Title: Endless Winter Mile
Author: Brix
Rating: R
Pairing: Sark/Sydney
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. Imitation is the highest form of compliment.
Spoilers: Through Season 3. Takes place three months after the finale.
Warnings: Character death – it’s an ensemble cast on a spy show. Come on. We all know this.
Feedback: Flowers need water and writers need feedback. Be kind, water a writer today. shadesofbrixton@gmail.com
Archive: Take it anywhere, but drop me a line so I know where it goes.
Author’s Notes: All the chapter titles belong to Hamlet. The title is cribbed from a George Herbert quote. With many superfluous thanks to Gabby Silang and her band of merry men, Hoopyfroodcat and his Alias Lexicon Brain, Sydney Real for her miraculous plot hole solutions, and Kyri, Jules, and the rest for their unwavering support and dedication. And, of course, to Rez and Jo, for being them.
“Honest men dream of what scoundrels do.” – Plato
i. prologue to the omen coming on
There was a common misconception on the East Coast, that no one had winters like the East Coast had winters. Even the Midwest, with their devastating sleet and often Arctic-like blizzards held no candle to the strife that the North-East coast of the United States went through during its six months of winter. From record snowfall to flat, expressionless gray skies, there was nothing worse than wintering on the Atlantic edge.
Which was why there was also a well-documented history of the rest of the states in the Union finding fault with California winters. Despite the ski resorts and winter holiday vacation packages that many areas of California offered, it was all too-often written off as a warm-weather state, abandoned bitterly during the colder months by its forty-nine relatives as a non-suffering province. The truth, however, was far from the perception. There were many areas of California that had debilitating snowfall. For the past thirty years, places like Leavitt Meadows, Squaw Valley, and Independence Lake had averaged up to sixty inches of powdery, crystal beauty as late as April. Not a statistic to be mocked, surely.
Nevertheless, Los Angeles could boast no confidences of having proper winters. Christmas trees were sprayed with fake snow, or purchased in a silver motif, or not at all. Skiers questing for opportunities and adventure traveled east, at least as far as Utah or New Mexico or Colorado, to find their heart’s delight. Children watched seasonal specials filmed in other locales and marveled that one day they would build real snowmen, not just mud piles dressed in old clothes. Snowball fights would be fought with icy, wet vigor – not clods of grass and rocks.
Truth told, Los Angeles hadn’t seen snow in far longer than anyone could really remember. The more detailed participants in the yearly conversation could remember the exact date – January 11, 1949, when the Los Angeles Civic Center had noted its record three-tenths of an inch of snowfall in a twenty-four hour period and its current standing record of 28 degrees Fahrenheit. It had snowed since, of course – several times in the 1950s and most recently in 1962, which some of the younger members of management liked to boast on having played in – but never so much or so quickly accumulated as the record date. Bottom line, trace snow was something to be shocked over in Los Angeles, but certainly not unheard of. Especially with the global cooling (being in an Ice Age, despite the melting of the polar caps) in the early Twenty-First Century, snowfall had been predicted to appear soon. Some were even hoping for a white Christmas.
Before it happened, Sydney Bristow was the kind of girl who could sit on her sofa and read an entire novel back-to-front in a lone Sunday afternoon. She could sip quietly at a glass of wine for hours, pouring over the imaginary lives written down in front of her, living vicariously and with immense joy at the world spun out in her own mind. Before it happened, Sydney was the kind of girl who would spend her warmer evenings jogging to take her mind off of work, off of case files and government responsibilities and inner-office intrigue; or to stop thinking about her mother (or her father, lately, all things considered). Before it happened, Sydney was the kind of girl who was content alone, who had found her place with the world, who had finally let go of the man she loved.
After it happened, Sydney wasn’t any of those things, because there were no books, or glasses, or case files.
After the sky fell, there was nothing.
ii. the time is out of joint
The sound of Sark’s captivity-issued clothes shifting against the pallet in the cell broke Weiss’ concentration. He pushed down the urge to reprimand the man for making noise – he was only moving, Weiss reasoned, and there was certainly no crime in that. Though, after tracking Sark for the better part of his career, it wouldn’t have surprised him if there had been. Besides, he knew he was on edge. Everyone had been, lately, what with all the prophesies and the strange relations coming out of the woodworks. Jack disappearing had made Sydney worse than usual – if that were possible – and Vaughn was just as stressed.
That’s what Weiss told himself.
“It kills you, doesn’t it,” Sark said, his voice drifting quietly up to the ceiling of his cell and out through the holes in the plastic that separated him from the rest of the room. Sark had taken up the nasty habit of speaking to him during his guard shift, one that Weiss had tried to shed him of as well as possible with no real success. Weiss still thought it was completely useless having a person down here to keep an eye on Sark – they had cameras and microphones for that kind of thing. But at this point, they were so pressed for information, even Vaughn thought there might be some merit in trying to get some out of their least reliable source.
“What kills me?” Weiss muttered, flipping through a jauntily colored book of crossword puzzles and scratching out ‘angel’ and ‘angle’ with his stubby pencil, trying to figure out which one was the correct spelling that would fit into 12A. ’90 degree ____’. Able to speak five languages he might, but spelling them was an entirely different matter.
Sark hadn’t moved, one arm propped behind him as he lay on the pallet, facing away from Weiss and staring at the far wall, as if he could see through it. “That they’re out there, and you’re stuck down here, doing double-shifts to watch over me.” It sounded like Sark was talking down a juice-can telephone, the sound was so distorted. Weiss had made one, once, when he was little, much to the dismay of his mother. He and his next door neighbor had strung the line between their houses, but eventually abandoned the project upon discovering that there was no way to make them ring like real telephones so that the person would know the other wanted to talk. And anyway, why bother, when you could just throw tiny pebbles at the window until it slid open?
Weiss looked at the clock. He hadn’t realized it had been a double shift – he was supposed to have been summoned to go over the weekly op-tech report over two hours ago. Time seemed to melt when he was in the subbasements, especially since they were absent of all of the usual noises provided by human traffic when he was in his office, or the briefing room, or doing whatever was expected of him up top.
Down here, all he had to do was sit and bear the lazy insults Sark had boiled himself down to.
Lately, with all the doom-and-gloom soothsaying running rampant in their mission briefs, Weiss had preferred to pull as many shifts in the basements as possible. Anything to get away from those same six faces creased in various states of dismay.
But that didn’t mean he liked babysitting Sark.
Twisting to one side so he could pull out his cell phone, Weiss threw the crossword book and the pencil onto the table and watched in vexation as the Ticonderoga promptly rolled onto the ground. He flipped open the face of the phone, washing his arm in LCD blue screen, and thanked the miracles of CIA wonder that allowed him to get a signal buried feet beneath the earth. And then he swore.
Sark shifted, curious.
“My phone’s broken,” Weiss said, more to himself than the prisoner, prodding lamely at the blank signal bars with a blunt finger. Sark made a frustrated noise, as if he was disappointed at having his study of the featureless cell interrupted, and resumed his visual interrogation of the wall.
Weiss resigned himself to having to go up to the first level of the building and plodded over to the first of the three barred gates that served as additional protection, should Sark somehow escape his plastic fishbowl, and punched the code into the keypad. The gate cranked itself up, and he continued his plod over to the bank of elevators. He punched the “up” button and shoved his hands in his pockets to wait for the elevator, watching the gate crank slowly down behind him.
The elevator didn’t come.
Irritated, he stabbed at the button a few more times. The light didn’t even go on.
Before Weiss could kick at the steel reinforced doors, something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye. He turned to stare at the security camera that focused on the row of elevators, and saw that the red light that indicated it was functioning was flickering on and off.
Abruptly, it faded entirely. Weiss felt cold fingers crawl up his spine.
Whirling, Weiss punched the code back into the exterior keypad, and didn’t bother to watch the gate crawl toward the ceiling as he ran back toward Sark’s prison. As he went, he saw the other cameras blink out one by one. Next to the plastic wall that made up the fourth barrier of Sark’s small room, there was a landline telephone for emergencies. Weiss yanked it to his ear.
Nothing.
Not even static.
He placed it carefully back in the cradle, as if afraid to damage something that was clearly already beyond repair, and saw Sark staring at the three barred gates, face twisted into self-concern.
Weiss stared at him, and then shifted his gaze to the gates, which had halted their movement halfway up. They looked ready to drop at any moment, and Weiss felt that cold clawing at his back again, thinking he would have to crawl back underneath them.
“Something’s gone wrong,” Sark guessed, pushing himself up off his small mattress and padding silently over to Weiss, the thick, scarred plastic separating them. His voice came clearer now, and Weiss had to force himself not to take the involuntary step back. He did shift his weight, though, swinging his gun subconsciously away from Sark’s gaze.
“Don’t ever let anyone call you a pessimist,” Weiss said. But his voice was curled with worry, and he was staring at the phone, not his ward. He picked it up again, snatched it to his ear this time, as if he could catch the dial tone before it hid from him. Still nothing. He tried pressing up and down on the hook switch to change lines, but there was still nothing, He replaced the receiver again, and stared at it.
Sark leaned his forehead up against the plastic, trying to peer around the barrier and utterly failing. “Realist,” he corrected mildly. “What are you doing?”
“Staring at the wall,” Weiss snapped. “Want to give me some tips?”
A sneer curled Sark’s mouth but he dropped to his knees, peering at the padded wall on the opposite side of the telephone. Pulling the cloth taut, he snagged one finger into the fabric and pulled. It ripped with a great wrenching sound, and a large strip of cloth came away, spilling the stuffing out into the room.
“What are you doing?” Weiss demanded, trying to peer around the corner of the plastic just as Sark had. “Stop that. You can’t reach the phone line from the back.”
“Well, you can’t reach it from the front either, now can you?” He pulled stuffing out by the fistful, letting it drift around his feet in great, fluffy clumps. When he reached bare concrete, he frowned and crossed his arms over his chest.
Weiss was leaning one shoulder against the fourth wall, looking sideways at him. “What were you expecting,” his voice came in to Sark distorted by the barrier. “A pry-away panel, like in the James Bond movies?”
“If the power’s gone out, the telephone should still work.”
Weiss squinted at him. “How do you know the power’s out? There’s no indication – ”
Simultaneously – not one by one to create suspense, but in a deep, plummeting, impulsive way – all the lights went out.
“Fuck,” Weiss said.
“So eloquent,” Sark muttered unkindly, his voice moving behind the barrier.
Weiss whipped his head toward the change of location and took a step back from the plastic, his hand on his gun. It was an entirely involuntary reaction and he was disgusted with himself for being so jumpy. He forced himself over to the wall, back to the telephone to investigate.
“No witty quip, Agent Weiss?” His teeth were audible in the taunt, the use of the title an insult in ways the other man didn’t have time to interpret.
“Shut up,” Weiss snapped, running blind fingers over the covered line that ran from the bottom of the telephone. Paint flaked off on his hand as he stooped, following the rectangular bulge as it looped itself along the wall and around the room. Somewhere, if he followed it long enough, he would find a fuse box.
“And dispossess you of both visual and auditory stimulus? I certainly won’t be responsible for your sensory deprivation when we come out of this.” Sark’s disembodied voice was disturbing, and Weiss forced the hackles on the back of his neck down, pushed his attention beyond Sark’s words for sounds that his meaningless prattle might be covering. The prisoner paused, and his voice turned again. Pacing, Weiss finally identified. He’d never seen the man give off any anxious movement before, and it felt odd to be hearing it. “And shouldn’t there be a stairwell, if there are elevators?”
“Activated by a power-run keycode system. You know that, Sark. Now shut up.” There was a clank right next to Weiss’ head and he straightened himself, his hand not leaving the line. The basement level flooded with a bright red glow just in time to show Sark physically startling from the loud sound. The generator powering up, Weiss noted; the flood of relief like melted chocolate in his mouth. Pulling his hand away from the wall, he gave a grin and tapped at the cinderblock. A hollow knock sounded. The generator would be behind the wall. So easy to service when it’s buried behind a foot of plaster.
With a crash, the frozen gates free-wheeled back to the ground, landing and locking abruptly. Weiss closed his eyes and swore indelicately, and Sark raised a pointed eyebrow, backing away from the plastic wall. Of course the generators would cause building-wide lockdown. Power being cut at the CIA, of all places, usually meant a terrorist attack. Regardless of what it was or was not, Weiss would be stuck in the basements until the lockdown was remanded.
With Sark for company.
He covered his eyes with one hand, squinted hard, and fought the urge to slump against the wall.
* * *
It was freezing.
Sydney could tell from the way she woke up – with the sheets tangled around her legs, curled up into a fetal position on her side, the pillows bunched around her – that it was going to be unusually cold, before it even registered in her mind. Not that the latter took overly long, either.
The first thing Sydney could see as she opened her eyes was her breath, spilling out of her nose in a wet mist. It pooled over her hand, leaving her arm feeling like she had waved it through an overburdened rain cloud.
Nose wrinkling, she slapped off her alarm and struggled into the shower, keeping on the balls of her feet in the bathroom to avoid the cold tile and letting her toes curl into the deep pile of the bath rug. It was stained light pink from a wash cycle with an errant red sock. The hot water burned away the cold of sleep, and she cranked the temperature as high as she could, sighing to herself and trying not to let her eyes close again. She could feel herself tinting slowly red from the heat and thanked her contractor’s insistence on solar panels. So much more environment friendly, and so much faster than a hot water heater working on its own.
It had been a long week.
Truth told, it had been a long month.
There were certain things that people were built to withstand, the way Sydney saw it. As a trained government agent, she also figured that her threshold for oddity was maybe – maybe – a little higher than most people. But still, she could really use a vacation. Or a way to shut her brain down when she wasn’t at work anymore – when she was supposed to be getting a full night’s sleep, which had been particularly elusive for the past few days (weeks? she wasn’t terribly sure anymore).
Naturally, it was all her father’s fault.
She scrubbed viciously at her hairline, working the shampoo into a hard lather and making sure she rinsed the rest of the red down the drain. She’d been too exhausted last night to remove the One-Day-Dye from her hair she’d opted for access the nightclub in Las Vegas, and it was now sure to have flaked all over her pillow case, along with a few smudges of mascara and eyeliner for good measure. She grimaced at the thought and made a mental note to throw her sheets into the washing machine before she left for work. There was nothing worse than inadvertently sitting down to put your shoes on, or make sure your stockings were straight, and forgetting that the sheets were covered in glitter. Not even the best lint rollers could get that off a black jacket.
Blinking water out of her eyes, she shut the water off and wrapped a towel around herself, wet footprints fogging momentarily on the tile in her wake. Her thoughts were wrapped up in whether or not her favorite silk sleeveless shirt was clean or still in the “To Be Dry Cleaned Maybe Next Week If There’s Time” pile when she squinted and pulled her towel closer around her. It really was freezing.
Robe first. Coffee second. Temperature issues will be manageable after coffee. She groped in her wardrobe for the robe Francie had given her for Christmas a few years back – the one that only gave her small pangs of remorse nowadays. (Quite unlike the blue silk robe that lay bundled in the steamer trunk at the foot of her bed along with the other items Vaughn had gifted her during their relationship.) She tugged it on and toweled at her hair with one hand, and, mouth set, decided she’d deal with the weather now, thank you. She didn’t need coffee to figure out what to wear. It was January, after all. It was allowed to be a little cool.
Resolutely, she padded over to the window and drew the blinds with a sharp tug.
And dropped the towel with a gasp.
The window – the window was covered. In snow. Sydney choked back a strangled sound and immediately dove for the catches on the window ledge, shoving the poorly-set frame up as well she could, fingers freezing on the brass handles.
The wall of snow didn’t move. She poked at it with a cautious finger and it crunched at her, little drifts of cold and wet scuttling down to pile on the sill. It wasn’t just snow – it was packed snow. Her face twisted in confusion, she slammed the window back down, the small pile of snow drifting down to the carpet and melting slowly in the warmer air.
Sweater, her brain piped up helpfully, and she threw herself into a flurry of motion, dragging on sleek, black skiing foundation leggings under her jeans and a turtleneck underneath her sweater. Formality wasn’t going to work if it was this cold, and she’d shown up at work wearing worse – let Dixon send her home over uniform issues if he had a problem.
Her mouth was still set in a hard line when she stepped back into the bathroom to dry her hair. Only to discover that the hair dryer didn’t work. She flicked it back and forth, furrowed her brow, and tried the light.
Nothing.
She plunged back out into the hallway and snatched the phone from its cradle, cursed herself for having all cordless telephones, and slammed it back into the charger in rapid succession. A cursory check of her cell phone confirmed the suspicion that she would not be able to turn it on. It went into her purse anyway, and, after a moment, the contents of the purse were emptied into her old backpack from school with a quick, violent shake.
Throwing the backpack at the front door, she suppressed a satisfied noise at the sound of the mesh nylon hitting the wood, rubbed her arms, and yanked a coat out of the closet. She had occupied herself looking for a matching set of gloves (instead of the lone brown and black left handed ones she had managed to uncover so far) when something glimmered in the corner of her eye.
The sliding glass door in her kitchen. Eight feet high. Packed with a wall of snow.
Trapped, her brain whispered, and she slapped the thought away. Determined, she cast about for her second glove – found the brown one, pulled them both on and flexed her fingers. Then she took a deep breath and went into the kitchen.
Truth told, the snow had not packed itself eight feet high. There were a few inches of blistering sunlight peeking through an uneven crack at the top. The reassuring sight sent her in a spiral of activity: pack a bag with what she needed for the office. Weapon, identification, nylon-weave line from the supply closet behind the washing machine. Flashlight, bottle of water, first aid kit that had come with the bicycle she’d bought with the intention of giving up running, an activity that reminded her far too much of things she didn’t need on her mind when she was trying to exercise.
She forced herself to slow down, to let her hair dry and eat breakfast. To think things out objectively. To find good boots from a trip to Switzerland, to discover an old skullcap that Vaughn had left (or forgotten) in the bottom of her sock drawer. To fetch the spare maps she had out of the filing cabinet where she kept her bank statements. The real bank, not The Bank. Those had burnt in the apartment fire last year – three years ago, her brain corrected, and she scowled down at her Cheerios.
Everything in the refrigerator was slowly going bad. It wasn’t cold enough in the house to preserve without the power on.
Yet.
When she was satisfied that her hair wouldn’t crystallize as soon as she set foot outside, she opened the sliding glass doors. A tiny avalanche of snow piled down into the kitchen, and she had to forcibly ignore the desire to find a towel to mop up what would eventually equate to water damage on her hard-wood floors. Instead, she fetched the gardening shovel from its wintertime hiding spot (the alcove that led out into the side yard) and began heaping more snow into her kitchen.
It took the better part of an hour, but she managed to make a gradual, wide ramp to the middle of the back yard, using a torn up cardboard box to shore up the sides. She was careful to tamp down on the snow before she stood upon it, propping the shovel, blade down, into the white crust beside her with a satisfying crunch.
At the end of the block, the palm trees were rimed over with ice.
Her cold sweat made itself known at the site and she swiped absent mindedly at her forehead with the back of a gloved hand, the rough fiber abrasive against her skin.
White. White everywhere. Tops of houses, imitation bali-style and terracotta roofs dotting the vast pale blanket with shades of red and brown. A bit of stucco walling, here or there.
Feet below her, she knew, was her small vegetable patch.
Unease clawed up her back as she turned, looked over the top of her own house and into her coated neighborhood. No one else was around, not a single person. No birds perching in the branches, or scurrying of squirrels eating away at her zucchini.
Just a vast, reflective silence.
She slid back down the ramp again, side stepping to give her boots better purchase, and tramped tread-shaped clods of snow onto the already destroyed kitchen floor.
More things went into the bag: sun block, sunglasses, a towel, dry gloves, two pairs of socks. She heaved it onto her back and fastened the clips around her waist, adjusted the straps until they were comfortable, and gave one last cursory check around the kitchen.
And then she went to the hall closet and unearthed the cross-country skis.
* * *
The room had no doors.
It was painted a dull cream – a cleaner version of nicotine stained white that he had seen so often in hotel rooms. The ceiling, the floor, the walls, all of it was the same color, the same texture, the same surface. There were no corners and no edges. The walls did not meet the floor so much as they melted into it. Every possible edge was curved – the ceiling arced down to meet the floor in a gradual bow that would irritate his vision if he tried to puzzle it out too long. The wall-to-wall line of site was curved as well. Overall, it gave the impression of being trapped within a very well-filed die. No windows, no break of any kind. It was a very large room, and, had she been able to examine its height just by looking – which was impossible, he had tried himself, and the reflected light screamed back at his eyes – she could have seen how very high it was. The air vents they hid high above her, in the endless blank space.
There was one light, and every time she woke, they had moved it. Which drove her mad for the first week, because there was no way in or out – there could be no way in or out, or she would have found it by now, surely. But the light – a simple painter’s lamp, the kind with a prop and a clamp attached and an angled neck – was resting on a different section of floor every time she woke. It cast shadows when she moved in front of it, so she tried not to move.
She was the only color inside the room.
Sometimes, she talked. Not to herself – the doctors had tracked her conversations, recorded them all. They had placed cameras and microphones not inside the walls or the floor or the ceiling or the hidden cracks, so fine that even she cannot find them, but in her clothes, in her dark hair, nestled under her skin. They recorded her brainwaves, her speech patterns, the spikes in her blood pressure.
Her voice echoed off the smooth shape of the walls, the never ending circle that surrounded her. When she first came in – and she remembered coming in, at some point, far in her brain, but they took the door out somehow and doesn’t remember how, or why, or when, or what it is that makes the room bright if there are no lights. When she first came in, she would walk and walk, trying to figure out where the floor ended and the walls began, and what was up or down. It was like being blind, and she had to look at her own hands and clothes and body to make sure that she was something, that she was real, that she wasn’t white like the rest of the room.
After two weeks, she no longer tried to find where wall became floor. She no longer walked.
She sat in the middle of the floor, hands on her crossed legs, and stared.
She talked to her father as if she knew he could hear her.
And he could.
* * *
“Nine letter word for ‘high morality’. Last letter is ‘Y’.”
Weiss, who had stripped down to his shirt sleeves and had removed both of his holsters, looked over his shoulder. Sark had settled himself, cat-like, near the glass and was reading the abandoned crossword puzzle book, the side of his head propped in his hand.
A few well-aimed kicks had busted the leg off of one of the metal chairs, and it had been only a few quick blows before he’d made his way through the layer of plaster. A coarse white dust covered everything, a combination of paint and fiber coating his corner of the room, including Weiss himself. He took a moment to re-roll his sleeves and ducked back into the hole again, squeezing between the two studs that held the frame of the false wall in the basement.
The generator hummed loudly at him, the emergency lights spilling red light in through the opening behind him. The trick, he figured, was to find a way to boost the voltage long enough to key open the gates. As with everything else, there were problems with the plan. He hunkered down next to the generator and read the statistics on the side of the machine.
“The answer is ‘sublimity’, by the way.” Sark’s voice trailed across the room to him.
“Not that you’d know much about that,” Weiss muttered at the generator, but his reply was lost in the whine of the battery. Sark wasn’t listening to him, anyway – he’d been talking to himself for the past few hours just to annoy the man into action. It had worked, at least – it had made Weiss determined enough to break through the wall, he was so eager to get the hell away from Sark and his incessant prattling. How long had it been now – three shifts? He’d left his watch on the table inside the observatory space, and was too afraid to look at it and have the dredge of time confirmed.
“I do hope the Agency gives adequate overtime compensation,” Sark mused, his voice too loud to be interpreted as casually as the tone meant it to be.
“Shut up,” Weiss called over his shoulder, and squinted at the label again. Fifteen thousand watts, a thirty thousand watt surge indicator…
“That’ll be a ‘no’, then.”
Weiss shoved himself upward, and ducked back into the room, thinking. The positive interlock system would have to be rerouted – the system that ensured the machine would turn on when the power in the rest of the building failed. And there would have to be at least a hundred of these running all over the building, to supply the kind of power a facility like the CIA needed. Even if they’d gone down to bare-bones security, the CIA’s separate power grid ensured that they needed an inordinate amount of voltage to make the equipment run.
He went back over to the telephone and, one last hopeful time, pulled the speaker to his ear. It was blank, but it was buzzing.
“Progress?” Sark piped up, picking apart a bit of fluff from the stuffing he’d shredded out of the wall.
“No thanks to you,” Weiss groused at him, pulling the telephone off the wall and setting it on the ground. He pulled a pocket knife out and unscrewed the plate that held the wires in the wall and gave the bundle a gentle yank, freeing the wall jack.
“You’ve hardly given me much of a chance,” Sark reminded him, his bored tone indicating just how much he cared. “Six letter word for ‘village’.”
“Hamlet,” Weiss said, picking apart the wires. Sark made a surprised, contemplative noise, and flicked his gaze up from the creased book. Weiss fished the phone company’s wire out of the bundle and severed it before picking the headset up again.
The buzzing was louder. Inter-office circuit. He tapped on the hook switch and listened as the hiss of white noise cut in and out.
“Houston, we have contact.”
“Planning on making a collect call?” Sark rolled onto his back, his legs crossed at the ankle, and folded his arms back behind his head. His eyes, however, he kept warily on his captor.
Weiss dropped the speaker back into the cradle and stood up. “Whatever it is that has us stuck down here, it’s not just our building. It’s the phone company, too. Otherwise we’d have been able to call out. There’s something wrong with the telephone company. If there weren’t, our phones should be running, now that the generator is on. A power outage shouldn’t cut the phone lines as it is, since they run on a completely different grid.”
“Fascinating,” Sark said, obviously meaning exactly the opposite.
Weiss’ mouth tightened, and he stood up sharply. “Fine. Then I’ll just leave you down here.”
Sark sat up abruptly, his legs curling around him elegantly as his gaze snapped onto Weiss’. His voice came out harsh and impatient, all his carefully painted boredom flaking away like the plaster had from the wall. “How are you getting out?”
There would be time to savor the victory later. Or so Weiss hoped. He still was far from sure what on earth was going on a floor above them. “Listen. There are two power inverters – they’re not supposed to go over twenty-five hundred volts, and we need more than twice that to get the gate up and propped. So we’re going to have to cut the generator, unplug the battery, insert the inverters, and turn everything back on. It’ll short out all the other electricity for this section of the building, because we’ll use the reserve capacity in the generator. It’s like dropping a match on oil. It goes fast.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate.
Sark was nodding slowly. “And what is stopping this, exactly?”
Weiss sighed and shoved a downward-creeping sleeve back up his arm. “Two things. First, I’d have to let you out.” He glanced up at Sark, his mouth set in a grim line.
The prisoner raised an eyebrow. “Second?”
“Second, if it doesn’t work, we’ll be stuck down here in the dark and cold until someone can find us.”
Sark’s Cheshire grin cut up at Weiss. “Truly a contrast to our current situation.”
* * *
And it was empty.
Sydney peered around the second-story office, glanced at the name plate on the desk and realized it was Barnett’s, that the woman must have moved, that Sydney now owed her money for a broken window.
With the snow level where it was, it had been easier to haul herself up onto the second story ledge and fire a few well placed shots against the glass than spend another hour digging her way into the main entrance. The skis had been abandoned on the snow outside, and she kept her gun in her hand while she surveyed the office, but the area was empty. She made a mental note to talk to Dixon about bullet-proofing above the first floor, especially in his office. She didn’t much care for Barnett, but Dixon was far too valuable to lose to an errant bullet.
But the entire office building seemed to be empty. She started on the fifth floor and worked downward, checking supply closets and offices and computer store rooms for any sign of movement, any sound, any indication that she might not be the only one left in this strange, snowy wasteland she refused to call Los Angeles in her mind any longer.
And still nothing.
Three days ago, when Dixon had sent her home on orders – orders to get some rest, orders to stop the manhunt for her father, orders to let the rest of the crew work in peace – she hadn’t expected to come back to the office to see things this changed. She had left the packet in his hands, all the files, all the evidence, everything that, according to her father, she wasn’t supposed to have seen. It had all been turned over to Dixon.
That night, her father had disappeared. Three months ago. Since then, he had moved from the Dangerous Persons list to the Missing Presumed Dead list. Everyone else knew better – Jack Bristow lived. Would outlive all of them, probably, knowing his unpredictable and dangerous nature. But Sydney had needed the break, and Dixon had sent her away, worried she was on the verge of a exhaustion-induced collapse.
It was funny, she thought, how three days could change everything.
It wasn’t until she had her hand on the doorknob of the War Room that she saw something – movement out of the corner of her eye. She abandoned the opaque-glass doors and squinted, stalked up to the television monitor, sure her eyes were playing tricks on her.
Auxiliary power generators had fired up all the video terminals, including the security feed.
She watched the silent, grainy black and white image of Sark hovering at a keypad, his hands cuffed and legs shackled together. He was peering over his shoulder, the lines of his arms all coiled tension.
There was a silent flash on the video screen, and then the entire terminal went blank.
Sydney drew her gun and spread her feet shoulder-wide, the weapon trained on the door. A rhythmic pounding drew nearer; quiet at first, then staggering and loud as something hit the door, lit up the access panel, and threw it open.
Weiss bent double in front of her, hands on his knees, panting. He looked up at her and gave her a weak smile.
“Hey, Syd,” he said between breaths, leaning on the open door and glancing over his shoulder. Sark trudged up the concrete stairs slowly, hindered by the chain at his ankles.
She shifted the sight of her gun to the prisoner. “You want to tell me why he’s out of that cage?”
“Long story,” Weiss huffed. “We got trapped. Needed him to get out.”
“Or not so long,” Sark said, the links of the chain scraping along the rough surface of the staircase. He leaned on the threshold and rubbed at his wrists. “Is it cold in here?” He cocked one head to the side as if he could see the temperature difference in the air.
“Funny you should ask,” Sydney said dryly, and holstered the gun.
“Where is everyone?” Weiss had recovered himself and was peering around at the abandoned terminals. He managed to straighten himself enough to let the door swing shut behind him, the heavy sound raising the hair on the back of his neck. After all the work he had gone through to get it open, letting it go was a minor tragedy.
Sydney was looking around again, as if she had expected people to appear, now that she had company. As if it had all been an elaborate joke. There was a not-so-particular unease growing in the front of her mind, congealing slowly into a headache. She blinked against it, tried not to think of words like ‘pain’ and ‘compartmentalize’, and slipped one of the straps of her backpack off of her shoulder. Letting it hang in the crook of her elbow, she worked the zipper open with a little work and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. She glanced over at Sark, who was watching her intently and trying very hard to make it look like he wasn’t. “One your knees,” she snapped.
The ascent of his eyebrows were the only change of his expression. “Come now, Agent Bristow, I don’t do that for – ”
“Spare me your wit,” she said, and cracked the handcuffs open, her voice gone soft and dangerous. “And get on your knees.”
For a heartbeat, she thought he would resist. And then, slowly, he sunk to the grey tile, his arms at his ankles. She loosed the cuffs on his wrists to change his position – to lock his arms behind him and cuffed his hands to his feet, stifled a sneer at the way he wouldn’t slump into the awkward position. He kept his back straight the entire time, his eyes stalwartly focused on the Central Intelligence Agency seal in the middle of the far wall behind a small bank of computers. It unnerved her slightly, and she found herself backing away from him, nodding at Weiss to follow her, trying to keep silent as though he might forget she was there.
“There’s no one left in the entire building?” Weiss had cottoned on by now, and they edged into the hallway. Sydney had her weapon out again.
“I was about to check the War Room when I saw you on the monitor,” she explained, and they both retrained their gaze on the smoky glass in front of them.
Weiss reached for the doorknob. “What are the chances…”
“It’s always the last place you look,” Sark said, his expression stone.
Sydney turned to curl her lip at him.
Weiss opened the door, made a choking sound, and shut it again.
The dry laugh that rasped out of Sark didn’t echo – it lay between the three of them, thickly. Sark who thought he knew, Weiss who did, and Sydney, who wasn’t sure she wanted to.
He wouldn’t meet her gaze – it took an effort to take his hand off the knob to let her push by him into the room.
The first thing that hit Sydney when she saw the body wasn’t the strange sight of the limbs - bent in ways that her mind couldn’t quite reconcile as at all right – or the odd placement in the center of the conference table, or the wedding band, or the watch, or even the face. It was the smell of blood, merging fluidly far in the back of her mouth, under her tongue.
And then it was the face.
She slumped heavily against the wall – or what she thought was the wall, but must have been the second of the glazed-glass doors that allowed heavier traffic flow in and out of the room, because Weiss managed to open its partner at the impact and force himself inside.
“Jesus,” he exhaled, leaning next to her.
Sydney just blinked, trying not to see the familiar shock of brown hair, or the day-old stubble, or the – and why was there so much blood anyway, it didn’t make sense, who could’ve possibly wanted to kill someone like Vaughn?
“That’s… he just…”
“Jesus,” Sydney echoed belatedly, and Weiss stopped trying to find words and started trying to look anywhere but.
He moved around the table, careful not to let himself step on the darkened carpet – patches where it was still damp and Sydney imagined the wet sound that would cut the room if Weiss hadn’t been as careful, and a small part of her had to keep from laughing at the thought. A very, very small part of her.
Weiss made the choking noise again and flinched back, his mouth contorting involuntarily. “There’s more.”
She managed to get her eyes off of the table and onto the other man. “More parts?”
“More bodies,” he clarified flatly, the flick of his eyes making her wonder what state they were in, that they were that hard to identify. Or even count. He retreated back to her side, looking blankly out the doors, pointedly avoiding her searching gaze.
Sydney approached the table, carefully, in inches. Small steps. She covered her mouth with her sleeve, taking deep, filtered breaths through her mouth. The smell was heavy and unbearable – the cold hadn’t preserved him, it had fallen like a shock of frost, and the body was defrosting in the milder temperature of daylight.
The body.
The body – the body was torn open, but it wasn’t vicious. There were cut lines, clean cuts, congealed blood that meant the incisions were made post-mortem. His skin was pulled back. As though he’d dug both hands below his sternum and pulled apart, as simple as taking off a suit coat. Below the folded back skin and muscle, his ribs had been broken away.
His heart was gone.
She stumbled backward, her legs refusing to work. It wasn’t Vaughn, it wasn’t his face, it was wrong – a latex mask or a clone or… She impacted Weiss’ chest, feeling his hands come up to curl around her upper arms, to pull her farther away. His breathing was shallow, as if he’d just taken a nasty fall onto his back, and Sydney let him pull her out of range of the sight. Only when they had their backs against the door again did he let her go.
She couldn’t move.
“Why would anyone have…” He shook his head twice, sharply, trying to dislodge the sentence or the idea, she wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” she admitted after a moment, and the silence lingered between them. And she couldn’t stop thinking the same words over and over again: Vaughn and No and heart and why. And she didn’t know, couldn’t understand why anyone would have done something, to someone so innocuous. To someone like Vaughn, the model CIA employee, the second – third? – generation to pass over the seal in Langley. She didn’t know.
But Sark did.
She turned and ripped out the door before the thought could even finish filtering properly.
Sark still hadn’t moved from his martyred pose, despite the cramp of his arms behind him and the pounding of blood in his legs. His eyes had gone half-closed, as if he was in some far away place where snow wasn’t coating the first floor windows and making the far hallway a brilliant yellow from the reflected sun. Sydney nearly toppled him forward in her rush to get the new pair of cuffs off, tearing at his wrists and watching the metal dig deep into his skin.
“Get up,” she hissed, and when he wasn’t fast enough, “get up get up you piece of shit.”
He allowed himself to be hauled to his feet, tilted his head back just enough to come off haughty and looked at her from under his lazy expression. “I didn’t,” he said, and she shoved him away but didn’t let go of her handful of shirt, pulling him back and shaking him hard.
“Tell me how you knew,” she demanded, her voice cracking just a little on the last word, and his face glassed over again.
“I told you,” he growled. “I didn’t.”
“You said – ”
“I am perfectly aware of what I said, Agent Bristow, and if you do not unhand me immediately you will find no further information from this source.” The words poured out in a fast slap.
Whether she would have let go, however, none of them were allowed to find out. Weiss pulled her carefully away from him, his jaw set and his eyes flinty. “You tell her how you knew,” he said, his words a coarse grate against Sark’s nerves.
“I didn’t,” Sark insisted. “It was logic. If there you have an empty building and one room unexamined the chances are three-thousand to one that it is not going to be filled with some kind of unpleasantness. Any insistence otherwise you will have to answer for yourself, Agent Weiss, since you were responsible for my captivity for the past season.” He gestured to the windows with a sharp, sideways nod of his head. “Which, it appears, has changed rather drastically. We need to follow the example of the rest of this facility’s employees and evacuate immediately.”
Sydney stared at Sark long enough to make Weiss nervous, to gestate an entire cycle of stress in the atmosphere. And then she snapped her gaze to Weiss, resolutely ignoring the prisoner, and picked up her backpack. “We need to get out of here.”
“Why? What’s been – ”
“Now,” she said, and started down the hall that led to a smaller conference room. “Forget him.”
He watched the jaunty bob of her ponytail until it disappeared around the corner, and then was surprised to find Sark next to him. Sark watched her retreat as well, and then turned to Weiss, a half-smile painted on his face.
“That wouldn’t be a terribly intelligent idea.”
Weiss scrutinized him out of the corner of one eye. “Why not?”
The smile grew, unfolded, stretched itself out in an eerie way. “Because. I know the fastest way to her father.”
* * *
“Power is still getting into my house,” Sydney insisted. “My alarm clock went off.”
“Is your alarm clock even plugged in?” Sark huffed a weary sigh, flopped his arm out next to his head, and tried to ignore the series of cracks that sounded where his collarbone met his shoulder on one side. Then he proceeded to examine his fingers with a small, experimental wiggle. Having the handcuffs off was a small concession, and he watched the persistent trickle of an ooze of blood slip along the outside of the knobby bone on top of is wrist. One that was practically negated by the door being locked and both Sydney and Weiss keeping their weapons trained on him, and the fact that he was bleeding fully onto both of his hands from Sydney’s treatment.
“Batteries,” Weiss piped up.
Sydney and Sark both turned to look at him, Sark rolling his eyes up in his head for a better view and Sydney giving a guilty start, so caught up in seething over the other man that she’d almost forgotten Weiss was with them.
“She has batteries in the clock, in case there’s a power outage.” Weiss scribbled something down on the sheet of paper at his elbow, scratched his eyebrow with the eraser, and looked up at them. “So she won’t be late.”
Sark coughed a laugh. “How very domestic.”
Weiss huffed an impatient sigh and they all fell silent at the stream of frosty air that trailed his breath.
“Right,” Sydney said, forcing herself back on task and away from the urge to slap Sark with an insult. Or just her hand. “So we know we need to leave. We know that everyone else did. Or that they’re holed up in their houses somewhere, or – ”
“Or dead,” Sark chirruped helpfully.
“Or dead,” Sydney ground out, squinting at him. “What makes you think my father is involved?”
Sark made a sound of contemplation, placing his finger on his chin for a moment dramatically. “Probably,” he stretched the word out, and then nodded, as if affirming something to himself. “Probably because he told me so.”
Sydney looked like she didn’t know whether to backhand him for lying to her, or shake more information out of him. “What are you talking about?”
“Before he left,” Sark said. “He came to talk to me about a few things. Family business, you understand.” He arched his eyebrows significantly, knowing that Sydney would not, in fact, understand at all.
“Why would my father tell you anything? He doesn’t trust you. He doesn’t tell you anything.” She had fury on a low burn, and Sark wasn’t overly fond of the way her fingers kept inching toward the gun on the table.
He kept a careful watch on the progress of her hand and replied, “Maybe not. But he doesn’t tell you anything, either.” He looked up at her, saw the slap written across her face. “Now does he?”
“Hypothetically speaking,” Weiss interrupted their verbal posturing. “If he has some idea of where we should be headed, it wouldn’t hurt that much to take it. I mean, we know we’ve got to go south, right? Away from this snow. It could be spreading, and we’ve got no idea what’s going on, and if any one of us ever does know what’s going on, it’s usually Jack Bristow.”
Sydney looked positively foiled, and shot Sark a look that indicated she was absolutely certain that he was about to advise them to go North. When he gave her a polite, questioning expression, she simply leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I don’t like the idea of running. It never seems like a good idea.”
“Spoken like a true hero,” Weiss said with a sigh, and pushed away from the table. He took his gun with him, holstered it again, Sark was interested to note.
Weiss rummaged in the supply closet for a few more moments, the sounds of small metal bits hitting the inside of the one closed door as minor storage boxes went askew. With a triumphant cry, he pulled a large tube of paper out and flung it onto the table. It unrolled itself.
“What is this, the world’s largest RISK game?” Sark pressed just the tips of his fingers against the table as he stood up and leaned over to examine the large map of the world, as if he was afraid to touch it full-on. It was painted in sepia tones and labeled with delicate, calligraphic brush strokes. There was even a small dragon near the compass rose.
Sydney forced her fingers away from the weapon on the table, and the urge to end Sark’s smart mouth, and rolled free the North and South America section, carefully weighing down the corners and propping one hand on the Galapagos Islands. She only gave the map a cursory glance before tapping at Florida. “Here.”
Weiss leaned over her shoulder, curious. “Florida? Really?”
She gave a resolute nod, but Sark shifted uncomfortably. “Why not New York or the capitol? It seems like we’d have a much better chance of finding people familiar with our own…situation.” He minced the word distastefully.
“Too far north,” Sydney said, sounding vindicated that he’d finally made the foolish suggestion. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and tapped the colored state again, the heavy paper rustling under her hand. “Florida is a perfectly good place. And there are plenty of islets if we have to go farther.”
Weiss gave her a weak grin. “Think we’ll have for time the rides?”
“I’ve never been to Disneyworld,” Sark muttered, almost to himself. Then he sighed. “It doesn’t matter, though. We do need to go farther.” He brushed his finger over South America, the sound light on the paper, and he stopped on Ecuador. A little star peeked out from under his finger – Quito. “This is what we want.”
Sydney’s eyebrows pulled together. “Why?”
Sark stifled the urge to paste an edifying expression of contempt on his face. “Because that’s where your father is waiting for you.” He kept his gaze peeled on his finger, and waited for the stunned silence that had blasted the room to settle.
“Right,” Weiss cleared his throat awkwardly. “Right. Okay. Well, we’re going to need supplies. We’re going to need a vehicle, eventually, because it would take us…the better part of a year to walk this.”
“We can start by finding me some new clothes.” Sark plucked distastefully at his prison-issue jumpsuit, too thin for the comfort of the climate-controlled cell in the sublevels, let alone an arctic winter.
Sydney felt her face curdling at his words, already pushed to the limit by his cryptic and typical necessary involvement, and Weiss’ insistence that the other man may be telling the truth – his own version of the truth, at least, which had at least as many adaptations as a household Bible. “Is the incarceration look not on the fall line this year?”
He leaned forward, the links between his leg shackles brushing against the floor. “I only want to look my best for you, Agent Bristow. Surely you can’t blame a boy. After all, you’re on the market now.” He gave a broad grin, and looked at her sideways. “Agent Vaughn and I are about the same size. Do you think his clothes would fit me?”
Weiss hit him before Sydney could.
iii. the primrose path of dalliance
Snowshoes settled it.
Weiss packed bags that included more than they could carry, and Sydney had to go through and remove some of the heavier items. There were a few moments of bitter cursing and rolled eyes as Weiss changed Sark’s clothes from the jumpsuit to heavy layers of clothing, and an interesting bit of handcuff finagling before they finally decided they would have to leave them off, if this was going to be productive at all.
And then the Global Positioning System had to be procured, tested, kicked at, and packed away despite its current uselessness. Weiss insisted that, given time (or a better signal), he would be able to coax it into its former glory. Sark had even been the one to push into Marshall’s lab – the first person to go in since he’d fallen into the coma, the gunshot wound having gone a little farther than any of them could have anticipated. Three months, and no one had tried to clean the place out – mostly because of the odd little traps Marshall had left around the place. The intern who had been in charge of boxing up the unfinished experiments had nearly electrocuted himself. Not long after that, everyone’s problems had gotten a bit more complicated, and the lab had been left alone and marked off as a non-priority project.
For the time being, the three of them staunchly decided not to think about the bodies in the War Room, for one reason or another.
Throughout, Sydney or Weiss – sometimes both at the same time – kept an eye on Sark’s busy hands. There was a fair enough reason to think that he would try something, considering each of their histories with the criminal. It wasn’t coincidence that he’d inherited Irina’s cell, Sydney was sure. Whether it was mean to be ironic, however, or some plan of her father’s, she didn’t want to dwell on.
She didn’t particularly care to dwell on her father at all.
Which was how she found the closet full of snowshoes – nearly had them avalanche on her, and tried not to laugh at that specific quirk of fate.
Sark, who had heard her and laughed for an inappropriate length of time before helping her up, was stuck hauling the three pairs of shoes and poles down the three flights of stairs and back into the common room they had designated their collection point. Sydney didn’t feel remotely better for it, but at least it kept his hands busy enough that she didn’t have to watch them.
And it was all easy, like that – the bags strapped on, maps folded and refolded, water stocked, shoes secured, second story window allocated, her skis properly stored in Barnett’s office. It wasn’t until they were outside again in the foaming winter that Sydney blinked, pulled on her polar goggles, and frowned. “I think it’s gotten colder,” she ventured.
Sark and Weiss didn’t say anything.
They were staring – gazing out at the dunes of snow that covered the streets, the cars, the coffee kiosks and newspaper stands and bicycle racks and mailboxes that surrounded the area. Sydney clapped her gloved hands together and they snapped their heads simultaneously toward her, their eyes covered by the reflective coating on the goggles. Sark’s mouth was pulled into a sharp frown, and Weiss had pulled back under his hood so that the rest of his face couldn’t even be seen.
“What happened?” Sark asked in an accusatory tone of voice. “What happened?”
“I went to sleep last night with the windows closed for the first time in a long, long time because the wind was too strong. I woke up,” she gestured out at the snow and jammed a pole into the packed surface at her feet impatiently, “to this.”
“We need to get on,” Weiss said, and gave his thighs a quick, harsh scratch from knee to hip through his pants, trying to scrape the cold away where it prickled his skin. “There’s only so much walking we can do at night.”
“What happened?” Sark insisted again, but Sydney and Weiss were already moving south, lengthening their strides for the odd, unfamiliar shape of the snow shoes. Sydney could already feel her calves burning from that morning’s exercise with the cross-country skis, and it wasn’t exactly looking like they’d have a restful night’s sleep. Sark huffed a long stream of condensation into the air and moved off behind them, the three of them keeping their eyes peeled for any unusual activity.
Not that a tropical city covered in snow wasn’t unusual enough.
* * *
“Theories,” Weiss was saying as Sydney caught up to the both of them, trudging through the sludge that had formed of their path. As the sun traveled on its downward arc, the fine layer it had managed to melt during the day would slush and eventually freeze, forming an inch-thick sheet of ice over everything. It would snow again, slush again, compact again, layer upon layer upon layer. It would make the surface look safe, feel steady.
It was what caused avalanches.
“What kind of theories?” Sark asked, their breath heavy in the air as the sun filtered through the trees and houses and splashed their shadows sideways. They had been skirting a residential area for the past hour and Sydney had fallen behind, checking their progress on the hobbled together GPS. They were moving slower than she’d hoped, given the surface terrain.
“Theories about where all the people are,” Weiss said. “So they evacuated…at least our building, right? Except there were no evacuation notices, no alarms.”
“Perhaps they simply forgot you in the sublevels,” Sark said snidely, but there wasn’t much bite in the statement. There wasn’t enough breath to spare on sarcasm, not after having walked for so long. Similarly, Weiss did not waste a response.
“If they’re smart, they’re bundled up in their homes,” Sydney said severely. The problem with that logic being, of course, that most people were not smart, and many had, no doubt, decided to attempt to travel north. They had found many track prints leading in the opposite direction, and an additional many traveling toward the coastline, and Sark had expressed his initial confusion as to why anyone would be heading north under such circumstances. Most people, Sydney had to explain, would probably want to make sure their families were safe.
Sark had called them idiots.
Sydney had been disinclined to agree until now, when the temperature dropped – again – and it started snowing.
Again.
* * *
They flipped coins to decide who would dig out a shelter for the night, and selected a Starbucks with a sturdy drive-through to camp on top of. They swapped off, every two hours, through the night to keep the tent clear of snow.
“It shouldn’t be physically possible,” Weiss muttered to Sark, who startled at the voice. Weiss was lying on his back, staring at the top of the tent, the soft piles that were gathering there and making the material weigh down. They’d chosen the right side to break the force of the wind, but the ice was still piling along.
“I know that,” Sark said, and they both looked over at Sydney, to see if she would wake up.
“Even if it was a continuous blizzard, I could understand it. But the daylight breaks, and then….eight feet?”
“At least. Less than that tonight, I think, or…”
They both drifted, the cold air whistling around in a lingering cadence as they grappled with words.
“I just don’t understand it,” Sark said finally, and Weiss looked at him like he’d said something in a foreign language. Sark kept his gaze firmly trained on the far side of the tent, the slight curve of the reddish material playing mild tricks on his tired eyes. “When I was on the Kara Sea, it snowed like this. Just once.”
There was a moment of silence, where Sark kept staring at the wall of the tent, and Weiss got twitchy waiting for him to continue the story. When he didn’t, Weiss, his voice still low, said, “What happened?”
Sark turned his gaze, slowly, but not his head. It was unnerving – like watching a doll’s eyes trace you across a large room. “Someone found us frozen and half-dead the next day. I’d passed out. Everyone else died.”
Weiss didn’t say anything, and Sark shifted his gaze away again.
When Sydney woke up for her shift, Sark and Weiss were both asleep again.
* * *
“Look at all these,” Weiss breathed in awe. Lines and lines of shining cars glistened in the morning light, and they all took the opportunity of solid ground to stamp the packed snow off of their legs. “Can we take one? We need to take one, Sydney. Right? Let’s take the Hummer.”
“Oh, yes, that will travel wonderfully light over the snow,” Sark sneered, pushing back his hood and itching at his scalp through the wool cap. The goggles came down around his neck, and it wasn’t difficult to take his bitterness seriously with the harsh red outline of pressure and impending frostbite that ringed his eyes and nose. The parking garage had come upon them suddenly, as they’d been walking into the sun – a diversion from their course, but a necessary one. Ending up in a business district again had turned into a blessing, though, with night’s new level of snow coming just to the second level of the parking structure.
The entire structure was coated over in ice, like a post-apocalyptic discovery. It was hard not to want to stay there, now that they’d found something that could weather the winter, but it was Sark – not Sydney, to Weiss’ surprise – who had demanded they continue on to South America. Jack Bristow could be a persuasive man, even at a distance.
“We need to find a Jeep,” Sydney decided. “It won’t keep us warm, but it’s probably the safest bet.” She bent to unbuckle her snow shoes and stepped out of them, flexing her leg from the knee, almost experimentally, as though she expected it might fall off from overuse. “Sark, head up to the next level.” She reached around into the back of her bag and fetched a Swiss Army Knife, and held it out to him, the expression on her face clearly indicating how bad an idea she thought it was, giving him a weapon. Even if it was a weapon with a corkscrew attachment. “Pop all the trunks that you can, try and find any canisters you can, or hosing to siphon gasoline.” She slapped the little red length into his hand and turned away from him, not bothering to watch as he struggled out of his own snow shoes. “Weiss. Find a Jeep. Start at the level below me. If you find anything, just shout.” She gave a self-deprecating smile. “Nothing else to hear in this place. I’ll start on this level.”
And like that, she was off. Weiss shook his head, and watched until she retreated.
“She’s developing an uncomfortable affinity for giving orders,” Sark muttered, flicking out the screwdriver attachment on the Swiss Army Knife.
“You get used to it,” Weiss said with a shrug, and then glanced from the knife and back to Sark. “You meddle around with that? And I shoot you.”
“How very uncouth,” Sark muttered, but disappeared without any further trouble.
In the end, it was Weiss who found the Jeep, but it was Sark who had to hotwire it.
“Honestly, didn’t they teach you anything in Langley?” His sound of disapproval was lost among the clatter of hollow plastic containers dropping to the ground – a good half-dozen gas containers of varying sizes, and a coil of garden hose with the packaging still attached. “I hope it’ll do,” he said with a nod at the ground. “It’s from Target. I left the receipt.”
Sydney didn’t answer – just jammed a knife back into the steering column again, questing for some invisible catch, and glanced at Weiss’ face for any confirmation that things were going right under the hood.
Sark watched them for a moment, almost wincing at their combined incapability, and finally had to push Weiss out of the way with a muttered “honestly, man,” and a flick of his screwdriver.
“We need something to connect the battery to the positive side of the coil, you see?” Sark pointed with the screwdriver. The coil had nearly corroded with age – the car wasn’t going to last them long, not on a hotwire, and not if they couldn’t turn it off. “It’ll melt whatever we use to connect it.”
The angry growl of the engine attempting to turn over stopped as Sydney came out from behind the wheel, slamming the door in frustration, and came to stand on Sark’s other side. “So we need something conductive that we won’t have to sacrifice.”
Sark patted one of his pockets with a small frown before diving inside and pulling out a chewed on pencil. “Would this do?”
She blinked. “Where on earth did you get a pencil?”
He grinned smugly. “Agent Weiss needs work on his vocabulary, clearly. Any real Agent should be able to do the crossword with a pen, I think.” He snagged Sydney’s knife away and began to strip the ferrule away from the rest of the pencil, the green and gold paint flaking under his ministrations. “Don’t worry, you can thank me later.”
Sydney yanked the knife back but managed to stifle her indignation for the moment – if he could get the car going, he wasn’t completely useless. She waited for him to give her the thumbs up from around the hood before she jammed at the locking pin again, and this time the engine sparked through the copper bit, and turned properly.
“Brilliant,” Sark said, and beckoned for Weiss to slam the hood down before going back around to the driver’s side.
Sydney was waiting, leaning on one arm out the window, a vaguely malicious smile on her face as Weiss climbed into the passenger seat and began rummaging in the glove box. “Don’t think this means you don’t have to siphon the gasoline.”
* * *
“I get the feeling she’s done this before,” Sark called to Weiss, the absolute certainty of the statement heavy in his voice.
Sydney glared at him from across the parking structure, a pile of fire extinguishers at her feet like a dog surrounded by recently unearthed bones. One of the extinguishers was foaming and abandoned, a large pile of the chemical froth pooling toward one of the industrial drains in the middle of the pavement.
“What are you doing?” Weiss called from behind the Jeep, where he was examining the tires.
Sydney didn’t reply, recoiling the length of hose Sark had recently abandoned in his gasoline harvest. She propped one of the fire extinguishers on it, nose down, and unclipped the safety on both the metal canister and her handgun. She took a step back, leveled the gun, and shot.
Sark and Weiss hit the deck almost simultaneously on different sides of the Jeep and even Sydney flinched back as the fire extinguisher erupted from its perch and went slamming into the concrete outer wall of the parking structure. After the initial burst, it spiraled off into the distance, sparking underneath a sports car before hitting a tire and stopping its tirade.
It was a weary pull to his feet, but Weiss managed it without too much disgrace. “Here’s an idea,” he called to Sydney, who was going over to the impact wall to check for hairline fractures, and he raised his hand to get her attention. “Let’s not do that again?”
“It worked,” came her quiet reply.
“What?” Sark. Still on the ground, but his sense of humor – or lack thereof – had recovered already, Weiss wasn’t overly keen to note.
“It worked,” Sydney echoed, and went back over to the pile of fire extinguishers and pulled out another, propped it up, and pulled out her gun again.
“Oh, hell – ” But Weiss’ reply was lost in the sound of gunfire and impact and then the same abrasive skittering sound of steel-on-concrete, the second extinguisher rolling away in the opposite direction. Sark crawled underneath the car, the polyfiber of their snow gear scratching oddly on the pavement.
“She’s gone insane,” Sark decided.
A third shot, a third impact, and this time a crumbling sound and Sydney laughing madly, the shuffle of her feet as she did a little dance over the corpses of the fire extinguishers.
“Utterly,” Weiss confirmed, and he and Sark shared an odd expression of wary truce and nodded to each other, and managed to stand up nearly simultaneously.
She’d broken through the wall.
She was already stooping down to change the angle on the next canister and the gunshot rang through the cavern, and Weiss noticed in a detached kind of way as he turned his head that Sark didn’t flinch at all. More of the wall crumbled and the fire extinguisher shot off into the snow, landed with a thud and buried itself.
After breaking through the wall (and sticking one of the errant fire extinguishers in the back of the Jeep with the rest of their supplies), it was only a matter of using the Swiss Army Knife to get two truck-bed doors detached from their frames and propped as wheel runners.
The Jeep hit the top layer of ice and sunk immediately, but managed to handle fine from there on out. Sark and Weiss, by way of unspoken agreement, let Sydney drive. As she had obviously gone – as Weiss muttered quietly to the other man – completely mental.
* * *
Every so often – just infrequently enough so that she could begin to think that they would stop completely – the doctors would spend an entire day running tests on her.
There were general intelligence tests. She was required to complete mathematics and reading comprehension questions, and they made her name colors and days of the month and the alphabet backwards and who she thought the President of the United States was. The last question was a little harder, because she was no longer as sure as she once had been how long she had been inside the white room. Long enough that when she was taken out, all the other colors were sharp like photography negatives and little black dots floated in front of her eyes while she tried to focus.
There were also memory tests, and flashcard type exams with blocks of different colors and little electric shocks if she forgot and connected the wrong pegs into the shaped holes. There were words to be spelled and pairs to be made – cat to dog, up to down, left to right, man to woman, brother to sister, father to son, mother to daughter.
She always had a little trouble with the last two.
They removed her at night, so it was easy for them to move her without her seeing them. They would filter gas into the room, very, very slowly.
At first, there were scientific tests, as well – needles and pumps and cold metal pressing in and saying “inhale” and odd tasting wooden sticks and little dishes curved like bananas collecting things with cotton tufts on the end. And it all looked (mostly smelled) vaguely familiar, and reminded her of something she didn’t like.
And if she didn’t like it vehemently enough, there were leather straps and buckles for her, fresh and unyielding and made new so the leather bit and chafed. A few days later, she would look down at her ankles, in the white room, and not remember why the marks were there, and she would ask her father why, why does it hurt? She would prod at the hurt, and the day she discovered that if she prodded hard enough, there would be a new color, the doctors watched as she painted the walls red.
When she fell unconscious, they cleaned it all until it gleamed and bandaged her wounds properly.
She woke to the same room, the same featureless, curving, hovering room. She liked to imagine that she lived inside of a Christmas tree ornament, like the kind they had used to decorate for the holiday when she was a child. It had been her job to hang all the blue baubles, and her father used to lift her on his shoulder, when she was very small, her tiny fingers curling in his hair for balance, and they would place the star together. She would say, remember, remember the star, daddy?
Even if she doesn’t remember, now, what that man looked like.
When he didn’t answer, she stopped asking him questions.
So they stopped the scientific tests.
Her father would stand outside the room, watching her through the video cameras from a frenzy of different angles, and she would scratch and scratch at the bandages but couldn’t quite seem to remember how to make them come off.
A few days later, she would wake and find them gone, and wonder if they had ever really been, but for the tender skin that remained.
If it was too much to watch the video terminals – as it could be on certain days, when she would sit in the center of the floor and rock back and forth and do nothing but speak directly to him – he would read the file in the plastic bin attached to the door (which she still had not found) and study what the scientists had discovered, or thought they had. He would make notes in the margins – increased dosages, recommended testing, more of one game and less of another, more time facing one direction but not the next. More muscle stimulation, because he was afraid her legs were going to atrophy if she continued to refuse to tend to herself.
It was a curious thing, in his opinion, watching a mind bend as far as it could. It was a matter of a tree in a storm, after all, as all good psychology textbooks explained. A small tree, in a storm, could bow to the wind and move with it. A large tree would splinter and shake and come crashing down. The mind was the same – the smaller it was initially, the more potential there was to fill it during the storm.
But he had no desire to watch the tree bow or splinter.
He wanted to split it down the middle.
* * *
They hit ‘civilization’ – as Weiss called it – not an hour later. The snow tapered off, they made good time, and people started showing up. Smart people, people who had stayed in their homes, people who were walking south, people who had turned their sandboxes into sleighs and were hauling belongings alongside the road. There was much waving and nodding and a bit of slow going around a particularly crowded caravan, but it was good to see people again.
Weiss put the handcuffs back on Sark, and he snarled at them both, livid from the relegation.
Two hours later, the snow started sloping down.
Thirty miles after that, they hit dry pavement.
Refueling had been an interesting job, especially with the car running, but the cuffs had prevented Sark from having to siphon with the hose again, and was spared the lingering taste of gasoline in his mouth for a second time. And Sydney’s CIA clearance meant there was no waiting at the border, which was preferable to Sark’s more familiar method of passing money back and forth.
The Jeep died outside of Hermosillo in Sonora.
It was ironic, Sark informed them, because the people of Hermosillo have a legend that an avenging spirit will prevent all modern technology from working near the city. As they piled out of the Jeep and shouldered their bags again, heavier this time in the more familiar weather, Weiss found it a little hard to appreciate that certain aspect of local culture.
They trekked slowly into town, the dirt of the road kicking up around them in dramatic devils, curling around Weiss’ legs.
In the center of town they had to stop, just to reacclimatize to actually being in a town. The people milled around them, throwing internationally recognized worrisome expressions at the curious snow suits they all wore. Sark and Sydney took the opportunity to adjust their wardrobe more appropriately for the weather and repack their bags.
Weiss, however, found a newspaper.
It had been a good five minutes of silence, which was unusual in anything involving Weiss’ aggrieved snark, and Sydney found herself checking that he was alright. When, in fact, he was very far from it.
“Weiss, what is it?” She dropped down at the table into the chair across from him, their bags piled high between them. Sark’s handcuffs had been removed again, of course, to prevent from raising additional suspicion, and she kept one eye on him. Sark, of course, was busy looking irritatingly casual just because he knew she was watching. She scowled at him for good measure.
“I think you’d better take a look at this.” But Weiss had trouble letting the paper go, and Sydney had to ease one of his hands away so that he could see.
The headline was splashed in Spanish, and Sark craned his neck around so he could see as well. “Apocalyptic Winter Sweeps North,” Sark read. “Well, that’s optimistic, isn’t it?”
“No,” Weiss said. “The byline.”
Sydney blinked and scanned down a few lines, past the subhead.
“What?” Sark wondered aloud, slightly irritated at being left out of an apparently significant fact.
“Oh my God,” Sydney said.
“What?” Sark demanded, and snatched the paper away from her to examine it more closely.
“Oh my God,” Sydney said, her face breaking in conflict from shock to joy.
William J. Tippin.
Associate City Editor.
iv. a king of shreds and patches
Things hadn’t been particularly excellent for Will lately.
In fact, if one were so inclined to ask him – in English, please, because he was still trying to figure out exactly how to convert tenses in Spanish, and it was taking him a bit longer than he had originally anticipated – he would have to explain to them that things were going down right Fucked Up, and coming from a guy who had seen his girlfriend’s clone try to kill him, twice, that was saying something.
If anything, things had gone from bad to worse. Accepting the job in Sonora had seemed like a good idea at the time – get away from the oddness in the United States, take up his real name again, ease himself out of Witness Protection now that Sydney was alive and well and back under her own, non-murderous (at least, non-murderous unless it was for the good of God and Country) tendencies. The temperature in Wisconsin had never really suited him, anyway, and leaving the construction company had been a little sad, but not all that difficult in the end.
No one had really explained to him how hard being an editor would be.
All he wanted to do, all day, was kill people. People were idiots. People were idiots, and something was going on in the US and no one could tell him what, exactly, that was. Entire northern cities were evacuating, great sheets of ice were crumbling southward, his correspondents in Vancouver and Maine hadn’t been heard from in two days, and something very, very wrong was going on. Which meant that he was in a worse mood than usual when his secretary came in with news that there was a crazy woman in the lobby who wanted to talk to him. And that she had a gun.
To be fair, people had explained to him about the crazy women with the guns. And, for some reason, they seemed to like to pick on him in particular. Will thought it may have been something about his inability to properly defend himself through the language, and that maybe word had spread. Or, more accurately, that his stories were being incorrectly translated into Spanish. Just last week, he had incited a bit of yelling-with-guns from a woman who insisted that her husband was not, in fact, dead, as his story had reported.
It was a hell of thing, Will had said, and issued a retraction.
Now he was beginning to wonder if he just needed to hire a new translator.
He sighed, twisted his coffee mug in his hands – the coffee was so much stronger down here and he was probably a little more addicted to it than he should be, but it kept him focused enough to get the job done – and nodded to his secretary.
Her head retreated back behind the door and he stood, slowly, working the kinks out of his back before reaching under the desk and retrieving the Louisville Slugger that slept at his feet.
The stairs he took slowly, the sound of the incensed woman already drifting up the steps. It sounded like she was screaming in some unholy mix of Spanish and English, which fared even worse for Will, because then she could talk circles around him and wouldn’t be able to properly defend himself in any arena.
But maybe she’d put down the gun.
At the bottom of the stairs, he took another deep breath and smoothed out his shirt. There was still hope for this. Things could go better. It didn’t necessarily have to ruin his day, anyway, and there was still that business meeting in the evening with the oil prospectors who had come all the way down from the border to speak with him. If he was lucky, he’d have time to get home and wash the day’s layer of sweat off before he went to the restaurant.
That encouraging thought in mind, he turned the corner.
And looked at the raving woman, her brown hair pulled tightly back and her gun at her hip.
She was shaking a newspaper at the woman at the reception desk, his mug shot gleaming from underneath his byline. It was a bad picture. He’d already requested they put something else with it. He let the baseball bat slide out of his hand, heard it distantly impact with the ground, just the handle resting under his palm. He suddenly, distinctly wished he had something more sturdy to lean on.
The woman turned at the sound, the newspaper still raised above her head like some righteous flaming sword,
“Will.”
God. God.
Maybe he wouldn’t make that business meeting tonight.
Sydney looked amazing, was the first thing that managed to filter through his surprised haze. All indignant and powerful, dressed in sleek black and anger. He was surprised at how fast the anger could shift into relief, shock, worry, and she crossed the space between them and embraced him, both arms around his and her chin nestled at the back of his neck before he could even figure out what to do with his hands.
“Hey,” he muttered after a far too awkward silence. “Um.”
And then she pushed him back, both hands on his shoulders, and the severe look was back as her careful fingers pressed into his skin, trying not to shake him to emphasize her words. “Will. Will, you have to come with us.”
At least there was that. The CIA could tell him what was going on – if not Sydney, then probably at least Jack or Michael Vaughn, who he didn’t particularly like but he at least trusted to give him a straight answer if his life was at stake and not too much national security would be sacrificed in the telling. The idea of it made him ready to go anywhere, even if it was back up north, where the stories had been threading thin and strange for the past week, if at all.
Over her shoulder, he saw the glass doors of the lobby swing open, almost in slow motion like the unrighteous spaghetti westerns he had voraciously watched with his sister until he turned ten. They had practiced quick-draw on one another for a full three months, driving their mother mad with shouted gunfire and civilian arrests and, particularly, the manually created chink-chink-chink of spurs that Will insisted Amy create him with a pen knife, dissected tin cans, and paper clips.
In retrospect, they hadn’t looked as excellent as he’d once thought on his Converse High Tops.
The fans overhead spun lazily in the forced air, cutting odd shadows over the door, and when he locked eyes with Sark, Will could feel the bottom of his stomach fall out again. A tingle started at the small of his back and snapped its way northward like a reverse Jacob’s ladder.
He picked the baseball bat up.
Weiss was pushing his way in behind Sark and by then Sydney had followed the line of Will’s disconcerted gaze and had turned, one of her hands abandoning his shoulders, to examine. Her gaze darkened on Sark as well, but perhaps, Will noticed, with a bit more venom than he had previously seen.
‘Us,’ then, was not as promising as he had originally hoped.
Weiss ushered Sark toward them, each of them hauling a pack and the latter looking rather peeved at the situation, as if somehow eligible to scold Sydney in lieu of an authority figure being present.
Will had never thought he would long for Vaughn to be around, but he found the idea increasingly appealing. Anything was better than Sark. Sark, who was behind all of the mischief and mayhem in his life for the past four years. Sark, who had fucked up his best friends, their families, their lives. Sark, who looked like a young tourist in silly clothing, except for the hard glint in his eyes and the cruel bent in his ghostly smile.
And then Will definitely, definitely wished he had more than a baseball bat.
Sark shifted his weight to one hip, his stance similar to that of an impatient teenage girl, and slid his gaze over to Sydney in an expression of false ease. It was odd to watch, to feel Sydney’s hand tense against the line of his collarbone, to see each of them expect Sark to say something cruel, or rude, or inappropriate. It had become a game, Will could see, and Sark played into it well. Sark’s mouth twisted and his gaze flicked from Sydney to Will and back again before he spoke. “Picking up strays?”
A game. The outcome of which, Will become slowly aware, Sark was not particular. So long as he landed his points by the end of it.
“We’re taking him with us.” Sydney’s decision was final, by the thread of her voice, and the way she tightened her grip on his shoulder just once before letting it go.
“Wait. Wait a second.” Will held his hands up, taking a step back without even realizing it. He tilted on the farther leg, taking the three of them in, sweeping the handle of the bat in an inclusive gesture. “You’re it? All of you?”
Sark rolled his eyes and Weiss had the decency to look embarrassed, but it was Sydney who told him what she knew would have him by her side. “Los Angeles,” she said levelly, “is an arctic wasteland.”
Will sighed, feeling the inevitability of it all pull down on the shoulder that held the bat aloft, and he lowered it again, this time in resignation. “Fine. Tell me what happened.”
* * *
Sark was interested to note that, when in an enclosed room with three other people and not enough chairs, things were usually a trifle tense. If you have attempted to kill them, the equation becomes inexorably more complex. The handcuffs didn’t go back on, but he wasn’t sure that was a measure of leniency, or more of an effort to make Will feel at ease in his presence.
Personally, he would have much preferred leaving the reporter out of it altogether. Civilians were messy. Even civilians who kept neat, tidy, CIA issued handguns in their desk drawers. For example, the weapon that he was now on the facing end of. Will sat behind his desk, the gun gripped firmly in his hand, and repeated the story for a third time to Sydney. “Snow,” he said. “Snow. In Los Angeles.”
“Ten feet,” Sydney confirmed, her voice soft and wondering. Weiss was staring at the shuttered window – his attention, Sark would have guessed, back in the War Room.
“Overnight,” Sark added helpfully, but none of them gave any sign of having heard him.
“Los Angeles, California?” Will looked as though he were about to inch for the phone and call the white-coats on the woman. The rest of it Will hadn’t had such a hard time with – that they had gotten out, that they were on their way to South America to find her father, that Sark was leading them there. He had, of course, asked if Sydney trusted Sark, and Sydney had just laughed, much to Sark’s own amusement.
It was just the weather that Will couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around.
“I just keep thinking something must be off,” he confessed. “I keep thinking…” He cut himself off, and shook his head slowly, chin propped on his hand as he swiveled slowly back and forth in his desk chair. “I mean, I wrote the story, of course. But. Writing it, and seeing it…” he trailed off again.
“Come with us,” Sydney said, sounding a bit more like herself. Sark waited for one or the other to make some inane comment regarding ‘the story of the century’, but it never came. Either they were both thinking it, or he had severely underestimated them.
With an assessing glance at Will, he gathered it was the former, and not the latter.
Will was nodding, rummaging in his desk drawers for notebooks and tape recorders and – oddly enough – a spare pair of socks, a sweatshirt. It all went into a backpack slung by one strap over the back of his chair, along with some t-shirts that were pulled from the filing cabinet, a flashlight, and extra clips for the gun. “Where are you headed first? I’ve got a pretty sturdy car, and I can try and call some contacts in San Luis, or Tampico…” He trailed off, tilting his head, considering the proposed cities.
“Mexico City,” Sark spoke up. “If we can get to Mexico City, I can arrange transportation from there.”
Weiss’ eyes drifted over to the side of his sockets before the rest of his head turned to assess Sark, almost as though he were checking that Sark was serious. Then he glanced back at Sydney, his mouth cracking into a disturbed, melted sort of smile. “Anyone else not surprised?”
Will look confused. Sydney sat for a good two beats before she grinned. Sark, kneeling on the ground, sacrificed the basic dignity of a proper chair, scowled up at them. “Is there something wrong with Mexico City?”
“Of course not,” Weiss said, standing up and stretching, reawakening to his purpose. “You’re just awfully fond of it, is all.” The amusement of a private joke laced his voice and Sydney laughed again, and Sark fought the itch to stab Weiss in the leg.
* * *
“Didn’t you try to kill me once?” Will’s gaze darted from Sark to Sydney and back again in a very ‘is this really a good idea’ manner. Weiss had talked them all into scaling one of the border checkpoints to camp atop the concrete surface. They would be able to see for miles, he had wheedled, and the range on the GPS would be much better if he could get it a little higher.
“More than once,” Sark said, distracted. He looked up and tilted his head at the sky, as if calling upon some long filed memory. “Although they all seem to have been indirect.”
Sydney’s voice was slivered glass. “You tortured him as a classified civilian and traded him for the Prophesy.”
Sark righted his head and glanced at Will. “Was that you?”
They all stared back at him, mixtures of incredulity and aggravation.
“What?” Sark demanded, defensive. “It was hardly personal.”
“Let’s not rush to change that,” Weiss said, clapping Will on the shoulder with false cheer and using the motion to lever himself upward to dig out some water for all of them from his bag.
An awkward silence fell, and the fire popped. They all made an effort not to startle, only Will failing the battle and shifting slightly closer to the light. The shadows flickered high, spilling in odd angles over the rocky, uncomfortable terrain. They had ended up perched on top of a platform, the dark abyss of the sharp drop yawning just at the edge of the firelight. Their equipment had been piled off to the side; save the backpacks, which Weiss had suggested by example they lean against. He distributed bottles of lukewarm water with a resigned expression, and they all made a concerted effort not to wonder where they could find fresh water when their supply ran out.
Sydney punched at her own pack, trying in vain to fluff the contents into a more comfortable position. “Let’s look at this reasonably,” she said, pulling one leg close and picking at a loose thread on the dirt-stained knee of her blue jeans.
“Reasonably,” Sark said flatly, his head propped up on his satchel, staring at the rising sliver of moon. It was overcast; a storm had been building all evening and the clouds were moving rapidly and in layers, obscuring the stars. The moon itself had gone blurry and increasingly dim as the clouds gathered. The irony was not lost on any of them, but no one pointed it out to the others. Sark massaged his wrists where the handcuffs had cut in, the salty sting having evaporated in the relative cool of night. “Well, it would appear that you are controlling the weather with your emotions, Agent Bristow.”
“I’m not sure that’s what my Webster’s defines as ‘reasonable’,” Will said in a conversational tone.
“You have to admit, it is rather uncanny that this weather phenomenon seems to have started in her home city.” He held up a hand to forestall Sydney’s protest. “Anyone else, I would say it was ridiculous. But you seem to have quite an unfortunate record for meddling in things that, traditionally, should not be capable of influence.”
Sydney scowled and picked a little more at the pull on her knee. “Still…”
They all fell silent for a moment, Weiss and Will watching Sark, Sark watching Sydney, Sydney lost in her own thoughts. And then Sark leaned up on one elbow and uncoiled some reserve of energy, slugging Sydney in the arm.
Sydney’s slack-jawed face of surprise and her noise of injury were overshadowed by an immediate crackle from the sky. A long, vicious stab of lightning sliced down out of the gathered clouds, transfiguring their indignation into surprise.
The crackle died away, leaving a burnt, empty feeling in the air, and Weiss was the first one to tear his gaze off of the sky to stare at Sydney. Will and Sydney looked down simultaneously, all of them exchanging significant looks. Only Sark kept his eyes on the starscape.
“That was a coincidence,” Sydney demanded. Will didn’t look at all convinced, and she flicked her gaze to Weiss, who was shaking his head. “It was a fluke.”
Sark slugged her in the arm again.
They all tensed, waiting for something to break from the sky.
When nothing came, Sydney punched him in the head.
Twice.
Sark caught her arm on the second blow and shoved her away, both of them baring their teeth in a mockery of a smile. He winced and cupped his brow, checking for blood. His hand came away clean. “Pity,” he spat, leaning forward and wiping his brow again. He let his eyes drift shut a little, trying to ward off the inevitable headache that was sure to build in his temple.
Her voice crackled ice. “Why’s that?” Will was watching her closely, ready to hold her back if she tried to attack Sark again. Not for any respect of his own safety, Sark was sure, but for the general well being of the group. An all-out brawl on top of a border checkpoint in the middle of the night was not the best situation to be in.
“Because then we could’ve just killed you,” he said, the words sliding lazily out of the side of his mouth.
“Hey.” Weiss’ voice was sharp in the darkness, sharper than the reflected glint of the handcuffs he held dangling in his hand. Sark’s face masked itself over again and he turned back to the sky, folding hands over his stomach. His raw wrists shone with a dull wet in the shadows.
Weiss folded the handcuffs back together and slipped them into an outside pocket of his bag. Will relaxed a little – leaned back and tried to look like he wasn’t watching Sydney with an intense protectiveness Sark had only seen from dogs directed at rare scraps of food.
Sydney simply stared into the fire, and they all waited for the rain to come.
* * *
It wasn’t a surprise, exactly, because few things were any more – but seeing the abandoned cars spread along the side of the road so far that they disappeared into the horizon was still disconcerting.
The road itself was dubious at best. Dirt, tree lined so thickly on both sides it was nearly impossible to see anything in the periphery. And the cars that lay on them were cheap American models or worse, dilapidated and dusty and packed to the brim with salvaged materials from the north. The question of why anyone would go through the trouble to bring all the goods that far only to abandon them here was in everyone’s mind.
What Sark wanted to know was why no one had touched anything.
In any mass exodus, it was common knowledge, there would be looting. It was the way the world worked. One group of people would leave possessions behind, and another group of people would swoop down on the immediately and claim them as their own, no matter the impracticality of the situation. Which was what made it so strange, then, that none of this had been touched. No cut bungee cords, no spilled suitcases, no jimmied car doors.
Curious, he tried one of the handles.
The door swung open with not so much as an ominous creak.
“This,” he said, and slammed the door to turn to look at Sydney, “is not right.”
She and Weiss were frowning as well, staring up into the thick foliage above. Will had fallen back a few steps, one of his hands pressing a print into the dust of the trunk of the car. The dappled road fell oddly silent, almost more so, and Sark had the distinct feeling of being watched. His eyes swept the tree line as well, seeking out the source of the sensation of people holding their breath, tore the greenery apart almost desperately with his gaze, immediately wanted a weapon in his hand.
Sydney had already unclipped the safety on her gun, though, and had it low at her side. She took a cautious step forward, the gun leveling up at the tree branches, questing for some unknown target.
What she sought found her first, though, and Sark barely registered the flash of metal before Weiss was shouting and Sydney had dropped to her knees. Three shots fired into the trees and the branches broke out in a flurry of movement. Sark retrieved Sydney’s weapon where it had scattered and fired off a round as well, in random direction, but wasn’t shocked when he heard a distinctly male yell of his target having been acquired. The rustling continued, however, proving that their attacker wasn’t alone, and the sound of their retreat faded only gradually.
Weiss was already down on one knee by the time Sark forced himself to lower Sydney’s weapon, to assess the damage.
“Knife,” Sydney was hissing at Weiss, and was pressing both of her hands up to the bleeding gash in her head. Sark’s gaze followed the path of trajectory and found the knife settling in a cloud of dust just between Will’s feet. The man was standing stock still, rocked back and frozen on his heels, both of his hands up in some vain attempt to shield himself. The blade had sheathed itself far down into the fine layer of sand that coated their path. He went and retrieved it, sparing only a cursory derisive glance at the very slowly unfreezing reporter, and slammed the knife point down into the dirt next to Sydney’s knee. He put the gun next to it where she could have it in easy reach.
“Scavengers,” he said shortly. “Protecting their find.”
“Animals,” Sydney hissed again as Weiss probed the wound, her entire body flinching away from him. Will echoed the movement with a pitying sound. She was standing and staggering and Sark found a distracted part of his mind trying to calculate the odds of the event, what chance it had been that she had recoiled in time, or that the throw had been off its mark in the first place.
“That, possibly, was not the best idea you have ever had.” Sark pushed on her shoulder and she dropped reluctantly to sit on the low wall that ran alongside the shielded side of the road, behind the cars. The deep gash on the side of her head was glaring and ugly in the afternoon sun.
“Shut up,” she snapped at him, her hands gripping tightly at her thighs as he probed the wound.
“No. Get that backpack off before you topple backwards.” He didn’t wait for her to comply before turning to Weiss, who was hovering awkwardly. “Go through this luggage. Find something I can use as anesthetic, and a sewing kit.” Weiss gave a nod, grateful to give some direction to his energy, and ducked behind a large chunk of metal to being going through the cargo hold.
Will edged closer, trying to get a look at the wound. Sydney grimaced when Will made another pitying noise, and clamped on her legs harder. “Go help Weiss, yeah? I want to get this done with as fast as possible.”
“It’ll need to be disinfected, as well,” Sark muttered to himself, and then glanced up at Will, his expression transforming crossways. “Well? Go be the little vulture you are.” He made little shooing motions with one hand. “Scavenge.”
The expression Will delivered Sark clearly indicated what he thought of the man, which obviously included some kind of natural fear, or he would have said been saying it out loud. But he moved off, gradually, as if making sure that his lack of presence wouldn’t end up in Sark throwing Sydney over the edge of the road and into the underbrush for the animals to pick at.
Sydney made a noise of protest and sat up a little straighter as she finally managed to free her burden, the backpack crunching into the gravel at the side of the road. “It doesn’t need to be – ”
“Shut up,” he echoed her, down to the inflection. They squinted at one another, Sark swiping his forearm over his matted hair in frustration. When it was clear she wouldn’t be yielding anytime soon, Sark exhaled sharply through his nose and fixed a sharp glare on her. “I refuse to let you saunter vaguely southward while the rest of us wait for you to bleed out. You only need a few stitches, and you certainly aren’t in any shape to do them yourself.”
Whatever internal battle waged within Sydney, none of it showed on her face. “Fine,” she clipped, but only after a long moment. “There’s bandages in my pack.”
Sark regarded her warily, studied the stony face of her words. But he gave a sharp nod and slung his own bag to the ground. He would have to see how she still felt about it after he cleaned the wound. He tugged an unopened water bottle out of her bag and pulled the winter parka out of his own knapsack, retrieving a knife and slicing out both of the soft cotton linings of the pockets of the coat. Sydney watched him carefully but made no protest at his having a knife, nor questioning where he’d found it. Or why he hadn’t used it until now. He folded it under her wary gaze and slipped it into his back pocket.
“Pull your hair off your face. I’ve got to get you clean.” She met his bitten-off directions and kept her hands on her face, making sure the finer locks at her hairline didn’t wisp back into his intended path.
Content that she would hold her place, Sark turned the pocket inside out, picking apart the rough seam, and cracked the seal on the water bottle. Careful not to let the water go anywhere but the pocket, he wet the cloth and slid the pocket over his hand. He angled her head to the side and did his best to get the larger particles of dirt out of the gash.
Sydney gave a sharp cry and her hands jumped on her head. “Hold still,” Sark growled, gripping her chin harder and scraping relentlessly at the wound.
“Stop mauling me,” she said through clenched teeth. Her eyes were brimming from the effort not to scream, the possible concussion, the shock of the wound, the loss of blood, the pain. Sark didn’t answer her, just kept up his rhythmic cleansing.
There was a sharp crackling, and Sydney looked up to see Weiss approaching, carrying a victorious expression on his face and a bottle of Listerine in his hand. “You wouldn’t believe what some of these people had in their cars,” he said, and slung down a duffle bag full of looted goods.
Sark plucked the rectangular plastic bottle out of his hand and shoved it between Sydney’s knees to have it on hand. A few more swipes with the cloth and he was satisfied that he’d gotten all of the dirt out of the wound. It was bleeding sluggishly now, and he pushed her backwards and poured a bit of water over the cut to flood out any remaining filth.
He snapped his fingers at Weiss and motioned him around. “Come stand behind her. I’ve got to tip her farther back.” Sydney was already scowling, ready to protest, and Sark gave her an unkind smile. “Unless you’d like mouth wash in your eyes.”
Weiss circled around behind her and braced her shoulder, and she allowed him to tip her head back. Sark cracked the seal on the Listerine and then hesitated. She rolled her gaze up at him, and one corner of his mouth twitched. “This is going to hurt,” he said, and poured the green fluid over the wound.
Her legs flailed.
Sark and Weiss both clamped down on a thigh and a low, reedy, angry sound spilled out of one side of her mouth. She clutched at her own head reflexively, the hands she’d put there to hold her hair back transformed into claws. Sark poured another calculated dose of the liquid over her scalp and half expected the wound to sizzle from it, vaguely disappointed when the hiss emanated from Sydney’s mouth instead.
“It’s clean,” she hissed at him, and he stepped away long enough to let her find her bearings, if not her dignity.
Meticulously folding up the sleeves of his shirt, he tilted the Listerine again and felt something in his jaw pop as he poured it over his left where the handcuffs had cut him. It did sting, worse than he had anticipated, but he forced the fluid back over his other wrist before capping the bottle with a quiet “click” of a safety catch, and set it on the ground. He took a steadying breath, helped the alcohol evaporate with a few quick shakes of his hands, and rounded on Weiss again. “Did you find anything for the pain?”
Weiss didn’t move from his position as sentry behind Sydney, but nodded at the bag. “You’ll be interested to see what the driver of the third car had stashed in his glove box. Check the outside pocket.”
Sark dug through the bag curiously, his fingers snagging on thin plastic. He pulled out a baggie of white powder.
Sydney looked blearily up at Weiss. “Is that cocaine?”
“It isn’t Cream of Tartar,” Sark muttered, dipping into the bag and rubbing the fine powder between his fingers. He glanced at Weiss, who shrugged. “It’ll do.”
He snagged the other pocket that he had cut out of the jacket and dampened it with the water, rubbing it between his fingers contemplatively. After a moment’s deliberation, he tapped a dime-sized pile of the powder onto the cloth and let it gather the damp. When it was just moist enough to be a thin paste, he grabbed her chin again.
“Have you ever done this before?” Her words traveled up through his fingers, into his arms.
He didn’t answer her. “The anesthetic will last for approximately ninety minutes.” His voice was clipped and clinical, and his motions sure. “The drug will stay in your body up to six hours. We aren’t going anywhere else tonight. Agent Weiss, I suggest you prepare a site and begin gathering wood. We’re going to need a fire to keep animals from investigating the site.”
Weiss wavered. “Aren’t you going to need someone to keep her still?”
“What?” Will stamped over the ground, knocking large clumps of red clay off of his boots. “Why does Sydney need to be held still?”
“Why does everyone need to talk about me like I’m not sitting right here?” Sydney wondered in the same mild tone Will had used.
“I’ll manage,” Sark answered Weiss’ question, his tone brooking no argument, and painted on the rest of the mixture. “Where is the sewing kit?”
Will procured a small, black sewing tri-fold from his back pocket with the words “Janstone Realty Ltd.” embossed next to a small picture of a house. He flipped it back and handed it to Sark. “It was all I could find. There’s only green thread left.”
“We’re not worried about cosmetic appeal here,” Sark snapped at him, yanking the packet out of his fingers and examining the needles.
Sydney stayed Will’s reply with a touch to his arm, and he glowered instead and began grumbling about his usefulness as a retriever. But he stamped off into the tree line again, and the sound of brush being gathered came moments after. Weiss followed with a shake of his head and a sigh.
“You’re being unnecessarily cruel,” she admonished Sark as soon as Weiss had gone.
He pulled the needle out of the Listerine, where he’d dipped it in an effort to disinfect it, and then rooted through his bag for a lighter. It cracked as it flipped open, the sandy sound of the flint striking home keeping his attention. “You’re using unnecessary words,” he said, and ran the flame over the needle. He snapped the lighter closed, dropped it into the bag, and turned to her. “Ready?”
“No,” she said, but pulled out a length of green string for him to use.
* * *
Sark rolled his shoulders back and forth, together, rubbed the back of his neck, and stared at the wall. He extended his left arm, setting off a series of pops and sparks in the joints and letting out a small, satisfied sigh. Then he reached up, snagged at a crack in the wall, and hauled himself up. Small chips of rock showered down under his weight and he reached up again, found another invisible crack, and hauled forward.
The heat and the rock bit at his fingers and his face, his teeth clenched down just the very way his dentist had recommended against. Of course, that cautionary statement had been under the assumption of grinding in his sleep, and the dentist had met a suspiciously unfortunate end not a few days later, but Sark still made an effort to relax his expression.
The dentist, if he recalled correctly, had been particularly brutal during cavity fillings.
Halfway up he stopped, the toes of his boots wedged precariously into a crevice that was just a little too far below his next extension to be entirely convenient. He looked down at the rope trailing behind him, made sure he still had enough line, and gave the half-circle of upturned faces a garish smile. He could see Sydney’s expression cloud over and turned his attention back to the task at hand before she could give Will some much-needed lessons on aim adjustment for moving targets.
Higher. They needed higher.
The concrete rubbed poorly against his jacket, snagging the weather-proof material as he ascended; tiny, gripping hands impeding his climb.
It was unnerving, the way the roads had been silent. With the exception of a few cars free-wheeling in the opposite direction, nearly every town they had come to had been abandoned, boarded up, or refused to increase their population, even by four.
Which was when it had somehow fallen to Sark to scale the shelter that hid two gasoline pumps from view. Atop the concrete fixture, according to Weiss’ attuned eye, Sark would be high enough above the surrounding tree line to triangulate their current location. The satellites that usually fed the positioning device Weiss had been using had become mysteriously and utterly inconveniently useless – much to the group’s distress. It being a matter of tree line and foliage was crap, and Sark had told Weiss just that. Even Will had had the decency to look skeptical.
But possibilities could not be ruled out, after all, and Sark sighed and reached for the next grip as he hauled himself upward.
Two days of careful driving, a bit more stolen gasoline, and several incredibly irritating nights of attempting to find hotel rooms and managing only to, once more, end up sleeping in tents in one village square or another were beginning to wear on him. Sydney had become, if possible, increasingly irritable. At best, Will was dead weight.
What Sark really wanted – more than a good clean shower, to be done with this ridiculous apocalypse nonsense, or a full, hot meal – was a gun.
He pulled himself up once more, his hands grappling on the top of the shelter, and managed to latch onto one of the long metal spikes that were put up to prevent bird, or other wildlife, for that matter, from landing and messing up the pavement below. Just as Sark was likely to, should he fall.
Shoving the grim thoughts out of his mind, he latched both hands around the sturdy metal spikes and pulled himself upward. There was a moment of terrifying vertigo as he released both feet from their secure crevices in the concrete pillar, and then he was up and over and flat on his back. Flat on his side, really, since there wasn’t room for much else with the rods covering the top of the shelter, and he sent up a brief thanks for there not having been an overhang to deal with.
It was only a brief struggle, after that, to pull himself up to his feet and uncoil the rope from where Weiss had looped it around his arm and neck, across his chest. He tied one end to one of the metal pikes – scaling down would be impossible, so the rope would help with that, at least. He dropped the bulky pack onto a bit of stained concrete and pulled out the small device inside.
“Gently!” Weiss’ voice floated up over the rim, and Sark spared a glance downward to see the man pacing to and fro, having retreated far enough to see Sark’s roughshod treatment of the equipment. Sark turned back to the task at hand, lifting the hand-held compact out of its casing, and straightened himself. It was easy enough to use, which was how Weiss had gotten out of the climb, and hard enough that Will wouldn’t be able to manage it, which had exempted the reporter. Sark had vetoed Sydney’s climb himself, her head wound still unstable enough to make him willing to do the job.
Of course, that had been before he’d gotten halfway up the wall.
He flicked it on and dialed their proposed coordinates, and the coordinates of Mexico City, and waited for the satellites to realign to configure the remaining distance between the two cities.
The screen blinked its green cursor up at him, and he muttered an oath or three under his breath before looking back down at Weiss. “Nothing,” he yelled down.
Weiss, who had started his pacing again, stopped to tilt his head back and squint into the afternoon sun. “Erase the coordinates. Let the satellites find you.”
Sark punched the reset button and entered the Mexico City coordinates, and waited.
The screen didn’t even register this time.
“Nothing,” he called again and, after a moment of Weiss’ silence, “This is sounding vaguely familiar, isn’t it?”
Sydney, aggravated, moved into sight. “Sark. Leave the rope tied, and get down from there. We’re wasting driving light.”
Sighing at the futility of the argument – it had been a waste of time in the first place, and he had been the one to point that out – he repacked the bag and tossed it down to Weiss, who caught it awkwardly and immediately began checking for damage. Sark rappelled down the column, the rope burning the insides of his hands, and he was in a thoroughly bad mood from it by the time he rejoined the other three.
Sydney had her hands on her hips and was trying to look over Weiss’ shoulder. “What do you mean you think the satellite is gone?”
Sark had the sudden, distinct impression that this was not a conversation he wanted to be walking into the middle of.
The device in his hand, Weiss was pushing random buttons. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense. This is a foolproof navigational system. It’s nearly impossible for all of these satellites to go down at the same time, or for cloud cover to be heavy enough in so many places that the radio waves can’t get through. It’s simply unheard of.”
“Unlike, say, the entire northern half of the United States freezing over,” Will offered, looking over Weiss’ other shoulder. When he ascertained that he would be unable to understand anything the little device read out anyway, he backed off.
“The man has a point,” Sark hedged, and was promptly affixed with a startled look from Will. He gave a half-shrug, a delicate lift and descent of one shoulder. “Would the clouds that brought the snow be enough to interfere with the satellite signal?”
Weiss nodded, but he was frowning. “I hadn’t thought…” he drifted off, and shook his head.
“That it was global?” Sark entertained the idea of ridiculing him for thinking only of the United States, such a typical take on international relations, but he let it pass. Daylight was burning, and he was eager to get back on the road. Sleep, even, if he could. Not that Sydney was in any state to drive just yet, and that meant they would have to juggle the transportation schedule a little. “Alright. No GPS. How are we going to navigate?”
“The way that’s actually foolproof,” Will spoke up, and scratched at the back of his neck. Then he turned to look at the abandoned gas station, scanning the hazed over windows for a familiar white metal rack. “Maps.”
* * *
After five weeks, they stopped moving the lamp, because she stopped moving altogether.
They hadn’t realized it right away, but one night, as they were filling the room with that subtle gas to make sure she was completely unconscious before removing her for a bit of requested testing, she moved a bit more stiffly than usual.
When she woke up the next morning, she showed what the chief physician called primary signs of waxy schizophrenia. To demonstrate, the physician raised one of her hands, and it stayed raised. He moved one of her legs, and it stayed where it was placed. She would no longer move of her own free will.
It was as if, the physician had said, she no longer believed she could move.
If this continued, the physician said, she would suffer the consequences of sensory deprivation. That the development of such symptoms was concrete evidence that she was, in fact, already suffering from such.
Her father had her returned to the room immediately, and she was no longer removed. Simply observed, from then on, and he watched with significant interest as she no longer picked at the tube that ran her intravenous feedings, as she had for so long – as if it were a slight nuisance, a fly buzzing near her mind she could not brush away.
After seven weeks, they removed the lamp.
The weeks flew this way, as, part by part, her body shut down. Her body no longer required chemical assistance to return to its nightly state of unconsciousness, and it made it easier for the nurses to change her catheter and freshen the IV that kept her alive. The thing that was once his daughter within and without now only lived in his mind, and hers.
The physician reported that she had stopped talking altogether, and was no longer responding to their nighttime sleep tests. She had gone deaf. They pricked her skin with needles and watched her not react, watched her sleep calmly on. Her brainwaves indicated no reaction. Her nerves had been eradicated. They were afraid, the physician told him, to test her smell and taste, in case they ended up overloading her senses and damaging her brain, but it was safe to assume that the results were equitable.
Her father had made it very clear that he wanted her mind intact.
She wasted away to nothing, her brain shutting down, side by side, slowly, piece by piece, burying itself under a protective layer of diamond-fine sand. And he watched.
He watched Nadia Santos disappear.
On the day she went blind, the reports of snow in Los Angeles came.
* * *
They drove and slept in shifts, with the agreement that Will and Sark would never be the two left awake, or in the same section of the vehicle at the same time. Considering that Sark had no real room to argue his case, he managed to put a fairly indignant front, but eventually relinquished to the terms.
As luck would have it - for everyone involved, because Weiss had gotten rather weary of keeping one eye on him all the time, and Sydney was exhausted from the verbal sparring he insisted upon as his only form of entertainment, and Will because…well, because Will was Will, a fairly intelligent guy who knew that it was always better to have a placated sociopath than not – Sark drew the short straw, and climbed into the miniscule baggage hold to sleep.
There wasn’t much anyone could do about comfort – the Will’s Jeep was a modern style, and at least came with a key to turn the ignition, and was therefore two counts up on being better than the one they had left behind on the road through Sonora. But no one, least of all Sydney, was eager to return to Mexico City. The map spread out between them, Will and Weiss commandeered the back seat to try and plot a course by penlight and a dim moon.
The evening continued in relative peace, save the near brutal killing of some kind of red-eyed animal that barely missed their tires in time, and Sydney slept harder than the thought she could have during her shift in the back. It wasn’t until several hours later, in fact, that the crews had rotated far enough around to have Weiss snoring obtrusively and Sark behind the steering wheel, the map curled over Sydney’s knees.
Will was scribbling furiously, a small, water stained reporter’s notebook propped up against one thigh.
It was eerie, the way the headlights on the car sliced the dark and then abruptly filtered off into jumping dust motes and nothingness. There were no road lamps, nothing to reflect the light back to any of the drivers, no city lights to break the horizon at all.
It was very, very slow going.
But no one noticed anything was wrong – more wrong than lately, what with the freezing of the northern hemisphere and random ritualistic murder of ex-boyfriends and familial betrayal – until Will pointed it out. He clicked his pen, pointed with the hidden tip to the windshield, and the confusion was evident in his voice. “The clouds are moving.”
Sark’s gaze flicked up of the road for a moment, but didn’t bother examining the sky, couldn’t risk taking his focus off of their path. Sydney, though, craned her neck upward, tilted her head so she could see up to the sky. “I don’t see anything.”
“That’s what I mean,” Will confirmed. Sark jerked in surprise – the other man had shifted up so he could peer out the window more easily, his shoulders squeezed between the two seats, and spoke right next to Sark’s ear. “The clouds shifted in awfully fast. Remember how much you were complaining about the heat today?”
Sark bristled, his hands slipping along the steering wheel as he adjusted for the washboard road. “I was not – ”
“Yes, you were,” Sydney cut him off. “Will, that doesn’t look right. I don’t see any motion?”
He leaned farther forward, his elbows resting on the console between the seats. “Well, where’s the moon? It’s risen by now, we should be able to tell how fast the storm is moving if we can see how fast the moon is moving over it.”
Sydney squinted for a moment and then rolled down the window, leaning her head out so she could look behind her. “I don’t…Will, where’s the moon?” Accusatory, as if he’d done something with it.
“What do you mean, ‘where’s the moon?’” Sark muttered, rolling down his own window and ducking an elbow out so he could glance around on his side. “Wasn’t it just full a few nights ago?”
“On our way down, yeah.” Sydney’s voice was a shout, but it filtered dimly over the rise of the car and the rattle of the unpaved road.
Sark pulled back inside the cab of the car to see Sydney on her knees, leaning all the way out the window.
He had to suppress an urge to shove.
They were all silent for a moment, staring ahead, Will settled between them. The pages of his notebook ruffled in the air from the open windows, and Sark let his mind fill with the steady crunch of road. It spread out straight before him, and he let the speedometer nudge upward for the first time in an hour. Then, with a half-laugh, he leaned his elbow on the window and his head on his hand and recited, “’The fourth angel sounded his trumpet.’”
There was a click of silence as they both tried to place the quote, and then Will gave a short, nervous laugh. “That’s ridiculous.”
Sark made a noise of confirmation, but Sydney turned in her seat. “No, that…that sounds familiar. What – ”
“’The fourth angel sounded his trumpet’,” Sark started again, still staring straight ahead at the road. “’And a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night.’”
“Revelation,” Will supplied quietly.
Sydney turned straight in her seat and didn’t say anything else for a moment.
“That’s ridiculous,” Sark said, parroting Will’s earlier sentiment. His voice was low, quiet, almost lost in the sound of the wind. Suddenly angry at the interference, he reached down and cranked up the window, and then fixed his gaze back on the road.
“Utterly.” But Sydney’s voice came out small as well, and when Sark glanced out of the corner of his eye, Will and Sydney both had their faces turned up to the sky again. Counting.
Disgusted, Sark refocused himself, checked the gas gauge and slowed their speed again, keeping the turns careful and trying not to let the vibrations from the uneven road and stone make his hands ache. The silence multiplied exponentially, and after the first few minutes, it was as if no one had ever entertained the idea in the first place.
“Scientifically speaking…” Weiss’ voice floated from the back, and Sark’s gaze snapped from the road to the rear-view mirror, startled. The agent was struggling into a sitting position, his head tilted back against the glass, his eyes rolled up in his head trying to see out. “Even if a third of them went out, the light might not reach us for…nine years, at least, I think it goes.”
Sydney made a disturbed noise, but didn’t turn. “Well, someone ought to explain that to the sky, then.”
Sark squinted at the road ahead as her words processed. Slowly.
Slower, then, for Will. “Wait. What?”
Sark exhaled sharply through his nose, a sudden urge to see it for himself, and threw the car into park alongside the road. He was out of the car before Sydney could even voice her protest, and Will cranked down his window to lean out as well.
They all craned upward, the lack of light pollution making the stars crawl straight down to the curve of the earth. The tiny pinprick designs hurt his eyes – where he trained his gaze the hardest, the light would fade out, and the brighter stars in his periphery would realign his focus. And then those stars would fade out, and the cycle would repeat itself as he flicked his gaze over and over the misshaped constellations.
It was only when he unfocused his gaze altogether than he could notice it.
A third of the stars. Gone.
Not in a slice – not in a way that would be absolutely noticeable, a third of the sky completely blacked out by a giant hand. No. Instead, it was spattered, random removal – as if someone had run the sky through a sieve, and certain points of light had been deemed too rocky to be permitted safe passage.
The constellations were a wreck.
Sark found himself backing against the Jeep, his shoulders colliding awkwardly with the door frame, Will’s upside-down open mouth swallowing the heavens in shock. The dippers leaked. The dogs hobbled. The thrones were stripped of seats. The archers lost their bows. Mythological characters sacrificed body parts. It was a completely different night sky.
“Well,” Will said quietly to the luggage rack. “It’s a good thing we decided not to sail.”
v. such divinity doth hedge a king
Three years ago, if someone; anyone, really, it didn’t matter – his sister, Sydney, Francie, his editor – had told Will that he would find himself dialing his story contacts in Mexico City to help find passage south so that he could escape the freezing northern continent, he would have told them they were crazy. Or, perhaps more accurately, he simply would have thumbed the emergency dial button on his cell phone, and waited for the men in white to show up and take away who ever was telling him such stories. If they had said that he would be standing next to two CIA agents and a government hunted sociopath while he was doing it, he would have checked them in the head with the nearest blunt object and run as fast as possible.
Three years ago, if anyone had told Will that he would share a contact with the aforementioned government hunted sociopath, he would not have believed them.
Now, however, there was not much that Will was surprised by.
Which was why he was not surprised that, upon responding to his anonymous telephone call, McKenas Cole’s appearance seemed to rattle Sark more than Will himself.
The four of them were gathered around a table, Sydney staring doggedly at the front door, waiting for anyone untoward to come in. Weiss was nursing a cup of black coffee, Sark was busying trying to look falsely bored, which kept him from authenticating the expression.
Will was making a house of cards out of sugar packets.
So it wasn’t exactly that Cole didn’t surprise him – Cole did surprise him, because Cole was a surprising guy. His facial expressions were disturbingly disarming, his innocent construction made him immediately suspect, and Will had never felt entirely at east with how fast he spoke. As a reporter, anyone who talked faster than another person could follow was immediately somehow off-point. And he certainly had a flare for dramatic entrances, which was evidence enough when he clapped two friendly hands down - one on Will’s shoulder, and the other on Sark’s – without anyone having seen him enter the establishment. They both jumped like guilty children.
Will watched Sydney shift slightly, and narrow her eyes menacingly, and hoped it meant she’d drawn her weapon under the table.
So it wasn’t that Cole didn’t surprise him – indeed the little stack of sugar packets collapsed quite theatrically upon his edgy response. It was that he wasn’t surprised when Cole knelt down between he and Sark and, looking between them, gave one of his highly disturbing grins. It reminded Will of nature shows he’d seen, with a deep voiced Richard Attenborough warning him that a show of teeth was more often than not a sign of challenge. Cole knelt between them and tilted his trademark smile first at Will, and then at Sark, and then back again. “Well?” he asked. “Which one of you fellows called me?”
Sark’s first reaction was to roll his shoulder down, throw off Cole’s balance, and snap his fist up into the man’s left eye. Will’s was to shake the man’s hand off and then scrub his shoulder with steel wool until it bled itself clean. For the good of the table, neither indulged.
“It was me,” Will said with a wave of his fingers as Cole pulled up a fifth chair and straddled it backwards, his arms folding easily over the back, his feet hooking around the legs. He hunched forward, the disturbing smile plastered on his face – as if he had no additional expression.
“Fancy seeing the two of you together,” Cole said, still looking at both of them. Sark’s upper lip was curling further and further back, as if he had lost all control of that response. Cole’s smile deepened, and he lurched forwards to sling one arm around both Sark and Will’s necks, hauled them close to his own face. “It is so good to see two teams come together as one, you know?”
Weiss was watching them closely, and kept checking Sydney for a response.
Sydney, whose hands were still underneath the table. Sydney, who hadn’t moved a single centimeter since Cole had sat down between the other two men.
Will cleared his throat and tugged against Cole’s hand, trying to ease back. It was only a small flash of panic when Cole wouldn’t uncoil his arm from around Will’s neck, and then the pressure relented and he pulled away. Cole held onto Sark, though, and tapped a finger on his chest. “You and me, boy, we need to have a talk.” He delivered the order as if it were a good joke, and his expression went expectant, waiting for Sark to laugh. Instead, Sark flared his nostrils and let his lip curl even farther. But Cole laughed to fill the void, and nodded, satisfied before letting Sark’s head go.
Then he turned to Sydney, and his expression went grave.
After so much levity, it was almost more disturbing to see Cole act serious. “Sydney. It’s been a long time.”
“Not long enough,” Sydney told him, her voice completely monotonous.
“You were playing with different toys, then, I think.” He turned to assess Weiss, and the private, lunatic grin was back. “Then again, maybe not. Just a different label on the ID card, right Sydney?” He thumbed at Sark. “I ought to tell you, this man isn’t entirely trustworthy.”
Sydney’s eyes narrowed slowly, by fraction, until they were only open in lazy and treacherous slits. She wrestled with the urge to tell him not to use her first name. “I know.”
“Losing your touch, man?” Cole patted Sark on the shoulder, conciliatorily, and Sark went tense at the touch.
“We need a plane,” Will blurted before Sark could reply – or his version of a reply, which Will anticipated would include bone and blood at this point. “To get us down to Ecuador. No questions asked.” Cole looked as though he were about to protest, or claim impossibility, and Will added, “You owe me.”
“He owes you?” Weiss muttered, and Will shrugged and stared down at the sugar packets.
“I do, at that,” Cole said, tipping himself back in the chair and gripping hard at the seat back. “I can transport two of you. No more.”
A chorus of protests from around the table, except from Sark. The blonde stared hard at Cole, and they locked eyes, an awkward moment of silent battle that none of the rest of them were privy to. Finally, Cole looked away and reaffirmed his statement. “Only two. Sorry, kids, that’s the limit. Jules here should’ve told you that before he contacted me, you know?”
“I didn’t,” Sark ground out, “contact you.”
“Well, you should’ve,” Cole insisted, though whether it was the imparting of knowledge or the contact he was encouraging was left up to them to guess.
“You two are working together?” Sydney asked, and didn’t sound the least bit surprised.
“Oh, Julie didn’t’ tell you that, either?”
“We’re not working together,” Sark turned his attention to Sydney, his hands clenching on the table. “We have never, and will never work together.”
“Irina sends her regards,” Cole said with a nod to Sydney.
Sark made a strangled, angry noise and Sydney drew one of her hands from below the table to caution him back – not an actual restraint, but enough of a warning that kept the other man from letting fly. “You know my mother?”
It was the disregard, Will finally decided, that made Cole the most disturbing man he’d ever had the displeasure of working with. The disregard he had to his own personal safety, the joyous glint his eyes took on whenever his life was threatened. The way he refocused on the largest threat at any given moment, and chose to antagonize that single point until it expired its hazard. Then he would move on again, and turn his attentions on whatever served to needle him the most next.
Will wasn’t sure whether to feel insulted or mildly gracious for his safety.
Cole made a tsking sound and nodded towards Sark. “As always, this one isn’t sharing his information. Yes, I know your mother. And, might I add, you are looking more like her every day.” He shoved himself up from the table, turning the chair around, and smiled at all of them, his hands propped gaudily on his hips. “Well, children. The airstrip will be prepped and ready for your departure in exactly,” he checked his watch, “two hours. Don’t keep my pilot waiting. He’s a bit tetchy, and it’s a passenger flight, not a cargo plane. I’m sure you understand?” He made no pause to see if they did or not before turning to Will. “We’re even. Don’t call me again, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Will said, not meeting the man’s eyes.
“Swell,” Cole agreed, and slapped him on the back again. “Bon voyage, kiddies. Remember – only two.” And then he slipped away, around a coat rack, toward the bathrooms, and was lost from sight.
Weiss deflated immediately, as if he had let out a great breath all at once. Sydney pulled both of her hands on top of the table, slapping a knife and a pistol onto the surface and looking disgruntled. Sark, if anything, became more tense.
“I can’t believe you know him,” Sydney said, shaking her head, sounding disgusted. “Wait. Yes, I can. Of course you know him.”
Will was about to apologize for it, and explain the incident with the rabbits and the electrolysis that had lead to Cole being in the red, but Sark cut him off before he could.
“I wasn’t aware my company needed to be approved by you, Agent Bristow,” he bristled.
“It’s apparently approved by Derevko,” Weiss felt it necessary to point out. He immediately shrunk back to silence when Sydney fixed her withering glare on him.
“That isn’t the point right now,” she said with a shake of her head. “We’ve got to figure out who’s going to come with me, and who’s staying here.”
“Sark seems awfully comfortable with Mexico City,” Weiss offered, a grim smile on his face. “Leave him here.”
“Tippin seems to know his way around just as well,” Sark pointed out. “Besides, she can’t get to her father without me.”
Sydney scoffed at him, covering Will’s sound of indignation. “Apparently, you’re not the only one with information anymore, Sark. I could contact Cole, get him to – ” Her answer was cut off by Sark’s laughter at the suggestion she go with Cole.
“You’re going to go with him,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “You’re going to go with him? The man stormed an entire SD cell after you tugged his pigtails the wrong way.”
“How is that any worse than you?” Will was bristling at the idea of being left behind.
“Enough.” They all glanced at Sydney, who had gone quiet, staring at the blade of the knife as it shined in the dull light. She looked up, belatedly, and glanced around the table. “We need to figure this out. We’re running out of time. And bickering isn’t going to help.”
“I think that may be a bit hypocritical,” Sark said conversationally.
“My God!” Will nearly exploded, his hands going up with his voice. “You just never stop, do you?”
Sark stared at Sydney, his steely expression registering none of Will’s outburst. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”
* * *
The trick with sensory deprivation was maintenance.
It wouldn’t do, simply to leave someone blind and deaf and unaccustomed to physical sensation of all kinds. It took more than that to hollow the senses consistently, and maintain such a level. Which was why, when Nadia was finally removed from the room – blind, deaf, rumored mute, the shattered equivalent of having been locked in a water tank and forgotten by her captors – the doctors did their level best to meet her father’s staunch requirements.
Arvin Sloane still watched behind glass.
In some far part of his mind – the part that had studied psychology for seven semesters and attracted the attention of the CIA to him in the first place – he knew that the barrier was a useless crutch to make himself feel better. That if everything that was rumored about his daughter was true, a few millimeters of glass certainly wasn’t going to protect him from it. That even turning her into a walking coma wasn’t going to help, in the long run.
That certainly wasn’t enough to get him any closer to her.
Nevertheless, the precautions were maintained. Nadia was never transported long distances – simply shuffled from room to room. Sloane made it his business to come to her, and never the other way round, no matter how convenient it would have been for him. She was wheeled on gurneys, all material carefully kept away from her skin. There were unfortunate sacrifices, of course. To blindfold her, there would have to be fabric on her skin. To adequately block her hearing, they would have to risk activating pain sensors. To make her accessible, they would have to risk ruining three months of work.
But it would be worth it.
Sloane turned away from the glass, satisfied that Nadia would be adequately settled. The room behind him was dark – with all two way mirrors, the voyeurs remained in the shadows. It was only now, when Nadia would be unable to ascertain the presence of any flaw in the room, even with her eyes open and her hands unbound, that they could place her here.
Personally, Sloane thought that, if it all turned out to be true – if he died because of it, if she killed him for it – he probably couldn’t blame her. It would be worth it.
Well.
That was a lie. It would be worth it. But he could still blame her.
Grim smile on his face, he clasped his hands behind his back once more and assessed his audience. “She has been prepared according to the prophesies,” he said, and was momentarily startled by his own voice. So long in silence, and it wasn’t only Nadia who had become accustomed to the lack of sound. In this enclosed room, with the walls pressing in, it was no difficulty to remember how much the building was a prison for him, as well as his daughter.
The consequence of going into hiding, of course, is that you have to stay hidden.
“We have seen your results, Arvin. The Council is pleased.”
He could feel the warmth rush through him and he propped himself against the back of the chair, the plush upholstery molding to his fingers as they gripped near his thighs. It was heady praise, especially from the Council, who was so rarely pleased with anything, or anyone. Sitting there, the coiled tension finally winding its way tight inside him, he took his first free breath in the long weeks he’d spent here.
Finally. Finally, it was worth it.
His smile widened, lost its self-deprecating nature, blossomed into something true and pleased. “You’ll be so pleased,” he said, his tone a confession, a secret. “You’ll be so pleased with our daughter, Irina.”
She leaned forward, the hard lines of her face utterly still as she examined Nadia through the glass. Her elbows rested on her knees, her hands pressed together in a sharp spade. It was only after a thorough examination of the girl bound before her that she turned her cold eyes on Sloane.
“Yes,” she said, the indication quite clear that, were she not, nor would he be. That he would pay for errors with measures of flesh. “I imagine I will.”
* * *
“Sark.” She pushed at him and he let himself be shoved away, his hands raising as if to demonstrate his innocence. “Not if you were the last man on earth, and I was the last woman.”
“Are you sure?” he purred and let his hands drop, coming closer again. “Because, Sydney, that could become a distinct possibility.”
“My God,” she said, her voice a mix of disbelief and anger, moving out of his nonexistent reach. “It’s like you don’t even live on the same planet with the rest of us.” There was a moment of silence where he watched her, something amused in his expression, before she added, “Every person I’ve ever come into contact with, even remotely, has had their lives threatened by you.”
He leaned back against the wall and considered. “Even if that’s true, Sydney. It works both ways.” He gave her a wry smile. “Besides, I was never overly fond of Sloane.”
She let loose a disgruntled noise, and he could see something in her thrumming for an excuse to hit him. Again. He made a mental note not to give it to her. The bruising was just beginning to fade from the last of the unexpected blows. Though, really, it rankled him slightly that he still considered them ‘unexpected’ – it wasn’t as if he ever considered it out of her range of possibility to deck him.
“What are you talking about, ‘it works both ways’?” her voice was demanding and suspicious of him, a small child disturbing a bee hive with far too short a stick.
His hands in his pockets, Sark displayed the perfect picture of lazy indifference, his chin tipped at just the wrong angle let his words come off humble. “It isn’t as though you haven’t been a mortal threat to every acquaintance of mine who you’ve come in contact with,” he pointed out. “I’m sure that they don’t appreciated constantly being shot at, covered in acid, forced to withstand interrogation at your hands. And we’re not all bad, you know.” He rushed onward, wanting to have his piece before the gathering storm in her face broke free. “Haven’t you thought about it, Sydney? Poor, desolate, evil man. Working for the wrong side through the trappings of fate. Caught at…at her mother’s side,” he said with a laugh, as if realizing the humor in that particular employment arrangement for the first time. “Torturing her friends, wishing only to liberate and redeem himself from the world he so despises?”
There was a moment – just a moment, where the hard note in his eyes met the shocked, infuriated, questioning line of hers. And they stared.
And then Sark cracked up, and had to throw up his hands to block Sydney’s incensed retribution.
“You ass,” she hissed.
“You have thought about it,” he crowed, using just a little more force than was entirely necessary to push her off. “You have, you stupid sod. And you want to know if it’s me who’s living on the right mental plane? Good Lord, Sydney. And Irina called you the smart one.” He shook his head, thoroughly amused, and rubbed at the back of his neck with a small, fond sigh. “Goodness. Well, let’s see. All your friends, is it? I don’t quite recall. Your father and yourself, naturally. And Agent Vaughn, but he had his day in court with me. As did Agent Weiss. Who throws a particularly mean right hook, if I recall? And Mr. Tippin, but really, that was circumstance.”
“Circumstance,” Sydney echoed flatly, her arms crossed over her chest.
Sark made a noise of confirmation and mirrored the pose. “Would you like me to say it again? Is it a too long a word?”
“Fuck you,” she snapped. “You killed Francie. You put my mother’s life in danger, you – ”
His laughter cut her off again, this time with an odd note of frenzy in it. “I put Irina’s life in danger? What life have you been living? Because I think I’d like to go over a few other key points in it, as well. Surely you can’t be deluded as all that. Next you’ll tell me that your father is a humanitarian.”
“No more so than yours,” she shot, and Sark could feel his mouth open whip back, and then closed it with a snap. She sneered at him, an imperfect iteration of her father’s expression of disdain. “What’s wrong, Sark? No quip for that?”
When he spoke, his voice was level and stern – none of its usual, casual mockery. “And yet, it is I who your father chose to confide in. And not you.”
She appeared startled by his sudden shift in demeanor, by the palpable difference in severity this statement had, compared to his normal irksome banter that a part of her mind – a very far part – knew was primarily to keep her off balance. To irritate her beyond rational thinking. It managed to settle her, a little, to know that he could finally be taking this seriously. She turned away from him, needing to occupy her potential energy elsewhere, if not on fighting with the man. “So you keep insisting,” she muttered, rummaging in her bag for the map. “Tell me, then. Tell me what he told you, if it was enough to keep me following you on this ridiculous trip.” Enough to risk Will and Weiss, she didn’t add.
“You’d rather I’d have left you in Los Angeles?” he said coldly. “That could be arranged.” She exhaled sharply at his offended bent – he dared deem her ungrateful, after all of it? Ridiculous man. Ridiculous, ridiculous man. He approached their bags, opened his, pulled out the map, and held it out to her. “Don’t you trust your own father, Sydney?”
“The only person I trust less than my father, Sark,” she said, snatching the heavy paper out of his grasp, “is you.” The last word she emphasized by whipping the folded paper open, frowning at the dull patches where the material was beginning to fray from the constant refolding. The seams were beginning to show wear as well, neat rectangles of white showing the fold lines. It wouldn’t be long before it started to fall apart.
“Flatterer,” he said with a sideways look, and then, even though she hadn’t said anything in reply, he exhaled a quick, exasperated sigh. “You’re simply going to have to trust me,” he concluded. “If not because you trust me myself, but because you trust him. When Jack Bristow tells someone that they are not to speak of a topic…” he mimed a gun with his thumb and forefinger. “Then you make sure not to speak of it.”
Sydney made a disgruntled sound. “So he assumed that I would follow you blindly to him. Oh, yes. That sounds nothing like my father.”
He seemed to consider the statement though. “I rather think he did, actually.”
She ignored the final barb and strode purposefully towards the door of the restaurant. “This is exactly why I won’t allow Will and Weiss to go off by themselves. If we leave them here, there’s no telling what you’ll order your poor, martyred henchmen to do to them.”
Before she could reach the handle, Sark had halved the distance and had his own hand over the catch. His face was hard, full of a kind of desperate intensity that Sydney was quite unfamiliar with. “Listen to me,” he menaced, his voice low. She made to retort, and he held up his hand. “Just listen for once, it won’t kill you.” His mouth twisted, as if there were something particularly ironic in that statement.
She took a step back from the door, wary. Her posture clearly read she would break for it if she had to. “Talk.”
“If you bring them with you, you put more danger on them than if they remain here. Charter them home, if you don’t trust me – which I expect you don’t. But make sure they don’t follow us, Sydney, or they may never see Los Angeles again.”
“If you’re threatening to – ”
“I’m not,” he cut her off. “This is the only information that was passed on to me. Anyone other than you or I gets off the plane at our final destination, and there is a very good chance they will not survive the welcome party. That’s what Cole thinks I should have told you in the first place.” He grimaced. “There’s a good chance we won’t, either.”
“You’re being dramatic. You’re lying.”
He stepped away from the door, and she yanked it open immediately.
“Maybe I am,” he called after her.
The unspoken suffix of whether or not she was willing to risk it didn’t need to be spoken.
* * *
“No.”
“Eric – ”
“No. Sydney. Don’t pull that first name crap with…no.” The man scrubbed an angry hand through his hair, ending with his fingers clamped hard on his head, little fistfuls of black peeking out from between the digits. When he let go, this disgruntled shape stayed. “This is ridiculous. This is suicide, and you know it.”
Will hadn’t said anything yet, for which Sydney was vaguely grateful. She kept darting worried looks at her friend, who was still staring at his sugar packets, as if they had formed some new meaning in her absence. Worried, nervous fingers were plucking at the paper again, slowly. She watched him begin to try to reform the tower that had fallen upon Cole’s arrival.
She refocused on Weiss, who was still staring at her. Furious. “You have to do this for me.”
“Absolutely not,” he protested. “Sydney, I have never seen you be so selfish.”
“Selfish,” she echoed, and blinked a few times, fast, her brain taking extra time to make sure his meaning of the word. It didn’t take her nearly so long to translate into Arabic. “If you come with me, it puts me at risk.”
Weiss grunted, and gestured toward Will with his chin. “Right. Him, maybe.”
Will said nothing, and added a pink rectangle of paper onto a blue foundation.
“And it will cost you your lives.”
The tower collapsed under Will’s hovering hand, and he blinked in surprise at the betrayal.
Weiss said nothing, and Sydney propped her chin in her hand and pulled closer to him. “I’m afraid that you might…turn up like Vaughn.”
“What happened to Vaughn?” Will asked immediately, his silence on the subject having expired immediately at the mention of the man’s name.
Sydney’s mouth pulled into a tight line, and Weiss simply looked out the window and said nothing. “He’s dead,” she told Will, and turned back to Weiss. “And I need you to make sure it doesn’t happen to Will. Please, Weiss.”
“So you’re just going to trust Sark. That’s it.” Weiss slumped back in his chair, his arms folding themselves over his chest. “All these years, and that’s what it comes down to.”
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not, and don’t you dare think it, even for a moment.” She lifted her head from its resting place and spread her fingers over her forehead in a contemplative gesture for a moment. “I don’t trust Sark. But I need you to trust me.”
“Easier said,” Weiss muttered.
Will straightened a little, seemed to have come to some kind of decision. “Don’t think of it as abandonment.”
“I don’t,” Weiss snipped at him.
“Or, like, babysitting or anything, right?”
He tried not to run a hand over his eyes and failed. “Tippin. I don’t.”
“Just think of it as…like…Merry and Pippin. Off on their own to stop the Orcs and help save the Ents.”
Weiss looked at Sydney. “Seriously. Make him stop.”
Something in her had lifted, though, at Will’s silent agreement to stay. “I’ll stay in contact, of course.”
“I just don’t like it. It feels too much like a trap.” Weiss was shaking his head, confused. “It’s too…convenient.”
“And nothing ever is. I know.” Her voice had gone conciliatory, and she reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze. “Try and find out what you can. There’s still too much we don’t know, and I don’t like relying on Sark for information. Especially when he’s so difficult about giving it.”
They fell silent for a moment, Weiss staring balefully into a abandoned cup of coffee near him. The colors refracted oddly on the surface, a thin layer of dishwasher soap having coalesced at the top of the fluid, dancing gasoline on pavement whorls back under his attentions. Will swept the sugar packets away from him, a gritty sound on the table where some of the paper had splintered and begun to leak the clear grains in their wake. Sydney cleared her throat and checked her holster, an old habit.
“I can’t believe you just referenced Lord of the Rings,” Weiss said suddenly, and Will’s surprised laughter spilled out onto the table.
Sydney smiled despite herself, and slid back from the table, rummaging in her wallet for cash. All their credit cards had been declined, and none of the credit offices had currently operating telephones.
The winter was spreading.
Sydney had a plane to catch.
* * *
In the dark of the cabin, it was easy to think that she was somewhere else, alone. There was something about the shadows of an airline seat that had always let her feel isolated, safe. It was always the calm before the storm. When she had first started working for SD-6, the plane travel had been the worst part for her. It had been Dixon who had taught her how to deal with the anticipation, how to hide the anxiety from the passengers, the flight crew and, eventually, from herself. It had been Dixon who had taught her that there was nothing to do for it while she was still in flight – there was no way to make the plane go faster or slower, no way to let worrying mature into actual benefits.
Draped by the dark, save the running lights that bordered the business class section, it was easy to pretend that she was with some other man. With Dixon next to her – Dixon, who she hadn’t even thought of since she’d left Los Angeles, Dixon who could be alive or dead and she had no way of finding out – this plane ride would have been easy. Getting ready for a mission with him, or her father, or even Marshall, nervous and panting and rattling numbers in his head to work out his anxiety.
Instead, it was Sark. Who had managed, against all odds, to tilt his head back into the seat and close his eyes, to will sleep on himself.
Sydney curled further into her own warmth – the window seat was cold, or she was, but there was no getting rid of it until they descended.
Her hands folded over themselves in her lap, wrapping the length adjustment end of the seat belt in and around itself, curled into a ball of strong nylon weave. Then she let the ball go, watched it stick for a moment before unraveling in her lap. Then she curled it again, let it go again, over and over, until Sark opened his eyes.
“You’re annoying.”
“So are you,” she said automatically, her hands still digging into the rough fabric.
He made a quiet, sleepy noise of amusement, and glanced at his watch. “No, I mean right now. You’re being annoying. Stop fidgeting, Agent Bristow, it’s unbecoming.” He used her title as an slur, as always, and his lip curled just slightly.
“Will you tell me something?” she asked, apropos of nothing, and her hands stilled as she glanced out the window. Only not out, so much, as back in – the window reflected the light of the plane, hosting an odd, distorted reflection of herself and the lower half of the man next to her.
“Honestly?” Sark said.
“If you can.”
He didn’t say anything. He would lie if he had to, she knew, or if it suited him. And there would be no way for her to know that it didn’t.
“Back at the headquarters. In the War Room. Did you know what would happen to Vaughn?”
He shifted in his seat, his head coming up off of the grungy cushion to look at her reflection in the plastic. “Did I know he would be dead? Or did I know the manner of such an event?”
That was answer enough, really. Sydney closed her eyes, pushed her forehead against the cool of the plastic, and took a deep breath. Then she turned back to him – her full body, shoulders shifting out and her hands pooled lightly in her lap. “Both.”
“Both,” Sark echoed, and averted his gaze, examined the garish pattern on the seat in front of him. “I had my suspicions. Yes. Both.”
Sydney cracked him across the face, and for the first time in a long while, he saw it coming before it flew.
It jolted his neck uncomfortably, the pressure from it kinking the muscles up, and that pain was deeper than the now familiar sting of a bruised cheek. It was an effort not to grip the seat arms below him, and he forced his fingers to release themselves from their grasp on the plastic and padding in order to allow his neck the proper follow-through – an attempt to forestall whiplash. The shock would settle into a black and purple ache splashed across his face and in the end, the bruises Sydney gave him would heal.
He was quite pleased to think that those he gave her might not.
Sark twisted his head back and around, cringing mildly and working his fingers into the muscle of his neck, teasing the hurt apart as Sydney glared over at him.
Smiling at her set off the thin rivulet of blood at the corner of his split mouth and he could see a convulsion of disgust in her eyes. He smiled wider, letting the dull red fluid seep into the cracks of his teeth. “I think,” he said conversationally, pausing to wipe at his mouth with his thumb. He examined the wet on his fingers before he went on. “That you enjoy hitting me, Agent Bristow.”
“You always were the smart one,” she said, deadpan. Her shoulders were sloped, like an invisible man was holding her from launching herself onto him all-tell and tearing his eyes from their sockets without mussing her fingernails.
It was a truly invigorating sight. “Nothing like a hot cup of indignant rage early in the morning,” he said, his voice smoky as he coughed; the wind had been knocked out of him and the dry, dusty road in front of the café had done nothing to help. “I hesitate to add that you did ask for the truth.”
“You’re the one who takes joy in delivering pain, Sark. Not me.” She slumped back in her chair, miserable and defeated.
“I think it’s adorable that you pretend to be surprised by that,” he said, his tone just the necessary touch of condescending. He took up his cocktail napkin and dabbed the end in his club soda to pat at his split lip. “I don’t suppose it would be too much to request, your not hitting my face any longer?”
“Rather too,” she muttered.
“It’s only that I’m beginning to look like a battered housewife,” he continued, the low simmer of rage he didn’t bother to conceal beneath the sugary veneer. “And I did promise your father that I would deliver you without harm.”
Sydney sneered at him, the disdainful exhale lost in the general rattle of the plane’s machinery. “I’m so lucky. You always keep your promises.”
He made a noise of agreement and folded the bloodied napkin into quarters before placing it in the nearly empty cup. “If you think you may be done with your daily physical abuse, it might be best for you to find some sleep.” He settled back in his own chair, his head rocking back into the middle of the raucously patterned fabric and his eyes sliding serenely closed. “It isn’t much better than the back of the Jeep, but at least you won’t have to worry about shifts.” And then he fell silent, and didn’t move for a good, long while.
It took Sydney even longer than that to calm down enough to stop turn away from him, a sharp and precise headache having cultivated itself directly behind her eyes. She raised a hand to the bridge of her nose, pressed sharply, and shrunk back into the relative safety of the chair to wait for the pain to pass.
* * *
Much to her consternation, Cole came through on everything he had promised he would. Upon landing in the Quito airport, a man with a jauntily lettered sign with Sark’s name on it was waiting, and even went so far as to tip his chauffeur’s hat to her in greeting as they approached. He tucked the name card underneath his arm after a bit of identification had been produced, and lead them toward the long term parking section, which was quite small, all things considered. The mild clime had the two of them donning warmer clothing again, much to the amusement of the chauffeur, and he waited patiently while they rummaged through their packs.
The limousine ride was by no means short, but Sydney stayed occupied the entire time, and Sark spent the hour on the telephone, alternating between shouting and stern, severe undertones in an attempt to get Cole to put him through with Irina. It was less than settling, and Sydney felt uncomfortable in her own skin as he continued the efforts without much progress.
It wasn’t until the driver stopped the limo and stepped around to let them out that Sark hung up on Cole, a satisfying slam into the wall-mounted cradle, and eased his way gracefully onto the packed-sand turf.
Waiting was another Jeep.
“They’re mocking us,” Sark muttered under his breath, and Sydney wasn’t sure if this was some piece of information she was not privy to, or if he was attempting a joke. Either way, the statement was disquieting and left her with a vague sense of unease that translated itself to aggravation.
The limousine left them shortly, and Sydney set to work cataloguing the contents of their transportation. When she found the tent and assorted camping equipment, she looked up curiously at Sark, who was still pacing outside the car, muttering to himself. “I thought you said my father was in Quito?” She held up a small tin pot to demonstrate her confusion.
He glanced up at her, distracted, and then resumed his pacing. “No. It’s another day’s drive east, into the rainforests. Brazil. Cole hasn’t spoken with Irina, either.”
The additional information confused her. “Wait, what do you… what does that even matter?”
“I was under the impression that Cole had been in contact with her, since he has been a part of…” He cut himself off with a shake of his head. “Well. That’s hardly relevant. But he lead me to believe that there were additional instructions and then…” he gave an uncomfortable shrug. “It was foolish to hope for clarification, I suppose.”
Sydney narrowed her vision. “I thought you said you’d been in contact with my father?”
“I have been,” he said mildly. “Do you have some audio problem I need to be aware of before we venture further? I was addressing the topic of your mother.”
“Then why do you care about her contacting you?” She began sifting through the equipment again, and glanced up at him surreptitiously, trying to track his nervous energy. “If you take orders from my father?”
His shoes scuffed at the loose stone near one of the all-terrain tires. “I take orders from no one, Sydney. I am under advisement from your father. It is Irina, however, who lays claim to my trust.” He ignored the look that she shot him – the one that said the word ‘advisement’ was a lie and he knew it. “It’s small comfort that Cole hasn’t heard from her either, but – ”
Sydney looked up suddenly, pulling a knee up to her chin to better crouch in the small area. “When was the last time you spoke from her, anyhow?”
“Before I was imprisoned,” he said, and turned his back to her, scanning the empty, flat horizon. His arms were crossed over his chest but his shoulders were back, so she had a hard time interpreting whether he was resentful or not.
“Three months ago?”
He let loose a little scoffing noise that bounced out over the plane. “Three years ago.”
“What?” The word snapped out between them, wrapped over Sark’s shoulder and demanded attention. When he said nothing within a beat of its strained delivery, Sydney ducked underneath the Y-support of the Jeep and pulled herself out of the vehicle. “How long has this been in planning?” Her feet on the ground, she attempted to gain Sark’s gaze, but he stared resolutely over the landscape, his fingers tapping restlessly against his shirt where they were tucked into his arm.
The wounds from the handcuffs were still livid.
“A long time,” he said quietly.
There was silence between them for a moment, and it began decently enough. But when he gave no further explanation, and refused to look her in the eye, she could feel her nerves tighten once more. The implication, then, was dangerous and nothing she hadn’t seen in the files of her own birth. The project her father had opened and approved on her date – the project she still knew nothing about. That her father had fled before she had the opportunity to question him bode poorly on the inference of the situation, from her perspective. Either she was not worth explaining things to, or things were not worth explaining.
Either way, she figured, things were not looking up. But then, they hadn’t done that in a long time.
“Sark,” she tried, her voice cautious, and she saw him blink and something in his eyes change.
He looked down at her, his grip on his upper arms loosening. “What?”
“I want you to tell me what – ”
“No,” he cut her off, and the silence fell heavy again.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know,” he said fiercely, as though the admission had cost him something, and turned back to the Jeep. The keys were in the ignition. “Get in. You’ll have your answers tomorrow night.”
Sydney turned and glanced out at the flat planes, watched the sun sinking in the distance, tried to see what it was he had seen when he had refused to look away from this angle. They wouldn’t be able to get very far tonight, unless there were roads in better shape than this one. She scraped one shoe along the ground, the heavy tread of a well-broken in boot collecting gravel in piles. Her shadow was cast long and behind her, and she had to suppress the urge to spin around to see if she could catch a glimpse of it before it, too shifted.
In the front of her mind – not even the decency to hide in the back, behind all the other rattling mess – was the knowledge that this was a very, very bad idea.
She got in the Jeep.
vi. o that this too too solid flesh would melt
Despite the arid temperature, the beat of the sun was enough to hypnotize Sydney, to carry her thoughts away from the wildly bouncing automobile and its less than palatable driver. More than anything, she estimated, it was exhaustion. She closed her eyes to the shimmering landscape and draped a piece of canvas from the flap of the disassembled tent in the back over her eyes, propped her feet up on the dash, and set to her the most difficult activity of all – not thinking.
The long stretches of time were the things that killed that ideal. With no one to talk to and nothing to talk about – at least, no one or nothing more desirable than the thoughts she was attempting to distract herself from in the first place – there was very little she could do to keep from dwelling. Left to its own devices, her brain tended to dwell on the things that had to be momentarily compartmentalized.
In the burn of a moment, things could be rationalized, dealt away, ushered through in urgency. The long lazy stretches were the things that damaged her the most, and it had become increasingly difficult to ward away the thoughts she needed furthest from her mind to complete this mission.
One of them, she noted, was that she still considered this a mission of some kind. As if she had been handed a folder and assigned a series of names and faces to memorize, people she would have to philander into giving her information. A flash of leg, a tremble of lip, a tilt of eyes, and she would have what she needed.
Only this wasn’t a mission.
This was her father.
And there would be no Dixon waiting for her debrief, and no Marshall circling around her to find out how the latest gadgets had gone over, and whether they needed to be smaller, or pinker, or perhaps have room to store a jackknife inside. There would be no wary glance at Barnett’s door, wondering if she would be sent there after a particularly trying ordeal, and no angry glances at Vaughn’s desk, wondering where his wife was and if she was with him at that very moment.
Because this wasn’t a mission. Or, if it was – if she absolutely had to think of it that way – it would be best to consider it the last mission. Because she wasn’t sure if she’d be getting back from it.
And she wasn’t sure why. And that was what made it worse.
And she wasn’t sure if Dixon or Marshall or Barnett were even still alive.
But with Vaughn, at least she knew.
Something inside her shuddered and collapsed, and all at once she had the violently strong urge for Weiss to be there with her, for them to pull over immediately and find the closest possible bar and play drinking games with their ex-friend’s name and tip shots until neither of them could think straight. She wanted him to be there, to tell her stories about how often Vaughn had slaughtered (bad choice of words, Sydney, part of her brain slid in) him in their one-on-one hockey matches, and she wanted to tell him about the time they had gone to the dock, so many years ago, and she had thrown her pager in the water.
She wanted to remember why it was all so important that she win this, and how it was that Vaughn had managed to make her feel that for so long. If anyone could tell her, it would be Weiss.
Instead, Weiss would be in Mexico City. With Will, if they were all lucky, or heading back to Los Angeles if they weren’t. Back to Vaughn’s body, where it still lay – frozen by now, she was sure of it – spread and tacked on the conference room table. Still wearing his wedding ring, still mourning his expatriate wife three months after.
She tried to remember how long she had worn Danny’s ring after he’d been killed, and couldn’t.
The headache sprung up again and she groped blindly for her pack, pulled out two low-grade painkillers and a bottle of water, and dosed without ever opening her eyes. She kept the water cradled in her lap, tried not to wonder if the motion had attracted Sark’s attention, and hoped he would spare her the indignity of interrupting her introspection with his words.
That in mind, and the water bottle still jostling against her stomach, she drifted into light sleep.
She dreamt of Alice in Wonderland, only Alice was dead and the white rabbit was smoking, and someone had pasted over the looking glass with newspaper clippings.
* * *
Watching the moon rise was the most interesting part of the drive.
It had been some time since Sark had started feeling tense. As a point of fact, he was used to it – tension ran in his line of work, and his choice of lifestyle, and he had become rather adept at adjusting to it when it became necessary to do so. But it was only when it was possible to understand what he was tense about that he could do anything to remedy it. And so it was that he was left in a veritable state of uncertainty, driving the dirt roads that bordered the overflowing trees on his left, and watching the night sky, and brooding.
Well. Not brooding.
But it was when the moon finally chose to show itself that he finally understood what it was that had been bothering him for so long – a third of the stars, a third of the sky, a third of the moon.
It stood proudly halved, beaming down on them in all its craggy glory, and he even took a moment to notice how a few of the craters and seas were visible from this area of thin atmosphere. Where the sun had been particularly bright during the day, the moon was particularly detailed in the evening.
And if the moon was halved, he consoled himself, then they still had time. Because it meant the moon was still cycling, and not stuck in its two-thirds rotation, and he was unsure whether to feel relieved or foolish for believing in such tales.
The problem was, from his point of view, there just weren’t enough concrete ways to measure this kind of apocalyptic event. Everyone just expected all plans to be dropped at the first Sign – capital S – of the second coming (or first, as the case may be), and be poised and ready for action. It was impossible to live a life like that and still manage to fulfill your requirements.
They barreled past a sign, the second in the past hour, and he checked their mileage with the map that lay folded open on the dash. Steady progress, steady rate. They would reach their destination on schedule.
“Omnifam?” Sydney said quietly, shifting in her seat. One leg came down off the dash and tucked itself under, the joint of her knee popping after having been immobile for so long. “Did I see that sign?” Her voice sounded fuzzy and confused, and Sark wondered if it might be time to pitch for the night. The roads weren’t exactly the best lit of places, and getting himself killed this late in the game seemed particularly foolish indeed.
“You’re not hallucinating, if that’s what you mean,” he said. It came out quieter than he had expected, and she had to turn her head to hear him. After the oppressive silence of the day, the blank night sky seemed to provide some kind of muffle.
“Sloane,” was all she said, and then faced front again.
Sark began scanning the side of the road, searching for an adequate place to pull the Jeep over and end their extensive day. “It’s cheaper to do his kind of research in developing nations,” Sark said, though he was sure it wasn’t anything Sydney would believe.
As predicted, she made a vulgar noise and gripped her folded leg at the shin, both hands clenching and unclenching reflexively. “Ah, his ‘research’,” she said, her voice telling Sark all he needed to know about how she saw her former employer. “He has these little factories everywhere. Is this supposed to be some kind of sick coincidence, that we’re going near one of them? Is that what I’m supposed to believe?”
“You’ll believe as you wish,” Sark said, and eased the car off of the loose gravel road and onto the edge of what seemed to be a wide field. “I’m bringing you where I was told. You still haven’t tried to leave.”
That fact seemed to roll through Sydney’s brain for a moment, and they both watched as the headlights on the car rolled up the trunk of a tree and flashed back before Sark cut the engine. They sat in the silence, Sydney’s eyes still fixed on the tree line ahead of them, Sark’s tipped up to the sky. “Does that bother you?” Sydney asked.
Sark blinked at the question, and crossed his arms over his chest, eyes searching out some familiar constellation that he couldn’t seem to find. “While it would have made things more entertaining? No. For the most part, I’m anxious for my part in this to be done with.”
She delivered another one of her derisive sounds and unbuckled her seat belt, twisting around behind their seats to pull out some of the tent spikes. “Hard to keep you locked down to one project for a length of time, is it?”
“No,” he said quietly. “It’s all I’ve ever worked on.”
Sydney pulled the canvas tent into her lap, and uncoiled herself from the position to face him. “What?”
He finally gave up questing the sky and sat up, retrieved the keys from the ignition and opened his door. “I’ve been assigned to your project for over a decade,” he said, and got out of the car. His voice echoed back in to her, and made her clench at the material in her hands. “Come on, let’s get this set up.”
She scrambled out of the car after him, and watched the bounce of a flashlight as he set up a small campfire, scattering the supplies they needed for the night in a tight circle around him. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she said, her voice accusatory, as she pitched the materials down on the ground. “You’ve been trying to kill me for ages.”
He looked up at her, striking a match and applying it to an easy-kindle pile. “That was my assignment,” he said, as if that explained everything. “And then it changed.”
Kneeling down to sort through their equipment and find another flashlight to work by, Sydney rolled the words around in her mind. “And if it changes again?”
He gave her an eerie grin and fed a piece of wood to the campfire. “Don’t worry, Sydney. It won’t.”
* * *
“Sark.”
His gaze flicked up, distracted, and he set the protractor down with a sigh. The outside of his hand was covered in pencil residue and he rubbed it on the margin of the map, over the graphs of distance between major cities. Not all of it came off, so he spat on one palm and rubbed at the silver tint in aggravation.
“Sark?”
“Mm,” he replied, his eyes still tracking the proposed path on the map, the land they’d covered already blocked out in a thicker black marker.
“Sark. Say something funny.”
The gaze flicked up again and locked this time, Sydney lying on her back and watching the low shift of the fire reflected from the open flap of the tent. It lit the harshly colored fabric drastically, and she was tracing one of the shadow lines with her finger, her mouth dipping down in consternation when the shadow danced before she could finish.
The silence pulled to such a length that Sydney turned her attention to him, and her frowned deepened. “You’re staring at me.”
Sark cleared his throat. “Yes. I am.”
She squinted viciously at him and shifted her weight to her other elbow, drawing back. “Why?”
His laugh didn’t rip free so much as fall out, his eyebrows climbing in disbelief. “Because you just asked me to, and I quote verbatim, ‘say something funny’.”
“And you haven’t yet.” She looked decidedly put out.
He watched her for a moment, wondering if it would be now that she lost her façade. Her face remained earnest and disappointed. “No,” he said cautiously.
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said slowly, drawing the word out to try and ascertain exactly how out of her mind she was. “Usually when I say something funny, you clock me in the face.”
She flopped a hand at him, washing the words away. “That’s only when you say things that are funny to you.”
His eyebrow cocked again, and stayed in place a little longer this time, considering. “So what you want, then, is for me to say something that you will find amusing.”
She pointed a finger at him, narrowed her eyes, and smiled. “Precisely.”
Sark hesitated, watching her watch him, and followed the sway of the finger with his eyes. “How have you been feeling lately?”
“Tired,” she said with a doggish sigh, and folded her arms in front of her to prop her head on. “Say something?”
He narrowed his eyes right back, stretching out until he was leaning on his elbows, his legs sprawled out behind him. It had far too much of a sleepover feel to it, but there wasn’t any other good way to get comfortable in the space. “Like what?”
“Hm.” She propped her chin in her hand and stared at the flickering shadow again, the gleam of the low light making her eyes look wet and unfocused. Which, Sark supposed, they probably were, if her brain was that scattered. “Say something British,” she decided.
“Something British,” Sark echoed immediately, his tone wry, and she snapped her head over to glare at him, spare tendrils of hair flying at the motion.
“That isn’t what I meant, and you know it,” she menaced, and it was thoroughly ineffective, all things considered.
His lips slid into a half-smirk. “Actually, I don’t,” he answered sweetly. “Since you’re not making any sense. At all.”
“Coordinated,” Sydney said.
Sark halted himself and then squinted through the dim light at her. “Excuse me?”
“No. Coordinated,” she repeated. “Say it.” The urging in her voice was like something from the playground, back when knee socks and short pants and blazers with crests fashioned on had still been involved in Sark’s life.
“Coordinated,” he parroted, his expression suspicious.
But Sydney just sighed, propped herself forward until she was mimicking his pose, the map crinkling under her hands. He glanced down in time to make sure that she wasn’t about to impale her palm on the protractor, and moved it again, just in case. She did manage to rub at the pencil lines, though, he noticed with a flash of irritation. Her lazy smile unraveled on one side, like a noisemaker. “Endeavor.”
He rolled her eyes, and said the word. “Endeavor. Is there a theme to this, or are you just being – ”
“Shh.” She sounded cross, and jabbed him in the shoulder with a finger. “No short words. They’re boring. Feckless.”
“They’re feckless?”
The rest of her grin unfolded then. “No, I wanted you to say it. And you did. Perturbation.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “I am not saying that.”
“Why not?”
“Pick something else, Sydney.”
She seemed to consider for a moment, her eyes drifting over the terrain of the map. “Matriculate?”
He echoed the word, and considered. “Juggernaut?”
Sydney laughed, then, much to Sark’s surprise. “Yes! See, you’re getting it now. Um. Ooh.” She sobered her expression as well as she could and drew her shoulders up, putting on a very pompous air. “Ignominious,” she said, drawing the syllables out, her voice a fairly poor imitation of his own.
“Oh, come now. You can do better than that. Ignominious.” He sped the word properly, giving it a bit of spin at the end, and she broke into peals of laughter.
“Virulent!”
“Cornucopia,” he replied, as if correcting her. “’Virulent’ is far too plebian.”
She leaned forward. “Say plebian again.”
He grinned at her, despite himself. “Draconian.”
Her eyebrows went up. “That’s nearly as good. That’s almost just right up there with plebian. Did you know that, or was it a guess?”
“You’re rambling,” he pointed out carefully.
She waved him away again. “Of course I’m not. Hush. More words.”
“Debauched,” he offered happily,
“Ooh, I like that one.” She was slipping farther down her arm.
“Go to sleep, Agent Bristow.”
Her mouth pulled in, tight and angry. “Keep going.”
“Disinclined,” he said, to distract her, and the smile lit up her face again, cracking a little on one side. A flash of tooth made him think of a wild cat’s warning. “I’m done now,” he added. As soon as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t – it was far too decisive, far too concerned with the situation at all. But Sydney didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re tired of me?”
“Very.” He picked up the protractor again, and fitted it with the pencil, resigning himself to graphite stains all over his hand, and probably his arm, by the end of the night. He spared a moment to roll his sleeves up. “Also, I’d like to steal your weapon as soon as you fall asleep.”
She gave him a cross look before shifting around – like a puppy nesting, was the first thing that came to his mind – and settling for the night.
* * *
When Sydney had been very young – four or five, perhaps, a time when her memory was spotty at best and contained mostly sights and sounds than full elaborated scenes with dialogue – she had been in a playgroup with approximately forty other children of the same age or younger. Daycare had been necessary, with a father always on the road for business trips and a mother with a steady nine-to-five schedule in the classrooms. And Sydney had taken to it naturally – always sociable, willing to share, a natural leader, the grade reports had said. Someone – she wasn’t sure if it was her mother or her father – had kept all of them, stacked in the bottom of a filing cabinet. She’d found them in high school and turned them into some kind of collage for her Home Economics class.
But the playgroup, as with any gathering of many small children, was often sharing more than toys. And in addition to chicken pox, which was a relatively easy recovery despite the itching, Sydney had been felled by a severe flu, and her mother had stayed home from school to look after her. Her father had been in Chicago finalizing a sale.
Between bouts of vomiting and hazing in and out of sleep, Sydney had contracted a high fever. She had dreamt odd things – things that seemed odd at the time, anyway. Conversations her mother had had on the telephone, propped on the edge of Sydney’s bed, had included words like ‘gun’ and ‘blood’ and ‘soon’, and mostly other terrifying words that she could hardly grasp the meaning of at the time.
When the fever had broke, her mother had dismissed her questions by citing the illness. Fever dreams, she had said, and had smoothed the hair off of Sydney’s forehead and kissed her there.
It was only later – much later, even after the fall of SD-6 and the disappearance of her mother – that she remembered the dreams and wondered, again, how much of it was real. Childhood memories are easily distorted, and dreams even more so.
But she remembered the sinking feeling distinctly – the fall through fog into the incomprehensible language of those around her, the hands checking her temperature and pulling up blankets. The feeling of utter hopelessness and inability to care about it at all.
The fever was freedom.
But this time, she wasn’t five. And she could remember more – or at least, understand it better. Hands that changed the wrappings on her head wound, pilings of odd-feeling covers sticking to her sweaty skin. Same hands that lifted her head just enough, by the back of the skull like a newborn child, to force cool water down her throat.
A lantern always on, just out of reach, and dry, cool air blowing through something onto her face.
More water, this time smoothed on something cloth over her temples.
Deft fingers checking a pulse, shadows hovering closer.
Her fever dreams had changed.
* * *
Sydney barely prevented herself from damaging the zip on the flap of the tent – they might still need the shelter, from cold or heat, the way the weather had been going lately, and there was no sense in utterly demolishing everything just because she was angry. A small part of her brain – one that was still minutely in control – informed her of this, but it didn’t help to keep the rest of her temper in check.
Sark wasn’t hard to find. Surrounded on all sides by green, anything in an even slightly varying shade would have been easy to locate, let alone his whey colored, prison camp hair. He was already looking at her, expectantly, the map refolded and stowed in the mesh outer pocket of her bag. The protractor was nowhere to be seen. She suspected it might have something to do with his not wanting it stuck in his thigh.
Despite the fact that he seemed prepared for a tirade of some kind, she forced him back by sheer proximity. Right up in his face, he had to yield a footstep to one of her own. “You son of a bitch, you took my gun.”
Her words seemed to surprise him, as it took him a moment to find a response. “I did tell you I was going to. I’m not sure it counts as thievery if there’s prior warning.”
She surrendered the step so she could turn, pace, stare down at the small fire he’d started to stir a pot of instant coffee over. “Why on earth would you take it, anyway? It’s not as if there’s going to be anything dangerous busting through this abandoned campsite.” She emphasized the last two words with a sweep of her arm, the dense trees waving their limbs in reply.
He crouched again, his face tipped down to prod at the boiling pan of sludge. “I didn’t feel entirely safe with you having it.”
She squinted down at him, three small lines furrowing upward from her nose to her hairline. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you be safe with my having it? Unless you did something completely idiotic and tried to attack me, in which case I would shoot you once in each knee and watched as you twisted in the dust.”
His mouth curled into a half-smile. “How beautifully sadistic you are when you’ve slept on rocks for two days.”
“Why did you take my gun?” she insisted.
The pan gave a soft rattle of boiling water and he pulled it off, pouring a thin layer of the top of the liquid into a cup. He took a sip and grimaced sharply – the coffee was foul, but it would do its work. The rest he replaced over the fire. “Did Agent Vaughn get to see you like this?” He started conversationally, with a deceptive and curious tilt to his head. “Hair all askew, nest of twigs in your –”
Her voice raised and cut him off. “Shut up. Why did you take my gun?”
Sark glanced up at her, something bright reflecting in his eye, and he raised a hand to shield himself from the sun. “Perturbation.”
She blinked at him, for just a moment, and then covered her eyes to massage at a temple, as if working out some deep, deep migraine. Oh. Oh, God. That was… Fucking. Fuck. When she managed to raise her head again, dismal and angry and still confused, he was hiding behind the coffee cup, his mouth looping a secret smile around the rim.
The gun was extended, grip first, and she snatched it away from him and holstered it without looking.
“Possibly a concussion,” he conceded, but the smile remained, as infuriating and self assured as ever. “But we’ve wasted far too much time already. Ideally, of course, you would need to stay off of your feet for about a week.”
“I know what a concussion is,” she said, a bit of a growl in her tone, but dropped carefully down to her knees in front of the fire. Things felt better lower down, she decided. Not as dizzy. The fire was too hot, and she moved back until she could lean against one of the Jeep’s tires, not caring if her back came away caked in the dried red mud that seemed to coat everything in the area.
“Then you know that you need to sit down, keep quiet, and rest.” He watched her carefully for signs of resistance, but she merely pulled her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her them “Are you hungry?”
She nodded once, her nose touching her knees briefly, and watched the fire. “It’s been days. This shouldn’t be happening now.”
He gave an uncaring, one shouldered shrug and began digging through their packs for something she would be able to eat. “Post-concussion syndrome, then. You haven’t exactly been under ideal conditions, mind.”
A snort of agreement and Sydney leaned closer to the fire, suddenly chill. The temperature moderation was significantly better, but she had a strong urge to climb back into the tent and sleep for another day. “Anything that involves McKenas Cole usually does equate to stress,” she confessed.
“And here I thought I had that dubious honor,” Sark said. But he didn’t clarify whether he meant being the one Sydney equated to stress, or being on the receiving end of Cole’s most devious actions. He finally unearthed a small packet of powdered soup and emptied it into one of the pots, the yellow flakes coming over the side onto his hand indicating some sort of chicken flavoring.
“You two work on the same side,” Sydney said, her head tilting slightly to keep an eye on him as he prepared her food.
He caught her eye as he was pouring boiling water into the pot. “I nursed you through a fever,” he said blandly. “You’re lucky that wound hasn’t gone septic. I’m not going to poison your broth, of all things.” He stirred at the soup – six times clockwise and six times counter clockwise – and Sydney found herself wondering at the precision. “And no, Cole and I are not on the same side.” The topic seemed to make him bristle.
“Why not?” She accepted the pot from him and found her own spoon, poking at some of the limp, floating noodles. Her hunger disintegrated quickly. But she took a small sip of the broth, knowing she would need the energy later. Especially if she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
“He set me up,” was all Sark was willing to say. “And even though I may admire his work, he has become far too…embroiled in my life for my own comfort.”
The curdled expression on his face spoke of some deeper injury, but Sydney didn’t press the subject. Instead, she wondered how Cole factored into the rest of Sark’s life. “How many people have you killed?”
He gave her a sharp look, and she scowled at him to let him know that it was an honest question, and not influenced by any lingering effects of the fever. He turned his gaze back on his coffee and managed another sip, this time hiding the grimace at the taste. “Less than you.”
She gave him a surprised look. “What math did you learn in school?”
“I’m not being facetious,” he said. “Think about how many people you kill on a single mission.”
“We don’t aim to ki – ”
“Yes, well, neither do I,” he cut her off. She knew the expression on her face was incredulous, but she was surprised at the vehement anger he would have toward it. “What is it you expect?” he asked, after he took a breath visibly devoted to calming himself. “You have all these ideals, Sydney. All these expectations of what the people around you should be. And you continually have them shattered.” Another slug of the coffee, which had to be lukewarm by now. “One would think it would cause you to readjust such expectations.”
“That’s awfully self-centered,” Sydney observed and sipped cautiously at her broth.
“It would be if it weren’t true,” Sark countered. “How many times have you been wrong about this kind of thing? You look at me, and you see… I don’t even know.” He shook his head, exasperated. “A villain. A black-hat. Things aren’t that simple, Sydney. They never are.” There was a long stretch of silence, broken only by Sydney’s slow lunch. “Your entire family,” he said with a bit of a laugh. “Your entire family is structured around this ideal. Shades of gray. I don’t see why you should look at me and suddenly feel the need to pin every evil action on my conscience. It just doesn’t work that way.”
“No,” she said coldly. “It works like this: I don’t have time for gray allies.”
Sark shook his head and, after a moment, tossed sand on the fire, smothering the flames. He brushed the excess dirt off on the thigh of his pants. “Then it’s a shame they’re the only ones who have time for you.”
“I’m not like you,” she protested, angrily scraping at the bottom of the pot as he packed away their goods.
“The only difference between you and I, Sydney, is that you think things, and I do them.”
She made a face. “And that’s supposed to be somehow commendable? Not having an impulse regulator?”
“They aren’t impulses,” he said with a shrug. “And they’ve kept you alive so far. Can you get into the Jeep? I’ll strike the tent.”
There was nothing she could say to that. So, instead, she loaded up the automobile securely, spread the map out on the dash, and leaned her seat back so that she would be able to doze as needed.
Sark revved the engine a few moments later, and threw the car into drive. Sydney touched her hand carefully to the freshly dressed wound, tender the edges, and glanced over at Sark. His eyes were fixed on the road.
“Thank you,” she said, and closed her eyes again. Sark said nothing, and Sydney wished, with a sudden, fervent pang, for her father.
* * *
The problem with Jack Bristow, as far as Sloane could tell, was that the man was highly unpredictable. At best, it made things difficult. At worst, it made things expensive. Neither of which Sloane could particularly afford (monetarily speaking or otherwise) at any given time, let alone with his first meeting with the Council.
It had been a long time coming. It had taken years, countless hours of research and dedication and sleepless nights. Drained bank accounts, under a variety of aliases, realigned the focus of his life, changed the way he looked at things in general. When it came down to it, as far as Sloane could tell, he was owed quite a bit more than Jack Bristow, on all counts. It was Sloane who had agreed to the experiments, Sloane who had been devoted enough to the cause to follow through thirty-odd years later, and Sloane who had made good with a daughter who fulfilled the prophesies in every way, shape, and form.
Jack couldn’t be blamed for having faulty DNA, Sloane had to admit. It would be unfair of him to begrudge Jack for a genetic fault. No one could have predicted that it would be his genomes – not Jack’s – that would coalesce in the correct order and combination with Irina Derevko’s.
No one but Rambaldi, of course.
It was luck, then, the way Sloane saw it. Luck that he was born when he was, and Irina was born when she was, and Nadia when she was. A series of fortunate coincidences, of stars being aligned perfectly and rotational axis slowing to the correct degree – of foretold signs and biological markers and scripture. Of ideals that went back before Irina’s blasphemously titled Bible, before the forty-seven prophesies of Rambaldi himself.
It was more than luck. It was fate.
And the Council – venerable, old, and more majestic even than Sloane had anticipated in its fervor to see its millennia-old work completed – was the very group to confirm this for him.
Why it should choose to initiate Jack Bristow as a chairman – now, after all this time, after so many other pieces falling into place – was what made no sense.
“It is not for you to question,” Irina told him sharply, her long strides sounding out as they advanced down the narrow hallway together. Or, rather, Irina advanced. Sloane seemed to circulate around her, part of her gravitational pull, his hands held out in front of him in a half-wringing motion. Irina stayed steady on, and Sloane pranced from her left to her right and back again, trying to catch her eye, trying to make her understand. This could not be lost.
He had sacrificed too much.
“You have sacrificed nothing,” she said succinctly, a mother scolding a child for detailing the bathroom walls in crayon. “Do not trust your position, Arvin. It is not infallible. The Council giveth, and the Council taketh away.”
“What kind of threat is that supposed to be?” he snapped back, and shifted over to her right again, darting forward to pull open a door for her and then rushing through behind. “Listen to me, Irina. This is our daughter we’re talking about. Our daughter, and no one else’s. Therefore, no one else should matter. Bristow should not be a part of this organization.”
She stopped for a moment, and it brought him up sharp. His hands fell to his sides and he drew himself straight, prepared for her denial. He was not disappointed. “I, as you, do not have the final say in that.” Her mouth twisted, waited for him to defy her. When nothing came, she turned heel and began walking once more. “Jack Bristow will be a part of this organization whether you – or I – want him to be. If you have the ability to pull in your lackeys; and trust me, McKenas Cole is nothing but a minion at the end of this very long day, then I am permitted to have one person I trust attending as well. Those are the rules of the Council. If you do not wish to abide by them, Arvin, then you may take your science elsewhere, and I will mine.”
The idea of her threatening to pull out of the experiment this late in the game was laughable, but he did not voice the thought. Instead, he tried a different tack. “Then I will remove Cole. Execute him. He knows too much.”
Irina’s mouth twisted again, this time in a semblance of mirth. “Which would, of course, require the assassination of Bristow.”
“Of course,” Sloane supplied, as though it had been her idea and not his own. He kept the bow of his head and his hand gestures modest, and opened yet another door after Irina punched in the appropriate numbers. On the other side of the door, a small elevator terminal awaited them, with only one set of doors. They were open, and the back wall of the compartment was gleaming brass and crushed red velvet.
“How convenient,” she mused as they entered, and Sloane pushed the appropriate button for her and waited for the doors to close, echoing her posture and her hands clasped in front of her. “Deactivate the security procedures on the first and second levels. I’m expecting a guest.” They both stared at their half-melted reflections. Or, Irina did – Sloane stared at the wall itself, the odd metal brushing pattern in the brass that reminded him of something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The light rippled against the surface and made it seem almost alive.
“It is a plausibility,” Sloane told her, and wondered as soon as he had spoken whether or not he should have. Her expression had not changed. And this was the unpredictability that Bristow sewed, and that Sloane hated so very much. By nature, Sloane was not an indecisive man. Beginning at a very young age, he had known precisely what it was he wanted, and needed, from himself and the rest of the world. It was only the means of setting about attaining these things that had ever caused him any bother. When Bristow entered the equation, things immediately went from algebra to calculus.
It was a matter of a different sort how his former partner managed to influence others in his life. It was not enough for Bristow to change the outcome of Sloane’s fate directly, the man thought. No. He liked to watch it come apart from the inside. He liked to plant dissent and let the fruit do its own work.
Bottom line, Jack Bristow did not like to muss his own hands with dirty work.
Sloane, on the other hand, rather enjoyed rolling up his sleeves and delving in as deeply as possible. There was never any shame in dirty work, he maintained, especially if it was of the particularly enjoyable nature. And joining with the Council, melding the cells of SD-6, their rivals, and The Covenant…. Well. That had been a particularly enjoyable chain of dirty work.
The elevator crept downward, a mechanical hum replacing the stereotypical bell sound of each floor they passed. As the car slowed, Sloane wondered – as he always did in elevators – what it would feel like if the main suspension cable ever snapped.
Once any agent blows up enough suspension cable, it will become their primary concern.
The doors spread wide and spat Irina and he out into another corridor, this one tiled, and she lead them once more, her shoes sounding ominously on the surface. “It is not a plausibility,” she said, and it had the kind of strength and resonance that indicated she had only recently come to the decision, and was still, at this stage, willing to fight for it. “He is currently necessary to our operation. We cannot lose track of Sydney.”
“Sydney is irrelevant,” Sloane bit, clenching his hands behind his back as they walked. “Nadia is the future. You have seen what she can do. All the rest may be disposed of.”
“Beware men who claim to be clairvoyant,” Irina cautioned levelly, as if she were advising him on nothing so interesting as stain removal or the appropriate method of arranging bed sheets with hospital corners. “Often, it is they who are the most blind of all.”
Sloane said nothing, merely pressed his lips together and attempted to smooth his significant brow. One last door, this time requiring a key card and retinal scan from them both. Irina once more bade Sloane leave the door open behind them. And then their footsteps changed once more, as they came upon the amphitheater.
Waiting inside were the members of the Council.
They were gathered around the gurney that held his daughter – the shell of his daughter, he corrected himself quickly. For Nadia was no longer in that body, but out among them all. In Los Angeles, changing the temperature. In Europe, shifting mountains. In Asia, juggling the very plates of the earth. Rivers would run dry and skies would fall, and he would sit next to the shade of his daughter and wash and comb and perhaps even braid her hair as they brought him reports of it.
“Arvin,” Irina said, summoning him closer to the gurney. The members of the Council closed around it, watching the girl warily, all of their hands tucked carefully behind backs or in pockets. Well out of range. Respectful. Sloane made a note of it, pleased.
“You have been of great service to us, Arvin,” she said, smiling. The expression was entirely disturbing, and Sloane echoed it with a joyous grimace of his own. Bristow stood at her right, his eyes locked on the young woman’s face, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. “It is time now for us to thank you.”
He would be inducted, then. And climb to the highest rank of the highest secret council in all the world, given time. And he would mold things as need be, and resurface and restructure the inside workings of all the planet’s government, just as his daughter worked on changing the construction of the earth itself.
“Thank you for your sacrifice,” Irina said and her smile grew.
Sloane pulled his eyes away from his glowing, perfect daughter to meet the woman’s eyes. “No,” he said with a beatific smile. “Thank you.”
“Shame,” Jack spoke up, finally, and Sloane was surprised to see Irina nodding as well, her smile cracking into something a little sad, and mostly pitying. It was an entirely foreign expression on her face for Sloane, and it sent something crawling up his back. “She could have been magnificent.”
And then, without any secondary hesitation, Jack reached forward and pulled off Nadia’s blindfold.
vii. one may smile, and smile, and be a villain
The front grille of the Jeep pressed into Sydney’s back as she leaned into it, her heels scraping in the gravel of the drive. She watched as the sun pulled itself behind the Omnifam building, its exterior not particularly cold and foreboding. Not that she had expected it to be – Sloane’s organizations were not as inherently evil as the man himself, she had to remind herself, and there were plenty of innocent people employed all over the world in his name.
Which certainly didn’t make her desire to pull his intestines out through unconventional exits decrease in the slightest.
The half-shadow of the evening threw her shadow far back onto the dashboard of the automobile. A continuous loop of traffic and weather reports cycled every five minutes on the radio, which Sark had switched on to cover the silence neither one of them wanted to recognize as tense. Sark sat behind the wheel, his hands folded behind his head, sunglasses mysteriously procured from one of their bags. If she had looked back, she knew, she would see the last flecks of sunlight reflecting off of the black plastic. Part of her resented him, having something to hide behind.
The rest of her was too focused on the doors in front of her.
“Let me try and understand,” she said to the drive, and Sark turned the radio off immediately. She thought it was a strange concession on his behalf that he even made the outward effort to listen. “He’s inside?”
Sark said nothing, and Sydney did not turn around. His lack of denial was enough of an affirmation – go inside, he had said. My job here is done, he had said. Your father is waiting for you, he had said. And climbed back inside the car. The guard stood far behind them in a small booth with a wooden and steel barricade that could be raised and lowered with the press of a large red button. She wasn’t sure if he was watching them or not – if they were being suspicious or not. He had let them in without so much as a request for identification from Sark.
Her head pounded from it, and she was grateful for the dimness as the last of the sun slipped away and the sparse lights outside the building flicked themselves on. She reached tentative fingers up to her forehead and grazed them lightly over Sark’s stitch job.
“And you’re just going to leave me here,” she went on, her eyes narrowing in an effort to make some sense of the numbers that had been stenciled on the double doors in front of her.
Still nothing from Sark, which she took as another confirmation, but she could hear him shifting a bit, hear the lines of the map being folded in on themselves under his careful fingers. It all seemed somehow utterly anticlimactic – that it had just been an easy delivery job, that whatever was waiting for her was just beyond those doors, that everything would be explained or ended with just this. No freezing to death in blizzards, no muscles straining in an effort to keep Will or Weiss out of harm’s way, no righteous closure to Sark’s involvement at all.
Just a normal delivery. Over an abnormally long distance of geography.
It was too easy.
“And you’re I’m not supposed to think this is a set-up?” she wondered aloud, not expecting his answer. And he gave none. Your father is waiting, he had said. With Irina, and Sloane, and the rest of the Council, he had said.
They are not patient people, he had said.
She pushed off of the front of the Jeep, her footsteps scuffing the gravel into odd patterns, and crossed her arms over her chest to once again survey the doors. She had her gun. She had everything she always had, and had no idea what was waiting for her, and it wasn’t a situation she was unaccustomed to. It should not, she told herself, be so difficult to walk through those doors.
Except that something in her wondered if Sark was telling the truth. And that was almost worse than an ambush.
A flash of blue fabric out of the corner of her eye and she turned to see him in her place, leaning against the grille, and wondered how he had managed to move over the loose stone without making any noise. Or if he had, and she had been too wrapped up in her own thoughts to notice. The former seemed more likely. At least, she didn’t like the idea of having been so far distracted that something so obvious had slipped from her view.
“I’ll ensure Tippin’s passage back to the United States,” came Sark’s quiet, businesslike voice. She had no reason to believe him, of course, but the fact that he said it at all was troublesome.
“You don’t think I’ll walk out those doors alive, do you.” It wasn’t a question. She tightened the grip on her upper arms for a brief moment, and then relaxed again.
Sark deigned to not answer the question, and flicked an imaginary piece of lint off of one cuff before refolding his hands in front of his stomach, elbows propped on the hood of the vehicle.
The dark had fallen almost completely, the shadow gone from the air. It would still be hours before the air cooled or the moon rose, but it was enough that the sun be gone. More outdoor lights flicked on, and the guard made sounds of movement within his booth.
“Leave the car,” she said, and turned around to look at him. He’d taken the sunglasses off, thank goodness. “In case I do.”
He watched her for a moment, his eyes just one side of unreadable, and then nodded and stepped away from the Jeep, handed her the keys.
And that was that, really. The end of it. She pocketed the keys in easy reach, in case they had to be used for a bit of makeshift stabbing, and checked the safety on her gun. The stone shifted under her feet again as she turned to the door.
“Sydney,” Sark started and grabbed her shoulder, the shape of it curling under his palm. Her eyes didn’t move off of his face, not giving him the satisfaction of her indignation at being touched. She watched until he removed his hand, every movement calculated and careful. Just the right enough humanity in the touch to obtain her attention. “If you do not return safely,” he started, and hesitated again, and looked her in the eye. “I will not be best pleased.”
In the game of words, traditionally speaking, duelists always strove for the final word. The last flung barb, the ultimate pinnacle of insult or wit.
Somehow, silence had become an evolved form of repartee. One that she wasn’t still sure she understood at all, or if it was even necessary that she did. She and Sark watched one another warily, waiting for the other to move, or speak, but nothing came. Only the final silence.
It was a small indulgence, therefore, for Sydney to be the one to not answer.
* * *
The halls did not ring with her footsteps, and that alone was somehow unsettling. They were the kind of halls that should – empty, glossy, shades of white on all six sides. The slick linoleum coating on the floor just begged for scuffmarks. But somehow, the vast space ate the resonance of her footfalls, leaving only a small padding sound as her tread hit the surface.
She eased carefully along the hallways, her mind drifting vaguely upward, like a deep sea diver surfacing in gradual stages. It was a scene set with heavy factors.
If her father was here, then she would have answers to her questions, whether she wanted them or not. No matter the outcome, life or death, she would have her answers. Even death itself would be a confirmation of sorts. But her father would not slip from her grasp again.
If her mother was here, then there would be more questions. Questions of betrayal, of cause, of effect. But most especially, of purpose. Why, after everything, would her mother have returned only to disappear again? The more elaborate the plan became, the harder Sydney found it to believe. Life, in truth, was never as complicated as it seemed to be. The simplest explanation was always the right one. And nothing in this equation added up to simple. Not in the short run, not in the big picture, not in any part or facet of it at all.
If Sloane was here, there would be more answers, but they would be lies. And he would deliver them to her on a silver, gleaming platter, tied up nicely in ribbons and shining paper. They would be beautiful, delicious half-truths gifted with a soft smile and a kind pat on the shoulder. But they would be lies nonetheless – curdled beneath and black and dark in the shadows, where they belonged.
And that was how she had to cut things up in her head. Her father would give her answers. Her mother would make things confusing. Sloane would be evil.
It was how things had to work, because it was how things had always worked, and nothing else made sense.
Slipping around one corner and scanning for video cameras that weren’t there – and that alone was odd, any self respecting business, even if it was a medical research facility, always had surveillance of some kind – Sydney had to stop to assess her position. No doors. Just more hallways, snaking, labyrinthine toward some unknown center. She checked behind her for people, and listened for the quiet footfalls of anyone approaching on either end.
The truth, if Sydney allowed herself to look at it objectively (which was admittedly hard with something like the truth, because it was a slippery and hard to handle kind of ideal), was what broke on the surface of her mind as her thoughts churned and tread water. The truth was that nothing was simple, and nothing was in layers, and the idea that her father would not betray her again – second, third, fourth, uncountable times – was foolish and impractical.
And understanding that was the hardest part of it all, really. Was that there could very well be no reason at all for anything that had happened in the past thirty-odd years. That it had been circumstance and frivolity and chance and a thousand other things wrapped up by people who she could not influence and forces she could not control.
She pushed away from the wall, moving farther down the hallway and into another blank corridor, determined to follow the maze to its end. To find the beast that dwelled in the center, waiting for her approach.
If there was one thing Sydney was tired of – one thing she would no longer abide by, deep inside her, at the end of the day – it was that she was done with being a victim of something as incorporeal as circumstance. Fate. Destiny.
Tonight, Sydney vowed, she would cut the puppet strings.
* * *
For the briefest of moments, Sloane thought that Irina was going to shoot him. He watched her gun arm twitch, and the fear for his life was immediately seconded by a curiosity as to whether she might shoot Jack, instead. And when those initial reactions passed without any blood or mayhem at all, he found himself fervently wishing he could be the one to supply them.
Nadia blinked up at them, her pupils dilated and unseeing in the bright lights of the amphitheater. Irina’s motion, then, was not to pull her weapon, but to slip one hand underneath her daughter’s head and help her up. Other hands went immediately to her prone body – hands of people Sloane did not even know the name of, touching his daughter’s arms and shoulders and back to raise her forward.
“It’s over,” Irina said to the young woman, brushing one of many stray hairs from her eyes. Truth told, Nadia looked a wreck. It was difficult to bathe someone who was supposed to be in a state of complete stasis. But Irina’s words were not comforting – simply factual. And it was that fact in her words that made shivers course up Sloane’s spine. Nothing was over – the very idea was ridiculous. They had barely even touched the beginning. Irina had no right to take this from him. None at all.
Nadia stared straight ahead, her eyes unblinking and unmoving and completely unable to focus on any one thing. Her gaze kept slipping over the things in front of her, as if she was trying to find one thing to see on that kept swimming out of her mind’s eye. The Council – the strange hands, all of them – reached out, dozens of anonymous fingers, to help circulate the blood in her veins. But she was still numb, Sloane wanted to tell them.
It wasn’t too late.
They could still go back.
Jack met his eyes over the tending crowd, both he and Sloane a step away from the inner circle. Jack took the opportunity to give him a crooked, falsely congenial smile that made Sloane’s very skeleton ache from the indignation of it.
He broke the eye contact and shouldered back into the circle, next to Irina, and tried the rather ineffectual move of trying to pry her fingers away from Nadia’s head. Irina gave him a warning glance, and he pulled back, fingers moving on the fly, not sure where to try and fix the damage first. “She’s not well,” he said quietly, quickly. “You can’t do this. You’re ruining – ”
His words stopped as Nadia swung her head, and stared directly at him. Her expression was still vacant, but it was as unnerving as it was unseeing.
“She knows you, Arvin.” Jack’s words, Jack’s voice, floating from somewhere behind him now. As if they were speaking of an absent dog and his master reunited.
“Jack,” Sloane muttered under his breath. “This is your doing.”
Nadia’s gaze did not waver off of his face, and she tried raising an arm. “Daddy?” she said quietly, her fingers reaching out to brush his face.
But Sloane was already arching away, horrified by her questing touch. He wheeled sharply on Jack, who gave no quarter at the invasion of his space. “You did this. You turned them against me. Just because it isn’t your daughter, and…” his words failed him, but Jack picked up the silence immediately.
“Daddy?” Nadia’s voice filtered through the hands restraining her, her hand still questing for his body, her voice like iron shavings. “What did you do to me?”
“It has never been you daughter,” Jack said simply, his voice like cold, frosted glass. “The Council has always known this. It is you, Arvin, who are truly blind.”
Irina stepped away from her daughter’s figure, the limbs of which the Council members were working back down onto the gurney. She stood next to her husband, her expression foreboding and somehow young, despite the lines carved around her mouth and eyes. “It is the child, then,” she said, and looked over Sloane’s shoulder toward a set of double-doors that would have lead, in older times, to a morgue.
“What child?” Sloane demanded. “And what about the signs, then, Irina? What about those? Los Angeles has frozen over. Half the stars – ”
“A third,” Jack corrected, as mildly as if it had been a matter of the color of the sky itself.
“The child,” Irina said again with a mysterious smile, and brushed past Sloane to the double doors. She paused, considering, and looked back to her husband. She gave a sharp nod of her head toward the gurney, where Sloane had retreated in a feeble attempt to get the blindfold back onto his daughter. “Kill them both.”
Jack’s only response was a nod.
* * *
“That,” McKenas Cole was saying as Sydney rounded the corner, “is some Seriously Fucked Up Shit.” She could hear the capital letter emphasis even as she pulled herself back around the narrow devisor and pushed her back up against the wall.
“I have always appreciated your eloquence,” came a woman’s voice, and it took at least three beats of something like horror before Sydney could connect the voice with her mother’s.
“You don’t pay me for pretty words,” Cole was replying even as Sydney suppressed the urge to dart around the threshold and appeal to her mother’s senses – whatever was left of them. “You’ve got the other one for that.”
“And he does a sight better job of it,” Irina said by way of agreement, but it produced a disgruntled noise from Cole. “Is he here yet?”
The sound of feet shuffling drifted quietly down the gap between them, and Sydney wondered if the hesitation was from reluctance or dramatic effect. “The car is in the drive,” was the only allowance Cole would make. Sydney wondered if there had been prior incidents of premature assurances, and retribution delivered upon their failure, that would give Cole a cautious tongue where he was so frivolous in other venues of conversation.
“But you haven’t seen either of them?” Irina pressed, accompanied by a sound of shifting fabric. It came to Sydney in a panic that if either of them passed her way, she would have no where to hide – and that she wasn’t entirely sure if she should be hiding at all.
“No,” Cole confirmed. “But they can’t be far. If you’d have just let me escort them here in the first place, we could have avoided all this cloak and dagger bullshit.”
“Free will,” Irina said, and it came out as a reprimand. Cole grumbled again and Sydney wished she could poke her head around the door, just enough to see him properly cowed.
“We let them go, in Mexico City,” Cole said – not fighting, just a cautious statement of what he believed to be fact.
Irina opened her mouth to rebuke him once more when the screaming started. The tail end of her words were heard at the end of the scream, as it cut off unnaturally, in the middle. Both Irina and Cole hesitated only an additional minute more before they moved back toward the far doorway, questing the source of the sound.
* * *
Jack smiled down at Sloane. It was a pleasant sight if one knew nothing about the man, but Sloane did, and that made all the difference. “It’s a shame,” he said conversationally, in the same tone he used to explain to telemarketers why, precisely, he was better off without their product and they would be as well. “I would have liked to been able to listen.”
Sloane stared up at him, fury beading sweat onto his brow, and he spat something violent and obscene against the inside of the gag.
“It’s just that the noise is a bit much for Ms. Santos right now,” Jack said, and Nadia gave a small twitch at her last name, rocking back on one foot and then forward again. “What with her sensitive ears. I’m sure you are familiar, Arvin, with how she came to be in that situation?”
Sloane said nothing, but the fury and fear in his eyes increased exponentially. Nadia rocked forward again, compulsively, gripping a bloodied scalpel in her left hand. There were streaks of the same fluid down the pale blue dotted front of her hospital gown, which made the fabric stick to her skin in odd spots.
On the floor, near the front legs of the chair Sloane was tied to, lay three fingers.
“Work quickly now,” Jack said to Nadia, stepping back a bit. His arms he kept crossed over his chest, and his chin tilted high. “You don’t want him loosing consciousness before you’re done.”
Another noise came from Sloane and Jack turned his head and presented an ear, as if to better hear the garbled curses. He shook his head, as if in answer, and took another step back. Nadia rocked forward again, and lunged at the other hand. Sloane’s head shot back, vertebrae popping from the movement, and he wailed against the rag taped into his mouth.
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Jack continued in his informal tone. “By all rights, it should be your skin. Not just your fingers. But we’re pressed for time, and a full-body fillet –” He was cut off by the noises again.
It was really only fair, the way Jack saw it. And it had been Nadia’s idea, of course, which was more important. Eyes for sight. Ears for sound. Nose for smell. Fingers for touch. Tongue for taste, which would be last, because they didn’t want him swallowing that much blood before they had a chance to finish. The tongue was an incredibly powerful muscle, Nadia had explained to him, as if to a child, and held quite a lot of blood.
Two more fingers fell to the ground, and Jack pulled a towel off of the table next to him and moved forward to wrap it around Sloane’s hand. The man made odd noises at the wound being touched, and Jack was careful not to get any blood on him.
Presentation was important, after all.
Nadia was standing next to him, her hands propped on her waist, leaving bloody prints where her hips should be in the formless shift she wore. “That woman told you to kill us both,” she said, and cocked her head to examine her work.
“Yes,” Jack said. “She did.”
Sloane’s screams came to a crescendo once more as she worked on his nose. Her fingers were not as deft as they should have been, he noticed, but one had to make allowances after so many weeks of inadequate stimulation.
“That woman told you to kill us both.” She didn’t face him, and her back blocked her work, but Jack could hear the concentration in her voice.
“That woman is your mother,” Jack corrected her sternly, for a moment only a replacement father speaking to his child about the improper use of titles when addressing adults.
She seemed to pause, filter the information in, and then he saw the blade flash wetly in the sharp overhead lighting as she reapplied it. Sloane gurgled in protest, but weakly. One of his legs, tied to the corresponding chair support, flailed against its bond. “Same question, revised,” she said.
“Not while you have that scalpel in your hand,” Jack told her. Which was the truth. Whether or not Irina had actually wanted her killed was a matter of interpretation. He had come to learn, after so many years of study, that a small percentage of her orders were for the benefit of others listening. It had been interesting, after all, to watch Sloane’s reaction to the words.
Personally, Jack rather enjoyed Nadia’s company. If he found it a little unsettling, well. That was to be expected.
“I will be thorough, then,” Nadia said, as if that settled the matter, and looked over her shoulder at him, smiling the same calm smile he had seen so many times on his wife. It would have been completely innocuous, if it hadn’t been for the spray of blood that had lanced her throat. “Uncle Jack.”
He waited until she turned back to her work, this time on Sloane’s eye, from the sound of it, before considering the words. He was, in some very twisted Oedipal form of the word. But it made him wonder how many other, errant ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews’ Irina may have running around, waiting to be tested.
How many she had held back from the Council?
Not that there was anything to be done for it now. With Nadia safely occupied and Sloane’s attention diverted elsewhere, the Council’s delicate work would come to fruition.
And at last, at long last, Jack would have the guarantee of his own daughter’s safety.
His thoughts were broken by Cole’s arrival – as they often were in the other man’s detestable presence. Irina trailed after him, not so much a follower to his lead as a separate party altogether. She nodded at him briefly, and he inclined his head in recognition before turning his attention back to Nadia.
A rather gratuitous spurt of blood arced over her back and slithered across the floor towards his shoes. He took an easy step to the side and watched Cole’s face go ashen with a certain amount of satisfaction.
“Enjoying yourselves?” Something in Irina’s expression was amused, and it made Jack remember Sydney’s fourth birthday party when he had dressed as a clown, much to the terror of his daughter’s friends. She had said something similar to him then, her hair framing her face, her hands pulled behind her, as he adjusted his curly wig and prepared to juggle oddly shaped pins. He didn’t remember his answer, but he did remember her.
“Your daughter,” he said, with no emphasis on the first word at all, “appears to have a natural inclination toward the art of dissection.”
Cole pushed a hand over his mouth, looking distinctly green, and backed out of the room in the direction he had come.
Either Sloane had passed beyond any possible thought range, or he still possessed enough self knowledge to understand the futility in such an act, but he made no plea to Irina when she approached to survey her daughter’s work.
A long moment passed before she pulled back, and Nadia leaned in again with the blade, her lips pressing together in absorption to her task. “How are you feeling, Nadia?” Irina’s voice was the even tone of a rider gentling a horse. Jack found it vaguely patronizing, and watched Nadia’s back for the telltale flex of muscles that would mean the lash of an arm toward Irina’s face. Neither such a sign of retaliation nor a verbal response came.
“She hasn’t been saying much,” Jack reported when Irina looked at him.
He found it abstractly remarkable that he did not tense when she approached. “You didn’t kill her.”
“I didn’t kill either of them,” he pointed out. “Though I believe Sloane may be well on his way.” The man in question gave a wet murmur against the soaking rag. Blood had soaked it, either from his chewing at his own mouth, or the flood of crimson that streaked his face.
“No,” Irina said, almost fondly, and their arms pressed together as she leaned back to watch Nadia work. “You didn’t.”
They watched in companionable silence until the sound of gunshot stirred Irina’s attention. Neither of them jumped at the sound – not like Irina had when the screams had started. They both looked toward the doorway, the source of the sound, and then at one another.
“It sounds as if our guests have arrived,” Jack said, and pushed himself away from the table.
“Well,” she said with a smile, rubbing her palms against the fabric of her pants in a distracted motion. “We’d best greet them.”
* * *
Sydney pulled something vicious in her arm as she swung her body awkwardly away from the range of the gun pointed at her, skidded behind the man coming at her, and managed to fell his legs out from beneath his body on her way. She found her footing first, and could almost feel the stick of her fingers on the linoleum as she yanked her body up and away. Her gun skidded ahead of her and she managed to lay three cover shots – enough to get her around the far corner.
It had been foolish, and she knew it. But her life was risk, and the urge to find the source of the screams had filled Sydney just as much as it had the others who had been in range of the brutal sound. To follow Cole and Irina had been a risk as well, and again one that she could justify to herself, given time. But it had been genuinely foolish to not expect one, or both, of them to double back. When Cole had removed himself from the amphitheater, looking worse for the wear, and vomited profusely on the linoleum, she should have taken been expecting it.
Not the vomit part, maybe.
She watched as he skidded up to his feet, like someone falling in reverse, and slipped a bit in the puddle of is own filth. He reached up and pulled a lever near the door, but no alarm rang. Her mind raced – she needed to find cover, and in the featureless surface of the hallway, she wasn’t likely to find much to help her.
A shout signaled the approach of guards, stamping down the direction she had fled, and she swore audibly, checked Cole’s position, and decided to run for it. The man was still disoriented enough to let her by.
Her legs burned as she ran, and she dimly felt the impact of her shoulder as she slammed past him, sending him flailing back into his own bodily fluids. She bolted further, laid another few shots of cover, and groped for her replacement clip as she rounded another corner. Cole’s angry shout directed the guards he had summoned after her, and Sydney bolted again after slamming her fresh clip home. The empty shell clattered at her feet, skittering on the surface of the floor, and she spared enough thought to hope one of her pursuers would slip on it.
Another corner rounded – one she thought she knew, but it was too hard to tell without any sort of defining marks on the walls – and she nearly collided with a very startled looking Sark. “What are you doing here?” she hissed, and fired two shots over his shoulder. The sound, right next to his ear, made his hand fly up – out of no control of his own – in an attempt to save his hearing. She could see the flinch, as he ducked back behind her cover fire and pushed them both back along the corridor.
“Why aren’t there any doorways?” Sark snarled in lieu of an answer, neck craning to find a place for them to shelter in and regroup defensive maneuvers. It was a futile sort of question, and she could hear it in his voice, and in the slight fumble of his draw when he pulled his own weapon. She wanted to know where he’d come from. How he’d navigated the hallways himself. Where he’d found someone to supply him with a gun.
Sydney squeezed off a quick round, buying them enough time to slip around a corner she had passed once before, and then Sark was pulling on her shoulder, hard. Hard enough for it to hurt, because she couldn’t stop the small cry that tore out of her as she was thrust backwards, through the door that Sydney distinctly remembered not being there the last time she had passed by – if she had, in fact, been down this particular hallway before. His body propelling her away from their pursuers, graceless and painful pressure where bruised bones met each other. They wheeled awkwardly, Sydney stumbling backwards and Sark with his arms in front of him but his gaze pinned over his shoulder, both of them watching the small window in the door and waiting. Waiting. Two heartbeats. Three. Four.
Waiting was always the worst part.
She managed to find enough of her bearings to pull him flat against the door, beneath the window, just as the rumbling of footsteps passed by, orders shouted in a foreign tongue too quickly and too far away muffled for her brain to manage the automatic translation.
The door did not budge.
They waited for tense additional seconds to tick by – waiting to see if anyone would double back. Even after that, neither of them relaxed. Sydney did manage to unwind her fingers from his shirt, and he slumped back against the door, his breath still coming fast.
“I would very much like to have a know what the hell is going on,” he said in a quiet rush, and she got the impression it was something he’d been thinking for a while.
“So would I,” she said, her tone conciliatory. Not that a request for answers would do much good at this point. Sighing, she turned herself away from the door and propped against it, both of them sliding down enough to rest for a moment. “I thought you were leaving?”
“I was,” he said sulkily. “I got turned around in the corridors, and then someone decided to draw fire.”
“It was Cole,” she protested, as if there were a distinction, and felt vaguely satisfied that she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t make heads or tails of the warren of hallways. “No one knew I was here yet. And why did you need to come in the building, anyway?”
He looked at her as if she had developed an impressive hole in her head, and then snorted and looked away. “You are being facetious, I hope? They’ve all been waiting for you. Of course they know you’re here.” Less defensively, he added: “I came in for keys to new transport. Did you expect me to walk back to Quito?”
Sydney conceded the point. Arguing would get them nowhere – and nowhere was exactly where she needed to not be. Along with small rooms and men who were supposed to be gone. She took what hoped would be a steadying breath, and scrubbed at her eyes. “Where are we?”
It was only when he didn’t answer that she looked up.
The room was small enough – the size of her kitchen, perhaps. There was an innocuous enough looking desk with a quiet, humming computer on it. The flat screen bounced around a corporate logo as a screen saver, and the rest of the table was devoted to laboratory equipment, most of it more complex than Sydney could identify. A spinet ran a single vial of blood, the rhythmic whirring coating the small laboratory.
Every other available inch of space was devoted to cooling units.
It wasn’t unlike standing inside a very small convenience store, a detached part of her brain noticed. A convenience store in a very, very warm climate, because otherwise there would be no need for so much refrigeration equipment. The doors were slide-open, and she could see wire racks painted white lining the inside as shelving.
All the shelves were full – some with vials, others with labeled, shoebox sized containers. Everything was carefully labeled in a neat, black, block lettering script. Handwritten, she noticed, and obviously highly organized.
No reason, then, for Sark to still be staring drop-jawed at the central refrigeration unit. Well. Not literally drop-jawed, she had to credit. But she half expected him to raise a shaking finger and point and gawp, the way the color had drained from his face. Determined to upstage his reaction, she pushed herself up off the ground – used the door to lever her exhausted body up – and lurched forward to one of the other cooling units.
Every test tube inside was labeled with a serial code and the word ‘N. Santos’ on the white label. She could almost see through it – the fluorescent lighting inside made the paper nearly translucent. She squinted and tilted her head, pressing her face closer to the glass, and tried to make out what could be inside all the tubes.
“Sydney,” Sark called from behind her, his voice cautious in a way that was simultaneously troubling and new. “You’d better have a look at this.”
She turned away from the glass only to see him behind her, mirroring her position at the case behind her. She went over, dutifully, and peered at what he was staring at.
It took a fully developed millisecond before her brain could properly understand what it was seeing.
‘S. Bristow.’
“What – ” she started, and cut herself off.
“There’s more.” Sark pointed to a lower shelf, and Sydney managed to shift her eyes down, off of the rows and rows of shining test tubes.
‘I. Derevko.’
Sydney took an involuntary step back, and Sark stooped to peer closer at the glass, as if he could better make it out from that angle. “What is this?” She hated that she could not help the nervous quaver in her voice, and bit down on the inside of her mouth in retribution.
“Harvest,” Sark murmured, his voice fogging up the glass for the briefest of moments.
She hardened her tone to keep the tremor out of it. “I don’t underst – ”
He did raise his hand, then, and pointed with a single, belated digit at the next refrigerator. The one he had been staring at when they’d been propped against the wall. “I’m in that one.”
“What?” But she was already crossing the space in quick, panicked strides, and kneeling in front of the case. There, halfway down, nestled between two other vials, was ‘J. Sark’. Her eyes swept up and down the case once, and then did it again – slower, left to right, like reading a book.
M. Dixon. F. Kendall. M. Vaughn. D. Hecht. W. Tippin. E. Weiss. M. Flinkman. M. Cole. A. Sloane. N. Hicks. S. Haladki. D. McNeil. C. Evans. A. Khasinau. M. Townsend. T. Barcelo. A. Saibi R. Veloso. P. Fordson. M. Naj. C. Schmidt. C. Richter. C. Blair. M. McCarthy. H. Fields. T. Powell. G. Nacor. A. Jezek. T. Dennett. N. Caplan. L. Karpachev. H. Brucker. J. Sark. P. DiRegno. S. Kingsley. P. Lagravenese. J. Parez. K. Bomani. S. Walker. H. Strauss. R. Lindsey. R. Lange. K. Blake. L. Brazzel. D. Hayes. L. Lisenker. D. Ryan. F. Reed. P. Berezovsky. D. Machuca. M. Bell. P. Terrance. W. Lazarey. C. Bernard. I. Hassan. S. Lambert. P. Kelvin. M. Shepard. B. Calder. A. Christophe. A. Russek. A. Devlin. J. Bristow.
On and on. Rows and rows of names, men she barely remembered: names of doctors, classmates, blind dates, the entire male staff of the CIA and some of the SD cells. “Oh,” she said, her voice hollow as it bounced off the glass back into her mouth, “my God.”
“Harvest,” Sark repeated, but this time his voice was right above her, over her shoulder. She glanced up at him, saw his eyes latched back on the vial inside the case.
“What is this?” she asked, her voice coming out in a wounded hush. He looked down at her, met her eyes briefly, and shook his head.
They both turned away, and she straightened herself with effort, one hand coming up to absently rub at the place Sark had bruised her on their way in.
Reluctantly, they both looked at the last case. The one with the larger containers inside. Some were labeled, and had temperature gauges on the outside. The needles pointed in the green zone on the dial face.
Sark was the one who managed to reach out and pull the glass door open. Sydney filled in the hydraulic hiss in her head she had been expecting that never came. He reached for the first tub, and it was only when his fingers were already latched around the lid that Sydney realized Vaughn’s name was neatly lettered on the side.
The lid popped open easily, like on a Tupperware of leftovers.
Sark looked inside, held the lid over the contents, and then exhaled sharply. Sydney shifted slightly so she could see and he jerked back, slammed the lid back on, and met her gaze.
His voice was steel. “It’s his heart.”
* * *
Cole kept his eyes down, as long as he could – until his shoes brushed something wet, and the smell of blood flared his senses uncomfortably. And then he had to look up – if only to see where he could walk.
Which was essentially nowhere.
Nadia sat, cross legged, in the middle of the table that faced Sloane’s chair.
Sloane… Well. Cole winced, took an involuntarily step back, and squinted one eye. Not that Sloane could have ever been described as a ‘pretty sight’ before, but he was most certainly the farthest thing from such a description now. Nadia was looking a bit worse-for-wear herself, up to her elbows in drying blood. He could see the cracks where the liquid had already consolidated and chipped itself away, flaking in a slick dust to her lap.
The scalpel lay embedded in Sloane’s right eye, which gave Cole some sick sense of hope – if she wasn’t holding it, she couldn’t use it on him.
“Nadia?” he tried, in a not-so-consoling voice.
She turned her head, very slowly, and looked at him. “What do you want?” Her eyes snapped down to his cautiously approaching feet and then back to his face. “Did my mother send you?”
“No,” he said carefully, waiting to see if that would merit a positive or negative reaction. “The Council wants me to keep you safe, Nadia. Is that alright?”
“Fuck the Council,” she said, and spat on the table.
Cole slowed his approach and raised both his hands, empty, palm out. “Just a short plane ride,” he promised. “And then we can get you into a shower and some clean clothes. And then you’ll see your mother again. Would you like that, kid?” He stretched a hand out, guardedly optimistic as she did nothing but track him with her eyes.
Cole grabbed her arm, and Nadia screamed, and screamed, and wouldn’t stop screaming until he managed to sink the needle into her neck and drive the plunger home.
The sound hadn’t been human.
* * *
“Burn it,” Sydney said. “Burn it all.”
“With what?” Sark countered, a box in each hand, his voice tinged with exasperation.
“Burn it all,” Sydney emphasized, pushing away from the refrigerator and turning to survey the room, her expression nearly frantic. He watched as her eyes locked on something and turned as she did, watched her stride across the room to a three compartment sink with drying laboratory equipment on the sideboard. She switched the middle sink on, hot water steaming up from the metal basin in a hollow thrum.
Sark took a halfhearted step after her, a box lettered with “S. Haladki” on the side weighing down his other hand. “Sydney, don’t you want – ”
“I don’t care,” she said, her voice shaking with the last word, as she swept toward a different refrigerator – the ones with her name, her mother’s name, printed on the side. She carted out a flat of vials and slammed them down next to the sink and began popping the lids on as many as she could fit in one hand. There were slight, sticky sounds as the contents hit the drain and merged with the scalding water, and then the sound of breaking glass.
“Sydney,” he tried again, and again she cut him off.
“Bring them here.” The malice that lined her voice was surprising, and Sark went to her side at the sinks.
He looked from the boxes in hand, disconcertingly heavy, to the drains, to Sydney’s face. “I’m not entirely sure they’re going to fit down the plug.”
She looked up at him, her expression ferocious, and he noted how her hands shook. “Sark,” she said levelly. “Destroy it. Destroy it all.” And then she looked away, her attention riveted to her undertaking, and worked faster and deploying the contents of the vials down into the torrid water.
In his own experience, there wasn’t much else to do but obey, when a Bristow ordered you to do something in a voice like that. So he opened the boxes, demanding his brain not to flinch at the sound of the muscles hitting the bottom of the sink, and moved the lever that would close the drain. It was only another moment as he cast about for hydraulic acid – a standard in any lab, he was pleased to find – and he deposited the large container, undiluted, onto the cool flesh that lay in the basin.
He half expected the hearts to start steaming at the contact of the acid, but they did no such thing. So he went back to the refrigerator and got two more.
The boxes in his assigned cooling unit, he was pleased to find, were mostly empty – including the one labeled with his own name, the label of which he took specific care to destroy. Many of the names he had never heard of, others were familiar. Either way, he found himself warming to the task – he had no desire to have his own innards join the icy remains of so many other men.
The vials with the men’s names on them were next, and he started in on them while Sydney was still emptying the third refrigerator of her own biological samples. Neither of them spoke of the contents, and Sydney joined Sark while the hearts steamed in the third compartment of the sink, acid eating slowly away at the tissue gathered there.
It was quick work, to destroy the reproductive results of so many people.
And it was only after things had been properly disposed of – including the lone blood sample still rotating on the spinet – that Sydney turned her back to the procedure. She insisted the sink stay running, like a child afraid a drowned spider would crawl back up the drain. They leaned up against the rim of the sinks, the metal cutting a groove into his lower back, and he waited for her to ask.
When she did, though, it wasn’t the question he had been expecting. “How much of this did you know about?” she said quietly, her fingers flexing near her elbows as she clutched at herself. “How much did you not tell me?”
He abandoned the sink and went back over to the refrigerators, restless, checking to see if they had left anything. “None of it,” he answered her, tense and defensive. He pulled open the refrigerator that had held the hearts and made another examination of its now empty space. He kept expecting to see his own box back where he had removed it.
“Bullshit,” she clipped.
“Fine.” He slammed the door shut, stalked over to her, squaring out her personal space. She reeled back, trying to make room in time, and ended up against the sideboard. “You want to know, Sydney? You want to know the big, bad secret? The one Daddy’s been scheming since you were born?” He spat the last word, tossed a hand in her face, and stalked away from her again.
She eased slightly when he reached a safer distance, but didn’t come off her guard entirely. “What are you talking about, Sark? You said… Will and Weiss – ”
“Tippin could be ripped open over a table for all you know,” Sark muttered, his back rigid, his hands flexing for lack of focus. He rushed on, before she could reproach him for the suggestion. “Weiss can take care of himself, as long as no one aims for the neck. They’re safer off where they are. Do you want to know why it had to happen Sydney? Do you?” He stabbed a finger at her, and laughed, a little manically. A hand ran over his hair, back to front and then in reverse, as if he expected it to be longer and was trying to understand where the rest of it had gone.
She gave a careful nod, drawing closer despite herself. Just a step, two. Enough to make him stop, focus, cross his arms over his chest. “Then listen closely,” he said, his voice level. “Welcome to story hour, Sydney.”
“Stop being a dramatic bastard,” she said. “And tell me what’s going on.”
“What’s going on,” he said, and sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “What’s going on is this. Your father, and my father, and your mother, and how they just have to fuck with the world.” He straightened his neck, looked at her. “Maybe you’ve heard of this fellow – Rambaldi? Does that ring a bell? And these pesky prophesies that he has? Funny thing – how your face is on that page. How everyone thought it was you, and then everyone thought it was Irina, and the Council knew all along that it wasn’t either of you.”
“What are you talking about?” She had gone quiet, threatening, taken another step closer. Her arms took up the position of his own, crossed defensively over her chest, one hand gripping hard to her shirt sleeve. Sark could see the fabric pull tight.
“I’m talking about your father knowing – like he always does – exactly how to play the game Arvin Sloane only wished he knew the name of, let alone the rules.” He paused, surveyed her, noticed their mirrored positions. He uncrossed his arms and jammed his hands in his pockets. “Do you want to know the rest, or will you shut up and get the hell out of here with me?”
“Tell me.”
He regarded her for a moment, giving her a chance to change her mind, but didn’t seem surprised when she said nothing more. “Infuriating girl,” he said, just a trace of fondness. “It isn’t your mother. It isn’t you. It’s someone who shares your DNA.”
“Nadia.”
“No.” He snapped the denial almost before she had her sister’s name out. “Sloane’s a fool – has Nadia imprisoned somewhere, has been running tests. That’s as much as Irina will tell me. Something’s up. But no. Not Nadia.”
“There’s no one else,” she insisted. “You’re not about to tell me I have another sister, Sark.”
“No.” He gave her a crooked smile. “A daughter.”
She sat down, hard, and Sark managed to stow his amusement long enough to grab at her arm, try and ease her to the floor. Bruised tailbones would be decidedly difficult to travel with, not to mention the gratuitous mood swings he already had to field. She shook his arm off, enough of her higher thinking still functioning to know that she didn’t want his hands on her in any form. He edged off an inch or two, crouching next to her, and waited for her to speak.
She didn’t.
Sark sat back on his haunches, one hand resting against the oddly textured concrete wall, the inadequate paint job not hiding the stone mix that cut into his palm. “There is a Council. That your mother started, with Sloane, before you were born. The Council dedicated itself to finding Rambaldi’s prophesies – or, when they thought they had them all – interpreting them. Do you like story hour, Sydney? Are you following me here?”
Sydney managed to make herself look at him long enough to nod, jamming her hands between her knees. Her shoulders hunched forward, her hair fell in her face – none of her body wanted to know what he had to tell her, but she managed to keep the important parts focused. “Tell me,” she said again.
“You ruled yourself out almost immediately. When they realized it wasn’t your mother, there was great hope for Nadia. Of course, as her father, Sloane could issue any testing he wanted on her, no doctors would question that. And if they did, he would find himself less curious doctors.”
Sydney stared into one of the open refrigerators, still pushing out cool, dry air.
“Irina is still a part of the Council. She keeps you father in formed,” Sark said, and made an irritated noise – they didn’t have much time left, they needed to leave, and Sydney was delaying them irreparably. Information could be passed while moving, his brain insisted. “Frequently. We’ve really got to move now, Sydney. If that’s alright with you?” The latter was a snide formality, an effort to push them away from the confessional nature of their current conversation. It didn’t seem to work.
“You’re not lying,” she said, her voice almost wondering. As if it had never happened before.
Sark offered a hand down, in front of her face. “Not generally. No.”
She looked up at him, at the hand, for a moment before she reached her fingers into his palm. “They did this when I lost my memory. But…but I had those memories returned, Sark, and I still don’t remember this happening.” She pressed her forehead to her knees, and he watched her eyes go unfocused, scouring for the scenes that would make his information fall into place in her mind. But nothing seemed to be focusing in her wild skim.
“They harvested your ova,” Sark said flatly. He grasped her wrist and hauled her to her feet, and then pushed himself away from the wall, stood up, began to pace the room. His arms he crossed over his chest, his head dipped down, and he watched the scuff of his shoes on the dry concrete. “They knew it would be your DNA. You’ve seen what’s here, Sydney. You can’t deny that this – ” he stopped and made a broad, sweeping gesture with his arm to encompass the whole of the room – “happened.”
He paused for her to speak, but when she said nothing, once more, he went on. “There were vials. Filled with ova. Filled with semen. Are you following?”
A nod, and her eyes flicked briefly over to the sinks. “What did they do?”
“Sydney,” he said, and her name came out hard on the first syllable. “This is a conversation we can have somewhere else.”
She squinted at him. “You were the one who was so eager to get me here.”
“That was before there were armed guards chasing you.” Sark crossed the small room and pulled open one of the doors, glanced out both sides. He pulled his head back inside the room and made a pointed movement with his eyebrows. “At your leave?”
Sydney gave a cursory glance around the lab and then followed him. He held the door open for her. “They’re going to have more,” she said morosely. “More labs. Somewhere else. My father wouldn’t keep all his research in one place.”
What answer Sark may have had for her, however, was lost in the sound of the lab door clicking shut behind them. Sark’s steps down the hallway aborted immediately, and Sydney looked back at him, and then up, almost simultaneously seeing two things: Sark staring ahead of her, and her mother staring back at him. In the millisecond it took her to backpedal to Sark’s side, her hand to her weapon, her father had appeared next to Irina.
“Hello, Sydney,” Irina said in her gentle, deceptive voice. “It’s so good to see you again.”
* * *
Once, on a mission in Taipei, Jack had had his arm caught in a steel jawed spring trap. The details of the mission – the objective – where lost in the confines of his memory as inconsequential. He had still be working for the CIA, the first time around, and Arvin Sloane was nothing more than a passing acquaintance on his way to his desk. It had been a routine information retrieval, perhaps, or some sort of op-tech assignment. Either way, he remembered the bear trap.
He remembered the decision to wear an extra layer of nylon that night, on the warning that they might have to spend hours sitting in the sleet. No one avoids illness naturally – precaution and regular safety were what had always kept Jack from the sickbed. Which was why an extra layer had seemed like a good idea, despite the bulk it would create under his jacket. The trap had been dropped on him from above, and he had raised his arms over his head to keep the foreign object from clocking him in the head. The rest of his teammates had scattered for cover, and Jack had suffered the blow of the trap closing around his arm in silence.
The trap had bled his arm in long streaks, scattering the dark floor beneath him with blood, and the rest of the agents with him and provided cover fire while their medical agent could help him remove it. They had used a wicked looking knife, the make of which had also escaped Jack’s memory (or, rather, he had an idea that it was Maxam, but rather thought it couldn’t be that because the Maxam was entirely the wrong shape for what they had needed at the time), to reset the trap and ease it out of his flesh. He helped ensure that no cloth had entered the wound, held the tourniquet while the doctor stitched him without anesthetic, and made no sound other than his teeth grinding.
The next day, he had been promoted to Special Agent.
But throughout the entire ordeal – and this was what Jack remembered the most, because the rest of the memory came back easily enough when he looked down at the light scars curved in a half-moon on his arm – he hadn’t worried. He had known exactly what needed doing, and how to do it.
If anything – anything at all – Jack Bristow always knew what had to be done.
Which was why it was odd, as he paced the cleaned floor of the amphitheater in long, scholarly strides, that he found himself debating how much to tell his daughter. Where to start with the story of her life, how it would be easier for her to not want to know, to simply accept his explanation. To be able to understand, without questioning, exactly what was happening. Just as Jack had known, instinctually, how to react when the metallic teeth of the trap had closed around his skin and burrowed their way toward his bone.
But then, he had to admit as he turned another pivot on his pacing, that wasn’t how he had raised her. Not in the slightest.
“Dad.”
Jack stopped, pulled his hands taught behind him, and met her gaze. “Sydney.”
She pulled herself away from the threshold. “She told me to come here.” Wouldn’t say her own mother’s name, Jack noticed. “Before I went to the observatory.”
He gave her a nod and then frowned a bit, making a visual check of her posture. “Are you okay?”
She delivered him a rather disbelieving smile, and shook her head. “No. I’m not. I’d like to know what’s going on now, though.”
“He didn’t hurt you, I mean.” Jack cracked his pause and went to her side, watching as she drew back from him, and amended his intent to a respectful distance. “Sark.”
“He did just as you ordered,” Sydney said, another piece of that laugh in her voice. It wasn’t a happy sound. “You should be very pleased.”
“Vaughn,” Jack said just to make her look at him. And she did, the broken laughter in her eyes melting slowly, so slowly into something else.
Waiting until Sydney had propped herself against the desk – the same desk that Nadia had perched herself on during Sloane’s visit to the room – Jack felt his first, crystal clear pang of happiness that his daughter was sitting in front of him. And then she opened her mouth. “They took out his heart,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she honestly thought he didn’t know.
And that was the final clause, really. Of the prophesy, of the child, of all of it. It all came down to millimeters and ounces and misinterpretations and twisted fate, and one entirely overly symbolic organ.
“She’s shown you the translations,” Jack said.
Sydney nodded. “I’m tired,” she said, and she looked it. “I’m tired of having dead men rule my life, Dad.” She tucked her hands between her knees and gave a quiet, shuddering sigh. “And those two years I lost, how could Rambaldi not have anticipated…” she drifted off at the incongruity of her question.
“All the analysis said that it would be Vaughn,” Jack assured her. Relying on his own form of comfort: facts. “And then you disappeared and he married Reed. That was when we started taking samples. If it wasn’t Vaughn, it could have been anyone.”
“But how did you know it wasn’t Vaughn?” she asked, her voice looking for bolt holes in the plan. Anything that would mean that her destiny wasn’t wrapped around a perfect stranger’s.
“She’s shown you the translations,” Jack repeated, and she shook her head in frustration. “The heart must be of specific size, shape, measurement. ‘And the father’s core shall be six – ’” he started to recite when she cut him off.
“Then how could Rambaldi have expected the father to create a child, with his heart ripped out?” she demanded.
“The Council always knew that the child would be artificial – there are clauses, measure taken into account in the translations, Sydney. We had to have conclusive proof of the paternity after the child was born.”
Her voice was raising, her questions losing their steady track. “Why let Sloane do all those experiments on Nadia, if you knew there was a child somewhere, already, who was causing the effects on the earth?”
Jack watched the nervous movements in her shoulders, listened to her detached, analytical voice. This wasn’t fact yet – this was a story, a case file, something happening to someone else. He wondered where they would be when the truth finally broke her china veneer. “When the temperature first dipped, we knew it had to be the child. By allowing Arvin Sloane to continue his testing, we ensured his distraction. The child had to be born away from him, Sydney. Surely you understand – an element like this would be a weapon, in the hands of a man like – ”
“A man like you,” Sydney finished for him, and they both fell into silence for a moment before she stood and walked toward the door. “I’d like to go to the observatory and see her.”
He nodded slowly, considering. “You should. It’s only right.”
“And then you’re...” the question drifted off, not sure of its own direction.
“Taking her, yes. Irina will keep her safe.”
Sydney gave a tight, unhappy laugh at the word. “You two haven’t done a terribly good job of that, have you?” They were almost at the threshold when she stopped. “Wait. This child has already been born. I only found Vaughn’s heart when I left, when the first signs… how could you have…” her brow was creasing. “You would’ve had to have created – ”
“Stem cells,” Jack said. “From which we selected the closest five to nurse into creation. The five nearest matches to the required DNA strand.”
“And they were all born at the same time,” she said. “Five children.”
“Girls,” Jack confirmed, pulling the door open and gesturing for her to precede him.
“And Vaughn’s heart wasn’t the right measure.”
“No,” Jack confirmed, waiting for the eventual discovery.
Her voice had gone soft and disbelieving, her eyes rough at the edges where they narrowed. “Then what happened to the other four children? The ones whose fathers had the wrong sized hearts? Process of elimination would require – ”
“Dead,” Jack cut her off, and looked away from her horrified face. “They’re dead. The prophesy lives. So does the father. Let’s move.”
* * *
“Every generation thinks only of themselves,” Irina said quietly, talking to the glass. Sydney stood next to her, both of their arms pulled behind their backs, hands clasped, as they watched the small child in front of them stack blocks. The small wooden tower grew, spelling out imaginary words from the letters on the side, and was promptly destroyed with the swing of a tiny fist. The words scattered downward, reforming into more undiscovered combinations.
“Since the beginning of the prophesies, we have looked for the answer in our own time,” she went on, her eyes looking past the child to the clock on the wall. “When the original transcriptions appeared, when I was a child, they thought it was me. And then the FBI interrogated you, of course.”
Sydney gave a slow nod, content to let her mother’s quiet, mannerly voice wash the inside of the room. She wondered if the woman’s accent had been thicker, when her father had fallen in love, or if it had always been the odd mesh of countries she heard in it now.
“We let Arvin think it was your sister. Half sister,” she amended. “The timing was excellent. The experiments were almost complete.”
“Experiments,” Sydney prompted after a moment of silence. Still, Irina said nothing. And then she turned from the glass and, her hands still clasped together behind her back, gave her daughter a very severe assessment.
“Do you wish to call me a murderer, Sydney?” That she asked it so reasonably was the difficult part to allow.
“Yes,” Sydney said, her own words as level and sure as her mother’s. “You killed four innocent children.”
“We kill people every day,” Irina said, looking out at the glass again. “It is who we keep safe that matters, Sydney. Who we protect with our own lives.”
Sydney fell silent, her hands shaking, and she had to pull them from behind her and ball them into loose fists at her sides. “You had no right.”
“The hardest thing for any mother,” Irina said quietly, “is to leave her own child.” She pulled her eyes back from the playroom, the one-sided mirror letting the child occupy itself in peace. “I need not envy you that choice, having made it myself.”
She stepped around her daughter toward the door, and Sydney watched the little girl pick at the carpet with over exaggerated motions. The door opened before Sydney found herself asking, “Do you regret it?”
Irina seemed to hesitate, which was enough to raise the hackles on the back of Sydney’s neck. But when she spoke, it was with the same quiet strength Sydney had grown accustomed to. “How could I look at what you have become,” Irina asked softly, “and regret any part of it?” And then she was through the door, and the faint catch of the latch nearly lost itself in Sydney’s racing thoughts.
* * *
“You did good work,” she said, and Sark had to steady himself to keep from startling at the unexpected appearance of the voice. The helicopter blades were swinging in increasingly swift circles above his head, and he rather enjoyed that particular part of his body exactly where it was. Attached.
“Did I,” he mused, stepping farther away from the powering machine, towards the shadows where she stood. “Is that your way of telling me my services are no longer required here?”
“Sark,” she scolded him with just the single word, her hair clinging to her face in the wash of industrial lighting on the roof. “Your operation has not been terminated. You agreed, when you signed on, to see it to the end.”
He grinned at her, tilted his head to one side, as if remembering. “I was thirteen,” he said wryly. “I’m not sure I knew what you had in store for me.”
“Do you now?” She sounded amused, and he wondered if he should be worried.
“Of course not,” he said, and graciously tipped his head to her. “You’ll be leaving, then.”
A noise of confirmation was nearly lost in the fully spinning rotors. “You’ll do well, Sark.”
“Thank you,” he said, and took a step back. “Another three years then.”
There was a flash of teeth from her, but he would be hard pressed to tell if it was in sympathy or delight. “Probably not.”
He weighed that on both sides, and settled for a last nod, pulling his shoulders back and not looking away from her. “Then I will await your further instructions. As always.”
“As always,” she echoed, and gave his arm a brief press. Her hands were strong, and she smiled on him as she always had. And then, with a duck of her head and a quick dash toward the waiting belly of the helicopter, Irina was gone again.
viii. more than kin and less than kind
Michael Vaughn and Marshall Flinkman were interned in two separate cemeteries, from two separate causes of death. Vaughn’s official case file was listed as murder, and Marshall’s demise was natural causes – many coma patients had lost full technological function during the freeze. Of any of them, Sydney thought she envied the technician the most. He had died peacefully, happy, and in his sleep.
In their line of work, so few would be so lucky.
Vaughn was interned in the Reed family plot, next to his wife. The words Loving Husband were carved meticulously into the granite headstone, and Sydney hoped she would live long enough to see the words fade to nothing but an odd shallow groove in the surface of the material.
But it was standing at his graveside, kneeling between the freshly turned soil of his resting place and the grassed-over plot of Lauren Reed, that Sydney knew how he must have felt three years ago when he had buried her.
Hurt. Broken. Empty.
Again.
Twice now she had buried Michael Vaughn – once in her heart and once in the ground. She wasn’t sure she had the energy to do it again.
While lain separately, however, Vaughn and Marshall’s stars on the wall in the front hall of their building were placed side by side, both men having been felled in the field of duty, in one form or another. Sydney stayed for the unveiling of the names, but removed herself swiftly thereafter. Her father had been chosen to speak on behalf of both men, and she could not think of a more inappropriate choice.
With the passing of time, so went the snow.
It took several days, but things, on an atmospheric level, began to return to their former state. Neighbors, family and coworker emerged from the unexpected winter like rabbits after a long hibernation. Barnett billed her for a plane of glass. It wasn’t a week after she had returned that she saw the first patches of grass in her back yard, yellow and hurting, dead flowers buried beneath the heavy press of snow.
And at the end of it all, there had been nothing. No explanations to pass on to Dixon, no foolproof reasoning that could be delivered to the populace around them. There were cloak-and-dagger meetings, at night, and she would watch her father leave in the morning as she was on her way in to work.
The disappearance of humanitarian Arvin Sloane was a staggering blow to the world community until a mysterious benefactor offered to handle the reigns of the company. McKenas Cole stared up at her from the cover of Newsweek, still cold and bent from the mailbox. Her father had returned, had his name dropped from the Missing Persons list, and gone back to work. Her mother had resumed her usual mysterious activities, filled with purpose and divine triumph for the greater good. Weiss and Will had made it back safely, filled her answering machine to the limit with concerned messages, and gone about their daily stride. Things had fallen, more or less, back as they were when Sydney had awoken to feet of snow.
At the end of it all, Sydney had never been less satisfied.
* * *
On the day the last milky, iced over puddles of snow melted, Sark knocked on her door.
To say that he was expected would have been an understatement. Sydney had been sleeping with her gun under her pillow since she had returned home, waiting for him to arrive. But she hadn’t expected him to show up holding her newspaper from off the front porch in one hand, and a pair of folded sunglasses in the other. He offered her the rolled up newsprint with a lopsided smile and raised his eyebrows in question.
Figuring she was in for an interesting conversation either way, Sydney let him into her home.
The kitchen, which had frozen properly and had needed a good bit of deicing and drying off, was looking worse for the wear. The water levels all over the country had risen exponentially – the melting snow had little place to go but out to the ocean, and a good handful of the more popular beaches had disappeared entirely in the insipient increase of ground water.
Sydney’s back steps were nearly underwater. The basement was a swimming pool.
Sark helped himself to a kitchen stool and peered out the back door, watching ripples in the lake that was her back yard. “Charming, what you’ve done with the landscape.”
“Thank you,” she said, and found herself pulling two mugs out of the cupboard. “Coffee?”
“That would be lovely,” he said, but kept his eyes on the water. “I visited Vaughn’s grave.”
A gauntlet, then. Sydney poured the liquid carefully, feeling the cup warm around the curve of her hand as the coffee spilled itself into the ceramic. “Paying your final respects to Ms. Reed?”
“Something like that,” Sark mused, and swiveled on the stool. “Mr. Tippin and Agent Weiss made a safe trip home, I assume.”
“Yes,” Sydney said, and did not thank him. He made a distinctly I-told-you-so sound and accepted the cup of coffee as she slid it to him, and drank it black. She stirred a spoonful of sugar into the cup and watched as it crystallized off the metal and into the darkness. The first mouthful was bittersweet.
It was, Sydney thought, above all things, surreal. Sark sitting at her kitchen table. Looking perfectly coiffed, once more – sharp lines of a suit, the reckless unbuttoned collar, no tie. Sensible shoes. His hair had grown nearly an inch, but not long enough for it to have started curling yet.
“You should be calling the office,” he said, and she realized he was looking at her looking at him. “I believe I have a nice fish tank to return to.”
“It’s your child,” Sydney said, and put down the coffee.
Sark said nothing for a moment, and then decided that wouldn’t quite do, and said, “Yes.”
“And they didn’t take your heart,” Sydney said, her eyes drawn automatically down to the pocket in the front of his suit, and then back up again.
The coffee mug was tipped on edge, as if to check how much was left. “Is this where I make a snide comment about not having one to take?”
“If you like,” she said, her voice guarded.
“The signs provided have pacified them for now. I’m sure they’ll come for it eventually. If they need to,” Sark said. She wondered what he would do on that day, if Irina sent Cole to collect on his internal organs. If Sark would simply undo his shirt and pick the scalpel up himself, no questions asked. He was watching her again. “Does it bother you?”
She leaned forward, resting on her arms on the counter. Her shoulders hunched back and she looked him in the eye. “Does it bother me that my only child is yours?”
“Does it bother you that they killed Vaughn’s,” he said, and she was fairly certain it was just to see her react.
She surprised herself when she didn’t.
“It bothers me that it’s me they have to meddle with,” she said, and Sark nodded. Not in understanding, but in something like sympathy.
They rested there for a good quarter of an hour, drinking coffee quietly and saying nothing at all. No idle chatter, no nervous movement. When Sark had finished his cup, and Sydney had as well, he rose from the table and pushed the newspaper toward her.
“Have a pleasant evening, Agent Bristow,” he said, and shot his sleeves. “I hope we meet again.”
I’m sure you do, she thought wryly, and straightened herself up to see him out.
“Do take care of that,” he said, and gestured briefly at her head. She had had the wound stitched again in the hospital upon her return, but the doctors had told her that it would most likely scar from not having been treated immediately. The thread had long since been removed, but the area was still sensitive. And then he left, slipping into the mid-winter shadows that had splayed themselves like lazy cats along the sidewalk.
It wasn’t until she got back to the kitchen that she unfolded the newspaper, and found a set of coordinates in his clipped, brief handwriting nestled between the sports and entertainment sections.
* * *
“You didn’t go,” was the first thing she heard a week later when she woke from a restless nap.
“Go away,” she said fuzzily, her hand immediately going to check her head wound.
“No.” Sark was on the end of the sofa across from her, his feet propped on the coffee table. “Why didn’t you go?”
She pushed herself upright and palmed an eye, rubbing sleep away. “Why did you give me the coordinates?”
“So you could find her,” he said, his voice clearly indicating his perception of her intelligence levels. “All the other sample sites have been destroyed. I thought you might want to know.”
“I don’t want to find her,” Sydney insisted, leaning her elbows on her knees, letting her hands dangle between. “My mother will do what she wants. She’ll raise her. If you want to see her, go see her. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re going back to work.”
“I’ve been back to work,” Sydney corrected him. “If my mother needs me, she’ll contact me.”
He slipped his arms onto the back of the sofa and sunk down lower, making himself comfortable. “And how do you know that isn’t what she’s doing through me?” He asked it as a prompt to an expected answer, not as a real question.
“Because that’s not how she works,” Sydney said, and he nodded, pleased at her correct assessment. “Perhaps you’d like to fuck off, now?” she asked him, not quite maliciously.
“Personally,” Sark said, his fingers deftly twisting a pull in the fabric of the sofa. “I think you could use a good shift of your lateral thinking.”
“Really,” Sydney said dryly, and stood up, stretching the kinks out of her shoulder from having slept on it. “And I suppose you’re the one to show me that.”
His lack of an answer was confirmation enough.
“Things are changing, Sark,” she said, and went around the other side of the coffee table to sit next to his feet.
He swung them down and sat forward. “Things are always changing.” His hand found hers, pressed it before she could pull it away. “Did you sleep with Tippin?”
She didn’t blink at the topic shift. “Did you sleep with Allison?”
“Frequently.”
“Don’t touch me,” she said levelly.
Sark grinned at her. “Make me.”
Sydney said nothing, for a moment, before sliding her hand out from underneath his. She looked at him, and he cocked an eyebrow back. “More coffee?” she asked, tilting her head toward the kitchen.
* * *
The sound of birds woke her, and the first thing she could see was that the window had been opened a crack. It’d been a cooler spring than usual, and the sounds of animals had been particularly sparse over the winter. Some of the larger predators – coyotes, wolves, bears – that usually found themselves hidden away to the north and south had been seen in nearby suburbs, driven closer into cities from a lack of food. The freeze had tampered with the whole country’s ecosystem, and there were scientists at work day and night in the War Room now, trying to render the situation manageable.
Long term, large scale adaptation, they called it.
She stretched onto her back, arms curling up above her head underneath the pillow, surprised and mildly concerned at the number of protesting sounds her body made. To her increased surprise, however, she found she was not alone in bed.
Sark was propped on the end, carefully lacing his tie.
At her small, sleepy noise, he glanced over his shoulder and gave her one of his not-smiles. “Tried not to wake you,” he said.
“You always do,” she admonished, and reached a hand up to his collar to pull him down. “You never stay.”
“I have to go,” he said, familiar with the conversation before she’d even started it.
“It’s not daylight out.”
He tapped his watch and raised a pointed eyebrow. “Six minutes to sunrise. You’ll let me leave then?”
“Probably not,” she admitted. Waking up with Sark still in her room was rare – rarer still than his visits at all. “Will you stay anyway?”
“No,” he said, and brushed a thumb over the thin, white line that ran counter to the rest of the creases in her forehead. “I won’t.”
Just waking up, it was easy enough to wonder if she was dreaming it. She had, once or twice before – only Sark had ended up doing something distinctly dreamlike, such as turning into a cow, or starting to sing show tunes. He had favored opening numbers from “Carousel” in the last iteration of that particular dream, and it had ended somewhere with her living in a bathroom and her father working as a hot dog salesman.
For as long as she could remember, Sydney had had unusual dreams.
Sark took her silence with him, and retreated from the bed once more, fishing below her line of sight for a pair of shoes she knew he would end up discovering in the front hall. She watched, clutching a pillow under one arm, and let her knees pop in the easy silence of the room, feeling the sunrise starting to crawl through the mist. The air changed with the sun – she had noticed after many months of overnight stakeouts, and had always enjoyed waiting for the exact moment of daybreak.
She watched as he retreated, as anticipated, down the hall. She pictured him hopping into his shoes, stealing yesterday’s newspaper off of the kitchen counter, and, less disappointingly, yesterday’s coffee from the coffee pot. Black, over ice if he had time. She distinctly did not picture where he would go after that – something that still sat heavy on her back, pressing her spine into odd shapes.
There were no such things as truces.
Not really.
She heard the sound of the front door opening and closing and let something like a smile drip from one side of her mouth to the other, long and lazy. He wouldn’t be back for days, or weeks. A month at the longest, and she was sure security section would confirm it for her if she asked them. Another thing she hadn’t brought up yet, but knew without having to – she was being surveyed, probably always had been, and no one had said anything to her. Not yet.
But the point was, be it day or week or month, Sark would come back. With unwanted news of a girl learning to crawl, or first steps or, one day, first words. News she still wanted nothing of. Even if it was her own daughter.
One day, she told herself, pulling her limbs into their correct position and crawling out of the warmth of bed. One day she would find the girl, and set things right. One day she would follow the family that had been created for her.
Because even if family was orchestrated and strange – as hers was, and there were ups and downs in that as well, wrapped in centuries old prophesy and mystery – even if that was still a factor, family was still family.
And for now, that was enough.