The dots were finally joining together. Finally, some semblance of an ending was in sight. Jett let herself bask in it for a moment, revelling in the rare sensation of being in control for a change. She'd done her time scuffing around in the shadows, hiding, running, and gathering with the wolfkin snapping at her heels every step of the way. Now they finally had the means to turn the tables and take the fight to their foes.

Given the lengths she'd already gone to, scraping together the funds to bribe the train guard a second time was a trivial matter as far as Jett was concerned. As long as Bronco could make good on his statement, they were going to Belforra.

Rapid's guards turned dubious eyes on the big vulkin. Rapid himself smirked, folding his arms and leaning against a supporting girder. He gave Bronco a nod.

"Sneakier than you look, eh?" he chuckled. "That's all well'n'good, but I'm gonna need you a little heavier on the details before I stick my neck in a wolf's mouth over this. How'd you track down a fence like that? Those folks don't send up a flare for anyone who comes knockin'."

"Hard as it might be to believe," Bronco rumbled, "being a watchguard isn't all fangs and fighting. Sometimes we do need to use our brains."

"You're right. It is hard to believe." Rapid flashed a fanged smirk. "So what's the story?"

"Zanzihar was an amateur—a lot of stamps but not a lot of street smarts. People noticed him when he went places a Silkie shouldn't."

"Went poking around with some seedy criminals, eh?" Karno cast an apologetic glance at Rapid. "No offence."

"None taken, wolf."

"I followed the transaction trail, canvassed the local areas for witnesses who might have seen him." Bronco shrugged. "I am a watchguard, after all. People were all too happy to help track down the killer of a Designate. Can't have the Silk feeling unsafe. Once I tracked his movements, I staked out the places he shouldn't have gone. You can find a lot of interesting kin that way."

"So, who're we dealing with?"

"I am dealing with them." The vulkin fixed him with a dangerous stare. "They took enough chances by even speaking with me. We bring the caps, they can get us to Belforra, but there are a lot of paws to shine to keep it muzzled. We do this my way, or we don't go."

Rapid glanced at his subordinate. Brushki gave a non-committal shrug. To Jett, it didn't look like an endorsement either way, but it seemed to be enough for Rapid. The albino turned back and made a sweeping gesture to the group.

"Alright, I'll bite. Take ya for a lotta things, Bronc, but I don't think there's a bone in that big skeleton o' yours that knows how to lie."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

Rapid grinned. "So, whatcha think your little Silk pal found in Belforra that was worth killing over?"

"This," Jett interjected, swinging her pack off her shoulders. She reached into her rucksack to retrieve the block drive containing the precious stolen data. Raising it into the light, she looked pointedly at Gallant. "You said you were a medicary?"

The deerkin nodded. "That's right."

"Are you good at it?"

"Excuse me?"

Jett sighed, shaking the block drive insistently. "How good a medicary are you?"

"I'm pretty good," Gallant snapped. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"We found something in the enforcer headquarters that frankly scares the tail off of me," Jett explained. "I'm a tech-breaker—a damn good one, mind you—but biology is not exactly my area. Maybe you can make some sense of what we found on this drive. We pulled the data from the enforcers' central computer."

"Toss me in the fire," one of the guards grunted. "Rap', you believin' this?"

"So far." Rapid shot the sharp-featured vixen a warning look.

"It's true," Jett continued. "Just take a look if you don't believe me."

Gallant's eyes widened, and her whole body seemed to tighten up at Jett's words. Her gaze flickered down to the block drive and back again, one hoof beginning to nervously scrape against the floor. Then she nodded.

"I'm not a scientist," she said defensively. "So, no promises, but I'll take a look."

"That's all we're asking."

"Wire it to the rig," Rapid ordered, motioning with a flick of his head to the old, ill-maintained hunk of machinery nestled in the back corner of the office. Jett eyed it dubiously, almost offended by the antique, grey carapace and single fat cooling stack spearing up out of it like a flagpole. The look on Rapid's face, however, made it clear they could use that or use nothing, so with Gallant by her side, she reluctantly trudged across to the machine.

Hooking a frayed cable into one of the block drive's jack ports, she reached out with her other paw to tap the command sequence in. The old rig came to life with a wheezing fizz of circuits, lights blinking up and down its archaic cooling stack. The others slowly coalesced around them as though they were magnetic, forming a loose semi-circle looking in.

Jett frowned as the glitchy display protested for a few seconds until its worn-down processing unit registered the block drive and linked to its systems. The images on this machine lacked the sharpness of the crisp enforcer computer, but the data still left her with a bitter taste in her mouth as she looked at them. The same bewildering deluge of tables, diagrams, and anatomical notes went tumbling down the page, and she stood up, turning to Gallant.

"It's notes on something called Project Excision," she explained, ushering the deerkin into the seat. "As to what that is...well, I told you biology isn't my strong suit."

Gallant nodded slowly, her eyes rooted to the screen as Jett spoke. An almost trance-like state descended on her as she started reading, and an expectant silence descended on the group. Beyond the doors of the office, the dull thrum of machines continued to drone away, but Gallant remained absorbed, craning her neck forward as she read, starting to flick through page by page, eyes narrowing as she squinted at the fine print.

Jett gnawed anxiously on a claw as they waited, trying in vain to make some sense of what she was watching. At a certain point, several pages in, however, something changed in the young deerkin's expression. What had looked like curiosity before suddenly morphed into a look of disbelief. Her large eyes widened, her mouth moving silently with words Jett couldn't make out.

Then she jerked her head back from the screen.

"No way."

"Clock's tickin', antlers," Rapid snapped.

"Well, I mean, there's a lot more data here, but if this is what I think it is...I...wow!"

"Wow?"

"Sorry, it's just, I've never seen anything like it." She swivelled in her seat. "This is some really complicated genetic experimentation they've been tampering with. I...I can see why the Conclave opted to shelve it."

Unease tingled up Jett's spine. "Why's that?"

"This project—it's some kind of gene-splicing program." Gallant glanced back at the screen. "From what I can tell, these preliminary pages are outlining some kind of preparation procedure to graft genes from one kin to another."

"You're sure about that?" Karno asked, his voice surprisingly subdued as he moved up alongside Jett, his arms tightly folded and tucked against his chest.

"Pretty sure." She shrugged awkwardly. "That stuff is a lot more complicated than anything I've dealt with before, but I understand some of the terminology. All that stuff about 'graft response' and 'instinct suppression index'—it's talking about natural reactions of one gene to another." Gallant shook her head. "This is some dangerous meddling. You could easily kill people with these experiments."

"Why would the Conclave, or the enforcers for that matter, want to do something like this?" Bronco asked.

"It's control," Karno said, his eyes locked on the screen with a worrying intensity. "It has to be. Everything the enforcers do is designed to control. This won't be different."

"What would the effects be?" Jett asked, doing her best to keep her voice level and logic out the problem. "Just take it back to basics. If you grafted my genes to yours in the way they're looking at, what would that cause?"

Gallant hesitated, a slightly helpless look on her face. "I...well, I guess, depending on the aggressiveness of the treatment, I would start exhibiting foxkin traits. We've all got our own biological quirks and anatomical differences. This thing would start to blur that. Someone like me might exhibit more carnivorous tendencies, and my mental processes might sharpen and change. You graft elements of otterkin, and the subject might be more inclined to take a swim. I mean, putting it simply." She shrugged. "I can't say for certain. Nothing like this has ever been done before, and it's incredibly volatile. There's no guarantee you could ever get the genes to combine in such a way."

Jett turned the last few minutes of conversation over and over in her head, sorting through the implications. The dots joined together easily enough to some degree—the relocations were a smokescreen to funnel test subjects for this experiment to Belforra. Logic dictated some kind of enforcer facility had been set up out there, on the edge of nowhere, where no one would have any reason to visit.

But she still didn't have the why. What were the wolfkin trying to get out of this? Then she remembered the citykin that had followed her, the glazed look in their eyes. At the time, she'd dismissed it as an oddity with altogether more pressing issues in mind, but now? With all the pieces laid out, a horrible possibility snapped into place.

"I think I know what they're doing," she said, nodding to herself.

Rapid threw her an incredulous look. "Y'think so?"

"Karno's right—it's all about control. The wolfkin have wanted to have full control of Wildhearth for years, but there just aren't enough of them. I think they might have figured out a way to even the odds."

"With this?" Bronco's face crunched with confusion, and he shook his head. "I'm not sure I follow."

"Think about it," Jett persisted. "What is the one thing that has stayed with the wolfkin? The one thing that they never, ever evolved out of?"

"Packs," Karno said quietly. "They still organise themselves in packs."

"Exactly!"

"What exactly you gettin' at?" Rapid asked.

"Kin can't breed with other kin," she snapped, slapping a paw down on the table as she spoke. "So the wolfkin can't just breed themselves into the population. There will always be enough other kin in the city that if we all joined forces, they'd be outnumbered. This...project changes that balance."

"How's that?"

"Somehow this thing, whatever it does, it makes kin more suggestible; easier to control. I've seen it! When the wolfkin tracked me to the warrenary, they had other kin do the leg work. I thought maybe they'd been drugged or threatened, but this explains it." She looked pleadingly to Gallant, hoping for confirmation. The words made sense to her, but Jett was achingly aware of her own lack of knowledge in the field. Could this gene splicing really result in such a thing?

"It could make kin more receptive to the pack mentality, more responsive to the commands of a perceived alpha." Gallant nodded thoughtfully, glancing back at the screen. "I'd need to read through the rest of the data to be sure, but it makes sense from everything you've told me. It would take a long time, but if it was done correctly, they could, in theory, actually structure Wildhearth into one big pack, with the wolfkin as the alpha species." She pinched the bridge of her snout for a moment, shaking her head. "Fangs, this is insane."

Jett opened her mouth to reply when a sudden deafening explosion thundered through the workshop. She let out a yelp and lunged towards the block drive, instinctively shielding the precious data with her body as a shockwave shook the ground beneath her paws. Seconds passed. Then she heard voices outside the door, rising in a crescendo of panic, the lights outside the office flickering worryingly. She looked around in bafflement, but Rapid and his guards were already moving for the door.

One of them, a stocky male with burnt red fur, shoved it open, waited for a second, and then ducked out with his armbow raised. He made it two steps before he collapsed to the ground screeching in pain, clutching at his calf where a bolt had thudded into him.

"Flaming piss'n'fangs!" Rapid spluttered in fury as he lunged forward, grabbing the howling guard by the scruff of his neckfur and heaving him back inside. Twisting his head around as he moved, he pointed at them with his axe.

"Pack up that drive—looks like your wolfkin buddies finally caught up to ya!"