Intuition. Anxiety. Dread.
No snooze button on that shit.
As she went and took a shower, she continued to be dogged by the sense that forces unseen and unknowable were coalescing, that the landscape was going to shift, that the chess pieces of various people were about to be moved by hands not their own, to places not part of their strategies.
The preoccupation stuck with her during the short trip into Caldwell proper; persisted as she got things started at the Iron Mask.
Unable to stand it any longer, she removed her cilices and went out into the city hours earlier than she usually did. And as she dematerialized from rooftop to rooftop searching out the Bastards, she had a feeling. . . tonight was the night.
But for what?
With that question weighing her down, she was especially careful to stay far from where the Brothers were fighting.
The fact that she had committed to giving them a wide berth was probably the biggest factor in her delay at finding that rifle. The Band of Bastards was out in the field every night, but as the skirmishes with the Lessening Society tended to happen only in the desolate parts of the city, it was hard to get close enough while retaining a distance from John and the Brotherhood.
Yeah, she had some grids that were new in her repertoire, but it was difficult to isolate who was Xcor - and even though that was academic, because she needed only one of those soldiers to slip up, get injured and have to be taken back to their lair in a car she could track, she wanted to know her larger target intimately.
Check out his secrets from the inside.
That she had gotten nowhere so far was driving her nuts. And the Brothers weren't crazy for it, either, although for a different reason: They wanted to just take the other fighters out, but Wrath had KO'd that one: They needed the rifle first, so the king had declared that renegade group of traitors off-limits until he got the proof he needed. Logically speaking, the proclamation made sense - no good would come out of slaughtering them all and then trying to calm the glymera with an oh-but-they-shot-me kind of thing. But the night-after-night was tough going.
At least they had one thing in their favor: It was unlikely that rifle had been destroyed.
The B. o. B. would want to keep that shit as a trophy, no doubt.
It was time to end this, however. And maybe this premonition thing she was rocking meant that she was finally going to.
On that note, and under the theory that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result was insane, she decided to stop looking for Xcor.
Nope, tonight, Assail was going to be the one she was after - and what do you know, she located his imprint in the theater district. . . inside the Benloise Art Gallery, natch.
A quick shift down to street level and she got an eyeball full of cocktail party going on at the facility.
As the artsy set was perfectly capable of wearing leather and considering it business attire, she slipped in -
Hot. Cramped. Lot of egocentric accents echoing around.
Jeez, in a place like this, you couldn't tell the sexes apart - everyone had bird-wing hand gestures and nail polish on.
Two feet past the door she was promptly offered a flute of champagne - as if blowhards with delusions of being Warhol ran on Veuve Clicquot.
"No, thanks. "
As the waiter, a nice-looking guy in black, gave her a little nod and sauntered off, she almost pulled him back just for the company.
Yeah, wow, there were so many arched eyebrows and pointed noses up in the air, you had to wonder if these folks even approved of themselves. And a quick glance around at the "art" told her that she and her mother were going to have to come here - just so Autumn could get a sense of how truly hideous and overindulgent some kinds of self-expression could get.
Dumb-ass humans.
With grim determination, she parried her way through all the shoulders, turning this way and that while sidestepping around other waiters. She didn't bother hiding her face. Rehv had handled all his deals by himself or with Trez and iAm, so no one here was going to recognize her.
And pretty quick, she identified the way to Benloise's office. It was just so damn obvi: Two goons dressed like waiters, but not carrying trays, were standing on either side of a nearly seamless door cut into the cloth-covered walling.
Assail was up on the second floor. She could sense him clearly. . . .
But getting to him was a thing: It was tricky to try to dematerialize into spaces unknown. There was probably a staircase on the far side of what was being guarded, but she didn't want to Swiss-cheese herself by re-forming in the middle of it.
Besides, she could always catch the guy on the exit. Chances were good he'd come in through the back, and would leave the same way: He was cagey, and his visit was not about the frickin' art.