Now that Jayden had a model to work from, he started making progress in fits and starts. His first few attempts at scanning with his new settings were amateurish, picking up one chemical or another at a time, but by the end of the day, he was confident that he understood now how to do most of what he needed on his own. He thanked Miller with sincere enthusiasm.

The stocky agent shot him a sly grin. "You're not doing anything after this, are you? I want to show you something really cool. Come on, we're going to the Metro."

"I've got my car here," Jayden said, helpfully.

Miller rolled his eyes. "Just come with me. You do not want to take your car, trust me."

They headed over to the Federal Triangle train station, and Miller led the way down to the blue line. Jayden was firing questions at him, hardly tracking their progress.

"How do you keep it from reading the air?" Jayden was trying to see Miller's ARI settings again in his mind's eye. "Like, telling you there's oxygen around you all the time?"

"Oh, yeah, I fucked that one up pretty bad in like the third week of training. Blacked out so fast at the overload I didn't even have enough time to hurt my brain. I've mostly got it set to look for anomalies, is how. It does still read the air, but it only tells me when there's something weird around, like chemicals from a meth lab. Hell, I guess I could find gas leaks with my ARI, if I wanted to."

They changed trains, headed east. Jayden finally interrupted his own stream of questions about the ARI to ask a different one: "Where are we going?"

"Ivy City."

". . . why the fuck would we go to Ivy City? I can see muggings in my own neighborhood, if I want to." It wasn't that Jayden was frightened of going there, but he couldn't imagine why they would want to head to one of the more notoriously dangerous areas of DC.

"There's a spot I know about that I think you'd like to check out," was Miller's evasive reply.

"What, like a nightclub?" Jayden vaguely remembered hearing that there were some there. "I'm not really a . . . clubbing kind of guy."

The other man snorted. "No shit. Actually, some of those clubs would be pretty interesting places to use ARI, too, especially the strip joints, but that's not what I'm thinking of."

Eventually, Miller motioned that it was time to get off the train; the two agents walked for blocks until the shorter man jerked with recognition and led the way up the steps onto the front porch of a shabby house. Strips of yellow police tape hung brightly across the porch, and Jayden followed Miller in vaulting over them and sidling through the front door and its splintered frame. The sunlight was beginning to fade, but nothing happened when Miller flicked the light switch inside.

"I forgot they would have turned the power off since I was here last," he grumbled. "That's all right. We don't really need it. This might even be better without it."

"What the hell happened in here?" Jayden wondered aloud. The place was clearly vacant, but showed apparently recent signs of both occupation and destruction. There were battered milk crates upended at odd intervals along the floor, empty food wrappers, smashed bottles, splintered boards.

"It was supposed to be a minor drug bust that turned into a meltdown. There was a lot more stuff moving through here than they thought. See that wall? Those are bullet holes. I've got a buddy in the Metro police department who tips me off whenever something interesting shows up so I can come check it out, and this place . . . well, maybe you'll see. This is something you're going to want to use my ARI for, since yours isn't set up for it, really." Miller held his glasses out, and Jayden took them, wrinkling his nose at what smelled like cat urine in the hallway. "Come on, the living room's the best."

"Best what?"

"Remember how I told you the lab was unusual because there were so many traces of different chemicals in it? This place is something else again, entirely. Take my ARI, stand in the middle of the room, and start scanning it. Just so you know, I've got it set to send up warning flags for illegal substances when it spots them. You'll see what they look like when they pop up. You'll see them everywhere. If you don't feel up to it, you don't have to, but . . . you should really see it."

Jayden had been working fairly intensely with his own ARI all afternoon, but making it unscathed through his earlier experience with Miller's gave him confidence. Also, his curiosity was whipping him forwards, hard. "I think I'm good." Jayden stepped to the middle of the room, pulling on Miller's glasses; his view of the dim room became even darker. He popped his knuckles, cracked his neck from side to side, and grasped for the floor with his gloved hand. He'd expected the branches to spring up around him again, but not the joyful explosion of color that came with them. "Oh my god," he gasped, "It's beautiful."

". . . I would have gone with 'badass,'" Miller's amused voice trickled into his ear, "But okay." Jayden gave himself over entirely to what he was seeing.

The floor had become a mosaic of glimmering shards fit to rival anything Jayden had ever seen in a museum: shades of red, orange, gold, green, blue, purple. Most of the molecular trees around him contained a small tinted banner that matched the color of each one's origins on the floor. Jayden pulled one towards himself, grinned incredulously at what he found there, and then snatched another. The first blue one he grabbed indicated traces of a Schedule IV barbiturate, and that shining golden banner hung from a molecular chain rising up from a Schedule II swirl of cocaine. Miller had color-coded his indicators of illegal drugs, and what he'd called his "flags" now both hung in the air around Jayden and beamed from the floor in the middle of that battered room. The trees without flags indicated the more mundane elements on the floor, like the clumps of organic tracings that might be blood or urine. Without moving, Jayden flicked his gloved hand out towards the space in front of him, and it lit up, too, sprouted trees of its own. He did it again, slightly off towards one side, and that part of the room sprang to life. It was as though he had a magic wand, as though he were bringing springtime. Slowly, he turned, only vaguely registering the other man's presence, as Jayden transformed the entire room into a crazy riot of color. The green was everywhere, everywhere, and the other colors shimmered in it like jewels.

Jayden was drowning in a stained-glass window made of chemistry and shadow. He drowned forever.

Abruptly, it all disappeared; he felt the glasses being pulled from his face. The dim room started to slowly blur back into focus, and Jayden blinked at it, confused. His lungs felt like they were being squeezed. "Shit. Come on, Norman," he heard in his ear, and realized with shock that Miller was . . . hugging him, very hard.

"I, uh," Jayden stammered, and tried to push himself away. His hands didn't cooperate well.

"You hear me now? Help me out, here," came the response. "You're falling down. Come on, stand up. Can you get your legs straight?"

". . . no." As the different parts of his body started talking to his brain again, Jayden realized with growing horror that most of them felt like they were made of floppy cloth. It wasn't an affectionate embrace he was feeling; Miller's arms were just the only thing keeping Jayden off the floor. He clumsily tried to grab at the other man for support now, started to creep his hands around Miller's shoulders like unsure spiders. His heart began to pound. "No. Help."

"Okay, buddy. Okay, hang on." Miller, surprisingly strong, was shifting Jayden's torso in his arms like a sack of potatoes to get leverage. "Keep talking to me. Keep calm. What's wrong?"

"I w-w-w-" Jayden squeezed his eyes shut; his vision hadn't come back all the way, anyway, so it wasn't helping to keep them open. He tried to shift all of the tension away from his tight chest and into his legs to help hold him up. It worked, a little. "Want to wash m-m-my f-f-f-f-"

"I get you. Bathroom?" Jayden nodded, then immediately regretted it as he lost his balance in consequence. Miller hoisted him straight again. "Let's get you to the bathroom."

Miller started walking cautiously backwards, arms locked hard around Jayden's ribcage, half-dragging the taller agent who was trying to stumble slowly along forwards with him. Jayden, panting, let himself be hauled along.

"Calm down, Norman," Miller counseled, grunting as he readjusted the other man's weight again. "Slow down. Gonna sit you down on the toilet here. You gonna stay up on your own?"

He was lowering Jayden downwards to the closed lid, trying to get him braced against the tank. Jayden didn't bother to answer, but, eyes still closed, started trying to transfer his grip from Miller's shoulders to anything in arm's reach he could grab onto for stability. The trouble he was having talking was new, terrifying, and he was fighting against breaking into that frightened wheeze that he knew would make things worse.

"Oh, shit, of course there's no running water, they cut that off, too. Ah, fuck. Okay. Okay, I got it." Hands were grabbing at his ribs again, and Jayden was being hauled sideways on the toilet lid. "Hold on to the sink, here, buddy." Miller helped him drape his arms across it so he could use gravity to prop himself up. "This is gonna be a little gross, but not that bad."

There was the sound of ceramic scraping, and a thud, and then the cool relief of wet cloth being passed across Norman's face. He grabbed anxiously for it.

"Hold on," Miller's voice cautioned from above him. "You've got yourself a nosebleed. Let me clean you up a little here, and then I'll soak it again." Miller dabbed at his mouth and nose for a bit while Jayden trembled. "Shit, I wish the lights worked." Eventually, he pulled the cloth away, and put it back into Jayden's hands a few seconds later, sopping wet. Jayden spread it across his whole face, focused on the crisp sensation. Though it wasn't as much as he wanted, it still gave him back his breath, steadied him.

"Again?" Miller asked cautiously, and re-soaked the cloth for him when Jayden nodded. Finally, he peeled back his eyelids again. At first, Jayden thought he was still partially blinded, then he realized it was just dark in the small bathroom.

"I can see," he said. He made himself speak slowly, deliberately, so his mouth would cooperate. "I can see okay. Can I have a drink?"

"Uh, no, better not. I dunked my handkerchief in the toilet tank. It's pretty clean water, but not drinkable. You sound like you're breathing a lot better. I want to get you out of here and go somewhere safer. Do you think you can stand up?"

"Maybe." Miller hauled up at him, but they only made it out the bathroom door before Jayden wobbled so disastrously that Miller slid him down the wall to sit on the floor.

Miller sounded like he was starting to panic, now: "Shit, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have had you spend so long in my ARI. I fucked up. I don't know what to do. How bad do you feel? I'd go get my car, but this is a bad, bad place to leave you alone like this."

Jayden was trying to figure out something he could hang onto. It took him a while to slur all the words out: "My head feels better. But nothing's working right. I've got to lie down, Andy."

"Listen, Norman. I can't just call a regular ambulance."

"I know." He let his head loll against the wall. He was struggling to coordinate talking and sitting up, never mind thinking of a solution to their situation.

"Do you want me to call Eric? Belasco? He could send someone. Or come himself."

"No." Jayden was instantly agitated again, now began pushing futilely at the floor to try to heave himself off it. "What we d-d-d-did is ih, ih, ih, ih, illegal." He wasn't sure if that was the word he meant, but it was close. "Can't get da-da-da-da-thrown out. Of the p-p-p-p-" He couldn't quite manage program as his hands scraped at the carpet.

"Shit." Miller was grabbing at him again, got an arm snaked around Jayden's back for support. "Okay. Relax. Deep breaths. I – shit. Okay, one second. Just, seriously, get your fucking head together."

Jayden was changing gears once again, trying to grip the wall. "I will." It was a vague promise.

"Here." Miller had wrapped one hand around the back of Jayden's disobedient head as it bobbed on his neck, was pressing something else gently under the limp man's nostrils. "Little snort. Just a little. Like nasal spray. It'll help."

Jayden, panting again, disoriented, shut his mouth and snorted. He jerked against the wall as his illogically responding brain went through a totally new set of readjustments and

And

And then

Nothing was ever the same again.