It was raining over Washington DC; a steady sapping downpour that conspired with the cold night to keep the sane and sensible indoors. Not that this stopped the streets bustling with people and traffic.
The city never slept. People worked under clear skies and stormclouds, under dim streetlamps and in dimmer office blocks, amongst labyrinths of rundown housing and in echoing capitol buildings. Workers worked, presidents presided, politicians politicked. Rich and poor and the powerful and powerless rarely rubbed shoulders.
In the White House, President Kuciyela sat at his desk and combed through reports on potential security compromises in the new fusion plants in Michigan. In Nebraska Avenue, the new Secretary of Homeland Security was, with little fanfare, being sworn in. In the Capitol, Congress thrashed out, by torturous degrees, reform on the NASA budget.
And in the Thaddeus Complex, a small and spare office complex crouched on the edge of Capitol Hill, Maria Ortega counted to ten under her breath as she directed a pointed look at the computer on her desk.
"Go on," she implored it. "Is it so hard to finish the search? I'm not asking for the world. I just want as-yet unresolved cases of missing people in Delaware, complete with locations and dates."
The bar indicating progress trawling through the sleek machine's multiple databases flickered hesitantly. It skipped forward a hair, and Maria's hopes rose.
Then it skipped back the hair, and it was only with a heroic effort of will that Maria resisted the urge to grab her umbrella from the stand in the corner of her office and start hewing about her until the computer had been reduced to its constituent molecules.
"I don't care how advanced you are," she said in a warning tone. "You aren't sentient. 'You shall not kill' doesn't apply to you yet. I only mention this in passing."
The computer deigned not to respond, save for looking intolerably smug.
It was a slim, dark machine, a mirror of the woman staring it down. Maria was slender and tall, dark-skinned and black-haired, her dark brown eyes enlarged by round spectacles. She wore a red skirt to her ankles, and a red cardigan over a white t-shirt. She was twenty-six years old, and had spent the past four of these years in the Department.
Her office, large as it was, also did service as the complex's hallway. Maria sat facing the door from behind a dark wooden desk. The seal of the Department of the Supernatural was set into the wall behind her; a upright arm holding a blazing torch against a dark field.
The sound of raindrops pelting the large curtained window to Maria's right obscured the throttle of a vehicle that was pulling up. It took the sound of a key clicking in the doorway to make Maria look up.
It was Coraline who had entered, along with a sharp gust of wind from the cold March night, and she nudged the door shut with her foot as she walked in. She set down a black backpack and a long zipped case containing her shotgun on the floor, and pulled off her damp trenchcoat, revealing her dry dark jeans and blue pullover. She wiped her damp boots on the doormat, and hung her coat and hat on pegs set into the plaster-white walls. She whistled as she did so.
Maria looked askance at her. "I take it someone had a good day at work?"
"What makes you think that?"
Maria looked her up and down. "You're alive, for one thing. But you've also got a spring in your step, a smile skirting your face, and you're whistling 'Zippity Doo Dah'. But apart from that, nothing really."
"That's you putting your investigatory skills to work, I can tell."
"I have to put them to work on something." Maria gestured at her computer. "While you've been out gallivanting with monsters from beyond, I've been busy discovering new depths of loathing for this. And I don't know what Wybie's been doing, but I'm pretty sure I heard an explosion a few minutes ago."
"Ah? I'd better go and check on him."
"You do that." Maria looked at Coraline critically. "Just for the record, the mission did go well, didn't it? You encountered the beldam?"
"I did. And I got there in time to save a kid as well."
"That's great. And what did you do to the beldam?"
"She hadn't killed any kid. I let her off with a warning and a stomach ache. She won't be doing any feeding for a good while, and I asked her a few questions, like you asked. She hinted that there was another up in Massachusetts."
"Nothing more specific than that?"
"Afraid not. But I'm sure you've got any number of leads for me."
"If there's something I don't lack, it's ways in which you can get yourself killed." Maria glanced back at her computer. "Give me another glacial aeon or two and I might even have something concrete for you."
"That's good to know." Coraline held up the backpack. "I've written up a case file for Wybie. He'll want to get it filed."
"He's in the lab with the cat and the intern, I think," said Maria, jerking a thumb back along the corridor. "I'd imagine there's science in progress."
"Isn't there always? You hold the fort here. I'll be back soon to lock my stuff up."
Maria waved her through, then looked up and frowned as if remembering something, and turned to Coraline's back.
"Oh, a message came through," said Maria. "Just to remind you that there'll be a cabinet meeting tomorrow."
"God dammit," said Coraline. "And the day was going so well."
Coraline walked briskly along the corridors of the Thaddeus Complex, finding her way to Wybie's workstation.
This was a task easier said than done.
The Thaddeus complex had been built at the height of the Cold War, by an architect who had somehow gotten it into his head that a mass invasion and occupation by the USSR was imminent. Therefore, he had deliberately made the layout as bewildering and illogical as possible, so as to baffle any Red Army troops who might have wandered inside for a quick smoke. Corridors looped and twisted and led in on themselves. Superfluous rooms abounded, multiple entryways leading somehow to different floors and short curved corridors that led back into the same room. Other doors opened onto brick walls, others onto the outside of the building.
The whole thing was an exercise in architectural madness, and it had only seen limited use before being left to moulder for half a century; before finally being palmed off onto the Department of the Supernatural.
So focused was Coraline upon not getting lost, that she almost bumped into someone coming the other way.
"Sorry, Sayid, didn't see you there," she said. She then asked "There have been rumours of an explosion. Dare I enquire further?"
The intern for the Department of the Supernatural was Sayid Pahlavi, a fresh-faced student with a sanguine demeanour, tanned skin, wiry black hair, and large, bright, blue-green eyes. He was, at five feet three, only a little taller than Coraline herself, and at twenty-one years old, five years younger, and wore a thin red long-sleeved t-shirt, jeans, and a constant smile.
"According to Mr Lovat, the path of scientific progress is riddled with fire and scorched shards of metal and the odd misplaced limb." Sayid seemed to consider it. "Which doesn't really fit with the accepted view of science, I believe. But what do I know."
"Oh, god. What went on fire?"
"Nothing irreplaceable, I've been told to tell you. Er, you don't look reassured."
Coraline, resisting the urge to bash her head repeatedly against a suitable wall, answered "I'll take what reassuring I can get. Shouldn't you be off the clock by now?"
"Technically, yes. But I was having fun here."
"You have a very twisted view of what constitutes fun. Go home and get some rest. I've just got some things to sort out."
Sayid nodded and moved on. Coraline did likewise.
As she drew nearer to Wybie's lab, along white-washed walls and dark-carpeted floors, another member of the department fell into step beside her. She didn't notice them until she glanced down at the floor.
"Hello, Tripod." She knelt down briefly to rub their ears. "Have you been managing the idiots while I've been away?"
Tripod mwwred at the attention and pressed himself against her hand. He was a scarred, reddish-furred, amber-eyed Turkish Angora, who spent most of his days hobbling around the Thaddeus complex and the surroundings on his three legs.
He had been the Department's mascot for a little over a year, ever since he had been taken in as a crippled stray. Hitherto, he had ruled the alleyways of the capitol like a petty tyrant, lording it over other cats and strays for several years. Fate had caught up with him, however, when he had picked a fight with the Rottweiler belonging to the visiting Polish President. He had lost a leg, but not before he had sent the dog yelping for its handlers, and sparked a minor diplomatic incident.
Now he lived in relative comfort and security with the Department, even if, from time to time, Wybie often tried some cryptic experiment to induce speech.
Speaking of which; Coraline picked herself up and kept on walking. Tripod hobbled after her.
As she neared the back of the building, she picked up the acrid scent of something burnt. She walked faster, past posters with an inverted crown proclaiming NOW PANIC AND FREAK OUT, and handwritten signs proclaiming Science in progress, run for your life.
She finally came to a plain green door, set into the white wall. She tried the handle, and let herself in.
"Wybie?" she said.
The room Wybie had set up shop was large and rectangular, lit during the day by a skylight, and lit now by large circular lights set into the walls. The walls were plain and drab, save for the odd scorch-mark or blistered stain set into them. The wall facing Coraline was plastered with whiteboards filled with diagrams and sheets of pinned-up paper riddled with equations and notation. Large, long workstations ran along the two side walls. They were long, clean, iron-grey metal desks, heavy with drawers, topped with the organised chaos that was Wybie's work. Piles of paper were sunk amidst toppling towers of electronics, wires splayed around them like rivers between mountains. Small, smoky glass jars sat atop several of them, scribbled-on sticky notes adorned some of them like feathers, a catalogue of failures and near-successes.
One particularly recent failure sat on the station on the right, smeared with foam and stuck powder, trickling oily smoke. It was a small cuboid, pieced and welded together from metal and wires and unfathomable electric components. From its sides, two long cords of coated wire extended, that could in theory have been joined together if the ends hadn't been fused into solid lumps of melted plastic and metal.
In the centre of the room, a more recent and significantly more intact version of the same machine sat sprawled, smaller wires connecting it to sockets in the wall, and the two longer cords joined and arranged into a circle on the floor. Above it, Wybie looked down, peering at it critically, taking notes on a pad of note-paper.
He looked up, saw Coraline, and brightened beneath the mask.
"Alright, take seventeen of the Reality-Eroder," he said, still taking notes, "I think it can wait. Is that paperwork? For me?"
Puberty had been kind to Wybie. A few weeks after it, whatever problem had existed in his back had finally been deemed to have been fixed, and his back brace had been removed.
And after that, his growth spurt had set in with a vengeance.
Coraline was five foot one, genetics having rolled in favour of her mother and hence doomed her to a lifetime of short jokes. Wybie had only stopped growing at six-and-a-half feet, and was broad across the shoulders and chest. His dark green eyes were bright and clear, and his hair was now accompanied by a straggly, curly beard. Over his frame was draped something that had started life as a labcoat, but had been so relentlessly resewn and patched and reinforced that it now probably qualified as armour.
"You're lucky I like you," said Coraline, rummaging inside her backpack for the case file. "I don't endure writing up paperwork for just anyone, you know."
"So I'm a special snowflake in that regard?" Wybie reached for the file with a gloved hand.
"You're special, certainly. Don't take that as a compliment." Coraline walked with Wybie to one of the drawers in one of his workstations. Wybie yanked it open with a clatter, and produced a massive binder, stuffed with sheets of paper in plastic pockets. He shifted through them, past pages of drawn pictures, blurred photographs, and several other case files. He finally found a relevant section, and slipped the file inside an empty pocket. Physical storage was for the best. Many an innocent computer had met a grisly end on these tables, and Wybie had eventually given up.
Coraline had turned her attention to the mess on the rightmost station, covering her nose slightly against the smoke.
"Scientific progress goes 'Fizzle fizzle kaboom' in this case?" said Coraline.
"Ah. That would not be my proudest moment right there. But I think I know where I went wrong."
"At least it's progress," said Coraline, surveying the carnage. "Can I guess from the fact that Tripod's still alive and intact that he wasn't in when you tested it?"
"Oh, come on. You know I never put him in for a first or second testing," said Wybie, kneeling to pet the cat. "Don't I, you fuzzy little sociopath?"
"Mrreeew," said the fuzzy little sociopath, which could have been Grimalkin for That's one principle you adhere to, at least or Whatever you say, human or And I thank my stars daily for whatever solitary cell of common sense rattling around in your skull knocked that notion into your head. Grimalkin was a nuanced language.
And if Wybie ever produced a functioning Eroder, the Department would be able to understand it.
Amongst lots of other consequences.
"In any case, I now have something that I think will work. I mean, I'm reasonably sure it's not actually going to go on fire this time. Although since it's best to just play it safe, could you stand back and keep Tripod with you?"
Coraline did so, holding the reluctant Tripod while Wybie made a last few adjustments to the device on the floor. She watched him and smiled.
The work they did was hard, but necessary, she knew. Their Department was small and underfunded. Critically underfunded. They were lucky when they had money for travel. They were unappreciated, unsupported, and had been regarded as a national joke or national embarrassment for all of their four-year existence.
And 'they' in this case referred to the entire Department. Herself, Wybie, Maria, the intern, and a three-legged cat.
But sometimes, the work they did in this building made it possible for her to forget the problems, and just see the pluses.
Wybie stood up and grabbed for a blast mask on the floor behind him, just in case.
"Ready?" he asked, slipping on the mask. "Fingers crossed."
He flipped the switch on the machine.
In theory, what would happen was that the reality within the cord-circle would be weakened. The Sur-real could bleed through, and the consequences (such as cats talking) could grant legitimacy to the Department of the Supernatural.
In reality, what happened was this.
The machine gurgled slightly.
A faint chattering came from the Sur-real specimen within the metal.
A few uncomfortable seconds passed.
Then, just as Wybie was about to speak, the column of air within twisted – it blurred and shifted, like the inside of a tornado, for one split second. The air in the room buzzed, and a faint honeysuckle smell hit Coraline's nostrils.
Then the machine shorted out, with a spray of sparks blasting out part of the frontispiece, and the cuboid fell onto its side. The cords jerked like serpents, then fell still.
And the only sound afterwards was of something small and hitherto unnoticed falling from the ceiling with a metallic tinkle.
Wybie looked for the source of the noise, and noticed it on the floor; a small shape that looked vaguely like a metal spider. It lay still save for the odd spasm, and he approached it gingerly.
"What is that?" said Coraline. Tripod hissed at it, and wriggled in her grasp. Wybie drew out tweezers from a pocket in his coat and poked at it. Its legs clutched onto the tweezers' arms, and grasped them firmly. Wybie raised it to the light.
"I … it's not mine," he said, baffled and curious.