Rook

caught a glimpse of gigantic gloved fingers.
    “I’m Pawn Steele” came the diffident voice. Through her migraine, the name stirred a memory.
    “Pawn Steele. You were at Bath, right? You were the one who went in with the chain saws and cut everyone out of the pods in thebasement.” Myfanwy remembered him well. A gigantic man whose ancestors had clearly come to England by means of some boats with dragons on the prows. Since today’s society frowned on the family trade of pillaging, he’d been drawn into the Checquy, where his potential for directed mayhem was appreciated.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What can I do for you?” she asked, trying to ignore the
sir.
    “Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this site smells the same as the incident at Bath,” said Steele.
    “Smells? No, I hadn’t.”
    “Well, one of my gifts is a heightened sense of smell,” said Steele.
    “Really? Take my hand,” said Myfanwy, ducking her head away from the sun. As soon as she felt his skin against her fingertips, she reached out through his senses. The smell of chemicals and fungus swept through the scent centers of her brain, bypassing the inconvenient route of her nose. “Oh, yeah. It’s the same.” What had Shantay called it? “Like a gigantic porcino mushroom—only this time it’s like it’s been doused in formaldehyde.”
    “Exactly,” said Steele. “Is that… is that your headache?” Myfanwy hastily broke contact.
    “Sorry about that,” she said. “Yes, it’s the same smell, and the events are linked. But I’d appreciate it if you kept that information to yourself.”
    “No problem, Rook Thomas. But I was thinking that if you like, I could just go in. I could get all armored up and hack those people out.” His voice was enthusiastic, and even through the pain, she could feel his heartbeat increasing at the prospect.
    “I see what you’re saying, Pawn Steele, and don’t even think about it.”
    “Hells, yeah! I’m on it! Wait, what?”
    “I’m sorry, Steele, but in my last operation, the manifestation ate three Checquy teams, including one team of Barghests, before we went in, and I almost had my brain broken down for fertilizer. Now that police station over there is giving me a bitch of a headache, so no one is to approach it. I don’t want any more members of the Checquyto be sucked into amorphous entities, especially since we can’t guarantee that it will treat them as gently as last time.” Belatedly, she recalled her observer status. “Is that all right with you, Pawn Cyrus?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Okay. Now, will somebody please get me a fucking aspirin!” The noisy bustle of the control room died as Myfanwy and her entourage entered, and everyone took on a hunted expression. For a moment, Myfanwy was ashamed, but then she decided they could probably all bear to shut the hell up and turn off the lights for a few minutes.
    A Checquy doctor came in and ran her ungloved hands over Myfanwy’s skull and down the nape of her neck. She muttered to herself about node sensitivity and then injected Myfanwy with something that fizzed in the syringe and had the effect of draping a soft wet blanket over Myfanwy’s brain.
    “You’ll feel some fogginess for a few minutes,” rasped the doctor. “And then you will need to urinate for a few more minutes.”
    She moved away as the workers resumed chattering and Myfanwy waited for her feet to touch the ground. Everyone seemed to acknowledge that she would not be making any contributions for the moment, so she settled back with her eyes closed to listen to those around her and try to prevent the top of her head from unscrewing itself and letting her brain glide away on cotton wings.
    “Pawn Carmine has a variant of millimeter-wave vision,” someone was saying. “He says there’s a cube of flesh in the front room and no other life forms in the building.”
    “So they’ve all been absorbed?” asked Cyrus.
    “Presumably” came the answer. “That cube fills the entire room. We can’t see through the windows because the flesh is pressed up against them.”
    “Do the doors open inward or outward?” asked Cyrus.
    “I’ll ask Carmine to check.”
    “He doesn’t get closer than twenty meters,” warned a woman with a Scottish accent.
    “He’s also telescopic.”
    “Or he could just use binoculars,” said the Scot. The intercom crackled.
    “This is Pawn Carmine,” said a calm voice over the speaker. “The doors open