“Some people announce who they are; others must be discovered.”

—Old Byzonian Proverb

After pushing the proper icon, Zaina gulped and turned to face Reida, who was slowly taking her armor off.

Reida stared back. “What?”

“I—I have to know something.”

“Oh?” Reida’s eyebrow raised. “And what’s that?”

“Were you—you weren’t really going to hurt his family, right?”

Reida sighed as she got the armor off, then started removing her shirt. Zaina blushed and turned away. “Come on, Zaina. Is that really how little you think of me?”

Zaina leaned against the opposite wall. “I don’t know what to think right now.”

“I told you things were going to get messy,” Reida said. “This is what real change looks like. We have to do what we have to do.”

“That’s not an answer to my question,” she replied, staring into Reida’s eyes.

Reida sighed. “No, I was never going to hurt his family. It was an empty threat.” She held up a small tube with a push-nozzle at the end and sprayed some green liquid onto her wound, wincing and giving pained groans. Then she wrapped her own shoulder with one hand, using her incapacitated arm to hold the dressings tight while she methodically maneuvered her uninjured limb to cover her wound. Once it was done, she put her shirt and armor back on. “That should do it. Why do you care so much, anyway? You don’t know them.”

“I don’t want any innocent people getting hurt.”

Reida, a little more relaxed, chuckled and said, “So sentimental. Come on, now. This is a war—and there’s no such thing as ‘innocents.’ But no—I try to keep those who aren’t directly involved out of it.”

“What about Ilstevor? He didn’t seem like a bad person.”

“So what?” Reida shot back. “Whether he was or wasn’t, he wasn’t getting out of this alive.”

Zaina was taken aback. “But—you told him—”

“Yeah, I lied,” Reida said, rolling her eyes. “I lied about killing his family, too, didn’t I? You’re so naive. I would’ve said anything to get him to do what we needed.”

Zaina didn’t have a response to that. She hung her head, staring at the severed arm next to her.

“Look,” Reida said, her voice softening, “I get it. You’re not used to this. But we’re doing this for a very good reason. It has to be done. Trust me, others have tried asking nicely, doing everything the ‘right’ way, and none of it worked. This is how it has to be.”

“I know,” Zaina said, “but it feels wrong.”

“Yeah, it does. But it’s all for the glorious cause. Think of all the suffering we’re going to prevent—all the great works that will come of this. It’s worth it, no matter what we have to do to get there. Besides, it’s better than they’d have done to us. When we get captured, we get tortured, interrogated—and they get called heroes for doing it to us. But when we kill, we do it quick and clean, and they clutch their pearls in terror at the absolute horror of it all.”

It was all more or less what Zaina wanted to hear—but she didn’t believe Reida, despite wanting to. “One more thing—”

“So many questions with you,” Reida said.

“One more. He—Ilstevor—he called you a pirate. Is that true?”

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Reida frowned. “Pirate, terrorist, that’s what we are to people like them. To him, it is true. Expect anyone else we encounter here to think the same of us. Why do you have so many questions, anyway? I told you what you were getting into with this.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No buts,” Reida said, holding up a finger to cut her off. “All that thinking and questioning’s going to get you killed out there. You can’t be focused on all that—there’ll be time to answer every moral concern and quandary you have when we’re out of the shit. For now, I need you to have my back. Can I count on that?”

A deep, frustrated breath rolled through Zaina’s nostrils. She wanted to turn back, but at this point that was impossible. There was no getting out of this unless they completed the mission. Besides—if Reida continued on her own, she’d definitely die. In spite of Reida’s questionable moral choices, Zaina didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.

In too deep.

“Yeah,” Zaina said. “Yeah, it’s a little late to back out now, right?”

Reida nodded. “That’s the spirit. The only way is forward. Don’t worry—urgh...” She struggled to her feet. “I’ve got your back, too.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

A smile came over Reida’s face. “I’ve dealt with worse in hotter situations. I’ll be able to use the arm, but not as well as I’d like. It’s all right, though. We’re going to get through this—together.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” Zaina said.

“So,” Reida replied, “not to change the subject, but we should probably expect to find company in the basement. From the intel we’ve been able to gather, they guard all the choke points to the lower levels pretty heavily.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Get one of your grenades out,” Reida said. “Once the door opens, we toss ’em. Squeeze it and give it a throw, and they’ll explode when they hit something. Pretty straightforward. From there, we’ll need our friend here to get us access to the sub-layer below the basement. That’s where we’ll find the crystal—then we can end this.”

“Given any thought to getting out?” Zaina asked.

“I have a plan,” Reida replied, “but it involves a lot of timing. Once we have the crystal, we need to find a way to the fiftieth floor to meet Captain Danjai for extraction. There’s a few ways we could get there.”

“Why the fiftieth floor?”

“There’s bound to be a lot of heat on the first dozen or so. Hopefully their security system doesn’t account for an extraction from that level.”

Zaina didn’t like it one bit. “Seems a bit haphazard.”

“I prefer to think of it as having options,” Reida said with a shrug. “There’s also a ventilation system down there—we could use that. We’ll also be a little less careful—who cares about tripping sensors on the way out?”

“Won’t that give him information on you, though?”

Reida’s head swayed back and forth. “He’s going down either way, so it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Say,” Zaina said, “won’t removing the crystal de-power the androids? That would help out a lot.”

Reida pondered the question for a moment. “It won’t happen as quickly as we’d like,” she said. “They have a limited amount of auxiliary power to draw from, too, so they’ll stay standing for a little bit after we pull the crystal out of its socket.”

“Sounds like a clusterfuck.”

Reida chuckled. “Nah. Another normal day in the life.”

“Well, when you put it that way, what could go wrong?” Zaina replied.

The elevator jerked to a halt, startling Zaina.

“Hm? Huh? What was that?”

Reida pulled her wrist-mounted vis-screen up and said, “Elevator’s shut down. They’re probably onto us.”

“So—what do we do?”

“You still have that resonedge, right? Want to see how it works?”

Zaina pulled the blade from her utility belt and pushed the button on its hilt. It hummed to life, the vibrations ever-so-slightly distorting the edge. She carefully grasped it with her other hand and drove it into the floor. To her surprise, it pierced through the metal like nothing was there. She walked in a circle to cut a hole out of the bottom, which then clattered and clanked down the darkened elevator shaft.

Zaina gulped. “That’s a long way down.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Reida replied. “But I have an idea. Plan B.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“First, put the grenade away. This’ll be a little dodgy, but we can use our grappling hooks to get down. They have a slow-release function. And, plus side, our friend can finally rest—we won’t need him if we’re taking the alternative entrances.” She gestured toward Ilstevor’s arm, still spewing blood, on the floor.

Zaina stared at it, unsure of whether it was worse to leave it here—part of her wanted to return it to Ilstevor’s body, but she didn’t know why.

Reida pulled her hook-gun out and aimed it through the hole in the floor—it shot through and stuck to the wall outside with a clank. “Shoot, swing, release, then find something to hold on to while it re-coils and you line up your next shot. The wires are a couple hundred feet, so it won’t take that long. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Reida sat on the edge of the hole and then went through—her grip on the hook-gun held, but she winced in pain. The injury was bothering her.

She growled, “Come on, Zaina! We’re losing daylight!”

Zaina de-powered the resonedge and holstered it before pulling out her hook-gun. She aimed for the wall opposite Reida, and her shot was true. She jumped through the hole. The only thing holding her off from the abyss was the hook-gun she tightly gripped in her sweating hands.

A shudder ran down Zaina’s spine; the descent into empty darkness reminded her of the Eldritch’s Hollow.

As if I needed more anxiety about this whole thing.