“It really is the worst goddamn clock there ever was,” Glory said, swirling her drink and staring up at the weeping Savior.

“You tell me this every time,” Dahlia sighed, watching her. Glory was a woman possessed of a harsh angelic poise marred only by her permafrost smile and dubiously ethical profession. The latter did not concern Dahlia – in fact, it was downright useful from time to time. The former she regarded as one of Glory’s many personal charms. Another: Glory was a full two heads taller than Dahlia standing on tiptoe; laying on the couch, as she was now, it was like staring up at some kind of athletic tree in a white dress. Her hair stood out in three tight buns at the back of her head, tastefully blonde and pulled tight.

“It’s beyond sacrilegious,” Glory said over her shoulder, “The little Catholic girl in me is rolling in her grave.”

“How can you tell? You buried her so deep,” Dahlia shot back, lazily, taking a luxurious swig of screwdriver (first of the evening) and twirling her hair with a free hand. She was staring up and past the ceiling. Glory backed away from the clock, bemused, and turned to circle the little sitting area with a lupine grace. One foot padded silently on the tile, her mechanical leg clicking sharply beside it.

“One day,” Glory said, “Some Casterite is gonna kick in your door and lop your head off.”

“And deprive you of your favorite customer? He wouldn’t get far.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?” Glory grinned with everything but her eyes. Her teeth were shockingly white, die-cut perfect and glossy like candies. Dahlia shrugged.

“Helps me sleep at night,” she offered. Glory lowered herself into the opposite seat, settling into a more businesslike repose. Dahlia did not, finding herself unwilling to compromise her carefully optimized sprawl, but did manage to turn her head to look.

“I was at a party tonight,” Glory said, leaning in for emphasis, “Casual party, rooftop at the Gira, but there were some very powerful people there. Some people who really wanted to meet with me, meet with my powerful people. Tomorrow’s financial news in the making. You know how these things are.”

“I do.”

“You will notice I’m not there now.”

“I did.”

“I’m not there now, because I got a call from someone who always has interesting requests,” Glory began, “which she is always prepared to pay for.” This was not sarcasm – Dahlia was both of these things, a combination which was less-than-common in this Glory’s line of work. Her official title was Acquisition Specialist, a combination lawyer/supplier who connected orchestrators of discerning taste to goods of particular quality. Less officially, these people were Ghouls, combination graverobbers/social climbers who connected, say, spiteful family members with the deceased object of their ire. Glory was a better class of person, in that she had a better client selection than most of her colleagues, in that the average amount of cruel pettiness involved in a given search was relatively low. Some Ghouls freelanced, but any of stature worked for a large company. Lazarus LTD employed some six dozen such people nationwide, three in the NYC area alone. Glory was one of these, serving mainly artists and fashionable servitor studios by tracking down the bodies of those who had some particular aspect the client wished to utilize (vitiligo was a big mover) through an extensive network of corpsemongers and bodybuyers. Of course, this was only one service Lazarus provided. There were many, many more.

“Do you think of me as self-aware?” Dahlia asked, with exaggerated sleepover nervousness. Glory blinked at her, utterly sideswiped. In her defense, it was a very stupid question.

“What?”

“How self-aware am I?” Dahlia repeated, folding all four arms expectantly.

“Dahlia,” Glory began, audibly unsure if she was truly irritated or just playing along, “Don’t tell me I came across the Park at this time of night for honesty hour.”

“Ohhhh, oh, fuck you, come on, just tell me,” she whined. Glory pointed to the clock. The clock pointed just north of eleven.

“That much,” She said. Dahlia made a thoughtful sort of “Hmmm” sound, without much finality, having received an answer she cared neither for nor about. She disengaged, bringing her attention back to her drink and the ceiling. She wanted a blanket.

“Can we get to business? I’m going back to that party at eleven thirty.”

“Not until you tell me what makes me so self-un-aware,” Dahlia said, fingering the rim of her glass. She wasn’t quite pouting, but it was up there. Glory had now decided that she was playing along after all, but also was truly irritated about it. She made a gesture of surrender and bent to put her single shoe on. While she was there, she tapped an indentation on her prosthetic, and a spike of matching height sprung out like a switchblade. She extended herself to her full height, more formidable than ever, and gave Dahlia a withering downward glare.

“Oh my god, you’re no fun at all,” Dahlia said, pulling herself up with two arms, “Such a whiner. Come on, follow me.” She headed off towards her studio.

In truth, Dahlia had been stalling to decide just what she was going to say. She was hoping she would be able to swing a solid lead into the possibility that she had been somehow working without herself knowing it with the self-awareness question, but now she was starting to wonder if she should be telling Glory about it at all. She wondered if she should tell anyone. She woke up without memory of the research she had done, but the scattered papers and clutched piece of microfiche proved that she had lost time. Trying to find a connection between the photo and the Lens quickly brought her to many of the same conclusions she had reached earlier in the evening – namely, that she had been using a sigil rune she never even knew existed. This time, instead of investigating herself, she called in backup.

“Glad I put my shoe on,” Glory said, eyeing the scattered assortment of surgical equipment. Much of it had been kicked out of the way as the Esoterica servitors shuffled their way out the door, but there was still some debris here and there.

“Shush,” said Dahlia, and wheeled out John Doe. She had removed the paper Lens (making sure to hide it in her study well before Glory arrived) and replaced it with a deeply flawed early draft she had lying around, modified to include the mystery character as it appeared in the photograph. Altogether, it was complicated enough that even if Glory could read sigils – a longtime mystery on Dahlia’s part, though she had her doubts – it would be some time before she could come to a conclusion on whether or not the piece would function. The pages flapped against the sheet of skin that stretched from his waist to his collarbone.

“Looks like you’ve already got your body,” Glory said, looking over John Doe with an appraising eye, “Is this your new piece?”

          “Part of it,” she said, adjusting a pushpin, “That’s John Doe in there.”

          “That – that serf you’ve had since you were a kid? Christ.”

          “Yeah, well. This is his last job, I think,” Dahlia said, allowing herself a little wistfulness. She smiled at him, sitting there like a particularly torpid sack of potatoes.

          “So you’ve got your body, what do you need me for?”

          “Not bodies I need, it’s information. See this?” Dahlia poked at one of the little crosses on the drafted Lens, “I don’t know what that is. I think I know what it is, but I’m not sure.” She just barely caught it: when she had indicated the letter in question, a microscopic expression had crossed Glory’s face. It was slight and fleeting, but clear as a shadow on the moon. All of Dahlia’s finely-honed social senses kicked on, like a fighter jet coming online, but she gave away nothing. Glory recovered in the same instant.

“And?”

“And,” Dahlia pointed to the microfiche display set up on a nearby cart with the same image of the scientist eying some wall of machines, the unknown rune in the background, “That guy seems to know.” There was no change in her face this time, but the absence felt just as suspicious. Something was wrong.

“So?”

“He’s a Lazarus employee, that’s a Lazarus lab, that’s a letter on a Lazarus-owned legal pad…”

“We don’t all know each other, Dee.”

“Really? A little mom and pop multinational like that and you don’t even know everyone’s name?” Lazarus had been operating since a scant few months after discovery of orchestration; as the first and largest private firm to take on research and commercialization of the practice in those first few weeks, it guzzled grant funding until there was none left to give. The US and the UK gave gladly even then, drunk on Cold War fear and choked with lobbyists Lazarus had sent to sell their own money back to them. When sigils were discovered in ’94, Lazarus only grew larger, spreading like kudzu over the face of a rapidly changing world. It moved from theory into practice, selling advanced servitors on an industrial scale (a glut of low-cost labor which, frankly, kept the anemic economy on life support) and opening a relatively recent line of body modification studios (which were currently in the long, painful process of going under – chop shops were a local game, and no amount of advertising could fix that).

“This picture is a decade old at least,” Glory said, leaning in, “He might not even be alive.”

“I don’t care about the guy,” Dahlia grunted, shouldering past her to tap the display, “I just want to know what his little friend here does.”

“We lost a lot of miscellaneous records moving to microfiche in the past few years,” Glory ventured, “Might just be gone.” This was definitely a lie. Dahlia knew how good their recordkeeping was.

“You saying you can’t find it?” Dahlia put all four hands on her hips.

“I’m saying, don’t get your hopes up.”

“Too late,” Dahlia said, handing her a printout of the picture, “They’re up.” Glory looked at it, looked at her, tapped the page.

“And another thing: I don’t like digging around in company property for you.”

“And I don’t like having to convince you to take easy money, especially my easy money. But here we are.” Glory nodded. Dahlia was vaguely aware that she had won something, or had been allowed to win something. It felt odd.

“Where did you find the picture, anyway?”

“Reference library,” Dahlia breathed out, “So who knows.”

“So all this is for your new piece?” Her voice had an edge of genuine interest that flagged it in Dahlia’s ear as something she had been waiting to ask. Which meant it was important. This was all too conspicuous for comfort: in Dahlia’s experience, if the other player tipped their hand, either they weren’t aware they were playing or they had already won. She played her own cards close to her chest.

“Maybe.”

“And that’s it there?” Glory asked, eying the big sigil pinned to Doe’s chest, “Mind if I make a copy?” There was that interest again, a kind of hungry light in her eyes that kept them wide and grasping. There was a growing electric dread in the room, which Dahlia wasn’t sure what to do with. She wasn’t sure when it began or where it was going.

“I do, actually. It’s a personal piece,” Dahlia snapped, trying to remember details about what Mike had assumed. Something about her dead dad, yadda yadda, her using Ghost as a final goodbye? Glory moved her lips in a way that looked, to outside observers, like a smile.

“I’ve got some higher ups who are very interested in your work, you know,” Glory said, somewhere between teasing and threatening.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Real interested. They say you’ve got vision.” This was not entirely surprising to Dahlia – she had seen Lazarus representatives at both of her past openings, and the social circles of high finance and expensive art overlapped frequently enough that she knew who was who in the NYC branches – but she had always been wary about getting involved directly. Lazarus had a bad habit of disappearing orchestrators it employed, only to spit them out again a few months later with just shifty eyes and a gag order to show for it. Besides that, working for Lazarus was widely regarded as selling out, and Dahlia simply would not let her reputation take the hit. What would the zines say?

“Tell them to act fast. Esoterica is trying to tie me down, too,” Dahlia said, unevenly. Glory just laughed.

“We’ve got a lot of big plans but a lot of small people, you know? Big, big plans, and not a lot of vision to see it through,” Glory said, advancing slightly. Not physically, but exerting a kind of atmospheric pressure, making sure Dahlia was aware of her full height. Dahlia opened her mouth to give a very clever rebuttal that she couldn’t seem to find. Instead, she settled for:

“Sucks.”

“It does. We’re always looking for people like you,” Glory said, smiling toothily, “And we’re always finding them. Why don’t you come with me to the party?” She extended a hand. Dahlia watched it.

“Miss Rhode,” crackled the front desk intercom, and the spell was broken. The two women paused, processing. Glory broke first, turning casually to examine the fake Lens once more, and Dahlia stepped lightly around her to reach the wall-mounted pager.

“Yes?”

“Are you expecting any further company this evening?” She wasn’t, but… She glanced back at Glory, who was staring expressionlessly at the paper. At this point, she would be all too glad to take an out if she was being given one. Something stirred in the back of her head.

“The more the merrier,” she said, feeling her wits about her again, trying to get into character.

“A man and a woman?”

“Yeah!”

“Good,” the intercom huffed, a little shaky, “Then you can come collect them from security.” There was the sharp click of someone hanging up with great conviction. Dahlia made a face, and when she turned around, Glory was making roughly the same one.

“Well,” she piped. The pressure was gone from the room, as if it had never been there at all. The vacuum was eerie.

“Call me when you find anything about that letter,” Dahlia said, ushering her her out of the room.

“You aren’t heading downstairs?”

“I’m getting some cash first. In case I need to bribe somebody.”

Next Chapter: V-Pit