Gunslinger Girl 1. Chapter 1

**GUNSLINGER GIRL**

"_Wham, Bang, Fizz, P.o.W."_

_By_

_Robert Frazer_

"_If you think you're free, there's no escape possible." _

Richard Alpert

* * *

The duvet rustled. The bedsprings creaked. Jose groaned. The pea dug into the small of his back once more and stopped him from getting to sleep.

Jose tossed about again, trying to get comfortable. He tucked up the covers in a tight clutch under his arms, but it was a poor substitute – it didn't fill the hole.

Jose felt as though there was a great depression, an abscess, a pit of absence beside him – he couldn't roll into and fill it because it wasn't physically there, but the sensation, the silhouette tracing the edges of the void, remained. All the time as he lay there he felt as though he was balanced precariously on the very lip of the slope down, quivering from one side of the cusp to the other, and that made it impossible to relax.

He missed having someone to share the bed with. Not for sex – although he certainly wouldn't have objected to it – but just someone to have close. Someone who could breathe in rhythm with him. Someone to be sure and solid when all manner of shapeless horrors hung down above the shell of darkness which the night encased him in.

Someone to keep him warm.

Of course, grey cardigans, starchy shirts, and well-combed bob haircuts did not conduct heat.

Spotless, shining Henrietta. The very model of a proper upbringing that would be a credit to any parent or guardian. Timid, in the way that let adults get on with their business. Immaculately turned-out, in the way that always satisfied sensibility. Attentive in her lessons, in the way that let her rack up a hefty kill-streak. Attentive and obedient, in the way that lets discipline be warmed and brightened into willingness. Faithfully and devotedly at his side, in the way that you pick up a ball and chain.

An angel on his shoulder? The Devil on his back.

These days he daren't even hit a bar and see if he could pick up a girl; he knew what would happen when some shrill idiot gabbler in the Public Front let slip – and one would, as sure as death and taxes – in earshot of Henrietta that Jose had driven into work wearing the same clothes that he had had on the day before. Never mind that – Beatrice, the _literal_ bitch, would be able to sniff a drop of perfume at fifty paces. Scandal! Calamity!

Murderous jealousy!

Rolling over in bed again and trying to trample down his frustrations, Jose caught sight of the sheaf of papers sitting on his desk. Equipment requisition forms for next week's training – he'd completed them before going to bed, but hadn't taken them down to the office because he had wanted to get to bed early and put some sleep in, in case a call came in for him and Henrietta. Best laid plans will go astray – and people winging it don't lose direction only because they never had any to begin with.

_Fuck it. _

Jose bounced off the mattress, threw on his clothes and grabbed the paperwork. He'd drop the forms off in the office in-tray now. There was no terrible national calamity where taking a few more minutes to respond to his pager would defuse it, and if it happened to be announcing the Second Coming he was confident that Christ in his charity would forgive the tardiness. A bit of exercise crossing the compound would tire him out, and the night air could cool him down. Who knew – maybe Ferro would be appreciative for his promptness and diligence in the morning.

* * *

Rico ran down tracks, along streets, up mountains, across fells, through surf – and then a harpoon speared through her arm, its wicked barb hooking cruelly into her flesh and its whirling power pinning her down into her bedroom.

"Gnnnnnnnnk? Whuzza?" Rico mumbled through her pillow.

"Finally!" Henrietta rolled her eyes, drawing her finger away from where she'd been prodding Rico awake. There was a thin coating of blood on the edge of her nail. "You're built to survive an air raid, but that doesn't mean you should sleep through it!"

"Mbbbsoh." Rico snored her assent.

Henrietta puffed her cheeks up in indignation at her sister-cyborg's dozy sloth, and begin yanking at Rico's arms, pulling her upright and holding her there so she didn't sink back down into the duvet. A thin, anxious voice in the back of Henrietta's mind wavered that it was improper to be so pushy – but, well, bigger things were at stake here. She was frightfully conscious of Jose's disapproval... but what had been that saying in the magazine that Chiara had brought back on her last run? "What he doesn't know won't hurt him." She was still showing concern for her handler's wellbeing and happy bearing, so that was OK.

Rico's refusal to get up was most certainly not.

"Come _onnnnnnn_, Rico." A more characteristic tremulous note of pleading entered Henrietta's voice as she continued to tug at Rico's pyjamas. "This is the first chance we've had to go out since Angelica died, everyone's counting on it! You can't let them down!"

"Yew? Eyefort 'swuzz yurturn." Rico tried to focus on Henrietta, but the milky smear of the other girl's face was splashed out across Rico's sleep-fogged vision and she ended up fixing on the vase of flowers atop the chest of drawers at the far side of the room.

"I _can't _go out, me and Jose are on standby rotation, remember, I passed you the note at dinner _earlier tonight_?" Henrietta hissed, infuriated by the other girl's sluggish dopiness.

"Ngeh." Was Rico's philosophic comment. She then held out her hand. "Munny."

Henrietta, hoping to elicit a more proactive response from the other girl, didn't give Rico the banknote but instead held it up for her take. Rico pawed a few near misses before finally closing her fist around it and crumpling up the fresh paper.

"Am gnnnnnnng, I'm goanininering..." Rico tottered onto the floor. The act of movement seemed to warm up her engine, and her actions became progressively more controlled as she took off her pyjamas, donned her exercise tracksuit and made sure that the money was safely secured in a closed zip-pocket.

"Ahem-hem-_HEM._"

Rico took her hand from the doorknob and turned back to Henrietta. With her shoulders hunched, her legs tensed, her face screwed up and her eyes fuming, Henrietta looked as though sheer exasperated rage would forcibly mutate her into Rumpelstiltskin and make her tear herself apart stamping through the floor.

Henrietta stabbed a finger towards the table, and the piece of ruled A4 notepaper lying on it, with such vehement force that you could imagine the air snapping apart. "Don't. Forget. The. _Shopping list!_"

* * *

While Chief Lorenzo himself enjoyed very well-appointed chambers in the core building of the compound, Section Two's day office was in the plain and boxy concrete Seventies 'New Block'. The cuckoo in the nest of the rest of the Agency's more classical architecture, it sat on one side of the old military parade ground (now used as a car park), across from the indoor shooting range. The office itself was situated on the middle floor, above the equipment workshop, affectionately called the "Q Branch" by most of the handlers (although the engineer spent more time fixing cover plates on mobile phones stabbed by cyborgs bowled-over by the txt msg revolution, and straightening bent iron sights, than designing jet-propelled football boot-studs). It also lay beneath a disused storey which no-one could think to fill with anything, although Amadeo insisted that it gave an oddly romantic view of the Technology Building and the training ground beyond, and that as the compound's various hidey-holes went it was an underrated place to commune an illicit tryst.

Priscilla had been found there once, although she said she'd gone up for a quiet catnap. In her defence no-one was with her in the room and there had been complaints to Maintenance about the instability of the old drainpipe round the side for months beforehand, so no-one could be surprised by it breaking.

Section Two's office – a single long, low, loud room with rows of small desks directly abutting each other, with a few small briefing rooms adjoining (larger meetings had to be held in another building) – contrasted significantly with Section One's broad, bright and airy open-plan affair. The oft put-upon Section One was the Intelligence wing and their agents did a lot more desk-based work than the handlers, though, so it was hard to begrudge them the comfort, even if Section Two's cracks in the ceiling tiles and lino flooring in the galley were some way removed from the Hollywood (and the handlers'!) ideal of a bustling counterterrorist hub.

As Jose trotted up the stairs, he could see that the office's lights were still on, although that in itself wasn't unusual – the radio desk had to be manned constantly whenever any Section staff were offsite. What was of interest was the identity of the operator – Jose saw him at the far end of the room, and after dropping his requisition forms in the In-Tray, sauntered over to see how he was getting on...

...only to realise that 'he' didn't have a name.

Jose stumbled, but he couldn't very well just about turn and march out after crossing half the room, could he? What sort of humiliating snub would that be? It was too late – he was committed, like a rockfall, or a stalled aeroplane.

The man looked up. "Oh, evening Mr. Croce. Burning the midnight oil as well?"

"Oh, just 'Jose' will do..." God damn the interfering wretch for sticking his oar in where it wasn't wanted! God damn Jose himself for not having the wit to just close off with a full sentence! Jose tried to smile endearingly, and check his pace to give him more time to think before getting close, but in his nervousness the smile became some distorted, crazed rictus grin. So he approached, shuffling in a half-dead, lurching gait, with a manic, demented expression and a strangled sentence hanging in the air.

"It's Avise Mancini, Jose." The man smiled indulgently. "Don't worry about it, I only knew half of my company by the nametags on their jackets."

_Thank Christ!_ Jose's relaxation into relief was so immediate that he almost slithered across the rest of the room towards Avise. It was a more than a bit embarrassing, not knowing the name of someone who would eventually be becoming a brother-in-arms, but in all fairness as Avise was still waiting on a suitable cyborg candidate he was rather inescapably the 'New Kid', swivelling about along the rim of the periphery but always being tangential to requirements, never quite locking into an everyday orbit. He'd been pretty much mobbed by everyone at the dinner table on his first day, all eager to get a good look at the newcomer, but he'd still looked quite bamboozled and overwhelmed with it all – much like the New Kid just arrived at school, in fact – and hadn't been very talkative.

That memory came from about two months ago, and since then Avise had been tied up in procedural lectures, handling tutorials and tradecraft practicals, and by and large kept different hours to the rest of the Section. Indeed, Avise almost seemed like a subordinate cyborg himself – tonight was one of the few occasions where he hadn't had his own handler from Section One or the Section Two support staff minding him about the compound.

The last time Jose had seen Avise was a full week gone – he'd been walking Henrietta to the Long Range and espied the poor man flailing in a dented Fiat on the Spaceship Pad (or so was called the field-sized slab of asphalt in the training area) and murdering orange traffic cones in what was probably meant to be a powersliding exercise but had become an expensive game of skittles. Jose had asked Avise about it at dinner that night, and the former officer had growled back that when he was at the controls of a Dardo he could just drive through walls and shunt aside other cars.

It wasn't the most positive note to part on by any means, but seeing Avise's open expression now it appeared that he wasn't holding any resentment over it.

Avise was indeed occupying the position of the radio operator, and had the headset slipped down low to form a collar around his neck while it wasn't in use. The desk was densely piled with books and papers, although he'd cleared a space in front of him, stacking up a small theatre of stationery, to indulge in a personal activity to while away the downtime. He had a pistol on the desk, but an unusual sort – instead of the familiar geometric L or jagged mechanical 7 of most sidearms, a curved grip instead described an more artful, languid, easier J. Its freer design spoke of an earlier time, and it was indeed something of an antique – an old Mk. IV Webley service revolver, its matt-black finish glinting with threads of silver where time and use had worn at its contours. Weapons were not wines, but with its bright edges you could well imagine the conceit that the Webley had matured and improved with age. Avise wasn't using the revolver in a way that wholly befitted its venerable stature, though – indeed, he was almost playing with it, cracking open the top-breaking barrel and cylinder and then trying to toss it closed again with flicks of his wrist, his eyes alight with the eagerness of a challenge.

Jose watched the other man curiously for a few seconds, before sweeping his arms out to encompass the desk. "They're being rather demanding aren't they, having you work nights as well as during the day?"

Avise shook his head. "No, actually, I volunteered for this, to fill out the gap after Guilio was sacked."

"You did? You've already made the cut, Avise, you don't need to keep jumping through the hoops to show that you're keen anymore!" Jose joshed light-heartedly.

Avise smiled indulgently. "No, I'm serious. It stops me dicking about in the evening, and it's a bit of extra cash on my paycheque. I live on the compound so I'm only five minutes from bed anyway."

Jose blinked in surprise. "Isn't that a bit... confined?" Every handler had his own room in the Agency compound, and they were quite well lived-in (Raballo had even moved several bookcases into his by the time that he died), but they were chiefly provided for when fratelli were on standby and handlers had to be onsite for immediate response; no-one really chose to stay in them when there were larger and more, well, _homely_ places to settle into comfortably. "I mean, they don't even have bathrooms."

"And it's the cleaners' job to muck out the Ablution Block, not mine." Avise shrugged. "I've been in base accommodation for most of the last two decades already, it's no big deal. Besides," his lips twitched up in a scampering grin. "It saves an absolute fortune on rent."

Jose winced inwardly as Avise's remark brought to mind his last council tax payment. All roads led to Rome... and all that wrapped around each other made the ringway a very tight noose.

* * *

At night the perimeter of the compound was regularly patrolled by a security detail, accompanied by a pair of dogs whose senses could see wherever the guards themselves weren't looking. It was a formidable obstacle that presented a deep challenge for the cyborgs to overcome, despite the patrol's diminutive physical size. It couldn't be a simple matter of evading their sight – the uncooperative fence always demanded an inevitable delay, one which could allow the patrol to stumble across the essayer (starting behind them was no advantage, because they could and did double-back on occasion), and even if they eluded sight their treacherous bodies shed a tell-tale trail in smell and sweat to set wet noses quivering.

They'd quizzed Beatrice for advice on how to deal with the dogs, and she'd come up with the goods. All of the first-generation cyborgs had volunteered their own weekly extra-curricular run, with multiple loops of the compound perimeter. The adults had nodded appreciatively at the girls' dedication to their fitness and training, and it had the added advantage of absolutely marinating the area of the fence in the girls' sweat as a matter of course, so the dogs would not detect anything untoward about a trace of one of the girls rubbing along it. Beatrice had exacted a steep fee for her consultation, however – a multipack of Mars bars, copies of two different celebrity gossip rags every week for a month, and a huge three-litre bottle of Pepsi.

As for the guards themselves, the risk could never be wholly eliminated (although Chiara had enthused that it spiced each sally with a delectable dash of danger). Dona, bless her, had suggested that they imitate a videogame that she'd seen being played while on an extended mission and just biff the guards on the head until they were unconscious so that they'd be none the wiser. After a well-aimed book had demonstrated to her the folly of that venture she had made up for it with a daring and valiant raid into the forbidding Terror Incognita of the Section One document store. The rest of the girls had paced about their rooms pensively, chewing their cheeks and haunted by the agonisingly lengthening watches of the night, clammy palms never daring to reach for the board and cross out their sister as Long Overdue. To a surge of relief, though, Dona had emerged from the shadow of the foreign veil into the light of the dormitories once more, and bearing a precious prize – carefully cradling within her skull the guards' routines, scanned with her photographic eyes.

It was this information that Rico was trusting to now as she picked around the gravel path leading up to Claes's garden for a few stones of suitable sizes. Through his inimitable method of 'fostering independent study' and 'encouraging original thought', during his (decidedly hands-off) school lessons Jean was frequently happy to let the video recorder play while he nipped off around the back of the building for a quick smoke. Consequently, Rico and the other cyborgs had seen a lot of cinema... and, let's just say, not always the mind-numbingly worthwhile French arthouse films that Jean had put in when the lesson had begun. It equipped Rico with enough knowledge to know that throwing a rock to distract a guard with the distant sound of its impact was an indefatigable tactic, but it was also common sense to see that it was only something that would grant you a few seconds' reprieve to sneak around a corner or through a door – you couldn't keep throwing stones for the fun of it as the enemy would soon cotton on the deception.

Having equipped herself with her arsenal, Rico ran across the compound towards the perimeter and leopard-crawled the last hundred yards across the grass behind the second-generation dormitory, keeping low just in case Alessandro was in the mood for playing Casanova tonight and Petrushka had her window open to receive his serenade. Once a short distance away she rolled herself parallel to the fence to get a better angle along its length, ran a quick mental calculation behind her eyes, and then with quick, economical motions, sat upright, snapped her stones up towards the sky, and quickly lay flat again before anyone could espy her.

The thrown stone couldn't distract an enemy more than momentarily, but then the hero in the movie was usually at a range of only a few yards, and a cyborg had a better pitching arm than Roger Moore. The perimeter patrol would still be a good five hundred yards away, and a flurry of impacts around them would throw them into a lather – the distraction and distance combined would give Rico the window that she needed to cross the fence.

This presented its own conundrum. The fence was twelve feet high and crowned with a dense spool of razorwire. This in itself wasn't a problem – any cyborg of any age could easily have cleared it with a bit of a runup – but motion sensors were spaced alongside the exterior. They had a moderate tolerance level – otherwise klaxons would be sounding every time a fox or badger trotted by – but still the landing from such a dramatic jump would have set every alarm in the security centre shrieking. Nor could Rico just get to work on the wire with her teeth and gnaw a way through. Right underneath the fence the grass started to bunch up thickly in tight, unruly knots – at a glance it would have looked unkempt and ill-tended, an affront to the very soul of any regimental sergeant-major who ever ironed a trouser-crease, but the effect was actually quite deliberate. It could require a close inspection before a neatly-clipped cut in the wire would be noticed, but the long grass, scraggy like a child's uncombed hair, would be trampled down by activity and make the signs of disturbances around and breaches through the fence more obvious.

If this dense cluster of troubles were just laid down as obstacles in the road it would still take a veritable contortionist to squeeze around them, and indeed Rico had to conduct something of a gymnastic feat to deliver herself across the fence. Leaning forward over the grass to grasp the wire in her hands, using the grip as a pivot to heft her legs over the offending strands, and then pressing all of her body against the slick links to scrape every last square centimetre of contact and joule of friction, scrambling up in a spider-crawl, before having to swing up, around and over the razorwire with no more than a finger-grip in the gaps between the blades to secure herself to – while the young girls enjoyed some advantage with their small hands, it had been at this very stage five trips ago when Chiara had sliced her hand open on the razorwire. The lengths they had gone to conceal that from her handler...! Chiara had had to suddenly acquire a Damascene love for cats so she could always have her hand buried in the fur of one of the compound's resident mogs whenever there were grown-ups about. It had been a positive relief when she'd been sent out on an operation and could get herself shot in the hand and obliterate the scar.

After curling around the razorwire, Rico then had to ensure that she had enough moment left to continue the swing and slap herself against the far side of the fence (this was the gamebreaker – even the most yielding fence couldn't help but jangle noisily at this contact, and any error in the placement of the perimeter patrol out of earshot would spell certain doom) and not just fall off the top and crash into a game-over on the ground. After that, it was comparatively easy – just an inverted spider-crawl fighting against gravity and balance with every twitch of her limbs until she could slither to the ground, then a tentative worming forward so as not to overly antagonise the motion sensors, and then she was up and away.

And laughing.

* * *

Avise went back to spinning the cylinder of his Webley, watching the rotating drum click around with the absorbed expression of a child with a spinning top.

"You'll break it if you keep that up." Jose chided him.

"Oh, not you as well!" Avise groaned with comic extravagance. "I got enough earache from your brother about that – he was practically ramming a Beretta automatic down my throat. The Webley's old, I'll admit, but it's not _that_ fragile. There's a few bruised bonces back in Iraq that'll attest to that." He finished with a chortle.

It was a late night for both men – Avise didn't realise, and Jose didn't cotton onto, the inadvertent slip that he'd pistol-whipped prisoners. "Where'd you get something like that, anyway? It's not exactly standard issue. Do they even make them anymore? How do you get the ammunition?" Jose asked, genuinely curious.

"A gunsmith friend of mine imports the right calibre rounds from India – and one perk of this new job is that the Agency procurement office now covers the cost! As for the Webley itself, it's an heirloom." Avise said, his voice swelling with proprietorial pride. "My grandfather won it when we conquered British Somaliland. During the war."

_No, I thought it was during the 1972 General Election?_ Jose didn't , as the British had pretty much abandoned Somaliland at the first hint of trouble and then came back and turfed out Il Duce's pride in fairly short order Jose sincerely doubted that Avise's grandfather – disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel which smoked from bloody execution – had prised his trophy from the cold, white-clenched grip of a vanquished champion at the crest of a mound of Anglian dead. On seeing Avise's almost childish glee at recounting the story, though, Jose thought it impolitic to press the issue.

"Still, sorry Avise, call me yellow but I wouldn't want to rely on that in a pinch. Sod's Law – it'd break on me just when someone had me cold."

Avise smiled, and tapped the body of the revolver with a sound that he must have thought was a deep _thunk_ of solidly-built quality but which sounded awfully tinny to Jose. "I wouldn't blame you, Jose, but this one's proven. I've been able to depend upon it. Kosovo" – Avise brightened up again with the opportunity to tell another exciting war story – "I was leading a party to arrest a KLA boss who'd been disarming his mob as we agreed, but by selling the weapons off to the Russian Mafia. He set a pack of dogs on me – I shot two down as they charged, and the third..."

Avise rolled up his right sleeve to reveal and display a forearm which still showed rough and mottled flesh from some very enthusiastic gnawing and tearing.

"...got _indigestion_ from its, aha, vitamin supplement." He rolled a loose round across the desk with his left hand.

Jose was silent for a moment, remembering that time in the APC compartment on the road to Belgrade, swaying in a box that shuddered and yawed as the road rippled with blasts and was rent up under its tracks. Shouting into a radio, bawling at a little box, trying to steer a blind battle by the probing feel of RPGs thudding against the side, the desperate blatting of the weak turret cannon less a ferocious, pummeling club and more a thin, tapping cane.

"I was in the Balkans, too, you know." Jose said, quietly.

"What part?" Although the announcement pleased Avise – it was a parallel familiarity, a point of contact over which they could communicate – he sensed Jose's reflective, maudlin mood and so did not break out into smiles and matey and comradely welcomes. He simply offered his interested understanding.

"UNAPROPISER." Or the United Nations Army for the Protection of Peace In Serbia, tangled up into a ball and then squidged flat with a rolling-pin.

Avise sucked in a hissing breath, and then nodded with respect. "Eh, the Croats' great chemical revenge? Bad business, that. I've never had to deal with that sort of thing, but even in the drills, it's no fun."

"No. It wasn't." Jose muttered.

The two were saved from a morbid reverie when Avise's radio squawked.

"Ah, one moment, Jose." Avise slipped on his headphones and flipped down the microphone. "Good evening, sir, and welcome to the Brothers of Courage, uplifting support for those in need of grace."

Jose blinked quickly.

"Certainly sir." Avise continued, perfectly imitating the received pronunciation of a Fifties newsreader. "Today's thought is: _'We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking only to learn that it is God shaking them'_. Have a peaceful and revitalising night."

Avise slid the headphones back down his neck, spent a moment scratching an entry into a ledger at the side of the desk, and then looked up. "Good Lord, Jose, you look as gormless as a bloody goldfish. Didn't your mother tell you not to walk about with your mouth open? If the wind changes, it'll stay that way!" Avise wagged a finger at the handler.

The handler lifted up his jaw. "What was that on the radio? Are you moonlighting as a call centre operator?" Jose sounded offended.

"Call centres? Perish the thought! That's the Dèvills' work!" Avise laughed. "No, that was just Cristiano making his nightly check-in."

Cristiano – Silvia's handler. The fratello had distinguished themselves by a deep-cover infiltration of the Hannibalists, the chief Bolognan faction of Padania, for a full year; hoodwinking arguably the most vicious and downright fanatical of the Five Republics' militants constituting a feat that was acclaimed as a genuine masterpiece of spycraft. Even the new second-generation cyborgs gradually being rolled into the Agency – primarily built for espionage – had not been able to match it. While Cristiano and Silvia had not been so deep since, they were still only a rare sight at the compound.

"You're being a bit, well, _earnest_ with all that though, aren't you, Avise?" Jose shook his head in bafflement.

Avise frowned, disliking what Jose may have been insinuating. "I'm not a God-botherer, Jose. It's all in the tradecraft textbook." He reached over the desk and held up a plain green hardback book. "I haven't had to bone up so much since second-order differentials back at university." He gave a strained grimace of overwhelmed entreaty to Jose.

They must have put out a new edition out since Jose was green – back when he had been picked up by the Agency, "Code White, Acknowledged" did the business well enough.

"Does he have to go through a whole theatrical circumlocution every time? What would he say if he was in trouble?" Jose asked.

"Probably something like 'Argh Jesus Fuck No I've been rumbled need backup now help help dear God blam blam blam blam click dial toneeeeeeeeeee...'"

They both laughed.

"How are you finding all of that, anyway? It must be a change of pace from what you're used to." Jose motioned towards the textbook.

"Well, I can handle the paperwork, half of what an officer does is just forms and dockets as it is. Still, it's a bit of bind." Avise tipped his head to one side under the strain of an invisible weight. "I mean, I'm sure that the needs of all of this cyborg management aren't half as complicated as they're making it out to be."

_You don't know the half of it, New Kid._ Jose's thoughts gently admonished the hapless novice.

"It's all very revolutionary science I know," Avise continued, "and the tech crew are no doubt proud of it, but they don't need to crow about it from the rooftops with all of this bloody verbiage." Avise reached over to another part of the desk and lifted up a thick wodge of plain paper held together with a plastic spiral bind. "All 292 pages of this is just the list of Primary Commands!" He cried out in exasperation. "'Primary Command Exit All' – _induce vomiting and defecation_?" Avise curled his lip back in disgust. "Does one of the boffins have a scat fetish?"

Jose frowned – that last part was a _bit_ unnecessary. Avise was a man who was certainly very sure of himself, but that confidence could easily confuse fact with opinion, or override tact and decorum with pugnacious attitude. "It's a _purgative_ action, a _countermeasure_ to limit the effects of _poisoning_. Not pleasant, but _entirely _necessary" The handler explained, labouring his words and the point.

Avise tipped his head up in realisation, accepting his mistake. "Ah, yes, I guess that makes sense." Avise looked at the booklet again, and his expression this time was more thoughtful. Reflective, even. Jose took a step back, leaning against another desk and waiting.

"It takes effort. I know that." Avise began. "It's hard, but then... it's an endeavour." He put the booklet down on the desk, and then placed his palm down on the cover, resting it there for a few moments, as though he was earthing something through it.

You might even have thought of it as some strange sort of benediction.

"When it's time..." Avise turned his head away from Jose, and a faraway look drifted over his eyes. A slow, wan smile crept across his complexion. "It'll be worth it."

* * *

Rico had spent long enough in the Agency training area that she could navigate her way around in the dark even without her eyes switching to low-light vision - the rough hummocks of grassed-over craters and the crumbling asphalt of dilapidated metalled roads traced a map under the soles of her feet. That said, it was important to remember that familiarity bred contempt and this place too held perils and pitfalls to humiliate and ensnare the overconfident and unwary. A couple of trips ago Henrietta had almost blundered into the midst of an entire battalion of Army infantry who had been assigned the area for a night assault exercise, and in her struggle to avoid being seen by sentries, the hapless cyborg had snagged several tripwires, set off a _Carnevale_ firework display's worth of boundary warning flares, broke several ambushes ahead of schedule, caused a highly-strung lance-corporal to lose his stripe with a frantic magazine of negligent discharges, and generally left a lot of officers with a lot of paperwork and a lot of privates with a lot of ablutions duty.

That wasn't a problem tonight, though – there was only Rico, her wonderful legs, her sweeping arms, the parting kiss of the wind and then the stars above, winking coyly at her mischief.

The exterior border to the training area was a simple chain-link fence with none of the sophistication of the Social Welfare Agency's perimeter, and Rico practically hopped over the inconsequential thing. After a careful walk over a road – remember the Green Cross Code - there was only a three mile overland tab through the broad avenues of commercial woodland, something that a cyborg could manage inside of twenty minutes at a steady lope.

And then, Shangri-La.

Which, being interpreted, means "the Montabari Junction Motorway Service Station".


	2. Chapter 2

Rico didn't approach the service station directly. While she wasn't fully versed in life skills, even she knew that someone coming in from the rear over the children's climbing frames in the dead of night would be remarked as strange by bystanders - not least the problems with that approach being that she'd have to punch through the patio glass, which was locked by that time.

Circling round the building and approaching from the front had its own advantages, anyway. The service station sat in its own bowl, separated from the motorway and the wider countryside by a dense copse of trees, resting in what seemed like a forest glade (at least, until it was buried underneath the tarmac for the car park). In this dark, warm, enclosed space the building shone as a radiant, blazing beacon of bright light; a burnished, brilliant trophy, rotating on its turntable for all to admire from every lavish and scintillating angle.

Rico walked past the service station's truck park, forming a station on the long tarmac processional up to the splendid palace at the height of her route. A dozen lorries sat still alongside each other, their cabins like squat, hulking, thickset beasts looming over the diminutive Rico; headlamps were milky, unblinking eyes and their radiator grilles toothy maws that could swallow her whole. Rico swallowed a little nervously, and concentrated instead on the loads behind the truck bodies. In her mind's eye, twelve cuboids became twelve ranks of soldiers standing firmly to attention, or twelve of those coloured rectangles getting all tangled up in dotted lines on a map whenever their history textbooks came to a famous battle - that settled her mind.

There were a group of lorry drivers smoking and talking quietly amongst themselves under a streetlamp. Like the large, boxy cabins, the drivers were burly sorts with thick, wiry beards – they looked more like members of the Hell's Angels, belonging more on two wheels than twelve. Rico remembered someone saying once that pets resembled their owners, and vice versa.

The drivers turned curious eyes to watch Rico as she walked past, but none of them had the wit to ask what a young child was doing so far away from the service station proper, where ordinary folk would cluster.

The sliding doors parted before Rico as though there were a pair of footmen stepping smartly to admit her. Within was a broad, high-ceilinged hall, with an arched glass roof. The hall proceeded down to a café and restaurant area in a large circular conservatory, looking out to the children's play area beyond; ranged along the length of the hall was a large newsagent's, a small supermarket, a McDonalds, a pharmacy and a small arcade and toilets. All of these stores and facilities were like heaving crowds on either side of the red carpet. The high ceiling was as exalted as the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele. The tiles on the floor were an off-colour grey from tramped-down dirt, but that only showed what a thriving and bustling hub of humanity this was, like the most sophisticated and urbane metropolises; the people had their heads bowed down low and their faces lined with early-morning fatigue, but how could they not after dancing away the night here, the place where the hot heartbeat of humanity heated you? Rico's eyes shone as she beheld it all, and for long minutes she simply stood in the middle of the hall; each visiting family with tired toddlers hoisted onto their backs and crooked in their arms, each sniffling and bleary unshaven businessman pawing at the pharmacy's cough medicines, each trucker devouring a Big Mac with concentrated gusto, each squabbling couple bickering over a crumpled road map all the way to the café, were fresh facets of a jewel that scintillated in Rico's brimming, loving, life-filled eyes. Rico floated up the tall hall in a state of ecstasy, of communion.

"Hey kid, you lost your parents?"

Rico blinked. A member of staff in a dirty apron was standing over her with some concern.

Rico shook her head. "I don't have any parents anymore, just my big brother, and he's fine."

The cleaner stepped back, suddenly looking embarrassed. "Well, go to your brother alright? Don't lose him."

"Don't worry, I never will." Rico smiled, before turning away to walk to the newsagents. She had come down after being elevated, and now it was only right that she make her offering.

After walking up and down the aisles a few times she found that book that the bomb squad has asked for – it had been difficult to find because it was right up on the top row of one of the shelves and she had had to jump up to get it – fortunately no-one had seemed to twig to the sight of an adolescent girl bouncing up a good seven feet from standing. _Amores of the Ambassador_, the title read. The frontispiece was a photograph of a very dark and elaborately-carved desk, the sort of grand furniture you might expect to find during a public tour of an old noble's mansion. Behind it, and framed by a tall window with heavy red drapes, were a man and a woman in modern suits. They were standing very close together, so much so that they were nearly bumping into each other. It didn't look very practical for reading that thick piece of parchment with old fancy curly writing that was lain out over the desk. Very odd. Rico had a curious flick through the book, seeing lots of unusual words which made her feel funny.

The strange sensations were a little discomfiting – once the novelty had subsided the giddy detachment was alarming, a loss of reference and security. Rico anchored herself back to the ground by closing the book and slipping it into her hand-basket. She busied herself with the rest of the shop, although the _Sudoku For You Vol. IV _that Henrietta had asked for didn't create the same weird, loopy, quivery, shimmery feelings, despite being another book, one that was even bigger than the last one. Rico couldn't explain why, but she felt vaguely disappointed about that fact.

The rest of the items that the other girls wanted formed the usual assortment of fizzy pop, bubblegum, chocolate, sweets and sugary snacks, and Rico gathered them all up with genuine glee, their bright, crinkly packaging reflecting the newsagent's lights and making her feel like a pirate queen scooping up a beach of crystal rocks and precious stones.

"This is rather _grown-up_ for a young bo—er, girl, isn't it?" The checkout lady said curiously about the bomb squad's book once Rico had delivered that night's swag to her. The strange tone in her voice only mutated further when she recognised Rico's actual sex.

"I don't know. It's not for me, it's for a friend." Rico explained.

"_Right._" The other staff member manning the checkout tills, a boy in his late teens, sniggered openly at Rico's words as he bagged up a copy of Travel Scrabble for a haggard-looking mother. It was said almost with a sense of paternal pride at seeing an adolescent learn her first dodge.

The lady turned the book over in her hands a couple of times, and then with a grimace she slid it over her till's barcode reader. Evidently the desire to improve her sales bounty won out over moral instruction to the new generation, and she contented herself with a philosophical sigh and an internal monologue about how the world was sliding into calamity and apostasy.

* * *

They never did a handout on the same night as a sweets run – too much activity was likely to arouse too much suspicion, and it was a precaution in case a perimeter alarm had been tripped, or a runner inadvertently passed through someone's peripheral vision, and the link to an impromptu 'slumber party' was made.

Besides, as fun and exciting as the handouts were, there was even better entertainment to be had today. They all clustered onto the roof to watch.

"Squad, will, turn, to the right in – _WAIT FOR IT ILIRIA! – _in threes! Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight... turn! _RIGHT! RIGHT YOU NIMROD! _An even choice and you came up odd! _DO IT AGAIN!_"

Elio Alboreto stopped dead in his tracks. He'd read stories about the whiff of cordite and baccarite suddenly transporting stress-disorder sufferers back to a state of shellshock; the fading echo of the shout bounced back off the walls and slammed into his face like a left hook. It knocked him reeling to miserable days of square-bashing in the pissing rain, harangued by an apoplectic corporal.

It had been arranged that the New Kid, Avise Mancini, was to be given all of the second-generation girls for a session – even though the cyborgs were programmed to be obedient and should have been much easier to handle than over a hundred unruly squaddies, procedure was still insistent on him demonstrating his command ability; another tick in a box, a brick in the road along the way to becoming a full handler. The arrangement hadn't troubled Elio too much – leaving Marisa for a few hours allowed him to catch-up with some overdue paperwork and get a gym session which he'd been missing out on lately. While he'd been pounding on the treadmill he'd wondered if this was how parents felt when they dropped off their kids with Grandma and Grandad for a weekend away...

...but the weird sense of relief began to slide into dread when he heard those sounds, and became aware of just what he'd consigned Marisa to.

Elio hurried towards the source of the sound, arriving at the tarmac square beneath the cyborg dormitories.

Seven second-generation cyborgs – Petrushka, Iliria, Giliana, Vanessa, Alba, Kara and the younger Marisa the odd-one-out at the back – were arranged into four paired ranks.

And Avise – Elio stopped for a moment despite himself. Avise looked _magnificent_. He was clad in full dress uniform, a swagger-stick snapped into place under one arm. His jacket and trousers were pressed so sharply it was as if he was not part of the world, but cut himself out of it with every movement. His shoes were bulled so brightly that you could have criticised him for being out of uniform, as they gleamed as white to the eye. The feathers on his hat were black, but not dull, rather shining like onyx.

The face below it was a knotted purple.

"'Eff! 'Aight! 'Eff! 'Aight! 'Eff! 'Aight! 'Efffffffff... **STOP! **Alba, are you a dancer? No? Petrushka is the dancer isn't she? Yes? Yes! Are you trying to upstage your comrade? No, she says. So, _why are your feet skittering about like some Hollywood musical_? What do we do when we're out of step? What? We don't start singin' in the rain, unless you want a punishment detail this evening! What do we do? We 'perform' a _check pace_! **AGAIN!**"

"A spot of drill, eh?" Elio tried to josh Alfonso, but it was a hollow, false humour, a sad, flimsy pretence that Elio could not give his heart to filling.

"Drill?" Alfonso shook his head, his eyes open and stark, incredulous and appalled. "Mr. Alboreto, _this_ is the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo."

In their ranks the girls had been assembled into bars, and the square had become their cell. They watched the girls conduct a few wheels around the corners of the square. They seemed to do it competently enough, curling at the correct angles and maintaining the same distance between each other's positions in the squad, but their taskmaster was evidently dissatisfied, bringing them stumbling and shuffling to a halt with another indignant yell.

"_YOU ARE THE PRIDE OF ITALY!" _Avise screamed, his voice momentarily slipping into a shrill screech, such was its unrestrained violence. "_HAVE YOU NO SELF-RESPECT? YOU ARE KILLERS! SUPERMEN!" _He leaned in close to Illiria. "_QUEEN BITCH OF EUROPE!" _Flecks of spittle splashed across Illiria's cheek – she added a snotty sniffle to it, on the verge of breaking down in tears.

Avise stepped back, his cheeks visibly tinged purple, and he had to suck in great gallons of breath before continuing. "And yet here you are, shambling along, knuckles scraping along the ground like a herd of _troglodytes_." Avise literally slapped his own face and dragged his glove down his face in an appalled, dismayed expression, before raising his head to shout again. "You are _cyborgs!_ You are _incredible! _You are _magnificent! _So where is your _pride_? You should _strut_ before these insignificant _peons_!" Avise gesticulated wildly towards the spectators. "Now gets your backs _straight_, throw your legs _out_, and show me some _SWAGGER!"_

The girls were visibly cringing, crumbling from the onslaught like bunkers cracking under sustained bombardment – except for one pouting figure at the back.

"Stop shouting at me" Marisa muttered.

"Right!" Avise swivelled like a Dalek mid-stride and his hand shot out with a laser's exactness to clamp around Marisa's ear. The cyborg emitted a yelp of surprise, which became a squeal of pain when in the very next step Avise started pulling her over towards the spectators. Elio blinked, not quite believing what she was seeing. The last Padanian to get within arm's reach of Marisa had had his limbs broken in twenty-eight separate places and she'd played his vertebrae like a harpsichord – but here sheer surprise had completely confounded her. It was all she could do to not trip over herself and fall as she stumbled behind Avise.

"Alboreto!" Avise barked. "Discipline your brat for giving me backchat!" After detaching his grip and brusquely depositing the stunned, stumbling cyborg in front of Elio, Avise swept back around and marched over to the other girls, his steel-capped boots snapping off of the tarmac like gunshot reports. Elio could tell that Marisa, by her act of defiance, had won the ardent blood-loyalty of the rest of the second generation 'til the fall of Valhalla – granting them the sweet merciful respite of a few seconds' sagging while Avise's back was turned.

Marisa herself struggled to regain some dignity from the inglorious episode by running her hand through her hair and patting down her clothes as though it was an inconsequential scuffle rather than an abject humiliation. Rubbing and wincing at her sore ear, she looked up at her handler and gave him the smirk of partners in crime. "My feet were cramping! Great to get away from that garbage!" She said, unnecessarily loudly.

"I _have _told you before to be respectful to other staff." Elio said coldly. "You can do forty laps of the building behind me to make up for what you're missing over there."

Marisa laughed, but when Elio's stern gaze didn't change, her mouth fell open, appalled. "_What_?"

Elio only jerked his head to one side to indicate Marisa's direction, with a click of the tongue to set the horse off on a trot. Marisa replied with a lengthy, lingering, hurt look of betrayal and then jogged off, in a slumping, unhappy gait.

Elio watched his cyborg go until she had turned around the corner of the building and gone out of sight. He sighed sadly as he turned back to the grim exhibition of the second generation not so much being drilled as cored out. He didn't really approve of Avise's... training methodology ("_Petrushka you can prance about the piano room all day like some nutcracking fairy so why can't you MARK TIME?_"), and quietly resented Avise's for putting him in a situation where he had to chastise Marisa in the first place. Still, as obnoxiously as he had given it Avise did have a point in that cyborgs were expected to show deference to other adult staff, even if the only one who could order them was their handler; in the absence of proper conditioning Marisa sometimes needed her boundaries marked out. Elio also couldn't help but be hooked by a creeping curiosity jostling him to find out just where Avise thought that he was heading with this... display.

"Shoulders - _back_! Heads - _up_! Legs – _forward_! Thumbs – on – _knuckles_! _GILIANA STOP TICK-TOCKING_! What are you, one of Triela's _TEDDIES_? Filling you full of stuffing instead of top-tier tech would be a damn sight more _USSEEEEFFFUUUULLLL_!"

The cyborgs battled their way across the square until they had reached the corner closest to the assembled watchers. Avise shouted that the girls would "do honour to their handlers" and had them march across the front of the group of watchers.

"Salute to the riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggghhhhttt... SALUTE!"

Petrushka was so utterly intimidated by Avise's booming presence that she instinctively looked left towards him and the source of the command instead. Without missing a beat, Avise had the squad carry on, about face on the march at the far end of the square, and then pass back across the way they came and salute the gathered crowd from the left instead.

Six pairs of eyes, desperate for release, looked towards their handlers with pleading entreaty. Elio felt his legs tremble. It was like a line of battleships tacking across to deliver broadsides at him.

The torment was not perpetrated for much longer – even volcanoes blow out eventually, and Avise was reaching the last sputter of toxic ash. "Useless. Absolutely useless. _Worse _than useless, because being _subjected_ to it did me physical _harm._ I would weep, but there aren't enough tears. You slovenliness brings shame to your sex, to your handlers, to your Agency and your Republic that you are pledged to defend." He bowed his head momentarily, as though to hide a sob. "This ends now. If this farce is perpetrated any further then I would lose my composure and shame myself, and it demeans this honourable Agency enough that you have comprehensively and irredeemably disgraced yourselves with your squalid conduct." His voice was genuinely cracked and choked, on the verge of tears.

"You will be dismissed" Avise whispered, laden with unvoiced anguish, a weight which crushed the breath out of your lungs.

The girls began to move apart.

"_**HAVE I TAUGHT YOU NOTHING?" **_

Elio saw a pair of Section One agents walking along the path at the far end of the square instinctively throw themselves down to take cover from the incoming artillery.

The cyborgs shuffled back into their ranks again, standing with their legs apart and their hands together behind their backs, with their heads bowed.

"_Squad!_"

Heads shot up with enough speed to give the cyborg whiplash. Backs became ram-rod straight so as to crack a few vertebrae.

"Squad... 'SHUN!"

"_In_!" Half a dozen hoarse, croaking voices bleated as they stamped their legs together.

"Squad, will, _retire_. Diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssss... _MISSSED!_"

Two ranks of three rotated ninety degrees to the right. Two ranks of three stamped their right feet. Two ranks of three took three strides from the left foot. Two ranks of three then promptly expired.

Elio remembered his time in Yemen during the Ogaden War, and relieving soldiers emerging from a bunker after hours of constant bombardment. He also remembered seeing an SIS analyst have to get up and leave after reading reports of rape camps during the Romanian Mineriad. None of it even approached this. These girls had been utterly and comprehensively destroyed. Even though they had been set free, they didn't sprint away, or caper, cavort and cartwheel in relief. The girls stumbled, leaden legs staggering bow-legged and arms hanging limp as though held on only by fraying tendons, their faces as drained as their spirits. They described an aimless, wandering course to the parade edge and fell off it, slumping down onto the grass, spent. Petrushka collided with Iliria along the way, but there were no complaints or remonstrations – they just both creaked their heads towards each other and stared past each other's shoulders, not able to muster the energy to go far enough to meet each other's eyes.

The flower of Italian defence policy had been demolished far more effectively than terrorist bomb.

Everyone's head turned from the settling detritus... to Avise.

_Walking their way...!_

The assembled crowd flinched instinctively from Avise as he came to a stop before them. It wasn't only the formidable martial splendour of his uniform which overwhelmed their more casual attire – they were buffeted backwards by the waves of suppressed violence which pulsed from Avise like a heat-haze of aggression.

Avise took off his hat, gave the feathers a quick brush with his sleeve, then pulled off his gloves and dropped all three items down onto the ground with a light pat of leather.

"Afternoon, everyone!" Avise cried brightly, with a warm, welcoming smile. "I think that it's coming up to lunch. Shall we all head over as a group, a bit of nice _espirit _to perk us all up, eh? What's on today, anyway?"

There was only the wet click of moisture and film as everyone blinked at him dumbly.

"Oh, haven't they put up a menu today? A bit inconvenient." Avise pouted.

"Letting a bit of steam off there eh, Mancini?" Amadeo said suddenly, in a bluff tone that was a disdainful criticism. "Things getting you down lately, needed to beat it out?"

"Down?" Avise looked genuinely confused, before he chuckled lightly. "Amadeo, what on Earth would give you that idea? Things have been great this past week."

"_Idea_?" Amadeo was so astonished at, and uncomprehending of, Avise's current incongruously light manner that it came out almost as a shout. "You were screaming at those kids so much we were almost taking bets on you having an aneurysm!"

"Your head looked as though it was going to pop like a champagne cork!" Nihad exclaimed.

"Well, of course it did." Avise looked baffled at their surprise, as though it was impossible to entertain any other notion. "I was doing drill."

There was a moment's fish-slapped silence.

Olga's eyes dilated and contracted again as she struggled to absorb the concept of how something conveyed with such vivid and fervent emotion could still be so insincere. "You mean... all that screaming and shouting and swearing and stamping... was an... an _act_?"

Avise picked out Elio from amongst the throng and gave him a despairing look, as though he expected the handler to be the only one who understood him. "Come on," Avise admonished the staff, "I know that _some _have you have been in the Army! I mean, what else am I to do? Mince about flapping my wrists and asking them to take a step to right if they'd be so kind and if it fit in with their busy schedules?"

"More than a few officers would do it that way, yeah." An anonymous voice murmured from the back. An involuntary spasm of sniggers rippled through everyone.

A shock of black passed in front of Avise's eyes at the jibe, but he managed to clench his jaw and grind down the desire to bite back.

Reading both Avise and the crowd with a quick scan, Elio bit his lip and leaned forward to prevent a souring of the atmosphere. "So, those girls were pretty dismal, eh?" He said gregariously loudly, elbowing past Marco and Hilshire to put himself at the front and directly in Avise's view. "Women can never find their way about, hah hah hah!"

Elio heard Priscilla mutter "chauvinist pig" behind his back and he could imagine her tossing her head and rolling her eyes, but some disdain from a bit of laddish humour (and she'd have already forgotten about it by the end of the day anyway) was preferable to the sometimes-tetchy Mancini losing his rag in front of too many spectators and showing up his bad side.

It had the desired effect – with something else to distract him, Avise calmed down quickly and the angry face faded as though it was never there. He shrugged in response to Elio. "No, they weren't that bad actually. Yeah, they're a bit scrappy, and there's plenty of rough edges, but it's their first time after all – it's only to be expected. Still, for novices they were pretty on-the-ball – I suppose that cyborg co-ordination has more than good PR behind it after all!" Avise chortled. "They did well – really, honestly, very well – that's why I let them off twenty minutes early."

Marianna's composure cracked with a spurting, half-choked cackle, and she had to turn and walk away before she erupted into manic hysterics.

Avise looked genuinely confused. "Was that some in-joke that I've not been invited into yet?"

Everyone assured him that it had been an impressive display, and began to drift off, citing desires to wrap up some paperwork or deposit their weapons before lunch began properly.

As Avise turned away to head back to the adult dormitories and change back into his dayclothes, something tickling his peripheral vision caused him to bring his head up to look at the roof of one of the surrounding buildings. Half a dozen little bobbing balls of heads were balanced on the edge of the parapet.

Avise pointed a finger at his own face, then spread two fingers out into a V to direct attention to his eyes. He then rotated a hand so that his finger was pointing towards the building.

_I see you._

The heads vanished.

Chuckling to himself, Avise brought his gaze back down to ground level, and espied Elio through the dispersing crowd, just about to disappear around the corner of another building. Avise jogged up to the handler, shouting a hello.

"Hullo, Alboreto, wait a moment!" He panted as he came up to the handler.

Elio grimaced, but smiled as he turned around to Avise. "Yes, Mancini, how can I help you?"

"I was just wondering what you thought of that just now. Was I making a good use of the cyborgs? I know I'm a little rusty; it's usually the sergeant's job to do drill, but if I'm to be a handler I ought to keep up my versatility. What'd you recommend?"

Elio was a little startled to see that Avise was actually looking to him for approval. He could detect a glint of admiration in the corner of Avise's eyes – even though Avise was an officer and Elio was Other Ranks, Elio's status as a grizzled veteran and as special forces was not a little awe-inspiring in the (relatively) younger man. "I was hoping that it'd impress you." Avise said, a little plaintively, feeling small in comparison to the hardened victor in front of him.

"Oh, Mancini..." Elio shook his head, finding the idea that he had a fan baffling, not least when that fan looked as though he was about to be presented before the President. "Just because we do drill doesn't mean that we like it!"

"Yeah, I guess." Avise twisted his lips as he reflected on it. "It's important and I wouldn't give it up, but everyone finds it a bit of a bind. Still, we all have to do our chores, otherwise we'd be living in pigsties."

Elio marvelled at the man walking alongside him. It was genuinely astonishing to see his changed manner, how... _loose_ he seemed, as though someone had taken a screwdriver to him and eased off the tension that had been straining his joints on the parade square. It was as though he was a wholly different person.

"Did you ever picture yourself ending up at place like this, Mancini?" Elio ventured carefully, prodding forward to see if could trace out a better image of the other man.

Avise looked about him before responding. "Well, everyone likes the idea of being a secret agent, don't they? The elite engineer who adjusts the cogs of society behind the facade. It's a thrill to be here, although to be honest I never expected it. I've ended up where Providence has guided me – thank God I've had the sense to follow. I never even expected to end up in the Army, let alone the Agency, but once I started in it I was glad that I did."

"How did that come about?" Elio was genuinely curious. All of the prattle about fate and faith was par for the course with those religious types and Elio had learned to tune that redundant noise out, but the nugget of detail that Avise – known by everyone to be a particularly enthusiastic soldier, as if the display on the parade square could leave anyone in any doubt of that – never had any particular martial calling intrigued him.

"It's nothing complicated. After my dad died an Army scholarship was the only way I could fund university," Avise explained, "and even that was a secondary option. For a while I actually through that I might have the Vocation. That was back when I was seventeen, not long before I wrapped up school. I was even reading the pamphlets about the priesthood at the back of church."

Elio arched his eyebrows in surprise – and that reaction was, in itself, surprising. He hadn't really been expecting to be astonished by the mumming moron Mancini having pretensions of poncing about as some pontificating pastor. Still, when it was actually laid out before Elio plainly like that, he couldn't deny that from priest to fighting soldier and dubious spy constituted quite a radical career change, a wide swing which felt unbalanced and strange. Elio decided to grasp the nettle. "So, what happened?" He asked plainly.

"Crocetta Maffucci from 6J happened. Four times. And I enjoyed it too much to think that I could spend the next sixty years doing without."

Elio threw his head back and laughed openly and uproariously. Maybe Avise was human after all.

Marisa jogged past them both. "Thirty-three." She pouted sullenly.

* * *

"Alright everyone!" Rico squealed with glee, practically dancing on the table as she swung the bag up to hold it aloft. "Come and get it!"

Rico's face was alight, the attention flooding into her from all the girls a surge of fuel stoking a fire. Her shining delight was blinding, and spurred by the eager shouts from all the other members of the sly snacking syndicate, she span about in place, whirling around like a catherine wheel, sparks dancing off of her gleaming eyes and open smile.

"Henrietta gets a bag of Creme Eggs" – Rico tossed it overarm like a grenade belt – "and her puzzle book!" _Sudoku For You Vol. IV_ span across the room like a Frisbee. There was a chorus of applause as Henrietta neatly fielded both in each hand.

"Chiara has two sticks of Toblerone!" Rico dropped the bag to her feet, reached into it with both arms, and then pulled out each bar with slow, exaggerated care. Gripping them at their ends, with a sudden yell of an impassioned call to war she leapt down onto the floor, flexing her knees and bunching her thighs with the impact and then launching herself straight at Chiara. The room descended into a raucous ring of cheering, clapping, screaming and laughing as Chiara and Rico sparred around the table, Rico wielding the Toblerones as though they were truncheons, each swing punctuated by a vicious cry of kendo spirit while Chiara swung and floated her head around each strike – however, any display of artful skill was undermined as she had to spend just as much time glancing each blow off of her shielding forearms. They'd foot-shuffled and back-stepped two circuits of the room when Rico sensed that interest was waning – and she didn't want to melt the chocolate and give Chiara formless slop either. Rico stepped back, making an elaborate show of mustering herself before charging forward with a two-fingered thrust. Recognising the telegraphed move, Chiara neatly stepped aside and plucked the long bars from Rico's grasp as she stormed past, the neat manoeuvre inspiring a final burst of applause from the appreciative audience.

Despite all of the energy expended in the duelling demonstration, Rico's star was undimmed and she immediately vaulted back onto the table.

"Claes has her bag of chocolate raisins, six Vicks Inhalers and a tube of lip salve!"

Several girls eyed Claes strangely. Claes sniffed haughtily and turned her nose up in an arch expression, as though she was considering higher matters than whatever the scurrilous gossip of the plebs might insinuate. "It's an experiment" she sniffed, and offered no further comment.

"Honey roasted peanuts for Triela!"

Triela accepted the three packets which landed before her, and immediately broke one open, playing the deep amber glazing of each nut along her tongue before crunching through them. Thus occupied, she watched the rest of the handout party with a thoughtful air.

It was odd, but making a big event of the handouts actually made it safer. Silvia had condensed the wet pearl of precious wisdom on one of her infrequent visits to the compound from her Bologna station, for maintenance. If the girls had scampered about with satchels clutched tightly under their arms and furtively sneaking glances about, then it would have been immediately suspicious – but making a grand show of a "study group" or suchlike occasion took attention away, because no-one would be conducting secret business so obviously. Hiding in plain sight – it was so elementary a double-bluff that it invariably worked, simply because no-one thought about it or dismissed it for its simplicity. The trouble with spies getting entangled in their dense webs of Machiavellian intrigue is that they lost the wood for the trees, and looked for complexity where there was none.

Triela's attention was drawn back to Rico when her tone of voice changed suddenly, abruptly dropping from her deliriously fervent squeals to a dissonant note of hesitation.

"Amelia, Bella, Cora, Diana..." she addressed the four members of the Agency bomb squad, who throughout the entire proceedings had stood with their hands folded in front of themselves calmly, their only actions to nod vigorously to signify their appreciation whenever a girl claimed that week's goodies. "I'm sorry, but I only have one thing for the four of you. Did someone forget to copy up the entire shopping list?" Rico was apologetic as she held up _Amores of the Ambassador_ (inspiring gasps from a few of the more clued-in girls).

Cora stepped forward and bowed her head in acknowledgement of Rico's concern. "We are gratified to hear your concern for our welfare, Rico, but we must reassure you that no error has been made, and that none of us are bereft."

Diana followed on from where Cora left off. "No other item particularly animated our interest and we decided amongst each other that it would be selfish to demand more of limited group funds for extraneous paraphernalia."

"You're not wearing sackcloth-and-ashes for our sake, are you all though?" Dona asked with genuine concern (and an odd level of maturity, to Triela's ears). "It'd make sense if it was a box of Quality Street you could all dive your hands into, but it must be difficult to pass around just one thing."

"You don't have to deny yourselves!" Henrietta piped up, with squeaky earnestness, her cheeks colouring a little from the effort – the timid girl found it difficult to make exclamations.

"There is no need for any distress, Henrietta," Amelia explained, "through the sharing of common possessions we merely harmonise our operational rhythm through sharing so as to obtain a state of sublimation and telepathic communion with extrasensory precognition while concentrating on mission priorities."

Henrietta blinked, visibly astonished. "Really?"

"No, Henrietta, that is not the case." Bella shook her head with slow, grave censure. "Amelia is being facetious, which is to say, she is utilising the rhetorical device of sarcasm to mock your gullibility and aggressively denigrate your intellect."

"In actual fact," Cora continued without pause, her voice level and measured in an explanation of calm clinical certainty, "we requested this book because we have found after a period of comparative study that the writing of this authoress is totally hot."

"We have concluded that she is capable of rendering male characters in such a manner that, if they were to be materially real people, we would desire to engage in sexual intercourse with them." Diana said.

A beat passed while this sunk in. _Sunk _in? Triela's cheeks burnt with shame and embarrassment.

Amelia bowed her head deferentially to the room, and the other three members of the bomb squad, clustering behind her, executed the same measure. "I apologise not only for myself, but on behalf of Bella, Diana, and Cora, for our preemptory manner. It is improper and against the gathering's friendly spirit to depart from it early, but we wish to retire."

Triela's flushed cheeks even showed beneath her darker complexion. "You want to, uh—"

Eight eyes swivelled 38˚ to bring Triela into vision.

Triela, gnawing her lip averted her gaze from the open, unblinking bomb squad. "uh, er... um..."

"We wish to begin arranging a rota for reading the book." Bella stated. "To refrain from utilising what has been purchased would be a waste of our limited funds."

"Oh, yes, ah, of course, um, it's no problem, er, you all go right on ahead." Triela managed.

Bomb squad, 'cline, to the left, two-three.

"_Thank you for going out for us, Rico._" They all said together.

"That's no trouble!" Rico beamed happily, and waved both her arms emphatically even though the girls were barely twelve feet away. "Have a nice night!"

_Nice night--!_ Triela almost choked in horror. God bless Rico's empty head!

The four girls all made an orderly file out of the room.

"_Cannon Fodder._" Dona murmured when the door clicked shut.

Put back on balance by the bomb squad's departure, Triela jabbed a hard gaze at Dona out of the corner of her eye. "Dona_tello_!" She chided the younger girl sharply. "That's a bit strong!"

"No, no!" Dona said urgently, keen to explain herself. "I don't mean 'cannon fodder', I mean _Cannon Fodder_. It's a game," she waggled her fingers downwards in something of a walking gesture, "and y'see, all of your army men are in these little files of four..."

She petered off when the room only responded to her with blank stares that might well have come from the bomb squad themselves.

Dona dropped her hands down in an exasperated sigh. "Rico, can I please have my Twix now?"


	3. Chapter 3

The following week was pretty much business as usual.

Jose and Henrietta spent time with what was, for her, a delightful road trip across Abruzzo and Marche and what was, for him, tailing the accountant of a figure rumoured to part of the new leadership that had claimed the Milan Faction following Cristiano's death. However, he was frustrated by the accountant never meeting anyone but mundane, legitimate clients, preventing him from letting Henrietta loose and bagging a Padanian captain into the bargain. Henrietta enjoyed the private sphere that wrapped around them with the rain pattering against the Porsche's raised hood.

The bomb squad were able to turn their dainty, delicate fingers to the more subtle side of sabotage, performing a political favour for one of the Agency's Senate backers and permanently crashing the computers of several off-message journalists in ways that were masked as power surges, cracked hard drives or burnouts from fan failures.

Dona had a little accident. She was in the training area's FIBUA village trialling a new submachine gun on behalf of Beretta – an update of the semi-caseless CB M2, which ejected its rounds' cases frontally along with the bullets themselves, like a sabot – when the barrel fouled and the weapon misfired explosively. She lost three fingers, which left her a real pouting grump for the half-day or so it took to replace them.

Henrietta's own face fell when she discovered that Rico had claimed six kills during a drugs bust while she'd been away, knocking her monthly standing down from third to joint-seventh.

There was a bit of excitement in Trieste when the Jethro-Monty fratello tripped over the Croatian border, and several second-generation girls had to be flown up to help them across. Defence Minister Petris left a memo with Foreign Affairs urging her Rt. Hon. Colleagues to encourage Croatia to enrol in the Schengen Agreement.

The Number Three from Section One's Perugia station was killed in a car bomb, and Amadeo was shot in the shoulder when covering the evacuation of the station office.

Claes sipped at the sweet scent of her winter-blooming Sarcococca shrubs.

And then, it was Triela's turn.

* * *

"Keeping busy, Miss. Triela?"

Triela froze for one choking moment – the shock of discovery made her heart skip a beat and it took a conscious exertion of will to stop the emergency pacemaker from kicking in and driving her into a cardiac frenzy that would have catapulted her up through the ceiling. Slowly, creakingly, she turned around, trying to paint a smile onto her face but only managing to judder out a freakish rictus grin.

Avise stood in the centre of the corridor, wearing a bemused, indulgent expression. "Feeling the burn, eh?" Commenting on Triela's shaking, Avise smiled broadly and genially. "Glad to see that you're so dedicated to keeping fit. After some good exercise, you'll sleep as soundly as the sweetest innocent!"

Happiness flooded Triela's face, but it wasn't pleasure from Avise's praise, but rather the relief of her remembering that she wasn't suspiciously togged up for a commando raid, she was wearing her tracksuit.

"Yes sir, it's especially important for cyborgs to remain in trim." She nodded dutifully, speaking in a level monotone as though she was delivering a report at a debriefing.

"What's your regime? I've been in charge of exercise programmes for years now, I could probably help tune you up." Avise offered helpfully.

_Hilshire is my handler, Mr. Mancini, not you! Don't you ever try to replace him!_ Triela thought defensively, jealousy pricking at her.

"It's hard to say, _Mr. Hilshire_ keeps up a rota that changes quite a lot." Triela said, with pointed emphasis on her handler's name.

Avise persisted. "Well, you use a shotgun, don't you – and maintain bayonet drill for close-quarter battle? You need to maintain strong upper-body strength, and if you'd pardon my saying so your arms seem a little thin—"

"Sir! I'm a cyborg!" Triela's voice was strained, and she gave Avise a hard stare.

Avise blinked quickly, realising himself the ridiculousness of what he had just said. He felt chagrined at his inadvertent slip into being a meddlesome busybody, which hadn't been what he had wanted. He felt sorry for putting Triela in this position, but now that the situation had emerged he had to keep up appearances. "Even so, I think--"

"Sorry for interrupting, Mr. Mancini, but are you free for a moment?" Ferro's voice cut in as her hard shoes clipped and clapped down the corridor towards the pair. She was carrying a personnel file in her hands.

"You're still working too? My, everyone's busy as a bumblebee here, aren't they?" Avise laughed lightly.

"I'm just about to sign out for the night," Ferro pursed her lips into a beestung expression, "but before I do, I just wanted to check something with you." She opened the file in her hands and flipped through a few pages with a practised nail-edge. "It says here that you're a university graduate, is that correct?"

"Well, it's not much," Avise shifted his feet awkwardly and rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, "a 2:2 in Physics. I mean, I can work out artillery trajectories and read a red-shift smear, but I won't be finding the Grand Unified Theory anytime soon."

Ferro's ears pricked up at the mention of "artillery", and she made a mental note of it. She lifted her head from the file. "Excellent, that's all great, Mr. Mancini."

"Really? What have I won?" Avise chuckled.

Ferro shut the file with what she must have hoped would have been a smart snap, but the loose, large leaves only limply flapped to instead. Undeterred, she carried on. "You've been awarded a new responsibility, Mr. Mancini – that of science teacher for the cyborgs' education segments. We've had to make do with the handlers just reading aloud from textbooks before now."

"I'm sure that I'll rise to the challenge." Avise replied blandly.

Ferro leaned back an imperceptible fraction in distaste. She'd been hoping to get the New Kid to squirm a little and have him stammer in frustration at being borne down by even heavier weights that he could not shift, but his cool response had spoiled it. "Glad to see you're enthusiastic about Agency life, Mr. Mancini." She composed herself, before making to walk off. "Goodnight."

"Same to you." The two adults turned their backs to each other as they went their separate ways. Avise was expecting to carry on where he had left off, and made to turn towards Triela, but the girl was long gone.

* * *

Triela was ninth in the queue at the station newsagent's. Ten minutes ago she had been fourteenth.

Even though it was two o'clock in the morning.

She looked at the fifty-euro note in her hands. Monique had shown her a trick with a five pound-sterling note where if you folded it in a particular manner, you could make the picture of the Queen on the back smile and frown. That was impossible with a European banknote, with their bland bridges half-faded into mist; still, Triela rubbed her thumb across its surface, feeling the texture of each individual layer of plastic, foil, ink and chemicals that the paper was treated with along the sensitive ridges of her thumbprint. The complex industrial process was necessary to give the money the stamp of authority and authenticity – Triela took a warm sense of satisfaction in relating the same process back to herself, but it cooled again when part of her head muttered that money was property to be passed from person to person.

The girls weren't permitted to own money themselves – discretionary income would mean a measure of choice and independence, she thought with some uncharitable cynicism. All their necessities were supplied by the Agency, and their luxuries furnished by the handlers, in order to strengthen the bonds (shackles?) that the cyborgs shared with their organisation. However, last summer, she and Hilshire had been rooting through the house of a Padanian cell that they had just eliminated, searching for a set of incriminating documents that their leader had been rumoured to be entrusted with. While going through the pockets of a Padanian who she had ventilated with a barrel of buckshot, Triela had chanced across a wallet which, remarkably, was stuffed with money – fully two thousand euros' worth of banknotes, she discovered at a later count, an astonishing fortune.

Perhaps the Padanian had had it on his person because he needed to repay a debt – perhaps a leak in the Agency had made him aware that danger was coming and he had been planning to flee with all that he could carry before the hammer fell, which had happened to be sooner than he had expected. Really, she ought to have declared the money during the debriefing and let the analysts consider its strategic implications. It would have been a sensible thing to do – important, necessary, even vital, because the stoutest armour that the enemy wears can be exploited by a single flaw and inferences could have been made to all manner of Padanian internal politics and disputes to capitalise on. Nonetheless, as much as she knew, _agreed with_, the reasons that she should have given up the money... she did not. It was an inexplicable impulse. The conditioning accreting around her neurones had weighed down and dulled most of her instincts, but one nervous reaction still sparked. Triela had folded the wallet closed, and slipped it into her inside pocket.

It hadn't been rebellion; there had been no dissatisfaction which made her claim a prize to fill out a sense of inadequacy. It was a random and unreasoned urge of instinct; a _mutation_, a tumour on Triela's psyche. Yet her conditioned mind abhorred this – sculpted into lines of order and regularity, Triela's subconsciousness could not tolerate aberrant behaviour. So, to prevent the episode from driving a crack into her mind, it had worked frenetically, churning under her thoughts to reconcile it to her attitude of conditioned service. She was fostering greater comradely spirit amongst the cyborgs. She was funnelling money back into the Italian economy and so defending the state by advancing prosperity. She was testing the compound's own security measures. She was enhancing her abilities with extracurricular escape-and-evasion training.

So here she was, rubbing sleep from her eyes while the woman in front of went tapping through four separate credit cards in order to pay for a bottle of water and an orange.

Musing on the cosmic infinities that ensured that any delay would always be agonisingly extenuated at least carried her over to the point when the woman entered her PIN wrong for the third time and had to switch to yet another credit card. Truth be told, Triela admired the woman – it took a certain quality of indifference to persist with such inconvenience to everyone around her, to the extent that it was grandly heroic. Triela also admired her dexterity in juggling so many separate cards – tossing and swapping before their low-interest introductory periods ran out, spinning debt around and around again in one long dizzying waltz – although the thought of what would happen to the house of cards if one twitched on the wrong side of a Bank Holiday brought to Triela's mind that time the safehouse she'd been storming had had the entrance mined. They'd picked up her right leg in a tree and her Winchester three blocks away.

Eventually the snacker had found a little spare gap in her credit wall to cram in her latest purchase, leaving Triela with her heavy baskets to hold up the queue just as long for the grumbling shoppers behind her.

With the business done and the wad of that fateful money pruned down a little more, Triela afforded herself a smile as she made to walk out into the hall. As much trouble as it was, at the end of the day the taste was worth it.

Then Triela's sensitive cyborg eyes looked past the bored-looking truck driver, the bedraggled new mother trying to soothe her mewling infant, the staff member sweeping up some broken crockery, and the pamphleteer still doggedly hanging about the entrance even at this ungodly hour...

...to see Hilshire walking in.

* * *

Triela felt a wheel dig into her side. She risked a glance upwards to see an elderly lady with a wheeled basket glaring down at her.

"You're in the way, young lady." It was a statement with added expectation, an unvoiced command.

"Ah, I'm sorry ma'am, I'm... looking for... my contact lens, it fell out." To demonstrate she twitched one eyelid spastically, thankful for the independent muscle control that her conditioned brain gave her.

"In the same position for four minutes? Nonsense! Don't treat me like I'm senile, little miss! You're hiding from someone."

_Did that mean that she'd been deliberately waiting that time to come and harass me? Joyless hag! _Triela thought uncharitably.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am, but could you _help_ me hide?" That, too, had an implicit command hidden within it.

It seemed that Triela's determination to assert herself was impressive enough to inspire a change of heart in the elderly interloper - her face split into a broad smile. "Of course! You remind me of—"

The woman squawked and her hands flew to her heart in surprise as Triela pushed up and sprinted off - showing to everyone looking across the aisles that she was having a conversation with the ground was not conducive to concealment! As Triela did so, she was frantically pulling out her pigtails, cursing under her breath as the elastic began catching on knots of hair. She'd done Observation And Recognition – she knew that people fixated upon specific details when reconstructing a face, and her barest bullet-burn breath of a chance lay with eliminating her prominent pigtails.

Hilshire was queuing up at the counter...!

Hilshire would see her as she walked out of the newsagent's...!

Hilshire would be dazzled by long golden hair reflecting the light of the hallway and his eyes would be drawn _right to her_...

Hilshire turned towards the counter as a till came free, and a relieved Triela hastily scooted across the hallway to seek refuge in the supermarket.

Triela took a pause by the ready meals to catch her breath. What was Hilshire _doing _here? When he'd come in to the station – his black trench coat almost seeming to merge him into the darkness outside – it had made him seem like some ghoul sweeping in to claim her. Triela suddenly felt sick, the conflict of both the fear of discovery and the guilt of hiding alike churning in and curdling her stomach.

She was spared from the ignominy of vomiting when it all suddenly solidified again – Hilshire was walking over to the supermarket!

Squeezing back into the narrow space between the freezer unit and the rear wall, Triela felt as though she'd been bracketed and pinned down in a foxhole by heavy machine-gun fire while Hilshire mused on the takeaway salads. Triela wasn't only pinned, she was shellshocked – she didn't know quite what to make of her austere handler succumbing to the fashion of a health kick.

Eventually, the barrage halted while the gunners paused to cool their barrels and exchange ammo belts – Hilshire had made his selections and turned away to pay at the supermarket counter now. Triela used it as an opportunity to conduct a tactical withdrawal deeper into the redoubt, and popped out of her hiding place to scamper back into the restaurant, where the servery was set back into its own recess and afforded a corner to hide behind. It could only provide a transient respite, however – there was no guarantee that Hilshire wasn't already harrying her heels, hounding her with the desire to buy a coffee as a late-night pick-me-up.

The restaurant? It was late at night and it would be closing soon. Triela shook her head, trying to disguise her distress from the other customers by making her turning head look as though it was choosing between the strawberry and the banana smoothies. If the restaurant was closed, it would also be empty, and the dining area was in full view of the hall – one girl sitting down and miming eating a pastry would only be even more obvious.

But beyond it...

A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Triela's head, and she gnawed her lip in anxiety as panic built up in her breast, the strain seizing her heart. Time was running short – not only could she enter Hilshire's line of sight at any moment, her own nerve was stretched tauted to breaking. There was nothing else for it. Triela put caution to the wind and sprinted across the hallway. Hopefully she'd be moving too quickly for Hilshire to resolve any detail on her face. She dashed across, scooted around tables, and dodged a few shoppers, to drive an unerring course straight into the female toilets.

_Base! _Triela breathed a sigh of relief and release as she locked herself into a stall. The one place where no man could ever follow her.

Then her breath died in her throat as she heard Hilshire's distinctive whistling walking in.

Triela snatched up her legs to herself on top of the toilet seat, rocking back and forth with the reverberations of shellshock and quietly blubbering to herself, anticipating at any instant the rapping crack on anger on the stall door...

"Do you mind?" A female voice cut in. "This is the ladies'!"

"Oops, sorry ma'am, wrong door." Hilshire's embarrassed, apologetic voice let itself out.

Triela pawed at herself cautiously. Just as well she was already in the toilet.

* * *

Hilshire rubbed the fatigue out of his eyes as he clipped his seatbelt back on. The meeting with the Section One station in Molise had gone on longer than he'd expected it to and he'd really have preferred to have stayed overnight in Campobasso – he'd never admit it to anyone, but as he approached forty Hilshire could sense that the engine of his body... well, needed Premium over Unleaded, and a fresh set of spark plugs. _The cyborgs don't know how good they have it_, he thought with a grim smile, as he pulled back out onto the motorway.

As he drove, Hilshire forked a spoonful of salad into his mouth, from the box that he'd propped up on top of the dashboard – it probably wasn't something mandated in the Highway Code, but he was hungry and the traffic was light. He hummed appreciately to himself as he chewed – he'd been not a little sceptical of the stuff at first, not wanting to be seen as yet another middle-aged man belatedly trying to deflate his spare tyre, but it had actually been a pleasant surprise. It was _good._

There was something else, however, that he remained uncertain about. He took the CD that he'd purchased from the service station newsagent and was now laid on the passenger seat. He picked up the disc, frowned at it critically, and then with a philosophical shrug slotted it into the car's CD player.

Hilshire had read about authors and musicians sneaking out of lessons to find the school record player, communing with vinyl as though they were celestial discs, rings of Saturn spinning will all the resonance of truth and reality. The cynic in him muttered that it was all some hot air blown up for the magazines and their desperate, flailing, floundering readership, but nonetheless his conscience, a desire to be elevated, pricked at him. As he drove he subconsciously tipped his head towards the speakers, straining his ears, reaching out to snatch at the ephemeral ribbons of meaning blowing from the grilles and fluttering and snapping tantalisingly in the air, to touch the pulse that powered the beat and melody of the music—

_Kraftwerk_.

He was listening to a _Kraftwerk _album.

When he was the handler of a half-robotic girl.

The naked ridiculousness of it curdled into exploitative obscenity. With a self-admonishing click of his tongue, Hilshire ejected the CD and tossed it to the back seat of the car. He felt disgusted with himself, as though he'd lapsed – he communed at a deeper and more profound level with cyborg, and he didn't need any pretentious and fanciful ideas of inference to know his Triela.

* * *

The sun was out today, but the cold, stark January light staining the road and trees made the landscape as sharp as frostbite. Even after his car had choked to a stop, Pietro Abruzzo was reluctant to leave the warm bubble of the car, and eventually his partner Mario Costi had to rap his knuckles on the windscreen to jerk him out.

"You're a freak, Costi." Pietro grumbled as he pulled his coat tighter around himself – although the professional part used the opportunity to adjust the pistol in his chest holster and make sure that it didn't stand out.

"Perfect weather, cold but clear!" Mario said breezily, before drawing in a long, chest-puffing, satisfying breath. "Cold, clean air, flushes out all of the muggy rot from your lungs, freshens everything!"

Pietro wanted to strike some acerbic remark – something like how Mario wouldn't need to have a pulmonary enema if he wasn't on twenty a day – but he caught himself from speaking after remembering that it was actually himself who was the smoker of the pair. Pietro instead settled for taking charge and waving his partner along. "Come on, let's get this done quickly, we're interviewing that Cosmo Bank robber at eleven o'clock."

Inside, the service station was bustling with staff and patrons – the air outside was cold, but the road was already burning rubber. Amidst the din of shuffling feet and the clatter of cutlery in the restaurant, it would be hard to see where they had to go, but Pietro's analytical eye picked out a likely character – a somewhat overweight man in a suit, standing in almost the centre of the central corridor and shifting his feet awkwardly. Pietro and Mario walked towards him, being discreet with their badges so as not to cause alarm and lose the man custom.

"Mr. Fuccini, am I correct?" Pietro greeted the man.

The man jumped in surprise, visibly astonished at being approached directly – he had been presumably expecting a member of staff to lead Pietro and Mario over to him. "Um, er, yes, I'm the manager of this station." He came out with, trying to recover his dignity into what meagre authority he could hold onto.

"I'm Detective Abruzzo, and this is my partner Detective Costi. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. You telephoned the police about a security concern?"

"Ah yes, yes of course, please follow me." Fuccini regained control of himself quickly – perhaps he liked to feel in control, no matter the significance of the action – and led the two detectives through a service door into the station's office area. A turn around an anonymous corridor took Pietro and Mario into a security room. It was the usual setup – a narrow, repurposed closet, with a stack of televisions linked to the station's cameras and a bored-looking contract guard in an untucked uniform, guiltily trying to sneak away the mobile phone that he'd been tapping out text messages to his girlfriend on.

"Nerio, do you have those tapes that I asked you to set aside?" Fuccini either didn't notice, or omitted to notice, his employee's slovenly manner. That he evidently took a direct interest in events on the shop floor indicated to Pietro that the manager had some awareness, but given his previous conduct it was equally likely that he obsessed over minutiae and confused that for attentiveness, like someone studying the paving stones underfoot before he walked into a lamppost.

The security guard clattered noisily around the side of the television, before pulling out an ungainly tower of old VHS tapes which looked threateningly likely to slip out from between each other and crash over the floor. Through some skilful dancing, however, they were transferred to Fuccini and over to a separate VCR and television at the far end of the room without any catastrophe.

With his boss in the room the security guard made a show of attentiveness to the video screens, although the way he swivelled in his chair and the way his head drifted continuously from screen to screen betrayed a lack of careful scrutiny. Fuccini, however, was entirely absorbed by the video recorder.

The old device grinded and whirred like a food disposal unit as one of the tapes was fed into it. "What I have here are excerpts from our security feeds for the last four months. I was reviewing them before deletion when I noticed something." Fuccini explained, as he scrambled through grainy shots of tired shoppers with the fast-forward button.

Pietro gave an askance glance to Mario over Fuccini's bent back, and the other detective mouthed the same thought over to him. _Four _months? It hardly seemed like a security matter if it took that long to formulate. Grimacing to himself, Pietro turned back to the television screen, already formulating how he could excuse himself and Mario at the point where the bare minimum of attentiveness to assure public confidence in the police service had been achieved.

"Watch this young girl, here." Fuccini pointed out to the image of an adolescent with a brown bob haircut, standing in the middle of the central corridor. Like many old systems the view was juddery, only recording every eighth frame or so in order to conserve limited tape length, but it still showed her activity well enough. The camera lingered on her for a long time – she seemed to spinning about the floor her head back and staring up at the ceiling, to the extent that she even stumbled into a few other customers. She would meekly bow her head at the gesticulated remonstrations, and then once the aggrieved party had swept off, continue on her way.

After a few minutes of camera time, the view cut to several shorter shots of the girl moving through the station's various stores and purchasing a variety of items. Then, it cut to an external scene in the car park where the girl – with two plastic bags heavily laden with goods – swung them freely as though they only held empty air. Pietro suppressed a smirk as the thin plastic on one of the bags' handles snapped, spilling shopping all over the tarmac. Chastened, the girl hastily gathered up the scattered goods and scurried out of view, clutching the broken bag to her chest.

It would have been tempting to discount this as a waste of time by a life-wasting middle manager trying to desperately restore colour to his life with fanciful conspiracy theories, but Pietro's detecting mindset couldn't help but notice that there was the seed of something in the video that he had just seen. The time stamp showed that the video was taken at half-one in the morning; the girl had been acting completely without supervision, even though she couldn't physically have driven to the service station; and even if an irresponsible parent was just snoozing in his car while sending his daughter off on an errand, she didn't seem to be approaching any vehicle in the car park. Perhaps they were dealing with a runaway? Pietro rubbed his chin as he considered the matter – even if it had no security implications as the manager had enthused, this was still actually something worthwhile.

"I take it she returns again?" Mario asked, voicing his partner's thoughts.

"Yes indeed," Fuccini nodded, "this one is three weeks later..."

Fuccini went through a further three videos, showing the same girl going through the same routine on several different occasions leading up to mid-December.

Pietro rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Well, thank you for bringing this to our attention, Mr. Fuccini, we do believe that there's something substantial here. If any information that you've provided contributes to a conviction you'll be entitled to the standard civil bounty which you can apply for—"

"Wait, I'm not finished yet." Fuccini interrupted, a little self-importantly, while patting the other half-dozen videotapes which had been in his stack.

"Thank you for your diligence, Mr. Fuccini, but we really have enough to work with here..." Mario explained patiently.

"No, no, not more of the same girl." Fuccini rushed to explain. "She has a group of friends, too."

Both detectives frowned in disquiet as Fuccini successively fed more tapes into the machine. Mario noticed the security guard leaning back in his own chair and craning his neck to catch a curious glimpse of what was being shown, and Mario had to shoo him back to his own desk so that the detectives could concentrate. The videos showed a similar routine being performed by a number of different children on several different occasions. One was a boy with short, thick blonde hair; another a fit, sporty-looking girl with short black hair cropped close to her head. There was another more averagely-shaped girl with long black hair running down past her shoulders, but she only appeared once, whereas the other two put in several visits.

"How often have these children come here?" Pietro asked.

"The timestamps say once a week, mostly, but rarely on the same day – it can be any point in the week. On a couple of occasions they've appeared twice a week." Fuccini replied.

A group of runaways camping out? Pietro's frown deepened. This was becoming more and more unlikely, and implausible. Nonetheless, the regularity and consistency didn't lie – this conundrum wasn't the creation of some overenthusiastic theory-crafting on Fuccini's own part.

"And finally this..." Fuccini was down to one tape.

"Another child? We get the message, Mr. Fuccini. We'll take it to identify him, but there's no need to show it to us now."

"This one's a her, and something's different too." Fuccini seemed rather inordinately pleased with himself at being able to inform the experts. He made no attempt to conceal what he would have insisted was an endearing smile; but you didn't need to be an expert in forensic science to identify it as a smug grin.

The VCR was spun up again, and now the television chugged through images of a half-caste teenage girl with very striking blonde hair and long, sinuous pigtails.

"This is very recent, from three days ago. She puts in a few appearances before that, but I'm skipping that to show you this..."

Just as the girl was leaving the service station with a bag of shopping under each arm, she abruptly changed course, jinking aside into the coffee shop. From there following her became more difficult because she was only jutting in around the edges of the camera field excerpt where she'd dash off behind another stack of shelves like a soldier hugging cover, but that difficulty itself was instructive enough – she was actively avoiding someone. If there could be any doubt, dashing for the female toilets like a schoolchild running for base during a game of tag confirmed it as gospel.

"Do we know what they were actually buying?" Pietro pressed the manager.

"Sadly no," Fuccini grimaced, "as I only noticed this the other day I'm afraid that we never made a record of receipts. _However_," he continued quickly as he noticed the detective breathing in to speak, "they tend to avoid the supermarket and restaurant, and stick around the confectionery and magazine stands in the newsagent."

Three months of living off of nothing but sweets and chocolate? Never mind black teeth – the girls should be dead with congealed sugar clogging their colons. And how did they fund such indulgence? In each video they had queued at the counters like ordinary customers and hadn't made any apparent effort to steal things. In the end, Pietro was a little disappointed when Mario nudged him with his watch – despite Fuccini's greasy, unctuous manner, this case was starting to grab his interest... and then of course there was the gauntlet of the frosty weather outside to contend with.

Assuring Fuccini that they would send a rookie to pick up the tapes later on in the day (some arcane official regulation forbade the collecting of evidence until a file was actually opened back at the precinct office) and unrolling the usual spiel about thanks for civic duty and conviction bounties, Pietro and Mario took their leave. The sliding doors of the service station's entrance seemed to never shut – there was always a new visitor coming – the cold blast of the morning air made Pietro shiver before he had even left the building. He tried to fend off the cold with conversation.

"A bit queer, isn't it, Mario?"

Mario didn't reply immediately, instead sucking in a deep, swelling breath after he had passed over the threshold to the outside. He then made just as much a show of blowing out his lungs, his breath streaming from his mouth as a thick, white cloud.

Pietro waved a finger through the twisting breath as it dispersed. "You know, Mario, if you really believe in that 'flushing out your lungs' schtick, aren't you contaminating the air for other people with all your crap, there?"

"You assume I care!" Mario laughed as he approached the car. "You need as much as you can before the heat of the day denatures all of the freshness."

Mario stopped short of the vehicle, and waiting for Pietro to catch up with him. Together, they dropped down onto the tarmac and did the standard chassis-check for car bombs, with Mario scanning underneath the sides while Pietro felt underneath the bumpers. Satisfied that no-one had tampered with the car during their time inside the service station, they wiped down their hands with rags kept in their pockets for just that purpose, and then got in.

"Anyway, seriously now, what are your thoughts?" Pietro asked as he started up the engine.

"Something's up, definitely." Mario perhaps betrayed that the cold affected him more than his bluff exterior admitted by holding his hands over one of the car's heater fans. "And I'm not sure that it's as simple as some runaways, either." Mario had evidently been following the same line of thought as Pietro himself.

"Yeah," Pietro confirmed as he brought the car back onto the motorway, "I've never worked on the disappearances desk, but if there had been that many young teenagers absconding we'd have heard about it on general orders – besides, runaways tend to go to ground in urban areas, where there's more to scavenge – not in the cold countryside."

"And not with enough money to afford inflated service station prices either!" Mario cried. "I mean, _ten_ euros for a plate of pasta? We should be arresting _Fucccini _for _robbery_!"

"Which begs the question, where did they get the money for such regular visits?" Pietro mused. "Theft? Mugging?"

"I doubt it. Those kids didn't look more than twelve."

"The Eurasian girl was a bit older, definitely a teenager," Mario pointed out, "and even though she's only a girl, she wouldn't have to attack someone directly. Brick the victim in the back of the head, go through his pockets while he's down."

"Worth looking up on the assault register..." Pietro's voice trailed off into a scowl as the car behind them insisted on tailgating, even though the detectives were already in the fast lane. Pietro pulled back into the middle lane to let the car zoom ahead. "We should arrest him for speeding." He grumbled.

"We're doing 140 KM ourselves." Mario pointed out.

"Yeah, but we're law enforcers engaging in pursuit of a suspect." A thin smile began creeping up Pietro's face.

Mario, however, poured water on Pietro's stoking enthusiasm. "Nah... I really can't be arsed with all the paperwork."

His partner's point punctured and deflated Pietro. "Eh, I suppose."

They continued to drive along as normal, with Pietro left pining for the elusive fluttering ribbon of action and danger that had just slipped out of his grasp.

Action and danger...

"Little kids like to play." Pietro said aloud.

"Eh?" Mario was surprised at the sudden declaration.

"We're looking at this from the wrong angle. They're too clean to be scabrous runaways who haven't washed in months. They've too much money to be destitute gutter-dwellers. They're eating too poorly to actually even survive months in the open. They're just _not_ runaways."

"Well, I can work out that much, but what else is there?" Mario inquired.

"Perhaps it _is _a 'security matter' after all." Pietro intoned darkly. "There's a large forest area just behind the station. A group of Padanians bivouacking out in there, and they've co-opted some local country kids to do supply runs for them. Twelve year-olds aren't interested in politics, they'd just be excited to be doing some super-secret spying."

"I don't know..." Mario sounded unconvinced. "Seems a bit convoluted. And would a bunch of terrorists be that committed they'd spend their entire time camping out?"

"Well, recent reports said that Padania's getting bigger support from ex-soldiers so it's not impossible. Not much surveillance out in the back of beyond either."

Mario grimaced. "Come on, Pietro, don't overreach yourself. We're cops, not spooks, this ain't _CSI_. Besides, you can't fuel a revolution on Kit-Kats, regardless of whether you're twelve or thirty."

"Yeah, but can you think of anything else?"

"I suppose not." Mario conceded.

"See what the chief thinks about it anyway, once we've given the Cosmo goon a working over." Pietro concluded.

The car turned off the motorway at a junction to cross round and head back to Rome in the other direction. As they negotiated the junction roundabout Mario suddenly shifted in his seat to look backwards at a passing exit. He patted Pietro's arm to get his attention. "Hold up – isn't there some big children's home off of here? Couldn't they just be kids from there, doing dares?"

Pietro thought for a moment, but then dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. "The 'Social Welfare Agency', that place, you mean? Nah, that's palliative care for cripples and cancer patients. You saw the girls on those videos, though – they were as fit as fiddles."


	4. Chapter 4

Panic swept the Agency when the perimeter alarm actually _did _go off. The security team scrambled for their first active alert in months, and hearts of the younger girls thundered at such a rate that they all probably carved off a good year or so of their lives while they fretted and struggled to remember if someone had arranged a sweets run that night. It turned out to be a badger after all.

Hilshire and Triela went on an excursion to thin out the numbers of the Camorra in Naples. The handler came back sporting a fresh scar in his side, and the cyborg came back looking thoughtful.

Avise and Giorgio spent a few days in Perugia, as bodyguards for the Section One forensic team that was inspecting the wreck of the station office. The time passed without incident – Padania was evidently satisfied with hounding out the staff and trashing the place.

Amelia, Diana and Bella successfully defused three bombs that had been placed outside a mosque to devastate Friday prayers. They disabled and removed the devices with silent speed and skill so as to rob Padania even of the effect of alarm that would have come from an alert. Tragically, however, the intelligence that had informed them of the bombs had failed to account for the contingency shooter – he ripped through the worshippers as they streamed out and had cut down three of them before the Section One agent assigned to watch the area could return fire and drive him off. The shooter himself was later killed when he tried to fight it out with police.

Rico was as pleased as punch when she beat Claes's best time on the obstacle course. Claes took umbrage at this grave and cutting insult – she ran the course more than anyone as part of her testing regime and took pride in knowing the mathematically optimal placement of every last footfall. As a result, even Claes's garden was neglected as she relentlessly hammered the track until she had edged out in front again, and practically shot through her latest pair of legs.

Beatrice found some old chalk in the back of a drawer, and played hopscotch on the path.

Then it was Henrietta's turn.

* * *

Mario Theuma felt a little exposed. Today, he was the only handler in the briefing room, and had sat down at a desk, drumming his fingers on the wooden top and not knowing quite what to do with himself. There were half-a-dozen other men in the room, but they were all members of the support staff and seemed happy enough chatting amongst themselves, leaving him exposed. Avise, the prospective handler, was also there but he was sitting by an open window in order to have a smoke and he didn't seem inclined for conversation either. Even if they were still part of the same organisation, it seemed that everywhere you went, people built walls.

Everyone was eventually given a focus to concentrate on as a group when Ferro, who had originally called the meeting, walked into the room. The conversation turned into a clatter of scraping chair legs; Mario shifted in his seat to bring his back more upright; and although Avise looked a little irritated at not getting to finish his cigarette, he nonetheless stubbed it out in a little lozenge tin taken from a pocket, and then took a seat himself.

"There is a short lead time on this fresh intelligence and the operation will be held tonight." Ferro announced, without any introducitoon. "Any leisure you have planned must be cancelled."

There were a few groans about missing the big Lazio-Roma _Derby Della Capitale_, which was going to be put up on the big screen in the bar. Ferro couldn't have not known about the big game herself – that she declined to mention it, instead discarding it underneath a generic remark, was a way of asserting herself, implying that any other concern was insignificant beneath her own will.

Ferro carried on regardless, ignoring the chorus of complaints as she began handing out briefing folders from the stack held to her chest. "A routine check of police traffic has turned up an item of interest which we want in on; apparently State Police are going to be attempting an arrest of a Padanian cell believed to be camped out in Macchio Forest."

"Macchio Forest? That's just a couple of miles away! It's practically under our noses!" Gregorio exclaimed.

"Precisely." Ferro pronounced the word in an elongated way, its lengthier delivery allowing the icy frost in her voice to penetrate everyone's skin. "If they have been loitering in close proximity to the Agency, it is likely that they are a reconnaissance unit of some description. Understandably we wish to minimise the risk of public exposure to the Agency, and if these Padanians have specific intelligence as to our activities here we need to control it, and capture of eliminate these Padanians before they can reach the ear of the unreliable police."

"There's an easier way to do this, surely." Nihad was frowning critically at a map of Macchio Forest, decorated with winding lines of route. "Why noy just get the defence minister to lean on the justice minister, and have this police bust aborted? Then we can scoop up the Padanians at our leisure."

Ferro twisted her lips into a grimace. She'd invested a lot of effort in creating an effective and elegant plan that would balance multiple interests at short notice, and all of this prodding was irritating and unhelpful. "It's a matter of not tipping our hand. Information security amongst the State Police is mediocre at best, and so we have to assume that Padania at least has some inkling that an operation is being prepared. If it is suddenly cancelled, they will know of our own awareness of the cell, and that will make subsequent capture all the more difficult. Furthermore, the limited manpower we have available for this operation means that the police can be an asset – by shadowing them, they can corral any Padanians for us."

Gregorio whistled, impressed by Ferro's command of the subject. "Here endeth the lesson!" he chortled.

"Why is this only coming up now?" Alfonso scratched his beard, looking perturbed. "I mean, are the police not jumping at shadows? If Padanians were kicking leaves in our back garden, we'd know about it. How did they escape notice for so long?"

"Something that we'll doubtlessly elucidate in interrogation." Ferro shrugged.

Avise had spent the entire discussion flicking back and forth through the briefing folder, keeping an ear out for others but having nothing particular to contribute himself - until he flapped back to the cover. "Operation _Shoelace_?" He cocked a quizzical eyebrow at Ferro.

"It's random, just what the computer spat out, nothing more." Ferro sighed in exasperation, flicking her gaze heavenward.

"_Hmph._" Avise grunted, as he began reading through the file. "A bit less clunky than 'Iraqi Freedom', I suppose."

"That was fairly _gauche_, I agree." Alfonso approached, slapping the cover of his own folder. "On the other hand, though, the name of this little excursion of ours is actually quite _apposite_." He rolled the word over his tongue and savoured the pronunciation. "You can surprise someone by tying their shoelaces together to trip them up, and indeed that is precisely what we're doing here, holding out a tripwire for them to catch themselves on as they run towards us unawares."

"In that case, wouldn't 'Operation Goalkeeper', or something like that, fit better?" Avise rejoindered.

"But how unsubtle! Ach, there's no poetry in your soul, Avise Mancini." Alfonso pronounced, aspirating his words with a theatrical flourish.

Avise rolled his eyes, and then sat down to read his mission file, humming a canticle to himself.

* * *

"What'd your wife say about that porn rag you're ogling?" Pietro sidled up to Mario, jostling him with his elbow.

"It's not a porno, it's a men's lifestyle magazine." Mario protested, wounded.

"What _sort_ of lifestyle?" Pietro chuckled.

"Enough with your juvenile tittering-behind-the-bikesheds! It deals with adult concerns in an open, mature way."

"Mario, Mario... that and a euro will get you a can of Coke. Anyway, there's something a lot more appealing to your eyes – look up, to the arcade area across the hall."

Mario squinted. "Hey, you're right – they actually have a couple of proper gaming cabinets in there! Heh, _Outrun _– that's a classic racer. It's good to see – slot machines are throttling arcades like knotweed these days—"

"Look who's _leaving _the arcade, dimwit."

There was an adolescent girl dressed in a sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms being led out of the area by a member of staff. She had large, hazel eyes, and chestnut hair in a bob haircut.

* * *

"...sorrry, little miss, but the sign says that it's over-eighteens only in here." The staff member ushered Henrietta out of the arcade.

"I'm terribly, sorry, sir, I didn't mean to cause you any bother and I'm sorry for being such a burden, but a friend of mine, she enjoys those games and I just wanted to see what they were like..."

The girl spoke with fine elocution and was not mumbling, but she was so meek and abashed that nonetheless he could barely make out what she was saying. It took a moment for the staff member to work out what she said and form a response, a gap which allowed another voice to cut in.

"Having fun, little miss?"

The hairs pricked up on the back of Henrietta's neck, every sense in her body screaming danger. With a thought she immediately started glanding combat drugs and turned around, slowly.

"I'm Pietro, and this is my pal Mario." Two men squatted down on their haunches to bring themselves level. "We're keen on games as well."

Henrietta shook her head. "I'm sorry sir, but my brother tells me not to talk to strangers."

Pietro laughed lightly. "Your brother is a sensible fellow."

"I love him very much." Henrietta said defensively.

"I'm sure you do." Pietro smiled warmly. "But you don't need to worry about that. We're not strangers, we're policemen."

Henrietta was already holding her bags of shopping, which was useful – her hands were already balled into fists around the handles, so no-one noticed her elevated tension. "You don't look like police." She said meekly, her childlike voice and expression disguising the gathering readiness behind her eyes.

"Well, not every policeman wears a uniform. Sometimes you've got to be in disguise to catch the baddies!" Mario gave Henrietta a conspiratorial wink. "A lot of games are like that, the heroine beating the baddies and saving the day for the goodies. You like that, don't you?"

"I don't like bad _men_." Henrietta said, fixing her eyes on the two men before her.

Mario's smile twitched, faltering for a moment as his subconsciousness detected a hint of the venom in Henrietta's dark pupils. He quickly pasted it back on, however. "Well, who does? Still, how'd you like to do it for _real_? Beating the baddies looks exciting and colourful on the screen – just imagine what a thrill it'd be in real life!"

"It wouldn't be anything difficult." Pietro reassured Henrietta. "Just a little walk out to the woods. You can be a big girl, leading us grown-ups about! And maybe your good friends you're getting sweets for out there can help us get the baddies we're looking for?"

Henrietta bolted. Pietro threw out a hand to grab onto her, but he only pawed empty air.

"_State Police! Everybody __**stop**__!_" Mario cried out aloud, now brandishing his badge to the air to prevent any have-a-go heroes from weighing in and thinking that they were saving a girl from a child abduction.

Alerted by the sound of Mario's call, two uniformed policemen rushed in through the entrance, barging aside stunned and confused At the sight of the fleeing Henrietta the two policemen squatted down, blocking the hall like American quarterbacks preparing to receive a charge in the fourth quarter. Henrietta did not try to dodge, but as she sprinted forward she swung the bags of shopping around, their heavy, pendulous weight cycling like morningstars. The policemen flinched from the hard-contact allusion but held firm – so Henrietta let go, casting each bag high into the air. One of the policemen blinked to avoid a collision with the projectiles, and the other instinctively reached out to catch a thrown object – scarce distractions, but enough to let Henrietta kick down into a slide between their legs, squeaking across the tile floor to flow up and catch each bag before they could crash and spill against the ground.

Henrietta cut a dagger-straight course for the door, but as she crossed the threshold outside another policeman who had been guarding the entrance threw himself over, trying to bundle on top of her. He hadn't anticipated a cyborg's speed, however, and only gave himself a bruising impact on the concrete pavement as he fell behind Henrietta.

As he stumbled back up, Henrietta turned back around towards the entrance that she'd left behind and sacrificed some of her swag and pulled a can of Fanta out of one of her bags. Yanking off the ring so that the can might as well have been a grenade, Henrietta pulled her arm back and pitched the frothing, spurting, shaken-up drink straight at the policeman, flooding his face with fizzy pop.

The policeman staggered backwards blindedly, coughing and spluttering and crying as bubbles rushed up his nose, and tripped over a rank of capsule-toy dispensers by the door. Pietro bit back an obscenity as the clattering crash of bouncing balls blocked his way out of the service station.

"Don't just stand there!" Pietro howled to the car park, the plainclothes officers who were dispersed across it, and the armoured firearms squad who were already pouring out of the three unmarked vans that the police had placed there. _"After her!"_

* * *

Mario scrunched down into a comfortable position at the lip of the slope. His was the only fratello tasked to the operation – while there were others free (He knew that Jose and Henrietta weren't doing anything tonight), he gathered the impression that Ferro was trying to prove something to the Agency's command staff by arranging an effective operation with an economy of resources and minimum expenditure. He resorted instead to ranging his gaze over and inspecting the half-dozen other support agents beside him.

Except for Dona's submachine gun, they were all armed with pistols – far from ideal, but short-range weaponry was necessary to prevent the risk of overshooting bullets from hitting the police chasing the Padanians – and in any case, in the darkness of night and the density of woodland, twenty metres may as well be two thousand. They had compensated for the closer contact and elevated level of danger with a better degree of protection – Dona needed little, naturally, but the adult staff accompanying her were clad in armoured vests and helmets. They mostly wore them over ordinary outdoor clothes, but even despite the short timeframe afforded before they left the compound Avise had changed into a battle-smock.

"Being a bit _earnest_, aren't you, Mancini?" Mario grunted, looking Avise and his attire up and down with a critical eye.

"I learned the elite skill of Operational Dressage that day a mortar bomb bashed through the roof of the shower block while I was in it." Avise replied breezily.

Mario chuckled at that, but it faded quickly: there was a more serious point he wanted to convey. "Even so, Mancini, don't head into this with the wrong attitude – it's a different sort of game. When you eventually get a cyborg, you can't expect to walk her down the Via del Corso as though you're both on foot patrol in Nasiriyah, you know_._"At the mentioning of the topic of cyborgs, Mario instinctively inclined his head towards Dona, who was settling into position a little further along from him, and gave her a paternal smile.

Dona slid her rucksack off her shoulders and gently lowered it to the ground, as though she was worried about dirtying it on the ground. She unzipped it open, revealing a dozen such cylindrical magazines neatly packed together. At a glance, they might have been mistaken for water bottles, or pencil cases. She lifted one out of the pocket and fixed it to her Bizon, the unusual position below the barrel making it look as though she had an under-slung grenade launcher attached to the submachine gun. Mario thought that something small projecting a hidden image and an unquantifiable power appropriately reflected the cyborg herself.

Dona noticed that her handler was watching her set up. Her cheeks coloured a little, warming at the attention, and she slowed her movements, performing every action with deliberate care to show off to her handler that every point of doctrine was being fulfilled.

When Mario made an appreciative noise, Dona's eyes lit up - albeit for a different reason. "Now that I've shown you I can do this, can I go back to my Calico tomorrow?"

Mario shook his head. "I'm sorry, dearest Donatello, but Olga secured a two hundred magazines' worth of ammunition from her old friends from behind the Iron Curtain, and if the intelligence directorate has assigned us to test the capabilities of the Russian's new toy then every round must be taken into account. And that _doesn't _mean you can start to spray'n'pray to get rid of it quicker!" he added, when he saw Dona take a breath in to speak.

The breath that Dona had been gathering instead flopped back out in a grumpy sigh. "I never get to have any fun." She griped.

"What are you talking about? I always let you have a play on full auto whenever we're on the range. Count your blessings and be grateful!" Mario chided his charge.

"But that's just not the _same_." Dona sighed wistfully. "It needs to be part of the _mission parameters_." It was a curious choice of words, Mario noted privately – as though the very fact of something being mentioned specifcally in an order made it acitvely enhanced and ennobled.

Mario suddenly felt a sense of guilty obligation to offer his cyborg something like consolation. "Well, I'd say that—"

"_Movement front!_" Nihad hissed in a loud whisper.

Mario's gaze abruptly hardened and he shot Dona a stern, disapproving look. The glint of torchlight was shuttering between the trees up ahead, dim but visible, but she should have noticed sound and motion well before the adults instead of making a scene over the pettiest things. Dona's cheeks turned a different colour and she turned back to face the oncoming threat.

"Open fire at twenty metres." Mario passed the instructions down the line. "Keep their heads down, and Dona will move forward to disable a target and bring him behind our line. Once she has secured a prisoner, killshots are authorised."

There was a murmuring ripple of acknowledgement and assent, the instruction helping to clarify and focus everyone's minds.

"_Tirez!" _Mario cried aloud with an indulgent Gallic flourish. The Agency unit chorused in acclaim, a volley of shots rippling through the undergrowth, snapping at leaves and thunking large chunks out of tree-bark. For an instant stark, goggle-eyed stares of shock flared up with the orange glare of their muzzle flashes, and then the performance was answered by cries of alarm and heavy thuds as lights blinked out and bodies threw themselves prone or against trees.

It was almost like a day out at the range. All of the Agency men were accomplished with pistols – there was often more call for them than large rifles in the tight confines of Italy's dense and congested cities – and rattled off rounds with cool nonchalance. Even though Avise's revolver had a smaller capacity than the others' automatics, with a custom-made belt of half-moon clips swapped with practised speed, he was keeping up the same rate of fire without difficulty. A few shots were sent back their way, but the desultory fire was ragged and undisciplined and presented no serious threat to their safety.

It presented no serious threat to their safety for a good couple of minutes. And then a bit longer.

Sensing that something was amiss (and that strange feeling that it was possible to get bored of gunfire) From his position inspecting Gregorio on the far left of the line, Mario squatted low and ran back over the the right edge, where Dona still remained in her position, Bizon firm in her grip but pointed low to the ground, looking dumbly towards the enemies that lay across the gap.

"_Donatello_!" He spat viciously. "We can't keep this up forever! Why aren't you shooting? Why aren't you _moving_?"

Dona turned her head to her handler. "_Except where specifically ordered by your handler, figures of official public authority are not to be harmed_." She said in a dull monotone and with a flat expression.

Mario frowned, puzzled. "Okay, well-quoted, but I don't see how that's relevant—" Mario's eyes suddenly bulged, seeming to become as wide as saucers, as awful realisation struck him. His gruesome goblin-face of horror vanished as he clenched his eyes shut, scrunching them up in a moment's frustration, before he threw his head back and bellowed as loud as he could, _"OPERATION FUBAR! IT'S THE ROZZERS! NIX THIS AND BUG OUT!"_

"Gweh?" Nihad twitched his head, confused at Mario's bizarre exclamation – but the general thrust of it got to him when a bullet punched through the bushes and smacked against his vest, knocking him onto his backside.

Indeed, the tension in the confrontation was steadily accumulating – Mario could tell that while the police weren't hardened warfighters, nor were they inept greenhorns. Despite being shocked and caught flatfooted by the initial fusillade, they had recovered and were now creeping forward under the cover of a steady, and evermore accurate, fire – the agents were only avoiding harm by regularly shifting their position as impacts pattered down woodchips and threw up dirt around them, interrupting their own shooting and letting the police gain the advantage in weight of fire. Scarcely a moment after Nihad was hit, Alfonso also cried out as a bullet thudded into his own helmet. It was clear that the balance had tipped against the Agency, and they had to extricate themselves from it before the snowball rolled up into an avalanche—

Why was he even stopping to consider this? They weren't even fighting the right enemy!

_The police weren't even an enemy in the first place!_

"Chin up, guys!" Gregorio called out over the crack and sting of weapon reports. "This way, we might get back to compound in time for the second half!"

It lent wings to their heels.

The flight of the Agency unit was noisy and obvious, a crashing of a falling-away wall – and that was what saved them. Seeing their enemy break encouraged the police to surge forward with a whoop – something impossible in a forest at the dead of night, and they rapidly became entangled in the difficult undergrowth, whilst the movement also slackened off their fire enough for the agents to get away without having bullets clipping at their heels.

The effect of the terrain went both ways, though, and Avise's own flight stalled on take-off as he tripped over a tree-root and went sprawling, scratching his face painfully on thorns as he fell. He immediately pulled himself upright again, but the seconds' delay wresting himself from grabbing briars and blinking through the fiery pain stinging across his face allowed two shots to flash past him from the side. Avise spun round in alarm to face the new direction of threat – had the Padanians been skulking around the gunfight, ready to seize on the weakened party like hyenas? – but had no time to bring his own weapon to bear before a body rushed through the gloom and tackled him back to the ground.

With all this falling, at least the ground was still thick with mush from last autumn – it made for a softer landing.

Avise struggled for purchase as the weight of his assailant pressed down on him, his mind singing prayers of thanks that his assailant had not just slipped a knife through his neck even as his limbs squirmed for heaving-room. By some agent of mercy the impact of the fall hadn't winded Avise, allowing him to keep his faculties as his mind worked frenetically for an escape. Even if the Padanian liked to administer a _coup de grace_ with a time-consuming flourish, Avise wasn't going to squander the gift of seconds that Providence had granted him. He ground his head around to squint up at the figure above him, hoping to throw him off in some way and get free.

"So, you like being astride men then, faggot?" He snarled, spitting through leaves and mud.

The figure above him laughed scornfully. "Don't get your hopes up, boyfriend."

Avise almost laughed himself when he felt a handcuff clipping around his wrist instead of a dagger-point ramming into his neck. The mistaken identity flooded him with relief.

"You're under arrest for trespass, attempted murder, soliciting from minors, unlicensed use of a firearm and... oh, what the fuck, I may as well throw homophobia in there whilst I'm at it, seeing as you mentioned it. You do not have to say anything, but anything you do not say make be taken and used as evidence against you should you later rely on it in court—"

"Hey, poofter, you like lengths in your mouth? Well, suck on this!"

The policeman looked up in confusion at the interjection – to meet the jagged end of a thick, heavy branch ramming straight into his face.

With a groan he fell back off Avise and lay spread-eagled out in the undergrowth. Dona dropped the hefty spar of wood (thankful that the policeman had been in plain clothes, otherwise things might have been difficult) and squatted down beside Avise, cocking her Bizon as she did so.

"Are you hurt, sir?" She inquired, the vicious sneer with which she'd lain into the policeman suddenly replaced by calm, polite, and faithful deference. She let the Bizon hang on its lanyard while she tore the handcuffs off of the adult agent.

"Dona..." Avise shook his head as he rolled onto his knees and rubbed his wrists. "Just _where_ did you learn language like _that_?"

Dona's face flushed crimson. "Well, erm, I, I, I just wanted to, um, be tough..."

She was interrupted by the sound of shouts and bobbing flashlights intruding in on them. Automatically responding to the presence of a threat in line with her mission parameters (and privately thankful for the opportunity to work herself out of a tight spot), she was set back into a businesslike, tactical manner.

"Sir, continue straight in this direction for half a mile, it's the fastest route to the road." She levelled a four-finger point into the darkness of the undergrowth. "When you reach the road, turn right and follow it along; that will take you to the vehicles. I'll cover your withdrawal." Dona blinked, and her mood changed again. "And, um... please don't tell Mr. Theuma about, er..."

There'd be time for scrubbing the girl's tongue with soap and a wire brush later. "Stop me getting a bullet in my back and we'll just keep that little indiscretion between ourselves, okay lass?"Avise patted her on the head in an endearing way and scampered off into the trees, back bent low, before Dona could give him her expansive smile of warm gratitude.

With the major problem dispensed with, Dona turned towards the rolling, closing wave of light, planted her feet apart, flicked off her safety and put her Bizon against her shoulder.

With one shot, the wave broke; a crashing, whirling spray of lights cartwheeling into the ground as the advancing police threw themselves down underneath the incoming fire.

Dona continued to shoot deliberate, measured fire towards the pinned police, every few seconds loosing off another round as she took slow strides backwards. She winged them over their heads high enough to have no risk of hitting anyone, but low enough for the whipping stream of each bullet to crack in their ears, and keep them low and cowed; and should any of the more truculent and rebellious types presume to defy her and crawl forward, she occasionally lashed the ground with a burst of rounds to kick up dirt in their faces.

It was a commanding display, but an ordinary shooter would have exhausted his ammunition and broken; yet Dona was not some mere poseur but of genuine stature. The enlarged helical magazine of the Bizon gave Dona the authority to assert her dominance over them without hesitation or pause. Once Avise had been given a few minutes' headstart, Dona considered herself satisfied; she spun about on her heel and swept out of the theatre at a rate than none of the prostrate before her could ever match.

She paused only to nod to Henrietta, ensconced in a bough of the tree above her. Henrietta threw down a bag of toffees.

* * *

Half a mile ahead, Avise was just negotiating the low barbed-wire fenceposts separating the forest from the unlit road. He felt his holster to make sure that it was clipped shut – and then almost sliced his foot open on a barb as he toppled over onto the roadside verge with a paralysing shock of realisation. His precious Webley was missing.

Avise picked himself up, ignoring the mud now streaked down his front, and turned back towards the black wall of the treeline. He could still hear the pops of reports being occasionally lobbed over its unscalable height.

"Shit. _Shit!_ Shit piss fuck dick Goddamned shitting _cuntlips_!" Avise's feet tramped and stamped the ground like a restless stallion as he struggled over continuing or returning. Eventually infuriating, hateful good sense won through and he jogged along the road back towards the vans, still turning the air blue even as he swung into one – that even made Ferro open her eyes in surprise.

* * *

"_Why-are-we-wait-ing? Whhhyyyyyy-are-we-wait-ing? Whyyyy-oh-oh-whyyyyy-yyy-ooooooh-must we-wait? Why-are-we-wait-ing? We-are-suff-oh-cat-ing..."_

The police taskforce had taken over the car park to regroup after tumbling and stumbling back out of the forest. Clusters of operatives had clumped together around each of the task force's incident vans, to pick pancaked bullets out of their body armour, get splinters from the ground's thorns and twigs pulled out of their ickle dinky pinkies, and be shouted at by the superintendent. In the meantime, traffic visitors to the service station were now backing up the exit ramp almost onto the motorway itself, and Detective Mario Costi was having to fend off the gazes – as fierce and withering as they were bleary and baggy – of a growing crowd of irate motorists.

"...have to get your kit together, but do you have to take up the whole car park?" The foremost man of the buzzing hornet-swarm – with a heavy belly but powerful-looking arms – remonstrated with Mario.

"Sir, you must..." Mario trailed off, and then massaged his brows in frustration as he struggled to conjure forth a placatory answer. Damn it all – crowd control wasn't his job, and after a near-miss had made his bald patch only that much larger he wasn't really in the frame of mind to start diversifying. He tried again. "Sir, you must understand that we are handling both sensitive and dangerous equipment and it is for your safety that we ask you to hold back for a certain radius..."

"That much? Just a bunch of government fascists throwing their weight about!" A voice sneered from near the back of the crowd, with a few echoing calls of support.

"_Shut it bozo, I'm talking!" _The lead man evidently liked the fact that he had seemingly emerged as the group's impromptu leader and wasn't keen on being upstaged. He turned back to Mario. "What about police's duty to the public good?" he said, trying to be clever. "Keeping us from rest and food's creating social unrest." He nodded slowly and sagely, as though he'd scored a rhetorical bullseye.

Mario sighed inwardly and tried to impress the simple man with martial grandeur. "Sir, you're standing at the edge of a literal battlefield. We have been engaged in actual conflict with terrorist elements in the surrounding woods and in such sophisticated and complicated—"

"Like that sort of stuff doesn't happen every day of the week nowadays!" The man snorted. "If it's in the wood, why aren't _you _in the wood, collecting evidence, or taking long lunches, or filing forms, or whatever it is cops do while the country's going to pot?" There was a ragged cheer of approval from the other assembled motorists.

Mario massaged his brow in mounting frustration, and then the weight of it broke. He scythed the crowd with a fierce glare. "Well then, that's reasonable!" He snapped harshly. "If you want the police to be more pro-active, all you have to do is cross this line and I'll be more than happy to start making arrests!"

Not giving the shocked civilians time to respond, Mario swept around expansively and made a theatrical show of stalking angrily back to the police vans, as though he was crushing the desiccated bones of children underfoot.

Mario was drawn towards the bright light emanating from the back of an ambulance. Huddled down low as he sat on the lip of the cabin was Pietro. Half of his face was buried behind a large white dressing which the paramedic was just finishing taping to him. While some shots had thudded against armour and snatched off caps through the passing slipstream, most of the injuries that the police had suffered came simply from cuts and bruises incurred during the pell-mell pursuit through woodland in the dead of night. Pietro was the only actual casualty of any note, and his perfect portrait of misery presented that he was all too conscious of the fact.

"How're you bearing up, Pietro?" Mario asked with sympathy and concern.

"Shi boak bai doze." Pietro mumbled dejectedly.

"I know, I can see that, but you're not letting that get to you, are you?" Mario tried a bit of gentle joshing to stoke his partner's fires again.

"Ip reely herps." It emerged as a plaintive whinny.

Mario grimaced at the fellow detective's low spirits. "Come on, these were terrorists that we were tussling with! That makes that an authentic war wound, doantchano! You'll be able to boast to your kids about it!"

"Mai sun voatz ferruh ryte-wyngge goup." Pietro stubbornly refused to be cheered up.

Mario despaired, but he was saved from having to put on greasepaint and find some bowling pins to juggle by the arrival of a policeman in a proper uniform (as opposed the mud-caked mess of those who had flailed through the mire). "Detective Abruzzo? I have to collect an on-site statement from you. Sorry to bother you when you're indisposed, but regulations, I'm sure that you know."

Pietro breathed in deeply to begin, an odd whistling singing through his throat as he did so. "Shi abbd uh skurt..."

Mario guffawed instinctively. His previous attempts to be sensitive were abruptly swept away by glorious, magnificent opportunity. He leant in close to his partner and gave him an apologetic grimace. "Sorry, Pietro, but you've got to let me score this point, it doesn't happen every day."

"Wuhzzyadoon?" Pietro's eyes crossed in confusion, and then became practically bug-eyed in horror as Mario spun round, threw his arms out expansively (almost swatting the statement-collector in his eagerness), and called out to the other police.

"Hey, guys! Listen to this! Ol' Macho Abruzzo got beat up by a _girl!_"

Laughter and hoots of derision flooded the car park – which only made the civilians over at the entrance even more irate. Pietro slumped down into his shoulders so far it was as though his head was migrating into the middle of his chest.

"Shubbt yu suhbiftik brootz."

Mario blinked in incomprehension. "Eh?"

* * *

Avise pushed out a cigarette from his packet and took it in his teeth. Just as he brought a match up to his mouth to light it, his upturned gaze caught the strained looks of desperate entreaty from the other men in the room.

Avise reached back into his pocket, pulled out the rest of the packet and shared them. They all puffed through their cigarettes silently and sedulously. Once they had spent the packet between themselves, the door swung open and Ferro walked in. Walked, as opposed to marched - she didn't project any swaggering poise through her shoulders.

She had been the one who had recommended the mission to Lorenzo.

Ferro reached down underneath the desk and pulled out a wastepaper basket from underneath it. She put it down on the desk. The men, forming an orderly queue, dropped their mission folders into the bin. Once they had finished, Ferro picked up hers from where she had placed it down on the desk, and did the same.

"Let us never speak of this again." Ferro said.

And they never did.


	5. Chapter 5

Henrietta didn't do much. They had been practising building entry and she'd been rappelling down the side, but had under-judged her last swing and so instead of sweeping nimbly onto the landing the rope pivoted on the upper window frame and slammed her straight up into the ceiling, before she landed heavily and smashed through the wooden floor. She was picking out splinters for the rest of the week.

Chiara didn't have much in the way of luck either. She had been chasing down a runner when she skidded off a side-street and smacked into a car. In the heavy traffic she bounced off the bumpers of four separate vehicles before spinning off into the far side of street. Leaning against a wall to catch her breath, she laughed manically about how fun it had been before vomiting and passing out.

Giliana, one of the older girls, came back to the compound after an absence of a few weeks. One of the stated purposes of the second generation was to facilitate infiltration and espionage, and she'd been ingratiating herself into a Padania cell – only to give the game away with an elementary but fundamental mistake when the light sprite of a supposed ninety-pound teenager was carrying heavy equipment for the boss one-handed. She successfully extricated herself from the calamity, and bagged a few Padanians into the bargain, but she'd gone into the workshop with no less than eleven separate switchblades, kitchen knives, hiking multitools and bayonets stuck into her, and now the caterers wanted to use her as a chopping block at dinnertime.

Triela had a better time of it. Loaned to Section One to assist them in an observation mission, she used her tuned hearing to listen in on conversations in expensive restaurants. She and Hilshire feasted royally on the Agency ticket, but afterwards Triela insisted that she didn't want anything in the next sweets run... or for pretty much every sweets run, ever.

Claes began selecting spring seeds.

Then it was Marisa's turn.

* * *

"Alright, final equipment check."

Sveva nodded quietly and turned out the pockets of her tracksuit and held them out in turn for the cell commander to inspect. Extendable baton. Office keycard. Fake ID tag. Four computer memory sticks.

Cyanide pill.

Sveva stared at it for long laden seconds. The little lozenge resting in the crook between two lines of her palm, so small it was difficult to see in the darkness of the night-time woodland. The fatal chemical itself was just a fractional component of the inert capsule – something tiny, and yet inescapably deadly. Much like those things that she was going to walk amongst now.

A hand reached over Sveva's own, concealing her view of the cyanide pill and closing her fingers over it. She looked up and her gaze was held by the cell commander's own eyes.

"I know that you won't need it." He reassured her softly. "I have every faith in you. It's only for their sake." He motioned his head back to the other five gunmen ranged around the knots of wood behind him, weirdly forming the effect of something of an amphitheatre as they coldly considered Sveva.

Feeling overwhelmed, Sveva sought a rock to hold onto. She leant forward and she and the cell commander rested their foreheads against each other for a lingering, moment, touching a feeling between each other that was deeper than a kiss.

Eventually the cell commander sighed and broke off, stepping up and back. He smiled sadly, looking down on the still-kneeling Sveva, and said, "We'll remain here until 4 A.M. – we still need darkness to cross and leave the training area without detection." It inspired a curious sensation in Sveva – even though he was issuing a final instruction, the confidence implicit behind following things through and not aborting the mission made the simple words still seem like some form of benediction.

Sveva picked up the bolt cutters which lay on the ground beside her, stood up, and turned away without a further word.

As Sveva picked her way between the trees to minimise the noise her passage was creating, she considered all that had led to this night. It had been a long time planning, and a long time preparing. Head Office had been formulating this operation since Ernest's attempt to capture a cyborg had fallen though, and it had solidified into reality when one of the battalion lieutenants had almost choked on his coffee when he had made visual contact with one of _Them_ in a service station some months ago. A comprehensive view of the Agency's perimeter defences had condensed together from sidelong glances, hasty eyeball-twitching and smears of colour in peripheral vision, and then been carefully nudged, brushed and cajoled into a more helpful light (in particular, aggravating the motion detectors with released animals to force their tolerances to be raised). Sveva felt a surge of pride that she was the one who would deliver the blow, demonstrating the cause's irrepressible vigour to a lax and complacent foe; the stinging prick of the splinter that would press into the government's eyes and drive it insane.

The exterior fence had no cameras, nor was it electrified – there was only so much that the Social Welfare Agency could conceal behind its facade of a government medical quango and rehabilitation centre before awkward things would start to poke out the sides. The rough terrain around the fence itself was problematic, but not in the short-term – it could only alert the staff to a breach after the fact, and by daybreak Sveva would be long gone, and beyond even their reach.

Once Sveva could espy the compound through the trees she squatted down and carefully inched her way forward to the fence. She clipped through the fence quickly, holding the bolt cutters at the optimal angle for efficiency (she'd practised on trellises borrowed from her cousin's small gardening business, of all things), and once she'd cut away enough to slip through, dropped the bolt cutters and concealed them from view behind the grasses knotted around the fence base. The lawn was negotiated by a leopard-crawl (and there had been nowhere to practise that other than the hallway in her house – up and down, up and down, scraping along the carpet until she had felt like a piece of string in a cotton mill) until she was on the tarmac in the cover of the buildings. Looking up to them from the ground, they loomed over her as imposingly as that first as a young sprat of a child (still fresh even two decades later) when the dark, worn oak doors of her uncle's company had parted to admit her on a visit. The portal was heavy and ancient, weighed down by generations and expectations as much as its black wood, but they had rested on well-oiled hinges, and parted at the feather-touch of her short, childishly pudgy fingers. Thinking back to past parallels countered and neutralised the Agency's awful pallor. This place would be no different; it would open just as easily.

Sveva pulled off the tracksuit to reveal a blouse and trousers underneath, a set of casual office wear – somewhat rumpled, but at least not covered in mud and grass from a long crawl. She stuffed the tracksuit down a drain by the wall, wiped her pumps clean with a cloth in her pocket, and then stood up, pressing her back against the wall and making a long, slow, regular breath out to calm and still herself. As the last of her exhalation passed, though, its tail flicked into a shiver of excitement, a quaking bated thrill. She was here. She'd penetrated past all of the public ignorance, the official obfuscation, the layers of deceit and deception, to finally touch and reverberate with the pulse of truth. She was walking in the hall of those who shaped the world. She was at the heart of the secret.

_She was in the Social Welfare Agency._

And she had a job to do.

Sveva set to walking. She stumbled for her first few steps – pushing off the wall felt like leaping off of a cliff-face – but quickly she regained her composure and maintained a regular pace. Never, ever run – any camera that espied her would only see a night worker going to collect something.

She knew exactly where to go – the plan of the compound was practically seared onto her retina after hours of staring at Google Earth photos, and the internal layouts of the building had been exactingly and painstaking compiled and cross-referenced by Padanian agents catching snatches and slips of conversation in the bars of Rome, and plenty of several accidental turnings around the wrong corridors when looking for the toilets during the Agency's public "open" days.

Making a studied saunter along the pathways between the buildings, Sveva moved directly but not hurriedly towards the main building. The door was unlocked – a schedule which had been elaborated when Lorenzo Fiore of the Third Battalion had overheard an off-duty Carabinieri grumbling that he had to get back for his night shift confirmed that the compound did not officially enter Night Stations (and lock the exterior doors for keycard access only) until 2300 hours.

The interior was easy to navigate, even if Sveva had been bereft of Padania's previous intelligence-gathering – all of the departments were signposted on the walls. For a moment it was alarming, dizzying with a discomfiting sense of dislocation – the place seemed more like a hospital than a dread factory, the dark satanic mill which pumped out the black malignity which rotted the core of Italy. This sense of disconnection seemed to be flooding over Sveva, a fresh wave sweeping her away from her references at every pause and juncture – the unreality of a place like the Social Welfare Agency, where even the title was a fiction, left the world a yielding, foetid mud. It was repulsive, slick and insubstantial, something impossible to grab a hold of – and undesirable even if you could. Sveva recited a mantra to settle her nerves. _Like a hospital. Like a hospital. Like a hospital..._ well, this whole place was the very exemplar for the sort of monstrosity that was created by socialist healthcare, when the government used nationalised systems to arbitrarily impose what it wanted to treat (and torture).

Sveva carried on to the building's upper levels, her reflection on and reinforcement of her convictions firming her resolve. She espied cameras in her peripheral vision. They whirred quietly, automatically tracking her movement, but she made sure to walk straight as though they weren't there. She was just another analyst, of no note to the security guard glancing tiredly over the same flickering, wearying images, and she was familiar with the compound security – to pay it any heed would give the game away. In any case, it wouldn't matter even if they could make out her face well enough to identify her – once her mission had been completed she would be repairing to France and sanctuary, beyond the arm of even these vile snickering daemonettes. God bless the Mitterand Doctrine! In the past cowardly Red Brigades fleeing justice had used it as a dank, rank pit to hide in, a rock for insects to crawl under – and now it provided soldiers of the Right with a harbour area to repair, regroup, respond, and sustain their campaign. Who'd have thought that communists would be actually good for something?

Even though it was not officially "Night Stations" it was still well past the close of play, and the Section One offices were shut. Sveva slipped a plain white keycard – its only feature the black magnetic strip – out of her pocket and slotted it into the door lock. A green light on the receiver began to flash intermittently. The hacking program had been devised by some whizz-kid who had handed it over to Padania as a protest against the government's opposition to "net neutrality" – more fool him, because her uncle's company, and Padania's backers in general, were themselves keen proponents of Digital Rights Management.

There was no sound, but the light on the lock became a steady green. The operation had only taken a few seconds, and Sveva made no attempt to creak the door open quietly – hopefully the general actions would gull the watching cameras into believing that she was just collecting some forgotten things and not betray any tics that would lead to closer scrutiny.

The office occupied one whole giant room - it was a wide-floored, high-ceiling and tall-windowed chamber, such that it remained in half-light even despite the night outside. Sveva wasn't there to comment on architectural trends, however, and wasted little time in skirting around the highlights of each desk edge to approach the computers at the centre of the room. Powering up four workstations, she slotted a memory stick into the USB ports of each. The small, dark plastic of each device looked for all the world like little leeches with silver teeth; hooking into the computers and slurping down the lifeblood of espionage – information. It tasted secret. Dangerous.

_Incriminating._

While she waited for the electronic poisons within to do their work and leach off her prize, Sveva discovered that she had a few moments to consider the weighty matters of the stone theatre that was architecture after all. She lifted her head up to take in the full scale of the office. It occupied what must have been an old banqueting hall or ballroom in the days when this house was a noble residence, before an evermore-rapacious government, its greedy apparatchiks exultant at being able to aggrandise more to themselves under the camouflage of 'equality' and 'tax', had stolen it for themselves.

Her brooding carried her through to a short bar of beeps which announced that the memory sticks were full of data and satisfied. She removed them, switched the computers back off (wincing instinctively at the Windows jingles breaking the silence), and then made to leave. Even though she was beginning exfiltration in a mission that would potentially blow the Agency wide open more effectively than a carpet bombing, she felt oddly steady. Not even calm but... _collected_, as though this was routine, of no more consequence than getting out of bed in the morning.

She certainly woke up to full alertness when she saw someone else entering the room.

A man with a sharp spiked goatee approached her with a genial smile. "Evening. I was just passing by outside and saw the light. Can I help you with anything? It must be awkward rooting around at night."

"Thanks for the offer, but I was actually just leaving..." – she wracked her brains, trying to link the man's features to the photographs that she'd been drilled on – "...Alfonso." She hoped that he'd accept the darkness as reason enough for the delay in recognising him, and held up one of her memory sticks as though it was something perfunctory and inconsequential, and definitely not dynamite.

Alfonso frowned. "You know you're not allowed to copy documents from the server! If you're late on a report that's just tough luck!"

Sveva made a show of rolling her eyes derisively. "Don't be daft, like I'd do that! It's my music, I was on the late shift tonight and left it behind."

Alfonso nodded, and then reached out his hand. "Hey, what're listening to lately? I'm pretty much played out with my CD collection and I'm looking for something new."

"Ah - maybe at lunch tomorrow? It's real late right now and I just want to turn in." Sveva pocketed the memory stick again, hopefully not too quickly. She wasn't sure if this nosy prat was trying to probe and catch her out, or hit on her.

Alfonso rubbed his head sheepishly "Yeah, sorry. I guess I'm a bit of a night owl, sometimes I forget that not everyone's tapping away at all hours—wait." His embarrassed face suddenly flattened out.

"What's the matter, Alfonso?" Sveva asked, as caringly and sympathetically as she could muster, as though she was a nurse soothing a patient's distress.

"How could you have listened to music? These are exclusively workstations. They don't even have Sound Recorder installed, let alone media players."

Sveva had won silver at the hurdles in the university track championships - she had vaulted over three desks, sending monitors and paper-tidies crashing to the floor, by the time that Alfonso had turned around. Alfonso turned to run, to reach for fire alarm, anything to bring others here – Sveva threw her hand out to stop him, and her reach was lengthened by the extendable baton which snapped out from her sleeve. Alfonso's hand instinctively jerked back and he let out a sharp cry as the baton cracked across his forearm. Sveva did not even pause to power another blow – the baton rebounded off of Alfonso's arm and she curved it straight up into his face, stinging a weal up the entire length from it. Completely overcome with shock and pain, Alfonso stumbled back, allowing Sveva to smack a blow against the side of his head, then reverse it and snap him back the other way, the thin but hard baton flexing and arcing like a whip.

Alfonso couldn't respond to this – it was all he could do to raise his other arm to try to shield his abused head. He tried to shout, to yell for help, but with his mind and body both reeling from the explosive savagery of the assault he couldn't form the words, and they only emerged as an indistinct croak. Sveva didn't thank anyone for the reprieve – her eyes burned with the single purpose of bringing down the agent before her. Taking the baton in both hands she brought it down in three axing arcs onto Alfonso's shielding arm, to batter it out of the way and expose his head again. Such was the force swinging into each attack that it didn't only bruise the flesh but tore through his sleeves as well.

For all the tight, concentrated power loaded into the flexing baton, though, Sveva failed to penetrate Alfonso's defence. He didn't collapse and leave himself open, but instead used the transfer of pain to let the fog clear from his head and deliver a savage kick aimed at the intruder's knee. Emitting a strangled cry, Sveva fell down as the pain spasmed up the length of her leg – but she immediately bounced up off of the floor and was able to drive a fist under Alfonso's guard to grind chokingly into his throat. Alfonso stumbled back, coughing and spluttering – but in the direction of the fire alarm, as if he was trying to throw himself against it, and it was only by slamming her baton into Alfonso's temple that Sveva could batter him away at the last moment.

"Take a _fucking hint _you _pig!_" Sveva howled in frustration, lashing Alfonso with all the spite she could muster behind the baton. Alfonso's face and head were already puffy and bruised from multiple impacts, and the baton's hard edge finally smacked open a bloody tear in his forehead. Overcome from the beating, Alfonso finally groaned and fell slack, slithering back against the wall to collect in a crumpled bundle at its base.

Sveva stood over the agent's unconscious form, panting heavily, sweat smearing greasy rivulets down her face. Her enemy's face was a battered mess, his jaw hung open and he lay as limp as a torn ragdoll – he already _looked _dead, and Sveva knew she really ought to make sure, but the time it would take to wring the man's neck would be a delay that she could no longer risk. Her knocking out of Alfonso had hardly been a coolly efficient and detached silent takedown – who was to say whether there were people coming to investigate, or that alarms had already been raised? Besides, she reassured herself as she patted her pocket for the memory sticks, she had what she came for, and neither the mission nor the cause would be advanced by the demise of one more of the government's mindless, lifeless and expendable stooges. Sparing only a moment to spit contemptuously on Alfonso's body, she turned around and walked out of the office.

But never run. Never, ever run.

* * *

It had been cloudy all day, and a murky twilight – darkness didn't advance across the land so much as obscure it in a mucky gloom, like dirt smeared over a camera lens. It was nights such as this that Nature decided to remind her Mediterranean tenants that for all of her was, after all, still winter – despite the cover of cloud which buried the night, there was still a biting chill in the air; not warm like the depth of a duvet, cold like the soil over a grave.

Avise felt the fingerbone-touch of it tracing across his skin as he walked across the car park to the Section Two office to begin his shift as radio operator. He stopped, looked to the New Block in front of him, and then glanced at his watch. There was still twenty minutes to go before Marco came off. He ought to run an equipment check before embarking on the operation.

"Need a coffee." Avise retreated back to the main building.

Outside the refectory proper there was a wide café area with round tables, casual seating, and a bank of vending machines for passing staff who wanted a quick bite. They weren't used all that often – one Euro fifty for a bottle of water? It wasn't a price, it was robbery with violence! – but there was always a slow but steady stream of custom from those whose pangs dug especially deeply, as was the case with Avise here tonight.

It was dark inside, the caterers having shut up for the night, but the hoardings of the machines lit the way like a beacon, glowing invitingly. Avise approached the coffee machine, admired it in all of its rich caramel splendour, and then proffered an offering of golden and silver coins to his other god.

The coins clattered into the reject slot.

Avise frowned, retrieved the coins, and reinserted them.

The shrine to The Blessèd Caffeine again spurned the supplicant's entreaty. The god was angry, and red lights flared up before Avise like the writing before Belshazzar:

"USE CORRECT CHANGE ONLY"

His tongue grumbling with wordless noise, Avise rooted about in his pocket and brought up a mess of coins in his palm. Hunching and squinting under the light of the machine's hoarding, he pushed about the proper denominations and slotted them into the machine again. This time it consumed them, and Avise eagerly pressed the vending button for his reward.

Smug, self-satisfied silence.

Avise pressed the button again, then a third time, then rattled the refund switch.

It was like a prisoner worrying his chains.

Avise scowled at the wretched contraption and aimed a kick at the tough plastic base – scuffed in several places with the frustrations of other confounded customers. _The finest minds in Italy have hundreds of miles of neurone-patterned circuitry, carbon nanotubes and nutrient solution to create a whole herd of lovely limb-lopping Lolitas, and they can't operate some cheap contraption with exactly three working parts to get me some rancid instant mud._

Avise sagged his shoulders and was about to turn to the cigarette dispenser instead when a tired voice stumbled in on him.

"Life's a bitch, eh?"

Avise turned around at the sudden interruption. Sitting in the corner, almost drowned in darkness that was only scarcely stirred into gloom by the low light of the vending machines and the faint glow of the lamps outside, was Olga. She was low in her chair, but not so much slouched – that'd imply actual idleness – as slumped, as though she was a wet cloth that had been thrown over the back of it. Olga's head was lying on her knuckles, and even though she had addressed Avise her disconsolate gaze was focused on a glass (and bottle) of neat spirits on the table before her.

Avise was so astonished at the very portrait of desolation that he didn't respond immediately, long enough for Olga to take another swig of her drink. Conscious of Avise's goggling attention at the pretty picture, she swished the drink around in the glass and momentarily twitched a rueful smile at it.

"Miss Olga" Avise blurted out, conscious himself of the building pressure of delay.

"Mancini," She began slowly, the tired clink of slowly-shifting gravel in the throat roughening her voice, "you go to Church, right?" She pronounced the capital letter with deliberate, portentous emphasis.

"Uh-huh, yeah." Avise nodded.

"Why?"

Avise considered Olga carefully for a moment. "Why what?" He replied.

"Why do you go?" Despite Avise's obvious stalling, there was no irritation in Olga's voice, only

Olga couldn't see it in the half-light, but Avise's lips had drawn back in a scornful sneer. Against Olga's obvious unhappy state, what welled up in him was not compassion but _contempt_. He regarded the Russian with derision. Another old ex-commie, a Red with all the colour washed out. Her wretched ideology had curled up and died, and Avise felt like putting his boot on the corpse, glorying over a fallen enemy. Olga's misery was his pride, a flash of vindication that they were wrong, and he was right; they were empty and unfulfilled, he was complete and satisfied.

It was a harsh stinging surge of cruel, unkind thought - but as the wave rolled back the retreating water sloughed away the hard face that he'd set towards Olga. Avise's expression softened; his eyes became wider and more accepting. He was fulfilled – and maybe he could seal up the holes in others, too.

"Why do I go?"

"Yes."

"Breasts." Avise said suddenly.

Olga blinked. She had been expecting a solemn, sombre, considered and enriching expression of emotional fulfilment or philosophic certainty. She was seeking a release from a state of misery, but that selfsame quiet despair was its own familiar comfort, like a bottle; in pathetic self-sabotage hearing about another way to lift her out of her despond really only masked a desire to receive another heavy set of uninspiring dull platitudes or staid, ponderous sermonising to settle her down further into her yielding moroseness. What she hadn't been expecting was – "Breasts?" She parroted back, dumbly.

"Oh yes, of course!" Avise nodded smartly. "Breasts!"

Olga's jaw worked. "...how?" Was all that she could grind out.

"Think about it. So much of nature is actually, really quite gruesome. I mean – if you'd pardon me for being blunt and vulgar – the vagina's the corridor to ecstasy, but, well... you wee out of it too." Avise shrugged.

Olga's jaw unhinged. There was the dull sound of someone slamming a door on the floor above, but it might just as easily have been her jaw smacking the floor.

"But breasts" – Avise paused for a moment, shaking his head with a faraway expression of awe and wonder – "breasts are immaculate. There's not a thing icky about them, and they exist solely for the purpose of bringing nourishment and joy to the world." Avise suddenly put up a finger before Olga, as though he was enumerating a series of premises in a logical argument. "Now, everyone is individual, and no-one can be said to have exactly identical perspectives between each other – and so, in recognition of this essential human quality, breasts come in a variety of shapes and sizes, to suit a variety of tastes."

Olga's mouth was opening and closing soundlessly, mindlessly and thoughtlessly, like a goldfish's. The tumbler slipped out of her hand and banged against the tabletop noisily, slopping drink over the surface.

"That said, one of the problems with breasts is that, despite all of the pleasure that they provide, only half of the people in the world are blessed with them. But then, that forces people to interact with each other and come together in order to experience them, so promoting society and community; and those that _do _have them have _two_, to make up for the shortfall!" Avise lifted up his hands in a gesture of completeness and fulfilment, and fixed Olga with a broad, beaming smile. "If that's not Intelligent Design, then what is?"

Olga returned to him with a glassy, unfocused stare. The hairline of a blink ran along it. A gasp slipped out through the flaw. Her eyes brimmed, and the building pressure behind them forced a crack – and then it shattered.

Laughter erupted out of Olga, shaking across her hands and pouring down her cheeks. It was the high, tuneful music of genuine hilarity, high airy relief sounding like the ring of a half-full bottle.

It took several seconds for the flow to subside, and its strong current had swept away every last vestige of Olga's earlier glum demeanour. "Oh, Avise _Mancini_!" She looked up at the prospect, her eyes shining and her face smiling. "You're ridiculous! Thank you. Really, thank you."

Avise made the show of a bow. "Ask and ye shall receive!" He said lightly, before turning away and making to leave the refectory. Before he did so, he paused and after a moment's consideration slotted another coin into the coffee machine, and this time a cup did indeed rattle out of it.

Olga watched him go, and when he'd turned off around a junction and out of sight, she glanced back down to the table and noticed the drink that had puddled around her glass. She didn't refill it.

* * *

Avise sipped at the coffee as he walked along the corridor to go back outside and return to the New Block, suitably fortified. Despite the stereotype of rancid vending machines and the thin puttering stream of the dispenser really bringing to mind another sort of leak, really the drink wasn't all that bad. The corridors were empty again – other than the maudlin moping of Olga, everyone else seemed to have retired for the night. He only met one more person as he walked – a young woman, coming the other way.

"Late night?" Avise called out to the woman as she approached, conversationally seeing that her head was drooping down low.

"Up in the office, every night!" She lifted up her head and rolled her eyes. "Still, at least we're done now, eh? Blessed sleep!"

"I'm actually just starting." Avise shook his head in mock dismay.

"Ah well – no rest for the wicked!" The woman smiled sympathetically.

"And I'm as bad as they come." The two shared a chortle as they passed each other.

When the woman had gone, something pricked at Avise. It was the coffee – the cup was only made out of a thin material and the heat was seeping through and burning his hand. Grumbling at the inconvenience, he turned and put the cup down on a window ledge so he could adjust his grip on it, but the pause also gave Avise a pause for thought. He was near the entrance hall to the building – he could even see the loom from the brighter lights mounted above the door through the window.

Why, then, had that woman been going the other way?

There were side-exits in different part of the building, but that wasn't the most direct route to the dormitories, or the car park if she was driving off-site. More to the point, she said that she'd come from the office area upstairs, and the staircase opened directly onto the entrance hall. She'd already walked straight past the main exit. Furthermore, her poise and bearing communicated an unusual sense. She didn't have a free, wide gait, pleased to be free and loose by pleasant fatigue after a day's work. She was slightly hunched, the soles of her shoes scraping the floor in a semi-shuffle, as though the magnitude of the place loomed over her.

_Like him on his first day_.

Avise hurried along until he found an internal phone set into one of the walls, and dialled quickly.

"Yeah, guardhouse. Go ahead." A sleepy voice yawned, his drawn-out breath buzzing in the receiver like a blizzard of static.

"This is Prospect Avise Mancini. My emergency code is D46. Intruder alert, refectory, south side. One suspect. Female, mid-twenties, short hair."

"What? Oh, damn! Right, on it. Please stand off for the security team!" The voice spluttered to alertness, before ending the call.

Avise replaced the receiver, and then stared out of the window, sipping his coffee thoughtfully. He had a dark expression to match the blackness outside.

* * *

Sveva fought against herself for the entire length of her journey back to the egress point. Success had latched onto her – the penetration of the fortress, the eluding of alarms, the completion of her objective, the defeat of an enemy, the deception of another, the maintenance of her exfiltration, the fear of discovery, the terror of capture – crawled over her body, tickled her ear, and scratched at her skin. The desire to run itched at her maddeningly, stabbing her legs and twitching her feet, playing the risk of discovery against the speed of escape and needling her to take the bet. The cocktail of excitement and anxiety was a heady brew, and Sveva struggled to maintain her composure and step the narrow course between the two outcomes—

Then the decision was made for her.

"_Carabinieri! Stop or I fire!"_

It may as well have been the buzz of a gate opening. Sveva pushed against the ground, striking it with energy like the crack of earthed lightning, and then she was away. Air rushed past her as she hurtled along – shouts, yells, whistles, all drowned out by the surge of wind roaring through her ears. She was channelled down a tunnel of rushing air, invisible to anything except that in her path—

"Hey, you!" A high-pitched female voice heralded a figure looming out of the darkness.

"Dumbass!" Sveva cried out aloud. The woman was slight with short, close-cropped hair and looked as though she'd blow away in a light breeze – and any leverage she might have gained by surprise in the low visibility had been spoiled by her helpful warning. Sveva threw up her arm, and the baton raked a furrow across the woman's face like a claw. She spun away, clutching her cheek and yowling like a wounded cat, and Sveva pushed past her with no resistance.

After that, the world dissolved into a blur. Sveva didn't hear the pounding of feet. She didn't feel the wet panting of dogs. She didn't see the compound flooding with spotlights. She didn't smell the tang of cordite gunsmoke in the air. All of her senses merged together, her entire body exerting itself into a synaesthetic core that throbbed in her mind with the one consuming objective of the gap in the fence, and escape.

Hearing the commotion outside got Avise's blood up – despite the instruction that the guardhouse had given him, he headed outside to see what he could contribute. Jogging towards the compound edge (and blinking under the day-like glare now that every exterior lamp in the Agency had been automatically switched on), he accelerated his pace as he caught the distant flutter of the intruder making across the broad grass field for the perimeter fence – and the closer figure of a Carabiniere security guard, with the single stripe of a lance-corporal (that most tragic of ranks – extra responsibility for no reward) standing there and watching her go, his rifle simply hanging in his grasp.

"What are you waiting for? She's right there!" Avise bawled at the guard as he ran up behind him. "_Shoot her_, for Christ's sake!"

One of the guards turned back to the agent, his face fretful and strained. "I'm sorry, sir, but I _can't_! The rules of engagement—"

Then the guard realised that he wasn't holding his rifle anymore.

Avise sprang the cocking handle forwards, thrust the butt of the rifle backwards, depressed the safety catch downwards, swung the barrel upwards, and began firing.

Each report rammed at his face like a hammer-blow, rattling his teeth and blasting through his unprotected ears, but Avise continued to shoot through the pain – it just became another crime that the woman had to pay for. However, Avise himself was not the man to bring the runner to book – he was out of practise, and rushing his aiming to get off at least something at her, and even though he fired six times she seemed to melt like smoke around the glare of each muzzle flash, while the last orange flare just melted her into the trees.

Avise lowered the rifle, twisting his mouth in irritation at not seeing that small but certain image of a puff of mist and a stumbling body. He was about to set off in the direction.

"—_all stations, this is Sergeant Sierra! What were those shots? Respond immediately!"_

Avise turned round and plucked the radio out of the hands of the baffled Carabiniere – looking increasingly distraught over how he seemingly had no control over his very own person – and barked into it. "Sergeant Sierra, this is Prospect Mancini. I was engaging the intruder, but I regret that I failed to hit her. She has crossed the fence about one hundred and fifty yards from the north-east corner."

The radio crackled back straight away with a terse command. "Ceasefire immediately and stand down. My section is moving forward in pursuit and we will be interrupting your firing lane. Sierra out."

Avise frowned as he saw the loom of brilliant fog lights move along the perimeter fence. He had made a contribution – indeed, he'd likely made the pursuit of the infiltrator possible in the very first place – but now that his part in the mission had been deliberately cut off he felt... dissatisfied. Unfulfilled. Peripheral.

That void suddenly made Avise very conscious of his own situation. A major had just taken orders from a sergeant – but here, as a "Prospect", the 'sirs' were not deference but diminuition. He was flailing in a limbo, and for one bitter moment he wanted done with the whole thing, seeing only futility in the empty void around him.

Shaking his head and dismissing the uncomfortable thoughts, Avise turned back and held out the rifle for the Carabiniere to take back. When he reached for it, Avise abruptly snatched it back.

"You haven't reminded me to make it safe! Get a damned grip already, corporal!" He snapped irritably.


	6. Chapter 6

"Whatever! I'm done! Clap me in irons! I'll sing like a birdie! Just keep me away from that... that _thing_!"

The captured Padanian's obvious terror set the Sierra's teeth on edge. That _thing..._? Had one of the cyborgs come out with them? The sergeant's rifle was suddenly clammy in his hands as he cautiously advanced forward, ripping his boots through the dense and tangled undergrowth, and he gnawed his lip with such force that the coppery tang of blood stained his tongue. Lurid visions swirled up out of the darkness of the forest like choking soot – he blinked it out of his eyes and they swam with images of entrails hung from trees like tinsel and decapitated bodies dangling by their vertebrae while their heads span over the ferns and bushes like punted footballs—

--What he actually saw were five people – four men, and one woman, the one that they had been pursuing – all kneeling in a semi-circle, with their hands behind their heads, utterly cowed expressions on their faces...

...and not a single scratch on their bodies.

They occasionally glanced upwards, stealing anxious, fretful, at the focus of the semicircle – Marisa, Alboreto's girl, standing with her legs planted apart and her arms folded in a gesture of confidence, and a satisfied smirk set into her features. The looks from the surrendered Padanians weren't scoping out potential avenues of escape or retaliation – they were fearful acts of submission, attentive to their mistress out of the fear of missing one of her commands.

The sergeant almost fainted. He would have preferred the gore and dismemberment.

Salvation arrived in the rustle and tramp of his section wading up behind him, and the sergeant took refuge in procedure as he directed the other Carabinieri in setting up a perimeter and restraining the Padanians, all of whom took being shoved forward into the ground and having cable-ties bite into their wrists – the first clank of the lock for a cage of thirty years, no remission – without a grunt of resistance or a word of complaint. While the Padanians were being arrested, the sergeant turned towards the cyborg. She was surveying proceedings with a proprietorial air, tipping her head back to survey the _hoi polloi _following their assigned tasks with arch satisfaction.

"Miss. Marisa," Sierra coughed, "what's been happening here?"

"Ah, thank you for remembering my title, sergeant." Marisa said smugly, the smarm plastered across her face like a greedy toddler smeared with chocolate and cookie crumbs. She said 'sergeant' in the way that a Colonel might – breezy and casual, more of a name and not as a mark of respect from a subordinate. Despite the extraordinary situation Sierra suddenly feet very irritated with the precocious thing and was sorely tempted to put her over his knee and teach her some manners, irate handler or not.

"In any case, I heard the alarms and saw that the base was waking up. If someone was leaving suddenly, they should know that it's _very impolite _to do so without saying goodbye." Marisa smiled evilly, less the movement of her lips and more the peeling back of her face around her teeth. One of the Padanians whimpered.

Sierra told himself that the shiver passing through his body was just the night-time cold, and that his quick turn away from the fire-haired cyborg was so that he could start issuing more orders. He waved behind himself in the general direction of the small pile of firearms – the Padanians were well-equipped, with half-a-dozen rifles, pistols, and a few old military surplus-looking grenades – that had been dumped near Marisa. "Private Jocasta, sort out those, will you?"

"_Wait!_" Marisa cried suddenly, so loudly that it made everyone jump. Her cool manner had abruptly been bored through with eyes of genuine terror. "That- that- that-that-" she stammered, pupils flicking about frantically, overturning the entire forest as they desperately searched for something. "-_that'sdangerousijustdumpedthegunsididn'tmakethemsafe—"_

"Little miss, don't worry about a thing." Jocasta, feeling slightly pleased he, one normally so lowly, could exercise a degree of authority and show some stature, adopted a gentle and soothing tone. "I'm trained to handle discarded weapons."

"No no no no _no _you don't get it!" Marisa squealed in shrill panic. "They're using custom explosive ammo and it's highly unstable and only I can – oh, _Hell..._"

A quizzical expression settled across the private's face as she shifted aside an assault rifle on top of the pile – to reveal a pair of plastic shopping bags.

"Private, what's that you've got there?" Sierra called across the clearing when he saw the young man squatting down over his find.

"_Sar'nt! It's a pack of chocolate brazil nuts, sar'nt!_" The Carabiniere yelled out loud as though he'd found a buried stash of mortars. He then abruptly gagged as he realised the ridiculousness of what he'd just said.

Sierra started in shock, and then glared at the private. He was just about to chastise him for being flippant while on a mission, but checked himself when he saw the private lift up the packet of chewy-n-crunchy treats, with an expression that was as baffled as he was. The sergeant slid his gaze over to Marisa, who was looking towards at the chocolates, aghast, hands pressed to her face and peering over her knuckles.

"...what else?" Sierra asked, guardedly.

"A six-pack of beer... no, not beer sorry, it's ginger ale." The young Carabiniere corrected himself dutifully, although the incredulous tone had not left his voice.

"Anything more of note?"

"Fruit By The Foot," the private squinted closely at the torn packaging, "half-eaten."

Fifteen years as a military policeman equips the typical Carabinieri NCO with a variety of useful skills. These included the ability to drive backwards uphill; sorting out white horses from black ones; making photocopies of old documents due to be destroyed; how to follow the helpful red indicator-stripe along the leg when putting on uniform trousers; and a rigorous and unstinting course in penguin husbandry. It also leaves them well capable of catching out a guilty schoolkid trying to hide doing something.

"It's the Padanians' stuff, I just dumped it all in a pile." Marisa insisted, although her voice lacked conviction.

The sergeant turned back to the Padanians, who were now huddled together at the edge of the clearing, trussed up with rifle muzzles prodding into their backs. "Is this true?" He asked, simply and levelly.

Sveva nodded her head. "Yes it is." She replied.

Sierra spun round quickly. Marisa emitted a strangled gasp and froze, caught making a throat-slitting gesture at Sveva over the sergeant's shoulder.

The sergeant turned back to Sveva. "Were you telling the truth just then?"

Sveva bowed her head. "No, I wasn't" she confessed, wracking through an anguished sob, fearing punishment from the creature beyond the Carabiniere... but while devils may use twisted contracts, they still have to abide by their articles.

"This is an uncommon place to select for a midnight snack, Miss. Marisa" Sierra commented.

It was the dead of night, but a bead of perspiration trickled down the side of Marisa's head. She scratched her head and played with her ponytail nervously, pushing her fingers through the braid until they became locked in a tangle and it took a genuine tug of effort to work them loose again.

"Well, y'see, our handlers do reward us with sweets and candy for good performance in our missions but because all of the cyborgs are dedicated to nothing less than total health and fitness like all good girls we never eat them but store them for short bursts of energy when operational demands require it as is the case now which is why I had them with me and I took a lot because I wasn't sure of the scale of the threat and I might have needed lots of energy..."

Marisa stopped for a breath and in that moment's pause absurdity her eyes brimmed. She tipped her head back, tears bursting down her cheeks.

"_They made me do it!" _Marisa wailed.

* * *

Claes had changed into her pyjamas and was sitting at the dresser, brushing her hair before bed, when she heard the door click shut behind her.

"So, what's your tariff then?" She asked, not turning round.

"Henrietta _kept_ the _receipts_, would you believe that girl?" Triela sighed heavily, lacking even the energy to throw her head up in cosmic despair. "All pressed flat and sorted by date!"

Triela walked up to the chest of drawers beside the dresser and began to undress and change for bed herself. "Hilshire was with them for over an hour," she continued, "and he had a notepad for _annotations_."

Even Claes winced at that.

"Every little indulgence I've treated myself with for the last three months, all weighed out to the very calorie! And it's all got to come off, he says – I've been instructed to do an hour's exercise at daybreak every day for the next three weeks."

"And disturbing _me_ as you clatter about in the dark, no doubt." Claes said sniffily. "You could just _not do it _– it's not as if _he'll _be bouncing out of bed at the crack of dawn, so how's he going to know if you skip it?"

Triela's head jolted in surprise towards Claes, and she looked at the other girl, who was sitting serenely as she packed away her toiletries, in a strange way. "I'd _never _do that." Triela gasped, appalled at Claes's suggestion.

Claes shrugged and got up to walk to the beds and climb to her upper bunk. As Triela finished buttoning her pyjama top she turned around to call back to her bunkmate. "So then, what are _you _down for?" She asked, an accusatory hint in her voice.

"Weeding."

"That hardly seems like a punishment for you of all people." Triela pouted sourly as she slipped under her own duvet.

"The _entire_ compound."

"Ah, I see. Commiserations." Triela said it – and meant it – in all genuine sincerity, but despite herself she had to lift up the covers to her face to cover her mouth and muffle a chuckle.

"I'm on litter-duty as well for the next fortnight. I overhead some Section One crew whispering that they're going to be tipping over the bins, just for me."

Triela sat upright, her brow furrowing in consternation. "That can't be right! Why on Earth..."

"They're somewhat nonplussed that Elenora Gabrielli's cheekbone was broken by the intruder."

"That's unfortunate, but I don't see why they have to vent their frustration on you," Triela sympathised, "and besides, what about poor Alfonso? His face is wrapped up like a mummy's - I could hardly recognise him!"

"I suppose that it's because you people were off gallivanting outside the compound yourself. Guilt by association, et-cet-era."

_You people? _Triela shook her head. Claes really could assume a supercilious manner when it took her. Besides, it wasn't as if all those packets of Strepsils and bottles of Benilyn that she'd been concocting potions out of had been planted in her handbag.

"Still, it was fun while it lasted." Claes sighed philosophically. "All good things, I suppose."

"...not over yet." Triela yawned, mumbling through her pillow as she turned over and began to drift off.

Claes paused in the process of taking her glasses off, her ears quivering. Then with sudden decision she slipped her spectacles back on and roughly shook the frame of the bunk-beds to bring Triela awake again. "What do you mean by that?"

"We've all been naughty – we deserve our punishments – but still, we've not been instructed to stop altogether. We'll be heading out next week, of course."

"How? They confiscated the wallet, and you can guarantee that they'll be going through your pockets every time you come back from a mission now." Claes pursed her lips in annoyance at Triela's foolishness. It was unkind, getting her hopes up with empty bravado like that.

"Oh, let me show you – and the duvet was just getting warm as well..." Triela swung out of bed and padded across the room back to the chest of drawers. She rooted around and pulled out one of her ties, turned it around to show the seam at the back, and then reached a finger up into the gap in the fabric and pulled out a few folded one hundred-euro notes.

"Triela, there may just be hope for you yet." Claes smiled thinly, it creeping along her face like a crack in the wall.

* * *

"Ah, Mr. Mancini." Lorenzo glanced up to note Avise's arrival, and then returned to scratching his pen over the documents on the desk.

Avise drew himself up to attention before Lorenzo's desk and waited for the Chief to relate what he'd been called up for. He blinked rapidly when this wasn't forthcoming – after the first acknowledgement Lorenzo seemed to dismiss Avise from his mind, and continued with his paperwork as though the prospect wasn't even present.

Curious despite himself, Avise leaned forward, imperceptibly, like a tall building with that little flexibility in the wind, and craned his neck to see what was occupying the Chief that was more important than his visitor. He caught a heading – "Operation Violet" – and a bolded name – "Aaron Cicero" – before Lorenzo shifted the position of his head, persuading Avise to drift back upright.

Avise shifted his feet, trying not to make his shoes rustle too loudly against the carpet. The light in the ceiling – one of those new energy-saving bulbs mandated for all government buildings – seemed a lot brighter, and a lot hotter, and under its glare Avise was burnt away to the squirming one-pipper on his passing-out parade, willing circulation back into his numb boots, forcing blood past the tight constriction of his starchy collar, and praying that the name wouldn't become literal. A full two minutes passed before Lorenzo shuffled the papers into his Out tray and addressed the waiting agent.

"Two items, Mr. Mancini." Even as he spoke Lorenzo still wasn't looking at his subordinate, instead rooting through a drawer in his desk. He emerged with a Ziploc bag with "EVIDENCE ROME POLICE" scrawled on the label in an untidy hand – the bag was visibly stretching under the weight of its contents, a vaguely J-shaped handgun.

"Is that my..." with a curious, interested expression, Avise took the proffered bag from Lorenzo and unzipped the pistol out of it – his eyes lit up with delight when he noted the serial number. "...hey, it _is_!"

"You can thank Priscilla." Lorenzo explained, with a slightly arch expression to indicate that he himself considered it to be a waste of effort – although as Avise was busy turning the weapon over in his hands and admiring it the effect was itself wasted. "She was conducting a routine inspection of police records for weapon seizures – in case heavy weapons turn up, the sort of thing that might cause our cyborgs problems, so we can go hunt down the source – when she came across an entry for this. As antique discontinued British revolvers aren't that much of a feature here in the middle of the other side of the continent, she figured that it was most likely yours. You were lucky – it was due to be melted down."

Avise smiled openly – having an important family heirloom restored to him filled in a hole in his spirits. "Well, sir, that's _really _good of her!"

With a slightly irritated curl of the lip, Lorenzo motioned to have the pistol back. "You can play with your toy later. In the meantime, though, there's another more serious matter, with another weapon – your theft of Lance-Corporal Luco's rifle, and you using it for an illegal shooting."

"Illegal?" Avise looked genuinely confused as he put the Webley back down on the desk.

"Rules of engagement are quite specific – it's illegal to fire on a fleeing enemy. Outside of a warfighting scenario – which this is not – units may only exert self-defence when actively engaged with a hostile figure. The purpose is protection and security – not wanton gunslinging." Lorenzo peered at Avise from over his glasses. "You were a uniformed soldier yourself until recently – have you forgotten procedure that quickly?"

Avise wrinkled his nose in distaste. "No, sir, it's not even been six months yet. But, respectfully, I don't see how it's relevant—"

"So, you consider yourself to be above the law, Mr. Mancini?" Lorenzo asked coldly.

Avise blinked several times, flummoxed and uncomprehending, failing to see the trick that he was sure that his Chief was teasing him with. Words escaping him, he thrust out his arms to take in the whole room – its carpets, its couches, bookcases, its ledgers on operational summaries, its diary of bionic refits, its window looking out onto the lawn and the training area beyond – and stared at Lorenzo helplessly. "Well, yes..."

Lorenzo grunted dismissively, decidedly unimpressed. "Mr. Mancini, I want you to get your head out of your backside."

Avise's hands flopped back down to his sides. This was why Lorenzo hadn't invited him to sit down – he had walked into an _Interview Without Coffee_. And now, he really needed one.

"Don't let all of this 'secret agent' schtick go to your head, Mr. Mancini. Drunks are only an embarrassment to themselves." Lorenzo set his elbows down on the desk with a pair of sharp raps, like an artillery cannon setting down its feet. His face was set and stern, his voice the curt cuff of admonition. "Quartered here are men of unique distinction and exceptional talent, a genuine elite whose mettle is blooded and proven, not all dusty past glory under sheets of flags and uniforms." Lorenzo tapped his pen against his knuckles, dismissing with a bare flicker the entirety of the martial heritage that Avise had invested himself with as an officer. Avise's reacted warmly, his cheeks colouring from the insult, but as he breathed in to bite back – strange that a promoted officer could be so readily insubordinate, that was another problem – Lorenzo carried on over the top of him.

"We've seen that selfsame mettle in you and, in time, you will be joining them." Lorenzo tied off that thread with a conciliatory remark, leaving Avise to trip over it while he continued on. "But while we have seen into you, it's evident that you have not fully appreciated us."

Lorenzo pointed out of the window. "I know it's difficult – those girls outside may seem the stuff of science fiction. No matter how fantastic it may seem, though, they are still flesh and blood – and polymer and carbon fibre – and grounded here on Earth. _You are not James Bond_, you are not some two-bit protagonist 'on the edge', and you do not live a life without responsibility – or consequence. What you _are_ is an agent of the _state_, and of civil authority – and so you will do what the state expects of you. You can, of course, be an uninhibited 'free agent', so to speak – all you have to do is walk out of this compound and find a Padania recruiter in a bar or an alley somewhere. But then, you know what'll be coming after you.

"Is that understood?"

This was the point in the reprimand that Avise stood up straight, bowed his head in deference, and said "Yes sir, completely" in a clear and unambiguous voice.

A ripple passed through Lorenzo's shoulders as he visibly relaxed. The hard part was over now. "One quality that does recommend you, Mr. Mancini, is your eagerness to volunteer. I've noted that you've adopted a number of ancillary tasks in addition to your prescribed training – it suggests good character."

Avise didn't flatter himself by giving thanks to the Chief – he could tell that a rejoinder would be imminent.

"Suggests, though – not confirms." Lorenzo continued. "As you claim overtime pay for all of them, some might insinuate that mercenary concern for sordid coin, rather than principled commitment to the Social Welfare Agency's mission, is foremost in your mind. I'm sure that that's not the case, and so you would be happy to take on some purely voluntary work to demonstrate that?"

Avise could have said no – he could also have leapt out of the window flapping his arms and trying to fly. "Yes Chief, certainly, I'm ready to meet any opportunity."

"Good!" Lorenzo nodded happily. "You can report to Mrs. Munticerro after you finish your scheduled training tomorrow."

_She doesn't have a rank?_ Avise wondered, perturbed. "I'm afraid I'm not familiar with her, sir."

"She's a division leader in Maintenance."

"'Division leader'...?" Now no amount of self-control could make Avise hide his dismay. "You don't mean that she's the _head_ _cleaner_?" He cried aloud.

Lorenzo smirked openly. "You will be assigned ablutions-block duty for the next fortnight. After all, resident in the compound as you are you _do_ make more use of the public facilities than any other handler or prospect, so it's only appropriate that you contribute to their upkeep."

Avise said that he understood and gave all of the necessary platitudes, and then marched stiffly from the room, like a clockwork robot with a rusty key. Once the door had clicked shut, Lorenzo pulled his in-tray across the desk and went back to his paperwork. He authorised annual leave for several members of the Technology Department, and signed off on a budget request for engineering work on the testing lab's hydraulic ram. Claes was now expected to be able to duck a Buick, although maybe the crew was being slightly too ambitious - after her last test they'd had to contract outside help from a team of orthodontists to set everything straight again.

With that out of the way, Lorenzo picked up a request from the support agent Amadeo, proposing that they accommodate the cyborgs rather than punish them and set up a tuck shop for them to spend small allowances in (Lorenzo rejected it). With that dispensed with, Lorenzo began reading through a report copied over from Draghi re-evaluating the risk of public exposure in the wake of the abortive Operation Shoelace. Typically for Draghi, it trailed some way behind the rather more pressing matter of the attempted Padanian infiltration of the compound that had just been thwarted. As Lorenzo continued to read the tardy report, he glanced back up at the chamber door.

Bersaglieri officers traditionally wore black gloves. Lorenzo wondered how they looked in marigold.

* * *

The chatter subsided as soon as the audience had recognised that Jean had entered the lecture theatre. He stood front and centre, before the projection screen hung up against the wall, to ensure that he was the focus of attention. Jean ranged his gaze across the arc of the theatre seating like the sweep of a radar beam, seeing a glint of reflected contact in each of the eyes of the cyborgs, young and old, that had been assembled here for this impromptu plenary session. He studied which gazes were open and steady and dutiful; which were nervous and questioning and uncertain; and which were lidded and languid and bored. Regardless of whether they were obedient or obnoxious, waiting for instruction or hoping he'd get on with it, all of them were silent in the presence of the adult. There was still the quiet distance between them – the wall that the eyes were only peering over.

Jean had never bought into the notion that fratelli were intimate associations – as the cyborgs existed for the sole and specific purpose of fighting for their handlers, there wasn't all that much to be intimate _about _in the first place. The recent revelations about cyborgs 'crossing the wire' had genuinely blindsided him – it had literally never entered his head that the cyborgs would even consider interests outside of the compound. That had been a stinging slap of humiliation for the senior handler to be exposed in a position of such myopic ignorance. Jean tightened his jaw, suddenly imagining the silence as surly insolence, the occasional blinks as flutters of condescension and disdain.

Some might have called it harmless fun which actually worked out for the best in the end, but for Jean the recent episode had poisoned the air with the taint of distrust (and, perhaps, the teargas sting of his own inattentiveness). Previously he had seen the cyborgs' chatter as background noise, the hum of lighting or the whirr of a computer's fan; but now he wondered just what they were whispering about.

He wondered if they were laughing behind his back.

Seeing some eyes slowly start to drift off of him, Jean decided that he wasn't going to give any of their attentions opportunity to wander, and moved straight into his introduction. "This is chiefly for the benefit of the younger cyborgs, whose recent escapades I'm sure you've been informed of," Jean explained as he walked up the stairs by the seating towards the projector on the top level of the theatre, "but I think that this film, as well as having particular relevance to the first-generation's indiscretions, can offer clarifying insight to all of the cyborgs."

"What is it, _The Great Escape_?" Triela drawled coolly, slouching back in her chair with a sly smile.

"Or _Bridge On The River Kwai."_ Illiria piped up on the second-generation side, her face obviously delighted at having the wit to slip something in.

"You're certainly ugly enough to pass for Colonel Nicholson!" Vanessa instantly cracked with the snappiness of a whiplash, shattering the whole second-generation contingent into crashing peals of laughter. Illiria, her cheeks burning red with stinging welts of humiliation, slunk down lower into her seat.

Once the din had subsided, Jean huffed, his shoulders spasming in what might have been a dry, sawdust laugh. He then reached out and flicked the theatre lights off.

"_One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest._"

**THE END**


End file.
