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"What?" It wasn't exactly creative, but Steve was having some serious trouble processing her words.

"What do you think happened to me when Joshua disappeared?" Claudia snapped.

"But you were in high school when that happened. Weren't you?" That was what he'd always assumed given a few of the comments she'd made, anyway, and not that high school wasn't still too young for her to be on her own, but Claudia always seemed too young for the things she did. And he couldn't imagine her letting some stranger from child services order her around when she barely even let Artie order her around. He frowned as the lingering sense of wrongness he'd felt when he'd seen her brother's image on the screen returned and he was finally able to place it. "Except he's too young, isn't he?" he asked before she could answer his first question. He hadn't really thought about it before when he'd seen pictures of Joshua, but the guy still had to be a couple years away from thirty.

It was her turn to look confused. "What are you talking about? He's too young for what?"

"You told me once that you went to live with your brother after your parents died, but he's not that much older than you are." If they'd both ended up in foster care, that would explain a lot.

"No, he was eighteen when I was born," she said. "And I did go to live with him after the accident."

There was no lie in her eyes, but it still didn't make sense. "Come on, Claude, I've seen him. He's at least a few years younger than I am. Well, either that or he has a hell of a plastic surgeon."

"Uh, no, not that I know of. But he did spend twelve years trapped in an interdimensional space where he didn't age."

"Twelve years?"

"Yeah. I was seven when it happened and nineteen when I got him back."

"Oh." Again, not particularly creative, but he couldn't reconcile her words with what he'd thought her past had been. He'd have sworn that her brother been trapped a lot less time than that. But now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure where he'd gotten that impression from. She might have implied things, or at least he'd inferred things, but he couldn't remember any actual numbers ever being mentioned.

"So like I said, I grew up in the foster care system," she said after a few moments of silence. "It's a hell of a lot of 'experience.'"

He winced as she marked out quotes in the air and then shook his head. "I'm not…I never meant you." Which probably didn't make one damn bit of difference to her given the things that he'd said—and never mind that he genuinely had been speaking from his own experience—but he couldn't not say it.

"Whatever. It'd just be better if I was the one who talked to Danny."

"Claude…."

"It's not a big deal."

"Lie." Although not as much of one as he'd have expected.

"Seriously, Steve. I spent most of those twelve years, or at least the eight years I was actually in the system, bouncing. It's nothing I haven't heard before." She shook her head and then reached up to grip her backpack strap. "I've got homework."

That she wasn't harassing or even asking him to help with. Yeah, not a sign of anything wrong there. "Not from a friend," he said before she could disappear. At least he hoped not.

"Didn't really have friends. 'scuse me."


Steve glanced up at the clock again and then at the door. He'd promised this morning to let her be the one to talk to Danny after school, but he'd be glad when she was home. Even if she was right and he was being a jerk—and realistically he probably was, especially since he wasn't undercover on some ATF operation at the moment—he'd still rather be talking to Danny with her.

He finally heard the door open, and he twisted towards it. "Claude? Anything?"

"Maybe." There were two thumps in quick succession, presumably the door closing and her backpack hitting the floor, and then she joined him in the living room, flopping down on the couch beside him. "He didn't know exactly where they'd been searching, but he did know that the last couple days when Brandon came home it looked like he'd been wading or something. I checked, and there hasn't been any rain for like a month, but there is a river off to the west that's running high this year. Something about runoff."

"So maybe he was searching a flooded barn or basement," Steve said.

"That's what I'm thinking. I pulled a bunch of abandoned property records last night just so we'd have them. It should be easy enough to make a list of the ones closest to the river."

"Well, let's get going, then. You get the list; I'll get the goo."

She joined him at the car only a few minutes later, but she was frowning down at her phone, and he tilted his head. "What?"

"I've got thirteen structures here. Five houses, six barns, and two garages. It's like half of the abandoned buildings within the town limits are all in the same area."

"And they're all flooded?"

"Close enough to the river that they should be, at least according to the satellite maps." She shook her head. "Who builds like that? I mean, has the river never run high before?"

"Unless that wasn't where the river was when they were built," Steve said after a minute. "How old are they? The houses, I mean."

"I didn't look. What do you mean that wasn't where the river was? Since when do rivers pack up and move?"

He shrugged. "This is farming country. It's possible that they redirected it or built dams or whatever at some point after the houses were built. You know, for irrigation or whatever. They did something similar to the river near where I grew up…it was before I was born, but every time we drove past one of the holding ponds my dad would talk about how they'd ruined the best set of deer blinds in the county when they, and I quote, 'put that damn dam in.'"

"I guess that would explain why they're all abandoned," Claudia said after a minute. "It means that the search is going to take forever, though. I mean, thirteen buildings, and all of them probably old…."

"Yeah, and you just know it—whatever 'it' is, and assuming 'it' is even our artifact—is going to be in the last place we look."

"Well, yeah. I mean, why would we keep looking after were find it?" She shook her head. "I've never understood that saying."

Steve grinned and mimicked the headshake as he turned the car on. "Fair enough. I'd suggest we grab something to eat first, but I think we're going to need all the daylight we can get."

"We can always go after. And I've got a headlamp and a flashlight in my bag."

Three hours later, and Steve was glad of the flashlight but very much wishing that they'd stopped to get dinner after all because no one was going to let them into a restaurant after this. And Artie was going to need a doctor when he saw the cleaning bill the rental car company was going to send them. "Have you got anything?" he called over to the other bobbing blob of light that marked Claudia's position.

"Aside from a pair of absolutely ruined boots, no," she called back. "I guess we should have brought waders."

The first house they'd searched would have been better classified as a shack, and the river had been and gone so while the floor had been starting to rot through, it had been mostly dry. On this property, however…well, the first two buildings they'd searched, the barn and garage, had been more muddy than really flooded. Which meant that he and Claudia had had the joy of digging twisted lumps of metal and bits of leather out of the mud in order to check them for artifact-ness—slipping at least a couple times each while doing so—with no success. And then they'd come to this house which was most definitely not a shack.

Like with the first house and the two outbuildings everything that looked even vaguely valuable had already been removed, but there had still been bits of this and that scattered around. Most of it old and therefore something that needed to be checked. And then Claudia had found the entrance to the root cellar and Steve had found himself wishing for mud.

The water only came about halfway up to his knees, although that was more than high enough to have gotten his feet soaked, but it had obviously been higher in the past, and between that and time what Steve thought had once been old crates or barrels had been reduced to so many piles of rotting wood. That he and Claudia got to sift through. So far he hadn't found much…some half-disintegrated burlap bags that had probably held some kind of food way back in the distant past, and an old bicycle wheel. And from the lack of anything but complaints from Claudia, he didn't think she'd been having any more luck.

"All right, I'm done with my half," she said after a moment. "Absolutely nothing even remotely artifact-like. Are you ready to get out of here?"

"Yeah. And I don't know about you, but I'm ready to head back tonight. We can start fresh again tomorrow afternoon."

"Agreed." A pause. "I call the shower first."


The first thing that Steve smelled when he stepped out of the bathroom was pizza, and he only took a few seconds to toss his wet things into his room before hurrying towards the kitchen. Claudia might be skinny, but when she got hungry, she could eat.

She'd left him more than half, though, and he grabbed a few slices and a can of coke and headed into the living room to join her. "What's on?"

"Not much. Want to do some of my trig homework?"

"Not really, no." He tilted his head. "You mind if I ask you a little more about what we were talking about yesterday."

"I'd rather do the trig homework."

"I won't ask if you don't want me to," he said after a minute. "I just…it doesn't make sense."

"Parents dead, brother missing, age seven. What's there to make sense of? I mean, I'm good, but even I'm not that good." A pause. "Not quite that good."

"I meant what you said about bouncing around. I mean, you're a genius. Like, literally. Shouldn't they have been fighting over you?"

She snorted. "Shows what you know."

"Gee, thanks."

She shook her head. "Foster parents like normal. You know, girls who play with Barbies and worry about clothes and get a solid B-plus to A-minus average so they can say 'good job' without worrying that she's building a killer robot in their basement. I'm not normal, and I'm not good at pretending that I am so mostly I got weird looks, cleared throats, and a lot of 'she just doesn't quite fit here.' And that was assuming my social worker could get anyone to take me at all; the older a kid gets the harder it is and by the time I took myself out of the system I think I was spending more time in group homes than actual foster homes."

"They can't all have been like that." At least he really, really hoped not, although that would kind of explain a few things too.

"No, there were a couple good homes, but…." Another shake. "They just didn't work out. People always go away."

He'd heard that before, but she'd never been willing to elaborate and he doubted that had changed. "How old were you?" he asked instead.

"Seven. Did you hit your head one of those times you slipped?"

"No, I meant when you got out of the system."

"Oh. It was my fifteenth birthday. I hacked their computers, convinced them that I was turning eighteen, and away I went."

"Of course you did."

She shrugged. "I was getting sick of it. And by then I could take care of myself."

"And the friend thing?"

"You might have noticed that I don't really play well with others. It's not a new thing."

"We get along just fine," he pointed out.

"That's different. That's Warehouse."

"Hey. You're my friend. That's always." He grinned. "But I still don't want to switch bodies with you."

"Do you want to search for artifacts in the mud while I'm at school tomorrow?"


"'Do you want to search for artifacts in the mud while I'm at school tomorrow?'" Steve mimicked. "No!" If he remembered her schedule right, Claudia was in trig class right about now, but he'd rather be there than the chest-deep-in-mud situation that he was currently in. Well, technically the mud was only about hip deep, but the muddy water was up to his chest because this guy had stayed in his home longer than most and had gotten the bright idea to turn half of his garage into a covered boat ramp. Except Steve hadn't realized that until he'd started sliding down the ramp, and he now had his back against the wall at the bottom. It was better than being in the river itself—and he was really hoping he wasn't going to trip some sort of automatic door-opening whatever—but every time he tried taking a step up the ramp he just slid right back down. His current plan involved sliding himself over to one of the side walls and hauling himself up that way, but given how deep he was, it was slow going.

He hitched the tub of goo a little higher onto his shoulder and then began to make his way along the wall. Slide. Squish. Slide. Squish. Mud in places he didn't even want to think about. Slide. Squish. Slide. Squish.

He finally reached the wall, at which point he found a flaw in his plan. Escaping this mess involved dragging himself along a half-rotted wood wall that was not only lacking handholds, the few handholds it did have involved splinters. Still, there wasn't a lot else he could do about it unless he wanted to wait for Claudia and a rope—probably not a great idea since he was supposed to be picking the one her up at school in a couple hours—and the wide window sills should give him some purchase if he could just reach them, so….

Dragging himself up the ramp was harder than it sounded, and his gloves were ripped to shreds by the time the surface under his boots was flat again, but he eventually did make it. "Okay, I'm officially declaring that no one found an artifact down in that sludge," he muttered to himself as he stripped off the remains of the gloves and then carefully pulled out the visible splinters, wincing as he did so. That meant that there was only the loft to search, though, and then he could move on to the house. Which, since it was built on higher ground than the barn-slash-boat-ramp, might have slightly less mud.

He sighed as he leaned against the wall and let himself breathe for a few minutes, considering the ladder leading up into the loft. Wooden, probably as rotted as the walls, and missing a few rungs to boot. Yeah. He felt really good about that. Well, at worst he'd just come crashing back down into the mud, and he really couldn't get any muddier at this point. The rental car company was probably going to just make them keep the car.

The ladder creaked alarmingly as Steve climbed, and twice he was pretty sure he felt it pulling slightly away from the wall—and there were definitely a few splinters still in his hands that he'd need to deal with later—but he was finally able to reach the opening leading into the attic. Which was dry, at least, although probably not very stable since there were several spots where sunlight was shining in through holes in the roof, and hitched up the goo again and then pulled of the flashlight on his belt and flipped it on. He didn't realize until he grabbed it that it had been soaked in his little boat ramp adventure, but miracle of miracles it still worked, although it was Claudia's and for all he knew she'd designed it to work underwater, and took a look around. Pretty deserted except for some wood scattered around, and he headed for the nearest pile and started to dig through it. Maybe it used to be part of a crate or something.

These weren't boards, though, he noticed as he lifted a few of them away, they were more like rods, and he frowned as he twisted two pieces that had obviously once been part of the same piece but were now only connected by a scrap of cloth. There were actually a lot of bits of cloth attached to the wood pieces when he looked.

Steve set down the two he was holding and pushed himself back, using the flashlight to survey the whole collection again. He wasn't in the same league as a couple of his teammates when it came to puzzles, but he wasn't an idiot either, and he would bet his paycheck that there used to be a much larger piece of canvas involved, and it used to connect all of the pieces of wood. Maybe it was from the top of a tent or an awning or something? He tilted his head. In some ways it looked like the wood pieces had been set out deliberately, like someone else had been trying to put a puzzle together, but whatever the wood and canvas had once been, it had obviously been in here a long time.

The obvious occurred to him a second later, and he closed his eyes for a second. "Oh, no." He should have put a new pair of purple gloves on as soon as he took the ruined ones off, but he hadn't even thought about it. And then he'd gone and grabbed something that had been up here for a long time in his bare hands. Granted that he didn't feel any different, but they already knew that this artifact didn't take immediate effect, and this looked really suspicious. "Claude's going to kill me." And if she didn't, Artie probably would.

He dug a spare set of gloves out of his jacket pocket and pulled them on quickly before slinging the tub of goo off his shoulder, fumbling a bit when the slick mud made it difficult to open. "Don't spark. Please, don't spark." Of course, even if it was the artifact, it might not spark unless he gooed everything, but….

He grabbed the pieces of wood and canvas he'd picked up originally, crossed his fingers, and dropped them in. And then jerked an arm up to shield his eyes from the shower of purple sparks that followed. "Shit."

He pulled out his phone, but unlike the flashlight it had been done in by the dunking, and he cursed quietly. Claude had the Farnsworth in her bag, and while he had been texting her the address every time he moved between properties, she wouldn't get out of school for a couple hours. And, again, he had the car. He could go pick her up now, make up an emergency to get her out of class—say a mudslide had taken out their apartment—but the idea that he could pass out while driving down the road…. No. The artifact might not take immediate effect, but he didn't know what the exact time frame was, and he couldn't risk it.

He stared down into the now-quiet tub of goo and then carefully removed the canvas and wood, trying to scrape off the extra goo on the sides before setting it carefully aside. If he was careful, he might have enough to goo all the pieces. Hopefully that would be enough to neutralize the artifact so the fact that he'd touched it wouldn't matter.