TamLin and Kitten were discussing something, but Raleigh felt dizzy and disoriented and as if her mind were drifting… And the sensation was oddly familiar.

And the way her packet of network connection software had reinstalled itself was doubly unnerving.

“Where’d Kasy go?” she blurted, grabbing at the thread she’d managed to spot in the midst of her fugue.

TamLin and Kitten both looked at her, expressions blank, and then Kitten looked to TamLin.

He wrinkled his nose at the younger woman, but he answered, “Headed to the breach we’re here to investigate, probably.”

Raleigh stared at him, forcing herself to process his words. “You’re here on official business? Why are you bringing civvies?”

He rolled his eyes and stepped around Kitten to start in the direction where Raleigh last remembered seeing his two coworkers.

Kitten watched after him for a moment, then glanced to Raleigh and tilted her head in a suggestion to follow him.

“Hey,” a nearby youth cut in, apparently angry with TamLin. “Where do you think you’re going, wireface?”

One of the boy’s friends was nursing a bloodied nose, and Raleigh’s memory brought up the image of TamLin causing it. Judging from this youth’s expression, tone, body language, he wanted TamLin to pay for that.

What was it that made some people ignore all the signs that someone was oh-so-obviously more dangerous than they were?

Raleigh sidestepped to put herself between the angry youth and the circling-back TamLin, angling herself toward the boy. “Walk away.”

“The fuck I will! He just broke Ro’s nose!”

“Zone out, Giffy,” the hurt kid said. “I insulted his friend. He responded. It’s over. Right, lady?”

“If your friend walks away, sure,” Raleigh said, even though something about the group of boys was making her neck prickle.

Maybe it was the pack aspect, where the other three were obviously lackey to the two leaders who were speaking. That dynamic was certainly enough for the group of them to be potentially dangerous. But she felt as if she was missing something that should’ve been more obvious.

Kitten didn’t seem to have any particular problem with the group, though. “Did you see where our friends went?” she asked the hurt one.

“Uh, yeah. The two nerdy secs? They went in that saloon on the other side of the street, two doors down.”

“Thank you,” Kitten said politely, and she strode straight for wide entrance on the side of the street they were on—which, if Raleigh’s calculations were right, was where the boys had come from.

“Hey, wait! I said—”

One boy attempted to intercept Kitten and promptly found himself on the ground from the Nameless girl’s countermove. As the boy landed on hard in the street, Kitten’s staid gaze flicked to his buddies, and she started moving a half-second before they did.

By the time Raleigh broke through the sluggishness borne of malfunctioning and neutered combat protocols—and had enabled herself to respond in a non-lethal manner—all five youth were down and Kitten was slipping inside the building on TamLin’s heels.

Raleigh glanced at the youth—they weren’t entirely incapacitated, but all were winded enough that they would require a few seconds to recover—and jogged after Kitten and TamLin. Those two had apparently recognized that the boys were a paid-off diversion or distraction, and they didn’t find anything odd about that. Maybe they were used to civvies being bribed to get in their way?

The entrance was an energy barrier, separating the inside and outside of the building without the need for a physical door. Expensive. Also risky—marked the building as a target for would-be thieves—and meant the place probably had good security.

She stepped through the entranceway, and the energy door was a light pressure against her skin.

Hot air, body odor, and pounding bass smashed into Raleigh. Judging from the cameras, lasers, and security droids she spotted in her first glance around the rowdy crowd, the dive bar was possibly popular enough to warrant round-the-clock hours, even aside from the prostitution part. Or maybe the brothel was what made the dive bar so popular. Difficult to say.

In any event, there were enough people there that it would be easy to lose track of anyone you entered with. Raleigh tentatively pulled up the macro she’d written the day before, to find Nameless by how their breathing affected the air near them. That didn’t trip any combat protocols that she could tell, so she used it to tag Kitten in the crowd then shut off all but the most basic of her tracking systems.

If anything reactivated, Kitten would be her only target, and the Nameless girl already proven she could handle whatever Raleigh threw at her.

Kitten was drawing further ahead than Raleigh felt comfortable with, so she pressed her way through the crowd. She was older and taller than Kitten, so she would’ve expected to have an easier time of things, but she was hard-pressed to keep pace with the girl.

Raleigh glimpsed a recoil in the crowd up ahead and realized that proximity to TamLin might well explain Kitten’s speed. The man doubtless gave a keep-away vibe to the various patrons in the bar, whether due to his status as an officer of the law or due to his violent streak that at least the prostitutes would be able to read, if not necessarily the patrons.

The pitch of the crowd changed up ahead, a bit past where she was getting pings for Kitten, and she revised that thought to patrons with half a brain, because apparently TamLin had attracted some fools with enough testosterone to pick on—

She broke through the edge of the crowd to see three men poised to intercept both TamLin and Kitten from progressing further. Something about the men triggered a recognition macro. Raleigh quickly shut that down before it led to anything she didn’t want activated.

“Nice gills,” Kitten said flatly to the one blocking her—which made Raleigh realize why the men had seemed familiar.

She recognized their uniforms just as their facial recognition macros evidently caught her, and the three of them started to move.

“Fuck apex,” TamLin muttered.

And he and Kitten intercepted and took down Miller, King, and Norris before she could override enough of her ‘friendly’-tag protocols to help.

TamLin shoved her back, between him and Kitten, and she almost struck out at him before she managed to override that protocol.

“Careful!” Raleigh snapped. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

TamLin gave her an incredulous glance.

“You know what I mean,” she said. If she was going to hurt him, she wanted it to be because she chose to do it, not because her enhancements took over.

“Trey, seh,” Kitten said.

That didn’t process as any language Raleigh recognized, but she didn’t dare dig into her software for a full check.

TamLin, though, seemed to comprehend it, so maybe it was an alpha universe thing. “Sei, oo?”

Kitten turned towards one o’clock and scrutinized…something. “Zed.” She glanced at TamLin. “Wrong universe.”

He growled. “How many somewhens are we fucking dealing with, here?!”

“Fai this floor,” Kitten said, a smile in her voice, and she sidestepped TamLin’s elbow to her ear without looking. “Three shadows, two extract teams…” She glanced at him, then. “Wanna take the one o’? Make things a little easier for whoever they’re after?”

TamLin shrugged. “Might as well, while we’re here.”

“You trey, me sei?” Kitten suggested, a smirk on her lips.

He glared at her.

Kitten’s good humor didn’t waver as she said, as if explaining, “Fuck with their heads.”

TamLin’s expression went blank, and he glanced towards seven o’clock and one o’clock, then let out some language that was even less child appropriate than his usual. “Kasy?”

“Probably,” Kitten agreed.

Raleigh was tired of being left in the dark. “What—”

“There are two infiltration teams here, right now, from two different apex universes. One is after you. The other’s probably on Kasy.” TamLin squinted upwards, checking the open indoor balconies above them, mesh walkways that acted as hallways for the upstairs rooms. “Which brings the question of how they’d know about her.”

Kitten cast him a wry glance that said he knew the answer to that.

His responding expression conceded the point.

The easy communication between the two of them was both intriguing and disturbing, considering the differences between their universes and the fact that they only met yesterday, so far as Raleigh knew.

But how different could their native universes have been, really, since the same people came to exist in both?

Did that mean that the apex-universe team from the other universe had its own edition of her? Now, there was an uncomfortable thought.

“I’ll help TamLin,” she said, since he seemed to be the one targeting the folks from her universe.

The expressions of both alpha universe refugees contested that.

“Find Janni,” TamLin said curtly.

“No,” Raleigh snapped back, and she met his glare with a narrowed stare. “I’d have to scan, and I’m not going to risk triggering any more surprises left in my programming.”

Kitten sighed. “The packets are hardcoded. You can’t stop them. All you can do is take advantage of the delays programmed in.”

“First, even if you’re pulling that programming knowledge out of Janni’s head, you haven’t seen my code, so you can’t know that,” Raleigh said. “Second, you’re ignoring that I have made my own modifications to my enhancements, which affects things. Kitten, you’re not from my universe, and you don’t know any of this for certain. Fourth, you’re both from a completely different type of universe than I am, and I have no idea what Kasy’s from.”

Both alpha universe refugees were looking at her with professionally blank expressions.

“What?!” she demanded.

The two of them exchanged a glance she couldn’t read.

“So what’d you think of First?” Kitten asked, in a pitch that would’ve meant idle curiosity in Janni. Coming from Kitten, it left her feeling wary—and made her wonder just how much she underestimated Janni.

“What do you mean, what did I think of him?”

“Would you trust him to protect you?”

Raleigh stared at her. “Your brother just lost his wife. I don’t think he’s going to be in a condition to protect anyone, anytime soon.”

Puzzlement skittered over Kitten’s face.

“Take the sei,” TamLin said curtly, and he pivoted on his heel strode right at one o’clock.

Kitten ran at the wall at seven o’clock and shimmied up to the open mesh that was the second-floor hallway, as if she climbed walls regularly. Considering Raleigh didn’t know how she got money for rent, that was entirely possible. Theft probably wouldn’t violate her namelessness.

Raleigh glanced up after Kitten and considered climbing after her…but the Nameless girl had already displayed that she could handle an apex-universe cyban in combat mode. TamLin hadn’t.

She sighed and went after him, hoping she’d catch up before he got himself trounced by some soldier that his hubris made him face alone.