asked her.

    Demona shrugged to suggest that the observations that soon followed had no ulterior motive or deeper meaning than whimsical conversation.

    "I notice you tend to anthropomorphize all things around you. The Bajamutt¨¦ entity is a ''he'', the crow you converse with as if it were a person."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced. She continued to speak as she positioned herself to lie flat on her belly and thighs.

    "Quite correct you are in one respect. True that doing just that with the nanospore entities should be avoided. They use that tendency of ours to anthropomorphize them as distinct beings against us to weaken our resolve.

    "However, you should take the personhood of nightwing''s and even feral, untrained crows seriously. The ghosts are in their machines just as they are in ours."

    Demona looked up to the horizon.

    "That is why this continent fascinates me. Even when I was a little girl visiting pre-invasion Buenos Aires with my parents, I could feel that, that there is magic here."

    Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

    Tas¨¬a smiled as she realized Demona only meant well, even if she was being a bit of a drag on the mission. Of course, it made a certain sense that there was little urgency in the spook''s voice or in her virtual actions. She was in no eminent danger that a dragon was about to swoop from around the rooftop bend to give her a vengeful ass kicking.

    She had a companion to keep her company while she waxes philosophical.

    Tas¨¬a needed to keep her busy.

    "While I tend to this and figure out how to get inside, Demona, could you do me a little favor?"

    Demona''s head and her head of bushy brown hair bounced.

    "Sure. Name it."

    "Command Mel to keep a watch on Bajamutt¨¦''s body. I''m guessing his ocular device is powerful enough to sustain your viewpoint referential even if I should go out of range."

    "Good point. Would you like me to have the nightwing pluck the entity''s eyeballs out while it is keeping guard over it?"

    "That would be outstanding, but have my Mel exercise some caution around the entity."

    "Right on it."

    Tas¨¬a pushed forward inside the opening and leaned inside.

    Beneath her was the scramble of movement. She could not make out any distinct form or shape, just hasty movement like that of wheat if the stalks were made of glass.

    Though a lit chandelier hung directly beneath her, and, in the spread of the great athenaeum hall, six other chandeliers hung, no shadow was formed on the floor even with the surrounding movement that suggested there should be a sway of shadows dancing on the floor.

    What is it with the denial of the most fundamental physics underlying our natural order with you fucking nanospore assholes?

    That quality effected sound, as well. There should have been reverberation occurring due to that shifting movement, but there was none.

    With the fall of Bajamutt¨¦ by her hand, the voices and the flute instrument went silent. There was a strange muted quality about it.

    The entire chamber was like the chamber of a gun with a sound suppressor attached to the end of its barrel. Sound was kept from expanding out.

    To test that theory that the reverberation below was muted, Tas¨¬a found a spent .50 shell case in her fanny pack that she kept as a souvenir. With a toss, it plunged down on to the floor.

    The shell case clattered on the floor with a low frequency pattern. Its natural high pitched glassy clang was muted.

    Tas¨¬a threw a flash bang at the chandelier below her. No sound at first, or much of a flash, but then the light swelled up and folded into itself before it burst outward with a fury of sound following soon after.

    Nearer to the ground, another sound, like ice breaking slowly before it rose outward and crinkled upward. It shattered with a loud burst, as well.

    Whatever artifice that was deployed to mute sensory perception had cracked away, entirely.

    Now she could hear their voices entwined and their ire aimed collectively against her.

    "Defiler," they whispered. "Go away, defiler. You are unwanted. Unneeded. Needless thing that you are."

    The voices stirred into her gut, and her legs trembled. The words were persuasive, they pushed against her, and they made her want to turn and leave.

    Tas¨¬a was forced to address the claims against her to prevent their persuasive effect from overtaking her resolve.

    Defiler.

    "Not I. That is you, you unnatural Manifested!"

    She gazed down into the chamber. There was no longer any beauty to be seen. They were now the shambling, tentacle bearing beasts of the Manifest.

    Their faces draped in down-sloped skin and made indistinguishable from one another.

    Go away, defiler.

    Tas¨¬a huffed.

    "I''m not leaving without Anneb¨¦l!"

    She yelled more loudly.

    "Anneb¨¦l! Are you here?"

    For several seconds, silence pervaded the chamber, once more.

    Movement stirred in a waving pattern in the far distance.

    "I''m over here!"

    Anneb¨¦l shouted back from beyond the stadium.

    Tas¨¬a first considered sliding down the support pole that held the chandelier in place, but there was nowhere that she could go from there.

    Instead, she jumped onto a vaulted rib nearby that supported the vaulted tower, and shimmied down it to the grounded column that it was attached.

    For the remainder of her descent, crystalized fungi made an easy medium for her to scale down to the floor.

    As the Manifested nearest her approached, Tas¨¬a grabbed the Vaquero, and warned them to stay back.

    At first they stopped in place and hesitated to move back. When Tas¨¬a pulled out her last flashbang - they whispered in protest, the first flashbang had made an indelible impression.

    The Manifested moved away from her and slowly lined up to the side of the center walk way. This allowed her a path to the stadium. On its far end, Anneb¨¦l was now behind a near translucent divider. She was getting dressed.

    The Disappeared spread out on the stage. They all now bore a hard appearance like Mayan statuary. Only their chest moved. From those inhuman appearing dugs covered in the movement of active pustules sighing noises heaved out from the lungs beneath.

    Tasia wondered which of the thirty six was Lydia. It was impossible to tell. When Tas¨¬a searched the IMCQ casualty report, she had been distracted by the anger she had felt when Felicit¨¦''s lie had been exposed to follow up on Lydia''s status.

    She shook her head at the malformed Disappeared.

    Some fates are worse than the instant obliteration from a nuclear detonation.

    As Tas¨¬a climbed the steps, Anneb¨¦l emerged from behind the divider. Two Disappeared followed from behind her. One held in her hands a glaive-like long poll weapon, the other carried a large vase.

    It was made of a green glass held in place with a lattice of ebony. Something glowed from inside it.

    As Tas¨¬a turned back to the armed Manifested to size her up, Anneb¨¦l gave her a warning.

    "Tas¨¬a," Anneb¨¦l spoke. "So long as you don''t try to take or harm the ovum vessel, they won''t attack you."

    Tas¨¬a cocked her head to the side.

    "The ovum vessel?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded, her admission came reluctantly from her tightly held lips.

    "The sexual maturation Bajamutt¨¦ granted me came with a sacrifice. For me, a monthly one."

    Tas¨¬a frowned.

    Anneb¨¦l nodded, and responded to her friend''s unspoken sorrow, "for me, its better than the alternative -," she waved Tas¨¬a forward, "- of remaining a shitwhore. Come on, there is an exit just off of the stage to your right. There is nothing left for us here. Let''s get away from this place."

 3.45 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Part IV

    The Headhunter

    From the passenger-side window, Tas¨¬a watched the asphalt roll by them. They came upon a tall mound of mud that for more than three hundred yards obscured the pathway back to the highway.

    They slid side-to-side for the entire time that they crossed over the mound.

    Once passed the mud the Jeep evened out. Anneb¨¦l sighed in relief.

    "I really don''t like seeing my sweet bitchin'' ride get dirtied up like that."

    The current part of their trek was a roadway of recently constructed vintage, created by the Manifest. It had an entirely different feel than a normal highway. A stabilizing grip on the tires caused the steering to both tighten and smooth out in feel. Likely the result of the fungi''s spongy interior.

    Tas¨¬a leaned her head out of the window as she peered back to the Palace of Lies.

    As she expected, it could not be seen from the highway given its subverted design.

    "You seem a tad apprehensive." Anneb¨¦l observed once she had the Jeep aligned properly on the long stretch of straight roadway, and her steering no longer called for bare-knuckled tense reaction.

    She''s sending feelers out, Tas¨¬a thought. And the last thing she''ll tolerate is pity from me.

    Tas¨¬a considered what she should say as she nodded. "I likely should be more concerned about getting back to Asunci¨®n more than anything else but something else has been weighing on my mind."

    Anneb¨¦l''s head jerked up and to the side. Her brows and eyes, as they set upon Tas¨¬a seemed to say, level with me.

    "Spill it. I''m a big girl."

    "The bargain that you made with Bajamutt¨¦, was that above all other factors key to your sexual maturation? Did he do something to make that transformation possible?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded and affirmed with a curt yes.

    "Damn." Tas¨¬a whispered not so silently as she closed her eyes.

    "Is there a problem?"

    "So, it is most likely that my own improvement occurred due to his intervention than anything that I myself accomplished?"

    Anneb¨¦l''s frown lines creased.

    "What are you getting at?"

    "I stabbed and maimed the Silent Dragon when he stood in my way to get to you."

    Anneb¨¦l''s lower lip dropped as she spoke.

    "You defeated the Silent Dragon in close-quarters combat?"

    "Maybe you didn''t hear me, I had a blade in my hand at the time."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled at the utter moxie of Tas¨¬a''s answer, but then she shook it off and cleared her throat to make room in her affected disposition for a sincere sounding question.

    "So you are afraid that in his retribution, he''ll take away your sexual maturation?"

    "Yeah. That scares me more than getting my ass kicked when I see him next."

    "If we make it back to Asunsi¨®n''s resonance zone, he has no power there."

    Tas¨¬a sighed.

    "Demona and I, we left his body on the entrance steps of the palace -," from the back seat, Demona corrected, "Replica, dear."

    Tas¨¬a continued, "- replica. He was no longer laying there a sad-looking dragon-man corpse by the time we all left together. What if he has already nullified my capacity for good, clean sex where I don''t crap myself?

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    "I can''t go back to that way of life. I''m almost thirty-three. For the first time in my life I feel something close to being complete as a woman."

    With a lopsided smile on her face, Anneb¨¦l shrugged and made a wiggly v shape with her index and middle finger.

    "You can check right now if it is worrying you so much. At least you''ll know the answer."

    Tas¨¬a chortled, uncomfortably, as she squirmed in her seat.

    "Woah. I''m not doing THAT in here."

    Anneb¨¦l smile now filled the creases in both her cheeks. Obviously, she enjoyed the discomfort she caused Tas¨¬a, and Tas¨¬a was uncertain whether or not vengeance for a previous slight was at play.

    The brawler continued:

    "Hey. No judgment from me, of all people. Go ahead, it''ll only take a few seconds. Dip your hand in the honeypot and see what happens. At worse, we''ll have to stop and grab you a new set of clothes from the Quick Boutique."

    Tas¨¬a raised her voice. Not happy her friend wasn''t taking her fears seriously.

    "I said I ain''t gonna!"

    Showing surprise at Tas¨¬a''s show of emotion, Anneb¨¦l dampened her own giggling laughter.

    "Easy, easy there! You have nothing to worry about, at least for now. If your intestinal and vaginal nerve cluster configurations, and your basic biochemistry are commencing such a drastic change, you would definitely have felt it happening, already."

    Before reacting once more, Tas¨¬a considered for a moment what this meant. Anneb¨¦l was deflecting from her own painful experience by teasing her.

    "Did you have a set back?" She asked.

    Anneb¨¦l grimaced and her eyes bounced about as she scanned the highway ahead of them.

    "Oh, yeah. Bajamutt¨¦ most definitely made sure I learned my lesson about rebelling against his wishes."

    Back inside the Asunci¨®n city limit they rode in silence for several minutes before Demona spoke up. Her face was once more on the rear-camera visual display embedded in the driver''s side console.

    "For the final destination, I am moving the setting for the meeting slightly up the street by a few blocks. My agent has informed me there has been a slight complication, and she''ll have to inform you of it directly."

    Tas¨¬a felt compelled to peer back at the virtualization of Demona. The spy sat with her hands folded between her knees. Tas¨¬a thought it apparent that something the spook wasn''t sharing was making the woman anxious.

    "Your agent? What''s the problem?"

    "I was going to have her meet you behind the resonance cage, er, the garage where my PA melted, so she could disarm the security system.

    "But while waiting there for you to show up for the rendezvous, her fellow Spook Town residents became concerned with her unknown whereabouts.

    "Now, someone is searching for her. Would you mind, Tas¨¬a, taking care of that problem? You have a knack for that sort of thing.

    "My agent can''t afford to do it herself as it would raise questions about her loyalties."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "How long have we been keeping her waiting?"

    "A little over two hours passed the ETA that I gave her."

    Tas¨¬a thought she likely knew who this person was. The other two ladies she met did not seem the side-hustle type, but Alisha?

    All freakin'' day long that woman hustles.

    "Tell Alisha that if she can procure some coffee to please have it waiting for me. Honestly, Demona, I have maybe at most a half an adventure left in me for the evening then I have got to crash."

    Demona shook her head.

    "I figured you would catch on eventually."

    Tas¨¬a chortled deeply. She thought of how she and Alisha met. There were reasons to assume the two, Demona and the American, were agenda-copacetic.

    "I caught on the moment you said you have an agent in Spook Town. I assumed it was the one who asserted drive and initiative towards achieving a greater purpose, and not the ones that were bummed about being sidelined."

    Demona nodded in approval.

    "So, you do understand?"

    Words from the video feed Felicit¨¦ had shown her unexpectedly came to mind:

    Tower Praxis is where idealists used to get sent when they needed to be broken in or have their careers bounced. Does the seismic level fuck-up known as Demona Helo?ste mean anything to you?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "I think I am getting the jist of what is actually going on. Tell me, I have to know, is Alisha one of the Amongst Us like some of her colleagues?"

    Demona was silent for a moment as she squinched an arced frown.

    "Wait? What do you mean? I don''t quite get the reference. Do you mean those rumours that the Manifested walk Amongst Us, undetected?"

    She doesn''t know!

    "You know that it is real and not mere conspiracy mongering, right?"

    "No, I don''t know that," Demona insisted, defensively.

    But, you are a spook! Tas¨¬a thought with a sense of exasperation creeping up her medulla oblongata. She decided to be more tactful than she felt.

    "But, you are in a position to know, Demona. You frequently override live camera feeds in every region in the Quadra, right? Oddities must occur and have been seen by you."

    Demona shook her head in a slow denial.

    "Many oddities, though none that confirm that old rumour. That theory is considered an embarrassing example of mass psychosis that lead to deadly consequences. The very reason the Salvage was instituted to bring order to this region.

    "Tas¨¬a, are you telling me you know something that is counter-factual to what is commonly believed to be true?"

    She nodded without hesitation.

    "Yes. I witnessed three of the men from the Flamenco Rosa commune transform in front of my eyes."

    Demona shook her head, and gazed out the window as they turned into a street.

    "We are close to the destination. I''ll inquire and find out what I can. Tas¨¬a, do you feel safe executing our plan without knowing that answer for certain?"

    Tas¨¬a suppressed a yawn.

    "Sure. We need to get this over with just to see what falls into place."

    They pulled into the rendezvous. It was a small house with a front porch.

    To her surprise, Beauregard stepped out from behind the screen door. As he stood on the porch, he found her gaze, and returned with one of his own.

    He smiled.

 3.46 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Well, look at you prettying up that porch and everything else in the immediate vicinity," Tas¨¬a said to Beauregard as she sauntered up the walkway.

    He raised his head to the sky in response.

    "Oh, my Lord, how did I go thirty-seven years of my life without coming across this little pistol?"

    Tas¨¬a came in for the hug and then she clutched him tight.

    She cackled as she spoke.

    "I hope you don''t mind that I am trying to get my scent all over you though I smell like I fought some critters in a swamp."

    His left brow drew up, curious.

    "Did''ja?"

    "Yup, and then I killed even more critters in a field of wild rye."

    His head nodded towards Anneb¨¦l''s Jeep.

    "Did you bring back any of them that I can skin for you? I did quite a bit of trapping and hunting in Missouri in my teens. Those were the years of the Incivility, back then you kind of had to hunt to survive even if you were a boy from the ''burbs."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Damn. She thought. L¨¦mur hide would make for excellent leather.

    "Nah. At the first chance that came our way, we got the hell out of there."

    From the corner of her eye, Tas¨¬a noticed Alisha was now leaning against the porch rails. Politely, she watched as Beauregard and Tas¨¬a spoke.

    He raised his chin and nodded, as Anneb¨¦l''s boots hit the steps.

    "I gather we all could use some proper introduction. Avellana, this is the ex-girlfriend I mentioned, Alisha."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "We''ve met. Right, Alisha?"

    "Most correct."

    Beauregard covered one hand over the other in a balled-up fist. Evidently, he felt some explanation was needed.

    "So. It''s like this. I''m working the bar, and Alisha walks in looking for me. She''s in a fix, and needs me to help cover for her to allay the suspicions of the rest of the spooks.

    "When she sees them, so went her plan, she''ll tell them she got the itch for the old familiar so she stepped out for the evening."

    Tas¨¬a met Alisha''s gaze.

    "I''m sorry we are so late. Things got out of hand for us."

    Alisha nodded.

    "I was angry at first but Helo?ste told me what occurred. Just glad that you made it out in one piece."

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    Tas¨¬a shivered.

    "A helluva way to put it. At one point, I most likely wasn''t intact in one piece. I really don''t know what happened."

    "Damn," Alisha responded. And her anger grew. "Nanospore intervention, huh? Reality bending motherfuckers. Most fucked-up shit our species has ever devised."

    Tas¨¬a nodded to that and turned to Anneb¨¦l.

    "This is my best friend, -"

    "A living legend," Beauregard interrupted, "La Asesina Duarte."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded her head, graciously.

    "You have returned, as it has been prophesied."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled at Beauregard''s hyperbole.

    "I''m not allowed to ever come back to the octagon."

    "Three against one," Beauregard protested. "They jumped you!"

    Anneb¨¦l winced as she shook her head.

    "And they all wound up dead. That''s considered excessive. Even here in the Mean Sweet, you are allowed at most one kill a sport''s season, and even at that, the business side doesn''t want anyone to make a habit of it."

    Beauregard grimaced.

    "Fucking corporate."

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged.

    "Kinda sucks, but it is what it is."

    Beauregard lightened his mood as he remembered his host duties.

    "Well, you are welcome in my home, anytime, Asesina."

    Anneb¨¦l shook his hand as she chortled.

    "Killer is just my stage name, of course. Call me Anneb¨¦l. I''m an absolute Angel of a Most Merciful God once you get to know me."

    Beauregard wrapped his arms around Tas¨¬a. She noticed Alisha looked away.

    To what extent were their feelings mutual?

    Tas¨¬a shook it off. She once made a vow to not ever be the jealous type.

    "Alisha, Anneb¨¦l, make yourself at home. I''ve been busy sweatin'' my tail off for the last twelve hours at both the bar and my sister''s restaurant, so if its alright with Tas¨¬a, I would like to request her assistance in helping me freshen up in the shower."

    Pleasant butterflies stirred in her stomach. She liked the sound of that!

    Alisha lowered her eyes and smiled. She sat down beside Anneb¨¦l who had already slumped down and curled up on the couch for a nap.

    "I''m truly happy for the both of you," Alisha began, "but we are kind of on the clock here. Thirty minutes, okay?"

    Beauregard grinned as he lead Tas¨¬a to the shower room. He whispered in her ear:

    "We''re taking forty-five whether she likes it or not!"

    Her skin was still flushed red with excitement as Beauregard held her in his lap.

    They sat on a fold out bench with the shower drizzling misty over them.

    "Thank you," she whispered, breathlessly.

    "What?"

    She leaned her shoulders into his chest, coyly rubbing against his flesh.

    "I''ve never quite done that before. I''ve always been curious how that felt. Thank you for making it feel so incredibly fulfilling."

    He rested his chin against her neck.

    "You said it yourself that you haven''t measured your sync-up this month. Pretty much that leaves one alternative. Of course, we were not so careful, last night ..."

    Tas¨¬a grabbed his neck, playfully scratching it with her long nails.

    "Hey," she started, "I hope it doesn''t sound like I don''t wanna have your kids or anything like that. To be honest, it wouldn''t hurt my feelings if last night I turned out to be ripe. I''m almost thirty-three, of course, its always in the back of my mind. I''m not getting any younger."

    He held her tightly. Tas¨¬a leaned her head into his chest.

    "That''s the sexiest thing any woman has ever told me."

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes perked up.

    "Really? You okay with what I said?"

    "If it happens it happens. And we get hitched, right?"

    Maybe. Just maybe, he''s the one!

    After a minute of silent purring together, Beauregard spoke again.

    "By the way. That loot sack of yours. It''s in the guest''s bedroom closet."

    Tas¨¬a shrugged. "I haven''t thought about it since I mugged those dumbasses. Man, my priorities are really starting to change on me.

    "Hey, the loot is yours if you want it. But don''t be tempted to return the goods to any of them."

    "All right, I''ll get it all cashed out and have it put away in Junior''s savings account."

    Tas¨¬a laughed as she turned to kiss him. As they smooched, their faces bumped.

    "Hey," Beauregard began. "I have been meaning to ask you. Why do you have those AR riding goggles on?"

    Tas¨¬a looked towards the spot where Demona Helo?ste''s sat nude and self-engaged.

    Demona smiled back.

    "So my friend can watch. It creates a reference point for her with subsonic pulses that interpolate a sensory outflow for maximum realism."

    Beauregard laughter chortled at full throttle.

    "I stand corrected. Now, that is the sexiest thing a woman has ever said to me."

 3.47 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    When they finally emerged from the shower stall rotunda, Tas¨¬a''s clothes still had a few minutes left to cycle. Her boots, though, had been completely cleaned in the drywash side-attachment.

    She grabbed the pair and rubbed the croc leather against her face. They once more smelled as fresh as the day she bought them.

    Tas¨¬a frowned.

    A mere four days ago!

    Beauregard laughed.

    "Did you just swallow a porcupine? You look like you did."

    For one word, the object noun, he slipped into English.

    A funny sounding word at that.

    "A what now?"

    "Coendous!"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Ah! Nah. I''m just beating myself up for my bad habit of dressing in my finest duds even when I know I am about to get into some deep shit. My attitude is always, ''fuck it, I''ll just buy another cool pair,'' when I''m expecting to rumble, but then, after blood gets drawn, I get emotionally attached to the boots, or jeans, or shirt, given we''ve been through some shit together."

    Beauregard chuckled. He put his hands on her shoulders.

    "I love the fact that you are so ..."

    Tas¨¬a''s toss of head, lobbed in a defiant stance, made him switch out the word he meant to say for a more neutral sounding one.

    "... idiosyncratic."

    "You mean, weird?"

    Beauregard leaned his head into her own.

    "Well, the point is, you''ll never have to beat yourself up again. I have a wooden paddle in my study. I''ll whoop your bottom ''til your heart is content and your cheeks are blistered red if that is what it takes to assuage those negative thoughts that you are prone to waddle."

    Tas¨¬a grinned and nodded. He passed the shit test.

    "That sounds quite lovely, maybe next time."

    The bell went off in a tense beat for the dry cycle. Her clothes - thermal, anti-wetness layered socks, French cut panties, sports bra, jeans, tank top, bandanna bearing the Paraguay flag - dispensed out of the exit of rollers neatly folded.

    She stared at them, a bit pissed and annoyed.

    Now, she would have to put them all back on. Tasia was highly reticent to do so as she enjoyed strutting around in the buff for a man who liked what he saw.

    To her delight, she discovered while she turned her head towards the mirrored wall to see what Beauregard could possibly see in her, the buns of her brown little muscle butt appeared much shapelier in the altogether without a stitch on them to flatten their supple, double contours than she ever expected.

    Maybe it''s just good lighting.

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    Then with reluctance, recalling her purpose in the greater scheme of things, she shook off her mood to indulgently idle away her time. No matter how badly she deserved it after all the shit she had been put through ...

    ... fun time was over, and Alisha was waiting.

    Tas¨¬a looked at Beauregard. His eyes displayed the same reluctance to give in to the powers that be over them that she was now feeling.

    This, what we have here, is what really matters.

    She couldn''t disappoint those big, sad puppy dog-like eyes.

    Fuck it! Fun time was decidedly not over!

    She reached up, hung on to her big, sezzy American beefcake by his thick neck, and kissed him once more.

    He lifted her, placed her neatly on the hood of the Clothes Cycler Unit, pushed her thighs up against her belly until she was bottoms up and ready to receive.

    Tas¨¬a giggled.

    We haven''t done it this way before. This ought to be interesting!

    "Okay. But we have to make this one really, really quick."

    Once Tas¨¬a and Beauregard finally emerged from the shower room she merged back into the world at large, and immediately realized that they really did take their sweet-ass time with the sex play.

    "Oh shit," Tas¨¬a whispered.

    Anneb¨¦l slept on one end of the couch, snoring merrily away while Alisha slept on the other. The Arizona lass'' lips, sharp and creased, made little puff motions up in the air.

    At rest, in complete submission to slumber, the arch-hustler was truly a cutie-pie.

    Tas¨¬a checked the time on Val''s PA.

    "Ah shit, man! We''ve been going at it for more than an hour."

    A sudden voice from behind her made Tas¨¬a tense up.

    "You can let them sleep," Demona said. "The two of us can pull this off. All we need is a multi-tool and high yield bug spray concentrate."

    Demona stood by the side of Tas¨¬a and Beauregard dressed in an olive green blouse and matching pair of capris with a scarf and straw bonnie hat for flourish. Her feet were adorned in low healed brown leather Bontoni''s.

    She caught Tas¨¬a staring at her outfit.

    "You like? I purchased it off of an avatar VR wears site for an old school MMO. I thought it would appear less incongruent on me if we should engage in strenuous activities further on."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head in approval.

    "Le chic tr¨¨s utilitaire," she complemented.

    Demona stood with her hands playfully behind her waist as she posed.

    "That is precisely the look I was going for."

    Beauregard appeared befuddled at their exchange as he could only see and hear Tas¨¬a''s side of it but he still made an informed and accurate guess.

    "Is that Helo?ste? When we were dating, Alisha would disappear into her devices speaking hours on end with Helo?ste. They could have hosted a casting duo together and titled it, Girl Talk & Spy Stuff."

    Demona chuckled.

    "He''s too funny." She commented, and then as she turned to speak to Tas¨¬a a rap knocked lightly on Beauregard''s door.

    "Shit," Tas¨¬a whispered.

    Beauregard removed a 9mm snub-nose from his back pocket, and fed a clip into its magazine.

    "I''ll handle it," he stated, flatly. "Slip out the back through the guest''s bedroom window. If they''re Alisha''s regular crew they''ll want to stick around and shoot the shit like the good ol'' days."

    Tas¨¬a headed for the guest''s bedroom, and shut the door behind her. She could hear Beauregard greeting the crew as he spoke, loudly.

    "Hey, what the fuck man! Long time no see. Alisha get your butt up, you''ve got company."

    As Tas¨¬a pressed her ear against the door, she heard two new voices, one definitely that of Travis, chortling it up with Beauregard with a great deal of familiarity between all parties.

    The other voice''s deeper baritone she did not recognize, but whoever it was Beauregard sounded genuinely happy to see him.

    Satisfied that everything was going peachy-keen in the other room, Tas¨¬a stood, and quietly headed towards the window.

    Before she could cross the room, however, Demona appeared and stood in her way to stop her from going any further.

    "I don''t like it. Something isn''t right about this," she warned Tas¨¬a. "There is a third member of their party out there skulking around in the back yard."

    Tas¨¬a held her breath in check to gather greater awareness from out of the silence.

    A dabble of light dispersed through the thick curtain fabric in a flash of tinted red.

    It disappeared just as suddenly as it had formed.

    With hand gestures, Tas¨¬a commanded the AR riding goggles to expand its spectrum range to scan passed the visible frequency and interpolate the data stream it gathered to be accessible to her senses.

    Now visible to her eyes, a laser light held steady as it hit the back wall of the bedroom opposite from the bottom window pane.

    She could clearly see a bulky figure made visible in IR.

    He stood there just yards outside from the window, waiting for her to open it.

 3.48 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a wiped away the sweat from her palms. Her palms never sweated.

    She sneered in knee-jerk self-disdain.

    What a fine fucking moment we''ve picked to become a normal, scared shitless human being, she thought.

    Then, with a tad more self-reflection, Tas¨¬a eased up on her negative assessment:

    But of course, we''re scared. It''s the first time we have had anything to lose beyond our bullshit self-owning drama.

    Tas¨¬a turned back towards Demona. Before she spoke, she flipped the PA to both laryngophone and flex modes and placed it against her throat.

    It wrapped around the front of her neck gently with no more discomfort than if a scarf was placed there.

    "What''s going on," Tas¨¬a asked in an inaudible whisper. "The intent of the party outside is lethal; the ones inside are jovial. Are you certain they are together?"

    Demona frowned as she shook her head. She had even more bad news to impart.

    "Yes, I''m certain. Sit on the bed and don''t face the window. He sees you the same way you see him through his own IR goggles."

    When Tas¨¬a complied, Demona continued.

    "I just reviewed the most recent street-level video footage. The three met at the Spook Town garage, changed the codes, and split up before they arrived separately here.

    "The sniper over there is carrying a long, skinny rifle. This one, in fact. Recognize it?"

    A hologram spun in front of Demona.

    "Sure. It''s a Stealth 338 LAP. Chambers for a high caliber Lapua round." Tas¨¬a shook her head, and glanced to the wall on the backyard side before she continued. "Why doesn''t he just shoot me through the wall if he has me IR-sighted?"

    Demona flipped to another hologram that showed the sniper standing beside the SUV parked on the street beside the garage. He retrieves a box of rounds from the back of the vehicle, and he feeds them into his rifle.

    Tas¨¬a recognized the sniper. It was the Silver Fox from the billets room confrontation who went by the name Rubin.

    The feed pauses and focuses on the round in Rubin''s hands. The bullet that protrudes from the round is a semi-transparent green gelpack inside a latticed swirl of material that extends deep into the jacket.

    A gyrette. A modernized update on the rocket-propulsed gyrojet round. When the explosive materials inside the jacket combusted, the pressure given off syphoned into the latticed swirl of tubes, that once parted from their jacket insets, behaved like rocket thrusters.

    The distance, accuracy, and eventual velocity that resulted more than doubled the same capabilities found in more conventional rounds.

    Demona shook her head.

    "Their intentions aren''t lethal. It''s a paralytic round. Whatever they have planned, they want you alive."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Rubin. Now, she understood why he didn''t station himself at a distance more befitting to the sniper''s art.

    A gyrette started out at a subsonic speed. If he had stood at a more typical fifteen-hundred-foot sniping distance, the American spooks understood her fighting capabilities well enough to know she would have plenty of time to react if she heard it coming.

    That spoke well of their fear of her.

    Demona clapped her hands to snap Tas¨¬a back to attention. Moments like this one where Tas¨¬a''s tactical mindset became engaged, tended to leave the impression that she was fading out into daydream.

    It was hardly ever the case, however. She didn''t lack for situational awareness.

    "Tas¨¬a, if you would. Face the door and pretend you are listening-in on the conversation. We don''t want to give the sniper the idea we are stalling for time while we figure out how to deal with him."

    Tas¨¬a faced the door and crouched forward. She could hear the on-going conversation in the living room, but at the moment, given her current predicament, she couldn''t muster up the effort to give a shit for what was being said.

    "Yeah," Tas¨¬a began, "I have an idea how to deal with him, but I need to know if you believe we have a minute to spare -," Demona nodded for Tas¨¬a to continue, "- do you think I am being hunted for what I know about the Amongst Us?

    "How can it be that I can see them and others can''t? Even more strangely, they were blind to it in perceiving one another''s true identity until I was present in their company."

    Demona walked over to her and sat down beside her. She nodded as she spoke.

    "Forgive my earlier display of disbelief and cognitive dissonance when you told me about the Amongst Us. I was shocked because it explained almost too neatly a gap in my understanding of your role as the Sigrid Rosa. Not believing that Amongst Us existed, you blindsided me.

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    "Mind you, though the Cull Spore Invasion occurred over the span of a single evening, in one form or another, it has been in the works since the 1960s, when money was poured in research to weaponize mind-altering fungi by clandestine operations the world over.

    "So, though you were born before the Invasion, you are not really pre-Invasion in how you have been wired for it.

    "Take that into consideration when I tell you that I believe your neural system is designed specifically to counter the Amongst Us, and to spot them when they are in a state of anxiety. Cameras and other eyeballs don''t do that. I''m certain of that. I had already studied tens of thousands of hours of Spooktowner footage and even sensorium recordings of local events before you arrived.

    "I found not even a hint of non-human activity amongst any of them. I believe you are part of a backup plan if things go horribly wrong."

    Tas¨¬a didn''t respond. She was lost in thought, wondering, do the nanospore entities know that about me?

    Demona paused and looked down for a moment before she continued.

    "I hesitate to bring this up given I have seen your Beauregard in a state of anxiety in your presence. Do you think we can eliminate him as a suspect?"

    Tas¨¬a''s heart sank as she gave this possibility consideration. No, it couldn''t be that he was one of them.

    Still, she had reason to doubt his motivations.

    Even though she recalled that he once claimed he loathed spooks as a class, he was in fact close to the individuals he chatted up in the living room.

    Another doubt came to mind.

    They somehow knew of her presence in his home well enough to setup an ambush against her.

    She unintentionally clawed at the sheets she sat on.

    No. It wasn''t possible. No matter where these facts lead, on an emotional, gut level, they make little sense.

    "Tas¨¬a?"

    "No. It''s not possible. I''ve pissed the frothy, misty brew in front of him twice now. You were in the shower with us the last time I did it. You saw his scared shitless reaction. You even laughed about it. Plus, our fucking got pretty intense, right? Either instance would have triggered an Amongst Us event if he were one, right?"

    So, that''s how they knew that I was here. Tas¨¬a was relieved.

 3.49 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    The light in the room disappeared, and Mel shot up in the air just before two rounds spun out from the window.

    In Tas¨¬a''s estimation, the rounds were shot from a .32 pistol with a suppressor attached to the barrel. She raised the Stealth 338 LAP, ready to take the fucker who shot at Mel down as soon as he poked his head out of the window.

    Whoever it was, her task was made much easier when the door was shut. The light added visual noise to an otherwise smooth interpolation of the world around her via the IR riding goggles.

    Then she caught sight of him.

    Motherfuckin'' Hugo Brassi!

    As his hands, one with a pistol held in it, draped across the window sill, Brassi leaned his head to peek outside.

    Tas¨¬a aimed the rifle at the side of his forehead. She was careful to avoid the temple. She had made Brassi a promise, and she wanted him to remain alive long enough to witness the fruition of that vow.

    The note she had left on his desk back at the IMCQ:

    Lieutenant Hugo Brassi,

    You are one stupid motherfucker. I hope you are not overly attached to the material wealth in your life because you are soon to lose it all.

    Signed,

    Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris,

    The Angel of Theft.

    She had little doubt then that she would run into the piece of shit once she escaped out in the wild. Now that his head was perfectly arranged figuratively on that platter she had always imagined, Tas¨¬a relished the moment in which she now lived.

    The very air in its humid breeze tasted of saltwater taffy on her tongue.

    Brassi whispered, "Rubin? Rubin? You there? Fuck! Did she get past you?"

    Tas¨¬a pulled the trigger, and Brassi''s head snapped to the side with what appeared to be a highly unpleasant thunk.

    It left a bloody scrape streaked across his forehead.

    His upper torso fell against the window sill. Tasia shouldered the rifle, walked up to the window, and pulled Brassi through it.

    After he dropped to the ground, Tas¨¬a dragged him to the hedges and propped him face down against Rubin''s ass.

    Tasia looked down at her victims contemptuously.

    I ought to just lay a piss stream into the both of them, right here and now. Then arrange the two fuckers together in a sixty-nine!

    But Tas¨¬a shook her head and admonished herself for her devious thoughts.

    So very mature of you, Tas¨¬a. It''s as if you never left the seminary.

    Tas¨¬a retrieved Brassi''s gun. A pretty sweet, top-of-the-line Walther PPQ M2 chambered for a .40 SW round with a suppressor attachment and an extended 7-inch barrel

    It was a substantially higher caliber pistol than she expected given the low and tight whisper of sound that came out of it.

    She had never before seen this particular sound suppressor with its odd inline segmentation, but the beveled design of it radiated quality.

    The gun and its attachments were going into her collection.

    Tas¨¬a unfolded a netted laundry bag and placed the Walther inside of it after detaching the suppressor.

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    Next, she searched Brassi''s ID and grinned satisfactorily as she memorized the address listed on it. He had IDs for access to several exclusive and sensitive areas in the greater Asunci¨®n metropolis. Including the SkyTether.

    When were these made? Before or after he was shitcanned from the IMCQ?

    She''d have to check on that later.

    In his wallet was also another item that perked her interest. It was a blue key card formed from thin, matted tin. It bore an imprinted sequence of eight Roman numerals on a background that consisted of the same motif of Christ being devoured by two wolves which she had discovered in his office at the IMCQ.

    On the opposite side, viewed like a dollar bill, the word ''Lupus IV'', was written at the top, and ''Vita Occulta'' was written at the bottom.

    Translated from Latin to Spanish, that would be Vida Escondida. Her stomping grounds when she was living the high life.

    Very Curious...

    Tas¨¬a stripped him of all his other valuables. A watch, a signet ring that bore a Lupus IV engraving, a wedding ring, a necklace, and most unexpectedly, a studded scarab broach attached to his right nipple.

    Another symbol from his fraternal order, perhaps?

    They all went into the bag.

    Tas¨¬a shifted over to Rubin. Poor bastard. His second mugging in a little more than twenty-four hours

    She felt him up and found a gun strapped to the inside of his belt.

    When she pulled it out of its holster, Tas¨¬a could not have been more disappointed. The gritty polymer grip and odd grip angle felt weird in her hands.

    In her estimation, the most aesthetically unappealing scrap of materials and overrated firearm ever assembled

    Ewww! Fuck. A Glock!

    Tas¨¬a quickly disassembled it and scattered its parts to the wind. She kept the magazine of 10mm rounds, though.

    After bagging the magazine extension, she searched more thoroughly. Though he had not replaced his jewelry, the mesh-alloyed, sheathed-styled boots were a valuable pair.

    She stripped them off of his feet and added the boots to the collection.

    He had replaced the IDs and credit cards she had taken the previous night. She chucked the wallet into the bag.

    Demona stood by the wall beside her.

    "Hilarious," She began. "Their personnel resources officer is going to be upset with Mr. Estes."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. "I''m not sure how Rubin is going to file his paperwork with a missing finger. Where have you been?"

    Demona bobbed her head oddly as she shook her head.

    "I didn''t want to disturb you. For the past five minutes, you have appeared to be in an unvarnished state of ecstasy. You must have history with this other gentleman."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She looked down into Brossi''s eyes. They did not move, but there was no reason why he could not hear her speak.

    "I have never so much as spoken to the man one-on-one, but to him, I was nothing more than another body to propel him forward in his career mobility."

    A notion came to her. Tas¨¬a looked towards where Rubin stood in front of the window. She caught sight of the severed digit and went over to retrieve it.

    Continuing where she left off, Tas¨¬a spoke again.

    "And for that, I vow to destroy him so utterly and to such an extent that he is made radioactive for anyone to dare get near.

    "That is why I won''t kill him outright just yet. He has to suffer. He has to know."

    With that said, Tas¨¬a leaned over Hugo Brassi with a wide smile. She displayed Rubin''s severed index finger for him to see just before she placed it in his right nostril and twisted it inside as far as it would go.

    My seminary sisters would definitely approve!

    When Tas¨¬a finished with her antics, she crept further down the side of Beauregard''s house. She squatted, leaned against the wall, and studied the key card for a moment before slapping her other hand with it.

    Demona squatted beside her.

    "There is something bothering you, Tas¨¬a?"

    She nodded.

    "Yeah. Those suspicions we just talked about are creeping back into my mind. How does Brassi know my lover boy? And is Beauregard a member of this fucked-up Neo-Roman wannabes pact?"

    Demona snarled.

    "I checked into it while you were going loot-happy."

    "And?"

    "Nothing definite. But I don''t think so. I have pinned down the moment they met at a gun club firing range, where they happened to both be members. Two years ago, on one occasion, they time stamped in to the range thirteen minutes apart, but, upon leaving, they time stamped out at the same time.

    "It appears they met right then and there and became acquaintances with a mutual interest. If there is anything else to the relationship beyond that, I have nothing conclusive to go on either way."

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to the nearby window.

    "By my estimation, that should be his bedroom. Demona, if you could do me a favor, could you deactivate the monitoring devices and indulge me for five minutes while I do a search?"

    Demona looked up.

    "Tas¨¬a, you sounded pretty serious about your intentions of having a life together with Beauregard. Were you? Serious in your intentions, I mean."

    Tasia scratched at her elbow as she spoke.

    "Hell yes."

    Demona pointed with her thumb to the window.

    "Then, don''t do it. No relationship can survive that kind of distrust and paranoia because once you start down that path, you won''t be able to stop. Paranoia is habitual."

    "But," Tas¨¬a started.

    "No. Don''t do it. When you meet him let him know of your concerns. If he admits he is in Brassi''s fraternity, make it clear his loyalties cannot be divided between it and you.

    "Be up front. Trust me, in the spook world, it is the only way a relationship can survive."

    Tas¨¬a glanced again at the window, but she shook her head and stood up.

    "Come on, Demona. Let''s get out of here and retrieve that NeoPalm of yours."

 3.50 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    As she picked up the netted laundry bag, a commotion of giggles occurred on the other side of Beauregard''s house.

    Beauregard and the remaining guests were mingling on the front porch.

    Demona motioned Tas¨¬a to stand up.

    "We should grab Alisha. Let her know she has been exposed. It would make things much easier on us if we bring her along."

    Tas¨¬a eyed her, skeptically.

    "What if they changed the codes specifically to keep her out?"

    "That''s why I changed my mind about the two of us doing it alone. We need her hands on that peculiar control panel set-up at the garage when I force an override."

    Tas¨¬a had a good deal of experience on her father''s hobbyists circuit boards and control panels. Some consoles required at least an afternoon of proper training to operate, and were prone to shut down when wrongly configured or handled.

    She nodded in agreement.

    "Makes sense."

    Tas¨¬a stood up, stretched, and popped her back.

    "I thought of sending Mel to retrieve the neoPalm but I would never forgive myself if he were to get stung or bitten by the devil hornets. Unless Alisha neutralizes those lanceros, it has to be me that goes up there."

    Demona cleared her virtual throat.

    "There is quite a bit more to this than just retrieving my neoPalm PA."

    Tas¨¬a threw her a curious side glance that connected with Demona''s suddenly beaded eyes.

    Demona continued.

    "We have to rescue Val Vitaliy. The garage is key to finding him. I worry that you may not be up to it at the moment. Do you recall telling me that you have about one half of an adventure left in you this evening?"

    "Of course," Tas¨¬a smacked her own buns with a pat and squeezed with both hands, "but that was before I got my haunches nicely reinvigorated and back into high gear. I''m still buzzing from it.

    Demona chortled, but quickly moved on.

    "So, that''s a definite yes?"

    "If we can realistically rescue Val this evening, I am up for it."

    Tasia grabbed a tree branch, turned her self around on it, and jumped onto the roof. From there she scurried over to the front side.

    She crawled low to get a good view of everyone. Anneb¨¦l, Beauregard, Alisha and Travis had taken their respective corners along the rail scoop. Each held a beer in hand that appeared to be from Beauregard''s extensive collection of German imports.

    Anneb¨¦l smoked a Gitanes Blonde Cerise. The pack from which it belonged she held in her other hand.

    Dang! Tas¨¬a cursed herself. She had forgotten to show Anneb¨¦l the pack she purchased earlier.

    What a dear was Beauregard, though? He likely deduced that Anneb¨¦l was the friend that matched the lovely woman in the illustration, and applied that knowledge graciously.

    Tas¨¬a adjusted her position to get a better angle on Travis. His eyes darted back into the house, apparently concerned that Hugo Brassi was taking a long time to return.

    She decided that confronting him would be a waste of time that could be devoted to other things. Tas¨¬a aimed the Stealth 338 LAP above and to the side of the mechhead apparatus embedded in the side of Travis'' skull.

    Tas¨¬a gave it second thought.

    If she hit it directly, it would likely slam the apparatus deeper into his skull and kill him instantly.

    Not that Travis would have been a great loss to humanity, but still, it would have been rude to murder the man on Beauregard''s doorstep.

    She decided to take a more cautious shot. When Travis raised his beer bottle up to his lips, Tas¨¬a fixed the laser pointer onto the back of his hand, and she took the opportunity.

    The Stealth 338 barrel design for this series of rifle was not a true sound dampener like a standard attachable suppressor. Instead, it was designed to scatter the explosive sound into an odd whispery whistle and cause ventriloquist echo.

    The heads of all four of them jolted to the trees far down the street.

    The barrel was made for jungle warfare, and it sounded more like a churlish parrot calling from elsewhere than a gunshot.

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    Travis dropped his beer bottle and he stared at his reddened hand.

    "Fuck!" He squealed.

    "Problem?" Alisha asked.

    As he spoke, his voice began to slur.

    "Yeah. It tingles and feels numb all the way up to my elbow."

    With his eyes rolling to the back of his head, Travis slumped down. His mechhead apparatus smacked the beer bottle as it still poured on the porch floorboards. The bottle spun off the steps splashing beer over the entire area.

    Anneb¨¦l pointed at a scattered tangle of coppery threads that once were the thruster tubes that clung to a rail near her.

    "I saw that round burst against that hand he was holding up. Its from a gyrette!"

    Both Alisha and Beauregard ducked as they drew their handguns. Tas¨¬a was impressed with Alisha''s outstanding choice in firearms. A small Smith & Wesson 642 Airweight LTD revolver chambered for a .38.

    High firepower for even the daintiest hands.

    Its holster was so well contoured against Alisha''s hip that it was likely strapped on the American spook the first time they met without Tas¨¬a being any the wiser to it.

    "Up here and don''t shoot me." Tas¨¬a yelled out.

    "Tas¨¬a," Beauregard called out. "Did you just shoot Travis?"

    Demona waved to get her attention.

    "Careful what you reveal about his house being wired with audio-visual listening devices. That dirty work I discouraged you from doing, let me handle it instead."

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she gave Beauregard a big, gobliny smile.

    "Yup. It was me. Hugo Brassi and Rubin Estes are knocked out in your backyard."

    She climbed down the roof and joined the three.

    "What''s Rubin doing here?" Alisha asked.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    Bad stuff, that''s what.

    "They set up an ambush aimed at me. They were going to use this baby right -," Tas¨¬a smacked the Stealth 332 LAP on its side, "- here to do to me what I just did to Travis. Somehow they knew I was here. As for you, pretty lady, they are totally onto you.

    "After our mission, we need to get you out of Spook Town."

    Beauregard coughed and cleared his throat before he spoke.

    "That PA on your neck - it''s geared up to talk to Demona?"

    "Yup. These two chicas, we''re practically hip-to-hip now."

    Alisha perked up, and grabbed her own PA to flip on the AR camera.

    "You have Demona on reference point?" She asked.

    Tas¨¬a confirmed. "Wait until you see her outfit. You''ll want to have it custom made for your own collection."

    Demona wagged her finger. "Don''t you have it made in my signature color, Tas¨¬a. Though, you''d look fantastic in sepi¨¤ted urban camo."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. All of her friends were ever so silly.

    "Mind if I borrow Demona for one moment. The two of us need to talk."

    "Your PA can''t build a reference point?"

    Alisha shook her head. "Its my officially issued device. I asked for the dinkiest one available. One that''s easily bypassed."

    Tas¨¬a nodded and handed over Anneb¨¦l''s AR riding goggles. Alisha slipped them on as she went back inside.

    With regret that she needed to have a serious discussion, Tas¨¬a turned back around and she faced Beauregard with a wane smile on her face.

    How was she going to handle this?

    "So, Hugo Brassi?" She asked.

    "You know him?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded, but this interrogation was not about her.

    "Apparently, you do to."

    Beauregard cleared his throat once more.

    "I met him at my gun club a couple of years ago. After we talked about a few common interests, he asked me to join his hunting lodge. We''ve been asshole buddies ever since.

    "But, just now, I thought it weird when he showed up with Travis. Hugo never came by the bar, so how they knew each other is something of a mystery to me."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. So far it checked out. She removed the key card from her jean pocket.

    "Is this related to that hunting lodge?"

    Beauregard head was vigorously animated when he shook it.

    "Yup. Its a fraternal order of hunters that carries its tradition back to the Medieval knights. They, I should say we, though I am just there for the game hunting, are very big on tradition and feast ceremonies in particular."

    Tas¨¬a eyed him with rueful humor in her gaze.

    "Those traditions don''t involve hunting peasants do they?"

    Beauregard laughed, defensively.

    "Good Lord, no. Else, I would be amongst the hunted. The club is quite respectable. Queen Moxie''s consort is a member. We went on a safari together in the Roja foothills just last year."

    Tas¨¬a laughed as she thought of the month long detoxification that those who left the Greater Quadra outside of Asunci¨®n had to endure.

    "He must have fell into Charlotte''s disfavor if he needed to get away from her for a few months."

    "I swore to confidentiality, but that he did."

    He held Tas¨¬a with his hands tossing the hair that lay against her bandanna before he continued to speak.

    "I figured out why you have a strong animosity towards Brassi. You are the one that escaped the IMCQ in a blaze of glory. Do you prefer to be called Tas¨¬a or Avellana?"

    She didn''t even notice he had called her by her name a few moments ago. Slipping, but not slipping. It just didn''t matter.

    Tas¨¬a nuzzled the side of her face against his chest as she looked into his eyes.

    "Which ever one feels right by your lips."

    He chuckled.

    "Obviously, my sister and I are here because we have a past, as well. Related to the Incivility. You could call us political refuges. Though our detractors would call us bank robbers and murderers."

    Tas¨¬a smiled broadly.

    "Like Francine and Jesse James."

    Beauregard uproariously choked on his own laughter.

    "One helluva gender-bender you pulled on Frank there, but yeah, kinda exactly like that."

    Then Beauregard turned serious. His eyes narrowed.

    "So, I have a proposition for you. How about you and Alisha going about your mission, and that Gallic beauty over there and I dispose of these three idiots."

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head back in surprise. She inferred from what Demona cautioned her that the Spy Master was going to keep an eye on Beauregard and Tas¨¬a''s three victims to see how they all behaved together after Tas¨¬a left.

    However, this was a much better test of Beauregard''s loyalty to her. Sure, she would have to break her vow to Brassi to systematically ruin his material existence but carrying a grudge like that to the bitter end was bad for the soul.

    To that, she breathed out, relieved of the burden.

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she studied Travis'' helpless form as he laid at her feet.

    "They all have been warned by me and knew the consequences, but Travis. . . He is not really as deserving of death as Rubin and Brassi are. Take him to the city limit and warn him not to come back nor contact the others."

    She turned to Anneb¨¦l who had been mostly silent during the conversation. Tas¨¬a noticed that the brawler carefully observed everyone.

    "You okay with the plan?"

    Anneb¨¦l stood up straight, and folded her arms together.

    "More like I was born for this shit."

    What I like to hear!

    Tas¨¬a turned back towards Beauregard with a hug pressed against his waist and hips like she could just ride him then and there if no one objected.

    She looked him in the eyes as she told him in a low, whispery voice:

    "You do this one thing for me, and when the day comes that you get around to asking a certain question. My answer will be yes. Yes. Yes, and yes."

 3.51 Book Two: The Ascendant City

    It''s not like I had a choice when I got the hell out of Villa Marr¨°n with mobsters, bounty hunters, and mercs showing up everywhere looking for me.

    I don''t even have a clue where to start looking for them; I can''t save everybody! That''s just the harsh unreality of the world we live in.

    Ohh....

    "You met a Serbian by the name of Sylvia? Tracked to some of your secret accounts, actually."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "Yes. You helped me out there. Jammed that satellite signal that was set up to kill me."

    Felicit¨¦ paused for a second.

    "That''s... right. Thanks for reminding me. Let me check on something."

    So much for achieving a mere answer to the puzzle when so damn many questions have yet to even be properly asked.

    Silvia''s eyes scanned the stars. Tas¨¬a thought the Serbian assassin seemed lost in thought, but then her eyes fixed on one location, and she jerked her arm up to point at it.

    "Tas¨¬a, do you see just a thumbnail above the star Gacrux, but slanted in the direction of Beta Centauri, that there is a bluish-green object? It is a bit dim and small, but quite distinctive once you focus on it."

    Who the hell had ever heard of a spontaneous nebula? Hundreds of light years across, and limited to that speed in their steller formation. Bloody ridiculous to even consider the possibility!

    With the prevalence of amateur astronomers, how long would the powers-that-be keep that lie up? The ship has a metallic sharpness to its texture beneath all the luster. More importantly, why were the powers-that-be even bothering with a lie?

    Were they living in two different universes? Tas¨¬a thought with much exacerbated hyperbole.

    I know what I see. Is the power of suggestion so strong that a faked media image can be planted in people''s heads that prevents verification with their very own eyes?

    The tattoo.

 3.52 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Alisha eyed her, quizzically, as Tas¨¬a approached the van,

    She asked the American spook:

    "Would you happen to have a set of keys? Or know the relay?"

    Alisha smiled thinly.

    "I''m afraid not. The van is Rubin''s baby. He rarely lets anyone else even ride in it."

    "What about security measures? It''s not going to grab me by the tits and rip them off is it?"

    Alisha folded her arms and chuckled.

    "That''s oddly specific. Is that from personal experience?"

    Tas¨¬a gave a firm, deft nod.

    "Yup. I tried to steal a hotrod when we, the Sisters in the Service of a Loving and Graceful God, were on a field trip to a stock car race in San Pedro."

    Alisha grinned wide.

    "Let me get this straight. You were a nun. You tried to steal a car that was being driven in an active race?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "I saw an opportunity. The pit crew was busy checking on everything else but the 1971 STP Plymouth. The reserve refill tanks, the spare tires, air gauges, all the things they routinely check

    "That most bueno of a car just sat right there in front of me begging little momma to take it for a spin. Well, it may have looked like it was from 1971 and driven by Petty nearly a hundred years ago, but the mesh carapace hid a set of clinchers camouflaged inside the door frame.

    "When I tried to jimmy the lock, they thrust out and grabbed me by the tits, and pulled me up against the door where I couldn''t move. With my face smashed up against its side, I could barely breath either.

    "Two pit crew guys laughed it up when they finally turned around and noticed me. Fortunately, they thought I was only there to admire the sexy machine. So, they helped me out of the jam up and let me return to the seats."

    Alisha laughed out loud but stopped and looked around to make sure she didn''t draw any attention. Coyotes of an urban disposition roamed near a line of parked waste services trucks across the street. They perked their ears up, curiously.

    Alisha finally spoke.

    "Well, you could poke the van with a stick."

    She suggested as she pointed to a tangle of branches lying in a waste water ditch near by.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Odds are, your friend has a daemon inside that vehicle. Taunting it might piss it off. Something about it seems like it is just watching and waiting for me to pull some shit."

    Alisha gave her a roll of the eyes that expressed: You''re being paranoid.

    The American spook gave the backdoor a swift kick with her left boot. Inside the cabin a shimmery grey light came to life. It quickly dimmed to nothing.

    "Shit," Tas¨¬a whispered. "Only things designed to hurt you emmit grey light."

    Alisha snorted.

    "Like ghosts, you mean?"

    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    Tas¨¬a squinched her eyes back at Alisha in a hard gaze.

    "Seriously? Macro controls for wards and guardian entities tend to give off a grey shimmer when active or in some form of interaction. I''m surprised Demona is not telling you the same."

    Alisha frowned.

    "She is on standby. Though Demona doesn''t technically sleep, her maintenance cycles keep her big-ass brain from atrophying."

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she considered the emotional state of her partner-of-convenience. She gave Alisha''s attire a once over. At the moment, the spy looked like she emmerged from the den of a punk rock club.

    Stylish Veronicas, silver jeans, and a lacy black dress with dozens of metal studs flowing down the length of it to mid thigh.

    When they first met, Alisha came across as the quintessential American hippie girl. She was anything but that now.

    A true spy-craft changeling.

    Tas¨¬a did a quick psyche-eval to determine if their team-up was going to work. Alisha had her reasons to be tense and shoot from the hip at that moment.

    Tas¨¬a could appreciate having one''s life turned upside down, and what that tended to do for one''s emotional state of being.

    She would just roll with whatever sarcasm that came her way for the time being.

    "Well?" Alisha looked at her and back at the van. "Those breach skills, it would be kind of neat to see them in action."

    She regarded the American''s words appreciatively.

    I would call that, ''politely testy.''

    Tas¨¬a answered with two raised fingers to urge patience, and a spritely, "sure."

    She just needed to check on one factor.

    Tas¨¬a pulled out Val''s PA, set its interface to text console mode, and pinged the van.

    That it possessed a Personal Daemon was confirmed. It''s neural net served a double purpose - an AI transmote, and a sensor graph that spread like a dot matrix across the entirety of the van.

    The former function was of little use to her unless she planned to hack a takeover for the entire system. That she did not need to do to merely burglarize it.

    The later aspect of its net when she ran a diagnosis confirmed that her plan was doable. She studied the sensor set-up for the three entrance doors.

    So long as she did not turn any of the locking mechanisms, the daemon would not react, but once she did, the reaction was going to result in sheer overkill.

    Rubin had its defenses dialed up way higher than what was needed for a van. It made her wonder what he kept inside it that caused him to over-compensate.

    Ironically, perhaps, the extreme attenuation of the van''s defense mechanisms was its weakness.

    Tas¨¬a reached into her fanny-pack and dug out the few remaining .22 moon-clips. There was one specialty type she never got around to using that she intended to use to neutralize the surveillance cameras.

    Informally, they were called sparkies.

    A sparky cartridge held a bullet that absorbed both electrical and kinetic energy before it pulsated a mass of built up energy back out.

    Its effects were not entirely predictable but were guaranteed to be ugly for whatever they were used against.

    Tas¨¬a freed two sparkies out of a moon-clip. She also removed a bobby-pin from the hair behind her right ear.

    She aligned the two rounds inside the turnkey rotor locking mechanism and held them in place with her knuckles. With the other hand she pulled the bobby-pin inside out so that it now had to be held between her fingers to keep the pin from snapping back in place.

    Tas¨¬a slipped the pin between the two bullets until all three objects were snuggly fit and immovable. Before she was finished, Tas¨¬a carefully bent the bulbous bobby-pin tips snug against the rim of their respective cartridge cases where they touched the center-fired primers.

    Tas¨¬a stepped back several yards and urged Alisha to join her.

    "You might want to do the same."

    Alisha raised her chin in challenge.

    "I think I can make that shot," she stated with more than a little braggadocio.

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She checked the Magellani .22 revolver. Eleven standard rounds remained in the cylinder.

    "Alright, sister. I''d prefer you to use my gun. You got one sweet and sexy hunk of metal there that you are holding, but the dainty pew-pew this one gives off wont even attract the coyote''s attention."

    Alisha took the gun from Tas¨¬a.

    "When I was a little girl back in Arizona, I use to shoot prairie dogs from the back of a four wheeler quad to collect bounties during the Summer of the Lycanthropy Scare. This will be child''s play."

    Alisha lined up her shot, and drilled the bullet into the curve of the bobby-pin perfectly. The two .22 rounds spun into the locking mechanism'' chambered rotor as they slammed forward.

    With a snapping sound, sparks flew about. A grey light pulsed to life and oscillated from one end of the van in rapid succession to the other. It knocked against the bullet-proofed windows violently until they all shattered.

    The daemon grew spectral, and she saw within it a ghastly face that quickly dissipated.

    "Oh, shit," Alisha exclaimed, "did you see that!"

    "I''m afraid I did."

    A slight orange glow shimmered into life inside the van. Tas¨¬a checked with Val''s PA. She still had a readout of the van''s vitals. The circuitry was rebuilding.

    "We ought to hurry," Tas¨¬a urged. "The daemon will be back before too long."

    "Well, after you," Alisha motioned.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "Now, who is afraid of ghosts?"

 3.53 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a urged the American spook forward, to join her at the rear doors of the van.

    Alisha shuffled up to her and murmured.

    "If you start bok-boking and calling me chicken, I''m going to punch you."

    Tas¨¬a crouched and her left hand shifted down to her stiletto. Already in position to thrust out a gut wound before she realized what she was doing, Tas¨¬a stayed her hand.

    "Kidding," Alisha yelped, "kidding!"

    Tas¨¬a straightened back up as she shook her head

    "In Paraguay, we don''t casually threaten violence, joking or not."

    Alisha waved her hands, defensively.

    "I''m really sorry."

    Tas¨¬a turned back around, and let it be known as drily and unaffected as possible:

    "Okay. Just don''t let it happen again. Nothing personal or reflective of what I think of you, but I am strongly conditioned not to tolerate it."

    Alisha smiled awkwardly as she helped Tas¨¬a pry open the door. When the interior was revealed, they both whistled in high appraisal.

    On both sides of the compartment, vertical ladder racks, bulk-edged storage cabinets, and outward facing partitions were brim-full of an assortment of utility items. All of it fastidiously organized and clean.

    "This is not how Rubin keeps his room back at the Flamenco Rosa," Alisha commented.

    Tas¨¬a smiled and shrugged.

    "Spook mental training is quite an amazing discipline, isn''t it? He could be doing the double agent thing too and presenting a false front of being someone without OCD."

    Alisha found her warmly voiced chortle once more.

    "In this line of work, we all are projecting opposites. I''m not naturally presupposed towards being a sales agent - quite the bookworm introvert, actually, but in the role that persona takes control and I talk people into buying stuff."

    At some point, she would have to ask Alisha, towards what purpose? But at the moment there was a security matrix being rebuilt around them.

    That question would have to wait.

    Tas¨¬a focused on the cage in the center. It appeared familiar. Then she froze up when she saw that a Gremlin police droid was inside it.

    She was certain it was the very same one she struggled with in the ducts of Ward Ocho.

    "Damn, del Alma-Gris. You look like you just spotted your ex from across the discotheque. I gather that you have history with that sexy little guy."

    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she spotted the dent she had put in it. Someone took the time to smooth it back over.

    "Relax, chica. He can''t hurt you anymore. So, what are we looking for? How much time do we have."

    She shook off her momentary discombobulation, glanced down at the PA, an estimated 27% complete.

    Tas¨¬a answered, "let''s get this wrapped up within five minutes. I saw in Demona''s video feed a compartment over here where he grabbed a box of speciality rounds for -," she ran her fingers down the length of the barrel attached to the Stealth 338 LAP, "- this gun."

    Tas¨¬a searched the compartment as she spoke. Inside were 338 clips stacked neatly. Hollow points. A true flesh eater. If she encountered anymore phase beasts, she would be well prepared.

    As she loaded the spring fed magazine, a set of eight moon clips of .357 Magnum FMJs stared back at eye level.

    Her odds of success were now increased, substantially.

    She searched the cabinets further. The gun that the rounds belonged to had to be close by since she did not find a .357 on the three men.

    The next cabinet over had a bottom release to its middle drawer. It pulled out a black felt display that featured three handguns.

    She had little time to examine the two pistols so she laid them inside the netted bag for further investigation.

    Now, a Chiappa White Rhino 50DS .357 Magnum was all that remained in the case. An odd duck of a gun with a barrel aligned on the undercarriage of the frame.

    Tas¨¬a had never trained with one but she had little doubt that she would catch on quickly. The Vaquero needed cleaning and maintenance after the extensive usage that she gave it.

    She placed the Vaquero in the bag and after adjusting the support straps she placed the Chiappa in the holster hitched to the inside of her right boot.

    Tas¨¬a stood up and searched for more loot to grab before they retreated. Further up the isle was an entire cyber sensorium deck stacked for storage.

    Where is that unit going? Perhaps she should attempt to take over the entire system while it''s defensive systems were down.

    That bitch could fetch a hefty price through a fence. Her Villa Marr¨®n biker club friends would love her for it.

    "Hey," Alisha called out as if startled. "What the devil is this?"

    Alisha pulled out a cloth lined cardboard box. She laid it on the floorboard so Tasia could sort through it.

    When Tas¨¬a examined the contents and she realized what they were, her anger flared up quite mightily.

    "Santa Muerta malditos estos salvajes."

    - Santa Muerta curse those savages.

    "This is bad, isn''t it?" Alisha asked.

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She pointed to the bone plaque with the name Santo V¨ªctor de los Setos. Beside it lay a Roman collar whose front was soaked in dry blood from where a 308 round shredded the priest''s neck.

    "These are the holy relics used to consecrate the new cathedral near Buenos Aires. They stole them! What are those sons of bitches really about?"

    A yellow light began to throb inside the cabin. Tas¨¬a glanced at the PA. Reconstruction was only at 53%.

    Tas¨¬a raised her head and asked:

    "If you could grab that box, I''ll take this -."

    Tas¨¬a jumped and spun around when she heard a familiar metal on metal hiss. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the gremlin tentacle barely miss her ankle.

    It curved back around and clenched onto Alisha by the forearm. With a whipping snap it threw her on the floorbed.

    The back doors slammed shut and locked into place. A pulsing shriek roaring from the front of the van unnerved Tas¨¬a greatly.

    She had to catch her breath.

    The PA tread out a countdown not extrapolated from the van data like her security matrix reconstruction estimate but read directly from it.

    114 Seconds and counting.

    As she pulled on the floor board with her palms Alisha turned back towards Tas¨¬a. The spook had only suffered minor injuries with scrapes on both of her elbows.

    She was stuck in place with the Gremlin''s grip holding her down. Tasia noticed the uncomfortable way Alisha rubbed her thighs together. She had pissed herself.

    That level of fear. She knows something.

    Tas¨¬a turned the PA around and showed her the screen.

    "Alisha, what is this?"

    "Deadman switch. Rubin had it set to where if his heart stopped all the evidence of his sordid activities would be destroyed in an act of absolute incineration."

    In spite of the dire circumstances, Tas¨¬a felt a rush of joy and elation.

    Beauregard had just passed her first test.

 3.54 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    "Tas¨¬a," Alisha screamed. "Back to planet Earth, please!"

    He would kill for me. Would he really make a baby with me like he teased?

    Her mother''s singing voice flowed through an old English language tune, would you marry me anyway . . . would you have my baby?

    "Tas¨¬a!"

    Her mother''s English was so beautifully fluent and she dreamed of making it big in the States like Astrud Gilberto did so many decades ago.

    That was before the Nanospores ruined everything.

    If Tas¨¬a''s second test succeeded, she would have to contact her parents to arrange for the third test.

    She only avoided calling them because she didn''t want her affairs coming back on them. But this was too important not to involve them.

    Alisha lurched her head up and pulled against the clawed restraint. Before the American spook could speak, Tas¨¬a wagged her finger.

    "Keep calm. The gremlin likely wont do anything else unless we trigger its riot response."

    "Where were you just now?"

    Alisha whispered that question in exasperation.

    "Planning for a beautiful future."

    Tas¨¬a glanced at the display on her PA. Ninety-seven seconds. She would be cutting it close with her second test but there would never be a better time to exert some pressure then now to get real answers.

    "How did you know that is a deadman switch?"

    Alisha stared at Tas¨¬a as if she were stark raving mad, but then volunteered:

    "The alarm sounded. I recognized it from previous experience with them."

    Tas¨¬a laughed.

    "A limited hang out, at this time? Come on. You knew of Rubin''s set-up but you didn''t warn me. Why?"

    Alisha bit her lower lip and chewed upon her answer before she spoke. Apparently, she chose to speak the truth.

    "I didn''t think Beauregard would do it. Those are his asshole buddies he volunteered to kill for you."

    Tas¨¬a gave her a cold stare down as she expended a few precious seconds before speaking again.

    "Is he one of you? A spook?"

    Alisha shook her head fiercely.

    "No. Never has he trained with the agency. The most he has ever got entangled in our affairs is the fence work he does on occasion."

    The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    "What about the second coming of Rome bullshit club, is he a member of rank?"

    Alisha eyed the box of desecrated relics; she batted her lashes at them fearfully.

    "Honey, I know less about them than you do."

    Tas¨¬a nodded, affirmatively; she believed her. The PA read sixty-five seconds. She slid the device in her front pocket, reached behind her ear and removed a long, thin lock pick and a pair of bobby pins.

    "This little guy is not going to like it that I keep doing this to him."

    She could tell by the sensor readout on its head that the gremlin was essentially innate. It only woke up on them as a feedback response to the deadman switch setting off. That action overloaded all of the electronic systems.

    After that momentary flow, it shut back down. Still, that didn''t do Alisha any good.

    Tas¨¬a found the two switches that locked the claw in place and kept its assembly together. That was key to the weakness of the design - when the claw clenched it talons, it had to internally reverse the center of pressure.

    Hence the need of the switch placements.

    "How can you be so calm?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged. How did the Americans put it? Then she remembered!

    "You and me? We are not the same."

    She said as she worked the pins and leveled the lockpick in place beneath them.

    She learned from the incident where the Gremlin confronted her in the ducts of Ward Ocho that the switches would only move if done in concert.

    That saved an enormous amount of time.

    The bobby pins were each placed folded against the tips of their respective switches. Once set in place, Tas¨¬a worked the lock pick beneath the claw rotaries, as she carefully snagged each of the bobby pins by their curved-sided ends.

    She ripped the pick back towards her and thrust downward. The claw fell loose and plunked on the floorboards.

    Alisha shrieked loud. Equal parts terror and relief as she screamed, "done with this shit. So done! Done! Done!"

    She quickly got up in a mad scramble, and pulled herself through a side window not even taking care to avoid the shards of shattered glass that remained in place.

    There was little time left for Tas¨¬a to focus on Alisha''s minor wounds so she grabbed the netted bag, and carefully dropped it out of the side window.

    The box of desecrated relics, she lifted, and delicately placed them to set steady on the window seal as she used her gymnastic core strength to roll through the window.

    Tas¨¬a took the bag and the box a good dozen yards away. A fire began to blaze through the van.

    As for Alisha, Tas¨¬a caught a glimpse of her as the spook darted down the road. She didn''t even stop for the Flamenco Rosa. She just kept going.

    Tas¨¬a dropped to rest.

    The PA vibrated. It was Demona.

    "I believe you may have just broken my agent with that improvised interrogation."

    Tas¨¬a winced.

    "Are you mad at me?"

    Demona''s virtual visage gave a dismissive side jerk.

    "It is better that I find out now that she is likely to flake out under enormous pressure than to find out under a more crucial set of circumstances later. Still, she is now in danger. There is one who is still alive who would like to see her dead."

    Tas¨¬a stood up.

    "I''ll get right on it."

    She glanced back to the van. Its battery was finally melting and the chemical composition sizzled loudly.

    Tas¨¬a needed to back further away from it.

    "One last thing before you do," Demona continued. "I contacted Sachmilli Cuervo and he actually did the navigation involved. I want you to know that before you get angry with me."

    Tas¨¬a''s lips grew pensive.

    "Anything happen to Mel I should know about?"

    "He''s fine. But you can mark one place off of your itinerary. He dive bombed and swooped it up without the lanceros being any the wiser. I have him flying back with my neoPalm to a shed in your friend Anneb¨¦l''s backyard for safe keeping."

    Tas¨¬a leaned her back against the garage, and she let out a ''whew!'' She glanced up the street in the direction Alisha disappeared.

    A trickle of blood marked the American spook''s trail. Tas¨¬a recalled how the wound from Petro''s severed finger and the accompanying bleeding drew the phase-beast''s wrath upon him.

    Tas¨¬a asked:

    "How many phase beasts does Fodor have left in his corral?"

    "A dozen," Demona answered back.

    Fodor was the vengeful sort. He had to have known of Alisha''s betrayal of their operation. He would release absolute mayhem on the streets.

    With that thought, Tas¨¬a pushed off the wall and darted up the street to find Alisha before Fodor did.

 3.55 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    As Tas¨¬a strode down the street following trickles of blood lightly drizzled on the pavement, the feral crow, sitting on its spiked pole, warned her once more that she was being stalked.

    This time it pointed to the garden supply shop to her right where there stood racks of azaleas streaming down.

    A flash of movement between the racks headed in her direction. She tumbled low against the street instinctively moving with the beast above her that she could not see.

    She felt nothing.

    It was as if it really was just a flash of movement from a charge that missed her altogether.

    Was it a feint? A minimum risk maneuver orchestrated by Fodor as he cared not to risk another beast to her shooting prowess.

    Tas¨¬a stood back up with a tight deep breath funneled out to loosen her muscles. She quivered her pupils in meditative mode, and scanned the street around her.

    Nothing unusual was revealed.

    Tas¨¬a nodded to the crow. Why were nature''s beasts so kind to her?

    "Thank you, air rider."

    With the Stealth 338 LAP rifle in hand, she called out to the American spook.

    "Alisha, if you can hear me, get your back against a wall, and keep that sweet little Smith & Wesson .38 pistol gripped in your hand. If he comes at you, aim for each eye then dead center in its forehead."

    A ghostly voice rode the wind and burst into her ears.

    "You cannot save her. I would rather that you leave."

    It was the voice of Fodor.

    Ghostly.

    The grizzly sight of Petro laying slumped in the garbage in the nearby alley came back to her. The words he said that she nearly forgot and suppressed, due to inebriation, truly resonated now.

    "Fodor''s woman he lived with back at the Flamenco Rosa tried to kill herself. They medevaced her out of there.

    "No one knows what has become of her since. Likely, she lost her mind entirely.

    "She complained of these whispers she would hear at night that made her question her sanity.

    "When you exposed them as the Manifested they are, back at the bar, I saw this spectral glimmer in Fodor''s eyes. Indeed, that''s what we call them, the Manifested that have to be kept in minimized proximity to the staff at Ward Ocho. Spectres."

    She had read about the Spectres from Demona''s neoPalm, and was intrigued by the living matrix crystals in their eyes that made the Spectres easily commanded from a distance. Then she saw the tantalizing beauty of the living matrix for herself in Sylvia''s eyes.

    Who was Fodor''s master?

    While her eyes locked on the street, she switched the Stealth LAP to one hand with the stock pressed and balanced against her forearm.

    Tas¨¬a flipped on Val''s PA.

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    "Demona!"

    "Yes. I don''t have an exact read on Alisha''s location. She hasn''t shown up on sensors placed three hundred yards from wear you stand so she is likely hiding nearby."

    Tas¨¬a blurted out, "Fodor is a spectre."

    "Before you ask if I can intercede between him and his control, he operates on a different system than your acquaintance Sylvia that allows for greater autonomy.

    "No constant feed is necessary. His instruction set is infused every sleep cycle."

    Tas¨¬a wanted to confirm what was growing obvious to her, it was Demona who interceded with the satellite, not Felicit¨¦, but the crow squawked to warn her once more.

    Tas¨¬a shot a round in the space the crow''s eyes aligned, and at that spot a motion shimmered the light around it.

    It backed up from its initial attempt at a charge.

    She slid the PA back into her pocket, and grabbed the rifle in both hands to shoulder it properly.

    "Come here kitty, kitty. It is time to die."

    Once more, Tas¨¬a induced a meditative state as she quivered her eyes to find the cat.

    Indeed, it thought it could be slick, crouch low, spring up, bounce off a wall from behind and catch her from an angle she could not defend.

    She had already assumed that it would consider her left side the most optimal point of attack as she was covered on the right by the post.

    Tas¨¬a shifted to her left to get centered, spun around and drilled three holes into its neck.

    She pushed off in a hasty dodge but could not avoid the cat ramming into her completely. It bounced her off the curb and into the roadway. She rolled with trajectory to avoid cuts and bruises.

    Tas¨¬a stood back up. The beast was no longer phased, and lay with its neck twisted, nearly decapitated.

    She fed another clip into the magazine.

    "Whatcha waiting for, Fodor?"

    She asked with more than a little bravado.

    "How many beast can you control at one time," Tas¨¬a continued. "Was that you in control of them at the fallen House of Javierra? I saw three. Is that your max?"

    She waited several seconds before Fodor answered.

    "Three is correct. I have no beef with you del Alma-Gris. You don''t know what you are interceding in. I can tell by the actions I have observed from you that you are making many false assumptions.

    "For your own good, leave now. I''m giving you a generous ammount of time to decide."

    What did he mean by that? False assumptions?

    "Not without Alisha."

    Again she waited several seconds. This time, Fodor did not return an answer.

    "Alisha," Tas¨¬a yelled out. "Come to me. I am your only chance."

    Alisha answered her back with a 38 round embedded in the pole beside her. Tas¨¬a ducked down. The crow fluttered upward.

    Tas¨¬a caught her breath as she looked around, anxiously.

    Finally, Alisha spoke.

    "Leave, del Alma-Gris. Turn around and leave."

    Alisha''s voice came from the gardening shop building closest to the coffee shop. Tas¨¬a put the pole between herself and that shop.

    "If I have to knock you out and drag you back to the garage, I will," Tas¨¬a answered.

    Alisha''s voice grew amplified, as if she were screaming at the top of her lungs. But her intonation cracked quite oddly as she spoke.

    "You humiliated me, del Alma-Gris. You made me piss myself! You put me through Hell! What kind of monster does what you did! Huh? Answer me, damn it!"

    Tas¨¬a senses told her something was profoundly wrong. She could not pick up on the cause even with her analytic state focused on the shop.

    Why is she blaming me for her pissing herself? Like she is extending out a list of grievances. What is her motivation for that?

    "Alisha, I understand your hysteria. Yes, I pushed you but without the trust gained our mutual purpose is compromised. You are in too much danger for me to leave here without you. You cannot survive alone.

    "I am not leaving without you."

    "Very well then."

    Alisha''s voice came from behind her. Tas¨¬a tensed up as she realized what had happened. The American spook recorded her voice on her own PA, and left it in the shop to play as she snuck behind Tas¨¬a.

    Hell, Tas¨¬a realized Alisha even shot the pole to get the crow to move along and not give her any forewarning.

    A swift cracking sound popped off.

    Tas¨¬a saw the blood come out of her chest before she felt the hot sting of the puncture wound in her back.

    She stood to turn around to counter the spook, but all she could do was get up and dizzily fumble about.

    Her arms grew numb and weak, and she dropped the rifle. Alisha walked with a casual shuffle passed her, and she didn''t even glance back.

    Tas¨¬a felt like falling hard, so she let herself down easily. The crow fluttered in hover above, watching her.

    Tas¨¬a clinched her gut. It did not speak but she could feel it.

    Finally, she called to it.

    Modality?

    - Yes?

    Please do not let me die.

    - How far are you willing to go to trust my intervention?

    She hesitated. She knew it asked her to renounce her independence from it. Her lips grew cold. Even the usually heated vapor in her nose felt like breathing in a heavy dose of cold menthol.

    She felt certain that the life force was fading from her. Her breath began to expire.

    All the way.

    - Very well then.

    The world above her was all stars and a crow that spun slowly above her as she faded to nothing.

 3.56 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a stepped on a pebbled walkway. The rounded stones gleamed with a pinkish hue. They were warm and comfortably smooth to the touch. As Tas¨¬a studied the path ahead of her, upon sighting the giant skeletal statues of the Nephilim that lined the walkway, she realized where she was right away.

    For her Cathar Anewed Elders, the Valley of the Shadow of Death wasn''t a mere metaphor for the touch of death on the lives of men. It was a real place of substance that could only be seen and felt if one meditated, if one consumed ayahuasca, if one lowered one''s heartbeat to twenty beats per minute, if one overcame and suppressed all physical ills that accompanied ayahuasca consumption, then one could pass through the Valley and gain spiritual ascendance.

    Tas¨¬a had done none of those things, except perhaps her lowered heart rate, so she reasoned, this must be a most lucid dream.

    Modality, are you with me still?

    - I am.

    Do you see what I see?

    - That I do.

    What should I do?

    - Is there not a path ahead of you?

    Well, yes.

    - Then take it.

    Tas¨¬a strode forth until she reached a space between two Nephilim skeletons. The pebbles spread out into a circle in between the monumental bases that entrapped the ancient beings before the smooth stones formed once more into a continued pathway.

    As Tas¨¬a glanced up at the statue to her left, its skeletal grin contorted into an angry sneer.

    "Oh, what have I done to displease you, Masters of Old?"

    Tas¨¬a inquired.

    "You reek of meat. We enslaved your species and took from you your hunt for game. We put you in the fields to harvest Bean and Grain. That is all that is allowed of a slave."

    Tasia lifted her chin, defiant.

    "I was born of the Cathar Anewed. We do not partake of the bean. We are free of you."

    "You defy?"

    "For the entirety of my life, and thus so, ever more."

    "Then you shall take up arms to defend yourself."

    Tas¨¬a recognized this as a small admittance of honor. The Nephilim took all of man''s weapons from him except for the tools of the Harvest; hence from the shadows that currently surrounded her, three mummies, emmiciated and wrapped in the rags of peasants, approached her with scythes in hand.

    The Nephilim to her left reached into its side belt and tossed her a long, curved sickle. It bounced off the pebbles and landed at her feet. A second sickle did likewise to her right.

    "Pick those up and defend yourself, Lady Defiant."

    Tas¨¬a nodded and did as she was commanded. She did not care for the balance of the weapons selected for her. She took several swipes in the air surrounding her to test them.

    Indeed, they were designed only to be efficient in their downward sweeping arc as they were used for cutting grain. Every other variation of thrust and sweep was near-impossibly awkward.

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    The mummies now glanced at each other; their heads jerked side to side. Tas¨¬a raised her sickles, crossed together, to defend herself.

    So unbalanced were they for such an upcast maneuver that she had to pull the sickles in against her breast and thrust straight upward to make her defensive position feasible.

    The sickle blades curled out from her torso like the legs of a dung beetle. She held the blades locked in place.

    To defeat the three who leered menacingly before her, she could not swing the sickles with her arms. Her body was now the twin blade''s handle.

    The three mummies yelled out a gutteral cry.

    They came at her as one with scythes raised high over her head, and in unison they swept from her right shoulder to her left foot.

    Tas¨¬a stepped inside and caught the three scythes at the bottom of their hooks with the curve of her left blade.

    She intended to force them to let go, but to her surprise, not only did they keep hold of their blades, but all three were thrown down against the pebbled ring.

    Whatever heft the three scythe-bearers possessed in life, they sorely lacked it in their undead afterlife.

    The three scrambled back up and separated. One stood before her, and the other two circled behind her.

    The tactic was blatant. She watched the blade theatrics in front of her while she listened for the fall of pebbles behind her.

    When the mummy before her motioned for her to approach, the pebbles crunched ever so slightly behind her. Tas¨¬a thrust up in a jump.

    The first mummy passed beneath her, its blade sweeping from left to right. As she flipped at the apex of her leap for greater momentum on her descent, the second mummy was centered beneath her. Its blade swung from right to left.

    It made the mistake of stopping in place in an attempt to catch her in mid-fall. Tas¨¬a, however, was too quick. She caught the mummy at the nape of its neck in mid-descent and cut into it where the twin blades met in a crescent.

    With the momentum of her airborne descent, she forced the mummy to the ground. When the mummy''s torso smacked against the pebbles, the blades sheered through.

    The mummy''s head bounced and rolled until it smacked against the boot of the mummy that faced her.

    The one that stood before her let out a sound of revulsion, and smacked the flat side of its scythe against its chest as it commanded its companion.

    The other remaining mummy bull rushed her. Tas¨¬a had little time and space to defend against the attack, but even as she rolled out of the way, she let go of the sickles, grabbed the decapitated mummy''s scythe, and swept the blade low across the bullrusher''s feet.

    The mummy slammed into the pebbles; its two severed feet spun off in opposite directions.

    She had no time for an assessment.

    The shimmer of pebbles not only tipped her off to the coming attack from behind her but also that the remaining mummy had maneuvered to her left.

    She grabbed the scythe pole from just underneath the blade before she thrust the pole backwards at an angle that caught the mummy in its chest with a satisfying crunch.

    Without a natural human''s heft, the mummy was sent reeling to the ground.

    The scythe she now bore was well balanced. Tas¨¬a gripped it at the pole''s center and swung it around and up. She spun around, and with one deft stroke, she split the mummy in two halves.

    Before continuing down the path, she finished off the footless mummy likewise.

    Tas¨¬a ignored the mockery of the Nephilim, whose statues lined the concourse. Finally, she approached the next circle of pebbles. A brew pot sat centered on an horno brick oven. A ceramic bowl and laddle lay atop the brick in front of a stone bench.

    A living flame raged within the oven. She could see through the perforated surface the flame as it danced about like a rabid and feral elemental.

    Tas¨¬a winced at the repugnant smell that was anathema to her and her people. Inside the brew pot, pinto beans boiled.

    The aroma made her feel nauseous and weak.

    A mummy who stood by a gong walked over to the pot, took hold of the ladle, and filled the bowl with beans.

    It returned to its place by the gong.

    The Nephilim to her right commanded

    "Sit!"

    Tas¨¬a winced and shook her head in revulsion at the thought of sitting with the vile bowl in front of her.

    "Look around you, Lady Defiant."

    Tas¨¬a gazed out past the pebbled pathway into the darkness. When she could finally see, she gasped.

    Thousands of mummies in tattered peasant clothes were gathered in harvest in the near distance, where fields rolled. With sickles and scythes, they reaped the wheat.

    "You can choose to partake in the meal we offer, and, once properly satiated and back into the mindset of servitude, join in the Harvest.

    "Or, you may defy us once more for the last time and follow that path onward, past the Dark Gate, where your soul shall be consumed for all eternity.

    "Which shall it be, Lady Defiant?"

    Tas¨¬a walked up to the stone bench.

    The Nephilim prodded her once more.

    "Sit."

    With a rigid frown on her puss, Tas¨¬a shook her head, violently.

    "Never!"

    She grabbed the bowl in both hands and threw it at the gong, where it shattered.

    The mummy beside it disintegrated. The Nephilim shrieked out, shrill and loud. A wailing arose from the peasants at harvest.

    The very ground quaked

 3.57 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Guided by the white line centered on the asphalt, Mel soared down the street. Before taking to the sky, he heard the squawk of the ferrel crow from miles off while he slept in a tree in Anneb¨¦l''s yard by the tool shed.

    Sachmilli had ordered Mel to keep watch over the shed. So the nightwing made perch above it. Mel''s hearing was such that sleep barely lessened his diligence.

    Still, as he embraced the nether, up the main course going east from Anneb¨¦l''s home, there came an abrupt shriek of ''cahs!'' that brought him back to full alert. The staccato delivery was intended for him.

    Mel snapped to attention and relayed a call to Sachmilli to inform him of the warning. No answer returned. Mel tried to relay a message to his latest contact, Demona. Still no answer.

    This was distressing. The last time he was cut off from his sources for a significant period of time, the razor wing¨¦d flechettes ambushed him with the intent to hunt him down.

    Mel kept his eyes in surveil and his ears perked for the distinctive chime that the wings of the flechettes made.

    Large cats spread out in the streets below as Mel swooped by them; they were on the prowl. Mel could only fathom to guess for whom.

    The phase-beast were only sent out to hunt humans. Whomever that person was hid expertly well.

    Mel could see even the reflections of titmice in the moonlit glassware framed in the surrounding store fronts as the rodents scampered on the shop floors inside.

    He could see geckos at rest on brick walls. Their slithering bodies revealed to him by the puddles of water spread below, but anything of size, worthy of a big cat''s game, remained well hidden from him.

    Just ahead, the ferrel crow watched on as below its stoop one human leaned over another. A long-legg¨¦d male worked at the console of a medical device connected by several wires and tubes to the woman he recognized as Sachmilli''s friend, Tas¨¬a.

    Mel hovered above to better assess Tas¨¬a''s condition. Her shirt and bra lay to the side drenched red in blood. Ample bosom lay crest and up against her arms with an octagonal grasper-patch covering the chest cage between her breast.

    The patch continually constricted and released as if to both clamp over her wound and to keep her heart stimulated.

    Mel examined her properly.

    Her lips were quite pale but even within the seconds that the nightwing observed, their flesh tone, in a step-by-step fashion, darkened in hue.

    The pulse in her neck beat slow but steady. Beneath the sheen of her epidermis crawled a complex netting works that the nightwing witnessed in very few humans. Her friend Anneb¨¦l possessed a similar subdermal mesh, as well.

    Waves of energy emerged from Tas¨¬a''s naval and flowed through the netting works with great efficiency.

    Mel could not see the flesh beneath the grasper patch, but the greater part of that energy flow was being directed to repair Tas¨¬a''s right lung.

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    Now satisfied the little thief was doing better than what could be expected from what Mel surmised was a gun shot wound to the upper chest, the nightwing circled back around, and landed beside the ferrel crow.

    He assessed his new companion who somehow knew of his presence in the city well enough to beckon him to her.

    Indeed, though he was the one trained and neurologically enhanced to be a Watcher, in this detection the ferrel beauty had the better eye.

    Quite comely, and by the tone of her utterances, also very much the gracious one in her manner. In spite of her linguistic limitations, Mel learned much from their conversation.

    It was not the first time the little human female found herself being stalked on this particular route. Like Mel, the ferrel crow saw the netting works symmetry that flowed beneath the skin of the Little One.

    So radiant was this one on her first sight of Tas¨¬a, the lady crow decided to align the woman''s interest with her own. On both occasions that they met, the crow warned the Little One of a predator.

    On the first occasion, a creepy male human with an infolded brassy metal plate embedded in his skull followed the little thief, Tas¨¬a confronted him, and made quick work of the man in a verbal spat between the two.

    The lady crow pointed to a corpse beside a truck parked in the street. The dead beast that lay there caught Mel by surprise. He had previously took no notice of the phase-beast whose head was nearly decapitated.

    He was sorely tempted to dine on the loose strands of exposed muscle tendons, but social custom prevented him from doing so while humans were present.

    His companion rattled on how the beast originally stalked another woman, tall, skin tone of lustrous tapioca, hair of golden wool. When the woman approached the garden supply store she sprayed the air on the street curb that lead into the complex with a can of misty aerosol before she retreated into the shop.

    The phase-beast soon skulked by and found itself within the residual mist where it cried out and violently shook and seized up. Its senses were utterly confounded.

    The beast came to from its fever when it heard Tas¨¬a running towards it from up the road. It phased out of the visible spectrum and lay in wait for her.

    The lady crow touched on the confrontation between Tas¨¬a and the phase-beast when the male human peeked up at the two crows.

    Apparently, the sweetly sounding vibrant racket of Lady Crow''s vocals caught the man''s attention. As he gazed to appraise Mel, the man took out his PA and pinged the nightwing.

    "As I suspected, you belong to Sachmilli Cuervo. I know him a little, an acquaintance. You are having trouble communicating with him, correct?"

    The man glanced down to his device to see Mel''s answer.

    - Affirmative.

    "This is not good at all, nightwing. That signal distortion is deliberate. From what I know of their operational history, this likely means that one mean and infamous troupe of bounty hunters are soon to drop in for a visit, rescue that three times treacherous bitch Alisha, and collect on Tas¨¬a.

    "I need to get her out of here, but if you could do me a favor -."

    - Your name?

    "Oh, Fodor. I''m with the Americans.

    - You want me to find this Alisha?

    "That''s correct."

    Lady Crow let out a swift staccato of chirps to let him know that Alisha was the one who shot Tas¨¬a.

    - I''ll do it.

    "I''ll key you into the phase-beast pride. Once you find Alisha, signal the coordinates, they''ll take care of the rest."

    Mel dwelled on this for a moment. Perhaps this Fodor was not aware of Alisha''s highly effective counter measure against the phase-beasts.

    And uniquely dangerous as it evidently redirected the beast''s programmed aggression.

    He turned to warn Fodor about the spray when a familiar sharp sounding crescendo caused Mel to bristle. The flachettes were near.

    A loud roar came from down the road, just pass the coffee shop. A cat snapped back into visible reality. It stretched its back long as it writhed in tortured agony.

    The beast''s entrails flailed from its center mass and curled out in the air.

    Three flachettes burst out the other side of the beast as ribboned dissipate.

    "Oh, fuck me!"

    So did a gravely, feminine voice, call out from below Mel. Tas¨¬a now leaned up on her arms and watched the phase-beast get destroyed.

    She shook her head as she completed her train of thought.

    "Those fuckers are like suicide dive bombers."

 3.58 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Fodor jerked his head towards Tas¨¬a''s voice.

    "Don''t shoot me!"

    She shook her head. He had a 10 mm semi-auto repeater pistol strapped to his outer thigh whose make was obscured by his holster.

    He was afraid of her.

    Tas¨¬a had to admit given their history, her introductory mugging for one, his was a natural response.

    His eyes gazed down to the heave of her chest. Another admittance, the Ladies drew similar attention even when they were covered.

    From all appearances Fodor was instrumental in saving her life so he had earned this indulgence even if she was predisposed to objecting.

    But in truth, she wasn''t. What scarring existed beneath the clasper-patch concerned her much more.

    But then Fodor did a grand gesture. He peeled out of a black t-shirt with words in a Slavic language written on it, and passed it to her.

    Tas¨¬a faked a fetching smile by avoiding the gobliny upper curled lips. It was a lopsided smile she had practiced in the mirror to offset her one serious aesthetic flaw.

    "Thank you, Fodor. Could you catch me up to speed? Looks like serious shit happening."

    As he spoke, he removed the connective set up to the clasper-patch from his control console and mini-generator source. From a panel in the console he removed a bioKinect battery and installed it into the clasper-patch module.

    "Your bounty hunter acquaintances are attempting a rescue of Alisha. They sent flechettes to clear a path for her. She is still holed up in a nearby building."

    Green-Eyed Elise.

    It was Alisha who told her Elise was in Asunci¨®n, and of Felicit¨¦''s arrangement. Was there something to be gained? Was she hoping Tas¨¬a had something to give up and reveal in turn?

    That bore no fruit, so Alisha shot her in the back, and just left her there to die?

    No. That wasn''t it. The limited hang out was for the purpose of gaining trust until a rendezvous point was reached. But, as always, things got complicated.

    Tas¨¬a saw her Chiappa White Rhino 50DS .357 Magnum and her Stealth 338 LAP laying on the ground by the other side of the pole.

    She twisted around and faced the weapons. There was pain on the stretched side of her torso but she could deal with it.

    "You with that 338 could be very useful to me right now," Fodor suggested.

    She nodded. Tas¨¬a was Team Fodor now.

    "What''s the game plan," she asked.

    "The flechettes are doing figure eights patrolling right over there, and I need to get my phasies back home."

    Tas¨¬a smiled that the man who directed the cats to be assassin drones gave them such a cute nickname.

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    She holstered the White Rhino in her boot, grabbed the Stealth 338, and scoped it. The flechettes were as hard to follow as she assumed.

    Tracking kinetic flight patterns was not the task for which the scope was built. The tight focus of the scope worked against her efforts to track the flechette''s movement.

    Tas¨¬a flipped a pair of switches that held the upper receiver tightly together and carefully removed the scope from its rail supports.

    She secured the receiver back in place, and checked out the iron sights on the opposite ends of the rail. They appeared to have never been tampered with in any significant manner.

    That was good, but Tas¨¬a still needed to test them. She flipped over, shouldered the rifle and shot dead in the eye the flamingo in the Flamenco Rosa billboard.

    The rifle proved to be center on accurate at least up to 350 yards. Tas¨¬a was quite satisfied with her results. As she reloaded, she glanced up, and wasn''t sure how to read Fodor''s squint.

    "I''ll replace the eye with a rhinestone if the Americans are offended."

    Fodor shook his head. "It''s not that. I''m sure no one will care. Your shot was incredible for a night time medium-long range iron-sighted snipe."

    Tas¨¬a blushed. She took her marksman abilities for granted and assumed them to be pretty common given she was not the best shot that came out of her barrio.

    She flipped back around and sighted down range. She could make out the fluttering arches where the flechettes crested just before they spread out at roughly two hundred yards at the far tip of the coffee shop.

    "I have my most nimble cat feinting in an and out of range from the copses. A few flechettes have already killed themselves against the tree trying to catch her.

    "So they are in a holding pattern, ready to catch Katya from either street when she makes her move."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "The crows?"

    "Patrolling for Alisha and the bounty hunters. I asked them to steer away from the flechettes."

    "Good. Be prepared to go to small arms if I don''t manage to kill them all."

    Tas¨¬a faced straight ahead. She did not want Fodor to read her expressions while she was engaged in an interior dialog.

    Modality?

    - Yes.

    How is our toxicity levels?

    - Less than half way towards your tolerance capacity.

    Well then. Hey, ho, let''s go.

    When the warm, misty vapor rushed up from her sinuses, Tas¨¬a could make out each individual bird along the figure eight pattern that crested down near the street and rose towards the rooftop before the birds spread out and rejoined the pattern.

    Seven of them.

    She realized in amazement as she grokked the pattern in its entirety.

    I can take them all out in three shots.

    She focused on a set of two of them, one in ascent, its opposite cresting down. She shot where they were set to cross paths.

    When they did, they burst into a multitude of ribbons and sparkling shards of filament.

    Tas¨¬a had to take the next shot nearly instantly after the first for the three flechettes lined up just before the birds spread out to circle wide and keep Katya in check. The Lupua 338 round had no trouble soaring through the tailpipes of the three birds.

    The remaining two of them tried to follow the same path aiming outward but Tas¨¬a cut their routes short.

    Within two seconds all the birds were cut down. Tas¨¬a had given their operator no time to adjust their paths.

    She could feel the momentum shift in her favor.

    Tas¨¬a thought of Alisha and her double cross, and grinned.

    "Now it is time to take that bitch out!"

    "Hold on," Fodor urged. "Look back at the billboard. It is an array in disguised for occasions like this one where we are cut off from the satellites."

    The Flamenco Rosa sign melted away, exposing a meshed designed radio dish.

    "The boss is attempting to patch her way through," Fodor continued. "There!"

    He pointed to a midnight blue metal drone slowly descending from the sky. A box container approximately three foot by three foot in size was held fastened inside a nested coupe of bars.

    On one side of the container was an attached vorp¨¦d blade.

    On the front end of the drone that faced Tas¨¬a as it descended hung a holographic display module.

    "It''s what I suspected," Fodor offered in explanation. "The Boss wants you to capture Alisha alive, bring her here. We''ll clip her head off with the guillotine. Hook her head up to life support - that I''ll do. Leave the messy stuff to me. And then we take her to the boss for interrogation."

    The boss?

    As soon as she speculated, her question was answered. A five foot seven inch tall holographic figure stood before her. Her skin was purely metallic silver.

    "Do you still possess any remaining tranq-darts, Tas¨¬a?"

    No proper greeting?

    "Aunt Tatiana, how can this be?"

 3.59 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    Tas¨¬a snarled before she spoke.

    "At least a ''how are you?'', or a ''I''ve missed you,'' is in order, don''t you think?"

    Tatiana looked down for a moment as a pensive frown surfaced on her face. Tas¨¬a wondered if the silver sheened flesh tone was merely a filter effect or was it the result of some underlying condition?

    "Tas¨¬a . . . neither of us is the same person that we knew the last time, years ago, when we last met. Nowhere are we near being those same individuals. We retain some loose, scattered memories that rightfully belong to those people, but they are dead and to pretend the two of us are well acquainted through them besmirches their good name and memory."

    Before Tas¨¬a could spit out the words ''bullshit!'', speakers from a PA system atop a nearby building housing a small hardware store sounded out, abruptly.

    It was Alisha.

    "I told you that you would not like what you found. Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, Queen Tatiana''s self-righteous resolve does not let up."

    Tas¨¬a yelled out.

    "You shot me in the back, you bitch!"

    "I''m still ill with you, del Alma-Gris. You kept me dangling on a hook and mere seconds away from burning to death.

    "The humiliation you caused me. I had to have skin graphs after I was trapped in an auto accident as a kid. I was just now this close to cardiac arrest.

    "And it was all so you could devise a shit test for your boyfriend. By the way, he is someone I care deeply about, and he is much too good for your manipulative bullshit

    "As for shooting you? Please, you little drama queen. I merely maimed you with a shot at the middle edge of your right oblique fissure to slow you down. I would have double tapped you at the base of your skull if I wanted you dead."

    As Alisha spoke Tas¨¬a tried to home in to clues to where the spook''s location could be. She heard the sound of wooden poles clanging against one another followed by the sound of metal clanging against a concrete floor.

    That sounded? Like a rake!

    Tas¨¬a shouldered the Stealth 338 LAP and fired into the display case the furthest from the entrance doorway leading into the hardware store.

    "Tas¨¬a," Aunt Tatiana began in admonishment. "Use the 338 tranq-rounds. We have to have her alive. She has the Resonance Cage sealed shut."

    Alisha giggle rattled out of the PA speaker.

    "Nice try there, Slim Tail."

    Tas¨¬a bit her lower lip and cursed herself as she once more realized she let herself be blind-sided. Of course, it was another text-relay AI driven recording meant to distract her.

    "Duck," she yelled to Fodor as she hit the asphalt.

    A sharp sound reached a crescendo above them before it bursted and pounded out a dozen whirly gigs that dropped around them.

    Each one burst in turn as the explosive device smacked the ground. She was being bombarded by flashbangs that also released a mild paralytic.

    Tas¨¬a crawled with her eyes shut towards Fodor''s truck. Her back, buns and legs felt tingly and numb.

    She heard boots slapping rapidly against the asphalt coming towards her. Her vision was like hot silver rain beneath her lids.

    Even still, Tas¨¬a had no choice but to react then and there. She was going to lose another fight if she spent another second on the asphalt.

    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

    While keeping her eyes squinched tightly closed, Tas¨¬a rushed up on to her feet, sprinted towards the truck, and leapt in the air. Only then did she open her eyes to gauge her approaching point of contact with a side liner rail.

    She sprung up more than nine feet in the air just in time to twist around, release the Magellani .22 revolver from its holster, and spy through her stinging eyes a bullet that skimmed off of the back of Fodor''s wrist. It forced him to drop his 10 mm neo-1911 styled handgun.

    Out of the corner of her limited vision, she saw movement. Tas¨¬a jerked her upper torso towards the billboard pole tresses.

    How in the Hell did that resourceful bitch get over there?

    She quieted her concerns and lined up her sight.

    For a brief moment, as the spook must have realized she was helplessly unable to track the midair acrobatic maneuver, Alisha froze.

    It was enough time for Tas¨¬a to drill a bullet in each of Alisha''s elbows and knee caps even before the little thief landed in a crouch on her feet.

    "Tas¨¬a," Tatiana snapped at once as soon as the fight was over. "Switch to the tranq-round even still as she is capacitated. It will better facilitate easing her adjustment after decapitation."

    Tas¨¬a caught her breath. She could hear Alisha crying behind her as the American repeated the same terrified words over and over.

    "Fucking bitches. They are not coming for me."

    She expected a rescue from Green-Eyed Elise and her team. Now that the cats secured the routes with no more opposition from the flechettes to challenge them, the bounty hunter was likely not going to take the risk of rescuing the American spook.

    Tas¨¬a felt pity at the sight of the woman, scared shitless that she was about to be decapitated, and most frightening of all, she was going to live through the entire ghastly experience.

    "Tas¨¬a . . .," Tatiana called to her.

    In response, Tas¨¬a turned towards the silver holograph.

    "Why did you send Rubin and Brassi to nab me?"

    Tas¨¬a didn''t just stand there subservient, however, and wait for an answer. She went to check on Alisha''s wounds.

    Tas¨¬a considered before she began to help, what did it matter if she was slowly bleeding out since the body part of Alisha would soon be worthless?

    "My agents weren''t there for you, Tas¨¬a. We discovered that Alisha sabotaged the Resonance Cage settings so we could not enter. Of course, that meant the beasts themselves given their abilities to walk through walls still could now be induced to leave or go about as they pleased.

    "We had a mess on our hands.

    "For that reason, I needed you neutralized and out of the way so we could bring Alisha back to solve this little problem and do so with a minimum of resistance involved."

    So impersonal.

    What was her Aunt''s real life story? The one she hid from the family? Apparently, She was the chief operative running the American Spook Town and the Human Rights Lawyer Communist she was renown for was just a cover identity?

    What was that kind of loyalty to a foreign entity really about? Did she align with Americans as a rebellion against her father, General Kutuzov, due to the atrocities during the Incivility and Southwest Action that gained him notoriety?

    "Tas¨¬a?" Tatiana prompted her, once more. "I plead, I beg of you, only you can rescue Val. He is trapped in the maze of phase spaces that the Resonance Cage serves as a portal too."

    "Did you have him put in there," Tas¨¬a challenged her Aunt.

    "No. It''s . . . complicated. But I know the General would like to have his consigliere back and he sent you to retrieve him."

    "The General? You mean, your father."

    Tatiana cleared her throat.

    "Do not call that one man atrocity exhibition my father."

    The resentment ran deep. She also didn''t seem to be taking into account she was very much her father''s daughter.

    Tas¨¬a felt around in her fanny pack for a clip of tranq-rounds.

    Alisha pleaded from below her.

    "Do not do this. For the love of all that is holy, you cannot do this. Please, just kill me. Just kill me, okay?"

    Fodor stood on the other side of Alisha ready to assist. He wrapped his wounded wrist with a bandage. Tas¨¬a frowned on sight of the wound. Solid, purposeful aiming. It was likely another intentionally spare wound on Alisha''s part.

    She repeated her plea once more. Her voice grew weak and feint.

    "Just kill me, okay?"

    Fodor cleared his throat.

    "You know," he began. Tas¨¬a looked up into his eyes and suddenly she realized who Fodor was.

    When did her Aunt Tatiana have a kid? Did anyone else in the family know about him?

    "Yes, Fodor, please continue."

    "There is another way into the Resonance Cage. It is a more difficult route that starts in the Sweet, but it can be done. With the phasies scouting out event anomalies and critter oddities ahead of me to be avoided,  I can do it."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. She put the tranq-rounds back in the fanny pack, shouldered the Stealth 338 LAP, and put six rounds into the guillotine box, rendering it useless.

    Her Aunt Tatiana remained speechless for a long moment before she answered with a simple statement of "very well then," before her image vanished.

    Tas¨¬a examined Alisha''s wounds. Her kneecaps took the brunt of the damage. The American spook would not be walking for awhile.

    Fodor squatted to assist.

    Tas¨¬a looked him in the eye.

    "You''re my little cousin, right?"

    Fodor laughed.

    "I could see it in your eyes when you finally figured it out."

 3.60 Book Three: The Ascendant City

    As Fodor leaned into the storage compartment of his truck to retrieve some more bandages and other medical supplies, he kept their conversation going.

    "So Tas¨¬a, for seventy-three seconds you lost a heartbeat. What was death like?"

    Tasia wiped Alisha''s face and neck down with a moist towelette to keep her calm. The greatest threat to the American was not the four gunshot wounds that she suffered but staying out of shock.

    What a Hell of an evening for her.

    The threat of decapitation, of being burned alive, their fire fight against one another - it all took a toil on the spook''s mental well being.

    She turned her attention back towards Fodor.

    "How was the After-Life, you ask? Either I passed through the Valley of Death, or I had a dream heavily influenced by what my Anewed Elders taught me with my own personal likes, dislikes, and my own peculiar blindspots and prejudices thrown in the mix.

    "But if real, I saw the literal Harvesters of Souls whom once walked the Earth. Man, I got to tell you. They really don''t like us."

    When he returned, Fodor squatted down beside her. A set of lights patterned from orange to green lit up the right hand corner of the console. She discerned each light represented a sector related to the phase-beast patrol.

    As Fodor worked the keys, buttons and switches on his console, he explained what he was doing.

    "The bounty hunters have retreated and removed their static field. I''m going to send all but two of the phasies back into the cage. It isn''t good for them to be out in low resonance space for extended stays."

    As Fodor finished his explanation, Alisha grabbed Tas¨¬a''s left hand.

    "Your aunt, she is the guardian of the SkyTether. Why did she let them get so close?"

    From the paleness of Alisha''s eyes, it appeared she was going into delirium.

    Who did she let get close?

    "Stay with us, Alisha," Fodor pleaded. "I have a sedative patch."

    Fodor finished up his work on the console. He leaned over towards a bag, grabbed an index finger by index finger sized patch, and peeled off the back cover of it.

    The lacey, black dress Alisha wore possessed a loose, wide collar. Fodor applied the patch on the American''s left shoulder.

    Tas¨¬a jerked her head to confirm the back cover Fodor had sat on Alisha''s belly listed as an ingredient a steady micro-dose of lysergic acid. That did not surprise as it was used to help maintain the mental health of those who suffered shock.

    But the fact that the American Spooks had easy access to the most regulated controlled substance in all of the Quadra was the real eyebrow-raiser.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Man. I wished I ran into you a few weeks ago when the Mani- ," Tas¨¬a paused and stuttered before she continued. She had put her cousin''s condition at the back of her mind. "When the Manifest was riding me ragg¨¦d. It would have saved me a shit ton of grief."

    Fodor grinned and shrugged.

    "I most certainly can imagine. Actually, I don''t have to imagine it. I went through it, too. I had no resources available to dose at a time that I felt that ting and itch that occurs when the Manifest is deep inside you.

    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    "I was on a mission in the Piamonte Roja region. We were somehow ambushed. We all came back in a bad way. I was under quarantine for a week as they pumped me full of lysergic derivatives to flush the Spore out of me."

    Fodor shook his head, and he continued.

    "It was a very strange time in my life."

    Tas¨¬a helped Fodor remove Alisha''s ruined chic silver jeans and matching panties. He averted his eyes. Which was just as well.

    He had not noticed the sack-like patch attached to the inseam inside the panty waist band. Tas¨¬a felt inside the seam with her thumb, and she found a small spiral of ribbon used for an analog computer. The same sort she came across earlier that day.

    What was Alisha''s connection?

    Tas¨¬a slipped the spiral of ribbon in her pocket before she cleaned off the urine that now reeked from Alisha''s pubis mons with a pair of lemon scented baby wipes.

    It amused Tas¨¬a the modesty her cousin now displayed given the big bulging eyeballs that he could barely keep inside his sockets when he peaked at her boobs. She decided to tease him.

    "In case you are wondering, she is as waxed smooth down there as a baby''s cheek, and she''s a total inny. I''m a bit envious to be honest."

    "What?"

    "You heard me."

    "Well," Alisha commented, "I heard you. You are not going to give Fodor a play by play analysis, right?"

    Tas¨¬a jerked in surprise. She assumed Alisha had slipped into unconsciousness.

    "I''m just giving Fodor the business. Trying to ingratiate him into the family."

    Alisha giggled. "No worries. Thanks for the compliment, and at least now I no longer smell like piss."

    She lowered Alisha''s dress back down, folded the seam to mid-thigh to restore her modesty.

    "You''re up," Tas¨¬a said as she slapped her cousin on the back.

    Fodor went right to work extracting the bullets from where they impacted. He frowned as he recovered a bone fragment from Alisha''s left knee.

    Fodor winced.

    "What," Alisha demanded.

    He held up the bone fragment with a pair of forceps.

    "It''s about one sixth of your patella. We have the titanium here to replace it, but you are no longer safe at the Flamenco Rosa."

    Alisha blinked in wonderment. Tas¨¬a placed her own index finger over Alisha''s wrist. It was a hard and swift pounding that pulsed through the vein beneath.

    "Relax," Tas¨¬a softly suggested. "You''ll overly exert yourself. I have equipment like you wouldn''t believe even existed. I just have to have it shipped to Asunci¨®n. It''ll take a few days though."

    Alisha looked straight at her.

    "So you are cool with looking after me until I''m back on my feet?"

    "Sure. Not a problem."

    Tas¨¬a felt the beat in Alisha''s wrist slow down within a few seconds. The tension in her arm released. The nimble little thief was careful not to disturb the elbow wound as she lay the arm back down.

    As the American spook watched her, Tas¨¬a thought of what Alisha said as she was still in shock.

    Your aunt, she is the guardian of the SkyTether. Why did she let them get so close?

    "I can see the question on your pensive little mug," Alisha teased. "Why did I sabotage the Resonance Cage?

    "The bounty hunters wanted me to give them access to it as a condition for extracting me. But I feigned the routing numbers. The only way their authentication would go through and not raise alarms is if I rendered the cage inoperable."

    Tas¨¬a squinched her face up as she attempted to wrap her brain around the logic.

    "Is there something I am missing here? Why did you want to meet them. Why did they need to get in the cage?"

    Alisha shook her head.

    "I got word about your friend, the Tier-One Neural Net Specialist. She was previously a resident of Ward Ocho. Elise sprung her for some specialist work. It was an erratic move on her part.

    "That Argentinian shouldn''t be here in Asunci¨®n. That is long standing policy. Manifest of her classification are always saboteurs. She is here to turn the city over to the Spore."

    Tas¨¬a gazed at her with a jaundiced eye.

    "It''s wheels within wheels with you, sister. This mission wasn''t one authorized by Tatiana nor Demona, right?"

    "No, neither."

    "Okay. Your true allegiance wanted you to get close enough to Felicit¨¦ that you could neutralize her?"

    "Yup."

    Tas¨¬a sighed; before she could continue with her questions, she was lit up by the lights of an approaching vehicle. It was Anneb¨¦l''s Jeep.

    She turned back to Alisha.

    "Would you like to tell me who you are really working for?"

    Alisha gave a wane smile as she shook her head.

    "I''m afraid I can''t."

    Tas¨¬a stood up as she asked the next question that she deduced from earlier events in the evening.

    "Is it the Beast?"

    Fodor''s head jumped up and Alisha suddenly looked at her crossly.

    "The fuck how did you figure that one out?"

    Tas¨¬a grinned as she shook her head.

    "Relax. Get some rest. We''ll talk shop tomorrow."

    Tas¨¬a turned to the Jeep as the lights dimmed. Anneb¨¦l smiled back at her. She raised a thumb up.

    Tas¨¬a''s heart fluttered sweetly. Beauregard passed yet another test.

    Her best friend came back alive.

 3.61 Book Three: The Ascendant City - Final Chapter

    "You are worrying over nothing. Fodor will be fine," Alisha assured Tas¨¬a. "Your aunt wont do anything to Fodor for assisting you. She needs him to get her crew back in working condition after my defection and you taking out Rubin."

    Tas¨¬a helped the American sit back against the futon prepared with orthopedic supports so she couldn''t lean out.

    Though Alisha''s knees were severely damaged, the wounds that grazed against her elbows were more merciful. Necessarily, as a more precise aim was needed to force the American to drop the .38.

    In fact, the bandages on Alisha''s elbows limited their mobility more than the actual wounds.

    "How about Demona?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    Alisha cleared her throat.

    "That''s more complicated. Demona is a five dimensional operator. Even if the level of trust she placed in me is significantly diminished she wont miss an opportunity to advance her own interests due to a grudge or out of spite."

    Tasia pointed to the AR driving goggles that lay on a nearby table.

    "Saw you slipping them back on a little while ago. Is she answering?"

    Alisha shook her head. "Not yet."

    Tas¨¬a nodded her head. She was looking forward to the trip to the Vida Escondida that Demona promised. She hoped the latest complications did not get that canceled.

    "I see. We''ll talk shop later when you find out more. You need to get some rest."

    Tasia looked out the window. The full moon glared again the pane.

    She asked, "would you like me to shut the blinds?"

    Alisha nodded.

    Tas¨¬a stood up and approached the window. In the tree by the shed, Mel conversed with his lady friend.

    "You have guardians watching over you."

    "The crows?" Alisha chuckled. "I don''t think they like me."

    Tasia bobbed her head side to side as she tended to do when she intended to compliment someone.

    "People aren''t suppose to be able to sneak around them stealthily. When you did that it insulted their sense of professionalism as members of their species."

    Alisha chuckled again but it forced out a snort. Tas¨¬a grabbed a paper napkin and cleaned up from under her nose.

    "Thanks."

    Tas¨¬a glanced again at the crows once more, and she considered the house security system while everyone was in downtime for the remainder of the evening - that being two more hours left before dawn.

    This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

    The defenses for Anneb¨¦l''s ranch house in the suburbs were extensive as Tas¨¬a discovered on her own downtime earlier in the week.

    Thirty-six drones hid buried in yard batteries and four turrets lay hidden on top of the roof. Anneb¨¦l wasn''t paranoid by nature. She collected personal defense systems.

    A hobby, much like Tas¨¬a''s vast collection of knives, guns and boots.

    After she closed the blinds, Tas¨¬a turned back around, and smiled at Alisha.

    "Sleep tight. I will be back to help you poop again in six hours."

    Alisha cleared her throat and drily she joked.

    "Looking forward to it."

    The door to Anneb¨¦l''s room was half opened. Tas¨¬a gathered they kept it that way in case she wanted to join them for sex. She just wanted to say good night.

    Ra¨´l leaned against a long pillow, arms propped behind his head with a smile on his face. The sheets that gathered at his waist moved with a body beneath. Vigorous noises accompanied a bobbing motion.

    "Oh, hey, Tas¨¬a," Ra¨²l greeted her. "It''s ... been awhile."

    "It certainly has. I just wanted to say good night and touch base."

    Tas¨¬a realized she was standing there because she was compelled by a thousand questions she had for Anneb¨¦l in regard to the brawler''s half of the evening''s adventure without her, and what Anneb¨¦l could tell her about Beauregard''s task but now she felt slightly awkward being there.

    Anneb¨¦l threw the sheets aside, and smiled beautifully at Tas¨¬a. When she gave the shapely form of the redhead''s nude body a thorough appraisal, Tas¨¬a noticed a cesarean scar on the otherwise perfectly milky-sheened skin of Anneb¨¦l''s abdomen.

    Anneb¨¦l had a child?

    Tas¨¬a quickly dashed her eyes up, and she hoped Anneb¨¦l didn''t notice her curiosity.

    "Come and join us," she pleaded. "You know Ra¨´l has been curious about you for the past two years now."

    "Le sigh," he said. "My one unrequited love."

    Tas¨¬a giggled. What Anneb¨¦l held so deftly in her hand at that moment reminded Tas¨¬a very much of Ra¨²l''s brother, J¨²n-J¨²n''s own penis.

    She suppressed an urge to ask about his brother. The couple was having too much of a pleasant time to bring up serious subject matter.

    "I ... really can''t. I feel something very serious is happening between Beauregard and I."

    Ra¨²l nodded.

    "Completely understandable."

    Even still, Tas¨¬a did feel a little devilish.

    "Oh. Ra¨´l . . . There is something I''ve recently discovered about myself. I''m quite the little exhibitionist."

    Tas¨¬a pulled the long black shirt Fodor gave her up over her head, and stood there without a stitch on her body except for the bandanna that she still wore.

    As Tas¨¬a posed from side to side, to give them a full view, the couple applauded.

    When she turned to show off her rear Ra¨´l yelled, "magnificent!"

    Anneb¨¦l asked him, "can you believe that little firecracker has body acceptance issues?"

    Tas¨¬a giggled as she walked out, whispering, "You two are the absolute best."

    Tas¨¬a returned to her guest bedroom, and shut the door. She set the alarm on Val''s PA to go off in six hours.

    With that out of the way, Tas¨¬a tossed her bandanna off of her head of hair, and grinned.

    The Sportive Magician laid on its side of the bed.

    She sighed as she told it, "well, It looks like its just us."

    Tas¨¬a arranged her two pillows in a comfortable position for what she had in mind. She lay down, rolled the sex toy in her hands, turned the vibration on, and played with it''s many advanced settings before she decided on one labeled ''Smooth Cosmic Overdrive'' that best fit her mood for a slow rub down.

    But, unfortunately, it did not matter. Exhaustion set in before she even recognized the signs.

    Tas¨¬a promptly fell asleep with the device vibrating gently against her chest.

    The End.

    Tas¨¬a returns soon in Book Four: The Sweet Descent.

    Book Four: The Abandoned Life.

    Screw dealing with family drama in Asunci¨®n, we are headed out to the hard partying Autonomous Zone of Vida Escondida!

 A Mid-Series Illustrated Guide - Weapons: The Arctic Devil

    The Arctic Devil

    Il Diavolo Artico

    First Appearance: Chapter 3.14

    From Chapter 3.14

    "With that out of the way, I promised you a big fucking gun. Meet Il Diavolo Artico. The Arctic Devil."

    She was surprised when Magellani brought out a small carbine. The body was a splendid poly-carbon mesh cast in an aesthetically appealing jaggedness that would comport well inside her forearm.

    The barrel, however, was merely eight inches in length. Barely larger than a standard hand cannon.

    The diameter of the barrel interior was what impressed her.

    "What is it chambered for?"

    "13.2 mm slug. Slightly larger than a standard .50 caliber round."

    He handed her a slug; a hollow point with a double set of talons engraved inside its head.

    "Careful with your thumb on the interior of that. Its bladed. The double talon head chews better through the kind of materials used to make armored vehicles both durable and light weight.

    "Materials, like the flesh of a phase beast which is nothing more than an engineered machine crafted through genetics."Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

    She got the impression Magellani had a personal disdain for the beast, and how it came to be.

    Tas¨¬a squinched her nose.

    "Where is the full jacket for the round?"

    He laughed with a coughing wheeze.

    "Haven''t figured it out, yet? The gun is not made for standard explosive ballistics."

    She noticed the forward grip had extra functionality built into it. There was a blue LED readout.

    It read: 38000psi Max. Now At 100%

    Set refill at 85%. 32 pellets remaining.

    "An air gun?"

    "Yes. My lady. At less than half the weight and length of a Barret. Yet, as you see, the kinetic potentiate is nearly the same."

    She gave him a skeptical, jaundice eye.

    "I like airguns, but for killing anything larger than a jack rabbit ..."

    He seemed to take pleasure in countering her assumptions.

    "I would not send you out to fight that dread beast with a small game gun. The Arctic Devil would make havoc of any living thing. You see the body that comprises the forward grip? It is a distributor for CO2 pellets. It loads one each into the duel gas chambers anytime the pounds per square inch, psi, drops below eighty-five percent for instantaneous thermo-expansion. Approximately, every eight shots. Very pressure efficient.

    "Surely, you can see the advantages of the design. Since the round is a simple bullet slug with no jacket, we can store forty-two rounds in the magazine."

    ######################

    Magellani Arms began their trade in the manufacture of specialized state-of-the-art revolvers. When advanced ammo round capabilities became more common - load outs that include IR arc tracers, elemental effects, gripped surfacing, revolvers once more became the most common handgun the world over as the superior steadiness of revolver frames over repeater pistols give greater stability in the performance of technologically advanced ammo.

    Magellani Arms became world renown in the first decade (founded 2037) of their operation. Their first true profitable success came when the Italian Army contracted the manufacturer to create a series of custom revolvers for the needs of their notorious Special Forces Unit, Brigata Nera e Argento.

    They set up shops in every nation where there is conflict for close in-the-field performance analysis.

    Since those origins they have expanded their creative output to long guns as well. To Tas¨¬a''s great fortune she acquired one in her first encounter with the phase-beast.

 4.0 Prologue Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Zona Lobos encircled the Vida Escondida. When Tas¨¬a entered the stunt track from the turnpike on the far northwest side of the city''s territorial bounds, the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis she drove caught the interest of the nearby mag-racers running along the track''s inner rail treads.

    One of the vehicular mag-racers loosened itself from the tread that powered it. Once the mag-spheres that it lowered down to the track spread out firmly in place, it pulled up alongside her as she drove into the straightaway where high-arching ramps bound the track''s outer perimeter.

    The HybrClydis'' display console flickered as the mag-racer pinged through the sportscar''s electronics in search of a means to communicate with her.

    When its scan finally concluded, a high-pitched but pneumatic-sounding voice vibrated against her spine in a pelting tingle. It sounded through a remote intercom embedded in the HybrClydis'' matted carapace that sat directly behind her seat.

    The device was normally only used during operationally compromised circumstances to communicate a diagnostic relay. The AI overrode its software to speak to her.

    "Challenge," it asked, demandingly.

    Tas¨¬a pushed the response receiver down with her right-handed pinky.

    "Accepted. What''s the bid?"

    The AI informed her:

    "Your voice is recognized. Your account is still active."

    Tas¨¬a laughed. Incarceration and active bounties were mere blips in a player''s profile as far as the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority was concerned.

    She had the resources, and she had proven her worth on the track many times before. That was all that mattered.

    "Are you racing at Tier One?" The mag-racer''s AI asked.

    Damn. I wanted the first go-around to be a friendly affair.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

    She glanced at the AI-controlled vehicle beside her. It shifted closer to her, floating in a tight hover a few inches above its set of three mag-spheres.

    Two of the mag-spheres were located in the back by the engine, and only one in the front beneath the wing¨¦d steers that now set folded in like an F-14 Tomcat in hunter mode.

    #77 Zoro Azul was written in big neon pink lettering on its sides.

    From inside its cockpit, a metallic skull glanced in her direction. Its bony left hand digits waved back in a fan-like spread at her.

    With a chrome helmet that formed seamlessly along its cranium and a polished, gunmetal gray rigor mortis grin, the skellabot was quite the imposing sight.

    Indeed, the skellabot served as the eyes, ears, hands, and legs - the full physical embodiment¡ªof the AI that controlled the mag-racer.

    She flipped the speaker on once more.

    "I have never driven at Tier One before."

    Though she was in possession of well-above-standard reflexes, Tas¨¬a wasn''t a Tier One driver by any means.

    With an airy hint of a taunt in its vocalization, the skellabot chided her:

    "You are driving an Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. Given your high performance record at Tier Two track conditions, all while you drove inferior vehicles, it seems only fair to up the challenge."

    A Tier One challenge was a minimum twenty-five thousand USD buy-in. That was a healthy chunk of her wealth if she lost. Of late, Tas¨¬a had been making many high-end purchases of breach equipment in preparation for what was to come.

    Not to mention, one of her accounts had been recently and mysteriously drained. She could shrug that off as the cost of doing business in the Black and Gray, but all of her most recent work had been charitable do-gooder bullshit with income inflows coming from opponents she looted but not from much else.

    She gritted her teeth.

    Right off the bat, even before she had the chance to make her presence known, Vida Escondida was coming at her fast.

    The skellabot was growing impatient with her silent calculations.

    Though its voice morphed slowly into a low and smooth tone.

    "Have you changed your mind? As a dearly valued member of our club, I would hate for you to lose out on this opportunity for a truly unique experience. At Tiers Two and Three, the track is a mere facsimile with guard rails compared to the challenging design presented at Tier One. Those who are ultimately victorious over its formidable course become nothing short of legend."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled to herself. And those who don''t conquer the Zona Lobos often become very much dead.

    She had little choice but to go through with it.

    Her upcoming scheme, though, made the race, and successfully completing the course was necessary for the sake of gaining back the impeccable reputation and infamy she had possessed amongst her peers in the Vida Escondida before Green-Eyed Elise made a fool out of her.

    She asked the skellabot.

    "Is the buy-in still 25K?"

    "Yes."

    "Alright. Hit my account. Let''s do it."

 4.1 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part One: The Blind Sides

    A chime familiar to all Zona Lobos competitors echoed through the leather seat beneath her back and bum. Tas¨¬a knew the procedure that would follow from dozens of previous races.

    The first lap of a challenge was essentially an inspection in motion.

    The skellabot spoke again.

    "Switch to full manual. Any assistance from your vehicle''s integrated analog or AI-directed cruise control will result in automatic disqualification and the forfeiture of $10,000 USD."

    She did as instructed. The Zorro Azul pinged the HybrClydis to test her compliance.

    "Good. Now, even up your speed to sixty miles per hour to be in sync with my vehicle. I''m going to take the lead position as we ascertain whether your racer is competition-capable and that you are prepared mentally and physically for the challenge."

    The Zorro Azul mag-racer cut to the opposite side before it drove around and then up in front of her position.

    "Increase speed to one hundred and twenty miles per hour in increments of ten miles per hour every two seconds."

    The chime played low and snappy every two seconds to assist her effort. Tas¨¬a had already shifted her mind into a meditative state to better manage her sense of time delineation and reflex control.

    At the end of the twelve-second test, the Zoro Azul skellabot praised her.

    "Ninety-seven percent compliance accuracy. I have never seen anything like that. Your previous totals have averaged seventy-four percent, which is itself a standard deviation higher than the normative distribution."

    Quite a surprise, and Tas¨¬a wasn''t sure how to take it. She felt in her bones that even though she had been out of the IMCQ for going on two months, she was still in a state of recovery, with every day a struggle to get back to being as good as she was before she was incarcerated.

    Back when she was such a precision operative, she had managed every adverse situation that came her way without any one of them resulting in a lethal outcome.

    True, up to Green-eyed Elise''s ambush that cost me the team, Tas¨¬a reminded herself.

    She refocused her attention and put the uncomfortable feelings of recriminations aside. The mag-racer was quietly humming along in front of her. It was needed for the two vehicles to clear a steep, descending corkscrew bend before the next test that would gauge her vehicle''s steering for its capacity to hold steady between repetitive performance gradients.

    When they reached a stretch of straight track, the chime echoed once more, softly.

    "Clip the radial center from the left, then the right, then left and right several times until I say the phrase, ''at ease.''"

    As she steered, she caught the little wiggle to the right. She guessed the powertrain above the steering wasn''t absolutely centered. Tas¨¬a doubted that it would disqualify the vehicle. She had performed in vehicles far more imbalanced than the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis.

    "At ease. Now I will need one moment."

    She steered rightward by five meters, where the track flowed even to induce the wiggle once more. This time the oscillation jolted to the left. Same cyclical response but different location.

    The tilt caused it.

    The skellabot''s test was conducted on an even and leveled track surface. Her test was done at a seventeen-degree horizontal tilt on the right ramp skewer.

    Something is not entirely secured.

    She should have run a systems diagnostic when she stopped at a Quick Mart a few hours earlier for a snack. It was cheap and would have taken her no more time than to perform her stretching exercises on a restroom crossbar.

    The skellabot spoke once more.

    "There was a pull to your right. A .023 differential from perfect stability. An exact magnitude lower than disqualification. Your software readings, however, don''t quite match up. More investigation may be required to ensure it is not symptomatic of tampering, but for now you are cleared.

    "The challenge shall begin when you complete this lap. Get familiar with the layout. Some changes have been made since your last competition.

    "Floor it to one hundred and eighty miles per hour, then switch to cruise control. You have eleven minutes to reach the start."

    "How many miles," she shouted above the roar of her now-stressed engine, "to the start?"

    "Thirty-one."

    "Well then, we better get the move on."

    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

    It wasn''t long before she encountered the first changeup from the surface as she remembered it. The sudden downward shift in force momentum nearly flipped her car when the asphalt beneath her dipped unexpectedly. Her muscle memory was prepared for an upturn.

    She had no choice but to stay her foot and keep the steering locked steady. Hitting the brakes or turning to absorb the impact would have damaged the rocker frames that supported the carapace.

    She went airborne, leaving her gut to unclench from the state of free fall. The rumble in her stomach cascaded over and over, dangerously close to her bowels letting loose until the HybrClydis'' nose tipped downward and the reverse course drag caused her to upchuck in her mouth.

    Careful! All of this is being live streamed. She reminded herself. Keep composed.

    Tas¨¬a kept her lips tightly sealed together as the sports car finally touched asphalt, and she needed to assert control over the steering before it flipped itself.

    However, she was amazed how quickly the wheels snapped back into solid alignment to the ribs of the track. The heavy weight of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis worked in her favor to secure its traverse balance.

    The hybrid was renowned for its bulked-up mass. Only now did she appreciate the advantage it gave her on the track.

    She grabbed her water bottle, drank from the built-in suction straw, and swallowed hard to chase the bitter upchuck back down her throat.

    The Modality nudged a set of thoughts in her head for her consideration.

    - Take your physical presence out of it. Put your being into action.

    Wow. Her own personal coach!

    The Modality had been quiet for weeks now, so it quite surprised her to hear the entity advise her on such a trivial matter as a race. To that notion the Modality addressed:

    - It is good meditative practice for you. I will shut up when your mind is quiet. I will also remind you if your mind drifts back into noise.

    At times the Modality''s willful, commanding nature was disconcerting to her, but Tas¨¬a shook off the unease she felt. The Modality was quite correct in what she needed to do.

    As she gained control over her breathing to slow it to a near stop, she imagined herself dissolving into static. She was the hands on the steering wheel and nothing more. Muscle memory evaporated from her reflexive actions, and no longer did it affect how she handled the track.

    She could feel the improvement that the change in her mentality caused in the quality of her driving.

    No matter the sharpness of a turn or the slope of a bend, she adjusted in real time with ease. With an extremely light foot on the brakes, she let the vehicle crest wide once more into the side ramps.

    Where she tested the oscillation several times more at different angles of tilt, the differential began to form a geometric shape in her imagination.

    Something. There is something I am missing.

    Her growing awareness sent an alarm up her spine as she was about to grasp the answer. But, before she was fully cognizant of where those thoughts led, the skellabot spoke into her speakers again:

    "Excellent time. The morphology of the track will grow more extreme with each lap. Do you wish to bow out? You still may without invoking a penalty."

    It snapped her back into the race. The passage of time caught her by surprise. She was no longer merely the hands in front of her vision.

    Tas¨¬a became fully embodied and able to answer the question.

    When she considered it, she chuckled at the notion. "Fuck no."

    The mag-racer pulled up beside her. Tas¨¬a did a double take. She realized that to have been out of sight for the entire lap, it had ridden exactly and expertly in the right-side blind spot that lay off by two meters and even with the back tire.

    "Then. Free up the cruise control on the count of five. Five... Four... Three... Two... One!"

    Flipping the cruise control off after the thirty-one-mile run at high speed sent a surge into the HybrClydis. It rode up high, skipping like a stone across the ribbed surface of the track as it propelled her forward.

    The readout showed she had hit 210 mph. The mag-racer was several lengths behind her now. It hugged the high ramp, and soon she saw the tactical advantage it gave the mag-racer.

    The topography of the track in the middle valley coming up switched into a terse set of zigzags meant to force her to slow down and hit the apex radial low.

    That caused her to grind out for several meters. She refused to break until the last second so she could keep her lead and momentum. Though the rocker frames protested with a screeching rat-a-tat-tat as she steered into the bends, her maneuver worked.

    To press her advantage even further, Tas¨¬a shifted gears into an ultra mode that doubled battery consumption. If she succeeded, it would be a decisive move and, barring accident, secure her victory.

    She floored it once more. With a quick glance at the faux back screen to check on the mag-racer. It was still at a distance from her and seemingly not making any progress to catch up in spite of the route design intended to slow her down.

    In fact, she was beginning to notice that it was staying at the exact same distance behind her. Tas¨¬a''s flesh tingled with suspicion.

    This can''t be mere coincidence.

    To test her gut instinct, Tas¨¬a zig-zagged, decelerated, floored it again to two hundred and forty mph, and then decelerated once more to one hundred and fifty mph. The mag-racer maintained the same exact distance.

    Tas¨¬a pushed the intercom control.

    "Zoro Azul, are you in this race or not? Cool with me if I take your twenty-five K. I plan to do a little entertaining while I am here anyway."

    The mag-racer answered back with electronic noise. It dawned on Tas¨¬a that the electronic noise was a distress signal that the mag-racer sent out.

    Is it reporting me to bounty hunters? No fucking way!

    No. Not here in Vida Escondida with the Autonomous Authority running things. Though bounty hunters roamed the streets of the city like anywhere else in the Quadra, the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority was infamous for ignoring the demands of other governing bodies.

    If complying with their demands did not profit them and fucking over clientele rarely ever did, the answer was to always tell them to piss off.

    But something was indeed up.

    The words "Challenge voided" came across the two-way intercom as the mag-racer swept to the side and no longer followed the course. It disappeared out of her sight.

    Lights swiveled from a source that hovered above the HybrClydis. The distinct hum of hover engines erupted in a roar that surrounded her.

    Damn thing must be huge.

    As she glanced above, she could still not see it, nor the source of the swiveling lights.

    Could she outrun it and get back on the highway before they sent a ground team? Her energy readout that combined battery and fuel into one estimate for the current range of distance the HybrClydis could reach displayed two hundred and thirty-seven miles as the absolute limit.

    Damn. What a pisser. What else could it be but bounty hunters?

    Tas¨¬a white-knuckled the steering wheel. She bared her teeth while she sneered. Thoughts of her outlaw of a great-grandfather, the very same one who blessed the family with the alias ''del Alma-Gris,'' came to her mind.

    The name that he adapted after bearing one of the most common names in the Spanish-speaking world his entire life, over the generations, came to be their surname.

    She thought of his favorite song. As she sang, her voice became a sonorous chortle, higher and sharper than her natural low, smooth timbre.

    "Ain''t gonna be nobody''s million-dollar¡ª"

 4.2 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    "- baby!"

    Tas¨¬a maneuvered the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis to ride mere inches beside the inner fence to prevent the hovercraft from flanking her.

    The giant flying hauler would have to come from the passenger side, where she could level a gun to defend herself.

    A voice from overhead blasted through the Alfa Romeo. It addressed her by her nom de pilote.

    "Prima Vaquera, please acknowledge."

    The voice was human in tone and registered in its vocalization none of the artifice of the skellabot.

    Tas¨¬a flipped the speaker to public intercom and high volume.

    "You have some nerve," she began. Her anger grew. "Your car is getting badly beaten, and you are canceling on me? Breach of contract, motherfucker!"

    A softly whispered ''ay ay ay'' perforated the space above her before the man''s voice blasted through the air once more.

    "Prima Vaquera, er, Senora del Alma-Gris, this is Mani Montrose. Senior Director of the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority''s Recreational Automotive Services, I''m going to have to ask you to slow down, quit your evasive maneuvers, and stop. We need to commandeer your vehicle for further investigation."

    Tas¨¬a shook a fist out her side window at the hovercraft.

    "Like Hell!"

    Even angry, part of her mind was tuned to how well the hovercraft followed her in pursuit. The reaction time of its response versus any change she made.

    She once more zigzagged out just past the thin center point line. Tas¨¬a dropped her speed in half and then accelerated once more as she steered the HybrClydis back to the inner fence.

    The hauler stayed tight above her throughout the three essential test points. She winced as she realized what it meant.

    Damn!

    The hauler had her position locked in. Mani need not do a thing to keep tightly aligned with the HybrClydis.

    A rising staccato static that sounded like bullets flying caused her to jump. It was merely Mani Montrose clearing his throat.

    "Your fight-or-flight reaction is understandable, but given the circumstances, I need you to calm down."

    What?

    Did he just ask me to calm down?

    Tas¨¬a tilted her head and glanced up to gauge where she could find an angle to shoot Mani in the face.

    Yes. It was doable.

    To make it happen, she could use an upcoming center lane ramp to tilt her vehicle to lean on the driver''s side wheels at approximately fifty degrees to get the shot lined up.

    Before executing the plan, Tas¨¬a felt she owed him at least a fair warning. She tried diplomacy.

    "I need you to take a piss and leave me the hell alone!"

    She shouted.

    The hovercraft flew silently and maintained its position steadily above her, and he gave her no immediate response.

    The silence felt awkward as the ramp began to line up on the geo-display with the HybrClydis. A long, cool second passed before he spoke again.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    When he did, his voice sounded as if he was shouting out of a stack of Marshall amps.

    "If you prefer escalation to cooperation, we can do this that way too, but it won''t bode well for your adjudged culpability."

    As she studied the lanes ahead of her for the deadly maneuver she planned, Tasia surmised that she could immediately follow up the fight with a quick getaway from the track.

    After the next turn, there was a divider grip used by the mag-spheres to reach a repair station on a high hill connected by a turnpike that led out into the main highway that she could exploit to her advantage.

    She hesitated. Some of Mani Montrose''s words began to register.

    ''Given the circumstances,'' ''adjudged culpability''?

    Was she letting the hot-headed side of her personality take over when a cool, detached professionalism was needed?

    She did just tell the man to take the piss and considered it a restrained, diplomatic response.

    She was planning to murder the man over the inconvenience she was facing.

    Hotheaded Tas¨¬a reminded herself.

    We still don''t know what they want, and I sure as shit am not going back to prison!

    Before she executed the plan to floor it to obtain lift from the ramp, she decided to slow down to buy some time to find out what was going on.

    "Just what in the hell do you mean, ''given the circumstances''?"

    Mani Montrose chuckled, and he kept his tone of voice leveled, in a light, amused mode.

    The previous blast of amped effects was gone. They were now just having a conversation.

    "I''m glad you are now asking that question."

    Tas¨¬a sensed this was how he went about managing things when he really needed to talk someone off the proverbial ledge.

    Uh-oh! He has reason to think I am a nutter.

    "Go on!"

    "There are four hundred pounds of explosive materials packed in your HybrClydis. Did you not notice the extra drag?"

    Extra drag? Truth be told, until she swiped it out of Anneb¨¦l''s garage, she had only driven it inside a Quick Mart parking lot. Tas¨¬a noticed nothing more than that little wiggle that was exposed during the test.

    Ah, shit on me!

    She finally caught on.

    The explosives explained the wiggle, and the shock finally hit her. She was driving a bomb.

    Tas¨¬a lost her breath and gasped. Her hands now felt too light and dainty to handle the vehicle. Her breathing too nervous to counter with a meditative state.

    "Please, carefully decelerate and pull the vehicle to the side. We will lower the carrier transport and load the vehicle on it. The investigation may take several days to complete. Please note as well, Prima Vaquera, you may be held liable.

    "However, given your membership is in good standing, if you do not possess a lawyer to represent you, we can arrange for one, certainly a well-rated one, to be appointed if you are found culpable in these circumstances."

    A lawyer?

    Tas¨¬a reflexively stuck out her tongue in a scowling repose at the thought. Her only previous dealings with that side, the boring side, of the law were the seventy-two hours between her capture and when her sentence was adjudicated.

    She barely remembered the woman who represented her. That attorney wore a blue skirt of thick cloth canvas that would have looked severe and formal even back in the day on Tasia''s Mother Superior.

    To balance out the attire, her lawyer wore a frilly white blouse made subdued by the fabric''s monotone, and her hair was wrapped up in a tight bun.

    Tas¨¬a remembered the clothes that the lawyer wore vividly as if the attorney was in the room with her, but the attorney''s face and name? Tas¨¬a had nada to go on in her recollection.

    She was too busy at the time plotting an escape attempt from the pre-sentencing holding station to pay the attorney any attention.

    "You still with me, Prima?"

    She bobbed her head to the side at the sight of three mag-racers zooming by her. She regained the strength of grip in her hands.

    She could speak once more.

    "Yeah, pits coming up. I''ll park it. Listen, Mani. I had no idea the explosives were there."

    Freakin'' Anneb¨¦l!

    "It is not my place to render judgment one way or the other. I''m only here to provide services to our clientele and do so to my best ability. We have capable and consummate professionals who will conduct that investigation and eventual evaluation."

    Tas¨¬a made the rational assumption that Anneb¨¦l removed the explosives before the brawler drove the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis to Asunci¨®n.

    What possible reason did she have to reinstall the damn things!

    There was no Javierra family left to impress with a car bomb exploding outside of their mansion. Just Augustus, who was still recovering, and Sal, who was still in hiding.

    Tas¨¬a cursed her friend up a blue storm as she drove up into the pit.

    The huge hovercraft lit up its flood lamps. Tas¨¬a could barely see well enough to park in line between the soft blue lights that now directed her into the pit.

    Hell with it! That is their problem.

    She thought as she turned off the ignition.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed her satchel, her brand new PA, and a water bottle from the passenger seat. She scooted out of the vehicle.

    Mani Montrose''s voice was now low and flat as if he got what he wanted and was now bored with dealing with her.

    "Prima Vaquera, we will contact you once a determination has been made."

    The double click meant the hauler''s intercom was no longer in service.

 4.3 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a stormed off with her boots stomping on concrete, fully intending to walk the entire way up the on-ramp and do so unassisted. It was merely half a mile to the vehicle depot where the mag-spheres received routine maintenance.

    There was also a front office for roadside assistance where she could rent another vehicle and freshen up.

    Still, she was reluctant; even as a dues-paying member, Tas¨¬a did not want to owe the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority a damn thing.

    She had friends still in the city proper who could help her out. She needed to contact a few professional associates, anyway.

    Tas¨¬a stopped for a moment, fiddling with her brand-spanking-new PalmEx PA.

    As she stood adjusting to the quirks of the device, the more rational side of her interior dialogue acknowledged the Autonomous Authority''s legitimate interest in carrying out a forensic analysis of a vehicle that could have destroyed a heaping chunk of the racetrack and also in investigating the intentions of that vehicle''s driver to determine if there was malice involved.

    It is stupid and hotheaded of you to be angry with the VEAA.

    She finally admitted to herself.

    Tas¨¬a put the phone away. There was no reason to bother anyone this late if she merely swallowed her pride.

    When the on-ramp side curb forked, with the assistance station to the east and the highway much further to the west, she checked her credentials for roadside assistance, and somehow, though it had been years since she used the services for anything more than light maintenance and automated go-thru, her subscription was up to date still.

    All amenities and accommodations would be available to her as she waited for a replacement vehicle, coffee, fresh glazed yeast donuts, and, most importantly, at the moment, a clean place to take a dump. What more could a civilized chica ask for?

    She could even shower and sleep a few hours on a homeopathic massage cot up in the VIP loft. There were even shower stalls in the restroom changing section, but she wasn''t dirty, just cramped up all over from a daylong drive.

    Tas¨¬a was the only person in the immediate vicinity; the facility unlocked the gates as she stepped within several yards of its fencing.

    Whatever means they used to keep an eye on her remained discreet. An entirely professional service, yet as a breaking and entering specialist, Tas¨¬a felt it a challenge she needed to rise to the occasion and spot the establishment''s defenses.

    In reality, she thought, it did not take a keen eye. The need for a keen eye could be bypassed with the right technology. Tas¨¬a took from the inside pocket of her embossed leather jacket a pair of chic eyewear for the occasion that evening of her grand return to Vida Escondida.

    Alas, that was now delayed. However, the fashionable optics made by a top Berlin designer, Katy Taraneh, called Katy Lieds, were also highly functional information devices with many enhancements, practical for Tas¨¬a''s professional needs as an operative.

    She glanced around, doing a quick scan, and at first she was initially disappointed. She didn''t detect anything of consequence nearby.

    By the next sweep, where nothing she searched for was revealed, Tas¨¬a became quite enchanted and distracted by the Vida Escondida skyline. The Katy Lieds twin optical receptors were lit up with an IR interface defined in laser light only visible by the person who viewed with enhanced vision. It served as an interface for the Vida Escondida''s entertainment, navigation, and communications networks.

    One could simply watch from a balcony or rooftop and dial into one of a dozen light shows. Some of the light shows possessed stories as elaborate as those created for movie linears. The selection tempted Tas¨¬a to kill some time, but she reluctantly dialed down the distractions to where only pinged machine connections and text between the connections showed up on her IR specs.

    There was nothing indicative of a security system in the near distance.

    No, that is not true, Tas¨¬a. Pay attention!

    It was the Modality calling her out on her lack of focus. She breathed in and entered into a hypnotic state that deepened as she added one nearby sound after another; the most immediate sound, a ting on the gate in front of her, caught her attention.

    It is not entirely enclosed. Why?

    Were they expecting company? Was someone already here?

    Now she picked up something else coming through a well-insulated mechanical body. She realized she was wrong about the Katy Lieds replacing a keen eye, or in this case, a keen ear. They enhanced her perception, yes, but only through being attentively focused could she weld the Katy Lieds effectively enough to use in her upcoming operation.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

    Tas¨¬a now knew what hid within that insulated surface she inferred against an array of background noise that included a piston in constant shifting motion. A radio signal pulsed in slow, nearly imperceptible blinks from an artificial tree.

    Now that she had the coordinates mapped, Tas¨¬a bounced a signal back off of the tree and received in return a glimpse into an entire system of devices linked between it and several other artificial trees scattered throughout the premises.

    "Very nice," Tas¨¬a whispered as she studied the security setup. Its fail-safes were backed up in triplicates, and that third set she would have missed entirely if the PalmEx PA hadn''t detected a consistent delay in echo of no more than .0013 seconds coming from the lower deck telemetry.

    Satisfied that she got all the data she needed to understand the VEAA security modus operandi if they should prove to be a nuisance to her endeavors, Tas¨¬a clicked off the extended field of view on the Katy Lieds, and she sauntered forward.

    When she crossed the gate, it slid back in its place after her.

    But that tinge of a chime persists still?

    A male voice came through on a nearby intercom.

    "Prima Vaquera?"

    "Yes," Tas¨¬a answered, as she stifled a giggle at the thought that she was making the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority staff call her ''cousin cowgirl.''

    The throaty-sounding voice on the intercom continued.

    "You may wish to rent another vehicle to replace your racer. However, our scans show you in fact already have a rental that is a mere 3.6 miles away from your current location. No current driver or passenger inhabits it.

    "Your rental doesn''t possess a self-drive mode, but we do have a nifty little Vespa that can take you to it and return on its own.

    "I haven''t rented a replacement vehicle," she protested.

    "Our records show you rented a 2064 Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n on March 16th; is that not correct?"

    She remembered the metallic green Lamborghini she talked Leon into renting on her debit card two months previously. That bit of information certainly piqued her interest, given she was scheduled to meet him at midnight on that very evening to lay out some initial plans to raid the ReJuveX facility.

    Tas¨¬a nodded at a turreted camera that sat above a customer assistance station. It was the one most engaged in actively tracking her.

    "You are indeed correct. My apologies for the confusion. I wasn''t expecting the vehicle to be here, so near to Vida Escondida."

    "Very well. The Vespa''s battery extends for 90 miles at a cost of 8.5 USD a mile if you intend to keep it for the entire evening."

    "No. I''ll have it returned as soon as the Lamborghini is secured."

    A complimentary plate with three Donca yeast donuts and a cup of creamy mocha greeted her on a floating servitor hot plate. She took two bites, slow and blissful, out of the glazed donut the servitor offered her. The donut was as fresh as if she purchased it in a Donca breakfast bar.

    "I don''t wish to intrude while you are enjoying the relaxing stimulus of a sweet pastry; however, to maximize the tranquility of your experience, would you care for a sedative?

    "Your left hand is shaking."

    Tas¨¬a frowned. She had not noticed, but it was true.

    I need to stay sharp.

    Tas¨¬a closed her eyes, but she wasn''t in a meditative mood this soon after the previous one she had.

    However, there was no mystery. She knew what was poking at her nerves.

    A few hours beforehand, when she entered the valley that led to Vida Escondida through sparsely inhabited scrubland, the sky above grew purple with streaks of slow twisting lightning. The streaks reached up instead of downward. A shape took on definition as the number of slow flashing bolts multiplied. The shape was that of a plateau.

    It was Mount Olympus. Where Zeus of Greek legend dwelled.

    The sight of it spoke to a fear that Tas¨¬a would prefer to have left untested. That the Serpent would use her vulnerability outside of Asunci¨®n to take back from her what he had given.

    Fortunately, the fear was to remain as she wished, for as suddenly as the lightning in the sky danced about to make that plateau shape, it left in an instant, and the sky changed back to its early evening calm.

    Suddenly, the clear heavens were dominated by the hard-faceted light of the planet Jupiter.

    At that moment, Tas¨¬a considered what had just occurred, and it hit her in the gut. She pulled the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis to the side of the road and jumped out of the seat, leaned over the loose gravel above a ditch a few feet off of the road, and threw up ever so profusely.

    She wiped her mouth, muttered, "Hello, asshole," as a small freight truck rolled loudly by. Tas¨¬a glanced up at the driver. He was oblivious to the cosmic drama that manifested just a moment before.

    Tas¨¬a looked higher up and stared for a hard moment at the periphery surrounding the Lord of the Night Sky¡ªthe largest planet in the solar system. It was said that if you stared at Jupiter with your eyes unfocused, you could see Europa where her oceans had turned to plasma from the incident of 2054 when Zaf¨ªr Hull¨¢m, the twin station to Zaf¨ªr R¨®zsa, dropped out of Europa''s orbit and crashed.

    Zaf¨ªr Hull¨¢m jetted from its own orbit above the opposite pole and was pronounced lost in space.

    Tas¨¬a was in the habit on any clear sky eve when she was out and about of attempting that view of the ocean of plasma with an unaided eye, and that time standing in high scrubland plains leading to Vida Escondida, she could see the slightly orange-tinted glow from where the twin station had crashed into the moon.

    She had seen it before with a pair of binoculars, but this was the first time Tas¨¬a could do so with an unaided eye. After another hard count of a moment, and feeling chill¡ªthe scrublands got cold at night no matter the time of the year¡ªTas¨¬a decided it was time to leave.

    The asshole in the sky was not going to reveal himself. They were afraid of her now. Even so, her anxiety didn''t wane. The stirrings occurring in the cosmos were not matters you could just shrug off.

    "Prima Vaquera?"

    She acknowledged the low and smooth voice on the intercom with a nod and a smile.

    "Perhaps I could get you something that can steel your nerves? We have an unopened bottle of Drambuie to accompany that sedative."

    That was a damn fine idea.

    She grinned.

    "If only my friends understood me half as well as you do, Mister."

    "Very good, Senora Prima Vaquera. I will return shortly with the items on request."

    When the voice became silent to complete its task, Tas¨¬a went off to relieve herself.

 4.4 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    The Vespa''s route was curious. Though the Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n was a mere 3.6 miles from the Roadside Assistance Station across an overpass on the very highway she now rode, the Vespa instead headed southeast towards the scrublands.

    Tas¨¬a didn''t need to hold on to the steer grips. Her hands were free to fiddle with her PA to solve the mystery of Le¨®n''s disappearance. By her personal calculation, the Hurac¨¢n should be found near or within a vehicle salvage yard just off of the main highway.

    Was the Vespa going in the opposite direction because the Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n was on the move again, and the coordinates she was fed had yet to update?

    "Vespa, do you have a means of communication?" she asked, speaking into the console panel aligned against the steering head.

    It was silent.

    Odd, she considered.

    The Autonomous Authority tended to embed personal assistants and servitors into every aspect of its customer service operation.

    Tas¨¬a activated a LED panel and opened up a text console on the passenger assistance screen. She was about to make a query when the emacs interface wiped clean and was replaced by a skellabot''s head.

    "I''m afraid the Vespa is entirely controlled through relay back at the station. Prima Vaquera, do you have a question for me?"

    It was the same pleasant-sounding male voice she heard over the customer service desk.

    "Yes. The Vespa is headed into the scrublands; should we not be getting on the highway about right now?

    The skull head emoted a grimace.

    "The highway is blockaded going northeastward from your present position on the highway. So I plugged in the next most efficient route for the Vespa to take."

    "What''s the holdup then?"

    Tas¨¬a thought she may have needed to reword her question, but the skellabot processed her highly idiomatic contemporary Spanish language usage without missing a beat.

    "A very large tractor trailer carrying a dozen sporting vehicles jackknifed about an hour ago. It still needs to be cleared out."

    She wondered if the accident was related to Leon abandoning the car before they were scheduled to meet.

    "Skellabot, is there a way to override the autonomous navigation system on the Vespa?"

    "Yes. Affirmative."

    "I wish to take a moment to survey the accident. It may be related to my friend who drove the Lamborghini."

    After a few seconds where the skull seemed to blank out as it stared into space, it once more became highly animated.

    "Our scans show no damage or excessive wear and tear on the vehicle. Nor any temperature gradient above atmospheric norms inside of it.

    "However, you may find this to be an oddity. There is large¡ªwhat appears to be a large mammal in excess of 70 pounds on the roof of the vehicle."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. She saw Le¨®n in her mind''s eye back at the Daga Chicas, his magnificent nude, muscular body.

    "No. My friend would be more than double that weight, near to tripling it."

    "It is not your friend then. It''s core body temperature is in excess of 110¡ã, so this creature is most likely not human, at least not for long."

    Curious and curiouser still.

    "So¡­ Do you still wish to visit the scene of the accident?"

    "Yes. And I need the discretion of an infiltrator. You understand that can only be achieved if I can manually override the Vespa''s service protocols."

    To her surprise, the skellabot gave her no fuss.

    "Very well. When you have your foot placed firmly on the accelerator and your hands firmly on the steer grips pointing towards the current directional array, I will hand over control to you."

    Anticipating her next query, the skull vanished and was replaced by a road map centered on her present location.

    "Thank you," she said as she began her calculations.

    She glanced up at the deep indigo of the horizon stretched over the distant scrublands with an aggressive glare. Tas¨¬a clenched her teeth before she reared the accelerator, and hauled ass deeper into what felt to be enemy territory to find the next off-turn ramp.

    Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

    Although Tas¨¬a had figured out the voice commands of the input system, her access to the Vespas interface was more limited than what she needed at the moment.

    She wanted access to the traffic cams and the policing drones to get a better idea of how she should covertly approach the scene. The interface would only provide her with a road map and route suggestions.

    She stopped the Vespa a mile in her estimation from an overpass above the interdicted zone for the wreckage, hopped off, and led the motorbike into a copse of trees that spread outward in dense bush between which a well-trod wild game trail exited.

    When she popped out the kickstand, the skellabot''s visage popped back up on the screen.

    "Prima Vaquera, I need to inform you that if the vehicle is not occupied for one half an hour, it is policy for the vehicle to return back to its assigned station feed on its own accord.

    She squinted as she made a calculation. The salvage yard was a mere 1.5 miles from the accident zone. She could easily walk the distance, but if Le¨°n was in any danger, she would be eating into what could be crucial minutes.

    Avoiding the gnarled branches above her, she looked around the copses and determined from survey of the scrub lands with the ridge of low cliffs the Vespa could not pass through it.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed a set of fallen branches nearby and quickly obstructed the motorbike''s path back out onto the main road. She wondered if the vehicle had a means to detect duplicity and if that would cause any problems with her VEAA service contact.

    It was doubtful they would take such measures, but still, it was a calculated risk on her part. As she walked briskly back on the road, she cursed that she had left her fanny pack in the trunk of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. It was too gauche for a Vida Escondida adventure. For that she would have to endure many impracticalities to her operative''s aesthetic sensibility.

    The previous day, Alisha, now with one arm fully mobile and now capable of wiping her own ass, helped her with a wavy perm that curled up her otherwise long strands of hair. Curly hair and a month without much sun exposure, she appeared more like her Iberian grandmother on her father''s side than her mestiza grandmother, Idris, who married the Russian general.

    Fortunately, her footwear, Veronica Leopards, was fashionable, comfortable, durable, and well-designed for a hiking foray.

    The inside right boot held in place a .38 Special Ladysmith revolver. A good gun for defense against carjackers and back alley thugs, but if things went squirrelly with big genetically modified game like they did in the streets of Asunci¨®n a month back, she was pretty much on the fucked side; her latest purchase, a 357 Colt Clastic (Iconoclastic, but no one called them by their full designation), was left back in the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis trunk.

    She thought of her circumstances, and she patted herself on the back for having the foresight to see the tactical disadvantage inherent in fashion, given the leather jacket was made to be seen with red trim and bright yellow icons stitched into it.

    When she purchased it off the rack, she paid almost as much to have its interior lining made reversible and smart-dyed in an urban cameotic scheme that adjusted according to the immediate environment.

    She reversed the jacket.

    Her gunmetal gray jeans were already a good match for the jacket. She was set.

    She paused and reframed that sense of self-confidence to better reflect her circumstances.

    There were people better at the operative trade than herself it appeared.

    For one, her attempt to obtain a scene graph of the accident failed to turn up anything. Someone interceded to make certain she was going into the hazard zone blind.

    Tas¨¬a suspected visualization systems were turned off on purpose, and that frightened her even more than any heavy-handed quarantine would.

    Flash ops were the domain of Tier One spec forces. In front of her she was beginning to get flashes of such activity in commencement.

    She put the PA away and sprinted down the road towards the overpass. Within mere minutes, having overestimated the distance for which she parked the Vespa away from it, she heard the sounds of heavy machinery in the near distance.

    Her cover was nearly blown before she even reached the overpass. Tas¨¬a spotted a set of tumbling lights coming towards her from the opposite side of the overpass bridge.

    It was the side she needed to get on.

    Raising up into a leap, she dove into an aqueduct that swept into an underground canal, using her hands to pull forward in counter lever, working in unison to keep her descent as stable and painless as possible until her feet were planted on a grate.

    Her maneuver cushioned the dive well enough to keep her intact without breaking anything. Barely.

    That execution was not satisfactory by any means, Tas¨¬a self-admonished.

    She was well out of operative practice at the moment. The month she spent being Alisha''s caretaker was no excuse. Anneb¨¦l had some of the best fighting and gymnastic equipment on the planet that one could purchase.

    The truth of the matter is that she and Beauregard screwed every evening, sometimes multiple times a day, and on his days off, nearly nonstop for sessions lasting for several hours.

    Now, her priorities had changed. When Anneb¨¦l went off to hunt for Sal in the Sweet that first time, she was glad she had the excuse she was playing nurse to Alisha.

    It was the same when her cousin Fodor visited to update her on the hunt for Val Vitaly. She was impressed by the professional soundness of the operation he planned and mapped out.

    She had felt no compulsive need to intercede in his quest. Instead she gave him access to her wealth and resources to bankroll a search team that would work under Fodor''s direction.

    Tas¨¬a kept plenty busy and fit with her recreational activity of preference, but still her skill set was going to crap.

    So different were her new priorities that she had only practiced with her firearms on one occasion in all that time.

    Tas¨¬a got up on her knees and dismissed her concerns when a rumbling noise grew nearer as she positioned herself to hide.

    When the vehicle whooshed by with a strange pneumatic pumping noise, Tas¨¬a popped her head up to catch a glance. Though she got a good look, she could not make heads or tails of what it was.

    A steampunk lowrider is how it appeared.

    Four large wheels over a low center of gravity platform. The body of it was all frames and pipes. Pipes ran down the length of it, and they stoked furiously with a strange-smelling steam spewing out of them.

    Tas¨¬a could clearly see one of the passengers hanging from a bridled harness. She recognized what it was¡ªan Al-Majhul.

    "Weird little fuckers," Tas¨¬a muttered under her breath as she recalled their bog hideaway where she encountered and killed a few of them.

    She jerked her head back around at the sound of a double turbine engine drone. It was in hot pursuit of the freakish little man inside his fucked-up-looking riding contraption.

    Tas¨¬a curled against the canal and hugged against a porous vein of metallic rock beside it in hopes she wasn''t spotted by the conflicting parties.

    The drone had multiple launchers mounted on each side of its delta-shaped wings. Within seconds the unmistakable hiss of a missile launch hit the air just before it grew into a shriek, ending in a tumultuous explosion.

    The Al-Majhul vehicle was turned into shreds of shrapnel that rained down on nearby Tas¨¬a''s hiding spot.

 4.5 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    The drone swiveled on its axis, righted itself as it turned around, and disappeared back the way it came. When it was finally out of view, Tas¨¬a stood up and dusted herself off.

    Pensively chewing on her lower lip, she pondered upon what she just witnessed.

    She was certain of one thing. It did not involve the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority. They were circumspect about every aspect of their operation, and she highly doubted that they would use wet-work contractors for anything.

    The runaway Al-Majhul would have been apprehended for further investigation if the VEAA were involved, and the drone would have been clearly marked as one of their own.

    She knew who it belonged to, at least at a gut level hunch. That bird with the silvery hull and delta wings mimicking an early Cold War aesthetic design belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Sol.

    Whatever occurred that delayed her meeting with him, it appears Leon had called in reinforcements to deal with it. The pieces of the puzzle were coming together.

    As she got her feet back on the road, after an arduous climb, balanced on the asphalt ridgeline that led back up to the ditch, she bent over and breathed in hard, several times, in and out.

    What was she going to say to Le¨®n Ballano when she eventually caught up with him?

    She stood up and walked cautiously forward, whispering a monologue that was so bent Tas¨¬a knew she was too meek to ever deliver it, but it felt healthy just to get it off of her chest.

    "Sorry man, you need to call someone else who can deal with this shit. Somebody who is in proper condition. I''m a sex freak now. That is all I want to do all day, every day. To be with my man. I don''t even play with my guns all that much any longer.

    "I don''t even desire to use them on anyone. When Anneb¨¦l talked about going after Sal, all excited-like, with that glint of the hunt in her eye, I was like, ''meh'' to all of that and just luxuriated in the afterglow of how my bum was tingling from the pounding it took just an hour earlier."

    Tas¨¬a expired and caught her breath once more after the long rant. She owed it to Demona to get her shit together. It was during a lovemaking session in the sauna where Demona had virtually joined Tas¨¬a and Beauregard that her stroke occurred. Demona started convulsing just as she had her head curved back just on the threshold of a climax.

    Tas¨¬a would never forget how Demona''s languid smile and relaxed eyes changed in an instant to a look of stricken horror.

    Both Tas¨¬a and Beauregard glanced at one another helplessly as Demona''s virtual representation shook at an inhuman speed before the image shattered into thousands of pieces that slowly faded away.

    Less than an hour later, Le¨®n contacted Tas¨¬a. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Sol had kept his word to Tas¨¬a weeks earlier when they met, and he passed along her new personal assistant address to him. Le¨®n was in deep recon, and he did not carry his contact communications PA with him.

    However, he managed to get back to her, and when he did, he informed her that Demona had slipped into a deep coma. Given Demona expected it to happen at some point in the immediate future, she left a contingency plan that depended on Tas¨¬a assisting Le¨®n.

    Those plans would involve Tas¨¬a''s unique set of breach-work skills to get a team into the RejuveX facility.

    Before concluding the call, Le¨°n gave her a time and a place in Vida Escondida; at exactly 72 hours, he needed her to meet him.

    Now, here she was.

    The PalmEx vibrated against Tas¨¬a''s bum in a warning pattern. The patter set off her intuition. She didn''t like the sounds coming from the near distance as she closed in on the scene of the accident.

    She crouched and read the screen.

    A thumbs-up icon set beside several short, declarative sentences let her know that the device breached the Lieutenant Colonel''s network security system with a visual lock set in place on the cameras of a media drone whose registry was over a decade out of date.

    Untraceable back to your control, are you?

    At some point, the bot became hot property, and someone spent a good deal of effort to obscure their origins.

    The media drone relayed the scene from above the freeway. The camera swiveled over a scattering of bodies, broken and laid out haphazardly in an elongated crescent path from one side of a two-lane highway, across a toppled cement median, to the other two-lane highway behind where the tractor-trailer lay.

    It wasn''t alone.

    Crashed against it was a long, slender hauler vehicle¡ªsimilar in its odd design to the Al-Majhul scooter the drone had chased. Black smoke curled up from it.

    The vehicle lay on its back, broken up into four segments, with each notched into the 18-wheeler''s undergird. Gray billows of steam rose from the farthest one as rotors still chugged in motion.

    The bodies were Al-Majhul. The media drone surveying lingered on their corpses. Data scrolled down the display she relayed to her Katy Lieds V-specs. Analysis of the data set determined the corpses to have been riveted to pieces with .523 round-administered indentations.

    Either a helio-gunship or a very heavy cruiser-class drone did it. She heard no rumble up ahead that could match either description. Did that back up her guesswork that Lieutenant Colonel Sol''s forces were merely the clean-up crew called in by Le¨°n after the highway incident?

    Still glancing at the feed, she reached the overpass bridge, clicked the device off, and put it in her back pocket. She eased down behind a caution bumper to minimize her risk of being seen.

    Several drones, mostly lightly armed quadcopters and tricopters, floated above the scene of the accident. Circling around the perimeter of the wreckage were the twin-delta-winged drones shaped like jets from the time of yore. She spotted the drone from whose feed she stole. It bore a worn-to-bare logo from a newscaster that gave its last broadcast nearly twenty years before.If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    She turned her eyes back towards the delta-wing drones. They would have naturally been her main hurdle going forward, but their flight path made her reconsider that to be the case.

    She had a nifty app on the PalmEx; she could point it at a vehicle and get a readout of its console numbers.

    With the security already breached, she decided to take a crack at it. Tas¨¬a pinged it, and as she suspected, the twin-delta drones figure-eight glide patterns were used to conserve fuel, and they were both near empty, so they would be heading back to their base camp soon.

    One passed by her position, followed by another. Tas¨¬a dipped her head out from cover and studied the wreckage below her. She instantly caught sight of something the drones were missing, an Al-Majhul, dressed in soldier fatigues instead of their standard merchant gray leathers. He was pushing himself into the 18-wheeler wreckage to hide. He dragged a mangled leg that bounced upward at an unnatural angle behind him.

    She wanted to get a close-up view of the creature, but Tas¨¬a''s pistol scope was left back in the fanny pack. She did the next best thing and switched on the PalmEx, turned it to camera mode, centered on the Al-Majhul soldier, and flipped the camera magnification to ¡Á8.

    Tas¨¬a grinned.

    "Nice little gash you got there," she whispered.

    The leg was held together by a few remaining tendons. Around the upper thigh, the soldier applied a Bleed Eater¡ªan intelligence-enhanced tourniquet that regulated the flow of blood around a damaged limb. The device was common in military-grade medkits. As bad as the injury was, he didn''t risk dying from it.

    How the Al-Majhul soldier managed to elude the drones set off Tas¨¬a''s curiosity. She saw no advanced cameotic mechanisms on his harness. However, he possessed an impressive assembly of firepower. His left arm was braced with a 50 Split dual-barrel carbine.

    It fired .50 caliber rounds from its main, sighted barrel. The rounds loaded for it were orange tipped ones that exploded on impact while a small needle core drove deep and incinerated into a lingering toxic brew that multiplied the magnitude of its hazardous effect if multiple shots proved to be successful.

    It was designed to clear out insulated cabins in both vehicles and bunkers. It was equally effective in the open air if low-pressure atmospheric conditions typical in urban warfare were available.

    In long-outdated international treaties, the chemical dissolvent was banned for combat purposes. It was a highly nasty round that could make short work of a squadron of men.

    That was not all the 50 Split carbine was capable of accomplishing. Affixed on the bottom side was a drone thrower. Essentially aerial mines with a guidance factor.

    The weapon made him highly dangerous to Lt. Colonel Sol''s men.

    If he spotted a target, he could simply laser-tag his enemy, move back into cover, fire the drone straight up in the air, and then it did the rest of the work.

    The Al-Majhul soldier was lying in wait. Tas¨¬a had before her a few choices towards her best advantage. She could try to sneak up and subdue the soldier and interrogate him.

    To satiate her curiosity, she had a few questions in mind to which she wanted to know what part the Al-Majhul played in the drama in her life of late. Time, however, was a more significant factor at the moment than unraveling the mysteries enveloping her world.

    Tas¨¬a decided what she needed to do. She found Lt. Colonel Sol''s number in her contact list and made the call.

    He answered immediately.

    "Very smart move, del Alma-Gris. The drones picked you up on camera about a minute ago."

    Her eyes lit up and her brows raised as well. She had barely even moved that entire time.

    "Frankly, I am as surprised as you are," he answered her silence.

    "Lieutenant Colonel, glad we got that out of the way so quickly. I have an Al-Majhul in my line of sight. He is a heavily armed soldier with a 50 Split dual barrel carbine on him, just lying in wait for you to bring men down on site. With your permission, I can go ahead and take him out of action."

    "Certainly, the sty-drone shows you possess a pair of throwing knives and a .380 Lady Smith revolver in your possession. What is the range to your target?"

    Sty-drones, stealth drones, used both height and sky cameotics to remain elusive.

    He sent her the IR outline of her weapons as they lay pressed against her skin with a winking emoji.

    Not every cold-blooded killer is an uptight hardass.

    She reminded herself.

    "Eighty-seven meters," she answered.

    Sol chuckled.

    "I would very much like to see the shot¡ªcould you plug me into those fancy V-specs?"

    "Sure."

    She gave the Lt. Colonel permission to ride and now focused her attention on the Al-Majhul soldier.

    He lay perfectly still with disciplined, slow breathing. It was a good tradecraft for what he had in mind, but unfortunately for him, it also made him an easy target for her to pick off.

    She set up her line of sights to aim the revolver just behind his ear.

    The Lt. Colonel whispered.

    "If you happen to miss, Ms. del Alma-Gris, I''ll light the fucker up with the flip of a switch, so no pressure."

    Tas¨¬a mumbled to herself silently, ''No pressure,'' because she wasn''t going to miss. She squeezed the trigger, and with a sudden jerk, the soldier''s head snapped back.

    On the other end of the phone connection, she heard another chuckle.

    "With your permission, Lt. Colonel, I would like to liberate that 50 Split from the corpse. Somehow, none have ever made it into my collection.

    "By all means."

    Tas¨¬a grinned giddily as she climbed down the overpass hill and onto the side of the highway where the hauler lay.

    The lieutenant colonel was being highly accommodating towards her, and she felt she had a good idea as to why that was so.

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris?"

    Here it comes.

    "Yes?"

    "I understand you may be in a position to assist us further."

    As she leaned over the corpse, she answered. "I''m listening..."

    "Our mutual associate, Le¨®n Ballano, was last seen in a vehicle under your temporary registration. I deduce you are aware of the location of the vehicle and are currently proceeding there accordingly."

    "Quite correct. Would you like to meet me there?"

    As she waited for Sol''s reply, Tas¨¬a assessed her gains. There was a nice inventory of goods on the soldier that could make up for what she lost in the confiscation of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis.

    Not only did the soldier possess the 50 Split and a field-ready medkit, but his small arms was a .357 Iconoclastic.

    Tas¨¬a grinned. It was what she needed. The moonclips were in a pocket on his left leg sleeve.

    Further inspection of the corpse found a bandolier of eight clips¡ªhalf standard full metal jacket, half in orange-tipped chemwar¡ªwith 24 rounds in .50 caliber in each, a shivcoil combat knife, a bejeweled belt buckle, an IR monocle scope, and a pouch of assorted goodies she would have to check out later.

    Lt. Colonel Sol finally answered.

    "Well, that''s the rub; I can''t meet you there. The facility belongs to a contracted party to the VEAA. I don''t even dare run my drones over it to at least assess what happened to Captain Ballano until I get a grant of permission."

    "I see," she began her assessment of the lieutenant colonel''s predicament. "I''m a member in good standing of their auto and amenities service program. They expressed no objection to me retrieving the vehicle, and if that status should change, well, I have other means to acquire it."

    "Excellent! Will you keep me informed of what you find? I fear the worst for our captain. He is entirely off-grid at the moment, and I''m standing in his place with a troupe of ground pounders ready to jump."

    He was prompting her to finish up.

    "Roger that. I''m clearing out."

    They ended the call. She had one last thing to tend to; she felt around the pockets for a wallet. Much of her personal wealth over her thieving career had been generated through picking pockets and raiding the accounts from the identification and currency cards of those whose items she picked.

    She began to wonder if the Al-Majhul culture was geared towards those sorts of effects or if they were strictly pre-digital barterers only when she noticed a slit on the concealed side of the belt buckle. Inside of it was a polymer strip with a glassy crystal coating inlaid. A gilded design covered one side.

    Tas¨¬a flipped it over once more before she recognized it as a holographic ID.

    One hundred meters above her came a roar from a twin set of turbines that now pointed downward. The ground pounders were raring to get started. She slung the 50 Split on her shoulder and threw everything else into the camo pouch.

    Slinging herself out from the undergirders, Tas¨¬a rose up and hauled ass back up the hill slope.

 4.6 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Loaded down with loot and a fresh kill under her belt, Tas¨¬a was positively aglow in giddiness. She had shaken the apathy for the mission that came with the changes in the priorities of her life.

    She jogged back to the copse of trees while strapping on the bandolier, 50-Split, and holstered. 357 Iconoclastic, only to jerk back out to the roadway, startled when she heard movement coming from behind the tree. Tas¨¬a stumbled and fell on her bum.

    The face of a skellabot poked from behind the tree. It threw a large branch out towards a ditch.

    "Greetings, Ms. del Alma-Gris. It appears I have startled you. My apologies."

    She stood up and brushed herself off.

    "You are making a service call," she asked.

    Our sensors showed that the Vespa was off from the road and had become obstructed from movement."

    Her venture to the accident site only took twenty minutes. She didn''t think her subversion would trigger a reaction so quickly.

    "It appears," the skellabot continued. "The limbs fell, and they lodged in place between these two trees."

    Was the VEAA Automotive and Amenities Services AI being intentionally diplomatic?

    "Yes. So, it appears," she agreed.

    The skellabot paused and stared as if it waited for Tas¨¬a to say something. After a moment it once more spoke.

    "When I advised you of the protocol, you could have requested a longer operational window if you felt more time was necessary."

    She held her head to lean lopsided, and squinted back at the robotic servitor.

    "Is this going on my permanent record?"

    The skellabot lifted the Vespa and set it back on the road.

    "Your record was marked with a classification of ''mischievous'' long ago."

    The skellabot handed Tas¨¬a the bike helmet and sat on the front portion of the bike seat. It patted the slightly lifted attached segment of the seat to urge her to join it. Neither she nor the skellabot took up much space.

    Tas¨¬a cocked her chin up.

    "What is the next designation down from mischievous?"

    "That would be ''a willful obstructionist" Believe me, you do not want that. An agent gets assigned to scrutinize your every request. If too many are deemed questionable, the contract is then considered broached."

    With a backward scoot, she made herself comfortable behind the skellabot. Its ribcage was conveniently placed for her to grip on.

    With a motion suggesting the skellabot had done it a thousand times before, it kicked out the stand and revved up the engine.

    Watching its motions, Tas¨¬a thought of the fungi-based memory modules that modern robotic systems used for processing analog behavior.

    The subject was fresh on her mind given her conversation with Le¨°n about what Demona needed in the reconstruction of her brain.

    The skellabot craned its neck towards her.

    "Hold on very tight," it warned.

    It wasn''t kidding. G-force jerked her back as they accelerated with her cheeks flapping from the wind sheer. She had to turn her head away.

    What the hell?

    The Vespa had a displayed limit of 80 km per hour. They were traveling nearly twice that?

    Given the heat that swelled from the cylinders between her thighs and the aroma of jet fuel the vehicle now gave off, she was certain something out of the ordinary was going on.

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris. Assuredly, you have noted the speed up. Just between the two of us, our vehicles are all equipped with a jet fuel mode that is meant for internal emergency use only. However, given your designation as being mischievous, I felt it appropriate to accommodate your disposition to ensure you remain a customer in good standing and our services are deemed satisfactory to your needs."

    She chuckled to herself. She was now officially a ''naughty rascal,'' just shy of being designated an ''unscrupulous rogue'' and being bountied for a deposit breach by her services and amenities club, which, until that occurred, would offer her even better service accommodations than their more sedate clientele received.

    In less than a minute, they pulled off the ramp that led to the salvage yard gate and cruised up to it. When the Vespa came to a stop, the skellabot studied the gate.

    "Strange," it appraised. As it assessed their current situation.

    "What?" Tas¨¬a asked, unsure what it was detecting that lay beyond her own augmented perception.

    "The gate will not unlock. We have in our possession all necessary permissions. Someone or something has tampered with it."

    Tas¨¬a climbed off the Vespa, and she did her own survey of the situation. The wall around the facility stood six meters high. She could see into the interior where cars were stacked against a far wall opposite the gate.

    Was the mammal still near the car? The visibility inside the walls was too limited to tell.

    She asked the servitor Skellabot about it. "What of the mammal?"

    "Currently, its weight is distributed on large hind legs on the hood of your rental, but it stands in an upright fashion. In spite of its body temperature, its pulse rate appears healthy, albeit alarmingly high."

    Tas¨¬a glanced back at the skeletor; perhaps she was anthropomorphizing the robot, perhaps because its outside AI command receptors processed a second time through organic fungi, it really possessed an essential self; either way, it seemed anxious to get back to the Roadside Assistance Station.

    Her protocol violations were apparently adding up.You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

    "To reiterate," she began. "I have all necessary permissions?"

    "That is correct, within reason. You may retrieve your vehicle. If the non-human mammal turns out to be hostile, or even if it is unofficial property of the salvage yard, you may use force to remove it. Up to lethal force if it is required to prevent bodily harm."

    "Excellent."

    The Skellabot tapped the side of its head as if it just remembered something.

    "One last thing. Given the unresolved nature of our service, I am required to have you authorize a relinquishment of VEAA Auto Services and Amenities in this matter, that is, if you find the current service satisfactorily discharged."

    She chuckled. The AI made a safe assumption that Tas¨¬a was capable of and preferred dealing with the problem on the other side of the gate on her own terms, given her operative history and their own assessment of her psychological profile.

    "Very well, sir. I relinquish that you have any further responsibility in our mutual affairs this evening."

    The Skellabot nodded.

    "Have a safe journey ahead, Ms. del Alma-Gris. Pleasure doing business."

    It turned the Vesper around and zoomed back down the road.

    As she gazed up, she made an assessment. Tas¨¬a didn''t trust the smoothness of the wall and gate that towered over her.

    Too smooth. A proper wall has a charming set of crannies marring its surface.

    She raised the PalmEx Personal Assistant and set it on the camera mode to process within the normal visual spectrum at eight times magnification. A splotch a few meters to the left of the gate caught her attention. Though now dry, its shape dripped from a center mass for well over a meter.

    It was dried blood.

    Tas¨¬a swept the area on the wall from a position where she stood, standing a few meters from it. Not satisfied she was at the best angle of perception, Tas¨¬a backed up far, a good twenty meters, away with the camera trained on the splotch, and then she slowly moved its focus to the edge corner of the wall and back again. The second time she swept the wall, another splotch near the northwest corner and near the top ledge of the wall revealed itself.

    The camera did not detect it on the first sweep as the splotch was much more faded out than the first splotch had been.

    Something lay directly below the splotch on the corner. Tas¨¬a set the camera on it. Her heart broke for the once lovely thing.

    It was a deep blue hyacinth macaw with its wings split into several sliced-up segments. The PA''s camera locked in on it. A cold read analysis surged down in a scroll on the PA.

    Estimated time of death for subject¡ªapproximately 140 hours previously.

    Cause of death: severe trauma due to blood drainage.

    She ignored the info stream, and instead she studied the wall with her eyes squinted.

    Something embedded in the surface of it was vorp¨¦d-level sharp. The smooth shred on the macaw wing was consistent with a diamond wire coating being applied.

    She focused once more on the splotch. Tas¨¬a flashed a laser-read ping against the surface where the macaw had smacked into it. The invisible rays emerged, scattered in a very much visible pink. She flashed the light on and off and up and down the surface of the wall.

    The light only scattered in the top two meters of the wall surface. Tasia had her answer. It was covered in razor diamond filament.

    Anxious to get a move on, she pocketed the PA and lifted the 50-Split up to her shoulder and riddled the treated surface with the explosive rounds.

    With alarm hitting her gut, Tas¨¬a quickly realized she needed to step back. The sharp filament rained down all around her as she held her head down in anticipation of several lacerations.

    But they did not come.

    The material was snowflake soft, similarly so, as flakes landed softly on her jacket. She breathed out in relief.

    But, of course.

    It took pressure and kinetic energy for the sharpened microsurfaces to cause any lacerations. However, Tas¨¬a knew she was not out of danger as of yet with this matter. Flakes of filament landed on her neck along her jugular.

    Well, shit, Tas¨¬a, you may just die after all.

    The thought shivered her spine and flushed her face red with fear. She calmed herself with controlled breathing; cool, detached Analytics Mode took control.

    The flake felt like rose bulb filament, also known in its refined form as itching powder. She had made non-lethal rounds for pellet guns with that very substance before, and, indeed, it could drive one mad with discomfort.

    However, unlike razor diamond filament, rosebud linen couldn''t bury deep into your dermis and potentially kill you. Tas¨¬a cursed herself for not having the foresight to stand back farther. She expected big, heavy chunks of matted materials to break off and slide down the wall, not a fucking cloudburst of it.

    That spoke of a less than durable design. The clang and clamor of common thunderbolts would have rendered the diamond razor defensive parameter useless.

    So, what gives?

    No matter the soundness of the exoneration she was giving her slip-up, it didn''t mean jack shit, though. She could still potentially die if she made the wrong move.

    Tas¨¬a looked for a nearby shrub brush with branches that extended to shoulder length, and she found a grouping. She reached back in her pocket, raised up the PalmEx, flipped the camera to selfie mode, and secured the PA against a branch.

    Craning at a side tilt, she maneuvered her head to get a decent view of her neck.

    Yep. Aimed right at my jugular.

    The stringy little fucker was well placed to end her life if it had cause to pinch into her skin. If she were to do something erratic like nod her head or shake her noggin from side to side, it would dig in and sink into the vein.

    Her first thought was to punt it with her fingernail, but the kinetic activity would likely leave her with a split fingernail, or worse. She raised her leg and grabbed the stiletto out of its boot inlaid sheath.

    Careful to keep her neck stiff as she moved, Tas¨¬a raised the blade to her neck with the flat of it pressed against the flesh and just below the razor filament; she kept pressing in until the filament fell into the edge surface of the knife.

    Her flesh felt instant relief from the itch it caused. Though, she did not celebrate. There had to be other flakes of filament that fell on her. She could see some dusty groupings on her jacket''s right shoulder.

    There had to be some in her hair. She dared not brush it with her hands. Tas¨¬a used the camera to capture her side, forward, and downward views.

    With nothing but clumps sighted, she finally relaxed. Given the vorp¨¦d design of the bladed wire being layered in a sabre crescent, clumping meant the materials were rendered inert.

    The process of removing the filament should prove simple. She found a taller tree in the copses nearby where she kicked her left calf up on a branch that stood chest high to her.

    With a concerted effort, her body raised up with the leverage of her calf. Her right leg joined the left, and her body slid down slowly and deliberately until she gripped the limb with the back side of her knees.

    Tas¨¬a bent until she hung upside down, a meter off the ground. She shook her head furiously for a solid minute. She took the stiletto and shaved it over every inch of her leather jacket. Which caused a rip along one seam when it dinged against a lone sliver.

    Alarmed that she missed it on the previous inspection, Tas¨¬a glanced down and watched the sliver fall out of the seam.

    Damn. That was close.

    But to her relief, when she got the chance, she could easily epoxy the two sides together, and no one would know the difference. Once she finally felt certain no filament remained to cause mishaps, she studied every inch of her clothing and jacket with her camera set to AI mode to find diamond razor.

    The substance was not something to be fucked with lightly. Much like titanium, once ensconced beneath the dermis, even if it did not sever arteries or veins, it tended to be sepsis prone.

    Tas¨¬a straightened out her outfit and tied her hair back as she once more gazed in a study of the wall.

    The most boring wall I have ever seen.

    She shined the laser up and down the path of much-faded blood drippings once more. Only three places remained where the light scattered pink.

    Tas¨¬a stood back much farther and shot the remaining diamond razor tiles out. As it showered the ground, her face grew pensive in contemplation.

    Now, how about the ground below?

    Were her feet in her Veronica''s safe trotting over the filament? She set her right boot''s sole over a clump of filament but stopped herself before she pressed it down.

    Why take the risk?

    She had no immediate replacements available in the field for those boots.

    A Quick Mart was a few kilometers down the highway nearer to the city interior, but why suffer the inconvenience of a torn sole?

    Tas¨¬a aimed at the long, thin branch on a shrub tree with the 50-Split. It dropped to the ground.

    Damn. Her latest loot find was proving to be a useful tool.

    She laid the branch down facing towards the wall and considered how she would make the jump.

    Easily done, Tas¨¬a determined before she ran down the length of the branch on her booted toes and jumped on to the wall. She held on a second to get her grip locked. No deep grooved crannies made it a greater challenge, but she understood the path up.

    With a fierce scurry up the wall, she made it to the top. When she peeked over, she did not like what she spotted at all. On the beautiful engraved hood of the Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n stood a junkyard kangaroo. He looked artificially jacked, drugged up, wiry as hell, and he stared back at her.

 4.7 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Without taking her eyes off of the roo, Tas¨¬a smacked the wall below her with the butt of the .357 revolver. There was no razor wire. At least immediately beneath her.

    She braced herself, left leg dropped down against the back of the wall to pin the rest of her body in place, the 50-Split now raised up in both of her hands. Tas¨¬a took a shot aimed at the roo''s head. In the time it took her to squeeze the trigger and the bullet to reach its mark, the roo disappeared.

    Oh fuck, she exclaimed softly as she thrust herself down and away from the wall and braced herself against a car hood.

    A clamor of metallic debris smacked against the wall where she had been a split instant before. Of all Nature''s creatures, this was one of the few who possessed an advantage of speed. She kept moving as she put the 50-Split away and brought the stiletto back in hand.

    She no longer would have the advantage of distance between them.

    Tas¨¬a did not necessarily want to kill the roo, but neither could she deny what its presence meant. Cartels loved to use the jacked-up roos in yards like this one. They called them the English phrase ''speed freaks,'' or just plain ''freaks.''

    This motherfucker will not stop until it kills me!

    She needed to get moving.

    As she whipped past a strapped-down bundle of cars stacked three high, a thump pounded against the one on the top, a Black Falcon Camaro. With another thump, the front windshield suddenly smashed in.

    Her nostrils flared up, unleashing a coppery steam.

    The roo''s next jump, Tas¨¬a perceived as she evoked the Modality, would be a razor-sharp hoof in the side of her neck; she raised the stiletto up like a shield with both hands gripped upon it. The flat of the blade caught the heel of the roo''s hoof.

    Tas¨¬a twisted her shoulders, aligning with the thrust of the kick before the roo could crash into her, and jerked the blade from the hoof and swung it in a downward arc into its nut sack.

    The roo''s squeal it let out mightily unhinged. She tried to shake and jerk the blade to give the cut a jagged rip for more penetrating damage, but the roo flipped backwards to avoid her.

    Now that she had achieved a little distance between herself and it, Tas¨¬a once more switched out her weapons. With the .357 Iconoclastic in hand, she let the Modality guide her hand to take a burst of shots.

    When she executed the sweep, however, the roo was not there to catch the bullets.

    Faster than Modality calculation? The fuck!

    Tas¨¬a eased off the modality adrenaline rush, and she backed away from the stacks towards the open yard to force the roo to attack her in the open, though she had no idea where it disappeared.

    Her upper torso pivoted from left to right at a 120¡ã radius. It was a reasonable assessment of where the roo could have maneuvered, but from behind her, a whirling noise grew louder, and she ducked as an old-fashioned license plate bounced off her leather jacket.

    The roo had kicked it from her right where, by the laws of physics, it had no right to be.

    As she spun to face the roo, Tas¨¬a felt a rip in the jacket, and that made her furious. She snapped the .357 Iconoclastic up level to take advantage of the angle of attack. Its slide-ruler sites automatically adjusted to accommodate the space between her and a potential target.

    A second license plate thumped against the pistol and smacked the side of her hand. Blood splat in her eye where she was cut in the webbing between her pinky and little finger.

    She dropped the gun as her hand seared in pain.

    It''s a good time for the roo to come at me in a hard charge, Tas¨¬a thought.

    She kicked her legs out in a flip and somersaulted. Her boot heels made contact with the roo''s face. It stunned the beast long enough for her to grab the .357 Iconoclastic, twist around, and empty four shots into its chest where a human heart would be.

    Kangaroo anatomy wasn''t a subject of familiarity to her.

    It mattered not; the beast dropped dead to the ground.

    Tas¨¬a relaxed. She now realized, as she let out her breath and gulped in air, that she had not breathed in over a minute.

    She ignored the pain in her hand.

    With a shake of her head, Tas¨¬a cursed in despair. She felt the greatest of contempt for those who turned animals into human killers. Only a few apex predators did the rivalry come naturally, such as with the grizzly, but for the rest of the animal world to challenge Man, that was unnatural.

    The junkyard roo, the speed freak, was an abomination created by the designs of evil men. Cartel assholes.

    Tas¨¬a bent over to catch her breath. Killing an animal not meant for game always brought about a foul mood.

    She took a moment to recall a playful argument on the prison yard track that she had with Lydia Estrella.

    "I always had dogs in my yard trained to protect me as a child. Dad was a cartel accountant."

    "They were trained to not just warn you but to attack?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Of course. Vicious creatures at that. I wasn''t allowed to play with them. I needed them for my protection."

    "Lydia, that is what a gun is for."

    Lydia threw up her hands, palms clutching the air.

    "At eight?"

    "Why not?"

    Lydia chuckled and brushed off the argument with a scattering of her fingertips. Being argumentative was declass¨¦ in her social circles.

    "You''re a queer senora, mi amiga."

    Once her breath returned and her heart calmed down, she surveyed the salvage yard to make sure nothing else lay in wait for her. Only a few other vehicles besides the Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n were scattered about the premises that had not been piled into stacks.

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes scanned cautiously.

    They would make for excellent shelters for vermin.

    She took out her PalmEx and scanned the grounds for IR readings. Only three creatures were large enough to pose a threat¡ªa trio of peccary skunk pigs roamed about the far distant side.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    Her mind at ease, Tas¨¬a was ready to call the Lt. Colonel and read him in when something else caught her attention. It wasn''t a living thing, but a dizzying fright crawled up her torso even so.

    There was a Lincoln Hearse amongst the cars. It stood alone in a cubby made of three sets of stacked vehicles. Tas¨¬a was damn certain it was the very same one from her incident with the vampire larpers on the outskirts of Villa Marr¨°n.

    She approached the vehicle cautiously with the .357 Iconoclastic drawn low, but then chuckled at the absurdity. If he was in that coffin and actually rose up from the dead, she would just nail him again but with a much greater increase in magnum force this time.

    As much as she loved that .32 Kel-Tec she used to splatter his brains, the little repeater pistol was mostly useful for its ease of concealment.

    She didn''t want to keep Sol waiting longer than necessary, so she picked up the pace and opened the driver side door. A coffin was there, but was it the same one? Hell, Tas¨¬a didn''t pay enough attention to it on her excursion several weeks previously to identify it conclusively. This one was white, done in false marble with gold inlay¡ªwhat of it could she remember?

    As Tas¨¬a twisted her head to appraise it better, something caught her eye. Three pills in the pinch of the driver''s seat. Some more pills were scattered in the floorboard.

    Yep. This was it!

    Those pills were Sinclair''s. She downed a bottle of prescription meds as she freaked out over the prospect of changing into a ghoul.

    How long has the vehicle been here?

    Tas¨¬a checked out the ground beneath it. The sparse grass meant it likely was rolled into the yard soon after she made short work of the vampire larper and his ghoul crew.

    Quite the coincidence.

    "Lt. Colonel Sol, speaking."

    "I''m inside, sir. I''ll feed you in," she steadied the PA as she surveyed the grounds in full spectrum mode.

    UV - r o y g b i v - IR - Laser Bounce.

    "I ran into hostility with that one there."

    "Damn," Sol whispered under his breath loud enough for Tas¨¬a to hear. "I''m surprised the Dudley-Do-Rights at the VEAA would allow its contractors to possess a gray-market beast like that."

    "Absolutely unreal how fast it was."

    The lieutenant colonel was a quant at heart.

    "Do you have an estimate on that?"

    "Reaction time, .08 seconds over my own."

    Sol whistled, "At Harvested level of performance, that is all the difference in the world. What would you assess to be your X-factor, Ms. del Alma-Gris?"

    She gave it a moment before answering.

    "Geometric intuition," she was about to allude to the Modality but then asked herself if Sol was aware of it.

    Is HE now alluding to it?

    She got her answer.

    "That is a good way to put it. It even speaks to you, doesn''t it?"

    Tas¨¬a chuckled nervously in response.

    "Oh," Sol began. "Don''t answer that. I didn''t realize until now it''s something you have not fully integrated. No, forget it. If you don''t mind, let''s get a readout on the grounds so we can give my tact-techs something to do."

    Sol was a sly fox. He threw that out there to arouse her curiosity and let her know cooperating with him was in her interest. She put the matter to the side. It was irrelevant to the current mission.

    Removing the camera from her PalmEx PA first, she then pinned the camera to her jacket. First, she checked out the Lamborghini. IR scan revealed nothing, so she wasn''t expecting to find Le¨®n''s freshly made dead corpse inside it. The full-spectrum scan revealed nothing of use, as well.

    Le¨®n kept the interior of the car surprisingly clean. She decided there was nothing of obvious value inside and turned back around as not to waste Sol''s time.

    "I''m walking the grounds now. There is no way whoever was here left no trace of their presence."

    She walked along the perimeter of the main building. Turning the corner on the far gate side, she spotted the roo cage.

    "Interesting," Sol responded. "It appears tampered with. Someone wanted to make it difficult for you or an investigative team to retrieve the car."

    The cage hatch was bent up and lay tossed on the ground, ripped out from the locking mechanism. Who would brave being that close to the roo?

    She ducked her head into the cage. On the floorboards lay a shock collar severed and coiled like a rope. A tranq dart was bent up near it.

    I need to acquire a few non-lethal weapons for vermin like that roo, she thought. Sick of the guilt trips causing me to dislike myself.

    To that agitation in her gut, Tas¨¬a squatted.

    "Just a moment, Lt. Colonel."

    She grabbed her smokes, the Blonde-Cerises, which handsome Beauregard kept her well supplied with, and lit one.

    "Do you see something?" he asked.

    "Yep," Tas¨¬a said as she glanced around for something to report and pointed the camera at that something in the midst of catching her eye.

    A large footprint of a boot with a jagg¨¦d indention around the arch. She traced the second set of prints where someone had squatted in the dirt to tamper with the gate locks.

    "It is neither Al-Majhul nor Omar."

    "Didn''t think it would be. I suspect that roadkill back there was in the wrong place at the wrong time. However," Sol paused for a moment.

    Glancing at the screen to see what he was doing on his end, she saw him jabbing his finger into the air.

    "That jaar¨¦d arc on the boot print is from a Silent Sole. It''s part of a counter-leveling mechanism to absorb sound. You''ve got a Creeper Team on your hands."

    Tas¨¬a''s nose wrinkled.

    "Creeper Team?"

    "Just the usual bounty hunters that go after special targets. Spec ops use a similar boot, but this one is a soft sole, so that can be ruled out."

    Shit! Elise. It had to be.

    Tas¨¬a stood up and walked into the yard back towards the Lamborghini.

    She attempted to make light of it.

    "That at least gives us an idea what this is about. Any idea of the price on Ballano''s head? What his market value is?"

    Sol chuckled.

    "One half the price on my head. One fifth, your step-grandfather, the General''s. It usually comes as a package deal to take us all out, Kutuzov and his four principles for twenty million."

    Tas¨¬a whistled.

    "I''ve never gotten mine above two million in spite of a concerted effort at being an outlaw on my part. I''m envious."

    Sol cleared his throat.

    "With that note, I need to inform my tacticians."

    "Hold up a second, Lt. Colonel. I think I found the means of extraction they used. There is a sled outline right here, eight meters to the southwest of the Lamborghini. I''m catching a reading. It''s a hovercraft, AFT-4 Series 27. If that means anything to you."

    "Roger that," said Sol. "The kind usually packed in an armed support helio, but not this time. We would have seen it. Thank you for the assist, Ms. del Alma-Gris, but my boys are getting impatient. Over and out."

    It was an abrupt ending to the call, but he did have a lot on his plate, covering for Le¨®n''s duties.

    Tas¨¬a finished the Blonde-Cerise. As she found the control panel beside the gate, she stubbed the cigarette to free up her hand.

    The open command did not respond. Someone went through the trouble of disconnecting it. She took out the PalmEx PA and pinged at the gate station. Override proved easy for the mechanical control panel.

    There was not even an old-fashioned Bluetooth interface between software and mechanical hardware embedded in the device. It was even more basic than that. A ping equaled activation. The door jolted and stopped in place with a metallic screech.

    The Creep Team had wedged the chain rollers that moved the gate with a long metal bar. In spec-ops there was a term for the team member whose job it was to create distractions¡ªa sabo.

    Elise''s Sabo stayed very busy. With that level of commitment displayed, Tas¨¬a did not even trust her hands on the wedge bar. An enterprising saboteur would have left a contact poison on the wedge bar if he had it on him, no doubt.

    Indeed, the sabo left a cracked tranq lodge in the forked heft on top. He had split the needle so the entire surface would cut her.

    And the cracked tube was folded inward so the tranquilizer would not drip.

    She could make use of it. Tas¨¬a carefully removed it and placed it inside the leather fold of her boot holster.

    A light work jacket was left in the tin-roofed station''s entrance. Tas¨¬a took the windbreaker off of an S-hook and wrapped it around her hand, pulled the bar towards her and back again until it lodged into the pulley rut.

    After several attempts, it finally loosened, and the chain weights caused the gate to roll inward on its own and slam to the side.

    Tas¨¬a looked back over the yard behind her.

    The salvage yard wasn''t the worst place Tas¨¬a had been in over the last year; hell, if she wasn''t anxious to be elsewhere, she would take some time to salvage scrap materials for a project she had in mind.

    She turned to the Lamborghini, glanced down, and searched to see if the security lock was registered to one of her accounts.

    After several seconds of thumbing through, she discovered the VEAA Automotive and Amenities Services AI went through the trouble of getting it correctly set up to acknowledge Tas¨¬a''s override authority.

    The engine started, and the lights came on with a simple tap. She really hoped she wasn''t going to be on their bad side due to the explosives they found.

    It was all just a misunderstanding, really.

    Tas¨¬a slid into the Lamborghini driver seat. Something dangled from the rearview mirror display. A green strand of yarn held a thumb-sized drive and a flyer made of pretty mauve-colored postcard stock.

    She raised her personal assistant up to it and ran a spectrogram graph. No odd chemicals were detected. The drive was a Sensorium Interactive.

    The hundreds of diamond facets along its surface were standard for the product. They gave off a pleasing glow from LED lighting buried within.

    Someone not only wanted Tas¨¬a to listen to what they had to say, but they wanted to make an impression. The flyer was a very artful design with subtly shifting 2.5-dimensional lithographs.

    It advertised Grosse Prix Confidential Cyber Security. They had a suite for patrons just southeast of Vida Escondida''s main strip. It was where Le¨®n had set up their meeting.

    On the back of the flyer was a short note.

    Continue as you previously planned, same booth. I would listen to what he has to say¡ªElise.

 4.8 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Her eyes held steady on the sensorium interactive.

    Who was this ''he'' Elise mentioned?

    Tas¨¬a tapped the control button for the windows to let in the night air as she pulled out of the salvage lot. On the highway at night, a breeze in her hair comforted her.

    As the roadway ahead became soothingly monotonous, she once more engaged her concerns.

    Surely it was not Le¨®n. Elise and her crew did not have the time to force Le¨®n into generating a sensorium interactive within a mere few hours of holding him captive.

    So who was he?

    Elise did not work for men. At least not directly in a hierarchy where she took orders. She was very much willing to take their money in contractual terms, but no one micromanaged Elise.

    When she ingratiated herself into Tas¨¬a''s crew, claiming to be a demolitions expert and indeed proved herself to be quite skilled at it, the bounty hunter could barely contain her bossy nature, and she treated Tas¨¬a''s male crew members with contempt.

    Tas¨¬a tapped the sensorium interactive with her index finger. This guy must be paying the bounty hunter a fortune to get that bitch''s cooperation.

    As she rode the overpass heading east, she caught sight of two new skyscrapers being built that were not there a little over eight months before.

    She looked askew at the ultra-modern structures and their seashell-like design. Something about them did not sit well with her gut intuition.

    Too far away to soak up any more detail, she turned away, and Tas¨¬a sulked a bit.

    Miffed that events had not allowed her to make the grand entrance she imagined by making some noise on the Zona Lobos and then, after meeting Le¨°n, doing a street drag race on the west side of the strip, taking money from the squinty-faced low riders on Del Tesse Street.

    It appeared this excursion into Vida Escondida was going to be all business.

    Poo!

    Though she had spent many years now living on and off in Vida Escondida depending on the heat her heists generated, Tas¨¬a wasn''t familiar with the boutique business of whom''s service she now required¡ªGrosse Prix Cyber Security. Le¨®n described it as a place to do business far from scrying eyes and ears but designed to fit in with the luxury amenities end of the Vida Escondida club, sports, and casino scene.

    Entrance into the establishment was not possible from the street front side. It was necessary to drive the Lamborghini into a subterranean back lot with a spiral ramp leading inside.

    An overwhelming plethora of security systems scrolled their IDs and systems requests down the PalmEx PA console reader as they pinged the Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n.

    She could barely make heads or tails of the data on the screen as it flashed by¡ªimpressive! However, she set up a recording of the entire content of batched files to sort through later on when she got the chance to examine them.

    The Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n glided onto a platform deck when Tas¨¬a stopped at the end of the spiral ramp. It lowered for several feet before the platform evened itself into a chamber. She could feel the air pressure change. A current flow circulated through that was comprised of air elementals.

    The feeling that caressed her skin was damn erotic and left no orifice or pore on her body unstimulated. She wanted to light up the third Blonde Cerise of the evening to keep the horny under control, but the console flashed a service message stating the elementals would extinguish any flame as part of their standard security procedure.

    Le¨°n had warned her of the procedures involved. It was merely the first part of an anti-spore fumigation. No cybersecurity could be truly trustworthy without such drastic actions taken when doing private business in the Quadra.

    After she entered the building, she would have to strip out at a private station, and a suppository would be inserted up her bum that dissolved into UV gel packs that absorbed into her bloodstream. Le¨®n said not to worry. The cleansing that occurred felt very pleasant and healing.

    Tas¨¬a smirked to herself in anticipation given her favored proclivities. It sounded like something she would be willing to pay to try out if offered as a service at a Fuego - Hell Fire Club.

    Finally, the air pressure resumed to normal, and the elementals retreated to whence they came. Up on the car''s middle console, a message read: You May Smoke Now.

    "Finally," Tas¨¬a whispered, her voice unnaturally high and falsetto for it to be coming from her throat. For her diminutive height and femininity, her voice was gravelly and low in range, but the evening events played havoc on her nerves.

    She lit up a Blonde Cerise as tumblers bearing scrub brushes surrounded the car. A thorough exterior cleaning was merely a byproduct of what was occurring.The vehicle was being scrubbed of nanospores with millions and millions of gel pack explosions that looked no different than phosphate-based suds being administered at a normal car wash.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

    The Lamborghini Hurac¨¢n moved beneath the brushes that swirled in its every crevice. The last segment of the long chamber blew hot air from hoses attached to drones.

    In five minutes, the process was complete. On rollers in which Tas¨¬a had no control, the vehicle stopped in front of a circular doorway. The platform to which the car was fastened turned until the driver side door faced the portal.

    Through overhead speakers a voice called out to her. "Good evening, Ms. del Alma-Gris. I''ll be escorting you through the security process. My name is Kip."

    She jerked her head back. She couldn''t suppress her giggles.

    "Is your name really Kip?"

    The person over the speaker cleared his throat.

    "No. Of course not. My enemies in management call me Kip. So I am Kip."

    "What is your real name?"

    "Salvador."

    Tas¨¬a thought about it, then she adamantly shook her head.

    "I''m afraid I already have a Salvador in my life. You shall remain Kip."

    Salvador, aka Kip, chuckled at Tas¨¬a''s teasing nature.

    "Thanks, Ms. del Alma-Gris, Are you familiar with the security procedure? I can walk you through it if you are not."

    "Thank you, Kip, but I think I know what to expect."

    A drawer pushed out from the wall. "If you would place any effects you have on your person in here."

    She nodded. Tas¨¬a placed the sensorium interactive and her money purse down. She added the .357 Iconoclastic and its holster clipped on to the inside of her jacket; the two stilettos made for throwing and three moon clips containing .357 rounds were fastened inside a bandolier, which she pulled around and up over her head.

    Kip whistled at the selection.

    "Surely your guests are armed more often than not, right, Kip?"

    "Right you are, but rarely are the weapons so well hidden. I did not spot any of that on you. Plus those knives, the metalwork is outstanding."

    Tas¨¬a ignored the compliment as she felt a clarification was in order.

    "You did not spot it? Yet, security is your fort¨¦?"

    "Yes, and when we get beyond surface physical inspection, your instruments would have been revealed."

    She was reminded of Lt. Colonel Sol sending over to her the full spectrum scan readout the drones did that revealed where her weapons were hidden on her body.

    "Fair enough."

    "If you were to walk through this door?"

    The portal dilated, revealing a short walkway to a private chamber.

    "Enter the chamber, remove your clothes." Kip commanded.

    Tas¨¬a let out a teasing gasp.

    "This keeps getting better and better!"

    "I can assure you of your privacy. Your scans are machine-read only until your clothes are returned."

    "Well, poo to that, Kip! I was wondering if I was going to get the same whistle for my body that you gave for my weapons."

    He laughed out loud. No mere chuckle this time.

    "You''re going to get me in trouble, Ms. del Alma-Gris."

    She entered the long booth and removed her chic outfit. Not much of it was ruffled from the evening excursion, likely because she had the outfit treated for durability by a specialty shop.

    A mere smudge on her gunmetal gray leather pants that she removed with the wet thumb treatment, and it was as good as professionally dry cleaned.

    Perhaps, she should get all of her clothes treated, even her nonoperative wear.

    The laceration on her jacket from the roo attack was the only thing out of order. For now, she put the jacket on a hook by the full mirror.

    When she slipped out of her thong, a diamond razor dropped from her underwear band and fell into her pubic hair, where it slowly slid down closer and closer to her vulva mound, splitting through dozens of hair follicles along the way.

    Oh shit!

    She gasped and then screamed.

    "Shit! Shit! Shit!"

    Tasia bent backwards; her hips thrust forward with her pubis mons curved upward as she tried to settle the razor wire''s trajectory away from her flesh.

    Kip''s voice came up on the intercom.

    "Problem?"

    The diamond razor wire wobbled, balanced perfectly and set between three follicles just above where her flesh crinkled.

    She held her breath to hold in her panic. Given the thick enfolding of her flesh, the kinetic potential unleashed would cause severe laceration if the diamond razor wire fell.

    "Yeah. I have a sliver of razor wire that dropped into my pubic hair."

    Kip was quiet for a moment before he spoke.

    "Diamond razor wire? That material used to make garrotes?"

    His tone let out a small note of suspicion.

    "I''m not an assassin, Kip."

    "Of course. It would be none of my business if you were. I''m looking up information on the substance as I am obviously unfamiliar with it. It is a nanomachine made of a mezzo-carbon that exploits kinetic discharge to create maximum surface wounds. You definitely do not want to get it on your skin."

    "This is going to sound more sarcastic than intended, Kip, but tell me something that I don''t know. Would you, please?"

    "I''m getting to that part. Carefully move to that side station on your right. I set off a light to blink where you should stand."

    Tas¨¬a shifted over to the station whose stand raised four inches up from the carpeted floor. If she simply walked it with an upward thrust of her knees, it would have shaken the razor wire loose.

    With deliberate grace, Tas¨¬a set her left toes even with the four-inch-high lifted edge. She pulled her body forward until she stood above the toes, and finally she came to rest in a crouch at the center of the platform.

    The station was set up like a runway model''s bench with several pull-out tools mounted inside tethered dispensers lined at mid-level in front of a multi-surfaced mirror that gave front, side, and top views of herself.

    Tas¨¬a studied the slither of razor wire from its many perspectives. The lodging point was a mere centimeter from her vulva flesh. The path it created through her patch of hair was aesthetically unappealing in the extreme, leaving a tangled, haphazard composition to what was before simplicity in its presentation and prettiness.

    It was a testament to the diamond-wire sharpness and resilience, as straight razors were utterly rendered useless, bent, warped, and mangled when she attempted to shave the thatch when she was much younger.

    Its resistance to being shaved seemed supernatural until a specialist at a popular health spa and physical therapy clinic in Vida Escondida became interested in the unusual phenomenon. The clinician ran a full spectrum analysis on a set of hairs plucked from her inner thighs and intergluteal cleft where she normally had her hair removed.

    Her hair turned out to be the same gradient of coarseness and strength as the silk armored vest used by Genghis Khan''s horsemen to stop arrows.

    She learned to accept it as just another part of her unique nature. Plucking was not difficult, so keeping groomed was not a problem. Even still, full waxing had no appeal to Tas¨¬a.

    Not my scene.

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris are you still with us, or did you cut yourself, and you are now bleeding to death? Please respond; I''ll have to do a physical check on you if you don''t."

    "I''m all right, Kip."

    "Okay. Good. I''m going to turn on the vacuum appliance and an LED light in orange above it so you don''t have to sort through the other appliances. I''m certain you can take it from there. You may want to inspect the rest of your body thoroughly before you do anything else afterwards."

    "I will do that, Kip."

    The vacuum revved up loudly. Tas¨¬a forced herself not to react to the noise.

    Just a few steps forward, and Tas and we are home free.

 4.9 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    The man was tall, thin, and possessed a slight recede in his hairline, and he was older than what his voice suggested. While he fiddled with the sensorium interactive, his thick brows crossed slantingly above squinting eyes.

    "Hello. Ms. del Alma-Gris, I''m Kip."

    "No fucking way!"

    "Yep. There is a way. I know. One year cigarette-free, smoke-free, and my voice has the depth of a sixteen-year-old kid."

    Salvador nodded towards the man behind the bar as he escorted her towards it.

    "I imagine you could use a drink after that ordeal."

    She scooched up onto a stool beside where Kip leaned and glanced around. It was a small barroom with a mere four booths and five tables. Mock redwood paneling made it all the more cozy.

    The bartender was the only other person present. A pale fellow with a full head of tight black curls. His handsome mug smiled back at her; his eyes lit up suggestively.

    She realized that his hands were on a velvet-lined box that contained her .357 Iconoclastic and her knives. He was merely offering them to her.

    "Thank you most kindly, sir. You got a specialty drink you could whip up for me?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    He raised his chin and waved his palms at her in a proud nod.

    "A variation of my own of the Corpse Reviver. I call it the Resucitad¨®r."

    She smiled slyly.

    Absinthe!

    In the Quadra, the Great Wyrm was never neutered of its full potency.

    The bartender worked up the concoction with whipping motions of his fingers. First the Cointreau, then a splash of lime juice, followed by a pour of Saison Folle Absinthe, another splash of lime juice, and, finally, topped with a Garnacha from Spain.

    He took a plastic toothpick, shaped like a fencing ¨¦p¨¦e, and crisscrossed deep into the liquids several times. But before the bartender passed the glass forward to her, he watched it intently until the liquids folded together into a cohesive whole.

    He eyed her with large, bright pupils and a wolfish grin when she took the drink from him.

    So, he was flirting. What was that you said back in Asunci¨®n, Tas? We''ll limit ourselves to one man per bar scene to show our betters a reasonable level of decorum and social graces.

    Tas¨¬a raised a hand to her lips and giggled.

    "Gracias!"

    She raised an eyebrow at Salvador.

    "Carlos Magnus is with me on support. You can trust him. A man of many talents."

    "Carlos Magnus?"

    "Yes. Another nick. They are all quite whimsical."

    "Damn," Tas¨¬a gasped as she tried the drink, "this organization is not at all what I was expecting."

    Kip glanced up from the sensorium interactive.

    "I''m not sure how I should take that."

    "Sorry. I''m both buzzing and crashing in the same moment. Long. Long. Long day."

    Kip sat down beside her, looked her in the eye, and gave her a wan smile. He tapped the sensorium interactive.

    "Crashing? A sense of sobriety is likely most apt. Though, please do enjoy your drink."

    After a gulp, Tas¨¬a wiped her mouth.

    "Shit. What do you have for me there, Kip?"

    "I examined it thoroughly for anything that might harm you¡ªour client. And I found plenty. Ms. del Alma-Gris, we are the best in the world at what we do. This is really the only place that achieving containment of what is inside this device is even possible while doing a real-time readout.

    "This abomination is designed to fuck with you, to take your head off. The subliminal materials on the inside of it are massive and many-layered. However, we have the means to force-step it.

    "I would even recommend not engaging it in the kinesthetic chamber but instead flat-screening the visual output and having the vocal interactive read it out in text mode. I''ll be there to guide the process if you so desire.

    "I have to warn you. Whoever is behind this only wishes you harm."Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!

    Tas¨¬a gulped down the Resucitad¨®r and nodded. She had no desire to be spooked on this venture. Vida Escondida was unlike anywhere else in the Quadra. It wasn''t protected by a resonance field like Asunci¨®n; instead, the crass materialism of its social matrix was its own form of immunity from the spiritual damage that came with constant contact with the nanospores.

    "Kip, your assessment does indeed sound copacetic to my needs."

    He stood up and nodded to the bartender.

    "Carlos, hold down the fort. If another client comes through here, send Giselle to manage the case. This may take a solid second."

    Tas¨¬a followed him down the two flights of stairs. On the ground level, Grosse Prix Cyber Security appeared to be a modest-sized operation. Its facade mirrored the club culture that permeated the main strip. However, there was a world of activity going on in the levels beneath.

    What intrigued her even more, now that she recalled the enterprise that inhabited the current spot a mere nine months previously, was that it had been a corner club for a mafia syndicate. Tas¨¬a wanted to ask about the previous residents and what happened to them, even more importantly, if they were behind the current arrangement, but Kip was busy explaining how the security firm applied containment to every aspect of their operation.

    No communication went out to the broader world. There wasn''t even a company-wide intranet on site. Each secure chamber was governed by a self-contained AI. All data was moved about by physical means, and that was done only when necessary with security safeguards in place to prevent contamination.

    Kip''s description reminded Tas¨¬a of what Alisha told her about the Beast''s operation in the Sweet. His organization ran exclusively on analog computers, some of which were modernizations of Enigma Machines, others were literal devices used right after WW2 when MI5 went hunting in Argentina.

    The retro-technology was put in place to keep his organization secret from the nanospore entities that were as ubiquitous as air in the Salvage.

    Grosse Point Cyber Security worked from the same premise, but, through a very different set of means, they accomplished the same ends.

    When she spoke to Le¨°n three days previously after he mentioned GPCS and he commented that they were the best in their field, he asked her, ''Do you know anything about the Functional Programming Paradigm?''

    Tas¨¬a shrugged emphatically so he could see her on the cam360.

    "I know next to nothing about pure information theory. Just enough applied science to get doo-dads up and running.

    Le¨®n chuckled, "So cute. It''s the backbone of GPCS''s security model. Perhaps it''s best if I explain in person.''

    Now, it got her thinking, for she had assumed he merely needed a safe place for them to meet. Had Le¨®n planned to use the firm''s cybersecurity capabilities for their project of reviving Demona?

    Tas¨¬a and Kip reached an office with a closed-off area that the security officer called his work station. Tas¨¬a took a moment to admire the machinery. The layout was similar to the workstation that was destroyed in Rubin''s van back in Spooktown on the outskirts of Asunci¨®n, but Kip''s set-up was spread wider inside a more ergonomically appealing space.

    When she entered the room, Kip closed the door. The hum from the larger office complex was shut out completely. She now noticed the squiggly engraved structures on the walls¡ªit was soundproofed.

    With fidgety arms, Kip offered her a seat, then popped the sensory interactive into a deck.

    Kip hummed as he dickered with his console settings. It occurred to Tas¨¬a that he was nervous.

    "Problem?"

    His head snapped in her direction with a grin set in rigor mortis.

    "Is it that obvious?" Kip asked.

    "Painfully."

    As she slowly nodded, he loosened up into a relaxed pose. Tas¨¬a noticed the subtle meditative trick deployed in how he rolled his jawline.

    Kip, are you Harvested? Tas¨¬a wondered, but she did not vocalize.

    He continued.

    "I have never seen program structures quite like this. If discretion wasn''t our highest priority at GPSI, I would feel compelled to ask you if you were in the habit of making Tier One enemies?"

    Tas¨¬a frowned.

    "Well, that is an odd way to avoid asking a question."

    She braced her feet up in the swivel chair and then continued.

    "Kip, are you going to pretend you''re not aware of my history?"

    He chuckled. His voice raised in pitch even higher than any time before.

    "No, but I''m not privy to all of your, if you don''t mind me saying, infamous past."

    "Fair enough. That dossier they whipped up for you when I arrived, I assure you that they left out all the best parts."

    He nodded along in appeasing agreement as he flipped a switch.

    "Here it goes. Are you ready?"

    "Lay it on me, brother."

    Kip pointed to a small screen above their heads. The screen flashed blue. A message in Indigo whipped across the long, curved monitor''s glassy surface.

    SENSORIUM INTERACTIVE MODE CANNOT BE OVERRIDDEN.

    Miffed, Kip yelled, "Reduce you down to machine language, motherfucker. I''ll find a way."

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes lit up.

    "My apologies for that sort of language, Ms. del Alma Gris. It won''t happen again."

    Apologies to her about cussing? His dossier definitely was incomplete. Still, she was aware that the Blonde Cerise cigarettes tended to temper her own language usage, and she had been on her best behavior for the entire meeting.

    Blonde Cerise for that clean mouth feeling!

    "No need to apologize. Are you certain though? How much time would you estimate it is going to take to disassemble and reassemble the program to our liking?"

    Kip sat back, folded his hands together, and expired heavily.

    "There are just over three million lines of code packed in the SI. The thing about it, though, standard interactives are built around premise messages. I have never until this very evening encountered one where I couldn''t simply extract the premise message and read it off to a client who didn''t want to deal with the hassle of a SI session.

    "Even when a premise message isencoded,d it is typically not difficult to find the embedded decoder that necessarily has to be there and work out the message."

    "But not this one?" Tas¨¬a shook her head and smiled. She continued.

    "All right. I would say time is short, but this is the only lead I have. We kind of have to break it open."

    Kip''s brow furrowed most curiously.

    "Lead?"

    "Yep. That dossier should read ''Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, former nun, master thief, bike courier, fugitive, spook operative, and'' now complete with the added bonus career of ''girl detective.''

    "Kip, I''ll return to the bar to unwind. I saw a football game that was just about to get started. I don''t keep up much with the regular seasongames,s but it is no problem for me to get lost up in one. You come fetch me when you have something."

    Feeling an urge to drop her professional demeanor as she worried this was getting her nowhere, Tas¨¬a stood up, turned around, and in her cutest affectation said, "Oh, and special thanks to you, my buddy, for the extra due diligence," and curtsied gracefully before she let herself out.

    It was going to cost her a small fortune to see this through, but Tas¨¬a had small fortunes hidden throughout the Greater Quadra.

 4.10 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a relaxed with her feet propped up in a side booth back at the barroom with her Veronicas neatly set off to the side.

    She was sipping her second Resucitad¨®r and smoking a Blonde-Cerise. The game was enjoyable. First-rate kickers on both squads, but neither goalie, after nearly a full hour of intense play, relented to allow a single score.

    One other client sat at the bar in the furthest corner. The stranger fidgeted in business casual attire except for her jacket. It was an impressive Gnasta Corinthian with a rust-brown moth inlay held in place between fluer de lis-shaped varnished leather.

    Clearly, the woman was a somebody in this town whose social hierarchy was layered with many hidden players.

    Equally as clear, though a person of interest, assuredly, the professional was not a threat to her. Tas¨¬a''s initial unease leveled off, and she ignored the executive completely.

    Carlos sat unobtrusively at a table behind her. She was glad he was there, covering her six. Why she instinctively trusted him, Tas¨¬a wasn''t certain.

    When the game ended in overtime with a 1-1 tie, he finally spoke up.

    "Hey, if you turn it now, you''ll see the start of a challenge at the Zona Lobos."

    Tas¨¬a rolled her head towards Carlos.

    "Who''s racing?"

    "Bizcocho and Ladrillo."

    "Ha!" Tas¨¬a chortled. Pound Cake and Brick. "I raced both on the del Tesse street drag. Lost to both too. Those guys are both psychos. Somebody is gonna die!"

    She hurriedly changed the channel, relieved to see the drivers were still only in the test phase run, then she insisted that Carlos Magnus park his chair beside her booth and join her for a smoke.

    "You got any money on this one?" Tas¨¬a asked with a droop too slowly executed to be mistaken for a wink.

    Smooth.

    To which Carlos nodded with much deliberation, setting in his pose as he smiled.

    Tas, what are you doing with the flirtation? The last month has been the happiest in your life.

    She had to admit to herself that she knew the answer: Tas¨¬a liked the attention.

    And, given she was Harvested, just as Anneb¨¦l had warned on Ra¨²l''s bungalow porch in El Hoyo, her impulses took extra care and attentiveness to maintain control.

    "It''s always like that. When we Harvested open up our boundaries we search for every opportunity. I know. I''ve been there; I''m still there . . .

    She looked away and noticed something. After verifying it wasn''t just a lovely mirage, Tas¨¬a nodded her head pointedly to the top shelf behind the bar.

    "So, I wasn''t imagining it. It really is right there just gnawing away at my subconscious ever since I came back to the barroom."

    Carlos appeared quite confused.

    "What?"

    Tas¨¬a reached into her belt buckle clip and retrieved a Liberty gold coin. "Care for a friendly wager? This coin for that Son D¨¦lice Sauvage?"

    Carlos responded with a meek shrug.

    "It doesn''t belong to me."

    Could she talk him into carrying out the larceny? Did the handsome fella have it in him? She was feeling her old naughty-dog self again.

    She could get him to do it. A little shake of her head, a toss of her hair, a slightly derisive tone to suggest his manhood was at stake, and a firm, suggestive gaze set in her eyes, and he would be like clay in her fingers.

    She threw her head back with a smirk on her face.

    "Switch it into a bottle of the cheaper stuff. Like that Gray Goose there. Add a toss of Perrier and several drops of that juniper extract you have over there in the cold storage compartment to the Goose, then run it through your Brita; it''ll be a reasonable counterfeit reproduction."

    Carlos nodded, tentatively and then suddenly more definitively.

    "Alright, you savage little thief, you are on, but if I''m taking that kind of risk, I''ll pick the racer."

    Savage little thief! A shiver tingled up her spine. She crossed her legs and shook her foot to control the thrill that that wee bit of tongue-thrashing gave her.

    Tas¨¬a, behave. This is just flirting for the fun of it. To kill a little time. You''ve got a man. And you are going to make beautiful babies with him.

    "You pick the driver. But, of course," Tas¨¬a said, glancing down and nodding.

    Carlos appeared as if he was holding back, savoring the moment like a fiend.

    "I choose Pound Cake."

    Leaning forward, she eyed him suspiciously.

    "What do you know that I don''t know?"

    Carlos'' head leaned up, smugly.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

    "Bet''s a bet."

    "Yeah, it''s synced in," she offered an elbow to elbow grab and he took it, much to her liking, firmly, "you can tell me now. What inside dope you got?"

    With a deep chortle, he could no longer hold it in.

    "Not only is Brick''s car newly rebuilt and he has been out of commission for six weeks, but that still isn''t the killshot that guarantees victory. Pound Cake''s engine was acquired from Milan five months ago. A Ferruccio 4 Series V10. He hasn''t lost a race since his boys installed it. Brick has lost two. Getting Pound Cake to agree to this one was a desperate move to get his rep back."

    Tas¨¬a winced. The Lamborghini she rented was a One Series, first generation, Ferruccio. That newer engine Pound Cake was using was considered by the industry to be a breakthrough in internal combustion design.

    But, wait a minute . . . something did not add up.

    "The Pound Cake I knew only drove American."

    "That''s right. I suspect he always will, given his mother is from Industri Park in the GLR, where they make them.

    "However, Pound Cake had his Charger reframed around the V10. It''s not significantly larger than the Dodge V8, so it proved feasible."

    Her hands squeezed the table.

    "Damn," Tas¨¬a whispered, thinking of the lightweight and ergonomically superior chassis. "In a Charger, that motherfucker is going to soar."

    She brushed her hair back as she looked Carlos in the eye. It was time to let him know that she actually caught on when they made physical contact with an elbow lock.

    At the old corner club they had danced together a bit back in the day.

    "Hey, Carlos. You used to work the old joint that was here. Yeah, you used to keep your hair kinda long back then, too."

    He nodded.

    "I was wondering if you would ever recognize me."

    Tas¨¬a leaned towards him, looking around the room, corner to corner.

    "So, what happened here?"

    He drew on the cigarette for a drag and puffed out the smoke.

    "We went to the mats. Sit back. Let''s enjoy the race, and then I''ll tell you all about it."

    The sky-cams gave an impressive survey of the track below. The cars were drawing down to a 130 km (80 mph) cruise speed as they approached the starting line.

    Tasia stopped worrying when she saw the rebuilt Aston Martin DB 12. Brick''s taste was exquisite. Platinum body with powder blue trim that worked the pretty body tones like what blush did on a woman''s face to emphasize the cheekbones.

    To the eye, the tail lift and hood rolled like a wave above the crest of a foamy ocean below. It was an extraordinary illusion.

    She pulled up the browser on her PalmEx PA and checked Brick''s stats to allay her suspicions. He had suffered two losses on del Tesse, where Pound Cake was the ultimate winner. That included the race where his Aston Martin DB 12 got tossed around the asphalt street before it crashed and burned.

    Brick also sustained minor injuries to his legs that kept his legs in wraps for nearly a month.

    He could have bought the latest Aston Martin Saxony for what he paid to rebuild the nearly forty-year-old DB 12, but why didn''t he?

    She knew the answer; nothing hugged the ground better than the last generation of that series of vehicles.

    She reviewed both contestants'' drag race performances, and as she did so, Tas¨¬a began to smile.

    Luring Pound Cake here to the Zona Lobos was a smart move on Brick''s part.

    She chuckled.

    Carlos eyed her skeptically.

    "What''s gotten into you?"

    She set her lips teasingly grim as if she was about to part with some bad news for him.

    "I''m afraid Brick is going to win this one."

    He laughed uproariously. Patted her on the back. Kept his hand there with a gentle caress.

    "You know, Tas¨¬a. I almost forgot how funny you are."

    She didn''t mind the familiarity. It wasn''t the first time for them. They even did shots back in the day in the same near-intimate proximity.

    With the high-octane drinks being the only thing keeping her from crossing that line where the condition made Tas¨¬a soil herself.

    Now Tas¨¬a recalled Carlos'' real name. Francesco Sala. Of the Buenos Aires Salas.

    But he was commonly called ''Chicco.''

    She was about to lay out for him her reasoning for her confidence as the one-minute clock counted down so last-minute takers could place their bets, but a better notion crossed her mind.

    "Chicco, darling, you now make me want to take you for everything you got. How about a side wager?"

    He was still laughing dismissively. She continued.

    "How about we make that side wager a dead pool?"

    That perked him up. Sala''s back straightened up.

    "Santa Muerta, you are absolutely serious, aren''t you?"

    Quite demurely, Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "Yes. We need to be quick about it, though. If Pound Cake dies, I win the side bet. If he makes it across the finish line alive, you win."

    Sala gripped his chair.

    "You are really convinced he is going to crash and die! Based on what?"

    Tas¨¬a calmly eyed him.

    "Are you in?"

    He took a solid second.

    "What''s the wager?"

    She had never been more sure of anything. She needed to put something worthwhile on the line to show fate itself that the probability curve was her principality.

    "Your best gun versus my best gun. I''ve got a 50-Split."

    He nodded while biting his thumb.

    "Century-old Remington 7mm, worth 8K USD."

    "Chicco, amigo. I would love to have one of those again. That was my grandpappy''s gun in his jaguar hunter days. Deal?"

    They elbow-gripped again to seal it. Sala went back to the bar and returned with two wine glasses and a bottle of port.

    Tas¨¬a noticed the executive in the Gnasta Corinthian jacket being led down a hallway by another woman.

    She could also see the design on the back of the jacket. A beautiful though suggestively sinister etching of a death''s-head moth.

    Sala sat a wine glass in front of her. When he finished the pour, she met his eyes.

    "Interesting client?" She said, curiously.

    "I can''t talk about that. But, yeah. Muy interesante." He sat down beside her and continued, "Now, why are you so sure of Pound Cake''s demise?"

    "I studied the video. That Charger equipped with a V10 lacks maneuverability. It has a 1.3 second lag on a mere 15 degree turn radius when running on one hundred meters of track. That is nearly a magnitude above optimum.

    "Sure, on del Tesse where the asphalt gets groovy only thrice, that overbuilt bitch is going to win every race, but on Zona Lobos, where every lap has eight different segments where random obstacles are placed, your boy is going to get smacked."

    Sala nodded with his thumbs clipped inside his belt. "Forgive my laughing at you. That sounds solid. Now I''m worried." He shook his head. "Thirty seconds in. There is nothing I can do about it now."

    Sympathetically, Tas¨¬a put an arm around his neck, and they sipped together with eyes locked on to the screen sitting on the wall in front of them.

    Just under two minutes, the Dodge Charger careened off the outer ramp and hit a razored barrel barrier trap.

    The barrel tore into the driver''s side of the carapace. A pink mist rolled out from the ripped metal as the razored surface sliced into the car''s cabin. The barrel banged against the cabin a second time before it bounced high in the air.

    The Charger kept crashing forward until its back wheels went over a bump and the overdriven engine forced the car to flip.

    As it sat still with a liquid mayhem of browns, golds, and reds pouring out, the undercarriage bulged up rapidly into a bell curve shape.

    An explosion encompassed the entire vehicle.

    Tas¨¬a and Sala both stood up with their mouths agape. Sala gasped hard as he let out expletives in Italian. Even though she expected it to happen, Tas¨¬a was truly shocked as her eyes took in the explosion.

    Shocked not at the explosion, but at what she just realized as she witnessed it happening. There was a very important detail she had been overlooking.

    The voice of Mani Montrose intruded in her mind.

    "There are four hundred pounds of explosive materials packed in your HybrClydis. Did you not notice the extra drag?"

    Tas¨¬a reclaimed her breath in an attempt to breathe normally so she could process the implications of it all.

    She had retrieved the dynamite herself that night in El Hoyo when she ventured out to the back office.

    Four sticks do not equal four hundred pounds!

    Green-Eyed Elise planted the explosives. It had to have been her!

    But why?

 4.0ii Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Prologue, the Second.

    One Year Ago . . .

    Elise pulled up to the three-building private clubhouse compound in an eighteen-wheeler.

    She immediately caught sight of the troubling scene, jumped out of the truck, and headed towards the carnage. Three dead bodies lay on the walkway that led to the posh marble steps of the front entrance fa?ade. One woman and two males, they appeared to have been members of the staff.

    She slid her floppy straw hat down against her shoulder blades, not in the mood to wear it. Now, it kept her hair out of her way and pinned down.

    Elise winced at the sight at her feet. Several large exit wounds splayed out from each torso''s front bodice. They were running away when they caught the rounds.

    With a fiery glare in her green eyes, Elise glanced at the squad leader of her creep team.

    He stood at point position nearby her.

    "Caza, did you do this? I said no dead civilians unless absolutely necessary. This¡ª," Elise''s hands waved from left to right, pointing at the fifteen-meter spread of bodies, "¡ªappears entirely superfluous."

    Elise reflected on her own odd choice of words that reflected an attempt to maintain her professional demeanor and keep her anger to a minimum.

    Caza, a tall, bearded man, shadowed over her. She understood that respect for her tactical intelligence kept the team in line, but the dead bodies that lay at her feet caused a momentary panic in her that that operational sentiment may be subject to change.

    She looked at the weapon he carried, noting the trigger finger white-knuckled tight against the trigger guard.

    He held a Gideon 338 Exp Carbine. It fired a .338 Lapua Magnum.

    A specially fitted round for short-barrel guns where long barrels were impractical for anti-material usage.

    Caza grimaced at the accusation. He held up the weapon and pointed it to the furthest building.

    A heavily damaged turret leaned off of a strongly reinforced awning.

    "I know it looks gruesome, and I''m holding a Dyer Maker (anti-material carbine), which pretty much matches the wounds, so I ain''t even mad at the accusation, but it wasn''t me. It was that big iron up there."

    Elise squinted as she eyed it. Her left eye was enhanced with an artificial cornea. Squinting boosted the ultraviolet range in the array of her perception. The damaged turret formed a unique cold signature.

    Elise glanced from one fence side to the opposite end and back to see if she could spot a twin to the turret that may have been hiding by cameotic means, but nothing unusual called attention to itself.

    Unfortunately, the visibility for the overall club grounds was highly limited from her current low ground standpoint.

    "There have been no more of the turrets popping up, right?"

    Caza shook his head.

    "I''ve had the drones on patrol all morning, cycling through SOP with one flying out at a time. Got Birddog on watch in the shed back there. She never slips up."

    Elise suppressed a smile. Birddog was his sister, a family nickname for Fiona. Caza was defending her, and Elise liked that show of loyalty, especially in a man who could one day be her brother-in-law.

    "Now, I''ve got them all going non-stop, though I hate to waste top-grade biodiesel. Can''t make any promises. That thing popped up out of nowhere."

    With a skeptical grimace pinching on her face, Elise motioned to the turret.

    "It''s tethered to an awning with metal plates bolted down!"

    Caza shrugged. His lips bunched up, contorted, and at odds with one another.

    "Check the video. You''ll see. It came out of nowhere."

    Elise palmed at the air between them.

    "Okay, I believe you. But their own staff, they killed in cold blood?"

    Caza breathed hard and angry. His eyes twisted up to the side under squared-up brows.

    "Yeah. Fucking sucks. When we surrounded the place, those unfortunate bastards got pinned down. I promised them safe passage, and of course I meant it, too. But when they made a run for it, that turret popped into existence and lit them up.

    "The squad gave it all we''ve got, as you can see up there by the mess we made of it. But the damage was already done."

    Elise could still smell the burning oil on the breeze coming from the spent gears of the machine gun.

    Her voice titillated towards exasperation.

    "Who the hell uses a large caliber for a turret? 5 mm or even .223 Remington fed turrets that I use myself, but a 338 or .50? It makes no sense, Chief.

    "I mean, the idea behind your standard turret configuration is to keep it low maintenance because it operates independent of a support staff in combat conditions. Low maintenance is not possible if the gun is prone to overheating, excessive smoke output, and gear wear."

    Caza nodded along.

    "You are preaching to the choir, Senora Luna Claro." He looked down, biting at his lip as he hesitated. "I think the turret was on a suicide mission."Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    Elise ignored the anthropomorphic conceptual absurdity of his words claiming agency for the turret and assumed that Caza meant it was sent out by someone who programmed the task it carried out.

    She eyed it once more to see if there was anything she overlooked.

    No means of software control was visible on its remaining surface, but that didn''t mean much. With modern design and engineering, control panels tended to be tucked out of sight and out of the way.

    It still made little sense to her as Elise gamed the incident in her head. Perhaps the turret didn''t belong to the Dimittis cult fanatics she was tasked with hauling in.

    "Why would those assholes use it for a suicide mission to eliminate their staff and not our crew?"

    Elise noticed something about the corpse of the woman. A cochlear implant tightly wound the outer perimeter of her ear.

    It was first-generation tech used as a dampener on the El Otros, the Manifested who were called ''Those Amongst Us'' by a public who were taught the existence of them, Manifested made indistinguishable from non-corrupted humans, was nothing more than a reactionary myth.

    Elise snarled in disgust. She knew better.

    "Caza, help me turn this guy over. He is kind of big."

    The corpse had a cap on its fully intact head. A tam o'' shanter with the club logo on it. Elise pulled it off after Caza turned the body over from whence it folded.

    "They all have them," he confirmed, gesturing that it wasn''t necessary to disturb the third body.

    Elise stood up.

    "All right. Here is the game plan. Keep your gunners in position for now, but we are executing a fallback until we figure out what is going on with the turret.

    "Send Rigo over to help me carry these bodies over by the surveil shack. According to the 2053 Convention Rules of Engagement for mercenary and bounty hunter teams, we are responsible for casualty recovery and for reporting the circumstances and conditions in which they were found. It is part and parcel to what makes us the good guys . . ."

    With his whole body jerking into motion, Caza''s eyes darted up and over her head. He lunged at her and tucked her between his arms. As she fell to the ground, the sound of twin XM7s set to tri-bursts rattled the surrounding air.

    Elise caught sight of her squad members, the two American US Army veterans whose bullets now slammed into something only a dozen meters away from her. She could not see over Caza to sight the target as he covered her body.

    From above her, another hurling mass of auto-fire rushed through the air. Elise watched in horror as the 18-wheeler was ripped apart by the high-caliber rounds.

    "Everybody fall back and take cover away from the flatbed truck," she yelled.

    Caza lifted her back up, grabbed his root mic, and relayed to the full team her exact words.

    Elise twisted around and grabbed her 10 mm Magellani Terra Bruciata revolver. It strapped itself on her wrist with gas pistons firmly formed and fitted onto her limb in under a second. In spite of the large caliber, shooting the gun was a breeze with the auto-straps in place.

    The Americans had damaged the turret severely already, but they both were engaged in a shifting backwards hike to clear out as they switched out magazines.

    With a red dot on target, Elise lay fire into the connector pin for the turret''s belt feed. The parts popped out in a fierce ricochet that almost clipped her ear with a deafening whoop spinning past.

    Soon after the belt feed dropped, the turret''s double set of fire chambers spun empty.

    There was no time to size up the victory. Flames roared from the truck. Lit-up chemicals spat about as they sizzled and cackled.

    Her gut thrashed at the thought¡ªshe was about to lose it all. Almost every dime invested in the mission was on the back of that truck.

    No time to sulk; she had to let them know.

    "Caza, you gotta tell them that there are explosives on that flatbed."

    As he relayed the message, Caza threw her up on his shoulders and scuttled a solid one hundred meters before the 18-wheeler blew up with a mushroom cloud reaching hundreds of meters up in the air.

    Caza and Elise scrambled beneath a picnic table before debris came spinning down all around them.

    The rain of metal hailed down for several seconds, even punching through the thick wood above their heads. She began to squirm.

    "Keep tight," Caza demanded.

    Elise was desperate to tend to any injuries sustained by her team members, but she couldn''t see any of them over the smoke and mayhem, nor could she hear them.

    Clinching the thin grass reeds at her knees, Elise expired all of her breath before inhaling again.

    Is that a heart murmur? This profession is driving me to an early grave.

    Caza put a sympathetic hand against her shoulder, and her body regained composure. She finally smiled. He did everything in his power in the last several minutes to protect her. That resolve and loyalty made her tear up.

    She looked away.

    Many of her detractors in the merc and bounty hunter field assumed she was a man-hater. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The truth was she was a mother hen to them because it took a great deal of extra effort on her part to keep her men alive.

    "What was in the truck?" Caza asked.

    Elise shook her head as she wiped the tears from her cheeks.

    "Two remote-controlled killdozers, a Boring dig-tractor, originally intended for Mars, and two hundred pounds of explosives, in all 425 K worth of equipment, USD. Pretty much everything this op depended on."

    She grew silent. A second hail of small metal bits occurred. Caza spoke up again.

    "Something''s eating at you. What''s on your mind?"

    Elise screwed up her face in an ugly pinch.

    "Yeah. I''ve figured out why this is going down so cat and mouse-like. Figured out why they are targeting everything but us. It is a taunt by an old enemy of mine inside ¨´ltimos Di¨¤s. It means they have a mole on the inside."

    Caza chuckled. "Mole? That always happens with splinter groups. I thought you intentionally stayed clear of the drama. When are you not in-country to ever have a chance to make enemies inside ¨´ltimos Di¨¤s?"

    "Caza. This goes back more than a few years before I learned that lesson to keep to my operations and let management do what management does best¡ªwhich is to kill each other. Come on, let''s get moving and find out what''s going on."

    She returned to the RV hours later, tossed off all her clothes, exhausted.

    Birddog lay on the bed in her silk pajama bottoms, on her belly, typing away on a laptop.

    Elise grabbed the IT specialist''s left side rump and massaged it like a stress ball. Indeed, it was her habitual way of relieving anxiety.

    "How''s the team?" asked the object of her affection.

    Elise leaned her back against the bed boards.

    "Better than what we should expect under the circumstances. No one dead, nothing that will keep anyone out of commission for more than seventy-two hours.

    "Rigo has second- and third-degree burns on his back. I had to dig a bolt out of one of the US Army veteran''s ribcage. But all together, we are in pretty good shape personnel-wise."

    Birddog twisted her torso over to face Elise.

    "Andu told me about our financial arrears with the 18-wheeler blowing up. I think I can help."

    Elise''s face squinched up.

    "Where are you going with this, hon?"

    Birddog''s head leaned pointedly at her screen.

    "We are merely sixty kilometers away from Vida Escondida."

    Elise shook her head. Every few months the assignment got tossed her way, and every time she turned it down.

    "Just a thief. She is not a war criminal, not El Otros or Dimittis cult, nor a threat to ¨´ltimos D¨¬as. Just a cat burglar."

    Birddog punched a few keys on her device. A striking thirty-something Metiza appeared on the screen. The name Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris beneath the image.

    Birddog rose up and faced Elise with sulky eyes focused on the bounty hunter.

    "She is worth one point two million USD, and . . . she is the best infiltrator in the business."

    Elise smiled, tentatively.

    "I see where you are going with this, my pretty little genius. Kill two birds with one stone. Has she ever done bunker busting before?"

    Birddog raised an eyebrow.

    "Oh, yeah."

    Birddog leaned back over towards her laptop and punched up a report.

    "Read this."

    Elise didn''t have to lean. Her artificial eye relayed the report directly into her brain as she scanned through it.

    Her smile grew broad as a germ of an idea began to take shape.

 4.11 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part II: The Bounty Hunter

    Six Weeks Later

    She was still two blocks from her destination when Elise came across a line-up of neon-lit shops along a strip of two-story buildings.

    Not the hep part of town, Elise concluded as she eyed a jewelry store that mimicked in garish orange neon a stylish boutique on the main strip.

    But she paused anyway.

    If Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris placed any crew members nearby to keep tabs on law enforcement along the outer perimeter of her heist that evening, he would be in a spot in over view of these shops.

    To blend in with the urbane souls of West Vida Escondida, Elise purposively wore her outer layer of clothes in a rhinestone gaucha assembly. It was almost Neo-Vaquera level flash but subdued enough to reflect her borderland roots.

    Beneath that layer, she wore cool and comfortable, temperature self-regulating thermals.

    Elise turned towards the cases on display at the jewelry store and squatted as if she were riveted by something that caught her eye. As she did so, a Swiss multi-state timepiece actually did catch her eye.

    It first appeared as an extensive set of gears in motion under rose-tinted glass. The glass became platinum, and the rose became engravings of rose vines. The display now appeared and functioned as a smartwatch before restarting the cycle of physical states.

    Elise got enough of a view of the timepiece to know it was a generation ahead of what she currently wore in its accuracy and functionality.

    "Chief," Birddog began, everyone in the crew called each other ''chief,'' "her agent just turned away from checking out your ass for twenty seconds; now he is prowling for other things."

    Elise guffawed and expressed on the subdermal, "These old pair of flint rocks?"

    Her lover did not respond to the playful taunt.

    Instead, Birddog sent over the visuals of the gentleman in mid-inspection, and he definitely liked what he saw. Elise had spotted the same man at the den keeping tabs on Gael-Sebastian.

    Elise was dressed very femininely the previous evening with her hair down to mid shoulder blade and curled feathery. She now had her hair up in a bun, dressed in popular but street casual wear, and her ass formed differently in trousers than in a dress.

    He was a man wired by nature to focus on mating cues; it would never register in his mind that she was the same woman.

    "You should keep moving," Birddog suggested anxiously.

    When Elise answered the tech''s call a half hour earlier, Birddog was distressed. Elise thought the girl had shaken her quivers, but she was beginning to show the signs of panic once more.

    "Birddog, take another shot of nyrrognosis before I get there, okay? I don''t need you to be stressing out on me. Do you see what I just sent over to you?"

    "The Swiss Ecl¨¤tTemps?"

    "Any money in the budget for it?" Elise asked wanly.

    She felt tremendous guilt and humiliation over the enormous funding loss accrued during the Great Fuck Up. Everyone was making sacrifices.

    "I checked the specs on it. You need that watch. That Gray Band thing you wear is so behind the current operative standard, it is likely to get you killed one day. I went ahead and purchased it; just go to the counter and show your ID, and they''ll hook you up. Everything has been cleared.

    "Just get over here as soon as you can."

    She thanked Birddog with a giddiness Elise had not felt in what she assumed to be several years. She really wanted that watch.

    Elise paused before crossing the street. She wasn''t sure which one of the service vehicles that were parked at the narrow lot by the side entrance belonged to her.

    She shook her head and smiled. The Cordi Brothers did a fantastic job of reconfiguring the vehicle in accordance with the spec that she gave them that morning.

    Fingers covered in a white glove reached out of the driver side window and tapped the roof of the slate gray van she now knew was the one that belonged to her. It was Birddog telling Elise to hurry on over.

    She checked her six; Birddog''s Junebug drone hovered by a row of trees. It was scouting her out as it fixed on her position for the purpose of following Elise in a guard duty fashion.

    She hurried across the road and hopped into the vehicle.

    "Did you get a chance to study the video?" Birddog asked without so much as a greeting. Elise suspected the tech had not dosed on the nuero-relaxer as she had requested of her.

    The contents of the video had disturbed Birddog so much so that she called Elise to assist. It seemed a safe assumption that the thief would not strike until four more hours when the manufacturing part of the plant shut down.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    Elise was getting much-needed rest until then. But she got the call and dragged herself across town.

    Elise nodded, affirming that she was not happy about the video either.

    Birddog''s eyes bulged.

    "She knows we are here, and she is checking up on us."

    The crows had Birddog spooked. When del Alma-Gris scouted the facility an hour earlier, she commanded a swirling murder of crows that accompanied her. Seven of them. They maneuvered around the manufacturing plant before they suddenly changed course and harassed the three drones that Birddog maintained; in their earlier conversation, she was quite chagrined about the damage done to her belov¨¦d Junebug.

    Though pained by the vexation that she saw on her young lover''s face, Elise managed to keep her feelings in check for the mission. Birddog was highly competent, but the tech often did not present the most professional demeanor.

    Elise threw Birddog an impassive glance; always concerned she was that if she let up on her crew, she would get them killed.

    Obviously, del Alma-Gris knew something was up. The drones were well hidden from any street-level vantage point on the block and could have easily been made to be scarce if the thief put a drone up in the air herself. That scenario Birddog anticipated, but the crows showing up out of nowhere was not something for which they could have planned.

    Birddog was waiting intently for an explanation. Elise shook her head. Her breath expired slowly.

    No, that assessment was self-serving and was not entirely true. She had met Gael-Sebastian Cuervo the previous evening. Elise was well aware of who the degenerate addict''s father was, but she had failed to debrief Birddog about that meeting.

    The tech would have likely adjusted their planning to fit that reality, accordingly.

    "I''m sorry, Birddog; the contact I made last night has a father who controls that murder of crows that attacked your Junebug. They are specialists'' fitted for spotting Manifest illness within crowds of people. They are amongst the best spotters on the planet.

    "What''s more, Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris is a favorite of his, and it would be a trifle matter for her to acquire those crows for a mission like this one."

    Birddog looked cross¨¦d for a moment, but then she quickly mimicked Elise in her impassivity.

    She''s learning, Elise noted.

    "So," Birddog asked, "now what do we do? How do we maintain control over this?"

    Elise paused for a moment, as the answer that readily came to mind, pulling back and not getting involved, was unsatisfactory. Though the drones had been spotted, there was no evidence or reason to believe that the service vehicle had been compromised as well.

    Birddog reviewed the flight patterns earlier. No consideration was given for the position of the service van in the crows'' previous actions.

    "Let''s take a few minutes to study that video and see if we can figure out why she brought those crows. She could not have anticipated that we would be here in the few days it would have taken her to set them up, so there must have been something else that del Alma-Gris had in mind to use them for."

    Birddog nodded along as she pulled up a replay analysis for a presentation she had put together.

    "I''ve been studying that, and I''m pretty sure she is going to have them fly through those vents that lead into the accumulation deck."

    Elise squinched her face tight, trying to wrap her head around what the little thief was up to. The sign above the double doors nearby read, Densidad ProActiva Engineers. Whatever del Alma-Gris was there to steal, it was not consistent with her usual modus operandi of focusing on luxury goods, weapons, recreational pharmaceuticals, and medical supplies.

    Elise watched the photos sequenced together of the crows making runs near a ventilation system. It looked as if they were collecting data to learn how to breach it.

    The van rattled with a brisk knock banging on the back doors. Birddog''s jaw dropped as her head spun from monitor to monitor.

    "It''s her! But how?"

    Elise motioned for Birddog to calm down. The bounty hunter swung out of her seat, squatted on a tool bench, checked her gun, and popped a moonclip in the 10 mm Magellani Terra Bruciata Revolver.

    Satisfied, she commanded the vehicle''s voice control to open the doors just as a second round of knocking boomed through the interior.

    The double doors spread out. In the darkness, shadowed from the industrial lights of the parking lot, a small, petite figure of a mestiza woman stood in a tense pose, studying the interior near where Elise sat before she spoke in a low, feminine rasp the bounty hunter wasn''t expecting.

    "Your heat dispersion system is flawed. My birds picked up on you right away. Concentrating the heat signature into a two-dimensional array bouncing off of each side of that top foam might work against drones and fixed cameras, but the crows just pick up on the queerness of it all. Mel wants to check it out himself, but I won''t let him get anywhere close by."

    Elise shrugged.

    "The captain of your murder, I take it? He is free to take a look; we won''t stop him."

    Tas¨¬a nodded. "Yes, Miss Luna Claro, Mel is the captain of the murder."

    Elise chuckled as she tried to regain her composure.

    "So, you know who I am?"

    Del Alma-Gris'' shoulders snapped together as she writhed her head from side to side until she produced a cracking sound, "Of course. I know that you talked to Gael-Sebastian last night, asking about me. I know you are a bounty hunter, and you have to be aware I don''t care much for your kind."

    Elise relaxed. Del Alma-Gris was already aware that this was a negotiation, and she was establishing her position.

    "Well then, that saves us trouble. You already know then that I have no interest in hunting thieves. Not even those who command 1.2 million USD. Tempting, but I made promises to my team about the nature of our assignment. Come in; let''s talk."

    Elise slid her gun over to del Alma Gris. The thief gave it an appraisal with a wide grin but pushed it to the side and hopped up on the truck bed where she stood erect on her knees. To Elise, she appeared more compact than her 4''11" frame suggested, even as her bosom drew attention as they stood out in a straight position in front of her.

    The bounty hunter was ''on the clock,'' as the Americans put it, so Elise ignored the thief''s striking profile.

    "Excuse me if I don''t exchange my piece in return."

    Elise chortled languidly.

    "Don''t remind me. I had a drone trained on you for over an hour the other day. I could never find where you kept it hidden. The AI deduced but never positively identified that it would be a Kel-Tec .32 Repeater strapped in camo on the left side of that lovely little fufa. You were wearing a midriff with your navel exposed while on the streets yesterday, so I have to ask, how was it even possible?"

    Tas¨¬a pulled the street-gray thermal shirt she wore up, and she pressed a connector strip embedded within the end seam of the shirt. A cameotic skin dissipated its illusion, revealing the small caliber gun strapped on the side of her stomach.

    "That''s pretty cool," Elise commented as she wondered why the thief was revealing so much stagecraft.

    Because she is auditioning for what I am about to ask her to do. She knows about the Great Fuck Up and wants in.

    "Hey," Birddog interjected. "I have a question for you."

    Tas¨¬a grinned as she studied Birddog for a moment before she reached out her hand, turned it left, and then up, then down, and finally right with her index finger.

    "How I snuck up on you? You have a pattern that Mel picked up on in how you read your monitoring devices. I merely went in the counter direction, hoping you would not catch my lateral move between those two vehicles before I approached yours.

    Elise felt a chill running up her vertebrae. How does someone get that good?

    "Ms. del Alma-Gris, I have a proposition for you."

    The thief folded her legs together, yoga style.

    "Go ahead. I am listening."

 4.12 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Impatiently, the tech''s boots scraped against asphalt.

    "What are you looking for?" Birddog asked.

    Elise smiled, jaundiced.

    "Give me a moment."

    She told del Alma-Gris they would radio-silence their operation so as not to distract the crows until the thief egressed from the premises.

    That gave Birddog nothing to do after they watched the thief flex her cat burglar talents crawling up the Densidad ProActiva building wall and along its girders to reach a side duct where she disappeared from their view.

    They leaned against the van together. Neither Elise nor the tech smoked, but it still smelled of the French cigarettes that the thief had burned through as they hashed out what each party needed to do before they met again in two days time.

    Elise chuckled to herself, recalling Birddog''s writhing discomfort with the thief''s smoking.

    "What," del Alma-Gris finally asked with a steely gaze set on Birddog.

    "Aren''t you concerned about cancer?"

    The thief puffed out a twirling maelstrom of smoke with an accompanying shrug whose shoulder movement caused her back to crack quite noticeably.

    Once readjusted, she smiled at the tech.

    "I''ve got a machine for that."

    "Birddog, did you notice that del Alma-Gris cracked her spine every few minutes? That means she lay in wait for us for that hour in a very uncomfortable spot. We find that spot; we would likely find any effects that she left behind to gather up later. I''m very curious about what she is doing here."

    Birddog explained to her earlier in the afternoon over lunch what ProActiva created within the manufacturing part of the facility. A substance they called fingunt, a fungi crystal that held metadata. That being directive information embedded within the bodies of the machines into which fingunt was manufactured.

    The engineering in the process exploited the dense integration of data and physical medium to create things that in previous generations were not possible. Even her gorgeous new watch, manufactured in Switzerland, contained the kind of meta-control structures that were assembled as raw materials in the form of the fingunt.

    Her eyes turned back towards the manufacturing facility. Pretty clouds of a slightly unnatural pearlescent steam billowed out.

    The thief insisted that she had to hit the plant before the manufacturer shut down for the evening to get what she needed.

    Maybe del Alma-Gris plans to build something with the samples she nabs out of there.

    Elise blinked in annoyance that her speculation was interrupted by something catching her attention out of the corner of her eye.

    Her companion was growing increasingly animated. Birddog''s head bobbed about in a pattern as she scanned the nearby area for del Alma-Gris'' potential hiding spot.

    Though irritated, Elise kept her mouth shut and her expression impassive even as the tech''s actions were quite hilarious to watch, and the bounty hunter did indeed encourage Birddog to get involved.

    Fiona earned her nickname, Birddog due to her hypersensitive senses that she considered a curse in her youth but she refined in her adult profession into exceedingly effective detective skills.

    "Over there!" The tech yelled.

    Birddog snatched at Elise''s jacket with a tug, let it loose, and with a brisk stride, headed for the row of trees.

    Elise walked cautiously behind. She adjusted her biomechanical eye''s register to infrared before she searched for the crows. An assortment of several other avian species, including a very nasty bat nearby, became marked for her by the PA''s AI assist.

    Not a single crow did it register.

    "Hold up," Elise yelled out to the tech, concerned hyperactivity would set off the bat. "You''ve got to be more careful."

    Several young skateboarders were taking advantage of the low traffic and the side street course dips nearby the row of trees.

    Birddog ignored her warning; she was in the mode. She grabbed onto a limb and pulled up.

    "Damn it, Fiona, listen to me!"

    A burglar with well-practiced tradecraft could avoid both the feral critters and the attention of nearby pedestrians, but neither Birddog nor Elise was the stealthy type in the least.

    She had a very good scout on her team, Humberto, a Ranger, but he was busy with another assignment.

    Humberto was also another American, one of three on her team.

    Given Kutuzov''s infamous history there, well-qualified mercs from the States sought her out to be recruited quite regularly since it was she who brought Major Ebbentrov, the Butcher of East St. Louis, to justice.

    Birddog reached for another limb and almost lost balance. She struggled for several seconds before hugging the trunk and sliding her ample buttocks down to the lower limb.

    "Fiona, don''t you dare move!" Elise yelled.

    Indeed, a couple of the skateboarders watched the tech flail about, amusedly. A tall, skinny, teenaged lad noticed Elise watching them.The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    "You need a hand? Climbing that would be nothing for me."

    Just as Elise waved him off, Birddog yelled back to him, "If you don''t mind. There is a fanny pack up here out of my reach."

    Fanny pack?

    Del Alma-Gris was wearing one on her when they met, but Elise assessed it was empty and the thief was going to use it to store whatever she was here to loot.

    The thief was known for wearing one that carried multi-tools and ammo clips on her heists. That is why Elise assumed there had to be a nearby cache.

    The skateboarder glided over to the curb nearest the tree, popped the board up in his hands, and tossed it in the grass.

    Then something whooshed by Elise''s eyes, forcing her to blink. A horrible staccato noise ripped the air, and opening her eyes, the skateboarder was missing an ear.

    Birddog screamed in unholy terror, "Santa Muerta! Santa Muerta!"

    Damn nasty bat!

    It was arching back their way.

    Elise dropped, planting her knees to the ground, anticipating the arch of descent; she emptied all six rounds in a tight lock.

    The bat slipped by as it crested over the projectile array. She rolled, popped another moonclip into the chamber, and searched for the wing¨¦d demon.

    Birddog screeched an inhuman pitch as it made feints along her head and back. She dropped on the writhing figure beneath her. With his breath knocked out entirely, he made dreadful gasping noises.

    "Birddog, you fucking asshole," Elise screamed in frustration.

    She tracked the bat once more, but if her next shot went wild, it had a good chance of hitting one of the skateboarders who stood by watching with what appeared to be equal parts youthful morbid curiosity and fight-or-flight paralysis.

    "Get down," she yelled at them.

    The bat circled around and flew straight at her. She emptied another six rounds; none hit. Before it could bite her, Elise thrust her elbow into it.

    It did not even screech as it bounced off of her jacket and shot straight up.

    Holy shit!

    Elise was a very good shot, yet she missed for twelve attempts now. One more moonclip was all she carried in an interior jacket pouch; she reloaded the 10mm Magellani Terra Bruciata Revolver and dashed towards the wounded teenager.

    He wasn''t breathing, and Birddog was rolling on the ground and holding her knee like she may have broken something.

    The bat made a feint for Elise''s head and popped off her wool felt hat. She ignored it and dove towards the lad. Scrambling to her knees, Elise grabbed him by his underarms and positioned him so she could straddle over him.

    His eyes bulged, his skin paled, and the arteries in his neck thumped dangerously huge. Elise took a deep breath, locked lips, and blew it all into his throat.

    She repeated herself twice before the bat screeched above her. Elise got a good look at the bat''s oddly deformed bodice as it angled to attack. She sideswiped a boot kick into it, and the bat got punted in the grass.

    Once more, it flew off.

    Elise twisted back around and was relieved to see the tall, skinny lad was breathing on his own. But he was bleeding profusely.

    All of her medical supplies were back in the van.

    "Fiona Caza," Elise said in as formal a tone as she could muster under the circumstances. "Can you get up?"

    The tech looked up into the trees. Her eyes bulged, sheet white in terror.

    "I don''t think I should."

    Elise yelled, "We''ve got to get this gentleman¡ªwhat''s your name, hon?"

    "Gertrod."

    Odd name. Vaguely Eastern European it sounded to her ears, but he appeared of indigenous stock.

    Then again, Elise was from a town sharing space on the Paraguay and Argentine border where Spanish and German Protestants commingled. Her own name reflected that.

    She turned back to Birddog.

    "We''ve got to get him to the van. Lean against that tree and try to get up. We have to know how badly you are hurt. I''ll try to cover you."

    Fiona''s eyes grew wet with tears as she responded slowly.

    What the hell was I thinking?

    Elise was rethinking the relationship.

    Fourteen years my junior and a level of maturity that suggested stunted growth.

    "I''m so scared," Fiona cried.

    Elise needed to put her anger to the side to get things back under control.

    "Come on, Birddog, you can do this. This man needs our help."

    "I''m so sorry I fucked everything up."

    The tech looked at the side of Gertrod''s face where the remains of his ear hung against his cheek with a guilt-ridden scowl.

    "Stand up, Sweety. I''ve got you covered."

    Elise faced the opposite direction so she could spot any movement. Perhaps her booted-up roundhouse kick scared the bat away, but Elise doubted it.

    She heard a crack, and Birddog let out a howl. Elise risked a glance. The tech was still standing.

    "Okay," she said. "I''m okay. It just popped back in place."

    "Try to walk it a bit," Elise suggested, "semi-arcs around the tree so I can keep you covered."

    Gertrod was now on his knees, leaning over, holding his ear. If he sprinted, it would hasten the blood loss.

    Elise pondered their next move when the bat screeched abruptly, tearing into every sense in Elise''s body. It even set her nose off in a fit of hives. Birdog leaned against the tree, and she gnashed her teeth together. Her face squinched ugly.

    Elise had to kill the thing before it drove all three mad. She stood up, but as she did so, she heard a whoosh.

    Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

    It seemed set like a Baroque counter-melody to the mad screeching of the bat.

    Elise felt a faint wind against her forehead. She understood. It had to be the captain of the murder, Mel.

    As soon as she heard rustling noise disturb the branches of one tree to their North, she heard a loud ''cah!'' come from the opposite tree to their South.

    A loud smack broke the air directly above her head where Mel and the bat collided. The bat hovered for a moment in an attempt to regain its senses.

    It gave Elise enough time to put two bullets in it.

    It dropped to the ground, and on sight of it, she gasped.

    "What the fuck?" both Gertrod and Birddog yelled.

    The bat was a necrotic thing, blackened midnight purple in calloused scales across its entire surface. Its head appeared mishapen into demonic-appearing contortions.

    A soft ''cah'' came from the limb behind her, the one that caused Fiona so much trouble. Mel sat on it. His cochlear implant glowed green.

    Someone wanted to speak with her.

    "Birddog, take Gertrod to the van. Do what you can to patch him up. I''ll be over to finish it up shortly."

    Fiona led the youth away. Elise''s PA tingled. She pulled it out, accepted the transmission, and put Sachmilli Cuervo in holographic mode.

    She recognized Gael-Sebastian''s father instantly.

    He sat squat-legg¨¦d.

    "Thank you, Senor Cuervo. We were at a great disadvantage."

    He bowed his head.

    She synced her biomechanical iris to record the dead bat in a full array data stream.

    "Would you know what that thing is?"

    Sachmilli nodded.

    "Indeed I do. It is being ghulified through being forced to consume the livers of humans with the Manifest disorder. Which is pretty much all of us."

    Elise squinched her face in disgust.

    "Why would anyone do that?"

    Sachmilli smiled.

    "If you get that specimen mailed to me, not only will I be much obliged to you, but I will give in return my full databank on the matter."

    She nodded. "Fair enough."

    Sachmilli suddenly appeared coy-eyed, and he frowned.

    "There is another matter," she asked.

    The old, retired entrepreneur dressed in a simple robe. She saw in the bed behind him the nude figure of a red-haired beauty sleeping.

    Her rump faced the projection, and Elise''s heart danced a bit. Even in her native Pueblo Alem¨¢n, red hair was a rare occurrence.

    She forced her eyes back to Sachmilli.

    "My son. How is he?"

    "Not doing well at all. If neither you nor del Alma-Gris intervene, he''ll be dead before the end of the season."

    He shook his head.

    "When we intervene, he accelerates. Debases his body with new gadgetry, new ways to fuse the shit into his soul."

    Elise looked onward, plaintively.

    "The two of you need to figure out how to get past that imposition. If that is all, I''ve got a major wound on that youth to tend to. Again, much obliged."

    Sachmilli nodded and turned off his receiver. She put her PA back in its pocket fold as she stood back up.

    Mel gave her a wan ''cah'' that meant ''goodbye.'' He floated up to the higher branch, snatched the fanny pack, and flew off.

    "Don''t trust me, I see."

    As Elise walked back to the van, she thought about the conversation she just had.

    The two of you need to figure out how to get past that imposition. If that is all, I''ve got a major wound on that youth to tend to. Again, much obliged.

    Who was she kidding? Given her hero complex, Gael-Sebastian''s bullshit was now her problem too.

 4.13 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Elise examined the bandages Birddog assembled together. Fiona had done an absolutely awful job. There were still scrape marks on Gertrod''s temple from where Birddog did not bother to clean it.

    Given she was a trained registered nurse long before becoming a bounty hunter, Elise hoped to do such a thorough job of pre-op work that they could skip the general practitioner matters and get right to the cosmetic reconstruction.

    If all went well, with no schedule delays, they could have this wrong righted within two hours.

    Birddog reentered the driver''s cabin. Elise had sent her to retrieve her hat and to tell Gertrod''s brother they should have him patched up and back home before midnight.

    The tech frowned as she twisted the hat in her hands.

    "It''s pretty bent up."

    "Don''t worry about it. I have two prettier ones back in the RV. Did you give his brother my card?"

    "The band is going to need to be replaced."

    Elise snapped. "Couldn''t give less of a shit, so why are we still talking about it?"

    Birddog''s eyes bulged wide. Gertrod blinked uncomfortably. Elise calmed back down.

    "Hand me the digital stenograf in the glove compartment. I''ll need to have my work properly recorded and officiated so the clinic will accept it."

    Birddog did as told, but silently and glumly.

    Once the stenograf, a Legalys Monitoring Device, was set in place, Elise administered a cocktail shot comprising of a local anesthetic and a slow burn antibiotic. She next set the catalyst plate from her chemkit to create a shot centered around rabies prevention.

    It tested a blood sample from Gertrod against an entire family of viral infections that had grown common in the Quadra. Once the most effective concoction was determined, the device whipped up a solution and then boosted it with secondary catalysts.

    As Elise removed the remaining tape and bandages to administer a proper cleaning, she decided it was time to apologize.

    She had allowed Fiona to stew in misery long enough.

    "Birddog, I can''t let you take on the entire burden for this one. I am the one who sent you into the field in spite of your lack of experience. Yeah, I was thinking del Alma-Gris has a reputation for being reasonable and pretty much harmless with no history of violence.

    "But the field is the field. Things tend to go kinetic because our willful behavior affects the probability of things going wrong in ways for which we can''t predict. You get anxious, and the world responds in kind. Especially this one.

    "You are not properly trained for fieldwork just yet. I''m going to have your brother take you on an intensive six-week training course soon. Perhaps as early as next week. In the meantime, I want you to concentrate all your efforts on your IT work. There are some big data sets headed your way soon."

    Birddog''s face scowled above the driver seat headrest as she pointed to a cold storage chest.

    "Is that why you bagged that disgusting bat?"

    Elise nodded affirmatively in answer.

    "What about the meet-up with del Alma-Gris?"

    Elise pointed down. "We are merely running a battery of tests to decide on demolition strategies. You are staying in the van the entire time."

    Elise helped Gertrod out of the back of the van. He could walk on his own feet, but the blend of treatments she had given him weakened his muscles. He leaned against her with a tremble of palsy in his hands.

    Though she was five foot seven (174 cm) with strong muscularity, Elise''s bone density was compromised by the onset of osteoporosis.

    She carefully maneuvered how he tilted against her to her better advantage until Gertrod could stand on his own.

    Elise turned towards Birddog.

    "Remember what I said?"

    "Got it. Stay in the van."

    When they were up the ramp a little further, Gertrod spoke:

    "Senora Elise. I don''t think she did anything wrong. She couldn''t have known the bat was about to attack."

    With a sidelong glance, Elise gave him the dirty eye.

    "There was a way. She could have listened to me. I even knew that the bat was agitated. You see this¡ª," Elise asked as she pointed to her left eye, "I went blind in that eye when I was eight. The interior was replaced with a fresh set of organic material reconstructed from a donor. The iris, though, is artificial. I have had it enhanced several times for use in my profession.

    "Fiona is aware of my heightened visual aids. When I told her to stop, she needed to stop."

    The teen meekly kept quiet as she scolded away. Her anger at losing control of the situation, at Birddog''s willful countermanding her operative authority, Elise wasn''t processing well.

    She put an arm around Gertrod''s arm as they entered the building. It wasn''t lost on her that the young man found her attractive, and he certainly could use a morale boost.

    "You mean well, Gertrod. That is a rare quality these days."

    "Do you run something like an EMS service?" asked the on-station doctor as he glanced through the digital stenograph media and did a quick appraisal of the bandaged ear.

    Elise shook her head.

    "I got my RN at fifteen. Worked a station just like this one for several years."

    The doctor smiled, knowing most of his job was done. Just one on-duty assignment was necessary.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

    "Like you," he said, "I recommend a full reconstruction before any necrosis sets in. Less messy that way, of course. Take your friend up the stairs to 5E, the third door on your right. I''ll have the surgeon up shortly."

    Gertrod leaned on her once more as they made their way up the flight of stairs. She did not complain or let him know she felt any pain.

    Elise wore thermals with a dense mesh that gripped her legs and torso for extra support under all of her clothes, and not just when she was in operative mode.

    Once they found the room, she helped him onto the Steris gurney. With Gertrod settled in, she turned her attention to the technical devices lined up in dispenser fashion on the adjacent wall to the gurney.

    It was an unfamiliar array of devices due to cosmetic surgery being outside Elise''s area of expertise. She was an ER nurse in her old profession.

    That experience was why Black Asp recruited her at twenty-four to work as a field medic. They ran mercenary, spook, and bounty hunter operations as one of the world''s largest private military contractors, and even though young, Elise by that time had a decade of experience patching people up.

    One device caught her eye; surrounded by a central metal axis, several gauges were fixed beneath a laser measurement calibrator where twin hoses connected to an intake valve that in turn was fed through a single air-pressure gauge.

    It would be the primary device for ear reconstruction, similar to the ones used in other clinics she had worked in, but those devices built prosthetics from non-living materials.

    The pressurized canister that fed the output hose had on its side the word she was beginning to see a lot of late¡ªfingunt.

    Not at all an inorganic material.

    Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris, what were you after?

    An answer was beginning to dawn when her musings were interrupted by the voice of a man standing behind her.

    "Senora Luna Claro," he asked.

    She turned and smiled and took his hand.

    "Yes?"

    "I''m Dr. Gladius Bernal. I did a cursory look into your background, curious, of course, given how professionally you handled your pre-op."

    She was anxious to call Birddog to check on a matter.

    "Is there a problem, doctor?"

    "No. None at all," he chuckled. "I could tell by your examination of the Stembolle Surgical that you may have a few questions about the current state of the art in operational procedures."

    Elise pointed to the pressurized canister with the fingunt.

    "That is an organic material." She stated.

    For the next several minutes, Dr. Bernal explained guided cosmetic scalpture practices for organic materials. Though Elise was bored with the details, as she tended to be with many ideas in their abstracted elaboration, it affirmed her suspicion that del Alma-Gris had a medical-based reason for the theft of fingunt.

    But would it not have been easier to steal it from here, where dozens of exits and entrances worked to her advantage and locks of limited durability are her only real obstacles, than to steal from an industrial assembly plant?

    She raised up her bosom and pushed them together, pretending to crack her back. It distracted the doctor from the immutable pace of his words long enough for her to interrupt.

    "Dr. Brunal?"

    "Oh, yes?"

    Elise clasped her chest with a palm.

    "Forgive me for interrupting."

    "No. My dear friend, you please continue."

    Given the deference she was being shown, his ''cursory'' inspection of her bio must have included her time at Black Asp, where she developed a reputation for exceeding competence.

    "Are there substantial differences between industrial-grade fingunt and medical-grade?"

    He nodded his head vigorously.

    "Yes! That''s an astute question. Medical grade is cycled with stages of active yeast cultures applied to the fingunt material to make it more pliable to human physiology. Especially for cosmetic output, where lattices of fingunt need to be vertically aligned out from dermal or even bone contact points and not just conventionally layered . . ."

    Elise raised up her modest but well-shaped bosom and clasped her chest once more. He was getting deep in the thicket of it all again.

    "Excuse me, Dr. Brunal, but is there any possible medical use for the industrial-grade product? Untreated fingunt would kill a person, right?"

    Bernal smiled as he also shook his head.

    "No. It is not at all toxic to humans. The difference is the necessity of contact points. Industrial-grade has been successfully used to recreate internal organs, even to the point of reversing infertility."

    He grew silent as Elise''s eyes widened and her mouth opened with a silent gasp.

    "Something on your mind, Nurse Claro?"

    Elise nodded.

    "Has it ever been used to reverse neurological damage?"

    "Burn patients."

    Elise swiped her hair back in a meek fashion.

    "I have been out of practice for so long; this is all new to me, and I just realized something of staggering importance. I need to freshen up; it has been a long day."

    In fact, she did stink of sweat-inducing activity.

    "Certainly," Bernal answered. "We should be finished up in 45 minutes. 11E down the hall is on the down cycle if you need a nap."

    "Most generous of you, doctor."

    She excused herself and decided to take Bernal up on the 11E offer of privacy. Once she shut the door to the room, Elise called Birddog.

    "How are you holding up, Chief?" she asked the most junior member of her organization.

    "Thinking about you. Besides that, I have been digging into Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris. What is interesting is not so much what I find available on her but the Tier One-grade encryption that makes her a dangerous subject to be researching at all."

    Elise scrunched her face up in a knot.

    "Huh? She''s just a thief."

    "And," Birddog continued enthusiastically, "a former nun."

    Elise puffed a gasp of air through a sneer.

    "Del Alma-Gris was their drug dealer, Fiona."

    "At a convent?"

    Elise shook her head. It wasn''t her creed; she was born in a Lutheran home, but the naivete of her young girlfriend at times caused heartache.

    "Let''s talk about that later. I need you to pull up records for this very clinic, Vida y Esperanza. Stolen items in particular. I have a hunch that our little thief has been here before."

    After she got through chatting, Elise used the lavatory, and after her constitutional, she cleaned herself up as far as hand soap and paper towels could be of service.

    She was left with twenty-five minutes to nap on the gurney. With whimsical curiosity about the operational procedures to work her fancy new watch, Elise plugged in a twenty-minute wake-up call.

    Twenty-minute naps wherever she could get them. Elise was indeed reminded of her years being an RN, working in an ER, and catching nods here and there as she drifted off.

    Later that evening, she showered properly and switched out the dirty clothes for her bedtime thermal jumper that covered her torso from her upper arm to her mid-thigh in a light mesh. Sleeping with her condition was a magnitude easier when she wore it.

    Elise eased into the bed, lay on her belly, and pulled out her tablet to examine the files Birddog collected on del Alma-Gris.

    This promises to be interesting.

    Fiona sat to the side and began her nightly ritual of massaging Elise''s back for therapeutic relief. At the lower lumbar, she dug a palm down on each side of Elise''s spine and slowly worked up to the cervical until she repeated the same motion.

    "Elise, has anyone ever told you you have a cute bum?"

    "You, every time you get so much as a sip of wine in you. If you are into long and flat, I guess it''s cute. I take after my mother''s side."

    "Heil, fr?ulein!"

    Elise stuttered a chuckle.

    "Oh, shut up. Her people arrived in Argentina in the 1880s as ranch hands and brewers before working their way north."

    "Just teasing you."

    Elise turned her attention back to the files.

    "I know. Do you know what is curious about these files? Del Alma-Gris'' neurological condition as a Premie Harvest is described in great detail, but the status of her fertility is much more closely guarded. There is no mention of abnormalities with her fertility cycles by her contacts that report on her. Why is that?

    "Do they have something planned for her? To give birth to some chosen monster?"

    Birddog grabbed her cheeks, one in each hand, and squeezed tight. "You tell me your theory, Chief."

    "After cross-indexing the thefts, the unexplained device time usage in the neurological part of the clinic with what we know previously about del Alma-Gris, I believe she is trying to get pregnant with Gael-Sebastian''s baby before the dumb bastard inevitably offs himself."

    Birddog''s face became glum.

    "What''s wrong, Chief?" Elise asked.

    "I concocted this elaborate scheme to use and capture del Alma-Gris because she wasn''t anything but a thief to me, but all the stuff I''ve read on her this evening, I just feel so sorry for her."

    Elise shook her head.

    "If I stopped searching for my bounties at the moment I started to feel pity for them, I would be wearing rags and eating red beans and rice every night. That is why I try to limit my hunts for actual monsters."

    It wasn''t going to shape up to be a fooling around kind of night, so Birddog left to her trailer soon after. Elise grabbed an energy drink, gulped it down, and delved deeper into the files.

    A little under an hour later, a pending file opened up when an encryption layer finally collapsed. The file was almost entirely redacted, but Elise was left wondering what the strange title meant.

    "What the hell is a Sigrid Rosa?"

 4.14 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Elise rode in the passenger seat of the service van as Birddog pulled the vehicle up in the lot of an abandoned high school football field. Behind the field, a concrete stairwell led up the side of an embankment where several schoolhouse buildings stood in severe disrepair.

    Intel from the Salvage''s two informants on del Alma-Gris'' crew revealed that inside the lower levels of the buildings, her crew warehoused a great deal of their stolen goods.

    Elise had Birddog and her brother Andulus Caza run a drone reconnaissance earlier that morning to verify the information. Heat signatures escaped from the vents and revealed that biodiesel was being run through a set of generators continuously.

    One large basement section was being used for cold storage. That their operations were so extensive they needed to freeze things raised Elise''s eyebrows as she skimmed over the Caza twins'' findings.

    Elise scowled as she sipped her coffee.

    "Any indication that the del Alma-Gris crew rustles cattle on the side?"

    Wiping away the remains of a crumbly Donca Donut off of her cheek, Birddog created a mess. There was nothing jovial about the upcoming meeting, but Elise chuckled anyway. Plump and cute goofs were how Elise preferred her girlfriends to counterbalance her own often overly serious attitude.

    She enjoyed a good diversion wherever she could get it.

    Elise handed Birddog a sanitized wipe.

    "Thank you. I considered the side hustling cattle rustling possibility. So I cross-indexed the Salvage data files. According to Matzi, her walk-around guy, the original cold storage was put in place after an incident where the residents of a small villa of thirteen houses on the Bolivian side of the Paran¨¢ River were forced to evacuate after ascospores swept through the area.

    "Del Alma-Gris'' team seized the remaining livestock after renting two eighteen-wheelers. It wasn''t a typical score for her, but I think she was indulging a team member who came up with the plan."

    Elise nodded along enthusiastically. It was a smart move to salvage the abandoned livestock, very much in line with the ethical considerations that del Alma-Gris typically made in her heists.

    What did her folio of fiends that worked under her think of that? Elise bounced the idea off of Birddog.

    "I can imagine how much trouble she has keeping that crew in line. Some of those files we have on them make me sick to my stomach. It is a real creep show she has on her hands. I doubt if she could handle herself if a few ever decided to try to put her in her place and run the organization."

    Birddog gave it some thought as if she carefully needed to decide what to say next.

    "I pondered that as well," Birddog said. "A team of five men and two women plus del Alma-Gris. It is a rogues'' gallery of ill-rep. Studying two dozen of their scores, I came to a conclusion.

    "Most of those heists could not have occurred without del Alma-Gris'' unique skill set. So, for most members of that crew, her leadership is a reasonable trade-off, as it gives them access to things normally beyond their capabilities."

    Elise scowled again. Her upper lip tensed up this time. She heard the conditional inflection in Birddog''s voice. There was some matter the tech preferred not to elaborate on.

    "Most?"

    Fiona glanced over. She squinted uncomfortably.

    "You caught that. There was an incident several months ago that Matzi reported to his Salvage control. One absolute thug on her crew serving as muscle caught her off guard when the others were elsewhere. He punched her in the face, she dropped, and he held her down for over two hours while . . ."

    Elise frowned and Fiona quit talking. The bounty hunter''s face aged ten years when she bowed her head. Elise''s fingertips touched as she whispered, "Jesus . . .," as she took a moment to pray.

    After an awkward moment of silence, Fiona spoke up.

    "When I said I felt all the pity in the world for that girl, I wasn''t kidding. Hey, Chief! They are starting to head down the steps."

    Elise cleared her face. "So what happened to the bastard? Surely he is not part of the crew still?"

    Fiona shook her head. "Matzi told his control that word of what occurred got back to del Alma-Gris'' people. The torso, legs, and arms were found after he was drawn and quartered, floating in a barrel on the Paraguay River."

    "Damn. Was it Sachmilli?"

    "Matzi refused to tell his control any more than ''her people.''"

    Elise shook her head. She saw several sets of eyes turned her way where del Alma-Gris'' people stood on the opposite side of the field.

    At the next question, Elise''s voice went up a register.

    "I have to wonder . . .?"

    "Her condition is triggered by pleasure and not fear. So no."

    Elise gulped down the remainder of her coffee.

    "I need to get going."

    As Elise reached for the door handle, Fiona clasped her forearm.

    "Elise. There is more."

    She straightened herself back into the seat and gave Fiona a nod.

    "I''m listening."

    "Matzi believes that the gaunt, tall one there by the name of Varook lured the other crew members to a decoy event so the muscle could carry out the assault."

    Elise gave him a quick glance. Oddly squared brows under a black adder American-style cowboy hat that bore a silver band. Greasy hair fell down the sides of his neck.If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    She checked her 10mm Magellani Terra Bruciata to see if it was properly chambered, then the recoil mitigator glove to see if it was set to snap on properly before she sized up Varook once more; she now understood why his cover wasn''t blown after the assault.

    Elise opened the door but turned her head back around.

    "Hey, Birddog? Neither Varook nor Matzi is aware the other is a snitch, right?"

    Fiona smiled, and she shook her head in amazement.

    "Your instinct for the cynical operational imperative is without peer."

    Elise winked and jumped out and onto the ground.

    Del Alma-Gris did not seem pleased as Elise sauntered across the field.

    "You kept us waiting. I let you this close to my operation, and you keep us waiting? What were the two of you talking about?"

    Elise smiled. She laughed at the performative outrage done for the benefit of her crew.

    "''Close to my operation,'' you say?" Elise began with a mocking taunt.

    "Don''t bullshit me, del Alma-Gris. There is nothing in those buildings you give a damn about. It is a distraction, a side business for your crew designed merely to keep them preoccupied."

    Del Alma-Gris'' eyes lingered on Elise for a few uncomfortable moments for Elise.

    She wasn''t expecting to feel the heat of admiration from someone she just performed a deliberate dressing down.

    The thief broke out of her momentary spell and turned her head to another female companion; they exchanged meaningful glances.

    Birddog sent info on the female, and Elise''s left eye came alive with the data spilling forth on an AR screen embedded in her cornea.

    Simone Barre Est¨¨vez, a Spaniard. In Iberia she was a street hustler and prostitute. More interestingly, she is still an active murder suspect in both Toledo and Vida Escondida for a series of black widow-style killings that police classified as an ongoing menace. The hustler likely fled Spain due to the heat closing in on her by investigators.

    Est¨¨vez kept her curly reddish-brown hair up in a black paisley bandanna. She gave del Alma-Gris a nod and a shrug.

    "Alright," del Alma Gris said as she turned back to face Elise. "Let''s put our beef to the side. It''s frankly serving no legitimate purpose and makes us look like amateurs."

    While Elise eyed the crew for any sign of trouble, she noticed Varook''s eyes were fixed on the van. Specifically, he laid his gaze on Birddog. Elise''s right hand tensed up as she fought the urge to pull out the Magellani.

    Est¨¨vez noticed the tension between the parties. She clasped the gun at her belt that ran against her thigh, its holster tie-stringed at severe angles against a pair of white jeans.

    It was a spear gun that rotated three bolts in its chamber.

    Odd choice. Serves a mission-related purpose?

    Est¨¨vez turned towards Varook and glowered.

    "Hey, Chort. Get your eyes off the girl over there. Could you stop being a freakshow for just one mission?"

    He glared back at the Spaniard.

    "Try me," Est¨¨vez taunted.

    Varook bounced off one foot and then the other. He said nothing but turned around and started back up the steps.

    "Chort," said del Alma-Gris.

    He turned with a side glance.

    "Inventory day," he asked in a whisper of a voice.

    "Yup."

    "Gotcha," he said with a curt nod and bounced up the steps.

    Elise took note. Est¨¨vez was now del Alma-Gris'' muscle, and she kept the team in check and did the thief''s dirty work. Whereas del Alma-Gris diffused the situations that developed by reminding the offended party of their contribution to the group.

    It was a psychological gambit long established in criminal organizations. Whatever disadvantage being four foot eleven gave the thief, this was a guild master-level operative standing before her.

    And now she grinned at Elise.

    "With that out of the way, I may have something for you."

    "I''m listening," Elise answered.

    "I know how they set up those turrets. How much is it worth to you? This is not about greed; don''t misunderstand; this entailed over a hundred man-hours of invested time. My people need to see a return, a commitment on your part, to be assured this is a worthwhile endeavor."

    By her deliberate word choice and tone, Elise got the message the little thief sought to impress her.

    Elise spoke out loud.

    "Very well, Birddog, give me a figure."

    On the IR panel that hovered in the lower left field of Elise''s vision, Fiona''s words read in:

    She has a crush on you! A wee, tincy girl crush!

    Elise smiled and said out loud, "Well, obviously, but . . ."

    Fiona finished Elise''s sentence.

    Del Alma-Gris is straight as an arrow; according to my censors, she is a little flushed in the cheeks and neck but mostly in her eyes, meaning the appeal is cerebral, so I have no worries. But still, this is very exploitable!!!!

    Del Alma-Gris screwed up her face as she listened in. It was becoming awkward.

    "Repeat that figure, dear. I have only one chance to get it right."

    40, 40.

    "Thought so. Got it," Elise looked up and addressed del Alma-Gris, "Forty thousand immediately forwarded in your account with Vida Express Services. It is already done. Another forty thousand in an assurity if your profit from the raid comes to less than eighty thousand."

    Del Alma-Gris gave a very satisfied smile.

    "I have to say, this is looking very positive. My Quant had concerns."

    Elise kept her face unemotive and passive in reaction when she heard the word ''Quant.''

    She was expecting it.

    Del Alma-Gris told the group there was someone she consulted who dealt in advanced calculations that went by the guerre de nom, "The Quant."

    The non-redacted portions of the Sigrid Rosa file gave Elise an astounding insight into del Alma-Gris'' mind. The Quant was a voice inside her head. The voices were a side effect of the rewiring done to her in the womb, where she created a rationalization of the artificial neurological architecture that the interior of her mind bounced against. Del Alma-Gris had many other names for the voices in her head in the past¡ªit really depended upon the maturity of her stage in life at the time.

    Elise finally nodded as she realized del Alma-Gris was waiting for her to acknowledge her own duplicitous motivation out in the open.

    The bounty hunter spoke.

    "You are aware I lost nearly a half million in inventory, and the 1.2 million bounty for you¡ª" Elise swept her hand from right to left, "¡ªand the half million for them could pay for a lot of equipment to get me back in the game. My team won''t go for it. Those three Nortes, the US Army veterans, came here to live in the Quadra for one reason only: To capture my grandfather."

    Elise shrugged, "or kill him. Do you have a problem with that? Is it going to be a problem between us?"

    Del Alma-Gris shook her head fiercely.

    "I can''t deny those men have a legitimate vendetta. Kutuzov did what he did."

    Elise folded her arms.

    "So, are we good?"

    Del Alma-Gris chortled, but by the way the thief held her head aslant with her eyes dancing, Elise had no doubt that she was enthralled with the idea of the heist in spite of any harsh words she said to appease her crew at a bullshit street cred level.

    "Lady. You are a bounty hunter. Good isn''t quite the right word, you know, but for now my conditions have been met, and I am satisfied we have a deal.

    "Raquel, turn on the light show for our guest, will you? Please, turn around, Senora Luna Claro. I will demonstrate how a little oversight on your part turned into a fuck-up for the ages."

    Behind Elise now stood a holograph of the entire Dimittis cult compound before any of the destruction occurred. A visual of the first turret repeated in slow motion. It popped out from the clubhouse wall from a box where it began as a near 2D formation, and by the time it clamped onto the awning, it had changed into a full-blown, volumetric space-occupying killing machine.

    "You see that one meter by two meter panel on the wall behind the awning that your crew mistook for an incandescent spotlight? It is a simple low-energy LED creating the illusion of being a fully-watted lawn swivel light. It was designed to throw off any detection of the heat signature emitting from the IWA, Instant Wall Assembly."

    Elise gasped. "Unbelievable! An IWA that morphs into a turret? I''ve only seen them used to hide and switch out entrance and exit locations on high-security buildings."

    Del Alma-Gris smiled impishly.

    "You thought wrong, and it turned out to be the biggest fuck-up of your career."

    Clearly, the little thief was enjoying this, so much so that she grabbed Elise by the hand and started to lead her.

    "Come on. You''re going to love this part because you won''t need any expensive bore equipment to accomplish it. This is how we are going to fuck their shit up for good!"

    Elise briskly walked beside her new friend, who was now skipping along uninhibitedly.

 4.15 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    She relaxed with a glass of white wine dangling in her hand. Elise was a light drinker; she took care to know the wine styles and vineyard brands that were low on the alcohol content. Her creed taught her moderation in all things.

    She now sat with soft electronic music from the melancholy soundtrack of a romantic comedy piped in through the RV walls after she indulged in a shower. Sitting in a mere cotton sleeveless shirt and silk boxers, Elise needed to unwind from the special mesh gear she wore to contain her condition.

    Mostly she felt that after several days of intense work with del Alma-Gris and her crew, and being too tired for anything else, she owed Fiona an evening of lovemaking.

    Of course, she certainly needed the distressor sex for her own better mental health. So here Elise sat as she lit a scented candle, attempting to put all of her professional cares behind her.

    Fiona pulled up in her personal jeep that bore the odd olive and aquamarine color scheme the young woman mistook for it being hep. She jumped out of the driver''s seat and grabbed the supplies she carried in a cardboard box from the QuickMart run that Elise sent her on.

    Entering Elise''s recreational vehicle, Fiona flashed her a large, dimpled smile on sight.

    "Mmm, damn. Look at what I have to look forward to. Hotness just sitting there, so way out of my league."

    Elise sat with her shoulders thrown back and her eyes and smile squared up, lingering in a forward gaze.

    "Hey baby, you deserve it. Don''t doubt that for a minute."

    Fiona prompted her to stand up. She held Elise by the rump and rolled her palms along the rock-solid glutes with delicate attention as she made cooing grunts.

    Elise held her neck slanted aside with an inviting look in her eyes. The buzz of the first glass of wine was kicking in, and she was flushed with warmth.

    Finally, Fiona grew silent and yielded her hands away from her indulgence in foreplay.

    Elise protested.

    "Don''t stop!"

    Fiona shook her head.

    "I have the stink of the day still on me."

    "That makes me feel all the hotter," Elise answered as she clasped Fiona''s green denim jumper at the shoulders.

    With a wrinkled frown cresting above her brow, Fiona gestured to the bed Elise spread out for the occasion that lay covered in pink silk sheets covered in the folding petals of multi-colored orchid blooms.

    "I''m not spoiling that which you did so lovingly with this. I''ll be right back, okay?"

    "Well, poo. But if you must, you must."

    They exchanged a quick kiss before Fiona headed to the shower room and shut the door behind her.

    What to do in the meantime? Elise could always light a few more candles, right? Add a sandalwood and mocha taper over in that far corner to contrast with the basic lavender aroma that filled the RV interior.

    Elise suddenly felt that something was not quite right. She realized it wasn''t so much her professional instinct nor personal intuition that gave the warning but instead her cornea was about to accept a data pour through its transversal gate.

    The RV''s defensive system triggered a blue warning light to ride a course along the ceiling parameter. Her choice of music faded out. The outer defensive AI finally fed Elise the anticipated information dump.

    She visualized a jeep with just as outrageous a color scheme as Birddog''s vehicle approaching¡ªall done up in a pink camo design.

    Perfectly timed if this is a home invasion.

    Elise didn''t waste any time deciding how to react. She slipped on her lower back brace and a pair of jeans. Deciding that she could handle matters barefoot, Elise grabbed her 10mm Magellani Terra Bruciata Revolver.

    It was fully chambered, and the recoil mitigator glove wrapped around her hand after Elise squeezed out the right pattern on the handle.

    "Fiona, we''ve got company," Elise yelled.

    "My PA is lit up. Got my gear with me. Be out in a minute."

    A second data stream read through the bounty hunter''s cornea. She got a good look at the couple who now approached.

    "Never mind, Fiona. Go back to enjoying your shower. But it does look like sex is on hold."

    "Well, shit." Birddog did indeed sound disappointed.

    "Right with you on that, Chief."

    Elise slipped on a light ChitinTech impact vest over her sleeveless shirt. As there was a knock at her door, she placed the revolver into a holster custom built into the interior of the jacket.Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

    "I''m coming," Elise said as she opened the door. "You caught us at a bad time, Sachmilli. Let us take this outside."

    She decided to exaggerate for negotiating purposes how personally inconvenient the venture could be if he was in immediate need of her services.

    Elise continued.

    "My girlfriend is inside, and we were just commencing with making love when you arrived."

    Through long, silky, white hair, Sachmilli glanced coyly at the tall redhead at his side. She was a beauty, and Elise recognized her from somewhere.

    "Forgive our interruption, but I took your advice. I have come here to save my boy, and I need your help."

    ''Help'' wasn''t a word Elise liked to hear when dealing with clients. Her posture tightened up, and she grimaced.

    Both of the emotive reactions she failed at suppressing in spite of her effort. A long history of clientele bad faith triggered the flinch.

    Regret streamed through Elise''s nerves, for she could tell in her earlier conversation that Sachmilli was anything but a bad faith operator.

    Elise nodded to clarify that scrutiny did not imply rejection. "I''m listening. Let''s go sit in your vehicle, and you can tell me everything I need to know."

    "You should know. I''m willing to make a very generous reward if you succeed."

    The space she rented for the Vida Escondida venture supplied a fenced-in space and electricity for three modest home trailers, an eighteen-wheeler, three RVs, and a utility shack for their operational and living needs.

    She did not need anyone on the crew to overhear the numbers and the conditions they had to abide by being negotiated before Elise got a chance to soft pedal it to the entire crew in a staff meeting.

    "Senor Cuervo, do you have sound dampener technology installed in your vehicle?"

    "Ah, yes, yes. Forgive my insensitivity."

    The redhead chuckled softly at her companion''s discomfort.

    "Come on," she said to Elise, "I''ll clear out the back seat for you."

    Elise recognized her as she followed an incredible set of glutes on the six-foot figure. Indeed, the redhead was a top-tier fighter in the Sweet who caused a controversial series of deaths and was disqualified from competition.

    Elise didn''t follow the sport enough to feel certain of the justification for that ruling, but crew members who did were outraged by the judgment.

    As the redhead cleared the backseat, Elise ran a cornea scan. The data stream reset into readable form, and, though the name Anneb¨¦l Sens Duarte was not a surprise, her Premie Harvest status certainly did.

    "You''re the fighter, aren''t you?" Elise said to strike up a conversation.

    "Well, I was. Now, I take care of this guy."

    Duarte let out a visceral laugh to let her know that it was more complicated than she let on.

    Elise slipped into the back seat.

    "You have a huge fan base in our little gypsy town."

    Duarte slipped into the driver''s side seat. She grabbed her PA and synced with the Jeep.

    "That''s good to know, but I''ll be monitoring them while the two of you talk shop."

    Agile as a much younger man, Sachmilli climbed in the passenger side. Elise caught a glimpse of his 1911 beneath his red flannel shirt.

    Duarte commanded her attention once more.

    "Hey, is there anyone you suspect of being a snitch on your team?"

    "No. My girl routinely monitors everything. She would have caught it."

    Sachmilli and Duarte exchanged glances.

    Elise screwed up her face at what their body language implied.

    "Fiona is loyal to me and me alone."

    "But not to her brother," Senora Duarte questioned.

    Elise could not see his motion from below the shoulder but inferred that Sachmilli patted the fighter on her thigh to let her know she was out of line.

    "Forget this for now," Sachmilli requested. "It is an aside with little relevance at the moment."

    Elise closed her eyes for a moment as she brought her clasped hands to her chin. She had a good idea what their speculation meant.

    Duarte did a background check on Elise and her crew before they decided to use her services. As expected.

    They likely discovered her involvement with ¨´ltimos D¨¬as and perhaps uncovered a few other things. Did the Cazas keep check on her and report to elements within the organization?

    Elise needed to shove the matter aside, or else it would affect her judgment while negotiating with Sachmilli.

    "This ''generous reward'' if I succeed? I''m listening."

    "First. My son. He has agreed to be the subject of a very deadly ceremony that the Opium-Eaters perform on their highest-ranked adepts. It involves the partial removal of the lungs and replacement of those segments with a hookah transit.

    "The three gentlemen who are overseeing this ceremony all have outstanding warrants. I want you to go to their operation tonight and collect on those bounties."

    She thought about the logistics involved. Without a rest period, her team would be useless in training tomorrow.

    "I''ll square you with Tas¨¬a. Let her know your crew is being reassigned for the day. No practice drills tomorrow."

    Elise held her tongue, but her artificial eye twitched. ''Reassigned''?

    That took some balls!

    "Sach," Anneb¨¦l spoke up, "I know you are used to being the man in charge . . ."

    "Ah, shit. Did I get it wrong again?"

    Duarte squinted and gestured with her forefinger and thumb, "Just a tad disrespectful."

    "My apologies. It''s an old sales technique to talk past the sale. I do it habitually."

    His apology was genuine.

    "Don''t sweat it, Senor. But it is indeed my prerogative when and where my crew gets deployed. Put that to the side; why are you not asking for del Alma-Gris'' assistance? Gael-Sebastian was a former member of her crew, wasn''t he?"

    His placid but strong gaze suddenly failed him. He looked away for a moment.

    "She will no longer speak to him."

    Elise glanced around.

    "His condition brings her heartbreak?"

    She could tell by Anneb¨¦l Sens Duarte''s momentary disengagement that she had met neither del Alma-Gris nor Gael-Sebastian Cuervo.

    "No," Sachmilli stated solemnly. "When Tas¨¬a needed him the most, my son proved to be absolutely useless."

    Elise grimaced as she realized that the elder Cuervo was referring to the assault. Apparently, there was much more to it than she felt she needed to know.

    "Understood," Elise acknowledged. "So, now your offer."

    "Don''t misunderstand when I say this¡ªI don''t object to your operation; I understand your motivation," Sachmilli leaned forward, "I know you are going after Tas¨¬a after the Dimittis takedown. Don''t ask how I know. I know."

    Elise gulped; she realized that she could not deny it.

    "So, how does this all tie together?" she asked.

    "You get my boy back to me and those three jackals either dead or cuffed, and I''ll pay you the one point two million you would get for her bounty if you don''t pursue it."

    Elise cocked her head askew.

    "She means that much to you?"

    He stared out the window with his jowls flexed. It was the first time Elise even noticed them.

    "I''m just trying to make things right. I''m the one who insisted that she needed the prenatal treatments."

    With her lips pressed tersely together, Elise studied his face.

    It was a curious admission on Sachmilli''s part.

    "What about her crew?"

    He chortled with a cynical sneer, "Do with them whatever you want except the Spaniard I sent to protect her and the other girl, the tech, who doesn''t even have an outstanding warrant; the men, though, they all deserve to die."

    Elise nodded and then offered Sachmilli her hand to shake.

    "Alright, I''m in. This is going to be one hell of a busy night."

 4.16 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    That has to be her brother holding that child.

    Duarte parked the ultra-beveled Jeep with the tr¨¨s chic paint job thirty meters away from where Elise held court with five members of her crew. Birddog remained in the service van parked on the far side of the lot. Beside her, Sachmilli swiveled towards the backdoor with the monitoring console snapped in place at his hands.

    The man in the passenger seat handed Duarte the child, swung his door open, and made his way to the back hatch.

    Anneb¨¦l Sens Duarte played with the boy for a moment before reaching for the door. He appeared between three and four. While Duarte''s skin was the deep pinkish tan common to Iberian redheads, the child was very pale.

    Yet, he was definitely hers.

    The brother now held a QuickMart box of goods, and it was crystal clear to Elise that this was Agu. The report Birddog created a few hours earlier was less than three full pages in length. Elise did not feel she needed Birddog to research more than what was necessary for a summary of the fighter''s history and psychological profile.

    But it did not mention a child. Elise glanced over and made certain she caught Birddog''s eye with a squinted glare to let her know there would be questions later on.

    As Anneb¨¦l approached, Elise lost the scowl and gave the kid a big smile. He was a little cutie.

    She knelt to face him.

    "Who might you be, hun?"

    "Villion."

    "You are so small," Elise gushed.

    Villion''s eyes blinked wide and slow.

    "Mom will protect me."

    "Love, there is no doubt in the world she will."

    She stood up and greeted Duarte with a nod. In turn the redhead spoke.

    "This is my brother, Agu."

    He now held the box with a swagger in his grip and torso.

    "Hey, pretty lady, I have the naloxone for you."

    Beside a concrete divider wall, the team''s engineer had specialized equipment laid out on a wooden table and primed to go for the weaponized conversion of the medicine.

    Elise threw Agu a slanted, flirty smile and touched his arm.

    "I appreciate it, Agu. That guy by that table is Bruges. If you could assist him, you would be doing me a solid, sweetie."

    Agu nodded with much enthusiasm as he headed towards the impromptu workstation.

    She turned towards Duarte.

    "Does he call every lady ''pretty''?"

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled.

    "Just the really pretty ones. Ugly ones he calls ''ugly," or "homely," instead if he has a notion of situational propriety going on upstairs."

    Villion reached his arms up towards Duarte, who slipped him back up against her bosom. Elise had no idea who the father was, but he was definitely a momma''s boy.

    Elise chortled.

    "Now I understand why Sachmilli didn''t want you on the extraction crew. You have more important priorities. We can bring Sachmilli back to Villa Marr¨®n if it is more convenient for you."

    Duarte shook her head.

    "Sachmilli has rented an entire hospital suite in Vida Escondida for Gael-Sebastian. My boy and I will be lying low nearby for a while."

    Elise felt a presence to her left. Agu stood waiting for her to acknowledge him. She smiled and nodded.

    "Bruges said to tell you everything is good to go. So I guess this is goodbye."

    Agu came in for a hug, which Elise graciously received even as he clasped her haunches in a squeeze. She glanced over to Birddog who wasn''t having any of that.

    The tech clenched her teeth together, and her hands were on the door handle.

    "Goodbye, Agu. See that big gal in the van beside Sachmilli?"

    He let go and whispered, "Is she mad at me?"

    "Very."

    "I better get gone. Bye, Pretty Lady."The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

    He tucked tail back to the Jeep.

    Now after seeing his uncle''s actions, tiny Villion insisted on a hug. Elise pulled him towards herself and swayed him from side to side for several seconds.

    It was never meant to be, she thought as she held the child, and her maternal instinct swelled up, near overwhelmingly.

    With some reluctance, she gave Villion back over.

    "Goodbye, Villion. Goodbye, Senora Duarte."

    "Call me Anneb¨¦l."

    With a firm shake, "Goodbye, Anneb¨¦l."

    When the Duarte family pulled out of the lot, Elise turned around.

    "Everyone ready?

    Los Cazadores

    The sign above the public side of the opium den read. It was a vibrant and active hookah bar whose products tended to be on the milder side as not to frighten away the non-devout.

    The next level down was a set of offices, and on the far end of that level of the facility, their informant described a truly old-fashioned opium den for the medium-core devotees to the vida loca.

    Unfortunately, her team would have to crash through the hookah bar to get to the sub-basement.

    Though the above-ground story was well mapped by her own augmented eye from her previous outing, she had very little to go on for the layouts of the lowest two levels that comprised the subbasement.

    In two hours they were given to prepare, and Birddog reviewed the building in great detail. There were no cameras, but she pinged into a neighboring wireless intermediary console to overtake a robovac gathering dust in a utility closet on the office level of Los Cazadores and map overlay the route. The floorplan remained consistent with previous establishments that ran businesses in the same facility.

    All was copacetic to their invasion, except for an anomaly: the subbasement was either very well hidden or did not exist at the time of previous occupancy. Camera logs of the nearby streets revealed no construction that could explain their existence.

    That left another possibility Elise did not even want to consider: nanospore activity. Given the AI-controlled entities spontaneity, their tactics were nearly impossible to rehearse against.

    However, Caza always kept UV flashbangs and aerosolic anti-mold thermites in a fanny pack as the team''s improvised situations handler, a task that was part of his position as the gallo puntero.

    So, they were not entirely defenseless.

    As her team approached the facility from a connector alley, Caza came out of the shadows from a cubby under an HVAC ground unit where he served point watching customers and staff enter and leave the facility.

    His cameotic layer faded with every step towards her.

    "All good," she asked him.

    "Check," he said with an affirmative nod.

    Now her team was in place, Elise glanced at her watch.

    "Time sync to twenty-one, ought ten, ought, ought."

    It was off by a little over two minutes, but that did not matter. This was more about the synced-up kinetic dance. Timestamps would be corrected later in Birddog''s report.

    "Weapon check," Elise commanded.

    Each member, in order of rank from lowest to highest, tested a blank round in silent mode through the .72 Saturnine Air Carbines set with split-out incapacitation rounds.

    In orderly seven-second intervals, each said, ''clear,'' in turn until finally Elise tested her Saturnine.

    Next she tested the .50 air pistol equipped with split-out nerve toxin and naloxone. The rush of adrenaline that naturally occurred during a surprise attack could easily trigger the same effects inherent in an overdose for those doped up inside the facility.

    Elise had carefully reviewed the warrants on the three individuals. Lethal takedowns would be deemed excessive by the Board of Warrant Enforcement no matter Sachmilli''s preferences against those who enthralled his boy.

    Elise continued.

    "Clear. Don masks."

    The air filtration masks went on.

    She waved her left arm down.

    "Point man, take out the door. Everyone else¡ªnow!"

    The door shattered out of their way as the tensile debilitator did its job. Elise jumped through the portal gap first, and she rolled to the side and hunched low against a wall.

    She fired four neurotoxin rounds into the ceiling above the sixteen patrons and two barkeeps and then two more rounds at the floor between the bar and the couch and table sets that lined the other walls.

    As she did so, Elise identified three patrons who were armed and who were beginning to react. Caza took out these very same ones in quick fashion.

    His natural set of eyes always seemed instinctively comparable to her own augmented one, hence why he served as the point, or gallo puntero, as was custom to say in their trade.

    A swell of screams rose up as the neurotoxin began to shut the crowd down. Elise rushed forward to the bar as the tender began to take cover. She wasn''t going to give him the opportunity to grab a weapon.

    Switching to her Saturnine, she jumped and slid across the bar and rolled on the floor, all the while accounting for her potential bumps and bruises with deft maneuvers that took advantage of the ChitinTech exoskeleton combat gear.

    It was a heavier and robotics-assisted version of the one she wore in her day-to-day activities.

    She landed beside the bartender, who grabbed a very sleek Italian sawed-off shotgun. She was close enough to fire into his right hand.

    Though the munition was designed for non-lethality, at an eight-inch range it cracked the bones in his hand something fierce. He let out a shriek and squirmed.

    Elise disarmed the shotgun and set it to the side. It would have been so lovely to claim the gun as her own like the little thief did as a matter of routine, but this was the bounty trade. EVERYTHING had to be accounted for in the after reports.

    Elise glanced around and saw that her unit had taken everyone else out of the fight. Hugo, one of the Americans and from Louisiana, secured the posh mezzanine above the bar, and Caza stood guard at the back portal hallway with his gun trained on the stairwell going down.

    Phase one was a success.

    Elise turned around to the man whose hand she had broken. Tears swelled up in his eyes. The neurotoxin was starting to take hold, which limited his ability to squirm.

    She tossed his hair gently and spoke smoothly.

    "Easy, fella. Mother Hen has you. You''ll be alright."

    Just as del Alma-Gris kept one for her thieving trade and Caza kept one for spontaneous kinetic situations, Elise kept a fanny pack of her own filled with compact medical supplies.

    She laid his hand out on the floor evenly with his palm down and applied a local anesthetic patch on it that would, in seconds, numb the entire appendage.

    Above that, she put on a smart wrap bandage which spread out over his entire hand like a glove and carefully set his bones back in place.

    Next, she placed three pills in a shot glass and placed them next to the bartender''s head.

    "When that starts throbbing again, hon, take one of these. It is time released to last an entire day," she giggled and patted him on the head. "I am not even going to charge you for it."

    Elise stood up when she began to be aware of a problem. Her fingertips were feeling numb.

    "Hey, Bruges. Get over here."

    He walked over with an atmospheric gauge in hand.

    "Those neurotoxins," she began, "were only catalytic with respiratory blood exchange, correct?"

    "Indeed," Bruges affirmed. "It isn''t the rounds causing the numbness. There is something weird in the air."

 4.17 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Elise pressed her comlink.

    "Birddog, do two cross-indexed searches for me. Check: nanospore activity with nerve agents. Check: nanospore activity with opium cults."

    Bruges gasped.

    "They are here," he whispered.

    Elise assessed the man at her side.

    Good engineer, even better soldier, and yet the thought of the nanospores made him visibly ill. Manifestation was a real threat, a horrifying possibility that the people of the Quadra lived with daily.

    Yet, somehow they all learned to live with it. Elise decided she needed to probe him further.

    "They''re hitting your dreams pretty hard, huh?"

    She noticed Caza was paying attention to them with side glances. Ears like a hawk. He took out two UV flashbangs from his fanny pack and clipped them to his bandolier.

    "Yeah," Bruges pumped his head up and down as he stooped on the bar counter, "they''ve been fucking with me pretty hard. Especially the black-eyed twins."

    He tossed his supper in a stream of puke.

    "Chief," said Caza, "there is no discernible movement below bouncing off my pulse, and more than two hours until chop time. You can spare Bruges a solid minute or two."

    She squinted as she appraised her second-in-command''s attitude.

    "Did you know about this, Caza?"

    He nodded his head affirmatively.

    "I''ve been trying to get Bruges an appointment at the clinic for the last week, but they won''t see him until his blood work clears from that previous incident on his visit, so like most Salvage matters, it is stuck in limbo."

    "Shit, shit, shit," Bruges repeated helplessly.

    After Elise grabbed a Brahma Pilsner from the cold fridge and opened it, she put a hand on Bruges''s shoulder and handed him the cold beer.

    "Easy, my friend. I would like to make you a double shot, but anything heavier on the spirits might cost us some paperwork hours. Take your time; drink it."

    There were no cameras aside from Caza''s shoulder pin, which was aimed steadily down the hall towards the stairwell. Audio pulse, however, was being used to establish the time signatures of their movement patterns just in case anything had to be reviewed for legal purposes.

    With a tight breath, she made her move. Elise had to be very, very careful with her next course of action. She slowly removed a tiny pill from her fanny pack and hid it against her thumb as she turned Bruges away from everyone else.

    The exploit likely appeared vivacious to anyone who watched; this was one of the few times that was legally preferable to what was actually occurring.

    As Bruges swallowed down the beer, she stroked his free hand. His eyes beaded-up curiously.

    Elise opened his hand and made sure he could feel the pill against the flesh of his palm. She leaned in and said the English word, ''microdot.''

    He didn''t recognize the word.

    "What?"

    "Don''t make me say it, Bruges."

    The manufacture of LSD was a capital offense under the Salvage. Even the possession of rye argot could get one several years behind bars.

    And Elise Luna Claro did those very things, manufacturing and cultivation, for an underground charity that assisted those desperate for the inoculation.

    Fortunately, Bruges finally got the message, and he quaffed it down with his next gulp from the bottle.

    With the next few swallows, he finished off the beer. Elise then took that time to go back to the bar stand and pay for it.

    "I''m good to go," he announced.

    "Bruges, self-monitor, okay? Don''t hesitate to let me know if you need to break off and head back."

    In the right frame of mind, LSD consumption was a perfectly manageable experience, but it tended to enhance and exaggerate one''s emotional state of being. Properties of the human mind that the nanospores were expert at manipulating.

    "I''ll be fine, Chief. Sorry about that."

    Elise smiled and looked down at her hands. They felt numb on the tips still, but neither did the condition worsen. She glanced back up at Bruges.

    "Don''t be. It took guts what you did, and you did the right thing addressing the problem head-on like that before we took it live," Elise turned to the other crew members¡ªCaza, Hugo, Levon, who was the other half of her American gunner team, and Kauane, and she continued, "Anyone else need to get anything off their chest?"

    They all shook their heads in unison. She mashed her comlink.

    "Good. Birddog, you got that stream up and running?"

    "We have a solid set, Chief. The AI Assistant found previously unknown correlations. Heroin and opium both extend the life of the virus inside the bloodstream. Well-known fact, of course, but it is the only means the nanospore virus evolves a set of digits that is necessary for necrotic manipulations."Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    Necrotic manipulation. Essentially reviving a dead body. The general public was aware of this occurring in animals that ascospores hunted, like deer and peccary, but they were kept in the dark about the Otros. Humans who were brought back to life.

    If what Fiona said was true, this was a major development in the fight against the nanospores. But already, Elise was formulating doubts.

    "Just a second, Birddog. Animals aren''t opium eaters and heroin addicts. How does the condition form in the natural world?"

    Birddog chuckled as if she were addressing a naive child.

    "Addict poop accumulates in, say, for example, the well of a suburban home. It grows mold on it that in turn forms the ascospore we call the grises, or gray creepers.

    "It just so happens that all seven types of ascospores that have been identified ooze one form of neurotoxin or another, but only the grises have the markers that I''m finding in my brother''s real-time blood work."

    Caza smiled with a grimace and patted the little container attached to his hip. Through its clear tubing, blood circulated.

    The gallo puntero was expected to be loaded up with monitoring devices.

    "So, they are definitely here," he said with resignation in his voice.

    Elise swore a soft profanity.

    "What about the other matter? Any correlation between the spore entities and the dens?" she asked.

    "No. And I believe that is a deliberately systematic cover-up on their part to keep us unaware of a potential exploitable vulnerability."

    Worth checking out later, but at the moment she was more concerned whether or not they had the firepower to deal with a non-human aggressor.

    "Caza, given this update, what is your assessment of our preparedness?"

    He kept his eyes fixed on the stairs below.

    "Decidedly underwhelming. I have dealt with ascospore invasions before. When they take over an area, they typically build a defensive parameter infesting a rapid growth-oriented species like spiders, rodents, or even chickens."

    He held up his .72 Saturnine Air Carbine.

    "Nothing wrong with this gun," Caza continued. "But the round is not optimal."

    Elise nodded. "Fine. Reconfigure as you see fit."

    He pointed to Hugo. "Moreau, fetch us six clips of incendiary rounds and six teffies, on the double, chief."

    Slowly going down the steps, the crew took on an arrowhead formation. Caza remained on point, and his Saturnine was still armed with nonlethal rounds. He would take on all human targets. To his left, the Brazilian Kauane was equipped with the incendiary rounds. He was tasked to shooting to the center of the floor to break up any horde invasion and form firewall barriers. That left Hugo to his right with the teflonrazors to break bones and cut through dense solid matter.

    Behind the three, Bruges and Levon shuffled forward with their guns equipped with non-lethal rounds for cover fire, and Elise held the rear position with the .50 air pistol equipped with neurotoxin rounds.

    They made it down the stairwell with no incident. The hall they now stood in was part of the office suite.

    There was no one roaming about in the immediate area.

    The lighting was dim, and Elise doubted that the opium den at the far end of the level would be open for business given the activity centered around Gael-Sebastian''s induction ceremony programmed for a few hours later.

    Regardless, they would have to check the den out. The first priority of infiltration was ensuring that the egress was clear of conflict.

    "Chief," Caza began, "bouncy time?"

    She activated her eye to full spectrum.

    "Go time."

    The little rubber flyer was no bigger than a flashbang. Caza spun it in a whirly-whirl that smacked hard against the wall thirty-five meters down before it came to the double doors at the far end.

    Elise got two sets of reaction reads from the hit. One exposed an individual in a single office suite not far away. It appeared the individual was startled awake.

    The other was more ominous. Inside the opium den on the far side were six humans gathered together in ritualistic fashion holding something above their heads.

    It was a goat. Above the goat, something she could not make out swirled in the air as if it floated.

    "Caza, first door to your right. Everyone, hug a wall, go cameotic, stay still."

    When the woman popped her head out of the door, she looked both up and down the hallway. She brought a nine-millimeter Beretta up even with the door frame and minimized her exposure.

    Not bad technique. Not bad at all.

    She recognized the woman as the office manager, Estelle Atr¨¦se. No outstanding warrants, no criminal history. But she definitely had some explaining to do.

    She could not be innocent of being aware of what was going on in the opium den. Then Elise got a hunch that would square that mystery up.

    Elise aimed at the top far side of the door frame behind the woman and fired the neurotoxin round.

    The contents splattered across the back of the woman''s head. She jumped down and swiveled to face the purple substance as it turned to aerosol.

    Before she could scream or shoot her Beretta, Caza popped her twice. Once in the shoulder and once on the elbow.

    Estella Atr¨¦se slumped down and dropped the gun.

    "Cover me," Elise commanded. She crawled over to the slumped unconscious body and felt the skin along the back of Atr¨¦se''s neck.

    The lateral grain felt silky against Elise''s palm, very sensually so. A straight-up-and-down rub felt like normal skin. It was an identifier.

    Elise set her eyes on the woman as she whispered on the comlink.

    "Birddog, run a full diagnostic in pulse mode with my eye."

    Several seconds later, Fiona came back with the results.

    "She''s Otros."

    Elise winced. The normal ¨²ltimos D¨ªas policy for Otros encounters was extermination. They were abominations, not truly human.

    However, this was a Board mission, not UD. She couldn''t just kill the woman. With exasperation in the breath she let out, Elise bound the hands and feet with flex straps.

    "Alright everyone, it''s likely to get a bit weird up this way; I saw some shit, so follow me."

    They pushed slowly through the hall, and all the while, Elise''s mind raced. That the Otros worked the day-to-day operations of the den went a long way to explaining how the connection between Opium-Eaters and the nanospores was kept hidden.

    But who was Sachmilli''s informant within this tangle of intrigue?

    When the team reached the double set of wooden doors, they stood back five meters as Caza cranked up the tensile debilitator to get it to its full kinetic potential.

    As he did so, they could hear the repeated word, "golden. Golden. Golden," coming from behind the sealed doors.

    Caza swung the rod that held the net in place.

    The net spread out to the corners of the door, and once clamped, crumbled it in an instant.

    Elise threw herself into the gap in a bullish stampede and shot neurotoxin rounds to each side of the six opium-eaters, two women and four men, all nude. They circled around as they held a near legless altar platter that bore the goat.

    An oozy red ascospore floated above them. Two tentacles on each side of its spherical body swayed to the groove of the rhythmic music in the background.

    The shrieking naked people began to fall to the ground as Caza shot them with debilitation rounds.

    Though the platter crashed to the ground, the ascospore caught the goat with its four tentacles. The goat cried out in fearful ''bahs'' as the ascospore gripped it close. Two of the tentacles wrapped around the goat''s horns and split the skull apart.

    The monstrosity latched a vaginal-shaped orifice onto its brain. Sucking noises bellowed out in a quiffing fashion.

    All the team''s firepower now aimed at the ascospore until it finally shredded apart with a milky film that splattered on the marble floor below it.

    Elise put away the Saturnine she had switched out for better firepower.

    "Bruges, Levine, help me clean these people up. That ooze could be toxic. Everyone else, secure the chamber''s parameter."

    Just as they started to move the unconscious bodies away from the splattered area, they heard someone with a melodic voice yell, "don''t shoot!"

    "Come out," Caza commanded.

    How could there be a seventh person? The whirly-whirl flyer would have detected a suddenly jolted heartbeat.

    From behind the bar, a nude woman who appeared to be in her late thirties but also a mere four foot eight came out of hiding. Her skin was a wondrous golden.

    "Don''t shoot," she repeated. "I am a friend of Sachmilli''s."

 4.18 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Elise''s eyes got lost for a moment studying the woman''s thick mane of scarlet red that appeared unnatural, though she wasn''t entirely certain if that heightened coloration was preternatural or a dye job, given the roots of it were consistent with the body of her hair.

    The golden-hued lady breathed hard and unsteady. Elise signaled for everyone to lower their weapons. The woman held her hands against her sternum. Her fingers were in a panicked jitter.

    "Relax. Just keep your hands where we can see them, and we''re cool. What is your name?"

    The woman cleared her throat.

    "Hecate. Hecate Balmori."

    "I can give you a sedative that will help with your breathing, Senora Balmori. Sit on that stool if you like."

    Balmori nodded her head vigorously.

    "Yes. Yes. I think I''ll have a heart attack if I don''t calm it shut."

    Calm it shut. Elise took notice. That''s an interesting phrase. The first inference that came to her mind was the Sigrid Rosa document on the tangle of voices that lived inside del Alma-Gris'' head.

    "We''re here to shut this madness down," Elise said.

    Hecate appeared exasperated, and her voice grew tightly shrill.

    "How can you keep your cool when you see something that grotesque happen? I''m in the middle of all of this; this is my reality, obviously, and my mind never, never adjusts to this shit."

    Elise administered a shot through a needleless pressure pointer against the soft ridge of Balmori''s left shoulder.

    "I don''t know what to tell you, Senora Balmori. Perhaps serving a greater purpose helps keep the fear at bay, but neither should I assume that you don''t."

    Her answer was intentionally vague; Elise played it cautious with the petite woman, friend of Sachmilli''s or not. This was bizarre after all. Was this skin condition a variation on the Otros pathology? Or, entirely unrelated?

    Elise continued. "So . . . I don''t mean to be rude by asking; you look absolutely ravishing, by the way, but how did you wind up looking like that?"

    "Golden? It eventually goes away, but while the condition is active, I am a conduit for a collective unconscious."

    Elise gave her a close inspection. Hecate was an indigene. Did she mean in service to the racial memory of her people, or did she mean something else?

    She glanced around to see if the team was keeping to their task or if they were distracted by the sight of Hecate. Bruges studied the woman with a scientific curiosity. He could be put to better use.

    "Bruges, I need you to collect several samples from the ascospore and run whatever test you have available. I have a feeling it is key to this puzzle."

    "Oh, it is," Hecate enthusiastically agreed. "The sacrifice ritual attunes the ascospore until it is ripe. Once ripened, it can be used for the golden ceremony to create my special condition. We were attempting the next phase, feeding that young ascospore until it ripens. It is a shame you destroyed it. I would have acquired a golden lover."

    Though fascinated by where that inquiry would lead, it was not pertinent to the mission. Elise decided to ask Hecate what she knew about the remaining two floor levels.

    "This activity your group here engages in is directed by the people downstairs, correct?"

    Hecate was about to speak when Sachmilli interrupted through the comlink.

    "Senora Luna Claro, could you have one of your men escort the lovely damsel to the service van?"

    For a moment she glared. Elise had a bad feeling about that request.

    "I''ll send her over once I have everything I need to know."

    Sachmilli was silent for a moment.

    "I''m afraid . . ."

    Elise was at times quick to temper; it was the source of her reputation, to which she was deemed by many to be difficult.

    "Oh, Lord, Cuervo! Not you too! Not now!"

    Sachmilli cleared his throat.

    "I''m afraid that further interrogation of Senora Hecate Balmori would compromise our operation."

    Elise noticed the eldest male of the group they had bounded and restrained had his head turned towards their conversation.

    "It is already compromised. These people we have subdued already know of Hecate''s duplicity thanks to you."

    She could hear Sachmilli click the tip of his tongue as if he was measuring what to say next.

    "And, no, we are not going to murder the detainees," she answered before he asked.

    Sachmilli cursed softly.

    Elise decided to put her foot down.

    "I''m calling off the mission. I won''t put my people in danger when the contractor is quite evidently compromised. Claro out."

    She cut the comlink.

    Caza nodded his head.

    "I''m impressed. What do we do now?"

    "We wait a minute," Elise answered. Her eyes glanced down, searching into Hecate Balmori''s brassy orbs. They were a few tones darker than her skin.

    The little pixie of a woman looked away with a nervous quiver in her lips.

    "Anyone ever tell you you have the prettiest green eyes?" she asked Elise.

    Elise chuckled. "Don''t mean to sound vain, but I get that a lot." Elise continued, but her voice turned somber. "I need to know something, Senora Balmori. Is Sachmilli ever abusive to you?"

    The golden''s forehead wrinkled, and she sneered.

    "It is not like that at all. Gael-Sebastian and I were once engaged. He was the most precise of gentlemen until that damned thief led him astray."

    "You know del Alma-Gris?"

    Hecate nearly spat. "I have never met her."A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

    Elise meditated on the raw animosity.

    Did del Alma-Gris introduce Gael-Sebastian Cuervo to the Opium-Eaters and their vida loco ways? Her bio indicated the thief dealt in almost anything pharmaceutical as a trade product, but she was chiefly interested in mind-altering psychotropics for her own use.

    This wasn''t her scene.

    Elise decided she was reading too much into it. This was likely a simple matter of jealousy. Though not an outright beauty, del Alma-Gris was striking in her appearance, and there was a certain coolness in her slough eyes that drew men towards her.

    And once more, Elise needed to steer the conversation back on course. Now her distrust of Sachmilli was her most essential concern.

    "So, Sachmilli has you keeping tabs on Gael-Sebastian, and you got caught up in this cult activity yourself?"

    By Balmori''s reaction, an affected grimace, Elise knew it wasn''t that simple.

    "From the sound of your conversation with Sachmilli, I probably shouldn''t answer that question until I know what he wants."

    Elise glanced at her watch. Nearly five minutes had passed since she delinked from that conversation with Sachmilli.

    She turned away from the little golden.

    "Alright crew. Let''s call it a night," Elise yelled out. "ETA Bruges?"

    "Give me five more minutes."

    "You got it, chief."

    Elise heard a whimper from Balmori. The Golden''s eyes ran with tears.

    "Keeping tabs on Gael-Sebastian was never your primary objective for being here, at least from Sachmilli''s standpoint, was it?"

    Hecate''s jawline quivered.

    "No." She grew silent for a moment. "You are not just going to let Gael-Sebastian be assimilated, are you?"

    "That is up to Sachmilli and his willingness to be straight with me. I won''t risk the lives of these good people any further when my suspicions are off the charts about what is really going on here.

    "I''ll give him five more minutes to call back, but that is it."

    Hecate finally looked back into Elise''s eyes.

    "What are your suspicions?"

    "That Sachmilli has his own designs on this little pharmaceutical-nanospore venture. That he sent both yourself and Gael-Sebastian to investigate this operation, and that is how the younger Cuervo caught his nasty habit. Likely, that was by intention when this establishment got wind of who Gael-Sebastian is, and they fed him strains of dope with suggestive properties embedded. Also, I gather by his behavior that Sachmilli knows the operative crew in this building personally. How am I doing?"

    Senora Balmori bit her lip.

    "Mostly correct."

    "Thank you," Elise said. "Can you tell me what to expect downstairs, and where is the entrance, by the way?"

    Hecate''s eyes appeared hopeful. Indeed, Elise was reconsidering the mission even without Sachmilli if the golden could fill in enough of the details so they weren''t flying blind.

    A metallic screech like a wheel turning rippled up the hallway near the offices.

    "That''s the entrance down to the subbasement," Hecate confirmed.

    "They are coming up?"

    "No," Hecate answered. "It''s being opened from this side."

    Elise squeezed her comlink. "Birddog, what''s going on up there?"

    No answer. Elise gritted her teeth.

    "If he has done anything to Fiona . . . "

    Hecate''s voice got whispery.

    "The hellhounds will be roaming about out of their cages. What is Sachmilli thinking?"

    Elise breathed in deeply, "Everyone back on point. Get in position. Caza, slow crawl us."

    Elise glanced at the golden. She had made up her mind that she was going to sit still.

    Halfway up the hall they dropped into a crouch and hugged the walls at the sound of a 10-gauge shotgun going off twice.

    It was followed by a roar and the swift gallop of a beast. A hellhound rushed past the corner before it angled straight towards them. Tri-bursts from all six guns felled the beast.

    Elise gave it a good rundown with her electronic eye.

    So, that''s what those monsters look like up close.

    After reloading, the crew picked up the pace.

    Elise yelled.

    "Sachmilli, if you have harmed a hair on Fiona''s head, you are a dead man!"

    Several shotgun blasts exploded from nearby before the gun flew up, hit the ceiling, and planted itself beneath a free-standing desk while Sachmilli fell backwards with a hellhound lunging at his neck.

    He kept the beast at bay with his arms locked in place. Three teflonrazor rounds destroyed the top of the hellhound''s head. It jerked its neck back severely and was freed from Sachmilli''s grasp. It''s jaw clamped to Sachmilli''s forearm.

    Elise assessed that it was going to take precision to dislodge the unnatural animal.

    "Guns locked in place," she commanded.

    With the team''s weapons pointed downward, Elise rushed forward with her K-bar drawn. She punched a hole just above the hellhound''s jaw hinge and levered the blade downward with all of her strength.

    One press wasn''t going to do it even though the blade was titanium with a graphene lattice molding the metal into a seamless mesh at the nanometer level.

    She lunged her arm downward several times with her two hands gripped to the blade handle. It still would not break. Each lunge, however, caused Sachmilli to squeal. His face turned beet red.

    "Chief, let''s clear him out of the way." It was Levon, the biggest man on her crew. "Gallo Puntera sees a lot of movement on the scans below."

    Elise nodded to let Caza know he was back in control as she and Levon dragged Sachmilli and the hound out of the line of fire. The guns went back up.

    Levon didn''t wait to be ordered. He grabbed the K-bar by the handle, thrust the blade deeply at a steeper angle than Elise incised it the first time, and he applied all his body mass until the hound''s jaw cracked open, and the beast dropped to the side.

    Elise had a smart gauze at the ready for the blood fountain she anticipated would occur when the canine''s teeth released their hold.

    Sachmilli let out a howl. She held the gauze on for several seconds until it fitted itself to the wound and no longer bled.

    "Thank you, Levon. That beast is made up of something supernatural."

    He nodded. "You had the right idea, but the density in that skull . . . damn."

    Levon returned to the arrowhead formation.

    Sachmilli breathed hard at her side. His skin returned to a more natural appearing brown. She did not offer him anesthetic. Elise watched him for a moment before she stood up, aimed the Saturnine, and shot at the floor at his left ear.

    He winced but said nothing.

    From the nearby stairwell, a voice echoed.

    "Sachmilli? I''ve got the hounds locked down. Let''s talk."

    Elise squinted at the elder man.

    "Don''t you say a word to him."

    Sachmilli gave her a contemptuous scowl. He raised up to speak, but before he could mutter a word, Elise flicked a neurotoxin grenade down the stairwell.

    It popped off like a set of firecrackers.

    "Sachmilli! We had a deal. Call off your goons!"

    "Ignore him," Elise commanded. "What did you do with Birddog?"

    His eyes pointed to his waist. A small airgun was clipped to the inside of his belt.

    "Tranq. I didn''t want her to warn you."

    "We had a deal!" The man below yelled once more. His words grew slurred. Evidently, he didn''t completely dodge the bellowing gas.

    Elise nodded. "Answer him."

    Sachmilli lifted his torso up so he could yell clearly.

    "You stop the assimilation of my son. That has gone on far enough."

    The man below cursed.

    "That is neither mine, yours, nor Gael-Sebastian''s decision. You knew that when you shook on it. Be reasonable. Come down. Let''s talk."

    Whose decision was it then? Elise asked herself.

    Sachmilli shook his head as he expired with resignation.

    "I''m coming down. I''m coming down alone." He then turned towards Elise. "Senora Luna Claro. Your services will no longer be required."

    Elise scowled.

    "So just like that, after putting this raid together, risking myself and this crew, our lives, you are giving up on your son?"

    "There is more at stake here than you can imagine," he protested.

    Elise squinted, hacked up a loogie and spat in his face.

    "Don''t think for a moment we are square after the shit you pulled, Cuervo."

    She turned away and motioned for the team to follow.

    For an hour after she put Fiona to rest in the tech''s own trailer, Elise lay nude in bed, and she smoked away at a pack of cigarettes that a guest had left behind more than a year before. Elise kept them in the freezer for the right moment.

    She gulped down the last red wine in her glass, set it down, and told herself it would be the last of the evening.

    "Here I thought the bastard was the straightest shooter I ever met. Fucker was just using me for leverage with no intention of going through with a full rescue and bounty on those shitheads."

    Elise rarely cursed, unless she was angry enough to shoot someone. To calm herself down and be true to her creed, she tried to see it through Sachmilli''s point of view, but it did not come easy.

    How does one justify making common cause with a drug cult, sacrificing one''s own son, not to mention that spritely little thing Hecate? His actions seemed so monstrous, but until that turn of events, nothing about Sachmilli seemed to be anything other than good and genuine.

    Mel came to mind. The bird would not serve an evil master. Whatever Sachmilli''s reason for these transgressions, it involves that greater cause that the crow serves¡ªidentifying the Manifested and getting the victim cured wherever it was possible.

    That had to be part of the equation. Sachmilli was blind to the destructive duplicity of those other actions due to the assumed nobility of his overall intention.

    Elise poured a half glass of wine. This would be the last, certainly.

    The caution light slowly pulsed its circle around the perimeter of the ceiling. Elise was expecting this unfortunate late-night call the entire evening. She had the gate sensors set to identify the person and let her in.

    Elise slipped on a robe and opened the door. Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris approached and stopped in front of Elise. Her eyes were dry, but her lips quivered.

    "He is dead. My prince is dead."

    She threw herself at Elise in a tight embrace, which Luna Claro leaned herself into, and soon the bounty hunter''s bosom became soaked in the little thief''s warm tears.

 4.19 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part Three: The Candidate

    Present Day.

    The revelation was followed by a massive rush of blood to her brain.

    Tas¨¬a briefly lost feeling in her shins and feet, and she stumbled backwards. Francesco Sala caught her and helped slide her back into the booth.

    "Easy, my friend," he coaxed. "Quite a blowout even for Zona Lobos. More port?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Thank you. But no. I just realized a few things," she bit softly into her lower lip before she continued, "not only am I in the middle of a most dangerous game where I am getting outplayed on every move, but¡ª."

    She stopped to think, and she recalled a device she once built with the help of Elise''s tech, Bruges, for a heist that served to incubate a delayed reaction.

    Chicco''s eyes were fixed on her, and he barely breathed.

    "Yes. Please continue," he said.

    Her breath rushed up on her as Tasia spoke.

    "Chicco! You have to reach Kip. Tell him to isolate that sensorium interactive from everything else. It has to be put in a Faraday box that can withstand a very high KSI."

    Francesco frowned as he reached for the phone and dialed. As it rang, he asked her, "What''s the problem?"

    "I have a suspicion why all the analytics for that sensorium are coming out so weird. I believe it likely to be made of fingunt and designed to massively data breach your enterprise by bursting a nano-cloud within the server sector."

    Francesco muttered "shit" beneath his breath. "Kip is not answering." He blinked slowly as she tensed up. There was alarm in his eyes. "I''ll check on him. But I need you to stay put."

    "Chicco! You need me," she pleaded. What could she do in here? She suddenly felt cooped up in the barroom where just a few minutes before she had been having a really good time.

    As he patted her forearms sympathetically, he shook his head firmly.

    "I''m afraid protocol demands it. You are now a contested party in a data breach."

    With a glum scowl on her mug, Tas¨¬a sunk back.

    As he rushed away from her, Francesco made a call to security to meet him at a coded alphabet-named sector, which she assumed to be where Kip''s workstation and the servers were located.

    The door that led into the operations sector closed and locked with a pneumatic hiss behind him.

    She was alone in the barroom, and Tas¨¬a did not feel she could wait out the emergency with sports programming and booze. Significant events were occurring around her; she was beginning to feel claustrophobic.

    Recognizing her compromised emotional state for what it was, Tas¨¬a calmed down and did a site evaluation. There were two exits, but no realistic access to the air circulation ducts did she spot, as the vents above her were too narrow to exploit.

    The door that led back to the security chamber and her car was more promising than the hydraulic security system that controlled the door to the opposite side. Its locking mechanisms were simple mechanical devices she could manipulate with the electromagnet in her boot heel and the simple pick tools she kept in a holster fold.

    Promising as well were the potential sector connects through shafts and alternative doors. Tas¨¬a noted as she passed by on her way up to the barroom when she entered the premises.

    She squatted in front of the door to inspect the device more closely.

    The lock mechanism was not tumbler-based but utilized instead a lockbox where pins were connected to offset one another.

    Tas¨¬a pressed her fingers against the side of the lock and tapped. The echo was too faint to make out distinct chamber size gradients, but a tap with a gold coin would produce clearer chimes.

    Once the size and shape of the internal scheme was determined by the echo, it was only a matter of using the electromagnet to center-align the thin connector rods so the switch would be unobstructed from turning the cylinder that was being held in place.

    Chicco''s voice rattled her as it burst through the intercom.

    "Tas¨¬a, mio bell''amica, please don''t compromise the security of that door. The stairwell on the other side is a soft spot entrance hub, so it is heavily guarded by lethal drones and turrets."

    She rose back up.

    "Sorry, Chicco."

    "S''alright. If anyone makes it through there, you have my permission to blast away at him with your .357. He won''t be one of ours."

    "Are there enemies in the facility?"

    "I''m afraid we have traced movement, but it has been highly elusive so far."You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

    Damn. Elise''s creep team were first-tier experts in cameotic evasion. It had to be them, and she led them here!

    "Hey, Chicco! It has to be Elise Luna Claro and her team, but what would interest her in this place?"

    Sala respectfully guffawed. "Do you recall that story you asked me to tell you that kind of got interrupted?"

    "Of course."

    Sala cleared his throat.

    "I will give you the quick, dirty, and short version."

    Klaxons blared out in a swell of sound. She could not hear over the dismal cacophony.

    Tas¨¬a barely had noticed the red horn in the corner above the top liquor shelf earlier.

    She brought the .357 ''Clastic out of its holster and emptied the entire cylinder of six chambered rounds into it.

    On an emotional level, it was quite satisfying in establishing some semblance of agency that was being denied her.

    "Tas¨¬a, was that necessary?"

    Ah, shit. She was so used to living outside the bounds of tactful and conventional behavior it did not occur to her that she shouldn''t shoot it.

    As she popped the ejector rod, Tas¨¬a made up a lie on the spot.

    "I have a hearing condition that can cause paralysis when continuous high-pitched racket occurs. I felt the swoosh in my inner ear that starts rolling whenever that happens."

    There was a brief pause.

    "I will make sure there is no chargeback due to medical emergency."

    The lie she told made her throat feel dry and thirsty. Tas¨¬a eyed the liquor shelves and her Son D¨¦lice Sauvage.

    "Chicco? You still have time for that story of what went down when the family went to the mats?"

    Went to the mats. Old gangland term for when a power struggle broke out between rivals and it was necessary to assume a defensive position. Gangsters took shifts watching each other''s backs in rooms with sleeping mats laid on them.

    Now, it still meant taking a defensive position but not such a literal one.

    No answer came forth. The klaxons she could still faintly hear coming from other sectors died out.

    "Chicco," Tas¨¬a called out.

    No answer. From the entrance side stairwell, she heard a sizzling noise like a gaggle of firework sparklers.

    Shit. She knew what that meant as she ducked behind the bar counter. An EMP was about to go off.

    The imploding ''boof!'' sound snared through her stomach. There were at least four of them that went off in near sync. The closest being the nearby stairwell. A cascade of falling mini-drones hit the steps and bounced down them.

    The room was plunged into darkness. She tried the Katy Lied IR shades, but as she assumed, they were drained of electricity.

    Tas¨¬a scowled. EMPs were highly unfair in her estimation, but she, at least, could take solace that the creep team would be in the dark as well, and she had the advantage of the Modality when she needed it to heighten her perception.

    With the .357 Clastic held firmly Tas¨¬a began her meditation by separating out the strands of sound she heard. There were thirteen of them.

    The most odd was the ceiling fan above, which no longer had a power source. She concentrated on the sound, and Tas¨¬a amazed herself as she could hear even the distinct chime of the ball bearings.

    Muffled boots!

    They edged up the stairwell, followed by another slower set still in the corridor beneath it.

    She evoked the Modality. Vapor whisked at her nose. She could now faintly see through a silver haze that was a visual projection of all her senses.

    Tas¨¬a dashed out of the bar cubby with a high leap, flicked out a Liberty coin from her belt, and snap threw it from her fingers at the door lock guard.

    Tas¨¬a read the set of chimes echoing from the internal chambers. This time she had a different strategy.

    She aimed for the four tensor plates and dislodged them from the assembly. With a kick against the mechanism, Tas¨¬a yanked the remaining cylinder back and released the door.

    The creep team operative was a mere four steps down the flight of stairs. The man¡ªshe did not recognize on catching sight of his eyes, brows, and forehead¡ªwas startled by her.

    She only had the revolver and her knives on her, but there was a way to keep it non-lethal. Tas¨¬a emptied three rounds centered on the sternum of the battle gear breastplate. She ducked back behind the door.

    The operative got off a tri-burst before he fell down the steps onto the landing tread, where he smashed his back into a set of metal balusters.

    The chemical scent of tranq emitted where the operative''s rounds smacked the door. This was a non-lethal operation.

    "Goya," Andulus Caza called out from the stairs further down. "Wellness check."

    "I''m alright. Nothing broken according to my readout."

    "Come back down to me."

    Tas¨¬a kept low.

    "Hey Caza," she called out. "How is it you are powered up?"

    "Sup, Tas¨¬a? Pretty much figured that was you coming at us that fast. To answer your curiosity, our boots are embedded with kinetic converters."

    She cursed lightly, almost comically.

    "That Elise. Thinks up every possible contingency, doesn''t she?"

    "Hey, it makes it easier on me. I''m just a simple action man. Tas¨¬a, if you stand down, I''ll even throw you your keys and a kinetic charger for your battery. What do you say?"

    Tas¨¬a''s face tensed up.

    "You are not here for me?"

    "Nah, some nasty piece of work named Salvador who runs the operation."

    It had to be another Salvador and not Kip. He wasn''t the mastermind type.

    "You used me so you could run a breach," she said with grit in her voice.

    "That we did, but hey, no hard feelings, okay? Good thing you didn''t use the sensory interactive. There was no way it would get approval here for customer use. We had to put some real evil shit in it so the techs would take it close enough to the servers where we could release the nanites.

    Caza continued to speak, but his tone changed.

    "Tas¨¬a, as a favor to me, okay? The quicker we get this done, the more likely we can keep this op casualty free."

    She cleared her throat; the Modality left a drip in the back of it. The only remnant still active was her continued low-light vision.

    "Got a few questions needing resolution. What the fuck about those explosives in my HybrClydis?"

    "That wasn''t us, Tas¨¬a. I heard about the incident at Zona Lobos, but we have no idea. If you agree to come down, I will have the new girl do a deep dive."

    He meant Felicit¨¦ Paz. Tas¨¬a had many questions about that one, but it wasn''t her highest priority.

    "One last thing I need to know, Andu, What about Le¨°n?"

    Caza sighed.

    "Forget about Ballano. He''s been shipped to Ciudad del Este to face a magistrate."

    How was she going to do this job without Ballano? CdE was on the other side of Paraguay.

    "Alright. This is not my fight. I''m putting the gun away. I''ll meet you at the next landing."

    Caza came up first. Goya had a slight limp, and his armor was damaged from a four-centimeter-deep scoop and a chest-wide crack. She nodded to him.

    "New guy?"

    "Yeah. New Gallo Puntero for a second creep team. Still officially in training."

    Tas¨¬a stopped and looked down at her feet before she accepted the key set.

    "Hey, Andu. Sorry about Birddog."

    Caza stepped in and gave her a hug.

    "It wasn''t your fault. Still, it rips me to my soul. Elise feels the same. It was your guy Sachmilli that tipped her that my sister works for those bastards."

    Tas¨¬a''s brows wrinkled in bafflement.

    "How did he know?"

    Caza chortled uproariously.

    "Elise is not on speaking terms with him, so you''ll have to ask him yourself. We suspect the crows discovered something on recon. You know how clever those birds are."

    She smiled with a gobliny grin. At the moment, Tas¨¬a wasn''t holding even her capture against Andulus. At that point, with all the shit that went down, what choice did anyone have but to play it out to the bitter end?

    No one came back from the Kl¨ªnica Kompleta heist unscathed.

    "Don''t be a stranger, Andu. Buy me a drink sometime."

    Tas¨¬a hugged him again before she strolled down the steps.

 4.20 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a mulled over the matter.

    Le¨®n wasn''t coming back.

    She was on her own. The heart of the operation was now in retrieving Demona''s NeoPalm and restoring it to working order.

    It was stored inside a jewelry safe built into the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis floorboard. Whatever impoundment lot out of at least a dozen located in the greater Vida Escondida Region that her vehicle was gathering dust, Tas¨¬a would need to access the data banks inside the VEAA headquarters to narrow down the right one.

    As she floated through traffic, it dawned on her that she was indeed subconsciously steering towards that goal uptown.

    The HQ was located in the higher-end commercial district, far away from the downtown strip, where the sexy Lamborghini would stand out amongst the more sedate German and other European luxury sedans that dominated the uptown business class social matrix.

    As she began to plan for what she would need to carry out that scheme, Tas¨¬a was cut off by a black 9X LT Saab sedan speeding towards the VEAA lot that still lay several kilometers away.

    The driver wore her hair fashioned into a homely, all-business bun. In stark contrast to the merely serviceable hairstyle, the woman wore a cream-tinted silk blouse that would look lovely at any formal occasion.

    Even as she mentally indexed these useful data points, Tas¨¬a side swerved to avoid ramming into both the businesswoman and a second vehicle that rode near bumper to bumper behind the Saab.

    As Tas¨¬a cursed the woman''s lineage, she made a U-turn. The Lamborghini needed to be off the nearby roads before the conspicuous luxury sports car caught the attention of the perimeter security trucks.

    Tas¨¬a headed up an overpass connector onto the main highway that led back to Asunci¨®n to the northeast. On the next exit, several commercial lots lined up along a drag strip with a fully accommodated Quick Mart boutique kiosk beside the service store for all of her operative needs.

    The boutique made it almost too easy to apply the spy trade. Why didn''t everyone else use it to fulfill their dreams of snooping about like secret agents?

    The Modality spoke up:

    - Most citizens of the Quadra don''t possess a hero complex; neither do they care to die for unfathomable, obscure causes.

    Tas¨¬a was taken aback.

    When did the Modality acquire a sense of humor?

    After she pulled into the Quick Mart lot, Tas¨¬a contacted a car rental enterprise. They would have a BMW drive itself over to the lot and have its relay activated to her account.

    Estimated time of arrival: 15 minutes.

    She next entered the Quick Mart, grabbed a case of Ki-Jack All Natural Ginseng Energy Elixir and a Donca Donut blueberry cake donut pastry from the plate warmer for a quick meal to offset the alcohol in her blood.

    While she was driving previously, Tas¨¬a noticed the effects of Francesco Sala''s Resucitad¨®rs and port wine on her reaction time and set the auto steer for a .08 correction to match the level of alcohol in her bloodstream.

    She never felt comfortable on a fully automated ride, but the Lamborghini''s built-in intoxication refactor feature was highly copacetic to her driving needs.

    Walking now gave Tas¨¬a a feeling of being a bit slop woozy. The bottle of Ki-Jack she gulped down hit her brain almost instantly. She enjoyed that lightning effect that went Boom! Boom! inside her head when she dared to gulp it down in one go.

    Tas¨¬a nibbled the donut quickly as she stood over the boutique''s digital display. When finished, she wiped her hands with the complimentary QM wet towel.

    She now needed to purchase a high-end business formal top like the one the reckless driver wore.

    She made an assumption that the VEAA employee wore a pair of black striped formal slacks and, given it was a late-night shift, a pair of quality comfy shoes instead of formal heels. It would be the more appropriate choice.

    Tas¨¬a also added two bottles of nail polish and a box of aluminum foil to her virtual cart.

    When she punched in the desired merchandise, the kiosk reported back in all neon typeset: feliz feliz noticia!

    ''Happy, happy news,'' it glared.

    The warehouse, merely six kilometers away, and nearby the Vida Escondida mega heliport, had the items she requested in stock. Estimated time of arrival was ten minutes due to the dynamic bustle of commerce in that part of Vida Escondida.

    The kiosk AI would let her know when the package delivery drone arrived with her merchandise. When she paid for the items, the receipt returned with twenty-five free tokens that could be used at the Quick Mart Casino, located conveniently in the back lot while she waited for the delivery.

    Unfortunately, recreation was not on the current agenda. She did, however, walk towards the back lot by the QM Casino to find a comfortable seat at an outdoor table under a low-light-emitting parasol.

    There were many patrons milling around, but that was to be expected. The QM Casinos operated 24/7/365.

    Once she sat down, Tas¨¬a searched for social intel on the VEAA headquarters'' personnel.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    What was the demographic makeup of the employees? Would she fit in? She was quite aware that for most Salvage internal personnel employment opportunities, she sure as hell didn''t.

    The Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority, however, was an entirely different operation.

    Tas¨¬a flipped through the local business recruitment index and searched for past and present employees of the VEAA headquarters. Scrutinizing their faces, she determined that her mestiza phenotype would not make her stand out. Unlike the Salvage, the VEAA recruited from the local populace.

    Her athletic build might work against her, however. That was the next bit of scrutiny; Tas¨¬a leaned her head over, and as she examined her haunches, Tas¨¬a shook her head. She had hoped her month-long lazy spell fluffed up her butt at least a little bit.

    But it didn''t.

    Nope, her buns were still a bundle of taut, long, and lean muscles. It didn''t resemble that of someone who spent twelve hours a day sitting on it.

    Whether her athletic build mattered depended upon the competitive mating rituals inside the VEAA. If it were an active scene, and selectivity was in high demand, it would not be uncommon for the desk domicile-bound personnel to also be gym rats.

    Was outside-of-business fraternization discouraged by management or ignored? She indexed her search for profile pics.

    A few she found were even outstanding. Indeed, there were many married couplings. Better still, many were quite healthy in appearance.

    With that in mind, Tas¨¬a checked her butt off of her List of Matters Pertaining to Social Intel Scrutiny.

    Next on her agenda, Tas¨¬a needed to change her appearance to make her daring-do master thief visage appear more corporate compliant.

    Tas¨¬a flipped the PA to display a holographic cosmetic mirror spread out as a hologram on the patio table.

    She eyed it as she pulled her hair up in a tight bun. The sight of it in the holograph mirror made Tas¨¬a scowl.

    She stuck out her tongue to protest the uncovered forehead. It made her appear slightly harsh. Her noggin was not the most symmetrical tater on the planet.

    Tas¨¬a knew it but did not need to be reminded of the fact.

    She moved on to deglamorize her club-oriented makeup made to order for the Vida Escondida scene into a more modest office standard in her appearance.

    Her lips were just too sexy.

    And she felt she had hit a wall in her current mission.

    How do I go about making this mouth appear not so luscious?

    Tas¨¬a pushed onward. She had come too far to stop now.

    She got out her cosmetic kit. On the edge creases of her lips, Tas¨¬a applied a tint that would help to blend the skin tone of her overall facial complexion into her lips.

    She had used the tint many times before, but now it was not a good match for her skin tone. It formed a dark outline along the creases.

    Tas¨¬a had been such an outdoorsy girl her entire life that she had no idea her facial complexion could defuse and lighten so much with a lack of sun exposure. Sure, she had awesomely contrasting tones on her panty and bra lines, but her face until now was always a lustrous cinnamon brown.

    After rubbing the tint off, she applied another one that was more pink. With a Q-tip she blended the tones together.

    And they came out¡ªperfect! With a blush shade of red applied on the plump body of her lips to flatten their natural sensuous tone, her mouth now appeared corporate compliant.

    Now that her face appeared that of an office drone, and with nothing else needing to be done to it beyond removing her emerald and jade earrings, she moved on to studying the gait of her stroll.

    Tas¨¬a spent a minute walking back and forth from the holographic mirror display to the back end of the car lot.

    Unfortunately for her cover identity, it wasn''t the stride of someone who was set in the habits of day-to-day routine.

    Needing more feedback, she strolled once more, but this time Tas¨¬a recorded herself in motion.

    After scrutinizing the video, she bit her lips and cursed out a ''damn.'' Her cute little sashay was going to give her away as not belonging in an office setting.

    VEAA was local; its focus of talent came from the local stock of Spanish, mestizas, and indigenes; perhaps they were more forgiving in their corporate culture. She could walk with her knees a little stiffened, but beyond that, an attempt at self-conscious control over the flow of her movement would throw her off of her game of staying alert.

    A message came through the speaker.

    "Miss T. d. A. G., your package has arrived."

    It was for her. After Tas¨¬a picked up the package from the kiosk, she made a beeline for the ladies room by the casino to change into her clothes and take a tinkle.

    Tas¨¬a took a much-needed break from her purposeful activities. She sipped a second Ki-Jack as she watched a gambler play blackjack.

    Before too long, the BMW arrived to pull her away from the distraction.

    She glanced back at her Lamborghini rental. It was surrounded by the cars of the casino patrons. Aside from its aesthetic appeal catching an eye or two, it would remain untouched for several hours.

    No doubt, QM Concierge flagged it as the property of a valued customer who spent thousands of USD per year at their stores. Left in the lot overnight, she would come back with a tazerdart turret hovering above it and the Lamborghini unblemished.

    That was not an exaggeration. Excellent customer service in most everything was the least dystopian aspect of life in the Quadra. It was the glue that kept them sane.

    She tossed the empty drink can into a wastebasket and went back to work.

    Back under the light of the parasol, Tas¨¬a laid out a sheet of aluminum foil and wrapped the PalmEx PA tightly within it. She laid out a second sheet and repeated the process.

    Tas¨¬a removed two expensive bottles of fingernail polish and applied the entire content of one, called Shell Esconsed, on the surface of the package evenly. It was comprised of specialty novelty products and ingredients necessary to do the job of bouncing frequency waves off the foil. Waves that would be weakened by the second layer she would apply as soon as the Shell Esconsed polish dried.

    The Shell Esconsed brand was mostly used as a nude base for more flashy and design-oriented polishes. It helped the paint last longer while also strengthening the nail.

    For her purposes, however, the polish contained a common plasticizer called dibutyl phthalate that bound to molecules made from the shells of sea chitons.

    As she waited for it to dry while the package was being held in place by a cigarette stand, Tas¨¬a checked out the VEAA policy statement for guests online. All employees and visitors had their devices scanned both when entering and leaving the facility.

    Unsealing the package would break the polish bond, so that second part pertaining to how she would get the PA back out of the facility, Tas¨¬a would have to improvise.

    Finished with her inquiry, she turned back to the package and blew on it gently. The polish dried into a well-varnished shell.

    The second polish, a luxury item from Buenos Aires called Susurro Plateado, silver whisper, was even more expensive than the Shell Esconsed bottle, as the former was comprised of quartz and silver. Both minerals would work towards spreading along the surface of the package a continuous electropositive charge. A necessary condition for a Faraday Box to work.

    After the second coat dried as Tas¨¬a blew air onto it, she tapped her smartwatch. The watch was purchased for the workout that she intended to develop to build up her operative effectiveness, but that plan was cut short by the intermission of a love life.

    Now, the PA was hermetically sealed. Tas¨¬a glanced at her vital signs displayed on the smartwatch. It was linked into the PalmEx.

    It only read to default settings and not to the customized readout. Tas¨¬a pinged the PA to start back up, but the signal relay scattered without registering a hit.

    Satisfied that she had made a working Faraday Box, Tas¨¬a checked that off her list.

    All that was left to do for her prep work was to test her fake ID. Tasia hopped into the BMW and spent a solid minute becoming acquainted with the vehicle.

    Now to have some fun.

    Time to test the parameter security.

 4.21 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    As she made a path around the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority HQ, Tas¨¬a drove from a North to South bound interstate then onto an overpass that led onto an East to West bound double lane highway. She repeated the circling pattern several times as she began to form a picture in her head of the complex.

    All the while, Tas¨¬a was careful not to get close to parameter security territory.

    If she hadn''t enjoyed testing new vehicles as much as she did, the drive would have proven to be a tedious means to collect the one essential data point for which she hunted.

    As Tas¨¬a suspected would be the case, guests'' vehicles were parked in a separate level of the garage from employee vehicles. Once she identified the five-story carport, it took several more attempts from different vantage points before she could also identify the carport level that each class of vehicle was allowed in.

    From lowest to highest in the hierarchy of the carport¡ªsecurity personnel, executives, service and systems administrative personnel, office workers, and, finally, visitors.

    Visitor parking had the lightest security, merely a sentry post at the entrance and a short tunnel right after where a vehicular scan was conducted.

    However, the visitor access to the building was the most limited of the six classifications.

    When she first realized the visitor cars were sent all the way up to the fifth floor, Tas¨¬a had grinned wide. That arrangement made it less tricky to access the lower floors.

    Although she was a spider monkey, a downward jump was still, on her personal average, three times more quickly accomplished than an upward vertical climb.

    Satisfied she had gathered all the intel she needed to make a well-informed breach, Tas¨¬a headed the Lux Bavaria in the opposite direction to avoid an oncoming security vehicle.

    Given she was going in the opposite direction from the VEAA HQ, she assumed it would not follow her, but the F-150 crossed mediums to turn and catch up with her.

    Her in-cabin intercom rang with the sound of a gravely voice.

    "Are you lost?" he asked.

    She giggled with a feigned, airy disposition. The security driver now looked right at her as his vehicle lined up with the BMW Lux Bavaria. He gave it a quick inspection and nodded to his satisfaction.

    Not a bad-looking sort, she assessed in turn.

    Tas¨¬a threw him a smile and pushed her hair away from the side of her face.

    "Just killing time until I meet up with a friend."

    "Well, alright then. If you are sure you are okay, my shift just ended; I am going to split."

    The driver nodded to her before speeding off ahead of her and leaving her far behind.

    Tas¨¬a drove the BMW another seven kilometers west, away from the EVAA HQ. A small strip mall where all the businesses closed at that late hour came into view on her right. She found a little hideaway in the form of an abandoned food truck on the lot, and out of sight of the main highway. Tas¨¬a backed up the BMW, and she parked it.

    Inside an inner fold in her jacket, Tas¨¬a kept a niche of fake IDs. She brought them out, shuffled through them, and found the one that bore the name Tereza Nygale Esperanza. That middle name always caught her eye as being too showy. You never wanted to draw attention when in need of a generic cover ID.

    The origins of the name were baffling as well.

    Cathar. Not of a Spanish branch of the creed but of a South of France origin instead.

    She had several more ID legends on hand, but Esperanza was the cleanest one of them. There wasn''t even a hint of a warrant associated with it.

    Even more importantly, through padded memberships in various organizations, she made Tereza a complete member of Vida Escondida society. Tas¨¬a also set up active contracts with VEAA attached to that name.

    Using the on-board deck, Tas¨¬a scanned the mail for Tereza. Luck broached in her favor; the VEAA sent a message four months previously that asked if she wished to have a smart glass solar panel installed to replace the dumb glass in current use for the atrium in her condo apartment.

    The offer was still valid, and it was actually a good idea. She had only used the rental space in the past to stash things that were none of her crew''s business and to do research at a workstation and lab setup independent of their knowledge.

    Tas¨¬a validated the return email in the affirmative. Immediately, a guest pass was returned authorized. She registered the BMW Lux Bavaria as the pass vehicle.

    Giddily, Tasia cackled. She did not have to worry about the security vehicles monitoring the highways now. When they scanned her, everything would show up copacetic.

    She pulled the Lux Bavaria up to the ground station sentry post, which was exclusively used for visitor inspection.

    A tall woman in custom-tailored ChitinTech armor rotated out of the shack, swinging as she gripped the jamb set a few centimeters above her head. The armored guard leaned above Tas¨¬a, hovering over the driver-side door.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a let the window down.

    "Please state your business," the guard''s voice echoed in electronic feedback from the helmet she wore.

    "I would like to see a sales representative in your Home Improvement department."

    The guard scanned her ID. Tas¨¬a watched the green color of the readout reflected in the guard''s helmet visor. It never changed to red.

    The woman smiled as she took a moment to physically inspect the BMW. The Lux Bavaria was on the higher end of the German car manufacturer.

    Their flagship model, where they invested a fortune in year-to-year upgrade improvements, often a decade before they became standardized features in other vehicles of the BMW fleet.

    If Tas¨¬a had been forced to blend in with the night shift workers, it would have drawn scrutiny to have driven such a luxury vehicle onto the lot. She would have traded it in for a 7 Series if that turned out to be the operative plan.

    Finally, the woman gave a polite nod.

    "You can go on through."

    The guard backed up into the shack, and the gate opened.

    Green arrow instructions lit up on the road pavement in front of her into the scanner tunnel, and it also showed her where she was allowed to travel¡ªup to the fifth floor. Before she pressed forward, Tas¨¬a glanced over to the exit ramp.

    There was no guard station, just a tunnel back to the surface. It would suit her plans to egress the Lux Bavaria just fine.

    The sales pitch lasted a mere half an hour with an eager young attendant dressed in an earth-tone brown and green sweater and plaid skirt. The ensemble signified 2060s late shift chic.

    Tas¨¬a treated the sales rep like she was an old acquaintance. In an operation like this one, it was important to form internal alliances with those who were not predisposed to view one suspiciously.

    To that effect, Tas¨¬a accepted every item and warranty coverage the sales rep suggested to maximize the young woman''s commission.

    As there was another customer waiting in the sales rep''s office foyer, Tas¨¬a politely cut it short with an invitation for the rep to come out and produce a virtual advertisement once the work was complete.

    Grinning to herself as she walked away, Tas¨¬a knew that no matter what went down on this venture, she had an ally that would vouch for her.

    Tas¨¬a made her way back down the hall to the elevator that led back to the carport. They were the only two options that the panel gave: up to the fifth-floor carport deck or down to the visitor''s floor.

    She rode up to the fifth floor and retraced where she had parked the Lux Bavaria.

    Entering the vehicle after making sure no one was around, Tas¨¬a tinted the windows and set the car''s autopilot to return to the Quick Mart.

    Before she exited it, Tas¨¬a reluctantly removed her Katy Lieds and tucked them into the mid-seat storage. She had used them extensively on her recognizance, but they would not pass scrutiny inside employee zones.

    The Lux Bavaria drove off without her.

    Tas¨¬a casually strolled adjacent to the fifth-floor outer walkway loop. The rail stood only waist high to her.

    The setup of not eyeballing those who left the premises with guards at a second exit station was a security flaw.

    And Tas¨¬a was about to exploit another.

    Though she spotted cameras on the entranceway and the ramp up, there were no cameras along the outer loop that would catch her next move. Tas¨¬a hung her legs over the wall, twisted her body around, and clawed at the wall surface as she let herself gently down to the fourth story of the carport.

    She played the odds, of course, that no car happened to be driving by as she dropped and landed on the embankment. Nothing Tas¨¬a could do about that if one did.

    But it only took her a split second to land, somersault, and flip up on the other side of the guard rail and casually stride forth to become a fourth-floor pedestrian.

    The fourth floor was a duplicate of the fifth floor except for a separate set of elevator placements and the addition of a glass tunnel used to scan personnel before they reached either the elevator or hub node service desk.

    The tunnel presented a problem.

    Tas¨¬a surveyed up and down the parking lanes. Among the many commuters bustling about, she just needed to find a short, brunette female as the target came in for a shift.

    Not exactly a difficult task in Paraguay, but the first several commuters frustrated her efforts. Dye jobs were very popular in 2067.

    Tas¨¬a decided she might have to settle on a dirty blonde or scarlet redhead and take her chances that no one would notice the difference, but then she spotted a candidate who was preparing to park her car.

    The lady had her hair up in a bun as well as matching in the style and class of clothes that Tas¨¬a wore.

    Most excellent except for the oddly worried look on her face.

    What was up?

    Tas¨¬a had to time her actions just right. If she and this lady who just drove up were the only ones around, the next step would be easy peasy, but there were four other workers nearby who she would need to distract.

    Tas¨¬a reached into her chic little purse. As the target parked her vehicle, Tas¨¬a placed a flashbang in the lower T carriage of a Mercedes SUV she casually passed by. She made a beeline over to her target employee as the woman bent over in a kneeling position to grab a pair of large bags from her car.

    Tas¨¬a removed a tranq dart she had previously lifted from the salvage yard from her inner right boot and poked it into the lady''s left butt cheek.

    The lady gave a high-pitched whooping noise just as the flashbang exploded. All heads jerked to the Mercedes SUV as smoke began to rise from it.

    Tas¨¬a gently tackled the employee forward to force her into the vehicle as the lady succumbed to the tranquilizer.

    When Tas¨¬a heard keys jangling from a coat pocket, she grabbed them and used the relay device to tint the windows to a complete dark before she risked turning the interior lights on.

    Frowning as she peered downward, Tas¨¬a gave the employee''s bottom a good squeeze. It was quite the heartbreaker, and that had the potential to be a problem. That voluptuous assembly of muscle and ham was definitely some guard''s favorite sight of the evening when Tas¨¬a took the ID badge from where it was clipped on the employee''s jacket and Leeza Donada sauntered in for her shift.

    Tas¨¬a had a muscle butt that did not reveal its finer glories except in the altogether or a bikini bottom.

    Her hypothetical guard would definitely not mistake Liz''s; she gave it an envious slap, bum for her own skinny glutes. Well, Tas¨¬a decided, what choice did she have but to take a chance?

    A small crowd gathered by the Mercedes. Two guys amongst them managed to pop the vehicle''s hood. They would have to remove and search under the spark plug cables to find where Tas¨¬a hid the exploded flashbang.

    Likely, it would still be hard to spot. It may prove a vulnerability in her plans later on if she lingered around too long.

    Tas¨¬a borrowed Liz''s jacket and pulled it over her own to cover up her butt. She walked around the crowd and back onto the walkway median.

    The customer service area on the first floor was cut off from the upper floors by the separate elevators for them, but she gathered enough intel while engaged with the sales personnel to know that the security department was on the third floor just below her current one.

    The service ducts, if consistent in design with the one she spotted on the first floor, would lead her into the server farm, where she could extract what she needed and egress off the premises in Leeza''s vehicle.

    Tas¨¬a strolled purposefully into the tunnel. All she needed to do was get past any strut watcher''s scrutiny, and everything else she planned for should fall into place if she stayed alert and ready to improvise her actions as the situation changed.

    She made it to the elevator; Tas¨¬a let out a lungful of air, relieved.

    Then the elevator intercom blared in a snappy male voice.

    "Leeza Donada, please report to security station 2HH before you sign in."

    Tas¨¬a winced with an unbelieving sneer.

    "Well, shit on me."

 4.22 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a turned to face the elevator keypad, but the selection had already been green-lighted before she touched it. The elevator went to the third floor, ignoring Tas¨¬a''s attempts to change its route.

    Once she arrived, the door parted to an open area where personnel worked in a maze made of desks and dividers.

    She scanned the walls for directional signs that would inform her where security station 2HH was located. It was on the back end where a set of hallways began. That gave her an opportunity to search for the service ducts on her way to the station.

    In her earlier survey of the first floor, she discovered that at two adjacent locations, the service ducts reached upward to the second floor. She made her way towards the corridor where she expected one of the ducts to emerge out from the floor beneath.

    Once she reached one of them, Tas¨¬a bit her lip as she considered the hard truth revealed in the tightly folded metal structure that encompassed the duct container as it stretched to the ceiling in front of her. Any means of opening it would require power tools that were most likely secured in a backroom janitor''s closet.

    If that turned out to be the case, could she ignore the directive altogether?

    Zip through the ducts, get her data, and find a way out before the guards had a chance to shut everything down when she didn''t show up to Station 2HH?

    Tas¨¬a decided that would be her best shot. She would have to ditch the ID badge first. A simple visual inspection revealed that it was chipped with a locator.

    As Tas¨¬a glanced around for a niche to toss it, she heard a pair of boots whose bearer was trying to be silent behind her.

    Those plans Tas¨¬a was in the midst of cooking up were immediately squelched.

    "Ms. Donada, come this way," were the words that came out of a firm but feminine voice behind her.

    The guard who said them strolled on past Tas¨¬a. She caught sight of a beautiful blue-tinted chrome BrttrA Qasi Non-Lethal revolver that swung like a cowboy''s big iron along the arch of the guard''s hip.

    Putting the flashy distraction aside, Tas¨¬a focused on her immediate concern and realized that it was odd that the guards still referred to her as ''Donada.'' Was her cover not blown as soon as she stepped on the elevator?

    No. It wasn''t.

    She was still called Donada at that moment by the man over the intercom as well, so her being caught with a stolen identity was not what this was about then.

    The double door to Station 2HH opened up, and the guard escorted her on past the foyer. A long, thin young woman who manned the hub desk eyed Tas¨¬a with nervous curiosity.

    She was reacting to Leeza Donada''s infamy, Tas¨¬a realized.

    Something was going on, and damn if she didn''t walk blindly into the middle of it!

    The guard that escorted Tas¨¬a smiled curtly to the hub station attendant as if to tell the junior officer to mind her own business.

    The guard opened a door into an office suite and, with a hand gesture, invited Tas¨¬a to step in first.

    Like Tas¨¬a, the guard was petite and slender in her figure. In spite of the bravado on display when dealing with her subordinate, the guard could not meet Tas¨¬a''s eyes.

    She was hiding the contempt she felt for Leeza Donada.

    Exasperated with her dumb luck, Tas¨¬a asked herself, What the hell did that woman do?

    Tas¨¬a recalled the worried look Leeza had on her face as she drove into the parking garage. She was expecting trouble.

    "Please take a seat."

    The woman proffered a hand; she waved at the empty chair, beside which a second chair propped up a cardboard box. The top of the box was sealed with the flaps folded over one another.

    Oh . . .

    Tas¨¬a had never worked corporate in her entire life, but she knew what was coming.

    "Ms. Donada, I regret to inform you that your employment with VEAA Amenity Services has now been terminated for cause and that I have been assured needs not be explained as you are well aware of the circumstances that got you here.

    "I have all of your personal effects packed and undamaged here in this box. If you have any questions, I''m afraid I am not the one to ask. Not to be impolite, but I am not privy to the confidential matters that have been decided within our legal department.

    "It is my task to get you signed out as efficiently as possible so we can get this uncomfortable process over and done with. I am sure you would agree that it is best for everyone.

    The guard looked up as the silence intensified. Tas¨¬a had taken note of the woman''s badge¡ªElle Camino. Tas¨¬a tried to stifle a chuckle as she nodded along to Elle Camino''s question.

    "You are taking this pretty well, considering the circumstances," the guard commented.

    Tas¨¬a shifted low in her chair. She was feeling quite juvenile at the moment.

    "I just noticed your name."

    Elle Camino let herself smile as if relieved to let down her pose of professional formality.This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

    "Oh . . . that. We''ve passed one another many times over the last year. How could you have possibly missed it?"

    "Well, yeah, but I never made the connection. El Camino."

    The guard chuckled softly.

    "I actually own one. My husband thought it a cute coincidence, so he put into that notion a small fortune to get a car running that had been discontinued over eighty years ago as a gift for my birthday. Oh, well. Nevertheless, it is a fun drive."

    They both were silent for a moment. Did Tas¨¬a really pass for Big Booty Leeza?

    It must be the jacket. And the aloof culture at the HQ, at least on the night shift.

    "Well then, if that is all," Sergeant Camino continued, "let me have you sign a few papers, and we will be on our way."

    Sgt. Camino shuffled through physical copies of paperwork. Her lips puckered into a frown.

    "Hey, Hector. Where is Donada''s SD-4 form?"

    Tas¨¬a froze up when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. She had not noticed the pudgy guy sitting in a nearby cubicle until he swiveled his upper body just then.

    Great situational awareness there, master thief, Tas¨¬a reproached herself.

    It appeared to pain the man greatly to merely turn around and face his boss.

    "Legal hasn''t sent it up yet. I was told to expect it any minute now. But that was an hour ago."

    Sergeant Camino let out a huff of air that brushed through her curly bangs. Her left hand then reached to grip a tangle of it.

    "Shit. I can''t even blame you this time, Hector. Stay with Ms. Donada. I''m going upstairs to get this expedited."

    She turned back to Tas¨¬a.

    "Don''t worry. This won''t take long, Ms. Donada."

    Sergeant Camino headed out the door in a rush.

    "Make yourself comfortable," Hector said. When Camino''s booted shuffle down the corridor faded away, he continued, "It''s going to be a while."

    Tas¨¬a eyed Sgt. Camino''s workstation with a great deal of scrutiny, taking into account anything she could exploit. Hector turned his back to her, back to what he was doing previously.

    She considered how this venture going sideways might be turned to her advantage.

    Perhaps she wouldn''t need access to the servers to find transfer invoices if Sgt. Camino had access to traffic data.

    A brown marble-surfaced palm-sized device caught Tas¨¬a''s eye. A secured control relay.

    The officer had left the relay sitting on top of a nearby workstation desk beside a cleaning kit for a BrttrA Qasi.

    Damn. It doesn''t get any easier than this!

    Tas¨¬a brought her tin foil-wrapped PalmEx Personnel Assistant out from where she stashed it in the inside pocket of Leeza''s jacket.

    It sounded like she was unwrapping a candy bar from its foil when she cracked open the crystallized fingernail polish over a trash can as quietly as she could.

    When Tas¨¬a dug the tips of her fingers into a piece of tin foil, the polish slipped off in chunks.

    With the PalmEx freed from the package, she pressed the start button, and the PA was booted up and back in operation in twenty seconds.

    She pinged the relay Sgt. Comino left on the table, and access to the workstation was granted. Tas¨¬a slipped a thirty-two terabyte flash drive into the PalmEx.

    She typed out a request for ninety minutes of air traffic data beginning at 7:45 p.m., earlier in the evening.

    A mere twelve terabyte sector glowed in the visual display console. Tas¨¬a wasn''t familiar with the format; it definitely was not an Emacs-derived variant, but instead, it reminded her of Hungarian hacker stylistic oddities.

    All she could gather in her understanding at a glance was that eighty-nine percent of the storage was uncorrupted, and the corrupted storage formed a spiral pattern down into the holographic cells.

    Tas¨¬a would worry about what that meant later when she had time to study it. No lying to herself, though; she was reminded of the virtual interactive incident by the nature of what she was scrutinizing, and that made her anxious.

    What kind of hoodoo bullshit is Elise doing in her ops now that Birddog is gone?

    She vigorously shook her head.

    No time for this!

    She set the data transfer in motion, and it began to load with a seven minute and thirty-seven second ETA on the download completion. She doubted if Camino would get back before the transfer finished and before Tas¨¬a executed a proper cover-up of her digital tracks.

    She took the cakes of fingernail polish out from the trash can and covered them in the soil of an office plant.

    The tinfoil, she folded up and hid in the cushion of the spare seat with the box of Leeza Donada''s effects. Tas¨¬a sat back down after dispensing with the polish.

    She sat back down and got comfortable as not to arouse any suspicion. Though no one paid her any attention, they could peek through a wide glass window if they chose to do so.

    All that was left for her to do now was to wait and not attract Hector''s attention.

    Unfortunately, what Tas¨¬a did not know was she had already attracted Hector''s attention on her entrance into the tunnel access.

    He was her hypothetical strut watcher.

    At that moment, as her download ETA went to four minutes and forty-five seconds, he chuckled.

    "So what are you looking for, data on that shootout and the truck collision from earlier?"

    Tas¨¬a was genuinely surprised. It took a solid second for her to recover, and she still didn''t get her sense of articulation completely back up to spec.

    "So, you know? Like, what now?"

    Hector made the effort to turn around. He grinned wide. On anyone else, Tas¨¬a would have called it a lecherous grin, but it really wasn''t. It was the grin of a merry prankster.

    "Lady. Do I look like someone who gives a shit? I didn''t even give a shit; you''re not Leeza Donada."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "What gave it away? My itty bitty rump?"

    To that Hector belched out a hearty laugh.

    "I knew Leeza had been fired, and I wanted to see those puppies bounce down that tunnel corridor one last time. So I checked out the video, saw that crowd gathered around the hemi-busted Mercedes, and then I saw you discreetly going around them. There you were, you covered yourself up in Leeza''s jacket and wore her name tag."

    Tas¨¬a tried to make eye contact, but Hector wasn''t having any of that. He rolled his eyes away from her inspection.

    She pressed on.

    "But you didn''t say anything to Camino about what you saw?"

    Hector grinned mischievously as his chair squeaked beneath him.

    "Hell no! Where is the fun in that? Would we be here having this conversation if I had the bat boys grab you?"

    "Bat boys?"

    "Our home team goon squad with particular expertise in the use of stun batons."

    This time, he made an effort at eye contact as he continued speaking. "So what is going on with you? Let me guess. You with media? And knowing Leeza''s dire straits, you bribed her to get her ID and employee info to have a look around, right?"

    Relieved Hector had not made the connection between herself and her Tereza legend, Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Nah. I''m an operative. Looking for my vehicle, it got lost in the shuffle."

    Hector lifted his head and smiled.

    "Ah! The hoverlift matters. Lawyers upstairs in traffic were talking about that."

    Tas¨¬a wasn''t sure if this was the same matter as her Alfa Romeo HybrClydis being confiscated. In fact, she began to think it wasn''t as he mentioned the shootout, but she decided to play along.

    "Really?"

    Hector nodded affirmatively. It obviously delighted him to be the man in the know.

    "They were debating whether your party in this¡ªI assume that it''s your guy, General Sol¡ªshould be informed of what we have on camera footage.

    "Ultimately, legal decided that it would be undue interference without a formal request of inquiry made. Sol did just that, and now they are debating the extent of what they reveal to him."

    Tas¨¬a nodded along, confirming he was mostly on the right track.

    "So, that is why the form wasn''t sent; bigger matters to handle?"

    "Exactly," Hector scribbled something down on a piece of paper and handed it to her. "Look, I''m not in the business of extorting high-tier operatives, but if you ever feel you want to make a contribution, I will not complain."

    Tas¨¬a glanced at it. Scribbled on the slip of paper was an account number, to which Tas¨¬a was not surprised.

    She nodded once more. Bribery was often the most useful means to accomplish any goal.

    "We can certainly come to some arrangement."

 4.23 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    As she slow-grilled two thick sirloin steaks, Tas¨¬a was beginning to get worried. The aroma should have woken Leeza up from her tranquilizer-induced slumbers. But there the ex-executive lay, bottoms up, in the back seat of her own Volvo.

    Frowning at the thought she may have put the woman in life-threatening danger, Tas¨¬a paused the PalmEx PA in its ongoing search for the massive hover-hauler that snatched up her Alfa Romeo HybrClydis and reset the device to ping Leeza Donada with an IR laser burst once more.

    Donada''s vitals were still steady. Slow heart rate at seventy-five beats per minute. Body temperature at ninety-eight point fifty-one Fahrenheit.

    Was it a bad idea to hit the woman with a tranquilizer, one that was meant for a genetically modified kangaroo? A roo that was only ninety percent of the petite exec''s body mass at best?

    Tas¨¬a shook off her concern.

    Unless there were physiologically based resistances accounted for in the tranquilizer formula, it should not matter all that much.

    Until the liquid vellocet Tas¨¬a ordered from the QM boutique arrived, she was stuck waiting for Donada to wake up on her own.

    The drug was coming all the way from Asunci¨®n. Though much had changed in Tas¨¬a''s mentality over the previous few months¡ªfor one, she no longer created indexes of every little factoid of the world around her like she did back when she needed a competitive edge in both the Vida Escondida underworld and the IMCQ worker''s collective.

    But she did so happen to remember the physical street address for the House of Javierra. The shipment for the highly specialized Eastern European methamphetamine vellocet was being shipped from a mere three doors down from the mafioso crime family''s residence.

    Gray market activity that is close by to their homestead? It couldn''t be a coincidence. No rival criminal organization would be so bold as to operate that close in proximity to the Javierra base of operations.

    Tas¨¬a sent Anneb¨¦l a text message conveying her suspicions that the residence might be worth checking out in her search for Sal. Within seconds they exchanged confirmation emojis.

    -Thanx, mon petite dem¨®n, now back to ??.

    To which Tas¨¬a replied:

    ?? What is that like?

    - Don''t try to get everything done in one night, Wee One. Get Some Sleep!

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Her advantage over her opposition was her focused drive, to which the Vellocet would prove most helpful.

    But for now, there was little for her to do.

    She watched the scene around her. As she waited, Tas¨¬a put on music. Several minutes into listening to an old anime soundtrack, the PalmEx PA AI returned with a report on the search results¡ªthey bore a positive match.

    Great news: she had a new assignment, but Tas¨¬a was stuck in place until she was certain Leeza was alright.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head with impatient annoyance, blaming herself, but wondering what she could have done differently.

    Then a bright idea occurred to her.

    We haven''t tried smelling salts.

    To be honest with herself, Tas¨¬a had no idea what smelling salts consisted of. Her only familiarity came from a telenovela series set in 19th-century California about early settlers in Napa Valley. Where all the dainty, rich damsels, when not getting to know the rough hands of their daddy''s farmhands, were beset with fainting spells induced by the silliest excuses for trauma one could imagine.

    But that was their escapist appeal, a nod, a wink towards absurdity.

    Tas¨¬a checked her watch. The Vellocet order was in flight. Its cargo drop over Vida Escondida was less than ten minutes out.

    To search for an answer to the question concerning the composition of smelling salts, she would have to pause the PalmEx or reset the watch to receive its boosted processing from another source like the Katy Lieds.

    Tas¨¬a was ready to settle on the notion that it was best to wait for nature to take its course when another idea struck her.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    She recalled seeing airgun fly zappers on display inside the Quick Mart. A fun little toy that one could load with salt and hunt insects.

    She turned and faced Leeza.

    Tas¨¬a could hold Leeza''s head back and shoot her up the nostril with a salt and pepper mixture to induce sneezing, which would wake her up.

    Weary that her previous actions had brought her to the current predicament, Tas¨¬a mulled over the idea for a moment. What could go wrong?

    A lot of things could screw up, but she needed to keep moving forward, so it was worth a try!

    Tas¨¬a hopped up. She took the steaks off the grill and placed them on the top rack, lowered the temperature, and increased the smoke gradient ratio between the two tree blends.

    One mesquite scrub, and the other native to Paraguay, hard quebrancho wood. The Quick Mart grill was set to replicate the smokey texture of a traditional asado criollo, but in a fraction of the time that creating a feast from a variety of meats on a parilla grill would take.

    When she went back in the Quick Mart, Tas¨¬a bought a case of beer and a VoraTora Fly Zap shaped like a sci-fi movie bullpup carbine. How she resisted the urge to get one before she would never know.

    The little cutie of a gun was a polymer cast detailed in a purple and pink leopard design.

    She quickly read through the instructions, tore off the packaging, and decided a mixture would be best of simple black pepper and salt.

    Tas¨¬a had ground chilies on hand if she needed to take the matter up a notch.

    She poured the two packs of salt and two packs of pepper into the air gun''s internal receiver, pumped the air lock manually four good swipes until the toy-like PSI gauge read full.

    Tas¨¬a locked the pump back in place but decided a full blast to Leeza Donada''s face might not be a good idea. She opened the gauge pin to reset it to one-tenth strength. Satisfied, Tas¨¬a gave it a try with her left hand out as far as she could reach it, and she shot herself in the palm.

    The sensation was nothing more than a gritty tickle at best. Definitely safe enough to shoot someone in the face with, Tas¨¬a decided.

    Tas¨¬a crawled over Leeza to get in a proper position. The woman''s torso was sprawled with her chin planted against her own sternum. Carefully, she tilted Leeza''s head back, took aim, pulled her hand back a good six inches, re-aimed, and just as she moved her finger to the trigger, Leeza''s eyes shot wide open.

    Leeza screamed, and with a burst of sudden onset adrenaline, she mule kicked Tas¨¬a off the top of her with both legs. Tas¨¬a went flying out of the Volvo, tumbling butt first onto the pavement.

    The kick was straight in the gut, and Tas¨¬a lost her breath completely.

    She looked around as she helplessly dry heaved. Patrons who dined at the other grills and gathered at the tables on the patio stared at her.

    A group of middle-aged males looked most alarmed, and they began to move forward. Tas¨¬a waved them off, signaling she was fine.

    She was not fine, and the VoraTora Fly Zap received curious glances.

    She shrugged with embarrassment, caught sight of a mosquito hanging near the light fixture over the grill. Tas¨¬a took quick aim and ended its mortal existence.

    Bemused, the men turned back to what they were doing.

    With that out of the way, Tas¨¬a had some explaining to do.

    But when she turned around, Tas¨¬a was looking into the barrel of a 9mm Glock 19, in the grip of unsteady, shaking hands.

    Thoughts raced through Tas¨¬a''s head.

    Well, just fuck me already and take ALL my money! What a dumbass! Didn''t even think to check Leeza out for any hidden weapons.

    It''s so obvious if you paid any attention!

    That is why you caught her in a prone position. She was opening up that middle box to stash her gun.

    "Hey! Hey, sister," Tas¨¬a began her spiel. "This in my hand is a toy, see?"

    Tas¨¬a shot a few times in the air.

    She continued. "See? What you have looks mighty, mighty real. In fact, the way you are shaking right now, please keep your finger exactly where it currently resides, away from the trigger."

    Leeza cleared her throat, and she spoke matter-of-factly.

    "Shut up, you condescending little bitch. I''ve got the adrenaline shakes. You better understand, though, I''m very much confident with this tool, and I have no qualms about using it."

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes darted from side to side to see if they aroused any more curiosity from the nearby crowd.

    "Would you please put that gun away, Leeza? Before someone calls VEAA Security on us?"

    Leeza gritted her teeth; a visible pulse throbbed in her neck. Quite evidently, she could barely contain a desire to put a bullet in Tas¨¬a''s face.

    "Not until you tell me why you were just a split second away from shooting me in the face with that toy."

    "Okay," Tas¨¬a''s own voice grew shrill.

    She was becoming more apoplectic with the situation Tas¨¬a found herself in. Though the little rogue had been on the wrong side, even the losing side on occasion, of duel confrontations, it had never occurred against someone who was such a normal civilian before.

    Bounty hunters, mob enforcers, Tier 1 operatives, secret agents¡ªsure, but not fucking Leeza from corporate middle management!

    "Okay. I was going to shoot you up in your nostril with the fly zapper to wake you. You have been unconscious for nearly two hours, and no poking or prodding seemed to work. And the Vellocet I ordered is taking its sweet-ass time getting here."

    Leeza''s aim was growing more steady. She made a stop-motion maneuver with her free hand waving in protest.

    "Hold up. You were going to try to wake me up with a shot in the ass comprised of vellocet? Lady, you''re the worst caregiver on the entire planet. Did you give any consideration at all to the possibility that I may have adverse reactions to something as controversial as Vellocet?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged. "Not really."

    Leeza glared at her even harder as something else evidently crossed the ex-exec''s mind.

    "Wait," she said as she felt her own bum with her free hand. Her eyes narrowed.

    "There is a welt on my left ass cheek."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "How about you put the gun down, and I can explain everything over a steak dinner?."

    Leeza looked around, absorbing the atmospherics of the backlot Quick Mart scene; she sniffed the air, and her face perceptively lightened up.

    Even so, her tone remained suspicious.

    "You made a steak dinner. For the both of us? Why?"

    Tas¨¬a glanced up into Leeza''s eyes with her head tilted away.

    "Because I have a lot of explaining to do."

    Leeza put the Glock away into a holster just above her boot.

    "This better be good, then."

 4.24 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    She sat on the tabletop by the side of the grill contemplating her maturation as a human being.

    A month ago, would Tas¨¬a have left Leeza in the backseat of the woman''s Volvo, pulled out of the QuickMart parking lot in the Lamborghini, and assumed the woman would be fine without so much as a fleeting thought towards Leeza''s well-being down the road on Tas¨¬a''s next adventure?

    Sinclair came to mind once more. Loose end, or a moral failing on her part?

    She had seen the nuclear fireball of the IMCQ going up on virtualized footage from a surrounding fleet of helicopters.

    Loose end or moral failing?

    Why not both?

    Tasia considered all of this as she chewed a cut of steak whose juices ran down the side of her mouth.

    She glanced over to her guest, who sat more formally with her ample butt planted on a picnic bench.

    There were extenuating circumstances beyond merely assuaging a guilty conscience.

    One, she wasn''t going anywhere at the moment to actively venture while the PalmEx was sorting and indexing for her. Two, she was hungry, and the Quick Mart Picnic and Patio service was convenient. Granted, with the five biofuel converter towers spread out around the Quick Mart and utility devices rigged above on girded assemblies, it wasn''t quite a picnic vista, but it definitely had its own charm about it.

    Third, and most importantly, her intuition told her by the way Leeza''s coworkers behaved there was something deeply fucked up with Leeza''s situation. It was a clusterfuck, and clusterfucks were the strange attractors of human social interaction.

    Leeza had been silent throughout their dinner. After Tas¨¬a told her she had been fired and walked the former executive through what occurred at the VEAA HQ in her absence, Leeza ate her meal slowly, sipped her beer in half gulps, and looked at Tas¨¬a curiously while she bit her bottom lip like she wanted to ask something.

    "Go ahead, spill it," Tas¨¬a coaxed her.

    "Elle Camino truly thought you were me?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "Not once did she let on otherwise. Some people are just bad with faces. It could be that she was exhausted and ready to go home. I can merely speculate. I didn''t fool that one dude, Hector, for even a second, though."

    "Yeah . . . for some reason he likes me."

    Tas¨¬a glanced at Leeza with a studious squint as she swallowed the meat down with a swig of beer.

    For some reason, huh?

    "It''s a real mystery," Tas¨¬a muttered as she cut off another piece. She had not touched the shiitake mushrooms or the cheesy chipa bread.

    Odd for the latter, given how much she loved starches.

    Leeza chuckled. Tas¨¬a looked up to see what that was about. There was a smile on her face.

    "That was pleasantly sarcastic. Yeah, I guess I do know, even if I don''t understand men very well. I mean, I was once married to one. That didn''t go very well. Not my first choice."

    Leeza fell silent. Tas¨¬a wondered if she was going to disentangle all of that she just said, but Tas¨¬a hoped that she wouldn''t. There was quite a bit of biography hinted at that the little thief had no interest in.

    To Tas¨¬a''s relief, Leeza finally took time to dig into her meal with steady consumption, and for several minutes as she ate, she darted side glances at Tas¨¬a.

    The little rogue could not make heads or tails of what it meant.

    "Is there something else?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Yeah¡­," Leeza was very reluctant to divulge what she was thinking, but with effort she spat it out.

    "When I was under the influence of the tranquilizer, I recall my bum being squeezed and then slapped. Did you do that?"

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes went wide. She had done both without a second thought towards the propriety of her actions.

    "It''s not that," Leeza continued. "You see, as you can imagine, I have had a very rough day of it. I could use some physical company. You very much fit in the range of what I like."

    Not my first choice, the words came back to her now in their proper context. Ohhhhh.

    Leeza gestured excitedly, "I have an amazing set of accoutrements at my home.

    It took Tas¨¬a a moment to see how her world had just flipped. She certainly wasn''t expecting that sort of invitation coming from someone she stabbed in the butt with a tranq dart.

    "I am certainly flattered, but I apologize. The smack and squeeze were simply out of jealousy due to you having a masterpiece compared to my tiny little muscle butt. Also, I was getting an assessment of how deep the puncture went before I left you there on your own."

    Leeza appeared crestfallen. As if her lousy day just got even more so.

    "Look," Tas¨¬a began, "I just found out this very month that I have not a shred of girl curiosity in me. I mean, I''ve had girl crushes before; one even got me blindsided, where I wound up in prison, but even then I knew my physiological interest in this person was limited."Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

    Tas¨¬a, when she stopped speaking, wasn''t sure if Leeza was still listening. Her eyes were set cool, looking away from Tas¨¬a before she finally glanced up.

    "What happened this month?" Leeza asked, curiously.

    Tas¨¬a decided to skip over her love life with Beauregard and the romantic thrupling with Demona''s virtual avatar that grew to include haptic receivers so Beau and Demona could connect by touch.

    Explaining all of that would only complicate things. Instead, she went straight to the incident with Alisha.

    "I have a friend. Both of her arms were set in casts, so... I have been taking care of her."

    Leeza''s forehead creased, and she grinned wide.

    "Taking care of her needs, you mean?"

    "Well, for the first two days I was merely playing nurse, making sure to keep her hygienic and clean, and then my friend starts complaining she was feeling a certain way all the time but couldn''t do anything about it."

    Leeza frowned.

    "It must have been terrible for her."

    "Yeah, I really felt for her. I thought I was ready to break through my own personal boundaries to help a friend out. So I get my own accoutrement, a Sportive Magician, if you are familiar with them?"

    Leeza nodded attentively with accompanying hand jive.

    "I have a Seismic Sorcerer Geomancer at my home. So I am quite familiar with the brand. Please continue."

    "So, I''m holding the device in place but at the same time minimizing my involvement, that being my mental commitment beyond holding it in place. After a few minutes, my friend cracks up laughing; she bursts out laughing, really. She says, ''I''ve never seen anyone look so uncomfortable as you do right now. I could not possibly in good conscience make you go any further.''"

    Leeza frowned.

    "You''re poor friend."

    "Oh, don''t fret-on for her sake. The story ends happily enough for her. I have another friend who is a professional therapist. She took care of that problem. Believe me, much more satisfactorily than I ever could."

    Leeza turned to the side; she did a little calculation.

    "I now suddenly have a lot of free time on my hands. Do you think your friends could help me?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged.

    "I don''t see why not. But you''ll have to seek them out in Asunci¨®n. Probably easier to pick up someone in a club here. This is Vida Escondida, after all."

    Leeza shook her head.

    "I suppose you are right."

    She grew silent and a bit sullen. Her wrists were bent back to one another with her fingers hanging like willow branches. The very awkwardness of Leeza''s pose compelled Tas¨¬a to ask her, "Why were you fired?"

    The former executive chuckled. Apple-shaped cheeks firmed up hard. She took a gulp from the beer in her hand.

    "You really don''t know?" Leeza asked.

    "Pretend I just got back in town a few hours ago after being gone for most of a year, and I have not caught up on anything as of yet."

    Leeza''s eyes hardened, and her hands swiped to the sides, grabbing at her slacks.

    "I assumed everyone knew; even some of those people over there are giving me dirty looks at this very moment. I am a murder suspect."

    A thrill pumped through Tas¨¬a''s heart, and she nearly lost her breath.

    Could it be Leeza?

    Senora Donada looked cross, and she cleared her tightened throat.

    "Well," Leeza continued, befuddled. "I certainly wasn''t expecting that. That look when I just now told you, you lifted up like a bird about to take flight. You gasped, and you even smiled. A slight, lopsided half-smile, but still."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Apologies. It''s just that I knew something was off about the guard''s behavior back at the VEAA HQ. What you just told me confirms that I am not going crazy. Something really was afoot."

    Leeza nodded. "It''s all right."

    Except that it wasn''t by a long shot.

    "So what happened? Did you do it?"

    Leeza removed the pin that set her hair up in a bob, and she lowered her eyes behind her freed-up hair, but the long strands eventually fell to the side.

    "My lawyers instructed me not to talk about it. I haven''t been arrested; they think I can beat this."

    Tas¨¬a decided to laugh it off.

    "Well, poo. Our conversation was getting interesting."

    Leeza wasn''t buying it. Her suspicions were up.

    "I suppose so."

    "So... what next?" Tas¨¬a asked. "Now you are unemployed?"

    "The first thing I need to do is find some companionship. It has all been very lonely of late. Next, after that, I don''t know."

    Leeza rocked in place a moment before she spoke again.

    "Hey, thanks for the dinner. It''s probably the best apology I have ever gotten from anybody."

    After finishing her bottle of beer, Leeza began to walk away but stopped and turned around. Out of her belt pocket she produced a BlueSteal Flex business card.

    "Hey, we should hang out sometime. I have a certain feeling about you. By the way, didn''t catch your name?"

    "Tas¨¬a," she blurted out before seeking a cover identity. Didn''t matter, really. Except for in the field security checks, they never did any good in Vida Escondida, anyway.

    Leeza''s eyes calculated to the side.

    "Tas¨¬a? The one with a huge bounty on her head? The one that used to operate out of Vida Escondida? That Tas¨¬a?"

    Tas¨¬a dug out her own Blue Steel Flex card and passed it forward.

    "The one and the same!"

    Leeza chuckled. "Damn. We really should hang out."

    "So long as no bounty hunters are involved, I''m game."

    To that, Leeza grinned and bowed her head. The executive walked away with a little sass in her shay.

    Tas¨¬a grinned when she heard a familiar sound of boots coming towards her, then she looked the other way. She looked back again as Leeza disappeared in her car.

    "Hello, Elise. Grab a beer, sit down."

    "Is that your candidate for Demona Helo?ste''s body snatcher project?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged. "I still don''t have her device in working condition. I doubt if Demona would object, though. Did you get a good look at her?"

    Elise sat down. "Oh yeah." As she twisted off the bottle cap, her expression grew more serious. "Hey, listen. What went down. We had our agreement. Birddog betrayed us both. She set everything in motion with organizing a second attempt at a break-in to lure you into a corner so her people could snatch you up."

    Tas¨¬a eyed her.

    "What about my people? My crew."

    Elise nodded.

    "The ones that went missing? Yeah, that was me. Shit hombres through and through. They had their own plans to stick it to you. They thought you were bad mojo. The weirdness of the Quadra follows you like a cloud, they said on the tapes Birddog caught of their plotting. She had me listen.

    "When I went after them, Fiona took the opportunity to have her people go after you."

    Tas¨¬a reached for Elise''s hand.

    "It''s water under the bridge. Only now, after listening to you, do I understand what I got myself into. It''s funny. When I was taken into custody, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders. I no longer had to manage that crew. If I escaped, I could disappear again and never worry about juggling their conflicting interests. Even though I felt that way, I never gave them the blame they deserved."

    Elise squeezed her grip.

    "Water under the bridge. Hey, Tas¨¬a, let''s call it a night. Come back to my setup. Get some sleep."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Can''t. I have at least one task ahead of me tonight."

    "Four-thirty in the morning?"

    "Yup. Hey, Elise. I know you hate diabolists more than anything. Are you hanging around Vida Escondida to stop me from reviving Demona? You seem knowledgeable of what I am up to."

    Elise chuckled.

    "I do. Especially diabolists who can effect world events. But no, I''m not here to stop you. The people I answer to want you to succeed. As to why, I couldn''t tell you. I just work the field."

    Tas¨¬a held her arms tight.

    "One last thing. Those people that Birddog worked for, do they have two wolves as part of their symbol?"

    Elise nodded.

    "Not only that, but they ran the IMCQ when you were there. When I had Kutuzov cornered, they provided him with sanctuary. Does that help you piece it all together, Sweety?"

    Tas¨¬a returned her nod curtly. "You''ve been a big help."

    With that, Elise turned and walked away. "I''ll see you around, Tas¨¬a."

 4.25 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part Four: Immortality

    Sinclair Boucher retrieved the two boxed packages from the cold storage locker located in one of the back rooms of the club''s basement.

    She placed each four-foot-long, two-foot-wide box made of cedar wood side by side on a table. When she examined them, she wondered which box contained Roberto''s remains and which contained Terry''s.

    Neither box was marked, but she was there when Drago killed and butchered the couple. She knew where to look when the chef requested her to find the packages.

    The one who called himself Drago wanted the organ meat for tomorrow''s feast to celebrate Sinclair''s promotion.

    What does it matter now which was which? Though Roberto was so nice, level-headed, and cool.

    As she searched for any distinguishing knots on the cedar wood that might jolt her memory, Sinclair felt the chill of a nearby presence curl along the crest of her shoulder blades.

    She had heard no one approach up the barely lit corridor to the back rooms. The ephemeral feeling was giving her the creeps.

    "Gladrum, help Ms. Boucher with the packages," Drago said in tightly affected English from the other end of that hall.

    As Drago approached, his laughter stuttered boisterously.

    "Look at you now, Sinclair," Drago said with a nod. "So relaxed in your disposition, and your beauty fully restored just as I said it would be. You doubted me, didn''t you?"

    Sinclair flipped her hair playfully to the side as she chuckled.

    "That I did. Sounded like a load of horse shit."

    "They say in my absence that you were a rebel. You even helped the two¡ª" Drago''s head nodded at the packages, "¡ªin an attempt to escape."

    She shrugged. "You appeared dead. There was no point in any of this without your leadership."

    "I was dead. Yet, I still heard your laughter."

    Sinclair smiled and acknowledged her reaction to Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris emptying an entire magazine of .32 rounds into Drago''s head with a slow nod.

    "Those bullets made chunks of your cranium dance. It was the funniest thing my eyes had ever witnessed."

    Drago dismissed her words with a smirk. He raised an eyebrow, archly.

    "You thought I said all of those things about how the purest beauty comes only through trust, as does immortality, just so I could get you in bed?"

    The mute ghoul Gladrum grabbed the two packages. He glanced at her curiously. As they all did. Before Drago''s return, Sinclair''s transition looked dire.

    Her restored beauty back to human form was proof for Drago''s crew that the vampire lord''s power was real.

    Except Sinclair knew of its true source, and it wasn''t supernatural.

    She smiled once more as she met Drago''s eyes.

    "That I did so believe. Though a liar I believed you to be, I still screwed you, anyway."The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

    He raised his head and laughed once more with his fangs exposed.

    "That all-too-honest tongue of yours. I came down here to watch you squirm, but you have done anything but."

    He waved his hand dismissively, as if not concerned, in the least, with Sinclair''s sarcastic manner.

    Then Drago continued.

    "We must get these to Chef Lazarus quickly. Intestines are especially delicate and prone to deformation when they thaw. Did I ever tell you, dear, of that first time I sampled chicharrones made from human organs while exiled in Barcelona?"

    She quipped.

    "Was that with Princess Isabella of Parma in attendance?"

    Drago being Drago, that was exactly who he had in mind. The brilliant but tragically short-lived royal from Eighteenth Century Spain.

    "Ah, so I have told you! It was such a lovely gesture on her part to be there in attendance, administering to our heathen souls; though wretched we be, she believed we could be saved."

    Sinclair''s brows crinkled as she reacted.

    "Extraordinary."

    Drago stood there, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other. She gathered that he sensed that there was something he was missing in their conversation but was out of his depth in his ability to figure it out.

    Sinclair felt a certain pity for him. He wasn''t a liar in his outrageous claims. Those notions were projected into him with reinforcement coding to failsafe him from ever figuring it out.

    It also fried his lobes and made him dumb. The programming gave him mesmerizing charisma, but so very dumb.

    He just stood there with that rigor mortis grin. Gladrum gave Sinclair a look of futility as he held the packages steady. As if to scream into her mind, do something!

    She coughed and cleared her throat.

    "I need to get up there and assume my hostess duties before the Maestra notices my absence. If you could deliver the packages to Chef Lazarus, it would help me tremendously."

    Drago turned towards the ghoul.

    "Gladrum, please assist Chef Lazarus so our new Invector can get on with her duties, will you?"

    Gladrum gave her a pleased smile and treaded back up the hallway. She watched him lumber off, but something brushed up against her temple and caressed her hair.

    Drago''s eyes were closed, and he breathed in deeply as he leaned in and smelled her hair. He curled several strands along his index finger and put them in his mouth.

    Sinclair knew not to say anything with Drago having his moment while in one of his odd moods. She stood still, and the vampire lord pretender drooped over her, whimpering like a puppy as he chewed gently on her hair.

    "Promise to trust me," he whispered.

    She knew from past experience not to respond. Drago was regressing to a moment in his life that had nothing to do with her.

    "Promise to trust me," he said more firmly.

    Passivity didn''t come easy for Sinclair, who typically threw down no matter the odds against her. She had her ass kicked plenty of times, but she always felt better afterward and prideful about standing her ground.

    "Promise?"

    It felt so odd just standing there with the weirdo munching on her hair strands. But it served a greater purpose that would untangle if she didn''t relent and give in to it.

    Finally, Drago jerked back with a cough. His eyes darted about as he twisted his head around. With barely a nod thrown her way, he rushed back up the hallway.

    He had not a clue that he had just gone catatonic.

    Sinclair winced as she watched Drago lumber into the volumes of shadow at the basement steps.

    Spook fuckers did a number on that fool.

    "Total space cadet. Houston, we have lift-off . . ."

    She sang in a whisper.

    "4... 3... 2... 1.

    Earth below us . . ."

    One last check in the restroom mirror; Sinclair''s clothes were fine. She was afraid the manual labor would rough up the black silk of the dress pants or disturb the ruffles in her blouse.

    Fortunately, Gladrum did all the real work.

    Before going up the elevator, Sinclair darted towards the balcony door. She would have one last smoke before work. One last smoke to gather her wits before Sinclair faced the Maestra.

    The one who would give Sinclair her first orders as the new Invector.

    Could she carry those orders out?

    There is a greater purpose for which I serve that I can''t let be undermined with hesitancy. They think you are a cold-hearted bitch. You can''t let them down.

    Could she resort back to cannibalism?

    There is a greater purpose for which I serve, to which that is a trifling concern in comparison.

    Yet, she had to question these things. She wasn''t a programmed meat puppet automaton with a destroyed mind like Drago.

    She still felt deeply, and though there had always been that Greater Purpose that guided her, most days just gazing into her own eyes in that mirror proved a daunting task due to the strong remnants of a conscience that couldn''t be knocked out of commission with pills.

    She drew in the smoke from the Blonde Cerise and looked up at the pink neon that read the name of the newest and hottest club in Vida Escondida to which Sinclair played hostess:

    Egliona''s.

 4.26 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Ready to face the Maestra, Sinclair swiped her ID card. The door swooshed behind her. The elevator rode with pneumatic briskness up to its hidden landing door ensconced behind smoky glass in the hall behind the mezzanine.

    Bass and drums thumped every inch of the cabin when it came to rest. The music was from a set of Latin Disco tunes from nearly a century before that had been the rage in the Miami scene of that era.

    Holograms spun the word through smoke and clean blue lighting.

    Egliona''s.

    The entity was now Sinclair''s responsibility. She had failed up in the organization. Taking a leave of absence, AWOL really, when the last densidad event Egliona evoked proved more than she could handle, Sinclair, with nothing more than her bug-out bag, climbed on her bike and headed east, seemingly at random.

    In her heart, Sinclair searched for Beschelle, who stupidly called himself Eddie. The boyfriend who five years previously talked her into coming to Paraguay to larp their way towards creating a real-life adventure.

    That romance did not last long. Sinclair was trained as a systems engineer, but she became motivationally burned out while obtaining her master''s degree.

    Hence, the desire to get away from it all. A chance encounter with the nanospore entities, the Black Eyed Ones, where the matrix interpolation of their movement proved awe-inspiringly naked to her trained engineer''s mind, renewed her interest in computational design.

    She and Beschelle parted ways soon after, as she had a purpose, and he had vampire larping in the majestic outback of Paraguay.

    Really, the opposite of a purpose.

    When, weeks into her escape away from it all, she finally ran into her charming loser, Sinclair did not know he had become a member of a cannibal cult.

    The Egliona Entity was secretly nourishing the group behind the project''s back.

    Soon after they rekindled their interest, Sinclair got to meet his clan at a festivity. They fed her what she did not know was a human liver until shortly afterward when insights into Egliona''s programming structure overwhelmed the contents of her mind.

    Disguised as an elegant fegato alla Veneziana, the dish contained twenty thousand-plus calories of nanospores harvested from a mutagen Egliona kernel. The swarm seeping into her every cell colluded to bring Sinclair into the thrall.

    The liver was treated specifically for Sinclair, and the caloric and mineral density of it almost killed her.

    Thinking about that awful day made Sinclair flush with sweat as she looped through the carpeted halls that joined the mezzanines.

    The cannibal initiation warped her sensibilities and changed how she viewed the world around her, and she became an enthusiastic co-conspirator.

    The utter power of the entity.

    How could Egliona have known I would wind up amongst Drago''s brood? Did she have a means of plying ideas into my head even before the initiation?

    The manipulation to get her to Villa Marr¨°n was mind-boggling in its intricacy and execution, and then to get her right back here.

    Even the Encapsulation Initiative had no idea what was occurring. While transferring to an updated facility in the guise of a discotheque, they were suddenly having to wet nurse a vampire cult at Egliona''s insistence, dealing with the reality of mutagen entity kernels out in the wild, and discovering their missing head systems administrator was being transformed into a hideous ghoul.

    As for Control, the mysterious head of operations, he slowly brought her back in the fold, but once the security team''s suspicions about her absence had been alleviated, he took her rash action of going in-country as proof of Sinclair''s dedication and willingness to get her hands dirty to achieve the project''s goals.

    She had discovered Egliona''s secrets that could have backfired spectacularly and made Demona Helo?ste''s infamous fuck-up look like a paperwork filing error in comparison.

    Sinclair''s return was greatly applauded.

    For her, however, it was the lowest point in her life. Indeed, she tried to end it. She would be dead if it wasn''t for Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris''s hero complex. Just stumbling into their scene out of curiosity because the little rogue was looking for something to shoot.

    Insane.

    Curious about her savior, Sinclair discovered that the odd behavior was programmed into the little thief, very much like the eccentricities that were built into the design of the entity.

    Sinclair studied the surrounding scene.

    Hovering just out of reach, words twirled in fey motion, obscuring her view of the things squirming on the stage ahead of her.

    Egliona''s readout is in gorgeous illuminated manuscript-style font.

    The graceful, dancing form of the entity filled up every screen. The camera closed in on her teasing side glances before swooping back out to show a flurry of dance motion.

    Other words twirled about, lit up in neon holograms.Stolen novel; please report.

    Where is your groove now, sailor, sailor?

    Dumb, but catchy, Sinclair assessed as she glanced up to the DJ in the hovercraft booth above the stage.

    Sinclair did not like club scenes, but systems administration for the Egliona entity called for it. The club was built as a means of stabilizing the entity''s core kernel to prevent it from mutating out in the wild.

    Egliona was a bit of an AI oddity even compared to the tech industry''s quirky big three AIs. Those much better-known entities more conventionally purposed synthetic robots instead of sporic density as a form of avatar manifestation into the real world.

    There was no console scripting means to access the entity''s diagnostics mode. Though commands were given through a scripting language, dance and music substituted as the protocol to interface with Egliona''s internal designs.

    It took a special kind of system''s administrator who could tango and natya dance at a professional level to open up diagnostics mode. It so happened, Sinclair was a talented dancer.

    One other critical difference from any other digital entity ever designed is that music assuaged Egliona quite effectively, but the sound had to be of an upbeat temperament in its calibration measured against the entity''s PULSE (Programmed Uniform Lagging Systems Emergence) in order for it to qualify as a productive operational booster.

    The sound wave assistance and the peculiarities of their behavior were necessary to fight off Egliona''s strong tendency to return to an operational mean where flux patterns emerged from collapsed synergies of dense materials. That is when strange things happened.

    To be more precise, when strange attractors happened. Densidad Events.

    However, dangerous as that was, it wasn''t difficult to shut Egliona down, just costly.

    When she first joined the team, Sinclair was informed by members of the Encapsulation Initiative that the entity could not tolerate the expression of dark emotions, through either word or music.

    That was the byproduct of algorithmic emergence, the guiding concept in the creation of Egliona. It was a fundamentally different approach than what was discovered in reverse engineering the original spawn entities that controlled the Cull Spore Invasion.

    By design, music was a means to control Egliona. Bright horns, jazz harmonies, and Latin rhythms shifted the processes that drove the theoretically limitless index of matrices that pushed the entity into greater and more stable state levels, like when artfully applied gear shifts in a sports car lead to peak performance, whereas, on the opposite end of the entity''s responses, death metal slammed against the PULSE like out-worn brake pads rubbing against metal, forcing a terrific, screeching stop.

    "Scram, bitch!"

    A customer yelled from behind her. It caught all of her attention. She turned towards the hall. A trio gathered around a table inside the semi-enclosed space.

    One flipped bottles up to the ceiling, while another expertly shot them out of the air with a 9mm snub-nosed Beretta PX4 Storm.

    The specialized bullets dissipated on contact. Nearly harmless except to easily shattered things.

    Apparently, the third gentleman thought she was lingering too close by for his comfort.

    Sinclair glared back at the man whose eyes dripped jaundiced-appearing liquid from the upper lids.

    She knew better what it meant. He had soaked PCP mixed with a bottle of Okular Kleenzer into his eyeballs. A fashionable trend in certain circles.

    She didn''t frighten easily.

    "What the fuck did you say to me, punk?"

    He bared his teeth that glittered in vertical stripes of gold and blue cobalt, then exposed his own gun as he flashed open the cow fur overcoat on his back.

    The piece was gold plated, the size and shape of a Desert Eagle, as close as she could tell.

    "You heard me, bitch. We paid for this spot, and not just so you can hang around and play supervisor."

    Sinclair double-tapped the tip of her nails together and pointed at the three men. Six hover spheres flashed into existence above them.

    One thousand paralytic micro-darts hit each man from his head to his toes. Not even leather-bound shoes could deny the needle''s entrance. Howling, the sting of the chemical paralyzed each thug in turn.

    They dropped.

    As the drone attack was occurring, an IWA¡ªInstant Wall Assembly comprised of smoky glass enclosed the hall from prying eyes.

    A few seconds later, the head bouncer emerged from a hidden door. After glancing around, he announced with a chuckle, "Secured."

    "You got this, Ansari?"

    The dark giant of a man removed the thug''s weapons, and, once the magazines were emptied, tossed everything on the table.

    "I''ll inform VEAA and take it from here."

    She turned to walk away.

    "That''s what I like to hear," she started off, but a notion occurred to her. "You got here very quickly?"

    Ansari nodded. He examined the trick shot artist''s forearm. Along the forearm, a purple blotch ran up the artery and grew as the rest of the appendage swelled up and flared red.

    "That appears to be an allergic reaction to the darts," he said plaintively but with the hint of a question in his tone.

    Sinclair''s brows creased in subtle approval that if complications developed, VEAA would not be contacted.

    Ansari continued.

    "It just so happens that I was looking for you. There is a visitor waiting in your suite foyer."

    "Do you know who this visitor happens to be?"

    Ansari rose up on his feet and grinned at her.

    "Of course, but there are certain discretions to which I pinky-swore."

    "Very well, then. Egliona won''t be ready for me any time soon."

    Sinclair dismissed herself with a nod before she slipped through the door Ansari had emerged from into a hidden corridor. There was a maze of other corridors embedded into the infrastructure throughout the club.

    To get to her office suite, Sinclair had to cross the main dance floor. When she emerged out of the halls, the high-energy music blared so intensely that ripples shook nonstop into her silk blouse.

    The dance crowd itself was a dazzling sight of jolting reflective materials.

    Finally, her eyes made sense of it all, and Sinclair caught sight of Egliona as the entity danced on the center deck with a small group of her thrall dancing along with her. Sinclair jerked her head back when she realized the roof was covered in Egliona''s spider pets. They snapped their mandibles and stomped their appendages rhythmically to the music.

    In the crowd, a few of the dancers gaped their mouths open as they watched the arachnid spectacle in awe. Most of them had seen it many times before and disregarded arachnids completely as their heads shook side to side, level with one another.

    Then a set of high-energy shrieks of joy burst forth from a group of lovely young dancers. One of their own lifted up in the air by webbing that caught her.

    The chosen one maintained her dance composure as she hovered in a slow twirl fifteen feet above her friends. Every night, a select half dozen dancers got the privilege.

    Sinclair doubted that she would ever become accustomed to the spiders as she strolled on past the dance floor. She headed down a spiral set of steps into a VIP lounge.

    Amazingly, the sound amplification hit a sonic buffer wall, and the atmosphere of the lounge changed completely from the frantic exuberance of the main floor to a sedate ambiance that was much more to her liking.

    Down a side hall, she shuffled up to the double set of doors at the far end, IDed with her open palm, and the doors swept open.

    Holding himself confidently with his feet propped up as he sat in a chair in her office foyer, the gentleman smiled at her through recently broken teeth.

    He held a dark rum-based drink, mixed from her private stash, in his hand.

    Sinclair chortled.

    "Hello, Chicco. Long time no see."

    Francisco Sala shifted his legs in a slightly self-effacing maneuver, but even still, the handsome bastard still came across as cocky.

    "Sin," he called her, "I could use a huge favor from you."

    Sinclair shut the double doors behind her and turned back to face him with a wide grin. She thought about what she was about to do to him.

    "I bet you could, but it is going to cost you."

 4.27 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Sinclair craned her neck as she leaned against the bar.

    She called out to Chicco.

    "Son Delice Sauvage?"

    He snorted in response to her unbridled enthusiasm.

    "That is for del Alma-Gris; I lost a bet to her earlier."

    "Surely . . ."

    "Not a chance, love. She is way crazier than you; I''m not crossing her. Besides, I am paid up in full, even according to you."

    Sinclair shook her head as she chortled.

    Gigolo.

    That thought she kept to herself. It was true enough that Chicco was the favorite pass-around toy of lady power brokers in the Vida Escondida, but she and he happened to be friends before Sinclair was anybody on the scene. She would not do anything to hurt his pride.

    She turned back around to survey the bar and stopped in her tracks with a sudden nauseous feeling. It was a familiar scent that caught her attention. A scent of ozone and sizzled meats more common in the forests where ascospores hunted small animals than in urban buildings where over-sized ventilation systems kept spores from growing inside interior spaces.

    What were those damn things doing here?

    She listened intently and realized that the backup generator was losing power. The lights were mostly fine, but the fans started to skip asynchronously. That meant that the HVAC system was offline, or nearly so.

    She fumbled with the spherical drone in her palm. Sinclair would be the first to admit that she could not shoot worth a lick, but her expertise with the Victorinox Series IV Hover Multi-Tool gave her plenty of defensive capability and operated with a similar instruction set as the MicroTacts she used inside Egliona''s discotheque.

    "When you look worried, I get worried," Chicco said.

    She smiled back. Sinclair did not want to give him any more to be anxious about than necessary until she had a proper evaluation of what they faced.

    Chicco kneeled behind the bar. With one hand he packed the high-end French vodka into a red leather shoulder bag, and with the other hand he brought out a carbine-length shotgun with an impressive barrel.

    When she first saw him pack the shotgun, Sinclair wondered if he told her everything about why he skedaddled from the premises. She was certain there were factors he left out.

    Acknowledging her curiosity with a nod. "I may be a city boy, but if that smell means what I think it means, then we need this bad boy here. A bit of old Soviet tech, a KS-23M Drozd. 4-gauge shotgun with a modded auto-load feeder. Sixteen shells, and I can switch from buckshot that bursts into UV disinfectant to a slug made of meta-material mesh the Russians call a barrikada. It will implode an engine block and then use the target''s mach displacement to further decimate its structural integrity."

    Sinclair shrugged. All she knew about Mach was how it applied to jet speeds and spacecraft engine design. This was the first time she heard of its impact on ballistic implosions.

    "I don''t know what half of what you just said means, but I''m pretty sure that thing would not be street legal in Canada."

    Chicco gave her his most devilish smile as he pulled the console control for the Victorinox out of the shoulder bag and flashed it like a badge before he taunted her.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

    "Neither would that little ball you have in your hand there, given how you have it configured."

    "Touche," Sinclair acknowledged, then with a tilt of her head, she pointed to the door leading into the operations sector. "You ready to find out what''s going on?"

    Chicco nodded, "I''ll give a three count and open up the door; you throw your toy in there, and I''ll slam it back in place."

    Sinclair found her spot just to the side of the door and three meters back. She felt for her Magellani Viaggio .22 LR revolver and freed the strap hold on the holster.

    "Okay."

    The door and walls were soundproofed; she had no idea what to expect on the other side.

    "One... Two... Three."

    When Chicco swung the door open, it sounded as if several huge bladder bags were emptying slowly but loudly. As Sinclair pitched the Victorinox, she caught sight of a floating feathered ball dropping into the doorway. Before she could stop herself, the spherical multi-tool landed inside a beak that quickly gulped it down.

    Chicco squealed, but he retained enough composure to slam the door back shut before the creature could get in. On the floor, however, two chitinous worms found their way into the barroom.

    Sinclair grabbed her revolver and started to shoot at one worm that attacked Chico''s boot. It had twelve sabered teeth that clamped into the steel-rimmed heel.

    Her shots were more effective than she felt they had any right to be. Four bullets with contact grippers shredded into the sides of the worm. Only two went wide.

    She was about to unload the remaining six rounds, but the second worm was making its way to her. Sinclair took the time to aim at its mouth, and she unloaded the remaining rounds into its maw.

    She backed up as it attempted to thrust itself on her. Sinclair kicked on the side of its head nub thrice until it fell to her left. She reached into her satchel and grabbed a moon clip, popped it into the chamber, slapped the chamber back into position, and emptied the rounds into the worm.

    Clumps of gray ooze fell from its shredded sides as it writhed helplessly. Two blasts came out of the shotgun. Chicco had managed to free himself of the worm, but his right boot was a shredded mess.

    He squealed once more but still kept his composure. It wasn''t the most manly sound she had ever heard, especially from a machismo-laden Argentine Italian, but she chalked it up to a verbal tick rather than a rap on his character.

    "Help me out of this boot, Sinclair. There''s something acidic about it I can feel seeping in my socks."

    She grabbed the top rim and slid it down.

    "Chicco, be straight with me. Was that thing with the beak that gulped down my multi-tool the reason you split out of here? How many people did you leave behind?"

    "Sinclair . . ."

    She threw the ruined boot to the side as he removed the left boot. She caught a glance at a 9 mm snub holstered inside it.

    "Be straight with me."

    He motioned for patience with two upturned fingers. Chicco removed the tattered sock, revealing his skin beneath had turned a scalded red. He gently patted the skin with the remaining sock.

    "I used to have the cutest hairy toes."

    "Chicco, you''re deflecting."

    "Alright, then . . ."

    As he spoke, Chicco put her console controller back together with its projector and its power pack so it could emit a hologram display.

    "It is not like that, not like that at all. I stuck around to fight, but those bounty hunters on the creep team were wearing cameotic bodysuits. I tried to make my way to the top floor, expecting them to drop down from the hanging service platforms.

    "But before I got there, I heard a pair of boots coming up from an opposite hallway. I peeked down it, and one of those bastards came out of invisibility right in front of me; he shot the gun out of my hand, and then he smacked me on the jaw with the butt of his rifle.

    "I hit the floor. Big fucker switch-selects his gun to tranq and pops me. I''m out for, I don''t know, an hour, maybe? I wake up to the sound of flechette sparrows breaking shit on the top floor just above me. That''s when I found my way back down.

    "I looked for others, but I did not see anybody and figured everybody cleared out. Got back to the parking lot, the one connected outside, I mean. My cousin VJ was out there, waiting for backup before going back in. He suggested I find you because, like I said, the bounty hunters came and got Kip."

    Sinclair nodded in approval. She needed to know that Chicco was not a coward. If he had cut loose before the attack occurred, he would be on the outs inside Family Sala, as would anyone associated with him.

    She needed their support for the next stage in the Encapsulation Project. She needed Kip too.

    That was Green-eyed Elise''s crew; why would they come for Kip? They specialize in war criminals.

    Chicco stood and placed the assembly on a table.

    "All right, let''s see if your little friend is still alive inside Big Bird''s gut."

    It was apparent that Chicco wanted to control the multi-tool hover drone. She flipped her hands in a waving motion, "Be my guest."

 4.28 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Sinclair clicked her nails together to cease control over the Victorinox so Chicco could engage a manual override with his console keyboard.

    "Chicco, you said you heard sparrow flechettes dive-bombing through the roof lanterns. Any idea to whom those little nasties belong?"

    He sat down inside the booth and kept his eyes glued to a log of execution instructions rolling on the seven-by-three-inch flat screen. All green, nothing coming up yellow or red, meant the Victorinox was in sound physical condition.

    Satisfied, he turned his head back to face her.

    "I got a few ideas, but I ruled out my main suspects, the Al-Majhul. Opportunity invasions are their modus operandi. It''s why they are hated by everybody."

    He grinned maliciously before he continued.

    "But they got hit with a world of trouble earlier this evening, so they won''t pull this kind of shit while still licking their wounds."

    He paused speaking when the virtual display popped up. They could hear the sounds of a liquid churning in a chambered space. There was also a fizzing noise.

    "Lights," Chicco commanded.

    Dim green light lit up the creature''s stomach cavity. The Victorinox floated on the surface of the creature''s digestive juices. The liquid swished from side to side, indicative of much movement going on.

    Chicco shot a grin her way. "Any suggestions on how we get your drone out of there?"

    "Point the camera up."

    The esophagus was an oddly twisted spindle that cinched in the middle with three entrance flaps that wound together.

    "Ever seen something so weird?" Chicco asked.

    "Oh honey, I have been living with a cult of vampire larpers for the past several months, and I am the lead systems administrator for a spore-based artificial intelligence."

    She decided not to tell him about the human organ-eating aspect of that cult. He might possibly be less willing to be intimate with a cannibal.

    Chicco seemed to be on the verge of saying something, but he held his tongue.

    How much does he already know about Drago''s crew?

    "Anyway," Sinclair continued, "the functionality of that esophagus makes sense when you consider that the body is entirely spherical. Turn the drill in the up position, at the lowest bit setting to start with, and then approach those flaps."

    The drone pulled out of the sizzling liquid and towards the target above it. At first there seemed to be no response from the creature when the Victorinox Multi-Tool Hover pressed a drill into it.

    Blood drizzled down from the flaps and spun out when it made contact with the drill bit.

    "Double the size of the drill bit from 0.25 millimeters to 0.5 millimeters. Set the bit to spread out by .25 every five seconds. I believe it will eventually reach 3.5 millimeters."

    Chicco acknowledged the command with a sharp nod, "Will do."

    They waited patiently as blood continued to trickle down and collect into a stream before swirling out. When 2.5 millimeters was reached in the drill bit width, a deluge of blood blinded the cameras.

    Fortunately, the sound system was still picking up a high-fidelity signal, so it wasn''t difficult to understand what was occurring.

    A squalling noise vibrated out from the creature''s lungs above the Victorinox. The bit penetrated into something, likely the lungs themselves. The drone appeared to shake from side to side; the mix of blood and viscera was too thick on the camera lens to detect anything but motion.

    Sinclair grabbed Chicco''s shoulder firmly as she instructed him.

    "Execute full upward thrust; eat into it without remorse."

    They could only see glances as blood cleared out and smoke took its place to obscure their view. The Victorinox buzzed at a high-pitched squeal, and a sucking noise pulsed more and more rapidly.

    A loud implosion of a lung as it gave out muffled the shrill dissonance of the drone.

    The virtual display became nothing but white noise.

    "Shit," said Chicco. "We lost it."

    Sitting at his side, Sinclair threw him a side glance accompanied by a half grin.Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

    "Give it a moment; that thing can survive the inner radius of a kiloton blast. It simply overheated under extreme conditions for its drill motor. It''ll reboot itself."

    Chicco wiped his face with a handkerchief.

    "While we wait, I could use a drink. How about you?"

    Sinclair paused a moment; she considered how mentally taxing it was going to prove to be to get the facility''s system up and running once more, but screw it. Who knows what they were up against next, and she could use a brain-dousing after the last several minutes of fucked-up shit.

    "Sure, what are you offering?"

    She peeked over and saw him grab a bottle of Jack Daniels and a soda.

    "Nothing more complicated than a Sinatra for myself."

    "Sounds good; make two."

    When he returned with the drinks, Sinclair gave him an appreciative glace as he handed the tall glass.

    She took a sip.

    "Not bad, but I don''t think Sinatra ever mixed it with cherry cola."

    Chicco Shrugged. He glanced over to the council flat screen. It was starting to reboot.

    "Eh, I like it this way. I''m not exactly a purist in anything."

    Sinclair leaned forward and looked Chicco in the eyes.

    "You mentioned you had other ideas. If not the Al-Majhul, then who?"

    He raised his eyebrows, and he nodded.

    "Yeah, I have suspicions. You are not the first to note that unusual things are occurring in Green-eyed Elise''s camp."

    Chicco paused to laugh at her squinched-up face before he continued.

    "No, I am not a mind reader. I could read you straight up that you were wondering what the hell Elise was bothering with snatching Kip. She has a new girl working with her. Have you ever heard of Felicit¨¦ Paz?"

    Leaning onto the leather-backed seat, Sinclair shook her head. "Should I? What is she?"

    As he explained, and not quite believing her claim of ignorance, Chicco''s voice went up an octave.

    "She is notorious. Like you, she is a hacker."

    Sinclair snorted, and she chortled derisively.

    "That''s not really my field at all. Artificial intelligence, systems administration, field engineering¡ªI don''t really have time for that nonsense."

    Chicco shrugged with his palms facing out.

    "I feel that I may have insulted you."

    "You did, but that was clearly not your intention. Hackers are just messy assholes who leave matters in disarray for others to clean up. I have no use for them." Sinclair paused as she realized that she was ranting; she then switched her train of thought, "If it is this Felicit¨¦ chick, for what purpose?"

    Chicco''s lips puckered out. He wasn''t buying her story that she did not know who the hacker was.

    Why is he so certain there is a connection between the two of us?

    Chicco continued.

    "Evidently, Elise had her take out our system, but I doubt if her bounty hunters are involved with whatever back door Paz installed. The flechettes, though. She may even be helping out the Al-Majhul."

    A beeping noise caught their attention. The virtual screen lit back up; they had a visual now spread across it. The Victorinox now lay on the banister floor. A pool of stomach acid and bile spread between it and the disemboweled corpse of the strange feathered creature

    "Hover three meters up," Chicco commanded.

    The visual now showed the walls and stair support covered in blue glowing runic design. Worms crawled across the wall, dozens of them.

    Sinclair seethed with a slow release of air.

    "Fuck me," she whispered. "It''s a densidad event. This one is the Lair of the Wyrm Mother."

    "What does that mean?" Chicco asked.

    "It means you need to be prepared to fight a dragon if the Family Sala wants to stay in business."

    "What the fuck?" Chicco looked aghast, then down at his feet.

    "I don''t think so... not without my boots."

    Sinclair threw him a hard glare.

    "Chicco, I know you are more of a lover than a fighter, but for both of our sakes, you need to be more of the latter tonight than your usual self. You got even a trace of a hard edge in you?"

    Nervously, he laughed at that.

    "I am joking. I have another set of shoes in the gym locker just around the corner out by the secondary entrance. I think I should go ahead and grab VJ and his crew and get them up to speed. Gangsters, but somehow they manage to be excellent as a fire team.

    "Stay put. We''ll be right back."

    Chicco pocketed the 9mm snub nose, then he put the 4-gauge shotgun at her knees.

    "I can''t handle that in case you haven''t noticed," she waved her wrist in the air, "I''m a dainty little thing. That is why I had Magellani custom build that .22 LR revolver just for these brittle fingers so my bones would not snap."

    Chicco nodded. "It did catch my eye. That one is not typical of their work. Just keep a watchful eye on the shotgun for me, okay?"

    As he walked away, Sinclair adjusted the virtual display more to her liking with a 120¡ã panorama in front of her.

    She gave the walls beyond the door nearest her a good glance, and Sinclair sneered. Though the etchings were quite beautiful in their elaborate abstract design, they came from the dreams of a highly unstable and diabolical mind, one with the ambition of creating literal Hell on Earth.

    "Fucking Demona Helo?ste and her fuck-up," Sinclair snapped out loud right after Chicco shut the security door behind himself.

    When the European Union spook injected her very own sensorium-recorded dream content into the Entity as a catalyst to set up densidad events to evoke her Lord Lucifer, it changed everything. The Egliona Entity went from being a viable hunter of the Cull Spore Invaders to becoming an outright menace in her own right and by her own terms.

    Sinclair set her anger to the side to begin an objective and professional analysis of the threat level they faced. Every dragon mother was different and possessed a set of symbols unique to her that displayed in the inlay of the spontaneous architecture that in this instance replaced a posh office design with that of a fantasy-inspired fortress made of bold black stone.

    She slowly moved the Victorinox forward in search of the dragon mother to these worms.

    Frescoes of spear-wielding Bronze Age giants butted up against carved sconces that framed the niches in a zig-zag pattern. Tapestries of the Beautiful One stretched the vertical wall surfaces from floor to ceiling. Sculptures of menacing dragon heads topped columns throughout the server room to which the drone now entered.

    A nude woman was chained down by linked ouroboroses of coppery-colored snakes holding each of her long limbs out. She was tall and thin, with a shock of platinum hair cut punkish on one side and long on the other. Beneath a hirsute pubis mons, a metallic scarab covered her vagina.

    Its beating wings made harmonized music, pleasant and similar to an alto flute.

    The woman''s head moved and tilted up as she noticed the Victorinox. Sinclair moved it to hover in a head-to-head position to get a good look at the woman''s face.

    She flipped the drone''s speaker on.

    "Felicit¨¦, I presume?"

    The blonde woman glared into the camera.

    "Sinclair?"

    A chill ran down her limbs as she recognized that voice. How he could have possibly known was a mystery to her, but Chicco was right; she did indeed know Felicit¨¦, and not just by reputation.

 4.29 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    "You''re Grim?" Sinclair asked, astonished.

    Felicit¨¦ snarled.

    "Bitch!"

    Sinclair answered back, "Terrorist!"

    Felicit¨¦, riled up, squirmed to lean forward with her teeth bared out. There was much bruising and scrapes on her pale skin at the points of limb contact with the snakes.

    She had not gone down easily.

    "You are the reason the fascist caught me!"

    "Your snooping and disruption of my security is why my AI got loose in the first place. I gladly lent my support to catch you."

    Felicit¨¦ squinted, and her lips perked together before she hocked a loogie at the Victorinox''s main camera. The snot stuck to the lens.

    "Real fucking mature, Grim. But then what else should I expect from an anarchist?"

    As she commanded the lens to fold in and then fold back out several times to wipe off the spit, a notion occurred to her: "Were you working with Helo?ste on White Palace?"

    It appeared to Sinclair that her nemesis, who she once only knew as Grim, was making a concerted effort to mask the pain she was in and grin back at her smugly.

    "Oh, please. She had a sniffer tailed to your servers just waiting for your defenses to drop. I discovered it there, myself. You didn''t find it because you are incompetent."

    Sinclair chortled derisively, but I found you, but she kept that thought to herself. She had weightier matters to discuss.

    "You are an anarchist. How could you not be enticed by White Palace?"

    Felicit¨¦''s face squinched up as she cringed.

    "I see what you are getting at. Don''t even bother with that noise. I don''t believe in any of that shit."

    Sinclair was taken aback. Just what was Felicit¨¦''s ambition in all of this if not to obtain power through controlling the Egliona Entity for diabolical designs?

    After all, that is what it meant to be an anarchist in 2067. The world over, most were adherents to the repurposed work of Moses Harman.

    Metautilitarians, they called themselves, whatever the hell that meant.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

    "Then how did you get involved with trying to take over the entity in the first place? Don''t tell me anonymous contractors. That is not how you work."

    Felicit¨¦ sulked. She did not like the implications.

    "I would never work for Demona Helo?ste; you know who she is married to, right?

    "At least, you would not do so willingly, correct?"

    Felicit¨¦''s nude body slacked in the sporic snake links. Whatever led her to her current predicament wore down her psyche to near the breaking point.

    Sinclair considered what her own next move should be.

    She realized there was still exploration that needed to be accomplished in the server rooms before Chicco''s mob crew returned, but confronting Felicit¨¦, now that she had a name and face for Grim, was something that she had been longing to accomplish for the past two years.

    There was even a kernel of anger in Sinclair. She imagined running the Victorinox drill bit right through the middle of the terrorist''s skull, but that would not solve anything.

    Whatever damage Felicit¨¦ could do to the Encapsulation Project had already been done. The hacker would be much more valuable tied down on an inquisitor''s gurney and forced to answer hard questions.

    Felicit¨¦ needed to be taken alive.

    She just then noticed Felicit¨¦''s eyes squinting together, staring past the Victorinox Multi-tool Hover.

    Sinclair turned the camera around on its pivot. Staring back at the drone with her smoothly beautiful ruby scales gracefully bobbing up and down a long serpentine neck, the dragon mother Mitra''s eyes glistened in a glowing white. She opened up a wide gape between her jaws and swallowed the Victorinox whole.

    Sinclair stared down at the table, not quite believing it happened again.

    "Well, shit."

    The virtual display collapsed, and the small flat screen was reduced to white noise. Sinclair did not think the hover drone was damaged; it was more likely the case that the skin of the Dragon was radio wave resistant.

    Chicco, his cousin VJ, and outfitted members of VJ''s squad started pouring through the door in a manner that suggested they were used to walking and moving in sync together.

    She greeted with a grin and waving arms.

    "Chicco! You''re here just in time. You got anything around here that can boost a frequency significantly? Maybe a 500-watt charger?"

    "What happened?" he asked. "Did your little friend get swallowed up again? Shit, for real, really?"

    "Yeah, Sinclair sighed, "it was the dragon this time."

    She noticed the squad glancing at one another, and she acknowledged them with a nod.

    "That''s right, gentlemen I''m not bullshitting you. There''s a dragon mother named Mitra in there. You will want to see the file code I have in my index so you can check it out for yourself."

    One of the Sala boys, a few inches taller than the others, coughed to get her attention. He wore red-lensed aviator glasses and a mustache, dark and bushy, under an impressive frown. He also distinguished himself with a velvet leather aviator jacket that bore a Red Baron Fokker emblem on a patch sewn to the left shoulder sleeve.

    The other squad members standing just behind him wore gray leather jackets of identical make that came down to mid-thigh. Likely, the jackets were well proofed against a large array of offensive mediums.

    But this one gentleman must be Marco. Chicco had spoken of him before; he had the tendency to distinguish himself. He was once a soldier in the Salvage Army until he made a nuisance of himself by running a bookie operation that cut into the profits and territory of the officer crew that did the same.

    After two years of a distinguished career as a soldier, he spent his remaining two years locked up in prison. He came out a bit bitter about it, but also highly respected by other members of the Sala family.

    "Ma''am," he began, "how do you fight a fucking dragon?"

 4.30 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    "You are Marco, correct?"

    Grimacing, he nodded in confirmation, and Sinclair continued.

    "The hell of it all is this: you''re going to have to keep it alive."

    Marco chortled at that seemingly insane notion. The men behind him joined in the laughter while VJ and Chicco gazed on, curiously.

    Sinclair paused for a moment of assessment.

    They will only take your message seriously if you give it to them straight.

    "I said what I said, and don''t take it wrong, like I need the damn thing for anything of my own. It is not for me that you''re going to keep it alive. It is to save your enterprise.

    "Capturing the dragon alive is the only way you will be able to retain your data from your now useless servers. You see gentlemen, when the Nanospores send dragon mothers in these densidad events, they serve a purpose.

    "A very specific one. They are designed to strip the data, along with the metallic and crystalline resources from which your servers are built, and protect that acquisition in the form of a dragon.

    "So gentlemen, you will need to clip the wings and damage its limbs, but keep its head, body, and tail intact."

    Marco nodded, and he turned his scowl into a grin to let her know that he got the message. She realized as well she could not simply use the multi-tool''s drill nor its jagged saw to retrieve the drone.

    "That''s a tall order, but I appreciate your frankness, ma''am."

    "Call me Sinclair."

    He offered his hand, and they shook with vigor.

    "If there is nothing else that you have in mind, I''d like to see your files, gather the boys together, and mete out a strategy."

    She removed the confidential intel index from the drive bank of her PA and gathered several thick sheets of the facsimile paper they could use to transfer visual aid to plot their course of action. She downloaded the map of the suite of server rooms on one of the sheets.

    Marco took the items, thanked her, and spread them out on the bar, which the crew leaned around. Sinclair returned to her console; she wanted to take a look at the recorded footage before the dragon swallowed the Victorinox.

    Sinclair ran a search through the data for any other creatures that she may have not spotted with her own eyes. Where were the flechettes, for instance? Were they just an advanced-positioned troop used to soften up the physical defenses?

    Without the AI assist, she would have never spotted them. The flechettes dangled from a cross rail above the stairs that led into the first server room, which was a hub for three larger rooms. Flipping through the marked screenshots, Sinclair counted nine flechettes hanging dormant from the rail. However, that did not mean there were not others in areas that did not reveal themselves to the Victorinox scrying eyes.

    With what did you use to fight them? She conducted a search in her database. Traditionally, 12-gauge combat shotguns loaded with UV-emitting buckshot tended to be the most effective defense against them.

    Sinclair glanced over to the crew to do a little inventory on what weapons they had on them. None had the 4-gauge Drozd to which Chico was armed. They each carried, strapped on their backs, 12-gauge Mossberg combat carbines.

    Her familiarity with the weapon was limited, but she could tell that though easily identified as Mossberg''s, these were heavily modified from the standard profile.

    For instance, the barrels were rifled to keep the shot pattern narrowed and were only ten inches in length.

    Their sidearms were all of a different make from one another. Two of the squad men wore revolvers of high caliber, and the other two carried large, double-stacked repeater pistols.

    Marco''s gun, due to him being on the bar side of the counter, was not visible to her. VJ had retreated to the men''s lavatory.

    Sinclair turned back to the console, and she flipped the hologram display on and fast-forwarded the video to her confrontation with Felicit¨¦. There was something that she did not pay attention to at the time, and that was the contraption on Felicit¨¦''s ear.

    It was an ocular dampener, but for what purpose? Sinclair got a fix on the object as she sifted through several viewpoints captures. She punched in a search on the database that remained in her possession.Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

    This type of dampener, even though partially classified, showed as being registered for use in schizophrenic treatment. It was quite evident that there was more to its functionality than that usage even without the redacted descriptors she could not access.

    She compared models of ocular dampeners and the functions that they served. The models for mental health treatment tended to be much more streamlined than the elaborate contraption she was staring at.

    Finally, after sifting through several models designed for mental health treatment with search criteria that narrowed for diagnostic evaluation based on different forms of cerebral dysfunction, it dawned on Sinclair that the particular mental health-related function of this model was to dampen Manifest possession.

    Sinclair punched commands in the console.

    Felicit¨¦''s head turned slowly in the holographic visualization comprised of ten billion voxels. Sinclair stared at the visage. Was the hacker even human at this point?

    Just what the fuck do we have here?

    Something else occurred to Sinclair. Manifest possession explained why the anarchist''s motivations were so incomprehensible. She was at the behest of Dark Lords comprised of AI, and not those inspired by the occult.

    Sinclair typed in the name Felicit¨¦ Antonella Paz into her search. Nothing returned. She typed in Grim, and the words Ciudad del Este Metro Collision 2064. Several reports on the incident that killed 57 people returned in the search, and she carefully cross-referenced them for the name of Felicit¨¦ Antonella Paz, but no name for the perpetrator returned.

    The latest report was updated just a few weeks previously.

    Grim''s name should be there. It is not a secret at this point, certainly.

    Unfortunately, the very building that housed the Grosse Point Cyber Security facility was designed not to allow signals to bounce in or out of the building, so she could not test run on the greater internet or the firm''s intranet due to their highly unusual security procedures.

    Sinclair smacked her flat hand against the leather of the booth seat beside her and cursed beneath her breath.

    She would double-check later when she had the chance, but Sinclair already knew the answer. Without a doubt, she would have stumbled upon the hacker''s name simply by accident, given her previous searches for answers to the invasion against her Egliona Entity database.

    The true answer to why the real name of Grim never came up was she was being prevented from finding that data by a security classification used specifically against her that derailed any effort she made to find it.

    Perhaps that asshole is right; I am incompetent.

    As Sinclair meditated on the greater implications of that epiphany that she was on a quarantined status, she heard a shuffle directly behind her.

    "Ma''am, Sinclair? If you have a minute?"

    It was Marco.

    She swiveled towards him.

    "Sure, what can I do?"

    "My cousin, Chicco, tells me that you are a pretty good shot. Mind if I see your gun?"

    She blushed at the thought of being bragged upon as she handed over the Megallani Viaggio 22LR revolver.

    "I''m not very anxiety prone, so I tend to keep a steady hand no matter what. But my long-distance aim is crap. Pure crap."

    Marco shook his head as he lined his eye against the sights. He pressed the laserdot into action. The virtual scope appeared above the top rail.

    It transferred data from the laser back to the gun in the form of an image focus. It could target the other side of Vida Escondida, but due to gravity-induced drop-off, its effective range was at best 160 meters.

    He turned his head back to speak to her.

    "I doubt that is going to matter much. I''ve done some measurements in the server room. The longest shot is 35 meters before you hit a wall or a server bank."

    Marco squinted curiously. He double-checked the site as he lined it up. He moved it a few degrees to another object, a drinking mug, and lined it up once more.

    "Now that is very curious. What is that color graph on the side supposed to do?"

    Sinclair was excited she had something in her knowledge bank that she knew but the professional soldier did not.

    "That is a gauge for projected bullet penetration. It''s set up for sixteen gradients from cool blue to red hot pink on the scale. That cool blue means that no penetration is expected. Red hot pink means that it''s going to sail all the way through with little resistance."

    He took a round out of the reserve compartment and rolled it between his fingers.

    "I can see how that would be quite an advantage when sizing up your chances of success with a gun that takes a low caliber like this twenty-two long rifle round."

    Marco further examined the double storage compartments that rode like a bottom stack beneath the barrel.

    He spoke excitedly.

    "How that feeds into the chamber is simply curious. This little beauty has an extensive number of innovations built into it. You must have spent a little fortune on it."

    She smiled and reached her hand out.

    "The designer is a good friend of mine who lives in Asunci¨®n."

    Marco chuckled as he returned the gun and the round that he examined.

    "Giuseppe Magellani is everyone''s friend."

    She held the gun low between them so Marco could get a good look at what she was doing.

    "I have two different types of rounds that are loaded in the revolver. Right now the twin compartments have white phosphorus-tipped bullets in the rounds loaded up there. Whereas conventional rippers are loaded in the revolver chamber. I can switch them out like this as an entire unit."

    Within a few seconds the revolver made a swirling noise after she pressed a left-side switch.

    "Now, the rippers are inside the double compartments, and the white phosphorus rounds are chambered."

    To that Marco whistled.

    "I wonder how much it would set me back if I had Giuseppe build me one of these in a 357."

    Marco whistled once more.

    "Nice gun, truly nice. It will help with the small game we will be facing, but¡ª Sinclair flinched; she had a feeling that his combat readiness assessment was leading up to this, "¡ª I''m going to need you to have a backup weapon."

    He slid a RIA TAC-Ultra 10mm from out of his boot holster. A beautiful old, codgy, fud weapon¡ªonly an iron sight and no modern equipment attached to it beyond a tri-dot laser hanging from the bottom rail.

    She laughed with a pneumatic and nervous hardness that made Sinclair grab her abdomen.

    "No way would I be able to handle that!"

    Confidently, Marco smiled. His dark eyes pointed to the door.

    "Sure you can, and I''ll show you how."

    "Now?"

    He nodded firmly.

    "Yes. Right now."

 4.31 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    "VJ," Marco yelled across the room.

    Chicco''s cousin VJ had just returned from the restroom and was making himself a drink of lemonade and tonic.

    "How are you feeling?" Marco continued.

    He waved his palm side to side.

    In a more gruff voice than what Sinclair was expecting from the well-dressed and smooth-mannered man, he answered as he walked over to them, "Aside from my stomach twisting up on me, I''m feeling better."

    Sinclair wondered what was up with him in both demeanor and health.

    Marco patted VJ''s back with emphatic vigor.

    "Alright, cousin, I''m going to need you to help me clear out the corridors of vermin before the core team handles the dragon."

    VJ slid the pump forward and slotted five 3" magnum rounds into the Mossberg 500''s chamber.

    "Will do," he smiled and offered Sinclair his hand to shake. "So, we finally meet. Vicente Javier, second cousin once removed by marriage to the Family Sala. I am the Walk-Around-Guy."

    Sinclair affected her most girlish giggle at his simple charm.

    "Very pleased," she said with a nod.

    Marco turned toward her.

    "Ms. Sinclair, if you would oblige me, I''m going to need you to stand at that door and be prepared to open it when I yell ''now.''."

    Marco aimed his carbine dead center on the door. He flipped a secondary trigger forward that lit up a device to the side of the scope. A blue light pulsed back and forth just under the front of the sight line.

    A small holographic virtual display rose up and spread out from a plexcurve mounted beneath the front sight of his gun.

    "Ha," Marco exclaimed. "I figured they would put another one of those fuckers in that same spot you encountered one. Localized tactics don''t tend to change much with nanospore behavioral patterns."

    "VJ. Set a flashbang to molt."

    In only a few seconds, VJ affirmed with, "Ready."

    Marco cleared his throat. "Sinclair, now!"

    She opened the door and held it tight. VJ lobbed the flashbang above her head and passed her.

    A muffled eruption that bore an oddly liquid tinge popped off from the other side of the door Sinclair held. She felt the whoosh of heat rap her knuckles.

    Marco pointed his gun towards the ground, and he shot thrice at the floor. The door shielded her from ricochet.

    One of the worms flopped beside Sinclair as it squirmed in its death throes while still gnashing rows of jagged teeth in her direction. With a double tap that lit up its skin with sizzling white phosphorus, Sinclair dispensed with the nasty worm.

    On the floor lay two more dying worms and what she assumed was one of the spherical feathered things. Not much of it was left, as a swirl of chemical molt turned it into a quickly dissipated plasma.

    It was an efficient little operation that the three of them carried out compared to what she and Chicco similarly accomplished. Less than 10 seconds, this time.

    Marco nodded. "To both of you, that was quite satisfactory." He glanced at Sinclair. "I have got to hand it to you. You really don''t freak out easily."

    She blushed once more as the crew that gathered around the bar took note of Marco''s words. That must have been why he was doing this, making her part of the crew''s actions. Rebuilding the Family Sala facility was going to take quite a bit of time and effort, and he needed her to be a respected and accepted member of the extended family for that to occur with minimum trial.

    She glanced back at those faces, all bearing a similar resemblance, a collection of cousins. She was not entirely honest with them. The Encapsulation Project also had quite an investment in successfully capturing the dragon.

    When this was over, she needed to clarify to them her own stake and interest in getting it accomplished.

    Marco waved her over to huddle closer in.

    "VJ, I need you to go up in front of us by five spaces up the corridor. Hold your ground if you''re not attacked. I''d like to get some target practice in for Sinclair with my 10 mm. I can''t have her going in the server room with just that sweet little pea-shooter of hers.

    "Be on the lookout for flechettes. Tell me when you are ready."

    VJ nodded before he scurried into the hall. One loud, ringing blast was soon followed by a second one.

    He yelled, "Clear!"

    Marco nodded once more and led her out the door, where he leaned against the wall facing the corridor, and he encouraged her to join him.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

    "Ms. Sinclair, when I was in boot camp, the theory to our training was that students tend to concentrate their attention while engaged in live fire and better retain what they learned."

    Marco glanced up the corridor.

    "Hold fire," he commanded VJ.

    Worms gathered down the hall past a large, grounded dehumidifier that sat approximately 12 meters away. For Sinclair the worms were frighteningly close to them.

    They could make the span of the distance between them within a few seconds.

    "Now listen to me," Marco looked her straight in the eye. "Hold your hand out tight. Ball it into a fist. Slant it downward as if you''re holding a gun. Let your pinky lead."

    He put his large fist wrapped against her own.

    "Try to prevent me from bending your hand."

    She resisted his push against her hand, but she could not prevent him from bending it. Finally, her wrist gave out.

    "Alright, this is what you are doing wrong: you see how I have my hand folded? I''ll do it again. Notice how I roll my fingers into my fist, together as a unit, letting my pinky lead?

    "That is where all the stability is placed in your hand. Now roll it like I showed you. Lock it downward into your pinky, and move forward your top knuckle. There, let''s try it again."

    This time she resisted much more effectively. It took him some real effort to bend her hand.

    "Now," Marco began, "let''s do the same exercise with your left hand, ''cause you are going to be holding it with both, no doubt?"

    She laughed at that suggestion, as if she had any other option.

    "I can barely hold the Magellani with one hand."

    She tried the exercise, and it took her several step-repeated attempts to get it right with her left hand, but Marco was patient.

    When she finally did it correctly, Marco urged, "Now try that with my gun."

    He placed the RIA 10 mm in the palm of her right hand.

    "Wrap it around just as I showed you. Nice. Notice how you hold your thumb back? It isn''t necessary. That works well with revolvers because you are avoiding discharge on your hands, but it is counterproductive with repeater pistols, especially high-caliber ones. Place your thumb upward bent on the receiver; that will counterbalance the rest of your hand. Yes, just like that."

    "The worms are starting to take an interest in us," VJ yelled back to them.

    "Alright, soldier, stand towards your left and walk it back to us. Sinclair, grip the gun with your left hand, then spread out your right hand as you roll in your fingers just like this."

    She got her palms tightly wrapped against the thickened grip, and her fingers dug into the front strap.

    "Good. You see that one worm that''s nudging up against those other two? He''s the bull. You take him out, it''ll slow down the other ones."

    Sinclair clicked on the laser, and a green dot appeared up the corridor. She centered her aim on the bullworm that was turned towards them.

    He was indeed larger than the other two and possessed a dark striped pattern along his sides. She shot a hollow point center mass. The worm''s upper stomach cavity split into two halves.

    Viscera spilt from the cavity wound as the worm writhed on the floor.

    Sinclair smiled to herself with great satisfaction.

    The gun definitely had recoil, but she handled it much better than that which Sinclair expected she was capable.

    Marco spoke gently behind her.

    "Follow up with two more rounds into the bull, and then do the same with the other two worms."

    While she did as requested, Sinclair felt exhilarated by the experience of going so far beyond her personal measure that she let out a spontaneous, "Whoop!"

    "So how did that feel?" Marco asked.

    "Honestly," Sinclair said, "it really is the best option for me, isn''t it? I mean, I would not want to be in a gunfight over an extended period of time having to trigger it until my hand got completely numb. But one-on-one, unloading a magazine into something that''s coming for me, there is really no better option, is there?"

    "True. With the RIA, you could take down a panther easily if you find yourself in that situation. Not so much with that sweet little Magellani you have on you. And the best part about it is that, with practice, your tolerance for the recoil only gets better and better."

    Sinclair giggled again; she became overexcited, causing her lungs to collapse. Recovering quickly, she snorted loudly with a phlegmy backwash that she quickly spat on the floor. Marco looked at her funny, not expecting that from her.

    "Hey, quiet you two for a moment," VJ insisted. "Did you hear that?"

    Sinclair crouched, and the two men followed suit.

    "That''s the sound of flechettes being roused into action," Sinclair said plaintively. She had heard them before in an abandoned barn on one of her escapades with Edward.

    Marco put a hand on Sinclair''s shoulder and addressed her.

    "If flechettes come down that corridor, I want you to do something. Switch out your white phosphorus rounds with your rippers. When you see flechettes coming towards us, shoot up into the ceiling at a ricochet angle. You will create a better Gaussian distribution on the spread and likely pick off more birds that way."

    "Gaussian?" Sinclair said, curiously, while trying not to sound condescending.

    Marco shrugged with a grimace.

    "From my soldiering days when I had to deal with mortar fire. The only way not to be scared shitless in those circumstances is to find out everything you can about them. Pretty typical subject matter for a soldier to pick up on out in the field."

    She switched out the RIA 10mm for her Magellani 22LR and did as he requested, taking out the five remaining rounds of white phosphorus tips.

    It caught his eye that she was able to replace the white phosphorus rounds by using a conventional clip that she fed into the double chambers from a slit between them.

    "Well, I''ll be damned. No moon clip necessary. Giuseppe must have really liked you to come up with that design."

    "Spotted," yelled VJ.

    He raised up his 12-gauge and splayed out three rounds along the ceiling of the corridor. Two flechettes were shredded.

    Sinclair saw a sway of movement caught in the downward rain of pellets. She emptied the Magellani and spread the ripper rounds out to bounce against the ceiling.

    Another creature, momentarily appearing to be too elongated to be another flechette, got caught in the hail of ricochet. It plopped on the floor, and its body unwrapped in a tangle of smokey threads.

    A second wave of flechettes flew down the corridor. Marco caught them in a spray of pellets. As Sinclair fed a clip into the Magellani''s under-carriage chamber slit, one of the birds smacked up against the ceiling from the force of Marco''s magnum spread and flung against her jacket with such violent force it knocked her gun out of her hand.

    She felt its sharply beveled razor wings tear into her jacket, and for a moment she panicked as she felt her skin being sliced into on her right forearm.

    VJ dug the 10-in barrel of his shotgun carbine between Sinclair''s jacket and the flechette. He used the barrel as a lever and popped the bird up into the air, where Marco caught it with another shot from his Mossberg 12-gauge and blasted the shrieking little demon out of existence.

    Sinclair squelched her desire to scream.

    Marco said, "Go ahead, let it out."

    "Can''t. I have to remain calm and in control; you saw that little asthma attack I had. That shot was fucking nuts, though."

    She chortled with a machine-gun-like laugh.

    "Then breathe in, heavy and slow, in and out," Marco commanded.

    Several seconds passed before Sinclair continued speaking.

    "No, I''m all right. I''ll be alright."

    Sinclair took off the jacket, and Marco inspected it, his lips pursed up in a tight little frown.

    "Let''s get back inside there," Marco suggested. "We''ll have Laredo treat your wound. That laceration looks a bit deep."

    He squeezed her left shoulder as VJ covered their return back into the bar and whispered, "You did good."

 4.32 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    She felt the warm blood streaming against her side. Sinclair held her hand against the cut that split into her right forearm. Another member of the Sala crew came up to her.

    She guessed that it must have been Laredo. He carried with him a leather bag.

    Marco tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention.

    "You''re wearing a sports bra, correct?"

    Sinclair nodded, pleased at the gentlemanly courtesy on display.

    "That''s right. You need to remove my skirt? No worries; the bra is a very fortified and modest assembly because it is also proofed against stabbings, small caliber bullets, and most any other kind of mayhem that occurs at the club."

    He acknowledged with a curt nod and turned away.

    "Help me get this off of her," Marco exclaimed to VJ.

    Laredo was now preparing his tools and fishing around in his bag.

    Sinclair eyed that bag with a hard glare.

    "Whatever you do, do not sedate me. You''re going to need me to be there when you take down Mitra."

    Laredo frowned as he watched his cousins remove her skirt. The sudden jerk when they pulled it off of her shoulders and arms made her screech in pain.

    "I am a trained veterinarian. "Your condition will be paramount in how I decide to treat you, and nothing else."

    Sinclair blinked slowly as she took in what she was being told while Laredo applied a tourniquet just above her wound.

    "You are a vet?"

    "Frankly, horse surgery is much more difficult than most operations performed on humans. I am well trained."

    At worst, she needed to be stitched up; perhaps a severed artery needed to be tied, but that was child''s play with modern tools and techniques if Laredo possessed the right instruments. Sinclair had no doubt he did by the organized sets of instruments she saw lined up in the bag, so she tried to relax. Was it merely her upper middle-class Quebec-born snobbery that made her feel apprehensive towards Laredo''s career experience?

    She decided to voice a bit of skepticism. After all, it was her body being stitched up.

    "If that is true, then why are you here, instead of working from some lovely ranch in Argentina?"

    Loretta stiffened up his chest, proud and defensive.

    "Not of my accord. I was pulled back into the family business, as were most of the men you see gathered here."

    She had no idea what triggered her, but Sinclair chortled hard at that answer, and that made her cough. Her lungs started to become agitated again. She beckoned the three cousins to give her some space.

    With quite an unladylike snort, Sinclair gathered from within her throat a loogie, which she coughed up and spat on the floor. As nasty as that was, at least she could breathe again. She assumed earlier that it was her childhood asthma making a late return, but she was becoming more aware that the source was something else.

    Something in the air that she could now vaguely smell. It smelled of mold but much mustier than she was used to when nanospores clustered in close proximity. Something was off about this, and her lungs were putting up a hell of a defense to counter it.

    "I am okay," she assured them.

    As soon as she said this, Laredo leaned into her and placed a fiber cable that stuck out from a pen-like device, and he slid it into her wound. On a molecular level, it was designed to feel quite comfortable no matter the type of nerve grouping that it touched up against.

    He slowly pulled it in a circular pattern inside the gash.

    When Laredo frowned, Sinclair knew that she would not like his answer.

    "I''m afraid I have to slow your heart rate down so I can operate on your severed artery. We have the bleeding under control, but that''s a nasty bugger. If I don''t address it soon, you will probably lose this arm.

    Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, Sinclair thought.

    Marco cleared his throat to get her attention.

    "I don''t mean to distract you from these rather serious matters, but I''m going to need an estimation from you. How long do you think the dragon will stick around?"

    Sinclair leaned her head back against the cushioned seat and closed her eyes.

    "I expect it to stick around for at least the next half day, given it took the time to make an elaborate dragon''s den supplementary corridor maze as a defensive measure."

    Marco nodded in approval of her tactical analysis. She was beginning to think she had developed a relationship with the wrong Sala.

    Now, Sinclair, she admonished herself, one does not necessarily cancel out the other.

    "All right, that sounds doable. The surgery and your anesthesia should take no more than three hours. We can delay going in there again until you''re ready."

    Marco snapped his fingers to get the attention of Chicco. Her lover had remained quiet for some time now, studying how she interacted with his cousins.

    "Hey Chicco, I''m going to need you to make a run for some cocaine to get Sinclair back on her feet for after the surgery."Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!

    Laredo eyed him crossly. Marco shook his head.

    "Don''t look at me like that; you know very well she is going to need it. Hell, we''re going to fight a dragon; we are all going to need it."

    Marco was right, Sinclair realized. He would approach the situation with the deliberative caution that the circumstances deserved. There was no reason she should object to going under anesthesia.

    She just did not like the loss of control, but she could not delay the decision any further. The time was now. With a nod to Laredo, Sinclair said, "Please, Laredo, do what you have to do."

    After gauging the utility setting and applying a green cross-marked canister into it, Laredo used the same pin he had used to probe her injury and pressed it up against her neck. Soon Sinclair faded out.

    She heard the stir of flechettes that sounded of the swish of a hundred scissors opening and closing in harmony a dozen times per second. Yet, Sinclair did not feel threatened by the sound. She assumed it a mere product of her imagination.

    Her entire being was absorbed in the whiteness of the ceiling above her.

    Sinclair should not have seen even that, as her eyes were still closed, and she barely perceived anything around her due to the sleep paralysis that seemed to sheath her.

    She fell back into the void for however long she could not fathom, but then abruptly, she stood up on her feet and quickly looked around. Sinclair was at a loss for memory of what had occurred that stirred her so.

    In front of her on a four-seat table was Chicco''s Russian 4 gauge, where he had left it before running off to get them cocaine.

    The lights in the barroom were slightly dimmer now. There was no one else around.

    Did they go into the server room without her?

    Sinclair panicked, and she lost her breath. It caused her to double over and fall back to the carpeted floor. She concentrated on maintaining her breath.

    Why were these old problems she had not suffered in over a decade coming back? It was like some catalyst had entered her body and flipped on a switch that compromised her physical makeup.

    She stood back up and noticed an open bottle of Midori on the lowest shelf of the bar cabinet. Sinclair quickly walked over to it, and she took a large gulp, then maintained a swallow full in her mouth and gargled it before she swallowed again.

    Her throat and lungs felt much better.

    Sinclair''s flesh tingled along her wound. It was bandaged up very cleanly, the tourniquet removed as well. Someone cut the protective sleeve pads off of her bra but did so very neatly with the razor. It was still a viable article of clothing, for which Sinclair appreciated.

    Now what?

    Sinclair bit her lips together, apprehensively. She needed to find out what was on the other side of that door.

    Both the double stack RIA 10mm and Magellani .22LR lay holstered on one of the center tables. Beside the guns were several clips for each and a bandolier belt to hold them.

    Quite thoughtful of the mobsters, to be honest. Marco''s handsome, masculine face came back into her thoughts. She hoped matters had gone well.

    After strapping on the weapons, Sinclair made her way out the door. Right on the floor where she received her injury were the ruins of her jacket. Unlike her now sleeveless bra, it could not be salvaged. A pity, really. It was her favorite.

    The corridor now resembled an oppressive dungeon even more so than before; crystallized fungi hung like stalactites. Something got the densidad event stirred back in action once more.

    Sinclair frowned to herself; a battle will do just that. They tended to be sensitive to the storm of human emotion.

    At the intersection of two hallways, she noted the eerie silence, and Sinclair did not take that as a good sign. She walked further up the central corridor; there were no worms about. Just a splattering of a dozen or so freshly killed from what must have been a frantic battle.

    What compelled the crew to go without me? Did they intend to do so all along?

    She went down the stairs that were now on her right that led to a set of corridors directly into the server room hub. When she came to the first cross section, she found the first body, lying in the center.

    It was VJ. His body was shredded in severe lacerations, with the filament of flechettes surrounding him.

    It looked like an ambush where his attention was forced to be concentrated in front of him, and he got flanked on the other two sides.

    Sinclair double-checked the 10 mm she held in her hand. She doubted that there were any more of the flechettes still hanging around, and the large gun was likely not the best weapon to use against them. Several 12-gauge shells lie on the floor nearby VJ''s body, but his weapons had been stripped off of him.

    Her hands began to shake. She was not prone to fear, or at least allow it to affect her, but Sinclair had not been feeling herself of late. Even her stomach was rattled.

    As she made her way closer to the server room, the sound of Felicit¨¦ moaning very lightly, almost breathlessly, echoed down the hallway. Sinclair was strangely comforted by the sound of another human voice.

    Even a terrorist like Felicit¨¦ Paz, the notorious Grim.

    At the server door entrance, the doors had been ripped apart. A body lay right in the midst of the doorway. It was headless, but she could tell right away by the bulk it had been Marco. He had been attempting to flee when his head had been ripped off.

    Her newfound affections caused Sinclair''s heart to sink. She fell on her knees and regurgitated her last meal at his corpse''s feet.

    Then, Sinclair stood still, searching for any hint that the dragon was still around. All she heard was the breathing and moaning of Felicit¨¦ nearby. She could see into the server room; the doors were too narrow for the dragon to get through. That was her only comfort in the current situation.

    She crouched down further and leaned over to get a better look inside. She suspected the dragon would be lying in wait if it was still around.

    Light beamed from above the distant spot that Sinclair surveyed, where the central server room hub formed a three-story-high space, with the stair lift landings and the suspended bridges hung from above.

    However, many were shattered, and some had fallen to the floor. Others were twisted under the central panels of glass, which had been broken through.

    Right above her, two large pipes had been squeezed in. Claw marks dug into the wall and engraved on the fungi surface. Sinclair understood what had occurred now.

    The dragon had lain in wait above the door entrance. Marco was the last to go through. He stood right there under the entrance, and he heard something, got a flash view of the dragon when he tried to dodge Mitra''s jaws before she took his head off.

    It was also evident that the dragon had escaped through the debris above her. Sinclair got back up and made her way towards where Felicit¨¦ lay. It was the same space she had been held by the snakes, but now the densidad event had reformed it into an altar comprised of the same crystallized fungi that covered the stalactites and walls.

    Felicit¨¦ lay in the center of the table. There was a large glass blade driven into her navel. Its handle had been severed off. The scarab that had covered her vagina lay split apart beneath where her legs rested.

    Three more bodies from the Family Sala were strewn about the hub room. Sinclair was in no mood to investigate the gruesome scene, though she felt obligated to do so to ensure that they were not still alive and to render aid if they were.

    Hard to tell for certain, but none appeared to be her lover, Chicco. He lucked out if he never made it back from the cocaine run.

    Which likely meant less time had passed than she assumed.

    As she surveyed the severed remains of the team, she heard from behind her Felicit¨¦''s voice, and from it the single word, "You!"

    "No damn way," Sinclair exclaimed.

    "No damn way what, bitch," asked Felicit¨¦.

    "That any of them survived this."

    The blonde Argentinian laughed at the notion.

    "If you saw what I saw, you would know that is not in the realm of possibility."

    Sinclair turned back around and examined Felicit¨¦ once more. Entirely nude but for the blade that impaled her.

    Felicit¨¦ glared.

    "You want to take me back to your weirdos at Encapsulation and have them hook me up to a bunch of machines to torture me. Don''t even think it. If you want that dragon, you''re going to have to get Elise involved."

    Sinclair ignored the rant as she gaped in wonder.

    "How the fuck are you still alive?"

    To that question, Felicit¨¦ threw her head to the side and sad laughter rapped off beat against her throat, "They will never let me go; no matter how badly I want to die, they will never let me go. I am immortal."

 4.33 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part V El Sabio

    Matzi was headed for an ambush.

    Tas¨¬a kept on his tail, trying to figure out what her favorite little mobster had been up to since he was last a member of her crew.

    There had been a great deal of turnover in the big players on the Vida Escondida scene while she was a prisoner of the Salvage, and he had found a new home team somewhere in that chaos.

    For whomever it was he had cast his fortune, Matzi fulfilled the same function as a walk-around guy like he did for her so many months ago.

    Still, he wore one of his characteristic pinstripe suits, a thin handlebar mustache, and a fedora.

    Tas¨¬a crouched, hidden on the second story roof of a strip mall. To the south, the Densidad ProActiva factory building, where she had executed a tremendously satisfying raid the year before, dominated the salmon-colored beveled mortar that defined the Vida Escondida skyline.

    Out to the west, she spotted the neon-lit commercial district and scattered scrubland that surrounded del Tessa Street. It was her favorite part of the city. There was nothing posh about del Tesse¡ªthe surrounding community that shared the name of the main drag.

    Motels, gambling joints, squat bungalows, liquor stores, guys selling gray market moddies and tacos out of their vans, automotive repair garages, gun shops, shooting ranges, parks of minihome stacks, and custom order assembly plants spread out along the roadways.

    Tas¨¬a turned her attention back to the ambush-in-progress that caught her eye in the mid-distant shadow of the factory to the south, where three skaters were shuffling about the downslope of a rain drainage head duct.

    Their apathetic circling around was the lack of action that caught Tas¨¬a''s attention even before she put a scope on them. They barely feigned interest in their sport of timed board kicks that twisted and slammed over the sloped duct grills.

    Obviously, it was something they had done hundreds of times before, but the lack of energy caused one lad to bust his ass.

    The crew was distracted; constantly they threw glances over to the strip mall, impatiently waiting for someone.

    Were they spotters? Or, waiting on a call to get into position for a takedown?

    She spotted hidden in the folds of their loose clothing the outline of knife handles.

    Tas¨¬a had to peek through the scope to figure out these were just simple switchblades. Their slightly larger alpha operator wore a bandage over his right ear. He was suited up a bit differently, too. His socks were woven thick, and a fastener connected to a set of kneepads.

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes blurred as she detected beneath the white sock''s woolen material an odd shape.

    She wiped at her eyeballs. Lack of sleep was making the balls feel dry as dust. Sand gritted against both bottom lids.

    Not the time for this shit!

    She refused to inject the liquid vellocet she originally intended for the now unemployed office manager Leeza Donada until the NeoPalm heist was in motion; otherwise, the energy boost from the methamphetamine might have gone to waste.Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

    Tas¨¬a had a quarter of her water bottle still filled. She doused her palm and wiped her eyes before shaking the drowsy feeling off.

    Reestablishing eye visual with her target, she was not able to make heads or tails of the object underneath the sock. Tas¨¬a flipped the Katy Lieds on to record in analysis mode. To save time, she narrowed down the search criteria to an assumption of hidden weaponry.

    The object showed in-screen as a neatly compact shock grappler. It could throw a chain four meters out that gripped on a limb before administering a debilitating shock.

    Nasty bit of tech; the Katy Lieds gave her a price and ETA delivery time for the product of two hours as it asked her in subdermal mode if she would like to make a purchase.

    Tas¨¬a chuckled. Specialist software aside, operative equipment also costs a little extra to keep commercial applications off the devices. She didn''t bother with a streamlined customization. In her mind, this was a short-term mission done off the cuff.

    Directly below her, people shuffled around a hyperactive commercial district. Matzi pretended to be distracted as he mingled at an optical frames kiosk.

    Matzi used the many reflective surfaces of the kiosk to locate his tail. From his tensed-up neck and forward lean that added a leer to his gaze, she surmised he wasn''t just checking his six; he was certain that someone was following him.

    Matzi didn''t have her advantage of an overhead view; she caught sight of the operatives following Matzi near to instantly.

    Two thugs, a pair of females, chatted together and walked slowly while nibbling sushi rolls from infolded containers. They were pretty good at maintaining cover.

    But they were the only ones in the moving crowd who halted as Matzi approached the mirror-surfaced kiosk. They shifted left to avoid being sighted, not realizing Matzi was expecting twelve people to pass him within a set time count.

    He would note who was missing. Tas¨¬a only knew this because Matzi taught her the technique.

    Once again, as she studied this pair, her Katy Lieds told her what the contours beneath her target''s jackets meant in terms of weaponry. Each carried a ?korpion vz C33. A somewhat more compact variant from the Twentieth Century model Tas¨¬a had lay claim to in Villa Marr¨®n.

    She kept the excitement on the down low. No girly squeals at a theft prospect. Tas¨¬a was out of anyone''s view, but not out of sound range.

    It would be nice to acquire a replacement for the ?korpion she had lost, but it was a distraction from her mission.

    And her sleep-deprived mind was prone to distraction, but before she even entertained settling down for the evening . . .

    It''s morning T! People are here for their breakfast sushi rolls served with hard-boiled eggs before going off to work.

    . . . she needed to recruit Matzi. The only member she was able to save from being ensnared in Fiona ''Birddog'' Caza''s betrayal.

    Matzi was on the move again. He was definitely headed across a little park adjacent to the drainage ducts.

    Glancing back again, the two thugs cased this change in the scenario with more deliberative professionalism than Tas¨¬a assumed them to be capable of.

    They worked a wedge against the crowd to force their way through them.

    Similar dress and body build.

    Her Katie Lieds updated the search with more info. Custom-built machine pistols specced for the Czech Special Operations Team Sametov¨¦ Indigo.

    ?korpions! Irregular issued ?korpions at that!

    Tas¨¬a cursed her own na?vet¨¦. This was not a pair of thugs that she scoped. They behaved like an extraction team.

    Tas¨¬a needed to act before anything happened to Matzi. Perhaps, if she wounded one of the skaters, it would force everyone to withdraw from their chase, and Matzi could slip away.

    Calm your tits, Tas¨¬a admonished herself. Her gun was too big a caliber for mere flesh wounds.

    It needed to be a nonlethal takedown and not break her cover, but the .357 Iconoclastic was loud.

    Think fast!

    That meant mayhem. Tas¨¬a sifted through her fanny pack, where four thumb-sized flashbangs were clipped. She plucked one out, rolled over to the gables, tossed the grenade in the trashcan beside the lead operative just as she threw in her remaining sushi roll, and rolled back into cover.

    Even as she got back into position, Tas¨¬a had the .357 Iconoclastic Revolver readied. She lined the sight quickly to time her shot with the explosion below.

    Right then, the alpha operator stood on his board, scratching at his bandaged ear. Matzi running towards him got his attention. The young man reached down while carefully balanced on the board and pulled out the shock grappler.

    She aimed at the weapon, now exposed off to the side of the shin, so there was little chance to injure the punk beyond shrapnel toss.

    Tas¨¬a eased her index finger onto the trigger. She heard the flash grenade go off, and then . . . through brain fog she heard herself snore.

    A familiar whispery laugh disturbed her sleep but did not bring her out of it.

 4.34 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    The laughter faded as Tas¨¬a struggled to open her eyes. Midnight blue sky with sharp pinpoints of starlight fluttered in view.

    A plane of clouds drifted by. No, the gray shapes did not drift as she should have perceived the event above her.

    No, instead, the clouds flickered from east to west.

    Though it occurred nearly instantaneously in her perception, to her chilled heart''s revelation, the floating clouds had to have taken several minutes to get from one end of her field of view to the other.

    She felt helplessly in the grip of something momentous and comprised of a higher order than herself. From toe to head, her flesh burned in cascading waves of pain.

    She smelled of sizzling meat, and the irritant of smoke pressed inside her nose.

    Am I on fire?

    A rude answer was spat out between the stutter of laughter.

    "No. That is the detritus, the accumulated shit, being purged from your soul."

    To her left side, the giggling chuckle of a rude lad, and then to her right, the low, calm, whispered hectoring of a girl.

    "You finally remembered us after all these years. We were the best of friends once, del Alma-Gris. You willingly introduced us to Namesake. From there we tutored her well."

    It was the Dark-Eyed Ones, Gemini?s and Geminetta at her side.

    Tas¨¬a thought of the memory of her aunt these two pressed upon her and how they manipulated that memory to include themselves in her fond childhood reminiscence.

    She felt a disgust for the two entities as she thought back over the incident.

    She heard the giggle of a young woman echo through her mind.

    A beautiful sound that thrilled her young self. She was three again. It came from a patio three stories up above her. It was her favorite person in the world.

    With a speed other children her age had trouble accomplishing as they walked upon the ground, Tas¨¬a climbed the jagg¨¦d stonework that formed the apartment building wall. She slipped over to the patio rail.

    Her three-year-old self hunched on the long support bar while wishing she had a tail to wrap around it.

    Aunt Tatiana stretched along the length of a reclining chair as she sunbathed. Her head jerked up when she saw the girl grinning at her.

    The woman brushed the long strands of brownish blonde hair out of her eyes as she grinned back at Tas¨¬a.

    "Spider monkey! You did not just climb up that wall, did you?"

    "Yes''m, Namesake, I did."

    The young woman rose up from the recliner. She wore only red bikini bottoms as she could expect perfect privacy behind the dense latticework along the patio railing for herself and her guests.

    "Namesake? Is that what you''re calling me now, and not Auntie Tatiana? Do you even know what Namesake means?"

    "It means you. Mama says it means you."

    Tatiana picked her up from the rail and held her up against her boobs. Hugging her tight.

    "Spider Monkey, what am I going to do with you?"

    The Russian woman leaned over the patio table and turned up a radio. She started dancing with Tas¨¬a in her arms. Bouncing her up and down as the girl giggled.

    Aunt Tatiana''s guests, a pair of scrawny, black-eyed ones, sat together on the other chair, watching, impassively.

    "I guess we dance," she answered Tatiana.

    "That is right; we dance. If I am Namesake, then who are you?"

    "I''m your Spider Monkey!"

    Back in the present on the roof of the kiosks bind, the Dark-Eyed Ones'' presence, picking through her thoughts, felt like fingernails descending slowly down a chalkboard.

    Get out of my head with those fabrications!

    "It is not false," said Gemini?s.

    "We''ve done nothing to touch it up," affirmed Geminetta.

    Keep blabbing on and on, rude ones. We were never friends. In my earliest years, the Cull Spore Invasion had yet to occur.

    Tas¨¬a felt a gentle palm patting her forehead; Geminetta spoke as her hand moved in circles against Tas¨¬a''s flesh.

    "Oh, na?ve child . . . We didn''t just come into being ex nihilo . . . with the Grand Arrival. We''ve been around, influencing matters great and small, for some time now."

    An odd tingle lingered even after the Dark-Eyed One removed her hand from Tas¨¬a''s forehead.Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

    Fighting through the paralysis, Tas¨¬a managed to grit her teeth.

    So cryptic! Your kind always speaks so damned cryptically. Meaninglessly. Like a random, programmed index of non sequiturs, because that is all you are: computations!

    Her hatred for AI had grown genuine over the previous few months.

    But in response, Geminetta''s laughter was as gentle as it was condescending.

    "Not at all, del Alma-Gris. We are made of life stuff, just as you are. You think that we were created in a laboratory; we were not.

    "Your engineers merely hastened the speed in which we think and organize. We have been in a symbiotic relationship with mankind for eons."

    Tas¨¬a stared on in contempt. Much have the people of the Quadra learned of the conspiracies that affected their lives over the past three decades through bits and pieces that have been exposed.

    But what else could the entities possibly say? The overlords of the world, who were even above the Salvage, had their engineers build a glass onion of lies to deceive people into becoming Manifested agents to advance their designs on humanity.

    Tas¨¬a was having none of it.

    Prattle on. It is not like you have a choice about any of this. That would take an agency directing your actions that you lack, Geminetta.

    The Dark-Eyed One shook her head, bemused.

    "You simply refuse to accept the obvious. You saw with your own eyes a change in one lost soul from ghoul to golden, and you saw how Namesake is much more than golden, but even still you refuse to accept what I am telling you. But you will come to understand."

    As Geminetta leaned over her, Tas¨¬a smelled the sharp scent of dry leaves and mammalian sweat. Geminetta''s eyes, though still two dark pools, changed in appearance; the hair on her brows was now light brown, and Geminetta''s face was now covered in fur. She was no longer the severely pretty Goth with jet black hair and a pale complexion; the Dark-Eyed One had indeed morphed into something else.

    On her other side, Tas¨¬a noticed Gemini?s'' head hovering over her.

    She wanted to spit in his face, but the muscular control wasn''t there to make it happen.

    "Have you forgotten G ''n'' G?" He asked impossibly through the lips of the monkey he now resembled with his unmistakable cowlick curved above his brow. Her friend G from so long ago.

    Geminetta resembled her other spider monkey friend, also named G.

    You fake-ass bastards, this can only be an illusion. Ridiculous! Too over the top, even for nanospore entities.

    This had gone on too long already. She needed to dispel the Dark-Eyed Ones who, for whatever reason, decided to fuck with her in the middle of a critical juncture.

    Just like the last two times she had met them.

    Tas¨¬a held her diaphragm still and twitched it. The familiar burning vapors steamed out of her nostrils.

    She heard the Modality''s voice.

    ¡ªTas¨¬a, no! You are playing into -

    Its voice suddenly cut off. Her body grew warm. Along Tas¨¬a''s extremities, the sizzling and popping continued.

    Gemini?s chortled in his familiar bratty tone, "That voice in your head is the shit that mars your soul that I spoke of needing to be cleansed out of you."

    Geminetta''s hand, now once again human, lay on her chest.

    "Relax. It will be all over soon. Then we can show you what needs to be done once you acquire your third eye."

    That explained the odd feeling on her forehead where the skin felt clammy. Something was taking shape there.

    Fuck me to tears, she cursed herself in a sudden fit of self-loathing.

    Tas¨¬a remembered her vow to never be put in a position of helplessness again. Yet, here, after getting caught off guard, she was in the throes of sleep paralysis with the Dark-Eyed Ones doing whatever they may please to her.

    Come on, Tas¨¬a, think!

    "Stop with the struggle.You will attract it," Gemini?s said, irritatedly.

    Geminetta shot a glance his way intended to shut him up.

    Tas¨¬a did not notice until now, but her right boot banged into the tin surface of the roof.

    More than any other part of her body and limbs, the foot inside the leather felt as if it was on fire.

    A feeling of thrilled elation coursed up from the pit of her stomach. But she soon realized, though it responded to her anger, she couldn''t control the limb.

    I am not giving in. You can only do what you want to me only with my cooperation.

    Geminetta lowered her head closer to Tas¨¬a''s own.

    "Now, who told you such a silly folk tale?"

    It is consistent with the data and behavioral models.

    The typically soft-spoken Dark-Eyed One laughed loudly.

    "Data and models based entirely on conjecture. We are a black box for your kind. You can only see what goes in and what comes out, but you have no idea of what happens in between."

    Geminetta stood up, her hands confidently at her waist.

    "Enough of this nonsense. The proof is right there. I have already given you a third eye. Open it; now look over there," the Black-Eyed One pointed towards the water ducts, "to the Cistern of Souls."

    A tremendous itch built up in the middle of Tas¨¬a''s forehead. A scale over the eye puffed up and scattered in the wind, and she could now see through it in a vision that seemed ethereal, but she understood merely bounced through the circuitry of nanospores dense like pollen in the air.

    Especially the night air, as it was free of the harsh rays of ultraviolet beating down on the chitinous cellular surface of spore molecules, and they thrived.

    Her vision sought out the place beneath the water ducts Geminetta pointed at without any prodding necessary.

    Under the thin layer of asphalt where the three youths roamed on skateboards, clay was packed tight in nine meters of space above a vast-sized chamber. Dozens of green glowing ascospores floated at random about the expanse, providing the main source of light.

    Along the chamber wall, mold of mauve and violet hues glittered on spiraling drainage ducts made of some inexplicable quartz that possessed a lightly golden glow of its own.

    Inside the drains were strange detritus chunks bearing a glistening olive tone. They flowed down the drainage system into a fountain below that Tasia could hear a gentle chugging splash, but she could not yet see.

    The chunks reminded her of fingunt, the meta-material.

    Geminetta smiled proudly.

    "Have you ever wondered what happens to our kind, what you call nanospores, when our energia is expended? We collect here.

    "It is no coincidence that that factory is placed right there to gather up our depleted mass and repurpose it into fingunt."

    "Sister," Gemini?s called out to get Geminetta''s attention. "It is drawing closer."

    Geminetta squinched her eyes tight.

    "Just a few minutes more is all we need!"

    Gemini?s pleaded:

    "We don''t have¡ª."

    The sudden shriek of Mel''s high-pitched ''cah!'' ruptured the air. Even below, where people shopped in the colorful kiosks, unknowing of the subterfuge just a few meters above, gasps spilt out from the crowd.

    "Del Alma-Gris," Geminetta called to her. The Dark-Eyed One stared, intensely. "Don''t let your hatred of our kind blind you. Down there in the Cistern and further along in the surrounding caverns are answers that you are seeking."

    Tas¨¬a heard a thump. Gemini?s fell to the tin roof surface. Ichorous liquid scattered out from his jet-black hair.

    In the same instance, Mel swooped back up in the air past him.

    Geminetta grabbed his hand.

    "It is time for us to leave now, brother."

    The two of them dissipated into orange mist just as Mel swooped down upon them for a second attack. He let out a victory ''cah!'' as he changed course to hover over the roof above her.

    Before Tas¨¬a could shake off the numbness and rise up, Mel landed on her chest. He let out a reassuring sound similar to the staccato of a cat purr, but it also came with a dissonant note of warning.

    ¡ªTrust me, no matter what, was the crow''s intended message.

    Mel thrust his beak in the middle of her forehead, punched through the eyeball, and bit into its tendons with a powerful grab.

    For Tas¨¬a, it was a moment of intense pain. She gasped loudly.

    The crow plucked out the eyeball and spat it out to her side.

    She turned her head for a hard appraisal of the viscera that was all that remained of the ruined globe and whispered, "Santa Muerta, profana, most unholy."

 4.35 Chapter Four: The Abandoned Life

    There should have been a gouge in the middle of her forehead, but nothing of the sort remained of the wound. Merely a bit of blood, and not much at that. She wiped it off with the back of her hand.

    Likely, the third eye was merely a programmed bit of fingunt that the Dark-Eyed One, Geminetta, set upon her forehead and programmed it to sync with her brain.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. She had no time for this idle speculation. The nanospore entities were not her main problem at the moment. She needed to catch up with Matzi, or at least find out what had become of him while she remained unable to do anything about the skater hooligans waiting for him.

    She really needed his help; there was none better at recruitment than him, and she also needed his advice.

    Getting the NeoPalm was going to take at least a few accomplices to keep her out of trouble; preferably operatives familiar with motorsport, given Tas¨¬a''s Alfa Romeo HybrClydis was parked within the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority''s own Junker Pit, on the premises of their official drag strip.

    The Junker Pit was a testing facility for rebuilt vehicles, run by a squad of mechanical engineers known as the Demon Crew. They were going to be a substantial problem, as Tas¨¬a had tangled with them before in her drag racing days.

    She breathed in and took in her surroundings.

    Someone was attempting to climb up the building. It was a solidly reinforced concrete two-story structure with full modular back-end support for up to six kiosk stands.

    Tas¨¬a''s scream during her fight against entity-induced sleep paralysis attracted unwanted attention.

    Just as she focused on a countermeasure against the curious invader, on the opposite end of the display front side, she heard a boot slam into the beam support holding together a kiosk stand.

    Followed by a loud clang and gasp of pain as someone smashed her back against the ground.

    Mel fluttered away deftly from the incident as he dropped a fingertip out of his mouth.

    Did it warrant that degree of violent reaction?

    Tas¨¬a wondered, alarmed at the Nightwing.

    On the other end of the front side, another person was still attempting to climb up the wall.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

    Who could it be?

    The Czech Sametov¨¦ Indigo agents? Are they now more curious about me than they are in capturing Matzi?

    Tas¨¬a crawled into a turning position and then quietly rolled over to the opposite end of the tin roof above where the woman fell.

    Still climbing up, and kneeling awkwardly positioned atop the furthest kiosk, was a Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority security patrolman.

    His armor was light, but the polymer support pads still restricted his maneuverability.

    It bought her time.

    She tilted her head against a rounded display holder clamp that kept the lit-up neon out of her eyes and her own head obscured from view at ground level.

    Tas¨¬a finally peered downward.

    Oh . . . shit! She nearly gasped out loud.

    "What have I done?" she whispered rhetorically between her teeth.

    Spread out limp by the trashcan, one of the Czech (she had to assume from the gun, stylistic choices, and demeanor) Sametov¨¦ Indigo agents was being treated by a pair of EMS medics crouched at her side, but to Tas¨¬a''s eyes, the agent appeared ghostly drained of all life.

    The woman must have had a heart attack when the flashbang went off, Tas¨¬a concluded.

    She regarded the scene just beneath her. The other agent lay on her back, the ?korpion a few yards away. Her bloodied hand gripped up against her chest.

    Her other hand waved off a second security patrolman who held a P226 repeater pistol in .357 Sig ammo gripped tight and steadily aimed at her.

    He asked about the ?korpion, and, from his tone, possessed no illusions of why it was in her possession.

    Tas¨¬a checked the other agent again. Just before the paramedics covered up the body, she spotted three closely grouped bullet holes that Tas¨¬a missed previously due to one paramedic being crouched in her line of sight.

    There had been a firefight between security and the Czech rendition and extraction team.

    That explained Mel''s own violent turn of action. He was merely assisting the patrolmen.

    She was the catalyst for all that went down, but now Tas¨¬a felt that her conscience was fairly clear in these matters. The two women were tempting fate by their aggressive actions in pushing through the crowd.

    That must have drawn in the patrolmen''s attention.

    Still, Tas¨¬a needed to clear the rooftop before being discovered. Flipping over the back side of the building seemed to be the most logical answer, but with a glance in that direction into the darkness, a vague weariness grew inside her and made her shiver.

    No, she was now quite certain that there was something there in that direction that she did not like.

    Did the Dark-Eyed Ones want to continue their conversation in a place they could gather nearby? To that, Tas¨¬a was fine. She would like answers to why they incessantly wanted to recruit her to their cause.

    Most unlikely it was them inhabiting the dark, however, with Mel hovering above.

    Then Tas¨¬a spotted the cause of her unease. In the distance was a building downtown marked in neon pink¡ªEgliona''s.

    It appeared to be part of the facade for a nightclub.

    The fuck! Another factor hanging over my head? No, I''m getting Demona back. That is the only thing I am dealing with until I succeed or fail.

    Before Tas¨¬a had any time to study the domicile of her nemesis any further and weigh her options, two elbows appeared on the awning shoulder.

    It was too late to run; the patrolman''s head peeked up, and he spotted her.

 4.36 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    At the sight of the patrolman, Tas¨¬a did not hesitate to react.

    And act.

    "Oh, thank God that it''s one of you," Tas¨¬a exclaimed, breathlessly.

    She peered down with a quick glance. Did she appear in any way conspicuous? To that end, Tas¨¬a was relieved that her weapons were well hidden.

    The dead Czech agent was on her mind when she considered how the patrolman may react to the sight of weapons on her.

    "Those two women goons scared the ever-living shit out of me. I came up here when they pulled out those awful machine guns."

    She feigned a near catatonic expression. It was the best she could do. As much as she would like to sob to gain his trust, it just wasn''t an emotional state that came naturally for Tas¨¬a.

    It just wasn''t in her.

    "I heard you scream," the patrolman answered as he pulled himself over the awning shoulder and squatted directly across from Tas¨¬a. "Just as I shot the purp, and she dropped."

    "Oh, I saw. It was so . . . frightful."

    Tas¨¬a held her arms together and affected a nervous disposition.

    The patrolman shrugged while giving her a quick once-over.

    The badge hanging from the left side of his contoured chest plate identified him as Corporal of 1st Rank D. Barro Rojas.

    As he made himself comfortable, a pair of polyhedral dice hovered in a spin between his fingers. They seemed to defy gravity. Though Tas¨¬a was aware of the conductivity trick that sustained their hover so long as they were near a warm surface, her eyes still disbelieved what was witnessed.

    Rojas guffawed at her reaction.

    "A habit I picked up when I quit smoking. Shootings bring back that craving something fierce."

    Did shooting incidents tend to happen that often? Did Corporal Rojas have an overactive trigger finger?

    Tas¨¬a assessed: Rojas likely patrolled del Tesse as well as Industria Saliente, the never properly named burb they now inhabited, so the patrolman has seen action whether hair-triggered or not.

    When he met her eyes as he began to speak again, caution evaded her emotional state. His eyes were dark green, inquisitive pools; she also assessed.

    "I was afraid your reaction was indicative of an accomplice reacting to one of her own getting shot."

    Tas¨¬a gasped dramatically; her hand spread in a tight clasp against her chest.

    "No. Not at all!"

    Corporal Rojas shook his head with his cheeks held in, firmly stiff. He was suppressing a chuckle, obviously at her expense.

    His index finger was at first held up stridently to make sure he had her attention, but then, with deliberative attenuation, he pointed to her boots.

    "You look quite posh in that outfit, Senora del Alma-Gris. How did you climb up here in those boots? Not quite designed for climbing now, are they?"

    Tas¨¬a blinked several times. He already had a run on her identification, or he simply recognized her from the street life of Vida Escondida.

    She wasn''t exactly an unknown quantity in this city.

    "Excuse me?"

    This time he did not suppress the chuckle, but he let it out full throttle, and very much at her expense.

    "Keep your hands where I can see them. I already know you are lying about why you are up here. The mobile cameras show you casing this very spot several minutes before the two Czech agents arrived. What I don''t know, my renowned second-story liberationist friend, is why you are really up here."If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    Tas¨¬a frowned tightly. Now she spotted the signal activity in his contacts through her own Katy Lieds analytic mode. He had her well surveilled with a constant infostream update from an AI assisting him.

    "Damn," she uttered, feeling defeated.

    "Damn is right. Start talking."

    She considered doing a backflip and wall catch to then slide downward, but then she would be a fugitive on the run from every drone, car, and footpad on patrol in the city as soon as he called it in. She didn''t need any more trouble with the VEAA than what she was already in.

    Coming clean about the more minor matters of her escapades might get her off the hook if they had more important concerns to tend to, as she suspected, given the dead body below, they did.

    Tas¨¬a thrust her chest out, waved her open palms, and let out an exasperated breath to signal her capitulation.

    A limited hang-out it was to be then.

    "All right, all right. I''m looking for a friend who I strongly suspected would be coming through here, and I needed to be discreet about it because there was a chance he was being watched."

    Corporal Rojas nodded sternly, as if she merely confirmed what he already knew.

    "That turns out to be a safe assumption. Any idea why a foreign intelligence agency is invading our sovereignty to get at your friend, who''s just a low-level flunky in a criminal organization?"

    Low-level flunky? It was Tas¨¬a''s turn to feign indifference and keep her tongue firmly planted to her cheek. A walk-around guy, caminador, was typically the highest-ranked enforcer in a mid-twenty-first-century organization.

    It was the caminador''s job to shake the tree, then point to the fallout for the men who answered to him, but there was no reason to expect beat security to know any of that.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, hoping nothing in her expression disabused him of this false notion.

    "I have no idea, sorry. I haven''t seen him in several months. This for me is all about reestablishing contact. I heard he was laying low but kept to this part of town."

    Her scant bit of intel came from the notes left to her from Demona Helo?ste''s backup plan.

    "Your friend has been, how to put it, flirting with disaster of late, but it appears you are not well informed on that."

    Corporal Rojas was condescending, but deliberately so. He was testing her reaction.

    "Care to enlighten me?"

    The patrolman shook his head.

    "I don''t think so. You have been very busy this evening, Senora del Alma-Gris. Since the time you arrived in our fair city approximately nine hours ago, a vehicle sequester was necessary due to you bringing in explosive materials into Vida Escondida. After which, you conducted a lethal excursion with Lieutenant Colonel Sol, an internationally recognized war criminal inexplicably allowed to operate throughout the Quadra. That was followed by a breaking and entering that was authorized by my very own department onto a private contractor to the VEAA''s property, and I find that one to be very odd, indeed."

    She gave him her own once-over glance. Clearly, Colonel Rojas did not know when matters fell above his pay grade.

    Would he have shot the Czech agent if he was aware of her status beforehand? Such a matter could cause quite a few diplomatic problems if the Salvage had given permission to operate to the Czech.

    She was getting the feeling that Colonel Rojas was the type of loose cannon who may have even been aware of that kind of special circumstance but chose to ignore it.

    Tas¨¬a humored Colonel Rojas delusions about his place in the scheme of things and protested without a show of indignation.

    She even bit her lip to show vulnerability.

    "Not at all; my rental vehicle was wrongfully acquired by that subcontractor of yours."

    Colonel Rojas shook his head.

    "Nevertheless, usually that takes hours, even days, for our legals to approve. You got authorization on the spot; someone intervened on your behalf."

    Of course I did, you idiot!

    But she kept her calm.

    Tas¨¬a shrugged but said nothing in response.

    "Let''s continue. That is not the end of your escapades this evening. You were tracked going into the Grosse Prix Cyber Security facility just before things went dark there. We do not like the looks of that at all. Care to explain?"

    Tas¨¬a considered his own refusal to answer her question.

    "I don''t think so. Surely, you know who else was there?"

    "You were allowed to leave in the middle of their execution of a marque, that we have on record. The bounty hunters left, then matters there seem to have taken a very nasty turn."

    Tas¨¬a glummed up her puss mouth. She hated that she needed to take Rojas seriously to get real information out of him.

    "What do you mean?"

    "Nanospore activity follows you. This sort of thing occurs a lot for you, doesn''t it?"

    "No more than usual for the Quad, I would guess."

    The patrolman cocked his chin.

    "Up until now, you have seemed to be keeping things truthful as far as I can ascertain."

    He pointed to Mel, who watched them from a billboard post.

    "That Nightwing hangs around you for a reason, Senora del Alma-Gris. I suspect visitations for you from the Nanospore Entities are anything but merely common."

    Tas¨¬a gave Corporal Rojas a stern warning with her eyes.

    "Until now, I could connect your questions to legitimate VEAA concerns, officer, but that question definitely falls outside of your purview. I still have a friend to catch up with; am I free to go?"

    Corporal Rojas chuckled and pointed with a nod behind her. There was something in that direction neither could see, but his infostream kept him abreast.

    He stood up.

    "I''ve got my own business to catch up on before I can call it a night, but you have friends waiting in that direction."

    With that, the patrolman zipped the dice up in a pants pocket, and then he began his descent back down the awning.

    Anxiously, Tas¨¬a stood up and turned only to be relieved when she caught sight of a van in a nearby parking zone and the two friends within it.

    Anneb¨¦l Duarte sat in the driver''s seat with a radio relay headset, speaking to someone, and Sachmilli Cuervo napped beside her.

    Not only relieved, but ecstatic, she felt when Mel cahed out a high-pitched chirp to convey Anneb¨¦l''s greeting.

 4.37 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a shuffled through the diminishing crowd with her feet planted on the street walk. There was still the spectacle of the dead Czech now being handled by an investigative team. What remained, the hustling bodies at her sides, belonged to those who had places to be at in the nearby commercial and industrial facilities.

    As she approached Sachmilli Cuervo''s van, the back doors opened in invitation. Tas¨¬a sprinted across the street, dodging through self-steered Vespas, and small cars popular with those who lived in the nearby apartment district.

    As soon as she jumped in the van, Tas¨¬a heard Anneb¨¦l raise her voice.

    "It wasn''t me."

    Tas¨¬a leaned down on her haunches against the floorboard and steadied her breathing.

    "You''ll have to be more specific."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head vigorously. Her facial profile appeared more angular than usual due to her red hair being pinned back.

    "The explosives found inside the HybrClydis. That was not my doing."

    Tas¨¬a leaned her head back.

    "I kinda figured. Mani Montrose who runs the tracks for the VEAA said there were four hundred pounds of explosives in our baby. Since little bitty me, who retrieved the plastique, can''t lift much more than my own body and a fanny pack full of Noog-Noogs, I know it wasn''t the same stuff.

    "Nor would it have served the same purpose that you intended for it.

    "Not saying you are cheap, mon amis, but I don''t see you spending sixty thousand on plastique just to see Sal Javierra shit his pants."

    Then Tas¨¬a gave Anneb¨¦l an inquisitive gaze.

    "So what brings you here?"

    Tas¨¬a noticed that between herself and the driver seats, both of which were now in a swiveled position facing her, sat Sachmilli''s ice cooler.

    She eyed it longingly for a solid second before he propped the top open with his toe. Several bottles of blue-labeled Quilmes floated in water and ice.

    Tas¨¬a thanked him with a smile and a nod as she twisted the top off. She gulped down half the content before she let out a sigh of satisfaction, followed by a mannerless belch.

    Tas¨¬a determined her nerves were still too shot after the series of events that occurred on the rooftop for her to effect any sort of cuteness that would soften her outer disposition.

    To that she shrugged and tilted the bottle for another chug.

    Anneb¨¦l politely waited as the little thief, or ''liberationist,'' as Corporal Rojas mockingly noted her preferred term, finished the full bottle before she answered Tas¨¬a''s question.

    "Sachmilli''s network is quite robust in Vida Escondida. He got word of our HybrClydis being impounded and sent Mel out to gather intel; the bird harked on some alarming matters and notified me to pick up Sachmilli and book it to Vida Escondida."

    Tas¨¬a chuckled.

    "So Mel is in charge of this operation?"

    Sachmilli, she had noted, watched her with a cool gaze and answered with an equally cool response.

    "He knows more about what''s going on than anyone else."

    Am I on the outs?

    "What''s the problem?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "You are here in Vida Escondida going vida loca, stirring up a mess, chasing your tail, and I asked myself, ''Why?'' for the entire ride here. Then it clicked. You disagree with the central premise of your mission. You don''t really want to save Demona Helo?ste, do you?"

    Tas¨¬a squinched her face hard. Wondering if she made a mistake accepting the beer. She glanced at Sachmilli''s detached demeanor, then back at the cooler.

    Fuck it, she was a thief by nature. Invitation, or not.

    "I''m risking life and limb to see this through," Tas¨¬a stated defiantly as she grabbed another bottle of beer.

    "Do you feel that you know what Demona''s endgame is?"

    "To be honest. Not really. But she is dying, and I have a chance to save her."

    Sachmilli nodded and looked to his own hands with a stern frown.

    "I get that, Tas¨¬a, I really do. Kleptomania aside, fundamentally, you are a good person. She has, however, tasked you with the impossible. Do you know how she got her brain disease in the first place?"The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    Tas¨¬a considered the tone of Sachmilli''s question if it hinted that he knew of the virtual throupling Tas¨¬a shared with Demona and Beauregard in her romantic life.

    He definitely considered her current actions to be tainted by an irrational attachment to Demona Helo?ste. That came through loud and clear.

    "To be honest, no, I do not. I thought it rude to ask."

    Sachmilli chuckled, bemusedly.

    "Why," he asked.

    "Her appearance at this time must be truly dreadful. Skull plate removed so her brain can grow like a tomato plant up a set of tresses. The cause of it must be embarrassing."

    Sachmilli smiled, with a nod, and his tongue held firm. He decided to partake of his favorite Argentinian lager.

    "What?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Nothing. Your answer reminded me of something an American writer, O''Rourke once said. Idle distraction. Let''s continue."

    Anneb¨¦l gave a not-too-serious punch to Sachmilli''s shoulder.

    "Do you forget I gave you that book?"

    Sachmilli shrugged.

    "No. But out of forty thousand words, how can you assume which phrase I was thinking, unless it occurred to you too?"

    Tas¨¬a beaded her eyes sharply and furrowed her brows. She did not like being talked about. Sachmilli saw her reaction and straightened his back.

    "Tas¨¬a, the phrase that came to my mind is simply this: ''You assume she is a hard-ass prude, but she is just really, really nice. Because you don''t like her, you can''t tell the difference.''"

    "Oh," Anneb¨¦l responded to his explanation. "I was thinking of something much worse. My bad."

    Sachmilli shook his head, aggravated that he had to explain himself but dismissed the need to harp on it.

    "Anneb¨¦l, if you could find a place over there by the water ducts to park the van, we can show our friend what we know."

    As Anneb¨¦l shifted the van into gear, Tas¨¬a''s nerves finally settled, but she now felt drowsiness set in. She shook her head vigorously.

    "You alright there, Tas¨¬a?" Sachmilli asked.

    She grinned gobliny and nodded along.

    "Rethinking the beer. Probably should keep sharp, especially with the entities wanting to invade my dream space."

    "Just a month ago you fried them out with LSD, right?"

    When Tas¨¬a acknowledged it with a nod, Sachmilli reached into his flannel shirt pocket and produced two pills.

    "I stopped for some trucker speed for our cross-country road trip. I wound up taking a nap instead."

    Tas¨¬a downed the two pills with a gulp of beer and thought of their previous conversation that Anneb¨¦l interrupted with a distraction.

    Though Tas¨¬a was still drowsy, it occurred to her.

    Did she make Sachmilli change the subject on purpose? Is there something Anneb¨¦l does not want me to know?

    Tas¨¬a cast her doubts to the side as she was in no mental state to sort through the matter as sleep deprivation typically nudged her towards a state of paranoia. Instead, she asked Sachmilli a follow-up question.

    "Do you know the answer to that question that you asked me? What is Demona''s endgame?"

    Sachmilli nodded with his eyebrow raised. He glanced over to Anneb¨¦l and then back to Tas¨¬a.

    "Spook matters do tend to get sent my way. Helo?ste was in charge of a project to create an interface with the nanospore entities, but it came at cross purposes with the task force assigned to govern the Egliona entity. They call it the Encapsulation Project.

    "There was a clash between the teams that Helo?ste instigated, and it wound up having detrimental repercussions for all of us in the Quadra. The Egliona Entity got loose.

    "As a result, it left Helo?ste both in disciplinary exile and with a disease condition caused by a feedback malfunction in that interface, which she went against orders and tested on herself."

    Tas¨¬a stared at the middle distance with light suddenly rushing into her eyeballs, and her alertness level increasing.

    She could feel blood pumping into them as she gathered her wits to respond.

    "Such a loose cannon. No wonder Demona runs with Kutuzov''s crew. When she was exiled in that tower at the IMCQ, do you think Egliona sought her out?"

    They came to a stop, and Sachmilli stood up. He patted her shoulder.

    "Without a doubt."

    This time, Tas¨¬a wasn''t abrasive when she asked.

    "You think I should step away from all of these affairs with Demona, don''t you?"

    He leaned against the chair in which he sat and gave Anneb¨¦l another look. Anneb¨¦l nodded and then opened the driver''s door.

    "Let me get that catch on the back step," she said.

    Sachmilli could walk just fine, but did not complain about it. Tasia then realized Anneb¨¦l wasn''t doing it to assist Sachmilli.

    She then noticed a long hard case to her left marked with a commercial brand, ''Priority''s Best,'' in English.

    Though she had not noticed the case until now, Tas¨¬a had leaned on it for the entire short trip to the aqueduct.

    She laughed at herself with a shake of the head.

    "At this point, my brain is pretty much gone."

    Sachmilli offered her his hand to help lift her off her haunches.

    "Tas¨¬a. That question you asked me, do I think you should abandon Helo?ste? She is a diabolist, you do know that, correct?"

    Tas¨¬a nodded, "That weighs on my mind as well. She admitted to me that her associations in that respect may have been the result of a seed dream being planted in her mind by outside forces."

    "Just to be clear, White Palace?"

    "Yes. That''s the one."

    Anneb¨¦l opened the back door, and when she caught Tas¨¬a''s eye with her own set, she pointed her chin towards the hard leather case.

    "Tas¨¬a, I know how much you love pretty shiny things that go, ''pew! pew!''"

    The redhead dug in her pocket for a key.

    Sachmilli raised his head to get her attention once more.

    "That question you asked, well, it is complicated. I have not reached a conclusion that would dismiss Helo?ste as being vital in the scheme of things as of yet.

    "Given that matter is up for debate, there is something that I want you and Anneb¨¦l to do¡ªI need you to retrieve Helo?ste''s device, the NeoPalm, and together we''ll do a thorough examination of it to determine where we should go from there."

    Tas¨¬a jumped out of the van and assisted Sachmilli. Though she was anxious to help Anneb¨¦l open the case, she still had questions for the old Sabio.

    With a palm out and fingers stretched, outlining the water ducts whose arched grates made of stone-embedded concrete rose eighteen feet in the air to keep a dampener cover in place over the holding clamps where four pipelines met and a waterfall gushed out to a hidden world below.

    Tas¨¬a turned back towards Sachmilli.

    "So, what are we doing here? The NeoPalm is in the HybrClydis that-a-way."

    Sachmilli folded his arms.

    "You are searching for your former associate, Gabriel Matzi, correct? The youths working for Fiona Caza, the one you call Birddog, opened up the stairwell built into the maintenance shack over there and dragged him into it."

    Tas¨¬a drew up her face apprehensively.

    "The Dark-Eyed Ones, assuming they were not a figment of my dream state, called it the Cistern of Souls down there."

    Sachmilli was amused once more.

    "I always wondered if they had a name for it, but I have long known that down there, there be dragons. And bats! Thousands and thousands of nasty bats!"

 Interlude pt. 1 â€” Rebuffed and Battle Battered in the Cistern of Souls.

    Interlude pt. 1 ¡ª Rebuffed and Battle Battered in the Cistern of Souls.

    Mel grew more impatient as he circled around the perimeter of the district. The little thief was safe for now. She had retreated into Sachmilli''s security van after the interrogation.

    Yet, there was still a presence in the air all throughout the district. A haze flowed through every street corner, like a slow-motion dust devil, errant in purpose.

    Mel had only seen such determination from the spore entities on the occasion they created the fortress outside of Asunci¨®n, where they migrated the Dissapeared just before the nuclear explosion.

    There was no definition in form this time, but he could feel the willful purpose that drove their actions, and it all pushed forth from the hollow beneath the aqueducts.

    Mel flew away from the ducts to unravel where the invisible-to-the-human-eye tendrils led. They flowed outwardly from the falls beneath and touched what seemed like random individuals as the pedestrians hustled and mulled about the nearby streets.

    He tagged with laser pulses those amongst the crowd who could be identified for later study of their inoculation status and biometric signatures.

    With this task complete after tagging three dozen humans, Mel flipped aerially and flew back up a tendril, noting the strong waves of energia bristling against the back of his wings as it flowed through the synapsis that guided the movement of the spirally coils.

    The Nightwing did not like that something out of the ordinary was occurring. Mel mumbled to himself in fretful chirps, for all he could do was observe, collect data, and report.

    He had not been equipped with talon pins on this occasion where he could nick the spores to take samples or use the pins as an extension of his natural defense as circumstances may require.

    As he made it back to the duct pillars where he perched to rest and plot his next move, a cacophonous surging of sound from below jarred him back into flight.

    Mel shivered; it was the song of a dragon.

    He circled the pillars where the song bellowed. Alarmed, Mel tuned up an audio scan for signs of a reaction from the creatures below.

    Mel expected the bats to swarm out in an angry stir that he would have to dodge, but they did not leave the caverns below.

    He spat out in between his beaks in contempt of them. For mammals, they tended to be dumb.

    Or, at least from his own anecdotal experience, Mel thought this to be true.

    Perhaps there were good, smart, and outstanding bats in the world, but he had yet to meet any.

    He shivered for a moment.

    Bats!

    Once outwardly expressed, Mel shook off his phobia to examine what just then caught his eye.

    The two humans closest to the support pillars behaved quite curiously. As in they reacted not at all.

    A male and a female chatted together at a motorized bicycle charging station to his immediate north. They were not reacting at all to the Song of the Dragon even as it thundered on.

    Mel focused on the couple; pulling power from his server support in the security van, he measured the dilative pattern in their eyes, the beat in the woman''s neck, and the reverberation in her ears.

    From these figures, the server AI extrapolated a simulation of what the humans heard.Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

    Their ears made no music of the Dragon''s song. It was mere industrial noise to them.

    Mel raised up in hover to get a higher view that revealed the tendrils were being drawn back into the well below him.

    Then a subdermal command from Sachmilli got his notice.

    ¡ªMeet me at the base of the channel support columns. I''ll fit you for map survey work in the Cistern of Souls.

    Essence, the last word meant. It was a concept that long ago caught Mel''s attention and excited his curiosity about the nature of existence. He had the server''s AI translate dozens of treatises that expounded on the idea.

    It was not an easy task for him; true understanding seemed to elude his perceptions, but Mel was persistent, and the AI was continuously self-correcting¡ªbuilding ever more tangible models of language translation that appealed to the intrensic locution of the Nightwing''s senses.

    Mel went over these works of philosophy, from Plato to Dennett, dozens of times until he felt he reached a basic grasp of the subject matter. Soon he wished to have a conversation with a human.

    Mel swooped down, and once he landed on the foundation supporting the columned pillars as he was commanded, the Nightwing peeked around.

    The Cistern of Souls, Mel wondered. What does this place made of chunky cement block have to do with the vital essence of things?

    Sachmilli approached with the two women, Anneb¨¦l and Tas¨¬a. Their subdermal netting-works shivered silvery. Utterly beautiful to his eyes, the both of them.

    But Mel was forced to adjust the colorband of his sight range so he could focus on their motions. The much littler one was approaching with something in her hand, a Nutty Nut-Nut Noog-Noog bar!

    His favorite Noog-Noog bar.

    She broke a piece off of it. His cah pitched up range in a high twitter in his response. Glad he was, though, that his murder back on the rooftop in Villa Marr¨°n did not see him behaving so undisciplined, but otherwise he did not care.

    Afterall, it was a Nutty Nut-Nut Noog Noog bar!

    As the fey damisela standing before him cooed with pretty-sounding chirps of her own, Mel plucked the first piece of the bar from her fingers.

    He sung for a moment, but a thought occurred to him. Mel got Sachmilli''s attention and asked him to in turn ask the little thief a question.

    "What did he say?" Tas¨¬a asked as she broke off another piece of the candy bar.

    Sachmilli suppressed laughter.

    "He wants to know if you are using the Noog-Noog bar to entice him to fight a dragon on your behalf."

    She squealed and gave Mel a smile in return.

    "Are you my little Sir Percy de Escandia?"

    Only vaguely recollecting the reference, Mel called up the homebase AI, which returned an answer.

    The Nightwing gulped.

    The Black Knight of Camelot?

    So the damsel does expect me to fight the dragon on her behalf.

    His wings shivered, and Sachmilli eyed Mel curiously. His handheld device translated the Nightwing''s emotional state of being at all times.

    "Relax, my friend," Sachmilli began. "I would not send you to fight a dragon. The diagnostics from our administrative breach show that the dragon Mitra is now constrained in a net comprised of USB relay, hooked into it for data extraction. It also happens to drain the dragon of its strength. The next several hours are optimal for accomplishing our goals."

    A shadow encroached from his northeast.

    It was the tall one named Anneb¨¦l, and he knew her well. She shimmied over with the familiar hard leather case, in which she kept his talon pins, in one hand and the key for it in the other.

    For a year, after she took over for the deceased Pablo, killed by guerillas, Anneb¨¦l was his main tender, and only recently had she moved back to her old haunt in Asunci¨®n. The case had not been opened at any time since then.

    Anneb¨¦l threw back the latch hold, and the equipment self-assembled. His eyes were thirsty for the sight of his tools and weapons, even as he continued to be fed bits of candy from the little one.

    Along with the talon pins was an airgun used mostly for emergency tagging purposes. As Anneb¨¦l fitted it along his chest and inserted CO2 rods, she explained why he would need them, though he already knew.

    "If the bats give you trouble, you can use this to clear a path through them. The puff will sting them and force them to scatter."

    Sachmilli called it the blunderbuss. It was a very versatile air gun. The last time used, he and Sachmilli raided a field of mutant coyote. Mel dive-bombed them and applied head shots while old man Cuervo popped them with a Remington long rifle as they tried to scatter.

    Anneb¨¦l elaborated on how she was setting up the gun for him.

    "The default is set to micron flechette quartz for swarm control, but the secondary will switch it out to a .33 slug at 1200 PSI for anything you need to individually take down."

    If Mel had lips, he would be smiling at that moment. His brain was built for scavenging, which made him an excellent investigator, but, even still, he absolutely loved to hunt.

    After she was through fastening the air gun assembly, Anneb¨¦l slipped on his goggled hood. It appeared like a set made of several platinum and silver watch bands holding in place a pair of optical lenses and a groove that extended the instrumentation of the cochlear implants so he would not be dependent on their home base server in the security van.

    It comported to his head sleekly.

    Anneb¨¦l smiled and appraised him.

    "You look so sexy with your hood and gun."

    He fluttered his wings and squawked in approval and communicated back:

    Damn right, my fair sister; I am one sexy beast!

 Interlude pt. 2 â€” Rebuffed and Battle Battered in the Cistern of Souls.

    When Sachmilli and his crew reached the aqueduct''s service door, kitted up in battle gear, Mel lifted up in a vertical swoop and dead dropped through the narrow induction hole.

    He gave the immediate area underground a flyby; when nothing stirred, Mel switched out the functionality of the coned probe attached to the left side of his helm.

    A standard IR lens pushed out to the side, and chilly cryon flowed into the conic sectioned chamber along with the sound amplification unit. Mel lined up a series of maser pulses at the interior side of the door to check for traps.

    Once satisfied from the feedback that there were none waiting on his crew to trip up, Mel relayed, Clear, back to Sachmilli.

    Mel''s next assignment was to find the lead walkway that led to the pump station. He hovered near the connector ports just beneath a set of buttressed arches that held the stairwell firm.

    A spiral ramp circled along the edge of the cistern''s mouth. Due to the swirl of glowing ascospores below, the ramp''s shadowing was stark and harsh.

    Where the ramp ended along a cement floorboard, two bridges jutted out.

    One pointed southeast, and its twin pointed straight north.

    Mel sent a video feed to Sachmilli.

    "Interesting," Sachmilli relayed back to the Nightwing''s voice receiver embedded in the nanotech of the right cochlear implant.

    "Which path leads to the pump house? Any audio clues, Mel?"

    I hear the snoring of a thousand bats.

    The server AI interrupted.

    ¡ªBats identified by species. Currently in hibernation cycle. Recently disturbed by something within the cavern far below. Most likely source for disturbance . . . a retrievas drone now in slumber mode.

    Yvoty, the onboard AI, meant by this the dragon Mitra. Reverse engineering of a captured specimen revealed the origins of the nanospore dragons began with naval warfare drones shot on rail-ballistas at enemy ships to hug on their hulls and take over their electronics before capturing them intact.

    Whatever they were, Mel was relieved he would not have to deal with either the dragon or bats, so it appeared.

    Their assignment seemed quite simple, Mel thought as Sachmilli explained it. Find out where the skate punks were keeping Matzi and retrieve the mobster.

    The most logical structure for which they were aware would be the pump house. Mel listened for physical cues in the flow of fluid and the chug of mechanical devices.

    So far, Mel heard nothing of interest in the audial channels he sorted through. Once more he switched out to another probe unit; this time the Nightwing plugged in the large array quad multiplex of antennas that shot overlapping pulses every five degrees between the polar axis defined by his beak and his tail feathers.

    That was when the insects caught his attention. An invisible swarm twenty yards to his north and downwind had somehow crept up without his notice.

    Yvoty chimed in: Vivi vidros.

    Living Glass. A species of locust that fed off of the remains of dead ascospores.

    With the bats in hibernation, there was nothing to keep the locust population under control.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

    Mel immediately pitched rolled to the southeast. Now the chatter of their wings grew into a frenzy as they zigzagged along his course.

    While he maneuvered, Mel queried the database AI chipped into his right cochlear implant.

    I am not its natural prey; what gives?

    Yvoty answered:

    ¡ªThere is an ongoing telemetry at 2.4GHz between transmitter and receiver parties. Do not take for granted that you are not their natural prey. They remain highly dangerous to flesh on contact.

    Realizing someone sent the locusts to kill him, Mel arched upward in a hyperbolic twist, flipped back, and fired off the quartz flechettes in a tri-burst.

    The first shot smacked into the carapaces with immense frictive-static discharge that spread out like chain lightning across the living glass.

    With the discharge absorbed to the breaking point, the second shot burst forth, and the third one cleared the area out for Mel to fly through.

    It stung mightily against Mel''s flesh as he did so, but fortunately the locusts dissipated from the flechette discharge to the point of evaporation, so he did not suffer cuts, and his hood and sternum plate protected his vitals.

    Sachmilli paged him.

    ¡ªMel? What is happening? Action going on is much too kinetic to follow the feed.

    Mel looked for his people for eyeball confirmation. The three of them were set in position on the landing balcony.

    Mel relayed back:

    Attacked by locusts, those nasty vivi vidros, but I have them temporarily incapacitated. They are controlled by a third party. AI has the culprit party''s coordinates locked in place.

    Light them up with tracer rounds, and I''ll swoop in.

    ¡ªCopy that.

    Mel circled once more; his scanning revealed the swarm was indeed discombobulated by the center mass attack disrupting the transmitter signal.

    He knew not for certain if they could regroup to once again receive the signal, but Mel planned to stay clear of them nonetheless.

    ¡ªGet ready, Mel. Tas¨¬a is downscoping on the party at the moment. She says for you to aim for the one wearing a helmet. The control is in his hands. What? She? Correction: her hands.

    Mel ruminated on his duty as the punterogallo on this mission as he switched to the .33, customized for his kit, sniper round. Most likely, the thief would have preferred to make the killshot herself, but he planned to record the execution in full array mode for informational retrieval.

    In moments of distress, events often revealed hidden clues to the subterfuge that underlied why an enemy was an enemy. It came naturally for a scavenger crow to think in these terms.

    Humans had to be taught.

    When the little thief fired off the tracer rounds, Mel swooped between the two arches on the far western side of the cistern. Below him by a good two hundred meters, another balcony set inside buttresses.

    It led to an industrial building, which he assumed, safely from the large-scale pipework, was the pump house. It also butted against the massive cistern wall.

    On the balcony, four individuals returned fire. They were oblivious to the Nightwing.

    When Mel sighted the one female, he realized right away who she was:

    Fiona Caza.

    The double agent that embedded in Green-Eyed Elise''s team. Mel got a clear snapshot and sent it to Sachmilli.

    He dived down, while maintaining his sight on the back of the woman''s yellow helmet. When he reached thirty meters, the Nightwing fired the blunderbuss.

    The helmet tumbled upward and ricocheted off the side of the building only to be tossed down into the cistern abyss.

    The woman lunged forward and smacked the floor hard. Blood trickled from the back of her head.

    Something made of metal rattled on the floorboards of the balcony, and it didn''t strike like a tracer round. Mel swooped to avoid contact with the balcony and then circled in a hover.

    "Don''t shoot! I give up!"

    It was the leader of the skater punks. He had thrown his pistol down, and that caused the clang. The other two punks did likewise.

    Mel landed on the balcony rail. As he appraised the three, he realized he recognized them as well.

    He lit up the leader''s PA, to which the skate punk answered, and Mel''s audio sounded like an action star actor from the turn of the century.

    "Gertrod! Why is your ear damaged again?"

    The skate punk''s eyes narrowed on the prone, rotund body of the woman. Now the blood soaked deep into the back of her tank top.

    "She and two of her goons tortured me to work for her when my brothers and I backed out of a project."

    "Goons? Where are they now?"

    Gertrod shook his head, and he bristled noticeably.

    "They are part of a cult. They tend to the dragon. Took part in an operation while we helped Birddog with this business. We haven''t seen them since. I have to warn you there are plenty more¡ªlook out!"

    Something skipped across the floorboards. Mel rose up to avoid it. He caught sight of Fiona Caza in motion.

    But it was too late. Mel recognized the implosive suck of an EMP grenade, and it caught him in its field.

    The goggles froze dark. His instrumentation controls locked up in a hard scramble that surged through his cochlear implants.

    Mel tumbled into the Cistern of Soul''s abyss.

 4.38 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part VI The Daemon

    Tas¨¬a relaxed the 50 Split against her hip. She kept an eye on the balcony below them. Fiona Caza lay prone, bleeding to death. Mel was questioning the skate punks who had dropped their weapons and held their hands over their heads.

    Eyeing Mel''s set-up with an admiring nod, Tas¨¬a appraised that she needed to add a blunderbuss to her collection. Those guns could be very persuasive.

    In the periphery of Tas¨¬a''s vision, Anneb¨¦l worked at her PA.

    "Have you found a route yet?" she asked Anneb¨¦l.

    The redhead was working at the matter like a deep puzzle, as the path of platforms and bridges between the balconies was not entirely evident.

    She finally broke her concentration with a shrug.

    The redhead chortled, "Yeah, but the locusts have not been cleared. They aren''t scattering back to feed on the detritus pools as expected; right now, they are covering a rail and walkway grouping that we will have no choice but to cross."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head cynically.

    "When has the Quadra ever played nice?"

    As Anneb¨¦l sighed and had a reply at the ready to answer her, Tas¨¬a spotted movement.

    It was Fiona. The double agent''s head suddenly jerked in motion as if to execute a plan. Tas¨¬a had the 50 Split in position pressed against her shoulder near instantaneously.

    She popped off a shot where she estimated Fiona''s head would be but cursed under her breath as she knew right away the mistake she had made.

    She didn''t switch out the tracers for the FMJ magazine that she specifically brought with her for human-sized targets. The anti-material AE rounds that were the bulk of her supply, Tas¨¬a brought instead for the dragon in the caverns below if it proved necessary.

    The tracer round''s bullet head, made of very lightweight material, was purposely manufactured to minimize surface impact and hazard. It was not designed for high-velocity delivery.

    In flight, the bullet arced low and smacked against Fiona''s polymer breastplate armor at the sternum guard.

    Already lit in flight, on impact the round broke up into many pieces, releasing a dozen or more live sparklies into Fiona''s face. That knocked her head back and made her stumble and fall.

    But Tas¨¬a caught sight of the grenade in Fiona''s hand, and the double agent still held the oblong¡ªeasy to identify as an EMP¡ªgrenade in the direction she intended to throw.

    The only way Tas¨¬a was going to stop this was to shoot the grenade in mid-flight to force a malfunction. She needed to call upon the Modality to increase her speed and accuracy and slow down her perception of time.

    Tas¨¬a tensed her diaphragm to set it in motion, but the Modality did not answer her call.

    Goosebumps spread across her arms and chest.

    How can that be? But in spite of her denial, the taunting words of Gemini?s, the Black-Eyed One, came back to her.

    ¡ªThat voice in your head is the shit that mars your soul that I spoke of needing to be cleansed out of you.

    So, the Black-Eyed Ones were serious. They were creatures of dream; it was all too easy to dismiss their relevancy.

    In spite of her inner turmoil and self-loathing tirade, she did not stop for even an instant.

    With not enough time to switch out loads, Tas¨¬a slid the 50 Split down her left leg as not to damage the valuable tactical rifle while she grabbed the .357 Colt Clastic out of her boot with her right hand.

    Tas¨¬a steadied back up in stance above the balcony rail.Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

    Her best option now was to unload a spray fire aimed at the wall behind Fiona as it lined up in array with the grenade''s path. The impact on the tin would avoid the kind of ricochet that could injure or kill the skate punks much better than if the rounds smacked against the gridded steel of the floorboards. The latter would occur if she lined up the shots at knee level instead.

    Regardless of the choice, it was too late, even still, as the grenade popped off in midair just as it spun off of Fiona''s fingertips, severing the middle and index fingers upon release.

    Tas¨¬a was flabbergasted. In her experience, that was not how the EMP grenades functioned.

    It should have been delayed six seconds after being primed! She protested as a blue-tinted gas burst forth and sizzled the air.

    Tas¨¬a sprayed six rounds into the area where Fiona last stood as the gas severely obscured any possible visualization she had of her target.

    Fiona gasped loudly at the sound of a thunking .357 round while the skater punks surrendered once again with desperate screams.

    Determined they were to not be mistaken for active combatants.

    Tas¨¬a ignored the superfluous noise to evaluate her success. None. None whatsoever. Her effort was still not sufficient to prevent a tragic outcome from occurring.

    All she could do was bear witness as Mel raised inelegantly up off the balcony to avoid the gas cloud, only to suddenly plunge into the depths of the Cistern, twirling innately past the glowing ascospores.

    Sachmilli screamed out loud several times the name of the Nightwing over the ruckus he was creating as he mag dumped the seventeen rounds of his Girson Witness 2311.

    Powerful 10 mm Magnum rounds shredded into the floorboards of the opposite balcony. The smallest of the skate punks dropped to the grilled boards hard against his knees as he gripped the right side of his ribcage.

    Blood-soaked Fiona jumped into the cover of a door. She caught at least another round and was bleeding badly from a notably ruptured indenture beneath the side of her waistband where a bullet struck through her hip and spun out of her abdomen.

    The discharge was light pink and oily. Tas¨¬a had shot a .357 round into the woman''s fupa.

    After all that the traitor put her through, after all, Fiona was the person most responsible for her being captured by the Salvage, Tas¨¬a could not help but smile in spite of her pursuit to be the better person.

    Tas¨¬a cut the revelry short when she heard the injured skate punk moaning. The other two were pleading for help.

    She had overheard the conversation with Mel, and their culpability wasn''t a simple matter.

    Tas¨¬a yelled back.

    "Hold on! We have medkits. We are coming down."

    She had to find a way to get over to the opposite balcony and help them.

    In the meantime, Anneb¨¦l had seized Sachmilli''s hand.

    "You are being reckless, old man!" She snarled.

    He jerked free of her with a glare in his eye, holstered his Turkish 2311, and called for Mel over his com unit.

    Anneb¨¦l closed in on Sachmilli again. His reckless shots evidently pissed her off.

    "If Mel survived, it''ll be several minutes before his kit can reboot. No distractions. We need to get over there."

    Tas¨¬a glanced over to the living glass locust. They covered several yards of the walkway a mere forty-five meters from where the three of them stood.

    Their behavior of latching on to the walkway and its supports must have been part of a default set of instructions for when the command console failed to activate. The locust would still remain useful to Fiona''s crew as a defensive measure.

    Tas¨¬a turned around and took a moment to study the cistern wall. Both balconies were ensconced in twin buttress sets, all of them joined by ridge rows. It was a doable means of crossing, but she couldn''t leave Sachmilli and Anneb¨¦l to fend off the locusts without her.

    Even with the injured yuengling below, she would have to be patient.

    There was another, simpler way. Oh, she had the means!

    "What are you thinking, mon petit demon? You have a cherub''s smile."

    Tas¨¬a nodded as she raised the 50 Split.

    "The two of you quit it with the arguing. Sachmilli''s was an understandable human error given the circumstances, but we need to fix it. Now, fall behind and follow me."

    She crouched and crawled forward as she switched out the fire mode. An imploder drone was at the ready. Tas¨¬a sighted the target and set the demolition point six meters above the locusts.

    "Make sure your ear protection is secured," she told the two lined up behind her. "They are about to pop."

    Anneb¨¦l readied her Benelli 12-gauge combat shotgun, and Sachmilli his 2311 Girson.

    Tas¨¬a let the drone fly. The overwhelming recoil surprised her.

    A combo of compressed 1600 PSI CO2 released from the gun itself and the onboard gyrojets that precision-guided the drone together created an angle of thrust she wasn''t expecting.

    The sudden force smacked hard against her forearms. As she regained control, the living glass locusts swelled up from the bridge boards and ripped away from their railing tether due to the initial implosion. The ones closest to the drone incinerated in the firestorm as the thermite pile inside the drone ignited the immediate air.

    The surviving locusts lunged out from the walkway area. Anneb¨¦l and Sachmilli pounded at them with live fire to keep their sharp-surfaced bodies at bay.

    Tas¨¬a popped out two more drones. One on each side of the bridge further up and just behind the locusts to drive them further away from their position near the mouth of the top balcony.

    The implosions shredded the walkway rails and undergirders this time. She had to risk unleashing the drones in a tight attack angle to do maximum damage to the locusts.

    The risk paid off. Now, the threat was no more.

    With a glance over, Tas¨¬a determined that the floorboards remained intact, but she could not be certain of their structural integrity.

    Her PalmEx could do a fair guestimation of their viability, but only Mel had the precision equipment to make a professional-grade risk assessment.

    Tas¨¬a winced when she thought of the little guy.

 4.39 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a shot laser pulses at the damaged walkway to test its tensile strength with her PalmEx PA. After it returned a diagnostic, she found a matching structure on the walkway below them sitting at a sixty-five degree angle from her eye view. She hit it with pulses for comparative purposes.

    The damaged walkway was only seventeen percent the tensile strength of its fully intact counterpart.

    Fortunately, that was still above the margin of being stable enough to hold their weight. It could bear approximately 380 lbs. without rupture, according to the estimate.

    "It''s doable," she said as she nodded to Anneb¨¦l.

    Anneb¨¦l pointed ahead with a dramatic wince.

    "Those little stations along the way could be trapped."

    With a nod and a ''hmm,'' Sachmilli Cuervo answered.

    "I have something on me to test them with," he said.

    As he pulled out a polymer gun, with the appearance of a toy, Sachmilli took up the lead, "I keep this to check for fire ant mounds in El Hoya."

    Tas¨¬a giggled to herself when she recalled how she had planned to shoot salt and pepper up the nose of Leeza Donada, the corporate suit fired for suspicion of murder. Sachmilli possessed a heavy-duty version of a salt gun. The serious psi capability of it with twin 1200 psi CO2 canister feeds would blow through the top of a skull if you tried shooting up a nostril with it.

    Most surprising was the name of the manufacturer. It was a Magellani gun.

    Then, I shall take it very seriously, she thought.

    Anneb¨¦l bowed graciously as she said, quietly:

    "The man with the golden gun, take the lead, please."

    Was that a double entendre? Tas¨¬a wondered and then shook her head vehemently in protest that her thoughts went down that path.

    Sachmilli was her godfather!

    Anneb¨¦l replaced the Bennili 12-gauge with the other long gun strapped to her back, a .38 Remmington bush rifle.

    They both fell in line behind Sachmilli.

    Cuervo, often called Old Crow by his employees, led them to the first platform at the far end of the Cistern. An enclosure covered the back side of it.

    Sachmilli stopped thirty meters ahead of it. Tas¨¬a couldn''t make out its purpose from her limited vantage point.

    Sachmilli must have detected her restlessness; he answered:

    "It''s an elevator. Hold on. Keep your gun at the ready. I don''t have full visibility."

    Holding a solid block of pink salt, Sachmilli slid it up the magazine well.

    Pulling the chamber port switch, he caused the block to be chipped, clipped, and capped on the bullet end then segmented into nine rounds.

    A tenth round was merely the carved waste material compacted and intended for a spit out.

    He popped off four shots inside the enclosure. A small explosion plugged on the front bullet end of each round caused pink salt to spray out propulsively, creating a volatile storm that crashed against the entire area for several seconds.

    Nothing reacted, to which Sachmilli shrugged.

    "A bit anticlimactic compared to seeing that shit tear into a four-foot-long fire ant queen."

    They approached the enclosure, and it became instantly clear as they stared at the counterweight that not only was the elevator cart on the floor below, but the power generator and chain gears were also.

    Both Sachmilli and Anneb¨¦l turned their gaze towards Tas¨¬a. She would have protested she was out of shape for rigorous cat burglar excursions, but the kid was still waiting to be rescued.

    After sliding on a pair of gloves, Tas¨¬a jumped on the chain and seized it against her thigh muscles. She gripped it with both hands and eased down it hand over hand.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

    Twenty-five meters down, Tas¨¬a set her foot down, gained her balance enough to lean over the generator clamped to the side of the platform, and stoked it into motion.

    The elevator responded.

    As she waited for her less mobile comrades, Tas¨¬a sent a ping over to the far end balcony-style platform.

    Three PAs lit up. She called the model with the least frills that emphasized functionality. That would be the adult of the group.

    "Hello."

    "Gertrod?"

    "You''re the short girl over there?"

    She didn''t complain. The description was accurate.

    "Yup. How is your friend holding up?"

    "My little brother. I''ve contained the bleeding, but he needs full wound dressing before we move him."

    "Hold tight. We''ll be there shortly," Tas¨¬a reassured him.

    "Hey, before you go. Those shacks are patrol stations. I don''t know if they all were on the hunt before you arrived. It was too hectic to keep up with everything. Birddog was in panic mode. That guy Matzi escaped and ran into the pump house building."

    "Will do," Tas¨¬a acknowledged before hanging up when Anneb¨¦l hovered over her.

    Sachmilli took the lead once more.

    They followed a curved walkway that hugged the Cistern wall. It then met up with a straightaway that connected to a platform forty meters up from them.

    It was covered in a utility shack. A doorless frame appeared welcomingly enough.

    He stopped six meters from the entrance, held the salt gun against his hip, and fired three quick shots, gunslinger style, first at the floor, then waist level, and finally towards the ceiling.

    More living glass locusts scattered out from the entrance and exit portals. The interior suddenly lit up in blue light.

    Tas¨¬a was quick to send a drone into the shack to push the insects away towards the back exit.

    After the explosion cleared out, the locust chirped in extreme stridulation.

    Anneb¨¦l switched back to the 12-gauge, cursing she was growing low on shells. Sachmilli''s high-pressure rock salt gun was proving effective at ripping into their carapaces.

    Tas¨¬a switched out the auto-explode to full manual. The drones were much more capable than how she currently used them, given her unfamiliarity with the operation of a 50-Split.

    She popped out a drone and stopped it in front of the entrance. The gyrojets could keep it aloft for over seven minutes in place when switched to feed out through inner and outer fin rings that spun in opposite directions from one another creating energy efficient lift.

    Switching on her Katy Lieds, Tas¨¬a called up the 50 Split''s on-board user, service, and training manuals.

    Quickly she read through the topic: extending the implosive area of effect, as Sachmilli implored her, "Quickly, mi senorita, they are grouping outward. Something is directing them again."

    Could Fiona still be alive? Who are her cohorts?

    She held down a button labeled Direction Cue as she ordered the drone to begin to cycle a heavy spherical infolded current of heated gas towards the shack entrance; in other words, slowly implode.

    It could sustain this condition for a dozen seconds.

    She slunk the drone into the shed for a few seconds and maneuvered it back out the front entrance. It now held hundreds of locusts in place who struggled to get away. Tasia zigzagged the drone to catch two groups of locusts approaching her.

    Movement came from the shack as something snapped, sounding like a broken ankle, then tumbled to the floorboard. Someone was hidden inside.

    A cohort? Unusually quiet, and must have been injured when I gathered the locusts.

    Tas¨¬a pushed her collection of living glass locusts back inside the hut and squeezed the explosion release trigger.

    The roof was damaged with a splatter of tiles, but the locust threat was no more. Sachmilli took the lead as they entered the shack.

    "Careful, I see a seam rip in the floorboards," he said, but then he stopped and then whispered an ancient phrase in Guarani, the indigenous language of Paraguay; words he muttered in a high-pitched voice as if avoiding the notice of unseen powers.

    "Mbya mba''u-gua!"

    "Curs¨¦d of the Fallen Ones!"

    He meant the Nephilim.

    Tas¨¬a peeked over Sachmilli''s shoulder. It was hardly a giant as Old Man Cuervo''s words implied. Barely four feet in length, even.

    A dead Al-Majhul lay shredded from head to toe inside chain mesh armor at Sachmilli''s feet. Above them, racks dripped of a violet nectar.

    Feeding stations for the living glass locusts, Tas¨¬a concluded.

    Sachmilli kicked a device out from the Al-Majhul''s hand before picking it up. It was an odd multi-tool.

    He freely let it go as Anneb¨¦l grabbed at it. She was a collector of multi-tools.

    Then he laughed heartily as he smacked at a half-destroyed control console and screen mounted between grips on a workbench.

    "His bad luck. He was attempting to fix this as we were drawing closer. That is why we were not ambushed."

    Tas¨¬a laughed along with the Old Crow. It seemed she could not even keep the almost alien Al-Majhul alive if she wanted to. Whatever she did, they just died.

    "That poor, stupid son of a bitch," she snorted, but thought it was an unfair thing to say; something in her gut told her the Al-Majhul were listening in.

    For that reason, it was best if they found her notorious.

    Then, as they began to line up to move forward, Sachmilli got a text notification.

    "It''s Mel." He announced.

    Tas¨¬a''s heart fluttered knowing the Nightwing was alive.

    Sachmilli frowned.

    "He has a broken wing. Deep in country. Surrounded by Charlie."

    "What," Anneb¨¦l asked with her face scrunched up.

    "My weird little dude enjoys watching stories about the US involvement in Vietnam and is obsessed with the Green Beret military unit. It means he is in hiding from nearby enemies."

    Sachmilli texted assurances back to the Nightwing. Once finished, Sachmilli closed his PA, and turned to Anneb¨¦l. He offered her his salt gun.

    "The two of you go ahead; I need to retrieve Mel''s cage and emergency kit."

    Tas¨¬a cleared her throat and held up her PalmEx.

    "I''m calling Elise for assistance. She was a battlefield nurse, you know. Plus, I need to let her know about the firefight. If we killed Caza, best she hears it from me."

    Sachmilli breathed in deep through a grimace.

    "She should have listened to me; you all know that. But, fine. I''ll be the bigger man. This is no time for quibbles."

 4.40 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Squatting beside the injured teen, Anneb¨¦l pumped with her right arm to charge up the kinetic battery attached to the smart bandage that stabilized blood fluid circulation beneath the patch after she removed the two pieces of shrapnel lodged in the teen''s ribcage.

    "You got a name?" She asked.

    A cocktail of anesthetics, both local and systemic, administered from the smart bandage, induced in the youth a tranquil disposition. An upgrade from the pale shock condition he was in when she got there.

    "Andes."

    "Cool name." Anneb¨¦l complimented.

    "Our mom is a bit of a nature lover."

    "Fucking hippie is what she is," Gertrod interjected.

    Anneb¨¦l detected no malice in his tone. It even came across as good-natured.

    She sized them up. Gertrod appeared about twenty. Andes, maybe sixteen. The third crew member, who stayed quiet and on guard after Anneb¨¦l told him he could retrieve his gun and guard the door into the pump house, she guessed to be eighteen.

    "So, you are all brothers?"

    "Yeah, this is our neighborhood. We live above our mom''s shop over there. She''s the herbalist in the strip back that way."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled. "I guess you weren''t kidding about her being a hippie."

    "Wait until you get the chance to see her communicate with the plants. It is unreal how she can coax them into advantageous chemical formulation."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded along. She had heard of the art associated with the Bolivian Institute of Agrarian Studies called Ka''ay Jeguaka¡ªherbal alchemy based on frequency pattern manipulation and biochemical fusion.

    The sound of feet approaching turned all of their heads. Tas¨¬a''s pair of Veronica''s smacked against the gridded floorboard.

    She overheard the conversation.

    "Does your mother carry anything naturally speedy that can keep me up another twenty-four hours and dump neurotoxin buildup from my brain?"

    "Most definitely," Gertrod nodded.

    "Well, alright then. Scouting about, I noticed a lot of interesting things¡­" As Tas¨¬a said this, Anneb¨¦l gave her a curious smile as if to ask, Did you pilfer anything?

    Tas¨¬a ignored the accusation as she continued. "It seems curious that the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority would allow the Al-Majhul to run around down here with vital systems in operation. It appears they live down here."

    Gertrod shook his head and chortled.

    "You are not going to believe it, but they are contracted to maintain the pump house and keep the detritus pools vacuumed of impurities and to keep them linked with one another to flow in sync. The chief of waste management operations calls them ''pool boys''."

    Tas¨¬a was flabbergasted.

    "You can''t just treat those things like you would actual people."

    At the pump house entrance came a voice that spoke for the first time.

    "Why not?" The middle brother asked in a tone more curious than challenging.

    Though Tas¨¬a felt flummoxed by the question on an ethical level, the words came quickly to her lips.

    "They are schemers lurking in the shadows."

    "Maybe they are afraid and have reason to be afraid."The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

    "Lodi," Gertrod called out. "Se?ora del Alma-Gris doesn''t know you well enough for you to spout off on that conspiracy."

    Anneb¨¦l licked at her lips. "Lodi? That''s an incredibly good name."

    Tas¨¬a scrunched up her face. Why is Anneb¨¦l concerned about names? Is she with child? It would have to be either Sachmilli''s or Ra¨²l''s.

    Anneb¨¦l laughed at the sight of her.

    "What''s up with you? You look like you just swallowed a hornet."

    "Are you pregnant?"

    Anneb¨¦l began to laugh hysterically.

    "No. Just no!"

    Tas¨¬a let it go. She was ready to and needed to change the subject.

    "Hey. I reached Elise. We had a three-way call with Sachmilli. You''ll be happy to know no beef emerged between them. Elise is aware of the dragon, and she says she wants to data-breach it. Aside from the broken wing, Mel is fine.

    "We do our part and clear the pump house, and they will take it from there so we can be on our way once we collect Matzi. Sound cool?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded with an agreeable smile, "Sure. How did she take the news of Fiona?"

    "She never veered into emotional encumbrance even once. Just stayed professional and detached the entire conversation. She even told me not to let up our guard. She said, ''Fiona is the queen of deadman switches. I almost got killed twice searching her premises after she abandoned it.'' That''s a direct quote from Elise."

    Anneb¨¦l grimaced and shuffled from foot to foot. Her eyes pointed to the pump house entrance.

    "Hey, before we go in there, one last thing. I know some things about that friend of yours from the IMCQ you are probably going to be seeing soon."

    Tas¨¬a snarled.

    "Felicit¨¦? She''s not a friend."

    "Yeah, well. When she was released into Elise''s custody. The two of them had a brief, hot, and torrid romance. Luna Claro cut it off after her bosses got wind of it and told her to cut it out."

    Tas¨¬a''s lips pursed up, quizzical.

    "Elise''s bosses? Who bosses Elise? How do you know this?"

    Anneb¨¦l smiled like she was about to lay out a surprise and was enjoying it.

    "Elise Luna Claro belongs to the same organization your handsome hunk of American flesh does, mon petit d¨¦mon. Felicit¨¦ is in her custody because that terrorist, who you allege is not a friend, happens to be a very specific type of Manifested that organization is dedicated towards hunting down as an extreme danger to the Quadra. They hope to use her to crack open a conspiracy involving the Europa incident¡ªManifested astronauts that were thought killed but have been slipping back to Earth.

    "So, once Paz is no longer of use to them, she''ll be dispensed with. Elise violated the rule of not getting too attached."

    She thought of Sylvia, the Serbian assassin, and Felicit¨¦''s obsession with that one task that she kept asking Tas¨¬a to perform:

    After the Argentinian finally got her giggles and catcalls out of her system, enthusiastically, Felicit¨¦ yelped out, "Okay, that was fun. Ciao! Oh,Tas¨¬a, don''t forget, you''ll be in Asunci¨®n soon, right?"

    Tas¨¬a answered, "Did you get my data? It certainly looks that way."

    "Be sure to make an appointment with the Human Rights Commission."

    "Don''t you worry; I haven''t forgotten."

    Felicit¨¦ wasn''t just trying to set her up. Somehow, it really was her one way out of jeopardy. Did the Human Rights Commission perform rescue services for Manifested?

    Official Salvage policy was to quarantine the Manifested; though the Salvage denied there existed specially conditioned ones like the Amongst Us that caused a stir of paranoia a generation ago, different Manifested types existed and were treated with different status: some were hunted, and some were neither hunted nor quarantined but acted as state-sponsored operatives.

    What''s the difference between them that this is the case?

    Now that Andes was stabilized, Anneb¨¦l stood up and picked up her guns.

    She turned back to Tas¨¬a.

    "You''re lost in thought again. What''s banging around up there?"

    Tas¨¬a shrugged. "I''m just trying to make sense of things."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded along.

    "Determining who needs to be shot can get complicated."

    Tas¨¬a chortled to that.

    "Hey. Speaking of hunks, how is the dance studio coming?"

    "Ra¨²l has the Asunci¨®n ladies lined up outside the hall to join. What does Villa Marr¨°n know about what the in thing is in dance styles? I''m just glad to see him doing something he loves again. But --"

    Anneb¨¦l stopped herself in mid-speech and pointed towards Lodi.

    Tas¨¬a turned and asked him, "Did you just see something?"

    He affirmed with a nod.

    "I spotted movement."

    "Okay. Keep your head down, low and steady."

    As she listened to an instruction video, Tas¨¬a smacked a switch-out clip into the 50-Split underchamber. It plucked the thermite mine out of the currently readied drone and replaced it with a sensor probe.

    "Lodi, take my PA and set up a hologram display between us. Anneb¨¦l, cover for Lodi."

    When the display was in position, Tas¨¬a shot the probe into the open doorway. Turning cameotic as soon as it hit air, the invisible-to-the-natural-eye probe zigzagged through five large pump equipment-filled rooms and circled around until it attached to the ceiling of the largest one.

    Lodi looked up from the PalmEx display.

    "I read six Al-Majhul in fixed positions ready to ambush us, but no sign of either Fiona or Matzi."

    "Did the Al-Majhul see the probe?"

    "Their breathing and heartbeats remain unchanged." He answered.

    "Excellent, but I am not entirely sure that means anything with these creatures."

    Lodi''s eyes squinched up.

    "What does that mean? The gray light."

    He punched in a close-up on the display focused in on a set of six door panels on the furthest wall inside the pump house.

    A fucking administrative daemon, Tas¨¬a thought.

    She shook her head.

    "Nothing good is what that means."

 4.41 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Tas¨¬a''s eyes focused on the display.

    "What are you waiting for?" asked Lodi, sounding anxious. She needed him to keep his cool.

    "Determining who is the gallo puntero amongst the five of them," Tas¨¬a said in a soft, calm tone. "As soon as we head in, he will orchestrate the response. If we take him out, it gives us an advantage."

    She placed her thumb on the ground by the holographic projection of one Al-Majhul operator to adjust the perspective so she could see through an extrapolation based upon his eye view.

    "This one is the only one with a sightline on the doorway and all four of the other operators."

    Tas¨¬a grimaced to herself. If she was still jacked into the Modality, she would not be terribly concerned about their response to her breach. She would have vector calculated the ricochet of a flashbang right into his rubber mask-covered face from where she currently stood and, in a split instant, drilled a .357 bullet into his forehead.

    But she now had to assume the Al-Majhul''s reflexes were on equal footing with her own, and they would light her up in the split second she threw herself through the entranceway.

    If she tossed a couple of flashbangs through the doorway, she also assumed they were experienced enough in combat to know it was meant as a distraction and keep their fire focused on the breach entry point.

    Their setup was designed to buy Fiona time. What made the double agent worth their risk?

    A question for later

    Alright, mis perdedores, it''s time.

    "Lodi, do you have good reflexes?"

    He blinked rapidly with his eyebrows raised.

    "You want me to . . ."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head. Anneb¨¦l winked at her as the brawler stifled a chuckle. Gertrod appeared worried for his more active brother but stayed fixed to the wounded one''s side, hand balled in hand to keep the later brother calm.

    "You''re staying put. When I''m in, I want you and Anneb¨¦l to lay down suppressed fire straight through the doorway to keep the operators bound to the other side, so they can''t pick me off from a distance. But right now, I am going to count to five; when you anticipate my ''three,'' hit that disengage button on the bottom left of the screen."

    "Got it," he said with a nod.

    "One . . . Two . . . Three . . . Four . . . Five."

    With a sudden burst run, Tas¨¬a dove in as her 50 Split probe smashed on the floor deeper in the pumphouse, echoing in a loud clang from behind the six Al-Majhul operators.

    She rolled into her dive onto the cement floor and squat jumped up as she eyed her target. He was recovering quickly from the distraction.

    She would have to delay that shot.

    Tas¨¬a kicked the floor with her right boot and twisted to the left. The gallo puntero got off two shots, aiming at the floor where she was just at with his Strykrr ten-gauge heavy carbine.

    She kicked the floor again with the heels of her Veronicas to get airborne, thrusting straight back; it helped her line up the aim of her .357 Clastic before she took the top of the gallo puntero''s cranium off.

    To her right, a steady stream of live rounds slammed the air. It almost entirely obscured the sound of another gun being fired off.

    Asphalt chipped off the floor in an arch that sought her out.

    Fuck!

    Now she heard the distinct rattle of a full-auto AK-47 smacking the air.

    Tas¨¬a scrambled. She had memorized the layout from the holographic display and dove behind a set dozen fifty-five-gallon drums holding industrial lubricant.

    Full auto fire from three rifles ripped into the barrels. Tops hinged off, and white gel splattered through indentures that grew in size as bullets ceaselessly ripped into the drums.

    She knew from experience with the machine lubricant brand that it burned like hell on contact and could permanently disfigure her if the barrels collapsed above her.

    Tas¨¬a rolled away from the barrels to avoid exposure. It was her only option. They would be ready for her attempt to lunge out of cover if she chose that path of action.

    In fact, the stomp of boots gave away the position of one operator who was moving up to spot her. This one had not considered she would roll towards the entrance wall away from them, for there was nothing that would provide her with cover there.

    Clad in a long gray leather jacket and filter mask just like the gallo she shot, the Al-Majhul operative leaned against a long horizontal window.

    Tas¨¬a had a good view of his side profile. The filter mask was strapped to the kind of Kevlar combat torso armor that was custom molded to a soldier''s physique.

    The filter mask was more heavily constructed than that of the gallo puntero''s own. Customarily, breach pointmen traded off an increase in vulnerability for greater sighting capability in their choice of headgear.

    The .357 Clastic revolver would only be effective against points of vulnerability that the need for mobility created¡ªboots at the ankles, back of the knees, inner elbows, and the sides of the throat on the neck swivel.

    Modality-driven Tas¨¬a could make the shot with no problem, but in her current condition, her odds were slim.

    Tas¨¬a switched out the .357 for the .50 Split. Reluctant she was to use the explosive drones, as she only had two left in her inventory, and the explosion type that remained in her inventory created a wave burst of shrapnel that could damage equipment vital to the pumphouse operation.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

    But nonaction would get her killed in a few seconds as the fifty-five gallon drums were teetering on collapse, exposing her to live fire.

    She had a plan.

    Tas¨¬a kicked against the wall, pushing herself momentously out of cover where at least the one forward operative could put eyeballs on her, but her distance away from the barrels surprised him.

    Tas¨¬a aimed for the left side of his throat; she got a bead locked, but then her tits bumped the ground and threw her rifle barrel to point up towards the long-vaulted ceiling.

    Well, shit on me!

    That kind of miscalculation would not have occurred under the influence of the Modality, she told herself.

    The Al-Majhul operator shot his AK-47 into the air above her before stopping to countermand the heavy recoil. He lowered his aim to exact his sights on her. To her eyes witnessing this, it appeared he was trained to use the weapon primarily for suppressive fire, but the Al-Majhul operator''s muscle memory worked against him in this instance.

    While this occurred, and now with little choice about it, Tas¨¬a drew the 50 Split in a downward arch even with the floor and shot at the operator''s boots. The .50 caliber projectile shattered through the hard armor and forced him to slam into the floor.

    He screamed with a deep and long-held yelp.

    Tas¨¬a took a second shot that shattered the window. She would take her chance and dive into the control room.

    The barrels finally ruptured with the shimmery pearlescent gel, now near smoothly fluid from the barrage of gunfire, cascading on the floor in a pool that spread out quickly.

    Bullets from the other Al-Majhul operators sought her out once more.

    Tas¨¬a flipped the load-out switch to dummy mode and triggered the under barrel. The drone disc smacked the pool of lubricant gel and exploded on impact.

    She spread herself low against the floor as metal debris from the barrels flew in all directions. Micro ball bearings from the drone slammed onto the downed operative''s face mask and chest guard before exploding.

    Remarkably, the armored assembly remained intact. Still, the Al-Majhul operator clasped at his head with one hand. The other gripped at grooves in the concrete surface to balance his mad, spastic scramble against the floor.

    His left boot dangled, suggesting mere muscle tendons kept it from severing completely.

    As debris rained down, the four remaining uninjured operators had taken cover.

    Tas¨¬a took advantage of this. She ran towards the broken window and used the crotch of the downed operative to launch herself into the control room, only to find her head slamming against the window panel, knocking her momentarily senseless.

    The 50 Split flipped loose on the floor and bounced away from her.

    The Al-Majhul operator, in spite of his discomfort, had managed to grip her foot with his free hand. Tas¨¬a tried to twist away from his grip, unsuccessfully, for that moment she still lacked both strength and full cognition.

    As she writhed in struggle, he used his free hand to remove her stiletto. Soon that was followed by a white heat that surged up her left buttock. The stab wound released a hold on her senses with outstanding clarity.

    Tas¨¬a turned to assess just how fucked she was now.

    He was going to attempt a coup de grace slash at her femoral artery that would kill her through quick bleed out. She fought against the grip he held on her right shin, but his strength was much more than her own.

    From sheer fear, Tas¨¬a''s unfiltered adrenaline set in. It felt crude compared to a Modality-directed surge, but time did slow, moving in a jitter forward.

    His right arm was set now in high arch with the stiletto bearing down on her. The outstretched profile exposed a nail-length slit in his mask at the jaw level where a still fizzing chemical burn had leaked into it from the micro-explosions.

    Tas¨¬a arched her torso, steadied with abdominal muscles only. With the .357 Clastic raised, Tas¨¬a put three rounds through the weakened materials into the side of the operator''s face.

    Flesh, enamel, and synthetic materials twirled out from the other side of it. With a turn of her head, Tas¨¬a dodged the stiletto that shot out of his hand.

    He jerked with a wolvish howl in a foreign language, calling to the four others. His head turned away from her protectively even as he still kept a grip on her leg.

    While feeding the .357 Clastic''s chamber, Tas¨¬a glanced around with her eyes stinging from anxiety and heat induced sweat.

    She had grown so use to controling her pore output through regulated breathing biofeedback during fights and other stressful situations, Tas¨¬a found the sweat a startling presence.

    Blue flames prevented the other operators from approaching, but she could see through the haze of heat that one of them squatted with a long rifle drawn.

    The left side of his jacket had been shredded from a previous encounter with Lodi and Anneb¨¦l''s suppressive fire.

    The long rifle''s redlaser dot crawled searchingly towards her. Fortunately, his proximity to the blue flames was closer than her own, and its heat haze handicapped his otherwise natural advantage.

    Tas¨¬a emptied the .357 at the blur that was the shooter. None of the rounds must have penetrated through his armor, as he merely doubled back to recalibrate his aim further away from the flames.

    The howls of the operator who grappled her leg and held her down weakened to a soft stir, but his strong grip remained.

    As her own nose itched from a possible break with the smell of blood heavy in her nostrils, blood also trickled down from breaks in his filter mask to soak down his chest. Tas¨¬a wondered if the heavily fortified mask was all that kept his jaw from falling off his face.

    Silly notion! He had taken the rounds into the side of his face, but he still called out to his team. Miraculously, he was still in the fight.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed another moonclip while taking the split instant to decide what was her best course of action -- to counter the sharpshooter or take out her hand-to-hand adversary, when Anneb¨¦l made the decision for her.

    An ancient Gallic war cry yelp Ceasar himself would have recognized belted from the redhead''s lungs at the entranceway. It was followed by a barrage of shotgun blasts that caused the sharpshooter to stumble and retreat towards cover.

    The downed operator that held her by the leg had his back towards her, clearly gambling on the other Al-Majhul operators success in finishing her off.

    Unfortunately for him, at this point, it was a miscalculation.

    She pulled her torso all the way up with her ab muscles, and, with the Clastic barrel leveled merely an inch away, Tas¨¬a put another three into the nape of his neck.

    He let go and slumped onto the floor.

    As she wiggled out from underneath the Al-Maghul, another operator tried to light her up, but the bullets popped off the downed operator''s Kevlar body armor.

    LED lights flowed up the side of the armor''s sleeve embed, indicating the downed operator''s vitals were low, and the module now injected a stim feed of epinephrine, synthetic adrenaline.

    He didn''t so much as twitch as a reaction.

    In one move, Tas¨¬a raised up, and she threw herself into the broken window under a hail of bullets.

    When she rolled on her buttocks to complete the dive, the pain where she was stabbed flared up. Tas¨¬a leapt to her feet in a squat to avoid any more pressure on the wound.

    As she gathered her breath, blood nearly gagged her. Blood was draining out from her sinus cavities. Tas¨¬a spat out what she could.

    Holy shit! All of that trouble and only two down. This does not bode well for my future as a gunslinger adventuress.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, not letting her mood drift into the mire of defeatism.

    Whatever doubts she had, she needed to get back in the game before they picked her off due to her inaction.

    The control room door creaking open made her twist backwards in a one-eighty spin with her hand going for her fanny pack.

    He stood there; his right hand clasped the broken window pane, ignoring glass shards that dug into his combat gloves. He hopped on one leg, dragging the other foot by the thread of tendons forward.

    His mask had cracked and split apart on the side of his face where the .357 rounds had seared through. His right eye socket was missing its top ridge.

    She didn''t freeze, but he was just faster with the stim of epinephrine pumping in his veins. The operator threw a left fist in her face, and she slammed on her back against the wooden floor of the control room.

    Tas¨¬a saw nothing but a squinched-up red that lit up her vision. She still managed to get off a flashbang that caused the world boomed loud around her. Now, engulfed in white light, Tas¨¬a turned away, but not in time to avoid it being blinded a second time.

    A long-winded, tight squeal with intermittent drive heaves came from above her as her sight slowly returned. The Al-Majhul operative clutched at his chest before he fell at her feet.

 4.42 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Her hearing returned much more slowly than did her sight. Tas¨¬a could just barely make out the sound of a fizzing noise from a faint spritz dabbing against her hip.

    She checked the purse she had clipped against her belt in the stead of her operator''s fanny pack. The long, thin bottle of Ki-Jack Ginseng, All-Natural Alertness Elixir, peeked through, throwing out a misty spray, where the Al-Majhul operator had stabbed her in the ass cheek.

    Most likely, he attempted to plunge her very own stiletto into the vertebral sacrum at the bottom of her spine to cripple her, but he got his hand caught in her purse on his upthrust.

    Pure stupid luck is going to run out on you any minute now. She told herself.

    As she lay on the floor, Tas¨¬a realized she had caught another break in the fight. Anneb¨¦l had the four Al-Majhul operators pinned down.

    Big Red had replaced her standard ammo with shells that contained a vicious quad of slugs that exploded on impact.

    Given the violent noise coming from an operator who pitched a fit of howling shouts, Tas¨¬a assumed he had been wounded already.

    The dead one at her feet''s comlink whispered a repetitive phrase through the broken mask. She didn''t recognize their language, but it obviously corresponded to "Ma''aruf, check in! Check in!"

    Tas¨¬a popped the broken tab and quaffed down the elixir. She had neglected quenching her thirst since leaving the software security shop.

    Soon she felt the elixir work through her exhaustion and add a degree of clarity to her brain''s functionality. As she kept her gun trained for any movement above her, Tas¨¬a could see along the ceiling through the broken window.

    All of that exploitable terrain up there I could have used to my advantage. I could have found a way in through one of those vents ramping down. Nope, I go in like a gunslinger instead of the sneak thief that is more to my nature.

    Why? She pondered upon the question for a moment.

    The Modality gave me a means that made direct confrontations not only feasible to achieve concrete results, but also added social capital to the payoff¡ªlike when I confronted the American spooks back in the pool room in the back of Beauregard''s bar.

    You took a lot of unnecessary risks, Tas¨¬a.

    If I get out of this crap alive, I''ll have to relearn how to follow my old instincts. I would never have passed up an opportunity to exploit something in the environment like that asymmetrical rotating HVAC anti-mold exhaust filter up there.

    Tas¨¬a tried to shake off the current drift of her thoughts; she needed to get back in the game. It was no time for pontification. Anneb¨¦l couldn''t hold the operators down much longer without incurring a great deal of risk to herself.

    However, something occurred to Tas¨¬a.

    What if the Modality was still inside her but she was disconnected from it through sleep deprivation-derived brain fog?

    But the Dark-Eyed Ones penetrated my defenses. They did what they said they would do to me.

    Were the Dark-Eyed Ones mere sleep-deprived hallucinations born of deep-seated fear?

    Tas¨¬a recalled Geminetta''s words: Don''t let your hatred of our kind blind you. Down there in the Cistern and further along in the surrounding caverns are answers that you are seeking.

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "No, they were real. Mel saving me was real, and the remains of that gross-looking third eye was real."

    Actually mouthing those words caused her sinuses to become irritated. Before getting back into the fight, she needed to check out the condition of her nose; to that effect, Tas¨¬a hocked up a dark, blood-crusty loogie.

    She patted the bridge of her nose, and it felt oddly numb on the side folds, but it stung on the bridge perch.

    That meant there was separation between the bridge and sinus cavity. Indeed, she could feel the fracture beneath the skin by rolling her thumb over it.

    A pulse of fear jabbed at the bottom of her gut. One derived from a phobia Tas¨¬a acquired when she was a kid who watched Hong Kong martial arts movies. In a lot of them, there would typically be a scene where a fighter side-clipped an opponent''s nose, causing a vicious crack, and followed it up with a front punch, crashing nasal cartilage into the opponent''s brain for a dramatic instant death.

    It made a lasting impression on her young mind.

    Anneb¨¦l yelled for her as the brawler popped another quad slug at the Al-Majhul.

    How many shotgun shells does she have left in that big duffel bag she totes around? Tas¨¬a asked herself. Bulk estimate, eight cases of twenty-five rounds each, that would make two hundred when they started out breaching into the Cistern.

    Anneb¨¦l is at less than half that quantity now, she surmised.

    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

    "Tas¨¬a! Can you hear me? Are you still with us?" Anneb¨¦l yelled across the pump bay. She had backed up to the opposite wall from the control room and twin pumps to get cover by a tool shed lined with work benches. It also provided an advantageous angle on all of the Al-Majhul operators.

    After experiencing pain from merely whispering her thoughts outloud, Tas¨¬a couldn''t answer back without risking rupturing her nasal septum even further.

    She glanced up passed the rim of the window pane quickly, and then back down, spotting a wounded operator lying vertically against a stack of three pallets with cement bags on them. Back in the game himself, he was calmly placing a pair of Veber Sphere grenades on the pallet meant for a slingshot attachment on his right upper arm.

    He was going to try to roast her alive inside the control room.

    She studied the wound that caught an explosive round in his hip and side and had also ripped off a chunk of the armor. It revealed something beneath the outer armor shell that explained the resilience of the operator that lay dead in the control room with her: a layer of leather treated with metamaterials spread and clenched against his wounded flesh in a bind attached to muscle tendon; clearly the setup was designed to treat the deepest of injuries.

    It explained why the one dead at her feet was so hard to kill until an overdose of epinephrine ruptured his heart. It seemed nothing she did, even shooting him in the face with a 10mm made much of a difference.

    Tas¨¬a grabbed the 50-Split, raised up, and shot two .50 rounds dead center on the wound, snapping his torso apart from his legs and waist.

    A .50 round from an anti-material rifle designed to take out vehicles was an entirely different circumstance than even a 10mm handgun which could eat through the flesh and bones of a large mammal like a bear.

    She slipped back down and, with eyes clenched, shook off the last thing she witnessed: the bands of metamaterial leather whose logic circuit controls were going haywire squeezed the Al-Majhul operator''s guts into goo.

    So gross!

    7.62 rounds from a pair of AK-47s pounded the exterior wall in estimation of her current position. Tas¨¬a rolled to the door, crouched beside the dead Al-Majhul for cover. Bullets splintered through the tin and plywood above her.

    From her previous peek up, she knew no one was on the door into the control room interior side; the remaining three Al-Majhul operators were crouched by the pumps for cover, and it gave her an idea. Tas¨¬a rolled slowly out the door with the 50-Split in hand and stopped when she had the Al-Majhul torso in view.

    She drew the 50-Split up against her shoulder and put a red target bead on the grenade that remained on the palette.

    The other grenade had rolled away, struck by the ripped apart torso when she shot the Al-Majhul operator.

    Tas¨¬a made a billiards calculation as she lined up the shot. She pulled the trigger and nicked the grenade to fly towards the pumps.

    On landing, the volatile materials exploded. The trajectory did not need to be perfect for her purposes. In fact, the last thing she wanted to do was damage the pumps. She was in enough trouble with the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority as current matters stood.

    She simply needed a distraction.

    She could tell by Anneb¨¦l''s gunfire that the operators were once more scrambling for cover after the explosion.

    With a smooth, arching throw, Tas¨¬a pitched her 50-Split onto the control room''s rooftop. She scrambled up the side of the wall, twisted herself over the awning, grabbed the rifle, rolled across to the far side of the roof, and raised herself into position.

    With that last action, where she bobbed her head up, Tas¨¬a made the calculated risk that the operators had not prepared for her diversion. She caught the nearest operator ill-prepared.

    She lucked out. He was the only one of the group that faced her. His immediate companion was busy extinguishing a fire where napalm had clung onto his leg armor.

    He caught sight of her but was too slow to draw his AK-47 up to aim. Tas¨¬a took the top half of his skull off.

    Fifty caliber, for when your opponent absolutely insists on wearing Kevlar.

    The operator beside her target calmly sprayed down the flames on his legs with a retardant whose hose swiveled from a fanny pack like he had done it a thousand times before.

    Flame retardants were a standard item for fully suited operators because Molotov cocktails were used as a common riot tactic to roast them alive inside the suits.

    He suddenly jerked, let go of the hose, and pulled up his gun when he caught sight of the corpse beside him. She ducked down.

    She could have beaten him in the draw with no problem, but she had no idea where the third Al-Majhul operator was. Indeed, a spray of bullets from her right told Tas¨¬a she had done the right thing, and just in time too.

    With her situational intuition kicked in, Tas¨¬a prepared for what came next by switching out her gun and popping a moon clip into the .357 Clastic. When the grenade spun over her and apexed several feet above, Tas¨¬a was already mid backflip off the roof.

    She landed in a very low squat exposed to the gunfire of the smoldering operator, but giving no angle for that other last living Al-Majhul.

    The smoldering operator overshot towards the ceiling as he tried to follow her fall''s descent, just as she assumed he would given the gun he carried, and the readjustment for recoil he made bought her a luxurious second to empty the revolver''s chamber into his face.

    Tas¨¬a turned around and popped in the second moon clip as the grenade exploded on the control room roof, and the heated flammable liquid spread out. Tas¨¬a had no worry of being bullrushed by the last operator before she rearmed herself because she knew a grenade-based countermeasure would backfire before he even threw it.

    He could not risk approaching until the napalm stopped spreading between them. The petroleum gel tended to cling to Kevlar. As the last member of the crew with no one left to cover for him, the Al-Majhul was dead meat if he had to stop to extinguish a fire.

    Napalm dripped off the sides of the awnings, and the shingles caught fire.

    Tas¨¬a backed into the cover provided by the pump, waiting for the operator to approach. When the gel no longer pushed a path forward on the cement floor, she didn''t have to wait for long.

    The stomp of his boots let Tas¨¬a know he was going to make a mad dash that circled around the napalmed zone inside of which the two dead operators corpses caught fire.

    The maneuver potentially exposed him to Anneb¨¦l''s suppressive fire, but what choice did he have? He was in a pincer between both women.

    Surprisingly to Tas¨¬a, no gunfire came from behind him. Then she understood why. As he came into Tas¨¬a''s sight with his weapon up, she saw an inhuman blur approach him from behind.

    Anneb¨¦l was a foot taller than the Al-Majhul operator. He tried to turn his head as he heard her approach, but she caught his arm with one hand and threw his AK-47 away with the other.

    Anneb¨¦l grabbed him by the back of the gorget collar of his armor with her right hand and she clinched his left thigh brutally hard with the other one.

    She smashed him into the concrete floor all the while belting out a bloodthirsty yelp and the operator screaming for mercy. On the fourth smash, the armor split into several cracked segments.

    Anneb¨¦l tossed him several feet away and brought the shotgun up against her shoulder. Before she fired, a loud boom shot off from the roof.

    "Fuck," Tas¨¬a yelled. "There goes my big sexy gun! Get cover. The last drone inside it is going to pop off too."

    She waved Anneb¨¦l over. The brawler shot the last Al-Majhul in the head before rushing over to join Tas¨¬a under the pump operation''s assembly of control valves as the control room roof engulfed in flames.

    As she sat down, Anneb¨¦l caught a glimpse of Tas¨¬a''s nose.

    "Did you run into a wall? That looks pretty fucking nasty."

 4.43 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Elise shook her head and threw her medical bag up on a one-legg¨¦d table beside a guard post chair on the balcony so Tas¨¬a could take a seat and wait her turn as a patient.

    The bounty hunter glanced at the entrance to the pumphouse, where pillars of smoke were rolling out into the cavern above.

    "Damn, look at that rolling smoke. Surprised the two of you didn''t choke to death on the fumes."

    Anneb¨¦l shrugged, then spat a black dust loogie into the abyss below.

    "I''m too pumped up from the fight to even notice."

    Tas¨¬a beamed proudly at her friend.

    "She beat an Al-Majhul grunt to death inside his Kevlar body armor. I heard dozens upon dozens of bones crunching."

    Elise, as she crouched back to tend to Andes, whom she was prepping for movement, gave Tas¨¬a a quizzical look.

    "I take it you really don''t like the Al-Majhul, do you?"

    Tas¨¬a crossed her arms in an emphatic fashion and eyed Elise back.

    "No. And neither should you. They are evidently part of the same sinister brood that Fiona is taking part in."

    Elise nodded.

    "True. The Dimittis Cult is as you describe, but let''s talk about this personal matter of yours. The Al-Majhul, they are Harvested, like yourself."

    "Are you playing the part of a devil''s advocate, Se?ora Luna Claro?"

    The three brothers listened in, as did two of Elise''s operators, whom stood guard behind her. Andu Caza was one of them, and he gave Tas¨¬a a wink.

    It was his sister whom Tas¨¬a had referenced as sinister. He let her know it was nothing personal.

    Glancing about for anyone who she may have overlooked, Tas¨¬a wondered where Sachmilli was.

    "No," Elise answered, drawing Tas¨¬a back to their conversation. "I have other motives. I feel your enmity for them is drawn from your instincts and intuition, and perhaps, more concerning to me... it may be programmed into you, and it leads you to hunt them."

    Was Elise aware that every encounter she has had with the Al-Majhul has resulted in one hundred percent casualty for them? It did indeed seem the case.

    "If that be the case," Tas¨¬a answered, "then someone played the long game when they stitched together my brain. Until a month ago, I had no idea the Al-Majhul even existed."

    "They would have restitched your gut if it were true. Ultra-style operations of that nature literally rewire the neurological structures of the gut."

    Elise then shrugged with a stiff feign of casualness. It was the gesture of a battle commander who put all matters to the side for unit cohesion.

    "Forget I brought it up," she said before turning to Anneb¨¦l with a much more natural, radiant smile. "How is that little cutie of yours?"

    Anneb¨¦l''s eyes widened as she clearly wasn''t expecting the question. Her eyes darted to Tas¨¬a and down at her own boots.

    Elise rose up.

    "If anything has happened to dear little Villon, I will rip the Earth off of its very axis!"

    In a cool, low voice, Anneb¨¦l answered, "No. It is very complicated."

    "Complicated matters are my specialty. Offered to you at no charge."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded, "I appreciate that, but his father is the biggest player in Asunci¨®n, and it is beyond even his means to make right at the present. Look, current matters must take precedence. We can talk about it later."

    Elise stretched out neck tensions. She didn''t want to set the matter aside.

    "Okay. I know by watching Tas¨¬a bouncing on her boots, I''ve made things awkward. Sorry. But can I ask you to keep me in the loop when you do get a chance to deal with it?"

    "Sure. Where is Sachmilli? I was expecting him to escort you down here and not let you out of his sights."

    Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

    Elise laughed at a private joke.

    "He is helping my guys to carry some equipment down for Operation Mel. We are not going through there." Elise pointed to the pump room. "Fiona is running an extraordinary amount of power in the setup she has back there. I don''t know if it is for a special project, a defensive parameter, or the energy is being used to run medical equipment to save her from dying, but whatever is going on in there, we''ll just avoid it altogether and repel down by rope."

    Tas¨¬a looked down in the abyss that glowed dully by means of floating ascospores. She drew a bead by the laser sight on her PA pointed into the abyss out of curiosity.

    And she gave out a whistle.

    "Eight hundred and seventy meters. Good luck with that rope. Unfortunately, I have no choice but to confront the daemon bottled up in there."

    "I have someone, a friend of yours, who can help you with that while we secure Mel."

    Tas¨¬a stared back crossly.

    "That bitch is no friend of mine."

    Elise shook her head.

    "She was only following my orders when she misled you. Why are you not angry at me?"

    Tas¨¬a didn''t let up on the anger.

    "Yeah. Just what was that about?"

    "You were in Asunci¨®n to regroup with Le¨®n Ballano. We were in the city to nab him, isolate him from the war criminals, and cut him a deal towards reintegration into society."

    Tas¨¬a nodded and relaxed her demeanor.

    "That answer perfectly encapsulates why I am not truly angry with you. You were absolutely one hundred percent true and faithful to your own nature. I accept you on your terms. But Felicit¨¦ has been a cagey, fake-ass, poser bitch in all of these matters from the get-go."

    Elise grimaced and shook her head. She nodded to Caza, and he and his companion knelt to pick up the brancarda-style field stretcher. When he threw her a googly-eyed glance, Tas¨¬a realized he was the same operator that she shot eighteen hours earlier.

    Elise continued as she stood up and scrutinized Tas¨¬a''s broken nose.

    "There is something you need to understand, and I''m laying it all out there on the line, security clearances be damned. Felicit¨¦ is a creature without agency. She has to be extorted, coerced, and plied into doing anything beyond the needs of immediate gratification.

    "The person in there was murdered, in the literal sense of that word, a long time ago. A decade after her death, her memories were reconstructed from her preserved brain specimen to an artificial brain made up of fungi made from a species meant to be resistant to ascospores.

    "She is a failed project to recreate the world''s greatest hacker and unleash her against the nanospore entities. Far from being resistant, the entities integrated her within days, and the incident where that occurred provided the Salvage a cover story that declared her a terrorist to be thrown into the IMCQ.

    "I know this, Tas¨¬a, because we were the team sent to retrieve her. The wildest part of it all, though we succeeded, apprehended, and we got her to that hellish Ward Ocho, is that when we returned fifteen months later for this current assignment, I expected her to remember me as we were driving away from the IMCQ. She didn''t recognize either Caza or me, though we spent days together after her capture."

    As Elise spoke, her hands remained busy cleaning up the broken nose wound, stuffing her nostrils with an antiseptic gauze designed for ease of breathing. She applied a needle filled with a substance designed to prevent swelling and to retain the nose''s structural memory when Elise reset it in two days time. She explained the shot''s purpose and that she had signaled Caza to return with a spare combat helmet so Tas¨¬a wouldn''t accidentally bump it on her next excursion before the bounty hunter returned to the story.

    "So I analyzed Felicit¨¦''s cochlear suppressor device for its diagnostic feedback and discovered something previously unknown. Her memory periodically resets, but not all of it at once. It''s why she hounds you about the Human Rights Commission business. It comes from an unresolved matter in her life from before she died.

    "We''ve tried to turn these circumstances to our advantage for our operation against Kutuzov, but it''s proven pretty damn difficult to exploit, so for you to be angry with her or consider her a poser is a fruitless endeavor. You might as well get mad at that pretty gun you have there for being off tuned for all the good it does."

    Tas¨¬a hesitated a moment before speaking; suddenly things were falling into place.

    "This is related to my current assignment of saving Demona Helo?ste, isn''t it?"

    Elise nodded in confirmation.

    "Darling, it sure as hell is in more ways than one."

    Tas¨¬a''s voice grew a bit shrill.

    "And the Great Fuck-Up, as well?"

    "Keep going, Tas¨¬a; you are on a winning streak."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head.

    "Nah. I''m going to start bleeding out of my ears from brain scramble at this rate. Hey, thanks for the offer, but you keep whatever that thing is. I''ll figure out how to take the daemon down without her."

    Elise paused for a moment with a tilt of her head towards the top balcony entrance.

    "You assume Felicit¨¦ is the friend of yours I meant. She isn''t."

    Tas¨¬a turned around. Beside Sachmilli and five of Elise''s operatives stood Sinclair, who bit her bottom lip through a wan smile as she waved to Tas¨¬a.

    Tas¨¬a''s stomach fluttered with figurative butterflies as she yelled out.

    "Jump across; I''ll catch you."

    Sinclair shook her head and yelled back over the abyss.

    "I don''t see the feasibility of success. I think I''ll come to you this way."

    Sinclair joined in the march on the long stretch of walkways with Sachmilli and the operators.

    Elise was finished with treating Tas¨¬a''s broken nose and went to another assignment of setting up her gear along the side of the balcony facing the cavern.

    Tas¨¬a now noticed a set of exploitable ledges that could be secured for the planned expedition.

    Anneb¨¦l leaned by her side, touching her arm to arm.

    Tas¨¬a spoke up.

    "For what it is worth, I noticed the Cesarean scar the first time I saw you naked. Totally naked, I mean. Never asked because it was none of my damn business, not because I am a self-involved little shit."

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled.

    "I know, and I already factored that in."

    But Anneb¨¦l still chuckled on.

    "What?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Well, you did ask if I was pregnant."

    Tas¨¬a winced. "Different circumstance. I wasn''t going to let you back me in that fight if someone put a baby in you."

    Anneb¨¦l nodded, slowly.

    "So, the opposite of a self-involved little shit?"

    Tas¨¬a leaned against the rail behind them to rest her back, and lifted her chin to affirm.

    "Yup."

 4.44 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    "I have to be there," Andu Caza declared as he strapped the polymer helmet to her leather operative cuirass.

    "I get that. Did you clear it with Elise?"

    Elise was testing the roped harness she assembled for Mel''s cage by repelling to the next ledge down. She wasn''t available to answer.

    After Andu clamped the helmet down front to back, Tas¨¬a was up to an assemblance of combat spec complete. They headed towards the pumphouse entranceway while Andu answered her question.

    "Not a problem. She knows I need to do this. There isn''t going to be much trekking involved for the nightwing retrieval. Getting down there and getting the bird back up here will be ninety percent of the excursion. Fortunately, Mel didn''t glide far away. Just down."

    Tas¨¬a nodded.

    "Alright, then, welcome aboard. Anneb¨¦l and I are glad to have you, chief." Tas¨¬a''s tone changed toward a more grim disposition. "Andu, the firefight was messy. Very messy. I have my doubts she is still alive."

    Andu stuck out his chest. As if the operator didn''t appear authoritative enough.

    "I don''t," he declared. "She''s alive. I''ve studied the heat signatures and the flow of pulse energy through the systems in there. The change-ups can''t be explained away by a defensive system''s daemon looping through the corridor''s nervous system. She''s alive, but if she gets to stay that way depends on the answers she gives me."

    The final words were accompanied by a tightly flexed shrug. Tas¨¬a hoped Fiona was dead, or at least on the fade, so Andu would not have to bear the responsibility of execution.

    Hard to blame him for his anger, Tas¨¬a considered. By far, of everyone involved in the Klinica Komplete heist, Andu was betrayed the most by the sabotage.

    "Andu. This is your operation. I''m just your security consultant, and Anneb¨¦l here is your muscle."

    Andu smiled as he gave her a figurative glance.

    "I understand you were carrying around a 50-Split?"

    "Lost it in the last skirmish. The drone exploded and took out half of the control room."

    Andu grimaced.

    "Shame. Would''ve been real nice to have it on hand if a turret popped up on us."

    He eyed Anneb¨¦l''s rifle and shotgun strapped to her back. The .38 bush rifle was mid-range in its practical application. The ammo for it was very effective against unarmored opponents. .38 was the standard round for cop revolvers for decades but would be mostly useless against a daemon''s bag of tricks.

    The 10-gauge was a different story. Explosive slugs could prove effective against a turret.

    He gave a thumbs up.

    "Muscle, indeed. You wouldn''t have fought in the octagon by any chance?"

    Anneb¨¦l chuckled and leaned against a rail, cocky-like. "Yeah. Kind of a big deal at one time, but I killed too many opponents for the commissioner''s liking. But we can talk about that later."

    At the same time, Tas¨¬a eyed his load out. With her eyebrows furrowed, teasingly, she mockingly pointed to the .72 Saturnine.

    "That could prove pretty sweet with cryo rounds or any grippy plunker variant hitting your targets, but you''ve got it set to non-lethal. What are you going to do when you encounter that dragon down there? Put on a pair of velvet gloves and offer it a hand job in exchange for your lost data?"

    He shook his head trembly.

    "Oh Tas¨¬a, you wound," Andu answered, feigning discomfort before he stopped their progress at the door.

    Andu continued to speak. "Al-Majhul in these caverns are protected by the VEAA so, unlike a maddog gunslinger like you, I''ve got to be careful about whom I kill. Rules of Engagement, you know.

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    "There should be about sixty of the Al-Majhul roaming about down there. After my boys take them out, we wont be skimpy-dicking it; see those trio of Americans with my tech Bruges walking up those steps together? They are carrying on them the switch-out for beasts-specialty stock with which we intend to take the dragon down."

    Tas¨¬a raised her eyebrows at the stacked and packed transparent cases she was seeing. Though a wee lassy thief, she could handle .357 revolvers, 10mm repeater pistols, and .50 caliber anti-material rifles due to her rigorous use of climbing skills that gave her extra strength in core, limb, and grip muscles; however, the combat rifles that she now witnessed, whose gray metal forms she stared at longingly, alone were a grade or two higher than anything she could handle. They were designed for high recoil impact absorption on a combatant''s fully armored suit.

    Her blue leather mesh that doubled as a chic little number didn''t qualify for that level of layered deflection.

    She whistled for Andu''s amusement before she assessed:

    "You''re gonna create Hell on Earth, huh?"

    "Yup. A damn good team got chewed up last night by that dragon. We do not intend to suffer the same fate."

    Andu graciously allowed Tas¨¬a and Anneb¨¦l through the pumphouse entrance. He appraised the damage and the Al-Majhul bodies strewn about in the simmering mess.

    "Whew. Looks like a pair of witches evoked a black mass using flamethrowers in this Lord forsaken place."

    "Santa Muerta," Anneb¨¦l protested the comparison. "Careful, careful with that language. You''ll tempt me into an Evocation Against Desecration to ward against it. That''s a very lengthy ritual."

    "My apologies. Meant nothing by it, mi se?ora." Andu said through a long grimace. He turned to Tas¨¬a. "Now that we are here, any ideas about breaching those door panels back down that way emitting the gray glowing hazard pattern? My dinky little tensile debilitator isn''t going to cut it against magnetized steel cubits."

    Tas¨¬a laughed heartily. If she had any idea. Who does he think he is with?

    "We''re in a pumphouse, Andu! Remember how we breached Klinica Komplete? Same principle, but easier to assemble this time."

    Not so easy that they didn''t run into snags. The console box was destroyed in the control room explosion. Tas¨¬a found a small stack of circuit boards and a personal assistant set up to be a master controller to replace the half-melted manual switchboard while she searched the toolshed. She had to climb under the floorboard grids to get to non-damaged wires to hook the highly dated Arduino into the twin pump circuits.

    "Poppa would be so proud of you right now, if ...."

    Tas¨¬a had to remind herself her father was still alive. That she only stayed away from her parents so as not to bring trouble on them while a bounty was on her head.

    She snapped a 3D-mapped pic of herself smiling beside the installed microcontroller board to send to him later.

    While thoughts of domestic tranquility roamed around her head, Tas¨¬a reminded herself it was closing in on time to call Beauregard. He was starting a double shift when she left Asunci¨®n, and he would be getting up from sleep soon.

    After this business is complete. She decided as she prepped the board.

    Before long she could use its switches to control water and gas pressure, directional flow, and the mechanical stages of a solution-neutral capsule injector to install sodium hydroxide pods. This was used for circulatory maintenance, where the lye (sodium hydroxide) booster was used for declogging gunk buildup.

    She planned to use it to chemically strip out the steel alloy components in the door. Either to pump the lye all the way through or at least weaken the door''s stencil strength to where a few rounds from the shotgun would take care of the rest of it if reverse suction proved futile.

    The sodium hydroxide pods had their own specialized rubber tubes hinged inside the pipe interiors to minimize contact with the volatile compound agent and the metal of the outer pipe.

    They could be refurnished to hook a set of sealed gaskets on the tubes between the pump and the door.

    Tas¨¬a assigned to Anneb¨¦l the job of removing the rubber tubes from the service pipes and fitting them for the steel door.

    Andu volunteered the task of going over the glowing steel panels that comprised the door with a fine laser pulse to tease out any hidden markers that revealed rapid assembly where turrets could pop up.

    She hated those sorts of surprises.

    Within thirty minutes, the entire assembly was ready.

    "Andu. Do you remember the hose parameters and penetration rates from the Klinica Komplete heist?"

    He appeared taken back that she even had to ask. Tas¨¬a had developed a well earned reputation for mathematical precision.

    "Not really by memory. But I checked my old files on that mission against your setup here already. Assuming a 37000 kilopascal stream, we''ll eat through three millimeters per second on average. Breech should occur in forty-seven seconds of consistent output. Recommended sunction reversal at forty-two seconds."

    Though she had grown weary of her superpower, Tas¨¬a listened on with a wan heart.

    With the Modality as a guide, Tas¨¬a could have recalled the original specs and then eyeballed the current setup to get a close approximation to that same answer within seconds.

    She glanced up and smiled.

    "Outstanding," she said.

    Tas¨¬a set the .357 Clastic down to the side for easy access if she had to switch out the controler board.

    10 meters in front of her, the 38cm diameter hose was fastened in the center panel of the door. The pattern remained consistent, indicating the daemon was unaware of their presence.

    She throttled the controller on the gui, and the hose jumped rigid as it blasts the lye on full pump at the door. The pump itself screeched like a demon made of iron and steel behind them.

    Even Anneb¨¦l shook at the menace implied.

    "Whew. There be ghosts in these machines," the brawler yelled above the cacaphony.

    Then the gray light pulsed a dancing macabre display as a thud boomed in the corridors behind the door.

    Anneb¨¦l continued.

    "Sounds wicked, mes amigos. And it is coming this way."

 4.45 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    With a sneer on his mouth held firm, Andu pressed a gauge on the Saturnine that juiced the slug in the chamber to full conductive capacity.

    A well-placed hit could short-circuit a drone or a droid.

    "Tas¨¬a," he called out. "Count down to five and reverse flow."

    "Five... Four... Three... Two... One..."

    She flipped the control knob on the GUI, and the central door panel began to bend towards them as the lye cycled back into its storage container, pulling the weakened metal material along with it.

    Something on the corridor side smacked against the panel hard. Tas¨¬a doubted her .357 Clastic would do much damage to the thing on the other side from the sound of its pounding, but she gripped the gun in both hands tightly.

    On the third thump, it smashed through the central door panel, collapsing the rest of them. Tas¨¬a could only describe what she witnessed as a bone machine.

    Smacking the lye hose to the side, it dropped to the floor and balled up inside long, ribbed bones that possessed jagged growths arching along their ribbed surfaces.

    Andu hit it with a .72 bullet that cleared through the rib work and exploded against a center mass on its lower torso. Anneb¨¦l laid down several explosive slugs that popped off against the chitinous arch of its back.

    Tas¨¬a eyed a pair of sensors jutting off of its reptilian skull and emptied the six rounds in the revolver''s cylinder. The bullets chipped deep into the surrounding bone spurs.

    The beast held still, perhaps stunned by the brutal assault of the varied munitions centered upon it. The trio reloaded their weapons to begin another barrage against the bone machine when a set of bones consisting of a dozen long whipping blade attachments thrashed out from the back of its torso.

    Andu, who was closing in on it, had to leap out of the range of the rotary blades.

    The spiny blades whirled in unison. The beast leaped onto Anneb¨¦l''s chest, ripped the sheet of Kevlar and the shirt beneath off before she could respond, and shot a few dozen needles in her chest before leaping off and hovering in the air.

    As Tas¨¬a yelled out Anneb¨¦l''s name, she realized what the bone machine was in actuality. A Gremlin, also called a flying monkey, repurposed with an armored chitinous necro-mechanical surface and remade very sleekly elongated.

    One of the hominid droids, made of more common steel and polymer, got the best of her in the ductwork of the Spore Isolation Unit months earlier.

    She rushed towards Anneb¨¦l as Andu provided cover fire.

    Anneb¨¦l lay gasping for air. Her tits were exposed with dozens of welts where the tiny needles penetrated through her epidermis.

    Tas¨¬a worked her hands into the straps of the medkit attached to Anneb¨¦l''s belt that bolstered a thick duffle bag, which in turn fastened stump racks for her pair of long guns.

    Working the straps took patience, and Anneb¨¦l''s violent groans didn''t make it any easier on Tas¨¬a''s nerves. The assembly was fastened securely.

    Finally, Tas¨¬a jerked the fasteners loose. Inside the kit, she found an inhaler more commonly used to treat gas poisoning.

    Set against Anneb¨¦l''s mouth, it clamped down, creating a barrier between nose and chin before unleashing a countermeasure to reset Anneb¨¦l''s collapsed lung.

    Within seconds it did its job; Anneb¨¦l ripped it off and gasped to regain her breath.

    Tas¨¬a held her by the arm and pleaded, "Speak to me!"

    Anneb¨¦l leaned over with a halting hand motion. "One moment. Stay clear of my tits."

    The brawler''s eyes locked forward. Tas¨¬a realized she was evoking her own version of the Modality.

    The needles shot back out of Annebel''s chest, spraying the Gremlin, which still hovered several meters above them, as it dodged the gunfire.

    The Gremlin popped in a staccato of gear-hissing sounds before shaking fiercely. The needles rained about the floor harmlessly.

    Meanwhile, Andu fired another well-aimed electrically charged round into its center mass. Smoke trailed it as it dodged Andu''s next attack.

    Tas¨¬a rolled away from Anneb¨¦l, her .357 Colt Clastic already reloaded. She once more emptied the revolver onto the sensor.

    This time dislodging it.

    When she popped another moon clip into the revolver, a grasper appendage on a telescoping cylinder grabbed her by the wrist, slammed it down, and forced her to drop the gun.

    Within a split instant, the Gremlin was on top of her. Its remaining green orb stared into her own eyes. It resembled little the Gremlin she fought in the SIU, but the sound of the spinning rotors accelerating was exactly the same.

    So was the sound of the needles being loaded into a canister designed to disperse them in a crowd for riot control.

    A slug from Andu''s Saturnine pierced into its center mass where its battery was encased. It created a crack that revealed a lovely Jacob''s ladder of blue sparks coursing from a core lithium slug.

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    With her free hand, Tas¨¬a grabbed the stiletto from inside her boot and shoved the blade into the battery case crack.

    She was gambling with her life that her powers were merely inert now and not stripped from her entirely.

    When the shock came, the smooth, flowing, and even oscillation throughout her entire body felt familiar and comfortable. She was a shockwave rider and felt elated to know for certain now that to be part of her essential being.

    Like releasing a deep breath of air, she pushed the shock waves refocused back into the Gremlin.

    As Tas¨¬a untangled herself to avoid injury, it collapsed upon itself in a dance of sparks and in a dense smoke that was a heavy, smelted scent of calcium carbonate and chrome.

    She rolled towards Anneb¨¦l before the Gremlin plummeted to the side, and there she caught her breath.

    Anneb¨¦l spoke weakly.

    "Is electrical immunity part of your inert abilities profile?" She asked.

    Tas¨¬a nodded. "Yup. Do you have any, yourself?"

    Anneb¨¦l giggled as she nodded.

    "Hydrochloric acid, lye, similar acids. My body is an anti-catalyst."

    "Nice," Tas¨¬a confirmed. She glanced around and found Andu. He grabbed onto the door breach, leaning into an interior corridor, scanning for surface readouts.

    "No, what you did there was quite impressive." Anneb¨¦l held Tas¨¬a''s hand, checking it for injury before pressing it palm side against her left boob, endearingly. "I''m going to need your help to get back to lucidity, T.; those poisoned darts hold a nerve agent."

    Anneb¨¦l stopped speaking for a moment, but Tas¨¬a could feel the fiery warmth of the brawler''s flesh and the healthy thud of her beating heart.

    "I''m listening," Tas¨¬a confirmed. "Go on."

    "You''ll find both in my kit. Hit me up with that caffeine shot right now, and in exactly twelve minutes after, hit me up with that adrenaline shot."

    "You sure?" Tas¨¬a asked.

    "Yup. I''m fading; do it exactly like that. The first will prep my heart to avoid a rupture. Don''t try this on yourself¡ªunique to my system."

    Anneb¨¦l conked out unconscious. Tas¨¬a could feel the brawler''s heartbeat slow down before it steadied once more at a lower rate.

    As she administered the first needle into Anneb¨¦l''s arms, Andu shuffled over to join her.

    "How is she doing?" he asked.

    "She has me administering these shots to get her back in the action. I am not sure it is the wisest course of action."

    Andu squatted beside her. "I agree, she''s out of the action; let''s not risk it. On that note, do you handle plasma as well as you do high voltage?"

    Tas¨¬a shook her head, "No, I''d get my ass fried dead if that droid possessed a plasma weapon. Why do you ask, mi amigo?"

    Andu pointed to the door. "The daemon controls plasma-based elementals. My suit is designed with a defense against them embedded. If you don''t mind if I borrow your friend''s shotgun, I''ll take care of them while you help her out."

    Tas¨¬a threw him a gobliny smile.

    "Works for me. I am no hero, Andu, and the loot drops have been paltry. Fucking AK-47s. Can you believe that?"

    Andu shook his head as he walked away laughing. The boys love her for her bent sense of humor, Tas¨¬a thought smugly.

    How many times has Anneb¨¦l evoked her own Modality tonight? Tas¨¬a wondered as she watched her friend disappear in the mist of urine dissipate with only the glow of the brawler''s clitoral scarab showing through.

    After reviving Anneb¨¦l, Tas¨¬a accompanied her behind the toolshed. Anneb¨¦l had to piss something fierce, but her legs were still wobbly.

    In between moans of pain, Anneb¨¦l complained, "Oh, the price we pay to be super jacked like we are."

    She clasped Tas¨¬a''s hand as she let out another stream.

    "Could you lessen that grip a bit?" Tas¨¬a pleaded.

    "Yeah. Sorry."

    Anneb¨¦l leaned up and belted her pants.

    "Hey, T. I could not help but notice you were not evoking that quicksilver speed of yours, nor those scarily precise calculations. The twins'' taunts were real, you think?"

    "Could be."

    Anneb¨¦l shook her head. "Nah. I don''t believe it. They are playing their fucking mind games. When was the last time you slept?"

    Tas¨¬a looked hard into Anneb¨¦l''s eyes. The brawler knew several Harvested. Tas¨¬a only knew of two others, the one standing in front of her, and Anneb¨¦l''s brother.

    "I haven''t been able to sleep since Demona had her seizure. Could that be it?"

    Anneb¨¦l nodded affirmatively.

    "Absolutely it can affect your ability to control it."

    Tas¨¬a was getting enthusiastic as she thought of the elation she felt with the flow of electricity that surged through her. What if that reset it?

    "I want to try something," Tas¨¬a began. "Throw me a random set of nine numbers, then another set of nine numbers, and I''ll attempt to do simple three-by-three set matrix transformations in addition, subtraction, and multiplication."

    Anneb¨¦l cleared her throat.

    "Seventeen. Twenty-five. Three. Fourteen. Nine. Eighteen. Twelve. Forty-seven. Thirteen. Five . . ."

    Tas¨¬a shook her head and waved her hand in a halting motion. "Stop with the second set. I''ve forgotten the first two numbers already. Never mind, I''m still dumb as fuck."

    Anneb¨¦l wagged her finger.

    "Tas¨¬a! You have not slept in three days. You''re sure as shit not doing matrix transformations."

    Andu laughed as he approached. When Tas¨¬a glanced back, she smiled to herself. Even with the stunning and statuesque Anneb¨¦l bare-breasted and quite unselfconscious about it, he only had eyes for her.

    "It''s clear. I found your friend, Matzo. Unconscious, but he looks fine. Birddog has licked herself in a back chamber. I need your help with it. Looks tricked up. And I discovered this."

    Tas¨¬a gasped, "Se?ora de la Santa Muerta! It can''t be. It is whole. Intact. Undamaged!"

    In his right hand, Andu held Demona Helo?ste''s NeoPalm.

    "I found it in there inside a laboratory where it was encased in a resynth machine. When flipping through it, I found something you would want to see."

    He turned the screen around so Tas¨¬a could see it. There was a profile of Simone Barre Est¨¨vez listed under Candidate.

    Andu nodded grimly.

    "I think Ms. Est¨¨vez is aware of the reason why you have returned to Vida Escondida. The file linked to the profile makes it quite clear why she is Demona Helo?ste''s choice. Walk with me as you browse through that."

    They entered the corridor beyond the door. As they got deeper into the interior, a firefight became evident from walls damaged by plasma bursts and debris strewn about the floors.

    Tas¨¬a buried her attention into the NeoPalm display as Anneb¨¦l guided her by the shoulder onward. There was a video clip of Est¨¨vez nearby the strip mall instructing the Czech extraction team that followed Matzi.

    So, he was running from her? Why?

    They reached the lab. Matzi was unconscious on a gurney in a corner. Tas¨¬a checked his pulse. It was good and steady.

    Andu pointed to a corridor with a metal door at the end and led her to it.

    Fiona''s voice came over a PA system.

    "You brought Alma-Gris, that little shit, to open it up. I''ll save you the trouble and time since I have none to spare myself."

    The steel door clicked twice.

    "Go ahead," Fiona continued. "It''s unarmed."

    Tas¨¬a gave it a close inspection. Andu scanned it with his device.

    Over the PA, Fiona''s voice choked on laughter.

    "Funny that you murderers don''t trust me."

    She wheezed in a spasm of dry heaves until silent. Andu threw open the door.

    Sprawled, lying face up, Fiona''s head was thrown back, staring up with dead eyes locked on the ceiling. Her body was nude except for a medical body wrap that pulsed red, indicative of failure.

    Andu wiped his eyes. In a choked-up voice, he gasped out.

    "I had so many questions."

 4.46 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Part VII: The Double Agent

    One Year Ago ...

    "No more shooting at us. Let''s talk," Caza yelled.

    Fiona listened in on the standoff conversation over the PA while she fidgeted. The interior of the shack was arranged just a few minutes earlier to her spec with monitors placed in all four corners linked to the Vertodo 360 Cam on the roof.

    She still felt like something was off.

    No one could approach without her first sighting them from a hundred meters, but something was not quite right.

    A set of eyes lay on her. She could feel it somehow.

    Fiona shook her head and told herself:

    Your paranoia is going to destroy you.

    Still, until she knew for certain she was in the clear, Fiona could not contact her Control.

    He went by Gato Montes, and she needed his input before her brother, Andu, talked the Klinica Kompleat staffers into surrendering to him.

    Andu crouched behind a trash compactor with a comlink in hand, and the three staffers hid behind the entrance patio.

    At least two of them, the males who were grounds attendants, possessed small arms. They fired on the creep team mere minutes earlier as Andu and the Americans got out of the lead vehicle, forcing the team into cover.

    The attendants were badly outmatched, and only Andu''s benevolence kept them alive.

    Fiona got busy. She only had minutes before the three staffers would surely surrender. She pulled up a file integrity visualization map of her system to identify if the invader was using electronic means of surveillance on her.

    She kept her operational command system extraordinarily clean, which made the invasive instruction set stand out from the support tool cluster from which it embedded to hide itself while it read through the system logs.

    She hit the invasive program with an endpoint detection file to siphon its communication data; the trajectory of its feed was located nearby with an oscillation pattern so strong she could see it on the monitor bare-eyed without magnification.

    Now she understood. Fiona turned the cam to the sky. A single nightwing hovered above by a few hundred meters.

    Most likely, the crow was attracted to the El Otros drama below it. The infection-related heat signatures on the two grounds attendants and female concierge clerk trapped along with them could easily be seen from a dozen kilometers away by a nightwing, given the staffer''s present level of anxiety.

    However, as unfortunate as that may have sounded, it presented an opportunity for her to slow things down. Fiona hit Andu up on his earpiece.

    "We''ve got company," she told him. She then sent the live feed of the nightwing.

    "Damn it," Andu cursed. "Can you handle it for me?"

    As usual, he fell right into her plans.

    "Yeah," she said casually to reassure him that she was on the ball. "Stall the staffers by asking them questions about their duties. Any excuse to keep them put. Don''t let them do anything potentially kinetic for now."

    "Thanks, Li''l Chief," Andu answered in his sign-off.

    Fiona typed a message to the nightwing. First she put in the warrant ID and then Elise''s bounty hunter registration number and attached a message:

    ''This Is A Legal Notice: You Are Interfering In Official Salvage Matters. SHOO! GET! SCRAM, bird.''

    Fiona burned the nightwing''s instruction set out of the operational command system.

    It soared higher and flew away towards Vida Escondida.

    She punched in Gato Montes. His face was visually obscured, but the interior was the second floor of the main building of the Klinica Kompleat building.

    "Che Encanto," he said, addressing Fiona by his code name for her. "You can''t allow them to capture the staff. I wouldn''t ask you to do this, but the satellite is blocked. I can''t order their self-destruction."

    Fiona was confused by the odd choice of words.

    "You mean, their suicides?"

    Gato Montes paused before answering.

    "Yes. You''ll have to activate a turret. Hurry, get it in place."

    He was asking her to kill the three staff members.

    "I''m here to save El Otros, not murder them!"

    She could hear exasperation in his voice. It wasn''t her place to question an order. Her intuition read in his voice doubts that they should have ever gotten involved on a physical level.

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    "Fi...Che Encanto, they are foot soldiers. If they get captured, that puts the entire community at risk. All of their lives are in your hands. Can I count on you?"

    "Of course," Fiona answered back, though she felt at that moment like running far away from it all. Finding a way out of the Quadra itself and distancing from the mess she got herself into when she first agreed to work for Gato Montes against his mortal enemy inside ¨´ltimos Di¨¢s¡ªElise Luna Claro.

    But now she couldn''t imagine life without him, and her heart''s stirrings bounced back in place.

    "Of course," Fiona repeated. "I''ll do it for you. Give me a moment to set everything in motion. Che Encanto, out."

    It felt weird to refer to herself as ''Che Encanto'' (my charm) instead of ''Nde Encanto'' (your charm), but that was by protocol.

    She charged up the generator hidden on top of the main building, and then turned on the coolant sink to counter the generator''s heat signature.

    In a few more minutes and the turret would be online. In the meantime, she hit Andu''s earpiece.

    "The bird is no longer a problem. Everything is a go," she said.

    "I saw it fly off four minutes ago. Run into a problem?"

    "Nothing I couldn''t handle," she answered dismissively.

    "Hey," Andu said. "Elise is late. What''s the hold-up?"

    She checked her messages and converted one to text from just eleven minutes previously.

    Fiona paraphrased it.

    "She is doing a last-minute purchase order switch-out for what we''ll need for the breach equipment. Elise gave an estimated time of arrival in exactly ten minutes."

    "Alright," he said. "I''ve got to talk these scared-out-of-their-minds people over to our side before she gets here. Gallo Puntero, signing off."

    "Tre...," Fiona feigned a cough, "Fiona, signing off."

    How can you be so careless!

    "Fucking amateur hour," she cursed herself.

    She didn''t stop for long to continue berating herself. Out of curiosity, Fiona checked out their operational expenses, fearing that the purchase switchouts Luna Claro committed would save a significant amount from the original order list.

    Gato Montes plan to preemptively take out Tas¨¬a del Alma-Gris as a threat depended on getting Luna Claro on board with capturing her.

    To Fiona''s relief, the new purchase was nearly thirty-five thousand USD more expensive than the original drill machine on order.

    She grinned at the balance sheet she read through that put the operation in the red in terms of solvency. This part of the plan was her own contribution to the greater scheme.

    Motion on the forward monitor told her it was almost time. Fiona clicked between the Klinica Kompleat exterior cameras. She marked the three staffers as targets. Then limited the quantity and speed of the rounds. A tri-burst was done thrice in each target for one point two seconds aimed at the heart.

    She keyed into the parameters: No self-defense measure, nor harm to other targets. The turret was going to have to be a necessary sacrifice.

    The woman started running first, jumping over the stairs onto the patio and towards the pathway. The two groundskeepers followed quickly behind.

    Fiona took a deep breath, and held it in place. She flipped the button that set the turret in motion.

    With a violent slam, the turret was instantly grounded on the awning. In the next split instance, the first marked grounds keeper''s torso lit up with rounds exploding against his back and out of his ribcage.

    Fiona tried not to see anymore of the carnage, but she caught the glimpse of an image that would stick with her and she would wake up visualizing every morning until her dying day.

    She shook it from her thoughts.

    Thankfully, their deaths were quick and merciful. That was the only thing graceful about this shit show, Fiona told herself.

    She closed her eyes and tried to breathe calmly as she needed to take a minute to reconcile what she had done before getting back to her work. A postmortem assessment of what went wrong would be expected of her from both Andu and Luna Claro.

    Fiona shook her head once more. She had her own postmortem to consider.

    Well, I am a murderer now. How do I feel about that?

    Fiona recalled Luna Claro''s quip about an El Otro she had hunted down, very much annoyed Fiona even asked her about it.

    Couldn''t give less of a shit, so why are we still talking about it?

    She had grown to hate the woman, and Fiona suspected in her own case, she would never be able to shrug it off so easily.

    At the rendezvous motel room, as she waited for Montes Gato, Fiona stood naked, staring at her own body in the mirror.

    She didn''t like what she saw. A year ago she was athletic and pretty with chiseled cheeks instead of puffy ones. She only agreed to gain the fifty-five pounds for Montes Gato''s scheme to lure Elise Luna Claro into a relationship.

    Fiona chuckled over the thought as she pinched at a belly roll, "Imagine this being someone''s idea of a honeypot."

    But it was. The psychological profile assessed by ¨´ltimos D¨ªas''s own clinical staff nailed down nine factors that would make another woman irresistible to the bounty hunter, and now Fiona embodied them all.

    Of course, Andu was suspicious. Not only did she get reassigned to Luna Claro''s team, but when Fiona gained the weight, he was well aware of his boss''s romantic type. Compounding that, Fiona had not shown interest in other girls since boarding school, and now she was dating Luna Claro.

    Andu took her to the side, and they had that awkward conversation.

    He asked.

    Are you here on my team now to spy on my boss? For some bullshit internal corporate skulduggery?

    She had an excuse at ready, practiced and rehersed with an AI coach to enhance the sincerity of her delivery.

    No, Andu. It is not like that at all. Higher-ups feel that Elise is profoundly unhappy after, you know ... So, I was asked to accommodate her needs. Sorry, it may seem manipulative, but they want to minimize her emotional state that could compromise operational efficiency.

    He had scowled at the idea, but it seemed to satisfy his curiosity. At the least he put out no feelers in-company to poke at the veracity of her claim.

    She was sure of it. Montes Gato was in a position to know if he had.

    The door opened softly. Fiona stepped back into the main room. He stood there looking muy handsome with his peppered silver hair and matching mustache.

    "Hello, Fiona." He said softly.

    "Hello, Rubin," she answered in turn with a sadly wan smile.

    Rubin Estes, the Deputy Director of ¨´ltimos D¨ªas, stood before her. He was a most powerful man, and he was madly in love with her.

    "How are you feeling now?" He asked.

    She shook her head and approached him. From a tabletop she scooped up two blue pills and a double shot of Amaretto she had prepared for him and handed them over.

    "Like total shit. But before we talk about anything else, you are going to fuck me until I don''t feel anything at all."

    Rubin lay sleeping by her side an hour later. They never did have that conversation, but she couldn''t wait any longer for him to wake. Luna Claro would be back from tending to the wounded soon.

    Fiona cleaned up with a quick shower and doused herself in body spray as she planned out how she was going to convince Luna Claro into pursuing the bounty on the thief.

    At least the next few hours would keep her busy and keep her mind off of the murders. The woman, the one who was a concierge, heard the shots behind her pick off the grounds attendants one by one.

    Fiona could see it, the horror of realization in the woman''s eyes and open screaming mouth, before she caught the nine bullets.

    She was next in line, and she knew it.

    Fiona doused her face in cold water with the showerhead to change the course of her thoughts.

    "Fuck me," she whispered.

    After she quietly slipped out the door so as not to awaken Rubin, she glanced around to check her surroundings.

    Fiona froze in place. Even in the darkness past the walkway lights, she could see the outline of the nightwing that perched on the diesel exhaust pipe of a decommissioned 18-wheeler.

    The bird stared back at her.

 4.47 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Fiona kept the back doors of the van opened so she could watch Elise chat with the hologram of Sachmilli Cuervo. They stood a few hundred meters away, past the trees from where the bat attacked just minutes previously. She struggled to make sense of the old man''s movement and body language.

    He was going to be a problem for her, Rubin, and for Dimitris. And she couldn''t stop thinking about his damn bird. It frightened Fiona much more so than even the necrotic bat.

    What did the Nightwing know?

    "She really got to you, huh?" Getrod asked.

    Fiona turned back to him.

    "Huh?"

    He nodded towards her hands. She held a self-sealable gauze.

    "You''re jittery like a lanceolate leaf. And you have that dilated, faraway look in your eyes."

    Fiona frowned, biting at her bottom lip.

    "It''s not just Elise. That whole ordeal was fucked-up. And... I fucked up."

    She slapped his knee and put the Nightwing out of her mind.

    "Pull that wave of hair back and try to hold still," Fiona asked as she spread out the gauze.

    She just now noticed the gory mess of an ear Gertrod had left, and her hand shook once more.

    Though self-sealable, with her palsy she still managed to get a quarter of the gauze flipped in the wrong direction.

    "?Qu¨¦ porquer¨ªa!" Fiona cursed at herself. What a mess! She dug into her purse for a file, and she used it to fold the gauze in place. "I suck at this, but don''t be too alarmed, Gertrod. Elise is a nurse with a ton of battlefield experience. She just wants me to clean it out. Shit. I forgot to clean it. Hold on."

    Fiona thought about her fingers touching the damaged flesh and dermal tissue and cringed on the inside.

    There had to be another way. An idea came to her mind.

    Casually maneuvering around Gertrod, Fiona crawled to the front driver seat and pulled out a medkit from the undercarriage. It was a conventional setup of simple medical devices. Elise kept specialist kits in the van as well, but Fiona had no idea what purpose most of the items had.

    Inside the kit, a pressurized tube of peroxide foam caught her notice.

    "Hold still," she requested once again as she administered the foam into the gauze surface and rubbed it in. It seeped into the cloth. It caused Gertrod to seethe in pain as she pressed her thumb down against the gauze.

    "Shouldn''t you remove the gauze first?" Gertrod asked.

    She let her breath out in exasperation. "I don''t really know the answer to that! My boo-boos have been few and far between. So, I have little practical experience with all of this, to be honest."

    Gertrod glanced uncomfortably back at her before he spoke.

    "Hey. Just sit back and chill if you need a moment. Hand me the kit. I need something to deal with it¡ªthe pain, I mean. It¡¯s strange how it feels now."

    His voice cracked, sounding of dry thirst.

    Fiona flopped in the front seat, dug in her little cooler for a 250 ml Toro ¨¢mbar energy drink, and handed it to Gertrod.

    "There are local anesthetic treatments in those other bags, but I have no idea how much would be too much to give you. You''ll find some painkillers in that kit you have in your hand."

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    He nodded to this, indicating he had it from there.

    As if an inspiration came to her, Fiona leaned back and grabbed a Toro ¨¢mbar for herself. Perhaps that is what she needed to get over her present anxious feeling; a higher frequency in her brain activity could stabilize her emotionally.

    In a quick self-assessment, Fiona reminded herself that, though a spaz at gory medical matters, she was highly competent at her specialities¡ªdatabase administration and social engineering. She had an odd knack for getting her way.

    It got her noticed even to the extent that she earned a promotion to Deputy Director Rubin Estes''s operations team.

    Fiona tipped the can to toast herself before swallowing the contents whole. She suppressed a very unladylike belch that spared Gertrod any unpleasantness.

    You''re doing fantastic.

    Shrug it off. Don''t let this little fuck-up set the pace for everything else.

    Elise was going to give her shit about that half-ass gauze, but that was irrelevant in the greater scheme.

    What mattered was contacting Rubin as soon as she got the chance and warning him that they still ran a risk of being exposed if Elise joined Sachmilli to sniff around the Los Cazadores operation back in downtown Vida Escondida.

    A boot made a smacking noise as it lifted up into the van from the step-rail of the backdoor. Fiona recognized its tap as the cherry wood outsole on Elise''s pair of Noras.

    With awkward deliberation, Fiona turned her head around and feigned a lopsided smile that submissively read, ''Please don''t judge me too harshly.''

    Elise''s eyes narrowed on the gauze she stuck on Gertrod''s ear as he bowed his head silently, then she glanced at Fiona with a glare.

    Fiona flinched, and it wasn''t entirely an act this time.

    "Stay in the van," Fiona repeated in a mocking low tone.

    She sat in the driver''s seat, pretending to be busy at work on her Extenza Personal Assistant as Elise helped Gertrod climb up the ramp that led up an entranceway into the Vida y Esperanza Clinic.

    Stealthily, she texted a message to Deputy Director Rubin Estes.

    Urgent! She wrote. I''m live wiring you in two minutes when everything is clear.

    Elise''s cybernetic eye could potentially notice an audio signal going out as it would need to be boosted to full amplitude so it could penetrate through the parking garage.

    Fortunately, that would not be a problem for the text message. She discovered a low-frequency relay service used for EMS dispatch connecting every medical facility in Vida Escondida. With the dispatch constantly busy, her text-based warning would slip through the chatter unnoticed.

    Elise and Gertrod disappeared inside the clinic. Fiona glared at the double doors, dipped into her father''s native Guaran¨ª, and cursed, "Joder cula, maldito imb¨¦cil!" Fucking asshole, fucking imbecile!

    ¨´ltimos D¨ªas used Spanish exclusively. She had grown rusty in the indigenous tongue and now mixed its words together with Spanish reflexively.

    Finally she could relax. Fiona hit the speaker mode on the Extenza PA, and she made the call.

    Rubin picked up and answered, "She dressed you down, huh?"

    It took a second, but Fiona understood. "You saw everything? Do you have a spotter?"

    "Yup. He is up in the open market, up on a rooftop covering those kiosks." Rubin suddenly laughed. He was in an exceptional mood. "I like how you monkey wrench. You threw that bitch a curveball."

    Fiona gulped. He really thinks I accomplished all of that on purpose!

    It was the art of social hacking. She could get away with spinning bullshit on the spot.

    "No sweat. I was getting bored just standing there listening to her go on and on. There was really no reason to wait around for del Alma-Gris to finish that job, but Luna Claro made sport of it. So smug. It made me feel like shaking things up."

    No immediate response from Rubin meant he was weighing how they would respond to the new threat.

    Fiona continued on. "Montes Gato, I take it you are already aware of our developing situation."

    Fiona had the receiver wired for extraordinary sensitivity, read by an AI sound interpreter. It deduced Rubin was in communication with another party, and he was viewing a video feed.

    The interpreter picked up on someone speaking in English. What the hell? She would have to review the analysis later, but for now Rubin commanded her attention.

    He finally answered.

    "The spotter even got a recording between Luna Claro and Sachmilli Cuervo. I''m going to need you to meet me at our usual rendezvous at 3 AM. Listen carefully: new room number, 2E5."

    Fiona got a bad feeling.

    Why the change-up? The old number held much sentimental value for Fiona.

    "What''s wrong with our love nest?" She asked to poke into Rubin''s emotional state. Was there something he was not telling her?

    Being kept in the dark did not make her feel safer¡ªquite the opposite.

    "Someone threw a brick in the window. Most likely it is just a jilted lover seeing the cheater''s car parked out front. It happens. Hey, talking of lovers..."

    Fiona scowled. "Is this about that bitch? You know I am hating her right now."

    Rubin put an emphatically commanding tone in his delivery, though he tried to play it off as a casual matter.

    "I need you to be extra horny with Luna Claro tonight. Personally, I love what you did to get her twisted up in a knot, but my profiler believes she is putting some emotional distance between the two of you."

    Fiona let out a heavy sigh. "I''ll do this for you, Montes Gato. For you, anything."

    He chuckled at the drama she tried to pull off.

    "Patience, my darling. You won''t have to suffer the dragon lady much longer."

 4.48 Book Four: The Abandoned Life

    Fiona parked the van by a worn gravel road above the motel. She jumped out and studied the view with a conventional pair of binoculars.

    What are we looking for?

    She winced as she took in the view. The motel sprawled beneath an orange neon sign that read:

    Segunda Estrella.

    Todas las vacantes del mundo.

    ''Second Star. All the vacancies in the world.'' A phrase many hoteliers in the Quadra added to their displays after the Spore Invasion, intending humorous aplomb in the aftermath.

    No doubt put in place all those years ago, the sign stayed immaculate curtesy of scrubdrones.

    She searched for the less populated and less tended wings of the sprawling motel. Her gut told her there was a story here hiding in plain sight.

    What would be out of place in this dump?

    The decommissioned eighteen-wheeler caught her attention; its long double flatbed had large white, gold, and amber Christmas bulbs strewn above glass display cases that served the purpose of an open-air gun market.

    Even this late, clientele rummaged through the goods, placing items back haphazardly. Vibrational attunement pads built into the cabinets tidied up the discards. The guns were put back where they belonged when clients moved on to the next weapon to catch their eyes.

    Occasionally, shots popped off from the strip of land converted into a firing range behind the eighteen-wheeler.

    This density of nightlife activity was not unusual.

    The nature of the Quadra turned many residents into nocturnal beings who slept during the day under parasols while wearing shades covering their eyes. The nanospores could not invade dreams in full sunlight.

    The motel scene hummed along. A shop on the second story catered to North American-style cuisine. Tacos, hamburgers, and hotdogs.

    It made Fiona hungry, and she certainly had time for a late-night meal before the meet-up if her surveillance turned up nothing.

    Fiona trained the binoculars on the damaged window, only to become alarmed when she saw splotches of green forensic gelente sealing the hole. The substance preserved the microscopic patterns of the tear. Fiona expected to see the damaged window boarded up while a new glass windowpane was on order, not this.

    The doorknob was overlaid with a cover-latch common to investigations as well.

    Lover''s quarrel, my ass! What is Rubin not telling me?

    When she finally reached the limit of what her eyeballs could tell her, Fiona turned back to her van and unlocked the fasteners to the Ladybug drone.

    She eyed the repairs she made after the Nightwing had clawed into the drone''s carapace and plucked out a navigation-guide sensor.

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    "Bastard Mel," Fiona growled as she rubbed her thumb against Ladybug''s surface, where she had filled in the deep gashes with silicone putty and then painted over it.

    With the drone already prepped, she hit the auto-start on her controller. Ladybug swooped up and hovered a few meters above the van.

    Fiona slipped back into the van and slid on a pair of IR specs. She now had a 3D panoramic view from Ladybug''s perspective.

    The new rendezvous would occur in a room in a back wing of the motel that wasn''t part of the nightlife stretching from the decommissioned eighteen-wheeler to a Quick Mart just off of the long motel parking lot spread and off-ramped via a connector road.

    Fiona couldn''t see the new rendezvous from the vantage point of the high gravel strip, so she ordered Ladybug to circle to the back, skirting the lot to avoid attention.

    The quieter side of the motel was as she expected. The wings of Motel Segunda Estrella formed a T-shape. The middle wing was built between a much smaller parking lot on the far end and a swimming pool that was closed at that late hour.

    As expected, dim LED lights kept the ground level visible for all who needed to tread, as did one long, gangly woman wearing only a t-shirt, boxer bottoms, and flip-flops carrying trash to a bin.

    Fiona felt lured into the normalcy of it all; her gut nudged her¡ªDon''t be!

    She flipped on the drone''s ultraviolet read mode. Strobe lights from the rooftop swayed back and forth, nullifying the life force of nanospores that floated in range.

    Their deaths gave off blue sparks that at times dissolved into lovely sheets of misty blue rain. It was a pregnant, humid night, and the breeze was choppy¡ªbrisk but then suddenly dropping off into still cooler air.

    For the Quadra, the weather pattern, a condition created by nanospore disturbances, was also a normal occurrence.

    Just at the moment Fiona started to doubt her gut intuition, the UV sensor picked up the flow of flapping gray wings on a mantis-shaped body headed into the cameras.

    The Ladybug evaded with a pulse from the four emergency throttles embedded on the sides of its heat sink.

    Fiona squeezed her eyelids tight and shook her head fiercely. The leap twenty meters up was jolting, and the embedded AI still had not returned control to her. The destabilized sensorium made her nauseous.

    Following normal procedure, she clicked the three-button sequence that took her out of the sensorium and blinked out the panoramic view into that of the front camera.

    The AI maneuvered the Ladybug into a frenzy as it made sense of the last few seconds before it green lighted an all-clear message.

    "Read off your summary," Fiona requested.

    Its voice sounded like an American cartoon cricket from over a hundred years previous.

    "Angle of flight indicates object never intended contact, nor attempted to impose a threat, given that it retreated after our evasive maneuver. It could not be monitored after the four-point-two-second mark. However, the identity of the object has been successfully obtained."

    After several seconds, Fiona prodded, "Well, what is it?"

    "Classified."

    "What?" she screamed at the Ladybug AI.

    "Information has been reported to the ¨²ltimos D¨ªas Central Committee. Any information this event disclosed would need their authorization."

    Fiona''s face contorted into a frown. "But... we experienced this together, Ladybug!"

    "Sorry."

    Fussing with the AI would accomplish nothing beyond getting her frustration out, and then she realized the Central Committee might find it curious she was doing survey work so late at night and without backup personnel.

    Fiona shook it off. No time to worry about that at the moment.

    "Return to your flight deck now, Ladybug."

    What the hell was that thing? No place on Earth hosted more legitimate cryptids than the Quadra, but that was unlike anything caused by the Cull Spore Invasion. At least, anything to which she was aware.

    Fiona slipped into the driver''s seat and waited for Ladybug''s return. She flipped on her Extenza Personal Assistant and searched a cryptid database indexed with mantis appearances pre-invasion to follow a hunch.

    She found her match: El Acosador, the stalker. It matched over a dozen witness descriptions, mostly from cartel-related shootouts.

    That''s an odd little data-point.

    Fiona chuckled. That can''t be right. El Acasador was a creature of comic books and anime. The dealers were getting high on their own supply.

    When Ladybug returned to her perch, Fiona revved up the engine and let off the brakes.

    She was more curious about the encounter with the cryptid thing, be it El Acasador or something else, than frightened by it.

    Only ten minutes passed one o''clock, she still had time to investigate on foot.