Miss Parker shoved her way through the doors to Lyle's office, flying ceramics or no.

"Lyle, what the hell happe — oh." Lyle was not there. The man idling behind the desk was instead… "Tuchen. Where's Lyle?"

Tuchen wheeled around to face her with a beatific smile.

"You just missed him. He said he was headed for Sub-Level 25. I assume to have a word with —"

"Jarod, yeah. Got it."

She turned to go.

"Miss Parker! Before you leave, if you have a moment?"

"I don't, no," she snapped.

"It's important."

She turned back. Tuchen's grating smile was gone, replaced by a taut, tense look creasing his brow. He kneaded the fingers of one hand with those of the other.

"What is it?"

Tuchen's gaze flickered upwards, to the camera above the office entrance.

"Not here," he said, and Miss Parker had to step closer to hear his half-mouthed words. "Could you meet me later?"

He grabbed a sticky note from Lyle's desk and wrote down a time and place. Miss Parker took it.

Parking Garage G, 7pm.

She considered him for a moment. Where had this new version of Tuchen come from? Why would he go to her, and not Lyle? Still, she'd never turn down an inside source of information. Even if it was a ploy, she could learn something from what he'd choose to pass along.

She gave him a curt nod and swept out of the room.


The Centre that morning was in an uproar. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone agonizing to their neighbour over the impact the mass death of every last one of the Triumvirate leadership would have on their personal financial outlook, or simply trading rumours.

"I heard it was an explosion."

"Why would they have every member of the Triumvirate in the same location? They should have built in some contingency plan for this."

"I heard they were gassed."

"Like how there's a designated survivor for Congress, you know? So even if everyone else dies, they're not all wiped out."

"I heard there was an earthquake at the hotel they were staying in."

Had the Triumvirate genuinely been wiped out? No, of course not, especially if your definition of 'the Triumvirate' was a broad one. Technically Lyle himself was Triumvirate, as was Dr. Cox, still skulking down on sub-level six turning roadkill into living room decor. Who was dead, then? Everyone who connected the Centre in Delaware to its outposts in Bangkok, in Kraków, in Montevideo, in Ulan Bator, etcetera. The Centre was abruptly adrift, completely independent outside of its bases in the United States and Canada. And even those were in question — the satellite offices in Dallas and Miami were already making a fuss.

Miss Parker felt her stomach crawl up into her chest cavity as the elevator plummeted twenty-five levels. Every stop they made let on a novel assortment of gossipers, steadily dwindling until she stepped off on SL-25, all alone.

The hallway was deserted save for Lyle, who was mashing the security code into the keypad alongside the door to Jarod's cell.

"Lyle!" she barked. "What the hell happened?"

Lyle looked up. His thumb slipped and hit the wrong key, making the keypad beep disagreeably and flash red.

"Shit," he said. He wheeled around to face her and plastered on a stick-on smile. "Hey, sis. How're things? How's CentSec working out?"

"Damn the pleasantries. What the hell happened?"

"A lot has 'the hell' happened. Which part are you referring to?" Lyle tried the door again. Miss Parker slid in quick, reached around Lyle and pressed the door back into its frame. Lyle sniffed testily. "Do you mind?"

"You can't conceive of how much I mind," she growled. "The Triumvirate, you dense muppet, what happened to them?"

Lyle looked her up and down, incredulous.

"Gotta say, I didn't think you'd be so ticked about this. Since when are you buddy-buddy with our late benefactors, Parker?"

"I don't give a shit about them. I care about you making power plays. First Raines mysteriously goes on sabbatical —"

"Vacation."

"Whatever," she spat. "Now this. I wouldn't have believed it of you even a month ago, you've always been squarely in the Triumvirate's pocket, but this — I believe this. You did this. What did you do?"

Lyle dropped all veneer of polite incomprehension, and a smile slowly spread over his face. He let go of the door to Jarod's cell and spread his arms magnanimously.

"Would you believe I actually got the idea from you?" he said. "During your little Wyoming retreat with Jarod, I had whole departments devoted purely to picking up every breadcrumb of your trail. You should be flattered, really. If I'd devoted that level of energy to recapturing Jarod, he would have been back with us years ago."

"I'll blush in my free time. Get to the point."

Lyle's eyes were manic. They'd been manic for days, but it had a different, more nerve-fraying effect in the gloom of an all-but-deserted sub-level.

"Your plane out of Wisconsin," he said, and with those words alone Miss Parker understood. She said nothing, however, but allowed him to monologue to his heart's content. "That Chabot woman is a piece of work, isn't she? More than a few bricks shy of a load. The papers love her, of course. We talked to her a little, but she was useless. All rehearsed story. That underling of hers who's going to jail, though, good guy. Honest. He told us about you two being on board. He also told us what Chabot's plan had been." Lyle laughed. "What a nut! She planned to crash a plane and sky-dive to safety just in time. Why do that? Why not take care of it remotely?"

Miss Parker had had enough.

"You crashed their plane."

"The French Canadian special, I'm calling it," Lyle confirmed. His mouth shrugged. "Well, not in mixed company. Tuchen assures me it's very funny, though."

"Why? Why do this? You're only undercutting the Centre's power. People are talking about scraps between the west coast satellite offices, and I heard something about Poland and Uruguay refusing to take calls from the head office? You've only made us less organized. What does this achieve?"

Lyle's smile dropped.

"I got tired of being a middle-man. The people here, they were following my orders, but there wasn't any true respect. They saw me as the substitute teacher, the megaphone for the wishes of the Zulus." He rushed forward and pinned Miss Parker against the opposite wall before she even noticed him move. His voice shifted to an eager whisper. "We don't need them. They don't — didn't — understand how we operate over here in the States. Everything productive I've ever brought to this place, I was able to bring only by going behind their backs."

He crowded her as he ranted, close enough that spittle flying from his mouth landed on her cheek. She cringed and wiped it away with the heel of her hand. She was suddenly very aware of being a slight-built woman in too-high heels. Lyle had been on the point of flying off the handle for days, and if she got in the way when he unwound all at once, she'd get hit. She slid her hands behind her along the wall until her hand closed on the trigger of a fire extinguisher, ducked out of Lyle's reach, and backed across the hallway, taking the extinguisher with her. She didn't point it at Lyle, only hugged it to her side and watched him warily.

This isn't the plan, the Jarod in the back of her mind insisted. She shoved the reminder to the side.

"Nobody respected you," she said, suddenly winded. "And now? Do you think that's respect, how they look at you now?"

Lyle looked at the extinguisher, then up at her face, nonplussed. He chuckled.

"What's that for? Wow, y'know," he said, cocking his head to the side in an exaggerated pantomime of searching one's memory. "It's been ages since I've seen you really, properly scared. C'mon, Parker. I'm not going to hurt you, I'm just." A deep, invigorated breath. "I'm excited for the future. That's all. Speaking of which, I'm here to talk to Jarod, so if you'll excuse me…"

He strode across the hall to the door to Jarod's cell. As he passed her, she reflexively raised the extinguisher, but he made no move for her. She lowered the nozzle, feeling foolish. Ignoring her, Lyle punched in the security code, successfully this time. She unfroze just in time to catch the door just short of closing, and shouldered her way in.

Jarod did not look surprised to see them. He was gripping the bars to his cell, pressed into the closest corner to the door. He'd clearly been doing his best to eavesdrop. He didn't look much worse than the last time she'd seen him, but then, he didn't look any better either. Still exhausted, still tensed against the cold, still grinding his teeth down to tombstones.

"Jarod, I — oh, Parker, I think you misunderstood," said Lyle. "This conversation is private, a matter between Jarod and myself. If you have more to discuss, we can address that upstairs. Give me an hour, ah… no, ninety minutes."

Miss Parker narrowed her eyes, gaze flicking between Jarod and her brother. She needed to speak to Jarod herself, she realized. With the Triumvirate dead, the state of the Centre could evolve far too quickly, far outside the realm of the expected in a matter of hours, days at most. Their plans had certain assumptions built in, assumptions which could be chucked out the window if the Centre were thrown into chaos. The next stage of the plan needed to get underway now. Jarod needed to know now. Yet here was Lyle, grand-standing for the Centre's most highly-treasured lab rat, leaving no hope of a private conversation between the two of them. She couldn't wait her turn in line, either. Lyle would find it odd if, when he finished up with Jarod, Miss Parker was still hanging around outside the cell door. She wouldn't find a better time to convey a message for hours.

"Why do you need to talk to Jarod?" she asked.

As she spoke, she splayed her hands out, palms facing inwards, playing the movement off as hand-talking. Her eyes flicked to Jarod. When she was sure he was looking, she quickly curled down the index, middle and ring fingers on both hands, so that her hands made two mirror-image Y-shapes.

'Today.'

A minute expression of surprise twitched across Jarod's brow.

"What, you're the only one allowed to plot with Jarod?" said Lyle. He seemed to pay no mind to her repurposed gestures. "Sharing is caring, Parker. Playground rules. I'll meet you upstairs in ninety."

Again, Miss Parker chanced a glance at Jarod. He jerked his head in an almost imperceptible nod.

"Ninety," Miss Parker said, and headed for the door. She had a lot of work to do.


Jarod's Pretends did not tend to be elaborately planned from the off. Planning to the letter did not leave room for improvisation, so his planning style was more likely to create something amorphous and sporadically populated with detail. This plan, the plan was different in two ways. One, it was Jarod's and Miss Parker's together. Two, it concerned the Centre, a decrepit behemoth known for being both grotesquely convoluted and highly systematized. All this amounted to a long, long flowchart of steps. Miss Parker's appointment to CentSec had allowed them to skip steps five through seven, which had been a convenient boon.

This was step thirteen.

"I don't understand," Broots said for the third time in as many minutes. "Jarod is finally back at the Centre. It's what you've been working for, what we've all been working for, for over five years. Why would you want to give him a window to escape? 'Cause that's what this will do, I know you realize that, Miss Parker."

"Of course I —" Miss Parker huffed out an exasperated breath. She double-checked the lock on the door to her office and closed the blinds on the windows. "Of course I realize that." She pressed her lips together. "Broots."

"Hm?"

She didn't really think he'd rat her out, not ever. The thrill of nerves coursing through her now had more to do with her growing paranoia, seeing pinhole cameras and listening bugs where there were none. She'd forgotten in the years since her previous appointment with CentSec the sheer number of surveillance devices planted throughout the building and its grounds. And those were just the officially registered devices. Who watches the watchman? Everyone else in the watchman's house.

"You remember when I told you I went with Jarod willingly when we stole that chopper in Philly," she said.

"… Yeah," said Broots carefully.

"Well, that wasn't the full story."

Broots looked at her expectantly, but she didn't answer right away. He frowned, an alien flicker of impatience darting across his face.

"You can tell me anything, Miss Parker. You know that by now. Just tell me."

She did know that.

"I went with Jarod willingly when we left Philadelphia. And when we came back to Blue Cove… Jarod also returned willingly."

Broots's eyebrows shot up, into where his hairline used to be when he was younger.

"What?" he said. "Why — why would he do that?"

Miss Parker sat down behind her desk with a weary shake of her head. Would Broots understand? More importantly, would he trust her enough to take a chance?

"He said he wanted to stop running," she said. She thought of the vanished employees. What if they'd tried to run, too? Jarod only stayed out of the Centre's grasp because he was a genius. Joe Average from Accounting wouldn't stand a chance. "And the only way to do that…" She trailed off. Broots leaned forward.

"Is…?" he prompted. "Other than the obvious."

"The Centre is never going to stop chasing Jarod," said Miss Parker. "It's never going to let me go, either. Not until it's gone and buried."

"So?"

She paused, wondering how to put it best to manufacture plausible deniability if the worst should happen, and their plans ran aground.

"So we hurry it along."

Miss Parker saw the moment Broots got it. His expression flattened, his jaw slackened.

"You're going to try to take down the Centre," said Broots in a hushed voice. "That's… that's crazy, Miss Parker, you know that, right?" He laughed nervously. "Why are you telling me this? If Mr Lyle finds out I knew anything about it, before the fact or after it, they'll find my bones under his summer cabin one day. And that's after a month or so in his torture closet. Why tell me?"

Miss Parker shook her mouse to clear the screen-saver on her desktop computer. The CentSec interface flickered to life.

"Why do you think?"

Broots's shoulders slumped.

"You want help."

"Got it in one," she said with a grin. She expected him to snap to attention and follow her order with nothing more than a pained look in the way of protest. For the first time in her memory of their acquaintance, he didn't. He stared straight ahead with a deadened expression, with the look of someone attending his own funeral. Miss Parker leaned across the desk and tilted his face in her direction. "Broots, do you like working here?"

"… No," he said, with clear reluctance. He picked at the skin of his bottom lip. "But, y'know. It's not the worst thing. It pays the bills. I don't have to look over my shoulder on my days off. Taking down the Centre… it's too big, Miss Parker. Even with both you and Jarod, it's too big. Yes, it's a little less of an intimidating prospect without the Triumvirate in power, but not much. It took Jarod thirty years to even get out of the building, what makes him think you and he could dismantle the organization before Lyle or Raines or somebody catches on and puts you both in front of a firing squad? Even if by some miracle you actually pull it off, I'm not sure I could ever really trust that the Centre is truly gone."

"All the more reason to get involved and make sure it's done right," she said.

"Do you even know what you're asking? What if it fails? It's not even just me you'd be putting in danger, Miss Parker, if that doesn't swing the needle for you." He was on his feet and pacing, his hands fisted in his pants pockets. "What about Debbie? What if this fails, and they go after my Debbie to get back at me? Best case scenario, what if they don't and she's left without a dad? Doesn't that matter to you?"

It did. Of course it did. But there had to come a point where you stop putting up with low-grade, steadily encroaching evil and push back.

"What's to say they wouldn't do that anyway?" she countered. "You're a good person working for bad people. At some point the people at the top are going to take issue with that. At some point it will be too much. Wouldn't you rather not wait around until that happens?"

Broots glared — really glared — at her. You'd really put me in this position?, the glare said. After a painful pause, however, he pulled up a stool and slid in next to her.

"What do you need done?" he muttered.

Miss Parker tapped him affectionately on the cheek. She hadn't convinced him, not really, but she'd take the appearance of conviction as long as it got done what she needed doing.

"Atta boy. I need to disable these —" She jabbed the screen in two places. "— And the cameras for sub-level twenty-five. I could do that myself, but I need it to look like… an electrical fault, or something. Can you do that?"

Broots gave her a skeptical look, then took a small device out of his pocket, reached around the back of the tower, and plugged it in.

"I'm sure you know what you're doing, Miss Parker, but I can't see why Jarod would volunteer to get captured by the Centre only to escape again," he said, while opening up a host of unfamiliar applications. "Wouldn't it be easier to break in himself, if he needed to be on the premises? Um, not that breaking in here is easy. No disrespect meant to the security department."

Miss Parker snorted. "None taken. Don't worry about it, buddy. Just disable those until four AM."

"Do you want me to disable the same security functions for floors twenty-one to twenty-seven?"

"No?" She tried to remember Jarod's instructions off the top of her head. Why would they have to disable other floors, too? "No. Twenty-five, that's all he needs."

Broots got to work on the problem. Twenty minutes later, he looked up at Miss Parker.

"Done."

"That's it?"

"Yeah. What now?"

"Nothing," said Miss Parker, feeling curiously deflated. She'd assumed it would be more difficult to unleash Jarod into the inner workings of the Centre. "We do our jobs. The closer we follow our daily routines, the less suspicious we look. Go do something mundane."

Just like that, Broots went off to do something mundane and hopelessly technical on SL-5. For her part, Miss Parker finished reviewing security vulnerabilities until her ass was numb from sitting in one spot. She forwarded a technical issue with the phone routing system to the information technology department. She escorted a belligerent accountant from the premises herself, just to get some fresh air and exercise. She tried not to think about Jarod. She drank over-brewed coffee. She listened to Harvey talk about his daughter, who was trying out for her school's first all-girls rugby team. She tried not to think about Jarod. She sharpened a pencil, snapped the lead while writing out a memo, then sharpened the pencil again. She bitched about the over-brewed coffee. She delegated, and delegated some more. She tried not to think about Jarod.

Picture-perfect mundanity.


At 6:55pm, with five minutes left before her meeting with Tuchen, she excused herself from a conference call with the respective heads of communications and purchasing to make her way over to Parking Garage G. Privately, she was glad for the excuse. The call had already gone on a half-hour too long.

"Miss Parker!" Harvey ducked his head out of his new, much smaller office. "You're still on-site, I woulda thought you'd already gone home for dinner. How are things, how's the transition?"

"Fine," she said. She paused; she couldn't resist. "The closet still smells like broccoli, though. Can't figure out how to purge the smell. Do you just eat a lot of broccoli, or what?"

Harvey laughed.

"You know, I do, actually. Never had that feedback before. Thanks?"

Her eye caught the clock on the wall. 6:57pm.

"I gotta run, Harv, see you tomorrow."

"With bells on!"

Miss Parker arrived at Parking Garage G two minutes late. Tuchen was nowhere in sight. The parking garage was damp and musty and perfectly still. There were a few cars still parked there, likely all night shift workers. She strained her ears for the tell-tale squeak of Tuchen's wheelchair. Silence.

She waited five minutes.

No Tuchen.

Ten more minutes.

No Tuchen.

A half hour.

No Tuchen.

"Like I don't have anything better to do," she muttered. "I swear, Tuchen, you don't show in the next sixty seconds, I'm leaving."

She waited a further hour before she gave up and left.


When Miss Parker pulled her car into her driveway that evening, she might almost have fooled herself into thinking everything was normal. More than normal, since she didn't have to devote a corner of her brain to puzzling out where Jarod might be setting the stage for his next Pretend.

She threw together dinner for one. She ignored her blinking answering machine. She fed Jo the rabbit, who had been extremely annoyed when her pet sitter Sydney did not show up. She washed her face, brushed her teeth. She read a chapter of the thriller she'd been reading. She went to bed. She tried not to think about Jarod.

She dreamed that she couldn't sleep, which was almost as bad as not sleeping at all.


Sydney finished buttoning the front of his pyjamas and looked down at himself with a sigh. Sweepers had been through his place hours before he was escorted down to SL-23, with orders to put together a bag for him, keeping an ostensibly indefinite stay in mind. He wished they'd included a better set of pyjamas. These ones were too short in the ankles, and made him feel like a teenager going through a growth spurt.

He leaned forward over the sink and examined his jaw. Raines had hit him back-handed at the tail end of their latest sit-down, frustrated with flashcard after flashcard of simple verbs and adjectives. It was frustrating, not being able to express oneself, Sydney could understand that. That understanding didn't make it any easier to take a punch.

A murmur of voices outside the door made Sydney pause. He'd thought he was the last staff member on SL-23 still awake. Then, an unmistakable sound: the elevator doors opening. He stumbled out of the washroom into the hallway.

Sure enough, Lyle was back. He paid no mind to the late hour, not troubling to keep his voice down at all as he carried on a conversation on his cell phone.

"He's in a wheelchair, how far could the little bastard have gone? … Yeah. Oh, I'm positive. Expect my call in twenty minutes, you'd better have a better answer for me by then. I need him in the ground by sun-up."

He snapped his phone closed with a grimace of frustration.

"Lyle?" said Sydney, incredulous. He couldn't imagine why Lyle would be down here in the middle of the night. "To what do we owe this honour? You haven't been down to visit us on sub-level twenty-three in days."

Lyle smiled, though it seemed to involve non-trivial effort to pull off.

"Why, you, Syd. I'm here to see you. I've been just plain rude, sticking you down here with no real explanation."

"Explanation?" Sydney echoed. His gut tilted under the weight of his unease. He didn't want an explanation. Explanations could only precipitate new Centre-branded horrors, and he could do without all that, thank you. "I'm here to assist with Raines's recovery, that's what I was told."

"Sure, of course. You had to have noticed, though, that you're possibly the least qualified person here," said Lyle. He jerked his head down the hall. "Walk with me, Syd? Nice PJs, by the way."

Sydney hesitated, but ultimately caught up with Lyle, bare feet on laminate.

"Least qualified? A vainer man might take issue with that assessment."

Lyle snorted. "You're a research psychiatrist, Syd, not a rehabilitative clinician. You stick out like a sore thumb down here. You do, however, have the same utility you've always had — you're one of Jarod's strongest connections to the Centre."

For once, Sydney was completely lost.

"What does that have to do with SL-23?"

"Nothing!" Lyle said brightly. "Not a damn thing. It has, however, become extremely relevant with the return of our favourite Pretender to the Centre."

It took a second pass for Sydney to parse what Lyle was saying.

"You caught Jarod," said Sydney. The implications cascaded down on his head like an avalanche. "You caught Jarod? … Is he all right?"

"He's fine. Not cooperating, but fine." Lyle stopped walking and turned to face Sydney. "Which is where you come in, Syd."

Sydney was quiet for a beat. It was nothing he hadn't expected, in a way. He'd expected from day one on SL-23 that Lyle was keeping him on ice, and his relevance to Jarod had always been the most salient item on his resume for the Centre administration.

"You want me to persuade him to comply," he said. He stared down at his feet and smiled wryly. "What happened, Lyle? Are your jumper cables on the fritz?"

Lyle ignored the crack.

"I want you to persuade him to comply," he said. "Failing that, you'll be his persuasion to comply."

"What does that —"

Lyle's phone rang, shrill and loud in the quiet hallways of sub-level twenty-three. Lyle pulled his phone from his pocket and flicked it open.

"Stokes, if you're not calling to tell me you caught Tu— oh, Townsend, my mistake. I'm in a meeting right now, you can call me back in the morning." He made to hang up, but something Townsend said stopped him. "What? How the hell — when? Are you sure?"

Sydney wished he could hear the other end of the conversation. He shifted closer, but Lyle caught the movement and cast him a venomous glare, potent enough to convince Sydney to keep his distance. He ducked into the closest doorway, which led to the staff room. He'd abandoned a mug of black tea on the counter hours before. It was bone cold now. He put the mug in the microwave and queued up thirty seconds on the timer.

Thirty seconds later, Lyle was still conferring with security — Sydney hadn't managed to glean much, but he had put together that the man on the other end was on CentSec, night shift.

"Call together your guys, I'll meet you in my office immediately. Yes. … No, leave it for now, it'll keep." Lyle hung up.

The microwave beeped and Sydney removed a piping hot mug of reheated decaf tea. He blew on it and took a tentative sip.

"Leaving us so soon, Mr Lyle?" he asked. "That sounded important. What's going on up top, what's happened?"

Lyle looked up, and Sydney swallowed a too-hot gulp of tea in shock. Lyle was angry. Blisteringly, terrifyingly angry. He opened his mouth, looking like he would very much like to tell Sydney where to stuff his questions, and stopped.

"You want to know what happened, Syd?"

No longer certain he did, Sydney nodded.

Lyle told him.

Sydney let the mug fall from his hands. It hit the floor tiles and shattered, sending a cascade of hot tea over Sydney's bare ankles.

No.


The next morning at the Centre, Miss Parker arrived in the main lobby to discover that the employee population was just as abuzz with gossip as it had been the day before. Granted, she supposed, the death of the Triumvirate was more than a day's worth of news, and the staff had not yet received any company-wide emails about what operations would look like as a newly independent organization. It would take some time to acclimate to the idea of not being beholden to a shadowy South African group, and to instead be beholden to their own shadowy selves.

Maybe she was imagining it, but it seemed as if she caught more than the usual number of oblique glances on the way to the elevators.

"Parker!" Lyle called from across the main hall, once she stepped onto the elevator. "Parker, hang on!"

He half-jogged towards her, waylaid by the odd misplaced shoulder as he weaved through the crowds. Miss Parker theatrically mimed grabbing for the 'open doors' button, then let the doors close in his face.

"He can take the next one," she said to her fellow elevator passengers. The woman next to her gave her a nervous smile, opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Down on SL-9, Willie and Harvey were chatting outside the door to Miss Parker's office. They fell silent as she approached; Harvey wore an odd expression, like he was searching for something in her face.

"Gentlemen," she said curtly and pushed her way into the office.

"Miss Parker," Harvey returned.

After a beat, they both followed her in and stood in front of the desk, looking expectant. She glanced between them. Willie sported a baffled grin, teeth flashing between bites of an apple.

"I don't remember calling a meeting," she said.

"You must be having a weird morning, huh?" said Willie. "I know I'm feeling a little… disappointed, I guess? And I'm not you. All of that, right? All of that work and it comes to nothing."

"I wouldn't blame you if you had some mixed feelings," said Harvey slowly, like he was pulling some long-forgotten, rudimentary training in counselling out of his ass. "I mean, I think in your place, I would feel… conflicted. Are you OK to work today?"

"Of course I'm OK to work. I've been back for days," said Miss Parker, impatient. Where was her morning briefing? It was supposed to be on her desk first thing. She shuffled around in her right-hand drawers, looking for her favourite pen.

Willie appeared to take her at her word and turned back to Harvey.

"You heard that Mr Lyle escalated the protocol a week or so ago," he said. "So they must have a back-up plan. They can always train up more of them, worst comes to worst."

Harvey hadn't given up, though.

"Are you sure you're all right, Miss Parker? I don't want to bring down a one-man Spanish Inquisition on you, you understand, I just. Well, I heard from someone that you and Jarod knew each other as kids."

Miss Parker gave up looking for her pen, and glanced up at Harvey.

"What?" Harvey's worried words caught up with her. People knew about her and Jarod hanging out as kids? More to the point, how was that relevant? A prickle of unease reached the nape of her neck. "Yes, sure, I knew little baby Jarod. There weren't a lot of kids around the Centre at the time, I didn't have a lot of choices. It was a long time ago. What's this got to do with the price of secrets in China?"

"I only thought, given the —" Harvey cut himself off mid-sentence, and a spark of realization transformed his face. A quick intake of breath. "Nobody told you."

A creeping dread oozed over the plane of Miss Parker's consciousness. Like a broom trying to sweep away an encroaching flood, she refused over and over again to listen to the feeling, to admit something was wrong. Something went wrong, something went horribly — No, It Didn't. Everything's Fine. Don't Think About It, Don't Give It Words.

"Told me what?" she said. She was directing a scene from a distance, watching herself act it out. Something went horribly wrong. Everything was more, suddenly — the lights too bright, the air conditioning too cold, the air freshener too cloying. Willie bit into his apple again with a deafening crunch. How could one apple be so loud?

"Ah. Man, I really thought someone would let you know before your morning started," said Harvey, looking everywhere but at her. "I really didn't think we'd — I'd — be the one to tell you this. Well, nothing helping it now. So. The way I heard it, last night there was some sort of —"

Willie cut him off.

"Jarod's dead."

.

. .

. . .

Miss Parker… stopped.

No.

That wasn't right. She'd heard something wrong.

"What?" she said.

"Oh, very nice, Willie," scolded Harvey. He grabbed Willie's apple from out of his hands and chucked it into Miss Parker's designated wastepaper basket. Willie made a noise of outrage.

"What? You were trying to rip off the band-aid slow, that doesn't work. Faster's better."

Harvey turned back to Miss Parker.

"Not the way I would have said it, but yeah." He heaved a deep breath through his nose. "We heard from the night shift guys. Apparently he tried to escape again. Not unexpected, 'flight risk' and everything. And what, what did you hear about it, Will? I heard people saying it was suffocation? I can't say I understand that, but it's what they're saying."

"Mr Big Brain fell down a shaft somewhere behind the walls. I heard his leg was broken when they found him, but suffocation is what killed him, yeah. Something about fumes, I figure maybe carbon monoxide? Hell of a way to go, after all that. He must not have read up on the spring renovations we had done down in the sub-levels. The vents can't hold a grown man's weight anymore. Hey, maybe that's why Angelo left."

A growing static obscured his words, roaring louder and louder in Miss Parker's ears. Her every nerve tingled, like her skin was somehow more exposed to the air than normal.

"He's d —"

She stopped. That word wasn't going to come out without tearing something. There was something pushing up her throat, past her airway and the root of her tongue, choking her by inversion.

She tried again.

"I need to see to something, excuse me."

She made for the door, the only escape she could conceive of. She needed to get away, but where? Out in the hallway, Broots stepped out of nowhere directly into her path, his presence incongruous and cruel when all she needed was to be alone, now. She reeled back as if dodging a jet of steam.

"Miss Parker! I was thinking about yesterday, about what you and — about the plan you two have. I've been thinking, I think I'd feel a lot better if I talked to, ah." Broots looked around for eavesdroppers. "If I talked to Jarod. Where is he? Could I talk to him?"

"No," she croaked. Broots shrank back in evident confusion.

"… No? Why not? I just think I would —"

"He's gone. He's dead."

That was her limit, four words. Her feet carried her away, double-time, past a thunderstruck Broots and down the hallway, into the ladies' room, into the farthest stall from the door. Onto her knees, against the porcelain.

She vomited her breakfast into the toilet. Up came granola, yoghurt, coffee and banana. A bit of granola got stuck on the way up and she started to cough, to hack, to heave.

Dead. That couldn't be right. She summoned up an image of Jarod in her mind, as she'd last seen him. Tired and cold, leaning up against the bars for scraps of information. Dead, now. Her mind pushed back against the idea. No. She summoned another image, this time of Jarod restraining a laugh over breakfast with Margaret. Dead.

It set off an avalanche. Jarod, grinning at her from his parachute, miles above the Idaho-Oregon border. Dead. Jarod, too shocked to respond when she'd kissed him on the roof of the hospital. Dead. Jarod, wrapping a blanket around her on the Isle of Carthis. Dead. Jarod, cursing her out over the shoulder of the sweeper manhandling him towards a waiting car. Dead. Jarod, catching her eye across a crowded room before darting away. Jarod, slipping through her fingers once, twice, dozens of times. Jarod, asking her what her first name was, down in the sub-levels when they were too young to be turned against each other. Dead. Dead. Dead.

She made an inhuman, wordless sound like she'd been socked in the stomach.

"Are you OK?" said a tentative, unfamiliar voice through the stall door.

"Get out!" she roared. There was a brief, panicked shuffling sound on the other side of the stall door, then the creak of the door to the hallway. She was alone again.

She was alone again.

"God damn it!" she screamed, the words ripping out of her through clenched teeth. To muffle the sound, she bit down hard on her bottom lip, hard enough to draw blood. She hit the wall open-handed, sending pain buzzing through her joints all the way up to her shoulder.

She had only just begun to figure out how… possibly, impossibly, the two of them could build something wonderful out of the elastic, electric tether between them. The tether which kept them leaping at each other's throats, rebounding, pulling away, knowing each other, one-upping each other, hating the knowledge that nobody would ever understand them the way the other did, lov—

A nascent sob surged in her throat, fighting for volume, fighting to be unleashed, but she couldn't. She couldn't yell, couldn't scream, couldn't channel all that energy into sound.

Nobody would understand why Miss Parker would shed any tears over the runaway Pretender she'd been chasing for over five years.

The stupidity of the thing, that he'd died because he couldn't find his way through the walls without tripping over his own damn feet and falling down a shaft. A masochistic image flashed through her mind, of Jarod with his leg bent under him at an unnatural angle, choking on the air itself and trying to claw himself out. The image was pure invention, tossed up by her own brain to hurt her. It was the same as the slide-show of faces from earlier, and the same as when she was a child and she'd poke bruises to check how much they hurt.

She spent a long while at the sinks, dabbing at every smudge of make-up that was out of place, holding a tissue to her lip until it stopped bleeding, rinsing a speck of vomit from her collar, coaching herself through her hiccups and audible breathing down to something slow and even and calm.

She stepped out the door, into the hallway.

Now what?


"Yeah, she was pretty wound up about it, huh? Hell if I know why," said Willie into his radio.

Willie — formerly Willie-the-sweeper, now Willie-from-CentSec — was checking the newly-installed motion sensors on sub-level twenty-seven. Raines had ordered them installed not long before his disappearance, citing the installation locations as potential entry points for Jarod. The thinking ran: what if Jarod decided to poke around some older projects that hadn't been reduced to cinders in the explosion a couple years ago? Not that they needed motion sensors for Jarod anymore. Still, Harvey had asked that Willie check to see why the sensors on SL-27 had stopped working.

A tinny voice piped up from the radio.

"It's not the weirdest thing, I guess, when she'd been chasing after him that long. You think those two ever…?"

"Maybe," said Willie pensively. "Hell, probably. Tell me why I should give two shits, that's what I wanna know, Harvey. Hey, Ulrich —"

"Yeah?"

"Were you one of the guys who found him?"

"No. Were you?"

Willie snorted. "Now why would I ask you if you found him, if I had? Think it through."

"Everyone says it was the night shift guys, but I haven't run into anyone who was there. It's messed up, though, isn't it? He died in the walls. Like a rat. You think if they hadn't known to look, they would have found him later when he started to stink up the place?"

"Gross, man. Would you tell me where I'm supposed to be looking for these dud sensors, Harvey? I can't see shit down here."

"The first one is above pillar 81. See it?"

"Oh, hm. Yeah. It's on, though, I can't see — oh. Ha."

"What?"

"It's not connected to the grid properly, that's why we're not getting the data up on SL-9. Hang on."

He sorted through the tangled wires, disconnecting some, reconnecting others.

"That did it, Will, that's great. We're receiving. Come on back up, I've started the incident report and you can fill in the details when you get here."

"Can't happen soon enough, I hate it down here." With this parting shot, Willie headed back towards the access tunnel. The light from his headlamp bobbed away, until all that could be seen in the hallways of SL-27 was yard upon yard of perfect, inky blackness.

. . .

. .

.

A match flared in the dark.

A shivering hand held the match up to a sensor in the ceiling, a sensor of a different sort. Nothing happened. The man's lip twitched in a small smile of satisfaction. His arm reached around to the scavenged backpack hanging from his shoulder and pulled out the flashlight, pencil stub and notebook stowed within. He bit down on the end of the flashlight to hold the beam steady and added a note to the bottom of the list. Many of the items were checked off along the left-hand margin.

The list read:

Exit sensors disabled 0345h D4

Evac 0400h D6? Wait on MP disabling CentSec measures for SL24-7 to confirm

Maintenance check on sensors turn-around time = 68 hrs

Sydney off-site?

SL-26 clear

CParker files 004 / misc 019

SL-27 clear

CParker files 000 / misc 043

Verify L report on escape — N/A, L is reporting I've died.

Why? save face

CO&S detectors disabled 2135h D4 — use this instead of St34-41?

He read the list back to himself under his breath, then tucked it into the front pocket of the backpack once more, exchanging it for a fresh box of matches.