Agent Herschler woke up in the projection creche, in the collapsed and smoke-filled ruins beneath Orpheus Group Headquarters. The bulletproof plastic canopy of the creche was cracked and clouded; a beam from the ceiling had fallen across it, trapping Herschler inside. Neel Shivani lay some distance away, unconscious.
Herschler found that he was somehow "balanced" between a state of projecting and being in corpus. He sensed that with a bit of effort, he might be able to project himself — and then he could puppeteer Shivani's body, and perhaps move the girder. However, he could not be sure what would happen to his own body if he left it without a working creche; and if Shivani did not regain consciousness, he had no way of reintegrating... wary of the risks, Herschler chose to remain in his own body, and thus trapped in the creche.
He began to yell for help.
Meanwhile, Agent MacMillian came to in another portion of the building. The floor had collapsed beneath her, dumping her into a sub-basement level. Crawling through the wreckage, she came upon another Orpheus employee who had survived the blast. Together, they began to search for a way out.
They climbed up to the next level and found a relatively undamaged stairway. At the top of the stairs they heard voices, and flashlight beams stabbed down through the dust and smoke. The other woman called out for help, but MacMillian was cautious. She dragged her companion into a shadowed corner and waited for the supposed rescuers to come to them.
There were four of them, decked out in black body armor, riot helmets, respirators, and Kirlian "ghost-vision" goggles. They carried silenced submachineguns and moved in tactical formation, covering all points with their weapons as they came down the stairs. They passed MacMillian's hiding spot, but the one covering their rear looked in their direction, shouted, "Targets!" and brought his weapon up. The wall behind MacMillian suddenly crumbled, and she and the other woman fell backwards into darkness even as the MP-5 chattered after them.
Meanwhile, in Agent Lane's car somewhere just north of the City, Rook aimed his pistol at Agent Lane's head. Agent Watts quick-projected, grabbed Lane, and flickered them both into the middle of a snowy field, half a mile due east.
Back at the car, Rook's goons opened fire on the car with shotguns — but the only body inside it was Watts'.
Watts was partially manifested, so Lane was able to see parts of his ectoplasmic form shred away as the shells tore into Watt's body. Watts opened his mouth as if to say something, then abruptly faded away, leaving Lane alone in the field.
Meanwhile, Agent Morrisson had recently returned from a trip abroad, and was hoping to get to Headquarters in time for the party. He found several black vans parked in front of the entry gate, and in the distance the Orpheus building appeared to be in flames. A man in a dark suit approached Morrisson's car and told him that there had been an accident; the fire department was handling it, but in the meantime all civilians must stay clear of the area.
Morrisson insisted on being allowed to approach the site, and managed to intimidate the man enough that he left to talk to one of his superiors. Soon a second man came over and told Morrisson that he would have to leave his car at the entry gate, but they would accompany him to the building on foot. Morrisson agreed.
Halfway up the long drive, the man accompanying Morrisson pulled a gun. Thinking quickly, Morrisson projected, morphosed into attack form, manifested physically, and dispatched his would-be assailant. He then returned to his body and hid in some nearby bushes as the rest of the black suits spread out to search for him. Projecting once more, he made his way invisibly towards the ruins of Orpheus.
Agent Watts was back in the space shuttle, beginning reentry. Flames licked the edges of the viewports as the atmosphere outside the craft began to heat up. The instruments were going crazy; the heat shielding had malfunctioned; the shuttle was beginning to burn. Lights flashed and warning indicators buzzed. The compartment began to shake, and Watts could smell smoke.
He heard a tapping noise coming from outside the viewport. It was his brother, Daniel Watts, clinging to the outside of the shuttle and banging on the glass to be let in. Daniel's hair and clothes were lashing wildly in the wind, and his skin was beginning to burn, pulilng away from his face.
Watts grabbed a fire extinguisher and tried to smash the viewport, but the glass was unbreakable. He staggered to the emergency hatch and blew the bolts. The hatch tore away from the body of the shuttle, and instantly Watts was sucked out into the upper atmosphere.
In the ruined projection room underneath Orpheus Headquarters, Neel Shivani finally came round. Though injured and disoriented, he managed to smash one end of the plexiglas canopy, allowing Herschler to wriggle out of the creche. Shivani then collapsed, bleeding heavily from a gash in his side.
Herschler dug through the rubble until he found a first-aid kit among the scattered and broken medical equipment, and began treating Shivani's wound.
Elsewhere, Agent MacMillian lay amidst the rubble, getting her breath back. She had fallen some twenty feet, landing on the body of the other woman, who was already dead before she hit the ground from the cleanup team's bullets.
Flashlight beams stabbed down from above, and MacMillian rolled over into the shadows. She could hear them talking amongst themselves, their voices distorted through the gasmasks. "—Flush her out?" "—No, you'll bring the whole structure down on top of us. Keep going; we're nearly at target."
She picked her way over piles of broken concrete and through tangles of sparking electrical cable. Down one half-collapsed corridor, she spied the cleanup team around the door to what had been the secure server room. One of the men was cutting through the slab of brushed steel with an acetylene torch. MacMillian headed in the other direction.
She came to a place where the corridor was blocked by rubble. Through a gap between two bent girders, she could see Herschler and Shivani. She and Herschler could communicate through the gap, but neither one was strong enough to move the debris.
North of town, Agent Lane stumbled through the snow until he reached Madley Hills Forest Preserve. In the visitor's center parking lot, he discovered Scott Archer, lying in the snow next to a bank of pay-phones, shot through the head. Lane searched Archer's body, found his car keys and a scrap of paper in his shirt pocket, a four-digit number scribbled across it.
The radio in Archer's car squawked to life before he even turned on the ignition. Radio Free Death's voice crackled through the static. "Who's receiving this? Are you there? Are you okay? What's happened?"
Lane told him to locate as many other Orpheus Agents as he could find and lead them to a rendez-vous point to regroup. Then he gunned the engine and drove back to the City as fast as Archer's car would go.
On the grounds outside Orpheus Headquarters, Agent Morrisson crept towards the collapsed and burning building. He spied several fire trucks parked nearby, but no one seemed to be interested in putting out the fire. Operatives, some in body armor and holding automatic weapons, stood in a defensive perimeter around the site.
Morrisson phased down through the ground, dropping into a sublevel of the underground parking garage. The access tunnel from parking to the main building was choked with smoke and debris, but otherwise the rest of the area seemed clear. As Morrisson pondered his next move, the radio in a nearby car switched itself on. It was Radio Free Death.
With the help of Radio Free Death, Morrisson made his way through the basement level of the building to the projection room, to find Herschler and Shivani, and MacMillian trapped behind the collapsed wall. However, approaching fast from the opposite direction were half a dozen fetch-hound spectres, scuttling along the walls and ceiling and sniffing for any signs of vitality expenditure.
Morrisson was projected, and could not move the rubble blocking the passage. Herschler and MacMillian were both sleeper-class agents, and could not project on their own. The group was trapped.
Agent Watts fell at hideous speeds through the upper atmosphere. Friction burned the flesh from his bones and blackened his skeleton. His eyes melted, but still he could see the dark shapes of continents growing larger; the constellations of lights along the northwestern coast of the U.S.; the great, glowing, corpse-light blotch of the City, rising up to meet him.
He could see lights surrounding Orpheus Group Headquarters. It seemed to be on fire.
Watts plunged down through the wreckage, phasing through broken floors until he finally came to a stop inside the projection room. Somehow, without speaking he seemed to know exactly what the situation required. He enshrouded Agent MacMillian, pulled her through the wall of debris, then flickered everyone — himself, MacMillian, Herschler, Shivani, and Morrisson — out of the building, beyond the edge of the property. After a quick return trip for Morrisson's body, the group made their escape.
They rendezvoused with Agent Lane in a cheap motel south of the City. Agent Watts, forever sundered from his body, stood apart, while the rest of the team huddled around the television, watching the news:
Fire crews and emergency rescue teams are still working around the clock after an explosion destroyed the offices of Orpheus Group, a local consultnig company located in the Technology Row district.
"Police have released few details as yet. They have, however, divulged that Orpheus Group had been under investigation for their many connections to pigment drug trade in the City, and may have been responsible for the infamous Warehouse D poisoning last year. Police have not ruled out the possibility that last night's explosion may have been deliberate sabotage by one of Orpheus Group's own employees.
"Several Orpheus Group employees have not yet been found in the wreckage, and may be still at large. Viewers should be advised that all of these individuals are wanted for questioning and should be considered potentially dangerous. If you know anything about these people or their whereabouts, contact the police immediately.."
Photographs of their faces appeared on screen as each name was read aloud:
"Emma MacMillian... Daniel McGee... Holland Lane... Robert Herschler... Michael Watts... Brett Morrisson..."