Sanity Line: Escapist

Episode 05 - Escapist

“I have been wrong before, and will be wrong again-“

Kline glanced coolly up from behind the mound of mouldering old volumes that, in their careful arrangement, were helping him to decipher the writings on the Wellstone that was buried beneath the museum. Assisting him in the matter was a small pile of photographs, as well. “It can be better to be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

His younger associated would not be dissuaded so easily. “Misquoted Twain aside, Professor Kline, I am surprised we are not sharing this information with the appropriate authority.”

Kline forced himself to look up from his references again, a slight frown cracking the otherwise perfect mask of polite detachment. “You yourself have said, Professor Derrida, that there is no relevant, governmental authority on these matters.”

“Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear,” James Derrida responded diplomatically, to the limit of all possibility. He was, compared to Kline, both young and brash, but being as he was into his late thirties, he had seen enough of the worst he had to offer to know better than to deliberately antagonize Kline. Worse, he had some inkling of what Kline was, or at least what he aspired to be, and had no desire to speed along his remembrance or apotheosis, whichever it was. “What I meant was, no means of effectively policing such matters exists. That doesn’t mean we should rob society at large of the ability to at least attempt to defend itself.”

“The chief reason I am not sharing this information, Professor Derrida, is because it means the beginning of the end of Agency Division. I would think, given your, shall we say, extracurricular activities, that would be more boon than bane.” Kline offered a slow, wry smirk, which suggested he knew even more than was let on.

Derrida accepted this rebuke coolly, with a half a smile tugging at the far corner of his mouth. “It puts the cart before the horse, but yes. One supposes it is.”

Adopting this sort of cocksure, uncaring attitude helped to stem the tide of nervousness welling up in the back of the younger man’s mind.

---

He could see them.

The Others came to his eyes as faint and off-focus stars in a sea of inky black, punctuated with the dimmest suggestion of structure from the firmament that was the isolation tank. Vidcund knew they were the Others, because he could still feel them – that myriad of too-many limbs, freshly resolved into entire bodies composed in full. They gnawed with their individual hungers, each too hot or too cool, un-comfortable, over-tired, or jittery with artificial stimulation.

This should have jarred him, as it surely would have jarred anyone else, but the sharpening sense of extra-bodily proprioception was met with a strong feeling of memory. He had come to think of the senses as not so much being discovered, but rather returning, as though some accident had numbed them. They had now persisted, in sensory flickers, even outside of the tank, for hours at a stretch after he emerged from his daily float.

Seeing this starry sea of them was new. One was particularly bright, as if it was much, much closer, and directly in front of him, more or less above his head. He found it difficult to move away, and after a few moments of feeling uncomfortable, he extended his arm reflexively, connecting with the release pad for the door of his tank, which hissed upward automatically on pneumatic tubes.

The lighting in his stateroom was dim and subdued, but brighter than the usual pitch dark he kept the outer lighting at. He could navigate in the almost total absence of light, these days, and preferred the gradual adjustment for his eyes over the sharp glare of emerging into a lit room.

He didn’t need to look around long to find out what had happened with the lights. Sergeant Drache was standing not four feet ahead of him, holding out a towel. “I’ve been trying to wake you for three minutes.”

“The hull’s soundproof. You’ve got to lift the lid.” Vidcund accepted the towel gladly, and was quick to use it to cover himself up. “What is it?”

“Class 2A Site Emergency. You’re the ranking agent on deck. Administration’s out for the night.”

Vidcund snarled slightly, and began towelling off at once. So much for modesty. “Who’s the lead Enforcement op?”

“You’re looking at him. I ordered the secondary and ternary access routes sealed. Whoever’s in is in, and whoever’s out is out. Local PD was on-site when the riot started so I can’t exactly do anything about the primary.”

Vidcund considered that for a long while. The Abject Facility, Agency’s hub underneath the H.R. Abject Institute for the Criminally Insane, had as its primary entrance a cargo lift that was in the Institute itself. This was mostly used for bringing down prisoners whose tale would, for obvious reasons, otherwise go unbelieved. “Lock out the down-shaft receiving area.”

“Naturally, I already have. I don’t consider the riot to be a threat to either operational or physical security. I’m merely required to report to you.”

Vidcund smiled, easing into his pants, which as a matter of course always went on after his shirt. His weapons harness would come next. “I have to say, Drache, in you I find my equal in terms of professionalism. Always a pleasure.”

“Pleasure’s mine, Vidcund.”

As the lights plunged the pair into darkness, and the hum of the isolation tank’s filtration pump was replaced by the dull silence of a failed electrical system, the silence and surprise was punctuated by a dull “huh” from each of the men. Vidcund set his jaw, removing his augmented-reality glasses from his face, while Drache uneasily shifted his submachine gun to a more comfortable – and ready – position.

“Well, at least there’s a backup system.”

---

“Are you trying to tell me that those sunglasses of yours have light intensification?”

Vidcund had stopped again. His and Drache’s progress through the powerless Abject Facility had been slow and steady – a constant game of groping in subterranean darkness, reaching locked doors, and each waiting for the other to perform their role in bypassing the lock. He leaned on the doorframe, waiting for the digital lock to launch off of the portable power pack that was part of Drache’s equipment. The device had to self-diagnose, load a defaulted list of credentials, verify the list was proper, and then, and only then, would it be ready to match against their respective identification. “Not exactly. They have a few filters for various spectra to translate them to the visual. It works particularly well for sensing certain objects. Living things, in particular, but also certain resonances.”

For Drache, it was all so much greek. Clever as he was in his own right, his considerable mental faculties were directed to the best, cleanest, and most expedient means of dealing with a small handful of practical matters. The technician to Därk’s engineer, if you like. “Ah. Is that how you keyed on the weird symbol at the High School?”

“No, that was actually a combination of luck and intuition.”

The lock beeped, and the door opened, and the two could finally get inside the security office. It was dimly lit – a vast improvement over the all-but-total darkness of the corridors themselves. The door re-locked itself as Drache brought his power supply in with him. It was just too useful a piece of kit not to have. He looked up to the emergency lighting with some slight satisfaction on his face. “Hey, at least something works.”

“Waste of half an hour if the computers aren’t, too.” Vidcund said bitterly, and moved to check just that.

Neither Agent nor Enforcer had expected much functionality out of the computers, and in that respect they were not to be disappointed. Abject, like most such facilities, had triply-redundant power systems, at least for some sections of the base. The first two redundancies were shared by the entire structure – mains power diverted from their surface cover operation, in this case the Abject Institute itself, and Diesel Electric Generators capable of outputting, as a rule, 110% average power load for three weeks with the fuel supplied. The fact that the security was working on battery-backed UPS instead of the diesel generators implied something must have gone wrong in that respect.

While Drache probed around the one working computer terminal to squeeze as much useful information out of it as he could before the battery system failed – which admittedly should have been a couple of hours down the road. “Does it bother you that we haven’t actually run into anyone yet?”

“No. I’m pretty much the only person who spends the night ever since the two other gates were added.” Vidund was tapping the “sweet spot” of the left temple of his glasses, cycling through the various available filter methods until he had expended them all. There wasn’t much to see – the thick walls of the facility had been specifically reinforced against most such imaging methods anyway. “Besides, Lockdown procedure is to sit tight and wait to be relieved by competent authority.”

While he was at it, Vidcund activated the Bluetooth on his phone. The base network was down, which limited a lot of his technological toys, including the simple ability to dial out, but at least here in the office he could steal data back and forth from the computers that had it available. “Try and find an on base-headcount. As current as you can.”

“I’m already uploading it to your phone. It should have self-updated at the moment of the power failure, so that’s about as current as we can hope for.” Drache switched over to another window. “I’m into the power monitor, but I’m not sure it’s working.”

“They spend more money than either of us will ever handle in our lifetimes on developing these systems. They work.” Vidcund frowned deeply, scrolling to the bottom of the spreadsheet for a total. Less than two dozen personnel, and 20 of them off-duty and supposedly in barracks. He found Drache’s skepticism that the computer was working properly unnerving. Technology was the only weapon the Agency had, and every minor failure was, in Vidcund’s mind, just as bad as a leak aboard a ship.

Drache glared back at Vidcund. “ ‘Mains Power Disconnect’ is a fairly normal cue in this situation. Matter of fact that’s what should be showing. ‘Diesel Generator Unavailable’ is not. It means that something’s wrong with the data connection between the Backup system and this computer. That implies there’s something physically wrong with system.”

“I need that in simpler terms, Sergeant.”

“To put it simply, sir, the computer doesn’t know the generators are there. And evidentially, neither does the rest of the base.”

Vidcund puffed out his cheeks, and started to cross the room toward an equipment locker. He had no interest in donning a full Enforcement uniform, but gutting one for a few key bits of kit wasn’t out of the question. Unfortunately, he found little, besides bottled water and first aid kits. “Alright, well, that’s a relatively easy fix. I’ll head down to Backup Power and have a poke around. You stay here. The very instant we have power operational I want you to get updated positions on everyone and everything in the building. And fresh intel for what’s happening above us.”

“Dividing our forces.” Drache chuckled. “Sure sounds like a good idea to me, Därk.”

“I have every faith in your ability not to die of boredom in the half hour or so I’ll be gone,” Vidcund said, tossing him one of the bottles he’d recovered from the equipment locker. “Just in case, though, stay hydrated.”

---

Vidcund was almost perfectly accustomed to darkness and silence, as one would expect. He’d grown to prefer it, in many ways, but there was a slightly different colour to darkness that shouldn’t be there. He made his way through the relative maze of corridors and stairwells in a slow, painstaking way. Without any meaningful signals getting through to his phone, the positioning software was useless. He still had the facility map, but he had to rely on dead-reckoning, and what was more, staring at even the dimmest images his phone could produce had a negative impact on his ability to adapt to the dark.

By the time he’d reached the fourth sub-level, where the industrial-order machinery was kept, he’d forgone both phone and augmented-reality glasses entirely. From a mixture of nerves and the staleness of the air at this depth without mechanical assistance to keep it circulating, he had even taken the rather unprecedented step of removing his tie, wrapping it neatly around his left hand before tucking it into a pocket.

It felt easier to breathe that way, regardless of any actual impact the tie had, and that was all that mattered.

In the dark and silence, his extraproprioceptive hallucinations returned – those myriad dim stars. Most seemed far distant – if he looked off to what he thought was the south-west, he could see a galactic cluster of them. One, however, was near enough that his constant travelling changed its position much more than any of the others.

A gut instinct that was a mixture of half-formed memory and a natural sense for orienteering told him that “star” was roughly where the security office was, to within a degree of angle or two, and that sort of positional fix was actually of great help in working his way through the final series of corridors. That it offered the distracting idea that it was somehow bored – an unusual attempt of his mind to personify that which did not deserve to be personified. Catching himself at that sort of thought made him uneasy. It felt verboten, and he had the distinct and very sudden impression of having gotten in trouble for it in the past, though he could not remember specifics.

Regardless, the going was physically easy. He found, however, as he got deeper into the facility, as the air got thicker and the prospect of unwanted solitude grew more intense, even the relative proximity of his own private star could not punctuate a profound sense of loneliness. This was not a feeling to which the agent was accustomed – like it or not, he was almost always surrounded by people – and that feeling of being entirely removed from any form of support made the prospect of whatever lurked in these shadows that much more deadly.

Attempting to remind himself, quite rationally, that nothing could possibly be in this darkness was only a further aggravation of those basal instincts. Like it or not, the upper architecture of the human brain was still built upon the foundation of the reptilian. Tell your basal instincts that there is no physical way for anything to be in the secure basement of an already-secure facility, and the helpful Branchiostoma-remnant components in the architecture would point out that any threat capable of circumventing such barriers was probably something you weren’t going to stop with a 9mm handgun.

So, from time to time, when he caught himself being particularly irrational in his precautions for rounding corners or clearing doorways, he would stop, force himself through one or another set of Agency-trained mental exercises meant, more or less, to isolate fear-based inputs from logical processing, and then keep going.

When he finally succeeded in disengaging the lock on the door to the Backup Power complex, he glanced up to the closer star, and wistfully wished that he could bring its light with him into the cavernous generator room that lay beyond.

---

Drache was restless. Sitting still had never particularly been a strong point, or even especially encouraged, and as a sergeant he was in the very desirable position of no longer regularly needing to pull guard duty.

He was, in fact, already leaving the security office when he had heard the grand concussion from toward the centre of the base. Reflexively, he levelled his Agency-Custom submachine gun down the corridor in that direction. The weapon was a premium piece of agency gear, the sort of ultra-clean weapon that made armchair generals wet their pants in excitement. Caseless ammunition left precious little for forensics analysts to work with, after all, what with the propellant itself being the only surface the operator might have touched.

That concussive blast sounded like someone expending a relatively high-end shaped charge. It was the sort of sound you expected when people were in the practice of blowing open doors rather than kicking them down. Drache trained his ears carefully. If he was right about that being a breaching charge, then the most likely application of it would have been to blow open the elevator doors upon reaching the lower level, since they locked without the appropriate authorization, which would have not been possible without power, even if you powered up the elevator itself, given that the verification servers were down.

If that was the case, he would have expected a second blast shortly thereafter. He was not disappointed in that respect.

He backed away slowly for the first few steps, before turning to hurry in Vidcund’s direction. They needed to get power back on line more or less immediately – having the base essentially to themselves, as they did, they were likely in for a fun-filled evening. At least with power, they would have an advantage over whoever was coming in after them. Drake, for his part, doubted very much it was anything less than a well-organized outfit. Had he missed a declaration of war, or something?

---

Vidcund was happy, when he finally got the sealed double-doors that lead into the generator room itself open, to hear that the generators themselves were up and operational. Indeed, their persistent droning drowned out almost any other sound that would have offered itself. Workers in this area were required to wear hearing protection and for good reason: the sound seemed to press in from all angles, and the air itself seemed to throb with its passing. The lights within were not working – only the dim, red-tinted emergency lighting had any utility.

Vidcund stepped inside with the less-than-enthusiastic resolve of someone who was thinking they knew damn well better than to do what they meant to. He liked to think he was largely unflappable, but this seemed to be the scenario he had now feared for exaggerated lengths of time. Ever since his phone had been compromised in that – attack? Conversation? – he had been concerned about vulnerabilities in Agency hardware. Technology was all that the Agency had – and they had it far beyond the working man’s scope of comprehension. If that technology could be removed from them…

It didn’t bear thinking about. Examining the generators, he determined where their power was being routed – yellow markings on the floor seemed to indicate buried cable – and the point of convergence, which was a large bank of what he assumed to be mains breakers.

Each such breaker was in the lowered, off position, from what he could tell. In the gloom, it was nearly impossible to see anything of note, but the levers certainly seemed to be down… and were snapped off at the base. Beside them, a locked steel panel-box, no doubt for the network hardware, had been punctured many times with the aforementioned lever-handles.

Even before the hairs on the back of his recently-shaven neck could stand up, Vidcund had produced one of the collapsible batons from under his jacket, in an effortless and almost casual way, letting the telescoping shaft spring out of the insulated handle. A firearm would have been a difficult weapon to justify, in quarters this close and with visibility this low.

He was silent and still in the dark, stretching out with his every sense. The noise was a definite obstacle to trying to have a sense of such things, but he couldn’t help but think that such sabotage would have to be fairly recent. These things were checked at the end of every duty shift – the outgoing and ingoing engineers had to mutually verify the state of the area they were responsible for.

Speaking of which, there was no sign of any of the base’s engineers on the premises, which was doubly concerning. Vidcund would have expected this to be the first place any of them went in the event of a power outage, and now felt quite strongly he was going to have to review procedure, or at least recommend such a review.

His hair prickled again, and he shifted his baton to his left hand, slowly and quietly drawing his handgun with his right. He had a sudden impression of cold where cold ought not to be, followed immediately by panic, and the sense of something growing closer.

Instinctively, he moved to a position of cover behind the corner of one of the generators, getting down low on one knee. A handgun was not an ideal weapon for holding a room, but with accuracy and surprise in his abilities, and show-stopping power in the handgun itself, he was confident he could make a lucky hit on whoever he thought he might have sensed.

As he waited, he realized the “near” star was moving, in spite of not illuminating anything that should have been hit by its glow, and as it eventually reached the level of the horizon, and began to approach the doorway, he suddenly relaxed, standing up slowly. “… Drache?”

---

Drache slowed his run to a near stop when he reached engineering. He wasn’t sure why he had hurried, but he found that the closer he got to Vidcund, the more urgent it seemed to find him. He was, after all, the only other verified person on base, regardless of what the computer reported.

What was more, when he was near stairwells, he could hear scattered noises of violence above him, which only made it that much more imperative that he hooked up with the one (to his mind) competent member of staff.

“…Drache?”

The vague anxiety immediately faded away. “Special Director. Facility’s compromised.”

“You don’t say.” Vidcund rather calmly – considering his slight flush – drew a second firearm out from under his jacket, after stowing the baton. “Secondary power was deliberately bypassed. We’re evacuating the facility.”

Drache paced a cool glance over the Special Director, and, perhaps owing to disparity in rank, chose to forgo what had been about to become a rather stern lecture on responsible firearms handling and proper handgun technique. Besides, he knew that Vidcund would not have been issued two firearms if the Agency didn’t think he could handle them properly, and if Därk thought he could reliably operate two handguns, Drache wasn’t about to stop him. “Yeah… about that. Primary Lift was breached. Total enemy force unknown, but they were making a hell of a racket.”

“Shit.”

Därk was quiet for a long time, and kept returning his gaze back into the power room, eventually re-seating his glasses onto the bridge of his nose – no doubt to have a look through those special filter packages. “How far have they gotten?”

“If I had to guess based on the last time I heard them, and what I was hearing, they’re on the third level. So, no matter what way we go, they’re between us and an exit.”

---

Vidcund felt he needed more time. He was thankful, at least, that Drache had had the good sense to run after him, but now he was running through the darkened corridors for all he was worth. He couldn’t see anything, but to his mind that meant his enemies couldn’t either, and he wanted to clear distance between him and his objective before that situation could be rectified.

Drache huffed and puffed along behind him, though, to his credit, he carried several dozen pounds more gear than the Special Director. “I don’t understand what the hurry is!”

“We are on a shortened timeframe.”

Vidcund finally skidded to a halt, and ran the muzzle of the gun in his left hand over the wall in front of him, until he was satisfied he knew where they were. “Plug in here, get this door open.”

“I don’t understand what the hurry is. Why is this any more of an emergency now than it was before?”

“Two reasons. The first is that compromised bases tend not to be the best place to spend the night if you’re planning on living through it, because SOP is to send in people surprisingly like yourself and basically slaughter everything that moves. Or just lay demo charges. Depends on the base.”

Drache smirked unpleasantly, as men of martial bent tended to, when considering the reality of their mortality. “Don’t even always need to lay the charges. What’s the more pressing concern?”

Vidcund paused, for a moment, fascinated that there could be a more pressing concern – to either of them – than the idea of their own side killing them. “Oh, uh… the way the gate system works. You can usually fire the last settings of the gate open based on residual power left in the system, even if you can’t get the targeting computer up. I’ve seen it done in a few action reports. Like the time we lost the Takan Maze Facility.”

Both men paused, as Vidcund seemed to read a nonverbal cue from Drache, even in the dark. There was a presence at the end of the hallway. Dark, and sinister, some shapeless, writhing mass of greater darkness, more impression than form.

Vidcund swallowed hard. “I’ll handle this. You get that door open.”

Drache needed no further excuse, and immediately took a knee, swinging his PDW up into a one-handed grip as he pressed the power pack into the bypass socket for the door lock. Vidcund was already moving down the hallway. In the absence of the sound of operating equipment, one could hear a pin drop, or, in this case, the trigger-locking pins from the safety mechanisms that Vidcund had just bypassed.

Vidcund felt Drache’s urgency as he stepped out of view, rounding the corner in the crisply tactical way to which he was accustomed. Proficient dual-wield gave him a level of ambidexterity that police entry forces would have salivated over.

There, at the far end of the corridor, the suggestion of presence revealed itself to be an actual figure. A giant of a man loomed there, approaching in a slow, nonchalant way. Vidcund’s dark-attuned eyes could perceive a general outline that was as imposing as the great height would have suggested. This man was barely capable of walking down the corridor without bending his head, and his impressive bulk seemed to fill the width of it, as well.

Though ordinarily one to shoot first and ask questions later, Vidcund found himself feeling unusually merciful. He was on home turf, after all, and it was highly suspicious that anyone should have made it all the way down here undetected, security breach notwithstanding.

“Identify yourself!”

He let the giant come three steps closer in silence, before he broke it. Biological night vision vanished in the flare of discharging gasses from the muzzles of his handguns, and with curious lucidity he wondered about the possibility of getting himself some flash suppressors for next time, as if he somehow knew then just how much of his operational work was going to be done in the dark, these days.

With a sort of lucid, low-adrenal clarity that came only when you’d done this sort of thing too many times to be considered entirely sane, the Agent then realized that the large man didn’t care he was being shot at. The shots were hitting, certainly – in the bright glare of each, he could see the growing number of spots in the man’s torso where the previous shots had hit.

By the time the slides locked back, Vidcund had no choice but to flee. In rare agreement between animal instinct and training, he pivoted on a heel and ran back around the corner, taking it wide and hoping to hell Drache would realize that he would, and, if nothing else, hold off his fire until the two could at least see each other.

He found himself running toward a hail of bullets, and yet was strangely comfortable with that idea. Just as he had intuitively known Drache’s position, the Seargeant seemed to intuitively know his, and the Enforcer was pouring into that corner to discourage pursuit without needing to be told.

“Door’s open, go!”
Vidcund ducked around the doorframe, discarding his handguns as he went. He carried no extra ammunition for them as a matter of routine, and, what was further – they seemed not to make much difference. Drache side-stepped through the door with him, discarding the spent magazine of ammunition from his bullet-hose. Vidcund noted with curiosity he’d been firing from the left arm, and realized only after he heard a metallic ‘ping’ and seen the broad gesture of the right arm that Drache must have been holding a grenade or some other piece of thrown weaponry in reserve the entire time.

He was rewarded with a muffled thump from behind the now-sealed door to the gate room, and Drache’s exhilarated-yet-confused expression. “Just what the hell do you suppose that was? Archangel up to his old tricks?”
“Archangel knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him.” Vidcund frowned deeply. “We’re being played, and I think I know by whom.”

Drache, for his part, took disproportionate care in reloading his firearm. Vidcund thought to stop him, for the moment. Bullets clearly didn’t faze their latest enemy.

What followed was silence, punctuated only by Vidcund’s operation of the gate terminal. He marvelled at the technology, at its crusty, analogue interface, which he struggled to comprehend, given the peculiar symbolic lexicon in which the various dials, switches, and gauges were identified.

Eventually, though, he did get it right, and a shimmering wave-front formed in the iris of the complex geometric web-work on the wall. It was some kind of printed circuit board, Vidcund told himself, struck by how alike to some of the old cult documents he found, and the symbology within. Nothing at work here but pure, proper Technology. Vidcund found he could not look through the gate. It was too bright, even with his glasses, and seemed to flicker in and out of colours, rapidly, shifting with prismatic effects into and out of colours he could not name.

“Alright, so where does that go?”

Vidcund looked to Drache. “I honestly haven’t the foggiest.”

Calmly, he stepped into the light, bringing himself to what he hoped would be safety, and trusting Drache to follow behind.

---

Time was the universal salve, so it was said. It healed all wounds, after all. That, at least, was the theory – if time had been healing the wounds Niles Clayton had accumulated in his unparalleled journeys, it was doing it in subtle, convoluted ways that seemed difficult to discern. He had lapsed from outright panic to nervous catatonia, becoming all but unresponsive. Only Scion, among his tenders, thought he showed any signs of an eventual recovery. Archangel, who had hauled him back from beyond shores of death, across the empty gulfs wherein, among others, ruled Daemon-Sultan Azathoth, had given up hope, condemning Niles to a slow, living death, in which his every material need was attended, and yet he would live until he died again without ever leaving the tomb-infirmary where he was housed.

Scion contemplated the oddness of this place from a minaret. The Grey Angels had chosen this ruined cemetery, abandoned one or two cultural shifts ago in the vast regrown forests of the northern Terrwald. They were in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, where the secrets of the island grew slumberous. No civilization ever lasted long in these parts, and that seemed true as well for whoever had created this.

It was Archangel’s purview. His family was from here, some ancient line that was among the few that could be traced unbroken through the centuries, down to the betrayal of the White Keepers by Gloria Creena. He was a Tererran through and through. The woods beat in his heart, and his blood flowed through these rivers.

Scion was not given to believing in magic, whatever platitudes he offered, however strongly he believed Clark was right with his Law. He had, as all the Angels had, his own personal experiences with the supernatural, and it was the memory of this that had finally distracted him from the strangeness of the return of the dead detective to their happy little family. He found he could explain nearly everything, from the gates to the ghosts, but the actual reversal of death?

He contemplated it all from that minaret, while he sipped stale, twice-or-thrice-warmed tea through the narrow opening of a paper cup, the report from Archangel’s contacts in the Mortuary business still on the third page of photographs on his desk.

The photograph had depicted a singular oddity. That Vidcund Därk should be among the dead in a gunfight involving himself and another skilled operator was not entirely unusual. Pyrrhic firefights happened more often than anyone who engaged in such things professionally cared to admit. What was unusual, however, was a pattern of three small squares as a tattoo at what was, supposedly, the base of Vidcund’s spine.

He’d had other tattoos, of course, including a valid UPC that returned a perfectly valid number. But those three tattoos were familiar, because Scion had a set of them himself. Such markings were commonly used by technicians operating a particular item of Slipher Medical equipment used for spinal fluid sampling. The only reason to get them tattooed was for frequent sampling, and the only reason for that…

“James.”

Scion shifted his attention away from his recollections and paperwork, turning his attention over his shoulder, to where Archangel had entered the room, unmasked. “Eli. Did you actually read this?”

“Yeah. I’m starting to question its validity. Vidcund Därk’s been seen since. It’s difficult to believe there are two of him.”

“Strange.”

“I certainly thought so.” Eli set his hand on James’ shoulder. “But, if I can raise the dead, then there’s no reason to believe nobody else can. It’s a problem to discuss when you get back from the infirmary.”

James frowned slightly. “I know you’re a doctor and all, but I hardly think a case of the seasonal sniffles is cause for alarm.”

“Obviously. You need to get down there because our guest asked for you.”

James lofted an eyebrow, and picked up his tea as he settled his mask back in place. “I wasn’t expecting him to be coherent this soon.”

“If at all,” Archangel countered, replacing his own mask.