The Short Version
Feelings are stupid.
Of the range of emotions available to mankind, Delfina Ibanez had once only valued the positive ones. Excitement at the arrival of ships full of exotic goods in her port village home of Zevala, Argentina. Hope for the future, when one of those ships might bear her away to lands where fruit grew in great violet bunches smelling of camphor and sugar, where the chinchillas had long blue fur and four-nostrilled snub noses, where the red grass she smoked in tightly packed cigarillos behind her family's sprawling shack grew wild in the fields she could glimpse in the visions it produced. Love for her parents, her grandparents, her brothers and sister. She had danced, she had explored, and she had only occasionally felt the need to be angry, unhappy or afraid. When wistfulness set in, she made promises to herself. When she was lonely, she sang for the smugglers at the docks who would one day help her to keep those promises. When she felt nothing at all, she took to the hills and breathed in the scents of the outside world blown in on the breeze, teasing herself with the possibility of climbing all the way up and out beyond the edges of her tiny world of green and blue and odd angles into the unknown beyond, or leapt into the waters of the cove and swam down until drunk on depth and her own held breath as the light of the sun sparkled on the coral nestled deep into the harbour's rock.
But when it all took fire, she inverted the magic formula. Hope became rage, hatred replaced love. She fashioned herself into an internal combustion engine, and it kept her ticking over until the tank was nearly empty. It took years to rebalance her life after that, to reclaim some sort of equilibrium, but she took care never to lose the edge. Never to become again the naïve, weak girl who had something to lose. Never to be vulnerable.
And then September 8, 2002 had happened, and in its destabilizing wake she had allowed a few chinks to form in her armour. She'd expected to regret it immediately.
It had taken a year.
Feelings are stupid, she repeated as she stalked the abandoned halls of Janitorial and Maintenance. The technicians would all be preparing for a long day of work tomorrow, assessing the state of a facility which had inexplicably been set back an entire year by the recurrence of the breach. She didn't know where she was heading precisely, only what she was heading away from. Raw stupid. Contagious stupid. She'd been a fool. She'd trusted.
She had thought, in her stupidity, that getting her dead agents back would make a difference. That she might come to know them better this time around. The simple act of eulogizing Mukami, Radcliffe and Gwilherm had forced the realization that she'd known next to nothing about them which didn't pertain to the work they'd done, or the ways they each had aggravated her. She'd wanted to fix that, thought she'd been given a second chance to do so.
Just one day later, and she almost wished they'd stayed in the ground.
Well, only Gwilherm had actually been in the ground. Her corpse was a colossal string of biological material buried in a hermetically-sealed container six feet short of topside in Ipperwash Park. Radcliffe had been planted in the soil above her, literally planted, having been transmogrified into a gnarled yellow tree. Mukami had been buried in a different sense, her thick sheaf of paper-thin remains under lock and key in low-yield storage. Though lacking any closure, and absent any consoling notions about life after death or the uplifting power of sacrifice, Ibanez had learned to let the dead lie. She'd grown accustomed to missing their faces.
Now they were back, and they had no interest in knowing her better, and Mukami was knowing Noè Nascimbeni, and the way that final fact was preying on her mind confirmed that the late-stage Zevala model had been best. Eat shit, die angry. Turn anything flammable to fuel. She could feel the rage building up again, fire in the furnace as her boots scuffed the lino with every kick-heeled step. She was no poet, and she hadn't sung in years. She didn't know what to do with depression. But anger? She knew how to work anger. She had used it to forge this life for herself. As her troops could well attest, she still knew how to work the bellows.
Her mouth tasted of bile as she passed the door to a decommissioned thermal vent, electronically-locked access bar strapped from jamb to mullion. Her throat suddenly burning, she bent over double and very nearly vomited. Too much of a good thing. It was building up, that vital force she'd been too long deprived of. Her body wasn't used to it anymore. She had to find release. She clutched at her head… and found her hair close-cropped.
What the f—
"Chief? You alright?"
She looked up, still holding the too-short strand of hair, ready to use whatever luckless agent had happened upon her as a release valve. Then she saw who it was, and pulled out her service weapon instead.
"You're dead." She drew a bead on the little man's forehead, to emphasize the point. She nearly pulled the trigger.
"Hey." The agent raised both hands in placation, or futile defence, his features twisted in confusion and fear. "I was just asking! Didn't mean to imply anything!"
"Bit extreme, Chief?" Another agent, a woman, stepped around her partner. "It's just us. Sandy and Lewis?"
Sandrine Holt and Lewis Bosch. She tall and gawky, he short and stocky. Both of them dressed in last year's uniforms, just as they had been when they'd died back in January.
Until this moment, unlike Mukami, Gwilherm and Radcliffe, they'd had the decency to stay that way.
It's not like we were serious.
Noè Nascimbeni had woman problems.
He was too old to have woman problems. He was already a widower. He wasn't a bachelor; he'd long since resigned himself to his Star Trekkish marriage to the enormous machine in which he worked, the SCP Foundation Lake Huron Research and Containment Facility known in shorthand as Site-43. He knew precisely know it worked, how to keep it working, how to assess its moods, how to tell when something was wrong, and how to fix it. He had never known most of these things about his wife, knew even fewer in the case of Delfina Ibanez. He was the world's leading expert on one surpassingly large and complex inanimate object, but in his early middle age acquiring new and even more Byzantine forms of expertise was a tall order. He'd never precisely burned bridges with his son, rather allowing them to deteriorate through inattention and lack of maintenance. His granddaughter was still young enough not to begrudge him his prolonged absences and shoddy attempts at doting, but the timer was ticking on that. He had allowed a patriarchal interest in the Janitorial and Maintenance Section to lapse after the death of his deputy and adopted nephew, Romolo Ambrogi, in the breach of 2002. He'd managed to repair much of that damage in the last few months without serious inconvenience, had even been miraculously reunited with Ambrogi, but his romance with Delfina… well. She was everything he wasn't: brash, unabashed, quick to anger, indistinguishable in fury or passion. She'd broken him out of his torpor, given him things his massive metal foxhole never could have.
And then, yesterday had happened.
Or rather, the yesterday of yesteryear had happened again. It brought with it Ana Mukami, whom he had always admired from afar with peaceful resignation but now met again in the mood for close contact. Mukami was determined to make every moment of her new life count, wanted to spend them with him of all people. A few months prior he might have been slow to reciprocate, but Delfina had renewed his appreciation for the squishier things in life.
You're seriously blaming this on her?
He shook his head to clear it, then cursed as his skull banged against the overhanging machinery. He had been lost in his own thoughts, forgetting where he was. He was past his boots in a horizontal crawlway, a selection of spanners on the hatched metal floor beside him, the undercarriage of a complex conveyor system looming above. The machine wasn't broken; if someone in Archives and Revision punched in a request, their chosen book would trundle in at approximately ninety percent of the speed the belt was rated for. Nascimbeni liked to pursue efficiencies, another thing he shared with Montgomery Scott and Geordi LaForge. It was where he'd once spent the energy most men his age lavished on their wives, their girlfriends, or both. Work and leisure bled together for him, and he could often be found tinkering with structure and infrastructure into the wee hours… particularly when the energy he hoped to burn was mental.
He wanted to forget Delfina's face. It was a brutally honest face, by way of a total lack of emotional regulation. He didn't know how she already knew what he'd done, but he did know that she did know, because the look of withering contempt and fury and hurt she had favoured him with at their last meeting had bled him dry of the solace he'd shared with Mukami just hours before. In that moment he'd hated himself almost as much as she apparently now hated him. He'd wanted to crawl into a hole, to die.
He had instead crawled into a hole to work. His first love was falling apart. The recurrent breach had sapped the strength out of every piece of containment apparatus in the entire Site, and it was his job to do something about it. This particular system was only tangentially related to containment, and there were plenty of items with bigger tickets on the block, but he didn't want to work on anything important and make any costly mistakes right now. He was really only working to keep his mind occupied, keep it off the decision he'd otherwise have to make.
Which one will you choose?
He laughed at the butterflies in his stomach. It felt like sudden onset indigestion. He couldn't imagine how it had come to this; he was far too old to be living like a teenager in a summer movie. Then again, the choice had probably been made for him already. He doubted Delfina would take him back. She wasn't the sort to forgive and forget, not if the pile of reports on the Chaos Insurgency and the stack of denied applications for a Mobile Task Force posting peppering her dorm room were anything to go by. No, he had broken an unspoken bond between them, had taken something from her before she'd had the chance to fully appreciate it. She hated that most of all. They had that in common, like so many other—
Someone kicked the soles of his boots, one at a time. He banged his head again, and swore louder. "Who's there?"
And then he was sliding out from under the conduit. Someone was pulling on the hems of his jumpsuit pants, and the wheeled skeleton on which he lay rolled out to reveal…
Trouble. Ana was leaning over him, smiling ear to ear. She wasn't wearing her mandated E-Class personnel uniform anymore, which was a surprise. She was wearing a tight, bright red tube top and white bellbottom pants, which was also a surprise and several other things beside. "Fancy meeting you here!" Her voice was playful, sing-song and strong. "All by your lonesome."
"Not lonesome," he grinned up at her, blinking away the lingering red of his worklamp. He'd been told it was easier on the eyes at night. "Not anymore."
He caught a flash of surprise in her eyes, and relished the rush of triumph. It wasn't easy to catch Ana Mukami unawares — she was after all a trained sniper — but since she'd been the one to take the initiative so far, apparently his forwardness had done the job.
She regarded him curiously. "I'm surprised you're so glad to see me."
"You mean Delfina?" He rubbed his eyes; the redness wasn't going away. "She'll get over it. You and I…" He groaned. His spine had started aching immediately once freed from the comforting flatness of the skeleton, and he rubbed at it fruitlessly. There was something wrong with his jumpsuit… it was thicker, slicker, cool and smooth to the touch where it should have been warm and variegated. He must have laid down in oil. Strange that it hadn't leaked through. His back felt dry, and he wasn't so old that he'd lost feeling in his skin. Easily sorted. He was a mechanic first and foremost, and always carried an extra rag in his pocket. He ran through the ritual he'd been performing for months, since introducing the new uniforms to J&M: reach for where the breast pocket on the old vests had been, then adjust his angle to find its counterpart on the jumpsuit. Old habits die harder for old men.
Then again, change was in the air. He willed himself to adapt. Eyes fixed on Mukami's, the red glare refusing to abate, he reached for the new pocket and ignored the nagging memory of the old.
His fingertips found the stitched nametag he knew to read, simply, NASCIMBENI in raised black thread. His wife had stitched it for him, some twenty years ago.
"You and I what?" Mukami watched as he patted his pockets and tugged at the lapels of his long-discarded uniform jacket in disbelief. "What will we do, Chief?"
He blinked in the glare of what he now understood to be red breach lighting.
"We," he replied, slowly, "are going to go find your boss."
This is bullshit.
William Wettle had been upstaged by dead people. Like an ocean explorer, he was constantly discovering new lows.
He'd never exactly enjoyed that his entire life was a high-viewership gong show, but if he had to be trapped in that endless pantomine of personal injury and social disaster, he saw no reason not to make it everyone else's problem too. So long as he was conscious, he was a bundle of live wires. Since falling out of bed this morning, for example, he'd been walking into doorframes and tripping on doorstops and getting struck in the face by swinging doors — there was a definite theme emerging — while turning progressively redder until he could feel brain cells bursting just to sustain the redness in his cheeks. He should have been the butt of at least a dozen brand-new jokes already. He should have made at least one person's day. But all eyes were fixed instead on the seven resurrected nobodies, and his customary indignities were even heavier to bear in obscurity. He didn't see what the big deal was. He certainly deserved more credit for surviving his own perilous peculiarities for nearly four decades than they did for dying, then somehow bouncing back.
The only thing mitigating this irritation was that one of the de-deceased had subsequently engaged him in a violent sex act, which he had found largely satisfactory. There was something refreshing about sustaining intentional injury for once. But a sudden rush of gas, dispelled with a mighty belch, reminded him that even minor consolations came with a price. He made a mental note to take a Gravol before his next sheet session with Gwilherm.
He was ambling his way to the Replication Studies lab to complete his daily round of calamity-avoiding rituals. He always locked the door after clocking out, then immediately forgot whether he had in fact done so and walked back to check. Delfina Ibanez had made it clear to him that this act was entirely superfluous, as indeed was Wettle himself. "This Site employs dozens of guards and agents. This Site has remote timer locks, and video cameras, and drones, all in cascading redundancy. You're not a point of failure in that system; there's no point to you at all, far as I'm concerned. Every sector is monitored by AIC, and every door left unlocked is locked on schedule automatically. Don't interfere with security protocol, and we won't interfere with the Department of Applied OCD." He hadn't felt he'd deserved this particular tongue-lashing, especially as she didn't know how he also rocked the keycard reader back and forth in its housing every time to ensure it was properly seated. He had his reasons for each of these behaviours, at any rate, and meta-reasons for not explaining them. Better everyone consider him forgetful and stupid than learn…
…the…
"…fuck?"
His hand froze on its path to the card reader, which was no longer present. The wall it had once been embedded into was also missing, as was the floor beyond. The door should have been about there — he waved his hand experimentally through the empty air — and the rest of Replication Studies should have extended away to the south, the cramped workspaces and his even more cramped office repurposed from the old A&R fax and mailroom. None of that was in evidence, replaced instead by a tremendous bedrock bowl of ash and soot and charcoal and other things he wasn't sure were synonyms or not, a pair of matched craters in the floor and ceiling divided by the wide swathe of nothing in between.
He performed some brief calculations.
1. He really was very tired;
2. His body ached in several novel ways;
3. He was not in the best of moods;
4. The person most likely to blow up William Wettle's laboratory was William Wettle;
5. The person responsible for blown up labs was not William Wettle, but Delfina Ibanez;
6. He had a head start.
He walked back down the AAF-D approach corridor toward Habitation and Sustenance, thankful as ever that his rooms were so close to where he worked. The breach lights were on in the halls; he was at least forty nine percent sure they hadn't been before. The sirens weren't wailing, however, so it whatever it was couldn't be all that bad. There were people in the halls… well. There was one person in the halls, but he didn't look to be in any particular hurry, and just watched as Wettle walked past, so that was if not comforting then at least a resumption of something like normalcy. The door to his dorm was ajar, which made him wonder if Gwilherm had returned for Round 2. If so, she wasn't still there, but she had left him a parting gift.
Everything he owned had apparently been shredded, smashed, or otherwise broken.
He grinned. My kind of woman. Perhaps she was coming back? Preferably before she'd had a chance to cool off.
He closed the door, pulled his mattress off the pile, determined that nothing in the shape of his bedframe was still in evidence, and tossed it onto the churned carpet. The resultant cloud of dust made him sneeze, and of course his glasses fell off. He took this opportunity to touch the tender spot over his left eye, and the grin widened. Definitely my kind of woman. He shrugged off his labcoat and dumped it beside the mattress, where it luminesced softly for no immediately obvious reason, then knocked the holster off his belt without noticing it at all. The gun didn't go off when it struck the floor, because that isn't generally how that works, and because it probably would have killed him, which wasn't how his bad luck worked either.
A voice intoned in the hallway. "You are wondering: will she ever return? I can tell you with perfect certainty that she will. Because I believe. Because I believe, she will return. Because I believe she will return, she will return. And I will go on believing, for all of our sakes. Because I love her, and I love you."
"That's pretty cool," he remarked. He found an old foam pillow, sans case, and after a moment's thought and a salacious grin went into the closet for another. Just in case. There was a foul smell in there that he couldn't identify or see the source of, but a quick sniff of the pillow caused him nothing more serious than a series of sneezes — he could never sneeze just once — so he figured it was probably alright.
He deployed the pillows, then belly-flopped onto the 'bed' with every intention of waiting for his lusty new lover, and fell immediately into a sound and dreamless sleep.
That was precisely how his bad luck worked.
"Chief? Talk to me, Chief."
Grimm Countenance Protocol (Abridged)
When encountering an extradimensional space or reality restructuring event, Foundation staff must obey the following directives:
1. Self-isolate from any native entities to assess the situation objectively, where practical;
2. Avoid interaction with said entities, where practical;
3. Where interaction is unavoidable, do not acknowledge any discrepancies between baseline reality and the new setting, where practical;
4. Do not ingest or inject any substances found in the new setting, where practical;
5. Attempt to exit the space or restore baseline reality, taking care to avoid alerting native entities to these goals.
Bosch and Holt had been pulled limb from limb by werewolves eight months ago. There had been nothing anomalous about their deaths, beyond the obvious. They hadn't been obliterated by a magic gas explosion and reconstituted on its anniversary in some perverse cosmic joke, they were simply here again, and Ibanez understood what that meant in the time it took her not to blink.
They hadn't changed, and she hadn't changed.
Here had.
Keeping the pistol trained on Holt — the more dangerous of the two by far — Ibanez reached for the keycard in her jumpsuit pants pocket. She found she was no longer wearing her jumpsuit; like them, she was dressed for last year's ball. The card was nevertheless still there, and she slapped it hard against the locking bar. There was a low beep, and a click, and the bar slid slightly on the surface of the door. She waved at the knob with her weapon. "Pull it open."
"Boss," Bosch began.
"PULL IT OPEN!"
Holt darted forward so abruptly that Ibanez nearly dropped her. Then the door swung open, and Ibanez followed it. She caught the backside kick with her boot, slammed it in Holt's face, and slapped the bar against the inside. Her keycard was still clapped to the reader; detecting the application of force, it beeped a second time. The locks clicked into place.
She took a deep breath. That was the hard part of 1) taken care of. The path to 5) was still unclear. She was standing in a void, a pitch-black expanse of fuck all. She holstered the gun, replaced the keycard and patted her other pockets to take stock. Nothing useful, but she did find the slim notepad she always kept tucked into her belt just behind the holster. She pulled it out, disentangled her penlight from the binding and flicked it on. A quick rifle through the pages revealed that most of them were full, so she started from the start. The first page was refreshingly direct.
You are Delfina Ibanez. You are the Chief of Security and Containment at Site-43. The Site is compromised. You may be compromised. There is a test on the next page.
She turned the page, unhappy at the implication that even her own identity might be in flux.
1A. Should intermittent vengeance arm again his red right hand to plague us?
Even alone in the dark she was faintly embarrassed by the white hot fury rising up inside of her. She clenched the pad tight as a steady banging started on the door, Holt's voice just barely coming through: "Chief? We want to talk."
"I'll bet you do," she muttered through gritted teeth, not entirely certain what she meant by that. She scanned the next few items in a rush.
1B. How did Question 1A make you feel?
2. Is there anyone in your head with you?
3. Who do you trust?
4A. Is Ana Mukami the Director of Site-43?
4B. If you answered "no" to Question 4A, who is?
Flip the page for the answer key.
Question 1 had pissed her off, as it had every time she'd seen it for the past nine years. She had no idea how to tell if she was sharing headspace with anyone else, but since the question itself implied that she'd know, she assumed that she wasn't. Mukami wasn't even duty personnel, and of course McInnis was the Director. As for who she trusted…
Six people, as of yesterday. Today the math was different, but when it came to life or death she knew their little band was mostly reliable.
She slapped her forehead. Five. Wettle was not so much trustworthy as predictable.
No, wait, six. Yancy.
She turned the page.
1B. Angry.
2. No.
3. Nobody.
4A. No.
If everything else she'd seen so far hadn't already, the answer to 4B told her something was seriously wrong with the new paradigm. There was a postscript:
If your answers diverge from the above, a Langford-Euler Memetic Clearance Agent can be found on your belt.
She had no intention of sticking herself with a needle, and anyway Langford-Eulers always made her giddy, then gave her a mild case of tonsilitis the next day. Did what she'd just read tell her anything about the situation she hadn't known before darting through the door? She read the questions again.
Risk of possession… Bosch and Holt? Doesn't explain why they're alive. Trust issues, possession, same thing. Mukami, Director… The resurrected Mukami had apparently transferred into administration, but she'd made no more grandiose claim. Chaos Insurgency… Question 1A was the motto of the Foundation's most unpredictable adversary, a mangled quotation from Paradise Lost. What did that have to do with anything? Chaos Insurgency mind control attack? "Fucking stupid." It was fucking stupid. That couldn't be it.
She slumped against the door. This time, Bosch called out: "Chief?"
"Dead people walking. Clothes changing. Impossible Director. Grimm Countenance." That last, of course, was the key. When in fairytales, keep a straight face. Don't eat the mushrooms, don't take the pills, don't tread on the grass. Don't start shit, and most of all don't let on that anything's wrong. You are the Chief of Security and Containment at Site-43. Damn right she was, in any world worth visiting.
She unlocked the bar again, and tossed it aside before kicking the door open. She kept the gun levelled until she saw that neither Holt nor Bosch had drawn their own weapons; the latter had his arm raised to rap once more on the door. Ibanez lowered her aim, flipped the notepad back to the second page with one hand, and began. "Lewis! Question 1A!"
"My boss?" Mukami repeated. Nascimbeni barely heard her.
He had seen building materials deform in all sorts of fascinating ways in his long career both before and with the Foundation. He'd seen plaster get wet and slough. He'd seen it burn and bubble. But he'd never seen it reconstituted into a frozen waterfall, as though cast that way from the start, and he knew this plaster hadn't been cast that way because he'd been there when it was cast. The studs and wiring behind the walls were exposed, the wires absent their shielding, electrical panels missing their covers, and even in the dim light he could see that everything was wired wrong. There were plenty of extra wires, too…
…and they looked like the string of organic rope which had once comprised Janet Gwilherm's mortal remains. They were dripping white treacle where they met and connected to each panel. He couldn't begin to imagine what they were doing, but they were steadily pulsating as they did it.
"My boss," Mukami repeated again. "Who do you think that is?"
He tore his attention away from the structural chaos and focused on her smiling face. This was easier than it ought to have been. "Delfina?" he hazarded. "I know you said you switched over to admin in the alternate timeline…" She was still smiling, but the expression seemed oddly fixed. He stopped, and started again. "I don't know what's going on here. Do you?"
She shrugged amicably. "I thought I did, but maybe I was wrong. What do you want to know?"
He waved at the walls. "Why everything is all messed up. What's the breach lighting about? Why aren't you wearing your E-class jumper? How much could I have possibly missed with my head in a console for less than an hour?" He felt his heart racing as the litany went on, and willed himself to calm down. There was no good time to have a heart attack, but they were presently near the end of the broad spectrum of extra bad ones.
She seemed to measure her reply for a moment before speaking it. "Everything is all messed up because of what the breach lighting's about. The breach lighting is about half the Site going insane and trying to kill the other half for no good reason, and the crazy spreading topside. As for your head, I really don't know."
He took a steadying breath. Like all his colleagues, he had training for this. "Okay, uh…" He pulled off his baseball cap, and leaned toward her. "Am I bleeding?"
She reached up to delicately pluck at his curly hair, then scratched it playfully like he was a favoured pet. "Nope."
He flushed, and slapped the cap back on. "Then I guess it's not all in my head, and the timeline shifts are still going. God dammit. I thought it was one-and-done." He resisted the urge to root around in the writhing walls, figure out what precisely their new deal was. "Is it the same as before? You and the others know the story, and the rest of us are in the dark? This all seems normal to you?"
"For a given definition," she smirked.
"Okay, but…" He sighed. "You didn't say anything about a civil war when you were debriefed. You made it sound like everything was pretty much fine. All seven of you told the same story."
She nodded. "They were told to keep it consistent."
"By who?"
"By the Director. Our Director."
"Which is?"
She smiled sweetly at him. "Me!"
He blinked.
"Like you said, I'm in admin now. I'm in charge of putting down the revolution. I couldn't risk telling you all about it until I knew it wasn't going to all come rushing back, and until I knew where each of you stood. As far as I knew, Noè, you were on the other side. But maybe those reality shifts you were talking about…"
He wanted this to be true. He wanted her to be trustworthy. He decided to run with it for now. "How bad is the situation? What resources do we have?"
"You should assume that anything not at Site-43 is inaccessible."
He whistled. "That bad, huh. What about the local area?" He tried to force a level tone, but his heart picked up on the implications and began ramping up again in response. "What about Grand Bend? Did anybody—"
She raised a hand, and pressed it to his lips. "Grand Bend was evacuated early on. Your family is safe."
He believed her, because he needed to. "Okay," he muttered through her fingers. "What about Romolo? He's not one of the—"
She pressed his lips shut again. "He's fine. So is David. They're on the right side of the divide." She winced. "Not everyone you care about is likely to be."
The way she phrased this instantly planted suspicions in his mind, but he pushed them aside. "Alright. You can tell me more as we walk. Can you take me to Del?"
"No. But I can take you to our camp." She started to walk, northward.
"You're camped… what, in A&R?"
"AAF-D," she chirped. "Or rather, past the AAF-D subway. It's complicated."
"F-D," he repeated. "Yeah, sure. Of course. Everything starts there." He shook his head. "Why are you the Director? What happened to Allan?"
"McInnis is gone." She walked with an unreserved spring in her step, gesturing grandiosely as she talked as though they were on a summer promenade along a garden path. "Nobody knows where. But we still have structure, and we still have a plan. It was a lucky break, finding you out here."
"Who else?" He needed this out of the way, before his arteries clogged up. "Who else is lost, and who isn't? Tell me about Del, Okorie from AO, Blank, Lillihammer, Phil Deering, Veiksaar, uh…" He frowned. "And Wettle, I guess." He almost added if there's time.
Her smile faded somewhat, and her pace quickened. "One out of seven ain't bad?"
"Hello."
Wettle opened his eyes, one at a time. It was an old trick from when he'd been married to his first wife. With one eye open, he could tell if she was waiting silently to berate him without tipping her off to his conscious state. She was not here now, nor had she ever been. He was rolled on one side, avoiding a spring which had sprung through the battered pillow top, staring at a massive crack in the drywall. The crack was covered in what looked like rust, but given the absence of any metal around it, probably wasn't.
"Hello," the voice repeated.
Wettle rolled onto his other side, and stared into the face of…
Well, it was a man at any rate. The man was about his age, with no beard and a much more attractive but notably less masculine face. He was lying on the pillow meant for Gwilherm. He was wearing a white labcoat with wide lapels. Wettle vaguely recognized it, but only enough to say for certain that he'd seen something similar before.
"Hello," he hazarded in response.
The man smiled. "Hello."
Wettle nodded. "Yeah. What are you doing in my…" He became suddenly again aware of the dull aches clustered around his left shoulder, which he felt certain should have subsided by now. Gwilherm had played rough, but surely not rough enough to do lasting damage. "What are you doing in my bed?"
The man nodded back at him. "Hello," he agreed.
Wettle reached out to examine the man's labcoat, encountering no resistance. There was no nametag, but he did see the black liner when he pulled the lapel back, so that settled that. This was one of the theologians. Wettle didn't want to talk to him, let alone wake up next to him. He was rarely operating at a luck deficit this bad before even getting out of bed.
"I'm gonna go," he said. "And call security."
"Go." The man watched as Wettle staggered to his feet and collected his own labcoat from the pile of rubble. "Call security."
"Right." Wettle swung his arms inside the sleeves without looking, and was surprised to hit on the right combination first try. He was also surprised that the throbbing pain became significantly sharper as he did this. "Well, nice meeting you. Stay here and wait for the rent-a-cops."
"Stay here," the man agreed. He sat up, and as Wettle opened the door he stood up and walked over.
"No." Wettle placed one hand on the man's chest. The man's head fell limply to one side, as though he were a curious and rather dim cat. "You stay here. I am going."
"I am going," the man smiled.
"No. I am going." Wettle stepped into the hall.
"No." The man followed him.
Wettle sighed. There was a security checkpoint not far from here, all he had to do was follow the emergency floor runner lights. Unfortunately they weren't lit, red breach glow or not. That cheered him up somewhat, actually; maybe whatever had blasted his lab wasn't any big deal after all. The fact that he'd been able to get some sleep supported this possibility…
He checked his watch, and realized he wasn't wearing it. He checked the other man's watch instead — they both wore Rolexes, but Wettle suspected that unlike his own, this one was real — and frowned at what he saw. "Seven o'clock?" That didn't make any sense. He didn't feel tired… how could he have only slept half an hour?
"Seven o'clock," the man repeated cheerfully.
"And all's…" Wettle continued, scanning the hall until he found precisely what he was not looking for. "…hell."
"What was that about?" Holt demanded as Ibanez lowered her weapon.
"Had to make sure." Ibanez scanned the corridor warily. "There's things I can't tell you right now. Not here." The best way to deal with suspicion was to redirect it. Better they think there was something she wasn't telling them that she was no longer herself.
"Alright, well." Bosch still looked shaken, but he obviously wanted everything to be fine. "We still need to figure out where they went."
Ibanez nodded. She kept up the fierce expression she'd worn since walking out of the shaft, to disguise the fact that she didn't know what was going on. "Any ideas?"
"They took the auditorium exit." Holt's arms were crossed in front of her chest; she was clearly less eager to accept her Chief's sudden outburst. "That takes them into H&S, obviously. They might have been planning to cross the floor, you know, defect — could be Del Olmo got them, or Wirth — but maybe they were looking for something in the dorms. I say we check Bradbury's first, then Blank's."
Ibanez felt her eyes widening, and quickly played it off as a burst of nervous energy by hopping on the balls of her feet. "Makes sense." HA HA HA. "I'd rather not assume anything until we've got more to go on. Let's head to the audit—"
The floor shook, and the ceiling tiles rattled so hard that several fell out and shattered. There was a deep, low rumble, then more rumbling, then nothing. It had come from somewhere not far to the west.
"The auditorium," Bosch muttered.
"Mukami knows they're out there." Holt unholstered her gun. "She's looking for them."
Ibanez felt a rush of confused anger. What did Mukami have to do with whatever was going on here? "Then we'd better find them first. Head north, then cut west into H&S?" It occurred to her, too late, that she shouldn't be making assumptions about what paths were and were not available in this strange new world.
Bosch shook his head. "Takes us too close to F-D. But I've got a better idea. Assuming someone just blocked up the auditorium doors, we can still get in at the tops of the aisles."
He was right. There were overflow stairs on each corner of the hall, with maintenance access leading into the Site's second skin. All they needed to do was find the nearest—
She heard the shot, and immediately hit the tiles on all fours. Holt flattened herself against one wall while Bosch hunkered down behind a set of exposed pipes. Three more shots in quick succession scored the floor beside Ibanez, peppering her with ceramic dust. One struck a pipe, producing a brief burst of yellow steam which quickly dissipated. Bosch coughed, once, then drew his weapon and returned fire.
Ibanez caught the door to the geothermal vent with one boot, yanked it open, and slithered behind it. A quick peek down the corridor from this vantage point to snap off a few shots of her own revealed their attackers: a small platoon of transparent humanoid things, the men in iridescent green, the women in glittering yellow.
"Too hard to hit," Bosch growled. "See-through bullshit."
"They still need to aim," Ibanez said. I hope? "Shoot for the muzzle flashes."
"This is bad." Holt reloaded her weapon. "If they got this far, they got past Yancy."
Ibanez stiffened on the floor. Howard Yancy was her most trusted agent. If she had to confess that she had no idea what was going on, and at this point it was obvious she definitely did need that, it would be to him. "Where is he?"
Holt's eyes narrowed, but Bosch responded: "Past the next junction. He should've radioed if he saw anything. He might be…" He shook his head.
She glanced down the line of her pants and boots, at the geothermal vent and its disused maintenance passages. She called up a mental schematic of where they let out. "Let's assume he isn't. Shoot enough for three, guys. I might be a while."
Nascimbeni shook his head. "I can't believe that."
"Well, it's true." They had left the outskirts of Janitorial and Maintenance far behind, and were now rounding the corner past the smoking crater of Wettle's Replication Studies lab on the approach to AAF-D. "Most of your staff has gone over to the other side. We don't know what they're up to down there, but it can't be good."
It was a relief to know that his nephew was alright, but over the past year he had learned to be suspicious of relief, so he guarded his optimism. "Who's in charge? Of the 'other side', I mean?"
She told him.
His jaw dropped. Suddenly, the idea that half the Site had lost their mind seemed considerably more plausible. "You can't be serious."
He could still see the calculated appraisal in her eyes as she answered. "You seemed happy enough about it before."
He opened his mouth to explain why the events of the past year had changed his outlook, but suddenly thought better of it. He wasn't sure he precisely trusted Mukami, even after what they'd shared just a few short hours ago. He wasn't sure this was precisely the same Mukami. The one who had dashed into AAF-D on his orders, had died in there, had been memorialized…
He stopped walking.
The mural was gone.
"Holy shit." He'd understood intellectually that reality was shuffling the deck, but this was the most palpable sign yet. Wettle cratering his lab? That made perfect sense. The loss of the memorial meant all his memories were now suspect.
"What?" She examined the wall he was staring at, then examined him. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. It's just… all starting to sink in." He marched towards the closed airlock door to avoid her probing gaze. "You're sure this is the way to go?"
"Yep." She joined him at the control panel. "Door codes haven't changed since September 18, 2002. Remember yours, by any chance?"
He considered. "Actually… no."
She frowned. He realized he'd never seen her frown before. "No? Really?"
He shrugged. "Sorry. I don't keep track of old passcodes. I know mine all the way up to the final word, obviously, but—"
There was a sudden hiss of escaping air, and the door rolled open.
There was a dead man standing in the airlock, and he tumbled toward them. Nascimbeni stepped back in shock, and the man's naked skin slapped the white tiles.
And then the dead man stood up.
The stranger followed Wettle down the hall, blithely stumbling over everything in his path almost as much as Wettle himself was doing. There was a lot to stumble over: big sodden clumps of insulation, stuffed black garbage bags with suggestive shapes, biohazard crates and empty suitcases and sundry items of every description littering the floor. Every once in a while, human corpses in various states of disrepair. None of it bothered Wettle all that much, because he was already too confused and terrified to take on additional troubles.
"Half an hour!" he muttered, more to himself than his unwanted companion. He'd known his coworkers were incompetent, but this really was something.
"Half an hour," came the dazed response from behind.
"They're going to try to blame me." He rubbed his sore arm, then swore as the fingers on his hand began to ache as well. "You can tell them I wasn't involved. We were sleeping together."
"Sleeping together."
"Actually, no. Don't tell them that. Tell them… don't tell them that." Wettle sighed. The man was obviously not going to tell anyone anything, not unless it was told to him first. It might be possible to train him to repeat simple phrases, like a parrot. He filed that away for later use, and immediately forgot it.
He sighed again, apropos of nothing, and came up short when the sigh echoed back at him from around the next corner, in a female voice.
"Who's there?" he demanded.
"Who's there?" came the response, both from behind him and ahead.
He turned the corner, and found… someone. A woman. A doctor; probably the head doctor, if he remembered her face correctly. It wasn't normally so slack and unfocused, but it did look roughly the right age. She had once been almost glamourous; like the man he'd woken up with, her appearance was now in a state of advanced disrepair.
"My shoulder aches," he told her. "You have anything for that? No?"
She smiled at him. "No."
Ibanez gently prised open the door from the vent passages to the main hall. She'd waited as long as she dared, a few short seconds, to see if she could hear any activity without. Yancy was counting on her, she couldn't be precious with her own safety.
The hall was empty of threats, but not features of interest. Everything was smeared in chalky white — abatement fluid, she realized, piped in through the overhead sprinkler system. She knew in an instant why. Someone, probably Yancy, had taken down some of the ethereal attackers by employing the Site's anti-ghost countermeasure, courtesy Dr. Anastasios Mataxas. They were lucky the fight was taking place in J&M. If it had been farther away from AcroAbate, where the sprinklers produced only water, they would have been SOL.
She stepped over the puddles of multicoloured goop which had once been vaguely person-shaped, weapon raised, listening. She took the first corner she found…
"Howard!"
She rushed to where Yancy was slumped against the wall, still standing, where the corridor doglegged before continuing on. His eyes widened as he saw her, and he gestured violently towards the side. The moment she stepped to the left in response, the tiles to her right exploded.
Sniper.
"It's her," Yancy spat. He peered cautiously around the edge of the wall, left hand clamped over his right shoulder, ducking below a gently spinning ventilation fan. "She's got me pinned."
The wound didn't seem to be bleeding much, and Ibanez could immediately see why. Yancy habitually clipped his radio to his epaulets; the line was now hanging uselessly at his waist, and there were scattered electronic components at his feet. "She shot your radio."
He nodded, teeth gritted.
Hitting Yancy's radio at a distance was a feat only three people in the Site might have been able to manage: Ibanez herself, Gedeon Van Rompay, and Ana Mukami. She didn't have to guess which was responsible.
"Howard," she said. "I need you to answer some questions, and not ask me any in return. Then I need you not to tell anyone I asked. You trust me, yeah?"
His eyes narrowed, but he nodded.
"It's Ana, right?"
Another nod.
"Is it really her?"
He shook his head. "She fucking shot me, Chief. What more can I say?" He bit his lip, clearly refraining from asking what she was on about.
"How many are there?"
He considered. "I'd say three. Her, and two nobodies."
She nodded, scanned the environment again, and nodded for a second time. "Alright. Here's what we're gonna do. In about one minute, you're going to start wasting your ammo. Shoot blind, stick your hand around the corner, never at the same height; you know how she is." Mukami was the undisputed markswoman at Site-43. She'd take Yancy's hand off if he wasn't careful. "Distract them. And when I give you the signal," she pointed, "I want you to surrender. Make them come to you. That clear?"
He nodded grimly. "Where are you gonna be?"
Where Grimm Countenance says I should. "The only place I know I'll be alone."
Nascimbeni stared at the dead man, riveted. He didn't even notice Mukami silently backing up and retreating to the A&R lobby. "Paul?"
Paul Nicolescu, Junior Technician in Janitorial and Maintenance, put on a slab on the same day Melissa Bradbury had met Phil Deering's mirror monster, was shivering in the hall in front of him. "Hey, Chief. Sorry about the… sudden entrance. I didn't think there'd be anybody out here."
"Why… are you out here?" There was less than no point in asking the man why he wasn't dead, but… "And why are you naked?"
Nicolescu winced. "Got caught." He glanced back over his shoulder. "They left me to freeze or starve to death. Guess they didn't know you gave your code to all the techs."
"Caught? By who? Doing what?"
Nicolescu looked confused. "The Director didn't tell you? Geez, Chief. He wanted me to steal…" His brown eyes suddenly widened. "SHIT! Get back!"
The naked man grabbed Nascimbeni by the shoulders and pulled him bodily through the airlock, then screamed at the top of his lungs: "NASCIMBENI ALEPH ELEVEN KEI JULIETT APOCRYPHAL."
Nascimbeni saw Mukami approaching, gun raised — not to fire, but defensively, judging by her posture. He hadn't even noticed she had a gun. "Wait!" she called out, extending her free hand. "Let me explain!"
"You explain," Nascimbeni snapped at Nicolescu as the door slid shut, and sealed.
"How do you not…?" Nicolescu shook his head. "She's one of them, boss! That was a Mukami!"
"What the hell do you mean, 'a' Mukami?" If Nicolescu wasn't stating the woman's initials, Nascimbeni was all out of guesses.
Comprehension dawned on the other man's face, and he withdrew out of the airlock and into the main access corridor within AAF-D. "They got to you. Oh, Christ, they got to you too." He clutched at his long brown hair in despair, entirely forgetting to preserve his modesty in the process.
Nascimbeni raised both hands. "Hey. Paul. Nobody got to me, honest. It's still me. I hired you away from an apprenticeship in Rome, where you were working for The Plumbers." The existence of an anomalous plumbing Group of Interest had momentarily given him pause about his own choice of employer. "I covered for you when you accidentally flushed Dr. French, and again when you drank that Megatherium concentrate, because I know you're a good guy and you do good work." He patted his jacket, his nametag, painfully aware of the irony. "It's me. Nobody else."
Nicolescu hung on the doorframe, still eyeing him suspiciously. "Then what are you doing with one of her? I'm surprised she hasn't wiped you clean, like the others. For Wirth."
Nascimbeni leaned back on the door. "I don't know what any of that means. Paul, something happened. I lost the last year. Everything I remember is apparently wrong."
"It was her." Nicolescu pointed at the airlock. "She did wipe you. Took away your memories."
"No, I still have them! They're just…" He exhaled in frustration. "Paul, she didn't do anything to my brain. Whatever you think she is, she's on our side."
"She's killed half the Site, Chief."
Nascimbeni blinked. "What?"
Nicolescu's voice was rising by the second. "She killed half the Site! Half the Site is dead!"
The air filters hissed again, and Nascimbeni darted forward as the door slid away from his back. He turned to see Mukami entering, gun still held casually. "Heard the passcode," she explained. "But I thought I'd give you a second to chat. Everything straightened out?"
"He knows what you are." Nicolescu looked terrified.
Mukami nodded coolly. "I should hope so. He already did." She smiled at Nascimbeni. "Isn't that right, lover?"
Nascimbeni swallowed hard as Nicolescu stared at him in shock. "How did you… I thought…"
"I can tell." Mukami lowered the gun. "The way you were acting, plain as day. This may not be your world, Noè, but I'm still the Mukami you fell for. Did he tell you I'm some murdering monster?" She gestured at Nicolescu with the gun; the tech cringed. "That isn't me. They've been feeding you lies, both of you. I'm the real deal, and I'm trying to help."
"You can't trust her," Nicolescu begged. "Take me back to J&M."
"You can't do that." Mukami walked into the airlock, and they both retreated from her approach. "They'll have sealed the bulkhead behind you, soon as they found out it was open. Fortress shut up tight again." She smiled brightly. "Be glad you're on the right side."
Wettle was prone to talking to himself in periods of stress, but he was rapidly unlearning this behaviour in the company of his unwanted… company. Everything he said, they muttered back at him in tones so cheerful he wanted to strangle them. He was beginning to get the idea that it might not be prudent to be generating a lot of noise in these halls, which were eerily still and devoid of anything remotely comforting. The security checkpoints were empty, often splashed with blood on the inside, outside, or both; there were barricades and choke points set up at every crossroads or t-junction, several of them featuring body bags or unbagged bodies; the lighting alternated between dim breach red, flickering fluorescent white, and the even-more-flickering earthy tones of fire. He was still trying to figure out how he might have caused this. Surely jiggling the card reader on his office couldn't have—
"OOF," he cried, careening into the nearest wall. "Oof," the doctor repeated dreamily beside him.
A short man in a grey labcoat, vaguely familiar, glared at Wettle. His escorts, two glowing green somethings, raised their pistols. "Think fast," the little man snapped. "Tell me what mission you're on, and I'll take you back to the boss instead of shooting you in the head."
Wettle cocked his head to one side, and responded as honestly as he could: "What?"
The other man's frown deepened. "Who sent you out here? What are you looking for?" He gestured at the two hangers-on. "Are you collecting specimens?"
"Collecting… specimens?" Wettle blinked, slowly, desperately wishing that he knew what the man was talking about.
There was a sound of distant footfalls. The little man glanced behind him, and sighed. "Just another headcase. Should've known. Come on, they're almost on top of us."
And he turned and ran, back the way Wettle had come. His escorts followed.
"What?" said Wettle, to the man's retreating back, and then a bullet whizzed over his shoulder.
Yancy fired a single shot to cover Ibanez's dash across the hall. She plunged back through the maintenance access doors, searching for the ladder she knew to be there. Nascimbeni had given her the grand tour of this cramped and warm space, for precisely the reasons that it was cramped and warm. They'd enjoyed the close quarters immensely, not to mention the fact that they weren't meant to be doing what they'd been doing there…
Focus. She took the ladder fast and silent, and headed through what the techs unhappily called the Jeffries Tubes after a similar arrangement on the starships in Star Trek. These were overhead crawlways providing access to vital systems above the drop ceilings, or below the second floor. From there she unhooked a latched hatch and began crawling through a space no human being was ever meant to enter: the air vents. These were kept clean through air pressure alone, monitored by remote-controlled drones when necessary. She was small enough to fit through, though it wasn't precisely comfortable…
More gunfire. She quickened her pace, thankful that the vents were solid and properly rooted to the bedrock above. They didn't bang like a miniature thunderstorm as she moved through them, as they might have in a feature film. She ran through the schematic in her head. Almost there… she found the panel she was looking for, and flicked a switch. The fan systems humming in the distance suddenly ceased.
"Wait!" Yancy's deep, booming voice still only just barely reached her. "Wait. Let's talk about this."
A trilling, musical laugh. Ibanez knew it well, though there was something off about the tone. It was more mockery than joy, now. "You want to talk? I thought we'd established that never ends well for your people."
"I'd rather be brainwashed than die."
Brainwashed? The passage now featured deep indentations in the 'floor', where the overhead air vents were located. These were simple grills, hinged on one side and latched rather than screwed in tight to prevent them falling and to allow cleaning access when necessary. Each grill corresponded with the air upflow to Applied Occultism above, meaning a vertical shaft meeting the horizontal one she was crawling through.
"You're already brainwashed." Ibanez looked down through the nearest vent and saw Mukami strolling forward with a spring in her step, kicking at the tiles merrily. One of the non-persons was standing beside her, brandishing a gun. "They convinced you to enslave the world. They convinced me, until the miracle set my mind free. You know what we did was wrong, Howard. You know we still have time to set it right."
Ibanez crawled to the next vent and stood up in the space provided by the vertical shaft, boots on the edge of the short drop. She saw Mukami turn to face the transparent soldier, and just barely heard her whisper: "If he runs, kill him."
It was all she needed to hear.
She stabbed the Langford-Euler into her neck — it contained adrenaline, among many other things — raised her weapon, and dropped down.
Her boots struck the metal grate, her weight more than sufficient to snap the latch. The grate swung open, and she fell onto the shoulders of the glimmering yellow nobody. She clamped her boots around its neck, grabbed its shoulder with her free hand, swung around and fired a single shot at Mukami's shoulder.
Her aim was slightly off.
She twisted her legs hard as she and her nameless victim fell to the tiles, and she heard its neck snap. She regained her feet.
Yancy was approaching from down the hall. He raised a fist, pumped it in victory… then suddenly fell back against the wall, breathing heavily.
"You remember what they did," Mukami rasped, and Ibanez turned to look down at her. There was no way she should still have been breathing; the bullet had gone in through the other woman's cheek, shattering the bone and lodging somewhere on the far side of her brainpan. She was dying, but she should already have been dead. "You can still see it now. The shed…" Her words were slurred, the product of obvious brain damage, but it didn't matter. Ibanez could see. She was
stripped to the waist and covered in bruises, the cop looming over her, leering. "Names would be a good start, but only a start. I want to know everything you told them, and then you and I are going to write a new statement. We're going to tell the truth, soldier. Our truth. And then I won't have to pay a visit to your parents in Mombasa."
It was so hot, and she was broken inside. Was she dying? She almost hoped she was. She swallowed the taste of iron in her mouth, then spat hot nothing. "Sure," she rasped. "Let's talk it out."
Talking it out was always the
"answer," Mukami finished, as her mouth filled with blood. She spasmed, once, and was gone.
Bosch and Holt appeared at the far end of the corridor, the former kneeling by Yancy. "Shock," he reported.
"Chief?" Holt called. "You alright over there?"
"Yeah," Ibanez whispered, then cleared her throat and restated it. "Yeah. I'm fine. Radio back to base," she hoped to god there was a base, "and tell them we need reinforcements. Medical first." She really hoped they still had medics. She felt like a memetic screening might also be in order, after what she'd just experienced. "Make sure he's stable, then let's go."
They both gave her the same stange look. "Go where?" Holt asked.
"Wherever Blank and Bradbury are." She checked her weapon, and picked up the one dropped by the barely-corporeal soldier for good measure. She could already feel the giddiness coming on. "Ana was right. I really need to talk this out with someone."
"We can't be in here," Nicolescu moaned. "They're going to find us again…"
"Who?" Nascimbeni had let the other man go on for several minutes as they walked the halls of AAF-D. By this point it was obvious he wasn't going to provide any useful information without prompting; he probably thought Nascimbeni knew everything worth knowing. "Who are you worried about?"
"Everybody," Nicolescu grumbled, with a dark look at Mukami. "But just this moment, the Mounties."
"The what?" Nascimbeni frowned. "The Mounties? They're here?"
The tech shot him a confused look. "They never all go out on patrol. There's always a squad or two watching the store. They were supposed to be fixing something on the lower level when I came in here, but I guess that intel was crap." Nicolescu rubbed an ugly purple bruise on his stomach. "Maybe I pissed the Tarantula off, and this was my punishment."
"The Tarantula?" Mukami asked. She winked at Nascimbeni, where Nicolescu couldn't see it. Translation: you're welcome. He smiled in gratitude. There were only so many questions he could ask before the other man stopped rationalizing them and started asking questions back.
"That's what we call the Director, when he's not looking. Which isn't often. But you'd know all about that, right?" Nicolescu hadn't met Mukami's eyes once in the five minutes they'd been walking. "You've got your eyes everywhere."
Mukami reached out to pat him on his naked shoulder. He recoiled. "Paul, I don't know how to convince you that I'm not who you think I am."
"Good." He quickened his pace, rewarding Nascimbeni with a lovely view of the other man's waggling ass. "Don't convince me. Let me die unconvinced. Because we are gonna die, if we go this way."
"Why are we going this way?" They were now rounding the northwest corner of the Synchronization/Reorentation and Ego Death Chambers, colloquially known as The Cavern. "I thought we were headed north, to the subway."
"We are," she said. "But there's one thing we need to check on, first, if we're going to make it there. It's a simple thing, but important. We need to create a diversion."
Nascimbeni frowned again. "What kind of diversion?"
"The kind that sets off loud alarms and flashing lights." It was really remarkable, Nascimbeni thought, how little damage there was in AAF-D. It was filthy, but it was intact. What little he'd seen of the world beyond suggested that Mukami's story of a series of pitched battles was more or less true, but apparently none of them had been fought in here. Why? "The kind that'll get them running in the wrong direction, so we can slip past."
Nascimbeni stopped walking. "You want me to overload something." As Chief of J&M, he could set any number of abatement devices on the road to ruin. His password wasn't enough, however. His voice would be required.
"I do." Mukami didn't stop. "Something simple. I'm not asking you to blow the place sky-high, I'm asking you to make a mess they'll have to address so they're too busy to track down trespassers."
"She wants us to sabotage them," Nicolescu moaned. He hopped on the balls of his feet, which provided Nascimbeni an even less desirable view. "Oh, god, they're going to pull our fingernails out." He turned to face Nascimbeni, letting Mukami walk past him. "Boss, don't listen to her. She's everywhere, she's batshit insane, and she's setting us all against each other. You trust me, right? You have to trust me." The words were superfluous to the note of pleading in his tone.
Nascimbeni didn't trust either of them. He expected to start trusting people at about the point where he started meeting people who weren't supposed to be dead. Still, Mukami was being evasive and Nicolescu's terror seemed genuine enough. He'd seen that pinched expression after the incident with Dr. French, whereas he wasn't sure anything Mukami had said and done matched up well with the version of her he'd met the previous day, much less the woman he'd known before the breach. It was a lot to take in.
"How about this." Mukami stopped behind Nicolescu, forcing him to turn and face her. He obviously wouldn't leave his back exposed. "We go somewhere you can safely trash — safe for us, safe for them, loud but not dangerous — and when we get there, I tell you everything you need to know to trust me. And then you do what I'm asking, and we leave here together."
"All three of us," said Nascimbeni. "Alive and well."
She smiled. "Of course. I'm certainly not going to haul either of your dead bodies all the way to the subway."
It was a relief to be shot at, really. Wettle knew where he stood with gunfire, or rather where he wanted to be standing: far away, as far as he could run from it. Being shot at simplified what had been threatening to become a very complex and confusing day. Being hit would tip the scales back in the wrong direction, of course, but he had never been hit with anything that would kill him so it seemed unlikely to happen now. Especially not with two meat shields left behind him, arms flapping senselessly at their sides.
"Stop!" a woman's voice boomed out from behind.
"No!" he shouted back, without turning. Much as he liked women's voices to boom, he drew the line where they drew down on him.
"Doctor!" The woman was getting closer. Wettle saw a bend in the corridor approaching, and wondered what would happen if he swung around the corner and then stuck his leg out to trip his pursuer.
You would break your leg.
"Doctor, stop and talk to us!" That settled it. If she thought talking to him would settle their differences, she had no idea who he was. He took the corner at a gallop, deciding to risk life via outstretched limb after all, and that was how he plowed into whoever was standing there waiting.
"Don't kill me," he panted. "Please don't kill me."
"Kill me," chirped the woman he was laying on top of. This jogged another memory of his first wife, but he didn't have time to think about that because someone grabbed him by the shoulders and roughly pulled him off. His glasses flew from his face to clatter across the tiles, so he couldn't quite make out the face of the blonde… cop? who was pointing the barrel of her gun down at him.
"Who are you? Who are you with?" she demanded. Two more cops, burly men, appeared behind her. They were leading the theologian and the doctor in front of them. "Which side? And where were you taking these deadheads?"
"We're not together." He raised his hands defensively. "We're not together!"
"Sleeping together," the man in the black labcoat supplied helpfully.
"They're getting away, sir." One of the meat slabs was itching to continue down the path.
"Right." The woman's boots marched past; a buckle brushed his ear, and he was surprised it didn't catch. "I recognize this one now, he's useless. We'll circle back around."
He waited until they were gone before crawling off the third zombie's chest and grunting to his feet. He had no intention of being here when whoever that was came back.
Except… they hadn't tried to kill him, not once they were face-to-face, and they had guns.
Actually, both sides had guns. And neither had tried to kill him. Dilemma, he thought, as he scanned the blurry floor for the means of making it clear again.
It was a unique and exciting twist when the woman he'd knocked over rose clumsily to her feet, staggered one step to the side as her lolling head threw off her sense of balance, and crushed his glasses underfoot. He'd expected to do that himself.
Ibanez locked the door behind them, and Bosch and Holt appeared at the end of the corridor before she had the chance to follow up with her newfound friends. She shot Harry a meaningful glance, and he pretended to readjust his carrying grip on Bradbury as she brushed past him.
"Timeline shift," she whispered in his ear. She spun on her heel to look back at him, and he nodded once. She glanced wide-eyed to the left, then the right — Bosch and Holt behind her in those directions — then shook her head. They don't know.
He nodded again. Bradbury's lips pursed, and she shifted under his arms.
"Where are we headed?" Harry asked.
"Headquarters," Ibanez answered. "Sandy here already tipped them off that we're on our way. You two take point, I want to have a chat with our runaways."
Neither guard looked entirely pleased with this suggestion, but they nevertheless allowed their boss to fall into the centre of the formation. Ibanez was still hopped up on adrenaline, literally hopping from one foot to the other and waving her arms expansively as though preparing to produce a tremendous crash with a pair of cymbals. She couldn't help it.
"What prompted you lovebirds to fly the coop?" she demanded, voice artificially high and cheerful. She hoped the mania she was projecting on top of the extra energy didn't seem forced.
"My ankle's fine," Bradbury suddenly announced. She squirmed in Harry's arms like a fed-up cat, so he set her down carefully. The sprain must have been minor, because she started walking immediately. Harry fell in beside her, looking sheepish about this turn of events.
Ibanez actually clapped her hands together, producing a loud POP sound. Both agents looked back at her in worried irritation. "Focus," she trilled. "Gimme an 'a'! Gimme an 'n'! Gimme an 's'! Gimme—"
"An answer, fine," Harry sighed. "I got a feeling—"
"That they were looking for something in the dorms," Bradbury interrupted him. "We've heard the reports from the Mounties, saying the nobodies tore up half the rooms in H&S. Harry thought they might be looking for personal access codes, and he left his tablet in his room back when this all first started. He wanted to see if it was still there."
"And?" Ibanez spun again, this time a slow 360, still walking. When facing them dead-on, she let the mask of cheerfulness fall away. This is where you get your story straight. She saw that Harry understood. She wondered if she and he were the only ones who remembered the true course of the year's events. She desperately hoped not.
"And," he said, "it was. But a gas main blew on the way back, and I dropped it in the hole left behind. Cooked, fried, finito. Threat neutralized."
"Huh." This was Holt. "That's convenient. Wonder if the Tarantula will buy it."
"He will if the Chief is selling." Bosch grinned at them. "Sometimes I think she's the only one the Director trusts."
"McInnis?" Harry said, before he could catch himself. Ibanez turned back to scowl at him. Do better. Their lives might depend on it.
Holt's expression hardened. "We haven't seen him since July. He might be dead, or he might be hiding." She had interpreted his stupid question as a non sequitur, which was for the best.
Harry shook his head. "Allan wouldn't hide. He'd be out here, leading." Ibanez understood the sentiment. If McInnis wasn't out here, leading, he had either been captured or killed.
"If you say so." The little man was shaking his head. "Yeah, if you say so."
Before the archivist had a chance to put his boot in his mouth again, Ibanez quickly traced his likely line of thought. They were heading for the Director, who was not McInnis. Would he ask who was? He probably wouldn't. He'd probably ask after his girlfriend and best friend; the order could go either way. Ibanez cleared her throat to buy a few more formulative seconds, then said: "While we're out here, we'd best think of targets of opportunity."
"Like what?" Holt asked, obvious suspicion dripping from both words in equal measure.
"Let's recap first. What's the 20 on Okorie?"
"Lost in the subway," Harry supplied. His morose expression confirmed that this was, indeed, her Harry; in no other universe could the scruffy historian have landed a catch like Udo. But was it Ibanez's imagination, or did Holt relax slightly when he said that? Presumably because he was reciting known facts, which meant he was One of Them. Not brainwashed. Trustworthy. That was a good start; the next step would be to set Holt at ease about Ibanez herself. If the lanky agent went off at a run to warn the others that her boss had been replaced by a pod person, her short legs would never be able to catch up.
"Hate to leave an asset like that," Ibanez mused out loud, as though she knew what she was talking about. "What about Lillihammer?"
Harry apparently hadn't asked Bradbury about that, which wasn't ideal. It was even less promising when neither Holt nor Bosch seemed eager to answer immediately.
Lillian Lillihammer was staring at a wall.
Her head was cocked to one side, and she was gazing intensely at the chunk of bedrock exposed between two wall joists, the removed tiles stacked haphazardly in a pile beside her. There were marks on the rock in chalk, engineer's marks, demolition marks; there was a keyhole punched through, and a wire disappearing into the keyhole.
Everything was at an angle, and she realized this was because her own head was at an angle. She wondered why this was. She had a strange feeling that she shouldn't correct it until she knew the answer.
Her hair, she noted, was damp and limp, and longer than she usually wore it. This was because she hadn't washed it for maybe a month, which wasn't true, since she'd had a shower late in the evening before heading to the meetup with the other survivors. But of course that meetup had never occurred, since she'd instead been standing here in TheoTelo, waiting placidly for her orders to come through, not an original thought in her head. She was standing guard, watching the dynamite, waiting for the techs to check continuity with the detonators.
She was aware of continuity problems with the thoughts running through her head, of course, but she chose not to focus on them. She wanted to see if they'd reveal where the faults and shorts in her brain lay.
She was wearing something unfamiliar. She dressed comfortably under her memetic glamour coat, as a rule, in loose-fitting blouses or casual tank tops or, when the mood took her, something flashier. She wasn't wearing anything comfortable now. She was wearing a shirt, and she reached up to test its fabric. The fabric was thin; she remembered when her father had signed her up for Cub Scouts as a small child. Same sort of material. She knew from hearing constant complaints, complaints so constant that she heard them despite generally tuning most people out as random noise, that the old Security and Containment outfits had fit that bill. She didn't look down to check, because she still had that nagging feeling that she didn't want to un-tilt her head.
Why am I wearing an S&C uniform?
She was wearing an S&C uniform because she'd been drafted into Mukami's army back in July, of course, back when Mukami was still dead, and there had been no army, as there still logically was no army. Because there was a civil war, and there was no civil war. Because the Foundation was collapsing, and the Foundation was fine. She'd walked here for no apparent reason, just wandering the halls as she did when she was thinking, and stopped to stare at the wall because it felt right. She'd also been sent here, deliberately sent here, in a narrative utterly incompatible to the one which felt somehow truer.
Lillian Lillihammer was staring at a wall, head askew, processing every remembered detail of two parallel timelines simultaneously.
She was a slave in enemy territory, and the enemy was her.
