07731 flashed up on Katrine’s screen, and she memorised it before clicking a few keys on her keyboard and. Her screen flickered to a screensaver, the head of medusa rendered in erratic cuts of pastel blue and pink. She heard the sounds of fighting from the other side of her earpiece, three or four seconds of grunts and yelps. Chloe was acclimating quite well. The fighting stopped, and something dropped to the ground.

“Is he-”

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

“Fuck, he’s heavy”

“They always are.”

Katrine fiddled with her computer while the two wheezed with effort. There was a crunch of plastic, they’d dumped him somewhere.

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

Katrine leaned back against the wall, she’d locked herself out now, she was done. The other four would sort things out and get back to the car soon enough. Katrine stretched her legs and shifted to try and get the brambles out of her face, she should have headed back to the car but she wanted to stay for a few moments, just in case they needed her.

Katrine’s screen lit up with pings, someone had pushed the panic button. They disappeared as quick as they arrived, not able to escape the local network. Coding wasn’t her forte, but over time she’d gotten surprisingly good at it. Being the Woman-in-the-Chair meant learning a lot of things.

A stiff breeze made Katrine wish she’d worn thicker jeans, and her ankles itched. Grass always did that to her. With nothing to do, Katrine thought. The warehouse was massive, the group had about 20 minutes to search it before something happened, and that was the best-case scenario. They’d need to know where to look. The RWHS wouldn’t hold a manifest on the cloud, but that wouldn’t make a difference, if she had access to the servers it’d be a matter of a few clicks. For a brief moment, she considered letting down the barrier and finding it, but that would cut their 20 minutes in half. Both of the teams were a while away from the house, and with the number of pings on her laptop, Sid had clearly decided to go loud. She’d seen the nearest computer, in the window, down the hall and through an open door. She could be in and out within a minute.

Katrine inched her way upwards to look in through the window. It was bright inside and dark outside, that gave her an advantage. But she still felt like the slightest movement would land every single guard on her at a moment’s notice. Addie could weave his way around people like it was nothing, but Katrine wasn’t Addie.

The hall was empty, the guard that had been waiting there must have been sent out. Poor guy. Katrine tried to ignore the knot in her gut and reached for the slide. It rattled, but the window stayed in place. Locked. There was another window 20 feet on her right, but that would mean moving around, completely in the open. There were at least two other soldiers Katrine knew had been roaming around when she cut everything off, what were the chances they were both dead? Not high enough. The window wasn’t reinforced, the entire house seemed flimsy, like a prefab, she could try to break it but that would be setting up a neon billboard. ‘Domestic terrorist here, come shoot!’ better to make a break for the next window and hope she had better luck. Better, but not good.

Katrine brought herself up into a crouch, her entire body curled around the knot in her stomach. Every fibre of muscle screamed at her to sit back down, get out of sight, don’t get caught. But she forced herself into the most painfully self-aware sprint she’d ever made.

The air was freezing. Wasn’t it supposed to be warm? Maybe she was just feeling things. She felt queasy. The window, she’d forgotten about the window. Nothing. It was bolted down tighter than the first, and looking out of it, from the kitchen, straight into Katrine’s wide, panicked eyes, was one of the guards.

He’d been looking for something, probably a gun or some body armour when she appeared, and for a second neither of them moved. A constant, repeating shitshitshitshitshit played in Katrine’s mind, and she found it in her to make the first move. Katrine bolted left, back towards the first window, and heard a shout from right behind her. What exactly the shout was escaped her, but she understood the intent. ‘Domestic terrorist here, come shoot!’

As she ran, Katrine bent down and grabbed a handful of pebbles. Or, she tried to, she tipped over like a sinking ship and fell to the floor. The guard was running alongside her inside the house, piling and stumbling but keeping up. He kept running, to the next window, and looked out. Katrine hurled her rocks as far as she could. They clattered against the paper-thin walls further down, and the guard kept running.

Katrine picked herself up and threw herself through the window, it smashed and crumpled like paper. The ‘safe’ in ‘safehouse’ was very clearly metaphorical.

The guard spun around to face her and levelled his gun downwards at the woman who was now curled at his feet. “Hands on your fucking head!” Three things happened in the next second, Katrine couldn’t tell in what order they happened.

First, a gunshot rang out from somewhere in the warehouse.

Second, the guard went to kick her.

Third, Katrine’s leg shot out and cracked into his shin.

The man fell to the ground and Katrine scrabbled on top of him. There was a shard of glass slicing her hands open before she realised she was holding it, and when her vision came back into focus they were both lying in a pool of red.

Katrine tasted bile but swallowed it back. The computer. She pried the man’s gun out of his hand, moving his index finger with the slowest movements possible, stuffed it in a pocket and went for the room.

The computer was an old one, it was running windows vista on a screen that flickered with stress whenever she opened a new window. The room itself was windowless and cramped, probably a converted bathroom. She wiped her hands on her jeans to get the blood off, but between the window and grabbing a shard of glass, she was starting to bleed badly. New cuts made themselves known by the second, sharp stings that were probably a lot worse than they felt and appeared, glass cut deep and streams of blood webbed their way down her fingers. She ached.

documents>business>log. Nothing but weeks of sign-in and sign-out sheets, probably useful but she couldn’t use it now.

documents>personal>Hunters. Even less, one folder for each person, she didn’t want to look further. Katrine couldn’t think of anything worse than seeing the man she’d just murdered with his family, or writing a cookery book, or throwing up after a night out. It was already too easy to imagine herself on the other side of the fight, using what she knew to hunt down magic, she’d rather not humanise them any more than they already were. Sid probably didn’t have that issue, Sid probably revelled in it. Katrine didn’t know if she was disgusted or jealous of the woman, she hoped it was the former, but she wasn’t confident.

documents>collective>warehouse. That was it! A single excel spreadsheet labelled ‘warehouse guide’, she opened it. Hundreds of columns, annotating when each shipment came in, went out, where it was stored, who tended to it. Most of what was listed was either code or a cover, stuffed animals, flatpack furniture, bags of grain. Katrine did a search, first for ‘book’. A shipment of Harry Potter novels from 2017, she sneered slightly and went again. ‘Magic’ brought up a set of kids toys from 2019, ‘Lucille’ didn’t bring up anything. What code would they use? Far-seeing eye. Binoculars? 18th September 2014. Glasses? Five shipments, all from 2018. Telescope? January 12th 2011, a bunch of novelty astrology kits. The same again two years later. But the third, Lucy-brand telescope. Telescope singular, the far-seeing eye. Entered July of 2021!

It took a minute for Katrine to realise people were talking over comms.

“-In the house if it’s a hard copy, that’s my best guess.”

“Argus?” Sid seemed too calm, in the way that made it obvious to Katrine that someone had just died. Or a lot of someones, “Can you find anything from the computers?”

A door somewhere rattled open. There was a shout, people were closing in on Katrine, somehow. She took a chair and angled it under the door.

“Negative, I’m locked out.” She whispered so she wouldn’t get their attention. “There’s three computers in there though, you can access it from there.”

“Stray, Guthrie, regroup at the house” The voices got closer, she could make them out, there were a lot.

“Negative again,” She hissed, barely over her breath, “I need a distraction.”

“I found Addams, on me!”

“Blood trail leads to the study, be careful.”

“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.”

“Breaching!” One of the guards kicked at the door, the chair splintered but the door held. Katrine raised her gun and fired where the man should have been. The sound of a body hitting the floor was her reward, but it was short lived.

“They’ve got a gun!”

“Get up, come on!”

Katrine heard someone being dragged away. Whoever she hit must have gotten lucky and only taken it to the body armour. Where was her distraction?

She shot two more times, so they knew not to come closer, but the gun felt noticeably lighter than it had before. How many bullets had she used? Two warning shots, was it two or three to the body armour?

Where was her distraction?

“Cover me!” one of the men shouted, and Katrine threw herself to the ground as a spray of bullets tore through the door. She glanced back at the computer, the keyboard was plastic splinters and something had taken the corner off the monitor, but in the seconds before it went black she memorised the location.

“Sid!” she practically screamed through comms, “Where is my fucking-”

“Cover your ears!” Addie shouted back, and the house exploded.

When she took her fingers out of her ears they were ringing like bells. Katrine lay on the ground. Her vision was hazy, fading at the edges like an old movie. Blood was pooling around her from all her cuts, which stung and ached like someone was cutting limes into them. It was like all the adrenaline in her system was pooling around her with the blood. She raised one finger to comms and whispered as she fell asleep. “Third row, top shelf, section D.”

Fuck… Get her up… Shouldn’t have… She could have… The mission… Component… never.

Katrine couldn’t differentiate the voices, but she had a vague idea from context. She was in and out of consciousness till later that morning. She dreamed that she was a bird, trapped under a boulder, and the boulder was lit on fire. The last part was ambiguous, but Katrine felt herself flush hot more than once before she was lucid again.

When she could finally string together a thought, Katrine opened her eyes. She was in a cot at the safehouse. Her safehouse, not the one they’d broken into. She was hot, but not sweating. Like someone had held a branding iron to her and taken it away. She was face down, her cheek was mashed into two or three pillows. There was a murmuring, repeating one word over and over, that stopped.

“Oh thank fuck, you’re awake.” Addie was sitting on the ground next to her, fast food wrappers and energy drink cans littered the area around him, and his hand was on the Component, which was apparently under her cot.

“I thought it wasn’t working, the thing was barely changing you for a good three hours.”

Huh. Brain activity levels had some effect on it, then?

“The component was working for three hours?” She managed to croak. Her wounds had all closed but the room still span like a top whenever she moved. Blood loss? Did the Component replace blood? Katrine didn’t often factor her blood levels into her self-perception, so it made sense. But no, the food, Addie where he was, the Component couldn’t have worked for that long alone “You charged the component for three hours?” he looked like shit, his eyes were starting to sink in his face and he was almost slurring his response.

“I’m fine. Needed the excuse to eat this much anyway. We started in shifts, but Chloe took Jodie home and Sid is off brooding somewhere.”

Neither of them said anything for about ten minutes, till Katrine felt strong enough to try and sit up. Addie helped her, but she was still woozy.

“I should probably have a transfusion. AB Positive.”

Addie got a bag from the fridge, labelled as such, and brought it back over. Katrine could barely hold the needle, so she had to instruct him where to poke. It took three tries, but he got it in her wrist. He held it up at shoulder height and began to explain what happened.

“Panzer and I didn’t fare well with the whole quiet thing. One of them called a second, which called a group, you know how it is. If Guthrie hadn’t shot that guard to get a few on her side of the warehouse we probably would have gotten bogged down into a full-on firefight. Long story short, magic books weren’t the craziest thing they were transporting, I found a grenade launcher and Panzer used it for your, uh, distraction. We found the book and got you out of there. Stray has this necklace she made, a mini version of the Component, it took care of some of it while you were still conscious, but it wasn’t healing the bad stuff. If Sid had us searching another ten, even five minutes-” He faltered. “We got you out, and when you’re ready for it there’s a new book.”

Katrine took the blood bag off him and practically ordered him to find a place to sleep. Energy drinks weren’t fuel for magic, no matter what Addie said. He protested, but went anyway, secretly happy she was still there to pester him into self-care.