"I'll tell y'everything I know." The words trickled from her dumbfounded grin, dried blood from her nose painting it in dark burgundy. The girl closed her eyes, exhaling melodramatically between eggshell teeth.

"Twelve hours ago," there was omnipotence in her voice, "you were contacted by a Faust Cunningham, alias Dante." The woman's hair was raven black, in a strained bun, pulling her pale face too tight. Her head was thrown back gently, and because of the angle of her oval glasses to the light, her eyes had been replaced by two blank discs. She licked at the front of her teeth and produced a pen that had been perched on her ear.

"That's right." Fara glanced at herself in the mirror cut into the room's wall, wondering if there was anyone on the other side, wondering if there was another side. "He'd foun' himself at th'*CENSORED* end of Westview whif' 'alf a dozen pistols at'is forehead."

Dante's smile broadened, and he stuffed a bite of cheeseburger into it. Staring through the car's windshield, he watched two ivory sedans slow to a stop in front of a stinking fish market in Chinatown. The first packed a handful of toughs with shaved heads and unkempt collars; from the second stepped a short, thin man dressed to the nines and yelling into his cellular phone. "You're late, Adrian," he chuckled to himself.

"Can you identify this man?" queried the woman needlessly, tapping her pen on the cold, steel desk. The tink tink kept a perfect rhythm as she pulled a photograph of a small man in a seersucker three-piece suit from a folder and slid it toward the girl.

Fara knew who it was without looking at the picture. "Yeah, that's Adrian Noble. He was some crime lord wannabe whif' a Napoleon complex."

"Was?"

Fara trained her gaze lazily on the woman's lips and countered with a Cheshire grin.

The man closed his phone with a snarl and stepped into an alley, the bald men followed. A few minutes passed, enough time to let some pretty tramp in a red cocktail dress and a fur coat to step out of the sex shop down the street and hail a taxi. Dante opened his car door and stretched, leaning upward. A shiver caught him off-guard as the season's biting wind slapped at his leathery face.

The driver's thin black suit leaned over before Dante closed the door behind him. "Try to exercise a little more caution this time, yes?" Lethe grinned knowingly, and the expression mirrored itself on Dante's face as he checked the clip in his overzealous magnum, and replaced it in his coat. The door shut with a decided click, and a shining crimson coat seeped into a crowd of charcoal suits and cobalt ties. Lethe was twirling a knife around its handle as the shots reverberated through the cluttered chasm of a street. He glanced upward with a yawn and watched the crowd scatter, a clean hole through each car's driver-side window.

Aboard the Equinox, there was an uncharacteristic air of serenity. Jouzu's massive form was crooked over itself, asleep on a single-form table with his face in a pile of small devices he had been fiddling with. Domino was on the floor next to him, curled up comfortably under a large sweater. The two newer men had decided to remain at New Antigone while a windstorm passed through. No doubt, they had met women.

Systemic's tanned body had finally collapsed onto the bolt launcher she had been reassembling for a marathon eighteen hours. Ooidal had lost a bet that she could make it to twenty without blinking. His massive tumor of a frame oozed over the operator's chair as he silently clacked away at a keyboard, rerouting a hard drop that had been patched downtown. Two of his monitors were still strewn akimbo from the melee with Dante after he had kidnapped the brat.

Fara was lying on her stomach, the corrugated steel of the bed-slash-table digging cold, red pockmarks into her cheek. Violent images of war flashed through her vision each time she closed her eyes: guillotined preteens and fires that would never burn out.

Those thoughts turned to ash, and were replaced with vague, out-of-focus memories. She was with the terrorist – Pyraci – with rocks sharpened to knives at one another's throats, one making their way through Zero One as blackmail for the other. Jagged structures ripped into the blackened sky, and impossible machines drifted around the two, infinitely patient for a moment of vulnerability. Then, she was stripped of her upper hand, and her consciousness.

She was pulled through an endless black tunnel that seemed only and exactly large enough to fit her body by a torturous cramp that fastened itself snugly around the small of her neck; it cradled her head and vaulted a sharpened spike into the back of her head, lapsing her connection with reality, and causing her ears to cough blood. The rest was too hazy – a null, distant stinging every now and then, but more than anything, a feeling like her brain was bloated and full. She did not need to remember it though; the patchwork scars and poorly healed stitches that painted her body told the story themselves.

"How did you know Mister Cunningham?" Absently, a few notes scribbled themselves onto the woman's open notebook. She reached for a glass of water, and remembered that the pitcher had been left on the other side of the mirror, where the tape recorders had been set up.

"He'd tried t'kill me." The girl patted down her pockets, and found a rumpled pack of cigarettes she had pilfered from Dante's jacket. She did not smoke, but placed one precariously on her lips anyway. "Why d'y'ask?"

His magnum unloading shot after shot at the hairless yeti, Dante swam through a whir of SMG fire. He lunged at the man, and they toppled through a splintered door, met by the surprised stares of a double-handful of trigger-happy thickset thugs. Frenetically, he bounced limbs across the first part of each that he could reach, and managed to subdue three of the men before being halted by a lead penetration in his left shoulder, and a shattered collarbone.

"Faust Cunnin'ham, as I live 'n breathe." Noble had a nasally voice with an accent like he had grown up on a bayou. A hand slapped Dante from shock, and he bit his tongue to give the small man a close-lipped grin. "Naw, this'us adorable. Here, I thought I'd missed th'opportune time t'kill you yea-us ago, back when you pulled a Houdini on us. But look 'ere. You've so puh'litely dropped in and deliv'uh'd me an early Chris-muss present." Noble stepped over to the chair he had been sitting in, and pulled an intricate, antique revolver from his jacket. "Find some rope."

"And the relationship between Cunningham and Noble?" She was glancing between the wall clock and her watch, checking if they were still in sync.

"Between you an'me I 'fink they were in love. This whole thing just seemed like a lovers' spat." Fara giggled mockingly.

"Please."

"Beh-fore Dante fell out 'huv th'machines' favor, he had a man inside some exile organization oh-r'unother. Y'know, before they got organized." The girl decided that gesturing with the cigarette between her bloodied fingers when she spoke gave her an authoritative flair. "Th'whole mob deal sorta' 'fing. Vuh-ry hush-hush; get on th' 7:15 at Mara and off by Achan. They'd gi-"

"There's no train service between Mara and Achan."

"Maybe they took th'bus."

Her head spun and her pupils shriveled as Ooidal tore open the shrieking metal door to the dormitory. "Dante jus' put out'tuh call f'ur you." Fara stumbled from the table, noiselessly landing on the cold ground with thinning socks. She kept the sweater-turned-blanket wrapped around her delicate form, remembering that she was in only a stained and threadbare camisole and the shorts that had been haphazardly torn to the crux of her thighs to accommodate the unseemly braces she had worn when first returning from the city. Their age difference gave Ooidal and Fara a father-daughter affinity, but she had before caught him stealing an inappropriate glimpse.

"Jus' came in. I duh'no what t'uh make 'huv it." He tapped at the monitor as Fara scanned through the message.

"Hey, friend. Listen, I think we need to bury the hatchet and get on with our lives about this whole thing. So I've got a little business proposition for you. Meet me in Chinatown – east end of Westview. You remember the spot, don't you? –Dante"

"Th'ur's some attachment I'm havin' some trouble decryptin'. Might take a while." Fara nodded without hesitation, and Ooidal stepped around her to his seat, running to protocols to find a hack closest to the market. Only a week ago, he had dropped her at the same spot – a payphone by the bathrooms of some cheap gambling hall where people always ended up shot to death. "Don't worry 'bout me," she had said, and went off to finally end that scum Dante.

He could not bring himself to tell her the truth: Dante's hand in the lost boys' survival, the strings he had pulled to keep Zero One from sending the four horsemen after the Equinox. If keeping her in the dark meant keeping her alive, than he would make it his mission to smash every lightbulb in the world. The machines needed more people like her. They could take care of the math, but there was always an element that needed to come from something, someone youthful and fresh. There needs to be a human side, a pretty face, someone to step to the podium and take responsibility, and answer questions, and write the press release.

On more occasions than he cared to admit, he had questioned how long it would be before the machines would decide to kill off their little army of awakened. When the news of the truce had first reached Babylon, he spent almost two weeks debating the longevity of his situation. But then, Dante's first death and Vice's last had helped him reach a decision. He swirled those thoughts around his head for a vacant moment and tried to come up with a tidy metaphor. But he gave up, because there was no metaphor to come from it – he had just stumbled upon a part of his brain that he did not like: the part that held irrefutable facts that made life seem too short and too simple.

"Bad news, kid. Th'line's down." His fat fingers danced across dark, faded keys for a moment. "Closes' I cu'hn get'chu is a phonebooth nine blocks out." Ooidal itched at the rust on his own neural jack. It had been almost nine years since he had been inside. He hated it in there. Everything was so neat and tidy, and there were right angles everywhere. Nothing ever grew, and nothing ever aged, and there was never any progress, and there were never any setbacks. Every year a new millennium flared into existence and every year a millennium died.

"Fine, can y'drop a car nearby?" She was attaching an IV cuff to her wrist, and gasped when it punctured the scab that it had created the last time she had gasped as it punctured a scab. After her surgery, she had been on the drugs around the clock; without them, her nervous system would attack the rest of her body, stopping her heart. Ooidal was well aware that they were eating away at her brain, giving her what he described to Systemic as a disorganized reality. He would keep her in the dark about that as well.

"Nuff'ing pretty, but it'll be a half block sou'f from you. Keys'll be on th'vis'hurr." The needle whirred to life, and he stepped over to the girl, staring into the scars around her glossy false eye.

"Don't worry 'bout me," she muttered apologetically, and darted her eyes away from him. There was amnesia on her breath. Ooidal thrust the skewer into her skull, and her face flashed to a contorted grimace of immeasurable pain, then went slack.

"Youthful and fresh," he thought to himself.

"Miss Yazin," she leaned into the table, showing her dull, chocolate eyes for the first time, "given your history with Mister Cunningham, I'm having a hard time believing that you would come to his aid in this situation."

"I wasn't going there t'help 'im," she furrowed her brow, the streaked deterioration of her makeup amplifying the effect. "I was going there t'kill 'im."

Ruddy, tangerine hair fell softly over her forehead, peeking out from under a white Panama fedora. Each strand pointed toward her big, bug-eye sunglasses, which reflected sunset rays between lowly peaked apartment buildings, pulling attention from her blackish, too-wide grin. Her shirt was an aggressive black, striped with a short white tie, like the carcass of a beetle. Over, she had a white vest in velvet, buttoned tightly and laced by a hidden belt. Outside, a ghostlike tailcoat in gleaming white that began to flail wildly to one side the moment she stepped from the shelter of the phonebooth. Her adolescent legs were trimmed in the same black as her shirt, pointing toward the toes of thin blackened boots. Already, the cold was turning her nose red.

She found the car parked next to a dumpster in better condition; it was a rust eaten two-door that must have been white at some time with an accurate six digits on the odometer. It started all the same, though the keys were on the dashboard – Ooidal was getting rusty. The nine-block trek did not seem long enough; Fara's heart was beating in her throat, and she could feel the blood coursing through her wrists. She parked the car at the end of the street, as a police blockade had kept her from driving any further – apparently some poor chauffeurs had been popped in the heads by a guy with a retro haircut and a red jacket.

A phony story about being DEA took care of Westview's Finest, and she made her way through the nondescript alley. Glancing at the outlined form on the ground, and the collapsed door, Fara hesitated briefly. Regaining herself, she stepped inside, and was promptly clubbed in the back of the head. Her vision blurred, and the world seemed to be far too bright as she fell forward onto her pretty little face.

It hurt everywhere. She woke up facing a window a few stories above most of the buildings across the street. It was night, and the moon was high enough in the sky to make it clear that it had been night for quite some time. The jacket and vest were piled in a corner, and had new stains of brown and red, and her shirt was untucked and her belt missing. Her nose felt broken.

"You're finally up," she could not see the voice, "I had begun t'believe you t'be dead, lass." A small man in white stepped between the girl and the window, dabbing at his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. "I do apol'huh'gize for th'heat. It seems 'ah thermostat is stuck on swelterin'." He let out a chuckle in a pitch just too low for his stature. Just then, Fara felt how hot it was – sweat was mixing with blood in some cuts that she did not remember. She tried to wipe at the stinging sensations, and realized that her arms, legs were stuck, tied behind her. "Please, don' get up. It's actually nic'uh here by th'window. Thank Gahd for poor sealin', huh?"

Slowly, he stepped around the chair, back out of sight. And the chair vaulted forward, falling over its axis and bouncing Fara's knees and nose onto the dirty wooden ground. Noble lowered his foot, being sure that the chair did not scuff his shoe and she let out a childish cry of helplessness. "Ooh, I liked that, lass."

"Why did Mister Noble take you in exchange for Cunningham?" She leaned on an elbow, cocking the opposite eyebrow.

"Dante must've known that he'd rather take some'fink from th'machines than get his revenge." Fara bit her lip slightly, the damp cigarette handing limply below her index finger. "Or maybe…he was just grasping at straws, trying t'keep himself alive."

She shifted her weight, and leaned the chair onto its side as the small man crouched down next to her, an elegant magnum hanging loosely from one hand. "Goodness, where're my manners, lass? Let me intr'uh'duce myself: my name's Adrian Noble, and if'n I can, I'm goin' break that mind of yours," he pushed the gun's barrel against her temple, grinning, the pale fat around his thin lips creasing, "and see if I can't take some secrets f'oh myself."

She clamped her eyes shut, shaking her head. "No!" she yelled, her voce cracking.

He bit his lip, and pulled on a leg of the chair, so Fara was laying on her back, staring up at the man. "No? Well n'ahw, that's not very polite. Perhaps if I were t'ask more cordially." His clammy, sweaty hand stroked at her hair, as he traced the revolver across her neckline. She yelped, and he took the moment to plunge the gun's barrel into her mouth – her eyes widened and teared up. "Oh, my. How did we arrive at such a delicate situation?" he teased, placing a knee on either side of her stomach, slowly pushing the revolver further into her mouth as she began to gag and choke, trying unsuccessfully to flail and escape.

"Still no?" Bile rose from the back of her throat, and got caught in her mouth as she screamed muffled nonsense into the gun. "I'm sorry lass, I didn't quite catch that. Could y'speak up?" Frantic tears escaped her eyes and she yelled again and gnashed her teeth against the metal. He pulled back slightly, letting her breathe, but not talk.

"Lass, I just don' see why a pretty thing like you could be a muh-chine science prah'ject. Then again, I don' see why any 'huv you…you muh-chine'uh'philes are still alive. Y'ask me, th'only rhee-son they keep y'arou-"

A ragged hole erupted from between Noble's eyes, spattering blood onto the wall behind the girl's hair. He momentarily gave a look of frustrated surprise, then fell forward, his chin colliding with Fara's forehead, the revolver pivoting around his limp hand and resting sideways across her lips. Dante stood there with his handgun still raised, a trio of agents with theirs trained on him. Fara gasped deeply and began to sob, overjoyed at the sight. The gun slid off of her face, and she giggled hysterically.

"Mister Cunningham, your contract has been terminated. You are no longer a necessary resource, and are scheduled for containment and removal from this system." Two black suits kept their arms raised while another handcuffed a compliant Dante. Fara was untied, and given a moment to collect her things as the three led Dante to a waiting sedan. She stood up, stepping over the her belongings; none of them seemed to make sense anymore, the stains bringing out filthy colors that should not exist. Suddenly, it occurred to her that Dante might have the answer to every question she had ever asked in her lifetime.

Outside, a small handful of machine higher-ups spoke in hushed tones as the man was escorted by. The girl made it out in time to see his door closed by a nonliving hand. He looked at her and winked, an overwhelming grin on his face. The black car pulled away, and disappeared behind a vacant apartment building. A large explosion lit up the night and rocked the street powerfully. Fara could not help but grin.

"No body was found in the wreckage of the car, and it is believed that Mister Cunningham is alive, and at large." The woman removed her glasses and leaned back. "Are you absolutely certain that you do not know where he is?"

"I'm sorry. I've told you all that I know." The girl leaned her head against the wall, resting her elbow crooked on the edge of the table.

A false smile, and an insincere nod. "You operator has forwarded the message sent to your hovercraft, along with an attached dossier of several exiles and potentials working alongside Mister Noble. Once analyzed for completeness and correctness, Agent Gray will contact you, and, no doubt, several other human operatives to locate and eliminate these threats." She closed her notebook slowly and stood up, flattening a crease in her skirt.

"Is that all?" Fara stared up at the woman blankly, her eyes tired and bloodshot, graffiti in her mind. "I have more stories to tell, if you'd like." She smiled, resting her chin on her palm, holding the cigarette against her cheek. "True or otherwise."