TIME July 3rd, 4:00pm LOCATION The Section House, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Two Agents dead in one night, a bomber loose inside the Section House itself, and a half-drowned lead about something called Aramis pods – the only thread anyone had left to pull.
WHAT HAPPENED
Stephan’s interview wrapped with a hard truth Raven didn’t soften: Jules would very likely die of the infection, wherever she’d been carried off to. Krusha checked Stephan’s own back for signs of contagion and found nothing.
Upstairs, Sam’s crew was already cleaning up after Kowalski.
Sanchez wandered off from the body mid-conversation, muttering to himself, until Brin – visibly shaken himself – had to call his name twice to bring him back.
“Yes, we need to find any information that might lead to his whereabouts – fast. Sanchez… Agent Sanchez!”
The letters kept coming.
A fatality at the Chuza Mercantile Guild.
A double casualty at Culpeper’s apothecary – the owner and a customer both, the responding Agent injuring himself checking the scene.
A Chuzan citizen dead after picking a note off a public noticeboard, witnesses said, and opening it without a second thought.
With the room down to Sam, Volok, Brin, Raven and Krusha, the Get Stuffed debrief finally got the attention it needed.
Krusha floated a theory: maybe Griffiths hadn’t been running an experiment at all, but a clairvoyance program of some kind.
Brin worried aloud about what that would do to trade if it got out; Volok’s mind went straight to the military applications – and neither man liked the idea of the NIL getting there first.
Once Volok and Sam left, talk turned back to the Aramis pods scattered from the crate the Golem had broken out of.
The lockdown lifted, and a new recruit arrived to fill the gap Crowe had left – Ash, transferred in from another Section House after hearing about the wharf incident from Dawson. The sheer volume of murders, disappearances, and drug activity in Section 18 alone had been enough to pull her here on request.
John Kraven was waiting outside when they went to collect the remains of Stephan’s dinner from Pine Street – still fishing for details on an active case, still being turned away, still apparently unbothered by their complete lack of interest in his offer to write them a ballad.
Stephan, meanwhile, was busy trying to patch the two holes in his own roof. The rubbish he’d been told to leave untouched was exactly where he’d left it; Raven hauled it down to the street and tipped it out, recovering two leftover Aramis pods – one of them stripped of its nut nodules and slick with slime.
Heading back, Ash and Krusha caught a cry and breaking glass from an alley – Kerrick’s apothecary, its door already swinging shut, sign flipped to closed.
Dim light showed through the window, low voices, and underneath it all, an unmistakable, unsettling laugh.
Raven tried the door and couldn’t force it; Krusha put a section of window through instead, Ash readying a spell as they went in without the element of surprise anymore.