Chapter 12 - Time to Take on the Whole Wide World

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Fleur delivered the rig on time, and Jett was waiting for her.

The felkin swirled into the foyer like some kind of ethereal spirit, the silk trail of a fashionable overshawl flowing behind her as she walked. She moved with a feral confidence, her steps strident and brisk.

Behind her, a burly, squat-framed beaverkin struggled his way through the door, a sphere-wheeled cart trailing behind him, currently sealed shut to protect the precious rig within from the elements and any wandering claws in the district. Following in Fleur's wake, he pulled it to a halt at the reception, breathing heavily after lugging the thing through the streets, leaning on the counter as a chuckling Hiyfa greeted them.

"Ahy, whatcha got that poor boy draggin' through my house today, Fleur?" she laughed, nodding to the cart.

"Rig for one of your lodgers," Fleur told her, patting the beaverkin on his back as he caught his breath.

"What room?"

"She didn't say. Just told me to bring it here. She's new, a foxkin girl—pretty little thing too."

Jett rolled her eyes and stepped from the shadows across the foyer, padding quietly towards the reception desk. Hiyfa spotted her over Fleur's shoulder and grinned. It took the felkin a moment to realise why before she whirled around.

"Ah, there she is!"

"Hi," she said, giving Fleur a withering look.

"Put yer claws in it there, girl!" Hiyfa chuckled as she sat back down behind the reception desk.

Fleur gestured to the cart, smiling impishly. "Got the rig, just like you said. Oh, and this is Dosker—he helps me with the local deliveries."

"Please to meetcha," Dosker grunted, still leaning on the reception desk, his bristly brown fur ruffled from the effort of dragging the cart.

"Looks like you get all the fun jobs," Jett replied wryly.

Fleur let out a short, delicate laugh before she turned and typed a code into the metal casket's locking keypad. It opened with a hiss, just enough for her to hook her claws under the lid and push it up to reveal the Calibre.

Jett felt a tremor of anticipation at the sight of the glossy, matte finish of the machine, the main structure surrounded by the extras she requested. Nodding without looking at her, she fished into her pockets for the rest of the barkstamps and handed them over, her eyes alight with possibilities.

"Thanks," she said absently, still only half paying attention to Fleur. "Unload it here. I'll take it up the room myself."

"You sure? We can—"

"I'm sure." Jett looked at her sharply, hoping that would be sufficient to stop her friend from making any gallant offers. Fleur held her gaze, an expression of surprise flickering over her face for an instant before her cheery demeanour reasserted itself, and she cracked a smile.

"Okay then. You have any problems with the rig, you let me know—the stuff I sell is guaranteed. You know where to find me."

"I'm sure I'll see you around."

She stepped back to give the felkin space to safely remove the computing rig from the confines of the cart. Fleur moved with the easy deftness of an expert as she handled the gear, depositing it on the reception desk in a matter of moments, arranged exactly as it had been within the casket. Then she closed the cart up and took hold of the handle with one paw, extending the other.

"Well, good luck with...whatever it is you're doing." She beamed so happily that Jett couldn't keep a smile off her face as she shook paws with the felkin. Their grips stayed for a moment, and Jett felt a sudden surge of relief in her chest as she looked into Fleur's eyes. She still had friends in this world, despite all the horror and the hurt that had crashed down upon her over the past few days.

With a slight tug, she pulled Fleur forward into a hug. "I'll be in touch." She clung on for a couple of seconds longer, feeling the felkin's claws dig gently into her back as the embrace was returned. At length, they stepped apart, and Fleur looked like she wanted to say something more. In the end, though, it seemed the words wouldn't coalesce, and she simply smiled and turned away.

Jett watched her glide out of the warrenary, Dosker trundling along behind her with the empty cart. Then she turned her attention to her new gear. Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her arms around the bulky cuboid of the main monitor and heaved it off the countertop with a grunt of exertion.

"Can you keep an eye on this stuff?" she strained out to Hiyfa. "This is gonna take a couple of trips."

The matronly quillkin flapped a paw at her. "Ahy, don't you worry yourself. Just get this off my desk, eh?"

***

It took three trips up and down the warrenary stairs before Jett had transferred the entire rig to her room. Once there, she locked the door and set about wiring the machine together. The main monitor squatted moodily on her desk, its black casing glinting in the light, with wires splurging from its rear sections to link to the power stacks, anti-hack module, and the scent spoofer that would keep inquisitive programs from tracing her. Opening up the casing with a screwdriver, it was the work of a few deft moments to patch the Ramfold logic boards into the guts of the computer to ramp up its operating potential.

A patch job by her standards, it was a formidable machine by most people's.

Slotting the flat rectangular plug into the room's howl-net port, Jett fired up the computer, feeling a pang of longing for the unmatched processing power of her old rig. This would just have to do for now, though, and she rattled through the start-up process on the heavy keys.

The screen flared to life, and she took a deep breath.

Time to fight back.

After working through the start-up and customising a handful of the machine's software functions to better suit her needs, she buckled down to the first phase of what she loosely considered to be a plan. But where to start? How did one go about tracking down a pack of wolfkin killers? How would she find what they were trying to hide?

Politics, she reminded herself. The sheer determination with which the wolfkin had pursued their goals told her they were protecting something that could not see the light of day. Wolfkin ran the city—at least at the moment—so it stood to reason they would be protecting that position of power. Their special enforcers did not come out to districts like hers. Something in that block drive threatened them.

She idly scratched behind her ear with one claw before smoothing her headfur down and leaning into the screen. So follow the politics. Someone in the Conclave assembly had something to hide, and they were willing to kill for it. She just needed to find out what. Her claws flickered across the thick keys, and she brought up the governmental affairs overview.

Blocky green text scrolled past pixelated images of the Conclave itself. Jett had never seen it in person—never had a reason to even go near the place—and she squinted at the hive-like building with interest. Even in the blurry details of the picture, she could see the elaborate spiralling balconies that wound their way up the tightly clustered towers. It reared up out of the surrounding buildings, several stories higher than anything nearby in the central district.

She knew the basics of political operation more by necessity than by design. All the kin in the city voted to designate groups of individuals to represent their interests—a simple enough system marred by a certain degree of apathy that Jett was as guilty of as the next. The higher the population, the more votes they had and the more individuals they could designate to join the Conclave's ruling body.

At least, that was the idea.

Over the years, the wolfkin had swelled their ranks through a simple tactic of being ruthlessly efficient. Some kin in the city were happy to have someone from a different background do the heavy lifting—to do the difficult and grinding job that kept the behemoth of the city running—and the wolfkin filled that void for many. They'd proven themselves so thoroughly that despite being a minority of Wildhearth's population, they had, by a narrow margin, the most designates in the Conclave, keeping them in a position of uneasy power. It had been that way for almost as long as Jett had been alive. She'd never questioned it until now. Until now, she'd been one of the people happy to leave them to it.

Then her mind flickered back to the felkin, the plushy dressed, skittish felkin that caused all this. He'd certainly had the bearing and dress of a designate. A political refugee, maybe? Had he gotten on the wrong side of the wolfkin faction?

It seemed as good a place to start as any. She clacked away on the keys, moving through the Conclave's databases, searching for the full record of designates assigned to the place. Her head sagged forward slightly when she discovered over twelve-hundred names spilling down the screen in unapologetic green.

"Fangs," she muttered, clicking through to a subscreen, searching for a little more data. Going deeper narrowed the search a bit, as now the designates had their kin listed alongside them, along with the date of election and a handful of other bolt-ons that Jett didn't care about. She scrolled until she found the felkin segment of the list, filtering out the others and leaving her still with around two hundred listings to wade through, and they didn't have pictures next to the records on her current screen.

Revenge, as it happened, started out quite boring. Jett clicked her way through each individual record, examining them briefly to see if they matched up with her encounter. The image grabs of their faces were a little better defined than the wider shots of the Conclave but still left her with a degree of uncertainty that she forced aside. Just keep looking.

In the end, it wasn't the portraits that triggered her memory, but a location. Scrolling through a possible file, her gaze snagged on the district the felkin represented—a few tram stops closer to the Silk than her own. She frowned and scrolled back up to examine the image again.

Zanzihar—a felkin designate. She couldn't be one hundred percent sure it was him, but he looked about right and, according to the accompanying vote log, hadn't attended any Conclave sessions for nearly two weeks. That stacked up with someone trying to drop off the radar. But she noticed another oddity in the felkin's file—he seemed to be listed as a government representative, a Sub-Master of Water and Power Distribution Coordination.

Quite a mouthful.

"Who did you pay off?" she murmured. Wolfkin had more than enough designates to fill the government posts necessary. Handing out even minor ministerial jobs to other groups didn't fit, but here it was in the bold, unarguable green of the government affairs database.

That only fuelled her certainty that this mess led right back to the damned wolfkin in government. Maybe this poor sack of fur had bumbled across something that they wanted to keep to themselves, and he tried to get it out. But a government official couldn't just vanish, no matter how good the wolfkin on-scene cover-up had been. There would be some trace of him. She quickly backed her way out of the government database and onto the citywide announcements board—a fairly loose collection of articles and features that one could call "news," though it was hardly a comprehensive account of the goings on in the city.

Still, a member of the government turning up dead would probably be hard to miss, even for these jokers. Sure enough, after a few minutes of trawling, she found a report from yesterday with Zanzihar's face plastered all over it, headlined in bold: FELKIN DESIGNATE FOUND DEAD IN PALHARR DISTRICT.

Jett smirked at the directness and opened up the article. Once she started reading, however, the smirk quickly disappeared. Before long, she realised that the cover-up was in full swing already, and it made her grind her teeth together in frustration as she read through the reports on the incident. The felkin's body had turned up in a refuse site, discovered by a pair of unfortunate night workers, but that's where things took a savage twist away from any semblance of fact.

While Designate Zanzihar's financial problems were well-known, none of us truly expected they could manifest in such a shocking fashion. Vulkin watchguards from the local guard pack have given little information away, but it's understood that the prime culprits for the vicious attack are the felkin bootlegger gangs of the outer spirals. We can only speculate as to the Designate's relationship with these individuals, but it is a dark state of affairs when one of the city's governance cannot walk the streets safely.

High Alpha Threndarr confirmed he would be supporting the local guard pack by any means necessary, even deploying a unit of the wolfkin special enforcers to aid in tracking down Designate Zanzihar's killers. He has stated that this lawlessness will not go unpunished, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice.

Jett sat back in her chair for a moment, her face pinched with disgust as she read the words. In the back of her mind, she knew she should have expected it. It's not as if the wolfkin would be taking responsibility for the murder, but seeing the falsehood written down so brazenly when she knew what had happened still stung. An image of High Alpha Threndarr appended the article, the venerable wolfkin speaking from a lectern, his fur silver with age but having lost none of his powerful bulk.

She noticed a connecting article at the bottom of the entry, and her stomach twisted at the headline. A voice in the back of her mind told her not to open it, but in the end, she couldn't stop herself. She clicked through.

FOXKIN FAMILY SLAIN – FELKIN GANGS SUSPECTED

Her claws bit into the wood of the desk as she read on, muscles tensing and hackles rising as more lies poured down the screen. The article compounded things by linking the death of her family to murdered felkin, punting some ludicrous line about bootleggers and drug gangs. She knew exactly how much influence those groups held in her home district and doubted many who lived there would be swallowing this smokescreen either.

But stuck in this room, she could do nothing about it. Not yet.

She exhaled a calming breath and kept going, tallying the facts in her head and trying to keep the emotions out of her mind for now. So they murdered the felkin and covered it up. They'd also killed her family; covered that up too. Curiously, though, there was no mention of her in the article as either survivor or fugitive.

By now, the two wolfkin must have reported her survival to their superiors, but nothing in the articles acknowledged her existence. Why leave that out? They could have ignited a full hunt for her across the city, plastered her face on news articles and shop windows, but they hadn't.

They wanted her bundled away quietly, she realised. Whatever it was that she'd stumbled into, the wolfkin did not want the city getting even the slightest sniff of it. If they got their way, this would be swept into the shadows and her along with it.

Well, good luck with that.

She circled her thoughts back to Zanzihar's ill-fated demise. His position in the government was bizarre, and it seemed to have gotten him killed. Were there others that the wolfkin had elevated to similar positions? Eyes narrow in thought, she rattled back through directories to the Conclave's database and list of designates. This time she filtered through to list the foxkin representatives. The smallest group by some margin, her people were not considered terribly political—not an assessment she could really disagree with, given she'd never even bothered to vote.

It took a little trawling, but before long, she found what she was looking for. Listed as a Sub-Master of Housing & Resettlement was a foxkin named Fisker.

"And just who are you, friend?" Jett murmured, cocking her head quizzically to one side as she examined the portrait. A foxkin from a district halfway across the city, even his portrait looked untrustworthy, his features sharp, eyes narrow, and a smear of dark headfur slicked back over his skull. His record was an unremarkable beige of sporadic vote attendance, a handful of dull speeches, and three re-elections because nobody cared enough to stand against him. All things considered, he was a political nobody.

And yet, he had a government position too.

It would appear the wolfkin seemed to be embarking on a new inclusive initiative, she thought dryly. This Fisker looked like a snake, skating by on a cushy salary and doing the bare minimum to keep himself relevant to the people he was supposed to be representing—she knew the type. The wolfkin could've happily bought his soul if they had the money.

Jett folded her arms, lounging back in the seat as she examined Fisker's profile. Whatever process had landed the dead felkin in government looked to have been applied to this little opportunist too. She quickly decided it would be good to have a little chat with Fisker.

Then someone knocked on her door.


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