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Unforgettable Too
2014
26 January
Capitol Hill: Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America
The man's head looked like a white balloon with a lot of the air let out, and his drawl was so deep as to almost be guttural. "I'm not in the habit of speaking out of class, miss… what was it?"
"Ibanez."
"Miss Ibanez. Not all of our volunteers and donors like to advertise their career and spending habits. These days, you can get a lot of trouble from the self-righteous masses if they find out you believe in things they don't."
She shifted in her chair. It was more expensive than the civilian clothes she was wearing, probably more expensive than any of the chairs at Site-43. "I understand that you don't want to talk about this," she said. "And I think you understand that you haven't got a choice, so I don't see any purpose to this prologue beyond expressing your own petulance."
She couldn't tell if the face he made was meant to convey offence or false humour. It was hard to clock the moods of a wizened reptile. "I'm not accustomed to taking orders from dual state actors. You'll have to forgive me."
She shrugged. "We can pretend I do. Now tell me about Ophelia Righting."
"Never met her. She was on President Bush's campaign staff. That's all I know."
That was all Ibanez knew, too, at least as far as the early 2000s was concerned. Decades earlier she'd been part of a think tank which had turned out to be a giftschreiber front, interfering with the results of a Canadian federal election. She wondered what 9/11 and its aftermath would have looked like under an Al Gore presidency. "The Senate Majority Whip never met one of the president's key advisors?"
He shook his head. His neck flaps wobbled like a wattle. "She vanished from his circle as soon as he was elected. That's not uncommon, as you should know. Politicians serve until political considerations shift. She's probably on a beach somewhere with Karl Rove." This time he did try to smile. It made him look like a police sketch from a Special Victims Unit bulletin.
"Maybe you met her, and you don't quite remember." He would assume this was a crack about his age, and she was content to let it be so. "Big bouffant hair, scar right here." She draw a finger vertically across her lower lip.
He frowned. It looked like he'd simply ceased to have lips of his own. "You sure you're after the right woman? That sounds more like, what's her name. Shenk. Geschenk."
"Lisbet Geschenk."
He moved to snap his fingers, but then didn't. Probably they would actually snap. She was reminded, as she often was when in the presence of necrocracy, of Edwin Falkirk. "That's it. You want to talk about donors? She's a donor's donor. I take back what I said. I'll tell you everything I know, because I don't want to end up in front of a grand jury."
She raised an eyebrow. "That bad?"
"Worse. Like I said, a donor's donor. Meaning she contributes everything she can contribute, and then contributes more. We think she's propping up other lobbyists and bankrolling people who wouldn't otherwise be moved to donate. We can't prove it, but maybe you can."
She frowned. "I'm not sure why you'd tell me that. If she's helping you clowns get your funding," for a moment she thought the old man might retract his head into his shirt, as his face screwed up tight, "isn't it shooting yourself in the foot to call foul? What about the next election?"
"You're not from around here, Miss Ibanez, so let me explain how Washington works right now. There is no next election. There is no future tense. You do whatever you can to make today go in your favour, you spend everything you've got on the present case, and you let tomorrow take care of itself. You're in my office with the name of Lisbet Geschenk on your lips, which means her time is up. Mine isn't. If I have my way, it never will be." His lip curled up so she could see his shrivelled gums and improbably white teeth. "If you're looking for someone who'll sacrifice their interests on principle, you're looking in the wrong place. The United States Capitol is the only hill nobody's ever willing to die on."
Harry sat down on the bench beside the wizened old man, and put on his most condescending smile. "You have got to start meeting new people."
Zwist continued crumbling the piece of stale bread he had in his hands, and raised his eyebrows by perhaps a single centimeter. "I have met more new people than you could ever name." There were very few birds on the lakeshore in the dead of winter, but Zwist was a time-tested optimist.
"Yeah, but that's a timescale artifact. On a day-by-day basis—"
"I understand what you mean, Harold." The cryptomancer tossed the crumbs out in front of them. They made dark little indentations on the new-fallen snow. "But you need to understand my position. I trusted Vivian, and Vivian trusted you."
"So if you trust me—"
"I do not trust you." The old man fixed him with a grim glare. "That's not how the math works. I half-trust you. Anyone you recommend to me would have a quarter of my trust, at best. Nothing you and I have to talk about could conceivably be shared with such attenuation of confidence."
Harry whistled. "If I lived as long as you, would I be able to talk like that?"
"You might stop wasting time talking the way you presently do, with a better perspective on how valuable that time is. What did you call me here to talk about, Dr. Blank?"
"Elizabeth Crocker." He watched as easily half a dozen emotions flashed across Zwist's face in quick succession, blending into each other in various ways. "Bittersweet?"
"The memory is only bitter." Zwist stared out at the lake, then looked down at his spread of bread crumbs. "But ruefulness is like… coffee, with too much artificial sweetener. A false note of humour. Elizabeth Crocker was my enemy. She was also yours, when you were also mine."
"Not me-me," Harry clarified, "but the Foundation-me."
"That's right. She and hers, the giftschreiber, have interfered with my work time and again."
"What is your work? You always talk about it, the way Scout used to, but all we really know about is 5382." It was how the Foundation, or rather Vivian Scout, had first discovered the immortal Austrian in the aftermath of the First World War. A moment of weakness in the mid-1600s had caused Zwist to curse all Germanic languages with an immolation virus transmitted by the written word, which he'd then dedicated his life to eradicating. The Foundation knew it as SCP-5382. Just another number in their massive database, though one with long-lasting implications.
5382 was how the Foundation had first learned of the existence of the giftschreiber.
"I am not about to tell you," Zwist half-smiled, "because you would interfere."
"Something Scout knew about?" Harry pressed.
"Oh, yes."
"And didn't approve of?" Harry tried to arrange himself more comfortably on the bench. He was wearing ski pants, and they weren't padded. His ass was freezing. "I know he used to run the hunt-and-capture teams, back in the day. Gave you a merry chase."
Zwist glanced down at Harry's shifting legs, and really smiled for the first time today. The old man was wearing thick snow pants. "I led, and he followed, but he had the sense never to consummate." The smile became impish, for an instant. "No, Vivian would have approved, and he knew some things that you do not. Perhaps some day. Rest assured that what I do is for the greater good, and where Crocker's path crossed mine, her intent was quite the opposite."
"It's hard to rest assured when someone who only half-trusts you says they're telling you all you need to know."
Zwist looked up. A blue jay was circling the clearing. "Oh, this isn't all you need to know. It's just all I'm willing to tell you, for now." He back glanced at Harry. "Is this how you wish to spend the goodwill between us, Harold? Do you want to talk about me, for you, or do you want to talk about Crocker, for your friend?"
Harry had tried to convince Zwist to meet with Del, not because he thought it would work out well, but because the security chief had asked. This chilly rendezvous was the compromise, and it wasn't a perfect one by any means. "Crocker."
"I hear the reluctance." Zwist brushed the remaining crumbs from his hands, as an afterthought, then patted Harry on the shoulder. "It's not an easy choice for you. I won't make this more difficult than it needs to be, then. Elizabeth Crocker is indeed still alive, and she is affiliated with a slowly growing cancer on the collective conscious. An organized cancer. The neuer giftschreiber."
Harry had heard the term before, had used it himself, but the implications here were new. "I thought they didn't organize."
"They don't," Zwist nodded. "But she does. She's not a pure poisoner, you understand. She came to them from outside." His eyes got that faraway look they took on when he was about to monologue, and his words took on the character of recitation. "The giftschreiber have always been a true secret society. Incestuous and secretive. But sometimes a convert can become the best of all believers, and that is the case with her. She has helped mold them into the threat they are today, to face the things that threaten them."
"Us."
Zwist shook his head. "Not only you."
"No?"
"No. There are others. I suspect a schism. Another faction is at large."
"We already sort of know about that." He wasn't sure he should be explaining, but really… who was Zwist going to tell? As far as he knew, the old man spoke to nobody but him. "We've encountered them, or their agents, elsewhere."
That 'elsewhere' is doing heavier lifting than any other word has ever done.
"Is that a fact?" The bushy eyebrows had now shoved a lot of paper bag skin into furrows in the middle of Zwist's forehead. "I'm surprised you'd be so free with this information."
If Zwist thought it was too far, it probably was. Oh well. Make up an excuse, or casually blow it off. As he usually did, he took the second option with a seasoning of the first, crumbled in like the bread now being hungrily eyed by the descending scavenger. "Maybe I'm trying to up my trust quotient. Anyway it's nothing you'd be able to act on. The place where we learned it no longer exists, and neither do the versions of us who were there, and saw."
"Very cryptic." The corners of Zwist's eyes crinkled with mischief. "Perhaps we talk together too often, you and I."
Harry let the sidebar pass without comment. "So Crocker is leading the giftschreiber against us, and some other renegade bunch of cryptomancers. That much we already figured out. But to what end?"
"That is something I have never been able to ascertain." The old man reached down and began sliding his hands into a thick pair of woolen gloves. "They speak of an apocalypse."
"Heard that, too. They seem really excited about it."
"They frame it as a new beginning. Something beautiful. And imminent. But they've been doing so for decades. Perhaps centuries. Their organizational sense of time is longue durée." Zwist certainly didn't seem worried.
"Do you know what an ancient Foundation facility in Argentina would have to do with it?"
That got his attention, if only because the change of topic was abrupt and probably confusing. "Ancient? How ancient?"
"Maybe a century, I don't know." It was true. Every time any of them tried to learn more about the place where Del had spent the planning phase of her eviction action on the Insurgency in Zevala, the upper echelons had slapped them with all manner of aggressive stop orders.
"So, not ancient at all, then." Zwist looked up at the sky, and squinted in the harsh winter light. "Consider to whom you speak. But that is odd… a chronological anomaly. Is it native to where it was found, do you think?"
"We don't know. Information is scattered, and… well." Harry smiled sheepishly, though Zwist's gaze was still on the clouds. "Parts of the Foundation trust me and my friends less than you do, so not everything that's known is known by us. But let's say it comes from an alternate universe, or an alternate timeline. What would that mean?"
The old man blinked. "It would mean that such things exist."
"Yeah. Well. Sorry for the revelation. Push past the shock. Why would Crocker want that? To learn how to travel through time? Through space?"
Zwist shook his head, and rubbed his face with both gloves until the skin was red. Harry had genuinely surprised him, apparently. "The giftschreiber are anathema to order. Everything they seek to know, or possess, must be bendable towards the aim of dissolution. I have never heard the faintest suggestion that they expect to escape the consequences of their actions."
"Oh. Well." Harry looked away. "We have."
"Do tell."
"I think maybe not all giftschreiber are created equal. Some are keeping secrets from the rest. Some of them expect to be whisked away at the end of all of this, and get the chance to start anew."
The jay finally got up its courage, and dove into the snow. They watched as it pecked away at the meager pickings.
"I have never heard that before," Zwist said finally. "And it doesn't sound like them, to be quite frank. Not at all."
Harry shrugged. "Maybe this is a new direction Crocker is leading them down."
"Lisbet does not lead them, Dr. Blank."
Something startled the bird, and it shot back up into the sky. A streak of blue on grey.
"What?"
The safe in Daniil Sokolsky's office — or at least the one Lillian was able to find, there were undoubtedly others — took the seventy-two digit code she'd liberated from his wallet, and clicked when she hit the final key. She turned the handle, opened it up, and…
…raised an eyebrow at the tidy white porcelain plate which dominated the interior space. In the middle of the plate was a multicoloured cube, textured like a 3D print but shot through with what looked like two competing spectrums, at a right angle to each other. One of Euler's memory pastings. Compressed thought.
She'd brought a tupperware container, and she slipped the cube inside. She'd need her equipment to take a look at the memory itself, to experience it. She considered leaving something in the safe to take its place, perhaps even heading to J&M and having them 3D print a believable replacement, but there was really no point. She'd known when she opened the safe that Sokolsky would know it had happened. That wasn't a problem, which was good, because it wasn't something she could prevent. The next time they spoke, she intended to talk to him about what was in the memory.
Although that would not be for quite some time.
In any case, that was that. She checked under the plate just in case, and chuckled.
She did close the safe before she left. No point being insulting about it.
2 February
Georgian Bay: Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada
"Get back from there." Ibanez couldn't feel Van Rompay's hands on her shoulders, through the combat armour, but she could certainly feel it when he pulled her away from the open helicopter door.
She shook him off, and leaned out again, hands on handles on the door and its frame. "I want to see."
"You're not going to see anything the machines don't see first."
"Maybe."
The modified Sea King was soaring over the southern end of Georgian Bay. It was sheeted over with ice; this winter was colder than usual. There was a signal somewhere out there, and they were following it, though visibility was very poor. As Van Rompay had said, human eyes were unlikely to spot the target before the chopper's sensors did. Still, it felt right to keep on the lookout anyway, even if the pair of MTF agents along for the ride kept glaring at her for keeping the door open.
"You're taking this very personal," the gruff old soldier remarked.
Ibanez didn't look back at him. The wind chilled her face, and the roar of the rotors was loud enough that she could only hear him through the headset. "It's personal whether I take it that way or not. I captured these fuckers. Someone else let them go."
The evidence all added up. An intercepted tip to the London police about suspected cult activity in an abandoned warehouse. A taste of geistschreiber energy on the street corner outside. Imrich's calculations tracing a line up the coast, then onto the frozen bay. The signal.
They were out there, or at least one of them was.
"They blew up an entire Site," Van Rompay growled. "Nobody 'let them go'."
"I'm not disrespecting the dead." Ibanez squinted, as though that would help. The snow was melting on her forehead, and running into her eyes. "I'm saying that when I catch someone, I expect them to stay caught. If they don't, I want to catch them again."
"What I am saying," and the big man hauled her inside again, "is that you're leaning out the door of my helicopter, and if I have to pull you back in one more time, it will be to chain you to your seat." And he pulled the door shut.
"Fine." She glanced at the empty bench, but didn't sit down. She didn't think she could, and she certainly didn't want to. "But they'd better not miss anything."
"They won't, if there's anything out there not to miss." Van Rompay did sit down. He was at that age where he would rather conserve his energy than keep up appearances. "As long as you stop distracting them."
The pilot up ahead did not react. The copilot was examining his instruments.
"Easily distracted, your people?" Ibanez smirked. "That sounds like a you problem."
Van Rompay smiled, but his tone belied it. "They're used to working with professionals. I don't allow amateurs on my team."
Her smirk evolved to a grin. "You're a real piece of work, Ged. You know that?"
"And you're a liability." Van Rompay wasn't smiling anymore. "The Director says you get to come, you get to come. But I'm not going to let you put my people's lives in danger. Let them do their jobs. You—"
"What the fuck is that?" the copilot suddenly shouted.
And the helicopter banked to one side, hard.
Del had already reached for the handhold on the closed door, so she kept upright, if only barely. The two agents and Van Rompay shifted in their seats. "Report!" the MTF commander barked.
"Saw something," the pilot snapped, no panic in his voice. "Didn't hit us. Could have been a bird…"
There was a loud BANG, and the chopper suddenly fell for a brief, exhilirating second. Ibanez felt her boots leave the ground, then slam back down. "What…!" she managed, through a rush of breath.
"What now?" Van Rompay shouted.
"Different kind of bird. Took fire." The pilot still wasn't panicking, but his tone was very flat and professional now. Clipped. "We're supposed to own these skies. No civvies around. Gotta be a hostile."
"Dammit." Van Rompay gestured at the three of them, Ibanez and a pair of grunts. "Strap in."
She did, but only loosely. He didn't seem to notice, focused on his own belts.
"I see it!" There was finally excitement in the pilot's voice. The chopper banked hard again, in the other direction, and Ibanez felt her armour cutting into the padding of the bench back. "Looks like a Huey. Sniper at the door."
Van Rompay slapped the back of the copilot's chair. "Weapons free."
"In plain day?" Ibanez asked.
"You're goddamn right." Suddenly he was grinning at her.
Suddenly she was grinning back.
There was a roar from somewhere in front of the cockpit, and the entire cabin shook. Something rattled, and didn't stop rattling. Heavy machinegun fire. Ibanez fought the urge to stand up again and take in the view. There wasn't likely to be one, and if there was, she'd be pressing her face to the only thing on the chopper's exterior that couldn't block a bullet.
As this thought crossed her mind, the pilot pulled them into a corkscrew that threw her stomach into her mouth. A dozen points of daylight suddenly streamed through the roof, and she realized they were bullet holes. Fired between the rotors.
The sounds from outside now incorporated a high, threatening whine.
Van Rompay slapped again. "How bad?"
"Not great!" There was a grunt of effort between the two halves of the pilot's report. "She's sluggish."
Ibanez stood up, and slapped the back of the pilot's chair herself. "Can you get her alongside?"
The pilot glanced back at her, just for a fraction of a second. "Alongside what?"
She could see the other chopper, a black shape shrouded in white on a grey blanket, out the cockpit window. She pointed at it.
"Are you crazy?!" Van Rompay shouted.
She pulled the door open again and turned to face him, leaning in so he could clearly see the look in her eyes.
"They're closing!" the pilot shouted, and banked the chopper yet again.
"Can't get a clean shot!" the copilot cursed. Through the door, the black shape resolved into what looked like a Bell Iroquois. Long out of production, but sometimes still in service.
She didn't wonder whose service this one was in.
"You're not one of mine," Van Rompay was yelling. "You're a civilian. I'm supposed to protect you."
This time the cluster of holes appeared immediately between his face, and the face of the agent strapped in beside him. Both faces went sheet-white.
"Good!" Ibanez threw herself to the opposite door, which was closed, and watched as the other craft approached from the rear, its flank exposed. There was an armoured figure in the gap. He was levelling some sort of rifle; she couldn't tell at this range. "You can protect me by letting me save our sorry asses."
The pilot looked back at her, and nodded. The Sea King banked harder than it had banked before, and the deck rose up as it canted to forty-five degrees.
She ran, and jumped.
There was blood all over her. Some of it, uncharacteristically, was hers.
The sniper had managed a lucky shot right through her upper arm, where armour met armour, and a few seconds into the skirmish she'd lost all sensation and control on that side. But it hadn't mattered, because by that point she'd already driven the man's rifle into his nose, and put four rounds into the rest of his face. There was one other man in the cabin, and she put him out the door. There was a hole in the ice shaped like him, now.
The copilot was next, because she wanted a free hand when the crashing started. Her round went through his eye, and spiderwebbed the window, which held. The Huey was already in a spiral, the pilot attempting to throw her out after her first victim, and she used that fact to her advantage.
When her feet left the floor, the momentum was more than enough to let her snap the pilot's neck.
One of the landing struts had broken as they hit the lake at a bad angle, and the rotors had chewed up the ice something terrible, but under the circumstances she thought it had been a pretty good landing. The Sea King didn't land — the ice would never have held — but Van Rompay was already out on a rope ladder as she carefully slid from the Huey's open door and trotted out primly to meet him.
"What the FUCK?" he screamed over the rushing air.
"I missed the last chopper I tried to catch," she explained as she grabbed the lowest rungs. "I don't make mistakes twice."
Behind her, the Huey groaned over and began to sink.
She pointed at the much smaller hole. "Got any diving equipment? My witness apparently can't swim."
"Have you ever been in here before?" Stacey Laiken asked her.
Udo glanced around the complex belonging to the Chair of Applied Occultism. She'd never made it this far during her first abortive attempt with Stacey, after the last deadline. But before that…
"Once or twice," she managed.
"It's weird, isn't it?"
Udo glanced around the sparsely appointed rooms, painted in primary colours and filled with cheerful bric a brac as it had never been when it had belonged to Dougall. "What about it?"
"It's been years and years," Stacey sat down on the nearest couch, plucking a pillow embroidered with a kitten's face out from behind her back and placing it to one side, "but I still think of these rooms as his. And now they're mine."
"It did occur to me," Udo lied as she sat down beside the other woman. "They couldn't let you keep your own place?"
"Well." Stacey shrugged. "Security. These rooms are better-protected than anywhere else in the Site, outside of maybe the Director's Quarters."
"Right. So the Serpent's Hand doesn't come after you."
Stacey laughed. "Is that what you heard? No. Dougall always liked to be dramatic."
Not more secrets. Please not more secrets. "What do you mean?"
"There was never any Serpent's Hand threat. It was something else." Stacey's expression was now what passed for grim on her cherubic face. "He was afraid of something."
"Something he was able to convince McInnis was important enough for all those security measures?" Udo gestured at nothing. None of it was visible. But she'd seen it all, in various ways.
Stacey dropped her voice to a conspiratorial near-whisper. "He convinced the Overseer Council, Udo."
Udo realized she was going to have to really start paying attention. This was sounding like fodder for her investigation with Del. "Do you know what it was? The thing he was afraid of?"
"No." Stacey looked pained. "He didn't tell me everything. Not even me."
"Right." Udo hoped her burning face parsed as empathetic.
Stacey bounced on the cushions suddenly. "So, when should we make the big announcement?"
"Eh?"
"Us."
"Oh. Well." So much for new information. "I wonder."
"What about? You're not getting cold feet, again…?"
"My feet never get cold, Stace. No, I just… I mean maybe we should figure out what it was Dougall was worried about, before we tear down all his precautions. You know? Play it close to the chest until we're sure."
The other woman looked uncertain. "Close to the chest, huh."
"Yeah."
She leaned in. "How close?"
Udo smiled in spite of herself. "Very close."
"Show me."
7 February
Falconer University: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"The first thing you ought to know is that I'm rusty." Harry made eye contact with each of the three Master's students, in turn. "I haven't taught in a long time. I'm gonna need to figure out how everything works, and you're gonna need to be patient with me. But not too patient, because if I'm getting in the way of your education, I'll need a kick in the ass."
"Not literally, I hope," said the short blonde woman whose name, bizarrely, was apparently Reggie.
"Probably not, but I can take a kick better than you'd think." Harry looked over the chaos of his office, and smiled. Books everywhere. Random objects in awkward locations. Standing and sitting room only. He'd had it set up like that a decade ago, and was only now settling in in earnest. It wasn't all that different from his office back at 43. "The point is that I'm here to help you get through this program as quickly and painlessly as possible, so if I'm slowing you down or giving you grief, that's on me to fix. But you might need to remind me, because I've got other considerations on my mind from time to time, and it can be difficult to keep perspective."
The dark, tall man with the spectacles, whose name was Altan, looked surprised. "What sort of considerations?"
"The secret kind. I've got a government job, and I can't tell you what it is. Don't look into it, and if I'm not here, don't ask me where I've gone."
Reggie blinked. "That's… a lot."
"I had a prof at Western who did work with CSIS," Altan mused. "Academics end up in all sorts of weird places."
"Isn't that the truth," Harry agreed. "So, first things first. You're all thesis track, because for some reason you want to be here two years for a thing you can do in one."
"I wanted to do more research before my doctorate," Reggie shrugged. "I like being in the archives."
"I have no idea what I want to do with my life." Heng, a Chinese man with muscles that made Harry's arm hurt just to look at them, was grinning. "So I want this to take as long as possible."
"Those are both very good reasons. Altan?"
"Everyone says I write too much. I don't see any reason to stop."
"Good enough," Harry nodded. "Well, you've all got a few months before I need your thesis proposals, but you should be thinking about them as soon as possible. The more detailed, the better. You don't want to get stuck working on something that doesn't do anything for you, and you don't want to have to change tack halfway through."
"Is that what you did?" Reggie asked. "With your career?"
"Yes and no," he smiled. "Have you considered social history, Reggie?"
"Maybe. Why?"
"Because you keep asking pointed questions."
Altan snickered. "You might have a calling as an oral historian."
She gave him a wry look.
"I've got questions too," Heng grumbled. "I was just being polite."
"That might be for the best," Reggie told him. "I think our supervisor is a secret agent."
"Fair guess." Harry knotted his fingers behind his neck. "Mine was."
Altan shifted in his chair, trying not to look like he was leaning in. "Really?"
"How'd you figure him out?" Heng asked.
"He wanted me to."
Reggie frowned. "What? Why?"
"Because he figured me out."
"And you went to work where he worked?" Altan's eyes were wide.
"That's right."
"So," Reggie said, "why are you back here again?"
He hadn't felt such a genuine smile coming on for a long, long time.
"Because I figured me out, too."
Three different security systems confirmed the identity before the door to her office opened, but Ibanez said the line anyway: "You're not my five o'clock."
"Sure I am." Lillian flopped into the chair she'd brought in with her. The only thing Ibanez had seen eye-to-eye with Edwin Falkirk on was the inadvisibility of providing accomodation for visitors. "It's an anagram."
Ibanez glanced at her terminal. "There is no way this name spells 'Lillian Lillihammer'."
"Well, of course not. It's also a cipher. But that's not the point. I'm your next two hours." Lillian clapped, once. "Congratulations."
Del kicked her feet up on her desk, and leaned back. The other woman looked like a scene out of Gulliver's Travels; Ibanez had opted for a desk her own size, rather than attempting to project. "Is this something you couldn't bring up at the next Survivors meeting? Because I really do have to be working on this actual case." She pointed at the terminal, though the screen was out of Lillian's view. One side was full of chronologically-sorted reports; the other was a stock photograph of Elizabeth Crocker's face.
"The actual case is what I want to talk about," Lillian said. "But you've been dodging all my calls."
"I'm busy."
"On a case that's been cold for over a decade. To the exclusion of all else." Lillian tutted. "Yancy's run off his feet doing your job for you."
Ibanez cursed her laced-up boots. Someone ought to kick their shoe into your head, for a change. "Doing my job for me has always been part of his job. I've done his for him. We're a force."
"You're a force. I'm not here to tell you to give this thing up. I'm here to tell you what you need to know to finish it."
Ibanez sighed. "Fine. What do you think you know that I don't?"
"I know you've already killed Elizabeth Crocker once."
She felt her pulse increase, and tried to keep it off her face. "I'm listening."
"In the first Deadline. You hunted her down and murdered her, in hot blood. But you plotted it out cold beforehand, like a good little soldier."
There was little point in trying to fool Lillian. Ibanez let the confusion wash over her. "I don't remember that. In the briefings, I mean."
"It isn't in the briefings."
She narrowed her eyes. "Why not?"
"Because you didn't bring it up. Because there were fifty thousand other things to talk about, and honestly, after you shot that bitch in the face, she stopped mattering so much to you."
She wanted to sit back up in her chair, but she wasn't one of those people who twitched and changed position constantly over the course of a single conversation, so she didn't. It took some effort, though. "That's very good to know. But why didn't you tell me after? Put it on the record?"
"Because once I reported that my memories were still there, TAD made me tell them absolutely everything I'd missed mentioning to Ngo, and then they told me which of those things I could tell anybody else about."
Ibanez frowned. "Told you? They don't tell people things. Udo and I have spent—"
Lillian raised a hand. "You and Udo don't have my brain chemistry. There was a time they could have wiped my memories, but not anymore. I'm immune, at least to anything that wouldn't leave me a drooling husk. And they're never taking that chance, especially not with 5243. So, I remember. And I keep their secrets, because I have the vague idea that they want them kept for a good reason."
Ibanez blew out a long, frustrated breath. "And yet you're telling me this. And more?"
Lillian nodded. "A lot more. Everything I know that you knew. How you found her, and how you caught her."
Fuck it. She rolled her chair back, and put her feet back under the desk. "Why?"
"Because I need you on the main line, Del. Not off on some fucking sidequest. If putting a bullet in Elizabeth Crocker will give you enough closure to get back on track, then honestly, fuck the timecops."
There was plenty of empty space at the bottom of the file. Ibanez paged down, cracked her knuckles, and pulled out the keyboard tray. "Tell me everything you know."
"There would never be enough time for that." Lillian grinned at her. "I'll settle for telling you everything you knew."
20 April
"You're seeing it too, right?"
Agent Charles Scrivens, retired, glanced over his wife's printout a second time for good measure. He nodded. "Of course. The numbers don't add up."
Agent Maureen McTeer, desk-bound, shook her head at him wearily. "She was right. As usual."
Maureen's office was sumptuously appointed by the standards of Security and Containment, full of the stuff of a long and successful career. Liberated artifacts with no lingering anomalous properties. Citations for bravery. Photographs with friends. No photographs with her husband, for very good reasons she neglected to explain to anyone who asked.
Charles, sitting across the desk from her in a comfortable chair he'd stolen from A&O during an equipment upgrade, rolled his eyes. "I don't know if she gets too much credit for it, in this case. Pensak has always been suspicious. And he doesn't make any effort to lessen it."
"And she's the one who hired him, too," Maureen reminded him. " I never understood that."
"Supposedly they go way back, in a way she can't explain and he can't remember."
She smiled to make it obvious that what she said next wasn't meant to be taken seriously. "Maybe we should be investigating her instead."
The smile he gave her back showed that he understood. "We'll make that our last case."
"You mean she'll make that our last case."
"Exactly."
She laughed. "You ever miss field work?"
"Sometimes." He shrugged. "But, you know."
"I know."
"Sacrifices."
She drummed her fingers on the desktop anxiously. "I don't know if that's the word I'd use for it, at this point. Sacrifices are usually a one-time thing."
He offered the look of melancholy sympathy that told her he wouldn't want to press this issue much further. It was showing up on his face more and more often as the decades wore on. "Dedication, then."
She didn't mean to scoff, but it still came out that way. "To what?"
"To the role. Just like him." Scrivens gestured at the file. "He's up to something, and he's been up to it for a while. Maybe he has a good reason."
She forced a smile. "I don't see much similarity between the two of you."
He glanced at the door, and the glass partition beside it that looked out on the S&C bullpen. Nobody had so much as batted an eye when he'd walked in, and they'd almost certainly forgotten he was there already. "Yeah, well, sometimes I'm difficult to see."
She reached across the desk. "Not for me."
He took her hands, and they shared a moment more private than any other couple on Earth could easily match.
Nascimbeni didn't realize he was clicking his tongue until the voice behind him said: "Something wrong?"
"These seals." He pointed at the submarine doors, before turning to face his questioner. "They were rated to last a lot longer than they have."
It was an older man. Still younger than Nascimbeni, but obviously a pretty boy. They aged into older men faster than workhorses like him. "Well, this place has been through a lot."
"Looks like it hasn't been through enough," Nascimbeni grunted as he reached down for his tool belt. "Maintenance, that is."
"Care and attention," the other man sighed. "Two things you won't find much of at Site-246." He stretched out a hand. "Cody Westbrook."
Nascimbeni accepted the gesture. "Director." Westbrook's handshake was firm, but the skin on his hands was smooth.
It took a few moments to prise open the protective flaps around the seals, mostly because they'd been bent out of shape from either use, or disuse. Probably the latter. Nascimbeni stuck his tongue out as he worked his screwdriver through the gunk which had collected over the most recent oil application.
"You're wondering why I didn't come down to meet you earlier," Westbrook said, and Nascimbeni nearly jumped. He'd already forgotten the Director was there.
"Not really, sir." He finished screwing around, having already seen enough. Stripped threads and not nearly enough action. A dangerous combo. "I don't need the diplomatic treatment. Just here to do a job."
"You'd fit in well, then." Westbrook glanced over the submarine bay, where what seemed like not nearly enough workers were converging on a stripped-down hull with torches and clipboards. "Everyone here is just here to do a job. To varying degrees of effectiveness." He shrugged at the massive door, and by implication the busted seals. "Can you fix it?"
Nascimbeni shrugged back at him. "I'll have to replace a few parts, but sure. Enough to keep it sealed until my next visit."
Westbrook made a sour face. "I doubt we have the budget for replacement parts."
"I'll bring them over from 43," Nascimbeni assured him. "We've got plenty left over from the last time we serviced our lake bulkeads."
"I would appreciate that. I don't mind a tomb you can walk around in, but a flooded tomb? No thank you."
Something came over the Director, and for a moment he seemed unsteady on his feet.
"Are you alright, sir? If you don't mind my asking." Nascimbeni minded having to ask, but politeness made its demands just the same.
"Of course." Westbrook took a deep breath. "Why wouldn't I be alright?" He reached up to rub his eyes.
Nascimbeni let it pass. "I'll get on the horn with my people. We'll fix her up tight."
"Thank you." An awkwardly-long pause. "I don't suppose you'd care to stay for dinner?"
Why do people do shit like this? Nascimbeni thought, grateful for the knowledge that his beard and lowered cap would keep the thought from evidencing on his features. "Thanks for the offer," he said, "but I'll need to be getting back as soon as we're done here."
"Family." Westbrook nodded, too sharply, like a drinking bird. "Of course."
Nascimbeni frowned, though he wasn't sure why. "No, just more work. You know how it is."
Westbrook stopped nodding, and looked away. "Yes."
Rasmus Mataxas was aware, as he often was, that a few of the older staff members were watching him.
He was moving down the halls of H&S with no particular aim in mind, and the little group of oldsters — Blank, Nascimbeni, and Ibanez — were sitting on a pair of benches in front of some laboratory or other. They'd been talking animatedly amongst themselves, heedless of the traffic, when he turned the corner and saw them. When they saw him, they started pretending to talk and not to stare as he approached, passed, and moved on. He could still feel their stares on his back.
It's the Foundation, he told himself. You're always being judged.
The crowd ahead parted around an obstruction he couldn't see, and then suddenly he could: a little pear of a woman with wild, short black hair and a trainee engineer's jacket. She practically bounded up to him, and said: "I want to check out your equipment."
He stared at her. Was that a twinkle in her eye? He didn't know how to respond.
"Joanna Bremmel." She extended a hand, brown eyes nearly disappearing behind an epicanthic fold as she smiled in greeting. He took the hand, and for a moment wondered if he was supposed to kiss it before she shook, vigorously, and let go. "Starting at Arms and Equipment today. You're Rasmus Mataxas, aren't you? First day with the Home Invaders tomorrow?"
He nodded, still not trusting himself to speak. The only thing that had softened the blow of losing his son to the Mobile Task Forces for Anastasios Mataxas was that Rho-43 worked closely with anyone investigating bumps in the night; houses and ghosts went together like pods and pod people.
"Great." She beamed at him. "Then you and I need to have a talk. I've been over your new gear already, and—"
"Hey Jo." Another woman, an H&P nurse only slightly taller but much, much thinner, slid in beside Joanna and grinned up at him, hand raised in greeting behind the other woman's back. On her, the messy black hair looked like more of a stylistic choice. "Hey, agent. You ready to get physical?"
He blinked.
Joanna kept her eyes on him, smile never faltering. "We're talking, Billie."
"So let's talk! Containment is a team effort, that's what his dad always says." The nurse winked at him.
"You know what my dad says about that?" Joanna asked sweetly, still not turning her head to face the other woman.
Billie let her hand fall to rest on Joanna's shoulder. "I'm guessing 'fuck off' is in there somewhere."
"That's the whole thing." Joanna shifted on the balls of her feet, and Rasmus looked down. Her feet barely touched the ground. He looked back up. "Physical isn't for another hour."
"I've got time now." Billie flashed a lot of teeth at him.
"I was here first."
"What do you think?" Billie poked Rasmus in the chest with her free hand. "Explore the wonders of biology with me, or nerd shit with Jo?"
He looked at them both, Joanna first, then Billie, then glanced over his shoulder at the old timers still reclining on their benches. Nascimbeni was still staring at him; Blank and Ibanez were looking back and forth between him and each of the women. He couldn't read the expressions on their faces, and the distance between them had little to do with it.
Judgement, he thought, and returned his attention to the impossible choice before him.
8 September
Perverse that it could become routine.
Ibanez started talking the instant the door was open. "This has to end."
McInnis was already waiting for her annual protest, hands tented, eyes alert. "If you have any suggestions, by all means."
"Contain him." Ibanez stalked up to the desk, and did not sit down. "Put him in a box. Like we're doing now, but alive."
"I meant suggestions for ending the 5243 loop, Chief." The Director looked, if not precisely tired, perhaps just a little bit frustrated. Ibanez felt not the faintest trace of sympathy for him. "Our instructions regarding Dr. Deering, while the situation is ongoing, are very clear."
"Since when do we follow bad instructions to the letter?"
She thought she caught a flash of warning in his otherwise placid grey eyes. When next he spoke, his words came slowly and his voice was pitched very low. "I think there must have been some sort of misunderstanding between us. The Temporal Anomalies Department—"
"—is some unaccountable shadow-shadow-government thing that has no business telling us ours," she snapped. "Our business. We do things our way. We always have." She didn't cut McInnis off very often, but when she did, it always went like this. He wouldn't raise his voice over hers. He would wait for her to finish.
"They have the authority of Overwatch Command behind them," he reminded her patiently. "If Dr. Deering lives, Dr. Deering must die. I'm surprised you have such qualms."
Her nostrils flared. "Why?"
"I've never known you to be squeamish."
"I'm not fucking squeamish." She wanted to clear his desk with a sweep of her hands; his desk, or perhaps his infuriatingly neutral expression. "I'll wade through a pile of stinking corpses any day. I'll get perforated bowel on my boot and blood on my face that isn't mine, and you won't hear me complain. What I will not do is put a clean little hole in the head of a man who has done nothing wrong except for overturning our precious theories about what's really going on here. He doesn't deserve that, and it doesn't serve any useful purpose." She was momentarily proud that she hadn't raised her voice, then momentarily concerned.
But then he gave her the opening she'd been waiting for, and the moments were all ended. "Could you please clarify what you mean, Chief, when you say you will not do this thing?"
"Sure." She turned to go. "Just give me five minutes with Roger's bullpen printer."
"Roger's?"
"Roger's. Unless you've got another fucking yes-man lined up to take my job."
Van Rompay was waiting for her at the door to her office when she arrived. She'd been seething the entire walk back, after handing in her notice, and she had no more fucks to give.
But he was uncharacteristically friendly once they were within speaking distance. "Did you kill him?"
"Of course I killed him." The MTF commander moved out of the way, to allow her to unlock her door. "I killed him last year, didn't I? Good little cop."
"I meant McInnis."
She laughed as she pulled the door open.
Van Rompay followed her in. "I take it you're falling on your Glock."
"Only choice I've got left." She walked behind the desk, but did not sit down. She didn't feel like sitting down.
She hardly ever did, anymore.
"You know they won't let you leave." Van Rompay shut the door, and leaned against it with his arms crossed.
"Yeah. I do know that." She kicked at the foot of her desk. "Maybe they'll put me in the cell they should be using for Deering."
"Maybe you could suggest a transfer instead."
She glanced over and up at him, surprised. She didn't care if he saw it. That amused him, and he didn't care if she saw it, either.
"I'm not working for you, Ged. We both know that's a non-starter."
He shook his head. "Not what I was going to suggest."
They stared at each other for what felt like several minutes.
"You serious?" she finally asked him.
He nodded. "Leg's not getting any better." An unfortunate incident a few years back, redacted heavily by the TAD but supposedly involving some sort of dimension-hopping crocodile squid monster, had taken a chunk out of Van Rompay and put him out of commission for a few months. Every now and then he needed to take health leave; the Foundation's preeminent Type Red — capable of anomalous energy transfer and healing — had already told him that the wound would probably never fully heal. Van Rompay's deputy, a sour little bulldog named Ullis, had spent almost as much time as Chief of Pursuit and Suppression over the past few years as the man himself had. Still…
"I thought Forsythe…"
"You thought Forsythe what?" Van Rompay laughed bitterly. "Would give me whatever it is they give you? Your friends?" He paused, scrutinizing her face as she reacted to the insinuation, then shrugged. "I'm just a grunt. All I've ever been. And I've hit the end of my, what do you call it. When a thing gets too old to be worth fixing up. Easier to get a new one."
"Amortization," the civic engineer said from deep down inside of her.
"Right. That. I'm amortized. But you? Seems like you might just be immortal."
She did feel like sitting down, now. She pulled out her chair. "I'm surprised you'd even suggest this. Why?"
"Maybe I'm ready to be done, and I don't think you are."
She lowered herself into the seat, hands on the low desktop, keeping eye contact. His expression was unhappy, but confident. "I don't believe that first part, and I don't believe you give a shit about the second."
"I'm not telling you my reasons." He glanced to one side, at nothing. Her office was furnished with only the bare necessities. No personal items. She barely had any to begin with. "I'm giving you excuses, so you'll do what I want you to do."
"And what's that?" She looked down reached up to scratch at her scalp, scattering streamers of hair she'd been pulling on in abject frustration in the subway not a few minutes back. "Just say it plainly, if you have to say it."
"You ever go to those annual security conferences they put on?"
She looked up again. "Once or twice. Waste of time."
"Sure." His eyes searched hers. "Ever talk to the other folks who go?"
"Try not to." She shrugged. "Not a big talker."
"Me either, but I had to know."
"Know what?"
"What they'd be like."
"Who?"
He approached the desk. Towered over it. "The kind of person who'd take my post. I talked to the other commanders. The hardasses they hire these days. Heard how they talked about their people. Their jobs. What mattered."
She blinked. "So?"
"So I don't want any of them riding my bird." He leaned forward, far forward, and pressed a fist into her blotter. "They're not getting better out there, Ibanez."
"They?" She shook her head. "They who?"
He tapped the Foundation insignia on his chest armour.
"So, what?" She wanted to laugh, but she couldn't work it up. "You think I'd be better than whoever they'd bring in to replace you?"
"I think you'd be better than me."
She stared at him.
"And that's what this whole place is supposed to be about, isn't it?"
She didn't know what to say, but he still wasn't done.
"And when it's your turn to go, just promise me you'll find someone better than you."
NOTICE FROM THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR, SITE-43
After nearly thirty years of selfless service, Chief of Pursuit and Suppression Commander Gedeon Van Rompay is retiring to Foundation housing in Sunset Cove, Pensacola. He will be succeeded in his role by Commander Delfina Ibanez, whose post as Chief of Security and Containment will now be filled by Roger Pensak. Continuity of service is expected, and all three are to be congratulated on the exciting adventures ahead of them.
— McInnis, Allan J. (Director, Site-43)
9 September
Philip Deering was looking at the mirror when Nascimbeni looked up from his desk. As always, he wondered what snide thing the mirror monster had said to the technician in response. He cleared his throat, and Phil looked blearily back at him.
"You're saying someone robbed your locker?"
"No," Phil shook his head. "I'm saying someone made a trade with me, after breaking into my locker." His eyes flicked to the right, where the slit-faced grey thing's mouth hole was trembling. "I left a piece of cake in there—"
"You what?" Nascimbeni coughed. He put his coffee down, and pounded his chest.
"Look, don't judge, alright? It was Ruya's birthday." Phil mustered the presence to look embarrassed. "I left a piece of cake in there, and now it's a shoe."
"Your cake turned into a shoe," Nascimbeni repeated.
"No, I mean someone took the cake, and left me a shoe. I didn't want a shoe, Chief. I wanted the cake."
It took a lot to rouse Phil to make a statement like this. It almost always meant his statements were convoluted and confused, as this one was now. "You weren't allowed in your locker all day. That's protocol until we've got all the apparatus damage under wraps."
This time Phil looked to the left, shifty-eyed. "I know, but look."
"You were going to eat cake that had been in your locker for two days?" Nascimbeni pressed.
"Can we not talk about the cake?" Phil whined. "Why do you want to talk about the cake so much?"
"I just think maybe you need someone checking on you more often."
The technician clenched his hands into fists, and bobbed a bit on his heels. "That's not the point. The point is, there's a shoe in my locker and I don't know where it's from. Same as the weird labcoat-thing last year."
"You're sure it's not your shoe?" With Phil, it was always worth making sure.
"I don't own any shoes."
Nascimbeni blinked. "What?"
"All I have are my work boots."
He didn't precisely want to be travelling down these tangents, but it was hard not to. "What do you wear when your shift is through?"
Phil shrugged. "Socks."
"What if you have to leave your dorm? To go to the cafeteria?"
"I put my work boots on again. Chief." Phil leaned on Nascimbeni's desk. "Something spooky is going on here."
"I'll tell Mataxas." Nascimbeni pulled up the reporting function on his duty tablet. "He'll be pleased for the chance to wave his magic wands. But I want to know for sure this isn't just you forgetting something again." He glanced up meaningfully, then said the meaning out loud. "For the thousandth time."
"Hey." Phil stepped back again. "That's not fair. No, Doug," and he turned all the way to face the mirror, finger raised in protest, "it isn't."
"He's right." Phil turned back to him. "No, I meant you're right. It wasn't fair. I'm sorry. I'm just distracted." Nascimbeni leaned back without finishing the message, pushed back his cap and rubbed his eyes. "We've got half the Site to fix, as you know. As long as you promise me you've never seen this shoe before…"
"Well, that's… uh."
Nascimbeni opened his eyes. "Uh?"
"It does feel kind of familiar," Phil admitted, "but I'm not sure how exactly. Maybe I've seen it before. Maybe it's a prank by one of the doctors? It's kind of an expensive shoe."
"Could you get it for me?" Nascimbeni sighed.
"Sure." A look of vague hope crossed Phil's face. "You think they could, I don't know. Get an aura reading off it, or something?"
"I'll ask Astrauskas," said Nascimbeni, "but I don't think her auramancy is sensitive to foot odour."
Nascimbeni didn't recognize the shoe, but Ibanez did. She was glad he'd brought it to her first; if Udo had seen the loafer, they'd have had to amnesticize her twice in as many days.
15 September
"There's the smiling face I love to see," Forsythe drawled as Harry appeared from behind the curtain.
"What, people aren't always glad to see your bigass needles?" He sat down on the examination bench.
"Wettle faints," she said. "Every time."
"That's just his body's way of falling over when there's nothing to trip on."
She made a little 'ah' of realization. "I get it now. You talk through the anxiety."
"Who's anxious?" he shrugged. "I love these shots."
She gripped his shrugging arm, and pushed the sleeve of his t-shirt back. He'd left his hoodie in the hall. "Everyone else is suspicious of them."
"Even Wettle?"
"Everyone else with a brain."
He smiled. "I appreciate the implied compliment."
"Is it my imagination," and there it was, the pinprick and the uncomfortable tension of having a solid object inserted into a vein, "or are you extra chipper today?"
"Probably not your imagination." He didn't look at the needle. He wasn't afraid of them, but he wasn't really a fan, either.
Well, most of the time.
"Who's the unlucky lady?"
"They should be so unlucky," he scoffed. "No, it's just that I went to bed last night…"
"That is new for you."
He acknowledged the point. "Sorry. I was thinking of not saying this out loud, actually. I went to bed last night thinking I'd be turning fifty in March."
She consulted his chart. "You're forty-eight."
"Yeah. Thought I wasn't. Thought I was forty-nine, all year."
"How does a thing like that happen?"
"If I had to guess?" He was suddenly squirming on the bench. "2014 being the same as 2013 being the same as 2012 BEING THE SAME AS 2011—"
Still, the shot did help.
It always did.
30 November
Lillian slapped herself. "Sorry. Fuck. I hate this. We really need to set up a real Vegas room." The slate in the Cognitive Decontamination Tunnel seemed to vibrate when she looked at it. She could feel her brain cells peeling off, as though she were rubbing them against the rough black stone and its deeply-carved sigils.
"I would have thought the Division already had something like that," Euler yawned. She wasn't sure what accommodations he'd set up back at Site-87, but Wheeler's people had agreed that it would be sufficient to isolate his thoughts. The telephone calls were routed through recursive firewire lines looped between half a dozen interdimensional Ways, resulting in a transmission speed very slightly faster than realtime and a signal that could not under any circumstances be traced or hijacked. It had cost a mint.
When you were saving the world, the Foundation opened up wallets so secret they practically qualified as concealed carries.
"Maybe we did." Wheeler didn't sound tired, the way Euler did, but she did sound a little confused. Site-41's secure comms room benefited from an effect the Division ordinarily found frustrating, the one that made everyone forget who they were when they weren't in plain view, and that effect was bolstered in a variety of occult ways. Lillian had it on good authority that an hour in that room caused migraines that didn't go away without amnestic treatment, which was fine, because Wheeler took amnestics after every one of these long-distance meetings anyway. "But we don't have one anymore, and the budget isn't there to replace it."
"Why not?" Lillian asked.
"Because most days we don't have a budget at all. One of the first things I do when I get in every morning is remind the Accounting Department that we exist. One of these days they're not going to believe me."
"Which makes what we're doing that much more important," Euler yawned again. The meeting was running long, and he was yawning everything he said. If they didn't wrap up soon, he'd probably fall asleep. "Lillian will handle the report, of course."
"Of course," Wheeler agreed.
"Of course. Because I did most of the work." Lillian paused. "Well, that's not true."
"Certainly it is," Euler said. He managed to get it all out without taking an extra breath in the middle.
"No. I couldn't have done it without you."
"Certainly you—"
"Let me be uncharacteristically generous, would you?" The nice thing about audio-only communication was that she could offset the vocal generosity by pulling a truly outrageous face. I hate being nice. I hate being nice. She let her tongue hang out in disgust as she continued to tell the old man how she felt. "Going against the grain gives me splinters, and we don't have time to listen to me sitting here sucking on my fucking hand."
He made a small noise of surrender.
"The new electronic systems have helped a lot," Lillian continued, "though we're still running into the squish factor. Automation doesn't help when people forget to check their machines. The new drugs have helped a lot with that, but obviously it's an uphill battle."
"And it's going to remain that way," Wheeler sighed. "I don't know how many groups there were studying antimemetic phenomena last year — I don't even know how many there are this year — but I'm sure there must have been more, because there aren't enough now. You're going to need to take up the slack."
"I've been visiting as many of our cells as I can," Euler yawned again. "We want to avoid cross-contamination, of course, keeping them all in their own unique headspaces, but—"
"But?" Wheeler's voice was suddenly hard and hyperfocused. "I'm sorry, Dr. Euler, but that sounds like a tremendous security threat. Why is it acceptable for you to be acting as a link between these groups? You're endangering the project, if I understand it correctly." Wheeler only occasionally made these little asides every year, when Lillian called and reminded her the project even existed. She was a woman who was used to being told she had forgotten something, but she was also a woman who would never be very happy about the fact.
"There is no linkage, Mrs. Wheeler. I've been cleared for this duty by medical personnel who are fully aware of the situation, and what it demands. There is no possibility of memetic contagion."
"If you say so." She didn't sound convinced, but then, he'd offered nothing convincing. Lillian hoped she'd remember to press him on it later. "The work is going well?"
"Of course not." Euler sounded very old, but then, he was very old. "It never does. But it is going. And it will continue to go."
"Then that's all I need to know. Unless there's anything else…?"
"No," Lillian interjected, "my back's cramped up bad enough as it is. And you've got your date with… whatever." She'd never understood what Wheeler's annual appointment was about, and the other woman had never elaborated. Perhaps she couldn't. "Let me know how it goes."
"If I ever find out myself," Wheeler said, "I'm sure you'll be the next in line. One way or another."
January 6
She'd waited a long time to see what was on the memory cube, nearly a year. The thing was, she knew the cubes themselves didn't go bad, but she also knew there were all kinds of nasty things they could be coated with that did. So it took a lot of testing, and a lot of waiting, for her to decide that the thing was safe to get hooked up with — safer than Sokolsky himself was, certainly, though that wasn't saying much — and even longer for her schedule to open up to the point where she could waste time on things other people wanted her to look into. It wasn't like the others had hit any dead ends in their investigations, anyway. They could wait for whatever revelations were stored in that crystallized fragment of Russian memory.
She half-expected it to be irrelevant nonsense anyway, another little gem from Sokolsky's twisted sense of humour.
It wasn't.
Site-03 was on fire, and Daniil was paralyzed. He was six years old.
So he was old enough to figure this out.
Fire terrified him. It walked up the walls like a swarm of spiders. It ate everything. It turned everything into itself. It reminded him of the way his father had screamed at him for setting fire to toilet paper in the bathroom of the Director's Complex, just to watch it curl in on itself. Like a bug under a magnifying glass.
Almost everyone was gone. Daniil walked through the halls, where everything that could burn was burning, calling out for his father, but his father was gone, too. The few who weren't gone weren't much help, because they were lying on the floor, or sitting in their chairs, or walking past him, muttering, crying, laughing. One man's hair was on fire. It smelled terrible. He should have been screaming, but he wasn't.
Daniil knew he needed to ██████.
He clawed at his eyes. He needed ██████.
He sat down on the floor, and wept.
He hated to cry. When he cried, his father shouted at him. He could see it in his mind's eye. When he wiped the tears away, he realized he could see it with his regular eyes, too.
"Blubbering little baby," Abrasha Sokolsky snapped. "Grow up. Stand up. Solve your problems like a man."
But he couldn't. And that made the fear worse. Because his father would never stop shouting at him, never stop shouting until finally he was shouted into nothing, and he would never, ever…
Would never, ever…
Escape. That was the word. That was the word he needed. The thing he needed to do. He needed to escape.
How could he do that?
But as the answer dawned, obvious and clear, Daniil Sokolsky appeared in front of him and said "Next time you pick my brain, Lillian, look me in the eyes."
"Son of a bitch," Lillian muttered. "Really had me going, for a second there."
After dismantling the cube, it had taken months to recombine the particles to form a coherent engram. Sokolsky had discovered a means of encrypting the memory cubes, because of course he had. She wondered if it had a more practical purpose than making her solve a puzzle just to unlock half a story, and a mocking 'gotcha!' moment.
Probably it did. Daniil Sokolsky was a being of many layers.
2015
January 7
"This was a good idea," said Technician First Class Azad Banerjee. His voice was muffled by the metal between them.
"Right?" Lillian grinned. "So good."
Eileen glanced up at her, expression unreadable, then looked back down at what Lillian had never stopped looking at. The three of them were alone in the auxiliary tech control room of AAF-A,
a room which purports to be a pastoral landscape: two of the four walls are covered in a painted mural, one is wall-to-wall circuitry, and the last is a massive console with space beneath to root around in a la a bridge set from Star Trek. (The number of things at Site-43 which can be profitably described in reference to Star Trek is quite high. This is because the only thing more inspirational to prospective engineers is the chance to be condescending to people you don't know.)
Many rooms in the undercroft of AAF-A are similarly decorated, the result of an initiative by Psychology and Parapsychology to offset a peculiar phenomenon: knowing that the rooms on the upper floors, where the front company operates, are often festooned with windows and naturally lit, persons working on the lower floors get topside-sick at a much higher rate than their counterparts working in the deepest depths of the main facility. Apparently, a few painted clouds and green hills can help offset this. The human mind and its workings may be the strangest anomaly of all.
— Blank, Lines in a Muddle
Lillian's mind continued to work as she watched Banerjee, clueless, proceed with his work. "We're on the same page here, right?" he continued from beneath the console. "The reason for these upgrades?"
"Is this a quiz?" Eileen asked archly.
Banerjee crawled back out of the console, and rolled over on the floor to look up at them. They both pretended they hadn't been looking at him, and looked at him again. "I was just wondering if it was the reason I'm thinking."
"What's the reason you're thinking?" Lillian asked.
He scowled. "Well, now I'll never know. You could just pretend."
Eileen scowled back at him. It wasn't a remotely fair contest. "Are you calling us liars, technician?"
He recoiled at her withering glare. "No, I just know you're… very creative truth-tellers. We all work at the Foundation, after all."
"Fine," Lillian sighed, "I'll say it. We're doing the systems upgrade today because the containment damage already fucks it all up anyway, so why bother repairing when you can replace?"
"Knew it." Banerjee smirked. "That's great. I still work for geniuses. All I wanted to know."
And he crawled back in.
"Now he's implying we might be going senile," said Eileen.
Lillian raised her foot so that the tip of her shoe hovered just behind Banerjee's left buttock. Eileen shook her head no furiously, but she was smiling as she did it.
"Of course not," said the technician. "I know I'm not anywhere near your speed, ma'ams."
Lillian placed a hand on Eileen's shoulder. Neither woman moved to make eye contact. "He thinks we're the same speed, Eileen. Have you ever received such a lovely compliment?"
"You might be going faster," Eileen said, "but at least I'm not pointing at a cliff."
"I'm already impressed. Don't pull a muscle on my behalf."
"Some things are worth pulling a muscle for."
From beneath the console, a low, knowing chuckle.
Lillian waited longer than Eileen had expected. They were almost to the subway before she started leering, "So, Banerjee."
"What about him?" Eileen played coy, not because she thought it would work, but because she thought Lillian should have to work for what she wanted.
"You know what about him." The other woman elbowed her in the upper arm. At her height, Lillian had to lean over a little so as not to elbow Eileen in the head instead.
"You're disgusting."
"You know better than most."
Eileen gave Lillian a look of exaggerated, if only slightly, exhaustion. "Most people don't have to put up with innuendo from their exes."
"Nobody ever really gets rid of me. I'm like a fixture." Lillian tapped the steel sheathing on the next corner they turned. "A core structural element."
"I think of you more like black mold." A passing agent visibly suppressed a laugh, and Eileen smiled at him.
"But seriously. Banerjee." Lillian's voice became comically husky. "Who knew, right?"
"Finish the thought yourself."
"Who knew he'd have such a nice b—"
Eileen elbowed Lillian in the hip. The gut was too high, and anyway there wasn't much of it.
"The beard, I was going to say!" the other woman laughed. "Who knew he'd look that good with a beard? I never liked the whole babyface thing he had going on."
Eileen acknowledged the bait-and-switch with an eyeroll. "He's Indian. Beards were practically invented for Indian men."
"That's the spirit." Lillian clapped a hand to Eileen's shoulder, and kept it there as they approached the turnstiles. "We're not that different, you and me."
"Most people also don't have to take insults from their exes."
"That's not true at all, and anyway I'm only insulting myself. You ought to be flattered." They flashed their passes at the reader, and the stiles turned for them. "So, about how we're so similar."
"Uh huh."
"Daniil."
"There it is." Eileen walked to the yellow line at the end of the platform, and turned to face her friend. They were alone, which didn't really matter; Lillian was no more or less bold with an expanded audience. "Finally. I saw this coming from a mile off."
The look on Lillian's face was as filthy as any Eileen had seen. "What, you've got video feed on his quarters?"
"Ugh."
"So, come on." Lillian reached down to squeeze her shoulder, and Eileen reached up to brush the hand away. "Let's talk about him."
"Why don't you talk about him with him?" Eileen suggest. "He loves when people do that."
"Not on this topic, he doesn't."
"What topic? What're you trying to get out of him?" And then she saw it. "Oh, god. You're only dating him to squeeze him for information, aren't you? I should have seen that coming, too."
"No, my motives include more than one kind of squeezing." Lillian winked. "But I am trying to draw him on a particular issue, and he isn't biting."
"That's not how I remember him." She regretted the words the instant they were out.
"There she is again!" Lillian crowed. "I knew the woman I once repeatedly loved was still in there, somewhere. Now, help me out. I need some leverage. Something I have that he wants, that I can withold until he gives me what I want."
"Sounds like you've already played that card," Eileen smirked.
"Something better than sex."
"I'm amazed to hear you say there's something better than sex with you."
"Some people have skewed priorities. Come on, Eileen." Lillian made a comical pleading face, lips stuck out in an inch-deep pout. "Help me out here."
"With what? What do you think I know that you don't?"
"Precisely one thing, and only because that's how its rules work."
It took Eileen a few moments to realize what Lillian meant, and by then she knew her refusal had been foreseen and preemptively defeated by the monstrous thinking machine whirring behind those big blue eyes.
She made the protest anyway, just so she could later say that she had.
January 10
Love is an advantage.
His mind was a trap, but not of steel. It was a chemical trap, and it was trivial to change the makeup. A little dopamine, some oxytocin and endorphins, and as the coup de grace…
She flopped over beside him, pulled his wallet off the side table, pulled out the little card, and smiled at him. "Watch my eyes."
He watched her eyes, his pupils dilated as hers no doubt were as well.
She read the card. Not out loud, of course. That would be disastrous. When she was done, she flipped it off the side of the bed, and looked at him.
He was still looking into her eyes. So she asked: "Can you tell?"
"I can tell. You weren't faking. You can read it. You have it."
She kissed him. "Don't I always?"
"How did you get the Password? I'm assuming you murdered Eileen."
"Only with facts and logic." She pulled him close; with the height differential, curling up on his chest would have been more symbolic than practical, and after all he was the one who could see only symbols on the card. "Bet you'd like to take it for a spin."
"I'll bet I could make you shout it."
She laughed, plucked one of his eyebrow hairs out with her teeth, and spat it out. "I think you have our roles reversed. You should be so lucky. You with the Password…"
"And you with my deep, dark, and relevant backstory. Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"The things you do for friendship."
"And the friends I do for friendship."
He sighed, and rested his head on her chest. "Didn't find what you were looking for in my office safe?"
She shook her head. "Mm-mm. Knew I wouldn't as soon as it was as easy as stealing a piece of paper from your wallet."
"I appreciate you not taking the money."
"There was, what? Ten bucks in there. Tight-fisted bastard. But I got the message. Tit for tat."
He reached over and squeezed something relevant. "Tat it is. I'll collect the other cube from deep storage."
"You could just tell me the whole story yourself."
"Oh, I'd rather not."
"Why? Too emotional?"
"No. It's just that the long version would take longer than fifteen minutes."
It was easy. He'd been and gone from this place a hundred times. All he needed to do was find the █████ ████████, and then…
It was all he could do to avoid crying again. He bit his lower lip, and his eyes remained clear.
His father was gone, because he'd never been there. There was a woman sitting cross-legged across the hall from him, pulling something red out of her face. He realized it was probably her tongue. She was laughing, and the blood was everywhere. She made eye contact with him, and nodded in a friendly manner.
These were some of the smartest adults in Russia, and Russia was the best of the Foundation. His father always told him so. If they couldn't figure out how to get to the first sublevel…
That was it, again. That was the thing which had ██████d him, the thing he needed to know. If he was going to… if he was going to…
The ceiling came crashing down, and he scrambled out of the way. He couldn't see it, because there were sparks in his eyes, but he could hear the woman laughing as she burned. And then another voice joined her, and another. All of them laughing. He turned and ran, ran so that he could escape, to the first sublevel, where he would just need his father's ██████ █, which was a problem, because his father was gone, and so were the words, and he was going to die, and he suddenly realized he couldn't breathe, and he suddenly realized that the word was KEYCARD.
The memory ended.
She hoped he wasn't any good at reading her expressions yet. "That… isn't anything Del can use. For anything."
He stretched out on the couch, and slung his hands behind his head. "I wouldn't think so, no."
She unhooked the EL-STA leads from her head, and set them on the hook attached to the stand. Euler hadn't been all that involved in the creation of the Euler-Lillihammer Somatic Transmission Array, but she thought he wouldn't object to his work being adapted to allow people to personally experience the memories of others, willingly extracted. It was the kind of positive, kumbaya-type thing he loved. "You made me work for that."
"I'm not sure I'd precisely call it work. And really," he yawned, and got more comfortable on the pillow, "do you expect me to believe you're only interested in things she can use?"
She raised a brow. "Daniil Sokolsky."
"Yes."
"Were you trying to be one step ahead of me?"
"I think I was succeeding at being one step ahead of you. It was a little exhilarating, if I'm being honest. And a little depressing to think I'll be behind you again, now. Metaphorically speaking." He showed his teeth. "Being literally behind you is never disappointing."
"We could never be in a relationship," she sighed.
"Why's that?"
She stood. "Because it would take up too much of my time, and I'd probably enjoy it."
"Where are you going?"
"To think about what you told me."
"You could think about it here."
"Not with that grin hanging over or under me."
He shifted onto his elbow. "Did you not hear what I just said, about being behind you?"
She considered.
She was a little proud of how long the consideration took her. "Fine, but you don't get the Password until I'm done with it."
He patted the cushion beneath him. "Challenge accepted."
January 11
It made perfect sense.
She was surprised she hadn't considered it before. She was even more surprised Sokolsky hadn't understood the meaning of his own memory. Or perhaps he did? Perhaps this was a gift he was giving to her, the knowledge of how…
She found herself shaking her head. Daniil Sokolsky did not share his toys. Daniil Sokolsky did not give other people the advantages he had. The only difference between him and a billionaire was that his wealth was knowledge.
That, and he wasn't making up for any deficiencies down below.
Obviously he'd been too close to the source material to fully comprehend its import. She understood that. She'd once had the same problem. But now that she had perspective, the perspectives of four different versions of her single self, she could see angles that didn't even exist in the geometry everyone else was used to.
She closed her eyes, and pictured the room.
The living room in Harry's childhood home, with its awkward angles and lines that only barely seemed to connect by random happenstance. Her little trick for clearing the mind of all distractions, and honing in with crystal clarity on what she needed.
As always, when her mind was completely still, she could take a breath and feel it fogging up against the impediment. The only thing which had ever happened to her that she could not in any sense remember. In her mind, she placed a single hand on the block, and conjured up the keys one after another.
She was standing at the bottom of the DUAL Core shaft, wielding a bottle of white vinegar as though it were a chemical weapon. Which, in this context, it was.
The carpet of corpses flowed over the edge of the catwalks above, forming and reforming, a new victim every time. People she knew. No-one she loved, not yet, but it was only a matter of time. She'd been a fool to get so attached. This should never have been her problem.
But it was. The bubbling mass of chittering chitin crept along the pipes and conduits, and she began to spray with targeted bursts. The first few came out as mist, and she screwed the tip of the bottle until it offered her more precision. The bubbling biomass retreated from each jet, and the space which already stunk of cutting oil now took on a vinegaric tang. The thing hissed, and pulled back, like a child which had burned its hand on the hob, and the hiss suddenly resolved into words.
"We are going to have you, brother."
She didn't respond, and she didn't stop spraying.
"We will be one."
And a face emerged from the crawling horde of spiders, billions on billions of them, and the face was spiders, too, but it was also a man she loved, and had lost, and had been forced to lose over and over again.
Del Olmo's rippling face spoke in the same histrionic sussurus. "What do you see, Lillian?"
She raised the bottle higher, and sent the next stream into the thing's false mouth. "A bad imitation, and an easy target."
The face exploded, and the spiders came raining down…
She shuddered, but kept her hand firm on the obelisk. Had it been an obelisk before? It now had contour, form and shape. She could feel its weight, its chill.
Wettle was trying to scream, but his mouth was filled with spiders.
The effigy of Alis pressed its lips to hers, and the stream of wriggling legs continued to pour out of her, and into him.
"Shush," she hissed. "You know it's right."
He thrashed his head to one side, and spat out a tremendous globule of saliva-drenched skittering horror.
She was openly weeping in disgust, waves of revulsion travelling through her body and pulsating through the corridor wall.
It was a corridor.
She was standing in the middle of it.
She was almost there.
There were no eyes in the darkness this time. It didn't make any sense, but even her oldest memories were filled with segmented legs and twitching pedipalps. The refinery that towered over them was swaying back and forth, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, like a skyscraper made of jelly, only the jelly was a colony of arachnids numerous enough to encircle the moon ten times over.
"You can withstand," Rydderech told her, and there were spiders in his eyes. "You will endure. The memory of dead worlds lives in you." He pressed a hand to her forehead, and there were spiders beneath his fingernails. They separated, and the things came crawling out, into her hair, into her nose, and still she didn't break eye contact. She had to hear the end of it. "You carry them across the gulf between." Rydderech's voice was now a sibilant squeal, like all the rest, but it wasn't real, and he was still him. "You are the vessel," he told her, and she knew that it was true. "You are unsinkable."
And she was there.
2004
9 October
Site-06: Outside Bad Karlshafen, Kassel District, Hesse, Federal Republic of Germany
Finally, urgently, as though realizing it was late to the party, a hollow screeching filled the halls. The solid red lights began to flash.
"Oh," said Wheeler.
"Uh," Lillian agreed.
It was the nuclear overload alarm.
"How long do we have?"
"Twenty-five minutes." Wheeler checked the magazine on her pistol, and grunted. It was a grunt neither of satisfaction nor alarm.
"I thought these things were supposed to go up in a flash."
"Not here. The nukes in containment facilities for slavering beasts, yes." The other woman's body language had changed in all sorts of interesting ways since the breach had begun. Lillian suddenly believed the unlikely story she'd heard about tentacles and the fire axe. "Cut short the rampage before it reaches the exit. But 06 is too important. There are vital assets here. They'll be evacuated."
"I'm a vital asset," Lillian said.
Wheeler didn't roll her eyes, because she was too busy scanning the corridors. But her voice carried the same implication. "Sure you are." Then her brow furrowed. "You might be more important to them, actually."
"You think so?"
Wheeler gestured back the way they'd come, where one of the giftschreiber attackers had made the brief error of attacking them. "He called you 'the vessel'. Thoughts on what that might mean?"
"Zero."
The other woman — was she an agent? Lillian didn't think she was a doctor, really she only thought of her as Wheeler — had apparently chosen a direction. Probably she'd memorized the Area's layout on the flight over. She was the type to be prepared like that. "Zero," she mused as they passed from pool after pool of red light. "The thing that makes all complex math possible."
"I wasn't trying to be clever."
"Maybe you don't even have to try. It just happens."
If Wheeler hadn't been holding a gun, Lillian might have patted her on the head. "Flattering. But what are you on about?"
"The giftschreiber are fascinated by your disaster." Wheeler poked her head around a corner, then swung around with her weapon at the ready, then ushered Lillian to follow her. "They think it's the key to understanding themselves. They think there's something intrinsic to it that relates to them."
"You're saying they think it's… in me, somehow?" It wasn't a pleasant thought, but neither was it totally a foreign one.
"Maybe. Or maybe you're the focus for it. Maybe it happens because of you. All of you."
"He didn't say I'm a vessel. He said I'm the vessel."
Wheeler shrugged. "Well, the most obvious connection would be your memory. Right?"
"Right. So it's probably not that."
"But what if it was? You're the only one who remembers everything."
"Well, not exactly."
"Not exactly?"
"The Victims remember, too."
That seemed to take Wheeler by surprise. "Do they?"
"Yes. That's why I said it."
"Don't get snotty while I'm saving your life."
Lillian didn't actually see the man at the end of the hall until they were stepping over his body. Wheeler had hit him centre mass, and he was passed out already from blood loss. Even the gunshot had been lost, as the periodic klaxon reminded them that there were things of this nature all around them, and they had really better leave.
"Ambrogi told Nascimbeni things he could only have seen in baseline," Lillian said as they moved through a windowless hall that put the words kill box in her mind, right where she didn't want them. "He remembered across the boundary."
Wheeler might have had the same thought, because she was moving like she had purpose enough for a woman twice her height now. "Anyone else, or just Ambrogi?"
"What does it matter? They were all the same. Variations on one mind."
"You know that for sure?"
"Yes."
"They didn't display any differences between them?"
"Well, sure, but… hmm." Lillian scratched at the back of her head as they made the next corner, where an inset seating area complicated the otherwise dead simple cris-cross of passages.
"Yeah?" Wheeler's jacket might have been full of magnets, the way she pressed herself flush to each stainless steel wall as she took in every possible approach.
"Yeah, alright," Lillian allowed. "Maybe. Maybe. But that's not useful right now. Even if it's just one of them and just one of us, that doesn't explain why it's so damn important. It's just facts. Impressions. Tastes and sounds. What use is that?"
The coast was apparently still clear. Maybe they were going to make it after all. "What use is the only record of a world that doesn't exist anymore?"
"That's right." Lillian nodded, more to herself than to Wheeler. "Yes. What use is that? Because that world doesn't exist anymore."
"I don't know," Wheeler said. "They're an apocalypse cult. Your memories are postapocalyptic. It's enough to go on."
"Go nowhere. Speaking of which…"
"They'll have locked down the elevators. I'm heading for the stairs."
"Good idea."
The next corner shaved itself off in a little cloud of polymer and metal shavings, and Wheeler pulled Lillian to the wall.
"But apparently not a unique one," the little woman muttered.
A voice rang out, a middle-aged man by the sound of it, in the direction they were heading. "Let's talk!
"Let's not," Lillian found herself shouting, "and don't say we did!"
Wheeler gave her a look.
"I've always wanted to say that," she shrugged.
Almost faster than Lillian could see, Wheeler stuck her head and arms around the corner and squeezed off a couple of shots.
"There's no reason for us to fight!" the man at the end of the hall shouted again.
"Says the reason this building is about to explode!" Wheeler called back.
"I think you'll find it was your people who set that in motion!"
"Yeah! For no reason at all! Just bored, I guess." It occurred to Lillian that she was making it easier for the explosion to kill all of them. By the look on Wheeler's face, she wasn't the only one thinking that.
It probably informed the other woman's decision to once again brave the corner, this time going low, and fire her weapon three times.
She had to be getting low.
"You don't need to keep doing that," the man shouted. "Listen to me!"
"You're a fucking giftschreiber!" Lillian yelled, and Wheeler took the opportunity to take yet another potshot. "'Don't listen to giftschreiber' is the first rule of memetics!"
"I know who you are! I know both of you! I know enough not to want to take my chances." The man's voice was dropping in volume; they were all getting used to the klaxons. "So let's talk, and then make our ways separately to separate exits while there's still time."
"What makes you think we'd ever let you go?" Wheeler yelled.
"Because you can't stop me, and be sure of surviving. I don't want to try my own luck, but if you force my hand, it will end badly for you."
Wheeler met Lillian's eyes. She expected some sort of resistance to what she was going to suggest, but she'd misjudged the other woman's own judgment. "This needs to stop," Wheeler said to her, much too quietly for their enemy to overhear. "Soon."
Lillian nodded.
"Okay, asshole." She took a deep breath, and stepped around the corner, hands spread. "Let's talk."
She was standing at one end of a short corridor. There was a man standing at the other end. There were two men not standing, and not crouching either, one on either side of him. Still, he didn't look worried. He was dressed for a brisk autumn stroll, and his hair was a shock of white.
"Dr. Lillihammer," he greeted her.
"And friend," Wheeler snarled from behind. Lillian could tell just by her tone of voice that the gun was levelled on him.
"We should all be friends," the old man smiled, "right now particularly."
As if on cue, the public address system announced: "Ten minutes to reactor overload."
The adrenaline almost made it hard for Lillian to hear. She found herself nodding frantically. "Yeah, let's all take the stairs up in friendly silence. Won't be awkward at all, and none of us will blow up."
"Actually, we're not on the way out." The pleasant smile became an almost as pleasant grin. God, but he's confident. "We're just coming in."
"Are you saying this wasn't you?" Wheeler snapped. She was beside Lillian now, and yes, her gun was raised. Lillian wondered if that would make any difference. "You're not with the attacking force?"
The old man nodded. "That's right."
"Then who are you?" Wheeler pressed. "And who are they?"
"Think of us as…" Lillian knew that look. He was choosing which lie to tell. "…two stones, in search of the same bird."
"I would rather think of you as what the fuck you are." Lillian wished she had a gun of her own. She made herself a promise to figure out a way to weaponize some of her memetics for close-range combat, if they ever got out of here. "What the fuck are you? Giftschreiber?"
"I've been called that," he nodded. His hands were still spread wide, as though that might convince them of the goodness of his intentions and the honesty of their parley.
"And who started the attack?" Wheeler demanded. She was edging slowly forward. They really did need to be getting a move-on.
"They've been called the same thing."
Lillian sighed. "Cut the shit. We're about to get blown to kingdom come, and my impression is that you guys have made different travel plans for the apocalypse. What are you after? What bird?"
"Unless I miss my guess, you just left her."
Lillian blinked. "…Alis?"
"I'm not familiar with the name. But, then, I wouldn't be." His grin kept getting wider, and yet never more threatening. "Very likely yes."
Wheeler was solid on the trigger as a finger of rock. "You're trying to get her out of here?"
"No. I'm trying to kill her."
Lillian did a double-take. "Oh."
"If you think we're going to let you walk past us," Wheeler said darkly, "and take out a prisoner…"
"Oh, that's what's going to happen no matter what." The man's hands closed, and Lillian saw Wheeler almost put a hole in him, or attempt to. "I'm just taking this moment to lend you a helping hand on the way, since you so obviously need it." He waited a moment to see what response they would give. When they didn't give any, he suggested, "I believe your line here is 'I don't need your help'."
"Well, I don't know that." Lillian reached out, very slowly, so Wheeler could see it, and lowered her partner's gun. Wheeler allowed it; Lillian knew it was only a gesture, she'd seen how quick the other woman was on the draw. But gestures could go a long way between cryptomancers. "I like to keep my options open. You're not the first weird old man to offer me cryptic advice. Of course I think you're probably full of shit, but."
"I think someone already said this," Wheeler hissed, "but it's worth trying again: can you two skip the niceties and get to the point?"
"Good idea." The man pursed his lips in thought. "If you'll tell me where I can find… Alis, did you say? I'll tell you a few things you want to know."
"I want to know a lot more than a few things," Lillian snapped.
"I wasn't offering to let you choose. I have tidbits in particular in mind. You don't have to agree until you've heard them."
"Wow. Real generous." She glanced at Wheeler, who shrugged, as if to say none of this will matter in about ten minutes anyway. "Okay, spit it out then. We're on a schedule."
"DETONATION IN TEN MINUTES."
"Good timing," Lillian sighed.
The old man affected a voice that reminded Lillian of the transcripts she'd seen of Thilo Zwist. She wasn't sure how that could translate, but it did. "We are all marked by ideas, ladies, and ideas are marked by their origins. There are ideas in you which do not originate from here, but other heres. You carry them across the gulf between. Now that we understand, we will not harm you. We need you to finish what you've started."
"This isn't the deal." Wheeler raised her gun again. "This is just more psychobabble. Why don't you—"
"I am your mentor's mentor, Dr. Lillihammer, and he did our work before his demise. He does their work now, as does another. I don't know his name, but when I do, I will kill him, too."
They were out of time. "Marion, shoot th—"
"In deepest dark I ope the hoods," he continued without missing a beat, "and firmly portals shutter. Stop."
It all went black.
"You didn't ask them what room she was in," Julia chided him as he climbed into the chopper.
"There wasn't time." He reached up for the belt. "We'd never make it before the detonation."
The roar of the rotors was too loud to be heard over. She waited patiently for him to put on his helmet before continuing. "This was a wasted trip, then?"
He glanced at the two unconscious women slumped in the back seat, and smiled. "Hardly. They'll make good use of what I've told them, after we drop them off."
"If they remember," Julia frowned.
"Oh, they'll remember. Eventually." He reached out to take her hand in reassurance. "It's what they do."
