So I just watched Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World and that movie is seriously really good.

Be a good spy, stay in the crate. Be quiet, stay in the crate. He remembered Omsk's words. He remembered them while the deliverymen came into the motel room and picked him up, while they carried him up a gangplank onto a small-ish cargo ship and while they brought him below deck and set him down onto a stack along with other boxes.

His crate shook as they dropped him down, and he jostled around among the cheap, scratchy straw packed in around him.

"Be careful with that!" said one man.

"It's not marked as fragile," said another.

"Yeah well, these personal shipments can be pretty fussy, don't want to mess it up."

"Eh, not like there's somebody in here who'll take it personally." He kicked the crate, and Jaune took it personally.

"Come on, let's get up to the top."

The two men walked away, leaving Jaune alone with his thoughts.

He had put himself into a burlap bag and hopped into the crate. When the men came to pick him up, they had nailed the top on tight. Now he was well and proper contained. He could not leave, either, since he obviously could not nail his crate shut again himself.

He listened carefully to make sure no one else was outside, then he started rustling. He ripped his burlap sack open so that he was just a little less confined. He looked around the crate with his night vision, but he bumped his skull against the top when he tried to crane his neck up. He sighed and laid back. He remembered the orders Omsk had written down in that notebook, the one he had ripped to pieces and swallowed, letting his acid dissolve the incriminating paper.

He was to be transported to a storage locker. He was not to leave the crate. If, by some disaster, he had to leave the crate, then he was to get to the storage locker and wait around there for Watts, a man with a wonderful mustache and a stingy demeanor.

He should be prepared to wait for as much as a month in the locker before Watts arrived.

Jaune's heart sunk as he recalled those words. Omsk had assured him that they would be as quick as possible; however, just the voyage itself would take weeks, if not a month. Jaune could be in the crate for two months at worst.

"Defeat the forces of evil…" he mumbled glumly. That was their whole purpose, to beat the evil people who made him and would have used him for their evil schemes.

And hey, if staying in the crate for so long was the only way, then so be it. He wanted to keep saving people and do good things, like he had back at Boggindorf.

And he wanted to meet his dad, and he wanted to ask him questions.

Jaune shut his eyes and began to enter rest mode. It wasn't good for him to stay in rest mode for too long (over twenty hours in one sitting), so he would have to wake up for a while at least once a day, if only for an hour.

Those would be some long hours.

"I am Agent Sundown, and this is my friend, Agent Moonlight," he said, introducing both himself and his partner.

"Yeah, I remember you," said the gruff security guard. "Back to snoop around?"

"Indeed."

The two AIS agents wore big bulky jackets to stave off the dreadful cold, and this far north, it was truly dreadful. They stood at the far edge of a desolate tundra, the north's version of an unforgiving desert. Mountains loomed above them, and now they waited before a big metal gate jammed into a rocky crag. The bullhead that had dropped them off waited on an ice-covered landing pad behind them. The other security around them hefted big assault rifles.

"Hmph." The security guard switched his radio on with a crackle, reported their presence to someone on the other side and waited.

"It's really, really cold," Moonlight said. "So if we could hurry this up—"

The frost-covered gate grated and slowly ground out of place; it parted to allow them entrance.

"Thank you very much," Sundown said with a chilly smile. He and Moonlight trudged through the calf-high snow and appreciated the immediate breath of warm air coming out of the gate.

They stepped through, stamped their boots clean of snow and walked further in. The lab's lobby was simple; unadorned concrete formed the floor; a ceiling of drilled rock formed the roof; bare steel support beams littered the rocky walls.

They walked past a few derelict forklifts and empty wooden pallets and continued down the barren hall.

"They've moved everything out pretty quickly," Moonlight noted.

"Promptly running away is a good trait to have," Sundown said.

The giant gate ground shut again behind them. The security guard from earlier marched up beside them. "So, what are you here to check out that you didn't before?"

"If you could take us to the room that the Pursuer was stored in most recently, that would be wonderful."

"Not a problem."

They were ushered through the cramped halls. "Lovely place you have here," Moonlight said.

"Ha, used to be a bomb shelter. Made back in the height of paranoia in the Great War."

"How fun."

"So, what are you looking for this time?"

"Things."

They turned through a big set of doors into a wide and tall room, one which obviously had been designed as a storage space. It now held nothing, sharing with the rest of the lab a sense of melancholy absence, like that of a home which had just had the family move out.

"Doesn't help that everything's been taken already," Moonlight said. "Wipes out the clues this place could have provided."

"We work with what we have," Sundown admitted.

The guard stayed back at the door as the two circled around the empty, unremarkable space. Their keen eyes scanned the walls, the floors and even the ceiling for anything that might be useful.

"Can we get a ladder?" Sundown said. He stopped and stared straight up. He pointed above him. "You see that?"

Moonlight stood beside him and squinted. "Yeah, I see it. Good catch."

The guard radioed for a ladder, and another grunt came in with one. Sundown snapped the metal hinges into place and climbed up, getting just a few feet under the ceiling. He shined a light from his scroll up and looked closely.

"What are you even looking at?" the guard asked.

"This." He tapped a pipe that was used to carry wires across the ceiling. They ran to and from the lamps bolted into the rocky roof. This pipe was bent up, as if something strong had hit it from below. He looked over at the nearest lamp and even saw that some of its bolts had been shaken loose. Sundown turned back to the guard. "The two androids would use this place to spar sometimes, right?"

"Leif and Penny, yeah." He shrugged. "When the sparring room was under maintenance a few times. Just a few times, though."

"Did they ever damage the place?"

"No, they were real careful."

"What about"– Sundown point at the bent pipe –"this? Maybe a forklift damaged it?"

The guard came over and squinted. He shook his head. "No, no incident report was put in here, or maintenance report."

"You sure?"

The guard scoffed. "Yeah I'm sure. I'm the poor sap has to do paperwork for any damage done in this place."

"Right."

Sundown prodded the pipe. Then he touched the ceiling above it. He dragged his fingertips across the rock, then pulled away. A not insubstantial amount of brown dust had come off onto his hand. He wiped it off on his pantleg.

Moonlight came up on the ladder after he stepped down and scrutinized the pipe as well. Sundown pulled out his scroll again and brought up the security camera footage from before.

"Orange-mocha frappucino, anybody?" said a guard who poked his head into the room. "We're about to unplug the machine."

"The price paid for cruddy cameras…" Sundown muttered as he sifted through the black-and-white footage.

Moonlight stretched up and wiped her hand against the rocky ceiling. "You checking for what I think?"

"That I am." Sundown sped through the footage and saw the unknown person who had walked into the room while the Pursuer was kept there and while some of the cameras were down. Except for two at either end of the hall.

"Moonlight, look at this."

She came and leaned over his shoulder. "What've you got?"

"Here's our John Doe entering the lab from one angle." He showed the footage of the camera that showed the man's back as he entered. "And here's him leaving." He switched to the feed from the other camera. It showed the man's back as he left.

Even in the blurry black and white footage, one could—with a trained and keen eye—tell that his back was discolored, darkened in a way.

Moonlight raised an eyebrow. She looked up at the ceiling, then down at her hand, where some of the dust she had gotten from just touching the rocky roof still clung to the dark scales by her fingertips.

"And the Pursuer could've gotten into its current state by getting in a fight with something," she said.

"Indeed."

"Bet a big thing like the Pursuer can pack a nasty uppercut."

"I bet it can."

Moonlight brought up one of her claw-like fingers and scratched at the side of her neck. Scales crept up her neck from below her collar, and she ran the claw-tip against her scales. "Hey," she addressed the guard, "was the Pursuer's computers set up in here as well?"

"Yeah, they hauled in a whole computer setup with the hardware and software with all the Pursuer's code or whatever on it."

Moonlight turned to Sundown. "Irkutsk said there was a program on the Pursuer's terminal that he didn't remember opening."

"A latent memory editing program," Sundown recalled. He rubbed his hand against his cheek, thinking. "But nothing in the Pursuer's code had been edited."

"Watts made both the Deceiver and the Pursuer. My guess is he probably used the same programming and tools for both, right? Then what could work on one could work on the other."

Sundown narrowed his eyes. He looked to the guard. "What about the lab coats around here, does everyone have their own?"

"Um, no. We've got one laundry room for everybody and a separate storage room for the lab gear that's cleaned."

"Is the room with the lab coats locked? Any security?"

"No, it's pretty much just a closet. People take lab coats and goggles and stuff when they need to."

Sundown glanced at Moonlight; she nodded slowly, agreeing with exactly what he was thinking.

"Where's the Deceiver's room?"

They strode through the stony halls again, and neither agent was surprised that they headed in the same direction that the John Doe in the video had headed when he left the lab.

The android's room was the only untouched thing in the facility. Sundown scowled at just how human it was: by all accounts, it was the room of a typical teenage boy. Blankets lay unkempt on the bed. A pile of laundry rested in a corner where the clothes had been thrown. The walls were almost completely covered with movie posters, some old and some new. One advertised the Hash-Slinging Slasher III; another, Lazer Team; another, RvB the Film Part 53.

"He really liked movies," the guard explained. "Penny was more into reading." He looked at the corner of the room and smiled sadly. "Yeah, he never did his damn laundry. Ever. Like, Pietro would have to yell at him to do it. Kid had a pathological hatred of washing clothes, I swear. But what boy doesn't, you know?"

"He shut down some of the facility's electricity one day during a battery test, right?" Moonlight asked.

"Ha, yeah. Poor kid said sorry to me a million times after that cus he knew I had to do the paperwork." The guard crossed his arms and shook his head with a glum sigh. "He was a good kid."

"And how did that happen?" Sundown asked. "Were there no fail safes against some malfunction?"

"There were, but they were turned off. Somebody somewhere got careless and forgot about it."

"I see. And why didn't the whole facility go dark?"

"Well, only fail safes in one section of the grid weren't up. We keep a localized power system so different parts of the facility, even different rooms, can be turned off and others not. It dates back to this place being a bomb shelter. So if there's any damage to one part, the whole place isn't under strain."

"Just a few parts went under."

Just the sections which happened to include almost all of the security cameras between the Deceiver's room and the lab that the Pursuer was kept in.

"And what was everyone doing during that partial blackout?"

"Ha! A blackout in a house with a bunch of engineering geniuses doesn't last so long, just around half an hour. Everybody decided not to strain the system, though, so we decided to just hang around in the cafeteria for the rest of the day. Called it there."

"And what was Leif doing during that time?"

"Ah he felt so bad that he came back here to mope. Told everybody he wanted to be alone…" He trailed off, realizing what kind of suspicions the two agents held.

He shook his head.

"No, no, no. Now, I don't know exactly what you two are thinking about, but Leif wouldn't do anything bad. He's a good kid, one of the nicest people I've ever met." He shook his head resolutely. "He wouldn't do anything to trick us or do something nasty."

Sundown rolled his eyes. Yes, of course, the DECEIVER would never deceive you.

"I think our investigation here is coming to a close," Sundown said. "I would appreciate a minute to speak with Moonlight in private."

The guard frowned. "I—"

"Leave."

He shut his mouth, face becoming red with anger. He looked between the two agents, both of whom gave him cold glares; their keen eyes stared at him disconcertingly, like the points of sharp knives.

He grumbled and left, muttering unkind things about them under his breath (but still loud enough for them to hear). He slammed the door shut behind him.

"Hm." Moonlight looked around the room, wondering just who the person was that had lived there. "These people are underestimating the thing they made."

"That they are."

"He's smarter than they think."

"Actually…"

Sundown stepped around the bed and to the corner of the room. He rooted through the pile of laundry, throwing aside t-shirts, jeans, shorts, socks and even a blue bunny pajama set. Then he turned back to Moonlight and held up a white lab coat, the back of which still had some brown dust on it.

"I think he's an idiot."

"Twenty-five bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-five bottles of beer…" Jaune sighed tiredly. "Take one down, pass it around, twenty-four bottles of beer on the wall." He had started with a thousand.

He groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. The ship had set sail what felt like an eternity ago. He felt it rock as it charted its course across the ocean. The only other stimulant he got from the outside world was the occasional chatting group that came down to check on things.

"Twenty-four bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-four bottles of beer…"

He had heard this particular jingle from an old man slumped over the bar. He had been muttering it to himself, and now Jaune understood his state of mind.

"Take one down, pass it around…"

To local denizens, the top story of that office building was just another floor on a passport processing building. It was not.

A few days had passed, and the two agents reclined in office chairs. The windows that gave a view of the cold outer world—a sad and decrepit old city about an hour from Mantle—were tinted dark and bullet proof.

They occupied a whole meeting room, and papers smattered with lists and graphs and photos covered the big table.

"Well…" Sundown spoke on his scroll with someone, listening intently. His brow was pinched up in a pensive scowl.

Moonlight scrolled through her laptop and scanned emails, of which there was a never-ending stream. Even secret agents like herself could not escape the sticky red tape of bureaucracy.

"Ugh…" Sundown got off the scroll and jammed it pack in his pocket. "The Pursuer."

"The Pursuer?" Moonlight shut her laptop. She had been mulling over the proper amount of ambiguously passive-aggressive language she could fit into a professional email to a particularly cumbersome co-worker. That could wait.

"The Pursuer, indeed."

Sundown stood up from his seat, snatched a scroll-pad off the office table and turned on a large smartboard set into the office wall. "Get everybody in here," he told Moonlight as he focused on pulling up programs and information on his pad.

Moonlight left the room and circled around the office, calling people away from their stations where they reviewed camera footage, audio logs and researched and composed personal files for all their suspects.

When they got back into the room, Sundown had set up a map of Atlas on the smartboard. "Alright everyone," he said as he turned to the group, "take your seats and—"

He stopped and scowled. He sniffed once. Then a second time. He pointed an accusatory and aggressive finger at a man at the back.

"You. Intern."

"Um, yeah?"

"Is that an orange-mocha frappuccino?"

"Yeah, I got it from—"

Sundown strode across the room and snatched the cup from the poor intern's hands. Without even looking, he threw the lidded cup over his shoulder and across the room, landing it straight into the trash.

"None of that here ever again."

The intern looked like he was about to cry. "Okay…"

The staff shuffled to their seats around the table as Sundown tapped on the big screen; where his fingers touched, a red dot appeared on the map. "Right here is the Deceiver/Fighter facility. Down here"– he tapped on a part of the map further south –"is where he was supposed to be transported for hardware repair. Now right here"– he tapped a spot in between the points –"is where their plane got hijacked. Here"– he tapped on a point further to the northwest –"is were the Pursuer got loose. Here"–he tapped on a point far to the south of that"– is where the Pursuer's bullhead was found, crashed straight into a river.

"The Pursuer had been seen heading due southwest, but this position shows a veer to the south. Now the specialists think that the Pursuer's quarry went further to the south; the specialists are idiots."

The room laughed with a tone of spite unique to interdepartmental animosity.

"My guess is the Pursuer shortly realized it shouldn't be heading straight for its target, that it needs to throw off those pursuing it. Thus, it veered south, got into the river and used that river for cover, heading either north or south in it.

He tapped another spot on the map, this further southwest of the spot in the river. "Here is a CCTS tower that just got hit. Security cameras show a large person (who's build just happens to perfectly match the Pursuer's) who appears to have aura smashing into the compound. Now, the camera logs were partially wiped afterwards, but the individual wasn't thorough enough. The outside cameras have a different depository than the cameras covering the inside of the tower, so while we don't know what happened inside, we still have eyes outside. Namely, we saw him heading west by southwest again.

"Not to mention that there's evidence the terminal had been hacked into, along with the connection directly to the tower's signal. Just like what happened back at the Pursuer's laboratory.

"So here we are. Thankfully, the Pursuer is leaving breadcrumbs for us." Sundown tapped the dot representing the Pursuer's initial facility and drew a line to the southwest that crossed over all of Atlas, only stopping when he hit the coast. He did the same for the dot at the tower, drawing a line across. The two lines made a corridor across Atlas, which converged around an area on the southwestern coast.

"Now this is our search zone," he said. "Especially"– he drew a broad circle that encompassed the coastal areas between the two lines –"here. It's only natural that the Deceiver would want to get out of the country, and one of these ports could work."

"The Deceiver?" the intern asked. All eyes on the room turned to him, and he gulped nervously. "Um, I mean, wasn't he stolen?"

"Our assumptions have been updated, intern. Didn't you get the email?"

"Nobody eve CC's me…"

Sundown sighed. "Alright, fine. Our working theory now is different from before, and the change doesn't leave our circle, understand?"

"Yes sir."

"Good, because the Deceiver did not just get stolen. He escaped."

"Five-hundred sheep, five-hundred-one sheep, five-hundred-two sheep…"

Jaune sighed. He had listlessly been making lists in his head over the past few days when he woke up. A perfect internal clock kept track of time for him by the second, but the meaning behind that time slipped away. Already, things blurred together. It felt like just yesterday that he had gotten on the ship, even though he knew several days had passed. Perhaps waking up for only an hour every day contributed to that.

Time ticked by. He kept listing.

"One-thousand sheep, one-thousand-one sheep, one-thousand-two sheep…"

"Sir, I think I've found something."

"What is it, intern?" Sundown asked. He sat in his office, a sparse and grey space, looking over several sheets of paper. Moonlight stood beside the desk, helping him sort through the mess of words and photos. Neither bothered giving the intern so much as a glance.

"Well, um…" The intern gulped nervously. "I was researching notable events in the area you defined, and I found something sort of suspicious."

"And what would that be?" Sundown took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He put his glasses back on and pushed them up the bridge of his nose. Then he peered down at the scroll-pad the assistant set down on the desk.

He slapped his forehead with his palm and sighed.

"Um, is it bad?" the intern asked tepidly.

"What is it?" Moonlight took the scroll pad for herself. It showed a news article about a recent Grimm attack on the city of Boggindorf. She scowled at the picture of the kid they provided. He didn't look like Leif, but of course he wouldn't. He had a smile similar to what the kid had worn in other photos, however, and he seemed to be around the right height and build.

She read the first lines of the article: A young huntsman saves the day! He insists that his name is Streetlamp Salad—

Moonlight slapped her palm against her forehead. She sighed.

"You're right; he's an idiot."