"Please don't pull stunts like that, okay? You can scare a person to death."
Once she saw it was the Geno-and-Twiggy duo, the tension drained out of Nicole all at once.
She folded her arms under her ample chest and grumbled at the pair, thoroughly unimpressed.
"We thought some dangerous Ethereal had come at us. I nearly pulled the trigger."
To be fair, Fairy hadn't been wrong. The guy standing in front of them really was a high-threat Ethereal. It just happened that this particular Ethereal was a friend.
"It's nothing. When people are up to no good, they never mind a little extra trouble!"
Geno stuck up a thumb as he said it, grinning with all the brightness of youth.
"I wasn't complimenting you, jackass!"
Nicole was fuming. The other three, by contrast, took it in stride.
Billy and Anby put their weapons away, then herded their boss over. "Never mind us. Why are you two here?"
"Twiggy and I took a commission to clear the Ethereals out of the building. What about you? Why come to a place like this? Weren't you off investigating Perlman?" Geno explained why the two of them had turned up, then asked the same of the others.
"That's exactly what we're doing. We found out this was the last place Perlman was seen, and Fairy went through more than half the public cameras in all of New Eridu to get it."
Eous came trotting out on its little legs as well and joined the group.
That caught Geno off guard. He hadn't expected Perlman to surface somewhere like this.
A few more exchanges, and Geno learned the Cunning Hares were headed for the West Tower too, so he offered to travel with them. With that cheerfully settled, the group set off, chatting as they walked.
With their numbers grown, Twiggy felt a good deal safer, and her mood settled considerably.
"Something wrong?"
"No. It's nothing."
Anby was the first to notice Twiggy was off and came over to check on her, but Twiggy found it humiliating that she of all people could be scared of ghosts, so she stammered and waved off the kindness.
But this was Anby. Former captain of the Silver Squad, a woman whose reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance were both maxed out.
One look told her Twiggy was hiding something, so she carefully steered her gaze up and down Twiggy's frame, hunting for a clue.
Then her eyes stopped. They locked onto the middle finger of Twiggy's right hand, where a glittering ring all but glared back at her.
'A ring? Twiggy doesn't wear rings. She says they get in the way of her experiments. And it wasn't there this morning, which means...'
A bold theory bloomed in Anby's mind. Her head whipped toward Geno, walking up ahead and chatting with Billy, then swung back to Twiggy, whose face was a mix of bewilderment, excitement and bashfulness (as Anby saw it). She was certain she had uncovered the truth.
'Geno proposed to Twiggy?!'
Hard to blame her for the leap. Twiggy really was behaving unlike herself, and the ring just happened to be on the middle finger of her right hand. It was very difficult not to believe.
Three parts astonishment, three parts confusion, three parts disbelief, and ninety-one parts murderous urge to gut Geno.
In the end she patted Twiggy's hand, her face full of warm reassurance. "You'd better be happy, all right?"
Twiggy stared back at that expression, the look of an older sister watching her little sister leave for her wedding, and wondered what fit her big sis was throwing this time.
The moment Anby finished, though, she left Twiggy's side and made straight for Geno, fists and feet flying. Geno had no idea what had hit him.
"What'd you hit me for?"
"Nothing. Mosquito."
"...Where would a mosquito come from inside a Hollow? And if there were one, it would have mutated into an Ethereal ages ago."
Put plainly, she just wanted to punch him, and Geno couldn't remember doing anything to earn it.
Nothing for it but to take it. Long experience with Twiggy had taught him one rule: never provoke an angry woman, and if you already have, play dead and wait it out before the conflict escalates.
A man has to know when to bend.
No matter the occasion.
They walked on like that for a while, Eous leading them toward the highest point of the West Tower, the last place Perlman had been seen.
"It's right up there. We're almost there."
Eous pattered along at a trot and soon reached a wide hall. Looking around at the empty, faintly chilly space, a big question mark popped up over its head.
"Strange. This should be the place. Why is there nothing here? Hm? What's this?"
Just as Eous was puzzling over why the scene didn't match expectations, a red light flared in the shadows, and a gunshot came streaking straight at it.
"Look out!"
"Waah!"
Clang! Metal rang on metal. Geno had knocked the incoming bullet aside with the longsword in his hand.
At the same moment Billy caught on, both pistols pouring fire toward the source of the shot, while Anby and Twiggy drew their blades and pushed forward to catch the shooter.
But when they rounded the corner, the spot was empty. Nothing but a spent shell casing and a gaping hole.
"Looks like there are still plenty of rats in this building."
Twiggy pinched the casing between her fingers. The heat hadn't faded; she could feel it burning even through her glove.
"It's a very old batch of ammunition. These days I'd guess only the Rebel Soldiers still use this lot." Anby recognized the round's origin too. For a former soldier, that level of deduction came easily.
Twiggy's brow stayed furrowed all the same.
"Why are the Rebel Soldiers turning up here too? What are these people actually after?"
Whether it was massing in force inside the Crete Hollow or slipping into the Ballet Twins, everything the Rebel Soldiers did was profoundly abnormal.
"If they wanted to strike, they weren't fast enough. If they wanted an ambush, they were far too obvious. Short of coming here to die on purpose, I can't think of a single other plan these Rebel Soldiers might have."
Even after everything they had been through lately, Twiggy still couldn't work out what the Rebel Soldier commanders had in mind. Were there simply too many mouths to feed, and this was their way of trimming the ration list?
That would be monstrous even for them...
"So, do we keep going?"
Eous asked the others once it had recovered from its fright.
As things stood, the other side surely had more troops lying in wait and more traps ready to spring.
"So, do we keep going?"
____
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