The child finally pointed out with his bat a huge dumpster used as bleachers for an audience of deactivated maintenance robots. Their arms trapped by the dampness held large banners covered with slogans punctuated by spelling errors.

I took the reported direction with my human on my heels. She had to come to my aid, stepping over lead red pipes as big as interweb cables, before I got lost in the dirty rags and candy wrappers littering the floor.

Lutka Ionescù was sitting on the cracked bench of an abandoned subway train. She was teaching a second group of orphans how to throw the ball perfectly by repeating the gesture. When she looked up at us, her class dispersed and the gangster stayed alone with us.

“Hunters? I’m afraid my reward is already reserved,” the tired-looking lady said. “I’m waiting for someone else. Someone who owes me a few clarifications.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” Ali explained.

“You’re waiting for Kousteau?” I asked as Ali leaned against the folded-in striped plexiglass doors. “Is this what I think? Is this how he makes easy cash? By helping you escape from the high-security penitentiary and taking you back? This is hackneyed.”

“Yes,” Lutka surprisingly confessed. “In exchange, half of my reward would go to my mother—for her care and food… All lies and deception!” Lutka looked down before rummaging through her pockets.

Ali intervened, a hand on her gun. “Don’t.”

“She died, you know… and this is my third escape,” Lutka went on before swallowing the medication she was looking for. “That means the end of the journey for me. And this traitor of Kousteau too!”

“For… me?” heaved the artificial voice of Karl Kousteau. Almost invisible, the bounty hunter had just slipped through one of the windows. Along the walls, he slowly approached Lutka as two weapons were aimed at us: a 9 mm colt with a silencer and a kind of flatiron that seemed rather heavy. “How come?”

“This brave and gallant bounty hunter, Karl Kousteau!” I joshed as the octopus-Freak continued to maintain a distance. “I think such a high reward was more than enough to pay a poor woman’s chemo—or a new set of lungs!”

“Nice try, con man,” Ali said, pointing to the escapee with her thumb. “But all good things come to an end.”

Kousteau took offense. “What? This is… blatant fantasizing!” the hunter huffed, turning his cephalopod face towards the fugitive.

“Shut it, Kousteau! There is nothing to hide anymore!” intervened this one as she grabbed the handle of a lead cricket bat lying on the ground. “We both dug our own graves out of poor choices.”

“Wait a minute!” the transcriber groaned as the bounty hunter retreated to the broken window behind him. His skin and suit changed color. They copied both the metallic gray and the graffiti from the disused carriage’s inside. “There is a… misunderstanding!”

Ali drew his Desert Eagle, but Kousteau was faster. His strange flat gun buzzed and my partner’s weapon immediately escaped her fingers. The caliber was attracted by a strange magnetogun.

“Surprise!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t… expect tha—”

Lutka acted. Not without cracking the fishbowl helmet, the swing of the lead bat violently ejected Kousteau out. Following the fall, we heard the sound of a dive. Then nothing.

“What’s behind?” Ali asked.

Lutka dropped her weapon, which bounced heavily on the steel floor. “The drinking water supply,” she replied, massaging her elbow.

My human was starting to step out the window before I intervened: “Stop it! You—” Too late! This untamable daredevil had already plunged into the chlorinated water collector and managed to make me scream: “Ali, you’re such an idiot, sometimes! We aren’t in The Big Blue! You have no chance against a cephalopod-Freak in an aquatic environment!”

“Your girl’s doomed…” Just like me, Lutka was a spectator of the bubbles and waves ballet shaking the surface.

“Would you have a terminal available? A microcomputer or something to connect to the station network?”

“I think the little Szalinski hides an old IBM under one of the seats,” she replied, glancing at the rear of the metro carriage. “If his sister didn’t steal it again, it must be there.”

It was perfect! The PC, neatly stored in its faux leather case, was functional and already wired. Despite the limit of eighty characters per entry, I managed to quickly make my way to the data-core. It was a child’s play to operate the gigantic turbine at the bottom of the tank to drain the water.

“Hey, Monsieur Cat? Why did you engage the turbine at the bottom of the tank?” Lutka asked, with her head bent over the tank. “This is going to be something.”

I heard the pumps squeaking under my pads. Yes. I had engaged the turbine at the bottom of the tank. “Hell! I’m too stupid! How can we cancel that?” I panicked while I was playing through the program. These management systems were convenient for issuing commands. But when it came to backpedaling, it was a real headache. “Where is the underscore? God! Stop_turbine_t=0! Stop_turbine_t=0!” I shouted and bludgeoned the runtime key. On my last attempt, this one jumped to get lost amid soda glass bottles. “Hell! One day, you will end up ruined with your medieval computers, IBM!”

“The water empties,” Lutka warned me. “I see movement, but especially the feed wire of a camera against the wall. Maybe you could try to find it on the network to perceive something under the foam.”

It was an idea. I could watch my human get shredded alive by my incredible blunder. The key back in place, I launched a research for the level’s electronic devices and was miraculously able to turn on the tank’s camera. The battle was displayed on the monitor with the worst resolution of the system. There, I saw Ali fighting hand-to-hand with Kousteau. The latter, stripped of his suit, was monstrous with a human torso surrounded sprawling tentacles. These gelatinous limbs, however, were of great use. He had wrapped them around my partner’s arms, thighs and neck.

As only two meters of water remained before the turbine blades, the engine wasn’t running fast enough to cause a whirlpool, but could still reduce them to a lint without making a difference. The mutant identified the threat and fastened himself to the wall with some of his tentacles. The camera out of the chlorinated water, I saw him keeping Ali’s head under the surface.

“Ali! I’m coming!” I cried, jumping from the train to land on the collector’s edge.

But Lutka held me back once on the rim. She had the bat in her hand again. “You’re being foolish! The tank’s almost thirty meters deep! You can’t jump right into this mixer!”

“Why do you care? Plus, there’re iron beams across!” I replied, with my head over the safety railing as I contemplated the scene. “Perhaps…”

The water gradually disappeared, but my partner couldn’t catch her breath. Kousteau’s tentacles tightened even more around her throat and mouth. The tip of one of them forced his way into the latter. My sapiens gnawed him with all her might. With a stroke of her teeth, Ali tore the appendix before spitting it out into the spinning turbine. “There’s going to be grilled squid on Liriope’s menu tonight!” she roared before biting another tentacle.

The Freak slammed his beak. Without a transcriber, it was impossible to understand his insults. He then inflated his gelatinous muscles dotted with implants and lifted my human by the waist, ready to throw her into the death trap. But my sapiens was more agile and managed to flee the embrace. Blocking her feet in the turbine power cables attached to the transverse metal beams, she pulled the cephalopod towards her.

“Monsieur Cat!” Lutka said in the distance. “I just found the console to turn off the engine!”

Larissa’s escapee was standing next to a corroded electrical cabinet that she had batted to crack it open. I joined her while keeping my eyes on the improbable fight that was taking place: Ali was violently ripping off Kousteau’s tentacles one by one.

“Don’t cut the turbine!” I warned Lutka before the young woman with the child’s body could activate the emergency stop switch. “Let’s get the ladder out!”

“Are you sure?” she asked before obeying my directive.

I came back to the precipice. My partner clubbed the soft cranium of the octopus, which she held firmly under her left elbow. She was red with rage which somewhat camouflaged the bloody suction marks covering her forearms, neck and face.

“Tell me, Lee?” she raged as chloramine reddened her eyes. “Trivial Pursuit’s green question: where is the brain of the octopods?”

“At the front!” I replied through the echo. “Right behind the eyes.”

Ali held a tentacle with her mouth and two others in her left hand. Kousteau cackled as he started struggling and used the remaining two to bludgeon her stomach.

“W’ong answe’, Lee!” Grabbing the spongy face by the orbits, my partner plunged the head between the blades and the steel sickle crushed Kousteau’s scalp. The turbine finally decorated the bottom of the vat with purple blood and shredded organs. “It’s on the fucking walls!”

“Well done!” I snickered. “Jules Verne took his revenge over the mephitic squid.”

“I know… I know…” Ali boasted, climbing the ladder as if nothing happened. “But who the fuck is Jules Verne?”

My sapiens had defeated the octopus-human, but was in a deplorable state. Besides the suction cup marks, the bounty hunter had crushed her ribs and bequeathed her a black eye. Covered with a viscous mixture of slime, ink and blood, she had to dream of the hot shower she had refused to take earlier.

“Have you recovered your iron?” I asked.

“Yep…” she cringed, sniffing her wet clothes stinking like chlorine infused with urine and rotten fish before unsheathing her sticky gun. The weapon cleaned, Ali pointed it towards Lutka Ionescù. We still had a contract to fulfill.

“Here we go again…” this one replied. “It’s fine. I’m not afraid to die, and tired of running.” She had approached us and had seized the barrel of the weapon. With trembling hands, she positioned it on her forehead. “I’ve killed a lot of people. Don’t let my condition make your heart go soft. If it’s not you, others will come… I accept the end I deserve.” With a stern look, Lutka removed the safety and held the muzzle firmly against her forehead.

Until a couple of months ago, Ali would have fired without an ounce of pity. That day, I saw hesitation in her eyes before she pressed the trigger.

Lutka screamed. “What did you—God!” Huddled on the floor, she held her trembling bloody left hand against her chest while Ali bent over to picked up the severed finger and the precious FID.

“Death is an easy relief, Miss Ionescù,” I replied as I jumped on my partner’s shoulder once she straightened up. Closing her collection box, Ali turned her back. “You better use that remaining hand to teach the perfect pitch to the orphans. Or we will come back.”

Back to business!