When Katya had walked past the steepest part of the slope, she took one last look behind her and seeing that she was indeed not being followed, brought the phone out to her ear.

"Three-five-five, Red Mists," she whispered, and then recited the code that she had memorized for that hour of that day. She pulled the phone away from her ear and covered the speaker. A muffled screech came over the line as her connection was scrambled and rerouted.

Facing the faint outline of a westerly sun, she plugged in the earpiece she had brought for the occasion and fed the phone down through her shirt so that the wire wouldn't tangle and get in her way. She slipped the phone back into her pocket as she began to climb the dirt road. She put the bud into her ear just as she heard a voice come through the line.

"Avanti? Operator, can you hear me?"

With a crackle, the reply came back, "I read you, Katya. Hold on, the memory strip just finished uploading."

Katya waited patiently as Avanti listened to the conversation she had just had. She amused herself wondering what Avanti would say.

"Alright. SPN tunnel established. Well-done. You always make it seem so easy. The aural polygraph analysis showed no suspicion on his part."

Katya smiled to herself. "If only everything could be so straightforward," she mused softly.

"Hold on," Avanti said, "there's a little bit of static on the positioning -- the signal scrambler, probably." After a moment, she said, "Ok, there we go -- looks like you are already in town."

"Correct. In fact, I think I just walked past the welcome sign."

"Does it say, 'Welcome to the Freelands'?"

"Freelands? Does Revner know you've switched sides?"

Avanti grinned, "What's that old saying? 'When in Rome...'?"

---

Katya was walking slower now. Despite the high altitude and the chilly air, Warrentown had not seen much snow. Instead, the unpaved dirt roads were left bare and the yellow-brown buildings stood stoically in the shadows of the giant deciduous forest surrounding them. Katya had made a career out of being fearless, but even she couldn't help but feel a little bit colder as the pale wind rustled through the little, empty town.

Occasionally, she would come across a torn body and the heavy crimson-dyed dirt around it would remind her of why she was there. In those instances, she would kneel down and find the corpses frozen in slow decay, their brokenness captured and preserved by the frost. Carefully, she took her photos: a shotgun, barrel snapped, laying across the severed torso of a man still in his long-johns; the punctured chests of a woman and a young girl, slumped together in the doorway of a cabin; the fireplace behind them, its ashes long without heat and now bedding for the single, slender finger that had rolled, improbably, onto this final, white resting place. But when she stood back up, it would be just her -- no local detectives peeking over her shoulder, no paramedics waiting on cleanup duty, no bystanders milling about with outstretched necks -- no attention at all -- just a lonely, lonely town.

In the background, Avanti's soft voice came through her earpiece, "The building in front of you is the sheriff's office."

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Katya stopped and stood for a moment. She looked at the ground around her and stated with absolute certainty, "This is where the attack started."

"How can you tell?" Avanti asked.

She turned to the windowless building before her. "There are no bodies here. No bodies on the street, I mean. Given the state of dress that we found most of the victims in, we know the attack clearly occurred at night and that most people were in their homes. The victims we found on the streets were ones that must have been roused from bed, awoken by the noises outside. But there is a fifty meter radius around this building within which we've seen no outdoor victims."

Katya walked up to the splintered board that had once been the door and pushed it aside. She said, as she stepped through, "I think we can hypothesize that at this point during the attack, the alarm hadn't yet been raised. How's the video feed, Avanti?" Katya turned on her omni-device's flashlight. "There's very little natural light in here," she noted, inching forward into the building.

"It's choppy. I don't think I'll be able to help much with visual analysis from this side," Avanti piped through. "Temperature scan reveals no active heat sources, although ambient temperature appears to be quite a few degrees warmer than outside."

"It is. Bodies are in an advanced state of decomposition. The air here--" Katya pulled her arm up to her nose, "there isn't much circulation it seems." She looked around for a window but found none. There was no escape from the fetid smell of decay and rot. "These bodies look to be about a month old," she whispered. "Attack pattern similar to what we saw in Pikevale. It looks like the victims here had just a few seconds of reaction time. One or two pairs but most bodies are isolated; suggests there wasn't much time for reaction or organization."

Slowly, she penetrated into the long hallway, avoiding the thick, congealed pools of human putrefaction where she could. She had noted from the outside that this building was unlike any of the others she had encountered in the town. Whereas those tended to be wooden and brick, the sheriff's office had a solid, concrete construction. And inside, the outside light died quickly. To each side she saw rooms scarred with the same splatter patterns she had seen all over the sanitarium in Pikevale. There was no need to investigate the victims with any greater degree of detail. She knew what she would find, and what she wouldn't.

As she continued along, a pile of debris to her right caught her attention. She would not have been able to articulate what it was that stood out about it, but she had come to trust the tingling sensation she felt in her shoulders, and pushing aside some of the fallen mortar, she noted, "There's a staircase here," as she pointed the light down into an otherwise blackened basement.

Avanti crackled through, "No active heat sources detected, but proceed with caution. It's my duty to remind you that you're unsupported out there."

With the static in her ear as her only companion, Katya carefully stepped down into the darkness.

"What do you see? Video is breaking up. Please maintain audio relay."

As she stepped off the last stair and onto the hard concrete floor, she noticed the air in this damp, unventilated basement felt even denser.

She whispered, "There are bars -- it looks like old-fashioned holding cells. I guess this building was also used as a jail. No structural damage to any of the bars or walls. Doors seem to be--" she coughed, "--sorry, the air down here is--" she bent over, her chest heaving against the thick, foul atmosphere.

Katya felt hot. She lifted her forearm to wipe her brow and then brought it back down to cover her nose and mouth. "Victims' bodies in the cells show signs similar to others upstairs and outside. Eviscerated offal scattered across cell floors. I can't be confident but on first glance it seems to match the patterns we saw in Pikevale, with livers and hearts, in particular, missing. Faces are entirely liquefied and unidentifiable through cursory visual inspection.

"It's interesting," she said, "there are a few empty cells here that have been opened. Fecal matter in buckets suggests inmates at one point but--" she gagged, involuntarily.

Avanti's voice went twisting through the static, "Perhaps they were dragged elsewhere?" She leaned towards her monitor, there was still no visual feed. She kept her eyes fixed cautiously on the charts and gauges at the bottom of her screen.

"Katya?" she said when there was no reply. "Katya?"

As she hesitantly began to call her Agent again, a spike appeared on the oscilloscope.

"I found something..." came the scrambled sound, "...it's...door...open...."