Our new neighborhood is a mess of concrete, fluorescence, and poverty. Shells of apartment buildings crowd the streets like homeless folk gathered around a fire. In the streets and narrow alleys are stalls and food trucks, slapped together out of scraps to make less than a hundred Vanguard credits a day slinging food at people. Liquor shops and other opportunities for vice fill decaying strip centers with lit up signs that should come with an epilepsy warning. The ambient noise sky-trains and hundreds of thousands of poor people bored out of their minds fills the air.

Only two blocks from where I’m hiding, a Vanguard grocer filled to the brim with food is currently being picked apart by my little sidekick. Probably a bad idea for me to try and get in there, drones or no drones, but Mateo won’t even come up on their radar, provided he can get away with some petty thievery.

“Childish,” Megajoule chastises me as I wait for Mateo to come back.

I shrug.

“When’s the last time you had a shower?”

I shrug again.

Megajoule groans, appearing next to me with a sneer. “Come. On. Gabe. What are you doing? You’re wasting away eating snacks and sleeping all day!”

“Don’t tell me how to live my life, ghost,” I say, jabbing my finger at him. “If you don’t like it, you can always get out of my head.”

“And take all my power with me, as we’ve established.” Megajoule shakes his head, crosses his arms, and looks down his nose at me. “You’ll never find out about what’s going on, acting like this. And good lord, how long can you live in your own filth?”

I have to admit he’s got a point. We can’t stay in a dingy survival bunker forever. We’re both missing a proper home. A proper bed, a proper shower, a proper air conditioning system. The bunker has become a trash heap, too, since we don’t have any proper place to throw all the plastic and paper we’re accumulating. Thank goodness there’s an outhouse, because otherwise we would have been shitting in the bushes. But we can’t use that forever, either.

“Fine. I’ll look into something.”

Megajoule vanishes at Mateo’s arrival. The kid jumps down off a board of light, offering me a plastic baggy filled with red liquid. “Check out the goods. We’re gonna eat bad toniiiiiiiight~.”

I’ve never had much sugar before, and still haven’t, because Vanguard sweetener is artificial. Sugar doesn’t really exist for anyone but the richest people these days.

But hey, sweet is sweet, and candy is candy.

I pull up my mask and rip open the packaging with my teeth. A tangy-sour spray of preservatives shoots up into my nose. I hack and drop the package to find a neon-colored… pickle.

“What the fuck, I thought you said this was candy!” I growl at Mateo.

Mateo, who is currently double-fisting chocolate, says, “I thought it was like a big gummy.”

“Gimme some of that chocolate,” I grumble, demanding my fair share. Mateo pulls his arms away from me, but my wingspan is twice his, and I’m able to grab a piece for myself.

“Dick,” Mateo mutters.

“Hey, so, we’re disgusting, right?”

Mateo gives me a funny look between bites of chocolate. “You have really low self esteem, huh?”

“We need a real house. I was thinking about going back to the Front,” I say.

“You want to go see them again?” Mateo asks, shocked.

“They told me they have properties. Epione might have somewhere for us to stay…” I rub the back of my neck. It’s not exactly the best plan, and we parted on very uncertain terms, but it’s the only idea I’ve got right now that might get us into real shelter. Thanh is closer to Paul than me so that’s out. Most of my contacts are the same way. “We could ask them if we can shack up for a while.”

“I thought you didn’t want to work with them,” Mateo says. “Are you starting to come around to us being on the side of the good guys?”

“I’m absolutely not about to admit anything like you were right, or that I’m starting to believe in them, or anything.”

Mateo smirks at me. “Oh, I see how it is.”

“I’ll tell you how it is. You smell. Bad.” I pinch my nose and turn away from the kid. “We can’t rough it much longer.”

Mateo runs a hand through his hair, notices it sticks exactly where he lays it, and studies the grease it leaves on his hand. “Alright, fine, you win. But if I stink, you have to stink double worse.”

“Nope, I can burn away my body odor,” I lie. I think he just can’t tell when people smell anymore because he got used to it. “Get your mask on.”

A few minutes later, I’m masked and jacketed again, Mateo is riding piggy back on my shoulders, and we’re flying through the sparse suburbs toward the city bramble of Houston.

It’s gotten a bit worse out here since we destroyed the dampener. I caught the news about that strip center with the out of control monster, and I’ve heard of a few more incidences of masks achieving Heavyweight status. It makes me wonder: did we do a good thing? That machine had human beings inside of it. Killing them was a mercy, I think. But I’m worried we’ve made life worse for the people out here just trying to survive.

We arrive at Rothko after not too long. I realize, on arriving, that I don’t have a way to contact them, and maybe I should have gone to Saw Off’s hideout first. But when I walk up to the black painting, Portrait steps out. “Home Run!” she calls to me. “I wasn’t expecting you. Thought I’d have to shut down this entrance when the alarm tripped. Who’s the kid?”

“I’m Volition!” Mateo says, his arms akimbo.

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Portrait laughs at Mateo’s earnestness. “Ain’t that something. Home Run with a little friend.”

I try not to roll my eyes. Mateo didn’t run that name by me before this.

“Well, Epione’s been hoping you’d come back. You took your sweet time with it. Portrait says, beckoning us to follow as she steps back through the painting.

“It’s a bit of a doozy,” I warn Mateo before stepping in.

On the other side, Mateo comes tumbling out, his eyes wide and a little awestruck smile on his face. “W-woah. That was so cool.”

“I was dealing with some personal stuff,” I tell Portrait while Mateo finds his feet. “But yeah, I’m ready to talk to Epione, if she still wants to.”

Portrait glances at both of us and I can see her wrinkle her nose beneath her mask. “Sure, but you might want to clean up before you do. There’s a bathroom by the stairs, with deodorant.”

“I knew it wasn’t just me,” Mateo says, glaring at me.

The club is quieter than normal, but not supernaturally so. Just a slow Monday, I suppose. Mateo and I crowd into the bathroom, a tiny single-person closet barely wide enough for the two of us to stand next to each other. I stoop my head and liberally avail myself of the deodorant. It’s not a shower but it’ll do until I can get one.

Once we pass Portrait’s sniff test, she lets us upstairs.

There are only two heartbeats up here, and from the heights of their heatmaps, I’m guessing it’s Silent and Epione. One of the heartrates is elevated, its heatmap correlating with frustration, and the associated Affect buzzing with bad vibes. We open the door on the usual community room, where Epione sits calmly while Silent stands and rants:

“-you might have gotten some more Heavyweight masks, but now they want to strike out on their own! You might know how the Affect works, Ep, but you don’t know how people work worth a damn. I told you changing the balance wouldn’t benefit us. And not only that, but the Fear got worse, you said! Worse! That’s more monsters, too, you said!”

Epione reaches out a hand to shush Silent as Mateo and I enter the room.

“What are you doing here?” Silent snips, her hand falling to her sword hilt. “And who have you brought now?”

Great, now I have to swallow my pride. “We kind of need some help,” I manage.

I explain as much as I can. That we were staying with someone we thought we could trust, but who’d kept something horrible from us. No names. Not that I’d really enjoy saying his name, anyway. It hurts just to talk around the issue.

“You need a place to stay, then?” Epione asks.

The surprising thing is, that while I know this will put us in their debt, I’m not actually too worried about it. I hadn’t wanted to admit it, but Front is my best way forward now, not just in tracking down Pandahead, but now in learning more about Lilac. And from what I’ve just gathered, they need some Heavyweights on their side. “If that’s something you can do for us, yes. And you’d get what you’d want from me. Home Run, permanently on the roster. To make up for the whole masks turning on you now that they’ve gotten a taste of power.”

“Sounds like more trouble than it’s worth,” Silent says, but Epione quiets her with a gentle touch on the knee.

“He is trouble,” she agrees. “But the kind we need on our side. And preferably housed.”

#

This house is out in the boonies, comparatively, as snug east against the Beltway as it can be. It’s one story tall, held together by the skin of somebody’s teeth, and the wood paneling has the pallor of a corpse. The shutters cling to the windows for dear life. A chain fence imprisons the house in a yard where yellow grass chews at life like a starving dog on a bone.

The other houses along the road are in even worse disrepair, and only one in four look like they actually have people living in them. Swampy jungle grows in the yards of the vacant houses, and sometimes in the yards of the occupied ones, too. Trees, brush, untamed thicket. Which, if you’re me, is perfect. It’s as if someone grew it for the sole purpose of hiding.

From our yard, we can see the reinforced highway rising up over the neighborhood. It mostly acts as a railway now, connecting the eastern disentanglement facility and repair zones to downtown, but there are a few lanes where cars can travel still. Occasional headlights flash by, accompanied by the roar of trains going out to the last stop east or bringing people back to the city.

Silent unlocks the door and waves her hand for us to come in. “There’s good parts. It’s got three bedrooms.”

Connected by a main hallway adorned with a tattered old rug are six rooms: three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. Generously, there are two bathrooms, each with their own roach that needs killing. The living room floorboards squeal like a dying cat with every step, the kitchen light buzzes like that’s part of the design, but the dining room seems nice, and a frosty chill grips the bedrooms, even now in the heat of August.

“Hell yeah,” Mateo mutters.

Clearly there’s shit wrong with it, but damn, we get to live in an actual house. A luxury most people in Houston won’t ever know. Mostly because it isn’t safe to live in a house. This neighborhood gets hit pretty hard by Affected battles, I’m guessing, because half of the “houses” I saw outside barely had walls at all. But hey, I’m here now, and if anything mean comes knocking, I’ll knock back.

Buzzing lights and squeaky floors aside, it’s nice to have some space. The house is furnished, too, meaning we’re not gonna be sleeping on the floor. I sit down on the couch, hear it squelch slightly, and grimace. “Metis, when’s the last time you cleaned this place?”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.” Silent checks the light switch on the porch. It protests by wriggling around in the socket, but it works.

“But beggars sure would like to have slime-free asses.”

Silent sighs and opens the door a couple of times, listening for some squeaking that I apparently can’t hear. “Then you’re free to steam clean it yourself.”

I sigh and stand up, wipe off my pants. “When I asked I just figured y’all’d have a safe room or something, not an entire house.”

Silent shrugs. “Epione’s got a lot of shit up her sleeves. Some of our patrons can’t pay credits, so they give us stuff. We own that club, this house, couple of other places, and she’s the one who got us our PK tech.”

That line of talk gets me uneasy again. I see what Epione’s talking about, what’s wrong with the world, but the mystery of who she is and what she wants unsettles me. And now, Mateo and I are beholden to her.

Nah. If I don’t like it, I can just hit the bricks. Grab Mateo by his scruff and get the hell out of town, fast. But if I do that… I might never untangle Lilac’s mystery. Or my own past.

“Speaking of, Epione found something for you.” Silent dips her hand into her jacket pocket and pulls out a small business card. She looks it over, turns it in her fingers, and her hesitance to hand it to me becomes apparent. Her Affect speaks of annoyance. “Something I should have gotten to, but given how the last couple of weeks have gone, it went on the back burner.”

“What is it?” I’m curious as to whether she’s annoyed because she’s a perfectionist or annoyed because she doesn’t want to hand this off to me specifically.

She puts the card in my hand. “The address of a Marskin holding. Not a warehouse, a town home.”

Marskin. That was the name on the warehouse where I found Mateo. I look at the card. Hopefully this address isn’t another dead end. “You know what this mystery company is all about?”

“Supposedly it’s a delivery company, worked with some of the Houston guilds and shit, mainly PK since they’re the biggest in town,” Silent says. “Guessing it’s a cover for Pandahead somehow. The problem is these flash in the pan companies appear, die off, and all the assets get moved without any record of who owns what literally all the time. Especially if they don’t belong to a guild.”

Record keeping is hard in the apocalypse. I nod. “I’ll dig around.”

“Yeah, good luck, man. And don’t fuck up the house, okay? We haven’t been here in a while, but it’s a great fall back.”

I scoff and wave the card in her face. “You’re the one who let the couch grow mold.”

“Enjoy!” Silent waves goodbye. She hops onto the motorcycle she has parked outside and drives off.

Mateo comes out of the bedroom he’s apparently laid a claim on, and takes his mask off. “So… whatcha think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like being in debt to them, but they are our best hope for catching Pandahead.” Not to mention, Epione seems to be the only way for me to get some more dirt on Lilac’s lab. Maybe I’ll even get an address out of her for that.

“I mean the house, dork. Isn’t it awesome?”

“If by awesome, you mean run down and creepy as shit, then yes,” I say.

“I know!” he exclaims.