I followed my quarry along the shadowed rooftops, radios buzzing with static in the homes beneath me, interference from none other than myself seemingly fritzing with the signals. A few annoyed voices and a smack later, letting my passage be simply chalked up to some well-needed percussive maintenance.

My quarry? Blackbird and Terror Girl, the diametrically opposed duo. Both terrorized the populace, but one did it 'legally' as a government goon, and the other as a freedom fighter. Both of them tried to liberate the grey matter of the masses from their sculls.

And what a pair they made, having gotten close enough to hear them complain at each other like an old married couple in the middle of a domestic incident. The mooks, despite their clear professionalism, looked like awkward kids. They had that, ‘Oh god, why do I have to be here for this’ stance to them, the kind you carried when you just wanted to not be wherever you were.

It was kind of funny if not for the fact that they seemingly knew what they were doing and were heading, presumably to the same place I was.

The problem with that was that I didn’t know exactly where it was.

If they were going to the same place, I needed to get there before them to secure dirt or a way up the chain, and if not that I needed to find where I was going near them, which meant I needed to follow them, and act before them simultaneously.

It also meant I needed to be ready to act now, as opposed to map out the area and come back at a more advantageous time.

Tricky thing that.

“Think of the money,” I muttered to myself, “So much money.”

“Jacalyn, what's wrong? Muttering to yourself isn’t a good indicator of your mental state,” Lilly asked, her voice worried.

“Ding dong one and two are arguing,” I told her, and then before she could ask, I said, “Blackbird and the other lady we fought in the bank, the Lotus girl.”

“Well, I can’t see it from here… Anything important?” She asked.

“They both need to get laid, preferably not with each other. Their kid would be a nightmare,” I told her.

She seemed to take that in and then, in a tone that I could only call a blush, said, “Can love bloom on the battlefield?”

“Is that a Pinky thing?” I asked her, confused by the sound. It sounded like something Pinky would say.

“No. The… The personage known as Malakai spoke it sub-audibly during our time at the bar.”

Personage is a clever cover for Servitor if I had to guess, but that, too, was progress.

“Anyone ever tells you that you sound cute when you flush?” I asked her dryly, though with a smirk.

“Bully.”

“I’ll stop bullying you when you stop sounding like you’re ready to flush. I can’t help myself when you’re so easy to tease. Can I assume that those radios fritzing out was a me thing?” I asked her.

I needed to know. Thankfully, she was nothing if not professional.

“It is, but it's because you're currently reading something. It’s the passive aspect of your peacekeeper abilities and proximity. They’re only the right energy to interfere at a close distance… Like sub three… Er… 3 yards. And even then, it's only a minor distortion. Not enough to track you, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She told me, translating whatever she used into real people's measurements.

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I told her, then paused and replied, “Or I wasn’t… Thanks for scaring the shit out of me. Now I feel like I’m glowing in the dark.”

“You are… Just not the way you think you are. As for scaring you, you get what you give. Goes around comes around. Don’t worry; it's not as easy to find you as it is in your war form or even your base form,” she told me.

“That is not helping,” I hissed. “I don’t even know why. Give me hows so I can find solutions.”

“The pigment in your skin is at fault there. It’s artificial and made to lower the damage caused by stellar radiation. The problem is that when the radiation hitting you isn’t high energy, it just reflects off of you like a beacon. Thankfully, it’s non-visible. Otherwise, that would be quite awkward at the moment.”

“Lilly… You’re using big words again,” I told her.

“You’re normally pale because your skin has high visibility paint inside it that makes you reflect light,” she said.

“That doesn’t sound conducive to good living,” I told her.

“It’s relatively inert. It’s also mildly magnetic, though only on a level where photons of light would feel it. Just slightly more than any given material is,” she said, not biting the comment, playing me straight, either for fun or just because that’s how she was.

“Great. Well, if I need to stop them from communicating, I’ll make sure to give their radio operator a hug,” I told her.

“Do they have a radio?” she asked.

They did not.

Which actually made me think a little better of this. At least they couldn’t call for backup.

We made our way silently after that, or as silently as we could, while we bickered a little while running on a roof. The rooftop path was mostly empty, though I did quiet down when I came across a very obvious gang member who eyed me like he didn’t know if he should whip out a knife or not. I gave him a gesture at the men in black, and he gave them a look, too, before deciding that they were worse than I was.

Who had two thumbs and was the lesser of two evils? This girl.

There was only the one encounter up until we passed out of a second wall and into a more sprawly outer layer that was less built up. It was here, where they slowed, coming up to a building, that I realized that I was about to luck out. They were taking this, not with a sudden door kick, but a slow and precise encirclement.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

They were going to set up around the building and make sure no one inside could get away.

They were going to waste a bunch of time, and I sighed in relief.

I could get inside before they did, which meant I could get whatever I needed before they could ransack it.

The topside path led around and above the building, a kind of peninsula of the path with a little railing like it was there to look out over the great view of shacks… Or possibly to scout something happening in the distance.

Looking out, the building was above the line of outlying buildings, laying at a kind of crest above them.

You could see quite a few important locations.

The spires were visible, obviously, but the edge of the fortifications that had shot at me was also visible, dark shapes peaking out from higher buildings. Interestingly, the distant warehouses, the tips of the redlight district, the voidrome and several other places that seemed to be important.

I described them to Lilly, making sure to check those with Pinky later and slunk my way atop the building.

Getting down was a bit of a longshot, however.

There was a ramp down, but it would lead me down to the ground where the suits were. Instead, I found a window and slipped down to it over the railing. I didn’t quite fall; the lower gravity made it more like a float, and as my feet taped down on the wood they made barely a noise.

Crouching to lower my profile, I pitter-pattered over to the window. It was a fold-out kind of window, more of just a hole with some shutters. No need for fancy glass when there wasn’t weather… Or winter… Or much of anything.

“Lilly, can you see anything like an alarm inside the window?” I asked.

“There is something. There's a beam… but it’s not powered,” she told me, a mirror of my own feeling in her voice.

There was something wrong there. It was a slight wrongness. Why have security when you didn’t use it?

Hesitant but driven by my greed, I ignored the warning bell in my mind, checked the room, and crawled my way in. Quickly making sure there wasn’t someone sitting in one of those corner chairs or whatnot, waiting for me like a creep, I made my way into the well-adorned office. There wasn’t anyone in a chair. The office, for it was an office of some kind, was empty, though from the clutter, recently used. It was well furnished; carpet flooring made the place look like it belonged in a bigger gravity well, as opposed to somewhere you could jump your height with ease. The furnishings were wood, or at least ‘wood,’ much like the rest of the building, but that was likely not the case.

There were documents about, and that made this place a jackpot. Quickly scuttling for every piece of paper not nailed down, I got my grubby rat hands all over them and flipped through to get their secrets. The desk was loaded, though it was loaded with papers that were loaded with normal things. Everything seemed business-related, and while it was very standoffish about what that business was, it wouldn’t hold any value.

Even so, I had found myself in the perfect room. Clear documents? Just how lucky was I going to get today? Would I suddenly bump into Mei and go back to her place? Was I going to stub my toe on a gold brick?

…

Was I going to get shot?

“Lilly… Remind me to get life insurance or something,” I asked her.

“If you’re thinking that the luck you’re experiencing will somehow lead you to a sudden fallout… First, luck isn’t a thing; it's just random chance. Fate doesn’t exist. Second, getting insurance knowing that you’re going to cash in immediately sounds like insurance fraud. So I will not be doing that.” She told me.

I needed to replace my armour. If I expected to get stabbed, it was best to make my money work for me. No point in having it if I got my ticket punched before I could cash out.

“Goody two-shoes,” I griped before flipping through one document. It was about taxes, but unfortunately, they had paid their taxes, so it was worthless. Returning it to its place on the desk, I decided to rifle through the desk's drawers for something more useful.

It, too, was clean.

I didn’t have enough time to go through at my leisure, but this entire place was looking cleaner and cleaner by the second.

There was, however, a problem with that.

It shouldn’t be this clean.

Every group, even those that were off the books, kept some records, even if they were only a scribbled little list of shortwave radio frequencies for cross-city communication or addresses where people ‘went shopping.’ There were no names; there was no dirt.

But there should have been dirt. I looked at the walls and then at the carpet.

I checked along the wall for spots where people might go to hide their real dirt. A secret wall panel is hidden behind a shelf, for example.

“Lilly, are the walls hollow? Or rather, are the walls inside big enough to store objects like papers?” I asked her, trying to narrow down if there was anything going on with them or if I had just read too many comics.

“They are quite thick. They’re using some kind of putty insulation below us, but the walls up here are thinner. Hollow but small. Check-” she started, but I was already moving toward one of the two non-exterior walls.

What kind of militant group had hollow walls but didn’t hide anything in them? What was the purpose of insulation if you had open windows?

An even sneakier type of group, that’s who.

One who wasn’t going to hide documents where documents go.

I checked the corner of the exterior and interior wall, the one without a door and found a slightly suspicious shelf full of well-held books and knickknacks. It had those little clip things to keep the books together, and while the knickknacks were on the shelf, they were on little grippy pads to stop them from freely moving.

I smiled.

The carpet was short, slightly closer to a rug than a normal carpet, but there were signs that something had moved across it, minor markings of flatness the only sign of its passing.

“Secret door,” I said. That was way better than a secret safe or whatnot.

“It’s not a door,” Lilly said.

“Secret room,” I said, looking for some kind of switch, somewhat to let the shelf move and I found it. The secret button was wrestling the shelf like a cave person.

It had rails, and it slid forward into the room after I started trying to wriggle it forward to get at the wall and check where the latch was, only for it to not have a latch. It had a fake wall behind it and a bunch of those slow-closing rails you put on sliding cabinet drawers that ended up slamming too much.

The second it got pulled out a bit, it slid freely, the whole wall behind it coming forward into a dark passageway.

“Secret tunnel,” I chimed.

“Secret stairway, if anything. Now stop acting like a caveman, Jacalyn. I have three brain cells, and they barely function, Jaydin. If you haven’t forgotten, we have been here for a minute, and the building is being encircled. I give them half a dozen minutes before the finish and walk in here. Get moving.”

“Yes, mam. Anything for you, mam,” I told her drolly, though I quickly moved my ass down the darkened interior. I might like poking her, but she was trying to make sure I didn’t get cuffed. Hell, the fact that she used my whole name would be enough to give me pause.

Taking the steps carefully in the dark, I turned down two stories to what had to be a basement, the room turning cool as I made my way down till I reached a concrete slab. The chill of the basement was the kind you got in a place where the light of the sun hadn’t reached in so long the world had forgotten what real light was.

There were lights down here, but they were off. Groping around, I stumbled around in the dark a little before letting go of my pride.

“Can you see any light switches? Maybe one of those pull strings?” I asked Lilly.

“There's a cord two feet in front of your face. Be careful, there are objects around you,” she claimed.

“Thank goodness,” I sighed, the last thing I would want was to trip over a stack of papers and break my neck. “A little light will make this safer.”

I reached out and, with a slight wave, found the cord and tugged.

The light came on, lighting the space, the building itself had one large open basement.

Around me weren’t papers but crates and boxes, mostly empty.

To my left was a bunch of papers off in the corner, to my right, a decently sized stockpile of weapons, across from me, a living nightmare, and worse than that, the entire basement, the whole ass thing, was surrounded by a wall of grey putty.

“Well…” I started, “I suppose I know why the alarm was off. Wouldn’t want to set off a few tons of plastic explosive when you go and open the window.”

The creature across from me moaned.

I guess she agreed.