Myka
She didn't find out until Saturday morning, when her Farnsworth buzzed as she collected fresh clothes and her shower carryall. Unless she was on a retrieval or on one of her rare vacations, she kept her Farnsworth stowed away in a drawer of the secretary's desk she had refinished herself and tucked into an elongated corner of the room, a corner that she stubbornly insisted had been deliberately constructed rather than ineptly measured. It wasn't a mistake but an "alcove." Her running pants clung unpleasantly to her legs as she bent in front of the desk. Either their unparalleled moisture-wicking performance was a fraud or repetitive use had worn it out. She felt the material grip her knees, and she rued her passion for organization, which had insisted upon one drawer, a bottom drawer, allotted to unsorted miscellany – how else was organization to thrive unless it had fertile soil? – and it was there that she scrabbled for the Farnsworth. The last time a Farnsworth had gone off when she wasn't expecting it was in September, when she and Pete were still together, when thoughts of Helena and the chaos that always seemed to accompany her were only a smudge of smoke on the horizon, a threat so distant that it seemed almost invented, designed solely to confirm that the present she enjoyed now, so filled with meaningful work, her friends, and the man she loved that it had no room for Helena, was her future, too. God, hadn't that call from Artie given her happiness the lie. Her heart beating as fast as when she had ended her run, Myka sat on the desk chair, waiting for the static to clear and Artie's face to come into view. Fuck waiting. "What's up, Artie?"
She wasn't sure if the annoyed-sounding snapping of the Farnworth's static was really the Farnsworth or Artie. His grumbling "Why do you always assume it's me?" didn't completely provide an answer, but it was intelligible and an octave lower than the static.
"Helena would've called me on her cell. Claudia would've texted."
"The Farnsworth provides the only truly secure transmission. How many times do I have to tell people to use it?"
You'll always be telling us to use it. It's boxy-looking and clumsy to operate and it looks like it's a leftover prop from a 1950s sci-fi movie. There's no talking discreetly on a Farnsworth, which tends to cancel out the security of the communication. Myka let the thoughts run through her head without giving voice to any of them. "What's going on?"
"You and Diane will be meeting with the regents this afternoon. They want to talk about the retrieval in North Dakota."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Believe it or not, I'm not always in the regents' confidence, and sometimes they make decisions without telling me," he said sarcastically. He rubbed his hand over his face, and his tone moderated. "Adwin informed me about 30 minutes ago that you and Diane will be meeting with the regents at 2:00 Eastern today. That's all I have for you, and while I can speculate about why they want to talk to you, your own guesses are probably as good as mine." He sighed. "You'll take the meeting in the sunroom. A secure web conference, so bring a laptop. They don't want to do it in the Warehouse."
On rare occasions Myka had physically met with the regents, a diner in Iowa, an office conference room in Atlanta, but more often, and those meetings hadn't been much more frequent, she had met with them in the Warehouse. She would hardly have exited the umbilicus before she found herself in a Venetian palazzo, a medieval castle, a 1970s-era 747 complete with lounge. She wasn't sure who had decided on the setting, the regents or the Warehouse, but Pete maintained that if the two of them concentrated hard enough the setting would switch to a deluxe box at Cleveland's FirstEnergy Stadium or backstage at a late '80s Metallica concert "when they were hitting their peak, Mykes." It had never worked, but maybe their failure owed less to the inherent power dynamics between regents and agents and more to her inability to fantasize that she was standing next to Lars Ulrich. Not that the regents would explain their preference for a non-Warehouse-aided virtual meeting, but their continuing paranoia about Diane's proximity to the Warehouse was likely reason enough.
"Have you told Diane?"
"No," Artie said, "I'm leaving that to you."
Great. She didn't throw the Farnsworth back into the drawer; years of her father warning her to "Handle them gently because books are money" had taught her better, but she let herself stomp off to the shower in high dudgeon and not a little anxiety. Her stomach was sour enough once she toweled off and dressed that she was afraid she wouldn't keep any kind of breakfast down if she didn't talk to Diane first. She resisted looking in the cottage's windows for a glimpse of Diane but wished she had after a third series of knocks failed to bring her to the door. She raised her reddened knuckles for another series when Diane opened the door, hastily removing a pair of earbuds.
"Sorry, I didn't hear you." Myka thought she could detect the familiar strains of Stairway to Heaven issuing from the earbuds. She couldn't repress a grin, and Diane said, a little stiffly, "Educating myself about seminal figures in –"
"British heavy metal?"
"I'm not that chauvinistic or limited," Diane said mock loftily. "Seminal figures in your reality's rock music. Yesterday it was Jimi Hendrix. Tomorrow I plan to sample Bob Marley." She gave Myka a puzzled look as she stepped aside to let Myka enter. "Your popular music, it's very, ah, anglophone."
"Your reality's isn't?"
"No," she said simply, "it isn't."
"That's what we call 'world music.'"
"And Led Zeppelin isn't a part of world music . . . or am I supposed to think it's superior?"
"You'd probably get a different answer if you asked a Led Zeppelin fan." The kitchen smelled of brewing coffee, and Myka realized that it wasn't very long ago that she wouldn't have hesitated to invite herself to sit down and have a cup.
"So, you're not a Led Zeppelin fan?"
"I'm not a Stairway to Heaven fan. If you listen to it backwards, it's about Satan." Myka adopted a grave expression.
"What?" Diane exclaimed and stared at Myka. Her mouth curled into a knowing smile. "Oh, oh, that. I read about it, trying to immerse myself in all things Led Zeppelin. Let me guess. My cousin spun the record backward, and Robert Plant is actually singing about me."
"Some around here would say Helena is Satan. You're just . . . ."
"Her henchman." Diane went to a cupboard. "Do you want any coffee? I'm having a cup."
"I would love it," Myka said gratefully, but she hoped not too gratefully. If their banter was indicative of a thaw, she wanted to keep things light and casual. She took off her coat and draped it over the back of a chair at the table. The cottage was warm, but her hands automatically wrapped themselves around the mug after Diane set it down. She was nervous, not cold. Diane sat across from her and set a plate with sweet rolls between them. "Fresh from Univille," she said.
"The grocery mart?"
"The bakery."
As Myka's eyes widened in surprise, Diane laughed gently. "Your illogical and, I'll note, inconsistent avoidance of sweets has left you unacquainted with what may be Univille's one treasure, Cookies, Cakes & Cream. The owner used to work as a pastry chef for a cruise line. Came back to South Dakota to be closer to family." She picked up a giant cinnamon roll and took a bite, running her tongue over her upper lip to catch all of the icing.
Are you trying to kill me? Myka silently asked her. She looked down at her mug. Better to introduce the moodbuster now, before Diane started moaning her appreciation of the cinnamon roll. "We have a meeting later today with the regents. They want to talk to us about the retrieval."
Diane grimaced and all but dropped the roll on a napkin. "That's not a good sign in any reality."
Helena
Years, no, decades ago when she had had a retrieval-related assignation she would arrive late, sauntering toward her would-be lover with the confidence that the desire that had brought him there and then kept him there would lead him to forgive her as well. That the frustration of being toyed with often keyed his desire to a higher pitch, making him impatient and incautious, only assisted her. She would get the necessary information or, if she were lucky, the artefact itself without having to surrender more than an apology for cutting their night of bliss together so terribly short. Sometimes, however, she would need to surrender more. Those occasions became fewer as she grew more experienced as an agent, but they never disappeared entirely. In fact, the last time she hadn't been able to avoid sleeping with someone to get a lead on an artefact was the retrieval in Paris the summer that Christina had been murdered. The retrieval hadn't gone well from the beginning, and her growing pessimism about its success had almost made her cable Caturanga with the demand that it be called off, but she had decided to soldier on and spend a few extra days in the city to try to bring the retrieval to a conclusion. The woman she had hired to look after Christina was unwilling to extend her employment even at double pay, and Helena, in desperation, had turned to acquaintances of Charles, "cousins," he had called them, based on some nonexistent blood tie between their families. The puzzling family sentiment in a man who had little sentiment and who had cut himself off from his family (with the exception of the sister who was the other half of H.G. Wells) was explained when she met Madame Delaroche, a buxom blonde who tittered whenever Charles's name was mentioned. She had turned out to be harmless as had her long-suffering cuckold of a husband, but an afternoon spent boating with an important client of Monsieur Delaroche, an outing that would have been far less entertaining if a sniffly Christina and her nurse had been allowed to join them, had been a self-indulgence that, in Helena's eyes, was nearly as heinous as the killing of her daughter and the nurse.
Helena shifted in her chair and checked the time on her phone again, almost wishing it were an assignation. Almost. The downside to arriving early was that it gave her time to think, and often her thoughts would wander down fruitless paths like these. She hadn't murdered the Delaroches, as she had Christina's killers, but she had destroyed them, all because they had prized a potential business opportunity above staying home with the niece of a man who had equally gifted husband and wife with his favor, although only Monsieur Delaroche's had been in the form of money. The possibility that the course of events would have turned out no differently except, perhaps, in there being four murder victims rather than two, she had brushed aside. She understood only too well the obsessiveness that served at first to relieve and then to replace the pain of grieving. The Delaroches had operated a rare books and antiques business, which Charles was fond of frequenting on his trips to the Continent and not only because of the complaisant Madame Delaroche. Within 15 months of Christina's death, as the result of some well-placed whispers of fraud and debts that were unexpectedly called in, it had been auctioned off to repay Monsieur Delaroche's mounting liabilities while Madame Delaroche had gone back to live on her family's farm in Alsace-Lorraine. Helena had frequently wondered if she wouldn't have taken the farm away from Madame Delaroche, too, if she hadn't become completely absorbed with the time machine.
"Helena?" Ed's voice was gentle, but she jumped at it all the same. He pulled out the chair across from her and lowered himself into it. He was a tall man, but not so tall that he should move so awkwardly. He appeared to be favoring his leg again, but that didn't answer for all of it. His height would draw attention, and Ed appeared to be a man uncomfortable with attention, unlike his father. His setting his mug down was a two-handed job. Helena noted it but slid her eyes up and away, smiling at him in gratitude that was only partially feigned. His arrival had stopped her from thinking about the even sadder end to the Delaroches' fall from respectability, if not grace.
"I'm so glad you could meet me." If there were a faint hint of desperation to her words, so much the better. She would be battling ghosts while she talked to him. While she might like to think that in the 130-plus years of her existence she had learned to accept responsibility for what she had done and live with the burden, her crimes refused to be passively shouldered. They were noisy with remembered terrors and pleas for mercy, cries that she would have the same done to her someday and recriminations whose origin – whether they were those of her victims or hers alone – she could no longer distinguish. Most of the time she could keep them to the volume of the white noise in an office setting, an unceasing mutter at the back of her mind, but today, today she had to stir her ghosts, wake them.
"Like I've said, I'm happy to help. What can I tell you that will reassure you that this new treatment for your father will work?" He lipped at his coffee, decided it was too hot, and set his mug back on the table.
"I'm interested in any . . .metrics . . . you might have on the treatment's performance. Actually, any data at all, on how many patients have shown progress, the length of time between diagnosis and remission or cure." Helena smiled and widened her eyes. It was harder to keep her tone light. Mockery gave her voice its richness. "Obviously your father's reputation . . . well, it's what brought my father and me here, but I'm a hard facts girl when you get right down to it."
"We're beginning to build a body of data, but the treatments are still too new. We need more time – and more patients." Ed tried to smile as broadly, but he looked away from her too quickly.
Helena debated whether she wanted to get another cup of tea. She wasn't sure how long or how deeply she could probe before Ed invented an excuse to leave. "When I told you my father is all I have I meant it. Once upon a time I had work that was important to me, friends, a child, and then I lost all of them. My daughter died senselessly and violently, and, while it may sound theatrical, I literally went mad." There was no shrinking away from her now. Ed's gaze was level and unwavering. "I lost my job, I drove my friends away, the only one who stood by me was . . . ." She tried to picture an Artie Nielsen unlike the one she knew, more like her own father, but all she clearly remembered of him was his shuffling walk and his wheezing rages at her and her half-sisters, which wasn't all that different from Artie's shuffling walk and bursts of ill temper. The only one she could picture was the only one who had stood by her, or tried to. But she could hardly introduce Myka's name into the conversation. "Was my father."
"You won't lose him" Ed said. This time he didn't look away, but he blinked, as if the intensity, or need, with which she regarded him was too much. He took refuge in his coffee, taking a long drink and then carefully patting his mouth with a napkin. "My father and I know what that's like. My mother . . . her cancer was aggressive and not responsive to standard treatments. He was helpless, and my father wasn't used to feeling helpless. Like you, he retreated from his friends, resigned his position at the hospital. My mother's death changed everything for him, and he had to start fresh."
"Your father was a lucky man," Helena said. "The sense of powerlessness is corrosive. You spend every waking minute trying to pinpoint what you did wrong, where you failed her. When that's not enough, you hunt down those responsible and make them pay. And when that's not enough," her voice dropped, "you try to bend reality itself to your demands. 'Bring her back, don't let her die.'" She paused before saying softly, "Are you so sure that's not what your father's doing?"
His blinking increased. "I don't understand what you're talking about, Helena. I'm very sorry about your daughter, but it's not the same thing –"
"I understand your father better than you do. The belief in our own omnipotence . . . the loss of that's harder for some of us to endure than the death of those we love." She couldn't stare him into submission, but she could keep her voice soft and conversational and let it beat at him like rain. "Before I lost everything that mattered to me, I still had one friend, someone I worked with. He was junior to me, and as the more experienced employee at our . . . firm . . . I was supposed to teach him everything I knew. I did, and then some. He was privy to all my obsessions, my vengeful schemes, and though I knew he was disturbed by what I was letting my daughter's death turn me into, he remained my most loyal supporter. He shouldn't have. He should have gone to my superiors, but he didn't. He thought he could save me." She didn't have to stage how she would say what was coming next. She saw Woolly's open, friendly face, the faith that, yes, this time the time machine would succeed, heard his boyish giggle at his pun. His screams followed only minutes after. The memory of them unsteadied her words. "I ended up losing him, too." She paused. "You can't save your father by denying what he's doing."
"So, this is what it's about? He has his detractors. Are you and the man you call your father working for them? They think he's running a scam, but he's not. They're small and petty and jealous because they don't have his vision." His outrage, necessarily conveyed at low volume, was further undercut by his now-incessant blinking, which Helena found dizzying to witness. Or maybe she was suffering the vertigo of seeing poor Woolly's face superimposed upon Ed's, though Woolly had never been hangdog like him, because Woolly had always believed. This man in front of her had stopped believing, long before the advent of Edison's magical fluoroscope in Tom Oliver's life, she suspected.
"I can talk like this about your father because we're cut from the same cloth." She shook her head at Ed in the fond admonishment she used to reserve for Woolly and his unsullied faith that what was wrong could be put right. Even her. "How many times did you put yourself under the fluoroscope before you knew it was a lie, that your father's 'treatment' wasn't curing anyone?"
Myka
Claudia had spent her lunch finding them a functioning monitor for the web conference with the regents. "Good luck," she grunted after plugging the monitor into the laptop. She grinned at Diane. "Got your Depends on?"
"What?"
"Agents have been known to pee their pants when the regents do a post-retrieval review." Claudia hooked her thumb at Myka. "Just ask Agent-Who-Needs-To-Do-Her-Kegel-Exercises here."
"Ha." Myka swatted at her.
"I feel that I'm well prepared for this. When was the last time the regents reviewed your medical records and asked intimate details about your sexual activities because they wanted to know how closely your history dovetailed with that of your genetic double?" When Claudia uncertainly scoffed and muttered "HIPAA" under her breath, Diane lasered her with a glare that reminded Myka of Helena. "If you're a potential threat to life as it's lived on this planet in this reality, then HIPAA is the least of the laws you have to worry about being ignored."
"Did she just throw shade at me?" This time Claudia's thumb hooked toward Diane. "Maybe I'll have to rethink my decision about not letting her into the clubhouse." She turned on the laptop and typed in a web address. "Once Adwin logs in, you should be able to join. I'm going to motor before the regents get a glimpse of me."
She didn't literally run out of the room, but she pulled the French doors closed so hard they rattled. Diane sat down next to Myka and crossed her arms. Then she uncrossed them, moved her chair back, and propped her legs on the table, slouching down in her chair for good measure. "Think this works?"
"Only if you want to be sent back to the CDC."
Diane chuckled as she pushed herself up and put her feet on the floor. "As embarrassing as it was to hear the doctors talk to them about the results of my pelvic exam, it was worse having one of the regents ask me, when I had to tell them about the intimacies Warehouse followers would offer agents, if more than one agent participated because," she lowered her voice and said in a passable Southern accent, 'in ancient Rome, the temple of Dionysius held bacchanals.'" Myka recognized the regent, a judge from the Eleventh Circuit court. "He was visibly disappointed when I said that wasn't how it worked, that whatever happened between an agent and a follower it was private. For the follower, it wasn't sex or only sex, it was an observance. Completely sailed over his head." She sighed. "My reality missed its purpose in not being his personal stag film."
"Your reality has porn?" Myka felt she was channeling Pete, but she was curious.
Diane glared at her in exasperation. It was only slightly less intense than the glare she had given Claudia. She was about to say something, likely withering, when the monitor flickered and Adwin Kosan came into view. "We'll talk," she stopped, bewildered by what she was about to say next, "we'll talk about that later," she hissed.
Myka suppressed a smile as more regents began to join the meeting. Smiling, especially anything that resembled a smirk, could send the regents the wrong message. Powerful people, not surprisingly, often wanted their power acknowledged. Smirking was a challenge, not an acknowledgment. She took a breath and met Diane's eyes. "Ready?" At Diane's nod, she turned the laptop's camera on.
Adwin was under no such constraints, greeting them with a tiny, frosty smile. Tiny and frosty, but a smile. The meeting couldn't become too hostile, not if he was smiling at them. All 12 regents were in attendance, which was even more of a rarity since they were meeting virtually; a few of the regents lived in countries with time zones that were several hours ahead. The initial questions were the basic, information-gathering ones that Myka expected: how did the 'anomaly' come to their attention, when did they decide that they were dealing with an artefact and not an anomaly, how did they identify the artefact. Some of the regents even took notes.
"Agent Bering, did you believe that this object was an anomaly?"
Myka thought that her and Diane's responses thus far had made that clear, but she knew better than to betray a reaction. The regents usually entered these reviews convinced that the agents had screwed up. She wouldn't be able to convince them to arrive at a different conclusion if she couldn't keep her temper. The regent asking the question wasn't the circuit court judge but a Silicon Valley CEO. Among the other apps his company had developed was an app that reviewed online reviews, identifying which seemed authentic and which were likely fraudulent. Of course he would be skeptical. "Initially, yes."
"Initially," he repeated. "What made you change your mind?"
Myka resisted the impulse to look at Diane. "I started to question what we had when we learned that the first person to have witnessed . . . experienced the anomaly had died. My understanding of how anomalies work is limited, but from how Diane has described them, I didn't think they had an artefact's 'recoil.' When we heard that the second person to have miraculously escaped death was seriously ill, we both were considering that what we had was an artefact, not an anomaly."
"You both were?" Another regent asked with disbelief. She cocked her head and stared at Diane. "My, it sounds like you were quick to give up on the idea of it being an anomaly."
"I may have been a little slower than Myka to conclude that the anomaly was really a relic, but, in the end, that's what it was." Myka could see Diane's jaw muscles stiffen. "I was too eager to see it as an anomaly," she admitted.
"'Eager,' that's an interesting word," the circuit court judge mused. "You've been with us for almost three months, and this was the first time we've heard of something that might be an anomaly. Why so eager now?" He took off his glasses and made a show of cleaning the lenses. "Wouldn't have anything to do with Agent Lattimer's abrupt departure, would it?"
Myka leaned forward. "Agent Lattimer volunteered for a temporary assignment. He hasn't left the Warehouse, and our search for the anomaly was completely unrelated."
One of the newer regents cleared her throat. "I'm not sure where we're going with this line of inquiry, Duane. Let's not invent a conspiracy where one doesn't exist." Dr. Kim focused her attention on Myka. "You've said you initially believed that the artefact was an anomaly, but did you understand how Diane came to that conclusion? Did she explain her thought process? Was there any kind of independent analysis that was done?"
"I knew she had been working with Claudia to develop a program that would filter news media and social media for potential leads on anomalies. I read the articles she found about a series of unusual events in southwestern North Dakota. I could understand why she found them intriguing."
"'Intriguing' doesn't tell us whether you or Artie Nielsen or anyone else in the Warehouse tried to arrive at the same conclusion using other methods," Dr. Kim said.
Myka hoped she wasn't betraying the irritation she felt. "We've never encountered an anomaly, so we have no 'other methods.' We had no advance information that there were artefacts in the area," she said, avoiding the use of "ping machine," which Adwin thought was unprofessional. "It's not unusual for us to be sent on a retrieval when it's not clear that there is an artefact. We operate on the 'better safe than sorry' principle. Since we didn't have anything telling us that an artefact was involved in these near-death experiences, it seemed plausible that the cause might be an anomaly."
"Still, you simply took the word of this woman, a genetic duplicate of Helena Wells, who claims, with virtually no evidence, that she comes from an alternate version of this reality, that you were dealing with an anomaly? At the very least, why were you the only agent to accompany her on the trip? Why weren't more agents assigned?"
Duane, the circuit judge, chimed in with "Unacceptable breach of basic security protocols. Adwin, we can't let this stand. I know you respect Nielsen, but the lack of discipline, it's intolerable." A number of regents nodded in agreement.
"I'll speak to Artie and Irene about this," Adwin said smoothly, "but to keep the meeting moving along, will you please address Dr. Kim's questions, Agent Bering?"
More agents weren't assigned because we don't have more agents, but let's put aside the chronic lack of resources at the Warehouse. I didn't want any other agents with us. But Myka knew she couldn't say any of it. "We haven't been able to discover any plot, any confederates, any indication that she's sprouted from the mind of Helena Wells. Yes, to take her at her word, to treat her like a Warehouse agent was a risk, but it was a risk we've been willing to run. To find out whether she's a fox, we've had to –"
"Let her into the hen house," Dr. Kim finished. "I believe that's one of Irene Frederic's favorite turns of phrase."
Diane didn't look at Myka, but she sat straighter in her chair. "Looked at that way, either I would reveal my malevolent intentions or, if there were an anomaly involved, I'd be returned to my reality. It was a win-win from that point of view, despite the danger to Myka." With a dryness that had Myka's cheeks burning, Diane said, "On the other hand I was partnered with the Helena-killer, so to speak. Who better to go up against me?"
"Admirable effort," Dr. Kim said dryly, "but I'm not sure I can give you the save." She looked down at a sheaf of papers and turned over only the top one. "I want to better understand why you weren't able to retrieve the artefact. Your report says it had 'shattered.' How does a fossil shatter? How did you know that was what actually happened to it? How –"
Myka felt an unwelcome pressure at the base of her skull. She was going to have a monster headache when this was over.
Helena
"What?" Ed exclaimed, then lowered his voice. "What are you talking about? Why would I have used the fluoroscope on me?"
His right eyelid began to twitch, and he impatiently rubbed his eye. But Helena didn't need the tell, she knew she was right. She was 99% sure she was right. She was highly confident that she was right. Bollocks, she had gone all in on what was, at best, an educated guess. It had had support from Dr. Kim but no confirmation, unless she wanted to rely on Ed's eyelid. She had returned to the hotel after meeting Ed and arranging to meet this afternoon, rapidly assessing what she knew about him to identify her best option for persuading him to tell the truth about his father. The son of a father who was a giant in his field, the seeker of true love on a dating site, the reader of "great men" biographies. She had turned them over and over in her mind, shuffling them with her and Artie's suspicions about the fluoroscope's imaging power, hoping each time she would deal herself a better hand. Glumly she had concluded that she might have to resort to the kind of book club conversation that reduces a book to a series of events that mirrors the reader's experiences ("So, Ed, how would you say Winston Churchill's relationship to his father might be similar to your relationship with Tom?"). Yes, that was precisely the stroke of genius that made her such a valuable agent.
Pushing the bed pillows behind her head, she cleared her mind and reviewed, as if she were watching a movie, her first meeting with the Olivers and her trip back to the clinic to talk to Ed. Of course, before there were movies, she had likely had another analogy for it, although she couldn't remember what it was. The slow, detailed recreation of a scene, it was something she had taught herself to do when she had started experimenting with time travel. She had had to minutely picture the room that had been Christina's bedroom when she had been left with Charles's mistress, everything from the frayed carpet on the floor to the pillowcases, yellowed with age. At least in Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve had had a coin to focus his thoughts. She had had only her obsession. Picturing Ed, she revolved him in her mind, noting his resemblances to his father and the details that differed. Unlike his father, he shuffled, he blinked, he held himself as if he carried a burden that might crush him at any moment.
Helena had reached for her phone on the nightstand and called Claudia. Claudia, as usual, had bemoaned the additional work. How was she ever to meet someone when she was babysitting the Warehouse like an overprotective mother with her first child? She hadn't had a weekend off in . . . she couldn't remember when. At least Helena could give her Friday night. She had a standing online date with a reformed hacker who had Fargo's skillsets and more and was way sexier – if she could trust the picture he had sent her. And if she couldn't, he was more interesting than what Helena was asking her to do now. Find out everything she could about Ed Oliver's medical history . . . legally.
"You're putting me on, right? There's no way I can give you what you want in the timeframe you want it without breaking into things. You know that, H.G."
"I can't afford to have you hacking into systems and news getting back to the regents. You do remember the last time you stumbled over a tripwire when you hacked information?" Claudia's growl was audible, but Helena ignored it. "Your chances of doing it cleanly in less than 24 hours are too small." In a retrieval that had targeted an artefact thought to be at a military base, Claudia had hacked into a database of personnel records that had actually been set up to infect a potential hacker's computer with malware. The regents had had to endure a long, unpleasant conversation with top officials at the Department of Defense, including the Secretary of Defense. It had been part of the "retraining" Helena had had to undergo when she was brought back to the Warehouse. Of the do's and don'ts lectures she had been given, the don'ts had far exceeded the do's.
"Don't try to pass this off as thinking of me. You're just too chickenshit, H.G.," Claudia said scornfully.
"You're right. I respect your genius, Claudia, but you're not infallible, and when I leave the Warehouse again, I would like the regents to want to be helpful in my job hunt. At Claudia's snort, Helena said, "I rail at the regents, I speak of them with derision, I even speak to them with derision, but there is nipping at the hand that feeds you, and then there is taking the hand into your mouth and savaging it. They are what I have instead of a job history and sterling references. I have a 401(k) to grow. People my age worry about things like that."
"People your age are dead." And with that, Claudia ended the call.
Helena had stayed up late enough researching illnesses whose symptoms included headaches, lack of balance, vision problems, and fatigue (she couldn't be sure that Ed suffered from it as well, but he was what Elle would have described, disapprovingly, as "low energy") that every miscellaneous noise of the hotel and its guests settling down for the night was amplified – a toilet flushing in the room above, the rattling of the elevator. Eerily amplified, she might have said if she had been prone to fearing sounds, but sounds in the night were welcome. It was the silence deep into the night that could still terrify her. She broke around three o'clock, having narrowed down a disturbingly large number of possible maladies to the few she thought most likely, given the particularities of the situation, including the artefact. She slept until six, when she got up, put in her time on the treadmill, breakfasted, and cruised a few more websites before calling Claudia.
She asked in lieu of a greeting, "What do you have?"
"In store for you?" Claudia laughed evilly, or tried to, before complaining, "It's 6:30 in the fucking morning out here, H.G."
"I wanted to call you half an hour ago."
"Bitch," Claudia mumbled.
"I heard that."
"You were supposed to." She sighed, and Helena heard the squeak of one of the office chairs in the war room. "God, I don't know how long I data-mined sites, until I said 'Fuck this shit' and contacted Marcus."
"Marcus."
"As in Aurelius. That's what he goes by, you know, my online guy. Anyway, he got you what you wanted, H.G."
"I said legally, Claudia."
"I didn't hack it or buy it on the dark web. Marcus helped me out because he wants to get in my pants."
"Please say no more – about any of it."
"Which I would happily let him do, if I could get a fucking vacation away from this place." Claudia was quiet for a few moments. "Marcus sent me a file from a clinic billing database that had been hacked a couple of months ago. Ed Oliver was a patient, and the doctor was a Paul Agnelli."
"What are the charges for?"
"Diagnostic services, various tests, exams." The pause was significant. "Do you want me to send the info to you."
Helena's pause was also significant. "Yes," she said finally.
That had been more than six hours ago, and Helena would have gladly suffered an eternity of Claudia's sarcasm if she hadn't had to do what she was doing now. She watched the battle in Ed's face between outrage and something twitchier, which might have been guilt. Eventually he pushed himself away from the table and less than gracefully stood up, using one hand on the table for balance. "I'm not going to listen to any more of this."
"You're losing your sense of balance, the headaches are getting worse. You hoped your father's fluoroscope would shrink the tumor, didn't you?"
"I don't –"
"You've been seeing Paul Agnelli." Helena found it more difficult to say what was next than she had anticipated. She looked down at the table, trying to ensure that her composure would hold. "He's a specialist in brain cancers, especially glioblastomas." She had called Lydia Kim after she had finished with Claudia, figuring "any time" meant any time, even if it was before nine on a Saturday morning. Twenty minutes later, having received a thumbnail summary of Dr. Agnelli's professional background, a mini-lecture on brain cancers, and confirmation of the pronunciation of "glioblastoma," she had called Artie, begrudgingly providing him with an update. The rest of the morning she spent trying to anticipate Ed's response – and dreading their meeting. His face had blanched, and she wanted to look anywhere but at the eyes that were the same eyes, no matter their shape or color, of anyone who had hoped for too much from an artefact. Anger, disappointment, and, even more painful to witness, a residual eagerness to be convinced that it had all been a mistake, and only if he tried harder . . . . "The prognosis is grim, isn't it?"
Ed sagged, folding down, rather than lowering himself, into the chair. "If I'm lucky, 12 months." He offered her a surrendering smile that was more relieved than pained. "I could do with another cup of coffee."
In addition to the coffee he had requested, she brought back a second cup of tea and two scones. She wasn't hungry but sipping tea wasn't sufficient occupation. She needed more distraction than that. Dimly she remembered the feeling of satisfaction, often intensified by a completely unmerited surge of triumph, when she knew she was on the verge of retrieving an artefact. Her superior intelligence, diligence, effort, whatever she chose to call it that day, had won out, yet again, against someone who had depended on an artefact to reward him with what he didn't deserve. There wasn't a little reverse snobbery in her attitude because so often, in her day, the ones who acquired the artefacts were the ones who least needed them. They already possessed privileges of status, education, wealth, which those whom she had lived among would need artefacts to achieve. The loss of Judith had had her questioning just how clever she was, and the loss of Christina had only pointed up how hollow her successes were. Now she felt only nauseous and very, very tired.
She didn't have to prompt him. Ed anticipated and answered her questions before she asked them. In the lost years after Karen's death, his father had sought guidance from so-called self-help gurus, "Charlatans, quacks," Ed said bitterly, "but some of them spoke of amulets and magic powers, crap my father once would have refused to hear." But he had listened, showing interest in the most heterodox of cures, including one that was reputed to reverse even terminal cancers. Its origin was obscure, but there were rumors that it had come out of Thomas Edison's laboratory. "My father sold almost everything he had, liquidated his investment accounts. I begged him not to, but he said he had had a dream about my mother, and she told him it would've saved her."
"So it powers what must be that enormous fluoroscope in the office."
Ed choked on a piece of scone. Mainly he had been crumbling it between his fingers. "It's not in the fluoroscope. It's in a drawer in my father's desk. When we tried to put in the fluoroscope, it nearly exploded on us. Couldn't even keep it in the same room. Sometimes the building shakes as it is."
"You'll have to show us."
"Right, you and your . . . father." He squinted at her, although the lighting in the coffee shop was what could be described as "warm, full-bodied, with a deep amber tint." However, Helena suspected it wasn't the quality of the light but rather the Medusa-figure he must believe she had turned into. "I wouldn't have let it go on so long if I hadn't thought that my father really had stumbled on a miracle cure. I mean, people were getting better."
"The placebo effect. If your doctor tells you your cancer is in remission, you're going to start feeling better." Helena took a sip of her rapidly cooling tea. Just once when she was on a retrieval, she would like to finish it when it was still warm. "For a time."
Ed nodded. "When they started reporting symptoms again, my father and I tried different things, more of the drug regimen, less of the drug regimen, more time under the fluoroscope, less time, but every scan showed the same thing, the tumors and malignant cells dying. We didn't understand." He balled up the rest of the scone, a large pile of crumbs, in a napkin. "Then I started falling, tripping. I couldn't see straight. Numbness, weakness. I figured it was something neurological, but I didn't want to tell my dad. I made an appointment with Paul. He was one of my father's many mentees." He finished a little bitterly, all but asking why his father always found time for his students but none for his family. "I had an appointment with Paul a couple of weeks ago. I had been zapping myself with the damn thing every day. Christ, I'd even come in late at night, just so my dad wouldn't know, but the tumor had grown."
"I'm sorry," Helena said.
He responded with a derisive huff. "Don't bother." He waited a few seconds, then said with a sigh, "That was rude." He blew out another sigh. "What now?"
She had been sorry. She was sorry. She would still be sorry after they had retrieved the artefact. It was her belief, experience, fundamentally, that if things were going as well as they could be, then people wouldn't need artefacts. It was that simple. Artefacts were dodgy. Unreliable, unpredictable, dangerous. They made an often unhappy situation worse, and when Warehouse agents swooped in to claim an artefact, the possessors returned to a reality that, if it were more tolerable than it had been before, was only because they were thankful they were alive to experience its disappointments.
Myka
"That was brutal." Diane slumped against the chair with a long, weary sigh.
Myka rubbed the back of her neck. Kneading the muscles wasn't making her headache go away. Brutal, yes, but compared to the meetings she, Pete, and Artie had had with the regents after Yellowstone, not soul-crushing. She probably would have retreated to the safety of her parents' bookstore even if she hadn't had to endure the regents' scathing appraisal, but the condemnation in their faces had been fuel to her flight. Until the day Irene had arrived with Helena or, rather, her hologram, Myka had daily expected to be fired, and she had survived the tension that built from the moment she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night by planning her post-Warehouse life in detail. She would work with her father and take over the running of the bookstore after he retired, she would run marathons, she would volunteer. After successive professional failures, Sam's death and Helena's betrayal, she wouldn't seek fulfillment in work. After successive heartbreaks, also represented by Sam's death and Helena's betrayal, she wouldn't look for fulfillment in personal relationships either. Moderation, caution, discipline, she thought she had respected those qualities, but she would embody them now.
She was such an idiot at times. Granted, she had been an idiot about Helena, but she had been an even greater idiot in her overreaction. As though she could have survived six months working full time in the bookstore, and while running in marathons and committing to more volunteer work remained worthy goals, she could no more play the field when it came to relationships than she could resist learning a procedure to its last detail. If she couldn't give her heart to it, it wasn't a relationship she wanted to pursue. Her place was with the Warehouse and if that meant subjecting herself to the regents' withering and, at times, unfair criticisms, she would accept it as part of the experience. "They did go overboard on how much money the retrieval ultimately cost." Myka rose, stretched, and shut the laptop. She surveyed the clutter of coffee mugs, Perrier bottles, Monster Energy cans, a half-empty package of chocolate Twizzlers. It had been a three-and-a-half-hour meeting. They had had to find a way to survive it. "As my dad always says,' 'The table won't clean itself.'" Actually her father would yell, "How are you girls going to get anywhere if you don't work? The table won't clean itself. If you want to be a worthless lump on the couch, Myka, go ahead." Her father always sounded better after a little editing.
Diane pulled a chocolate Twizzler from the bag. Meditatively chewing an end, she said, gazing at the mess "I look at it, and I think something grand should have been birthed, like the United Nations. Or Star Wars."
"No, only the right to keep working our jobs." Myka gathered up an armful of cans and plastic bottles.
Diane collected the mugs and followed her into the kitchen. "Six million dollars to pay for a broken artefact," she growled in her spot-on imitation of the circuit court judge, "the average taxpayer would be up in arms if he knew what his money's being spent on. Shoulda looked a little harder for it before you called on Mr. Nielsen."
"He's an ass," Myka said dismissively. "Artefacts self-destruct, it's in the archives." She started lining the counter next to the sink with the cans and bottles.
"More frequently than I would have guessed," Diane said, placing her mugs on the counter. "You were on a roll, citing all the artefacts that have disintegrated or exploded, seemingly without cause. I wasn't sure what was more impressive, how incendiary these things are or the amount of research you were able to conduct in a short amount of time."
"I knew they were going to harp on the money that went to the Warriners and accuse us, in so many words, of 'breaking' the artefact." Myka widened her eyes and gave Diane a look she hoped was innocent rather than glassy. "I had to defend us, didn't I?"
Diane's laugh was brief. "What was the purpose of that meeting? There were no helpful explanations of how we could have done better. No thorough consideration of other potential outcomes. No additional training recommendations. No identification of what we did well and how it might benefit agents on future retrievals. However, if the purpose was our utter humiliation, I would say they succeeded."
"No cranky, budget-conscious regents, sorry, elders in your post-retrieval reviews?"
"We don't have to defend the value of what we do. Our elders want to make us better agents, not drive us away. All of it's a learning process, what relics and anomalies are, why they exist, what they tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit." Diane leaned against the counter. "Your regents seem to be completely unaware of what a privilege it is to be associated with the Warehouse, in any capacity. Or maybe they're indifferent, which is even worse." Absent-mindedly she loosed the knot of her hair, which had steadily been unraveling through the meeting, and combed the strands with her fingers, shaking them free.
Myka tried not to stare at her and diligently focused on rinsing out the bottles. Her headache was threatening to halve her skull in two, she felt both waterlogged and bloated, and yet she could acknowledge that Diane's simple actions were intensely erotic. Or they would be, if her head weren't killing her.
"I'm starting to sound like the old agents, the one who retire but never leave. They still live in the dormitories and they lecture the younger agents about how much better things were when they were young. The elders were nobler, the intercessors more spiritual, the agents superior." She grinned at Myka. "Handsomer, too."
"Some of the regents can be jerks. I'd like to believe they're all selected because they bring something special to the Warehouse, but a few," Myka shrugged, "I've figured they were appointed as a favor." She rinsed out the rest of the cans and bottles. "But who am I to say things like that? I'm just a lowly agent. Adwin Kosan isn't asking my opinion about anything."
"He seemed interested in your opinion about whether I was a help or a hindrance on the retrieval." The tone was light, but there was wariness in Diane's eyes.
"Are you fishing for a compliment?" Myka registered the wariness but hoped her joking response would lessen it.
"Not at all. Call me paranoid, but he was asking whether you thought I had tried to sabotage the retrieval in any way." Diane moved away from the counter and began restlessly circling the kitchen. "It's been three months since I found myself in that freight container, but the regents and most of the people here still can't seem to decide whether I'm the first salvo in an unknown enemy's attack on the Warehouse or one of my cousin's experiments gone horribly awry. No one wants to believe that, just possibly, I'm neither. Surely I would've done something by now if I had evil intentions."
"You wouldn't be the first to play the long game." Myka flung open a cupboard door. The axe that was cleaving her head in two had sunk in deeper. She dry swallowed a couple of ibuprofen, then thought better of it and poured a glass of water and drank it down. "Doesn't your Warehouse have to deal with those who fear it or want to possess its relics? It's not only those on the outside, it's the former agents, former regents, scientists, doctors, contract workers. They're the ones who come closest to doing us in."
"Occasionally there are threats, but," Diane stopped her circuit of the kitchen, "my Warehouse is a fortress, a very public fortress, but a fortress. A special division of the United Nations peacekeeping force is assigned to guard it, and, though we're never to acknowledge it, a special division of the host country's armed forces guards it as well. Yes, we do, on occasion, have a rogue agent, but it's nothing like what you have – a Helena Wells or James MacPherson. The people who serve the Warehouse are devoted to it."
Nettled by the sarcasm in the last remark, Myka snapped, "We're not all plotting the Warehouse's ruin, you know. Some of us are as devoted to our work as you are. In fact, so was Helena . . . once. She didn't go rogue. She was driven –"
Diane held up a hand to stop her. "I've been treated shabbily, but not by you. I've never questioned your loyalty to the Warehouse." With a gentleness that Myka found harder to hear than the sarcasm, she said, "It was a long, stressful afternoon, and, obviously, I need to relax and not think about it for a while. I'll see you later." With an apologetic smile that made Myka feel they were separated by a universe, or an alternate reality, rather than eight feet, Diane opened the back door and slipped out.
Myka remained rooted to the floor until she realized that she didn't want the day to end like this, feeling that she and Diane were further apart now than they had been after the retrieval. Swearing softly at herself and, for good measure, the regents, she chased after Diane, feeling her shoes slip on the icy walk. The motion lights outlined Diane against the black backdrop of the night. Coatless, she was huddled against the cold and walking very fast. Deciding that rushing up on her from behind wasn't the best approach, Myka called out to her to slow down. Diane turned, watching Myka slide to an arm-flailing stop inches from her.
"I don't want to argue," Myka said breathlessly, "but I'm feeling worse now than I did during the meeting. Was it what I said about Helena –"
Diane violently shook her head. "No, yes, maybe a little bit. It's not just Helena, it's being here and looking like her. The success of my work in my reality is fitting in no matter where pursuing an anomaly takes me, and I'll never fit in here. Listening to your regents, all I could think was 'They'll never see me as anything other than a threat because they will only ever see me as H.G. Wells, the 'father' of science fiction, agent extraordinaire, and monster, all rolled into one. I wasn't on trial. She was, yet again. Do you recall how many times they referred to your retrievals with her, her leaving you and Pete for dead in Egypt, Yellowstone?"
Myka felt the cold bite through her sweater. It was in the teens, and the temperature was dropping fast. They wouldn't be able to stand out here much longer. She recalled the snide remarks about the "girl power" she and Helena supposedly exulted in, the pointed emphasis of her failure to read the clues about Helena's real plans. Maybe there had been more about her and Helena's partnership than she remembered, but she had absorbed it as only one thread of criticism about her performance among many. "It wasn't about Helena, it was about me, and my mistakes as an agent."
"Or maybe they were just making plain the truth of the matter – there's no talking about Helena without talking about you. You're the light to her darkness." Diane had begun to shiver, the tremors beginning to enter her voice. "You may not want to admit it, but you respond to that utterly unpredictable, utterly frightening side of my cousin. I don't know if you find it a challenge or a call to save her or both, but you're wedded to her, Myka." An unhappy chuckle escaped her.
"It's too cold to argue, so even if I do want to save her and even if she does want to be saved, I'm not the savior she's looking for." Myka jammed her hands into her jeans pockets. Is this all it took, standing in below-freezing temperatures without any protection, to squeeze the truth out of her? "I wasn't madly in love with Pete, and he wasn't madly in love with me, but I was enough for him. For the first time in my life, being enough was good enough. Then I saw you and I wanted –"
"You didn't see me. You saw her and you wanted her," Diane finished for her.
"Quit talking over me. I saw you and I wanted more, more than I had with Pete, because no one had ever looked at me like you looked at me. To you, I wasn't someone to best, I wasn't just enough, I was what you were looking for, me, Myka Ophelia Bering. How could I not be bowled over –"
Myka didn't get to finish that sentence either because Diane grabbed a fistful of her sweater and pulled her in for a kiss. Their lips were cold, and it was more a hard smack of lips than a kiss, but they weren't a universe apart anymore. When Diane drew back, Myka whispered, "Of course, I wasn't really the Myka were you looking for –." Diane silenced her with another a kiss, a softer one. "Are we in a better place now?" Myka asked, when Diane took a careful step backward.
"I know that you've given me more to think about," Diane said, "but something in me says that you still haven't reckoned with everything Helena meant to you, continues to mean to you." She took another hesitant step backward, and Myka hoped it was because she was searching for a reason to return to the kitchen with her instead of an ice-free spot on the pavement. Yet Diane found her footing and pivoted away, hurrying toward the cottage.
Kisses followed by more cautions. Myka wasn't sure which she should take to heart more. She walked carefully back to Leena's, her headache pulsing with every step.
Helena
Helena sighed, working herself deeper into the leather of the chair. One more sip of her Irish Breakfast, and then she would allow herself to doze. She had arrived at Logan at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early Sunday morning flight to O'Hare and had been rewarded with a free upgrade to first class. She could never predict when or how she would achieve a few hours of sleep except when she flew first class. A recurring fantasy was imagining herself sleeping on a first class flight from New York to London, Seattle to Tokyo, or Los Angles to Sydney. Perhaps she should arrange for a vacation during which she did just that, flew first class around the world, soundly asleep. She could have taken the same flight that Arttie had, a 9:30 p.m. flight to Denver with a connection to Rapid City that would result in him arriving at the Warehouse only a couple of hours before she left the hotel for Logan. But leaving later guaranteed an Artie-less flight. He hadn't minded, accepting without comment her suggestion that she stay overnight to provide Lydia Kim with an update the next morning. She would provide the update during her layover in Chicago.
He hadn't minded because secreted within the depths of his damnable valise was a neutralizer bag with a glass fragment from Edison's original fluoroscope. From the time Artie's Uber left him at the curb outside Dr. Oliver's office to the time another Uber took him away, artefact safely retrieved, no more than 20 minutes had passed. Did he ask her how she had managed it? Of course not, he had said only, under his breath, that "you were pushing the timeline." They could have finished this days ago had they taken the course she had recommended, which was stealing it. But no, there had been the farcical charade of visiting the office as father and daughter, her tortured conversations with Ed - the last had been torture, wringing painful admissions from them both - and then the pathetic reveal, the oblong of almost iridescent glass nested in cotton batting in a box in Tom Oliver's desk drawer, as if it were a baby rabbit the Olivers were trying to nurse back to health, not an artefact so powerful that it couldn't be in the same room as a fluoroscope. With a gruff "We'll debrief when you get back to the Warehouse," Artie had left her to attend to Ed, who had sat, wordless, in one of the visitor chairs in front of his father's desk as she and Artie, after they had secured the artefact, searched both offices to make sure there wasn't another "miracle cure" that Tom might have obtained without his son's knowledge.
Helena had sat with him for a long time, neither speaking. At last Ed had asked, "What will happen to him?"
Agents didn't clean up after a retrieval. The damage they caused in retrieving the artefact, the damage the artefact caused, the legal ramifications (civil and criminal), the political ramifications, the ethical ramifications, those were the regents' problems. In theory, that was how it was supposed to work. When the regents were incompetent or, as was more often the case, implicated in the corruption that frequently attended the surfacing of an artefact, the problems were blamed on the agents. She had witnessed it, she had experienced it. "I imagine there will be charges . . . and lawsuits. You'll likely be accused of defrauding the desperate, not to mention the insurance companies and the government." She said slowly, "If we had been able to leave the artefact behind or admit to its presence, you and your father might have a defense, if only to claim that it was all done in error. But after tonight, Ed, Artie and I won't exist, there will be no record that we were ever here, and anything that your father might point to as proof that he had possessed a part of Edison's original fluoroscope will either be erased or treated as a falsification."
"So, we're evil or we're crazy."
His hands were resting limply on his legs. He didn't resist when she lifted the one closest to her and interlaced their fingers. "You need to prepare your father."
"For the fact that he'll be spending the rest of his life in prison?"
"No," she said, leaning in and looking at him until his eyes met hers, "for what's going to happen to you."
He didn't look away. Instead his eyes filled with tears. "If I can convince him . . . he may never believe that the – what did you call it? – artefact didn't work as promised."
"The truth is going to be hard for him, but don't let him squander what time together you have left."
He let go of her hand and brushed at the tears. "You don't understand, not completely. He's not you. He won't surrender his belief in his omnipotence for anyone, not his wife and not me."
Recalling moments like that wouldn't ease her into sleep. Helena sat up straighter in her chair and flagged an attendant to ask for another cup of tea. When the plane landed at O'Hare, she had enough time to make it to her gate and provide Dr. Kim with a very brief update. She tried her at home, but Dr. Kim's husband shouted over the noise of a football game and children fighting over which Christmas cookies they got to decorate that his wife was at her office. It would have been a brief call had Helena been able to leave it at just an update. Dr. Kim made appropriate clucks of sadness and relief at the appropriate times as Helena relayed what happened, but she was clearly distracted and noted that the regents meeting yesterday had consumed more of her time than she had anticipated.
"I don't want to keep you," Helena said, "but I've been wondering, what made you think that this wasn't the onset of dementia or a psychotic break? Why did you see Tom Oliver in his new guise and think 'artefact?'"
"I'm a regent. Why wouldn't I?"
Because most regents are deeply uncomfortable with them. Regents in the 21st century, that is. The regents of her own time were still, by and large, God-fearing; they might detest curiosities, think them an invention of Satan, but they weren't unsettled by the fact that there were curiosities. Victorian-era regents didn't view them as an affront to the laws of science because science had yet to supersede the laws of man, which were, in turn, only a reflection of the laws of God. Curiosities were a part of the greater reality to which all living beings, sooner or later, would be introduced. "Typically a new regent has, shall we say, a period of adjustment."
Dr. Kim laughed. "Do you have time for a story?"
Helena surveyed the gate. The gate attendants were getting ready to announce the start of boarding. "Is it one with a moral?"
"No."
"Then I have time."
Dr. Kim's laugh was louder. Quickly sobering, she said, "My mother and father emigrated from South Korea, but my mother grew up in North Korea. When she was a teenager, a family friend, more of an acquaintance, gave her a hair pin. It was inset with a good luck charm, and he said he had decided to give it to her since he didn't have a wife or sister or daughter to give it to. He told her that she would know when to use it. She thought it was a strange thing for him to say just as she had thought it was strange for him to say he had no sister. He had had a sister who had tried to cross into South Korea years before, but no one had heard from her or of her since. One day she used it to pin her hair and discovered that she was virtually invisible. She understood then the gift she had been given." Dr. Kim cleared her throat. "Cutting to the chase, shortly thereafter my mother made her own escape from North Korea. She managed to make her way to the Joint Security Area and crossed over, literally sight unseen. Maybe my mother made up a tale about a magical hair pin to hide the truth about how she successfully entered South Korea. It happened more than fifty years ago, and most of her family, not to mention the family friend, are long dead, but that wouldn't matter to the North Korean authorities. On the other hand, my mother, despite having a 30-year career as a mechanical engineer, appreciates all that science and rationality can't explain. Maybe the magical hair pin was really a magical hair pin. I'll probably never know. She says she took it out one night when she crept into a farmer's hayloft not too far from the demilitarized zone and couldn't find it the next morning. She was afraid she might be discovered so she couldn't afford to spend much time looking for it. She bound her hair back with a strip she tore from her skirt and continued on her journey to Seoul." Dr. Kim stopped, then resumed in a softer voice. "I like to think that, having served its purpose, the hair pin transported itself back to North Korea, to help some other young woman looking for a better life."
"Stranger things have happened with artefacts." Helena was pacing the gate. There had been no free upgrade for her to first class and the last of the passengers in coach had disappeared down the jetway. She needed to get on the plane before they shut the door to the jetway. "Thank you for sharing that with me."
"Question for you. What do you make of your double? We had a post-retrieval review with her and Myka. I wasn't involved in a lot of the early interviews or meetings so this was my first extended experience with her."
Helena found her strides automatically lengthening as she charged down the jetway. One of these days she was going to lose her balance and roll down it like a barrel. She would prefer it to having to justify every item on a Warehouse travel voucher or defending every decision she made on a retrieval. Phone still to her ear, she nodded a greeting at the flight attendants and tried to wheel her carry-on down the narrow aisle without blundering into the aisle seats. Oh, wasn't it aces that she was at the very back of the plane? Maybe it was that extra concentration she had to devote to not ending up in the lap of the man in 16C, who truly made "hair suit" of hirsute, which had her saying, "She's not a threat."
"You sound pretty definite."
"Who better to know whether a Helena Wells poses a grave risk than Helena Wells?" She had arrived at her row, and she was the middle seat. The flight attendant who had been on her heels since she had started wheeling down the aisle lifted her roller bag and wedged it in the overhead bin. Then he slapped the bin door down and levelled a hard stare at her as she squeezed between the back of the aisle seat in the row ahead and the unforgiving knees of the passenger in the aisle seat in her row. She slumped in her seat, the cream in this annoy sandwich of a seating assignment. "She's not here to hurt the Warehouse."
"Then why is she here?"
"Wouldn't we all like to know?" The flight attendant gave her an even flintier stare and motioned to her to shut off her phone. With a hurried good-bye, Helena ended the call and turned her phone's airplane mode on. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the fact that she was essentially jacknifed into a seat for the next two and a half-hours.
She's here to remind me of who I used to be. She's what I could have been had everything that created Helena Wells happened differently or not at all. She's a woman whom Myka can love without reservation. She's my past, present, and future all in one, my reset button, my wake-up call . . . if only there were a reset button to push, if only I wanted to wake up.