The Chief was a medium-sized man, but impressively broad in muscularity. His hair, brown and sandy, he wore trimmed evenly throughout.

He spoke in a Scandinavian accent.

"I hope you are watching, little Tasìa. You cost the lives of a few worthy men, today. That is most unfortunate.

"I tend to be the most merciful of men as it is often said that we on this side of the law are just an indictment away from being on your side of the law. Clichéd it may be, but it is the sad truth. So I had hoped to have reasoned with you, instead."

Their attempt to shoot her from the laboratory window did not at all seem very reasonable to her.

The Chief continued.

"But now, it is out of my hands. There is a protocol I am duty-bound to follow so no more of my men come to harm. It is a policy that most definitely puts your life in a secondary consideration.

"When it comes to it, and you are about to meet your fate, little Tasìa, just remember, you did it to yourself. Not I, I gave you a chance. So do not curse my name to whomever gods you may believe."

Tasìa had one last thing she wanted to do before she scuttled off. It was the only chance she had to buy a little time. She felt along the grill's surface. The vents were evenly spaced.

Unfortunately, the thumb-sized gas grenades could not slip through them.

The Chief vied for her attention again. He held something up between his hands. It was a pair of her light blue bloomers.

She was slightly embarrassed but only for the gauche quality of the underwear.

She would buy several sets of French-cut panties, thong underwear, and silk boxers as the first thing on her escape agenda.

It was impossible to feel pretty wearing the utilitarian brown work uniform, or the sweats allowed in the dorm unit.

Tasìa smiled, thinking of Este-Oeste and the thongs her husbands slipped in for her on visitation day.

"Watch this, little Tasìa. These were found in your laundry bag."

The Chief placed the bloomers in a clear colored chemical container. He pressed a switch latched on the side of the device. A liquid rushed into the inner vat from a compact tube.

As he vigorously shook the container for several seconds the bloomers inside dissolved in the chemical bath.

As he commenced doing this, most of the other guards were busy prepping the Gremlins.

Tasìa had some experience with these robot units. They were not merely propped drones. They were fully articulated hominid simulacra.

They could also fly. A popular term for them was the flying monkeys. Each one of them would get a sample of the chemical bath containing her pheromones, and use it to track her down inside the ducts.

She thought of retreating back the way she came, back up the vent, and on to the skywalk. No, the fact the Chief had his men inside the building to search for her meant they kept a set of eyes on the vent entrance.

Most likely, a sharpshooter waited in place to blow her head off.

They decided, for one, trying to compete with the spider monkey themselves inside the vents would be a futile waste of time. Neither did they take the time to assemble the robots outside and simply have them follow her path.

She understood why.

When she took out the sharpshooter, they were forced to scramble for cover as well.

For that brief moment, she did have the high ground.

The best course of action for them was to come inside the Spore Isolation Unit where the ducts limited her capacity to pick them off with the .30-06 rifle.

Until they figured out where she went and followed, they were in desperation mode.

Tasìa decided to sacrifice the rifle. She forced the barrel of the gun through the double-set of grid holes. It was a tight squeeze, but once firmly in place, she gave the butt of the gun a swift kick. It took several more stomps.

After removing the now damaged rifle, Tasìa smiled in satisfaction. It was a hole quite useful in size. She tossed two of the grenades down on the men below.

As she raced around the atrium ductwork, she heard the guards coughing below her. Tasìa calculated that it would take just under a minute to get to the vent on the opposite end of the atrium's figure-eight design from the entrance-ramp to the east.

Most likely, by the conventions of design, that would be where she would find the connector duct that could get her to the Westside corridors.

A thunk sound surprised her from the vent just ahead of her by a few feet. Tasìa scurried up and peeked around the corner.

On the grill, a black spidery object set.

Ah, shit. Sticky grenade.

Tasìa hustled forward. The grenade blew a cloud of beryl-colored smoke into the vent now behind her. She heard another thunk sound echo from ahead of her position.

A blast of bluish-green smoke rushed into the duct, billowing in front of her.

Tasìa had no choice but to crawl through it. She covered her mouth in the collar of her t-shirt and she closed her eyes shut tight, pressing onward.

The smoke smelled of almond and turmeric. It burned her eyes and sinuses less than she thought it would. Then with this frail hope pulling her forward, her heart sank when Tasìa realized her face was feeling numb and the flesh of her arms began to itch.

The motherfuckers!

They were using a nerve agent.

She spat at the pretense of the Salvage, and their claim to be emissaries who served a higher purpose.

At heart, they were as dirty as any strong man thug who had ever planted a flag on Latin American soil. They merely had better PR at their disposal.

Droplets of a chemical catalytic began to form and drizzle down from her face. Even her hair began to become soaked. The gas was reacting to her skin. A soft sizzling sound perked into Tasìa's ears, worrying her dearly.

The gas was heavier than the air so it clung to her body. Tasìa refused to breathe it in, knowing if she did, it would cause severe nausea.

Hell, if it is what I think it is, it will likely choke me to death if I let it get into my lungs.

She pressed onward down the ductwork with her eyes closed, feeling the tin siding along the way.

It seemed far longer than a minute, but her watch had yet to pulse at the minute mark when she came to the adjoining duct. It was just where she assumed it would be on the west-most side of the atrium.

Tasìa swiveled on her butt and pushed forward. The duct slid down forty-five degrees for twenty feet. Once down into the west side ducts, Tasìa finally let her breath out.

She gave herself fifteen seconds of rest, fully knowing that if the Chief's men got the Gremlins online, she really could not even afford that much of an indulgence.

The flat level duct she now set on went into two different directions. She calculated the southern direction to her left would take her to the ductwork which led her to the tower on her first venture.

However, the other direction could prove to be the most adventageous. On her way back to the SIU building from the spook tower earlier, Tasìa took a ladder from the maintenance tunnels into a small room with a cross-bridge that sat beneath a centralized section of ducts.

This was a longer route, and given its connection to the floor level, it was likely the means that the Gremlins would use to get into the ductwork.

It would be safer to search the ducts above the equipment room corridor, she concluded. She was still going in the right direction.

Only seconds after she made this calculation, Tasìa discovered it was in error. She jolted at the sound of a long metal on metal screech somewhere forward in the direction in which she moved.

The duct itself rattled around her.

Metal was being sheared. A Gremlin was clawing its way into the ductwork.

Tasìa took out her .357 and she crawled forward on her belly. The sound of rotors and a hissing noise approached. As she expected, the first thing she saw was a little red LED light on a small antenna to the left of its main sensor.

The sensor was in a socket equivalent to a hominid's left eye. It rotated around as it identified her.

Tasìa put four bullets into that socket. With the limited capacity of the weapons that she had on her, blinding it was her best hope.

It seemed as if she was successful, so Tasìa backed up. Its behavior, when wounded or incapacitated would be unpredictable.

As she turned around, a canister popped out of the Gremlin's side, exploding in a swarm of tiny darts. Most of the needles that shot in her direction did not even penetrate her clothing, but those that did stung like hell.

She knew almost immediately it was the same agent that Missi had used to get her off the wall.

The strength was draining out of her limbs. It was becoming more difficult to breathe.

The Gremlin was not finished with her just yet. A cable shot out from it. Little claws on the cable end latched onto Tasìa's work boot. The robot started reeling her in.

She still possessed two rounds in her .357. She shot both of them into an exposed rotator support just above the cable.

The cable came loose enough for Tasìa to roll over. She pulled at the claw trying to wrench it loose as she backed away from the Gremlin.

She gathered that the robot was stuck in place. The shots fired into the socket must have damaged other internal systems.

That was why it was using riot oriented countermeasures instead of the lethal Hunter mode actions it was capable of performing.

Tasìa could not merely pull the claw off of her boot. Her muscles were feeling too rubbery to do even that much physical exertion.

She took a moment to examine the mechanical structure of the claw. Two switches surrounding the claw assembly locked it in place around her heel.

Tasìa kept a set of bobby pins and lockpicks beneath the hairpins above her ears. Fortunately, it was common and some what expected in her culture for hair, even as smooth as her own, to be shaped into distinctive coifs with the assist of hairpins.

Tasìa removed one of each, and worked at the switches. There was a connector between the two that ran underneath the claw. She used the lockpick like a wedge and squeezed it between.

Running the lockpick up and down the length between the switches, it finally loosened with a spring popping up in the air.

With no more pressure to keep it supported, the claw slackened in on itself. Tasìa kicked herself free and she scurried away from the Gremlin.

She was forced to backtrack in her weakened state. It was a slow haul. Beneath her was the sound of other Gremlins. They must not have had a fix on her exact position like the one she rendered inoperable.

The chemical was taking a toll on her. She successfully fought it off with the adrenaline before. But now, she was suffering the after-effects.

Tasìa wanted to do nothing more than find a safe little comfortable niche and fall asleep.

She passed by the duct that swooped upward back to the atrium to the eastern half of the SIU.

She kept crawling northward into unknown territory. There were whispers that sounded like a hallucination to her. If the sons of bitches had also used a hallucinogenic compound to tip those darts, Tasìa could only wonder, what took them so long?

It would have made the chemotreatments more interesting.

She shook off her concern once she understood the source of the whispers.

To her amusement, Tasìa found a niche display whose surface was covered in orange and green glitter shaped like a bunny . Two dozen white and yellow pebbles formed a sunburst.

Quite child like.

There was a vertical duct in the center of the display, but no LED lights upon its surface like all the other ducts.

A whisper unfurled from its depths.

From vibrations in the tin surface beneath her knees, she knew that the Gremlins were loose again in the ductwork. Tasìa did not have what it would take in either weapons or personal strength left in her to hold off another Gremlin assault.

Another dusk whisper came up from the dark of the vent. It wasn't drug-hued imagination, it was the Disappeared.

It now appeared to be her best chance. She had figured from her last survey of the maintenance tunnels that at least two of the access corridors ran near the floor of the Containment Ward for the Disappeared.

There was a Gremlin close enough to her that Tasìa could hear its rotors churning.

She would have to take her chance on the floors below. Spinning her legs around, she set them down into the vertical duct; she grabbed a hold of the lip to push off it.

Tasìa used her elbows and her knees to squirm downward. It was almost too much for her rubbery-feeling muscles; she managed to keep this up for a dozen feet.

Blood rushed to her head, she felt faint. Tasìa responded by squeezing her body up against the side of the duct.

A tense ache jolted her in her gut. Her heart fluttered.

The last thing Tasìa was aware of before she fell unconscious was that she was falling.