Athrun stared moodily across the shallow pool of extremely hot water. Ysak met his gaze from the bench on the other side of the pool and glared resentfully back. They had split up about twenty minutes earlier, resolving to have nothing to do with each other for the rest of the resort trip. However, all of the pools in both the other buildings they had gone to were too tepid for their tastes. Athrun had decided to sneak back to their initial pool at almost exactly the same time Ysak had hit on the same plan, a building away. Both boys reached the pool at nearly the same time, entering from opposite doors. Needless to say, they had not been pleased to see each other again, but neither was willing to give up the promise of genuinely hot water.

Athrun sighed. "This must be karma. I'm getting a lesson in tolerance." He mumbled to himself.

"What's that?" Ysak said sharply.

"Nothing. Just deciding to accept fate and share the pool." Athrun replied, standing up and slipping into the piping hot water slowly. Jumping in quick was a sure way to get scalded. Better to go slow, get each part of the body accustomed to the heat before sinking deeper in. Ysak mirrored his caution. He'd learned the hard way the first time. There were no hot springs on the PLANTS, and bath water never got anywhere near the temperature this spring was at, nigh on one hundred and fifteen degrees… too hot for most people. Ysak had just careened into the pool, expecting it to be no different than a hot tub or bath. Of course, he had careened right out again, cursing up a storm and nearly falling over in his rush.

"We need a topic of conversation." Ysak said suddenly.

"What?" Athrun replied, distracted.

"Something safe to talk about."

"Why?"

"To stave off boredom."

Athrun shook his head slightly. So Ysak wanted to talk like civilized folk, eh? Well, he supposed he could handle that. It would make a refreshing change from the rest of the day.

"How was your day at the beach?" Athrun asked after some thought. "Yesterday, I mean."

"Of course yesterday." Ysak snapped before calming himself. "It was nice. Relaxing. I wouldn't mind going again."

"What did you do?"

"Kicked the crap out of a bunch of civilians in volleyball. We made it all the way to the finals before I... got distracted and wandered off."

Athrun sensed there was more to this tale. "Distracted and wandered off?"

"Dearka had just finished telling another basic training story. As usual, I was the butt of the joke."

"He tells plenty of jokes where you aren't the punchline… just, not when you're around."

"Of course, no one had much sympathy for me and I was a little annoyed, so I got up from the drink bar and left, telling everyone I was going for a walk. Just an aimless, wandering walk. I asked if Katie and Chanel wished to come along, expecting a yes answer. They told me they'd be along in about ten minutes after they finished their drinks. I was surprised, since I had no idea where I was going to wander to, how would they be able to find me? They assured me they had their ways. I was doubtful but didn't wish to argue and so I left."

"And then?"

"Don't ask me how, but less than five minutes later they found me. I'm embarrassed to admit, I was angry at them and I tried to make it hard, doubling back once or twice and finally hiding in a crowd of people watching a street entertainer juggle flaming clubs. One moment I was alone, the next they were right next to me, one on either side, as calm as could be. I never even heard them approach. I had made sure to have people taller than me standing all around me as a visual blind, but it was totally worthless. When I asked them how they did it, they just smiled those secretive smiles and told me they had their ways."

"That is odd. Maybe it's something they picked up from Alkire or Raine."

"That's what they said at first. But that didn't quite ring true. We received some commando training in preparation for the mission on Heliopolis. Never did we ever hear anything about techniques for locating people in a crowd when you have no idea which way they went or where they might be. I could have been anywhere within three blocks of that juice shop and they found me like I was shooting off flares. After nearly half an hour of cajoling, threatening, arguing and finally begging, they gave me another story. Though they warned me that I wouldn't believe them."

"And what was that?"

Ysak tried to keep his face straight, but wasn't very successful. He looked disgusted. "They said they homed in on the tele-empathic signals of my subconscious. And they said that with totally straight faces."

"What?" Athrun sat forward a bit too quickly and winced at the heat. "What did you do then?"

"Well… it pains me to admit it, but I laughed at them. Then I told them to quit joking around and tell me how they did it. They got really angry. Like, as angry as I get. And then they left. Just stormed off before I could say anything else."

"Wow."

"Yeah, I was confused, to say the least. I went after them, of course. But damn me if they didn't just vanish like ghosts. I wasn't three seconds behind them and once they made the first turn I never saw them again for the next three hours. I only found them because they let me, I'm pretty sure. Then I made another mistake."

"Really?"

"Yes. I demanded to know how they'd avoided me so well."

"How'd that turn out?"

"They told me."

"And?"

"I don't remember the exact wordage, but it amounted to them saying that they were listening in to my thoughts and so knew exactly where to go so that I kept going in circles."

"Telepathic girlfriends. That's a new twist."

"Shut up, please. It's bad enough hearing it from them. I don't need that story spread about. Dearka would manage to twist it into something worse than it already is, I just know it. I'm going to get to the bottom of this though and learn the real way they were able to find and hide from me. And I'm not going to accept any bullshit about telepathic powers and empathic signals or emotional transcripts or neuro-connectivity, either."

"Sounds like a lot of fairly heavy duty terms. Maybe a bit much for a pair of teenage girls to come up with on their own."

"You believe they're telepathic?"

"No. That's fiction stuff. I'm just saying that all those terms they threw at you don't seem like an average sort of cover up. Maybe you should ask Raine. She's their adopted older sister after all. Maybe she can clear things up for you."

"Yeah, maybe I'll do that." From the tone of his voice, Ysak probably wouldn't but that was how he was. "So what did you do yesterday? I mean, before Cagalli brained you with a vase."

Athrun snorted. "I went to Cagalli's house."

-------------------------------------------------

"What?"

"Yeah, it's a good story all right."

"You took him to your house?" Miriallia said, incredulous.

"Well, we were in disguise!" Cagalli hastened to point out. "And I did kind of talk myself into it. Or allowed Athrun to manipulate me into it, which amounts to the same thing."

"And what happened then?" Lacus asked. She was sitting on the edge of the pool, having decided that too much exposure to the hot pool was making her light headed and drowsy. She missed her pink Haro robot, which Alkire had forced her to leave behind at his Hawaiian safe house, citing how distinctive it was. Sometimes the room felt empty without it bouncing around all the time.

"Well, Athrun had already called a taxi, so we were committed. We took the hour and half cab ride without much incident. We arrived at my house… my father's house, the main one where he publicly lived anyway, just after a tour started, so we were forced to wait for another two hours for another one to start. I used up that time by giving Athrun a tour of the outer grounds."

"They just let people walk around the outer grounds?" Katie asked in some surprise, from where she and Chanel were taking turns braiding and unbraiding each other's hair into successively wilder patterns.

"Well… not technically, no. But it is MY HOUSE. I know more ways into the grounds than the entire security detail."

"You were a bad girl growing up, weren't you?" Miriallia said. Cagalli blushed a little.

"Only after I turned twelve. Before then I was one of those disgustingly cute little angel girls. You know… like Lacus."

Lacus kicked some water at her. "I had plenty of mischievious moments, I'll have you know. I misbehaved often, actually."

"Yeah… sure, whatever. You'll have to tell us about those, later." Cagalli snorted in disbelief. "I took Athrun in through the route I knew was the safest. The one I used to run away from home after Heliopolis so I could join Desert Dawn along with Kisaka. There's this pond on the southwest corner of the grounds that borders right up to the privacy wall. Well, the pond is supposed to have a drainage channel through the wall, a pipe about three feet around. The thing is, the pond never gets high enough to flood down the pipe, so it is as dry as a bone. There are a few vermin grates and an infared detection system in there, but I bypassed those when I was thirteen and the security forces have yet to find out about it."

"So who went first through the pipe?" Miriallia asked.

"Athrun, of course. He's much more of a gentleman than Dearka. He didn't even suggest that I go first. For all he knew, the tunnel could have been full of rats."

"Would that have made a difference?" Chanel asked.

"Athrun hates rats." Lacus replied. "I wouldn't quite call it a phobia, but he loathes them. He went exploring into an old warehouse when he was five or six and disturbed a big pack of the things. He gotten bitten and scratched up pretty badly, if I recall right. Ever since then he hasn't liked them at all."

"Yeah, and that doesn't go beyond this pool, either. I only found out myself by accident, and I know he wouldn't appreciate it being spread around." Cagalli warned everyone. "Unless you all want to cough up your boyfriends secret weaknesses first…"

"My lips are sealed… I know anyway though." Lacus said.

"I won't say anything to Dearka. Knowing him, he'd find some way of slipping a few rubber rats into Athrun's cockpit or something, and then he'd crash and blow up and everything would be bad." Miriallia said.

"Ysak isn't in our good graces right now. He won't hear a thing from us until he apologizes and even then, we won't tell him about this." Katie put in.

"Okay, good, continuing on. We went in through the pipe, which seemed tighter than I remembered and got out into the grounds without being noticed. I then led Athrun to what was, during my younger, more innocent days, my secret castle."

"Ooo… secret castle. I had one of those too. Though mine was just a big cardboard box my dad brought home from work one day." Miriallia cut in.

"Well, mine wasn't a cardboard box. On the south side of the house, right next to the patio, there's this big pine tree. The branches go all the way down to brush the ground and it's very thickly foliated. However, what only I and the groundskeepers really know is that the branches on the tree start a good ten feet up the trunk and descend in a bow shape to the ground, leaving a reasonably large cavity between the braches and the trunk. About the size of a large family tent, I'd say. The grass under the tree is thickly carpeted with soft old pine needles, and the branches completely block anyone from seeing you from outside. Of course, it's equally hard to see out from inside, but that's not the point. It's actually pretty well lit inside, with light streaming down from above, where the branches are less densely packed."

"Sounds like the perfect hiding spot." Chanel observed.

"Yeah. I used to go there when I was angry at my father when he wouldn't let me go outside the grounds to play. I used to be so childish, it amazes me now. My father had so much more patience than I ever gave him credit for."

"So what then?" Lacus asked. Cagalli blushed quite deeply.

"Well… we still had about an hour and fifteen minutes to kill and the adrenaline rush of sneaking into my own house and re-visiting all my old hiding spaces was still in full flow and… well… one thing led to another."

"You did it right then and there? Not thirty feet from your house? With the possibility of a security patrol happening by at any moment?" Katie said with a wicked grin. "Go girl." Nobody else said anything. Chanel and Lacus were both pretty embarrassed themselves, just by the topic. Neither were entirely comfortable discussing sex so openly. Miriallia just cocked her head and grinned, gifted with new ammunition to needle Dearka with.

"Y-yeah. Thanks… Katie. Well, skipping ahead about forty minutes…"

"Forty minutes!" Katie cut in again. "Damn!"

Chanel dunked her into the water. "Shut up. She's trying to tell a story, and we don't need your lewd comments."

"Forty minutes later…" Cagalli repeated, trying to ignore Chanel and Katie, who were now dunking each other enthusiastically. "… we slipped out of the tree and back across the grounds. We almost mistimed it. I think one of the kids in the tour we missed saw us. He gave me a wink when we passed him on the way into the house."

"Maybe he just thought you were pretty." Lacus mused.

"With Athrun there, holding my hand, arm in arm? He didn't have the build to be brave enough to do that." Cagalli refuted. "But he didn't say anything so we were okay. We joined the next tour group and stood around waiting for the other tourists to show up. I remembered how much I hated the days when our house was open to the public, even though it usually meant I got to go to our sea side mansion, which is a much nicer house. Back then… and hell, even now, I'm not too fond with having my private life on display. Once I hit age thirteen or so, it started getting really annoying having to move out every two days so four bunches of total strangers could look through my room on their way back from my father's study and the upstairs guest room."

"I can see how that wouldn't be very enjoyable." Lacus said sympathetically. She knew well what it was like to have your life always on display, even if it was to a lesser degree, since she chose to become a pop singer, wheras Cagalli was just born into her job.

"Yeah, well, getting back to the story, we started the tour. It was really hard, resisting the impulse to correct the guide. The one we had was obviously new at his job and he didn't know very much about the house and the stuff he did know was usually slightly flawed. He'd date the furniture wrong or say a room was important when it wasn't or tell a story about a room that actually happened somewhere else. I was kept busy the entire time, whispering the real stuff to Athrun." Cagalli stopped for a drink of cold water, pulling herself out of the hot pool to keep her skin from getting wrinkled.

"When we finally got to my room, I nearly freaked out. For one thing the guide totally botched the description. He seemed almost ashamed to be in my room. I could tell everyone was thinking about that nasty videotape Blue Cosmos made. But the worst thing was that not a single thing in that room was actually mine. Everything of mine had been taken out and replaced with replicas. Pretty good ones, but to me they were disgustingly false. I don't know where all of my stuff was, the police probably took it when they put Kisaka in jail, searching for clues. I was so angry I couldn't speak. All of my pictures, my music, my stuffed animals, my clothes… my gun… everything was gone. They hadn't even replaced the gun, which was too bad because it was one of my prize possessions. Not the viridian dress, like the guide said. He didn't know the first thing about me! I hate dresses!"

"So that was it?" Miriallia asked. Cagalli half glared at her.

"Expecting something more?"

"Well, no, I guess. It's just that usually something unusual happens when you feel the need to tell a story about it."

"The unusual stuff happened later, when I trashed the hotel lobby and took Athrun down with a glass vase." Cagalli replied. "And besides, what's so common about sneaking onto the grounds of your house, as a wanted fugitive, making love to your fiancée less than fifty feet from thirty kinds of people who'd like to put you both in jail, and then giving your fiancée a tour of a house you'll both probably never live in?"

"Given some of the days we've had, that really isn't so weird or exciting." Lacus pointed out.

"True enough." Katie said, having won the dunking fight, as usual when physical activities were at stake. She turned her head suddenly towards the door.

"See something?" Chanel asked.

"Could have sworn I saw someone at the door, but there's no one there now."

"Someone looking in at us?" Miriallia asked.

"A guy?" Lacus asked.

"Well, a girl wouldn't have too much to gain by staring at us in a bath." Cagalli replied.

"Our guy's wouldn't do such a thing." Lacus said firmly. She paused a few breaths. "Well, I know Kira wouldn't."

"Athrun wouldn't either. Besides, both Kira and Athrun have little left of the female body they haven't seen anyway." Cagalli added, causing Lacus to blush quite thoroughly.

"Ysak wouldn't… on purpose." Chanel said, somewhat doubtfully.

"It wasn't Ysak." Katie assured her.

"How do you know?" Miriallia asked.

"Cause if it was Ysak, he'd still be staring, goggle eyed. He doesn't exactly have a large depth of experience with beautiful women like all of us. To him, we're all still pretty magical. Trust me, we'd have caught him red handed if it was Ysak." Katie said with a wink to Chanel.

"That really only leaves Dearka." Mir sighed. "I'm supposed to think of some defense for him?" she complained. She thought for a few moments. "I can't think of any reason why Dearka wouldn't be the culprit. He's twisted like that. Though if he is the peeper, we'll probably not find out until at least a week from now. He's not stupid, not at all."

"We could find out pretty easy." Chanel countered.

"If he suddenly has a camera when next we meet him, then we'll know he's guilty. No matter what he says, nothing good has ever come of him and a camera." Katie added.

"Look at the time! It's just about time to meet the guys in the center pool. We should get going, so we can get there first and claim all the good spots." Miriallia spoke up. Everyone agreed, clambering out of the pool and rushing to get dressed.

---------------------------------------------

Asmodeus found Frost waiting in the parking lot when he got back from his aborted trip to the hot springs. Dyre was sitting in the back of the SUV, properly chastened and sullen. Asmodeus made a mental note to make sure the Lieutenant had a stiff word with the man about fire control when next the Hellhounds gathered together. "What do you want?" Asmodeus asked Frost as he climbed out of the car.

"This car. I've been ordered to go finish off Kisaka." Frost replied. And indeed, he was dressed to kill. He wore a variation on his grim reaper Halloween costume, dark grey long sleeved shirt and dark grey pants, over which was worn a long black leather mantle that covered him from neck to toe, split down the sides to allow freedom of arm movement. A separate hood with veil and integrated night vision goggles was tucked into his belt; a skull was painted on the veil in white. Frost casually leaned on his pride and joy, a fire blacked ash scythe with a monomolecular titanium-steel edge, hand forged by Frost himself. If Frost really was on a kill mission Asmodeus knew that hidden underneath the mantle there would be at least four or five combat knives, a large caliber revolver of some sort, Frost's skinning/carving knife and two machetes with chainsaw teeth that were powered by mini batteries. The chainblade machetes were extremely brutal weapons, able to chew through hardened steel like it was soft clay.

"Ordered by who?"

"By Cervantes, of course." Frost replied scathingly. "And he want's it done now!"

"Don't let him have the car until I verify this." Asmoedus instructed his Hellhounds. They pulled out their guns and trained them on Frost. "He's the sixer." Asmodeus warned them. Dyre's eyes tightened, as did his compatriots. They were familiar with the BCPU project. Frost grinned hugely.

"I see my rep gets around."

"What do we do if he attacks, sir?" one of the other Hellhounds asked.

"Shoot out the tires on the car." Dyre replied. "He wants the car, but it won't get far on the rims." Asmodeus shook his head and headed inside. It was too bad about Dyre. The man was smart and clever. He just didn't have very good common sense. Asmodeus quickly made his way to Cervantes's office, the one formerly used by Lord Nara Attha.

"Frost say's you're sending him to kill Kisaka?" Asmodeus asked, after the room was clear.

"True." Cervantes replied.

"Why? I thought you said earlier this morning that Kisaka still had some use as a public scapegoat."

"I've got a good feeling about getting rid of him. We don't need a scapegoat any more, Asmodeus. The populace is perfectly willing to do whatever we tell them, without a tangible target for their anger. However, there is a small faction, mostly consisting of those who fought in the last war, who still believe in Yula Attha and Kisaka. If they could break Kisaka out of jail… well, he's a serious professional in your field. There's no telling what harm he could do with just a little popular support. I'd rather not be the sheriff of Nottingham to his Robin Hood."

"I suppose that makes sense." Asmodeus allowed. "Is there any evidence that a break out is being planned."

"No. But I prefer to get a head start on the opposition, and remove Kisaka's head before the day is out."

"Whatever you say, sir."

"Precisely."

"Let him have the car." Asmodeus said into his phone, after dialing Dyre's radio. "You drive. To the prison. Just drop him off at the front and then get the hell out of there. We'll send in a retrieval team later." Asmodeus turned to Cervantes and turned off the phone. "So the whole prison is going to go, if you're sending Frost?"

Cervantes shrugged. "Part of the cover up. No one will believe one man could kill all sixty guards, plus the dogs and all the inmates. We'll be able to pass it off as the work of fanatical terrorists. Then we can arrest some of Kisaka's supporters and pin the blame on them, say they were unable to handle the shame of being deceived by Kisaka, so they decided to take revenge. People will buy it."