Actually getting access to the killing-house and getting the people working there to look the other way turned out to be easier than she had expected. Some rings to grease the foreman’s palms and a few hand-rolled cigarettes to fill his mouth with smoke was all it took. Krahe placed two arrays of explosives — one within and around the stairway, and the other inside the basement, painstakingly carving away sections of wall to properly hide them from sight. She then concealed a trigger-receiver within a light sconce on the wall. The way this house was built and the amount of explosive she used, there was a good chance the detonation would topple the whole thing.

  Thanks to being designed to be set in advance, the explosives would endure for a good long while if left alone. Thus, Krahe was able to leave the killing house as it was for now — the time limit was how long the foreman was willing and able to blow smoke up his boss’s ass, if anything. While she waited for an excuse to spring the trap, Krahe also picked out the location that would be her office. She had already narrowed it down to a handful of candidates while searching for the killing house, and now she was just working out the final choice. She only visited any of the locations when she was decently sure that she wasn’t being followed. In the end, she settled on a place that was neither too likely for someone to just stumble upon, but also not so far out of the way as to make it overly hard to find for customers. Rather than meet with the owner personally, she paid Garvesh to send a courier with her offer on the property, spending the remainder of her time until her scheduled meeting with Brizogia more or less in seclusion, reading and preparing talismans. Yao’s “Basic Security” scroll was similarly obtuse to her “General Tips and Tricks” scroll, but the moon-logic required to parse one translated to the other, meaning Krahe made quick headway into the basics.

  The safehouse in which she resided became her testing ground, as, thankfully, Yao’s basic talismans were designed to be as minimally intrusive as possible, specifically so they could be used to set up safe zones even inside hostile strongholds. Krahe felt that she had developed a sufficient understanding of the principles quickly enough, as many of them carried over from both local network security and the logic of setting physical boobytraps.

  Nonetheless, as with many of the other things she was focusing on, she would have to leave actually paying this effort off for later. The time had nearly come to meet with the silver serpent. Before their meeting, however, Krahe had gone to the effort of asking a few knowledgeable people a very important question: “How bad of an idea would it be to offend Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat?”

  The answers she received, when put altogether, painted a promising picture.

  It would, undeniably, be a bad idea, but she was significantly less powerful than she wanted people to think. There was a reason why her feud with the church hadn’t gone anywhere. Had the agency’s true heads wanted to make trouble, they could have done so, even if it would be a doomed effort and just waste the agency’s resources. But they hadn’t — everything following the church’s demand for proof had been done at Brizogia’s personal expense.

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  She was, in the end, an administrator. There was no doubt that she had to be fantastically rich — rich enough to own a mansion built by the head of the Silverswords’ former main competitor.

  But Krahe could tell.

  From her manner of conduct, the way she tried to leverage her assets, even the lack of caution in her communications directly to Krahe.

  Brizogia was a face. A front. A fall-guy. Perhaps she was acting out of her own volition, or perhaps whomever stood behind her was using her ownership of the mansion as an excuse to act through her. More likely than not, this other had been acting through her to use the mansion and its associated tunnels to begin with, and this was just a natural continuation of that puppetry.

  Whatever the case, Krahe had decided that dealing with Brizogia wouldn’t necessitate true caution. Even if killing her outright was out of the question, she could still cow the woman and break her resolve to pursue this matter further.

  The Scarlet Star Ring tightened reassuringly around her finger.

  They met at the cafe as agreed-upon. Krahe immediately noticed that the place had been cleared out in an unsubtle manner, surrounded by a perimeter out to around twenty meters. It didn’t go to the extent of outright setting up blockades or posting guards in the open, but it was close.

  Krahe was happy to engage in a hollow conversation of pleasantries for a few minutes, even for a half-hour if that was what it took, and, so it seemed, her foe was of the same mind. They spent this time probing one another, during which Krahe readily offered up a true side of herself, the side that was a straightforward mercenary, the side that happily engaged in ultraviolence for just enough money to pay off the costs and buy some drugs for the afterparty. Even if it was just one facet of many, it was no less real than the others — Krahe just had to turn the metaphorical polyhedron of herself so that Brizogia’s probing always struck that particular face.

  Brizogia was a woman with blonde hair, pale skin, and a sharp face. She wore an off-white pantsuit of sorts, with a vest, dark-red tie, and a large coat draped about her shoulders. At a glance, she looked perfect. Too perfect, even, in a way some people strove to project intentionally. But to Krahe’s experienced eyes, she gave off the air of a past-her-prime celebrity with a face made of plastic, or perhaps a brainfried coomer who had decided that they preferred the aesthetics of gonzo internet porno to even the already-exaggerated reality of Megacity Gamma. Even though her hair was undeniably natural, even though her skin was real and her face moved normally, there was something wrong, just beneath the surface. It just wasn’t quite right, a sort of hyperreality in the movements, endemic to people who made a living pumping out short-form brainrot videos. Brizogia came across as fake because she was emulating a falsity, an exaggerated idea. She wasn’t the person sitting across from Krahe, the well-off attractive businesswoman, she was someone, something else, role-playing as that person.

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