Organ music again. Footsteps on stone. The sounds of machinery. Wheezing, thrumming, flowing, an alien mixture of sounds that, nonetheless, evoked the mental image of a vast computational engine.
A computational engine that, with her awakening, wound down to a near-halt.
Everything ached. Every heartbeat sent pain flowing through her, akin to a full-body headache, as if the insides of her veins had first-degree burns. Breathing was markedly less painful, but refused to give proper feedback. There was a sense of numbness, and even a full breath failed to satisfy. The answer was obvious: Her lungs were permanently damaged. This was a symptom of widespread internal scarring.
Her eyes were covered, and when she tried to move, she realized she couldn’t. It was like back then, during the operation — she was weightlessly suspended in mid-air. Even so, she felt the need to try moving at least her hand, just to affirm that she could. That she wasn’t paralyzed. The music continued, but gradually grew softer and simpler, becoming just relaxing, ambient noise. An alarm broke that, splitting Krahe’s focus with its clarion call, like a red hot poker being shoved into her frontal lobe.
“Ah. I see. You are awake. Please, if you would, stop trying to move,” came the voice of High Grafter Fidelia. “We had to lock away your motor control so that you would not harm yourself as a result of your actions within the dream.”
Approaching footsteps. The music persisted. Hands on her head, fingers in her hair. Cold and metallic.
“I will now remove several quasi-voidkey connectors,” Fidelia said.
An unpleasant, tickling heat overtook the headache as something was pulled out of her skull, leaving behind a hollow feeling. Then again, and again, five in total, from the back of her head and down the length of her spine. Again with the red-hot poker inside her head as sight returned and light flooded in. Squinting as she sluggishly looked around, Krahe made sense of her surroundings. It was some kind of Zaveshian facility, that much was obvious, based on the mix of alien technology and religious iconography. Countless tubes and cables entangled her body, connected to various points, simply sinking into her skin as if it wasn’t even there. More interestingly, she still had her biosuit on.
“They didn’t want to destroy it in the process of trying to get it off of me, so they just pierced through it,” she thought.
Slowly, she regained control over her extremities, floating down to just a few centimeters above the suspension-table that held her. It was nearly identical to the operating table they had used to replace her spine. Despite being attached to all that machinery, she felt little discomfort from it, and when she thought to sit up, the suspension-table’s invisible force fields adjusted to assist her. Several more beds were to be seen to her left, with great arrays of machinery standing behind them. Cables stretched from them to the machine behind Krahe’s bed.
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Fidelia loomed over her, observing all the while, while two of her tendrils stretched across the room to continue playing an enormous organ.
“How do you feel?” the high grafter asked.
“Alive, but also cooked from the inside-out. My lungs are probably fucked,” she said, and even this was enough to leave her feeling out of breath.
“An astute self-assessment. We will go over your options all in due time. For now, however, your condition is stable. I expect that you will wish to know what took place following your loss of consciousness, yes?”
After Krahe gave a simple nod, Fidelia continued, recounting the course of events. Krahe had, moments before she lost consciousness, used the Liminal Coil to send Fidelia a locational ping. As a direct result of this, combined with instructions Casus had given Yazata before the raid, both of them were brought into the high grafter’s care without the awareness of anyone not directly involved with the raid.
“That’s… Good. How long has it been? What of the mansion?” Krahe asked.
“Two days. We locked down the mansion for investigation,” Fidelia began, only for Firminus to walk in, interrupting her. “-despite the Silverswords’ bitching and moaning. Bad news: By the time you raided them, any trafficking victims were already gone.”
He grabbed a chair, sitting down next to Krahe’s bed with an eyebox in hand. With a click, he awakened the device and turned it around for Krahe to see, various news articles scrolling past as he spoke, his cigarette holding on for dear life. Even now, he kept smoking.
“Good news: The traffickers were sloppy, and left us plenty of trails to follow. Damn-near every living soul we caught sang like a bird the moment we brought Ms. Witch-inquisitor into the interrogation room. The ones that didn’t keeled over from some sorta curse. As it stands, it’s being covered up. Far as the city knows, we just took the opportunity to off Semzar and grab as many of his people as possible. I won’t get into all the shit we found out from your Abara Morph, but to make it simple, we’ll be able to make major improvements to our organic-type Mamon Armors for the first time in a couple hundred years.”
“Firminus, she has just come-to. Can this not wait for later?” Fidelia chided.
“Too late, already done,” Firminus shrugged. “The Hashem Family’s activity has already cratered, just these past two days. Whether they stay careful for a while or return back to business as normal once they think it’s blown over, we’ll see. You can get the details yourself. In short, it’s pretty obvious this goes well beyond regular mafia shit.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see… How’s Casus?” Krahe asked.
“Aristedes is undergoing repairs. The damage he sustained — much of it self-inflicted — surpasses even your injuries. Fortunately, banishers have the advantage of intelligent design — that is to say, we simply placed him in a maintenance-trance and disassembled him to carry out the necessary repairs. It will take some time, but he will recover, as will his coupler,” said Fidelia.
“That’s… Good…” Krahe said, her eyes glazing over all of a sudden. Before she knew it, she lost consciousness again. She slept so deeply that, to her, it seemed as if no time had passed at all. A similar sequence of events played out, with Fidelia noticing that she was awake and checking her state. She had slept for 18 hours.