31. Wilhelmina

Wilhelmina


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When you're underneath the cover and you're looking for your mates,
When you're crawling through the muck and mud to learn their sorry fates
Under rotten timbers fallen, or in craters hewn by shell,
It's not easy to remember that the home front's also hell.

Applied Occultism had become a recursive mousetrap.

What had once been a compartmentalization borne of safety necessity had become a direct… indirect… misdirecting threat to life and limb. A labyrinth of tiny passages with no minotaur to spice them up.

At least, she hoped there was no minotaur.

Her little sorties were getting bolder, and yielding less in the way of results. Every time she left the triage camp she forced herself to push a little farther, explore deeper recesses in the warped teal disaster zone where the wizards had until recently plied their wyrd trade. The last two times she hadn't found anybody. Now she was so many collapsing chambers into the mess that if she did find someone who needed help, she'd have a hard time getting them to it, or vice-versa.

She'd just resolved to give up when she saw the corpse.

She hadn't seen any of those yet. She'd found seven wounded wizards, but no critical casualties until now. The middle-aged man had been an AcroAbate researcher before the ceiling had fallen on him. His head was twisted around so badly, it was nearly on backward. He looked familiar…

He opened his eyes.

She screamed.

It took a few minutes to get the man's legs free, and a few more to check him for injuries. Other than the old one, the one which made it look like his head was always facing you no matter where you stood, Lénárd Dobos was a picture of health.

It was an interesting trip back. Wriggling through a gap in the pile of rubble splitting corridor 2F into 2F-1 and 2F-2, Dobos ahead of her, his eyes watching her over the back of his collar. Him noting damage on the walls that he didn't seem to be looking at. Her trying not to stare, even though it only looked like he could see her doing it. She'd never ministered to the man before. He was one of the Strange Cases, as her mother put it, and her mother always handled those herself.

She passed Dobos off to one of the nurses on duty, and went looking for the Chair of H&P. Helena Forsythe was one of the few medical doctors at the Site who hadn't been taken out by the destruction of the central subway station, or the intruders, or DISCIDIUM. She was the rock on which this triage camp, in the lobby of a hospital largely inaccessible and for all they knew obliterated, had been built.

And she was nowhere to be found.

In the end, it was the sobbing that tipped her off. A rare moment of silence when the air conditioning's rattle and the coughing of the crowd and the ticking of the pipes conspired to stop for a moment of peace. The sound was coming from a storage closet hard against the broken doors to the wards, and without thinking, she walked in.

The moment she switched the lights on, something heavy hit her, and the lights snapped off again. "Don't," said a voice. Rough and ragged. The author of the mysterious lament.

She flicked the switch again.

It was her mother, looking nothing like herself. Eyes red and puffy, tears streaming down her face, uniform disheveled, expression wild. An image catastrophically strange, and yet naggingly familiar. "I told you not to," the other woman choked.

She looks like…

No. No. "Mom? What's wrong?"

Her mother slumped against the back wall, dislodging a broom and dustpan. "Everything," she whispered hoarsely. "Billie, you have to take over."

She must have heard wrong. That didn't make any sense. "Take over?"

The tears flowed like twin rivers. "I killed her. It was my fault. It'll come out eventually. I need you, I need you to take over from me. Right now."

Her own eyes filled with confused tears. "What are you talking about? Why?"

"I KILLED KAREN ELSTROM!"

The world seemed to contract to a single point. Her, and her mother. And the impossible revelation.

"I don't remember what I did," the Chief Medical Officer of Site-43 wailed. "It was only yesterday, and I've already forgotten."

She took her mother's trembling shoulders. "You're tired," she said in what she hoped was a soothing tone. "You've been up—"

"I always knew." The elder Forsythe sank to the floor, head in her hands. "When it happened to her, I knew. I could feel it. That some day, it would be my turn."

And with those words, the familiarity of her mother's state hit home.

She looked like an old woman, lost and lonely, waiting in a Foundation nursing home to lose her final memories and die.

She looked like her own predecessor. Like Émilie LeClair.

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