XIII.
In a ravine where her breath crystallized before it left her lungs, Judith Mossman struck her eighth stormproof match.
Her fingers attempted to hold the flame steady while she unfolded a ragged scrap of paper, her chapped, bloodied lips moving silently to make something of its faded ink. The sheaf her associate found crammed in the bottom of a drawer was why so many good people lay dead: a single ashen, partially-burned carbon copy dated 1970 revealed the design specs of the icebreaker Borealis.
If only she could absorb its secrets, hide them inside her… All those from whom she'd inherited the sheaf were gunned down, she the last link in a drawn-out chain of seek-and-destroy. It was why these rigs, drills and endless units invaded the barren tundra. The Combine would raze everything in its path just for a single glimpse; that much was evident by the perpetual brush fires that flickered on the horizon, cremating the bodies they abandoned.
Static-fueled voices and the fragrance of ignited gasoline haunted her into insomnia. And yet, no matter how many times she scrutinized them, these damned schematics refused to gather into anything meaningful.
Mossman halted at the sound of footsteps, which was followed by a compressed drone. She killed the match with a whip of the wrist and stuffed the blueprint inside her breast pocket, pressing her back against the cragged wall. A needle of light swept the darkness where she had knelt moments before.
Using darkness for cover, she snuck behind the approaching unit and drove the knife she kept hidden in her sleeve between its shoulderblades. It was a meager switchblade she'd purloined from a haphazard box of supplies when the compound began to quake from the impact of Hunter sieges. Rust-crowned at its edge, it wasn't worth brandishing in combat. But six inches of a foreign object buried in the human body with sufficient force guaranteed death in almost any scenario regardless.
Grabbing the helm from behind, she wrenched the body backwards and jammed the blade up to the hilt. Bone didn't stick the blade, so she must have struck something soft and vital.
When the unit stopped twitching, allowing the harsh, screeching winds to batter the icy walls, she withdrew the knife and wiped its clotted blade on the snow, leaving behind a dark streak. That business finished, she reached into her pocket and took the ninth match from the pack.
Not since the Seven Hours had she kept count. Never thought she'd repeat old habits.
Outside, the gales shrilled louder, daylight's last pulse fading beyond the crevasse's upper lip. There wouldn't be much time between now and sundown to shield her from tonight's bitter plunge.
Igniting the match, she lit the corpse and fanned the spark until it blossomed into a reasonable flame. Then she nestled the unit's respirator over her mouth to protect her lungs from the toxins, whose necessary warmth filled the crevasse.
Something extinguished the blaze.
Struck dumb by incredulity, Mossman cursed, pawing at the smoldering snow. Christ, of course tonight would decide to be a bitch. Where had the wind snuck in? Her curses deepened as she plunged her hand inside her pocket and found the book empty. Dammit, she wasted her last match, her last viable match—
An eerie glow filled the darkness. Like a rising tide, a radiant meniscus crept over the cragged walls.
She never should have made the mistake of turning. What she hadn't known then, she learned at once: it's very possible to be deafened by the sound of your own screams.
Alyx returned from a dreamless sleep to find Judith sitting upright in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, chin raised to observe the oceans of gray that submerged them. Sleet wept messy, noiseless tears down the carrier's windows.
A small, pained huff escaped her lips as she shifted in the driver's seat. Waking required a gradual period of adjustment where she acclimated herself to maneuvering inside a hurt, compromised body.
New injuries groaned beside the old: the nick the plasma round had sliced in her calf scabbed and itched against her boot. Sleeping braced by the seat did fuck-all to loosen the cramps gripping the toughened muscles around her Hunter wounds.
Her pulse pounded in her rotator cuff. She must have tied the sling the wrong way, pinched a nerve by forcing it to support the weight of her bad arm. But the nerve was now dulled, and she feared reawakening it. Shifting it to the correct position seemed too precarious to risk. Like rearranging a bundle of bricks in a flimsy cotton sack, her arm might tumble out and redistribute the burden on the muscle.
So many wounds vied for attention that her ability to focus on any of them dissipated. By now, she felt like a collection of parts held together with, as Milt once said, wishes and duct tape. Some broken-down mechanism trying to avoid the scrap heap. The immediate future promised further abuse, if the immediate past was any indication of the fun to come, but she lacked the energy to entertain such anxieties.
Sleep offered less and less reprieve, becoming a dice roll. Caffeine pills applied a temporary solution to her nightmares; they couldn't keep the door shut forever, nor banish the shadowy presences locked behind, clamoring to be let out.
She wasn't stupid; she knew she had to be careful. More often than not, overuse resulted in crashes that found one drained and listless. Coupled with dehydration, they threatened to squeeze migraines from her skull. Only three left in the bottle, anyway. She kept the loose caplets inaccessible in the pocket on the side of her bad arm in order to wean herself off them.
Though, a few seconds after rousing, she caught herself unconsciously reaching for them and berated herself. Pain be damned, she was not going to become one of those people who used as a crutch.
Alyx released a yawn, then bristled. Lethargy sharpened into anxiety when she glanced upon an empty back seat. How long had she been out for? An hour?
Oh, God, Barney, that idiot. Don't tell her he sat fuming in the weather the whole time. He must be freezing by now. She reached for the door handle when Judith stopped her.
"I remember," she whispered. "What he did. What he wanted."
Bathing in the windows' melting serenity, Judith bent her head to examine Azian's necklace spooled in her palm. The wooden pendant flicked its lid under her prying thumb after a few clumsy attempts to open it—the loss of her left eye fooled her depth perception. A square-cut amber stone tumbled out.
"You're lucky he didn't find this." She extracted the chip her father had chiseled from an old Xenian crystal and brought it before the lantern. In the dim, the bauble lacked luster. But even dull specimens contained such pure resolution that when light struck them, miracles bloomed.
Eli said the first crystal excavated from the borderworld crumbled during AnMat's preliminary experiments. While protocol demanded they destroy compromised samples, he managed to salvage a tiny piece before cleanup shoveled the remains into the furnace, and gave the stone to Azian for safekeeping.
He'd recounted the tale with such distinct clarity that neither Alyx nor Judith needed to blemish the silence with another recollection. The test sample perched in the receptacle. Just a browned hunk of slag, really. None bothered a spare glance when he obeyed the order to activate the laser.
Within Judith's fingers, the chip's facets turned, refracting beams across the cabin. Quasar blue, neon yellow, sea-bottom green. Like fish in a koi pond, hues eluded the eye as soon as they were perceived.
AnMat kept their lasers mode-locked, subjecting test samples to several short but intense pulses of light rather than a continuous wave. The team had expected some strange behavior to occur, but nothing so beautiful.
As the laser bounced along its predetermined path, the warm radiance that emerged out the other end cast a shimmering miasma through the dispersion chamber. Rainbows of every subtle hue scattered broad, undulating ribbons across lead-shielded walls until the boundaries no longer mattered. Light reached through the observation window to lure them from their skeptical whisperings like a siren's song.
Magnificent, transient, never static, never stagnant. This waste of a crystal wielded photons to think a painting into existence, blossoming its canvas before their very eyes.
He'd almost missed his supervisor's orders. Dr. Vance, tilt the specimen seven degrees clockwise, if you'd be so kind. The kaleidoscope lens shifted at the flick of a dial. So did the celestial world projected therein. Behind Plexiglas goggles, Eli swore he had felt the light breathe.
He claimed it was their carelessness that destroyed the sample. The laser overheated the material, their only warning a faint crack. Seconds later, a large fissure cleaved the crystal from root to tip and shattered it into a cloud of radiant dust.
"Wallace supervised that experiment," Judith said. Wavering garnet bands caressed her cheekbones, making it appear as though she wept blood. They juddered the longer she held the chip, and, swallowing hard, she snapped the stone inside the pendant, dousing the cabin in shadow. "I hope he hadn't remembered when he caught it."
Alyx accepted her mother's necklace, clasped the chain behind her neck. The filigree felt gelid on her bare collarbone. She rubbed the pendant in slow, meandering circles.
At this point, there was no way to tell what Breen might have intended. Part of her preferred to let it die with him. Another part indulged morbid curiosity.
"What would he have done with it?"
"I don't know." Her whisper soft. "That's the most gruesome thought."
Red fumes dominated her vision as if she were still in his chambers, oppressive heat seeking to breach her skin and roast her organs. "You left me in there with him." She found it hard not to let that go, couldn't refrain from speculating on just what Mossman's willingness to abandon signified. If Judith were capable of a repeat performance. "Alone."
"Yes." Just like that, the truth. No denial, no spouting saccharine excuses to cover her ass. "I did."
She narrowed her eyes. "He could've killed us."
"I know."
"You know, but do you care is the real question."
Bruised hands twitched, then fell still. "I'm sorry." Judith returned to her sentry. Shadows of droplets glided trails down reinforced glass. "I'm not proud of what I had to do in there. I had to feign madness… though I fear not all of it was an act."
"Yeah, well. Guess it fooled him."
Her scoff fogged her reflection. "Of course it did. It's the oldest trick in the book."
Torture victims suffered rashes of irritability as their minds struggled to process their suffering in a way they could understand, and there was little doubt in her mind that the hell they'd experienced in Breen's chambers would scar anyone's amygdala.
"What's going onwith you? I'm on your side, aren't I?"
"For now."
"Really?" she asked. "That how you wanna play it?"
"Not at all. It was a sufficient rescue, if a bit messy. In terms of loosening his hold, you and Calhoun did quite well." Mossman folded her arms. "My only regret is not being able to stay long enough to hear him scream. I pray the Combine tear him to pieces. Those who play with wolves should be made to suffer their teeth." Slowly, she turned. "You look surprised."
No shit she did. Alyx crushed her jaws together because she suspected they ran the risk of dropping open otherwise. "Who are you?" she asked. "Last week, you were 'You should've waited for my signal' this and 'It isn't necessary to send them through a Combine superportal' that. Remember, Mossman? Whatever happened to her?"
Judith waited. And then an embittered smile curved her lips, stretched the sores dotting her jowls. "Last week, Wallace was dead."
"Yeah, until the slugs brought him back." And the Combine cried hallelujah. "Honestly, I was scared you were gonna hand me over to him. You get why, right? It's not like you don't have a track record for that sort of thing."
"Well, then," said Judith, "you'd be mistaken. I despise him. That much has never changed." Another smile, flickering at its corners. "Six days, Alyx. We spent six days locked in that rancid hole in the ground. Every thought I had since he dragged me back was dedicated to the moment of his passing. I laughed because I was excited. I couldn't wait for to that waste of skin to breathe his last."
Back to the window, peering at half-formed rain.
"Your father knew how deep my hatred ran. Every day, he asked me to swallow it. We mustn't expose our weaknesses if we want to keep this Resistance safe. Do you know what he would advise me to do?" Alyx said nothing, watching the shadows of droplets glide patterns down their flesh. "Smile. He claimed that was what I did best, after all. 'Whenever he tries to get a rise out of you, don't give him the satisfaction. He'll reap what he's sown soon enough. Just give him a smile, because he's going to need it.'" She shook her head. "He pitied him. Did you know that? Your father pitied his enemies. I never had the strength."
Her chuckle was just as sharp and mirthless a noise as her scoff. "And now he has the gall to die." Resentment smoldered in her voice. "'Smile.' The absolute nerve of that man."
"Judith… "
But she was no longer speaking to her. Ghosts spilled through the cracks in her psyche.
"Damn you, Eli, what else are you going to take? This wasn't what we agreed—" She smacked the dashboard, rattling the incandescent tube. The filament jumped, scorched a dangerous spark. "How dare you leave?"
The anguished cry that burst from her larynx sounded nothing like the Mossman she knew, self-contained, low-toned, deferential. She tore her arm free of Alyx's grasp and bashed her fist into the window several times, each blow more violent than the last.
She beat the window until her strength dissolved, her fist flattened into splayed fingers as a silent sob bucked her chest. Grief sucked her under, drained her spirit. Upon the last blow, she buried her head in her hands and tucked into herself like a wounded animal, her hair a tangled curtain veiling her shoulders.
"Don't touch me." Drawing back her slim shoulders, she took a loose, shuddering breath and pressed the back of her wrist to her ruined eye to inhibit the discharge threatening to seep through. "You've done what you came here to do. It's clear we owe each other nothing."
"That's not true," Alyx said. "Just because Dad isn't here anymore doesn't mean we can afford to cut each other loose. I would have come back for you."
Watery exhalations trembled her as she shook her head, silver trails glinting on her cheeks. She recoiled from the tentative hand Alyx reached for her. "Don't."
"You need to cover that. It'll get infected."
"I'm managing it," Judith insisted, clearing the pus with the swipe of a scraped knuckle. "I'm fine."
"Listen… you probably don't want to hear this, but you couldn't wait for him to come around."
"Oh, Alyx, that's such old news." She lowered her head, massaging the temple beside the socket. "Let me be tired just this once. Please."
"The minute he heard, he wanted to go after you. It's just—"
"He passed," she finished. Her stare blank. "Yes. Wallace gloated about it."
In the absence of her mother, her father deferred her to Mossman without having said a word. She used to wonder what the hell streaked through his mind when he did, encouraging his daughter to look to a woman so insecure she felt threatened by a child.
Mossman projected a perfection she failed to reach. Mossman, punctual, friendly, meticulous, whose hands dared not soil themselves on headcrab blood but produced calculations ever so watertight.
"He told me to scream."
Judith announced this in monotone, a dry recital of fact.
Too disturbed to offer a proper reply, Alyx let her words hover in lukewarm air. The meaning behind them didn't sink in right away. It took some time. As the numbness subsided, sensation emerged. With it, a passing beam of clarity.
"Oh, God." A hairline fracture. "He said… " One hand rose to conceal the twitch in her mouth. "'Scream. Eli won't hear you.'"
Years ago, Kleiner had rescued a doll that used to remind her of Mossman. She'd rub her thumbs over its repaired seams, blemishing oily streaks on the bloodless white of its cold glass skin. A missing piece of cheek made it difficult to tell whether its smile was truly a smile, or a grimace.
The doll harbored a poorly-concealed discontent over being salvaged from the gutter. She declined to hold her bent parasol and instead slumped between textbooks, refusing to stand with the quiet dignity Kleiner insisted on recapturing.
As a child, she sensed a similar veneer behind Mossman's porcelain mask. She asserted herself in the right for hating it. For rejecting it.
Whether through youth or inexperience, Alyx seldom took the opportunity to recognize that Mossman might have already cracked. That she also resented Eli's attempts to fix her. It hadn't occurred to her that perhaps Mossman had expectations of her own to fulfill, and her suffering dove beyond ordinary fears of inadequacy.
Alyx thought of the chamber, its crushing isolation echoing Mossman's deepest fears of abandonment. Eli's charity tormented her conscience just as much as Breen's deprivation, if not more so. At Black Mesa East, she constantly strove to prove herself worthy of a seat at the table. Being a burden inflicted a worse sin than being inadequate. Contributing little of worth, the damning sin.
Becoming a pawn and surrendering yourself, passed back and forth between the hands of two men more alike than either admitted. She couldn't begin to imagine.
Painfully aware of how deficient the words were, she whispered, "I'm sorry."
"Spare yourself the trouble. It's not your apology to give."
"No," Alyx said, "it really is. We've been awful to each other. I don't want to keep going the way we've been. Especially not now."
"Is it true?"
The question took her off-guard. "Is what true?"
"What Eli did," she said, "in Black Mesa."
That long, absorbed stare. Mossman had the uncanny ability to unzip her skull and cull her thoughts with just a single look.
"Seems I've been mourning the wrong person," Judith murmured. "He may have forced me to swallow poison, but at the very least, poison can be expelled." Another pause. "I suppose that's why you haven't told anyone."
"There wouldn't be a Resistance if I did."
"You underestimate its fiber, Alyx." Barbs pricked her words.
"There's no point."
"Not for Gordon's sake?"
"He's in a coma."
"You'd rather carry that burden alone."
"No one else is gonna."
"And yet," said Mossman, "millions have already suffered."
"He should have let me go."
"Then someone else would have been chosen," she said. "Wallace, perhaps. Would you want that?"
Daggers stabbed her rotator cuff, depriving her of a reply and drawing a deep grimace. Jesus Christ, she wished Breen had just bit the bullet and torn her arm right off. Would be so much easier.
"You and your father were close. These feelings can't be comfortable for you."
"I don't want to talk about this with you, Judith."
"It won't last forever," she said. "The doubts, the self-loathing. Over time, you learn how to walk the tightrope," once again offering unsolicited advice, "to balance the negative with the positive. Some days, I admired your father eminently while hating him to my core."
"Really." She wrapped cold fingers around her throbbing collarbone. "Could've fooled me."
"There were days I hated him precisely because I agreed with his plans and he did nothing to stop me. But he shouldered incredible responsibilities that aren't to be envied. He tried to do right by his Resistance. And make no mistake, Alyx, it was his Resistance: as much the product of his blood and tears as you are." Her kneading slowed. "He remained conscientious of honoring the trust he'd been given. Being penned in with Wallace made me realize some men can't be trusted with even a modicum of power."
The enraged thrashing of limbs on a bed of shorn metal clattered in her ears. She went silent for a moment before answering. "Is that what you meant when you told him 'they' were coming to collect the flesh?"
Mossman nodded. "I've heard of it spoken in his office. The Combine police their cohesion quite severely. When one unit suffers bodily harm, it threatens their infrastructure. The others initiate a neurochemical process to dissolve the flesh from the inside-out. You can imagine the rest." Didn't have to, and quite frankly, she preferred not to. Breen unraveled into a mindless sack of organs in the end, as pitiful in death as he'd been in rebirth. "Inviting a foreign consciousness into one of their host bodies is highly taboo. They must have placed him inside one for a specific purpose."
"That he failed."
"Miserably." Judith's fingertips rose to collect more drops of pus, which she rubbed dry. "I admit I don't fully understand the process myself. It could be a ritual of some kind."
"Doesn't matter now."
"I suppose not." Following another prolonged silence, Judith reached into her breast pocket and unfolded a scrap of paper she'd tucked into neat quarters. The grain beaten and singed, faded white diagrams stood on gridded navy blue. "Take a look at this." She handed the carbon copy to Alyx, who studied the Borealis' infrastructure.
Aperture nurtured ambitious dreams for its flagship. They planned to employ a bevy of cutting-edge tech, starting with an oblique design previously unheard of the time of drafting. Most icebreakers of the day crushed floes under a standard double-hulled, rounded bow. By contrast, the Borealis boasted a wider bow and used her thrust propulsion to torque her body, carving out a broader angle of attack through the ice.
Gingerly, Alyx traced years' worth of dreams. One device stood out to her; the design echoed the cylindrical superconductor Breen had nested upon in the weather station.
"A bootstrap device," Judith said. "The last of its kind. It's what keeps the vessel weaving in and out of the folds of spacetime."
That explained quite a bit. "Barney thinks the shipgot caught in some kind of flux."
"If it is, it won't be for much longer. When Aperture launched the ship, they did so under the assumption that the bootstrap would maintain a state of self-sustaining flux after the first few hundred loops. But the vessel cannot remain that way forever," she said. "It decays over time. Each loop the ship takes destabilizes its set resonance a little more. We're not sure what may happen when it becomes completely destabilized."
Frost crept slow films in her blood. "So they launched the ship with no idea what it would do, or if it'd return. Why?"
"To raise money on a scandal," Mossman said, "or to avoid scandal. Both are likely. Aperture wasn't as stringent as Black Mesa; their facility struggled with finances for decades. Most of their experiments cut basic expenses wherever possible."
"I don't know," Alyx said. "That sounds pretty Black Mesa to me."
"You share your father's skepticism. He believed all of this was just an urban legend until I forwarded him the logs from the Citadel," Judith replied. "W… Breen hoped the discovery would restore his good standing with his superiors in the event his attempts to capture Gordon failed."
"This bootstrap. That's what they want."
"After this, I've become less certain," Judith said. "The fact that a week has passed is rather suspect, don't you think? The Nexus has never been particularly interested in our little neck of the woods. Other than to punish us for rebelling, I don't see why they'd want to get their hands on the vessel alone."
"Combine are stranded here," Alyx said. "Reason enough." Of course they'd want off the planet now that their little power trip was coming to an end. Probably freaking out that the mother ship had yet to bail them out.
"Yes," Mossman said, lost in thought. "Although I can't help but feel something else must be on that ship. Something Aperture didn't want the rest of the world to see."
The last thing she wanted to hear were conspiracies. Once upon a time, Black Mesa also squirreled away its critical research. No happy endings for that old fairy tale.
"Before the compound was raided, we received a faint mayday signal. As far-fetched as it seems, the Borealis' transient nature is such that I came to suspect the signal originated from the hands who'd vanished with the drydock." Judith added, "They may have wanted Aperture to activate the magnetic resonators necessary to anchor the ship to its original launch point. It's been fifty years, however. By now, the resonators are destroyed, or have since gone missing."
"Then what'd you switch on in—"
"A copy," she said. "Based on these blueprints."
"So, was Breen just… waiting for the ship to come close enough to anchor it?"
"It wouldn't surprise me, frankly. Any excuse to avoid doing the work himself."
"That it?" Alyx asked. "Borealis ticking down its clock. Anything else?"
Judith took back the blueprints. "It's possible," she began, "I misread the signal. If not mayday, someone aboard might have activated a… A self-destruct program."
Rain drenched the windshield.
"Dad wanted it destroyed." Fate ensured he'd receive his wish after all.
She gave a small nod. "Eli thought we should let well enough alone. Whoever activated the program did so out of desperation or malice, and we can't hinge our odds on the more favorable intent."
"No one who uses that kind of technology has a 'favorable' intent, Judith." The other woman winced. "Hell, for all we know, stupidity might have a hand in this, too. Remember what Dad said about the preliminary tests? Even if Breen didn't push the sample, AnMat would've wound up abusing the spectrometer sooner or later. You figure the machine can take just one more push, boom. Gives out completely."
"Perhaps, but human interference isn't nearly as destructive as the Combine's."
"Isn't it?"
"Listen to me," Mossman said in a stern tone that suggested she best drop past grievances. "Your father worried if the Combine captured the ship, they'd weaponize it against us. Turn it into a bomb of sorts. The damage such a thing would wreak is incalculable."
"What'd you tell him?"
She sighed, wringing the sheaf into a tight scroll. "I said the Combine are nothing if not utilitarian."
A fist thumped the glass, startling the two of them. The window rolled down, allowing sleet to explode on the open dashboard in thick droplets. Sure enough, there stood Barney, cheeks wind-whipped into a bright red flush.
"You're not gonna believe this," he breathed, sniffing hard. It sounded like he'd trekked some distance from the carrier while she and Mossman were talking. "Saw some weird kinda light half a klick east, turns out a pack of Vorts are bunkered down in there. They want us to join 'em. They said they'll help navigate."
Alyx craned her neck, barely distinguishing the pair of figures awaiting in the murk. "Vortigaunts?" In this weather? They must be lost. Partially cold-blooded, their species required at least tepid waters to regulate their core body temperature. No way one would be found living amidst a brutally cold and arid climate, much less a small clan of them.
"Yeah, Vorts. Remember them? Three arms, talk like Yoda?"
A dim flicker of hope, promptly quashed. "They our guys?"
"Not as far as I can tell. They aren't sayin' much." His eagerness melted into a dour mood. "You ain't gonna drive us there with one arm, are ya?"
"No, I planned on steering this thing with my feet."
"Look, we doing this or not? Freezing my ass off out here."
"Fine," she said. "Get in."
"About time," he muttered, stamping the snow from his boots before clambering in between them. "Sorry, Dr. Mossman. Not a whole lot of leg room in these bad boys."
APCs had no ignition except for a rectangular slit under the throttle. Alyx slid Barney's stolen access card inside, lighting up the gauge cluster.
Some instruments were more sophisticated than others. On the left-hand side you had your typical fare, speedometer, fuel gauge, tachometer. On the right, the nav. The carrier's primary means of navigation consisted of a palm-sized coordinate systems screen, which currently flashed 'DATA UNAVAILABLE' in Cyrillic. One downfall of sensitive equipment was that heavy precipitation scrambled the hell out of their sensors.
Slowly, Mossman leaned forward, peering into the swirl. "Strange, they don't look like normal Vortigaunts. Are you sure they're not stragglers?"
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe a Strider picked off the rest."
"Strider?" Mossman asked.
Alyx toggled a series of switches.
"Oh, sorry," Barney said, "let the cat outta the bag?"
"You encountered a Strider?" Yet again his quip rendered her question rhetorical.
"Well, it was less 'encountered' and more 'got our asses kicked.'"
Alyx grit her teeth. "Not now, Barney."
"And get this—our guys might be stuck on the ship 'cause they wandered into a fluctuation."
Mossman's stare bored holes in her temple. "You never told me this."
"Course not," Barney said. "Why would ya?"
Alyx wrenched herself from the dashboard. To hell with this, winging it now. Whoever bitched about it, tough.
She gripped the throttle and cranked it into drive. Two thousand horsepower kicked a powerful engine to life; floodlights threw long spears into an endless field of gray, bringing the Vorts' angular figures into stark relief.
Barney refused to sit back, dripping on the seat. She scrubbed a damp palm on her hip with a disgusted sigh. "God, sit down. You're soaking wet."
"Gee, wonder why?"
"You didn't have to stay outside."
Barney ground his jaw, fingers digging into the seat's leather casing. "I catch hypothermia, it's your freakin' fault."
"Lay off."
Caught in the awkward position of bystander, Mossman developed a keen interest in the sleet slapping the windows.
Alyx radiated such stubborn silence that it gave him no alternative but to concede a temporary defeat. "Whatever. Just follow 'em."
Fine by her. The less they stoked the flames, the better. There'd be plenty of time to air grievances later. Preferably somewhere with less risk of drowning in hail. Sure, it rained now, but give the temperature time to sink a few degrees and those pliant drops froze into stinging pellets.
Barney stewed. Half a minute later, he tried speaking to Mossman. "Good thing they showed up. Might be able to take a look at that shiner."
"It's not a bruise," she replied. "Though I suppose it would be more convenient for you to call it that."
"Does it—"
"Of course it hurts."
"Well, I just asked 'cause—"
"It looks like I'm crying? I'm not. Tears come from the lacrimal duct. What you're seeing is a direct draining of pus. It's positively repulsive, I cannot staunch it, and we have Breen to thank for crushing my ocular tissue like a grape." Rubber wipers scraped glass. "Any more questions?"
Barney tucked his hands under his arms. "No, ma'am."
"Very well."
His sigh drowned in the loud, droning purr of the APC's traction. His breath shivered through his clenched teeth, and his hiked shoulders trembled. When he wasn't looking, Alyx reached for the heater's slats and angled the vent in his direction.
The Vortigaunts guided them toward the flicker Barney spotted, a stray beam emitting a simmering glow in a low-hanging cavern. She parked the APC just outside the mouth, allowing the vehicle's traction to spit out crushed snow. Good timing, too. The sleet had died down while the skies darkened to an ominous shade of anthracite: signs that typically preceded hail.
After disembarking the carrier and gaining a better view of their Vortigaunt companions, she was quick to recognize Sokolai and Dushan, and even quicker to process the implications. "What are you two doing here? Something happen at White Forest?"
Equally quick to appease, Dushan entreated her with a raised claw. "Be calm."
"All is as it should be," Sokolai said.
She looked toward Barney, whose shrug dispelled her suspicions; the sleet must have prevented him from seeing them clearly.
Something wasn't adding up. The base hadn't many Vortigaunts on staff as it was, but the surgeon would rather crawl through glass than send her nurses to a dangerous liasion in the Arctic. Besides, didn't she need them to keep watch over Gordon? Had he…
No. They would have told her if that were the case. And all of this assuming they managed to get past Kleiner and Magnusson in the first place.
She wondered if Uriah were here.
The pair shepherded their human compatriots into the cave, guided by thickening ribbons of smoke. As they ventured into the smoldering nook, Judith retched a little; her hand flew over her mouth to dam the cough. It didn't take long for Alyx and Barney to follow suit.
Christ, this air was foul. An acrid, melting-rubber smell invaded their nostrils and drew tears from their eyes. How could the Vorts breathe in this? It was like they'd marinated the headcrab in battery acid before roasting it over the spit.
Barney pivoted to spit a mucous glob on the ground. "Je-sus," he drawled, muffled under his gloves, "stinks like death in here."
"Apologies," replied the Vortigaunt who tended the culprit with a ragged branch. "These lands are unsuited for good hunting. The only sustenance we found was this poison crab, frozen in a slab of ice. We endeavored to locate its nest, but the cold has slowed us down. We've since redirected our efforts to the preparation of this meager bounty."
Well, that explained it.
"Come," Dushan said. "You must sit." Far be it from them to decline. "We have removed the barbs and drained the glands of their toxic secretions. Rest assured, the meat shall inflict no harm except offending the palate."
"Hey," Barney said, "long as it ain't twitching, that's fine by me."
That said, Dushan snapped off a leg for each of them, a shank of meat they accepted with a measure of gratitude. It'd been days since any of them had anything resembling a meal.
Alyx raised the steaming shank to her lips, then hesitated, surveying her companions as Dushan divided the rest amongst the other Vortigaunts. She'd never eaten with both Barney and Judith present before. Usually one or the other would be missing from the mess hall, lost to work.
In another time, it would've been funny to watch the stark difference in their table manners. Barney sank his canines into the fattiest portion without shame or hesitation, not caring how grease sprang rivulets from the punctures and dribbled down his stubble-peppered chin.
Meanwhile, Judith studied her portion from various angles as though it were some mathematical problem in need of cautious approach. Distracted by his noises, she muttered a small sigh. At length she decided to pinch the shank by the talon and peel the tendons into individual strips.
Regular headcrab tasted spongy, bland, and oozed a little grease when boiled or fried: perfect for the chunky gravy-based stews Black Mesa East's chefs were fond of cooking. Most complained of the frequency with which the menu served its staple dish—again? Ugh. Looks the same coming back up as it does going down—but at the very least, it was something warm to hold you over.
"That eye," said Dushan.
"You are Mossman, correct?" Sokolai asked. "Ah, so you are. These ones are most pleased to make your acquaintance. The doctor speaks well of you."
"Maria?" Judith raised her head, curious, patting her mouth dry with a corner of her sleeve. "It's been quite some time. How is she?"
The pair responded simultaneously. Dushan dispensed the polite answer: Her expertise grows daily, while Sokolai offered the truth: She is plagued by a cavity. The latter almost brought her to laughter, drawing a rare smile.
"Yes, well. She always did have an insatiable sweet tooth."
Drawn by an odd sight, Alyx set her food aside to walk deeper into the cave.
One Vortigaunt sat apart from the group with his back turned to the fire, crouched on a rocky slab. His shadow stretched a long, ragged silhouette on the cavern wall. The sinewy muscles in his shoulders flexed repetitive movements.
The first thing she noticed was the stone lying beside his feet, which had been used to smash several electronic collars into scrap. Black plastic alloy crumbled, rendered useless shards embedded in the frost. A smatter of wires joined the shavings littering the floor; alkaline trickled a thin leak between them.
Sharp steel flicks filled the silence. Alyx cautiously approached as he continued to whet his talons with the edge of a pocket knife.
Those burns encircling the throat: she knew just one Vort in the world who bore them with pride.
In close enough proximity to break his meditations with a tap on the shoulder, she dallied, sucking in her blood-encrusted bottom lip. Slowly, she released a shivering peal of mist, let the abused flesh unfurl from her teeth.
"Luther?"
A swift flash sliced the air, barring her from another step.
Luther raised his head to accompany the knife he clutched. Vertebrae rippled the thick charcoal-colored bands winding ropes around his nape.
Crimson eyes met hers following a bit of struggle to place her; cataracts clouded them to a murky pink.
His snout wrinkled. "Alyx Vance," he rumbled in a deep, gravelly voice. "Hello, my sib."
The blade withdrew. As a sign of gratitude, she bent down and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. It was damn good to see a familiar face.
"God, how many years has it been?"
"In the choking grip of Combine scum, far too many." He obliged a curt, reciprocal squeeze, digging claws into the sleeve—taking care not to puncture the fabric—before rising to a stand.
"Not so fast," she said, coaxing him back down. "What are you really doing here?"
"Ask me nothing of how and where this body goes. I fear the reminiscence won't be worth your time."
"We've got enough. Let's chat." She joined him on his left, tucking her free hand under one knee.
When she was a toddler, she went missing in City 17. Luther reunited her with her father after breaking free of his miserable indenture and fleeing the Combine.
For understandable reasons, her father seldom spoke of that time. The Citadel had been a burgeoning skeleton of the monument it eventually became, the Resistance the seedling of an idea he nurtured after seeing the scars of Luther's servitude.
Back then, he'd had no name. In those days, most Vortigaunts didn't.
Luther underwent capture several more times—at least twice of his own accord—and passed hands between cities. Overwatch paraded him, bound and chained, as a cruel taunt aimed at the rest of his species, having executed his kin for far less. Over the years his hatred toward such callous despots grew, along with his disgust of the transhuman cogs whose thankless turnings sustained the machine.
As a slave, he counted among the last to witness Gordon kill the Nihilanth. The dying of the old guard for the Vortigaunts stranded on Earth.
Little by little, his generation disappeared as the Combine hunted them down. Few born after the Occupation shared his experiences, despite their speaking of the Nihilanth as though they'd served the Master themselves.
Communication, more precisely his lack thereof, erected another barrier to his reassimilation. The Nihilanth preferred its slaves mute. To receive orders, never contest them. His flux shifting was guttural and broken as a result, akin to a voice weakened by years of silence. This effectively aborted most conversations.
Regardless, younger Vortigaunts harbored a somber sort of admiration for the quiet warrior. As they claimed: his hardships rendered him scarred of skin, milky of eye and short of word.
Age and an austere demeanor belied his brutality. Posters around City 17 decried him a bogeyman to be killed for substantial reward.
Snipers eager to snatch the trophy considered him a challenge and a bane: the former because he presented what should have been an easy target. Bulky and muscular, he didn't resemble his lither counterparts. Many presumed the extra heft slowed him down, a misconception bolstered by the fact that he didn't blend into the crowd. The thick, mottled gnarled-oak epidermis of the Xenian-born lightened into a smoother amphibious gray membrane as subsequent generations gestated in warmer waters than the spawning pools of the borderworld.
The latter because he refused to die. Although he spat upon any Combine to cross his path, he deemed snipers recreants deserving of an especially hateful death. No matter how heavy the hell raining down, he scaled apartments plagued by laser nests and dismembered whoever suffered the misfortune of wielding the scope.
He once accosted a sharpshooter that pinned their group in an alley pinched between ramshackle tenements. Smoke and dust kicked up a thick swirl, a shimmering blue beam seeking flesh as it probed the crevices of pitted brownstone. Due to poor visibility and her preoccupation over the best way to avoid exposing their location, she was only able to catch glimpse of a dark figure darting across the street.
Luther climbed three stories up the fire escape, bullets spitting blazing curls of shrapnel around him, and lunged through the open window. A horrendous scream pierced their ears. Seconds later, a leg soared through the smoke and exploded on the curb in a pinkish spray.
She bunkered behind the dumpster with the others when he pushed it aside, coaxing her out as if she were three instead of seventeen: Be unafraid, Alyx Vance. I have cut its vortal threads.
Few cared to know the reason behind his violence except her father. After Luther delivered their haggard band to a relieved reception at Black Mesa East, Eli pulled her from the excited chatter. Don't cheer him on.
When she asked the natural question, why, he voiced suspicions that Luther lashed out from a place of pain. Snipers triggered his memories of the resonance cascade.
He volunteered no more information, so she softly steered him toward his original train of thought. Black ops, you mean?
He wiped a hand down his mouth. No. Trauma sustained in service of a cruel Master, which deployed slaves to fight and die on its behalf.
Eli's expression crumpled as he clutched the edge of a desk, unable to continue for a time. Then he released a shaky breath, squared his shoulders and addressed her in a stronger tone. Don't get too attached. He won't stay here for long.
True to form, Luther disappeared before dawn the next morning. Rumors circulated among the scouts that he boarded a razor train to City 14.
Years passed.
Nihilanth slaves counted among the most difficult demographic to recruit: without their controller, they lacked purpose and deemed life unworthy of further strife. Rather than submit to what they believed a lost cause, many committed suicide by striking reckless blows at the Combine. Luther exceeded their expectations with his talent for survival, choosing instead to forge his pain into a deadly cudgel.
Even so, Alyx shared her father's sadness each time she glanced upon the old Vortigaunt, beheld the scars digging deep brown ruts around his throat and wrists. His flesh bore burns from dozens of electronic braces.
No wonder he held his tongue. While his fellow Vortigaunts regarded his methods an antiquated vestige from a time they artlessly charged their enemies, human fighters applauded his vicious streak. They enjoyed no lack of Schadenfreude for the stray zombies he fed, and in their ignorance reaffirmed that his value to the Resistance measured solely as a weapon.
"This one regrets the loss of the Eli Vance. Yonder ones informed me of his passing." Luther angled his head toward Sokolai and Dushan. "His absence echoes throughout the Vortessence."
She forfeited answer. Words failed to capture the ache her father left behind, something she exiled from conscious thought around every corner; but she had grown so tired, so damn exhausted, over the past few days that to repress his specter seemed less tenable than to simply let him in, invite him to haunt whatever chamber of the heart he pleased.
Alyx wiped a limp strand from her brow. "He worried a lot about you, you know."
Luther gave a low, measured growl. It was about as close to contrition as you'd get.
Between scrapes of the blade, he raised his head, gazed upon her with an odd and piercing degree of lucidity. The clouds fogging his central iris dispersed as his pupils shrank. "Something troubles you, my sib."
Many are the threads that bind us, Luther once told Eli in what, she now realized, had been an earnest bid at comfort. Inextricable. If not again in this life, we will meet in the next.
He believed that wholeheartedly, not a drop of duplicity in his convictions. Eli struggled to maintain such steadfast faith, fearing his every goodbye the last.
Across the way, the others finished eating and dispersed to attend other matters. Sokolai and Dushan congregated around Judith, irradiating her damaged eye in green energy while Barney observed the process from a safe distance of two or three feet. They shared a brief glance, returned to their respective places.
"Nothing more than the usual," she said. Luther rose to his feet. "What are you doing?"
Luther touched her on the brow. One cool talon, sharp enough to unstitch the skin, skimmed circles in her forehead. Bewildered thoughts buzzed until they quieted.
The walls of the cavern smooth over, grow tall and clean-cut. Its occupants vanish. Her own body fades to a gray ether.
Where there was a fire now dwells a circular pool. Darkness besmirches its opalline waters. Drops of ink, spreading, staining, growing hungry tendrils over ripples of glistening white. Gentle undulations ebb until they cease.
We who observe, she says, cosmic radiation shimmering in her alveoli, have watched you drown in your madness. No more.
Alyx snatched a greedy gasp of cold air. Her heart skipped a beat, an electric jolt wracking her muscles causing her to blurt, "What the hell?" She collided with her body headfirst, the contrast between dreams and reality sending her into a tailspin.
She jerked her head up, missing the flicker of sky blue receding from Luther's cataracts, the nets of luminescent violet weaving over his skin returning to the scars of subjugated flesh.
Afterimage twinkled short-lived stars in the edges of her vision. It was like when Breen reached into her mind. How could a monstrous violation seem so familiar, so long ago? What did he do? "Did you just—"
She seized Luther's forearm, prepared to demand answers, when an intruder lurched through the cavern mouth, inked in fire and shadow.
It unsettled her, just how quickly her windpipe abandoned its next intake. Oxygen fled her lungs, leaving her heart to starve.
He panted. Not a dream conjured from stress, nor an apparition sent to test her faith in the bottom of a crevasse, but here. Painfully, inexplicably here.
He lumbered over the entrance, leaning against the wall for support. One gauntleted arm swung loose from a shoulder coated in torn mesh, pale skin peeking under the shine of moist netting. Dried blood caked his right cheek in black and russet streaks. A brighter crimson smear painted a torn earlobe.
Metal reverberated when the crowbar struck the floor, rattling ridged ice and glancing the weathered toes of his boots, bringing their noise to a standstill. Nothing dared disturb the deathly silence he brought save the wind shrieking outside and the gristle crackling within the flames.
"Ah, Freeman," Luther greeted him. "Your presence humbles. Join us."
