That has to be her brother holding that child.

Duarte parked the ultra-beveled Jeep with the trés chic paint job thirty meters away from where Elise held court with five members of her crew. Birddog remained in the service van parked on the far side of the lot. Beside her Sachmilli swiveled towards the backdoor with the monitoring console snapped in place at his hands.

The man in the passenger seat handed Duarte the child, swung his door open, and made his way to the back hatch.

Annebél Sens Duarte played with the boy for a moment before reaching for the door. He appeared between three and four. While Duarte's skin was the deep pinkish tan common to Iberian redheads, the child was very pale.

Yet, he was definitely hers.

The brother now held a QuickMart box of goods, and it was crystal clear to Elise that this was Agu. The report Birddog created a few hours earlier was less than three full pages in length. Elise did not feel she needed for Birddog to research more than what was necessary for a summary of the fighter's history and psychological profile.

But, it did not mention a child. Elise glanced over and made certain she caught Birddog's eye with a squinted glare to let her know there would be questions later on.

As Annebél approached, Elise lost the scowl, and gave the kid a big smile. He was a little cutie.

She knelt to face him.

"Who might you be, hun?"

"Villion."

"You are so small," Elise gushed.

Villion's eyes blinked wide and slow.

"Mom will protect me."

"Love, there is no doubt in the world she will."

She stood up and greeted Duarte with a nod. In turn the redhead spoke.

"This is my brother, Agu."

He now held the box with a swagger in his grip and torso.

"Hey, pretty lady, I have the naloxone for you."

Beside a concrete divider wall, the team's engineer had specialized equipment laid out on a wooden table and primed to go for the weaponized conversion of the medicine.

Elise threw Agu a slanted, flirty smile, and touched his arm.

"I appreciate it, Agu. That guy by that table is Bruges. If you could assist him, you would be doing me a solid, sweety."

Agu nodded with much enthusiasm as he headed towards the impromptu work station.

She turned towards Duarte.

"Does he call every lady 'pretty'?"

Annebél chuckled.

"Just the really pretty ones. Ugly ones he calls 'ugly", or "homely" instead if he has a notion of situational propriety going on upstairs."

Villion reached his arms up towards Duarte who slipped him back up against her bosom. Elise had no idea who the father was but he was definitely a momma's boy.

Elise chortled.

"Now I understand why Sachmilli didn't want you on the extraction crew. You have more important priorities. We can bring Sachmilli back to Villa Marrón if it is more convenient for you."

Duarte shook her head.

"Sachmilli has rented an entire hospital suite in Vida Escondida for Gael-Sebastian. My boy and I will be lying low nearby for a while."

Elise felt a presence to her left. Agu stood waiting for her to acknowledge him. She smiled and nodded.

"Bruges said to tell you everything is good to go. So I guess this is goodbye."

Agu came in for a hug, which Elise graciously received even as he clasped her haunches in a squeeze. She glanced over to Birddog who wasn't having any of that.

The tech clinched her teeth together, and her hands were on the door handle.

"Goodbye, Agu. See that big gal in the van beside Sachmilli?"

He let go, and whispered, "she mad at me?"

"Very."

"I better get gone. Bye, Pretty Lady."

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He tucked tail back to the Jeep.

Now after seeing his uncle's actions, tiny Villion insisted on a hug. Elise pulled him towards herself and swayed him from side to side for several seconds.

It was never meant to be, she thought as she held the child, and her maternal instinct swelled up, near overwhelmingly.

With some reluctance she gave Villion back over.

"Good bye, Villion. Good bye Senora Duarte."

"Call me Annebél."

With a firm shake, "Goodbye, Annebél."

When the Duarte family pulled out of the lot, Elise turned around.

"Everyone ready?

Los Cazadores

The sign above the public side of the opium den read. It was a vibrant and active hooka bar whose products tended to be on the milder side as not to frighten away the non-devout.

The next level down was a set of offices, and on the far end of that level of the facility their informant described a truly old fashion styled opium den for the medium core devotees to the vida loca.

Unfortunately, her team would have to crash through the hooka bar to get to the sub-basement.

Though the above ground story was well mapped by her own augmented eye from her previous outing, she had very little to go on for the layouts of the lowest two levels that comprised the subbasement.

In two hours they were given to prepare, Birddog reviewed the building in great detail. There were no cameras but she pinged into a neighboring wireless intermediary console to overtake a robovac gathering dust in a utility closet on the office level of Los Cazadores and map overlay the route. The floorplan remained consistent with previous establishments that ran businesses in the same facility.

All was copacetic to their invasion, except for an anomaly; the subbasement was either very well hidden or did not exist at the time of previous occupancy. Camera logs of the nearby streets revealed no construction that could explain for their existence.

That left another possibility Elise did not even want to consider, nanospore activity. Given the AI controlled entities spontaneity, their tactics were nearly impossible to rehearse against.

However, Caza always kept UV flashbangs and areosolic anti-mold thermites in a fanny pack as the team's improvised situations handler, a task that was part of his position as the gallo puntero.

So, they were not entirely defenseless.

As her team approached the facility from a connector alley, Caza came out of the shadows from a cubby under an HVAC ground unit where he served point watching customers and staff enter and leave the facility.

His cameotic layer faded with every step towards her.

"All good," she asked him.

"Check," he said with an affirmative nod.

Now her team was in place, Elise glanced at her watch.

"Time sync to twenty-one, ought ten, ought, ought."

It was off by a little over two minutes, but that did not matter. This was more about the synced-up kinetic dance. Time stamps would be corrected later in Birddog's report.

"Weapon check," Elise commanded.

Each member in order of rank from lowest to highest tested a blank round in silent mode through .72 Saturnine Air Carbines set with split out incapacitation rounds.

In orderly seven second intervals each said, 'clear', in turn until finally Elise tested her Saturnine.

Next she tested the .50 air pistol equiped with split-out nerve toxin and naloxone. The rush of adrenaline that naturally occurred during a surprise attack could easily trigger the same effects inherent in an over dose for those doped-up inside the facility.

Elise had carefully reviewed the warrants on the three individuals. Lethal take downs would be deemed excessive by the Board of Warrant Enforcement no matter Sachmilli's preferences against those who enthralled his boy.

Elise continued.

"Clear. Don masks."

The air filtration masks went on.

She waved her left arm down.

"Point man, take out the door. Everyone else - now!"

The door shattered out of their way as the tensile debilitator did its job. Elise jumped through the portal gap first and she rolled to the side and hunched low against a wall.

She fired four neurotoxin rounds into the ceiling above the sixteen patrons and two barkeeps, and then two more rounds at the floor between the bar and the couch and table sets that lined the other walls.

As she did so, Elise identified three patrons who were armed and who were beginning to react. Caza took out these very same ones in quick fashion.

His natural set of eyes always seemed instinctively comparable to her own augmented one, hence why he served as the point, or gallo puntero, as was custom to say in their trade.

A swell of screams rose up as the neurotoxin began to shut the crowd down. Elise rushed forward to the bar as the tender began to take cover. She wasn't going to give him the opportunity to grab a weapon.

Switching to her Saturnine, she jumped and slid across the bar and rolled on the floor all the while accounting for her potential bumps and bruises with deft maneuvers that took advantage of the ChitinTech exoskeleton combat gear.

It was a heavier and robotics-assisted version of the one she wore in her day to day activities.

She landed beside the bartender who grabbed a very sleek Italian sawed-off shotgun. She was close enough to fire into his right hand.

Though the munition was designed for non-lethality, at an eight inch range it cracked the bones in his hand something fierce. He let out a shriek and squirmed.

Elise disarmed the shotgun and set it to the side. It would have been so lovely to claim the gun as her own like the little thief did as a matter of routine but this was the bounty trade. EVERYTHING had to be accounted for in the after reports.

Elise glanced around and saw that her unit had taken everyone else out of the fight. Hugo, one of the Americans, and from Louisiana, secured the posh mezzanine above the bar and Caza stood guard at the back portal hallway with his gun trained on the stairwell going down.

Phase one was a success.

Elise turned around to the man whose hand she had broken. Tears swelled up in his eyes. The neurotoxin was starting to take hold which limited his ability to squirm.

She tossed his hair, gently, and spoke smoothly.

"Easy, fella. Mother Hen has you. You'll be alright."

Just as del Alma-Gris kept one for her thieving trade and Caza kept one for spontaneous kinetic situations, Elise kept a fanny pack of her own filled with compact medical supplies.

She lay his hand out on the floor evenly with his palm down, applied a local anesthetic patch on it that would in seconds numb the entire appendage.

Above that, she put on a smart wrap bandage which spread out over his entire hand like a glove and carefully set his bones back in place.

Next, she placed three pills in a shot glass and placed them next to the bartender's head.

"When that starts to throbbing again, hon, take one of these. It is time released to last an entire day," she giggled and patted him on the head, "I am not even going to charge you for it."

Elise stood up when she began to be aware of a problem. Her fingers tips were feeling numb.

"Hey, Bruges. Get over here."

He walked over with an atmospheric guage in hand.

"Those neurotoxins," she began, "were only catalystic with respiratory blood exchange, correct?"

"Indeed," Bruges affirmed. "It isn't the rounds causing the numbness. There is something weird in the air."