Agent Watts found himself wandering aimlessly through the Lady of Fate polio ward. Angela Delafont had set her laptop up to receive the local newsfeed; an anchorwoman was reporting that the recent shooting in Babbitt Plaza was the work of an Orpheus agent resisting arrest, and urged all viewers to report any sighting of any former Orpheus employee to the authorities immediately. The news then switched over to the growing crowd of people meditating on Babbitt Plaza's central mall. A reporter was interviewing Elison Daley, leader of the Church of the Children of the Embracing Mother:
"This is a peaceful demonstration, a spiritual demonstration," he said, with his characteristic broad smile. "We're not here to proselytize, or hand out pamphlets. We're just here to meditate, and hopefully spread some spiritual well-being throughout the heart of our City's financial district. You might hear us chanting a little," he laughed, "but we promise to do it quietly."
Watts moved on. He found himself in Walter Hanley's room. Hanley was running through his usual routine: sitting quietly on the bed, then leaping up and running to the window, mouthing Emma's name in a soundless scream. Then his spirit-body partially dissolved, flowed back to the bed, and reformed, and he would start the whole process over again.
Watts watched this for a while, then took out his enshrouded pistol and cocked it. "I'm sorry," he said, and started to point the gun at Hanley's head.
"What's going on?"
Watts turned; Sam the ghost was standing in the doorway.
"I'm putting himi out of his misery," said Watts. "You should leave."
"Is that what he wants?" Sam asked.
Watts said that he thought it was what Hanley would have wanted.
"Have you asked him?"
Watts didn't have a good answer to that.
"Didn't you guys used to... you know... help ghosts like him?" Sam asked. She proposed that they infuse Hanley with vitality and try to communicate with him, to find out what he needed to "move on." Watts did so, and Hanley gasped out, "Emma! I — I can't find Emma, she's trapped —"
"Emma's fine," Watts told him. "She's alive and she's okay."
"And Kate?" Hanley asked.
"...She's just fine too."
"Matthew..." Hanley cried, "I tried to stop him. But I was too slow. I was too slow."
"It's okay, man," said Watts. "You did the best you could. It's not your problem anymore; you can let go now."
Sam took Hanley's other hand and transfered her vitality into him. Hanley's spirit form filled with light, and he began to disintegrate into glowing corpuscles that floated up throught he ceiling. "Thank you," he whispered.
"Thanks," said Sam.
Watts nodded. "Hey kid," he said, "if you ever need any help 'moving on,' let me know."
"Uh, thanks."
Agent Watts joined Agents MacMillian, McGee, Herschler and Lane around a folding table in the main room of the polio ward. They were listening to an old clock-radio tuned to the voice of Radio Free Death
"We've been working together for a while now," the voice was saying, "and if I haven't always been very forthcoming about who I am or what I'm about, it's only because I put myself at risk everytime I broadcast. It's always possible for someone to trace me back to where I am, and it was a while before I could figure out who was on whose side, you know?"
But since MacMillian and Delafont had done him a good turn a couple of years back, he had been trying to help them in more significant ways, culminating with helping the survivors regroup after the destruction of Orpheus Group. Now he wanted to bring their trust "up to the next level."
"But the thing is, I need a favor first," he explained. The place I'm in right now, it's very safe, but it's also very tiny, and I can't get out without help. I need your help busting out of here."
The others agreed, but asked: where was he?
"Well, I guess you probably figured out by now that my name is Terrence Greene. I was on the Row with Bishop, Rook, and the others, back in 1998. And I died in the fire, same as the rest of them.
"And that's the thing, see. I'm still in there. I'm still inside Conquin State Prison.
Agent McGee tracked one of the Conquin Prison Guards to his home, and Agent Lane puppeteered him while he slept. During the night, Lane experienced the guard's nightmares of being slowly chopped to pieces; his anxieties about working in the prison; and his knowledge of the prison's layout. He skinrode the guard to work the next morning, and the other Agents followed in spiritus.
From the outside, Conquin Prison had been transformed into an enormous, bulbous hive. Spectres, tiny in the distance, crawled over the hive's outer surface and buzzed through the air. Inside, the prison's spirit reflection had been warped and tunneled-out by the activity of the spectres — there were doors and hallways in the ghost-world that had no matching counterpart in the physical. Skittering and scraping sounds came from these hallways, and a low buzzing sound vibrated the floor beneath their feet.
Agent Herschler found a patch of brickwork not completely covered by spectral excreta and attempted to haunt the entire prison complex. Although he was able to take control of the building, he could sense a large area that was somehow twisted out of sync with ordinary geometry, outside of his perception or control. Terrence Greene's basement room seemed to be right in the middle of this black space.
Using his control of the prison building to bypass guards and locked doors, Herschler guided the rest of the group to a stairwell leading down to where Greene was located. As they neared the bottom of the stairs, physical space and spiritual space began to merge. What they saw next could not be said to wholly exist in either.
Beyond the last step was a massive cavern of jagged, broken concrete, its inner walls crawling with hornet-like spectres. The cavern floor, hundreds of feet below, was not stone, but a vast, pulsing membrane. The silhouettes of hundreds of somethings pushing on the underside of that membrane were visible in the vermillion light. And hanging in the air across some 200 feet of empty space from the Agents was a rough, house-sized cube of concrete, attached to the ceiling by the tip of a huge stalactite. On the side of that cube was a tiny, yellow window; and waving to the Agents through that window was Radio Free Death.
Herschler activated a Nimbus fire in the hallway at the top of the stairs, hoping to lure some of the spectres out with an expenditure of vitality. Hundreds of spectres responded, rising up in a swarm towards the Agents. MacMillian captivated dozens of them with her Beckon emanation, but that still left hundreds more in the space beyond, growing more and more agitated as the projectors continued to burn vitality.
Agent Watts then pulled a folded firehose from the wall, tied it around his waist, jumped out into the cavern, and flickered across the intervening space to end up inside Greene's room, with the hose stretched like a rubber band behind him. The spectres went berserk, covering the outside of the concrete cube. The weight of them caused the stalactite holding the room suspeded to crack. Watts grabbed Greene, blew out the wall with a spite-fueled shotgun blast, and jumped back into space, intending to swing across on the fire hose.
Agent Lane used Pandemonium to shrink the distance between from the stalactite to the stairwell, so Watts was able to grab onto the bottom step and pull himself up. Meanwhile, Agent McGee flickered down to the membrane surface in order to draw away some of the spectres. At that moment, the tip of the stalactite holding the room up in the air broke free, and the huge cube of concrete plummeted down, crushing spectres out of the air as it went. McGee waited until the last possible second, then flickered out of the way — allowing the cube to strike the membrane, and puncture it.
A tide of blackness that dwarfed MacMillian's beacon poured upwards from the split. The Agents staged an expeditious retreat, through the escherized doorway at the top of the stairs and out of the prison building. Herschler twisted local geometry so that the spectres would find themselves trapped in an endless loop of hallway, but he could not hold them there for long. He vacated the building and the Agent team drove away as the black cloud burst from the top of the hive and spread out into the sky.
Back at the hospital, Terrence Greene sat down with the Agents and told them the story of the fire that ripped through the death row of Conquin State Prison in 1998.
Some men had come in to talk to the inmates. "We could tell they were government types, and high up, too, because there wasn't a warden or a screw anywhere near 'em. No chaperones. They just walked right into D-Block like they owned it." The government men offered the death row inmates a deal: if they participated in a top secret experiement, their sentences would be commuted and they would be allowed to go free.
Some of the inmates were suspicious and refused. They were led into a separate room. "I don't know if the government men capped them there and then, or if they just let the fire do its work," Greene said, "but none of those dudes ever saw the light of day again." The rest of the inmates were taken out of their cells and brought into a large hall where rows of hospital beds and medical equipment had been setup.
The inmates were strapped down and injected with a black substance. Several men began convulsing and vomiting black foam. These victims were wheeled out. Greene found himself floating above his own body, looking down. At first he thought he was dead; then he realized that he was still connected to his body via an insubstantial, silver cord, and that he could re-enter his body any time he wanted. Looking around he saw that several of the others were also floating above their bodies.
"So then the men in lab coats put on these goggles, and started asking us all kinds of questions," Greene continued. "How do you feel? Can you move? Can you move this ball with your hand? What about without your hands? Crazy stuff. And then when they were finished, they told us to get back into our bodies.
"Bishop looked at us. We looked at him. And he just shook his head, and said 'follow me.'
"So we went through the walls and got out of there. I found myself in that basement room with the radio equipment, and got too scared to leave. And back on D-Block, the government men doused everything with gasoline and burned it.
"So that's that story. But the reason I needed to tell you is because of this."
Green stood up and walked over to the big bulletin board, covered with photographs of Orpheus' enemies and pieces of string connecting them.
"The main government guy? The one running the whole show? Was him." Greene pointed to the picture of Samuel Magabe.
"And the main scientist guy, the one giving orders to all the other white coats? Was him." Greene pointed to the picture of Masato Takeichi.