With Rapid by her side, Jett stole through the lower levels of the compound, the low alarm of the wolfkin still shaking her ribs as she moved. Uncomfortable memories of her break-in at the enforcer headquarters in the city coalesced in her mind at the sound, but she did her best to ignore them, focussing on remembering the route they needed to take through these eerie hallways.

Given that the bearkin had been rampaging off in the opposite direction, whatever chaos had engulfed the facility was a long way from her right now. Hopefully that would drag enough guards away from the innards of the place. She wondered dimly if anyone here had made any kind of connection between the series of security incidents and a possible group of interlopers. How common was it for one of those enraged subjects to get loose? She imagined the outbreaks of violence from hundreds of downtrodden citykin couldn't have been that uncommon.

With her longclaw concealed beneath her stolen lab coat, she directed Rapid, letting the wily criminal take the lead as they picked their way deep into the bowels of the structure, making their way towards an access panel for the maintenance shafts. From there she'd scribbled a set of directions through the network that would bring them into the core room.

They went several minutes without seeing another soul, deliberately skirting away from the labs that would be fully staffed, sacrificing speed for stealth as they took a circuitous route through the narrow, sterile passages. As they paused at a corner, however, the alarm suddenly shut off and Jett swallowed hard. That meant some level of order had been restored; the bearkin dead or captured once again.

"Better pick up the pace, eh?" Rapid murmured.

She nodded, glancing furtively back down the passage, expecting wolfkin guards to emerge at any moment. For the moment it remained mercifully empty but the growing tingle of unease didn't leave her, fur prickling up her spine as the scampered onward. They dodged a pair of fast moving technicians, both too engrossed in arguing over technical specs as they walked to notice Jett and Rapid skulking in an adjoining passage. With the sound of steps receding into the distance, the pair scuttled down the hallway the techs had come from, just one more turn away from the access panel that would get them into maintenance shafts. Rapid led the way, rounding the final bend.

"Hold up," he hissed suddenly, jerking back and pressing his body up against the wall, urgently flapping a paw for Jett to do the same. Doing as she was bidden, she slid up alongside him, heart in her throat.

"What is it?"

"Problem." He flicked his head to the corridor beyond. "Got a guard on the hatch."

"Fangs," Jett cursed. "Just one?"

"Looks like it." The axe appeared from beneath Rapid's coat, the blade smeared gore red with blood. "I say we take our chances."

"You mean kill him?"

"Got a better idea?"

She didn't. The hatch was the only way they stood any chance of even getting close to the data core in one piece. Sucking a breath in through her teeth, she silently slid her longclaw from its sheathe.

"Follow me. If we rush him we can get him by surprise."

Jett shook her head. "No, you stay here. I can get close." She tugged at the collar of her lab coat. "Just wait. If I get into trouble... well you'll know. Come running."

Rapid bristled, clearly uncomfortable with letting her approach the wolfkin alone, but the sense of the plan cut through any objections he might have had. His claws flexed around the axe-haft until eventually he nodded.

Squaring her shoulders, Jett smoothed down her headfur and tucked the knife beneath her coat, jamming her paws into the pockets and hugging it tight to her slight frame. With her heart racing, she steeled herself and stepped out.

The guard's head instantly snapped towards her, his eyes narrowing in suspicion at the lone foxkin figure that came stumbling into his domain. Forcing down her fear, Jett met his gaze and raised a paw, holding the other tight against her side as though injured.

"Please," she panted breathlessly. "Help, that thing got loose..."

The wolfkin pivoted towards her, a flash on confusion on his face. He took a step towards her, still uncertain, paw straying towards the stun truncheon at his belt.

"This is a restricted area," he growled. "Tech and Security only. The bearkin's been subdued. You should be back to your duties."

"It tried to kill me!" Jett exclaimed shrilly, still walking towards him. "I just... is there someone that can escort me back to the lab? I'm not-,"

"Fangs, we're not your nursemaids," the guard snarled contemptuously. He pointed past her. "Turn around and get back to work before I have you reported. You wanna join those kin?"

"No, no, no! I just..."

She was just steps away now. In a swift, leaping motion Jett burst forward, whipping her knife free and aiming the blade for the wolfkin's heart.

To her shock he reacted in time, years of violence and training instilling an instinctive response as the guard wrenched his body sideways and lashed out with one paw. He struck her wrist, turning the blade off target. Instead of killing him, the blade sank into his shoulder, extracting a snarl of pain but little else. In the blink of an eye his other paw swung hard into her gut knocking the wind from her and sending her staggering back.

Jett spluttered for breath, trying to reset her feet and raise her knife again. In front of her the wolfkin's eyes flared with fury, his injured arm hanging down by his side with blood flowing from the wound in his shoulder. With his free paw he tore his stun-baton loose and swung at her. She only just stepped out of range, the cracking tip fizzing through the air inches from her chest.

Too late she realised that the swipe was only to buy space as he spun away from her, bounding for the maintenance hatch and the howl-net port embedded in the wall beside it.

The wolfkin reached for the receiver.

There was a flash of white in her peripheral vision.

Flying past her with a wild yell, Rapid swung his axe and hacked the guard's paw off at the wrist. Blood fountained through the air and the wolfkin unleashed a nerve-jangling screech of pain. He tumbled backwards, yowling and clutching at the bloodied stump, eyes wide with shock and agony. His cries were cut short as Rapid stepped forward, crunching the axe-head into his throat with a snarl.

Ripping the axe free with a nonchalant snort, Rapid turned to her, pointing at the maintenance hatch with his weapon. "You better get that open 'fore someone wanders by."

She stared at the corpse, momentarily dumbstruck by Rapid's sheer brutality. The shock didn't last, however, as the memories of why they were here; what they had seen and what they had to do came rushing back. Swallowing down her nausea and trying to ignore the coppery tang of fresh blood, she shed the burdensome lab coat and tossed it carelessly aside. Stepping gingerly around the rivulets of crimson working their way across the floor, she snapped the panel open with her knife and sliced through a pair of wires.

The simple lock disengaged with a clunk, and she hauled the square panel of the maintenance hatch open. A tight passage maybe a meter square opened up before them, linking into the complex system of vents and air scrubbers that filled the facility. Sparing the dead guard one last uneasy glance, Jett clambered inside.

***

They traversed the maintenance crawlways with care, knowing that it was possible they might run into a technician in these tight confines. She kept her knife close, breathing shallowly, paranoia coiling around her. The enormity of where they were and what they were doing threatened to wash over her at any moment. An insignificant foxkin like her fighting to quite possibly turn the government of Wildhearth upside down – it seemed insane.

Yet her she was, in the den of the wolves, just a few more passages away from the prize that would let her put an end to this place.

"Toasty in here," Rapid commented as they moved, the growing heat making him pant lightly to keep his body cool.

"Just means we're doing in the right direction," Jett told him, not looking back. A rig large and powerful enough to handle the sheer volume of data that flowed through this place would need a formidable cooling system, and there weren't a lot of places for that excess heat to go. It would be diffused into vents in the room and eventually carried out into the night air. "According to the schematic," she whispered. "There's a ceiling access vent in the next passage."

"Good – I'm starting to feel like a fastpack meat fry."

Jett allowed herself a faint smirk as she turned the final corner, scanning for any sign of life. She saw nothing but the metal walls and a square grate in the floor. The heat intensified as she approached, her tongue lolling out as her body reacted to the increased temperature. Gingerly, she extended her paw out over the vent.

Hot air prickled her fur and she pulled back, nodding. "This is it." She leaned close, examining the edged. Four bolts lined each side of the square, fixed tightly in place with the bolt-heads facing down into the room. "It's screwed in tight – we won't be able to undo the bolts."

"Then just cut it and get us in there," Rapid grunted.

Shooting her companion an irritated glance, Jett freed the cutter from her pack and set to work, ignoring the bolts and quickly melting a square along the perimeter of the grate. As she reached the final edge she beckoned Rapid forward.

"Get a hold of the grate," she instructed hoarsely. "Don't let it fall in when I finish."

The albino scuttled sideways until he crouched at the opposite side of the vent and slipped both paws through the small gaps in the metal. Secure, he gave her a stiff nod, and she swept the blue flame of the cutter along the final section of metal.

It came free with ease. With a deftness she wouldn't have expected from him, Rapid gently eased the section of grating out of the way, laying it down on the floor of the maintenance passage silently. They both sat there for a moment, staring at the hole in silence. Jett took a deep breath, shaking her head violently from side to side to clear her head before taking a grip of the edge and levering herself inside.

Jett gasped at the sudden wall of cold that engulfed her as she dropped into the room, her paws striking icy metallic floor plates. Contrasting sharply to heat of the vents, the abrupt shift left her momentarily transfixed as her body tried to catch up. The heat was being sucked up and out of this room with fearsome efficiency, creating a hot vortex at the vents themselves but leaving the room behind nothing short of frigid.

Shuddering, she stepped aside as Rapid dropped down after her. He let out a hiss of surprise, a mist of breath briefly hiding his face from view.

"F-fangs!" he stammered, hunching his shoulders against the cold. "Out of the oven and into the freezer, eh?"

Jett nodded, trying to ignore the cold as she looked around to get her bearings. They were surrounded by a veritable labyrinth of cooling and processing stacks that hummed and crackled, all illuminated in pale blue. Lights blinked and twinkled, sending spears of colour through her misty breaths. Thick power cables snaked from the bases of the stacks, all seeming to converge to a central point in the room. She tapped Rapid on the shoulder, pointing to them. He glanced down; back to her. Shrugged.

"Guess we follow the cables."

Hunkering low, Jett crept silently along in the shadow of the stacks, knife ready to swing at a moment's notice. Rapid slithered along behind her, his piercing pink eyes flickering left and right for any sign of movement. She inhaled sharply and slid to the side behind one of the stacks as a wolfkin technician ambled by, his arms full with a heavy toolkit, not so much as glancing left or right.

She pressed a claw to her lips, looking to Rapid. He nodded, though his axe was held back, ready to swing and kill anyone unfortunate enough to stumble across them in a single blow. They waited for a moment to make sure the technician was gone – the buzz and hum of the stacks made it difficult to discern footfalls in the core room.

Eventually she decided they could wait no longer and the two foxkin continued their creeping advance along the power cables, weaving through the stacks until they emerged into a clearing in the technological forest. Jett's jaw dropped at what awaited them.

The serried ranks of cooling and processing towers formed a huge, tightly packed circle around the clearing, and dead centre, suspended on a lattice of reinforced metal hung the data core of the Belforra facility. The obsidian sphere glittered with lights, easily five meters across and surrounded by what looked like a moat of swirling, icy fog, only accessible by four elevated walkways arranged in a cross shape. Those bridges reached a slim ringed platform around the sphere's centre, where Jett could see banks of screens and jack-ports. Monitors embedded into the skin of the machine vomited huge showers of numbers as the core processed the torrents of data flooding into it.

Beneath the gangways she saw swirls of ethereal smoke and as they drew closer a bitter cold began to seep into her bones. Jett took a breath and peered over the edge.

"What is it?" Rapid murmured uneasily, not approaching the whorls of smoke.

"I think its some kind of liquid coolant for the core," she replied, easing her head away from the freezing air. "Below freezing."

Her companion gave a nervous chuckle. "Best not fall over the rails then."

"You can say that again." Jett glanced left and right for any sign of the technicians that she knew were somewhere in the maze. At the moment any nearby wolfkin remained obscured by the stacks. They had a window of opportunity.

"I'm going over," she told him as she moved over to the closest walkway, taking a grip on the guard rails with both paws. "Watch my back. One of those techs will probably be swinging back here soon to check up on the core."

"I gotcha covered." Giving his axe a murderous twirl, Rapid slithered back into the shadows between rows, his eyes glinting dangerously. He wanted more blood – that much seemed clear.

Steeling her nerves, Jett stepped out. With her eyes fixed on the core she moved slowly and methodically, step by step on the narrow walkway. Her footpaws clung easily to a grippy canvas-like material that had been fitted to the floor to ensure the technicians could traverse the core safely. She shivered violently as the cold swelled up around her, forcing herself not to look into the smokey void on either side of the rails. Anyone who fell into a bath of whatever freezing coolant lay below would not be coming back.

Jett exhaled a breath of relief as she stepped onto the thin platform, entering a bubble of relative warmth so close to the core. Picking out a jack-port, she glanced back over her shoulder once before bundling the block-drive out of her pack. Her little cube had an impressive capacity, but it was little more than a bucket compared to the oceanic mass of the Belforra core. The tech-breaker in her itched to get a look at the machine's inner workings.

Focus. Unspooling a cable, she reached forward to connect the block-drive.

Then the lights went out and the alarms started blaring again.