She left the dead-drop point alone for now, knowing full well that they would be paying attention to it. The possibility of being attacked at that cafe didn’t particurly concern her — it was one of, if not the most public pce she visited, not far from the central square. No, she just wanted to let them stew for a bit, and to give herself time to take other actions and observe whether the stalkers reacted to them, thus proving their employer was connected.

  Razem welcomed her with open arms, asking her to recount her experience during the raid in the same tone one would ask a friend to recount an amusing bar-crawl story. She readily did as much, keeping some key details to herself out of instinct.

  “I truly appreciate you keeping this old man company, but surely, you haven’t come just to give me a first-hand account,” he said, swirling the blue liquid that filled his gss. He smirked. “I hear you’ve been trying to register an agency. How’s that going for you? Find a new appreciation for the church’s bureaucracy yet?”

  “Yeah. I’m appalled at myself,” Krahe replied, jokingly. “I’m sure someone is stopping up the cogs. Figured you might be able to grease them.”

  “Don’t you know the secur government operates separately from the church?” Razem asked, facetiously.

  “I’m not asking you to act as a clergyman. I’m asking you to use your personal connections to ensure that the process of government are carried out properly and without undue interruptions from other third parties… And to ideally find out the source of those interruptions, if possible. Is that too much to ask? I’ve already got a gaggle of morons trying to tail me, I’m sure if I tear down enough puppets I’ll yank the puppeteer’s hand down by the strings eventually.”

  Razem looked at her for a few seconds. He took a sip, and for a moment, he stopped being a clergyman. For a moment, Krahe was sat across from a bloodstained creature with murder behind the eyes, one of her own kind. Then, it was over.

  “Of course I can clear it up for you. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding,” he said with a genial smile.

  A few days passed.

  Conveniently, as if by pure coincidence, the moment Razem had involved himself, Krahe’s paperwork was no longer an issue, and the only thing left to do was to secure a public office location. However, surely also by pure coincidence, her stalkers only grew more aggressive, attempting to cut her off multiple times in the span of a single day. Outmaneouvering them was a matter of some effort without Barzai, but outmaneouver them she did. It had become abundantly obvious that, the moment they saw her arm, they tunnel-visioned on it to a deleterious degree, and Krahe exploited this fact along with some basic quick-change. Not only did she lose her stalkers through this method, she also managed to get up-close and get a good look at a few of them. In the middle of the night, she stopped by the cafe dead-drop. Even now, one of them was stationed there, but he was fast asleep. She retrieved the memste in the dead-drop and vanished like so much smoke. The memste was of shockingly high quality, wrought of unblemished, perfectly homogenous material and with sigils so tiny they were just lines. Using a separate, disposable eyebox, she pyed it, and found herself disappointed by the carelessness her opponent dispyed — she had thought this was chess, but instead, it was checkers.

  An older woman’s voice filled with an insufferable sense of entitlement spilled out of the device, and a handwritten transcript scrolled alongside it.

  “This is Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat, of the Silversword Agency. You have surely heard of me by now. Meet me at the agency’s office in the Orguss District. Do right by me, and you will have your personal micro-agency before the week is out. Refuse, and you will never find work in my city again. End recording.”

  Going off of the timestamp at the transcript’s bottom, this had been recorded before Krahe got Razem involved. If she had to guess, Krahe imagined Brizogia to be seething in her office at the moment the news reached her. Deciding to add salt onto the wound, Krahe recorded a curt response. She then made her way to the cafe and pced it right there, on the table, in front of the sleeping lookout.

  The message was simple: “Meet me at this cafe, or we don’t meet at all. I hope you make a better offer next time, for your own good. I will be here next Saturday at noon.”

  Krahe intentionally set the meeting time so that there would be a good number of people around. Even if Brizogia pulled strings to get the area cleared out and locked down, that would still achieve Krahe’s intended effect of drawing attention. The point was to make it as painful for Brizogia to try anything shady as possible. If she tried to kill Krahe in broad daylight, it would look bad, and when Krahe inevitably humiliated her by thwarting such an attempt, it would look even worse. The only way for Brizogia to come out of this with a net gain would be to py nice. This was so abundantly obvious that there was no doubt in Krahe’s mind Brizogia would realize it, which in itself was another sort of torment, if Brizogia’s temperament matched Krahe’s first impression of her.

  In the meanwhile, accounting for the possibility of Brizogia’s people actively coming after her, Krahe picked out a suitable killing ground: An old, poorly-maintained house, scheduled for demolition as part merging it with its neighboring property. Its basement had a single entrance, and shared a wall with the neighboring basement. These two things made this pce in particur perfect as a trap — Krahe could cave in the entrance, light the fuse of the actual killing apparatus, and simply skim out of danger, reaching the surface before the bombs went off. It would be like a magic trick. She would keep her tools out of sight and mind, directing their attention as was necessary until the key moment. The explosives she intended to use were of the same type employed in soulbeast hunting, designed to be hidden from creatures who could naturally sense thaumic fluctuations. The only downside was the setup time, making it impractical if you couldn’t get the quarry where you needed it.

  This was all an eborate way of getting around the fact she couldn’t bring Barzai to bear. Were he an option, she would have had a much easier time disposing of these halfassed stalkers, but such was life. One couldn’t always expect to have the full extent of one’s arsenal on-hand.

  Akaso