Meryl had been tackled to the ground, bounced backward off the stone dais and rolled over again until she lay pinned beneath her attacker, blinking and waiting for both her breath and her vision to return. Dizzy and disoriented, she struck out blindly with fists and feet, hoping to do as much damage as possible to her assailant while her senses came back under her own control.

"Get off me!" Meryl demanded in a growl, bringing her knee up hard into the man's side, trying to find enough leverage to push him off her chest. His hands seemed to be—everywhere! It took her a moment to realize he was tangling her up in her own cloak. She pulled one arm free enough to jam her elbow up into the underside of her attacker's chin. He made a choking noise and put both hands at his own throat, gurgling out a howl of agony that Meryl was quite sure such a (fairly) minor injury did not deserve.

But she was still tangled up in her cloak and the man was now sitting up, straddled across her middle. She brought that free elbow down again as hard as she could into his groin, and couldn't help thinking with some amusement that the shrieking wail of pain that escaped him at that point was entirely warranted.

He doubled over automatically, squeaking something that sounded suspiciously like "Marianne!" and Meryl shoved him off sideways. She immediately rolled onto all fours, shaking herself free of the cloak. Then she leapt toward the man, turning him onto his back and kneeling hard on his sternum, using what little weight she had to keep him satisfactorily immobile.

Meryl pressed down on his throat with one hand and pulled her other fist back, ready to strike, shouting:

"Who are—"

"You!" the man in red finished (his voice slightly higher than normal, Meryl noticed).

She smirked.

And in another moment she was crashing down to the stone again, feeling the wind knocked out of her as the man in red flipped her over as easily as though she were a stack of the reports Milly always knocked off her desk.

Meryl had barely caught her breath when she realized she was on her back, under him again. He was already wrapping her up in her own cloak, humming merrily to himself.

"You—you!" she shrieked, struggling.

"That was NOT nice," he chided her, emphasizing his words with a yank of fabric as he tied a knot in the cloak's front lapels, fixing Meryl's arms tightly to her sides.

Meryl could think of plenty of things he was doing at that moment that were "not nice", but before she could articulate any of these arguments, the man in red abruptly bent forward.

She gasped; his face was only iches away from hers, and his eyes had suddenly changed. The maddening sort of sparkle she was familiar with had been replaced with cold steel. The look in his eyes was dangerous, and it made her whole chest freeze up, unable to breathe.

"You should be more careful," he advised.

Meryl drew in air in a gasp, lungs shocked into life again. He had spoken in a voice she'd never heard before. It was low and quiet, and it matched his eyes. She could practically feel it rumbling deep inside his chest.

And then he was smiling again, that big open-mouthed grin she always found so infuriating.

And then he flicked the tip of her nose with his finger, saying, "Bang!"

And she lost it.

Meryl let out a feral scream and burst out of the shroud he had made of her cloak, with force entirely disproportionate to her size. A small, easily overlooked part of her brain cautioned that perhaps this was not a wise move, given what she had seen in his countenance just moments earlier, but apparently her perpetual annoyance at his antics was so deeply ingrained that her reaction was reflexive.

The man in red shrieked, falling back, and Meryl leapt for his throat. They met in a tangle of limbs, all elbows and knees and sharp angles, and together they rolled off the stone dais into the sand, each shouting furiously at the other.

"Get off me, get off me!" the man was yelling, trying to shield his face, slapping Meryl's fists away.

"You attacked me!" Meryl accused, pummeling the man's knees with one hand in the attempt to free herself from his gangly-legged vice grip.

"My goodness, I had no idea you two were so close!"

Meryl and the man both froze, stuck for a moment in a horrible still-frame snapshot of the ludicrousness of their fight: one of his long legs was wrapped around Meryl's waist while the other was tangled up in her cloak, and Meryl had one hand stuck flattened between their chests and the other yanking out the hair at the side of the man's head.

Milly was looking down at them, still smiling brightly with sandwich in hand.

Meryl pushed the man away from her with as much force as she could muster and the two of them sprang apart. Meryl scrambled to her feet, not looking at the Idiot, and made a show of untangling and settling her cloak again. Then she gasped.

"My derringers!" Her hands dug into the folds of her cloak and came up empty. Even as she looked around for them now, she realized she should have noticed earlier when she had been rolling around tied up in the fabric.

"Here they are!" cried the Idiot, happily.

They were hanging by the trigger guard, five on each of ten long black-gloved fingers.

"Wow," exclaimed Milly. "That's amazing, Mr. Vash!"

"What kind of bodyguard do you think I am?" he asked, overly incensed. "You think I'd just let an enemy carry around four dozen pistols?"

Meryl gritted her teeth and snatched all fifty derringers out of his hands, stowing them back in their holsters so rapidly that her skinny arms appeared as just a white blur. Her hand lingered for a moment on the oldest pistol as she tucked it into place over her heart and felt an odd sense of misplaced anger that the Idiot had dared to touch it.

She recognized that there was no way the man could know what it was or what it meant, but that didn't stop her scowling at him. But the Idiot wasn't paying attention to her anyway.

"Ooh, is that a salmon sandwich?" he asked, excitedly. He snatched Meryl's dropped sandwich from the ground and inspected it carefully, brushing off some of the sand. Then he stuffed it, whole, into his mouth before Meryl could say anything.

Meryl was standing, staring at him in disbelief—both at the fact that he would actually eat it off the ground as well as that he didn't even ask her first—but he was already marching away, singing to himself through a full mouth.

"Mmm-hmm-hmm-Marianne!"

Meryl's eye twitched again.

"There's sand in your hair, Ma'am," Milly said, laughing. "May I?"

"Thank you, Milly," said Meryl, sighing. She shut her eyes tight.

Milly threaded her long fingers in Meryl's short hair and thoroughly ruffled it, sending sand flying everywhere.

It was somewhat of a lengthy process, and Meryl let her thoughts wander for a moment.

And she thought of the man in red, and his other eyes, and his other voice...

And his breath... Breath that smelled like donuts.

"What was that, Ma'am?" Milly asked, giving Meryl's scalp one more vigorous rub.

"Uh," said Meryl, trying to catch her balance after being shaken around. She didn't think she'd said anything aloud. "Nothing, Milly. Nothing."

Still, it troubled her. Meryl guessed that she had seen then what truly hid behind those yellow glasses when the man in red donned them, and facing it nose-to-nose was unsettling. He confused her entirely, and it made the muscles of her forehead ache like nothing else. Not even writing reports.

Who the hell is that man?

"Ma'am, do you hear that?" Milly asked, suddenly.

Meryl listened intently.

"I don't hear anything," she said, looking to Milly, confused.

"Exactly. Mr. Cliff was playing that Victrola earlier, and Miss Marianne was singing," Milly pointed out. "And now it's all gone quiet."

"Even that idiot's humming stopped," Meryl said, grimacing now. Something was definitely wrong. She could feel it in the evening air, something in the timbre of the night itself had changed. "I think we should find everyone else," she said, darkly. All the lights in the mansion were on, but no silhouettes passed over any of the windows.

Together, Meryl and Milly hurried across the courtyard and into the house. Meryl thought she had seen the Idiot go in the back door, through the kitchen, and she followed the same route quickly.

"Hey—" Meryl called out for the man in red, but stopped short, not knowing what to call him, aloud. She was saved too much effort thinking about it when Milly called, "Mr. Vash?" Scowling, Meryl's first instinct was to argue, but it had worked. The Idiot's head suddenly poked around the next corner from the back hall.

"Have you seen Miss Marianne?" asked Milly and the Idiot, simultaneously. Milly giggled and the man in red flashed her a winning smile, but both shook their heads. "No," again, together. More giggling. Meryl would have given an exasperated sigh and a good eye-rolling if she wasn't starting to get seriously unnerved by the whole situation.

"What the hell is going on?" Meryl muttered, mostly to herself, under her breath. They searched the mansion, top to bottom, and still found nothing. When Meryl passed Schezar's study, she tried the door. It was locked. She absently tugged at one of her earrings, debating whether or not it was worth trying to pick the lock.

"Maybe the ghosts got her," Milly commented, finally. She sounded half-resigned and half-worried. Meryl followed the younger woman's voice into the sitting room, where they had all first met that morning. That seemed ages ago, now...

"What, Milly?" Meryl asked, honestly not sure if she had heard the girl right. She heard hurried footsteps behind her and turned to see the Idiot standing at her back. He had been making furious cut-off gestures over her head to Milly, and when Meryl caught him he just grinned, pretending he had been doing nothing of the sort.

Meryl glared at him.

"What did you say?" she asked Milly again.

"The ghosts on the roof," the younger woman said, as though this explained everything. "Mr. Vash had been patrolling the roof earlier, 'looking for spooks.' "

"And you would know this how?" Meryl demanded, through gritted teeth. She was addressing Milly, but she was again glaring at the man in red. He seemed to wither under the weight of her gaze.

"Oh, I saw him outside my window, earlier," Milly offered, cheerfully.

Meryl's eyes narrowed in fury. She thought her nostrils might have been flaring with each breath. The Idiot shrank away.

"Heh," he said, weakly. "Hers wasn't Miss Marianne's room either..." His voice trailed off.

"How dare you!" Meryl shouted, anger from earlier in the evening renewed as she realized he had looked in on Milly, as he had on her.

The Idiot scrambled backward away from Meryl as she advanced on him, cracking her knuckles menacingly. His knees hit the seat of one of the plush green sofas littering the sitting room and he faltered, then climbed onto it as Meryl showed no signs of stopping.

"Time out, time out!" he wailed, waving both hands in front of his face as he leaned away from Meryl's raised fist. He let out a loud squeak as he lost his balance and fell over the back of the sofa. Long, gangly arms wind-milling, the Idiot grabbed for something, anything, to catch him from plummeting head-first to the floor. His fingers caught the end of a decorative cord hanging from the ceiling near the wall.

As his weight fell on the cord, the curtains in the corner of the room—where Marianne had been hidden that morning—slid open. For a moment, the Idiot hung there, his knees still on the back of the sofa, balancing himself with one hand still clutching the cord.

Then the cord abruptly gave another six iches under his weight, and a door concealed in the wall swung open. The trick door had matched the wall and wood paneling perfectly, completely seamless and impossible to see without knowing it was there. It opened into a long, dimly lit passage.

"Well that's interesting," Meryl said, eyebrows raised.

The Idiot was so surprised at the sudden appearance of the tunnel that he let go of the cord and toppled out of sight over the back of the sofa. When he sprang to his feet again he looked excited, chirping a delighted, "Aha!"

Surprisingly cold air blew out at them through the mouth of the tunnel, and distant voices could be heard carried out to them on the faint breeze. Suddenly there was a sharp cry, unmistakably one of pain, and Meryl and the man in red shared a brief glance. They both leapt forward immediately and there was another furious scrabble of elbows as each tried to beat the other into the tunnel.

Meryl won, one of her elbows striking solidly in the center of the Idiot's solar plexus, but she was soon outdistanced in the dead sprint down the tunnel. She lagged behind Milly's and the Idiot's long-legged strides, but gave a valiant effort to keep up and made it to the end of the passage only moments after they did (though she was noticeably the worse for wear, panting and bent double over a side-ache).

One glance told Meryl she was right to be wary of Schezar. She, Milly, and the Idiot stood in a great cavern, at the top of a great complex of pipes and massive storage tanks and crates. They overlooked a factory floor where machinery worked, converting water into blocks of ice for easier storage. A spillway emerged from the concrete under their feet, water cascading down a steep angle to a runnel at the floor of the cavern where Meryl could see Schezar, standing over a figure, which after a moment Meryl recognized as Marianne.

The woman's long blonde hair was pulled back in a severe bun and she lay on the floor on her side, gripping her right shoulder. She wore a dark red jumpsuit, and Meryl could see even from this distance that whatever injury Marianne had sustained was bleeding through, a darkening splotch on the fabric growing larger with each passing moment. She needed help, soon, or she might bleed out.

But how was Meryl supposed to get down there? She couldn't see any stairs, or even a ladder leading down. There was some kind of gated elevator near the mouth of the tunnel, but Schezar would surely hear it even if she and Milly could manage to hot-wire it quickly enough.

The conversation below was audible now, if only barely.

"I should have known it was you," Schezar was saying. "I knew there was something wrong with you from the start." Meryl's breath caught in her throat as he raised the gun and pointed it straight for Marianne's forehead, but he paused and frowned down at her, asking, "What's this?" Schezar stepped forward and Marianne recoiled as he reached down to rip something from the front of her jacket.

Meryl saw the object glint in the dim underground lighting as Schezar turned it over in his fingers.

"A Marshal, eh?"

Marshal?

Meryl felt a small, sudden stab of jealousy in her gut, but she quashed it just as quickly.

"They must be desperate," Schezar went on, laughing. "To be recruiting kids."

"You won't get away with this," Marianne growled, wincing and gripping her injured shoulder.

"Won't I?" he asked, raising one eyebrow. His face split in a cruel grin. "Once I kill you, who's to know?"

At this, Meryl knew she had to act, some way or another, before Schezar could make good on that threat.

Apparently the Idiot took this as his cue as well. "Bonsai!" he shouted gleefully, diving head-first into the spillway.

Oh goddamn it.