Her thoughts untangled as Tasìa drifted in the haze of sleep—a dreamt, at times an absurdly pastiche version of the last few months, invaded her rest.

  Barely aware of the world around her, she sensed long fingers holding her, carrying her out of the van, and tossing her upon a bed. She heard Matzi collapsing down on the twin bed beside her.

  "Careful with him," she murmured, and as Tasìa continued to talk in her restless sleep, she admonished, "He is not in a good way."

  On occasion she mustered enough strength to raise her head and check the progression on Matzi's headband as it monitored the regeneration of his nearly failed organs.

  One bar had faded from yellow to green. The other LED lights remained unchanged.

  Satisfied sleep didn't interfere with her assignment; Tasìa faded back into dreamland.

  There she envisioned her silver-skinned Aunt Tatiana, pushing her away with hands raised. Tasìa strained against a buff of wind until she collapsed on her knees.

  Tatiana faded in and out of the scene like a pulse that waxed and waned from being concretely real with a predatory focus in her feral eyes, then she shifted into an ethereal ghost, eyes widened in dazed fear and loss.

  Tasìa recalled a conversation with Annebél a week after her confrontation with Tatiana.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" Annebél asked.

  "Fuck no."

  "They did that to her," Annebél answered. "She has no control over it. It's okay for you to grieve."

  "Truly, I don't think about her at all these days."

  That took Annebél back. So cold, but true. Aunt Tatiana never crossed Tasìa's mind any longer—no longer would she be led by the nose by emotional blackmail, even from family.

  Once she refused to think about Tatiana any longer, the terrain of dreamland shifted away to another conversation with Annebél.

  Just a few hours earlier, Tasìa and Annebél crossed the parking lot between the Densidad ProActiva Engineers complex and the Cistern of Souls waste treatment plant when Annebél tapped her on the shoulder and pointed to their left.

  "Hey, is that Elise's current systems administrator? The one you share some history?"

  Indeed, in the passenger seat of Elise's van, Felicité sat and craned her head to watch them. She lifted up her hands with some struggle to show she was bound by chains and handcuffs.

  Annebél cleared her throat to stifle a chuckle.

  "Does Elise have bad luck with her IT staff picks, or what?" Annebél said. "You want to go and say 'hi'?"

  Tasìa shook her head crossly.

  "I have nothing to say to her."

  Tasìa turned away and marched towards Sachmilli's vehicle.

  Immeasurable time passed. Voices and surrounding noises softened in intensity.

  It's okay to grieve. Let it out, mi dulzura.

  In Annabel's accent, the words played pleasantly in her ears. Tasìa felt a warm and pleasant sensation spread in the skin of her pubis. An aroma of lavender and eucalyptus rose up from her.

  Wait. What's going on?

  "Relax, mon petite demón," Annebél giggled. "I noticed something gashed out chunks of your curlies like a peccary chewed through them. I can't have you returning to your man like that. So, I ordered up the materials to give you a Brazilian wax. Consider it a fresh start."

  Oh? It's unusual to just take the initiative on an endeavor like that, but, admittedly, it's a practical and efficient use of our downtime.

  "In truth, I got bored," Annebél chuckled, as if she read what Tasìa was thinking.

  Sometime after Annebél left her side, words again drifted from previous conversations, seeping elusively into her mind.

  From Sinclair:

  "When you get a chance, visit me at Egliona's. We have so much to talk about."

  From Andu: "Now go get some sleep. You look like you are about to collapse."

  And a private text from Mel as Green-Eyed Elise, bent over with her back against the platform rail, worked on mending his wing.

  --(Please, don't share this with Andu.) Did you get her?

  The poor fella looked terribly scraped up and battered.

  I did. Her last hour of life was a very miserable one.

  —I feel that it is right. A soul will not return proper if its vessel was not subject to consequence.

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  Eventually, Tasìa got cold again. And the gnawing words repeated again.

  It's okay to grieve, mon petit démon.

  Was Annebél planting that mantra in her head? She has been quite the busybody of late.

  Tasìa dismissed the phrase with her own words that came to Tasìa almost freeform, muttered outloud, but the words unsettled her in the imagery they evoked.

  "If the past is just ghosts, lingering in the graveyard, sure. Take the time. But when they are forked-tongued ghasts grasping their claws at you even still, grief is a very dangerous luxury that will make you vulnerable at the worst possible time."

  "Huh?" Annebél's voice called out from the other side of the room.

  Tasìa realized she was talking in her sleep. She peeked up again long enough to focus her eyes. Two bars were now solid green, with one still tinged in yellow but halfway there.

  Pleased she wasn't derelict in her monitoring duties, Tasìa turned on her right side and fell back to sleep, soon submerged in the worst kind of sleep.

  Not nightmares, but problem-solving dreams. The kind of dreams that ate into restful sleep.

  Tasìa saw herself in Beauregard's back office, alone in the white noise of two well-synced air conditioning units. Blue strips of light ran along the irregularly surfaced ceiling in wavy patterns—a coldly comforting place she found it to be over the previous month when she visited Beauregard at the bar.

  The whiteboard Beauregard often used to explain his business plans stood with ledger-like marker scribbles under the words:

  In the Game of Quad, who is aligned with whom?

  Manifested

  Disappeared, Golden, El Otros, Spectres, Patients...

  An endless variation of Manifested types Tasìa had never seen before scrawled down the board in blue marker.

  But the Specters caught Tasìa's attention.

  Spectres, like the American spooks and her own nephew Fodor, were infected humans and subject to mental control. Tasìa had helped Alisha escape from them.

  —It was your Primie Harvested pheromonal defenses that made Tatiana's silver sheen reveal itself.

  "Modality. Is that you?" She asked out loud.

  No answer came forward, and Tasìa gave up on listening for it as a pulsing noise drew her back to the dreamt room where Beauregard rocked in a chair, staring straight ahead past his desk. Her Aunt Tatiana paced the floor lost in thought, wearing a hairband, a laced-up shirt, a miniskirt, and go-go boots, all in an assembly of silver.

  Her skin was as pale as the Ural mountain caps but at least now shaded in the human range of experience.

  Beauregard watched her aunt pace from the wall-mounted stereo system to his liquor cabinet and back again. He turned to Tasìa and smiled.

  "She came around on three different occasions," he said, "poking and prodding. I didn't mind. She was nice, like you."

  That was the answer he gave the night she met him when Tasìa asked about Tatiana.

  She was nice, like you.

  That wasn't the reality Tasìa eventually confronted at all.

  —Yet you have never asked him about it.

  It was the voice of the Modality speaking again. Replenished, perhaps, after Tasìa's sleep deprivation silenced it?

  If the Entities had the power to erase it, as they claim, they would have lobotomized it from her head decades ago.

  —You are afraid the life you have built around Beauregard will be found to be a lie if you ask him to explain himself.

  She couldn't concentrate on what the Modality was saying; the pulsing noise throbbed against her temples. It was now everywhere.

  Finally, Tasìa woke up and rose to see where the sound was coming from. Her PalmEx Personal Assistant pulsed yellow. Someone was trying to open her locked chest in the guest room where she kept quarters.

  Tasìa flipped the cameras she set up in her room. A bored-looking Alisha sat on the floor, leaning against the bed railing, poking the chest with a cane.

  She wasn't trying to get into it. She was trying to get Tasìa's attention.

  Tasìa flipped on the intercom system.

  "Hey, you, Arizona," Tasìa said, "what the hell, man?"

  Alisha stood up with some struggle; her left arm was still in a sling. She faced the pin camera in the southeast corner of the guest bedroom, and she spoke:

  "Finally! I have been trying to get in touch with you for the last two hours."

  Tasìa was distracted a moment when she heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door open. Annebél strolled out on tiptoes until she caught sight of Tasìa.

  Tasìa turned back to the phone.

  "What's the problem?" She asked.

  "Now that I can get around on my own, I decided to pay a visit to the La Se?ora Azul," Alisha began. "The place is open and as packed as always, but it's being run by Takuára now. Beauregard and Belle Jo have split town."

  Takuára, Tasìa had met that first evening when she asked about nearby medical facilities. Takuára was the one who could not be bullshitted.

  "What?" Tasìa exclaimed, grabbing her hair in a tight grasp in exasperation. "Did she give any kind of explanation?"

  "She refused to tell me, but Takuára asked me to tell you she is holding on to Beauregard's office key. He left something in there for you, and she said for you not to worry."

  Her emotions tipped; Tasìa was furious.

  "How can I not worry when my world is collapsing on me one pillar at a time?"

  "Hey," Alisha said, "I am just the messenger. Any estimation when you will be back? I've been watching the feed on SubRosa. Some fucked-up happenings are going on yonder that way in Vida Escondida."

  Tasìa understood Alisha was looking for feelers. Tasìa liked Alisha, considered her a dear friend even, but didn't trust her at all in the spook game.

  She kept her answer vague.

  "No doubt. My matters here are still mostly unresolved. The original plan went to shit before it even got started. Hey, is there anything else you need before I have to cut this short?"

  Alisha smiled. "No. I'm good. Be seeing you. Watch out for dragons." She flipped her own PA over and held it steady for the camera.

  A SubRosa—a professional newsfeed service for spooks—headline glared: VEAA Seizes Dragos XM-95 Ballista.

  The weapon system platform, which is used to fire unconventional data-siphon drones, was deployed in a terrorist attack on a downtown business...

  Tasìa caught the time on the PA device before she cut off the transmission. Roughly eleven hours since she and Annebél left the Cistern of Souls, and everyone else back there.

  She was wondering how the team fared against the dragon when Annebél threw down a set of clothes on the bed Tasìa had been sleeping on.

  "I bet you haven't even noticed that you are standing there with not a stitch of clothes on you."

  Tasìa blinked; no, she had not. There was Matzi one bed over, comatose. The bars on his headband were now all green.

  Tasìa looked down at her body to examine the results of the Brazilian. "Hey, nice work there. I probably won't be keeping it though."

  Annebél chuckled. "Doesn't bother me. At least it doesn't look like the Grim Reaper went at it with a scythe any longer."

  As Tasìa threw on the jeans, plain pair of white bloomers, sports bra, and tank top—evidently Annebél purchased all new—her stomach growled loudly.

  Annebél's mouth gaped open as she listened to Tasìa's gastronomical noise factory, then she responded, "Hey, go ahead and get something to eat. I'll take care of your boy, per Elise's instructions."

  "Thanks. Thanks for everything."

  Annebél grabbed a medical bag, one Green-Eyed Elise put together for Matzi specifically, from beneath the other bed.

  "Hey, if you want to return the favor," Annebél said, "when you get back, fill me in on your plans. I need to know, are we taking down Simone?"

  Tasìa had not given it even a moment of thought.

  She had put the matter to the side a mere few moments after she discovered Simone Barre Estèvez was the candidate.

  Damn. Do I have a talent for avoiding responsibility, or what?

  Tasìa considered it as she stood at the open door, but her mind went blank. She turned back around and answered, "Maybe. Maybe after a cup of coffee we'll make a decision on that together," before shutting the door behind her.