Chapter Twenty-Seven - Unnoticed

Not being noticed was the first and greatest way to complete an assassination. How to avoid notice came in a few varieties. There was plain stealth, then there was deception. My first ever kill had come in that latter form. I'd taken a job delivering groceries, and delivered a lethal dose of something I picked up over the counter to the man I was being paid to kill.

No one suspected me because I was just another nobody doing their job. Though I still cringed when I looked back at how poorly I'd planned my first job.

Stealth and deception were the bread and butter of a good assassin, but on some occasions neither were options.

In those rare moments it was sometimes preferable to go loud.

People often over-prepared for the thing they feared most. The paranoid would have layers of systems in place to make stealth difficult and to make deception impossible. Those same people rarely expected it when you walked right into their home or hideout with weapons blazing.

Of course, I was never the one to walk in like that, because doing so was asking to get shot. That kind of thing could be hired out.

Assassination was a deep and complex art, the likes of which could take a lifetime to master. Even now, in my second chance at life, I was learning new things.

For example, being a small animal drew plenty of attention, but it was also a very easy way to be dismissed.

"Kitty," a lady by the entrance to the mega building the cult inhabited said. She smiled guilelessly and bent down to scratch my head.

I dodged out of the way, then walked up to the door she was standing next to and meowed.

"Oh, you want in, kitty?" she asked. "Here here." She shifted her assault rifle to the side so that it hung by its strap and opened the door for me.

And just like that, I'd sauntered past the nineteen armed guards stationed around the base of the building and was let right in without a fuss. It helped that this was a residential building. Pets were likely banned, and that banning was likely ignored by a sizable percentage of the inhabitants.

Sharp and I had been in this building before, but only for a few minutes. We'd moved quickly, because the place creeped us both out. That feeling was still here. It was an oppressive weight pushing me down. I wanted to hunch down, and my fur was standing on end.

I noticed that the people around the ground floor all had a sort of... listlessness to them. They shuffled whenever they moved about and their eyes seemed unfocused. That wasn't to say that they were entirely unintelligent. I saw people smacking vending machines, others gathered in small groups listening to music. A few were passing a joint around next to an escalator, and the ground-floor shops were all mostly open.

These people were either used to the feeling, or were learning to cope with it. In either case, it was definitely affecting people, just perhaps not as much as I feared. There was no voice over the building-wide intercom either. Maybe that was a factor as well?

"--Queen? Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you. Can you hear me?" I asked in return. This entire operation was predicated on my ability to talk to Sharp not being lost with range. We really should have tested it, but this was the first time that I was more than two rooms away from the girl since we'd met.

"Mhm!" she said. "Okay, so it looks like you're on the ground floor. Jenny says that Aly is higher up."

"Can you be any more precise?" I asked. This was a mega building. It had fifty floors above ground and likely a quarter as many below. Several thousand people lived here. I had no idea how many were involved with the cult, but I imagined it was likely a majority. Though it was very possible that it wasn't something they wanted for themselves.

Subversive mind control magic like this was going to get noticed, if it wasn't already. The government and corps might have been slow to act at the best of times, but they would move eventually. Brain-dead zombies didn't make for good consumers and they didn't pay taxes.

"Hmm, okay, sorry for the delay. We're moving up the parking garage to be on the same level." Sharp huffed a little, and I imagined that she was walking up stairs at that very moment. "Uh, I think we're three floors up already?"

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I nodded. "Heading up, then," I said. There was nothing for it. I bounced over to an escalator and made sure not to let my tail get caught on anything as I rode it up. Once at the top, I slipped between someone's legs and into an elevator.

It was a bit of a gamble, but it paid off when someone tapped the fourth floor button.

"I'm on the fourth floor," I said.

"How?!"

"I rode the elevator."

"That's cheating!" Sharp said. She was definitely out of breath.

I grinned as I walked out of the elevator. "Think of all the Body experience."

Sharp grumbled some more while I found a quiet place to hide. That turned out to be next to an overfilled garbage can by the entrance to a washroom. The whole floor was residential, but clearly whomever was supposed to keep it clean was off-duty and had been for a while. Trash was piling up and some of the lights above were flickering. I noticed some apartments had their doors left open, and the interiors looked abandoned.

Graffiti covered just about everything too. More so than a poorer mega building would normally have. A lot of scrawled messages about Him, done by unsteady, inexpert hands.

"S-seventh," Sharp said. "We're on the... seventh... floor. Oh god, Jenny, why aren't you tired?"

I missed whatever the shorter woman said.

"That's... not... fair... either. Queen, urgh, we think Aly's on this floor."

"Understood," I said. So I had to climb up a few floors, then? Not too hard. There were several stairwells, and I needed some Body experience too. By the time I was up on the fifth, I was starting to feel a lot more sympathetic for Sharp. I was not in any shape to be running up stairs like this either.

The sixth floor stairwell was blocked. Trash and rubble were stacked up, along with a few lengths of barbed wire just thrown onto the heap. The barricade was far from professional, but it was exactly the kind of thing that would stymie an unprepared advance. If the only way up to the seventh floor was the elevators, then that meant that defences could be concentrated there.

Unfortunately for whomever jury-rigged the barricade, they'd done so to stop human-sized opponents. I squeezed myself under an upturned couch, then hopped over an ottoman and between some office chairs, then I was free on the other side.

The door into the main corridor was left opened, and I noticed that there were no barricades to the eighth floor. Interesting, but not something I could do anything about at the moment.

"I'm on the seventh floor," I said as I carefully poked my head around the entrance.

The carpets here had been ripped off, leaving the floor semi-bare except for glue marks and some tarp left on the ground. Doors were missing from every apartment, and some walls had been knocked down, turning what should have been tiny habitation units into much larger, more open spaces.

I didn't know what was going on around here, but I was definitely getting bad vibes from it all. Fortunately, the lighting was poor, so even though I could see plenty of people wandering about in that same shuffling gait, I moved slowly and silently along the edge of the wall and kept to the darker patches and out of the way.

"We're watching," Sharp said. 'Uh, Jenny's complaining that there's fur in the way, but it's fine. Looks creepy in there."

"It feels creepy," I agreed. The air here felt thin and cold when I breathed it in, but at the same time I couldn't help but feel like it was thick and cloying. The dichotomy didn't make sense, and yet it was what it was.

Basically, some magic shenanigans were afoot, and I didn't like it.

I liked it even less when I carefully rounded a corner and noticed that some apartments had been turned into large cages. There were people in those. No Alyssa, from what I could tell as I scampered past.

Then I did find her. In one of the more central parts of the floor, in an area cordoned off by opaque sheets of plastic tarp. There were several cages laid down on the ground, barely tall enough for a short person to stand in, and surrounded by lines of salt and burning candles.

Within one of those cages sat Alyssa, the girl's face pressed against the bars and her eyes glassy and unseeing.

***