Now that they knew where Sebastian was staying, it seemed wise to once again keep an eye on him. Something suspicious was happening and they needed to know what it was, in case it was related to the impending apocalypse.

And rat spies just weren't cutting it.

According to Letitia, they kept trying to tell her that someone was already spying on him. Except they were being nonsensical, because no one was. Just to be sure, Katrina consented to allow a few of Letitia's little friends to come with her. Mostly because they didn't seem to want to give her another option.

As she was about to leave, they swarmed around her feet squeaking “she'll put you in a bag, she'll put you in a bag,” according to the rat psychic.

“Alright, fine,” she relented.

The current head rat, Sir Whiskerface, distinguished from his breatheren by the tiny little blue and green striped sweater that he wore, sat on her shoulder. The others disappeared as soon as they were outside; into sewer grates, long grasses, and convenient holes and cracks that led to some rat highway, the little illusionist imagined.

A short bus ride away, Katrina slipped out invisible behind someone that got off not too far from where she was headed. It was early, not many people were out. According to Letitia's spies, the unicorn man usually got up about now. The little invisible girl walked toward the gym's door and peeked through the glass to see what kind of place this really was.

Aaron thought it was a pretty sweet deal, even if it was kinda weird.

He was really sick of working out at the Sanctuary; there were always a lot of guys using it at any given time, and not quite enough equipment for all of them, so they always had to share, or take turns. And, to be honest, those big red guys scared the bejesus out of him. Especially since he was almost certain that he had gotten on their bad side somehow. He almost stopped working out entirely.

One day, Lori's kid overheard him complaining about it over a game of pool. So she dragged him aside, and gave him the offer: she would have the Sanctuary pay for a gym membership somewhere else. He didn't know the kid could throw her mom's money around like that! But it wasn't out of the goodness of her heart that she was doing this. She had her own motives. What these motives were, he couldn't say, but he did know that his membership came with strings attatched.

For one, she wanted to go with him sometimes on weekends, and during holidays. She would even be able to make him go there on occasion, even when he didn't feel like it. And he was never to call her "Kaitlyn" outside of the Sanctuary, or to make any references to living in the Sanctuary whatsoever. He had to play along with this "story" that she cooked up. While they were at the gym, her name was "Lily," and she was his kid sister, and he had to watch her while their dad was busy, but he also needed to work out, and would it be okay if he brought her along?

"Sure," said a big man named MacMillian, "Just keep an eye on her, and don't let her do anything stupid to hurt herself."

And so Aaron got to get his workout on at a much nicer gym, and one that was far less crowded, than the one at the Sanctuary. Kaitlyn err, Lily brought a small backpack with her, the contents of which were anyone's guess. Right now, she was sitting on a staircase in the corner of the gym, reading a paperback copy of Eragon.

Sebastian woke in a better mood than he had for several days. The grey clouds had parted to let in a few rays of light. That, and having a goal, made all the difference in the unicorn man's disposition. He actually whistled as he made his way downstairs for his morning workout. Even when he nearly tripped on the girl at the bottom of the stairs, it didn't upset him in the least.

“Pardon me, milady,” he smiled at her sweetly and bowed low before continuing on with his daily regimen.

First, a warm up, a few minutes on the endless running machine. Next, daily sword exercises to keep his muscles and his motions working fluidly together. Finally, he finished off with an upper body strength work out, he alternated upper and lower each day. Last of all he headed into the locker room for a shower.

“What, you don't feel like getting your face pounded in today?” One of the tough looking boxers called after him.

“Sorry, I've got errands to run that I need to look pretty for,” the immortal called back, and with that the door closed after him.

It took a few minutes before someone came out the door; several long minutes of waiting to slip in unnoticed and invisible without making everyone believe that the gym was haunted. Finally a big and burly someone or another exited and the little illusionist took advantage of his door opening.

Inside the gym was very... gym like. It smelled like feet, and dirty clothes, and something that maybe had crawled somewhere to die. It wasn't like the place wasn't cleaned once in awhile, there were faint traces of lemon zest here and there, but the place was so old that the other scents were long since absorbed into the walls, the mats, everything.

Her target was awake, swinging his sword in flashing arcs with a look of intense concentration on his face. His tail swung around behind him, a white counter balance to the silver sword.

The invisible girl wandered around, checking out the other people in the gym as well. Any of them could be new associates of Sebastian that could give her clues as to why he had so suddenly changed from his former self. Why would he come here of all places? Why the sudden interest in pointy objects? Why wasn't he frantically searching for his missing wife the same way he had frantically searched for his missing son? Something wasn't quite right.

The other occupants of the gym included three men who looked like the could tear a phone book in half with their bare hands, one guy that looked scrawny in comparison but probably could still have beaten Katrina up with his thumbs, and a girl a little younger than herself who was completely uninterested in the goings on in the rest of the gym; she seemed completely engrossed in her novel.

Too bad Katrina had once again forgotten to bring a book with her. She had learned this lesson last time, she thought, but apparently had forgotten after the interim in Serbia. Number one piece of spy equipment: a book for when things got boring.

The little illusionist thought about going around behind the other girl and reading over her shoulder, but when she got too close, the little rat on her shoulder, Sir Whiskerface-or-whatever, started squeaking loudly in her ear.

Squeaksqueak squeaksqueesquee squeeee-ack!

What the?

She back pedaled and put her hand over the little guys mouth. He was going to get her caught!

Pure fear.

Kaitlyn tried not to let it show, and she failed miserably. She knew too much about the man bowing to her. He killed his wife and son, and though she had only seen his handiwork after the fact, she knew how dangerous he was. The unicorn-man probably thought she'd never seen a mutant before. She made her best effort to return his smile, then buried her head in her book and tried to make herself as small as possible.

A high, squeaking noise finally jolted her out of her book and back to reality. The Orderling slowly put her book down, scanning the area for the source of the noise. Failing that, she stood and crept up the stairway, taking her backpack with her. It was time to do what she came for.

The door to Sebastian's room was locked. Kaitlyn made sure nobody was looking, then got to work picking the lock. That military-grade thing Lisa gave her was really easy to use; it looked kinda like a key, but with a bunch of little adjustable sliding parts on the end of it that could move the tumblers around, which she could control with a few tiny buttons on its handle. Best of all, she could hide it in her pocket. It took about ten seconds of metallic clicking and tumbler-jiggling before the key turned with a satisfying click.

She scrambled into the room and set her backpack down, forgetting to close the door fully behind her. There was a lot more... pink than she had expected. And a lot smaller. She pulled a roll of duct tape, scissors, and a palm-sized box with an antenna out of her backpack, then crawled under the bed.

The little girl ran back up stairs, the unicorn man disappeared into the shower, and the men in various stages of buff kept working out. Katrina sighed. Spying was never actually as exciting as it was in the movies. Though, it looked like the girl who had been on the stairs (maybe she lived here) had left her book behind.

Katrina slyly sidled over to it, checked to make sure no one was looking, and pulled it into her little world of invisibility. Then she made her way over to a corner where it looked like no one would trip on her. She was well into chapter three, granted she skimmed over a lot of the longer descriptions, before anything exciting happened. In real life, that was: namely, a unicorn man with a towel around his waist walking past and heading up the stairs.

That wasn't something Katrina necessarily felt she needed to spy on, so she stayed put, waiting until a more fully clothed unicorn man emerged and went somewhere so she could actually find out something interesting.

Sebastian walked into the room he shared with Noel, closed the door, and dropped his wet towel on the floor. There weren't really any empty drawers available for him in the tiny dresser, so he was living out of the shopping bags on the top of the dresser.

He found a new shirt and ripped the tags and stickers off, leaving them in a little pile of paper and plastic on the corner of the dresser. He wished for an iron. The shirt still had the creases in it from being folded in a certain way on a shelf. He smoothed his hands over the creases, but it didn't help much.

Next: pants. They were folded over the end of the bed, because he had finished tailoring them for a tail. He reached for them and almost tripped on a girly backpack on his way. The unicorn man rolled his eyes, picked up the little red bag without inspecting it closely at all and dropped in unceremoniously on the bed. Noel really needed to learn to pick up after herself. This room was way too small to leave things like that lying around.

Pants, achieved. Then the sword belt (he really needed to get one with room for more than one sword) and his long black coat.

Tail and coat tails swished out the door once again.

After about a minute, the little box had a new home, duct-taped to the underside of the bed that the unicorn shared with his weirdo girlfriend. The Order spy pressed a button on it, then reached into her pocket for the fancy phone Lisa gave her. It had a pink, rubbery shock-absorber thing around it, so that it wouldn't get destroyed like 95% of Kaitlyn's other cellphones. It also had a "baby monitor" program in it, which she could use to hear whatever the microphone in that little box picked up. All she needed to do was turn that program on and let it get "synced" or whatever, and then she could...

Were those footsteps?

Yep. And that was a wet towel. And that... that was a pair of bare feet and a tail. Which were all attached to a naked unicorn man. Who was going to kill her. Kaitlyn was going to be killed by a naked unicorn mutant. Maybe if she stayed really still, he wouldn't notice her. He would get changed, and he would go away, and then, when her legs stopped feeling like jello, she could get up and get out of there, too. All she needed to do was avoid his notice, and she was safely hidden under the bed, along with her backpack.

Wait... where was her backpack again?

Oh.

And he was tripping over it.

The touch-screen of her cellphone cracked, making a tiny sound that wouldn't be heard over the noise of the gym. She held her breath until Sebastian closed the door behind him.

Kaitlyn was still breathing a little bit harder than usual by the time she returned to her spot on the stairs, almost a minute later. This little orderling was extremely lucky to be alive right now. Now... where did she put her book? It wasn't on the stairs. She unzipped her backpack and dug through its contents for a few seconds before she was certain that it wasn't in there, either.

"Someone stole my book," she muttered to herself. Leaving her backpack on the steps, she stood up and started looking around, checking the entire area around the staircase.

The unicorn man didn't dawdle to talk to the other men working out in the gym. He walked like he had a mission to accomplish. Katrina skittered out of her seat, leaving the book behind, pages fluttering in the wind as she hurried to catch up to the door before it swung all the way shut after Sebastian's tail

She almost ran into the girl coming down the staircase. She didn't, but she had to backpedal a bit to avoid her, and then she barely made it through the door before it closed. Or didn't, rather, but managed to slip out while only barely keeping to door open longer than it should have been.

The unicorn man was waiting at the bus stop. Which was kind of odd, since he usually walked everywhere, but Katrina wasn't complaining. She got plenty of exercise these days, what with conditioning classes. They had to run a mile by the end of the week. Katrina could barely run a single lap without falling over wheezing by the end. Sam was going to have his work cut out getting her into shape.

The bus rounded the corner. The rat on her shoulder started chattering again, looking backwards.

The invisible girl was forced to cover the little pipsqueak's mouth with her hand. Luckily the bus was stopping and it sort of blended in with the squeal of brakes.

That little jerk was going to get her caught! Didn't he realize... that they had a bus to catch? The illusionist slipped onto the bus behind the unicorn man and slid into a seat behind him.

Buses were noisy, smelly, and impersonal. They did, however, get a man to his appointments on time when he didn't have his own vehicle. Today's appointment was with a realtor.

The unicorn man took a fold piece of paper out from his coat's breast pocket and examined it. There was plenty of square footage, it was in an ideal location, the only obstacle was the building's past. If he bought it, he'd have to prove that it was a totally new place, untainted by it's former purpose.

It wasn't going to be easy, but then, nothing about this plan was.

Did her book just... appear? As in, right out of thin air? Because it wasn't sitting there just a second ago. Something very strange was happening in this gym. Was the gym haunted? Did an invisibility mutant just steal it and put it back? Did somebody teleport it? Was this all somehow Sebastian's doing?

Speaking of Sebastian, where was he? If she had started looking around just a second later, she wouldn't have noticed the unicorn man on his way out the door. Less than a minute later, MacMillian would interrupt Aaron's bench-presses, and inform him that his little sister just ran out the door by herself, unaccompanied. Aaron wouldn't know how to respond.

Kaitlyn followed Sebastian at her usual safe distance, until it was apparent that he was going on the bus, and she would have to follow him onboard. On the plus side, her legs wouldn't be sore by the end of the day, as had been the case so many times over the last few months. On the down side, she would be sitting right next to him. And he might even see her face. That would make two times in the same day, in different places. He might realize who she was and what was going on, and he might try to kill her!

Okay, time to get on the bus. She had to stay calm. She had to pay her bus fare. She had to not blow the bus to smithereens if she made eye contact with the unicorn man. Thankfully, she was spared from his gaze; he was reading a note or something. Maybe, if she was careful, she could get a glance at it sometime during the bus ride. The spy took her backpack off, held it in her arms, and sat herself down on the seat right behind him.

Only, it didn't feel like a bus seat. It felt like somebody's lap.

The girl with the book from the gym was also going to ride the bus? Wasn't she a bit young to be using public transportation all by herself? Then again, at that age Katrina had been wandering the labyrithine hallways of Mondragon Labs, befriending vampires and spying on resistance meetings, so she couldn't exactly talk.

The little red head made her way down the bus aisle, then, of all the places she could have sat, she turned at the last second to sit in Katrina's seat. Err, umm...

It was too late to duck under the seat, or hop over it, or scoot in farther and try to be really small.

The rat on her shoulder chittered a loud warning, then jumped onto the floor and scrambled away.

Too late!

Katrina was sat upon.

Err, umm, again.

Should she...say something?

She started with, “Hi.”

Sebastian was oblivious to the drama playing out in the seat behind him. For now at least, he was busy inspecting the document in his hand and crunching numbers in his head. Mortgage payments and bank account numbers, possible loan sources, assets he could liquidate to free up some more cash, and the addresses of various banks where he had vaults filled with antiques to sell.

The bus started and the grey city outside the window started to roll by.

Yep. That was somebody's lap she was sitting in. An invisible somebody, who said "Hi." Probably an invisible girl, judging from the voice.

Awkward.

"Uh... hi," Kaitlyn answered. "Sorry." She slid off the lap and onto the seat next to it, then placed her backpack on the floor of the bus.

The little spy looked at the seat next to her for a few seconds. Kaitlyn assumed it still held the invisible girl, unless she had already moved seats. Would she care if Kait started looking over Sebastian's shoulder at the note he was reading? And maybe started taking pictures of it on her phone? Invisible girl would probably think she was acting kinda weird, but she probably wouldn't care, the spy decided. So she decided to just stand up and start staring over the unicorn's shoulder, certain to keep herself far enough away that he wouldn't feel her breathing on him, and ready to sit back down at any moment if he started to notice her.

Kait couldn't possibly wrap her mind around this stuff. All these numbers, dollar signs, grids, and such were too much. She stared at it for the better half of a minute before giving up. Maybe if she just took a good picture of it on her phone, she could show it to Lisa and they could figure it out later. After taking her phone out of her pocket, she met once again with the fact that her shiny new phone just got destroyed. Or, at least, damaged. The cracked screen still kinda worked. Kinda. Could she still take a picture with it? One way to find out. She tapped furiously at the mostly-broken screen, which only responded to said touching less than half of the time.

Her “hi” worked apparently. The girl just thought she had sat on someone who was invisible-for-completely-non-nefarious-spying-reasons. That was good. She even scooted over to her own seat.

Then she started fiddling with her phone and trying to hold it up over the seat. Was she trying to get better reception? Was she a tourist who had never seen the inside of a city bus before?

Katrina craned her invisible neck to see what the little phone was pointing at. It was almost like she was trying to use her phone to look at the unicorn man's papers in the seat ahead of them. Except her phone was cracked and not working properly.

Curiosity got the better of her.

“What happened?” She pointed at the screen, forgetting for a moment that the girl couldn't see that gesture.