Charlie was quick to find himself a pair of chairs along with Cassandra, not seeing any real point in standing around for the next hour or two. The tent before them was quite monstrous in size, clearly made to hold several hundred patients at once. Would all those patients be treated with the capabilities required for their survival? Probably not. Yet their bodies would be safe and out of sight.

Opening up his mental interface, Charlie noted how close it was getting to the night. Just a few hours more until the temperature would drop once more and snow would begin falling. The man wondered if there was a chance to find a good place to sleep for the group before night truly fell and darkness would surround them. While being alone in the dark was a completely find occurrence, being in the dark with unknown people close was a risk that didn’t need to be taken. Charlie still kept a few of his trinkets close by if he was ever put in a tough spot but there was no love about the idea of using them just yet. He could only avoid death with them so many times. Wasting them on something so trivial as people with guns wasn’t something he had any desire towards.

“Are there any other plans for the future which I should know about?” Cassandra asked from his side. Charlie had nearly forgotten she was there, the woman silent enough to make herself seem like air. That was dangerous. While he had come to trust her at some level, there was always the chance of her acts being a mere dedication to keeping up the masquerade. With how many operations like it had been carried out in his country of birth, he knew it was more than possible. Yet… some level of trust was in order.

“When we get the chance, we head further into the country. Going towards the capital is a direct ‘no,’ due to the large number of agents hiding up in there. Mara knows a few contacts that we can meet up with if the situation calls for it,” Charlie said, at the start of his word pressing down on one of his more well-used trinkets. It was a local jammer of sorts. Helped isolate noise from the surroundings. It wasn’t extremely effective since anybody with a camera could just record their lip movements but it was enough to make him feel slightly safe. It was unlikely that the government had time to lip-read every citizen's conversations at the current moment anyway. Too many stress points were being made.

Charlie looked through the mental interface with an irritated expression. The local connections looked to have been near-entirely removed, only the tents having some form of information lines sat up. War zones seemed to just demand isolation in every form, though Charlie supposed that the current method worked well in their favour. With no larger access to the country’s databases, it would be quite hard to quickly identify their faces. It only helped that basically none of them would have their identity on the public side of the digital world. Living inside a bunker for twenty years helped make that happen, and the government owning that particular bunker had wiped anything from before that cleanly.

Speaking of… there was a potential need to do that with the new addition to their group. Charlie would have to find a good freelancer if that was meant to become a reality. Too many places back up data nowadays. Privacy laws might have been enacted on nearly every level but the governments still thought themselves above their own rules.

“Anything else I should keep in mind? Secret code words, something to alert each other about possible dangers… things like that?” Cassandra continued. Charlie gave her a blank stare, realising that the ideas about what they did were more than a little misconstrued.

“We don’t get in the way of the public, we don’t get into situations where ‘secret code words’ would be required, and we don’t get ourselves into a situation where only one person would notice danger. We stick together for as much as possible,” Charlie replied bluntly. That is until he looked back onto his mental feed and saw a single thing only. On it sat an open invitation to join the tent hospital’s network, one which had been previously locked. Switching the ports in his head, it was clear that it was intended for Charlie and Charlie only. How… the man knew caution was meant to be taken seriously and he truly did keep that in mind as he accepted the possible connection.

If they were close enough to them that they could play around with the network connections, Charlie knew they had no way to flee anyway. Letting curiosity play him along was for the best. And perhaps it was even the option that allowed progress to happen in the first place.

‘Hello?’ a message came in on a chat-board. It was seemingly a private one, heavily encrypted on both ends. It would take months for a supercomputer to get through it, leading Charlie to suspect that somebody had maxed out security without realising how large a drain that was on the system. Meaning, the sender was somebody with the ability to completely control the network without having the necessary background info to know where to hold the line on acceptable actions.

‘What do you want, Adam?’ Charlie sent back, not needing much more to realise who had connected him to the network. It would make sense that the AI had his credentials saved somewhere. The man had changed them so many times in the past months that anything which Fatum had would have been positively useless.

‘Troy was put to sleep five minutes ago but his remaining glove is allowing me to connect to the system semi-consistently,’ Adam sent back after a few more seconds. That at least explained the delay in the answer. Or, that and the small alarms being heard in the tents. It seemed a ‘server’ was being overloaded for some reason. Charlie hoped the AI wasn’t causing too much damage other than a database being overheated for a short while. ‘According to the scans done on the arm, there were massive amounts of internal bleeding. The bone had also been mushed into smaller bits, leaving nothing to be salvaged. With possible death, if not removed, the doctors decided that the best course of action was to remove the arm before anything worsened.’

Charlie muttered a few swears as he leaned back in his chair. That seemed to catch the attention of Cassandra. The woman looked ready to ask about his actions right until the moment that one of the doctors seen before walked in with a small screen of some kind along with a small pencil.

“Your friend requires amputation if he is to survive,” the doctor began, sounding mildly stressed. Charlie had no real trouble wondering why. “We are already getting him prepared for the surgery but we need somebody to be there to sign for him.”

There was a motion for the legal document which was accepted without question. Charlie looked over the small piece of plastic and the words put unto it for a moment before deciding to just sign it without further question. There was something about a monetary prize but that could be solved easily enough. Everything was free for as long as the war was proceeding and that wasn’t going to stop in the next couple of months. A mere bill wouldn’t be able to follow them for half that time.

The doctor accepted the signed waiver before leaving once again, letting Charlie and Cassandra be alone in the room once more. Seconds passed to make sure the personnel was out of earshot before they once again turned to each other.

“We need a place to keep Troy and Mara for the next couple of days. It needs to be within the city, needs to have ample food and water, and shouldn’t be dangerous to stay at for more than a week,” Charlie explained to the new member. “Do you have any way that you could find us while I stay here to wait?”

“I can certainly ask around to see if a hotel is still open,” Cassandra answered, getting up from her own chair. “With how things looked outside, I don’t doubt at least a few are still operating without question.”

Charlie didn’t doubt the woman could find something workable with the time they had to spend. The surgery itself would likely only take an hour or so. Then it would take another for Troy to wake up. After that, it would take another before he could stand up, albeit with a lot of assistance. Awake enough to move around but not enough to do anything productive. Within that time, Cassandra should have found a place where they could sleep, Mara should have been ready to leave, and Charlie would finally have a chance to close his eyes for more than ten minutes. A safe place to hide for a while would provide the rest with his body was slowly announcing as a requirement. Insomnia was perhaps commonplace among the people but those experiencing it when over the age of forty had effects that were slightly more severe than others.

‘Did you see what happened to Mara before Troy got escorted into the surgery room?’ Charlie sent out into the chat room, hoping for something that he could work within the meanwhile.

‘She was given a few pieces of things to swallow including medicine, drinks, and energy bars. If everything goes well, she will be escorted out to you momentarily,’ Adam responded.

That earned a sigh of relief. Charlie had been worried about that.

‘Speaking of the room Troy was escorted out of, however, would it be possible for you to request the glove that was taken off Troy’s body? The doctors left it in a basket and I think they forgot to take it further inside afterwards.’

Sighing for another reason entirely, Charlie started to do the one thing he could actually help with. Even if that meant asking around for a glove he could remake within a day.