"WHERE IS SHE?!" shouted Patrick as he leveled his pistol at Zummy's head. The boy shook in fright as he knelt on the bed. The tension in the moment was high as Patrick's eyes bulged with anger and Erin was almost sure he'd pull the trigger.
"Patrick, don't!" she called out.
He turned to his sister. "You know this asshole?"
"His name's David Zumwalt. He's Reiko's friend from math," saying the word Reiko with emphasis to make sure Patrick didn't give away their larger secret.
At that moment two agents dressed in black suits jumped through the open doorway of Rei's loft. Both had their guns drawn. "Freeze!" they yelled in unison, "drop your weapon!"
Erin put her hands up while Patrick raised his pistol but didn't drop it. "She's gone!" he told the two agents as they maneuvered in the apartment. They booth looked around and then at each other.
"Great job, people!" Patrick admonished. "She's in the wind." Both the male and female agents blushed in flustered embarrassment, as they had been fooled by Rei's charade. They looked at each other again, trying to gain their composure but knowing all too well their jobs were on the line. "Calling it in right now!" said the male agent.
The female agent spoke to the others. "Do you need help here?" she asked.
"I got this," replied Patrick as he lowered his gun. "Go check on the Fochs downstairs, maybe they know or saw something." The agent nodded and replied, "will do," then she turned tail and ran out of the loft as the other agent stood on the staircase and gave his report. Patrick then turned his attention back to the boy.
"Out of the bed," he ordered and Zummy obeyed, walking in his socks and still wearing Rei's nightgown. Now concentrating on the new puzzle, Patrick set his mind to work while determining what to do with the suspect in front of him.
"Hey, sis? Can you take a look around and see if she or someone else left anything? Careful not to touch stuff, it's a crime scene." Erin nodded and started to search the apartment. Patrick then waived at Zummy with the pistol to go and stand a few feet from him. With Zummy still trembling and his face colored sheet-white in terror, Patrick took a wooden chair and then placed it a couple feet from one of the inside walls. Then he motioned for Zummy to go and sit on it. The boy immediately complied.
A second after Zummy sat down in the chair Patrick rushed over to him and kicked the chair, sending Zummy flying backwards waiving his arms. The chair was close enough to the wall to block its fall, but leaving the boy precariously perched on a chair with only two legs on the floor and his feet high in the air. He was immobilized, and exactly where Patrick wanted him.
Patrick now pointed his pistol at the boy, the sights of the pistol lined up right at Zummy's forehead. The boy was now so frightened that he was shaking violently. "All right, let's talk. Where the hell is she?"
"I don't know!" Zummy yelled.
"Oh, fuck you! One more time, where is she?!"
"I swear I don't know!" Zummy again answered. At that Patrick slightly adjusted his aim and then fired two shots into the walls of Rei's loft, each bullet landing within a foot of David Zumwalt's head. The boy screamed in fright.
Behind Patrick was another screaming voice. "PATRICK, STOP IT!" He turned around while still keeping the aim of his pistol squarely at Zummy's head. Erin was standing there, more furious than angry, and holding an envelope in her hand.
"What?" asked Patrick.
"Before you put holes in his head you should at least see this first!" Erin admonished and then handed Patrick the envelope. It was a plain white letter envelope that was unsealed and on the cover was in handwritten ink "Forri-kun & Forri-chan." While still holding the pistol with one hand, Patrick used the other to nimbly remove the note from the envelope. The note itself, written on a plain white notecard, said simply in Japanese "Sayonara." Patrick knew Rei's handwriting enough to know it was from her.
What the hell's going on? Patrick then showed the notecard to Zummy, who was now crying profusely from his red swollen eyes. "Did you leave this?" he asked.
"No, no, I swear to God no!" replied Zummy. "She messaged me last night and said she needed a favor, so we met at her lab and then we switched places!" he blurted out while sobbing. "I didn't know what she was doing!"
"And you didn't think to ask!"
"How the hell would I know!" cried Zummy. "I just did it for her, okay! I didn't know it would end up like this!"
"Some friend you are!" Patrick scowled. "Did she at least say why she was doing this?"
"No, no," said Zummy, "I asked her and she said she couldn't tell me, only that she regretted putting me in this position."
"Yeah, I bet you really regret this now," Patrick growled.
"Please don't kill me! I swear I never touched her!"
Patrick leaned into Zummy's face, bearing his teeth as he spoke to him in a growl. "Do you know who I am?"
"You're Reiko-s-s-s boyfriend!" Zummy blurted out. "The one who likes guns!"
This guy is so freaked out that I doubt anything he's saying isn't true. But then if so what really happened here? Why did Rei run away like this?
There were noises of footsteps on the wooden staircase and all three of them turned to see who it was. Now entering the loft was Dylan, followed by Oliva. Both were wearing serious expressions on their faces. Dylan took a good look at Patrick holding a pistol at Zummy's head. "Oh, shit. What have we here?"
Olivia Perry got right to the point. "ANGEL evaded us completely. No sign of her anywhere in the vicinity."
"Don't you have a tracker on her," asked Erin. "Like a subdermal chip or something?"
"Not allowed on her," Olivia answered. "They said it interfered with whatever they do at Dr. Foch's laboratory."
"So what the hell happened?" asked Dylan as he moved towards Patrick. Patrick himself finally lowered his pistol much to Zummy's relief.
"She swapped places with his loser here to trick her security detail." Patrick turned to the boy. "What time did you get here last night?"
Zummy tried to regain at least some composure, hoping that the presence of other agents would preclude Patrick from blowing his head off. "Um..like, 11:30 or something? She told me to wear her nightgown before I went to bed."
"What, he took her place?" asked Olivia. Dylan then picked up the blue hair wig off the apartment floor and showed it to Olivia. "Great," she said in frustration. "If he got here at 11:30, then she's been gone at least eight hours."
"There's also a goodbye note," Erin offered. "We're pretty sure it's her handwriting on it." Erin offered it to Olivia, who then carefully examined it and sighed deeply. "She bugged out," Olivia said aloud.
"No way," Patrick said, now more in disbelief. "She wouldn't just run away like this."
Erin was less skeptical. "She might if she felt like she couldn't stay," she told the others.
Before anyone else could get a world in Patrick's mobile phone rang and he took it out of his jacket pocket. The caller ID was from a satellite phone, and not one he knew before, but he answered it anyway. It was Kaji's voice on the line.
"Yes, sir."
"I just got the notice. How long has she been missing?"
"At least eight hours," answered Patrick. "She swapped places with one of her classmates and the clowns in her security detail missed it!"
"Was it voluntary?" Kaji replied. Patrick didn't answer immediately, knowing what he wanted to be true and what could actually be true were opposed, and now as a newly-minted Alliance agent he couldn't let that interfere with what was now his actual job. "From all indications it was, sir," Patrick finally said.
"Considering there was a serious security threat against her at this moment I wouldn't conclude anything. Please conduct a through and speedy investigation and hopefully we can locate her before someone else does."
"Yes, sir. Um. Director?"
"Yes, Patrick?"
"I know that I'm sort of close to the subject matter in this case. I guess what I'm asking is that, you're not going to replace me with someone else once this investigation gets going, are you?"
"Of course not, this is your job. Please proceed, I'll ensure you have every resource at your disposal."
"Thank you, sir!"
"Keep me updated. We've had another crisis here in Japan we're dealing with, but I want to be sure I'm informed directly from you."
"Something else has happened?"
"Focus on the current situation please, It's important if we can resolve this expediently as we may need Rei in the very near future. Ciao." Kaji then hung up before Patrick could say anything else. He then turned to the others in the room.
"We gotta find her fast," Patrick told them.
Dylan nodded. "We'll case the apartment, see if we can turn up anything." Olivia motioned to Zummy, who was still stuck on his half-seated chair leaned against the wall. "What do you want to do with this guy?"
"Let's find out what else he knows," Patrick answered. He turned to Erin again. "Think you can ask your friends in campus security to see if they have CCTV footage we can check?"
Erin smiled confidently. "Oh, I don't need to ask. All I have to do is login to the school's MAGI and they're plugged into the campus surveillance system. Just need to know when to search."
"Can someone please set me down?" came Zummy's voice from behind them.
Several agents arrived in Rei's loft in the next few minutes to begin sweeping the place for clues, and one was found nearly immediately: an empty envelope in a trash bin, the only writing on the front saying in Japanese "AYANAMI-SAMA," Also in the trash bin was an empty syringe, one that Patrick knew as the same one Rei used for her LCL stabilizer. On examination the syringe looked recently used, indicating that Rei had given herself an injection probably before she left the apartment for the last time. As Rei's stabilizer lasts normally five days this provided an action deadline for Patrick and the search effort, because if Rei didn't receive another injection within five days the cells in her body would start to reject her LCL blood. Patrick made a mental note of this and put it front and center in his mind, to ensure he could reach her in time. In addition, he set the time on his watch, enabling him to look at a glance and see how many hours they had to find her. At the current moment and after deducting 8 hours and thirty-five minutes since he estimated Rei did the injection, his stopwatch read 111 hours and 25 minutes.
Further on-the-spot interrogation of David Zumwalt revealed that Rei had performed the switch in the Artificial Evolution Laboratory itself, and had escorted David inside around 10:30 PM the previous evening. It was a good choice to do this, Patrick thought to himself, as her security detail was not permitted regular access to the AEL and didn't maintain cameras in Dr Foch's laboratory. So Rei had left the laboratory wearing Zummy-kun's clothes and shoes and having a hood over her head, and Zummy had left a few minutes later wearing the blue-haired wig, Rei's winter overcoat, sweatpants and shoes. He had also carried her purse with her mobile phone inside, Zummy had at Rei's request left his phone at his dorm room beforehand.
The 10:30 swap point gave Patrick and Erin a timeline to follow and Erin promptly used her mini-notebook computer while still in Rei's apartment in order to log into the MAGI and access the campus security files, finding the archived video from the prior night in short order.
Erin pulled up a set of video files, each showing a camera feed from around the TNI campus. "I've got them here," she told Patrick. "So, let's start with the video outside of the lab. " She selected one of the files and then adjusted the time to 10:30pm, then ran the speed at 10x normal. It didn't take long to see footage of both Rei and Zummy.
"Here's Zummy," Erin pointed out to the others on her mini-notebook's screen. "He's wearing Rei's parka and has her purse over his shoulder." The video was of good quality, but still unable to see the boy's face as he had pulled over the parka hood well over it. As the video ran, they watched as Zummy quick-marched over to the left edge of the screen, hurrying on his way to go to Rei's loft.
Patrick looked back at the security team that were watching along. "Does that confirm what all of you saw?" One of the agents nodded, as he had followed who he had thought was Rei that evening and knew the clothes she normally wore.
"Okay, so let's check about five minutes later," said Erin and she forwarded the video further. Within about seven minutes after Zummy left in Rei's clothes, the video showed someone else leaving in Zummy's hooded sweatshirt and pants with the hood pulled well over Rei's head and face. "Zummy, is that your stuff?" Erin asked him. David Zumwalt, now sitting on the bed and surrounded by agents, briefly got up and walked to where the group was gathered around Erin and her computer. "Yeah, that's it! TNI logo on the sweatshirt in gold."
"Great, so let's follow her." On the video, Rei walked briskly east and off the edge of the camera's view. Erin then queued up another video file and showed recorded footage from another camera immediately afterwards, showing Rei crossing the campus alone and headed towards the old MIT building that was on the eastern edge of campus.
"Where's she headed?" asked Olivia. No one yet answered. The video showed Rei going into the MIT building from its west side, so Erin retrieved two more video files. One was from inside the MIT building's central rotunda. The Great Dome, as it had once been known, was the central atrium for visitors to the TNI campus but was also a well-liked study spot for students wanting peace and quiet to do their reading and reports. Elaborately set up with columns and a high ceiling, it was still quite beautiful due to its classical architecture. Rei however paid the chamber no mind and walked straight through, not even gaining the attention of the studying students seated around the interior.
Erin switched to another file that showed Rei leaving out of the Great Dome's eastern doorway, and onto the well-kept garden in front. A grassy lawn lined by trees stretched out for two hundred yards and Rei walked right in between the tree lines and then finally off the campus' eastern edge and out of the camera view.
"She's going into Old Boston!" said Dylan. The senior agent's hunch was confirmed when Erin pulled up one last video file, showing Rei crossing an avenue and then proceeding to a closed-off bridgeway in front of her. She quickly crouched down and under the guideposts and then proceeded down the bridge itself.
"Where does that go?" Patrick asked.
"That's the MIT Bridge, or technically I guess it's the Harvard Bridge," Dylan explained. "It crosses the Charles River and then on into Back Bay. The bridge is still intact but they don't let vehicle traffic over it into the old city." The camera view kept Rei in sight for another four or five minutes until she arrived at the far end some seven hundred feet away and then she disappeared into Boston.
Patrick turned to Erin. "Are there any other files?" She shook her head. "No, that's as far as the campus security goes." He then asked Olivia and Dylan. "What about CPD?"
"Cambridge Police probably doesn't have active cameras in the old city," Olivia answered, "but maybe the Staties do." She referred to the Massachusetts State Police, who were technically responsible for law enforcement in the wreckage of Old Boston. "Can we call them?" asked Patrick. Olivia nodded and immediately picked up her phone "I'm on it!" She then placed a call to her liaison at the state police while the others conferred.
"Dylan, how well do you know the old city?" Patrick asked him.
"My grandparents had a place in South Boston when I was little," he told him, "so I was there a few times. Most of the worst damage was around the harbor areas and the waterfront, where it's all underwater now."
"If you still wanted to hide out in the old city, where would you go?"
Dylan sighed. "There's a few places. Roxbury, Hyde Park, maybe Roslindale has a whole bunch of old houses. Maybe thousands of residences that still stand. The government's cleaning things up but it's taking a while and you know they're preoccupied with recovering the Liberty Trail sites first across the river."
"So there's lots of dumps she could go to, or be led to."
"Yeah, within an hour or two's walk from the bridge," replied Dylan. "We'd need hundreds of people to really canvas it quick.'
"We need to find out what that note said," commented Patrick. "Someone was arranging a meeting with her of some kind." There were more footsteps heard from the front door and all of them turned around. An agent escorted both Doctor and Mrs. Foch into the loft.
"So she is gone," said the old scientist, who then let out a long sigh of frustration. Beatrix was mournful, holding Rei's cat in her arms.
"Did she say anything to you?" Patrick asked them both. Beatrix shook her head. "No, but she left this." She then handed Patrick another note. Written in Rei's handwriting, the note read
PLEASE TAKE CARE OF HIM. GOODBYE.
"That sounds pretty final," Erin commented.
"She said nothing else to me, or Bernard these last few days," Beatrix continued. "She refused any contact, even when I walked up to bring her some food." Both Dylan and Erin looked at Patrick, their faces marked with deep worry.
"There was something else," she recalled. "About three days ago she put letters downstairs for me to send in the mail."
Patrick's eyebrows raised again. "Letters?"
"Yes, three of them. Just plain envelopes already stamped. I admit I didn't bother to read exactly where they were going but I think they were all for overseas. I remember one of them was going to Japan but I didn't recognize the address."
"Did you mail them?" asked Patrick. Beatrix nodded in reply. "I put them in the mail that day. I feel terrible, I should have been paying more attention."
"I do hope that she's alright," add Bernard. "Do we know if she used her stabilizer?"
"It looks like she administered it right before she left," Patrick answered.
"Well, that gives her 120 hours. If you don't find her after that she'll be in trouble physiologically."
"Don't I know it." Patrick felt the urge to pound something in deep frustration but knew he had to at least maintain a calm appearance. Others were counting on him to find Rei, and he was counting on himself.
"Does anyone know how she got that letter addressed to her?" asked Patrick. Erin shook her head. "No idea." None of the agents had an answer either. "Well, someone must have given it to her!" growled Patrick.
Olivia got off the phone with the Massachusetts State Police. "The Staties told me they don't have good camera coverage in the old city, but they'll send us what they have as well as patrol reports."
"Do you guys check her incoming snail mail?" Patrick asked the agents.
"Yes, we do," Olivia confirmed, "and nothing like that note showed up through her mail slot here or at her locker on campus. It's not even mailed from the look of it."
"Which means someone handed it to her," said Patrick. "But who?"
Olivia gained a determined look on her face. "Let's find out. Everyone!" she called out to all of the agents, of which six were in the loft collecting evidence. "Everyone, go back to your notebooks and look for any type of exchange between ANGEL and anyone else. We're looking for something like a gift or a note. Go back about two weeks!" The group of agents standing in the apartment dutifully opened up small black notebooks and then started flipping through, as all agents were required to "book" or record any contacts made by their subjects during the day, no matter how minor.
Still standing next to Patrick and Olivia, Zummy looked at Erin with a puzzled expression. "What's really going on?" he asked her. Erin put her finger to her lips in response and Zummy promptly shut up and sat back down on the bed.
It took a few minutes for the protective agents to search their books until one finally shouted out. "Have a possible contact!" Olivia jogged over to see his book, along with Patrick and Dylan. "When?" she asked.
"Eight days ago, Friday before last," the agent said. Showing them his shorthand notes, he told them "ANGEL got a letter from ROMEO while in the student café." ROMEO was the agents' codename for Diego.
"ROMEO?!" exclaimed Olivia. "What was it?"
"I had assumed," the agent tried to explain, "at that time that ROMEO was trying to fix things with TIGER" he nodded to Erin where she stood "so it didn't raise any suspicions."
"She didn't mention it to me at all," Erin told the others in surprise. "I never knew about it."
"You think?" Patrick asked Dylan and Olivia.
"Could be." Olivia showed the letter envelope to the agent. "Was this it?"
"Looks about right," he said.
"Worth enough to track him down," said Olivia. "Do we know his whereabouts?" she asked the others.
"Last reported still on campus as of yesterday," said another agent. Olivia then nodded. "Then let's bring him in and find out what he knows."
That morning Diego was hiding in the lobby of his dorm apartment complex, trying to keep from being seen from the outside windows as he waited for his escape plan to unfold.
In the space of a few days his entire life had gone to complete and total hell. A simple posting on EVAChan had escalated into not only a messy breakup with the pilot girl but a snowballing crisis that so far eclipsed his bourgeoning academic career at TNI, and now likely his immigration status.
That his online presence was basically destroyed by Erin was of minimal consequence to him, Diego knew. He could always build new identities and in fact he had a reserve identity he had kept as a "fallback" in case of a disaster occurring here in America. In his jacket pocket were a new phone, registered to a new name with an Ecuadorian passport that he had paid handsomely for prior to leaving for school last summer.
The academic destruction was worse however. Diego was cursed with being both streetwise and book-smart, streetwise from surviving with the gangs in the wreckage of Lima after Second Impact. His gang was his family, and to pull his weight in the group they had made use of his intelligence and studiousness in order to further their reach into society. All he had needed to do was get a university degree he could make a handsome salary off of, and then place himself within some company or government agency where the gang would benefit as a whole. Pretty easy goings for a guy who was living out of trash cans a decade earlier, Diego thought, but it was apparent that he was tangling with the wrong tiger and as a result was now beating a hasty retreat.
He had already once been brought into custody by Alliance intelligence on account of his pursuit of Erin Forrestal, but then kept his cool and prayed that they couldn't find too much about his past. Somehow he had been released over the winter and was free to pursue the other part of his plan. To no avail that had now crashed and burned as well, and he wasn't going to wait until black-suited agents knocked on his dorm room again.
The last straw had been seeing a flock of agents and police around the blue-haired girl's apartment loft that morning. He knew quite well who she really was and just how precarious of a position he was now it. Not that it was his choice, as to him Diego had run well out of choices long, long before.
On his new phone Diego monitored the ride-sharing app as his vehicle of escape approached. Once he saw the agents around Rei Ayanami's home that morning, he had sprinted back to his dorm and frantically packed his suitcase, then snuck to a nearby alleyway where he smashed his phone and burnt his old identity documents. Returning to the dorm, he called the ride and during the wait had booked a flight from a nearby small regional airport to take him to the Midwest USA first and not immediately out of the country as those flights would be under surveillance. Then from the middle of America he would switch to yet another ID and book passage via sea ferry to Cuba, and then a couple more stops to reach Peru. Once free of the Cambridge region it would be hard to track him, Diego was confident, but first he had to get out of the jaws of the trap.
His screen flashed "DRIVER APPROACHING: LOOK FOR A WHITE PRIUS" and Diego peeked outside. Parked on the curb was a white new-model Toyota Prius four-door. The driver, named Antoine, appeared to be of Haitian origin and Diego didn't recognize him from any of the Alliance agents he knew escorted Erin and Rei. Carefully scanning the outside from the window and confirming no one else was around, Diego then bounded from the lobby with a backpack in hand, and then ran to the Prius.
Opening the back door, Diego threw his backpack in and then jumped inside. "Antoine?" he asked the driver, just to make sure it was him. "Good morning, boss!" the driver replied over his shoulder. Diego slammed the car door. "Springfield Airport, fastest route please."
"I got to drive the way the app tells me," Antoine told him. "Otherwise I get in trouble with the app people."
"A hundred dollars says you can beat that app!" Diego then handed Antoine a $100 bill.
"OK, hang on!" he told him and immediately punched the accelerator.
Diego leaned back in the seat and took a deep breath, not letting go until Antoine made his way around the Charles River and then southeast onto the Concord Turnpike. Diego himself knew the route, Concord to I-95 and then to the Mass Turnpike, and then all the way to Springfield and Westover Airport. Once on the I-95 he knew he'd be home free of the immediate dragnet.
As he monitored the driving route on his app, Diego thought back to how this mess had started. Was she worth it, he wondered? Muy Dios Erin was a goddess as far as he was concerned, blessed with beauty, charm, and physicality, and it certainly took months to break down her very-well constructed walls. He had made the mistake of just taking that one last step a little too fast but he had then figured with her asshole brother out of the way and the clone girl being preoccupied with medical issues that Erin had simply not been more isolated then that moment, so he had to move when he did.
Quite unfortunately Erin had also proved to be much more sharper in intelligence and determination than he had figured. He had seduced girls before back in Peru and usually after that first time they were so entranced that he could do no wrong in their eyes. Those girls had perused at their strength and worked then down to their weakness, but Erin had been penetrated at her weakness but then rolled onto her strength. In another world she'd make a fine wife, Diego considered, but alas now she was an animal uncaged and he was the prey.
Was it regrettable, he wondered? Perhaps not worth this much trouble, but then he'd have one hell of a story to tell his gangmates around the firepit, assuming he survived to tell it.
Suddenly the Prius jerked to the right and sped down an offramp. Diego looked out the windows and saw that they weren't going on the I-95 like had expected, but instead were disembarking the freeway. He hastily pounded on the door. "Wait! That's the wrong route!"
"Boss, there's big road construction on the Interstate," replied Antoine, who didn't even look backwards as he spoke. "Gotta take a shortcut around it."
"Okay, but better do it fast," Diego complained, "or I'll miss my flight."
"Sure thing, boss!"
The Prius sped through a park area, avoiding a series of CAUTION signs on the road that guided him further north and west. Diego looked nervously, knowing that this was no longer the road to Springfield. He searched through his backpack to find his second mobile phone, if he was compromised he'd have to ditch his current phone and then try again for another ride, this time through another state or perhaps even a rail station. He had to get out of the Cambridge Metro area fast.
"Hey," Diego shouted, pounding on the seat where the driver was. "Drop me off here!"
"No can do, boss!"
"Fuck that! Just drop me off here or I'll get out on my own!" The car's acceleration increased and the Prius sped out of the park area and into a suburban set of homes.
"I said slow the car down!"
"Company policy, boss!" replied Antoine, "I gotta follow the app and the app says to take you up ahead."
"But that's not Springfield!"
"No boss, you changed it! New destination."
"What do you mean I changed it !?" Diego looked out the windows again and saw a large sign on the right side of the road that said ALLIANCE OF FREE NATIONS BASE NORTH. WELCOME!
Diego immediately went for the door latches but found they were locked from the driver's controls. He pushed on the door to try and force it open but it didn't budge. It was at that moment that his heart jumped a whole spread of beats. The Prius promptly drove through the open driveway and security gate of Alliance Base North and parked.
Diego looked out the window and saw a squad of agents clad in dark suits surrounding his ride share. The door was opened before he could reach for the handle.
"Hey!" said Dylan with a smile. "Well, if it isn't Senior Padrote! How nice of you to come and see us!"
"This is a big mistake!" Diego shouted as Dylan and another agent grabbed his arms and pulled him out of the rear seat. "I didn't mean to come here, you pendejo!"
"Sure you did," Dylan told him. "It's right there on the app I think." Dylan motioned towards the car driver. Diego stared at him with an accusing glance, while Antoine was rather nonchalant about the whole affair.
"You paid me $100 boss, but they paid me $1000," said the driver. Antoine looked at Dylan. "Ride over?"
Dylan shrugged, motioning to his catch. "For him anyway."
"Don't forget to give me a good review. I get docked if my rating goes too low."
"Don't worry, we got you covered," Dylan replied, and satisfied the driver drove the car and sped off out the entry gate as Diego mournfully looked on.
"So, Mister Stud," Dylan said to Diego with a grin. "Let's have another talk, shall we?"
Well, here we are finally six months later and another post! That too entirely too long, but I had a long string of disruptions including two major trips, illnesses from both my family and in-laws family, business chaos, and not-quite-grown-up child chaos. Basically too much adulting and not enough time for writing, and then on top of that yet another creative project that took all of August. But here we are at the first chapter of the second half of NJA.
For those of you who have stuck with this, I would expect a quicker pacing than before now as we have a double-sized crisis for our friends. Stay tuned the next chapter won't take that long to come out.