It was a ten-minute’s walk from the frozen front steps of the I/O Tavern to the Department of Incognita Science, this through the hushed snowfall of campus. All the while, two thoughts smoldered at the back of Vy’s mind. The first was her better judgment. Was all this—the contract, the accomplices, the conditions—a mistake? You bet your level-11 fangsword it was; they might as well have been putting their necks in the maw of a bone boar. Yet though that doubt stewed beneath Vy’s knitted cap, it did so in conflict with a second consideration: the hammered-steel sturdiness of her word, with which she had agreed to be the students’ party member for hire. Ascend the steepest of mountain fortresses, fling open the most remote of chests, and you won’t find even a bad replacement for a person’s word.

It was the one loot you couldn’t find anywhere but in yourself.

A welcome warmth and several maglock doors later, the five of them arrived at their destination within the Department of Incognita Science, the Laboratory for Advanced Neural Interfaces. LANI for short. The facility was the University of Reformed Massachusetts’ interdepartmental laboratory for the study of and experimentation on the myriad systems of the Incognita. Though usually populated by any number of brilliant minds, in recent weeks the lab’s bustling attendance had dropped to an all-time low, on account of the its overseer—Dr. Ritcard Dorman, AKA Axshn the Illusician—being “unavailable” to approve new slots.

Good news for our would-be adventurers, as this meant the facility was the perfect place for they and their for-hire advisor to hash out any last-minute details of their already hurriedly put-together plan. As the hours passed, the laboratory sensors darkened the automatic lights one by one, until there was only the glow of the break room’s lights through the gas-frosted window that looked into the lab proper. From time to time, these automated lights would flicker on and fade once more as graduate student after graduate student left to catch what hours of sleep they could. Until at last there was only Vy and Elliot occupying the small back room—and of those two only one was going anywhere at all.

“You know, we can find you an actual bed,” Elliot said, his expression a cross between concern and utter exhaustion. He stopped partway through the break-room door to turn and face her as he left.

By this point, Vy had dragged three plush-bottom chairs into a line in front of the cluttered counter, crushed cans and envirtualization manuals, and she was now working on the fourth. “This is fine,” she said, without any discernable emotion. She was beat.

“You sure?” Elliot said, mustering up a sluggish empathy.

Her impromptu bed now made, Vy stopped to look back over her shoulder. There in the artificial light, a hint of warmth flashed across her face. “Thank you, really, but this will do just fine. Will you get the light?”

He did, and soon thereafter took leave of the laboratory. As Vy lay across the chairs in the dark she watched the frosted obscurity of the observation window go from gray to light silver to gray again as Elliot’s path crossed the sensors. Reaching back on the counter behind her, she felt for the remote, then pushed the button that controlled the window. In a reverse fog, the glass went clear from the outer boundaries in, to reveal on the other side the dim glow of instruments and simulation indicators. From the light of all of them combined, she could just make out the shape of the laboratory equipment. Of especial interest to her drifting-away mind was the pièce de résistance of the LANI’s high-tech offerings: a single EVC (EnVirtualization Chamber), AKA a “dream pod.”

The device itself was a four-by-seven-foot capsule secured to the floor plates by a fully articulating arm. This allowed the unit to be positioned vertically, horizontally, or any degree in between. Not that the pod’s passenger would be much aware of it, of course—in fact, an EVC was designed precisely to avoid its passenger being aware of anything at all outside of the virtual world. It was meant to be the perfect 1:1 experience. Even now, on the cusp of sleep, Vy could rattle off a list of features that advanced envirtualization units offered over the standard at-home model: inner-ear recalibration, variable pressurization, micro-fluctuating temperature control, humidity and air flow governance, liquid-haptic feedback, waste control. . . . The list went on and on and on.

For the average envirt, envirtualization was not much different than watching a television program. No matter how compelling the content or alluring the narrative, you could still just walk away. Switch off. Unvirt. Why would one do so? Well, while a leg of wildlamb virtually ingested might persuade the brain into curbing its hunger an hour or two, it didn’t take long for the human body to wise up. Even if a person had the foresight to eat and drink prior to envirtualization, sooner or later the bodily functions would come a-calling. And even beyond these two factors, starving and soiled, eventually you would have to sleep. The divide between the two worlds was insurmountable. No matter how much you might have adored the Incognita, you were forever married to reality through your biological needs.

Unless, of course, you had access to an EnVirtualization Chamber. And by access it was meant lots and lots of money.

Vy herself had only once been lucky enough to try an EVC, and even then it was only for a few hours. The occasion had been part of a high-level contract around the end of her first year as a party member for hire. At this point in her career, her reputation didn’t yet command much attention, nor did her experience much pay. But what she did offer was a good job done cheap—and for some clients, that was all the résumé one needed.

“Should be a real easy ‘tract for a professional like you. A real piece of pie. Take on the guise of a fair maiden—fair-enough anyway. Lie in wait at the Festival of the Somber Solstice. Shadow the lord of Blackfawn Manor. Then, right as he is among all his pretty little patrons, his squealing, fawning, giggling little dewflowers . . . you zero-sum the miserable bastard.”

All this had been conveyed by a drone buzzing around her head as she browsed aisle to aisle the crummy, foul-smelling shop. The client himself was safe and secure behind three inches of blast glass at the back, an oily-skinned, round-faced man who ran a little five-and-grand just outside of the City Centralis. He was an info merchant by the name of Gorge Govas. The whole while he explained the gig, he didn’t look up once from his position on the other side of the glass, where he sat digging at one of his toenails with the sharp end of a neuro-ROM tool.

Vy thumbed through the wares about midway up a shelf, half-working EIU augments and suspect info cards. She picked up a card and inspected it, then plopped it back from whence it came.

“And where will you be during this little escapade?”

The drone spun around to get a better look at her. Projected in front of the device was a small version of the face that watched her from the back of the shop. In both places, the info merchant flashed a sick-looking grin, a row of sharp teeth tinted yellow. “Well . . . nobody ever said ‘party member for hire’ had to be so literal.”

So it was an assassination mission. Remove the target from the (virtual) world; open up his Incognita assets to the public; watch it all get snatched up in an EIU feeding frenzy. And who oh who had shelf after shelf of Emulated Intelligence Units on discount? Why, Gorge Govas coincidentally. On any other day, Vy might have rejected the contact on principle alone—though the target was, let’s be frank, nothing more than an avatar in a computer-generated virtual reality, the fact remained that anyone she could feasibly assassinate she could just as feasibly turn into a client. And this particular hypothetical client—Gorge Govas’ real-world rival Oldr Carien, AKA “Elfred Pergirue”—would make a heck of a good one.

But she could name an even better heck of a good one: cash money up front and now.

Moral quandaries have been settled for less. With a swipe of her hand, Vy gave the drone-projected contract the old dotted-line treatment, and five minutes later she was standing before Gorge Govas’ own personal EVC. The unit was contained inside a cramped storage room to the right of the blast glass. Though normally the kind of costly equipment that one kept polished and clean, the stowed-away envirtualization chamber had been stripped down to its bare essentials. It looked like it had been pulled from the bottom of a junk pile.

Ah, but money was money was money. So, without a word futher, she climbed inside the machine. When she opened her eyes again, she was staring at a moonlight sky. Above her, branches brushed at the night like the strokes of an artist’s instrument. The air crackled with life all around, and she could taste the deep forest smell carried on the breeze. And all this a change balanced between breathing in and out a single instance, from the stale air of the store room to the green air of the Aeryn. She’d never had a transition so smooth. Had she been classed as a bard, she would have used the kinds of words you saw in the ancient scripts of Ylmoth, syllables of poetry and power. Instead she simply blinked away the new world and said: “Time to get to work.”

Before she could even fully rise to her feet there in the soft needles of the forest copse, she ascertained her current position as being deep in the forests of Devieux, about six miles from the sleepy hamlet of Moonmire. This merely based off a glance at the West Sword, the go-to star formation for navigation. By the time she had risen fully—to stand in a silken, dark blue cloak, cinched at the waist—she had caught a glimpse of Moonmire’s torches in the night. And by that first step forward, she had used both details to orient her point of travel further toward the Devieux interior, where she would find Blackfawn Manor. She’d also searched her garments for a weapon. What she found buried deep in the folds of the cloak’s underlying tunics was a silver-hilted knife about as long as her hand.

She could work with that.

By the time she reached the back perimeter of Blackfawn Manor, the Festival of the Somber Solstice was already in full swing. Falling from the open windows of the squat, stone manor, gentle music could be heard, sawing strings and harps plucking jovially at the crisp air. Vy waited in the shadow of the night watching the back balcony of the manor, where a few guards drank and sang and generally presented no great difficulty at all.

While they reveled, she scaled the ledges and wrought-iron fixtures to arrive inside one of the quieter windows—a musty, dimly lit library, shelved floor to ceiling with silent tomes and watched over only by the occasional piece of period-appropriate art, lords and armies dosed in ultramarine blue and surrounded by stamped gold. It was there that she ditched that dark cloak she had spawned with, to exit wearing the outfit beneath: a chartreuse layering of tunics hemmed with light gold. Her hair, normally dented into shape by a perpetual case of helm hair, was kept pearly and partially obscured beneath a squarish veil.

Making her way down the hall outside the library, she soon slipped behind a group of ladies all dressed as ladylike as she. They were like a gaggle of birds—shrill and noisy and organized around a central “goose,” a dark-haired maiden who would turn from time to time to address them.

“Oh would you just look at Lady Nuvireux,” she said in one of these sudden turns, “that ghastly wimple of hers! Do you see?” She made a show of hiding-but-not-hiding her words behind a raised hand.

“Do I?” said another, positively glowing in her mean-spiritedness. “She looks as if she had stolen it from the mouth of some wilderly beast, a . . . a . . . moorwolf, or a ghastghoul.”

Vy found herself speaking without thinking. “Nah, not a ghastghoul,” she interrupted, “a ghast will eat clothing and meat and all in one gulp. I’d say more of a razorvirgin probably, they keep their clothing as part of their curse . . .” Because of course the ladylikest trait of all was knowing the distinguishing characteristics and predatory habits of southwild monsters. . . .

The gaggle turned to face her, a look of apprehension flat across their faces. Vy forced a smile and they sneered but soon returned their attentions back to the not-them, to those who dared to differ from themselves. But at least they had turned their attentions away from Vy. Her “ruse,” if you could call it that, was enough to assuage any suspicions of her sudden arrival, and she was able to use the cover to follow the ladies down into the foyer and out into the main hall. So it was infiltration – one, friendship – zilch.

But still: infiltration – one.

Breaking off from the gaggle, Vy ventured into the manor’s great hall—or rather, to the edge of the balcony that overlooked such. Ahead of her past the railing, a long hall strung with large glinting chandeliers, the largest of which was hung over an impromptu dance below. Of those people dancing (as well as others in attendance, who stood idly by or engaged in conversation), garments of all sorts, doublets and tunics and flowing purple dresses. And very few of them NPCs from the looks of it.

Vy had gotten to the point that she could routinely spot the NPCs in a given crowd. Though the AI that powered them did so with the awesome power of envirt-based analysis, artificial behaviors hadn’t yet progressed to the point of total invisibility. In particular she had her eye on the cocky fellow now crossing the bustling floor below, striding really, with a emphatic flourish at the end of each movement from one side of the hall to the next. There was no way he was human; his movements were a cold and calculated grand. Each glide and bow and ostentatious curtsey. It was like watching the automaton servants in the City’s shopping district. He preened and dance-led like a machine constructed for such. He was a great amusement to those dozens upon dozens of people gathered, laughing and drinking and waiting for the Lord of Blackfawn to appear and celebrate them during his annual solstice speech.

Vy, too, was awaiting the Lord’s arrival—though for quite a different reason altogether. And while she wait, scanning the great hall with a somewhat downcast gaze, a large drunk man lumbered by, sloshing beer from the copper flagon he carried in one hand. She wouldn’t have noticed him at all, except that as he passed by he drunkenly attempted to set his flagon on the railing of the balcony—and did so at a foot’s length less than was actually needed. Instinctively, Vy reached out and grabbed the vessel, fast as she might have a snatched an arrow from a quiver and nocked it. Just as quickly as she had seized the flagon, she swung it up to set on the balcony as the man had intended. He didn’t even seem to notice. With little more than a grumble from his bearded mouth, the drunken man stumbled onward, and Vy focused once again on the crowd below.

She had forgotten the event entirely when a man’s voice, another man’s voice, spoke into her ear.

“You should drink up,” he said, in a deep tone that made her muscles tense. Vy glanced over her left shoulder to note the figure from which the voice emanated, a tall, dark-haired man with a look of arrogant approval across his face. He was dressed in black garments cut close to the form of his body, shoulders and chest, a distinctly militaristic look.

“Your client, after all, will want to know that his time and money went toward something, if not an assassination.”

She’d been made, that much was clear. Though she had been previously frozen by his words, she now felt her pace quicken. She could move like lightning if she needed to. But did she need to? And what would she do anyway, kill this complete stranger, then jump down from the balcony into the crowd and hope Elfred Pergirue was nearby and conspicuous? Actually it didn’t sound half bad; she was over this whole “fair maiden” act anyway. And the more she thought about it, the closer her right hand moved toward that silver-hilt blade stowed away in her tunic. . . .

“For whatever do you search?” the man said with a kind of mock attentiveness, leaning with one arm against the railing. It was then that he produced from the folds of his dark clothing the very blade for which she now groped. He flashed a smile sharp as the blade itself. “Don’t let my garb fool you. I’m classed as a thief.”

“But are you so certain I work alone?” She cut her eyes at him, flashed teeth from one side of her mouth.

“Mmm,” he said, returning the blade to its place in his garments, “No, I don’t believe that for one moment. You, my lady, are a lone moorwolf if I ever saw one.”

“You don’t know me,” she said with a huff.

She was absolutely right, of course. But one didn’t have to know her to know that character classes skewed toward basic personality types. The magic classes—the illiusionist, the dark mage—they attracted people obsessed with their own internal might, the academic or the power-hungry; the fighter classes attracted those on the other end of the spectrum, those who wished to be externally powerful, or in leading others to appear so; the rogue classes—the thief among them—appealed to those who tended to keep to themselves, who rather watch from the shadows, then strike when least suspected.

Like this man here, Vy too was a rogue. So by knowing himself the man knew her about as well as one could.

Down below, an event was occurring. The doors at the far end of the great hall had opened to admit a number of new patrons, tightly formed into a cluster. At the front of this cluster was none other than Elfred Pergirue. He was a thin, lanky man, with an air about him that simply drew people in, like a beloved statue or a fine painting. Except Elfred was no inanimate item—he was about as animate as they came, with a warm, friendly smile that seemed to leap from his face to yours. He was, in Vy’s opinion, the very last person you’d want to kill. You’d have to be pretty low to want that removed from the virtual world.

“Edston,” the man said finally.

Vy had been concentrating so hard she’d been scowling. “What?”

“Edston Brinvar,” the man said again. “I am Lord Pergirue’s for-hire.”

She was only half listening. She was watching Elfred as he moved across the room. It was a real treat to see a (virtual) fellow such as he; the Iron was so bogged down with opportunists and two-faced weasels it was almost like she was witnessing a new character class altogether—the simply decent person. Featured skills: not being a complete asshole.

In the corner of her eye, she saw Edston smile again, warmer now. “Oh don’t be so steely,” he chided her, “I should frankly be the admonished one here. It was you, after all, who assumed that for-hire security—of which I am in charge—would be so light as to need nothing more than a petty blade. Is this . . . is this even enchanted?” He patted the blade where it lay beneath his clothes, laughing lightly to himself.

“You know,” he continued, now turning away from her to face the crowd below, “Lord Pergirue’s not a bad fellow at all. I don’t just mean that he pays well. Out of all the avatars I’ve protected, he is the only one I’d consider doing so for . . . reduced price. Half cost maybe. The rest of the clients I work for in the Aeryn, upworld I wouldn’t even give them the time of day. But Elfred is not a bad fellow.” He paused. “He’s not a bad employer either.”

It was then that Vy did something unexpected. She demurred. “Is that so?”

“It is.”

The two were quiet for a moment. Soon, the band began to play a new tune and those down below began to dance. After a while, Edston spoke. “Well, I ask you, my lady . . .” he paused and cut his eyes her direction.

“Thornheart.”

“. . . Lady Thornheart,” he said as if he’d known all along, “what, pray tell, is your current agility level?”

“High enough for any maneuver you can come up with, I assure you.”

Edston took Vy’s hand. “Oh really?” And just like that, he swept her from the railing and into the crowd gathered at the top of the stairs leading down into the great hall proper. From step to step the two went, dancing with such eloquence that even the bearded drunk now collapsed at the bottom of the stairs looked up from his stupor. Vy and Edston twirled through the gathered people, first in a calculated Basse Dance, slow and low in movement, then in a few glides crossed from one end of the crowd to the next. Next came the flourish, as Edston tipped Vy and they both looked up so as to reveal their faces to the upper balconies. Then upright the two were once more, to return to the comfortable monotony of a methodical circular dance.

A series of claps from the crowd. In the midst of all that movement of the two touching down upon the great hall’s bottom floor, Vy let loose a smile. It was an in-the-moment kind of thing, not on purpose. As she and Edston moved through the gathered people—dozens upon dozens now, twirling, moving—she couldn’t help but laugh. Maybe it was few and far between, but there was fun to be had in a crowd. She just had to be a little more receptive to it.

“Edston, Edston, Edston, my boy!” cried Elfred Pergirue from the swirl of bodies dancing in the center of the great hall. The man holding tight to Vy’s hand swung her so that her other sliced the air to land in the palm of Elfred’s, who leaned forward and kissed the hand with a kind and not unwholesome grin. “And who is this lady of yours?” he said loud over the din of the room.

“You mean,” she said with a bit of bite, “who is this gentleman of mine?”

And with that, Vy spun Edston away from her—a deliberate, expressive action, as Elfred stood looking on and laughing and clapping. He truly seemed as friendly as Edston had said; so friendly, in fact, that as Vy finished her spin to stand on the edge of the circle of dancers, she almost felt bad to remove that reacquired blade from the nape of her neck, where she’d hidden it just moments before. She felt bad about Edston too, who having twirled to the other side of the great hall stood with his expression reflecting the realization settling in on him like moved earth. And among these feel-bads, there was what she felt for the unaware crowd, too, who had gathered alongside Elfred underneath the glinting center chandelier—the far-flung support rope of which Vy, with a level of accuracy that would make your average envirt swoon, severed.

Down, down went the chandelier, that crystal colossus plummeting to the floor below. Sure, she liked Edston. He had a kind of warm, boyish charm that made even that heart of hers long to smile.

But, you see, she’d given her word—and she wasn’t about to respec now.