TIME June 19th, morning LOCATION Outside the Watering Hole, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Between debriefs, the Agents made time to see Asquith before the grimoire went back into evidence at the Section House, pending the investigation’s outcome. Agent Boosey renewed his suggestion that the Kleet and Zhakarov business was better left to more experienced hands – Crowe, Hawke and Raven filed it under advice ignored. After a night’s rest, Hawke returned to the matter of the fires and proposed the obvious next step: track down Jess’s neighbour and find out where her husband had gone. The morning papers made the timing feel urgent – another fire, protests spreading through Karnath, and word that lethal force had been sanctioned to put them down.
WHAT HAPPENED
The walk to the fire scene didn’t get far. Outside the Watering Hole, a riot was already finding its feet – a local squaring up to Agent Dew and the NIL with more threats than sense behind them.
Branson didn’t wait for it to become a real threat. He cracked the man’s skull before the words finished leaving his mouth, and the street went from tense to open warfare in the same breath.
Debris flew. Crowe went down first, pinned under a thrown crate, fighting just to get free. Hawke and Raven waded into the crowd to ‘quell’ it – Raven tried reasoning first, but her voice never had a chance against the noise. Hawke’s baton put down rioter after rioter, non-lethal and efficient. Raven’s swords weren’t nearly so polite.
By the time the riot lost its momentum, the street was a ledger: seven dead, fourteen knocked cold, four more critical enough to worry about.
Hawke noticed it first – something off about Branson mid-fight, the twitchy over-commitment of a man riding more than adrenaline. Raven raised it. Branson was sent home. Agent Dew asked, quietly, that it not go any further – they were still on probation, after all. Raven didn’t answer. She let the silence do that.
Reinforcements arrived to finish the job. Wagons hauled off the dead; the walking wounded were marched to the Section House for processing.
It was thirsty work. The Agents took a break at Bashka’s cart – the water vendor they’d helped see off a twitcher earlier in the year – and drank in the shade while the wounded filed past. Bashka’s assistant kept glancing their way, agitated about something none of them asked about.
With the riot behind them, they finally reached Jess’s building. It still reeked of smoke. The lower apartment was boarded over with a Kemer-Lexi notice; the upper one, Jess’s, was charred and dripping from the firefighting. Across the landing, the neighbour let them in for tea.
“Had a temper on him – didn’t like him. Don’t know where he went – it’s quieter now, you know. Well, until all those men rushed up earlier today. Such a commotion. So much noise. And smoke. And banging. And water. I know they were trying to help, but did they have to make so much noise. Would you like some tea? Poor Jess, she was such a sweet young thing. And Tilly – have you found her?”
Mary-Jane – “call me Jeanie”
Jeanie repeated herself more than she answered, but the shape of it came together: the husband, Ransom, had a temper and had taken to wearing an Agent’s garb before he vanished. He and Jess had a daughter – Milly, or Lily, or possibly Tilly, Jeanie wasn’t certain – who was nowhere to be found. A cursory search of the burnt apartment, and a closer one of the floor below, turned up nothing. No sign of the girl. The Agents headed back toward the Section House to run down where Branson lived.
They didn’t get far. A man staggered out of a wooden warehouse off the Chandlery, begging for help – something snakelike had come out of nowhere and taken Jax.
Hawke went in first, threading a spread of thorn caltrops at the entrance without slowing down. He never reached the snake – a hidden sniper put a bolt in him from above before he got the chance.
Raven followed and fared worse, caught by the snake’s fangs and the poison that came with them. Crowe held the doorway, sniping in from the threshold.
Behind the first snake, one of the ‘bodies’ on the floor got up. It wasn’t dead – it was Saarkh, of the Zhakarov brotherhood, and she had a grudge: Raven had killed a friend of hers. She summoned a second viper to make the point.
Hawke took a second hit from the snake, poison stacking on poison. The sniper kept up a steady rain of crossbow bolts while Saarkh wove a sphere of flame and sent it after Raven.
Crowe blew the second viper apart with a kemercannon blast, but the sniper’s next shot dropped Hawke outright. He stabilised fast. Raven bought the room a second of breathing room, disrupting Saarkh’s flaming blade before it finished forming – and Crowe used it, putting a sneak attack into Saarkh that ended her part in the fight with one shot.
Raven broke for the stairs and the sniper. He managed to open her up with a dagger before Crowe cannoned him from below and Raven finished the job.
Crowe got a potion of cure light wounds into Hawke and brought him back around. Hawke returned the favour on Saarkh – down to a thread but stable, and talking, eventually. Raven checked the sniper for anything worth taking, then dropped his body over the balcony to the ground below.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Ransom – Jess’s husband, missing. Had a temper. Had taken to wearing an Agent’s garb before he disappeared.
- The daughter – Milly, Lily, or Tilly (accounts vary) – also missing. No trace in either apartment.
- Branson – sent home after showing signs of twitch use mid-riot. Dew asked for it to go no further.
- Bashka’s assistant – agitated, watching the Agents closely at the water cart. Nobody asked why.
TWITCH
A stimulant cut for aggression over euphoria – cheap, common on Chuza’s back streets, and increasingly common among Agents who should know better. Branson wasn’t the first suspected. He won’t be the last.