Elise examined the bandages Birddog assembled together. Fiona had done an absolutely awful job. There were still scrape marks on Gertrod's temple from where Birddog did not bother to clean it.

Given she was a trained registered nurse long before becoming a bounty hunter, Elise hoped to do such a thorough job of pre-op work that they could skip the general practitioner matters and get right to the cosmetic reconstruction.

If all went well, with no schedule delays, they could have this wrong righted within two hours.

Birddog reentered the driver's cabin. Elise had sent her to retrieve her hat and to tell Gertrod's brother they should have him patched up and back home before midnight.

The tech frowned as she twisted the hat in her hands.

"It's pretty bent up."

"Don't worry about it. I have two prettier ones back in the RV. Did you give his brother my card?"

"The band is going to need to be replaced."

Elise snapped. "Couldn't give less a shit, so why are we still talking about it?"

Birddog's eyes bulged wide. Gertrod blinked uncomfortably. Elise calmed back down.

"Hand me the digital stenograf in the glove compartment. I'll need to have my work properly recorded and officiated so the clinic will accept it."

Birddog did as told, but silently and glumly.

Once the stenograf, a Legalys Monitoring Device, was set in place, Elise administered a cocktail shot comprising of a local anesthetic and a slow burn antibiotic. She next set the catalyst plate from her chemkit to create a shot centered around rabies prevention.

It tested a blood sample from Gertrod against an entire family of viral infections that had grown common in the Quadra. Once the most effective concoction was determined the device whipped-up a solution and then boosted it with secondary catalysts.

As Elise removed the remaining tape and bandages to administer a proper cleaning she decided it was time to apologize.

She had allowed Fiona to stew in misery long enough.

"Birddog, I can't let you take on the entire burden for this one. I am the one who sent you into the field inspite of your lack of experience. Yeah, I was thinking del Alma-Gris has a reputation for being reasonable and pretty much harmless with no history of violence.

"But, the field is the field. Things tend to go kinetic because our willful behavior effects the probability of things going wrong in ways for which we can't predict. You get anxious and the world responds in kind. Especially this one.

"You are not properly trained for field work just yet. I'm going to have your brother take you on an intensive six week training course soon. Perhaps as early as next week. In the meantime I want you to concentrate all your efforts on your IT work. There are some big data sets headed your way soon."

Birddog's face scowled above the driver seat head-rest as she pointed to a cold storage chest.

"Is that why you bagged that disgusting bat?"

Elise nodded affirmatively in answer.

"What about the meet-up with del Alma-Gris?"

Elise pointed down. "We are merely running a battery of tests to decide on demolition strategies. You are staying in the van the entire time."

Elise helped Gertrod out of the back of the van. He could walk on his own feet but the blend of treatments she had given him weakened his muscles. He leaned against her with a tremble of palsy in his hands.

Though she was five foot seven (174cm) with strong muscularity, Elise's bone density was compromised by the onset of osteoporosis.

She carefully maneuvered how he tilted against her to her better advantage until Gertrod could stand on his own.

Elise turned towards Birddog.

"Remember what I said?"

"Got it. Stay in the van."

When they were up the ramp a little further, Gertrod spoke:

"Senora Elise. I don't think she did anything wrong. She couldn't have known the bat was about to attack."

With a side glance, Elise gave him the dirty eye.

"There was a way. She could have listened to me. I even knew that the bat was agitated. You see this -," Elise asked as she pointed to her left eye, "- I went blind in that eye when I was eight. The interior was replaced with a fresh set of organics reconstructed from a donor. The iris, though, is artificial. I have had it enhanced several times since for use in my profession.

"Fiona is aware of my heightened visual aids. When I told her to stop, she needed to stop."

The teen meekly kept quiet as she scolded away. Her anger at losing control of the situation, at Birddog's willful countermanding her operative authority, Elise wasn't processing well.

She put an arm around Gertrod's arm as they entered the building. It wasn't lost to her that the young man found her attractive and he certainly could use a morale boost.

"You mean well, Gertrod. That is a rare quality these days."

"Do you run something like an EMS service," asked the on-station doctor as he glanced through the digital stenograph media and did a quick appraisal of the bandaged ear.

Elise shook her head.

"I got my RN at fifteen. Worked a station just like this one for several years."

The doctor smiled, knowing most of his job was done. Just one on-duty assignment was necessary.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Like you," he said, "I recommend a full reconstruction before any necrosis sets in. Less messy that way, of course. Take your friend up the stairs to 5E, third door on your right. I'll have the surgeon up shortly."

Gertrod leaned on her once more as they made their way up the flight of stairs. She did not complain or let him know she felt any pain.

Elise wore thermals with a dense mesh that gripped her legs and torso for extra support under all of her clothes, and not just when she was in operative mode.

Once they found the room, she helped him onto the Steris gurney. With Gertrod settled in, she turned her attention to the technical devices lined up in dispenser fashion on the adjacent wall to the gurney.

It was an unfamiliar array of devices due to cosmetic surgery being outside Elise's area of expertise. She was an ER nurse in her old profession.

That experience was why Black Asp recruited her at twenty-four to work as a field medic. They ran mercenary, spook, and bounty hunter operations as one of the World's largest private military contractors and even though young, Elise by that time had a decade of experience patching people up.

One device caught her eye; surrounded by a central metal axis, several gauges were fixed beneath a laser measurement calibrator where twin hoses connected to an intake valve that in turn was fed through a single air-pressure guage.

It would be the primary device for ear reconstruction, similar to the ones used in other clinics she had worked, but those devices built prosthetics from non-living materials.

The pressurized canister that fed the output hose had on its side the word she was beginning to see a lot of late - fingunt.

Not at all an inorganic material.

Tasìa del Alma-Gris, what were you after?

An answer was beginning to dawn when her musings were interrupted by the voice of a man standing behind her.

"Senora Luna Claro," he asked.

She turned and smiled, and took his hand.

"Yes?"

"I'm Dr. Gladius Bernal. I did a cursory look into your background, curious of course given how professionally you handled your pre-op."

She was anxious to call Birddog to check on a matter.

"Is there a problem, doctor?"

"No. None at all," he chuckled. "I could tell by your examination of the Stembolle Surgical that you may have a few questions about the current state of the art in operational procedures."

Elise pointed to the pressurized canister with the fingunt.

"That is an organic material." She stated.

For the next several minutes, Dr. Bernal explained guided cosmetic scalpture practices for organic materials. Though Elise was bored with the details as she tended to be with many ideas in their abstracted elaboration, it affirmed her suspicion that del Alma-Gris had a medical based reason for the theft of fingunt.

But would it not have been easier to steal it from here where dozens of exits and entrances worked to her advantage and locks of limited durability are her only real obstacles than to steal from an industrial assembly plant?

She raised up her bosom and pushed them together pretending to crack her back. It distracted the doctor from the immutable pace of his words long enough for her to interrupt.

"Dr. Brunal?"

"Oh, yes?"

Elise clasped her chest with a palm.

"Forgive me for interrupting."

"No. My dear friend, you please continue."

Given the deference she was being shown, his 'cursory' inspection of her bio must have included her time at Black Asp where she developed a reputation for exceeding competence.

"Are there substantial differences between industrial-grade fingunt and medical-grade?"

He nodded his head vigorously.

"Yes! That's an astute question. Medical grade is cycled with stages of active yeast cultures applied to the fingunt material to make it more pliable to human physiology. Especially for cosmetic output where lattices of fingunt need to be vertically aligned out from dermal or even bone contact points and not just conventionally layered . . ."

Elise raised up her modest but well shaped bosom and clasped her chest once more. He was getting deep in the thicket of it all again.

"Excuse me, Dr. Brunal, but is there any possible medical use for the industrial grade product? Untreated fingunt would kill a person, right?"

Bernal smiled as he also shook his head.

"No. It is not at all toxic to humans. The difference is the necessity of contact points. Industrial grade has been successfully used to recreate internal organs. Even to the point of reversing infertility."

He grew silent as Elise's eyes widened and her mouth opened with a silent gasp.

"Something on your mind, Nurse Claro?"

Elise nodded.

"Has it ever been used to reverse neurological damage?"

"Burn patients."

Elise swiped her hair back in a meek fashion.

"I have been out of the practice for so long, this is all new to me, and I just realized something of staggering importance. I need to freshen up, it has been a long day."

In fact she did stink of sweat-inducing activity.

"Certainly," Bernal answered. "We should be finished up in 45 minutes. 11E down hall is on the down cycle if you need a nap."

"Most generous of you, doctor."

She excused herself and decided to take Bernal up on the 11E offer of privacy. Once she shut the door to the room, Elise called Birddog.

"How are you holding up, Chief," she asked the most junior member of her organization.

"Thinking about you. Besides that, I have been digging into Tasìa del Alma-Gris. What is interesting is not so much what I find available on her but the Tier One grade encryption that makes her a dangerous subject to be researching at all."

Elise scrunched her face up in a knot.

"Huh? She's just a thief."

"And," Birddog continued, enthusiastically, "a former nun."

Elise puffed a gasp of air through a sneer.

"Del Alma-Gris was their drug dealer, Fiona."

"At a convent?"

Elise shook her head. It wasn't her creed, she was born in a Lutheran home, but the naivete of her young girlfriend at times caused heart ache.

"Let's talk about that later. I need you to pull up records for this very clinic, Vida y Esperanza. Stolen items in particular. I have a hunch that our little thief has been here before."

After she got through chatting, Elise used the lavatory, and after her constitutional, she cleaned herself up as far as hand soap and paper towels could be of service.

She was left with twenty-five minutes to nap on the gurney. With whimsical curiosity for the operational procedures to work her fancy new watch, Elise plugged in a twenty-minute wake-up call.

Twenty minute naps where ever she could get them. Elise was indeed reminded of her years being an RN working an ER and catching nods here and there as she drifted off.

Later that evening, she showered properly, and switched out the dirty clothes for her bed-time thermal jumper that covered her torso from her upper arm to her mid thigh in a light mesh. Sleep with her condition was a magnitude easier when she wore it.

Elise eased in the bed, lay on her belly, pulled out her tablet to examine the files Birddog collected on del Alma-Gris.

This promises to be interesting.

Fiona sat to the side and began her nightly ritual of messaging Elise's back for therapeutic relief. At the lower lumbar she dug a palm down on each side of Elise's spine and slowly worked up to the cervical until she repeated the same motion.

"Elise, anyone ever tell you you have a cute bum."

"You, everytime you get so much as a sip of wine in you. If you are into long and flat I guess it's cute. I take after my mother's side."

"Heil fräulein!"

Elise stuttered a chuckle.

"Oh, shut up. Her people arrived in Argentina in the 1880s as ranch hands and brewers before working their way north"

"Just teasing you."

Elise turned her attention back to the files.

"I know. Do you know what is curious about these files? Del Alma-Gris' neurological condition as a Premie Harvest is described in great detail but the status of her fertility is much more closely guarded. There is no mention of abnormalities with her fertility cycles by her contacts that report on her. Why is that?

"Do they have something planned for her? To give birth to some chosen monster?"

Birddog grabbed her cheeks, one in each hand, and squeezed tight, "You tell me your theory, Chief."

"After cross-indexing the thefts, the unexplained device time usage in the neurological part of the clinic with what we know previously about del Alma-Gris, I believe she is trying to get pregnant with Gael-Sebastian's baby before the dumb bastard inevitably offs himself."

Birddog's face became glum.

"What's wrong, Chief," Elise asked.

"I concocted this elaborate scheme to use and capture del Alma-Gris because she wasn't anything but a thief to me, but all the stuff I've read on her this evening, I just feel so sorry for her."

Elise shook her head.

"If I stopped searching for my bounties at the moment I started to feel pity for them, I would be wearing rags and eating red beans and rice every night. That is why I try to limit my hunts for actual monsters."

It wasn't going to shape up to be a fooling around kind of night, so Birddog left to her trailer soon after. Elise grabbed an energy drink, gulped it down, and delved deeper into the files.

A little under an hour later, a pending file opened up when an encryption layer finally collapsed. The file was almost entirely redacted, but Elise was left wondering what the strange title meant.

"What the hell is a Sigrid Rosa?"