37

Back in your "office" next to the morgue, you open up the guard's email and hurriedly transfer everything you can to your own phone. You check the camera roll and find pictures of the parking lot, including one where your Mitsubishi is visible, though it isn't centered. The guards are obviously worried, though they don't know much about you.

The phone suddenly goes black and reboots. When it wakes up again, it's been reset to factory defaults. That's a nice trick, but you already have copies of the guard's emails. You destroy the phone and spend the next few hours sorting through the correspondence. You have everything you need: your target's stint in Afghanistan leads directly to private security work through a dozen mercenary contractors with fast-changing names, then to a company called Roadrunner Protection Agency that was investigated in 2016 for its connections to an illicit opioid distribution network that ran all over the Southwest. The company disappears by 2017, but the network definitely didn't; these black-jacket guards are just Roadrunner, and they're still running opioids. And they're doing it right out of St. Basil's.

The next thing you do is try to connect every name and face you can find to everything you know about the Second Inquisition: the SI's political fronts, militia groups, associated armed forces details, police fraternal organizations, everywhere they operate, everything you know they've infiltrated. And after three hours of solid work, you have good news, because you have negatives across the board. As far as you can tell, there are no connections between Roadrunner and any factions of the SI.

So if you piss them off, they're going to come at you with assault rifles and hand grenades, but not stakes and flamethrowers. That's a relief.

Next

The Roadrunner guards are a constant presence. They're not paying attention to you, but the hospital guards are increasingly aware of your activities. You spend a few nights scouting the hospital director's office, but you're going to have to act soon.

Pattermuster has been unavailable for several nights, even though you've made it clear you'll both need to act soon to make the upload.

He returns to the morgue before 7:00 p.m., just as you're getting dressed after a shower.

"I want to know!" the Brujah shouts back over his shoulder, his ragged voice echoing down the halls. "Answers, or you're cut off!"

The thin, pitiful wails of the ghouls reach your ears as you shrug into your leather jacket.

Denied vitae—the Blood of vampires—St. Basil's ghouls will soon resume aging, if they don't go mad from withdrawal first. It sounds like Pattermuster knows how to keep his retainers in line.

The Brujah stomps past you, his eyes burning, and slams his fist into one of the slab doors, denting the metal. Then he rips it off its hinges and flings it against the far wall. You know the reputation of the Rebels for their terrible fury, so you wait for this storm to pass.

Finally Pattermuster squeezes his temples and crumples against the wall of the morgue. He's ditched his scrubs for a tweed jacket and a bow tie, like a midcentury doctor on holiday.

"What happened?" you ask.

"Rita May's dead," he says.

Rita May, the painfully thin Caitiff, slept in the slab Pattermuster just tore apart.

"Someone cut her head off. I found the body last night. I was stuck outside the hospital with it all day. I'm going to find out who did this, Krarr. And I'm going to kill them."

He glares at you with red-rimmed eyes, as if you might be responsible. You're not sure you have time for this, but Pattermuster looks haunted.