The car ride wasn’t long enough to dig through all the phone’s features and native apps – it was, however, long enough to discover “Vox”. The app seemed to the Agency’s own version of Slack or Discord – and invites to a dozen servers waited for her. Along with the invites, there were several long PMs from Jones, pointing her to several “n00b guides” and places on the Agency intranet she should check out. Curt pulled the car over next to the mansion’s impressive wrought iron gates and turned off the engine. ‘Gray knows we’re coming, so we don’t need to be discreet, but I wanted to go over a…

It took twenty minutes for Curt to return – enough time to return twice more to the buffet bar, and get some more fluffin flavours. And three more of the bacon fluffins. Curt returned after she’d finished all fluffins and had started on the egg. The white sauce was something like hollandaise but far sweeter; the orange was coconut-almond – a strange choice for eggs, but not one she’d argue with. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said as he put his jacket back on. ‘Most newbies stick with very human foods.’ Nothing seemed like it would shrink me down or turn me into a cat. She stared at her plate, uncomfortable with…

Curt’s “I know a place” was an ugly, squat six-storey building. ‘If I say this doesn’t look like much,’ Stef said as she touched the sun-faded paint next to the door. ‘Are you going to get on my case for judging a book by its cover?’ It was the kind of place you just looked past, the kind of place that didn’t catch the eye at all. Everything about it was…ordinary. The type of cheap office space rented for startups, temporary offices, or project work that didn’t care about looks. Or, less charitably, a derelict building for murderers who needed a convenient commute to their kill space. ‘The building is…