Things That Pass
1920
6 May
The Simpson Centre for Policy:
Toronto, York County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
"Who is 'Fleetfoot Ruggles'?"
The examination room erupted, by its standards, with a series of chuckles and groans. Her colleagues — there were six in the room right now, poring over a disparate assortment of papers — shared knowing glances as they silently decided whose turn it was to brief the novice.
She had gradually trained herself not to hate this part.
A young man named Gulliver, who she fancied a little — he stammered sometimes, and she found it endearingly thoughtful — apparently won the invisible coin toss. "He's one of The Suit's fascinations." The Suit was, of course, Vivian. "Julian Ruggles. He's… he was a footpad."
Ilse frowned. "Footpad?" She had some idea of what that could mean, but it was almost certainly incorrect.
"A highwayman," Gulliver clarified. "Brigand. Bandit. Robbing the rich and throwing their money away. Very famous English folk figure."
Ilse's frown deepened. "What's so special about him?" She'd been working on her most recent assignment, tracking down a chemist peddling painkillers that completely removed a person's ability to feel empathy, when she'd stumbled on an entire file about Ruggles.
Gulliver shrugged. "Suit won't say. It's… part of The File."
She heard the capital letters, just as in The Suit's moniker. Again, the knowing glances. They were all enjoying this. "The file?"
A woman named Spector — the only other woman Ilse had seen at the Centre so far, though her horizons were admittedly limited — walked to the corner cabinets and procured a thick, bound book. "Oldest file we have. Grandfathered into our purview, started before Scout joined the Foundation." She dropped the heavy, variegated volume on the cabinet in front of Ilse. There was no title, but it was monogrammed: WBY. "Something like two dozen historical figures who are supposed to be linked somehow, but only Scout knows why. We've got some basic criteria to identify new candidates. You know the ones."
Ilse remembered. They were meant to flag personages who recurred in their documents, when some degree of notoriety existed in the areas of politics, crime, policing, or revolutionary sentiment. She'd assumed it had something to do with either the giftschreiber/schriftsteller dossier, or else the Foundation's project of order. Most things crossing her desk fit into one or the other category, if not both. "Is he the only one working on the actual file?"
Gulliver shrugged again, more vigorously, as though he resented losing her focus. He became marginally more endearing to her. "Only one here we know of. Probably the missus is involved as well."
This time the chuckles were stifled, the glances directed to all uninhabited corners of the room. "The missus?" She felt certain, sickly certain, that she did not want to know. "Scout is married?"
Spector smirked. "Not in this lifetime. Stick around long enough, you'll figure it out."
"Bet there's a big, fat file on that somewhere, too," Gulliver remarked wryly.
1921
1 January
It had taken him this long to catch her.
Maybe he'd known all along, and hadn't wanted to intervene unless it became a problem. Perhaps he'd seen it as a phase, or a coping mechanism; that had been how she'd justified it to herself, at first. As the master of all that transpired at the Simpson Centre, surely Scout knew where she spent her evenings off the clock.
Or maybe the air just smelled different during their second vigil.
"You've been sleeping in the quarantine cell," Scout remarked lightly as he poured her coffee.
She froze, suddenly feeling very small and silly behind her desk. "Yes." And then, as though the two things were somehow connected, as though she were negotiating for a special treat with good behaviour, "I'm caught up on all my work."
"And then some." He poured himself a cup, and sat down. "I understand you've been taking those chemistry electives we spoke about."
Under the Foundation's auspices, the Centre offered a few part-time courses on matters pertaining to its remit. Ilse had briefly sampled the physics and medical offerings before settling on chemistry as the most promising angle. "It's been very… enlightening," she offered tentatively.
The truth was, she was obsessed. Every other night she took a pile of papers into the room where her sister had died, and devoured them. By now she felt she knew almost as much about chemistry as she did about literature. It came easily to her… or at least, she couldn't stop.
"I take it this relates to your interest in document disposal."
She sighed. "I know that's not why you hired—"
He raised a hand, but waited for her to trail off rather than interrupting. "As you said, you've completed your assignments. You do not need to justify self-improvement to me. But I do wonder whether this is the most efficient means of pursuing your… special interest. Or the most appropriate venue."
She nearly saw black. "You're not… firing me?" It didn't seem to logically follow, but fear knew no logic.
He smiled at her with such genuine affection that the grip on her heart morphed into an altogether different sensation. "Never, and not ever. You are a boon to this project, and I am lucky to count you a friend. However," and the smile widened, "I do think perhaps you could stand a brief change of scenery. See things from a different angle. And perhaps…" He glanced at the framed photographs on the wall, and his smile changed again. Now it was wistful. "Perhaps I might introduce you to another good friend of mine."
17 March
The Adriatic Sea
She hadn't been back to Europe once since joining the Foundation.
"And you never will again," Scout told her at the rail as the Kaiser Franz Joseph I finally hove in view of the continent. "You live in a different world now. Though there will be some confusing overlap."
'Confusing overlap' was a good term for it. Their transatlantic voyage was made possible by forged passports, a ship built in an empire that no longer existed, and some combination of threats and bribes occurring wholly out of her view but subtly visible in the smiles or frowns of the people attending on them, both on shore and at sea. It was a more pleasant passage than her initial immigration had been; the scourge of the Spanish Flu was now long ended — though it felt as if the scars left behind might never heal — and the boys had all been brought back home to boot. The occasional surly German sailor or sniffling, disdainful British lout was nothing compared to close quarters with the frightened and wounded, and their spacious accommodations offered a little extra leeway in the way of conversation.
"You're going to love it there," Scout smiled from his comfortable chair as she gazed out the porthole of their first-class suite at the Gulf of Trieste. "I've always thought of it as my home away from home."
"You have a home?" A yellow-legged gull dove into view, disappearing beneath the waves only to return an instant later, empty-taloned.
Scout turned the page on the book he was reading, something tawdry called The Mysterious Affair at Styles he'd picked up in Madrid. "That's right," he tutted. "Let it all out. You'll be in much finer spirits when you witness my partner's masterpiece."
22 March
Alscher & Adler: Lower Austria, Republic of Austria
Alscher & Adler was the ugliest thing Ilse had ever seen.
The chemical plant was like a skyscraper — her previous contender for the aesthetic nadir, though she'd only seen a few in Toronto and Vivian had told her they were rather poor examples of the type — but far better suited to scraping. Gantries so grossly protuberant they seemed designed for the construction of giants, vast concrete steles, mass clusters of pipes like fistfuls of licorice, and chimneys of concrete, brick and stone which gave the complex a stormy sky all its own in the Austrian blue. In her abbreviated review of war-ravaged Europe, these intentional scars on the landscape struck her as the worst.
"Who would ever want to work there?" she marvelled as their Steyr Type IV rambled along the strasse. They were miles away, but the plant's imposition still oppressed her.
"Work is not a matter of preference for most," Scout murmured. Their driver smiled at him, though Ilse was sure he only spoke German. The deference was curiously on-point. "But you're correct, it is not a pretty sight. And that's rather the idea."
Alscher & Adler cleared its orbit most efficiently. It was out in the middle of nowhere, and defined that nowhereness as permanent. Nobody would live beneath that coal sky, or in the shadows of its tremendous spouts. They hadn't passed anything but company cars — black as coal dust — for the last hour of their drive.
Past the checkpoint, for of course there was one, a ruddy-faced man wearing a worn tweed suit was waiting in the dust and gravel parking lot. He stepped forward to get the door for Ilse — the driver clucked his tongue disapprovingly, but still he smiled — and the owner of this Stygian travesty took her hand and helped her out.
"The beautiful and brilliant Dr. Reynders," he cried in a querulous Welsh trill. "At last. I'm Wynn."
"Ilse," she smiled. The portly man's wince-smile widened, and he condescended to kiss her hand before releasing it.
"Fraternization," Scout admonished him as he closed the car door. "I shall have to write you up."
"If you wanted me drummed out," Wynn laughed, pulling the other man into an embrace so tight it was almost a wrestling move, "you could find much more effective material."
She'd known these two were old friends, but Scout had never struck her as physically affectionate. The hug went on long enough to dim even the driver's solicitous smile.
Dr. Wynn Rydderech was founder and Director of the Acroamatic Abatement Group. Before Scout had proposed this visit, she had only heard discouraging words about the AAG. They handled anomalous cleanup and sanitation, and they didn't like other fields impinging on their work. Not part of the Foundation proper but patronized by them, as well as a few other groups with an interest in the maintenance of normalcy — most notably the Occult Federation, some sort of novel international peacekeeping force that also kept a very low profile — they helped the top dogs dispose of their anomalous trash.
"This was my consolation prize," Rydderech roared as they strode between the stacks and conduits. "The Foundation stole my partner away, and I built this humble home for myself in grief."
Scout rolled his eyes. "What he means is that he'd been planning this for years, and without me around to distract him he had time to get funding and support."
"That's what I said." They entered a long, low building of red brick and glass — Ilse was both relieved to be out of the smog, and worried how breathable the air would be in such close quarters — and Rydderech waved them through yet another checkpoint. "We burn a ton of anomalous waste every week. We melt, shred, or otherwise break down about half a ton on top of that. Not a lot on the face of it, but you'd notice if we stopped." He smiled another painful smile. "They'd probably notice on the moon."
Ilse frowned, and not only with the effort required not to ask what manner of being was on the moon to notice anything. "A ton a week? That's an awful lot of smoke for such a small load of fuel."
He turned his smile on her. "Very perceptive. Yes, our bark is much bigger than our bite. That's to keep up appearances. People expect us to be processing chemicals, so, we do."
He led them along a series of orange corridors, past glassed-in labs not dissimilar to those at the Simpson Centre. "The problem is," Rydderech mused, "we're just one plant, on just one continent. We could handle much more material — enough that we could repurpose the dye plants and coal washers — but there's no way to get it to us. We need more facilities."
"How do they dispose of this waste elsewhere?" Ilse asked.
This time Scout responded. "Smaller labs, much smaller, at every existing Site. In Europe, with the reconstruction and demolition efforts still ongoing, it's relatively easy to hide. In North America the growing industrial economies can cover up a lot of burning evil. But it's true a better solution must be found."
"It has been found." Rydderech's face suggested teasing, but there was something grimmer in his tone. "You're just not ready to settle down yet."
Scout spread his hands in a vague mea culpa, and the big Welshman didn't press the issue further.
Rydderech's pride and joy was the new factory floor.
In contrast with the grime and noise outside, this space was clean and full of serious-faced silent workers in shiny grey oilskins. They entered on a mezzanine overlooking the lower level, where a maze of pipes fed towering vats or long, white tanks before winding their ways out, up, or down. It was the largest interior space Ilse had ever seen.
"This is where the magic ceases to happen," Rydderech crowed. A few of his scientists turned to watch them pass with mild interest before returning to their tasks. "Most anomalous effects known to man, or at least our special subset thereof, can be made ineffectual through some combination of processes we're equipped for."
"Most," Ilse repeated.
Rydderech snapped his fingers, badly. It was more of a dull thock. "That's the rub. We don't know everything, and we never will. The world gets stranger every day, and we need to think strange thoughts to keep just behind it. Getting ahead? That's essentially impossible."
"Perhaps not," Scout murmured as they finished crossing the floor to a final, glassed-in checkpoint station.
Rydderech gave him an odd look, then gave it to Ilse as well. "Vivian speaks very highly of you," he said in a cryptic tone.
She tried to look innocuous. Sometimes she wished she'd been born brunette. "Probably not as highly as he speaks of you."
A glint came into both men's eyes simultaneously, like a reflection. "Oh," Rydderech smirked, "you've been telling tales out of class?"
Scout shrugged easily. "I might have let slip a few details about that demon you exorcised in California."
Rydderech guffawed. "The Lakeview Gusher? That was a lazy fix." He shook his head, ruefully. "These days I could have broken that bastard down to his component parts, instead of blasting him into the atmosphere until there wasn't enough oil left to think infernal thoughts."
"Still," Scout clapped him on the shoulder, "I hear the fires burned very brightly in Kern County that summer."
She wasn't sure why, but it almost seemed he took greater pleasure repeating the feat to its originator than he'd been to relate it to her.
They had a most unusual dinner — Welsh sausages, Austrian sausages, a fish stew called cawl and a few cakes Rydderech fried up himself — in what was euphemistically termed the Director's Complex: a sequence of windowless rooms, sparsely furnished but secure from prying eyes and pricked ears. The two men caught up with great enthusiasm, particularly after the Welshman broke out the Marillenschnapps; Ilse remained sober. She'd never really picked up a taste for alcohol, and anyway it was far more entertaining, and potentially instructive, to watch the old friends at play.
She'd never seen Scout so seemingly care-free and loose.
When it was late, Rydderech put her up in a tidy little niche with a comfortable mattress and thick blankets, and retired to his own chambers to sleep the spirits off.
She found herself so exhausted by the trip and tour, she fell soundly asleep before asking where Scout was bedding down.
When she awoke in the morning, he had already gone.
When Ilse had started at the Simpson Centre, she hadn't even known what the Periodic Table was.
When she started at Alscher-Adler, she'd known it to contain ninety-two elements.
Two months later she was up to nearly two hundred, and she'd destroyed two-thirds of them in practice, and perhaps an additional sixth in theory.
The worst by far was the Barnumium. It mimicked human speech so closely, she could almost imagine it sapient.
30 June
Frederick Banting was not a social man.
He was tall, and he was handsome, and judging by the quality of his apparel he was also quite rich. He had large round spectacles and neatly slicked-back hair; he was a perfect gentleman in cameo, but in motion and action he could not have been less engaging.
"Do with it what you will," he muttered as Ilse watched the containers carried into the main bay. They were filled with slate grey canisters, and covered in bright yellow warning labels. "Just don't use it on people, for God's sake."
Ilse examined the data sheet the Canadian scientist had brought with him. "Wind-resistant sulfur mustard," she read. "Mustard gas? Really?"
He fidgeted with his watch fob. "I had a government contract. I didn't ask questions. Scientific advancement takes more than money, these days. You need connections…" His eyes suddenly focused, and he glared at her. "Who are you? Where's the foreman?"
"I'm managing the floor today." She flipped the pages, noting what was there and what wasn't. "I don't see anything about storage safety on here. How long will those canisters last, and if we need to replace them—"
He shoved his spectacles up the bridge of his nose so hard, she was surprised the thin metal didn't snap. "That's not my problem. I never wanted to make this stuff in the first place. I'm a doctor. Your man tells me I'm to pass it along for abatement, or I won't get any further work. I do what I'm asked, even make this ridiculous voyage just to sign a few forms and attend the handoff. I have things that need doing back home, miss…?"
"Reynders." She watched as the last pallet was rolled in, and the workers began setting up transfer equipment. "How does this gas resist wind? And what does that actually mean?"
He sighed. She wondered how any man so pretty could find it so difficult to speak with a woman for more than a few seconds. Scout never had any trouble. "It means momentum is preserved from the initial deployment. It means that unlike myself, though perhaps like you, it has no idea what way the wind is blowing. You may learn the mechanics from the attached thaumaturgical review, because I will be catching a tailwind home at my earliest convenience. Good day, fore-woman Reynders."
And he walked stiffly away.
She sighed, and turned to the workers. "Alright. Let's get a look at those labels, and start testing the canisters for corrosion. If we get a move on, we can set the man at ease before his ship even leaves."
As usual, they only ignored her for a few seconds before doing what she'd asked.
1 July
She was the only one on the floor when the vats cracked.
It was a standing rule that anyone on the lower level had to be wearing a gas mask when any material was in circulation. Banting's mustard gas was being pumped out of its canisters — found to be in serious disrepair, which they all put down to long-term storage in unsatisfactory conditions — and into the first stage abatement vats for study. The pipes were hissing, which was nothing new, and she only had a few seconds to react when the tenor of the hiss sharpened suddenly.
She was wearing her oilskins, as she always did when a new substance was running through the systems. It was a quick jog to the nearest locker to pull out the leather shroud which hooked under her mask, and the hood she could pull over it, and get them roughly into place.
And then, as though it had been waiting for her, the world turned yellow.
The gas was thick, shot through with veins of black and curious clouds of roiling grey. But it was primarily the hue of jaundice, and it expanded to fill its container with such ferocity that one second she could see the vats, and the next she couldn't see anything. There was shouting from the level above, and someone must have hit the venting controls, because a new hiss joined the existing one and the deadly mist began to swirl.
But it wasn't dispersing.
She swam through the miasma, searching for the stairs, but everything was a yellow and black blur. She couldn't see an inch in front of her. She could see the bulb of her nose, and the glass of her mask's eye sockets, and that was it. Her hands were greased fabric and her tread was leaden. Nothing about that had changed, but suddenly she felt she knew what it was like to be truly, utterly alone.
As though in response, or negation, a voice boomed high above her: "Ilse?"
It was Rydderech. She raised her hands above her head, and waved. But she was short, of course, far too short to be seen above the clouds. If there were people still on the second level, though, that must mean the gas was clinging to the colder clime. That was good, and not only for the others.
If the controls upstairs had been compromised, there would have been little to no chance of her getting out of this.
As it was, her breathing was beginning to feel laboured. Though she was still taking in oxygen through the mask, the flow seemed to be interrupted. Banting's anomalous sulfur was clogging the filters. She was an island in a hungry sea. A monad in a universal pocket made of soiled synthetics. Sole resident of the tiniest prison on the Earth, a prison of her own making.
And the black was gradually overtaking the yellow.
Until, suddenly, it wasn't.
A bright light flared in the middle of the miasma, and the yellow suddenly lit up a vibrant orange. Something brushed past her boot, then squeaked along the back of her oilskins, then coiled in front of her mask so she could see it before snaking away into the gloom, lighting it up like a match in methane.
Her first thought was that it was some kind of snake. But when it passed in front of her again, she realized that she could see through it, that it was bubbling and boiling inside, that it seemed to go on forever, and also, of course, that it was hovering several feet off the ground and moving through the air like a serpent in water.
And everywhere it went, the mustard gas seemed to thin just a little.
Now she could see that the vents were working full-tilt, the black and yellow pouring into the corners of the factory floor faster than it was leaking from the ruptured vats. The canisters Banting had brought in were corroded away to almost nothing on their pallets; she wondered if he'd known the state they were in, or what his creation was capable of. She wondered if he would care to be told, assuming anyone survived to tell him.
Mostly, though, she wondered at the new and wondrous creature circling her like a python in search of a meal.
"Ilse!" Now the gas had dispersed enough for her to see the row of researchers at the rail above, and Rydderech with the microphone pressed up against his filters. "Are you alright?"
She wasn't sure, but she nodded anyway.
As the air cleared, the endless amber worm seemed to glow brighter, as though taking the gas into itself. A sudden impulse entirely unrelated to self-preservation occurred to her, stark and shining, and she followed it. Moved to the storage locker on the far side of the floor, pulled out the cumbersome camera, set it up, and snapped a shot. The men above, staring down at her in shock and worry, her subject in the foreground, all whorls and wending light, and anonymous behind the lens, behind the glass, her own self. The witness.
It seemed to notice her, when the flashbulb blew. Its pencil-end face split, just for an instant, into a ravenous animal grimace. Then it snapped back into shape, and coiled around her, and she stared into its gloaming, and dropped the camera, and wondered if it was going to crush her to death like an anaconda, or whether it would burst like a rubber balloon if it tried.
Then it turned away to wrap around the pipes, the valves, the conduits and vats. It picked at the ruined canisters. It pressed itself low to the floor, and raised up as high as the limits of the gas, but no higher. It searched, it searched, and it never stopped searching, not even to acknowledge her presence a second time.
It doesn't know what it's looking for, she realized, as the air burned hot around her, and for an instant she couldn't see, and then the spots faded from her eyes and she saw that it was gone.
2 July
The exterior of her leathers and oilskins was melted, burned, and fused. They had to cut her out. It took five hours to decontaminate her, and her skin itched all over when it was done.
All anyone could talk about was the creature that swam in the gas.
All Ilse could think about was…
Rydderech found her at the rail, just past midnight.
"Thinking Canadian thoughts?" He took up position beside her.
She shrugged sheepishly. "I don't always notice how quickly time passes. Specific dates bring it home to me."
He nodded. "What would you be doing now, if you were back there?"
Dominion Day, 1920 was fresh in her mind the way few other things unrelated to her work were. Crowds on the Toronto waterfront, with the false fairyland of the exhibition grounds spread out behind her. Scout had bought her a panoply of baked fair treats, none of which was a stroopwafel, but they weren't half bad for that. Red Ensign flags blowing in the Lake Ontario breeze. Fireworks from a barge just offshore, another of those baseless and charming assertions of confidence the fledgling nation specialized in.
Tomorrow, we go back to the Foundation, Scout had smiled at her. Tonight, we live in Canada.
She must have been lost in thought for a long while, because Rydderech chuckled softly beside her. "I'm always telling Viv he should move to a real country and put down roots. I've nearly resigned myself to the fact that I'll have to come to him."
There was a thin band of gold on his thick ring finger, and she couldn't help but glance at it. "Won't your wife have something to say about that?" It was an inappropriate question, but it was also an inappropriate hour.
"We don't have much to say to each other at all, these days." There was no hurt in his voice, though perhaps a little regret.
"This job doesn't leave you much time for… that sort of thing, I suppose." She glanced at her own bare fingers, thin and delicate.
"I could have made the time." Rydderech rapped the rail with his knuckles, and the ring rang. "I didn't want to."
They looked down on the polished concrete and gleaming steel for a while, searching for something else to say. Or, at least, she did.
"Had a bit of scare today, didn't we?" he finally remarked, as though Ilse had fallen off her bicycle.
She laughed. "I didn't have time to get scared. Mostly I was just confused."
"It seemed pretty confused, too." He shook his head. "You see something new almost every day, in this line. I wonder if it was something that lived in the gas?"
"Maybe Banting kept it in there, like a pet fish."
Rydderech gave her an appraising look. "Nothing bothers you much, does it?"
She shrugged. "Some things do. Apparently ghost snakes aren't part of that set."
He had apparently been building to something, and it would admit no segue. "Why are you here, miss Reynders?"
She looked up at him in surprise. "To learn."
"No." His expression was unreadable. "Why are you here?"
Of course. As with Scout, for Rydderech here was code for the Foundation. "For my sister." It came out easily enough. Too easily.
He nodded, as though he believed her. "She died in the War."
Something deep inside her rebelled. "She died during the War. She died in the Foundation."
He smiled grimly. "Is that worse or better, do you think? Or the same?"
If it had been the same, she wouldn't have bothered with the distinction. "I don't know."
"It's better," he said with all the confidence of a waterfront starburst. "Trust me." He looked up at the dimmed lights and exposed steel girders of the distant ceiling. "I lost someone in the War. Not fighting, though that would have been bad enough. The lights were out in London, and he was in the road. We've never died so efficiently as we do now, Ilse. Technology kills ruthless and fast, and almost… incidentally. There isn't time for it to matter. No time for goodbyes."
"Who was it?" she asked. "Who did you lose?"
"My brother. Ashley." He rapped the rail again. "He could have been blown to bits by a bomb, or chopped up by machine gun in some Norman trench, but instead he gets hit by a bus in the capital of Empire. Everything we learn to do has the capacity to destroy us, now. The only thing preventing the end of the world is a lack of quorum."
"And the Foundation," she reminded him.
He sighed. "If the Overseers thought nonexistence was orderly, they'd wipe the slate clean in a heartbeat. There's a difference between what you and I and Viv do, and what some of the others are up to. You chatted with Banting long enough to know that, I suspect."
She decided not to comment.
"The point is, there's two ways to live in the new world, and two ways to die. With purpose, helping navigate these treacherous waters in hopes that there's sun on the far horizon, or letting the cynicism win. Pretending that there's nothing in the world worth fighting for, until finally you believe it. Me, I'm going to keep making these infernal mills work for us. I'm going to make engines of life, Ilse. But I can't do that if I'm only fixated on the dead. My lost brother, and my cold bed. You can't build a future if you're living in the past."
There was a thought creeping timidly to the front of her mind. She was as afraid of it as it was of her. "I think I have something," she said. It was like a flower blooming over the lake, or a gentle smile from behind glass.
"So do I," Rydderech sighed. As she looked up at his wide, beatific face, she had the sudden and startling impression that they were thinking of the same thing.
19 August
The Simpson Centre for Policy:
Toronto, York County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
It was kind of like a homecoming.
She fancied he was as glad to see her as she was him, though it was harder to tell, now. In the months she'd been gone, he'd acquired a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, and the lenses caught the light.
"Too long squinting at musty old things," he smiled from behind the newest of his many, many masks. "Your eyes were always bigger and brighter anyway."
In the months to come, she saw a great deal that had once passed beneath or above her notice. At first, she'd thought it was the rigorous study and endless toil of the AAG that cast her old work in a different light.
Eventually, she decided it was coming out of the murk that had made the difference. Watching one mystery burn up another in the amber glow of who knew what.
"Me," she whispered as she struck the final key, and rolled the new SCP file out of her typewriter. She clipped on the blurry photograph she had taken, and patted the entire thing down on the surface of her desk. "I'm going to be the one who knows."
1923
16 April
"It's a question of density," Ilse explained.
Scout glanced at the single sheet of paper on the metal desk, and raised a questioning brow. They rarely crept over the edge of his luminous lenses unless he was making a point.
"Yes," she acknowledged. "Paper is not dense. Well, it is, but this isn't where we get into the question of pulp. Trust me, I've bent Wynn's ear on that subject enough to know it's not relevant to this case."
"He might have mentioned that," Scout half-smirked.
She could hear the words coming faster as her subject excited her. "What I mean by density is information." The paper had been cut out of a newspaper broadsheet, on suspicion of having impelled a woman in Peterborough to cut up and eat her husband. Even after reading the grisly recovery record three times, Ilse still wasn't sure what had triggered the instincts of the officer on the scene. "This isn't just ink. It's words. The words carried the anomalous effect, of course."
"Of course," Scout nodded, meaning two things by it: that he followed, and that this was the only sort of anomaly she deigned to study these days. Not judging, merely acknowledging.
"So," and she reached out to turn the page over, running a bitten-down nail over the words and crude woodcut renderings, "we can't just abate the paper and the ink. We need to abate whatever resides in the words themselves." She thumbed his attention to a pitch-black glass tube in the corner of her little lab. "That was from setting just a single character — an 'e', if you like, because that's the most common one in the English alphabet — on fire. The glass is laced with obsidian now. If we'd tried burning the entire broadsheet, I think it would have flash-fried the entire Centre into flint glass."
Scout whistled. "So, how do you propose to handle this problem of density?"
She gestured at the piles of apparatus, some hand-made, some still in their parcel boxes festooned with foreign stamps, still others discarded in the corner or broken in the trash. "The only way you handle anything in science. Outweigh your questions with enough data to form an answer."
Scout nodded again, more thoughtfully this time. "I imagine you'll be speaking more to Wynn on this matter?"
Since returning, Ilse had become the de facto link between the Simpson Centre and the AAG. "Very likely," she agreed. "He's been doing tentative experiments with plasma that I'd really like to hear some more about. Of course, all of this would be a lot easier if we were working under one roof…"
In a heartbeat, she could see him become remote and unavailable. "For the time being, keep looking as best you can, with the resources to hand." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Reunion can wait until things are a little more settled here."
"What's unsettled?"
He wrinkled his nose, and let that suffice as a response.
1927
June 4
Scout left the office, hat in hand, and this time Ilse decided to follow him.
He'd taken to riding with the Mobile Task Forces in their black sedans at least once a week, doing what the Foundation called 'containment': identifying things in the 'real' world which were best considered fantasy, picking them up and putting them in storage. The Simpson Centre's archives were already brimming with little bits and bobs of strangeness. A long-playing record that erased a random and not necessarily sequential forty minutes of your memories every time you listened to it; a statue of John A. MacDonald, Canada's founding Prime Minister, which filled passers-by with an unaccountable feeling of hunger and an empty stomach; the cowcatcher of a Toronto tram that increased pedestrian accidents by a factor of five for the car it was attached to. There was talk of making the Centre into a proper facility, whatever that entailed, and Scout's increasingly lengthy excursions only made the need seem stronger.
She caught up with him in the parking lot. Three men in dark business suits were waiting for him a few metres away, next to yet another unmarked and gleaming car. They had the professionalism to turn away and look busy when she grabbed Scout's arm. "Hey."
He glanced down at her. "Ilse. Were you trying to get my attention earlier? I apologize, if so. I've been distracted."
She shook her head. "I just wanted to ask where you're going."
"Containment run."
By now she knew all his tells too well. He was speaking the truth, but not in whole. "What are you containing? You've come back with nothing three weeks running."
He glanced at the car, as though longing for escape. From the question? Or from her? He did so love his time out with the boys. "Yes, well. This is turning out to be quite the difficult pursuit."
"Pursuit?" She narrowed her eyes. "You're trying to contain a man?"
Now Scout definitely looked uncomfortable. "Yes."
"Who?"
He gave her an answer he'd given her before, but only very rarely. When she'd asked what he knew about the Overseer Council. When she'd asked where Overwatch was headquartered.
When she'd asked who was creating the cures to the linguistic poison.
"I can't tell you that, yet." He clapped his hat over his forehead, and apologized with his eyes.
"Then when?" she pressed.
"Soon." He glanced almost guiltily at the waiting vehicle, then added, "I hope."
1932
4 May
He didn't look surprised to see her waiting on the bench seat, hands folded primly in her lap. He did look a little guilty. "Ilse."
She smiled at him, and waited.
He sighed, rolled down his window, and leaned out. "Not today, Stafford. We need a spare seat. Tell Gupta he can look into that matter with the greengrocers, and you'll back him up."
She couldn't quite make out the clipped response as the agent turned away. The sedan's rear doors popped open, in sync, and two of his black-clad peers climbed in behind them. They didn't quite have Scout's composure, but they knew their place and made no comment.
"You're just going to let me ride along?"
He shrugged. "There's no danger. I daresay we won't find anything." He made a complicated gesture in the direction of the driver, and the engine rumbled to life.
Before long they were rolling down Yonge street, passing Toronto Transit Commission rolling stock on their recessed tracks and guidewires, wandering groups of itinerant would-be workers and the occasional Bennett Buggy — horse-drawn automobiles, deprived of the luxury of gasoline. The Eaton Centre loomed over them, proudly proclaiming an economic fantasy of days gone past. Scout kept his window open, arm perched on the sill, watching the spare traffic slide past like a moving panorama of stiff-lipped destitution.
"Where is he today?" she asked.
Scout glanced at her, then returned to scanning the streets. "Selling radium water out of the Distillery." They were headed for the disreputable warren of alcohol production in the city's western corner, then. "Under the very eaves of Gooderham and Worts."
"What is he claiming to cure?"
Scout grinned. "Warts. He's going by the name of Dr. Goode."
"Bold, isn't he?"
"The boldest." He settled back in his seat, and folded his hands in his lap in apparently unconscious imitation of her. "I take it you feel ready for distraction, Ilse?"
She raised her brows. "Distraction?"
"You know who I'm tracking, I think. And I think you know why. We've played this little game of tentative question-asking and answer-dodging for a good long while now, because both of us know that knowledge is dangerous. A fire that burns flesh."
"Or in flesh," she nodded. "Yes. Maybe I feel not knowing is more of a distraction, now."
He took a deep breath, and let it out by inches. "I trust you to make that judgement. But I caution you: there is likely nothing you can actually do with this information. I myself am doing all that can be done." His gaze darted back out of the window, just for a moment, as he said this last. He smiled sheepishly as he turned his spectacles back on her again. "It will change nothing about the work you do."
"It will change what it means," she said. "Which is everything, actually."
He tilted his head, just so, and the shadow of his fedora made his tired grey eyes visible behind the lenses. "I can't argue with that. I am tracking a man named Thilo Zwist."
There was silence in the car for a few moments. He turned away, and they both stared out their respective windows.
"He is the man responsible for penning the cures to your sister's ailment," Scout concluded.
She finally met his gaze. She knew he wouldn't look away again until she did. Wouldn't put the blinders back up until she was satisfied. "Is that all?"
"What do you mean?"
"He creates the cures. What is his relationship to the disease?"
"I do not know." There were no lies behind the glass. "But I would very much like to find out."
There was only the faintest flicker of conviction as he spoke that final addendum.
Zwist wasn't at the distillery anymore, but he did leave a calling card of sorts.
The ramshackle wooden stand, recently relieved of its livery — she could still see a few of the finishing nails poking out, little scraps of colourful fabric trailing off of them — featured a lovely crystal vase of white tulips.
"The colour of respect," Scout observed. "Our adversary is impressed."
"He shouldn't be," one of the agents grumbled. "We haven't seen so much as the back of him in months."
"Might be they're meant for the lady," the other agent winked at her. "What with the particular choice of flower."
White tulips could symbolize respect, Ilse knew. Of course she knew. But she knew a little more, too.
They also symbolized forgiveness.
She left them on the stand.
1939
10 August
She stared at the calendar. She was transfixed.
"That can't be right," she told the empty laboratory. It voiced no opinion on the matter.
She shrugged. De tijd kent geen genade.
She thumbed through the pages, and fixed a date for her next research consultation. The Good Work knew no mercy, either.
10 September
"Again."
The word carried hollowness out of her chest to linger in the air, as though her lungs were a pair of dusty woodwinds. Scout flicked off the radio in disgust. "Again," he agreed. He took off his spectacles, and already she could see the old, familiar dark circles beginning to form.
"We could give them all a thousand reasons not to fight," she told him.
He laughed, then, loud and startled, and she almost turned around to see if something delightful had suddenly appeared behind her. "All we could give them, Ilse, you may trust me, is a thousand thousand new things to fight over."
1940
As a scientist, Ilse was used to feeling her way around invisible things and discerning their contours from context clues.
She was in no way qualified to know that the Foundation, and probably the Occult Federation, were engaged in anomalous warfare on the continent. But the materials she was sent to abate, the formulas Wynn was scrutinizing, the letters to and from the front Scout was personally assigned to censor for anything critical or cognitohazardous, it all took up one single, unpleasant shape.
"They'll have us making banners before the war is out," Scout muttered one day with one foot out the door. When she slipped out and asked him what that meant, he simply looked mortified and refused to elaborate.
For some reason, though, it reminded her of Banting's pinched face, haunted eyes, and self-defensive distance.
She lost a month to the development of an acid that could break down beryllium bronze mortar shells. Another to studying the inexplicable popularity of the Horst Wessel Lied with certain social clubs in England. Seven weeks trying to figure out why the name tags sewn into soldiers' uniforms should conjure up instant tears in the eyes of the most hardened politician. One day, a red-letter if ever there had been one, telling a stuffy Department of Defence bureaucrat in no uncertain terms that she lacked the capacity, the will, or the moral right to develop a liquid fuel for carpet bombers that would burn hotter and spread more efficiently.
"I'll be shot through with grey by the time this is over," Gulliver groused as she passed through the workroom on the way to her office.
"We all will," she agreed, and then a sudden thought overtook her, and she detoured briefly to the women's washroom.
Tugged out her coral locks, and scrutinized them.
Pressed a finger to the flesh beneath each eye.
Examined the pores on her skin, and then stared at her own blue eyes in the mirror, startled for the first time by the absolute clarity of that vision.
Tomorrow was her forty-third birthday. She'd lived a lifetime in the past two decades, and another, half-forgotten, before.
She looked old enough for one of them, at most.
She almost told someone.
Instead, she bought a pair of eyeglasses. Scout recommended the shop.
1941
8 September
Zwist was still an open question. She didn't ride with Scout again. She trusted him to tell her what he found, if he ever found anything. The matter of the File, though. That was different.
She had finally made up her mind to demand an explanation — few others would have extended him the courtesy of two decades worth of patience — which made the unexpected catharsis perversely unwelcome.
"I have found what I was looking for." Scout placed his hat on an empty stretch of shelf in her office, and sat down across the desk from her. "I apologize for the…"
"Deception?" she offered.
He looked wounded. "I've never lied to you," he chastised. "I've merely been… unforthcoming. But now that I know what I know, now that I have… what I have, well. Things are going to be changing rather rapidly now."
She still had enough of the resentment she'd intended to channel left to offer a scowl that was only perhaps half-pout. "What do you have? What did you find, Vivian?"
Wordlessly, he drew a piece of cardstock out of his breast pocket and handed it to her. It was a telegram, as yet unsent. He was the prospective sender. It read:
BIRD IN HAND. ORNITHOLOGIST TOO.
OUR WATCH BEGINS.
DRAW UP YOUR PLANS.
"Who is this for?" she asked, playing for time as she tried to disentangle the cryptic phrases. She already knew the answer.
"Wynn." He reached out, and she drew the telegram closer to her chest, afraid he was going to take it away again. But he only took her free hand, and worked their fingers together. "And you. Neither of you know what it means. He'll be on the first ship over, to find out."
"I'm already here," she said. She felt like she was always reminding him of this fact. "I've been here for over twenty years."
He clasped her hand tighter. "I know. It's high time I showed you a greener country, don't you think?"
James Ralston fit the type.
There was a certain breed of politician in Canada which Ilse had become adept at recognizing. They all had the same flabby, florid faces, the same stocky build, the same arrogant set in their jaws. From the Prime Minister on down, they were of a type. Domineering, and terrified of being dominated in turn.
The Minister of Defence was presently attempting to decide whether to stick out his chin or suck in his teeth. The unhappy halfway point made him resemble a bulldog risking heat stroke. "Say that again."
The Minister's desk was built much like himself, thickset and seeming difficult to move. The big politician was still dwarfed by it, as were his visitors/opponents on the other side. Scout had the centre seat, with Rydderech to his right and Ilse on the left. Scout spoke, again. "I said that I've come here for rather a weighty favour."
Ralston scoffed. "Didn't think there was anything we poor benighted Canadians could do for the high and mighty Foundation."
"Usually, there is not." Scout let no rancour run into the admission, which made it sting the sharper for its matter-of-factness; Ralston's blush rose. "Today I need something from you that we cannot create, or otherwise procure, by our usual means. Something your government, and indeed your office, is uniquely and solely suited to parceling out."
The thick-necked bureaucrat rubbed his temples, the verbiage already weighing on him. "Just get to the point, would you? What do you want, and why should I give it you? We already let your lot get away with quite a lot, you know."
Scout nodded. "I do know." He glanced at Rydderech, who nodded, then at Ilse. She could barely suppress a grin as she followed suit. "I am asking," Scout continued, letting his gaze linger with Ilse for the first few words before turning back to the Minister, "for you to surrender Camp Ipperwash to me."
Ralston blinked, then blinked again. "What the hell?" he rasped, then swallowed and tried again. "What the hell are you talking about? Why?"
"Our purposes, as always, are—"
"No." Ralston's hand shot up, fingers pressed together in a chop of denial. "I don't care why you want it. I care why you think I should… no. Why you think I would give that to you."
Scout shrugged. "Because you aren't really using it. That base is largely superfluous. I rather think you're simply camping out to keep the Indians off their land."
Ralston scowled. "So what if we are? That's no business of yours."
"I think we've established that you know little, bordering on nothing, about our business." Still Scout was the outward picture of politeness. "I know a great deal about yours. More than you do, in point of fact."
The other man's eyes narrowed. "Meaning?"
"I understand you lack an organ for determining these sorts of things yourselves." Rydderech's mouth twitched as Scout continued blithely on. "I have to tell you, our paranormal investigation of your predecessor's untimely death was most revealing."
Ralston was now as static as his desk, save for his mouth, which barely moved. "Are you accusing me of something?"
"Of course not. You hardly had the capacity to bring down a military aircraft, before attaining your present post. No, of course it was the Italians."
Now Ralston was visibly confused. "The… Italians."
Rydderech rumbled to life. "A saboteur applied some invisible paint to the fuselage before takeoff. Member of a fascist occult club, hoping to make a statement. We rounded up his whole cell, but the plane was already airborne."
"We told the Prime Minister," Ilse piped up. Ralston blinked again, as though he somehow hadn't noticed her before. "And we told him to declare war on Italy. Parliament passed it the next day."
"I would think," Scout concluded smoothly, "that a man in your position, who might find himself whisked away to parts unknown at a moment's notice by the exigencies of his post, might want to ensure good relations with the sort of people who can prevent such tragedy from finding him en route."
Several seconds of silence ensued. The three of them smiled placidly as Ralston's face ran the gamut of unpleasant human emotions.
Finally, he growled: "That sounded like a threat."
"It was not," Scout assured him. "It was an offer of aid. Is it sufficient to move you to a similarly gracious gesture, Minister Ralston?"
Ilse saw the future unfolding before them in the politician's sagging jowls.
1942
1 April
Lambton County: Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
It was the first time Ilse had ever known one of Rydderech's concoctions to fail.
The man was a legend among esoteric chemists. He'd created countless panacea against the existence of anomalous waste in his career, and yet something as simple as this had somehow defeated him.
"It'd be worse," he insisted as they stomped through the forest together. "I swear to you, it would be worse."
Scout, with his hat and his glasses, was the least troubled by the malaise. Still Ilse thought she detected a hint of strain in his voice as he responded: "This is nothing. Deer and horseflies?" He scoffed, and it definitely sounded forced now. "Go up north a ways, and see how you like the blackflies."
Ilse raised her right hand to find a fat, fancy insect gleefully draining the colour from her flesh. It hurt immensely, as it had the first three times. This time she bit her lip and fought through the pain long enough to get the beast to her eye level, so she could flick it to pieces with extreme prejudice. Then, almost as an afterthought, she whimpered.
"I'll whip up something better next time." Rydderech shifted the weight of the shovel on his shoulder. "I'll have the bloody time."
The spot was unassuming, and the ground proved hard as rock. But the big Welshman plunged the blade in deep as he could, and then Ilse and Scout joined him in driving it down to the step.
They turned the earth, uttered a silent prayer, and then retreated to the relative safety of their camp.
Not every new frontier is friendly, Ilse thought as another near-blinding burst of pain shot up her right leg.
9 May
The flies were worse on the waterfront, but Ilse didn't care.
They were digging away in the interior, and that was where most of the heavy machinery was headed, but the only actual construction was taking place at the shore of Lake Huron. Already the rough frame of a structure was taking shape; within a few days, if she was lucky, they'd be able to enclose enough space for her to engage in a few tentative abatements.
Within months, she would be standing in the most sophisticated Acroamatic Abatement facility in the entire world.
She and Rydderech had planned it out room by room, system by system. His expertise was the greater by far, but she had a sense of a whole range of processes that he hadn't before encountered. Project CLIO was engaged in what was very probably the Foundation's only concentrated document abatement program — you could never be one hundred percent certain that there wasn't another hand replicating your function elsewhere, with these people — and Facility AAF-A was designed almost as much with her needs in mind as his. Not that the 'traditional' methods were getting short shrift; this first refinery would on its lonesome replace everything he'd left behind in Vienna, and it wouldn't be lonesome long.
She stood at the shore end of the long pier jutting out into the lake, and watched as the latest cargo ship sailed off toward stormy skies. It was always stormy over the lake these days.
"Probably for the best," she mused as lightning struck somewhere far over the water.
"Ma'am?" One of the construction workers was examining the latest shipment of building supplies, checking things off on his clipboard.
Ilse was technically the foreman of this operation. It had been Rydderech's idea, and he'd wanted her to think he'd done it because it was funny. Really, of course, he'd just been avoiding the flies.
The men called her ma'am, which to her mind was just a polite way of avoiding sir. Still, it was something. "I was just thinking," she explained, "that the cloud cover probably makes it harder for people to spot all these ships going to and fro."
"Might do," the labourer mused, though he didn't look half convinced. As she raised an eyebrow, he flushed in embarrassment. "It's just that I've heard a few things from the boys on them boats."
"What sort of things?" She'd long since learned, in her line of work, that rumour had a bad name it didn't truly deserve.
The man scratched at a bug bite on his arm with the edge of his clipboard. Ilse suppressed the urge to tell him that wasn't healthy. "You hear about the man overboard last week?"
She nodded. "That was in calm waters, though. At least, that's what I heard."
"Sure enough," the man nodded. He looked miserable. "Over the edge with the lake still as a mirror, that's what they say. No reason for him to go, but he went."
She frowned. "Are you implying something?"
He shrugged, and turned to watch as the gathering storm began to close over the increasingly small and fragile-looking craft. "Just that you wouldn't catch me on that lake in broad daylight, never mind in the teeth of no gale."
24 May
Rydderech caught the door before it struck the inner wall, but only just, since he was the reason it was swinging open with such force. It was just one of the things she loved about him: quick to anger, but quick enough to contrition that he never did any damage.
"No good?" She didn't look up from the moth-eaten tome she was perusing.
He huffed, and then the table in her makeshift office shook as he dropped another heavy box of books and papers in front of her, then sat down so quickly it was indistinguishable from falling down. That, of course, was enough to make her look up. His face was beet red, and it wasn't from the bug bites.
"No good," she repeated without the interrogative.
Rydderech spoke through grit teeth. "I'm not a carrier."
She frowned. "A carrier of what? Is there a sickness going around now, on top of—"
He shoved the box for emphasis. "Not a box-carrier, Ilse. Not what I got into science for. That's what the big burlies do."
She smiled, just a little. "You're plenty big and burly." The smile died before it really lived, when she noticed there were tears in his eyes. "Wynn? What's…?"
Then she realized what was wrong.
The labourers usually carried her boxes in.
She stood up.
He waved her down. "It wasn't all of them." He deflated into the chair until he almost looked like discarded laundry, and nothing more. "Just three."
"Three," she repeated. "Three deaths?"
He nodded. "Feeding team. We tried giving them a god damn deer. Not in the mood for venison, apparently."
Ilse sat back, horror and fascination dueling in her brain. Over the past weeks, more and more unfortunate incidents had occurred on the ships bringing fresh supplies and building materials to AAF-A and the inland project. Then things had started going missing around the work camps. Then people. Not many, and at first it was just assumed that the hard work and deerflies had been driving away the faint of heart, but then one of the shift supervisors had been found in two separate clearings a half-mile apart, with the rest of him strung in between. And then the sightings had begun…
"Did you get a good look at them this time?"
Rydderech's tired eyes opened almost imperceptibly. "Ilse, I wasn't there. I'm not an idiot."
She nodded, pursing her lips in what she hoped was a soft and placating way. "I know. I'm sorry. I just wondered—"
"Big cats," the big scientist spat. "Big as a man. Horns like this." He mimed something the rough size of an aurochs horn on each side of his head. "Long tails. Went through one of the boys at the thigh. He's the one they didn't eat."
"At least they didn't eat one of them?"
The look he gave her in response was fair. "You know what I think?"
She shook her head.
"I think they let one go, just so he could tell the rest of us what happened."
She thought about that for a moment.
"Does that suggest anything to you?"
He sighed, loudly, through his nose. And that was the only response he gave.
She bulled on anyway. "To me, it suggests there's a course of action we can take that makes this better. That's what they're trying to tell us. We just need to figure out what it is."
He gestured at the box again. "That was already your working theory, no?"
She turned over the book she'd been skimming, Huron and Wyandot Mythology, with Appendix Containing Earlier Published Records. The rest of Barbeau's bibliography would be in the box, assuming the folks at CLIO had been able to find it in the Centre's archives. "Yes," she agreed. "But it's always nice to be proven right."
She definitely deserved the look that got her, too.
29 July
Kettle Point Reserve: Lambton County, Ontario, Dominion of Canada
Faces she'd first seen full of anger and mistrust had now settled to something like grudging acceptance. She supposed that would need to be enough.
Scout was shaking hands with the various elders, while onlookers from a variety of bands cupped their ears to catch snatches of what words were passing back and forth. Ilse had never seen a democracy function quite like this; each of the elders seemed subject to more surveillance by the people they represented than were most Foundation employees.
A woman wearing a beautiful beaded jacket was standing in the middle of the room, smiling cryptically to herself, and Ilse felt one of her customary sudden urges coming on. She crossed the unfinished lobby — the afternoon sun baking the still-dirty white tiles through the wide windows, the endless hammering from all corners vibrating each pane in its sill — to introduce herself. "Ilse Reynders."
The woman's smile became more compassable, almost compassionate. "Vivian mentioned you."
Ilse flushed, and told herself it was at the casual familiarity with which this unknown woman addressed the most powerful man she'd ever met. "Only good things, I trust."
The woman chuckled dryly. "That's what he said, actually. That there are only good things to say about you. I think he realized what kind of figure he cuts, and wanted to be able to point to someone more genuine and benevolent-looking."
A new kind of heat rose in Ilse's cheeks. "I'm a scientist," she nearly snapped. "This place exists because of me."
The woman shook her head, almost sorrowful. "No. That's something you need to understand, and quickly. This place exists because they're allowing it."
Ilse blinked. "You mean the water panthers?"
"The mishepeshu. Yes. If they wanted to, they could sweep all of this into the lake. Or if not them, well." The woman's chameleonic smile took a turn for the nasty. "They're not the only ones whose home soil you're trampling on. And I'm not talking about my people."
Ilse watched as a man in what she took for ceremonial dress embraced Scout warmly. He looked shocked for the merest of instants, hands outstretched and rigid, before he laughed and clapped his hands to the other man's back. "Your people seem to have gotten quite a lot out of this."
The woman shrugged amiably. "Clean water," she allowed. "More than the government ever offered. But we live next to one of the largest lakes on Earth, so is that really so much of a benevolence? And as for getting our own back… well, that was never on the table."
Ilse considered the woman closely. How old was she? There was a timeless quality she couldn't quite place. She wondered if she looked that way from the other's perspective, as well. "Nothing ever goes back to the way it was," she said. She wasn't sure who she was saying it to. "There's so many… wases, anyway. How would you ever know where to stop?"
"Very true," the woman nodded.
"You have to make the present work." Ilse watched as Scout approached Rydderech, who was sulking behind the unfinished reception desk with his arms crossed. The Director of Project CLIO placed his hands on the AAG Director's shoulders, and Ilse fancied at this distance that it almost looked like an impromptu tension massage. "You can't ever turn back the clock."
"Now that," the woman sighed, "has the tenor of prophecy."
1943
1 April
Provisional Site-43: Lambton County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
It was Vivian Scout's fifty-eighth birthday, and the first day of the rest of their lives. Two hundred men and women descended into the depths for the very first time, and what they found waiting for them…
Ilse didn't know. Ilse wasn't there.
AAF-A had been up and running for months, and she hadn't set foot outside once.
31 December
"Got any plans for New Year's?"
It was an innocent question, but it nevertheless produced an instant compartmentalization response in Ilse. "Not really," she lied. Well, was it a lie? She wasn't going to be spending it in Lys' cell at the Simpson Centre. She'd assumed she and Scout would find somewhere to pass the occasion, but… Keep talking. Pretend it's fine. "It's not like I have a family I can go to right now."
Right now. Those words were less than loadbearing.
"Yeah." Her assistant's voice carried a wealth of remorse; she felt a similar pang for unfairly causing it. "I— sorry, Ilse."
"It's fine." She casually fingered the thread that would pull open the envelope under her arm. Soon. Soon. "I will be getting the last bit of closure tomorrow, though."
Their destination was in sight, and they parted at the door. She hoped that would be enough to prevent him from grasping at the straw she'd dangled in front of him, in her haste to relieve his mortification.
Hoped in vain. As she opened the hard-sealed door and entered the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber, Jackson's brow arced and he said: "Oh?"
Inwardly cursing, she affected her 'straight-speaking foreigner' persona to get the exposition over quickly. She hated explaining this, hated it more than anything. One more day, and you'll never have to tell anyone ever again. "Yes," she recited. She'd long since prepared this speech, all the better to avoid dragging herself through the memories behind it again. "The anomalous document that killed Lys." She slipped the envelope out from under her arm, and placed it on one of the many tables in the ADDC. "It won't hurt anyone ever again."
Many years later, the next few moments would seem to have proceeded with agonizing slowness, and in crystal clarity. In the actual moment, as she fed document after document into her custom-built incinerator and daydreamed of the final catharsis to come, as she responded on autopilot with increasing irritation to Jackson's well-meaning queries, only one thing truly occupied her attention.
It was the quote from Louis Couperus she'd been scrawling in her notebook, on the day the angel of death had come to take her away forever.
The words rang in her ears. She would find it. She would find peace, that impossible peace, the world and its wars be damned. Just one more day — she keyed in the ignition sequence, and turned the final dial — and though she could not turn back time, she'd have the next best thing at last.
Time stopped.
