TIME July 8th, 12:30pm LOCATION The Plaza, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
The commissioner’s address had barely finished breaking up the crowd when an explosion went off at the edge of the Plaza – the letter-bomb campaign, it seemed, wasn’t finished with Chuza yet.
WHAT HAPPENED
A young woman calling herself a nurse, Bethany, approached Raven as panic started to spread; Krusha scanned her for magic while Raven pressed her toward two critically wounded citizens.
Bethany tried to help and clearly hadn’t the first idea how, visibly distressed by the blood on her own hands – not a nurse at all, it turned out, just a girl who wanted to be a physicker one day.
Her own mother had been crushed in last month’s riot on Priest Row, and Bethany had been the one still holding her hand when it was over.
Krusha actually stemmed the bleeding with KemerLexi’s power.
Both Agents caught the sound of something thumping from inside two massive crates parked on wagons at the Plaza’s edge.
The wagon driver, calming his horses, went to check the cage and found the chains hanging loose, no locks in sight. His scream was drowned out as the whole wagon shuddered and the cage door began creaking open on its own.
A second driver rushed his own shuddering cargo as a roar tore out of the first crate and the door slammed wide, hurling the driver bodily across the cobblestones.
An eight-foot, pure white Girallon – four-armed, easily eight hundred pounds – dropped onto the Plaza and bellowed.
The second crate answered in kind, nearly decapitating its own handler as the door slammed open on a second, equally furious beast.
The Girallon didn’t wait for an invitation – it grabbed the nearest citizen and tore him apart, joined a moment later by a huge ape that piled straight into the same frenzy.
Seven civilians died before the beasts even turned toward the Agents.
Searing light and scorching rays lit the rain-slick Plaza; Krusha landed a critical smite on the ape that all but finished it, and Raven closed out the job.
Ash drained the Girallon’s strength from range, turning its blows from bone-crushing to merely dangerous, while it clawed and bit at Raven in return without landing anything decisive.
Ash’s last volley of missiles finally dropped it with a dying roar.
As the crowd settled and the cleanup began, the surviving wagon driver crawled out from under his own chassis, badly shaken and utterly baffled – the locks had been eight feet up, the animals sedated for transport, and nobody he’d seen had gone near the wagons in the hour and a half they’d been waiting for the address to finish.
His best guess: the noise, the heat, and the detonation together had simply woken the beasts up. He was held for questioning and released shortly after.
Back at the House, word came in of two fatalities during the Eskobar raid, and Brin had one piece of good news buried in an otherwise miserable afternoon – the recovered drug stash from Eskobar’s den had turned up more than expected, remarkable for a single Cutter’s operation.
Then a note arrived from Griffiths himself.
“I trust this finds you well. I’ll get to the point. You took some items from my home. I want two of them back – the ones who respond to 35 and 35b. There is no negotiation. You hand over the two subjects and I leave the Empire. The letter bombs were just a taste of the carnage I will wreak on Chuza if you do not comply. Today’s demonstration at the Plaza should give you an idea of the potential. The lives of two children seems a very reasonable exchange, compared to the alternative losses. Arrange for the clocks to chime an extra two tolls in two days’ time, at 2pm, and I will make the necessary arrangements. If I do not hear the chimes, I will assume you reject my fair offer and will proceed accordingly.”
Dr Griffiths
Boosay chose that exact moment to walk in, and Brin swept the note under a pile of paperwork before he could get a look at it.
Boosay had a way of making a room feel smaller just by standing in it – bandaged forearms he never explained, and a habit of thanking his knife, quietly, whenever his hands needed something to do.
He answered to the commissioner and Lord Morden directly, a clandestine posting well outside Brin’s own chain of command, which left precious little room to simply show him the door. Boosay’s offer, once he made it, was its own kind of ugly – the two corpses from the morgue in exchange for a lead on Griffiths’ location, on the condition he got to keep Griffiths himself for a public arrest, trial, and execution.
Brin wanted nothing to do with it.
Sanchez was sent home to rest, and the Agents took up a different lead instead – a meeting at the Ship Inn, in full armour, weapons and all.
The concierge seemed more interested in Raven’s sense of style than her hardware, and led them to the waiting booth – and to Valka.
The deal on offer was straightforward enough on its face.
What it actually required was rather less so:
Exhuming the corpse of Agent Hawke.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Griffiths wants ‘subjects 35 and 35b’ – two of the rescued children – returned within two days, or he escalates beyond letter bombs.
- Boosay wants the two morgue corpses and first claim on Griffiths’ public execution. Brin has refused, for now.
- Valka has a lead on Griffiths’ location – at the cost of Hawke’s exhumed corpse.