Author's Note: Bit of a shorter chapter. It wasn't done, but I thought I'd update a little bit instead iof letting you wait for even longer. I am struggling to write this at the moment. The plit is mostly planned out, but I just can't PICTURE it in my head, and when I write so distractedly I feel like you can't picture it either. With the summer coming up I will soon be very busy, so I must regrettably warn you all that there will be a long break in updates soon. Y'all have been really great so far, and I appreciate all the support this story got.

Chapter 11

News

Even with squinting, intent eyes, Judy couldn't quite fathom what she was looking at. They were standing before the closed gates of an old factory building, with perhaps half a mile between themselves and the actual construction. Nick was less confident than his usual self in the presence of the towering wall of concrete, surrounded by barbed wire fences.

"This is where…we can find Koslov?", she asked hesitantly. They had returned to a nicer part of tundra town. It dawned on Judy that they were dealing with organized crime, that a predator so well situated within the city had both money and a reputation to hold himself safely above water.

Nick seemed unsure. He glared up at the building as though he expected a light to flare up in one of the windows, but the building remained drowned in an eerie silence, the windows black and hollow like blind eyes.

"Strange. Looks like nobody's home. Usually you'd see the occasional shady figure passing by a window. This place is strangely unimposing tonight.", murmured the fox with one raised brow. The bunny had to agree. There was no sign of life beyond the fence, no figure lurching in the dark, no lights or sounds. On top of that, she noticed, the premises had been fenced off by yellow tape not too long ago. Remains of it were still tied around the closest lamp post, and one bar of the gate. When she pointed it out to Nick, his ears sunk back.

"If he's not here…where is he?"

There were voices approaching from around the corner. Both mammals' ears shot up as they turned first towards the source of the noise, than towards each other, and they wordlessly scurried away. The distant sound of sirens joined the noise, and Nick, in a panic now, grabbed the bunny's wrist and began to pull her into an alley. Judy protested, the weight of her body slowing him, when she saw that they were heading into a dead end.

"Nick, what the hell are you doing? We can't escape from here!"

"I know a way out!", the fox hissed back, and to the bunny's horror he lowered himself to the ground and pulled a manhole cover out of the street to uncover a deep hole below. Without hesitation he slipped down into the sewers, and Judy followed with an impatient twitch of her nose.

Soon she could smell nothing but an enveloping cloud of stench. It numbed her senses and made her dizzy for a moment. The air in the sewers was moist and cold, and the darkness was deeper than the night above. With her back to the wall and her feet nervously planted to the floor, Judy waited for Nick to shift the manhole cover back over their escape route and jump down to her side.

"See? Easy. They won't come after us. And it gets better – I know where we can go from here."

"Where are we heading?"

"Back to Honey's, for now. I can't shake the feeling that she forgot to tell me some things."

Judy sighed, feeling in the dark for his presence. She leant weakly against his arm, wondering for a second when she had become so comfortable in doing so. "It stinks."

Even without looking upon his face she guessed his expression – a smug, mocking, sarcastic smile.

"The sewers? Stinking? Rabbit, what an outrageous idea."

"How can you stand it? The stench must be even worse for you."

Carefully treading behind one another, they started moving along the small path that ran beside the water. Light fragmented and broke on the surface of the stream, reflecting a faint, dirty, green shine onto the ceiling. It looked strangely pretty – in a mesmerizing, taunting way.

"Oh, you know. You get used to these sort of things."

She was about to retort and question how someone got used to these sort of things, when Nick extended his paw out to her and stopped her by her shoulder. He held one finger to his snout as he looked ahead. A shadow cast on the wall around the corner was growing larger, and eventually a large rat, much smaller than his shadow, stepped into their view, regarding them with narrowed, small dark eyes. As Judy stiffened, Nick relaxed.

"Hi there.", he greeted casually. "Is this your part of the sewers? We were just passing through."

"Har har. Rat in de' sewers, so ya assume it's ought to be a sewer rat, all stereotypes and stuffs.", grumbled the rat. "Well, sure, ya just trample through mah home, feel free, I dun care, I says."

"Glad to hear it", chirped the fox. "Say, you wouldn't know what happened to", and he lowered his voice, nearly whispering the name behind a raised paw. "Koslov, would you?"

"Sure I do, everyone do.", grinned the rat. "He left Tundra Town with his tails between his legs, you knows, if his tail was long enough, that is, of course. When all them riots broke out."

"Where did he go?"

"Set up his base elsewhere, he did." The rat eyed the two of them in the shadow suspiciously. A bunny and a fox ought to have been a strange sight. A paler light lit the path before them, so that both the rat and the other two mammals were standing in protective darkness. Made brave by perhaps the anonymity, the rat raised its snout proudly. "What do I gets for telling ya though?"

Judy was going to come up with a suggestion of how helping a follow citizen was reward enough. Or perhaps she would have mentioned that she was police, and the occupation of city maintenance facilities such as the sewers was quite illegal. But before she could open her mouth, Nick stepped into the light, a grim sigh escaping him. "Help us out here, buddy."

The rat stared at him uncertainly. "You is Nick Wilde, isn't ya."

"The one and only.", the fox bowed sarcastically.

Nervous all of a sudden, the rat scuttled back. "I meant no trouble, I didn't. Just trying to get by, you knows? I'll tell ya though, so no reason to be mad or anything."

With a smile that carried a visible note of bitterness, Nick dismissively gestured for the rat to speak.

"I'm listening."

"When were you going to tell me, Honey?"

"I was going to…soon. I didn't want to ruin your mood just when you got back! Besides, the cop, and all…."

Honey weakly gestured towards the bunny that sat on one of the cushioned arm chairs with strictly folded arms, staring down the honey badger with a ferocity she didn't feel. She heard talk about Wilde Times many times at this point, but to her it was an abstract concept, a distant idea to which she felt no emotional connection. The image of the amusement park would never form concretely in her head, a swirl of shapeless colours that lacked substance or meaning. To Nick however, it meant the world. And there was a pained fury in his gaze as he stared down his friend.

"I thought Wilde Times had closed. I mean… I knew it would, but…it's my warehouse! How did this happen?"

"He-he just stormed in one day with his bodyguards, all suits and sunglasses, and said he'd claim the building back because you still owe him the money…"

The fox's ears dropped back in bitter resignation, and some of his anger evaporated as he paced aimlessly through the cluttered room.

"I'm sorry Nick – I know how much it meant to you."

"What became of Benji? Where's Finnick?", retorted Nick, his ever shifting face pausing momentarily in an expression of concern.

The honey badger ran a paw through her short cropped white fur and sighed. "Benji is doing odd jobs. Pretty sure he was a delivery boy for a while. He even sang the messages at the door. And Finnick…", her expression grew dark, storm clouds passing through her eyes. Nick froze on the spot, meeting her gaze. Judy tried hard to think back to whether she recognized the name. Whoever it was, he held an important position in Nick's life. That much was without doubt. She recognized it in the fidgeting of his paws, the restless trailing of his tail.

"Look, Nick, things have been shit lately, alright? I wish I could have helped out Wilde Times, but it was closed for months with yellow tape all around it. I think there is still….a stain…"

She didn't finish the sentence, and the group shuddered simultaneously.

"Finnick tried hard to find something to do with himself. We all did. But it just wasn't the same anymore. Nothing was the same without you. We lost track of each other. We don't talk often anymore. In the end we had to realize that you were the sticky glue holding us together, Wilde, and we just couldn't do it without you."

"Where is he? What is he doing?"

"I don't know. Not really. But I know he's joined the riots. Shouting his little lung out by the new borders, with signs and shit like that. Alright? He's fine, I'm sure he's fine. He's just…angry. We all are." With a look of accusation, she momentarily regarded Judy. The bunny sank deep into her chair, her knees pulled to her chest.

"Is it dangerous? Are they…are they getting hurt?", murmured Nick. He had forced himself to take a seat, his paws occupied with another cup of tea. They had been glad to come in for a hot drink after wandering through Tundra Town and the sewers. Nick was in his second set of clothes – hardly different from the first set, and Judy was wearing nothing but one of Honey's far larger shirts whilst she waited for her washed police uniform to dry. Had it not been for the tension in the air, the situation would have been strangely mundane. As though the bunny and the fox just came back home to a friend from a winter walk, and were just warming up. The little house above the trap door to the bunker had a strange cosiness to it, made characteristic by so many strange little trinkets and items.

"I don't know.", sighed the honey badger. "No, I….I think they are just passive aggressively glaring each other down. The preds have to be careful not to get too angry, so…it's a silent effort."

Judy uncomfortably remembered the piercingly sharp eyes glaring at her from the dark when they had passed from the slums to the better parts of the district. It was a lurking, silent threat.

"I don't understand.", said Judy. "The last mayor was a tiger, right? I thought…I mean; didn't he look out for you? Didn't he care about the fairness of it all? He was a predator; he should have made things right."

To her surprise, both Nick and Honey rolled their eyes and exchanged a look of knowing dismissal.

It was Nick who turned to her with smug impatience and dismissively expressed: "Sweetheart, the last mayor was a figurehead. A 'Hey, we love everyone equally!' bumper sticker on a van full of ex-bullies with a want to restore their reputation so they can go on the school trip."

"…what? But he was mayor, he…one of the most powerful people in the city!"

"Yeah. A pushover. Do you honestly think he had much of a say? Did you watch any of his interviews? He talked as if he was doing us a favour, with the collars, with standing down as mayor. He might as well have been reading of note cards telling him exactly what to say and do. Trust me, Carrots, that mayor was for show. Bellwether has been running this ship for longer than you think."

"He never fought back? He never fought for you?"

Judy couldn't believe it. Could there really be a powerful mammal so absorbed in retaining his position and easy life that he would sacrifice the entirety of the predator community? The last mayor too, after all, had been wearing a collar. Shared suffering may have tied some closer together, but tempted others to step over corpses if necessary to rise to the top. Was that the sort of animal Mayor Edward Striper had been?

"Maybe he did fight. Maybe that's when all of this started.", Honey murmured in crazed enthusiasm. "They released him off his service and he went craaaaazy and savage."

Judy was caught up in the idea momentarily until she watched Nick roll his eyes dramatically.

"What is he doing now?", the bunny asked. Had the tiger mayor fallen to the same level as all the other predators? Had the community condemned him to be forgotten and disregarded?

"No idea.", shrugged the fox. "I do know one thing though. This fox has some things to do." And with those words he rose from his seat, setting the empty cup down on the table. "I'm gonna pay a visit to my old love – the beautiful Wilde Times."

"Who's that?", Judy jumped up also, quickly pulling her still slightly damp trousers off a coat hanger and putting them on. The fox lifted a finger and shook it before her face, dismissing her.

"No. You're not coming. This is between me and Koslov – no offense, carrots, but your prim little police attire is not gonna make you any friends there. Nah-ah. You're staying here."

"You promised you'd help me investigate!"

"That's exactly what I'm doing, Fluff. Trust the fox – I've got this. Never you fear. But the fuzz ain't welcome. Bye bye now. Stay here like a good girl."

He patronizingly ruffled the fur on top of her head and she glared up at him, fuming. Before she could retort however he was through the door, just one arm shooting back to pick the fedora hat back up. Then even the red furred arm was gone, and Judy remained alone under the glare of fluorescent light and the suspicious honey badger.