Worldbuilding!
Pam looked up and said, “Sorry, but you must have already thought there might be a lair, right? This isn’t a surprise.”
One of the people we met last night — Bill Marshall, it was — shifted a little in his seat. For this meeting he was wearing field Guard gear; it was the new, supposedly standard uniform, too. Clearly either Director Ong had some pull, or Washington took this sector’s Reclamation very seriously. “Yeah, but we might have been wrong,” he said. “It’s happened before: some parent doesn’t report their kid, keeps it a secret. Hell, maybe that happened here?”
“Well,” replied Pam, “I guess a parent might be worried enough about their kid to keep her from being registered, but not worried enough to have her brush her teeth. But there’s this, too.” She took a wooden pointer and tapped the feral’s left armpit. There, under the grime, was a series of blue dots and triangles.
Pam shook her head. “That’s fang-woad,” she said. “No question. It looks like it’s derived from the patterns that the Court of the Sanguinary Chill used, but they might be from the League of Mithras instead. Badly copied, sure. But not something you can blame on a scared mommy and daddy.
“I’m sorry to say this, but you’ve got a lair hidden somewhere in the ruined part of town. Worse, it’s maybe a holdout lair.”
I spoke up. “On the bright side, you did do the right thing to call us in.”