"Come on, get up. We don't have much time." Esther's head was hanging like a wilted flower and her hands were on her hips, as though she had just finished a race to get to her. Helena shifted to make room for her on the step. She didn't understand the hurry. Esther's voice was ragged, and there had been a small gasp at the end of her words, as though she barely had the strength to say them. Her head tilted up, and her eyes fixed on Helena's. As her thoughts scudded and broke apart, like clouds captured in time-lapse, Helena felt she knew that gaze intimately, but she couldn't remember who had pinned her with it before. Not the one with the green eyes. . . that one could look intently, even fiercely at her, but there was always warmth in those eyes. . . .
"Did she. . . Myka." There, the name had come to her. "Did Myka send you?"
"Didn't have to." Esther was trying to pull her up. "Doesn't look like there's much to you, but you're a solid one," she grunted. "Get up, Smarty Pants."
"I don't think I can." With Esther tugging on her arms, Helena couldn't cover her head with them, protect herself from the birds that continued to swoop toward her, birds that sounded like people she had known long ago, their cries more human than not, but angry, so angry with her. She wouldn't be afraid if there was only one, but there were so many. . . .
"You have to, because you're the one who knows what to do." With another grunt, Esther pulled Helena to her feet.
She tottered and then, freeing herself from Esther's grasp, she began to descend the steps. She needed to find some place where she could get away from the birds. They were distracting her so that she couldn't think, but there was a message. . . something she needed to hear or read. She needed a building with computers and phones, not this vacant hulk. Why was she here, anyway? She felt a hand grabbing at her arms again, and she brushed it aside. Helena heard the slap of tennis shoes beside her on the steps and saw from the corner of her eye a figure in blue jeans with a long white braid pass her only to stop two steps lower down and fold her arms across her chest, like a crossing guard forbidding her access to the street.
"She's counting on you, and I know you don't want to disappoint her."
Who was counting on her? This woman, this. . . Esther. Yes, Esther. Not Myka. Myka was younger and very pretty. Had she told Myka that? She had a phone, yes! She would find her phone and call Myka and tell her about the birds and tell her that she was very pretty. Helena patted her pockets but couldn't feel the oblong shape of her phone. "I can't find my phone," she said pleadingly to Esther.
"You don't need your phone. You can talk to Myka later, when you're done here." Helena felt Esther's hands on her arms again, one hand slipping down to circle her wrist and tug her down the remaining steps. At the bottom, Esther began to drag her toward the side of the building. Helena dug her feet into the ground, and Esther turned and peered into her face. "Do you remember why you wanted in this building? I need you to remember." Esther was panting although they hadn't been running. But it was hot, very, very hot - and noisy. The sky was filled with birds. Helena didn't have to look up to know that. "He's very loud, that used car salesman. Do you remember me telling you that's what I hear when I'm in Ellis? He hasn't ever been this loud, and I'm having a hard time shutting him out. You have to start working with me, Helena, now."
She was disappointing Esther, Helena realized, and she didn't want to disappoint her. She didn't want to disappoint Myka either. But it was so hard to hear anything but the birds, she fretted resentfully, they didn't understand. . . . There was a new voice but a familiar one. She had heard it many times before; she didn't know how she knew that, but she knew it was true. She had heard it when she was sitting on a bench beside an African-American woman, an African-American woman in an oddly formal suit for such a warm day. The woman was speaking to her, quietly, calmly, but the eyes above those moving lips were immovable in their disdain. Helena flushed and wanted to turn away, but it was as if the woman held her head fast in order to speak directly into her ear -
I was less worried about your soul when you were planning to end the world. At least then you still felt the world was worth taking on.
You've become, what, an appraiser of Victorian-era antiques and memorabilia? I assume you must be able to do that in your sleep. A woman of your talents ought to ask more of herself.
Every agent, every caretaker has done things that do not rest easy on her conscience. The measure of her is in how willing she is to carry that burden.
A pause.
You're not measuring up, Helena.
The old crone. It was what came to Helena first. Then, Irene.
In a great flapping of wings, the birds retreated, squawking discontentedly as Helena clutched Esther's shoulders. "I have to get into the school. . . and you have to talk to me."
"What do you think I'm doing?" Esther demanded.
"Give me something to focus on." The birds were hovering, she could hear their cries, which were becoming more distinct, individualized. She shouldn't be listening to them, but one sounded like a little girl sobbing. Christina, she needed to find Christina and comfort her. No, no, no, Christina was dead, she had been dead for . . . . Helena noticed the wrinkles crosshatching and scoring Esther's face. Christina had been dead for longer than Esther had been alive. She released Esther's shoulders only to press her temples between her hands. "Tell me. . . tell me about Ruth Ridley. She's a relative of yours, isn't she?" She tried to smile at Esther, but she felt it freeze into a grimace as Christina's sobbing became louder and more insistent. "And help me find a way in."
Esther yanked at Helena's wrist. "The idiots padlocked the front door but didn't do anything to the side door. The lock's been broken for years." They went around the corner of the school in an awkward half-jog, Esther tugging at her every time Helena slowed. The lawn hadn't been maintained, and Helena tripped over uneven patches of crabgrass and thistles; it was hard to keep her footing as the birds were becoming louder, Christina's sobs mingling with Lebecque's screams, both rising and falling in rhythm with the pulsing in her head. "She was always Ruth Eustis to me. She was married by the time I was old enough to remember who she was." Esther sharply pulled at Helena's arm to force her to stumble up the step to the side door. "You wanted to know about Ruth Ridley," she shouted, wrenching at the door with her free hand. It ground against the cement, opening only a few inches. "Damnit, Smarty Pants, stop woolgathering and help me with the door."
Helena heard the exasperation, and the fear, but Esther's voice was becoming lost among the birds'. She was shaking her head, trying to shake Esther's voice free, when Esther took her hand and crimped her fingers around the door. Helena stopped shaking her head and obediently began to pull at the door, the scraping of the metal partially drowning out the sounds of the birds. "She helped her brother write a book about the county. They've got a copy of it in the museum in Boise City. Is that why you know about her, because of the book?" Esther was bumping against her as they struggled with the door, her hands becoming tangled with Helena's, her nails scratching and digging into Helena's skin as she fought to widen the opening. "Don't you go off to la-la land on me. Tell me, do you know her because of the book? We always used to think of it as Joe's book, 'cause it's mainly his."
- I don't understand why you're offended. I wanted to ensure that your contributions to our mutual creation were known, so, yes, I named you in the acknowledgments.
- You are my dearest sister, and I don't think it's patronizing. I also thought the sentence 'Without you, H.G. Wells wouldn't be half the man he is' rather clever.
- Would you prefer 'Without you, H.G. Wells wouldn't be half the writer he is'? I can see you don't like that either.
- I don't think 'Without you, H.G. Wells wouldn't exist' is hardly fair. He's as much mine as he is yours. More so, in fact. I'm the one who takes your far-fetched ideas and makes something comprehensible of them. I'm the one who convinces the publishers that people will want to read about a time traveler and your other fanciful creations. Like it or not, it's my face, my life that will be recognized as H.G. Wells'. You will be his 'dearest sister.'
"Like hell," Helena yelled and slammed her shoulder into the door, Esther backpedaling away from the assault. The door groaned and shook but moved only another inch or two, but the additional inch or two was enough for Helena to squeeze through, finding herself in a corridor, at the far end of which was a door. Behind that door was a stairway, she hoped.
Once Esther had negotiated the narrow gap between the door and its frame, Helena took the lead down the corridor. The voices in her head had quieted, no longer a great flock of birds tearing at her mind, but the ghosts whose murmurs she was used to filling the silence. When she had been encased in bronze, there had been no need for the voices to shout; there had been no competing distractions. As she approached the door, she sensed rather than heard a hum. Like the Warehouse's, only more. . . industrial. The corridor was dim, the windows having been boarded over or filled in with brick. No power was coming in, though it was possible that whoever had the artefact had brought in a generator. But Helena had never known an artefact to rely on an external source of energy.
"Do you still need me to talk about Ruth?"
Helena almost jumped at the sound of Esther's voice. "I want you to explain why your family had the misbegotten notion that she wasn't as essential to the book's composition as her brother."
"She always said it was Joe's book, that's why."
"Probably because everyone automatically assumed that he would have been the one to write it. I suppose next you're going to tell me that she was perfectly content to cook her husband's meals and, given the era, to raise their children virtually on her own." She sounded peevish, Helena knew, which didn't lift her to the lofty heights from which she could deliver a lecture on assumptions about 'a woman's place,' but she was unnerved that, so close to the artefact, its effect, its overwhelming effect, had seemingly disappeared. She had never known that to be true of an artefact either.
"You're all full of vinegar," Esther observed, laughing weakly. "You don't hear what you were hearing before, do you?"
Helena stopped and turned around, trying to discern Esther's expression in the shadows. "Hasn't it gotten better for you?"
"Can't say that it has. That used car salesman, he's getting pretty persuasive."
"Then perhaps you should listen to my voice." Helena touched Esther's elbow and leaned in, trying to look into her eyes.
"Eh, you just like to hear yourself talk. I'll be better once you find what you're looking for. So get to it."
Helena saw Esther's hands move in what looked like a shooing motion. Letting her hand trail down Esther's arm, in what she hoped would be received as a comforting gesture, Helena turned back to the door and tentatively twisted the knob. It opened onto an equally dim stairwell that appeared to climb to the third floor. She placed her foot on the first step, and the hum that was more sensation than sound felt heavier, as if someone had suddenly thrown a blanket around her shoulders. An iron blanket. Five steps, and she felt her that her lungs had been collapsed like the bellows of an accordion. They weren't even to the landing between the first and second floors. Three more steps, and once on the landing, Helena sagged against the wall, mouth open, wheezing.
"What's going on with you?" Esther crouched beside her. Helena couldn't be sure, because Esther's dark eyes seemed to blend into the shadows, but her gaze seemed unfocused, her eyes traveling in all directions, and Helena, raising her hand with difficulty and pushing it through the wet cement of the air, pinched Esther's chin between her thumb and forefinger.
"Stay with me. We're almost there." Helena wasn't sure that was true, but this seemed the appropriately perilous moment that, in the movies, would see one of the doughty adventurers encouraging his companions to soldier on. Not infrequently the one who did the encouraging was dead by the end of the film, but she wasn't going to concentrate on that. As Esther's eyes wandered away from hers again, Helena drew Esther's face closer to her own. "You haven't finished telling me about Ruth." She let go of Esther and grabbed the handrail, pulling herself up. It was no easier to breathe; she felt as if she were trying to suck air through a straw, one punctured with holes. But she also wasn't going to concentrate on that. Where was that famed British pluck, that cheerful perseverance in the face of disaster? Everything came down to putting one foot in front of the other, then doing it again. Righty-ho.
The sense of being compressed was intolerable. She set her foot on the step above only to feel that the school would be collapsed, any moment, like her old room in the B&B, she and Esther flattened inside of it. Eons from now, in Warehouse 21, another Myka would open this building like a pop-up book, she and Esther and the stairwell flipping up in the center. She looked down and realized that her other leg was still on the step below. The leg looked like hers, but it felt as heavy as an elephant's. She couldn't lift it high enough to clear the top of the step, and her foot banged into the edge before she could draw it even with her other foot. She forgot how many times she repeated the process, Esther's voice, thin and wavering, managing to rise above the rasp of Helena's breathing and the scratching of her shoes on the grit that covered the stairwell in a fine layer as she continued to haul herself up, step by step.
"Ruth married a professor. He was older, but they were happy, as far as I know. She had a couple of kids, a boy and a girl."
Helena would have rolled her eyes, but they were weighted down by sandbags. They were on the twentieth step, she thought, but she couldn't be sure since she had lost count. She couldn't move her legs from one step to the next and count them as well. They were past the second floor, but not by much. She wanted to encourage Esther to keep talking, but her mouth was too busy breathing. The hum was everywhere - around her, on top of her, in her. Invisible, it threatened to pulverize her, yet it filled her lungs like water. She was being crushed to death, but all that enveloped her was air; she was drowning, but there wasn't a drop of water. She hadn't experienced such remorseless annihilation since she had been bronzed.
Esther had fallen silent. Helena wasn't sure if she could straighten and turn around or, having done that, whether she could turn back. It was all she could do to cling to the handrail. But if she let something happen to Esther, she wouldn't want to make it to the top of the stairwell, she wouldn't care about retrieving the artefact. She incrementally shifted her feet, feeling like a second hand on a watch that was dying for want of a fresh battery. Tick. . tick. . . tick . . . . . .tick. . . . . . . . . tick. Her waist and legs were facing downstairs, while her arms were still slung along the handrail, but she could see Esther, who was slowly going down the steps.
"You can't go." She hadn't said it very loudly, and she had said it mainly into her arm, but Esther stopped, with one foot dangling in the air. Esther had heard her, but whether she was still able to listen was something else.
"I've got to," Esther said wearily. "I've got to go. . . look at something, I think. You'll be all right." Helena's plea wasn't stopping her.
"You can't go," Helena repeated. Esther hesitated. "You can't leave me alone." She released the handrail and swayed on the step, the unbearable weight pressing down on her, almost tipping her over, but if she couldn't persuade Esther to stay, if she couldn't work her own magic against the artefact, then she might as well tumble down the steps. "I won't survive it again." Her cheeks drew in as she struggled to breathe. "You think you can stand the . . . isolation. You have your . . . ghosts. . . to keep you company." She forced her lips into a wry smile, hoping that her joke, however feeble, might evoke a response from Esther. "But they have weight, your memories, your thoughts. Your. . . ." She fought for a word, something plainer but more encompassing than 'consciousness.' It was too hard to keep smiling, to keep breathing. "Your . . . youness. . . has weight." Helena tried to point to her chest, but she didn't have the strength to lift her arm. "At first, it's just a rock in your chest, but as time passes, it grows larger, heavier." Whispering to herself, she added, "That's how you know that time has passed, the weight gets larger and heavier."
Esther tugged on her braid, looking down the stairs and then up at Helena. "Why did they do it to you?"
"Because I asked them to. Because I was still so proud. Only the worst for the worst." Helena closed her eyes, but it was a child's trick, this summoning of a darkness that, in the end, bore no relation to the darkness of the bronze. "You can't get away from it. . . from that sense of being crushed, because it's you. It's only you." She opened her eyes to see that Esther had turned toward her and was, with deliberation and effort, climbing the step in front of her. "I couldn't. . . I couldn't. . . I let it. . . ." How to tell her that one day, one year, after fifty years - she didn't know - she had let the weight carry her over the edge? That her pride was no match for her madness? The remorse she had felt at her actions gone, the recriminations in the voices lost within the screaming. She had expected to spend an eternity contemplating the horror of her crimes; stripping her of such conceit, the bronze had taken her mind and riddled it, leaving her only horror.
Esther continued climbing, her breaths sounding as loud and ragged as Helena's. She spared another glance at where Helena stood or, more accurately, wobbled, and gasped at her, "Hang on, I'm almost there." Periodically she would brush her arm against an ear, as if she were trying to drive away an insect buzzing around her head. Two steps below Helena, Esther reached for her hand. "I'm here. Can you turn around and get to the next step?"
Helena scuffled, slowly, toward the end of the step and grabbed the handrail. "I can get myself up the steps. You need to spend your strength on shutting out your used car salesman."
They climbed the remaining steps together, Esther able to mount each one faster than Helena, who was so bowed as she pulled herself along the handrail that she was practically on her knees. The encouragement Esther offered her was her sparse summary of Ruth Ridley's life, her "I'm not sure about that" and "So I've heard" outnumbering actual facts. Which did nothing to encourage Helena until Esther approached the end of her story. "Became a birder in her old age. Took to lobbying the government to preserve the prairies and wetlands. Must've got some powerful people to listen to her because she got big chunks of land in the eastern part of the state protected as bird habitats. The largest of them is known as the Eustis Preserve."
The third floor landing was just above her. Esther was already on it, swaying slightly but grinning down at her. "And there you were thinking all she did was pick up after her husband and kids."
Helena had reached the end of the handrail. She had nothing to propel her up and over the edge. She could sink to the cement and crawl the rest of the way up, or she could ask the teetering Esther to help her. Or, the intolerable pressure notwithstanding, she could lunge. It was dramatic, it was ridiculous, so, of course, she lunged the few inches of space separating her from the landing, relying on her elephant legs to give her the necessary lift, and not surprisingly, her feet didn't clear the edge. Her arms began to windmill, slowly, as she tried to maintain her balance, but Esther shot her hand out and grabbed a fistful of linen shirt and yanked Helena to her. They stumbled against a wall, and as Helena staggered back, one step, two, she protested, "I wouldn't have fallen down the stairs, you know."
Trying to gulp down air, Esther hiccuped, "Could've fooled me."
Helena's head was below her waist, her hands splayed on her thighs. The sense that she was on the verge of being crushed to death hadn't lessened, and she felt that if she completed the retrieval, she would be a couple of inches shorter than she was when she had entered the school, but she forced herself to straighten and give Esther a grateful smile. "Thank you for telling me about Ruth."
Esther lifted a dismissive shoulder, but the casualness of the gesture was belied by the anxiety in her eyes. "I'm out of stories, Smarty Pants, and I'm hanging by a thread, so you better fix things quick."
Helena looked at the exit door. If it was locked. . . .Staring at it, she saw herself in her room at the B&B, standing at the window, hoping she hadn't missed Myka go through her pre-run stretching. She had spent the night reviewing her plans for her trip to Yellowstone, her final trip anywhere, and as she felt an excited flutter in chest at spotting Myka in the garden, the utter absurdity of the situation wasn't lost on her. Behind her, on the desk, was the itinerary of her one-way flight to Bozeman, Montana, and yet she was eagerly watching Myka stretch her hamstrings, as though her day couldn't start properly without a glimpse of long legs and a cascade of hair temporarily restrained by a ponytail holder. In a few days, none of this would exist, they wouldn't exist, yet she couldn't turn away. Then Myka raised her head, looking up at Helena's window, no, not at it but through it, through that Helena, and at her.
- I can't come up if you don't open the door. Open the door, Helena.
Helena did. It noisily objected, but the door swung away from its frame. She was confronted with another corridor, but there was an open doorway halfway down it. Fumbling behind her for Esther's hand, she led them out of the stairwell. The iron blanket remained on her shoulders, her lungs were still working to draw air through the eye of a needle, but she was upright, more or less, and walking, more or less (more, if you didn't notice that she was weaving from side to side); that artefact was hers.
Over a hundred years ago, she had walked, far more steadily, toward the cylinder in which she would soon be encased in bronze. Caturanga was next to it, impassively observing her as she neared it. He would be the one to lock her in and, once the Bronzer was securely sealed, to initiate the process. Perhaps he saw his presence as her repudiation of his selection of her, of the years he had spent training and mentoring her, but she had chosen him because she had trusted no one else. She hesitated before stepping into the cylinder, not because she was afraid but because she thought she should say something to him, though nothing seemed adequate.
- You placed too much faith in me.
She heard something too soft to be a sigh but too strong to be simply an exhalation, the only sign that he was disturbed by what was about to happen.
- You understand yourself so slenderly, Helena. You're a survivor.
- I understand myself well enough. I'm a monster.
- No, sometimes in trying to survive, we do monstrous things. There is a difference.
Survivor and monster, another conundrum. But right now, as she pulled Esther with her into the room, her eyes darting everywhere, seeking what didn't fit, she was focused on being a survivor. The card table in the center didn't fit, the folding chair behind it didn't fit, and the middle-aged man slumped against the back of the chair didn't fit either. Helena put her fingers to his neck; he was warm, and he had a pulse. He needed to be attended to, but he could wait. Helena glanced at the watch on his left wrist; whoever he was, he had made the past 40 minutes among the most miserable of her life.
"Gene Butler," Esther said wonderingly, "what's he doing here?"
"That does seem to be the question." Helena took a neutralizing bag from a pocket of her pants. She had forgotten to bring gloves, but there was little that the artefact could do to her that it hadn't already done, she figured. Pens and notepads bearing the slogan "Better with Butler" littered the table. There were flyers with Butler's picture, in which he was smiling and tipping a cowboy hat, and underneath the photo, he promised to bring back "law and order the way it used to be." She swept them all into the bag, but nothing sparked; she didn't feel a lifting of the omnipresent pressure, and Esther's eyes still showed a tendency to drift. "Who is he?" she asked, trying to say it sharply enough to capture Esther's attention, but it sounded tired and muffled, as if this time she was trying to push her words through mattress ticking rather than wet cement.
Esther had begun wandering the room, which, with the exception of the card table and the man behind it, was bare. The linoleum flooring, cracked and scuffed, once suggested the room had been an office; it bore the imprints of desks and faded brown splotches that resembled coffee stains. "Every election he runs against Don Paulsen for sheriff, and every election he loses," she responded, approaching too close to the doorway for Helena's comfort.
Having cleared the table of objects, Helena scanned Paulsen, seeing nothing in his hands or lap. A tip of gray plastic peeped from a pocket of his sport shirt, and she gingerly removed a toy sheriff's star. When she dropped it into the bag, it sparked violently. She turned her head to make sure that Esther was still in the room. "Feeling better?" It was easier to speak, to breathe, and the iron blanket had dropped from her shoulders.
Esther cautiously nodded. "I don't hear the used car salesman anymore." The look she directed at Helena wasn't quite as piercing as the one Helena remembered from their first encounter at the farm, but it was gaining strength. "How about you?"
"Improving."
The pressure was lessening, but the hum, Helena could still feel it reverberating within her. Taking a deep breath and appreciating every musty-smelling molecule she was inhaling, she set about searching Butler, finding a small black case, similar in size to a ring box, in another pocket. Inside, nestled in a protective material that looked like foam but felt gel-like was an irregularly shaped piece of black glass. Helena took it over to a window and held it up to the sunlight. She thought she could see movement within the glass, as if the fragment were the tiniest of fishbowls and inside fish were swimming up and down, back and forth. She carefully placed it back in the case and snapped it shut. Looking down at the side street, Helena imagined that soon it and every street in Ellis would fill with people, those released from the artefact's hold over them and those arriving to gawk, not to mention state troopers, sheriff's deputies, and Guardsmen. Major Lowry. Helena wearily ran a hand through her hair. He would want to know what she had found in Ellis, and, like the mills of the gods, that rock-like figure would grind her slowly and small. She needed to get Esther and the artefact away from Ellis now. Tucking the case and the worrying object it contained into a side pocket of her tropic-weight pants, which, smeared with dirt and torn at the knees, looked as if they had been worn in a rain forest, she returned to the table, where she had left the neutralizing bag. Esther was at Butler's side, touching his face with gentle fingers.
"I can't hear him," she said. "He needs a doctor."
"I'll see that he gets medical care." Helena placed a hand on Esther's shoulder. "There's nothing we can do for him."
"He's full of hot air, but he's harmless."
Not so much, Helena silently disagreed, as Esther's head tilted toward her, puzzlement written on her face. "He did all this, what happened to the town?"
"Not without assistance." Helena helped Esther to her feet. She picked up the neutralizing bag, questioning the wisdom of what she was about to do. Although it held pens, notepads, flyers, and a plastic star, it was as flat as when she had taken it out. Esther warily regarded it.
"What did he have, a secret weapon or something? Some crazy sci-fi, Area 51 type of thing?" She laughed nervously.
Helena smiled reassuringly. "It can't hurt you or anyone else now. But if people see it, they'll have questions, and there aren't any easy answers." Actually the answer was easy, only nothing anyone would believe. "I need to get it out of this town quickly and discreetly."
"You want me to take it." Esther derisively blew a gust of air between her lips. "Save your bacon, tell you stories, babysit your gizmos. Don't ask much of a person, do you, Smarty Pants?"
"I'll be back to get it. Just don't take anything out of the bag." Helena handed it to Esther and nudged her toward the doorway. "Now go." She had thought about giving Esther the fragment of black glass as well, but decided to keep it herself. She wasn't sure that she knew what the glass was, but she knew she didn't want it anywhere near the artefact.
Esther hadn't advanced much beyond the table when she stopped, as if she had heard something. For a moment, Helena feared that, somehow, the artefact was still working, still sending its message through the goo, either that or there was an artefact she had missed, and she suddenly felt cold in the stifling room. But when Esther turned, there was nothing unfocused about the eyes that met Helena's. "Your friend's in trouble," she said grimly.
Myka. Helena grew even colder. "What kind of trouble?"
"Not sure, but whatever it is, it's big, and she's in the middle of it."
Flying past Esther, tearing down the stairs, Helena tried to remember where she had left her phone. In the SUV, which she had left, still running, on the sidewalk in front of the hardware store. She wasn't laboring any longer under a weight that threatened to crush her; the erratic beating of her heart and the strangled sound of her breathing were the result of her fear. She hadn't let her ghosts grow beaks and talons to tear at her or relived the eternity she had spent in bronze only to lose Myka now. Trouble, she reminded herself, that's what Esther had called it, not danger. Trouble. But the distinction wasn't enough to make her breathe any easier or to cause her to slow down.
She slammed herself against the stuck side door, pushing it open a few more inches, and then she was across the yard and into the street. People were emerging from the bank, a bar, the café, squinting into the sun and calling to one another. A better person than she would go over to them, ask if they were all right, help them to reorient themselves after the time lost to the artefact, but someone who attempted to end the world wouldn't be expected to look after others. Someone who attempted to end the world was a monster, and monsters only looked after themselves. And Myka. So perhaps she wasn't being entirely monstrous, but she wasn't being helpful, certainly not selfless, and damn well not spending another minute in Ellis. The SUV was where she had left it, unmolested if not undamaged. She was one long step away from reaching the opposite side of the street -
"Hey." Again. "Hey." And this time a hand clamped onto her arm. She spun around, almost colliding with a man, unshaven and pale. He gestured limply at the surrounding buildings. "Do you know what happened here?"
"Not a clue," she said quickly. "Sorry." She edged away only to feel the hand locking around her arm again.
"I stopped in the bank to make a deposit last Wednesday," he said plaintively. "Ten minutes ago, I realized I was in front of a computer monitor, cans of Coke and cheese puffs around me, and no memory of what happened." He leaned closer to her, eyes bloodshot and wild. "Today's Wednesday, but it's not the same Wednesday, and I want to know what happened."
"Your guess is as good as mine." Helena smiled apologetically. "I'm sorry, but you need to let go of my arm."
His grip tightened. "You look a little banged up, sure, but you smell like you've showered. I know everyone around Ellis, but I don't know you." He gave her arm a shake. "I bet you know what happened. Why won't you tell me?"
Helena could forcibly free herself, but that would attract only more attention, and since others were beginning to take an interest in them, she didn't want to draw a crowd. She also didn't want to put the man flat on his back, which a firm shove might be enough to do. Though his grip was pinching her arm, he wasn't steady. It was hardly sporting to take out a man who looked every bit like he had lived on Coke, cheese puffs, and little-to-no sleep for a week. Behind him she could see the black and white cruisers of the state patrol. She needed to get to the SUV before the troopers saw her; although she and Myka had met only the two guarding the northern boundary outside the town, she had no doubt all of them were very aware of the two government agents sent in to "fix" Ellis. Having to answer questions now just added to the delay of getting to Myka.
"You forced it out of me," she said in a low voice. "I have it on good authority that the federal government was behind this, experimenting with an anti-terroristic measure that went terribly wrong, I'm afraid." He nodded thoughtfully, as if he had expected such an explanation all along. Or perhaps he was still chewing through "anti-terroristic," she knew she wouldn't be able to get the taste of it out of her mouth for awhile. "If you don't let me go, I won't be able to inform the others."
He didn't ask her who the others were, which was just as well because she hadn't gotten that far in her story. Instead, he relaxed his hold, and she offered him a vaguely conspiratorial jerk of her head, a curt signal that no more should be said about what had gone on in Ellis. He seemed to understand, putting a finger to the side of his nose and winking. She sprinted the short distance to the SUV and heard the soft rumbling of its engine. Throwing herself behind the wheel, she shifted into reverse and prepared to back the car off the sidewalk, only to see one of the cruisers stop behind her bumper. Its lights weren't flashing, but then they didn't have to. She was boxed in. Feeling for the case in her pocket, she took it out and removed the black glass. Protected by the unusual foam and then by the case itself, the object would elicit more interest than she wanted it to have. Loose, in her pocket, it was a trinket, a charm, nothing to merit a second look. As Officer Aaron, the young, helpful one of the two she and Myka had talked with at the barricades, approached the side of the SUV, she waved and stretched her mouth into a wide, friendly smile as she turned the engine off. There was nothing to be gained by being uncooperative.
He motioned for her to get out of the SUV. Blinking, as if she wasn't sure she understood him, she slipped from the seat but didn't move away from the half-open car door. "Beautiful morning, isn't, officer? The sun is shining, and people, well, they're people again, aren't they? A little the worse for wear, especially the poor gentleman I found in the school building over there, but I'm sure medical teams are already on the way. You'll make sure to send one over to the school, won't you?"
"You need to come with us, agent."
Maybe Officer Aaron wasn't a morning person. The round face with the soft, pleasant features was trying to look hard but managed to look only grumpy. He paid no attention to the growing congregation of people on the sidewalks and in the street, looking at themselves and each other in disbelief, more than a few crying and reaching out to hug those closest to them. He was focused on her, as if she had brought the craziness into Ellis rather than ended it. But she kept her smile wide.
"I was on my way back to Agent Bering to make a report. I suppose I couldn't just follow you?" She took a tiny step backward, gesturing at the SUV, and one of Officer Aaron's hands began to inch closer to his duty belt. Bollocks, this was bad.
"If you would get in the car, agent." When she inclined her head in assent, he escorted her to the cruiser and opened the door, ensuring that she was settled on the seat before he shut it.
She gave Officer Nolan the same wide, friendly smile she had given Officer Aaron. Behind large reflective sunglasses, he was observing her in the rear view mirror. "Would you be able to tell me what the police escort is for?" He continued to look at her in the mirror until Officer Aaron joined him in the front seat. Helena tried one more time. "Do you know where Agent Bering is?"
Officer Aaron said, in a tone designed to quash additional questions, "She's on her way to Boise City. You'll see her at the sheriff's office."
The cruiser crept toward the northern end of town, not once stopping, although more than one person came up to slap the car's hood or top to get the officers' attention, shouting, "What the hell went on here?" Other cruisers were parked and the troopers were patiently answering questions. Helena wondered what the official response would be. The troopers' confused expressions suggested that an official response hadn't yet been developed. An ambulance was in front of the bank, and another was working its way down the opposite side of the street; behind it were familiar olive drab trucks, camouflage tarps pulled tight like skin over the cargo areas. Helena expected any minute to see Guardsmen clambering down from the backs of them, carrying out searches at Major Lowry's, or his counterpart's, orders. Where had they been that they could arrive so quickly? Had they been brought in earlier in anticipation of a clean-up after the "military option" had been exercised? She narrowed her eyes, turning to watch them as the cruiser drove through the town's outskirts. She almost missed the CDC team outside the gas station - the cruiser was picking up speed - standing, lost, among the gas pumps, resembling down-at-the-heel astronauts in their dirty, torn hazmat suits. And then they were gone as the cruiser sped down the highway, fence posts and telephone poles whipping past, the greens and browns of the bordering fields and pastures resembling checkerboard squares as they alternated in rapid succession. Helena hoped she might spot Esther on her bicycle, pedaling the artefact to safety, but the cruiser flashed by the turn-off to the farm without Helena seeing anything on the move other than birds circling high overhead. She had had enough of birds for the day.
The officers didn't speak to her again until they arrived at the county building in Boise City, asking her to follow them. They entered the lobby, the officers standing off to one side as Helena was searched, hand searched on this visit, which only emphasized the suspicion she was now under. She had emptied her pockets, but the piece of black glass excited no one's curiosity, although she could have sworn it vibrated in the plastic bowl. The search concluded, her dignity only slightly less rumpled than her clothing - she didn't care about that, not really, because she would willingly subject herself to far worse to find out where Myka was - the officers took her back to an office, not the sheriff's, which was furnished with one table and two chairs set on either side of it.
Major Lowry was sitting on one of the chairs, but 'sitting' couldn't capture the rigidity of his back, straight and held a half-inch away from the back of the chair, or the tension of the arms placed in perfect parallel on the table. Boulders couldn't spring from the earth, not of their own volition, but Helena could imagine Lowry springing from his chair to throttle her, because there was no mistaking the rage in his tight-lipped expression and no way of pretending to miss the swelling along one cheekbone.
"Sit down, Agent Wells," he said, his voice appropriately flint-like.
"I need to make my report to Agent Bering," Helena said, her voice calm but unyielding.
"You can make it to me. Sit down."
Helena suppressed a sigh. Major Lowry would always choose to go through rather than around, which would make him a horrible Warehouse agent. "Agent Bering is the senior agent." Only in a sense but now was not the time to quibble with herself about her choice of words. "I report to her. Where is she?"
"Agent Bering's whereabouts aren't your concern at the moment. Sit down before I sit you down myself." Major Lowry's voice was trembling with fury.
Helena swiftly reviewed her options. She suspected the major was acting without authority, but there was no one in this building who would be willing to confront him. She could disable him, only temporarily, unfortunately, but she didn't know where Myka was - she wasn't completely convinced that Myka was in the building despite what Officer Aaron had said. She was also afraid that the black glass she carried in her pocket might start interacting with an artefact harbored in the museum on the floor above. Who knew what memorable event at the 1925 Cimarron County fair, a tornado or a violent dispute over the awarding of a blue ribbon, might have spawned an artefact? She needed to get out of this room, and the best way to do that was to have Major Lowry, under his own power, release her. She sat down.
"What happened in Ellis?" He tried to keep his voice even, and he steepled his fingers together in an effort to appear composed.
Helena bit back her first response and said quietly, "The anomaly was removed."
"What was this 'anomaly' that was removed?"
"I'm not at liberty to say." As the major's face flushed an alarming red, the swelling turning scarlet, Helena added smoothly, "You'll need to ask the Department of Homeland Security for clearance for that information. Then I will gladly give it to you."
"Let me give you the score, Agent Wells, since you seem to be laboring under a misunderstanding about just how happy your bosses are with you." He pointed to his cheek. "I had the authority if I believed you and Agent Bering weren't going to be effective, to . . .do what I thought necessary to protect this county and the surrounding area. I was going to do just that when Agent Bering slammed my face against the hood of the car and put a gun to my head, threatening to shoot me if my officers carried out my orders." He smiled. "She not only prevented an officer of this country's armed forces from carrying out his duties, she threatened to kill him. Do you have any idea how much trouble she's in?"
Esther hadn't been exaggerating. Helena wanted to close her eyes or put her head in her hands, but she couldn't, wouldn't do that in front of him. "I'm sure you feel you're not at liberty to tell me what you were planning to do, but whatever it was, it would have only made the situation worse, not better, and Agent Bering did what she had to do to prevent that from happening. Homeland Security will take that into account as well."
"Just tell me what it was you found, and I'll let you see her." His smile grew lopsided, sneering. "And let's not pretend, you and I, that you're so anxious to see her because she's the senior agent."
She desperately wanted to see Myka but she wouldn't trade the artefact for it and, confronted with that sneer on his face, she wouldn't give in to this bastard for anything. She hoped not, anyway. "As I told you before, I'm not at liberty to discuss it."
"I guess we're just going to stare at each other across this table, then." He relaxed enough to let his back rest against the chair's back. "Next time you hear a car engine it's going to be the sound of Agent Bering being transported to Oklahoma City."
Helena couldn't stop her mouth from thinning. That was exactly the kind of thing that was going to make her rethink whether she should be protecting a bloody sheriff's star. A toy sheriff's star. She didn't drop her eyes from his, not even when someone knocked at the door. The major, without turning his head, barked at the interruption, grinning at Helena when he heard that the governor was on the line for him.
"Tell Paulsen I'll take it in his office," he said to the soldier, who had features, Helena thought, as young and soft-looking as Officer Aaron's and as equally ill-equipped to assume the stern, unrelenting face of the law. Or, in this case, the United States military. He was scowling at Helena and projecting as much knee-buckling danger as if he had been Drew or one of his friends; she tried to recall if the soldier had been one of the underlings with Major Lowry at the barricades this morning. "Quit growling at Agent Wells," the major amiably chided him. "She's not going anywhere."
Helena allowed herself to groan, but softly, once Major Lowry had left the room. She remembered how tautly Myka had been holding herself, how big the shoulder holster and gun had looked. Normally Myka wouldn't be one to react violently, but it wasn't every retrieval that the military was threatening to blow up, quite literally, in fact. It also hadn't helped matters that Myka and Major Lowry had instantly found the other an irritant, but Myka didn't let irritants and annoyances and pet peeves make her decisions for her, unlike some agents. Helena squirmed in her chair, recalling a retrieval when she had been at 12 that had almost failed as a result of her locking her partner in a cellar. She had been unable to stand his ceaseless chatter. But he was a skilled fighter, which would have stood her in good stead when she encountered the holder of the artefact and his henchman in a very dark, very lonely alley. . . .
The door opened, and she was about to snap at Major Lowry that she wouldn't move until she knew where Myka was, when she realized that it wasn't a boulder in the doorway, but something softer, more like the Michelin man. "Come with me," Sheriff Paulsen said, crooking a finger at her. "I can take you to Agent Bering."
Helena didn't hesitate, running out of the room and following him down the hallway. "I can't let you stay too long. Lowry'll be looking for you, but I can give you a few minutes." He turned into another hallway, which took them to the back of the building. They stopped in front of a secured door with a card reader. He gave Helena an apologetic glance. "Had to put her here. Didn't have any choice." He held his badge to the reader, and the door unlocked. "Go on in, Reed'll take care of you in there."
"Thank you." Helena's brows creased in a question she didn't ask.
Sheriff Paulsen held the door open for her. "You folks stopped what was going on in Ellis without leveling the town, and for that I owe you."
She was in an office with another secured door across from her. At a desk, a deputy was already rising to punch in a code on the keypad. After a loud click, the door automatically swept open. "She's in the first cell on the left. We don't have anyone else in here right now." The door closed behind her.
Myka was pacing the cell, stopping mid-turn when she heard the door and then running to the cell door when she saw Helena. Relief washed over her face, and she squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, they were wet. "Hey," she said in a small, unsteady voice.
Helena was reaching for her through the bars, but Myka didn't come any closer, grinding her palms against her eyes. "So, tell me," she said, fighting to keep her voice controlled. "Tell me about the retrieval."
Helena let the hands that Myka hadn't clutched and pulled to her loosely wrap themselves around the bars. If Myka needed to maintain this distance, act the Warehouse agent, she would let her, for a little while. "It was difficult," she admitted. "I won't go into the details about how difficult, but, thankfully, Esther was there."
Myka laughed and sniffled at the same time. "You know, I didn't - There wasn't time -"
"I know," Helena said. "She had been waiting, I think. Maybe she heard our worrying, maybe she heard someone else's and biked in for the show. But the reason doesn't matter, I wouldn't have been successful without her."
Myka was tearing off sheets of toilet paper by the toilet in the corner of the cell and blowing her nose industriously. When she was finished, she said, her voice more strongly matter-of-fact, "What did you find?"
"A man on the top floor of the school, unconscious. The artefact was a plastic sheriff's star in his shirt pocket." At Myka's frown, Helena continued, "The kind you see packaged with a toy Colt .45 and gun belt, all a child needs for an Old West fantasy. The star wasn't scratched or dirty or worn. It was new, and Esther said he had been unsuccessfully running for sheriff for years."
"Specially replicated for him," Myka said musingly. "That's new, and disturbing." More sharply she asked, "What else did you find?"
Helena hadn't realized until that moment that she wasn't going to tell Myka about the black glass. Not until she knew exactly what it was. The rationalization seemed logical but felt empty, like a lie. "What makes you think that there was something else?" She wanted to wince at her clumsy temporizing. Being around this woman always made her want to listen to her better angels, but she was so out of practice. . . .
But Myka seemed not to notice or, as was probably more to the point, she wasn't ready to let on yet that she knew Helena was being evasive. "Because whatever signal that toy star was emitting or spell it was casting, we could sense it five miles away." She threw the used tissue in the toilet and put her hands on her hips. The no-nonsense posture was slightly undercut by the fact that her eyes were still welling with tears. She impatiently thumbed a tear away and cleared her throat, trying to assume her cool, dispassionate agent face.
"When did you start sensing it?" Helena asked quietly.
"About ten or fifteen minutes after you left. Some of the men started slapping at their ears and necks, complaining about bugs. I didn't hear buzzing, but I heard the sound of water, as if we were near a rapids or a waterfall. Lowry said he was hearing gunfire." Myka begun to tug at her hair, and her expression grew clouded with an anxiety that hadn't completely left her, even with Helena standing in front of her. "One of Lowry's men started running toward where we were standing by the car, shouting that he needed to go into Ellis and stop the noise. That's when Lowry said that we," Myka paused, drawing a connecting line in the air between her and Helena, "you and I were done, and that he was going to finish what we couldn't." She shrugged, as if to suggest that what came next wasn't important. "He's a big man, but I had the element of surprise. I managed to pin him against the hood of the car and put my gun to the back of his neck. I said we were going to wait until you had stopped it. Even the soldier who wanted to drive to Ellis settled down."
"Myka." It was more breath than sound. Helena rested her head against the bars. Myka was regarding her defiantly, using her fingers to squeegee her tears to the sides of her face.
Myka started to laugh, albeit shakily. "I know that half the time you don't know what you're doing, but you always come through in the clutch. That's why I knew you wouldn't kill me in Yellowstone and that you'd figure out the right chess move to save me in Hong Kong. That's why I should have known when we saw Sykes' bomb. . . ." She faltered. "I should have known that you would. . . ." She covered her face with her hands for a few seconds. She rocked back and forth before dropping her hands and giving Helena a wry smile through her tears. "You're thinking I pulled a gun on him because I was trying to save the retrieval, because I was afraid he was going to bomb the town and endanger people far beyond Ellis."
"I'm assuming that it was a consideration, at the very least," Helena said slowly, uncertain where Myka was going. "We're agents, and we've been trained to think about the artefact first." Her smile mirrored Myka's in its wryness. "I'd also like to assume that my well being was a consideration. And that of the good people of Ellis, of course."
"You remember when I told you about knowing that my marriage to Pete was over when Drew was in the hospital?" Myka was returning to the toilet for more toilet paper. "I didn't tell you how I knew or why I knew then." She wiped her eyes, her nose.
"I thought you would tell me when you were ready."
"I thought you would have figured it out by now," Myka said with exasperated indulgence. "You're so blind, Helena." Helena began to protest, but Myka cut her off. "It's true. I remember years ago when we were all watching Titanic and sobbing our eyes out, even Pete, and you were still going on about how the ship should have been better engineered."
Helena wasn't sure why Myka was bringing up one of those ancient movie nights that they had had at the B&B, before Boone, before Yellowstone, except that she needed to work up to telling her whatever realization Drew's illness had caused her to have. Helena was more than willing to help her delay the moment; she felt that her soul – if she had one, if it wasn't as small and hard and wrinkled as a walnut – had been blistered, riven, during her time in Ellis. A weak thing, it couldn't stand up to much more. "It should have been," she objected, eagerly entering into the argument. "Did you never read about the jaw-dropping errors and poor decision-making that went into its construction? And if you're going to lecture me about how I should have been paying attention to the love story instead, it was utterly ridiculous. I'm supposed to believe that had the ship not sunk, those two would have lived happily ever after? What about the differences in class, education -"
"When you come down to it, all love stories are 'utterly ridiculous,'" Myka cried impatiently. "What's the logic, really, in saying this person is better or more suited than that one? It's as crazy as listening to Pete tell me that he never knew it was possible to love someone as much as he loved Drew and realizing that I had, I did love someone as much as I loved Drew, and that it wasn't him." She repeated softly, "It wasn't Pete."
Helena groaned, rubbing her forehead against the bars. It wasn't how she had imagined hearing Myka tell her that she loved her, in part because she hadn't let herself imagine it. It had been enough to sense it, assume it, believe it these past weeks because it was all one with their not ever saying how they felt, which went all the way back, on her part, to a morning she couldn't even place, except to recall that it was a sunny, clear morning after an awful, sleepless night, and Myka had been in the garden going through her quad and hamstring stretches, and Helena had watched those legs flex and that hair glint red and gold, wanting for the first time, not since the bronze but before it, for there to be another morning and another one after it, so she could see her, like this, again and again and again.
"You don't have to tell me, Myka."
"But I do, because you need to know that someone in this world loves you that much, because you're convinced that no one can love you as you are." Another laugh, higher-pitched and a little wild at the end as if the absurdity, the utter ridiculousness of it all was too much, even for her. "I can't remember it, when you stood outside that shield you had created for us and smiled at me, thanking me. I can't remember it, that moment, that second - and that's all you gave me, Helena - when I knew I had never experienced anything so gut-wrenching, so agonizing, not even when Sam died." She stopped, and when she looked up at Helena, her eyes were free of tears. "I can't remember it, but I've dreamed it over and over. I knew you were coming back from Ellis because I wouldn't let there be any other outcome."
Myka was still standing outside her reach, but Helena didn't try to coax her into coming closer. It was too much. It was impossible to reconcile, the enormity of the emotion and the fragility of its object. And she was a very, very fragile vessel for Myka's love. But people gave themselves over to such absurdity all the time, because not to surrender, not to believe . . . she was living proof of what happened when you stopped.
'I love you' was faint-hearted.
'I would die for you' was repetitive because she already had.
But silence was unacceptable.
"I think if we were to watch Titanic again," Helena said carefully, "you would find me more appreciative of poor Rose and Jack."
Myka stared at her, astonished. "That was completely inadequate, you know. I've just poured out my heart to you, and that's what you come up with." But she was laughing.
They were still smiling at each other foolishly, crazily, lovingly when the door opened, and the deputy stuck his head around it. "I have to take you back," he said to Helena. She nodded mechanically, not hearing him, but Myka sobered.
"One of us needs to stay out of jail," she said. "It's time for you to go save the day again."