“I just don’t understand it” The old woman said, who with a wry smile clearly signaled that she did. “He was on track to becoming a Constant himself, don’t you know.”

Hailien had finally figured out how to latch her burrowhorse to the slats. She had never ridden one before, but Morgan was trying to encourage their use after a trader left them with far more of the creatures than they knew what to do with. With that done, she couldn’t ignore the woman any longer. “It was his idea of protest. I don’t condone his actions.” Hailien said blankly. “But he had his reasons.”

She was just starting out in the legacy when Johann Remainder did what he did. He was such the model for what they had groomed Hailien to be, yet she knew with that came the fear she would turn out just like him.

“He killed a Constant.”

This part of the story always bothered her. She never thought death was his intention, his whole point was in abstaining from it. But it was easier to think of him as a succesful assassin than a failed peaceful protestor. “Yes, and we’re all very lucky he didn’t do worse.”

This section of Gutworth was a street that went straight to the great cliff of the Drum, but by the time you got to the crematory the odds of seeing anyone living there was scant. There was no need for that anymore, corpses fed the sand and made it dream, and so it had been buried by time.

“They should have catched someone like him far before he got to that rank.” She said, tut-tutting to the sliver of sky above them, bright as white emptiness. “And strung him up too.”

“Where is the hotel?”

With a frown, the old woman pointed to the tallest building around, the one whose top floor had been scraped off by a low hanging mountain. It was like the architect had not accounted on the height of the outcropping.

“I didn’t know anyone used that one.” She said, but you could say that about half of the buildings here. Gutworth always seemed on the verge of being abandoned to her.

This illusion was broken when she approached the building. It’s glass front door and the ribbon like frames adorning it comically over cleaned. The soot and water damage only feet away from the entrance made Hailien wonder who they were trying to fool.

The lobby was a stark white, punctuated by large tears in the walls that revealed a jungle of wires underneath. There was barely any furniture, or really anything recognizable outside of some yellow tinged stairs behind a desk, and another door to the left.

The desk read like a fortress, jutting out of the wall with metallic bumps on its customer facing side. Commanding it was a small woman looking down at her hand. Close cropped brown hair, red lipstick, a white and black outfit that suggested she worked there. As Hailien approached she could hear the words the woman was mumbling to herself.

“Such irregularities cant be helped, I see no harm in it. Tell me again when it goes above 2 percent, or when more than one room is involved. You’ll just give it a rinsing after, It’s not that harmful.”

She saw a flash of silver in the odd woman’s palm, the same shade as the lobby, but it was gone, replaced by the veiny back of her hand. The Woman flipped her palms downward and leaned her body over the desk.

“Hello, welcome to the Salmacious! The best hotel not owned by Morgan Lemure. How may I be of service?” The woman said, her manner deranged.

At that point Hailien noticed another woman sitting on one of the stumps that served as chairs. She was tall and in civilian clothes, with a blue dress under a white and red business suit, wearing glasses that made her eyes look like a pair of perfectly circular bottomless pits.

She recognized from the demeanor that this was 36, through she had never seen her outside of her Lemure uniform. Better to see her than 35, who she assumed was already at work. She gave a mumbled apology and walked away from the receptionist.

”Oh, yes, get aquainted! We’ll be here to help you plan a stay whenever you need it! 10 rooms currently available.” A pause, she leaned her ear to her palm. “Perhaps eleven!”

She sat on the stump nearest to 36, she needed no introduction.

“We have two bright numbers on it.” 36 said, as if they were continuing a conversation previously discussed. “Montanna will waltz down here with the body that matters once it’s been done.”

”Alive?”

”Hopefully alive, if we can count on Montanna not being Montanna/“

Hailien offered little more than a nod. She remembered a time in her youth when she waited in a clinic similar in sterility to the Salmacious, tensing herself for bad news she knew she would receive. But she was older now, strong enough to resist the urge to show these feelings. What was her service in Lemure’s Legacy if not a journey in creating her own mask to hide in.

“And if Montanna is Montanna?” 35’s real name, something he was strangely upfront about.

There was no obvious change in her demeneaor, but 36’s fists were now clenched. Hailien understood why she wore the glasses. It was only now that she realized just how livid the Number was.

“Are you suggesting that he’ll ruin this mission for the fun of it?”

When Montanna first started, the gulf between him and the current 36 was immense, with her having been 15 when he was 1. More than a dozen numbers between them. And yet over the course of the last few years all of them conveniently found themselves dead, missing, or presumed dead, until he became 35, and there was no doubt in Hailiens mind that he wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than replacing Morgan himself.

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If Hailien had anything to be proud of, it was that she had never killed or masterminded the death of another Legacy member. Thevan did not count.

“I think we both understand that he’s a liability. You’re his direct superior.”

“That’s what I’m told.” 36 produced a small white stick from her coat pocket. “The lady at the desk is giving these out, did she give you one?”

Hailien shook her head, suddenly aware of the woman on the counter eying them.

“Watch” she bent the white stick and it snapped with a satisfying crunch without breaking. A blue light glowed from its middle. Hailien heard noise that after a moment became comprehensible as words.

“-The Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni is, as of this writing, the largest known Invertebrate, and the largest Squid in terms of sheer mass. A creature worthy of preserving, even if it takes up precious space. Only discovered less than 200 years ago, it is a testament to how many of Earths mysteries are still unknown to us, especially the ocean, which covers more than 70 percent of our world. And yet, scientists calculate we have only explored 3 percent of it. While gravity and the checks and balances of energy consumption means that terrestrial creatures have a limit on size, aquatic creatures do not have the same restrictions enforced upon them. Conceivably, they have no limit. Who knows how many species were left behind simply because we did not know they were there, perhaps-“

“Pretty cool right?” 36 said. “Each one says a different thing.” She snapped another one, and the same voice began talking about some pastime Hailien had no frame of reference for, something about a ball and a place known as the diamond. The new voice was superimposed upon the old one and the sound soon became untenable. She crushed the newer one under her heel, which brought the voice to a whisper then a close. Hailien kept the other. “I’m fine with just one.” She put it on the middle of the table, still blabbering. 36 wrinkled her nose, now annoyed by the very curio she introduced.

“How long have you been waiting for them?”

“Not long.” She said with a sigh. The stairs behind the desk were flanked by a white wall diagonal to the stairs and a foot higher. They’d hear footsteps long before they’d be able to confirm who it was. “Someone came down a few minutes ago and I got excited. But it was just one of the other guests. He gave me a look that made me want to shove his head in glass.” A crack of her hands. Her Remark sprang out from her nails, sharp as ever. “I would have done it.” The Remark retracted as she lowered her head. Her voice was muffled by her knees. ”If I wasn’t on duty.”

“Technically we’re never off it.” They had signed their lives away.

“You don’t really believe that.”

Before she could reply there was a thump from above. The metal chair she was sitting on skidded as she got up. 36 grabbed her arm.

“It’s probably nothing. There’s a lot of noise here. Besides.” She smiled cruelly. “He’s supposed to be quiet.”

There was another thump, this one followed by a groan. Again though, nothing that pinpointed it as having to do with them. Still, she readied herself for confrontation. Already standing up, and not accounting for the distance, her Remark carved the chair she was sitting on in two, and pierced the floor. With a lazy swipe, and a much more considered spin and flip that put the Sword behind her back, the floor was ripped open, revealing the same jungle of wires that pockmarked the walls.

“Oh no oh no!” The woman from behind the desk hurdled over it and ran to the exposed floor. A now detached wire danced in the bundle of red and yellow lines, hissing with strange blue flame. It wasn’t hot to the touch, the receptionist passed through the flame with no problem as she hurriedly put some blue gunk from her pocket at its flaming end. She spoke into her hand. It was a white perfectly rectangular object that could have been mistaken for a trendy glove or piece of cloth, if it wasn’t for the way it cleanly integrated into her flesh. “You were supposed to tell me when it escalated!” She screamed into it.

Footsteps descending.

The woman whipped her head to the staircase. Hailien did the same, and was rewarding with heavy breathing and footfalls.

A woman, no, a girl, burst out of the door behind them. She screamed when Hailien turned towards her, and fell over clutching something small and dirty. The way she immediately collapsed confirmed to Hailien that whoever this was, she was not a threat. “Thats not one of ours…” 36 said. Meaning neither the assassins or one of the targets.

The girl got up with some effort. She was dressed in a blood covered service uniform, the style suggested a restaurant, and gripped a piece of rusted glass in her hand. Two strands of her brown hair hung down in bangs like zig zagging curtains. Even as she had to push herself off the ground to get back up, she never let go of the dirty shard. A remark? No, Hailien thought, it was far too mundane, far too tangible. It would have dissapeared when she fell over.

“Stay right there.” Hailien commanded. But the girl’s deranged expression was like a cornered crywolfs, angry with fear, and far more trouble than she was worth. When the girl ran past her, Hailien made no attempt at stopping her. It was certainly some poor bystander Montanna had terrified for his own amusement. She put her sword in the ground and stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for the still descending footsteps.

Still, it was a loose end.

“36, go catch up with her. Follow but don’t engage, if she stops anywhere then tell me and keeps tabs but other than that be silent.” 36 left as the footsteps got louder. There had become more scattered, like someone was hopping.

Someone was. “Bloody girl got me right in the foot.” Montanna said, his hair was a mess and a far cry from the perfectly coiffed style he was known for. “And you’re not even chasing her?”

“She’s not your target.”

“You don’t get to tell me that.” Montanna said, forgetting his place. He hopped awkwardly down the last few steps. There was a ripple in reality that suggested a Remark, but none appeared, it’s like he decided against the summon at the last moment. “Did you not see what was in her hand?”

She sighed, already priming herself to run after this mystery girl. “How about our target, did you find Adam?”

“He’s dead but that doesn’t matter. It’s his remark. That girl stole it and she killed two of my men.”

There was no way. “That was barely a Remark.”

“Well Adam is barely a man. It wasn’t a killer I saw up there. Grand, dude looked like a fucking skeleton and was dead when we got there. He was never the trouble, it’s his” Montanna pulled into himself, putting his hands on his eyes and taking a deep breath. He lifted up his arms and exploded outward. “It’s his fucking Remark. That's the real danger!! And you let it sashay out of here!”

She had heard enough. Not waiting up for Montanna, she strided out the door, her Remark clipping the frame on the way out, contacting 36 through her smart veins for the woman’s current location.

“Wait ma’am, you forgot this!” It was the hotel receptionist. Her thin voice not enough to make her turn back. It was the strange language device she had dropped. The last thing she heard from that place was the device prattling on before the wind took precedent. Something about a project.