Lengthy author's notes (sorry!):

I don't normally say this kind of thing because it feels like pandering, but: thanks to everyone who's taken the time to drop me a line and say what you think on this thing. I am, up to this point, proudest of it out of all my fics, but my timing sucks in that the show is kind of imploding and it seems things are thinning out a little around here as a result. While I have every intention of finishing this story I'm a little worried it'll be crickets around here by the time I get there, so thanks to those of you who stick it out.

A note re. Jack the Ripper: I needed some kind of serial criminal to advance the plot and stole the idea of Jack the Ripper from the S5 promos since it's at exactly the right era. But I haven't seen the S5 episode in which he appears, so my use of him here is all me; don't try to make my use of him make sense with reference to W13 canon, because it won't. I've attempted to be somewhat historically accurate in terms of the murders attributed to him and their timeline, but of course I've spiffed things up in a way that hints toward artifact-related nastiness.

The W12 caretaker McGivens is hermitstull's creation from her Warehouse 12 fics (they're in her collection "The Vodka Made Me Do It," posted in its entirety on AO3; chapters 30, 40, 53, 54, 62, 69 and 71. GO READ if you haven't, because they're amazing).

Shout-out to Manhattanite for giving me a little help with the geography of Queens here.

TW: A character is suicidal at one point in this chapter. There is also one use of a transphobic slur.


Nurse Valerie's stomach ties itself in knots over the behaviour of Helena Wells.

Her tantrums were as bad as ever—worse, even—in the days immediately following the confrontation in Dr. Austin's office. But they can't give her laudanum, with the pregnancy, so they resort to the older methods, the kind of methods usually reserved for far more dangerous and reactive patients than Miss Wells is.

When they can, they resort to a straight-jacket. It's the most humane option, after all; she can move around, stand and sit as she chooses, but without the ability to harm anyone else or herself.

But then sometimes, sometimes she becomes so upset that the straight-jacket will not suffice; she throws herself at anyone who comes near, or at the furniture if there is any, and screams at them to untie her. Those are the days when they strap her to a gurney. She howls until she's hoarse, hauling against the restraints until her screams turn into tears.

Sometimes she exhausts herself enough to fall asleep.

On one such day, Nurse Valerie walks into the room, even though policy says she shouldn't do such a thing without a guard. But young Miss Wells is sleeping and in those moments Valerie notices how young she truly is, at twenty-three. Valerie remembers being twenty-three and thinking her growing was finished, she understands, now, that growing never finishes, not if you don't want it to.

She looks at Miss Wells and sees a young woman who comforted old Tommy about a dashed bird's nest.

After a week or two of this, Miss Wells learns where her tantrums and outbursts will put her. She adjusts, like the knob on a gas lamp turned down to the barest glow. Dr. Austin comments on her remarkable progress, but Valerie cannot help but lament the loss of her energy, her joie-de-vivre. She has a hard time watching the shadow of Helena Wells pace quietly about the common room and understanding that outline, that bare minimum, as recovery.

/

Charles has spent very little of his adult life in the company of pregnant women prior to Helena. He's heard stories, though, of how they may be moody or temperamental but through that they glow, they bask in the grandeur of their body's majestic endeavor.

He can't help but notice that he sees none of that in Helena. If anything, he sees the opposite. She, who has always been so mercurial in virtually all respects, has become grey, dull. When he visits, they walk in the garden, or sit in the common room, and speak of pleasantries, the weather. She persists with the odd tics, the rolling of the shoulders, the rubbing of the wrists, but those seem to dwindle off in the later months.

Sometimes he tries to engage her by discussing his studies at university, which have always fascinated her before. But now, when he brings them up, she stops him with a shake of her head or a wave of her hand and says "Not now, Charles. Thank you."

Visiting her becomes so dreadfully boring.

"She's making wonderful progress," Dr. Austin says, and Charles wonders how this can possibly be progress when Helena was clearly so much happier when she was "ill."

"Have you found a home for the baby?" she asks, every visit. And every visit, he is forced to say that no, he has not, though he's looking.

And he does look. He sends letters to cousins who have families. He reaches out to childhood friends. Eventually, in desperation, he writes his father. His father responds by telegram, one word: "never."

"I am sorry to have burdened you with this, Charles," Helena says, but her voice is so empty, so dispassionate, that he knows not how to interpret her words. She has never been one to apologize without sarcasm, but now, he hears not even that.

"I am not sorry for her, though," Helena says, curling her hands over her stomach.

"Her?" Charles says.

Helena shrugs slowly. "Intuition." She smiles wistfully down at her own body, pressing against the dress that wasn't cut for pregnancy. "While she is with me, I am never alone."

She composes stories for the baby and sometimes, on sunny days, she tells them to him, asks him to write them down for her. She's as marvelous at telling stories as she is at virtually everything else, so of course he transcribes them and keeps them in a folio on his bookcase.

(Well, not all on his bookcase. He's taken three of them, his favorites, and sent them to various magazines to see if they'll publish them. He's waiting for responses.)

One day, he sees her smile, a hint of the old Helena pushing through the surface. They are walking in the garden and she stops, brings her palms to her swollen belly and says, "the baby is moving." She grins, then, widely, first down, to herself, and then over at Charles. "The baby's moving!" she says again, and he's so relieved to see her smile that he can't help but smile back.

Three more visits pass and Charles sees no hint of that light again.

"If she remains this calm in the weeks following the delivery of the baby, we may be able to look into releasing her. She may rehabilitate after all," Dr. Austin says.

"Are you quite all right?" Charles whispers to her, one day, in the corner of the common room where nobody can hear.

She smiles a little, just with her lips, and then shrugs one shoulder. "I suppose," she says, and that's when Charles knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she is not. And he knows not what to do, because this version of his sister might finally be released from Bethlem, but she is empty as a frame without a picture, a hat without a head.

/

Charles looks horrid when Wooley arrives at The Morlock's Arms that night. There's an empty pint glass in front of him and a half-empty one beside it, and he's slumped over the bar, hair in disarray. That's how Wooley knows there's something really wrong: Charles is forever preening, hoping to catch the eye of this or that young lady, and will never be seen with a hair out of place.

Wooley wonders, briefly, if he should turn around and leave, because the day's been terrible for him, too, and perhaps they wouldn't make good company for one another.

But he's here, and he wants a pint, and misery loves company, surely.

"Rough day?" Wooley asks as he pulls up the neighboring barstool.

"The most recent among many," Charles mutters, before taking another long drink.

"Care to tell me about it?" Wooley asks.

Charles huffs out a breath of air. "I'd rather hear what's new in your life."

"Ugh," Wooley groans. He sets his hat on the bar-top and orders his pint from the bartender. "Jack the Ripper has come out of retirement," he says. "Or at least it looks that way. There's another case from a few months ago that might be his work, too. We're revisiting it now, in retrospect."

Wooley's mind retains the most recent crime scene more vividly than any photograph or drawing, not because his memory is terribly remarkable, but because some images burn themselves into one's mind with the fire and noise of a brand on the flank of a cow. He's seen the earlier ones, too, that were in every respect more gruesome – so gruesome that he'd been able to dissociate himself, to an extent. To operate as though the mutilated bodies were just that, and had never been people.

(He'd felt guilty about that, when he'd first realized he was doing it. But his sergeant had explained that it was a good thing to do, that it made it possible to keep doing the job without driving himself to Bedlam with the horror of it.)

But this latest woman had been all but intact. The off-centre gash in her neck had been her only visible wound, but the blood—the blood—so much of it, everywhere, slicked across the body like oil. And there was no detachment. There was no pretending this was just a murder without a victim, that this wasn't a person lying there.

(And he needn't reference the words he'd heard his superiors use to describe these women. Women of the night, they were, but still someone's daughter, someone's mother, and as deserving of justice and dignity as any other woman on the street.)

Wooley blinks for a moment and realizes he's been silent, staring into nothing. Charles is staring at him, blearily, a third pint glass sweating into his palm.

"Wooley," Charles says. "Wooley." He must not have eaten much today, for two pints to affect him like this.

Wooley pinches the bridge of his nose. "Yes, Charles?"

"Ihaveanidea," he says, his upper body tipping toward Wooley, his elbow sprawled across the bar-top. But his eyes, for the first time this evening, are bright.

"Do you?" Wooley says.

Charles nods. "D'you remember… d'you remember when I told you about that Sherlock Holmes book? And you said you wanted to hire a genius consulting detective to help you find the Ripper." He sits up and eyes Wolcott expectantly over the rim of his glass as he takes another drink.

Wooley rolls his eyes. "Yes. But Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist."

"You're right," Charles says, reaching forward and poking Wolcott's knee with a resolute index finger. "Sherlock Holmes is a fictional." Poke. "Character." Poke.

"Yes, Charles." Wolcott waves to the bartender; his friend clearly needs a glass of water.

"What if I toldya I knew a real-life, bona-fide, Sherlock Holmesian genius?"

Wolcott's running out of patience for this. He picks up his glass and swallows a gulp of beer, then another. He'll see Charles again some other, more sober day.

"No!" Charles says. "No. I see what you're doing. Put your glass down."

"Charles—"

"No, see, when you say that, you sound just like her. Exactly like her, and you've never even met."

"You're drunk, Charles," Wooley says. "Whatever this conversation is, it can wait for another day."

Charles straightens up in his chair, both hands braced on the edge of the bar. He looks at his half-empty pint glass and pushes it away. "You're right," he says, "I'm drunk. But that doesn't make me an ignoramus." He waves down the bartender and asks for a glass of water. "There is someone very dear to me who needs help," he says, his voice measured, calculated, pushing through the dull edges of the alcohol. "She needs help and I promise, she can help you. So sit down and give me the chance to convince you, at least 'till you get to the bottom of your pint. But no rushing." He thrusts an accusatory finger at Wooley's shoulder.

Wooley slouches forward toward his drink and a heavy breath escapes. "All right," he says. "Out with it."

Charles smiles. There's water in front of him now and he drinks the whole pint glass full and then thrusts it toward the bartender for a refill. "All right, Wooley," he says, "let me tell you about my sister."

/

Charles notifies the staff at Bethlem by telegram that he will be visiting with Detective Constable Wolcott for a consultation with Helena. He asks them to notify her. He takes a day's leave from his mind-numbing coursework for the occasion.

When they arrive, Helena looks a little more like she used to. Her hair is up in its chignon for the first time in months, and while the dress tugs awkwardly over her stomach, she carries herself tall and square. She shakes Wolcott's hand in greeting as a man would, and Charles is mortified but Wooley merely smiles.

The hospital has granted them access to an examining room and, after much haranguing between Dr. Austin and Wolcott, has consented not to have a guard in the room with them.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" Helena asks as she settles onto a chair opposite Wolcott's. Charles sits between them.

Wolcott clears his throat. "Well," he says. Then he coughs. "Your brother has led me to believe you have certain… remarkable talents?"

Helena, of course, arches an eyebrow at him. "I'm a woman of many talents, Detective Constable Wolcott," she says, "but I'm afraid I can't tell you whether I can help you unless you tell me what the problem is."

Wolcott bends down and pulls a folder from his satchel, where it rests by his feet. He sets it on the table.

"I presume you've heard of the serial killer we call 'Jack the Ripper'?"

/

On the cab ride back to South Kensington, Wooley can barely contain himself. He wants to detour the cab to stop by his supervisor's house immediately. He wants to go directly to the Scotland Yard office and wait there eagerly until morning.

"She's a genius, your sister," he says, over and over. "And I haven't the foggiest what to make of her idea but despite their absurdity they make more sense than anything else I've seen up to this point."

When presented with the crime scene photographs and investigators' notes, Helena had swallowed hard, several times, and covered her mouth with her hand.

"Helena," Charles had said.

"Are you quite all right, Miss Wells? I do apologize for the graphic nature of the images," Wolcott said.

Helena was silent for a long moment, long enough that Wolcott, apparently deciding that the images must be too graphic, leaned forward to shuffle them back into the folder.

Helena's hand shot forward of its own volition and clapped the papers back to the tabletop. "No," she said. She swallowed once more and leaned forward, sliding the photos apart over the tabletop and beginning to leaf through the paperwork. "Give me a few minutes to look this through, and then I want you to tell me everything you know that doesn't appear in these files."

They talked for an hour. They talked for another hour. Charles lost interest after thirty minutes. He found himself fighting to stay awake, his head falling forward against his chest, again and again.

"This is positively bizarre," Helena said. "I'll tell you what I think. I think Miss McKenzie was not murdered by the same person who murdered the first five."

"I agree," Wolcott said. "But to be frank, I'm not sure why I feel that way."

"Look at the wounds here—"she pointed to one photograph—"and here," she pointed to another. "Look at the angle of the cuts and where the weight has been applied. The first five women were murdered by a right-handed man and the second by a left-handed man."

Charles barely contained his chuckle at the way Wolcott's eyebrows leaped into his hairline and he practically threw himself across the table. He'll be buying my pints for a month, he thought

"You're right," Wolcott said. "You're absolutely bloody right—sorry—and nobody ever noticed that."

But Helena was still puzzled, Charles could tell. She was shaking her head like she would when they were children and she was working through a difficult mathematics equation in her head.

"I assume tissue samples were taken and analyzed from each of the victims?" she said

"Of course," Wolcott replied.

"No traces of any toxins, I assume?"

"None."

"So very strange," Helena said quietly, almost to herself. She scratched absently at her temple with one fingernail.

Charles sat up at this. He hadn't been paying much attention but he recognized her air, the one that said she had a thought she thought unworthy of sharing. "What is it, Helena?" he asked.

She shrugged, then pulled three of the photographs closer to her. "Not all of the pictures show the same level of detail," she said, "but all three of these women have these pale bumps on their skin, see? This one at her jaw, that one at her elbow, and that one on the back of her hand."

Wolcott looked and shrugged. "Indeed. Warts, I suppose. Women in their profession are tragically prone to…"

But Helena was shaking her head. "Not warts. Warts have a different texture to their surface and they tend to grow in clusters. These bumps are evenly-spaced. I read a study a few years ago… this looks like the skin irritation that can arise from arsenic poisoning. But if the bodies contained arsenic, it would have shown up in the testing."

Helena sat up straighter, then, and pressed her fingertips to her eyes. "It's as though something's inspiring an arsenic-like reaction in these different victims with different murderers, without leaving any kind of chemical evidence. Which is completely implausible, of course."

She leaned forward and began to gather the paperwork back into the file. Wolcott, brow furrowed, leaned forward to do the same.

"I'm sorry, Constable Wolcott," she said as she watched him slide the folder back into his bag. "I've given you nothing of use. Were I the investigator, I would attempt to discover what might have connected these different murderers that would have inspired these strange symptoms, but there's barely a thing to go on."

But Wolcott was smiling broadly, too broadly for a man who'd just spent hours poring over gruesome images of murder victims, Charles thought.

"On the contrary, Miss Wells," he said, "you've been extraordinarily helpful. Extraordinarily."

She smiled at him and shrugged, and Charles noticed her eyes weren't as dull as they'd been when he and Wolcott had arrived.

Now, sitting in the cab, Wolcott turns more fully to face Charles alongside him on the bench. Charles is tired, and Charles is bored, and while he appreciates the good the visit may have done for both Wolcott and Helena, he is keen to be allowed to sit in silence for a few moments.

But Wolcott won't have it. "What's she in Bedlam for, anyway?"

Charles huffs. "She's an invert," he says. "Perverting the minds and bodies of innocent young women, so my father said."

Wolcott furrows his brow at that. "But then how… how could she become… the baby?"

Charles rolls his eyes. "Damned if I know. She won't tell me."

Wolcott's energy tempers at this, much to Charles' relief. Charles settles against the opposite side of the bench and closes his eyes. The sound of the horses' hooves is soothing when he listens to it.

"You want her released," Wolcott says.

Charles grunts instead of saying "yes."

Wolcott's head tips forward, empathetic. "I don't have that kind of authority."

Charles shrugs. "You might, one day."

/

The following day, Wooley presents his new findings to his sergeant, who glances over the paperwork and sets it aside with a brief comment of "good work, Constable."

"But sir, different people are committing murders with the same oddities connecting them. Don't you think that's—"

"I said good work, Constable," the sergeant interrupts. "Back to your desk with you."

Wooley is annoyed. Infuriated, really. But he's never been one to disrespect authority quite so explicitly, so he takes his frustration back to his desk with him.

That night, Wooley returns to his flat before venturing out for his nightly pint. He deposits his satchel by the foot of his bed and turns to fetch the meal left for him by his landlady and nearly leaps fifteen feet in the air because there's a man in the middle of the room.

Wooley glances at the door to his room. It's still locked.

"Detective Constable Wolcott," the man says.

Wolcott can only blink. "Er—yes, sir?" he says, when he remembers to speak.

"Excellent work on the Ripper case," the man says.

"What are you doing in my room?" Wolcott asks, growing firmer now, a little more stable on his feet as he's recovered from the surprise.

The stranger takes a step forward, and then another. The floorboards creak loudly in the still room. "My name is McGivens," the man says, "and I'm here to offer you an invitation to endless wonder."

/

Charles has taken Wooley to visit Helena in Bethlem. Wooley seemed to benefit from it greatly, or at least to enjoy the conversation.

And then Wooley disappears.

A week passes, and Wooley never appears for their nightly pints at the Morlock's Arms.

Charles goes to visit Helena again. She's worse than he's ever seen her. Her braid is disheveled, her eyes dark and sunken. She is nearly silent as they stroll quietly through the garden on a day of glistening sunshine.

Her hand drifts up to pat a stray hair into place, and gravity pulls down on her sleeve. Charles' hand darts out of its own accord and grasps her forearm, pulling it out between them, so the deep shades of her bruised wrist twitches beneath their gazes.

"What happened, Helena?" Charles asks. But Helena merely tugs her hand away and pulls her sleeve down over her wrist. She shakes her head and looks down.

"Please don't bring your friend here again," she says, just before he leaves to return to South Kensington.

Charles pauses. "You seemed to enjoy him," he says.

Helena is tugging at her sleeves, fiddling with the buttons that keep them closed at the cuff. "He seems lovely," she says, "but I can't. . . the turning myself on again, and then having to remember how to shut off. I can't do it again."

Another week passes. Wooley does not appear at the Morlock's Arms. Charles resents him. No: Charles is coming to despise him, for taking sight of his family's greatest weakness and choosing to flee under its weight.

Charles' studies are suffering. His tutor has cautioned him regarding the potential repercussions of his declining performance.

Charles hates his studies, anyway.

He continues to go to the pub, alone. It is a small thing he can control in a life that feels like a carnival ride gone off its hinges.

And then, one evening Wooley shows up, out of nowhere. Behind him is an Indian man, older, shorter, balding, bearded.

"Charles!" Wolcott says, smiling, as he weaves his way through the tables, the older man following behind him.

Charles can bring himself to respond with naught more than a grunt.

"Oh, don't be like that, old chap," Wooley says, clapping him on the shoulder. "I've been transferred to a new division. I'm sorry I couldn't come to tell you."

"Well, bully for you," Charles says.

"Bully for me, indeed," Wolcott replies, and he's grinning, positively glowing. "Come sit at a table with us, over by the back. This is my new supervisor, Mr. Chaturanga. And we have a proposition to discuss regarding your sister."


Myka feels weird about these texts she gets from H.G.

They don't come often, fortunately, and she doesn't always respond to them. When she does, her answers are always inoffensive. She doesn't divulge any information about where she is or what she's doing. Most of the questions she answers have to do with modern life and the like: "What's the difference between a credit card and a debit card?" and "What exactly is the significance of the word 'hashtag'?".

One morning she wakes to two texts:

"Please tell me that science and medicine have caught up in knowledge to what women have always known about the nature of their monthly visitor"

"and have concurrently devised better materials for the management thereof."

Myka guffaws, still blinking awake in her bed, and responds with a series of messages that explain pads, tampons, Motrin, and where to find them.

They're all inoffensive questions and she provides inoffensive answers. And she doesn't tell Artie about it.

It's not that she trusts the woman. Far from it. It's… curiosity. And maybe a little, just a little bit, of hero worship, because H. G. Wells is writing words that are intended for her.

She looks forward to those texts even though she tries not to encourage them, these minuscule micro-treatises from her favorite author, but she finds herself needing to school her features when they come in, just like she did when she started dating Sam and they were both worried about what the rest of the team would think.

Her pocket buzzes. She pulls out her phone, swipes it awake and opens the message. There's a pull at the inside of her cheeks. A tug, like the pull of a grappler.

There's a post-it note tucked inside the front cover of her copy of The Time Machine.

/

Joey spots Keisha's fuckin' narc a mile away, walking down his sidewalk like it's her fuckin' sidewalk.

"Hey," he says, when she gets close. "You just keep walking, bitch."

So of course the fuckin' narc stops.

"I really don't see the need for such language, young man."

"Yeah, whatever," Joey sniffs. "Keep steppin."

"I'm looking for Keisha."

"I bet you are."

The bitch stops and stands there, arms crossed like a pissed-off schoolteacher.

"Keisha," she says.

Joey shrugs, then turns to go talk to Dawn who looks like she's about to start fuckin' withdrawing right there on the curb—

and something grabs his wrist and suddenly Joey's face-down on his own damn sidewalk with his wrist pinned to his back and this fuckin narc is kneeling on his back and he's just down, like some kind of damn pussy.

"Oh, bitch, you have no idea what you just did," he says, because he's not an idiot. He carries a gun, and she's kneeling on his back but he's got one hand free—

And, nope, she's got the gun now, took it right outta the back of his pants.

"There's a fee for that kinda touching around here," he says into the concrete.

"Where. Is. Keisha," the woman asks.

"Fuck off."

Then there's a click and Joey knows she's just flipped the safety off on his Glock, and then, yup, there it is, cold muzzle against the side of his jaw. Joey groans.

"Keisha," she says.

"I ain't her fuckin' keeper."

"I'm rapidly losing my patience with you, young man." She cocks the gun and he feels her lean down, close to him, her lips almost touching his ear. "I don't require a gun to kill you, but if you do not answer my question truthfully the next time I ask it, I will shoot you just for the satisfaction of watching the stain grow through this lovely blond hair of yours. So, one last time: Where. Is. Keisha."

And Joey's met his share of psychos in his life but this one takes the cake and he's not gonna fuck with that.

"I don't fucking know, man," he says. "Goddamn tranny bitch. After that tweaker buddy of hers kicked it, she was all down and shit, and nobody wants to hire a streetwalker who looks like someone just shot her dog, so I told her to step off. She use to have a place, like, six blocks that way." He points with his chin, as best he can, under the gun.

And the bitch gets off him. She steps back and he stands up, slow. His girls are just standing there, twenty feet away, watching.

"You got something to say?" he says, stepping toward them. Jewel shakes her head "no," Dawn just turns away, everybody else just looks down and tries to fake like they weren't watching in the first place.

But the fucking narc bitch still has his goddamn gun trained on him.

"Where does she live?"

Joey shrugs. "Sutphin and 115th, down that way. Second floor. I don't know which apartment, though."

It satisfies her. He watches as she flips the safety back on and then—

"Fuck that, man! That's my gun!"

She's tucking it in the back of her own pants.

"Is it?" she asks. "And I assume you have the paperwork to prove it."

"Fuck you."

"You're quite fond of that word. It's unbecoming a gentleman."

"Fuck you."

"I'd rather not." She's looking down the road toward Keisha's place, but now she looks back at him and damn if the look she's giving him isn't scarier than the feeling of the damn gun in his face.

"I have a particular dislike for individuals who abuse the bodies and intentions of young women," she says. "A person's choice of profession is her own and I have no moral concerns with the trade plied on this corner, but if I find that you have laid a hand on anyone, or sought to intimidate anyone into working in any capacity against her wishes, I will find you, and I will kill you, perhaps with your own pistol."

Joey straightens his shirt and lifts his hat to pull his fingers through his hair. "Yeah, man, whatever."

She slides her eyes away from him and now she's looking at his girls, over his shoulder. He's not going to look back to check on them. Not when she's got his gun. So he just watches her watching them, sees her nod. Then she turns away and starts walking.

He lets out a long breath. "Who the fuck says 'pistol,'" he says to himself. "Seriously."

/

When Keisha gets home in the morning she's not expecting to find Helena sitting at her kitchen table.

Keisha's standing in her kitchen doorway. Helena's got a glass of water and her legs crossed at the knee and she's just sitting there like she owns the room.

"Who let you in?" Keisha asks. "Chandra? Alex?"

"Alex, I believe," Helena says. "She's asleep. "

Keisha rolls her eyes. "What'd you pay her? Fifty? A hundred?"

"Seventy-five," Helena says, and shrugs. "Per her request, I've touched nothing but this glass of water and the chair I'm sitting in."

Keisha tips her head back, annoyed, and rolls her neck to one side, then the other. She realizes her mistake a moment too late; Helena is on her feet and holding Keisha's chin like she's a kid, turning her face to the side.

"Who did this to you?" she asks, soft and angry.

"Oh, come off it," Keisha says. She shoves Helena's hand out of the way and crosses the room to the freezer. With a Ziploc of ice pressed against her swollen jaw, she drops gracelessly into the other chair. Helena sits back down in the chair where she'd been sitting before.

"Somebody hurt you," Helena says.

"Shit happens," Keisha replies.

"I looked for you on your corner. You weren't there. I haven't heard from you in ages."

Keisha sits up straighter. "Before, I just thought you were weird. Now I think you're a fucking stalker."

Helena is quiet now. They are sitting on opposite sides of the small table, both with their back to the wall, so they don't have to look at one another. Keisha glances over and Helena is looking down, now, at her hands in her lap. She's made Helena feel bad and for a second she feels bad about it. But Helena had no right to show up at her house like this. She's off her tits if she thinks that overpaying for a weird, buddy-buddy night and day is supposed to make them friends.

But she relents a little anyway. "Look," Keisha says, "Things stopped working with Joey. I work with a different crew now. Dude's a little rougher than Joey and sometimes shit like this happens. It's okay. I been taking care of myself for two years. I got things under control."

Helena looks up and stares straight ahead like she's got x-ray vision through the wall over the kitchen sink. She pulls her fingers through her hair and it falls back to exactly the right place.

"I'd like to see you safe," she says. "I should have access to more money soon. What can I do to see you safe?"

And Keisha laughs, just once, harsh and thin. "I've heard that one before, from you."

Keisha knows she hurt her that time. She adjusts the ice pack against her face and doesn't look over.

Silence sits with them for a long moment.

"I'm sorry I couldn't arrange things quickly enough," Helena says. "I tried. I'd like to try again."

And Keisha's angry now because this is stupid, this is so fucked up, and who the hell does this woman think she is?

"Look, Helena," Keisha says. "This ain't my first rodeo. I met your type before, the ones who wanna be the great white hope that saves the little Black hooker. Only difference is, most of them want to 'save' me because they want to fuck me, or because they're religious types. You, you're trying to use me to fix something broken in yourself."

"And if I am?" Helena interrupts, growling. "Do you like this life? Working for a man who hits you?"

"What're you gonna do, Helena?" Keisha yells back. "You gonna put me up in an apartment in Brooklyn or some shit? Tell me to get a job as a check-out girl at a supermarket for six-fifty an hour, and then what? You gonna pay for me to get my GED and go to college? You gonna pay for my hormones and my surgery?"

"You shouldn't have to live like this," Helena bites out. "You're a child."

Keisha looks at her for a minute, then she's smiling and she doesn't even know how it happened, because duh, how didn't she see this before? "Oh," she says, "That's your thing. You got baby issues."

Helena's shaking her head no in that too-strong way that Keisha knows means she hit the nail on the head this time. "That's unfair," she says.

"Life's unfair," Keisha replies.

Keisha's jaw is starting to get numb so she goes to the freezer and puts the ice pack back on the shelf. She works the joint a few times, open and closed and side to side, and it moves better than it did before. The swelling's down a little.

When she turns around Helena is leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, looking down at the floor. Her fingers are tangled together, squeezing so hard the joints are white.

"Listen," Keisha says, crouching down in front of her. "What you're feeling—I get it. I do. But I'm going to keep living my life the way it works for me. This gig is okay. I don't hate it. Keeps me close to people I care about. Money's okay. In a couple months I think I can get a computer and then I can do things on Craigslist, maybe, get off the corner." She rests her hand over Helena's clenched fists. "But it's on me. It needs to be on me. It's not your responsibility. I can't be. I don't want to be. Okay?"

Helena sits up suddenly, like she's robot somebody just switched on. She pulls her fingers through her hair and flips it back behind her shoulders and then stands, fast and jerky.

"Very well," she says, and she sounds so British Keisha can't help but want to laugh. "I'll see myself out."

But Keisha walks her to the door anyway. "I think you should erase my number," she says.

Helena nods. She glances up at Keisha out of the corner of her eye, without lifting her head, and then steps out the open door into the hallway.

/

It's mid-afternoon and a woman is crying in a chain hotel room in Astoria. She's kneeling on the carpet, its coarse weave imprinting in her skin through her trousers, and she crouches over her hands, they hover beneath her face, as though she cannot even bear to touch herself with them. Her sobs filter through them as water filters through rocks in a fall.

Between her knees rests a gun, fully loaded, safety off. One side of it is polished smooth where it's spent day after day rubbing against the skin of its previous owner.

She is in the wrong place. She is in the wrong time. She has failed everyone she ever wanted to help.

She wants to end everything. Herself. Everything.

One claw-like hand stretches open, then closes into a fist, then opens again. It reaches for the grip of the gun, picks it up, feels how surprisingly light it is. Wonders if she should test-fire it into a stack of pillows to make sure it works, first. Decides not to bother.

She is shaking, the gun is shaking in her hand, when her cell phone vibrates in her pocket.

Only two living souls have this number. One just asked her never to contact her again. And the other never initiates contact.

She is intrigued. Intrigue is her greatest weakness. She pulls out the phone, reads the text message.

Bollocks, she thinks. Purposeful, now, she sets the gun back down on the carpet and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She pulls up the number on her phone and presses call.

It rings. Rings. Rings. And then stops, without going to voicemail.

Seconds later, the phone vibrates again. Another text message. She reads it.

Bollocks again, she thinks. She stands, tucks the phone in her pocket. She picks up the gun again and flips the safety on. Then she empties it of its bullets; a quick inspection reveals the extra bullet in the chamber and she pops that free, as well.

In her closet she finds a shoe-shine bag. After wiping the gun and bullets with a towel, she drops them into the bag and tucks it into her waistband.

She picks up her room key, and goes downstairs. There's an office for guests that has a computer; she should be able to use it to find the information she needs.

An hour later, after she's found what she needed, she walks two blocks down the road from the hotel until she finds a wastebasket on the curb beside a bus stop.

As nonchalantly as possible, she drops the bag with the gun inside.

/

The first thing Myka thinks, when she hears about Dickinson, is that it's her fault.

It's not rational. She knows it's not. Even as she sits on the edge of her bed, half-packed suitcase beside her, she knows that she should stop listening to her inner monologue, snapping back and forth like an angel and devil on her shoulders. The devil says you should have been there and he offered you the chance to go back and someone probably killed him to get to you.

Or to Pete, the angel answers. Or to Artie. It's not all about you.

She reminds herself of the number of times she's saved Pete in the year-and-a-bit she's been at the Warehouse.

Some other partner would have saved him, the devil says.

Like some other agent saved Dickinson? Like some other partner saved Sam? the angel retorts.

She looks down at her hands. They're shaking. There's a white shirt clutched between them; it flutters like a flag in a storm. Surrender.

Myka can hear Pete moving around across the hall, packing his things for the trip. She wants to cry. She wants to be held while she sobs through this, but he's got his own grief to carry and she can't ask him to hold hers, too.

She thinks about Leena, knows that Leena would take one look at her aura and wrap her in soft arms. But there's something… clinical about it, when Leena reads your aura and responds to it. She's motivated by observation, not empathy. And it comes from the right place—everything about Leena is warm—but it's not what Myka wants, right at this moment.

The shirt in Myka's hands is rumpled, now. She tosses it to the foot of the bed and goes to the closet for a crisp one, which she folds, carefully, and lays atop her slacks in the suitcase. She looks down at it a moment and suddenly a wet spot darkens its pristine surface. Then another.

Dammit. She wipes her eyes.

She doesn't notice she's doing it when she's doing it: she picks up her phone and sends a text message:

I just found out a good friend was killed. I'm trying to pack for the funeral and I'm a mess.

Just saying it helps, somehow. She stands, walks to her closet, and begins to gather the rest of the clothing she needs.

It's the first message she's ever sent to H.G. that wasn't in response to a message H.G. first sent to her.

On the nightstand, the phone begins to buzz. And buzz. And buzz. She walks over, clothing stacked between her palms, and looks down at the screen. It reads:

Call from

JACK GRIFFIN

No, Myka thinks. No. The texting is as far as she'll go. She will not talk to H.G. Wells, Warehouse enemy and all-around shady character, on the phone.

She drops her clothes onto the bedspread and slides the icon on over on the touch-screen to end the connection. Then she sends a text:

I think that's too far. But thanks.

She wipes her eyes with the back of her finger. She finishes packing. She pockets the phone and goes downstairs.

Two days later, the thing that surprises her most is her lack of surprise at seeing H.G. at the cemetery. But H.G., she learns, is a woman who knows a thing or two about loss. When she talks about her daughter her emotion seems forced, like she's an actress putting it on, and Myka understands that. She does, because she did that, too, with Sam. She knows what it feels like to turn off the faucet where your emotions pour out because otherwise you won't be able to stop overflowing with them. You turn it off, you make yourself numb, but people don't understand that numbness so you perform grief and tragedy overtop of the nothing that fills you completely.

This is what Myka sees when H.G. talks about her daughter.

At the hotel, that night, Myka finds the tracking device in her pocket, and laughs. She laughs and laughs, by herself, for the first time in days, for the first time since she got the call about Dickinson.

With a shake of her head, she flips the device off her thumb like a quarter, catches it, and pockets it again.

She doesn't know why she's doing it. She shouldn't do it. This is a really, really bad idea. She should tell Artie.

But she doesn't tell Artie, She just takes the tracker with her in the pocket of every different jacket she wears.

It gives me the upper hand, she thinks. She doesn't know that I know how she's following us.

Actually, she probably does.

In the airport, when they've got tickets to Moscow in hand and are walking toward security for international departures, she catches, out of the corner of her eye, a head of gleaming black hair. She pivots on her heel to look for it, but it's gone.

"What's up, Mykes?" Pete asks, one eyebrow cocked, his mouth full of airport bagel and cream cheese.

Myka shakes her head. "I just thought I saw… never mind."

He cocks an eyebrow at her. He knows something. She knows he knows. But he's a good friend, so he doesn't ask.