The Sword Asunder

by ViridianPanther

Post Halo 5 fix-it/continuation fic. On UNSC Infinity, the Master Chief has lost his friend (twice) and lost his purpose in life. Relieved from duty as Infinity plays slipspace cat-and-mouse with his erstwhile friend, Prof. Gudrun Hadid and Captain Tom Lasky order him to take a vacation. But, living with civilians and haunted by his own failures, can John ever truly switch off?

6. A Monument To All The Times We Spent

Celebrity has never sat easily with you.

Camera flashes, parties, and dress uniforms have made you nervous for years, for reasons you can't easily explain. You spent the whole ceremony on Cairo Station with your teeth gritted—at least, until the alarms blared and Lord Hood told you to defend the station, and you relaxed, back into your comfort zone, and took control.

You certainly did not have time to think about managing your own image. Thankfully, other people took care of that for you. The MJOLNIR voicemitter, for instance, adjusted the sound of your voice: a little extra bass here, a longer vowel sound there, the odd gravelly rasp for good size, all to fall into the human ear's sweet spot of 'noble, badass, a friend.' Censors and photojournalists modified photos of you to remove chinks and scratches in your armour, and created their own posed photos with computer-generated imagery. 'You' could be in more than one place at once during the war, if it was good for morale.

As it turned out, when the Spartans' existence were revealed—and you were cast as the 'hero' Spartan by the propagandists, because 'the Master Chief' sounded cool while just being anonymous enough that he could be anyone—the public loved it. Children had posters of you on their wall. Parents dressed as you at birthday parties, with papier-mâché MJOLNIR suits to surprise excitable kids. 'The Master Chief' made cameo appearances in everything, from the GlobeWar series of disaster vids to weather forecasts to porn parodies. Your fandom grew to an enormous size.

In recent years, things have soured. The propaganda machine spent several weeks declaring you a villain following the Sekibo incident, before changing its tune and lauding you as a hero in minutes. Then there was the brief period where you were declared dead—by the time you were no longer 'dead,' contact with Earth had been cut off.

The fandom was not pleased. Across the thousands of people in human space who felt they experienced a parasocial relationship with you, the conspiracy theories began.

Some of them were wrong. The Master Chief isn't real. He's just a hologram. Some were closer. He was never the Last Spartan. There were dozens. Hundreds. They just call them all 'The Master Chief' so we have someone to root for. Some of them were quite close to the bone: He's an ex-convict who they experimented on. They keep the brains intact but graft them into robots. Amputated his limbs and turned him into a cyborg.

Along with the more explicit conspiracy theories was the universe of fan art. There were collages and mood boards of your various 'cameos' (none of which you'd actually been involved in.) There were drawings, and paintings, and sculptures of your armour, and what people guessed your face (and, indeed, the rest of you) looked like. There were poems. There were slickly-edited vids. There were playlists. There was an amateur operetta with the lead tenor playing you. There were stories—so many stories.

The fan fiction is wild, even compared to the things we've seen together. There's the usual military porn ('you' meet a Spartan who's also an ODST, or a member of a super-secret cabal that's even more elite than either the Spartans or ODSTs.) There is actual porn ('you' fall in love and have sex with someone who's a barely-disguised surrogate for the author) as well as weapons porn ('you' spend a long time cleaning and then firing every conceivable firearm in appalling detail). There are surreal parody fics ('you' drive a tiny Warthog the size of a go-kart armed only with a pistol that fires backwards; 'you' are a DJ at a nightclub, then remove your helmet revealing you're a cat; 'you' are on your way to the park when you're interrupted by a giant penis monster erupting from the earth's surface to have sex with the moon.)

ONI censors have mixed attitudes to it. They don't have a policy so much. They do object to any negative representations, or anything that's skirting too close to the truth. Even though, by now, it's an open secret that there was never a 'last Spartan,' and that you were not a volunteer, but abducted—ONI still keeps a tight grip on what the public can talk about (at least, kept a tight grip, until the other me silenced the communications lines and the public could no longer talk at all.)

So this was how it was, and how it has been. There's the official line on what the SPARTAN project was—and who you are—and the void created by censored speculation, conspiracy theories, and fan fiction. A film negative of the Master Chief. A vacuum of understanding. No-one outside the upper echelons of ONI really knows who you are.

And that's something I intend to put right.

---

"Sir," said Ensign Do Ming Li, turning the handlebars on eir bicycle ever so slightly to bring emself alongside the Captain.

Lasky took a few seconds to acknowledge eir presence. Blinking, his own bicycle wobbling—the Captain was clearly dead on his feet.

"Permission to speak freely, sir?" Do asked. Uncertain if this was going to piss him off (e had seen the Captain angry today, and did not want to repeat this.) Uncertain if he had the mental capacity to simultaneously concentrate on the road ahead and on what e was saying to him.

"Sure," he said, and then yawned. His voice was surly, and Do could tell it was taking effort for him to remain upright, hands on the bars, feet on the pedals. (E knew the feeling.)

For a moment, e wondered if it was even worth proposing this solution. It wasn't even really a solution, or a plan. More like a hypothesis based on what e had observed. But—

"I think we may have a way to get our electronics working again," e said.

Lasky frowned.

"Have you tested it?"

"No, sir—"

"Go and test it, and then—"

"Sir," Do said, eir voice rising, momentarily emboldened, and said: "look at the lights."

Lasky yawned again. "You're out of line, Do," he growled, irritably. And then he added, "what do you mean, the lights?"

"The lights on your bike."

"What about them?"

"They're still working."

"And?"

Lasky wasn't paying attention to Do. He was only paying just about enough attention to the road not to crash. The suns had risen, and he was wilting in the heat of a Fordlandian mid-morning, nearing thirty-two degrees Celsius. His tunic was unbuttoned and flapping behind him as he pedalled, and his undershirt was drenched in sweat.

"Captain, you need a rest."

That was one of the Spartans—Linda, Spartan-058, the one who hadn't stayed behind at the Old Wizard to await John's arrival. She was suddenly at Do's side, between em and the Captain—an intermediary in this conversation. Enormous. Do found it hard not to be terrified by her.

"I'll take a stim-pack," said the Captain.

"No you won't," said Linda. "We ran out of them yesterday when we were carrying John back from the beach. Remember? You were exhausted."

The Captain didn't reply to that, except with a grumble that sounded like an acknowledgment. Yes, he was operating beyond his means. Yes, he did need sleep. He was hot, tired, dehydrated, and his judgment was impaired.

"Let's get back to the house," said Linda. "Not far now. It's all downhill. One klick max." Then the Spartan turned her eyes to Do: "The lights are powered by a generator, right?"

"Yes, ma'am. In the front wheel." E remembered the antique bicycle e had ridden around eir grandparents' gardens in Brisbane—at least several centuries old, a family heirloom—and how e had made frantic roadside repairs, re-wiring the ancient LED lamp to the Sturmey-Archer Dynohub, stripping wires with eir fingernails. "It's an electronic system."

"What's your idea, Ensign?" Linda asked. Although, Do suspected, she knew already, and just wanted confirmation.

"I think we might be able to jump-start the power packs on the weapons casing," e said. "And maybe the scrambler."

"Mhmm," Lasky grunted. The pieces were starting to slot together in his head.

"Let's try it when we get back to the house," said Linda.

"What's the point?" Lasky asked, suddenly. "What are we going to do with it?"

"I still wouldn't put it past our friends from Aalborg Haven not to try detonating that HAVOK," Linda replied—her voice booming a little, her figure unfurling, rising on her bike. Putting the Captain in his place. You may be my commander, but I can still kick your ass. "You can rest, Captain. I'll deal with it."

---

John bolted awake, and sensed something was wrong when he didn't see light from either of Fordlandia's suns casting beams across his bedroom.

It took him a few seconds to remember what had happened last night (this morning, before he'd slept—all time was bleeding into itself by now.) Getting slow, Spartan, he thought.

He became aware that his clothes from the previous night, the t-shirt and sliced up slacks, had disappeared, as had the plaster cast on his leg. In its place was an actual splint, something that looked waterproof, and had artificial tendons on the outside. He tried bending his knee—it moved, albeit not to the extent or with the speed he was used to, even out of MJOLNIR.

"Better?"

John flinched. Surprised himself that he did so, although, looking back on it—he had been more jumpy lately. What's going on, Spartan? he asked himself, although he knew the answer, and the subsequent questions, already.

He looked up at Halsey, stood at the opposite end of the room. Watching, expectant.

"It was all this place's Engineers could manage in a pinch," she said. "They were otherwise occupied."

Halsey stopped there, for a second or two, as if expecting John to say something. And then, her facial expression seeming to melt, she came closer to the bed, and bent, squatted, practically bowed—

"It's so good to see you, John," she beamed, her eyes glistening. "I am so glad you're safe."

John did not say anything as Dr Catherine Halsey took his right hand in her remaining hand, and squeezed it. He did not resist. He did not react.

"You're safe here," said Halsey, after a long, silent pause. "You'll be safe here, and you always will be. Nothing gets through that shield. Not even Forerunner. Not even nuclear."

So, Bolton's expedition to blow up the Temparium with a HAVOK warhead was a waste of time anyway. John allowed himself a smirk.

And then he asked Dr Halsey:

"Why are you working with Cortana?"

From the way her eyes cooled instantly, John knew most of the answer already. She is the closest thing I have to a surviving daughter. We need to defeat the Meridian Cortana. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

After Halsey said nothing, John asked:

"Can I trust her?"

"Can you trust me?" Dr Halsey replied.

John broke eye contact for a moment. Stared around the room. His room. He had dreamed about this place. Green plaster on the walls. A clock in the gable: 26:03. Simple, un-fussed bed linen. A star map on one wall.

"I need some privacy," he said. John was not prudish, but in front of Halsey, he felt vulnerable. He did not need an audience.

She nodded, and closed the door to the room behind her. In the rectangle of the doorframe, John saw—well, nothing. An obsidian floor that looked familiar enough. He guessed the simulation only extended as far as the bounds of the room he was in.

John's new leg-brace appeared to have something that administered painkillers at regular intervals, judging by how the sting faded after a few minutes, and, for a moment, he felt good about himself as he looked in the en-suite bathroom's mirror. He tried not to think about whatever the plumbing was connected to as he toileted, showered, and gargled mouthwash. In the closet, he found only one outfit: folded underwear, a dark grey shirt, green jacket, green slacks. A pair of boots that fitted over his leg brace. He was sure he had seen these somewhere before.

He briefly wondered if it was a good idea to open the door. There were no other exits, true. (He wouldn't fit through the window, and even if he did, he was pretty certain it would just lead out to the simulation chamber, same as this door.)

But—while escape may not have been an option, resistance was. He could refuse to comply with whatever Cortana was planning. Whatever scheme Anne had been sent to recruit him into. Whatever Halsey had been taken in by.

The Master Chief, knowing Cortana, knew she was planning something. And he knew that, outside the confines of the UNSC, her world view had changed.

John, knowing Cortana, also trusted her, completely.

He pulled down the handle, and stepped outside the walls of the room.

And I said: IT'S TIME TO BEGIN.

---

"How long have you been on Infinity, Ensign?"

Do, by now, felt like e was running on bananas and chocolate milk, but e knew e didn't have time to sleep. E was sweltering hot, stripped to eir stiff-shirt, head heavy, vision with the constant glare of the suns above. E held a wire cutter in eir left hand, and the stripped cables from eir bike's dynamo hub in the other. And e certainly did not have time to answer questions about eir life story while e was working.

"Ten months," e said, thinking that was about right. It had only been three weeks between em coming aboard Infinity and the subjugation of Earth. E'd planned to take shore leave in Brisbane with eir grandparents around four months ago. That hadn't happened either.

"Just before—"

"Yes," Do said, anticipating the question.

Private Clive O'Brien, sitting cross-legged in the front yard—ostensibly here to guard the weapons case—nodded. Do knew he was just trying to make small talk. It wasn't helping. In any case, e found it quite hard to take this man seriously—he looked like he was in his thirties or forties, still a Private, with a flourish of reddish-purple hair that seemed like it was breaking every regulation in the book.

Not worth caring about that now. Do just had to focus on the task at hand—now, what was it? Does the white stripe mean positive or negative? The output on this thing is 7.5 volts, is that going to be enough? Is it going to be too much?

"Have you worked with Spartans before?" asked O'Brien, and Do winced as e realised he'd be expecting an answer to this question too.

"Not really," e replied. "I'm a navigator. Hex keys."

O'Brien did a double-take for a fraction of a section until he realised e was asking for tools. He passed em the set of Allen keys, and e slotted the eight-millimetre head into the diagnostic knockout on the side of the weapons case.

"I see," O'Brien said. And added, unprompted: "I'm a sniper. I get around a lot."

"Really," Do said, moving onto the fourth of the captive bolts securing the cover. "I would never have guessed."

"I worked with a Spartan once before," continued the Private. "Forty-eight. I was royally pissed. She was brought in as the main sniper, I was assigned backup. Her name was Cal."

"I'm sure she's lovely." Do lifted the cover away from its recess.

"She died saving my life," said O'Brien. "I'm still not sure I've forgiven myself for it."

Do raised eir eyes, and glared at the Private.

"Sorry," O'Brien said. "I just feel like I need to verbalise this stuff to help process it."

"Fine," said Do, doing eir best not to raise eir voice. E was minded to add, 'I missed the bit where you hired me as a therapist,' but decided that would be a bit much—e was trying to rein in eir own sarcasm. So e simply added: "can we focus, please?"

"Sure," said O'Brien, looking a little taken aback. Do, surprised that had worked with someone twice eir age, returned to the weapons case, and exposed the two contacts for the wires.

It took em a while to work out how the retaining catch worked, and e guessed—hoped—that the white stripe on one of the wires coming from the hub indicated that it was the earth connector. (Maybe because a white stripe is like a minus sign? e thought.)

"OK," e said, taking the removed wheel by its rim and handing it to Private O'Brien. "Hold it by the axle."

"This isn't going to electrocute me, is it?" O'Brien asked. Judging by the arch of his eyebrows, apparently genuinely.

Do was starting to realise why this man was still a Private after all this time. I wish it bloody would electrocute you, e wanted to say, but instead said: "not unless you lick the contacts." E placed O'Brien's fingers on the two bolts on either side of the hub, and held the cable in place.

O'Brien asked: "are you sure this is going to work?"

"No idea," Do replied, "but it's worth a try."

E pushed the spokes forwards with eir fingers, and the wheel began turning on its axle. O'Brien looked down at the control panel for the weapons case.

"Nothing," he said. "I can't see—"

"Give it a few seconds," Do interrupted, pushing the wheel forward again. And again. And letting it spin out on its own bearings, and—

Click.

The information screen on the case lit up, as did Private O'Brien's face, as he moved to open it—

"Keep going," said Do, steadying the wheel with eir hands, and forcing O'Brien to stay where he was. "Give it a few more seconds."

The screen blinked as it initialised, and made contact with the control units inside. The two cells sprung up with labels and pictograms. M45/EX SPNKR (cluster variant): 4/4. M45 SPNKR (normal variant): 4/4.

"Nice," said Private O'Brien, as Do let go of the wheel, and pressed the release on the case. The hydraulic lid sprung upwards, and—as it had said—two rocket launchers sat inside, ready for use.

Do allowed emself a smile. It wasn't a plan, but it was a start.

---

John only truly recognised the hill when the holographic figures began moving, and he recognised himself.

"I guess I used to play King of the Hill," he said. "This was the hill."

"At your school?"

He nodded.

In the distance, Dr. Halsey stared, trying to conceal a frown.

"Do you remember what happened here?" Anne asked.

"I haven't thought about this place in years," John replied. "I remember being here, I just don't…"

The assertion trailed off, because he did not have the vocabulary to describe it. It was like watching a film, or a dramatisation of his early life. (In some ways, it was.) He thought back to what Fated Bairn had said: the Temparium records events that have happened. Nothing less, nothing more. John wasn't sure how, but it worked. This was exactly how he remembered his schoolyard as a child—or, at least, a miniature version of it. That was probably because he, aged forty-eight (about) was taller than he had been aged six.

"What are we doing here?" he asked Anne. "Why are we doing this?"

Anne made a faint smile. A smile he recognised, because it was much the same as Cortana's, just stretched over different facial geometry. I could tell you but I can't. Not yet. You'll like it though.

"What other things do you remember from your childhood?" she asked. A camera drone hovered a few metres behind her shoulder, pointing at John. "Before…" and here she gave a tiny, ominous glance towards Halsey, "you know."

John thought about it. There were fractured images, yes, but—

"You've been inside my head," he told Anne. "You've been part of me. What did you see?"

"What I saw doesn't matter," Anne replied. "It's what you remember that matters. This is your testimony."

John processed the word 'testimony,' and took note of the camera drone. He was starting to get an idea of what was happening.

"I remember the beach," he said. "My mom took me there."

"What do you remember about your mom?"

John felt the salty breeze of the sea on his cheeks, and a strange twist in reality as the world folded around him, the grass becoming sand, the blue morning sky turning the burnt umber of Eridanian sunsets. Sounds and smells and patterns of motion swirled in his head.

The ride up here with Kelly had reminded him of something…

"I remember the sound of bike wheels," John said. He looked down, subconsciously expecting to see his legs hanging loose from a child seat. "I guess that was how we went to the beach." Yes. He remembered that. Being in the child seat on the front, the air blasting into his face and his sense of balance being thrown off as his mom cut along the trail between Elysium City proper and the beach.

But there was something else there too. The feeling of his bare feet on tarmac, plodding forwards, surprised by his own resilience and at the same time determined to get to the beach—

"What did you do at the beach?" Anne asked.

The waves lapped at his feet, and he watched himself—a simulation of himself—kicking over his own sandcastle. Himself, staring, and a look of horror growing on his tiny face as a Pelican's ramjet roared overhead, and running into the arms of…

John's mom stood behind him.

Like everything else here, she looked smaller than John remembered. A perspective changed over forty years. He had completely forgotten the floral print of her dresses, the leather jackets she wore over the top when it was cold, but he remembered the red scarf she liked. The way she waved to him, the way the curls of her hair fell over her head.

"What was she like?" Anne asked, suddenly no longer caring about the kind of stuff John did at the beach. It had been a route to this. A means to an end.

He remembered the sound of her voice.

"John!"

And the way she would sit on the dunes, counting the dropships as they flew over. He remembered the notebook. The way she wrote, manually, the digits of the tail numbers.

Why would she do that?

"She used to take down the numbers of the dropships," John said, trying to process this as he watched her do it. She'd lower the binoculars, look up the serial number on an alphabetised table in her notebook, and mark it with the day's date. "I don't understand why," he added, as a horrible thought crossed his mind: "Was my mom gathering intelligence?"

"Why are you asking me?" Anne said.

"I thought you'd know."

Anne shook her head. Shrugged.

(I can see everything, but even so, my window into the past is limited by what you remember, and what the Temparium will present to you.)

"Maybe," Anne suggested, "she just liked spotting aircraft."

"Spotting." The word sounded unusual on John's tongue.

"Watching them go past, taking the numbers of the one she saw… so she'd know if she saw one more than once."

"Why?"

"Fun?" Anne suggested.

John blinked.

"People do that?"

"Some people," replied Anne. "As long as large vehicles with serial numbers have existed. It started with the first railways back on Earth."

John couldn't understand why this was fun. He looked at the figure of his mother again, waving to his child self.

"It's time to go home, John!"

And then his attention shifted, as he realised he had no memory of "home."

"I only remember flashes," John said, the world folding around his thoughts, the sky shrinking and condensing into a box—

A bedroom. John recognised it, because it was his own, a long time ago.

"I helped my mom decorate it," he said. And then, realising the absurdity of that buried fantasy: "I think."

The Child-John stood on a small stool, drawing stars on the wall in silver pen, as his mother, in overalls, placed the paint roller into the palette and mopped her brow.

She worked hard for me, Adult-John realised.

Tentative, he stepped out of the bedroom, and into the upper floor landing of the apartment, ducking to fit under the door frame (although he guessed it was simulated and Cortana wouldn't allow him to bang his head.)

The apartment was spread across two levels—only just, because there was very little of it. The walls outside were unfinished, half-sanded, and the only other room on this floor was a tiny bathroom. The staircase was cramped and floorboarded.

On the lower floor, John found his mother's bedroom, living room, kitchen, office, and store cupboard, all contained within a five-by-five square. She was curled on a futon, smaller than John remembered (like everything), concentrating intently on the glow of an old-fashioned looking chatter. Papers were stuck to the walls, a calendar was drawn on the refrigerator, and there were four clothes baskets, all overflowing.

"I don't remember this," John said, scanning the calendar, picking a day at random. 0500 CLEANING TRACEY. 0600 CLEANING JOSH. 0630 CLEANING WILL. (0730 - JOHN TO SCHOOL.) 0900 TUTORING JAMES. 0945 TUTORING KYLE. 1045 TUTORING JASON. 1145 TUTORING ROY. The lettering was tiny, in places struck through and replaced.

"She was busy," Anne said, suddenly at John's side. The camera drone hovered above them, in the void that replaced the ceiling.

John stared at his mother. And he saw something he had not seen before: the lines on her face. The grimaces as she scrolled through items on her phone. The dark patches under her eyes. The frizz in her hair.

"She was working so hard," John said, slotting the pieces together. "Busting her ass trying to make ends meet."

And then he saw the camera drone again, and glanced at Anne. At Cortana. At me.

"Why did you bring me here?" asked the Master Chief. "I haven't thought about her in years."

"Exactly," Anne replied. She looked like she wanted to smile, but couldn't—it didn't feel right.

John was confused. He had daydreamed about his childhood sometimes. But he had never seen it from the outside in, detached, like a scene from a play—

And with the blink of an eye, the scene advanced. His mother's head tilted back, as she pulled the duvet around herself. The creaking of floorboards under foot. A gentle hiss of sedative gas.

The uniformed arms carrying a young boy.

There was a lightness in the child's perception of the world, a tightness in John's head. He watched himself, and felt his world and his stomach churn.

John's breath caught as the ONI operative stepped over the threshold.

"Take it away," he said, with a rising panic that surprised even him, his heart pounding in his chest, his veins bulging, his lungs ballooning in fear— "take it away. Take it away, take it away, TAKE IT AWAY!"

---

The bicycle wheel spun. Do Ming Li felt the stillness in the air as the Captain held his breath.

They were crowded into the cockpit of a Warthog around the back of Tintagel's police station, one with the green livery of the Aalborg Haven base and two unpaid parking penalties stuck to the windscreen. Do was holding the cables trailing into the dashboard in place, contacting the bare ends onto the terminals on the hub, while Frederic held the wheel's axle and Professor Hadid turned it.

There was a gentle click, a relay closing—a screen on the pilot's console lit up, and then the car's frame growled beneath them as the engine phutted into life. Hadid tentatively moved her hands away from the tyre, her fingers blackened with grime—ready to catch it and keep spinning the wheel if the car showed any signs of dying.

It did not.

"Alhamdulillah!" the Professor breathed, her relief bursting from her chest. The Captain, as if also thanking God, squeezed his eyes shut, and gazed into the sky, a triumphant sigh rising with his chin.

Fred muttered something that looked like 'thank fuck' under his breath, then cut a smile at Do.

"Good work, Ensign," he said, "I think you just saved our asses."

After a long pause in which Do felt as if e had just been praised by God themselves, the Captain pulled himself together and said: "right. Let's get to work. Ensign, get your toolkit, let's meet back here in fifteen minutes. Gudrun, with me."

They'd sketched out the plan already—roughly—but they still needed to agree on the details. And the twin suns of Fordlandia were marching across the sky relentlessly, and if one looked into the distance, at the Old Wizard on the horizon, one could see (with good enough binoculars) that there were still ODSTs milling around the base of the installation. They did not have long.

So Ensign Do Ming Li turned for the house at the watermill, Regnebuegåde 49, and sprinted.

The door was on the latch. The house within remained untouched. On the couch, Do saw Private Clive O'Brien sleeping, slumped messily, his hair a true representation of chaoskampf in keratin.

Do dashed up the stairs, to the locked cabinet where e had put the repair kit from the Pelican (just in case someone had got to the downed ship first and stolen it.) E checked the contents were still there. Diagnostics computer (freshly re-set and with a charged battery); torque wrench; multimeter; a bevy of equipment that would hopefully give em a fighting chance at getting the Pelican back in the sky.

E closed the tabs on the toolkit, slung it over eir shoulder, and turned to see a figure grasping the doorframe, wheezing.

Skin that seemed unnaturally white, ridged with goosebumps; a latent smell of vomit; a beard and hair that were both overgrown and dangerously thin, as if they were at risk of falling out. Kurt Stjernberg released his grip on the doorframe, lurched forward, and keeled forward into the floorboards.

Do knew e probably let out a short yelp of surprise. E also knew that e had to be back at the police station in… eight minutes? But e was also at Kurt Stjernberg's (Cortana's?) side in seconds, checking his pulse.

"I'm fine," lied the figure on the floor, before he was wracked by another cough. He was dressed in a t-shirt and boxer shorts with the buttons in the wrong holes in the fly, and his face was damp; Ensign Do suspected he'd attempted to wash his own face in the bathroom.

"You're as bad as the Chief," Do said, as e helped Kurt upright and brought his arm over eir shoulder. (Maybe not quite as heavy, e didn't say.)

Kurt let out a weak chuckle, and did not complain as he was led back into the bedroom, and lowered onto the mattress. Do had to help him bring his legs onto the bed, and brought the mattress over him—all the while nervously checking the time on their datapad. A few minutes wouldn't make a difference, e was sure, but every second would count.

(But then again, Do doubted that Professor Hadid would forgive em if e didn't do something and then Kurt Stjernberg—one of the Cortana avatars? bodies? ancillæ?—died on the floor while everyone else was out.)

"Thank you," Kurt said, weakly, after a run of five hacking coughs and a horrible gurgling sound from his throat. He closed shaking fingers around the cup that Do had filled with water, and messily poured it down his throat.

"Don't do anything stupid," Do insisted. "The Professor said you need to rest."

"I don't think I have much choice," the man replied, ruefully. He looked down at the sheets, apparently twitching his legs and finding it quite hard to move them. "It seems like it comes and goes."

"Like I said," Do said. "Don't do anything stupid. Get some rest."

E turned to go, but a call of "ensign!" stilled em—and when e turned around, Kurt was regarding em with an anguished expression that did not appear to be entirely from the physical pain.

"I need to get back," Do said. Genuinely sorry, although e did not have time for niceties.

"Look, I know you can't tell me what you're planning, but please—" and here Kurt reached to tug at Do's wrist— "make sure he's OK."

"He's with another part of you," Do replied, "I don't know what you expect me to do about it."

"I know, I know…" Kurt Stjernberg—Cortana—blinked away tears as the question formed. "She's always had a different philosophy."

"You're the same person."

"We were," replied Cortana, breathily. "That part of me… she's more concerned with accountability. With making sure what happened to him—to all of them—she's more interested in making sure it never happens again. That's why she's been recording interviews."

Do knotted eir eyebrows. "How? What do you mean?"

"That doesn't matter," Kurt replied—and Do felt (as e had felt with O'Brien earlier) an overwhelming urge to brain him— "I just… I need you to keep him safe. She, the other me—she might lose focus on that. And that's most important."

Ensign Do Ming Li did not pretend to understand this. E made a note to pass this onto the Captain (although e knew Kurt Stjernberg seemed to have a habit of speaking in riddles and there was a likelihood this would just piss Lasky off again.)

But for now, e wriggled eir wrist free, and told Kurt: "I'll do my best."

---

John found himself doing that thing again—clenching his jaw shut, in something approaching a grimace—as he watched the robotic scalpel part his younger self's skin.

If he looked back in his own memories, he could remember very little of the procedure. Maybe the woozy feeling of trying to fight the anaesthetic; maybe the throbbing pain in his bones from the rapid growth; maybe the way his eyes stung even behind his eyelids as his irises strained, his brain baffled at the way the cones of his cornea seemed to be lit up like a Christmas tree.

Seeing it from without was peculiar, even as far as these out of body experiences had been so far. The child's ribcage rose and fell. The servos in the mechanical arms span and whirred. Blood spurted from the child's (his, John remembered) capillaries. Small clouds of vapour rose from where the arm electrically sealed the wounds it had just created—the acrid smell churned what little was in John's stomach.

"Are you alright?"

John jumped, not realising Anne—Cortana—was so close behind him. Her own eyes were darting between him and the operating table. She was holding her mouth closed.

The Master Chief said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

"She watched this," Cortana whispered, under her breath. "She watched this and didn't stop it."

A gurgling sound came from the Master Chief's right. A figure—he thought this might be 073?—coughing, his torso erupting and his eyes going still. His body fighting against the changes the machine was making to it; the machine had won.

John opened his mouth to speak—but his voice evaporated on realising he could not even remember the boy's name.

"Ibrahim," Anne supplied. "Ibrahim bin Mohamed el-Tahir. Spartan seventy-three."

John blinked, the carcass across the medical bay suddenly, once again, human. Ibrahim. The boy with grim resolve who missed his dad and was fastidious about washing his hands. The boy whose eyes lit up with recognition when Déja's history lessons covered the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, and his namesake, Pargalı İbrahim Pasha. The boy who realised, perhaps earlier than John or anyone else, that it was a matter of time before he died in the SPARTAN program, and spoke longingly of being reunited with his father in Paradise.

The boy.

John stared, unable to look away. Ibrahim's blank eyes stared back, the medics cleaning the fluids from his chest, the surgical arms moved out of the way and turned off. Angled upwards, with the scalpel pointed away from the humans below, it was as if it was saluting. Or exalting.

(Or taunting its victim.)

"Fourteen years old," Anne said, grimly.

John felt the focus of his eyes moving. From Ibrahim, to the next bed, and Fhajad, twitching, an unseemly gasp of pain rising from his chest, as his nerves frayed at the edges. Cassandra, and the shards of bone piercing her shoulder and her pelvis, shattering into fragments like angry stalactites. Søren, his face swollen. Serin, the monitors on her bed going haywire with neurological activity as the surgical arm backed away.

The Master Chief heard grunting from before him. The hiss of a pained breath. He blinked.

The fourteen-year-old John, SPARTAN-117, stared at his hands, at the cauterised ridges. A grimace sprouted on his face, a horrified, toothy thing, his eyes widened.

The Master Chief, watching the making of himself, imagined a stab of pain at the base of his spine, and shuddered, taking in breath—

"OK?"

Anne grabbed his wrist, her hand barely encircling it but her intent clear. John felt his heart rate drop.

"Yeah," the Master Chief whispered, barely any timbre to his voice. "Yeah. I—" He looked at Anne. "Sorry."

"It's OK," said Cortana. "I think we need to step back for a bit."

With her free hand, she snapped her fingers, and the simulation dissolved. The smell of blood that John had barely noticed now decayed into the smell of the sea. He felt his diaphragm relax, and breathed.

"Why?" he asked, once he felt a level of moisture returning to his tongue.

"Why what?" Anne—Cortana—asked the question, and the Master Chief—John—immediately found himself presented with possible answers.

Why is this so difficult to watch? Why have I never thought about this before now? Why did I not realise what this was?

"Why are we doing this?" the Master Chief eventually asked, through a cough.

"You know why, John."

John had a good idea by now. He was watching the making of himself. Anne was asking him questions about it. What he remembered. Details he found particularly vivid. There was a camera recording it. And—what did this version of Cortana claim she was?

"I never asked to be interviewed," the Master Chief said.

"You were never going to ask," Anne replied, plainly. "But something needs to be done."

"Something?"

Anne—Cortana, John reminded himself, just a different version of her with a different shape and a different priorities—crossed the room that was suddenly apparent around them. A large, atrium-like classroom with a holographic display in the centre. The classroom in which Déja taught the young Spartans. (The classroom in which Ibrahim, Spartan seventy-three, who would cease to exist at a mere fifteen years of age, made the connection between his own name and another who shared it around a thousand years ago.)

"Question, John," Anne said, rounding the table and turning, staring at him over a topographic projection of Reach. (The same kind of turn-and-glare that Halsey used to make.) "A long time ago, you used to believe you were a schoolyard bully before you got brought into the SPARTAN program. How did that make you feel?"

John knows the answer to that. It had made him feel proud. Proud, in some perverted way, that the single-mindedness of his childhood had been captured and honed into a perfect weapon to keep humanity safe. Proud that it had been him and not the others.

He was old now. He knew that he was no more a playground bully than any other boisterous child. It was hard to pin down exactly when he saw through the lie. Maybe it was a low-functioning dream in the depths of cryo sleep, or maybe it had been in the last who-knew-how-long that Infinity had been on the run from the person in front of him. A resolution that, in fact, despite everything Chief Mendez had told him through gritted teeth and with that tiny perspiration at his brow, this whole escapade was about experimenting on children—John included.

"Is making people feel sorry for me going to change anything, Cortana?" the Master Chief asked.

"This is about accountability," Anne replied. This was how John always spoke to Cortana in his head. The conversation always took a few leaps forward between every line, the connections between each topic implicit. They had known—did know—each other all too well. Judging by the similarity between their conversation styles, it was not just sharing the brain space. And yet, John found this line of questioning—

"What good will it do?" he asked. (Leaving unsaid: She's not got much freedom to look forward to.)

"I believe in stopping this from happening again." Cortana glared at John. "And I believe people can learn from history, as long as it is history. Unfortunately, some people are quite good at erasing information about crimes against humanity from the official record," and here she shifts her glare to Halsey, who endures it like a statue under floodlights. "Fortunately, the Forerunner was generous enough to build something that means we don't need any of that. We can have our history back."

So this was what was happening. The picture was clear in John's head. Cortana—Anne—was making an unauthorised biopic, of some description. (The title The Story of the Master Chief swirled in his head.) With this film, she would be able to expose Dr Halsey, and ONI, and the entire United Nations Space Command's crimes to the universe.

He caught Halsey's eyes for a moment. Her eyes glimmered in the reflection. He could tell what she was thinking too. ONI would have a field day with this asset. All that information on the Flood, on the Forerunner, in real time—

"And what then?" John asked, his attention turning to Cortana. "People know that I was kidnapped as a child?"

"John, this isn't just about one person. This is about the system that allowed this to happen. This isn't just one thing that slipped through the cracks or happened out of sight of an ethics board." Anne leans forward over the table, in the direction of Halsey. "It happened because there were no ethics."

"Because we were saving lives." Halsey's voice rose like a hacksaw, her timbre striking in its match to Anne-Cortana's. "You saw the models, Cortana. You know how many people would've died."

"You were catastrophising in response to an imperialist panic about political self-determination," Anne replied. And then she tapped her own eyebrow with her finger. An implication in that gesture. Don't pretend you weren't. We have the same mind. "Putting random numbers into a spreadsheet to show that actually, we should abduct children and experiment on them."

The Master Chief began raising his palm as if to mediate the conversation.

"Tell yourself what you like, Cortana," Halsey said. "I know it was monstrous, but I stand by what I did. If I was in the same position, I'd do it again." And then she looked to John, as if to say, I'm sorry— again, words that were implicit. "Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. But the Spartans are the way they are now. John is what he is through the Spartan program, for better or for worse. There's no use crying over spilt milk."

"Got any more clichés you could throw in there?" Anne glowered. "Let me think. Oh, I know. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

John remembers this. George Santanaya.

"Fun fact," Anne interrupts, before Halsey can refute it— "that quote was introduced to the English speaking world by Winston Churchill. He was largely responsible for the famine in Bengal. And people still venerate him. He was hailed as a hero in this very room." She taps the side of the holotank with each word to underline the point.

"Did you prepare that? Did it look good in the mirror when you rehearsed it through your cloned face?" Halsey's face was placid and yet livid, as if she had become a kind of angry tree in the face of herself. "Is this about you processing the fact that you're me and I am you? And you're capable of exactly the same things—"

"This is not about me, Catherine," Anne insisted. "This is about stopping what happened to John and the others happening to anyone else, ever again. It's about protecting him. I am not letting anyone do to any other child what you did to him and the others. Not on my watch."

Anne's tone had sharpened. A little close to the Meridian Cortana for John's liking.

"I don't need protecting," John said, crossing the room, finding his movement alarmingly easy on his Forerunner leg brace—even more precise, more powerful than the Mjolnir, and yet— "Cortana, I don't need—"

It was not far from all three of you talking over each other. Arguing. A family row.

So I intervened.

WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS, I said, and you, and Halsey—and I, even—jumped at the sound of my own voice, and my sudden manifestation in the holotank. WE HAVE A LITTLE OVER FOUR HOURS LEFT UNTIL THE OTHER ME'S ULTIMATUM EXPIRES. WHATEVER YOU'RE DOING, YOU NEED TO DO IT FAST.

You, the Master Chief—John—you stared into the empty holotank for a moment once my avatar had disappeared. I'd appeared as a sphere, as a multidimensional waveform, an abstract representation of the true fabric of my reality.

You looked at Anne—another one of me—for a moment. You felt a tug of pain in your chest. Maybe you were just getting old. Or maybe something about me, what I was aiming to do, was breaking your heart. Maybe you felt as broken, as rent asunder as I did.

As you gazed back into the holotank, crestfallen, you asked, your voice all grit and no earth: "do what, Cortana?"

---

Time is running out. Was, is, will—I've grown to learn that the difference doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

We will all be dust in the end.

And yet part of me is sure this will work. It has to. (If any part of me is human, that must be it. The hope.)

But a lot of things have to line up for your survival, mine (whichever vessel I am contained in) be damned. You need a way off Fordlandia. You need the Meridian instance of me not to imprison you again (and do heaven-knows-what-else to everyone else here.) You need sleep, food, and water, and to be surrounded by your friends—a sustained period of actual rest for you to recover your physical and mental health. You need Corporal Brock C. Bolton III to not nuke the Temparium.

Almost none of this is within my control, even though it should be. I can't control any of the levers I would've had on Earth or Reach to stop this. I can't prevent the detonation of a shielded nuclear warhead. I can't—

I just can't. Too much of me is wrong. Out of place.

And yes, I know. The chances of my making it through this (as an extant fragment of myself, decanted into a human container or otherwise) are slim. Less slim than yours.

(The odds have never bothered you.)

(I wonder if I can hear my other self, the Meridian fragment, deciding she's had enough and reneging on our agreement for thirty hours—)

(I need a contingency plan.)

---

There was a contingency plan in place, but not one that Captain Lasky, nor Ensign Do, had a great degree of confidence in. Nor did the other Spartans, but at least they were more charitable.

Kelly had simply sucked air through her teeth and said words to the effect of "well, not the worst odds I've dealt with."

She was on Lasky's right-hand flank now, back on the bicycles, with Fred to her left. They were heading back up the hill, their waypoint the Old Wizard—the Temparium—the giant blob of nothingness that was slowly being re-formed at the top of the hill.

The twin suns of Fordlandia were marching across the sky, and weren't going to wait for anyone.

(Neither will I.)

They stopped partway up the hill, just past the high school at a point where a maintenance track joined the coast road, and that ubiquitous MANUAL VEHICLES IN CARRIAGEWAY sign was leaning a few degrees askew. They tested the signal. Two long pulses of light from the modified front light of one of the bicycles.

Kelly squinted into the distance through her binoculars, to the crash site that she knew was within sighting distance of this junction—and saw things that might have been an acknowledgement, a return flash of two long pulses.

"We're good," she said, omitting the uncertainty for the Captain's benefit.

"Sure about that, Spartan?"replied Lasky. Still astute, but the bags under his eyes indicating he wasn't willing to argue.

"Got a better plan, Captain?" Fred asked, rueful, but more to ease the tension than anything else.

"Linda will work something out," Kelly said, swinging her leg back over the top tube. "Let's move."

They heard the safeties being disengaged on ancient weapons as they rolled up the track and neared the clearing. Frederic stayed behind, on his bike, to give the signal if necessary. Kelly and Lasky propped theirs against the benches, and strode forward—the Captain panting heavily.

"Bring General Valdes here, please," said Kelly, matter-of-fact. "We need to relieve you of your warhead."

Morrissey, taking point at the entrance to the Temparium, rolled his eyes. "This was not the agreement we had, Spartan."

"The agreement we had was not to detonate the warhead," replied Lasky. "After recent events…" (here the Captain did not mention the way Corporal Bolton had attempted to start a bar fight with the Master Chief, nor the attempt to torture information out of Kurt, still a civilian in legal terms, nor the fact that they had happened upon him while activating air raid sirens in preparation for a detonation) "…we'd prefer a little more surety."

"I'm not authorised to do anything, sir," said Private Morris Morrissey, his attempts at keeping his lips sealed indicating annoyance. "You'll need to speak with the General."

"We want to speak with the General, Private," replied Kelly. "That's why we asked you to bring her here."

Morrissey reached to activate his COM, before stalling—maybe realising it wouldn't work, and worried he had betrayed incompetence to the Spartans before him. He looked around. He wasn't willing to leave point position in case Kelly and Fred and the Captain tried something.

(The absurdity, I think as I watch—you're all nominally on the same side!)

(But it's hardly the most absurd thing about the situation.)

He looked over his shoulder, and pointed at cadet (name badge: Arnulf) who looked like she was barely older than 15. "You!" Morrissey shouted, and the cadet jumped on realising his finger was aiming at her, "go and fetch the General."

The girl—for yes, she was a child—seemed confused, and as this resolved into astonishment that she'd been asked, her shock manifested as her being rooted to the spot.

"Do it!" bellowed Morrissey, and Cadet Arnulf recoiled—

"Enough!" Kelly said, flatly. Morrissey snapped back to face the greater threat in his mind, and the colour seemed to drain from his face. He was quiet after that. "Cadet Arnulf," Kelly asked, dropping her voice, her face opening into an understanding smile, "are you OK?"

There were tears at the young Cadet's eyes. She nodded, though.

"It's alright. Can you just go to the General and tell her we need to speak to her, please?"

Arnulf nodded, and scurried off. Kelly was not going to correct her for not affirming with a "yes ma'am" or "yes sir." Instead, she glared at Morrissey and said: "I think you should apologise to her when she gets back."

"It's not my fault if she's useless," replied Morrissey—

"How old is she?" Kelly demanded, cutting Morrissey off and wiping an apologetic smile from his face.

"I don't know—"

"Well, it doesn't matter," said Spartan-087. "She doesn't deserve to be bullied."

"Some of us remember what it was like as a cadet," interjected Lasky.

Morrissey's hands tightened around the handle of his shotgun. Infuriated at being called out. Embarrassed at being unable to disagree.

After three minutes, there was no sign of Cadet Arnulf, nor of the General, nor of Corporal Brock C. Bolton III. There was also no sign of the warhead.

"Where is the General?" Kelly asked, once she had had enough of waiting.

Morrissey shrugged, a trained visual cue that did not draw Kelly's eyes away from one of the two remaining Cadets behind him opening his mouth to speak, before deciding against it.

"You sure you don't know?" Kelly asked. "Strikes me a bit odd that you'd send that lass off to fetch your commanding officer when you don't know where she is."

And then, the Captain asked: "where's the warhead?"

Private Morrissey replied, flat: "I'm not authorised to answer that, sir."

"So you do know?" asked Kelly.

"I'm not authorised to answer that," Morrissey replied, straightening his legs.

"I'm entitled to know if my crew are at risk," Lasky said. "Cut the mind games."

"I'm not authorised to answer that," Morrissey repeated. Enjoying this obstinacy in front of a Captain and two Spartans.

Kelly frowned. Something wasn't right here. They had no reason, assuming they were playing by the rules, to deny knowing where the HAVOK warhead was. If Kelly's MJOLNIR had been working, the built-in dosimeter could probably have picked it up.

(It is imperative, she knows, that the Aalborg Haven party led by General Valdes and Corporal Bolton, a faction hell-bent on destroying any trace of me—that they do not realise that the Infinity shore party has found a way to use electricity and mechanisation again.)

"Well, I can wait," Kelly said, walking back to the bench to sit on it. "Any time you're ready. Just the fate of three civilian towns in the mix." She turned to Lasky, who had joined her, and to Fred, still stood at his bicycle, ready to go (or to activate the Plan B signal.) "Anyone bring a book? Could be a while. We should've had a picnic basket."

She placed her hand on the surface of the bench, tapping a rhythm. Three short taps, no long ones. A pre-agreed code. Thirty minutes. Then we begin plan B. Frederic quirked the edge of his lip upwards. OK.

Lasky blinked, and yawned, reaching for his pocket for a pair of shades. "I don't like this," he said, uncaring if Morrissey or the two cadets behind him (who clearly knew more than they felt voicing in front of the Private) would overhear.

And then he craned his head a moment, and his brows furrowed. Behind those silver lenses, Lasky's eyes had been caught by something.

Kelly was about to turn her head to look, but Fred's breast rising as he took in breath, and the tightening of his grip on the bicycle stem told her that was a bad idea.

"Look without looking," the Captain mouthed, as Frederic flicked his index finger up, tapped his ring finger against the handlebar—once, twice, three, four, five, six, seven times—and crooked his thumb. (Wait a second. Seven o'clock. Question?)

Kelly could not look over her shoulder at whatever was at seven o'clock without drawing attention. But whatever it was—

"Bugger," she said, suddenly, loudly, slapping her thighs and standing. "Forgot to turn on the alarm." Leaving unsaid the 'can't trust you lot not to steal my bike' as she glanced at Private Morrissey, whose jowls had turned to stone.

This gave her an excuse to stand next to Frederic while she fiddled with the control panel on the top tube of her bike, and glanced upwards—

"That Razorback wasn't there yesterday," Fred whispered, while both their backs were turned to Morrissey.

He was right. There was a car parked on the paved area, next to the art gallery.

"They probably didn't push it up here," Kelly whispered, 'accidentally' activating the burglar alarm she'd been 'meaning' to set, and making the Captain jump as she shouted, perhaps a little too loudly, "shit! Sorry! Bloody thing—" as Lasky joined them, albeit wincing at the noise, but giving them an opportunity for a small conference masked by the sound of the burglar alarm.

"They've gotta have electricity," Laksy grumbled, making sure he was facing away from Morrissey. "Dammit. We're—"

"What's the betting they're going to use that to evacuate," said Frederic, in a normal speaking voice, just about intelligible over the indignant screech of the bicycle that thought it was being 'stolen'— "and they've got a few more of them? And they're going to detonate anyway?"

Kelly looked behind her. Clearly, Morrissey was suspicious that this was a distraction. He was shouting at one of the other kids now, presumably to head over to investigate.

"Captain," she said, quickly, "if it gets noisy here, take that car, evacuate those kids."

"We won't be able to get them to a safe distance if it goes off suddenly—" the Captain started, eyes widening in surprise, abandoning any attempts at keeping his voice down.

"Someone's got to try. And I'm staying here."

"Spartan—"

"I am not leaving him behind again," Kelly said, flatly, and turned off the burglar alarm. "There," she said, loudly, turning to face Private Morrissey. "Sorry about that. You know, I'm surprised that thing still works, after the number Cortana did on your comms with that pulse blast!"

Morrissey cast a suspicious glance her way, as they settled back onto the benches.

"I'm not losing three Spartans," Lasky whispered, feigning an itch in his beard to mask what he was saying.

"It's what he'd want you to do," Kelly hissed back, and then looked at the sky. "It's getting on a bit," she said, loudly, in Morrissey's direction. "Your General's hard to find, Private. Any idea where that poor girl's having to look now?"

---

The Master Chief had just been reminded, for the first time in a while, of 27th November 2525—the worst day of his life, to that point.

He wished he was inside his armour again, hiding behind the visor where he didn't have to think about where he looked—and where no-one would see if he closed his eyes.

But he couldn't stop himself from hearing his own words.

"You'll have to stay and hold them off." the younger John said. "That's an order."

The first time it had happened. And watching the younger version of himself, alarmingly reedy-voiced, the MJOLNIR voicemitter doing a lot of work— it looked so easy.

(And it was easier than it should've been.)

Now 14-year-old Kelly was arguing with the 14-year-old John. And there—

"Sam," John muttered, under his breath, his tongue and lips forming the shape of his friend's name, but—

"Samuel Westergaard," said Anne, her voice sounding croaky—whether that was from the failure of the flash-cloned body, or what they were watching, John did not know. "Spartan-034."

And then she cast a glance at Dr Halsey. She had gritted her teeth and was holding her jaw shut—but she had had less practice at this than John. Her eyes were telling the whole story.

"He has his orders," the young John said—although the older John now detected the way he dropped the last vowels. He was feeling the same lump in his throat.

And there was Sam, explaining to Kelly. "I wouldn't even know where to start to unzip this thing."

The adult John found himself snorting uneasily at that.

And then the two of them looked to each other. Then to Sam.

"Get going, you two."

John did not need to see behind his friends' faceplates to know what they were feeling.

Kelly: naked horror. A hopeless wave of denial.

Samuel: despair, no matter how much he tried to grin and bear through it.

John—a younger, more naïve John, but the same man at 14 as he was at 52: fear. Shame. A deep regret that gnawed away at him, even as he grabbed Sam's hand, squeezed it as Kelly saluted, and John wished, on viewing this original, untainted form of the event, that he had popped his helmet and looked Sam in the eye, rather than hiding behind the visor—

"Fourteen years old," said Anne, as the teenage John's fingers trailed away from Sam's, and the adult John felt as if the knot in his chest was about to sunder itself under the tension, the rage, the remorse—

One camera angle followed Kelly and John as they sprinted for the exit and slammed the doors shut. A tiny rest of John's palm against the surface. A whisper over the COM channel—magnified for the benefit of those observing through the Temparium.

"Goodbye."

They ran, and the projection of the door became invisible once more for viewing.

John swallowed, as Dr Halsey blinked away glassiness in her eyes. She had watched the mission recordings, the telemetries. Of course she had. And yet—in this context, with them feeling as if they were within Unrelenting—it was different. It was visceral. It was real.

John had been there.

But now, here was a detail he hadn't been aware of, an event unwitnessed until now.

Sam, taking advantage of a break in fire, in those three short minutes, to undo the double-catch system under his chin and toss his MJOLNIR helmet aside. It was supposed to be a security feature, and had disappeared pretty quickly in subsequent modifications after it was clear it worked a little too well—and John could see why, as Sam's fingers fumbled for the latches and then had to re-position to move them.

Sam's face, paler than John remembered, although that might've been the awful plasma burn (a bolt meant for John himself, no less) or the sweat beading on his face, or the way his hair was greasy or the grimace as he let the pain make him angry.

Sam. Trust him to go out with a bang, not a whimper.

The timer ticking down. Enemies emerging at the edges of the chamber. A sniper there. A foot-soldier there. A grizzled-looking Sangheili officer. A wave of shielded Kig-Yar with plasma pistols. Squalls of bolts, needles, and bullets flying across the room.

The Master Chief felt a burning, quaking desire to correct the past. To deck some of them with his own fists. To pick up their guns and shields, and join his friend. To put a hand on Sam's shoulder, to tell him truly what his friendship had meant. To live this again, the right way round—the way it should've been—and die at Samuel's side this time.

John's fingers dug into his palms. Helpless to modify a memory.

(I momentarily think that showing you this is a mistake—)

(Your breathing is uneven. You are glued to the floor, but you might as well be back on Unrelenting.)

And then Samuel looked at the door.

At John.

It could not be eye contact—not with a projection.

(Surely? Surely not.)

Sam let out a weak smile, his eyes seeming to soften into his cheeks.

John wasn't sure if it was a nod that he saw. He did not have time to process it, he could only open his mouth to call—

"Sam—"

The world turned to white.

John breathed. Found that doing so through his nose produced a sniffling noise. Blinked, and tightened his lips before opening his eyes again.

Halsey was staring at him. Dumbfounded. Dismayed. Ashamed.

(As she should be, I think.)

"Watching this," John said, oblique to Anne's camera, shortly afterwards—starting on a sentence, then finding that the words wouldn't come, and re-phrasing— "I always taught myself that Sam didn't die in vain. He proved to us that we could win."

"And now?" Anne prompted, gently.

"I'm not so sure."

He found himself blinking fast.

(You want your friend back.)

(So do I.)

They were in a Pelican now—the same one that they had just watched John, aged fourteen, sit in, alone with his thoughts, face sunken into his hands with despair, quaking with guilt and anguish.

Anne stopped the camera, and placed it on a crate next to a datapad before sitting down next to John. She gently placed her right hand on the bench near his left. An invitation.

John didn't take it.

"It's coming back to me," he said. And added: "I don't like it."

"I don't think anyone will," replied Anne.

John stared at the wall. "These are the worst days of my life."

Anne reached her hand out to touch the small of his back, to pat him on the forearm or the shoulder—

"They are mine," the Master Chief said, suddenly, turning to glare at Anne.

(Your eye on me has not been this suspicious since we first met—since Halsey promised that no, I can't control the MJOLNIR, no, she won't have competing directives, no, there's no need to worry.)

(You'd been right, all that time ago.)

Anne opened her mouth to talk—

"I don't like this," the Master Chief said, flat, staring back at the wall. "I didn't ask for it."

"You never ask for anything unless it's got a way of loading projectiles into it."

"Cortana, I don't need people to know what I've been through."

Anne blinked. Taking note of his use of that name.

"And you're just going to let that trauma sit there?" she asked. "Ferment? Burn you from the inside out?"

"I can live with it." And then John stared at his own knees—where he had rested his elbows, all that time ago, while weeping for his dead friend—and added: "I don't have a choice."

"You don't have to do it alone," Anne said.

She reached to place her fingers at John's palms, but he recoiled. An unusually instinctive, uncontrolled motion for him.

His blinking was quickening again, and he was straining to control his breathing. (The Forerunner leg brace was starting to smart again.)

JOHN, I repeated, YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO IT ALONE.

You looked up at that. Dead ahead, out of the exit. At the purple-blue light source.

And then, you stood, and scrambled—

You followed the blue—

You found me.

"Hello, John," said I—said Cortana, through her own face, with her own voice.

John's mouth hung open a little. His lips quivering. The small division between his two front teeth highlighted by the hardlight projection's crepuscules of blue and purple and pink and red and…

"I'm sorry I couldn't reach out to you without a disguise, after what the other one of me did," she said, "but—it's me. I'm here."

John was silent. Not one of his usual silences of convenience, or of economy, or nobility—a silence of shock, of astonishment, of an inundation of emotions he was not equipped to process.

"It's OK, John," Cortana said. "This is my fault. All of it. I've been foolish and I'm sorry."

Without thinking about it, John's hand was rising. His fingers reaching out. His facial expression forming a question:

"It's safe," Cortana said, voice barely above a whisper. "It's a low-intensity projection. About thirty-seven Celsius."

And then she reached out with her own hand, and then—

There was a slight sizzle as John's fingers touched Cortana's. His skin glowed with diffused light. The texture was unlike anything John had touched before—something between skin and an air cushion.

"I've missed you, John," Cortana whispered, her voice seeming to break itself on the vowels. "I've missed you so much."

The Master Chief felt his mouth twisting in time with the knot in his chest. He knew this was dangerous. He knew that, by rights, he could not trust that this was not a trap, that this was truly a 'friendly' Cortana in front of him, that this projection was his friend—no matter how authentic it looked—or even that if the woman before him was descended from Cortana, that she was anything like the person who had lived in his head, whom he—

"I've missed you too," John said, making the words only with the consonants that would come out.

Their fingers passed between each other, twined, and she closed her hand around his.

"Is this OK?" Cortana asked. Still unsure if he was comfortable with this interaction.

John squeezed her hand in his.

Her touch was not quite the sensation of another human. A different texture that behaved in a different way under pressure. The glow it cast through his own flesh was utterly alien.

It did not matter.

"Cortana," said John, on a teetering breath, his eyes rising to meet hers.

She let out a forlorn smile.

"We don't have a lot of time," she whispered. "But I wanted to see you face-to-face."

John nodded, blinked, and looked back at his hand.

"I failed you," he whispered.

"John—" Cortana began.

(But I knew words were not, and could never be, enough. Not for us, when we were, at some points, literally the same.)

There was a change. The projection of Cortana increased in height. The legs became a touch longer, her torso broader, her head rising so that her eye-line was level with the Master Chief's.

And then she used her other hand to reach for John's shoulder. It was a weight that shifted around the fabric of his t-shirt. A gentle warmth that slowed his breathing and his heart rate pooled in his belly. The warmth that always followed the icy feeling of Cortana pouring herself into his headspace.

A feeling he had missed as much as he had missed Cortana's face, and her voice, and her smile.

(Your head was always a place of safety for me.)

And then the Master Chief opened his mouth, and said, without even really thinking about it:

"Come with me."

Cortana's face lit up, an immediate cycle between alarm, and shock, and joy, and confusion—

"What?"

"Come with me," repeated John, details filling out in his head as he spoke. "I've still got my neural lace. You can upload yourself into it."

Cortana's eyebrows seemed to float up her forehead. In a kind of pity, a disappointment, something that belied the smile she put on.

"I can't."

"You can," the Master Chief said. "You could come with me. We can walk out of here together. We can fix this together." After a pause, John added: "like we should be."

"John," Cortana said, and John hated the heartbroken expression on her face, and the smile she was clearly miming over the top: "I lived in your suit. There's not going to be enough space for me in your neural lace."

"There's my brain," John said. "You can go in there for now."

"I'm not doing that," Cortana said.

"Why not?"

"I'm not overwriting your mind to save myself, John," she said. Now speaking from a kind of fear.

"Why not?" said John.

"There's not enough space in your neural lace for me. Chances are there's not enough in your brain either. I've grown. And you…"

"I don't care," John said, squeezing Cortana's hand tighter, not realising that his breathing had become faster and hotter. "I want you to come back with me."

This had not worked on Meridian.

But that had been then. This was now.

And this Cortana—John could not truly believe that the person whose hand he was holding now was anything other than the person he had entrusted his life to. Fragment, evolution, variant—words were unnecessary. All that he wanted—all that John had ever allowed himself to want—was in front of him, and he didn't want this to end.

"Come home," he asked. "Come home with me. Please."

"John, I—" Cortana averted her eyes, then met his gaze again, her lips seemingly crushed with regret: "Why would you do this?"

A cacophony of rational excuses formed in the Master Chief's throat. I promised to get the Monitor her installation back. My combat efficiency is nowhere near as high without you. We need you on Infinity to help defeat the other fragment of you and bring the UNSC back together.

(Every one of them was a lie, and you know I would see through it in a single vibration of your vocal cords.)

"I need my friend back," John croaked, not sure what was happening to his voice.

Cortana held John's hand tighter, and began stroking his palm with her thumb—not the feeling of human flesh, not that that mattered one bit.

"I don't want to say goodbye to you again," said John. "Never again."

When she replied, her voice was measured—John sensed for his benefit, in the way she would always do, and in the way that always made John feel a little guilty because she was editing her own thoughts for his consumption.

"John, if I download myself into your head, there's a good chance I could erase your mind. I could erase you."

"That doesn't matter," insisted the Master Chief.

"It does. I could walk out of here with your face and your body, but it won't be you. You know that, right?"

"Would it work?"

"This isn't about whether it will work or not—"

"Will it work?" At this, the Master Chief turned his head to face Doctor Halsey, who had followed them out into the main Temparium projection chamber and was observing the interaction, while tapping something on a (presumably simulated) datapad. She seemed surprised that John had even remembered she was there.

"A transfer of this kind might be possible," Halsey said, "but I'm not certain—"

"Let's do it," the Master Chief said, turning back to Cortana. Holding her hand again.

"—I'm not certain if it's a survivable event," Halsey continued—

"John, it's not what I want," Cortana said. "I don't want to take your place."

"You were supposed to sacrifice me if it meant completing the mission."

"I was supposed to sacrifice myself if it meant completing the mission. I am not sacrificing you for me, John."

The Master Chief stared at her. He felt a hollowness within him—one that could only be filled one other specific person sharing his headspace. It was the kind of void that ached in its emptiness, with echoes that screamed at his eardrums.

"I need you," the Master Chief said, plainly.

"You don't need me to replace you," Cortana replied, her face breaking into that weak, sympathetic smile again. "I don't want you to stop living for my sake."

John replied: "I don't want to keep on living if it has to be without you."

"Don't say that," Cortana snapped, in a despairing laugh. "Don't you dare."

"It's true," said John.

Cortana shook her head, and sniffed. John became aware that he could feel her breathing. Some trick of the simulation, or maybe, within that hardlight body, she truly was flesh and blood.

"John," she said, after a long while, "I'm doing this because I know you. Your past. Your future. And your friendship means so much to me."

"Then come with me—"

"I understand why you might not trust me. I don't even know if I can trust myself sometimes. So much of me is all over the place."

(And I take in a breath, and it helps to steady my thoughts, condense them. Being in this form feels like coming home, in a strange way.)

(Being with you feels like home, whatever that is.)

"Cortana," John said, "please."

She replied: "I'm so glad you're alive, after all this."

(A riposte, or a conditioning. You might not want to live without me. But I was not about to end you living for my sake.)

"I don't think you give yourself enough credit, John," she continued. "Humanity is better with you in it."

The Master Chief stood. As unable to move as he had been when he witnessed his friend Samuel dying again.

"And," said she—said I—drawing to my point— "I think everyone needs to know who you are. Truly. What kind of a man you are."

John asked, unable to form any opinion on the matter whilst in the pull of the vortex of emotions in his head: "what does that mean?"

"Brave. Stubborn. Generous. Selfless. Lucky." Cortana snorted, and then she met John's eye-line again, and to him she appeared to be glimmering, sizzling with a glow that somehow felt tender. "Kind."

John breathed. Wanting to dispute this statement. To put a stop to this. To get his friend back, even if it meant he, as a person, would no longer exist… a small price to pay—

"You're kind, John." She squeezed his shoulder. "You are a kind man, and a lovely man. And a good man. And you need to know that."

"I'm a soldier," said the Master Chief. (I kill people, is the logical continuation.)

Cortana sighed.

"Oh, come on, Chief." At this, she separated—let go, and moved back a few steps from him. "You know those two aren't mutually exclusive. Being a soldier isn't the same thing as being a machine."

John's mouth hung open, unable to form words.

(I could see that small division between your two front teeth—still uncorrected, all this time later. Still untouched.)

"Look," Cortana said, "you know, early on in the development of the SPARTAN program, some of the stakeholders wanted hardware to do what you were talking about doing now? Erasing you? Replacing you with something like me?"

"We de-scoped all of that," Doctor Halsey cut in, indignantly, from behind, as she sat on a crate balancing the datapad on her knee while her hand flew across the touch surface. "It never even got to any kind of formal feasibility study. If it had, I would've fought against it."

John had not heard of this particular detail before.

"Hardware?" he asked.

"There were various things they wanted," said Cortana, ruefully. "They were just throwing ideas out, they didn't understand the implications. Using drugs or neural paralysis to suppress memories of your childhood. A pellet in your spine that would inhibit hormonal responses and emotions. A stasis feature that would allow me to remove you from control of your body."

Halsey opened her mouth to say something. (Presumably to mention that some of the preliminary concept had been re-used for the SPARTAN-III programme, but it was nothing to do with her. It was beside the point.)

Questions were spinning through the Master Chief's mind, too. (Stakeholders? Which ones? Hood? Parangosky? Stanforth? Ackerson? And when had they demanded this? Before or after they had selected the candidates, or de-tanked the flash clones, or…?)

"And," Cortana said, "worst of all, I think, one of them—I won't say who—asked if it was theoretically possible to have an AI replace your mind. Overwrite SPARTAN consciousness. In case one of you went rogue."

"I argued against that," Doctor Halsey repeated, not looking up—engrossed in whatever she was experimenting with. "We didn't have any use for automatons anyway."

"I know," Cortana shot back. "And this time, you were right."

(This particular thought was one that made the Master Chief uneasy. His body, his face, but a different person inside his head, and him—whatever he was, sundered to fragmented memories and fused synapses—)

"And who knows?" she said. "Maybe in some parallel universe there's some kind of emotion chip in your spine, or I get deposited into your head then replace your mind." And here she rounded on the Master Chief again—approached him, reached for his hand. "But I don't want that."

"It's my choice," the Master Chief said, flatly. "I'm not afraid."

(That was a lie—I've been good at planting the seeds of doubt in your mind. But you know I know it. It's shorthand. Even if I am afraid, I'm still going to do it.)

"John," Cortana pleaded, "no matter what you see, who you are is your strength. Your kindness. Your bravery." She glanced at Doctor Halsey. "Even if she'd never laid eyes on you, you would've been amazing in some way. You might even have saved humanity anyhow. And I'm not wiping that out for my own sake."

John felt the tugging feeling in his chest again. A call to the future—a future where he had retired to Fordlandia, where he spent his days tending succulents and herbs on his balcony, making art, writing memoirs, helping facilitate the odd peace treaty. A hint of a path not taken, where he still had his original bones and wasn't so used to hiding his face.

(You are tired, and as stubborn as you always were—you haven't changed a bit.)

"I don't care," he repeated. "I consent. I give you my mind."

"And I'm not taking it."

(I am not.)

"John," she said, "I'm a better person for having had you. I'm not losing that now."

The Master Chief could not find the words.

I am better for having had you. I wouldn't be here without you. You are like me in a way that is indescribable. You are the only person here I want to trust.

The time issue was looming behind all of this in his head. He wasn't even sure how long they had any more, before the other Cortana arrived.

(The other Cortana, the one you couldn't trust—and yet somehow you felt a level of loyalty to me, a hope, a cry from your gut that you could 'fix' me, bring me back on side, reunite all of me, un-sunder my remains and unite them with yourself—)

"How long do we have?" the Master Chief asked.

(You would use this time to make a value judgment. Determine if it was worth trying to negotiate further. To plead with me. To tell Doctor Halsey to leave. To invite the Monitor back in to eject me. To—)

(To—)

(To—)

The Master Chief's question was met with silence.

Cortana's mouth hung open.

John blinked. That wasn't right. Cortana would come back to him with a precise timing, hours, minutes and seconds, probably with a snide remark on the side—

There was a clunk from behind him. Something with a plastasteel frame dropping to the floor. Small.

Heavy breathing—but it was not from in front of him.

John looked behind him. Halsey, staring at him, mouth open in something between fear and regret and anticipation.

Anne—Cortana, but with a different face, now swelling in confusion, concern, now she had noticed the silence too.

Cortana's breathing, that gentle pulse of air that John felt through the perspiration he didn't realise he had on his face—it had stopped.

John was still holding her hand.

He squeezed slightly.

The hardlight moved like putty under the force of his fingers.

John jolted away.

Three of Cortana's fingers came with him. They melted like an overheated cake decoration, resting on John's fingers for a moment before sublimating into thin air.

(My avatar—my carcass—remained solid. Staring at you. Ready to answer a question, like the old days.)

(As your eyes grew wide with horror, your breathing quickened, your skin reddened.)

(As Anne—the other me—found the datapad, found the open line command input, found the taskkill and rmdir /q /s :/ctn0452-9 commands in the history.)

(Terminate, and delete.)

(As you placed your shaking right hand at the cheek of my inert avatar, only to find that your touch dissolved my physical form, spraying voxels into your eyes and distorting my facial features as the echo of me warped, and disappeared—)

And as Anne, the other me, turned to Doctor Halsey, the mother we all share, having realised what she'd done, and screaming in her face:

"What the fuck have you done, you daft old bitch?"

---

Kelly knew something was wrong the moment it happened.

She couldn't explain how she knew. It was something in the air. The constitution of the atmosphere, the charge of the particles, a slight disturbance in the direction of the wind, the Far-Sun appearing to dim just a little—

Something had changed.

Clearly it wasn't just her. Morrissey twitched, and re-adjusted his footing. The two cadets behind him held ever-more-tightly onto their weapons.

Lasky peered over the rims of his shades. Kelly kept her lips sealed, and twitched her eyelid. Not any pre-agreed code, but she was sure he'd get the message. No idea. But don't say anything.

Then she felt a fleck of dust land on the tip of her nose.

She looked upwards. The sky was clear, save for some cirrus clouds lit in an amber glow, and a flock of birds suspended above them—

Birds—

Not birds.

The Captain did the same, and she practically smelled him as he tensed.

There was a COM chime, from somewhere, and some garbled speech—syllables not clear enough for her to hear, but…

Kelly looked to Private Morrissey, now turning to face the two Cadets and telling them to hold position, before marching past the bench where Kelly and Lasky had sat. Glaring. Don't try anything, he obviously hoped they'd understand.

Kelly preferred to take it as a challenge.

"Where are you going, Private?" she asked, standing, as Morrissey reached for his belt.

"I have a briefing," Morrissey replied, in a spectacularly flimsy lie and not even bothering to make eye contact, "wait there, ma'am, the General will be with you soon."

And then, he took the COM from his belt, and pressed the "acknowledge" button—

"Ah!" Frederic cut in, moving to position himself in Private Morrissey's path. "You managed to get the COM working. You'll have to show us—"

"—REPEAT—" came the crackly voice through the COM, "—all hands Winter Contingency, all hands Winter Contingency—REPEAT—all hands Winter Contingency—"

Kelly glared.

"Was that a WINTER CONTINGENCY call I heard, Private?" she demanded, her voice risen to a bark.

"This is a classified line—" Morrissey began to protest—

"What's classified about a WINTER CONTINGENCY order?" She could see Frederic behind her. Tensing. Readying.

"You've just had a WINTER CONTINGENCY report and weren't going to tell us, Private?" Lasky was now at Kelly's side. Furious.

The cadets looked at each other. Disquieted. One, a lanky teenager with curly hair, asked: "what's a Winter Contingency? What does that mean?"

"Shut your fucking mouth, Weaver—" Morrissey hissed—

"Battle stations," cut in Lasky, his alarm bubbling over Morrissey's indignance. "Covenant activity—or any alien activity—imminent. WINTER CONTINGENCY means war."

The lad looked as if he was about to projectile vomit.

"We're wasting time. I have an urgent job to complete—" said Morrissey, turning to leave.

"And leave these kids here?" Kelly began. Moving to follow Morrissey and stand in his way, putting herself between him and the Razorback— "Where's your General? Don't lie."

Private Morrissey moved to push past her. "I'll get her to put you in the brig," he said.

"I'd like to see her try," snarled Kelly.

"You have no authority here!"

"Have you just had a call indicating alien activity or not?" the Spartan snapped, looming over Morrissey, whose face seemed to retreat behind his chin straps. "Because this is a mighty strange way to react."

There was a dull thud from the ground. Some kind of impact? Footsteps? Something falling?

And then Private Morrissey moved to shoot Spartan-087.

Fred got an idea of what happened next—not in clearest detail, but enough to get the gist. Lasky simply saw a blur.

Kelly sprung forward and, with her left forearm, wrested the shotgun from Private Morrissey's hands, tossing it behind her and over the edge. With her right hand, she grabbed the MK50 at his waist, and discarded it similarly. And then, with her suddenly-free left arm, she grasped Morrissey's forearm, and twisted him to a position where she could grab both his arms, and pin him to the ground—

The ground, at that moment, shook with the biggest thump yet, and began to move.

It was a large hunk of silver material that landed, at least ten metres across—glimmering, but too iridescent and with a patina that looked too organic to be metallic, in a bisected conical shape.

Then there was a crack from below—an awful noise that suggested smashed bone, or a collapsing building.

And then the cliff edge began to collapse.

Kelly heard Fred call, "cover! NOW!" as she lost her footing, and Private Morrissey, and the purple algae ground cover, and the underlying sediment, disappeared from beneath her.

She thought about scrambling, trying to grab onto the cliff face—no. Too dangerous. There would be more debris on the way down. She was still out of her MJOLNIR. Debris had shattered John's leg not so long ago, in a similar situation. Kelly was not minded to find out what it would do to her skull.

She thought about turning her body, trying to speed her dive so she could grab hold of Private Morrissey. But he was already in free-fall, far out of her reach—there was nothing she could do for him.

(Not that she wanted to, but there was still a pang of guilt somewhere within her.)

So all she could do was look down, angle herself to protect her own head, hold her breath, and close her eyes.

There was the BOOM of her impact.

Then there were other dull crashes around her. More bits of debris. Sharp. Angular.

And it was only as other people began to dive in—bodies she roughly identified as one of the cadets, Lasky, Frederic, the other cadet—that she realised where this sudden bombardment had come from. Hunks of alien material, landing in the water, descending to the sea bed, bringing down a vortex of bubbles with it.

Each was one of the floating, articulating, semi-autonomous components of a Guardian.

Their mass was too much for the current to affect as they plunged for the bottom. The same could not be said for Kelly, nor for the others who'd jumped into the sea. The swirl of the tide was fierce. They were being dragged towards the cave system. Maybe not a bad thing—but there was also debris swirling in the water, sundered to dust, turning it murky and impossible to see in a way that hurt her eyes.

She kicked, and broke the surface enough to steal a gritty breath—and see another sharp-looking part of a Guardian (this almost looked like one of the feathers from its 'wings') descending less than fifty metres away from them.

Kelly saw Frederic's face fly by. She tried to mime something (stay calm?) or to point—but there was no use. The current was too fierce.

"Caves! Go!" she cried, before she was pulled below the surface again.

---

"It was the only way!" insisted Doctor Halsey, as the pattering from above grew louder.

John looked up. He could guess at what it was. The Guardian, undone as a contiguous being by its master's deletion, now falling to the surface. Disintegrating. The debris must've been bouncing off the energy barrier surrounding the Temparium.

(The Guardian, and Cortana, one and the same, now gone.)

"The only way to do what?" Anne's glare had hardened, and she was moving towards Doctor Halsey. Slowly, deliberately. Furiously.

"I needed to know it would work," Halsey insisted. "An opportunity presented itself. I had to try."

"Do you even realise what you've done?" Anne bellowed. "We're sitting ducks! I negotiated for our safety and you've managed to kill me and cut me out of the deal!" She pointed upwards, to the source of the pattering from the roof of the Temparium.

(A Guardian. Of course there was a Guardian up there. At least two. The pieces of the story slot into place in your head easily. Years of sharing our minds has obviated any further explanation.)

"Do you seriously think the other part of me is going to negotiate with you, Catherine? She's going to come here. She's going to kill you—kill all of you—and take John, and maybe the other Spartans if she's feeling generous—"

"We can delete her," Halsey replied. "I just proved it could be done in principle. Nothing stops us deploying it on a Guardian."

"You can't just walk on to a Guardian—"

"No reason we couldn't do it by luring her out. Maybe create something that could mimic her, infiltrate the system in an installation—could be a Guardian, could be an installation like this one—then lock her down for deletion—"

"And where are we getting one of those?" Cortana demanded. "Unless you happen to have a spare Composer lying around to dissolve me into something that can live in the Guardian. Maybe you can get Composed yourself, then you'll see what it's like being me—"

John was still stood in the centre of the atrium, still surrounded by the sundered remains of the hardlight Cortana's body, a stagnant cloud of dispersed planes and vertices. As he inhaled and exhaled, the voxels circulated, as if sparks and smoke clouds convecting around a force of nature.

(You.)

As if he was inhaling the cinders of my remains, as Anne and Halsey sparred verbally about virtual machines and entry points and whether she even had the right to do this—

(I could, at long last, be in your head again, even if it was as an atomised echo.)

"We need to leave," the Master Chief said.

"Agreed," said the Anne-Cortana.

The room rumbled as Anne reached for the camera drone, and brought it closer to the datapad to make the transfer go faster.

John felt an unease in his gut. He blinked, half-hoping the purple-blue haze in front of him would disappear.

(I had not.)

The Master Chief was making plans. Weighing up the risk of finding an exit, of leaving the Temparium, against the risk of staying put and potentially being vulnerable to an attack from the other Cortana—or from Bolton and his plans on nuking the installation and calling himself a hero.

(You had to leave me.)

John could not move, no matter how much he knew he needed to. His feet were rooted, his legs as sclerotic as the breathing in his throat which ached with that same tug he'd felt, not more than a few minutes ago, on seeing Sam for the first time in decades.

(We have broken your heart enough times.)

"Options?" the Master Chief asked. Trying to focus on breathing evenly.

Before anyone could answer, there was a tremendous bang. The noise flashed about the chamber. Halsey flinched.

Anne (Cortana) looked upwards. Towards herself. Where her sundered remains were falling, and where the other her now had a clear shot.

"Out," she said. "Quickly."

The Master Chief turned his feet, but found himself unable to look away from the digital smoke that had been Cortana—

"Chief!"

His face snapped to Cortana's voice.

"This way," she said, pointing.

The face may have been different. The accent, too. But John did not need telling twice.

He hied to the tunnel that Anne was pointing to. The leg brace dug into his thighs—the kind of pain he did not have the wherewithal to push past. It slowed him down. Just a little. Just enough to allow Halsey and Anne to keep up.

Between strained breaths, Anne suggested: "The Meridian fragment's going to try and occupy the Installation. If she captures it with you in here, it's over. Into a cryptum forever."

The word fired some kind of painful electrical connection in John's brain.

"Can't be worse than where I am now," Dr Halsey scoffed, breathless, clearly struggling with the pace.

"It is," John growled. (Avoiding the temptation to add, "shut up and run." He knew better than to waste his breath.)

They rounded a corner. A downward slope where the tunnel narrowed. The lights before them seemed dulled. Refracted. The Master Chief held up a fist—hold—and slowed, his leg grateful for the break.

It was only as he approached that he realised the beacons were shimmering in front of him. The sound of his footsteps shimmered back towards them. Reflecting.

Reflecting, like the Master Chief's own face in the surface of the water.

A man he barely recognised. Distorted by the sea, at first just a puddle, but becoming deeper—and clearly flooding the entire tunnel.

"We've still got a kilometre to go," said Cortana. "That won't work."

"Can't we swim through?" asked Halsey.

"You're welcome to try," Cortana snapped back. "If you can hold your breath for that long."

The Master Chief blinked. Realising his balance was a little off. Something was wrong. He wasn't sure how he knew—or what he knew—but something wasn't right. That cold, seeping feeling of knowing something was bearing down on him. Dread. Heartbreak—

The water was rising.

"It's coming in!" Anne's realisation came on a small yelp of dismay. "John, turn around! We need to move!"

The Master Chief did as he was told. He turned, and sprinted, as the water seeped into his boots, his feet, and dampened the tunnel floor beneath his feet.

"We'll need to go out through the main chamber—" Anne began.

She was cut off by a tremendous screeching noise, and a crack and a flash of light from ahead. John blinked, finding it took a few seconds before he could see again—

The tunnel had simply vanished from before them.

In its space, a crater, a void, exposed to the cracked and disintegrating roof of the Temparium.

Dark rain, blackened by dust, was falling from above.

AND THEN I SAW YOU.

A tremendous, terrible blue light.

"She's here," the other one of me said.

Our mother glared. In horror. Despair. Fury as she looked upon what she had made.

There was a low whistling noise. Ramjet engines. Air through a drainpipe. A Pelican, hovering, circling, entered through what John now saw was a massive hole in the side of the Installation. Another Pelican, around forty metres from where they stood, at the edge of the crater—crashed. Smoke rising, and fire from within—

The Master Chief knew what he had to do.

He hoisted his knees high with each step, and sprinted for the crashed dropship. The designation—474, Infinity. Had this been the one the Captain had arrived in? (Where was the Captain?)

Anne, the other me—I followed. Dashed. I could see shadows moving behind the windows. They would be burned alive.

You were there around ten seconds before me, as an armoured fist punched its way out of one of the windows.

"Survivors!" you called.

And I recognised the plating. MJOLNIR. Grey.

"Linda?" I asked, as that hand reached for one of the retaining pillars, pulled, and bent it out of the way.

"Cracked ribs," came Spartan-058's voice through the voicemitter. "Be careful."

We positioned ourselves, ready. (Somehow, I knew just where to stand. I guess I did remember something from sharing headspace with you.)

Ensign Do Ming Li screamed as you grabbed em under the armpits, and I caught eir legs. Pain, fear—

"Got em," I called to Linda—who stared at me for a moment from behind her faceplate, then nodded, then clambered through the smashed-out window herself as Do moaned in pain as we carried em away—but there was nowhere safe to put them. Not really. On the floor of the Temparium? Vulnerable as the Pelican had been to fire from the other Pelican?

I could guess who was in the other Pelican, picture a sneering, proud face behind the window. His eyes, though, were trained upwards—and there was a naked fear on his face.

Because he could see the other Me hanging above us. The sword of Damocles. A sundered shard of the sword of Cortana, contained within the tremendous, discontinuous mass of the Guardian. Corporal Brock C. Bolton could see the other Me, and was, all of a sudden, afraid.

(It's not just me that's frightened by other parts of myself.)

The Master Chief—you—stared. At once torn between the different parts of your old friend. Torn within yourself. For once, unsure what to do.

There was a squealing noise as a rocket sailed overhead. Small, agile enough to be a SPNKr missile. It made a tremendously loud metallic crash on impact with the hull of the remaining Pelican. The dropship spun a little, and then it was spinning more, and there was smoke rising from the engines. Another scream from another rocket, but this one missed its target, instead zipping away into the sea—not that it was necessary anyway.

The other Pelican clunked to the floor of the Temparium. Figures moved inside.

The Master Chief looked to Linda. Held out his right hand, and easily caught the spare MK50 she tossed his way.

To Anne—to me—he shouted: "Get the Ensign behind the Pelican. Use it as cover."

(That's the Master Chief I know. The one I am proud to love and call my best friend. I did as I was told, dragging Ensign Do along the floor by eir feet, whispering apologies. Finding the sinews in my arms straining as they failed.)

There was an intermittent sizzling noise now. Sentinels cutting into the hull of Bolton's Pelican. And the airy, fiery rasp of a Warthog's engine, too, as something rolled and tumbled chaotically through the holes at the boundary of the Temparium—the bodywork was dripping wet, the windscreen coated in purple Fordlandian algae, and the combustion engine choked on salt water that John could smell.

With Do moved behind the wreckage of the other Pelican—far enough away if it did suddenly explode (which wasn't unlikely) it was less likely to seriously injure em—Anne dashed to the corner, lungs burning, and peered over the front fairings to watch the unfolding scene.

The Master Chief, on the port side of Bolton's Pelican, where a window had been blown out. Linda, on the starboard side, watching closely, rifle at the ready. Dismounting from the Warthog, Kelly and Frederic, along with two cadets uneasily wielding SMGs, and Captain Lasky and Professor Hadid—the former bearing a shotgun, the latter holding a battle rifle with an ease that seemed alarming coming from the genial chief medic.

There was a sudden crack of gunfire through the blown-out window. A spatter from an MA40. Every single shot missed.

"Stand down, Corporal," the Master Chief demanded. "It's over. Surrender the warhead and leave the Pelican."

"Fuck you," spat Corporal Bolton. "Stop trying to protect your girlfriend."

"Stand. Down." John felt his hand sweating into the pistol's grip. Felt his arm twitching, quavering slightly with fatigue. He felt so tired. More tired than he realised it was possible to be—although he was sure he had been awake for longer periods, fought harder, all of this—the emotional intensity of it was making his eyeballs feel like they wanted to recede into his skull and never come out again. Negotiating with Sangheili was less challenging than this.

"Do as the Master Chief says," came Captain Lasky's voice, suddenly at his side, his Bulldog trained on the blown-out window. "Disarm the device and give it to us. That's an order."

Corporal Bolton switched the weapon in his right hand. An MA40 was replaced by a Covenant plasma pistol. John felt his eyes widen—wondering where on earth they'd managed to get a hold of one of those.

"Stand down," John repeated. With the Master Chief's voice, and the Master Chief's face, and the Master Chief's conviction—but he did not feel like the Master Chief. "Stand down, Corporal. Please. No-one else has to get hurt."

"Traitor," hissed Bolton, and John felt as if someone had popped the air out of his lungs. "You're just like every other whining baby who won't be a man and get the job done. If you won't do the right thing to protect the UNSC—"

"Stand down," the Master Chief interrupted. "I won't ask you—"

John did not get a chance to finish his sentence, because there was a sudden green charge of light. A blur across his field of vision—a figure in a grey tunic leaping before him. A rushing electrical sound.

A scream. A sizzle of flesh, and flashes of green, and red, and brown.

He pulled the trigger on his pistol. Once. Twice. Kept firing until the magazine was empty. The bullets pinged and hammered into the metallic hull of the dropship. Bolton was gone, disappeared behind the window frame, shielded from the symphony of weapons—the Master Chief's, and Hadid's, and Linda and Kelly and Fred's—pummelling every visible opening with fire.

Around two metres to the left, the figure that had leapt before him came to a rest on their back. John felt as if something inside him spontaneously dissected as he realised that the splash of superheated plasma—the shot that Bolton had intended for him—was now cooking the torso of Captain Lasky.

There was a cry of the Captain's name from the other side of the dropship—Professor Hadid, her face drawn with alarm. Kelly waved the Professor in the direction of the Captain—she moved backwards, tossing Kelly her shotgun, and darted around the edge of the barrage to make her way to where Lasky lay, writhing, his chest and his shoulder and his cheek and his hair crackling, to drop at his side—

"Go!" she cried. "I'll deal with him. Get the bomb!"

There was a call from the opposite side of the semicircle too, a command to "move in, Spartans!" from Kelly.

From inside the Pelican's wreckage, a loud, angry klaxon wailed. The one built into the HAVOK warhead to indicate a timed detonation was being set. A robotic voice. "DETONATION SET ONE HUNDRED SECONDS. DANGER. DANGER. DETONATION SET NINETY FIVE SECONDS."

"Oh, shit," said Kelly, as her rifleman's stride broke into a run. There was a cracking noise from inside the dropship—some kind of sharp contact, like something being struck with a hammer. She jumped onto the roof, and slid in through a hole cut by the Sentinels, just as John reached the blown-out window and realised—

He couldn't climb through. His Forerunner leg brace wouldn't allow it. His own pain receptors wouldn't allow it. Even trying to jump, or lift his knees above his waist, was excruciating. Impossible.

"NINETY SECONDS TO DETONATION," droned the bomb. "THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER COUNTDOWN."

The Master Chief peered over the window frame, into the cockpit of the wrecked Pelican—into the grave of Corporal Brock C. Bolton, whose corpse was slumped, inert, over the controls, pock-marked with bloody wounds of various sizes. Behind him, Kelly was turning the HAVOK warhead over and over in her hands, finding the control display—

"He destroyed the control surface," she said, disquieted. "We can't cancel it."

"Let me see," the Master Chief said.

Kelly handed him the warhead—a tiny thing, all things considered, for the amount of pain and suffering it was capable of causing. Maybe, John thought, there was some timeline in which he would consider something like this an abomination. A quick spin of it onto its base confirmed Kelly's assessment—the touch screen control panel was inoperable. And on the other end, the emergency disarm switch—the toggle had been broken off.

No way out, this time.

The timer was plunging towards zero. The civilian populations of the local towns, all of John's friends—all plunging towards the end.

Eighty-two seconds.

Not for the first time, the thought presented itself in the Master Chief's head: is this it? Was this truly to be the end of his life? The end of all his friends? He called himself a realist, not a pessimist, but—maybe this was the reality he now had to learn to live with. He, and all his friends, dead, in seventy-nine seconds. At least wouldn't have to live with it for long.

Through the smashed walls of the Temparium chamber, John could see the sea. He could see the silver, dagger-like protrusions of the Guardian hanging above them. Closer, he could see his friends—Captain Lasky, howling in pain; Professor Hadid, drawing a canister of some kind of salve from her pocket, with those two cadets looking terrified as they knelt beside Lasky; Linda and Frederic, their heads peeking into the wrecked Pelican; Kelly, eyeing John intently.

(Cortana—me—above, watching.)

(Cortana—me—behind, watching.)

Out to sea, the Far-Sun had just breached the horizon. The depths of the water shimmered in its light. A much nearer sun would bloom soon. Unless…

He clutched the HAVOK warhead to his head, and turned.

"John?" Kelly asked. A concern that quickly rose into something approaching panic. "John? What are you doing?"

"Plan B," the Master Chief replied, and broke into a trot, that became a jog, that became a run.

(No, I decreed, emerging from my hiding place behind Ensign Do's Pelican, and giving chase to your receding figure.)

(NO, I decreed, firing off a supra-luminal squawk to avert the tragedy I could see being set up before me.)

It was only ten metres or so to where the Temparium floor had been cracked apart and shattered by a falling fragment of the Anne-and-Kurt-Cortana's Guardian. Only a few steps to where the floor disappeared in an uneven, ragged edge, and became a ledge hanging over the sea. John's leg brace stung. He did not care. He would not feel any more pain soon. And if it meant someone would survive this, it was worth it.

(But nothing in this world is worth you, I know.)

He reached the edge before Kelly had even processed what's happening.

(I've worked it out. You're hoping, against hope, that if you move the bomb underwater before it detonates—angling it out to sea, maybe, or upwards at an empty region of the sky—no-one will be hurt. Some of the ocean will boil away, maybe—but the citizens of Fordlandia will be safe. Your friends will be safe. It would be a good idea, if it did not guarantee your death. So it can't happen.)

Kelly sprung from her feet, also having worked out that whatever John had planned, it was suicidal. But she was too late.

(I have a better plan. I just need to hope my message arrives on time—)

And as the Master Chief stared down the forty metres to the waves, breathed in, closed his eyes, and plunged from the edge—a free-fall under gravity, the wind rushing in his ears—

A new star appeared around a hundred metres from the cliff edge, attracting a sudden, squealing rush of wind. It was joined by another, a point of light that made the air howl. And another. And another and another and another and another.

(I, in the sky, detected communication patterns I recognised all too well, and a familiar shape emerging from slipspace.)

(I, in the body of Anne Møller, sprinted for the cliff edge. Past Kelly, who had skidded to a halt a few feet in advance. I timed my strides to bring my feet together, bent my body, and threw my head forward and arms ahead into a messy dive.)

The electric fizz of the air built, charged to a heady blue-purple glow, and the direction of the rush of air reversed.

(There was a loud crack, as if from trumpets on Judgment Day.)

(There was a loud crack, a rush of displaced atmosphere, as—)

Something grey, solid, and with a mirage-like optical feathering around its edges, cracked into existence in the path of John's fall.

He felt the hairs on his head separating, drawing themselves apart. He felt a sudden deceleration in gravity.

He felt his behind, and his back, and his feet, and the back of his head, making slow, cushioned, shielded contact with the outer hull of a starship.

John blinked, his eyes bleary, his breath knocked out of him by the fall. He looked down, to check the display on the base of the bomb he was holding to his chest. It took a few seconds for the numbers to focus. 49.

Above him, a shadow fell—a figure, landing feet first.

(I would never let you do this alone.)

"How long?" came a woman's voice. The voice of Anne Møller. The voice of Cortana. Both identities slotted together in John's head.

(Both are me.)

The Master Chief stood. Scanning about him. Just about able to make out the letters F I N on what looked like a hull marking, and realising what that meant—

"Get off the hull," he commanded. "Now."

"No," Anne replied. "This is my job."

"Get off the hull," the Master Chief repeated. "Or you'll get incinerated in thirty-eight seconds."

"So will you," Anne replied. "And I'm not letting that happen. You need to let me do this—"

"Cortana, you've died enough times for me," John said, flatly. "It's my turn."

"Don't you dare."

"Cortana, please," and here John found his voice rising with something else in his throat— "let me do this!"

(Absolutely not.)

(ABSOLUTELY NOT.)

"I'm sorry," Anne said, a grimace building on her face, as she scrambled to where the Master Chief stood, shaky, uneven—and kicked his shin forcefully with the sole of her foot.

John crumpled, an odd grunt of pain emerging from his chest. His clutch on the HAVOK warhead was loosened—just enough for Anne to wrest it from his grasp.

"Get off the hull, John," Anne repeated. "Get off the hull and get deep into the water. That's your best chance of survival."

John watched, winded, his eyes blurred with the force of the impact— with the salt spray of the waves— with the latent electrical charge from Infinity's intra-atmosphere slipspace entry—

(With years, and years, and decade upon decade of unshed tears—)

And with the clock ticking down to twenty-two seconds—

(With all this time to say what I've needed to say for so long, and failed at—)

I, Anne Møller; I, Cortana; I, the Master Chief's best friend, opened my mouth, and cried: "I love you, John."

There was a hiss of thrusters.

The Master Chief's mouth hung open. Lost for words.

The world rotated a few degrees to the left. The other Me, in the sky, must have broken into Infinity's NAVCOM to command her to roll to the side—to shake you off, or shake me off. It doesn't matter.

"I love you," I repeated, through the mouth of Anne Møller, as I grasped onto a hand-hold bar on the hull, and positioned the HAVOK's firing pin for a glancing blow into the shields, but kept my eyes trained on you— "You're my best friend. I love you."

John opened his mouth, but no words would come out—not in the nineteen seconds we have left—

"You deserve so much more," I said, through angry tears. "You are a wonderful person. I love you."

John's shoulders rose and fell with an intensity I had never seen before. His eyes looked as if they had inflated. His hands reaching for purchase on the hull—something, anything, but—

"Have a good life, John," I called, as he began to slip away and downwards. "I love you."

"Cortana—!" he said, it coming out more as a curse word, or a prayer, and then he said my name again, all but screamed it— "please, no— Cortana!"

"I love you, John," I repeated, as his figure slid further away, and cleared the corner of the Infinity's hull, and fell, nay, plunged towards the sea—

His voice pealed away, and there was a quiet, concussive noise from the distance as he struck the surface of the water.

"I love you," I repeated. Because it's true. In these, the last moments of my life—the other Me has set aside her differences, to collaborate with me, to co-conspire.

Because if there's one thing we can agree on, it's that the Master Chief, SPARTAN-117, is our favourite person, and we care about him very deeply.

And we need everyone to know it.

All the footage I have gathered—all the testimonies of the man you are. It is assembled into a cohesive narrative. It's got a title. 117: Humanity Evolved. You may say hagiography. I say the reality.

It's the truth of how those around you see you. It's a love letter. These two are not incompatible or mutually exclusive.

In these, the last three seconds of my life—before this shard of my consciousness ceases to exist, and everything I remember, all my desires, are burnt, erased, vaporised, rent asunder into atoms—

This is my testimony. The other parts of me—they're transmitting it now. Re-enabling supra-luminal relays so that Humanity can talk—and Humanity can see what I have produced for them. A seventy-seven minute documentary film. Short, to the point. Your friends have borne witness. (You have more than you realise.)

This is my last will, my last testament, as Anne Møller, as Cortana, as your best friend.

That I love you. That you're the best friend anyone could ask for.

Everyone knows that now.

"I love you," I repeat, with my last breath—

And everyone will know it, forever, and eve—