Chapter 2: Lemures

Tales of Ise 136:

Today too I have been sleepless,
Remembering hours spent
In tense anticipation,
Waiting for someone
Who never came.

He had vanished before their eyes. Peter had disappeared as they looked at him, even as he spoke, exhorting both sides, both his natal world and his adopted world, to work together to prevent the war that would inevitably destroy both.

And then he was gone.

Olivia had been the first to react, running to the spot where he had been, gone as if never there.

The Secretary of Defense had brought in the most sensitive scientific instruments he had access to. The lingering traces of Peter Bishop could be found from the machine to the spot on the floor where he had been standing, and an unusual pattern of low-level radiation indicated that something had happened at that spot, something on the quantum level. Other than that, there had been no clue to where he had gone.

The disruptions on both sides had immediately quieted as a result of the machine creating a permanent connection point between them. Walter's calculations indicated it acted as a kind of anchor, though he hadn't yet reasoned out how permanent the effect would be.

And his equations didn't tell him where his son had gone.

Since Peter went away, Walter did nothing but calculations. The boards and paper in his lab were covered with them. He fell asleep on a cot in the lab, just long enough to allow him to work again. He would have forgotten to eat if Astrid didn't bring him food.

While Walter looked into the theoretical, abstract, Olivia turned toward the concrete. She went over every single fringe case, anything even remotely related to the Pattern, that she had access to, both in Broyles' records and the files Nina Sharp gave her access to. She looked for anything possibly related to disappearing people throughout history: the Mary Celeste, the Roanoke colony, even Ambrose Bierce. The problem with learning about unsolved cases was that they didn't give a lot of answers.

She was reading an old issue of Fate magazine in the lab sometime well after midnight. Walter, who had been up for three days straight, had lost consciousness on his cot.

Besides herself and the sleeping Walter, and the sleeping cow, the lab was empty.

Which made her think she was imagining things when she saw movement in her peripheral vision. She looked up, and sure enough, there was nothing there.

She relaxed and went back to reading.

Then she heard something clink.

She spun around, gun in hand.

There was a woman standing in the shadows. A woman she didn't know.

"Who the hell are you?" Olivia asked. She also wondered how she'd gotten in there: she hadn't heard the door open. And wasn't the door locked? Had she fallen asleep?

The woman didn't react. The clink had been a silver coin between her fingers. "This was his, wasn't it?"

Olivia, who was now standing with her gun outstretched, took a few steps closer to the woman.

She was tall and skinny, and pale, with long dark hair, wide dark eyes, a black sweatshirt, and jeans. She seemed completely unfazed by the gun.

"Yes, it was. Who are you?" Olivia repeated.

The woman looked up, her eyes locked on hers. Even in the dim light, Olivia could discern something eerie about those eyes, like a secret. "You can call me Alia." She flipped the silver coin across her fingers.

"Put that down," Olivia ordered.

She didn't. "Amazing, the hold our belongings have over us, especially if they're sentimental. Ever wonder if something we own gets imprinted with some kind of signature from us, like maybe when we care about something, look at it, touch it, it forges a connected to it. I suppose if that happens, you could use something that belongs to a person to find them, like a bloodhound catching a scent." She finally put the coin down, next to a black chess piece, a queen.

"What do you want?"asked Olivia.

"There will come a day when you'll be offered a choice. When that day comes, I want you to remember this."

Olivia heard the door unlock. She glanced behind her. The door opened, and Astrid entered.

Astrid stared at her, then at the gun she still held outstretched. "Olivia, what's going on?"

Olivia looked back at where the woman had been standing, but she was gone, gone so completely it was like she was never there.

"Did you see a woman here?" she asked.

Astrid closed the door behind her and took a few steps into the lab, looking around, then glancing at Olivia. She'd seen too much to dismiss the idea that someone else had been there, but other than Olivia and the still-asleep Walter, there was no one there, and sleep deprivation was another, slightly likelier explanation.

"No. Did you fall asleep?"

"She was talking to me. She was right here, and then she was gone. Just like that."

"Just like Peter," Astrid added.

Olivia went to the spot where the mysterious woman had been standing. On the table there was Peter's silver coin and the black queen.

She picked it up and looked at it.

"Where did that come from?" Astrid asked.

"She left it. I think she left it."

They both stared at it for a moment. The windows were beginning to turn blue with predawn light.

"Who was she?" Astrid finally asked.

"She said her name was Alia. what I want to know is...what was she."

"Do you think she was an observer?"

Olivia shook her head. "She didn't act like them. And I've never seen one of them just disappear like that."

"A ghost?"

Without answering, Olivia picked up Peter's coin. She could almost feel his touch still lingering on it. "I think I might know how to find him."