Author's Note. This is the second part of a story is designed to examine what Sonic's fight against Robotnik would be like if it more closely resembled a conflict on Earth. Further details should be obtained by reading the story and by reading part one, Gardenia. Thanks very much for your readership and any reviews you provide! The story is still being written, and your input can only help to make the story better.

Persona non Grata

a story of Mobius in four parts

Part One: Gardenia

(a rounded image of Sonic Hedgehog rolled into an impervious razor ball, face contorted in vicious joy, pistols in both hands, bordered by a snake desperately seeking to bite its own tail)

Part Two: Burning Beard

(Sally Acorn struggles to carry ball in heavy gloves; a purple stole knotted about her neck; she is turned away to face a bank of trivid cameras, lights casting her in silhouette, a single eye looking back over her shoulder; the image is bordered in a rectangular frame of ornate swords in their scabbards)

(1) Security District, Robotroplis, 1 Floreal 3230. Subject Sally Acorn begins the Knight's Gambit.

(2) Tolsalvey, Robotropolis, 2 Floreal 3230. Subject T. Baxter Posniak is bad at his job; Subject Sally Acorn is paged.

(3) Security District, Robotropolis, 2 Floreal 3230. Subject Amanda Polgato fights organics; Subject Snively Kolensky bears no fault.

(4) Terscala, 2 Floreal 3230. Subjects Baxter Posniak and Lupe Almatrican take account; Subject Myron Catalano revisits the scene of a crime.

(5) Unincorporated Green Hills Administrative District, 3 Floreal 3230. Subject Antoine D'Coolette's medical care develops a complication; Subject Molly Lotor has a meeting with her boss.

(6) Port Orange, 3 Floreal 3230. Subjects Sonic Hedgehog and Sally Acorn are lonely; Subject Tails Prower visits the old neighborhood.

(7) West Molineaux, 4 Floreal 3230. Subjects Joshua Dursine, Frank Pulaski, Baxter Posniak, and Renee Donlevy unknowingly compare notes.

(8) Muzenkspitz, 4 Floreal 3230. Subject Lila Spitz gives a history lesson; Subject Rotarak Tulugarjuk stops a wild pitch.

(9) Moselle, 5 Floreal 3230. Subject Lupe Almatrican makes a new friend; Subject Renee Donlevy's investigations unexpectedly intersect.

(10) Security District, 7 Floreal 3230. Subject Sonic Hedgehog and others go to the hospital.

(11) Security District, 7 Floreal 3230, continuing. Subject Tails Prower finds that nothing seems to go right; Subject Sally Acorn takes a snapshot; Subject Amanda Polgato thinks harder than she has in years.

(12) Tolsalvey, 8 Floreal 3230. Subject Baxter Posniak's employment and residential situations are complicated; Subject Joshua Dursine runs up his utilities bill; Subject Molly Lotor discovers a new talent.

(13) Great Forest, 8 Floreal 3230. Subject Tails Prower loses his tough coat; Subject Sonic Hedgehog confronts his fear; Subject Sally Acorn has a medical problem.

(14) Great Forest, 9 Floreal 3230. Subject Sally Acorn undergoes a medical procedure.

(15) Grosse Durchfahren, 2 Firmaire 3213. Subject Julian Kintobor describes a parabola.

(16) Kingsport, 11 Floreal 3230. Various subjects leave and return home; Subject Sally Acorn wins the morning news cycle.

(17) High Demon, 11 Floreal 3230. Subject Sally Acorn considers fear and love; Subject Sonic Hedgehog emigrates.

Part Three: Search and Destroy

Part Four: Immigrant Song

(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)

Security District, Robotropolis, 1 Floreal 3225

The human's tie was too thin, limp and crimson, as though someone had botched the job of slitting his throat. Above the wound his face was pale, and that was about all that could be said of it. It seemed to change shape before Renee's eyes, indeterminate, suspended between the features of all of the other VIP's milling about in the shadow of the polished, new glass monolith reaching to the sky at 33 West Five Trees Street, two blocks west of the reconstructed Palace itself, known to most as the Carnival Building, probably because of the company's Carnival Wheel logo plainly visible behind the reception desk in the lobby inside. "Have you ever considered a career in private security?" he asked.

The pine marten blinked, staring at him a little more closely. "What?" He was aware that she had a job now, right?

"Pawel," the male said, extending his hand, and then followed it with a Lachels surname with four syllables and four v's. "Vice President of Hydrocarbons, Ellingson Mineral. We're going to be moving our Robotropolis offices into the twentieth through fortieth floors. Historically we've had some trouble with our desert explorations—"

"Of course," Renee nodded, dancing her eyes around the periphery of the wide cement plaza they'd decided to name Freedom Square. It was filled now with dark human suits, tables full of delicate vulpine fingerfood, eight or so mobians in tuxedos caressing the smooth curves of viols and violins. Along the sidewalk and the property lines were red-painted wooden sawterrapods, stenciled POLICE BARRIER, and curious Sunday mobians in tastefully rumpled cotton button-down shirts out of a Dudziak & Lowell catalogue, people wealthy enough to live east of the Great River or with enough time to bother crossing the security checkpoints at the bridges.

Renee's ears stayed on Pawel's moneyed drone while her eye gravitated to the back of the three meter bronze that dominated the front of the square. From here you just got the vulpine and squirrel tails emerging from a pair of Great War-era Mobian Standard Army uniforms, but you could see the weight of the homeland on their wide soldiers, the alert turn of the ears. The city had planned the plaza as "Great War Freedom Memorial Square," before some smartass ingrates joked that Mobian freedom needed a memorial. She wished there were some way to send them to a parallel universe where they could enjoy what freedom they could find beneath Overlander boots—

Just visible around the marble base of the statute was a young canine. He leaned over the barriers behind the back of a yawning, uniformed Robotropolis Police Officer, cobalt fur puffing thick and knotted around his neck and shoulders. Renee glanced down automatically and saw the cuffs of the wolf's pants, more likely to have seen the inside of a rock tumbler than a tumble-drier—

The human's voice pattered on, tight with indignation. ". . . . injustice of double taxation of corporate profits—are you busy, officer? Should I speak with someone else?"

Renee bumped the man's shoulder as she walked past him, speaking to the lapel of her jacket, the mic she kept in place with a lapis Mobian flag-pin: "Post four, wolf, blue fur, no shirt. Take him quietly."

They took him inside, downstairs, she followed down to check it out. The male's bathroom for service employees, her strike of dress heels on the grey tile floor reverberating. She took off the black jacket of her pantsuit and hung it on one of the pegs by the door. The wolf sagged over his spread knees, head low to avoid the lip of the pristine porcelain sink above him, the handcuffs the two uniformed RPD officers had threaded through the p-trap pulling his arms behind him. His fur was lumped and ruffed, his belly and shoulders crisscrossed with raised welts under the fur. One of the cops, a rat, still had his baton out and he was playing with it, spinning it around and around his forearm.

Renee sighed and shared a glance with the other officer, an unhappy otter with droopy whiskers. She didn't need to ask: the wolf kid fought like a demon and hadn't said a damn word. She almost wished she didn't have such a keen nose for subversion.

Stooping before him gave her a cleaner look at his half-lidded eyes and swelling cheeks. The wolf was a kid, real young, and for the first time in more than a year she was reminded of the Royal Army investigation that Captain Snively Kolensky had promoted her away from. That kid, the fox kit with the second tail, in trouble in the middle of the forest, captured by gunrunners after he tried to steal guns for his superiors. She wondered what had happened to him. Dead? Or just turned into a snarling beast like this one?

A good year trying to hunt down this strange group of occasional terrorists who weren't old enough to be out of high school and claimed to be led by the dead Princess Sarah Acorn, and then all of a sudden it was as though it had never happened. The operation had moved into a new phase, no longer an investigation, but a sting. The Lachels intelligence agent Captain Kolensky used had somehow dug up a raccoon that was both trusted by key members of Royal Army and totally beholden to the government for her survival, nicely situated to transmit false information to the rebels, setting them up for capture and destruction.

The old investigation, the hard, slow business of trying to figure out Royal Army's lines of supply and communication, root them out of their safehouses and bases, was languishing. Even though Renee was no longer part of Captain Kolensky's task foce, she would still get calls from bemused MobiusTelecom line workers, telling her that they'd found another one of the illegal phone splices left in their physical plant by the walrus (alias "Rotor"), slowly pulling away the strand of what seemed an endless web of mechanical misdirection designed to keep the government from tracing their calls in real time, keeping their electronic intelligence outdated and useless.

But right now she didn't really care whether they caught the walrus and the hedgehog and the squirrel or not. Why? Just to make way for this pup, even younger and more vicious?

"Are you one of Lupe Almatrican's?" she asked quietly, resting her arms on her bent knees. "Who's your Alpha?" In civilian clothes she was a Good Cop, but she was feeling it, too, too much. It was horrible to think of this kid putting a bomb in a mailbox, popping off at some clueless district official with a pistol two times too big for him, being dragged off, biting and snarling, to a long session on some ISO pain bed . . . . "You haven't done anything, have you? You were just looking. Looking where your Alpha told you to look." Renee leaned forward onto her knees, reached a hand out to rub the pup's neck. "If you—"

Renee felt in the cool motion of the air the wolf's teeth slapping together in front of her nose. She fell back onto her rump, legs splayed, and gasped as the pup spat a wad of bloody spit into her right eye, flecks of bright red foam spattering the floor. "Police whore!"

The heel of Renee's right shoe snapped as she drove her foot into the pup's chest. His skull slammed into the sink, closing his jaws over his tongue with a wet chop. The marten pulled the wolf's blood out of her face and shook it to the floor. The wolf's head bobbed sleepily, an incipient whine in his throat as the pain held him. The canine phlegm still matted Renee's fingerfur as she tightened her knuckles into a fist—

"I'm an undercover agent."

One of the badgers had a giggle that was far too weightless and girlish for his size. She couldn't see him. Both of them were behind her. "You're what?"

"I aAH! Ah!" The chain holding Renee's arms above her head winched from taut to tight. Her weight shifted from the balls of her shivering feet to her big toes. Her calves failed and tightened into rock. She felt her lips whimpering, pressing each other, wet.

That giggle. "I'm sorry, I—hehe—I couldn't quite, um, hear you."

She started crying. She wanted to cry. She was failing more miserably than she had ever feared; betraying her mission and her superiors and her country—

"Larry, shut up. Sydney, we need an explanation for the bodies. If you killed them, just tell us and we can stop stressing you. Because if you don't tell us, we're going to have to move on to hurting you. Do you understand me?"

"I'm a . . . . gugugods I'm an ISO agent. My real name is Renee Donlevy. I was in Marigold on a classified mission. I—I shouldn't be here—"

". . . To do what?"

"To kill a cyborg. A failed military experiment, dangerous."

"What, like a . . . like an Assaultbot? That thinks, or something?"

"No. It was a rabbit."

"Oh, a rabbot?" Larry giggled. "Why would you want to kill a cute little bunny rabbot?"

Such disappointment in that gentle voice. "Sidney. Really now. Did you think we were going to believe that?"

"It's true," she wept, "it's true it's true it's true it's—"

"Sidney," the badger interrupted, "have you heard of the 'pain bed'?"—

"Ma'am?" The otter had put her baton under the pup's neck, holding him firmly and silently against the underside of the sink. "You alright?"

Renee blinked, not taking her eyes away from the wolf's clenching and unclenching her shivering right hand. "Tell your Alpha that this city," she said, her voice an amphibious croak, "is off limits. I don't care how strong you think you are in Terscala. Any pack wolf that sets foot in the capital will learn that the strongest pack of all calls Robotnik its Alpha." She got to her feet slowly, sloppily, wobbling as she rediscovered her torn heel and kicked her shoes off. "Keep him down here until after the party. Then take him to the Gordon's Crossing freightyard and dump him. He'll find his way home."

"Sure thing, ma'am," the rat sat said, saluting loosely with his baton. He kept swinging it as she turned to the door. "Howsabout it, puppy? You want to call me Alpha, HUH—"

Renee lost the sound of any collision when she slammed the steel door sharply closed behind her.

The day before the mission, they went to Tolsalvey, just the three of them. They tended to group two together; the third would dash ahead through the relaxed Sunday streets to stare into a mute shopwindow, or dally behind, tying a shoelace. It was as though there were some strange tripolar magnetism at work. Perhaps there was. They had never been all three together much, by design, by necessity, and now all of them were on some level wondering if it risked some dangerous chemical reaction.

They walked along the streets with no aim other than staying south of the Desantis Post Road. There Internal Security Office had run out of money for the new CCTV cameras that watched most of Ascogne-Dascogne for student radicals aping Independence University north of the border, for student maniacs out to recreate last winter's campus riot at Corukas Technical. But they were still close enough to wade in the shallows of the University ecosystem. In a thin strip of grass and trees between the two one-way streets of D'Ansuzio Promenade cheap folding tables were lined with the young and old mobians that made up the ALL DAY CHESS PARTY. Banners hung end-to-end from rusted poles, £ 5 FOR 5 MIN, £ 15 FOR 30 MIN. Beneath them the sharks moved up and down the line, a pair of bony, underfed weasels and a very, very old mouse, smacking down the dilettante undergraduates from the University.

Tails jaydashed in front of a honking car to hook his snout around a meerkat in a GEOLOGY ROCKS! t-shirt and peer at one of the active boards. Sonic hung back uncertainly, brushing a dirty white glove back over his limp quills. Sally was always reading her puzzle books with the chess boards. "You and Tails gonna want to hang out here?" he whined. Then he glanced over at Sally. "Because, you know . . . ." His lip drooped, uncertainly. "I mean, we could hang out here, for a while." He blinked and put a smile onto his face like a stick-up man tying a bandana over his snout.

They crossed the street together and watched Tails stare first with struggling frustration and then wide-eyed admiration at three games being played by the same weasel. The weasel would hunker down over a board, study and plan and check for about three seconds each and dance away to the next board, turning his eyes to the third while his hand was still slapping the clock.

"What do you say, young sir?" The second weasel approached Sonic with the showman-politeness of the chronically poor, rubbing a white king between his palms. "Five for five? Ten more and I'll play against the lady and—" He paused, realizing at a second thought that the fox couldn't be their son. "And your friend here."

Sonic shook his head, quills half-up, closed eyes on his sneakers. "Nah, I don't, uh . . . ." He tried not to look at Sally's standing beside him, and tried to come up with something other than I don't know how to play chess. "It's just too slow for me," he laughed defiantly, watching the weasel from arrowslit eyes.

"At five minutes?" the weasel asked with a devious grin, picking up a second white king and holding it beside his head. "Five sovs gets bughouse, two minute flag."

"Bughouse . . . ." Sally groaned, pressing her fingers to her temples.

"Can we play bughouse, Aunt Sally?" Tails was tugging on the sleeve of her black windbreaker, huge young eyes begging like a repen puppy's. Sally didn't know where the kit had heard of bastardized, frantic, two-board team chess, unless he'd heard her complain to Rotor that bughouse had a reputation for turning budding masters into twitch-wrist caffeine cases—"I promise I won't get addicted to it please," Tails hopped on his sneakertoes, "please please can we play bughouse with Uncle Sonic?"

Sonic cringed; Sally sighed. They spoke in unison: "Tails, I—"

Five minutes and fifteen sovereigns later they were on their third game, Tails running the attack board, using most of his turns to lay down pieces that Sally had taken from the weasel on her board. If he hadn't played before he quickly learned the wild attacks the game required and yapped like a surgeon for tools to chase the white king about the board: "pawn . . . pawn . . . pawn," barely audible over Sonic, who grasped the spirit of the enterprise: "Get him!" He leaned over Tails' shoulder to point a gloved finger at the white king, "Get him! Get him!" And on the next board Sally traded a little plastic queen for a pawn, a little plastic knight for pawn, a little plastic priest for pawn, smiling at the light joy in the movement of her fingers.

It lasted as long as it could.

The next day was Moonday, cooler, fewer clouds. Tails returned very early, the sky a muted dawn blue. He wore a field hockey t-shirt over his cracking winter fur, straps of a small pack rubbed his shoulders. A chill breeze bit his thin ears and wet nose. Rotor walked alongside, the growing tension of the approaching mission muted not only by fatigue but what he guiltily realized was pleasure at the sound and motion of the city. "Y'all shouldn't spend—hrg—so much time with me," Bunnie had sighed two days ago, lifting again and again the tree-trunk segment Rotor had chainsawed into a clumsy, rough-gripped hand-weight for her. She'd used her unarmored hand—Rotor suggested it as a good idea to avoid scoliosis, though whatever nanomachinery infested Bunnie's biology seemed to counteract the risk of spinal curvature presented by her macromachinery. Most of the things that caused her the most discomfort—the botched attack on the hair follicles in her legs that left her with constant eczema, the disappearance of half her form under bulbous ablative armor—were things about which Rotor could do nothing. Well, nothing serious, just little things: his ridiculous little cortisone oilcan contraption; a rough tailor's job on the right sleeve of that purple t-shirt she loved. "It'll be good for you to—rrgh—get into a big ol' city," she said.

"Have you ever smelled one up close?"

She'd dropped the weight with a heavy, leaf-muffled thump, wiped her raw palm's dust and splinters off on her bellyfur. "I remember snatches a' Fortune—think I must have visited, once, when it was really little. Then she went—" Pause, a shiver signifying the momentary fight to reclaim another one of her memories, pushing past the strange distance Bunnie felt toward everything in her life before Snively had subjected her to his treatments. "—I saw a bit of Terscala back when I ran off with Rhett to fight under the Committee. Glass and steel and dust. Robotnik had it pretty much in hand, but it still smelled like burnt octane."

"All those attractions, huh?"

"You're missin' the big one."

"Rhett?"

". . . and all sortsa people," Bunnie had allowed, a hot blush gathered in the dark of her flopped ear. "Snow fun to spend all your time out on the farm."

"Or in a cave. I wish I could get Sally to agree to more travel for you, Bunnie." Rotor had hesitated awkwardly at the threshold of the joke, before tumbling into it face first: "Or at least that I was ravishing as old Rhett."

"Sally's right—you can't have pictures of me floatin' round till you can prove it was Snively done the experiments. And Rhett was always so . . . . He wasn't sweet. Not like you."

Her snout had brushed down his this bristles as she kissed him on the cheek.

No one else on the planet knew what Rotor was thinking, probably not even more experienced Bunnie with her petit aristocrat memories. He was still embarrassed. He could see the artist falling in love with his creation. But a mechanic?

"This way," Tails said, tugging him sluggishly from his reverie.

"Huh," Rotor muttered, looking at the row of perfect, unused chessboards. Tails walked silently. He'd been sullen ever since Sally kissed his nose at five a.m., promising a pizza dinner when they reunited in the evening.

The weasels were elsewhere; just the mouse sat in a lawn chair, ice blue eyes and sparse gray fur emerging from an unseasonably heavy parka, a green thermos on the ground beside him. Tails stood across the board, sharing the silence, then looked mutely at Rotor until the walrus produced five sovereigns. Quivering fingers emerged from the mouse's sleeves to take the coin and wind the clocks to 11:30. Tails touched his fingers to the white king, feeling the points of its crown, and moved its pawn two spaces forward.

Rotor hadn't learned as a kid—chess wasn't as big in the old country as it was in Mobius—and hadn't felt the need to since. Sally said Tails was good for his age, but the old man owned him. The mouse used two minutes to Tails' eight, and he studied the boy's face as much as the board. When Tails had his queen dodge a strike by her enemy counterpart, the mouse reached out and stilled the clocks.

"You are a strange one," the mouse said in a thin, dry squeak, tinted with Antoine's accent. "Why do you not trade queens with me?"

Tails shrugged. His ears were flat; he didn't meet the rodent's eyes. "I like the queen. It goes as fast as it wants—"

"This is the third time you have refused to trade pieces." His nose indicated the places of Tails' soldiers: "To trade your king's knight would have been to your mild advantage, unsettling the pawns on my queen's flank. To avoid trading your bishop and queen, you have ceded control of the center and given me an unopposed file of attack. Those who play bughouse—" the mouse spat this word from his lips as though it were a disgusting, chitinous insect in his mouth, bock-house— "normally face the opposite problem, but the decision not take a piece requires as much thought as to take it. You are young, but you seem to understand these difficulties you are causing yourself." His thin-furred scalp wrinkled: "Yes?"

". . . . I don't like to lose pieces," Tails replied, quietly.

The mouse searched the kit's face a moment before his wrinkled features drooped with placid understanding. "A recent complaint of young players," he said, his voice almost a laugh. "I am now . . . eighty-three years old. War has spanned your life, but this game will endure past any war. It is merely plastic, yes? No buildings are overturned, no one is hurt."

"Do you want to go?" Rotor asked, as quietly as he could. After a moment he realized that Tails wasn't answering because he was crying. "Let's go. We'll see you around, pops."

Tails gave a little boy's growl as he walked up the sidewalk, high pitched and soft at its edges, a sound that immediately made him look around, embarrassed, too see if any older kids were snickering.

"I'm worried about them, too," Rotor sighed.

"Then let's go," Tails mumbled, angrily wiping his arm fur under his eyes, trying to wrestle his voice down into his chest. "Let's go wait for them with everyone else."

Rotor fought his belly's weight with a heavy, deep breath. Quinn was playing sniper since Antoine was going with Sonic and Sally. Cat and Gunther Maersk were waiting with some Standard Army troops in a borrowed van, ready to haul ass if everything went to hell. He was sure a fat walrus and a prepubescent fox would make all the difference in the world.

But he knew how Tails felt right now, too. "Alright," he decided. "We'll catch a cab as soon as I can find one." He just hoped he'd be able to keep the kit safe if anything happened. Wiping his wet nose with the back of his glove in the open street, he looked so fragile.

"Thanks, Rotor," Tails said, sniffing. He reached up and felt again to make sure he was wearing his backpack. In it was a book he was reading and, hidden beneath a sweatshirt and long familiar from clandestine practice with Sonic, two pistols.

Every morning at five, for a month, Jacques and Andre would show up at Lord's Haven Hospital in Green Hills, the last suburb south of Robotropolis. They would suit up in the khaki private security uniforms, human-styled, long sleeves and pants. At six they would load the van and drive out from the recessed loading dock of the morgue. Right as they reached the overpass and the long, sloping stretch of the highway, Jacques would pull off into a Coffee Time Donuts that was sleepily drifting towards bankruptcy and park behind it in a lot heavy with the too-sweet, dirty scent of garbage. Andre would head inside for six glazed donuts, and Jacques would drum his fingers tensely on the wheel and wait to have the shit kicked out of him.

Jacques was a tree squirrel—royal squirrel, as was sometimes still said—and his deep brown eyes settled on the thin line of trees at the back of the lot that marked the end of the south suburbs, plowed fields of barley behind the leaves. That was where the terrorists would come from, just like fifteen years ago in the Worm foothills, the humans coming out of cover every evening like the fog.

This assignment was insane. These strict orders. When you are attacked, you do not just sit and take it! No matter how clever a trap you think you have or how consistent a history your enemy has of not killing anyone if they can help it (except the hedgehog). When the terrorists finally attacked, Jacques would run them down with the van. If the van failed he would shoot them.

They did not attack. Andre would return, invariably unmolested. Jacques would drive onto the northbound highway and they would eat donuts under the arrows to SOUTH SUBURBS/TOLSALVEY. "I wish they'd just come at us, already," Jacques would say—he said it this time, anyway.

"You're crazy," Andre replied, tiny mouth munching with quick little bites, his sharp ferret eyes rolling after billboards as they passed. "They say that bastard the hedgehog's killed two people and given five more five months in the hospital. I don't want to see a single hair of him. If I do, we're going to see if he can dodge a bullet."

"Yeah, I hear you." They would drive two hours, heavy uniforms cooking them even with the windows open, to an industrial park in the burbs, which wasn't much of a park. It reminded Jacques of a military airstrip with more empty cement, smaller hangars and no planes. They would drop the package with Gaumont Labs receiving just inside a sweltering whitewashed warehouse, grab a nasty lunch at a Jimmy's and eat it in the van on the way back south, the highway stretching long and monotonous—

"Shit, right there!"

Jacques cut the van across a lane of honking traffic into the tight Roisin Boulevard offramp, a nervous chitter in his throat as he passed the yellow MAX 30 KPH sign, feeling the van lurch beneath him as he pumped the breaks and brought it tensely into line. "I see it; I see it."

"Sure you do. Was your head this deep in the clouds back in the Worm campaign?" Andre shook his head snidely, crooking his elbow out the open window to catch the breeze in his long sleeve and his loose brown hair. Jacques glanced, then looked again as smooth and dreamlike, the hedgehog's head drifted into sight from behind the ferret's. Blue quills, a mad grin totally unstressed as he . . . ran? Alongside the car? Andre shook his head, smiling. "You ought to be dead by now, you oblivious son of a bitch."

White glovefingers interlaced in Andre's hair and slammed his temple against the doorframe. Jacques pulled his sidearm and felt the tire treads taking leave of the asphalt and without thinking he dropped the gun into the footwell and wrestled some centripetal force into the wheels. The hedgehog clambered in the window viscous and liquid, plopping onto Andre's lap in a ball of spikes.

Jacques kept his eyes taut on the street, hands at ten and two. "Don't hurt me."

"Whassat?" the hog asked. He jerked himself up with a sound of ripping fabric, leaving a lonely quill in Andre's thigh.

Jacques flinched, slowly rolling the van to a STOP at the intersection with Roisin. "Just . . ." He pressed his cheek to the wheel as his fingers groped by the brake pedal for his gun. The hog didn't kick him very hard, just sort of lifted him back against the wall with a quick press from the sole of his sneaker. The squirrel laughed, terrified. "You can't blame m-me for trying." It became a question. "Can you?"

The hog squinted, uncertain. "I dunno." What kind of question was that? He didn't know how to answer it. But an impulse came to him and he followed it, mashing the hopeful face into the wheel with a satisfying little honk! Sonic took the van to the shoulder by a vacant, tree strewn lot and got the guards out of the—

"Sonic," Sally goggled as he tumbled the guards out of the passenger door into the weeds. The ferret had an eye open, but they were both nowhere close to waking up.

He dusted his gloves, winked. "Ready to do it to it, Sal?" Just a little break and enter and steal evidence of a secret vivisection project that could bring down the government.

She raised her eyes and shook her head, smiling. "Shame on you,Sonic Hedgehog," she chided, brushing her hair out of her eyes as she knelt to undress one of the guards.

She and Ant switched clothes and got out the raccoon's ID cards and stuff while Sonic jerked open the back of the van and hopped in. The coon chick called it a bodybag, but it was more of a carton, hollow at a knock, styrofoamy to the touch. Army make, she'd said. Sonic smiled at the thought that there was fast food inside rather than a sleeping person for the robot experiments.

Sally and Ant came up. Ant had put on a pair of fake tiny glasses, the ones with little circle lenses, and he looked more like himself than ever. And Sally—

"You look good in uniform," Sonic purred as she clambered into the van with him. "Hey," he said, realizing. She glanced at him, snout bent quizzically. We're in a van, he mouthed. He leaned against the wall, and the chassis rocked beneath them.

Sally opened her mouth all sassy and her eyes sharp and sparkling oh you filthy BEAST and Sonic leapt over the bodybag and they did it right there in front of Antoine's hanging open mouth, to hell with all her "I just can't risk it for the next few months not until we're done with the blah blah blah I'm a cold bitch who doesn't know what's good for me" stuff, had each other right there with the doors open—

Actually he leaned back against the wall, eyes closed, somehow shutting off his brain's access to his limbs and letting the sensations of burn through him. Torture. Gods in hell, he muttered, brushing his lips silently together. He had wanted things before; some days he wanted everything he saw or scented, butshe was becoming . . . . worse, different. How could all the want stay inside him? Fuck, he would burst.

"Well, at least we've done one good thing. And before we even make it inside the lab," Sally said, taking one of the guard's codekeys and sliding it into the bodybag's security lock with a beep. "Wake up, fellah, it's your lucky day."

The smell hit all of them hard: artificial, sickly-sweet, and underneath it that faint shit-scent. Antoine's sleeve went to his nose with a weak, "oh, mon dieux!"

Sonic wrinkled his snout, quills low, and scratched at his chin in confusion. "Coon chick said the test subjects were supposed to be alive, right?"

Kain Blackwood - 2008