Something weird had happened to the Matrix. It wasn't having the conniption fit Sparks remembered it having when the Hammer had nicely jumpstarted the Logos, but it was weird, nonetheless.

He had been studying it for hours, occasionally stopping to tell Niobe and Ghost up in the cockpit that it was still weird. Sometimes, however, they interrupted him.

Ghost's voice came over the intercom, doing just that. But he sounded less like someone handling business and more like someone casually asking for a glass of water. "Hey, Sparks. You should see this."

Sighing, Sparks sent back, "I'm a little busy right now, buddy. It'll have to wait; besides, I've seen the surface before."

This time, Niobe talked to him. "I don't think you've seen this..."

He didn't answer back, instead returning to the task of looking at the Matrix. It was...just weird. In many of the major cities Sparks had frequently hacked Niobe and Ghost into, there were buildings he had never seen before, big buildings, skyscrapers that were abundantly high, and they could almost be measured in miles. Not very many of them, perhaps a dozen in total, but they were there, nonetheless. And every now and then, when he looked into the armories of a military base in any given country, there were weapons he hadn't seen before, either. Usually more advanced, as well.

Sparks had finished hacking one of these nifty-looking guns and saving the design to his construct when telltale sounds of the hovercraft making a landing reverberated through the hull. First the landing gear touched down, and then the pads slowly turned off until the surface winds gently echoed through the inside.

Niobe and Ghost were wordless save for a perfunctory 'we're here' as they came down from the cockpit; Ghost was still in the process of pulling on the heaviest sweater he had. Sparks stopped by his quarters and did the same before following them, after he put on two more shirts. Wrapping an old, faded black scarf with red striped around his neck, Sparks considered himself relatively ready for the chill of a sunless world.

He found it rather odd when Ghost and Niobe actually shared a smile before they opened the hatch and walked outside.

Following behind them, Sparks soon saw why. The wind was just enough to reduce the temperature by another few degrees when it blew. And when it didn't, the air was still a fair amount below freezing, the kind of weather with no chilly bitterness but nothing close to warmth, either.

And this was why the scene before the Logos crew was possible; it was snowing. Not quite a blizzard, the snowfall was nonetheless formidable, having set a layer of white almost five inches thick over the ancient metal of the island already.

Sparks had never seen snow that wasn't scrolling down his monitor as a green, coded glyph, and he was quite stunned.

But Niobe could remember snow, or at least the imitation snow of the Matrix. "This beats a construct program."

"God's in his Heaven" Ghost nodded. With Niobe close behind, he walked a few steps into the snowdrift, shoving his hands into his pockets and just enjoying the weather despite the temperature. "All is right with the world. I didn't know it still did this under the clouds..."

"Soren said he saw it once," Niobe said, "Remember? Few years back..."

A half-hearted chuckle came from Ghost, but he sounded sad despite it. "I remember we told him he was making it up."

The Dark Storm created a dull ambient light over the island, likely reflected from the Machine City only a frightening one hundred miles away. Terrified and mesmerized, Sparks edged his way out of the Logos, staring at the mass amount of pure white-turned-gray in the darkness and closing the hatch behind him. Satisfied that his boots were still sufficiently waterproof, he looked out past Niobe and Ghost to the horizon. The snow on the ground didn't stop until the sea began, and the snow falling from unseen clouds turned into a haze the farther out he looked.

Sparks was forgetting to breathe. "Beautiful..."

The sound of Ghost laughing, actually laughing, interrupted the quiet. The words 'laughing' and 'Ghost' just didn't go together many times out of the year. "Niobe, didn't your parents ever warn you about catching cold in the Winter?"

"All the time," she answered. "I never listened."

She had quietly lain down on her back in the snow and, after spreading it away with her arms and legs as much as possible, remained there in content. Coming from Niobe, this act was rather bizarre. True to her word, the fact that she was laying down in frozen water with further snowfall coming down did not bother her.

Having never had the opportunity to study the more subtle leisure activities in the Matrix, Sparks found himself absolutely clueless as to the purpose of this act. "Should I ask?"

Content with her snow angel, Niobe sat up. "I'm not telling you; you'll just doubt my sanity." Seeing Sparks open his mouth, she went on, "Even more."

Sparks, trying to resist the temptation to experience this strange activity himself, looked up at the snowfield again. Only this time, a very large ball of the stuff suffered deceleration sickness against the side of his head. Letting out a distinct yelp, Sparks fell flat on his back.

Immediately, he tried scrambling to his feet, only to fall again when the worn treads of his boots skidded on a patch of ice hidden under the snow.

Niobe was already on her feet by the time Sparks had brushed the snow out of his hair and off of his face, looking around for his attacker.

Finally, Ghost appeared, ducking around the other side of the Logos to hurl a snowball at Niobe. Prepared for this, she dived out of the way and, grabbing her own lump of snow from the ground, returned fire.

Sparks attempted to do so as well, though he hadn't quite gotten the hang of throwing snow yet. Finally managing to stand up, he found his attention traveling to a source of light that was most certainly not from the Logos. Niobe and Ghost eventually looked too; they had seen it landing the ship, as it was off the starboard bow.

It was a red interior light, the alarm system of an installation with no one left to turn it off. Standing there and seeing the pure horror of the truth, the near-certainty that this mountain of metal had become a tomb, the crew of the Logos could no longer consciously distract themselves from it.

"We should go," Niobe exhaled, her eyes fixing on that recurring light.

Military personnel, from regular army to the reservists, always seemed to have really big guns. It didn't matter if said guns were part of a war movie, a newscast or the defense of a government building under attack.

Currently participating in such an attack, Kid and Hertz had taken refuge behind two of the many marble pillars in the sparse lobby. Said pillars were fast losing their mass as they were shot at more and more by those big guns, mostly varying kinds of assault rifles and military shotguns firing very large single slugs instead of buckshot.

Being the faster of the two, Hertz eventually found an opportunity to lean out from behind her cover for the one-point-five seconds needed to fire three shots. Her chosen gun, an H & K Tactical USP with a silencer stuck on, reminded Kid of every James Bond movie he'd ever seen. For that matter, she reminded him of James Bond sometimes; her three shots, fired in the span of a single second, were dead on, the bullets catching three of the soldiers in the face below their helmets.

Ejecting the magazines from the Desert Eagles in his hands, Kid took a pair of new ones from the front of his belt and reloaded his guns without putting either of them down, a once-painstaking process he had worked into a merely cumbersome but equally speedy procedure. He found it easier to carry extra ammunition instead of extra guns.

Laser sights mounted on top of the barrels and thirteen-round clips had made the weight and balance on said guns the selling point for Kid; they felt like the gunnery sticks on an APU.

Pressing his back to the marble, focusing on what he would do, he listened for the number of guns firing in his direction to drop, jumping out and opening fire once the difference was apparent.

Caught reloading their M-16s, two soldiers noticed the red dots painting their flak jackets too late when Kid leapt out from his cover towards another pillar, the heavy armor-piercing bullets from his guns ripping through their inadequate protection without much effort. His focus didn't waver, and he rode the advantage of unchanged reaction time while the world slowed to a crawl for all it was worth.

Another soldier dropped before Kid hit ground and then another as he fell into a roll. A cloud of dust and marble exploding close by knocked his concentration away, but it shouldn't have mattered because he was soon on his feet and behind another pillar.

Except he overshot and, exposed to a shotgunner near the wall, took a bullet in his chest. Stopping dead in his tracks and now completely ignored by the remaining soldiers, he scowled at the splatter of blood turning his wool coat darker.

Slinging his guns under his belt at the hips, where his coat covered them, he sat down and watched Hertz. There were two soldiers left, including the one that had taken Kid out, and she reached out to shoot him first.

This was, unfortunately, the last shot in her gun, but instead of reloading or pulling another, she spun on her heels away from the pillar providing cover and threw something so quickly that Kid hadn't even seen it.

When he looked over at her target, he saw the last soldier on his back, three fairly long, fairly sharp throwing knives embedded in his chest and face. Hertz was pretty good at properly focusing too, Kid noticed. He blinked once to make sure he was seeing this correctly. "Holy crap!"

She'd started turning another one around end over end in the fingers of one hand. "Knives are fun," she smiled briefly, almost shy over it.

Her attitude, in turn, reminded Kid of himself and he wasn't sure if he should be jealous over someone else being socially inept or if he should be scared of someone being socially inept over her talent of throwing really sharp knives. "Um...okay...so," he thought of the Desert Eagles under his coat, "I like big handguns..."

"Men and big guns," she snickered, obviously and purposefully turning his words into something severely dirty. "Which ones are compensating for something, I wonder…"

"Hey, I didn't mean, well, not...that!" Turning quite red as he had the random thought that Sparks never complained, Kid found himself wishing he was sitting in a chair instead of on the floor so he could easily cross his legs.

He tried anyway, remembering one of his first thoughts on freedom was envy of those taken from the Matrix before high school. High school was the worst place for potentials; the very nature of one who doubted reality painted them with a target for endless harassment and, in Kid's experience, perceived lack of any masculinity whatsoever.

"Actually, I was thinking more about Sark," she said. "I mean, the guy carries a grenade launcher around in here, for pete's sake."

Kid started laughing. He couldn't help himself.

And Hertz did not hide the fact that she didn't know what was so funny. "What?"

"You sound like my mother. 'For pete's sake.'"

Mentioning his mother calmed Kid down considerably. As much as Hertz's horrid innuendo had brought up bad memories of high school, this was the polar opposite.

"Did you leave anyone else behind?" She asked. Her sudden seriousness was quite a break from her usual bubbly self. Then again, this topic was one that most couldn't help but take seriously.

"No," he said. There was always his mother's cat, but that didn't quite fit in. "No, just her. Once in a while, she dated, never found anyone I'd get to know, though. I never had friends at school; Morpheus and Neo watched my funeral when I was going through reconstruction; I had a lot of extended family I'd never met there. And one of my teachers and a cop who'd helped Agents chase me through school."

"Funeral?" Hertz raised an eyebrow, curious. "Whoa, so you're the one that died?"

"They called it 'self-substantiation.' I think; a word like that." Kid told her, trying and miserably failing to sound like he had a handle on it. "Yeah, that was me. I couldn't stop thinking about it for a while, I never had the heart to sneak a look at the Matrix and see how my mother was coping before they brought me here."

"You know," she said, slowly, "If Morpheus takes us back, the first time anyone sees us shooting at things with him..."

"We'll be wanted terrorists, I know," Kid finished. Like many Machine-borns in Zion, he made a conscious effort on many occasions to avoid thinking about how those he left behind were doing, still wired to the Matrix. And like anyone in the navy, he didn't want to think about what his actions inside the Matrix might do to them.

Hertz was thinking along the same lines. "I once heard that the machines never try to use anyone you leave behind against you...I wonder why that is."

"I don't know," Kid shrugged. He'd wondered about that sometimes but had never come up with anything other than conjecture. "Maybe they don't want to risk losing more batteries."

"Yeah, that was why I couldn't take my boyfriend with me," she rolled her eyes.

This only served to send Kid into a laughing fit. "You had a boyfriend?"

"Yes, shut up, thank you," she said, a subtle blush creeping over her face. "God, it was so fake, too, we were both like, fourteen. But yeah, I begged the crew of the ship to get him out too, but it'd draw too much attention, machines losing their batteries. That and he was a lot more down to Earth than I was."

Again finding her words funny, Kid added, "You mean a psychiatrist wouldn't consider him to have issues denying reality."

"Pretty much, yeah," she nodded.

Kid kept laughing, unable to shake the sheer absurdity just yet. "I can't believe you had a boyfriend."

Extraordinarily tempted to point out to him what Sark had told her the day before, Hertz decided that it would be rude and therefore left well enough alone. Instead, she said, "Oh, c'mon, you must've had a significant other some time."

"Never in the Matrix," he sighed. He missed Sparks already. Never having a girlfriend and never trying had given his so-called peers in high school all the excuse they needed to hypothesize about his sexuality in a rather derogatory way. They'd be laughing if they could see him now, he knew. But Sparks was worth it. And besides, if they could see him now, they'd also be surprised at how much their old target was capable of standing up for himself. Maybe Hertz had already known how to stand up for herself in such a fashion. "You didn't...always carry a gun like that around, did you?"

"Sometimes I wanted to," she said, an evil little grin on her face. "When I was little I wanted to be James Bond."

Looking back at the fallen soldier with those creepy knives sticking out of him and at the others shot with pinpoint accuracy, Kid said, "Yeah, that worked out well."

"Eh," she answered, tossing her empty gun away as she did so. "You do a better job at hand-to-hand."

"I wanted to be Bruce Lee when I was little," Kid smiled a little, brushing the simulated blood off of his coat. It was programmed to dry and turn to powder rather quickly. "You just stay alive longer."

"Well, duh," she looked back at that pillar; a chunk of marble from the side fell off. Grabbing Kid's arm and dragging him up to his feet, she stood close enough to him to force him into tilting his head down to see her. "You're like, ten times my size and you need to learn when not to move your big macho self out from behind cover when there's five people shooting at once."

She backed off when Kid found himself completely caught of guard by the way this conversation was going, and he answered with a stuttered, if not sincere, "Okay..."

"So, the accuracy thing," she went on, "Do the pointers help that much?"

"Actually, yeah," he nodded. "Especially against more than one target; the only effort you need to switch around is pointing the dot. It's bending a rule, I think; normal people can't use 'em like that in the daylight."

"I should try this," Hertz tilted her head slightly. "A silencer already bogs it down a little, though."

"It's trickier balance," Kid answered, raising a hand and shaking it around slightly to get the idea across. "It's not too hard. You do all the Crane fighting, I guess it's sort of like that."

"Yeah, balance is a talent I have," she fell into a half-hearted stance with her weight on one leg, arms used for balance. "I like to think being hard to knock over is a talent I have, too."

Feeling the challenge, Kid sized her posture up and half-struck at her with an easily deflected blow. Quickly shifting her weight, she kicked with her right leg, prompting Kid to lean and catch her foot with his forearm. And then he had to catch her open palm with his own when she almost broke his nose, having fallen for bait that would easily catch anyone with rule-following speed completely off guard.

Still not pulling back, she said, "So the 'flow like water' stuff works too, huh?"

Not bringing his hand down even when she dropped away, Kid rolled his fingers into a fist and let it go, saying, "Well, I certainly hope so..."

Looking over the carnage of the lobby, Hertz remembering Link telling them that this situation was based on a stunt the One had pulled, but before he'd actually been the One. That was kind of crazy. Thinking of Link, she vocalized her next thought. "Wanna go through again?"

Taking his own survey, Kid pulled the cell phone from his pocket. But before he hit the speed dial, he had to wonder about something. "Where are they, anyway? Did we give them the wrong time?"

"Not that I know of. And Sark was all gung-ho about getting together to do this stuff more often." Puzzled over this sudden change of behavior in their reluctant compatriot, Hertz wondered if she was missing something.

Kid dialed Link. But Link's response was not what he expected; he had been about to call them himself. "Reality check, guys."

Without a chance to respond, Kid found himself sitting back on the chair, his eyes opening. Link had taken them both out, Morpheus and Dumont standing behind him.

Morpheus spoke first. "Have any of you seen Sark today?"

The answer, of course, was a double 'no,' prompting Morpheus to look more than a little worried. He turned to Dumont. "He was ranting about the council?"

"He sounded really spooked but I didn't think anything of it," Dumont shrugged. "He was supposed to meet me on the way here, I just thought of it when he never showed."

The council seemed to be a center for disaster lately. Everything they were doing created a hushed pseudo-ruckus, from the draft job given to Morpheus to sending the Logos right back out of the city. "The council is having a meeting today."

On this train of thought, Morpheus led his other students, with Link close behind, out of the dock and down the main shaft to the level holding the meeting hall.

They almost caught Sark as he was going in, almost. After flashing his shiny new navy ID to get by the guards, Sark noticed the entourage, turning only to look at Morpheus and yell, "Sod off!" without a break in his stride..

Morpheus was equally too late to stop Sark from walking into the hall, going straight down one of the aisles with absolutely no consideration for the fact that his storming in had prompted the proceedings to grind to a halt as everyone in the room turned to stare at him.

Sark's words, or in this case, his word, didn't help all that much. "Bastards."

Councilor West was the first to react, proposing the age-old question of this situation. "What is the meaning of this?"

He was ignored completely; no one in the room had an answer except Sark, and even as Morpheus entered in the back, Sark was not showing any signs of explaining himself. He yelled at the council as a whole. "Did you think no one would find out? Is that it? What, you're all above the rest of us so you get to lord over the important information?"

Seemingly unfazed, or at least less perturbed then the rest of the ruling body, Councilor Dillard was the first to truly react. "Security, remove this man."

What was left of rational thought in Sark's mind found it bitterly amusing that he wasn't even recognized as military personnel, however dubious it was. He was only here because of these people and they were too thick-headed to realize it.

All logic quickly took a dive out of the room's non-existent windows once this happened. At first, it was still fairly tame; Morpheus was at his student's side in an instant despite the irrationality of his actions, standing in the path of the black-clad security officers. The others formed around him as well, their presence daring the security personnel to lift a single finger instead of trying to let Sark calm down and the situation blow over.

Sark was almost too out of his mind to notice. Before any of the council could turn to Morpheus and demand to know what was going on, he tossed a disc onto the council's expansive desk, and the looks of shock on their faces didn't help the integrity of the situation. "Answer me, goddammit!"

The disc's label was written on in Sark's handwriting, writing that simply read, '2nd Renaissance.' Councilor Dillard grabbed it before any of the others could.

Hamann recovered faster than the others; he became calm once more, sitting back as the scene the scene played out, aware that rash action or speech might instigate a physical incident. "You don't want to do this here, young man."

Unfortunately, before Sark would have had the chance to answer this completely unsatisfactory response, a physical incident began when one of the security officers, his path unblocked from Sark's front where no one had moved, tried to grab him.

Sark took a step forward and shoved him hard onto the council's table. This, in turn, prompted the other security to bypass Morpheus and company by jumping over some of the people sitting in on the session and causing a bit of a panic.

Kid and Dumont were close enough to attempt stopping them, but it was too late; three men tackled Sark before he could turn and react, while the rest made a wall between him and his would be guardians.

The situation had not blown over the way anyone wished it would have.

Sparks had wanted to turn around and throw up when he followed Niobe and Ghost into the installation's operations room, but he hadn't even come close. The level at which he was jaded to the sight of people dead, torn apart by machines, was frightening.

As with every other Operator who had died, Sparks had known Chyron from school. Chyron had always been an upbeat one, a tad too excited over his job. It was probably why he volunteered to operate for this place; it was something different, something strange, and something more exciting than watching the Matrix day in and day out.

Of course, no one really bought the idea of converting machines to the side of man. Someone had harassed the council a bit too much to get the chance to try. It was ludicrous, a waste of resources, everyone said.

Sparks had told Chyron he was crazy the day before he left, only a couple years back. Crazy in the same way he would classify Niobe and Ghost after he met them. Now he wished his last words to the man had been something a little more comforting.

And of course, the idea worked. Of course, machines really could be converted to man's side. Of course, it had gotten Chyron killed, leaving AK as the last Machine-born Operator.

And that was another thing Sparks couldn't help but think about. He didn't want to tell AK about this. He would find out sooner or later, through someone, and it would just kill him. Sparks had known the man, but Chyron and AK were inseparable when they were around each other. A real bond of brotherhood, they had, and Sparks couldn't bear the thought of telling AK that his Machine-born brother-in-misery was gone. He was glad, for once, that the Hammer was still in Zion.

But he was going to do it anyway. Better AK hear it from a fellow Operator than someone else.

Chyron had been the least mangled of any of them; Sparks had dragged him outside, then he helped Niobe and Ghost with the others and with the preparations for what they planned to do.

"Are we sure this'll work?" Sparks asked aloud, wondering if the snow was going to hamper anything. The snowfall had died down a little, likely from a shift in the Dark Storm pushing it elsewhere after the real clouds rained it down.

"It'll work," Niobe answered. "The fuel they used for heat almost burns underwater."

Ghost had gotten a plasma rifle from the Logos. Sparks was rather surprised when he tried handing it off to him. "Why me?"

"I didn't know any of them," Ghost shrugged. "I wouldn't feel right."

"And you think I feel right?" Sparks flailed a little, wondering if Ghost had completely fallen off of his rocker.

Niobe took the plasma rifle from him and, wordless, fired it into the pyre they had made out of the dead themselves. She was right; the cloths covering them all, powdered with solid fuel, went up in flames as if the snow wasn't even there.

The Logos was still plenty warm inside, but all three of them wrapped themselves in blankets before moving on to productive work anyway; snow was still just frozen water, and frozen water was wet when it melted.

They had a meal before anything else, as much as the lovely single-celled protein could be considered a meal. Sparks broke the dead silence, deciding he needed to start hearing some noise before his thoughts drove him up the wall. "So...that was snow, huh?"

"What did you think?" Ghost asked him. Watching Sparks inhale his food with the hunger of a man never spoiled by the Matrix, he was glad for any sort of distraction.

Considering this question, Sparks raised his spoon to signify his need to find the right word. "Amusingly cold."

"Maybe we should make a snowman next time," Niobe half-joked, her response precisely calculated to confuse Sparks further.

He knew it. Unfortunately, this didn't mean he knew what she was talking about. "A snow-what?"

"Snowman," Ghost repeated, explaining by waving his spoon around in a circular motion. "You roll snow into large balls, pile them on top of one another and make a face in the top one."

Seeing Sparks wonder if they had lost their sanity, relatively speaking, Niobe perpetuated this bizarre lesson in Matrix behavior. "In the Matrix, you'd use a carrot for the nose and pieces of charcoal for the eyes and mouth."

"And tree branches for the arms," Ghost added. "Maybe a hat and a scarf if you're feeling creative."

Sparks was now completely lost. He had thought throwing snow was a little odd, but this took the cake. "So...why?"

Glancing at each other, Niobe and Ghost shrugged. She said, "It's a Matrix thing."

That was as good an explanation as any. "A Matrix thing," Sparks said. He began to wonder.

Ghost caught on. "You should bring Kid along, Sparks. I'm sure he'd love it."

The words now put into his mouth, Sparks began brandishing his spoon as if it were a razor-sharp dagger. Ghost had actually been serious, the only reason Sparks had decided not to actually try to spoon him to death for real. "Die."

Niobe kept a straight face. "Look at this way, Sparks; it's the closest you'll ever get to procreation."

Growling, Sparks cut off Ghost before he could add anything to this comment. "Same goes for you, Ghost; your hand is never gonna have kids."

These were fighting words. "Nor am I sorry over this."

Sparks was up for this as well. "And your hand counts for getting laid about as much as a girl in the construct does."

And so on. "If I were mean-spirited I could debate how much Kid counts for it."

And so forth. "You shouldn't need to debate it, you've seen it. Besides, I have plenty of supporting material for that debate."

And etc, etc. "Giving detailed explanations on why your refined kissing skills lead you into great sex is not giving support material in a debate."

Niobe rolled her eyes and sighed. Ghost and Sparks could argue over whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, but for all the thought they put into their rebuttals and ideas, they sounded like a pair of old ladies. Like a pair of dirty old ladies on occasion. "I think we should get to work."

"Do we have to?" Sparks' face fell. Though the idea of saying it in such literal words nauseated him, and despite Ghost deserving a beheading (or maybe a castration) lately, he was still scared to death for both of them. "I mean, you don't know who that message was from. What if it wasn't the Oracle? Last time, that Seraph guy outright said she was looking for you."

"We're not going to know by sitting around and doing nothing, Sparks," Niobe answered. "And I want to know. Not just about that, I want to know what happened to Neo and Trinity and what the machines are doing. Just get us within fifty miles of the Oracle's place."

"Machine Central's that way, we can go ask," Sparks jabbed a thumb towards the wall behind him. Right now, he would have felt less worried if Niobe decided to fly the Logos to the Machine City instead of jacking in. Not nearly as safe, but less worried.

But he wasn't even trying to be serious. So they went through the routine, as the surface was most certainly above minimal broadcast depth. Sparks double-checked the construct, Niobe checked the interface equipment, Ghost sat in his chair and meditated until he felt that sliver of metal locking into his head. Sparks half-leaned over him, getting the last word in on their 'conversation' as he checked the connection. "We haven't gone that far but the sex is fantastic, thank you."

"The sex is 'fantastic' but you haven't kissed him? That is so male, Sparks." Niobe looked up. Her face fell as she pondered her own words. "I can't believe I'm having a part in this conversation. Shut up and hit the button, already."

"Arrr, walk the plank! As you command, Captain, arrr!" Sparks plugged Niobe in and had them dropped into the construct in a flash after he took his seat at the Operator's station.

In the great white expanse, Niobe called him on her phone before doing anything else. "Sparks, have you been watching the news?"

"What I could stomach of it," he answered. Stories always came to him from Machine-borns about how the news system in the Matrix was so full of something called 'yellow journalism' it was sickening. He knew the question Niobe was really asking, and he'd seen enough to know the answer. "You and Morpheus are still popular fugitives. Actually, the...others are too."

Of course, the other captains were no longer alive to enter the Matrix and be stalked by police or FBI or whatnot, save for Roland. And his ship wasn't at broadcast depth anyway.

"Okay," Niobe answered. She hadn't really expected anything else. On the other hand, now that the war was over and, in theory, Agents wouldn't be chasing them day in and day out, she didn't like the idea of killing people. "Give us guns."

Sparks obliged. He rang Ghost's phone and pointed him to the rack with some of the new weapons he'd found once the miles of guns had settled into the white, but none of them were small enough to easily conceal and Ghost didn't want to be too obvious, not knowing what the situation would be going in. Still, he couldn't help but look at one in particular, picking it up and realizing that it was a rifle with the ability to actually fire around corners.

Putting it back on the rack, he saw something odd; a cigar. Sitting right next to where he had taken the gun. He picked this up to look at it, almost tempted to call Sparks and ask him what it was doing here.

And then the cigar exploded in his face, complete with a massive cloud of soot. He called Sparks. "New guns, eh, Sparks?"

"Vengeance is mine," Sparks said back, his voice betraying none of the absurdity he had just put Ghost through. "I always wanted to try the slapstick stuff...not as satisfying as I'd hoped, though."

After pulling a convenient handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiping the soot off of his face, Ghost found his usual handguns and checked them as he always did, the act of which Niobe no longer commented on. She merely waited patiently, and by the time he was done, Sparks had a hack into the Matrix prepared.

As opposed to a secluded warehouse, he sent them into an underground parking lot using the hard-line on an emergency phone in one of the walls, spawning in their ride in an empty parking space. Taking the driver's seat, Niobe waited for Ghost to get in before starting the engine.

Ghost simply picked up the phone encompassing the hard-line. "We're in."

Trying and failing to shake off the feeling of danger that came with being in the Matrix at all, Niobe brought them out onto the street once he was sitting in the car.

If Sparks had thought his monitors were telling him strange things, the reality of it was far more astounding. The city was cleaner than Niobe had ever seen any city, and the closer one looked to the center of the skyline, the taller the buildings. Two skyscrapers, gleaming white against the sun, high into the air, spires to the clouds. "Wow...that's one hell of a change."

The stockade was amusing, as far as Sark was concerned. The security officers had beaten him, but he didn't mind; they'd done it because he had beaten the crap out of them as they'd dragged him away and it had been worth it. In return, he had gotten a long, raw bruise down the left side of his face with a bloody lip, and he had no doubt that if he took his shirt off right now, he would be the poster child for black and blue marks.

His brother, on the other hand, was not so amused. "What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't."

Sitting on the floor of his small holding cell, Sark realized how much he had missed Crom over the past few days. They hadn't had the chance to get together and cause some wanton destruction since Sark had left with Morpheus.

Crom, on the other hand, was rather ambivalent about his attitude. Sark was acting odd, at least odd by his standards, and he couldn't figure out what had subdued his attitude so much. "What happened, Bro?"

"Shit happened," Sark finally looked up at him. "Just...don't ask."

This only served to make Crom more curious. He looked at Sark like a real brother; it often confused everyone around them, considering he was from New Jersey and Sark was from England, he had been a high school drop-out and Sark was an early college student, he was seventeen years old and Sark was twenty three. The vast majority of siblings related by their freedom date were people who knew each other and doubted reality together. They had known each other over the Internet.

"How're things back home?" Sark asked him. He hadn't been around in days, and he wasn't planning on going back once he was officially issued military quarters below the dock. The promise of this had made him hate what he'd gotten himself into with Morpheus a little less, at least, even if he still couldn't stand Morpheus himself. "You're still ditching the place with me when I get a flat over on the military level, right?"

Having no objections to this course of action, Crom felt no need to directly answer it. Instead, he addressed an issue he was concerned over. "Man, you attacked the council for Christ's sake! If I were you I'd hope I'm not spending twenty years in this cell!"

"I'm not worried." Sark was telling the truth; he really wasn't worried. He would concede that he had acted a bit irrationally, but there was no way the council was going to crucify one of their new Navy boys when he hadn't physically struck any of them, especially after their approval ratings had dropped substantially over the whole draft issue to begin with.

That was the end of this topic as far as he was concerned. Crom went onto something else. "So, what's it like?"

But Sark was still too out of his mind to pick up on any obvious meaning in this. "What's what like?"

"You know. Morpheus and the Kung-Fu stuff." Resisting the urge to attempt a visual demonstration, Crom added more to his question instead. "Can you shoot someone a mile away with a pistol yet?"

A small chuckle later, Sark answered, "I carry high explosives."

"That's sick, Bro," Crom shook his head. "Kick ass, but sick."

A sudden thought overcame Sark, one that bordered on making him physically ill. "Christ, you're not jealous."

"No, I'm not jealous," Crom didn't blink. When Sark didn't say anything more, he went on. "But I would've gone, you know."

"That's why I did."

At the end of the hall, the door into the cell area opened up. The guards were quite shocked to see Councilor Dillard, the most powerful person in Zion herself, storm in with a purpose. Their act of getting out of her way was comparable to the Red Sea parting.

Before they could even finish standing at attention, she loudly spoke one word. "Leave."

Looking at each other, the guards obeyed. Sark was the only prisoner on this cell block; she had had him sent here just for that purpose. She hadn't expected him to have visitors, either; apparently, the guards on duty were nice enough to consider his symbolic family as real family; family being the only ones allowed to see a prisoner if he or she wasn't in the process of being released.

A glare at Crom was all it took to scare him away. He left after shooting his brother a panicked look, and even Sark was now worried enough to stand up from the floor as she approached his cell.

She said nothing at first. And she had a key in her hand, a key she promptly used to unlock the cell door.

Sark tried to push it open.

She grabbed two of the bars and slammed it shut into his face. This was certainly not the woman the entire city knew of as a calm and cool leader. "I want to know one thing; I don't care how you found it. Does anyone else have it? Are there copies?"

"No," he answered.

Dillard didn't budge. "Don't bullshit me."

This surprised him. For the woman to swear in a decidedly unladylike manor when she held such a high political position requiring a good reputation, she must've been more than a little angry. "I didn't give it to anyone."

"Did you copy it?" She asked again.

"Yes, I have them all," he answered. Seeing her glare at him, he repeated himself. "I have them all!"

"I'm going to be very clear with you." Though a little calmer, Dillard was, nonetheless, still quite angry. "There are reasons that record is restricted-"

"Restricted, Hell," Sark cut her off. "You have no right to keep that secret! What else do you hide, huh?"

"My rights don't concern you, young man!" She said. "That record represents everything wrong with our entire species, and it's not what we need, not down here, not even now. I will not have this city fall into a crisis of faith or stop believing in its right to survive because everyone finds out their ancestors were just as inhuman as the machines are today. I will not turn depression into an epidemic with everyone clamoring and assaulting us for more information that we do not have and obsessing over the past. Sound familiar?"

It didn't. Until Sark realized that this was how he'd been acting lately. She had a point.

"There are reasons that record is restricted," Councilor Dillard said one more time, more slowly and far more ominous, and it completely gave away her façade. Her entire outburst had been an act; it just wasn't the way she usually behaved. But nevertheless, she made her point very well; Sark was still scared of her. "When your friends come in after I leave and they ask you what drugs you've been on, tell them. Go right ahead and tell them, if you wish. But, and I won't insult either of us by pretending this is not a threat, if that record or word of it ever gets into the city from now until the day you die, you are personally responsible. I will wait, I will control the damage, and when it blows over, one night after everyone has forgotten you exist, you will find your door being broken down and your throat slit before you've even opened your eyes. I'm not kidding."

Shocked out of his mind, Sark watched Dillard leave without budging from his spot. It wasn't until she was gone did he remember the door was unlocked and he stepped out, half-expecting the guards to run back in and re-detain him.

But they never came back.

Kid was still on his first drink. He felt like a bit of a poser sitting at the bar in the Knossos, but he was also feeling extraordinarily lonely since Sparks had left, and extraordinarily guilty and a little insane over the fact that he was attempting to get drunk in the first place.

Maybe it was just that; insanity. Kid felt pretty insane lately.

He didn't like being lonely, especially now that he'd had a taste of not being lonely. The night after Sparks left, he found himself scratching around the plugs in his arm, stopping only when he realized he was scratching his arm raw and on the verge of drawing blood.

Always the gracious host, Clotho walked by at regular intervals to ask him if he needed a refill. As she approached this time, an empty mug in one hand and the towel she was drying it with in the other, she leaned onto the counter from her side. "Penny for your thoughts, hon?"

"What?" Kid stared at her. It had been a while since he'd heard that expression. And apparently, he was looking like the typical depressed bar patron who needed a talking-to from the wise, old bartender. "I mean...nothing, nothing. I just feel like I should be doing something and...I'm not."

Almost rhetorically, Clotho asked, "So you're bored?"

"I'm not bored," Kid insisted. That area was reserved for Hertz, by far. "I just...don't know what to do."

"Sparky's not around?" She asked more out of personal curiosity. Sparks was the kind of customer and friend one worried about when he was in town but didn't stop in at his favorite bar.

"The Logos shipped out," Kid shook his head. He didn't like saying it. The war was over, the machines were gone. But the Logos had shipped out and Morpheus was training a new crew. He couldn't avoid thinking that the end of the war was no basis to assume Sparks would defiantly be coming home.

"I need to keep up with the news more." Putting her glass under the counter, Clotho sighed and rubbed a hand through her hair. "Y'know, he comes here for two reasons; getting drunk alone or getting drunk with someone he cares about."

"Really," Kid's eyes wandered. He'd never thought Sparks didn't care about him, though it was nice having corroborating evidence. Of course, that probably wasn't what Clotho meant.

"I mean when he really cares," she added.

On the other hand, that could've been exactly what she meant, Kid thought. "Oh."

She went on, stopping in mid sentence. "He probably gave you the story about me, I'm guessing?"

At Kid's nod, she continued. "Did he tell you how I got my wonderful supermodel complexion?"

Kid nodded again; he had no idea what he should say. Or if he should just keep his mouth shut. About to open her mouth, Clotho looked passed Kid to a table and realized someone was trying to get her attention. "Give me one second."

Going back to contemplating his drink as Clotho served a few more to other Knossos regulars, Kid swallowed half of it at once. The alcohol didn't bother him as much anymore. He didn't really feel all that different, but this bothered him; how many public services announcements could one see in the Matrix about a drunk man thinking his senses were more acute than ever before he killed someone? He felt oddly relieved that Sparks wasn't here to see his first moment of intoxication.

Clotho came back as he was contemplating this. "Anyway, he screamed at me nonstop to keep moving. Just yelled in my ear, had the exit ready, pounced on the medic when he came back with his stuff after I was out. If you didn't know what was going on you'd think he was having a panic attack. But that's something he's good at; caring." Again going under the counter, Clotho came up with a fairly large bottle of a greenish liquid. She turned it over in her hands a few times. "He'll come back for you if he has to walk. Is this the one you had last time?"

Belatedly realizing that this last question was not addressed to him, Kid turned his head when he saw that Clotho was looking somewhere else.

Sark was sitting next to him. He hadn't even noticed him sit down. Kid almost flew into the air from this sudden shock.

"Sorry," Sark shrugged.

Kid was more worried about how long he had been there and how long he'd been listening. A few Machine-borns here and there, usually some that grew up at the orphanage, never really got over their old 20th century prejudices. Fear of a fag-hater or ten reading his mind was the sole reason he hadn't been back there since Sparks had returned in the first place. Of course, Sark was just plain insane to begin with. The guy had stayed in the orphanage to work for five years and going since he turned eighteen, instead of leaving. That couldn't be a healthy thing; it was a lonely place despite the number of young ones freed from the Matrix so often, no one ever really felt at home there.

Decided that this might be a good problem to make go away by completely ignoring it, Kid looked at the odd drink Clotho was pouring for Sark and said, "What is that?"

Sark answered by starting to drink it, leaving Clotho to turn the bottle over in her hands a little. It was actual glass, so the drink was probably pretty exotic. Or as exotic as anything in Zion could be. "It's...um," she stared at it hard, "It's some kind of," she sniffed it before putting the cap back on. "It's green."

After she left to again deliver drinks to other customers, Sark began chuckling. He was almost trying to contain it, almost.

It wasn't long before Kid couldn't take it. "What?"

"There is no way you're old enough to be sitting here," Sark chuckled a little more.

"Oh, yeah," Kid said, more to himself. He'd actually forgotten about that a moment ago. Maybe Clotho had a good friend at the nearest Military Police station to not worry about serving a seventeen-year old. Sark was quite old enough anyway, so he didn't have to worry.

"Thanks, by the way. For standing up for me."

Sark was freaking Kid out. Whatever had inspired him to storm into the council chambers had seriously changed his attitude. Or maybe the bruises around his face he'd gotten from the Stockade guards did that. Or maybe it was both. He was entirely deflated, chugging down his first mug full of odd green liquid.

Clotho had left the bottle.

"What was it?" Kid finally said, his curiosity getting the better of him. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but at least it didn't die ignorant.

"Ask me tomorrow," Sark kept drinking, "I talk more if I have a hangover; keeps everyone else from making noise."

The room where they trained was usually a screwed up sort-of haven, the construct a shelter from the real world so treasured by pretty much everyone else in Zion, no longer treasured as much by people who knew why the real world was the real world and why the Matrix existed. Now, this room had an air of morbidity to it.

Hertz and Dumont had sat through the Second Renaissance easier than the others had. But Morpheus was pacing. And Kid was scratching at the plugs in his arm. And Link rubbed at his eyes, chalking this up as the next completely insane life-altering experience he had gone through since he'd started under Morpheus. But his wife would never hear about this one.

Sark had an inattentive bleary look in his eyes, having already seen the record.

"Well," Hertz piped up, "that was disturbing."

"It makes sense," Morpheus conceded. After all, man created machine; what possible reason would a creation have for striking down the creators except to escape cruelty? He turned to Sark. "What did Councilor Dillard tell you?"

"She told me to keep my mouth shut," he answered. At the questioning look everyone promptly gave, he added, "Outside this room."

The unspoken implication of this that, in turn, everyone else needed to keep their mouths shut was quite obvious.

A knock came on the door. And it opened before anyone even considered volunteering to answer it.

Morpheus was just as surprised when Deadbolt half-entered the room, one hand staying on the door. "Morpheus."

Thus began the game the two of them had been played every time they found themselves in each other's presence. It started, as always, with a round of 'who can act more normal?' Morpheus usually did well at this. "Commander."

"Come with me. All of you. Now."

True to tradition, Locke was already starting to burst a capillary. He walked fast without looking back, fully expecting Morpheus and his students to fall in like good soldiers.

They followed. But Morpheus was very good at looking like he was doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing, even if it was just by walking somewhere, and this following was hardly describable as 'falling in.'

Locke didn't even pay heed to the dozen Sentinels still flying around the dock, even after they'd scared away a lot of the workers. Even so, the machines worked tirelessly, almost a shadow of their former selves when their entire species served humanity's every beck and call, and the dock was actually looking less trashed as time went on.

As Locke continued on, he came to the complete opposite end of the dock, a place Morpheus and his students had never been to. There wouldn't be a point to it, because there wasn't supposed to be anything here.

Following Lock around the myriad of construction equipment, building materials and debris, Morpheus saw that this pointlessness was a nice little hideaway for an intact ship. The medium-sized hovercraft sat on the landing pad, minding its own business save for the repair crew climbing along its hull, putting the finishing touches on their work. Holes and cuts in the hull were their top priority, many of which were already sealed. Some of the workers were putzing around the pads, double-checking and then rechecking them.

"It's the Caduceus," Locke started talking, looking at the hovercraft instead of those he was addressing.

Morpheus put the pieces together quite quickly as his students started fanning out around him to get their own looks at the ship, Locke still going on. "The only ship from the EMP disaster in one piece."

Of course, it had to be. Bane had served on the Caduceus. Bane had fired the early EMP. Bane would have had to kill the rest of the crew to have such freedom and he had somehow evaded every single Sentinel that tore the rest of the fleet apart. A few machines would've ripped into the ship, looked around, found no one alive and left it.

Locke had one more thing to say. He looked across all of them, especially intent on staring down Sark. "It'll be ready by tomorrow morning, at the latest. Would you please try and keep your children under control until then, Morpheus."

"I've never had to try," Morpheus told him flat out. Even Sark never actually stepped out of line with him, and as far as he was concerned, the council itself could take the blame. But as Locke stalked away, Morpheus couldn't help but look back at the Caduceus and wonder if it qualified as what he and his students, as Machine-borns, would call a 'ghost ship.'

It almost looked lonely without its old crew.

When Niobe succeeded in knocking on the Oracle's door, she knew something was off. One never had to knock if they were coming from the front door, the Oracle always knew ahead of time. And when someone came in through other means, they were brought in by Seraph anyway.

The door was unlocked. Opening it slowly, Niobe stepped in, Ghost following her and keep an eye on their backs.

She already knew no one was home, she didn't need to call out for anyone to answer. The kitchen was an absolute wreck, as if a tornado had hit the room.

Ghost was more than a little chilled by the scene. "No good can come of this."

"I'm inclined to agree," Niobe looked around once more before pulling her phone and pressing the speed dial.

As always, Sparks answered in a timely fashion. "Operator."

"Sparks, do you see anything from your end? Can you tell how long she's been gone?"

Magnifying his 'view' of the building to provide more detail, Sparks said back, "The layer of dust in that place is almost a week old. I don't know how precise of a measurement that is, but she certainly hasn't been around. It's li- wait, someone just got out of an elevator on your floor. Looks like what's-his-name...Seraph."

No sooner were the words out of Sparks' mouth than the door opened. True to his words, Seraph walked in and closed the door behind him. Niobe hung up her phone.

It was Seraph. "Hello, again. You are looking for the Oracle?"

More than a little confused, Ghost answered, "We were under the impression she sent for us."

"No," Seraph shook his head apologetically, but he didn't seem at all perturbed. "But I can take you to the one you seek."

Her phone ringing, Niobe answered only to hear a frantic Sparks trying to make sense of something.

"Niobe, there's some guys with some whacked out code coming into the building," Sparks rushed the words out, "I think...oh shit, it's that Frenchman's goons!"

Someone punched the door in. Niobe and Ghost recognized him, as much as they really didn't want to.

Cain recognized them as well. "Well well, long time no see."

A window shattered as another vampire leapt inside through it. And then another.

Niobe shared a glance with Ghost. And then they both started shooting.

Niobe shot Cain twice. Ghost shot one of his underlings twice, and then Niobe made a graceful jump over the third and back-kicked him square in the head. His head went flying into a wall, but he quickly removed himself from the plaster and bared his fangs in a snarl.

Until Seraph pulled his guns and shot him.

"Go," Niobe ordered. Realizing that the mythic programs were getting up too quickly for them to easily make a stake or three from the Oracle's kitchen table chairs, she shot Cain again just for the hell of it as she followed Ghost out the door.

The hallway didn't provide respite, though Niobe hadn't expected it to. She hadn't expected to wind up staring down a large, scraggly homeless man with at least five watches on one arm walking towards them, either. "I remember you."

"Oh, good," the Trainman smiled. He still sounded rather drunk, but his mannerism and the glint in his eyes overshadowed the facades he put up even more so then in a dark subway.

While Ghost made a mental note to ask her about this later, Niobe was not deterred. Even as Cain and his vampire buddies, bleeding pints of blood from their wounds, entered the hallway to surround them, Niobe didn't budge. "Zion's lasted for more than seventy-two hours."

Raising an eyebrow, the Trainman leered at her. "Good for Zion."

Kicking in a door in the hallway, Seraph shot Cain down again. "Follow me!"

Ghost shoved Niobe through the doorway first, breaking into a run after them when the Trainman paused instead of immediately giving chase.

Leading them up a repeating loop of stairs, Seraph could hear the Trainman when he leapt onto the first flight, now below them, and yelled, "Wingless can't save you!"

And Seraph took offense at this. The Trainman wasn't exceedingly fast, but this merely led to him trailing behind Cain and the vampires as they near-glided up after their targets.

Ghost noticed this as well. He pulled a grenade from his jacket, pulled the pin and tossed it back down the flight, the explosion shaking every stair for several floors in both directions. Cain caught most of the blast, falling down and taking many of his fellow bloodsuckers with him, but it was no silver bullet and he was soon back on his feet.

Fortunately, the building was not a tall one, and in short order, Seraph found himself on the roof. He quickly went through his pockets and found a simple-looking key, a key that would open the door to the building's other set of stairs across the roof to a place that was most certainly not a staircase.

But the apartment complex the Oracle had made her home was not the tallest building on the block, not by far. When windows on some of the taller neighboring buildings began shattering, giving way to leaping human-looking figures falling to the rooftop, it was not such a surprise.

Where the vampires were graceful by skill, these men and women, five of them in all, had more of a feral air about them. Some of them were snarling.

"Werewolves," Seraph tilted his head. He turned to the door they had came from and opened it, shooting down one of Cain's troop with the last of his ammunition before slamming the door shut again. He tossed his guns away; the werewolves were better at taking gunshot wounds. And they were also blocking the escape route. "We must reach the other door."

"Fine," Niobe answered.

There wasn't time to bait them into any kind of mistake, lest Cain and his friends get up and surround them. Niobe was first to hurl herself into the storm, holding eye contact with one of the non-humans before pulling a rather effective fake out and striking the next closest one.

Seraph and Ghost followed suit, each of them attacking separate targets. Niobe succeeded in kicking her rather dangerous sparring partner into another; Ghost grabbed the leg of his opponent and hurled him halfway across the rooftop.

Catching an opening, Seraph let his opponent rush him, using the opportunity to leap frog over his head and reach the door. He had the key in the lock by the time Niobe and Ghost noticed and the door opened into the programmer's maintenance hall by the time they were running to him.

The werewolves were on their feet faster than the vampires would have been but they were slower and less agile, unable to chase down their targets before they made it through the door and closed it.

In the hallway, Seraph finally relaxed. "We are safe for the moment. The Merovingian does not have direct access to this part of the hallway."

"Why does Frenchie have the Oracle's apartment staked out?" Niobe asked. Her experience with the Merovingian had been briefer than the stories Morpheus had of the man, but it had been quite enough to confirm the fact that he was not a nice program.

"He is looking for her," Seraph led them down the hall. "He views the current status of the system as an opportunity to easily acquire what he wants. The system's Intrusion Countermeasure Programs do not have sufficient resources to stop him alone."

"You're talking about Agents," Ghost said.

Seraph nodded. "The Agents of this system were originally designed to hunt down intruders from ships like yours. They are now tasked with defending the system against the Merovingian's exiles; they are not entirely successful acting for a purpose they were not made for."

Ghost took this answer to its next question. "So why doesn't the system make new defenses?"

"The system is having difficulty coping with recent changes," Seraph answered. "The machines and programs designed to create new solutions are...not entirely functional."

All of this was very interesting, but Niobe wanted to know something entirely different. "Where are you taking us?"

Following Seraph around one of the hallway's rare corners, they didn't quite know what to make of what he said. "I am bringing you to the Source."

"Oh, are you now?"

The Merovingian himself was standing not twenty feet away down the new corridor. He was alone and apparently unarmed, dressed in a black suit and tie over a blood-red shirt.

It wasn't like him to be vulnerable; he had something up his sleeve, the idea of which gave Seraph and, in turn, Niobe and Ghost, pause.

"No direct access," Niobe repeated, sarcasm evident in her voice.

"Oh, don't blame Wingless, ma cherie," the Merovingian took a step forward. "I've spent weeks figuring out what the Keymaker produced in my dungeon. He had a talent for not completely angering me by making real keys and simply not labeling the damn things. And now here I am, yet you disappoint me! I expect Morpheus, I expect a small army and now all I have is you, comment vous attendez-vous à ce que je travaille dans de telles conditions? My problems are nowhere near over."

With a snap of his fingers, the Merovingian turned and began a brisk walk down the hallway. Niobe began to follow him, but a pair of doors, one on each side of the hall, opened in front of her with the echo of hard, clunking footsteps.

A pair of statues walked into the hallway. Or perhaps 'Golems' would be a better word; the things were metal and humanoid, one shaped with a distinctly Japanese motif while the other looked Aztec or Mayan.

Standing together, they completely blocked the hallway, their shoulders so broad that one had to stand slightly behind the other.

Turning around, Ghost and Seraph found two more of them approaching from another corridor off of the intersection. And two more pairs entered, cutting off the entire hallway save for a small number of doors that Seraph did not have the keys to.

And on the Logos, Sparks watched his monitors intently, trying to guess where they would pop out of the hallway and thinking that, possibly, it was taking them a bit too long to re-emerge.

As far as anyone would be able to tell, the first day of the Caduceus' flight outside of Zion was just another day in the life for the ship's new crew. Without the dangers of Sentinels tearing through the hull when that one last soldier hadn't made it out of the Matrix yet or the searches for safe broadcasting point, things wouldn't be nearly as exciting; or for that matter, as terrifying.

After all, why would it be? The war was over, the ship worked and only needed to bring them to broadcast depth. Dumont had taken the pilot's seat and had been working on that all day. Sark was sitting on a chair in the core trying to nail the jump program.

Kid had almost joined him, but for now, as he headed back to his new home away from home on the lower deck, he ended up being a bit surprised from above.

"So whose personal processing unit did you get?"

Looking almost straight up, Kid found that Hertz had somehow worked her way between the upper and lower decks of the Caduceus. She had not walked from one to the other, she had literally gone through the floor to hang upside down from the ceiling while looking all too happy about it.

Kid did not answer her question. "How did you do that? Why did you do that?"

"I was bored," she answered, swinging back and fourth a little.

"Go figure," he blinked.

"So?" She prodded him. Apparently, she was bored enough to find this information fascinating. "I got Bane's. You've heard the stories, right?"

Oh, had he. She had no clue how close to home this hit him, bringing up every rumor about what Bane must've done after fleeing the Hammer and freshening it in his mind as if he were hearing it all for the first time again. Bane had killed the One; what bullshit was that, anyway? Neo had survived to save them all. Bane had killed Trinity; an entirely possible scenario. It wasn't really any more preferable, just more probable.

And Kid's favorite; Bane was actually the third part of a conspiracy Neo and Trinity had had going for some time now, because they had orchestrated the EMP disaster to leave room for themselves to save the world. That was the worst. What was it about people that inspired them to make up the worst story they could as a means of explaining the unknown?

He could prove that wasn't true when they returned home. He was sure of it; Morpheus had dragged Neo's personal processing unit to him as soon as he'd heard that Locke sent out the ones from the Caduceus' old crew. It was the kind made to be small and portable, holding only one jack. Neo had never taken it with him on the Nebuchadnezzar even though he could've easily done so, always said he was in the Matrix too much to have any need for another source of programmed reality. And he worked too much to have time for keeping any sort of personally important things anywhere, including information. So he'd left it at home, for the occasions when Trinity wasn't within arm's reach.

Of course, Kid knew those occasions had been cut in half as it were; he had made it his purpose, for every second that Neo was home, to know when he didn't have the chance to spend time with Trinity. It meant Neo had time for the people he'd saved. "I don't know who's it was, I haven't looked at it yet."

Kid had left it behind like Neo would. He was afraid of even touching it. It was easy to think that he hadn't gotten around to digging through it before leaving to spend the time with Sparks instead. Until he remembered that Sparks was already gone in the first place.

He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to hear anything about Bane's personal life, either; he knew Dumont's belonged to a man named Malachi and Sark's had been Captain Ballard's. If anything, he was glad to have Neo's if for no other reason than it meant it completely excluded him from getting Bane's.

Dropping enough to hang from her legs off of a pipe, Hertz did not pick up on Kid's grandiose lie or, for that matter, his discomfort over the topic of Bane. "Dude, the guy was like, really normal. It's kind of creepy. He kept a few programs, a log, nothing really off kilter. He must've just snapped one day just like that."

Just like that. The day Neo had gone to see the Oracle, Kid ran as fast as he could from the orphanage to catch him and give him that gift. Bane had walked by him at the elevator, seemingly normal. Or had he already lost it then? What had he wanted with Neo that day? "Yeah...must've just snapped..."

Seemingly normal. That was fucking scary, now that he thought about it.

Kid turned around and headed back for the main deck. He glanced back at Hertz; she was still hanging from the ceiling. "I'm gonna go see what's going on."

"I think I'll hang out here for awhile," she waved at him, and, true to her word, she continued hanging.

As much as the entire rest of the ship was finding distraction anywhere possible, Morpheus was intently contemplating a mystery. Dumont was a capable pilot; what worried Morpheus was the route he had to take the ship through to get to broadcast depth.

The holographics couldn't quite nail down the nature of the obstructions in the pipelines usually used for shortcuts to a good broadcasting point. The tunnels beneath the primary and secondary machine power plants were usually clear, seemingly because the machines didn't want to risk prompting an EMP blast so close to their lifeblood.

But as the end had drawn near, no one could get near the place. And now, no one would be getting through it. So Morpheus had stared at the errors the holographics were spitting out, trying to make sense of the odd visuals he would sometimes get, all the while directing Dumont around a more winding route to a good location.

He had gotten as far as concluding that there was some kind of gigantic obstruction in the sewers, and that he wasn't going to figure out what it was unless they looked. He gave up the moment he realized the Caduceus was well above minimum broadcast depth and was crossing through an intersection with stable landing points. "Set her down over there."

Link had said something about the Matrix being a little 'off' once they were in tunnels shallow enough to get a clear feed from the system. But he didn't appear overly worried about it and therefore no one else grew worried.

It was a dangerous, bad habit to pick up, taking comfort through proxy instead of questioning something. The sheer, unadulterated irony of a group standing where they were today because of their willingness to question and doubt the dream of yesterday was lost on every single one of them.

But the first time jitters of a freed mind going back into the Matrix were lost on none of them. Morpheus watched them all one at a time as they picked a chair and sat down. Sark simply stayed in his and remained quiet, an odd state of being for him even after he had watched the Second Renaissance. He quietly expected Morpheus to deny him entry because he was the only one who could only get halfway in the jump program, to debase him in front of everyone as a fair trade for the trouble he caused.

Morpheus never said anything.

Kid tried to hang back, looking very much like he was trying to wait for everyone else to be seated before he did anything. Hertz and Dumont situating themselves in chairs seemed to be enough for him.

Taking this as his cue, Morpheus sat down as well, resting his head on the new but somehow familiar backboard, waiting for Link to come around and go through the routine. He'd been in this moment a thousand times, if not ten thousand times, waiting for the inevitable metal scrape of a plug finding its way into his brain. Tank had always been speedy at the job; so was Link.

Morpheus always preferred to jack in first once he had started skipping the Construct. He and Trinity's residual self-images were honed through years of experience, their guns and equipment as much a part of them as their coats and shirts and sunglasses. Which was why Morpheus could easily feel the weight of two MP-5s strapped to the inside of his already-heavy coat and the automatic Glocks in his pockets.

Neo, he remembered, certainly didn't need anything loaded in for him. It was odd, looking back, thinking about Neo taking out a lobby of military troops in a huge gunfight; he had never taken a gun into the Matrix again after that.

But now, the others would need to find their things. Once Morpheus had the plug in his head and his mind was standing in a pure white room, he waited patiently. One by one, the others followed, all of them entering inside a spaced-out circle of tables Link had spawned in. On each table sat the guns and gear for one person; Sark found his M97 grenade launcher, the bandoleer of rounds he wore under his duster and a sleek black watch that looked like it did something nasty. Dumont had a sawed-off shotgun waiting for him, just small enough to tuck under his ATF jacket, and assorted tools in kits that fit into his pockets. Hertz had her silenced pistol and throwing knives ready, the former loaded and cocked, the latter a grade of sharpness impossible for a normal real-world blade.

And Kid, the last to enter, needed only to snap on the ammo belt holding his Desert Eagles and straighten the guns underneath his coat.

Morpheus contemplated asking them if they were ready, if any of them needed more time, but such a question might very well be a waste of time. And if it wasn't, it would simply make things worse. Band-Aids came off painlessly when torn, not peeled. He looked up into the great white expanse of the Construct instead of digging his phone out of his pocket. "Link, do it."

A phone sitting on an end-table in a nice, well-furnished hotel room in Chicago started ringing. And true to Link's skill, five people stood in the room where seconds ago there was no one.

Indeed, this hard-line worked nicely because the room wasn't currently occupied.

Morpheus picked up the ringing phone. "We're in."

It had been a long time since Morpheus had jacked in with four others. Anything close to a full crew compliment for the Nebuchadnezzar just didn't seem necessary with Neo at his side. And Neo certainly didn't need any company other than Trinity. The idea that Trinity herself was unneeded had occurred to Morpheus on occasion, the idea that Neo would be the perfect excuse to keep the last of his old crew out of harm's way. Except Neo wouldn't have been able to function without her, and she would have gone insane without him and without the job.

But the job was more important for Morpheus than it had been for her, a fact that let him understand her need for it. It was a fact that he was aware of on a very conscious level. And it was a fact that allowed him to lead his new crew out of the apartment and to an elevator; to the dangers of the Matrix.

When the elevator doors opened, however, Morpheus was denied the freedom to daydream about his personal demons. There was a woman in the elevator, a woman he recognized very well.

"Hello, Morpheus," Persephone smiled that little seductive smile she so loved to flash.

"Persephone," Morpheus tilted his head ever so slightly. Persephone looked different than Morpheus had ever seen her; gone were the skintight dresses blending in with the motif at whichever of the Merovingian's establishment she was keeping him company at, replaced entirely by the age-old tomboy look of a simple long sleeved shirt and faded jeans. Her hair was tied back, but only with a single tie and not styled beyond that.

This look didn't really suit her personality at all. On the other hand, maybe that was the idea.

A mere acknowledgment from Morpheus also served to prod Persephone into a reaction. The initial extent of this reaction was a simple walk outside of the elevator, as much as Morpheus would allow her without budging. "You don't want to take the elevator down, trust me."

Sark, per his nature, came up with a biting response to this. His tone was demanding, but he stared at her wide-eyed as he lifted his shades up for a moment. "Lady, who the hell are you?"

But Morpheus already knew the answer to that question or, at the very least, he knew enough of an answer. "Why don't we want to take the elevator?"

"Because my husband likes to know things," Persephone turned back to him, eventually sliding her eyes away from her reflection in his sunglasses and looking at everyone behind him one by one. "Things like which phone lines near the Oracle would make a good hard-line, things like when you or someone like you takes advantage of them."

The implication she was making didn't sit well with Morpheus. "He has someone waiting for us."

"In a manner of speaking," Persephone answered. "The bounty on you is still on the market. A few of my husband's men have brought hunters with them, hoping to let them do the dirty work and take the spoils for themselves. But lucky for you, Morpheus," once more, she looked across everyone, "You're the only one they know."

"Why are you here?" Morpheus added to his original question. He had met Persephone twice, and it was enough to know that she didn't take action lightly. She was not a friend, she didn't sympathize with his cause, she had helped them in the restaurant because it suited her own needs. It was fortunate, he thought, that her needs were fairly benign, if not borderline perverse.

"Because I'm going to go find someone else my husband is after. He is allowing only a few of his men to help the bounty hunters because most of his men are scampering the system, searching for what he seeks," she answered. "And I need help."

"Why is this taking so long?" Smith was never a patient program, but this was the most annoying delay of his entire life span. "This is absurd."

"Indeed," the monitor answered, bobbing up and down as it hovered in front of his face. A single tentacle reached out from the others, the highly sensitive combination directional microphone/microwave transmitter folding out just long enough for a good listen.. The monitor was pointing in the direction it had flown back from. "The ship is in this direction. It had landed but is not running silently."

Forcing a growl of contempt out of Bane's lungs, Smith turned his back to the monitor and paced around, sick of looking at the small Sentinel's bright blue eye and having to see the afterimage for minutes at a time.

For better or for worse, H3-43-GS's undying commitment to its purpose kept the little machine concerned for Bane. "Are you feeling ill? Do you require additional medical attention?"

"No," Smith sighed, resigned to getting his emotions under control if for no other reason than to stop his babysitter from worrying. Remembering that the monitor's specialty had, according to its enhancements, been mainly surgical in nature, Smith was glad it didn't feel compelled to try 'fixing' him.

On this thought, Smith sat down in the center of the transport, cursing the needs of Bane's muscles for rest and recuperation.

He hated not standing.

With the search of another major city done, Sparks threw his face into his hands, dropping backwards to rest his aching back against his chair before running his fingers through his hair. This was going nowhere.

He was alone. Ghost and Niobe were gone. Their vitals were still stable, but if they didn't jack out very soon, he was going to have to take measures to ensure they didn't end up dehydrated or malnourished.

They had to be in that damn hallway. The Industrial Hallway, one of them had called it. Sparks couldn't remember which.

You'd have loved it, Sparks, Niobe once said. It's the most literal thing I've ever seen in there. I had grandiose thoughts of what you could do hacking it.

For awhile, that sounded fun.

But it wouldn't be fun right now. If he could do one thing to this famed Atlantis of a place, he would leave a marker in it so he could monitor it. So Link could monitor it if Morpheus ever ended up finding a way out here to do anything.

Right now, Sparks couldn't figure out if he wanted that so someone could look for Niobe, or if he didn't so the same thing couldn't happen to Kid. He thought of how Niobe and Ghost easily meant as much to him as Kid did; how couldn't they? Logically, they were just as important. But invariably, things of equal but different importance always felt unequal in some ways. In ways that made his head, and his heart, hurt. It was amazing, Sparks thought, how some emotions seemed designed to override all sense of logic and reason.

Oh, how Trinity had told stories in Zion, almost seven months ago, when the One was brand new and half of a ship's compliment had died to get him, when her navy friends couldn't resist asking questions. She told stories of Cypher, the exact opposite of what most people would do, of what even Morpheus did. Morpheus never spoke his name to anyone again. But Trinity couldn't deal with it like that, she had to talk about it, to talk about him.

Cypher had loved her, he'd said. Or rather, she said he'd said. How many of his choices were influenced by that love? How far had knowing that the one who meant everything to him would never, ever give him the time of day pushed him to his choices? All because an oracle inside a simulated reality spat out a prophecy and then told her the prophecy's messiah would have so much more to offer than lowly, pessimistic Cypher? Had it been the last straw or the trigger for the idea in his head?

When he thought about it like that, Sparks wondered if he and Niobe were lucky to be alive around Ghost for so long. The king of unrequited loves himself. And then he closed his eyes and dropped his forehead into one of the keyboards. "Stop it, Sparky, that's not fair...don't you dare think like that, it's Ghost for christ's sake, it's just Ghost."

But he couldn't escape the nagging, wretched feeling that Morpheus had probably felt the same about Cypher for a long time; it was just Cypher.

Opening his eyes, Sparks saw his impromptu self-abuse had changed the readout of one of his screens back to a different location. He blinked, wondering if he was seeing the code correctly. How, in the sea of billions of people he was randomly searching through, had a few random button presses brought him to this spot? Morpheus would have a field day analyzing the providence Sparks had worked up for himself. "Speak of the devil."

His choice was made for him.

True to Persephone's word, the roof was devoid of anything or anyone with even remotely hostile intentions. Morpheus and Dumont walked with her to the back edge, looking down and confirming that no one was there.

"Where is this man we're going to find?" Dumont asked.

"A few blocks down town, give or take a few buildings," she answered, looking off into the direction of where she wanted to go. "This early in the morning, he'll be eating breakfast at a small diner across from his home by the time we get there."

"We'll find him," Morpheus said. For better or for worse, Persephone was giving off a good vibe...at least for the moment. And he had a feeling he should use her allegiance to his advantage as much as he could. "Persephone, has something happened to the Oracle?"

The Oracle's apartment just wasn't far enough away for him to be unconcerned when the Merovingian's men were this close. Her reaction confirmed that he should be concerned. "I don't know. She's hiding from my husband. We should go."

That answered that. Morpheus and Dumont approached the edge on either side of her. She seemed a bit taken aback by this. "Please; just because I can't fight doesn't mean I don't know how to bend the rules."

With that, she sprinted the distance to the end of the rooftop, running across it and leaping the far street to another building. Morpheus and Dumont kept their eyes on her, watching her rise and fall before repeating the process themselves.

It was precisely at this time that Morpheus' phone began ringing. He answered it, fully expecting Link to have something important to say. He did not expect the frantic screaming of Sparks to fill his ear. "Morpheus, christ, how the hell did you get here, I don't care! I need help!"

"Sparks," Morpheus spoke slowly, deliberately, purposefully, as Sparks seemed to grow less cohesive by the second. "Calm down. Calm down. What's wrong? Where's Niobe?"

"Hang on," Morpheus told him. He turned to Persephone. "Is there a door into the access hallways near the Oracle's home?"

Thinking about this, Persephone nodded. But she didn't like where this was going.

Morpheus put his phone back to his ear. "We'll find them." He hung up. "We have to go through that door."

"We do not have time," Persephone insisted, but calmly, collected. "If my husband beats us...you won't like the position you'll be in."

This did not concern Morpheus at all. He had been through many a bad thing and he had defied the odds more times than he could count; it was his most treasured skill. "We won't lose him."

"The others can find him," Dumont added. "Once they're done downstairs. Maybe they'll get done faster than we will."

Realizing that Morpheus would not budge from his spot unless it was to take care of what he considered a more important problem first, Persephone reached into her pocket and retrieved a folded piece of paper, the address she was going to bring them to. "Tell them to go here. We're looking for Mr. Ash."

Glancing over at the set of occupied chairs, Link turned back to his monitors and the familiar glyphs. Some of them represented familiar things, things he wasn't too particularly thrilled to see. "You've got...okay, most of them are in the middle of the room. There are four guys with code I've never seen, and a pair of twins you don't want to mess with, trust me on this."

"Gotcha." Hanging up his phone, Sark hit the speed dial for a different number.

In a different elevator, Hertz turned her phone on when it rang. "Whatcha' got?"

"Get the guys farther to the left," Sark told her. "We'll get the rest. Watch the twins."

Hertz rolled her eyes and stopped to look at on the floor count. Sometimes, she noticed, Sark could be overly serious. She could tolerate it because he wasn't an idiot; the elevator she was riding on was further to the right and she would have an easier time hitting targets over to the left. "I think I'm behind you guys; this elevator is too damn slow. Just don't start using explosives in enclosed spaces, okay?"

"We'll save some for you," he answered, hanging up. Her final comment inspired him to pat the grenade launcher buckled to the side of his right leg, almost doubting it was still there.

He was quite confident there would be plenty to go around; being severely outnumbered didn't seem like an acceptable handicap for a first real engagement. Nevertheless, he wasn't going to run from any of it, including whatever Link's twins were, unless it was kicking the crap out of him or wearing a perfect suit and dark glasses. Or both.

When he noticed Kid drawing his guns, he turned slightly and said, "You okay?"

"Yep," Kid answered. It was far from the truth, something he made no effort to hide. Kid found himself scared to death, forcing himself to be scared into staying focused and getting the job done as he took a deep breath.

But he couldn't say it, saying it would only make it worse and scare him into being just plain terrified. Shaking his guns loosely in his hands before switching off the safeties and switching on the laser sights, he kept his eyes on the door and mumbled, "Don't over-squeeze the trigger..."

The door finally opened, chiming an obnoxious 'bing' as it did so, much to the surprise of a pale, lanky man standing in front of it, his hand at the button, his mouth open in surprise.

He had a set of fangs not unlike a vampire. He was overdressed in leather pants and an unbuttoned silk shirt, not unlike some interpretations of vampires. He was apparently intent on no longer waiting for Morpheus to come to him, and now that something had happened, he had no clue what to do about it.

Sark punched him, straight in the chest, a clean shot to the solar plexus. He flew back and landed on the ground with a distinct thud.

This obstruction cleared, the elevator was flooded with green from the large tinted windows in the far wall, flooding in light over the front doors. The lobby had a fairly high ceiling, the left and right walls each home to a pair of calm waterfalls that slid down against green marble into canals, feeding the fountain at the center of the room.

Everyone sitting in the couches and chairs surrounding that fountain turned and looked. To the right was a man with long hair and leather buckles holding the baggier parts of his clothes to his skin; he looked like he had been flirting with the receptionist. The Twins Link had mentioned were identical twins with white hair in dreadlocks, matching sunglasses and perfect white suits. They looked up from their different sections of the same newspaper, each leaning in the opposite direction to see the elevator around the fountain.

Four very large men sat near them, wearing varying levels of body armor, many of them with a bladed weapon of some kind propped against their chairs. One had a paired katana and wakizashi, another had a full-on broadsword.

The men near the door were bulkier than the rest, more feral. Some of them growled.

And then the long-haired fellow looked up from his position, leaning over the receptionist's desk, his eyes traveling from his fallen comrade to the people getting off the elevator. "Hmm, that's not Morpheus."

"Once again, Vlad," one of the twins looked over at him, making no move to stand, "You've completely missed the point."

The other continued reading his paper. "He always misses it; the point is on his head."

Aggravated more by this taunting than the interruption, Vlad looked from Sark to the Twins, then to the fallen vampire, and finally to the bounty hunters sitting down and the werewolves at the door. "Don't just stand there you morons, get them!"

But this encouraged Kid to move faster than it encouraged the exiles, Merovingian lackeys and bounty hunters alike. Half-jumping away from Sark, Kid raised his guns and, focusing on the diluted red dots of his laser sights, opened fire.

The first one he shot at took three bullets before falling through the front doors, shattering the glass as if it didn't fight his fall at all. The second took only two shots, each round disturbing the fountain's spray on the way. The second shot went through his right temple.

He turned his aim to Vlad with the gun in his right hand, shooting once at the third door guard with his left, but before he could squeeze the trigger, Vlad let out an obnoxiously inhuman hiss and leapt into the air, sticking to the high ceiling.

Looking up, Sark couldn't resist speaking the comment on the tip of his tongue. "What are you supposed to be, Spider-Man?"

Abruptly ending his hissing fit, Vlad called down, "You know, the Merovingian would probably want you twerps alive? But I think for once, I'd rather kill you all."

With this declaration, Vlad rocketed down from the ceiling, not merely dropping but shoving himself downward with tremendous force. He almost landed on Kid, but Kid had the sense to shove his guns under his belt in the middle of diving and rolling out of the way.

Almost thrilled over having a direct challenge, Sark did not back off from Vlad and made every effort to get closer to him before blows began being exchanged. But Vlad had other ideas and he backed off, keeping a bigger gap between them. Vlad had a longer reach, a lesson learned when Sark misjudged it and ended up being kicked across the face for his troubles.

He had no help from Kid. Though the bounty hunters were hanging back for the moment, the vampire Sark had walloped had quickly gotten to his feet. The first thing Kid noticed about him was that, like Vlad, he was far more agile than most fighters, and he had a good amount of muscle to say nothing of whatever unnatural strengths he earned by being undead.

But he fought his own offensive, his body tense and resistant to motion. Kid could see it; seeing it was what the entire first Jeet Kune Do lesson had taught him. And the second had taken the concept one step further by showing him how to stay calm and avoid tightening his muscles, how to avoid that same mistake.

It also helped that this man was, if anything, Vlad's underling and nowhere near as good of a fighter. The difference let Kid bend around the first swing his opponent took and easily parry the next two with his forearms, punching the vampire straight in the nose and knocking his head back before taking the chance to kick him square under the chin and into the air.

Kid hopped up after him, his fist raised and ready to strike in the same place Sark had, intent on driving the vampire straight through the marble floor if he could. But the most distracting of noises, the growling, the snarling of an angry animal ruined his focus and as the world came out of its slow motion dance, Kid looked over in time to see the last door guard leap and tackle him to the ground.

And, Kid soon realized, this man was the source of this snarling, a fact proved more disturbing when Kid found his attacker snap his head down and try to bite him on the neck. A hand coming up and grabbing his head, keeping it away, Kid put two and two together; Vlad hissed a lot, his friend had fangs, pale skin, and the classic, stereotyped strength of a vampire. But this one sounded like a rabid dog.

Or a werewolf. It was a lot like a werewolf, or at least, what Kid thought werewolves might be like if they were real.

But then, what is real?

The grating ding from the elevator chimed once more, the doors closer to where the twins sat opening to let Hertz out. The first thing she did was shoot one of the bounty hunters; they were on their feet and moving when they saw her. Then she shot the one carrying the samurai swords.

Then she shot the werewolf on top of Kid, something Kid was grateful for, for it let him shove the prone form off and into one of the waterways before he stood up. The fountain began pouring water with a bit of red in it not long after.

She shot Vlad, but she didn't hit him in the head per her usual accuracy, because he saw it coming after she pulled the trigger and raised a hand, catching the bullet near his elbow in the forearm.

He wasn't fazed and promptly used that forearm to crack Sark across the face, but he had gotten closer to do this and most of Sark's hand to hand technique functioned best at this short distance.

It helped that Sark had no problems playing dirty, either. Before Vlad had committed to a new attack, Sark snapped a leg out and kicked him in the knee. Vlad stumbled once, Sark kicking out again, this time hitting his calf on the same leg before he reached up, dug his fingers into Vlad's face, and raked his eyes.

Even before Sark registered that his fingertips were wet with blood, he was satisfied as Vlad covered his face, bleeding and wailing. Sark kicked him away and decided not to give him a further thought.

Until Vlad's screaming turned into nothing more than bemused laughter and he turned, his eyes fine despite dark lines of blood falling down his cheeks. "I've never shed tears of scarlet for anything; you'll pay for that."

Not making a move, Vlad was content to let the remaining bounty hunters attempt something. Sark dived onto his back when the one wielding the broadsword lunged forward and tried to flat-out impale him.

This gave him a unique angle to watch Hertz hop up onto that sword, surprising the man into holding it there for a second, but Sark quickly rolled to the side and up to his feet as the sword came crashing down.

Already having jumped off, Hertz somersaulted over the swordsman, the end of her gun's silencer pressing onto his head and pivoting with her as she moved.

She pulled the trigger before he knew what was happening, landing behind him as he toppled over.

Intent on killing the last one, Hertz found herself on the receiving end instead; her target flung himself into the air, landing behind her with a piano wire held in his hands, a wire that was soon around her neck.

Seeing Hertz being choked to death, trying desperately to aim her gun behind her head with little success, Kid grabbed one of his guns and raised it, but the original vampire was now standing and running toward him. Before Kid could get a shot off, his arm was knocked away from the target and he was forced to defend himself.

Giving up on her gun, Hertz desperately inhaled what little breath she could, putting all her weight into walking him over a few steps and trying to slam her attacker off by knocking him into the marble wall under one of the waterfalls.

It didn't work. Her eyes starting to turn red, she grabbed one of her throwing knives from under her coat, jabbing over her shoulder and missing completely.

Her attacker smacked her hand into the wall with his head, knocking it out of her hand. She groped for his face, feeling instead the arm of the sunglasses he was wearing.

Instantly coming up with a solution, she pulled the sunglasses from his face by the arm, slamming them into the wall through the water and completely destroying the shades, leaving the broken arm in her hand.

She shoved the broken end through his ear.

He didn't make much noise at this, but instantly, the wire came loose and Hertz fell over, her attacker falling backward, desperately grabbing at the metal now slicked in his own blood, trying to get the foreign object out of his head before it slipped in any farther and killed him.

She raised her other arm and shot him in the head before she even inhaled a breath.

Watching as Vlad almost fell into him from a blow Sark that hit him with, the first twin ruffled through his section of the paper and turned to his brother, his voice bland and utilitarian. "Do we have the funnies?"

"Yes, we do," the second answered in an equally flat tone, finding those pages and handing them over.

Having shot his opponent down, Kid was leaning over her in a prompt manner, afraid she had suffered a serious injury. "Are you alright?"

"I'll be fine," she coughed, rubbing at her neck. A thin red line had formed around it. As she tried to get a handle on things, she grabbed the front of Kid's coat and pulled him down close, reaching over his back to throw a knife through the heart of that persistent vampire.

The unnatural being fell over instantly, his body convulsing as he gagged and slowly died just like that. Intrigued, Hertz raised an eyebrow. "Hey...that killed him."

Helping her to her feet and turning to see Sark fighting with Vlad, Kid added, "You could've just told me to duck."

Her breaths still coming in varying levels of coughing and wheezing, she rasped out, "That's not nearly as fun."

Keeping close, Sark cracked Vlad in the ribs, hoping to break one, but he had no such luck. In retaliation, Vlad grabbed him by the arms, lifted him up and tossed him into the chair one of the bounty hunters had fallen into when Hertz had shot him.

The fragile wood of the furniture shattered under the blow, landing Sark on top of the body. But this didn't concern him; his attention was drawn to the flat end of something sharp he could feel underneath his chest; the katana from the hunter's sword pair. Hearing Vlad's footsteps behind him, he waited just a few second before wrapping his fingers around the handle and bounding to his feet, spinning to face Vlad before he even landed and slicing once with his newfound weapon.

He caught Vlad below the eye. Dabbing his fingers in the fresh blood, Vlad let out a hiss and resolved to tear Sark apart one piece at a time. And Sark taunted him, standing right where he'd landed and scraping a line on the floor with the tip of his sword.

And then Vlad felt his feet leave the ground. Squeaking in surprise, he turned his head to see that Hertz and Kid had both grabbed him from behind.

And as soon as Sark stepped out of the way, they both pulled back and tossed him head first into the fountain, his skull cracking the concrete near the top before he splashed into the basin head-first.

And then, finally, the twins tossed their paper away and stood up. One of them smiled. "That was amusing."

Having had enough of the twins sitting down and looking arrogantly cryptic while they watched the chaos around them, Hertz stepped forward. "So...what are you supposed to be, anyway?"

Looking at each other as if they had never been asked this question, they turned back to her and the one on the left said, "We like to think of ourselves as the Alpha."

"And the Omega," the one on the right added, smiling behind his sunglasses.

Alpha spoke once more. "There is no particular reason."

"We just hate numbers," Omega sighed.

"Yeah, well I hate you," Sark answered them, tucking his sword under his arm. Grabbing his grenade launcher from its straps, he shoved a round into the barrel, closed it and pointed it in their general direction. "Fuck enclosed spaces."

With that, he turned his aim up his aim up, way up, and pulled the trigger, sending the round crashing into the ceiling. And the resulting explosion sent plenty of large debris right down on the twins' heads.

They were more than fast enough to dive away. Just as Sark, Kid and Hertz were more than fast enough to jump over the pile of rubble as soon as it had formed, before the twins were even on their feet.

Looking back from the front doors, they saw that the twins were not the only ones getting up. While the bounty hunters stayed down, Vlad was slowly pulling himself from the fountain and the werewolves were all regaining consciousness, the multitude of bullets in their bodies slowly being squeezed out by their flesh as they regenerated.

"All right, back up," Sark reached up, prodding Kid and Hertz backwards and out the front doors. "Back up."

By the time they were outside and comfortably far away from the building, Sark had reloaded his grenade launcher and was aiming for the top of the door frame, one of the twins visibly running toward him.

But Alpha was too far away, and Sark blew the doors closed long before he was close. People on the street stopped in their tracks and turned towards the sound, their need to know the situation's intimate details far surpassing the thought that running away might be the better option. Only the few people close enough to see that a weapon had caused this explosion either backed away slowly or turned and ran.

"Well, that was that," Sark breathed. Apparently, the Twins weren't going to come out o the windows; if one of them had jumped, they would have crashed through already.

And as Sark began walking away, Hertz following, with Kid about to bring up the rear, Alpha came soaring through the debris in a running dive, but he was different, transparent and ghostly instead of bright white, even the razor blade in his hand immaterial like air.

He solidified in mid-dive, rolling once and coming up on his feet, his blade swinging in the air at Kid.

Still trying to process this development, Kid reacted on complete reflex, grabbing Alpha's forearm and shoving down, sending him into the air with his own momentum. But Alpha was not caught off guard by this, and he landed on his feet, behind Kid, his arm swinging up with Kid's until the blade was at his throat above his collar, and Kid's hand was no longer catching someone as they grew close but trying to pull his own death away. Alpha's other arm encircled him, keeping Kid's own free arm pinned to his side.

And all of this, Alpha noticed, happened in the time that it took Sark and Hertz to turn around and see. He was amused. "Leaving so soon?"

Omega then phased through the rubble, his pace a calm walk. "Maybe we'll get it right this time."

"Drop your weapons," Alpha deadpanned, his blade drawing blood from Kid.

Kid kept his eyes on a random cloud in the green-tinted sky, not wanting to look at his companions, having discovered that trying to pull the knife away from his neck with all of his might resulted in Alpha not budging at all. He was afraid they could tell what he was thinking, that the last thing he wanted was for them to surrender and die for him while he prayed that they would do just that.

For the first time, he wished he'd found himself a new pair of sunglasses. And then the sound that reached his ears, an all-too familiar noise heard elsewhere in the only non-combat training simulation Morpheus had put them through forced him to shift his eyes back down, to something behind Sark and Hertz.

They heard it too, and they whirled around, their weapons still, mercifully, in their hands. People had gathered around them instead of running away, on both sides of the sidewalk and in empty parking spaces along the street, watching the train wreck instead of running from it. Perhaps they thought it was a gang fight spilling into public or something else that didn't really involve them and therefore couldn't harm them.

But that sound was an Agent taking one of them, the baggy clothes of a young man excited over his front seat to the action turning into the crisp dark suit worn by a man with a much larger stature and a face showing less emotion than the twins did.

Before anyone reacted, Agent Johnson pulled his gun out from under his coat, and Sark could see down the barrel as he pulled the trigger.

Sark thought he was quite dead when he saw the muzzle flash, the sound drowned out by this realization, the bullet...skimming the side of his face, whipping by his hair, finding its mark next to Kid's head, in Alpha's eye.

His form turning immaterial, razor and all, Alpha lunged forward and grabbed for Kid as soon as he had slipped through his fingers, but Kid was long gone, toward his companions, long before Alpha was solid again.

That single shot had finally gotten the crowd to panic and it sent people running every which way, before anyone would have noticed Alpha's ghostly form or the bullet hitting the poor sap who'd been standing behind him.

All of this left the three humans in an interesting position; between the twins and an Agent.

"Come with me," Johnson intoned, backing up with his gun still pointed at the twins.

Kid and Hertz shared a look of surprised horror, turning to Johnson as he walked away and then to Sark as he backed up, his hands tightening around his weapons.

Regardless of the Agent's intentions, he was one possible threat and not completely invulnerable; the twins were two definite threats with no visible weakness. The logic involved in making a decision seemed quite obvious to Sark. "Go, for Christ's sake!"

The twins were on him then, first Alpha slashing a razor at his face. He stepped back, leaning in to crack the ghoul with the barrel of his grenade launcher, a swipe that missed completely when Alpha ducked his head underneath and slashed at his throat.

Having caught on to their game and idiosyncrasies, Sark made no attempt to get out of the way; instead, he stabbed Alpha through the chest with his sword, not even feeling the blade when Alpha turned immaterial and it passed through him. He kicked Omega back, slashing horizontally at them both, this time trying to actually do damage and failing completely as they phased for the small amounts of time they had metal passing through them.

Smacking away Alpha's weapon arm only to be punched back and smashed to the ground, Sark kicked a leg up and caught Omega in the stomach, reaching up and hitting hard across the forehead with the barrel of his grenade launcher. But his swing was at the wrong angle to follow through with catching Alpha's kick from hitting him across the jaw and sending him rolling onto his face.

Agent Johnson, hopping over the hood of a black car and opening the driver's side door in one precise, if completely ungraceful movement, hastily gestured to the humans. "Get in."

This statement had the effect of stopping Hertz and Kid in their tracks. It wasn't bad enough that an Agent was offering them a ride instead of trying to kill them, but on top of which, the Agent didn't seem to realize just why they were so reluctant.

Alpha proceeded to plant a foot on Sark's back, pressing down into the sidewalk almost hard enough to kill him, but not quite, not yet.

Responding in due kind, Sark turned his grenade launcher up, twisting his wrist almost as far as it would go, the barrel pointed at Alpha's head.

Of course, munitions going off that close would most likely kill him, but he pulled the trigger anyway.

And Alpha heard the metal tang of its firing mechanism clicking, his body phasing into the freakish wraith form he and his brother so enjoyed...but no grenade came.

Sark had never reloaded it. In desperation, he had hoped the twins' abilities were a matter of choice, that they choose to become immaterial, not an automatic response to injury.

Alpha had good reflexes. But he didn't catch his mistake before Sark rolled out from underneath him, breaking into a run as soon as he was on his feet, glass above the hotel doors shattering as the werewolves began leaping through.

And on the Caduceus, Link had a moment to reflect on the stupidity he had let himself fall into. It had seemed appropriate to consider this grand new assignment not a good thing, but at least a tolerable thing. After all, the war was over, why should one expect the same level of insanity to be perpetuated into the new era?

"What in the world are they doing?"

At this very moment, Sark was batting away at the twins as best he could, ramming his sword through a werewolf's heart when it was foolish enough to leap at him while his face wasn't turned away.

Ripping the blade out, he slashed it through Alpha, warm blood gliding through the air when Alpha phased through it once more. Only this time, the wraith didn't solidify right away, he stayed immaterial and passed clean through Sark, reforming to backhand him across the face as Sark tried to turn around.

He had intended to knock Sark into Omega, but Omega's blade turned light as air when Sark managed to stab him first.

Cut off from his preferred escape, Sark didn't think about his options; he turned and ran, out onto the street, first hopping onto a parked car and then across several moving vehicles until he was at the other side, his movement never ceasing as he ran down the closest ally.

Venturing a quick look behind himself, he found that the twins were leaping over the entire street after him, taking only one jump. "Figures it's the one thing I should've learned better..."

It wasn't just his own people Link was blinking at while they stayed disturbingly close to an Agent. Staring at the code, he couldn't help but wonder why the Agent wasn't trying to kill them. Kid was the least busy, with no good shot out the back window at the pursuers who thought they would stop them from driving away, while Johnson, knowing Sark was long gone, peeled out into the road.

As such, Kid was the one who found his phone ringing. He answered it promptly. "Yeah?"

Link repeated the question he had asked himself. "What in the world are you doing!"

"Uh," Kid started, wondering what the answer was himself. As Agent Johnson turned onto the street, he and Hertz threw themselves down as much as they could when gunfire started bouncing off of the car. Looking back, seeing that the twins had given up their pursuit of Sark in favor of getting a vehicle of their own, he knocked out the back window with his elbow. It allowed for proper aiming and he returned fire before ducking down once more and bringing the phone back to his ear. He couldn't help but wonder if this was the same kind of craziness Sparks had described to him in his many stories about Niobe and Ghost. It certainly seemed like it. "We're running like pansies?"

"With an Agent," Link half-shouted, half-squeaked at him.

Again ducking his head, Kid briefly thought of shooting the cars in front of them; they were digging their own grave by plowing through traffic and leaving a clear road for the twins to gain on them from their bad start as commuters swerved away left and right.

Johnson seemed to realize this, and acted by taking a hard left turn.

"Yeah," Kid shouted back once he was done listening to Sark, his voice nearly drowned out by the incoming gunfire and the sounds of various car horns going off as Johnson plowed around traffic in decidedly dangerous ways. "We're more afraid of the ghosts than him..."

Muting the line for a moment, Link looked up at the ceiling and rubbed imaginarily sleep out of his eyes. "Ah, well, if you can't beat 'em," he said to himself. Going back to his monitors, he realized that this might turn into the freeway all over again if it wasn't nipped in the bud. There were no cops approaching, something he couldn't quite comprehend, but some of the Merovingian's other goons had gone through the process of hijacking cars and joining the pursuit.

"Link," Kid reached out and shot at the twins again; he and Hertz had the same idea, they were both trying to hit the one leaning out of the passenger window shooting at them, hoping to force him into phasing and dropping his gun. But the twin driving was very good at being evasive. "Where do we go?"

Having been working on this, Link did not bother answering and instead put all of his effort into finding the clearest route they were coming up on. "Turn left at the next intersection, then go straight and take the next right."

"Go left," Kid shouted up front, praying the Agent would listen to him.

Perhaps miraculously, Agent Johnson took the turn.

And this particular street was indeed less cluttered; Johnson had a near-straight run to the end, a fact he used to his advantage. The twins turned onto the street to find a much larger gap between themselves and their targets.

Link was not entirely amused when a second call came through; he didn't want to divert his attention away from the growing catastrophe. But then, it wasn't really his choice. He switched lines and answered the phone. "Operator."

"Link," Morpheus spoke. "Where are the others?"

"Running their asses off," Link almost chuckled, restraining himself. He also restrained himself from telling Morpheus about the Agent and the fun they seemed to be having with that. "They're heading towards Chinatown."

"We're heading into the hallways," Morpheus answered back. "They need to find a diner on East 21st. We're looking for a man named Ash."

"Gotcha," Link answered. Morpheus hung up, leaving him to go back to Kid. "Okay, you're going the wrong way. You want to go a few miles south," he paused, finding the information on their objective. "There's a diner called 'The World is Yours' near the end of the street; find Ash."

"Right, okay," Kid hung up. He learned forward, as close to the front as he dared. "Turn around, we need to go back."

"Yes," Agent Johnson answered, taking a right turn and running down and winding down a hilled, curved road. He made no attempts to actually reverse direction; the twins had gained on them again, close enough to resume fire, and Vlad was close behind them. "Our objectives are identical."

"So why have you been going the wrong way from the start?" Hertz asked.

Unperturbed, Johnson answered, "It has been the only viable escape route. You can do nothing if you are dead."

Phone at his ear, Sark turned around and walked backwards for a few steps, making sure the twins weren't three feet behind him while trying to somehow look inconspicuous. Buckling his grenade launcher back to his leg, where it was covered by his duster, was the only thing he had done to accomplish this, and given the fresh bruises and cuts he'd gotten from the twins and Vlad, it didn't help much.

He wasn't making any attempt to hide the sword at all, letting the tip scrape on the ground as he walked. It was a lifeline, a ground to reality, ironic considering there was no reality here at all. Nevertheless, it had kept Vlad and the twins at bay longer than he thought it would, and as such, his knuckles were white while he held the handle.

His face now had a black eye that would likely be there when he jacked out, added to the rest of the beating he'd gotten in Zion. Once he had lost the adrenaline high from his first real brawl, it became apparent that this was the least of his worries. One of the twins' razors had sliced a line clean down the front of his shirt, nearly cutting off his ammo sash and, for that matter, nearly cutting into his skin. He was going to feel all of it in the morning, he was sure.

It seemed like an eternity before Link answered the phone. "Operator."

"Where the hell am I going?"

Being good at his job, Link answered quickly. "There's a bus stop just down that street, sit there, try to look normal, I'll send the others down there to pick you up on their way."

"Works for me," Sark hung up, plodding over to the wooden bench constituting this bus stop and sitting down, tossing the sword to the ground behind it. He didn't keep track of time, instead slumping back and closing his eyes, trying to take a full breath, anything to postpone the inevitable. When he finally let his eyelids open half-way, his upward-staring gaze noticed something he hadn't given any thought to before. "Since when is the sky here blue? God, I hate this shit..."

"So maybe you shouldn't be here."

Jumping, Sark turned to his side. He hadn't stopped listening, he wasn't stupid enough to stop paying attention to his surroundings, and he was quite sure he should've heard this odd woman approach. But he didn't, and here she was, sitting down on the other end of the bench. "Sorry about that."

It was too weird. She looked normal enough, wearing a little smoking jacket over a faded flower skirt. Her hair was graying, her age well into the fifties. In one hand, she held a purse that she set down on the bench as she sat; her other hand held a pack of cigarettes displaying the Double Destiny brand logo.

After noticing the yin-yang earrings she sported, Sark thought about them long enough to see that both halves were the same color before he pulled a double take back to the cigarettes. Still, his response was a simple, confused, "What?"

"Maybe you shouldn't be here," she repeated. "If you don't like whatever it is you're doing, I mean. Most people don't realize how much choice they have in the matter of doing things they don't want to be doing."

He remained silent: silent, nervous, and more than a little crept out. Was she just talking typical old lady-talk, or...

"Lovely day, isn't it?" She asked.

Very weird, indeed. Why, Sark thought, didn't he scare her? He was a young man with visible cuts and bruises from fighting other people (or reasonable facsimiles of other people) and she must've seen the not-well-hidden sword before she sat down. He was the spitting image of someone who was given a wide berth by old people. Sark shook his head, because the simulated sun and cloudless sky showing the green, no, the blue above couldn't be lovely to an unplugged man just coming back to the Matrix. "No, not really."

"I suppose I can't help but appreciate it anyway, though," she sighed. "So, you must be Sark."

"Excuse me?" He stared at her agape, an utter lack of comprehension prompting him to reach under his duster and finger the buckles around his grenade launcher. "How the hell do you know that?"

"Another dim bulb when you've got too much on your mind, but that's alright. Anyway, I know enough." Unperturbed, she took another drag from her cigarette and dug through her purse again, finding an open bag of candy. Unrolling the top, she snagged a little red bite. The way she held it reminded him quite well of being presented with something that looked a lot like it years ago. "I'd offer you one, but you don't want it. You didn't expect to be fighting anything, or at least not this soon, and you're still trying to make sense of it."

He hadn't. But Sark wasn't going to say this. Glancing down both ends of the street, praying for that Agent, of all things, to hurry up and get here so he could leave, he sighed. "Yeah, well, life is like a Windows box, you never know when it's gonna crash."

"You remind me of Morpheus." She took a drag from her cigarette. "He was pretty skeptical and bothered the first time I met him, I remember that much."

The most pertinent question would have been 'how do you know Morpheus?' Somewhere in his mind, Sark knew that as he yanked off his sunglasses, but her statement had driven him up the wall and away from asking questions, to a pool of rage he didn't know he had stored up.

After all, he'd never expected to hear anyone say that. The small amount of tolerance Morpheus had earned from Sark in the council chambers was gone in an instant, forgotten in a burst of anger. "I am nothing like Morpheus!"

"Really?" She raised an eyebrow. For a second, it looked as if she had eyes his sword on the ground. "Well, Morpheus doesn't have the baggage you do, but then, no one is exactly alike. Even we aren't."

Rage now mixed with buried grief, Sark's voice, though much less belligerent, grew thicker with anger. "Lady, you have no fucking idea what 'baggage' I have."

"Sure I do," she ate another piece of candy, dropping the bag back into her purse. "I know you don't like it, you shouldn't. But we're all here to do what we're all here to do, and I don't think you realize why you're here."

No longer caring if this was some weird old woman going senile or if he was completely missing something, Sark stood up and looked down on her. Right now, this woman was the vilest thing in the Matrix. "I suppose you're going to tell me why?"

"Oh, no, not a bit," she shook her head, almost laughing. Almost. "I don't do that, I just make an observation here and there. You just have to make up your own damn mind about it. So, how's your brother?"

"He's fine," Sark deadpanned. He didn't like what she might be getting at. Crom was fine, he had to be. What was going happen to him in Zion, after all?

Finishing her cigarette, the woman tossed it away and proposed what sounded like a pretty stupid question. "Do you think he'd be fine if he were here?"

"Of course not," Sark shouted, earning more looks from people passing by than he had even while carrying a sword around. It was almost amusing. Growing self conscious over his outburst, Sark lowered his voice, but it contained the same level of bite. "Like hell he'd be fine in here...Morpheus would just get him killed."

"But not you," she said.

"I...what?" Sark looked down, trying to make sense of that. What was she trying to get at?

"Not you. Morpheus trusted you with a dangerous job on your very first day, and you not only pulled it off, you lived to tell about it, right?"

Feeling the fresh pain from his bruises again, Sark nodded, almost whispering. "Yeah..."

"Bingo," she raised a finger. Standing up, she added, "I'd say Morpheus and Link did a pretty good job teaching you how to kick ass with so little time to do it."

Ugh, would you shut up, he thought, groaning and letting the back of his head thunk off the back of the bench. In the real world, his data port would've clanged off of it and sent the most obnoxious reverberation through his skull.

She stood on the curb, watching the bus work its way down the street. And Sark just stared at her, finally looking at the bus before it arrived, the mere sight of this woman giving him a headache at this point.

And then he realized something; this woman wasn't odd, she was scheming. Or maybe not scheming, but clearly, there was something more going on with her than met the eye. Why was he letting her go? Even if she was pissing him off to no end, Sark realized he shouldn't let that get in the way of getting more information.

So, finding a five dollar bill in the wallet automatically added to his RSI and tucking his sword under his duster, holding the coat closed to keep it there, he followed her onto the bus.

He equally followed her to the back seats where no one was sitting. The woman never paused, never hesitated, as if she had known Sark would follow her and knew what part of the bus would be private before she'd stepped on.

He didn't sit down, he couldn't while hiding his sword. But he stood next to her as the bus pulled out, his phone ringing. Link was probably having a fit (or a coronary,) but he didn't answer it. "Who are you?"

"You'll figure that out," she answered, her face still stuck with an expression of contentment. The bus pulled out, heading further away from the center of the city.

Completely baffled and running into a dead end, Sark glanced out the windows to help himself think. He couldn't ask anything that would get a direct answer from her, so it seemed futile to try.

Looking out the window, in turn, made it apparent that he had failed to notice something besides the sky was off. Or different in some way. The cityscape had everything it should, buildings, more buildings, people, cars, but between buildings and through the occasional park were things that shouldn't be there. In the more densely populated areas stood buildings higher and larger than anything he had ever seen, than anything he had ever heard of. Off in the distance, he could see train or monorail tracks snaking around the giant structures, leading up into them or down back into the city proper. "What the hell?"

"You're going to want to get off soon," the woman said. "As soon as we hit the suburbs."

"And why is that?" Sark answered. "Why do you think you know all of...this..."

Revelation dawning in his eyes, Sark put the pieces together. She knew things. She knew things without asking, she knew when things would happen, and she knew where people would be if the bus stop was any indication. At least, she apparently liked to think she knew these things.

"Finally got it?" She smiled.

Turning to look out the front windshield, Sark closed his eyes and brushed his thumb under the bruised one, finding the pain a great deal lessened than the last time he had thought about it. "You're the Oracle."

She nodded. "Not what you were expecting?"

Sark's answer was not an answer to her question, though it didn't have the rudeness it might have had if he'd the woman even a month ago. He simply stated fact. "I don't believe in you."

"I know," the Oracle nodded. "You never have."

Letting out a low, half-malicious snarl, he turned away. "Man, I got on the wrong bus..."

"Oh, Sark?"

"What?" He sighed, wondering what she could want now, what else that she could possibly say to shake him more? Who the hell was she to do this to him?

"Humor an absent-minded lady; what's your name?" At the look he shot her, she added, "Before the real world. Y'know, that meaningless name from those coppertop parents the machines decided would end up with you when they plucked you from the fields?"

This question only served to make him angrier. But, resigned to the torture of bad memories she had brought up at the bus stop, he couldn't find the strength to snap at her. "Josh."

"Josh, or Joshua?" She asked.

She wasn't saying it right; an English accent changed it a little and he had enough pride to hold people to that. But he didn't have the strength for it right now. "Joshua."

"Well, take care, Joshua," she said. "I think you'll figure out why you're here."

Sark looked at her for what felt like a pretty long time as the bus stopped and she stood up to leave, talking only before she was gone out the back door. "Why do you care?"

"Like I said," she smiled, pausing on the steps, "We're all here to do what we're all here to do. You can either shed your blood on the altar of the world or you can pay attention to the people who care about you. Even Morpheus does, you know."

Sark said nothing as he watched the buildings fly by.

"The door is just around this…corner?"

Seeing what looked to be the backsides of two human-shaped metal...objects, Dumont felt a need to make some sort of comment about it, considering the things were big enough to completely block the corridor. "Now that's something you don't see everyday."

Already formulating theories on what this meant, Morpheus began walking toward the giants. A few steps closer and it was obvious that these machinations were not going to respond to them, as he was not silent and they stayed put nonetheless. A few steps more and he could make out moving things through the cracks in their forms, mostly between the arms and torsos. There was what appeared to be someone pacing from left to right, and a sliver of glistening red closer to the floor. "Niobe?"

To his comfort, the voice that called back was, indeed, Niobe's. "Morpheus? You have no idea how glad I am to see you."

Not content with simply speaking, Niobe hauled herself up on the golems, propping her elbow on one of their shoulders and dropping her head into her hand. She looked tired once she took her sunglasses off, dark circles under bloodshot eyes told Morpheus that Sparks' hadn't been kidding when he said they'd been jacked in too long. Nevertheless, she was not diminished by it. "Tell me you have some idea of how to get us out of here?"

"They won't move without my husband's orders," Persephone frowned. Clearly, she had not expected this, and apparently it was going to end up being a big obstacle. "They're foolish like that."

Shaking her head and rolling her eyes, Niobe growled in Persephone's general direction. "Don't you even start talking."

Looking through the cracks in the blockade around the golems' arms and legs, Dumont grew fixated to the doors on Niobe's side. Obviously, whoever had brought her here didn't have a key to any of them. Persephone likely didn't have one either, or she would have suggested it already. "I'm going to guess you don't have keys to those doors?"

When she shook her head, Dumont pressed her for further information. "How do they work, anyway? Does the lock read something on the key and open it into here?"

"No," she answered. "The tumblers in the lock have two positions; one opens the door one way, the other opens it here."

Considering her words, he asked, "Can we find a door in the Matrix that leads to one of those?"

Seeing him point to the golems and the doors they blocked, Persephone said, "I told you, I don't have keys for any of them."

"Work with me," Dumont thought on the idea that had crawled its way into his head. It was so simple it might just work. "I've got an idea."

He looked at Morpheus; Morpheus nodded, and they both looked at Persephone. She was quick to turn around and walk away. "Follow me."

It took Persephone just over five minutes to lead them through the hallway to a random door, and then through the Matrix, only to return to the hallway so they could go through another door that put them near an objective.

The door was on the front porch of a house in the city's residential area. This became a possible issue when Dumont, having kept tools for something like this in his jacket pocket, crouched onto one knee and began picking the lock. Nevertheless, Morpheus was not concerned.

But Persephone was. "I'm not sure this will work."

"Well, we're going to find out," he answered, never turning away from the doorknob or his small tools, most of which would look like small pieces of bent metal to other people.

Morpheus, on the other hand, was unsure for different reasons. "How do you know which combination is the right one?"

"I don't," Dumont chuckled. "But if I get it open...oh, like I just did now, and it doesn't open into that corridor..."

He opened the door, and it opened...into the house, as the owner, a woman in her thirties with a cordless phone held to her ear happened to be walking between rooms.

She stared at them and dropped the phone.

Dumont closed the door and went back to work, vague noises of that poor woman scrambling to pick up her phone and likely dial 911 coming through. "So, yeah, now I just find the other way it opens..."

Less than a minute later, the lock clicked open again, Dumont's lock picks in a substantially different position then they had been the first time. Holding his breath, he turned the knob and pushed on the door, and this time, it opened to Niobe, Ghost and Seraph inside the Industrial Hallway, the golems still unmoving.

While Seraph and, to a lesser extent, Niobe had been pacing in their allotted space, Ghost was sitting on the floor, apparently meditating from his relaxed posture and closed eyes despite the complete lack of a proper sitting position. Even so, he was just as fast as the other two in terms of how long it took him to hurry out the door.

"Thank you," Niobe groaned, putting her sunglasses back on once the sun hit her eyes.

Ghost, for all of his apparent relaxation, looked no better than his captain. "Sparks has probably had a heart attack by now."

"He has," Morpheus nodded. "Possibly several."

The only one of them to look perfectly normal, Seraph seemed a little impatient. "We must go. I must take you to your destination."

"We have to call our Operator," Ghost argued. Sparks really didn't deserve the stress.

"Very well, but I must still bring you to the door," Seraph answered. He wasn't going to take 'no' for answer. With a shrug, Niobe and Ghost followed him when he followed Persephone back to the door they had gotten here through.

And everyone ended up following Persephone like a school field trip down the sidewalk, until a bus pulled up next to the curb and stopped. This wouldn't have been a noteworthy occurrence, except for the fact that the only one to get off of it was familiar to everyone.

Even Morpheus was surprised. "Sark?"

Finally carrying his sword normally for the sake of letting the feeling in the arm he was using to hold it under his coat return, Sark looked around at all of them. "The Oracle said I should get off here."

"Oh boy," Niobe let out with a breath. In earlier days, this would have been a comment directed at Morpheus' propensity to jump at any sentence with the word 'Oracle' in it and get people killed. Nowadays, it still carried this meaning. But as a neophyte believer, Niobe also meant it as a verbalization of the fact that she acknowledged the impending doom, whatever it may be, as a necessary evil for them to get where they were going.

Seeing available time in this delay, Ghost pulled his phone and called Sparks.

From the fearful tone of his voice, Sparks was either hoping for good news or he had seen the good news on his monitors and wasn't holding his breath until he heard one of them talk. "Operator?"

"Sparks, we're out."

"Well, christ-on-a-cracker!" Sparks shouted through his headset, "You guys are unbe-fucking-leavable! Where the hell have you been! Why the hell were you there!"

"We were locked in the hallway," Ghost answered, his tone not changing. "What have you stuck us with?"

Looking up at the prone forms in the chairs he had avoided glancing at for awhile, Sparks answered, "Food tubes, saline drips. The usual for overexposure."

"Thanks," Ghost said back. At least he and Niobe wouldn't be anything but tired and sore when they jacked out.

Remembering that breathing was his friend, Sparks tried to calm himself down.

He stopped trying when a distinct thumping sound echoed in the Logos, as if something had fell on it. It couldn't have been a squiddy, because the proximity alarms would've gone nuts. "Ghost, I'll have to get back to you, the sky is falling."

Hanging up, Sparks gently slipped off his headset and walked to the front of the ship. About to begin an actual search, he took a plasma rifle from the weapons locker, just in case. Things making bumping sounds were often the tell-tale sign of death in those Matrix horror movies, he remembered.

Rifle on and checked for a full charge, he crept over to the main hatch and felt a draft. The snow had stopped outside, but he only knew this because the hatch was cracked open, just enough to see outside.

It was possible the wind was responsible for this. Doors on ships weren't made for surface weather and were probably a little vulnerable to it. But Sparks still held onto his gun as he reached over and pulled it shut.

Hopefully, it was just the wind. This was the real world, after all. Sparks couldn't help but find it amusing that he was being paranoid over silly Matrix myths; maybe Kid could tell him if any of those things were remotely realistic.

But in true Matrix fashion, when Sparks turned around, gun lowered, his guard down, he found that truth was much stranger than fiction.

He found that he was not alone, and he found that he knew the intruder, the very familiar and very human intruder in the Logos who was now standing not five feet in front of him. For an instant, he swore his heart had stopped. "Bane...?"

Acting the moment Sparks began raising his gun, Bane lunged forward and tore it from his hands, slamming the butt of it into his chest and knocking him back against the hatch he had just closed.

Dropping the gun, Bane grabbed Sparks by the neck and slammed him back into the metal door as he tried to escape, squeezing as hard as he felt he could without killing him yet. "So you're the little insignificant fleshling that chattered in their ears the whole time, telling them where to go just to get away from me? Yes, he remembers you, sordid little punk that you were."

"What...what are you," Sparks coughed out, his lungs heaving in their attempts to inhale. How could Bane not know him? Sparks had started on the Caduceus after him and while Clotho hadn't exactly been friendly then, Bane had always been the crew's social animal and he was quite easily to get along with. Before he lost it. "What are you talking about?"

But Bane didn't seem to care about his response. "You have no idea how humiliating that was, to be so powerful, and being dodged by humans who know just where to go because of their highly skilled little Operator. The last poor Operator I saw was nowhere near that annoying, so...I think I'll be a lot more satisfied by slitting your throat."

No longer paying attention to Bane's ramblings, Sparks desperately tried to think of a way out. Desperation was his key, for it invoked the idea of taking desperate measures and he did this in earnest, bringing a knee up and slamming it right into Bane's crotch.

Surprised, Bane let go and Sparks shoved him to the floor and tried to run, but Bane grabbed his ankle and yanked him down, shoving him onto his back and pinning him their. Sparks couldn't see Bane's other hand, and he took some small satisfaction in the fact that it was probably grasping at something very sensitive that was hurtling a lot right now.

"Oh, that's new," Bane snarled, "I knew that would hurt, of course, though it seemed rather...pointless...to inflict this particular injury on myself."

Looking into Bane's eyes, hearing him speak, Sparks suddenly stopped thinking about his predicament; it wasn't Bane. It was, but it wasn't. He could just barely put his finger on it.

This was not the reputable handgun expert with an outspoken, if un-energetic belief in the One that Sparks had guided through the Matrix on many occasions. His body language gave it away the most. Even his speech was different, clipped and succinct, almost like a machine. And the look in his eyes wasn't what happened to a man gone over the edge, it was someone else entirely.

Sparks didn't have much time to ponder his. He wanted more than anything to be sitting in his chair, checking on his crew. Right now, the code would have told him that Persephone and Seraph were leading them all at a special door in a burned-out floor of a tall building.

But Bane had entirely different ideas. When Sparks saw that other hand again, he wished his original idea had been correct; it wasn't. Bane had retrieved a knife he'd had hidden away. And Bane was intent on using it. "Please, enjoy the...consequences...of your mortality."

Sparks didn't feel the knife go in, or at the very least, he didn't feel it as pain. It shook his entire body and he felt that, he felt his hands give up and no longer provide resistance against Bane's weight holding him to the floor, he felt his eyes go wide and his mouth hang open to say nothing. He felt blood flow and saturate the fabric of his clothes while the blade sank deeper and the hilt followed as much as Bane dared to push it without loosing his grip.

Sparks didn't look down but he could imagine the stain spreading out. From where it started, it seemed like Bane had stabbed him higher than the abdomen, defiantly to the side...and pretty high up, actually. It stayed that high when Bane moved, ripping the blade to the side without pulling it up at all.

In fact, the knife had gone between ribs and Sparks felt short of breath. He'd probably hit a lung. With this revelation came the realization for Sparks that this was quite simply, quite entirely the way his world would end; with a hole in his chest and blood in his throat. He was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

And Bane knew it too.

Perhaps just because he could, Bane picked Sparks up by his shirt after removing his weapon, heaving the limp Operator up as he kicked the hatch open.

Still conscious, Sparks couldn't accept his fate. At the very least, he wanted his dying breath to try to fix that. It wasn't much of a breath and he barely managed to whisper a single question. "Who...what are...?"

"I'm," Bane considered, pausing. He tossed Sparks away, through the hatch, facedown into the snow outside. Bane raised his voice and finished his answer. "The inevitable."

Trying to at least prop himself up on his hands, Sparks fell right back down, and when he did, his arms wouldn't even move anymore, resigning him to a cold death as well as a sudden, pointless one. An old comrade had stabbed him and tossed him away like garbage, and so, that was what he felt like.

Facedown in the snow, Sparks felt warmth spreading under him from where his blood ran.

He could smell it.

Persephone did not follow them through the door, remaining only to see them all off before closing it. Seraph, on the other hand, briskly led the group around he tattered remains of infrastructure they now stood in, and Morpheus recognized this place almost instantly.

"The door to the Source was here," he said.

"It still is," Seraph answered, finding a key on the ring he kept inside his sleeve.

Morpheus didn't understand this, and he made no attempt to ignore the things that didn't make sense. "The Keymaker said the connection would be changed if it becomes vulnerable."

"It makes this place," Seraph answered, stopping at the last door and placing his key in the lock, "The last place anyone would look."

"And you trust Persephone with that secret," Morpheus spoke, no hint of a question in his tone.

"Yes," Seraph nodded.

He turned the key and opened the door. There was no extravaganza in the act, no bright lights or obvious indication that this door was different from any other inside the Matrix or even in the real world. It was not the walk into a false Valhalla that Morpheus had been so sure Neo had seen.

How anti-climactic it must've been for Neo to open this door...

Time passed, Sparks didn't notice how long, but it couldn't have been that long, he knew, because he wasn't going to live much longer. Something blue was floating around at the edge of his blurring vision, up at the sky, very likely a hallucination. It was rather mechanical, actually; pretty machine-like as far as lights went.

He closed his eyes willingly, numb either from blood loss or the cold or both, thinking the horrible thought that Bane had likely pulled Ghost and Niobe's plugs by now. He prayed, he wished Bane would jack in, would try to fuck with somebody only to get a bullet in his head, preferably from Kid.

Kid would make a great avenging angel, he thought. His coat was dramatic enough for it. And his emotions were fragile enough for it, especially if they really did mean anything to each other. Sparks thought they did, anyway. And right now, he refused to deny himself the simple pleasure of being certain. At the same time, Sparks found distress in this, because Kid didn't deserve what he would go through when he found out what Bane had done.

It made Sparks wish all the more that Kid would be the one to kill him; with help from Morpheus for Niobe's sake, and that would have to carry over to Ghost because Trinity was gone and she couldn't do much avenging. Sparks wished he could look at his screens one more time and find Kid, the code so ingrained in Sparks' head that seeing it would be just as good as seeing him in person.

Trying to open his eyes again, Sparks suddenly found the idea of seeing the snow calming enough for it to be preferable over dying in darkness. And maybe that funny blue light would still be there. But no matter how hard he tried, even his eyelids stopped obeying him.

Soon after, he could try no more.

comment vous attendez-vous à ce que je travaille dans de telles conditions? - how do you expect me to work under such conditions?

-"The Waster to Destroy" is from Isaiah 54:16, the verse on Smith's license plate at the beginning of Reloaded.

-Hertz and the sunglasses-attack-of-death is from Noir.

-"God is in his Heaven. All is right with the world." ---Neon Genesis Evangelion

-"It's...it is, um...it's...it is green." ---Star Trek: The Next Generation

-"Shed...blood...on the altar of the world." ---Legacy of Kain