The building was more than just well guarded.

No patrols, or anything that would be so blatantly vulnerable to human error. Instead, the place was full of technical fail-safes. Security cameras, drill-proofed power lines, internal generators – both regular and back-up - , air-lock entrance, lasers, mines, infra-red monitoring. Most likely pass code, retinal scan, voice and fingerprint protected access terminals on the front doors, plus additional authorization checks for the inner layers.

Poison loved it.

Thing of beauty, really. She would have loved to take her time with this, to take it apart piece by piece. To dismantle the defences, break down security layers, peel it all away until she was at the core and the systems bowed down to her.

But they were on the clock, with no time to properly think things through, to prepare appropriately, or to indulge her slight cases of megalomania.

With so many restrictions, Poison had no idea how they were going to get in there. She didn’t even know if they could have done it with three weeks to plan. A job like this required finesse and care, and they had time for neither. The impossibility let her heart beat faster in excitement.

Next to her, Lilly fidgeted. He usually didn’t come along on jobs in person, preferring instead to monitor and support them. His talents required a stationary position, anyway.

This time though, they hadn’t been able – or trying, for that matter – to get him to stay home. Out of all of them, Lilly was the most invested in seeing this operation succeed, and he couldn’t stand the wait.

Still, this was new territory for him, and despite his determination to come, Lilly had never been in a position like this before. Poison tried to remember her first job, her anxiety and fear of being caught, and couldn’t. It was too many years, too many jobs ago. Had she fidgeted, too?

Orion seemed to pick up on the jittery mood, anxiety from Lilly, excitement from Poison.

‘Hey, Lilly. You got everything set up for later?’

Lilly nodded, never taking his eyes off the facility on the other side of the street. ‘I prepared new IDs and background for the five of us and arranged for Yoshua and Eliah to leave the city tomorrow night.’

‘They’ll lock down the city. How do you plan to get around that?’

‘News helicopter.’

Poison stared at him. ‘What?’

‘And parachutes.’

‘You’re not serious.’

Lilly yanked a pair of binoculars from his pack and kept watching the building.

Orion sighed. ‘How are we getting in there?’

They were lying on a rooftop, across the street from their target. A very wide street. It was a good enough vantage point, but they would have to go down and across to get in.

‘Can’t do the board gig again, too wide of a gap,’ Poison mumbled. ‘It would take too long. Sewers will be sealed, no old subway or maintenance tunnels in this area.’

They had done the most basic of research before taking of. Rudimentary maps of the area, but no planning. Poison hated planning on the job. It meant she was desperate, and that mostly led to bad endings.

Lilly started to stand.

‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’, Poison hissed.

‘In.’

She cursed and yanked him back down by his jacket. ‘Don’t go reckless on us now.’

‘Yoshua’s in there,’ Lilly hissed.

‘Yeah.’ Orion grabbed the other side of his jacket and pulled. ‘And you don’t want to get caught in a shootout before you can get to him, do you?’

He pointed down to the street.

Poison followed the gesture with her eyes and cursed silently, pressing her body flat against the roof and ducking her head. She could hear the other two shifting similarly beside her.

A cluster of people had gathered down on the street corner. Specifically, a cluster of people in body armour and face masks. The pale yellow light of street lamps reflected off heavy sub-machine guns and smaller handguns, flash-bang grenades, tear gas canisters, and ammunition clips.

Heavy weaponry, no badges, no visible ID. Either someone else caught wind of the party about to go down, or the cops are making this a Black Op.

Poison grinned. Oh, this would be good. All the fun with a different, manageable level of risk. ‘Gentlemen, we’ve got ourselves and entrance.’

Orion parted with his scowl for a second to stare at her in incredulous amazement. ‘You mean the police task force that will probably shoot us on sight if they spot us?’

Poison’s grin widened. Extra fun. ‘I mean the police task force without ID tags that will make the building occupants run around in confusion so they won’t notice another alarm go off.’

Lilly’s mouth formed a small “o” in understanding.

Orion nodded, catching on to her mischievous expression. A grin spread on his face as well. ‘Let’s wait a few minutes for chaos to break out. They’ll want to clear the building in steps and move forward. Since it’s a Black Op, they won’t set up camp inside. We can follow in their wake if we’re careful. They’ll make us a nice path right to where we want to be. If we’re lucky, they won’t find all the good stuff and leave some treats for us.’

They didn’t have to wait long. A short discussion among the cops below, with lots of gestures and confirmations, hand signals and weapon checks. Then someone blew open the front door with a grenade launcher and they poured into the building.

Orion sighed. ‘Subtle.’

Poison didn’t really care. If the cops wanted to go blunt, by all means. Made her job all the easier. Plus, if you knew you couldn’t sneak, might as well bring out the explosives.

Sounds drifted out into the night from the blackened hole where a door had been. A lot of shouting, a lot of annoyingly shrill alarms going off, some screams and bullets fired.

They had slunk down to street level by then and were ready to go in.

'Internal air circulation, no ducts to use,' Orion instructed quietly. 'We take the corridors. Poison, take point. Lilly, mid. Communications and info. I'll cover our hides. Move quick, stay close. Go.'

The first corridor was empty, just as predicted. The cops had moved on. Some scorch marks and bits of door, nothing else. The place wasn't built to withstand heavy weaponry. Further down, security doors to offices or other rooms had closed and simply been blown open.

Poison checked the first. Small room, a computer, some equipment. The monitor showed the front entrance and multiple angles of the corridor.

A guard sat slumped in a corner. Opposite the door. She was probably just unconscious, tossed by the explosion or caught by a piece of rubble as her door was destroyed. Poison didn't bother to check.

Right next to the computer was a panel with a key still stuck in it. A small red light blinked plaintively, as if asking for someone to pay attention, accompanied by a high ping. First response alarm.

Poison discarded the room quickly. They moved on.

Intersection. Voices and distant gunfire drifting by. A warning light flashed down the right-hand corridor. Nobody visible down that way, just voices and steps. It was impossible to tell if whoever they belonged to was getting closer or moving further away.

The left-hand corridor shortly ended in a door.

The hall stretching out in front of them was long. Many more doors, many more corridors branching off.

Government facility, Poison's mind supplied. Lots of security checks. Authorization levels. No grenade-proofing on the doors, though. Not prepared for forced entry.

The inner structure wouldn't be too confusing. Grid layout, mostly. With the higher security sectors towards the inside.

We're at the left front corner. We'll go forward, then right, towards the opposite corner.

There should be a records database there. Just a general overview, nothing too sensitive. The necessities. Automatic shut-down in case of a breach. Lilly might be able to get the servers up and running. He had breached Agency security before, this should be around the same level, or at least not much harder.

'The fuck does the government want with Yoshua, anyway?', she muttered, then raised her voice to direct a whisper direct behind her. 'Lilly, you up for a little hacking? Ten minutes or so?'

He hummed his agreement and probably nodded.

Poison led them on, forward. A few more doors, blown open. More rooms with desks and a few – possibly unconscious - bodies.

They stopped at each intersection, each branching corridor, to listen. Nothing. The building shuddered once, briefly, as another grenade went off in a different section. They were far enough away to only feel the vibrations beneath their feet.

The first clearly dead guard came into view after they had turned right at the end of the corridor, at the back edge of the building.

As they approached the corner, Poison halted their advance with a gesture.

Bullet holes in the thick concrete walls. Marks in the floor where lead had chipped away at the material. Blood splattered across the wall to their left.

Someone had started a shootout. The task force had come through here and been surprised on their way around the corner.

Now, everything was quiet. The distant shouting and gunfire were gone, though it had likely come from a different skirmish, or they would have seen one half of the assailants. The only thing breaching the quiet was an errant alarm blaring a few intersections away. Red light flashed across white walls, blending with the blood to mask the splatter for a second before fading and flaring again.

Poison used her small telescope mirror to check the corridor around the corner. She spotted the body quickly. Nothing else there, no movement except the flashing red lights. Her hand was steady.

'Body,' she whispered and slowly rounded the corner. The guy was sitting against the wall, half-slumped over his machine gun. He had a badge on his dark uniform marking him as building security.

There were three bullet holes in his leg, and one in his forehead. Open, empty eyes stared back towards the corner.

Poison stepped around him without a word, avoiding the pooling blood. It had stopped flowing, so he had been an early casualty. She glanced back.

Lilly had gone white, his earlier determination bleached away with shock. He shuffled sideways along the wall, wide eyes latched onto the corpse. Orion urged him forward with quiet words. His face was hard, a mixture of caution and a hint of regret, but much more used to the sight.

He hated killing, same as her, she knew that. But on their jobs they couldn't help coming across the errant dead guy every now and then. And from the way he handled himself around the dead, she had a feeling Orion had seen corpses before, in different context.

Either way, he never told, and she never asked. But it rattled him every time, still.

What does it say about me that I'm unfazed by the sight of a corpse?

Poison dismissed the thought immediately. It was a hindrance, and she couldn't afford hindrances as she continued down the corridor.

A police department and a government sector in a shootout. Curious. Rogue forces involved? Probably. On which side? Or would both just claim plausible deniability and use the excuse to shoot at rivals? It was surprisingly fitting, in her experience. Law enforcement: friend and helper. They weren't usuallythis hot-headed or trigger-happy, though. Not quite.

'Why would they kill each other?', Lilly voiced Poison's thoughts in a high, tight voice. He had always held on to his views of the police as the good guys, the ones who played by the rules. Even through his experience with Michael, that opinion somehow held fast. She guessed he simply hadn't been through the kind of experiences she had, or that image would deteriorate rapidly.

A sudden shout, more voices mixing into a roar. Poison dropped to a crouch. Far away. Two or three intersections off towards the centre of the building. Still, they could be coming closer.

She tried the next door. Closed. The one after that had been blown open. The room beyond was empty save for a table and three chairs, all stainless steel, all of them thrown back by the blast, ripping bolts out of the ground. One of the chairs was dented.

Poison slipped into the room and motioned for the other two to follow. As quietly as she could, she turned the table onto its side, legs towards the door. Plausible enough. If the bolts had given way later in the explosion, the table would have tipped and toppled. If anybody came close enough to check on the marks where steel had been ripped out of the concrete floor and noticed something was amiss, they were done for anyway.

She crouched behind the upright table surface. Lilly cowered down next to her, taking up the remaining space.

Orion had gotten the cue and squeezed himself between the wall and the partly-unhinged door. It hadn't been blown apart or even fully out of its frame, just warped. The lower corner was wedged tight between wall and floor.

They waited. The shouting continued, interrupted by errant gunshots.

Two minutes. The shouts ebbed. Running feet faded, soft among the monotone blaring of an alarm.

Another minute. Running feet again, this time coming closer. Onto their corridor. Closer.

Poison hunkered down, forehead against the cold metal surface of the overturned desk. Her breathing slowed to a shallow, inaudible flow of air. Lilly was a bit louder next to her, breathing through anxiously flared nostrils. It should still be quiet enough. She couldn't hear Orion. Good.

The world narrowed into sharp focus, each breath an eternity, each second a gaping expanse of nothing happening.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

A dozen pairs of feet thundered past the open door. None of them bothered to stop. Nobody came into their room.

The steps passed and continued down the corridor. Another minute, and they had faded enough to be completely drowned out by the alarms.

Poison didn't move yet. They sat for another two agonizing minutes, waiting, breathing shallowly. Poison was used to waiting like this, as was Orion, who hadn't as much as shifted behind his door, even though he must be uncomfortable in such a cramped space. They were actually used to much longer periods of waiting, hours if necessary, holding out until a shift change or the right opportunity.

Lilly found the stillness noticeably harder to maintain. Waiting for code to run was one thing. Hiding behind a desk with flashing lights and alarms droning a monotone tune every two seconds, evading notice or even capture, was a whole different kind of stressful.

Droning was a good way to describe it, actually. The alarms were repetitive enough to shift partly into background noise in Poison's perception, but loud and piercing enough to register every now and then as a new, distracting sound. Kind of the purpose, she guessed.

Finally, satisfied that nobody was lying in wait for them, Poison stood. The focussed calm remained with her. She motioned Lilly up and scuffed her boot along the floor to signal Orion to come out. She didn't want him to jump out or slam the door into her face at her calling out to him.

Orion's hand appeared, gripping the side of the metal sheet. Another braced against the wall, and he vaulted over the stuck lower portion of the door. He landed in a crouch and stood.

Poison grinned. She checked that the corridor was empty, then raised a mocking eyebrow at Orion.

'More of a twist towards the wall, and you'd land on your feet silently. Less shock, less pressure on the door.'

Orion stuck his tongue out at her. 'I didn't make a sound, and the door is stuck fast.'

Lilly stared at the two of them, bewilderment and fear in his eyes.

He always knew we joked on the job, but the experience is more to take in than the plain knowledge. Or is it because this is about Yoshua?

Whichever it was, joking was part of their process. This was no one-time deal, this was a regular work situation. She took it seriously, but not that seriously. Relieving the tension was a must if they wanted to keep up a job for hours, and if they wanted to keep working and not drop from stress. Maybe if Lilly came along more often, he would get used to it.

They continued on their prior way. As far as Poison could tell, the group of people passing by them had gone in the opposite direction, back towards the corner with the dead guard. Still, she was careful at each intersection and each open door they came across.

According to her internal clock, the task force should be halfway done. The building inhabitants should have mostly cleared out. The fighting part was over, now came investigation and then probably a quick exit. Black Ops didn't usually stick around government facilities until the counter-cavalry arrived.

Despite the danger and unknown elements, despite the knot of fear she knew was clenched around Lilly's stomach, despite the harsh possibilities of where Yoshua was or what had happened here, Poison felt her earlier unease recede further, replaced by the calm gleam of excitement. She knew that feeling well.

The thrill of being on the hunt, unseen, unheard, with every muscle ready to spring into action and knock out an attacker or overcome an unavoidable obstacle. Pure skill fuelling her progress. She relished it.

Lilly did this for a cause. Orion used the cause as an excuse. Poison did it plain for the kicks, and she was okay with that. She was good at it, it was fun, she got paid. Perfect.

With Orion, she could show that rush of excitement, that almost carnal need for action. He was as focussed and elated as she was. They hunted together, pressing on, flowing through the motions.

Now that Lilly was with them, and so upset, it would alienate them from him. It would hurt him. He wouldn't understand.

Poison forced the grin back from her face. Pushed the desire for challenge down and away, to be enjoyed at a later time, a different hunt. Instead, she would hope for low security and little trouble or opposition, for Lilly's sake.

True to her instincts, they didn't encounter the group that had passed them earlier. They did find another prone guard. A lot of blown-out doors. Some forlorn alarms warning personnel that wasn't there of a danger that had already come and gone.

And, as predicted, they found an undisturbed door, almost directly in the back right corner of the complex.

Orion moved to attach an Opener, but Poison held him back.

'Neither time nor use for subtlety. The servers are probably already shut down.'

This was one of the few times Orion deferred to her experience, and he did so today, too.

'So, blow it?' Lilly was catching himself slowly.

Poison snorted. 'Entrance expert, remember? I'm more elegant than the grunts.'

She pulled out the compact battery-powered drill she kept in a side pocket of her backpack and made a finger-wide tunnel rather than a hole in the middle of the door. Brushing away the steel shavings, she stuck a capsule to the tip of her pinky and carefully guided it through the opening, bending the finger downward as soon as she was through. The capsule latched onto the inside of the door, just at the lower tunnel edge. A short buzz told her she had succeeded.

Carefully, Poison added a second capsule on her side of the door, roughly in the same spot vertically. The capsule lit up and buzzed, then snapped a hair's breadth to the left, to the correct spot, and connected to its counterpart. The capsules were now directly opposite each other, with a minimum amount of steel door between.

Poison stepped back and tapped her phone. Thin cables sprang from the capsule on the sides and spread out in a circle until the wires were taut, latching on to the door like the spokes of a wheel. The ends buzzed and clicked and the steel popped and hissed and sizzled and smoked, and then Poison kicked. The sphere covered by the cables gave way and she pushed it to land on the other side of the door.

The result was a nice, large hole. It had just the right size to let Poison crawl through, feet first. The method completely used up two capsules each time she used it, but that was so worth it.

'That is awesome,' Lilly breathed.

----------------------------------------

'Yeah, well,' Poison grunted, wiggling her way through the hole in the door. 'Chemicals and magnets, darling. It's obnoxiously unsubtle, so I don't use it all that often.'

Orion could hear her struggling to keep the pride out of her voice. Her arms were the last thing to disappear beyond the steel. A moment later, her head emerged again to look up at them.

'Servers are down, power is out. Wanna come in and have a look?'

'Power will be cut completely by now,' Orion objected, 'and we don't have that much time any more.'

'All right, Lill', what do you want me to do?'

Lilly looked lost for a second. He shrugged. 'Grab any hard drives you can find.'

'Take 'em with us? You sure that's a good idea?'

Orion thought quickly. If the government tracked those files back to them, they'd be hunted. More so than they already were. More than they would be as soon as they had Michael? Probably not. Plus, if they were lucky, any missing data might be accredited to the task force, not them. If it wasn't too obvious that Poison's toys were no police equipment by a long shot. Big if.

But what kind of attention would they catch when they got to Yoshua? Probably much more than for stealing some files.

'Do it,' he said. 'Lilly, you'll have to be quick about copying them, and they can never enter the flat. There will be trackers on any hardware.'

Lilly nodded. 'Signal scrambler, remote location, decode the access key and copy the rest to unravel in peace. Got it.'

'Yeah, what he said,' Poison commented drily. She worked her way back through the door and got started.

Orion knew the details, they'd done this before. Lilly, on the other hand, glanced through the hole in the door to watch. He would see Poison replacing the steel drill bit with a Phillips head bit to unscrew the server casings. She would grab the hard drives that were easily accessible. Quick and dirty.

If they were lucky, and the people here really didn't have a lot of physical safeguards, the high security data drives wouldn't be protected any better than the low security ones, at least not when it came to hardware. The software problems could be dealt with later.

And it seemed luck was indeed on their side, since Poison had managed to lead them straight here. She obviously shared Orion's guess as to the typical layout for this kind of facility. The doors weren't explosive-proofed, either, nobody had been expecting a brute force attack.

Four minutes. That was all Poison permitted herself, and then she pushed her backpack, bulging with rectangular shapes, through the door and followed suit. They split the load among the three of them, and set off once more. Back the way they had come. The task force should be done by now. Not much time, but clear paths.

The first door to the left, leading further into the building, had been blown out. Poison led the way over pieces of debris into a dark corridor. The lights had gone out in this section. No annoying red flashes, no emergency lighting, nothing. All was silent. The alarm sounds had quieted into faint background noise that was much easier to ignore than the piercing whine from before.

The corridor ended in a T-section. To the left was another door, likely leading back to a corridor that approached the back right corner from the other side. A nice little square sealed by diagonally opposite doors.

They went right. Doors led off to either side, and here they were all open and charred. This was the higher security section. More interesting stuff than outside. Orion spotted the remnants of access panels on a few doors. In other places they had fallen victim to the grenades and been obliterated.

An arrow was painted on the left-hand wall, just after the second scorched door frame. Yellow against grey, smudged with soot, with black, all capital letters stencilled on.

Experimental study.

They stopped and exchanged glances. Poison's was wariness mixed with excitement. Lilly's was fear.

Orion guessed his own features had drawn into a mixture of anger and disgust. He remembered a similar arrow, similar letters, in a different place. Unpleasant, unwanted memories welled up in his mind.

He shot Poison another, more private look. Her eyes widened, then hardened. She caught on immediately.

'Lilly, you're with me.' Her voice was hard but gentle. 'The right-hand doors will lead to offices, where they keep and evaluate the data. Highest security level. You worked with government tech more than once, so I'll need you to handle the equipment.'

Lilly's eyes were fixed on the arrow, trying to comprehend the words, to align them with something, anything his mind could come up with and connect that made any sense. Orion could see he hadn't gotten to the truth yet, because there was not enough shock, not enough nausea in those eyes.

'Hey!' Poison snapped her fingers in front of Lilly's face.

He turned, blinking. For a few seconds, the words seemed not to register with him, then he frowned. 'You said we shouldn't split up.' His voice was normal, not lowered for caution any more, no longer fitted to the situation.

'We don't have much time,' she hissed.

'I'll look at that,' Orion squeezed himself into the conversation, gesturing at the arrow. He had to fight to keep his voice level. 'If there's anything in there, I'll come get you. Promise.' Lie.

He held Lilly's gaze for a few seconds to emphasize his point, and forced sincerity into his expression. It seemed to work, because finally, Lilly nodded, slowly, almost distractedly.

'Yeah. OK.'

Lilly had seen him lie so often, hiding untruth behind a hard expression, but he didn't notice it now. Didn't see the way Orion hid his pain, his dread, his guilt and disgust behind a façade of slight trepidation.

It was necessary, though. Orion had an idea of what awaited him, a pretty good one, too. Lilly didn't need to see that.

Orion waited until Poison had ushered a reluctant Lilly into the next room. She glanced back at him in sympathy, then disappeared. She had caught on that he knew something, and dreaded it. Thankfully, she didn't ask, not now. The questions would come later, and he would think about his answers then.

Those lies would have to be prepared more carefully.

He took a deep breath, and pushed the nausea aside.

Get into another mindset, he told himself. Just like old times.

Cold blanketed him, smooth and quick, smothering the horror, the fear and foreboding. It wrapped itself around him like an old companion and tied itself so close that his emotions were bound and held fast, with no room to wiggle out into the open. Cold settled around his stomach, around his chest, and Orion let it. He felt like what he guessed freezing might feel like, like drinking something cool without his chest warming up again a second later, and he embraced that.

Blocks of ice didn't panic, or break down. He was ready now.

The door to the experimental block had been pushed back into its frame after an explosion had knocked it out. Tact, Orion guessed. He hoped so much that he was wrong, but as with his other emotions, hope was tucked tight beneath his cold blanket, and it was no more than a thought. He was aware of one of the hard drives poking into his back, but that was no more than a thought, either.

Orion didn't take another deep breath or steel himself. Too deep of a breath might rip his blanket of cold. He just pushed the door far enough into the room to wiggle through the gap, then returned it to the frame. He turned around.

----------------------------------------

The room was large, and white. Computers, monitors, lots of medical equipment. The emergency lights were on, here. Pale and neon yellow. A monitor displayed vital signs, multiple flat lines, with a red light blinking furiously, ignored. No audible alarm with that. Strange.

Orion took a step towards the centre of the room, footsteps hollow on the tiled floor. A drain was set in between the tiles, with the ground tilted slightly inward, towards it.

A lab coat lay forlorn over the back of a chair. No scientists in this room any more. Either fled or arrested, Orion thought. Not surprising. There was a body, after all.

A body sitting slumped in a chair, strapped in with metal restraints around arms and legs, waist, chest, neck, and forehead. Electrodes and finger clamps, a blood pressure sleeve, and an IV drip were attached to the naked torso. More cables disappeared into a shock of blond hair.

Orion stepped closer.

Some of the electrodes were stuck on with small disks and pressed onto skin, held by suction or adhesive gel. Some seemed to disappear beneath the hair and skin into the skull. Orion carefully peeled off the discs and pulled on the others. A handful of finger-long needles withdrew from Yoshua's skull from where they had been jammed into sutures or through small drilled holes.

Six more in his face, two each on the upper edge of the eye sockets, below the eyes on the cheekbones, between chin and lips. They were driven at odd angles into natural cavities in the bone. Nerve surface points.

Orion drew them all out, then took off the other sensors. The monitor still showed flat low lines for brain activity, blood pressure, and heart rate. The wavering line of blood oxygen hung at about forty percent and plummeted to zero as Orion removed the finger clamp. The deflated pressure sleeve went next, then the IV needle. It hung down to spill the drip's contents onto the tiles, where it started flowing towards the drain. A saline solution and sedatives, perhaps.

He spent a minute searching for keys, then discovered all locks on the restraints had opened on their own, probably corresponding to the building's emergency mode. He pried them open. They held just fast enough that the body hadn't flopped out of the chair by its own weight.

Orion braced a shoulder against Yoshua's chest to keep just that from happening as he opened the last restraints around the head. He hoisted the body up over his shoulder, then hesitated. He wiped the contents off one desk and spread the lab coat on top of it as best he could one-handedly. He placed the body on top so the scalp lay a few inches below the coat's collar.

For just a moment, Orion allowed himself to close his eyes and breathe. His blanket of cold fell open for a moment, as it always did at some point, rushing him with a hot wave of emotion, grief and guilt, and then anger. He ran a shaking hand through his hair, ignoring the gel and blood on his skin.

He pressed both hands against his closed eyes, smearing his face, and took another, shuddering breath. Two seconds, he permitted himself, two seconds of despair, and then he pulled the cold blanket back around him, tight around his emotion, and promised he would discard it and curl up in a corner as soon as he was done and safe.

The blanked held fast again, but this time he could feel the storm of emotions, could feel them raging just beneath the cold, demanding to be set free. He willed them down, but they refused to make way for the cold completely.

Slowly, he buttoned up the lab coat.

A desk drawer yielded a stapler that helped close the collar over the head.

The coat sleeves tied around the neck made a moderately secure covering for the head.

A cable from the various machinery kept the arms to the torso and the coat covering skin.

Orion stepped back, satisfied enough with his work. He hoisted the body over his shoulder again, then left the room, not bothering to push the door back into its frame this time. His willingness to keep up pretend decency was gone.

Pressing against his earpiece to unmute the microphone, he started back the way he had come. Right, then left, towards the door.

'Where are you?', he rumbled against the sensor at his throat, voice dead.

A moment of silence, then a crackle and Poison's voice in his ear, spitting static. 'Done in the second data storage, awaiting your go-ahead. Lilly's muttering something about fixing the interference from the scramblers around here, to prevent static.' Her voice was so alive, so excited, and she was restraining herself. He never noticed when his emotions were on.

'I'm on my way out. You go, too.'

'What about experimental study?' That was Lilly, insistent like a petulant child whose parents had promised ice cream and had yet to deliver. How could he worry about promises now?

Orion clenched his teeth and scuffed his feet in a quick shuffle, small, quick, sure steps. He kept moving and soon reached the dead guard, not bothering to try and stay clear of the thickening pool of blood. It was sticky, and his boot made a sucking sound as he lifted it off the concrete.

A few red steps later the film on his sole had dried enough to leave only the errant mark and not stick to the floor with every step. There was no need to worry about being identified by his soles or something like that. Too many people had walked through blood in this building tonight.

'Orion?'

'People will be here soon. We have to move, now. I will tell you about it later, there is nothing in here important enough to risk our hides over. We have been here too long already.' Orion took care to dampen his voice, to make it a little urgent and annoyed, pressing the words out between barely parted lips, as if he was actually worried. As if he could feel worry right now.

A short pause.

'All right. Meet you outside.'

He muted the earpiece again. Lilly would find out later, and be upset, but he didn't need to see what exactly had happened in there. His outrage would only slow them down, and his emotions would make him feel bad, too, later.

Orion had only known, only had that hunch, because he had seen this before. Back when... He forced himself to breathe calmly and regularly as pictures of Jordan streamed through his head. Jordan's serious face, Jordan's hard eyes, Jordan's cold grin, Jordan's quick gun, and quicker knife.

One last corner. He jogged a bit to make sure Lilly only saw him when they were already outside.

The body was heavy. It lurched with the motion of Orion's steps and at one point threatened to slip off to the side. Orion had to readjust his grip several times.

Then, finally, early morning air brushed over what was exposed of his face, reminding him with an oddly stiff feeling in spots on his skin that he must look like someone straight out of a horror movie, complete with bloody smears and a body over his shoulder.

It was about four in the morning. The temperature was still dropping, but the light was as far gone as it would, leaving a sense, a feeling, of blackness alongside the regular look of it.

Orion flared his nostrils, replacing the scent of concrete, plastic, and gore with that of trash and dirt and cool night air.

It tasted like rain.