The nerve centre of the enforcer compound was a very strange place when divested of life. Some consoles had been closed down, others abandoned in haste after the triggering of the alarm. Jett stepped lightly over the threshold, a small part of her convinced they were an instant away from being ambushed by a hidden core of wolfkin and bundled away into the night forever.

But it didn't happen. Instead, they were greeted with a big octagonal room riddled with consoles and sectioned off into a dozen different rooms. Twinned staircases at the far end marched up into a bunker-like office well above the main floor, with a long band of glass that looked down over an area that ought to be teeming with life.

The dark, oceanic blue of the emergency lighting cast a pall over the enforcer nerve centre, but Jett tried to ignore the unsettling sensation of seeing the deserted place, instead focusing on the prize.

"Up there," she said, indicating the office with a nod. "Must be where Hera keeps watch when she's not running around trying to kill me."

"Let's go then."

Keeping low in case of any stragglers, the two stole their way past the consoles, slipping up the staircase to the office. She constantly kept her head on a swivel, unable to shake the sensation that someone was watching them. With the blaring alarm, there was no way she'd hear someone sneaking up behind them.

They sidled up to the door of the office—a daunting thick slab of metal that was more than likely hardened against explosive blasts. Luckily, they'd brought more subtle means to defeat the security measures. A thick lock kept the door clamped shut, complete with a keypad, but Karno had prepared for just such an eventuality. Jamming a screwdriver beneath the lock housing, he snapped the casing open with a grunt of effort and set about cutting a series of wires with speed that left Jett envious. Hijacking the system, he fed the wires into a flat rectangular code-buster board, letting the machine's simple, ruthlessly efficient brain churn through the combinations faster than any normal mind could attempt, bypassing normal lockout countermeasures.

A few minutes later, a clunk sounded as the lock disengaged, and they gained access to Hera's inner sanctum.

Jett stepped through the doorway, her eyes flickering to take in every detail of the room. As it happened, there wasn't a huge amount to take in. Furnished with spare functionality, the biggest thing in the room was a desk, a big steel monster littered with bark-paper reports, computer drives and, rather disconcertingly, an open case containing four wicked-looking knives. She swallowed hard and looked past them.

Behind the desk, built into the wall like a statue carved into a mountain, loomed a massive obsidian computer rig. The screen alone stretched almost two meters wide, larger than anything Jett had ever seen. For a moment, she just stood there staring at it in all its majesty until Karno touched her elbow, breaking the machine's spell.

"Think you can bust that monster?"

"You have to ask?" She shot him a wry smile and stepped forward, slipping into the firm, high-backed seat in front of the machine. The thing had all the comfort of a granite slab, designed for nothing but functionality and certainly not moulded to her slight physique. She reached across the keyboard and tapped the start-up; even the keys themselves required more pressure than she was used to applying.

The gigantic screen bloomed into life, displaying a login screen, featureless save for the text block and a logo depicting a side-on wolf's head in the top corner.

"Give me the shunt." Jett held out a paw. Karno reached into his bag and retrieved the bypass shunt—a rectangular block of hardware that she swiftly wired up to the machine through one of the dozens of jack ports that riddled the outer casing. The shunt was like smashing in a safe door with a battering ram because you didn't know the combinations. It would trigger every kind of firewall and security alert imaginable, sending alerts all over the complex, but that didn't matter right now. She just needed access.

With the shunt hooked in, she brute-forced her way through the password security of Hera's console and plunged headlong into the deepest darkest parts of the enforcer leader's files. Through a forest of progress reports, operation assessments and security dossiers, she waded, resisting the urge to lose herself in the staggering wealth of classified data she suddenly had access to. They simply didn't have the time. Instead, she jacked in a general search query, compiling all mentions of the mysterious Belforra.

And in a folder unobtrusively titled "Ancillary Initiatives," something caught her eye. Behind that innocuous title, she discovered a project file with a title that made her gut twist, her fur prickle, and her skin crawl. She went to open it, to be met by an additional password lock and firewall, only confirming her suspicions that this was something they needed to see. She deployed the shunt again, and its secrets spilled across the screen.

"Karno..." she breathed.

He leaned over her, head cocked to one side in curiosity. "Project Excision?"

She shrugged, peering at the notes alongside it. "Started out as some kind of government contract. Says here that...the Conclave council voted to discontinue the project, citing 'no tangible benefits.'"

"And yet here it is."

"It's more than that," Jett continued. "The file's time-stamped less than two days ago. It's still being updated. This is an active project!"

"Hera's been doing some nasty things behind the Conclave's back, methinks." Karno smiled wryly. "Sounds like our baby. Let's see what we're dealing with."

With him leaning in close over her shoulder, Jett began scrolling through the frightening deluge of data. She recoiled slightly, taken aback by the sheer volume of information that had been tucked away in Hera's hidden black box. Even the opening pages were jammed with tables and technical jargon that meant very little to her. Phrases like "optimising graft response" and "instinct response dilution" were scattered liberally throughout the paragraphs. Her eyes narrowed, and she flicked through the next pages.

"What in the Peace and Fire is this?" Karno whispered, squinting at the monitor.

Jett waved him into silence, glancing furtively at the door before returning to her work, claws flashing over the key with frantic speed. More diagrams spilled down the screen, anatomical sketches of the different kin of the city, flayed down to their bones and organs, annotated with notes that might as well have been in a different language for all the sense she could make of them.

"I don't ...I'm not sure. Looks like some kind of ...medical journal, maybe?" She pressed her jaw tightly together, trying to figure out what she was looking at, but she was no doctor. "I can't say. It's some kind of tallying for physical and mental attributes, but there are hundreds of pages of notes in this thing. Even if I knew what any of this meant, we don't have time to go through it here."

"Fine, scrag the whole thing, and we'll take it with us. Once we've got some breathing space, we'll look it over properly—maybe find a damned translator while we're at it."

Jett nodded, punching in the relevant commands to copy Project Excision to her block drive in all its glory. A progress bar appeared on the screen.

"Fangs," she muttered. "It's going to take a couple of minutes."

"Seriously?"

She looked at him irately. "It takes as long as it takes, Karno."

He opened his mouth to reply, but suddenly the blare of the alarm shut off. They both froze, staring at one another for several horribly silent seconds. The blue lights stayed on, but the alarm shutdown meant someone was still here—maybe a suspicious technician or a maintenance team who'd countermanded the siren after discovering the reactor wasn't really going into meltdown.

"Well, that tears it!" he hissed. "I doubt we've got a few minutes to just sit here. They could be coming back any second."

"We don't have a choice! Keep an eye on the door," she snapped back and turned her eyes to the screen once more.

He let out a snort of frustration but stepped away nonetheless, slipping over to the doorway and peering out. Jett stayed rooted to the spot, her paws clenching and unclenching as she watched the progress bar advance with aching slowness.

"Jett..." Karno murmured.

"One minute." She pressed her paws against either side of the casing, lowering her head to stop looking at the infernal bar. Come on, come on, come on!

Finally, the computer bleeped, and she tore the cables free with frantic energy, bundling the block drive and its dangling tendrils into her pack. As she withdrew her paw, she took one of the nerve-clogger bombs out, just in case. With the alarm shut off, she knew they had a better than even chance of running into wolfkin returning to the compound. The only question was if they could get to an access grate in time.

"I got it," she blurted, grabbing Karno by the arm. "Let's get out of here."

"You can say that again."

Then they were off, pelting through the eerily deserted interior of the enforcer compound with their precious cargo safely encased in her pack. Retracing their steps, they raced for the server room and their escape route, hoping to get out the same way they came in.

Before they could reach it, however, she heard the unmistakable heavy tread of enforcer paws echoing through the halls. She stumbled to a halt so abruptly that Karno cannoned into the back of her, grabbing her by the shoulders as she pitched forward. She managed to stifle her yelp, and he pulled her back into a standing position.

"Fangs," he cursed, looking around.

"This way." She grabbed his paw and yanked him off down a connecting passageway, away from the encroaching steps. They hurtled off in the opposite direction, away from the server room and instead heading for another subsidiary entrance. Jett hoped against hope that her memory wouldn't fail her now—their lives quite literally depended on it.

They passed a series of what looked like dining quarters, abandoned meals of half-eaten, partially torched meat littering the tables. Then they swept past a locked armoury, a few security monitoring rooms filled with computers, and even a broad training hall. Dummies pin-cushioned with armbow bolts stood dumbly as they sprinted by.

"Where are we going?" Karno asked, panting as he pulled level with her.

"Sanitation maintenance," she gasped back. "Probably the last place people will be rushing to when they're manning their posts. Don't have time for the vents. Need to get out now."

He nodded his understanding, and they raced on through the closed-in little world of the wolfkin. She couldn't remember exactly which part of the city the sanitation exit would deposit them in, but she had no choice but to bank on its relative insignificance to see them through. For a blissful couple of moments, that idea sustained her, and she allowed herself to believe they might actually pull this off.

Until they passed a junction in the passage, and a voice scythed into Jett's hearing.

"Intruders!"

It was half-scream, half-growl, and the sound of it wrenched Jett's head around to look. She saw a female enforcer with ash-grey fur and short-clipped brown headfur gesturing wildly. A second later, three more of them spilled from an adjoining hallway.

"Let's go!" Karno snarled, dragging her away as the wolfkin came pounding towards them with murderous intent.

Jett shook herself free of Karno's grip long enough to let fly with the nerve clogger, slinging it with all the strength she could muster into the path of their foes. It smashed to the ground right in front of the lead wolfkin, and he got a muzzle full of the compound, tumbling forward with a coughing bark of surprise, spitting and cursing as he went.

His companions were moving too fast to be thwarted by the cloud, however. The female exploded through it with a frightening bound, hitting the ground in a flying dive and rolling neatly to her feet, the two males blazing along in her wake.

They didn't have far to go, she knew that, but it still seemed far enough. In the straight, narrow passages, there was nothing to slow their pursuers, no obstacles for her to use to throw them off. In a dead foot race, she physically couldn't outrun those long powerful strides for long. Even Karno pulled out ahead of her, fear putting a spring in his step as they turned the final corner, in sight of the exit tunnel.

He only noticed the distance between them when the wolfkin caught her.

The claw dug into the scruff of Jett's jacket, dragging her to a halt even though her legs kept windmilling furiously. She twisted, bucked, and writhed with every ounce of strength she possessed, but then the two other wolfkin arrived, more claws grasping at her, weight forcing her to a standstill, and it was her feral shriek of frustration that stopped Karno in his tracks.

Jett fought like a wild animal, the sickening realisation that this might well be the end of everything pulsing through her like a drug. Her teeth gnashed and snapped at the paws that tried to restrain her. Pure, desperate energy coursed through her as she slung her limbs left and right. A pair of strong arms circled her waist, only for her to ram an elbow back hard into the eye socket of her attacker. The wolfkin fell back with a yowl, buying her a precious instant.

Ripping the pack free from her shoulders, she plunged a paw in and grabbed another nerve clogger before throwing the pack and its cargo at Karno as he started back towards the melee. The pack hit him hard in the chest, and he caught it with a gasp of surprise, tumbling backwards, trying to cushion it and protect the block drive as he fell.

The female wolfkin surged towards him, but Jett lunged, tackling her from behind and bringing them both to the ground in a kicking, flailing heap of limbs. She hooked her free paw through the wolfkin's belt, snaring her in place even as the two males piled onto her. Jett sank her teeth into the wrist of the one who tried to grab her free paw, biting down to the down and tasting the tang of blood. He let go with a yowl, leaving her with a chance to do one last thing.

"KARNO, RUN!"

With a defiant scream, Jett slung the bomb hard into the ground. It exploded with a rasping cough, and seconds later, she and the three wolfkin enforcers were engulfed in a grey-white smog. She tried to hold her breath but flailing around in the grasp of her captors, she simply couldn't do it and soon inhaled a thick lungful of the nerve clogger. She hacked out a cough, spluttered for breath, and then everything went hazy.

The grip on her arms slackened as the agent took effect on all of them. She was dimly aware of slurred voices shouting and shadowy figures swaying drunkenly. Then she toppled to the ground, slamming into blackness.