The man who opened the door was even more surprised to see me than I was to see him. He was a fair skinned human with grey hair and he was wearing an Alchemy jacket. It’s a common garment for people who work with chemicals in Arkadia. It’s kind of like a lab coat, white and made of thick cotton, but instead of having patch pockets and buttoning up the middle it has a double flap front that buttons at the shoulders, and you wear it with an apron that has pockets.

He obviously worked here and he definitely wasn’t expecting to see a bipedal Hyena with an armful of pill bottles.

“Hi,” I said, desperately scrambling for something non-threatening to say. “I’m a Scavenger, just passing through. I thought this building was abandoned and I’ve just found all these used pill containers. Is it okay if I take them?”

I could see him working his way through the whiplash back and forth of my words. He recovered quickly and said, “Yeah, sure. No problem. We end up throwing most of them away. How did you get here?”

“Through the garden,” I said. “Sorry about that, like I said, it looked abandoned.”

“Well, it’s not. You’d better come out the front with me and I’ll show you the proper way out.” He ushered me back out the way he had come.

I put my hand in one of the many pockets of my jerkin and sent a message on my tapstone.

PE-AM. RAN INTO STAFF DUDE. HE SUS AF. TAKING ME OUT FRONT

From

To

Message

PETRA

AMRIS

I RAN INTO A DUDE WHO WORKS HERE. HE’S ACTING SUSPICIOUS AS FUCK. HE’S TAKING ME OUT THE FRONT WAY.

Something was wrong here. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but I knew that this man was concealing at least as much as I was. He had recovered from the shock of seeing me far too quickly, and he seemed oddly keen for me to come with him, rather than for him to come and see how I had got in.

My body was screaming at me to run back to the safety of the train but my brain was committed to finding out what he was hiding. To do that I had to find out where he was taking me.

The tapstone in my pocket vibrated with the staccato tapping of a message from Amris.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

AM-PE. WILL FOLLOW STEALTH.

From

To

Message

AMRIS

PETRA

WILL FOLLOW WITH STEALTH

Then a second message.

AS-PE. TRAIN RDY WEN U R.

From

To

Message

ASSER

PETRA

THE TRAIN WILL BE READY WHEN YOU ARE

Then a third.

SA-ALL. CALLING KIDS BACK

From

To

Message

SARAH

ALL

I’M CALLING THE CHILDREN BACK TO THE TRAIN

The man in white guided me through another lab, very similar in layout to the last one, but in much better condition, and clearly in use. There was a pile of freshly washed glassware drying by the sink and some kind of distillation apparatus set up on one of the benches. I could see the stool he’d been sitting on just moments before. It was pulled out from the bench close to where a large ledger sat open.

I slowed down, trying to get a surreptitious look at the open book. I knew it wouldn’t be for long and I’d mostly be looking at it upside down and in poor light. I was betting that it would still be worth it. Hyenas have better low light vision than humans and the Gift of the Outlander translation perk would probably still work even if the text was upside down.

Of course with the angle and the lighting and the time constraint I only got about a third of a page. It wasn’t super interesting. It was just a list of people who’d been prescribed the pills they were making here. All the names from the section I could read had been prescribed the same pills, the Celerity pills that had left behind so many empty containers. Whatever Celerity was, it was pretty popular around here.

One other thing struck me about the ledger page as I allowed the man to guide me toward the exit. All the names had some kind of abbreviation in front of them. At first I’d assumed it was a tracking code or the first letters of their names but that didn’t make any sense.. Most of the names had the same letters, PVT. There were a couple of CPL and one each of SGT and LTN.

Something was screaming at me from the back of my mind as we went through the door on the far side of the lab and into a wide corridor that ran the full width of the building. This corridor intersected with the one that ran from the back of the building toward the front. They met at a curved front desk that had been turned into a dispensary counter. I could see the backs of a couple of other men in the same white uniforms as the man I’d run into.

That was when I realised that my brain was screaming at me about the abbreviations in the ledger and I was overcome with a horrible sense of dread and impending doom. They were ranks. Private, Corporal, Sergeant and Lieutenant.

I reached for the tapstone. I had no time for a coherent message so I tapped out one word. SOLDIERS.

Then I took another couple of steps and saw the people queuing up at the dispensary counter. The men waiting to get their Celerity pills Once I’d got a good look at their uniforms I corrected my message with another word.

FASH.