They still had their two tagged Green Jackets, but the problem with surveillance tech that was so tiny and hard to detect was a general lack of range. Bulluru seemed to have gone out of town, and the other one, whose name stubbornly avoided any mention, didn’t mention the specific hour of the meeting.

So Gaylen and the crew simply waited, split up into their separate little roles. Kiris used her breaker to open the backdoor of a neighbouring abandoned business, and Herdis and Bers took up position inside, waiting for a moment when they might be needed. The Chanei also opened a vehicle entrance on another building, and she and Jaquan waited in the car outside as the man kept an eye on the drone feed. Ayna waited to play her little stealth games. And Gaylen sat on top of his light, alone, cut off from comms, and just waited. The light coming through the tinted windows faded until it simply vanished, and he waited.

It was that dreadful combination of tense and boring; the perfect growing tank for intrusive, troublesome thoughts. They were a familiar old enemy, if a relentless one, and so Gaylen fought back. For a while, that was all he had to occupy himself with. Then…

“Boss-man,” Ayna whispered, her voice quite audible in the dead-silent building. “Jaquan sees movement on the drone. He suspects this is it.”

“Alright,” he told her. “Just remember: More taggings are a bonus, not a necessity. I’ll probably overhear everything we need right here.”

“No playing hero, I get it,” the Dwyyk said to him with a sigh in her voice. “That’s your thing these days, apparently.”

“Good luck,” he told her.

“Yeah, you too.”

He thought she’d left, but he couldn’t hear her footsteps either way. After a bit of a moment, she spoke again.

“Eh… I don’t like this place, man,” she added, her voice more serious. “I just… don’t. Good luck. Really.”

“Yeah.”

At some point after that, she did leave. And he knew because the meeting began.

They arrived via the shot-open backdoor; four men, from what Gaylen could tell.

“Hello?” one shouted into the big, open space as they turned the lights on. “Are we the first?”

“Yes, yes you are,” another man said, in the squeaky voice of an imaginary resident.

“Shut up, man,” the first one replied casually. “Alright, I’ll just-”

There was the sound of something being brought out and opened.

“No comms in here,” the second speaker reminded him. “Remember?”

“Yeah, fine.”

Gaylen just lay on top of his light, still and flat and silent, as the men ambled around, doing a perfunctory check for intruders from the sound of it. They then went to the sofa area, but apparently hadn’t seen the big blood smear before, and were rather grossed out by it.

“Honestly?” who do you think did this, one asked, as he, by the sound of things, helped himself to a drink from the cooler.

“Does it matter? Not our headache.”

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“We-”

Gaylen heard footsteps through the half-open back door, and the men soon heard it as well.

“Guys?” Sammy said.

“We’re here.”

“Did you check the place?” Sammy asked. “Make sure no one’s planted anything?”

“We… we looked around, yeah.”

Sammy either bought it, or didn’t bother with a follow up. What he did do was remind them of the importance of this meeting, and to put on a good face. Whatever that meant to a pack like the Green Jackets.

Next he sent some of them up on the walkways. Gaylen, with some amount of confidence, counted three sets of feet moving up the grated, echoing metal, and quite close to his hiding spot.

Boredom was well and truly gone. But he kept calm. On balance, with all the factors counted in, that had probably played the largest part in him surviving this long.

Keep calm and survive.

The three didn’t seem to take a closer look at anything; they just sort of stood around, taking the odd step around on the small network of walkways and platforms, never far enough away that Gaylen dared move at all.

The agents arrived mere minutes later.

There was a knock against the main door. Sammy hurried over, and said “Use the back door!” through the thick plastic.

They did, and seconds later Sammy was talking to them almost directly beneath Gaylen.

“What, did you guys come here for a fight?” the man asked.

“There was a fight here, recently,” the seeming leader of the agents, the kicker, replied. “One would be a fool not to come prepared.”

“Well, there’s no one here but us,” Sammy told him, and Gaylen didn’t know if he just didn’t pick up on the insult. “The place has been checked.”

“Let’s talk about the handoff.”

“Let’s talk about it inside,” Sammy told him. “You know, since we are all being hush-hush.”

There was movement away from the door and inside the building, that quickly stopped.

“Just you two?” Sammy asked.

“Professionals take precautions,” the kicker told him. “The rest of my team will wait outside.”

“Fine. Fine by me,” Sammy replied, even though he sounded just a little bit snippy about it. “Follow me.”

They started walking, and Gaylen did the maths: Eight Green Jackets, and at least three Heg agents, pretty heavily armed. This was definitely not the time for mistakes.

“He’s not here?” the kicker asked, as the group slowly went around the leftover machinery.

“No,” Sammy replied, as if he’d been asked a rather silly question. “We settle the price first.”

“The price and the future,” the agent told him. “We-”

The lights flickered. It gave Gaylen a bit of a start, but he kept quiet. The men below had stopped, and the lights flickered again. He worried this was going to trigger a check of the lights, but at the third flicker the building’s faint background hum of power did the same.

“What is going on?” one of the Green Jackets by the sofas asked out loud, even as Gaylen asked it quietly.

Then the lights simply went dead, and so did the hum. Only a handful of chemical lights activated, casting the interior into vague silhouettes as opposed to total darkness. Gaylen’s hand travelled to the bulge of his pistol.

There were sounds of movement down below, but with the background hum gone and everyone on high alert, Gaylen didn’t dare make any noise by peeking.

“Hey hey hey!” Sammy said. “It’s not us! It must be the wiring! This place is a dump, in case you didn’t notice!”

The dim lights changed. Specifically, the colour. Except it wasn’t the lights. The new, slightly stronger illumination seemed to have no origin. Everything just came into a bit more focus, although bathed in a dark… something.

Then came the voice, echoing faintly, every bit as sourceless as the colour.

“You are a pest upon this world. Upon my world. And like a pest, you summon more of yourselves. You establish a foothold, and spread. Until you are burned out. This is your burning. This is your punishment. So burn, vermin.”

The colour kept changing, reaching a strange border between magenta and violet, and a pit opened in Gaylen’s stomach as he recognised it.

“Burn.”

The air turned wrong, and someone or something screamed. Gaylen drew his pistol, but something made him give it a second look. The little electronic readout wasn’t active.

The next scream was definitely human. It came from one of the men who were up on the walkways.

“WHAT IS THAT?!”