A/N: Not the smoothest of landings, maybe, but we're here at the end, or almost the end. There's going to be a (relatively) short epilogue, but the fic is essentially done. Sorry for the exceptionally long hiatus, hope you find it worth the wait. Thanks for sticking with this.
Only now was she hearing the report, the flat crack of the firing, long after Sam had crumpled to the ground, as if the bullet had been shot from the gun faster than the speed of sound. She was running, she had been running since he stepped backward, hands held out in an almost supplicating gesture, as though he had intruded upon something he wasn't supposed to see. First one leg had given way, then the other. He had been early. They were to have pincered the counterfeiters between their two teams, and his team had jumped too soon. Another agent was already bending over him, pressing his hands against Sam's chest. Run faster, run faster, she urged herself. Her breath was coming in ragged bursts. Run faster, goddammit. She fell to her knees beside him, watching the blood spread from a small, dark hole just to the left of his sternum. Earlier in the morning, her head had been resting on that chest, her breath, not ragged then, gently stirring the hair that grew in the slight vee.
They had been talking about what they were going to do that evening. Sam had wanted to go out to dinner, special occasion, he had said, winking at her. She wasn't sure what merited one. Their first year anniversary was still a couple of weeks away. Maybe the divorce had been finalized, but that required papers to have been filed, and she was pretty sure that neither Sam nor his wife had yet taken that step. She hadn't wanted to go somewhere nice, she remembered whining, but Sam had only winked at her again, saying, Trust me, bunny, you'll be glad we did. She had sighed, parting a few chest hairs and kissing the warm skin beneath. She didn't like the endearment, she never had, but it seemed such a petty thing to complain about, just like complaining about dinner. She loved Sam, she really did, except that sometimes she wished for, wanted -
With the part of her mind that was still doing the job, analyzing the factors, noting that the agents who were pursuing the counterfeiters were already too far behind them, she examined the wound that she and the other agent were vainly trying to plug with their hands; it looked like a flower, the expanding blood stain on his shirt, almost like something Georgia O'Keefe would have painted, large petals and a dark, dark center. Blood was continuing to well between their fingers, but more slowly. Sam's eyes were growing glassier. He hadn't recognized her, he hadn't spoken, but that was all right, she could do the talking, Hold on, Sam, help is almost here. Hold on. But he couldn't hold on, and the other agent was removing her hands from Sam's chest and squeezing them gently, Stop, Myka, you can stop now.
. . . They were frantically looking for something to stop the bomb, she, Pete, Artie, and Helena. Except that Helena wasn't with them, she was standing a few feet away, head down, fingers flying over some object. Christ, that was so like her, to be distracted by something that momentarily caught her interest. She was about to scream at Helena to stop being so goddamn curious and help when she heard something snick into place above them, like an umbrella being opened, but she couldn't see anything that was going to protect them from what was about to rain down. Then she saw Pete hold his hand out and press against the air, except that it wasn't air, his hand wasn't going through it. Bewildered, he looked at her, and she looked, in turn, at Helena. Helena was smiling at them, a sad smile but a relieved one, too, and she thought she had never seen Helena so peaceful, so happy . . . so beautiful. She pounded on the inside of the shield, but it was surprisingly resistant. Thank you, was that what Helena was saying? Thank you? She and Sam had had so much time, and they had said nothing, nothing important. She and Helena had so much to say, and they had no time. Thank you. Was that all Helena had to say to her? Give me more time, Helena, give me more time. Give me more -
...
She had crawled under the porch as far as she could. They wouldn't think to look for her, not for a while. They would think she had run to Auntie Cora. Daddy didn't like her spending so much time with Auntie Cora, who wasn't her aunt, wasn't anyone's aunt, but who had been called Auntie for as long as anyone could remember, including her daddy. Auntie Cora claimed she had second sight, which Daddy thought was the mark of the devil. The devil had lots of marks, and now she had been marked by him, too. She carried the mark of Cain because she had killed her brother. Her forehead would have the same red streak that had appeared on Howard's after she had thrown the iron at him. Auntie Cora might have second sight, but she couldn't raise people from the dead. Auntie Cora couldn't help her now; there would be no more talk of how special she was, how she would see wonders that God would show no one else, how she would live to a great age. She had thrown the iron at Howard and seen it strike him. She had seen the blood. He was dead, and the white men were going to come and send her far, far away. It didn't matter that no one would miss Howard except Mama, she had committed a horrible sin, and God would punish her.
She heard scrabbling in the dirt; a huge, dark form was trying to wiggle underneath the porch. A bear. God wouldn't have a chance to punish her because a bear would eat her first. "Reenie?" That was her daddy's voice. He didn't sound angry. He sounded worried. She hugged her knees to her chest. Maybe if she made herself very small and was very quiet, he wouldn't see her. "Reenie, it's all right. Howard's going to be fine. He's going to have a sore head for a bit," Daddy chuckled, "but he'll be fine." Then he sounded very stern. "Irene Esther Vaughn, I can see you."
He was determined to squirm his way to her, digging his elbows into the dirt and pulling himself forward, occasionally bumping his head against the planks of the porch above. Just because Howard was alive didn't mean God was going to forget about punishing her. She asked warily, "Are you going to let the white men take me and send me to jail?"
His head jerked up and collided with wood. "Godda-. Why would I let the sheriff take you?"
"Because I wanted to kill Howard. He made me so mad, Daddy, calling me a bookworm and saying he was going to stomp on me and squish me like a nightcrawler."
Her daddy laughed. "If God went around striking everybody dead who wanted to murder his brother at one time or another, there wouldn't be anyone left." He sobered. "You have to learn to rein in that temper of yours, Irene. That's how the devil finds his way into our hearts, and once he's there, it's hard to get him out."
He was close enough now that he could stretch out next to her; he was too big to sit up. Mama said he was naturally big, tall and broad, that his family would have been warriors way back in Africa. Her grandmama, her mama's mama, always sniffed when she heard Mama talk admiringly of how big and strong Daddy was, saying, "I don't know about that, but his appetite is sure unnatural." Daddy smelled of sweat and the fields. He had been called to be a pastor, but he could preach only on Saturday nights and Sundays; the rest of the week, he worked Mr. Abernathy's cotton fields just like everyone else. She liked being close to him, feeling the rough material of his shirt and smelling the faint tang of mint on his breath. Her daddy didn't smoke or chew tobacco like other men did. He chewed mint leaves because he said no one should be spreading the word of the Lord with breath that smelled like the devil.
"What if the devil is already in me, Daddy? What if I can't get him out?" She burrowed into him fearfully.
"God forgives anything, Reenie, except refusing his love and forgiveness. Let him in and he'll cast the devil out." Daddy was resting his chin on the top of her head. It was big and solid, like the rest of him, and pushing her head into her neck, but she would never ask him to stop holding her. Daddy might think he was puny against the devil, but she knew better.
"But what if, Daddy? What if God doesn't forgive me?" To Daddy, God was something real, something he could almost reach out and touch, but to her, God was like the clouds that piled on the horizon in the summertime, dark and towering and promising all sorts of trouble. Sometimes, although she would never tell her daddy this, she had a hard time telling the difference between God and the devil.
Then he was whispering into her hair, "Even if God doesn't forgive you, baby, I always will."
He was drawing her into him even tighter, and Helena couldn't breathe. She felt she was twisting her head around, although she knew she wasn't moving. The eyes, dark and knowing, were Irene's and then they were not; they were immeasurably colder, remote. The voice, too, had changed, still a whisper but carrying a note of command. Hold on. It was Myka's voice, Hold on, and then it wasn't. It wasn't a single voice but thousands, millions of them coursing through her, laughing, crying, raging, and above them the sounds of rock tumbling, crashing. The ground beneath her tilted up, and the table tilted down, the tub and all that remained of who she had been in another time, in another place, disappearing into a yawning hole. She would disappear into that hole soon enough, and while a part of her welcomed the fall, there was another part of her that was begging, Give me more time. So foolish to think that she had been given too much of it when there would never be enough. She thought she could hear Myka's voice crying above all the millions of voices, Hold on, and whether Myka was crying it to Sam or to her didn't matter. Helena held on.
. . . The sky was gray. She was cold. Oh, and she hurt, she hurt as if some malevolent force, pretending to save her, had dropped her from a very great height. Very carefully, she lifted each finger for a second before moving onto the next. She flexed her toes with the same care. Gingerly she pushed herself up to a sitting position, balancing herself on her hands, and surveyed her chest, her arms, her legs. No gaping wounds, no broken bones poking through her skin. Her clothes were more or less intact, a few tears here and there. She was sitting in a field, but there was nothing but weeds as far as she could see, no buildings, not even a plaintively mooing cow. That wasn't completely true. Far off to her left, she could see plumes of smoke. Not entirely certain that all of her bones were attached - they had absorbed a lot of punishment over 148 years - she rolled onto her knees and used the ground to lever herself up. She could stand, that was progress, and she could walk, which was even better, although she felt that each step was enough to jar her head off her shoulders. At her current pace, Helena figured she might make the smoke, what was left of the old Farraday plant, she surmised, by nightfall.
She hadn't stumbled far - and stumbling was all her disarticulated joints were allowing her to do - when she spotted an SUV, not black and not government-issued, bouncing across the field toward her. She was hopeful that the passengers were friendly, or, at the worst, gawkers come to stare, open-mouthed, at the site of an explosion, but it was possible that they were scientists who had worked for Jaffee, those not rounded up or on the run, who were anxious to find out what had happened to their laboratory. Helena knew she had no cause to grumble, again having survived something that should have killed her, but if the Warehouse had decided to spare her, it could have made for a softer landing; as it was, her fight or flight response was closer to vociferously argue or creep away. If the people in that car were intent on harming her, she could do little to prevent it.
The SUV juddered to a stop half a football field away. The passenger side door opened and a dark head popped above it before quickly disappearing. Helena might not have been able to hear what was being said, but as the door was flung open and the man jumped out, she would recognize Pete's flailing arms anywhere; they punctuated his victories at Call of Duty, his dismay upon finding an empty Doritos bag, and, apparently, his consternation that his Good Samaritan wouldn't come any nearer to a potential terrorist or, conceivably, the radiation-poisoned survivor of a thermonuclear blast. The car door slammed, and Pete started running to her. Helena could only increase her pace from stumbling to shambling, but she was able to curl the fingers of one hand and hold the thumb and pinky to her ear. "Myka! Is she all right?"
Pete hiked his shoulders and held out his arms in the universal sign for utter incomprehension. God, he was an idiot. How Myka could have married him, let alone stay married to him for seven years - but she was laughing maniacally and hobbling as fast as she could all the same. He swept her up and then immediately dropped her to the ground, backing away in horror. "I'm so sorry for hugging you like that. Are you okay?" Bloody idiot, he had just compressed what few intact vertebrae she had left. "We were out there on the interstate, and there was this 'cra-a-ack' and then a 'whoosh.'" In demonstration, Pete puffed out his cheeks and exhaled a long breath, then flung his hands up. "I told the agents to take Mata Hari back. I'd flash my badge and commandeer a car to come back here."
Helena squinted at the sky. It wasn't much darker than when they had entered the grounds of the plant, and night fell early this time of year. If Pete's recounting was accurate, she hadn't been in the underground laboratory for very long at all, but it had felt like - it didn't matter now. "Have you called the hospital to find out about Myka?"
"No, I mean, we were just out there when all this happened." He searched his pockets for his phone. "You look like crap by the way, like you might have gotten blown up or something." His smile was uncertain. He stared at her for a long moment before he suddenly pulled his shirt over his head and awkwardly tied it around her shoulders. "This isn't much, but it should keep you a little warmer." Shivering in his t-shirt, he continued patting his pockets, finally digging his phone from one of them. He looked at the screen before looking at her. His eyes might have been watering from the cold, but Helena didn't think that was the cause. "I'm afraid, you know, afraid that all this," he waved his hand above his head, "that it didn't work. You somehow survived that fireball, H.G., and it was just . . . massive. You should see the crater. There's nothing left of any of those buildings, they're all gone. I'm terrified that your going all Spock wasn't enough to save the Enterprise. I'm not sure I'm ready to call Claudia yet."
Bloody idiot, Helena thought fondly. She lightly ran her hand along Pete's arm, feeling the goosebumps. "When you're ready."
He blew out another long breath and squared his shoulders. He pressed the screen. Helena heard a click and then an ear-splitting squeal as Pete held the phone away from his ear. "Omigod, it wasn't Linda Blair from The Exorcist good, no levitation, no spinning head, but she's back, our Myka's back, Pete."
Helena didn't hesitate, grabbing the phone from Pete's hand. "Let me talk to her, Claudia," she demanded. "Put Myka on, I need to hear her voice." It had worked, her desperate, frankly harebrained, scheme to uncouple an artefact, to separate it into its component parts, the object and the emotion melded to it. Her goal hadn't been to replicate the power but to release it. She had conducted her own reverse engineering in the hopes that further destabilizing the 'artefacting' process (now there was a mate for 'terroristic') would finally prompt the Warehouse itself to act, to reabsorb the energy that Jaffee and his friends had hoped to control for themselves. She had had the desire more than the expectation that the Warehouse's neutralizing of the shadow Warehouse would free Myka's mind from the overwhelming power of hundreds of artefacts, thousands of them - but now that her gambit had worked, she didn't trust it. She wanted to hear Myka speak, say her name, say anything. She didn't sink to the ground, but she wobbled, first to her left and then to her right, before Pete shot out a hand to steady her. "Myka," she insisted.
Claudia emitted another squeal. "Frak, H.G., how did you do it?"
"I jammed a knife into a toaster," Helena said impatiently. "Now let me talk to Myka."
"As soon as she opened her eyes and said your name, they were shooing everybody out of her room, me, Drew, everybody. They let Vanessa stay, I guess, but -"
"Myka asked for me?" After assuring himself that she could stand on her own, Pete had started walking back to the SUV, so Helena had no one to stop her swaying from side to side.
"Who else?" Claudia said.
But that was before. Before today, before she and Myka and, yes, Irene, had swapped memories in the Warehouse's version of a Vulcan mind meld. If she had been privy to Myka's greatest sorrows, there was no reason to think that Myka hadn't been a witness to hers, watching her hunt down Poule and Lebecque with murderous fervor . . . . "How did she sound?"
"Sound? Like she had been in a coma. Just get back here, and you'll have all the time in the world to make sure she's okay." Helena could hear background noises, more voices talking, inquiring anxiously, including Claudia's, asking "Can we see her now?" Then Claudia's voice, loud in her ear, excited, "They're letting us back in. Hurry up, your girlfriend's waiting."
Helena crossed her arms over her chest, phone held loosely in her hand. She felt colder now than when she had woken to find herself in the middle of weeds and brownish clumps that she could only hope were dirt. Hugging herself, she hissed as a torn shirt sleeve slid over her skin. That was an ugly gash she had on her elbow, but she couldn't recall how she had gotten it. Maybe she had cut her arm in the laboratory, maybe she had scraped it against the ground in her crash landing. Pete was loping toward her, gesturing at her to join him at the SUV. "I've convinced Wayne back there that you're not out to blow up Washington D.C. Let's get out of here before the feds show up."
She looked at the plumes of smoke, flat and wide at their tops and tapering to points, like nails. Nails in the coffin of Jaffee's grand plan. A cliché, but then she hadn't put her hand to any serious writing in over a century. Barely visible above the grass at this distance was a line of black ants marching toward the smoke. But they weren't ants, they were black SUVs, most certainly government issued. "We're too late."
One of the ants broke formation, having sighted their Good Samaritan's SUV, and roared across the field to intercept them. Helena hoped that, Wayne was it?, had the good sense not to try to escape. She raised her arms and waved them, crossing her wrists above her head, as if to suggest that she and Pete were a pair of rubberneckers who had encountered car trouble. They were all hustled into the government-issued SUV, including Wayne, an amateur photographer wearing a cap with an embroidered FBI decal glued front and center. Oh, that would help them immeasurably, Helena thought sardonically as they jolted their way to the ad hoc command center, three SUVs parked in a rough semi-circle with their cargo doors open and agents at laptops squatting inside. The crater was some distance away and already partially ringed with law enforcement, but Helena understood what Pete had meant when he said everything was gone. There was no building left standing, not even a stray piece of concrete left to mark where one had been. All had been sucked into the explosion as though the Warehouse had perceived its rival as nothing more than crumbs to be swept off a table.
Although the agent in charge was no less granite-jawed than Major Lowry, she had one of the agents scrounge the SUVs for a blanket that Helena gratefully draped around her shoulders and an extra jacket for Pete. That courtesy, however, was the only one she extended, and she seemed no more inclined than Major Lowry to settle for Helena's explanation that they, Wayne excepted, were Homeland Security agents on a classified assignment. While Pete adopted a different approach than Myka's curt professionalism, his summoning of the always dubious Lattimer charm failed to soften Agent Anderson. "Seriously," he was saying, "can't we get out of the cold, stop at the nearest Mickey D's, and hash this out over coffee? Maybe a Big Mac or two?" He smiled disarmingly. "Okay, so maybe you're a grilled chicken sandwich kind of woman, I can work with that, but we're all basically playing on the same team."
Anderson stared at him impassively before being called over by a couple of her agents. Pete quirked an eyebrow at Helena. "Maybe I read her wrong, maybe she's on your team."
Helena tugged her blanket closer. "I have no team, but your problem is that you have no game."
He leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. "How was I going to live without your constant insults?"
Anderson ended her discussion with the other agents and pointed to Helena and Pete. "That was Homeland Security. We're to bring you in." She pointed to Wayne. "You're free to go as soon as you give us the memory card to your camera." Wayne looked as if he might protest, but, after glancing from the shivering, blanketed Helena to Pete, almost as miserable in a windbreaker too small for him, he appeared to decide that capitulation was the wiser course of action.
Helena's hopes that the order to bring them in was just some interagency posturing before the deputy secretary stepped in to release them died as soon as she saw Dave waiting for them. He was outside the same room in which they had interrogated Suzanne. "Sorry," he murmured to her as he followed them into the room, "but my boss has a boss who wants answers about what caused an explosion strong enough to have rattled the windows of the Oval Office."
She and Pete were questioned, both separately and together, far longer than she had been in the cavern. If she had re-experienced months, years of her life in less than an hour, the Warehouse worked no similar temporal magic here. Although she was repeatedly asked if she had detonated the buildings, a question to which she as invariably rolled her eyes and sarcastically remarked, "Yes, with the convoy of explosives that I had brought with me," the more serious response she provided also never changed. She acknowledged that she had been charged with ensuring that Jaffee's secret "artefact factory" was shut down, but that she had done nothing more than walk through the rooms. "Because every inch of space not filled with objects considered artefacts was filled with World War II-era munitions. What they thought to do with them, I couldn't say, but I realized that they were extremely unstable. I was lucky to escape before the 'fatal spark' was provided." At this, her 17th iteration by her count, Dave's gaze was no less opaque than it had been at the beginning, but he suddenly clapped his hands and concluded the interrogation.
"I think we've gotten enough for now. The site may yield additional clues, and Agent Wells may have more to tell us when she's had a chance to rest."
Homeland Security didn't need to know how the laboratory was destroyed, only that it was gone. No one needed to know what had happened. The facts of her life were a Warehouse record, but the grief and horror she had suffered, and had caused, were hers alone. Why the Warehouse had decided to save her she might never know, but she figured it wasn't her place to explain why the Warehouse did anything. If the Warehouse wanted to explain why it had flung her far from the explosion, then it could manifest itself as a burning bush or the four horsemen of the Apocalypse or Dumbledore and explain away. But she would remain silent. Helena wouldn't have been surprised if her willful refusal to provide details had guaranteed that she and Pete would be taken to a holding cell, but instead, Dave walked them out to a black SUV, instructing the driver, an agent identical to all the others in his conservative haircut and conservative clothes, to take them to George Washington University Hospital. Once more Dave was murmuring in her ear, but his voice held no apology this time. "You'll be providing me with a report later, Helena, that includes everything you left out today."
She made no acknowledgment other than to nod, her mind already taking her to Myka's room where she would find out exactly how much Myka had seen of the deaths of Poule and Lebecque. She took no consolation in the fact that it was late at night and that Myka might be asleep. No one slept in a hospital unless drugged unconscious; if it wasn't the blinking lights and the officious noises of the monitors, it was the nurses entering with medication or performing status checks. Myka would be awake, if not alert, but rarely was Myka awake and not alert. During the interrogation, an agent had provided her with pants and a shirt, and she had been allowed to clean herself up as best she could in a restroom. She wouldn't be walking into the hospital looking like she had been pulled from a collapsed building, but the clothes clearly weren't her own and, though soap and water had removed the grit, the hasty wash had only made her scratches and cuts all the more visible. The ill-fitting clothes and scratches she could breezily dismiss, what she had no story for - none that Myka would believe - was the haunted look in her eyes, which she had been unable to scrub away and which told her that, despite the Warehouse's decision to spare her, it hadn't saved her, not really. Wherever her daughter still lay in a makeshift morgue, wherever Lebecque, tied to a chair, shouted his defiance, she was there too.
She had assumed that the only artefacts whose emotions she could release would be her own, but she had been focused on the energy generated by the emotions, not on the emotions themselves. Regardless of how energy was created, it was still energy, subject to certain laws. If she were going to be torn apart trying to destroy the replication that Jaffee's scientists had invented, she would be torn apart the way matter was typically torn apart when it encountered a massive surge of energy. She should have realized that her spirit, her soul, whatever it was called, had always been frailer than her body, more subject to breaking. The rage and despair of the years following Christina's death had been too strong for her; released the moment she had held the fraying and rusty remains of her history, they had overwhelmed her once more.
Pete was holding the elevator for her. "C'mon, Helena, get in. You're finally going to see for yourself that she's all right."
But she isn't, she can't be after everything that has happened, and neither am I.
There were a lot of people in Myka's room this late, but they parted, clearing a path for her to the bed as soon as Helena crossed the threshold, Claudia, Abigail, Vanessa, Artie, Steve. Drew was curled up at the foot of the bed asleep, and Helena threw him an envious glance. Myka was sitting up bolstered by several pillows behind her back, her expression revealing all the anxiety that Helena was feeling. Helena stopped, confused. Revulsion, disbelief, anger, horror, any of those, all of those she would have expected, had been expecting, but not this anxious regard, as though Myka were preparing herself for a proper Victorian chastisement, complete with fusty references to what befell the ancient Greeks when they dared the wrath of the gods.
Myka tilted her chin. "I had to solve the puzzle," she said, her voice cracking.
"Leaving me to save the day?" From somewhere Helena mustered a theatrical note of outrage.
"Because you were the only one who could." Myka tried to smile, but she was biting her lower lip too hard for the smile to gain purchase. She impatiently brushed the back of her hand across her cheek.
Still bewildered, Helena sat on the edge of the bed and pulled Myka to her as everyone filed from the room. Myka wasn't only crying, she was weeping without restraint against Helena's shoulder, saying "I'm sorry" over and over as Helena stroked her back and kissed her hair. Helena knew that she should be the one crying, prostrate on the floor in her case, and pleading for forgiveness. Perhaps that would come later when Myka was more herself, when she realized or remembered what she had witnessed. Perhaps this was the Warehouse sniggering at the trick it had played, rescuing her only to have Myka renounce her, in which case Helena would have preferred to have been left in the cavern.
Lifting her head, she searched the room, hoping that Irene might be making one of her unannounced visits because she could use some gnomic wisdom right about now, but she saw only Drew wrinkling his face in his sleep, sensing that something important might be going on but not so important that it required him to wake up. "I knew that if you got to her first," Myka was mumbling, her breath hiccuping between the words, "I couldn't save you, but if I got to her first . . . you could save me. I'm so sorry, Helena, to have scared you like that." Suddenly her arms were around Helena squeezing her so hard that Helena thought her bruised ribs might surrender to the pressure and break. "But there was no way I was going to lose you."
Irene had told her that she had almost passed Myka over for the Warehouse because, as intelligent and competent an agent as she was, she wasn't special. Then something changed her mind, and though Irene hadn't been specific about what it was, she said she had realized that what set Myka apart was her fearlessness in doing whatever it took to save the ones she loved. Irene may not have seen Myka's frantic race to save Sam until today, but Helena had no doubt that it had been the genesis of Myka's resolve to be the first to the rescue. Having been too late once before, Myka would never be late again. Run faster. Helena squirmed farther onto the mattress, balancing herself on her side and Myka, knocking pillows to the floor, curved into her. Their feet nudged Drew but he only sighed and inched closer to the bottom of the bed.
"Myka, you were dying, and I had a single half-assed idea." Her voice was the one that was cracking, breaking.
"You needed only one."
"The right one," Helena grumbled . . . softly.
"When it counts, you always come up with it."
"Myka, when I was trying to undo what Jaffee's scientists had done, I saw Sam. I saw him being shot, and I saw you running to him. I saw my own life, too." Helena hesitated. "We were connected for a time when I was in the laboratory where the replication had taken place. I need to know - what did you see?"
"We've always been connected, Helena, even when we thought we weren't," Myka said. Her words had dragged, caught in an opposing current, and her eyes were almost closed. "It's not the Warehouse's doing, it's us. We'll talk, but for now, I just want to be with you. Is that all right?"
All right for now. Maybe not all right after they really talked, but Helena would take their momentary all rightness and enjoy it. She relaxed against the warmth of Myka's body. She wasn't ready to shut her eyes, she didn't trust what she would see, but she could look at Myka and Drew, and that was almost as peaceful as sleeping.
In the morning, there was no time to talk. With the unerring accuracy children have for divining the first hint of sunrise, Drew had awakened and crawled in between them, displaying a similarly uncanny ability to squeeze himself into a millimeter gap, mainly by aggressive wriggling that had Helena grabbing at a storage cart to keep herself from falling out of the bed. Drew settled next to her and, after a collision with her cheekbone that might have been meant as a kiss, announced that he was hungry.
"No, 'Welcome back, Helena,' no 'I'm glad you're okay'?" She recognized that her giving him a hug that was more a clamping of his head to her chest - any true use of her arm would have sent Myka off the other side of the bed - undercut her complaint, but she didn't care. He was giving her Pete's silly grin with a certain wide-eyed look that was all Myka.
"Of course, I'm glad you're okay, but you were going to save my mom. You had to be okay. That's the way things work, 'lena." He frowned at her as if she were the child. His confidence was completely misplaced, but she wasn't going to argue him out of it. She would simply accept it, just as she had accepted Myka's sleepy reassurance the night before that everything was all right. The goodness of this moment with Drew and a restlessly mumbling Myka might disappear in the next, but it was hers to hold for now.
Even though Pete came to claim Drew for a "manly breakfast" in the cafeteria, his claiming of his son was a protracted process, involving multiple hugs of Myka, a long recounting of how he had found Helena wandering in a field that was "like practically in another state," and, from Helena's point of view, exceedingly tedious reminiscing about several close calls he and Myka had experienced on retrievals. After enveloping Helena in a bear hug or two, "just because I'm so freaking happy," which had Myka urging him on with a wicked enthusiasm, Pete finally backed out of the room only to usher in a team of specialists who decreed that they needed to run more tests on Myka.
"Never saw anything like it," one volunteered to Helena. "I've seen people recover from seemingly irreversible comas before but not like she did. She was a little wobbly but she would have tried to leap from her bed if we had let her."
Myka hitched a shoulder in modest acknowledgment, but there was nothing hesitant or unsure in the gaze she directed at Helena. Not so much "Hold on" this morning as "Wait until I get you home." Helena waved as they trundled Myka, firmly told to stay in her bed, out of the room; she picked up an ancient fitness magazine and collapsed into a chair prepared to wait out the rest of the morning. Which was when Vanessa entered with a wheelchair and a stern expression, pointing at the wheelchair. "Don't think you're escaping without an examination."
"Don't you have to have hospital privileges to be threatening me with tongue depressors and blood pressure cuffs?"
"You're not actually asking me for my bona fides, are you? Get in the chair."
Vanessa might have worked at the hospital for years based on how readily the nurses hopped to do her bidding. Helena was divested of her clothing as well as a good share of her dignity, bleeding, peeing, and spitting into various containers and opening every orifice, or so it seemed, for a sample. Nevertheless, she preferred that to Vanessa's insistence that she tell her, once the door was closed and the nurses sent on their rounds, what happened at the Farraday plant "because," Vanessa scrutinized her curiously, "you shouldn't have survived an explosion like that." Vanessa assumed that Helena had made use of some artefact to save herself and she cautioned her that "it would be a hell of a thing for you to die as the result of a side effect when being in the blast area of a bomb couldn't do it."
"I didn't use an artefact, but I don't remember how I got out of there." It was a true statement as far as it went, but Vanessa clearly expected more, uttering a suspicious "hmmpf" from the corner of her mouth. Vanessa probably expected much frenetic picking up and putting down of artefacts, a razor-sharp mind imagining properties that would erect a force field or bend time and space so that the explosion would be forever deferred. She wouldn't be expecting an answer on the order of "The Warehouse hugged me to safety." It was homely and saccharine, a rescue designed by a Hallmark card or the Lifetime channel, a father protecting his daughter. There was no wonder . . . just love, improbably enough. If the Warehouse had wanted to get all warm and fuzzy, it could have found a better object for its affection. She had just emerged from the virtual reality of her own past, in which, with a cruelty greater than his own, she had scored and mutilated Lebecque with her rage. She wasn't the type of child whom the Warehouse should have clutched to its breast. "Honestly, I have no idea how I made it out."
With the saturnine observation that she had the body of a healthy middle-aged woman and the disposition of a crotchety 96-year-old, Vanessa dismissed her. Superficial abrasions (with the exception of the gash on her arm) and a mild concussion. Surely the anguish of removing the sheet from her daughter's corpse had caused a small stroke and the horror of inserting a blade into Lebecque's eye socket had caused her heart to stop. She couldn't be leaving the examination room with only the wry recommendation to rest and take a few ibuprofen. "It's what I tell all my patients who survive utter destruction," Vanessa had said. Of course, because it was the Warehouse, Vanessa had also advised her to watch for any delayed side effects - "You know, the usual. You turn into a fictional character or everything you touch becomes a chicken." Helena would have welcomed the former, having always wanted a turn as Victor Frankenstein, and, so long as she kept from changing Myka and Drew into Rhode Island Reds, she wouldn't have cared about the latter.
It wasn't the supernatural consequences that she was worried about but the natural, human-sized ones. In the space of half an hour, she had had to endure the loss of her daughter again; in the space of an additional half an hour, or slightly less, she had killed two men and tortured a third. It was true that torturing and killing others weren't natural for most, but they were, unfortunately, human-sized. Until yesterday, Myka had almost convinced her that she could become part of a family, that she could be one with the suburban, middle-class masses, ferrying their children to their activities (she had been on the verge of giving into Myka's crazy idea of having a baby) and, after sending them off to bed, spending that free hour watching television with glazed eyes. The mourning she had refused to do for Christina she had begun to experience in a muted fashion (necessarily so after more than a hundred years) as she cared for Drew, the continual recognition that "she's not here" and "I'll never get to do this with her" strangely, wonderfully softened by being able to tease and chide and watch over and love a child not her own. And just as strangely and wonderfully, by acknowledging that Christina wasn't here, couldn't ever be here, Helena found her everywhere.
But there was no incorporating what she had done to Poule or Lebecque, not even the minor cruelties she had inflicted upon Raymond, into that life. Though she hadn't been forced to relive her killing of MacPherson or the deaths of the students she had hired to find Warehouse 2, they were of the same cloth as her other sins. "Twisty" was how Claudia had described her, and Helena couldn't deny that there was something ungovernable within her, something that indeed twisted away from the need to follow the same rules as everyone else. Myka with her insistence upon seeing her as two halves miraculously balanced, her twistiness flattened and straightened by the weight of all her so-called good qualities, she would have to let go of that now because she had witnessed for herself just how bad - and it was very, very bad - one H.G. Wells could be.
Helena brooded over all of this as she sat with Artie and Steve and Claudia and Abigail in the visitors' lounge outside Myka's room, all the while laughing at Artie's "curmudgeon in paradise" views on Maui and listening attentively to Steve's tale of his spiritual reawakening in Nepal. Hearing him describe his newfound centeredness, she thought but didn't say that being centered, being balanced, was possible only if the burdens you carried were light. Occasionally her eyes found the clock on the wall, almost noon. Maybe she would have a chance to talk with Myka while the others went to lunch. Yet when noon came and along with it Myka in her bed, the specialists hovering over her, no one left and all the gang crowded into her room, including Pete and Drew carrying pizza boxes. More laughter, a burping contest, Pete waxing reminiscent yet again, and this time joined by Claudia and Artie. It was the cozy kind of B&B gathering Helena had always tried to avoid and into which Myka had frequently propelled her, sometimes literally with a push to her back. Myka didn't rise from her bed and physically steer her closer, but she frequently looked in her direction, finally shouting to be heard above Pete and Claudia and announcing that it was time for everyone but Helena to leave. After a few snickering comments about behaving themselves from Claudia, the last to leave, Myka and Helena were alone.
"You wanted to talk," Myka said, her voice suddenly quiet, "so let's talk." She folded her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, an anxious, defensive posture that immediately made Helena regret insisting upon a conversation that Myka clearly didn't want to have, but they had to get it out now, the ugliness of what Myka had seen - "You want to know what I saw," she continued wearily. She was still wearing the pair of flannel pants and the long-sleeved top she had worn last night, but her hair had been drawn back and clipped into a particularly bushy ponytail, the curls, profuse and thick, refusing to be restrained. The fullness of the ponytail made for an odd contrast with the shaved patches on the sides and top of her head where the electrodes had been attached. Her face was drawn, and Helena wasn't certain whether it was from the series of tests Myka had undergone or . . . her.
"I saw so many things, heard so many things. There were so many people clamoring in my head. You read about people being crushed to death at a concert or in a fire, and that must be what it feels like, screams and heat and bodies. I was breathing in hands and elbows and feet and faces. I was connected, Helena, to every person who had ever created an artefact, and I was drowning in their memories." She paused, wanting to take care with what she said next. "I saw you. You were in a room with two men tied to chairs. One was dead, and the man who was still alive was crying, saying that he had killed your daughter." She paused again. "You had done horrible things to the men in that room. I know that." Myka tried to run a hand through her hair, but the clip was an obstacle. "Is this when you tell me you're a monster and that you don't deserve to be happy? Is this when you run away?"
"It's one thing to read accounts in the Warehouse archives and to hear me give my version of events, it's quite another to see me in action, so to speak." Helena heard the brittleness of her tone, and her hands were nervously worming around and over each other.
"What I saw, Helena," Myka said with deliberateness, "what I saw was that you let him go." She looked up, her eyes all the more green for the tears shimmering in them. "He said he killed Christina, and you let him go. Maybe he was lying, maybe he was hoping to be done with it all by goading you into killing him, but you believed him, and you let him go."
"I was so exhausted," Helena said, looking at Myka but not seeing her, seeing herself instead, tottering, blood-spattered, dazed by the enormity of what she had done. "I don't think I could have raised my arm to stab him if I wanted to."
"You call it exhaustion, I call it mercy."
"I was no better after that," Helena felt compelled to remind her, "and in some ways worse."
"True, and then you punished yourself far more severely than the regents were prepared to do."
"Only to emerge from the bronze a century later and almost destroy the world."
"Almost." Myka's smile was faint. "We've had this argument before, and every time I think I've won it, you start it up again." She rolled onto her side, her face turned away, but Helena had no difficulty understanding her. "I'm going to take a nap because the tests tired me and because you're tiring me. I'm leaving this hospital tomorrow morning, I'm not waiting for them to discharge me. You can leave with me or you can run away, your choice."
Of course she wasn't going to run away. Of course she was going to be here in the morning, prepared to convince Myka not to be so precipitous about discharging herself. But as Helena silently blustered and protested, she knew that wasn't what Myka had really meant. Not so much "here" as "present," fully committed to this world and no longer straddling two. If Christina was not here, would never be here, then she herself couldn't be there, could never be there again. Over the past few months she had congratulated herself on living rather successfully in the 21st century only to be immersed once more in that ancient grief and hunger for vengeance, which hadn't felt very ancient as she had stood, paralyzed, in front of her artefacts.
Maybe she would have to learn to make that commitment to being here, to being present every day. Pete had once said that the first thing he did upon waking up in the morning was to promise himself that today was a day when he wouldn't have a drink. She had faltered in her commitment, but all she could do was try to be better, which might be, in the end, what forgiveness was, another chance - a second, sixth, fortieth - to be better. Thankfully she had found someone who loved her enough to give her those chances.
It could have been the barest whisper of fabric sliding against itself, but Helena believed she sensed more than heard Irene's arrival. Without knowing how she had ended up in a chair in the visitors' lounge, she was nonetheless sitting across from Irene, who was wearing her usual pumps and skirt suit, perfectly coordinated in shades of coral. She might have wandered out to the lounge or Irene might have spirited her to another dimension in which this exact same grouping of chairs and loveseats existed. She didn't know, and Irene certainly wouldn't tell her, but it did seem odd that they were the only two in the lounge. Just as Helena was about to give the nod to being teleported, Irene held out her palm, the locket and its necklace in the center.
"I don't think we need this anymore."
"I'm surprised you didn't pack it in goo and ship it off to the Warehouse for storage." Her sarcasm was blunted by her fastening the locket around her neck. It felt comfortingly warm.
"It's only an artefact when it's separated, permanently, from its creator. You merely loaned it to me." Irene settled back in her chair and crossed one leg over the other.
Helena tipped her head, considering her. "Your father was a good man but a bit of blasphemer, don't you think?"
Irene smiled. "Because he said he would forgive me even if God didn't? I suppose some might think so, but he was a father who loved his child. How would God not understand that . . . and forgive it?" She smoothed an invisible wrinkle in her skirt. "Mr. Lattimer may not be the most eloquent of men, but something he said a long time ago has stuck with me. Everyone in this world needs someone in his corner, someone who will have his back. I had my father. I think you know who's in your corner. She's forgiven you even when you might have thought God had forsaken you. Yet you're out here instead of in there." Irene dipped her head in the direction of Myka's room.
"Why did the Warehouse save me?"
Irene had the temerity to chuckle at the question that Helena had asked in all seriousness. Seeing her amusement, Helena half-expected Irene to wag a finger and indulgently cluck, "That Warehouse, such a practical joker." There was no finger-wagging, no clucking, just a shrug and an "I don't know." Reading the suspicious disbelief that Helena knew was in her face, Irene added, "Maybe the Warehouse felt a burst of gratitude . . . or affection. Maybe it thought it might need you in the future." Fixing her with a darkly intent look over the top of her glasses, she asked, "Does it matter why?"
Helena surprised herself with her answer. "No, actually it doesn't."
"Good. Perhaps after all these years, you're finally learning how to be a true Warehouse agent." Irene's glasses winked at her or, possibly, it was just a quality of the light. "Something else Mr. Lattimer has said, 'The why's are less important than we think, it's the is's that matter.'"
"It's like hearing the Psalms read to me," Helena said dryly. "Words to live by."
"They are," Irene said, "especially for those of us connected to the Warehouse."
This time Helena shrugged. She had asked for gnomic wisdom; it was too late to complain now.
"There's rarely a satisfactory answer to 'why.' You can waste a lifetime, several lifetimes, asking it. A much better question is 'how,' and the answer is in that room." There was no gentle dipping of her head toward Myka's room; instead, Irene jerked her head with impatience and pointed.
And Helena was there, not knowing how or when she had entered Myka's room. Perhaps she hadn't left it all, perhaps she had merely dreamed Irene. Myka was still curled on her side, but Helena knew she wasn't asleep. She could tell Myka that she loved her, that she would always love her; she could tell her that she was sorry and that, if Myka were to forgive her again, she would try to be better. Or she could say the one thing guaranteed to get Myka's attention.
"Quit pretending to nap. We have things to do, Myka, a Christmas tree and presents to buy, Drew's bedroom to remodel, baby names to argue about. We have plans to make."
Sheets and a blanket were flung aside, and Myka was up, finding her phone and scrolling through the apps. Her fingers darted over the screen several times. How many planners did she have? Helena audibly sighed. Myka stuck out her tongue, then she grinned. "Oh, the plans we'll make."