Fiona parked the van by a worn gravel road above the motel. She jumped out and studied the view with a conventional pair of binoculars.

  What are we looking for?

  She winced as she took in the view. The motel sprawled beneath an orange neon sign that read:

  Segunda Estrella.

  Todas las vacantes del mundo.

  'Second Star. All the vacancies in the world.' A phrase many hoteliers in the Quadra added to their displays after the Spore Invasion, intending humorous aplomb in the aftermath.

  No doubt put in place all those years ago, the sign stayed immaculate curtesy of scrubdrones.

  She searched for the less populated and less tended wings of the sprawling motel. Her gut told her there was a story here hiding in plain sight.

  What would be out of place in this dump?

  The decommissioned eighteen-wheeler caught her attention; its long double flatbed had large white, gold, and amber Christmas bulbs strewn above glass display cases that served the purpose of an open-air gun market.

  Even this late, clientele rummaged through the goods, placing items back haphazardly. Vibrational attunement pads built into the cabinets tidied up the discards. The guns were put back where they belonged when clients moved on to the next weapon to catch their eyes.

  Occasionally, shots popped off from the strip of land converted into a firing range behind the eighteen-wheeler.

  This density of nightlife activity was not unusual.

  The nature of the Quadra turned many residents into nocturnal beings who slept during the day under parasols while wearing shades covering their eyes. The nanospores could not invade dreams in full sunlight.

  The motel scene hummed along. A shop on the second story catered to North American-style cuisine. Tacos, hamburgers, and hotdogs.

  It made Fiona hungry, and she certainly had time for a late-night meal before the meet-up if her surveillance turned up nothing.

  Fiona trained the binoculars on the damaged window, only to become alarmed when she saw splotches of green forensic gelente sealing the hole. The substance preserved the microscopic patterns of the tear. Fiona expected to see the damaged window boarded up while a new glass windowpane was on order, not this.

  The doorknob was overlaid with a cover-latch common to investigations as well.

  Lover's quarrel, my ass! What is Rubin not telling me?

  When she finally reached the limit of what her eyeballs could tell her, Fiona turned back to her van and unlocked the fasteners to the Ladybug drone.

  She eyed the repairs she made after the Nightwing had clawed into the drone's carapace and plucked out a navigation-guide sensor.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "Bastard Mel," Fiona growled as she rubbed her thumb against Ladybug's surface, where she had filled in the deep gashes with silicone putty and then painted over it.

  With the drone already prepped, she hit the auto-start on her controller. Ladybug swooped up and hovered a few meters above the van.

  Fiona slipped back into the van and slid on a pair of IR specs. She now had a 3D panoramic view from Ladybug's perspective.

  The new rendezvous would occur in a room in a back wing of the motel that wasn't part of the nightlife stretching from the decommissioned eighteen-wheeler to a Quick Mart just off of the long motel parking lot spread and off-ramped via a connector road.

  Fiona couldn't see the new rendezvous from the vantage point of the high gravel strip, so she ordered Ladybug to circle to the back, skirting the lot to avoid attention.

  The quieter side of the motel was as she expected. The wings of Motel Segunda Estrella formed a T-shape. The middle wing was built between a much smaller parking lot on the far end and a swimming pool that was closed at that late hour.

  As expected, dim LED lights kept the ground level visible for all who needed to tread, as did one long, gangly woman wearing only a t-shirt, boxer bottoms, and flip-flops carrying trash to a bin.

  Fiona felt lured into the normalcy of it all; her gut nudged her—Don't be!

  She flipped on the drone's ultraviolet read mode. Strobe lights from the rooftop swayed back and forth, nullifying the life force of nanospores that floated in range.

  Their deaths gave off blue sparks that at times dissolved into lovely sheets of misty blue rain. It was a pregnant, humid night, and the breeze was choppy—brisk but then suddenly dropping off into still cooler air.

  For the Quadra, the weather pattern, a condition created by nanospore disturbances, was also a normal occurrence.

  Just at the moment Fiona started to doubt her gut intuition, the UV sensor picked up the flow of flapping gray wings on a mantis-shaped body headed into the cameras.

  The Ladybug evaded with a pulse from the four emergency throttles embedded on the sides of its heat sink.

  Fiona squeezed her eyelids tight and shook her head fiercely. The leap twenty meters up was jolting, and the embedded AI still had not returned control to her. The destabilized sensorium made her nauseous.

  Following preventative procedures, she clicked the three-button sequence that took her out of the sensorium and faded out in a near instant the panoramic view into that of the front camera.

  The AI maneuvered the Ladybug into a frenzy as it made sense of the last few seconds before it green lighted an all-clear message.

  "Read off your summary," Fiona requested.

  Its voice sounded like an American cartoon cricket from over a hundred years previous.

  "Angle of flight indicates object never intended contact, nor attempted to impose a threat, given that it retreated after our evasive maneuver. It could not be monitored after the four-point-two-second mark. However, the identity of the object has been successfully obtained."

  After several seconds, Fiona prodded, "Well, what is it?"

  "Classified."

  "What?" she screamed at the Ladybug AI.

  "Information has been reported to the últimos Días Central Committee. Any information this event disclosed would need their authorization."

  Fiona's face contorted into a frown. "But... we experienced this together, Ladybug!"

  "Sorry."

  Fussing with the AI would accomplish nothing beyond getting her frustration out, and then she realized the Central Committee might find it curious she was doing survey work so late at night and without backup personnel.

  Fiona shook it off. No time to worry about that at the moment.

  "Return to your flight deck now, Ladybug."

  What the hell was that thing? No place on Earth hosted more legitimate cryptids than the Quadra, but that was unlike anything caused by the Cull Spore Invasion. At least, anything to which she was aware.

  Fiona slipped into the driver's seat and waited for Ladybug's return. She flipped on her Extenza Personal Assistant and searched a cryptid database indexed with mantis appearances pre-invasion to follow a hunch.

  She found her match: El Acosador, the stalker. It matched over a dozen witness descriptions, mostly from cartel-related shootouts.

  That's an odd little data-point.

  Fiona chuckled. That can't be right. El Acasador was a creature of comic books and anime. The dealers were getting high on their own supply.

  When Ladybug returned to her perch, Fiona revved up the engine and let off the brakes.

  She was more curious about the encounter with the cryptid thing, be it El Acasador or something else, than frightened by it.

  Only ten minutes passed one o'clock, she still had time to investigate on foot.