II.


The first thing Eli had said when they'd landed in City 17 was: "We're here, Kleiner. Don't look back."

Until now, he believed he'd heeded that command to the best of his ability.

Do you remember? Eli would ask, were he still here. Maybe you hadn't heard; I mumbled it to turbulence. You'd fallen asleep with Alyx in your lap when it hurt too much for me to hold her.

Yes, I remember.

Not out loud. He's listening.

To tell the truth, Kleiner had partly humored Eli out of fear for his precarious state of mind. It was easier to believe he'd been drifting in and out of a morphine stupor, that his warnings arose as the byproduct of traumatic stress.

It hadn't occured to him then that what Eli said wasn't just a hasty declaration, of wanting things to be finally and resolutely over. It wasn't just exhaustion playing shadows in his eyes. It wasn't their jagged heartbeats, the smell of smoke or the flecks of blood and glass threading little Alyx's sunflower blouse. It wasn't any of that. It was a creed, for both of them to follow.

Was it safe to chance one glimpse? He didn't know.


Mere trinkets testified to where they were, where they had been.

Unpeeling their protective swaddling, Kleiner placed a pair of bifocals next to Eli's wedding band on the gouged surface of his desk. He gingerly perched himself on his late friend's work stool, tucking his hands over his lap.

Alyx did thorough work when she used the shop to eschew thinking. Gordon's new lenses boasted a snug fit with almost no give to speak of, incongruously bright, clean and unscratched compared to the chipped plastic frame in which they lay, patched together with electrical tape.

Of course, she had not considered how her work might be rendered moot if the frames failed to hold. He hadn't had the heart to tell her the ribs had begun to bend, the coils loosening.

He released a sigh, massaging the back of his neck. Solitude draped an aching heaviness around his shoulders like a mantle. It was true even in the old world that once a man reached a certain age, loneliness became his most faithful companion. For years he had done all he could to stave that inevitability. Now that it had arrived, he saw little reason to fight it.

If he indulged himself a moment's quiet, grief would enter, a dark, silent visitor. So he kept his own company with memories of recent days.

"Barney, it's time."

Clad in torn Civil Protection garb, splashed with blood, Barney pivoted from Eli's awaiting body. "Will you give me a minute? Y'all had three days to say goodbye, and I" Collecting himself, he heaved out a ragged breath. " I won't keep you long." His whisper broke off in his throat. "Please."

The smelter crackled cinders as he reached down and touched his gloved hand to Eli's wrist, stroking the knobby joint.

Barney said nothing, only gripped his hand. Slowly he skimmed his fingertips down Eli's ashen ones. Kleiner hadn't quite ascertained the small twisting motions he made until the ring slid from his third foreknuckle.

"What are you doing?"

"You don't want this burning with him." Cradling it carefully, he trudged over to Kleiner and gingerly deposited the band in his creased palm. Gold worn to a smooth pale sheen glinted in the renewed flames. "Someone might need it."

That 'someone' still grieving herself, susceptible to lashing out. Their dreadful quarrel thundered through even Gordon's muffled walls.

Fortunately they had reconciled, he'd hoped, for the most part. Divided forces only stood to benefit enemy interests. Fractured but not yet broken, this Resistance lay in a delicate state.

So too did Alyx. Her steely face branded an afterimage behind his eyelids. Her old softness had eroded, truth-forged into something harder, less assailable.

"Why did he lie?"

He wished he could say.

It was strange to think he'd have once craved silence in an empty gray room like this. Two decades ago, schedules, meetings, and deadlines dominated his life. At Black Mesa one chased the next twenty-four hours in an interminable game of catch-up. Progress outraced them with boundless energy, lunging ten steps ahead for every tentative foot they put down.

And now, it seemed, their efforts had reached a conclusion. A standstill. The culmination of twenty years of blood and suffering. With the result left in Alyx's hands, he had no option but to drift toward hypotheticals, other paths not taken.

Was there more they might have done? If so, for whom? Eli was gone. Nothing more could torment him, in this world or any other. Gordon had returned for a short time; it seemed to Kleiner the contract that conspired to keep him alive now snatched him out of reach. Twice he'd feared his pupil's demise, once in the week following the breach at Nova Prospekt, along with Alyx, and again when the medical staff carted his and Eli's bodies into the base. One dead, one clinging to life; Alyx, the trembling intermediary, trailed after them both, repeating the same unanswerable questions over and again.

A knock sounded at the door. He took a moment to compose himself before answering. "Yes," he said quietly. "Who's calling?"

"Me, you reclusive old goat." Arne. "Is this an opportune time, or shall I wait until you've finished whatever it is you're doing in there?"

"There's no need," he said. "I'm… Sitting at Eli's desk for the present."

The door opened, casting fluorescents over a bare concrete floor. "Were you? It's so dark I couldn't tell." Magnusson sniffed at his reticence before striding in. "Christ, Kleiner, this isn't New Mexico; you need to open the blinds once in a blue moon. Don't turn into one of those vagrants who hiss at every stray beam of natural sunlight." He gave the shades a brisk tug. Powder white sunlight crept in to illuminate the dust motes lingering in the air. "There, isn't this better?"

Truthfully, his eyes stung a bit from his time cooped in the HEV's chamber.

"I'm not certain we've done the right thing." Magnusson cut right to the heart of the matter, his voice quieter than usual. "I came here to see if we would be in concurrence about that. You and I, we've had our… disagreements, to say the least, but… " He exhaled, gazing out the window. "Since the wake, I've had a nagging suspicion we've let out something that oughtn't be known. Similar to the feeling some of us had when we greenlit the test, actually."

Intellect did not exist in mutual exclusion with superstition; in Black Mesa, ill hunches abounded weeks before the Anti-Mass Spectrometer overloaded. But they hadn't the ears to listen.

"Feelings are not the same as facts."

"You know damn well that isn't what I mean, Isaac." Mockingjays trilled in his silence. "I don't believe that letter was a farewell letter."

He didn't understand why Arne had changed his mind, what had caused this abrupt shift in thinking; days ago, their roles had reversed. He'd hesitated to disclose such an awful truth without solid means to lessen the impact, while Magnusson maintained Alyx needed to read her father's letter for the Resistance's welfare.

They might have devolved into outright quarreling had he not recalled Eli halfway during their conversations. His tired mien, his heavy conscience; had something in his psyche not cracked and relented, Alyx may now be chasing the Borealis in relative safety.

"If Eli divulged his intelligence to her," Magnusson said, "any part of it, that in and of itself makes her a prime target—"

Kleiner traced patterns in the engravings of his friend's wedding band. Faded cursive read a Latin inscription: Quos amor verus tenuit, tenebit. True love will hold on to those whom it has held.

"I assure you he never would have purposefully endangered Alyx." The last thing Eli wanted was to harm his daughter. He sorely wished the truth had found a softer path, but that wasn't possible. Although Eli's tortured conscience had never reconciled that fact, they needed to make their peace with it if they desired to go forward. "She needed to hear from him the content therein, yes. It did not, however, disclose information that could compromise our Resistance."

"How do you know this? Did she tell you?"

"In so many words." He went on to tighten a screw in Gordon's glasses. "What he knew died with him. That's all there is to say."

"Haven't you become curious regarding the circumstances? If those letters languished in the recesses of a junk drawer, that'd have been one thing, but they were buried in his quantum entanglement journals. The very ones, might I add, used to resurrect your teleport?" He lowered his head, unable to reciprocate Magnusson's unflinching gaze. "He didn't want merely anyone to stumble upon them. And for good reason. My God, the man was a walking dossier; you're telling me he wouldn't have enlightened her on a single speck?"

His reply was almost deceitfully simple. "He loved her."

Outside, a clamor arose. Shouts spiked, accompanied by the frantic pounding of feet.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Magnusson snapped. "What could be kicking up that much racket this early in the morning?"

An answer arrived in the form of Uriah, who uncharacteristically barged in without greeting either man. They bristled at the sight of him; his laminated ID, which he kept dutifully clipped to his pocket protector, had fallen off. His lab coat swung loose from his knobby shoulders and pooled in the crook of his spine, as if an intense bout of sprinting threatened to peel it away.

"Quickly!" He clutched the doorframe. His snout twitched with nervous energy, and his pupils shrank to slits as he watched personnel dart down the corridor. "The Magnusson and the Kleiner must come. The Freeman has awakened from his slumber."

The news shocked Kleiner into rising from his seat. "What?"

Magnusson's jaw unhinged. "That's impossible," he said. Uriah chose not to respond and disappeared around the corner. Alarmed, he called after him. His assistant seldom ignored him in such a brazen manner. "Uriah? What is the meaning of this? Uriah; get back here!"

As Uriah's absence stretched, his fists uncurled, and he receded from the door. He cast Kleiner a glance he could only call 'bewildered,' which hardened the stone settling to the bottom of his stomach. In the four tumultuous decades he had known Arne Magnusson, he had never seen the man at an utter loss to understand. Bemusement, yes. Certainly perplexity on occasion. Frustration in spades. Rarely, if at all, the helplessness paling his complexion.

They'd expected their days of running to be over. Not so. Their steps never carried them faster.


Blood. Alarms. Broken monitors.

The scene's surrounding chaos faded for Kleiner. For a cold moment, the years dissolved. Another took his pupil's place. There Eli lay, not dead but painfully alive on a bed of blood and shattered glass, clutching a torn raincoat to his chest, his wife heaped dead beside him. Screaming a horrendous unheard plea, muted by the wail of sirens—

He almost failed to notice Arne's elbow banging into his rib when he lunged through the crowd, thrusting onlookers aside to get a clearer look. The moment his gaze found Gordon, he demanded: "Will someone tell us what the blazes is going on here? Why is Freeman on the floor?"

His brusque tone lured him into the present. Black Mesa's saturated corridors softened into White Forest's dim observation room. The difference didn't matter. His hands retained their tremble.

The crowd thickened, its numbers clotting as people accrued around the door. His view dwindled the more he was pushed back into the corridor.

From what scraps he caught, the surgeon had tilted Gordon on his side and lay his head in her lap, talking him through his convulsions in a calm, assiduous voice as others frantically orbited them.

"Dr. Freeman, listen. My name is Maria Stezenka. I'm the surgeon at White Forest. You've had a fall and woken a little before the alarm. There's no reason to panic; we're going to get you stabilized." She snapped her head up. "Hvatit. Quit pulling on the tube, his throat's clinched around it. Force it out, it'll break off in his larynx—"

A needle withdrew from his arm. "Shit," her assistant said, regarding the empty tuber with wide-eyed apprehension, "what is this? It can't be prophylactic reaction, he's not responding to the carbamazepine—"

"Calm down," Stezenka said. Her grip maintained a steady pressure on his temples. Gradually, his bodily quaking ameliorated into shivers. "Looks like it's quieting a little."

Her assistant crouched beside her. "Is another coming?"

Cradling Gordon by the base of his neck, pressing her thumbs on his bruise-gray eyelids, examining his exposed pupils for signs of change, she shook her head. Kleiner had known her long enough to know that gesture did not necessarily mean no. It meant she couldn't tell.

"A grand mal in his condition—"

"I know," she said. "I know. But we can't do a fucking thing with the paparazzi taking pictures." A sharp stare galvanized Magnusson into ushering onlookers from the scene, including Kleiner.

"All right, everyone who isn't a part of the medical staff, clear out, out—"

"Arne—"

"Unless you plan on procuring an MD in the next seven seconds, I don't want to hear it."

He caught glimpses through the gaps in elbows and shoulders. As the staff initiated a cautious extraction of the tube, Gordon gave a spasmic wheeze. His hands wandered outward, brushing and patting over a tangle of forearms.

"We're removing the tracheal tube now, Dr. Freeman. Just a moment."

His chest bucked once the pink-tinged plastic slithered free; a gasp shuddered through them as a pulpy thrust of blood dribbled down his shirt.

"He's bit on his tongue," Maria said.

His bloodshot eyes flickered over them and slackened into fuzzier focus, not quite registering individuals from the crowd. This maelstrom of stimuli must be wreaking hell on his senses.

Stezenka, her assistant, and two Vortigaunt nurses, Sokolai and Dushan, helped lift him back onto the bed. The crowds parted on either side to allow them to wheel him through. As he passed, bound to the padded table, Gordon's eyes sought and held his.

(Help.)

Less than a whisper scraped the air before he vanished behind elevator shutters. His lips hadn't moved their chapped plates; it shouldn't have been possible, given the klaxon and worried chatter filling the corridor, but the plea targeted him with unnerving clarity.

Kleiner clutched the wall for support, breathing in and out.


An hour passed without news. Then another, yet more. Late-summer sun rose over the mountains, glistening the dew on withered leaves tapping outside the windows of the compound.

Birches dripped gold plumage along the crest of the ridge. They reminded him of Lamarr, her affinity for napping in dry beds of leaves. Perhaps she'd migrated to the mountains for the winter. Perhaps she'd gone home.

Gradually the base dispersed, each retiring to his duties with an unfocused hand. Magnusson walked in and out of the room, scuffing the Persian carpet as if he had difficulty deciding where to be.

As for himself, he sat in the corner nursing a tepid cup of coffee with Uriah. He stirred cream until foam lapped the surface. Spoon scraping porcelain lulled him into a numb sort of meditation. He had too much time to contemplate Gordon's plea, whether it was real or sleight of mind—

None could tell exactly when Sokolai arrived; he clasped his claws before himself in a slight bow. "Apologies to all. We know much time has passed since the Freeman roused."

Uriah spoke. "Has his affliction—"

Their spirits sank along with his downcast gaze. "The doctor sent this one to retrieve you. She wishes to explain his predicament face to face."


"Doctor? Here we are."

"Yes." Maria gave him a weary smile. "Thank you, Sokolai." She gestured for the group to take a seat on a shorn leather sofa littered with X-ray blanks. "Please forgive the mess, gentlemen; it's been a long day. Push some things aside if you must."

Magnusson swept the sofa for the two of them to sit.

White Forest's surgeon kept residency in modest quarters not unlike Eli's own. He noticed the tray of untouched stew sitting on the nightstand beside her desk, which Dushan quickly carried out of the room. Dr. Stezenka seldom kept a regular dinner schedule in sync with the rest of the base—a stubborn old habit borne of the need to be on call at any moment.

She withdrew from her pocket protector a cherry Tootsie Pop, wrapped in bright red wax paper. Crinkling sounded as she unpeeled the wrapper, wadding it into a tight ball to press back inside her waist pocket.

Maria Stezenka scrutinized them in silence, then sat on the Adirondack chair Sokolai had cleared of weighty tomes. The lollipop withdrew a shining orb from her mouth.

"Does Dr. Freeman have arrhythmia?"

He glanced toward Magnusson, who echoed his confusion with a shrug. "None we've heard of. Black Mesa would have made note in his physical evaluations were that the case."

"I ask because we believe a heart-related phenomenon may have triggered the seizure." She crossed one leg over the other, contemplated with the stick dangling from her fingers. "He's since calmed down, and his EKGs are returning excellent readings."

"Of course they would," Magnusson said, "now that he doesn't have entire crowds swarming him."

"And I extend you my thanks for clearing them, Doctor," she replied a bit tersely.

Kleiner's elbow brushed the glossy surface of a blank draped over the armrest. "Is it possible his apnea played a part?" he asked.

"No apnea is severe enough to induce a grand mal, I'm afraid. It has to be a structural issue within the heart itself." She trailed off, dissolving the candy in her mouth a little more.

"What is it?"

"He, er." She searched for words by tapping the stick's bare end against a white pucker on her bottom lip. Portal storms had shattered a medicine cabinet long ago, coating her left cheek in a fine web of scars. "The reason he fell is because he managed to sit up for a few seconds."

"Is that significant?"

She appeared at a loss to answer, the open and close of her mouth shifting the web's tendrils. "I don't know. It's… Incredibly strange," she said. "As far as we can tell, he wasn't quite conscious during. Something must have stimulated his tendons, though I can't pinpoint what." And here she fell silent. "Christ. I shouldn't waste time quibbling over theoreticals.

"I wish there was a kinder way to put this," she said. "Dr. Freeman didn't have subdural hematoma before the fall… " Paused; dropped the lollipop into a waste basket. "But when his head struck the floor, it caused internal bleeding. That blood is now steadily applying pressure to his prefrontal cortex on top of the liquid from his initial trauma."

Arne cursed.

His heart pounded an insistent beat in the base of his throat. "What are our options?"

A prolonged pause ensued on her end. "It isn't an ideal—"

"Oh, spit it out, woman," Magnusson burst. "Enough with this beating around the bush!"

"Very well," she said. "Put simply, we have interdependent problems worsening one another. Subdural hematoma aggravates epilepsy, and epilepsy aggravates bleeding. My principal concern is staunching that blood without triggering another seizure, then draining the liquid squeezing his cranial cap."

"What you're suggesting combines two surgeries into one," Kleiner said. "That will take quite a toll on you."

Maria folded her arms over stained lapels. Dark flecks speckled the off-white of her coat where Gordon had coughed blood. "I'm not so very decrepit in my old age." She gave the floor a brief frown before continuing. "If drainage isn't possible through the usual channels, we may need to induce a chemical coma."

No. His first thought, a pained reflex. Nothing so drastic. "Are you certain that's wise, when he lies in such a precarious state?"

"Right now, we can't be certain of anything. Under better circumstances, I'd suggest that we submit Dr. Freeman to more rigorous testing until we gain a clearer picture of what we're dealing with. But time appears not to be on our side."

Her stare was cool, guarded, practiced. Stezenka had had to deliver news of this caliber an unfortunate number of times. That this delicate balance of sensibility and truth shaped Gordon's fate, when he was once their prayer for survival, struck him as uncanny.

"If indeed we do decide surgery is the best recourse, additional precautionary steps will then have to be taken to maximize the odds of its success. That's why I would want to send Dushan and Sokolai to Smolensk."

"City 14?"

Grim nod. "Our reserves are preciously low. An apneic patient with potential cardiological and epileptic issues won't respond well to general anesthesia." She added: "This isn't the dark ages. We can't ask him to polish a bottle of wine and put the leeches to him."

At length she stood.

"Gentlemen, I realize this is a great deal of foreboding news to absorb at once. I don't mean to overwhelm you, but neither will I lie to you. When a coma victim suffers a grand mal, their odds of recurrence increase with each moment that passes, unless the damage is repaired in an expedient manner. Given the time-sensitivity of his condition, the next that comes along may induce hemorrhage. After which, he may be beyond our power to help."

Her last word evoked the image of Gordon, bed-bound and terrified as he passed by. Kleiner scrimped the armrest until his knuckles whitened over creaking leather. The waning of time evaporated the air in the room, leaving a pressing weight to clog his lungs.

Magnusson resumed the conversation without him. "How is it you don't have everything you need here? Why must you shrink our defenses?"

Her jaw knotted. "For Christ's sake, at least let me request slightly better tools. This sort of thing was difficult back in Kiev, with full access to proper staff and equipment. You're asking that I accomplish a miracle with a rock, a chisel and a prayer. I can't. It's unconscionable."

Hoarse, mirthless laughter trickled from him as he shrugged affronted shoulders. "Well, what do you know? We're hosting quite possibly the one neurosurgeon in Russia without an ego to challenge God's."

"Even the Lord's hands would falter here," she said. "And too much blood has been spilled for me to entertain blasphemous delusions."

Kleiner said softly, "Surely there must be something we can do." They couldn't leave Gordon to the mercy of chance.

"Help us maximize our resources," she said. "Give clearance to send a scouting party to Smolensk. Dushan and Sokolai know its layout best and can return with what we need quickly, if it hasn't already been evacuated—"

"Or," Magnusson said, "is stuffed to the brim with Combine sympathizers—"

"—which by all accounts it oughtn't be, given the Citadel's destruction has already emptied City 14."

"Whose accounts? Why is this the first I'm hearing about it?"

"You never asked," she said. "I'm certain Uriah would be happy to fill you in on the details." He avoided Magnusson's incriminating glower. "Dushan says the core implosion extinguished the power lines spanning along the Citadel's outlying districts. A band of Vortigaunt defectors used the confusion to escape Smolensk several days ago, and they seem to be fleeing westard on foot. No doubt they'll seek asylum here once they cross the ridge."

"Excuse me, what part of 'this constitutes a massive security risk' isn't registering with you? Two nights ago thugs dragged hostages to our front door and slaughtered at least one! We can't enfeeble ourselves for what amounts to a questionable reconnaissance! I won't allow it!"

"I… " His quiet interjection dissolved the accumulating tension, if only a bit. "I suppose synthesizing a compound is out of the question?" Years ago, she'd developed an antidote to poison crab neurotoxin by studying the enzymes that the creature generated upon transmission.

The scarred ends of her mouth drooped, crumbled his nascent hopes. "Normally not, but I fear developing a synthetic would take more time than he has."

He swore Eli's hand grasped his shoulder in warning. Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to, Iz. "What will occur if they return empty-handed?"

"We continue with surgery, just with… Our usual." She swallowed. "However, the likelihood he'll respond unfavorably is quite high."

Don't look back.

There is no child fussing in his arms. This room does not reek of the sweat and acrid, stinging bleach where overtaxed staff tends to victims. There is no plastic mint-green curtain separating three-year-old Alyx and himself from her shell-shocked father.

But there was an awful, smothering moment when the analog clock moved its liquid hand. When he realized the child he cradled in his lap, nodding into a fitful sleep over his low, halting lullaby, might no longer have either of her parents.

The same cold gripped the back of his neck when the curtain stirred…

"All right." Whomever wielded control over these resolute words may or may not have been him. All he knew then was that he'd do whatever it took to keep the present from repeating the past. Gordon had fought too much and lost too deeply for them to fail him. "Tell your scouts they'll have their clearance, on the condition that they must send us a relay as soon as they reach the city."

"Kleiner," Magnusson said. "Think about what you're saying—"

"I am. We must do everything within our power to assist him." He addressed the surgeon. "May we visit him?" After those empty hours spent in fruitless waiting, he ached to see Gordon. "Is everything settled?"

Contrition stooped her shoulders. "He's endured a battery of tests. He's honestly in no better shape than when we wheeled him down."

"Please."

Her brown eyes searched his face, darting liquid over the invisible lines they read. "A moment, Isaac. No more."

He stood and thanked her. Magnusson, however, refused to budge an inch. "Aren't you coming?"

Irritation bled through his mien like an agitated blister. "No, Kleiner, I've been up since a quarter past three this morning and I'm developing a positively hateful migraine for the trouble." Sighing, he massaged his temples. "See him back up here when you're finished, will you? Last thing we need is him wandering lost in the basement."

"Of course," Uriah replied, and touched a claw to his elbow. "Come. Freeman awaits."


Excepting the electrocardiogram's intermittent tick, a deathly hush crept over the room.

Kleiner stood clutching the doorknob's chilled brass as Uriah and Sokolai filed ahead of him. The other Vortigaunt nurse, Dushan, was already tending to Gordon, patting a damp cloth over his brow.

The knob whined in his grip. Dread writhed in his intestines, raised his nerves to their bursting point just below the skin.

Light struck the soles of Gordon's feet, gripped by blue veins. He willed himself to wander forth. Feet sloped into chafed ankles, reddish hairs glinting pale strands on his calves. His skin pricked with diodes, stray wires tightening and coiling as they snaked over his body.

Gordon nested amidst a heavy bed of plastic. Cables, diodes, and tubes tumbled to the floor like streams pouring from a waterfall. Were it not for the thin rise of his chest, shuddering beneath their tangle, one wouldn't have been mistaken in thinking him dead. His pallor was ashen, drained of blood. The palsy that once twitched his limbs in the throes of dreaming had settled into an unrelenting quiet.

IVs fed his veins one languorous drop at a time.

He slid Gordon's bruised hand into his own and squeezed.

"You've given us quite the scare over these past several days, haven't you?" He smiled, a watery chuckle rising to his lips. "Why, if I didn't know any better, I'd be inclined to believe this was another one of your practical jokes."

The Gordon they knew had a wry, wicked sense of humor embedded in his silent demeanor. The incident hadn't completely stolen his propensity toward humor; he'd struggle to manage an upward flick of the lips when occasion warranted.

How much would this injury cost him? Which pieces of him would be lost, and which would become obscured, masked? How much more would Black Mesa thieve—

Sniffing lightly, Kleiner raised his head. Through misting vision, he caught a faint green glimmer hovering just above Gordon's heart. He might have mistaken it for the EKG producing some sort of afterglow were it not for the needle-like gleam dancing over the wires. The ray shifted, broadening.

Perhaps it was a cojoined trick of light and aging eyes. Perhaps neither. Curiosity compelled him to reach for empty air.

A static shock scorched him. He recoiled with an instinctive cry and shoved his wrist into his lapel.

"Kleiner?"

He looked up apprehensively at the Vortigaunts, the flush of anxiety sending blood throbbing to his ears, rendering him too aware of their presence. "I must have touched an unsheathed wire," he murmured. "How careless… "

Uriah tested a talon on Gordon's brow. "The flesh is cold."

"M'unng ch'a. Fire and ice afflict him in turn. This is all we can do to soothe him."

Those words sprouted the first crack in his composure, releasing a weak, airless sob from the base of his throat. A misplaced shudder lowered his head in his hands; grief wrapped cold fingers over his heart and squeezed until his vision misted over, blurring past and obscuring present, blinding the future.

Gordon Freeman was not always an inert body struggling to tether its life. Two decades ago he'd been his brightest student, soon graduated into an intern who observed entanglement processes in broken Austrian. Finally placed into a lab coat and tie where he belonged, a fresh, hesitant employee who, despite his pushing, refused to vouch for himself at the facility, thinking instead his work would speak for him. Lowering a plastic tray onto the table at Eli's hearty call: C'mon and have lunch with us, we won't bite.

Gordon, a survivor, creeping from the elevator doors one shuffling step at a time, twenty minutes after the incident sent alarms screaming throughout the complex. Smudged glasses, shivering, smeared in ash and fresh blood. Alive, oh thank God, mercifully alive.

Now all he saw reflected in his pupil's quiescent face were their failures, their sins. Black Mesa burning. Eli burdened and Alyx broken. This world gnarling into a twisted husk under the Combine's reign.

But they persisted their fight, and for what? For this battered young man to struggle for what might be his last ounces of breath?

His Vortigaunt companions coalesced toward him.

Uriah rubbed his back. "There, now."

"Freeman has endured ordeals far more treacherous than this," Sokolai said, "and emerged triumphant. Have faith that he shall prevail."

"The flesh deceives," added Dushan. "What you call loss, mere oscillations. If you could see through our eyes the luminous threads that bind us together, these tears would turn to laughter—"

"Remember, and take comfort: the doctor has vowed to protect the Freeman. She will not abandon him in his hour of need."

"Nor we."

"Whatever befalls him, we endure alongside him."

Their consolations deepened the pang in his heart.

"Dry your tears. There is hope yet," Sokolai said, trailing off. "But… "

The EKG spiked in an even monotone, the silence between intervals crushing. Tch. Tch. Tch.

He dared not breathe. "But?"

Sokolai rumbled a negative, lowered his head. "It saddens these ones to say they can provide no useful counsel at this time."

Maria's voice accompanied a soft rap of knuckles on the door. "Boys?" The open jamb poured light into the room. Form and color intruded the quarters, she a shadow steeped in a harsh, buzzing glow. She folded her hands in front of herself. "I'm sorry. It's time."

An abrupt conversation commenced between the Vortigaunts in their rocky native tongue. And just as gently as he was led into this room, Kleiner found himself shepherded back out.

Grated elevator shutters encaged them. As the cabin began to rattle a slow ascent up the quarry, Uriah spun around and seized him by the shoulders. "Speak truth. Do we both perceive what watches the Freeman?"

Initially, he didn't understand what Uriah meant. No one had watched Gordon except his nurses, and perhaps the threads of light that—

No.

No, no.

Not now.

The truth uncurled a singed fingertip cradled against his chest. "He's here."

"Our sentry has grown lax," Uriah said. "It was wise to send the Alyx Vance away, for its hold on her has weakened, but it has since turned its wicked eye toward the Freeman."

"Was he… it… the reason for Gordon's premature awakening?"

"So it seems," Uriah replied. "This one fears human hands alone cannot prise him from its grip. Stronger intercessions are needed."

He turned to the shafts of light dancing through the cabin. The contractor had returned, undoubtedly seeking to collect Gordon as collateral now that Alyx had been removed from the terms of Eli's bargain. The irony being that the truth had to cut her to the core in order to protect her.

Gordon protected us when we needed him. It's about time someone else did the protecting for a change. Her parting words haunted him. He shuddered to consider the young man lying deathly still in that cold room.

He fully acknowledged the faint implausibility of such a prospect, but another part of him prayed, somehow, that Gordon had found a way to do what Eli could not. Resist from within the confines of his mental imprisonment.

"Gordon… "

"We feel his distress ripple through the Vortessence. The hunter creeps ever closer. It is now only a matter of time." It always circled back to time, their lack thereof. "Perhaps it is to our great fortune that our brethren have fled the neighboring city. Together we can invigorate him, reclaim what the beast has stolen."

"How?"

Uriah tipped his head toward the floors that scraped past, appealing to something that inhabited a space unbound by girders and limestone. "In those mountains resides an antlion cloister. We must hunt the den mother and extract her heart. The blood will allow us to communicate with his Vortessence, if for a short time."

"You're proposing husbandry?" he asked, surprised. "I didn't realize you practiced it still."

"Not for many years." Uriah blinked heavily. "Magnusson calls it a most rudimentary custom."

He'd expect as much. "And Sokolai and Dushan? What have they said about it?"

"That you must help us draw him forth," said Uriah. "There is a rite. Our brethren in the mines wove together the threads of the Freeman and Alyx Vance, to draw her from the beckons of the abyss. But her thread grows thin, and the Freeman wavers."

"I don't understand."

"The joining of life differs from symbiosis. The creature that approached Eli Vance froze the Freeman's heart in time so hers might beat. They are entwined. This Resistance cannot afford to lose either. Should one fall, so do the others."

Shivers trembled him from scalp to sole.

"How long—"

"We have known since the Eli Vance first extended his offer of peace. Our silence is our gift and our curse to him."

The truth stretched between them, so thinly cutting it could have drawn blood.

Parting doors offered just a sliver of escape.

"I'm sorry, Uriah. I… I need time."

He hurried through the elevator doors and, when he was certain he'd eluded their metallic shudder, buried his face in his hands. He did not look back. A single regressive glance invited nothing but the threat of more loss.

As usual, Eli was right.