The front door opened, admitting Maria and a short gust of rain before it was closed again.
Maria shook off her umbrella and unfastened her dripping coat, looking at her desk to see Sayid sitting there, his head bent over his dissertation.
"I used to wonder what friendship could be," he crooned as his pencil blurred over the paper, ruthlessly scoring through sentences and scribbling notes in the margin. "Till you all shared its magic with…" He suddenly looked up and coughed, surprised and slightly embarrassed. "Hey, Ms Ortega."
"Sayid," said Maria, hanging up her coat. "Have I ever mentioned how you're a paragon among interns, of such impeccable moral character and all-round…"
"I'm not saying I don't like it when I'm flattered," said Sayid, getting up. "It's just that you invariably expect stuff in exchange for the flattery."
"Milk, no sugar."
Sayid muttered as he walked off to the kettle on the other side of the building. Maria settled herself down, gently pushing aside Sayid's papers (noticing a spelling error as she did, and noting it with a pencil) and booting up her computer, which complied with a recalcitrant gurgle.
She logged in, and once again brought up the tables on New York, resuming from where she had left off the day before.
She had narrowed down her list of likely structures considerably by the time Sayid returned with a cup of coffee, steam wafting off in curlicues from its surface.
"We had the Secretary of Homeland Security over here earlier," he said casually, placing the cup down beside her. She paused with her hands over the keyboard, surprised by the information.
"The new one? Did he say why?"
"Just to have a look round," buzzed the intercom, Wybie's tones distorted by the wires. Maria jumped.
"Is that thing broken again? I thought you fixed it the last time."
"'Fixed' is such a relative term. Blame the intern."
"Why? What did the intern do?" asked Sayid, gathering up paper.
"Something morally reprehensible, no doubt, that resulted in a damaged intercom. Don't do it again," Wybie cheerfully answered.
"How did you get by before you started abusing power?"
"It's like a drug," Wybie confessed. "When's Coraline due back, by the way? Did she tell you yesterday?"
"All she said was sometime today," said Maria. "She'll come back. Don't worry."
"But I'm so good at it."
"Regardless," said Maria, turning back to her computer and absently crossing off the plot on Hester Street.
She got on with her work in silence, while Sayid transferred himself to another room and the assorted clanks and scratches and muffled thuds of Wybie at work came from the intercom.
It was a full half-hour before the door opened again, letting in a little more rain and wind and another wet figure.
"Coraline?" said Maria, looking up. "Good to see you're intact. How did it…" She saw Coraline's face, and stopped talking.
"Hey, Maria," said Coraline, dumping her bags and trenchcoat (which bore one rent in the fabric running across the stomach, and two more on the right shoulder, Maria noted). Her expression was carefully blank, her voice was hollow. "It could have gone better. I'll be back to put these away in a minute, okay? I've got something I need to do."
With that, she walked briskly off through a door to Maria's right, vanishing through it. Footsteps sounded up stairs.
Maria looked after, recognising the scenario and realising the implications. She leaned in close to the intercom, which had fallen silent.
"She's back," she said quietly. "Go to her."
It was a brief minute later.
Wybie stood outside a door on the first floor of the Thaddeus Complex, trying to gather his nerve to knock.
From inside, there came a sniff, as if the person inside was trying to hide it, even when they were on their own.
"Coraline?" asked Wybie, and knocked.
It was a hard job they did, he knew, and for many different reasons.
They had no prior knowledge, save what they could pick up as they went. They had virtually no support save each other, they had few resources, and they accepted that death was a likely consequence of some of the missions they embarked upon, when they faced what they faced.
Like any difficult job, failure was always a strong possibility. But when they failed, it wasn't necessarily them who paid the price.
Nobody knew that more than Coraline.
When they were lucky, and when they worked as fast as they could, they could get to a psychephage before it could begin to ensnare a victim or before it could drain a person's soul. Over the years, there had been many occasions where Coraline or the department as a whole had charged in at the last moment, and averted tragedy.
But there were occasions where as fast as they could simply hadn't been fast enough, and the evidence was still recognisable.
There was no response to his knock, and Wybie gently pushed the door open.
The room it opened onto was a long, wide room, with mystifyingly empty boxes stacked to the ceiling. On bright days, light would enter from long windows along the wall. The light today was muted, at best. Coraline was crouched between two towering stacks leaned against a wall, one arm wrapped around her knees, the other rubbing her face. Her shoulders shook, and wet tracks ran down what showed off her face.
The instant Wybie entered, she looked up abruptly, and furiously scrubbed harder at her eyes.
"No, for god's sake, don't look at…" she snapped, her voice broken and low. "Not you."
Wybei didn't say anything. He'd seen this before, but he still didn't know what he could say. He merely knelt down beside her and gently took the hand that was around her knees.
They held their positions for a few quiet moments, the dull light casting upon them, the wind and patter of rain outside the only noises permitted.
"What happened?" asked Wybie, in his gentlest voice.
It took Coraline a few minutes to answer. "I got there. I got there too late. Just a few minutes." She took a shuddering breath. "Too. Goddamn. Late."
Wybie took her hand a little more firmly, a little more reassuringly, lost for a response that wouldn't have worsened the situation. "You couldn't have known," he ventured. "We did everything, everything, we could to check out what was going on there. We couldn't have known that the kid had been taken that recently."
"No," she snapped, bitter and sharp. "We just couldn't. I couldn't have gotten there a little faster, you couldn't have done a little more research, Maria couldn't have done a little more fact-finding. We couldn't have done a single thing. Just write it off. Lost cause from the beginning."
Wybie briefly considered trying to dispute the cynicism in that retort, but every particle of common sense in his skull dog-piled atop the notion in an instant.
"Do you think the notion even occurs to Skirving and his goddamn lapdogs?" snarled Coraline. "That when he damn well takes away what little we've got, this sort of shit happens. We could have gotten there in time, and I should've."
Wybie opened his mouth, and then closed it. Venting anger could help her. Maybe it could help her. He was frustrated by his helplessness in this situation, yet he always found himself in it.
Another minute of silence passed before Coraline said "I didn't get round to writing a report. I got the souls out. I killed the beldam there." Her jaw tightened around the last sentence. "I didn't feel a thing when I killed it. It begged me for mercy, and I didn't feel a thing, and it bothers me that I didn't feel a thing. It drained a kid's soul, but you have to feel something for whatever's begging for mercy. I don't know what's happening to me, and I don't…"
Wybie, lost for all other options, could only put one arm around her and hold her close. After a second, she returned the gesture.
Rain glanced off the window, leaving shining rivulets which were forced roughly along new channels by buffeting wind.
After a long minute, Coraline pulled away slowly. "I'll be okay," she said, pulling herself up. "I'll be okay. Thank you."
"Hey," said Wybie, awkwardly patting her shoulder. "What else are psycho-nerds for?"
"Stopping draughts? Firewood?" They both laughed, and walked towards the door.
Wybie spared a thought for when they had gone to the same high school and college. They had been always friends, and for a few brief times, a little more than friends. But whatever they had tried to make last had never managed to, and other things had always somehow conspired to get in the way.
Whatever they were now, they were here for each other, each ready to try and support the other when they needed it the most. Darkest hours were never at their darkest when someone stood by with a light.
"Any update from Maria?" asked Coraline, breaking Wybie out of his thoughts and trying to push the conversation on.
"Not that I know of. Um, we got a visit from the Secretary of Homeland Security when you were gone. Malinois?"
"I met him at the cabinet meeting." Coraline thought about it, and then dismissed the subject. "Skirving probably asked him to go over and dig up dirt. Did he find any?"
"Well, I ended up having a good, long conversation with him…"
"Be still, my beating heart."
"Cynic. And I think I made some progress on the Eroder…"
"What went on fire this time?"
"I'm not talking to you anymore."
"Is that a promise?" They alighted from the stairs, and Coraline pushed open the door to Maria's office. Maria looked up from her desk, her expression expectant and pensive, at Wybie and at Coraline.
"Are you…?"
"I'm okay," said Coraline, with a forced smile. "But you know what makes me even okayer? Kicking the crap out of psychephages."
"Step right up. I've got just what the doctor ordered."
"Hit me."
"Tomorrow, how does a brief trip to Brooklyn sound?"
"Sounds excellent."