Testing the Margins - SCP Foundation

Testing the Margins

2021

Her Majesty's Royal Fortress and Palace of the Tower of London:

London, England, United Kingdom

Dr. Lillian Lillihammer wanted to sit on the throne.

She assumed it was a throne. It looked too awkward and garish to be anything so practical as a chair. It was rectangular, it had finials, it was gilt-edged, it was hideous. It was sitting on a little stage with what looked to her like Christmas-themed step molding, in its own little niche in the whitewashed brick wall of a picturesque octagonal chamber. She was standing in Martin Tower, which was a tower, which was attached to the rest of the Tower of London, which was not a tower. She was alone, because she'd managed to shoo her agent escort out of the room by threatening to sit on the throne if they didn't leave, which now left her with precisely two things to do in the spartan space: stare at the monitor affixed to the wall, which displayed a plain old iron door surrounded by an indescribably bizarre alchemical contraption, or offend the dignity of the House of Windsor anyway.

It wasn't really much of a choice at all.

As she plunked herself down on the thin cushion, spine straightening in regal discomfort, there was a loud bang from the monitor. She looked up just in time to see the door swing open violently, so violently that it struck the stone wall, and two figures tumbling out as though the door were actually in the ceiling. They landed in a heap as gravity reasserted itself, the thin and dark one splayed over the round and pale.

Two members of MTF Delta-6500 ("Magical Mystery Tour"), armed with an ivory-handled revolver and a brightly-glowing golden sword respectively, advanced on the prone pair. The round one looked up at them, and flashed an exhausted grin.

"We toppled a monarchy," she declared.

Lillihammer pumped one fist at the monitor in silent congratulation, and seriously considered snapping off one of the finials in solidarity.

The thin one rolled off her partner's back, and lay on the floor of the basement of Martin Tower on her own back for a few moments as the round one squirmed onto her side to face her. Their eyes met, and the thin one smiled sadly before not saying anything at all.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Dr. Udo Okorie growled at the notification flashing across her screen, before whisking it away once again.

It had popped up three times already, urgently demanding that she drop what she was doing and attend to the needs of some jackass in Memetics and Countermemetics with an obviously overblown sense of his or her own importance. It wasn't using the priority flair, there was no containment breach in progress, and Okorie knew fully well that she had total control over her own schedule nowadays. She didn't have to answer this. She had more important things to be worrying about.

A few months prior, she'd willingly submitted herself for SCP object classification. Her trip to Corbenic had yielded one fascinating factoid about herself which she'd managed to keep mostly to herself in the intervening time, a fact of her parentage which made her not quite normal and quite eligible for containment. When the Foundation had offered a general amnesty to anyone hiding anomalous attributes back in July, she'd been one of the first to come forward. Now she was spending almost every day poring over data from Sites across the globe, scrounging every scrap of data which might help her to understand her own inhuman nature. This was high-priority work. She was meant to be immune from outside interference.

And yet… there it was again, the notification. She knew full well what the notification settings on her terminal were; she had just checked and double-checked them in bewildered indignation a few minutes prior. One-and-done. Dismiss and forget. It shouldn't have been possible for this missive to keep slipping into her view, but…

Actually, this time it was different. The previous four times, her attendance at some far-flung lab across the Site had been vociferously demanded. Now the message was painfully direct:

I am standing outside your door.

I don't know magic (this kind).

Open the fuck up.

The messages, sent through the 43NET notification system as they were, had been unsigned. The wording of this one might as well have been a signature.

Okorie sighed. She stood up. She stretched. She prepared herself mentally for the fact that Lillian Lillihammer had once more returned to Site-43, walked around her desk, waved off the wards keeping the door to the outer office locked tight, and swung it open.

She was not, in fact, prepared.

Lillian's snow-white hair had grown longer; it had already been long, longer than Okorie's, which was longer than anyone else's around. She seemed fitter than she'd been before departing in June — to take training in memetic thaumaturgy, becoming even more of a menace than she already was — and this fact was accentuated by what she was wearing: a sleeveless blue hoodie which looked to be made of latex, its zipper presently in a dangerously transitional state between up and down.

Leaning casually in the corridor doorway, one hand draped insolently over the back of her head, Lillian slipped her PDA into the back pocket of her blue jeans and grinned.

"Come out to play?"

2021

Her Majesty's Royal Fortress and Palace of the Tower of London:

London, England, United Kingdom

Chief Delfina Ibanez was very, very comfortable.

She didn't like it. She was wearing what had once been her Rayon MTF jumpsuit, transformed by a trip to the dead city-scab of Alagadda into a gorgeous gold and burgundy dress which fit her too well, shone strange colours when it caught the light, and had the approximate physiological effect of having her skin brushed with a feather duster by someone with impure intentions and the life experience to realize them. She would have sooner been debriefed in her underwear, irony be damned. She wondered where her underwear had gone.

Udo was wearing a labcoat; not her standard Applied Occultism job with the nifty wizard hood, as when Ibanez had last seen her, but a sort of platonic ideal of the SCP type. Generic. A little bit unreal, as though it had been recreated from incomplete memory. She had it buttoned up from top to bottom, and from the way she was sitting and the view of her clavicle on offer between the collar and the topmost button, Ibanez strongly suspected she wasn't wearing anything else. She wondered whether her friend's underwear had gone, too, and she actually shook her head to clear the thought away.

Udo looked blasted, dazed, beyond exhausted. Ibanez understood some of that; the other woman had just walked out of an extradimensional afterlife after talking down a raging god, then narrowly escaped capture by a compound entity of two of the worst anomalous beings known to exist, after sacrificing herself to save her friends from a fate many times worse than death. This had not been a normal week for her.

Ibanez suppressed a strange urge to punch her friend in the shoulder. She wasn't sure where it was coming from.

The three of them were sitting in a bleached-looking octagonal stone chamber, Lillihammer facing them across a folding card table. This contrasted absurdly with the gaudy seat on which she sat, towering over them both; most things towered over Delfina Ibanez, who was only four feet ten inches tall, but Lillian Lillihammer at 6'3" on an actual goddamn throne was something like a judgemental god.

"This is your debriefing," Lillian yawned. She fidgeted with the buttons on her own labcoat, which was frankly hideous: every inch of it was covered in strange sigils, whorls, fractal patterns, probably a hundred different memetic something-or-others woven into its fabric. This was why she'd been sent to debrief them, Ibanez had instantly understood. She was Site-43's top memeticist, and she was going to ensure that nothing in their whirlwind trip from the living city of Kayaköy to the Wanderers' Library to Alagadda and Corbenic had compromised their cognition. The only things on the card table were a blackboxed recording device and a truly tremendous stack of cards, face down, which thoroughly confirmed this suspicion. They were in for a long afternoon of tests.

"I've already been de-briefed," Ibanez snapped.

"Me too," Udo mumbled. She tried to force a smile. She couldn't quite swing it. This time Ibanez suppressed the urge to pinch her cheek.

Lillian gave the impression of ignoring them. She probably wasn't really; she'd likely filed their shared joke away somewhere for future analysis, incapable as she was of overlooking even the tiniest of details. But she had an atmosphere of affable cruelty to keep up, so she breezed on by. "First off, let's talk motivations." She stabbed one long white finger at Udo. "You. Why did you separate from your team?"

Udo shrugged. "We weren't all going to make it. I had to do something."

The finger swung to point at Ibanez, but Lillian's icy blue stare remained fixed on Udo. "This one had a magic sword and the power of superprotagonism, or whatever shit. Placeholder's tried to explain it to me, and you won't believe what it takes to get him to shut up." She blinked. "So yeah. You're a trained thaumaturge, and your team was trying to escape from magic hell. Why did you run off into space hell instead of letting the hero take care of the problem?"

Udo shrugged again. Ibanez wanted to reach out and hold her shoulders in place. "It seemed like the best course of action at the time. We didn't know what the sword could do. Del needed to get back to Overwatch so they could figure it out. I was expendable."

"You were expendable." Lillian nodded. "Okay." She turned her gaze to match the arc of her finger. "You. Why did you breach containment on Alagadda?"

Ibanez huffed. "Because she isn't expendable, and I was damn well going after her. I cleared this with Moose. I had permission."

"Did you have permission to leave a dangerous SCP object behind? Because we've been through your bag, Del, and there's no creepy talking mask in there. Not even an ounce of creepy mask muck."

Ibanez winced. "Okay, so it didn't go precisely to plan. The main thing is, I brought her back. She's safe. And it's not like we were getting any benefit from keeping 035 around; have you read that file? That thing was the Keterest Keter ever to Keter. It's happy where it is now, and we're happier without it. Nothing of value was lost."

Ibanez saw Lillihammer's eyes flick to one side, just for a moment, and turned to see a stricken look on Udo's face. "What? What did I miss?"

Slowly, haltingly, Udo explained, and Ibanez completely forgot about being comfortable.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Nhung Ngo's office was nothing like her personal quarters. At home in pristine, austere surroundings, she nevertheless filled up her office with clutter. Neatly-curated clutter, of course, but still there were statuettes and photographs and doohickeys of every sort in every direction one might choose to turn. As a memeticist, Lillihammer understood this. She remembered Bernabé Del Olmo's old office, packed with a variety of esoteric gewgaws producing entirely non-anomalous cognitive effects when examined; there, the idea had been to encourage visitors to open their minds. Here, she imagined, the concept was reversed. Ngo's patients could look every which way, focus on something strange or ugly or ridiculous or even occasionally beautiful, and in so doing let their thoughts wander down the paths they were afraid to tread consciously. Ngo had that kind of insight into the way people's minds worked, particularly people whose minds worked at Site-43. Lillihammer intended to capitalize on that.

Ngo didn't offer her a seat, knowing the other woman would set herself down without asking. Lillihammer did not disappoint. Ngo also didn't speak first; after all these years, they really did understand each other quite well.

"Let's talk Udo and Delfina," Lillihammer began.

Ngo nodded. "Nothing confidential, you understand."

Lillihammer shook her head. "I've got the authority to wring out the confidential shit if I need it, but I probably won't. You know me. Give me a little, I'll turn it into a lot."

Ngo nodded again.

"How long have they known each other?"

Ngo raised an eyebrow. "You know the answer to that question. Twenty years."

"You know how my memory works. I want all the relevant information in this package, so I can skim it later." Lillihammer's eidetic recollections were a source of constant wonder to everyone but her; she had new wonders to dwell on these days. "So, twenty years. Okay. How well do they get along, do you figure?"

Ngo glanced down at the papers on her desk, though Lillihammer knew this was just a way to play for time. Ngo never forgot a profile. "They're best friends," she said. "They have been for most of that time. The breach brought them together, as it did the rest of you, and they've rarely been apart since. They spend a lot of their spare time together."

"Huh." Lillihammer didn't collect that sort of data, what people did in their spare time, as a general rule. She had once read Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, and fallen very much in love with Sherlock Holmes' declaration that he would choose to forget the fact that the Earth revolved around the sun to make room for more valuable information about the types of cigars smoked and mud trodden in urban England. Her work was rarely ludocentric, so she avoided details about other people's pastimes like the plague — particularly since, unlike Holmes, she was incapable of forgetting anything she learned. "They been doing that lately?"

Ngo shook her head. "No. Udo's been very busy with her project, hasn't made time to see anybody in months. Delfina has been training a new crop of agents for the extra MTFs Sokolsky wants." Nobody at Site-43 save for the Director was cleared to know what was up about that. Lillihammer knew regardless, but she passed up the opportunity to share and let the psychiatrist continue. "They're still close, but the circumstances are keeping them apart at the moment."

"Huh," Lillihammer said again. "You're sure about that? That it's the circumstances doing it? How's Udo handling what happened to her dad?"

Ngo pursed her lips. "Getting into confidential territory. But yes, it's affected her, obviously. She's stopped coming in for sessions, which is a problem; she needs more, while she grieves, not fewer, and the fact that she's shut herself away from others as well compounds the issue. I am worried about her."

"Who else might she confide in?"

Ngo considered. "She doesn't have many friends outside of our group, the Chairs and Chiefs and Provisional Task Force. She keeps her mother in the loop, but that's just about it. She hasn't dated anyone since dumping Harry for good, years back, and she hasn't been training new people — she delegates most of her interpersonal duties, which is not unusual in her line of work." Wizards, as a rule, were solitary souls.

"Uh huh." Lillihammer prised the skin of her latex hoodie off her own skin, airing out the interior. Ngo maintained polite eye contact. "What about Del?"

"You know as well as I do. She has all the friends she cares to make — the same ones Udo has — and her romantic needs are handled with spot treatments only. She prides herself on full self-sufficiency, and she's not going to take any action which threatens that."

"Relatable."

Ngo shuffled her papers absently. "Why are you asking for this information in particular?"

"Because I need to know how stable they are." Lillihammer filed away the little she'd learned for future access. "I haven't been around for a few months, and you're the one who would know. My twenty-year opinion is that they trust each other implicitly, know each other well, work together terrifically, and are completely set in their respective ways. If any of that's changed while I've been gone, I need to know before moving forward."

Ngo smiled. "They've spent half their lives in constant contact. Perhaps they just need a break from each other."

"Is that your professional opinion?"

"No."

"Then what is?"

Ngo told her.

It wasn't new information, but confirmation was better.

2021

Site-91: Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom

For many people at Site-43, it was difficult to remember that Delfina Ibanez had long since vacated the position of security chief. She'd occupied the post for a decade and a half, and she'd occupied it visibly: stalking the corridors with that special kind of swift determination reserved only for the very short of stature, obtruding herself into spaces and situations with no apparent regard for propriety or privacy. That she was still doing this while heading up the Site's mobile task forces, since she didn't have anything better to do (or anything she liked doing better), made the fact that she was now Chief of Pursuit and Suppression easy to forget.

Okorie was learning precisely what the change meant.

Del was pursuing her with dogged determination. When Okorie met with the Site Director to receive condolences on her father's passing, the bobbing burgundy bulldog was waiting for her outside the office. When Okorie went for a long walk around the old Georgian manor's extensive footprint, she kept meeting her friend coincidentally coming the other way. When she sat in her mother's study and talked around the loss they'd both just suffered, Delfina was disastrously absent, but at all other times they were never more than a sprightly jog apart. It were as though, having just retrieved Okorie from across the Nevermeant, the other woman was attempting to protect her investment.

That was nothing compared to what Lillian was up to, however.

Lillian was somehow managing to dog both their footsteps, ducking out when one wasn't doing anything interesting to pop up in the other's face. Okorie and Del had conferred, and discovered a disturbing trend in her endless questions.

To Okorie: "The Hanged King is one of the most dangerous eldritch entities in existence. What gave you the strength to confront him?" "Everyone else who goes to Corbenic gets eaten by a giant monkey or drafted into a sci-fi army or eaten by sex fiends or drowned in a treacle river or eaten by a witch. How were you able to make so much progress?" "All our other thaumaturges were borderline useless during the Impasse. How is it you were able to haul yourself along on an adventure across space and time while the rest of them were moaning and groaning in bed?"

To Del: "Did you just straight up invent your whole report, or did you really engage in that much superheroic theatrics? Were you showing off, or what?" "What prompted you to abandon your MTF and go looking for a single missing thaumaturge?" "The Ambassador of Alagadda is almost as bad as the Hanged King. What gave you the strength to confront it? Twice?"

They knew what it looked like she was doing. They didn't know for sure she was really doing it, however, if only because Lillian Lillihammer as both a memeticist and a maniac was always more than met the eye.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Okorie walked into the briefing room with a heavy tread. She didn't tread heavily often; she didn't have the weight to put behind it. Today, however, the sheer force of not wanting to do this was bearing down on her heavily. She thought: Please let it be over quickly.

Ibanez walked in behind her, on the balls of her booted feet as always, invigorated by just how much she herself did not want to be here. She thought: If you ask me to sit down, I will kill you with the chair.

Lillian was at a table once more, brushed steel now instead of cheap plastic, and she gestured to them both to sit down across from her. "Thanks for volunteering," she smiled.

Okorie sat down. "You got ETTRA to order me." Both of their pet projects were under the auspices of the Emergent Threat Tactical Response Authority.

Ibanez also sat down, noting ruefully that she hadn't been asked. "ETTRA, huh? I only got Site Director orders. Lucky you."

Lillian pressed her hands together, then sprung them apart, then repeated the gesture again. She looked as energetic as Okorie didn't feel, more energetic than did Ibanez. "Well, these tests are very important. I don't like to brag," and she waited for the impact of that statement to reach them both, "but I think I'm on the edge of a breakthrough that'll make all our lives much easier."

Okorie regarded her curiously. It was an open secret among the Site's high-clearance staff that Lillian was spending most of her time with Thilo Zwist, an immortal Austrian thaumaturge whose work had been exploited to create the science of memetics. She was doing this to turn the tide of an ongoing war between the Foundation and not one, but two distinct secret societies of rabble-rousing cryptomancers. Nobody who knew her had any doubt that she could manage it. Nobody who knew her had any idea how far she'd progressed towards her goal, either, though the fact that like Okorie she'd accepted SCP classification in July suggested she'd added at least a little magic to her already impressive faculties. If this was connected to that, then this could be big.

Ibanez waited impatiently. Her only hope was that Lillian was planning some sort of meme-heist, and required firepower to back it up. She'd shot a few giftschreiber before, but she'd never gotten to shoot a schriftsteller, so far as she knew. She was something of a collector.

"We're going to run a series of tests on the two of you. I've got them all set up in the Gauntlet already." The Gauntlet was a series of eight linked chambers in the Research and Experimentation Section, ringed by an observation gallery with one-way glass. "They're memetic, as you might expect. They're also skill-testing."

Okorie raised an eyebrow. "Why are you testing our skills? I thought this would have something to do with yours." As a thaumaturge herself, Okorie was interested to see what the memeticist had learned so far.

Lillian grinned. "It has everything to do with mine."

Ibanez sighed. "She's testing us to test herself. She's trying out memetic warfare on us." The possibility that this was connected to the ulterior motive she and Udo had suspected last year at Site-91, she kept mum about that.

"I can neither confirm nor deny. This is a blind test, and you are my mice." She stood up, up, up, towering over both other women. "You might guess my criteria, by the end, if you pay very close attention or it all goes right to plan. Make a game of it, if you like!"

Okorie thought: I don't think I will. I don't like to play games.

Ibanez thought: I don't think I will. I don't like to lose.

Lillihammer thought: You don't even know the rules, and that's before I change them.

2001

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

This guy is an idiot.

"It's an odd admixture, to be sure! Memeticists and abationists." There was a titter from the audience as the speaker paused, smiling at his own absurd choice of term for his own absurd profession. Lillian chose instead to linger on his choice of the word 'admixture', which she understood to mean 'mixture' but be two letters longer. This did nothing to shake her conviction. "Not often do the Sections of our Site mix so thoroughly, but this is a project requiring both your specific skills and ours, so here we are!"

'Here' was the Site's main auditorium, capacity six hundred people, presently seating the combined throng of Applied Occultism, Acroamatic Abatement and Memetics and Countermemetics, which was to say fewer than one quarter that number. There was no assigned seating, so everyone was spread out at random in clumps or, like Lillian, singlets. The 'project' was… well, he hadn't gotten around to that yet. 'He' was Dr. Dougall Deering, Chief of AO and apparently a tremendous imbecile.

"Now, I know you're all highly-trained experts and your time is very valuable. So I propose we get right down to it, right away, right now, and focus on the matter before us: choosing a name for our combined workgroup."

More laughter. Lillian began to suspect that imbecility was contagious. She started examining her opposite numbers, just for something to do; she saw a woman who looked like a chipmunk, a man who looked almost unfeasibly plain, a woman with orange eyes (?) visible across the auditorium, a woman who looked like a squirrel. Magic rodents carry the day, she thought idly as Deering began to speak again.

"Our task in mind, I might suggest 'The Mind Melters'." He paused for laughter again, and every part of Lillian save for her physical body sighed in response. "If you want something punchier, perhaps 'The Vandals'. Since what we're going to be doing…" He slapped his forehead. "I haven't told you what we're doing! Of course. We're going to abate an entire museum's worth of cognitohazardous bric-a-brac."

There had been no laughter after 'Mind Melters', and this told Lillian something very, very important. Dr. Dougall Deering was a lecturing academic. He had a feel for audiences, and he didn't break for applause or laughter unless they were likely to be incoming. The fact that nobody had laughed meant that Dr. Dougall Deering had chosen to stand up in front of nearly one hundred and fifty very important people and make a speech he had not rehearsed beforehand. He was winging it. The audacity of this almost, almost caught her fancy. But then her eyes settled on his oh-so-neatly trimmed beard, and his stupid pouty mouth, and the fact that it was her time he was wasting with his arrogant lack of care, and she re-discovered her standards.

The orange eyes drew her attention once again as the lecturer resumed his spiel, and she realized she could see them so clearly because they were wide, wide open. Whoever that woman was, she was absolutely enraptured by this blithering idiot. That meant one of two things: either she was an idiot too, or she was seeing something Lillian couldn't.

Which of course meant she was an idiot.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Lillian and Udo were standing in the first chamber when Ibanez arrived. She had a brief moment of uncertainty when she realized she didn't know whether the tests were for each of them individually, or competitive. She wasn't sure she liked the idea of competing against Udo; she wasn't sure what a test that both of them could take at the same time would even look like. What she could see so far suggested a singular focus: three Kevlar target dummies arranged along the back wall, beside the door to the second test.

She almost said 'I don't know which of you to shoot', but she'd come to realize that most people didn't appreciate that kind of joke.

"Since you're wondering, and in the interest of friendly cooperation, I'll ease your minds: you'll be performing most of these tests on your own." Lillian's eyes sparkled, no doubt because she was aware that the word 'most' essentially scuttled her statement as a mind-easer. "The first test will be yours, Del. The next will be Udo's, then rinse and repeat."

Ibanez nodded. "What's the test?"

Lillian stood aside, and Udo followed her in a mechanical trudge. "You're going to shoot those target dum—"

Ibanez removed her service weapon from its holster and placed one bullet in the heads of each dummy just as Lillian finished her inaudible final word. Udo visibly straightened, a smirk playing at the edges of her mouth as she stuck both hands into the pockets of her labcoat and stretched.

Lillian cleared her throat. "You're going to shoot those target dummies after I administer a memetic effect to you. But hey, full points for audacity."

Ibanez smiled, again resisting an urge, this time to blow the smoke from the barrel of her gun. It didn't do to show off too much in front of Lillian. When she started showing off back, things escalated quickly. "Alright, do your magic. I'm ready."

Lillian shook her head, and headed for the door to the outer observation room. "We're going to want to get out of your firing range, for safety's sake. The test will begin when the door closes."

Ibanez replaced her weapon in its holster and loosened up. "In your own time, then, ladies."

Behind Lillian's back, Udo allowed the smirk to win and flashed it in Ibanez's direction before disappearing past the door. It shut with a click.

And then the lights went out.

"The hell?" Ibanez put both hands on her hips, even though there was no way for anyone to see it. "Lillian? What's going on?"

There was no response. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the test—

She already had the gun out of its holster again, and opened fire. She had twelve shots total, three of which were already spent, so she replicated the motions from earlier and put a trio of holes into where she knew each dummy was still standing. Clip empty. She ejected it, and let it hit the floor with a rattle and scrape to further indicate completion.

The lights snapped back on.

"Was that it?" Ibanez asked the empty air. The door to the gallery opened, and Udo walked out looking almost as confused as Ibanez felt. "Was that the test? Or did you fuck up?"

No response from Lillian. Udo walked over to the dummies, examining the four holes clustered in each of their chests — centre mass, because showing off was only the right decision under ideal conditions. She whistled appreciatively.

Or did I fuck up? Ibanez shook her head. She wasn't the doubting sort. Whatever had gone wrong, it hadn't gone wrong with her.

The door to the next chamber slid open. "Head on in, Udo," the memeticist's modulated voice instructed. "Delfina, you're with me."

Udo gave her an apologetic look before acceding to the demand.

Ibanez watched her go, then headed into the observation hall with a sinking feeling.

2007

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Lillihammer rubbed the back of her head until she'd worsened the injury enough that it stopped hurting in response, then examined the hand she'd used. It came away slick with blood, which was good. She'd expected it to be covered with—

"They're out there, alright." Delfina stepped away from the peephole on the lab door. "Just waltzing around like they own the place."

"They do own the place." Udo was sitting on the floor, back against an overturned table. She was, in the middle of all this, actually reading a book. "They are the place."

"They can't be everything." Delfina walked over to a row of filing cabinets against the back wall, looking for all the world like she was about to kick one. She didn't, but she clearly wanted to.

"They are. Or at least, that's my working theory." Udo blew out a breath. "Everything. Every inch of everything. Every micron, even. Hmm." She looked both disgusted and fascinated.

"What are you thinking?" Lillihammer knelt down in front of the thaumaturge, wiping the blood off on her jeans. "You're obviously thinking something."

"I'm thinking," Delfina interrupted, "that if we don't figure out where those fuckers are going, or find a way to make them fuck off, we're going to starve to death in this lab."

"That's not true," Udo smiled. "We might also get eaten by the ones in this lab."

Delfina shot a warning glance at every piece of furniture in the room. "If there's any microscopic monsters listening, I will have you know that I can jump my entire height up into the air, and these boots are made for squashing."

"Udo." Lillihammer ignored the security chief, focused on the solution she saw congealing behind those bright orange eyes behind those huge black glasses. "You're figuring something out. I want in."

Udo handed her the book she'd been examining — Paraparticle Physics by, who else, Dr. Ilse Reynders — and stumbled to her feet. "Whose lab is this? Bremmel? Please say Bremmel."

Their flight had been a swift, horrified blur, but Lillian's feet were incapable of forgetting a floorplan. "It's Bremmel's, yeah."

"Awesome." Udo had found a half-height bookcase behind the old scientist's desk. "Couldn't be better. Bremmel's paranoid, right?"

"That's what the harassment complaints all say," Delfina nodded. She was back at the door, peering through the peephole. Not obviously pleased with what she saw in the hall. "Divides his time between thinking insane shit, thinking someone's trying to steal his insane shit, and trying to put insane shit over on those people so they can't."

Lillihammer had heard this as well, though she tried her level best to keep personal details of this nature outside of her total recall.

Udo made a victorious crowing sound as she rifled through the bookcase. "There we go. Of course, of course he's got this." She sat down on the floor again, apparently unconcerned at the very real possibility of the furniture or the book she was holding exploding into multi-legged death. "I read this one when I was a kid, in the manor library."

"The what?" Delfina was looking at her now. "The manor library? You mean at 91?"

"Yeah. I used to read all the zero-clearance books, the ones you don't need a keycard to get at. Had special dispensation from the Director, even."

Ibanez whistled. "Smart cookie."

Lillihammer narrowed her eyes. She didn't begrudge anyone their compliments, she just preferred it to happen when she herself wasn't right there primed to receive. "And what was little bitty Udo Okorie reading in Ye Merry Olde that's so very useful right now?"

Udo raised the book up so Lillihammer could see: Predatory Psychology by Dr. Koda Anoki. This was ironic, considering what had happened to Anoki in the cafeteria yesterday.

"Okay," said Delfina. She left her post at the peephole to join Lillian in her crouch. "You're gonna figure out where they're going, or how to distract them, by reading a psychology book. That's great and all, but like… they don't have brains? So I'm not sure they have psychology."

"Of course they have brains," Udo scoffed. "Regular ones do, anyway, and from everything we've seen these bastards should be no different. So if I can tap into their brains, and send them a signal they'll…" Her eyes were still scanning the book, and now they lit up even more than they always already were. "Ha! Here we go. They don't normally go after humans, but if they identify us as threats, they'll consistently attempt to bite. To injure, or to eat. That's all I need. If I let them know where there's a human, give them a conscious sense of one—"

"Hoooooold on." Delfina raised one hand. "Are you seriously suggesting—"

Udo was already standing, looking around the room. "Find me something hand sized. Is there clearance between the door and the floor, do you think?"

Lillian squatted down, and looked. "Yeah, there's space. This is a bad idea."

"This is a terrible idea, and I don't even understand how it's going to…" Delfina was clutching her head as though she could somehow massage the anxiety out of her brain. "Your magic works on… particles." She whistled again. "Fuuuuck. No, no, no."

"Yep, yep, yep." Udo had found a small metal ashtray; Bremmel kept them in every space he occupied. He didn't smoke, but he had this funny idea that if someone broke in and started rifling through his stuff, they might be stupid enough to smoke while doing it. He'd watched a lot of noir movies. "And they're the particles of this universe. Everything is made up of them. It all boils down to them. So if I get a good handful, get acclimated, get the feel…"

"You're going to use your dust magic to invade their hive-mind?" Lillihammer found herself laughing, which didn't happen all that often. Laughter was a response to the unexpected. Even in a hell-world like this one, she expected most things she saw. "And you're going to scuttle the particles away from here, and let the hive identify them as human. Lead them away."

"Yup." Udo hefted the tray experimentally. "How do we activate them? Obviously there's a trick."

Delfina and Lillihammer were both about to make a suggestion, when Udo's eyes flashed brilliantly one more time. "Almost forgot," she chuckled. "I don't need to. I'm magic."

And the ashtray melted into a revolting organic puddle, which reformulated into a mass of writhing, segmented limbs, which melted again, which reformulated again, and Udo shrieked in spite of herself and flung the stuff at the door, being careful to keep hold of a tiny globule which she rubbed between her fingers over and over as it tried and failed to make each transformation stick. She sat down in Bremmel's chair, and her eyes rolled back, and the glob flattened itself down to wafer width and slid beneath the door and out into the hall. The chase was on.

Delfina walked to the door, and looked out through the peephole again. For a third and final time, she whistled, and then she looked back at their priceless, unconscious micamancer.

"More like a smart cookie factory," she smiled.

Her consciousness divided though it was, Udo still managed to half-smile back.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

The second test chamber featured a table, a chair, and a double-wide tablet computer with a black screen. Remembering Del's assertiveness in the firing room with a smile, Okorie sat down without being told to do so. Take that, control freak.

"Stand up," Lillian's voice demanded.

Okorie sighed, and stood back up.

"You may be seated."

Okorie glanced at the one-way glass, and considered saluting it one way or another before sitting down again.

"Turn on the tablet, and complete the problem."

Okorie picked it up, and flicked the power switch. The screen was suddenly filled with a colourful series of geometric shapes which she instantly recognized as the floorplan of Site-43.

And then they disappeared. The screen now featured an empty white rectangle. Okorie's fingers found a stylus set into the back of the PDA, and she drew it out experimentally. She tapped the stylus to the screen, and a thin line appeared where she dragged it. She dragged it into the arc of a frowny face's mouth, and when she removed the tip from the screen to start in on the eyes, the drawing space disappeared. The Site outline returned, just for a moment, and then the empty white space returned.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you can fuck right off."

Lillian expected her to draw the entire Site from memory without taking the stylus off the screen.

Is there a memetic effect to help with this? She knew there had to be, else what was the woman even testing? She could hear a faint hum of machinery in the walls… or was that tinnitus? Perhaps she was already under some sort of thaumaturgic memory enhancement spell, something Lillian had learned from Zwist and was now making a practical application of. So she tapped the screen once, then let go, and when the outline returned for the briefest of moments she considered it as carefully as she could and then began to draw from memory.

She got halfway through outlining the wards of Health and Pathology before she realized that she couldn't actually remember a goddamn thing. "What the fuck," she muttered. As she always did when confronted with a problem of this nature, she reached instinctively for her bag of reagents…

And frowned.

That can't be it.

She glanced at the one-way glass, then up at the speaker on the ceiling. She remembered Delfina taking her potshots at the dummy, and the way Lillian hadn't quite been displeased at this outside-the-box thinking. She decided to chance it, in the absence of any instructions.

She took the pouch off her belt, unstrapped it, and dumped it out on the table. She took the grains of red sand between her fingers, began rubbing them together until the sense of them was full and strong inside of her, and then she made them move. They sailed through the room, buffeted on the recycled air, and mixed with the grains of dust in the corners and the air vents, and she realized the air vent system was full of unprocessed dust as well, and then she was off. In a minute she had enough granules in her control to simulate an entire separate human mind, and then another, and then another, and by the time she had every bit of vacuum-begging detritus in Mem and Countermem in her control she had enough storage space to keep that colourful image permanently in view of her multi-mind's eye.

So she tapped the screen again, did precisely that, then sketched out the entire thing from extended memory.

The moment she finished the final line around Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D, the door to the observation room swung open. "Next," Lillian droned noncommittally.

Okorie's momentary rush of self-satisfaction disappeared in that airless response, and it was all she could do with her lack of concentration to pull the remainder of her red sand back into its pouch. Delfina strolled in, looking not very much more certain than Okorie, and shrugged. "Like a god-damn sphinx," she said. "No clue what she's up to."

"Oh, well." Okorie cinched the pouch tight again. "We'll know when she wants us to know."

"You might know before." Delfina punched her in the shoulder, hard, and bit her lip. "Mrs. big sand brain over here."

The next chamber door slid aside, and they dutifully traded places.

2002

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

The main cafeteria was, improbably, Lillihammer might even have ventured impossibly, full. It was a vast, high-ceilinged space seating nearly two hundred people, and it was, indeed, seating nearly two hundred people right now. Something about the confluence of two birthdays, an abortive containment breach, a holiday weekend and a heaping helping of unpredictable individual factors meant that not only could she not select a secluded spot as per usual, but had in fact to take one specific seat among many: one of two chairs facing an aisle table, directly across from Stacey Laiken, the chipmunk occultist she'd identified in the auditorium. Laiken was reputed to be shy, and Lillihammer decided to weaponize that. She sat down with her tray of burger, fries and shake, made aggressive eye contact — the other woman giving off the affect of a blue-eyed doe just seconds before becoming roadkill — and then proceeded to pretend the other woman did not exist. She nibbled on her own burger in a way which did not dispel the cervine comparison.

"Is that an aura reading?"

Words to this effect usually suggested the presence of someone entirely unbearable in close proximity, so Lillihammer glanced at the long table across the aisle where another couple of occultists were seated. One was the squirrel, the other the intense and orange-eyed possible idiot. Lillihammer hadn't spared a thought for either of them since the project briefing.

The squirrel blushed, for some reason, and turned the colourful graph she was examining around so her friend could see it. "You think I can print out my aura readings? No, this is a magnetics plot."

Data points fell into place in Lillihammer's mind as she mulched her meat. First: the squirrel, being an occultist, probably had some special ability to perceive auras around people or places or something. The kind of incredibly stupid shit she was always infuriated to find actually existed in the real world. Second: the squirrel was somehow involved in something actually scientific, which increased the odds that her magical stupidity wasn't bogus magical stupidity. Third: the woman with the orange eyes was friends with someone who possibly had a brain, and might actually not be an idiot after all.

"Magnetics?" Orange-eyes picked up the sheet and scanned it cursorily.

"Geomagnetics, specifically," the squirrel explained. "I've been conducting soundings in the park." Ipperwash Provincial Park, one kilometre above, was the functional high ceiling of Site-43. "Seeing what I can see."

"And what can you see?" Orange-eyes clearly didn't know how to read a magnetic survey, but it did look like her interest was piqued. She looked in Lillihammer's direction for a moment, then did a double take and looked for longer when she realized she was being blatantly stared at. Lillihammer pushed more burger into her mouth, and chewed it at her theatrically.

"It's not easy to penetrate deep, not with the equipment I've got access to for recreational use, but there's a lot more metal down there than there ought to be. We're talking tons. Those responses," and she tapped the sheet in orange-eyes' hands, "are what you'd expect to get if somebody had buried a battleship under the turf."

"Sure," orange-eyes nodded slowly, "but isn't that just… the Site?"

"No." The squirrel shook her head excitedly. "No, that's just it. The Site shouldn't be returning magnetic results at all! It's magnetically cloaked, in case some rogue geophysicist goes tromping through the forest and finds out we're down here. Whatever this is, it's not us." She passed another sheet over. "And check out this resistivity!"

The orange eyes blinked. "Resistivity?"

The squirrel's brown eyes rolled. "Yeah, sorry. Uh, electrical resistivity. You shoot a current into the ground, and see what resistance you get. Specific conductance down there? Off the chart." She handed over yet another sheet, and yet one more. "Check out the ultrasonics! And the seismics! There's definitely something big and wacky sharing these caves with us. I can't wait to find out what it is." She shivered in obvious anticipation. "Gives me a little thrill."

Orange-eyes had a strange look on her face now. "I didn't know you were into… whatever this is."

Delfina Ibanez stumped into view, passing through the throng to stop at the occultists' table. "Hey. You Rozálie Astrauskas?"

The squirrel nodded. "Yes, sir. What's wrong?"

"Come with me." Ibanez jerked a thumb towards the door. "Briefing, then amnestics. You tell this one?" She pointed at orange-eyes.

"I… tell her what?" Astrauskas looked baffled.

"This." Ibanez tapped the sheets. "Shouldn't have happened. Not your fault, but you're not cleared to know it. Neither of you are." She collected the reports, folded them up and wadded them into her back pants pocket. "Didn't know we had any amateur seismologists here. Maybe I'll pick your brain on the subject, after we've wiped it."

Astrauskas swallowed. "How much wiping we talking?"

"Just enough." Ibanez gestured. "Come on. We'll do you first, then your friend here."

Astrauskas looked mortified. "Sorry, Udo. I didn't know."

"Hey." Udo smiled. "Nothing to be sorry for. It's neat that you know this stuff."

"Yeah?" Astrauskas smiled back, even as Ibanez put one hand on her shoulder and began steering her away. "You think so?"

"I really think so." Udo rested one elbow on the table and her chin on her palm, and watched them leave with a curious look on her face. "Huh," she said to nobody in particular.

"Do you always stare at strangers when you eat?" Lillihammer turned to face Laiken; the effort of asking this question had very obviously almost killed the other woman.

Lillihammer finished the burger, the fries, and the shake without taking her eyes off the flustered occultist the entire time.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

When Ibanez walked into the next chamber, she was greeted with a sudden flash of light. She didn't blink. Even so, she couldn't quite make out where the flash had come from. That probably wasn't good.

There was a blue stripe painted on the floor, bisecting it from the door to the observation hall to the opposite wall. There was a pair of cinderblocks on either side of the stripe, in the centre of the room. There was a tremendous pile of…

"Holy shit." There was a tremendous pile of what looked like Erector Set pieces, metal toys she'd once played with as a child, brought in to her home village on one of the monthly smuggler runs. Those had been plain grey metal; these were very colourful. The first one she picked up also felt strange in her hand, as though there were something wrong with the material. It was painted green.

There was a chart on the wall, beside the one-way glass. It read:

Red: Tin

Orange: Lead

Yellow: Antimony

Green: Aluminium

Blue: Beryllium

Violet: Tungsten

Something else that had been smuggled into her village was a copy of the collected works of Lewis Carroll. Carroll had once stated that when a mind is torn between two different words, the mouth will form a combined variation leaning towards the one which suits one's state of mind best. She'd considered this little more than his excuse to make up nonsense words like 'frumious'. She learned otherwise when her mind thought both Lead?! and Tungsten?!? at the same time, and her mouth produced "Lungsten?!?" out loud.

If she'd taken a second longer, she would have probably said 'Lindigonsten' as the omission of the much-maligned sixth spectrum colour occurred to her.

She definitely wasn't going to touch the orange pieces. She intended to eat lunch sometime in the near future. She'd select the tungsten pieces, of course, because of course she had to select pieces, because of course the test was to build a bridge across the blue line which would support her weight. She didn't need to be told this, she of all people, and so Lillian wasn't going to bother telling her. She'd probably take it as an insult if it happened.

In any case, the tungsten pieces would be extremely strong. She wasn't sure where you would even get a tungsten Erector Set — but, then, of course all these pieces had been manufactured specifically for the test. The other six colours were among the weakest metals on Earth; the pieces would probably snap the moment she stepped on them. This was almost too easy.

Almost too easy…

She glared at the chart. She remembered the light. She remembered that one of Lillian's earliest, most favourite memetic tricks was to change how people perceived specific colours. She glanced down at the pile of pieces, and sighed. She was definitely going to have to wash her hands now.

She wondered how Lillian had managed to make it so that she only saw the colours of the pieces wrong. Perhaps she'd worked a little thaumaturgy into the mix. A thought suddenly struck her, and she wondered if it might be possible to avoid touching the lead pieces after all. Maybe her too-clever friend had added a genius bonus to the test.

Ibanez selected an orange, putatively lead piece, and tried to bend it in her hand. It wouldn't bend. It was heavy, very heavy. It was tungsten.

She sat down, like a small child — she had once been a very small child — and began to build. The time slipped by, and she got more than a little carried away. The bridge she built could have crossed a real river, and she trotted across it in absolute and accurate certainty that it would hold.

"You know the drill," Lillian drawled, and the doors popped open simultaneously this time. Udo walked out, looking…

What is that look?

Udo pointed at the bridge. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

"Got a Foundation M.Sc. in engineering, you know." She shrugged. "Went with a truss girder type; fast to build, strong and efficient. Might've sprung for cantilever if I had a real river to cross, but, uh, well." She suddenly felt very vulnerable. "Didn't want to waste all day on it."

"In what world would this be a waste?" Udo knelt down to examine the bridge. "Man, that's cool. You should ask if you can keep it." She seemed entranced by the ridiculous little orange thing.

"I'll wrap it up, give it to you for Christmas." Ibanez wasn't feeling any less silly about the situation as the seconds ticked by. She gestured at the doors. "Shall we?"

Udo nodded, but she still reached out to press down on the bridge a few times, testing its flexibility, before standing up and heading for her own next test.

2004

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"How many you figure are out there?"

"I don't fucking know. All of them?" Lillihammer pressed her back against the wall. "I'm not sticking my head out again."

"They've got shit aim." Delfina stuck her arm through the doorframe they were both flanking — the door was on the floor, broken cleanly in half in the least-likely direction, against the grain — and snapped off a few random shots. "I'll bet they couldn't hit you if you walked right up to them."

"If that was your bid to make a distraction out of me—" Lillihammer was cut off as the edge of the doorframe beside her face erupted in a hail of splinters and metal flakes. "Fuck! How long until your people get here?"

Delfina shook her head. She was smiling; it was a very contented smile, even a little indecent. "Could be hours. Could be days. We don't know what kind of bullshit they're up against. Could be you and I against the world right now."

Lillihammer grimaced. "I am a high-value asset," she stated in a clear and direct voice. "I have vital intelligence about the enemy. My safety is your main priority right now."

Delfina laughed, and squeezed off another shot without looking. They heard what sounded like a cry of pain from the other end of the hallway, and the security chief pumped her free fist in celebration. "I hate to tell you this, Lil, but my safety is my main priority. If I've learned anything over the past few months, it's that I'm the only one who can shoot straight, and there's a lot of shooting left to be done."

Lillihammer looked down, way down at her friend. Delfina was bobbing up and down in place, as though preparing to set off at a gallop. She was flexing the fingers of her free hand. She was flushed. "Are you enjoying this?!"

"You kidding right now?" The other woman actually chanced a look down the hall before taking the next few potshots. The return fire missed them by a mile; Lillihammer was glad of the porcelain tiles on the walls, and their relative thickness. Their opponents would be far more likely to hit a water line or an electrical conduit than to get a lucky path straight through into one of their fleshy backs. "I've got shit cover, no way out, bad guys galore with no moral worth whatsoever and enough ammo to light up a platoon." She reloaded her weapon as she said this. "I couldn't enjoy it more without—"

This time the opposite side of the doorframe burst into fragments, and Delfina's hops started lifting her off the ground entirely. "Alright. Alright. Do you have a memetic solution to this?"

Lillihammer considered. "Well, they might still think I'm one of them, so that's something."

"Uh huh, uh huh, go on." Delfina's voice was sing-song and breathy.

Lillihammer glared at her. "I've got a kill agent in my back pocket. I guess I could walk out and say 'Hey, you guys wanna see a neat trick?'"

Delfina laughed so hard, she doubled over. She snapped back upright at obvious risk to the integrity of her spine, and said "I bet I could ping them all before you had it out of your pants."

Lillihammer raised both eyebrows. Her eyebrows were pointed already, so she knew the expression would have its desired effect. "You're not seriously going to walk into live fire."

"No," Delfina nodded. She pointed at Lillihammer's own firearm, still tucked away in its holster. "I am not going seriously."

And without warning, she rounded the corner and began to shoot.

Lillihammer fumbled with her own weapon as small explosions and large collateral damage filtered into the tiny janitor's closet from outside. By the time she had cleared the doorway herself, Delfina was halfway down the hall. She was moving faster than Lillihammer had ever seen anyone move, and she wasn't moving predictably. As she watched, while simultaneously trying to draw a bead on the cluster of flabbergasted figures at the end of the hall, she saw the chief of security running up a ramp of broken ceiling tiles and office desks to kick a man square in the face with her combat boots. She jumped off the end of the desk and stomped him in the head again on the way down, firing her weapon straight through the top of his skull for good measure, then ducked behind a burst water pipe as the incendiary response from his fellows arrived. She then squinted through the spray, raised her gun and squeezed off three more shots; as Lillihammer's first shot missed, all three of her partner's connected. Delfina jogged back into the hall, bending the water pipe forward as she went so that the spray preceded her, and emptied the rest of her clip into the remaining figures. The last one hit the floor before Lillihammer could get off a second shot.

Delfina turned to face her as she approached; she was covered in water and blood, her short black hair was plastered to her face, and she was clearly out of breath. She held her gun to her chest, and resumed hopping up and down. Lillihammer's legs felt weak. She thought she might collapse as she watched the other woman reload her weapon—

She saw a blur as she reached the scene of the carnage, she raised her weapon, and with impossible speed Delfina wheeled, visibly judged the situation, and headshot the woman who'd unwisely been attempting to sneak up on her before Lillihammer had her own sights in place.

And then she straightened, maroon eyes alight, face flushed, and sank her teeth hard into the memeticist's forearm.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

The next chamber was filled with sand. Red sand. Okorie recognized it faster than immediately; she'd been able to feel its presence since the beginning of the tests, in fact, though it wasn't until she was actually in the room that she knew it for what it was. She had an affinity for all granular material, but the sand used by SCP-5281-D to put the children of Québec to sleep had a special importance to her. She'd never known why — she was in fact considering it one potential angle of research for her project with ETTRA — but she'd taken to the stuff like she'd known it all her life. She could do anything with that sand, and here was a literal sandbox for her to play in.

The door to the observation hall opened, and Del walked out. She looked confused. The door closed behind her, and Lillian's cheerful voice piped in: "You'll recall that I lied about these being individual tests, earlier. Okay, you'll recall that I said it. You didn't know it was a lie, because you're gullible. Or maybe I bewitched you into believing me! I'll let you decide."

Okorie and Del rolled their eyes at each other.

"There's a compressed air rifle in this room somewhere. We're talking a rifle that shoots compressed air, you understand. Like an air bazooka. Bremmel demoed it for me last month, and it's an absolute blast, if you'll forgive me. And I think you will, when you give it a go."

Okorie could see where this was headed. "We were right," she said. "She's recruiting us."

Del nodded. "Only explanation that makes sense."

"Stop conversing with the enemy." Lillian's cheer was unflagging. "And start shooting. Udo, I understand one of the first things you learned to do with this stuff was form humanoid figures. Is that right?"

Okorie nodded. She tried not to blush.

"Well, you'd better start forming them now. Here's the rules of engagement: if short stuff blows apart fifty of your constructs, or you get that jumpsuit off her back—"

"Come on," Del snapped.

Lillian laughed. "Alright. If she gets one close enough to kiss you on the lips—"

"I will come in there," Okorie threatened. "You've given me more than enough sand to do the job." She paused, then looked to where she felt certain Lillian was standing on the other side of the gleaming mirror. "And also glass is made of sand."

"Fair point." Okorie wasn't sure she'd ever heard the memeticist sound so pleased with herself, which was truly saying something. "Alright, final offer: if you can take the gun away from her, you win. That suitably Platonic for you?"

Okorie sighed. "Whatever. Let's get this over with." She glanced down at the floor; she knelt, picked up a few grains, and ran them between her fingers until they caught beneath the nails; she waved, once, and the gun was revealed on the tiles. It looked like some kind of kid's airsoft toy, huge, painted black.

"Ready," Lillian said.

Del picked up the gun.

"Set."

Okorie felt a strange mood creeping over her when she saw the look on her friend's face.

"Go!"

And she threw up a hasty figure between them, buying time to construct something more nuanced, lending just enough of her perception to the grains that she could command them to lunge forward. BOOMF. It exploded all around her, and the feeling of the air blasting through the chest that wasn't hers but kind of was was unexpectedly exhilarating. With a moment to focus, she called up three more figures and surrounded the MTF chief in a triangular pincer. Del rolled, taking out two of them with one shot; Okorie wondered how much air could be in a rifle like that. Probably enough to take fifty shots. Lillian would know that Del never missed.

As the third figure fell on its target, grasping for the gun and catching various inappropriate handholds instead, Okorie caught her friend's eyes and realized she was being watched. The other woman was guessing what would happen, and when, by watching the mind behind the masses. Okorie grinned, threw up a wall of sand between them, and reached out with stronger perceptual ties to the next three figures she manifested. She could see through the clouds of dust filling the chamber, could see Del rolling and jogging and leaping into position, getting the drop on each doppelganger as their master brought them into existence even without the benefit of foreknowledge. Damn, but she was good. Okorie set the sand-wall to rising and lowering, getting a few good glances with her actual eyes at the tactical situation, then decided to call up a small platoon of rougher types instead of the articulated warriors the other woman was effortlessly BOOMFing back into formlessness. Twenty of them fairly filled the room — Okorie felt like she was the room — and still Del ducked and wove and kicked their legs out from under them and elbowed them in their blank faces and lined them up in rows, the better to send them all to coarse oblivion. Okorie began jogging the circumference of the chamber, trying to get a better vantage point, simultaneously observing the scene from every corner via the extended consciousness of a billion grains of French pixie dust. She was already out of breath, but she didn't care. Del was covered in sand, sticking to her sweaty face and hands, she was breathing deep, but her grip on the gun was like an iron clamp. One after the other, BOOMF BOOMF BOOMF, the makeshift soldiers fell.

"Ten left, by my count," Lillian cooed. "Might need to go to the tapes, though. Getting pretty busy in there."

The diminutive warrior had never looked so alive, Okorie thought. She was in her element; she's in my element. She felt a sudden rush of affection for her friend, and in that moment contrived a way to distract the gun right out of her hands…

…and instead, in a rush of panic at the very thought, sent the final ten figures crashing over Del like a wave-turned dune, poured all of her self into controlling that mass of grasping bodies, and felt a visceral, palpable excitement as the other woman exploded out from inside of her.

The last violent burst of sand rained down from the ceiling, falling between them like a diaphanous curtain of sparkling blood.

Ibanez took one step forward, and Okorie did too, and—

"Victory," Lillian called out. "And the winner wins… another test!" The door to the next chamber slid open — roughly, Okorie noticed, its workings thoroughly gummed up with sweat-stained sand. "I've got the air conditioning cranked in there, if that helps."

Wiping her brow and spitting sand, Del ran through an incomprehensible series of facial expressions before offering Okorie a shuddering nod and stalking towards the door. She kept the gun.

2012

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Few places at Site-43 had only one entrance, or only one exit, but most of the extra apertures were some variety of classified. Applied Occultism, for example, was primarily linked to the rest of the Site by what was otherwise the topside elevator. This was why, on her way back down from a productive night of egging William Wettle's house — it was October 19, and she had it in her head to give him Twelve Days of Halloween this year — Lillihammer caught Stacey Laiken kissing Udo Okorie's cheek.

Lillihammer walked out of the elevator, beaming good-naturedly at both of them, not a hint of guile or malice on her face. Laiken scurried past her, nodding sheepishly, turning incandescent red. Udo already looked resigned to what she undoubtedly knew was coming next. She didn't even bother walking away, she simply waited.

The moment the doors closed behind her, no doubt whisking the Chief of Applied Occultism away to an early morning's work, Lillihammer purred: "When's the wedding?"

"Fuck off." Udo did begin to walk now; knowing the Site's floorplan and her friend's itinerary as she couldn't help but do, Lillihammer knew she was walking nowhere in particular.

She fell in easy step beside the thaumaturge. "Are you seriously dating Stacey 'Stacey Laiken' Laiken? Wait, wait, have you given her 'the talk' yet? Does she know about sex?"

"She's in her forties," Udo snapped. "She knows about sex." A smile crept in under the mock outrage. "But man, you just set us back weeks. She's been working up so hard to that public cheek-pecking. I was so proud."

Lillihammer guffawed. "What can you possibly see in her? Are you some kind of… dorkosexual?"

Udo raised an eyebrow. "Have you been drinking?"

"I've been outside in Canada in October in the early morning, of course I've been fucking drinking. But don't avoid the question."

Udo shrugged. "I dunno. Stacey's nice."

"Nice!" Lillihammer spun in place, arms outstretched. Two passing security guards ducked under each arm. "Stacey's nice. Udo Okorie can control sand with her brain, so she's got that going for her, but Stacey Laiken is nice."

Udo didn't turn red easily, but she was making an effort now. "I dunno. There's something about her I like."

"Is it the fact that she bleaches her hair so bad it looks like she's going as the concept of piss for Halloween? Is it that fact that her cheeks ow," and Lillihammer massaged her side where Udo had punched her. "Seriously though, what could possibly be intriguing about the single most boring wizard in…"

Lillihammer stopped walking.

"Yeah!" Udo stopped walking, too, turned and pointed up at her friend's chin. "Exactly! Exactly."

"What the fuck." Lillihammer shook her head. "How have I never considered that?"

What kind of thaumaturge is Stacey Laiken?

She was shocked that the thought had never occurred to her before. The Chief of Applied Occultism was required to have some variety of occult talent, of course. It had taken years, years after his death in fact, but they'd eventually learned what Dougall Deering's was. But Laiken? The idea that she could have some ingrown power, some secret capability which entitled her to rule over an entire coven of thaumic practitioners…

"And that's not all." Udo strode away again, and Lillihammer easily caught back up. "You ever hear of Outpost-47?"

"Of course I've heard of Outpost-47." As always, she felt no need to prove that statement, and Udo didn't question it. Outpost-47 was a monitoring station in Kelowna, British Columbia, which had been entirely swallowed up by a beach back in 1997. "What's the relevance?"

"You ever hear that somebody made it out?"

This time Lillihammer seized Udo's shoulders, stopping her from moving forward. "You're shitting me. You are straight up shitting me at seven in the morning while everyone else is too asleep to shit."

Udo scoffed. "God, you're such a poet when you're drunk. But no, seriously. It was her. She survived the Kelowna Gulp. And, that trip we took to Site-01? I found her last name on the monument."

"What monument?"

"The monument."

Lillihammer felt the world grow fuzzier as her eyes widened so much that it hurt. "Not the Red Right Hand monument."

"Yeah."

"On what side?"

Udo leaned in, and up. "Both sides."

"The fuck you say!" Lillihammer walked away, stalked away, then stalked back with one finger upraised. "You are not telling me that Stacey Spacey Chipmunk-Facey Laiken is related to Chaos Insurgents and outsurgents. I am not buying this bill of goods, Doctorow, Cory." She had been saying Udo's name this way at random intervals since attending an Open University lecture.

"Well, now you know." Udo gave up on the somewhere-to-be charade and leaned on the nearest tile wall. "Woman's got layers."

"The only layers that woman should have are woolly sweaters." Lillihammer shook her head. "How'd you find all that out? You ask her?"

The red in Udo's cheeks was now very festive. "Well. You know."

"You're spying on your girlfriend!" Lillihammer crowed. "Way to lean into the evil mad scientist angle."

"I'm not evil," Udo grumbled. She pushed off the wall, and started back the way they'd come at a considerably faster clip.

"Hey!" Lillihammer called after her. "Don't go away mad! Scientist!"

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Lillihammer was waiting in the next chamber, sitting at yet another plain steel table. There was a chair across from her; this time the memeticist gestured, and said the words. "Please, sit down."

Having forgotten to wish death on her should that occur this time, Ibanez merely complied. She set the gun down between them, and relished the cool air as it passed through her soaked and filthy jumpsuit. "What you got for me now?"

"Interrogation." Lillian bared her long white teeth in a hungry smile. "I'm going to try to break you."

"Oh, fuck off." Ibanez felt instantly antsy. She wanted to do something. She wanted to keep moving. "That's boring."

"Boring?" Lillian played with the zipper on her jacket, which Ibanez had to admit she didn't find boring at all. "What's boring about it?"

"You know." Ibanez looked away, at the one-way glass, wondering if Udo had caught her ogling. Maybe Udo was ogling too; that was almost certainly the point. "Normal interrogations won't work on me at all, because I'm trained. Memetic interrogations probably will work on me, because you're trained. Foregone conclusion."

"Nah." Lillian shook out her hair. It looked very soft. "This will be a straight-up battle of wits. Ideas versus ideas. The beating heart of memesis. We can be memesis nemeses!"

Ibanez grinned. "That was a very attractive display of tongue-twistery."

"You'd already be attracted if you knew how I can twist my… hey, you know what? I've been told to keep this rated G, so let's move on." Lillian's perfect blush hadn't changed one shade. "Here's the deal. I will ask the questions, and you will give me the answers — or not! You can tell me what you think I want to know, or you can try not to tell me anything. You can even bullshit me, if you dare. That's the game."

Ibanez drummed the table, and squirmed in her seat. The sooner this was over, the better. She had to work off all this adrenaline, but fast. "Shit game. I'm not gonna tell you anything. But go ahead."

"Alright!" Lillian leaned back, hands behind her neck, and said: "Why haven't you told anyone you saw the Bad Light?"

Ibanez straightened in her chair. "Where the hell did you hear that?"

Lillian didn't miss a beat. "What does 'El Barco Fantasma' mean?"

Ibanez was speechless.

"Well?"

Ibanez spoke. "It means 'the ghost ship'."

Lillian nodded. "Why do smugglers from the nexus of Puerto Extrano use that name for the village you came from?"

Ibanez did not speak.

"What was the real reason Vivian Scout hired you back in '94? Not the one he put in his report, and not the one you put in yours."

Ibanez caught, and held, the memeticist's sky blue gaze. Still she did not speak.

"How did you pass your M.Sc. test without even having a bachelor's degree?" This time she didn't even pause to wait for an answer. "How long have you known that your father is alive?"

"Where did you get any of this?" Ibanez wanted to stand up. She wanted to walk away. She wanted to reach through the layers of irony and feline satisfaction and extract a series of honest statements from her impossibly well-informed friend.

"Ding!" Lillian pretended to ring a bell on the table. "You broke the deal. I ask the questions, remember?" She clicked her tongue. "And here I thought you might make it through this battery with a perfect score. Your BFF might be about to clinch it."

She stood up, walked to the door to the observation hall, and kicked it with one sneaker. It obligingly slid open; Udo was apparently not waiting to come in, which meant she was standing at the one-way glass. Watching. Listening.

Lillian waved goodbye as Udo finally emerged, looking…

Ibanez wasn't sure what that look was. Unlike Lillian, she hadn't seen it before.

She decided to blow the entire thing off. She greeted her friend with a finger-gun, and mimed taking off her own head with the other. She felt this appropriately conveyed a sense of jovial distaste for the proceedings they were engaged in. Light. Playful. Not at all rattled.

Udo gave her a sympathetic smile in return, and Ibanez understood that whatever this game was, she was definitely about to lose it.

2021

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"No matches," Okorie grunted.

"Well, you know the rules!" Delfina was positively giddy by this point. She'd had almost no reaction to Okorie's shoes; she'd offered up a strange remark about 'little piggies' at the loss of both socks — and insisted that they only counted for one item of clothing, together, a sentiment supported by the other five players — and she'd taken unseemly pleasure in how long it took for Okorie to shimmy out of her blue jeans. But the removal of her shirt, now, that was cheering the other woman immensely.

Okorie folded the shirt up carefully and placed it under her chair. Behind her, Nhung Ngo was putting her underwear back on in rueful disgrace after sitting at the table for an undoubtedly excruciating five minutes after losing the game. In front of her, sitting on the floor with her back to the table, cards clasped tightly to her chest, a fully-dressed Ilse Reynders was softly humming "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" by The Ink Spots. Across from her…

She told herself it was an irritating sight. Lillian Lillihammer was, by all fair accounts, no more dressed than was Ngo. The fact that she'd shown up wearing a pair of cat ears had thrown everyone off their game, such that they hadn't even noticed when the woman discarded her socks along with her shoes. She'd pointed it out when, to all appearances, she'd been drummed out; she claimed that this gambit, in combination with the presence of the cat ears, meant she was still a contender. They'd had to admit it was an excellent psychological angle to play — it had even fooled the Site's psychologist, fooled her right into failure in point of fact — and it was hard to argue with the woman when she was perched naked on a stool, legs and arms positioned artfully for maximum obscurance, playing with all the confidence of someone in a three-piece parka and not surmounted by a pair of fuzzy grey ears.

Okorie also didn't mind because it had given her an idea.

Del was already down to just her underwear, but it was proving a remarkably resilient pair of items. Okorie wasn't much good at Uno; she was certainly better than Karen Elstrom, who had already collected her clothing and dignity and departed for the evening, and she was better than Ngo — though she suspected the latter of throwing the game, the better to observe the others. But Lillian and Ilse were absolute terrors at this, as they were at any act susceptible to sudden acts of mental brilliance, and that presented an opening.

So when her turn came around, and she lost her shirt, she first set her cards on the seat beneath her. As she pulled the garment up over her hair, she carefully, carefully, oh-so-carefully manipulated the little pile of dust she'd gathered on the floor while discarding her earlier items, creeping it up the side of the chair, lifting the entire hand and passing it under the table. Ilse would probably make better use of the assist; for a woman who'd been born eight decades before the game was invented, she'd taken to it with ferocity, as she had to virtually any social pursuit introduced to her after a doublelifelong imprisonment in an old incinerator room. But then, Ilse probably wouldn't cheat.

She took her time with the shirt, wondering if Del's rapt attention was yet another psychological ploy to keep her off balance, and felt one card slip out of her granular clutches… and then the weight returned, and she knew an exchange had been made. She shifted uncomfortably in the chair, an easy enough act when she was already half-disrobed, then reached down to pick the cards back up as they drifted home.

Lillian fanned herself with her cards, and graced Okorie with a smile which was several distinct sorts of thrilling.

She promised herself she was going to see Delfina Ibanez reduced to the status of Ngo and Elstrom before losing another item of clothing herself.

As payback for the unseemly stares, of course. The woman had it coming.

None of them, save for Ilse, had ever been caught so thoroughly unprepared for a breach alarm.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Lillian instructed them to enter the next chamber together. There they found a pair of tables, parallel to each other and the observation window, with flatscreen computer terminals sitting on them. There were, once again, chairs. They sat down, once again, without being asked.

"Ugh," said Okorie. "This is just lazy now."

"Mental endurance test, or something?" Del sighed.

On Okorie's screen, and apparently on Del's as well, there was a maze. There were no dead ends in the maze; it was really a grid, ten squares high and… twenty squares wide, with an obvious entrance and an obvious exit. Okorie tapped the screen, and found it to be a touch screen when the entrance line lit up. She dragged her finger straight across the maze, to the exit; she could see Del doing the same, and smiled. As soon as the white line hit the opposite end of the puzzle, it disappeared.

"Nope," said Lillian over the speaker. "And nope."

"You know what? I'm getting tired of this." Okorie straightened in her seat. "I'm not at all sure she isn't just fucking with us."

"Maybe this is her idea of foreplay," Del suggested. She was bopping up and down in her seat, and brushing at her shiny, damp hair as though her hands were unruly soldiers which couldn't be trusted to sit still without a task. "You know how she is. Isn't she single right now?"

Okorie considered. "She's been on more of a guy kick the last little while, right?"

Del shrugged. "Doesn't mean anything. You and I have seen plenty of dudes."

It felt bizarre to be discussing this, so Okorie looked back down at the puzzle. "I don't… why is this anything? There can't be a memetic effect to this. It's just trial and error, unless I'm missing something."

Del suddenly stood up. "I'm too wired to sit down," she said. She didn't explain what she meant, and still flushed from the combat test — and perhaps the interrogation — she didn't have to. "Maybe that's the point? Maybe she's testing our ability to switch modes…"

She froze.

"What?"

Del pointed at the back of Okorie's monitor. "Hey. Can you see anything on the back of my screen?"

Okorie craned her neck… and saw what Del must have seen. The back of the monitor on the other table featured a black electrical grid, and winding across it in a roundabout pattern was a single black wire. Undoubtedly, the path to the exit. She laughed. "Oh, fuck. You thinking what I'm thinking?"

Del sat back down. "For sure. Fuck all of this. How can we send the pattern without her knowing?"

Okorie smiled. One of the reasons she'd had to apply for SCP classification was the unusual, illogical way she'd discovered her thaumaturgy worked while trekking across Corbenic. Her Talent was the manipulation of granules, and that was still the kind of magic she did best, but she could also produce thaumaturgical effects she'd been trained in without the use of any reagents at all. Without even expending the unnatural force within all registered mages. Without an apparent cost. This was one of the reasons it was very, very important that her origins be discovered. If there were more people like her out there, they would be dangerous.

Because they could do things like this.

Hand under the table, Okorie began to trace the full grid with one finger, in front of Del's legs so that Lillian couldn't see. Then she traced the proper path in thicker, glancing at the back of Del's monitor a few times to make sure she had it right. She could have next sent the schema floating gently into the other woman's lap, but in a fit of something she couldn't quite justify she instead lifted it back out from under the table and set it to floating in front of her chest instead. Lillian wouldn't be able to see it with the monitors in the way.

"Hey," she said. "Stand up again, and check it out."

Del obliged, and smirked when she saw where the presentation was. She spent a moment examining it… and her face looked very much as it had during that ill-fated Uno game last year. Okorie became painfully aware that her shirt was plastered to her skin from the earlier exertion as the other woman finished her examination, then quickly and efficiently traced the path on her screen without sitting back down.

"That's one," Lillian told them.

Okorie let the schema drop back down, and sent it tumbling beneath the table to sit in Del's lap… then shook her head, and floated it up between the woman and her screen. Del smirked, scanned the back of Okorie's monitor, then tentatively reached down to pinch the thicker line of thaumic coruscent. Okorie felt a faint thrill as the feedback reached her system and the line she'd traced for Del was bent into the shape of her own puzzle's solution. When the work was finished, Del gingerly lifted the frame up and pressed it against her own chest, smirk widening.

Okorie took her sweet time. She pressed one finger to the entrance, and slowly, very slowly traced the path without taking her eyes off her friend's chest until the exit was reached.

"And that's two." If Lillian suspected foul play, it didn't make it into her tone. The next door slid open.

Okorie allowed the schema to disperse, releasing her focus on it. Belatedly, she looked up to meet Del's very wide eyes, and felt her cheeks begin to burn.

2009

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"NO!"

"GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON WHY NOT!"

"I COULD GIVE YOU THIRTY GOD-DAMN THOUSAND!"

As a rule, Lillihammer was repelled by the sound of conversation unless she caught a snatch of something interesting to her. Most people weren't interesting, and most conversations were pointless. She gravitated towards shouting, however; the only kind of conversation she almost always enjoyed was a no-holds-barred blowout.

So instead of continuing along her road to Identity and Technocryptography, where she expected to engage in a long and dull discussion of coding violations in her self-customized office security routines, she swerved into Theology and Teleology.

Most of the theologians were away at Reliquary Area-27 for a conference; Lillihammer had enjoyed the drastic reduction in magical thinking around her office, since the actual magicians all worked upstairs. One of the screaming figures was Brenda Corbin, who'd been left behind to mind the store. She was standing on the platform in the centre of T&T's pentagrammatic open-air workspace in a vain attempt to get a few extra inches on her opponent. Corbin was thin, not very tall, very round-faced and round-eyed, with a dusty red pixie cut and big black browline glasses. She was physically unimposing, even elfin, when she wasn't getting worked up.

She was worked up now, however.

"THAT'S JUST A MYTH!" she spat. She picked the nameplate off her boss's desk, and for a moment it looked like she might chuck it at Delfina Ibanez. Lillihammer would have loved to see that, not least because Delfina was standing on top of a desk in order to meet Corbin's eyeline.

"It's all just myths! You can't pick and choose just to get your damn way!" There was nothing she could grab from where she was standing, save for her service weapon, and she looked like she might be seriously entertaining the idea.

Corbin made a loud, strangled cry of frustration. "You're so pigheaded! You have no sense of discovery! Do you realize how much use we could get out of another protector deity in the lake? One we can actually talk to?"

"You can talk to the lake serpent! Go try, right now! I'll give you fifty bucks if it eats you." Delfina kicked the blotter off the desk. "And what's this bullshit about protector deity? I read your damn report. This fucker stalked some chick, then found out she was married and threw a hissy fit big enough to create an archipelago. And you want to wake him up?"

"We don't even know if he's in there!"

"In where?" Lillihammer walked up to the base of the platform. The other two women were high above her, but their elevation only seemed to underline how much shorter they were than her. "Where's this god you want to meet?"

"Giant's Tomb Island." Corbin was still seething. "He went to sleep after making the islands, and the trees grew over him. His name is Kitchikewana."

"His name is mud," Delfina snapped. "And I'm not letting you dig him up."

"IT'S NOT UP TO YOU!" Corbin rapped the nameplate on the desk for emphasis. "And who said anything about digging? I just want an escort to do some geophysics, see what's down there. Pass it on to the Director already, for fuck's sake!"

"No!" Delfina was hopping up and down on the desk now. "I'm not wasting his time with this bullshit. You're not on the practical end of this, Brenda. That's Tactical Theology's bag. You're strictly theory."

"So let me PROVE my theory!"

"Let ME keep YOU from getting YOUR dumb ass squashed!"

"STOP INTERFERING!"

"STOP UNDERMINING ME!"

Corbin screamed inarticulately, and hopped down off the platform. She pointed up at Ibanez, arm straight; the finger made it to the level of the other woman's belly button. "SOMEONE NEEDS TO CUT YOU DOWN TO SIZE!"

Delfina jumped off the desk, bumping into Corbin in several particularly awkward ways. "IT'S NOT GONNA BE YOU! GO BOTHER A GOD, BRENDA!"

"I CAN'T! SOME BRAZEN BITCH WON'T LET ME!"

Delfina pushed Corbin into the platform wall, and growled: "I've had it up to here with your backtalk, doctor. I'm the chief of security. I'm not gonna stand for this questioning of my authority in public." She slammed one hand into the wall, on either side of Corbin's face, and leaned in close. "My word is law."

Corbin reached up and shoved the arms out of her way. She brushed past Lillihammer, then wheeled on Delfina again and said: "You wanna hammer this out in private? Let's fucking go. I'll make you cry 'uncle' where your precious grunts can't see it, and you'll be sending a report to your psychologist when it's over."

"FINE!" Delfina swept an empty outbox off the desk, and stomped towards the exit. "We'll see who's crying when I'm through with you."

By the time they were out of sight, they were screaming again.

Lillihammer removed her PDA from her labcoat, and called up the 43NET personnel tracking system. She didn't have the credentials to track everyone's location, but she had designed the system, and that was functionally the same thing. She tagged Ibanez and Corbin, and watched them wobble their way out of T&T, through I&T, up through Habitation and Sustenance, and into Delfina's quarters.

She considered, for a moment, then set two flags and timer before heading to her own meeting.

She was just saying good evening to Eileen Veiksaar, and wandering back to her office, when the flags were tripped. Corbin had just left the security chief's room.

She'd been in there two hours.

Lillihammer smiled.

2022

23 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

This time, the door to the previous chamber closed behind them. This time, there was no announcement.

This time, the chamber was empty. There was a piece of paper taped to the final door, the door which led to the hallway and presumably the end of the ordeal. A single sentence was printed on the page:

State the connection between these tests.

"Oh," Okorie sighed. She thought: I should have seen this coming.

"Come on," Ibanez huffed. She thought: I'm not in the mood for more puzzles.

"Was it recruitment?" Okorie raised her voice, thinking that perhaps once one of them hit the nail on the head the game would be called. "Was she, were you, Lillian, trying us out for some new MTF thing?"

"That wouldn't make any sense." Ibanez leaned on the wall, crossing her arms over her stomach. She slid back and forth, like she was trying to scratch an itch on her back. Her legs were twitching. "We've both been in task forces already, and we've been through a lot with her. She doesn't need to test us. She knows what we can do."

Okorie frowned. "You thought it seemed plausible before."

Ibanez shrugged. "Well, I've thought it through since. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny."

Okorie thought: Are you saying I haven't thought it through? She said: "You've got a better idea?"

Ibanez nodded, jerkily, her hands massaging the fabric of her suit. "I still say she's trying to pick one of us up, the lecherous old witch. And she can't do it normally, because she can't do anything normally."

Okorie scoffed. "If she's trying to pick us up, why hide in the observation hall the whole time?"

"We each got to spend time in the hall with her," Ibanez reminded her.

"Yeah, well, I dunno how she was when you were in there, but when I was in there, she stared straight through the glass and didn't say a damn thing."

"Then maybe she wants to see which of us is more talented? Compare her options? You know her, only the best will do."

Okorie leaned on the wall opposite Ibanez. "The tests had nothing to do with anything she finds interesting. Shooting? Bridge-building? That doesn't make any sense."

Ibanez thought: And your idea did? She said: "If you've got a third idea, I'm listening."

Okorie had a sudden urge to take her haughty friend down a peg. For some reason the image that sprang into her mind's eye was a violent tickle attack. She clamped it down. "She's testing memetic effects. Subtle ones. Messing with our perception, to prove she can. Stuff she's been learning from Zwist."

Ibanez nodded. "There was a bright flash of light before the bridge test. I think she screwed up my colour perception."

Okorie cocked her head. "I dunno about that. It'd have to be something more involved than just a flash of light. Is your perception still out of whack?"

"No," and there was suddenly a brittle edge in the other woman's voice, "it only worked on the Erector Set. She gave me…" Ibanez paused, remembering. "Violet-orange colour confusion."

Okorie laughed. "That's not a thing. And are you saying you thought that bridge was purple?"

Ibanez blinked. "I thought it was orange. It was purple."

"I saw orange too? And I didn't see any flash of light?" These came out as questions, but Okorie meant them as a statements.

"Well, fuck, I don't know. You come up with this theory, and I try to help prove it, and you shoot me down." Ibanez kicked off the wall, and began pacing. She started shaking out her boots, then stomping them back on properly. The laces were coming undone. "Didn't you notice any mind fuckery? Beyond the basic stuff."

"I heard a ringing in my ears during the memory test."

"I heard it too, in the observation hall. I think it was just faulty wiring for the light fixture."

Okorie slid off the wall and walked to the one-way glass. "Is there no connection at all? Is that what you want to hear? That you just wasted our afternoon?"

"She wouldn't do that. Even when she's fucking around, there's always a point."

Okorie spun, and walked towards Ibanez. "Yeah, that helps a lot. We're really piling up examples of what definitely isn't happening. Maybe once we've covered the entire range of possibilities, in say a year or two, we'll find the truth by process of elimination and our skeletons can go home."

Ibanez closed the distance between them; Okorie had momentarily forgotten that her friend was incapable of backing down. "Tearing down my tearing down isn't helping either, Udo."

"None of this is helping, Del!"

Closer. "Maybe she's trying to show us what we're capable of!"

"I already know what I'm capable of! It's not news to me that I can cloud compute with dust!" Okorie kicked the floor with her sneaker sole. "Maybe she was trying to show you."

"Like I need proof that wunderkind Udo Okorie has got chronic galaxy brain," Ibanez growled.

Okorie snorted. "You're in good company, nerd." She pushed her thick spectacles up her nose, with a flourish and a finger-wiggle. "Look at me, I'm the badass supersoldier who reads engineering journals for fun."

Closer still. "You wanna shit-talk my soldiering? Are you the same woman who ginned up a small army of sand-people half an hour ago, and nearly kicked my ass?"

"Nearly kicked…? You blew the everloving beJesus out of me, woman! Just like those mannequins! Jesus Christ," and now Okorie was laughing again, "you didn't even need to see the damn things! The arrogance on you! Have you ever experienced a single solitary second of doubt in your life?!"

There was no space at all between them now. They could each smell the other's sweat. "You think I'm arrogant? Little miss perfect who can't play by the rules, and never could?"

Okorie nearly smacked her. "The rules? You're one to talk! Security chief, MTF chief, and you throw the playbook out the window when it suits you! How much random shit have you seen that never went into an official report?"

Ibanez had a vision, crystal clear, of strangling the other woman. "You didn't mind when it was keeping your ass out of containment, if I remember correctly! You didn't mind when I walked across the Nevermeant to find you!"

Udo was shouting now. "I did the same god-damn thing for you! Do you remember that?"

"It's the last damn thing about you I do remember! You've been hiding in your hole ever since!"

"I didn't hear you knocking!"

"I didn't hear you COMPLAINING!"

"YOU'RE HEARING IT NOW!"

Ibanez reached up, claws extended. Okorie didn't flinch, not even when the other woman's hand clenched a clump of her long brown hair, not even when her head was pulled roughly down into a fierce and protracted kiss.

Okorie was not surprised to discover that Delfina liked to bite.

Ibanez was a little surprised by Udo's lung capacity.

Neither of them noticed when the door to the hall slid open, and they wouldn't for some time.

Lillihammer watched on the monitor as they left the final test chamber, hand in hand. They were still hand in hand when they reached Ibanez's quarters, and slipped inside together. The last thing she saw before the door closed was Udo ruffling Delfina's hair, and Delfina poking her hard in the ribs with a smile.

She tapped her PDA a few times, setting two flags and a timer, then reached into her back pocket for her workbook. She turned to the latest unfinished chapter, and uncapped her pen. Thilo is going to have a fit when he reads this.

"She's going to think this was her idea," Ibanez murmured.

"She's going to be wrong," Okorie breathed into the other woman's scalp. "And I think that was the idea."

Ibanez smiled. She nodded.

She frowned. "What does that mean?"

In lieu of an explanation, Okorie lunged at her partner's stomach with fingers outstretched.

The timer was up to twelve hours and counting when Lillian cleared both flags herself, and logged off.

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