The mic is in the vicinity of the speaker, but out of focus, his mouth pointed away from the receiver, liquifying the consonants.

Make out what they're saying.

modifier +1

You are listening to here. This place. Now.

Spirits invoked by a well-placed cricket somewhere in the shrine.

There is no undercover. This is just Ramses, doing what he does.

Director General. The asset with the airy voice addresses his superior by his formal title.

And in each eye, a tear. A hundred assets. A hundred vanishings.

The only explanation is that the delegation is not what it seems. There is another motive behind the ceremony.

Around the ceremony, another ceremony -- above it, below it, enveloping it.

Metal sting of blood in your nose.

It's a cricket, that much is obvious. Picking up a conversation happening right here, right now -- a live ceremony.

The conjured spirits have fallen silent. The machine hums and crackles with failed ceremony.

Has he been smoking this whole time?

He's got something for you. Ears on your enemies.

Silently, he asks you to trust him.

Gone. Just gone. It was insanity to bring him on a hit.

The likelihood that he is playing a cover instead of having merely lost the plot drops by the sentence.

Oblivious.

RADIAN is a support asset, not a theatre-primed asset. Currently, he is an operational own goal.

Oral imitation of double bass blastbeats. One kick with two pedals thundering nonstop thirty-second notes.

It probably sounds a lot more impressive on an actual drum.

Motorcycle go fast, vroom vroom.

He changed... his t-shirt.

Behind the customary barbed wire-tangled corpses, the outline of a riot cop suggests political rather than wanton violence, and the logo -- now that you look at it -- does seem slightly more intelligible than his usual fare.

In the diffuse wilderness of Ramses' cognition, the line between irony and honesty is blurred to nonexistence -- and in this liminal space he is home.

It's unclear whether or not he's joking. Does he even understand the gravity of the situation?

Yana is her own person now. You don't need to betray her trust just because Ramses picked up on some speech patterns.

Not a second of hesitation, doubt, or curiosity. You couldn't fake that kind of acceptance if you tried.

In Ramses' imagination, the L-pop physically leaves Kaleidoscope's body in perfumed and colourful vapours as he is repeatedly pummelled.

He wishes you hadn't asked him that.

ALL PERSONNEL HAVE BEEN BRIEFED ON A NEED-TO-KNOW BASIS AND ARE SUFFICIENTLY AWARE OF THE RISKS.

Of all your assets, none knows better than KINDRED. Wilful ignorance is another matter.

A delicate ship constructed out of the flotsam of spy dramas and revenge fantasies sails headlong toward this rock, where it will shatter into a thousand lacerating crystals.

Natural enemies.

A platonic loathing, based purely on musical taste. If placed in a jar together they would kill each other out of spite.

From this distance, Portofiro is just a cluster of dim lights in early daylight. Mist clings to it.

So not technically zero. Cool.

The problem has been weighed carefully from the perspective of one who knows themselves disposable.

A lighting strike that finds you when it had the whole earth to choose from.

You'd remember a name that stupid.

The rapture. Biggest cortisol hit the body can deliver and take, a knife bisecting the brain in the wrong direction, then -- silence.

No silence. Only the Eternal Tone, the tinnitus ringing that will play on until the end of life.

For better or for worse, he's pegged us and Deaf Romero as spiritual gäng of some sort.

You have merely been living 'Hearing Impaired Romero'. Time to crank the volume.

The boat thing.

The sickly-green horizon of the Noscorrentes Sea encircles the lonely radio vessel 360 degrees.

Self-annihilation gäng. We must respect it.

Tanka Hônen survived his assassination of East Kodian opposition leader Reido Saiji, whom he shot twice with a homemade firearm at a train station opening ceremony.

Archive yields zero results, bar a few unsolved mysteries where the perpetrator was never uncovered.

A flicker of hope.

Strange things tend to happen around world-shifting events such as these. Synchronicities. Reverberance. Repetitions.

No judgement, just a fact -- you have never lived through the bloody 'loose ends' phase of a spy network collapse.

Another little reminder. The subtlest of knife-twists.

Zero Out Lich is the primary objective. Survival and extraction of lead Operant, secondary. Survival of local assets, tertiary.

RADIAN's willingness to die mid-assignment has been repeatedly confirmed, and highlighted in theatre reports as 'likely ideational'.

Self-annihilation gäng. We must respect it.

He's never going to let you forget that you alone came out unscathed the last time.

It's your inner steel he is seeing. Disregard any criticism.

A hot fragrance of mango and mountain grass blooms through your air canals.

This is a known fact about you?

In certain cultures, a final sacrament offered to terminal patients and prisoners about to be executed.

Fully recognisable. No pretence of cover. Your credibility as lead plummets in real time.