I.
"Spider," said his little girl, scrunching up her nose.
Her trouble with hard consonants made the word sound more like cider, but he had to admit she was onto something there. The creature sprawled out on the steps resembled a daddy-longlegs gone horribly awry. A sharp layer of stubble prickled its black, leathery skin and its sinewy legs; it stank of dried blood as well as the trash it must have vandalized, for wet scraps of paper clung to its bristle. One of its teeth had snapped, dangling from the root.
Even at three, Alyx knew enough to duck inside before his lips could form the words. While his mind had frozen and stopped issuing proper commands, she'd had the forethought to push the socket wrench's cold grip into his hand. So now he stood on the crumbled step with the weapon in his left hand, and his baby's warm fist clutched in his right.
The longer he stood, the more her dread dissipated, little by little. Eventually she peeked around him and crept toward the dead organism. She was anchored, of course, by the rigid grip his hand maintained on hers. His body would not let her go. Not under any circumstance.
(this, this right here; this is why you don't go outside, this is why you don't take a moment to breathe, never promise to look at a sunset, never pretend this place is for a single moment normal)
Eli forced himself to look toward Victory Square, whose setting sun painted the Citadel a soft rose-gold. The evening's rays glimmered as they sank, bathing his daughter in a warm, honeyed light. But marring that beauty were dark spots crawling over the sky like plague-ridden fleas. Gunships.
The spider, if they could call it that, must have fallen off the roof. That was his best guess, fell off the roof. No bullet fragments blistered the skin; no neon-bright slime spread across the concrete. Hadn't even heard a gunshot.
Yet 'total fluke' felt inadequate as an explanation, as if their world already held no more room for such things. If it had perished by accident remained dubious. For all he knew, that thing slipped while it was waiting, hit the concrete, gave a grumble and died there on the steps.
Its prey had simply opened the door for a moment of fresh air. The serendipity he felt upon realizing they'd missed horror by mere seconds, due to the predator's error, an unforseeable mistake, gave way to a slow, viscous feeling somewhere between awe and dread. Chills spread like hives over the nape of his neck.
Alyx shuffled the toe of her scuffed pink sneaker at the ground, edging it toward the alien flesh.
"Don't," he said, voice cracking, and tightened his knuckles. "Don't poke at it. You don't know if it's—asleep or not."
She had another thought in mind. "It's a baby."
"What?"
"Baby spider. See? He losed his tooth."
Eli pondered, and gave her hand a light squeeze. "Let's go inside, sweetheart."
In the beginning, there was City 17.
And, depending on who you talked to, it was good.
Not them. Not the survivors. Not the agricultural students and engineers who once called it Melitopol, who would hardly recognize it now. What lay underneath its singed crust had been razed in order to make room for the military district the Combine erected in its place.
Little of the old identity remained except for occasional fragments that floated them by: marshrutkas stopped dead on the cable line. Boarded doors marked ОСУДИЛ - CONDEMNED. The pedagogical university, a rubble-filled crater. Victory Square choked by forcefields. Homes teeming with unnatural wildlife, their human occupants absent or dead.
Each day the landscape evolved into something a little more alien. Rolling barriers crept across the oblast like monolithic steel tides, crushing everything in their path into fine clouds of dust. You could hear them early in the morning, growling and grinding in tandem with the APCs that rumbled through the block. In the afternoon, these noises relented to the Citadel moaning at its growing pains. Come dusk, the few surviving sodium lamps ticked on and Overwatch's cold, thin voice admonished the guilty.
When they weren't rotating shifts, they spent much of their time foraging Melitopol's ruins for supplies. Those pharmacies and hospitals not already crushed in the Combine's grip had been ravaged empty in the panic following the Seven Hours. Although medical supplies dominated their priority list, more often than not their efforts to scrounge up any respectable sort of cache failed. A good day typically consisted of a handful of painkillers and some gauze packs.
As difficult they found it to reconcile past losses with present circumstances, however, they had to concede the even harsher truth that they were better off than most. They weren't alone, for one thing: throughout the ordeal he and Kleiner had stuck like glue. For the past three months since arriving in Crimea, they'd traveled inland together, from house to house, checkpoint to checkpoint, guns in their twitching hands and ragged looks on their faces. Staying alive was their principal goal, and in the beginning it consumed their every waking thought. There was never time to rest as they scraped the edges of barricades. Never time to look around, exhale, mourn—just run, bodies aching and minds full, to the sirens that chased them through each week.
The auto repair shop proved about as stable a shelter as they were going to find in these parts. It stood at patrol's outermost fringe, where APCs seldom bothered to squeeze through the narrow road. The Combine had more or less abandoned it to the elements—though if anyone had asked him how to get there, he couldn't have done much more than shrug. Damned if he could pronounce that many syllables, let alone string them fluently enough together without risking his listener bursting into raucous laughter.
Naturally, when they began fixing the plant for long-term use, Alyx wanted to pitch in. Their concerned glances shifted from her to the oil gleaming in iridescent puddles on the floor. Neither man needed reminding that the shop area was the farthest thing from babyproof; hence he confined most of her chores to the waiting room, straightening out the children's toys or dusting off the leather sofa that would later become her bed.
Alyx was a strange child, probably the only three-year-old he knew whom chores kept happy. Only later did he realize it meant she'd spent more time with him here than she had at Black Mesa.
She clutched rolls of sheet plastic as he stapled them over shattered windows. This will keep the cold air out, baby. Then a gust filled the plastic, making it bulge. He had to chuckle a little when she puffed out her cheeks in a similar fashion.
Summer's brisk shift into autumn arrived a bit early by their standards; according to the other refugees who'd hailed from the city, this was its usual seasonal fare. Kleiner guessed it was late September, but Eli believed it probably closer to the beginning of October. Wrong on both accounts: they'd missed several weeks getting themselves settled in. The office calendar claimed today October the twenty-eighth.
Surviving such a long, bloody summer had pushed any thoughts of impending holidays completely out of his mind. Did Alyx remember Halloween? He wasn't so sure, seeing how she'd only participated in two in her short life, the first time dressed as a bumblebee and the second as a much too giggly jack-o'-lantern. She'd been a smidge young for candy, but there was a chance she might have remembered the costume parties Sector H would have hosted at this time of year.
Oddly enough, he seldom saw the rest of the Anomalous Materials team at those parties. Kleiner had administrative calls to heed. He'd seen Gordon once, a few years ago, lounging behind the refreshment table as if trying to melt into the background. And what are you?He'd smirked as his coat-clad colleague pointed to a small auburn ponytail hanging off his nape by a rubber band. Grunge scientist. HEV's costume enough for the other three-hundred sixty-four days. Hey, I'll toast my punch to that.
Eli was still thinking about it when he traced a finger down the schematics. "Hey, Izzy," he said. "Almost Halloween."
"Indeed?"
"Did you have trick or treat when you were a kid?"
A hum accompanied a slight adjustment of wireless rims. "You make it sound so long ago… " But he intuited the real question behind his musings. "She would certainly not be missing out, in my opinion. One night I returned to find someone had sprayed Silly String over every solid inch of my lab."
He fought to keep his lips from succumbing to a grin. "That's awful."
"They never did find the rapscallion responsible, either, since he showed up as a monkey costume on the surveillance cameras. It took me hours to get that blasted concoction off my greaseboards. Apparently Mr. Kong couldn't be bothered to return and play custodian... "
Eli shielded his face under his hand, shoulders quaking silently.
"It wasn't funny! I had to erase at least one working theorem on—"
"I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at you, really." He cleared his throat. "But that's what I mean. She would be missing out on things like that."
"Well, I wouldn't encourage delinquency of that sort." The cool stare he received went on a tick longer than usual.
He rubbed the back of his head. "Aw, Izzy."
Thin shoulders hunched, Kleiner tapped his pencil eraser against the metal carcass sitting on the desk, producing a hollow drum. "I don't like that you're risking your health on these runs. It takes you longer and longer to return home."
"Because more of the city's getting blocked off."
Kleiner shook his head. "One of these days, Eli, I fear—" He stopped cold at the notion, banishing it with a wave of the hand, and returned to examining the schematics. "Perhaps, if we cannot prevent these forcefields from drawing electricity from the Citadel, we can at least prevent a portion of the current from flowing out of it. That would be the most expedient solution."
Was that the best they could conjure, a stop-gap measure? Days ago he'd proposed using the machinery he stole to build a magnetized device. Magnetism might scramble the signal, but, as his colleague pointed out, without a full understanding of how these forcefields worked or even the algorithms that kept them running, they gambled a huge risk of backfire. Kleiner added, Such a device would have to be nearly touching the hardware to work.
That salient point landed them back at square one. And they were going without the luxury of time to start over and regroup. If they didn't come up with something to protect or cloak their position, it would only be a matter of time before the Combine did take notice of their little corner of the city.
He tried not to imagine huddling in a dark closet with Alyx as screams and shouts drowned under gunfire. God, never again. "Tell me we won't have to move."
"It may not be for a while yet—"
"But we'll be on the run again," he said. "Out on those streets again."
"We will think of something."
He wished he shared Kleiner's faith.
The plant ran on a backup generator, which afforded them just enough electricity to work by night. During the day, they used the light to hunt for more provisions.
It seemed counterintuitive not to hide in shadows. The "spiders" were nocturnal creatures, less likely to attack in broad daylight. And despite its near-constant noise suggesting an otherwise ubiquitous presence, patrol slackened toward mid-morning, when Overwatch recalled its sector sweepers to bolster civilian surveillance at the city center. As many a refugee had put it: every second an officer spent looking in another direction was one more second they had to capitalize.
They were studying a piece of Combine hardware that had been operating a forcefield-generating barrier. The forcefield failed when an electrical node overloaded. Only problem was, that node failure occurred three districts over. Its lights blinked out once and were extinguished. The neighboring streetlights maintained their strong, buzzing hum. The soldiers had used the blackout to siege the block and hadn't noticed the surge.
Eli snatched the careened structure and ran, saving questions for later. Oh, did they ever have questions; once safe, he and Kleiner bandied them back and forth. How did the Citadel send out such a precise strike without also blacking out half of Melitopol? How could those ionized particles make such a specific, targeted jump over a distance of forty-plus miles without sustaining charge loss?
Kleiner suspected a matter of quantum superposition and vanished in his equations. Meanwhile, Eli carefully dissected the hardware's various layers. For the next few weeks he hunched over the microscope until his back ached, using a thumbtackto manipulate the delicate innards. The processing chip, though gargantuan by subatomic standards, fit neatly on the head. Sleep-deprived, he'd giggled like a loon when he found it.
If they could get this processing hardware up and running again, recreate the conditions that led to the node overload, they would have the theoretical groundwork on which to build a device to override Combine machinery. People wouldn't have to be trapped anymore, with no choice put to submit to hunter's jowls.
The tech's sophistication enamored Kleiner, who found their equipment at Black Mesa rather backwards and lacking by comparison.
"Their supercomputers are much quieter. And more compact, too. How they release that excess heat without compromising their operations is beyond me... "
A thought struck him, nearly foreign in origin. "Time crystals."
"What?"
"They've gotta use something similar. Have you heard of Norman Yao's work with them? They break time-translation symmetry, but not thermodynamic symmetry. Maybe the same idea is going on here."
"Breaking time-translation... " Kleiner traced a weathered pencil along the grooves of equations they'd tortured to inches within their lives. Amidst the feathery scratches, he said, "If these superposited fields aren't Hillbert-inclusive, how might we conceptualize them?"
He rubbed his chin, thinking. More and more he wished for Black Mesa's brainpower backing them up. Right now all they had were notions, faintly sketched. Quantum fluctuations never became certain until time solidified them. Until then, everything remained a game of odds.
They could start with some Banach-based function analyses, but—
A tug on his belt broke his concentration. Alyx rubbed at her eyes with dimpled fists, draped in the wrinkled mechanic's shirt he'd put on her an hour earlier to serve as her pajamas, its sleeves drooping from her arms. Her hair, untamed, puffed out from her scalp. Poor thing looked miserable.
Eli brushed a hand to her brow. "Sweetheart, what are you doing out of bed?" he asked, cocking his head to one side. A furtive glance at the analog clock on the southern wall told him the hour, far from decent for such a young girl. "Oh, baby, did we keep you up again? I'm sorry."
Likewise surprised by the appearance of their small guest, Kleiner wheeled around in his chair. "What are you doing awake, my pea? Little ones need their rest."
She removed one of her fists and squinted at them through the dim light; too tired to verbalize her needs, she instead regressed any thoughts to a small whimper. That, of course, led to fussing.
Kleiner flinched. "Now, there, everything's all right. There's nothing to fuss over—" She sniffled, unabated. "Oh, goodness. What's the matter?"
"She's just tired." He picked her up, wondering what had roused her, since she usually slept well. He switched her weight to his other arm, turning her to face Kleiner. "All right, c'mon. Say good night to your Uncle Izzy."
She managed a limp 'bye-bye' wave before burying her head in her father's shoulder, prompting a good-natured smile from the older man.
He carried her to the waiting room at the end of a short hallway separated from the shop area by an alcove. A small desk lamp hummed beside the sofa on a filing cabinet. Beyond that, a dead flat-screen television, a wilted potted plant unresponsive to their revival attempts, and a modest playpen scattered with toys.
Her sleeping roll lay where he'd tucked it. So far he couldn't tell the problem. Her reticence made it difficult to discern whether a nightmare had frightened her awake, so he tried prying more concrete answers from her. Are you wet? Are you hungry? She shook her head.
Eli cradled her, rocking her while rubbing her back in turn. "Shh, it's all right. Time to be quiet now, baby girl. Close your eyes."
While they did everything in their power to keep things quiet after dark, it was only inevitable, working with this tech, that on occasion one of them would drop something with a loud, sonorous clatter, and a thin whine would rise in protest.
His arms felt heavy, but still he rocked, determined to settle her down even if they disengaged from their sockets. Alyx's fussing only continued, and he directed a sigh at the ceiling, letting his aching eyelids droop. Please, baby. I know you've been good all day. Just a little while longer.
He paced the room until his hip bumped into the filing cabinet, producing a sharp crack. He pivoted to find the family photo broken on the floor.
Oh, Alyx. The culprit stared at him in black-and-white. Was she wishing her mother could tuck her in?
He didn't like that split. A thin, jagged fissure ran down the center of the glass, separating them from Azian, her face obscured under a small spray of fine shards. Large pieces had dislodged from their side as well, now glittering on the floor, but the breakage had otherwise left them whole. Impact must have struck Azian's side first and rippled outward.
Setting his daughter onto the sofa, he bid her stay with a stern jab of his finger. "Don't move from this couch," he said, "not a single muscle, y'hear? Don't want you cutting yourself on this glass."
She watched him turn the frame over and hollow it out with a few claps to the back, letting the clinging shards sprinkle onto the floor. Her large eyes, catching everything, followed him as he rose on stiff knees to retrieve the broom wedged in the supply closet.
To see her watch him sweep, you'd think it was the most mesmerizing thing in the world. The steady scrape the thistles made against the linoleum hypnotized her.
Her silent curiosity melted into silliness. Missed one. That one over there, too. She beamed when he acted flustered, sweeping faster. Excuse me if I missed a spot, Your Highness.
She pointed at implausible places just to hear more of Daddy's funny reactions. Now here. Now there. Now on the ceiling. Now in your nose. She giggled like a fiend when he asked a little too theatrically, "In my nose? How onearth?"
Her hair tumbled down in a curly spray as she scrutinized the gap under the sofa. "Did you sweeped it all up?"
"I think so. Now to see if there's a mat somewhere… "
Alyx bounced impatiently on the cushions while he dragged back a that retained the smell of motor oil. It wasn't pretty, but it'd have to do for the time being.
His knee buckled on the way, seemingly for little reason other than an accidental snag. He stumbled forth, dropping the mat and catching a hand on the couch's armrest at the last moment.
Heart hammering, he shook his head at himself. Damn it, get it together. Don't let her see you like this.
He'd be lying if he said his occasional clumsiness with the prosthetic didn't embarrass him. Even though he was growing more proficient with it, there were still moments of miscalculation where he misjudged the weight he placed on his prosthetic. It was a plastic alloy guaranteed not to slide on various surfaces, but as is often the case with such things, theory proved sounder than practice. Small bumps and bruises on his arms graded his learning curve.
Exhaling, he took a moment to reorient himself, tentatively straightening his posture. He noticed Alyx watching him, rapt, and gave her an appeasing smile. "'s all right. The old leg's just acting up a little."
She scowled at his knee. "Bad leg."
He had to chuckle at that. "Hey, now. It's doin' what it can."
Young children grieved their losses just as much as adults; he knew better than to assume otherwise. Izzy had warned him to watch out for sudden tantrums. Alyx's fits may have been the result of her mind attempting to express a concept yet too inexpressible for her.
She asked constantly about his leg. Where did it go, could they find him another? Honestly, she seemed more harrowed about it than he had. He remembered struggling for answers through a morphine-addled mind, wondering if maybe he had come detached. Oh, sweetheart. Your daddy's falling to pieces.
During quiet moments when there was nothing to do but sit and wait, Alyx would climb into his lap and trace the abrupt tapering of his kneecap, marking the boundary where flesh and cloth ended and foreign metal began.
Alyx peered quizically at him, and said: "Are you stuck?"
She had a way of verbalizing his subconscious thoughts more succinctly than he could overanalyzing them. In a sense, yes, he was, just like the front stoop earlier; why was he so prone to immobility these days? He just needed to snap out of it, was all. He opted to turn himself slowly, lean against the armrest and take the weight off the prosthetic. "It's all right, pumpkin. Daddy's just… got some things on his mind." He carded a hand through his hair.
Alyx contemplated this. "Like Mesa?"
"No, not Mesa." Slowly, he bit the inside of his lip. "Why, baby? Have you been thinking about it?"
Probable culprit number two. Black Mesa's shadow stretched long across the desert, following them on the heels of exile. It was a smoking crater now, eviscerated by a bomb intended to wash the government's hands of their blood. He'd cried when he heard, tears squeezing silently from his eyes as the radio droned in their escape car. All their suffering amounted to in the eyes of their so-called protectors, cinders and gulch. The scorch from the blast had branded Black Mesa into their minds, and Alyx was no exception.
What would they do, he'd worried, if she wanted to know about it? He and Kleiner discussed the matter several times over, in hushed whispers over her slumbering head. They eventually came to agree that the best recourse was to let their answers be frank but tempered with softness. There was no use pretending the world was fine when even a child could see its most fundamental paradigms had shifted. You didn't just uproot your lives to start afresh in another country without a substantial reason. Nor, as far as any sane mind was concerned, did you huddle in smoke-wreathed rooms with dozens of other refugees, waiting for the ceiling joists to stop raining silt.
To their relief, most of her concerns involved the banal—what were they going to have for dinner, what are you working on, can I help, I already colored this page, how come I have to play inside, the spiders will make me icky if I touch them.
Only death he exempted; he didn't explain death to her. How could he? His throat cracked every time he tried. He confessed to Kleiner he'd wake up some mornings smelling smoke and hearing sirens. Grief visited his mind when its fortifications lay still, stifling conscious thought. Death gnawed terrible pain at his knee, turned his baby girl into mere weight in his arms. Death spread Azian's hair over broken glass. Death opened the door for a strange man to enter, striding through the haze, and gave him a choice to make. Choose wisely.
Life was never knowing if he had.
His daughter's mind conceptualized death in much simpler terms: "going asleep." He felt it too cruel to correct her. People slept on sidewalks and in toxic, steam-purled rooms, anywhere the Combine patrolled or spiders, as she called them, crawled. She watched them fall over and stop twitching.
He wished to God he could scrub those images from her memory, keeping them from ever reaching her eyes. There were only so many times you could beg a child to turn her head, only so much reaction time your reflexes would allow to divert her attention.
Amidst his myriad of worries, he also feared the consequences of continuously averting her gaze. If he kept her face pressed to his shoulder, she'd probably never see another blessed thing for the rest of her life but the ripped cotton of his sweater. She'd begin to notice the dissonance. He hoped she wouldn't also begin to resent it.
Alyx's curiosity grew with the summer heat, much like the sun glittering on the Citadel. She wanted to know why her mother had disappeared, why her father's new leg didn't walk as well as its flesh-and-blood predecessor. She wanted to know why they had to leave their home and drive through endless stretches of desert just to board a small plane, and once they arrived, why everyone flocked to these huge old churches, banging on their doors to be let in. Why the people here wept in different languages when their tears expressed the same despair.
When she mentioned Black Mesa, she could have meant anything. He sat on the armrest with his palms resting atop his thighs.
Alyx burrowed under the sleeping roll, then raised her head. "I forgot Hello Kitty." Her favorite toy, the one he bought for her first birthday, unimaginatively named. She confessed this to he and Kleiner both about twice a week, along with other strange asides, but this time her tone was a bit more ponderous than usual. Thinking about what it meant. Not a good sign. "She's sad."
Guilt.
Immediately Eli picked up her favored toy from the play area, a stuffed dog missing one of its eyes. "Well, we have Mr. Huskie to keep you company, and he wouldn't want you to be sad. Wait—what's that?" He raised the dog to his ear, squinting to give off the impression of listening intently to its sage advice. "Okay, I'll let her know. Mm-hmm." He lowered the toy. "He says to tell you Hello Kitty is okay."
She clutched the roll's frayed edges. "How he know?"
"Hmm, now that's a good question. Why don't you ask him?"
He planted the stuffed dog in her lap, cocking its head. Mr. Huskie commanded her attention with a soft, inquisitive, "Ruff?" Or as best he could manage; ventriloquism wasn't exactly his strong suit. He cleared his throat as she glanced skeptically up at him, pretended to look elsewhere.
Alyx grasped the dog and he bombarded her with tickles, making her squeal. There it was, the smile that always lit up his day.
Shifting on the armrest, it occurred to him that he might also benefit from a slight rest. "You know what? Might just… sit down a minute with you and Mr. Huskie. Scooch over?"
As he settled himself onto the couch, she climbed in his lap and pressed her ear against his heart. Though no longer in need of a bottle, Alyx still liked being cradled, listening to his heartbeat for the comfort of its steady cadence. His diaphragm pushed softly against her head, making it rise and fall in turn.
Muffled against his shirt, she murmured, "I wanna go home."
His chest sagged in a heavy sigh. She was prone to raising the issue whenever things went quiet, and he seldom had a good answer. Once she latched onto a certain thought, she stubbornly clung to it and refused to be railroaded.
A hundred possible answers crowded his mind, all of them inadequate to say aloud. So he asked, in between softly combing his fingers through her curls, "Don't you wanna stay here with me and Uncle Izzy?"
She didn't answer. The long, drawn-out breaths that rippled across his shirt folds led him to believe that maybe she had mercifully dropped off.
Drowsiness sagged his own eyelids until an announcement forced them open. With a sinking heart, he realized this room didn't remain silent for long. Its thick concrete walls originally insulated customers from lugnut drills and blowtorches, letting them wait in peace, but even these failed to completely mute Overwatch's icy feminine drone. He'd put Alyx here thinking, not unreasonably, that it would shield her from the sounds of the outside world and give her some measure of reprieve—to allow her to just be a child in a quiet space set apart from their harsh reality.
Try as he might, City 17 refused to be ignored. It seeped in through the gaps in his fingers he covered over her ears, resisted his efforts to muffle its horrors.
The only real tactic at his disposal was to divert her attention toward the trivial. Make a game of everything. Look, baby, there's a picture of an orange and a lemon on the wall. I wonder what it says? Together they'd touch the grainy concrete and try to learn Cyrillic from dusty graffiti.
He made to rise as carefully as he could when tiny fists clutched his shirt. "No," she implored him, her voice small. "Don't go."
"Baby, I gotta."
"Stay."
Every fiber in him wanted to obey that command. "Believe me, I'd love to. But Uncle Kleiner needs my help with the calculations. Tomorrow night."
"Not tomorrow." The sleeping roll rustled as she propped herself up. "Right now."
He tried a placating tone. "I'll just be down the hall if you need me." He added softly: "Listen, you'll feel a whole lot better once you get some sleep. Don't worry about anything, okay? Just lie down, close your eyes and think of… " He picked up Mr. Huskie again, waving it before her. "Think of nice doggies. Big ol' fluffers with puffy tails and—"
She wrenched the stuffed toy out of his grip and threw it down.
His voice tightened. "Alyx." Oh, Lord. He knew that darkening scowl too well. "Alyx, please. It's incredibly late, and you're tired. You know what happens when we let ourselves get tired? We get crabby."
Her hand hooked on his shirt pocket.
Slowly, Eli relented. He crouched before her, meeting her gaze. "I swear I am not leaving you," he said, meaning every word, "I'd never do that to you. Why don't you believe it?"
"'cause you're always gone." She cut right to the heart of the matter. "You always say, 'not now, maybe later,' and then you forget. I don't want you to forget. Stop forgetting."
His lips fumbled for a response. He had no idea she felt that way. "Alyx—"
Her mouth drew into a thin black line, bloodless. "I want to go home," she continued resolutely. "Mommy doesn't forget."
Alyx didn't mention her mother often. His head dipped, brow pressed against the sofa's cool edge. "Please don't bring her up."
"Why?"
He let the silence linger.
Because it hurts. Whether you know it or not, it hurts both of us.
"I want Mommy," Alyx repeated, so softly it hurt.
Five months ago, life was normal. Like the other survivors, he hadn't appreciated its beauty until it had been ripped away from him. Azian lived in a hazy, golden world, one that grew painfully dimmer as each day drifted them further toward a murky future.
He missed her for the large, life-affirming milestones they'd shared—their joint acceptance into Black Mesa, their marriage, Alyx's birth—but also for the small things, the little experiences that made life worth living, and at this point he couldn't say which loss cut deeper. He hadn't given her a proper memorial beyond a few watery whispers directed to a torn, smoke-eaten photograph.
(where do we go without you)
(what do we do)
(tell me, Azian)
Now that the grief had settled, like a house creaking as it shifted on its foundations, what remained were dull, persistent aches. He missed speaking with her, joking with her, marveling at Alyx's growth together. He missed the future they'd planned. The future they deserved.
"So do I."
That wasn't good enough for her. "Bring her back," Alyx demanded. "Take me home!"
Hot films of moisture pricked at his eyelashes, which he swallowed back. When he at last summoned the courage to lift his head, his voice crept out low, drained. "We can't go back."
She smacked the hand he reached for her.
He grabbed her wrist and held it, gently but firmly, until she looked him in the eye. Little lady was stronger than she looked, but he couldn't abide by hitting. He could rarely stand it when she entered these moods. "You're not gonna get what you want by hitting, all right? I'm trying my best, but you have got to meet me halfway here."
Unfortunately for him, his even keel didn't defuse the situation. Instead Alyx switched to the next weapon at her disposal. Screaming.
She was devious—she'd learned that raising her voice brought about immediate results, that Daddy had to respond quickly, most often by appeasing her. But she had yet to understand that, in a place like this, screaming was tantamount to painting bullseyes on their backs.
Frazzled, he felt his thinning patience wear down. How did Azian handle these tantrums? What tone of voice did she use: "Alyx, honey, I am begging you, calm down—" No dice. If anything, she dug her heels in. When it became clear she had no intention of backing down, he blurted: "You know why I've been gone so much? Because if I don't help with these calculations, we're not keeping this roof over our heads for much longer."
Her scowl deepened, and he knew he'd made a mistake. Before he could retract those hasty words, she yanked the covers over herself, curling up in a protective ball.
"Alyx… "
The Citadel spoke, its stern tones echoing off cobblestone and fluttering cable. Attention, airwatch: outgoing antibodies must be cleared for complement cascade. If approved, prepare sectors three-eight-zero, six-one-two for inoculation.
Dread sank his stomach as the rest of the message tapered into white noise. The fine hairs on the back of his neck rose until they stood bristle-straight. Clinical words blunted horrific intentions, dulling their listeners to the realities at hand.
380-612 was the area code for the neighboring oblast, Zaphorizhia. "Inoculation" plunged a lethal syringe into the vein of an unsuspecting portion of the neighborhood. Headcrabs, most likely. But Breen was known to launch missiles containing pure neurotoxin, forgoing the risk of friendly infection. He hadn't even the decency to wait before priming the place for another wave of shellings.
His throat clinched. There was a very real possibility they might not have a home in the next few days. Of course, he couldn't pile onto Alyx's problems with even more problems. He patted the bundle, feeling it squirm in agitation. "Good night, sweetheart. Daddy loves you."
More silence followed. Since she offered no forehead for him to kiss, he hugged the mound that had assumed the shape of his daughter, pressing his cheek to the padded roll for the briefest moment.
He then rose on unsteady knees, looking to the photo for support. Watch over her, Azian, please.
Alyx's sheer stubbornness allowed her to maintain her bravado right up until the door clicked on its jamb. The first small, forsaken moan that wafted through the limestone nearly split his heart from stem to ventricle. Don't go. His instincts wanted him to rush right in and hold her, never let her go, I'm right here, I'm right here—
Guilt and self-loathing mingled in his gut, amplified by his feelings of inadequacy. He'd implied her as the cause of their problems, and his conscience battered him for it. What kind of father unburdened his anxieties on his little girl, anyhow? A scared one? A stressed one? Good excuse; and the next time she pushed his buttons, could he expect to blurt something even worse? You have got to get yourself together. Shape up.
"Has she finally settled down? I thought I heard noises… " That was Kleiner's diplomatic way of commenting on the tantrum. His troubled expression softened as Eli slumped against the door, scalp clutched in his hands. "Oh, dear. Is everything all right?"
He took three steadying breaths between Alyx's whimpers. "Do you think I've been neglecting her lately?"
"You, negligent? Absolutely not."
His nails sank deeper into his follicles. "Then why do I feel like I'm abandoning her?"
Hesitantly, Kleiner asked: "I'm loath to ask, Eli, but… Has this anything to do with her mother, perchance?"
Silence.
"You know," he went on, "it will take time to find a suitable model for these numbers no matter how we look at it. Perhaps they can wait just for one night."
"No." He withdrew his hands. As much as he hated to admit it, their collective safety had to take precedence. He just hoped... she'd understand. "No. She... She'll settle down in a little while. Show me the problem."
"All right." Kleiner faltered to follow his clicking gait down the hall. "If you're certain."
Kleiner had dropped off over the numbers, his head pillowed by the arm he'd slung over the desk. Eli gently shook his shoulder. "Izzy." A little more insistent now. "Wake up."
His colleague startled awake with an instinctive shudder and ran a palm along his cheek, embarrassed to feel a sticky note clinging there. "Oh… Those calculations—"
"Nothing's ruined. I wrote everything down before you dozed off."
Emitting a relieved sigh, Kleiner began to peel his sleeve from his wrist, just to remember a second later that he no longer wore a watch there. He'd traded it for a student refugee's extra sleeping roll back in Crimea so Alyx would have a spare.
Eli hadn't forgotten. That watch was quite possibly the only thing he had left from his childhood in Austria; it was his father's, and he'd struggled to part with it. He'd begged him not to: She can sleep in mine if she loses hers, Izzy, really, put that away, and the guilt stayed with him despite his insistence that Alyx's needs came first.
"Dear me, what time is it?"
He briefly flicked the shutters to peer outside. Light struggled to fill the cracks. The sun had yet to emerge as far as he could tell; the city's outline threw stark black shapes against a smoky, predawn blue.
"About six, I think." Poor old Izzy looked about ready to crumble without some morning joe. "I'll go put on some coffee."
"Oh, bless you."
He yawned over the water simmering on the hot plate. Black coffee with a dollop of sugar for Kleiner and a hot chocolate for Alyx. Most mornings they had instant oatmeal or cream of wheat, with orange juice stirred up from a powder mix. Egg-based breakfasts, as well as cereal, were becoming increasingly rare due to the employee cooler's poor ability to refrigerate them.
It was almost too simple a thing to miss, the sizzle yolks hissed on a skillet, yet his memories ached for it all the same. In a fairer world, he'd be greeted by Alyx bouncing in her high chair, gleefully smashing Cheerios underneath her sippy cup. Welcome back to the daily grind, Azian would gently rib him.
His gaze slipped from the foam bubbling over the lid toward his wedding ring, glinting a pale gold in the early morning light. Busy man, busy life. The phone would shrill off the hook and the newspaper would mysteriously vanish. Azian would clap a lid over the skillet just as flames leapt up and insist she'd oiled the pan this time, honest. His mouth remembered its muscles stretching into a mischievous grin. What do you think, baby girl? Is Mommy lying? Alyx, beaming, pounded her sippy cup like a gavel, like gunshots, the smoke seeping out of the pan the same smoke that crept through blast doors, bang-bang-bang—
Eli screwed his eyes shut and released his breath, dragging his thoughts out of the past. Now wasn't the time to let these memories overwhelm him.
He gave the kettle a small jostle and rummaged through a cardboard box marked 'SAVE.' Inside, he sifted through the rations until he found the batter mix.
Back home, Alyx constantly begged him to make his specialty: chocolate-chip pancakes with an unhealthy amount of whipped cream sprayed on top. Processed sugar was their best-kept secret in the household of a health nut. He'd spray cream into his daughter's hands, only to laugh as she slathered it onto his cheeks. Daddy looks like Santa now, huh? How do you suppose Santa is gonna explain his Cool Whip beard to Mrs. Claus when she gets home, little lady, mm?
Instead of sprinkling in a helping of chocolate chips, however, he'd crushed Kit-Kats taken from a vending machine.
The world inside their little bubble, though not ideal, was far softer than its external environment. Outside, radio chatter floated up in crackling, insectoid tones. An APC's engine hummed, the Doppler effect letting it wane as it passed the adjoining street. Overwatch warned of imminent sector sweeps.
Guess Breen's trigger finger is starting to itch a little sooner than we expected. He let the grim thought dwell in his mind before pushing it aside. Don't waste your energy on things that haven't happened yet. Let's focus on getting through today.
Plate in hand, he grasped the door's smooth, cold knob and twisted it, opening the door a crack.
"Alyx?"
As a parent, the last thing you want to hear when you call your child's name is dead silence. Apprehension gripped him as quiet greeted him, and he opened the door a little wider, crossing the boundary from concrete to linoleum.
Her covers lay in the same bundle as when he tucked her in. He peeled them back, though no little girl curled up inside.
Could she have crawled out sometime during the night? Her stuffed animal remained on the floor where she'd thrown it, Mr. Huskie's bad eye clenched shut.
Still nursing that grudge. What else did he expect? His toddler was just as capable of giving him the cold shoulder as any adult. And it wasn't as though he didn't deserve every drop of it.
He dragged his hand down his mouth, not liking where this was headed. Best to be honest and upfront; he probably deserved her snubbing, true, but he also had to be the one to put his foot down. "All right, baby, I know you're mad. Come on out, let's—"
Both bathrooms turned up empty, increasing his misgivings. She knew she wasn't supposed to venture outside without adult supervision.
"Alyx?" He called for her a few more times, to little avail. "Where are you?"
That was when a gleam caught his eye. The family photograph stood at her bedside, its glass whole, not a single crack marring its smooth surface.
He snatched it off the stand. No… He'd broken it just last night. The pieces were lying in the bottom of a covered recycle bin. How could it—
He turned the frame under the lamplight. In place of his own reflection, another face studied him, a split-second flash in the uncertain gap between this heartbeat and the next. Much paler, with radiant, corona-like eyes, its thin mouth curling into a smirk—
"Izzy." He turned the frame facedown with a trembling hand, backing slowly out of the room. As dread accelerated his heart, his apprehensive call gained volume. "Kleiner?"
He took her.
That bastard took her.
" …which is why I've elected to establish my administration here, in the Citadel so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors."
Day and night the Wallace-Breen spoke without pause. Rather he'd render himself deaf than to hear his lies for much longer.
The water in his beaten pail sloshed an unhealthy charcoal gray as he slid his mop across thefloor. Electronic batons bit his flesh, and gloved hands violently repelled him at his attempts to refresh the bucket. Suspicious were the Shu'ulathoi, that one might not even venture out of their sight for but a moment.
These men who watched him from the safety of their armor had forfeited their right to be men. They had exchanged their human faces for plastic masks with large, pupilless eyes. Their hands had grown claws which sloughed sparks, remorseless for the flesh they singed. He saw them crawl across the city like insects, watching always, but scarcely perceiving.
They were more than men, to hear the insistent drone of the Wallace-Breen, which oozed from every speaker and every screen. They had transcended fragile human wanting. Come, now, he urged, shed the coccoon of ignorant fear which binds you. Transform in submission; be assimilated, be free.
He uncurled his upper lip. What did that traitor know of freedom to speak of it so? Indeed, or of any other vicissitude lashed upon them?
G'uung ma
Gallum galla gilla ma,
Galla ma.
Fate is not cruel, but blinded and fooled
Believing we cherish our chains.
By some happenstance of ill fortune he found himself slipping one yoke only to enter another. And despite the suffering they shared, neither human nor transhuman spared him pity. Fear and revulsion gripped them when they saw the ruts in his skin where shackles used to be.
Perhaps he was meant for little else. If such was his fate, he would not have denied it. He had been born a slave in the pulsing heart of the Nihilanth's spawning chambers, had emerged from those warm, rippling waters already knowing his place. He had yearned for nothing more, for one like him could expect nothing more but a drone's thankless servitude.
If the Master commanded he kill, he killed. If the Master wished him to bleed, he bled. Cruel though his Master may have been, the Shu'ulathoi proved even crueler still, as they did not suffer loss. Even one as merciless as the Master would cry out for its dying brood. For whom did they weep? He suspected they numbered very little.
The Blackmesa. An ironcoffin it was, full of anger and terror. Icy steel dominated their surroundings, the Freeman's wrath matched solely by his immense dread at the prospect of death. They knew his mind. They passed at his hands, and as they passed, they cried out the name of their killer, so clearly they could feel him move through the Vortessence. Upon each misery he inflicted, their resolve to kill him grew ever stronger, tying them together.
With curses came blessings, however slight. When the Freeman severed the vortal cord of his Master, it was as if light flooded his mind. Through the connection his kind shared, he thought often of the clear, soothing waters of a distant planet. The honeyed warmth of a blue sun kissing upon his eyelids. He longed for a home he had never inhabited.
And he was here. Chained to a miserable rock, fit only to serve scum.
The small, bare bulb strung from the ceiling flickered and sputtered, its inner filament robbed of its burning glow. Torturous instruments stole the current from the custodial rooms; he shook his head in the dim that befell him, his collar humming in the silence. A quiet this iron usually preceded screams.
What heralded the darkness this time? Surgical knives? Power drills? No matter; once the torturer was finished, he would be left with the task of sanitizing the room.
One of the heavy iron doors embedded in the corridors opened with a long, anguished groan. A pair of transhumans marched out, mocking the weak resolve of their victim.
"Heh, didn't even put up a fight." Turning sharply toward him, the left unit—blood sprinkled across its mask—shoved him inside with a scoff. "Fuckin' slug. Go clean it up."
They walked away as if nothing had happened. As the urge to electrify his tormentors prickled at his skin, his collar vibrated, chokingly warm around his throat. If he indulged his murderous desires, the current in his body would be redirected through the forsaken device, turned against him tenfold.
A vortal one lay slumped in the chair. Ko, but it was sad to see humans here, the light from their eyes extinguished. What he felt for his kind was far greater, nearly suffocating. At first he despaired to discover them dead—but upon each encounter the callus around his heart toughened a little more, until even the scar had numbed.
He wheeled in his supplies and wordlessly began. These days, it behooved him to think of the dead as objects, same as any other in these rooms. He would dress them in shrouds of ammonia, remove the filth surrounding them until they were clean.
Still, he was not entirely without pity. Fate has been most unkind to you, he said as he moved the dead one's limbs to reach a stain on the chairback, knowing those words held little justice for they who now perceived the All-in-One. He continued his grim work until a flash of orange halted him.
His teeth glinted in a snarl. How serendipitous that the Freeman dared show his face.
His collar may have subdued him, tamping down his most lethal skill, but he had an entire torture room from which to draw a makeshift weapon. The Freeman faded at the bucket of filth he'd hurled at him, no more substantial in those browned droplets than smoke.
Shock jolted his senses. What manner of trickery is this?
In place of the Freeman, curled up on the chair behind the desk, a creature slumbered.
He cursed in his garbled native tongue and quickly retreated, parrying the mop before him in case it lashed out in retaliation. Though it resembled a human, a small specimen at that, one could hardly practice enough caution in these matters. It did not attack, fortunately—did not hiss venomous teeth at him as would one of those fanged pests.
With a measure of skepticism he lowered his mop, whose hair dripped glimmering threads. This was no Freeman, but an apparition.
He prodded the creature with the handle. The Freeman's form shivered. And faintly, lowly, an insistent thump arose in his ears. He recalled a similar noise from all the way within the Master's spawning chambers, the strong, warm beat of a heart.
He had to admit if this was indeed the heart of the Freeman, he would have obliged the stabbing impulse to shred it apart, just to make his tormentor suffer. What halted him was the fact that, as he listened, he perceived two pulses in lieu of one. Synchronous. Whatever its nature, this creature breathed the breath of another. Numinously, it and the Freeman inhaled as one.
The Freeman; he vacillates.
His heart had fragmented, separate from the body.
Why? Whence had it come? Had the Master inflicted a curse upon the Freeman in his dying throes, sealing the intruder away? It was a strange time to appear now, he thought. And what of him? He had no special importance to the Master, had done nothing to warrant the custody of an inheritance both vile and precious.
He cocked his head. The flow of time winds strangely around it. Perhaps it can see this one home…
If true, then it held power beyond reckoning. He ought to see that it continued living, if merely to see one fragment lead to others. With enough power came freedom, a light at the end of an inexhaustible darkness.
He gripped his mop handle until the woodgrain bit splinters into his flesh. Could it be true? Could he grasp peace as simply as that? Or should he continue to submit to this endless parade of tedium and numbness? For so long he had imagined fate arriving to spirit him away from this forsaken place. Now it expressed a wish to test him.
Trust that fate leads us astray, for
Even the stars must change course
As the bulb sputtered above him, he cursed it, as if finally perceiving its poor illumination. No matter the outcome, he should accept the chance fate denied his brothers. Doing nothing would lead him toward nothing; one's chains only broke once cracked.
Carefully he scooped the Freeman's heart into his arms, blanketed it with a cloth, and departed the room.
"Welcome; welcome to City 17." The Wallace-Breen smiled upon an empty train station. "It's safer here."