The mining camp was still shrouded in mist when the van rolled through it the next morning. As Nico threw the van into park, Nero turned up his collar against the damp and drained the last of the hot coffee from the travel mug Kyrie had sent with him, bracing for the chill of the dark tunnels. "We should have scheduled this adventure earlier in the year," he muttered.

Lady zipped her leather jacket up to the neck. "Well, if we find anything down there worth killing, I'm sure a little exercise will warm you up."

"Yeah, but anything that's still alive that deep in Agnus's territory is probably going to be a bitch to kill."

Vergil, standing near the side door with the Yamato resting at his side, flicked a glance at Nero. "Afraid it'll be beyond your skills?"

Nero was startled to hear him speak—Vergil had been more than usually tacit since the previous day—but tossed back a fierce grin. "I'm just worried there won't be enough action to go around. I guess you'll all just have to keep up and hope we find four of whatever's down there, so everybody gets to play."

Lady slung Kalina Ann's strap over her shoulder. "As long as it's not four Nilepochs, I'm game."

"Same here. I only have two legs, and I'm rather attached to them." Trish reached past Vergil to open the door. "We all set?"

Nero spread his hands. "Just waiting on you."

"Then let's get moving." Trish hopped down and sashayed toward the mine entrance. Vergil followed, seemingly in no particular hurry, but Nero noticed he was gaining on Trish despite his apparently-slow pace. His strides were longer than they appeared.

"Hey." Lady caught Nero as he prepared to jump down from the van. "Sorry to throw you under the bus. I just thought if Trish or I paired off with Vergil, the day would probably end in homicide."

"Yeah, I figured as much. It's fine." Nero forced a smile. "I mean, he hasn't tried to kill me in over a year, so as homicide risks go, I'm probably pretty safe."

Lady cocked an eyebrow. "It's cute how you automatically assume that Vergil would be the one doing the killing." She stepped down and followed the others toward the mines.

Nero shook his head and followed her out of the van. "Hold the fort, Nico," he called back.

Nico saluted him with her lighter before holding it to the cigarette in her lips. "Yeah, I'll be here. Try not to bring back anything demonic and ugly." She paused to blow out a plume of smoke, then grinned. "'Cept yourself, I mean."

"Ha, ha." Nero slammed the door and jogged after the others.

The tunnels were just as dark and twice as clammy as they had been on their previous visit. It was almost a relief to reach the laboratory level, where the temperature and humidity remained more or less constant. When they entered the lab where they had set up the ambush for the Nilepoch, Vergil surveyed the damage done to the room by their fight. "This looks better than I'd expected."

Trish followed his gaze. "What do you mean, better?"

"The condition of the room. Considering your last encounter was a total rout, I hardly expected anything to remain standing."

Nero bristled. Just because it happened to be true didn't excuse Vergil's attitude. "That 'total rout' is what got you out of short pants, wise guy. And I'd like to see you do better."

"When we find the Nilepoch, I shall."

Behind him, Lady rolled her eyes. "Let's get moving. We've got a lot of ground to cover. Nero, how do we get into these tunnels we're supposed to be searching?"

"That depends on how you want to split them up. There's the utility access, which is basically a big loop that runs through the whole underground facility, following the ventilation system. It's pretty cramped in some places. Then there are the mechanical rooms, which run pretty far out past the perimeter. There are several of them, accessed from different levels. There are two generator rooms: The main one is off toward the waterfall, and the backup geothermal one is all the way down on the opposite side. And finally there's another laboratory section that Nico and I found last year, but didn't check all of. That's off on its own branch, so we can probably leave it for last."

Trish and Lady exchanged glances. "We'll take the utility route. Since you're more familiar with the layout, you'll probably have an easier time finding all the mechanical rooms."

Nero nodded. "I was going to suggest that, myself. You two are skinnier than we are, so you'll have an easier time fitting through the hatches."

"Wisely spoken." Lady winked. "How do we get there from here?"

"It's down toward the geothermal generator, but it's a little tricky to find the access. I'll show you how to get in, and then Vergil and I can continue on from there. We'll check the hydroelectric one, since it's at the far end."

As they made their way through the tunnels, Nero was doubly grateful that Nico had managed to restore one of the backup generators. The emergency lighting strips running through each corridor didn't provide much illumination, but compared to the claustrophobic horror-film experience he and Nico had endured last year when they'd explored the facility with only a pair of pocket flashlights, it was a vast improvement. He could smell the difference, too: With a few of the ventilation fans in operation, a stream of fresh air helped cut the dank, stale reek of the lower tunnels.

The first few hours of the search were uneventful. Vergil remained quiet, speaking only when absolutely necessary and responding in monosyllables when Nero asked him questions. At first, Nero didn't mind; the previous day's conversation had left a residual tension between them, and since he knew they were stuck with each other for the rest of the day, he didn't want to risk making things any more awkward than necessary. After several hours, though, the perpetual silence began to grate on him. He made a couple of halfhearted attempts at conversation, but Vergil never engaged.

Fine, Nero sulked after his third failed attempt to get Vergil to answer in a complete sentence. Not like we have anything to talk about anyway.

They did, though, and that was what galled him most about the lack of communication. Nero had learned so much about his father over the past few months that he could have launched an extended discussion on any of a dozen topics. He had questions about Sparda, and wondered how their family had lived when the twins were young. He was curious about Vergil's fighting techniques and martial training. He wanted to know everything Vergil remembered about Bianca Lucentio, no matter how trivial. And even if Vergil didn't want to talk about his own past, they had three months' worth of shared experiences to reflect on, now—trips to the shop to play violin. Fighting demons together. Rescuing Julio from Lauda.

There was no reason for them to be spending hours in silence, apart from the fact that Vergil didn't feel like talking. And for Nero, who was accustomed to Kyrie's steady conversation, Nico's endless prattle, and fielding a thousand questions a day from curious children, the silent treatment felt personal.

It was a relief when they finished their assigned sweep and made their way back to the lab they'd started from. Trish and Lady were already there, munching on the light lunches Kyrie had sent with them. "Any luck?" Lady asked around a bite of apple.

Nero propped Red Queen against a console so he could sit on the floor to unpack his lunch sack. "Nothing on our end. You?"

"Not so much as a rat." Lady cocked her head. "Wait, do you even have rats here?"

"Yeah, but they're an invasive species. They come in on ships. But I doubt we'll see any this far underground; there's nothing for them to eat down here." Nero fished an apple out of his bag and started to polish it on his jacket, then realized how much dust of questionable origin he'd picked up in their subterranean explorations and thought better of it. "All we've got left is that other lab level. We can head down there and check that off after we eat."

Lady saw him trying to dust off his hands and tossed him a packet of hand wipes. "Here, I came prepared."

"Thanks. I don't trust anything I touch in this place."

Lady crumpled her empty lunch bag into a ball. "While you're eating, I'll run up and check in with Nico, just to make sure she hasn't seen anything."

"I'll come with you," Trish offered.

Nero didn't miss the fact that the task conveniently removed them from Vergil's presence as well. When the women had departed he glanced at the Silent One, who was staring at a doorway across the room, his fingers drumming impatiently against the Yamato's sheath. "Hey. You gonna eat?"

Vergil looked back at him, then at the remaining lunch sack. With a short sigh, he collected it and peered inside.

Nero decided to make another stab at communication. He held up the packet Lady had shared. "Wipes are here if you want to clean your hands first. Who knows what kinda chemical residues Agnus left down here."

Vergil scarcely glanced in his direction and made no move to collect the wipes. "I've eaten worse."

That was three more words than Nero had gotten out of him in the last hour, though the near-growl they were spoken in warned that they came grudgingly. Nero decided to press his luck, and issued a challenge. "Oh, yeah? Like what?"

Vergil's eyes narrowed at the question. "Raw demon flesh."

The turkey sandwich Nero had just bitten into turned to ash in his mouth. He forced himself to swallow before it choked him. "You… what? Why?"

"Did you think the underworld had its own greengrocer?" There was a mocking curl to Vergil's lips as he bit into his apple.

Nero was on the verge of replying that he'd assumed something edible grew in the underworld, when he recalled that the only underworld produce he knew of was a fruit cultivated from human blood.

One which Vergil had also consumed, come to think of it.

Perhaps the topic of what "worse" things Vergil had eaten was one best not pursued, conversation or no conversation. Nero tucked the hand wipes into his jacket pocket and tried to summon the courage to take another bite of turkey.

Silence lay heavy over the lab until Trish and Lady reappeared a quarter of an hour later. Thankful for some verbal company, Nero all but leaped to his feet and slung Red Queen back into her harness. "Okay! Everybody good to move on to the labs?"

"Ready when you are," Lady said. "Which way do we go?"

Nero glanced around the room. "Uh, give me a second to figure that out."

"Haven't you been down there before?"

"Yeah—once, over a year ago. There isn't exactly a map of this place with a 'you are here' sticker." Nero ducked beneath the massive pipes that blocked the view of the opposite wall and shouldered open a rusty door in the far corner. He spent a few seconds flicking the beam of his flashlight around the space. "Here we go. I'm pretty sure this is the way Nico and I came when we were tracking down Agnus's research. We found a couple more labs, and past that there were some rooms that we never got into. Once we'd found where Agnus kept his paperwork, we didn't have any reason to keep kicking in doors."

The others followed him through a barely-lit corridor and down a shuddering access ladder to the next laboratory, which was filled with shelves of dessicated samples and banks of looming machinery. The space was eerily silent, though the curving walls magnified their own footsteps into an army of echoes. Nero paused and strained his ears at each junction, but if anything remained alive down here, it wasn't moving about.

At last the passage they were following terminated in a metal door that sagged in its frame from where Nero had levered it open during his previous visit. When he shoved it wide, the hinges shrieked in blood-curdling protest. Lady clapped her hands over her ears. "Well, if there is anything lurking down here, it knows we're coming."

"Eh," Nero shrugged, "we weren't going for stealth anyway."

"You may not have been." Trish stepped past him, her feet silent as a cat's. "I prefer to make my own entrance."

Nero rolled his eyes and followed her into a circular area that had doors spaced evenly around the perimeter. Most were closed, though one immediately to the left stood ajar. All the doors were identical to the one they'd just come through. "This is as far as Nico and I got. That door there," he pointed toward the open door at his left, "leads to yet another creepy lab, as well as a document storage room. That's where we found most of Agnus's files. Everything else beyond this point is terra incognita."

Lady performed a quick count. "Eight doors, minus the one we just came from and the one you've already explored, leaves six for us to search. How about Trish and I take the three on the right, and you two take the left?"

"Works for me."

Lady delved into one of her innumerable belt pouches and produced a magnetic compass and a few sheets of folded paper. She sketched a circle in the center of a page and added eight marks around the outside to stand for the doors. "Given how similar all these passages look, we may want a map to find our way back here. I'll add the rooms or turnings as we go. That way even if the paths branch, we can find the way back to where we started. Here, Nero, you can track your side." She thrust the paper into his hand and started to repeat the sketch on a separate sheet.

"You got a spare pencil or anything?"

"Um…" Lady checked her pouch. "No. Maybe you can find something in one of those rooms? If there are more laboratories, they might have some office supplies."

"It's fine. I've got a pretty good sense of direction." He handed the paper back to her. "Why do you have the cardinal directions marked on there?"

"For navigation." Lady held up the compass. "This rotunda will look the same no matter which door we enter from. If any of the corridors connect beyond here and loop us back to this room, we'll need some way of knowing which direction we entered from."

"Uh, one small problem." Nero pointed back the way they'd come. "You know those mining tunnels we came through?"

"What about them?"

"You know what they were mining?"

Lady's expression flattened. "Why do I have the feeling you're going to say iron ore?"

"The whole mountain's full of it."

"Damn." Lady tucked the compass back into its pouch. "So much for mechanical navigation. I guess I'll just have to take good notes, then."

Vergil threw a look of supreme disdain in Lady's direction. "Or you could simply apply intellect to the problem." With a smooth motion, he drew the Yamato and slashed at the door directly behind them. As the blade slid home in its sheath, the door burst into fragments and collapsed, leaving a low pile of metallic rubble in the doorway. "Now you can easily identify the door we entered from. I haven't any bread crumbs to offer you, but I think even you can manage counting to three." He jerked his chin to indicate the doors on their side of the room.

A muscle pulsed in Lady's jaw, and Nero thought he saw her fingers twitch toward one of her pistols, but she quickly regained control. "Let's go, Trish."

Trish was shooting Vergil an equally venomous glare. "Never soon enough."

Nero watched Trish blast a hole through the lock plate with Luce before kicking the first door in. The rusted metal buckled beneath her heeled boot and slammed back against the wall hard enough to wrench free of its upper hinge. Once the women had vanished into the dark passage, he turned to Vergil. "So I'm curious: Do you practice being an asshole, or does it come naturally?"

"I told you." Vergil stalked toward the farthest doorway with that long, confident stride. "No skill is attained without effort."

In the end, Lady's map would have proved unnecessary. It quickly became evident that a large circular area had simply been divided into identical wedge-shaped portions, with the rotunda at its center and the other rooms filling the perimeter space. Behind each door off the central room, a short hallway led to another set of doors positioned at right angles. The smaller door on the right-hand side of each hall opened on to a narrow triangular storage area, while the larger door straight ahead opened into a large trapezoidal room.

While their layouts were identical, the functions of these rooms varied. The first one that Nero and Vergil entered had clearly been some kind of armory. Swords, lances, and even the odd rifle lay in various stages of decay, some knocked from their racks or half-buried in dust. Most of the weaponry was older than anything Nero could recall seeing the Order's troops use during his lifetime, though a few neglected Caliburns languished in a rack near the door.

Nero circled the room, scanning for any other exits and occasionally pausing to examine a sword. "Man, look at these antiques." He hefted a corroded broadsword. It was half the length and only a fraction of the weight of Red Queen, but he knew it made up for the lack of mass in speed and maneuverability. "It's too bad I didn't find these before the rust finished them off. I might have been able to salvage some of them."

Vergil, waiting by the door with his back to Nero, exhaled a little more forcefully than necessary. "I thought you were deeply committed to your fuel-propelled novelty sword."

Nero stiffened. Even if he couldn't see Vergil's face, there was no mistaking the sneer in his voice. "It's metal." Nero tossed the broadsword onto a pile of other weapons. "And carbon steel is worth a lot of money to the right people. I know you skipped a few decades of basic economics while you were living rent-free in the underworld, but up here, some of us don't have pizza-loving siblings to mooch off of. A haul like this in good condition could have fed my kids for a month."

It might have been Nero's imagination, but the tension in Vergil's shoulders seemed to ratchet higher. "I think we can safely conclude that the Nilepoch is not in this room. If you've finished playing with the refuse, we have other rooms to search."

Nero suppressed the profanity that rose to his lips not out of regard for Vergil, but because he knew he was stuck with him for the time being and wasn't sure he would be able to deescalate once he let his true feelings out. "Lead the way." The asshole was implied.

Vergil stalked out of the room, and Nero was just about to follow when a glint near the floor caught his eye. He flashed his light over the rack of Caliburns, then pulled it away from the wall to reveal a sword lying behind it. "Hello," he murmured, brushing the dust away from an early-model Durandal. The officer's sword had a wider blade with deeper curves, a nearer relative to Red Queen than to the later, streamlined designs like the one Credo had carried. A layer of grime seemed fused to the blade, but Nero knew the sticky finish was a sign that the sword had been oiled properly before being placed into storage. That layer of oil would have protected the steel from rust, at least for a time. "You poor girl. Somebody cared for you once. Who left you here to rot?"

Well, he wasn't going to leave her here to corrode like all the rest. At the least, he could clean up the sword and sell it; more likely, he'd keep it as a spare, in case he ever needed to repair Red Queen. Nero shouldered the sword and headed back out to the circular room.

He stepped out into the middle of a showdown. Lady and Trish faced Vergil across the room, hostility rolling off all three. Nero's appearance seemed to break the tension, and Lady's eyes tracked toward him. Was that relief he saw in her face? "What's going on out here?" he ventured.

"Just wondering where you were." Lady relaxed her posture, though Nero noticed she kept one hand near her holster.

"You see?" Vergil's tone was mocking as he addressed Lady. "He's still breathing."

Lady didn't validate his comment with a response. "What'd you find?" she asked Nero instead.

Nero caught the flash of interest in Trish's eyes as she followed Lady's gaze, and another possible use for the sword occurred to him. "A sword for Trish, if she wants it. Red Queen's older and slightly less exotic cousin." He tossed the Durandal, and Trish plucked it easily out of the air. "I doubt she's fueled up, but we can fix that back at the house."

Trish executed a few experimental swings. "I don't know that I especially need fuel. I tend to make my own." To illustrate, she summoned a bolt of supernatural lightning and shot it along the blade. Some of the oil and dust burned away, revealing the still-bright metal underneath. "This will certainly do until I find a Devil Arm that suits me." She lifted the sword over her shoulder and planted it against her back, where it hovered just as though she were wearing a carrying harness—which Nero could see, thanks to her bustier and the close-cropped hairstyle she still wore, that she was not. Apparently whatever devil power she used to stow Luce and Ombra about her person applied to swords, as well. "Thanks."

"No problem. Are you guys done already?"

Lady shook her head. "We've just been through one room. We were on our way to the next when we saw Vergil out here alone."

And they'd assumed the worst, apparently. "Yeah, we're on our way to door number two, ourselves. Guess we'll meet you back out here in a few."

The next room they entered was filled with tall banks of some kind of electrical equipment, most of which Nero couldn't fathom a use for. A few of the machines were labeled with words he recognized but would be hard-pressed to define, while the majority of them simply displayed dials and readouts. Their indicators were hauntingly blank in the absence of power, like dozens of black eyes waiting to open.

Nero embarked on a circuit of this room as well, pausing to peer at some of the instrument panels. "What the hell is an inductive transducer?"

"What it is not," Vergil said tersely, "is the Nilepoch."

Nero shot a blistering glare in his direction, though its effect was wasted as Vergil was half-turned away from him, watching the door. "You got someplace else to be?"

"I simply feel our time would be better spent in tracking down any of our several enemies, rather than indulging your curiosity."

Nero was about to fire back a retort when he noticed how tightly Vergil's fingers were clutching the Yamato. Vergil usually wore half-gloves on combat missions—in fact, until the past couple of weeks, Nero didn't think he'd ever seen him bare-handed—so Nero couldn't say for certain that the white-knuckled grip was abnormal, but he'd always had the impression that Vergil's attack power came as much from his calm and mental focus as from his physical strength. And Nero had done enough martial training to know that a grip tight enough to squeeze blood from the fingers weakened the hand. It was unthinkable that a swordsman like Vergil would habitually hold his weapon so tightly.

Was Vergil really that angry? It seemed unlikely; Vergil usually met a challenge with icy indifference, rather than the heated fury that drove Nero into battle. Of course, he and Lady had always been at odds, but it didn't seem possible that she could have infuriated him to the point where he'd lose his rigid self-control—at least, not in the thirty seconds or so that it had taken Nero to find and pick up the sword. Something else must have Vergil on edge. Perhaps he sensed some threat? But Nero had seen Vergil stay calm even in the presence of formidable enemies…

Well—he'd briefly lost his cool when he'd seen the Nilepoch at the factory. "You'd be able to sense it if it were here, wouldn't you?" Nero asked suddenly. "The Nilepoch, I mean."

"Naturally."

"So it wouldn't be able to jump out and ambush us, right?"

"Of course not."

"Right. So it's definitely not here."

Vergil adjusted his grip on the sword. "All the more reason to curtail our search."

"Okay," Nero conceded. Something wasn't right, but clearly Vergil wasn't about to share his feelings. "Let's keep moving, then."

They passed through the rotunda without encountering Trish and Lady and moved on to the third room. Like the others, it had a storage room off to the right. This one was filled with shelves holding row after row of numbered bins. Mindful of Vergil's impatience, Nero didn't linger in the storage room for long, though he did glance into several of the containers. Each bin held nested pieces of shaped metal, obviously parts for assembling… something. "Huh. I wonder what these are for?"

When Nero emerged from the storage area, Vergil was standing in the next doorway, staring into the larger room. "I suspect that is your answer."

Nero joined him and stared at the ranks of armored Bianco Angelos standing at attention in neat rows that spanned the full width of the room—or rather, hanging, mounted on multi-tiered racks that compressed a full squadron into a compact rectangle of floor space. Like the weapons in the armory, the armor in this room was dirty and corroded, but Nero still moved with caution as he approached the silent soldiers. "I thought these things were built by the machines in the lab upstairs, but I guess they must have assembled the suits of armor down here. Maybe that lab is just where they put the souls inside them." He shivered, thinking of the soulless humans he'd seen suspended in cages the first time he'd stumbled across the Angel Creation laboratory. After the fall of the Order, no one who had known about Agnus's experiments had been left alive, so Nero had taken it upon himself to retrieve the lifeless bodies and commit them to one of the temporary morgues that had been erected to house the dead in the wake of the destruction. No one had noticed a few more corpses among so many casualties.

While Nero walked down the rows of empty armor, Vergil remained in the doorway. His posture was rigid, but from time to time when Nero glanced at him, he saw his fingers twitch—almost as though he were fidgeting. That was definitely not in character.

He was so distracted by Vergil that he almost missed the disturbance in the dust. "Huh."

Vergil sent a vague glare in his direction. "What?"

"This shape on the floor is weird." Nero crouched in a wide gap between squadrons of Bianco and Alto Angelos and brushed his fingers across the lines in the dust on the floor. "There's an outline, like there was something here that's been moved."

Vergil took a few steps until he could see what Nero was staring at. "Most likely a storage rack, like these others."

Nero glanced at the frames that held the units to his right and left. "Yeah. From the size, it must have been a rack of Alto Angelos. I wonder why this one's missing." He saw Vergil's eyes narrow and quickly stood before the other man could make a remark. "I know, I know, it doesn't matter. No Nilepoch, so we might as well head out."

Vergil didn't disagree. He spun on his heel and preceded Nero out to the rotunda.

They reached the central room just as Lady and Trish emerged from their second door. Lady glanced at the door they were exiting in some surprise. "Are you done already?"

"Yeah," Nero replied. "Nothing alive on this side. You?"

"Clear so far, but we've got one room left. I suspect we won't find anything of interest there, either." Lady nodded toward the open door that led to the lab where Nico and Nero had found Agnus's notes. "Why don't you go ahead and clear that last room, while you're waiting? Might as well check it, since no one's been in there in a long time. We'll be finished in a minute."

"Uh… Sure." A trifle reluctantly, Nero went to the open doorway, then glanced back at Vergil. "You coming?"

Vergil's jaw tightened, but he followed Nero silently down the short hall. The small storage area full of filing cabinets sat much as Nico had left it a year and a half earlier. Beyond it lay the laboratory, a massive room full of eerie glass tanks that Nero remembered primarily for how much he had hated being inside it.

The previous spring, he'd reluctantly agreed to bring Nico down here. She had been anxious to collect more of her father's research, and—perhaps the greater motivation—scavenge fabrication materials from his laboratories. They had hit the jackpot when they'd found the room full of files; more than ten years of Agnus's notes and pseudo-scientific papers had been archived there. Nico had squealed and flitted from drawer to drawer like a child surrounded by too many birthday presents to know where to begin unwrapping them.

But the attached laboratory was one of the most unsettling rooms Nero had ever been inside, and he'd seen plenty of Agnus's workspaces. Its whole atmosphere was one of despair, and somehow it embodied the twisted legacy of the Order even more than the Angel Creation lab or the demon-filled torture chamber he'd discovered inside the castle.

Part of that, Nero understood, was due to his own guilt. While he'd managed to lay the soulless shells he'd found in the upstairs laboratory to rest, he hadn't known about the bodies in this room—human or otherwise—until they'd been left there for years.

From the higher security on the door, which had been easily bypassed by Nico after years of neglect, it was easy to infer that this laboratory had been where Agnus had stored his more valuable specimens and test subjects. The cavernous space was dominated by a double row of enormous glass cylinders, each large enough to contain several humans or one low-level demon. In the years since the Order's fall, most of the subjects had long since been reduced to ash or decaying piles of scales and bone. A few of the skeletons had appeared human enough to make Nero look twice, but there hadn't been enough left of them to know whether they had been humanoid demons or more of the Order's faithful, sacrificed for Agnus's experiments.

All of that was unpleasant enough, but what had pushed Nero over the edge during his previous visit was the way his arm had reacted as he'd moved among the cylinders. Passing one of the tanks, his right arm had suddenly flared with a light that was too bright to endure in the dimness of the room, and a wave of something almost like nausea rolled through him. He'd instantly known something was very wrong here, and for some reason his arm was resonating with it.

He'd held his flashlight aloft, scanning the room, using the beam and the ethereal glow of his hand to look for an enemy, but nothing moved in the darkness. He'd even examined the nearest tank, but he could make out nothing within the grimy glass but a jumbled pile of black armor on the floor.

Unassuaged, his arm had continued to burn and tug at his mind, until he'd finally told Nico he'd wait for her outside and stumbled back through the maze of corridors until the searing light faded. At the time, he'd half entertained the idea of coming back alone and hunting for whatever demonic force remained buried here, but a few weeks later he'd lost his arm, and the very existence of this place had retreated into memory.

Nero stretched out with his limited devil senses as he retraced his path through the dusty tanks, but nothing brushed at his awareness. Perhaps whatever had been here then was gone—or perhaps he could no longer detect it without his original arm, which had always been better equipped to detect demonic energy.

Then again, Nero realized, he had an advantage now: Vergil was with him. Dante and Vergil were far more sensitive to underworld energies than he was. Even if the trace of power were faint, Vergil should be able to sense it.

When Nero looked for him, he found Vergil standing rigid in the central corridor between the cylinders, eyes glued to one of the large tanks. The surface of the glass nearest him was shattered.

That was odd; Nero didn't remember any of the tanks having been damaged during his last visit. Had someone else been here? Who even knew about this place besides himself and Nico?

Nero stepped closer to examine the tank, and something crunched beneath his boot. He flashed the beam of his light over the ground. Glass shards were strewn all across the aisle, as though they had exploded outward from the tank with significant force.

Someone hadn't broken the glass to get to whatever was inside. Something inside the tank had broken out.

Vergil still hadn't moved, and when Nero turned the flashlight toward him, he realized why: Vergil's eyes were dilated, his skin gleaming with perspiration even in the cold subterranean room. His chest rose and fell with rapid, shallow breaths.

Shit. This wasn't Vergil on edge, as he'd been in the previous rooms; this was Vergil in the early stages of a meltdown. Nero didn't know what had set him off this time, but he appeared to be experiencing the same kind of reaction that Zaffiro had after his nightmares. The last thing he needed was Vergil going catatonic on him a dozen floors underground.

"The last room was clear," a voice came from the doorway. Nero whirled toward it, and his light fell on Lady and Trish as they stepped through the rusted door. Lady threw up her arm to shield her eyes. "Hey! Point that thing down, will you?"

"Sorry." Nero lowered the light, but not enough for them to be able to see past it to Vergil. Maybe he could bring him out of it, if they had a minute alone.

"You find anything?" Lady flashed her own beam over the tanks. "Ugh, what is this place? It's creepy."

"It's where Agnus stored his living experiments. Creepy is putting it mildly." Nero risked a glance at Vergil. "This is just gonna be another dead end. Why don't you two head back first? We'll finish our sweep and meet you back there."

Lady hesitated just long enough for Nero to realize he hadn't succeeded in fooling her, but thankfully, she didn't press him for the reason. He doubted she had any interest in prolonging her contact with Vergil, anyway. "All right, we'll wait for you at the main lab. Don't take too long."

When they were out of earshot, Nero moved closer to Vergil, who was still staring straight in front of him, face blank. "Hey, Vergil. You okay? You still with me?" When there was no response, Nero put a hand on his shoulder.

Instantly Vergil spun into a low posture, and only Nero's superhuman reflexes saved him as the Yamato sliced through the place he'd been standing an instant before.

Nero swore volubly as his feet touched down after the frantic backward leap. He kept the flashlight trained on Vergil while preparing himself for another evasive maneuver. He didn't want to fight Vergil in here—didn't want to fight him at all, really, especially if he were not in full control of himself. What the hell was going on?

After a few seconds, Vergil's eyes seemed to regain focus. He squinted against the flashlight beam and straightened, sheathing the Yamato.

Nero turned the light toward the ceiling to cast a dim but uniform illumination across the room. "What the hell was that? You wanna take my legs off this time, see if I can regrow those too?"

Vergil froze—only for an instant, but Nero spotted it. His eyes flicked from the Yamato in his hand to Nero, now halfway across the room, and then his chin rose. The impassive mask slipped back into place. "Had I seriously intended you harm, you wouldn't be standing there to ask."

"Well for somebody who didn't seriously intend harm, you came damn close to cutting me in half." He stepped nearer. The way Vergil could hop around in space, Nero knew the amount of distance he left between them was immaterial, and Nero wanted a better look at his face. "What the hell happened to you a minute ago? You freaked out about something, went totally blank, and when I touched you, you took a swing at me."

"I dislike being touched without warning," Vergil said mildly. His tone tended toward a sneer as he added, "But I'm pleased to see your reflexes are adequate. You would do well not to lower your guard, especially in a place like this." He glanced briefly around the room. "There doesn't appear to be anything of interest here, either." Without waiting for a response, Vergil strode to the door and slipped through the narrow opening.

"Like hell," Nero muttered. He moved to the place Vergil had been standing and stared at the shattered tank, trying to figure out what had triggered the bizarre attack. The cylinder was completely empty; not even bones were left. Like all the other tanks, there was a label affixed to the glass near the top, but it bore only a code number of some kind.

Well, it couldn't hurt to look that up—at least, it wouldn't hurt much. He wished he'd had the presence of mind to take the paper Lady had offered, but he didn't have time to go look for something to write on now. Aware that Vergil was waiting just beyond the door, Nero scooped up a shard of glass and jabbed a sharp corner into the pad of his finger. Quickly, before his healing ability sealed the wound, he pulled open his jacket and used the bloody fingertip to copy the code number from the broken tank onto his shirt. Then he hurried after the others.