Cate had more on her mind than a nap before we stayed up late, but I still felt incredibly well rested as we walked through the moonlight back towards the house Flicka had pointed out the day before. I was back in my traveling clothes and fully armed just in case, no dresses for me while I break and enter. I had halfway expected Cate to don some kind of form fitting black leather cat suit while we got ready, but unfortunately she settled for a pair of dark brown men’s trousers, a dumpy surcoat and a floppy wide brimmed hat. With her hair tucked up into the hat and the baggy clothing hanging loose around her rather generous figure, she looked almost like a pudgy male from a distance. According to her an all black outfit would just draw attention, but cheaply made clothing without bright dyes just made you look poor.

When we got to the low fence around the house she stopped and leaned over as if she had a stone in her shoe. When she straightened again she flashed me a quick smile. “Coast is clear, let’s go.” I made a cradle with my hands but before I could offer it, she’d already taken a running start and jumped to the wall. She was able to jump and heave to raise her top half over, and then just leaned in and gravity did the rest. It whipped her legs and rear high over the fence and around in graceful circle as her arms extended again and she dropped lightly to her feet. I just jerked myself straight up the side of the wall, getting a foot into place on the rim and jumping down. I hit with a bit of a thud and she shook her head at me. It couldn’t have been audible more than a few feet away and I was tempted to complain.

I bit the feeling back down though, and followed her across the open ground around to the side of the house. She stood up on tiptoes and peered at a window, then dropped to her feet and repeated the exercise twice more. I was a good head taller than Cate and thought about offering to tell her what I saw so we could move a bit faster, but she apparently found what she was looking for before I had decided. A long slim metal tool came out of her sleeve, and it bore a striking resemblance to the slim jim I used to keep in my patrol car. She slid it up between the two large wooden shutters on the window, then used something that looked vaguely like a knitting needle to reach up in from the other side and do something else. It took long agonizing minutes and I kept looking back over the darkened yard, expecting a dog to bark or one of the neighbors to step out and spot us.

There was the sound of scraping followed by a click and Cate returned the tools to her sleeve and eased the shutters open. A sharp knife disposed of the muslin fabric that seemed to mostly replace glass for all but the well to do here, and this time Cate took my offer of a boost to help her inside. I put my back to the wall and she stepped into my cupped hands, shimmying a little as she went up and her breasts were in my face. I smiled into the dark. Something about the rush of illicit activities had put some spice to the thrill I would have already felt. She offered a hand from out of the darkened house and I followed her up inside.

Out of the moonlight it was as dark as pitch inside the building. In a world without flashlights I had no idea how we were supposed to creep around investigating without knocking over furniture and waking the owner. Cate was a pro though, and produced something that looked a lot like a metal clamshell. Two thin metal bowls were affixed together maybe an inch apart, and she lit a short stubby candle that sat in the bottom one. A weak glow diffused through the gap between the bowls, and I followed the thief as she glided confidently deeper inside. There was a kitchen we ignored, and an obviously empty bedroom that reeked of mothballs. There was a sitting room with sheets draped over the furniture, and a dining room with a round oak table but only a single chair. A door opened up to a storage closet, and then finally we entered another larger bedroom with an unmade bed in pride of place.

I froze when I saw that. This was obviously Phillip’s room, and that he wasn’t tucked in fast asleep made me nervous. I drifted over and started looking through his possessions on top of the night table. From the look of the other rooms, if there were anything incriminating it would have to be somewhere in here. Then Cate’s low hiss drew my attention. She stalked over and pressed her lips almost directly to my ear. “He almost never leaves the house, the fire in the kitchen was still warm but we’ve been in every room.” I cocked an eyebrow at her, not sure where she was going with this and she grimaced at me and moved back in. “Secret room.”

A secret passageway behind the bookcase. I thought that was only a staple of bad fiction and Scooby Doo episodes, but Cate seemed pretty sure of it. I gave her a searching look and shrugged in response, trying to indicate, ‘but where?’. She stalked over to the wall and began walking out of the room. I followed confused until I realized she was counting steps. She crisscrossed the house like that a couple of times before stopping at a large china cabinet in the kitchen. She knelt down and sat her candle contraption on the floor and pointed at faint grooves in the tile. Sure enough, this entire cabinet had been moved on a regular basis. I walked over to the other side and ran my hands up and down its length. No fingerprints in this world which made things easier. I found a section of wood that stuck out further than the rest of it, and when I pushed it in it slid easily, traveling deep into the cabinet until there was a click. After the click I slid my hand into the recess and tried pulling on the cabine, and it moved much more readily than its appearance would have suggested.

The door was built directly onto the back of the china cabinet, the outlines of the passage the exact dimensions. The inside of the door itself was lined with a quilt, and after a single confused glance I realized that must have been to deaden sound. There was a set of stairs leading down, with light coming up from the passage and Cate extinguished her candle. I stepped in first. Even if she was the stealthy one, if we were going to get in a fight I was the logical choice to lead. Creeping slowly down the stairs, one tread at a time, stepping to the edge of the risers hoping to avoid a creak, it felt like I might go mad. Partway down there was a snuffling grunting sound and I wondered if Phillip kept livestock down here. The sound kept repeating and I started to fear it was a captive. Either way the noise should cover us descending the stairway, so I readied my baton and increased our pace.

At the foot of the stairs I stopped, shock freezing me like a deer in the headlights. I’d seen a lot of things in my years on the force, and plenty of unpleasantness since I woke up as part of the Game. This was a new low. There was the dessicated corpse of an old woman in a rocking chair. It had been placed on top of some crude alter, built with fragile children’s bones. That was bad. There was a man who could only be Phillip, dressed in what I could only guess was the dress belonging to the corpse standing in front of the alter in a circle of torchlight. That was worse. The snuffling and snorting noises were coming from him as he held up the hem of his dress while busily rutting away with the still bound but obviously dead body of a child. That defied reason and stopped me in my tracks. After a split second to process what I was seeing an ocean of rage engulfed me, and it was as if I saw the world through a red filter as I bounded down the last few steps into the room. Cate, obviously made of sterner stuff than I had the presence of mind to scream, “Don’t mark the body.”

I dropped my baton to the ground as I closed the distance. He turned at the sound of her scream, the bestial look on his face quickly transforming to one of shock and then terror. I didn’t say anything, just rammed the knuckles of my left hand into his throat. I purposefully came in a bit to the side, hopefully not cracking the hyoid or crushing the larynx, but still briefly disrupting blood flow and causing a boatload of pain. His hands came up to grab at his neck and the child’s body fell, and I slammed a knee into his belly and then into his groin. I wouldn’t leave him alive long enough for bruises to form, and without a real ME soft tissue injuries would probably go unremarked. Phillip was bent over, trying to retch and suck in air at the same time, having difficulty achieving either. I didn’t really need to in order to subdue him, but I couldn’t help but drive a couple of hammer fists into his kidneys.

Cate came up then, and reached up under her giant men’s shirt to pull out some of the padding. She handed me a towel made of soft thick wool that had been soaked in turpentine for the purpose. I whipped it around Phillips head and gripped it tight in the back. I pulled him upright and even a little back against my hip to expose his solar plexus before driving my elbow down into it, knocking what little air was left in his lungs out of him. His struggles were brief which was kind of a shame, but I continued to hold him in that position with my teeth bared for a few long minutes. Cate put her hand on my shoulder and when I looked at her there were tears in her eyes. “We didn’t know. There were rumors about Phillip even when I was a girl in the poor quarter, but I assure you, we didn’t know.” She looked around, like she was trying to estimate the number of dead from the remains and shook her head. “We would have stopped this. This, this we wouldn’t have let slide.”

I couldn’t find the words to comfort her in the face of such horror. I let the monster’s body drop to the ground, then leaned in and offered a quick hug. When we broke apart I waved my hand at the macabre cellar.

“We can seal this off for tonight. Come back and give everyone a proper burial later. I need you to help me get this one upstair and changed into men’s clothing. I don’t want to make anymore waves at the inquest than strictly necessary.”

She nodded and stepped over and grabbed one of his ankles. I took the heavier torso and we heaved him off the ground and started to struggle up the stairs. His dress tore a couple of times, mostly because it fit him so poorly and the fabric was definitely old. After a lot of sweating and a good deal of enthusiastic cursing, the body was in place on the bed and I just tore the rest of the dress loose. I had to unstrap the female sandals he was wearing and just pitched both back down the staircase before swinging the china cabinet closed. Cate picked out an oversized night shirt that I forced over his head, while she artfully arranged a few dirty dishes and a tray so it looked like he had been stuck in bed for a while.

We unloaded the rest of the clothing from under Cate’s shirt into the guest bedroom, and I cracked the window and propped the door open to help get rid of the mothball smell and give it a lived in feel. She had a locket with a tiny portrait in it that if you squinted just right and tilted your head a little resembled me, and that went into the top drawer of his nightstand along with his cufflinks and a rather cheaply made set of boot buckles. I rifled through his papers to make sure there wasn’t a diary that would expose the lie, while Cate did a quick scan of customary hiding places. I came up empty while she found a box of old fashioned jewelry and a handfull of coin. Finally we had completed all of the preparations we could think of, and Cate slipped out the back door and disappeared into the night. I changed into modest pajamas of the sort a spinster neice taking care of a distant relative might wear and climbed into bed. Falling asleep was difficult. Missing Cate, the horror of what I’d seen, having taken another life, it all combined to give me a restless night. Maybe the red eyes would give a little versimilitude to my fake grief tomorrow, and I lay there staring at the ceiling and worried about the future.

Dawn came, and light flooded my window. I ignored it and continued to wait. According to Cate, Phillip had a longstanding order for a weekly delivery from the local grocer and it was due later this morning. It had been part of the reason we had to move on this last night. I wanted a convenient witness nearby when I discovered the body. After some time had passed I got up and wandered to a spot in the dust covered sitting room where I could see out the window. It was still too early, but I was incredibly bored. Eventually I saw the deliverymen opening the gate, so I walked into my ‘uncle’s’ bedroom and started to scream.

The workmen were very solicitous of the hysterical woman. One of them stayed and reassured me, while the other left to fetch the guard. I’d managed to regain enough of my composure to relate a stuttering account of the illness that had sent my uncle to his bed and how I’d been nursing him until he failed to wake this morning. I only broke off into jagged crying fits a few times. The watch captain offered to summon a priest to counsel me, and I almost wondered if I’d overplayed my hand. The whole thing seemed a bit to informal for me, I’d been through the bureaucratic nightmare of death certificates and coroners reports too many times to count. Here I tipped one of the watchmen a copper to send by someone from the mortuary, and he came by in the same wagon the knackers used when they collected dead horses from the stables. Even with the relatively simpler methods used in this world, it was still afternoon before the last of officialdom had left and I was able to change back into my regular clothes. I left through the front door, locking it behind me. This was my house now, and it was time I got my neighbors used to the change.

I traveled to the Walk Right Inn and met Cate for lunch. Zeno’s stew was good, but I had to put up with him complaining about a constant stream of urchins that would come to tell him things he already knew. I consoled him with a couple of the silver coins I’d found at Phillip’s, and he agreed to hire Benito to come dig the graves in the cellars. Cate and I had agreed last night that neither of us had time to mess with the manual labor, and she had claimed Patrick was too soft to stomach it. Benito was probably the most calloused soul on the earth that could still arguably considered on the side of the angel’s, so he had seemed like the logical choice to subcontract. After business was over Cate and I lingered at the table, just enjoying each other’s company in the somewhat mushy way that only new couples can truly accomplish. After a while though she laid her hand on mine and spoke in a low voice.

“I hate to say it, darling, but I fear I may have some competition. That little slip of sexy over there has been eye fucking you long enough that I’m getting wet.”

“Beg your pardon?”

I followed her subtle nod and spotted the serving girl from House Verin. She looked down when I looked over, and I turned back to Cate. I grinned at her and explained who she was. Cate frowned thoughtfully. “The clothes aren’t right. I don’t know who she is, but she’s not someone’s house servant.”

“Let’s go find out then.”

I stood up and started in the direction of her table, and Cate followed me. She must have flashed some kind of signal to Patrick over my shoulder, because he shifted around in his bench and touched that massive crossbow, and obvious sign he was psyching himself up for trouble. The slender woman didn’t react as Cate and I sat down on each side of her, and I reached out and picked up her cup. As I peered into the contents as if I could read her fortune in the wine dregs, Cate spoke.

“Well, hello there. What brings a nice girl like you to a place like this?”

She shot a brief glance at Cate before seeming to dismiss her and focusing her gaze on me. “House Verin pays its debts. I am Michelle, third daughter of Lord Thomas. I am here to function as your bodyguard until you master the art of the sword.”

“I am Julia, only daughter of a mean drunk and a woman with questionable judgement. I don’t need a bodyguard. I need a weapons master who can teach me to use a sword myself.”

She brought her hands up from her lap and laid them on the table palm up. I looked down at them and saw a layer of callouses that must have been close to a quarter inch thick. “I have studied the art of the sword since I was 4 years old, and have yet to be granted the rank of master. I will serve as your instructor until you surpass my skill to instruct you, but be aware you may never master the art of the dueling sword.”

I gave her an incredulous look. “That means you’d be my bodyguard for the rest of my life.”

“Actually, only for the rest of mine.”

It seemed a strange distinction, but Cate’s foot trod heavily on mine before I could follow it up. I looked over at her and she bugged her eyes at me, obviously trying to communicate something but I couldn’t tell what. I gave her a helpless look, and she sighed.

“Michele, tell me, is house Verin devoted to one of the Patrons?”

“Yes, we are adherents of the way.”

Cate gave me a significant look as if that were supposed to mean something. I had a feeling the notes I’d gotten from her the other night hadn’t exactly covered everything going on in the kingdoms. I stood up and walked over behind Michelle until I reached Cate and rested my hand on her shoulder. She settled into me, her head against my belly and I hope gave a clear demonstration to Michelle of the nature of our relationship. Michelle held my gaze, not uncomfortable in the slightest and I nodded.

“Cate is authorized to talk for me in any significant negotiations. I need to step out, but if you’ll fill her in on the details I’d appreciate it. I’ll be upstairs.”

Michelle looked mollified by that last statement, and nodded before I walked away. I hoped to hell I hadn’t just made a mistake, and made a mental note to question Cate more closely when I got her alone. I thought of her particular preferences and amended that to question her rigorously with a grin. I continued upstairs for now, but ducked into my cell rather than Cate’s more conventional room. Once there I started feeding a stack of Cate’s and some of Gabriel’s laundry through the automatic cleaner. If I was going to be constantly borrowing their clothes it seemed like the least I could do. While I worked I quizzed the D.

“Can you give me any information on what happens at the end of 30 days?”

“Your performance will be assessed and if you survive story mode will be unlocked.”

“And the difference in story mode is?”

“That information is not available to you at this time.”

“Of course not. Do you keep track of whet I’m doing in the simulation?”

“Certainly.”

“How am I doing so far power base wise?”

“That information is not available to you at this time.”

I shifted over some more laundry, trying to think of a better way to pose the question. I was mostly just trying to kill some time for Cate to give Michelle a proper grilling, but it seemed like a good idea to pry what I could out of the D. It came to me that there was an avenue I’d been down before but hadn’t explored for the fifth task yet.

“I can still use the store right?”

“Of course, Julia. How can I assist you today?”

“I’m not sure. What are the most popular items other players are buying at this point?” If I couldn’t figure it out, it didn’t mean that other players hadn’t. I was hoping the list would at least point me in the right direction if I was leaving anything out in my planned power base.

“Bladed weapons, armor, and power tools have been the most popular purchases.”

Weapons and armor were just common sense, but power tools knocked me for a loop. Once I started thinking about it, it made sense. A lot of people from my world with access to a machine shop could go all industrial revolution on this world’s economy. I wondered just what they were planning and how many different markets would be cornered in the next 30 days. If there was a way to know who was located where, or at least which industries I could probably make a fortune through insider trading Cities that had economies focused on textile manufacture or other labor intensive industries were about to take a nose dive. Maybe the economic crisis it would cause was the whole reason we’d need a power base in 30 days. If I couldn’t beat them I could at least join them, and I tried to think of a way to use my 20th century smarts in the middle ages.

In the end I came up with bupkes. I’m a hell of a driver, but I didn’t even change my own oil. I just wasn’t that mechanically inclined, and unless you counted field stripping a firearm I’d never even taken a machine apart, much less had the wherewithal to build my own. I could probably make some contributions to the field of medicine, but those were mostly based on hygiene and germ theory, and it seemed like it would be kind of difficult to sell those ideas without some sort of proof. I finished the last of the stack of laundry I’d carried through into my cell, and loaded my arms down when nicely folded clean clothes to carry back to the inn.

I saw Michelle start when she turned around to find me standing behind her. I tapped the door to Cate’s room with my foot as if I’d just shut it behind me and pretended nothing unusual had happened.

“Oh hi, didn’t see you two come up.”

“There you are, dear. Michelle and I had a lovely little talk. She’s going to escort you to the home you recently inherrited, she’ll be staying with you there for a while. I’ll drop by later for a night cap and we can. . catch up.”

I handed over the piles of laundry and led the way.