Sarah had brought everything except people.

This was her business, and hers alone. This was a personal mission for her own and the Duumvirate's goals, with nothing to do with her holdings, and she wouldn't feel comfortable bringing any of her many retroviral sentients to this raid. She also strongly suspected that there was a good chance her target might have been like the guy Paul raided, in which case she wanted as few people to see it in operation as possible, simply because it could not be unseen. She'd summon the cleanup crew out of pure necessity, but no more than that.

However, she had no intention of pointless self-sacrifice. Along for the ride were an Enforcer pilot, a half dozen mimic robots, and another five mimic Enforcers, all of which looked exactly like her, all of which had explosives strapped to them, and all of which she fully expected to lose as her minesweepers. Combined, all her gear weighed a whole forty pounds, about a sixth of that ammunition, another fifth explosives, ten pounds being the fusion laser/shotgun combo and five pounds being the flexible mirror plate she wore around her clothing. A counterintuitive choice, the armor was the result of discovering that reflections could do some very weird things to some targeting systems, as well as adding some protection from lasers and giving precious moments of confusion to organic foes. The rest was extremely specialized spy equipment, some barely out of the prototype stage, her favorite being a long-wave radar echolocator that could detect holes in walls. It wasn't perfect- it could never be- but it was very nice to have along.

The real problem was that the person performing many of the useful technical advancements was Gritzl himself. She scowled. The man was a genuine scientific genius. What's more, Gritzl was highly entrenched and had been for years; he seldom admitted visitors to his complex, never left it except for absolutely essential functions, and surely took the time to design it like the lair of a typical evil mastermind, continuing the Illuminated tradition of being the real-world, far deadlier counterparts of movie villains. And this place, situated in the far freezing North on some godforsaken and bitterly fucking cold island, was known to no normal organization, save a few miscellaneous tidbits warning pilots to stay away for some bullshit reason or other. Odds were the place was jam-packed with every kind of sensor she'd heard of, and possibly some she hadn't.

Which is why she didn't bother with conventional stealth. She had considered tunneling and striking from below, but he would probably detect that, too, and it was much easier to hurt people with a linear escape route. The only real way in that didn't reduce the place to slag was to kill everything outside, blast a hole in the wall, and let explosives and engineered reflexes do the work.

In a way, she was glad for it. Nuking the six targets from a mile away with sustained laser fire was much better than trying to play sniper tag. Other than that, it was two AM and fifty below, and having to lug around cold weather gear in addition to the rest of it was dangerously silly.

The blaze of four guard towers (and two immolated Enforcers at the building's entrance and gate) greeted her vision. She almost expected some kind of mirrored anti-air to pop up out of the ground once she slowed down; it didn't happen. She raked the ground and parts of the ceiling anyway, and as the doors opened to let the first wave of decoys rappel out, she listened to the merry, pop-bang-bang-pow sound of ammo cooking off, like a wet log thrown on the roaring fireplace of the rocket engines. Mmm. She'd have to have some buttered popcorn after she finished here.

She used a tiny fraction of the available power to blast a hole in the wall, slowly melting away metal, which glowed and dripped. A few trees some hundred yards away caught fire, whether as the result of flaming debris or simple reflection she couldn't tell. Her squad entwined itself with the ropes, prepared for the next phase of the plan:

The part in which she accelerated to the roof of the building, and dropped them off to use more conventional shaped charges to blast their way through the ceiling. As an entrance method the microwaves were useless here. Her squad could never actually enter the burning hole for hours; the molten metal at the spot was more than 3000 degrees Celsius. People on the wrong side of raids, however, would almost certainly not think of that, which made it an excellent feint.

There were two more feints. The six robots would go in first, followed shortly by one of the Enforcer impersonators. Assuming that he had something capable of telling the difference, the only biological target would be assumed to be her. Then, after a short time (depending entirely on the telemetry from the duplicates), she would herself go along with the four remaining impersonators. This also took advantage of misguided thinking: "She sent six robots and one Enforcer, now five more come, she probably got six of both, so she's still in the jet!" There was no logical reason to believe that from the target's point of view, but in blitzkrieg raids, targets didn't think logically unless they had the benefit of long practice, computerized tactics, or engineered DNA.

She blasted more holes as her squad entered, being conservative, using her screen to watch them gun down Enforcers ('Where did he even get that many?') with wide-area weapons and two robots get gunned down themselves. They had orders to spread out, the concept of a fire-team useless in such conditions, leaving miniature motion sensors as they explored. One robot followed a hall, its echolocation failed to find the trap and it was caught in a net, covered in some sticky substance. Sarah herself could have sidestepped it easily. Another robot was trapped in hooks of crisscrossing tape wrapped around it. 'What the fuck? Why the fuck would anybody use...' Her muscles tensed: 'He obviously doesn't know what I am, and he made this place for me.' This was replaced by a slow upwelling of mirth, followed by a deep chuckle. That arrogant, stupid son of a bitch. So he went all-out, did he? He went all-out with his idea of defensive operations, his insanity embedded in the architecture, and Sarah was going all-out with the offensive concepts the organization had provided and she had tweaked. And she knew what happened when those concepts met.

A sudden blankness hit the Enforcer's feed: Telemetry lost, with no clue what happened. There could be any damn thing down there. 'Fuck it.' Time to party, everybody in. Sarah swapped seats with her pilot, fixed the gas half-mask around her nose and mouth, and went in second, her first new infiltrator diving into the hole unopposed.

She took a quarter of a second to listen. Somewhere, something was on fire. There was the hum of heavy machinery, buried somewhere deep. There was no audible alarm; the concept was outdated. The half-mask made it impossible to smell anything, but she knew what was in the air: blood, smoke, and probably terror. It felt like home.

The room they had dropped into was a laboratory of sorts, unidentifiable bioelectric projects neatly arranged on tables, the door blown off its hinges. Her Enforcers rushed out immediately, Sarah close behind. Enemy Enforcers reacted to this new threat, approaching from an explored hallway, but the breadcrumb motion sensors alerted Sarah to point the Micro around a corner and incinerate them in one wide-beam blast. She rushed down the nearest unexplored hallway, seeing some downward stairs that none of her support had gone down yet, but she figured that was entirely a trap; her lead Enforcer rushed down a promising hallway instead, seeing nothing on echolocation, and suddenly there was a great amount of glue spraying from the ceiling, sealing it to the floor, coating its nose and mouth and choking it to death as it struggled against the heavy, viscous fluid. 'You've got to be fucking kidding.' Definitely something down that way, then. She considered bringing another Enforcer to lead but decided she needed the distractions more than she needed peace of mind. 'Next time, more!' she reminded herself. 'Always. Bring. More!' There was nothing that she did today that couldn't have been done with three dozen Enforcers instead of just six and some robots. She had resources now. She needed to think less like an assassin and more like a general.

But there was no time for remonstrations now. She took another look at the stairs, an office building-like construct going down to multiple doors at each floor. Clearly a trap. Not because of the way the fluorescent lighting subtly invited her to go down them, not because they looked somehow used and yet not, but rather because this was still a facility designed for daily use. There was no way in hell he would want to climb up and down two flights of stairs to reach what he wanted on a daily basis.

She gingerly held the EMP in her hand, setting its yield and its timer. She had to be careful with these. She carried plenty of electrically-detonated C4, it could erase computer data, and because Gritzl was using the control collars, an EMP would instantly kill someone she could have interrogated. She looked at the stairs again. Yup, definitely a trap, and if she was wrong, oh well. She tossed the EMP down the stairs to set it off and confuse the defenses, pulled out the fusion shotgun to fire two armor-piercing slugs at the far end of the hallway, one for floor, one for ceiling, and one in each of the sides, and rushed towards the glue.

This was the first time that she'd ever had to wall-jump while on a raid, and despite the danger she savored the experience. Her shoes were designed not just for stealth but for friction, able to get a grip even on slick metal, her gloves just the same. Her powerful legs and arms propelled her from side to side of the ten-foot-wide hallway, tremendous leaps keeping her well clear of the treacherous floor. She landed on the far end when the EMP went off, and nodded in satisfaction when she heard the tremendous crash of the entire stairwell collapsing.

She thought she heard human voices, and stealthily ran next to the side wall, using a small paint-gun-like tool to weld a few hallway doors shut in rapid succession. No sense in risking ambush.

She flicked a mirrored hand and saw some of what she was looking for. Down the right hallway was a large, pink room, the doors wide open, a number of girls inside, guns in their hands and wide, frilly dresses on their bodies, the subjects of Gritzl's perversions. Just from the sounds of their breathing Sarah could tell that none of them had any idea how to use their weapons. She took a good look with her echolocator- yup, this hallway was trapped as well, irregularities all over the place. She fired the fusion shotgun through the walls, destroying and setting off traps, sending spikes flying into the hall, and sending a few more fusion slugs into the floor and ceiling, just to be sure. She only had a dozen left. She reminded herself to bring more of those, too. She rushed into the room, worried that perhaps something in the back would shoot right through the girls to get to her and taking the calculated risk.

While Sarah's first few bullets blew through the things that were actually meant to kill her- the auto-turrets mounted in the ceiling- another girl was waging her own, private battle.

Gritzl had been big on 'decisions'. "It was your decisions that put you here," he had told her more than once. "What you make of your experience here is also your decision." It was bullshit, she knew it was bullshit, but that was what he kept telling her over and over, controlling her emotions the whole two weeks she was here, patiently waiting for her to 'decide' to have sex with him as the rest of the girls had. Now with an invader there to kill or rescue them (she didn't see much of a difference anymore), there was a real decision to be made, and she made it at once.

So it was to Sarah's utter surprise when one of the collared, presumably brainwashed girls shot another girl in the back of the head with a glazed look in her eyes.

Sarah was still in motion, her mirrored suit playing tricks on the girls' eyes. Her guns spoke faster than any human can talk, semiautomatic pistols firing faster than some machineguns. She chose not to kill. Her armor-piercing bullets went for collars, guns, wrists, security cameras, other electronic equipment. None of the girls fired at her- they didn't even know where to aim. The ceiling of the room was higher than the hall she'd come from, a number of auto-turrets directly above her as she entered, but those were far slower than she was and she continued to disable them almost instantly. And then suddenly Sarah was right there, fingernails slicing nine-tenths of the collar away from the shooter, who didn't flinch.

"What's your name?" Sarah asked her, voice unmuffled by the advanced mask.

"Ruby." One of the other girls was on the ground and screaming, a thin high-pitched whine as a result of her shattered wrist, and Ruby shut her up with a kick to the throat. The rest of the girls, those who weren't already, broke out into sobbing and crying.

"Ruby who?" Sarah cared far more about the way Ruby would answer than the actual name, and talked as she reloaded and looked at the echolocator again. There didn't seem to be anything else in the local area. One of her robots reported being hit by Enforcers and she simply blew it up. The explosion was audible from where they stood.

"What's your last name?" Ruby asked in response. Sarah wasn't expecting that.

"Dominus now, but my maiden name is Mortis," she answered simply, waiting. "Which way is he?" The Enforcers were coming closer, running at a dead sprint.

"Then I'm Ruby Mortis." Sarah wasn't expecting it to be that easy, and wondered how much Ruby truly understood.

"No, you're not supposed to tell.," groaned one of the sobbing girls. Ruby answered by aiming her gun at the girl; Sarah moved her hand away so Ruby stomped the girl's face instead. 'She's already mine,' Sarah thought instantly, and started getting suspicious; something was very wrong here. Was Peter up to this level of subterfuge? It was technically possible, but he'd have to guess that she was coming and what she'd do and where she'd go... What it felt like was that there was something else at work here, something outside her normal range of experience. The irony did not escape Sarah: A raid on a demented, high-tech psychopath, and the girl acting the most like her is the one who finally manages to creep the queen of death out.

"Down that hall, and to the left. Not either of the doors! It's the wall right between them. This whole place is screwed up like that," Ruby informed her, interrupted by an explosion from the hallway, one of the welded-shut doors bursting open. Sarah nodded, her echolocator agreeing, and rolled a steel ball with the number 1 on it down the hall she came from. "Once you get in there it's just straight, past the beds and the.. stuff. It's an elevator down," she continued in a rush. Ruby was surprised when the ball didn't seem to do anything as it continued rolling, bouncing off the wall and going out of sight, and Sarah just stood there for half a second.

Then the Enforcers reached the corner, and Sarah pressed a couple of buttons on her PDA. The ball exploded with a violence unexpected for its small size. The Enforcers were shredded, blood and body parts flying every which way. Some small pieces of shrapnel were not absorbed by the meat and ricocheted towards the girls; one went through Ruby's dress near her thigh, and another would have gone into her chest if Sarah didn't block it with a fingernail. That hurt like hell, but Sarah didn't show it.

And then she was gone, leaving Ruby standing there among a loose collection of crying girls. If they had been looking closely enough, they would have found the contempt on her face unmistakable. She almost killed them all right there before she figured that Sarah had left them alive for a reason. Instead, she just stood there, heedless of everything.

Sarah did not step into the elevator; that would have been incredibly stupid. Instead she C4'd the wall above the elevator door, blasted out the cables with a few HEAT rounds, and waited until she heard the crash. Then she put another fusion-propelled slug into the elevator-shaft ceiling (and out the facility, through the air, halfway to orbit) to check for another sort of deathtrap, fired another quad of fusion slugs into the walls, strapped on some forcible-suction pads, and scuttled carefully down the wall like a gecko.

She used a mirrored hand to take a look around the corner, then shot two already-wounded Enforcers. Already wounded? What had...

It is bad form to laugh in the middle of a mission, particularly one this dangerous, particularly when the deviousness and resources of the target mean that anything could be a trap. She cackled anyway, to the point where Ruby above thought she had been hit by laughing gas or something.

This room was apparently Gritzl's evil-genius control room. Among its various screens and specialized controls (some of which Sarah felt were just there to clutter the place- he could have done this from one screen really), it featured four torture-chairs, the fifth having been replaced by what had been a restraining shell. The occupant had been one of her Enforcers. The shell that Gritzl had placed around it immediately after capture had Faraday-caged out all transmissions. And then Gritzl had somehow let it know he was there, maybe he opened part of it or something to gloat over his captive...

And then the Enforcer had thought 'Primary target, unable to capture alive' and detonated the ten pounds of C4-variant it had on a twitch-toe trigger. The shell had the effect of a thick-walled pipe bomb. Chunks of meat and blasted steel were embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Sarah had to take a good look at Gritzl's feet- half a shoe still on one of them- to ascertain that yes, in fact, this was the carcass of a man with normal genetics. No wonder there hadn't been much more than an automatic response. She took another second and a half just to gape at the idiocy- Gritzl, you fucking retard, what did you think this was, kids' TV? Then she shook her head and wall-jumped her way back up.

She looked at the mass of girls and decided to bring just the one, strange, girl with her and leave the rest for the cleanup crew; she'd parked them fifteen minutes away and summoned them with a few button clicks. She gestured and Ruby followed, a couple of other girls almost following but not quite having the guts.

Ruby stumbled a few times. "This dress-" Was instantly torn off in one bladed-fingernail swipe, with underthings ('He really was a sick fuck') ripped to shreds. Ruby kicked off the shoes and left it behind. "Never again," she said very faintly.

"How did you know I'd take you?" Sarah asked as she helped her come back the way she had originally entered, incinerating the glue with a steady low-power microwave beam, making sure none of the traps reset. Not a chance. All of them were of the explosive-bolts and chemical-ignition variety.

"Because that's what the other guy did." 'The other guy'? She must mean Paul.

"How did you find out about that?"

"Peter couldn't stop whining about it. He was all going like 'Oh, the Dominator's really overstepped his bounds this time' and 'he had no right to do that'.. bunch of bullshit." Ruby overdramatized Gritzl's voice quite a bit. Stupid of him to mention it. Stupid of him to give her hope. "I hope you made him suffer." The jet was still in the same position Sarah had left it, the Enforcer pilot not moving an inch. Sarah grabbed Ruby with one arm and grabbed the rope with the other, yanking once to get it to retract.

"No such luck. He was dead before I got there. Did he say anything else about the Dominator, or the Duumvirate?" Sarah answered after they were inside. "Return," she told the Enforcer, and enjoyed the quick 180 degree turnaround and subsequent blast-off. Mission complete, time for debriefing. She considered sticking around to support the cleanup crew, but they were retrovirals now; with a lot of warning, the defenses eviscerated, and the owner dead, they shouldn't need her help.

"N.. yeah, when he was pissed, he said 'The dumb-virut won't stop until we're completely stripped of all privileges!' Whole bunch of shit like that. He wasn't talking to me, though." Her voice was even more exaggerated.

"Who was he talking to?"

"He was on his cellphone. Some guy named Bob."

Cellphone? Could she be so lucky? "Did it look like an ordinary phone?" Sarah asked very quickly.

"Well, yeah-"

Sarah instantly turned to the viewscreen, tapped into normal networks, and immediately began a search with tools normals will never have. It would make sense; if he didn't trust Illuminati communications, he'd try to lose himself among the normals; the only difference would be the encryption. If he was making calls from inside a sealed Illuminated facility, he'd have his own static relay, which would show as someone who never moved in the slightest, a set distance from a real cell tower. Gritzl's facility was at this site with only one nearby tower- shit, he might have ordered the tower built himself, he was so far from anything- so any calls made from that distance were him, but of course the normal records weren't set up for searching that way, and if he edited things at his cell tower this would go nowhere...

"Wait, you're not going to ask me anything else?" Ruby asked.

"Data can be deleted," Sarah replied curtly, working fast as she ripped large chunks of normal cellphone data and uploaded them to an Illuminati server, and then taking time to search through them with specialized tools there. A few lower-level assassinations featured a trace on someone war-driving through wireless networks, this was child's play in comparison... Aha. The towers identify themselves on this network, only a few random people make calls here, this one's got to be him. But the number he was in constant communication with was a complete false ident. The master list- a master list indeed- said that it was a relay, a resource jointly owned by five Illuminati. She turned on the viewscreen and commanded her newest retroviral, Richard Wickerson, to find out who Gritzl was talking to; if he called back with "It's a relay", she would be sorely disappointed. Why five Illuminati would want to share such a thing, Sarah wasn't sure, but it was clear that the rogue was attempting to lose himself in a group.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't understand that Sarah would gladly implant all five of them to find out who he was, and to hell with the political repercussions. She wasn't even sure the rogue was one of the five. Although it was, naturally, pretty much normal-proof, the relay's real security status was unknown; someone may have added himself as a sixth, and was probably busy purging away all traces of himself now, or possibly inserting false data to point the finger at someone else.

No matter how good at it she became, Sarah royally hated this wheels-within-wheels bullshit.

Still no answer from Richard. Good. It would have taken him seconds to come up with the obvious answer, but instead he had correctly assumed that Sarah had looked at the master list already, dismissed the idea of repeating the information, and took it upon himself to take the investigation further. This was the sort of self-directed servitude Sarah liked to see from the unimplanted. Sarah spent the time going over her 'known' information on Gritzl's lair, comparing it to what she actually saw in there, looking for intentional misdirection or missed detail among all the variances. Almost all of them fit into the 'couldn't possibly know' category, with the rest being changed after the data was collected. Especially the fucking map.

Richard's answer came back a full three minutes after Sarah asked him for it, with an even worse diagnosis: one of the Illuminati had been running it as an open communications relay for any other Illuminatus who wanted in. In fact, according to Richard, it was being promoted as a local terminal for exactly this: easy communication to normal-world operatives without a trace back to Illuminated holdings. ('Damn, could I have used that four years ago!') All the other party had to do was make up some normal identity and simply not register it in the master database.

No one can keep track of six billion people- not even the Illuminati.

There was no false promise of "well we'll keep looking and see what turns up" or anything of the sort. He was gone.

"What was Gritzl's relationship to this person?" Sarah casually asked. Ruby looked like she was almost asleep- wonder of wonders, how the hell did that happen?- but Sarah had to get the info while it was still somewhat fresh.

"I dunno, his.. friend, I'm guessing." Which could mean anything. "Gritzl never talked about anything real personal. He sure as hell didn't talk about us."

"Anything that really stood out?"

Ruby's bitch mode, dormant, was triggered and she reveled in it for the first time in weeks. "It all fucking stood out. How was I going to know to remember his fucking telephone conversations? If you want to know who this guy is so bad, why don't you just fucking call him up and ask him?" 'I can't believe I just said that to her.'

Sarah's logic overrode her snappy retort- What if that could actually work? It was an assumption that 'Bob' knew Gritzl was dead, but what if he had no idea? Sarah called Richard back. "Get into that relay, on my authority. Physically, severing the outside connections but leaving the inside ones up. No warning. And get me a voice imitator who knows the speech profile. We're going to give Bob a call."

Richard starting moving in a fast, deliberately efficient way, typing, reading, and talking at the same time. The hallmarks of a good servant. "Sorry, Sarah. There's no real physical component. It's just software connecting to a telco." Software would be inside somebody's house. "Would you make that a command to raid him?"

"No. Wait. So it's supposedly owned by five guys but it's being routed through one Illuminatus' identity?"

"Yes. The Illuminatus in question is Richard Flynt. He's advertising it as an open unlogged relay."

"Bullshit he's not logging it. But he'll un-log it in a second the moment we show up, rogue or not."

"Indeed. Hrm. We don't have a lot to go on with speech patterns. He's never made a public speech in his life and we don't have enough recorded conversations. It won't be perfect, but would you use an Enforcer?" Richard had taken the two requests of 'raid' and 'call' separately.

"Yes. Yes, I would." Not for the first time, Sarah noted how this would all be so much easier if direct Illuminati transmissions were logged. Not for the first time, she remembered that they would never permit the privacy invasion and not even she could force it.

Wickerson transferred Sarah over to an Enforcer, a ringback tone of "Everybody wants to rule the world" audible. Apparently Flynt had a sense of humor. Sarah made a sharp shushing motion to Ruby; the Enforcer would likely re-speak what anybody said.

The pick-up was within five seconds, and not an answering service as Sarah had envisioned. "Pete, what the hell are you doing? Didn't you go off-grid?"

Off-grid? Apparently they had an underground network of sorts and they figured Gritzl had escaped to it. But apparently that didn't stop them from being stupid enough to answer a call after they knew a raid had happened.

"Guess what? I got her," Sarah said, and the Enforcer reiterated with a voice that made Ruby twitch in surprise. What Sarah was text-messaging Wickerson with, however, would clearly define who got who: Find the owner of this voice, fully interrogate him if possible, and kill him.

"Oh my god. You actually killed Sarah."

I obey. , Wickerson replied. Of course he obeyed. The reply was to signify that he would enjoy obeying.

"No. Alive."

"NO!" A combination of disbelief and awe. "You couldn't have! When the highers" (Hires?) "hear about this, they are going to send you up and make another one!" What was this guy talking about? But she couldn't hint that she didn't know.

"Bob, hold on a second. Don't you think we should keep this between us for a bit? Who are you going to tell?"

"Everybody! You really think we should put this under wraps?"

"If it wasn't Sarah I'd say no. Anybody in particular you want to get in on this?" Names, you bastard, I want names!

"Yeah, like Jack.. or Tom, or Bob, or Steve, or Rebecca, or Danielle, or..." He was obviously rattling off as many English names as he could think of, the panic in his voice evident. "Shit, shitshitSHIT!" Click. Sarah saved her maniacal laughter for when the Enforcer was off the screen- no sense in Ruby having to listen to Gritzl's voice do that.

Richard grinned the whole way through. "Oh, how I wish that was a full success!" Sarah exclaimed after she was done. Damn, she fucked that up. Maybe if she had tried something else, some other line of inquiry, maybe if Ruby had told her his mannerisms, but that would have taken time... fuck it, hindsight was like that.

"It could not have been done better. We have a good chance of getting him and I think Jack was a lead. Do you have any suspicions?"

"None," Sarah replied. "That's our problem, too many jacks, not enough aces." Richard smiled. Sarah joked rarely, and he treasured every time she did it, dreaming of one day becoming her part-time lover instead of just her servant. She said nothing further so he clicked off the screen.

Ruby stared at her, thoughts roiling with conflicting emotions: awe for Sarah's efficiency, pride in suggesting something that worked, and an overarching sense of shame at her own weakness. "You want something?" Sarah asked casually. One problem dealt with, on to the next. She was almost certainly expecting her new acquisition to begin the useless, normal 'healing process' of recriminations, memories, and various brands of blame and guilt. She had prepared nine different varieties of shut the fuck up should this process progress beyond its initial stages. She could not, would not, listen to a fucking word of that. The way Sarah solved problems was a permanent one.

"Two things. I want you to make me like you." Damn, everybody wanted the retrovirus!

"Well then, I've got good news!"

"And I want you to erase my mind." Ah. The logical reverse of Sarah's problem solving. At least the new servant favored a direct approach. It made them easier to train than the ones who seemed to think useless twists were necessary.

"Then I've got bad news."

"This is the Illuminati, right? You can't just scrub everything?" The not-so-latent death wish stood out, like a mole. She'd do anything to rid the past two weeks from her- even if it meant frying her own brain.

"I can, I just won't. Mindless servants are cheap, we make them in boatloads. If I want more of those, I'll just get some." Which she probably should have done earlier. Before the raid she had no idea that more than ten copies of herself would be anything but a waste. After, she figured she could use several dozen. Live and learn.

"From people...?"

"No, not from people. At least not anymore." That made her silent, as she realized the Enforcers she had seen in Gritzl's lair were never sentient. Sarah pondered taking the conversation further- but no, despite how Paul had done it, now was not yet a time for opportunistic servant-shaping. Shock-and-awe was a tactic for raids and blitzkriegs, not long wars or permanent relationships, despite getting them off on the right foot. ('Maybe this is what we ought to do every time. Good-cop, bad-cop the entire thing. Set up some shithole for them to suffer for a week, and then sacrifice a dozen Enforcers or so to do a convincing rescue.') Tempting, damned tempting, but if they were going to be real servants they'd figure it out sooner or later. Of course if she wanted to be devious, she could intentionally invite sick fucks to the Illuminati for this very purpose... nah.

It was an hour's slow flight to Northberg, Ruby wanting to make conversation but having no idea what to say. She was taken, and had no idea what that meant. At least it beat where she was an hour ago. The things she had said to her.. the things she had seen the girls doing.. the things she had avoided doing, only to feel the suffering in her brain as punishment.. she didn't want to remember it, didn't want to care. This mirrored, pretty-voiced killing machine had put a violent end to it. It was enough. It had to be enough.

The jet landed gracefully, and Sarah opened the door to step out.

"Um? Clothes?" Ruby asked, still bare to the world.

"Do you need them?" Sarah asked casually. Her servant was badly messed up in a great many ways, jagged rips in her mental state. Sarah intended to retraumatize her properly by cutting the fissures clean, then seal them back up with solid doctrine.

"I'm naked!" she shouted, confused.

"And why does that matter?" Sarah asked.

"What? Guys will be staring. I'll be like a slut." Sarah's face: nobody cares. "And won't it be cold?!"

"In Northberg Medical? I'm certain you can stand sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit for a bit." Most of it was kept warmer.

"Fine then, if it's so great, why don't you do it?"

Sarah believed that one of the cardinal rules of good leadership, eschewed by most masters but valued by the assassins, was not to issue commands you would not do yourself. There were obvious exceptions, such as particularly dangerous or specialized missions. This was not one of them. Sarah replied by taking off the mirrored garment- spy gear hanging off of it like technological cocoons- and tossed it right past Ruby's head into the back. The only thing she left on was the belt carrying her PDA. "Now let's go," she said, a bit of real authority dripping into her voice.

The concept of authority no longer meant a damn thing to her new servant. What did matter was how fundamentally this all shook her sense of normalcy and sane behavior. She liked that. If she could finish the job- send everything she thought was right crashing to the ground, destroy everything she cared about, burn it all to ashes- then what happened to her would entirely lose its meaning, and Gritzl would just be another mutilated corpse among.. how many?

"Sarah, how many people have you killed?" Ruby asked, walking alongside her, feeling the not-quite-cold metal on her feet, looking around at the men at the hangar as if to dare them. Wait, they weren't men, they were the same thing Gritzl had.

"I have no idea," Sarah cheerfully replied. "Hundreds. I stopped counting a long time ago, and I'm not even sure how to count. Does that mean personally, by servants, or some other way? Does it really matter if I tell an operative or a guided missile to do it? Do Enforcers count? I don't even have a metric to base an answer off of." It had been ages since she had a chance to brag about it.

"Those Enforcers, you've got some too?"

Sarah gestured with a bladed thumb as they boarded the tram, Ruby just noticing the fingernails of death. 'God damn, I hope she never has to pick her nose.'

"Yup, my pilot was one and I invaded with some. Mindless servants by the boatload. Although I wasn't expecting him to have quite so many. They're made, or they're supposed to be made, here, and we track them." She sighed. "The tests will come back soon, but I don't think those were." The enemy having Enforcer production capability? Usually Enforcers were no match for sentient engineereds in any real fight, and the ones Gritzl had were slightly different and not as good as the Operator's latest models; if that was their state-of-the-art and the enemy was unable to merge their Enforcer variant with the Northberg kind, they weren't likely to catch up any time soon.

Sarah didn't care for 'usually' and 'likely' very much.

"Where are we going?" Ruby asked, noticing the lack of a rumble as they moved. The tram might as well have floated on air.

"To the psychologist."

"Oh, great."

"Have you had a problem with a psychologist?" Best to get this out of the way fast, another fissure to slice open.

"You want to know what happened the last time I went to one? I was told that everything I said would be in complete confidence, so I actually told him the truth. Then he told my parents everything and recommended this center for troubled girls or some bullshit, and there was some sort of 'car accident'," she said, waggling her fingers for quotes, "they found my 'body', and I was reported dead before I reached the 'center'."

"Well, this one is going to tell me everything, and he's not going to tell anyone else because I'll kill him if he does. He's also going to look at your body, in spite of himself. But he's not going to do anything and he's not going to suggest it, can you guess why?"

"Same thing, you'll kill him?"

"Exactly. You're getting the hang of this." Ruby understood. Her integrity and self-respect weren't protected by fabric. They were protected by force. And Sarah had a lot of force. So when they reached the psychologist's office, Ruby smiled at him, as if inviting him to try any of the shit that had been tried on her in the past.

Sarah spent the time doing more research, trying to figure out who Gritzl's friends were. The rogues couldn't be stupid enough to deal with each other in public, although checking up was a necessary gesture. She got a high-priority message from her cleanup crew and read it three times over, making sure that this wasn't some kind of misinterpretation. One of Gritzl's brain devices was something to precisely map every single neural connection and save it to a hard drive measured in exabytes.

"...send you up and make another one," 'Bob' had said.

Cloning. Of the he's-my-perfect-copy variety. The enemy had a fucking clone machine.

Sarah couldn't help but think of the implications, even if they weren't her business. Copying and using this new technology for themselves was the Operators' concern (and both Day and Night would be very concerned indeed). How long did the rogues have this? She remembered how, almost six years ago, three of their enemies had appeared eager to die and one of them had killed himself. But if they weren't the originals... She shook her head. This line of thinking wasn't her problem either. Long-term strategy was the twins' business, and business would shortly be booming.

Current problems first. "You and Paul sure know how to pick 'em," the psychologist said when he walked out of the room, a bit shaken. It was one of those days when he didn't know who was crazy anymore, and in his line of work that was a very bad thing. "She wants to destroy herself. It's not.. quite.. a death wish. She wants to obliterate her past, just forget everything."

"She told me as much."

"Well, since we're not going to do that, she wants to alter as much of herself as she can, and in her position I can't say I blame her. There are a whole lot of.. things.. attached to her identity in her mind that she would be better off without. She's looking for crimson hair, new face, new everything, she doesn't even want what she looks like now documented anywhere. And you should have seen the way her eyes lit up when we mentioned another experimental alteration, this one involving fire." Very careful misuse of dragon genetics had led to the same combustive-gas bladders available as part of the forearms and lower legs of freshly engineered humans. Now all they needed was a willing sentient for the final test, as Enforcers and the unwilling give poorer results.

"Give it to her," Sarah said, as if asking why he hadn't already.

He wasn't about to second-guess her.