Gunnar lagged far behind his target, his hands in his pockets as he tried to look as uninteresting as possible. He was dressed much like everyone else in the area, which meant that he’d been forced to visit a local Tailor and buy something expensive, fashionable, but casual.

He hated the result, which made him feel like he should be heading toward some country club to play a round of golf with a bunch of idiots who thought money and pricey status symbols were the most important things in the world. That he looked like one of them felt like he’d just taken a swim through perfumed sewage.

But it was necessary if he didn’t want to stick out, so he swallowed his discomfort and played his part.

The Oasis Spire was both old and new, and from Gunnar’s perspective, a blight upon the city that highlighted all of its problems. The Spire itself was built upon the ruins of the Columbia Center – once the tallest building in the state of Washington – which had fallen only a few months after the world’s transformation.

Once Isaiah and his new government had taken control of the city, they’d embarked upon a quest to return Seattle to its former glory. In most ways, they were successful. The city – at least on the surface – looked like a modern paradise, with interesting and magical architecture. Gunnar didn’t have an issue with that, save that some of the time, effort, and money required to accomplish that feat should have been funneled downward. But from an aesthetic standpoint, he could appreciate it.

But then there was the Spire.

Like its fallen predecessor, it was easily the tallest building in the city. At nearly two-hundred stories, it had more in common with the Burj Khalifa than any American skyscraper. In fact, Gunnar had heard that it was over three-thousand feet tall, which meant that, before the apocalypse, it would have qualified as the tallest building on Earth.

Gunnar wasn’t certain if that was still true.

His issue wasn’t with its height, though. Rather, his problems stemmed from two sources. First, while its footprint was only around a thousand yards wide, the park surrounding it was more than twice that in diameter. That, in turn, was surrounded by a fifty-foot wall guarded by elite soldiers meant to keep the commoners from intruding upon its wealthy residents’ lives.

It wasn’t enough that those rich assholes made the poor live underground like a bunch of morlocks, but they further separated themselves with walls, firepower, and a paradisical, park-like buffer zone. It was like they lived in an entirely different world than everyone else.

But even more important than that problem was that it was, simply put, ugly. Its twisting curves looked like the worst sort of architect’s pretension. A design that screamed, “Look at how unique and creative I am!” to anyone who laid eyes on it. And even worse than that, there was no prevailing theme. It was a soulless building, lacking any real theme, and masquerading as art.

It wasn’t surprising. The building had been designed by a high-level Architect, and no expense had been spared in its construction. However, from what Gunnar understood, the Architect in question had never received formal training. Rumor claimed that she hadn’t even worked in construction before the apocalypse. Instead, she was supposed to have been an office worker.

How she’d pivoted to architecture was anyone’s guess, but clearly, there was more to the profession than whatever magic the system provided through her class.

In any case, Gunnar had had no issues sneaking onto the grounds, and once he was inside, he’d merged with the crowd of rich assholes. If he’d had any choice, he’d have avoided the place like the plague of bad taste it was, but at the end of the day, he was a hunter. And he needed to follow his prey.

Currently, his target was leaving one of the expensive shops on the building’s ground floor, his wife by his side.

Jean-luc Lafevre was, in a word, unimpressive. He was average height. Average build. Not quite middle-aged, but already showing the signs of its fast approach. His clothes were expensive, much like Gunnar’s, though he wore them with a certain disdain that suggested he was even less comfortable wearing them than Gunnar himself.

Or maybe he was just too rich to care.

The woman on his arm was very different, though. She was taller than him. Slimmer, too. She walked with a model’s gait, as if she expected every single eye to follow her every step. She’d also had some work done, probably recently. With the urbane nature of the city, many so-called Aestheticists had risen to prominence.

Few had the actual class from which the label originated, but that didn’t matter. Colloquially, it had come to refer to anyone who specialized in adjusting peoples’ appearances. Some did so through healing magic. Others, through alchemy. Still others specialized in subtle illusions. There were even clinics that housed entire teams that worked together via myriad disciplines to create the best product possible.

And Victoria Lafevre – formerly Brockerton – had needed no such work. By all accounts, she’d been a beautiful woman even before the apocalypse. She’d gone that route anyway, and the enhancements she’d commissioned, while subtle, had tipped her appearance over the edge from beauty and to something otherworldly.

Gunnar just thought she looked like an alien’s idea of what humans might find attractive. All the pieces were there, but there was just something missing. The result was that, while he could acknowledge the beauty of the result, it was like looking at a painting or a statue. Beautiful but not attractive.

As the couple, followed by a pair of burly men carrying armfuls of bags, left the shop and headed down the wide, mall-like corridor, Gunnar rose from his seat outside a quaint bistro, laid a couple of copper ethereum on the table, then followed at a safe distance.

This time, he’d actually used a bit of makeup to change his face. Over the past couple of weeks, he’d been following Lafevre, so he needed to change things up so as to avoid being recognized. He’d yet to find anything incriminating, even when he’d searched Lafevre’s office in the city’s central district, but he intended to keep up his surveillance until he was certain that the arms dealer hadn’t ordered the assassination.

To that end, he followed the happy-seeming couple for a few more hours, always at a distance, until they took one of the elevators to their home on the top floor. The Spire was an entirely self-contained community, so they never needed to sully themselves by mingling with their lessers.

Once they were gone, and to a place he couldn’t follow without the possibility of garnering significantly more attention, he retreated to the apartment he’d rented. It was on the lowest floor of the building, but it had still cost a relative fortune. Thankfully, Hart had agreed to cover his expenses through one of Atticus’ intermediaries, so it wasn’t coming out of his pocket.

More of those expenses had been dedicated to the laptop resting on the bedroom’s nightstand. Gunnar undressed, discarding those uncomfortable clothes, then settled onto his bed, the laptop on his stomach.

Then, he navigated to the proper application, opening a nine-by-nine grid of video feeds. Buying the laptop hadn’t been difficult. Nor had it been expensive. Getting the application installed wasn’t cheap, but the true expense had come from the equipment he’d installed in the building’s main server room. That small bit of technology – powered by ethera, of course – had allowed him to tap into the security feed.

And if there was one certainty about Seattle, it was that the city was fond of its surveillance. Unfortunately, that surveillance didn’t extend to the apartments themselves. Even in what amounted to a police state, there was some expectation of privacy. Gunnar was certain that someone like Isaiah had his own network in place, but he wasn’t capable of tapping into that.

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In some ways, Seattle’s world appeared much like the old one. There were cars on every street, phones or tablets in every hand, and a host of other technological amenities that had once been taken for granted. However, it was all a mirage. Not only did most of it run on ethera – or electricity created by ethereal engines – but it was also isolated from the rest of the world.

For instance, the cars could only go a hundred or so miles before they needed to be recharged. The phones couldn’t contact anyone outside of Seattle, and the information on the local internet was curated to such a degree that most of the city’s residents had no idea what was going on even a few miles outside of Seattle.

Most of them didn’t want to.

They were happy living in their little bubble. And if they weren’t, they were too afraid of breaking free and braving the big, bad world, with all its dangers. Even the residents of the Undercity were like that.

That wasn’t to say that there weren’t people who left. There were. Plenty of them. But those who stayed were blissful in their ignorance and isolation.

Which was why someone like Elijah was such a threat. He’d come in, broken through their meager defenses, and thrown the ugly world at their feet. So, not only had he issued a warning, he’d reminded everyone in Seattle that they weren’t nearly as safe as they wanted to think.

It was no wonder that Isaiah’s position had become so tenuous.

And it was far from surprising that someone wanted Elijah dead. Gunnar just needed to figure out who would benefit most from it. So, he watched the cameras outside Lafevre’s penthouse apartment. Like that, more than a day passed, during which time Gunnar rarely moved, save to run to the bathroom or prepare a meal.

Then, he got a break when Lafevre and his wife emerged, dressed to the nines. This time, the gunrunner wore a perfectly tailored tuxedo like he was born in it. He didn’t slouch. He didn’t hold himself like he disdained the outfit. Instead, he wore it like a suit of armor.

Victoria, by contrast, wore her dress like a weapon. The plunging neckline. The artfully placed pendant that hung between her breasts. The high slit in her formfitting skirt. She looked like a Hollywood starlet on her way to walk the red carpet, but even more stunning in her perfection.

Gunnar hardly noticed it.

Instead, he considered the implications. The pair were going somewhere important – that much was obvious. And if that was the case, he needed to be there as well. Unfortunately, he had no outfits meant for attending a black-tie party. That meant he was going to have to improvise.

He closed his laptop, enabling the ethereal lock before he quickly dressed, then raced out of his apartment. Fortunately, no one was in the adjacent hall, so he had no impediment to his path to the elevator. That good fortune extended to when he reached the bottom floor, where he saw the couple striding through the lobby toward the exit. Outside, a sleek, black car awaited.

It was one of the newer models. A work of art in and of itself. They entered without hesitation or paying it the attention it deserved.

That left Gunnar to puzzle out what to do next.

He didn’t hurry through the lobby. That would bring too much attention and threaten to break the spell of Low Profile. But neither did he tarry as he wove through the crowd. By the time he reached the exit, the car was already pulling into traffic.

Inwardly cursing, he followed, picking up the pace.

At top speed, he could keep up with one of those cars, but that would require a dead sprint. He didn’t need that kind of speed, though. The flow of traffic wasn’t exactly a crawl, but it wasn’t fast, either. Gunnar managed to keep pace, though only because their path was plagued by more than a couple of stoplights.

A dozen blocks later, they pulled to a stop in front of a large, three-winged hotel that Gunnar recognized. The Fairmount Olympic had somehow survived the apocalypse, maintaining its position as one of the most luxurious hotels in the city. It’d received a bit of a facelift, but whoever was responsible for that had decided to preserve the historical building rather than replace it.

It was the right decision for an iconic landmark that traced its history back to the early twentieth century.

The structure itself was composed of three distinct wings, arranged to look like three sides of a rectangle. The fourth side was open – like an inverted U – with the entrance nestled between the other two. Leading up to that entrance was a literal red carpet lined by most of the city’s press.

Often, Gunnar wondered just how truthful the media really was. They obviously picked and chose the stories they covered, but he wasn’t sure if that was editorial choice or something that came from the government. Either way, the gossip columnists never pulled any punches. If there was a scandal concerning the rich and famous, they covered it without fail.

Gunnar’s cynical side considered it a distraction, no different from the city’s sports arenas or entertainment venues. If the residents were paying attention to those sorts of things, then they wouldn’t see what the government was up to.

In any case, he knew he wouldn’t be going in through the front door. He wasn’t dressed for it, but more than that, he didn’t have an invitation. So, he needed to find another way in.

Thankfully, he was well-versed in that kind of infiltration. He was no spy, but over the years, he’d developed a few skills along those lines. So, it was in service of one of those skills that he circled to the back side of the hotel, where he found one of the service entrances. Predictably, it was guarded.

Knowing that his opportunity was ticking down, Gunnar gained entrance by ambushing one of the hotel’s staff, snapping the man’s neck, then donning his uniform. He hid the body in an alley, staging it to look like a mugging. In a city like Seattle, where the divide between the haves and have-nots was so wide, nobody would care about the death of a simple porter. They’d look no deeper than the most obvious explanation and move on, probably to never think about it again.

Killing the porter might not have been necessary, but in a sad state of affairs, a dead body was far less conspicuous than the non-lethal alternative. Gunnar barely gave a second’s worth of thought to the morality of the situation before discarding such concepts. They were less than useless when he was on the job.

Once he was appropriately dressed, he stepped inside, trusting that the combination of his disguise and Low Profile would keep him from garnering too much attention.

It worked.

After exploring the hotel for a few minutes, he found himself at an impasse. The worker whose place he had taken was just a porter. He wouldn’t get access to the party. So, Gunnar targeted one of the waitstaff, treating him much the same as the last casualty of his mission.

After stashing the body in an out-of-the-way corner where it wouldn’t be noticed until it started to smell, Gunnar once again changed his uniform. Then, he grabbed a silver tray of tiny quiches before heading into the party.

No one looked twice at him.

Part of that was because of his ongoing ability, but mostly, it was because these sorts of people never stopped to notice the help. There were exceptions – especially when that help happened to be a pretty young woman – but for someone like Gunnar, it was as effective a camouflage as he could’ve conjured.

Gradually, he made his way through the party. Every now and again, he’d offer hors d'oeuvres to the partygoers, but for the most part, he remained entirely ignored. So, he had no issues finding Lafevre and his wife on the second floor of the ball room. The weapons dealer was busy telling a boastful story to some other rich idiots, but Gunnar couldn’t help but notice that his wife was acting quite suspicious.

Her eyes kept shifting to a man across the room. She held a drink, but she never touched it, either. And when her husband told a joke, she was a beat late with her laughter. Almost as if she wasn’t really listening, and was just waiting for everyone else’s reaction to inform her own.

Then, she broke away. Her husband barely even marked her absence. But Gunnar chose to follow as she circled the ballroom and slipped into an unused room. Predictably, the man with whom she’d made eye contact followed only a few minutes later.

That was when Gunnar heard the unmistakable sounds of amorous activity.

Clearly, she didn’t consider loyalty – or monogamy – a virtue.

That went on for only a few minutes before silence replaced the subtle grunts and moans. And then, he caught a bit of conversation.

“…he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Victoria was saying. “He’s an idiot. All he cares about is his stupid guns. He barely even notices when I’m gone.”

“What about the other thing?” came the man’s much deeper voice.

“The shipment should be in place tomorrow evening,” Victoria stated.

“And then?”

“I don’t want to talk about this, Gustaf. Not now.”

“When?” he asked.

“Not now,” she said. Then, she followed that up with something Gunnar couldn’t hear from without. He did catch it when she said, “We need to get back out there. Jean-luc is an idiot, but he’ll notice if I’m gone too long.”

Gunnar heard footsteps, so he quickly dipped behind a nearby corner. A second later, the door opened, and Victoria stepped out.

For a moment, he considered interrogating Gustaf. He was a new player, with his own motives. And there was a chance that a few questions would give him vital information. However, it would also necessitate Gustaf’s disappearance. Once Gunnar revealed himself, he couldn’t leave witnesses behind to raise the alarm.

In the end, he decided to follow Gustaf. He’d been keeping tabs on Lafevre and his wife for quite a while, and it was time to change things up. So, when Gustaf exited the room, Gunnar followed, hopeful he’d find something relevant.