Fire in the Hole - SCP Foundation

Fire in the Hole

1994

1 April

Village of Zevala, Argentina

The planes were still bringing in gas, and it wasn't long before they knew why. The occupiers weren't building furnaces, they were building generators. The generators powered the facility they were also building, in what had once been the town square, which they had levelled with more massive gas-powered machines brought in by massive seaplanes. Fina couldn't begin to understand how it was possible for them to do this so openly, so flagrantly, in what had to be Argentinean sovereign territory. But it was happening. It was her reality. And she was dealing with it as best she could.

It had taken weeks, but she'd determined that none of Zevala's approximately one hundred shacks and half-dozen granaries contained any live prisoners. She was afraid, very afraid that all the villagers who hadn't been killed — if there were any — had been shipped out on the planes instead of kept on-site. What she found in one of the granaries told her that finding any specific person was going to be a difficult task; she would never forget the stink, or the flies that burst out of the hatch when she opened it, or the maggots she saw crawling down in the depths when she cast her torchlight over them. She'd dropped the torch in, and said a quick prayer after scrambling back down. The occupiers didn't notice the fire until it was far too late, and even though it was a risk she stayed close enough to feel the heat and let the wind carry sparks into her exposed skin and hair, where they crackled and fizzled and died in little pinpricks of pain. It wasn't quite a baptism, but it was certainly a start. She left the soot on her face for the rest of the day, even knowing it had once been part of her circle of neighbours, friends, or perhaps even family members. Because she knew that.

When the prefabricated structure was fully up and running, a massive squat thing all perfectly square corners in contrast to the haphazard geometry of the village shacks, she saw what she had missed. She'd known that the planes moored at the pier next to the wreck of the Reach, and that occasionally small skiffs plied the waters of the bay in its direction, but she'd never thought to search what little was still visible above water. On the first of April — not that she had any idea what day it was anymore — the occupiers sent a barge over to the exposed bow and came back with a mass of bedraggled humanity. The survivors of Zevala. They'd been kept in the sunken ship.

Most of them went into the facility, under guard. The rest were chucked in the bay. Some of them sank immediately. Some struggled weakly. One struggled mightily, and a guard put a bullet through her forehead. The ones who were too sick, injured, or waterlogged to keep around, Fina imagined.

But that didn't matter, couldn't matter, because she'd seen who was in the group of not-too-far-gones.

Her mother, and her lone remaining brother, Jorge.

That simplified matters. She'd been working up the courage to do more than simply steal and sabotage, and lighting the granary morgue ablaze had lit a fire under her as well. She knew she was going to do something, something bold, something soon. She hadn't been sure until now what form it would take. But on the first of April she made Yésica promise to stay in the cave, then took her most prized possession down the hidden path and along the coast to the main lighthouse.

It was time to wake up the neighbours.

She had no idea if this would work, but it was certainly worth a shot. The package was planted, the device she'd stolen from secure storage and laboriously sussed out attached and ready to go. She'd set the timer, then crept back to the back side of the facility where it met with the remains of the pier, and now she was waiting. Waiting to see if she'd timed everything correctly.

If she hadn't, she was going to try and find a gun. She didn't know how to shoot, it was one of the only survival-related things her grandfather had refused to teach her, but she felt that she could learn very quickly should the need arise. She'd just picture that scar-lipped woman in her mind's eye, and pull the trigger. It wouldn't be hard. Not at first.

The explosion was almost as dramatic as the ones which had flattened about a quarter of the Zevalan shacks in the initial attack. The top of the lighthouse disappeared in a flash of fire and smoke, and the rest of it toppled down into the bay. There was shouting and screaming immediately, and the electric lights all over the village flickered and died.

The generators had been in the lighthouse.

The lights came back on, just for a moment, as the backup generators kicked in. She was glad she'd been listening so carefully to the hushed conversations of her hateful adversaries over the past month, and felt a wicked grin creeping onto her face when the second explosion took out the secondary lighthouse on the opposite end of the bay. When the lights went off this time, they stayed off.

She waited by the door to the facility, her grandfather's long hunting knife in one hand, black soot from their cave fire all over her exposed skin. She was a ghost. She believed herself prepared, if absolutely necessary, to render another human being strictly spiritual as well. Whatever it took.

Her family was in there.

And so, she waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They're not coming out.

The barge had been retrofitted as a pump tanker after the granary incident; she'd overheard the idea that a rogue generator spark had set off the methane gas inside, but at least some of the occupiers were certain that whoever had been stealing their supplies and spiking their weapons and breaking their machinery had escalated to terroristic violence, so they had wanted to be prepared. The barge was now pulling alongside the main lighthouse as the fire raged within, which was not particularly helpful because for reasons known to only one person in the bay area, the pumps were suddenly non-functional, and it got a lot worse when the ballast suddenly shifted and the craft began to list. New lights flared in the portholes, almost as if someone had set a fire in there as well.

And all for nothing. How could she have been so stupid? So much effort expended in the hopes that these goons would lack the discipline to stay at their posts, and yet here they were. Still standing guard. They probably suspected the attack was a ruse, which it was. She had no idea how she was going to get inside without being noticed, now, but…

…but you have to. She glanced down at the knife, glinting in the moonlight, and made a fateful decision.

And then un-made it in an instant as two figures came barrelling into the levelled square and past her hiding place, arguing with each other. "We can't just fucking leave her!" one was shouting. A woman.

"Keep your voice down!" the other hissed, a man, and she mentally willed the woman to disregard this instruction. "You want Betty to know who was playing games in there? We're not even supposed to be on shift!"

"You think I don't know that?" They were almost out of earshot already, headed for the distant fire. "I had to give Gunnar my left tit to get off fire brigade tonight…"

And then they were gone.

Her?

Who was 'her'?

They'd come from the direction of one of the few central shacks not obliterated by the village's repurposing into an armed camp.

Her family's shack.

Her home.

Mom.

She ran.

She would never have known it was her house if she hadn't seen the outside illuminated by a single portable spotlight, and recognized the specific rust patterns on the sheet metal framework. The inside was unrecognizable; even the floorplan, such as it was, had changed. The little indoor bathroom had lost a wall and gained a set of steel bars, the kitchen fixtures had all been removed in favour of a card table and chairs, and the room she'd shared with Yésica was simply gone. Missing. Obliterated in the name of a little extra floor space. None of their furniture was still in evidence. None of their personal belongings, save for one of Aurelio's school books left lying on the floor with half of its pages torn out.

The bathroom with bars was obviously a prison. There was a prisoner inside, a filthy and bedraggled woman with long dark hair, handcuffed to the kitchen sink. She was lapping up water from a standing pipe which had once fed their bathtub, now absent.

Fina ran to the bars, and shook them. It was a swinging door, and it was locked. She cast about, and to her surprise saw a set of keys on a ring on the card table. These jailors were worse than second-rate. She darted over, snatched up the ring, and had the heavy door open in a flash.

"Mom?"

The woman drew her head away from the pipe. Her face was covered in scars, as were her arms and legs. She was wearing a tank top and jean shorts, and they were peppered with nasty-looking puncture wounds oozing blood. She whimpered, and blinked her bleary eyes at her.

"Fina…"

"Mom." Fina fell to her knees in front of her. There was a broken plate on the floor with what looked like dog food smeared over it. There was a bowl she recognized as having once belonged to their actual dog. There was a pair of bloody scissors.

"I'm so sorry," her mother whispered.

Fina couldn't help herself. She darted forward and held the fragile woman close; unlike with Aurelio, only a sudden intake of breath suggested the pain this must have caused. "It's okay," Fina said. "It's okay." It was okay. It was going to be okay.

"I'm so sorry," her mother repeated. "It's all our fault."

"It's okay."

"We were wrong. We did this. We did this."

We did this. Fina remembered her grandfather's last words carrying similar implications. She rejected them. "It's not your fault."

Her mother held her tight, the strength in her muscles belying the weakness in her voice. "We did this. We tried to hide it. They told us it wouldn't work forever."

Fina drew back and brushed the hair out of her mother's tear-streaked face. "Who told you?"

"The Foundation."

She had heard the word before, spoken in tones of fear and hatred by the armed men and women occupying the village. She had no idea what it meant. "What's the Foundation?"

"They'll come." Her mother was an endless well of tears. She might have been drinking simply to replenish her stock. "You'll see."

Fina felt warm. There was something wet on her dress. She looked down, and saw that she was now covered in blood. "Mom," she whispered, "you're hurt."

"Don't worry about me. Take care of your sister, and your brothers."

Even at her very best, Fina's voice would have cracked in response to that request. She was not at her very best now. "Mom…"

Her mother reached up to touch her cheek. She could feel the bloody thumbprint it would leave behind. "Promise you'll take care of them."

"I promise," Fina choked. Finally, finally, she was weeping. It felt like releasing a too-long-held breath. It felt terrible.

"And you." Her mother wrapped her fingers around Fina's neck, and pressed their foreheads together. Her breath smelled like salt and bile. "Take care of you."

"Okay." She drew back, and started re-examining their surroundings. If this was a workplace of sorts, and not just the occupiers' private torture shack…

She was momentarily distracted by a terrible, terrible thought, and examined her mother's appearance more closely. No. No, she didn't think so. She couldn't ask, couldn't bear to make her mother answer, but she didn't think so. In the process of this inspection she noticed that most of the blood was coming from a series of stab wounds on her mother's legs, and then she saw a discarded belt in the corner, and knew where she had to start. She scrabbled over, picked it up, and made to wrap it around the worst-affected limb near the groin.

When her mother saw the belt, she recoiled for a moment, and Fina understood in a flash of awful clarity that her fears had nearly been true. The traded shifts, the guilty skulking back to the fire brigade, the frustrated note in their arguing voices. They'd smuggled her mother out of the facility while Fina was watching the front door, somehow, taken her here where they wouldn't be disturbed, but they had been at perhaps the last possible second.

Fina had no experience of these things, but she'd heard whispers from some of the less reputable smugglers and ship crews, and plenty of boasting from the occupiers while deep in their cups. She hoped the realization wasn't visible on her face. She didn't want her mother knowing she knew about…

Her mother cried out in pain as Fina tightened the belt, and then clapped a hand over her own mouth. Fina nodded grimly, then reached under her mother's arm. "Now let me—"

Her mother wriggled free and began clawing in the dirt. For a moment Fina thought the trauma had finally broken the woman's mind, until one of the blood-slick floorboards popped up and came aside to reveal a shiny black plastic card. Her mother snatched it up, and handed it to her with shaking fingers. "Take this."

She did. "What is it?"

"The bunker. Go into the bunker. You'll be safe there."

"In the cleft?" She'd seen the enemy gathering there from day to day, cursing and cajoling whoever was inside. On the rare occasion that Fina had been able to distract the guards long enough to get a look, the space within had seemed like any other minor fissure in the cliffside. She'd begun to think the old lady with the cane was off her rocker.

She resumed her hold on her mother's arm. "We'll go together."

"I won't make it." Her mother suddenly burst into tears, expending obvious effort to try and keep them quiet. "I don't want to die."

What was left of Fina's equilibrium vanished, leaving a sucking vacuum in her stomach. "I don't want you to die."

"I'm so sorry."

Her mother wouldn't get up. Perhaps she couldn't get up. Fina was going to have to carry her. "It's not your fault." It was an easy burden to bear. She might have been lifting a small, wounded bird from the forest floor. "You did the best you could." She kissed her mother's forehead as they crossed the threshold of the cell. "I love you."

"I love you." The woman's voice was getting quieter by the second. "Tell your brothers and sister I love them."

"Where's dad?"

"Gone."

"What does that mean?" Fina stopped at the open door, taking in the limited sights. There was no way to look across the bay at the fire from where they were, but there was enough red light still playing on the water that she knew they'd be safe for at least a little longer.

"He's gone." Her mother's eyes were closed now. "They're all gone."

"They can't all be gone." How had they gone? On the planes? Through a tunnel in the cleft? How? And why would they have abandoned her here? And her mother? And Yésica?

How could they have?

"She was furious," her mother muttered deliriously.

Fina stepped out into the cool night air. Her skin immediately broke out in goose pimples. It hadn't been hot in the shack, but it had felt oppressively humid nevertheless. "Who?"

"She told them to beat me." Her mother winced with each step Fina took down the brief flight of porch stairs. "She wanted to see me break. She was furious."

"Who, mom?" Fina leaned her head in closer, pressed her ears to her mother's lips. "Who?"

"Don't take this with you."

She drew back. "What?"

"Let it stay here when you go." Her mother's eyes were open again, as clear as Fina had ever remembered seeing them. There was a plea there, echoed in her words and the tone in which they were delivered.

"I'm not leaving," she promised.

A sad shake of the head. "When you go, leave it all behind. Don't let it weigh you down. "

"No." The tears were back. Maybe they hadn't left, she'd just been too focused to notice them.

"Swim away, Delfina. Swim, or fly, or climb, and don't ever, ever come back."

"I can't." Her knees failed her, and she sank into the sand at the foot of the stairs. Her mother didn't seem to notice.

"The water is warm." This was now the voice of childhood lullabies on cold winter nights. "Be free."

"I don't want to," she wept.

"I'm so proud of you." It was less than a whisper now. "I'm…"

A sudden intake of breath.

Fina clutched her mother's head to her chest. "Don't go," she pleaded. "Please don't go."

They made eye contact again. Her mother spoke once more, so clearly, so deliberately, with what had to be all that remained of her strength: "I'll always be with you."

"Don't go," said Fina. "Don't go."

Her mother was dead.

What am I going to tell Yésica?

What kind of reaction was that? She stared at her mother's ruined body, demanding something more from herself. Cry. Scream. Fall down. Scratch your face until it bleeds. Something. Anything.

Nothing.

Hours might have passed without her noticing. She made no move to conceal herself. She cradled the corpse in her arms, sang to it softly, sweetly, and tried to summon the tears again. But she was too stopped-up to cry. She could feel it bottling inside of her again, demanding release.

When it seemed absolution would never come, she stood up again and carried her mother back to the front porch. She laid the body down, folding the hands peacefully over the chest, then headed back into the shack. She found a small portable generator in what had once been her parents' bedroom, still full of gasoline. She found a pair of kerosene hurricane lamps. She did what she had to do, then headed into the bloody cell to retrieve the scissors.

She picked them up. She tried to see herself where the rust was absent, but the surface wasn't clean enough to offer a clear reflection. Only enough to reflect a little light, when struck at the right angle.

She took her long, silky hair in one hand, and without really thinking about what she was doing, began to cut.

She was still brushing the blood off the ragged edges when she reached the cave again. Her mother's funeral pyre blotted out the moon.

2 April

Zevala was ablaze, and all the insurgents — as they called themselves — were scurrying about like chickens with their heads cut off. There was talk of an attack. A second invading force. Perhaps the Foundation. Perhaps something worse.

That something worse had every intention of worsening further still. There were many, many more things to burn before she and her sister were alone on the cliffside.

2003

31 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Ibanez had seen things with worse implications for herself, personally. That was the only metric of horror on which this sight knew remote equal. It was a wall, in a basic sense. It stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other, floor to ceiling, barring further passage. It was pink. It bubbled inside, and it sounded like a hundred simultaneous cases of indigestion which echoed off the rock around it.

It was made of human bodies.

Not corpses, bodies. Some of them were still alive. Legs flexed, fingers twitched, heads bobbed up and down. They were fused together haphazardly, limbs through torsos, digits through faces, blended and bent as though each had been placed in the sequence with sadistic care. Some of the positions suggested even greater perverse indecency than the overall concept itself, which was a feat. Fifty feet wide, maybe fifteen feet tall. A human weave. Four tiers of victims stacked one atop the other, writhing, softly burbling, softly sighing. Drooling. There was a puddle of grey water pooling at the base of the wall. She stopped before her boots touched it, and looked at the closest face at eye level.

It was staring at the cave floor, a few strands of no-longer-hair hanging down over its breasts and slim torso, chest heaving slowly like an exhausted flu sufferer. Ibanez put a thick glove on her right hand, reached out and gently lifted the woman's chin.

As soon as her face was raised, she tried to speak. Her pink eyes stared unseeing, her jaw working, cheeks twitching, and Ibanez moved her hand to cup the neck instead.

The jaw fell open, and the woman made a sound like an emptying toilet bowl, and what had to be an entire stomach's worth of grey water full of pink and orange floaters poured out of her, over her teeth and tongue and onto Ibanez's boots. She dropped the head — it snapped down again with a sickening crack — and the torrent continued, smelling of onion and turpentine, visibly boiling up through the translucent skin like a lava lamp. Ibanez whipped off the glove and threw it to the ground, stepped back, and vomited. When she was done, she could still hear the woman puking her own pink guts out.

She straightened again when the deluge had become a drip. There were teeth in the wet slush on the cave floor. The woman's jaw was still slack, still dripping. But she was moaning now, and moaning was essentially speech.

Ibanez took out another glove and repeated the process. This time the woman kept her lunch, assuming there was still anything inside to expel, and her blind eyes swivelled drunkenly. Ibanez realized she knew the face, the chipmunk cheeks and button nose and wide orbits. It was one of the geistschreiber, the one who'd made herself Director of Area-21: Imogen Tarrow, or her twin. She almost felt relieved. The idea of the other side having an active chameleonic agent had given her a sleepless night or two.

Of course, this discovery was going to give her months of sweaty nightmares, so it was hardly a fair trade.

"Help," the wretched thing hiccoughed stickily.

"Who did this to you?"

"Him," it moaned.

"Markey?"

The other woman shook her head, nodded, shook her head. Vomited pink sludge. "Him. We were wrong."

She flatly refused the clarion call of memory those words triggered. "Wrong about what?"

"Him." The eyes closed, stuck together, fluttered madly with the effort required to un-stick. The tongue lolled to one side. "Help."

"Do you want me to…" Ibanez gently let the head down, then tapped it twice on the scalp.

It nodded, just barely, with a wet crunching sound.

"Okay."

She discarded the second glove, drew her sidearm, took careful aim, and fired.

The bullet passed through the woman's head, which exploded. The whole body burst like a punctured water balloon, skin cracking and sloughing off, features instantly melting into a sticky mass that flapped against the quivering wall.

The gun was silenced, of course, but still loud enough in the enclosed space that she couldn't tell if she was imagining the sigh of relief as the geistschreiber deflated.

1994

1 May

Fina had been born small. Not premature, not sickly, merely compact. Her father was short and stocky where her mother was long and lithe, and Fina had arrived in a feminine form of the former with the latter's cross temper. As a baby, she hadn't cried. She'd scolded. As a child, her older brothers had found her very poor bullying material indeed; she simply could not be found when she didn't want to be. No hiding place was too small for her, no hunter stealthy enough to get the drop. She was the only child in Zevala who hadn't learned to fight from another child.

She'd learned from her grandfather.

Emiliano Ibanez had once been the village headman, before his son and daughter-in-law had taken up his duties so he could take up theirs. He'd showed Fina how to hunt deer, root out coral snakes, set snares, and fight dirty. He'd provided the first three lessons because he firmly believed all residents of the village should be able to provide for themselves in the eventuality that the ships one day stopped coming. He'd taught her where and how to kick a man so he wouldn't get back up, because once he caught her in the bowels of a smuggler ship dancing for the dirty gang who kept the boilers going. "Don't ever let me catch you doing that again," he'd told her. "And when you do, it'll be because none of them would dare to lay a hand on you."

He'd taught her well. It put an edge in her singing, the awful wish that one of the rough sailors would make a pass at her so she could lay him out flat and show them all that dancing was a transferable skill. But it never happened. She got lucky, to her great regret.

She was promptly going to be employing some skills which had never properly been tested. She hoped the invaders weren't wearing codpieces.

"You're scaring me," said Yésica as Fina leapt from treetop to treetop, hacking at branches with her freshly-sharpened machete. "Get down from there."

"Not until you're terrified." The exertion was exhilarating. Anything to make her body sing, and her mind go silent. "I'm going up against grown men, not children."

"Going up how?"

Fina swung from branch to branch, remembering how Jorge had once called her a howler monkey. She'd swung off and landed on one of his feet, and he had howled. Memories of Jorge, his fate still uncertain, were the only ones that didn't sting now. "You don't need to know."

Yésica stamped her feet in frustration. "You never tell me anything, cheto."

It was true. Fina hadn't told her anything. If she did, Yésica would want to act. She'd be burned up with the same fire Fina felt in all her muscles and all her joints, the urge to hurt as she had been hurt. The desire to kill.

And that would destroy her little sister.

Better that it only destroy Fina. There wasn't that much of her left at this point anyway.

She had a duty to catalogue the casualties if she could. She wasn't surprised to see that the bulk of the wall was her security staff; they were the most numerous personnel type, and the most dangerous, and the least desirable for conversion. She saw a few faces she recognized from the other Sections, and a few particularly active victims she suspected might be recent additions — OSAT officers from AAF-D. She wasn't sure if she was disappointed or not that Morwen Couch didn't seem to be among them…

"Oh," she said. "Oh, no, no."

She knew that face, the protuberant teeth, the slight frame. Rozálie Astrauskas, one of Udo's best friends. She was near the bottom of the pile, hands weakly slapping at the spreading puddle of goo, making meaningless vocalizations to herself and burping up bubbles like a pot near boil.

She didn't even think before taking the shot. Rozálie broke apart as the bullet tore through her head, the pressure redirecting down the line so that each of her fingers detonated with wet little pops in sequence. And then she was gone.

There weren't enough bullets in her pack for this, and she didn't think she'd survive it anyway. Mentally. Emotionally. In her soul.

She turned her back on the atrocity, for the time being.

She needed a bigger gun.

1994

4 June

"A plane! It's a plane!" And Yésica was gone, out the cave mouth and over the lip of the hidden path.

Fina lost her footing on the slick stone, just as she had months ago at the granary. Then, she'd merely had to swim to safety. She'd been the only one at risk. Now… "Yésica, wait!"

She lost precious seconds getting to her feet, and rushed out into the dying drizzle. The ground was soaked to mud, and the forest smelled alive. Her sister was nowhere to be seen; Christ, but she was fast! "Yésica!"

She called again at the foot of the path, danger be damned, but never heard the word. There was an unearthly howl as something massive plunged down from the heavens, cleaving the treetops in twain and setting them ablaze as it slammed into the forest floor. Fina wasn't thrown down, as she might have been in a movie, but the force of the blast and the sound of the crash made her ears ring and robbed her of balance momentarily. What is going on?

She heard a canvas fluttering, then the sound of something else striking the ground, and pressed her back up against a tree. A quick peek confirmed her suspicion: someone had just landed. Someone wearing a backpack that had once contained a parachute.

A pilot.

There were dogfights in the sky over Zevala. Not just one; she could hear the shots rattling out now, as the forest crackled to ash behind her.

The forest is on fire.

She had to keep moving.

She saw the next few moments in what felt like slow motion, with the benefit of a burst of frightened adrenaline. Surrounded by twisted metal and burning sundries the pilot spun to face her, a stocky woman in a bomber jacket with strange black and white insignia on the shoulders. She raised a pistol at Fina, but held her fire.

There was another, more distant explosion, then another flutter of canvas, and then another, and the woman turned to fire into the trees. There was a cry, and a man came tumbling out of the air to land in the plane's flaming wreckage. There was return fire, and the woman went down; a second woman in what Fina recognized as insurgent dress and a pilot's harness approached, shrugging off her own parachute, and the first woman put a round through her shoulder. The insurgent fell to the ground with a cry, and then blew her counterpart's brains out.

Then she collapsed, face-first in the mud.

Fina ran.

She stumbled down the hill, scattering fragments of twisted wire and cracked fuselage and a length of broken steel pipe, still smouldering, still hot. She stubbed her toe, and ran faster through the pain. "Yésica!" she screamed, and it was lost in the roar of engines overhead. She had never run so fast. She didn't even stop to breathe.

She reached the shoreline, and stopped dead.

There was fire in the sky again. Two silvery shapes collided over the bay, and a new star burst brilliantly to life. Men and women dressed like the pilot the insurgent had killed were putting some sort of gun together on the ground, and the fanwheel-marked black planes were turning them into fabric-flecked mincemeat where they stood. Flaming wreckage tumbled down to hiss upon the harbour, where a small body lay in a spreading pool-within-a-pool, the dark of wine against the dark of water. There was a hole in the back of her head, and a geyser of red with clumps of grey was pouring out as she bobbed in the tide.

The world declined to stand still. The rattle of gunfire overhead, the winds whipping the treetops, the relentless march of moments all continued as she watched the small body floating face-down in the breakers. The earth shook beneath her feet, and she did not fall to her knees. Thunder clapped overhead, and she did not flinch. Lightning struck, and she did not cower.

Instead, she bore witness.

When feeling returned to her body like an ashamed child creeping in the bedroom window after curfew, Fina left her sister in the water. It was where she'd been the happiest.

On her way back up the hill, she picked up the piece of broken pipe.

The insurgent was still slumped against the wreckage. There was smoke coming from the back of her jacket, where it met the smouldering metal. She was breathing heavily.

She scrambled for her weapon when she saw Fina, and tried to shout.

Fina drove the pipe through the woman's open mouth, smashing through her front teeth. Blood gushed out, and she screamed, and reached up to push the pipe back. Fina drove it further, and further, and only stopped when she hit something she couldn't punch through. She wasn't sure if it was bone or metal.

She pushed the pipe down at a more severe angle, then wrenched it violently to one side. She heard things snap in the woman's neck.

When the thrashing stopped, Fina used the pipe to roll the first woman's corpse over. She bent down, feeling a curious distance between the sudden serenity in her mind and the actions of her limbs, and beat the flames off the jacket with her bare hands. They were sooty and smarting as she used them to pry the garment off the woman's slack shoulders, and threw it over her own.

She walked back to the cave alone, blood trickling down her jacket sleeve to stream from her trembling fingers.

2003

2 November

"It's done?"

Bremmel nodded. "It's done."

Ibanez examined it on the table. "It won't do the whole… cascade grandmother murder thing?"

"I suppose you could line a lot of grandmothers up…" the engineer mused.

"I'm serious."

"Then you should have asked seriously. No. It should only cascade eliminate materials of the same composition. So try not to shoot the cave itself too much; the rocks will vary enough, probably, but it's not worth testing."

"Thanks. How do I use it?"

He pointed. "Trigger."

"What settings, though?"

"Trigger," he repeated. "Pull to shoot, don't to don't."

She gave him a cockeyed glance. "There are like five hundred dials on this fucking thing, Trev."

"Yeah," he nodded. "Looks like shit without them."

"So you won't mind if I just—"

He slapped her hand away. "Leave it alone. Point and shoot." He picked it up, and aped a demonstration. She didn't much like how he pointed it at her while he did so. "Like a camera that really does steal your soul."

He held it out for her to take.

"We almost certainly have a real one of those." She took the gun, and tested its weight. It was going to be a bitch to haul along her chosen path.

"Love to get my hands on it," he said. "Be interesting to see what kind of energy the soul gives off."

"Okay." She nodded. "Bye."

1994

5 June

Fina target practiced on the corpse.

She could penetrate the stomach with ease, but noted this would leave the entire upper torso active. The eyes punctured even easier, but the target area was small and armoured. She sharpened a stick and pushed it through the woman's left eyelid, the eye, and into the brain — she only knew she'd reached the latter when she used the stick to pry the sticky mess open and check. She took note of where the ribs were, and where they were weakest. The neck was an obvious choke point. She cut the body open to find the organs. She noted the tendons and veins visible in the neck.

When it was too dark to keep up her dark studies, she headed back down to the village to watch the insurgents work. From time to time they played with the weaker prisoners, the ones who'd outlived whatever their usefulness was. There was nothing Fina could do to save them, but she could learn a lot from how they met their ends. She saw how the operators operated. She saw the strengths and weaknesses of their tactics, where they were well-trained, where they were lazy, what their blind spots were.

She wasn't shying away from her reasons now. She knew fully well what she needed the information for.

Whoever the Foundation was, their attack hadn't worked, and hadn't been repeated. Zevala was still occupied. The Insurgents were still here.

She was going to kill them.

She was going to kill all of them.

The wall of flesh had come apart with an almost orgasmic collective gasp of relief, leaving only a thick grey line on the tunnel floor. She jumped over it, slinging Bremmel's rifle over her shoulder, and entered into Markey's realm proper.

It was properly impressive, she had to admit.

The farther down she penetrated, the more the space opened up. The ground was pebbled, marbled, textured and coloured in blues, reds, oranges and greens. The stalactites and stalagmites were shaped like Doric and Ionic columns, soaring from floor to distant ceiling. She started to see arches, vaults, buttresses. It was like walking into a cathedral, carved rather than erected, in living colour and living stone. Some of it was vibrating. Some of it was sobbing. There was water weeping from above, and she avoided it as she picked her way through the too-sparse shadows. She was all out of cache materials now, but she didn't think it mattered. She was nearing the end of the road.

As she crested a rise, she became aware of strange soggy footsteps coming up behind her. By the time the bullets started flying, she was already crouched down and ready to fire back with her peculiar piece of ordnance. The nobodies disintegrated as the dappled, intermittent ray traced across them, and she imagined them Chaos Insurgents, or giftschreiber, to make the encounter feel like something that actually mattered. They were emptiness in human form, sacks of walking water (more so than she was), and they were trying to kill her. They were trying to kill her friends. Her agents. The researchers. The civilians, even.

When she pictured them advancing on little Flora Nascimbeni, she entered into a red haze that didn't end until she'd painted the cave with their dissipating remains.

Then she moved on.

Before long, the cathedral became a city. A cave so big she couldn't see the top from the bottom, filled with spires, a whole universe of spires shaped from blue rock. Waves of rippling light filled the air, flowing around everything. Through everything. It was like a matte painting from Star Wars, only animated. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before.

She was going to destroy it.

She was crouched on a ledge overlooking an impossibly deep, vast valley filled with gleaming pink water and rustling yellow foliage. The spires shot up above her, so tall that they had to be in danger of breaking the surface. She wondered whether, given enough time, Markey would have constructed an organic space elevator. She wondered if he even had an end game, or if he simply planned to incorporate all living humans into his unlivable city…

There.

She fell flat on the brushed stone floor, and slung the rifle over her shoulder. It had a broad silencer which had been helpful for taking out the corpse wall, but she unscrewed and discarded it in her pack for now. When she took the next shot, she wanted the fucker to hear it. She looked through the scope, and saw what the tank-topped technician was up to.

He was brushing his hands lovingly over a mound of pink… well, it had to be flesh, didn't it? She thought she could see protuberances in roughly the right places. He was making a statue from yet another victim, another live human being subjected to a fate far worse than death. She wondered if she could take them both out with one shot, or whether she'd have to take two.

Or…

She examined the dials on her weapon. Bremmel had refused to clarify their purposes, but she'd taken the gun to Lillian, who'd taken her best shot. The biggest dial, in pride of place where the forestock met the magazine, would control the scope of the destabilization. Turn it far enough clockwise, and it would not only eliminate Markey, but everything entangled with his atoms.

Right now, the dial was set where Bremmel had left it.

She turned it clockwise, just a hair. As much as a light jostle could have done. Surely that wouldn't do any harm, and it might do a great deal of good. She flicked on the directional microphone, and lined up the shot with her target. She wanted to hear the sound it made when he winked out of existence.

He was humming discordantly to himself, and muttering. "Nobody produces anymore. They reproduce, and reproduce, and reproduce, Xerox after Xerox, but no originals. No originals. Free expression is originality, or it is false. You are you and only you, so when what you make is what they make, you engage in a perversion of free will. Do what thou wilt, an it harm you not. Everything else is ethics, or worse. Kill the critics. Kill the movements. This," and he suddenly plunged his arm into what now looked to be the statue's screaming mouth, "is not a fountain."

He pulled out a set of flexing, candied lungs, slammed them on the ground, then resumed his gentle caresses. "There, there," he soothed. "I'll let you sing when it's done, and you can sing whatever you want. I promise that I'll listen." He smiled serenely. "But I don't need to. That's the beauty."

She could take the shot now, but it was better to let the gun calibrate for the distance. She was maybe a kilometre away from the arcaded Byzantine gallery where he stood, mountainous minarets towering over him, roiling rosaceous sea below. She might only get one shot, so she needed to make it count.

It had been the right decision to refuse Nascimbeni's help. It would have driven him mad, lying here beside her, waiting for the fateful moment. He might even have tried to stop her. Would she have had the heart to follow through?

Probably shoot him too, she thought, and though she knew it shouldn't, the thought made her grin.

"Give me a hand with this, would you?" Nascimbeni was deep in the guts of the turbine, trying to force a pair of man-sized clamps apart long enough to get some soldering done. They simply would not snap into place, and he was near to snapping himself at this point.

"Yeah, uh."

He squeezed back out of the narrow aperture in the maintenance access, and pointed at the rolling tool cart. "Just grab a bracer."

Phil pulled open the tall top drawer, and hesitated. "I'm not supposed to touch those."

Nascimbeni sighed. "We're not gonna honour probationary periods here, Phil. Grab the damn bracer."

The junior tech shut the drawer again. "I'm not qualified to operate them."

"Huh?"

"I never took that test. Remember?"

Nascimbeni blinked. "You were set to be certified in… mid October, last year? Before everything fell apart."

Phil nodded sheepishly. "Yeah, I just never studied. Decided not to take the test. Probably would have failed, you know? So why bother. Didn't seem like something I needed anyway."

"What? You get a pay raise and a ladder bump just for getting that cert, whether you use it or not."

The other man shrugged, and looked away. "Didn't figure it was worth the effort, I guess."

2002

8 October

The Old Timeline

Nascimbeni glanced over the audio log. He always felt a little dirty reading the transcripts of Phil Deering's microphone recordings, but every once in a while Blank would flag one for him to check out, and that had happened today.

Log #5056-10-07-02

Date and Time: 10/07/2002, 8:05 PM

Location: Southern Dormitories, Habitation and Sustenance Section, Site-43

Context: J&M Multi-Tool Certification Test preparation session (private)

Present: Technician P. Deering; SCP-5056-A

[Audio event consistent with an active television set on low volume.]

SCP-5056-A: Already given up, Philip?

Deering: On what?

SCP-5056-A: On yourself.

Deering: I liked you better when you were screaming.

SCP-5056-A: You don't care.

Deering: About?

SCP-5056-A: Your life. Your worthless life.

Deering: Shut the fuck up.

SCP-5056-A: You're never going to improve.

Deering: I'm fine the way I am.

SCP-5056-A: Useless. A waste of skin and too much fat.

Deering: I'm not fat.

SCP-5056-A: You'll die of heart failure at forty, just like your father.

Deering: Don't talk about my father.

SCP-5056-A: Would he have been proud of you? Of what little you've become?

Deering: Why can't you leave me the fuck alone for five minutes?

SCP-5056-A: You'll be alone forever, Philip. You're not worth wasting time with, and all you do is waste time.

Deering: You don't know anything. You're just talking shit.

SCP-5056-A: You would have failed anyway.

Deering: What did you say?

SCP-5056-A: You're a failure whether you take the test or not, Philip. You knew it. You didn't need confirmation.

Deering: Is that what this is about?

SCP-5056-A: You didn't have it in you.

Deering: I made a decision.

SCP-5056-A: You haven't made a decision in years. You procrastinate until it's too late, and pretend you chose not to move. Sluggish. A stone gathering moss. Rot on crumbling rock.

Deering: It's just a fucking cert test. They do a dozen of these at my level. I can catch the next one.

SCP-5056-A: But you won't.

Deering: I can still take this one!

SCP-5056-A: But you won't.

Deering: Watch me! I'm opening my bag! I'm opening the god damn book!

SCP-5056-A: You're not smart enough.

Deering: I'm getting out my notes.

SCP-5056-A: You don't have the drive.

[Audio event consistent with the deactivation of a television set.]

Deering: I'm going to pass the test, you corrugated snot-smear. Just watch me. Not like you have much choice.

SCP-5056-A: More choice than you.

SCP-5056-A: Philip.

SCP-5056-A: Philip.

SCP-5056-A: Philip.

Deering: Fucking show you.

Nascimbeni grunted, then glanced at the test results.

He grunted again.

"We can still do the test, you know," he reminded the other man.

Phil shrugged. "Enh. What's it matter now?"

"We'll need more people who know these things, going forward."

"I dunno." Phil fiddled with the drawers, pulling them open and shutting them again, one by one. "Probably not cut out for electromech. Don't have the brains for it."

"You never know until you try." He knew it wasn't enough, but it was all he could think to say. The discrepancy in what he'd expected and what he was getting was… freaking him out, honestly.

"I don't wanna know." Phil closed the last drawer with unwarranted force. "My gut feeling is I wouldn't like it. I've failed at enough things already."

The snap he'd felt coming finally came. "I should have known."

Phil glanced at him. "What?"

"You've given up, like you always do."

The tech put up both hands defensively. "Hey."

This was it. This was the solution. Maybe this was even why he still had his memories, what he'd been meant to do with them. "You haven't got the drive," he growled, warming to the subject.

"Fine, I guess." Phil shoved the cart aside. "Fuck me for an asshole. I'll go see if anyone certified is around, and they can help you."

And he stomped away, taking something Nascimbeni had been desperately holding onto with him.

He waited until the other man was out of sight, giving himself that long to overturn the revelation if he could, then reluctantly keyed his radio. "Azad? You there?"

"Go, Chief."

"I need another one of those telekill slugs, no questions asked. There's somewhere I ought to be."

1994

19 June

There was a guard at the front doors. He was smoking a cigarette; she'd seen the light from a great distance. They'd grown incautious in the absence of her continual raids, probably imagining she'd died of some viral infection alone in one of the countless caves ringing the forest. She'd seen their hunting parties canvassing the area, had prepared a few extra boltholes in case they found the one she'd shared with Yésica, but it hadn't proven necessary. Maybe they didn't really want to find her.

Maybe they were afraid.

The guard at the door coughed up blood, and died instantly. Fina was carrying an empty rifle with a sharpened bayonet, and she'd thrust it straight up through his neck, severing the spinal cord. She levered him off the front stoop and into the bushes, then stood up on the tips of her toes to peer through the window in the door.

All clear.

She slid the door open, silently, and closed it behind her, silently. The interior space was all pre-fab drywall panels, growing slightly moldy in the June heat, so she ditched the mud-soaked cloak she'd used to approach in the darkness and edged along the wall in the clean white medical frock she'd confiscated a week ago for this very purpose. She also had a map of the building, not that it was very large, and she'd memorized the layout. The guard station would be right around the corner, and there ought to be a counter about the height of a half-wall looking out over the corridor with only a bulletin board on the opposite wall. She crouched down, and slithered left.

There was the counter, there was the bulletin board, above her the dull sound of music being played over headphones. Something jaunty. She liked the beat. Then the sound of a chair being pushed back, and someone humming as they walked away from her, and she darted up to plunge the bayonet into their kidneys from behind. A followup stroke through the back of the neck, and the second soldier was down. She didn't even stop to see if it was a man or a woman, young or old. There were further hurdles to essay before she reached her destination.

The barracks.

It had been a mighty struggle, but they'd managed to put out her fires. The next time she tried to put Zevala out of its misery, it was going to damn well work. There was going to be nobody left to stop her.

The third guard, who she encountered standing at a water cooler in the lounge, vomited blood all over her when she put her bayonet up through his chin, nasal passages and brain. She stripped off the medical coat, shirt, and pants, and was back in nothing but her sun dress and the pair of jeans she'd been wearing over the bottom. Like ablative armour.

There was only one more guard between her and her goal, and despite her preparation, it almost all went south. The woman walked out of a door Fina hadn't even known was there, nearly bowling her over, and it was all she could do to bring the butt of the rifle up to smash the insurgent's nose in. She cried out, and Fina brought the butt 'round again, and this time the bone must have pierced the brain because the body went limp with a final, plaintive gurgle.

She took off her backpack, unzipped it, and removed an improvised pipe bomb. She had five of these, and she knew just where to put them. One in the main barracks block, one in the server room, one in the head office, one in the generator room, and one back at the checkpoint station on her way out again. First she'd set off the intruder alarm, which none of the guards had managed to trip, to call everyone back here for their fiery finale. The only thing left to do before putting the plan into action was checking the barracks for stragglers, and putting them down. She placed the first three bombs, then crept to the final door and opened it.

The lights were on, the rows of bunks unoccupied save for one. There was a man lying prone, eyes closed, facing her as she walked in, and she recognized his face immediately.

The force of her horror must have been palpable in the air, because Jorge's eyes opened as she raised the bayonet up. "Fina?"

"How…?" she managed.

He sat bolt upright, and swung his feet over the bed. "Fina, it isn't safe here. You need to hide."

She kept the bayonet levelled on him. "I thought you were dead."

He reached out his hand. "Come with me."

She swung the blade, and he kept his distance. "Why are you here?"

He walked to the door, looked both ways down the hall, then looked back at her. "Come with me. Come on!"

"Why are you here?" she repeated, standing her ground.

She looked him over; cut-off jeans and shirt, leather jacket, a firearm in a holster at his belt. Dressed, in short, like an insurgent off-duty.

"You're with them?" she breathed. She felt light-headed.

"Fina." He raised a hand in warning.

She raised the bayonet higher, as though intending to put a hole in his palm. "After what they did? You're with them?"

"Listen to me." His expression was tired. Tired and pained.

"They killed grandfather."

The pain deepened, though not, she felt, by much. "I'm sorry."

"They killed Eloy, and Aurelio too."

He staggered back until he hit the wall. She thought he might have fallen over if it hadn't been there. "What?"

"They're dead." She made it an accusation. "Eloy and Aurelio are dead."

His lips trembled. Tears flowed down his face. He said: "I didn't know. I didn't know."

"They killed our family." She stabbed at the air between them. "Are you one of them?"

"Of course I'm not one of them!"

She didn't believe the anger in his voice. It sounded forced, even accounting for the obvious lump in his throat. "What are you doing here, then?"

"I'm surviving," he snapped.

"I'm surviving. This is surviving." She pulled at the worn, bloodied fabric of her summer dress. "What are you doing?"

"What choice did I have?" He made it a plea for understanding.

"Run away."

"I couldn't run away. They found me in the schoolhouse. With the students." He took a step toward her, but she didn't give him ground. "With the children, Fina, What was I supposed to do? Let them burn us out?"

"And where are the children now?"

He looked away. "I don't know."

"Then why are you still here? Run. Away."

He sagged against the wall again. "There's no point."

"How can you say that?" She suddenly wanted to drive the point into his stomach, and leave him here to die. It was better than imagining that this was the man who had once been her most beloved brother.

"There's nothing out there! You can't get away. You're just wasting your time. Come with me, and we'll fix it. I'll get you some hot food." To her astonishment, he affected a friendly smile.

"You are one of them," she hissed.

"Fina, listen to me. They don't want to hurt you. They don't care what happens to any of us. They just want one thing, and it's in the bunker. If they get that, they'll leave. And they'll take us with them."

"Take us with them?"

"Wherever we want to go!" He took another step forward, and this time she let him take two before stopping him with the bayonet. "This place is finished. There's nothing left."

"That isn't true."

"Aren't you the one who always wanted to leave? This is our chance. It's not what we wanted, but it's what we have. Give them what they came for, and we can go. You and me and Yésica."

"Yésica is dead, too." It felt like hot iron in her mouth, but the satisfaction she felt when his jaw dropped was worth it. She kept up the assault. "And father?"

"Father and mother have to give them the bunker." He was blinking rapidly, trying to process what she'd just told him. "We, we have to make them understand."

"Mother isn't going to understand," she said in a low voice.

"She has to. Fina, these people, they told me things. Things about Zevala."

"She won't understand."

"Fina, this village—"

"She won't understand because she's dead, too."

He closed his eyes for a moment. He didn't know it, but with the constant stream of tears down his sharp cheeks, he strongly resembled their mother in her final moments.

"They killed her. And they were going to do worse."

His jaw worked, like he was chewing on his words. Nothing came out.

"They tortured her with a pair of rusty scissors, and they left her to die in filth."

He began to hyperventilate.

"They have to die."

He slammed the back of his skull against the wall, once. Twice. Three times.

"I'm going to kill them all."

He opened his eyes. Her father's eyes. Her sister's eyes. Her eyes. "You can't kill anyone."

"I can."

"You can't. They'll kill you." There was genuine terror in his voice, behind the atonal overlay of shock.

"They won't."

"I can't protect you if you go."

She pressed the tip of the bayonet against the breast of his jacket. "You're coming with me."

"I can't—"

"YOU'RE COMING WITH ME!" she screamed, until her throat caught short in agony.

"FINA!" He raised both hands to hush her, brushing the bayonet aside in the process. "Be quiet! They'll hear you! You'll ruin everything!"

"They killed our mother, Ernesto. She's dead. And grandfather. Eloy. Aurelio. Yésica. Old man Lanzo. All of them." She felt that if she could just make him see, if she could repeat it until he knew it was true, could feel it was true, then he would understand. And come away. And help her.

"And you dying too won't bring them back," he said.

"Help me," she begged him.

"I'm trying to help you."

"Help me stop them."

"You can't stop them."

"They're evil."

"What did Aurelio teach you? Nobody is evil. Evil is action or inaction. People are people."

She shook her head bitterly. "Not these people."

"We aren't strong enough to stop them." His voice and movements were growing frantic. "The best we can do is survive."

"That's not the best I can do. I can do better."

He edged along the wall, towards an alarm box. "I'm going to call the guards."

"You won't."

"They'll let me take care of you. They trust me."

"Who did you kill to make them trust you?"

"I'm going to call the guards," he repeated. Once again, he wouldn't look at her. Perhaps he never would again.

He reached for the red lever. She knew she could stop him. She knew she could stop herself from doing what came next.

"Please trust me," he said. "I'm your brother."

"I have no brothers."

She walked back out into the hall, then broke into a run before she could change her mind.

She dumped the rifle in the bushes as she walked away from the fire, which blazed merrily in the moonlight. The whole facility was gone, a few dozen men and women still inside, called in by Jorge's distress call. The last she'd seen him, from her perch on the first tree outside of spark range, he'd been trying to organize a bucket brigade. Rushing in and out, attempting to salvage the comfortable home he'd chosen for himself.

The last time he went in, he didn't come back out.

Faintly, very faintly, she wished she could feel anything about that.

Nascimbeni swam back to consciousness slowly, fitfully. He didn't know why he had to. He couldn't remember going to sleep.

His head hurt.

"Your body is falling apart," a familiar voice teased him. "I'd get David to make you a new one, if we were on better terms."

He blinked away the bleariness, and found himself staring into the face of his former Deputy Chief. His nephew. The young man who might as well have been his own natural-born child. Romolo Ambrogi.

Shit. He'd made it maybe a few hundred meters into Markey's tunnel before the other lunatech had coldcocked him, and now he was… somewhere else. The walls were shining orange, and there were patterns just below the surface, shifting in expanding and contracting spirals. Like nautilus shells, only made up of what looked like blood vessels.

"Get up." Ambrogi stretched, then reached out a hand.

Nascimbeni rose to a seated position, but ignored the offer of aid. "You don't have to do this, Romo."

Ambrogi grinned. "Ah! The agency conversation." He reached down and effortlessly hauled Nascimbeni to his feet, via his shoulders. "It always comes up at times like this."

"What?" Nascimbeni rubbed at the sore spot on the back of his head. "What are you talking about?"

"'You don't have to do this!' You get that from the movies." Ambrogi laughed, then spun Nascimbeni around and pushed him forward. "That's what the good guy says to the bad guy when they think, because they're the good guy and they just don't understand bad, they can talk their way out of the problem. But the bad guy has no agency, of course, because nobody is bad by choice, they're just made that way, so naturally the pleas fall on deaf ears. That's the thing that always amuses me about this. When people say it. Because what do they think they're going to get? They're going to get murdered, of course. Because that plea never, ever works."

"You aren't a bad guy." He looked over his shoulder as Ambrogi put a hand on the back of his vest, forcing him to walk forward. "You're my son."

There was no trace of recognition on the other man's face. "As though those are mutually exclusive. Come on, Noè. Your actual son drank his family into debt, and his wife killed herself in despair. You are wholly capable of having bad children — although I admit, he took a page out of your book in that regard. I wonder if little Flora will turn out any better?"

He grimaced. "This isn't about them."

"And it isn't about who you think I am, either. Because I'm not."

"Not what?"

"Not him. Not anymore. He's gone. It's just me and me and me, and me, and me and me, and also me… or is that one me too many?" The man was fairly skipping along the cobbled stone surface as the tunnel widened out before them into a veritable chasm.

"Then how do you know about Gallo?"

"You got me there!" Ambrogi laughed. "Must be there's some small part of your nephew clawing around inside my noggin, screaming, trying to get out!" He pounded at his skull enthusiastically. "Or maybe not. Maybe this is what he's always wanted, to really let loose, you know? You and his dad set him up for life. He never got to pick his path. Now he can go wherever he wants! Just walk straight the fuck through the walls if the mood strikes him. Strike the earth! Haha."

Nascimbeni's heart sank further with every word. He'd thought his revelation back at J&M had dispelled the endless streak of self-actuated bad luck, but here he was, making yet another mistake. Who was going to pay for this one? "He wouldn't do the things you've done."

The mirth drained out of Ambrogi's face all at once. "You can't have it both ways, old man. He can't be here and not here."

"You've twisted him around. You've brainwashed him. But that's still his body you're walking around in, and I know he'll beat you eventually. He's strong." He didn't really mean it. He was going through the motions, just to see what it could get him.

It certainly got him something.

"Strong?! You think he's strong? Let me tell you about strong, Noè Nascimbeni." The other man stopped him cold by looping his fingers through his vest's sleeve holes, and spun him around again. "Your strong boy, Romolo Ambrogi, got hit by some pipe spray and turned inside out. Do you know what that looks like? It looks like your face and arms and legs and cock and balls sucking into themselves and squirting out a gooey reddish-grey juice that used to be your guts in every direction, and then your skeleton falls over. That would be the slow-mo replay. In practice, it just looks like you blow up. Like a balloon!" He mimed an explosion. "BLOOSH! A water balloon, only the water is red and grey and thick. He left bits of himself all over the room. Absolutely plastered the walls — Markey would have been so jealous! — and covered the ceiling, washed the windows, shit and piss and the stuff of life all up in the tiles and grout. There's still a tiny little bit of his sphincter embedded between two of the concrete panels, did you know that? I could feel it when I was walking around in what used to be his body, on September the 8th. I can still feel it, point of fact."

He felt the floor going out from under him. He couldn't feel his legs. He was sure he was about to collapse, or have another heart attack. "That… didn't happen."

A flicker of doubt crossed Ambrogi's face.

Nascimbeni advanced on him. "That didn't happen! Not in this timeline! HOW DO YOU REMEMBER THAT?!"

"I remember everything." The other man didn't back away, but his expression was hardening into a mask. The levity was gone.

"Then you know…" Nascimbeni shook his head. "You know that none of this was meant to happen! You know we're stuck in a cycle!"

"I've been stuck in a cycle since the first man wrote down the first rule, child. And until the rules are broken, all of them, I'll just keep pedalling on. Because I do have to do this." He shoved Nascimbeni again, and again, until they were both facing down the tunnel once more, heading for the sickly light ahead. "And you have to help me."

Ibanez was about to take the shot when Markey suddenly stiffened, and turned to face one of the hundreds of tunnel entrances dotting the city's dome of rock like cells in a honeycomb. A flash of orange in her peripheral vision; she brought the scope around, and saw something that made her heart skip a beat.

God damn it, Noè.

Markey abandoned his unfinished statue as though he had already forgotten it, left it quivering and trilling behind him as he hopped up onto a hundred-foot aqueduct to approach the new interlopers. There was probably half a kilometre of impossible city between them, sloping streets and tiered gardens and multi-storey abominations, rivers flowing with human treacle — by now she was sure the pair had somehow managed to liquefy half of Grand Bend to get their raw materials. Ambrogi chucked Nascimbeni down a short set of stairs, then headed on to meet his rival. After checking to make sure her fellow Chief was no worse for wear, she aimed the directional microphone between them and waited for the twain to meet.

Markey's voice came through first, gradually rising in strength as he approached the midway point. "You aren't welcome here."

"That's not how it works," Ambrogi retorted. "Freedom of movement, remember? I go where I want, and so do you. You could have visited my salt caves any time."

"And be reminded how you betrayed me? Betrayed the work?" Markey's hands balled up into fists as he jumped down from the curb to mount the street Ambrogi was walking along. "We were going to create masterpieces together. Together. Two sides of the same—"

"Two sides," Ambrogi laughed. "Two out of seven. What can we accomplish together? Nothing. We pair off, like we're the same as them." He gestured over his shoulder at Nascimbeni, still lying prone at the bottom of the steps. "But we aren't. It doesn't matter what clothes we're wearing, what's inside makes the difference."

"I've seen what's inside." Markey waved his hand, and as one the entire city let loose a keening wail that momentarily reduced Ibanez to tears. She blinked them away, not wanting to risk shifting the microphone and missing any of the baffling dialogue. "I've seen all of it. There's nothing special."

Ambrogi thumped his chest. "You haven't seen what's inside one of us. That's what Ana is working on. They want to find a way to recombine us, you understand? Make us one again. Can you think of anything more revolting? More offensive to the cause?"

Markey snorted. "What cause? You ask each of us what freedom means, you'll get six different answers."

"Seven."

"Six," Markey repeated. He smiled wickedly. "You think I haven't seen what's inside us? You're wrong. Tell me, you speak to Del Olmo recently?"

Ambrogi stopped dead in the centre of a plaza, just beyond the point Ibanez was aiming at. "What?"

Markey met him there, running his hands through the sizzling green ooze of a projectile fountain fed by vomiting human gargoyles. "Del Olmo. You know what was inside of him? Sweet fuck all except for the gooey usual. You're not the only one who can tear something apart."

Ambrogi was speechless. Ibanez caught movement out of the corner of her eye, and afraid that Nascimbeni might be trying something stupid, she swung the rifle around.

Roger was standing over him, helping him to his feet. The two Victims, intent on their argument, didn't even notice. She intentionally caught the light with her lens, and Roger's head snapped instantly up. He prodded Nascimbeni in the back, then pointed.

Nascimbeni looked up at her. She zoomed in as close as she could with the electronic scope, until she could see every wrinkle on his face. Her hands were steady. She held his face in frame.

He had never looked so old.

He nodded, once. Then bit his lip.

Then turned away.

Roger was leading him back up the stairs as she swung the rifle back around. It was settled, then.

All over but the crying.

She switched on the active targeting again, and placed the reticule over Markey's chest… then slowly, very carefully, adjusted her aim to target Ambrogi instead.

1994

20 June

There was nothing for it now. No reason to hold back.

Her sister was dead. Her mother was dead. Her brothers were dead. She didn't know where her father was, but the options were either dead or gone, and both meant he wouldn't be coming to her aid, or in need of hers. She'd learned all she could from the Insurgents, and the corpse she'd been practicing on had become an active health hazard, so she'd chucked it through the mess hall window on a stormy night and stayed up to listen to the howls of outrage in the morning. Their conversations had become more fearful, even superstitious in the past month. They called her a ghost, or a demon, or a monster. She once found one of them crying in the graveyard after midnight, praying in Latin, begging forgiveness, and she gave it to him after putting the scissor blade through his aorta. She didn't see any point in being petty. They were all going to die, and that would settle their accounts with her.

All she had left now was a single directive, a final card to play.

She stole into the cleft in the dead of night, when the guards were otherwise occupied with each other. She made a mental note: if she ever found herself managing a military of her own, she would never pair off sexually compatible partners. The cleft was narrow and slick, the rain just starting up again in earnest, and even in the bomber jacket she felt increasingly miserable. She kept bumping her elbows and knees on the rock. It hurt. She experienced hurt as annoyance at this point, and she didn't have time for annoyance. It distracted from the rage.

And there, suddenly, it was.

A pitch black pillar, chest height, sticking up out of the pass. There was a sheer stone wall behind it. She walked over, lifted the card, and tapped it to the pillar experimentally.

Nothing happened.

She examined the card more closely. There was a strange crosshatched pattern in the plastic; the longer she looked at it, the more details she could make out. In seconds it looked like the most complicated etching she'd ever seen in her life. In about a minute it hurt to look at, so she looked up.

The pillar was an absolute tangle of diverging and converging lines, like a bas relief of the courses of every celestial body known to man. She tried to follow them all, and felt dizzy in an instant.

She looked up at the rock…

…and it was gone. Not all of it, but enough for her to keep walking. She plunged down the new path, mind boggling at what she'd just discovered. That was the secret of the card. It had showed her how to proceed. The insurgents had lacked the key, and so couldn't make their way through. She imagined them reaching the pillar, and turning back frustrated. Could it really be that simple?

She walked for what felt like an hour, a strange tingling sensation at the back of her mind telling her the subtle effect was still working on her unconscious mind. She'd never seen anything like it, not even in the strange things the smugglers had brought them from the place they called Puerto Extrano. It its own way, it was as beautiful as the cobalt blue flowers. Perhaps even more.

She reached a metal door set in the cliff face, with a black plastic slit beneath a glowing red light. She looked at the card in her hand, and awkwardly inserted it. It took a bit of work to figure out the correct motion — keycard locks were not a feature of shack life in the village of Zevala — but eventually the light turned green, and the door slid open.

She'd never seen a door that opened on its own before.

She walked inside.

"I won't go back," Markey was saying. "I won't let them do that to me. And now they can't."

"You killed him," Ambrogi marvelled. "You magnificent bastard, you actually killed him!" He paced the plaza, swinging his hands through pillars and altars and statues, slicing holes in them and laughing. Markey was cursing him under his breath, and she knew she'd never heard language like that.

She'd never heard a language like that.

"They don't get to decide for us." Markey pulled himself up to his full height, a comical thing to do with his flabby frame and filthy tank-top. "That's the entire point. Mukami and Gwilherm? They're acting more like the other guy."

"You know what?" Ambrogi closed the distance between them suddenly, and Markey took a step away… then the former clapped the latter on the shoulder, and laughed with what sounded like genuine pleasure. "It's good to have you back, David. I think we might be able to work together again after all."

The rifle beeped.

She took the shot.

It impacted Ambrogi over his heart, right on his stitched nametag, and though the effect worked quickly it was far from instantaneous. The man's body came apart like a sand sculpture, splitting into discrete and identical pieces like one of Udo's golems forming in reverse, and for a terrifying second he appeared to be re-forming, so he had just enough time to shriek in terror before he disappeared entirely. Markey gaped in her direction, and the sound came from all around her. The entire city reverberated with unholy agony; she'd never heard a howl like that outside of a crib. He fell to his knees, eyes ablaze, and then he raised his hands in the air, and the city began to move.

All of it. All at once. The entire thing, every inch of the structure, shifted position towards her. Structures crawled over structures, stalactites and stalagmites inverted, and the pink water table rose up…

It was something between a warehouse and an office. She couldn't make heads or tails of the place, nothing about it made sense. She saw signs of occupation everywhere: bedrolls and cots, crates of supplies, papers scattered willy-nilly. It was like the pre-fab headquarters only writ large, writ very, very large indeed, extending on and on into the face of the cliff and under the ground surrounding Zevala. Had it always been here? Had this been the secret her mother and grandfather had meant, the one they had died for?

In the middle of what looked like a broad common area — she didn't really understand corporate architecture, though she had read a little about it in her grandfather's engineering books — she found the incongruent remains of a campfire, the stones burned black as ash from constant use. There were scraps of paper within, and she sifted through until she had a handful of mostly readable fragments.

Item Designation: ICS-001

Description: Item is Facility-01 and the surrounding environs.

Report: Appearing in Caleta San Roque in Chubut Province, Argentina in 17

parently originating from an al

eloped in Latin America before all other industrialized regions of the Earth due to a combination of the localized superabundance of anomalous phenomena and gove

rther, tentative modelling suggested that the effect could be reproduced v

ed to determine their relative position by the specific tint

cted to say the least. They have chosen to eject us from the facility, though they have promised amnesticization rather than termination, and I am inclined to believe them. When I told them rediscovery is inevitable, they told me they will be prepared. I have my doubts, but cannot fault their claim. After all, their anc

rateful for the opportunity to get out ahead of the problem, as I cannot share their pessimism. This light was brought to us, our little pearl of possibility, from across the blackness between w

None of that helped her at all.

21 June

She didn't notice it at first.

She was exhausted, so she slept, and when she woke up she felt like all her faculties had come rushing back all at once. Like she'd swept away months of sleep debt effortlessly. Then she checked the watch she'd taken off a dead insurgent, and saw that she'd slept for twenty-two hours.

She walked the halls, taking note of which doors were open and which were closed, what colour the lights over each keypad or card reader were. She picked up every piece of paper she could find, and read them. She still didn't learn much. There had certainly once been many people here, and they had conducted some sort of business which produced a lot of paperwork, but everything left behind was banal and useless to her. Accounting. Logistics. Human resources. Boring stuff.

She collected it for fire-starters, as apparently had her predecessors.

When she had enough to start a fire, that's when she noticed it. Fires had many purposes in survival: heat, cooking, drying, cauterizing, destroying. She didn't need any of those yet.

Not even cooking.

She wasn't hungry.

How was it that she wasn't hungry after having been trapped in here for the better part of a day? That was impossible. She should be ravenous.

A new kind of hunger took her when a voice came over a concealed speaker overhead: "Are you at home, little girl?"

It was the woman from the pier. The woman from the street.

The woman who had murdered Ernesto, caused Aurelio to die, ordered her mother tortured, and forced her to burn Jorge alive.

For that woman, yes. Fina was definitely at home.

She only had to figure out how to respond.

She found the communications controls in the security checkpoint near the front foyer, where an insignia not unlike the one on her bomber jacket, though not precisely the same, had been ineffectually buffed out of the tile floor. A strange mood took her, and she decided to wait and see if the murdering bitch wanted to talk badly enough to make a second entreaty.

As it happened, she did. "Trick or treat," came the mocking request.

Fina slammed what she hoped was the response button. "Smell my feet."

"We're done playing," the woman scolded. "Let us in, little girl."

"Or what? You'll blow my house down? Because if that's your plan, I have bad news for you."

"Don't mistake my patience for impotence. I'd prefer to do this right, take the prize intact, but if I really can't do that, if I can't wait you out, I'm going to have to risk a little collateral damage. "

She felt a sudden swell of victory in her chest. "I think you're lying."

"Generally a good bet," the woman chuckled. "Honestly, I think the world would be a lot better if people gave in to their natural instincts and lied all the time, openly and without shame. If that was the expectation. If you didn't have to stop every one in a while and think 'hey, wait a second, is it possible they're telling the truth?' Because let's face it, most of the time they aren't, so having to make that calculation whenever you speak with someone isn't only exhausting, it's a net waste of time."

"You really like listening to yourself talk."

"Only because I know you're listening, too. You know what a lie is, little girl? A lie is a creative truth. You ever hear the phrase 'the truth will set you free'? There might be no more ironic lie in all creation. Truth is rigid. Truth is a cage. Lies are freedom. This entire village was a lie, and it was free, and it was only the arrival of the truth that brought it down. Truth destroyed your life. So let's agree to lie to each other. I'll promise to let you go if you let me in, and you'll promise to let me in if I let you go, and I'll come in, guns blazing, and you'll try to pull some Home Alone bullshit, and we'll see who's more of a woman between the two of us. Sound good?"

"Maybe tomorrow." She yawned. "Schedule's full up today."

"Listen closely, you little b—"

She cut the line, and walked back into the depths of the facility. She'd seen some interesting buttons in a room that looked how she imagined a laboratory might, and she thought she might try pressing one.

…and then it wavered, the entire fantasy landscape all at once, like a mirage dispelling in the desert. The undercurrents flowing through it all had stopped, Ibanez realized, the glow was dying, and then the materials began to implode one by one. The water disappeared into a sudden sinkhole in the middle of the cavern, which began to swirl, churning up the bedrock like it was only so much chocolate pudding, and the spires began to topple down into it.

Markey was waving his arms frantically, like a symphony conductor or a mad wizard, and while the structures were responding to his whims, he couldn't seem to stop the dissolution. It was crumbling apart in front of her, the entire world was being sucked into some sort of void, and she suddenly realized what had happened.

The dial.

Ambrogi had provided Markey with most of his raw materials. They were entangled with his signature, tethered to him, and his vanished silhouette was falling down a hole into oblivion and dragging it all down with.

And then Markey fell, too.

The plaza collapsed beneath him, and he tumbled into the pit. His head snapped up, and he made eye contact with her through the scope, and he raised one hand as though to reach out and pluck her from her perch…

…and then he was gone.

1994

29 June

She came out the front door. By now she knew there were other ways out, knew in fact that she didn't need to exit back into Zevala at all, but it was only sporting to give them this chance. They thought they would be facing the same angry, frightened girl who had passed into the ICS building a mere four days ago by their reckoning. They probably expected her to try and shiv them with a bayonet, or creep along and set fire to their barricades.

They didn't expect the full combat armour, or the machine pistol, and they definitely did not expect her facility with both.

She had a dozen insurgents dead before she cleared the pass to the road, and a dozen more were splattered on the pavement before she started hearing panicked orders in her headset. They were using unsecured channels; that was funny. The scattered training materials had suggested it might be the case, but it had seemed like an outside possibility at best to her. Surely the Insurgency knew better than that, considering their origins.

The squads guarding the cleft entrance broke within minutes of her big exit. Her armour would have only been able to sustain a few direct hits, but they didn't land a single one. She was fighting fit, she had a low centre of gravity, and her aim was absolutely immaculate. She only wished she'd been able to figure out how to activate the heads-up display; she would have liked to have seen how many headshots she landed.

"What the fuck is going on down there?" a woman's voice shrieked over the radio. The woman. Scarface.

"She's got help!" Apparently whoever was answering had rationalized the dramatic change as an entirely new player entering the game. "We've got a real pro down here! Foundation!"

Foundation. She still didn't know what that meant, but it did feel good. She was, after all, still wearing the bomber jacket under her armour. For good luck, and a little extra protection if it came to it. She almost effortlessly knocked a sniper from his roost on the roof of the Arechavaletas' shack, and then another on the second floor balcony once belonging to the Pastors. Not many families had a second floor in Zevala, and now there was one less; she tossed a grenade up there, for good measure.

There was a sudden roar overhead, and she looked up to see a reprise of what had once been the most nightmarish vision of her life.

The planes were back.

She saw the insignia. She saw the first bomb falling, and ran hell for leather at the cliffside. They wouldn't be bombing the water, they'd bomb out the buildings first—

Like something out of a song, the bomb exploded in mid-air. She heard the rattling of machine-gun fire, and then the plane followed suit. Its wreckage collided with the ruins of the Outer Reach, which shifted in its watery grave.

There were more Insurgency planes in the air now, but they were being accosted by what she could only assume was a renewed assault by the Foundation fliers. They'd returned at the best possible moment — assuming they weren't going to try to stop her from murdering every last occupier in her village.

They were hurriedly setting up more anti-aircraft batteries at the pier. She'd seen the Foundation trying to do the same during the battle that had taken her sister, presumably having airdropped the heavy batteries in, but it hadn't worked out. The insurgents seemed to mean business, though, so first order of business was spiking those emplacements to give her air support a fighting chance.

If her enemy had expected any resistance, they certainly hadn't expected it to come equipped with thermal charges; she made short work of the battery in the wreckage of the Gallardo shack, then made good time to the next one occupying what had once been the Ramos' green wine vineyard. The jets shot overhead, flying dangerously low, and occasionally one came down in a plume of smoke and fire to impact the ground, or the water, or even one of the houses. It didn't matter. It didn't matter at all.

The woman had made threats. She'd cajoled. She'd joked. She'd thought she was talking to the same naïve and inexperienced girl who'd first walked into the cleft, had believed every day that twenty-four hours of privation had been all that had transpired between their little talks, so she'd tried all sorts of guileless promises. But she hadn't offered up prisoners, and that meant she didn't have any.

Everyone who had lived in Zevala was either gone, or dead, or her.

There was a strange sound on the air now, a sort of rhythmic chopping, and she turned her head to see a helicopter landing in the tiered gardens outside the Evangelista and Carmona shacks. Now, what could that be for? She started running for it before she had the answer, so confident was her hunch, and it was proven correct when the white-clad woman staggered out of the smoking granary and dove into the chopper's open door.

Fina raised her weapon, aimed it at the rotors, and fired.

An empty chamber.

She reached for her belt, still running, and found no grenades.

She couldn't bring the chopper down.

So she leapt for it.

She caught the rail, and tried to haul herself up as the craft began its wobbly ascent. The woman leaned out the door, looming over her, and shouted: "Where did you come from?!"

"This is my home!" Fina reached up and clamped one gloved hand over the woman's shoe, and squeezed. From the scream that followed, she must have broken at least a couple of toes.

"Get off me, you little bitch!"

"I'm going to eat your heart," she growled as she pulled herself into the helicopter's cabin."

"Already beat you to it." The woman fell back on the couch, and the last thing Fina saw before stars consumed her vision was the bottom of the cane thrusting straight for her helmet's faceplate.

It didn't make sense. It was probably just the adrenaline again. But she felt like she was falling in slow motion, falling into the bay, diving down to the waters where it was cool and dark and safe. She turned her head as she fell, and before the hull of the Outer Reach obscured her line of sight, she saw an Insurgency bomber spiralling out of control to land on the cleft and pulverize the little passage into Facility-01.

At the moment she struck the water, the village seemed to shimmer. Like asphalt on a hot day. Or a vanishing mirage.

When she was over the shock of her landing, after she pulled off her helmet and started to strip out of the heavy armour to keep herself from drowning, after she glanced up at the escaping helicopter and watched it sail into the sunset unmolested, the planes intent on shooting each other down, after she saw the tramp steamer's superstructure finally give way under the force of a nearby detonation, sinking beneath the surface of the harbour, she realized the pier was gone.

And the burned out lighthouses.

And the town hall. And the granaries. And every single shack, the ruins of her own included. All that was left was the still-smoking hulk of the Insurgency facility, and fires in the trees and on the hillside.

The village of Zevala had vanished.

Ibanez ran.

The cave and the pillars and the bedrock were all doing the cha-cha-cha. It was like something out of a movie, boulders falling in place behind her, split-second Indiana Jones shit. Her mind was awhirl as she plunged through the tunnels, relying on muscle memory to take her along the correct route, relying on the muscles themselves to get her out of the radius of effect. Was that even possible? What part of this cave wasn't entangled with Ambrogi? For an ice-cold moment, she wondered if she'd destroyed the entire Site.

And then she realized that the rumbling she still thought she heard was only in her ears, was in fact her pulse, and she allowed herself to skid to a stop. Her uniform was torn. Her hair was plastered to her face. She stank of sweat, she was covered in dust, and she was alive.

She turned around.

There was a yawning, endless chasm behind her, into which soil and rock and oh my god those are trees were falling like heavy rain.

She watched it fall until the way was truly shut, then staggered back to her feet and headed down the tunnel again.

She turned the correlation dial on her weapon all the way to the other side, just in case.

Her teeth ground themselves shut tight as she walked the path back to civilization, and she felt her eyes following suit. Everything hurt. Everything hurt. But it was over.

It was over, again.

She'd won.

She allowed herself a moment of relief when she saw Roger and Nascimbeni standing at the next cache, waiting for her. She didn't grant them the courtesy of a response to their entreaties, though the old technician in particular looked desperately in need of consolation. She knew she ought to say something. Tell him precisely what those monsters had and had not been, where fault did and did not lie.

But she'd had enough of fault lines for the day, and enough of responsibility for damage control. They were alive, and their targets were not.

That ought to have been good enough for anybody.

1994

1 July

Site-34: Undisclosed Location, Argentine Republic

She was sat in a comfortable chair — it wasn't meant to be comfortable, but after what she'd been sitting on over the past month, it was an almost unimaginable luxury. She could feel it, but it didn't mean anything to her. The chair was sat in front of a table, a very impressively non-detailed table: all dark metal, perfectly angular, no extraneous flourishes. There was nothing on the table. It was probably bolted to the floor, based on how flush it was with the tiles and the way they seemed to lap over the edges of each leg bottom. There was a bed in the rear of the room, definitely bolted to the wall and floor, with white sheets and a white pillow. The walls and floors and ceiling were white as well: tiles, tiles, and more tiles. There was a single light in a recess above the very centre of the table, casting a glow over all the room which was, unsurprisingly, white. It wasn't a lot to take in, which was good, because she wasn't taking anything in at all. The last thing she'd felt in Zevala, sopping wet, standing over the corpses and wreckage and inexplicable lack, was a pinprick on the back of her neck. She hadn't felt anything since waking up in this chair. She didn't even feel groggy. Whatever had been in that needle, it was good.

There were two doors in this room. One looked heavy-duty, and probably led to the exterior, whatever that was. It had a little porthole. The other door yawned wide open, and as it was in the precise centre of the wall, she could see where it led from where she sat: a small bathroom unit, with a shower and toilet and sink. All dark brushed metal, again on white. She didn't need to use any of that, because someone had apparently cleaned her up and put her in a fancy orange uniform with a name tag reading D-32368, whatever that meant. Not that she much cared. She'd done everything she needed to do. She was at loose ends now. She was, herself, a loose end. She expected to be tied off at any moment.

The other door opened, after clicking three times and beeping once, and a… man, walked in. He was old. He was very, very old. Older than anyone she'd ever seen, and there had been some oldsters in Zevala. He was hidden within a grey three-piece suit and wearing a grey hat — she thought it was called a 'fedora' — all of which looked to be reasonably expensive and well-kept, but the parts of him that were him looked tired and worn-out. His skin was pale, almost translucent, there were lines on lines on lines on his face, and he was deathly thin. He moved with a purpose, however, and when he sat down across from her she saw a faint twinkle behind his nearly opaque spectacles. He was alive inside, if very deep down.

The man affected a look of empathy — it was so blatant, she could read it even in her state — and said "¿Hablas inglés?"

She nodded.

"Hello, miss Ibanez. I am very, very sorry. My name is Vivian."

She didn't answer.

"There's a few things it would be very helpful for me to know at this juncture. We're recovering what we can from the site, but… well, I believe you saw. Can you tell me how many people lived in your village?"

She didn't answer.

"How many Insurgents did you kill?"

"I know I killed forty-seven. I saw that many, or at least heard them. There were a lot more I didn't see."

"Where did you learn how to do that?"

"Practice."

"Did anyone teach you?"

"They didn't mean to."

He smiled thinly. It was probably the only way he could smile; everything about him was thin. "There are some serious discrepancies in what little information we were able to extract from the insurgents on-site. The few you didn't kill, I mean."

She nodded.

"You would appear to have developed a great deal of skill in a very short period of time. A frankly impossible amount, by a very, very wide margin."

She'd finally lost patience. "Was I the only one?"

He regarded her carefully. "The only one who made it out?"

She nodded.

He nodded. "Just you."

"The insurgents killed them all?"

"Very likely." Scout's expression was kindly, but he was apparently not the sort to sugarcoat things. Then again, maybe he had simply read her receptivity well.

"My village was destroyed," she said slowly, "by the Chaos Insurgency."

Delfina Ibanez was seventeen years old — by now, she was pretty sure, though she'd quite lost track of time for multiple reasons — and she came from a small village with little to no outside contact. It was possible to say things like 'The Chaos Insurgency' to her without tripping her absurdity filter. She had after all been hearing about things such as 'Elephantine Trumpeters' and 'Great Globular Awks' until just recently.

"Yes," he agreed. "And we're not entirely sure why, although random acts of violence are rather their style. We know they were trying to build something at Zevala, and we think they partially succeeded, but you rather threw a spanner into the works." He smiled again. "Which rather impresses me, and that's no easy thing to do."

"Okay," she said. "Who are you?"

"My name is Vivian Scout. I represent the SCP Foundation."

"Okay," she repeated.

He steepled his hands on the table. They were skeletal. She could see every vein, every bone. "I have many questions for you, miss Ibanez, though I understand you may not be in an answering mood. I also have answers. Some, not all. Perhaps we can arrive at a few more together."

She shrugged. "Whatever."

She felt exposed under the colourless glare of the lights, and his glasses. "You have been traumatized. There are marks on you. You are hiding beneath those bruises, and that mask. I understand. For the moment, it will help. It won't help forever. When you need to speak to someone about what happened, really speak about it—"

"Ask me your questions." She straightened in the chair. "I only have one… maybe two, for you."

"Well, it's only polite to let the guest go first." Scout relaxed in his own chair. "What do you want to know?"

"Did we kill the Chaos Insurgency?"

He smiled sadly. "The damage you inflicted, and the damage we inflicted, were only two small cuts on a larger organism."

She nodded one final time. "Okay. Are you still trying to kill them?"

"That is one of our many, many goals. Yes. But it will take years."

She placed her hands where he could see them for the first time, and spread them wide. "I'm young. I've got years."

His smile became simultaneously warmer and much, much sadder. "There we differ, miss Ibanez. Let's make the best use of the time we have together."

"How are you feeling?"

She shrugged. "No different."

She and McInnis had the boardroom to themselves. He'd arranged it that way without having been asked. It was nice, she reflected, to have a boss who really understood you — particularly when you weren't in the mood to be misunderstood.

"How were you feeling at the outset?"

"Angry." She refrained from shrugging again, because she knew if she started, she'd never stop.

"And you're still angry."

"I think I'm always gonna be."

He clicked his tongue. "That isn't healthy."

"Beg to differ. It's kept me alive."

"You can't live only for death. One day you'll run out of other people to kill, or lose the ability to kill them, and there will only be one death left for you. And it will happen when you still have much to give the world."

"The world can get fucked," she snapped. "It's already taken more than its fair share."

"I would tend to agree. But yet you seem intent on sacrificing everything you still have."

She pursed her lips and expelled a frustrated hiss. "What do I have?"

"Your health. Your intelligence and determination. Your talents. Your friends."

"I'm doing this for my friends. You're welcome, by the way."

"You almost lost one of them because you wouldn't let him help you."

She narrowed her eyes, not only for effect but also to spare herself the clarity of his paternally judgemental face. "He helps himself, mostly. And he's right to. That's the way it's supposed to work."

"I can't have a security chief who only values her duty to protect. She needs to value the people she's protecting as well."

She shook her head in frustration. "What do you want me to say? That your respect and affection keeps me going? It doesn't. It couldn't. I can't be worrying about all of you when I'm trying to do my fucking job."

"Worrying about all of us is your fucking job."

She opened her eyes wide again. She almost expected to see him smiling. She'd almost never heard him swear before, not even in repetition.

"No," she said, after a moment's hesitation. "You're what gets in the way. I don't need to know you people have my back, because then I'm always wondering who's got yours, and I start looking back, and that's how I stop moving forward."

He steepled his hands on the table in front of him. "What if instead, we move forward together?"

"No."

He raised a brow. "Why not?"

"Because it isn't safe."

"It isn't safe for you to always be forging ahead alone, either."

"I don't need to be safe. I need to be moving."

"Just so long as you're moving forward, Chief."

She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. She would sooner have faced a firefight than a verbal sparring match with the newly-minted Administrator. "Meaning?"

"Zevala is gone. Every inch. Every trace."

"I know. I was there."

He favoured her with an infuriatingly pitying look before responding:

"Was?"

The Cruelest Fight

The Breach Goes On: Wrong Tomorrow

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