Hi, all. So I know I'm not the greatest at updating in anything resembling a timely fashion. Please forgive me. I also have to admit that unfortunately this story and I have estranged ourselves a bit and that I will be taking a break, but I will give you everything I've written thus far, which includes this and the next two chapters. Never fear: I will return. It's just a-wait for it-matter of time. Ha. I'm allowed to make puns about my own story, right? (Say yes).

As always, thanks for reading!

Side note: For those who are confused about the progression of the story and the times at which Magnus is switching between universes, I will say that unless I explicitly include a scene in which she is clearly dizzy or nauseated coupled with a dramatic scene alteration, then you may assume she is in the prime universe. I know I haven't been as clear as I could be about this, so I apologize if you're feeling a bit lost. Please bear with me, and I promise I will try to be clearer about this going forward. I plan to include a chapter that is more explanatory for the purposes of hopefully getting you caught up.


Though they had switched out incandescent for geothermal lighting, the wall-length spears, filtered off-white, had begun to blink and dance since Alandair had arrived. Now, as she, Tesla, and Druitt trailed Henry to his lab, these lights were dark in their sockets.

The only light filtering through the hallway was semi-natural, coming from the windows. Had the walls of her office not fostered three such windows, she might have noticed the power glitch significantly earlier.

Henry was walking fast and talking faster. "Okay, so, EMP's down, communications are down, security's down, and I'm still working on auxiliary. I can't even open the front door from here."

"Impossible," said Tesla.

"That's what I thought. But," Henry held a finger in the air, "not if our hacker is working from the inside. I tracked the location to somewhere within this sector, but I wasn't in my lab, and I couldn't finish the protocols on this dinky tablet before everything shut down."

"We're locked in?" asked Druitt.

"Looks like. You're not. But hey, I've got my new assistant down working on the generators."

"New assistant?" asked Magnus.

"Yeah, the fangoran you sent up after…" Henry stopped. "You…didn't send me a new assistant, did you?"

She shook her head. Accordingly, Henry gave a masterful performance of feeling stupid, grimacing at the ceiling and stamping a foot. "Damn it," he whined. "And I just…ugh."

"I think we've found our culprit," said Magnus, thinking it was just as well. With everything but the bare bones of her facility extinguished, there wasn't much she could do.

"Yeah, I'm on it," Henry muttered, still frowning. "Stupid, stupid…God, I'm so stupid."

Feeling charitable, Helen placed a hand on the small of his back. "It's alright, Henry. Why do you think someone would do this?"

"Uh, I don't know. Any number of reasons. If they're looking for something, this place is a treasure trove of secrets and information. You tell me."

"Perhaps not something," Tesla mentioned, "but someone."

Magnus exchanged a look with her peers. If someone with the resources and cognition to capture a pure-blood vampire had infiltrated the Sanctuary, then they had more than a problem.

"We need to act fast," she said, looking pointedly at Druitt. "This could get out of hand."

"Wait, you think they're here to steal Count Dracula?" asked Henry. They had reached his lab, and he quickly began booting things up. Before she could ask, he patted a box in the back corner. "I got this baby. External power source."

Not surprised, Helen nodded her assent. "Yes. Do you know where Will is?"

"I…think maybe I saw him in upper-level SHU. Sally's been having a rough time since we started boarding out to…well, you know."

"Alright. John, find Will. Tell him to send the Zilant to the other sectors, to warn them about the situation."

"The Zilant?" asked Henry.

"Small Persian dragon. Very intelligent."

"We have one of those?"

"Several. Henry, keep track of your 'assistant.' If you find anything, use John to let us know. Nikola, with me. The lock on the basement cell is electronic, and I fear we'll be dealing with more than one obstacle."

"Hey." Henry held up the source blood shield and tossed it to her. "If you're going down there, take this. It's not finished, but I think it'll work."

"Thank you, Henry."

She took Tesla by the elbow and steered him toward the door. She was reeling, running on fumes, and she almost jumped when Druitt caught her shoulder from behind. Her eyes landed on his, which gave her a clear idea of where this was headed. He was an array of remorse and reproach.

"Helen—"

"Don't. We'll continue our discussion once this is taken care of."

He considered her a moment, passive and silent, before extending a disdainful arm to Tesla. When the scientist yielded to the offer, Druitt rapidly seized his wrist and yanked each of his companions through a rift, tearing them through jagged nothingness and spitting them out, depositing them on their hands and knees on the base level before popping off again in short order.

Tesla groaned, rolling to his feet. "Good old Johnny."

Stomach still in knots for the lack of forewarning, Helen panted and took Tesla's hand as he offered it. She braced herself against him and huffed upright, trying to stifle a wave of nausea.

"Alright?" Tesla eyed her with something like wary concern, but she waved him off.

"Fine."

She led the way briskly into Alandair's room, shouldering through the door with fingertips grazing the butt of the pistol she'd tucked at her waist on the way to Henry's lab. Poised for a scuffle or a stand-off, she was taken aback to find Alandair standing placidly in the center of his room where they had left him.

The vampire's gaze glittered with interest as they rushed in, Tesla moving for the control panel to the inner room, and it made Magnus sick all over again to meet his eyes. After a short examination, Tesla stood back and said, "Hm."

"What is it?"

"The system failure tripped the lock. The door's open."

Immediately, she was on the defensive for a trap. "Alandair, I apologize, but the state of your containment and protection has been compromised. We have a situation here involving a criminal trespasser. Have you seen anyone?"

"I have not, inasmuch as I have not left this room. However, I was alerted to your circumstance by means of the inactivity of your systems."

"You knew the door was unlocked," Tesla remarked. "Why not leave?"

"I have more cause to stay than cause to leave. I am here in the interest of preventing the barriers between our universe and the next from dissolving, in that my ancestry shall not ascend to power."

Magnus crossed over to Tesla with the intention of restoring the lock, but got as far as glancing at the faint outline of digital controls in the glass before gasping and pitching forward. She realized too late why her nausea had not subsided, and Tesla seemed to realize with her.

"Damn it," he cursed and launched himself to grab her, but she never felt his hands meet her shoulders.

She stumbled across paved concrete instead of white tile, careening into the arms of someone who exclaimed "Mom!"

The single word raised every hair on her body.

It was too soon. Any minute of any day within the next million millennia would be too soon.

It was there that every instinct within her raged against her will to embrace the woman in front of her, and before she could catch herself she looked up. She choked. "Ashley…"

"Yeah…?"

She was speechless and could only shake her head, heaving in air that wasn't hers and strangling on it. Her voice was what did it, what sealed in the agony and the empty thirst. It was her breaking point. It was past the extent of every limit in her body.

In dire shock, still dizzy, and bitterly exhausted, Helen plunged for the door, letting it slam behind her and walking away, she didn't care where, more and more unglued with each slamming step. She was only vaguely aware of the several voices calling after her.

For over two centuries she had given the universe its due, she had respected its rules and played by them, used them, and even invented a few—it was the birthplace of her every discovery, of her every interest, of everyone she had ever loved—and she had never hated it so intensely.

Once was enough. In fact, twice had almost broken her. But to lose her daughter continuously, over and over, every time she was tossed here and then wrenched back… Helen grappled with the closest object, a vase, and flung it, kicking back and hurling it until it smashed against the farthest wall.

Seeing Ashley again, and not only seeing but touching her, feeling her softness, hearing her voice, breathing her in…knowing that she was alive and real, but that for Helen, she could never exist… Every feeling was brought back as fresh and as raw as the day she'd lost her.

She had not noticed the approaching footfalls. A pair of hands connected with her arms, gently restraining her. Wild with emotion, breathless and boiling over, she whirled and lashed out, connecting a solid strike against the cheek of Nikola Tesla.

Against her assault and her violent hatred, he remained unmoved. Tesla felt of his face where she had struck him and did not flinch.

"I think you can do a little better than that, don't you?" he provoked.

She took the bait. It did not take much. She turned on him without reservation because she knew she could. She aimed a blow for his jaw, clocked him and felt his lip split between her knuckles and his teeth. Another smeared his blood across his nose. She besieged him, and he neither dodged nor fought back. She punched, kicked, kneed and clawed with all the vicious desperation of an animal, forgetting her karate, her judo, her jujitsu—but she could not fight faster than he could heal.

Helen danced over him and hurled into him, taking his balance and slamming him to the floor. She hammered into his chest, his face, his sides, and felt every connection of every rock-hard impact in her bones, but by the last blow he was straightening his nose and cracking his neck. She clutched fistfuls of his collar and dragged, hauling him up and smashing him into the wall where his head thumped, but she was running out of steam.

She slammed him again, weakly, before finally grinding to a stop. Still clenching his collar, Helen bowed her head into his shoulder and they collapsed, sagging to the floor with her weight. Her face was streaked, and she started to feel a splitting ache in the rawness of her fists as the roaring in her head died down. Her right wrist throbbed the worst, where she had caught the brunt of Druitt's earlier punch.

"Told you," Tesla coughed, wheezing a little. "You could do better than that."

Gasping to fill her aching lungs, she turned her face into her hands and groaned at the mess of it all. She was in pieces, and so was he.

Tesla stretched and sighed, flexing fresh muscles and sounding satisfied. He tugged her into him as she continued to put herself together, taking advantage of how she crumpled into his tattered, untucked shirt to pat at the top of her hair.

"You're allowed a breakdown every hundred or so years, right?" She felt his voice through his chest and tried to push him off.

"Nikola, I'm not in the mood." Her voice was hoarse.

"On the contrary." He raised his eyebrows at her, daring her to say otherwise. "Helen…take your time. The world can wait."

"No, it can't." She bolted upright, but he held her down.

"Yes. It can. The savoir of the universe is not a woman in the course of a nervous breakdown."

At this, she considered him. Though all of his features were intact—no bruises, no inflammation, no disfiguration, and only the barest of scrapes—stripes of browning red glinted up at her from his nose down to his chin, curving inward at the corners of his mouth. Past his lips, she saw pink in his teeth. His eyes, trained up on her, were bloodshot.

Suddenly, surprising even herself, she flared. "You have no idea who I am."

He didn't—because she had no idea about him, either. Helen thrust herself upwards, away from him, and faltered unsteadily in the direction she presumed to be her bedroom. He did not follow her, but she could feel his eyes on her back.

It was as Alandair had said; she was only a composite of her history and her experience, none of which had she shared with the Nikola Tesla of this timeline. He had willingly allowed her to beat him into the ground for the sake of her own peace of mind, which was not, to her knowledge, a very even-handed course of action. It played too close to feelings like guilt and devotion when she had never known Tesla to be a martyr to anything but his own work.

This was a new Tesla: one which she had no idea how to handle. This was a new universe, and it terrified her.

Helen found her way into a hot shower and scrubbed until her skin was raw. Alone with herself, she felt shame. She had lost control. She had lost sight of her own principles and had traded holistic temperance for short-sighted indulgence. Unthinking, she had unleashed the intensity of her misgivings not just on Tesla, but on her daughter, too. It was the same thing she'd done to John—the same thing that had seemingly landed her in this catastrophic pain in the arse.

When she had toweled herself dry and recovered a robe, she did not bother to hunt down fresh clothing; she would only be leaving it behind in some number of minutes or hours. Still shaky, she sank into a chair at what would be her fireplace and closed her eyes.

Ashley was dead. Her father was alive.

Her Sanctuary was in jeopardy. So was the world.

She contemplated these things and the connections between them, feeling weary and out-of-place. It would be easier to reach the ground-zero for Adam's time manipulation device in her own timeline, but she couldn't risk leaving during a crisis. Perhaps because the device was on enemy territory here, it might be better off. Kill two birds with one stone. No matter the gravity of her situation, she had to take advantage of what she could.

She didn't realize she'd been asleep until she felt a tap on her shoulder. With some modicum of grace, she managed to start up and glare, but she wasn't quite sure how threatening she could look in a bathrobe.

Tesla came around the back of her chair and set a platter of tea in front of her. "I knocked, but you didn't answer."

His eyes drifted down to where the fabric of her robe had slipped down, exposing a shoulder. She pulled it up. "Thank you, Nikola."

It was his cue to leave, but he didn't take it. Almost expectantly, he perched on the chair across from her, and she sighed.

"I'm sorry," she told him, knowing he wouldn't leave until she said so. "For the way I acted. It was unfair."

"Yes, I thought you'd think so. But that isn't why I'm here."

She stopped, suddenly unsure. Different Tesla, different motives…but perhaps not different hazard. "Why are you here?"

He took in her skepticism and seemed to deflate. "Believe it or not, I'm here for your benefit." With the barest movement of the wrist, he nudged the tea platter towards her, causing the cups to rattle in their saucers.

She accepted a cup, and he continued.

"I think you'll find I'm not so difficult once you get to know me." She wanted to counter that by saying she did indeed know him all too well, but that would be a lie. "Of course, that depends on whether or not you want to get to know me."

"Do I have a choice?"

"Certainly."

"Isn't there a war?"

"All the more reason. Know thyself. Know thine enemy. In this case, it's all very much related. Considering we're…comment se dit paramours, I should know best how to tell you what you need to know."

"That isn't exactly objective."

"Not much is, these days."

"What is it that you intend?"

Within a limited time span, there was only so much she could learn that she didn't already know or at least suspect. It seemed like grasping at straws, but she'd take what she could get.

"Here's the fun part—ask me anything."

"Don't be so drastic." There were better uses for their time than a game of twenty-questions.

"Come on, Helen. You don't think you're going to spring on over to vampire central and poke around at a few time-gadget fuses without knowing what you're up against, do you? We're all fighting the good fight, but that won't matter unless you stop the universes from overlapping and expanding, which you can't do unless you know how this works. Whatever's going on in your side of town, that won't matter either. So again, ask me anything. Believe me, if you don't trust me, this isn't going to end well."

She leaned back and took a sip of tea, thinking it over. He had a point. But trust or no, Helen wasn't sure this would end well anyway.