June 7, 2045 - 11:45 AM

I don't want to be here anymore, Margo thought, waiting still as the cacophonous, blinding world around her assaulted every one of her senses.

Her hands gripped around her Fatemaker, lifting it to the wave of clubbers before her, but someone else had control over her arms. She watched her fellow Psychwatch officers open fire, the beams of deadly energy cleaving through the indocile crowd before her, but she felt immovable amid a world that couldn't hold still. She wanted to save people that day, but never in her life would she have considered death to be a treatment superior to all others. Never.

Until she'd stepped foot in that hellish club. Until she'd discovered firsthand that there really were people who'd put innocents in harm's way just to feel even the most fleeting moments of euphoria. Put them through rape. Murder. Humiliation. Everyone before her, hiding behind a rabbit mask and clouding their minds with the false promise of pleasure that was Wonderland Mist, would never see the light of day again.

Margo pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Eight times in only ten seconds. A shot landed every time. Sometimes, the target would utter a scream. But each scream was indistinct, fading into the hundreds of others filling her ears at the moment. With those screams and the shrill, metallic crackle of her Fatemaker, her ears would go numb by the end of the day, like fists against a concrete wall.

Maybe I can save them, she thought, studying the fragments of orange light discharging from her gun. Maybe I...

She stopped pulling the trigger, her finger hovering over it, ready to strike. In the far distance of the room, she watched the Multi Man and those peculiar twins descend the steps to the bottom floor. Directly before her, the screams were the loudest, and the messes, most copious. Severed limbs littered the floor, deprived from their original owners by Subjugate-Mode Fatemakers. Of course, when standing in nearly complete darkness before a crowd of inebriated savages with unpredictable movements, the officers didn't always land clean shots. Or at least that's what she told herself to justify the sight of organs and chunks of flesh splattering the floor.

In all the chaos, she'd forgotten about Mr. W and Slater, the latter choked into unconsciousness. And following that realization, her gun trained on the rabbit man.

"Don't kill him!" she yelled. "Psychwatch needs him at the end of this!"

"I'm not killing him," Mr. W replied. "I'm doing you all a fav—"

A growl distorted by static left his tongue as a beam of orange light grazed his shoulder. Slater's body sagged from his arms to the floor, his rabbit mask breaking his fall with a loud clang. Blood sprayed from the fresh wound, and Margo jerked her head to the side to see Andrade armed with an Assault Fatemaker, training it on her and the rabbit man.

"Don't sh—" Margo exclaimed, but her superior was quick. Not as quick as she was, however. The shot burst into harmless little particles as it collided with her chest.

"Out of the way, Sandoval!" Andrade barked, but her colleague refused. Margo smacked the barrel of her gun away, and a random clubber fell victim to a powerful blast, his body disappearing in a burst of red mist.

"Thank you," Mr. W said, gripping the wound on his shoulder.

Margo turned to him, frustration burning in her eyes. "Take off the mask, or I'll let her shoot you."

Andrade scoffed. "Perra, you don't get to order—"

She gasped as the Fatemaker jammed into the crease in her arm, forced back by her fellow officer standing before her. Even the BufferSuit couldn't keep her in place, the gesture causing her to stumble back toward Kusanagi. Margo couldn't see her jaw drop behind her mask, but the humiliation in her eyes eased a small bit of her stress. As did the sight of SanityScans descending from the rifts in the ceiling by chains.

"Stop resisting!" Kusanagi yelled, his gun still trained on the remaining clubbers as they squeezed into a massive pile. A shot fired out once or twice, but the man was careful with the trigger.

Margo turned back toward Mr. W, her own Fatemaker rising to the rabbit man's level, aiming right between his eyes.

"Who are you?" she growled.

The rabbit man removed his hand from his shoulder, blood trailing down his fingers and his arm. With both hands, he loosened the mask's restraints around his neck, taking his time to ensure he had a firm grip on the hem of the mask. Margo's throat burned, parched from the shouting and the screaming. Her heart pounded furiously in her chest, only a matter of time before it would burst through her ribcage and kill her.

When the mask was off and the clubbers went silent, all of them grasping the threat of two dozen Fatemakers aiming their way, Margo felt her heart stop and her lungs crumple up into tinfoil balls, smaller and smaller until she'd pass out. The blood drained from her face, a sudden dizziness coming upon her, and all she could think was, Who can I trust anymore?

The man underneath the rabbit mask, clad in leather and bleeding from his shoulder, was Carl.

"Officer Maslow!" Andrade shrieked.

"No," he grunted, a flourishing rage sparkling in his emerald green eyes. "He hasn't been out in a while, no thanks to you and Mason."

"Vince?" Margo wheezed, her voice so shrill and low, the murmurs of the crowd nearly drowned her out.

The alter in control of Carl's body nodded his head. It was him. Vince. Underneath his glove would've been an LED ring glowing bright green, just like those eyes of his.

"Everyone, freeze!" boomed another familiar voice. Margo and Andrade turned back to see their commissioner standing at the base of the elevator, Fatemaker in hand. And silence came upon them, aside from the pain-ridden screams from the wounded among the crowd.

"I am Commissioner Janice Mason," she continued, her voice echoing through the cavernous room. "Everyone in this room is now under the surveillance of the Psychwatch Societal Stability System. That means each one of you has been assigned a Threat Level coinciding with your mental health and your risk of partaking in harmful impulses. So...by order of Psychwatch, remain still, or we will open fire once again!"

Another round of terrified murmurs rippled through the crowds like waves over a rocky shore. Margo could still hear the groans of the injured clubbers, the one who needed medical help as soon as possible. Or they might have still been having sex. The Wonderland Mist kept the two sensations inseparable, and she fucking hated the stuff because of that.

"Just to be clear," Mason continued, "we do not want anyone else to die here. We know what some of you have been through. And we also know what some of you have been doing down here, too. But if anyone threatens the life of my officers, we will not hesitate to shoot! So as of this moment, please do not take any further risks, because I can assure you nothing good will come of it."

"What are you gonna do with us?" a woman shouted from the crowd, and suddenly the rest of them joined her in loudly making their anxieties known to the officers.

"Silence, please!" Mason ordered, and the shouts slowly faded out. "You will all be escorted to the surface and driven back to Psychwatch for diagnoses and interrogations. Medical officers are on standby for those of you in critical condition. Any other questions?"

"Indeed, we do, Commissioner!"

Another voice, far too familiar. Margo recognized him from the rally. Gravelly. Deep. A sound like a blade scraping against one's spine. Only moments ago, he'd shouted at the top of his lungs, but the voice didn't match such an outspoken personality. The man she heard, the one who'd convinced her to take her eyes off Vince, was the masked man at the heart of all the chaos. The Multi Man.

"My question for you is," he said, "do you really think it'll be that easy getting these folks out of this dump?"

"Lenses on, officers!" Mason barked, and Margo watched as rows of holographic lenses illuminated before her colleagues' faces, hovering before their left eyes. She then scolded herself for losing her own to that asshole, Slater.

"Where are you, sir?" Mason asked, and following her order, the officers activated their laser sights on their weapons.

Harmless lines of green light fired off into the crowds, ensuring that the shots would land every time, even as they frightfully jabbed each other around, hoping to avoid the crossfire. Margo looked up at the rifts in the ceilings to find a dozen more laser sights piercing through to their level, the green lasers tracing through the clubbers to find their target.

"I'm here, Commissioner," the Multi Man said. "Or maybe I'm not. What do your precious SanityScans tell you?"

"Show yourself! Now!"

"But then I'll die! And that would be the end of the fun. But then again, it probably won't look good killing someone who isn't even a part of your System."

Mason snapped her fingers, and thirteen Psychwatch officers, including Kusanagi, ambled toward the crowds, their guns raised to their shoulders and the barrels facing the rabbits before them. Margo trembled in place as she watched the terrified clubbers back away from the approaching lawmen, covering their faces and whimpering pleas for mercy. She felt her own Fatemaker rattle in her hand, a full-scale war contained within a single vessel.

"Margo," Vince said, "give me the gun."

"What!" she whispered. "Why?"

"That man is going to kill every single person in that crowd."

"So what? Mason is probably gonna execute them later, anyway."

Did... she thought, Did I just allow Mason to kill these people?

"Sir, you have ten seconds to identify yourself!" Mason ordered.

"And you," the Multi Man replied, "have the entire rest of the day to scrape what's left of these poor bastards off the floor."

"Nine!"

"I'm serious, Commissioner! My men still own the same guns we used at the rally. We could kill every single person in this club in six seconds tops."

"Eight!"

"Commissioner, maybe he's right," Andrade said. "Maybe—"

"Shut up, junkie," Mason hissed. "Seven!"

"I'm not sure if you realize this, Commissioner, but some of these folks are just scared. Couldn't hurt a fly."

"Six!"

"Of course, we definitely have plenty of rapists and murderers in here, some of them so high out of their minds, they have even less ethics than they normally would."

"Five!"

"Alright, let's get this over with."

A series of weapons clicked on the opposite end of the crowd, ready to open fire. Screams sounded through the crowd itself as the clubbers packed together like bundles of wood.

"Final warning!" Mason shouted, her voice cracking. "Stand down now!"

Margo pivoted her head towards the tyrant she swore loyalty to, hoping to mutter out anything to calm her down. But just as she looked away, Vince nabbed her gun and bolted into the crowd.

"Hey, wait!" Margo shrieked, and she pursued him.

Then Mason witnessed her, doing nothing to ensure her safety. "OPEN FIRE!" she declared.

One by one, clubbers dropped to the floor dead, red mist engulfing the room and spraying Margo as she dodged and shoved through the ones still standing. The lime-green laser sights caught her eyes, and if not lasers, then blood would smear the lenses. Her eyes burned, itched. A part of her wanted to pop them out of her skull, pretend as if such a move would have zero consequences.

"Vince!" she yelled, bolting through the crowds, wiping the blood from the lenses on her mask.

Her officers weren't as merciless as she'd presumed. She expected everyone in the club to be dead on the floor by then. But she realized they were only going for the Threat Level 5's. Those armed with weapons. Drenched in blood that wasn't their own. Those proud of the destruction of others' lives by their hands. But the culling was still far from clean.

Puffs of hot air surged against her back, friendly fire from her colleagues far behind her. She crouched low, watched the orange beams collide messily with their targets rather than her. Nausea boiled in her stomach, and her legs tingled as if slowly pulling apart. Amidst the flashes of light, she could see Vince shoving through the people ahead of her.

"Margo!"

Ellie! she thought. How the hell did I forget about her?

"Margo, help me!"

CRACK!

A Fatemaker opened fire. Her Fatemaker opened fire. She turned around, spotted Vince through a brief gap in the chaos surrounding her. He shot again, three times, and two masked men met the floor. But the crowd swallowed her once again, screaming faces and pounding fists filling her line of sight. She shoved and punched back, but the satisfaction of resistance was gone. Some clubbers were on the floor, bawling like lost children. Others merely desired survival, kicking and hitting anything in their way to avoid the crossfire.

Margo found herself near the floor once again as another barrage of gunfire came her way, this time from the masked men. The sounds were endless, chattering, roaring like heavy rain. The people surrounding her, mutilated beyond recognition by projectiles no one saw coming. Fragments of bone became shrapnel, launching in all directions as bullets ripped through the clubbers. Margo screamed as innards rained down on her, her arms and hands darkening maroon the further she bolted into the atrium. She saw flashes of electricity with every round fired off, sighting them through the gaping holes blasted through people's chests.

"Ellie! Vince!" she shouted.

A shot from the masked men's modified rifles collided with her chest, throwing her off her feet. She stumbled back, toppling over one poor clubber attempting to crawl out of the crowd. Darkness engulfed as she crashed to the floor, darkness broken only by the flashes of light from the guns blazing around her.

"ELLIE! VINCE!"

She thrusted herself back up from the floor. She stumbled but quickly regained footing, the floor beneath her coated with blood. But she kept running, staying low to avoid shots from Psychwatch and the masked men. Without her gun, she was a fish treading volatile waters. Punching, shoving, elbowing, that was her only hope.

Until a powerful arm latched around hers and snatched her out of the crowd.

"Ellie!" she shouted, but she reunited with Vince, who used his free arm to resume firing at the masked men.

Behind the last one he'd killed were the Multi Man and the twins, bolting down the ramp into the laboratory.

"Let's go after them!" Margo shouted, but Vince quickly yanked her back. "Vince! Let's go!"

"It's not safe," he said. "Just run back up to the surface before it's too late."

"Vince, I'm a Psychwatch officer! This is my job!"

Suddenly, she met the barrel of her own Fatemaker, Vince's finger hovering above the trigger. "You have any idea how long it's been since Carl's seen you, kid?" he said. "If you want to see him again, get the fuck out of here."

"What—but..." Margo felt her brain moving a hundred miles an hour, not a comprehensible word out of her mouth for some time. "What if Psychwatch finds out about you being down here?" she finally spat out.

"Mason told us to come back around this time, anyway. We'll be fine. And if not, then fuck them. I'm Carl's protector, and Carl is everyone else's protector."

Vince shoved the Fatemaker back into Margo's chest. "What are you gonna do?" she asked.

"I'm gonna rescue that Cohen guy you've all been looking for. Before Holloway wakes up and rips him to shreds." He grabbed Margo's shoulder. "You just get back to the surface. Go to a hospital if you need to. And eventually Carl will apologize for everything Mason's done."

Curiosity anchored Margo to the floor. "What Mason's done?" she repeated. "What the hell did she—"

"Go! Just run!"

Vince departed the scene, running for the steps back up to the balcony. Margo looked around, one leg positioned toward ramp to the lab and the Psychwatch officers standing by it, rounding up the clubbers and gunning down potential threats. The other leg twisted toward the exit where she could reunite with the sun, wash off the blood, and finally see her sister in God-knows-how-long. She studied her Fatemaker. She had plenty of shots left to make, she thought, and the chaos left behind a loud ringing in her ears, muffling every other word and sound coming to her.

The ringing in her ears was her excuse for journeying down into the lab again, she decided. If she lived long enough to see Vince or Carl again, that's what she would've told them. "I couldn't hear you with all the ringing in my ears!"

She trotted towards the ramp, unaware of the crackling echo each footstep had against the floor beneath her. To her left, bloodied cadavers occupied the dance floor. With the strobe lights and the music off, her only source of luminescence were the dim gray lights decorating her colleagues' uniforms and the glow of their Fatemakers, either orange or green. The lights reflected off puddles of blood pouring around the bodies, and Margo peered back to find footprints trailing behind her in dark crimson.

"Freeze!" barked a Psychwatch officer, and Margo looked forward to see the laser sight of an Assault Fatemaker trained on her.

"I think she's one of us," another officer said.

"But the Scans say she's fucked up."

"She's only a Threat Level 3. Those ones are usually reasonable."

"Hey!" Margo shouted, holding her own Fatemaker above her. "I can hear you! I'm one of you!"

"Shit, it's one Mason sent down earlier," the unarmed officer said. "I fucking told you, idiot."

The armed officer lowered his gun. "Hey, she doesn't have a ThoughtControl on her, so how was I supposed to know?"

With a disgruntled sigh, Margo removed her mask. "See? It's me! Margo Sandoval!"

"Sandoval! Uh..." one officer said, "We've never met before, so—"

"The masked man went down into the labs! Follow me!"

Margo returned to a brisk jog, another wave of embarrassment flowing through her once she realized the officers weren't following behind her. Gotta do this myself then, she thought.

"Wait, Margo!"

Margo jerked her head back. Ellie once again. No sight of her once again. Margo cursed to herself, bringing her mission back to the forefront.

"Margo! Stop! I'm over here!"

I'll come back for you later, Margo wanted to tell her, but she kept running.

Fatemaker in hand, she barged through the doors at the base of the ramp. She stood in the same concrete hallway as before, where the Wonderland Mist came and went in boxes. Realizing this, she strapped her mask back onto her face, taking a deep, placated breath, knowing the breathing apparatus would keep her safe from the lab's notorious commodity.

"Neutralize, empathize, stabilize," she said. "The goal of Psychwatch."

She made her way down the hall to the opaque windows she'd seen before, pointer finger curled around the trigger. Step after prudent step, the building's noises became known to her. The water dripping from the pipes, the echo of her footsteps, the plodding creaks of the walls settling.

And the screaming from the other side of the glass.

Margo soon leaned against the wall beside the translucent windows. A bright blue glow shined through the glass, the light rippling and wobbling side to side like smoke. It's not smoke, it's Wonderland, she realized, and she adjusted the mask so it'd fit her face perfectly. No gaps. No exposed flesh. Just fresh air and protection from the elements.

"No, stop! Please!" she heard a man cry, followed by a loud crash of metallic objects.

She glanced up and down the corridor, looking for a clearer window or another entrance. To her right, three doors, one presumably leading to the lab itself. To her left, dust blanketing the floors and flickering lights dangling from the ceiling, all in the way of a door leading away from the lab. She went right, entering the door where another explosion of noise came from.

Standing before the door, ears plagued by tinnitus, she blasted the knob off with her gun and marched through. She expected a stereotypical narcotics lab and received plenty of the sights she'd expected from such a place: boilers, beakers, rows of fluorescent lights hovering seven feet above the floor, metal tables littered with chemicals and instruments, crates full of empty Blue Caterpillars. Even manufacturers decked out in hazmat suits, every single one of them dead on the floor, bleeding out from ghastly lacerations to their throats and chests.

One thing she didn't expect, however, were hundreds of trash bags full of spark roses piled up in the corner of the lab.

Directly beyond the doors was the apex of another set of stairs, where Margo stood to survey the sinister place. Everything else of interest awaited her at the bottom, including the Multi Man and the twins. The Man faced away from the Psychwatch officer, towering above another drug cook he was executing. Margo couldn't see the kill itself, but she saw blood streaming down his yellow suit, dying it dark brown like a rotten banana peel, collecting at his feet. She heard the choking sounds, watery coughs incomprehensible from human speech, before the victim's corpse collapsed to the floor for good.

"Freeze!" she declared, and for once, she'd felt like her gun had found the right targets.

Whitey and Crimson pivoted their heads toward her, half of their faces hidden behind gas masks, only their fiery red eyes exposed. Knives and machetes rested in their hands, pointing to the floor.

"Drop your weapons now! By order of Psychwatch!"

"We don't have guns," the Multi Man replied, not even bothering to look back. "And even if we did, we already got all the drug manufacturers. Guess you could say we did the job for you."

"I said drop your weapons!" Margo paused, taking a deep breath. "I'm coming down. You all need to let go of your weapons by the time I get down there. Understood?"

"Fuck off, doctor-cop," Whitey spat.

"Whitey, do as she says," the Multi Man said. "Unless you've somehow mastered throwing knives, you'd be hopeless going up against her."

"But we can take this bitch, sir," Crimson said. "I mean, look at her! She'll snap like a fucking twig."

"So will you if you don't do what I say," the Man growled, and just like that, the twins' weapons met the floor in an array of clangs and clatters.

"Good," Margo said. "Alright, I'm coming down now. And you, sir, don't move. I've got a gun."

One step after the other. The leather of her boots beating against the metal steps, resonating like funeral bells. Four blood-red eyes trained on her, far deadlier than the gun trained on them. Her eyes darted from the twins to the Man to her own feet, praying she wouldn't tumble down the steps and seal her fate.

"Y'know, I'm honestly happy to see you," the Multi Man said.

"Remain silent, please," Margo asserted, overcoming the last steps.

"It's true. I knew they'd send you down. It's always the people like you who end up in places like this."

"I said remain silent."

Margo stepped forward, five feet away from the twins and seven feet away from the Multi Man. "Turn around. Slowly," she commanded.

The Multi Man did so. She studied his navy blue suit, the many brownish stains around his sleeves and gloves. A bloodied handprint even caught his mask, right beneath the left eye, engulfing the fake teeth in its unbreakable grin.

"Yep," the Man said. "I knew it would be you. I remember you from the rally."

"You don't even know who I am," Margo muttered, raising the gun to his face.

"Come on, Margo. You don't think I'd recognize my own daughter?"

Everything went stiff. Margo's eyes, her arms and legs, her finger around the trigger. Her BufferSuit felt like a noose, dangling her from the ceiling over a deep pit. Yet this masked man before her was so...

Predictable.

Predictable, she thought, and she chuckled to herself.

"Something on your mind?" the Multi Man asked.

"You really think," Margo laughed, "that I'm gonna believe that you're my father?"

"Well, you certainly believe plenty of other things. But it's easier to believe a lie than it is to let go of one, isn't it?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Hello?" called her sister from down the hall, back at the top of the stairs. "Margo, I know you're here. Where the hell are you?"

Margo's head jerked up toward the ceiling, following the sound of her sister's voice. She couldn't help but continue laughing, simply relieved that she didn't fall for the masked man before her, glad someone was willing to acknowledge her disappearance.

This newfound pride distracted her from the brisk, forceful removal of her mask by Whitey and the slamming of her head against the wall by the Multi Man.

As she lay on the floor, world going dark and head pulsating with a concussion, the Man kneeled down to her and said, "Something tells me the truths behind so many of the lies you believe are about to come to light."