Tasìa sucked in air to avoid screaming. The chemical burn surged through her veins.

Oh, God! Why did you bite me there? It is not even a juicy tush! No rational creature would bite that for fun. Just a tiny little muscle butt, that's all.

She had to remind herself, hornets were known for being anything but rational. And then, to intercede her pleas, the crunch of another stinger broke off as it gave way to her meaty glutes.

You bit me again, you little bastard!

Tasìa breathed hard. In and out. The swarming racket above her head enveloped even the lightning-derived white noise that still pressed into the dermal layers of her skin.

In the span of a few seconds, many notions came to her in near simultaneous synergy to form a strategy.

She had already planned to fold up into a little fetal ball, and just take the ass-kicking she was about to receive, hobble back to the safe house, and bathe in the cortisone-based treatment tank Annebél had installed for her gym workouts.

One major hitch, her arms were not cooperating with her will to deploy them.

Still numb from the lightning strike Tasìa was stuck in place. Her body was spread long like the Sphinx statue, ready to be dive-bombed by the lancero devilkin.

Use the Force, Luke!

No, using the analytics-mode would be a rash decision. She was still blind, after all.

There was no objective to push towards until her sight returned, and she would need the analytics-mode once again after the fight to steam press the venom out of her system.

This time, just take that ass-kicking.

The only factor she had control of with any assurance was her breathing. It was also the best means at her disposal to calm the lanceros.

Another hornet attacked. It pushed its scimitar-shaped stinger into the meat of her shoulder blade. Tasìa pushed her conscious mind into diagnostic-mode, the meditative state taught to her by the Elders of the Anewed, her father's Later Day Cathar creed.

She focused her attention on the present until she was one with the stark shadow and the sheen of glimmer made purple and midnight blue from the cityscape behind her.

Her breathing stopped.

A hornet crawled along the side of her neck before it bit into it. Several crawled around the scalp inside her coif. One of which veered deep into the strands of her hair before it tapped down its stinger.

The intensity of the pain caused flashes of red to burn through her already-blinded vision as the venom chased the white noise out of her retinas.

Her vision returned in tones of sepia.

That venom is searching its way through me like it is up to something. There is nothing ordinary about it! I know what normal venom should feel like like I know the taste of apple juice.

This feeling isn't it.

Of course, these hornets are guided biological weapons. Why assume the venom is natural?

Keep calm, don't breathe.

Tasìa once more entered the mind of her ten-year-old self.

"Keep calm. Don't breathe," said Sachmilli Cuervo.

She sat cross leggéd, studiously mimicking the Elder Sachmilli who sat in front of her. His lesson that day was to teach her how to use the diagnostic-mode to conquer both fear and pain.

In his hands, he held a pair of sharp brass needles. They gleamed in the wicked red fire of the sun.

"Accept these gifts and more gifts will come."

Exactly in the same place, he pushed the needle in her neck where twenty-two years before a devilkin lanchero just now stung her.

Push through the pain until you feel elated.

To her surprise, the Elder was not wrong.

As he had said then and she felt now - a feeling of joy overtook the fear, and numbness overtook the pain. Another set of bites occurred, mostly on her back, but as she held her breath, and kept docile, the hornets lost interest in her tender flesh.

Those that nested in her hair, likely attracted to the aroma of her shampoo, flew away first. The rest soon followed.

She drew in breath and realized that movement was slowly returning to her joints.

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Tasìa turned her neck from side to side. It felt like she burned a thousand calories mostly from her overworked lungs just to make that attempt.

With a heaving thrust, Tasìa poked her neck up to search for the hornets. Though the ones who lost their stingers died, the remaining, still formidable in number, regrouped into trios hovering equidistant from one another.

Tasìa, with a smoothly deliberative motion that put a raw strain on her every joint, lifted her knee so she could acquire the Magellani .22 revolver into her hands.

The gun was the opposite of the hand cannons typical of revolver design.

This little lady, however, was sleekly designed for near-silent takedowns where spraying a target with low-powered but extremely accurate firepower would prove more useful than a full frontal assault.

Situations where excess was both counterproductive and could get you both noticed and killed.

Essentially, the designers had in mind tunnel-rat styled close-quarter guerilla warfare for which Italian special forces had in recent decades become infamous.

Either through intuition or coincidence, she could not have brought a more perfect weapon to accomplish the feat she now intended.

Tasìa clinched her gut to get in mode. By the time the vapor filled her nostrils, her every joint and muscle felt freed of both strain and stress.

She jumped up too quickly for the first three hornets closest to her to have time to react.

She took them out with pinpoint accuracy.

Between your beady fucking eyes!

The next three began to twist away from the circular pattern they flew and into a more irregular arching path that bobbed up and down.

They were too slow and hesitant for this countermeasure to help them.

She popped their heads off as well.

Lanceros in three elliptical flight patterns swirled about a broadening range. Too far away to aim for their eyes but Tasìa did manage to drill a round each into her targets' upper thorax torsos.

She looked around for other targets and saw none.

Near where she landed back on her feet, the neoPalm personal assistant was a smoking ruin.

Well, fuck!

How was she going to contact Felicité and let her know she was now in Asunción? Tasìa had been holding off until she had a solid plan put in place to contact the Human Rghts Commission On War Crime Claims while minimizing the threat to her safety such exposure would risk.

Shaking her head, Tasìa chuckled to herself. What was an anarchist like Felicité doing putting her trust in an organization like the HRC?

Before she could elaborate upon that thought, her stomach started to quiver. The analytics-mode adrenaline rush draw down induced nausea.

Overwhelmed, Tasìa clinched her nails into her palms and braced herself. Sunk down to her knees she spewed out the contents of her previous meal.

It must be the venom.

She had a higher than normal tolerance to hornet stings, but something about this venom her body rejected altogether.

She even began to sweat with a cold, damp trickle that streamed down her forehead and it drenched down the sides of her neck. At the same time that she realized that her breath had become highly agitated, three hornets popped out of a nearby vent.

Tasia ran to the opposite corner of the roof, rolled off the side, and repelled down the wall.

When she hit the ground, Tasìa rolled into cover. This was the same side of the garage that faced the motel.

Though the Magellani was designed with sound suppression in mind with its air-tight chambers and low-caliber piston-driven rounds, it remained in the realm of feasibility that highly tuned security sensors could still pick up the sound and zero in on her location.

Tasìa peeked over to the motel. Lights in several rooms. But no activity outside.

It was time to rest and assess what could help her going forward.

She propped her back against the garage wall beneath a smoked glass window. She peered up into it.

A glass darkly, she thought.

So, what just occurred?

It was Ingenious. But why would an abandoned garage be protected by a sophisticated defensive system disguised as a naturally occurring biological entity?

What of the surrounding blocks of abandoned buildings? They outnumbered the active commercial properties three to one, in her estimation.

Did that make sense, economically? No longer a modest-sized city, Asunción was the center of operations for the Salvage's substantial public economy.

Then it occurred to her why, though she planned to ditch the rest of her surveillance for the evening to deal with her injuries, she did not consider the evening a loss.

She was certain that this was quite the valuable bit of intel she sat upon.

Every city bearing strategic value in the greater scheme of things had its own clandestine Spook Town.

A set of buildings, sometimes tunnels connected them if such an infrastructure proved feasible. Most essential to a Spook Town's existence was an integrated, mostly self-sufficient, economy of agents who operated with mutual purpose within an overall agenda.

It would appear she stumbled upon Asunción's very own Spook Town.

However, many factions operated in Asunción.

Some cities with competing factions had more than one Spook Town.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a seething noise.

The hornets sounded angry flying roughly thirty feet above her.

Tasìa shook her head as she peered back up to the roof. She watched the devil hornets closest to her side of the garage as they swung about in wide arcs in search of her.

She must have caused a lot of them to be deployed from their nest when she scurried off the roof.

She needed to get going.

She stood up but paused.

How did this Spook Town operation involve her investigation? Would it prove fruitful for her endeavors if she pursued this lead?

If this Spook Town did not overlap with the disappearance of Aunt Tatiana, it would be the first time spooks were innocent of anything.

In all of human history.

Perhaps, an exaggeration, but still . . .

Tasìa glanced back at the motel complex.

After all, they are somehow tied to all of this.

The American hippies lived in an abandoned space that took up much more room than they appeared to need. What if they were a part of the Spook Town operation?

They were excellent candidates for that kind of role.

Then it occurred to her. She thought back to her conversation with Travis.

Limited hang-out.

Tasìa was puzzled as to why the mechhead indulged so much of his crew's game plan.

Limited hang-out.

It was an old spook technique to distract from what they were really doing by coming up with a juicy story (true or not) that would satisfy the curiosity of the journalist or foreign influencer whom they were attempting to persuade.

He was blowing smoke up her ass. Something far more devious than laundering assets from a heist for specialized crystals was going on here.

After all, through working a flea market and a street vendor-based operation, were these anywhere near the most efficient means to launder the value of those crystals into monetized wealth?

Of course, not.

Tasìa briskly walked towards the next street over. She retraced her previous path past the trash bins while she muttered to herself with her fists clenched.

"Smoke right up my bumhole, followed by rainbows and sunshine. Tryin' to stretch it out of wack for good, are you?"