As the Vultures storm the White Rabbits' stronghold, and collateral damage increases, Goblin and Bugbear - along with Ms. Wizard - try to stay alive long enough to make it all worth it. Though the way things are going, something is going to come crashing down any minute, now.

Hour 4:30: Tay n' Bel's place on Floor 55

"You're Tay?," I ask Ms. Wizard has she stands in the dim, unlit center of what seems to be her living room. Apartment 55af80. Lights are still off in the building and the daylight outside is taking winter break behind some fluffy gray cloud shit.

She's chewing her finger nails and staring at a broken, old-fashioned, non-aether TV is sitting on one side with a white rabbit face spray-painted on it. Besides that, most of the art scattered across the walls is over relatively high quality if amateurish. Anime-coded. Half the stuff in here is broken. Kitchen looks like they are harvesting mushrooms to eat. Enough takeout boxes my guts feel queasy.

"Hey," I say again, "You're Tay?" I'm being rhetorical. Sort of. I need someone on the inside who can speed this process up before the whole building burns down or gets blown up. I'm holding a digital photograph frame that seems to only have one picture that blinks every half-minute like its trying and failing to load more. In the near dark of the room, this bring is bright as fuck.

There are two young women in it. One is Ms. Wizard, sans costume. She is much as she looks now. Dark haired, curls. Dark skin. Freckles. The other is someone else. Looks fairly standard mid-sized small town beauty. Red-hair, straight. Real pale skinned. Big blue eyes. Glasses. They are standing in some park somewhere, bright summer day, and the flashing letters on the digital frame list them as "Tay n' Bel" with each name being roughly over the head of one of them.

Neither of the two women in this photograph makes sense in the context of a violent youth gang.

She walks up and snatches it kind of roughly from my hand. "Leave my shit, alone, old man."

Fair enough, really. Hell, I'm glad to see she isn't taking my shit too quietly. Fight is good, especially since we might have to fight our way to wherever I need her to take me.

Bugbear comes out the back. "There are just...boxes...of pharm in the room at the end of the hall, Bug. Like, real pharm. Kind of stuff for diabetes and herpes."

Tay scoffs and then gets even angrier. "That room was supposed to be locked. Bel must have forgotten."

I point to Bugbear. "He's bad at locks. They keep breaking around him."

"He's cute, for an older guy," she says and I realize she's tossing barbs back. I like her. I suddenly feel the oh-so-dangerous Dad-mode starting to activate it and try to squish it down.

"HEY!," Bug shouts, and I chuckle. Bug is a few years younger than me, but I'm the kind of 52 that looks like my 60s and he's the kind of 49 that looks maybe late 30s thanks, in part, to some gentle hedge-magic transhumanism but also due a bit to his genes. It's a big enough difference that some folks assume we are some sort of family unit, uncle and nephew like, despite the differences in skin color and such. Hob's parents were both from Somalia. Bug's mom was local and his dad was Hob's dad's brother. One of Bug's exes assumed he just had to be Samoan. People tend to see what they want in him.

All this mental drifting isn't getting us anywhere. At this moment, I need to get us moving again. We only dived in here hearing some gunfire erupt a couple blocks over. A large group of people ran by Tay's front door and then didn't stop. While you can hear lots of shouts and shots in the distance, the nearby zone seems relatively clear. For now.

My drone spots a lot of flashing lights in its various cameras. I mean, could be fucking worse. MUNI isn't bringing in any of the big guns, yet, but we might need an escape plan.

"Ok, Ms. Wiz, you know how we get to where need?"

Tay nods. "Yeah, but they have him locked in a null room."

Hour 5: Big Badda Boom

A null room? What the hell? I know the feather is being stored in null box, cut off from the Soulburn in the way some versions of Hell are all about absolute separation from God, but a whole-ass room? That has to be costly. the kind of stuff they do to really rough hedge mages where shooting them might not be enough.

We are beelining for the nearest stairwell, since apparently Mr. Boris is three floors up, when the whole building shutters and shakes and loud, ominous cracks can be heard firing off in the support structure.

Bug and Wiz scream as the floor slants slightly to stage left. Then, we all go a bit quiet. The screams go quiet. The distant gunshots go quiet. No more crying babies or doors slamming. Hell, it's like Christmas Truce right this second. Like everyone is waiting to see if they are still alive before they pick back up the slaughter.

I try and dig into my drone...

...and the outside makes no sense. There are a ton of emergency vehicles, or were. Now a percentage of them, a fairly big percentage, are smashed. MUNI are fighting a group of folks straight out of a street-Sam fan convention. People with some heavy chrome aether-upgrades and gnole-tech. Who the fuck are these fuckers?

And why the fuck is my first thought that I have to keep them away from Tay? From Wiz....think in codenames. It helps.

"Ok, Wiz, stair..."

The floor in front of us tears away with a massive roar like the building just developed a sinkhole. FUCK. Chunks of Floor 55 have just plowed through at least Floor 54 and it sounds like are gearing up to continue their journey.

"...well, shit."

She grabs my shoulder and pulls me back towards a set of sliding doors two blocks down. An elevator. A goddamned elevator in a collapsing building with no power.

"Look, I appreciate..."

"Shut the fuck up and get these open, we can climb up the inside. Or does prune juice make your hands too slippery?"

"That doesn't..."

Bugbear forces open the doors and leans in but yanks his head back right as gunfire rips out of the confined space.

"Hey, boss, we got company."

Boss my ass. He only calls me that when he sures the job is failing and he can imply it is somehow my fault.

I think about trying to make a run back the way we came but honestly, her plan has merit, and I'm looking forward to beating a few folks. With guns. They, I mean. Me, I just got my fists. Makes it more satisfying.

Ok, I need to think about my life insurance options more clearly.

"You still got your gun?," I ask Wiz...

...and she nods, pulling out a simple barely aether-kissed number. She's not the most confident person holding a gun that I have ever seen but she at least is holding it in a way that suggest she knows how to point it and make it go bang.

"Good, you and Bug take a few shots and let me know the set-up."

Wiz nods and then joins Bugbear in firing, somewhat blindly, into the elevator shaft.

Bullets tear back through the opening and Wiz yelps a bit. Bugbear yanks the door back partially closed which absorbs most of the shots. Based on screams down below, they hit at least one of the fucks.

Bugbear explains what he saw. Five guys on top of the elevator. Possibly trapped since Wiz's gun set off the fire system in the building. At least this means there's a platform.

I come up with a plan, the three of us will jump down and take the fight to them. Wait, this is a lie. My plan was for Bug and I to do it, but Wiz got pissy at me. While there is no in hell this girl has been in as many fights as veterans like us, this is not the kind of city where avoiding fights keeps you alive. Just ask the paramedics who are getting crushed outside by metal armed jackasses.

We leap in...

...and I punch the first guy I see so fast he maybe never realized what the strange, little man in front of him meant. Bugbear and Ms. Wizard land behind me and open fire back to back. Another Vulture is down but I hear Bugbear grunt either from getting shot or taking some sort of shrapnel from all the bullets going off.

At any rate, we are in it now...

With the last of the Vultures dead and us nursing wounds, we start heading up the interior of the elevator, hoping that another explosion doesn't rip it all away.

On the way up, I get a high-priority ping on my ASE and answer it.

It's Arkyu, herself. "Um, Ar..."

"Shut the fuck up Goblin, I see from the tracker that you found my daughter. If you get her away from Alice and alive, I will triple the pay for this job."

I look down at Tay, face barely visible in the very low light in the shaft, but I think of that photo and now the family resemblance is way too obvious.

Well, shit.

Hour 5:30: Crossroads

"Through here. Ratfuck's that way, janitor closet has been turned into a null room. But we should go this way to get to Alice, tell her that her mom is trying to help..."

We are in 58ee19. What was once an apartment has been converted into a gatehouse of sorts. Walls knocked down. Bed in the corner where whatever guard on duty might get some rest. What looks to be two other apartments have been joined with this one, making the whole thing in a ragged mess of an L-shape.

Door was replaced with a keypad that Wiz could get us through. Now we have two directions, both leading further into the inner circle of the White Rabbits.

If the chrome bastards blowing up MUNI cars and no-doubt storming this very building are after the feather like I think they are, then we need to get to the Null Room post-haste and get this shit done so I can call Genny and he can get the word out that the target is neutralized.

Only my big mouth and bad guess has made a wrinkle. A bad one. I assumed, because my own daughter is the kind fraught-bitch that would 100% name herself something like "Queen Goblinslayer" just to spite me, that Alice had to be a familial reference to the Red Queen. A daughter. Maybe a niece.

Only the actual daughter of the Red Queen, Arkyu, is right here. Tay. Goddammit. I only met her because of complete chance. Only snagged her because of her robe. Only got stuck with her because of a freak accident involving a fire alarm and an AED device. Chaos upon chaos upon chaos. Which, somehow, Arkyu had predicted. She's somehow been spying on us from her strange dark otherworld lair.

"Look," I say, holding up my hands, "I was an idiot and made a bad guess. It wasn't Alice's mom who sent us, it was yours."

We are running on the kind of clock that doesn't have time for committee meetings. This is no doubt a terrible idea, but I need to maybe shock Tay, Ms. Wizard, into following us.

Hoping, of course, that her and her mom are on good enough terms that she won't just shoot me instead.

"Well, we were actually hired to get in and find Boris and wreck some magical feather he has before a bunch of real bad people can get to it. Bad people who are probably around Floor 20 and killing everything in their way. Only Arkyu...your mom...just called me and said she also wanted me to..."

"Yeah, I know, dipshit. You weren't supposed to figure it out until after the job..."

""Fuck," she says. Then, louder, "FUCK!""

I am definitely getting left behind by a woman young enough that she still thinks she has a future in front of her despite choosing to live in The GLOW and I'm not happy about it, at all. BUT, death is coming on fast legs and I ain't gut time to pity pity party. "I don't know what is going on, but..."

"Shut the fuck up, Goblin. God."

She pulls a piece of bright gum out and starts chewing on it. Her eyes go a bit glossy for a second but then clear. Some sort of microdose.

"I was supposed to be with my mom today, only she said that I should hang around the building and wait for you to show up. Let you get thirty seconds from finishing the job and then she was going to call you and call it off, say the client decided to keep the feather. I was her insurance plan.

"She realizes it is worth way more than the paltry sum that Rosa bitch is paying her. Mom had been telling me how to find you. Why else do you think I came right away? If you hadn't grabbed me, I'd probably have faked tripping or some shit."

Another piece of gum while I process this. This time her eyes stay glossy for longer. The effect stacking.

"I'm going to be honest," I say, "I'm thinking really mean thoughts about your mom right now but our only salvation is getting rid of the prize before the contestants with war gear grafted to their body wins this game show. Door number three is a goat and we are in the process of opening the bitch. Take me to the fucking null room, please."

I need to talk to Arkyu about this level of fucking subterfuge which frankly is at least two degrees north of her normal amount of fuck-Goblin-but-pay-him-well bullshit but right now the biggest trump card into an entire deck of trump cards is 2 meters from me. And pouting that her and her mom got caught before I could have gotten absolutely cucked from full pay.

The Final Hour

The null room, from the outside, is some sort of utility closet but the door has been rebuilt to look like sleek black marble. It might be sleek black marble. Sue me, I'm not a rock dude.

I also mostly know these things by principle. Rumplestiltskin, the only operative I ever met shorter than me, fucked up and offed an ex-Order member's daughter while trying to assassinate a known pimp and all around general fucktard. Rump was 95% old school but liked to jack up into pillars of pleasures unknown to us regular mortals and had a stack of strange sigils grafted right to his dick that made the Kama Sutra woefully inadequate.

His punishment, once it came out that person who put the order out for the pimp was the ex-Order member himself - who had been trying to cut his daughter's new questionable boyfriend out of the picture - was to take a plea bargain deal which sunk the ex-Order fuck and plopped Rump into a null room for six months with a stack of Louis L'Amour books and a perfectly normal dick.

Rump shot himself in the head five days after getting back out.

Turns out even non-GLOW spots of the earth have some amount of latent Soulburn going at all times. A null room is like forcing an artist to stare at a black wall long with nothing but stale rice cakes to much on. Do it long enough, and their brains run out of whatever juice is required for them to even hallucinate color.

Only Soulburn is worse than any color. Losing that, and then getting it back after a length of time does terrible shit to your... well, to your soul.

"You can get us in?," I ask Tay who is now on her third piece of gum. First one was a few seconds. Then around twice as long. This one has taken her out for a minute. The building has shaken twice the past ten minutes and I suspect we are racking up some hellacious interest charges on the time we are borrowing.

I'm doing some mental math about what would happen if all three of us go out in a single bubble suit and hope for the best. Maybe the burning ambulances will cushion our fall.

She shakes her head no, and is trying to pop another piece of gum into her mouth when I slap it away. "Corpses don't chew gum, you got it? You can get high once we survive through this."

She seems like she is going to protest but just sighs loudly. I have figured out she's probably a couple of years older than Jullie but my girl has her beat in emotional maturity now that Tay has had to drop the character.

"Bug?," I ask-tell my long-term partner to do his thing.

He tabs across the featureless door, finding access points I couldn't even see, and it cracks open. I gently pull on Tay's arm...

...but she is already walking in the direction. She lets me hold on to her arm but leans a bit away from me like she wants it clear that there's a hair of protest here.

We come in and look down at Boris "Ratfuck" Oblonsky in his Null Room cell. The interior, including floor and ceiling, is coated in that same black-marble looking material. But there's a water cooler, some MRE-type foods, and a small porty-potty inside. Along with a bed and a couch and a TV with an old school DVD player and a stack of cartoons. He's half-crashed on the couch and staring blankly up at the ceiling.

Why do all this instead of just kill him and take the null box, itself?

Then I see why, a strange onyx-colored cord with red veins attach to a black, metallic box. Somehow he has set up his null box to a deadman's switch and it is powered, apparently, by his own blood flow.

Strange.

He blinks a few time like he is waking up from cryo-sleep and I look down at him. "Ratfuck...," I start...

...and he interrupts, saying, "Hey, Goblin. Shit! Buggie! Good to see you guys. Thanks! Sorry about the explo..."

Then his sigils all over his bald head flare up bright blue and he slumps over. Apparently, dead.

The red lines start to slow and stop and then box makes a high-pitched, ominous noise.

"FUCK FUCK FUCK," I say, but Bugbear is already on it.

Within six seconds, and based on the increasing beeps that was maybe six out of ten total we had, the box stops making a noise and a few seconds after that has been opened up. Blood flowing back out of a cable he has cut and is pumping in his fist to buy just a bit more time.

Inside there is a laptop and a large glowing feather. I wait until Bugbear has picked up the laptop and I go to grab the feather, to get ready to destroy it or possible haggle against Arkyu with it in whatever petty way I can muster, when a voice stops me.

"I'd be very careful touching that, Garret."

At the sound of the voice. I freeze. And I don't mean in a broad, "Old Goblin got spooked" sense. I mean I can't move my body. Bugbear is frozen leaning over to put the laptop down. I can't turn my head to look at Tay but I can guess she also is unable to move.

Then he walks around in front of me. The fat guy from the bodega. Mr. Unsweet. He smiles at me then bends over and picks up the feather and it looks like he sticks in the sleaves his Hawaiian shirt only I realize it is more like he put into the skin of his own arm.

A flash of images hit me as my body regains control and before I can process them, I see Tay pointing a gun at the guy, saying something about that belonging to her mom, and I'm moving in front of the gun while turning to look Tay in her scared, angry eyes and try and stop her from pulling the trigger...

...and I feel the bullet punch through my ribs.

The only real thought I have as I am pretty sure I am dying is that it's a shame because Tay and Jullie could probably have been good friends.

Only there is no blood. It hurts like a bitch but the bullet has just stopped there against my chest like my ribs are made out of some sort of super-alloy. I had felt it tear through my organs but it is now like the rules of that past half-second were rewritten.

I feel his hand on my back, and I realize that I just witnessed...I just became...a Christmas Miracle.

I'm terrified. Those fucking images. Of hundreds screaming as code programmed into the Soulburn fired off to bring something up from the depths, code that has been rewritten to bend the energy surge back into the GLOW itself. A fox-faced person screeching as their eyes melted from their skull and down their mask. Order Agents ripping off coats as their sigils melted their flesh.

And over-head, he was flying like a goddamned crow.

Tays eyes burst into tears and she realizes she shot me and and I'm terrified for her. I turn back around to look at him and I see his eyes watching Tay, only they are not eyes. They are Soulburn swirling. More than that, they are the corpse of a nebula hundreds of times the size of our solar system.

A word comes to me, there. Witch-King.

"I knew your mom," he says, talking to Tay. "She tried to kill me a few times. Didn't take."

"My mom has killed a lot men," she says, trying to sound tough, but the effect is ruined by the sobs she lets out.

"True, and to be fair I did almost kill her a couple of times. Seeing how her daughter turned out, I'm glad I failed."

He smiles at that and then bends down and picks up the body of Boris and the laptop like the former weighs nothing and the latter weighs everything. He hands the laptop to me.

"I asked Rosa to send out the job request. She and I talk, sometimes. She owed me a favor."

"Um," I say, at a loss for words, "what do I call you?"

"I am partial to Nurse."

It is only now that I see that Bugbear is sitting cross-legged like a little child. I turn to see what Tay is doing and she misreads my gesture and pulls me into a hug and I feel her tears running my neck. She's taller than me so it is a bit awkward, but she is very much so a small child that needs a hug. So...

I give her one.

Behind me, I hear the man start a strange song, a song that turns into the loud caw of a crow the size of allspace, which turns into the screams every person who has ever died in The GLOW, only with a few words blended in, and then...

We are back in the other-Lobby of Arkyu's domain and Genny is running from around a corner, gun out.

He stops and stares at us. Puts the gun down. I'm still holding on to Tay and doing my best to be a supportive surrogate dad.

I reach a free arm and hand Genny the laptop. Then I puzzle out what the words hidden in the deafening noise were.

"Oh, um, Eustace says hi and wants you to know that Hitomi is fine."

And just like that, Genny Yusada, possibly the most dangerous man alive in the entirety of the GLOW, which means the entirety of the whole world, bursts out in tears.

Well, fuck me.

---