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"Is it really okay," she whispered under her breath when they were far enough away and she could get close enough to him not to be overheard, "to leave them to die like that?"

"I don't know EV. In this world, it's either us or them. They have a reputation among these parts that I'm fortunate not to be added to."

******

Lefo looked towards the establishment that EV meant and looked at her incredulously.

"A brothel? Or a love hotel? I suppose it could work to keep us off the streets discreetly... but an elf in this establishment would certainly raise eyebrows. We elves can't really... you know..."

Indeed, there's no reason for an elf to partake in such pleasures since they reproduce like plants did. Their pollenating process has some part to play in that regard. Still, EV's idea warranted merit and Lefo could see no fault in that. He didn't know why but he fished out his compass and looked at the hotel.

Frowning slightly, he replaced the compass in his bag.

"I suppose since this is your sort of crowd, I'll let you do the talking."

And Lefo knew roughly which room that they would want to rent.

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"A brothel? Or a love hotel? I suppose it could work to keep us off the streets discreetly... but an elf in this establishment would certainly raise eyebrows. We elves can't really... you know..."

EV smiled sardonically. "Venches don't either, at least not pre-metamorphosis. Of course, that doesn't stop some from trying. But really the brothel thing is only a cover - they don't care what happens once the door closes."

She took the lead on this one, trying to slip back into the persona of life on Centerpiece even though it seemed like something lived by another person. The entrance was actually a cleverly designed holoprojector that extended the image of the wall onto the doorway. It shimmered as they passed through and a cool light bathed over them. Ev whispered back to the elf, "Basic check for weapons, that kind of thing."

They had none anyway and quickly passed through into the interior of the building. Compared to the rubble and ruin of the outside, it was surprisingly modern with mirrors installed strategically along the walls to reflect in the maximum amount of light from Amalgam. There were no living presences, but booths along the far wall allowed one to book a room in relative privacy. EV and Lefo squeezed into the tinted glass box; this one had not been designed to accommodate a Vench's full grown size.

She studied the punch card in front of her for a moment, bubbling out the appropriate boxes. This time she could not use a dummy account - these transactions were cash only. Thankfully they did not collect until the end of your stay, but still - the prices were quite steep. But she would think about how they could run off without paying the bill later. She finished filling in the last bubble and inserted the card into the reader machine. It came up with a display of the place's layout, already taken rooms were grayed out.

"Okay, pick a spot."

Lefo looked at the hotel schematics and took out his compass. The arrow stopped at a room overlooking the streets at the far east corner.

"We'll take this one," he announced as he pressed the screen. A soft mechanical whirr sounded and a tray popped out beneath the screen with a nondescript key on it. He gingerly reached for it and stepped out of the crowded booth first.

He led the way towards the room and opened it carefully. Satisfied that his hand didn't dematerialized suddenly, he stepped in with his compass outstretched, it seemed to be pointing at the victorian looking cabinet.

"There's a gate there. It's a convenient place to make a very quick getaway if needed. Where it leads to, I have no idea. I don't fancy going through it without my suit and neither do you I should think."

He sat on a hexagonal stool by the bed and replaced his compass inside his bag. The bulge from the undelivered nutrient packs were still there, reminding Lefo painfully that he haven't made his deliveries for today yet. How he wished he had a tack service right now.

"Cubes, I forgot to make my delivery. Sector 6 colony needs this. Do you suppose we could call Wesog's guild for a quick pickup? It's safer than me delivering this alone."

His unspoken sentence would be: It's safer than me leaving you here alone. Salarishkay's death still didn't fit into all this mess. He wondered when Ruin's synchronicity will act on this matter and put everything in its right place?

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Adnan ran on, panting. He was so close to them he could almost taste the sap in the elf’s veins and the pulp that made up his vench target. He’d been surprised when the vench woman had met up with the elf in the sewers, but it did make sense as he worked it out. To have escaped notice while spying on the gate project must have taken a lot of insiders and contacts. He was glad that the elf had come. Now he could take out his frustrations with Croy on the other one.

He followed the trail to a man-hole cover and knocked it out and away only to see a gang waiting for him. They had knives and whatever else they could find. Adnan had seen worse and expected better from his targets, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“Aye, I think we got a live one ‘ere. Come and show us yer throat…”

Adnan never let him finish and instead let go of the top rungs. While the upper half of his body fell back to brace against the metal trim that held the cover, he whipped out his trusty shotgun and unloaded it’s last shell into the group of them in the front. It wasn’t enough to kill them, but then again Adnan liked to work with his hands.

When he tried to right himself, one of the two at his back plunged their knife into his shoulder. Adnan’s cry of pain was short, the snarl that followed it was much longer. The extra adrenal glands that were implanted in Adnan fired up and sent a surge of vigor through him. His own hand crushed the fingers of the punk that had stabbed him as he lifted the knife out of his shoulder and tore it out of the other person’s grasp. With the self same knife he stabbed the poor kid, tearing it out in a gutting motion.

The kid’s face went white as he tried to hold his intestines inside and filed. Mean while Adnan turned on the only other standing thug and leapt at her, tackling her to the ground. She tried to say something, but Adnan wasn’t listening when he clamped his jaws around her neck and let his fangs tear apart her throat.

Three shots rang out behind Adnan and he whirled on their source, the girls twitching corpse rising with him as her neck was still in his teeth. Behind him the other gang members were dead, killed by a man with a uniform similar to Adnan’s, but hit far less gore on it.

Adnan spat the throat out of his mouth, letting the girl fall away, and forced himself to calm down, “I see you finally got here Trent. Where’s the tack?”

“Invisible, apparently,” Trent answered in a robotic monotone, provided mostly by the metal mask he wore over the lower half of his face, “The ones capable of synchronicity are still trying to find him, but it seems that the box is protecting his location as well as it’s own. It seems our measures of protection were a little overdone in this case. Once he moves again we might get lucky and catch him on the run.”

“Fine, fine,” Adnan waved him off, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder and focus on the scent of his targets, “What about Croy? Please tell me that the gate got him.”

“No, it didn’t,” Trent replied, “He used some of that teleporting technology he was raving about last month to get there with a team in record time. It seems that agents such as ourselves will be obsolete soon. But I digress. They contained it quickly enough and lost three men to the traps left in the vench’s workshop. It was obvious that she was building something, but we won’t know more until we can sift through the debris. Cloy did have an interesting insight into the investigation.

It seems that he used to work under a vench connected with the gate project. She was cast out, something to do with internal politics, but she was on the cutting edge of their research. I believe that she is our mastermind. I have no records with her name, just the initials E. V.”

“EV huh?” Adnan stroked his chin for a second, giving up on the trail amongst the blood, “I hate it when my targets have names. Get a wire going out. I want a reward on her head. Make it big enough to notice, but not too big. No sense on handing her over to any group other than the Committee.”

“Why not use your synchronicity to find her?” Trent asked, “You are the former tack here.”

Adnan paused, looked at the two he’d killed, and looked back at Trent with a sly, bloodstained, grin, “My head’s still too full of them. I need some time to cool off. When I have I’ll set up the field. They can’t hide forever.”

__________________
I wouldn't touch it. That thing is made out of like 95% pure, unadulterated, badger-in-my-pants crazy...
-Geist Panik

My scroll

EV shook her head to his suggestion. "No, we can't use Weesog's. I think that's how he found me - I use them for my deliveries. And that man, I didn't get a good look, but he had Vench blood on his clothing. I don't think Weesog will coordinate any deliveries anymore."

She paused to acknowledge the loss of a fellow Vench and a good man.

"No tacks are safe anymore - no one is. I'm sorry about your failed delivery, I really am. But unless you deliver it yourself, you can't lead anyone else here." The question lay unasked upon the air. EV was too mixed up in things now, the hunters would never escape. The elf though, he still had a chance, it was possible nobody would realize he was connected. So would he choose his job and his safety over this ungrateful Vench who had only ever treated his socialization with silence? If so, she could not blame him. How many times had she opted for the success of her research at the expense of a colleague?

She moved over to look at the window at the street below, searching for some sign of the men following them. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing but crowds rambling through the market as usual and the roofs of a multitude of colored tents. The quiet in the room made her nerves buzz and the prototype she still held to feel heavy in her hand. Even though the windows had been mirrored for privacy, she could help but feel like something was watching them. Damn synchronicity and its way of messing up everyone's life.

She moved back from the window, into the shadows at the edge of the room. Her not eyes moved in the elf's direction, antennae providing a physical prop. "I think we have to find the source, the center of the spiral. If we keep running it will only get wider and wider and we'll never escape."

Lefo nodded his head to EV's suggestions and looked out of the window as well. What she said certainly made sense, but what if you didn't know where you were in the spiral? How could you find the center? What if there were more than one present? After a few seconds he knocked his head with his fist, they missed the most obvious starting point.

"We'll need to go to Center Piece. Everything started from there, your work, the box, Salarishkay's murder, the agents. Everything has Central and the Center Piece written all over it. I have a few contacts there that might help us," well, he thought they would help him. They're also known to be flexible with their loyalties when it comes to money.

"I'll need to go to the bank first for a hefty withdrawal however... I was saving it for another shipment, but this warrants a more dire need. I can't save any more colonies if I'm dead."

Somehow, he was hesitant to go to the door and exit the room. They're quite safe in here, but they're also inexplicably trapped as well... save for that gate that he didn't know where it leads. Comparing to a confirmed death outside that door, he was starting to like the idea of an unknown gate's destination more and more. Gate's could lead anywhere from another part of Ruin to the dark void vacuum of the Sprawl and everything in between.

"Of course... we need to figure out how to get out of here first while staying very much alive."

Lefo didn't like how the odds were stacked against them at all.

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The idea of going into Centerpiece made EV's stomach drop, but she knew as soon as he said it that they had no choice. If you were going to do something, you couldn't just do it halfway. "Yes, I think you're right. Centerpiece it will have to be."

The Vench crossed back over to the window and glanced down at the market again, looking for disturbances. If the agents were still chasing them, wouldn't they have been here by now? She could not hope that the thugs or the business of the market would have been enough to dissuade them. And yet nothing moved out of the ordinary in the streets below them and the sense of dread that always tingled along her setae was distant, no longer tinged with the horrible urgency of the chase. She watched a little longer then turned back to the elf.

"I think if we're going to leave, it will have to be soon. They appear to have stopped chasing for some reason and we need to take advantage of that while we can." The Vench glanced at the wardrobe - had it been in their collection of maps? They had gotten this far when they had been collecting data for her work in Centerpiece, but had never been able to enter the building itself. Still... "If that gate is in here, it almost definitely leads to Centerpiece. The Central engineers would not have left it in place if it did not serve a useful purpose - they're very big on gate destruction over there. Of course, the only question is where exactly."

The perfect way for a business man to manage his discreet encounters. No doubt there were gates that let out near the entrance to this building as well - no one sees you go in, no one sees you go out. That thought made EV feel significantly less secure.

"Even if we go through however, we can't just waltz around Centerpiece. The Central agents will almost certainly have put out a reward on both our heads by now. So we'll need to step carefully." How exactly they would do this, she had no idea.

"Well, into the wardrobe then?"

"I suppose now is as good a time as any other. Hopefully they wouldn't expect us to be in Center Piece so soon at this distance."

Lefo wasn't one for praying to the many gods here in Ruin, truth to be told elves were an atheistic lot, relying solely on logic and their nutrients to keep them tethered to the real world. In times like these when he had to step through the portal without a suit, he wished he had something to pray to. EV's claims were conjunctions based on logic, but it was the best thing that Lefo had heard today.

He stepped through first and found himself in a small room filled with mops and buckets lining up the walls and a small computer screen at the far end (which wasn't very) of this small room. A door was directly behind him but Lefo doubted that it led back towards the hotel in Section 4.

"A janitor's room. How quaint."

He stepped a way a few feet to give room for EV to step through. Looking at the computer screen which was closer to him now, Lefo lifted an eyebrow as he scrutinized the words:

Central Municipal Hall Janitorial Management System

"Out of the frying pan....."

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Fredrick’s silence was all the answer that Jordan needed. A few thoughts passed through Jordan’s head as he slumped against the wall. The first and foremost was that he was being hunted. It made him panic as he thought of Committee agents tearing into the elf and ending it’s life. He felt sick. In a way it was his fault the professor died.

He didn’t wait for Fredrick to prepare or get out of the way. He tore past the man, out the door, and into the city. He wasn’t about to let anyone else die because of him. He ran as fast and as far as he could through darkening streets. He kept to the alleys and out of sight of any Committee security he saw. He just wanted to lose himself in the pulse of Ruin.

When he finally ran out of breath, he slumped against wall made of a fibrous ceramic and took a moment to rest. There was really no place for him to go. He knew from personal experience that the box and it’s ward were keeping him alive. Center Piece agents would have found him long ago otherwise. He reached behind to his back pack to retrieve the box and was alarmed when his fingers touched its black finish instead of the cloth of his sack.

He withdrew the thing and placed it on the ground in front of him. He knew for a fact that he’d secured it in his bag. There was no way it could have worked it’s way out. He watched it on the ground, intensely, wondering just what kind of cursed thing he’d come across. As he watched he saw something that both turned his stomach and made him watch in awe. The box didn’t shudder or give any sign that anything was wrong, it just moved.

With either care or sluggishness, the thing extended slightly and pulled itself along the ground a few centimeters. The box was alive. Jordan thought back to all the times people had seen him with the thing and remembered that in each the box had gotten from his pack and into his hands. With a sinking feeling Jordan realized that it wanted to be opened and found. If he wouldn’t do it, it’d find someone that would.

The thing was still when he gingerly picked it up again. His mind fought the thought that it even could be alive while he turned it over. Boxes weren’t alive, even in Ruin. The box defied what he knew.

There was no question in Jordan’s mind that what he held was too important to just return or ignore. It was something dangerous enough to kill for. Jordan wasn’t about to walk into his own death. He stilled his suddenly shaking fingers as he lifted the lid and opened the box.

--

Trent waited while Adnan prepared the field. Silence was the only thing that filled the gap between the two men. Bodies still lay where they died around them and Trent was personally glad that he couldn’t smell anymore. He could only imagine what it was like for Adnan, but chided himself when he remembered that his current partner must enjoy the smell of death.

“I have them,” Adnan said simply while he looked around for signs, “They’re in Center Piece…”

__________________
I wouldn't touch it. That thing is made out of like 95% pure, unadulterated, badger-in-my-pants crazy...
-Geist Panik

My scroll

The Vench contemplated for a moment letting the elf go through alone, finding some other place to run, some hiding spot to bunk down for the moment. There was no indication that the authorities were after him - she might at least spare one person's life in all this craziness. But EV was not that noble. The idea of facing those men on her own, of spending her last days alone and helpless, were not ones she fancied. In the end, if it meant even the slightest chance of survival, she would drag the elf down with her. And that was the dirtiness of her soul. Sad that she would still metamorphize into a beautiful butterfly all the same. Life was ironic like that.

She let her analytical mind settle over all those dark thoughts, shoving them into some untouched reach. And the small room suddenly got a whole lot smaller as a giant caterpillar joined Lefo among the mops and buckets. She managed to squeeze in without anything poking her, but it was not a happy home for a Vench. The elf was squinting at a computer screen with an expression that did not bode well for either of them. If she had hands, EV would almost definitely be massaging out a building stress migraine right now.

"Where are we?" she moved closer to 'look' over the elf's shoulder.

Central Municipal Hall Janitorial Management System
Of course. Nothing was ever that easy. But at least she had her bearings now; several times in the past they had held conferences for the upper officials, while the men twirled their pencils and gleamed off anything that might advance the wealth and success of Centerpiece. It had never bothered her before, but she realized now that not once had they cared about anything beyond their precious little city - had not even stepped into Ruin to do a thing. Until now. Now something in Ruin definitely had their attention.

Outside the door behind them, moving shadows obscured the tiny crack of light. The uneven hurrying of foot steps and the squeak of cart wheels. It did not sound like the high efficiency tak-tak-tak of the most populated levels of the Municipal Hall. She looked closer at the screen. "How much feedback to do you think this thing has into the central computer system? We should be able to pull up some kind of diversion."

Nothing big, just enough to draw a bunch of janitors and free the hallways outside. EV attempted to survey their confinement. "Think you can scrunge up a uniform from all this?"