He was hanging on.

Forsythe couldn't explain it. Mataxas hooked him up to a somatic imager, and concluded that he couldn't understand it, either. None of Imrich's calculations showed any activity in the old man's future. Rozálie could only say that his aura was at rest.

In every sense but the most vital, Noè Nascimbeni was dead.

But you never would have known it, for all the visitors he received.

There were things they needed to do. Important things. He'd made a list, and arranged each item in order.

It would take an entire year to get through them.

He marked the final day on his calendar, to make it seem more real.

"It's a date," Harry whispered, in the privacy of his own room.

Where nobody could hear him, and subsequently take him to task should the day pass him by again.

As it had so many times before.

Lillian still hadn't bothered to get herself a secretary. The thing about having a secretary, she'd always felt, was that it gave people the impression they could schedule meetings with you. Appointments. That sort of thing. Bureaucracy invented obligations, obligations she had no use for. She could manage her own schedule.

Her four o'clock had arrived. She knew this because it was four o'clock. This woman in particular was never late for anything.

If she was, the people she was meant to meet often forgot she even existed.

The door opened, and the little old lady came in, and sat down.

"I was wondering when you'd figure it out," Lillian smiled.

"I'm cautious. You know that. And I like to have all the data in front me before I come to a conclusion."

"And what conclusion have you come to?"

"It worked."

Lillian upgraded her smile. "It did work. It shouldn't have! It really shouldn't have. And holy shit, did it ever nearly not. But that sense of calm you're feeling, and probably scared to death of, is the real deal. You did it."

"I did it?"

"Absolutely."

"How do you know it was me? It could have been anyone."

Lillian laughed. "No, it could only ever have been you."

The other woman sighed. "Do you know how it happened? What the ultimate plan was?"

She shook her head. "Nope. I have no way of knowing. And neither do you."

A smile, apparently genuine, stretched across that congenitally dour face. "Appropriate, if you think about it."

"Even more appropriate if you don't." Lillian reached across the desk with one hand. "Congratulations on not being dead, and also on winning your war. You've finally got one up on me."

Wheeler took her hand, and shook it. "Well," she said, "you've got time yet."

"That's it." Forsythe stood back up. "He's gone."

Her daughter looked down at the thing which had, until just now, been Gedeon Van Rompay, and made an ugly pouting face. "Poor guy."

It irritated Pensak more than he could justify. "Why?"

She blinked at him, then kept blinking to get rid of the tears. "What?"

"What's there to be sympathetic about? His choices brought him here."

The little nurse put her hands on what passed for her hips. "That doesn't mean he deserved to die alone."

"He didn't die alone. He gave what he gave to the Foundation, and the Foundation sent three people to witness his death."

"But it's not like we were his friends," Billie argued. "I didn't even like him."

Pensak nearly laughed. "So why are you feeling bad about how he died?"

"Because I don't need to like someone to have empathy for them." She looked up at the stucco ceiling in frustration. "Jesus Christ."

"Billie," Forsythe murmured.

"What? He's being an asshole."

"BILLIE!"

Pensak raised a placating hand. "You're right. I am being an asshole. And if Van Rompay was standing in my place, he'd be an asshole, too. He was an asshole. He didn't care about anyone but himself."

Forsythe's hips were far better suited to her hands. "That isn't true."

"It's close enough to true that the difference doesn't matter." He looked down at the corpse's expressionless features. "I understand what he was thinking. He found a place where he could do the things he liked doing, the things he was good at, and he didn't have to do anything he didn't like. He didn't have to worry about people's feelings. He didn't have to make friends. He got to dress up like a soldier, and shoot people."

"I'd hate to have you eulogize me," said Billie.

"You'll be eulogized by your husband, or your children, or your grandchildren. People like Van Rompay don't get eulogies. They don't get funerals. They just die. Because they lived for a cause, and the cause doesn't have time to waste on them when they stop being useful."

Forsythe looked like she might be about to check him for a heartbeat, too. "That's an unhealthy attitude to have about your own job, don't you think? Are you planning on spending the next few decades getting nothing out of life, and dying with only strangers to…"

She probably had meant to just trail off, but her daughter finished it for her. "…talk shit about you?"

Pensak leaned forward to test the dead man for pulse. Protocol dictated a double-check. "I'm not saying there isn't a lesson to be learned here. I'm just saying the lesson isn't that dying is fine as long as you've got friends who'll miss you."

"Well," the doctor grunted, "if you've figured out a way to not die at all, then please by all means let me know."

"Why would I do that? The only thing Van Rompay really did right was be selfish."

Billie pushed past him, headed for the door. "Maybe you can send a deputy next time we have to do this for somebody."

He watched her go, then turned back to Forsythe. "Maybe we shouldn't be doing it at all. The reasons are bogus. It's a formality. He signed up to die in the dark, and that's how he should have died." He picked his jacket up off the chair he'd been waiting in. "Van Rompay made his choices, and they were wrong, and he paid the price. The only good thing about standing here when it happened is we can decide that it won't happen to us."

"Hi! Are you Philip E. Deering?"

Flora was milling around with the new hires, seeing who was who. She'd somehow missed the woman with the bad hair and brilliant smile who was presently chatting up Phil Deering, who was standing around gormlessly at his little info station. He had pamphlets explaining the thing that leered over his shoulder from the red-rimmed mirror. He looked embarrassed, or something else.

"What's he saying?" the woman continued. "I bet you get that a lot, sorry." She was pointing at the mirror, where the monster was talking up a storm.

He was staring. "Uh. He says you aren't disgusting."

She laughed. "Well, tell him he's not disgusting either."

"Nobody's ever told him that before."

She beamed up at him. "Everybody should treat him better, then. He looks like he needs a friend."

"Just the one."

She stuck out one thin-fingered hand. "Fine, I'll be your friend instead. My name's Amelia."

"Phil. Uh. Well, you already said that. My name, I mean."

"I said your whole name!" Amelia protested. "You didn't tell me I could call you something shorter until now. But that's what friends are for, right? You can call me Amy."

Flora had never seen Phil so flustered before. It was more than a little bit cute. "Can I still call you Amelia instead?"

"It's pretty formal-sounding, but maybe you're a formal kind of guy." Amelia winked at him. "I won't complain. What kind of work do you do here?"

Phil shrugged. "Mostly janitorial. I used to do a lot of tech stuff, but."

"But?" She glanced over his shoulder again. "Your friend is talking up a storm."

"Yeah," Phil sighed. "He's saying I don't do any work here. And when I do, I do it wrong."
"Wow. And you've been here for how many years?"

"Uh… jeez. Going on twenty, I think." He scratched his thinning hair.

"Twenty years only doing work when you do it wrong!" Amelia cheered. "You must be the king of skiving off. Technician royalty. Are there myths and legends about you? Do you have a fan club?"

Flora recognized the look on his face. He got it whenever anyone expressed interest in him as a human being. It was a look of disbelief, like he expected the rug to come out from under his feet at any second. It was a Wettle kind of look. "I can't tell if you're joking or not." He was half-smiling anyway. "I mean, you are joking. But I can't figure out why."

"Because I don't know anybody here, and you're the only one who looks uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable, too." Amelia had her hands clasped behind her back, and she was swaying back and forth, a picture of innocence. "If we're both uncomfortable together… that kinda sounds wrong. I don't know where I was going with that."

"Did sound kind of dirty." Phil blinked. In the mirror, Doug's scars were vibrating like guitar strings. "Sorry."

"What're you sorry about?" Amelia laughed. "It was my phrasing, not yours." She looked over his shoulder yet again. "Does he ever shut up?" She craned her neck further, and addressed the shivering spectre. "We're trying to have a conversation here, buddy!"

"He won't look at you," Phil explained.

"But he can hear me?"

"Oh, yeah. He'll be misinterpreting anything you say for the rest of the day, and telling me all about it."

"If it's all misinterpretation, it must be pretty easy to ignore, right?"

He winced. "You'd think that."

"I'll just have to make sure I'm super direct and clear about my intentions with you, then. So there's nothing to misinterpret. Does that sound good?"

He still clearly couldn't believe this conversation was happening, but he'd apparently decided to roll with it. "It sounds pretty good. Yeah. Okay."

"Awesome." Amelia stuck out her hand, and he took it like he wasn't entirely sure what to do with it. He figured it out eventually, and Flora inwardly cheered. "Since you're my new best friend, and I've gotten the briefing, and I think everyone else in the room has already gotten the pamphlet… where, would you say, could we go to have a chat? I'd like to know everything there is to know about this place."

Phil managed to look lost, in a place he'd occupied for about twenty years. "The Chief would know better than I do." He winced. All of them forgot from time to time that for now, there actually was no Chief. The Director was finding Flora's grandfather hard to replace, and it was generally suspected that he didn't much want to. The previous Director, she'd heard, had experienced a similar hangup when Ilse Reynders had gone into the incinerator and left AcroAbate without its own Chief.

The thoroughly flustered senior technician was about to answer Amelia's question, when instead he turned to look at the mirror. "Yes, Doug. Pretty much everybody would know everything better than I do."

Amelia laughed. It was a warm, open sound. "I'm not friends with pretty much everybody yet, and I probably never will be. I'm very selective. Just like Doug!" She leaned her hip away from him, and her head towards. "So, where to?"

He blew out his cheeks. "Uhh, the cafeteria, I guess?"

"Sounds like a plan! You look like you could use a good meal, anyway. If you don't mind my saying."

Judging from the look on his face, he didn't mind at all.

McInnis paused, keycard in hand. The biometrics reader was still socketed away in its casing; it wouldn't come out until he swiped the card, unless he went another route and attempted voice verification. The Director's Complex admitted entry to only two persons, out of the Site's population of over one thousand.

Unless entry was forced, as it apparently had been now.

The security sweep showed that the disturbance had been limited to the first few rooms of the complex.

The interloper, or interlopers, had been unable to gain access to the Director's private rooms; that level of security was far in advance of what was defending his assistant's quarters, and the reception rooms where they'd all bunkered down in the third deadline.

Whether frustrated in their efforts or finding themselves exactly where they wanted to be, the result had been the same for whoever had broken and entered.

Zulfikar's rooms had been ransacked.

And Zulfikar himself was gone.

"So, you're pretty close with Philip Deering."

Torosyan nodded. "He's my friend. My best friend."

Karen tented her fingers in front of her, just as she'd seen McInnis do a hundred times. But she thought she brought more grace to the gesture. Her fingers were longer, for starters. "I'm glad to hear that. You like him a lot?"

Already there was a wariness in the technician's eyes. "He's a good guy. A bit down on himself, but he would be, right? What with the thing. You know."

Karen didn't smile, but she did try to keep her glare as friendly as possible. Her spartan office was already making the other woman uncomfortable enough. It did that to everybody. "I know. You're not bothered by…" She decided to try a little vernacular. Torosyan was, after all, an orange collar worker. "The thing?"

"It's not like it's the thing from The Thing. It doesn't kill people. Well…" Torosyan looked to the side, as though she felt bad talking about her friend's more intimate issues without him being present. "He feels really guilty about Dr. Bradbury. Keeps saying he wants to call her, but he isn't sure if she'd want to hear from him."

"Best he puts a pin on that. Dr. Bradbury's situation is a complicated one. But it wasn't his fault, what happened." Karen had her own counsel on whose fault that had been. Well, she thought it was her own, anyway.

"You'd think he'd know that," Torosyan agreed, "and maybe he does, like, academically, but he doesn't really believe it. But no, it doesn't bother me. It bothers me that it's bothering him. He doesn't deserve to have all that garbage flung at him all day long. He needs a break."

Karen nodded. "Again, that's good to hear. We have a little… unofficial project in the works, to keep Phil in good spirits." This time she did smile. She liked to parcel those out sparingly. Keep the value up with rarity. "Something we've been working on for quite a few years."

Torosyan's smile was incandescent.

Karen hated her just a little for it. I thought you came from Site-19, for chrissake. "I'm all ears. If it's a surprise birthday party thing, I've got his gift already picked out."

It was difficult not to laugh in derision. "No, nothing like that. This is privileged information, Amelia. You can't tell him I've talked to you about this. It's above your clearance level, and this conversation is provisional."

The tech frowned. "Weird? But if that's how it is, that's how it is. I won't break clearance confidentiality."

"Good. What's the nature of your friendship with Phil?"

Now she was definitely getting suspicious. "We hang out a lot. Every day, pretty much. We're on the same schedule. We watch movies. Go topside sometimes, when he remembers his sunscreen. Had a snowball fight not too long ago. We have some fun."

"Is that all you're interested in?"

The frown reached her eyes and forehead. "Meaning?"

"Have you ever considered beginning a romantic relationship with Philip Deering?"

The other woman's blue-green eyes widened. "That… is a very strange question to ask."

"But have you?" Karen pressed.

"I'm starting to get this picture forming in my mind." The smile was gone now. Torosyan actually looked like she might be getting angry. "Are you… trying to arrange dates for Phil?"

"If I was, would you be interested?"

"No."

"I see." Karen turned to her terminal, and keyed in the code for her shift schedule. On to the next item.

"And I think that's disgusting," Torosyan continued.

Karen didn't look back at her. "Well."

"Let me guess. There's financial compensation if I say yes."

"There's an honorarium," Karen nodded. Still she didn't make eye contact.

Get the picture, would you? This meeting is over.

"Of course there is." Torosyan apparently wasn't going to let this go. "And it looks real good on my annual report, right? Marks me down as extra cooperative."

Karen sighed, and finally graced her angry visitor with a look straight down the sides of her nose. "It's an important HR initiative. Technician, you don't have to get angry about this. It's fine that you aren't interested. But you have to know, there are more important considerations here than the dignity of one man. Technician Deering—"

"—doesn't need you to hang sausages around his neck so the dogs will play with him, doctor." Torosyan stood up, and Karen saw that her hands were in fists. "I'm not his friend because I think I'm going to win fabulous prizes for it. He's not a pity case, and he's not a project. And I don't think you want me to say what I think of anyone who'd take you up on the offer you just made."

"We're all trying to do what's best, Amelia." Perhaps a little familiarity might help.

"For who? Not for Phil."

"For everyone."

"You know who worries about everyone? Actually worries about them?" Torosyan was fuming. The freckles on her cheeks were almost invisible against the bright red. "My best friend. I'm glad I can't tell him what you people think about him. Like he's some threat they need to manage. Phil's what everyone here should be. He's got problems, but he's working on them. He wouldn't go behind anyone's back like this."

"You're on the promotion track, I understand," Karen remarked evenly. "It's possible you'll be Phil's boss some day."

"He has seniority."

"And he has baggage. He'll never be the Chief of J&M, when we finally get another one of those. What are you going to do if you have power over him?" Karen stood, to look her in the eye. "If you have access to information about him that even he hasn't seen? How are you going to balance that?"

"Whatever way works out best for everyone." Most people would have backed down under Karen's stare, even across the desk. Not, apparently, Amelia Torosyan. "Him, and me, and the Site too."

"What if you have to choose?" Karen pressed.

"Then I'll choose what's right. And that means choosing him."

Pensak investigated the disappearance, but not very carefully. Just enough to make it look like he was doing his job. When he found the first piece of evidence pointing at what he already suspected was the cause, he had the Day Trippers take him to the classified airfield, and made the trans-Atlantic journey to Site-06.

The one they'd built to replace the one that had blown up when his prime suspect had first escaped.

She looked a little worse for wear, but Imogen Tarrow was still identifiable as herself.
"Been a long time since I had a visitor," she told him.

"No more friends to spring you from jail?" Pensak sat down.

Tarrow leaned across the table, twisted sideways as though sharing a sensitive confidence. "They've got more important things to deal with."

"That must be embarrassing for you."

"Embarrassing for you, more like." She grinned. "The Foundation doesn't even register as a threat, by comparison."

"You remember Chief Ibanez."

Tarrow's grin faltered a little, but not entirely. "Of course."

"You remember, maybe, that she wasn't the patient sort."

"I got that impression."

"I am much less patient than Chief Ibanez." Pensak made no move to get comfortable. He didn't even pull the chair towards the table. The message was clear: play ball, and soon, or I'm taking my jet back home. "I don't want to hear any apocalyptic rhetoric. If you start rambling about how I don't really know what's going on, how there's all these magnificent secrets I haven't heard, all these threats arrayed against me whose might I can't begin to comprehend, blah blah blah, I am going to walk out of here, and I am going to leave a note in your file, and that note is going to recommend that you be kept in permanent solitary confinement. And nobody is ever going to visit you again."

A little verbal reinforcement was always good, once the body had expressed its own language.

Tarrow looked impressed. "You're scarier than she was. And she was very scary."

"I don't have to be scary at all. I'm very reasonable. Just tell me what I need to know."

"Okay." She gave him her most guileless look. It was almost convincing. "What do you need to know?"

"Someone kidnapped the Director's assistant. I have a hunch you might know why. Do you know why?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"So you'd come here," Tarrow smiled. "And talk to me."

Pensak nodded. "He's dead."

"Oh, probably." Tarrow shrugged. "I didn't take him. And I don't know where he is."

"They did this so I'd come here." She'd already said as much, but he repeated it to fix the fact in his mind. "Why?"

"So you and I can talk, I guess. Why do you think that is?" There was a whole lot of depth in the woman's dark brown eyes. "Why would they want you to talk to me?"

"I guess that depends on who they are. The giftschreiber?"

She nodded.

"I'm guessing they don't want to turn themselves in."

"Very likely not."

"Then what?"

"I'm a pretty good judge of character. Know what I think, when I look at you? I promise this is relevant."

He turned his palms up, a gesture of acceptance.

"I see a man of flexible morals. That's why you were hired. That's why you've proven good at your job. You're loyal, when it gets you the best result. You're a good person, when it gets you the best result. They've never seen what you're like when those facts don't hold. Am I correct?"

He knew there'd been a reason he'd made sure the cameras were turned off before coming in. "I'm Chief of Security at an SCP facility. They've checked out my background, backwards and forwards. They know they can trust me. And they do."

"Should they?"

"Yes."

"Should they." Her eyes had narrowed to the sleepiest of slits.

"Yes."

"It's good to see the truth written on your face." She drummed the table suddenly enough to startle him, though he was sure it didn't show through whatever Tarrow thought she was already seeing there. "I have a couple of leads for your investigation."

"I thought you didn't know anything about the kidnapping," he remarked wryly.

"I don't. But it's not like you're really investigating that, now, is it?"

The first lead was the number of another cell at Site-06. Pensak wasn't a fan of scavenger hunts, but he could stand to walk down a single hallway, so he did.

"Who the hell are you?" Rudolph Marroquin demanded as the guard opened his door. Unlike Tarrow, whose interrogation had been scheduled ahead of time, the scruffy former tech chief and Maxwellist mole was still in his squalid living space. Bed, bookshelf, toilet, sink. Showers were down the hall, and they were communal.

Pensak jerked a thumb over his shoulder as the guard secured the door between them. "Know who I was just talking to?"

"Your rabbi."

Pensak leaned on the door. "Imogen Tarrow."

Marroquin laughed, and looked up at the ceiling.

"She seems to think you and I should have a chat," said Pensak.

"She say what about?" Marroquin stretched out on his bunk, and fluffed up the sad little pillow. Not that it did much good.

"No. Somebody kidnapped the Director's assistant yesterday, sent me here to talk to her. Now I'm talking to you. For about five more minutes, then I'm writing all of this off as a bad fucking joke."

"So the gifties sent you to us, huh." Marroquin slid his hands behind his head, beneath the pillow. He nodded at what he'd been staring fixedly at since lying down. "Probably safe to say those cameras aren't recording anymore."

"Why would they not be recording?"

"Because they've got people everywhere, chief. Or is that Chief? You look arrogant enough for it. What's your name?"

"None of your business." Pensak crossed his arms. "What's the game here, Marroquin? What are the giftschreiber? Really?"

"You don't know?"

"I don't know."

"And you're the Chief of Security?" He laughed again. "That really is a laugh."

"You ever try laughing with a broken nose?"

"You really want to try breaking my nose." Marroquin's expression instantly shifted to a corpse-like neutrality. So, he was a sociopath. That was no great surprise. "Go ahead. I'm excited to see what happens."

"Look." Pensak kicked off the door, and moved to loom over the older man. "I've had it just about up to here with these death cults and their bullshit. Nobody tells me anything, because it's all classified at the highest levels, and only about a dozen people really know what's going on. Someone wants me to know what you people know, and if you're in bed with them—"

"Buddy, I was in bed with everybody." Marroquin patted his thin mattress. "Wanna join?"

"—then it's probably to your benefit to help me out, here."

"Because what? I scratch your back, you'll… break me out of prison?" Marroquin shook his head. "You don't seem the type. I don't see a lot of sympathy in those eyes. You've got the face of a self-preservation artist."

"I read your file." Pensak examined the man's little library. It was all romance novels and high fantasy. Probably they wouldn't let a machine cultist have science fiction. Certainly they would let him see any technical manuals. "You were caught helping the Maxwellists infiltrate 43. Was that just a blind? Were you working for the giftschreiber?"

"Sure." Marroquin yawned. "But isn't that what you want to hear? How can you trust it?"

"I'm not trusting anything you say. I just want to hear you say it, so I can sort the lies from the truth. Why would you work for them? You're not an idealist. You're no cultist. You don't believe in anything. You blackmailed your whole staff for money."

"Ah. Now I see it." Marroquin finally looked satisfied. "In your eyes, right there. Right in the corners. You're an opportunist. The Foundation's your grift."

"They gave me a new life." Pensak straightened his jumpsuit at the waist. "And something to do with it."

"And a foxhole to hide from your creditors, eh? Or are you just a big man with big, expansive plans your pocketbook wasn't gonna cover? You embezzling funds from the bullpen cookie jar? Or are you a big time operator, Chief?" Marroquin chuckled. "Amazing. You're not bleeding them at all, are you. But you, you're bleeding. That's in the cheeks. You need a cash transfusion, don't you?"

Pensak didn't answer.

"Know why I knew you were a cop? It wasn't the fucking jumpsuit. I could picture a little white envelope in that big, calloused hand. See it plain as day."

"If you're about to tell me the chaos cult has deep pockets, I'm about to laugh at you."

"Nah, the cult's not much on money. They won't need it when they reach Shangri-La or whatever bullshit they're planning. No, for deep pockets, you want something big and stable. A government, say."

"You're not talking about the cult now."

Marroquin's teeth were unnaturally white. "No. I'm talking about the Insurgency."

Tarrow's second 'lead' led him to a small hospital room containing what he at first took to be a corpse, but then he noticed it was breathing. It had what looked like an esophageal tube and a colostomy bag, and the lids on one eye were sewed shut. On closer inspection, the sewed lid sagged like there was nothing at all behind it.

Pensak wasn't sure what he was meant to see, until he saw it. Then he couldn't un-see it.

It was certainly something to think about.

"Sleazy prick, isn't he?" Tarrow asked as Pensak closed the door again.

"Marroquin?" He shrugged. "A greasy prick in a tight place. They always get in there eventually."

Tarrow clicked her tongue, twice. "Nice."

Pensak sat down, and this time he pulled the chair up. "I want to make very sure I understand what's being offered, here."

"Was it somehow subtle?"

"If I'm going to do this, I'll need assurances."

Tarrow turned her head, as though addressing an invisible partner. "He knows the script. He's rehearsed."

"I've seen enough movies to know that money's not worth much when the world ends. I want to know that the world isn't going to end."

Tarrow shrugged. "Easy enough to manage."

"Is it?"

"Sure. Play both sides against each other."

He frowned. "Both sides?"

"They fight each other to a standstill, and the world keeps on ticking. You keep getting your kickbacks. Everybody's happy."

"Sorry, what's the other side again?"

She told him.

"You're joking."

"If they'd let you read their files, you'd have said it more like YOU'RE JOKING." He didn't flinch when she shouted, but she reached out to make an appeasing pat pat gesture as though he had. "Sorry, sorry. But seriously. If you told them that… you're not going to tell them that, are you?"

"Why would I? What's in it for me?"

"Might get you a promotion, if they think you stung this information out me."

He rolled his eyes. "Promotions past where I am get you no more money and a lot more responsibilities."

"Life extension, though."

"I don't want that."

She looked genuinely surprised for the first time. "Why not?"

"Because I get this funny feeling that if I live longer than I'm meant to, I'll see that little cold war ending with a bang."

"So you're happy taking bribes, with the understanding that you're helping to make the world a whole lot worse, for its inevitable slide into anarchy and destruction, as long as it happens after you're dead?"

"Should I make an offended face, profess my innocence, express a little guilt?" He chuckled. "I'm very good at faking those things."

"No thanks. Truth be told, I'm not a very patient person either. You want to hear the next steps or not, Chief?"

Pensak rolled up his sleeves. "Call me Roger. And I'm all ears."

They'd never had the heart to do it themselves — not McInnis, not the ASC, not even Karen Elstrom — but the Foundation's policies were almost uniformly unsentimental. Noè Nascimbeni was now officially retired. Unlike Melissa Bradbury, he wasn't expected to get better and contest that decision.

They were going to have to replace him.

In his capacity as Chief of Janitorial and Maintenance, that wasn't expected to be a problem. The machine he'd built had kept buzzing along just fine in his absence, by design. His design.
In his other capacity… well.

They'd just have to wait and see.

It was possible the dead would be far more discriminating than were the living.

"No, sir. Other than the financial trouble, he checks out."

McInnis nodded. "I'm relieved to hear it. You're certain?"

The S&C agent was visibly far too old for field work, which was probably why McInnis hardly ever saw the man. He had a vague recollection, but nothing more. "Unless every file we accessed has been compromised, which Chief Veiksaar assures me cannot be the case, then yes. Quite certain."

McInnis clasped his hands, and thumped the blotter once as a full stop to the debriefing. "Excellent. It goes without saying that Chief Pensak must never be aware he is under investigation."

The agent raised an eyebrow. "Is, sir?"

"Yes."

"I'll leave the file open, then."

"Yes," McInnis nodded. "Unofficially, as before."

"Very good, sir."

The agent made no move to leave.

"I recall you had a second piece of business to discuss with me, Agent…?"

"Scrivens, sir."

"I must be getting old. I don't forget names that easily."

Scrivens smiled warmly. "It's not you, it's me."

McInnis looked at him askance. "Do I need to call security? That seems awfully redundant."

"No, sir. You're in no danger." Scrivens pulled up one of the visitor's chairs, and sat down. "I've already spoken to Dr. Blank about this, but he thought I should tell you personally. You'll be able to remember my identity properly soon, as the effect fully fades."

"What effect?"

"I believe you call it the Forgotten War?"

Lillian looked like she might faint. "We did what?!"

Harry flopped onto the couch, and buried his face in a pillow. "I know."

Lillian sat on his shins, none too gently. "And we hid it from ourselves?!"

He turned over, with no help at all from her, and sighed. "We're too smart for our own good, I always say."

They had always assumed that the Forgotten War, their term for the giftschreiber losing focus on Site-43 and refocusing elsewhere, was the result of some accidental memetic effect blowing up in everyone's face. There was precedent. The Antimemetics Division wasn't the Foundation's first department of that nature.

Finding out that it had been an intentional Foundation plot was more than a little bit shocking.

Harry had just finished the database file, his first Explained-class anomaly. SCP-5054-EX, which he was now colloquially calling "The Memetic Myth of Joe Who?" The short version was that the giftschreiber had tried to destabilize Canada in the 1979 federal election, as a way of putting pressure on Site-43 and the Foundation at large — to the extent that anything centred on Canada could pressure anything outside of it — and had created a conceptual void that could only be filled by the Foundation creating a fake Prime Minister from first principles, shadowplaying a whole year of national governance, and imbuing the nation's symbols with a version of the Frontispiece effect.

Vivian Scout was implicated. Thilo Zwist was implicated, and Harry intended to give the old man an earful over it. Agents Charles Scrivens and Maureen McTeer were also implicated, because the first was the false politician himself, alias Charles Joseph Clark, and the second was his wife. The effect had been so strong that even Foundation personnel could not resist it, and a safeguard to ensure that all would be explained when the problem was solved had badly failed, so it was only now that the truth became known. Harry had met Scrivens at his home, interviewed him, pinned the results to the ten thousand word mess he'd been able to cobble together on the topic, and retired to the dorms to tell Lillian about it, and then probably cry.

Lillian didn't look nearly as upset, however. "It's kinda fun, I think."

"How is it fun," he growled.

"We thought it was just more of that grim, world-ending bullshit. But it wasn't. It wasn't even different grim, world ending bullshit, like it was with… Bernie." She sniffed, once, and not for the first time he wished there was some way Lillian could let go of at least some of her immaculate memories. "This was just ridiculous, the entire time."

"Well." Harry reached down, and almost immediately from beneath the coffee table, a wet nose appeared to sniff at his fingertips. "I mean, the gifted kids did try to fuck us up, real bad. And they're going to try harder, now that the effect is gone. Especially with what we're going to try and do in September."

"Yeah, yeah." Lillian stretched back on the couch, still sitting on his legs. They were going numb. "I just think it's nice that despite everything, despite everything we know — sorry, everything I know — there's always something new to discover. It's a wholeass world of experimental possibilities out there, Harry old chum."

Scout, the cat, leapt up onto Harry's chest. He was extraordinarily spry for such an ancient creature, by the standards of his time.

"Experimental possibilities," Harry repeated. A picture was suddenly forming.

Lillian closed her eyes. She was probably about to take a nap. "Ayup."

"Lillian, did you drug my fucking cat?"

"God dammit."

Pensak hadn't ever heard McInnis curse. He wondered if anyone had. "I'm sorry, sir," he said. It probably even sounded like he meant it.

They were standing in the Site's morgue. Pensak had brought the corpse in himself, after dragging it out of the ditch and calling in a ride from Ibanez. The tip had been good, because of course it had.

"Damn." The Director looked like he wanted to punch something. "Damn."

"We'll find whoever did this." It was an empty promise, but then, they all would be from now on.

"I doubt that very much." The older man's voice was suddenly flat and without affect.

Uh oh. "Sir?"

"If they were able to get to Zulfikar, they had help." McInnis' grey eyes somehow managed an angry flash. "The entire Foundation might be compromised."

"That seems a bit of a leap from one kidnapping." Pensak was fully aware of the irony of this statement. He hoped that awareness wasn't the kind of thing an expert communicator might be able to read on someone's face. Oh, but the next few years were going to be very interesting.

"These people couldn't even focus on the Site properly until before this was done. They couldn't have done it unless they had agents on the inside. It's been happening right under my nose."

"You can't blame yourself, sir."

McInnis stopped himself halfway through a dismissive gesture. "As a matter of personal preference and leadership style, Chief, I consider myself the only justifiable target for blame."

"What should we do about it, though? The potential infiltration?"

The Director zipped up the body bag, very delicately, and said something Pensak couldn't hear before something Pensak could. "Coordinate with Chief Ibanez. We're going to start cracking down hard on the giftschreiber."

"Which ones? Neuer or Alte?"

"Both."

Pensak smiled. He let the other man think it was in anticipation of righteous vengeance.

The Book of the Turning Gyre sat on table, between Nass and Corbin on the one side and Udo on the other. It was time for the final analysis.

"What can we say for certain," Nass asked them, in his natural role as facilitator — meaning, as Corbin would have it, that he had no useful skills, but a pleasant enough face — "based on what we've read?"

The other theologian looked bored. "Those who can, write. Those who can't, giftschreibe."

"I'm pretty sure that's an incorrect conjugation," Udo smiled.

Corbin shot her a sly look. "Sorry. Been a long time since I conjugated."

Nass rubbed his chin; Udo thought he was probably erasing the first traces of a smile. "If we could focus? On the book, I mean."

"Sure." Corbin kicked back, and her boots thudded on the desk. "So, first things first. This is a how-to manual for ending the world."

"And the how is pretty weird," said Udo. "Robertson is using a universal schema first conceived of by Yeats."

"And he hasn't got the poetic chops to make it work. That's not a random diss, I think it's an important element of what's going on here." Corbin twirled her cigarette. She hardly ever smoked them anymore, but she did seem to like to hold them. "The giftschreiber have this idea about how the world works, and how to make it stop working, but none of them are individually talented enough to actually exploit the information."

Nass nodded. "So, the schema. History is twin, interlocked gyres of chaos and order, waxing in waning in inverse proportion. An era of rationality gives way to an era of irrationality."

Corbin tapped the cigarette on her cheek. "Except it's hard to phrase that objectively, because our perspective always privileges order over disorder. Peace over war. Rationality over irrationality. The giftschreiber obviously don't think they're moral equivalents either — they're very much in the chaos camp — but the model doesn't admit of such easy categorization. It's just two poles of reality. Two halves of the human civilization-brain."

"According to Robertson," said Udo, "every act of radical subversion accelerates the chaos spiral."

Corbin thumped one sole on the desktop. "Which suggests, conversely, that every act of excessive control does the same to the gyre of order."

Finishing Corbin's thoughts, or vice-versa, had proven a very satisfying pastime over the previous year. "Each gets a season, and then the season changes, and then it changes again. Cyclical. Winding up, winding down. But crucially, they don't wind down without a push. That's not in Yeats." She glanced up at the light fixtures, and narrowed her eyes. "I can say this with authority. Harry talked my ear off about Yeats."

"Poetry is romantic," Corbin grinned.

But Udo, as usual, wasn't having it. "Not when you dissect it. Nothing is romantic when you dissect it."

"Might we assume, then," Nass cut in, "that the erased entity you encountered was a means of achieving, as Robertson puts it, 'knock'? A concretization of anarchy, a concept given form?"

"Except he talked like he'd been around forever," said Udo.

Corbin was back to twirling her prop again. "That isn't necessarily contradictory. If he is chaos, like an avatar of it, the transformation from concept to neural pathways might have translated the long chain of cause and effect into simple memory. He might 'remember' being a part of every act of excessive chaos ever conducted."

She shook her head. "I don't think so. We've been plenty chaotic ourselves, even as we've been trying to re-establish order, so if that were the case, the Uncontained would have known our every move. And he didn't. We beat him." She paused. "Chief Nascimbeni beat him."

She made a mental note to visit the hospital after their meeting.

"So—" Nass began, but Corbin interrupted him.

"Hey, wait a second."

He nodded. "Yes?"

"Udo, that's how you'd characterize it?" Without warning, the boots were back under the table and the chair had all four legs on the floor again. "What you guys were doing?"

"Eh?

"Re-establishing order?"

She shrugged. "Well, yeah. The Victims tore everything up, and we put it back together. They made a mess, and we cleaned it up."

"Huh."

"I think I know where you're going with this."

Corbin laughed. "I'm not sure I know where I'm going with this."

"It's something I've thought about a lot. But there's a mental block in place, and…" Suddenly, she felt as though she was the one whose stomach had just turned a somersault. "And I think I know why."

Even though it was her dorm room, Udo was almost never the one to set a meeting's agenda. But this time was different. For starters, it was a one-on-one.

"I figured it out," she said.

Lillian was picking at the fabric of her recliner. She'd already plucked one entire armrest bare. "You figured what out?"

"All of it."

"That's a tall order." There was a faint ripping sound as a long thread came loose, and Lillian quickly dropped her elbow to hide the damage. "I'm going to be very angry with you if you're right."

"We can't just stop the explosion that kills the Uncontained, when the Breach happens this year. We need to find a way to stop the orphic outflow from blowing the gaskets in AO." Udo could feel her cheeks burning, either with pride or the radiation from her brightly gleaming eyes. "We need to keep that containment cell from flooding."

"Uh, you sure about that? Because it sounds an awful lot like changing the natural course of events."

"The natural course of events is wrong." She gave that a moment to sink in, but because it hadn't yet been proven, it bounced off Lillian in a way that was almost audible. "That's why I can't remember anything I do during the Breach. The thing that happened there, it was the most important thing."

Lillian snorted. "I liked you better when you had confidence issues."

"I'm serious. That's one of the two keys to the entire thing. Del Olmo was interviewing the Uncontained, and when the Uncontained got vaporized, it got aerosolized. God particles stuck to the Victims. We know that part." They only knew it now, now that it had been conclusively proven, now that they had met the beast itself. They'd been unable to focus on the question for a decade and a half before that, because human brains abhorred a noöspheric vacuum.

"Right…"

"And something else was happening in the containment cell where I was, of equal importance. Equal…"

"…and opposite?"

"And opposite."

Lillian's blue eyes were unfocusing and refocusing rapidly, like blinkenlights. "You're suggesting…"

"I wasn't alone in there. I was with someone else. Someone who got vaporized. Just like his—"

They said the word at the same time.

Lillian shook her head. "But, listen to yourself. If it's the same thing, more or less, why didn't we get possessed too?"

"Who's saying we didn't?"

Sokolsky found her in the cafeteria.

Lillian much preferred her office, where nobody ever came calling unexpectedly, but sometimes she needed the background chatter. Other people talking was like putting a stupid sitcom on in the background while you studied for your test.

Because they had to pass this test, or the rest of the term would be in serious doubt.

"You're looking thoughtful this evening." He sat down across from her, a plate of salad on his tray.

She blinked until she could see him clearly. "As opposed to what?"

"Mindful."

She shook her head. "Mindfulness is for yogis."

"What's eating you?" He took a bite of lettuce. Only a lunatic would eat unseasoned lettuce on its own.

"I'm reflecting on the nature of self."

"Your self, or…" He scoffed. "Why am I even asking? So, what about your self?"

"I'm wondering how much of it really is me. We had an unpleasant revelation earlier today."

"Of what nature?"

"Inhuman nature. Mine. Ours." She watched as he picked up the pepper shaker, and started making the lettuce either better or worse, depending on your perspective. "I think we've been infected by something, and it's changed the people we are."

He looked thoughtful, but not for long. "I do not think that."

"You haven't even heard the explanation yet," she scowled.

"Am I likely to?"

"No," she sighed. "I have to tell the group first. We have to. Udo figured it out." She sighed more profoundly. "I hate it when people figure things out before me. Especially when I have all the facts."

"Worst thing about facts is that sometimes feelings get results faster." He scarfed down another length of slightly spicy green.

"Rarely better results." She leaned away from him, let her arms fall over the back of the chair, and watched the smattering of night owls working their way through whatever they were eating, or talking about. "You ever wonder if we're doing the right thing? I mean, in general. Are we wasting our time? Wasting our talents? Doing what other people want, instead of… I dunno. What we could be doing."

"No. I never do what other people want. I only do what I want. And so do you."

"Except I have the most horrible sense that I've been doing someone else's bidding for the last seventeen years."

"What would you have done differently?" he asked, with his mouth full.

"I don't know."

He swallowed. "Would you have still tried to figure out the Breach?"

She glared at him out of the corners of her eyes. "Of course. It's the weirdest thing that's ever happened around here. I'd be all over it."

"Would you have done all the stuff you did with Antimemetics?"

"Yeah. That was all me."

"Would you have had sex with me?"

She laughed, and sat up straight again. "That was definitely all me."

"Well, that strikes me as everything important." At the bottom of the lettuce was a single large tomato. He put down his fork, and picked it up. "I guess there's the stuff you overvalue, too. Would you have still kept in touch with your friends? Harry?"

"Harry's been my best friend since before I was sapient. Well, before he was sapient. Yes."

"The others?"

"Maybe not Allan. Or Nascimbeni. Probably not Willie."

Sokolsky held the tomato in front of his eyes, as though it were an apple he was inspecting for spots. "You're not really friends, or in touch, with Willie anyway."

"That's true. I'd probably be tripping over him just the same. It's just… I don't know." There were no three words she hated more, in that configuration. "I don't think this affects who I am, at all. I don't think it affects who any of us are. I think it gave us new tools, and I think we used them the way our personalities and needs dictated. But it does feel sort of like finishing a game and then finding out you had a cheat code enabled the entire time."

"What if the game was broken?" he suggested. "And you couldn't beat it without—"

"Better," she nodded. "The other side was already cheating. This just evened the score. Yeah. Yeah!" She slapped the table, and the silverware jumped. "That actually helped. Thank you."

He bowed his head. "Happy to. You figure large in my future schemes, Lillian. I need you safe and sane."

And, again as though it were an apple, he took a big bite out of the tomato.

She watched him eat. It was almost meditative. "I think I might need a break from schemes."

"No idea what that feels like," he shrugged. "But sure." The entire thing was gone in seconds, and he dabbed at his serviette daintily to get the juice off the ends of his fingers. "I'm working on something, have been for a good long while, but it won't pop for a few more years. You've got time to take a breather."

"Why is this not reassuring me?" She wanted to chuckle, but it didn't come out right at all. "Don't you think maybe, just maybe the world would be a better place to live in if people weren't always planning and plotting and—"

"Hell no." He shoved the tray into the middle of the table. "Absolutely I do not. Having plans moves life forward. Being proactive is living, as opposed to simply reacting. Having schemes means… well." And he grinned that selachian grin. "Living a unique life."

She twisted away again, but drummed at the tabletop with the fingers of her right hand. "I couldn't have schemed up a more unique life than this one if I'd tried."

He took the hand in his own, and halted the percussion. "If you believed that, you wouldn't be half the woman you are. You might only be just above perfect."