After all was said and done, three people volunteered.

  Rachel thanked everyone for coming and the crowd cleared out; leaving Rachel, Touch, Stephan, Sal, and one guy she didn’t know, who introduced himself as Curt. Larrisa, a friend of Touch, who was keeping tabs on Gail, was also there. Six people in all.

  They gather around a table and start introducing themselves.

  “Wait, so no one here knows each other?” Rachel asks.

  “Uh, only by reputation, I’m afraid.” Stephan says, pushing up his glasses.

  “Same. I’ve met you two,” She says, pointing to Touch and Rachel. “I’ve heard of you,” jutting her sharp chin at Stephan. “Never heard of you, but if you’re welcome here, that’s good enough for me.” Sal says to Curt.

  Curt gives a slight, exaggerated bow.

  “I don’t get it, why would you all risk your lives for a total stranger? How can you trust me?”

  “We don’t trust.” Curt says. “Everyone’s been keeping an eye on you since you’ve shown up. I’ve had enough time to make up my own mind about you. You seem legit, and I don’t smell a trap. When your life depends on being a good judge of character, you learn to trust your gut.”

  “I don’t have any way to repay you.”

  “Pay! What have you been teaching this girl, Golem!” Sal says, smacking Touch in the back of the head.

  “Ow. I tried explaining it to her. I don’t think she believes me.”

  “People around here watch each other’s backs.” Curt cuts in, “Today you are the stranger who needs help. Tomorrow I could be the one in need.”

  “Yeah.” Stephan speaks up. “We don’t really keep track of who owes who. We just all kinda help each other out when we can. Plus, I like you. I think you’re cool.”

  “But you’re risking your lives on the word of someone you barely know.” Rachel pleads.

  “Ha! My friend, we’re professionals. These militia aren’t a threat, they're practice.”

  “So, what’s the plan?” Touch asks.

---

  Major Sanders whips out his phone as he steps out of the farmhouse and marches to his car. Luckily, colonel Dunn picks up after a few rings.

  “The girl was here. The couple claims the three of them were held hostage by one of the CEO’s runaway experiments, the one with the stone skin. Locals have taken to calling him the ‘Golem’. The two of them left here nearly two weeks ago.” Sanders reports.

  “You believe them? You really think the target is a prisoner?”

  “Not sure. This whole place is a playground for the underbelly of society. Whether gangs have a stranglehold over these people or they are freely assisting them, I can’t say. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Put the screws to them. Arrest the couple and seize their farm. That’ll get the truth out of them.”

  “There’s no need. The trail’s cold here. Staying any longer would be a waste. I need you to request support from Cyber and see if they can find anything on this ‘Golem’. And I need someone to email me everything we have about him currently. Finding him is our best lead on the girl.”

  “Alright. I’ll see what I can get.”

---

  Naturally, he was being held in Sancam’s old police station. Luckily, there was a cafe across the street where Rachel could observe unnoticed from the outdoor tables. Shortly after she sat down, however, the place became packed with the very militia she was spying on.

  Forgot about lunch breaks...

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  “Backside looks like a delivery dock inside a fenced off lot. Two guards, one rifle, one handgun, two tazers, two batons.” Sal’s voice buzzes in her ear.

  The police station was a two story brick building, surrounded by open space cutting through the block of other buildings. To the right was a parking lot, with only a few police cruisers and a few normal cars in it. To the left was a side street big enough for two cars to squeeze through. The front was pushed back, away from the curb, until there was enough room to drive a car in between the front door and the sidewalk.

  Rachel clicks the button on her headphones twice, acknowledging that she heard the message, while bobbing her head as if listening to music. She wants to tell them about the two guards, each wielding handguns, tazers, and batons out front, but there were too many militia running around with their reflective armbands.

  The server comes with her tea, and a bowl of oatmeal topped with various fruits and cinnamon. Rachel thanks him as she sees Stephan walking down the street, robot hand wrapped in fake skin and a cast, and towards the police station. The cast has metal splints in it. It should be enough to get him past any metal detectors.

  She watches him. Stephan puts on a convincingly shaken and vulnerable facade as the guards search him, and he steps through the double doors. All that's left to do is wait. Larrisa couldn’t push her contact in the militia for much information, he was assigned to go on patrol, not guard prisoners. So the plan was for Stephan to go in and pretend to be an unwilling collaborator to their fictional terrorist cell, turning himself in to identify their captive and help catch the rest. And in the process, hopefully figure out what cell Gail was in.

  Obviously, they couldn’t send him in with any radio or illegal electronics large enough to be confiscated if he was searched. So it was up to him to gather all the information. It was one hell of a gamble, they could be hooked up to corporate databases by now and look up everyone who walks in to see if they have a bounty on them. They could sit him in an observation room, and bring Gail out to him, rather than bring him straight to the holding cell. But Stephan insisted, and it was their best option.

  “We could start a fire. Just enough to clear everyone out, and hope the militia is humane enough to evacuate any prisoners, or cruel enough to leave them for dead while we storm in.” Sal had suggested.

  “No. We are not putting any bystanders at risk, and we aren’t going to start something we can’t control.” Rachel commanded. She doesn't know when she got so comfortable being confrontational like that.

  Sal shrugged. Obviously taking no offense.

  “We can do a recon outside easy enough. What we need, is a way inside.” Stephan said.

  “We need to give them something they want, without putting them on guard.” Touch continued.

  “I can go in.” Rachel interjected. “Take a page from your book, Touch. I go in, pretending our fictitious demon clan somehow twisted my arm into helping them-”

  “And now you’re here to pass on information to lead to their capture.” Stephan finished.

  “What if this militia is connected to corporate data? You may not be on the public wanted lists, but that new major could have put out an APB, like the old-fashioned police.” Touch pointed out.

  “Can you ask your guy if that’s the case?” Curt asked Larrisa. She shook her head.

  “He’s out on patrol. There’s no telling when he’ll be at a safe wifi spot.”

  “I’ll do it.” Stephan said, “I have a really small locator and a microphone I can smuggle in and activate if I’m captured. Either way, we get the information we need. And we keep that sword of yours in play to break us both out."

  Everyone looked to Rachel while she thought it over. She hated the idea of putting anyone else in danger. She stood the least chance of getting caught, but if she did, the outcome was the least predictable when they didn’t know how the militia was told to handle her.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” She asked.

  “Absolutely.” He smiled.

  “I call getaway driver,” Curt said.

  They worked out the finer points of their plan and headed into town. Curt had one of Jonah’s vans parked in an alley by the back of the building.

  “Hello, haven’t seen you around here before.” A young man looks down at her and smiles. The reflective armband around his bicep screaming militia.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Rachel's painfully aware that she was just staring at the police station.

  “Oh, yeah. I heard this place was good. Thought I’d try out the competition.”

  “Competition? You a cook?”

  Why would I say that!?

  “Yeah, I own a cafe on the other side of town.”

  “Really? That’s cool. What’s the place called?”

  “The Purple Jay Cafe.” She laughs nervously. For some reason, in this moment of crisis, the only thing that came to her mind was a cooking game she played as a kid. It was one of the games she had recently replayed and made a video about.

  To not look suspicious, she ended up digging herself into a hole and talking with the young militiaman for several minutes. She couldn’t keep an eye on the station, turned as she was, nor could she find a way to end the conversation. So she invited him to sit, and kept the station in the corner of her eye, looking over at it whenever she found a plausible reason to break eye contact. His eyes were a boring brown.

  She keeps answering his questions about how to prepare certain dishes, using only what she knew from the game and her own cooking experience. This man clearly didn’t care: he asked no follow-up or personal questions. She had gotten used to this brand of casual suspicion moving through the towns, and during her time in the military.

  Shit, what if he used to be a cook? Yet he hasn’t called her out on anything yet...