When Woodsman arrived, Locus mistook him for a demon. His red-gold hair seemed to radiate light in the darkness of the tavern, but by contrast, his obsidian skin seemed to absorb light. The stranger beside Locus retreated the instant he recognized the advancing apparition, and Woodsman slipped into the empty seat without ceremony. The bartender plucked a bottle of something from the top shelf and poured a glass of the wine-dark liquid for Woodsman.

  "You got business here, friend?" the bartender asked.

  "I've got dark business," Woodsman replied. "The Queen of Darkness herself is going to watch us as we work. Unless, of course, we manage to move somewhere more private."

  "West four is open," the bartender said. "There's a reservation in fifty minutes so your business needs to be quick. I'll add it to your tab."

  "Up we go then," Woodsman said. "Twist, is that you?"

  "'Tis I," Twist agreed. "Sweets told me you've got a job. Need any help?"

  Woodsman rubbed his chin. Took a sip of his red wine. Nodded.

  "I'm not going to say no."

  He stood up, which prompted Sweets and Twist to do the same. Locus plucked his coffee cocktail off the bar and followed them toward the edge of the tavern. Burner, the priest-looking man with the red robes, stalked them in silence.

  They passed through a pair of pitch-black doors decorated with a glowing white tree embedded right into the metal. Beyond, there was a long sloping ramp that led up toward a room glowing with copper light. As they ascended the ramp Locus began to feel a pulsing in his chest. Boom, boom, boom. The sound of music began to dominate his senses.

  The entire second floor of the structure turned out to be a dance floor, nestled into a forest of towering holographic trees, each glowing with coppery light against the darkness. The curved catwalk was separated from the dance floor by glass panes, each of which was illuminated by purple lights hanging from the bottom of the dark handrails. At least a hundred people were dancing on the polished wooden floor. They were all chromed up, and most of the women were topless.

  Up a small flight of glowing purple stairs, they came to a private booth overlooking the dance floor. The ceiling was transparent, glowing with faint purple holograms of nude women swimming between two panes of glass. Armless couches were arranged around an odd table, the likes of which Locus had never seen before. It resembled a polished wooden pyramid, with the apex jutting up through the square hole in the center of a broad sheet of glass. Everyone took a seat around the table and set down their drinks, with the exception of Burner, who sealed the door and stood guard.

  "The room is clean," Sweets announced.

  Locus saw Twist clearly for the first time in the light of the booth. She looked a bit boyish with hair that flared out to one side. She caught him ogling her naked breasts and her eyes shifted from red to green. Her smile looked genuine just before she took a sip of her neon blue drink and then glanced at Woodsman.

  "So what's the job?" Twist asked.

  "We've got one more task here in Saint Ingrid," Woodsman said. "Then we need to move out to Saint Vaska."

  Woodsman set a small device on the table. When it activated, it created a 3D hologram just big enough to fill the space between the couches. Unlike the trees around the dance floor, the new hologram was full color, and the resolution wasn't too shabby either. It depicted a fancy estate at the top of a skyscraper, surrounded by gardens, fountains, and rows of immaculate trees.

  "Looks like a corpo estate," Locus said.

  "No corpos," Woodsman said. "Northern Ayaru drug cartels. The house was recently purchased by a man named Nil Gerard, a high-ranking member of the cartels. The place is worth at least fifty million New Krismark, with a minimum of twenty percent down-payment on the mortgage, and Gerard most likely paid half again as much to launder cartel money across the border."

  "Is that our target?" Twist asked.

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  "It is," Woodsman said. "Even before he boarded the airplane to Saint Ingrid, he needed a passport. He is a wanted man, even in Ayaru, so he arranged to have a false identity generated in that nation, using the standard methods that we are so familiar with."

  Locus nodded. "And Lucrezia intercepted him?" he guessed.

  "Not too bad," Sweets said.

  Woodsman chuckled. "And Lucrezia intercepted him, yes. His identity service provider was actually a HARPR Holdings shell corporation. The whole thing was arranged by somebody who owed Lucrezia a favor."

  "What has been done can be undone," Locus said. "The job is to take the house, then Lucrezia is going to pull the rug back in Ayaru."

  "And how would you go about taking the house?" Woodsman asked.

  Locus stopped and thought about the problem. How are we going to replicate the title? he wondered. There were plenty of shops on the street that specialized in making replica KB/CA Biomedical Corporation birth certificates. The title for an estate like that was something else entirely.

  "We'll need to find a contact that can forge a new title," Locus replied. "Then we hit Gerard, Lucrezia makes him vanish from history, and we stuff the title into a bank vault somewhere."

  "That's not quite right," Sweets said. "For all we know the deed to that estate could have been printed with a one-off printer in Saint Vaska that only services half a dozen requests each year."

  "Ah," Locus said. She's right. That was a mistake.

  "The security features on the physical document could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of years old," Sweets continued. "The documents have probably never been digitized. A trained professional needs to manually verify the security features, most likely a master-apprentice setup going back to before the dawn of computing. If we had a few samples, we might be able to get help from an AI to create a replica."

  "But 'might be able to' isn't good enough for Lucrezia," Locus said. "Why bother when we can just break into the place?"

  Woodsman nodded. "Sweets will break into the basement of a stone castle in the forest outside Saint Ingrid's Cathedral. It was constructed hundreds of years before Saint Ingrid was even born, and there are no digital records of the traps the engineers left for us. The rest of the plan is routine. Locus, you'll need to break into the bank database and replace the mortgage records. Sweets needs to physically break into the bank vault in Saint Vaska to swap the two deeds."

  "It sounds like we'll be busy," Locus said.

  "And we will take out Gerard," Twist guessed. "Me and you, right Woodsman?"

  "Nil Gerard is a full cyborg," Woodsman said. "I was planning on storming the house with Burner, but I don't mind the backup, Twist. The cartel enforcers in the house will be heavily armed."

  "And there will be a security system," Locus said.

  "You'll be helping us as well. Gerard will be protected by one or more cartel hackers, maybe even old-school cowboys like you. You'll need to watch the skies in cyberspace. And, of course, you'll need to deliver an icebreaker and a virus to the house security system."

  Locus nodded. "And what about the Tacticals?"

  "The cartels know how to avoid Tacticals," Sweets said. "Gerard probably registered his guards as a private security force that can intercept emergency calls."

  "Lucrezia has verified that is the case," Woodsman said. "They don't know Gerard is living in the house and they have no reason to care what happens there. Not unless we really, really fuck up."

  Nobody spoke for a few moments, and the only sound in the booth was the pulsing beat of the music on the dance floor. Locus took a sip of his cocktail and considered the plan. His intuition was telling him that something was missing.

  "So what's Grace going to be doing?" Locus finally asked.

  "Grace is going to be negotiating the logistics of getting Julia Webb here," Woodsman said. "Her name will be on the title for the house. Once the cartel thugs are dead, she'll be able to move in. Then we can start the second phase of the plan."

  "And who is Julia Webb exactly?"

  "I have no idea," Woodsman admitted. "Somebody that Lucrezia thinks is important. Apparently, Selucia Grace has been trying to track her down for several months."

  "I could try to search for her," Locus offered. "If she has interacted with cyberspace at all, then..."

  "She's not here," Woodsman interrupted. "She's not in this world. She's not in my world either. Grace thinks she's in one of the other Elemental Planes."

  Sounds like bullshit to me, Locus thought, but he said nothing.

  "What's the second part of the plan?" Twist asked. "Why go through all this trouble to steal a house for this Julia bitch?"

  "Grace hasn't told us all the details," Woodsman said. "All I know is that our long-term plan is to destroy the Emil Nadiya Company, and Julia Webb is the only person in the whole universe that can pull it off."

  "She's going to take down the entire company by herself?" Twist asked.

  "It's got something to do with those augmented humans that Lucrezia finds so offensive. Once Julia is here in the Physical Realm, we'll plant her in the augmented human program. Then she'll fuck them up."

  "And how does Burner fit into this?" Locus asked.

  The red-robed priest was still standing stone-faced with his back to the door. "We will spread the wisdom of the Queen of Fire to the people of this world!" he proclaimed. "All boundaries will be erased! Every living being, every living soul, will return to the exalted purity of First Chaos!"

  "Burner is going to spread his little religion," Woodsman said. "Once the augmented humans are dealt with, we can get help from the youth gangs in Saint Vaska to ruin Emil Nadiya's reputation. Lucrezia has some sort of hostile takeover plans. You know, buy up a majority share and then bleed them dry by demanding dividends."

  "Then we get paid," Sweets said.

  "Then we get paid," Woodsman agreed.