Mobius' hands felt clammy as he prepared for work the next morning, dismissing Miss Minutes the moment she appeared to wake him up. He could barely stand to even look at her, now. As he straightened his tie in the bathroom mirror, he paused to really look at himself, blue eyes staring back into him. A distant memory, one that definitely belonged to him, flashed in his mind; the eerie, frightened jolt he'd had as a new hatchling catching a glimpse of his reflection for the first time, his hair still blonde instead of silver.

Was that what it would feel like when he finally caught the Skrull?

At any rate, if he didn't catch this guy soon, there was no telling the damage he could do. Whether or not the TVA deserved that damage was a flicker quickly growing in the back of Mobius' mind that he was trying desperately to snuff out.

He made his way to the cluster of agent cubicles, where G. typed away, quietly absorbed in his work, and immediately checked his desk drawer. The thief hadn't come in the night. The shapeshifter had taken the first can-the one that Lucky had found-and three more that the robot had discovered in the vents, so there were still two precious cans of Josta left.

"Did you make any more headway on your… case, Mobius?" asked G., without turning around. He continued to type up an arrest report as he spoke.

Mobius, ignoring him for a second, knelt down and stuck thin, flat tracking devices to the bottom of each can; completely hidden, if one wasn't looking for them.

"Not really, but I'm about to. Hey, G.?"

His chair creaked. "Yeah?"

"Could I ask you a favor?"

"What?"

"Get lost."

G. stopped typing, then, and his chair creaked slowly as he spun around.

"Excuse me?" he asked.

"Scram," Mobius repeated, without malice. "Vamoose."

"But-"

"This Skrull, or whatever he is, isn't going to show up and take the bait if you're here all day." Mobius stood and wiped his clammy hands on his pants.

"Mobius, I know this is important, but I have paperwork to do." G.'s inflection was affronted, offended, even.

"I'm asking you as a friend, then. Make like a tree and do your paperwork somewhere else."

G. stammered a bit, gave Mobius an offended scoff, then, deciding against debate, gathered everything from his inbox and shuffled away with a hefty stack of manilla folders under his arm.

Mobius waited for a while at his desk for Lucky and Six to be done with class, alone, pretending to work, staring at his blank computer screen. Folders were piling up in his own inbox, too, including that stupid Rasputin case Ravonna had nagged him about, now covered in red sticker flags. He couldn't think about anything else except what he'd been through the past few days, about the killer robot, and poor Zeit and Evette and Libby, and fainting for seemingly no reason, and coming this close to catching that copycat bastard in the act. Snippets of that vision, the one that had knocked him out, played over and over again like an incomplete movie, like the little bits of film the shapeshifter had cut out of someone's life reel. The woman, Joanne, with bleach blonde hair and mascara running down her face, screamed at him in his mind.

"How stupid do you think I am, Jeff?"

Jeff. Even saying the name to himself, not out loud, made a tiny chill run down his back. Jeff. The idea that had been slowly coagulating in the back of his mind for days was starting to solidify into something almost too terrible to imagine. Mobius hated how much sense it made, even though taking humans straight out of the timeline and somehow brainwashing them felt like a lunatic conspiracy theory. Occam's razor sliced it to the bone. How else could this 'Joanne', and B-15's dream, and Zeit's 'imaginary' dog, feel so visceral and real to all of them, unless they were all under some kind of medically induced psychosis? More importantly, now… what did the shapeshifter know that he didn't? And how?

After a while, a blur of movement from the corner of his eye startled him out of his ruminating thoughts. Lucky and Six came trotting up to him, bookbags in hand, smiling excitedly, like puppies running around without a care in the world. Mobius swiveled in his chair and gave them such a glare that they stopped dead in their tracks, then he stood and sauntered over to them as nonchalantly as he could force himself to.

With a firm hand on Lucky's shoulder-as if Mobius was afraid he'd bound away if he didn't-he led them over to a couch in a recessed rest area, within eyesight of the agent's cubicles. It was set off to the side of a larger, cavelike hallway, perpendicular to the one that led all around the balcony that overlooked the TVA. He sat down next to the trainees, making sure that no one seemed overly interested in what they were all doing together.

Lucky leaned in and whispered, "Okay. We're ready for this, Mobius. We have our books, and our notes, and we're going to 'study' until… you-know-who shows up." Lucky grinned ear to ear as he put the word, "study", in air quotes, and couldn't seem to help but chuckle to himself.

"Stop acting like you're happy to be here," Mobius retorted sharply, keeping his face carefully blank. "This is a stakeout, not a pizza party."

That wiped the grin right off of Lucky's face.

"Now, listen up, because once I'm out, it's all up to you guys, got it?"

The hatchlings nodded, but Six squinched her eyebrows together in confusion, and leaned in even further, whispering even lower.

"If you have the tracking devices, then why do you need us?"

Lucky butted in before Mobius could explain. "Because there's too much lag. He wants to know exactly when the shapeshifter starts moving so we can follow right behind and then gang up on him."

"Right. And I need extra people here as witnesses, and to call for help, if anything bad happens."

Lucky nodded sternly, as if he had any idea what he was doing.

"And," Mobius added, allowing himself a sly grin at Lucky's expense, "Somebody just had to come and prove his mettle to his girlfriend."

Six and Lucky's faces went absolutely ghostly pale for a second, before Lucky shied away and his cheeks began to blush bright pink. Whether it was out of anger or purely embarrassment, Mobius wasn't sure, but he found it hilarious either way.

"You know, I could have had some experienced muscle help me out with this, like B-15 or C-20, but Lucky here got on his knees-"

"I did not!" Lucky hissed indignantly.

"-he got right down on his knees and begged and cried until I let him help. Didn't you?"

"No!" Lucky blurted, his face growing an even deeper shade of red.

Six's smile trembled, threatening to explode into uncontrollable laughter, but she held in her mirth and bit her lip.

Mobius jostled Lucky lightly with his elbow, hardly able to contain himself, either.

"Aw, I'm just kidding around," he whispered, "lighten up."

Lucky grumbled, with more venom than he expected, "I thought this mission was serious, Mobius, or did you agree to this just to embarrass me?"

Mobius coughed, and in an instant, was all business once again.

"All right, Lucky, you know the drill, and I assume you told Six all about it. The only thing we need to do is station Six somewhere else, closer to the cubicles."

Lucky's expression fell. "But-"

"No 'but's," he interrupted. "Two lookouts are better than one, but only if we have all our angles covered. This area is too open, there's too many ways he could approach. Besides, this guy saw you, right? He got a real good look at you?"

"Yes. I even talked to him, he sounded just like you."

"Course he did. The point is, if he sees you again, he might get suspicious, especially if you're staring straight at my desk. You stay here on this couch and angle yourself so you can see it out of the corner of your eye, but don't take your face out of your book."

Lucky did so, readjusting himself to look at least somewhat comfortable. "Like this?"

"Good. Now, Six, you're going to be over there, on that orange loveseat. You'll have a full line of sight leading all the way to the main terminal entrance. I assume he doesn't know what you look like."

"Er… about that, Mobius," she began, giving a quick, frightened glance to Lucky. The other trainee sat up straight again.

"You don't think that was him, do you?" Lucky whispered.

All three of them stared silently at each other for a moment, until Six pursed her lips and reached into her bookbag.

"Did you bring yours?" she asked.

Lucky nodded, then reached into his bookbag, as well. They each brought out small squares of paper: photographs of some kind.

"You start," she told Lucky, and Lucky swallowed and handed his photo to Mobius, with a terribly guilty look on his face that gave him a pang of dread.

What now? he asked himself.

He recognized what it was immediately, seeing Lucky's gray silhouette surrounded by a cloud of color, and tried hard to keep the exasperated sigh out of his voice.

"You used the temporal scanner, didn't you?"

"Just out of curiosity, you know. I wasn't trying to break anything…" he trailed off as Mobius studied the picture more closely. The blue aura surrounding Lucky's chest wasn't nearly as opaque as a variant's soul would be, and in the middle of his chest lay a fiery crimson blotch. That pattern… it wasn't like a variant soul at all, almost as if…

"What is it?" whispered Lucky coarsely, his green eyes nearly bulging out of his head.

Mobius regained his composure and shook his head. "It's nothing," he lied. "It is a little strange, though."

Under no circumstances could he tell either of them that Lucky's temporal aura looked quite a bit like a possessed person's aura. He forced his fluttering heartbeat to calm down as Six handed him another photograph, as equally shocking, somehow.

"How did you get a freaking mugshot?" he rasped. "You've been sneaking into the archives, too?"

Six stared at Lucky, who coughed and glanced away quickly. With a tiny scowl, as if she was frustrated with him, she explained, "We both were there. And I saw… someone. I didn't get a good look at him, but I know it was a man, and I know he had blue eyes. They looked like yours."

"You only saw his eyes?"

She shifted uncomfortably, and Lucky looked like he wanted to disappear.

"He was peeking at us. Through the shelves, between the folders."

"And why were you both…?"

Mobius didn't need them to answer. It came to him easily enough, seeing their mortified expressions.

He shook his head at them, tried to look severe, then examined the mugshot closely. With terror growing inside of him, he recognized the man in the photo, the name, the number so close to the other variant whose I.D. was etched into the cut up film, so close to something unknown in himself that he could just barely conceive of it.

J-83355: Jeoff Boid

Mobius turned the mugshot over, saw the scribbles on the back, and tried not to have a heart attack, though he couldn't help what came out of his mouth.

"This is my handwriting," he whispered.

The trainees stared at him, uncomprehending, innocent and horrified all at the same time. The barely-trained puppies had proudly dug up and presented him with a smoking gun and a human skull… with his fingerprints all over it. Everything he thought he knew about the entity impersonating him was starting to fly straight out the window, and he was left with nothing at all to replace it. Had the whole world gone crazy, or just him?

"Can-can I keep these?" he asked of Six and Lucky, and, still bewildered, they nodded. He stuffed them into his pocket, right next to the bit of film that he'd never left out of reach since Miss Minutes had apparently raided his room.

Out of the same pocket, he produced three tiny, beige colored earpieces: wireless linked coms that agents used for stealth, when they couldn't use a tempad to communicate during a sensitive mission. Lucky and Six stared at them like he was handing them pieces of gold.

Mobius fitted one of them in his ear, and the trainees followed his lead.

"Okay, do we all copy?" he said, hearing his voice echo in his earpiece as Lucky and Six both jolted a little.

"What are we copying?" asked Lucky, and his expression turned to surprise as he no doubt heard his own voice in his ear. Mobius was so used to using them he'd forgotten how weird it had felt the very first time.

"Just say 'copy'," he whispered. "It means you heard me and understood what I said."

"Copy!" they said in unison, scaring themselves again.

"Good. Now, I'm going to go to the cafeteria and I'm going to stay there until exactly 14:00. I will not come this way until then. So if you see me before 14:00-"

"It's the Skrull," Lucky interrupted, a bit too loudly. Mobius glanced around them and put a finger to his lips as a warning.

"Right. So you can just whisper that he's there, all right? Don't yell, don't jump out of your seats, don't do anything suspicious, okay? Just tell me. Quietly."

"I was thinking," said Lucky, conversationally, "we should have some kind of code phrase for when we see him."

"I don't think-"

"Like, how about, 'the eagle has landed'? I don't know what an eagle is, but I heard that when we were studying Earth's history. What do you think?"

"That's really not-"

"That's so stupid," Six jumped in with her two cents. "It should be something we would actually say in real life, so it doesn't sound suspicious. How about, 'he's coming to dinner'?"

Lucky frowned. "'The eagle has landed' sounds so much cooler, though."

"Guys," Mobius butted in, rubbing his hand against his face, attempting to wipe the cringe off his lips. "Please. Just say 'he's here'. That's all you have to do."

They both nodded, and Six chimed brightly, "Copy that!"

Mobius let out a tense sigh. He was starting to deeply regret this idea already.

He headed towards the cafeteria, leaving the gumshoe trainees alone to take their places and pretend to study, praying that they weren't going to blow up his best plan to capture the thief. He grabbed whatever off of the cafeteria line, without even looking at it, and sat down at a table in the corner, with a good view of the entrance. To his chagrin, he'd taken a bowl of lime jello with rubbery grapes inside, festooned with whipped cream; the exact same dessert he'd vomited over the side of the balcony that fateful day he'd lost track of his memories. He pushed it to the side. He never wanted to see jello again.

Mobius took his tempad out of his pocket and laid it down in front of him, then turned on the tracking application. The two devices pinged slowly, steadily, right next to each other, on a crude map that only detected walls, open space, and distance to the target.

This had to work. If it didn't, all he could do was scour the maze of vents himself, or hope that one of his colleagues saw the shapeshifter again… and knew which of them it really was. It was either that, or let Miss Minutes send out more killer robots to eliminate the problem.

That wasn't an option.

He had questions burning inside of him so fiercely it felt like they'd char holes straight through his skin. He was the only one who could answer them. The shapeshifter was no use to him dead.

Mobius sat and waited anxiously, watching the multi-handed clock tick by through the cafeteria window to keep his mind vaguely occupied, occasionally glancing to the entrance. Perhaps the copycat would grab some lunch before stealing his drink. There was a possibility that a robot had already taken care of his target overnight, that he would never come out of those vents again.

Mobius shuddered. He didn't want to think about that.

The hour ticked by excruciatingly slowly, but somehow, before he knew it, it was already 13:00. Most of the crowd had thinned out. He sighed, stood up for a second, and stretched his arms and legs. The tracking devices still pinged in a slow, steady rhythm, like a stationary heartbeat. Perhaps the shapeshifter only stole at night?

Lucky and Six's voices suddenly clamoring over each other blew through his earpiece so loudly that he nearly yelped, even though they were still only whispering.

"Mobius! Mobius, dinner's here! I mean the guy! Copy! Do you copy?"

"The eagle has dinner! Er-oh, you know what I mean! Come quick!"

Mobius groaned. Please, he begged the shapeshifter silently, please don't notice them.

"I copy. Which way is he headed?" asked Mobius quietly.

Six responded, "Towards you, towards the cafeteria, I think… yes, he's going!"

"Mobius, what do we do?" asked Lucky. Even without seeing him, Mobius could tell Lucky was ready to jump out of his skin. The tracker pinged a little faster, one of the devices coming down the hallway, the other staying put in his desk drawer.

"Follow him," he said, "but not closely. And not together, got it?"

"Copy," they said in unison.

Mobius watched the little blinking light come closer and closer, his tempad pinging faster and faster, echoing his racing heartbeat. If his target came into the cafeteria, Mobius could pin him between himself and the trainees, even if doing it in a crowd of people wasn't the safest idea. He watched the entrance, waiting to pounce at any moment.

The blinking, chiming dot came tantalizingly close, then, to Mobius' frustration, stopped dead in its tracks. It paused for much too long. He licked his dried out lips, sucked in a breath.

Turn the corner, you bastard…

The target had seen something. It was stopped like a deer in headlights. Mobius' heart plummeted to his feet. The Josta thief knew something was up, could sense a trap about to be sprung.

His target moved again, slowly, and Mobius' spirit lifted momentarily, thinking he would dash into the cafeteria for cover. Instead, the second he turned the corner, the thief darted straight past the cafeteria entrance and took the third right down a hallway. Mobius had been looking at his screen instead of at the door and hadn't seen his face.

He cursed silently to himself. At least he'd taken the bait.

He sprang up, went to the cafeteria entrance and turned to the left to follow the guy, when someone grabbed his arm roughly from behind.

"Mobius, Mobius, I've got him! Do you copy?" shouted Lucky, with Six closing in behind.

Mobius tussled with Lucky for a moment before he had to push Lucky so fiercely it nearly knocked him down.

"Lucky, it's me!" he growled, pointing to the device in his ear.

Lucky stared at him, embarrassed and open mouthed, as Six caught up to them. Several employees watched them from inside the cafeteria, bemused. The three of them had already made too much of a scene. The dot moved farther away, and faster, blinking more slowly. He must have heard. He knew, now.

Mobius groaned. He should have accounted for one of the trainees mistaking him for the thief; should have worn a bright tie, or something. Too late.

He rearranged his plan quickly as the dot darted through the hallways, making zig-zagging turns like a fox dodging a pack of hounds.

"Okay," he told them, "I think he's taking a roundabout route for the elevators, or a transport. We have to cut him off before he does, otherwise it'll be a hell of a lot harder to find him." He pointed to his left. "Lucky and I will go this way, and Six, head back out the hallway, go to the main terminal."

They nodded. Six took off at a jog, and Lucky followed right next to Mobius. A glance at his tempad told him the target actually wasn't taking a shortcut towards the middle foyer at all, but seemed to be going deeper diagonally into the maze of TVA hallways. It wasn't a move he expected, but it was impressive, nonetheless, if the guy really knew the TVA well enough to confidently escape that way. He was keeping Mobius on his feet, that was for sure.

"Lucky, go four hallways down, take a left, try to cut him off. Six, are you at the main terminal?"

"Not quite," she breathed heavily into the earpiece.

"New plan. Go right down one of the main halls. We'll either smoke him out, or corner him."

With Lucky coming at the target from the left and Six about to close in from the right, Mobius positioned himself at the middle rear of their flush-out line. The dot beeped faster again, the guy now just fifty feet away, separated by several walls. He was so close.

Suddenly, the dot paused on the map, still blinking, and Six gasped loudly into his ear.

"What, what is it?" he asked, still running.

"I see him-I-uh, Mobius-" she stammered, then there was a breathless pause, followed by a short scream and a grunt, punctuated by feedback whining into his ear.

Mobius nearly dropped his tempad, forgetting about his target.

"Six! Six, do you copy? Answer me!"

"Where are you? What happened? Are you okay?" Lucky yelped.

Six's com remained silent.

Mobius felt panic pounding in his chest, and all of his attention went to blindly finding Six instead of the thief. This had been a bad idea, he knew it. He should have brought B-15. The Skrull could have changed into a dangerous alien, one with claws and teeth and poisonous stingers, one that could do horrible things in just a few seconds. If he'd let something awful happen to Six, he'd never forgive himself.

Finally, he turned a corner and caught sight of Six lying on the ground, groggily lifting herself up on one elbow. She was alive, at least, and didn't look bloodied. Her hand groped the carpet, grabbed her earpiece off the floor, and Mobius heard her doing the same in his ear. A bit of muffled movement, and then he heard her panting heavily, just as he came running up to her.

"Six!" Lucky's voice blasted through the hallway as he rushed to her and helped her up by her other arm.

"Anything broken? Did he hit you, stab you, sting you?" asked Mobius.

She shook her head. "No, he pushed me out of the way, and my earpiece fell out." She blinked a few times, bewildered, and looked at Mobius like she was seeing him for the first time. "He looked at me and said… 'silver', or something? I don't know… then he ran past and pushed me against the wall."

"I'm just glad you're not hurt," breathed Lucky, giving her a bear hug that audibly squeezed the air out of her chest.

"I think he opened a door," she added with a squeak, still in Lucky's embrace.

Knowing Six was just fine, Mobius brought out his tempad again. The dot, to his surprise, was almost directly where they were standing, but wasn't beeping quite as fast as he'd expect it to. Searching around, he started opening doors, hoping perhaps he'd hidden in one of the rooms. The trainees followed suit. They didn't find any signs of life, but further down the hallway, Lucky opened a door and blurted, "Stairs!", making his voice reverberate into the concrete stairwell and back out into the hall.

Of course. That made sense. The guy had probably gotten better at finding less-used emergency stairwells instead of the highly trafficked elevators and transports. The tracker wasn't beeping fast because he'd gone either up or down, but it was impossible to tell which way from there. The three of them went into the bare stairwell.

"I'll go down," said Lucky breathlessly, "and someone else can-"

"No," Mobius cut him off. Did he think he was an agent already? "I'm not sending either of you off alone again where I can't find you quickly. Wait here."

Mobius went up a flight of stairs, and the dot blinked and pinged faster. One more flight and it ticked away even quicker, like a metronome gaining speed to a crescendo. The dot hadn't moved much, possibly at all, since he found Six on the floor.

Mobius smirked. The fox was hiding when he should be running. He turned down the volume on his tempad, rushed halfway back down the stairs, and stage-whispered to Lucky and Six over the railing.

"Come up here! Don't say a word! Stick close to me."

They did as they were told, and the three of them snuck into an identical hallway two floors above where they'd been. Straight ahead of them was a double-door labeled, 'Variant Belongings Storage: Division Nine.' Motioning Six and Lucky towards the door, he swiped his badge, let them inside, and closed it again as quietly as he could.

The warehouse was unfathomably enormous, even bigger than the film archives. Vast racks of identical gray storage boxes reached dozens of feet into the air, so high he could barely tell where they ended and the ceiling began. Each row had several spindly, terrifyingly fragile-looking ladders attached to them that could move down the row freely as needed, to let archivists reach any box. The rows reached on seemingly forever in front of them and to each side.

If his tempad volume had been on, the tracker would have been pinging like a staccato xylophone.

Lucky opened his mouth to speak, but Mobius shushed him quickly. A single word might send the fox running again. He motioned the trainees to follow close, and they walked slowly down the main aisle. Mobius could hear nothing but his heart beating through his ears. He felt Lucky and Six staring at his tempad over his shoulder. They were less than fifteen feet away now, and the dot flashed so fast it looked almost solid.

Mobius held up a fist; a signal to stop dead in their tracks. He held his breath. This was it. His target was on the other side of the rack.

With a burst of speed, he turned the corner and yelled, "Freeze!"

Except, there was no one to yell at. The aisle was empty. No one was hiding on top of the ladders, and no one could possibly fit into one of the storage boxes. Mobius was stunned, but only momentarily. His tracker still blinked wildly.

"Lucky, Six!" he shouted. "Check the aisles! He's got to be around here somewhere!"

There was a shuffling noise as the two of them went in separate directions, searching, but it became quickly apparent that they were the only three living bodies in that room.

Mobius shut off his tracker as an awful realization dawned on him. Some agent instinct led his gaze downward to the boxes on the bottom row. It blended in almost perfectly with the dark shadows cast by the tall racks, but the sheen of a small, black square of plastic caught his eye, stuck onto the front of one of the boxes.

He sank to his knees and pulled the tracking device off of the box, stifling a scream growing inside him.

"Motherfucker," he hissed, feeling his face grow hot with frustration. How did he know?

Lucky and Six came back to him, looking down on him kneeling on the floor, seemingly understanding without words that their mission had been a failure.

Mobius groaned, shifted into a cross-legged position, and put his face into his hands, not caring how pathetically unprofessional he must have looked to the trainees.

"Maybe there's a vent in here somewhere…" began Six helpfully, but trailed off.

"You see how huge this place is?" Mobius murmured into his hands. "Every division only has one Variant Belongings Storage warehouse. This place probably takes up half the floor. If there are vents in here we'd just be wasting time just trying to find the back walls."

They all waited in silence for another moment before Lucky chimed in.

"What's in the box?"

Mobius lifted his head and pointed. "This box? The one the tracking device was stuck to?"

Lucky nodded, a little sheepishly, and Mobius couldn't help but scoff.

"There's nothing in the box," he said. "Why would there-"

He cut himself off. Well, perhaps it wouldn't hurt to look, anyway.

The front of it was blank, unlabeled. He grabbed the handle, feeling almost frightened, for some reason, and slowly pulled the box out with a metallic, scraping sound.

A keychain lay inside. That was it. Nothing more.

He lifted it out, everything jingling, attached to each other. It seemed totally innocuous at first, the rings and carabiners and small, spiraling cords all hopelessly tangled together, but something about it felt… familiar. Two silver house keys were attached on the same ring to a large, weighty, metal keychain, shaped like an odd, five sided polygon, with the word 'Georgia' printed on it in cursive script. That was attached to another ring with a single, larger key. Black plastic encased the bow of it, which read, 'Ford' in fancy script, circled by an oval, molded directly into the plastic.

What especially interested Mobius, though, was what dangled at the ends of the cord.

The spiraling cord was a faded red color, frayed and stretched out with heavy use. On one end, attached by a loop, was a little, metal piece that looked almost like a lobster claw. The red cord had been threaded through a large keyring and tied a few times, whoever had done it undoubtedly thinking it was good enough to keep everything attached. On the other end of the cord was a circular key, very different from the others, with a bit of grippy, almost sticky plastic on its bow.

Mobius stood, leaning on the racks for balance. He knew. He knew what it was. He took out his tempad, hands shaking, and opened the door to his secret beach timecell.

"Mobius?" asked Lucky, confused, but he barely heard him.

Mobius practically ran to the Yamaha Waverunner stranded on the beach, flinging fake sand with every stride. Lucky and Six followed behind, but not too closely, watching him helplessly, probably wondering if he'd gone insane.

He didn't realize he was smiling like a madman. Perhaps he had gone a little crazy, after all.

With great effort, he pushed and pulled at the beached Waverunner, getting next to no traction on the sand.

"Hey!" he called out to Lucky and Six, "Come here and help me with this!"

They positioned themselves at the back of the jet ski on either side and pushed while Mobius pulled from the front, and eventually dragged it out into the shallow, simulated water. Six had been right; having fake water lapping against your legs was a strange feeling if you weren't actually getting wet.

He climbed on top of the bobbing jet ski, trying not to drop the keychain and lose it in the water, almost delirious with some indescribable feeling between fear and joy.

The safety clip. It wouldn't start without the safety clip.

He stuck the lobster-claw clip into a tiny, flat opening in the body of the jet ski, under the handles. It fit perfectly, and Mobius let out a crazed burst of chuckling laughter despite himself.

Now for the other key.

He put the middle of the circular key on top of a small nub under the other handle, then turned it to the right.

The Waverunner roared to life, and Mobius let out a whoop of pure happiness. He'd never actually ridden a jet ski, only admired them from afar and in his precious magazine… and at the same time, at that moment, he'd done it a thousand times. Muscle memory told him what to do. He revved the engine and zoomed forward like a racecar taking off. Fake water sprayed behind him, disappearing as it fell. He took an expertly sharp turn, hollering almost as loud as the engine as he zipped around in circles, like a madman.

Lucky and Six watched him from the shore. He caught glimpses of them staring as he pressed the Waverunner as fast as it would go. Let them stare. He'd never felt more alive, more himself, in his whole life.

Suddenly, the Waverunner let out a horrible grinding noise, then stopped dead in the water, floating silently like a bloated whale in the ocean. Two words, 'ENGINE OVERHEAT', blinked one after the other on the tiny digital display between the handles.

"Well… shit."

He supposed that was the reason why Hal couldn't get the thing to work right in the first place. The engine needed real, wet water to cool itself off. He didn't know if he'd deduced that with logic or if it was something he'd always known.

Stranded several yards from the beach, all Mobius could do was gather the keychain, jump off the jet ski and swim to shore. The water didn't have time to drip before it broke apart and vanished, but Mobius instinctively shook himself off a little, anyway.

The entire time Mobius had been taking his joyride, Six and Lucky hadn't said a single word. They continued to stare at him in confused silence, Lucky looking even more concerned than Six.

Mobius wiped some stray saltwater from his face, surprised that it hadn't vanished with the rest, until he realized it wasn't water at all. They were tears. He'd been crying. He was still crying, and didn't even realize it.

He didn't know what to say to them, to comfort them, to explain what had just happened. There was no explanation, no comfort. Everything was changed. Everything was wrong, upside-down, but so wonderfully different. No. The TVA was what had been upside-down and wrong in the first place. That was obvious to him in his deepest heart, even if he didn't have all the pieces to this puzzle, yet.

"Mobius?" said Lucky timidly, bringing him back to reality.

He took a deep breath, tried to steady his voice, so as to not burst into tears again as he spoke, though his soul trembled feverishly inside of him.

"You can't tell anyone at all about this, ever."

"Yeah, obviously," whispered Six.

"I mean it," he continued. "I need you to forget about this completely, do you understand?"

Six and Lucky nodded, but Mobius kept going. He paced the beach as he started to ramble.

"This never happened. You weren't here. You don't know who I would be looking for even if I had been-no! I'm not looking for anyone. There is no Skrull, no shapeshifter, no one in the vents. Everything is normal, everything is fine-"

"Mobius," Lucky interrupted him, making him stop in his frenzied tracks. Lucky looked equal parts frightened and annoyed, hugging his arms against his chest. "We get it, okay?"

Mobius regretted what was about to tumble out of his mouth, even though he felt it coming. Nothing could stop it. His formerly indestructible mental filter had holes poked in it and everything was leaking out. He took a single step towards Lucky, and Lucky backed away.

"No, I don't think you do get it. Do you know what happened to them, Lucky? Do you know what they did to them?"

"To who?"

"To everyone you snitched on. They didn't just get demerits. Libby went from agent to maintenance. They scrambled Zeit's brains so he couldn't talk. They tried to kill Evette."

"What?!"

Both Lucky and Six went deathly pale, their eyes wide, horrified. Mobius, disgusted with himself, put a hand over his mouth, looked away. He shouldn't have said that. Why did he say that?

He continued, haltingly, this time. "I'm sorry. I wasn't-what I mean to say is-Lucky, Six, if you don't remember anything else I've told you, you have to remember this."

Mobius came close to them, and they stood frozen to the spot, like they were too terrified to move.

"Don't trust Miss Minutes. Don't piss her off, but don't assume she's trying to help you. She's not. If you have a bad feeling, trust it. Trust your instincts. And… trust each other," he added gently.

For some reason, a slow, secret grin spread across Six's face, with that same crazed glint in her eye that she'd had after Mobius had found her in the vents. Lucky, on the other hand, looked like he was about to cry, himself.

"Can we go back, now?" he asked miserably.

Mobius opened the timecell door again and led them back into the vast Variant Belongings warehouse. The trainees quickly left through the double doors in the front, but not before Lucky threw a small, sad glance behind at Mobius as the door shut on them.

The quiet permeated his entire being, like suffocating smoke. He sighed into the silence, made his shoes thud a little louder, if only to hear an echo in that overwhelming stillness. When he made it back to the box in which he'd found the keychain, he knelt down, placed it inside, and looked all around him, all the way up to the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

"Are you still in here?" he asked, to which nothing replied. He even held his breath to catch the slightest movement, perhaps the thudding of someone moving through a distant vent. Nothing stirred.

"Well, if you are, I'd really like to keep the keychain, but I can't. I think you know that."

He paused, realizing that he was kneeling in front of the box, speaking quietly, like a pious worshiper praying to his god, as so many cultures and species did. He chuckled slightly to himself, reached into his pocket, and left an offering in the box: the mugshot, the temporal scan, and the tiny piece of variant film.

"These are yours, too," he said, sliding the box back into place and crumpling up the tracking device. "I just want you to know, I don't want to hurt you. I don't want anyone to hurt you. I need to know who you are, though. What you are. Why me, of all people? Why not show this to a judge, someone who can really make a difference?"

He stood up and dusted the dirt off his knees. "I should thank you, too. I didn't ask to know, but I'm glad, anyway." He took one last look around as he headed to the main aisle, as if he'd suddenly find him perched on a ladder, or hiding behind a rack. No such luck. With one hand on the door, he took a glimpse behind him at the colorless warehouse.

"Be careful. Don't stay in the vents too much, if you can help it."

Mobius left the storage room, then, feeling somehow as light as a feather, with a grin forming slowly under his mustache.