an music again. Footsteps on stohe sounds of maery. Wheezing, thrumming, flowing, an alien mixture of sounds that, heless, evoked the mental image of a vast putational engine.
A putational ehat, with her awakening, wound down to a near-halt.
Everything ached. Every heartbeat sent pain flowing through her, akin to a full-body headache, as if the insides of her veins had first-degree burns. Breathing was markedly less painful, but refused to give proper feedback. There was a sense of numbness, and even a full breath failed to satisfy. The answer was obvious: Her lungs were permaly damaged. This was a symptom of widespread internal scarring.
Her eyes were covered, and wheried to move, she realized she couldn’t. It was like back then, during the operation — she was weightlessly suspended in mid-air. Even so, she felt the o try moving at least her hand, just to affirm that she could. That she wasn’t paralyzed. The musitinued, but gradually grew softer and simpler, being just rexing, ambient noise. An arm broke that, splitting Krahe’s focus with its call, like a red hot poker being shoved into her frontal lobe.
“Ah. I see. You are awake. Please, if you would, st to move,” came the voice of High Grafter Fidelia. “We had to lock away your motor trol so that you would not harm yourself as a result of your as within the dream.”
Approag footsteps. The music persisted. Hands on her head, fingers in her hair. Cold aallic.
“I will now remove several quasi-voidkey ectors,” Fidelia said.
An unpleasant, tig heat overtook the headache as something ulled out of her skull, leaving behind a hollow feeling. Then again, and again, five in total, from the back of her head and down the length of her spine. Again with the red-hot poker inside her head as sight returned and light flooded in. Squinting as she sluggishly looked around, Krahe made sense of her surroundings. It was some kind of Zaveshian facility, that much was obvious, based on the mix of alien teology and religious iography. tless tubes and cables entangled her body, ected to various points, simply sinking into her skin as if it wasn’t even there. More iingly, she still had her biosuit on.
“They didn’t want to destroy it in the process to get it off of me, so they just pierced through it,” she thought.
Slowly, she regained trol over her extremities, floating down to just a few timeters above the suspension-table that held her. It was nearly identical to the operating table they had used to repce her spine. Despite being attached to all that maery, she felt little disfort from it, and whehought to sit up, the suspension-table’s invisible force fields adjusted to assist her. Several more beds were to be seen to her left, with great arrays of maery standing behind them. Cables stretched from them to the mae behind Krahe’s bed.
Fidelia loomed over her, all the while, while two of her tendrils stretched across the room to tinue pying an enormous an.
“How do you feel?” the high grafter asked.
“Alive, but also cooked from the i. My lungs are probably fucked,” she said, and even this was enough to leave her feeling out of breath.
“An astute self-assessment. We will go over your options all iime. For now, however, your dition is stable. I expect that you will wish to know what took pce following your loss of sciousness, yes?”
After Krahe gave a simple nod, Fidelia tinued, reting the course of events. Krahe had, moments before she lost sciousness, used the Liminal Coil to send Fidelia a locational ping. As a direct result of this, bined with instrus Casus had given Yazata before the raid, both of them were brought into the high grafter’s care without the awareness of a directly involved with the raid.
“That’s… Good. How long has it been? What of the mansion?” Krahe asked.
“Two days. We locked down the mansion for iigation,” Fidelia began, only for Firminus to walk in, interrupting her. “-despite the Silverswords’ bitg and moaning. Bad news: By the time you raided them, any traffig victims were already gone.”
He grabbed a chair, sitting dowo Krahe’s bed with an eyebox in hand. With a click, he awakehe devid tur around for Krahe to see, various news articles scrolling past as he spoke, his cigarette holding on for dear life. Even now, he kept smoking.
“Good news: The traffickers were sloppy, a us plenty of trails to follow. Damn-near every living soul we caught sang like a bird the moment we brought Ms. Witquisitor into the interrogation room. The ohat didn’t keeled over from some sorta curse. As it stands, it’s being covered up. Far as the city knows, we just took the opportunity to off Semzar and grab as many of his people as possible. I won’t get into all the shit we found out from your Abara Morph, but to make it simple, we’ll be able to make major improvements tanic-type Mamon Armors for the first time in a couple hundred years.”
“Firminus, she has just e-to. this not wait for ter?” Fidelia chided.
“Too te, already done,” Firminus shrugged. “The Hashem Family’s activity has already cratered, just these past two days. Whether they stay careful for a while or return back to business as normal ohey think it’s blown over, we’ll see. You get the details yourself. In short, it’s pretty obvious this goes well beyur mafia shit.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see… How’s Casus?” Krahe asked.
“Aristedes is undergoing repairs. The damage he sustained — much of it self-inflicted — surpasses even your injuries. Fortunately, banishers have the advantage of intelligent design — that is to say, we simply pced him in a mainterand disassembled him to carry out the necessary repairs. It will take some time, but he will recover, as will his coupler,” said Fidelia.
“That’s… Good…” Krahe said, her eyes gzing over all of a sudden. Before she k, she lost sciousness again. She slept so deeply that, to her, it seemed as if no time had passed at all. A simir sequence of events pyed out, with Fidelia notig that she was awake and cheg her state. She had slept for 18 hours.
Akaso
