The two children scaled the creaking fire escape. For one, it was to her displeasure.

"Stooop…" she whined from the back, knees buckling as she felt one of the rusted nuts of the metal stairway grind against concrete in a disconcerting way. "Our parents are gonna get really angry if they find out we were outside at night!" She pleaded, invoking parental deities in a last-ditch attempt to ward off her companion.

The other laughed loudly, and turned to look back down, hands on her hips. "Don't worry about it!" She confidently answered. "My folks'll cover for you when we get back! Don't be a crybaby! Just a few more steps and I can show you something really cool!"

Against all odds, the snivelling half of the duo eventually caught up, and their rubber soles soon came to a halt on the grimy, weedy, cracked roof of the forgotten building.

The city felt like a million miles away in the silence and, more importantly, the lack of light pollution. White pinpricks danced amid the smears of blue and black splashed across the night sky.

Each time they laid eyes on this view, their breaths were taken away. At their age, the city of Eridu felt like a planet unto itself – and yet what stretched above them was a yawning expanse that even those oh-so-smart adults couldn't fully comprehend.

"Look, up there," the girl said, and pointed to the night sky. The other followed her gesture, up to the largest object hanging above. "Isn't it scary? The Moon?"

Logic and science dictated that, once, the planetary satellite was solid, bleached stone, and yet the current reality was that half of it was consumed by a black canvas. It reflected no light, and what illumination it provided took the form of an eerie green hue, pockmarks scattered across a lightless plain, serving as cores for a whole landscape that was out of touch with reality.

It was a stern and cheerless reminder of what awaited the people on the planet if the Hollows were not contained and controlled.

No matter how young you were, you regarded the Moon with wariness, and feared the emergence of a Hollow, lest you became trapped within.

She grimaced, and felt her arms clutch themselves. "Y-Yeah…"

The girl dropped her arm, and looked on at the infected satellite until she whispered with solemn awe.

"But I heard we used to send spaceships into space all the time. We landed on the Moon, before it got that Hollow." There was a smile in her voice, brimming with pride and possibility. "We had a flag up there. The whole world watched a person do that, and he became super-famous. The Man on the Moon."

She turned to look at her friend. Her closest of friends. The one she could trust with her impossible sentence.

"I want to go to space."

"W-Why?" the other asked, a young imagination envisioning her friend flying into the darkness, never to return. "The only thing up there is the Moon, but if you go up there…"

"Because every time I see this sky…" The dreaming girl said, sentence momentarily unfinished, before her voice firmed up. "I want to go to space because we haven't been for years."

The other girl clenched her hands, eyes nervously fixed skyward. "But how? We don't know how to fly a plane or anything." Did pilot uniforms even come in their size? How did one learn to fly in school?

"I… I really don't know!" The girl said, before laughing in disbelief at forgetting that little step. Yet still she smiled when she asked, "Hey, if I try, could we do it together? We'll be the first two girls to fly into space again!"

The friend looked up at the Moon, with its gross visage bearing down on them. It was still terrifying to imagine getting anywhere close to it, let alone setting foot on its misshapen surface.

But…

If it could be done… If they really could be the first in space again…

First in that vastness of infinite potential…

The Belle Cherie was another of New Eridu's cafes with delusions of grandeur, believing that the right upholstery, the right uniforms, and the right foam scribbles would allow the staff to overcharge patrons.

The cycle that defined so many of its competitors would in all likelihood be perpetuated here, with preening foodies boasting of paying through the nose for a frosted peppermint pumpkin-spiced something-ccino, leading to an early surge and a quick death after the yuppies moved on and the meek of the city realized that Coff Cafe's prices remained unbeatable.

But on the semi-legal Inter-Knot platform, the restaurant was making rounds for another reason: Table 17.

Whatever quirk or managerial oversight occurred, the two-seat set up was a nightmare to approach, hidden behind a pillar and a cutlery cabinet near the kitchen entrance. It was hard to observe from other spots in the restaurant, and it even sat in a blindspot of the security cameras, which could see when Table 17 was occupied, but not who the customers were.

However long Belle Cherie would last, its obnoxious prices were a fair trade for allowing underworld movers and shakers a new comfortable corner in which to conduct business, away from the prying eyes of New Eridu Public Security or the Hollow Investigative Association.

Even the staff found itself unable to object. After all, the otherwise radioactive Table 17's reservation list was always booked by John Smiths and Jane Does more than willing to pay their fair share, and the servers enjoyed the exhilaration of their tame, harmless brushes with adventure.

Belle, meanwhile, was thankful to have her own, normal name, as she sidled into her impromptu lunch-date.

Across the faux-marble table, Rain sat nervously, hood drawn over her head, and hands clenched around the sides of her chair. The pudding on the table sat collecting dust, while the pink-haired girl's eyes failed to meet Belle's as she kept glancing around the cafe.

"...I'm not going to ask if you're okay, but have you been managing?" Belle asked.

It might have been a rescue worthy of Random Play's action catalogue, but one didn't exactly leave a kidnapping, a black-hat job performed at gunpoint, and an attempted murder with a smile on their face – yet Belle had a feeling that Rain wasn't going to bow to life's misfortunes, the way her trembling found itself matched by the firmness behind her eyes.

"Well, I still haven't worked up the nerve to walk further than my local 141, and I'm probably going to get insomnia, but…" A ghost of a smile. "I'm still here. The people at Victoria Housekeeping have been keeping an eye out for me, at least."

Belle hummed, delightfully surprised. Von Lycaon certainly carried himself in accordance with what his occupation – and reputation – demanded, but if nothing else…

"It can't be cheap, right?"

"Yeah, I thought so, too," Rain said. "I asked them about the cost, but Lyaon just said it was just thoroughness for the Ballet Twins job."

"...You know, that can also be kind of scary."

Belle inwardly grimaced at the thought. Victoria Housekeeping certainly sounded like an organization that had a long memory. Thank whatever god may exist that she and Wise had managed to get on their good side. "Still, seems like you're as safe as can be. So – what can I do you for?"

Rain drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "We're both after the same guy, right? Perlman, and whoever wanted him silenced."

Belle nodded, doing her best to not give away that she knew even more than the hacker did. But even Rain could work out that the corrupt former executive of Vision Corporation had stepped on someone's toes; someone who had the pull to force the girl to remotely hack the airship the stout man had been riding to his court case and send it careening towards a Hollow.

"I've been doing a lot of reading to figure out if there's anything I could do to find either of them, and I found something curious."

Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, Rain held her phone forward, allowing Belle to see a wall of text surrounding an image of the dirigibles that sailed across New Eridu's skies every day. Most of the words were inscrutable given the file size, but the blue-haired girl could still make out terms like "tonnage" and "displacement".

"The ship's technical data?" Belle asked, something Rain confirmed with a nod.

"I was trying to understand more about what happened, so I worked backwards and tried to see how I would have hacked the airship myself."

The hacker tapped the screen for emphasis.

"Every airship needs its flight plan logged in ahead of time. If one goes off course, it would have set off a series of alarms and countermeasures. NEPS would have been alerted."

Belle nodded, arms folded. "That makes sense… what did this mean for you when you were in the Ballet Twins?"

"If those alarms went off, I would have had to shut them down. But here's the thing – I didn't have to do a thing."

That would have made the hacking and the remote-controlled flight effortless, Belle imagined. "What does that mean?"

"I'm guessing that even if the pilots already memorized the route, the digital flight plan was deleted from its systems beforehand. Clear case of tampering. If I were to guess, that means there'll be a trace of that in the airship's flight recorder, its black box."

Rain looked up from her phone to meet Belle's gaze with a hard stare.

"Perlman might be on the run, but he hijacked that airship. It's full of evidence and data, and an airship is easier to find than a fugitive. If we can get our hands on that black box, we might find out who scrubbed it."

The hacker's compatriot stared at the technical information, and returned another firm nod. "This is a huge lead. I would have forgotten about the airship if not for you. Are you okay telling me this?"

"You were there at the Ballet Twins, too. Let's try and chase this down on opposite ends. If this helps you nail them, I'll be satisfied," Rain grimly sneered. A faint hope of revenge still glimmered in those eyes.

Before the two could continue speaking, a waitress stopped by the isolated table, and an unforgettably bored voice spoke out.

"Dearest customer, your bill for the pudding. Thank you for eating at Bell Cherie."

A delicate hand placed a tray with a receipt in front of Belle, who frowned and looked up… at Ellen Joe, the shark Thiren and, more importantly, an agent of Victoria Housekeeping.

"Ellen?" Belle asked, perplexed. The teenager, dressed her in maid uniform, shrugged, wordlessly retorting what exactly she had been expecting. Instead, Belle looked back down at the bill. "Wait, why am I-"

On the other hand, Rain interpreted the action in an entirely different manner.

"Shit, I gotta go," the hacker hissed, taking her phone back and shoving it into a backpack she hauled up from the floor and hastily threw back onto herself. "Don't worry about me, Victoria has my exit strategy – seeyoulater-"

In an instant Rain was gone, rushing into the theoretically prohibited kitchen, while Ellen sauntered away.

Belle looked at the abandoned pudding and the cheque, and sighed. Taking up a small spoon, she just began to slice into the egg and sugar when the front entrance swung open to reveal a trio of NEPS officers who couldn't have screamed "undercover" any harder with the way their fashion was painfully off-the-shelf and a decade old.

The three twisted their heads to and fro, acting simultaneously far too casual and yet too intense, and failed to notice Table 17 at all.

With an unnoticed snort, Belle reached into her jacket and pulled out her own phone, which had a call active the whole time.

"Hey, Wise, you got all that?" Belle, half of the proxy Phaethon, asked, far more ably pretending to be a woman enjoying a treat in a cafe, spoon in her mouth and a hand on her cheek.

"Yeah. We owe Rain one. Come back to Random Play as soon as you can. We'll get in touch with Caesar, then."

"Got it, bro," Belle answered before cutting the call, and quickly switching apps to one of her generic social media threads.

Despite everything, it was best to keep Rain in the dark. For Belle, Perlman was no fugitive, but more importantly…

She knew who to ask about this missing airship.