Gina sat in her cell, staring at the door. She wondered how she could ever have thought this plan would work. How stupid the whole thing seemed now! Break into the most heavily-defended building in Hong Kong, bust someone out of a Fed prison, and then escape scot free. Yeah, right.      Then the Spice trance came on again, and her growing despair became remote, out of touch. Unpleasant...

     “What do we do now?” asked Rat. She stood over Bomber with her hands hovering a few inches above him, feeling like she should do something but too afraid to touch. The creeping horror of the building had finally wiped the grin off her face.      “Cut him loose,” the Emperor ordered, tossing her a sheathed Fed sword from the corpse. Rat took a moment to figure out...

     The night passed by, dark and dreamless, Gina didn’t stir until the first rays of morning sunlight touched her face. It poured through the glass sliding doors like a river of honey and turned the room to gold.      Blinking against the brightness, Gina turned over and went back to sleep. She didn’t get long before the alarm clock on the nightstand started...

     Gina’s body rested on a pile of soft leaves. Golden sunlight played through the lush, green forest canopy above her. There was no wind, however, not a leaf moving out of place. Gina noticed the strange silence, completely barren of animal life. The air itself had a familiar dreamlike quality to it.      Gina eyed her surroundings for a minute, then sat up and said,...

     “That’s it,” said Jock, his voice buzzing from the speakers of Rat’s mobile phone. “Looks like you’re clear of them. No one armed in the area, I’d call it safe.”      Gina closed her eyes in relief and leaned her back against the wall, panting. The Spice still whirled in her head.      One pill. One pill had kicked...

     Gina blew smoke into the night outside the shop, waiting for a dark van of some type. The description was vague, Jock had just said it would be dark, with red flame decals down the side. She wasn’t quite sure why she was doing anything Jock told her to do, but at the moment she didn’t have any better ideas. The cigarette calmed her nerves as well. Still, she felt a little bit cagey about being back...