Tasìa watched the EMS hovercraft as it approached. She held her gun low and hid it behind the balcony rail. She did not want to frighten them away.

If the phase beasts were after Augustus Javierra, she would need to warn them.

Tasìa clicked on the control for the transceiver mode on Val's PA. She pointed the device at the EMS hovercraft.

With Val's Dispatch Code successfully relayed, she sent a warning.

"Unknown threat still persists."

The pilot requested Val's info tags. It was a lucky break for her. He was listed as a Registered Investigator. The exact type of professional they would expect to see at a volatile crime scene. So long as she did not cause them suspicion they would not need to contact the public policing authorities given she had the investigation part of the incident covered.

"RI-3337. It appears you have a little warzone on your hands."

"Terrorist activity. Their people have cleared out except for one injured casualty. We've run into a little problem. There appear to be active drones left behind.

"We are in the process of clearing them out, but it is still too unsafe for you to land."

After several seconds, she imagined the hovercraft likely conducted an IR scan of the premises out of an abundance of caution, the pilot got back to her.

"RI-3337, you have a track record in Code Orange Terrorist Incident engagements, what would your recommendation be?"

Tasìa smiled that her winging it was working, but they were assuming she was Val, a consummate professional if there ever was one, so why wouldn't it work?

Other than she was a she? Val's name was foreign. The pilot assumed it was a variant on Valeria, evidently.

Just keep sounding confident. They want to believe in you.

"My bounty hunter partner has a tan-colored jeep on the road by the golf course, nearby. Land nearby it, and she will come to retrieve the Jeep and a pair of triages. We will bring the casualties to you."

"Jeep has been sighted. Will do, and out."

The hovercraft rose, spun around, and swooped to the agreed-upon landing site.

"Did you just draft me into something that is going to require jogging?" Annebél slapped her boobs and played up the cinematic bounty hunter role. "these lungs are for the lookin', not for the achin'."

Though exactly the kind of country girl the profession tended to attract, Green-eyed Elise would not have said those words in a million years.

Tasìa laughed. "Guess I was being little Miss Presumptuous Girl Boss, but I don't think they would have bought-in to me being an effective RI who happens to have a lowkey temperament. A squirt like me could not get away with it."

Annebél drew her elbows up as her shoulders dunked. Her right hand made a drawing gesture.

"Mon petite démon, I'm having it scribed on your tombstone, 'Fucked up ever so mightily, but her heart was in the right place.'"

Tasìa chuckled.

Annebél gave a reluctant glance passed Tasìa and into the room's enclosed extension. It was a safe assumption that it was a lavatory. She made an internalized decision with a nod of her head.

"I'm going to need you to cover for me," she asked Tasìa.

The brawler glanced back when she didn't get a response, and read the questioning expression on Tasìa's face.

"In ballistics mode, my jog is inhumanly fast, the mode feels like quicksilver rolling and surging inside of me," Annebél elaborated, "I am going to need to tinkle first."

Tasìa snorted when she finally caught on. As a fellow Harvested, she knew exactly what her friend meant.

Tasìa felt okay with her own condition at the present. One Modality twitch in the bank, but at the time when she used it to shoot up the Night Brigade with precision there were no stressors to cause her anxiety. There was no need to boost the energia surge-flow while the Modality was engaged.

Annebél patted the thief's nose with an index finger.

"En garde," Annebél urged with a smile.

Annebél unbuttoned her pants as she approached a bare wall. She turned around, leaned up against it, pulled her pants down, and squatted.

So nothing could exploit her vulnerability, she held her carbine up against her shoulder.

Tasìa's nose crinkled. She would be a hypocrite for mentioning it, given her own preference for peeing in nature, but the bathroom was right there! Just five yards away in the extension of the room they inhabited.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Annebél read Tasìa's expression. She tended to pucker her lips with her arch folded upward when she questioned the judgment of others.

"With those phase things floating around here, the bathroom feels to me like it would be awfully claustrophobic. I would prefer not to get trapped on the inside if those things decided to pounce"

Tasìa's gut told her the phase drones wouldn't interfere until the two of them brought Augustus Javierra up the stairs and into the open.

Only if challenged would they react until then.

Even though she felt certain she was reading their intensions correctly, Tasìa kept an eye on both the balcony and the doorway into the main hall on the other side of the room.

After all, she had been correct at less than fifty-fifty on the assumptions she made of late.

Annebél unleashed a healthy stream that cackled and sizzled on the carpet below her butt.

Tasìa's curiosity was aroused when the familiar hell mist rose up to surround the redhead as she squatted.

Tasìa was struck by how much scarier it was to witness it as an observer than it was to actually piss cackling hell mist out of one's urethra.

Annebél's jeweled clitorial scarab glowed green and its wings fluttered gently off the sloped sides of her flesh upon which the wings were normally at rest.

Annebél gave a jittery laugh when Tasìa noticed it.

"It actually has a purpose. I'll explain it to you one day."

Tasìa smiled.

"It's neat as hell. I want one."

"One is already on order for you."

Nice!

Tasìa went back to her guard duty; she had to step around an area of the carpet soiled with a pool of blood caked with the splatterings of spiked metal beeds and other viscera that Tasìa wished not to examine too closely.

With a single bobbing motion of her head, she peaked into the hall. A phase drone moved in a smooth glide - its eight tentacles trailing behind its body - down the length of the roof towards the patio side.

Then something truly odd occurred; its reflection flowed in a curvy vorpal across the glass panels moments after the drone had passed above the sunroof.

A delay in the reflection was a delay in communication.

Tasìa slipped back inside the room. She did not want the drones to know that she had seen that potential vulnerability.

She wondered as well if they could move through walls like the phase cat could. One had earlier burst through a pane of glass in the sunroof.

Why would it do that if it can phase through matter?

It was reacting to the sight of Skydog, she realized. It either can't or had not the time to allocate the energy and resources to phasing through space. Simpler just to smash through the glass, and then devote its energy reserves to taking Skydog out of commission.

Then it occurred to her what it was that regulated what it could and could not do at any given moment.

Annebél joined her side and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Archimedes had less substantial eureka moments than the one I see lit bubbly on your face right now."

Tasìa looked her friend in the eyes. She was excited.

"They are fundamentally unstable machines. They require substantial amounts of energy to keep them from falling apart. Those nuclear power plants underneath the SkyTether that feed the resonance crystal frequency to keep the nanospores at bay, I bet every android you own for your octagon training versus my every gun that that place feeds into the beasts and drones."

Annebél held her head high in a calculative pose. She was savoring the gaucha bounty-hunter role Tasìa assigned her.

"Well, I'm not taking that bet because my chica mana buddy-girl, is a gawd-dang, motherfucking super-genius to come up with that shit."

Tasìa waved her hands in denial and gave her best impression of a Venerated Saint.

"Nothing special, I just open up my heart to all possibilities and potentialities."

Annebél guffawed with a snort.

"Before you add any more excrement to Sal's pile and dirty up my boots, I'm going to climb down the side of the patio and jump. Then make a break for it. You got me covered?"

Tasìa smiled, "no doubt."

Tasìa readied her position on the patio with her sighted Vaquero .357 revolver in hand.

Annebél climbed down the side of the patio. She hung on the landing with the tips of her fingers and swung out before she dropped to avoid the concrete sidewalk directly below.

She sprinted like a gazelle both in grace and speed. As Tasìa watched, she wondered:

Would the Olympics governing committee consider being Harvested pre-natal doping?

Tasìa put irrelevant matters to the side; she needed to not only concentrate on her immediate task of watching Annebél's back but she also wanted to meditate in preparation for the hunt she would commence as soon as she felt Annebél was in the clear.

In that meantime, Tasìa regulated her breath and fixed her eyes forward to invoke the Ocean Within.

A smile crossed her face as she became aware of the phase drone that hovered over her head.

Annebél was still in sight several hundred yards up the course, and Tasìa was only in the early stages of the meditative trance. The drone appeared to flicker in her vision at the upper corner of her right eye.

The tighter and more intense her eyes vibrated the more solid the sprawl of tentacles above her appeared.

She wanted to complete the cycle this time before she reacted. Even with the threat of the phase drone above her, Tasìa still held her breath.

Fortunately, the pattern of movement in which the tentacles writhed about also steadily maintained a predictable cycle.

For now.

Just as Annebél reached a hill incline that comprised a course greenway, two blurry creatures rushed passed the unaware brawler, ignoring her, towards the mansion.

Tasìa released her breath and throttled her eye twitch vibration. Revealed to her in the cascades of light shooting down from every direction, including the silver cloud linings above, were two phase cats who kept their momentum charging forward before breaking off and splitting up to patrol the parameter of the mansion grounds.

At that very moment, above her, the sprawl of tentacles reversed direction.

She dropped to the balcony floor and shot six times into the dead center of the drone.

It sputtered in a violent jerk with blue, salty ooze splattering about, but it quickly righted itself.

She rolled before it could slam its tentacles through the landing floorboards. The claw-like clinchers remained clamped between the broken boards, slowing it down.

Already with the next moon clip fitted into the Rugar Vaquero, Tasìa rose up and waited for the sweet moment.

The drone freed its tentacles with a snapping jerk. When it rose, the indented center of the carapace bottom was once more exposed.

Tasìa emptied the revolver chamber of all six shots aimed dead center into its bottom support. This time the bottom fell out, and the blue, salty ooze poured from leaks coming out from all sides of the phase drone carapace.

All eight tentacles withered, their muscular mass becoming as substantive as that of the bodies of snails in a pile of salt. The phase drone collapsed to the broken landing boards.

Tasìa had to leap deftly backward to avoid being hit by the deadened coils. She didn't stick around for long. She twisted around, leaped straight upward, gripped the mansion wall, and scampered up to the sunroof.