My churning stomach became filled with butterflies as the transport halted instantly. Contrary to how inertia usually worked, it didn't apply to Calico's arma. So, the large and heavy vehicle stopped immediately without even a screech of the tires. Calico and I felt the weight of this defiance of conventional physics, but our harnesses kept us firmly in place. From within, we heard numerous soldiers being tossed into the bulletproof glass at the front of the cockpit.

"Uh-oh, no seatbelts. That's a violation of the law!" Calico yelled cheerfully.

She placed her hands on the hatch, gripped tightly, and flared her ghostly cat ears before ripping it entirely off the steel hinge. The lid landed 40 meters behind us, nearly striking some civilian vehicles and penetrating at least a foot into the concrete. The cover alone had to have weighed at least 100 kilograms, and Calico tossed it like a backyard frisbee. She was almost as cute as she was terrifying.

"Calico! Be careful where you toss things that could've killed a human!"

Her smile faded for a moment and was replaced with wide apologetic eyes.

"Oops! I guess I got a little carried away."

Calico's arma also allowed her to store kinetic energy and use it to bolster her physicality, making things like steel useless against her strength. We both detached our harnesses from the magnets and jumped down into the vehicle. We were met with the groans of half a dozen 'elite soldiers' sprawled out on the control panel by the front windshield. Their riot armor helped against most forms of trauma, but it wasn't rated for being slammed into a bulletproof windshield at 100km/h.

To our disappointment, Rain was not present amongst the crash dummies. The only person seemingly unfazed was a hooded man toward the back of the vehicle, who had apparently ignored our dramatic entrance.

"Damn it! We must have hit the wrong transport or something." I slammed my hand into the metal siding.

Calico and I approached the hooded man in the corner, and Calico knelt down to take a peek under his hood.

"Hey, mister mime, you're not gonna ignore a lady, are you?"

"Calico, stop teasing him and take the hood off. He's probably just a prisoner being transported to a different facility."

"You do it. I'm getting creepy energy."

Calico skipped to the front of the transport, humming a tune while passing the bodies.

I lifted the hood off his head and confirmed Rain wasn't here after all. Instead, under the hood was a beaten man, stitched at the eyebrow with bruises along his cheeks. His eyes were a pale and hazy orange, but they were absent of consciousness. He had a collar around his neck; it was a limiter device.

"Yeah, it's not him, Calico. Pop the back, and let's go."

Calico fiddled with the control panel in the cockpit before the bay door in the back of the transport began to lower. I unfastened the man from the seat and lifted him to his feet.

"What are you doing, Sy?"

"We're taking him with us, so we can get the limiter off."

A limiter was a kind of suppression device for cambions, fastened around the neck or wrists that removed our ability to use arma. Additionally, it reduced us to a tranquil state, forcing a suppression technique called void on our bodies. It was cruel, and regardless of who this man was, he didn’t deserve this treatment.

"Taking him? Are you nuts, Sy? We'll be swarmed with military police in a minute, and he's gonna be dead weight."

"I can't leave him like this; these collars are horrible and inhumane.”

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She was right, we didn’t have much time before the blues arrived, but the thought of leaving someone like that didn’t sit well with me. I knew what it was like; I'd been forced to wear a limiter while I was locked up. It was like being in a lucid dream or living with only your head submerged underwater.

“You go then, Calico. I’ll catch up. I know what it’s like to be in that collar, so I can’t leave him.”

“Ughh, Sy! I get it, I do. But we don’t even know him! He could be some kind of psychopath for all we know!”

“You and I just free-fell 100 meters onto a moving military transport and likely snapped the necks of all these soldiers from whiplash.” I waved my hand to all the bodies.

She puffed her cheeks and paused for a moment, looking between the injured soldiers and me. Most of them seemed like they were out cold, but a few had begun to groan and stir. Outside of the transport, we could hear the sirens of police vehicles approaching.

"Rescuing Cambions in need is what we do. I'd be dead now if you hadn't made a choice to save me back then."

“Alright,” Calico mumbled, “get him, and let’s go, now!”

Calico and I lifted the man together, each taking an arm. We exited the back and immediately headed toward a cluster of buildings past the sidewalk. The street lamps had just begun to flicker, signifying the sun would set soon. We were only about a mile from the sector 9 gate, and judging by how close the sirens were already, Rain must've seen this attack coming. Police response times in Concordia were usually infamously slow unless you lived in the higher-end districts.

Sector 5 sat comfortably in Concordia's northwest corner, the closest sector to the resource-rich Palpa Chania mountain range. It was a heavily labor focused sector, housing most of the industrial plants in the city-state. The workday was already finished, so the streets were relatively clear of humans. It was one of the few sectors with a gate leading outside the city-state, and it was an easy place to disappear if you knew the layout. Thankfully for us, Dead Circus operated here frequently, so we'd adapted quite comfortably to the road and alleyway designs.

Calico led us up into a steel plant; it was closed for the day, so we didn’t have to worry about running into any humans. We climbed the fire escape to the second floor and sheltered ourselves inside. After shutting the metal door, Calico bent a rebar rod around the handle to keep it closed. The factory was dingy and filled with gloom. It smelled of rust and sweat, and I could hear the groans of steel beams when the slightest wind pushed the walls.

I helped the man out of his shackles and removed the shroud he had been covered in.

“Sorry about the limiter collar. I can’t do anything about that here. Are you hurt?”

It was a dumb question because removing the hood gave me the answer. The prisoner was worse off than I initially thought; it looked as if someone had ripped his face apart and done a shoddy job replacing the pieces. The skin on his wrists was bruised nearly black, and I could tell the bones were fractured. He had a bandage over his left eye and long stitches over his right brow and lip. I hadn't noticed the patch over his eye when I first examined him.

"Sorry, I guess your injuries are apparent. Can you tell me who did this to you? Was it Rain Reinhurst?"

None of my words seemed to pique his interest. He continued staring past me into nothing with his one glossed eye.

Damn, whoever this guy was, he sure had made an enemy of the military, apparently. Judging by his injuries, he must have been tortured for some time. Who was this guy? He must've been a high profile Cambion. If the government had maimed him this badly and still needed to transport him elsewhere, he must not have given up any information. Though, sometimes torture served as a pastime for the military in Concordia.

This situation didn’t make much sense; Raust knew who Rain was, right? How could he have gotten Rain mixed up for this prisoner? We were confident we had him; I even saw his heat signature through Raust's eyes. If Rain had caught wind of our operation, what was his source? Or, if someone else was responsible for this mix-up, who was it?

While I mulled over the situation, Calico stomped around, surveying the steel plant before contacting the team.

Heyyyy, Raust, honey. Care to tell Sy and me how you fucked this up? How could you get Rain mixed up with some random fucking collared prisoner!?

Well…we were thinking the same thing, but she was far more aggressive with her approach than I would’ve been.

Yeahh, I’m trying to figure it out, Cali. Cool it. You can yell at me all you want after I get you and Sy out of this surprise event. MP’s are blockading the gate to sector 9, and they’re blocking off the road by the transport.

Hey, Raust. This is Sylas. We'll definitely yell at you later, but right now, we need to get Calico, me, and the prisoner out of here, and he’s in bad shape.

Yeahh, sure, Sylas. Just make the quest even more difficult.

Raust wasn’t wrong. Now that I’d been given time to examine the prisoner, I questioned the decision I’d made. He could barely stand, let alone run, and he was in a forced void, so not counting on him for a fight. Void was a technique cambions could use to eliminate their presence, though it required a massive expulsion of our bodies' energy. So, when forced into void by a limiter collar, our bodies would become fatigued and weaker over time.

Limiter collars were one of the military's tools for combating Cambions. By forcing us into void, it eliminated our ability to use arma. Additionally, it was nearly impossible to remove the collars without killing the Cambion unless you had the right tools. They were terrible things, and depending on how long he'd had it on, we probably didn't have much time before the collar sucked away the rest of his life.

Calico had climbed up a set of stairs to the windows above while I examined the prisoner. They were covered with thick wooden blinders, and Calico slid them aside to have a look outside.

“They’re checking out the transport right now, Sylas. But, they’ll start a search soon if any of the soldiers can speak and tell them what happened.”

The situation was far from ideal and far from what we’d planned. It angered me to not have Rain, but I pushed my anger aside to focus on the task at hand.

“Sir, do you know where they were taking you? If you can tell us anything, it may help us find a route to safety.”

He looked at me with his hallowed face and one dead eye and finally spoke.

“Article C.”

Shit.

His first words were the worst thing he could’ve told me, and after softly trailing on the end of his words, he returned his gaze to nothing. I heard Calico close the shutters before returning to us.

“That's where you were locked up, right, Sy?” She inquired.

“Yeah…unfortunately. Though, I didn’t know it was still in use. It was a military facility for Cambion experimentation. All for the sake of learning more about us and how our physiology works. Once they had their fill with a test subject, they'd brainwash you into joining the military or kill you. It was a hell on earth.”

Calico’s eyes narrowed as she avoided looking at me, staring at the floor instead. I’d forgotten for a moment that Calico was from Balitgo and wasn’t quite used to the horrors of being a Cambion in Concordia.

Calico looked to the man, “any idea why, mister?”

Life returned to the man's eye for a moment, as if he'd been waiting to tell someone for years. He weakly but urgently lifted his head to me before speaking.

“They’re planning to—“

Click.

Boom.