Peering around her from a squatting position, Tasìa saw two clear means of gaining entrance inside the tower interior. As she glanced above at an austere gable, Tasìa grew more cautious. What first appeared to be the most assessable of the choices given, the entry shack to the stairwell, now made her suspicious.

Something perked her intuition.

As she approached the shack door to get a better look at the lock, she spotted a camera hidden in a roof board support.

Felicité had not mentioned it. There could only be two explanations for that.

The first possibilaty occurred to Tasìa as Felicité was describing the security layout to her earlier. The Argentinian had assumed the cameras would all be of the same stock type when she made her calculation of the watt output being spliced for the cameras.

This camera was tiny, not like the forty-watt cameras seen everywhere else in the IMCQ complex. An almost forgivable assumption to make, but these spooks were not regular staff using only stock equipment supplied to them.

Felicité would have checked the feedback to be certain the number of separable oscillations in the current received in the readout matched her calculation for the number of cameras routed within the tower.

However, even that would not have mattered if the camera was running on its own power source. Given its small size that was likely the case.

This little device was also likely set up in the gable for only one reason, so the welcoming committee could spot Tasìa as she entered. If they knew she was coming, she had to assume these same spooks were Felicité's actual employers.

Tasìa spat on the asphalt. These 'friends' Felicité talked about.

Fortunately there was another means to get inside the tower. Tasìa turned towards the loud roar of fans to her right. Conditioned air buffed warmly on her face as she crawled towards the HVAC unit where she came face to face with an ensconced grilled vent.

Until she figured out how to remove it, the vent was her main obstacle preventing her from entering the tower. Fortunately, given the need to maintain such devices there was almost always a practical means built into the design of such systems to do it with a bare minimum of hassle involved.

Adjacent to the vent casing was a sliding door. Tasìa pulled on it to discover a navigable compartment beside a duct entrance encased on all three open sides by the vent assembly.

Fortunate for her the folds of the vent were clampes on the wall supports and not welded to them. She merely had to loosen a set of bolts to ungrip the vent from its supports.

As she commenced to do this something stirred in her gut. Tasìa tried to ignore it at first, but the feeling grew even more persistent.

All right, what are you trying to tell me?

Tasìa took the time to close her eyes and breathe in thrice. She felt the fuzzy feeling in her head that accompanied what her father's religion called the Diagnostic Mode.

Back up. It said.

She leaned her head back and she saw it. Outlined in the dust on the floorboard of the HVAC, there was a niche of space where equipment hooked directly into the heating grill had until recently sat.

She now noted the hole bearing grind marks created where a pipe had been removed.

Tasìa opened up a second sliding door further down the HVAC beside another fan. Inside was the loose pipe.

Tasìa admonished herself. Normally, she would have seen this as soon as she had opened the door, but she was growing anxious and with that her vision grew as myopic as a grifter's duped mark.

The spooks had set up the HVAC to be easily assessable, so that she would use the vents to enter the tower. It did not mean that she should use the door instead. They were prepared for both possibilities.

Damn.

Tasìa leaned against the HVAC unit, feeling nearly defeated. An ugly grimace tightened along the length of her face.

Perhaps, she should go ahead and meet these people. If they believed her rogue skills to be so valuable to their cause, what harm would they do to her?

Perhaps they even had the answers that she was seeking.

No, she was only thinking within the terms that had been presented to her. In her father's Creed such subservience was a taboo of the highest order. Tasìa shook her head at the irony of it all. She had joined the Old Church in open rebellion of her own father.

Now his words flowed through her.

Always find the most optimum means. Disregard how anyone else defines it.

It was her father's constant mantra as he tested her - as he had her solve difficult puzzles in the environment of their backyard, or in the alleyways of their local barrio, or simply on paper. He had taught her to trust herself.

She had not checked every factor out in her current environment even now.

Tasìa crawled up on top of the HVAC and took a look around. She was outside of anyone's sight range. Even on the radio tower, to the East, only the antenna could be seen from her current vantage point.

Beneath the antenna, the radio tower possessed several devices for detection - sound, visual, sonar, and infrared. Fortunately, she slipped beneath the sightline as the tall onion domes came between.

She slowly raised up checking on all of her sides, cautiously as she came to a full stand.

She thought in terms of the four cardinal points: the Spore Isolation Unit to the East, the patrol station to the North, the deeper complex to the West.

If she could find a schemata of access tunnels she could exploit in conjunction with the layout she was now memorizing, she would not even need Felicité for her escape.

Which meant she still needed to get into the tower.

Tasìa jumped off of the HVAC. She peeked down the length of the western side of the tower wall.

On the ground directly below her was a fenced-in area that contained three picnic tables, a smoke pit, and a basketball court among several other recreational accoutrements that suggested the tower was well lived-in.

She also noted that there was a hatchway in the fenced-off area to a sub-basement. Tasìa grinned to herself. She still had a chance to do this on her own terms.

She flipped over the balustrade effortlessly before climbing down the wall. Upon jumping the ground, she tried pulling the cellar door. The hatchway was not even locked. When it popped open, she was overwhelmed by a stench.

Tasìa peered in the dark. She opened the hatch fully. In the basement were rows of shelves. She leaned in to get a better look. By a table that appeared to be set up for a poker game on the opposite end, four dead bodies lay slumped.