The city was the most beautiful at night, she thought. Almost like it could be civilised.

There were whole massive edifices that had no peak. Many were lit up in the enscarpments of concrete, their hard edges of silken grey or glimmering titanium awnings like blades that ended whole massive columns, stones terminating in glass or steel. There were a sea of lit squares and glass boxes to fill the world. It reflected the sky in brilliant replica, the overhang of distant stars dimmed by the brilliance of the city's myriad hum of coloured lights, some azure, gold, white, red. Colours upon colours of tinted glass gazed back at her on the building faces that had no enmity nor favour. At best, she could imagine perhaps commerce, or perhaps the lives of those across the river, whom she found herself not envious of, but some mixture of pity, or despair. The structures that surrounded her, the river between the world of skyscrapers and tenements and apartments and flat lofts that she had only the barest understanding of.

Perhaps it surprised her, lost in the considerations of the sensation she had accustomed to herself amidst ancient foliage and more natural life, that again, Snake had appeared among her without notice, and when she turned and saw him without feeling his presence, she did not notice apprehension in her despite the abruptness.

Lara had been standing on the roof for a length of time unknown to her. The rest of the night prior was a series of practical concerns. Originally, Otacon had planned on staying behind at their new headquarters, and at the insistence of Snake no less, but Otacon had made his case to the both of them that, weather conditions being haphazard and this being their first outing, it might be best if he was at least locally capable of contact. Staying behind in the States was almost entirely out of the question. Rurrenabaque seemed likely.

All their talk after that had been deflated of mirth, with few exceptions. Otacon did a moment or two of preening, with regards to the building's outfittings, including two bedrooms (if a room, a cot, a pillow and blanket could indeed be called a bedroom,) a kitchenette downstairs, and a water closet on each floor. There was roof access from the stairwell, terminating in the second floor with a wall-mounted ladder leading to a small hatch that opened out. Lara was sure she'd stay at the building, with little doubt being cast by Snake and Otacon.

An early evening had been called, and Otacon mentioned having a lot of digital prepwork that needed taking care of, figuratively speaking. Lara said she'd turn in early then, and Snake mentioned being back later in the evening, with Otacon's approval that a more thorough discussion and briefing could be accomplished en-route, once travel arrangements were made. So Lara went down the hall to her meager accommodations, cot with canvass and small folding chair for a desk next to it. She found Otacon had already taken her shipment of spare attire and left it in the room, so she changed into light cotton pants and a sleeveless top before bed.

She dozed. Lara had lain on the cot, metal rods unpleasant and not conducive to anything restful, for more time than she should have before getting up again.

Once insomnia had asserted itself and she'd given up on worthwhile repose, Lara made for the "living room," finding Otacon still at his desk, typing hurriedly, the various monitors the only source of light and his attention embroiled in the numerous windows they each possessed. Deciding company had no allure, she went for the roof.

She crunched on the gravel, barefooted but not pained. White bricks lay the work for the roof's trim, and she sat down on it, listening to the air currents of cars, the embers and cracklings of the city's nightlife.

"How long have you been creeping about here?"

Snake shrugged at her. "Just a little while. I got back almost half an hour ago."

"Then what are you doing up here?"

Snake gently shook a pack of cigarettes in his palm. "Relax. Otacon heard me come in, started complaining about the smell." He took one to his lips, lit it, and drew in deeply. She had to admit, he made the habit seem incredibly alluring. At least until she caught whiff of the miserable aroma it produced.

"The smell of you or those awful things?"

"Funny. What are you doing out here?" Snake looked out on the city, stood next to her, let the wind talk for a time.

"Lara."

She looked at him.

"It's the video, isn't it?"

She only nodded. She felt her body betray her, eyes begin stinging, chest grow tight, and refused to speak.

Snake flicked his cigarette off the roof.

She let his hand fall on her shoulder and squeeze the flesh gingerly.

"I can't tell you anything comforting. I'm sorry."

She nodded.

"That's not going to be the last time we see something like that."

She nodded again.

"Snake, I'll do what I have to. But this is different than what I'm used to, that's all. Not by much, but… it feels separate, somehow."

"Hey," Snake said. "What is it exactly you do again?"

She laughed. "You're terrible. Have you ever been the only living person within a hundred miles in any direction?"

He shook his head.

"It's remarkably exhilarating. You'd be shocked how invigorating it can be to be the first human to see something in thousands of years, or be completely cut off from the outside world and be perfectly at ease with it. I've spent a lifetime uncovering things others can't, or won't, and doing my best to be someone who'll find where we're going by where we've been."

"A good strategy."

"Maybe. I like it a lot. I lost my parents in an accident, when I was still a teenager. Did you know that?"

He shook his head.

"My father was a great man. He taught me a good deal about history, about archaeology. The rest I picked up at University, but it wasn't the same. I've spent a lot of time since wondering whether or not it was time wasted, looking so much on the past. I wonder if he would have made different choices if he had known about the accident ahead of time. I spend so much of my time doing the same thing, wondering if it's a loop, if he wondered about his own obsession with bygone eras that there's nothing for him in the present." She hesitated. "Snake, can I tell you something?"

"Like what?"

"A few years ago," Lara said, and brushed a strand of hair out of her face, hoping he wouldn't notice the quick swipe at the corner of her eye, ridding herself of the moisture there. "I was in North Africa. I'd been recovering relics related to the boy king of Egypt."

"Tutankhamun?"

"You're old drinking mates I take it?" Lara pretended she didn't notice Snake rolling his eyes. "Regardless, I'd gotten a call that mentioned there might be something to be found, and even though the Egyptian officials squelshed things a bit, I was still able to have a few nights in a catacomb or such out there. Do you know what I saw?" Lara looked back out to the city. Lights blinked on and off, people drifted down the street, a boat passed in the harbor. There were the dwindling lives of people for whom midnight was not the end of something but the start.

"What, Lara? What did you find? What did you see?" Snake spoke softly, almost like an afterthought.

"I had spent half a week trying to find an entrance into what I thought was going to be something great, or wondrous. I'd uncovered antiquities in the region before, great emeralds inlaid upon dais made of ivory and gold and the most fragile sandstone. But that wasn't what was there. I finally got inside, and just found swords. And bones. Lots of bones."

"Snake, I saw how little we'd changed," she said.

Snake said nothing.

Lara thought of trying to explain the shattered marrow, the blown-out casts of shields that had been pierced by arrow-fire, or the caved in helmets that had been left to rust in the half-collapsed foyer of a much large construct, lost to a cave-in many years past. All that remained was room after room of massive stone blocks and broken skeletons, armaments, shattered weaponry that had been used up and discarded when it failed.

She had found a massacre.

"You should go to bed."

"What do you think's going to happen in Bolivia?"

Lara met his gaze again.

"I think there's going to be shooting. And death."

Snake nodded.

"Snake, where do you go every other night? Wandering off when you think nobody's paying attention?"

One eyebrow up, he looked mildly shocked. "I guess I'm not used to there being anyone around to notice."

Somewhere, a car alarm went off. A bicyclist ducked out of an alley, jumped on, sped off.

"I walk around. Think. Smoke. It's not that exciting."

"It's more than that. I think you're avoiding the question."

"I think you should go to bed." He checked his watch, and, briefly, she saw something catch the orange light beneath its band, a discolouration of the skin. "And so should I. Otacon said we'd be leaving at seven in the morning."

Lara wanted to press the question, but Snake just turned, went to the ladder, and disappeared down its hatch.

"Snake!"

Lara heard, distantly in the halls of sleep, Otacon's voice calling out.

"Snake, get Lara! Hurry!"

There was only the briefest pause between when she understand the communication and when she heard the pounding on the door to her room, limited it might be. She heard him on the other side, and as she drifted upwards out of the vague haze of melatonin's underworld. Rythmically, she felt it could not have been dawn out.

Then she heard his voice in a way she hadn't before, and his fist pounding against the metal.

"Lara, we need you out here!"

She did not hear him so much as feel the timbre of his roughly grained voice, washing over her like ice water. She smelled something like cordite, or wood. When she bolted out of bed, she was peripherally aware of the humidity that had accumulated on her skin, and the sweatiness of her body, and the cool cement and porcelain tiles of her surroundings offering no comfort.

She swung her door open, and Snake had already gone to the central space, with its monitors aglow even from down the hall. As she snapped out of the room and quickened to them both, she heard a flurry of telecasted voices surround her as she entered the room's centre.

On one side, there was Snake, peering at the monitor that glared with myriad faces scowling at them, each one from the shoulders up, and with earpieces glued to one ear. They were a mix of men and women, almost all white, sitting in front of desks, and their voices comingled in a way that she couldn't make sense of, the volume turned too low and their speech much too similar in tone and in pentameter. Their authorial presence as newscasters was undercut by the strange supercilious manner with which they were presented, surrounded by graphs of bright colours, neon articles of bars and pie charts.

At the other side of the room was Otacon, digits bashing like a piano's hammers mashing its string bridge, madly burying himself in work she did not understand in the slightest, lines upon lines of information reamed out before him on the multiple screens presented. He was sweating, and looked haggard, with the tightness of skin under his eyes having built from under his eyes. When he spoke, his normally soft voice was only concerned, with traces of fear.

Lara faced the both of them, feeling a low anxiety build somewhere in the nape of her neck, like something had been left to supercharge the air. "Hal, Snake, what is it? What's going on?"

"We've got a problem."

Otacon hit a key, and the volume bloomed rapidly.

"—Authorises use of—"

"—But left to the senate's intervention—"

"—Executive order—"

Lara looked from video to video, all displayed on the main screen, one loverlaid the next. In the bottom, Lara read off the news ticker Otacon had displayed.

U.S. Administration orders crackdown, aid for Bolivian government w/ regards to new coup.

"Oh, no."

Lara hardly felt Snake's hand on her arm. "It gets worse. Take a look." Snake jerked his head at the screen, looking to his partner. "Otacon."

The volume rose while the other feeds receeded.

"—And with this emergency call for Senate approval, security contractors can be dispatched as soon as Monday, with security contractor Araignée unavailable for comment. This news comes rapidly, on the heels of this morning's broadcast that private—"

"Hal, the next feed, please."

Otacon muted one newscaster for the next, a woman whose thick accent and clipped speech seemed positively a-twitter with anticipation.

"Xe Services, a limited liability company based out of the southern United States, has mentioned that although they were beat to the punch for this new defense contract bid, they will still maintain a significant presence in the middle east and continue to explore merger opportunities."

Snake pointed to one window. "Otacon."

"—Which is why, with liberal America raging rampant, we need to show the citizens of Bolivia that the full force of the United States and its affiliates will completely—"

"Turn it off, Hal. Please."

Otacon muted all the video feeds, with Snake retracting his hand.

That, she noticed.

"Does this mean what I think it means, Hal? Did we just get blackballed out of making it into the border? Why are troops being sent in by the states? Is this one of those hired gun groups you two were talking about?"

"Blackballed, maybe not, but otherwise, you got it, yeah." Snake said. "The US has hired a bunch of bastards to do their dirty work for them. Araignée's based out of France, and it's one of the new blood who're trying to compete with standing armies for manpower and battlefield presence." He was moving to the lockers on the opposite side of the room. He began pulling out items and clothing that Lara had little interest in discerning; she joined him, at her own locker.

"How much time does this give us, lads?" She asked, periodically glancing at the moving mouthpieces of the media at large.

"At most? Three hours to get off the ground." Otacon had turned back to typing as well as talking to them both. "Lara, I don't follow politics, so I'm only getting this in fits and starts. I know right now if we don't touch soil inside of twenty hours, we're not making it in Bolivia without a lot of trouble." Otacon began yanking out drawers from his desk, rifling through them for a variety of cables, cherry picking from each and separating them.

Lara was pulling out a pair of cargo shorts and roughshod boots. "When you say 'without a lot of trouble', what do you mean."

Behind her, Snake slid a clip of rounds into his .45, and pulled the slide back with a click.

"Oh," she said.

"There's another problem, too," Snake said. He had already begun loading up a large suitcase full of items, and was sealing it shut. "If the US is hiring a security firm to help Bolivian military contend with that group, then getting out of the country's going to be even worse."

Otacon nodded. He'd yanked free a small tablet computer, strapped on a wearable to one arm that he hid over one white labcoat sleeve over the top of a thin t-shirt, and flipped closed a laptop before loading all of it into a metal suitcase identical to Snake's. "Yeah, I don't know what to do for us, there. We might end up stuck there for a while. Think the both of you can stomach an extended vacation?"

"Bolivia's lovely if you can find a place to stay, Hal. Besides, you blokes are too serious. We'll be fine." She was lacing up a pair of boots, the last in a series of wardrobe adjustments. Neither men had any time to note her lack of modesty in the sudden change of attire she'd undergone. Otacon hadn't even noticed, between his head buried in the monitors and then in packing. Lara decided not to comment on the glances at her behind Snake had made, obvious or otherwise. "What incites this, anyway? Is this because of the Boys of Che?"

"The same. Here." Before pulling the plug on the last of the active computer resources, he clicked his touchpad twice, three times, and audio began to play in a rough Portuguese. The man speaking sounded rough, stern, and with only the musical inflections the language lent his cadence. After a minute or two, it was finished, the silence left behind broken by the computer's automated "goodbye" chime.

"The two of you want to translate that for me? I caught every other word." Snake was loading a handful of empty clips and then carefully placing them into a titanium carrying case.

Otacon glanced at Snake sheepishly. "I actually already translated it, so I couldn't tell you exactly."

Lara's voice was clear, her enunciation precise, flowing, beautiful. Bilabial sounds became buoyant, flouncy, and she made the language sound otherworldly in its florid simplicity. Her English accent did it a service. "O nosso governo, a nossa vida. Não temos exigências, mas temos um futuro. Vamos fazer um futuro. Fixar as armas, e a floresta não vai comer o seu corpo. Este lagarto trará uma nova nação."

Snake and Otacon stopped, stared at her.

"Our government, ourselves. We demand nothing, but a future. We will make a future. Give up your arms, and the forest will not devour your flesh. This lizard will birth our new country." When they continued to look at her, she brushed a strand of hair out of her face. "Boys, you're making me blush. Do you think it's cryptic enough?"

"Cryptic enough to start a shootout at the American embassy."

Lara and Snake both gaped at Otacon. He looked ashen, and very, very scared.

"It followed the release of the Boys of Che's declaration earlier this morning. About the time we went to bed, actually," Otacon said. "The embassy's in La Paz. They ran in, shot half of the people there, then disbanded into the city. So far nobody's been caught, let alone injured, outside of diplomats or American nationals. "

Snake had begun moving their suitcases down the staircases. Lara had moved to follow suit, but Snake had already snagged hers. "Thank you. Hal, that speaks very specifically of a show of force, if you asked an amateur. Can we get inside? How are going to get there?"

"About the time Snake was waking you up, I made us arrangements. We've got a chartered flight, and we have less than two hours to get on board."

They finished up whatever small methods they could manage to put together, and took a vehicle Otacon had arranged to pick them up, with a second vehicle arriving solely for their multitude of supplies, and by the time they departed, they found the early morning traffic to be monstrous in size, lines upon lines of vehicles stretching out into infinite black rows laid before them, turning and winding through. They had to escape New York initially, heading for a private airport just on the other side of the river. The ride was long, featured by a cross of the bridge over a massive suspension bridge that led them away from the cacaophonous wonder of skyscraping metalglass needles biting at the clouds and coming dawn.

Their ride was chauffeured by a driver in a compartment completely cut off from their cabin, a sort of soundproofed private sedan, non descript to the outsider but otherwise luxuriantly upholstered.

During the wait of the ride, Lara felt the adrenaline continue its slow dissolve into her bloodstream like flashpowder making her muscles ache for movement, tension, release. There was only the low hum of the car's velocity, well above the speed limit. 70, 80 KPH seemed like the distant past. When she looked at Snake, she could see the hushed anticipation in him too. The thin hints of veins in his hand, his neck seemed more noticeable. His chest and shoulders seemed bigger, muscles tight against black shortsleeved shirt, eyes taking a determination and focus she'd never seen in him.

He looked like an animal keen to pace his cage until the door swung loose.

"Hal," Lara said, halfway through their ride, unable to maintain the silence. She also felt eager to perhaps assuage his obvious fears. "We'll make it. Okay? Stick with us. It'll be alright."

He nodded. "I know."

They were silent for almost the entire rest of the ride.

When they reached the airport, passing three security checkpoint even for the small strip she could see beyond a number of (relatively) modest hangers, they all piled out and into a thin-chested cargo plane, its quarters for them hardly vast, and the size available for their loadout large enough with some space to spare. A jeep had been already been rolled onto its cargo bay, and locked into place with a trio of straps. Otacon told them of their plans to entertain no transfers, risking a non-stop flight to La Paz with just one passenger arriving, with the other two passengers disembarking on a layover in Chile.

"Otacon, we're not going to be able to land in La Paz without being arrested, and entering through Chile could cost us days. You two can make it, no problem, but—" Snake was protesting, leaned up against one door of the jeep while Otacon went over a clipboard and checklist. Lara was investigating the contents of the Jeep with admiration until she saw reason to interject.

"Snake, we're doing nothing of the sort."

"Hn?"

Lara plucked a duo of parachutes from the back hatch of the Jeep's interior and slugged him in the chest with one. "Don't suppose you fancy a bit of skydiving?"

Snake looked at Lara, then at Otacon, at a loss with the parachute in his hands. "You have got to be kidding."

Otacon shrugged, biting one corner of his lip. "Sorry, Snake. I didn't have much choice. Besides, you guys aren't dropping in at an especially high altitude. You'll be jumping off as we make a premature descent into La Paz."

A man in a helmet, aviator glasses, and airtraffic uniform approached. "You three are going to have to board and strap in, we're departing in ten."

Otacon finished his checklist and left to one corner of the cargo bay's floor, rubbing the ridge of his nose. He looked troubled.

Lara watched as Snake, without a word, handed her the parachute, went to him, and in the distance between them, she couldn't make out what was said. Otacon pallor was still pale, and he looked thinner somehow. She watched, feeling like a voyeur, as Snake spoke to him, listening more than talking, and only caught a sentence. "Are you sure," from Snake, said with an eyebrow raised. Otacon nodded in return, and Snake put both hands on his shoulders and seemed to give him a reaffirming squeeze. Otacon looked up at him, and again, she was disarmed by how handsome Snake looked when he smiled. It seemed infectious; in short order Otacon returned, and then sat down, seemed weary but not as exhausted.

Lara did likewise, buckling herself into the canvass seat of the wall-mounted chair, and rapidly found herself asleep.