Title is from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Chapter 3: In Today (Already Walks Tomorrow)
Amy doesn't know where she is. It shouldn't be the thing that's scaring her the most right now - that should probably be her house going up in flames with her favorite books still inside or the the burns along her legs which are starting to hurt or that she didn't see Mom come out or that she has just been kidnapped - but it's all her mind can focus on right now. There aren't even any street signs for Amy to guess her location off of; she blacked out just after being carried out of the house, and she was far away from the city and any familiar road signage by the time she woke up.
Maybe she hasn't woken up yet. Maybe this is all a dream. Amy hopes it is a dream; if it's a dream, then she has to wake up eventually, and she'll wake up in her own bed and none of this will have ever happened. Until then, Amy tries to tell if the road around them has any distinguishing landmarks that can tell her where she is.
.oOo.
As Hope limps into her office, Irina wonders why she's still here. Alistair's already left, claiming too much excitement for one night and a need for peace and quiet, and she should have disappeared into the smoke-filled night with him. No one here - not Hope, not Arthur, and certainly not the Holts, who she's butted heads with more than once - trusts her, so her (worryingly limited but still more extensive than any of her current allies') knowledge of Isabel probably will be of little use in finding Dan and Amy. And even if she can help them find where Isabel's gone, they might be too late; it's been almost five hours already, and Agent Smith was dying of malignant hyperthermia the ER couldn't treat within four.
Hope comes back to the Holts' minivan - her own car had been damaged by the fire - with a laptop under one arm and a go bag slung over her other shoulder. As soon as she's seated, Hope opens the laptop and pulls up a street map of New England. It takes Irina a few minutes to notice that there is a blinking red dot traveling south.
"Is that Dan or Amy?" Alistair, who's peering at the map over Irina's shoulder, asks.
"Dan's bear," Hope says, and that's fairly clever for a woman who had decided her best course of action was to aggravate a woman who kills most of her enemies and many of her allies. The bear is presumably Dan's favorite, so he wouldn't part with it easily, and a tracker hidden within a bear could be significantly larger (and, therefore, emit a stronger signal and last longer) than a subcutaneous one. Irina frowns at the screen, running through the list of Lucian strongholds in her head.
"There's no Lucian base that way except for the one in New York, and Isabel wouldn't go there," Irina says. "That would be far too conspicuous." Hope frowns.
"Why are you telling us this?" she asks. "Isabel's your ally."
"No more than the Man In Black is yours," Irina says. Arthur snorts. Irina wonders why; even if he has not interacted with Madrigals (which she sincerely doubts), his wife, like everyone else in this van, bears scars from Madrigal encounters.
"How so?" Hope asks.
"She's killed everyone I loved," except for my brother, who won't speak to me, "and I am honestly surprised she hasn't killed me yet." She's tried, of course, but not very hard; I have seven years before she succeeds, and even then it will be mostly by accident. "She's caused good agents to die or defect for no reason but her own overinflated ego, and she's killed some of them herself." And I can't watch another child die, Irina thinks but doesn't say; it won't help her here. I can't do that again. I've died for your children, Hope, and you won't live to see it but it was just yesterday for me. I'll sacrifice myself again if I have to, but your children are not dying today because of my inaction. "We have a common enemy, Cahill, and that's enough for today."
"Doesn't Cora have a house in New York City?" Alistair, probably trying to break the tension, asks.
"She does," Arthur says, "and it isn't connected to a Janus stronghold." Something inside of Irina releases; if Cora took the children, they're probably alright. (At least Cora doesn't have a record for killing children that Irina knows about.)
"Let's go," Eisenhower says as he pulls away from the curb. "She's already a few hours ahead of us."
.oOo.
When Cora parks her car, dawn is just starting to break, and the New York house is quiet. Cora takes Dan out of the backseat - he's still clutching his ninja teddy bear and sleeping soundly - and unlocks the door. It's only when she sees that there's a light on in the kitchen that she remembers she didn't plan for the house to be empty this week.
"Leila, I wasn't expecting you for another two hours; you said your flight was going to be-" Cora can see the second her youngest sister realizes who just walked in. "I thought you weren't coming until tomorrow, Cora."
"Cam!" Cora puts some fake cheer into her voice as she pretends she doesn't wish Camille was anywhere else. "I thought you had finals this week."
"I had finals last week," Camille says (leaving the not that you've ever cared about that implied this time), "and Cecelia ensured I left school as soon as possible." There's bitterness there - Camille has always resented Cecelia's presence in her life and the lack of freedom it represents - but Cora ignores it in favor of setting Dan, who is deceptively heavy for his small size, down. She doubts a fifteenth iteration of that particular argument wouldn't end with Camille being angry at her, and Camille will do anything to spite her eldest sister when she's angry. Camille's eyes flick to the boy's face and then back to Cora. "That's not Jonah."
"No, he isn't," Cora says, "but he's staying with me - with us - for now. He is Janus, after all." He's not - there's no evidence he is, at least - but it doesn't really matter to Cora. A path to a clue is a path to a clue. Power is power.
"That's Dan Cahill," Camille says, and Cora should probably ask why her sister knows what Hope Cahill's children look like even though Camille won't give her a straight answer. "Why the fuck do you have Dan Cahill with you?"
"It's been a long night," Cora says. "I'm going to bed. You'll let Leila in when she arrives, yes?" Cora doesn't wait for Camille to say anything; the vile-tasting gas station coffee is wearing off, and it really has been a long night.
As she flops down into a bed, Cora doesn't notice Camille's eyes flick towards first Dan and then the keys Cora dumped on the entryway table. By the time her car's engine roars, Cora's fast asleep; she doesn't even hear it drive off into the early morning light.
.oOo.
Just as the sun is starting to rise (to Amy's back, so they must have traveled west, but Amy's not sure for how long), the mean lady parks at a small farm. She pulls out a sleek-looking handgun from her purse and points it at Amy.
"Follow me," she says, and Amy gulps and races after her.
The mean lady heads for the barn - painted red with white details, just like the ones that pop up in Saturday morning cartoons that she and Dan watch with Dad - and fusses for a moment with the padlock keeping its doors shut. Amy briefly wonders if she should run for the woods to her right; the distance doesn't look that long, and she might be the slowest runner in her class, but even she could probably get that far as the mean lady tries key after key after key…
The mean lady finally gets the padlock open, and she turns to point the gun at Amy again. "Inside, now. No dawdling." Amy hurries after her but can't help but gasp as she sees the barn's contents: a sleek black helicopter with its lights already on and with a few stray pieces of straw stuck to its sides. As soon as Amy has struggled her way up into the cockpit - the ground clearance is almost half her height - the mean lady slides the door shut and walks into the cockpit. She slides that door shut behind her, too.
Less than a minute after the cockpit door slides shut, Amy hears a hiss, a thump, and a crackle of speakers turning on. "Don't be afraid," a mildly accented voice says.
"I'm not," Amy says as her voice shakes.
"Of course you aren't," the voice says, "but lots of people are when I do this. Can you tell me your name?"
"I'm Amy," Amy says. "Amy Cahill. What's your name."
"It's nice to meet you, Amy," the voice says after a brief pause. "You can call me Nat. Help is coming, but it won't arrive for at least another hour or two. I'm going to need you to be very brave, okay?" Amy nods. "Good. There's a pair of handcuffs under the seat to your left. They should be unlocked. I'm about to open the cockpit doors. Here's what I need you to do…"
.oOo.
Halfway to New York, Eisenhower pulls into an empty parking lot and next to a black sedan with tinted windows. A black woman is standing next to the driver's door and fiddling with her nails. Hope doesn't wait for the van to fully come to a stop before jumping out.
"You have them?" Hope asks.
"Only one." The woman doesn't look up as she methodically chips off her emerald green nail polish. Panic starts to stir again in Irina's chest. "Dan's in the backseat. I don't know what happened to Amy, but Cora didn't have her. I'm sorry." Hope nods.
"Thanks, Lupa," Hope says as Arthur takes Dan out of the sedan's backseat. "At least I have one of them back. Can you head back safely?"
"It's not the first time I've gone against Cora," the woman (Hope called her Lupa, but that's a hilariously obvious codename for a Janus double agent) says, "and… one of my friends… has 'spontaneously' decided to make a trip to New York City in case things go wrong and I need to leave in a hurry. I'll be fine. Cora's probably not even awake yet." The woman drives off, and Irina's thoughts spin out of control.
Nine hours. It's been nine hours since the fire died out and the police left and they banded together to find Hope's children. A lot can happen in nine hours; Jones was dead in five, and Smith was uncontrollably vomiting blood in six, and Li's kidneys failed at seven… even Beckmann, luckiest of the unlucky, would've been at death's door by hour eleven (which is almost definitely going to come long before they find what remains of Amy Cahill) if she hadn't self-injected a little too little antidote, stole Irina's third favorite jacket, and stumbled out into the long, dark, cold winter night, never to be heard from again. Irina had allowed herself to think that, maybe, Isabel wasn't a culprit this time; she'd let herself believe that, maybe, people were going to walk away this time.
Irina's pager buzzes. She pulls it out of her pocket to see a message from an unknown number.
Got the kid. Headed E towards you. - B
"Who messaged you?" Mary-Todd asks.
"I don't know," Irina says as she shows Mary-Todd the message. It's not entirely true - Irina is pretty sure she knows who it is - but it will do until she's certain. "We need to head west." Discreetly, Irina messages back, I want my coat back. She receives a smiley face in reply.
.oOo.
Three and a half hours after Irina received Beckmann's message, Arthur pulls into an empty gas station to refill the minivan's gas tank and let someone else take over driving. As soon as he is out of the car, a dented, dark blue pickup truck pulls up alongside her. Its windows aren't tinted, so Irina can clearly see Beckmann at the driver's seat and Amy in the passenger's seat behind her. Irina steps out of the minivan and sits in the pickup truck's front passenger seat.
"Hey, Spasky," Beckmann says as Arthur takes his daughter out of the backseat; aside from the burns on her legs, she looks remarkably alright. "I didn't expect to see you again."
"You messaged me, Beckmann," Irina says. Beckmann shrugs and fidgets with her thick glasses; they look exactly like the ones Irina last saw her in, complete with the tied-together left hinge after she lost the screw on a long op in Madrid.
"I didn't know it was you," Beckmann says. "It was just a number Radova gave me." Irina raises her eyebrows.
"Nataliya's in on this?" Irina's ignoring the massive question of how Nataliya, one of the most heavily surveilled Cahills in history, had Beckmann's number; Nataliya can find a way to do anything if she sets her mind to it. What's more strange at this particular moment is the fact that Nataliya, who has never expressed more than mild irritation with Isabel's actions, has decided to contact a traitor and go completely against Isabel. (Then again, Irina hadn't thought of going against Isabel except in her wildest dreams until less than a week ago, and she couldn't be "accidentally" killed in quite so many ways as Nataliya, who has just as many dead bodies as Irina for motivation.)
"Kabra tried to use the Shark," Beckmann says.
"She forgot about the remote override?" Irina guesses. (When it comes to incidents in the Shark not caused by someone forgetting to check the fuel gauge before taking off, it's almost always because someone forgot about the remote override.)
"And the knockout gas dispersal systems," Beckmann says, and Irina had forgotten about those, "and the unpickable cuffs Radova stashes under the passenger seats. Kabra was starting to stir when I got there, but I gave her another dose of sedative, and she's still locked to one of the seats."
"Good." Irina needs time to think without looking over her shoulder, to align her knowledge of what's to come with what's just happened, to plan what she needs to do next. The Trents have survived the fire - they've all survived the fire - but that doesn't mean they're safe yet; Kabra's never been inclined to give up until she gets what she wants, and Irina thinks she wants Hope and Arthur not only out of the clue hunt but also dead. "That should buy us a few hours."
"A few hours to do what?"
"We could run away. We could get false paperwork and onto a plane within five hours. We could start our lives over in some remote place, quiet and far from prying eyes. We could go to a city, hide in the crowds there. Or," Irina takes a deep breath, "we could get ready to instigate a shift in leadership. After last night and this morning, Kabra's power base is going to be shaky; we could probably disrupt it entirely if we tried." Honestly, between the old guard and the kids Kabra's tried to mold into perfect weapons and her tendency to kill good agents who disagreed with her, Irina isn't sure how Kabra's held onto power for so long, much less how she'll hold onto it until the day Irina dies.
"We should start at the New York base," Beckmann says. "It's the closest major base, and Isabel's never really been fully in control of it." The New York base is also incredibly well-connected; it handles the mission assignments and interest files and surveillance for all of North America.
"Let's go," Irina says, and Beckmann starts the engine. "How did Nataliya know to contact you and to tell you to contact me?" Beckmann fidgets with her glasses and laughs nervously.
"I wish I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you," Beckmann says in her best James Bond impression. Irina lets the subject drop; Beckmann will just talk around the question if she asks it again, and answers can wait until after they've disrupted Isabel's control (or died trying, in which case the answers won't really matter anyways).
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