Between Minds

by 3theCaptain

After surviving her battle with GLaDOS, Chell wakes in Aperture Science and makes another escape attempt. Meanwhile, after his ordeals through City 17, Gordon wakes at White Forest and tries to recover the Borealis and Judith Mossman... Or at least, that was the plan. The unexpected throws Chell, Gordon, Alyx, and Barney down paths toward inevitable consequences.

10. Dynamic Equilibrium

Dynamic Equilibrium

A little knock interrupted the counselor's thoughts. She shuffled papers across her desk and said, smiling, "Come in!"

It took a few slow seconds for a shaggy, near-red head of hair to poke around the door, followed by a pair of wide green eyes. The child entered the room and hopped up onto an empty chair on the other side of the desk, swinging his legs in unison.

"Now," she gave him her well-practiced stern look, "is there something you want to tell me?"

He glared into the carpet and shook his head.

Her lips pursed into a point. "Mr. Shultz told me you cheated on your quiz today."

"I didn't cheat." His head was still facing the floor, but his hand balled up into an adamant fist. "I didn't!"

"Now, now," she soothed, "there's no need to get upset. He heard you tell your friend you didn't study, and you got every answer right. I understand it can be hard, but cheating -"

"I just - remembered it!" Angry tears were welling up in his eyes. "I don't know, I just did. I looked at it and my eyes took a picture and I remembered it."

"Really?" Her eyebrows knotted together. Her fingers tapped the desk as she thought. On a whim, she rifled through a drawer and pulled out an old Polaroid. "Look at this. I want you to take a picture of it with your eyes, just like you did with the test."

She watched the boy hold one corner of the picture as his eyes widened and flitted back and forth across the surface, his face an eerie blank slate.

Then he was done. He handed it back and she held it up to her eyes, its back to him so he couldn't see. "Alright. Tell me, what was in the photograph?"

"A house."

"Good," she nodded. "And how many people are there?"

His eyes stared at something invisible in front of him, as though the photo were still there. "Four. And a wolf."

"That breed is called a husky. What color are its eyes?"

"Left one brown, right one blue."

"How many windows does the house have?"

Chubby little fingers counted them out. "Nine."

"What does the tall man's shirt say?"

He squinted. "I can't pronounce it."

"Spell it, then."

"A. G. S-C-A-B-E-I-O-U-E-I-G-H."

She laughed in disbelief, setting the photo back down. "I'm sorry Mr. Shultz accused you of cheating, sweetheart. You can go back to class now. I think I'll make a quick call to your parents."

"Am I in trouble?"

"No, no. In fact, I think they'll be proud of you."

As he opened the door to leave, she cooed, "You have a rare gift, Gordon. You should feel blessed."

---

"Hands in the air!" The distorted bellow of an Overwatch soldier barked at him just as the last wisp of energy from his teleportation faded. "Now!"

Gordon obliged like moving through water, but his mind sprinted. A ring of soldiers surrounded the small chamber he'd arrived in, a tall cylinder of clear material; an automated system raised it into the ice blue dome of a ceiling. More held their guns at the ready in clusters around the room, which was spacious, circular, and walled entirely by windows gazing out on a vast white expanse. The suddenness of teleportation still jarred him: there was no getting used to it.

Shit. Fifteen in total. Most were in standard armored uniforms the color of soot with blue goggles embedded in their gas masks, but one, two - three were Elites: white armor, their masks defined by a single, giant red lens. The entire Overwatch was known for its efficient brutality, but the Elites were better equipped, better trained, better programmed.

"Step out of the chamber." One of them beckoned him forward. "Slowly." The Elite's words, like the rest of the Overwatch, were a warped growl. Inhuman.

Double shit. The ring of soldiers around him constricted as time caught up to him; they pressed the barrel of a gun into the nape of his neck and confiscated his weapons - even his gravity gun and crowbar - with rough movements, shuffling him across the room.

"Anticitizen One contained," one of them barked into a handheld radio.

"Good," the response came. It sounded like the Dispatch voice Gordon had heard drifting off odd broadcasts and APCs, its pathological efficiency never faltering. But this didn't sound like a simple computer repeating recordings. This was... awake. "Escort him to the Supervisors and await further orders. If he is ever with less than a ten-man guard you will, every one of you, answer to me."

The cylindrical portal chamber lowered back to the floor. Flashing lights came to life around the circular room as the hum and grind of the machinery sped up.

"Another incoming transmission, Consul." The Elite again. "What should we do with who comes through?"

The world stopped. Alyx's final words echoed back to him: I'll be right behind you, Gordon! He could see her, less than a minute ago, with her fingers crossed for luck and giving him a particular smile. She had no idea what was waiting for her.

"Cauterize. Disinfect," the voice clipped, and the radio fell silent.

Gordon's guards began ushering him across the room. His head was down in a facade of submission, but in reality he tensed, felt energy build up in his limbs, and waited for the soldier on his left - the one that stood between him and a long row of counters which could serve as cover - to slip up. The mechanical humming of the incoming transmission hitched up an octave, and the troop glanced aside for a fraction of a second.

Too long. Gordon's armored shoulder tackled into kevlar, and in the same motion he wrenched the pulse rifle from the soldier's hands. With a tap of its secondary trigger he launched a dark energy sphere, which bounced from one troop to another like a pinball, disintegrating them into clouds of sparks as he ran for cover.

Gunfire behind him felt like a drum solo of full-force punches to his back. His shield glimmered like an electric aura around him; although it deflected the path of the bullets into wide arcs, it channeled some of the opposing force into himself.

Throwing himself behind the waist-high controls, he knew he only had moments, which meant a choice. He could get to the doors and escape, help out Dr. Mossman, do the whole Borealis-hero thing. Or he could do - he didn't know, something - to keep the Combine from getting Alyx with her stupid headband and her damn smile -

He made a sound of pure exasperation - mostly with himself - and slipped a hand into the compartment at the small of his back to pull out an orange-splattered canister. You didn't take my grenades, you fuckers! It flew in a curve through the air, then shattered the tall cylindrical portal chamber in an orb of flame.

Amid the thunderstorm of approaching boot falls, he saw to his relief not a single wisp of blue energy in the teleporter: only green. The transmission hadn't started. Thank god, he thought, and something hard cracked against the back of his skull.

Triple shit.

---

Chell didn't consider herself a poetic person. Thinking up pretty ways to describe something was a waste of mental energy, energy better spent solving puzzles and fighting giant robots. So when the mouth of the vortex snapped its jaws around her and shut out the ambient light of the Aperture Science dry dock, she didn't bother trying to articulate the experience to herself. In fact, she took every part of it - her molecules separating like a pile of sand hitting concrete, her consciousness as suspended as her disbelief - and tucked it away into the little folder in her brain she kept all the other redacted information of her life.

So she wasn't a poetic person. But it turned out she didn't have to be, because when she felt a solid surface under her back and opened her eyes, she found herself in the mundane-est of the mundane situations.

Chell awoke in a wheat field.

The earth beneath her was... warm. And scratchy from undergrowth. Tall, untended stalks of wheat swayed and whispered secrets in the breeze. The sun sighed heat onto her from a sky that particular shade of blue you could just get lost in - there were even goddamn birds chirping. The world was, in short, one big gold glow of summer.

What the actual fuck.

"Hey! You there!"

Leaning her head, her adjusting eyes watched a limping silhouette of an approaching person.

"Wait a minute, now, aren't you - how'd you drift all the way out here?"

Something tickled her wrist - a bug was crawling over her bare skin, exactly where her wrist strap should be.

And then a sound she hadn't heard in a long time: her own voice, from her own lips.

"This is a dre-"

Her eyes snapped open - but weren't they already open? - somewhere completely different, somewhere dim, manmade, and cold. This time, she wasted no time leaping to her feet, even if the blood drained from her head. The navy spots on her vision disappeared, and she realized how ridiculous the dream had been: she may have recently fallen through a wormhole after helping a wizard and a little girl possessing a demon, but wheat? Nah, that was just silly.

This new room was a dome of plaster and concrete, near empty save for two waist-high consoles along the walls, a few scattered chairs, and a - whoa. Aiming down from the ceiling was some stalactite-like device, its surface all coppery and its point shooting off arcs of electricity like a Tesla coil.

Chell's heart dropped into her toes. This was some sort of experiment.

"Oh my god!"

The world wasn't entirely still yet, but she could make out two figures, each with an alarmed expression and each approaching her. The image swayed, but one symbol stood out to her: one of the figures had an orange lambda symbol painted on their clothes.

She took the warmth, the hope that spread through her at the sight of other people, and dumped a bucket of cold cynicism on it. Human didn't mean good, and human didn't mean bad, but these humans were peering at her like scientists at a rat in a maze.

And she was not doing that shit again.

There were two exits: an arched steel door on one side of the dome and a pair of white double doors at the other. The latter looked more promising, so made two quick shots of her portal gun: a blue mass above the double doors, an orange puddle at her feet, and -

The portal energy splattered and dissipated against the surfaces. Nothing happened.

"Hey, wait!"

Whatever the walls and floor were made out of, they didn't support portals. So she ran. She dragged the pair of doors open and a moment later freezing wind hit her like a battering ram.

The world stretched out in front of her, a godforsaken Antarctic wasteland. So very high up, the sky was coated in clouds so smooth and thick that she thought if she'd been able to reach it, she could rap her knuckles against it like marble. The force of pure animal intuition was almost enough to push her back into the relative warmth of the testing room, but Chell was a force of nature all her own. With a surge of willpower, her long fall boots crunched into the top layer of snow one after the other and didn't stop until she'd reached a landmark.

Leaning against a violent, upward jut of ice was a long-abandoned military tank, its canon glaring at the sky and its back hatch lolling open on the ground like the tongue of a corpse.

The cold soaking into her hair and clothes, she slipped through the hatch and, finding the space low enough she had to duck, curled up as tightly as she could into a corner on the floor. Every inch was crammed with hatches, periscopes, incomprehensible and long-dead controls. Time had turned the interior into a wintery cave; the cushion of the bench against a wall had frozen into a solid block and icicles drooped from a series of tubes on a rack.

Shivers turning into hard shudders, she tucked her entire body into one of the uniforms: a thick, padded one-piece jumpsuit designed for the cold, the mottled camouflage pattern an assortment of white, grey, and blue. Her fingers, prodding the cushy fabric, traced out what felt like ceramic plates across the chest, back, and arms.

As heat spread from her torso... to her limbs... to her fingers, her mind started working better. The personality sphere was scanning the room with its large white eye.

'u cold?' Chell scrawled into the panel on her wrist strap. It was more difficult through the glove, but at least it worked.

"Aperture Science technology," the sphere responded in its moderated GPS voice, "remains fully functional from 2 to 4000 Kelvin, approximately the range from the background temperature of space to the base of the Earth's mantle."

She raised her eyebrows at it.

The white eye darted to the side, too professional for an eye roll. "No, I am not cold."

'date?' she scrawled.

"No thank you."

That made her laugh. Shaking her head, she tried, 'day? year?'

"My internal clock has not automatically adjusted. To change date and time settings in the event of societal collapse, point my unit at the night sky so I might determine the passage of time by the change in constellations. If, in the future, the stars are A) dead, B) stolen, or C) sentient, please disregard these instructions."

Chell watched her breath suspend in little puffs in front of her face; it was clear she'd get nothing useful out of the personality construct. Unless...

'reiner317'

"Password invalid. Please keep in mind all administrative passwords are case-sensitive."

'REINER317'

"Password inva-"

Her index finger flicked a loose chunk of ice and it plinked against the iris, which made the sphere ignore Chell for a while.

This place sounded strange. Sure, there was the background murmur of wind, but you can always hear that if it gets quiet enough. Here, the ice would groan and crack at its own continental pace and, after a few minutes of silence, deep booms or the crackle of gunshots like a remote battle, barely audible across the distance.

Probably not a good idea to stick around.

Numerous scales, small and vast, tilted and re-aligned themselves in Chell's mind. On the one hand, taking care of herself all on her own was a proven system. It worked. No need to involve other people when they'd just rope her into their own drama. On the other hand, she wasn't overly fond of the prospect of dying, which looked pretty likely in this setting. If there were people this deep into the middle of nowhere, they must have transportation.

And then there was that symbol. Back in Aperture when she'd been escaping, she'd found that strange turret with a flickering light, which had spoken to her of things she didn't understand. It had said to watch for the lambda, and, well, here it was.

So what, out of all the pros and cons, the final vote comes down to a deranged turret? Is that really the deciding straw?

Off in the distance, gunfire erupted.

Yes. Yes, it is.

---

Whatever her feelings on other people, the warmth of the testing room was more than welcome. Her gaze was so locked onto the floor as she entered that the only thing she could see was the giant red '2' on the floor. Gathering her courage, she met the pair in the eye and forced herself to not look away.

A white woman. A black man. Both appeared older than herself, the woman more so. She held a bearing Chell recognized and immediately distrusted: calculating. Her chin was raised and eyes narrowed as though trying to determine whether milk had soured or not. Other details blurred past: her hair, auburn, was held in a large clip to frame a pale, ageing face while large hands held a tablet computer.

The man's eyes were more trustful, or at least less distrustful. He could be any random person passing in the street, but the slouch to his shoulders and the way he stood turned slightly to the side hinted he was a long sufferer, and survivor, of hardship. He wore a tattered blue jumpsuit and a Kevlar vest packed with ammo, and -

He had a gun. Not like an Aperture turret which just spat out whole cartridges with high air pressure, but a real, actual, gun. This was a horrible idea I should have stayed in the tank - but she dragged her gaze back up to his. Scars or dark freckles lined the bags under his eyes.

"So..." He broke the silence with a warm, if authoritative, voice. "Do you speak or something?"

She considered it, she really did. But something caught the words before they could form in her throat, and a slew of excuses came to mind: out of practice, waiting for the right moment, cards close to your chest, and, other than the vague sense that a long time ago she had spoken, the quiet assurance that she had always done it this way.

Well, do something at least. She locked up her facial expression and body language into the most neutral and confident she could manage; she just dragged a chair over to a grate sighing hot air into the room and plonked down, rubbing her hands.

They glanced at each other.

The woman came into Chell's field of view, though she didn't look up from blowing onto her fingers. Her eyes slid, not unkindly, over the features in Chell's face: near-black straight hair, sandalwood skin, tilted eyes. "Maybe she doesn't speak English?" she suggested.

Chell's responding glare was virulent enough to make the man chuckle.

"I'm thinking she knows what we're saying just fine," he said.

This isn't working. Just as she wracked her brain for a method of communication, the personality sphere at her hip blinked. Of course.

"Where am I?" the sphere repeated what Chell scrawled into the panel of her wrist strap. "What happened?"

"Oh, what a relief," the woman chuckled, a hand to her chest.

"You're in the Arctic," the man explained. "There's probably a prettier way of putting it, but there you go. Northeast Greenland National Park, actually, or whatever's left of it. My name is Leon, and this is Judith. Welcome to Adlivun Electric."

"More specifically," the woman - Judith took over, "this room we're in - that machine up there - is called a siphon. It detects exotic matter. Do you...?"

She let the words trail off, evidently asking whether Chell knew what the hell that stuff was. Which she didn't. She just gave ol' Judy - presumably a scientist - a dry look and moved on to rubbing her nose.

"Exotic matter messes with reality," Leon explained.

"Right." That made Judie laugh. "Well, these siphons detect it and teleport it here from other - well, from... ahem, parallel universes." Her face squashed up in expectation of an indignant response, but none came. After a few slow moments, Chell just nodded for her to continue.

"Ma'am?" Leo's tone intended to cut this short. "What we're saying is we tested out the device a few minutes ago and it found you. We didn't know it was a person, of course, let alone a living one, but there ya go. Now as you might imagine, that brings up a few questions."

"The first one," Judith said in a softening tone, kneeling on both knees to get on Chell's level, "is how you got to a parallel universe in the first place."

She chose her words with care, aware she could very well face charges for tampering with experiments. This conversation was rapidly devolving into an interview.

"Accident," the personality sphere translated. "Laboratory."

"So you were a test subject?" Leon.

She didn't hesitate giving a couple firm nods at that one.

"We don't know how long you've been in there, but I should warn you it could feasibly be a very long time. What's the last date you remember?"

That wasn't exactly a straightforward question. She had no idea how long she'd been sleeping in GLaDOS's test chamber, or how long she'd been in stasis in the Relaxation Center, or how long she'd been in the Mystic Void of Nothingness just now. The only thing she did know was the year it had been when everything had gone to hell.

With her fingers, she made a two, then double circles, and then a three and five.

"2008?" Judith repeated, eyes widening and rising to her feet. She and Leon shared a charged glance, one which worried Chell. "And... what month?"

Chell didn't like the way they were looking at her, like a guinea pig in an experiment. Slowly, she raised a hand, five fingers splayed.

That got a reaction.

"May 2008..." Judith breathed. Her head shook with disbelief.

"The Resonance Cascade?" Leon asked. "What does that have to do with any of this?"

"I don't know."

"Ma'am?" He directed at Chell, the word briefly surprising her. "I don't know how to tell you this, so I'll just be blunt. It's September. September 2032."

2032? her mind echoed. That was... actually a little less than she'd estimated. Her mind tried to slide back to memories of home - how it had changed, what must have happened to everyone - but a needle of pain stabbed into her head behind her left ear and she banished the train of thought.

The pair were watching her for a reaction, but she gave none. "She seems real choked up about it," muttered Leon.

"And the other question..." Judith inched into Chell's bubble of personal space. "Is how you have exotic matter on you -" she reached down to grab the portal gun, and Chell snapped.

The next moment Chell was aware of, Judith was backed against the wall and she had the mouth of her portal gun aimed toward the old scientist's neck.

"HEY!" Leon was shouting at her, pointing a pistol at her head. "CALM DOWN, what the HELL does that thing do?"

Chell grew aware of the snarl on her face and, piece by piece, managed to draw it off into something more neutral. Slowly enough that Leon would see she wasn't trying anything funny, she backed away from Judith and plopped back into her chair in front of the heating.

That was weird. It would probably be a good idea to apologize or something.

"I'm sorry," the sphere translated. The panel on her wrist strap was a couple inches in length, which meant she could only fit in short messages at a time. "Instinct. Protective. Tense." She fired the portal gun at her own leg to demonstrate: an intense but fleeting heat through the cushioning of the uniform. "Nothing. Harmless."

The two hadn't moved and continued to stare at her like a loose tiger.

"You speak English?"

The tablet computer broke out into a ringtone, which finally got them to move. They clustered around the communicator, but Leon didn't let go of the pistol.

"-ear me? Can you hear me, come in."

"Reese?" Leon smiled. "Glad to hear you're still in one piece! What's your status?"

"Well," the person called Reese answered with a note of hysteria, "they're still after us, which is both good and bad. Good 'cuz they're not after you. Bad because yeah they're after us, which sucks the sweatiest of all balls. Leila got those Bradleys running not a second too soon. We'll keep the chase up as long as we can, but there's no telling when they'll figure out you're not with us."

"I see." Thinking, Judith adjusted her hair clip more firmly against the back of her head.

Chell scanned the room, checking her exits by force of habit. A monitor on the wall made her pause: it was a video - live feed or looped recording she couldn't tell - of some sort of large, shadowed boat tucked onto an ice shelf. The name, Borealis, was the same as the life vests from that dry dock back in Aperture Science. Her eyes narrowed.

"Alright, then," she concluded. "Listen, I've been running some tests on the old research here and I think I'm on to something big; I need you to send over someone as soon as possible."

"No can do, Moss," Reese responded. "Anyone we send would lead 'em straight to you; Elin's driving like a maniac and it's all we can do to just avoid them."

"This is more important than any one of us, myself included. It's not certain my transmission got to the Resistance at all; we have no way of knowing when or if Alyx and Dr. Freeman will arrive. We have to make do on our own."

"Yeah, about that... the name of the game has changed. Vittus picked up the HEV suit's signal. Doctor Freeman is here."

"What?" Leon. "There's no way he got here that fast!"

"Well, at the very least his suit is. In AE's teleport room, looks like. Vittus added your com to the suit's secure channel."

"Why, this is perfect!" A laugh - the one you make when the stress you've been under lifts - bubbled through Judith's words. "He can help me modify the siphons; it shouldn't be a problem for him! I -" And then the stress came back, concern dampening her tone. "And Alyx? Is she here, too?"

"If she is," Reese said, "there's not a word on her."

"Well, what's he say?" Leon leaned in to the communicator while Judith was absorbed in her thoughts. They seemed to have forgotten Chell's existence entirely.

"Huh?"

"Dr. Freeman - haven't you contacted him by now?"

"Yeah, tried that, and there's no response." Followed by a mutter: "Not like he'd say much of any-"

"Alright," Judith began stuffing things into a backpack, still speaking loudly enough to be heard over the com, "I'll make my way to him and try to -"

"Doc, don't be irrational," Leon stopped her, "it's just a software packet; you need to be here for the final punch. Maybe I should -"

"Push there and back through Lamant's entire army? There's no way you'd get back here in time to help with the transmission -"

"What, and you're a better option?"

"You're deliberately misunderstanding me! I only mean that -"

"I'll do it."

The two fell silent to stare at the speaker: the personality sphere. Like one being, their heads turned from it to Chell.

She hadn't been able to follow everything, of course, but she'd gathered enough: they needed something done that they couldn't do themselves. She continued scribbling into her wrist panel. After a couple words she had to pause and wait for the screen to refresh.

"Help me... escape and... I'll do... this for you," the sphere repeated everything.

"Are you sure, ma'am?" Leon wasn't sure whether to look at Chell or the sphere. "The Combine are in a 'shoot first, ask questions later' mood. It's dangerous."

"Not a... problem." She hefted her portal gun to the military crest on her shoulder.

---

Judith finished up her explanation as she spread out a map. Curling at the edges, it displayed in fading print a collection of buildings at the center labeled Adlivun Electric. About a half mile north was a tiny building on its own, and another one to the southeast and a third to the southwest: they formed the points of a large triangle around the compound.

"In fact, we are here." She pointed to the southeast one. "Siphon 2. Siphons 1 and 3 are the other two points. And... well, since this map was created, some variation of cataclysmic event split Adlivun Electric in half -" a pen drew a jagged line nearly through the center of the compound, "- and now the crevasse is a few hundred feet wide, several times more deep, and far too long to consider getting around."

"Which is unfortunate," Leon put in, "because Siphon 1 is on the other side. We won't be able to help you with that, so just trust the Doc; he'll find a way across."

"From what we've heard, Doctor Freeman arrived in the portal chamber of Adlivun, right at the center. Now, the Combine will find you if you're outside too long, so you need to take a service tunnel; there's one from the central complex to each of the three siphons. Just stick to the tunnels and download the data at Siphon 3, then try to find some way to 1." She sighed with the exhaustion of summarizing quantum mechanics to a six year old. "Are you getting all this?"

Actually, Chell had lost track way back when alternate universes came up, but she'd never admit that. Keeping any trace of doubt from her face, her eyes bored holes into the map. Tearing a scrap from a blank corner, she scribbled down the instructions in their most basic format. Use tunnel to center. Find Freeman. Go to Siphon 3, then 1. That was all she needed to know: the bare facts of what she had to do. She didn't really care about why.

After a quick scribble into her wrist strap, the personality sphere translated, "Then I leave?"

Judith hesitated.

"Yes," Leon strode over. "If you can do this, then... We promise you'll get out of here when we do."

Chell's steel-grey eyes passed between their faces, letting them see her distrust. She'd heard the half-truth in there. She just didn't know what it meant.

Then she turned on her heel to approach the steel door. Fingers dancing on the handle, she didn't bother with goodbyes or wishes of luck. She just checked over her gear - data packet taped to her portal gun, personality sphere now muted and secure on her shoulder strap, uniform fitted nicely - and stepped into the tunnel.

They watched her disappear, frozen momentarily at the suddenness of her departure.

"Good luck!" Leon shouted after her. As usual, there was no response, just the sound of her fading footsteps.

Leon watched the girl leave, let the iron door shut with a decisive swing, and then went back to digging through the pair of duffel bags on the ground, once again inspecting every last item. Judith leaned against the console and couldn't bring herself to get back to work, so just stared at the pages of equations in the manual in front of her.

A flicker on her wrist caught her attention, and she fiddled with the bracelet. It was possibly the only thing she'd managed to keep with her since before the Resonance Cascade. 'PROGRESS,' that's what it said, engraved in gold on a chain. It was the one ideal that she, Eli, and Breen all shared; the one she'd hoped for so long that they could unite over. She had been trying so hard to set it all right, but it might be too late.

Around sunset last night the vortigaunt had bowed his head in grief and said that Eli was...

But that couldn't be true, not so soon after everything had come into the light. There'd been no time to make up for everything she'd promised him she would. All the years she'd survived and all the people she'd outlived pushed down almost enough to crush her.

"We should have been honest with that girl." Maybe she was just tired of deceit, but if they were sending her into a war zone she at least deserved to know the full truth of the matter.

The Combine had crashed their helicopter the moment they'd entered Adlivun Electric airspace. Either they won, or there was no getting out for anyone.

---

Turns out, Gordon thought as he was dragged by his forearms across the room, when an Overwatch troop cracks the butt of his pulse rifle into the base of your skull, you do not pass out!

His vision swam with a collage of nauseous colors as they shoved his body into some sort of small containment unit which felt like a vertical coffin. His arm reached out for any sort of handhold before they could close the lid and managed to nick his fingers into one of their masks - they struggled back and forth until a fist punted the bridge of his nose and he collapsed back. One of them slammed the lid of his unit and a lock clicked into place.

The lid on the upright coffin was clear, which meant that the soldier could see it when Gordon tasted blood on the back of his tongue and spat red saliva at him.

The soldier just shook his head and turned away, barking again into a radio. The battalion rearranged into a square, grid-like formation around him and, their legs stepping in unison, began marching through the double doors. There must have been wheels under Gordon's feet because the coffin glided forward, too.

The wreck of the portal chamber, all warped plastic and bits of metal, disappeared from view. He wasn't sure how he felt about destroying it now. Sure, Alyx was safe, but he'd also single-handedly prevented any hope of backup reaching him soon.

... But Alyx was safe.

Another exasperated groan. Was he really doing this? Really? Of all the worst times in the world to -

They hadn't even known each other very -

You know what? Screw it. He tried to ram his shoulders or knees against the walls, but there wasn't any room; the containment unit, all metal and smooth edges, only gave an inch of spare space.

The painful brightness of the portal room gave way to a dim hallway, lit by patches of light from what fluorescent bulbs were still working. Someone must have gotten the power up and running.

The soldiers had distributed his guns between them; even his gravity gun glowed from one of their backs. An Elite turned his crossbow, jerry-rigged out of scrap parts and bungee cord, over in his hands and then broke it in two.

A sound like heartbreak left Gordon's throat. My precious, precious crossbow! Rest in peace, friend.

The hallway, he noticed, was a helix: it sloped downward and in a constant circle to the left. It seemed to circle down around a wide central shaft like the thread of a screw. Along the inside of the curve, there was only one door per level, designated a scientific category. By contrast, the right wall along the outer curve of the hall had doors at random intervals, with signs saying things like 'Cafeteria,' 'Dormitory,' 'Garage,' and their Danish translations.

It wasn't too long before they began passing bodies. Still in lab coats or service uniforms, they appeared against the walls or just sprawled across the floor. They were so intact that Gordon at first mistook them for fresh; hair still clung to their heads, sometimes still in neat styles; their skin was, for the most part, intact, but pulled tight over clawed hands, bared teeth, and empty eye sockets until their bodies resembled leathery raisins. They may have been in the Arctic, but this was very different from simple freezing. They'd been mummified.

Which brought up a critical question. Where were the dead Xenians? He could only assume the scientists were killed during the Resonance Cascade all those years ago, when alien creatures were pulled to Earth through portal storms. But you would never see all these human bodies without at least a couple dead bullsquids or houndeyes as well. Which implied something else had killed them, something potentially worse.

Okay, so two critical questions. Was it still here?

They'd descended maybe a half-dozen levels when their path unexpectedly brightened; a chunk of the outer wall had fallen away. Freezing wind whistled through the opening.

They did one full circle deeper and found another, bigger, hole in the wall. Through the ragged edges Gordon could pick out the glow of a morning snowstorm and the foggy outline of a construction crane.

How could he see anything, let alone daylight? Weren't they deep underground by now?

By the time they'd made the loop a third time, the battalion marched to a stop in front of the hole, which was now ten feet wide and large enough for a clear view. The gap looked out across a sheer, thousand-foot drop into a crevasse in the glacier; although the snowfall was picking up and blurred the opposite side, scattered scraps of Combine tech stood out across the space.

There had been moving walls back in City 17 that crawled across the asphalt and consumed everything in their path, and it appeared this same pseudo-organic technology was being used here; a network of black metal vines crept and connected across the wall of ice, knitting together and forming nodes for control centers. A dozen or so bridges of the same light-sucking metal extended across the distance from one wall to the other, extending like feelers of a poisonous vine.

And all of it expanded outward from an icebreaker ship with a rusty hull, waiting at the heart of the crevasse on an ice shelf for all of this time. In the shadow of the glacier, intermittent floodlights illuminated pieces of the ship: a towering antenna reaching into the sky, a crane on deck carrying a freight container with the Aperture Science logo, and the unmistakable word 'BOREALIS' on the hull. No one knew what it had hidden inside, but the race was on: humans or grubs. The ship was a postmodern ziggurat, and Gordon meant to Indiana Jones this thing.

At the base of the hole in the wall, a knot of the same metal-organic material began to churn and then begin extending over the crevasse; the entire building rocked with tremors. Gordon's teeth clattered against his control; the hole in the wall widened as pieces of drywall collapsed; even the soldiers had visible difficulty remaining upright.

They intended to take him right into the thick of it, and his mind raced. If he could reach the grenades at the small of his back, which would be stronger: the container or his hazard suit? And what was the exact stupid/brilliant proportion of that idea?

The water main, a long pipe hanging from the ceiling, buckled and then with a high-pitched, grating sound it burst, gushing out a jet of water to the floor. The soldiers tensed as one, prepared to fight, but nothing came.

The bridge was about halfway across when the water main popped again, closer - and then a third time, nearly directly above their heads and close enough for droplets to splash onto the clear lid of Gordon's container.

The liquid wasn't what you'd expect in a residential complex: it was this bright, neon blue like the sign on a cheap motel. It began pooling around the soldiers' ankles as they waited for the bridge to complete.

There's a certain animal instinct that warns you when something is not quite right. It tells you the difference between fresh and rotten food, and scares the shit out of you when that tree out your window looks like a human face. The instinct had been programmed out of the Overwatch's consciousness so they didn't notice a small, crucial detail that could have given them a few moments' warning.

But Gordon saw it. And as soon as he did, his body temperature plummeted: although the hall was at a angle, the water wasn't flowing down. Eddies of current flowed around the battalion's ankles with predatory intelligence.

It happened in a second. The blue puddle on the floor flowed upward, twisting in the air, and congealed into a long, three-dimensional tentacle; its end formed a sharp point like the tail of a scorpion - and then it stabbed straight through the back of a soldier.

Chaos erupted. In the time it took the nearest troops to see what had happened and grab their weapons, an entire forest of tentacles rose up from the puddle on the floor and began the slaughter. A thunderstorm of gunfire bellowed in the narrow passageway, but lead bullets just passed straight through the gelatinous flesh and pulse rounds sizzled into nonexistence.

The first soldier to be impaled was lifted, screaming and writhing, into the air in front of Gordon's container - the tentacle clenched, and a scarlet mass of blood and viscera was sucked down the gelatinous tube into the puddle on the floor, and didn't stop until it had drained every drop of moisture from his body.

Gordon's senses shut down; he didn't feel like himself or in control, like he was watching everything from third-person: there was gunfire illuminating everything in nightmarish freeze-frames - there was a soldier trying to run only for a tentacle to snake around his leg and drag him back - there was another one, which sliced open a soldier's torso through the kevlar and buried its head into the chest cavity - and there was a man trapped in a vertical coffin, losing his mind trying to escape.

When Gordon, shivering and his head hot-cold like he had a fever, returned to his body, the bridge had stopped moving so the building as a whole was still, but a barrage of knocks made the interior of the containment unit deafening. The tentacles had circled it and were banging their scorpion-like heads against the walls, looking for a weak spot. Their neon blue flesh had been dyed into a dark, purple wine; dried husks of bodies littered the ground behind them.

One wrapped around the coffin and constricted - a few seams and joints in the coffin snapped. Any moment now it'd squeeze through the cracks and suck him dry like a creamy nougat center, but instead it lifted the container into the air and flung him down the hall into darkness where it slammed into a wall. The welt at the back of his head screamed.

Phosphene flares across his vision. His reflection blinking dully back at him. White fog on the glass coming and going with his breath. And, in the hall, a sickly blue outline against the black, a tentacle crawled across the floor, coiled around the leg of the last Overwatch troop, and dragged it out of sight.

---

Chell's view extended down a long, crooked tunnel of ice, about wide enough to accommodate a single car. She patted the data packet they'd given her, now duct taped to the side of her portal gun along with the note to self. Dim and forgiving sunlight glowed from all directions; she didn't so much as cast a shadow as she placed her feet one at a time in front of her. The floor, walls, ceiling - all blended smoothly into one irregular surface like a lake flash-frozen in a storm. The ice was so clear and pure the color bordered on mint green. Even her jaded ass could admit it was beau-

Thump, her backside slammed into the ice, interrupting any nascent sentimentality. Her long fall boots had slipped. Shrapnel cakes! she swore, rubbing warmth into her thighs.

Something was moving on her back. With a tug of her shoulder strap, she saw the machinations around the sphere's iris were sorta pinched together and... twitching?

'Unmute'

Instantly, the tunnel echoed up and down with laughter. Its iris and handles were crinkled up into an artificial smile. The sphere, surprised, collected itself and rearranged its features into a neutral expression. "Ahem. The use of caution would be recommended on icy walkways."

Narrowed grey eyes scrutinized the sphere, who was trying not to meet the gaze. Could there be more than meets the eye to the pumpkin-sized encyclopedia?

Chell grabbed a handle and threw the sphere as far down the tunnel as she could. But it was an affectionate throw, a you-may-not-be-as-big-of-a-cold-hearted-moron-as-I-assumed throw.

"AAaaa!" it screamed as it shrunk into the distance, and then ricocheted against the icy walls; Chell giggled in response, something she'd forgotten she was capable of doing.

Rising to her feet, she was back on her way, and managed to get moving again with side-to-side motions like ice skating. She had a good rhythm going: kick the info sphere with the side of her boot like sports equipment, skate a while until she caught up, and then repeat. Each time, it struggled to maintain a passive expression.

She actually might have been a little more inclined to like it than Leo or Judy, just by virtue of it not being a person. People tended to toss Chell in a maze and poke her for a reaction. Though being a robot wasn't exactly doing it any favors, either. They tended to try to bake Chell alive. You know what, if everything sentient could just stay 100000 feet away from her, she'd be happy.

When this was all over, she'd build a little shack out of scrap somewhere niiiice and quiet. Use a couple portals to bring in a water supply, and that would be the absolute last she'd mess with them. Somewhere she could change out of her sweaty overalls, without even a single bottomless pit to fall into. Maybe in a golden lea, like her dream. Wide-open, with a view of the sky she'd never have to abandon.

It chewed her pride to admit, but she was pretty sure she had met some good people before. They'd been kind and welcoming. It was such a long time ago, but what were their names...?

A wasp sting of pain pricked behind her ear, smothering the thought.

Maybe she just needed to befriend someone who was neither a person nor a robot. Yeah. That'd suit her perfectly.

She'd been making good progress like this for a while when something caught her eye and she let herself glide to a stop.

There was another one of those silver cracks, just like she'd seen in the dry dock. It looked like one of the hairline breaks you'd see in a mirror, projected in the third dimension. It extended up though the ceiling, near vertical. Also like the ones in Aperture Science, it was intangible; she walked straight through it and it felt no different than passing through air.

What the hell was it doing here? Back in the Borealis dry dock, a whole bunch of these cracks were spread out from that glowing-orb-of-death-thing, like the spot in space had been smashed with a hammer. If this really was the same phenomenon, then logically this crack, too, began at another glowing-orb-of-death-thing. But where? And why on Earth would these things be in the Arctic and in Michigan?

"Hmm..." She stepped through again, and wondered just how similar it was. She lifted her portal gun, aiming the glowing end toward the seam.

"I would not recommend that course of action!"

Her gun fired a mass at the crack, and instantly a chopped-up mess of green energy stormed around it, thrashing light and noise into the tunnel and - then silence.

She covered her laugh with the back of her hand. This was exactly like the dock.

"The use. Of caution. Would be. Recommended!" The personality sphere was stuck on its side, white light glaring at her.

She dismissed it with a wave of her hand. Whatever it may think, she wasn't an idiot; after being shuffled through testing chambers like a cow through a slaughterhouse, you learn to appreciate the value of 'nothing ventured, nothing gained,' even if that meant trying a few wacky things along the way. If Chell didn't have the 'try new strategies even if they are potentially dangerous' instinct, she would be long dead.

Will jumping through these portals launch me across the room or drop me to my death? Let's try it!

Will this High Energy Pellet bounce off the Companion Cube or burn through it and sear my head off? Let's try it!

Standing in the path of rockets and jumping out of the way at the last second is literally the stupidest idea I have ever had. Let's try it!

And besides, the cracks weren't dangerous. She'd only gotten sucked into the Mystic Void of Nothingness after she'd shot that orb-of-energy thing, the Anomaly, as Mr. Johnson had called it. The cracks were fine: they'd just shout a bit and give glimpses of some other place.

She reiterated the rule to herself. Shoot the orb, get sucked into nothing, very dangerous, do not do again. Shoot the seam, it tries to open, doesn't have enough power, nothing happens.

Now that she thought about it, maybe it was just that simple. If you wanted something to do its objective, but better, you just throw more energy at it! She was no expert, but she was pretty sure that's how Science worked.

Blue - orange - blue - orange - blue - her index and middle fingers alternated the triggers as fast as she could press them and the crack stormed with green energy louder and brighter until some internal minimum was met, and it finally yawned open like pulling apart a seam in a piece of cloth.

It's a portal.

Not the neat oval portal she'd grown accustomed to, but a jagged tear across her path. And the world on the other side couldn't have been more different. Through the tear, the sky was a rich teal, clear as crystal like a tropical pool. Instead of one singular landmass, shards of land and rock floated through the air like flying islands, flowing on invisible currents through wisps of silver clouds. The atmosphere began seeping through the portal into the tunnel, and Chell closed her eyes to enjoy the warm, humid breeze. Wherever this place was, the air was breathable.

It was only once the seam shuddered back together and stabilized once more into a plain grey crack that Chell felt the look of pure wonder on her face. She'd seen more than her fair share of strange things, but they were almost never that pretty and non-homicidal.

She flitted her hand through the crack like passing your finger through a candle flame; last traces of warmth still lingered in the air. Pushing through the temptation to open the tear again, she looped the personality sphere back onto her shoulder strap and continued her skate down the tunnel.

Her mind replayed the scene over and over again. Back in Aperture, just before she'd discovered the Borealis dock, she'd seen a mural... one with a teal sky and silver clouds. The painter must have seen that world, too! But what on earth do any of these lambda people have to do with Aperture Science? And more to the point, why didn't she just pass by the dry dock and continue on to the exit when she had the chance?

She berated herself, gliding through the ice, and made a silent promise that if she saw the chance to escape, she would take it. No hesitation.

---

"Gordon - wait, do I hold the button down or just push it once?" The recording of Alyx's voice then made a small, nervous laugh. "Okay, great. Gordon: we're not sure what happened with the prototype, but we're trying to figure it out as fast as we can. Unfortunately, the way things are going now we're going to have to take the helicopter like we originally planned, which means it'll take us an entire day to get up there."

The familiar voice projected, tinny, from his suit radio and echoed coldly on the walls of the containment unit. It was a slow process calming his nerves after the creature's attack, but discovering Alyx's message had helped significantly.

"Just - please, do what you can to help Dr. Mossman, and try to get into contact with me. I'm sure you'll find a way. And... take care of yourself."

As he listened a small, goofy grin pulled up the curve of his lips.

He let the recording loop again, and then once more because that little laugh at the beginning was fucking adorable. The moment 'take care of yourself' finished again, he clicked the connection off. Did any of Dr. Mossman's team get the recording? More to the point, were they still alive? In a sick way, it really wasn't up to them. There was no way of knowing what twisted path that man in the blue suit was leading his friends, let alone himself.

Shitdammit. Whenever he tried to apply reason to that thing, he lost himself in the twists and turns. But now was as good a time as any, and he needed a good, lengthy puzzle as a distraction. So he closed his eyes and tried to think. Let's go over the facts.

It had all started at Black Mesa - hell, you could fill a library with that preface - when the executive started appearing. He'd first been in the rail car opposite Gordon's, even in that mundane scenario distant from the world around him, just staring and watching. The man felt... wrong. Like a corpse stood upright, its eyes propped open to stare at you.

He'd been in the corner of Gordon's eye the entire 28 hours, untouched by the chaos around them. Then, in that factory on Xen when he'd struck the final blow against the Nihilanth, the business man had transported Gordon to some sort of ethereal rail car. He was given a choice: die fighting the abominations on Xen - or enter into employment. It would have been so easy to say no and die a hero's, a martyr's, death, but he hadn't.

Gordon had chosen the latter, and was now facing the consequences of that choice.

Twenty-four years in stasis passed like a forgotten nightmare, and then blinking into his senses he found himself on a train entering City 17. Just like at Black Mesa, the business man was watching around every corner.

And then... at the crest of the Citadel as Breen's teleporter exploded, the man froze time itself. He reported, almost boastfully, of how good of an investment Gordon was proving to be, while Alyx was stood frozen beside them and the explosion was a half-formed orb in the background. The world grew dark, and he was once again in stasis, merely waiting for his next assignment.

But then something happened. Sinking again into the numbness of stasis, Gordon felt like something was pulling him, pulling him, from very far away, and then he found himself standing far away from City 17 and its troubles. A narrow coast of sand and sunlight wound lazily around him. An old man with a smile and a limp welcomed him to the village of St. Olga, and instructed him to do a bit more work. When Gordon had finished fighting off some soldiers a few minutes later, he regrouped with the old man, who clapped him on the back and congratulated him on a job well done. Then St. Olga dissolved away and...

City 17 materialized around him. There was Alyx, a statue, and the Citadel's explosion frozen in time, and the business man gloating away. Somehow, time had ticked back a mere few seconds, before the world had grown dark. Turns out a couple seconds were all the vortigaunts needed. Their skins glowing ultraviolet with power, they intervened and carried Alyx and Gordon to the base of the Citadel.

After that, the man was conspicuously, loudly, absent from Gordon's life. He and Alyx retrieved Dr. Mossman's transmission from the Citadel, delayed the reaction, and gotten the hell out of Dodge, all without so much as a glimpse of the man anywhere. At least, until that hunter mauled Alyx out of nowhere and the vortigaunts had no choice but to heal her. Then he'd stopped time again and whispered that phrase, "prepare for unforeseen consequences," to her and monologued for a while.

Gordon's eyes unfocused as he recalled what the man had said. Having an eidetic memory didn't mean he remembers every single detail of his life; he had to purposefully store the moment in his memory for perfect recall, or "press record" as he thought of it. When he looked back, it really felt like he was watching a video in front of his eyes. He had thought it prudent to "record" all of the business man's speeches.

Now, in his chilly little coffin, he pressed a little play button in his mind and the words came back to him. In his implacable accent, that man began. He said that he hadn't been able to intervene until the vortigaunts were distracted healing Alyx. Then he mentioned rescuing her from Black Mesa as a baby: a claim which Eli later confirmed. Some of his final words ticked across Gordon's mind: "Dr. Freeman. I wish I could do more than keep an eye on you, but I have agreed to abide by certain - ress-tric-tions."

Restrictions. That must mean he'd made a deal at some point. But with whom - about what? And he didn't even know what was up with all that St. Olga shit.

Gordon took a deep breath - fogging up the glass in the process - to slow the pace of his thoughts. He tried to put together his ideas. The man in the suit - he should really think up a snappier name, like Jacob or Scrappy McGee - made an agreement with someone to not interfere after the Citadel exploded.

But now he was back. He had deliberately appeared to Gordon just before he'd stepped into the prototype room at White Forest, and mere minutes later Gordon was in Adlivun Electric, back on the job. Somehow, that must mean the gloves were off.

What happened? He wondered. What had changed so that He was free to interfere again?

A metallic thud in the dark reminded him of how screwed he was. A following thud betrayed its source: the ceiling.

Shit shit shit shit shit -

He tried, like before, to wobble side to side - to kick his legs against the lid - to reach his arms up to push but there wasn't enough space between his armor and the lid or -

Another thud, closer.

Why the hell had he wasted so much time this wasn't the time to think he should have been trying to escape not just waiting around and - !

The grate of a ventilation duct flew off its screws and out tumbled an entire person: someone with a military uniform, a soccer-ball-sized lantern at her hip on a strap, a device which looked a bit like the gravity gun around her forearm, and coated head to toe in a thin layer of dust.

Utter relief swept over him. He'd have gotten her attention, but she stood stock-still, giving the wall a long, intense stare. It was the kind of stare you'd expect to see on an action hero about to plot the bad guy's downfall, or on a wise senior contemplating life's mysteries.

"AaaCHOO!"

And it was just a sneeze. As she wiped her hands on the same wall, Gordon thumped his armored arm against the lid. She must be part of Judith's team, there was no other explanation. Or, at least, very few other explanations.

She didn't flinch at the sound, but did tense into a more defensive stance; this was someone accustomed to the life-and-death. Her head swung round to face him, and on meeting his gaze didn't move.

This didn't feel unlike any number of other times he'd been saved - by Barney, by Alyx, by Dog, by a hundred rebels - so he looked to her expectantly as an ally, but the warm greeting didn't come. Her face didn't break into a welcoming smile and she didn't start prattling about what they were going to do. Her eyes just stared right back into his, the color of cold steel.

Any friendliness drained from Gordon's face. She was with Judith, right?

Chell herself wasn't sure what to make of him. Her eyes slid over his form - he was all packaged like a mint condition action figure - in some sorta orange space-age getup. Why it didn't have a helmet was beyond her. And there was that damn lambda symbol again, but instead of painted onto a cheap jacket or something, this was emblazoned across his chest like a medieval crest. But more than that, there was something in the way he held himself, like he was a starved dog trained for the ring and wouldn't think twice about ripping her throat out. He seemed dangerous. If she was being honest, he creeped her right the hell out.

Wait, what was his name again?

Shuffling footsteps along with radio-altered voices up the hall made her turn. Crap they were getting closer! A few quick steps took her to the coffin door; a couple levers scraped in protest but managed to unlock the door and together, her prying and him pushing, the lid groaned open.

He stumbled out.

He tried to sign, (Thank you,) as an attempt at being polite, but she just grabbed a panel on his arm and yanked him toward a nearby door - as soon as he heard the boot falls rushing toward them, he followed suit and slipped into the room with her.

The room was a large circle the same size as the portal room on the ground floor. Desks had been pushed against the walls to make space for what lay at the center: hundreds of clear boxes were stacked into towers like miniature skyscrapers and alleyways. And every single box contained a different Xen crystal. Judging by their red or yellow coloration, they were of a lower purity than what he had handled at Black Mesa, but the sheer number was startling nonetheless.

The woman dragged him to the side and they took cover behind a desk. It sounded like just two soldiers; if Gordon had had his guns this wouldn't even be an issue, but as it was he didn't even have the gravity gun. After being shot at earlier, his shield remained at 6, but his health was good at 88; there was still a welt at the back of his head, but he'd stopped tasting blood a while ago.

The pair of soldiers slowed to a stop just outside the door.

"It's empty." They must have found the containment unit. "Inform Lamant."

Gordon turned to the woman in the dark and signed, (I need to find my weapons.)

Her gaze just followed his hand movements distrustfully.

(Weapons, I need -) he tried spelling it. Nothing. Just his luck.

The soldiers paced mere feet out the door.

That same look from before crossed her face, like she was about to sneeze. With panicked eyes, Gordon waved at her to stop, do anything to just not sneeze! She convulsed, but with her nose pinched and her mouth covered, it was nearly silent.

He relaxed.

"Bless you," the sphere remarked.

"What was that?"

Chell only had time to press the sphere's iris into her abdomen to stifle its light before the soldiers inched into the room shotgun barrels first. Scribbling into her wrist panel she wrote, 'fire lazers!'

To which the sphere responded, voice muffled but horribly audible in the silence, "Why would I have lasers."

The soldiers spun around and in the same moment Chell pivoted the sphere to face them - the white light flared into their eyes, blinding their night vision. While they recoiled in pain, Gordon blindsided the one in front, white armor and a single red eye, while the one in back, black armor and blue goggles, blasted his shotgun in the fight's general direction - to Gordon's surprise, it wasn't ordinary buckshot but a pulse shotgun - which shattered a tower of Xen crystal containers in the process. The precious stones skittered across the tile.

While lambda-man and the white-armor poured all their strength into angling the shotgun toward the other's head, the black-armored soldier cleared his vision and lowered his gun at Chell's face.

Out of options, she launched wads of portal energy to distract him - and one struck a crimson crystal the size of a walnut. It began pouring out pure, bloody light into every corner of the room and flew up to the ceiling.

And then everything else flew up to the ceiling, too.

Amid the shower of junk as gravity reversed, Chell was the only one quick enough to pivot midair and land on her feet - just in time to kick the disoriented black-armor under a falling desk.

Gordon and the Elite crashed as one into the ceiling, their cumulative weight crumpling the plaster squares; the weapon fumbled from their hands so he rammed his elbow into the Elite's mask again, and again, and again until the giant ocular lens cracked and he fell limp.

The two humans stood panting and pinned to the ceiling as the miniature Xen crystal continued to spill out red light. He glared at her; what the hell did she do? Gordon hadn't seen Chell fire her portal gun, but he knew something must have activated the crystal and had the vague sense it was her fault.

It could have just as easily irradiated their organs or sent them back in time or turned them into a hamburger with extra pickles. That's the funny thing about exotic matter: it messed with space-time, which Gordon had learned was generally not something you wanted to mess with. He estimated Xen crystals like these were 25-60% exotic matter, essentially billions of quantum computers overlaid in crystalline structures; the purest one he'd ever heard of was 92%, and that had caused the goddamn Resonance Cascade.

The walnut-sized oddity shuddered, snapped in half, and dropped everything back to the floor.

Chell landed easy as anything on her feet as gravity reoriented itself, but the lambda-man slammed into his side with a pained groan. His armor was impressive, she had to admit, but judging by the stiffness of the joints and sheer bulk of the thing it limited his mobility. She offered him her hand; leaning back she channeled all the weight into her boots as she helped him to his feet.

Rolling his shoulder, he gave her a half-grin. He mouthed the words, "thank you," at her as clearly as he could and demonstrated the sign for it: just lower your flat hand down from your chin. He repeated it until she understood.

(Thank you,) she repeated, uncertain with the motion. Her right arm still in the portal gun, she used her left.

He brightened and made to high-five her in celebration, but she turned from the contact to focus on her portal gun. Peeling up the corner of the duct tape, she pressed the data packet and note to his chest.

Before he could examine the gift, a shuffling in the corner drained the friendliness from his face: the soldier Chell had kicked under a desk now lay dazed and spread-eagle on top and was regaining consciousness.

He scanned the room until he swiped the shotgun from the ground, staggered over to the soldier, pressed the barrel against the nape of his neck, and -

Bam!

Chell jumped out of her skin, but couldn't tear her eyes from the sight. A solid, concussive blast the color of sunlight burst chunks of something into a dripping splatter on the wall.

The soldier's mask dropped with a conclusive thud. It was suddenly so quiet, so quiet! She could hear her own breathing scratching at her ears as the man wiped a red drop off his cheekbone like it was nothing. Her head craned to look at the white-armor on the ground; she'd thought he'd just been knocked out, but drops of blood dribbled onto the tile from the crack in his lens.

He killed them. He killed them. He killed them!

It was pretty damn clear that whoever this lambda guy was, there was a very good reason he'd been locked up - he was probably some international criminal on his way to trial, that's why all these guards were after him.

What the hell did she do.

Human didn't mean bad. Human didn't mean good. But it had been humans who'd dragged her into this hell of a new life in the first place, and she'd been an idiot for getting herself involved again.

She scooped from the floor an amber shard into her hand, which tingled even through her glove. The workings of the crystals were a mystery to her, but they seemed harmless enough.

"Ehh!" A guttural sound from her throat got his attention just before she threw the shard right at his stupid face - he caught it by force of habit in the time it took her to leap toward the door.

She only saw him staring at the piece in his hand - with the wide eyes and tilted lips of someone who was completely confused by a situation - and fired a wad of energy directly at it.

---

What the shit is her problem? He'd thought they'd been getting on pretty well. Gordon was lucky enough that the crystal the military woman shot did nothing more sinister than blare La Vie En Rose at triple speed. By the time it had died down and was clearly not about to end the world, she'd already disappeared down the hall. He sent a sarcastic salute after her. People who hung out with him - particularly blatant redshirts like her - tended to not last long.

The new pulse shotgun, a full matte black, was longer and thinner than his old SPAS-12. He held it lengthwise in plain view of his glasses for several long seconds while the head-up display scanned it.

Bing, a miniature image of it appeared in the number four weapon slot on his glasses, along with an ammo counter in the bottom right.

"Defensive weapon selection system activated," his suit reported as he slipped the weapon into one of the compartments on the back of his suit. "Ammunition level monitoring activated."

That was one hell of a feature for research equipment, but who was he to judge.

It didn't take long until he was back at the hole in the wall and the site of the massacre; once he was certain the water creature was no longer here, he picked through the husks of dead Overwatch for his weapons. Their bodies, more armor than anything else, were uncannily lightweight - there weren't even any stains on the floor. Every last drop of moisture had been absorbed.

Only his gravity gun was still here. That was a blessing, at least. Slipping over his shoulder the electrical wires that served as its strap, he stood at the brink of the hole in the wall. The length of the completed bridge extended the width of the crevasse, a sickly black limb that branched out into mechanic roots on the other side. And then there was the Borealis itself, once a research vessel with a promising future but already a beautiful ruin. Blurred by distance and snowfall, sinister bloated figures hovered in packs of three or four as they picked over the wreckage: Advisors.

A sick kind of uncertainty settled in his stomach at the sight, part fear and part anticipation. He was on his own.

Oddly enough, his concern wasn't for his own safety: the man in the suit seemed to have all his i's dotted and t's crossed when it came to keeping his top employee alive - Gordon could probably douse himself in pig's blood, go up to a great white shark, then give an award-winning impression of a dying seal, and somehow even it would turn out to be Barney in a mask.

What really concerned him was a repeat of the Black Mesa Incident, really the last time he'd been fighting on his own. Without allies, he didn't have to think about what he was doing or their consequences or whether the introspective physicist he thought of himself as would approve. He didn't have to worry about scaring someone. Without people, Gordon was terrified of what he could do, and how easily he could bring himself to do it.

He stalled: he patted his chest and - oh yeah, she'd given him something. Duct taped to his armor was some sort of data packet and a note on a scrap of crinkly paper.

'IMPORTANT!

Take USB to Siphon 3

Then Siphon 1

Stay in contact w/ J&L'

The handwriting was a little immature, but at least legible; there was also a scribble of a map. He also wasn't too sure who L was, but J had to be Dr. Mossman. The freezing expanse of bridge stared back at him, and then he turned aside to ascend the hallway. Something sat uncomfortably in him: relief or disappointment, he couldn't tell.

Siphon 3 looked to be to the north of where he was now - didn't he pass a door for the garage earlier? He mashed the button for his suit radio, a tiny rectangle on his left wrist, which brought up little blips of static on the channel.

"Seems to be some interference," someone noted over the connection.

Gordon brightened at the result, pressed it faster.

"Well, that's not possible," the unmistakable voice of Judith responded, "it's the encrypted channel..."

"It - look at this, it looks like it's coming from the hazard suit."

"The hazard - Doctor Freeman? That can't be you, can it?"

He grimaced, pinched the bridge of his nose. How the hell was he supposed to respond? At least it was her.

"Just try to give us some indication this isn't random noise."

He appeared at a loss for ideas, but then his eyes unfocused, as though he were looking at some invisible chart a foot from his eyes. There were certain things he'd made a point to memorize long ago, back when the prospect of having wild adventures was invigorating. With the button for the suit radio, he alternated between clicking it quickly and holding it down.

Click click click click / click / click hold click / click.

He could only hope they got the gist: dots and dashes. He reached the door that led to the garage which led down a long, narrow hallway, but at least this one was straight and level.

There was a pause, a murmuring of hidden voices, and then, "Alright, tell me this: where were you studying before you took the research assistant position at Black Mesa?"

The hallway opened up into, sure enough, a garage, stocked with some junk and a few rows of vehicles, sleds, and snowmobiles. It was all contained on the other side of a ceiling-high locked gate, though.

.. / -. / -. / ... / -... / .-. / ..- / -.-. / -.- he answered, looking for a key.

"Freeman? It's Leon, you and I met earlier at Shorepoint Base. What was swarming when you made off for Nova Prospekt?"

Gordon rolled his eyes at the memory, but he must be the L from the note. He tapped .- / -. / - / .-.. / .. / - - - / -. / ...

"Sorry about all that, Doc," Leon continued, relieved, "we just had to make sure this wasn't a trick by the Combine."

Yeah, yeah, he finally just jammed his elbow against the padlock and pushed his way into the rows of vehicles.

A snowmobile would work. He settled on one that could take the hazard suit's weight and tested the engine before walking it toward the garage door. Frozen shut, he had to drag it open manually. Painful white light flooded the room.

"We sent someone over to you with an information packet; did you get it?" Judith's inquiry was laced with nerves.

All he managed in response to Judith's question was an affirmative -.- - while he focused on revving the engine and rolling out onto the snow. An ancient sign post pointed in three directions: Siphon 1, Siphon 2, and Siphon 3. He squinted in the last direction; although any path had worn away long ago, there were wooden posts at regular intervals with red flags tied to them: ragged, but still distinct. The treads of the snowmobile crunched over the fresh snow as it picked up speed.

"Oh thank goodness, that's such a relief. We weren't sure how dependable she'd be, but we really didn't have any other choice: I have to stay undetected where I am. You see, Dr. Freeman, I think I've figured out what to do about the Borealis!"

That got his attention. Some of Eli's last words echoed across his mind, 'Destroy that ship! Whatever it takes!' Did she even know what had happened to him?

A flock of birds, little black dots at this point, were approaching as he passed the first flagged post.

"The Combine had already found it by the time I got here, but only more soldiers and Advisors have shown up since; the place is swarming with them. We cannot let the technology fall into their hands, no matter what. I've been going over the research here at Adlivun Electric, and it looks as though we can use some of the old equipment here to our advantage.

"They developed something known as siphons," she continued, "which scan parallel universes for exotic matter and teleport samples here for experiments. No doubt you remember Black Mesa would send entire teams of scientists to Xen to collect crystals, but the environment was just so hostile. According to the logs, back in the 1970's the computers here detected a massive spike in the energy they associate with exotic matter."

The Borealis.

"They attempted to pull the source through to Earth for study, but it was simply too large: the siphons they had at the time were only capable of crystal-sized transmissions."

"Long story short, Doc," Leon put in, "they took a long-ass time - a couple decades, maybe - upgrading the siphons up to snuff until they could drag the Borealis here. No doubt they were surprised to find Aperture tech, but apparently not enough to return it."

"Yes, and to handle an object of that size, all three siphons needed to work in harmony with each other." Judith had, again, taken over. "Which is essentially what I need you to do now, Dr. Freeman. I've been acquainting myself with the technology, and I'm certain that if you can just download that data packet at the two other siphons, then I'd be able to synchronize the systems and reverse the whole process."

Gordon passed a fourth flagged post; the birds had grown to fat little shapes in the sky. Did he hear her correctly?

"I can transmit the Borealis off of Earth someplace safe until the Resistance can decide what to do with it. There's a universe parallel to ours with almost no matter and excruciatingly slow passage of time: essentially everything there is in stasis. If you can just download the reversed software, then every soldier, every Advisor, every dangerous piece of technology on that ship - all will be put into stasis until we can handle it, if and when that time ever comes, and until then the Combine won't be able to get their hands on it. If you can do this, Gordon... we win."

---

Screw this. Screw all of this.

Chell raced down the spiraling hallway, the repetitive banging of the personality sphere against her hip fading into the background. It didn't matter if she'd made a deal, it didn't matter how difficult navigating this world on her own would be, she'd risk it. You do not kill people - robots and turrets maybe, but never people. She'd sooner walk to civilization than get mixed up in all this drama.

Traveling a circular hallway was surreal; whereas with a straight one you can see the end and have a point of reference, a circular one never seems to end. The horizon of the curve never gets any closer; you just feel like you're running in place and the floor comes up to meet you.

And what the floor brought up to Chell next made her slow to a stop. There were soldiers, more of those black- or white-clad troops, but they were sprawled out across the floor with splattered bullet holes through them. She'd taken the ventilation duct when she'd come up this way earlier, and had missed this entirely.

She couldn't have known how long she stood there, but once she did move it was to kneel down beside one and grip the edge of their gas mask. It pulled away like skin off a dead fish, and her stomach churned at the sight of what lay underneath.

Any pigmentation of the skin had been bleached away into translucency, and stuffed beneath the skin were plastic tubes and metal wires; an oozing port the size of a golf ball had been gouged out of their neck; any racial or gender markers had been scraped away until only cold efficiency remained. They were human, she'd been right about that, but so far removed from the concept that killing them was probably a mercy.

Her mind rejected it. Shaking her head, she peeled off another's mask: the same bleached skin, the same chemical port, the same dead eyes and cybernetics.

If she were anyone else but Chell, she might have passed out. Even though she couldn't, consciously, remember anything further back than waking up in GLaDOS's test chamber, her experiences were still carved onto the inside of her skull and dictated every choice she made. So if she hadn't spent most of her childhood jumping through obstacle courses and answering questions; if she hadn't dug through Aperture Science and found every twisted experiment imaginable; if she hadn't been to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, tasted neurotoxin on the air, and watched people drop left and right like flies, then she might have curled up right there on the floor and suffered a complete mental breakdown.

As it was, however, she just steadied herself against the swaying walls and swallowed the bile in her throat. And the little compass rose in her mind changed direction.

Alright, Lambda. Fingernails digging into her palms, she marched herself down the hall and into the tunnel access room. I'll play your game.

Three steel doors waited in an otherwise empty room; she made herself face the passage behind her, the one that said 'Siphon 3' in chipped black paint. The door itself had fallen off its hinges long ago, and was now held across the frame with thick fingers of white ice. Completely frozen over.

Every plan, every worry dropped from her thoughts as she turned in place. She saw the steady lights overhead, heard the hum of the ventilation system, and smiled.

Well, this was a quick fix. Protruding from the water main in the ceiling was a red valve the size of a steering wheel; she leaped up, clamped her fingers onto it, and swung her body in heavy swings until it clanked off, gushing out hot water onto the door.

The ice snapped, cracked, and fell away, revealing a crooked tunnel of mint green ice. As she started moving down the tunnel with side-to-side skating motions, she didn't notice that the water, still spilling out onto the ice, had turned bright neon blue.

---

Do not! Trust! Birds! Gordon's snowmobile strained to maintain its breakneck speed toward Siphon 3. Turned out, what he'd mistaken for a flock of fat birds was in reality those shitdamn scanner bots from City 17, the ones that flashed light in your eyes so you had to stumble around like an idiot with your arms in front of you for ten seconds.

"We're picking up radio chatter; APC's are headed your way, Doctor Freeman, and a lot of them. Didn't she tell you to take the tunnel?!"

As a greyed-out dome on the horizon approached, so did the Combine vehicles from all sides.

The scanners bobbed in the air trying to veer him off course - they'd start blaring an alarm and dive bomb him, which meant he had half a second to aim the gravity gun, pluck the fucker right out of the air, and blast it into the snow before it had the chance to blow all his limbs off.

Siphon 3! He didn't bother with slowing down - the snowmobile plowed through the double doors, shattering them on their hinges. Even before the vehicle had skidded to a halt, Gordon had leaped off and practically flew into the console. He stopped only long enough to locate a software port and slap the data packet in, then turned his attention to the snowmobile; with the parking brake on he strapped the duct tape around the throttle until it pressed against the handlebar, tossed a few live grenades into the basket on the back, and yanked off the parking brake - the engine howled and the whole contraption propelled back through the double doors.

He could only hope that would stall them long enough to find an exit; there was an arched steel door at the opposite end of the dome, but it refused to budge. An explosion outside; the grenades had gone off. He turned back to the room; a man-sized needle pointed downward from the ceiling, whatever machinations it performed inert. There was also what appeared to be a hairline crack in his vision across the room, but it must have been a fault in his vision. A monitor on the counter was stuck at, 'Still Downloading / Stadig Henter'.

A soldier, a crest on his uniform labeled C29, staggered into the room and loosed a dotted line of sparks along the wall which then drained the last few points off his shield - he hefted his shotgun to his shoulder and blasted the soldier three feet. The grenades had bought some time, but there were more coming. His fingers rifled through the ammo pouch on his belt without taking his eyes off the door.

Come on, come on! Twelve shells left.

---

Chell estimated she was a little over halfway through the tunnel when she caught sight of something in the corner of her eye. A long, snakelike limb was undulating somewhere deep within the ice, like some sort of moving underground river. It flowed in loops and spirals, and then careened straight toward Chell.

A growl, loud and deep as thunder, grew and echoed through the tunnel.

Maybe someone else would have stopped, looked over their shoulder, and gaped in horror before running for their life, but Chell knew better. The moment she heard the ice around her beginning to buckle, she grabbed the info sphere by the handle and began skating the fastest her legs could carry her.

The noise crescendoed - a glance to the side revealed cracks racing across the walls like lightning strikes - and everything began to collapse.

Truck-sized chunks of ceiling collapsed like dominoes, so close Chell could feel flecks of ice striking the backs of her legs as they pumped back and forth, clambering to maintain balance as the floor crumpled beneath her.

The tunnel curved to the side and the end was in sight - but the steel door was shut!

By this point, momentum carried her forward more than anything else. Lungs heaving and exercise-induced nausea unbalancing her head, she forced one last burst of speed as the dead end flew up to meet her, and leaped into the air feet-first. Her long fall boots slammed a giant dent into the steel and the door screamed off its hinges, bursting into the new room and screeching to a stop with showers of sparks on either side.

She'd only gone from one life-threatening situation to another: Siphon 3 was a warzone. Soldiers, most in black armor but some in white, poured through the opposite double doors and across the giant red 3 in the tiles. Beside a monitor flashing the words 'Download Complete / Hent Komplet' was that man in orange armor, holding the bottleneck as best he could with a single shotgun like a goddamn one-man army.

The doorframe to the tunnel, spitting out its last few chunks of ice, was packed tight: there was no going back.

With all the instincts of a woman who had once looked at giant hydraulic presses and thought, 'Yeah, that looks like an elevator to me!' something else caught her eye: suspended vertically in space from floor to ceiling was an intangible grey crack.

Chell wasn't one for introspection. As she began firing portal after portal at the crack - blue - orange - blue - orange - blue, she didn't stop to wonder why she was helping the strange lambda man with the penchant for shotguns. Maybe, much like she'd tried helping that family of personality spheres, she just empathized with the unlucky son of a bitch; her intuition told her he was the underdog in this scenario, and she knew all too well what that was like.

Or maybe, despite all she thought of herself and what GLaDOS had whispered into her ear... Maybe Chell was actually a pretty good person.

She wasn't one for introspection. She wasn't even one for right or wrong. There was just now.

The crack yawned open across the width of the dome to another, warmer, world: one with a wide-open teal sky and wisps of silver clouds.

She turned to face Lambda, who stared at the tear in astonishment. With a half grin - the first indication she felt anything but disdain for him - she stepped through the seam, and let him decide whether or not to follow before it snapped shut.

He did.