My body aches when I wake up. It's not surprising, I've spent 3 days training it to do things it's never had to do before, and occasionally getting the shit beat out of me in the process. Today's the day, the last day before Victoria's deadline. We’re gonna have to head out, and see if all that practice was worth anything. I'm not terribly optimistic, there's only so much that can be done in 3 days. Hopefully it won't come to that, anyway. Penny says she's going to put some enchantments on our clothes which should help us slip under the radar.
I get out of bed and strip my shirt off, examining my various bruises in the mirror. The longer I stay here, the more I accrue, thanks to our combat angel friend. At least most of them, at this point, are in service of making me stronger. They feel kind of fitting, anyway. I've been trying to put Victoria's advice to use, pushing back against the limitations my halo places on me. It's… difficult. I've had plenty of time to develop the habit of avoiding what it wants to keep me away from, and habits formed based on the kind of feedback it gives are hard to break. Just remembering that I have the option of pursuing "undesirable" thoughts is a struggle. Once I manage it, it feels… well, it wouldn't quite be accurate to say it "hurts," I don't think. It's frightening, uncomfortable. I feel like I'm stepping off of solid ground and out onto a tightrope. Buffeted by the wind, I could fall at any moment and it'd just be the end of me. I can't bear it for long, but I'm trying. I want to escape the safe little island I've been trapped on. The only way out is across the gap.
I hear the door swing open behind me. No knock, no announcement. Victoria's customary entrance. "Today's the day. Would've liked a little more of a chance to prepare you but, we've taken as much time as we've got. Here, put this on."
She tosses a gray bundle of fabric at me, which I catch and unroll to reveal a simple hooded sweatshirt. "Put it on? Why?" I glance back at Victoria and notice that she's wearing an identical one.
"Penny's enchanted it. It'll make you less noticeable."
I blink and look back down at the hoodie. It looks perfectly normal, even plain. "Huh. So this is what an enchanted shirt looks like? I would've assumed it'd be a little… flashier."
"That would be counterproductive,” Victoria replies matter-of-factly. “The point of the enchantment is to decrease our chances of getting noticed, so it helps to put it on an unremarkable item. We don’t want the carrier to interfere with the spell.”
Huh. I guess that makes sense. I pull the hoodie over my head and stand still for a moment. “I don’t really feel any different.”
“And you won’t. C’mon, let’s go eat. I do not recommend starting a job on an empty stomach if you can help it.”
By the time we arrive in the kitchen, Penny is eating breakfast and Jackie is nowhere to be seen, presumably having already finished his. “Oh, good, you’re already wearing your sweatshirt,” Penny says cheerfully as we sit down. “For your purposes, the enchantment shouldn’t require any additional upkeep. Just step lightly and you should be fine. The spell will keep you from being noticed by anyone who isn’t already aware of you, so long as you don’t do anything to call attention to yourself.”
"Just like that? Why even bother teaching me to fight if we're going to have such an easy time staying hidden?"
“It’s not infallible,” Victoria replies. “Unfamiliar people in a place they don’t belong are pretty attention-grabbing by themselves, so we’re gonna wanna stay out of sight as much as we can. The spell will just make that a little easier.”
Penny nods. “If someone catches a little glimpse of you out of the corner of his eye, or a foot sticking out from behind a box, that’s not too big a deal. But you can’t just go stand in front of him, and you can’t make a bunch of noise or conspicuously move stuff around. You’re not invisible, you’ve just got some extra leeway.”
“Basically, just follow my lead,” says Victoria.
I was kinda planning on it anyway. With or without enchanted gear, only one of us has any form of experience with this kind of thing. As much as I’ve improved over the past couple days, I have no doubt she could kill me in an instant if she felt the need, and so could damn near anyone we’re likely to encounter on this little field trip. Even so much as trying to teach me to fight feels like a bit of a joke. I’m utterly out of my depth.
We finish eating pretty quickly, and Victoria leads me back to the nearby manhole we emerged out of the night we arrived at Penny’s home. “The underground will be the best way to reach the dropoff without being spotted,” she explains, holding the cover up while I climb down. A moment later she drops down herself. “I’ve had some eyes down here near where we’re headed, they haven’t seen anything unusual.” She adjusts the package on her back which at one point contained a few hundred doll cores. It’s now filled instead with a few lumps of scrap metal from Penny’s workshop for weight and some thick, soft fabric for padding, and leads me off down the tunnel.
Eventually she approaches a wall and kicks open a small panel, which she stashes the package inside of. "How many of those things do you have down here?" I ask as she seals it back up.
"Enough," she replies curtly. Once the panel is firmly secured in place, she climbs a ladder set into the wall and lifts the cover at the top just enough to peer out. "We're clear," she whispers. "Follow me." With that, she climbs up out of the manhole and holds the cover open for me. I emerge into a pretty cramped alley. It's fairly dim here, even in broad daylight. Victoria lowers the manhole back into place, then begins scaling the nearby wall, climbing up a drainpipe.
"You didn't tell me I'd have to climb a wall!" I whisper up at her.
"You don't have to climb a wall," she replies without looking back down at me. "You have to climb a drainpipe. Much easier."
I grit my teeth and glance away, down the alley. For a brief moment I consider bolting. I don't think I'd get very far. Victoria would probably come down right on top of me before I reach sunlight. I take a deep breath, steel myself, and start following her up the wall.
About 20 feet up, Victoria slides a window open and crawls inside it. I follow and we find ourselves on a high catwalk running around the perimeter of the main room of a large warehouse. Crates of varying size and material are scattered fairly haphazardly around the room, most concentrated at around the edges, leaving a large, mostly empty area in the middle. In several places the crates are stacked up fairly close to the catwalk in ways that look like they'd be fairly easy to climb down. Of course, there are also ladders placed intermittently for that purpose. It looks like we won't be using those, however, as Victoria ducks under the railing at the edge of the catwalk and creeps down the stack of boxes. I follow closely behind until we reach the floor, where we both crouch behind the row of crates.
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"Alright," Victoria whispers. "Wait here. I'm gonna go drop the package."
We've talked about this over the past couple days. Now that I'm safely hidden inside the venue, she's gonna drop the package off, without the sweatshirt, go to a pay phone and call in the delivery like she'd been instructed, then put her sweatshirt on and come back to me. The idea being, if anyone's watching the place, seeing her deliver the package without subterfuge should hopefully put them at ease.
My part is easy enough, for now. I just sit back and wait as I hear Victoria enter through the front door, drop the package in the middle of the floor, and leave. A few minutes later, she silently drops down to sit next to me. "They should arrive before long," she whispers. Sure enough, a few minutes later we hear the door open, a slight scuffling noise as the package is picked up, and then the door slams shut. As soon as we hear the door close, Victoria rushes over to the wall and peeks out the window. I follow closely behind, sitting with my back against the wall as she scopes out the alleyway. After a moment, she slides the window open and we climb through into the alley outside. By the time we get outside, whoever picked up the package is nowhere to be seen. Nonetheless, Victoria seems to know exactly where she's going. She dashes off down the alley and leads me down a series of turns, always avoiding open roadways. After about ten minutes, she stops, leans against a wall, and cocks her head to the side.
“He’s inside,” she reports. “We’ve found our target. Two blocks over and one down.”
“How can you tell?”
“I listened.”
With that profoundly unsatisfying answer, she turns the corner and begins leading me through the alleys again. I have to choose between asking for clarification or keeping up with her, and I choose the latter. Before long we reach our destination, a completely nondescript office block. Unnervingly nondescript, even. Normally this sort of building would bear the logo of whatever company is operating out of it, but this one doesn’t even have that. It’s nothing more than a slightly irregular beige brick.
My musings about the strange building are interrupted by Victoria scampering off into the bushes that line the edges of the parking lot. As we come around the back, I whisper, "Do you have a plan to get us in there?"
"Yeah, piece of cake. This building's prefab, there are dozens of it all over Karnassus. This isn't the first time I've had to enter one unannounced." She points at a dark window on the building’s back wall. "See that window? Architectural flaw. It opens straight into a storage closet. The blueprints were already widely distributed before they caught it, so it's just a quirk of these buildings now. That's our entry point."
I nod, and we make our way up to the window she indicated. Fortunately, the shrubs we're using for cover come right up along the back wall of the building, and we're able to get there pretty easily. Victoria slides the window open and we crawl inside, among dimly lit mops and cleaning solutions. "Alright," says Victoria. "I'm gonna boost you up to that vent cover. Open it, then crawl inside."
"We're gonna crawl in the vents?"
"It's not that bad, the actual duct is bigger than the cover. It's our best option to get around without being seen. We're gonna have to be quiet, though."
I still don't love the idea, but it's a little late to start arguing about infiltration methods. I step up and let her boost me up to the ceiling. It takes a little effort, but after a moment I manage to unscrew the vent cover and swing it open. Victoria helps lift me up as I pull myself inside the vent, and once I'm inside she leaps up to grab the edge of the opening herself.
“The executive office should be our best bet for information.” Her voice is barely even a whisper, dropped as low as possible to avoid making noise in this echoey expanse. “Follow me.” I silently acquiesce. We carefully make our way down the duct past a number of vents identical to the one we climbed in through. Occasionally I sneak a glance through one as I pass by. The sights are unremarkable. Drab offices, furnished minimalistically, manned by various angels. Nothing unexpected. Maybe I’d see something interesting if I could sneak a glance at their computer screens, but I’m not at a very good angle for doing so in this duct, especially not when I’m limited to peering through a grate as I pass by.
Eventually Victoria brings us to a stop, and I check the vent she’s stopped in front of. The office inside is a bit more tastefully decorated than the others we’ve passed, with some art hanging on the walls and a large desk positioned in front of a wide window. Behind that desk sits a middle-aged man with tired eyes and no halo. Probably a witch. There tends to be one or two of them a bit higher up in any given pecking order for the angels underneath to answer to. The type of person that gravitates toward our arrangement isn’t really management material. We watch him type away at something on his computer for a few moments before the door swings open and an angel pokes her head in. “Sir? You’re needed in production, apparently there’s an issue with the latest shipment.”
He lets out a weary sigh. “Thank you, Stella, tell them I’ll be right down.” She nods and shuts the door. After another minute or so of typing, he gets up and leaves the room.
“Alright, this is our window,” Victoria whispers as soon as the door shuts behind him. “We’re getting as much as we can off of that computer, and getting out of here.”
“Lucky timing with that delivery issue,” I comment as she jimmies the vent cover loose.
“Nothing lucky about it. I knew when I stuffed that package full of scrap metal that they’d need the cores for something, obviously someone was going to notice that it wasn’t what I’d promised. I figured there were pretty good odds they take it right to the manager, and it seems I was right.” She drops silently to the floor, and I follow her, slightly less silently but at least managing to avoid making a racket.
The two of us step behind the desk, and Victoria begins looking through the computer’s folders. “Hmm… Unsurprisingly, it seems they’re mass-producing doll vessels. Still doesn’t tell us how they solve the issue of ensouling that many cores, but it’s good to at least know that much.”
I lean forward and look over her shoulder, and one of the files catches my eye. “Wait, does that say… Combat doll? What does that mean?”
Victoria looks toward the file I’m pointing at, hovers the cursor over it, then lets go of the mouse and begins rummaging through the desk’s drawers.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a flash drive. There’s a lot here and we’re not exactly drowning in time to read all of it.” After a few moments, she finds what she’s looking for, sticks it in the computer’s USB slot, deletes the files that were already on it and begins loading it with anything she finds suspicious. I glance down at the clock in the bottom corner of the screen. It's been 3 minutes. "Alright, let's get out of here." She pockets the flash drive and closes the file explorer.
I turn away from the computer and walk with Victoria back toward the vent we entered through. On our way, something catches my eye through the window on the doorway. There’s a logo on the opposing wall of the hallway outside, a dot in the center of a circle. The insignia of Herrid. Questions whirl around my mind as I start to unravel the implications. Is that who this place belongs to? Have I been breaking into one of his offices this whole time? I've barely started trying to process this information when a wave of pain washes over my skull, a yellow light from above blinding me. Every last thought is forced out of my head, and I'm left with nothing to do but open my mouth and scream.