Beneath a long flowing black overcoat two hot feet pulsate against the shadowy pavement. The darkness of the city night engulfed the empty street, the only relief to the dark being the remaining functioning streetlamps that lined the road. Her arms and lungs pumped in the cold night air, a lone woman in pursuit of her nemesis.

Lica skidded around the corner onto a wide boulevard and shuffled up against the wall into the shadows so as not to be seen. A tall metallic colossus of a man was crouching a few hundred yards down the street and was closely examining a large red cylinder. Lica noticed that one of his arms was totally inside the red object as if trying to reach something inside it. Despite being bent over he still stood over fifteen feet tall. His perfectly formed silver body glimmered under a streetlamp directly above, he seemed to not care if he were spotted or not. There was no sign of any joints or sharp edges on the silver man’s body. If Lica hadn’t dabbled in those things she didn’t understand she would have thought him to be made entirely from molten silver. But to her cost she knew more than she had ever wished to know about Yerev and his kind.

It had been eight tough years since Lica had looked into Yerev’s dark dank dangerous eyes. At the time she believed that those two thin entrances to Hades would be the last thing she would ever see. That awful day he took away her only love, her only passion. She couldn’t let him get away this time. Not after how she had suffered.

Although she had stopped running her heart was still thumping hard and her breaths were still quick. Certain that Yerev hadn’t seen her Lica reached into her deep pockets and drew out a small gold slab about the size of her palm. The device looked brand new but was in fact very, very old, ancient even. No one at the Bureau knew how old it was and only a few souls were now left who knew how to use one safely. One side of it was covered in tiny keyholes all of different size and depth. The other side bore the carving of a single eagle just about to take flight. Lica crouched down and not taking her eyes of Yerev, placed the slab gently on the floor so that the vacant keyholes were facing her.

She stooped behind the gold block and delving into her pockets once more she pulled out a bunch of keys. The keys were of the same dazzling golden colour as the slab and were of many different shapes and sizes. Lica flicked through several stubby wide keys, the function of which she still wasn’t sure of and chose a long thin one with razor sharp grooves.

Shaking, Lica slid the key into the keyhole that was in the perfect centre of the slab. She knew that tonight was the only night in eight years that the conditions were right for a capture. It would be another eight before the cogs were aligned in this way again. Her thumb and forefinger slowly turned the key in the lock. Lica heard an almost silent click, a distant whirring sound that didn’t appear to come from the object at all but from a distance street somewhere over the top of the buildings and then the ticking began…