October 20th 2012

For the second time in a week, Daniel woke up with a pounding headache and an as-yet undefined sense of dread. He took several deep breaths in an attempt to force additional oxygen into his blood and tried to blink away the bleariness in his vision. The first things that he saw were his own feet, each bound with copious amounts of rope to the legs of a wooden chair. His arms were nowhere in sight, and it took a moment for his foggy brain to work out that they were bent awkwardly around the back of the chair and fastened together. He got the impression that he was in pain, but his nerve endings seemed to be dulled and his tongue felt thick and dry. He scraped it experimentally against the roof of his mouth, noting the roughness of the motion, and tried to piece everything together.

The headache could be caused by an injury or by dehydration, but was most likely a mixture of both. The numbness and confused thinking could also be attributed to either of this factors, but Daniel was intimately familiar with the sensation of being drugged and he could tell that there were the remains of a sedative coursing through his veins, at least six hours old.

He needed to figure out what had happened, so he backtracked to the last thing that he definitely remembered, which was calling for the car in the alley, and moved forward from there in his mind. The two Assassins had been cuffed and put in the car, and then Kaczmarek had...

'Would you like some water?'

Daniel tried to look up sharply, failed with a grunt of pain as the action plucked at his aching neck muscles, and then attempted the move again with more care. Blinking to clear his vision, he saw that he was in a bare, boxy room with grey stone walls, and seated on a chair in front of him was Clay Kaczmarek.

'W-' Daniel began, and paused to try and work some saliva into his throat. 'Water?'

'Yes, water. Would you like some?'

Now that his eyesight was a little clearer, Daniel saw that Clay was sporting a bandage over his temple, and that his face was littered with at least a dozen small cuts. His left arm was in a sling, though the arm itself was not in any kind of cast. A dislocated shoulder seemed the most likely cause for it. He was smiling, but not in a pleasant way.

More to the point, however, were his words - for Daniel realised that he would very much like some water. In fact, he'd probably amputate a couple of his own toes for even a cup of the stuff to soothe his parched mouth and throat. 'Yeah,' he replied at last, his voice sounding like that of an eighty year old man who had smoked three packs of cigarettes every day since birth. 'Yeah, I'd like some water.'

Clay nodded thoughtfully, but didn't move. Daniel gritted his teeth.

'I mean, some water would be good right about now.'

Clay cocked his head to one side and said, in an almost pitying voice, 'I don't have any water.'

'Then why the hell would you...?'

'Just wanted to put the idea in your head.'

Daniel stared for a moment and then huffed out a painful laugh. 'Damn. You were such a nice kid when we found you.'

'I'm surprised you even remember.'

Daniel remembered. Most of his work outside of raids and infiltrations had been for Abstergo's Lineage and Research Acquisition department: namely, tracking down living descendants of prominent Assassins or those with "useful" genetic memories and obtaining them for use by Warren Vidic and his team. His assignment to Desmond Miles' case had been for the LRA, and two years prior he had been tasked with finding a descendant of, among other high-profile figures, the infamous 'prophet' Ezio Auditore da Firenze.

The Assassin in question had originally shown up on their radars after he somehow managed to infiltrate Abstergo's headquarters and break into the office of Alan Rikkin himself, stealing a number of important files related to the Animus project. The kind of skill required to carry out such an operation had impressed Warren Vidic, almost as much as the operation itself had infuriated him, and after investigating Kaczmarek's ancestry he'd instructed Daniel to "track that little bastard down and drag him back here".

'It bothered me,' Daniel revealed. 'It bothered me that you were so easy to find, so easy to capture.'

The chase had almost been disappointing. The guy had been in his apartment, for God's sake. He'd actually been asleep when Daniel and his team burst in, and as they dragged him out onto the streets, half-dressed and shivering in the cold February dawn, he'd simply said, "Please don't hurt me, I'll do whatever you want, I swear, don't hurt me" in a frightened, honest voice. He hadn't struggled or fought at all on the long journey to Italy, instead remaining mute unless spoken to and staring out of the window whenever one was available.

It had felt wrong. Daniel must have helped to track and capture a dozen Assassins by that point, and not one of them had gone down without a fight. He'd heard the stories about Auditore, and the rumours of Kaczmarek's break-in, and had been gearing himself up for a proper chase with a thrilling battle at the end of it. The easy surrender had left a bad taste in his mouth.

This new Clay Kaczmarek, however, looked a lot more promising. There was something dark and broken and manic behind his eyes, a jitteriness to his stare which implied that he was seeing multiple versions of reality and gripping the steering wheel tight to stay focused on the correct one. He had the look of a dog deciding whether or not to bite the hand reaching towards it. Daniel would call him improved, though he knew that few would agree.

Accepting that water was off the menu, Daniel tried angling for information. 'What happened?' he asked. 'I remember being in the car, but things get a bit fuzzy after that.'

'Bill and the team were following you. They managed to intercept you at a crossroads. They intercepted you pretty hard, in fact. There's a nasty dent in the front of the van now.'

'The driver, and the other guard?'

'Dead.'

'Right.' It was all coming back to him now, in bits and pieces. Daniel drew his brows together in concentration. 'I shot someone,' he remembered abruptly.

'Shaun.'

'Did I kill him?'

'No. He's going to be fine.'

'Shit.' Daniel pulled a face. 'That's embarrassing. Taken captive without a single casualty. How did Bill Miles find us, anyway?'

'Desmond has an implant.'

Now that was embarrassing. Daniel had even overheard the two of them talking about some kind of implant, but he'd been negotiating his way around a fifty foot drop at the time and had been too distracted to analyse the conversation. Now that his clarity of thought was returning, however, he was beginning to get an idea of the kind of welcome he would face upon his return to Abstergo. He'd been given two "second chance" missions and failed both of them miserably. He'd probably be stuck doing paperwork for the rest of his career, Rikkin having decided that even speech-giving was too difficult a task. What inspiration could the new recruits find in an habitual fuck-up?

'So,' he said, trying to stave off such thoughts. 'Why are you here, Kaczmarek? You on guard duty?'

Clay shook his head. 'No, they don't trust me with guard duty. I'm crazy, remember? The others don't know I'm here.'

'Why are you here?'

'I came here to kill you.'

Daniel experienced an odd sensation, as though his entire body had been put on pause. Clay continued.

'I waited for a time when I knew the sedatives would be wearing off. I wanted you to be awake when it happened. I wanted ... I don't know. Vengeance, maybe.'

'You wanted to take those two years out of my hide?'

'Something like that.'

'So why haven't you?'

Clay stared at him for a long time before he answered. 'When I got here, I stopped at the door for a second. To psych myself up to it, you know. And I looked over, I looked down the corridor, and I saw Bill Miles, and he saw me. He stopped, just for a second, then he moved quickly out of sight.' Clay bared his teeth. 'He saw me, and he knew why I was here and what I was planning to do, and he left. See, Rebecca managed to get the Shard off you and knock you out, and then she sort of stood over you insisting that we should try to question you, that we couldn't just kill you while you were sleeping. Not very noble, see. So we brought you back here with us. But Bill doesn't want you here. He wishes that you'd been killed in the car crash. He doesn't want to have to deal with you. You're an unnecessary burden that he can't get rid of without losing face. But...' His let the sentence hang, waiting for Daniel to catch up.

It took a few seconds, but he did. 'But if you break in here and kill me then Bill's problem gets solved, and he didn't even have to lift a finger.'

'Exactly. They can all stand around over your corpse feigning regret and saying how they should have kept a closer watch on the crazy guy, but no one will mourn you. Bill Miles gets his obstacle removed, and it's all nice and clean and simple.' That smile was back, the smile that was devoid of happiness but full to the brim with sick humours. 'Do you know that it was Bill who organised my kidnapping? Told me it would all be fine, that they would get me out as soon as I got my hands on the information.'

Daniel woke up a little more at that. 'Of course,' he said. 'That's why you didn't fight.'

Clay didn't seem to be listening. 'I'm not going to kill you, Daniel,' he said, speaking quickly now, as though he'd just heard the ticking of a bomb. 'I'm not going to kill you just because Bill Miles wants me to. That's what they all want - these leaders, these old men. Miles, Vidic, Rikkin. They want us all to kill each other so that their lives will be easier. They dress it up in doctrine and rhetoric and pretty words and turn the whole thing into this grand fucking narrative with Templars against Assassins in a war as old as time, but we're nothing but pawns to them, Daniel. We're pieces on the board in someone else's game of chess.' He laughed shakily, delighted by his own analogy. '"Move the lunatic two spaces to B4 so that he can take out the Master Templar and check."

'Well fuck that. I won't die for them. I won't kill for them. Not any more.'

Daniel thought this over while Clay caught his breath. Finally he asked, 'You know, if you really want to piss Bill off, you should let me go.'

Clay grinned. 'I'm not that crazy.'

'My life flashed before my eyes. It was terrifying, yet at the same time strangely liberating. I feel like a man who has looked Death himself in the face and said "no, not today!"'

'Oh yeah, man. You were in some really big trouble. I feel your pain.'

Shaun glared over suspiciously at Desmond, whose voice was still a little muffled by a fat lip and whose stitches and dressings were being checked over by Rebecca. Drawing himself up to his full height, and then wincing as the movement tugged the bullet graze on his right bicep, the historian snapped back, 'It's not a competition, Desmond.'

'But if it was, I'm pretty sure Desmond and Clay would be lifting the trophy between them,' Rbecca commented, swiping antiseptic over a long, deep cut on Desmond's forehead. 'At least, they would if either of them were in a state to do heavy lifting.'

'I'm sorry, Rebecca. Was my near-death experience not dramatic enough for you?'

'I think that maybe it was the shot in the arm you needed,' Rebecca replied, making no effort to disguise her grin.

'O-ho. Yes, I see what you did there. Very witty.'

Bill entered the room, the Shard of Eden held by its broken chain in his hand. He, Shaun and Rebecca had walked away from the car crash relatively intact, the Templar's fancy modern car being no match for the sturdy tank of the Assassins' van. The front windshield had splintered badly when they rammed into the car's bonnet, which had made driving to the safe house something of a challenge. They were currently holed up in a large but slightly run-down building on the outskirts of a fishing village about twenty miles up the coast from St Petersburg. There were beds and an emergency stash of food, but there was also a layer of dust over the place and the Assassin team who were supposed to have been camped out there were gone. It hadn't been a pleasant welcome.

'You're all done. Just don't do too much jumping around for the next couple of days and you should heal up OK,' Rebecca assured Desmond, packing away the first aid kit. To Bill she said, 'How are things going with our latest artefact?'

'I've been testing it out,' Bill explained. 'It's very interesting. I assumed at first that the shield would only resist metal objects, but it seems that it's actually capable of repelling anything that qualifies as a threat. Slow-moving objects are permitted to pass through the barrier, but anything above a certain velocity gets thrown back. More importantly, however, is this particular feature.'

Bill pulled a lighter out of his pocket, flicked the lid off and then sparked up a flame. He then moved the flame close to the Shard (Shaun made a small protesting noise of indignation at this threat to a valuable piece of history) and demonstrated how the fire flattened and bent around the piece of golden metal, never quite touching it. Closing the Piece of Eden inside his fist, Bill then brought the lighted towards his own skin, whereupon the flame cringed away before being extinguished entirely.

'Holy wow,' Rebecca breathed. 'It resists extreme temperatures. That would explain why some of the First Civs managed to survive the original solar flares. If they managed to get their hands on a Shard, they could have used it to shield themselves.'

Desmond ran this over in his head and looked up suddenly at his father, heartrate quickening. 'What's the range of this thing? Could we use it to...'

'To shield the entire planet?' Shaun interrupted witheringly. 'It would be like trying to hold back an ocean with a cocktail umbrella.'

'He has a point, Shaun,' Rebecca said. 'Now that we have the basic principle, all we would need to do is amplify the effects...'

'Oh, is that all we would need to do, Rebecca? Just amplify the effects of a single magic amulet to account for an entire planet. Great, you figure out how to do that and I'll rustle up some hot chocolate.'

'But we already know how to do it!' Desmond said excitedly. 'At least, we know it's possible.' He raised his eyebrows meaningfully at Rebecca.

'Right,' she said, immediately latching onto the same idea as Desmond. 'Of course, Eye Abstergo! The Templars worked out a way to duplicate the effects of the Apple on a global scale by placing it in a satellite and broadcasting the signal. It was all ready to launch until their Piece of Eden was destroyed.'

'Oh my God,' Shaun said slowly, looking up at Desmond in amazement as if unable to credit that he'd managed to think of it first. 'That could actually work. Assuming they tuned their technology to be compatible with the energy produced by the Pieces of Eden, they could use the same principle to project the Shard's protection.'

'There's just one problem with that plan,' Bill cut in. He'd been wearing an increasingly dark expression as the conversation progressed. 'The Assassins don't have anywhere near the resources required to build and launch a satellite like that, even if we somehow managed to get our hands on the plans for it. Certainly not in under two months.'

Desmond bit his lip and braced himself before speaking. 'We don't have to build our own satellite,' he pointed out. 'The satellite already exists.'

Bill scoffed. 'Are you suggesting that we somehow break into the launch facility, figure out how to correctly place the Shard within the satellite and make the necessary adjustments, then launch the thing before Abstergo's private army of guards tears us all to shreds?'

'No,' Desmond replied stubbornly, looking his father in the eye. 'That wasn't what I was suggesting.'

A silence fell over the group as each of them processed Desmond's unspoken suggestion. Rebecca glanced over at Shaun, who was running a hand through his hair and looking deeply troubled. Bill, however, was shaking his head emphatically.

'No. No. We just found the Shard, and you want us to hand it over to the Templars? That's insane. As if they didn't have enough power already!'

'What if we told them about the solar flares?' Desmond persisted, standing up from where he had been perched on the edge of the table. 'We have the evidence to prove it. We could send them the logs from the Animus, the warnings from Those Who Came Before, the memory that Clay uncovered!'

'What's to say they don't already know?' Bill countered harshly. 'Maybe they were planning to hide underground and let the world burn. It would be a fresh start for them, allowing them to design a New World according to their own philosophy.'

'That doesn't make any sense! Why would they plan to launch a global mind control device if they knew that everyone was just going to die anyway? Besides, Minerva and the others went out of their way to make sure that the Templars were kept in the dark.'

'And why do you think that was?' Bill snapped. 'Their plans deliberately excluded the Templars. They had another plan, Desmond, and I think that you know what it is!'

Desmond clenched his jaw. He hadn't told his father about Juno showing him the location of the Grand Temple. He felt, deep in his gut, an instinct telling him that going there would be wrong, but he also knew that it was what Bill would want to do. His only option was to feign ignorance as to Juno's plans, but he had never been particularly good at concealing things. He'd been asked, as soon as he woke up after the car crash, what the goddess had said to him. He'd said, "Nothing important," but had been unable to maintain eye contact whilst speaking, and so Bill had immediately known that he was lying.

'What are you hiding, Desmond?' Bill pressed on, frustration clear in his voice. 'If there's already some kind of plan in place to stop the solar flares, then we need to use it.'

'I told you, I don't know anything. But even if I did, I wouldn't trust them. In case you've forgotten, their plans didn't really work out last time. Besides, you saw how Adam and Eve ran from them, that weird factory that they ran through. It looked to me like the First Civs were no better than slaves, and you want to put our fate in the hands of their masters?'

'We don't have a choice.'

'Yes, we do!'

'We are not working with the Templars, Desmond! I refuse to hand them another weapon.'

'The entire world is about be destroyed, for fuck's sake, can't you put aside your petty differences for one second...?'

'Petty?' Bill interrupted, his eyes blazing, and Desmond realised that he might have gone too far. 'These people and their organisation have slain thousands upon thousands of men and women...'

'Sounds like another organisation I know.'

'They believe that liberty and free will are obstacles to progress, Desmond.' Bill took a couple of steps closer to his defiant son. 'You think that Those Who Came Before might have dangerous motives? We know that the Templars do. Whose side are you on, Desmond?'

Desmond was about to retort that he was on whatever side allowed the human race to survive, but he realised that it was pointless. He'd had this argument with his father before. Alright, perhaps not this specific argument, but he'd had a hundred more like it and they all ended the same way. He turned to the other two for support. 'Alright, let's vote on it. What do you two think?'

Shaun and Rebecca looked a bit alarmed at being put on the spot. Unsurprisingly, Shaun was the first to speak. 'Well, I ... We've come this far by following these messages from Those Who Came Before. I can't say I believe in the whole fate angle, but we've seen first-hand how advanced their technology was. If anyone knows how to stop the solar flares, I imagine that they would.' He sat back, visibly relieved at having stated his own position and looking pointedly at Rebecca.

She had been staring at the floor thoughfully, and continued to do so for a few long seconds before finally looking up. 'I think we should at least contact Abstergo. Explain the situation to them and see if they'd be open to a temporary alliance. I know our ideologies are kind of incompatible but I'm pretty sure we can all get behind the idea of not burning to death. Besides, the Shard isn't nearly as powerful as the Apple, not in a destructive sense. It was designed for defensive purposes. Of all the artefacts that the Templars already have their hands on, it would probably be the least useful to them in a world-conquering sense.' She noticed the way that Bill was staring at her disbelievingly and shrugged her shoulders. 'Sorry, Bill, but I think Desmond's right. We have to try anything that might work.'

The silence stretched out uncomfortably. Two of them were for the idea, and two of them against it. Technically, Bill could pull rank and forbid any communication with the Templars, but in a sense their true leader was not Bill but Desmond. He had apparently been chosen by Those Who Came Before as the saviour of the world, and he was the only one among them capable of properly using the Pieces of Eden. Bill could command all he wished, but if Desmond refused then there was little to be done.

'Alright,' Bill said heavily. 'But we still have the challenge of actually contacting the Templars in the first place. I don't exactly have Alan Rikkin on speed-dial.'

'Maybe not,' Desmond said with a small grin. 'But I know someone who probably does.'