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Nothing Changes

2011

6 October

Timeline 5243-C
Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

He was a distant echo of the man he wasn't.

Where his brother had been firm and toned, Phil was soft and airbrush-monotonous. But the frame was the same; he was tall enough for her tastes, his figure hadn't completely gone to seed, he had the straw-brown hair (even if it was thinner, whether on his scalp or his jaw or his chest or even lower) and the soulful brown eyes (even if the look of fiery intellect had been replaced by one of sorrowful apology) and the wide shoulders (it was certainly her imagination that Phil's seemed almost rounded). They were practically identical where it counted, however. She had no intention of putting it to him this way, but her new boyfriend had precisely his late, unlamented brother's cute butt.

It was presently out of sight. Phil was slumped over the edge of the mattress, inverted, watching her dress. He seemed to have a thing for that. She didn't mind; after eight years, she and Harry had long since ceased to ogle each other after bed. He'd taken longer than she had, but then, she knew he had more to look at than she did.

Truth be told, he'd never taken very good care of himself. Sometimes she thought that was her fault, playing so easy to get. If she'd given him an uphill battle, he might at least have gotten in the habit of exercising.

Phil, at least, spent a lot of his time walking from station to broken station. He was not wholly without muscle mass, and she'd felt quite safe in his arms after their awkward mutual struggling beneath the sheets. Of course, there was probably no threat in the world he could neutralize half as effectively as she could, but the checklist of attraction hadn't been substantively updated in centuries. A solid arm lock went a long way.

"What's on for today?" she asked, as she turned away and wriggled into her underpants.

He didn't answer. She had a sudden image of Phil making cartoon awooga eyes at her backside, and sighed.

He reached out and poked her in the buttock.

She sighed again, and turned around. "Philip Deering. What is your schedule for today?"

He looked up at her, though not quite making it all the way to her eyes. She refused to sigh for a third time, so instead she bent down and kissed him on the lips, upside-down, as a sort of very, very soft reset.

When she withdrew, his eyes were closed. That was almost as cute as his butt, but it wasn't getting her any closer to a response, so she lightly slapped him on the cheek. "Speak."

"I dunno." He rolled over, planted his face into the mattress, and spoke into it. "What day is it?"

"Tuesday."

"Oh, Tuesday." He nodded, still into the mattress. "That would be the same as Monday. And Wednesday, for that matter. Shift starts in… what time is it?"

She picked the digital alarm clock off the bedstand and tossed it onto the bed. The cord reached, so the plastic thudded into his scalp. He looked up, grunting, and stared blearily into the red glow. "Two hours? Wow. Don't normally get up this early. Guess I have time for a shower?"

He looked up again, and waggled his brows.

She snorted. "Yes, you have time for a shower. But only a shower. I don't rush for anybody."

"Me either." He yawned, rolled onto his back again, and closed his eyes. "Shit happens whether I'm running around or not. If I'm standing still, at least I've got perspective."

She suddenly felt she very much wanted to reach down and haul him back up. She continued reassembling her wardrobe instead. "Except you're not standing. You're lying on the bed."

She almost didn't believe it when the only response she got was a light, snuffled snore.

She had always had a way of folding herself into a scene, finding a pose-shaped hole into which she could contort herself and pull focus, as though there might be a photographer waiting in the wings at all hours to document perfect poise in still life.

She lay on the bed, stomach to mattress, legs kicked up in carefully carefree form, hands splayed regally over the pillow which preserved just enough of her modesty to enhance the allure. It was by no means unpleasant, but it did leave him wondering how long it would take her to stop putting on a show and allow a little unaffected spontaneity… if her years of emotional self-sequestration hadn't already made that impossible.

It's not like we have all the time in the world.

Well. They had all the everything in the world, actually, and would until next September. It was still a sobering thought, though not enough so that her intoxicating pinup pose did nothing for him. Chin down, irises barely visible as curved slits beneath her pointed brows; yes, she was pulling out all the stops this morning. As if to beg the question: if this was all there was, was this enough?

As his senses came back to him with a yawn and a stretch that took him to the tips of his toes, oxygen flooding his brain, he suddenly remembered that by contrast with this private spectacle he was doughy, unkempt and wholly devoid of grace. He went searching for a shirt, and pants. She adjusted the tilt of her head to keep the provocative angle intact; whether the product of instinct or mindfulness, he couldn't say.

"Rushing out?" she teased. There was a hint, just the faintest trace of anxiety preparing to blossom into insult in her husky morning tone.

"Hiding my paunch." His jeans were on the floor. They were freezing, and he squirmed a little extra as he squirmed into them. He'd never understood how denim caught on in coldest Canada.

She waved one hand as though dismissing a fly, the other remaining fixed to catch it when it fell back into place. "I didn't come for your physique, just like you didn't come for mine."

He cocked a brow as he found his socks beneath the bed, conscious as he did so that no brow cocked half as handily as hers. "What's wrong with your physique?"

"Nothing, I guess." She was still looking up the curve of her long lashes at him, and as he pulled on his pants, he found himself unable to stop looking back. That she could do something with her eyes to distract from what was going on astern was a testament to long years' practice managing appearances. "Any plans for tonight?"

And there it was, nakedly, which of course was half-appropriate to the situation. She was wondering if this had been a one night thing. She was hoping it wouldn't be. He felt a complex wash of empathy, sadness, and… well, pride. On a great many metrics, Karen Elstrom would be considered a serious catch. She was certainly out of his league, and always had been.

So what changed?

"Meet up again?" he suggested, tone wavering across the line between encouraging and anxious.

Her blue eyes lit up, though the smile became no less salacious. "Bring me a present, and I'll think about it."

"Yeah," he agreed without thinking — he was reorienting his hoodie to put it on — "I'll pop up to the grocery store to grab some flowers."

He spent a second longer than he needed to in the bowels of the sweater, mouthing curses, before emerging. If she'd reacted to his doom and gloom, the mask was already back in place.

"You'll just have to get creative," she smirked. "I'm sure you'll think of something."

The Inter-Sectional Subway ran on a wholly unreasonable schedule.

There was no good reason for it to cycle continuously in the middle of a shift. The entire system rarely had more than a handful of riders during these off-hours, and yet it had long been mandated that the timetable must be kept to regardless. Every few minutes, every stop saw the modified Red Rockets roaring into view. They stopped. Perhaps one person would get off. Perhaps another would get on. Then off again they went, gradually wearing down their bearings and other moving parts, demanding constant upkeep. The only way Nascimbeni could justify it was the fact that his technicians very quickly learned the skills they needed to repair the trains, and were never afforded the opportunity to forget them. If it hadn't been for that, he would have put his foot down ages ago. If folks didn't want to walk, there ought to be some sort of tradeoff. It wasn't like anyone ever had to stop and wait for a train at Site-43, and he rather felt that sometimes they should be made to.

Nascimbeni did not, as a rule, have a very open mind in his early middle age, but he was right now having cause to reconsider this position.

He'd arrived at precisely the moment that the train shot off to its next destination, and so he would need to wait the full ten minutes it took for the Green Line to cycle back 'round again. His back ached, and he wasn't about to push this heavy cart all the way to R&E on Trevor Bremmel's say-so, and so he would need to do precisely the thing he thought nobody ever did. He sat down on one of the pristine benches, which few butts had ever touched, crossed his legs and arms, and pulled the brim of his cap down over his eyes.

"Guess we just missed it."

Nascimbeni didn't shift out of his snoozing pose. It was never good to offer yourself up for conversation before you knew who the potential partners were, and the new arrival wasn't talking to himself. The voice was familiar; it was either Mataxas or the junior doctor on Forsythe's totem pole, that hotshot from Athens. What was his name?

It's LeClair's totem pole now.

"Excellent." That was Mataxas, Nascimbeni realized. The coarser tones of age.

"What's excellent about it?" The second speaker's voice was strikingly similar, hence Nascimbeni's confusion with the young physician he couldn't quite put a name to. Mataxas junior, then, the fresh MTF recruit. Rasmus.

"Come on, Ras," a woman's voice sighed. "You should know better than to invite a lecture. He does them often enough of his own volition." This would be Polyxeni, Rasmus' sister, junior researcher in nothing much. She wanted, like her father, to be a ghost hunter. Like her father, she found no position to fill at Site-43 which would satisfy her criteria.

As though he hadn't heard his daughter, Anastasios Mataxas adopted a sort of sing-song tone as he responded to his son. "It tells us that time keeps on ticking, even down here, even when 'down here' has no meaning, even when 'up there', where the sun once was, is gone. Without the sun, without the moon, without time zones, Greenwich Mean Time, without even Greenwich, we could be forgiven for forgetting that there's still continuity from moment to moment. That time even exists. But it does, for behold! We have missed our train."

Under his heavy lids, Nascimbeni rolled his eyes.

The younger man wasn't having it. "Not everything is a teachable moment, dad."

"But of course it is. Any moment that isn't teachable is empty, and no moment is empty. Even with our horizons cinched around us like a belt, there are things to learn from every instant we're awake. That is why we're here. To learn, so we might know. To know, so we might teach. I give you my knowledge, and you build upon it. So that when the world returns, the three of us will return to it better than we were before."

"Assuming it returns," Polly muttered.

"Which of course it will," her father chastised her.

"Why?" Rasmus asked.

"Because if it didn't, then this would be a prelude to nothing. And I refuse to admit that I might have stood around hectoring you ungrateful little shits for no reason at all."

Not able to see their faces, Nascimbeni was caught off-guard when this provoked not a sullen silence or recipricol recriminations, but a round of hearty laughter from both children. Their father joined in soon after, and they were still playfully bantering when the train finally arrived.

Nascimbeni pretended to be asleep. He could catch the next one.

He had time.

Bremmel couldn't whistle, but he was blowing a lot of air out of his mouth anyway. "Would you look at that."

"Yes, sir," his assistant agreed.

"And none of it the slightest bit otherworldly." The old engineer paced back and forth, admiring the tangle of cables and the embarassment of panels with more blinking lights and unlabelled switches than the bridge of the original Enterprise. He ran his fingers along each one, not to press, merely to caress. It was a beautiful mess, the kind of thing you might cook up in your garage if you were a billionaire and your garage was the size of the Batcave. "All made from perfectly standard components, cobbled together into… something wonderful."

"Yes, sir," his assistant agreed.

"Multimeter."

The hand had barely stretched out, piggy little fingers grasping, before his assistant slapped the requested device in his palm. Bremmel grunted, grumbled, and began affixing leads. "This is going to take months, you know. This is going to be like reverse-engineering how the DUAL Core works, only worse. Much worse."

"Yes, sir."

"You're on sixteen-hour shifts until further notice. The fourteen I'm on, and one on either side to prepare what I need and then review what I've accomplished."

"Of course, sir."

The slight variation produced a slight response from his boss. Bremmel glanced at him, once. His eyes unfocused, and he glanced away again. "You don't have much to say for yourself. What was your name again?"

"Who cares?"

Bremmel laughed. "You know what? It's only been a day, but you're already the best assistant I've ever had." He consulted the multimeter, clicked his tongue, and nodded. "Let's see how long it takes you to fuck that up. NCV tester?"

It was already in his hand. "Yes, sir," his assistant smiled.

9 October

Like the Inter-Sectional Subway System, Intake Point-94 had been spared by Wirth's comprehensive conceptualization of the Site's interior footprint. The long glass tunnel and broad glass dome now looked out on nothing at all; there had been some concern that the pressure change from the lake's disappearance might cause structural difficulties, but these had so far not come to pass. Unlike the subway tunnel, which was already becoming enough of a thrilling footpath that Security and Containment were having to restrict access, nobody was trying to walk the glass road to the middle of nowhere. Few, fewer than even before, were bothering to take the little tram. It was a long way to go just to look at nothing.

Still, Harry had thought it might be a nice change from their perch beyond the elevator. There were already enough experiments being run from the platform that it lacked much in the way of privacy, and the increasing intimacy of their arrangement was easier to manage beyond the reach of prying eyes.

He shouldn't have been surprised to find that someone else had had the same idea, for different reasons.

"Your mom know you're out here?" Harry asked, and instantly knew it was the wrong thing to say, even before the girl's pug nose twisted itself into a knot.

"No," Billie Forsythe snapped. "So don't narc."

He put both hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Who, me?" He was feeling older by the second, between having actually asked someone if their mom knew they were out here and being accused of being a cop.

Billie was standing at the glass, looking out. Harry took up station beside her, at a distance equal parts respectful and practical. In his experience, young adults tended to smell. "Taking in the sights?"

She snorted. "Yeah."

"You find you want to keep looking at it, even though there's nothing to look at?"

She glanced at him, just for a moment. "Yeah. Doesn't make any fucking sense, does it."

"Not really, no. Must be something philosophical."

She snorted again. "Everything stupid people do isn't philosophical. Sometimes it's just stupid."

"What makes you think there's a distinction?"

She turned to look at him, and he returned the gesture. The exposed skin around her raccoon makeup looked red and raw. "Between what? Philosophy and stupidity?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Philosophy is about knowing ourselves, and the universe. The search for meaning. Stupidity is one of the most meaningful things there is. One of our purest ways of interacting with the universe."

She affected a flat expression at all times, but he thought he saw the faintest quiver of an eyebrow at this. "Sounds stupid — and when I say stupid, I don't mean profound — but go on."

He could feel himself slipping into lecturer mode. Like Scout before him, he'd moved into a largerly supervisory role at Falconer University now that he had tenure and his cover was intact, but he still delivered the occasional academic harangue, and it was not unlike riding a bicycle. "Mistakes are how we understand the way things work. You don't learn much from doing everything right. Doing everything wrong? That's practically communion."

She managed to raise her eyebrows without opening her eyes even a sliver wider. "Now he gets religious at me."

"I'd rather jump out that window." He knocked the glass; he would never have had the courage to do so when the water was still there. His overweening sense of responsibility was already demanding that he tell Nascimbeni he'd done this, and the rest of him was dreading the condescenscion he'd get in return. "But you get what I mean, don't you? Despair, and shame, and hopelessness, or even just irritation, those are all just ways for our emotions to help our brains get smarter. We fuck up, we get mad, we get sad, we get better. If things never got worse, they'd never improve."

She twisted her mouth to one side of her face, and her nose followed suit. "What do you think they learned when they blew up the universe? Was it proportional? Must've been one hell of an insight."

He puffed in mild agreement. "Must've been. But we'll never know."

They turned back to the glass. He let her sit with her thoughts in silence for a while.

She didn't look at him when she started speaking again. "Know what I think?"

"Nope."

"I think everybody's trying to make this mean something because they haven't got enough meaning themselves already."

"Enough for what?"

She scuffed the floor with her sneakers. "To keep going."

He had the sense that this had suddenly become a dangerously important conversation. He considered his next words carefully. "That's why we keep going."

She rolled her eyes.

"Because things don't mean anything. And that isn't good enough. So we keep moving forward, until they do."

"Structurally unsound."

He felt a sudden stab of panic. Did she mean the glass? I knew I shouldn't have touched it. "What is?"

"Your, whatever you call it. Literary construction. We keep moving forward until things mean something? What the fuck does that mean."

He laughed, as much in relief as good humour. "I dunno. I think it means… perspective."

"Perspective."

"Yeah. You can't see things clearly from up close. You don't know how big they are, you can't see the whole shape, you don't really understand all three dimensions. So you move forward, as far as you can, and then you look back, and then you understand. Then it all makes sense."

She seemed to be considering this seriously. "So it doesn't make sense when it's happening, but then you get some distance, and it does?"

"Maybe. Or maybe it means something now, and it means more later, with context. Perspective. A different vantage point. But that's only possible if you don't stay stuck in the same spot forever." He paused. "Or if you're dead."

She grunted. "Nothing means anything when you're dead."

"Nothing meaning anything is being dead. So keep looking out that window. Maybe you'll see something today. Maybe you won't know what it was until tomorrow. You'll have to wait and see."

She put a hand to the glass, and didn't say anything.

After a few minutes more, he walked back to the tram. Billie was softly humming behind him, and it echoed through the window on the worldlessness.

When it was all over, he thought, he might ask if there were any courses to teach at Falconer.

Just a thought.

10 October

It was only by chance that LeClair noticed the wall panel was slightly out of place.

She'd been staring into space, trying to remember something, when she'd instead forgotten she was holding her pen, and dropped it. It rolled to the wall, and she bent to retrieve it — her body certainly knew this activity had once been much, much less of a trial — and saw that the panel disguising her escape route was not quite properly seated in its frame. There was a button under her desk for perfecting the illusion, which only she knew about. She tapped it, and the panel readjusted itself to blend in seamlessly with the rest of the wall.

So she stood up, and tapped her keycard against the panel to open it up.

She knew she ought to call security, but curiosity got the better of her. She walked a ways into the tunnel, and didn't spot anything out of the ordinary until she reached the side door providing cave access. She hadn't given it a moment's thought since the lockdown, but apparently someone had.

The light on the reader was dead. She bent down to examine it, and saw that someone had cut the thing open and pulled out all the wires that made it work. The door to nowhere had been disabled, from the inside.

She didn't think security would have handled it quite like this, but then, they had been in something of a hurry at the start. It was certainly worth reporting.

She wondered why anyone sneaking around in the Site's second skin would intentionally deprive themselves of an escape route, even one leading to a sheer and profound drop.

Cabin fever, she thought, and not for the last time.

12 October

Imogen Tarrow slammed the dorm door shut.

Her sister didn't react; each had always been able to sense when the other was near. She did ask: "Rough day?"

Imogen threw off her labcoat, and kicked her shoes across the room. "It didn't work."

Madchen Tarrow stretched, and pushed back from her desk. She'd spent the entire afternoon trying, and failing, to perform some delicate electronics work that one very angry Argentinean woman wouldn't want her performing. She'd been ready to vent off some steam about it when her sister returned, but apparently she was doomed to be upstaged. Such was life. "It didn't work?"

"He must be a eunuch." Imogen flopped down on the couch, then bounced on the cushions and sprang back to her feet to pace. "Or maybe he's gay. I wish we had Oscar."

"You went the seduction route? Real subtle."

Imogen glared at her. "It gets results. Most of these people think with their dicks, and they're all going stir crazy to boot. It should've worked. Madchen, they're fucking around with something down there. Something we need to know about."

Madchen shrugged. "You could try seducing Bremmel, instead of his assistant?"

They stared at each other for a few moments. Things had been tense between them since they'd been released from custody, and not only because they knew their every move was being tracked. Madchen wondered if Imogen suspected what she'd been up to. That would be a problem.

"Because you're my sister," Imogen said, very slowly, very carefully, "I am going to pretend I didn't hear that."

Madchen returned to her tablet and screwdriver. "I'm sure you got something."

Imogen rooted around in the minifridge. "They've been fucking around in F-A for days now. They're bringing down all sorts of equipment, to the bottom sublevel, and they're not bringing anything back up. It's just Bremmel and whatsisface down there, and Bremmel never leaves. Whatsisface only comes up to report to McInnis."

"Why doesn't Bremmel report to McInnis?"

"Whatsisface says Bremmel is borderline incoherent. Lost in the sauce. Speaks in volts and tolerances exclusively. They're figuring it out, whatever it is."

Whatever it is. They both had a pretty good sense of what it could be. Not in concrete terms, but in terms of import.

Whatever it was, it was the difference between nine wasted years and a nine-year march to triumph.

It was what they'd been sent here to find.

Madchen examined her sister. The rail-thin woman was pounding back a bottle of water, shivering in the air conditioning. A thought occurred.

"Maybe you're not his type?"

15 October

"That ought to be your job."

Phil froze. Having been, until that moment, very much in motion, it was a painful and confusing transition. "What?"

Udo glared down at him. "It ought to be your job. You ought to be the deputy chief."

Phil slowly lowered his hands to his sides, rubbing sweat off onto the bedsheets. "Were you, uh. Thinking about that the entire time?"

She rolled off him, and then off the bed. He felt a sudden chill in the air, and it had little to do with the fact that she was no longer between him and the ceiling vents. "You've been here as long as Banerjee. Exactly as long as him. You shouldn't be taking orders from anybody but the Director by now."

He watched her snatch up and bunch up her scattered articles of clothing. "I mean, I've only been here twelve years."

She glared at him over her shoulder as she got dressed. "Twelve years. Your brother…"

He sat up. "My brother what?"

She wasn't looking at him now, a tanned expanse of back facing him as she pulled up her pants. "Your brother became one of the Foundation's leading thaumatologists in five years."

"Yeah, well." Phil found he was still massaging the sheets, like a kneading cat. He willed himself to stop. "I'm not my brother."

"That's for sure." Udo wrestled her hair through the neckhole of her shirt, which then lay loose around her clavicle; every shirt she owned hung like a blouse from this daily trauma. "You should at least demand to be made shift supervisor. There's no way someone else should be setting your hours after eleven years' service."

Phil didn't get angry easily. He didn't even irritate. But something in him rebelled against this treatment, particularly given what it was an abrupt sequel to. "Maybe I don't want to be a supervisor. What do you say to that?"

Her eyes were low-burning embers behind those thick, round glasses now. "At least it's a fucking opinion." She smoothed out her labcoat, looked around the room, and sighed in frustration. "Now, would it kill you to get a mirror in here?"

22 October

"Do you follow?"

McInnis smiled. "Not at all. Which is good! Dr. Lillihammer?"

Lillian had spent fully half of Bremmel's explanation with her head shoved in various compartments, making noises. Once the engineer had stopped her with a sharp "keep your spit off those wires, woman!" and twice he'd moved as if to kick her in the behind; she'd been saved the ignominy only by the fact that her behind was high up, and his feet low down. Still, she had been listening, and she nodded with enthusiasm. "There's nowhere you could go where I couldn't, Trev. But where's it getting all that power from, you figure?"

Bremmel shrugged. "No idea. Potentiality, maybe."

Lillian scoffed. "That's just a theory of a theory. Of a theory. That can't be it."

"It worked well enough for DR-RHETORIC. Which I shouldn't have to lecture you on."

"That's a different principle altogether. The ontokinetic reach interfaces with the—"

"Doctors," McInnis intervened smoothly. "I am asking if you're both clear on how this mechanism functions."

"Yes and no," Bremmel responded. "Yes, we can operate it. Yes, given the time and resources, we could make a second one. No, we have no idea why it actually works the way it does. We'd need a thaumatologist to consult if we really wanted to understand it."

"Or DR-RHETORIC," Lillian sighed. "But that ship has obviously sailed."

"Mm." McInnis nodded. "Do you have anything to add, doctor…?"

Bremmel's assistant, an olive-toned young man whose name McInnis could never quite remember, shook his head placidly. "No, sir. Dr. Bremmel did all the work, I just passed him the tools. But I'm confident he's got the machine figured out."

McInnis made a mental note to make time for encouraging the unassuming scientist. Anyone who could see such a fraught research project through under the supervision of Trevor Bremmel was not without talent; he certainly might have a future in admin. "Very well. Dr. Bremmel, I'm going to ask that you draw up the most detailed and precise technical specifications document you can, with Dr. Lillihammer's help."

The pudgy old man grinned. "Be maybe a month, but it'll be a fun month. Then what?"

McInnis smiled.

17 November

Wettle felt the hairs on the back of his neck standing up before he smelled her perfume, as though his nose had known she was coming before reporting the fact to the rest of him. The rest of him followed suit with the usual suite of physiological responses, and he turned to see Alis sashaying into the lab.

That wasn't a word he normally kept in his vocabulary, but the way she was walking brought it back to him in force. She looked mildly crestfallen as she took in the room, and Wettle realized it probably had something to do with the fact that Bremmel's assistant hadn't looked up, and hadn't seen.

"Heyyy," she said, and approached to where there was ostensibly a desk beneath a solid carpet of paper clutter. The assistant looked up, confused, in time for Alis to lean down over him and drop her elbows in his business.

"Hello," he offered.

She fluttered her eyelashes. Wettle felt sick to his stomach, and told himself it was saccharine overload. "We're busy," he snapped.

She wiggled her rear at him, but kept her eyes on the other man. "Engineers are talking, sweetie. I hear you've been conducting stress tests?"

The assistant nodded, arranging his hands strategically to block a few of his documents from sight. "That's right. But this is classified work. Need to know. No outside consults."

He couldn't see it, but Wettle could imagine the pouting face she was making now. "Aww. But I love stress tests. Pressure. Motion. Tolerances." She reached out and drew a finger down the man's nose.

"Dr. Lane," the target of her affections said coldly, "I am going to have to ask you to leave. Dr. Wettle and I need to make sure we can reproduce the functionality of each component, and we're working on a tight time frame."

Wettle knew her well enough to know what the slight tensing of her shoulders meant, but she gave it another go nevertheless. Running her hands down both sides of the tube top she wore beneath her engineer's blues, she cooed, "Tight frames are my specialty."

Slowly, deliberately, the young man reached out.

"And then he called the FUCKING GUARDS on me!"

Imogen nodded.

"Gay it is," Madchen sighed. "Fuck."

3 December

Pensak slapped the book shut, appearing to relish the soft thump. "And we're good." He stood up from the duty desk, carried the bound daily record to the shelf, and slid it into place. "Pointless physical copy copied, all glorious four sentences of it."

Ibanez waved her hands in a mock hurrah. "Three loud arguments and one broken lightbulb, preserved for posterity. When it turns out Bremmel and whatsisname accidentally built an EMP bomb and they wipe the network, we'll still be able to tell each other the most boring fireside stories of all time."

"More likely use it as the firestarter." Pensak stretched, then detached his belt and headed for the lockup. "That's me out. See you tomorrow, boss."

"Want to catch a drink?" she called out, before she really thought about doing so.

He didn't miss a stride. "Nah. Card game in the mess. Still gives me a thrill, knowing the banks all disappeared and I don't actually owe anybody any money." He waggled a finger in her direction, without looking, as he slammed his locker shut. "That isn't to say I don't expect my back pay when it all comes howling back. Night boss."

She grimaced. "Goodnight."

She sat in the empty bullpen, holding down the fort until the second shift filtered in. She made her brief and pointless report to Holt, made brief and pointless small talk with Bosch and O, then surrendered to the inevitable and walked out. She didn't remove her uniform or check her firearm, because she was really never off-duty. Not even when she drank.

She really had wanted that drink.

William Wettle passed her going the other way, hands stuck into his labcoat pockets in a way that suggested they were balled into fists. He was eating his beard. His labcoat would probably have tasted better; there was a long streak of ketchup down the back. Somehow.

She caught him by the blue felt belt, and held on until he noticed he was trailing a cape behind him. That was what passed for a swift reaction from Wettle; normally he would have kept walking until he clotheslined himself. He turned back to face her, and she let go. "Hey."

Fight or flight fought fiercely in his eyes, producing as they always did a stalemate. "Hi…?"

"You want to catch a drink?"

He narrowed his eyes. They disappeared under his long lashes. She noticed he had long lashes. "Why, are you going to throw one at me?"

"Only if you make a pass."

If it were anyone else, they would have found a way to make a joke about throwing things and passing things, and how throwing things in football was called making a pass. Harry probably would have nailed it. Wettle never nailed anything. Well. That wasn't true. Though it ought to have been. "Why would I do that?"

She had the sudden desire to leap on him like an angry dog. Make him bleed. She suppressed it, but not without first doing serious damage, and not to him. "You've done it before, asshole."

He blinked.

"At 169?"

"One… sixty-nine," he repeated blankly.

"The survival training?"

He shook his head.

She turned and stormed away, blowing air between her lips in a long, sustained raspberry of rage. It wasn't until she'd turned three pointless corners on her way to nowhere in particular that she realized what she'd almost done, and began to cry.

13 December

It hadn't come to a fight, and that made her fighting mad. So Udo did what she did every time her frustration reached a boiling point, and she needed to get away: she stalked to the nearest subway station, and got on. When it reached the Blue Line terminus, she switched trains and took the only trip she could in their less strange, far less brave new world. A nice little vacation to beautiful no-longer-shoreside AAF-A.

It was funny how the change in fortunes for everyone else had more dramatically affected the only person who should have been unaffected. A small crowd of researchers and agents was walking away from the window to the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber as Udo walked up to it; Reynders almost always had visitors these days, in large quantities. She was the smartest person in the universe, and one of the kindest, and now that everyone was trapped under non-ground anyway, her company was much in demand. Her prison-within-a-prison contained the only person who really had perspective on what was going on.

Or perhaps it just made people feel better to think there was someone even worse off than them.

It was probably that.

It was why Udo was here, after all.

"Hey." She raised a hand in greeting.

Reynders was smearing grease paint on her window, crafting a mural. She'd taken up painting only recently, because the academic work she normally busied herself with was too difficult to manage with constant interruptions, and also because she said Helena Forsythe had told her to try it, for stress relief. Helena Forsythe denied having done this; Udo knew that if asked, the little genius would explain that she meant a different Helena Forsythe altogether.

But only if the Sampis asked, of course. Reynders had long since been briefed on what was going on. Considering she could see it anyway, it had been an easy call to make.

"Where's the hubby?" Reynders sang, painting a pale green streak across the glass. The grease paint had been in the ADDC for decades on decades on decades, and was only now seeing use. It had a shelf life, unopened, of perhaps a few years. It would nevertheless have lasted forever had she not decided to finally start expending it.

Udo scowled. "Don't call him that."

"Another argument, huh." Reynders was rendering — ha — a peculiarly vibrant sunset or sunrise. Something she hadn't seen since the world was last at war. Something no-one had seen since the world had last existed. Given its nature, the sun she'd seen had never been seen by another living soul. "Do you ever think you're being too hard on him?"

"No." Udo stamped her foot emphatically. It made her feel very foolish. "I don't think I'm being hard enough on him. I don't think anyone is. He falls back into the worst habits the moment I look away."

"One relates." Reynders reached up and tugged at a lock of her orange bowlcut; it sprang back into place, precisely, with unseemly speed. "We're all just cycles of ourselves."

Udo reached up to paw at her own hair. It was cut short, again, months ahead of the usual deadline schedule. She'd hoped it would give her a more severe look. She tried not to think about why she would want that.

"What's your endgame with him, anyway?" Reynders studded the green streak with dots of white, and began rubbing them in. "Is this a dry run for doing a better job in baseline, or is it just a fling?"

It was hard, sometimes, to remember that the other woman came from an era of strikingly different norms and morality. The Foundation was always ahead of most curves, of course, since most curves had some scientific basis and the Foundation had most science before most people, but a woman from the 1940s was still essentially a woman of the 1940s, unless she made the effort to change. Reynders had apparently made that effort, if she could conceptualize a fling as something that was acceptable for a young woman like Udo to embark upon.

Or maybe that was antihistorical bullshit. They'd had flappers and shit in the 1930s, hadn't they? She almost wished she could ask Harry.

Almost.

"I don't know," she admitted. "I just think… I don't know. We're here, now."

"Very true." Reynders was more here, more now, than anyone else. Ever.

"And I guess I see him, and I want to… help?" Was that right? Was that even remotely what she meant? "I want to do something. For him." For him. "There's a lot of potential."

"Raw material?" Reynders suggested, swiping a grey streak between green and orange for emphasis.

Udo rolled her eyes ruefully. "That makes me sound like some domineering bitch. And I don't think I am. Do you think I am?"

"I'll defer to your judgement on that. But I've always thought you were a fine young lady." There it was. The occasional turn of phrase that suggested this was a woman of more years, more ages, than her face hinted at. Even before the accident, she'd been older than she looked.

"Phil thinks so too. He thinks I'm a superhero and a supermodel at the same time. That's good enough for him. But I think… he could do better."

"Than you?"

"No, than what he's doing. Because he's doing nothing!" Again, infuriatingly, her foot stamped in fury. "I don't know how he doesn't realize he's wasting his life away. It's plain as day to everyone else. Do you think it matters, what happens to us in here? Since we're going to…" She paused, then pulled out her tablet and checked the subroutine Veiksaar had installed for her. There were no prying ears nearby. "Since we're going to reset it anyway."

"Character is who you are in the margins," Reynders smiled. She swirled her finger through the sun in speculative spirals.

"Mm." Udo sighed. "I guess. Maybe it is just a dry run. There's a version of him out there who's got it even worse, and that version is doing better. So I know he can be better. I see something…" She sighed. "I see something in him."

"That," Reynders smiled, stepping back and beaming at her through the light she'd drawn reflecting on the glass-still waters, "is only slightly the wrong way to put it."

31 December

Harry awoke with the feeling of something profoundly heavy on his chest, forcing the breath and the life out of him, and he gasped as he sat bolt upright.

Beside him, she was still sleeping.

He stayed upright until his breathing became regular again, then fell back to the pillow and exhaled. Whether the impact beside her or the change in the air currents, something made Karen stir. She danced her fingers along his chest, nails probing but playful, and then she pressed her mouth to his shoulder. "Nightmare."

"Yeah."

"What about?"

He wrapped an arm around her, and scratched absently at her scalp. She scooted closer. "Same one I always have."

"You never told me." Her voice was soft and content.

"Didn't I?" He supposed he hadn't. "I'm standing on the shore…"

He paused.

"I've seen you in this dream before."

He caught the faintest glint from her eyes. She was very awake now. "Oh, so it's that sort of dream."

He smiled, wondering if she could see it. "No, it's not. Sorry to disappoint. It's…" He shook his head. "It varies. This time it was a ship, a huge, huge ship, underwater. I can see everything, and I have to see everything. It's my job, I guess. My responsibility. Sometimes it's a tremendous weight I'm holding up by one hand, or one finger. Sometimes—"

She yawned. "Oh, yeah. Obvious metaphor. Go back to sleep."

And to his shock, she audibly did.

"But you were there," he whispered.

She didn't so much as twitch in her sleep. But she did pull him closer, and he held her all the tighter in response.

2012

1 January

Everything had fallen into place as though pre-ordained.

Much of it, of course, had been; part of the Foundation's business was preparing for apocalypses. Still, they'd handled this one with particular grace, given the complete and total lack of a safety net. Bremmel had been made the tech tsar for developing sustainability initiatives, and had come up trumps time and again; the hydroponics labs were now working at what Ghosh estimated to be four hundred percent efficiency, and the turfgrass manager himself had managed to speed-run the discovery of two entirely new strains of edible grass. The resultant fivefold increase in food production meant they would soar handily past the deadline, not that anyone involved was aware this was a consideration.

What Bremmel designed, Nascimbeni built and made work. He pushed himself to the limit, and past. He worked hours he'd not seen since he was a very young man, with something to prove. Some of his staff were inspired to rise to the occasion with him, but most were content to accept the lesson in leadership and hard work as something to aspire to, just not quite yet. When the resources came under more serious strain, he was confident they'd be up to the challenge.

"They'll have to be," LeClair muttered darkly as she scheduled him for his next weekly physical. "Since you'll be dead."

Du, scheduled for a dental checkup immediately after, had strolled in halfway through the appointment. LeClair had forgotten to close the door. "I think it's romantic," he said.

His friendship with Blank and Lillihammer had taught Nascimbeni to see an insult coming a mile off. "Romantic how."

"You put it all into your work," the quantum mechanic explained with a grin. "Which you're married to."

Nascimbeni had snorted derisively, then spent the rest of the afternoon mad about it. It only made him angrier when he related the incident to Bremmel, who nodded amiably and agreed with Du.

19 January

---

"Stand up straight."

Phil sighed.

"And don't sigh." She fiddled with his tie until it was clear the cause was lost, then pulled his lame knot loose and began tying it around his neck herself. She briefly considered making it too tight. Then even more briefly considered pulling it all the way taut, and attaching it to his ceiling fan.

He made a sort of strangled inhalation-exhalation sound, which was clearly a sigh crushed in the cradle of his esophagus.

Ever since Karen Elstrom had attended, through lack of anything better to do, one of J&M's Employee of the Month award ceremonies, an absurd rule still on the books from the 1940s that stipulated all technicians wear ties at dress occasions had been followed to the letter. The ties had looked silly when they were still hidden behind vinyl vests. They looked absolutely moronic hanging from jumpsuit collars, and everyone knew that the original legislators would have relaxed the rule if only they'd known where it would lead. But as Blank had put it, "standing on ceremony is only impressive because ceremony is unstable."

"It should be you getting that award."

He rolled his eyes. A month ago he wouldn't have dared. "I'm a shift supervisor. Wouldn't be appropriate."

"Banerjee was a shift supervisor when he got the award in '02."

"Banerjee is better than I am."

"That's true." She finished cinching the tie, having opted for a tightness just south of uncomfortable, and stepped back.

He relaxed into a slouch immediately, and turned to head for the door. She bent her hand into a claw, and goosed him as he went.

He nearly hit the ceiling tiles. "Jesus!"

"Stand up straight, I said," she said. She could have said it softly, and she could have said it playfully. She could even have said it erotically, since she had just grabbed his ass. But because she said it snappishly, the way she said most things now…

…he turned and pointed a finger at her. "You're not my mother."

She gestured at their shared bed. "Good thing."

It had been an attempt at defusal, but he didn't interpret it that way. The bed was of course unmade, because that was one of his chores. "Even my mother didn't harp on me about making my fucking bed, or doing my fucking laundry. She didn't bitch about every little thing, you know?"

Udo was no longer so invested in de-escalation. "It shows, Phil. It really does."

He pulled the tie off, making a little involuntary glurk sound in the process. "Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning you're a lazy slob, because nobody's ever expected more from you!" She found she was suddenly shouting.

"Maybe it's just that nobody judges me except for you!"

"You don't think you need judging? It took nagging from your girlfriend to get you promoted to mop detail supervisor. Left to your own devices, you'd be a toilet scrubber for the rest of your life!"

"Someone's got to scrub the fucking toilets! Maybe I don't want to be a supervisor!"

"What do you want, Phil? Do you want anything? Do you care about anything?!"

They were both on the balls of their feet. All four hands were clenched.

"Maybe I do," he snarled. "But it's not like you'd ever ask. You just tell. You just criticize. You—"

"I'm trying to—"

"—never even—"

"—make you a—"

"—LET ME FINISH A FUCKING SENTENCE! Jesus CHRIST, Udo, you act like my FUCKING BROTHER!"

"AT LEAST ONE OF US DOES!"

It didn't take long to clear her things out of his room.

She'd never even taken a drawer.

25 January

It was kind of a dare.

Wettle wasn't really sure who or what he was daring, but there was no denying the stakes were real. One slip…

Well, nobody knew what would happen, actually. They'd probably send a drone down after him, get telemetry. Maybe let him record a message for his parents, if his parents still existed. Most likely there would be snapshots taken, and they would circulate throughout the Site: William Wettle falling end over end, endlessly, forever in his element. Failure.

But he never slipped. He won the dare. The subway rumbled alarmingly underneath, and Wettle walked the lonesomest of all roads.

But not alone.

Coming the other way, to his surprise and frustration, he saw her. Why, he wondered, does it always have to be her?

When he could see her face, he could see that Alis was wincing. She would have spotted him long before he spotted her, so she'd have been preparing this wince specifically for him to see. That was either flattering, or it wasn't. He wasn't sure.

"Beep," she said.

"Huh?"

She made a shooing gesture. "Beep beep."

He glanced down. The curved concrete arch of the subway tunnel flattened out on top, and there was technically enough room for one person to slip past another, but if one of them was William Wettle and the other was hauling as much freightage as Alis, probably not so much.

He pointed. "No passing lane."

She shook her head in irritation. "Then lie down, and I'll walk all over you."

"What are you doing up here, anyway?"

She gave him a look that said you're up here too. He had a longstanding rule against letting people know he could read body language, so he just stared stupidly at her until she sighed and planted both hands on her wide hips. "I'm walking."

"I'm walking here," he quoted. The impression was poor enough that it probably didn't parse as a quotation.

"Do you even know what that's from?"

He did not. "Of course I do. And you didn't answer my question."

"I answered it as much as I care to. Now get the hell out of my way before one of us has an unfortunate accident."

He snorted. "That's just what they're waiting for."

She blinked.

He smiled.

She blinked again. "What's that mean?"

"Come on, Alis. Why else would Lillihammer let you walk around free? They're all waiting to see how you fuck up. So they can learn something from it."

She wrinkled her nose. "They tell you that?" She laughed. "Of course they did. You're not smart enough to have figured it out on your own."

He didn't correct her.

"Fine." She stepped forward, reached out, and took his hand. Before he could protest, she hauled him around — We are both about to die, he thought as his feet left the concrete — and then they were both facing the same direction, back the way she'd come, and she was pressed against his side. "I choose this mistake."

And they went nowhere together.

It was only by random chance that Ibanez and Nascimbeni crossed paths these days. Her patrols were regular, and he usually had the sense to stay out of them. His tasks were scheduled, and as chief of security she had privileged access to all the schedules. Either one, or the other, or both, had slipped up. That was the likeliest explanation.

But only random chance could have placed them at the AAF-A subway stop at the precise moment that Alis Lane and William Wettle came down from the subway roof access together, she dismounting the ladder daintily, he, of course, falling.

She, surprisingly, laughing. He, even more surprisingly, laughing with her.

Most surprising to Ibanez was the intense well of frustration that boiled up inside of her stomach as she watched the scene unfold.

"Some things really don't change, do they?" Nascimbeni remarked from beside her.

She looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

Well, she thought. Since we've already fucked this up anyway.

Pensak responded to the call, service weapon raised. A suspected murder in progress. The pot had finally boiled over, and it was up to him to respond.

The tech who'd made the call pointed at the maintenance closet, face ashen, finger trembling. Pensak tried the door, but it wouldn't open. There was a crash from inside, and a muffled scream.

He pulled out his keycard, and swiped it.

Two error codes flashed on the reader:

ERR: ADMIN LOCK ENGAGED -- C/SC
ERR: ADMIN LOCK ENGAGED -- C/JM

He was confused at first, and was about to shoot out the lock when he realized that what he had taken for someone banging on the door with their fist and demanding to be released was actually something altogether different.

2 February

Karen yawned, and glanced up at the clock mounted over the sliding glass doors. 4:35.

It was the first time in living memory that the end of her shift hadn't crept up on her. Sometimes she even forgot there was a clock in the room.

She looked down at the neat little pile of paperwork in front of her. All issues resolved. All matters settled. Nothing outstanding.

She glanced past the edge of the daïs. The day shift at Admin were stretching, putting files away, chatting in hushed tones or yawning the way she had done. She reached up to rub the crick in her neck, and was surprised to find that it wasn't there.

It had always been there, from the very start.

She thought about that for the remaining twenty-five minutes, and by the time the clock struck five, she was grinning ear to ear.

She downed tools on time, down to the second, and left just a few minutes past the hour.

Another first.

4 February

---

Nascimbeni fished the pager off her belt, and passed it to her. She heaved a tremendous sigh, as only she could heave, and squinted at the display. "God dammit."

He passed her the belt, and the jumpsuit attached to it, and stretched back on the bed. "Us problem, you problem?"

"Me problem," she growled as she flopped around on the mattress to worm into the suit. "Gonna make it everybody's."

"You always do," he smiled, and he kissed her on the forehead.

"He's gone," Bremmel blurted the instant she stepped through the door.

Ibanez glanced around the empty lab. "Evidently. Who he?"

"My assistant!" The engineer threw his hands up. "Who else? He's gone!"

She frowned. "What was his name again?"

"How should I know?!" Bremmel walked into the far corner, where a cheap and undersized desk was shoved between two storage lockers, and snatched an ID badge off the labcoat folded neatly on the back of the chair. He squinted at it. "Uh…"

"Today, please, Trev." She had plenty of energy left, but not for waiting.

He tossed the card at her. It landed on the floor. She sighed; it seemed beneath her dignity to pick up things people threw at her, but on the other hand, she was closer to the ground. She bent, and examined the badge.

She found she couldn't read the name either.

"Fuck," she said, and then she left it behind her in the rising dust.

One of these days she was going to break those fragile, birdlike bones.

Ibanez slammed one of the Tarrows — she was pretty sure it was Imogen — against the clinic wall and stuck her pistol under the other woman's nose. "What did you do with him?"

Probably-Imogen blinked. "Sokolsky?"

Ibanez bent the other woman's nose upward with the barrel. "What about Sokolsky? Did you take him too?"

The geistschreiber was raising both hands so slowly, it was like they were tied to helium balloons. "I didn't know what you were talking about, so I assumed you meant Sokolsky. I slept with Sokolsky. Last night."

Ibanez suppressed a laugh. She might have accidentally shot the woman's nose off. "Okay, pin that for me. Right now I'm looking for Bremmel's assistant, and I'm only seeing two possibilities max here. Either you fuckers erased him, or he was one of you. Which is it?"

Imogen's eyes were crossed, staring down the barrel at her. "Bremmel's…? That guy with the hair? I don't know anything about—"

She gulped as the barrel slid past her teeth. "Make this easy for me," Ibanez purred. "I dare you."

The other woman simply shook her head, very carefully, so as not to chip her enamel on the blue steel. From the way her pupils dilated, Ibanez decided she was telling the truth. "Fine. Where's your sister?"

"I dote doh."

Ibanez pulled the gun back out, and with a quick and efficient motion deposited Imogen on the exam table, none too gently. "If I find out you're lying to me, you're dead. All three of you."

She headed for the door, preparing to key in her emergency override and lock it behind her.

"Wait!"

She waited, but didn't turn.

"Bremmel doesn't have an assistant."

Ibanez did turn. "What?"

"He sent the last one topside for coffee every day."

"Bullshit. There's coffee every three feet in here."

"Yeah, but… you know. Bremmel."

Ibanez did know. She already realized she was being told the truth. Trevor Bremmel hated assistants the way an addict hated drugs. They got him where he needed to be, but given the choice, he'd rather go clean. Sending one on a topside coffee run was just the sort of pointless workplace humiliation he went in for.

Fuck.

She had the sudden and maddening feeling that she was only just now catching up with an earlier version of herself.

"Fuck."

She locked the door behind her anyway.

"It's that fucking guy again."

The seven of them occupied their former stations around the perimiter of Udo's living space. Having turned the Director's Complex into the headquarters of their in-group, they'd needed a redoubt for this very much Sampis-only matter, and the obvious solution had been deemed best.

"What guy?" Wettle asked.

"I saw him a few times in the first deadline," Harry said. "Always at a distance. Like he was just watching things unfold. He had a weird labcoat, like the ones QS wear, but black and red." He always related information like this in a flat monotone, obviously uncomfortable reciting something that sounded like a memory but wasn't. He'd gotten it from playing the debriefing tapes back, just like everybody else.

"He approached me in that same deadline," McInnis nodded. "Helped me with our reformed O5 Council, and laying the groundwork for our new Foundation. He said his name was…"

McInnis scowled. It wasn't something he did often, and never in company, but the absence was like a hole being gnawed out and re-knit and gnawed again every time he tried to see what was in it. He simply shook his head, and gave up.

"One of the geistschreiber, then?" Udo suggested.

"Worse," Lillihammer muttered.

McInnis gestured at her to continue.

She wasn't looking at him, but she continued anyway. "He appears, and disappears. Popped in and out in dash-A, stayed for a stretch and then vanished in dash-B—"

"Don't," Nascimbeni begged her. "I didn't even like reading about that one."

"The point is," she continued with the edge her tone always acquired when she was interrupted, "he comes and goes as he pleases, he watches us, he sees what's important, and then he leaves."

"Oh," said Udo.

"Great." Delfina spat into the trash can. Nascimbeni gave her a disapproving look, and she shrugged at him.

"What am I missing?" Harry asked.

"I think there's something… yeah?" Udo glanced at Delfina, who nodded grimly. "Yeah. There's something we need to share with the group. Something we've been working on without you, for… reasons."

McInnis spread his hands wide.

Udo took a deep breath. "So, about Dougall Deering. When he died, I sent out this email…"

When they had finished, the others chewed on the information for a few seconds. As she always did, Lillian finished her mental mastication first. "So what we're saying," she said, "and I would have said this without all that lovely, inexplicably withheld extra detail… is that this fucker is chasing us between the lines."

This time the silence was considerably longer, and more profound.

Wettle broke it first.

"Do you think we could hitch a ride, next time he goes?"

5 February

---

"See?" Ibanez pointed at the open door in the corner, and then the open doors on the cabinet over the sink. "And there's a bed, too. What the hell is inhumane about that?"

Imogen Tarrow was sitting on the examination bed, chewing a granola bar without enthusiasm. "I'm sure they've got bathrooms at Guantanamo, too."

"Yeah, but you have to share." Ibanez grabbed the other chair, then turned back to face the door. "Well? Come in. And get the lock for me while you're up."

Alis entered the room wordlessly, closing the door so softly that it didn't even click, though the lock did. She leaned against the wall, eyeing the other giftschreiber with obvious mistrust.

Imogen continued to munch, looking back and forth between them.

"Good news and bad news," Ibanez began. She leaned forward, hands on her knees. It made her look even smaller, but that didn't matter. "Good news: the missing guy isn't your problem. Bad news: can't find your sister."

The other woman stopped chewing, and swallowed. "Maybe she found out you locked me in the clinic."

"She would've come let you out," said Alis.

"Whose side are you on?"

"Me?" Alis stepped forward, coming up behind Ibanez. "Whose side are you on? If Madchen's disappearance is part of a plan, it's not one I'm aware of."

Imogen scoffed. "Why would you be? I've seen you with that dumb prick on the subway."

Ibanez glanced up. Alis wasn't blushing, but her eyes were narrow slits now. "I'm having trouble remembering, maybe you can remind me. It's been a long time now. Did they tell us to only do the really fun parts of espionage? The easy bits?"

"Oh, please. You're not pressing William Wettle for information. You're just pressing him." A sharp bark of laughter, one syllable. "You're helping these fuckers, because you're afraid."

"Of course I'm afraid. They deleted the world, Imogen. I don't know the whole master plan, but I'm pretty sure it involves the world existing so it can properly end."

Ibanez held up a hand. "I like a good catfight as much as the next dude, but can we focus? We're down one spooky word witch, and in the absence of a compelling explanation to the contrary, I'm assuming one or both of you knows where she is. You wanna spill?"

Imogen screwed her face up. Alis remained impassive.

Ibanez decided to give them one more chance. "Here's what I know. You're all members of a doomsday cult. You came here to figure out what happened to your boss, or whatever magic doohickey let you do the shit you do, or whatever. You didn't find it. But you kept looking; you were still looking right up to the point where we found Wirth. Now—"

"Wait." Imogen looked confused. "Still looking…?"

"Yeah, what?" Alis walked around the chair to stand between Ibanez and Imogen. "What're you talking about?"

"We've kept tabs on all of you since Lillian let you out. Obviously. Madchen tried to hack Veiksaar's half-done AI so she could shut down the cameras and go snooping, but Lillian had already hardened and double-tracked the routines, so it didn't take. That's part of how we figured out where Wirth was hiding."

Imogen stood up, and walked to stand beside Alis. "She… you're serious? You're sure?"

"That can't be right," Alis breathed.

This time it was Ibanez's turn to look from face to face. Nothing she saw there carried the faintest hint of deception, for a change.

"Am I to understand," she said slowly, "that you didn't know she was doing that?"

"I knew she was trying to hack the system," Imogen said. "But she told me it wasn't done yet."

"She told me," Alis added, "that she didn't think it could be done. What the fuck?" She turned to face her erstwhile partner in crime. "What the fuck, Imogen?"

Imogen shook her head. "It doesn't make sense. It doesn't…" She looked down, at the floor, then turned away.

"Huh." Ibanez stood up. "Okay. Well, that clears a few things up, then."

Alis stared at her. "It does?"

"Yeah." She walked to the door. "I know I definitely can't trust either of you, but you're also definitely too useless to be worried about."

It was already early in the morning when she took Alis to meet with Imogen, and she still had a fugitive on the loose, so Ibanez chose simply not to go to bed. Nascimbeni would be up early — his old man metabolism thought three in the morning a fine time to wake up — and if she went back to her quarters now, and found him there, she wouldn't get much sleep anyway. She was far too frustrated not to take it out on someone one way or another. So, she headed back to the bullpen and took Pensak's nightly report.

Which was nothing. The entire facility was holding its breath, apparently, in anticipation of what the missing geistschreiber might get up to. With the unwarranted enthusiasm that came with her second wind, Ibanez went on a random walk to see if she might surprise her quarry in the act of… whatever. Surely there was an act in the offing. It wasn't like Madchen Tarrow was going to escape from Site-43.

The first thing she thought of was the broken keycard reader in LeClair's escape tunnel, but that didn't seem related. She trusted her gut instincts. They'd had a remarkable run of luck back in Zevala, and had rarely let her down since.

To her surprise, her own act of simply going for a stroll resolved the situation entirely in her own mind. She took the subway to AAF-A, passed the guards stationed at the undergantry without asking them if they'd noticed anything unusual, and walked into Reuben Wirth's repurposed factory.

Madchen stood in the middle of the empty space, eyes rimmed red, hands clenching and unclenching, plain as day. There was a security camera looking right at her; apparently her hacking efforts hadn't been quite so unsuccessful as both Eileen and Lillian thought, or else her memetic camouflage had hitherto unsuspected, entirely more upsetting dimensions.

"Where?" the other woman demanded, hoarsely. Her fingers were bleeding; she'd been pulling metal panels off the wall. It was a miracle the guards hadn't heard her, glamour or no. "Where is it?"

5 February

---

Ibanez considered shooting her, but it wasn't worth the expended bullet. She could have tossed the woman into the black, but there were problems with that idea too; it might, conceivably, reunite her with Wirth after all.

In the end she settled on the easiest option. They'd cleared out a lot of dangerous anomalies since SCP-5243 made the Site a poor candidate for long-term containment — fewer than back in baseline, since the Breach was only a one-time event here, but the Foundation was superstitious by the nature of its work — and there were plenty of empty chambers available.

Maybe some time in the next six months, fed through a slot and left to her own devices, the snarling cryptomancer might be willing to talk.

6 February

---

It was past midnight when Ibanez finally did give in to the temptations of flesh; specifically the need to sleep, since Nascimbeni would long since have passed out and she didn't trust herself to find an alternate that wouldn't come with a bevy of added complications. He was in his dorm, so she went to hers instead — almost never used, as she preferred to bunk down in the barracks with the rest of the grunts. She soon found, however, despite her solitary choice of quarters, that she wouldn't be spending the morning alone.

She noticed Alis Lane before Alis Lane knew she'd been noticed, but if the geistschreiber had decided to become a threat, the altercation would already be over. So she went through the motions of closing and locking the door, unzipping her jumpsuit, and flopping down on the couch before saying: "Well, get on with it."

A shape on the easy chair gradually became recognizable as a human being. Alis wore her engineer's blues wrapped tight, and her bright green hair was tucked away in a neat, if vast, bun behind her head. This lame camouflage did little to lessen the impact of her gradual appearance from out of nowhere. "How'd you know I was here?"

"Months of knowing things were there that I couldn't see. What do you want?"

The other woman looked haggard. Ibanez had never seen her as anything less than aggressively pristine, save for the brief stretch where she'd been incarcerated back in baseline. "I want to talk about the Tarrows."

Ibanez yawned. "That's convenient. I want to talk about them too. But the problem is, I'm talking to you, and I don't trust you more than I trust them. I know you better, but… well, that's why I don't trust you."

Alis sighed. "You know what I've been doing the past few months? When you haven't been throwing me into your series of decreasingly-clever makeshift holding cells?"

Ibanez shrugged in vague invitation to continue.

"I've been doing the job I'm supposed to have. Working on engineering projects. I've got a bit of expertise in the matter; they had very good teachers, where I come from, and all the illusion in the world can't disguise a genuine fraud forever."

"I dunno," Ibanez mused. "I've seen a lot of episodes of The Fugitive."

Alis didn't acknowledge the sidebar at all. "What I'm saying is, this isn't completely an act. I'm at least a little of what I claim to be. I've done some good work over the years. I've probably done less spying on Foundation employees than you have."

Ibanez smiled, and stood up. "That's good. I like that. You want a beer?"

Alis sprawled back in the chair. "Sure. You'll want to have a prop to play with while you pretend not to listen to what I have to say."

When Ibanez had tossed her a bottle and sat back down, immediately beginning to peel away the neck label, Alis continued. "So, the Tarrows. You should kill them."

Ibanez took a pull on the bottle, savouring the flat and bitter taste a little before swallowing both the beer and her first, harsher response. It was safer to have a prop, sometimes. "Why's that?"

"Because they're true believers. You know what they've been up to the last few months? Exactly the same thing they've been doing since we got here. Trying to find the missing link."

"Wettle's lab's just off the main drag."

"You know what I mean. I know you know. They're trying to find… he, she, it, whatever. The source. Because they're still working to the plan. They still want it to happen. They're true believers."

"And you aren't?"

"You already know I'm not. Willie…"

She grimaced.

"Wettle told me what happened in the other timelines. It's no different now—"

Ibanez held up a hand. "I'm sorry, back up. Did you say I need to kill the Tarrows? Because it's SOUNDING," and she scooted her feet up onto the cushion, and it was all she could do to avoid standing on the couch, "like I need to shoot WILLIAM fucking WETTLE."

Alis waved the rage off with a gentle swoosh of her bottle. "He didn't do it on purpose. I cheated it out of him. He's not as stupid as you think he is, but he can't keep a secret from me. I'm willing to bet not many of you could. But you're not really angry, because you don't really care. You know my staying alive depends on the situation here remaining stable, and you know I'm smart enough to know that, so you know I'm not going to rock the boat. You've known that all along, or you wouldn't have let me go free. You didn't want me to know what was really going on, but it doesn't change much that I do."

Gradually, Ibanez returned her legs to their former position. "That," she said, "is more or less correct. I guess. But still, I think I'll kneecap him for symbolic purposes."

Alis chugged down half the beer, and wiped her lips with her labcoat sleeve. "Fair enough."

"But what's your point, anyway?"

"My point," and the other woman leaned forward, as she instinctually did whenever she wanted to be extra convincing — props again, Ibanez thought, and had to stifle a laugh — and made eye contact for a long, long moment. "My point is that I don't care to see everything burned down. The spell is broken. I don't know why it didn't break for them, but I'm my own person now. I might not be precisely on your side, but I'm sure as hell not on either of theirs."

"If that's true," and Ibanez left little doubt what she thought on the matter in her tone, "then maybe you'll be even more forthcoming than all the other yous I've known. Yeah? Maybe you'll tell me something about that death cult of yours I don't already know."

"Sure." Alis sat back again; was it Ibanez's imagination, or did she seem to be curling up into herself, as though recoiling from an outburst that hadn't happened yet, but inevitably would? Probably it was the sleep deprivation, the frustration, and the beer working together with her undernourished imagination. Life in a blank expanse was dull indeed, and the mind would have its fascinations one way or another. "Here's the first thing. Madchen and Imogen? I don't think they're both in the same death cult."

Ibanez raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Yeah."

"No, what?" They'd had their suspicions since the monitoring process, and of course Ibanez had heard the five-second foreshadowing in Alis' speech, but she had to keep up the façade. Never let the enemy know how much you know. "I thought they were both with you."

"Yeah, I thought so too. But Madchen was going behind Imogen's back, and I was watching you today. Yesterday. Whatever. She was trying to find Wirth, but not like her sister was. I think she wanted to kill him."

Ibanez whistled. "Why would she want to do that?"

"Search me."

"Don't tempt. What's the second thing?"

It wasn't her imagination. The other woman was definitely tensed against a coming strike now. "You were talking earlier about spending months surrounded by unseen threats. You were talking about Zevala, right?"

Ibanez leaned forward and gently placed her beer on the ground, against the leg of the couch. She did this because the feeling was suddenly draining out of her hands, and she didn't want to spill it. "That's right." She wanted to ask: Where did you hear that name? But she couldn't, because she had no feeling in her mouth, either. It was rapidly going dry.

"Do you know who destroyed it?"

"The Chaos Insurgency." The answer was so ingrained in her being that she could utter it even now, when all other syllables were in open revolt on the tip of her tongue.

"Do you know what the Chaos Insurgency is?"

Ibanez stared at her.

The other woman smiled grimly, and nodded. She had no way of knowing how close she was to a sudden, spectacular death as she said: "Yeah. You know, now. You see it."

Alis was disappearing again, but it had nothing to do with memetics and everything to do with the red haze that melted into the gloom of Ibanez's quarters to render the entire landscape a featureless blur.

"Did you see anyone special there? Anyone particularly memorable?"

The woman in white. The cane. The scarred lip. A voice she could never forget.

"Do you want to know why she did it?"

Ibanez stuck her jaw out so far it hurt, and in that flash of here-and-now reality, came back to herself enough to growl: "No."

Something in her voice and visage made the geistchreiber wince. "No?"

"No." Ibanez stood up, and kicked her bottle of beer against the far wall where it shattered with a wet and musical crash. "I just need to know her name."

Six months.

Six fucking months.

She could wait.

She could wait precisely that long.

12 March

---

He'd never been given this assignment before.

There were only two facilities that Phil had never cleaned during his tenure at Site-43. The first was Applied Occultism; it had never been explained to him why he should be banned from Upstairs, but given that upstairs was full of wizards, he'd never felt the need to complain.

The other was AAF-A, and much as with the former case, he was not at all sure why the latter was no longer off-limits.

Well, okay. That wasn't entirely true. He had an inkling.

Udo hadn't taken the subway north since Phil had been reassigned, and the timing of that reassignment had been… pointed, he felt.

At least it's warmer than Antarctica.

He had heard about Dr. Reynders, of course. Everyone at Site-43 had heard about Dr. Reynders. Truth be told, there were few people at the Foundation who hadn't. She was a living legend, textbook case, and textbook writer in most esoteric fields of study. But he'd never actually seen her in person before, to the extent that anyone living had, so that was a positive experience he could chalk up to their overall terrible stretch of luck since early September of last year.

It felt deeply inappropriate, even insulting to look at someone who had more PhDs than he had years of formal education and think she's pretty cute, but the nice thing about thoughts was that no-one could criticize you for them.

He'd had enough criticism for one year.

"Good morning, Philip."

He smiled, and waved. "Hey, Dr. Reynders."

"Does that floor really need to be mopped again already?"

He considered the question, then considered the floor. "Dunno. There's plenty of scuff marks; somebody's popular."

She shrugged.

"As for dust and dirt, I dunno." He paused. "Where do you think it even comes from? Now?"

It was her turn to consider. "I'm not sure. If we really are surrounded by a featureless void, then we should be slowly haemorrhaging material into it that we can't get back. New material shouldn't be cycling back in…" She placed the pencil she used to transmit her voice to the audio enhancers in the glass, into her mouth, and chewed it thoughtfully. If gingerly. Very gingerly. If she wore it out, she'd need to get another, and she was already damned lucky not to have run out of things to write with and on in her sixty-something years of hermetic sealage. "Maybe the air systems are drawing the detritus back inside. If there's new dust, it could be coming from the lower membrane as it crumbles with exposure to the air. Though where that air is coming from… hmm." Her eyes focused, and she looked at him as though seeing him for the first time today. "Where's your friend?"

"Eh?" He wasn't pleased to realize that nobody he knew precisely fit that open-ended bill.

She tapped the glass of her enclosure. Don't call it that! "Your friend. Fifty…"

She closed her mouth.

He tilted his head.

She shook hers. "Don't worry about it. I've been seeing things. You know how it is."

He nodded. "Stir crazy. You've got more right to it than anyone else down here." It was easy to talk to her. Easy to forget she was so far out of his league. The fact that she was unobtainable was softened considerably by the fact that she was… well. Unobtainable. Literally. "Was that insensitive? It was probably insensitive. Sorry."

She smiled. "Just because I'm suffering doesn't mean you're not. That isn't how it works."

"It just seems unfair." He leaned on the mop, and tentatively glanced into the line of her big blue eyes. Good lord, but they were big. "If they fix whatever's wrong, you'll still be down here, but the rest of us will get to leave."

He wasn't sure what the look on her face meant. She was still smiling, but she looked nevertheless on the very edge of tears. "Yeah," she agreed. "Yeah, you sure will. I'm happy for you."

He was also unsure, deeply unsure, why he found this response so unsettling.

16 March

---

Stacey Laiken was, as before, sitting on a vinyl couch in a flat little fort of her files and devices. Udo sat down on the couch nearest her chair, and slid all the way to the armrest so that their feet were almost touching.

"I have a problem."

Laiken smiled at her. Udo tried to remember a time when Laiken had looked at her without smiling. Maybe there hadn't ever been one. "Go on."

"I still miss Dougall."

The smile didn't fade, it just acquired extra nuance. "Of course you do. So do I."

"But he was a bastard."

Laiken's lips thinned out as she pressed them together. They wiggled back and forth, as though she were churning up a response, and then she spat it out: "Yes. Yes, he was. But he didn't deserve what happened to him."

Udo had more complex feelings about that, but she wasn't sure if sharing them was the right thing to do. She had a purpose in coming here today, and it wouldn't work out if she alienated Laiken. "I think… I think he made me a worse person, Stacey."

Laiken reached out to take her hand. As before, the touch was soft, gentle, and faintly electric. "Then you must have been such an amazing person before, Rabbit."

Udo bit her lip, hard. It hurt, but it hurt less than explaining Dougall's nickname for her would have hurt the other woman.

"I think you're too hard on yourself." Laiken patted the back of her hand. It would have been an absurd, comical gesture from anyone other than her.

"Well, you didn't see me with Phil." Udo practically spat out the last word, her now very definitively ex-boyfriend's name. "I was trying to make him a worse person, too."

Laiken squeezed. "What makes you think you have that kind of power?"

Udo squeezed back.

Laiken straightened her back, and looked Udo directly in the eye. "I propose an experiment."

"I'm listening," Udo whispered.

The other woman leaned in.

"See if you can make me worse."

And she breathed into Udo's lips:

"I'll bet you can't."

She had just enough presence of mind left to tint the common room windows a deep, dark orange, and gum up the works in the door lock so it wouldn't open for anyone. She could probably have flown Laiken's keycard over and put in a proper administrative override, but that would just have been showing off.

22 May

---

Harry traced the line of her nose with one finger, then cupped her cheek with one hand and tested the pores of her skin with his thumb. Karen smiled. "You're going to get tired of this eventually, right?"

He ran a fingernail along the edge of the bags under her eyes, the ones she stamped out every morning in her makeup routine. Except after the past nine months, they were barely even visible; she looked years younger now than she'd looked since as far back as he could remember. "Get tired of art? I'd rather die."

She laughed, ungracefully. There was half of a snort in it. Sometimes she almost giggled. It was the most profound kind of beautiful: wonderful and sad in equal measure. "Is that all I am? A pretty face."

"Of course not." He brushed her silvering hair back out of her face. "It's just that you're a very pretty face, so I get distracted from all the other things I love about you."

Her upper lip receded a little. "We should probably talk about it."

He pulled her upper lip back out, with both of his. "The things I love about you?"

"No." But she craned her neck forward and kissed him back. "No."

He pressed the tips of their noses together, and looked into her eyes. "No?"

She sighed. "Yes."

9 July

---

Nascimbeni sat down without being asked. It was McInnis; McInnis always, always asked, so what was the point of waiting?

"Can you guess why I'm here?" he asked.

McInnis steepled his fingers over the desk. "Possibly. You're not carrying an envelope, at least not that I can see, but…" He unknitted his digits and tapped his temple with two of them. "I suspect you're carrying it up here, instead. Should I deny the request before you make it, or is the entire pantomime necessary?"

Just like that, Nascimbeni's deadly calm evaporated. He felt raw and dry without it, and leaned forward to shake some of the strain out of his muscles. "It isn't really a request you can deny, Allan. When we get back to baseline, I am going to quit. Unless you fire me first."

The Director put his steeple back in place. "Why would I do that?"

Nascimbeni laughed harshly. "Because this time, this time, I killed almost the entire fucking human race. If that isn't gross negligence to you, you must be… grossly negligent. Yourself. You see it, right? Of course you see it. I can't keep doing what we're doing. I'm done."

The other man's expression didn't change an iota. "How nice it must be for you to have that option. How did you come by it, if I might ask?"

Nascimbeni blinked. "What?"

"The option to withdraw. The rest of us are set in our duties. There is a schedule we must keep, and it keeps us also. You imagine this to be something from which you can simply walk away. How precisely does that work?"

"Look." Nascimbeni sighed. "We don't know what happens if someone else takes our places, right? And I don't see how what I do can't be done by any old tech. Wirth didn't even know who I was, Allan. It didn't need to be me sending the techs in to die, and Markey… I don't know if I even had any effect at all on what happened to Markey."

"I see." McInnis nodded. "You're saying it would be trivial for any other man to act as you did."

"That's right."

"You're saying that what happened on the eighth of September, 2002, would have happened precisely the same way no matter who answered that call and ran to the AAF-D airlock."

Nascimbeni shifted in his seat. "Okay, that's not…" He sighed again. "You know that isn't…"

McInnis smiled sadly. "You know what I'm going to ask you."

If it doesn't have to be you, it didn't have to be you. If it didn't have to be you, then why do you feel so guilty?

The Director sat back. "If you can articulate a response I find convincing, perhaps I'll reconsider. But only perhaps."

"Why are you doing this?" Nascimbeni hung his head, so that the brim of his cap broke eye contact for both of them. "Why can't you just…"

"Let you off the hook?" For the first time in memory, McInnis sighed as well. "Noè, I'm hanging right there beside you."

8 September

Nascimbeni kept his hands in his pockets as he approached the airlock. They were all carrying portable tape players now, with their lines pre-recorded. It had been Sokolsky's idea, in case any of them froze up.

He ended up not needing it.

The previous year, he'd cared too much to go through with it.

He didn't have that problem anymore.

The Survivors meeting was brief, and to the point. Harry made it back to his dorm just an hour after the Breach.

Karen was pacing his living room, and she wheeled on him like some wild thing when he entered.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

Her voice was shaking. "For the walking dead."

"That's not…" He sighed. "So, no. You're not alright."

"I thought I would be." She took a step towards him, and then a step back. "But no. Not really. No."

He took two steps towards her, and reached out to take her hands. "This isn't the end. I'm going to see you again tomorrow. And you're going to see me."

Her hands were cold. "But not this version of me. This version of me is going into the universal waste paper bin."

He pulled her into an embrace. "It's just a year's variance. You're the same person, deep down."

"So, it hasn't been an important year?"

He pulled back to examine her face. She wouldn't meet his eyes. "That's not—"

"Nothing meaningful occurred?" Her eyes were closed.

He kissed her, and she opened her eyes. "That's not what I meant. Look. When this fades, I'm not going to forget it. I'm going to remember what we had. What happened to you. How you changed."

"And what are you going to do with that information?" Now she met his gaze, and he almost shrank away from what he saw there. Almost.

"Sweep you off your feet," he said. He'd barely had to think about it.

She laughed. "Right. 'Hey, Karen. Guess what? If you don't have any serious responsibilities or outside pressure, you're not actually a bitch! So quit your job and run away with me.' That sort of thing?"

"Well, I'm not quitting, so it's not like we'd be running anywhere."

"Speaking as someone who only forked from their baseline incarnation twelve months ago, I can guarantee you I'm not quitting my job either. So what are you going to do? How are you going to convince me?" Her blue eyes suddenly went very cold. "Are you going to convince me?"

He took a deep breath. Butterflies died and were born again in his stomach. "Of course I am."

"Is that a promise?" There was a vulnerability in her voice that he had never once heard before.

"Of course it's a promise! I love you." The look that spread across her face brought him up short. "What?"

"Do you love her?"

He wasn't sure what she meant. His first thought was Melissa Bradbury, so he kept his first thought to himself.

Which was for the best, because she clarified. "Do you love the other me? The one you're going to spend the rest of your life around?"

"With." He squeezed her tightly. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life with her. And I do love her."

"Then why did you never get involved with her?"

There could be only one response.

"The time was never right."

Stacey Laiken looked like a wet red shirt. Udo had never met anyone who cried so ugly. It was adorable. "Do I get a last request?"

They were lying on Stacey's bed. It wasn't Dougall's bed, but it was where Dougall's bed had once been. "You're not dying." Udo stroked her girlfriend's hair.

"Am I not?"

Udo sighed. "What's the request?"

"Actually, some… historical background, would be nice." The other woman curled up against her, hands clawing the two of them closer than physics preferred to allow.

"I don't remember most of what happened in the other timelines."

Stacey's voice was hoarse and raw, but there was a strain of certainty in it. "You'd remember this, because you would have had to decide whether to act on it or not. Do people normally ask you to do things back in baseline, after the change? Do things for them?"

She had no idea where this was going. "Sometimes?"

"And do you do them?"

Udo took too long to respond, this time.

"I kinda didn't think so." There was bitterness behind the tears, now. "Like promises to the dead, right?"

Udo held her partner so close, it hurt. "You're not dying. We don't know what's going to happen. We never get to see that end of things."

"If you had to guess," Stacey asked with the same expression she might wear when opening up stitches on a wound, "would you say that these timelines keep… persisting, when you leave them?"

Udo thought of Ilse Reynders, and her mouth was honest before her brain had time to dissimulate. "No."

"So, promises to the dead." Stacey pressed her head to Udo's chest, and closed her eyes. "But I am an occultist, Udo Okorie, so if you make me a promise and then break it, I absolutely promise that I will haunt you."

Should she laugh, or cry, or both? She felt paralyzed. "What's the promise? Or should I guess."

"You can guess." The other woman's voice was very quiet now. Exhausted. Resigned."

"You want me to ask you out, in baseline."

"Yes." Barely a whisper.

"I mean, I was going to anyway. I've made a note. I'm going to bring it up in my debriefing. We're all set."

Stacey raised her head to press their lips together. Her eyes were still closed. "But will you do it? Will you actually do it?"

"I just said—"

The eyes opened, big and blue and vulnerable. "You said you intend to, right now. Will you want to, back home?" She reached up to touch Udo's hair. They'd cut it short just last week, as a sort of act of rebellion against the universe. "Are you the same person there that you are here?"

9 September

Baseline Temporality

It was the briefest debriefing they'd ever had.

Lillian recited the things they had learned in a monologue. Harry rattled off the narrative like it was the outline of a book he was writing, but didn't really want to be. Nascimbeni and Ibanez didn't say much, but they occasionally held hands. Wettle didn't say anything.

Udo asked to be excused.

McInnis said he could handle the rest. He was, after all, the only one who really knew what had happened.

Udo swept into the chair's office and flopped down on the visitor's chair, labcoat and wizard sleeves fluttering around her in the self-made breeze. "Hey boss. Run a theoretical past you?"

Stacey pushed the paperwork to the side of her desk, and smiled. "Always." Then she recoiled at something she saw. "Did you cut your hair?"

"I'm sure it'll all be back tomorrow. But about the thing."

"Okay." The Chair of Applied Occultism was still staring at her hairline, but that was fine by Udo. She wasn't sure she'd be able to do what had to be done if their eyes were locked together.

"It's a relationship thing."

Two blonde eyebrows rose. "Whose?"

Udo felt herself grinning manically. "It's going to stop being theoretical if I explain that."

The brows knitted together. "You're blushing."

"Yeah." Her hands were shaking, too. "Probably."

Stacey sat back in her chair. "I thought you and Dr. Blank were declared."

"We're not together anymore."

The blue eyes widened. Not vulnerable. Not yet. "Really? I thought…" She suddenly seemed to come to a realization. "This has something to do with the Breach, doesn't it."

Udo shook and nodded her head. "Sort of. Kind of. Not really?"

Stacey exhaled. Not in frustration, just confusion. "It might be easier if you just came out and said it. Rip the Band-Aid off."

This was precisely what Udo had been waiting for. "What's the policy for relationships with power differentials?"

"As in, between supervisors and the supervised?"

"Yeah. That."

Stacey made the kind of pouting face she used when she was thinking carefully about something important. "It has to be very transparent. Has to go through all three of H&R, P&P, and A&O for approval. Constant monitoring. Regular check-ins to ensure there's no abuse going on."

Udo whistled. "Wow. I was kind of expecting it to be, uh, 'No. You can't do that'. Sort of thing."

"I was engaged to be married to Dougall," Laiken reminded her.

"You were, weren't you."

"Also, Dr. Blank is a Section Chair, and you were dating him."

"I was, wasn't I." She took a deep, deep breath. "But he's not my Section Chair."

"Well," Stacey laughed, "I think I'd know if you were dating your Section Chair."

"That's true. You would." She took another deep breath. "If I was."

Stacey frowned. "Oh?" She stopped frowning. The vulnerability suddenly appeared. "Oh."

"Yeah."

The other woman stood up, and walked to her filing cabinet. Her legs seemed unsteady. "I'll, uh. I'll look. The paperwork. I'll look into the paperwork."

"Okay," said Udo.

Stacey pulled open the top drawer. "Okay."

"Okay."

Stacey suddenly smiled, and the room perceptibly brightened — though it might have been Udo's own eyes flashing with pleasure. "Okay!"

Everyone got Breachmas off early, except for the Survivors, but the ninth was a day like any other. It was late when he finally got out of the briefing, and found Karen right where he'd thought he would: sitting at her desk, in the cavernous emptiness of Admin and Oversight's main foyer. Every other desk was unoccupied.

He leaned on her wooden cubicle, and smiled. "Hey, Karey. Got a minute?"

She shook her head without looking up. "Not really."

It was, in a weird way, like seeing an old friend he hadn't seen in several months. This was how she'd always been. The difference was night and day. "Well, will you have a minute later? Like, today later."

"What?" She looked up, and blew out a frustrated breath. "What is it you want, Harry? I've got… you don't care." She shoved off from her desk, and stood up. "You don't need to know what I've got going on today. You're just going to ignore that information, and make me deal with whatever bullshit is on your mind, like always. You might as well do it now." She crossed her arms. "I'm listening. What?"

He tried to say it. He really, really tried. But what he said instead was "What?"

In his labcoat, his phone buzzed. Stunlocked by Karen's furious glare, he pulled it out.

He looked dumbly back up at Karen, who was now looking at her watch.

"Nothing," Harry told her. "It was nothing."