The big bruiser from the day before took her back to the cell at a hurried pace. Shouts were beginning to filter through from somewhere in the building, cries of surprise turning to terror. He became increasingly agitated as they went.

“Just stay calm, ok? I'll find out what’s going on, and let you know when it's all sorted,” he said. He sounded like he was genuinely trying to reassure her. This was an unexpected change from the silent, blank-eyed muscle the man affected when in the presence of Pearce.

“And if it doesn't get sorted...?” she asked, testing this man’s new-found talkativeness.

“Then… then I'll come and get you out.” The corporal hesitated. “Look, don't worry. Whatever's going on up there, we’ll…”

Keri saw her chance as they descended the final set of stairs to the cells. A huge crash from somewhere above drew his attention from her for a brief second, his eyes flicking to the ceiling and whatever was happening beyond. It gave her enough time for her to shift to the side and trip him, thrusting a leg out as she threw her shoulder in, sending him sprawling. She said a brief prayer of thanks to whomever had seen fit to design these cold, bare steps with their unacceptable lack of handholds as the man tumbled heavily down, bouncing painfully off each one. He smashed down at the foot of the stairs with a groan, and went limp.

Now, to open the cells.

Fortunately, this turned out to be rather simple. A hard-port, designed to work only with a corps within close proximity, was built in to the wall at the beginning of the corridor. Despite the fact that it should have been coded to work only for certain users, Keri was not surprised when it connected without issue to her corps. She sent the signal to open all the doors, which swung open with a hiss, and tried hard not react when a smiling, bearded face flashed across the control screen for less than a heartbeat.

Cassandra was the first to emerge, peering cautiously around the corner as the sounds of distant fighting echoed down to them. Her eyes widened slightly for the slightest moment upon seeing Keri, then returned to normal as she stepped out.

“You actually did it. But how did you...?”

Cassandra shook herself as the alarm continued to blare. There would be time for questions later. She dived into the next cell, bringing Eu and Anisa out before doing the same with Andreas.

“What's going on?” asked a disbelieving Andreas, eyes darting around as if expecting an ambush from every corner. “How did you get the doors open?”

“I can explain later,” said Keri. “…I think. Right now we need to move.”

“Our little prophet’s had another vision,” said Cassandra, but nevertheless she half-pushed, half-guided the others along the corridor. “She's going to lead us from this desert and to the promised land.”

The others looked confused, but went along anyway.

It wasn't as if they had much of a choice, Keri thought.

Anisa gasped when she saw the fallen ink-man.

“You did that?” she asked, looking from the sprawled form to their unexpected liberator.

“He's breathing,” Keri replied. Anisa raised an eyebrow at her matter-of-fact tone.

“Best tie him up then,” said Eu, out of nowhere.

Keri smiled as an idea came to her.

“No need. He can have our room; we don't need it anymore.”

They dragged him to the furthest cell and left as the sounds of gradually returning consciousness came from the man’s limp form. Keri instructed the doors to lock once more, and his shouts followed them down the corridor.

“So, how exactly are we going to get out of here?” said Keri, staring around the bare cell she and Cassandra were trapped in.

A sound from Cassandra made her turn, and when Keri looked to where the woman was pointing she realised it was at her corps, a pulsing glow beneath her skin.

Curious, thought Keri. She had thought this place would stop the corps receiving. There shouldn’t be any signal down here.

“I'm going to connect. There might be…,” she said, word faltering. She didn't know how to explain the feeling that she simply had to go into the spheres.

Cassandra had hardly begun protesting before her voice faded, gravity seeming to shut off as the world slowly became an ocean of soft, flowing colour. Keri released a deep breath, a breath like that of stepping into a hot bath. The numerous background aches and pains of the last few days disappeared as the backlog of data she had requested since her last immersion flooded her mind.

Amongst that data she found the file.

It was a vid file, unannotated and without comment, a sequence of stitched together scenes from a variety of cameras dotted across the city and beyond. This was not something she had requested. It shouldn’t have been there, sitting within the upload stream as if the famously impenetrable scans, filters, and security-keys that protected a corps from outside interference meant nothing.

Encrypted together with the file was location data, strings of longitude and latitude that marked the place and time the clips were taken. She knew instantly where each location was in reference to her; the corps sorted the facts out and placed the knowledge directly in her mind.

The vid file showed the Butcher. It was coming this way.

“So you just knew when the Butcher was going to arrive?”

Andreas sounded as incredulous as Cassandra had the evening before. Fortunately, it was she who took the reins of the conversation now.

“Later,” said Cassandra. “We’ll figure out exactly where these hints and tips are coming from later. First, we have to get out of here.”

“Uh, not exactly,” said Keri.

The group came to a staggered halt at her unexpected reply, each person nearly tripping over the one in front as they headed for the stairs.

“Not exactly?” said Cassandra. “Not exactly? Then where do you think we are going?”

“We’re not leaving without it,” Keri said plainly.

A second’s pause, and then…

“The sphere again?” Cassandra's face turned red with rage. “That thing brings us nothing but trouble. Let them have it, whoever it is that wants it. Butchers or Ink-Men or modders or whoever. Let's get out of here.”

She looks around for support, but saw only hesitation and uncertainty.

“You know we can't do that,” said Keri. “If the Ink-Men or the modders were to get it, who knows what they would do to it. There’s no telling what would be born.”

“And if it's the Butcher that gets it?” said Cassandra.

“I’m… not sure,” Keri replied. “But I know it can't be good. No, we've come this far, we can go a little further. We get it back, now.”

The others murmured in what could, to those so inclined to think so, be agreement.

“And if, no, when the Butcher decides we're in its way?”

“We play it safe. Listen, I know where the data sphere is. It doesn't,” said Keri.

“How can you be so sure?” asked Andreas, staring quizzically at her.

“Because if it knew, it wouldn't be rampaging around the upper floors when the sphere is down here.”

The others looked at her in surprise.

“It's down here?”

“Somewhere on this floor or the one below us,” Keri said. “It moves around a lot, but rarely goes above. I guess they're keeping it as hidden as they can.”

“And this also just happened to be left for you in the spheres?” said Andreas, somewhat critically.

“Look, I don't like it any more than you do,” she replied, an edge to her voice. “It's my head someone is getting into. But for now, I'm going along with them. They got us out of the cells, didn't they? Now, you're welcome to make a break for it if you like, but I'm not going anywhere until I've got that sphere back.”

“Alright, alright,” Andreas mumbled, abruptly chastened. He stared down at the floor. “I didn't say I wasn't coming with you. Just saying it's a strange situation, that's all.”

Cassandra laughed.

“I think our Andreas is getting a little scared of you, Keri,” she chuckled.

They reached the stairs down which Keri had tripped the ink-man and kept going, walking past them and along a corridor that grew gradually brighter and better-maintained as they progressed. A set of doors a short way further on blocked their view, and Keri cautiously pushed one open to peer through at what was ahead.

The cells really had been an afterthought, it seemed. The area on the other side of the doors was far wider, cleaner, and brighter than where they had come from, in a completely different style as if the two parts had been built in different ages. For some reason this main area was designed in a strange, futuristic way, if by futuristic you meant how decades-old vids had seen the future. The walls were shaped to make the corridors into warped hexagonals, aesthetically curious but completely impractical for allowing the smooth flow of human traffic. The lighting ran in thin, vertical strips along the walls at regular intervals rather than along the ceiling, creating odd patches of light and dark, each of which seemed stronger due to the contrast with the other. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to give this place the same technological style as a low-budget space melodrama, as if choosing to use a black/white motif and running with it.

Ink-men were dashing frantically up and down the corridors beyond, diving in and out of the numerous rooms running along them and emerging with arms full of data-spheres and paper. They appeared to be trying to protect what data they already had, but were managing to drop half of what they carried on the floor as they crashed into each other along the awkwardly shaped corridors. Documents crumpled under the soles of sprinting, panicked shoes.

Must have heard what happened at the Terminal, Keri thought. These were the actions of people terrified by what was coming.

Keri watched through the crack in the door for some time, crouched low and keeping the opening as narrow as possible. She needn't have bothered, she realised - the people on the other side were like headless chickens, carrying armfuls from room to room only to have someone else carry the goods straight back. It was farcical. They had nowhere to go; no one was going to be the first to ascend to the upper floors, from which crashes and cries still came, so they were as penned in as Keri and the others had been in the cells.

A couple of Ink-Men came running towards the door behind which they hid at one point, threatening to expose the crouched group, before yet another huge crash from upstairs sent them skittering away down a side corridor in fear.

The crash felt like it had come from directly above them.

Keri swung the door open, unwilling to stay there any longer, moving in a crouched run to the nearest room she could see. The others were right behind, Cassandra almost knocking her to the floor as they piled in. Keri pushed her away, and stood up.

“Lock the door,” she hissed.

They were in some kind of small office, a single desk of fake mahogany placed at the end furthest from the entrance. Atop it sat a mess of documents and readers, paper-thin electronic screens continuing to pour their light and information into empty air in the absence of whoever had requested it in the first place.

The door clicked and locked as Anisa finally worked out the correct gesture to make this happen.

“Great” said Cassandra, resignedly. “This is a much better situation.”

The room was extremely cramped with the five of them in it, and made Keri realise exactly how small she was compared to the others. Eu, the shortest of the four, stood nearly half a head taller than her, and Cassandra far beyond that. More than this, however, each of them was muscled in a way Keri, with a life of light-to-trifling exercise and little physical exertion, was not.

A thought struck her.

“You guys are pretty tough, right?” she asked.

Each of them wore a variation of the same frown.

“It's not like we have the corps to do everything for us,” answered Andreas. “We tend to work for our dinner.”

“Do you guys ever… get in fights?” Keri asked, ignoring his tone.

“Like, fist fights?” said Andreas. “I don't know about you, Keri, but that's generally something we try to avoid... ow!”

His cry was because Cassandra had punched him on the shoulder.

“I think what Keri’s trying to ask is if we could take a bunch of tech-head ink-blots,” Cassandra said, as Andreas rubbed his arm.

“What? How... oh.”

He blinked, looking from Keri to Cassandra and back again.

“You want us to fight our way through here?”

“Well, the guys out there may work out, I imagine,” Keri replied, “but I don't think they know how to use it. They're basically glorified traffic wardens, after all.”

Keri saw Cassandra smile at the reference, as she reached for the door.