As Tasìa searched for a path between the mechanical trees to get to Annebél, she jerked back. A noise of substantial bearing sped passed her head.

Whatever its source, it left in its wake a maddeningly sharp metallic tone.

The bob and weave she did in response nearly caused her to fall from the tree limb as the air imploded above her.

What now! Am I being shot at?

Tasìa was in no mood to tolerate anything that got in the way of saving Annebél. She would dodge through a hail of bullets and give free rein to whatever daemon guided the Modality if that is what it took.

Her fingers dug into the limb as she listened. The same noise, high and shrill, shrieked by. The noise abruptly faded in a stark sonic decay until three separate tones parted in widening intervals from one another.

Still, she saw nothing of its physical presence.

Tasìa looked around for signs of bullet holes or any other unnatural gaps indicative of a moving body, perhaps cloaked, between the trees but found none.

Are they using trace-winders?

An ammo round designed to be shot above a target and while in mid-flight angled fins sprung out to drive the round downward at a curved angle.

The round wasn't known for its accuracy but if several were used in bursts fire patterns by a rifleman trained for the tactical round, the odds of a hit improved significantly.

Often with the onslaught of trace-winders cover became useless. Tasìa glanced above for signs that she needed to get out of the way of exposure.

The limbs, leaves, and branches above lay still so most likely that wasn't what was happening. If someone was shooting at her from below, given her superior vantage point she had scanned in infrared only moments before, she would have more than likely spotted the culprit by now.

Large black fanned-out wings swooped down into a nearby clearing between the trees that formed a natural aerial arena. The previous abrupt but allusive shriek belted-out from behind the blackbird. Three jaggéd shaped sparrows yelped in unison, threateningly.

Tasìa breathed a sigh of relief. She could get back to her business and ignore the birds and their mayhem.

Or she so thought. Tasìa paused her plan of action once more at the sound of a crow's familiar 'cah.'

Mel!

What was he doing so far from Villa Marron? It made little sense given his Watcher status. She was no longer in danger of becoming Manifest. Its sensorium interface was built around Manifest detection.

The sparrows attempted to corner old Mel but he was far smarter than they. He could shift his dive and feint with masterful disequilibrium that sent the sparrows spiraling off-balance with the greatest assurity. Their only advantages were in their petite size and speed.

Still, if the dynamic of the parlay did not change to Mel's advantage soon they would wear him out with their simple strategy of dive-bombing the Nightwing.

Her first good sighting of one occurred when the alpha of the three reached just at its apex for its next dive bomb attempt. Its wings were sleekly vorpéd, so such as to remind her of the modern beheading blades, and their warped-surface sensibility, that had come to be in great fashion in the world outside of the Quadra.

But what was is it with those strange birds?

She shook off her wonderment. There was little time for solving the mystery of their design. Tasìa took out her Magellani .22 revolver.

They simply had to die.

"Lead them into that clearing between the two copses near me, Mel."

That would narrow their path and give her an advantage when she placed her shot.

Mel swung back towards her in obeyance.

Such a good audio range! Tasìa also understood that Mel responded so well to her command due to someone steering him remotely.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Sachmilli.

It stung her ego somewhat but she realized that he didn't send Mel to look after her, but to keep an eye on Annebél instead.

After all, the Gallo-Spanish beauty larped as a 19th-century Parisian courtesan for his amusement.

As she kept an eye on the sparrow she identified as the alpha, she grew to anticipate its position in space. Mel circled below it with feints between the trees.

It was a strategy to force the sparrows to smash against the trunks if they miscalculated their dive bomb attempt. It also forced them to be more hesitant and cautious in their attack.

The sparrow she tracked closed in on its apex, and just before the latest attempt at a dive bomb it met the apex with a bullet in its breast. As it jerked backward in descent, its body unwound like a yarn made up of wormy earth-pink tendons.

The wings broke off into hundreds of metallic nettles.

Nettles? What the hell!

The remaining two birds swung back around to test her. They crisscrossed one another just at her bosom while letting out a blood-curdling shriek.

Tasìa bent her torso backward to dodge but her feet gave out. She did not fight it; the struggle would be counterproductive to the downward dive that would allow her to aim at the attacker if she went with the flow toward another branch.

As she descended, one sparrow swung away from her as the other sparrow arced its flight back her way. In its downward sweep, it aimed its talons where she planned to grab a branch.

Feral smarts. Animal Kingdom smarts. How to bring a human down when you are a tiny sparrow?

Peck! Peck! Peck!

Make that bitch fall and break her fucking neck!

She took the shot a split instance before the rendezvous at the grab point. The teflonrazor round utterly crushed the sparrow's head. It too spiraled out in a splatter of wormy tendons. The wings spliced off in front of her.

Tasìa had no time to dwell on the utter beauty of its silvery unraveling; she grabbed the limb and wrapped her boots around the thicker portion of it for balance.

Where is the third sparrow?

Mel rebuffed with the curve of the wind as he slid down on its bent current to hover above a branch nearby. The last sparrow was caught in Mel's talons, and he clinched it by its wings.

The creature squawked an ungodly sound, dark in timbre and at odds with its confident battle cry, as Mel ripped it apart.

Tasìa watched the dissipation of its body into oddly dissolving tendons, and the wings ... close up, she realized what the nettles were - flechettes.

Damn that's curious.

"Sachmilli," Tasìa called out as she held the PA in her hands. "I have Val Vitaliy's PA."

The Nightwing settled down on a perch and soon after Sachmilli's face flashed on the screen. The Cathar Anewed businessman likely had Val the fixer, lawyer, and investigator, on his speed dial.

"That could have gotten nasty," he stated. "Flechettes. That is what those birds are called. They could have shredded Mel and yourself something serious."

"Then why didn't they? After all, assuming they belong to the Al-Majhul, I killed one of their own."

Sachmilli's face tightened into a rugged squinch.

"Don't worry yourself about the Al-Majhul. Those poor bastards are merely slaves to the UnMarred. Their lives mean little to nothing to their masters, and they possess no independence of their own to purpose into a vendetta.

"As harsh a world ours happens to be, and though we may be of a brutal temperament, we being those of us who continue to endure in the Quadra, we still have scruples. They do not."

"They? Who are these UnMarred?"

Sachmilli grinned wryly as he so tended to do when he revealed or hinted at occulted lore.

"Ancient tribe - hidden to history. In truth, the first spooks."

Let's change the subject, Tasìa thought as she decided that the matter of the foriegn agenciers was a distraction from her greater purpose. I intend that this will be the first and last time I have anything to do with the UnMarred or the Al-Majhul.

She trained her own ruthful eye on Sachmilli's screen image.

"You are here to keep an eye on Annebél?"

Sachmilli squinted and he raised his eyebrows, simultaneously.

"You know me too well. Here, take a look at this."

Val's PA flashed another image. A schematic of a mechanical tree.

She had wondered how she was going to get the mechanical tree that held Annebél to open up. The energy source for the wild game-trap fed from cables at the false roots.

In turn, the source supplied the same set of cables that fed into the camera blind and its cameotic illusion.

Tasìa did another careful once-over of the schematic to confirm that the locking mechanism was kept in place through a set of hydraulic pumps. A power outage would force the air pressure to release. Good to know that the air pressure wasn't kept locked in place in the event of a power outage.

She surveyed the wires that crossed over the pond and found the source cable for all of the trees. By her estimate, the cable as seen from her point of view displayed a six-inch diametric width in its thickness.

Fortunately, the Magellani .22 revolver was scoped. She drilled three tight holes at a vantage point on the cable just below the surge relay.

Still not enough. She had to empty the first chamber of eight rounds before the cable began to fry and sizzle. With a fit of jerks that slithered up the cable, it finally broke off and dropped into the pond below.

The mechanical tree released Annebél. The brawler kicked against the double doors that comprised the trunk in front of her and jumped to the ground, coughing and catching her breath at irregular intervals.

A broken clincher cable lay limply on her left shoulder.

Mel cahed to get Tasìa's attention. In the pond, an Al-Majhul floated face down. The body began to rise as a dark glassed oval-shaped object, twenty-odd feet in diameter rose from beneath the water.

The unmoving corpse rode along on the glass top. It spun slowly round and round, and smoke rose from its jaggéd glass sides.

A scent of burning flesh started to move along with the breeze in the air.

A vehicle it may have been but Tasìa got the odd feeling that she may have just killed it.