Prologue
They had gone to the seashore, an unusual, and welcome, day trip. Papa didn't ordinarily take time off from work, and it was expensive to ride on the train, but he had come home in good spirits declaring that it was "someone's birthday, I wonder whose?" and Helena had clapped her hands, saying "Mine, Papa, mine," until Mama had shushed her for shouting. Charles had sulked. Papa hadn't taken a day from work to take them to the seashore for his birthday, but Charles' birthday was in February, not in September when it was still nice enough to walk along the beach, if not wade in the water.
Very early the next morning they took the train, Helena still half-asleep and thinking the seashore didn't sound nearly as inviting as it had yesterday. Papa carried a hamper filled with food, Charles labored with a couple of blankets rolled tightly and tied with string, while Mama held baby Robert, or Bob as he was already called, to her chest. He was waving his arms excitedly, as if he knew he was going to see the ocean for the first time. Although Helena had intended to stay awake to watch all the people in their car and wonder about where they were going and where they had come from, the rocking of the train lulled her to sleep. Papa had had to shake her shoulder to wake her at their stop.
The walk to the shore wasn't long, which was good, because Mama was tiring. She tired more easily than she used to, which Charles said was nothing to worry about, because she had had the baby only a few months ago. He had said it with all the authority of a brother who was four years older, but Helena never gave much credit to what Charles said. She was already better with sums, and she didn't struggle over the words in the Scriptures as he did. Papa said that she should give her brother the respect he deserved, which, in her mind was none. Charles wasn't any more deserving of respect because he was a boy and older. And he was wrong about Mama because she coughed now and she hadn't before Bob was born, deep, wracking coughs that left her struggling to breathe. She didn't wash the rags she held to her mouth when she coughed, looking at the stains on them and then throwing them into the fire. Mama wasn't coughing today; she was smiling down at Bob as he waved his arms. Today was a good day and not just because it was her birthday.
Other people had decided to spend the day at the shore as well, and Papa had had to search the beach for a spot big enough for the four of them, but he found one, a little farther up from the ocean than Helena wanted. The ocean was so big, however, that it didn't matter where they sat because the water was still so near, so wide and blue that she wanted to draw it around her shoulders like a blanket. But blankets didn't ripple, didn't roll like this, what she saw wasn't water but hide, covering the muscles of some huge, powerful animal whose head and tail were far beyond her sight. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to ride that animal, whatever it was; it would be so strong that it could carry her into the sky. Then she giggled, she knew there was no animal, only water. There was nothing magical about water, but that didn't make the ocean any less special.
She and Charles played in the surf until he tried to drag her into the waves and dunk her head beneath them. But she was stronger than he realized, fighting him until he was forced to let her go. As he gave her a push, he lost his balance and fell into the water, his knickered bottom hitting the sand with a thump. Papa shouted at him, very sternly, and pointed Charles to the blankets that had been spread out, and Charles scowled as he sat next to Mama and Bob, forbidden to go down to the water again until Papa said he could. Papa came down instead, taking her hand and walking with her along the shore. She loved the times when she had Papa to herself, and he seemed to enjoy them too. As they walked, he pointed at unusual-looking stones in the sand and drew her attention to the birds that were diving into the ocean.
"They're looking for lunch, pet. Why don't we go back to the blankets and have our own lunch?"
After lunch, Papa napped under a rented parasol with Mama and Bob. He had relented and allowed Charles to take Helena back to the water's edge, cautioning him to keep an eye on her, but Charles had seen a group of boys playing farther up the shore, and he had dropped her hand, saying threateningly, "Don't get into any trouble and wake Papa, or I'll tan you when he's not around." He had run off then to play with the other boys, but Helena didn't mind being left alone. She knew better than to walk too far into the waves and, besides, it was too cold to stay in the water for long, even if it only covered her feet. Head bent, she looked for interesting stones she could show Papa, and her search took her far down the beach, far enough that, when she looked up, she couldn't tell their umbrella from the others.
Afterward she was never sure if she had seen the girl or the stone first because it seemed to her that she had seen them at the same time. Crouching to free the stone from the sand, she had seen feet in front of her, although she could have sworn that they hadn't been there a moment ago. Slowly rising, she took in the shift the girl was wearing, much like her own, and the dark hair that was braided and bound with an identical blue ribbon. The girl had dark eyes, and she was viewing Helena with the same curiosity with which Helena was looking at her, her head inclining to the side in exactly the same way.
"I didn't say you could pick up that stone," the girl said. She didn't sound angry. The girl sounded like Charles did when he dared her to do something that would get her into trouble.
"It doesn't have your name on it," Helena said boldly.
"No, it doesn't," the girl conceded. "Pretty isn't, it?"
Helena nodded. It was pretty, turning different colors in the sunlight, and it didn't feel like a stone. It felt light and smooth, more like metal than rock, and its color, when she wasn't twisting her wrist this way and that, was a gray that looked more like metal too, shiny, not dull. She attempted to give it back to the girl. Maybe she had seen it first, Helena grudgingly admitted to herself. But the girl shook her head. "You can keep it until I come back for it, and then you must give it to me."
"Must I?" Helena repeated saucily.
The girl looked at her soberly. "Yes, when I come for it, you must give it to me. If you can't promise me that, then I won't let you take it."
This girl was beginning to sound even more like Charles. "You can't stop me from taking it," Helena declared.
The girl's expression remained just as sober, but her lips were beginning to twitch into a smile. "Yes, I can, but I'd prefer not to. Will you promise to give it back when I ask for it?"
Helena was beginning to think the girl was as slow as Charles, too. How would the girl know where she lived? She hadn't even told her her name. "Yes," she said flippantly, "I promise to give it back."
"Don't lose it," the girl admonished her, but Helena wasn't listening, fascinated by how quickly the colors changed as she held the stone. When she thought to look up, the girl was gone, although Helena could spot no other little girl in a white shift among the children playing in the water, and she could pick out no dark braid flying and bouncing on the breeze. She turned around and began to walk toward the umbrella she thought was theirs, only realizing halfway there that, although the waves had washed over the girl's feet as they had her own, the girl's feet had never looked wet.
Papa was angry that she had wandered so far away from them, and he had barely looked at the stones she held out for inspection. He hadn't even noticed the special one, and as she tried to describe the girl she had met, he overrode her bubbling about how much the girl had looked like her to shout at Charles, who was only then sauntering up to their blankets. Papa's face was red, and he grabbed at Charles' ear to drag him to where he and Mama were standing, the hamper packed, the blankets rolled and tied, and baby Bob crying piteously against Mama's shoulder. Charles started sobbing, and it was a much less happy family boarding the train to go home than the one that had taken the train to the shore. Mama started coughing in the car, and despite her hurried tucking of the cloth into a pocket of her dress, Helena saw the blood on it.
Eventually Helena lost the stones she had gathered from the shore, all except the special one, which she hid under a corner of her mattress. The mattress was so thin that for the longest time she thought she could feel it under the ticking when she crawled into her bed at night. But as Mama's coughing grew worse and baby Bob began to sicken as well, she began to believe that their day at the shore was the cause of their illness. That's what her grandmama and aunties said, blaming Papa for letting Mama breathe in all that damp air. They wouldn't have gone to the shore if it hadn't been her birthday. It was her fault that Mama coughed all the time now and that Papa had to hire a woman to help with the house, although Mama would say through all the coughing that they couldn't afford it. Helena would have thrown the stone away but for the promise she had made to the girl. The promise hadn't seemed ominous at the time, but it weighed on her now. Maybe the girl did know where she lived, and if she threw the stone away, Mama would become even sicker. So Helena kept the stone, hating it but unable to part with it, and she would lay awake, listening to her mother cough and feeling that the stone was burning through the mattress her skin felt so itchy and hot.
There came a day, much later, when Helena got rid of the stone. Much had happened before that day; Mama had died, and Papa had married the woman he had hired to care for her. Papa's new wife insisted that Charles and Helena call her "Mama" because she was their mother now, but at least in this, Helena and Charles were united; this woman, with her pinched, sour face, would never be Mama. Bob, however, seemed not to notice the difference, staggering after their new mama on unsteady legs. He was still sickly, running fevers and developing spots, and his nose never seemed to stop running. Helena disliked him almost as much as she did the stone, but he wasn't responsible for Mama getting sicker and dying ("going to heaven," their new mama would insist they say). Not only did they have a new mama, they were going to be living in a new place as well. But the new place wasn't any nicer than the new mama. Helena had seen the rooms; they were smaller, grimier, cheaper. Papa had lost his old job, and his new job didn't pay him as much. Or so she had heard him tell their new mama.
Their few belongings were already strapped in the wagon, and she could hear Papa call for her, his voice angry-sounding. He was always angry now. Helena was at the back of the house, standing over a small hole she had scooped out using a spoon. Mama had planted flowers in this little strip of earth when she had been well, it seemed as good as any place to leave the stone. Helena dropped the stone in the hole and hastily brushed the dirt over it. If the girl wanted the stone that badly, she could come here and dig it up herself. Her father shouted again, and Helena ran to the wagon. He would take the belt to her later. The welts on her legs from the last time he had struck her with it weren't quite healed. It would be a very long, painful night for her, but she was finally free of the stone.
Myka
The call wasn't an unwelcome interruption, and it should have been. It really should have been. She and Pete had taken a very rare vacation - a full week - and gone to Vermont to see the fall colors, walk the hills and ride bikes on the trails, cuddle together under quilts, and make love in front of a roaring fire. It was the stereotypical romantic getaway for a not-so-stereotypical couple, a pair of agents who worked for an organization (if the Warehouse could be called such) that no one except those in the highest reaches of the government knew about and who, until recently, had been more Greg and Marcia in their interactions than Scully and Mulder, or Castle and Beckett, for that matter. But things had changed, she and Pete had changed, although they had been slow to recognize it, and it was working, this new romantic relationship of theirs. Admittedly, it had been weird at first, they had felt they needed to be more respectful of each other. Myka didn't punch him in the shoulder every time he said something stupid or irritating (which was most of the time), because that was something Myka the buddy, not Myka the girlfriend, would do, and Pete didn't pull nearly as many practical jokes on her as he used to (no more switching out her secret stash of Twizzlers for a package of red coffee stirrers or persuading Claudia to load a screen saver onto her Farnsworth that had the U.S. Olympic men's swim team in their butt-hugging, aerodynamically superior trunks) because that was something a work partner, a pal, not a boyfriend, would do. They had found their rhythm, it just was different from their old one, that was all.
But still good. Very, very good. Which was why Myka annoyed that her heart had skipped a beat, eagerly skipped that beat, when the Farnsworth buzzed. They shouldn't have taken one on their vacation at all, but when Pete had showed it to her before putting it in their bag, she hadn't said no. After all, you never knew when another Helena Wells would be on the verge of destroying the world, and first and last, they were Warehouse agents. She hadn't actually said it to Pete, but she had thought it. She still thought about Helena, and though it might have seemed strange to be thinking about her minutes before they were to drive to Rapid City to catch their flight to Burlington, Helena was inextricably part of the Warehouse no matter how hard she tried to free herself from it. Thinking about Helena no longer caused her heart to beat a little faster than it should, and she could thank Pete for that. If nothing else, this relationship with him was showing her how it never would have worked, her and Helena.
So if she had found her true love, why was she flinging herself across the bed to retrieve the Farnsworth? Shouldn't she be groaning and complaining at having to move from the nest of quilts she and Pete had constructed in front of the fire? Furthermore, shouldn't she be just a little bit peeved that Pete was beating her to the nightstand? He yanked open the drawer that served as the Farnsworth's home when they were sleeping, or otherwise occupied - "It is our vacation," he had explained, "and I love Artie as much as anyone, but the brows and that voice do not make Not-So-Little Pete want to come out and play" - and flopped on the bed with it, opening the lid.
Artie was speaking through fingers, his face averted. "You better have clothes on. If you don't have clothes on, put them on."
"We're dressed, Artie," Myka said, pinching the material of her sleep shirt between her fingers and pulling it away from her chest as proof.
Artie cautiously spread his fingers, looking from Myka to Pete. "Put on a shirt or something, Pete."
"Hey, I've got on sweatpants," Pete protested. "It's a little warm in here with the fire and everything."
"God," Artie groaned, "you've now ruined charming country inns and fireplaces for me forever."
Myka punched Pete in the shoulder. "TMI," she whispered in his ear. "He didn't need to know about the 'roaring fire.'"
Pete tossed Myka the Farnsworth and slid off the bed, taking his t-shirt, draped over the back of the desk chair, and pulling it on. Rejoining her on the bed and thrusting out his chest, he motioned to Myka to hold the Farnsworth close to the t-shirt. "Better?" he demanded sarcastically.
"Too close," Artie grumbled. "I can count his chest hairs." He paused, looking off to the side. "I didn't want to interrupt your little getaway, believe me," he emphasized, "I didn't want to call you. I want to know about what goes on with the two of you only from the neck up. But something's happened, and we need you here. Tonight preferably but I'll settle for tomorrow."
"Did something happen to Claudia? Or Steve?" Myka asked, concerned. Artie seemed beset by no more than his usual level of irritation, and if either Claudia or Steve were in jeopardy he would tell them, albeit begrudgingly. But Artie made people work to get information out of him, especially if he loved them and especially when the news was bad. It was counterproductive to make her and Pete pry this latest development out of him, it delayed their ability to help fix the problem, whatever it was, but this was part of the Warehouse manual too, the "unwritten rules" one that Myka carried in her head. Artie seemed reluctant to realize that his attempts to shield them were a way to shield himself.
"They're fine. I've had to call them in, too." He hesitated again, then said softly enough that Myka felt her stomach flip, "We've asked H.G. to come because it concerns her."
Pete's hand was already on Myka's back, rubbing, stroking, and she rolled her shoulders away from his touch. She didn't want the comfort, didn't need the comfort. Artie wasn't saying that H.G. was dead. "What's going on, Artie?" she asked coolly.
"It'll be easier to explain once you're here." And with that, he ended the transmission.
And just as she had wondered, uneasily, why they had both been too eager for the Farnsworth's interruption, Myka thought that maybe they were complying with Artie's order too quickly. Pete had no sooner dropped the Farnsworth on the bed than he was reaching for his phone and reserving two seats on the next flight out of Burlington. Factoring in the plane changes and the overnight in Atlanta, they wouldn't get to Leena's (Myka suspected that she would always call the bed and breakfast Leena's no matter how many managers it had or how long Leena had been dead) until mid-morning at the earliest. They could enjoy what little time they had left in Burlington instead of spending it on a cramped flight to Atlanta. But if Pete had been too rushed in his decision to put them on a 9:30 p.m. flight to Atlanta, she hadn't tried to talk him out of it. In fact, she had them completely packed, all Pete needed to do was to change his sweatpants and t-shirt for jeans and a pullover, and they could leave. Maybe this was something they should talk about, this mutual willingness to be distracted from each other. They hadn't talked about their relationship since their confessions to one another during the whole is-the-Warehouse-moving-to-China crisis; they had accepted their almost offhand acknowledgments that they loved one another as basis enough. Basis enough for what? The sleeping together that had followed soon thereafter, the assumption that, eventually, there would be rooms that they would share, permanently, and, later down the line, a ceremony in which Pete would have to dress up in a tux, again. But there hadn't been any talking about it. Except the sex. And that wasn't quite what she had expected either.
"Hey," Pete said, touching her arm. He had stuffed the sweatpants and t-shirt into their bag's outer pocket. "Ready to blow this joint?"
Myka tried to suppress the flicker of irritation she felt at him not taking the two seconds it would have required to put the clothes inside the bag. Two seconds, that was all. "Sure, let's go." Then, without thinking and with an anger that surprised her, she said, "Let's go take care of yet another mess that Helena's made."
They were quiet on the flight to Atlanta, and they were quiet in the airport hotel room they shared since there were no series of flights that would get them to Rapid City until morning. She thought that Pete might start kissing the back of her neck and shoulders once they were in bed, one of his signs that he wanted to "get busy" as he invariably called it. Another minor irritant. But after a business-like kiss on her cheek, he rolled over - taking most of the bed covers with him - and fell asleep almost immediately. She had been reading on her iPad a scathing account of the Syrian civil war, her hair a wiry mess and her glasses sliding down her nose. They were new glasses with frames that were stylish and lenses that weren't three inches thick; she had gotten them shortly after she and Pete had started dating. Of course he had seen her wearing her 1980s-era monstrosities, but it was one thing to wear them when they were friends, and another when they were sleeping together. She didn't want him to think that he was making love to his third-grade teacher when she had them on and they were in bed.
She continued to read or, rather, her eyes continued to move across the screen, but she wasn't taking in the words. While they had waited in the gate area to board their plane, she had scrolled through the headlines, wondering if one of the endless national and international crises had had ripples that were affecting the Warehouse. Normally their work prevented a crisis, but, on occasion, an artefact had had a role in a testy dispute between nations or in a prison break that had resulted in a nationwide manhunt. None of the headlines had seemed a promising clue, however. As a last resort, she had searched the Los Angeles media; since the problem had some relationship to Helena, maybe it was local, and Helena had made Los Angeles her home after she left Boone.
After she left Nate and Adelaide in the lurch, Myka thought acidly. She blinked at the iPad's darkened screen. After several months when there had been no contact, Helena had called her to let her know that she and Nate had split up and that she had accepted a position as a forensics investigator in Los Angeles. There had been another call a few months after that and Helena had told her that she was seeing someone, Giselle was all the information about the woman that Helena had seemed willing to divulge, and she had sounded so curt and closed-off that Myka decided not to tell her about the biopsy. It didn't matter anymore, none of it, although Myka wasn't sure she could articulate all that "it" encompassed. When she and Pete had decided to act on their feelings, she had initially decided that it was too soon to tell anyone, but now, several months into their relationship, when she had told everyone who hadn't already figured it out, she still hadn't told Helena. Despite all their promises to keep in touch, something had happened to them in Boone; sometimes Myka thought some residual resentment at Helena's leaving the Warehouse and settling down with a widowed attorney and his daughter when she should have . . . Myka always pulled up short when she thought about what Helena "should" have done. There were no "should's," Helena had done what she wanted to do, and there was nothing wrong with her having fallen in love with Nate and his daughter. And if Myka felt an unwarranted spurt of resentment every time she thought about it, that was her problem. So, yes, she worried on occasion that her resentment had created a coolness to which Helena had responded by holding back, and their friendship had disintegrated from there. But sometimes she thought something else had been at work in Boone, and she suspected during moments late at night, when she looked at Pete's sleeping form and feared that this wasn't what she wanted, that whatever it was that had happened during the few days she and Helena had had to forge a partnership to retrieve the jawbone artefact, it had not only been a factor in her turning, eventually, to Pete but in Helena's . . . aban- no, yes, abandonment of Nate and Adelaide as well.
She put the iPad and her glasses on the nightstand. The brief clatter woke Pete, and he raised himself on an elbow, muttering "What?," and then Myka, who rarely took the initiative because, to be honest, she never had to, pressed herself against his back and let her hand drop down to his boxers. She hesitated at the waistband and then his hand guided hers through the fly. It didn't take long to tease him out, and Pete, with few preliminaries, pushed up her sleep shirt. She wrapped her legs around him, and they began a rhythm that she quickly urged him to increase because she didn't want to think and when they went slow - which she ordinarily liked - her mind . . . every once in a while . . . drifted. He came with a brief cry, and she followed a few seconds after, her cry softer and even more abbreviated. Pete curled himself around her, hand rubbing her stomach. "It could be our kid growing in there right now." He kissed her behind her ear. "I know this isn't the best time to bring it up again, but I want you to go off birth control, Mykes. Hell, I'll marry you tomorrow if that's what's stopping you. You know I love you, and I'm ready. We can make it work with the Warehouse and everything, I know we can. Can't you picture it? A little boy or girl with your green eyes and my . . . okay . . . my sense of humor." She could feel him grin against her neck. "We'd make the best parents ever, I know it."
The best parents, not the best lovers, not the best spouses. Parents. And just as she sometimes looked at him and suspected that she had been looking for a refuge in him more than a lover, she wondered if his repeated desire for a child with her was his way of evading a recognition that he didn't love her as much, or in the way, he wanted to. If they decided to have a child together, more accurately, if she let him wear her down, that would put an end to it, the self-doubt, the questions. Yet she that wasn't true. Helena had finally found a child to whom she could be a mother, but there had been a flaw in her relationship with Nate. Hadn't she sensed it in the short time that she had been in Boone, had seen Nate and Helena interact? Children didn't fix a relationship that wasn't working, they only further complicated it. She wasn't ready for a child right now. She would tell Pete that, again, in the morning, and she would bury deep within her what she was frightened to think was the bigger truth, that she would never be ready for a child with him.
They arrived at Leena's mid-morning, yawning and tasting the staleness of airports and airplane cabins in their mouths. Claudia greeted them at the door. After looking at their exhausted faces, she said in a sarcastic sing-song, "So sorry that your romantic getaway, well, got away." At Pete's glare, she moved to the side, and they shouldered past her with their bags.
"Where's Artie?" Pete was halfway up the stairs to the bedrooms.
"In the sunroom, waiting for you," she shouted after him. Opening the French doors to the room, she disappeared behind them. Myka still stood in the foyer, bag at her feet. Claudia's attitude toward them changed day by day; one day she seemed to accept their relationship as a natural outgrowth of their friendship, and the next, she was convinced they were committing a kind of workplace incest. Early on she had attempted to talk to Claudia about it, which, since Claudia found talking about emotions as difficult as Myka did, perhaps even more so, made for a conversation largely made up of silence and sighs. Myka only clearly remembered two sentences, possibly because they were the only two complete sentences spoken. She had said, haltingly, "It surprised us, too, Claud, but Pete and I really do love each other . . . like that," and Claudia, after what felt like minutes spent frowning and staring at the floor, had said in turn, "I don't get how you can be surprised by something you're saying is so big that it 'had' to happen." Myka hadn't had an answer for her.
Ten months later, the answer continued to elude her. She picked up her bag and followed Pete up the stairs. For the first time in forever as she passed the room that had been Helena's, she stopped outside the door. Maybe Helena was in it or her bags. She could have beaten them here. Or she could have refused to come. She heard the squeal of a door opening behind her, and Pete poked his head out. "Hurry up, they're waiting." The bag rolling behind her, she went on to her room, which was two doors farther down. Claudia occupied the room next to Helena's and Steve's was across from Claudia's. The room at the very end of the hall, which used to be Leena's, remain unoccupied. Abigail chose to live in a rented house in Univille. If Helena had arrived before them, what had she made of the changes?
But Helena wasn't in the sunroom, and when Myka asked where she was, Artie said, "I wanted the opportunity to brief all of you before she arrived." An older TV on a cart had been wheeled into the sunroom, and Artie was feeding a DVD into a player. As Myka took a seat at the table she smiled a hello at Vanessa. Usually Artie flew to Atlanta to see Vanessa, and Myka was surprised to see her here. Steve scuffed in from the kitchen in the bunny slippers that Claudia had gotten him as a jokey Christmas present one year but which he continued to wear because they were, he said, "crazy comfortable." He was sipping from a mug. Hooking a thumb back over his shoulder, he said to Myka, "Want some? The teabags are still out."
She shook her head. Pete was eating from a bag of Doritos that he had bought at the Rapid City airport. He held the bag out to her and shook it invitingly. "You like Cool Ranch." She shook her head again. Not at 10:30 in the morning. With a satisfied grunt, Artie reached back for the remote on the seat of his chair and turned the TV on; the DVD was already playing. Grainy surveillance footage appeared, and Pete hooted through a mouthful of Cool Ranch crumbs. "You called us in for a convenience store robbery?" Artie flapped a hand at him to shush.
Men in uniform - they could have been women, Myka supposed, although it was hard to tell with the helmets and the bulky kevlar vests and poor quality of the video - were opening a door to a cargo container, semi-automatic rifles at the ready. As soon as the people, all women, emerged, their frightened faces turned toward the men, their arms automatically rising in a needless gesture of surrender, the men lowered their rifles. There wasn't any sound, but Myka could tell that the agents - Border Patrol? ATF? - were trying to identify the ones who could speak English. The women's clothes were ragged, and their hair was unkempt. They were blinking and shielding their eyes, and though there seemed to be no light other than daylight and the light from a row of suspended fluorescents, the women ducked their heads as if the agents were shining flashlights on them. All except one woman. She blinked, but she held her head high, and she viewed the agents pressing around them with a steady, curious gaze. Her hair was as dirty and lank and her clothes as stained and torn as the other women's, but she didn't share their fear. Helena.
Myka didn't realize she had said it aloud until Artie nodded, his hair waving in agreement. "That's what we thought, although how she would've gotten swept up in a human trafficking ring uncovered in Houston when she was supposedly living in Los Angeles . . . ." He lifted his shoulders and dropped them.
"Undercover?" Pete hazarded.
"If she had been working undercover, would I have called you back here?" Artie demanded testily. "She works in the LAPD's forensics science laboratory. They're not going to send her undercover. And she was in Los Angeles at the time this video was taken. The woman you're seeing is not H.G. Wells."
"Who does she say she is?" Steve asked, sipping his tea.
"At last, a halfway intelligent question." Artie pressed the fast-forward on the remote. "She says she's Helena Wells."
Everyone stirred a little in his (or her) chair at that. But just a little. They had all encountered far stranger mysteries. Artie stopped the fast-forward, pushing himself up from the floor with a grunt and reclaiming his chair. The video was clearer this time, footage from an interrogation room. The woman was seated at a table. She was in different, cleaner clothes, and her hair looked like it had been recently washed. The clothes weren't a jail jumpsuit, but they were too large for her. She was being held, wherever she was, and this wasn't the first round of questioning, Myka suspected. A pair of investigators entered the room, a man and woman, professionally nondescript. A low buzz issued from the TV and Artie leaned forward to adjust the volume until the buzz separated into words. The investigators were asking her why she had been found with the other women. She was the only one who had been able to speak English; the rest of the women had spoken Chinese or Spanish or Russian. Her story didn't match the others' either, the investigators said; the other women had all responded to ads on the Internet promising jobs in the United States, she had said she couldn't remember what happened, only that she had woken up to find herself in a cargo container crammed with women and a few teenage girls. Whenever the agents asked her where she lived, what jobs she held, if she had any family, her response was always the same, "I don't remember." They showed her pictures of the traffickers who had held her and the other women; she pointed to one, indicating that he was the one who had brought food and blankets into the cargo container and took their pails of waste and emptied them. She didn't recognize the other men. Changing tactics, the investigators asked how long she had been working with the traffickers, if she had been put in the cargo container with the other women to keep them calm, to ensure their docility when the container's doors were opened and one or two were removed, never to be seen again. The woman hadn't expressed shock or disgust at the accusation; instead, she rolled her eyes, asking quite clearly, "You truly believe that I voluntarily dressed in rags and spent 24 hours a day in a container that smelled like shit?" The investigators had looked at each other and then one of them reframed the question, suggesting that, possibly, her collusion with the traffickers hadn't been voluntary. Maybe they had blackmailed her or threatened a family member. And so it went on until, during a pause as the agents reshuffled the papers in their files, the woman looked directly into the camera and enunciated carefully, "I want to speak with Irene Frederic."
Artie froze the picture. "That's all we have. We don't know how long the ATF sat on her, days, maybe a week or two. Finally it went high enough up the chain that someone knew who Irene was, and the regents were contacted."
"Has Irene talked with her?" Myka stared at the face looking up at the camera. There was no distress in the features, just a growing impatience. For a woman who claimed she remembered nothing except her name - and Irene's apparently - she was remarkably composed.
"Not yet." Artie hesitated, giving Vanessa a go-ahead glance from underneath the unruly border hedge of his eyebrows.
"We have . . . Helena . . . at the CDC in Atlanta," Vanessa said, looking at each of them in turn. Myka had never been able to reconcile the elegant remoteness she projected, the product of the marriage of the debutante she must have been decades ago with the medical researcher she became, with Artie's saturnine disposition. Yet whatever they had together - and Myka was never going to inquire too closely into that - appeared to work for them. Like Claudia, she would have to learn to accept what she didn't entirely understand. "We're taking every possible precaution."
"What? You think she's been artefacted into existence?" Claudia was incredulous.
"We don't know what's happened," Vanessa said calmly, "that's why we're taking every possible precaution."
"But you must have examined her," Myka pressed. "You must know something, otherwise you wouldn't be here." At Vanessa's amused arching of her eyebrows, Myka added, flustered, "I mean here with us, in the sunroom, now."
"We've examined her and, genetically at least, she's H.G." Vanessa spread her arms out in a gesture that seemed uncharacteristically helpless. "Not only that," she paused, "she's the same age, as far as we can tell. She's not a clone, not a recently engineered clone, anyway."
"Holy crap," Pete and Claudia said simultaneously. Pete tried to do the math in his head. "She's like a hundred and thirty, forty?"
"You don't have enough fingers and toes, dude," Claudia said. "I think we can leave it at 'She's pretty damn old.'"
Artie pushed himself up from his chair, pointing a finger at Myka. "You're on the morning flight with Vanessa to Atlanta. H.G. will meet you at the CDC. Irene will . . . Irene will get there however she gets there." He glared fiercely at her. "Find out what's going on, and keep in mind that it wasn't all that long ago when H.G. was our adversary. You're Secret Service, at least you used to be. Treat her like a suspect."
His mumbling, head-shaking exit was the end to the meeting. Claudia had run around the table to sit beside Steve, and they were whispering excitedly, or, rather, Claudia was while Steve sipped his tea and wriggled his bunny slippers, the floppy ears flopping. Vanessa touched Myka's arm, telling her that they would put their heads together later about coordinating arrivals and trips to the CDC to see Helena. Feeling Pete's eyes on her, Myka refused to meet them, first keeping her attention on Vanessa until Vanessa left the room and then staring at the still frame of Helena looking up at the camera.
It was hard to shake the illusion that Helena was looking at her, and although this woman couldn't be her . . . their Helena, until Myka knew who she was, she would continue to refer to her as Helena, it made things simpler. Impatience and fatigue dominated this Helena's expression but there was also confidence, confidence not cockiness, in those eyes, which had fixed themselves unwaveringly on the camera, and in the tilt of her chin, as if she were ready to take a blow launched at it. She was going to get out of that room, one way or another. Myka fought not to smile at the image, responding to the woman's confidence in spite of herself. Yes, for all any of them knew, this Helena had a plan as mad as the other one's to destroy the world and the will that the other Helena had lacked to carry it out, but Myka didn't think so. She didn't have many special talents besides a formidable recall, but she still liked to consider herself a bit of a Helena-whisperer, and this new Helena wasn't here to destroy the world. She was pretty sure about that.
She spent the rest of the day washing clothes and packing for the trip to Atlanta . . . and avoiding Pete. She had slipped out of the sunroom before he could catch her, and when he tried to flag her in the hallway, she had held up her laundry basket, asking "Can it wait?" In the basement, there were a couple of commercial washers and dryers, and she had perched on the dryer while she waited for her clothes to dry, reading on her iPad. It didn't serve as the best distraction from thinking about the Helenas, but short of going on a retrieval, it was the best of her alternatives. But her respite from Pete was only temporary as he managed to corner her in her room before dinner, which, since Leena's death, had become a largely ad hoc affair. If someone felt like cooking, she or he made enough for the others, but otherwise they made do from the stack of TV dinners and pizzas in the freezer or, if they were desperate, they went into Univille. As Pete closed the door behind him and leaned against it, crossing his arms, she made the decision then to go into Univille by herself and have a burger and a beer, which she would nurse as long as she could.
"I want to talk about this Helena 2.0, and even if you don't, you should." He paused and looked down at the hardwood floor, an original part of the bed and breakfast's nineteenth century construction, in need of a good repolishing. "I asked Artie to send me with you, but Vanessa doesn't think it's a good idea. She thinks contact should be limited to you and Irene because she's afraid Helena 2.0 might freak out. I guess H.G.'s going to have to hide behind a curtain or something."
"She's not going to freak out," Myka said, carefully placing a pair of slacks in the suitcase.
"I don't think so either. She looked way too at ease in the interrogation footage."
Myka looked at him sharply. "Did you get any vibes from what we saw?"
"No, I'm just remembering that's how H.G. looked when we caught up with her in London, like she knew how to handle any curve thrown her way." He looked at her from beneath brows that had knotted together in concern. "I'm not talking to you as your boyfriend, Mykes. I'm talking to you as your friend and your partner. Whether she's the original or a copy, that woman messes with your head, even when she's not trying to. I know you, you already want to trust her, and I'm telling you, don't."
"Listening to what someone has to say is not the same as trusting her."
Pete shrugged at that, but he didn't say anything more, and he left her to her packing. She took a deep breath and folded a dress blouse with especial care and laid it on top of another one. She liked to engage in rote activities when she was angry; the mind-numbing repetition tended to calm her. Maybe she would pack another bag. First Artie, then Pete. It wasn't their suspiciousness of the other Helena that annoyed her because it was crazy, right, that another Helena existed in the first place? Only in the Warehouse's universe could you have a woman who was well over a hundred years old passing herself off as a woman in her late 30s and then be faced with her double, who, apparently, was also well over a hundred years old. It was what their suspiciousness said about their feelings toward the first Helena. Maybe Helena had understood the Warehouse and its agents better than she did and realized that, on some level, she would never be able to get past the distrust. Once a madwoman bent on ending the world, always a madwoman. Her self-sacrificing act to save the Warehouse and Artie and Pete as well was proof, in the final analysis, that she would always gravitate to the extreme. And the part of Myka that was still a Secret Service agent, asked the rest of her, slyly, didn't Helena's moving in with Nate and then out, all in little more than a year, lend credence to the belief that, at best, she tended to act on impulse?
Of course, engaging in rote activities sometimes didn't work to calm her at all. She quashed the temptation to upend the suitcase on her bed. It was time to find the keys to one of the Warehouse's cars in the bed and breakfast's parking lot and head to Univille for dinner. Thundering down the steps to the foyer, she refused to look into the parlor, which was on the other side of the foyer from the sunroom. She could hear the sound of the TV, but she couldn't tell whether Pete had the History channel on or was playing a video game; all she could hear were gunfire and explosions. She turned to go down the hallway to the kitchen; the keys were kept on a coat rack nailed to the wall for the purpose. Steve was heating a pan of soup on the stove, and he waved at her as she took a keyring from the rack. She wondered what he thought about Helena 2.0. He wasn't the type to make snap judgments, and he hadn't had the history with Helena . . . 1.0 that the rest of them had, but she didn't want to talk about the Helenas with him, either.
She had planned to stay at Univille's one bar only long enough to eat her burger and drink a Coke. At the last minute, she amended her order, thinking that tonight wasn't perhaps the best night for her to be drinking alcohol. She and Pete and Claudia frequented the bar enough, usually to play pool or darts, that the bartenders and the few regulars recognized them, and she had responded to the nods of greeting in kind as she had taken a seat in one of the booths. Although business looked slow, there were a few new faces, and as she had forgotten to take her iPad with her when she rushed out of Leena's, she glanced at them more often than she would have otherwise. She had finished her burger and was waiting for the check when a man and woman approached her booth and asked her if she would like to join them at the pool table. They were tired of playing each other, they said. They were some, actually the majority, of the new customers she had spotted earlier, and her instinct was to politely decline. She didn't sense any threat from them, mainly just boredom, but the woman had a level, almost piercing way of looking at her, and Myka heard herself saying "Sure, why not?"
There were any number of reasons why not, Myka argued with herself as she followed them to the pool table. Just because she didn't sense a threat from them didn't mean that they weren't a threat, and she had no desire to be jumped as she went to her car. Also she wasn't so blind to her emotions that she didn't realize that the reason she had accepted the offer was because the way the woman had looked at her reminded her of how Helena 2.0 (and a big thank you to Pete for putting that tag into her head) had looked at the camera in the interrogation room. Thankfully that was the only resemblance, although the woman was striking in her own way and flirtatious. Myka had thought she was simply flirting with the man she was with, her boyfriend Myka had presumed, until one of the regulars joined the game and they split into teams, the regular and the boyfriend forming one, she and the girlfriend, Tori, forming the other, and the woman's flirtatiousness didn't diminish. Myka eventually recognized that the glances and the laughs and the occasional brush of Tori's hip against hers weren't incidental, and though nothing was ever going to come of it, Myka let herself respond to it, just a little. She had found women attractive before Helena and while she had never chosen to act on the little fillips she had felt upon meeting certain women, she hadn't felt compelled to deny them. So she laughed more readily at Tori's remarks and held her eyes for longer than she should, and, if anything, the boyfriend approved, from what she could judge, as he occasionally slid both her and Tori knowing smiles. The regular playing with them seemed unaware of the other game they were playing and eventually put his pool cue back in the rack, saying it was time to go home. There were just the three of them then, and Myka knew it would take only a "Yes" from her, or maybe only a nod, and she would find herself with Tori and her boyfriend in a motel room or the bedroom of whatever farmhouse Tori and her boyfriend called home. It wasn't just that there was Pete, or that she didn't do threesomes, or that she didn't sleep with strangers, although all of that was true, it was also because she couldn't be sure that Helena somehow, someway wasn't mixed up in it, and she wouldn't risk seeing her face in Tori's.
In the end, she said, "It's been a long night. Thanks for the game." If Tori and her boyfriend were disappointed, they didn't show it, except that Tori didn't look away, even after her boyfriend started back toward their table, and Myka, turning toward the door, felt she had done so too late, that Tori had seen something she still refused to acknowledge.
Safely in her car, Tori and her boyfriend not having followed her out to mug her, Myka was too restless to return to Leena's. It was late and she and Vanessa had an early flight, but she knew she wouldn't sleep if she tried to go to bed. She could always visit Pete's room and she could lose the remaining hours with him. He would be amused that she had turned down a threesome - when he had been single, he had never turned down a "lady sandwich," or so he said - but she didn't want to hear all the cautions that would come in the morning, about how she needed to be on her guard, about how Helena 2.0 might be like the old Helena and try to play her with her own tragic tale. When she came to a stop outside the Warehouse, she wondered if this was where she had meant to go all along.
Artie was still up; she knew he would be. When she entered the war room, he was hunched over the "ping machine" as Pete and Claudia called it, mumbling about a jade elephant that had been unearthed in India. There were no electrical cords connecting the computer to any power source, and if it had a battery, it apparently never needed to be recharged. She assumed the computer ran off all the artefact-generated energy that the Warehouse tried and, with dismaying frequency, failed to contain. She wouldn't elevate his connection to it to the kind of connection that Mrs. Frederic had with the Warehouse as its caretaker, but it was true that the computer wouldn't respond as readily to other users. It seemed to know when it was Artie researching or locating an artefact. Vanessa wasn't in the room with him. She was probably in his bedroom behind the office or back at Leena's. Myka supposed that they did normal couple things like loll in bed of a morning or watch TV spooned together on a couch, but she never caught them kissing or even touching one another in an affectionate way. Not that she wanted to see them acting like lovers, but she thought it might help to remind her that Artie was still worthy of being loved, that he was still Artie.
Funny how he and Pete couldn't seem to get over the fact that the old Helena, the original Helena, had done terrible things to them and to others, but everyone, and that included her most of the time, conveniently forgot that he was responsible for Leena's death. The people Helena had killed, the men who had murdered her child, MacPherson; Myka didn't want to say they deserved to die, but she didn't find it especially horrible that Helena had killed them. As for the students who had died helping her to implement her plan, the only thing Myka could say in Helena's defense was that she hadn't meant for them to die. And even though Helena had wanted everyone in the world to die when she was poised to strike the trident a third time, she hadn't struck it the third time; even in her madness, she had been able to listen to another voice. Myka understood that there was a difference between succumbing to your own rage and grief and succumbing to a power outside you. Intellectually she understood that there could be a difference, anyway, between an organic madness and the madness caused by an artefact. Sometimes, however, especially when she was suffering through one of Artie's grumpier, more misanthropic moods, she would feel that there was no difference, and that Helena had proven herself to be the stronger of the two.
She knew that he grieved for Leena, as they all did. He had taken to playing the piano at Leena's more often, the music frequently an improvisation on a familiar melody, and when the melody began to sound like it was alone on the prairie in a thunderstorm, she, as well as everyone else, had learned not to interrupt him. He took more trips to Atlanta to see Vanessa than he had before, and Myka wondered if it was easier to be with Vanessa because she hadn't lived with Leena day in and day out as the rest of them had, or because he could get a refill from her for the anti-depressants they all pretended not to see him take. But there was no madness, no raving, no obsessive planning to make the entire world feel as he did. Artie's guilt, and Myka wasn't so unbending as to refuse to believe he felt guilty, was a guilt that could be assuaged, if not entirely erased, by the knowledge that he had murdered Leena without wanting to, without intending to. Helena would never have that consolation.
Ultimately, however, whether he meant to kill Leena was beside the point, she was gone, and he was the reason why, and the fact that he couldn't seem to understand that he and Helena were not poles apart in their actions but separated only by the thin excuse "I never meant for it to happen" was enough for Myka to draw in a shaky breath and sometimes leave a room they shared. Otherwise she feared she would explode at him, shouting words that she would never be able to unsay. She had spent too many years feeling the impact of words said without thought or care for their power; she wouldn't allow herself to be that cruel. Tonight she wasn't afraid that she might blurt out something hurtful, but she felt no rush of affection as she watched Artie track the artefact's trail on the screen.
Without acknowledging that he knew she was there, he rolled himself away from the table and swiveled the chair so that he could face her. Then, with the insight and the gentleness that continued to surprise her, even after all the years they had worked together, he said, "You're here to tell me that I shouldn't still be so suspicious of H.G. I'm not, actually, but my first duty is to protect the Warehouse, and I can't ignore the fact that, in the past, she wanted to destroy it."
"She also saved it," Myka said quietly, the desire to battle Artie deserting her. He looked like a teddy bear suffering from gout.
"That's true." He peered at her. "I'm depending on you, Myka, more than ever this time. You've always been able to see sides to Helena that have eluded the rest of us. You need to keep being her champion because I can't afford not to be suspicious of her, and the same goes for Mrs. Frederic and the regents. Pete, for obvious reasons, won't be tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt, and Claudia, her feelings about H.G. have always been all over the place. You've always been . . . fair." He said the last with such a long sigh that Myka flushed as if he had just presented her with a criticism of her performance.
"You make that sound like a bad thing, and, if I'm being perfectly honest, my feelings about Helena are all over the place as well."
"Not as much as you may think," he said with a certainty that unsettled and irritated her in equal measure. "Sometimes you're a little too fair, don't you think? It's okay to get carried away, to let your emotions get the better of you." He removed his glasses and used the bottom hem of his shirt to clean the lenses. "I want you to trust your emotions, about H.G. and this . . . other one." He held his glasses up to the light. "I know that you'll do the right thing if you sense either one of them is a threat, you always have." He turned his chair around and, with a Flintstone-like paddling of his feet, launched it toward the table. "Now get out of here. I'm about to assign Steve and Claudia to a retrieval in Mumbai. He'll love it. Her? Big cities, heat, foreign languages. She'll hate it. Hell, she grew up in New York, what's the problem?" He shrugged and started humming to himself.
Myka wished she had had the beer when she was at the bar, maybe it would have made the import of the conversation they had just finished, that Artie had just finished for them rather, clearer to her. So Artie saw her as a Helena-whisperer as well? She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. Did he know something about this situation that she didn't? And what gave him the right to tell her what she felt about Helena? He wasn't even shooting a glance at her from the corner of his eye. The conversation over, he no longer had to notice her. She might as well go back to Leena's. Leaving the war room, she halted at the railing and looked out over the expanse of the Warehouse. What artefacts did it hold that might have caused this? When had Helena accessed them, if she was the one behind this? Who had accessed them if she wasn't? Myka realized she would stay up all night thinking about the possible answers to those questions if she didn't find a more productive use of her time. Back at Leena's, there were her books on her iPad and Pete, not necessarily productive in their different ways but absorbing. Or she could go down into the Warehouse and start looking up some of the artefacts that could have blessed - or cursed - the world with another H.G. Wells.
