“You’re on camera 3, the door’s 20 feet ahead and to the right.” Argus said. Neither of us responded, but Guthrie raised a hand and peeled off the path.

“Camera 3 no longer sees you, and…” she paused to type in a few keystrokes, “never did.”

Guthrie made a motion with her hand, twirling her finger, some hand sign. I made my way up, trying not to step on anything that would make a noise, and settled in on the other side of the door.

“Keep watch.” She whispered through her mask and pulled out a set of thin metal pins. I looked around for anyone, anything that could spot us. My mask itched at the straps, a grey ceramic faceplate that cut off my jaw, borrowed from Sid till I found my own.

“You’re both clear, one guard making their way to you but you’ve got a minute before he’s there.” I heard a few more clicks of a keyboard from Argus’ end. The last click came from the door, and Guthrie pulled the picks out to try the handle. It rattled, but didn’t open.

“Shit.” she hissed.

“Guthrie!” I tapped a knuckle on a panel next to my knee, “There’s a keypad.” And moments later, “Argus, there’s a keypad on our door. What’s the code?”

“Always something, isn’t it. Fucking government paranoia, I’m uploading a script, 21 seconds till I can get you the code.”

“We don’t have 21 seconds, I hear footsteps. Stray, get behind that bush.” I followed and crouched in the brambles. Guthrie found her own place, over the wall into an alley.

The guard walked with lazy confidence, swaying his rifle as he moved. When he got to the door, he stopped and took a cursory glance, before raising a finger to his left ear and saying “East face, clear.” He started to walk off, and I let out a breath I’d been holding for nearly a full minute.

And then he stopped.

Crap.

And glanced to his left

Shit.

To see the open panel of the keypad.

Fuck.

“Cut the network, grab his arm.” Guthrie made no change in her tone to insinuate who she was talking to and hurled herself out of the bush at the man, I did the same a moment later. By the time I got there she already had one arm clamped around his neck and the other over his ear, shielding the earpiece. He’d dropped the rifle and was going to his thigh when I reached him and grabbed both his hands. He slashed at me with the knife he’d been going for, and I barely managed to dodge out of the arc before lurching forwards again to punch straight for his nose.

He went down eventually, though it was messy and I was pretty sure Guthrie could have done better on her own.

“Is he-”

“No, that takes about four minutes of choking, he’ll be out for a while though.” Guthrie dragged him towards the wall, “Take his legs”

Lifting a body was difficult, especially one weighed down with body armour. It took a couple of tries but we got him over into the alley. He was a big guy, with a neck tattoo and a messy beard and a pinkish tongue that rolled around at the strangest angles.

“It’s oh-double-seven-three-one, and all the connections are dead.” Said Argus.

The screen lit up green as I keyed in the numbers, and the door clicked open.

The warehouse was dark and musty, like old cloth and wood; everything damp, held in by five sheets of metal. We were meant to find a book in all this? I started counting. Five rows that I could see in the darkness, if we went quickly that would mean a half-hour per row, it was just after four in the morning so-

A hand clasped over my mouth and the body it was attached to pulled me behind a stack of crates, wrenching me from my thoughts and into a wall. My hand shot towards their gut, shoving them with the barrel of my gun, but she didn’t move an inch, she barely grunted. My eyes focused before I went for another hit and I saw Guthrie through the eyeholes of her mask, wide eyed and flushed from the effort it took not to grunt. She stared at me from an inch away. A torchlight flashed down one of the rows, illuminating right where I’d been standing, I exhaled, nodding quickly. She let go, and started down the row, away from the torchlight.

“Luke? Luke, are you there?” a man’s voice accompanied the steady squeak of trainers.

“Round the back, that’s where he last checked in, the south face.” A second man. Two of them, one each? I looked at Guthrie, she didn’t look back, kept her eyes focussed on them through the slats of the pallet, but nodded and raised three fingers. She was barely breathing, and none of her movements made any noise. She dropped one of her fingers, then a second. On the third she exhaled and I felt a warmth radiate off her.

Both of us shot towards the guards, right before they reached the door. Guthrie reached her man first, I didn’t see her long enough before I reached mine and kicked him in the back of his leg. He went down on one knee, but when I went to elbow him again he rolled forwards and sprung up. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me off balance, and when I straightened, he pressed the muzzle of his gun against my spine.

“Don’t come any closer!” He practically shouted, how much closer could I even get? No, he was talking to Guthrie. He wrenched me around to face her, and I saw the woman pointing her gun straight at me, through me, to him. The man she’d been fighting was motionless, ten feet away on the ground in a pool of blood.

“I don’t need to.” Her voice was calm. No, not calm, controlled, tensed. I considered for a second how terrifying this must be for him. His partner was dead or dying on the ground and a demon of a woman with a porcelain face, the very thing he’d been taught to kill, had him panting in fear like a trapped animal.

“They teach us how to deal with witches. No magic. Put your hands down or I blow her fucking head off.” He pulled me closer and moved the gun to the side of my head. I could feel his breath, ragged and panicking. I couldn’t hear myself breathe, so I forced myself to inhale. So long as Guthrie kept him talking I could come up with a plan. I could feel my own gun slip from my hands, and tightened my grip before it fell

“Look. you’re scared, I can tell.” Guthrie started. Could I slip out? Jam the gun somehow? No, I didn’t trust my magic enough for that. “The fact is that if we get into this, you’re gonna lose. Your only bargaining chip is that you have her, if you shoot her, you lose that and you die. Do you want that?” knock his head with mine, stamp his foot, no, neither of those would get my head out the way fast enough. I was hyperventilating, my face was getting hot under my mask, my vision started to vignette.

“So, what’s gonna happen is this. I’m gonna lower my gun, you’re gonna let her go with me, then walk away like you never saw me, okay?”

I felt him breathe panicked gasps and felt the muzzle rattle and shake against me. Was this how much they feared us? What did the RWHS teach these people?

“Fuck. You.” The man hissed, and pushed the gun further into my temple. I felt a flash of what wasn’t heat, Guthrie’s arm twisted, and a sound, right behind me, of a watermelon being torn apart. Something with the consistency of slime splattered onto my back, and the man let go of me. I turned around to hit him but he was already on the ground. Well, most of him was. Some of him was on the wall. Some of him was on me.

It felt like an hour before my mind settled back in my head, though it was probably closer to a few seconds. Guthrie was kneeling over me, and fiddling at the straps of my mask.

“You’re having a panic attack,” she said to nothingness, rather than to me “I’ll get you somewhere safe and come back for you.”

“No,” I managed to blurble through the saliva that had pooled in my mouth and batted her away. “I’m fine. I’m okay. The book.”

Guthrie pulled me up, warily, and pressed a hand to her ear as she walked off

“Orange Fanta, report on your end?”

“Azure sea. No luck, but we had a run-in with some of them, we should get out soon.” Orpheus, slightly drawn in his breathing.

“Negative, We’re getting this book.” Panzer spoke as if she were biting down on something.

“Look for a manifest, some sort of record or log that’ll give us the layout of this place” I said. I had to say, I had to keep myself where I was. I couldn’t afford what happened last time. There had to be a manifest, a place like this would be impossible to run without one.

“Where would that be?” Panzer asked.

“On the computer system, or in the house if it’s a hard copy, that’s my best guess.”

“Argus? Can you find anything from the computers?”

Argus’ voice was hushed. “Negative, I’m locked out. There’s three computers in there though, you can access it from there.

“Stray, Guthrie, regroup at the house.”

“Negative again, I need a distraction” She was barely whispering, I had to turn her channel up just to hear her.

“Why?” Guthrie asked.

“Because I’m looking at one of the computers and there’s at least four guys about five seconds from my position.”