Now what?

Miss Parker leaned against the wall outside the ladies' room, paying no mind to the employees casting her curious looks as they filed past.

She'd have to tell Margaret.

She'd have to tell Emily, who would likely do her best to murder her out of misdirected (or not-so-misdirected) revenge.

She'd have to tell Sydney, as long as he wasn't already dead himself, beating Jarod to the grave.

She'd have to tell…

No, Broots already knew.

Well, that was one item off her to-do list.

Not giving much thought to where her feet took her, she left SL-9 and found her way to Sydney's old lab. The place was deserted. There was unfamiliar equipment set up in the middle of the sim lab, suggesting plans for Jarod's first on-site simulation since '96. She had no reason to come here. Sydney was missing, and Broots was working on SL-5. Still, the route to the sim lab was a practiced path, and it felt natural to come here.

Apparently she wasn't the only one who thought so, because she hadn't spent twenty minutes sitting on the steps down to the staging area before she felt the presence of someone trying very hard to be quiet yet conspicuous. She twisted around.

Broots stood in the doorway. His arms hung limply at his sides and his face drooped, all of him reaching for the earth.

"Hey, Broots," she said. She didn't bother to conceal the croak and the weariness in her voice.

"Miss Parker —"

He sounded like he wanted to say something, but nothing else followed. He stared at the floor, brow knitted in puzzlement.

"Great minds think alike, huh?" she said weakly. "Class reunion in the sim lab."

"I can't believe he's dead." He swallowed around a lump, a huge one. One hell of a lump. "I know I've been a little… weird about Jarod since you got back. I didn't know what to think about the whole…" He cleared his throat. "It doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't," she agreed, and turned back to the staging area.

"I knew he shouldn't be here. I knew it was wrong, keeping him here. I knew… it doesn't matter what I knew. He's d — he's dead." He let out a long, shaky breath. "I'm not looking forward to telling Sydney."

"No," she said, on automatic. Everything had drained from her veins, her lungs, her gut. "Me neither. Broots, I —"

She ran out of words. The sheer effort of keeping composure had left her bone-tired.

"What?" he asked.

She felt him sit down next to her on the steps. She didn't look at him.

"Nothing."

"I know," he said.

Irrational anger surged. He couldn't possibly understand.

"What exactly is it you think you know?"

Broots audibly waffled. She didn't bother to look round. If he was going to get around to the point, he would. If he wasn't, he wouldn't. It made no difference to her.

He delivered the news as gently as he could:

"You loved him."

She looked over, startled. A new, wistful sadness had crept into the lines of Broots's face. Recovering quickly, she snorted.

"If I was, it's news to me. Jarod was my job."

Broots nodded slowly.

"Sure, yeah. And." He knocked his shoulder against hers. The comment finished itself, unspoken. And you loved him. "On a bad day, I might have wished it weren't true. But you did. Do. It's one of a half-dozen reasons I never made my little infatuation your problem."

Too late, Miss Parker remembered that Broots had long harboured a doomed, ostensibly secret crush on her. Well. She couldn't be bothered with that now, and she didn't bother to respond. All she could see in front of her was the fabricated tableau of Jarod's body crammed in a pipe, choking on flue gas.

You're… you're a girl! She'd been the first girl his age he'd ever met.

She felt something brush against her back, and tensed. It was Broots' arm; he was pulling her into a hug. She let him, not moving her arms to reciprocate but burying her face in his shoulder. It might have been a comfort to cry. Instead, her body shook, a full-body shiver that had nothing to do with the over-eager air conditioning.

Behind them, someone cleared their throat. Miss Parker jerked up and reached out for Broots's shoulder, clamping down until the shaking settled. She rearranged her face into something more composed before looking over at the interruption.

It was Lyle.

"Sorry to interrupt," he said. "I tried to catch up with you at your office but you were, uh." He nodded pointedly at her crumpled face. The beginnings of rage coiled behind her breastbone. "You were in the ladies' room. You scared some poor girl in there, by the way. She ran out of there like she was being chased."

"What do you want, Lyle?" She hated that he'd be able to hear the grief in her voice. She hated that she had to hide it at all.

Lyle came down the steps into the staging area, a nauseating spring in his step.

"I was going to break the news to you about Jarod," he said. "But it looks like someone has done that for me. Gotta say, Parker, your reaction is… interesting, to say the least."

Miss Parker bit her proverbial tongue. It wouldn't help to deny her reaction, nor to explain it. No excuse would appease Lyle. She stared him down, instead.

"Like you said, someone did your job for you," she said. It took every last shred of energy she had to keep her voice from shaking. "So you can leave. This is a private conver —"

The word 'private' kicked a neuron in her memory. This conversation is private, a matter between Jarod and myself, Lyle had said.

Lyle had been talking with Jarod hours before his attempted escape.

"Something wrong?" Lyle asked.

"You were talking to him that day."

"Him…?"

"Jarod, don't be obtuse. What were you talking about?" she demanded. Her fingers twitched, aching to seize Lyle by the throat and dig in. It wouldn't help, but it would feel so cathartic. "Did you do this? If you did this —"

"I didn't do anything," said Lyle, exasperated. "I went down there to talk to him about the future of his simulations. When I left him, he was as healthy as a horse. Healthier, even. It's not on me if he didn't know the architecture of the Centre as well as he thought he did." With his hand, he mimed something falling from a great height, complete with a cartoon-ish descending slide whistle and the sound of an explosion. "Hell of a way to go. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy."

A beat.

Miss Parker threw herself at her brother. She had no clear plan of attack, only to inflict as much hurt as she could in the time given to her. It was possible, even likely, that Lyle put up some kind of fight, shouting at her, hollering for help. She took no notice. She pummelled him doggedly with every scrap of intent within her, bruising every inch of him she could reach. Her fingers sought eye sockets, her fists sought kidneys, her foot sought shin bones. Her attack was silent, brutal and thorough.

Sweepers pulled her off him. She hadn't even noticed them arrive. It took three of them to separate her from Lyle: two on her arms, one restraining from the back. Two more helped Lyle off the floor and dusted him off.

She made another lunge in Lyle's direction — how dare they stop her? She needed this. This time, Broots slid between her and her target, hands splayed.

"Miss Parker, don't! He'll —"

"Why the hell not?" she snarled.

Lyle took advantage of Broots's distraction to regain his composure. He got to his feet, holding his side where she'd gotten in a particularly well-placed punch to the kidneys.

"Jarod had a similarly extreme reaction yesterday when I suggested your continuing role in persuading him to participate in simulations," he said, and tutted. "If I knew there was such potential in your shared history, such… depth of feeling, I would have done something with it sooner. A lot of grief could have been avoided. I am surprised, however, to see you valuing the runaway lab rat over your own family."

He had the nerve to look betrayed.

"You did something," she said. "You did. I know you did, and now he's d —" All the air rushed out of her lungs. She still couldn't say it.

"Not that I owe you an explanation," said Lyle testily. "But no, if it will put your mind at ease — no, I didn't kill Jarod. Check your security tapes, you'll see I went to visit him around five AM this morning. He was gone. Your night shift subordinates brought me up to speed later."

"Sir," said a nameless, faceless sweeper at Lyle's elbow. "You said you wanted to attend the aut —" The man cleared his throat. "Ah, the procedure on sub-level eighteen. If we hurry we should be able to make it for initial impressions, or I could radio down for them to wait."

Sub-level eighteen. A rational thought wormed its way into Miss Parker's consciousness. The refurbished morgue was on sub-level eighteen. Jarod's body would have been taken there for autopsy. The thought of Lyle attending Jarod's autopsy was like a real, tangible pain. And after the autopsy — what next? Jarod was an asset to the Centre in any form, dead or alive. What kind of postmortem experimentation did the Centre have planned?

When she came back to herself, Lyle was half-way to the doors. The sweepers had seized the opportunity to usher him away. In different circumstances, she might have laughed at the look of fear on their faces.

"Lyle!" she shouted.

He hesitated, apparently considering whether or not to acknowledge her. Ultimately, curiosity won out and he turned to face her.

She crumpled.

"You really didn't kill him?"

"I really didn't," he said, dryly.

She had no bargaining chips, but she had to try.

"Lyle —" She broke off, hearing the edge of a sob trying to barge its way in. Lyle frowned, curious. She tried again. "Lyle, leave his body alone."

Lyle raised an eyebrow.

"And why would I do that?" he said. He didn't bother to deny his plans for the body, she noted. "We have Einstein's brain road-tripping across North America, showing us the anatomy of an extraordinary brain. We have the brains of Broca's patients to illustrate what can go wrong with the brain. Jarod's would be an extraordinary addition, ask Syd, he'd tell you. You'd get in the way of scientific progress for the sake of your nostalgia over a childhood pal?"

At Lyle's shoulder, one of the sweepers winced at the mention of Sydney. Miss Parker filed the observation away for later, but she wouldn't be distracted.

"Please," she said. "He's given enough. Leave him alone."

She didn't really think he'd agree. She didn't have anything to bargain, and she'd just beaten the snot out of him to boot. Even if he weren't an evil bastard, he'd have every reason to refuse, and carry out every invasive, grisly procedure known to modern science just to spite her.

Lyle stared at her. She held the stare, refusing to be the one to back down first. After a long moment, he broke their little staring contest and smiled down at his shoes.

"You got it, Parker," he said. "If it'll keep you happy."

Miss Parker blinked. What?

"You'll leave him alone?"

Lyle rolled his eyes. "I said I would, didn't I? Don't say I never did anything for you."

"Oh," she said, stunned. Why was he agreeing? She pulled reluctant words up from somewhere in her gut. "… Thank you."

"Don't mention it. He'll be cremated as soon as I get around to having it ordered. Will you, uh." He gestured around inarticulately. "Do you want some sort of service for him?"

"No," she said automatically. She paused to consider. Who would even attend? Her and Broots? Sydney, if he could be found? Anybody else's presence would be an insult, like an inmate's funeral being attended solely by correctional officers and cops. Hell, hers and Broots's presence might already have been pushing it. And they were hardly going to invite his family to Blue Cove. "No, that won't be necessary."

"Good. Makes it easier. Can I go, or do you need to get a couple more punches out of your system?" His sarcasm was tempered by an odd edge of… sympathy?

Miss Parker shook her head and wordlessly waved him out.


"Leave it for now, it'll keep."

Today, Sydney was a physiotherapy assistant. Lyle hadn't been wrong last night: Sydney lacked experience in rehabilitative medicine, which in practice meant that the other staff members ordered him around a lot.

"Why does he need to learn how to walk sideways? Can't he just learn to walk normally?" he'd asked.

"It's for his back," said Matt, the physiotherapist. "Do I tell you how to do your job? Just spot him, don't make a thing out of it."

So, Sydney was spotting Raines and not making a thing out of it. In fact, he was barely paying attention at all. Raines made his way sideways down the hallway with his hands on a specially-installed railing, functionally unsupervised. Sydney was too busy going over his last conversation with Lyle.

He was embarrassed to admit it even to himself, but at first blush he'd believed Lyle.

"Your boy's dead, Syd."

He'd always taken pride in his capacity to bring skepticism to the table in any interaction with the Centre higher-ups. He couldn't say he'd never been fooled, but it was a close thing. Yet, when Lyle had broken the news of Jarod's death, Sydney had not been able to see any alternative to it being the truth. It was the isolation, he decided. He had no other source of news from the rest of the Centre, or indeed the rest of the world. If he didn't believe what sources he had, there was nothing to believe in at all. Schrödinger's reality.

So he'd believed. For one horrible night, to Sydney, Jarod had been dead.

Uncertainty had returned in the morning, and with it, frustration. If he could only get the elevator working or find some way of breaking down the door to the stairwell, he might be able to find someone else. He'd be able to hear it from another mouth, one he didn't distrust by default. Then maybe he'd believe Jarod was dead.

Until then, Schrödinger.

"Leave it for now, it'll keep."

Beside him, Raines grunted in alarm. Sydney glanced over; the man had his hips pivoted off-centre and he hadn't adjusted the grip of his leading hand on the railing to keep pace with his feet. For a brief moment, flash-in-the-pan, Sydney considered helping him. But what could be gained from that? Raines deserved this. Sydney doubted his neglect of Raines would piss Lyle off — he was willing to bet Lyle was hoping Raines's recovery would be as long as possible, and preferably indefinite. He sank back into his thoughts and ignored Raines's increasingly unsteady stance.

If Sydney did manage to escape and find someone else to confirm or deny that Jarod had died, though, who was to say they'd know the truth either? If Lyle had lied to Sydney's face, he could just as easily have lied to the rest of the staff. He might have told everyone else the same story, maybe while hiding Jarod somewhere even more secluded. Sydney shivered. He didn't like to contemplate why the Centre's most successful serial killer would want to hide Jarod somewhere more secluded than a Centre holding cell.

He wondered if Miss Parker had returned to the Centre when Jarod had been caught. If she had, and Lyle had spread the same news about Jarod's ostensible death to the staff, she would certainly have heard by now. The thought made Sydney's heart clench. Miss Parker always made an elaborate show of hating Jarod, but he knew news of his death would cut her to the bone. Worse, she'd believe it. Ever since finding out the truth about her and Lyle's birth, she'd never been able to let go of the kernel of hope that Lyle was just that little bit less of a monster than he seemed… if only to escape the same condemnation herself.

Meanwhile, Sydney refused to believe it. He had to, or he'd lose himself down here.

"Leave it for now, it'll keep."

That was the line that spun through his head on repeat like the chorus of a catchy song. Lyle had said it when he was on the phone with CentSec last night. What could that mean? What was 'it', and why could it keep? Some errand pushed to the back-burner? Sure, that could be it. Or.

Or it could be the body. Leave the body for now, it'll keep.

Sydney felt sick. He needed out.

There was a loud clatter and a shout as Raines lost his footing and fell to the floor. He groaned pitifully, trying to push himself off the ground.

Sydney… stared. Around him, rehab staff swept in from all sides, palpating Raines's head for signs that it had hit anything hard on the way down, helping him to his feet, rubbing his back to comfort him. A couple of them shot Sydney angry, indignant glares. To them, Raines was a miserly employer and an old bastard, but essentially harmless. To Sydney, he was the root of everything wrong in Sydney's whole world.

Sydney stalked off towards his quarters. He hadn't lifted a finger to help.

He needed out, now.


Miss Parker had read the same sentence of the report in front of her four times already. She hadn't taken a word of it in. The day yawned before her, asking her to bend her mind towards security rosters and surveillance review and task delegation when all she wanted to do was let her mind white out.

A sharp movement in her peripheral vision caught her eye. She looked up in time to see Harvey step in front of a CentSec officer in suspenders, to prevent him from breaching Miss Parker's office. Harvey leaned close to the new arrival and whispered something in his ear; the officer looked surprised, then mildly irritated, and finally did a one-eighty and headed back down the hall.

Harvey was warding people away from her. For privacy, presumably. Fondness surged fleetingly in Miss Parker's chest before it sank back into the marshes once more.

"Harvey," she called out.

Harvey froze, and turned around with an irrationally guilty look on his face.

"Miss Parker?"

"You don't have to keep people away."

"I wasn't —"

"Yes, you were," she said tiredly. She mustered a fraction of a smile. "Thank you for the thought. I'm fine. And even if I weren't, I could do with the distraction."

Harvey looked at her carefully for a moment before nodding and striding away.

She hadn't asked for bereavement leave when Thomas died, and she wouldn't ask for it now. Even without any pressing need to be on-site, she wouldn't have been able to explain why the loss of the greatest thorn in her side was enough to send her home to grieve when the loss of her boyfriend had not been.

Nothing felt real, that was part of the problem. It felt like any second now, she'd wake up to the sound of her phone ringing, and Jarod's voice would be on the other end, making some oblique comment in that affected I'm-giving-you-a-clue tone of voice he'd reserved just for her. It felt like she should be able to rewind back a couple of days and try this again, and get it right this time, because this couldn't be the real ending.

She looked back down at the report she was meant to be reading. Finally, a random phrase sank in, picked out of so much word salad: "… assigned to sub-level eighteen."

Sub-level eighteen. The morgue. That's where Jarod was now. Lyle had said he would be cremated as soon as he gave the order to have it done.

She didn't want to see Jarod. If she saw his cold, inert body down in the morgue, she knew the horror of that image would break down every dam she had. At the same time, she knew she wouldn't completely believe he was gone until she had some tangible sign.

When the elevator let her off on SL-18, stepping into the morgue was like stepping into a refrigerator. It was better than the alternative, of course — nobody wanted to smell sun-baked dead guy — but the cold set her on edge. The place was busier than she expected, too. How many bodies could one company possibly be processing? Even when that company was the Centre?

She caught the elbow of a passing morgue attendant, a woman with a blonde ponytail whose name-tag read 'Amber'.

"I'm here to see a body," Miss Parker said, brusque and to-the-point.

Amber-the-morgue-attendant's face transformed, adopting an expression of patient sympathy.

"You're here to identify a loved one?"

Broots's voice in her memories, again: You loved him. She shoved the voice to the side.

"… Yes."

"My sympathies, Miss Parker. I didn't realize you had lost someone recently. Who have you come to see?"

"Um," said Miss Parker. She glanced around for any possible observers. "Jarod. I'm here to identify Jarod."

"Jarod who, ma'am?"

Miss Parker stared at the woman, waiting for her to get it. She didn't.

"The Pretender."

"Oh!" Amber laughed, evidently embarrassed. "Oh, my apologies, I'm such an idiot. Of course I've heard of Jarod, and I knew we had him in today. I just didn't think — well, I didn't make the connection. I assumed any visitors would be around earlier in the day. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I believe his body is already in the crematorium. You may have missed your chance."

An icepick of cold stabbed down Miss Parker's jaw and into her chest. She missed it? She hadn't even wanted to see the body, yet now it felt like something had been stolen from her.

"It's already done?" she asked. Her words came out weak and stunned.

"Likely, yes," said Amber. Her chipper-yet-consoling tone had lost its shine. Her brow creased in concern at Miss Parker's expression. "I'm. I'm sorry? I can tell your brother that you did your best to be here on time, if that's the concern. I'm sure you did your best, you have a lot on your plate. I heard you got promoted to head of CentSec, that's exciting, yeah?"

"Demoted," grunted Miss Parker. Amber's smile dipped. "Where's the crematorium?"

Amber pointed behind her to a set of doors at the back. Miss Parker didn't bother with a parting word.

With a word like 'crematorium', Miss Parker had envisioned something a little more upscale. This looked more like a pared-down factory, where the raw material was human bodies and the product was ashes. There were two furnaces with sliding hatches facing the door, two long instruments which looked like a cross between a shovel and a hoe, and a package of flattened cardboard boxes leaning against one wall. One of the cardboard boxes had been stapled into the shape of a rudimentary coffin.

Another morgue attendant looked up as she burst in, pausing in the act of using a packing tape gun to seal the cardboard coffin.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

Miss Parker didn't reply. Her world had narrowed to the open hatch of the furnace on the right. Inside was a skeleton, collapsed beyond recognition except for the delicate shape of a glowing skull, back-lit by flames. As she watched, a third attendant grabbed one of the long hoe-like instruments off the wall and, without ceremony, crushed the skull into dust. He tamped down the rest of the embers until the irregular pile of bones became a flat layer of ash carpeting the furnace floor.

"Who was that?" she asked. To her own ears it sounded like her words had come from far away.

"Uh," said the man armed with the packing tape gun. His name-tag said 'Ivan'. "I'm pretty sure we can't disclose that."

Miss Parker grabbed blindly for the ID in her back pocket and waved it at the man impatiently.

"Parker, head of CentSec. Who was it?"

Ivan's eyebrows flew up.

"Oh. Right, fair enough. Damn, I've got egg on my face, huh? Not least because, eh. I don't exactly know who it was. We don't get names, we just match an ID number on a toe tag to the same number on the schedule. We don't even seem 'em, Amber wraps them up before they come back here. All I know is this one was from the community."

"The community?"

"Blue Cove. We're the only functioning crematorium in town this week, so we're helping out. I'd guess that one was an old guy, from the weight distribution. If you need more info than that, you'd have to reference the ID number. You want me to check for you?"

Miss Parker's shoulders dropped in relief. Jarod wasn't any less dead, but at least she hadn't just watched his skull get crushed.

"No," she said. "No, I'm here for someone else. Jarod."

Ivan looked over at his clipboard, which was balanced on top of the cardboard coffin.

"Jarod," he mused as he skimmed the schedule. "Jarod, Jarod, Jarod…"

"Think we just did him. That unit there," grunted the other attendant, gesturing to the left-hand unit. "Still cooling. We — hey!"

Not giving herself time to psych herself out, Miss Parker strode forward and yanked open the hatch door of the indicated furnace.

Another carpet of ash, distinguishable from its neighbour only in that it wasn't glowing orange.

She wasn't sure what she had expected. Some indication of significance, some frisson of recognition which would tell her that yes, this was Jarod. Over and over again that morning, she'd thought to herself that it didn't feel real. Was this real enough for her?

She grabbed the hatch handle, ready to slide it shut again and do her best to forget the sight of Jarod's remains, and stopped. There was something in the ashes, there at the back. Something glinting in the harsh white light of the crematorium. Trying not to think too hard about what she was touching, she leaned forward and fished the object out of the ashes.

It was a metal rod, slim and soot-caked, with screws fastened to its length at regular intervals.

"What the hell is this?" she said, half to herself. Ivan leaned over her shoulder.

"Ah, yeah. Yeah, that's one of those lumbar implants. We get those in with the ashes sometimes."

"Lumbar implants?"

"Yeah, they put those little fellas in when you get lower back surgery sometimes. The metal parts don't melt, it doesn't get hot enough. Gold and silver melts, but titanium, you can't touch that."

As if the long-cooled metal had burned her, Miss Parker dropped the implant on Ivan's workspace.

"It's not Jarod's," she said. "He's never had back surgery, I know his file back to front."

Ivan frowned. "You sure?"

"Positive."

"Oh." He looked taken aback. "Well. I guess it must have been left behind from the body cremated immediately before your friend's. That would track, since that was also an older fella."

Something in Miss Parker recoiled. The thought of all that was left of Jarod, stirred up into a bone dust slurry with the leftovers of some random pensioner, made her innards shrivel.

Her lip curled. "Brush up, boys. The professional standards here are not exactly award-winning."

It had the wording of one of her classic digs, but her mouth was running unsupervised, scripting words without a great deal of input from her higher cognitive functions.

"There's a dead body in the Centre," she'd told him excitedly.

"A dead body? Where is it?"

She should never have come down here. Ashes were never going to give her closure. The dust in the furnace had nothing to do with the man she'd been chasing for the better part of her thirties, nothing at all to do with the boy she'd coaxed into adventure, down in the sim labs twenty-odd years ago.

Miss Parker dusted her hands together to wipe the ash from her fingertips. She left without another word to the morgue staff, wiping her hands all the while, long after the last specks of ash had dissipated.


Somehow, Miss Parker made it to clock-out time. Somehow, she got herself home and across her threshold. The house was in disarray. She'd slept poorly last night, dreaming of insomnia, and she hadn't bothered to clean up after herself as she readied for work the next morning. Her bed was unmade, its blankets twisted in anxious spirals.

Miss Parker sat on the edge of the bed. Her shoulders were so heavy. Her chest was so, so heavy.

She looked over at her dresser, at the pair of photo frames perched atop. She'd unpacked them from her suitcase last night in a fit of restlessness: one of her father, the other of her mother.

A picture. She needed a picture.

The need to see Jarod, to have visual confirmation that he'd ever existed at all, seized her all at once. Where could she get her hands on a picture? There were plenty back at the Centre, there had to be, but she wanted one now. She strode to the table by the front door and sifted through the stack of files there — nothing, all the files concerned the missing employees, nothing on Jarod. She tore through her closet — nothing. She opened her suitcase (still half-packed and ready to take off at the first sign the plan was not going their way), dumped everything out, and rummaged through the contents — nothing.

"Come on, come on," she muttered to herself. "Where the hell is it?"

She aimed a kick at the suitcase on her way to the bedroom, where she shredded her way through the contents of her bedside table and everything on top of her dresser. Nothing.

"God damn it!"

With little hope left, she abandoned the logical hiding places and jumped to the illogical ones: the top of the refrigerator, the bathroom cabinet, the dresser drawers, the laundry hamper —

The laundry hamper.

Her hand plunged into the back pocket of a pair of pants she had taken with her to Philadelphia, and froze. The frenzied energy which had driven her to tear up her home like a miniature tornado sputtered out. She drew her hand out slowly, gripping her prize.

It was water-damaged, likely from the rain storm in Wisconsin. It bled at the edges. But there it was. There he was.

She'd taken it from one of Jarod's employee profiles and had been using it for the last year or so when questioning those persons of interest left behind at former Pretend sites. His hair was longer in the picture than it had been when she'd last seen him. It was tucked behind his ears. He looked tired, less hubristic than he normally did. In her mind's eye, the picture moved. The Jarod-in-miniature in her imagination caught her eye, grinned, and sprinted away.

It was like she'd been waiting all day for this. She looked at his face and the dam burst. A sob tumbled out of her, and another and another. There was no stopping it now that she'd finally let go. Her knees buckled and she fell to her hands and knees. At last, she didn't have to worry about keeping quiet, and she took advantage. She howled in pain, howled so long and loud, it should have been enough to wake the dead.

But it wasn't.

She wasn't sure how long she knelt there on the cold floor of her laundry room. Eventually the tears ran out, as they tend to do, and she was left staring at nothing in particular with an ache behind her eyes. She pushed herself to her feet and stumbled out into the living room, seeing little, processing even less.

Her gaze landed on a dark bottle poking out from her liquor rack behind the dining room table. Who had dropped that off? Brigitte, she guessed. She could see herself now, taking the bottle from her step-mother with a wrinkled nose of distaste, scanning the label skeptically, then shoving it away where she wouldn't have to think about it until every other bottle in the house with a proof on the label had been drained. Just the thing. She grabbed the neck and pulled it out.

The bottle accompanied her back to her bedroom, where it found a new home on her bedside table. A half-hour later, it was joined by an order of sushi from Blue Cove's best sushi place. She hadn't been able to face the task of preparing dinner.

She struggled with the chopsticks, already several shots into the bottle. The bottle's contents were dark and tasted like anise, reminding her of her father's habitual collection of licorice allsorts. After several failed attempts, she successfully pinched a California roll between her chopsticks and popped it in her mouth.

Why did this keep happening to her? Every time she got her teeth into a real, tangible sense of hope for the future, for escape, for a life beyond the Centre. Every single damn time, it ended in death. She sobbed again, a dry sob.

Several shots in, she could admit that she'd invested a lot of hope in Jarod. Some of these hopes were purely practical, and could be admitted sober: they had planned together to take down the Centre and, even in the case that the plan failed and she had to go on the run, she knew he'd help her embark on a life as a fugitive.

Some hopes were less practical, but no less important. With time, they could have figured out how to put their years of enmity behind them. They could have run away together, out of the Centre's cannon-fire range. They could have stopped running, could have found someplace to make a life. They could have…

She took out the picture again and stared dully at the two-dimensional version of Jarod.

They could have done a lot of things.

She didn't notice when she closed her eyes, nor when her thoughts turned from saccharine fantasy into alcohol-fueled surrealist nonsense. She woke up two hours later feeling like her mouth was stuffed with cotton balls, all the lights in her house blazing. She'd started changing into her pyjamas before she drifted off, but only got half-way. Her blouse was still part-way buttoned, and her pants hung on by one ankle.

Her dream had been a jumbled haze of skin sliding against skin, of frantic, clumsily-synchronized movement, of her mattress dipping in the centre under their — hers and Jarod's — combined weight, of Jarod's fingers, of lips on flesh. An empty ache pulsed between her legs. Empty and warm and wet. She slid her hand under the waistband of her pyjamas and wriggled her shoulders into the headboard.

Second verse, same as the first, now with intent. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, shutting out the world. In her head, Jarod hadn't died. Instead, he was leaning over her, slowly drawing her underwear down over her hips and past her knees, peppering kisses as he went. The images flashed through her mind faster and faster as her hand between her legs sped up. Jarod moving in rhythm over her, her legs curled loosely around his torso with her ankles resting on the small of his back. Jarod's teeth scraping against the soft inside of her thighs. Jarod under her, pulling her down for a kiss, groaning against her lips. Jarod's hands on her hips, guiding her movement.

She'd been close when she woke up, and it didn't take long. When she came, she turned her head to the side and bit down on her pillow, the hand between her legs pressing down with punishing insistence. As she rode it out, the convulsions spreading outwards from her core terminated in shuddering sobs.

There was something uniquely dysfunctional about bringing herself off to a cheap mental slideshow of hypothetical sex with a dead man, she knew that. Bluntly, it was unhealthy. Unhealthy and more than a little pathetic. She was acutely aware of that fact.

That fact didn't help.


Miss Parker woke up to a rolling headache like a hot poker being rocked back and forth against her frontal lobe.

"Mrmph," she said. She hadn't felt a hangover this fierce since that whole fiasco with her mom's empty grave two years ago.

Then, because the inevitable can only be delayed for so long, she remembered.

Jarod was dead. The plan had failed. And Jarod was dead.

A weight settled on her chest.

She'd have to go into work again this morning. Voluntarily stepping across the threshold of a Lyle-run Centre would be orders of magnitude more difficult now that she didn't have an exit strategy, nor anything to look forward to. Not a single bright spot at the end of the tunnel.

She squinted at the sunlight streaming in through the window. Far too bright. Far too bright… and far too high in the sky. She grabbed for her alarm clock and stared at the digital display until her vision focused.

9:48AM.

"Shit!" she said under her breath and struggled out of bed, pausing only to extricate her ankle from the leg of yesterday's pantsuit.

The living room was a disaster area. She'd torn through every possible (and every impossible) hiding spot for a photo of Jarod, and hadn't spared any thought to disaster relief. She picked through the wreckage until she found her phone. Harvey's number was a recent addition to her speed dial; she depressed the '6' key and listened to the phone ring in her ear.

"Go for Harvey."

"Harvey? I'm late, I know. Something… came up." The token excuse tumbled out of her in a rush. "I'm going to be another hour still, but you're welcome to debrief the night shift workers, you know the job. Hell, you've probably done that already, you don't need my permission. I do need to talk to the night shift guys, though, anyone who was on staff when the body was found. I could probably make it in forty-five minutes if I skimp on breakfast, but if you could —"

"Miss Parker!"

"What?"

"It's Saturday."

"Yeah? OK. So what?" But she knew 'so what'. So what, she didn't work Saturdays. Not anymore.

"You don't work Saturdays."

"Right."

"Not anymore."

"Right."

"Unless you want to join us on the weekend shift," said Harvey, letting a little humour seep into his voice. "We'd love to have you. Many hands make light work."

"No, that's. That's fine, I'll see you Monday."

"Miss Parker?"

"What?"

Harvey paused.

"Are you alright?"

"I'm fine."

She hung up. Inertia caught up with her and presented its bill, all that early-morning late-for-work panic grinding to a halt. She found herself staring at her phone. The answering machine light was blinking. The answering machine light had been blinking for a while. She remembered it blinking last night, remembered ignoring it as she tore through the files on the entranceway table. She remembered it blinking when she'd headed out the door the morning after Jarod died, blissfully unaware of the news she was about to receive. She remembered it blinking the evening before that, when she'd come home irritated after being stood up down in Parking Garage G.

She cued up the first message.

"Miss Parker, hello." Tuchen's voice. "My apologies for missing our meeting. I hope you didn't end up waiting too long, and that you didn't run into any trouble while you were there. Lyle appears to have got wind of our planned meeting. Some of his men were waiting for me when I showed up, so I had to get out of there fast. I don't think they expected a man of my mobility to be able to get away as fast as I did."

Here he laughed, an exhausted laugh but a genuine one. Miss Parker lowered herself into a chair to listen. Lyle had sent men after Tuchen? This must be something serious, to turn Tuchen against Lyle, and for Lyle to be willing to burn one of his only remaining alliances.

"This works just as well, I suppose, though I will not be able to confirm that you've received my message. I will just have to make my peace with that, and hope that this message reaches you. I reached out to you this morning because I can no longer support your brother's decisions regarding the Centre. His plans for our organization… they frighten me — or rather, his lack of plans, as he seems to be driving us all off a cliff without a map. You should know, Miss Parker, that Lyle was behind the death of the Triumvirate leadership —"

Miss Parker grabbed the answering machine off the table and jabbed the stop button, almost trembling with frustration.

"I know that," she muttered to herself. "Goddammit, I figured that one out within five minutes of getting the news. This is what he wanted to tell me?"

She wasn't sure what she had been hoping for. No, that wasn't true. She knew exactly what she wanted to hear: further information about Jarod's death. This didn't make sense, as Jarod had been alive and not-so-well when Tuchen had requested a meeting, but it was what she had been hoping for all the same. She needed someone to blame. Yes, she could blame the Centre or Lyle specifically for having recaptured Jarod in the first place, but there was nobody to blame for the exact circumstances of his death. Nobody but Jarod himself, for getting lost in the walls and for not researching his exit route properly.

(There was a second option, which was to blame herself. She was the one who had moved up the schedule when she'd heard about the mass murder of the Triumvirate leadership. She was the one who had told him to move 'today', when he perhaps had not been ready to escape. She had not let herself entertain this idea. Grief was enough to deal with, without guilt along to accompany it.)

Dismissing the fleeting temptation to chuck the answering machine across the room, she pressed 'play' again. At the very least, maybe Tuchen would have left some means of contacting him for more information.

"— as you may have guessed. This is just the culmination of a trend I've been observing from my front row seat over the last few weeks. Maybe 'observing' is too passive a word for the nature of my involvement, but this is a recorded message, and I know better than to incriminate myself needlessly.

It is enough to say that, during Mr Lyle's stewardship over the Centre, there has been progressively mounting discontent among the staff. For some, that discontent has been sufficient to push them to leave the Centre. Not quit, mind you. The majority know better than to try to formally resign. They just fail to show up for work.

Lyle has… not been taking this well. Lyle has been — well, there's nothing to be gained from putting this delicately. He's been having them killed, Miss Parker. The first time it happened, I suspect it was an in-the-moment response, spite or rage or something similar. After that, he seemed to rationalize that terminating AWOL employees was necessary for the sake of preserving company secrets. In any case, he murdered them, or had them murdered. He's likely ordered the same done to me, but I won't give him the chance if I can help it. I believed in Mr Lyle for a long time, maybe for flimsier reasons than anyone should have for propping up a tyrant. I had stars in my eyes and I thought he might grow to… care. Or something."

Miss Parker snorted aloud. For him to believe that Lyle was capable of reciprocating his infatuation, he must have been pretty far gone. Poor man.

"Take care, Miss Parker. I don't know how to stop Mr Lyle, and I don't know if I have the nerve to try. But I think you do."

The message ended. It was the last one on the tape. She rewound the tape several times to listen to select portions over again, until she was satisfied she understood the entirety of Tuchen's by-proxy confession.

"I don't know if I have the nerve to try," he'd said. "But I think you do." Did she? In some ways, she'd never had less nerve in her life.

The Centre had become a functional, long-term hostage crisis. She thought back to the first interview she'd conducted when searching for information about the missing employees. What had the woman's name been? She picked up the files from the stack near the front door and flipped to the file in question. Yameena. Yameena's friend Lena had disappeared after vowing to quit. Miss Parker remembered thinking that Yameena missed Lena even more than she let on.

She flicked to the next file. Todd Powell, a twenty-something with a weak chin. The next. Michele Oberholtzer, a tall woman with a long, dark braid. The next. Terrence Chan, looking very much like he had one foot in retirement. If he'd shown up in the morgue, absent any larger signs of conspiracy, nobody would have blinked.

The morgue.

Following a hunch, Miss Parker flipped through the files until she found what she was looking for:

Frank Volokh, Information Technology System Administrator, DOB: 01/10/1924. Failed to show up for work 08/18/2002. The relevant line was in sick leave history: in 1998, he'd taken a week off from work to recover from spinal fusion. Lower back surgery, Ivan the morgue attendant had called it, when she'd asked about the titanium implant she'd found covered in Jarod's ashes. Volokh had ended up in the Centre crematorium, mislabeled and unclaimed, with his remains indiscriminately mingled with a dead Pretender's.

Miss Parker's face hardened. Tuchen was telling the truth, Lyle was killing off anyone who dared try to flee the Centre. That had always been a possibility, and the uncertainty of that implicit threat had kept people like Sydney and Broots coming to work every morning for years. Still, there'd been that temptation to denial: 'surely they wouldn't really kill us for quitting!'. It was another thing entirely to see the evidence of that threat being carried to fruition.

As she saw it, there were three choices in front of her:

A) Keep on keepin' on and watch from the sidelines as the Centre devolved into a slaughterhouse,

B) Flee, get shot in the back on the way out the door, and end up as bone dust in the crematorium on SL-18, or

C) Finish the plan.

With Jarod dead, it was hard to see a way forward to implementing what remained of their plan to take down the Centre. But that wasn't a reason not to try.

One way or the other, she'd see the Centre fall.