"Cathy, wake up, dear. You are gonna be late for school."

Cathy groaned. "I'm already up, mom!"

"Then come down for breakfast. What are you doing in your room anyway? The bus will be here soon."

There was a loud honking from outside the window.

"Cat, the bus is already here!"

Cathy groaned again and grabbed her book bag. "I heard it, dad!" She rushed downstairs and through the living room and towards the door.

"Cat." Her dad's voice was stern.

Cathy stopped and turned around. Mom and dad stood at the head of the hallway. Their faces were grave with their expression hovering somewhere between concern and disappointment. Cathy was quick to understand what that look meant. She rushed up to her parents and wrapped her arms around them at once. "I love you," she whispered.

She felt her mother's hand on her back. "I'm glad you remembered."

"I'm glad you stopped to think about it, Cathy," dad said.

Cathy tightened her embrace. "You gotta be kidding me." She scoffed. "I'd never forget this. Never..."

#

Cathy opened her eyes. She was alone in the bed again. Ana was still asleep in her crib. Dawn hadn't cracked yet. Cathy was feeling lightheaded from her dream. The thing didn't quite feel like a dream. It was too lucid.

It wasn't like any of her nightmares where she kept shooting her dad again and again. No, what she saw in her sleep wasn't surreal like that. It was just...real.

She climbed out of the bed and padded over to the closet. She opened it and retrieved Milo's skull from the pile of neatly folded clothes. She threaded the cranium through the chain around her neck again and carefully lifted Ana out of the crib. She carried her out of the room and headed downstairs.

Lisa was probably in the garage right now, probably going through the operating manual of the truck, probably trying to work out a new sequence or something. And as far as she knew, Erik wasn't asleep either. He'd hardly slept since Germaine had left.

And he'd been even more active since the Eli Hodges knock down had worked so well. Cathy wasn't surprised. This just meant they were going to be moving into the next step of their mission. Possibly the most dangerous step yet.

She looked down at the baby sleeping soundly in her arms. What were they even going to do about Ana once they start with the next step? Who was supposed to be looking after her? It certainly didn't seem like Lisa was going to go for a maternity leave at this stage. The way she had been pushing herself suggested anything but that.

Cathy let out a soft sigh. These worries were all valid and important but she really didn't want to think about them just yet. Something else was occupying her mind at the moment. She went into the library. Maps, diagrams, lists and notes scrawled in barely legible handwriting were strewn across the large desk at the center. An empty bottle of gin lay stinking in the middle of the mess. But Erik was nowhere around.

So she walked over to the pantry. The trapdoor in the ground was open. She descended underground. Erik was hunched over the desk by the wall on the left. The telegraph jack was plugged in and he was wearing a headset connected to the telegraph. This was the machine they used to communicate with Watcher who was in the unsectorized state. It was old tech by now so it was a lot safer to use it than any other form of machine that involved a radio.

Erik noticed her as she came and stood by him. He gave her the slightest nod. His face was sober, almost grim. He was transcribing the signals he received from his headset and onto a sheet of paper. His face became a lot grimmer as he kept scribbling dots and dashes across the page.

Morse code. Cathy had tried learning it some time ago but gave up when it came to decoding the signals into alphabets, let alone form words from the alphabets and decode them further using whatever key Erik and Watcher were using to communicate. Erik was so good at it that he barely needed to glance at the key anymore. However, despite her meager understanding of the morse code and the key, Cathy was still able to decode a few words that Erik was transcribing. One of them meant "liar" and another certainly meant "asshole".

Erik grimaced as he kept transcribing. His face was even more somber than before now. Cathy decided against interrupting him in the middle of whatever this was. She stepped back upstairs and waited in the kitchen. Erik ascended after another fifteen minutes.

His face was parchment pale and his shoulders were slumped and his steps were heavy and dragged.

"Everything okay?" she asked. "You look like a kid who got admonished by the headmaster."

He paused. He looked at her, grimacing again. "You just had to make that comparison, huh?"

"Was I right?" she grinned.

Erik didn't look amused. "Infuriatingly so." He groaned and sat across from her at the dining table.

Cathy couldn't stop grinning. "Now I gotta know this. What did Watcher say?"

Erik heaved a sigh. "Oh he gave me a piece of his mind. A pretty big one for keeping a big secret from him."

"Big secret?"

"I didn't tell him about the massacre at the prison."

"Why the hell would you do that?"

"Because I was ashamed, okay? I'd made a promise that not many people would die. And you know what happened at the prison." He leaned his elbows on the table and rubbed his face tiredly. "But I deserved all the music I got. I shouldn't have kept such a big mistake a secret from Watcher. Since he is also playing a big part in this whole revolution. If he did something like what I did, I'd be just as pissed. So yeah, in this case, just this once, I'm gonna shed my ego and take my lecture like the bitter medicine that it is. It's necessary." He shrugged, looking away.

Cathy lost her grin and looked at the man with sympathy. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry you have been going through such a situation."

"It's okay. You don't have to be sorry for me." Erik waved his hand dismissively. "As I said, I deserve it. I just wished all this miserable criticism came to me like a crashing wave rather than these little doses of recurring punishment. First Gemmy left and then I had that fight with Lisa and now...Watcher got mad at me too." He heaved another sigh.

"So...did he say he was leaving us too?" Cathay frowned.

Erik chuckled. "What? No. Of course not. He gave me a long lecture. Doesn't mean that he's gonna abandon me. The scolding was the icing on the cake. The real reason I was down there for so long was cuz we were discussing the next step. There have been some massive changes to our previous steps on his end."

"Now I'm curious. What happened?"

"It's quite complicated. But long story short–Eli Hodges is now on our side. And he has given us a big lead for our next step."

Cathy wasn't expecting that. "Oh? What's the lead?"

"A man named Dr. Yann Atron," he said. "Turns out he is the one who came up with the concept of that rain and also invented the special grade trucks. Watcher's spies are currently sniffing out his location. Our next step involves kidnapping him."

Cathy blew a whistle, astonished. "Woah, that is a big lead."

Erik nodded. "Indeed. And we can't fumble this one."

The girl just nodded, feeling almost speechless.

Erik helped break the silence for her. "You want something to drink?" He got up from the table and stepped up to the counter.

"Didn't you just finish an entire bottle of gin last night?"

"If you think that's enough for me you are criminally inconsiderate." He filled a kettle with water and set it to boil. "And either way, I'm just gonna make some coffee for myself."

"Well, I won't mind a cup, I guess."

"Coming right up."

Cathy looked at the kitchen window. The day was getting brighter outside. Ana stirred in her arms a bit. Cathy soothed the child back to sleep, patting her lightly on the back. She looked at Erik, who was now pouring a spoonful of grounded coffee into two cups. "I wanted to talk to you about something, actually." she said quietly. "I had a dream."

"Oh? I thought you had those every night."

"Yeah, well this one was different."

"Why is that?"

"First off, it wasn't a scary nightmare. And secondly...it didn't quite feel like a dream either."

Erik looked at her, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

Cathy nodded, feeling equally puzzled yet fascinated. "It didn't feel like a dream. It was like...a memory. Like something that actually happened and it just...found its way back to my conscience. The thing that makes it so significant is that, for the first time, I felt like I belonged in that dream. The memory felt like it was actually mine. Actually something I've lived through."

"I see."

"Can it be possible that...my system is somehow accommodating the side effects of EpiFreeze?"

Erik was frowning now. "I've never heard of such a thing happening to someone. People get used to having nightmares but what you're describing is just...quite unusual."

"I'm not asking if this has happened before. I wanna know if it's possible." Cathy leaned ahead eagerly.

"It might be." Erik shrugged. "Everyone's brain functions differently. When they started vaccinating the agents of Vigilant Squad, EpiFreeze was barely more than a prototype. There wasn't much data on what kinda side effects would show up on whom. They can vary from person to person."

Now it was Cathy's turn to frown. "Why did they give something that was basically an unfinished product to their agents?"

"But it wasn't an unfinished product," Erik said. "It still had an efficacy rate of ninety nine percent. Whoever was vaccinated with EpiFreeze could survive the spores of the virus. It did its very basic job. That's all they wanted it to do anyway."

Cathy rolled her eyes. "Yeah that was really thoughtful of them."

"Forget about their focus, Cathy." Erik poured the coffee into the two cups and carried them over to the table. "Tell me what's your focus." He handed one of the cups to her.

"My focus?" She took the cup from him.

Erik nodded. "Maybe what you saw was a memory and not a dream. What is it even supposed to mean for you and your brain?"

Cathy sighed. "I just want my brain to feel less like a scrambled egg. And I want my memories to feel less surreal. I want them to be normal. I want to remember it the way it happened."

Erik sipped his coffee. "But have you considered why your brain may be distorting your memories like that?"

"Isn't it just because my brain has been through a wringer? Like first I had the virus mess with my head and then the EpiFreeze giving me those wild side effects. Isn't that supposed to take some sorta toll on my poor brain?"

"Or maybe your brain is just distorting things so you can accept them." Erik took another sip of his coffee.

Cathy felt at a loss for words. "Wh-Why would I feel, I mean subconsciously, why would I feel like I won't be able to accept my past?"

"Maybe something bad happened in your past?" Erik looked at her gravely. "Maybe something that might hurt you if you remembered it exactly how it was?"

Cathy was truly speechless now. She looked down at the bird cranium hanging by her chain. She just realized Milo hadn't spoken anything since she'd woken up.

#

Lisa kept eyeing the metallic cube on the work desk in front of her, kept eyeing the polycarbonate cylinder at its center, and kept eyeing the fiery orange fluid that swirled within it. The operating manual for the truck was under her elbow opened to the same page that depicted a diagram of the cube and the names of its various components.

She wasn't trying to learn any new sequences today. She had taken a different approach to understanding the truck. She studied the structure and limitations of the vehicles.

She had made discoveries both disheartening and alluring. The disheartening ones felt dumb now that she thought of them in hindsight. The truck had been so efficient and powerful until now that she had never expected it to run out of it's finite ammunition. Going through the manual she'd learnt that the truck only housed twenty ground-to-air missiles. And they now left with just seven. The fully automatic machine guns that were, although compatible with normal incendiary bullets, were already exhausted down to fifty percent magazine capacity. Same was the case with most of its artillery. She felt even dumber for wasting it the way she had back at the prison.

But these were all disheartening discoveries. The fascinating discovery almost seemed to outweigh the former.

Lisa kept eyeing the fiery orange liquid in the cube. The operating manual called it "hybrid-0" or simply "Hy(0)". The manual didn't go much in depth in describing what this thing really was. But it was meant to remain inside the cube at all costs. A cautionary note under the diagram described it as "extremely dangerous on contact with oxygen." Lisa could only imagine what would happen if the cube was to break. If "Hy(0)" was to get exposed.

Another thing that fascinated her about the cube was the fact that Hy(0) depleted only 0.01%. Throughout all her use of the truck until now, she'd barely depleted one percent of the orange fluid. She took the cube in her hand and gazed at it keenly. Here was a never ending source of energy. Something that fired the truck for days on end while barely losing a drop--perfect to keep a war going for another decade.

Lisa kept gazing at the fiery orange fluid, gazed at her own reflection in its liquid flames, captivated, transfixed.

That's when she heard a familiar noise in the distance. Propellers.

#

Cathy and Erik stepped emerged from the mansion while Lisa was also walking out of the garage. They heard the sound of stampeding feet, marching closer. The three of them stepped out of the main gate of the mansion to see a small army of operatives making their way down the street. And leading all the operatives was Agent Luce. Next to him was his friend Tracy and two other men who looked like they were leaders and chiefs of some sort from their uniforms.

Erik stared warily at Luce and the army of operatives came to a halt right outside the mansion. Luce stepped up to them.

"You brought an entire parade with you, huh?" Erik said. "They're all gonna join the revolution?"

Luce nodded. "These are just the first fifty. We landed the freight carrier outside in the industrial zone. There are a hundred and fifty more."

"And even more will join in once the word spreads," said one of the two chiefs at the head of the parade. His name tag read: Dulvers.

Erik looked at the men as they stood ready, waiting for orders. Then he looked at Cathy and Lisa. The girls still seemed uncertain but they nodded. Then he turned to the silver haired man. He stepped close to him and held out his hand. "Welcome to the revolution, Agent Luce."

Luce smirked and took the man's hand. "Feels great to be here." 

(to be continued...)