Chapter Nine

It took quite a while – and quite a lot of what seemed like very grudging help from Ben - for Sketchy to find what he was looking for. There were a lot more environmental cleanup groups in Seattle than Sketchy had expected, and it turned out his idea of starting with the government-sponsored ones had been a big mistake, totalling three wasted hours. In the end it was an independent company, RCF Demolition & Disposal, who had only branched into strictly environmental projects within the past two years, where he found what he had been looking for.

He saw that for the two years RCF had been focused on environmental work, they'd had authority over a condemned apartment building in Sector Two. Of every project the company had running, this one had been on their books the longest, and nothing seemed to be happening there. The building was simple cordoned off, and no work was being done that anybody knew about.

As Sketchy packed up his things, Mitchell excused himself to make a call, saying he wouldn't be able to go with, given the rest of his workload. He slapped Sketchy lightly on the shoulder as he walked away. Once he was out of sight, he dialled the number of the team who had been assigned to follow the younger man.

"Sterritt," a woman's voice answered. He didn't know her personally, but she had a good reputation as a fighter, and had been briefly considered for joining the Phalanx team Mitchell himself belonged to - an honour which a very select few were granted had they not been bred specifically for that purpose of leading the warrior line.

"This is Ben Mitchell. He's headed for the burial site in Sector Two. We still have people there on and off; I'll contact them, tell them to clean up and clear out."

"Is he marked?" Sterritt enquired.

"Yes. Relaying the frequency now."

"Good. We're attempting to isolate his cell frequency. Might not work until there are less people around him, but the tracer signal is good."

"You'll have to get it soon. It's a soluble tracker on his clothing," he lectured. "It won't last five minutes in the rain. If we miss this we miss forty-eight hours of surveillance; he's at the messenger service all day tomorrow, so I won't get a chance to mark him again until Thursday."

"We can always pick his pocket and mark the phone directly before replacing it – which, for the record, you could have done yourself," Sterritt pointed out insolently.

"There was no opportunity."

"Never mind. We have the signal."

Sketchy's phone rang as he exited the building. He didn't recognise the number on the display, and tripped over his own feet when he heard the voice on the other end.

"Last night was fun," Melissa told him by way of greeting. As she watched, she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing when Sketchy stumbled and collided with an old woman on the street.

"Hi!" Sketchy squeaked as he gestured an apology to the woman he'd nearly floored, who stomped off muttering angrily to herself.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," he replied, managing to bring his voice back to a tone humans could hear. "I... I thought I'd forgotten to give you my number."

"You left your phone on the table when you went to the bathroom last night. I grabbed your number before you came back," she lied. She had, in fact, gotten the number from Logan. "I was wondering if you wanted to hook up and grab something to eat."

"Uh…" Sketchy groaned, delighted that she'd called him but hating her timing, "I'm actually pretty busy today. I'm following up on a lead for a story I'm working on, and an old friend of mine might be passing through the city tonight. I haven't seen her in a while, so a couple of us were gonna get together at a friends' apartment."

"How about tomorrow?"

"Sure!" Sketchy considered for a moment whether or not he should even ask his next question, thinking what Logan might say if he thought Sketchy was blabbing to everyone who'd listen about this story. "Hey, if you're not busy now, how about you come with me to check out this lead? I'm not even sure if where I'm going to is the right place, but if it is, it could be a pretty interesting trip. It might be sort of dangerous, though," he warned. "If anyone's standing guard, we might have to bolt."

"I'm pretty quick on my feet," Melissa assured him.

"This friend he's expecting a visit from – an Eyes Only contact?" Sterritt wondered aloud.

"Or 452," her partner, Jeremiah Bors, suggested eagerly. "They were good enough friends that he was one of those who went with her to Terminal City when they ran from Jam Pony." A team of analysts had confirmed that morning that 452 had indeed been breathing on the news cam video following the bombing. The awkward position in which she'd been lying coupled with the distance of the chopper from which the footage was recorded had made it to tell, and the media couldn't be bothered going to such lengths. Their people in the DOD had passed on the word that at least one government agency was aware of the deception, but weren't about to show their hand. There was still no word on whether or not 494 had been alive on the footage, but nobody was nearly as worried about him as they were about 452.

"I wouldn't get too excited," Sterritt cautioned. "Even if it is 452, we won't be the ones to go after her." Sterritt didn't think much of her new partner. Apparently she was supposed to be a role model, and her superiors expected her calm to rub off on him, but Cora Sterritt had no love for training youths, and still wondered how a man who could barely sit still for ten minutes and was known for having a hair-trigger temper had even survived his training.

"Inform the Conclave," she ordered. "Likely intel on an Eyes Only contact meet, possibly X5-452. Request two teams be placed on standby, one surveillance, one tactical assault just in case. Location unknown; we'll keep the teams posted."

The condemned building looked like it had once been an expensive apartment block, but it had been listed as condemned since before the days of the Pulse. It had certainly seen even more damage since then – it looked like it had been victim to every kind of natural disaster there was.

"Do you really think there's anything to this?" Melissa asked as they entered. "I mean, a dawn-of-time super-soldier project doesn't exactly scream 'true story'.

"Well, a year ago everyone thought the stories about Manticore were crap," Sketchy pointed out. "Look how that turned out."

"Good point, I guess."

She looked back over her shoulder to where Sketchy's other shadows had parked, just outside the entrance to a small market at the end of the block. There was no sign of them leaving the car.

Mere seconds after the pair crept inside, Sterritt saw the two guards emerging from a nearby alleyway, each man carrying a large gym bag, and one nursing what she could tell even from this distance was a badly injured hand. She didn't vocalise her disgust at what she knew to be in the bags, but Bors certainly did.

"Defiling our heritage to hide from the throwbacks," he growled. "We should just walk in there and tear them to pieces. Nobody would ever be stupid enough to pick up the story again once they heard what happened to the last guy who tried."

"There'll always be someone dumb enough to pick up where the last idiot left off," Sterritt told him in an exasperated tone. "Besides, if Cale wants to, he can always just run the story himself. He's doing it this way to piss us off, and to get us to show our cards. If we're patient, we can get to Cale through that idiot," she nodded towards Sketchy just as he disappeared from sight, "before anything truly threatening gets out, and Cale gets us 452." Handing her laptop to him, she said, "The girl could be his security; a plant by Eyes Only. Check the Manticore database; see if she's in there."

Tip-toeing downstairs, Sketchy was more than a little surprised to find no more than an empty guardhouse, and not a sole in sight. Following calmly and silently behind, Melissa noted a trail of recent footprints indicating that someone had definitely been here, and judged by the pattern that they had left in a hurry. She didn't mention this to Sketchy for fear it may alarm him without cause, but he realised on his own that they'd only just missed the guards when he peeked into the guardhouse and saw that the coffee machine was still on. Glancing around anxiously, he suggested that they might still be around.

"I doubt it," Melissa told him. "If they were, I don't think they'd let us just walk in here. The building's condemned," she pointed out matter-of-factly. "That's all the reason they'd need to tell us to take a hike."

"Then why not stick around?"

"I don't know," she lied. It was a dangerous game she and Logan were playing with Sketchy's life, with her as his only protection. She thought about the two Familiars outside, and the guards - also two, she knew from the footprints – who for all she knew were only right outside in the alley. Four Familiars. She strained her ears for some sign that the guards were still close by, but found nothing. Four Familiars, and she didn't know for sure that she could even take on one in a fight. She'd have to talk to Logan about a way of evening the odds if it came to that.

Pretending to be looking for signs of the evidence Sketchy wanted, she split her attention between the stairs leading down from the main building, and the exit at the back. The door was slightly ajar, and she could make out the shadows of another flight of steps leading up to street level. There was no sign of any human shadows. It seemed the Familiars were content to let this play out for the time being.

"I think this is it," Sketchy announced excitedly. He was standing at the edge of a large, roughly round dirt pit. It looked to be about twelve feet deep. As Sketchy produced a small flashlight and began shining it around the pit, Melissa joined him and peered over the edge, examining the vertical walls.

"Lots of stuff to grab onto," she noted. "Climbing out should be pretty easy." She didn't mention that she could easily jump out from the bottom. She turned and shimmied backwards, hanging over the edge. "Can you lower me down?" She held onto his wrist as he held hers, and he lowered her as far as he could, until her feet were just a short distance above the bottom. Once she let go, Sketchy himself climbed most of the way before dropping.

The flashlight again in hand, Sketchy ran the beam all around the walls and ground, but saw nothing. His face fell a little at the thought that maybe this wasn't the right place, thinking that maybe the guard was just an ordinary guy who'd gone for a bathroom break, and would return any minute, yelling as he showed them the door. Then, as he shone the beam slowly around for a second time, he noticed something that stood out.

A large stone pillar at the far end of the pit had been smashed at about head height. Sketchy took the photos from his backpack, and flipped to the one that showed the painted Manticore symbol. It wasn't easy to tell from the photo, but Sketchy guessed the ruined section of stone would have been about the size of the painting. On the ground beneath it, however, was nothing.

"Looks like they cleaned house," he suggested disappointedly. "Must have bagged all the bones and hit this with a sledge hammer."

"Then why is there blood on the stone?"

At first he didn't see what she was talking about, but as he held the flashlight right in front of the damage to the pillar, he could see small spots of blood all around the edge of the shattered surface. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he almost soiled himself when he realised what he was looking at. "Somebody did this with their fist?!" he yelped, going pale and taking a step away.

"Looks like the fairy tale is true, after all," Melissa conceded, not bothering to hide her revulsion and worry at the sight in front of them. No Manticore graduate would have been anywhere near strong enough to do this with their bare hands, and she doubted she could have tried without screaming louder than any gun. "Guess they did this in a hurry. Probably didn't have any tools on hand, and a gun would have been heard on the street."

"I think I'm gonna puke," Sketchy groaned. Tearing his eyes away from the pillar, he knelt in the dirt to take a closer look at where the remains should have been. Some small pieces of the broken pillar lay on the ground. He picked a few up, looked them over, and discarded most. On one, he saw what at first glance looked like more blood, but as he looked it over more carefully, his disgust at the broken pillar was forgotten as he realised it was paint.

Practically squealing with excitement, he began flicking through more of the small pieces of rubble. In the end, all he found was three more pieces with any paint on them, the largest of them barely the size of a fifty cent piece. With so little, it took a while to match what he found to the photograph. In the end, he matched two of the pieces to different portions of the creature's body, one to a piece of the tail, and the last to what he thought was one of its claws. Melissa let him piece it together himself, holding the flashlight over the stones and the photograph, watching him with an amused smile.

When he was done, Sketchy rummaged through his backpack for his camera, and took two snaps of the pieces, one on their own and another with them placed on the appropriate sections of the original photograph from the file. Righting himself, he also took two shots of the smashed pillar; the second a close-up which he hoped would show clearly show the blood once developed. He also made a mental note to develop these himself and not to say anything to Ben Mitchell, still finding himself unable to trust the other reporter.

While he was taking the photos, Melissa searched his bag and found a foil-wrapped sandwich. Tossing the sandwich itself, she scooped up some small handfuls of dirt from the ground just below the pillar, wrapped it in the foil, and tossed it to Sketchy. "If your boss will spring for lab tests, they could prove that there were human remains here recently," she explained when he enquired, bewildered, as to why his admittedly sorry excuse for a lunch had been replaced by a pile of dirt.

Taking another quick look around to make sure they hadn't missed anything, Sketchy bagged the soil sample along with the painted shards of stone. His camera he slung under his shoulder, and he pocketed the flashlight, then tossed the bag up over the edge of the pit. Melissa move ahead climb up, but paused and turned when Sketchy asked her to hang on for a second.

As he stepped towards her, clearly terrified but determined not to lose his nerve a second time, she cocked her head to one side, regarding him with an amused expression. Then, just as he leaned in, she stepped quickly aside, giggling a little as she kicked his feet out from under him.

Stunned and winded as he hit the ground, Sketchy barely had a chance to wonder what had happened when a hand on his chest prevented him from trying to get up.

"Now where was that bravery last night, when it might really have gotten you somewhere?" Melissa asked with angelic innocence.

At this, every coherent though in Sketchy's mind evaporated, and all he could do was stammer inanely in response. Not giving him time to pull himself together, Melissa turned away, laughing slightly as she began to climb.

Leaping up and practically sprinting up the wall as Melissa disappeared over the top, he found her lying on the ground using his backpack as a pillow. "Took you long enough," she told him idly, the sweet smile still lingering as if she were the most innocent girl in the world.

"If I try that again, am I gonna get my ass kicked?" Sketchy wheezed as he dragged himself over the edge.

"Depends on how well you do," she challenged, clearly enjoying driving him insane.

He decided it was worth the risk of getting knocked back down into the pit. Melissa let out a surprised yelp mixed with a giggle as he grabbed her ankle and pulled her towards him, and wrapped her arms tightly around him as he fiercely kissed her.