TIME July 2nd, 16:30 LOCATION An abandoned warehouse, Bank Street, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Mikael had broken off his rampage and fled, badly hurt, with two Agents shadowing him from a distance – the last confirmed sighting of him heading away from Get Stuffed, past the Copper Pan, into a city that had no idea what had just been let loose in it.
WHAT HAPPENED
Krusha started shifting what was left of the Nesterrook dead into the warehouse as the children were walked toward Get Stuffed. Jeff, still recovering, insisted he could hold the scene alone; Krusha overruled him and sent him back to the Section House infirmary instead. Before the argument could go further, Bill came sprinting back around the corner, out of breath.
“We’ve got him! He’s trapped in an old warehouse, but I don’t know how long.”
Bill
They left Bill’s partner to secure Get Stuffed and moved the children on toward the Section House, where Bowlohr met them at the desk – Jay Sun and Alia visibly awed by the building, and by the plate-armoured guard dog stationed near the entrance.
Upstairs, Brin took the briefing with mixed feelings: disappointed to lose Griffiths, who could apparently disappear into thin air outright, but willing to call the operation a success given five children recovered alive.
Krusha laid it out plainly – Griffiths had been experimenting on children, Crowe’s best guess put the total involved somewhere past seventy, and Griffiths’ own brother had produced something that shrugged off ordinary weapons and had already killed at least one bystander outright.
The children and Jeff were sent up to the infirmary, Raven making sure the nurses understood to treat the rescued children with caution rather than pure sympathy.
A round of restorative healing later, three extra Agents were pulled in under Kowalski to help finish the job, and they headed for Bank Street.
The warehouse had clearly stood boarded up for a year or more, iron bars still fixed over the ground and first-floor windows. Someone had smashed the entrance in and wedged a wagon wheel into the frame to hold it. A crowd had gathered at a safe distance, watching a third-floor window that had been broken outward, boards scattered across the cobbles below. Crowe caught movement at the window – a large humanoid shape, almost certainly Mikael – before it withdrew.
Then the window gave way outward entirely, and Mikael came down with it, slamming into the paving hard enough to leave his own outline pressed into the stone. He was still moving. His eyes had lost the black sheen they’d held during the fight and looked almost normal, if badly bloodshot; a massive scar ran up the side of his skull, burn marks visible beneath the gore. He recognised Krusha, and reached for him, lucid for one brief moment.
“Please help me. I think you scared it. But it will return. I… I… the darkness, I don’t know. What’s wrong. Do it again, please – it’s coming. He’s coming back. Sooo colddd. Can you help me?”
Mikael
It didn’t last. Raven moved in behind him as Crowe got the manacles on before he could react – and as the irons closed, his skin darkened and his eyes went black again, the plea gone as quickly as it had come. He fought the restraints rather than the Agents, which struck everyone present as distinctly unnatural – no perp fought manacles over a fist, not even one his size. The crowd, watching batons rain down on a man who’d just fallen out of a window, made their own confused feelings known. Mikael strained against the iron, losing ground steadily under the beating, until Crowe finally drove Saarkh’s stolen cold iron dagger into him. He screamed – black smoke curling from the wound – and inside thirty seconds, the fight that had chased them across half the Section ended with his body cold on the cobbles.
Reece arrived in the middle of it – still in civvies from his watch on Get Stuffed, ducking back behind a building out of habit before he caught himself and walked out toward the door of the Copper Pan, straight into the aftermath. He took the scene in for a long moment. “Holy… what… who did this?”
The rookies struggled to lift him into a wagon Raven commandeered without much ceremony, and they delivered the body to Sam as a present on the way past.
“Griffiths got away – sorry, apologies for that. But you did an excellent job recovering those children and shutting his operation down, at least for now. Good work. You went on instinct, and it paid off. That’s something you can’t teach.”
Captain Brin
Brin sent the new recruits back with them to Get Stuffed to finish securing the scene.
Reese and Bill, minding the building in civvies, reported no sign of either Griffiths or his brother – only a nurse helping a distressed young girl out of the building, calm and reassuring despite everything, apparently humming to soothe the child on her way past.
“She was certainly a looker. Strange laugh, though.”
Reese
Inside, blood streaked the floor from the direction of the cabin at the far wall, where a camouflaged door stood open over a stairway down. Both doors below had been smashed open from the inside; the cell corridor beyond looked like an abattoir, blood and worse coating every surface along with the remains of at least one Nesterrook – and, harder to look at directly, what might have been a blue Section House uniform among the wreckage. The Shrieker Tank was still wailing by the time they reached the breach room; pushing the plunger silenced the rotating arm at last.
A search of Pitr’s room and Griffiths’ own laboratory followed. In the basement boiler, Raven found the remains of something recently burned. Up in the warehouse, the freezer room – smashed open on her way through – held the dog-beast’s body on ice beside a smaller one that might once have been Brad, though the skin tone shifted oddly beneath the frost and the face no longer quite matched, fused teeth and holes through the cheekbones and all. Griffiths’ most recent taxidermy piece turned out to be, disappointingly, an entirely ordinary giant lion.
Griffiths’ bedroom held the real find: a scrap of parchment behind the headboard, a detailed anatomical diagram of a girl’s head surrounded by flowing script – High Jouvaine, by Crowe’s reckoning, the kind of language used in courts rather than back-alley taxidermy shops. Her face had several lines scored through it.
Downstairs again, the rookies had found a second camouflaged door behind a heavy bookcase, hiding a small room with a chair and a curtained cabinet full of oddly shaped items in glass, wood, bone, textile and ceramic. Prying the bookcase itself away from the wall turned up two more parchments – more diagrams, more of the same flowing script, and a portrait of Caleb, his face scored through exactly like the girl’s.
They left the rookies to finish cataloguing the lab and climbed back up through the warehouse toward the Section House, considerably more experienced in the world than they’d been that morning.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Dr Griffiths and his brother remain at large.
- A nurse, ‘beautiful, strange laugh’, helped a girl escape the scene – Pitr, in another shape?
- Anatomical diagrams in High Jouvaine script, portraits of both Caleb and an unnamed girl scored through – marked for what?
- The freezer holds the dog-beast’s body and a corpse that may or may not still be Brad.