Bozzie and Agent Herschler met in a secluded alley. Bozzie reported that he had good news or bad news, depending on how you looked at it: Phillip Nash was dead. He had shot himself in the mouth with his own revolver while standing in front of his bathroom mirror.
Bozzie mentioned two odd details he had come across in the police reports. First, Nash had apparently tampered with the trigger mechanism of his gun, so that it could be fired by simply pulling back and releasing the hammer, without touching the trigger. Second, Bozzie had nearly been caught in the police station by officers who appeared to be able to see him. They didn't seem like pigment users, however. Bozzie's guess was that they had been puppeteered.
He then gave Herschler a small amount of pigment that he had managed to scare up, promised to keep watching his back, and left.
When Herschler got back to the latest safe house (a flop motel in Rivertown), Radio Free Death was in the middle of briefing Agents Watts, MacMillian, and Lane on the whereabouts of other Orpheus survivors. RFD had located Tommy Fabrosi entering St. Joseph of Arimathea Hospital less than an hour ago, badly injured. However, once he was inside, RFD had lost his "signal", and something in the hospital was blocking him from searching it.
Fearing that Fabrosi might be in imminent danger, the Agents decided to investigate immediately. Neel Shivani volunteered to stay at the safe house to watch Agent Lane's body and research any information on St. Joseph's that might be helpful.
The Agents arrived at St. Joseph's as evening was falling. Herschler and MacMillian were in body, but managed to sneak through the emergency room reception area with the help of Agent Lane puppeteering the nurse on duty. They contacted Shivani, who told them about an abandoned wing that had been slated for remodeling in the 50s. The project was shelved, the wing remained unused and empty, and the rest of the hospital was simply built around it. With Shivani's help, they made their way through increasingly empty hallways until they found it — the Our Lady of Fate Polio Ward, closed for repairs decades ago.
They made their way over floors covered with grit and broken plaster from the crumbling ceiling; past stripped, bare walls and empty door frames; around piles of broken furniture and huge, rusted iron lungs. Their connection to Radio Free Death sputtered and went silent. And as they turned the corner, someone put a gun to Herschler's head and said, "Freeze, this is loaded with ghost-shot."
To the Agents' surprise, it was Angela Delafont -- she had not recognized them in their disguises. Once she realized who they were, she welcomed the Agents with open arms, and urged them to call Shivani and the other survivors and bring them all in.
Delafont and the other survivors of the destruction of Orpheus Group had managed to set up a temporary refuge here in this abandoned polio ward. Living humans were easy to divert or scare off, and ghosts did not bother them due to an informal but long-standing tradition that held St. Joseph's Hospital as a "neutral zone" where ghosts do not trespass. Quickly, she gave them the run-down on the other survivors:
Tommy Fabrosi had survived the attack, but was recently injured by police in a reconaissance mission. They had spirited him back here and stabilized him with medicine and supplies stolen from the populated parts of the hospital. Li Xianjin was alive and in good health. Kate Hennisson was seriously injured in the attack — she lost her right hand and right eye — and was currently in a coma. The others cared for her and treated her with stolen medicine, but no one had any idea when or if she would wake up.
Walter Hanley was dead, but his ghost remained. Unfortunately, he existed only as a "blip" or "repeater" — mindlessly performing a simple task over and over again without rational thought or the ability to communicate. This appeared to be a side effect of the massive amounts of pigment he had internalized while working against the Tad Eccles-led management and, earlier, during his abduction by a pigment cult. The drug had crippled Hanley's ability to store and use vitality, rendering him a mindless shade. This came as a shock to Agent MacMillian, who had used pigment several times before, as well as to Delafont, who had used pigment often during her undercover work.
Although everyone was now aware of Matthew Podlowski's (unwilling) role in the attack and knew that he was dead, no one had seen any sign of his ghost. And no one had any idea what might have happened to the Board of Directors, or where they were now.
Beyond these, there were about 20 survivors hiding in the hospital, 3 of whom were sleeper-class projectors, the rest administrative and medical personnel. Adding to this the Agents and the survivors they had rescued from Autumnville Mall, that made some 35 survivors, out of over a hundred employees once employed by Orpheus Group.
Once they were settled, Delafont then briefed the Agents on their current situation and goals. They had security and supplies of a limited kind. Her biggest worry was that she had half a dozen sleeper-class Agents who were near useless because they had no projection creches.
She believed that, with Shivani's help, they could retrofit one of the old Eurydice suspended animation chambers to work as a projection creche. However, all of the various locations in which the Board of Directors had stashed the hibernation units had been compromised... except one. Underneath the war memorial statue in the middle of Millennium Square was a pumping chamber from the City's old, disused sewer system; hidden in that chamber were the last two surviving hibernation units. Delafont knew about the units but had made no attempt to recover them; she was certain that the area was being watched by their enemies, and she would not send in any Agents who could not handle an ambush.
Herschler, Watts, MacMillian, and Lane immediately put a plan into execution. Lane and Watts drove the enshrouded SWAT truck that they had liberated during a previous struggle with the police into the middle of Millennium Square, right up to the memorial statue. Meanwhile, Herschler and MacMillian accessed the sewers at a point where they intersected the old, brick-lined system. From there, they made their way to the pumping station, and Lane and Watts phased down through the ground to meet them.
The two hibernation units were right where Delafont said they would be. Inside one was an elderly man; in the other, a woman in her late 30s. A label attached to the lid read, "Rachel Sanderson."
Suddenly they were attacked by a spectre in the form of a stitched-together human skin stuffed with hundreds of tennis-ball-sized maggots, and a pack of fetch hounds. While the others held the spectres off, Agent Watts enshrouded each of the units in turn and transported them up through the ground, into the waiting truck.
Once the units were loaded, Agent Lane commandeered two of the many ex-military ghosts gathered around the war memorial and started driving the truck away with Watts and the two soldiers in back. A reaper flew down from a nearby rooftop and attacked the truck, stabbing its scythe blades through the roof, but Watts and the two soldiers were able to repel it with gunfire. Meanwhile, Watts and MacMillian, though grievously injured, managed to finish off the spectre in the sewers with ghost shot, and made their way back to the hospital.
After Watts had transferred the hibernation units to a second enshrouded vehicle to confuse further pursuit, they returned to Our Lady of Fate and resolidified the units. The Agents were treated for wounds and exhaustion, except for the ghost of Agent Watts, who simply found a secluded place to rest and rejuvenate his energy.
The two bodies inside were now beyond all possibility for cellular repair; the contract that Eurydice had made with them and their relatives — to keep them safe until they had developed the technology to revive them — was now irreparably broken. With a heavy heart, Shivani ordered the bodies removed and began the process of refitting the units for projection work.