Elise shook her head and threw her medical bag up on a one-leggéd table beside a guard post chair on the balcony so Tasìa could take a seat and wait her turn as a patient.

  The bounty hunter glanced at the entrance to the pumphouse, where pillars of smoke were rolling out into the cavern above.

  "Damn, look at that rolling smoke. Surprised the two of you didn't choke to death on the fumes."

  Annebél shrugged, then spat a black dust loogie into the abyss below.

  "I'm too pumped up from the fight to even notice."

  Tasìa beamed proudly at her friend.

  "She beat an Al-Majhul grunt to death inside his Kevlar body armor. I heard dozens upon dozens of bones crunching."

  Elise, as she crouched back to tend to Andes, whom she was prepping for movement, gave Tasìa a quizzical look.

  "I take it you really don't like the Al-Majhul, do you?"

  Tasìa crossed her arms in an emphatic fashion and eyed Elise back.

  "No. And neither should you. They are evidently part of the same sinister brood that Fiona is taking part in."

  Elise nodded.

  "True. The Dimittis Cult is as you describe, but let's talk about this personal matter of yours. The Al-Majhul, they are Harvested, like yourself."

  "Are you playing the part of a devil's advocate, Se?ora Luna Claro?"

  The three brothers listened in, as did two of Elise's operators, whom stood guard behind her. Andu Caza was one of them, and he gave Tasìa a wink.

  It was his sister whom Tasìa had referenced as sinister. He let her know it was nothing personal.

  Glancing about for anyone who she may have overlooked, Tasìa wondered where Sachmilli was.

  "No," Elise answered, drawing Tasìa back to their conversation. "I have other motives. I feel your enmity for them is drawn from your instincts and intuition, and perhaps, more concerning to me... it may be programmed into you, and it leads you to hunt them."

  Was Elise aware that every encounter she has had with the Al-Majhul has resulted in one hundred percent casualty for them? It did indeed seem the case.

  "If that be the case," Tasìa answered, "then someone played the long game when they stitched together my brain. Until a month ago, I had no idea the Al-Majhul even existed."

  "They would have restitched your gut if it were true. Ultra-style operations of that nature literally rewire the neurological structures of the gut."

  Elise then shrugged with a stiff feign of casualness. It was the gesture of a battle commander who put all matters to the side for unit cohesion.

  "Forget I brought it up," she said before turning to Annebél with a much more natural, radiant smile. "How is that little cutie of yours?"

  Annebél's eyes widened as she clearly wasn't expecting the question. Her eyes darted to Tasìa and down at her own boots.

  Elise rose up.

  "If anything has happened to dear little Villon, I will rip the Earth off of its very axis!"

  In a cool, low voice, Annebél answered, "No. It is very complicated."

  "Complicated matters are my specialty. Offered to you at no charge."

  Annebél nodded, "I appreciate that, but his father is the biggest player in Asunción, and it is beyond even his means to make right at the present. Look, current matters must take precedence. We can talk about it later."

  Elise stretched out neck tensions. She didn't want to set the matter aside.

  "Okay. I know by watching Tasìa's knees bouncing and her boots tapping, I've made things awkward. Sorry. But can I ask you to keep me in the loop when you do get a chance to deal with it?"

  "Sure. Where is Sachmilli? I was expecting him to escort you down here and not let you out of his sights."

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

  Elise laughed at a private joke.

  "He is helping my guys to carry some equipment down for Operation Mel. We are not going through there." Elise pointed to the pumphouse. "Fiona is running an extraordinary amount of power in the setup she has back there. I don't know if it is for a special project, a defensive parameter, or the energy is being used to run medical equipment to save her from dying, but whatever is going on in there, we'll just avoid it altogether and repel down by rope."

  Tasìa looked down in the abyss that glowed dully by means of floating ascospores. She drew a bead by the laser sight on her PA pointed into the abyss out of curiosity.

  And she gave out a whistle.

  "Eight hundred and seventy meters. Good luck with that rope. Unfortunately, I have no choice but to confront the daemon bottled up in there."

  "I have someone, a friend of yours, who can help you with that while we secure Mel."

  Tasìa stared back crossly.

  "That bitch is no friend of mine."

  Elise shook her head.

  "She was only following my orders when she misled you. Why are you not angry at me?"

  Tasìa didn't let up on the anger.

  "Yeah. Just what was that about?"

  "You were in Asunción to regroup with León Ballano. We were in the city to nab him, isolate him from the war criminals, and cut him a deal towards reintegration into society."

  Tasìa nodded and relaxed her demeanor.

  "That answer perfectly encapsulates why I am not truly angry with you. You were absolutely one hundred percent true and faithful to your own nature. I accept you on your terms. But Felicité has been a cagey, fake-ass, poser bitch in all of these matters from the get-go."

  Elise grimaced and shook her head. She nodded to Caza, and he and his companion knelt to pick up the brancarda-style field stretcher. When he threw her a googly-eyed glance, Tasìa realized he was the same operator that she shot eighteen hours earlier.

  Elise continued as she stood up and scrutinized Tasìa's broken nose.

  "There is something you need to understand, and I'm laying it all out there on the line, security clearances be damned. Felicité is a creature without agency. She has to be extorted, coerced, and plied into doing anything beyond the needs of immediate gratification.

  "The person in there was murdered, in the literal sense of that word, a long time ago. A decade after her death, her memories were reconstructed from her preserved brain specimen to an artificial brain made up of fungi made from a species meant to be resistant to ascospores.

  "She is a failed project to recreate the world's greatest hacker and unleash her against the nanospore entities. Far from being resistant, the entities integrated her within days, and the incident where that occurred provided the Salvage a cover story that declared her a terrorist to be thrown into the IMCQ.

  "I know this, Tasìa, because we were the team sent to retrieve her. The wildest part of it all, though we succeeded, apprehended, and we got her to that hellish Ward Ocho, is that when we returned fifteen months later for this current assignment, I expected her to remember me as we were driving away from the IMCQ. She didn't recognize either Caza or me, though we spent days together after her capture."

  As Elise spoke, her hands remained busy cleaning up the broken nose wound, stuffing Tasìa's nostrils with an antiseptic gauze designed for ease of breathing. She applied a needle filled with a substance designed to prevent swelling and to retain the nose's structural memory when Elise scheduled to reset it in two days time. She explained the shot's purpose and that she had signaled Caza to return with a spare combat helmet so Tasìa wouldn't accidentally bump her nose on her next excursion before the bounty hunter returned to the story.

  "So I analyzed Felicité's cochlear suppressor device for its diagnostic feedback and discovered something previously unknown. Her memory periodically resets, but not all of it at once. It's why she hounds you about the Human Rights Commission business. It comes from an unresolved matter in her life from before she died.

  "We've tried to turn these circumstances to our advantage for our operation against Kutuzov, but it's proven pretty damn difficult to exploit, so for you to be angry with her or consider her a poser is a fruitless endeavor. You might as well get mad at that pretty gun you have there for being off tuned for all the good it does."

  Tasìa hesitated a moment before speaking; suddenly things were falling into place.

  "This is related to my current assignment of saving Demona Helo?ste, isn't it?"

  Elise nodded in confirmation.

  "Darling, it sure as hell is in more ways than one."

  Tasìa's voice grew a bit shrill.

  "And the Great Fuck-Up, as well?"

  "Keep going, Tasìa; you are on a winning streak."

  Tasìa shook her head.

  "Nah. I'm going to start bleeding out of my ears from brain scramble at this rate. Hey, thanks for the offer, but you keep whatever that thing is. I'll figure out how to take the daemon down without her."

  Elise paused for a moment with a tilt of her head towards the top balcony entrance.

  "You assume Felicité is the friend of yours I meant. She isn't."

  Tasìa turned around. Beside Sachmilli and five of Elise's operatives stood Sinclair, who bit her bottom lip through a wan smile as she waved to Tasìa.

  Tasìa's stomach fluttered with figurative butterflies as she yelled out.

  "Jump across; I'll catch you."

  Sinclair shook her head and yelled back over the abyss.

  "I don't see the feasibility of success. I think I'll come to you this way."

  Sinclair joined in the march on the long stretch of walkways with Sachmilli and the operators.

  Elise was finished with treating Tasìa's broken nose and went to another assignment of setting up her gear along the side of the balcony facing the cavern.

  Tasìa now noticed a set of exploitable ledges that could be secured for the planned expedition.

  Annebél leaned by her side, touching her arm to arm.

  Tasìa spoke up.

  "For what it is worth, I noticed the Cesarean scar the first time I saw you naked. Totally naked, I mean. Never asked because it was none of my damn business, not because I am a self-involved little shit."

  Annebél chuckled.

  "I know, and I already factored that in."

  But Annebél still chuckled on.

  "What?" Tasìa asked.

  "Well, you did ask if I was pregnant."

  Tasìa winced. "Different circumstance. I wasn't going to let you back me in that fight if someone put a baby in you."

  Annebél nodded, slowly.

  "So, the opposite of a self-involved little shit?"

  Tasìa leaned against the rail behind them to rest her back, and lifted her chin to affirm.

  "Yup."