Tap tap.

The touch on his shoulder was so light the guard nearly dismissed it. Surely it had been the night playing tricks on him. It seemed his theory was correct when he spun around to find only empty space behind him.

“Jessa was right. This shift-”

He was cut off by a sharp blow from the butt of a gun. Without another word he crumpled on the front steps of the Grussel Museum. Above him stood a woman, glancing down from beneath her hat. A wicked smirk turned up the corners of her red painted mouth.

Jack knelt and plucked the guard’s keys from his belt. Spinning them about on her finger, she carefully stepped over the body and let herself inside. The lobby was a sprawling array of welcome desks and assorted displays; one, a skeletal monster, fangs as long as her arm. Above her hung a replica of an old war plane, its mannequin pilot wearing eccentric looking goggles. Chains created walkways, meant to control the crowds as they entered. Though, as an explosion erupted in the distance, she imagined there was never much need for those chains.

A few feet through the door and the world shifted around her. Smoky ripples moving just at the edge of her vision revealed a similar structure. It may have even looked the same once, but the eerie red of the sky cast horrifying shadows in the devastated remains of the museum.

The chains were knocked down, nothing more than scrap metal that created lines on the floor. Jack walked along them, balancing as though they hung miles above the shattered tiles. The downed plane gave her pause, however.

“You’ve blocked my path, soldier,” she tutted. “A shame you’ve lost your goggles. I think they would have looked dashing on me. Don’t you?”

The pilot offered no response, his head missing entirely. How terribly rude, Jack thought as she dismounted the chains. The least he could do was apologize for crashing so inconveniently.

She gracefully pulled herself up onto the wing. Striding across to the pilot’s seat, she tugged on the strap across her chest. Her gun flung around easily into her hands, bracing ahead of and behind the round magazine. Barely looking, she took aim. The shots from it rang out in quick succession, the weapon vibrating wildly in her hands.

When the flashes subsided and the echoes died down, Jack looked at the holes she had torn in the wing opposite her. A few dozen dots of destruction that hadn’t been there before were just a handful of inches away from the mannequin.

“Not even a flinch?” she sounded impressed. “Admirable, soldier. I supposed I can forgive your poorly placed plane. This once.”

Jack stepped over the pilot and leapt easily off the now tattered wing. Bits of the chain remained but the path ended abruptly. No one manned the desk, or what was left of it. No one asked her for a ticket or payment. Unsurprising considering the convincer on her back.

The monster that had been constructed in Bellum laid in a heap in the red world and he was all too happy to lend her a hand. Well, an arm, to be exact. She twirled the humerus as though it were a baton while she drifted along.

“Don’t scream, don’t yell,” Jack sang as a dark shadow crawled across the far wall. It was massive, but its maker didn’t create a single sound. Silence reigned in the red world, save for the screams of the lost. “Don’t make a sound when it comes after you.”

Her voice echoed eerily. A slithering pool of darkness moved around a corner and she peeked after it.

“But if it asks you to confess you’d better answer true…”

The hall it had traveled down was entirely blocked. All of the halls were, in fact. Every exit from the lobby was inaccessible. Jack sighed, but even then she spun easily. The hazy red faded back into the night of the museum.

Purgatory, as she had grown accustomed to calling it, was a labyrinth of uncertainty. It was impossible to know which ways might be broken beyond repair, which paths might be blocked, and why sometimes they would unexpectedly change.

The hungry shadows navigated it without problem. Nothing slowed or stopped them, not when there could be prey nearby. Their rules didn’t apply to her, but she had her own rules that applied to no one else. Should anyone else find their way in, they became the prey. And no one escaped.

While not as eerily quiet as the inbetween, the museum itself was still all but silent. Her heels clicked on the stairs as she ascended, a lone rhythm. If anyone was alerted to her presence, they didn’t make it known.

Following the hall it felt like there were a never ending number of doors. Jack peeked in each and every one and somehow none of them were what she needed. Some she considered though. One she left only after pocketing a handful of gems.

Eventually footsteps caught Jack’s attention. They weren’t her own and that was curious. She hadn’t heard any of those since entering. It was easy enough to follow. The clicks of dress shoes against the tiles was as glaring as the emergency lights.

They came from a room in the middle of the hall. The archway was ornate, beautifully chiseled from stone. This was unsurprising given who the room was dedicated to.

Commander Lukas Brandt afforded the war torn realm of Bellum decades of reprieve. They said the last bullet shot from his gun, a unique and mysterious weapon, ended the wars. All of them.

At least, that is what Jack read on the plaque just outside the exhibit. They will need to change this, she thought, because the gun was exactly what she was there to get, and it would be the start of many wars.

“Hey! You can’t be here!”

Jack looked lazily at the approaching guard.

“How did you get in here?” the man growled and gestured toward the bone. “Where did you get that? What did you-”

He stopped short. As easily as she had come into his view, the woman was gone. The look of confusion he was wore was quickly replaced with a flash of fear as she appeared at his side. With her hat pushed back he caught sight of her eyes. Grey orbs without any sign of pupils stared back at him. Somehow, he knew they were smiling.

Immediately his gun was drawn.

“Don’t take another step!”

Jack stepped. The gun fired. The bullet ricocheted and rang out. Not that she heard it. She had passed into Purgatory moments before the shot would have hit her.

Walking in a slow circle around the lingering shadow of the man, Jack drummed her fingers on the bone. He seemed frozen, but any movement he made would take months for her to see there. Not that it mattered.

Red became blue as she wound up. The monster’s arm connected with the guard’s head from behind, causing the man to crumple to the floor.

“You missed,” she sang.

Turning on her heel, she faced the room. The walls were lined with art and articles. A variety of cases held the commander’s belongings. Her target, however, was in the center.

A massive display was encased in a glass box. Commander Brandt, life size and sculpted from stone, stood upon the corpses of his enemies; a fact Jack could respect. An arm was extended, raised and aiming a pistol at some unseen foe. It appeared to be a pistol at any rate.

The weapon was not stone. It was a breathtaking mix of wood and metal, polished and painted, and intricately engraved. Difficult to believe a shot from a gun so small ended anything but Jack imagined it had something to do with who or what he shot. Not that she could be bothered to find out.

She was already slipping into the red, looking for a weak point in the glass. The tip of the bone tapped lightly on it, playing out a rhythm. Jack hummed along as the intensity grew. When the melody reached its crescendo, she swung hard at a nearly imperceptible scratch.

Glass rained down onto the tattered tiles. A couple more swings and it was a torrential downpour of shards. Tossing the humerus aside, Jack stepped inside the display and the former box crunched beneath her heels. It was a sound abruptly silenced by her return to Bellum.

Nothing was broken there. Nothing but the base of the statue was under her shoes. She was trapped inside the box, as much on display as the Commander.

“Evening,” Jack saluted, climbing up the heap of stone bodies. “Since you seem to not understand its value, or even how to use it, I’ve come to collect that gun. Any objections?”

Silence.

“I thought you’d see it my way.”

It slipped easily out of the slot designed for it in his hand. There was a faint sort of glow from the carvings, only just visible even in the darkness. No bullets remained but that was unsurprising; no one had been especially accommodating so why should she expect anything different from Brandt. Twirling it on her finger, she stopped it suddenly and took aim. It was well weighted, balanced.

“Perhaps I’ll keep-”

Tap tap.

Jack frowned as she spun to face the sound. Just behind her, with a finger resting on the glass, was a grinning man. The jacket he wore with it’s high fur collar hardly fit the style, making it evident he wasn’t a guard. But who then?

Slicking back his black hair, he beckoned her. There was something about him that made her both want to run and want to hear his every word. She hesitated only a moment before choosing run and taking a step back into the red world, vanishing from his view.

Gun tucked in her trousers she headed for the archway. Blocked. It must have been so before; after all, she had entered through the real world. That wasn’t concerning. Even as she turned to see no way out through Purgatory she was hardly worried. It wasn’t the first time it had refused to let her go.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Jack tipped her hat to the man from behind him. Or it should have been behind. He had already turned to look at her. “I have places to be.”

The man arched an eyebrow, smile never fading. He took a step forward.

“Well, that is fortunate. So do I.”

With an annoyed grumble, Jack moved out of sight. Still, her exits were blocked. But that was fine. The butt of her tommy gun was raised to knock the man out. He rippled back into existence, a full foot away from where he had been, blocking her path to the door. It was as if he had known precisely where she would reappear.

“You’re wasting your time.”

“You’re wasting my time, gent,” Jack corrected, flipping the gun around to target him. “Now. Step aside.”

“See? I could, but I haven’t even introduced myself,” he said, sounding bored.

She hardly cared who he was; he was just another obstacle. It was an obstacle she stepped right through in Purgatory, his shadow only a wispy reminder.

Tap tap.

Whipping around she found herself face to face with the man, his hand very near her shoulder. The red world with all its fierce shadows only made his unyielding smirk more unsettling.

“My name,” he began, easily taking in his new surroundings. “Is Damien Latch. And I’m here to offer you a job.”