It was raining again. It had begun raining almost the instant she stepped out of the Terminal, the previously clear skies giving way to a solid downpour that drowned out all other sound and limited visibility to a few meters. Crouching, she pushed aside a heavy branch and made her way through the undergrowth, leaves and twigs scratching at her face. A trickle of bitingly cold water ran down her back and made her shiver before the self-warming fabric of her clothes turned it into a merely uncomfortable dampness instead.

She turned as a grunt and a curse behind told her she had allowed the branch to swing back a little too fast.

Andreas was picking himself up off the floor where he had been smacked in the face, wiping mud from his eyes with hands equally dirty so that all he achieved was to make himself even blinder.

Keri waited while he sorted himself out, using the rain to clean himself off enough that he could at least see.

“You're sure you still want to...?” she began.

“I'm coming with you,” he said once more, as insistent as when he had first caught her slipping out the Terminal along a quiet section of corridor.

At least he hadn't told the others, she thought. This wasn't a journey she wanted them to come on. Not because she didn't want them with her, but because she feared what would happen to them if she were wrong.

It had been easy to slip out, in the end. The Terminal was in uproar, the corporal getting angrier and angrier with every man that lost contact. It didn’t help that the engineers remained unable to explain why they couldn't bring the satellite feeds for the area back online. She had taken her chance to sneak out when one of the engineers began muttering something about a ‘ghost in the machine’ and the corporal had exploded. No one was wasting their energies watching her.

The cover the weather provided was an added bonus, though it didn't feel like it at the moment.

They came across the first inc-man several minutes later. He was young, practically a teenager. He had taken off his helmet and was sat on the ground shivering, staring off into the trees. He gave a short shriek when he saw them, before calming down.

“Y..you? What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be…”

“What happened? Where is the rest of your group?” asked Keri, deliberately taking the first turn of the conversation before the boy could gather his wits.

The Inc-man gulped.

“We had him. Picked him up on the scansweep hiding out a short ways from here. No way to hide from those waves, at least.”

The boy began breathing heavily again, eyes wide.

“But he must have registered the ping. Started moving instantly, away from us. Thought it was running, so we started chasing after it. Stretched ourselves out. Stupid. He turned in an instant and was on us, taking us one by one. I'm the only one left.”

“Taking you?” said Andreas.

“Yes!” cried the Inc-man, increasingly wild eyed. “It was like something from Jurassic Park![1] One minute they were standing there, the next they were being dragged away faster than you could see. It took them one by one, but must have got all of us in less than a minute.”

“How many were in your group?” Keri asked.

“5, including me.”

“And your weapons?”

“It didn't give us a chance to use them! I barely saw the thing.”

“Can you detect it now?” she asked.

The inc-man shrugged, gesturing to a pile of equipment lying on the ground a few feet away.

“Probably. I'm not going to, though. I'm done. Hunting Butchers was never part of the deal.”

“I thought that's the kind of thing you ink-men lived for,” said Andreas.

“Being torn limb from limb by a monster with the cheats for god-mode?” replied the boy, incredulous. “No, screw this. I'm out.”

And with that, the boy stood up and walked away, a shell-shocked expression on his face.

Keri and Andreas looked at each other as the inc-man disappeared into the trees.

“You're sure you want to keep going?” Andreas began.

Keri shot him a glare, saying nothing. Andreas rushed to follow her as she picked up the scansweep and strode off between the trees.

“Look, I'm not trying to stop you. Hey, I'm right here with you, but I have to ask: do you really know what you're doing?”

“What's with your face?” said Keri.

She heard him falter, caught off guard.

“My what?” he replied.

“Don't doxx me, not now. Just tell me. How did you change your face? I know you didn't look like that when we first met.”

She didn't slow her pace, sweeping the scanner around in a wide arc as she walked. Andreas hurried to keep up.

“Look, it’s an old story, alright? Like, from my childhood old.”

“Well, I think we've got time, don't you?” Keri said.

The rain was letting up, a sliver of sunlight piercing the clouds. Threads of steam rose from the both of them.

“You gonna stop walking to listen then?” he asked.

“No.”

Her pace didn’t falter.

Andreas was quiet for a while. The only sound was that of their footsteps on the leaves and the soft patter of water dripping from the branches above them.

“Ok,” he said.

He drew a deep breath.

“So, I'm not an analogue,” he said.

Keri gave him a questioning look.

“Well, I am, but not by choice. Look…” he said, raising his left arm and exposing the wrist.

Keri paused to look at it. There was the same scar the others had, the deep short one of the implant overlaid with the far longer one of extraction. But Andreas’ extraction scar was fainter, Keri realised. It must have been made a considerable time ago.

“My parents had my corps installed when I was a kid, just like any family. Some of my earliest memories are of the edu-spheres, the colours and sounds and sheer magic of them. My folks always said I would have disappeared into the spheres if it weren't for the time limits.”

“So what happened?”

“It started when I was about eleven, I think. It's hard to know; we didn't understand what was happening at first. I got sick. Really sick. I was in and out of hospital for months. Years. Sometimes it would go away, only to come back stronger just when we thought I was over it. I'd have palpitations, migraines, fits. The doctors couldn't figure it out. Or rather, they couldn't get their machines to figure it out.”

“It was your corps,” said Keri.

“It was my corps,” he replied with a nod. “A one in 650 million chance, they said. Like an allergy, an allergy of the flesh and nervous system. They didn't figure it out until it was almost too late.”

Andreas raised his arm further and ran a finger from the opposite hand down an even paler, longer line almost impossible to notice before he pointed it out. The line ran from the base of his thumb all the way up his forearm, disappearing under his sleeve to reappear above the collar of his shirt. It continued all the way up his neck and curved behind his ear, out of sight.

“My entire body went into shock, all at once. Massive organ failure. My body was trying to reject the implant, but not only that. My body was trying to reject its own skin. They couldn't save it, so they did what they had to do. An artificial organ transplant.”

Andreas smiled suddenly, and moved his fingers across something at the base of his neck.

Keri saw sudden redness beneath the white line, a deep, rich colour that expanded as Andreas slowly drew a fold of skin up and away from the flesh beneath. Flesh that was, she realised, coated in some kind of transparent polymer that held it in place.

“Wait… you can remove your face?” she asked in amazement.

“Yeah, though it's probably a bad idea to do it too much in this rain. You want to see some more?”

Keri shook her head, forced to turn away from his grinning smile as the dark red line spread up across his chin and the taut strip of skin stretched outward in his hand.

“No, no, that's enough. Thank… thank you.”

When she turned back, Andreas’ face was once more its scarred, familiar self.

“All of my skin and most of flesh is artificial. I’d wager it’s a close run thing whether it’s the guy we’re chasing or me that has less of the body they were born with. Modular, too. I’m like a child’s alterable action doll.”

“So you have, what, a face for every occasion back home?”

Andreas laughed, a smile breaking the tension.

“Ha, yeah. A few at least. Confuses the hell out of identification software, I can tell you.”

Keri found herself chuckling despite herself.

“Well, now that's out of the way, I'll ask you one more time,” Andreas said. “Do you really know what you're doing?”

The humour faded from Keri’s expression.

“No. No, of course I don't,” she replied. “But I'm going to do it all the same.”

Andreas was still smiling.

“Good. Then let's get going, shall we?”

They pushed onwards.

Keri wasn’t surprised when, a few minutes later, her corps began to vibrate. She dropped the sweepscan, discarded, and brought up her display.

All that could be seen on her corps was a map, with two points. One glowing blue point that moved as they did, and a single grey one several kilometres northwards.

Their location, and the location of the Butcher.

[1] Not the movie, but the early Butcher-era mechanized theme park. Which had, coincidentally, failed in a similarly spectacular fashion. Velocidroids are fearsome things.