I stuck the pistol and holster both in a jacket pocket. It was just a cased-loading Thayer ten-milly, steel-framed and hammer-fired, but I wasn’t going to say no to a backup-backup. Besides, sometimes it was faster to do the old ‘Quarry reload’- just pulling out your other heater.

My new rifle was more interesting. Svelte and plain in appearance, but it had that carefully engineered simplicity to it that just screamed quality. That was confirmed by a look at the rollmark on the barrel: it was an Amsidyne, probably worth what I made in a year even at my new ‘salary,’ and that didn’t include the glass. There were no other markings except the serial code and a number stenciled on the thumbhole stock- probably a Precision Outcomes rack number.

I’d never handled a bolt-action before, but it seemed to work just like the ones in video games. It held five rounds and was chambered in some terrifying .400-caliber magnum whose cartridges were as long as my hand. The scope, luckily, was still usable without a direct nerve interface. The red- illuminated reticle bristled with range-ladders and lead-compensating marks and all sorts of stuff I’d found too boring to learn about on the Net. And look where being lazy gets you, I thought ruefully. The only other thing I noticed was that if I hit a small button on the gun’s grip the reticle changed. A little speeding-bullet icon appeared in the corner and if I was reading the markings right, all the distances moved farther out. It must have had some kind of EM assist to make a shot extra-spicy, just like the Ultima revolver I’d owned for maybe a week tops. Even considering that my marksmanship was, shall we say, best suited to shotguns and beltfeds, I figured it might be useful.

I searched the rest of the shack and the sniper’s body but found nothing except for a few reloads for both guns, a radio which I didn’t touch for fear it was chipped, and a hydration pack with some ration bars in the pockets. That I did take, eagerly snarfing one of the ration bars down in maybe one and a half bites. They were the good mil-grade ones, stuffed with calories and nutrients rather than the subsistence-grade arpaste the phrase brought to mind in D-block. It tasted like vaguely fruity chalk but it was filling. I saved the rest for Arc and headed out with the rifle slung on my back.

I took the stairs this time, though I still stepped carefully over the tripwire or camera or whatever it was at the bottom. It didn’t explode or set off an alarm which was good enough for me. There was still plenty industrial noise coming from the other end of the roof so I risked running back to Arc and Alvar. She raised an eyebrow at my fresh equipment.

“See? All good,” I answered the implied question. “Maybe you would’ve done it faster, but we’re fine. You hungry?”

That got a rise out of her. “Ravenous.”

“Here.” I gave her a ration bar and she devoured it almost as quickly as I had, then pulled the hydration bladder out of my hand and swigged heavily from the hose. When she was done I had a drink too. Alvar just looked up at us with a forlorn look on his face. I glanced at Arc and she shrugged. I might have been a murderer but I wasn’t heartless. “Fine, fine, quit it with the kitten eyes. You can have some too.”

“Shanksh,” he mumbled around a mouthful of the bar I’d handed him. “You really killed that sniper?”

“Nah, I just bought this stuff off him. Turns out I’m higher on the pay scale than I thought.” He scowled back, but I figured he’d gotten the kind of answer that question deserved.

“Perhaps we can continue showing off our sparkling wit inside?” suggested Arc, tone dry. “I’ll take point.”

“Right. Go ahead. Come on, tva, you’re in the middle.” Alvar obeyed silently, still trying to swallow the dense ration bar. Following Arc’s lead, we ran from our cooling unit to one in the next row up. From there we could see a more open area in the middle of the roof. Rows of angled skylights marched across it, faintly lit from below and rusted open to varying degrees. I looked around for more snipers but didn’t see any nearby. There might have been a rifle across the way, sticking out of a twin to the shack I’d cleared out over here, but the angle was wrong for anyone in there to see us.

“Alright, Alvar. Can we get in through one of those skylights?” I asked.

He only thought about it a little. “Most of them, they’re over the main floor, so like a fifty-foot drop. The ones over there, though-“ he points to the rear side of the building- “you might be able to drop onto one of the catwalks near the ceiling. If you don’t pull it down the second you land on it- ‘cause they’re really rusty, I mean, not because-“

I laughed quietly. “I’m not light, man. It is not news to me. But won’t we be out in the open if we do that?” Arc leaned in beside me to listen.

“Maybe not if you-“

“If we,” Arc reminded him.

He grimaced. “If we go in at the right spot, there’s a closet we can duck into until it’s…not safe, I guess, but until we’re not gonna get shot.”

“Show us where, then- no, wait,” I interrupted myself. “What about the perimeter?”

“We…we ought to still be outside it. Yeah.” He nodded as if to confirm it to himself, which didn’t fill me with confidence. “We- Macomb I mean- we don’t have enough people or enough geowire to fence the whole building. It’s just around the work area, really.”

Seemed hinky to me. “Is that normal, half-assing it like that?”

“This is only my second contract, but no. I don’t think so. I heard one of the stripes- Sergeant Ortiz, I mean, the one you, um-“ He waved a hand vaguely at himself. “I heard her talking with another officer. When we pulled our supplies to come down here, they had Depot give us a bunch of scraps and cutoff G-wire rather than a whole spool. The techs were bitching about all the splices while they strung it.”

“They didn’t want a paper trail,” I guessed. “Or less of one.” Alvar shrugged helplessly.

“It sounds as if these ‘Administrators’ don’t even want their fellows finding out about this,” Arc added. That wasn’t too surprising. I already knew Admin wasn’t a monolith, given that the Montesquieu had helped the Bones fuck over the Cromwells. Nothing could ever be simple.

“Whatever the reason, I’m not gonna say no to a free advantage. Where would we go after we drop in?” I asked Alvar.

“So, we’ll end up over the medbay, which means, uh, which means we could get to the ground floor, go around back through these old office hallways and then cross the perimeter near the barracks. Only one guard there, most of the time.”

“Okay. And would we be close to the elevator, then?” My chest twinged, as if to remind me how in over our heads we were.

“You’d still have to go by the lab. But…” He looked unsure if he wanted to continue.

“Go on,” said Arc from her spot crouched in the shadows. “We’ll all be worse off if you don’t tell the truth.”

He glanced at her and swallowed. “Those ID’s won’t be enough to turn it on. Lieutenant Moha can, and probably the scientists and other ivans, but not us.”

“What, they don’t trust you to stick around out of a sense of duty?”

That actually got a little laugh out of him. “They don’t pay us enough for that.”

“I suppose we’re visiting the lab, then,” Arc lamented, rubbing her forehead. I was with her, at least mostly. If we could have gone right to the elevator it would have been the smart thing to do- we were outnumbered and outgunned. But I thought Alvar was probably telling the truth about it being locked down. It made sense, and why would he want us around longer? Besides, I still wanted to find out exactly what the hell Admin was doing down here. The Sculptor and the mysterious ability she’d granted me, Martyred King Ironstride, Admin and the Cromwells and their interest in artifacts…it was all connected and even wondering about how made a nervous tightness form in my chest.

I sighed. “Whether we want to or not, yeah. Ready, Arc?”

She snorted quietly. “To leave? Yes.” She zipped out of cover, moving hunched and silent. I gave Alvar a little shove forward and followed. I felt terrifyingly exposed out here. Though the light of the fires was fitful and getting dimmer as they were extinguished it was still more illumination than I liked. Odds were nobody would notice our shifting shadows amongst many but it still made my neck prickle, like standing in the middle of a road.

Our prisoner made a beeline for the leftmost row of skylights. He hemmed and hawed for a moment then chose one with its wide pane rusted open. I hoped he wasn’t entirely guessing. Without being asked- or asking- Arc crouched beside it, looked in, and dropped through. I didn’t hear a sound from below; maybe if she translated just a bit she wouldn’t hit hard enough to make one. Or, I thought as I stuck my head in, she went right through the catwalk. But no, she was standing on a walkway of rusty metal grating and frantically waving me down.

I sat up enough to get Alvar going ahead of me then joined him. He was a better acrobat than he was a soldier: his perfect tuck-and-roll barely seemed to have weight, while my much heavier fall physically shook the catwalk. We all froze, waiting for someone to notice the noise or for the whole thing to peel off the wall and kill us. Other than a few flakes of damp rust in my hair nothing happened.

“The closet, Alvar,” Arc reminded him as I rose. I saw slimy, rust- streaked concrete walls and light somewhere way below, but I was more focused on hiding right now.

He frantically looked around. “There! Come on.” He scrambled past me, hunching low despite the railing being entirely see-through. I felt myself doing it too and supposed our monkey brains still interpreted the situation as hiding in a shrub or something.

Alvar’d done well. We quickly came to a rusty metal door with a chain looped through the hole where the knob used to be. Al fumbled with it for a second before I reached over and jerked it out of its sticky frame. I clunked the stock of the sniper rifle against the doorframe and almost caused a traffic jam, but Arc got it unstuck and we piled in. She quickly pulled the door shut behind us.

I looked around, half-expecting there to be someone in here already, but luckily for us- and that potential merc- we were alone. A caged LED bank bolted to the ceiling provided flickering, sickly-blue illumination. We shared the cramped space with several sheet-metal shelves that had been shoved to the back. The torn-up tile floor was scattered with cigarette butts, mini liquor bottles, foil-plastic pill wrappers, spent charges for those stupid net-connected nic-puffers they loved up town- ‘only 3 nits a drag on the premium plan!’- and even a few empty hush aerosols. Not the first substance I’d mix with automatic weapons, personally. And this stuff wasn’t dusty and rusty, it was all recent. The tableau smelled like smoke, BO and mildew. Arc stood near the wall with her feet oddly close together, like she was trying to shrink away from the clutter. Combined with the dissatisfied look on her face it made her look like a cat on a too-small windowsill.

“I’m guessing this is the unofficial break room,” I said, dragging a boot through the garbage.

“Pretty much. Not like this is the most exciting contract.” Alvar leaned against one wall, avoiding a damp spot. “If you’ve been in long enough and you’re friends with the stripes, nobody gives a shit. But if I got caught stoned on guard rotation I’d get pay-docked and stuck in a hearing.”

Yeah, that must really suck. It was tough not to say it aloud, or something just as sarcastic. He kept going back and forth between resenting us and trying to have a conversation. Maybe he was just lonely. “At this point, Allie, you might as well smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” He and Arc both raised an eyebrow at the nickname but I kept going. “Which way to these offices?”

“Same way we were going,” he said quickly. “We shouldn’t run into anyone back there. Outside the perimeter so it’s not really patrolled.”

Arc raised an elegant eyebrow. “If that’s the case, how do you know the way?”

Alvar shot her a resentful look, which slid off like rain on a poly-treated jacket. “I’m the new guy and everyone thinks I’m- well, they think I’m a deek, a fuckup. So if they don’t need me for anything they tell me to fuck off before I get in the way, and I ended up exploring to pass the time.”

“I see,” Arc said tonelessly.

I decided I was best off not commenting. “Just get us to the perimeter, Alvar. I trust you.”

Based on the look he gave me my words didn’t have much encouraging effect, but he got up off the wall. “Follow me, then.” This time he managed to get the door open, creeping out with an impressively quiet gait considering he was wearing combat boots. Some of his training had stuck, at least. I followed and Arc brought up the rear, gently shutting the door behind us.

Still in a low crouch, Alvar peered down from the catwalk and I joined him. Maybe four stories below was an empty concrete-floored room, now serving as an improvised medical bay. Rust stains and snapped bolts marked the spots where machinery once sat. There was a row of low cots against the wall opposite ours, Only one was in use, occupied by a lanky guy dressed in civvies who was watching something on his slab with his feet kicked up.

“Tomassino, you fucking shirker,” Alvar muttered to himself. “How do you break your toe in carbon-shelled boots?”

“Alvar…” I murmured.

“Yeah. This way.” He turned and took us further down the catwalk, putting each foot down with the exaggerated care of a cat on a crowded table. The walkway didn’t fall so I guess it worked. It led through a door in a sheet-metal wall (this one rusted open, luckily). The sectioned-off space beyond was small and dim, higher than it was long or wide. Luckily, a lot of that space was taken up by a set of metal-grate stairs. We crept down the flights as quietly as possible. The flurries of rust our shoes shook loose didn’t make enough noise for anyone to investigate. The work-noise from the roof was nearly inaudible now.

I was happy to be back on solid ground. Being my size was good for a lot of things, but traipsing around on rickety gantries wasn’t one of them. Alvar led Arc and I through another man-door on the opposite wall, or at least the remains of one. It had been made of cheap fiberboard and not much was left except the hinges. He flicked on a red-lensed light as we entered; these halls were unlit. Why would the Cromwells bother if they weren’t using them?

This part of the factory reminded me of the abandoned industrial park I’d rescued Walker from that one night. Patchy industrial low-pile on the floor, rotten drop ceiling, fiberboard doors into dust-choked offices, monochrome walls streaked with fungus-blooms that looked like blood spatter in Alvar’s red light. Our prisoner seemed to hunch down a little under the weight of dark and time. Arc was silent behind me but I could feel she was right off my shoulder.

Alvar stepped over a heap of fallen ceiling tiles gummed into a mass by furry gray mold, then through the open door at the end of the hall. The space beyond was larger, dimly illuminated by Allie’s dull red light. It was a conference room or something, dominated by a big table in the center. Once-fancy swivel chairs surrounded it, and in them-

I half-jumped, my heart jolted by that sudden shock you get when you try to put your foot down on a step that wasn’t there, and my hand snapped towards my gun. Human skeletons slouched lazily in several of the chairs, graying bones glued together by dark creepers of slime mold. The black tendrils webbed their ribcages and wound in and out of their toothy grins. Their eye-sockets were stark pits under Alvar’s crimson light.

“What the fuck, Allie?” I hissed.

“S-sorry! I forgot! I mean, I’ve been back here a few times now…”

I managed to pry my hand off the butt of the coilgun, feeling embarrassed. I wasn’t going to waste expensive ammo blasting old bones to dust, but my heart was still hammering. Even Arc had gotten a shock: Though the set of her mouth hadn’t changed, her eyes were wide as they roved the room. It would have looked funny if I wasn’t freaked out too.

“Hell of a thing to ‘forget,’” I said, voice still shaky. “Who the hell are they?”

A shrug. “They were here before I was. Maybe they were here when the place fell.”

Somehow I hadn’t thought about that. It was miraculous how intact the works were, honestly. Anyone inside probably would have lived as long as they didn’t fall and break their neck during the quake. But what then? They’d be stuck on this little ledge, with nigh-unclimbable cliffs to either side. No running water. No food but what they’d brought for lunch. I noticed a boxcutter on the table in front of one bony figure, its blade and handle stained almost black in the red light. Arc was still beside me, looking into the corner. Two more skeletons sat there, tangled with each other, almost indistinguishable beneath a net of mold. I awkwardly patted her on the shoulder to try and hide the fact that I was completely creeped out myself. She jumped at the contact, but gave me a thankful nod and brushed a lock of dark hair out of her face.

“W-well, holy shit, Alvar. There any more horrorshows or are we done? Maybe a torture room next, or a leaky reactor-“

“No, this is it!” He bit his lip. “Or, there is a leaky reactor, actually, but we don’t have to go anywhere near it, so…”

“…sure, man. Just keep going,” I sighed.

“Please.” added Arc.

Alvar turned and took us to another door at the other end of the conference room. Black mold pulled at my boots as I stepped over the bones, and Arc spat as old cobwebs trailed into her face. Behind the door were more decrepit office hallways. Cast by the low, jittering beam of Alvar’s flashlight, every shadow looked solid and infinitely deep. We went through a rusty steel door at the end of the corridor and entered some kind of parts room.

“Watch out for all the crap on the floor,” whispered Alvar. Once the room had been full of sheet-metal cabinets lined with parts drawers, but now most of them were tumbled out of their tracks and heaped on the floor. I had to keep a close hold on the sniper rifle to keep it from knocking into things. We high-stepped around the mess, rasps of rust sounding when my calf nudged a pile. It was the one with the giant bruise on it, of course.

There was a hole knocked in the cinderblock wall at the other end of the room and Albar stopped us a moment. “This isn’t the perimeter, but we might run into people past here.”

I glanced at Arc and she nodded slightly. We knew what would happen if he was right. We knew what we’d have to do. “Okay, Alvar. You stay in the lead.” He swallowed but nodded back. If we did run straight into his coworkers he’d at least buy us a moment of confusion.

He took us through the hole, then a tight dogleg in the hallway past it. Around the second corner there was enough illumination from the caged bulbs on ceiling he turned off his flashlight. It was less than every other one lit, so it was still pretty dim. I could still see we were back in the more industrial part of things, the concrete floor and thickly-painted cinderblock walls reminding me of prisons I’d seen on the holo. Of course if someone in D-block got carced they’d more likely be stuck in iso anyway, waiting out their court date in an eight-foot plastic cube holding nothing but a cot and a toiletry unit. I’d heard horror stories from people who’d been there.

Still on point, Alvar crept slow and quiet down the hall. There wasn’t any cover to hide behind if someone did show up. His uniform showed he was meant to be here, of course, but Arc and I kind of spoiled things. Not like I’d have been able to steal a set of fatigues my size anyway. We rounded a corner and suddenly he stopped, throwing up a hand. Arc and I stacked up behind him and a moment later, I heard it too.

There was a cracked-open door on the near wall, the opening facing towards us. Slightly brighter light within made a pale wedge on the floor, and coming from inside were sounds of movement. Rustling cloth, a slight creak of furniture, muffled words, a quick intake of breath…huh. What could that be? Despite the situation I had to keep down a laugh. Still signaling us to keep back, Alvar quickly leaned his head around the door frame. The sour look he wore when he jerked it back actually did make me snort, and Arc raised a questioning eyebrow.

Someone inside the room spoke, making us all twitch. “Hurry the hell up before someone comes looking us,” a woman murmured. Obviously not words meant for us. There was the very distinct sound of a military belt’s cam buckle releasing. “You ought to know what to do by now,” she teased. There was more rustling and creaking from inside, and an almost comical look of realization widened Arc’s eyes yet again.

Perfect. What were the fucking odds? I had to try even harder not to laugh- if my life was a holo, it would be a dark comedy. Alvar rolled his eyes, then quickly lunged across the door’s opening. No change from within. I wondered if he was pissed they were shirking or just jealous he wasn’t getting any. Me and Arc followed on his heels, but whoever was in there must have been too busy to look for infiltrators. We kept on down the hallway without further incident. It opened up onto a cavernous space that might have been a shipping and recieving area once. The ceiling must have gone all the way to the roof, so high it was lost in the dark except for a few LED panels that were obviously new additions. Much of the floor was occupied by huge presses, mills, and more esoteric manufacturing equipment. They were crammed together in haphazard rows, and I guessed they’d been moved from deeper within to make space for Admin’s experiments. Cromwell’s, not Admin’s, I thought. Arc’s theory had a lot going for it.

The main attraction, though, was a big open bay door leading deeper into the factory. Strung across its upper edge was a length of copper-spiral cable, probably the geo-wire that set Macomb’s exclusive perimeter. It continued along the wall to either side, held in place with chem-bond clips. A couple lights on stands illuminated the door’s immediate threshold, along with the solitary guard. A lanky guy with a shaved head, he sat on an empty wire spool, playing on his slab. Next to him a ruggedized laptop perched on a rotten wooden crate.

That was all the look I got before Alvar practically shoved us behind a monstrous old lathe taller than I was. “That’s it. That’s the perimeter,” he whispered.

“And these will get us past it?” asked Arc just as quietly, pulling the stolen Macomb IDs out of her pocket.

He squinted at them. “Yeah, yeah, but…what about Galley?”

“The sentry?” I asked.

“Yeah-“

“I mean, there’s always the traditional method.” Alvar paled when I said that. “But it’ll get us caught for sure if his biometrics go dark, so that’s the last resort. We gotta get him out of the way.”

“But how are you-“ Alvar cut off when he saw Arc and I’s expressions. “No way.”

“It’s gotta be you, Allie.” I met his eyes. “He sure as hell won’t let me or Arc just walk up and ask.”

“And you think that’ll work if I do it?” he hissed.

“No. Come up with something.”

“Oh. Right. Sure.” He looked to the sky, as if waiting for the Kings to help. “Just come up with something, I should’ve thought of that. While you just sit here.”

Arc was unmoved. “Do we look like actors to you? This is your organization. You’ll do a better job gulling him than either of us would.”

Alvar squeezed his eyes shut for several seconds. He was either calming himself down or he was about to explode and get all three of us killed. Luckily it was the former. “Ugh. Fine. I’ll t-try. But I have to at least look armed. It’ll be weird enough I don’t have a rifle.”

I grabbed the sniper’s pistol off my belt. It was a chunky steel-framed thing, perfect for a technophobe like the previous owner must have been. I dropped the mag, racked out the round in the chamber, decocked it and passed it to our hostage. Or maybe he was an ‘asset.’ That sounded a lot more tactical.

“You aren’t even gonna give me one shot?” he complained as he clipped on the holster.

“Why would I do that?”

“To- to like, let me prove my loyalty, you know? ‘Cause I could have shot you but I didn’t!”

He wilted before the flat look on my face. “How ‘bout I don’t give you the chance to shoot us at all, tva?”

“It would be a meaningless exercise anyway,” added Arc. “Not shooting one of us would merely demonstrate that you’re smart enough to recall the other exists. It would prove not trust but cunning, which would in fact make you less trustworthy.”

“Okay, fine, fine, it was a dumb idea,” Alvar sulked. “No need to recite your friggin’ dissertation…”

I very nearly said something about my degree in ass-kicking from the school of the streets, but this wasn’t exactly the time. “You asked for a gun and you got a gun. You ready now?”

“Yeah…”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be watching.”

That almost got a laugh out of him. “Don’t worry…yeah, sure.” With that he walked out from behind the lathe. I climbed up onto a junction box on the back and was just able to see over the huge machine’s top as Alvar broke into a run, sprinting towards the perimeter. The fuck is he doing? He was going to make the guard more suspicious, not less! I reached for my coilgun, just in case.

“Yo! Galley!” he called in a convincingly distressed voice.

The guard jumped and almost fumbled his slab. “Huh? Wha? The fuck’s your problem, A’Hern?”

“Problem- hah-“ Alvar feigned panting, like he’d run all the way here from outside. “Problem is that flyer we shot down was cover! They stealthed in mercs by the garage! We need-

“Bwhat?” Galley almost fell out of his chair, snatching at the rifle that leaned against the crate he’d been using as a table.

“For real! They want everyone out front now! Comms are compromised!”

Now Galley squinted. “You sure, A’Hern? Why haven’t I-“

“It was the Ennie that sent me back here, Galley, a fucking Mask! Are you not gonna listen when one of them gives an order? Because I sure as fuck am!” Alvar did a good job of sounding freaked out, though he probably wasn’t acting.

“Stride’s iron dick, okay, okay!” Galley finally got up and checked his rifle’s chamber. “What about you?”

“I gotta tell the lieutenant, man! And look at me! The fuckers already shot my rifle off me.” Alvar waved his empty hands.

Galley snorted and shook his head. “You really are a boot among boots, A’Hern. You got issued a sling for a reason! Fuckin’ virchies, I swear…go on, then.” He waved Alvar through the perimeter, briefly squinting at the laptop as he went through. “You gonna get someone else to mind this gate?”

“Yeah, Galley, I will.” Alvar nodded rapidly.

“You better.” The sentry started to jog off, then turned. “Oh! A’hern, your-“

“Yeah!?” Alvar twitched so hard his feet almost left the ground.

“Your biometric implant didn’t come up.” Behind the lathe, I winced. Should we not have cut it out? But Galley kept going. “Fuckin’ lowest-bidder Kayne junk. Get the doc to check it out when you get a chance, yeah?”

“S-sure. You got it. I really gotta go, Galley-“

“Yeah, yeah, the lieutenant, the Ennies. Kingsdamn Vitroix dick-swingers…” Still muttering, Galley finally jogged off, heading for a door on the opposite side of the room. I let out a breath and Arc slowly shook her head. We heard the door slam shut and left our hiding spot even as Alvar frantically waved us out.

“Come on, come on!” he stage-whispered.

I took the ID Arc offered me- meant for one PFC Dorthia Kamal- and followed her to the perimeter. Clenching her own stolen badge in one hand, she stepped beneath the wire. I tensed- and nothing happened.

Alvar squinted at the laptop, which Galley had left behind. “It didn’t pick up your biometrics, same as me, but you’re good,” he said with palpable relief. I followed her through only to freeze as Al’s expression changed.

“No, no, you’re fine! I think,” he said. “It’s just bitching that your life signs are weird. Wants me to make sure you aren’t a dead body. Maybe you have a slow heart rate or something.”

“Maybe.” That tension in my chest returned. It had to be something to do with my bones. “Well, we’re in. You ever consider an acting career, Allie? That was a lot better than I would’ve done.”

Arc nodded sagely. “Yes, not bad at all. I wouldn’t have been convinced, of course, but anyone else? Putty in your hands.”

“Really? I mean, I used to stream on the net, but…” He actually looked abashed for a moment before he seemed to remember his situation. “Thanks. Whatever. The lab’s this way.” He turned to head deeper into the works. Arc and I followed.