"I must go."
    "Oh, no! Not that again. I'm not letting you out of this room until you tell us what's going on." I blocked his path.
    "They're going to let my parents go."
    "In exchange for?"
    "My life."
    "Do you believe them?" Scott asked pertinently.
    He looked unhappy.
    "One way or another, that's not going to happen," I said firmly.
    "I leave that to you... I feel sorry, this isn't your affair. If you could just make sure that they will be safe, I would appreciate it."
    "First of all, these are variant criminals, and that's what we do, so this is our affair," I reminded him. Never mind the minor matter of a suspended team charter.
    "We're certainly not going to let them kill anybody if I can stop them," Scott agreed.
    "They may kill them, if we try." Ute's voice remained soft.
    "So then we get them away, first," Scott shrugged.
    "Considering the nature of the people involved, the powers involved..." Promethean continued to hesitate.
    "If you two can fight your brother, I'll keep Kymrik busy," Scott offered, glancing between the two of us.
    "They will kill them at any hint that you are there," Ute protested.
    "If we get there before them?" I suggested.
    A lengthy discussion of tactics ensued. Scott's suggestion of using scuba gear was discarded, picked up again, and adopted. The tunnel complex had several entrances near the harbor. Scott, Lucky and I would all go underwater, well before the meeting was supposed to happen, and wait in concealment at the designated island—the one the Wuxia had been "born" on. I couldn't fly in with Lucky, thanks to that darn glow and the fact that we couldn't be sure when they would arrive..
    Promethean would come in at eleven o'clock, the set time for the meeting. We knew for certain they had two variants, no telling how many others, but we could be pretty sure the entire League wasn't around. When the fight broke out, I would grab the parents and get them off the island, drop them on the mainland and come back. Promethean seemed sure that his Denver friends would be able to take care of them in the future, if we could just get them out of the city. Scott would engage Kymrik; his own shapeshifting ability should prove enough to baffle the German's powers. Since Lucky tended to be unpredictable anyway and was off talking to Don Vincent while we hammered out the plan, she was assigned in absentia to loose cannon position. Even without his warning to the effect, no one had any intention of getting between Promethean and Marcus—I planned to stay as far from that fight as possible, myself, not being anxious to see myself turned into a piece of well-done toast.
    We speculated for a while on whether the Fourth Reich was after Promethean or the defectors to the League and got nowhere. Eventually Lucky wandered back in, looking slightly shaken.
    "What does Vincent have to say?" I asked.
    "Those weren't his fellows out in front."
    "Good."
    "They were WCL. I, um, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm being followed wherever I go, and I think it would be a good idea for me to do some questioning of the people following me."
    "We were discussing the same thing," Ute replied. "My brother said that if I let them kill me, they'll release my parents. An appointment has been made to let them do so."
    "They'll kill your parents anyway."
    "Yes."
    "That is the assumption we've reached," Scott agreed. "Question for you: do you know how to scuba dive?"
    "I guess so."
    "Excellent. If you're going to dodge on the question of what Don Vincent had to say, we're not going to press you," he went on briskly—news to me, I thought, but held my peace—"but do you have to go off and engage him in a death duel this evening or something?"
    "He's not after me," she sighed. "He's after the same people we're after."
    "Oh."
    "We can go deal with Hans' crisis, and they can shoot each other," I smiled.
    "Um, no," Lucky said.
    "No?"
    "We have to do the work. He's paralyzed."
    "I thought you said he was walking around?"
    "I don't know what's going on here," she admitted wearily.
    "Well if he's walking around, then he's not paralyzed." Maybe I was taking too simplistic a view of the situation, but it didn't seem to me that we had all that much reason to debate the issue.
    "I'm not sure that was anything but a facsimile of him, under his control in the same way that the Blood Board remote-controlled Scott's brother."
    I sighed. "Either way, he's got some kind of mobility."
    "He has a facsimile of himself walking around," she repeated.
    "Okay." Was I being stupid? "He's controlling it."
    "What time is it?" she wanted to know.
    "About one."
    "We have ten hours before we have to go—why are we scuba diving?" she asked suddenly.
    "We'll get to that in a second," Scott assured her. "Why, what are you doing?"
    "We're thinking of ways to get out to the island before they do, and to get out there without anyone seeing us," I summarized. We took turns explaining the plan and decided that we were all in agreement on how it would work.
    For once.
    I don't know why I continue to bother hoping, I really don't.

[Perspective switch: K. Robeson Enterprises]

    We killed time. Albert paged slowly through his sheafs of notes, continuing to apply "one of the greatest minds of our time" to whatever puzzle he was finding in my files. Scott sent a message through the computer to K. Robeson requesting that someone pick up some scuba gear and leave it near the tunnel entrance. Muse mentioned in his reply that they would have Maggie do it, that he was currently "blonde and German," and that the people watching the place weren't very bright, so our cover appeared intact.
    "Hans" and Lucky worked out. He spent most of the time telling her about his childhood and verbally flagellating himself. She listened.
    I called Mr. Taurus back.
    "Yes? How are you?"
    "Very well today," I lied. "How are you?"
    "Good, good. I've been going over that package that you sent."
    "Yes? Glad it arrived safely."
    "Oh, yes. The financial irregularities weren't so bad that they couldn't have gotten out of it, but people panicked, as people are wont to do, and the entire thing went down the drain." He tsked softly. "It's always depressing to see a promising business collapse, but as I said, it was just too morally risky for us to consider handling."
    I raised an eyebrow to myself. "Hm."
    "Yes?"
    "Anything interesting strike you? Any people who you know, disappeared, or who met bizarre fates?"

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