With a pin light in her hand, Tasìa followed the corridor as it zig-zagged through the entire bottom floor interior of the building. The final hallway opened up into a windowless room.

She stood in front of a vaulted sliding door. It would not open without a series of key presses inputted correctly into the mounted pad on the wall to the side of the sliding door.

As she crouched down, Tasìa removed a panel from the bottom of the keypad. She then examined a set of green marked pin connectors twisted together and bounded with a zip tie.

Nothing had been switched out in the wiring since the first time she cracked open the locking mechanism years beforehand.

She already knew which one of the connector wires would override the keypad. If activated, it would set off a set of pressure locks in a sequenced release.

That part was a known quantity for Tasìa. Here, however, was her dilemma.

Since the vagabond squatters kept at least one of the generators in the basement running, she could flip the main control switch on the electric service panel to get the keypad up and functional again.

In itself, not a problem.

However, if lights were to come on, after more than a year in which they had been kept off, the Hijos Lux guards would certainly take notice of this sudden occurrence.

She would need to examine the electrical schematic to isolate the necessary cable that controlled the electrical throughput for the room from the myriad tangle of all the other ones.

After picking the button-ply lock on the electrical service panel, Tasìa flicked the pin light back on and she waved it along the inside of the thin metal door.

"Ah, shit," Tasìa muttered. She brushed her bangs out of her face; habitually she did so in frustration whenever her plans were set back like they were right now.

Most of the schemata had been peeled off and scratched up. It was unreadable in its present form.

She would have to deduce the scheme of wires without a guide.

With the pin light set at eye-level, she pointed at the line-up of circuit breakers. Thankfully, they were well labeled.

One label stated, outdoor lights - back end.

There was another for the front side lights further down the row of circuit breakers. She switched both breakers off.

Curiously, the squatters ran none of their own appliances through the electric service panel box.

The main switch was kept in an off position.

They ran their own cables and simply kept this box off so their own energy usage was conserved and not split.

She searched up and down the twin rows of breakers. If she could isolate a breaker for this very room, she would not have to worry about alerting her targets.

There being too many possible random factors she could not account for ahead of time stressed her.

For one, a random LED air quality warning panel left on near a window, but locked away upstairs where she would never see it but the cultists did, would be enough to botch her planned raid on Hijos Lux.

It would take her at least a solid hour to rummage through all of the building's locked rooms just to search for all of the stray lights.

Tasìa hoped that the circuit breakers for this one room could be isolated from everything else on the panel.

Along a bottom left-hand row was a set of four breakers.

Lot A, Lot B, Lot C, Blank, Back Fence.

She suspected the blank circuit breaker to be the one for which she searched, but Tasìa could not be entirely certain.

Other breakers were sectioned off by their proximity to one of eight corridors. This made sense; the cables in the ceiling physically branched out in that very fashion.

Likely, the breaker to this room was split away from the corridor cable to protect it from the kind of meddling to override it that she was attempting now.

She paused to think the situation through. A sound burglary in practice took a lot of thoughtful patience to even stand a chance at success.

As Tasìa ruminated, the solution occurred to her.

One way to test it. Reverse flow.

Tasìa unscrewed the bulb from her pin light. She carefully unfastened the main wire to the keypad and reconnected it to the batteries in her pin light.

On the electrical service panel was a built-in amp reader. Indeed, the diagnostic readout indicated the blanked-out circuit breaker was now throwing out juice.

Tasìa flipped all the other breakers off followed by a downward thrust of the main switch.

Within a few minutes after she juiced the right connector wire the pressure locks released in a top to bottom sequence.

The vaulted sliding door opened.

Past the fenced-in cage, the earth moving equipment gleamed in the moonlight. A crane, the most dominant in the skyline of the several earthmovers on the lot, arched thirty feet up in the air.

Metal monstrosities. Long, tall and wiry.

Tasìa grabbed the pistol scope. She crouched down and leaned her head out the door. She scanned the rooftop of the closest brownstone building.

A guard stood on the corner with his feet planted on each of the connecting sides. A carbine was held close to his chest and folded stiffly in his arms as he stared up at the Moon.

Tasìa magnified the scope to its full x7 setting.

This close to her target she could see from his obscene appearance that without any doubt the guard was a fully formed ghoul.

His browline and rigid face gave the appearance of an evil monstrosity. His eyes were those of a lost soul.

As she observed, Tasìa grimaced at her own train of thought. The ghoul seemed caught up in his own moment of reflection.

Could she regard him as still human?

She wondered if she and Sinclair could truly be friends. In spite of the horrid evil to which the Canadian woman was an active party, Tasìa came to like her.

She was but a lost soul in a land that dangled on the precipice of the Abyss.

Tasìa breathed in a rush of air to jolt herself back to her greater purpose. She studied her current predicament.

If she moved further out from where she now crouched exposure would be risked.

The awning above her and the door that still remained open provided her cover for the time being.

Only when the ghoul finally moved along on his patrol would she be given the chance to dash the thirty-five yards between the vaulted sliding door and the first row of equipment stacked in-line closest to her.

There was nothing to hide behind in the caged corridor between.

Tasìa froze in place when she heard a familiar swish of a clicking sound caused by a multitude of gears grinding away.

It moved swiftly up and down the row of equipment that it now patrolled.

Tasìa encountered the damn things many times while raiding mansions in the Esconda Vida.

Fucking spiderbots!

It turned as it jostled its legs in a leftward rotation. Its two glowing infrared sensors swiveled as if it was attempting to pick up a reading. After several seconds, the sensors lined up, facing in her direction.

With the gears in its eight legs letting out a high pitched squeal, it quickly headed down the row and in her direction.