"Followed?"

Tasìa's arms felt weak as she steered the Jeep. Hell, her entire body felt weak.

She suppressed her interior monologue that asked questions about León and Demona while she needed to maintain her grip. The Jeep began to swerve wide. Thankfully, this was a lightly traveled road.

She had yet to gain sight of whatever was tailing them. She glanced in all three of the mirrors available to her.

"I don't see anything."

Annebél leaned forward and stuck her head out of the window.

"It was there," she gasped.

Tasìa spoke with exasperation in her voice as well.

"Mi Santa Muerta! Don't tell me their cars are cloaked like every other fucking thing in Asuncíon."

"Shit. Shit. Shit." Annebél exclaimed.

Tasìa's bad language was rubbing off on the redhead, she noted with satisfaction.

Her steering was now back under control, and adrenaline rushed through her naturally without an assist.

Back in her groove, she could now start thinking tactically. Tasìa turned on the rear steering display.

"Annebél. If you could be a dear, link up the display with Val's PA, and wave the IR camera at the road behind us."

Tasìa decided to switch their route from one that lead back into the city, though circuitously, to another country road that eventually crossed the Paraguay River into some boondocks that comprised a warehouse district just above the port side.

If she was going to get into a gunfight, that would be the environs that Kutuzov's Spetsnaz style small arms combat she trained in could be utilized to her best advantage.

"Interesting."

That was all Annebél would say. Oddly, given the circumstances, no curses accompanied it. That did not bode well in Tasìa's estimation.

"Look at this," the redheaded brawler motioned to the screen.

Annebél poked her head back out of the Jeep, and she waved Val's PA at the road behind them.

"Do you see it now?"

Tasìa glanced at the rear-cam video screen. The vehicle that followed them was displayed on the screen as an intense but spectral color of midnight violet. The object appeared to menacingly suck up the universe around it as it drove in a smooth glide, low off the asphalt surface.

"No wonder you were flabbergasted. That can be one batshit optical illusion. Objects in ultraviolet, when they move like that in volumetric space, oftentimes appear as if they are eating light and everything else around them.

"Question is, all the other cloaked critters and assholes we have encountered so far gave off heat signatures. That fucker behind us is using a different technology."

Annebél threw her a skeptical glance.

"Is that something you gleamed from Vida Escondida thrill kill culture?"

"Hey, I killed no one back in the day. But yes. There is something about ultraviolet light and clubbing culture. It hides the fucking stench from conscious and conscience visibility."

Annebél kept her head turned towards the unknown object, but Tasìa could still feel the smirk on the brawler's lips.

"You see," Annebél said. "You can learn something pertinent from the linears."

Tasìa scoffed.

"Linears. Bullshit linears. Those stories they try to sell you on the Vida Escondido? They only tell you what they think the gente-normales can process, and nothing more."

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Tasìa rode hard into a sharp curve with an upswing in acceleration. At the same time, she carefully measured the approach to ensure that she stayed on the road this time.

She needed her eyes to be focused elsewhere. She needed to keep her eye on the rear-camera display screen.

When the vehicle that tailed behind them made its turn around the curve, Tasìa scoffed once more.

"Now there is a car that you need to blow into smithereens and not that luscious Alfa Romeo HybrClydis. That car tailing us is a Porsche 911. Forgive me Lord for saying it but I fucking hate them."

Mel squawked. She and Sachmilli had that argument about the worthiness of that particular series of sports cars years previously.

"Don't get me revved up again, you squawk box back there. You know I'm right!"

"Uhm ...," Annebél started. The brawler's teeth gritted as she examined the screen. She had something ugly to share.

"No! You too, my belle-estest amis?"

"Oh, not about the Porsche 911, they don't get my pussy wet either, but that car isn't one."

Tasìa pouted in a huff. She took it as a personal offense that she could be found to have misjudged a high-end vehicle.

"Mon cher! Don't be angry with me. I see why you would make that mistake due to the visual outline on display. After all, it is currently invisible in the normal visual spectrum. But that is an Aston Martin Vulcan."

Tasìa floored the speed. Mel protested with a wider range of vocalized and visual cues than what a normal, non-cybernetically enhanced bird was capable of performing. Apparently, at a slower speed, he could focus on the sports car and visualize with little problem.

Once he quieted down, and Tasìa had let out some steam with some fast-driving highway therapy, she asked," Alright, Miss Booksmarts, how do you figure?"

Tasìa was not ready to admit that even in her current reassessment, she duly noted the front carapace of the cloaked vehicle was more beveled in its lines than curved as you would find on an utterly boring Porsche 911.

"Well, it kind of sucks that I know that car intimately but I do. That car belongs to The Beast."

Tasìa threw her head back to figure out where in the telemetry of the three Jeep mirrors and their electronic surface readings the image of the car on the screen lined up.

"That Anglo-American you mentioned ...?

"Yes. His actual name is Bishop Pierce."

"Is he out here to kill us?"

"Not sure, but I doubt it. He runs the Sweet but only for his own personal amusement. He does enforcer work for the global intel alphabets outside the Quadra. Likely, he found out I am in town and he wants to have a little chat."

Tasìa shook her head.

"I don't want to be Miss Bossy, and you obviously have your own concerns with this matter, but I would highly suggest that we write him in for sometime later on. Right now, we just don't have time for him."

Hearing Demona's voice caused Tasìa to tense up. Talk about having concerns. The spook's pretty heart-shaped Arab face filled the rear camera screen.

"I concur. Any agenda he has will eat into your time and make it that much more difficult to get to Val."

Now that Demona spoke and Annebél did not voice any objections, Tasìa enacted a change of plans. She took the next off-ramp that led eastward away from Asunción.

"Smart move," Demona concurred. "He won't follow you into Spore Country unless he has been authorized to do so by his professional associates."

Tasìa was in the mood to bite the head off of someone or something, - and as Mel let out another sudden squawk - possibly a bird.

She sneered hard and ugly as she glanced down at the display.

"And if he has been authorized to do so, that means he plans to kill us."

Demona smiled sharply at Tasìa's reply.

"That appears to be the test of how you should respond. If he follows then you should assume lethal force is necessary. You won't get a better chance to deal with him as a threat than out in the country away from his people."

Tasìa glanced over to Annebél who was being unusually quiet.

She knew the car, intimately?

Annebél, being Harvested, had the same problems with intimacy due to triggered incontinence as Tasìa did until recently. With Annebél's therapeutic help, mental discipline, and the Modality's healing ability, she conquered that problem.

However, Annebél did not overcome her problem until the Spore entities in Villa Marron assisted her. For her former lover, Ferenzi, it wasn't a problem. He was a fetishist of a certain tact.

But what of Pierce? Two individuals, powerful gentlemen in the underworld trades, living in the same city with the same rather gross, in her opinion, kink. Perhaps, it was quite a common kink amongst the powerful.

After all, that German fellow with the odd mustache was said to have shared that disposition.

Then she remembered something she once heard about Pierce's alleged ancestor.

And then it made sense.

Ohhh.

She realized she needed to do a one-eighty on her own currently snide disposition.

Tasìa smiled and used her free hand to rub Annebél's arm and shoulder.

"What's gotten into the big dog," Tasìa asked. "Sitting there like a mopey cocker spaniel."

Annebél sighed.

"Something I should have taken care of long ago is now catching up with me."

Tasìa gave her smoothest and most consoling voice. She understood that since Demona's revelation about León being her husband, something Tasìa had yet to truly process, she had been a bit of a pill to deal with.

We've got to do better, Tasìa.

"My Sweet Sister, we are Daga Chicas. We call those kinds of days where shit gets real days that end in '-es.'"

Annebél laughed.

"As if we get the weekends off."

Tasìa joined her in the laughter as she pointed at the screen.

"Who says we never catch a break? He's turning around."

Tasìa looked around. It was starting to get dark.

"Annebél -"

The brawler replied.

"Demona is already on it. She has an alternative route set for the second objective. Don't turn just yet. Proceed into Spore Country."