Looking at the milling crowd as he stepped out of the concourse hall, Tzal took a breath and sighed as the smell of blood reached his gently curved and stylish nostrils. It was wonderful and rich. Several people had died. For a solitary and disturbing moment Tzal thought his job had been completed by Amra Iben Sakr’s men, which would mean he would have lost his completion bonus. He stepped forward with the exiting crowd, moving carefully around the flashing lights of the plastic police barrier, and inhaled again. Deeper this time, he filled his lungs and his soul equally with the heady perfume of spilled, pulsing, scarlet life.

All healthy. All young.

All …human.

Tzal smiled as this registered. Not a drop of blood he could smell was anything other than plain, unremarkable, delicious human.

Thirty meters beyond the gate he had entered the concourse through, shuffling along with the throng of other travelers coming to Philadelphia from Toronto, he saw the local authorities as they milled around what was, despite many screens they had erected to hide it all, a murder scene with several bodies.

He caught details of red splattered white suits.

Three, possibly four.

And a fourth (fifth?) man. He had been large. Not young, but possibly just passed his prime. From his scent, the man had been healthy. And Tzal saw bits of stained fatigue pant legs on the bit of leg he glimpsed around the edge of one opaque screen.

He had been hoping to catch the party Amra had been interested in before they had left this city. He had hoped Amra’s men would have information for him.

Stopping by the exit from his current concourse to the main hall of the airport… No. Not “airports” anymore. Once humans had stopped using airplanes, and started using the electro-static-something-or-others as aeronautical propulsion, they started calling them aero-courses… must remember the vernacular… change… always change… otherwise I may as well have died with Toantan Suyu, my beloved Kingdom of Four Parts… his breathing stuttered slightly as he thought of all he had lost when his empire, now long, long gone, conquered and ground to nothing but memories and dust.

There were few things that could hurt Tzal these odd days, and most of them were those horribly pesky things he did to himself. It was a truism, Tzal often reflected, that no one can hurt us quite as pointedly as those who love us, and none loved Tzal, he would readily admit, as much as he loved himself. With a shudder, Tzal gathered his will, and pulled himself together with a minor shudder of his shoulders.

He then dialed his contact number for Amra’s offices in Cairo, knowing that no matter the time difference, someone would answer this number he had been given. He lifted the datpad to his ear, the way old people who didn’t have implants now did. Like people used to do when they used cell phones.

He could feel the eyes of several travelers looking at him as he did so. He counted on his “foreign” looks to function as a cover for his archaic and unfashionable behavior. Though the idea that HIS looks were foreign here in the Americas was laughable to Tzal, but there you were. Times had moved on, and now people from European and African stock looked at his caramel and cinnamon countenance here in the Americas, and they would see someone “foreign.” Anyone under fifty had implants.

Tzal just couldn’t bear the thought of having such barbaric things inserted into his wrist and behind his ear on his skull. Some humans now even had implants into their eyes. The idea made him squirm.

…ew.

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Not for him.

The number he had called had been very slow picking up. Tzal had been just on the verge of disconnecting his own line and moving on to figure out what next he should be doing in this silly, if well paying, chase.

But, just at the edge of his patience, that amazing voice picked up at the far flung other end. “Good morning, SunRize Special Associates, how may I direct your call, Mister Tzalqua Kisim?”

Her voice was the smell of jasmine and vanilla on the wind, the pulsing of blood from the heart of a fallen foe, and the soul rending sigh of a young woman reaching completion with her very last breath, all in one subtle and consonant rolling package. “Oh, good morning, my dear lady! Hello, and I hope your morning is going well. I am indeed in need of help only your office might provide.”

“Of course, Mister Kisim, how may we be of assistance?” Her voice practically purred in that enticing way that all of the secretaries Amra hired had. It must be their sole hiring criteria. Tzal realized that he would listen to every single word this woman said, forever if he could. It was beyond alluring, he knew, it was… magic?

Magic across technologies? Tzal marveled for a moment at the idea, before catching himself, and continuing with the reason he had called.

“My dear, I am tracking the party Mister Iben Sakr has interest in, and his agents last reported them at my current location here in the Liberty Aero-Course. But, they…” he faltered here, not wanting to get drawn into whatever Amra’s people would require of him if he let them know their agents were, in all likelihood, dead. “... well, I cannot find them, and I need an update.”

There was a momentary pause, before the woman said “Oh, I’m so sorry for the inconvenience, Mister Kisim.”

“Please, call me Tzal.”

Somewhere far off in Cairo, she chuckled, deeper and with greater resonance than any simple, simpering giggle, and every micro-fine hair along Tzal’s spine stood on its end and danced, causing him to close his eyes tightly as he tried to concentrate past the outpouring of concentrated lust that suddenly washed over him through the datpad speaker. “Ah, I see we have some update data from two of our agents. I will forward what we have from their datpads to your account. It should be coming through now.” There was a pause as she did whatever it was she did on her end of the line, and there in that Philadelphia aero-course, Tzal held his datpad from his face to see if and when new files dropped in from his employer’s office.

And there it was. A new file, sporting the SunRize icon on his screen.

Before he could gather his concentration again, the woman on the other end of the line asked him if there were any other services she might provide this morning. And momentarily, his mind locked itself into a loop of horrible, and wonderful thoughts, before he said “Ah, no, Miss, thank you so much. You have been the very soul of aid in these trying times.”

With that, he closed the connection, and let the smile drop from his face as he stood and worked to compose himself. His heart rate was so elevated, he would have been embarrassed to be found in such a worked up state in any other setting.

Once his vision cleared, and his mind was no longer swirling with a fog of overly sexualized fantasies about a woman he had never even seen before, Tzal opened the new file, and looked at the data he had been sent.

It contained several still camera shots of a very tall red headed woman, curvy, but not fat. Not sloppy, as some women became with inattention, and a lack of self worth. Interesting.

There was a young man, with skin almost as dark as his own, though without any of the ruddier earth tones that marked his own people. His brows were heavy, his eyes deep set, and his short hair was a curly mass of reddish brown. He had the shoulders of a natural athlete, and something looked off about his arms as he sat in a concourse chair next to the very tall woman.

My word, and on my bones, she is tall… he thought as he compared the two as the image showed them next to one another. ,

There was a third member of their party. In the fifth photo, Tzal finally got a good, clear look at the man. He was a dwarf. A “H’Aghram” as they called themselves. He cycled through the rest of the photos in the file. Then he went back to that fifth photo. The clearest image.

…fuck…

He looked familiar. He looked too familiar. The dwarf looked like…

…fuck…!

Tzal broke out in a cold sweat, as he stared at the image on the screen of his datpad. A tremor started in his hand where he held the ‘pad. A moment passed. He began to shake.