Dead Man’s Secrets - SCP Foundation

Anorrack

Dead Man's Secrets (6144 words, 33 min. read)

Author: Anorrack

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Peoria, Illinois, 17:01

Quinn Law was in the same dinged-up rental, parked in the same weedy parking lot, and staring at the same water treatment plant that she had been hours before. It could have been called repetition, had she not a corpse in the passenger seat, a dead mouse in her hand, and wasn’t now trying to break into the secret government facility inside said plant.

It had been a strange six hours.

The corpse shifted uncomfortably next to her as they watched cars leave the employee parking and peel out the driveway. The end of the day shift. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

The agent nodded wordlessly as she bit into a fresh apple, ignoring his question. “Was that the last of them?”

“Ah, yeah. As far as I know.”

Quinn was out of her seat and clambering into the back before Cristóbal Gonzalez finished his sentence. “Great. I’ll get to work.”

The rear of the car was a mess. A random assortment of components, ingredients, herbs, car batteries, and various good luck charms were strewn about the floor. The apple was already left forgotten on one of the piles, a single bite taken out of it. A blue tarp stretched underneath the mess, with intricate sigils inscribed across it in colloidal silver. A mobile ritual circle. You could do a lot of things in a minivan if you threw out the back-seats.

Gonzalez turned around to face her, each of his stiff vertebrae popping in sequence as he rotated. The pentagram staked over his heart in iron needles pulsed with an imagined heartbeat, the holographic sigil throbbing with simulated life. “I mean, is this really the best idea? I’m not a cop or anything, but I don’t think the best solution is busting down the door.”

Quinn began assembling the necessary components for the ritual in the back. Car battery, stripped copper cabling, radio antennae. Home Depot remained unrivaled in sorcerous retail. “Cristóbal, these aren’t people that you can talk to up front. They are the G-men, spooks, Clancies, you know. I mean, they killed you for going down the wrong hallway.”

Cristóbal’s eyes narrowed, their scratched lenses glinting from the dim yellow ceiling light. “And how sure are you that they won’t just kill you, too?”

Quinn gently cradled the dessicated mouse in one hand and pulled out a double-pointed silver needle with the other, which she couched between her lips as she put together the final touches on the circle. She spoke through her teeth. “I’m not. But this is the best option I have if I want to figure out what the Lighthouse Mafia was here for. Plus, it’s not like the Pentagram would respond to a FOIA request in this century, anyway.”

“Wait for backup, then. All you have right now is a gun and me, the amazing talking corpse.” Cristóbal gestured vaguely at himself, the motion emphasized by the cracking of resisting tissues.

Quinn wanted to pull her hair out from frustration, but forced herself to keep an even tone. “I can’t. The longer Jenny and her crew are allowed to roam free, the longer they have to do whatever the hell they have planned, and I can’t let that happen. I won’t.”

As she busied herself with touching up the circle, she could feel Cristóbal burning holes in the back of her head with his studious gaze. “It’s personal for you.” More of a statement than a question.

Quinn sat on her haunches for a second, parsing the sentence. Her mouth opened to voice a venomous retort, but none came. Her lips twisted into a half-baked mixture of a frown and grimace.

She was quiet. Then, “It was my second, third year in Unusual Incidents, and I was assigned to help out with this drug smuggling case in Portland. We clawed our way tooth and nail through their stash house to take them out, but we—I slipped. People died. Jenny got away because I was a hothead. I’m not going to let that happen again. Not when I’m this close.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Quinn turned to lock eyes with him. “So I’m going in there, and you’re going to help me.”

Cristóbal matched her gaze for a few moments before breaking away, a twitch of stiffening neck fibers made a jerky nod. “Okay, no problem.”

The circle was ready, with Quinn at its center. As she sat there, she felt every sore wound she had accrued over the past week throb and ache, her throat in particular. The bruising made it hurt to speak or swallow, making incantations a pain. She felt drained from the stress of constant fighting and prodigious magic use, from trekking across half the country looking for a cut-rate governor. But more than anything, she felt tired. Quinn wanted to lay down on the dirty interior carpeting and be one with the filth, just for a chance for a good night’s sleep. But she couldn’t. Not until she caught those rat bastards.

Quinn sighed, and fumbled through her pockets until she retrieved the pneumanite pendant, its sickly light giving her skin a pallid sheen. The powerful artifact’s mere presence energized the ritual circle, the colloidal silver glowing slightly in the darkened interior. She stared into its fractal planes and fifty-five pairs of eyes stared back at her, daring her to use them.

Running this close to burnout was bad for magic-users, where a misplaced syllable or bad posture could result in death or worse. But her half-cocked plan required Quinn to dump a lot of power into the binding, and she had run out of energy drinks.

The agent set her jaw and gently laid the pendant at the subtending vertex of the central cross. The stone sparked and flashed upon contact with the silver, and the circle flared to life, radio antenna crackled as teasing strands of electricity leapt between the prongs. Sounds of subvocal screams of hate and static came through on the car radio through the circle. Quinn did her best to ignore them.

Cristóbal was still had one last question. “How do you know you won’t get fried when you hit the door, though?”

Quinn pursed her lips as she lined up the needle below the C4 vertebra, the silver growing hot in her hand as she plunged it into the mouse's spine. “Wards are like pressure plates. You can’t screen everything, it takes too much energy. They tried doing that in Korea and they kept on short-circuiting from the mosquitoes. So if I can’t go in there, maybe something smaller can.” To punctuate her speech, she prodded the pad of her thumb with the point of the needle, letting her blood drip down the silver and intermingle with the stagnant fluids of the mouse. The tarp underneath her burnt and smoldered, the runes flared gold, and the world became nothing but a smear.

The agent felt an intense, borderline painful prickling and white noise as her nervous system mapped onto this new body. Everything suddenly looked ten times bigger as Quinn's consciousness was ripped from its host, the world expanding and growing to titanic proportion. The rigor mortis popped out of her joints as she flexed animated muscles, dried skin snapping and crackling as she stretched. An intense wave of dysmorphia washed over her from these new sensations; the ragged, clipped tail an odd weight on her rear end, her arms too short to scratch the itch on her long snout.

Quinn looked at the massive, calloused hand holding her, and her black eyes followed the path of the limb up to her own head, sagging down as her consciousness partially evacuated its shell. Quinn focused, and extended outwards, reaching back into her old body, shoving a bit of her astral projection back into her Quinn-self. When she tried to speak, it was like when she had her wisdom teeth removed — jaw numbed from the anesthetic, tongue absent from the equation.

Her words were slurred and mumbled, but they conveyed the meaning well enough. “Ritual holding, for now. Have a few back-up macros I can pop if it gets too hairy in there. But if I get caught and sent to paranormal Gitmo, at least there’s a witness.” The mouse strained and slid the silver pin out of her neck, and wriggled out of her giant double’s hand, falling to the floor.

The mouse looked to the front of the massive chamber that was once the rental, the large, blurry shadow in the passenger seat waving slowly to her. The looming shadow emitted deafening thunder, echoing across her two pairs of ears. “Can you hear me?”

Quinn tried her best to reply, operating her jaw like a sock puppet. “Roger. Guide me.”

The plan hadn’t struck her as particularly foolhardy until she reached The Door. Yes, it was daring, bordering on suicidal to break into a Pentagram facility. No, she had no back-up, and would probably be cut loose by the UIU if caught (not that she would blame them). Yes, the plan was half-baked, but there was a plan of some sort.

Cristóbal had worked there for years, so he had a fairly good mental map of the place, and a less-fair-but-still-alright map of the ventilation. What was another rat skittering among the halls and walls of a waste treatment plant? So, Quinn had confidence. The adrenaline-fueled, sleep-deprived confidence of a college student turning in a due essay at 11:59 PM, but confidence nonetheless.

Maybe it was her small form, maybe it was the fact that she was effectively a densely knotted ball of magic energy and nerves, but to her wizard eyes, the floor positively radiated EVE. There was something below the plant, something powerful. It was a shock that no one at the plant had felt the backlash of the place before. If she checked, Quinn knew there would be a higher rate of carcinomas at the plant. Magic was just another kind of radiation, after all.

It had gone relatively smoothly at first. Quinn only got turned around a few times in the labyrinthine vents. The dark, echoing ducts and their cool steel were unforgiving towards the tattered pads and splintered claws of Quinn’s host as she skittered around the HVAC arteries, guided only by her rotten senses and the faint voice of Cristóbal. The mouse body would have been chopped into a fine mincemeat, or sucked into air filters if not for his knowledge. Unfortunately, none of the ductwork led to the lab. Probably on a sealed system. She lost track of time within that blackened maw, but after a few false steps, her search finally came to an end. She squeezed her rodent body through a vent grate and fell gracelessly onto the floor below.

Quinn’s weak nocturnal eyes were immediately blasted by a rectangular monolith of EVE. Hexes and curses in ancient writ writhed across its ivory surface of metal and light. Inscribed within the pearly opalescence was a plaque of burnished bronze, the words difficult to make out in the brilliant shine. Squinting her shredded lids, the agent could barely make out the words “D.R.M.A.T. ROOM – CAUTION, RESTRICTED AREA.”

Quinn relayed her findings to Cristóbal. “Yeah, I think you found it.”

She glanced to the side, and saw the hallway was still blocked off by yellow caution tape, a week after Cristóbal’s demise. “Okay. Moment of truth here.”

Quinn scuttled across the floor, claws clicking against the buffed tile as she approached The Door with trepidation. Through her true-sight, the door sparked with powerful magic energy, promising swift death to humans that touched it. Hopefully just humans.

Her pace slowed as The Door eclipsed everything else in sight, towering over her verminous form like a crackling monument to the god of mortality. A promise. A threat. As she approached her hackles raised not of her own volition, but as if the air itself was statically charged. Cautiously, hesitantly, she raised one paw to gently brush against the metal door.

Quick as a flash, it had Quinn in its grip, a formless all-pervading force that made her ears roar with the sound of her still heart and a dead ocean. The curse roiled and raged within her, wresting control of the mouse’s nerves from her, making the corpse seize and collapse to the ground, paralyzed in the face of its all-consuming totality. The Pannypsycho’s frothing thought-form tore throughout her body searching for its target, but found… nothing.

The vessel was void of any soul to bind, save for a single aural note, like a key played on a dusty piano in a condemned house. The curse, dully sentient in a way, flickered for a moment in artificial bemusement. The mouse slumped as the Pannypsycho released its grip, skulking back to its residence within the door.

A whispering in Quinn’s subconscious, faint at first but grew in strength until it was almost noticeable. Cristóbal. Grabbing her true-shoulder and rocking her in the rental. Concern made his scratchy voice break like glass. “Quinn? Quinn, are you there?”

Quinn-within-the-mouse gently unfolded herself, having wrapped herself instinctively in layers and layers of cognitouflage and psychic wards. Her left breast burned as the college-hangover ward finally saw action in repelling the curse, disguising her soul as a mote of dust in an empty vessel. Even with those sheets of protection, sharing a mind-space with such a caustic meme for any length of time was close to brain damage. Rattled, she reinforced the tenuous connection to true-Quinn, flapping her jaw and moistening her lips, which were bitten bloody by her spasms. “Yeah, yeah. Almost got me there.”

“We have a problem.”

Quinn tried her best to sober up and come to attention. “What is it?”

“The plant. Searchlights came up on the roof, and they are scouring the property. Probably looking for us.”

Shit. Shit. “Cristóbal. I want you to get in the driver’s seat. The keys are in the middle console. Put them in the ignition, but don’t start the car until I say so. If you do, we would leave me behind. I don’t want to be a mouse corpse forever.”

Law felt and heard the faint shuffling and banging as Cristóbal wedged himself in the driver’s seat, fumbling the keys with his deadened fingers.

Okay, okay. Quinn tried to center herself in the mouse again. Her vision slowly came back into focus, sludgy visuals turning coherent and grays gaining color again. A severed claw was still attached to The Door, torn off during the seizure. She smelled burning rubber. At least The Door seemed a bit duller, perhaps peeved from the false-alarm.

Quinn spread her ribcage, cracked her skull and squeezed underneath The Door, three remaining claws scrabbling against frictionless tile. The other side looked much the same as the last, a blank hallway terminating at another door, this one blessedly not warded.

“I see flashlights sweeping the grounds, Miss Law.” A voice hissed from behind her eyes.

“Few more minute,” she slurred back.

As she scampered down the hall, she noticed strange outlines on the otherwise monochromatic floor. Tracing the lines, she could see teeth, claws, what could have been eyes. The two-dimensional forms shifted and morphed, tracking her movement like chickens following insects. The manifolds didn’t do much else but trace her steps, their touch on contact with her paws was cool and tingled with the static of intersecting lines. Their handler had probably just fed them, which Quinn was thankful for.

Squeezing underneath the second door, she was finally greeted with what she came here for, though absolutely not what she expected.

The door opened to a catwalk suspended over a giant server farm, whose racks hummed with megawatts of power. Cooling pipes siphoned from the plant above gurgled and pulsed with high-pressure water. Chatter from workers below girded the noise, helping to form a mighty, consuming background of industry.

Server "farm" wasn’t quite the right word for it, though. The humming of the computers set both sets of teeth on edge, a sputtering, grinding sensation that scraped the ears in a familiar tone, like an evil dial-up modem given barebones, spiteful intelligence. Quinn cocked her head, her nostrils flared. Chants spoken at 5.5 GHz, routines processed in a Tartarean machine language on circuit boards etched in cold iron. The smell — not of burning rubber — of brimstone.

It wasn’t a farm, it was a hell, filled with untold numbers of infernal abacuses slaved together to do… something.

Focus on the workers. Ignore the toys. I’ve made enough deals with enough demons already. Quinn skittered across the catwalk and down a supporting beam to hone in on their conversation, picking out their voices from under the noise of the servers and piping.

Three employees in hi-vis and white helmets were standing beneath the catwalk, next to a water cooler. One was a portly, scruffy man, with the look of a computer programmer based on his tacky tie. The others seemed more lean, wiry builds and alert positions that marked them more of the military mindset.

One of the soldiers. “Two alerts in as many weeks…”

Programmer. “Hope it isn’t like last time. I still have a black-eye from that big bitch.”

The other soldier, this one with a more feminine voice. “How’s your sector handling the theft? Y’know, since you let them steal it?”

“She took my pen-knife! I was powerless!”

The first soldier. “Sure, it’s not because you love taking orders from tough women.”

“Shut up, Glen.”

Talk about something more useful, damn it. Quinn inched down the pole a little more, but could feel her grip slipping. Cristóbal’s muttering in the background didn’t help her concentration.

“What’s the forecast looking like, now?”

The programmer shrugged and blew a raspberry. “A week, maybe more. The flying monkeys are looking for the thieves, but we can still work with four nodes in the mean-time."

"Three. Heard through the grapevine that Beta is offline due to 'persistent glitches.'" The soldier did scare quotes with his fingers. "Again. That sector's got a bit of a temper."

The programmer set his jaw. "Launch is still a go. Triangulation will take much longer, is all. It's just a rounding error's worth of calculations lost.”

Closer…

Glen grinned and took a swig from his paper cup. “Finally, lockdown has been hell for me, I don’t know about you guys.”

The woman frowned. “I’m still not sure… Are you certain the jump is safe with only three nodes?”

The programmer made to respond, but paused. “Uh… fairly sure. The doormat hasn’t failed this far, but this is the farthest we’ve ever tunnelled…” The programmer grew a crooked smile. “Lucky I’m not going to be eating crayons on the launchpad with you guys.”

“Fuck off, Jer.”

C’mon you bastards. Against her better judgement, Quinn slips a little closer down the pole until she was parallel to the head of the tallest soldier. She already was psychically linked to the mouse corpse, what was one more connection…

Living tissue was a lot more resistant to penetration than that of corpses — The body's natural EVE output dissuaded most low level workings and phantasms — but once you cracked astral projection, possession is just a short ethical jump away. Loosening lips was even easier: just dampen the inhibition center and stir up some memories. She couldn’t read their minds, but she could make them talk. Not admissible as evidence and technically illegal since the Supreme Court ruling — but they weren’t on trial, and she wasn’t a prosecutor.

Quinn whispered a "Hail Mary" and with a shaking real-hand reached out to brush against the pneumanite focus. Her brain was jolted to full capacity from whispering death-rattles and muttered curses, her thinly-stretched consciousness pulled all the more by grasping psychic hands eager for a taste of the living. But it was enough of a boost to reach into a cortex and pull on a few strings.

Jerry wiped his forehead as it beaded with a sudden onset of sweat, and nervously chuckled. “Who would have thought working with a dimensional triangulator was so hard, huh?”

“Yeah, or that a dry-run on Other London would be so stressful-” The female soldier froze and cocked her head. Her gaze flicked around until she landed on Quinn, suspended awkwardly from the pole. Law had been so focused on the programmer she hadn't taken in the woman's looks. The soldier’s helmet had slipped, and the points of her ears escaped their confines. Her slitted pupils dilated and filled their irises upon locking eyes with Quinn. Damned Sidhe and their double-damned magic sensitivity.

“Intruder!”

Time to go. Quinn released the pendant and tried to pivot to scuttle back up the pole, but she forgot she was missing a limb. Her claws grabbed empty air as she fell backwards, plummeting downwards until she landed on an oily, smooth surface.

“It’s on my fucking head getitoffshit!” Jerry flailed around and jigged as Quinn tried to steady herself on his retreating hairline. In a quick calculated effort, she jumped off of the programmer’s head during a particularly violent jerk and was flung onto the brickwork of the sub-basement wall. The rough texture provided her with enough leverage to skitter up and back onto the catwalk.

“Get after the damn thing already!” The Sidhe marine roared as she leapt over to a glass-covered button and smashing it, switching the cool blue light of the basement into a flickering, sissurating red.

From the car. “Time to leave, Miss Law.”

“Justasecond!”

If Quinn was left behind before she got through the wards of the facility, the car would quickly escape the range of her projection, and she would be yanked out of her body, and flung directly into the high-powered American-made wards of the facility like a moth in a bug zapper. It would not be pretty.

Need to get out need to get out need to get out. Quinn let the rotted remnants of the rodent brain take over as it did what mice did best, and scarpered. The pounding of boots on the rickety scaffolding was a motivational drumbeat in her head as she scampered across the catwalk and dove underneath the door.

The manifolds sizzled and snaked across the linoleum as the blaring alarm activated their pleasure centers, alerting them to the muroid intruder. As they slowly caught up to Quinn, the static in her paws intensified as they started to eat slices of her cross-section upon contact, tail-up. Death by a thousand infinitesimal cuts.

Quinn tried to gather her scattered, panicking thoughts and formulate a counter-measure, racing through her mental rolodex of macros she had primed in her amygdala, nerves she wasn’t really using anyways. Reanimation, telekinesis, these are all three-dimensional! She couldn’t find anything that would work on beings operating on literally another plane of existence.

The boots continued to shake the floor beneath her, and Quinn heard the click of a safety as a gun was drawn from its holster.

She risked a look down, and could see a drawing of teeth, a scribble of eyes from one of the manifolds as it had her centered in its flatlandian body. Its silhouette and organs were all composed of a single unbroken line, twisted into interesting topologies, almost art-like. If it’s a single line, maybe I could break it?

The gun cocked back with a metallic double chuk.

The Door was so so close, but being eaten alive was slowing her down, and the footsteps were getting louder. Quinn skimmed through her rolodex again, and found the perfect macro. A graffiti spell she learned from the scene in Miami. The air twisted and thrummed, and the smell of a Florida produce section washed over her on a non-existent breeze as the tiniest puff from a spray-can materialized and coated the manifold’s body in paint. The manifold froze in place and shrieked, darting away to hide in the grout as Quinn dove underneath the Door and cleared the wards.

The finger pulled the trigger, and fired a bullet aimed with military precision square at the retreating mouse.

But the speed of thought is faster than a bullet.

Quinn slammed into her true-body and lunged into the passenger seat as the mouse was vaporized into countless dessicated chunks. “Hit it.”

Tire met asphalt in a screaming reunion as Cristóbal put his lead foot down, leaping over the parking lot’s concrete blocks and the lawn onto the road proper. Floodlights from the facility focused on their van, and a fleet of black tinted-window vehicles roared out of the plant’s garage and gave chase.

Cristóbal’s dry tongue licked dry lips as his glass eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. “Find what you were looking for?”

Quinn racked back the slide on her M1911 and opened up the glove box for more mags. Her body smarted from the sympathetic lacerations criss-crossing her torso courtesy of the manifold. “Jenny and her crew stole a fucking dimensional triangulator from the goddamn Pentagram.”

A stray shot from the military convoy shattered the back window and the rear-view mirror. Cristóbal focused back onto the road. “The hell is that?”

The van swerved into the passing lane to get around a semi-truck loaded with industrial equipment. Quinn eyed the side mirror and waited until the lead vehicle began to pass the truck. Her father was a tow truck driver, and if there is one thing she learned from him in her ride-alongs was that those tires were under a lot of pressure. If they got over-pressurized…

Quinn mouthed a snatch of prose in Enochian, and the temperature inside one of the truck’s eight tires increased by twenty degrees. There was a sound like a shotgun blast, and the tire blew, the force of which shattered the neighboring vehicle’s window and caved its passenger door in. Three SUVs made it past before the jack-knifing truck blocked off the road entirely

“A dimensional triangulator is a quantum-demonic-computer-thingy that brute-forces the coordinates of anything, on- or off-Earth. Take this next right and then a left at the light.”

Cristóbal dutifully jigged the car to the right, bumping over the curb and a mailbox before straightening out. “So she broke into a military base… for a map?”

The SUVs pulled closer behind the van, a dark figure shifting behind the tinted glass before their back windshield blew out. Cristóbal made a ragged, airless gasp as the bullet tore through his sternum and put an O in the odometer. He kept driving.

Quinn slid down in her seat to shrink her profile. She rifled through her pockets and reached into the back to grope for spare parts, tinkering with odds and ends. “It’s not just that LEFT with the right coordinates you could do a lot of things SPEED UP like espionage or sympathetic vodoun or even tearing open a Way. Very diffic—SLOW DOWN.”

Cristóbal slammed on the brakes and let the SUVs sail past him. “Right right right RIGHT.” As the van skidded through the intersection, Quinn could see the juked SUVs almost blink, a video jump-cut, and they were now in the opposite lane, headed back at highway speed with no time lost in between. That working and that much g-force would kill a normal person, but she was pretty sure these people weren’t quite human anymore.

Cristóbal wheezed. Either one or both of his lungs were definitely popped. “So smuggling? This crime spree is to — I don’t know — build her reputation back up? Take over the criminal underworld?”

The roided military vehicles had much better engines than the dinky rented minivan, and their fat tires were able to cut corners quicker, grabbing the road and pushing themselves forwards like lunging tigers. They were gaining.

Quinn was still fiddling with her gadget, the tips of her fingers turning blue with frostnip as she held the pneumanite, blessing the ball of junk with the sign of the cross. The edges of her vision were starting to blacken. She needed to rest. But she couldn’t, not yet.

She focused the remaining magical power she had left into her fingers, slowly and gently coaxing the souls' energies to wrap around the fetish like a thin shawl. “Not just that, you don’t need military hardware for that. You could break into Fort Knox with what the Pentagram cooked up. The White House. Hell, you could crack a pocket dimension in an hour and have a trip to Three Portlands… shit.”

The black cars were on either side of them now. They had faint glamours to them, which meant the average commuter saw testosterone-fueled drag racers instead of a black-ops car chase. But even with the glamours, Quinn could see just fine as the SUVs' sunroofs retracted, and black-suited, hyper-jointed, slack-jawed thralls crawled out onto the roofs of the moving vehicles. There was a loud thump from above and the ceiling noticeably sagged.

Quinn bit down on the pneumanite and experienced the worst brain freeze of her life as she drew her service weapon and fired into the ceiling, which yelped and dripped blue blood. The bound ghoul writhed in spasmodic twitches as it rolled off the roof and under the wheels of the third pursuer behind them. “Gah that sucks. Tap on the steering wheel three times.”

Cristóbal did so, looking more and more mystified. He glanced down at Quinn’s lap at the monstrosity she was constructing. “What the hell did you make?”

She held her creation up, examining the pins she used as buttons for the grease-rag onesie. “Apple-head doll. It’s not perfect because it’s not dried and I was snacking on it earlier. The best cursed totems look almost human. At this street, close your eyes and put your foot on the gas.”

“It’s turning yellow.”

“That’s why I told you to close your eyes.”

Quinn rolled down her window and slunk further down into her seat. The action was met by a spray of gunfire, a single bullet boring between Cristóbal's ulna and radius, leaving a perfectly cylindrical hole in his arm. Quinn blessed the incompetence of intelligence agencies.

The light turned red.

Quinn kissed the demented doll, faintly radiating with unearthly energies from the random sacred components stuffed in its nappie and the blessing of fifty-five souls. “God bless you,” she murmured, before pitching the doll out the window and into oncoming traffic.

The blaring horn of a t-boning car suddenly faded away. So did the sound of the engine. The vibration of the car. It all fell away as if everything was wrapped in thick packing cotton. Quinn was blinded by the gray, and tried to steady her breathing as her eyes tunnel-vision onto her knees. Cristóbal's foot was still on the gas, but they weren’t going anywhere.

Cristóbal was stock-still, but Quinn knows if he were alive he would be shaking. His eyes were still closed. “…Are we alive? Can I open my eyes?”

Quinn leaned on the B-pillar, counting her heartbeats. “Just— Just give it a minute.”

“Where are we?”

The fog shifted and subtly churned, as if something was moving through. As though they were moving through it. Quinn closed her eyes, taking in the cool air. “Everywhere and nowhere.”

“Is this part of the plan?”

Quinn’s heart stopped sounding like a jackhammer, which was a good sign. She was starving, though. Quinn would miss that apple greatly. “Crossroads are an important thing. The meeting of strangers, the confluence of armies and politics and culture. Every city had one at its heart, at one point.”

“And?”

Quinn faintly smiled, the darkness behind her lids slowly brightening to a soft cherry-red. “There are easier Ways to travel than brute-force, Cristóbal.”

They both opened their eyes to a vast desert landscape, endless red dunes rolling away under a bleeding setting sun. The car sat idle at an intersection, the cracked and pitted tarmac scrolled out into thin lines at right angles, eventually disappearing into the cragged peaks of the mountains on the horizon. The breeze whistled a lonely, melancholic tune through Quinn’s window and the back windshield. It was a tune that her mother used to sing. Quinn eyed Cristóbal. "As long as we're here, we shouldn't leave the car."

Cristóbal repeated himself. “Where is here?”

“The Road. Once we reach another intersection, we’ll do the ritual again. And then we’ll be where we need to be. We can’t be here long, though.”

The corpse stared ahead, white-knuckling the wheel. If he had working salivary glands he would have swallowed. The car gently accelerated, sand gritting underneath the balding tires’ weight. A coyote whined in the far distance, in a language so foreign it was no longer spoken.

He drove for a while, neither of them wanted to break the silence. They had turned the radio off once it had began to speak to them. Quinn thought she had dozed off for a bit, but the bloated sun hadn’t moved from its skulking perch above the mountains, its red light glinting off the rusted hood all the same.

Cristóbal caved first. “So your theory.”

Quinn had been mulling it over, in between sucking on hard pieces of jerky and watching the dunes roll by. She rolled in the passenger’s seat to face him. “What do Jeb Bush, conceptual silver ingots, and a demonic GPS have in common?”

Cristóbal shrugged his sloping shoulders, sneaking a glance at Quinn. “Am I supposed to know?”

Quinn worked at the jerky, thinking. “No, but neither am I. But there is something. Ways, Ways, what does she want with Ways?”

Cristóbal's ragged lungs made a rattling sigh. “You said Fort Knox, maybe there? Needs Bush for biometrics?”

“Good guess, but the silver?”

Shrugged again. “Indiana Jones it? Replace some gold bars with the silver.”

“Yeah, but the silver is probably worth more than the gold. Conceptual silver is… hard to come by. Literally the platonic idea of silver. The Silver-est silver. It would be worth more than a similar bar of uranium.”

“But you think she wants to break in somewhere? Where could she break in only using military hardware?"

Quinn rolled over again, looking at the mountains. She spoke slowly, tasting each word for clues. “Guantanamo, maybe. Antarctica? A secret Pentagram moon base? Three Portlands?” She was close.

Cristóbal smirked. “Guantanamo sounds right. Maybe she wants to break a buddy out, use Bush as a bargaining chip.”

Quinn’s eyes widened. God damn it all. “That’s exactly it.”

The corpse looked surprised. “Yeah?”

“God, it’s so simple, now.”

“No, it’s really not. Tell me, damn it.”

“Jenny is going to break into Paramax to free Hamilton Burke.”

Silence in the car except for the whistling of wind as they followed the path less traveled.

“What?”

“Um, okay. So Paramax is this free-floating penal colony in the Void owned by the US, right? And it houses the former leader of the Mafia, Burke.”

“O-okay…”

“The only way you can get there is by making a Way through the use of a very delicate ritual involving sympathetically linked silver.”

“Alright…”

“But, Jenny could just brute-force the Way by just calculating the coordinates, sacrificing Jeb Bush in a blood ritual, and then using the conceptual silver to carve a Way into the prison to free her boss.”

Silence reigned in the car again.

“…Why Jeb Bush?”

“Biometrics, like you said. Jeb’s brother was president, his father was president, he’s basically American royalty. That close of a tie with the ontological weight of America, his blue blood would go a long way.”

“Okay.”

They both stared at the highway, a thin ribbon of gray against a background of scarlet. They could see a crossroads up ahead, marked with a towering stele of a horned goat.

“Is this normal for you? Like, is this normal FBI stuff?”

Quinn pursed her lips. “Not particularly, no.”

“Ah.”

"Mainly try to go with the flow, and it's been working out well so far."

Cristóbal looked at her as they rolled to a stop under the shade of the granite pillar of old. "We almost died."

Quinn was feeling a lot happier, giddy, even, as she painfully crawled out of her seat and into the back to make another totem. "I almost died. And it worked out, because of my plan."

"This was your plan."

Quinn had a knife between her teeth as she worked on cutting up the tarp for another totem-diaper. "I would say… that was Plan D. Plans A through C were much cleaner than that."

Cristóbal's mouth twisted in a grin, almost against his will. "And this… crossroads thing. Where is it going to spit us out?"

"Wherever we need to be," Quinn repeated. "But I believe that means Colorado."

Cristóbal's eyebrows arched. Either a conscious act or his spirit was finally settling back in. "Why Colorado?"

"Law of Sympathy. If you are going to break into Paramax, even with the tools that Jenny has, you need a Place, a symbol to ground at." Quinn returned Cristóbal's grin. "And where better to ground than at America's largest supermax, Florence ADX?"

And, She neglected to add as she gathered her materials, tomorrow is the summer solstice, the time of growth and change. Perfect for a prison break. So let's hope we don't get there too late, and find a smoking crater instead.

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