The Cruelest Fight - SCP Foundation

The Cruelest Fight

1994

9 January

Village of Zevala, Argentina

Fina stood on the end of the harbour pier and listened to the sea birds cawing as the freighter hove to. It was the Outer Reach, as always, the only ship which ever came to the little port of the little community of Zevala. Tucked away in a tiny, secluded bay behind a cluster of tall hills or squat mountains, connected by nothing so much as a footpath to civilization, this ship was their connection to a wider world. Her connection.

It came every month, the Outer Reach, bringing supplies of special interest up the coast from who knew where. In Arroyo Seco and Campana it sold its mundane cargo; in Zevala it sold miracles. Every time she would see the traders gathering at both ends of the pier, putting up their tents and gathering up their wares. The visitors would offer something new in the way of exotic animalia, stuffed or salted. Last month it had been "underpemmican," a dried and preserved meat product made from something between a bird and a fish which the smugglers — for they were obviously, blatantly, even flagrantly smugglers — called an "underpelican." The meat was violet, even spiced and desiccated. The month before that had brought "black hart" hides. Before that, "ironjaw" livers. Each new creature seemed more fantastic than the last, and even though nobody in Zevala knew what was coming before it arrived, they were always, always willing to buy. Her father had explained it like this: "We take what they bring us, or they'll stop bringing anything." In any event, most of it was sold on to the strangers who filtered in over the cliffs, brought in by the guides who were the only Zevalans to ever leave the confines of the village. Fina knew that one day, she would be one of them… if she couldn't swing a berth on the freighter, that was.

She spied her parents at the end of the pier, and waved eagerly. They waved back. Her mother was beaming, though her father looked troubled. This was normal, in both cases; they knew what these visits meant to her, and reacted accordingly. She was pleased to see her daughter pleased. He was worried about losing her.

He was right to be worried, of course.

2003

17 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Ibanez was examining the restored telekill sheath with Veiksaar, making blissfully little small talk since they were both too tired and antisocial to care, when what had looked like a solid wall panel revealed itself to be a sliding partition by sliding aside. A filthy, filthy man in an oil-stained blue labcoat stepped out.

"Hello," said Trevor Bremmel.

Ibanez already had one hand on her holstered gun. "What the fuck?"

"Where the fuck have you been?" Veiksaar demanded.

Bremmel turned around, and pointed. "In there."

Ibanez took a steadying breath. "Sure, but—"

"Hiding," he added.

"The whole time?"

"Yes."

Veiksaar's button nose turned up even more. "You smell like a toilet."

"Well, yes." He nodded. "I should hope so."

"Bremmel's back."

Lillian looked up as Ibanez strolled into the workshop they'd cobbled together in the secure server room. She had the gun on the table in front of her. She was covered in a multitude of colourful fluids, and Ibanez thought she hadn't ever seen her look quite so irritated.

"Well, thank fuck," the tall woman grunted. "I can't figure out how this piece of shit is meant to work."

"Are you going to sing again?"

Fina spun in place, confused, then laughed as she realized the sound was coming from over the edge of the pier. She walked to the end of the boards, looked down, and saw her sister swimming in the bay. She considered kicking dust down onto her, there being no shortage of that thanks to the bowl of same they lived in, dotted though it was with strangely resilient thick copses of trees and scrub, but what was the point? She'd just dunk down and wash it off anyway. So Fina knelt down instead, and said "Maybe. Are you going to get chopped up in the rotors?"

Yésica dunked her head underwater — Fina sighed — then came back up and spat out a thick stream in her direction. She had already dodged to the side, expecting the assault. "Your imagination is too violent, mi reina. Big ships don't have rotors."

Fina snorted. "How do you think they move about?"

"They have engines."

She cocked her head to one side. "What do you think the engines do, stupid?"

They were speaking English, mostly. She was aware this was something of a peculiarity in Argentina, which was of course primarily Spanish, but Zevala was different. The Zevalans rarely if ever conversed with other Argentineans. If they spoke to outsiders, it was the crews of the smuggling ships, and the smuggling ship crews used English as their lingua franca. (She was just old enough to recognize the irony of this statement.) Fina had once read a comic book with a Spanish protagonist who had spiced up her English dialogue with Spanish phrases — helpfully translated by the editor in a footnote — for what she had to assume was meant to be ethnic flavour. Very few people on Earth used their mother tongue in this way, unless they were legitimately at a loss for words. In Zevala, however, it was the prevailing norm. English was perfectly serviceable, but it lacked a certain… something, sometimes.

Her sister had chosen to avoid the losing battle, and pulled herself up onto the pier instead. "You didn't wear the flowers."

Fina always bartered with the smugglers for the special blue flowers they brought from… wherever it was they went when they weren't trawling the coast of Argentina. They lasted a long time, keeping their colour and springy flexibility for far longer than did the local flora, and Fina liked to wear them in her hair. Sometimes she was still wearing them when the smugglers returned the next month, though by then they were beginning to grey and droop. "It looks desperate," she explained as her sister dried off beside her in the afternoon sun. "Bad bartering technique."

Her sister laughed. "You're already half-merchantman, eh? Maybe you think they'll hire you."

She tried not to stiffen at the remark, but couldn't entirely hide her reaction. Her sister raised an inquisitive eyebrow. "You're not seriously…?"

Fina stood up. "Forget about it. Where are Eloy and Jorge?" Two of their three brothers were young, though still older than Fina and much older than Yésica, and prone to running around wild during the day once their work was finished. Their oldest brother, Jorge, was always found at the watch tower on the northern end of town.

"Eloy is reading for school." The little school of Zevala handled all grades simultaneously, having only to teach nineteen students in total. Eloy would have been about to start university, if he'd lived in a big city. "And I don't know where Jorge is. I'm not his nanny."

"No, that's me." Fina ruffled her sister's soaked hair, to an indignant squawk of protest. "I'm nanny enough for all of you."

They watched the ship approach together as the sun rose higher and higher into the sky. Fina fancied she could see the speck of a distant airplane as her sister dove back in.

2003

18 October

"I'm going on the hunt."

She didn't phrase it as a request, or a proposal, because it wasn't either of those things. She was explaining to the group what was about to happen. That was all.

They nevertheless responded as though their input was required. "It's not safe to go out yet," Nascimbeni told her with knitted brows.

"I'm on the pill." She dropped her fanny pack on the table for emphasis. "So to speak. I'll be fine."

"You can't keep using that indefinitely." In the absence of a medical doctor — Forsythe was far too busy gathering empties and trying to get a rise out of them — the bleeding heart role fell naturally to Harry. "It'll start leeching your brain out of your ears."

"I'll be careful. This is going to be an entire exercise in care."

"I take it you'll be hunting V-4 and V-5?" McInnis had his fingers steepled on the desk, his collar starched, his expression calm. Just another day at the office.

She nodded. They were experimenting with calling the Victims by their designations now. It was easier to discuss their murder when they didn't have names. V-4 was Ambrogi, V-5 was Markey. They weren't people, they were vectors. This wasn't just a convenient fiction; as far as they knew, it described actual fact.

"Hold up." Nascimbeni raised a superfluous hand. "I thought we'd decided to hold off on violence until we figure out whether we can fix their brains?"

Ibanez pulled out her tablet and chucked it at him. It rolled corner over corner across the room, the shock-proof casing making dramatic rubber thud noises every time it struck the tabletop. Like a shuriken, it hit its mark precisely. He looked down at the grisly image she'd queued up for just this moment of protest. "That," she told him, "was Ignaz Achterberg. Eileen culled a screengrab from the cameras on her last vulnerability exploit run. Flick past him when you're sick of the gore."

Nascimbeni reached down and flicked the image to the left, then recoiled in disgust. "That," she told him, "is Veasna Chey." If he'd scrolled right, he'd be looking at Dominic Blades from EPAU. She had no end of images to choose from. "These are all people your boy went through, and there's a whole lot more where those came from. Achterberg wasn't even supposed to be out there, he just got off his meds and slipped past the guards, got confused, got lost. Now he's dead." She extended her hand, and wiggled her fingers. "Gimme."

He slid the tablet back to her. She scrolled a little more, then slid it back. Nascimbeni barely glanced at the new image before blanching. "I don't know who all of those are," she admitted. "But at least one of them is Ruya Darwish."

He turned the device off, and did not return it to her as though he could thereby stop the butcher's bill from rising. Ruya Darwish was one of his technicians, junior grade, a new hire just last year. She was nineteen. Either Ambrogi or Markey or both had inserted both of her arms into her urethra.

"They need to get gone," she told him. She was telling the rest of them too, but only he really needed to hear it. "I'm going to make it happen."

He nodded imperceptibly.

McInnis was watching him. When he saw the assent was given, he nodded more overtly. "I endorse your plan in concept, Chief Ibanez. What of the execution?"

She pushed back her chair, pressed both hands onto the table, and hopped effortlessly on top. She walked to the tablet and picked it up, hardly making a sound the entire time. "Yes," she said. "That's certainly the word for it, sir."

The planes roared overhead. They were black, low flying, and slow enough for her to make out the insignia beneath each wing. A black and white swirl, with a red dot in the middle. She stared at the insignia while the boards of the pier exploded and the ship began listing to starboard and the figures on its deck began to dance and something wet splashed everywhere around here. Something exploded in the distance. The planes had passed over her, and she was untouched. The gunfire continued.

She turned to look behind her, in a sort of trance. She knew this couldn't be real, and the fact that none of it touched her confirmed this. She heard the groaning of metal as the ship's lower hull rose over the waterline beside her, saw the market stalls in tatters and the people lying in coffins of shattered pier-board, blood everywhere, and she heard the ones who weren't yet dead begin to scream as the planes crested the western hills and came around for another pass.

She walked dreamily to the side of the pier again, and looked into the water. Her sister was gone.

"FINA!"

She turned back toward the market, and there was one of her brothers. Eloy. There was blood on his shirt, but it didn't look like it was his. He loped toward her. "We need to go!"

She wanted to laugh. What an obvious thing to say! And what a silly one, too. None of this was real. None of it was happening.

The planes were strafing the village now, pointlessly peppering the odd metal sheds and silos with lead. As her brother hauled her by one hand to the end of the pier, past the bodies — they smelled like a barbecue in an outhouse — she saw a larger plane break off from the group and deposit a stream of parachutes along the western bank. They drifted down; they were already opening fire on the fleeing crowds with machine guns by the time she and Eloy had reached the square.

"Eloy!" a man's voice shouted, as the villagers cowered behind the grain stores or called out for their children or simply ran for their lives. It was Lanzo, the old man whose house was closest to theirs. Fina had stolen a pie from his window when she was only six, and they had been friends ever since. "Get your sisters to the hall! We're going to activate—"

He suddenly leapt in the air, and spat blood at them. Fina belatedly heard the machine gun fire, and traced it to a man dressed all in black who had landed on the dockmaster's flat office roof and was spraying the square indiscriminately. Eloy darted forward to catch Lanzo as he fell, but the old man was fat and awkward and all dead weight, so instead he only managed to dump the corpse onto his sister. They fell into the dust together, she and old Mr. Lanzo, and she felt something hot and wet spreading from his shirt to her skirt, and he drooled on her face as his body spasmed and that stench of iron and sulfur returned.

This is real.

She began to wail.

Her brother leaned down and heaved the old man's body off her, then grabbed her shoulders and shook hard. "We need to GO!" he repeated, stupidly, and she wanted to scream at him, and she scrambled to her feet and ran, ran back to the market, back to the pier, back to where the ship was sinking in the cove and more planes were filling the horizon, and she heard him calling her name but she didn't care. She was running back time, back to when the world had made sense.

She fell down again as a massive burst of air forced her off her feet, and another of those tremendous explosions sounded somewhere behind her. She rolled over onto her back, as it began to rain.

It wasn't rain.

Eloy wasn't following her anymore.

Eloy was gone. The end of the pier was half missing, the market had been obliterated, and the air smelled like the curing-house on slaughter day.

Across the water, planes were strafing the cattle herds in their enclosures.

She was covered in her brother's blood.

Her heart broke at the absolute top of her lungs, and she didn't even stop screaming when something crept up from the edge of the pier, seized her roughly by the straps of her ruined dress, and pulled her into the bay.

2003

19 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

She had meant what she'd said. She was going to take every possible precaution, and do this right. Not because she was afraid for herself, but because if she failed, there would be nobody else to get the job done.

It wasn't that she didn't trust her people. She knew they were good at what they did. The ones who were left, in fact, were among the best. But none of them could do what she was going to do, because none of them had done it before.

Howard Yancy could hold his own in a facility shootout, because he'd been defined as a survivor in an assault on his police precinct by thugs hopped up on parafentanyl. Sandrine Holt could make a Laura Secord run through the caves and woods all the way to Kettle Point in a matter of hours, because she'd been picked up by a Foundation cordon after outrunning a pack of SCP-939. If the army of nobodies descended on them, the last man standing would probably be Lewis Bosch; he'd been found under a pile of bodies one metre tall when an MMA match between two middleweights went the wrong way, and one of them turned out to be a Sarkic fleshcrafter. Ibanez had the idea that these defining moments shaped the kind of agent you became, and she was in a class of her own in that respect. This was her task. No one else's.

That didn't stop Nascimbeni from trying to muscle in. He'd asked to help set up her route, outfit her with gear, even share in the expedition. She'd flatly shut him down on every count. It wasn't only that she didn't trust his motivations — though she didn't — but that she didn't much want to talk to him. She held a grudge like nobody's business, it was what made her who she was, she was still angry, and they had gone long enough without a heart-to-heart that the whole thing felt pointless and awkward. Better just to run.

So, she ran.

She took her journal and her telepill and headed out into I&T, past where the sheathe would have otherwise protected her, and hunkered down in a computer lab still covered by Eileen's cameras. She had the vague, probably inaccurate feeling that she could build up a tolerance to the telekill if she spent a little extra time toting it around before the big day. Nobody else could come and pester her here, since there was only one pill and the chance of possession was still extremely high, so she was able to read in peace.

Not that it was particularly uplifting reading, of course.

Markey, according to alternate-her's reports, had treated the tunnels and solid stone around the Site as his personal playground. He was making… Christ, what wasn't he making? Caves, temples, great big deep dark holes, maybe even a whole city underground, just for him. The reports were fragmentary, some picked up from the body cameras of unfortunate individuals hauled to their deaths (or worse), some from unmanned drones sent through by Nascimbeni — she was going to have to requisition those scans from him, she realized with rising dismay — and some firsthand, though surprisingly few. She got the impression that her alternate self had decided to bunker down very early on in the narrative, and she wondered why that was.

Ambrogi, on the other hand, had simply walked up to an exposed cavern wall one day and started whacking it with his arms, real Kung Fu shit, and it came apart like cotton candy. He went straight through the bedrock, pinwheeling away, pulling things apart — again, with his bare fucking hands — and stalking around Markey's caves and pulling them apart. Molecule by molecule, according to the eggheads.

You have a degree in structural engineering, she reminded herself. You're an egghead.

But the others wear it better.

She was a warrior. Alone among her staff, she'd been defined by war.

Not for the first time, Fina tumbled down in the inky depths of the Cala del Ciclo. But she had always been alone before, testing the limits of her lungs, pushing the boundaries of the world she could explore, against the better sense of her elders and even her peers. Now, someone else had drawn her in. They placed a hand over her mouth, and lifted her back up into the world of fire and smoke.

She coughed and spluttered, but the sound didn't carry far because the tiny fingers were still stretched over her lips. She fought fiercely against her attacker, kicking like a mule, and a voice hissed in her ear: "Stop."

She fought for a moment more before realizing she recognized the voice. She'd heard it in the late watches of the night, from the side of her bed, urging her to venture out and explore the village after dark. It was her sister. It was Yésica.

She stopped fighting, and together they floated beside the pier as the bombs continued to fall, and the great freighter canted dangerously away from its moorings. It was on fire. It was sinking. It was groaning as it rolled.

Eloy was—

"Look," Yésica breathed, and she pointed. The western end of the village sloped down to meet the beach, so it was hidden from their view behind the piles of the pier. They could see the sloping superstructure of the ship on fire, and over the bulk of its cabin, the setting sun blood-red. Against that backdrop, a woman was walking along the boards. She walked with a limp, and carried a cane. She stopped when she reached the end, standing in the centre of the bay, seemingly oblivious to the chaos all around her. Planes streaked across the sky, shacks disappeared in flashes of orange light, and the woman calmly placed both hands on the head of her cane and stared out across the waters to the ocean beyond. Another flash, and Fina could see she was a very old woman, very pale, with strangely distorted features. A deformity of some sort. A scar?

The unloading crane on the freighter suddenly swung toward them as the starboard deck touched the waters of the harbour, and it struck the water with a crash of spray. The woman didn't so much as glance in their direction. Fina kicked away from the pier, grabbed her sister around the waist, and began to pull them towards the shore.

"No," Yésica whispered, and pulled in the other direction. "No. Fina. This way."

Her sister knew the bay like no-one else. Their father liked to joke that she was half-mermaid. Fina let herself be led along the water's edge, shaded from view by the rocks. There were people scurrying back and forth now, people with guns. They were shooting. There was screaming. They passed a rock slick with blood, and then another, and then a body floating in the water. She wanted to scream, and she knew her sister wanted to scream, and she knew that neither of them would as long as the other didn't, so they were safe.

They were safe.

An eternity later, Yésica pulled them into a storm drain running beneath the southwestern road. They had swum across the bay, the long way around. They hid in the culvert, soaking wet but not shivering. The night air was hot. Hot with fire, hot with blood.

Hot with hate, she realized. She'd never known hate before, but somehow she recognized it now.

"Who are they?" her sister whispered.

She shook her head, long black hair sticking to her shoulders and restricting her movement. "I don't know."

"Who was that woman?"

"I don't know."

"What do you know?" Yésica hissed.

Fina pushed her back against the culvert wall. "Shut up." She looked out at the waters, which were glowing red, orange and yellow as the sun descended and the bombs still fell, then looked west to their salvation. For the first time since the pier, she really thought about what she was doing. She formed a plan. She started to move.

"Where are you going?" Yésica whispered behind her.

"We're going to the cabin." Fina heard her sister's feet stomping over the filthy metal. She was following.

"We should go home."

"We can't."

"Why not?"

She could still see the square. Old Man Lanzo.

Eloy.

"It isn't safe."

"But—"

"Mother and father will be in the town hall. It'll already be locked up."

"What about Ernesto? And Jorge? And—"

Don't let her finish. "They'll be fighting the fires."

"They need—"

Keep talking over her. Don't let her finish. Don't think about what she isn't saying. "We can't help them. We're too small."

"What happened to you?"

Fina stopped moving. Her breath was loud and heavy in the culvert.

"Fina? What happened?"

"We're going to the cabin." She reached back and seized her sister's hand. "I need to keep you safe."

The tunnel closed around them, emptiness ahead, fire spreading in the sky and on the water far behind.

2003

20 October

Nascimbeni was still begging her to let him help, and she was still shutting him down. She knew he couldn't be a part of what she was going to do. He'd never forgive himself. She was going to go after Markey first, so he'd have time to get used to the pain before she really twisted the knife; he would lament the loss of his most veteran tech, but his Deputy Chief and nephew? That was going to ruin him, and she found she didn't want that.

"You don't have to do this," he told her for what felt like the ten thousandth time.

"Anyone else was gonna step up, they would have by now." She was filling a backpack with ration bars.

"I mean it doesn't have to be done." He was following her back and forth through the cluttered supply aisle in the back of the server hall. "We can save them."

"That's what this is." She stuffed the bars into the bag with extra gusto. "This is me, saving them."

"They're alive, Delfina. Hasn't that sunk in yet? We're in a world where they're alive again. All of them."

"I don't know if that's true." She shook her head. "All I see is a bunch of knock-offs. Bad impressions. Got as much in common with the real thing as one of those Presidents figures at Disneyland."

"They're in there somewhere," he insisted.

"Well, they've got a few days to claw their way out before I go in hot." She did up the zipper, and hauled the bag over the table where the other three she'd already done were sitting.

"Your plan won't work."

"It's worked before."

"What does that mean?"

She sighed, and looked up at him. "There's no version of this conversation where I lay out what I'm gonna do in front of you and you convince me not to try it. I know for a fact this is the right way to handle these two, and there's nobody here with a better chance of seeing it through."

"But look," he said, pushing her earlier bags aside and spreading a printout across the table they were sitting on. "This is what I've been working on all year, apparently."

"It looks like spaghetti."

"That's how far my alternate self got in plotting out the tunnel network. It's comprehensive."

It certainly looked comprehensive. A splatter of caves mapped out by drone, until everything with a rotor in J&M had been spent without ever coming close to plumbing the whole thing. It was impressive. It was also useless.

"They'll have changed it all since then." She was filling her pack up with rations, jerky, and bottles of water. "You give me a map, you're just putting preconceptions in my head I'll have to overcome."

He sighed. "Del, I know how these things work. I'm an engineer."

"So am I."

He frowned. "Are you?"

"Yes. And you don't know anything I don't know about caves. But sure, this might come in handy. Thanks. Or should I thank him? The other you? Since this you has apparently done sweet fuck all for the cause."

He tapped the page for emphasis. "This is the merest fraction of what's down there. It's a god damn honeycomb. It's practically an entire foreign country, and most of it is desert."

She patted the nearest backpack. "That's why I'm planning out oases."

"What if it stretches on for miles? Dozens? Hundreds, even?"

"Then they die a month from now, instead of in a week."

"You think you can keep up your guard that long?" She recognized the strain of anxiety in his voice. "You think you can own them on their own turf, never make a mistake?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Without help?"

"Never crossed my mind that I'd be doing it with help."

She didn't regret the look of hurt which spread across his careworn face. Not very much, anyway. "Delfina, we have no idea what's happening topside. The worst of it could be down here. We have a chance to make things right. Start over. Correct our mistakes."

A wave of sympathy passed over her. She plunged it down. "It's an illusion."

"What if it isn't?"

"It's always an illusion. You can't go through the same events and get different results, because you are still you." She poked him in the chest to further emphasize each italic.

"We're here because that isn't true!" He was waving his hands in his own ethnic variety of emphasis. "We reacted to the same stimuli differently!"

"No, we didn't!" She found herself suddenly shouting. "What happened in September was completely new, because we'd spent a year changing the context! We're still the same people, you and me. Same people we always were. Walking in the same direction."

"What if it's the wrong direction?"

"Of course it's the wrong direction! We only figure out the right one by process of elimination. That's what I'm doing. Literally."

He lowered his voice. She couldn't tell if his energy was spent, or he was trying to sound reasonable in the face of her inflamed passion. "We know what we did wrong, and we can do it right this time. The way it happened doesn't need to be the way it is. We're branching off into unknown territory."

"We're the SCP Foundation," she reminded him. "We document the unknown, and we cut off the branches. That's also what I'm doing." She grabbed the last empty backpack, and headed back into the aisles. "You've made your argument. I'm not changing my mind."

He didn't respond. She started stuffing bottles of water into the bag, pretending not to notice that he was still there. When he hadn't left by the time she returned to the table, she sighed and asked: "You want to keep your map?"

"No, you keep it. You'll need to find your way back again."

1994

10 January

They crept along the cleft in the cliffside that led to their grandfather's cabin, the bursts and blasts of war receding in the distance and echoing through the trees. Fina went first, creeping like a mouse, urging her sister to follow only when she knew the coast was clear. Yésica was a fish out of water. She was no stealthier on land than was their father, more apt to step on a pig's tail than sneak stealthily through the underbrush.

"Where's your wife, old man?" a harsh voice sounded up ahead, and Fina pressed them both against the rock. She slid along the wall, up towards the edge, where fronds and blades of grass marked the plateau where her family had first settled long ago.

"Long out of your reach," her grandfather's voice declared defiantly.

She peered up over the edge, and saw him. Saw them. Two men in black uniforms and knit caps, with rifles pointed at her father's father. He was standing bare-chested in the wilderness, on the porch of his squalid home. He was blinking. He was probably drunk.

"Kids?" the speaking attacker snapped.

Her grandfather suddenly smiled. "You don't want to meet them."

The second man ignored the veiled threat. "You live alone, then? Any visitors? Houseguests? Grandchildren?"

"No-one." He crossed his arms. "Do what you came to do. Cross off your list."

And he spat on their boots.

"We don't have a list," the first man said. He pushed his rifle into her grandfather's chest, and pulled the trigger. A burst of flame that set his chest hairs alight, a burst of blood from his back, and he fell to the stairs with a heavy thud. "We're freestyling."

And they headed along the path, without so much as a backward look.

Fina made no effort to restrain her sister. They both loped up the dirt ramp and onto the scraggly lawn, then onto the steps where their grandfather lay bleeding, gasping and weeping in agony.

"Grandfather?" she felt herself saying. She didn't know what she expected him to say back.

"We have to help him." Yésica was crying too. Fina wondered why she wasn't.

"You can't," he gasped. His hand was clamped to the wound on his chest. She couldn't see where precisely he'd been shot.

Yésica shoved her. "You can move him into the cabin. You're strong."

"She's right," Fina nodded.

"I want to stay here," their grandfather grunted.

Yésica shoved her again. "He keeps booze in a cabinet. I know how to get in. We can sterilize—"

"Yésica…"

"WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!" she screamed, and this time Fina clamped her hand over her sister's mouth. Yésica's eyes were big, brown, scared and sorrowful.

"You need to be very quiet, child," their grandfather whispered. His voice, like his body, was shaking. "Like a little mouse."

Yésica's mouth worked against Fina's fingers. "Please…"

"You can't stay here." He coughed, and the sound was wet. "Take what I have, and go."

Fina let go of her sister's mouth, and leaned over her grandfather again. "Let me bring you where it's warm. I'll start a fire."

"Start no fires," he said. He had almost no voice left; when he spoke, it was really just the air leaving his body. "Start no fires, and let me lie."

She spoke her fear. "I don't want you to die."

"I'm going to die."

"No," Yésica whimpered.

"I'm going to die, right here, with you." He reached up with both hands — a great gout of blood rushed out of his chest, covering his legs and the steps below — and each of them seized one. "That's what I want. I feel numb. If you try to move me, I'll die screaming. I don't want you to remember me like that."

Fina's eyes were wet. "Why is this happening?"

He closed his eyes. "No deception lasts forever."

"What do you mean?"

"This place was a lie we told ourselves." He shuddered, and coughed again. "Until we believed it. But they didn't. They saw through. And we hid poorly… you'll have to do better."

"How?" Yésica almost wailed.

"Listen to your sister…"

"She's just a kid!"

His eyes opened again. They were unfocused. "She's never been just anything. Neither have you. Find your parents. Find your brothers."

"Grandfather… I saw—" Fina's voice caught in her throat.

"Find them," he repeated. "Promise her you'll find them."

"But—"

"Promise us both," he whispered.

He was watching her. She was watching her. The moon up above was watching her, and whatever God was letting this happen was watching her, too.

She nodded.

"Good," he said, and he smiled as the stars came out. "Sing me a song. Sing it softly."

She sang him "El Día Que Me Quieras," soft and low, so no-one else could hear.

He made it to the end, just barely.

Yésica was still sitting on the steps when she emerged from the cabin. "Where are we going now?" Her voice was dangerously flat, like she wasn't really awake. Wasn't really there.

Fina shouldered the backpack she'd found and hastily filled. "Where they won't find us."

"How do you know?" Her sister wasn't looking at her. She was looking at the body on the steps, hands folded over his heart, eyes still open to the stars.

"Because nobody ever has."

"What are we going to do there?"

Fina walked down the steps, avoiding the blood, and extended a hand. "You're going to figure out how to open these cans. I'm going to figure out…" She looked up, and let the wind dry her tears. "I'm going to figure out the rest of it."

2003

23 October

The caves seemed to stretch on endlessly, which, Ibanez mused, was almost possible. The amount of bedrock down here was impressive, and if Ambrogi and Markey had put their minds to it over the course of nearly a year, they could have built an entire metropolis of tunnels with their combined talents. She hoped they hadn't. But where she'd expected the first three caverns to be the only three caverns, she found instead that these were merely the vestibule to the mad technicians' loopy domain. There seemed to be a cave for every colour in the spectrum, each of them larger than the last, and most of them showed signs of having been hand-scooped by Ambrogi. The fourth cave left her in awe; the ceiling was maybe a hundred feet up, though she entered it at the halfway point in its rim wall, making the whole thing feel like a clamshell she was coming through the mouth of. She had a mental image of Ambrogi pinwheeling through solid rock, up and left and right and down, reducing it all to dust, then Markey coming through and scooping it up into the impressively horrible sculptures she saw all around her and… it made her feel really quite sick.

She took this as a reminder to snack on her ration bar as she fixed the next box beneath the overhanging edge of a stalagmite, rooted into a portion of stone which had eroded into cobbles thanks to a steady stream of water from the western wall. She consulted the map Nascimbeni's other self had prepared, shaking her head at the audacity of the effort implied.

She occasionally heard hoots and hollers from the farther reaches. She reacted with lightning speed to each, at first in mortal terror, later in the need to be always prepared. She couldn't afford to get complacent. Complacent people, almost certainly, got made into Markey's art nouveau.

That wasn't going to be her fate.

1994

21 January

Zevala wasn't very big, but Fina was very small. There were wide open spaces between the shacks, but they were full of gardens and shrubs and little outbuildings that gave her more than enough cover for moving around in, even in broad daylight but especially after dark. She'd spent much of her childhood hiding in plain sight, spying on her neighbours or sneaking up on her friends.

What she was doing now was the equivalent of going professional from the minor leagues.

There were people in combat vests and combat boots and toques everywhere, carrying a wide array of personal weaponry. They were closer to irregulars than disciplined soldiers, but she knew that if any one of them caught her, she would be killed, and if she was killed her sister would die one way or another. But still she scoured the arc of the village around the bay, searching.

Searching for the rest of her family.

So it was that one evening, as the sun dipped down below the wreck of the Outer Reach where the bow still peeked up over the waterline, she was in the town square when a siren sounded from far in the north. She glanced across the bay to where the larger shacks were situated, the ones which had once housed small families of comparatively well-off villagers. There was no such thing as being rich in Zevala, but due to the vagaries of trade a few people were more comfortably well-off than others, and they lived on the east end nearer the beach. That was where the siren was coming from; she could see bright lights over there as well, and faint variations suggesting that a small crowd was forming. The occupiers around her hiding space next to the well were all heading that way with alacrity, so when she saw her chance, she headed that way too.

It took her about half an hour to make her way along the coast, hugging the cliffside and staying away from the winding roads, the parade of black-clad mercenaries — were they mercenaries? was that what they were? — with their strange fanwheel insignia keeping pace with her. By the time she reached the Aguado residence, at the head of a long crop strip and across the way from the main lighthouse, there were dozens of people standing in a semicircle around a much smaller crowd on the road. There was a woman, the same woman she and Yésica had spied on the pier, and there were two young men on their knees. One of them was Ricardo Sala, who sometimes tended their garden when her father was too busy with village business.

The other was her brother Ernesto.

The woman was speaking in a loud, clear voice at the cleft in the rock behind the Aguado home. "You know how this ends," she said. "You know there's no-one coming to save you. What's the point of spending your last few days in an airlock?"

It wasn't clear what kind of response she expected, or who or where she expected it to come from, but she was met with only silence. The crowd stood silent too, watching her every move intently. Fina slid down the cliffside until only her head was above street level, a tiny inlet of the bay far below her. The cliffs were much steeper on this side, and a fall could easily be deadly.

The woman was leaning on her cane, but only with one hand. Fina couldn't see the other. "I know you can hear me in there."

She glanced down at Ricardo, and then Fina saw what was in her other hand. Just before she used it.

"I'm sure you heard that, too," the woman remarked mildly. Ricardo Sala was lying on the street, the entire left side of his face missing.

"Please," Ernesto said. His voice was surprisingly strong. It carried over the crowd. "Don't."

The woman laughed at him. "Why are you asking me? I have no power over what happens to you next." She gestured at the cleft. "Ask them."

"I am asking them." He glared up at her defiantly, then called over to the rock face again: "Don't let her in!"

And the woman shot him in the ear.

Fina couldn't feel more pain. It wasn't in her to hurt more than she already did. She found herself slipping down the slope when just moments ago her footing had been sure, and she felt another burst of unreality fill her mind, and the endless throbbing agony crowded out the signals from her eyes again for just a moment, but there was no lower level of despair for her to sink to. All there was, was the sense that everything was unravelling and soon nothing would be left.

She caught a protruding rock with her foot just in time to avoid spiralling away to a death in the cold, wet black.

"Cause and effect," the woman was saying. "Resistance, and death. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration."

Fina wanted to throw herself up the cliff, through the crowd, take the woman's gun and… no. Not that. Not with the gun. It would be too easy. It would be too clean. She wanted to take the woman's cane away, and bludgeon her to death with it. She wanted to see the look in her eyes as her skull deformed from the impact, as her brain died blow by blow…

"You know I could bowl down that door if I wanted to," the woman was still speaking. Fina could barely hear it over the blood in her own ears. "Carve out your cliffside, bore straight through you and your women and children huddled in the hot dark. But I'd rather not damage my new property, so I'm going to keep asking nicely for the next little while. It's your call. You have… I'd say maybe a week's worth of chances to make the smart move. Half that if I get impatient, which has been known to happen in my old age. Take a good look at these faces, and decide if you're fine with losing them all for no good reason."

Faces. There were more prisoners.

Her mother? Her father? Her…

Her two…

…remaining brothers?

She lost her grip, and fell.

2003

26 October

Intellectually, Ibanez had understood that there would be a lot of caverns. She'd once read that the Great Lakes, the largest freshwater bodies in the world, had a surface area of something like a quarter of a million square kilometres. The Mishepeshu were said to have used their tunnels to travel between the lakes and their islands. Ipso facto, there would be a lot of interior space down here. She'd patrolled some of it before. She'd seen it mapped by drones like the ones Nascimbeni had used. She should have been prepared.

But the reality, surreal as it was, truly humbled her. There was virtually no trace of the water panther courses now. Everything had been replaced by hand-hewn passages gleaming in an array of sickly colours, their surfaces and speleothems covered in so much repurposed biological material that she wondered if it really had been Ambrogi who broke into the locked-off subway tunnel. Those poor, poor people. Because the winding passages and their organic moss lighting system didn't go on for hundreds of metres, or thousands, or even tens of thousands. There could easily be a megametre of overlapping trackways down here, depending on how much time Ambrogi had spent carving it out. That changed the nature of her spelunking profoundly.

It was no longer a simple matter of laying over enough supplies to leapfrog to the destination in a single go. She was going to have to find a reliable route to her target, assuming he didn't blunder out to the early stages as he had on September the eighth; if there was anything of David Markey left inside, it would remember the night at Sam's Canadian Pub in Grand Bend when he'd tried to drunkenly grab her ass and ended up having to pay for the bottle she'd broken on his forehead. He wouldn't be quick to challenge her.

There was also the possibility that he might try to lure her into a killbox of his own devising. She had some experience with that, so it wasn't likely to be an issue. Just something to keep in mind.

Which was good. If she kept her superego occupied with minor considerations, the lizard brain could keep planning routes and obscuring caches and examining half-melted human candles for the Markey equivalent of spoor without interference. She didn't want her emotional intelligence and creativity to be paying close attention when she found Michael Nass half-fused to a cave wall, drooling pink slime into the dust and talking portentous nonsense about Norte Chico burial rituals while his jellified skin sloughed off, considering whose fault it had been that he'd been at AAF-D when the sinners came marching in.

She'd had more than a little practice with that sort of mental compartmentalization.

1994

February

By day Fina talked with her sister, told her stories, sang to her, and when they were both in the right frame of mind even passed along a few of their grandfather's survival tips. They gathered wood for the fire, bedrolls and food, and obscured their tracks each time they ascended the narrow way. At night she crept down into the village and followed the patrols along the winding roads, taking cover in the shadows of steel huts or dodging into the long communal strip plots of red-tinged wheat. She cased each home from outside, seeing where the guards were living and where they were storing things and where they were doing nothing at all. She raided the houses they weren't in, listened to their muttered conversations under opened windows or beneath open porches, even learned a few of their names.

She wasn't sure what she was going to do with all this information.

She tried thinking about it once.

Only once.

2003

27 October

She was tracking a target, but that didn't mean she was unaware of all the other moving pieces on the board. There were countless nobodies, precisely-counted empties and brainwashed former friends, and of course the other active Vectors to think about as well. She didn't want one of any of those creeping up behind her while she was intent on her prey.

That was why she noticed almost immediately, despite the lack of what anyone else would have considered clear signs, when someone started shadowing her steps from the safe zone to each oasis and back again. She'd already been spooked by the sight of what had to be one of the empties, a man in what looked like a Quantum Supermechanics outfit soaked all the way through in blood, who had disappeared after turning a sharp corner. If she'd been on guard before that, she was damn near paranoid now, so it was almost too easy to weaponize a switchback in the tunnels to get the drop on her present pursuer.

"The fuck are you?" she asked Roger as the edge of his poofy hair came around the corner. She had her weapon levelled at it.

To his credit, he kept creeping around the corner instead of standing up. He at least knew how precarious was their situation here. "Doing?"

"Asshole!" she growled. "I almost shot you."

"Sounds like you're the asshole."

She lowered the gun and turned to face the tunnel expanse again. "Why're you following me?

"Because nobody else could."

She headed up the bedrock ramp to the next rise. "Not a good reason."

He fell in half-step beside her. "It's a great reason. First rule of survival: know stuff nobody else knows."

"The first rule of survival is to have somewhere safe and dry to sleep."

"I'll sleep when I'm dead."

It took a lot of self-control not to laugh at that. "Better to sleep when your enemies are dead. Seriously kid, why are you here?"

He shrugged. "You seem like the only one who's got it figured out. I wanted to see what you were up to."

"Well, you've seen. Now scram."

As she'd expected, he ignored the directive. He wasn't supposed to do that, since he was wearing one of her uniforms, but then she wasn't exactly fulfilling her role as the Chief of S&C right now, was she? "What're all these supplies for?"

"Me. Touch them and die."

"Wouldn't be worth the effort to haul them back out," he smiled. "Net calorie loss. Against several survival rules."

She wasn't going to give him the ground. She wasn't going to give anyone any ground, not until this was done. "How about you go write a manual? Old man Zwist'd be glad to help, I bet."

"How about I help you instead?"

She stopped edging forward and turned to face him again. "I don't need your help. I don't need anybody's help."

"I said that to you not long ago," he reminded her, "and you didn't listen."

"That's because I'm awesome, and you weren't worth listening to."

"You know I'm stealthier than you."

"And yet I caught you."

"Exactly." He nodded. "Different skill sets. You can use me."

"This isn't a camping trip. I don't need someone to toast marshmallows with."

"I was thinking more a forward scout."

Her stomach tightened. "No way. I'm the one who takes the first steps. Only me."

"Then how about I go back and forth collecting more supplies while you move ahead? I can avoid any patrols better than you."

"I don't need—"

"And you can teach me about cave survival. Spelunking."

"I'm not a fucking Boy Scout leader!" She hadn't meant to start shouting. She knew better than that. She forced herself to calm down.

He didn't do the same. "And I'm not a boy! I was in the fucking IDF! So give me a little credit, alright?"

Well at least you fucking admit it now. "No. You want credit, earn it. The first drop is about half a klick back, unmarked. Be back here in ten with a good description of where it is and what's inside, and I'll reconsider my position on sidekicks."

1994

8 March

Try though she might, Fina couldn't figure out where the occupiers were keeping the rest of her people. Most of the shacks up and down the bay were empty, or quartering troops, or full of supplies. It was possible they were being held in the town hall, but she thought it much more likely that it was being used for its intended function: a headquarters. Some nights she stood at the lip of the pass leading to their cave, in the dark, and looked down on the lights of her stolen home town, and wondered: which of those lights can my mother and father see? Or Aurelio and Jorge?

Or had they gone where lights could not penetrate?

Not gone. That was too passive. If they were in the afterlife, they had been sent there.

It was while pondering this dilemma for the hundredth time at least, creeping through the early morning light hauling a backpack full of stolen bread and water past the burned-out husk of her grandfather's home — the attackers had swung by shortly after his demise and torched the place with flamethrowers, saving her the trouble of having to both bury him and obscure his final resting place — that she got the answer to one of her questions.

Leaning on a tree, clutching his stomach, was Aurelio Ibanez.

Her second-oldest brother was still wearing his football jacket, though it was now frayed and there was blood seeping through the white fabric. Maybe the red fabric, too, but that was harder to see. He was in obvious pain. He was talking to himself.

So she ran into his field of view, easy enough with the height difference, and made him talk to her instead.

"Aurelio?!"

His eyes focused on her face. "Fina…"

"What are you doing out here?"

"Bleeding," he said. He smiled, weakly. The smile disappeared when she reached for the zipper pull of his jacket. "Stop! Don't." He looked back the way she'd come. "Not here."

She reached for his sleeve instead. "Come with me. We have a place."

He frowned, just barely distinguishable from the overall grimace of pain. "We?"

"Yésica and me."

The smile returned. "Yésica and I." Aurelio was one of their two school teachers, the apprentice to old lady Tapia.

"Sure," she agreed. "Yésica and you and me. Let's go." She pulled him away from the tree.

He bit down on his lip to keep from screaming. "I can't. It hurts."

"Big baby," she sneered. "Bite your tongue."

He reached out and grabbed the back of her scalp via her mass of uncombed hair. "Little bitch."

"Yeah." She led him to the hidden path. "Tell me more."

"Rotten little weasel," he grunted as they entered the switchback that marked the beginning of their difficult ascent. "Tree snake. OW!"

"Does it hurt, big baby?" she mocked him. "OW!" She laughed silently.

He was laughing too, though he clenched his teeth every time his mouth closed. "Wring your neck."

"I'll pull your hairs out, one by one."

"I'm still bleeding, Fina."

She knew it was serious if he couldn't keep the game going any longer. "I know. We can make a little fire."

"For what? Blood soup?"

She ignored him.

"What do you need a fire for?" he pressed.

"And we have bark for you to bite on. Just a little farther."

"Maybe I would rather die," he reflected.

It was a miracle he didn't wake the entire village with his screams. He certainly woke Yésica.

9 March

Aurelio was lying on one of the sleeping rolls Fina had liberated from an enemy barracks, and her sister was leaning over him. The scent of burned flesh filled the cave.

"Where did you come from?" Yésica asked. She was crouched down, but rocking from side to side. She hadn't been so energetic since the day of the attack.

"I was hiding in a granary." Aurelio's voice was soft and low. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open.

"My brave brother." Fina was standing at the mouth of the cave. She'd heard a few early morning mutterings on her way out of the village that made her itch to get back down there.

"I teach school," he reminded them.

"You never taught me anything," she said. It wasn't really true, though most of what she knew, she'd learned from one man only. Particularly the sort of things she needed to know right now.

Yésica glared at her. "Fina, be nice to him. He's hurt."

Aurelio propped himself up on one arm, with effort. "You only ever listened to grandfather."

"Only grandfather ever listened to me."

He shook his head. "Nonsense about leaving."

She turned to face them. "We should all have left. Before this." She gestured at the cave mouth.

He winced. "We didn't know."

"Grandfather knew something."

Yésica was looking back and forth between them as this exchange continued. "Did they shoot you, Aurelio?"

"It's a stab wound." Fina had seen one before. She'd made a few herself, on a dead deer. Her grandfather had believed in more practical pedagogy.

"Why would they stab you?" Her sister's face flickered back and forth between outrage and worry.

"Because they wanted me to do something, and I wouldn't." When Aurelio didn't want to expand on something, he phrased his responses like this. It was probably another teacher thing.

"Were you with mom and dad?" Yésica's face had settled on worry.

He shook his head. "They keep families separated. Trying to stop us conspiring to get out, I guess. I got lucky." He reached down to probe at his wound, jerking his fingers away each time as though it were an open flame. "In a manner of speaking."

"Did you hear them say anything?" Fina asked him. "Anything we can use?"

He considered. "They're bringing in some planes. A lot of planes."

This was what she'd thought she'd heard. It didn't make any sense. "How? There's nowhere to land."

"They're going to land in the harbour."

"What?" She walked over to hunch down next to Yésica. "What kind of plane can land in the harbour?"

He smiled paternally. "Surprised you don't know. Sounds like your kind of thing."

"What's in the planes?" she pressed.

He shook his head. "Machines, I think. I don't know what kind."

"Maybe they're here to fish," Yésica suggested.

Aurelio reached out to ruffle her hair. "Scoop you right up, Tuna."

2003

27 October

To her immense irritation, Roger found her nine minutes later with what could only be described as a precise description. She hadn't waited for him, and had been making good time. He was, she had to admit, not bad at this. Not as good as her, but then, who was? She consented to allow him to tag along for a while, with the proviso that it was only for the company. This was still her hunt. Her kill.

"Do you know where your target is?"

She frowned. "Generally."

"Generally means no."

"Yeah. No. I don't."

"Do you know the terrain?"

"Generally."

"What makes you think you can do this? Do you know your target?"

They were cresting another rise in the terrain. It rose and fell far less than it twisted and turned, but still there were endless variations in z-level. She wondered if there were any internal logic to the waverings. There certainly didn't seem to be, and the drones hadn't detected any. "I used to. I don't know them at all anymore. They might as well be a stranger in familiar skin."

That was sufficiently personal-sounding to shut him up for a few minutes. It wasn't really true, of course. She'd never known David Markey from a plaster patch on the wall. For the sake of efficiency, she'd described Ana Mukami instead. He didn't need to know that.

The kid liked to talk. They didn't have that in common. "So… yeah. What makes you think you can do this?"

"I know me."

"That's not good enough."

"I know my equipment."

"You need more determined variables."

"This is a hunt." They crouched behind a true rarity in this environment, an all-natural stalagmite. "All I need is my wits, and my body."

"This is an assassination." He put a hand on the stone; she knew it was deathly cold, but he didn't seem to notice. "You need control of the environment, and you need to know where the target's going to be, and you need them not to know where you are when you're ready to take the shot."

"Kid—"

"I've killed people before."

"Roger. I appreciate that you want to help."

"I don't want you fucking this up," he said, "because nobody else is going to manage it if you don't."

It was tempting to start shouting at him again, even this many kilometres up Markey's intestinal land tract. "But I don't need you lecturing me. I don't need a spotter, either."

"I've lived naked in the desert for a week." It was a boast.

"I've lived alone in the forest for months, and I was a lot younger than you are when I did it."

She hadn't wanted to say that. She resented him for making her.

He clearly didn't know what to make of it. "I just want to be sure you know what's going on."

She detached from their cover and headed on. "I do."

He made no move to follow. "I'm not going to stop making sure."

"Fine." She wasn't even sure if he heard the rest of what she said, but then, it wasn't really for him. "But stop trying to tell me my business. If I fuck it up, maybe you can do better once I'm dead."

1994

11 March

Fina must have been standing at the cave entrance for too long, too often, because eventually Yésica stopped tending to their brother and came over to bother her. It had been a rough couple of days, but Fina had scrounged up what she thought were antibacterial medications from the wreckage of the cabin below, and Aurelio seemed to be on the mend.

"What are you thinking about?" Yésica asked.

"I'm thinking about the planes," she admitted. They had arrived earlier that morning. She'd seen them sink below the treeline. She couldn't see where they'd landed in they bay. She wanted to. She at least wanted to see them taking off; she told herself it was to gauge their relationship to her existing network of active threats.

"Don't," Aurelio protested from the back. "You're staying right here. With me."

She waved him off without turning around. "Yésica will look after you."

"Fina—" her sister began.

She scratched her sister's scalp, like she was a pet cat. "You'll look after him."

Yésica squirmed away, face flushed for multiple reasons.

Aurelio's voice was still weak. "She's just a baby."

"You're just a baby," Fina retorted.

"Sing me a lullaby?"

She picked up her empty pack, and settled into a crouch. It was time to go. "Maybe when you're dying."

12 March

She was out of breath, more out of excitement than the difficult climb — which was no longer so difficult, increasingly agile as she was — when she crossed over the lip of the path and entered the cave. She had to inhale twice to get out her first sentence, not even checking to see who was listening. "I finally figured… out… what the planes are for. It isn't… machines."

There was no response.

Fina's eyes adjusted to the dark. Aurelio was sleeping on the bedroll. Yésica was sitting beside him, cross-legged. She was stroking his long, matted black hair.

"They're bringing in gas," she continued. "Great big tanks of gas."

Yésica looked at her, but didn't respond.

She walked over to them. "I think they're going to build a furnace. I don't know why, but it's going to be a huge one. I—"

Yésica burst into tears.

Fina hunched down, taking her sister's shoulders in her hands. "I'm sorry. It might not be a furnace."

The younger girl wrenched out of her grasp, falling to the cave floor and not bothering to soften the impact with her hands. She curled into a ball, and shuddered with the effort of forcing out her tears.

Fina reached out again, stopping just short of touching her. "Yésica?"

The voice that came out of her sister was small, so small and fragile that only the echoes of the cave gave it enough strength to be perceived. "Why were you gone so long?"

She had been caught out at night, so intent was she on determining what the insurgents were up to. She'd spent a few hours asleep in a tree, until it was just light enough to find her way back. "You know how slow it is. I have to be careful."

"So careful," Yésica whispered.

Fina rolled her over. "You want them to find us here? You know what they'll do to us? To a little girl and a sick man with a bayonet hole in his shoulder?"

"They won't hurt him." Her eyes were frighteningly blank.

Fina wanted to shake her. "They'll kill him, Yésica, and you'll wish they'd killed y—"

"HE'S DEAD."

A long, long time passed.

Seconds later, Yésica repeated herself. "He's dead." She gestured sharply at the cinders on the cave floor. "He's been dead since the fire went out."

Fina found that she had fallen back, and was now sitting on the cold stone. Her tailbone ached. Her eyes unfocused, and her mind's eye opened. She saw Eloy on the pier. She saw Ernesto in the square.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"That's it?"

She didn't answer.

Yésica crawled over to her, putting one hand on each of Fina's knees and staring her down from just inches away. "That's it? You're sorry? You're telling me you're sorry? You feel bad for me? Our brother died, so you tell me you're sorry?"

She shook her head. "I don't know what else to say, Yésica."

"DON'T SAY ANYTHING!" Her sister's face was soaking wet, her eyes wide and staring. "CRY! CRY, DELFINA!" She pushed off, and fell back into the cold ashes of their extinguished fire. "Why aren't you crying?"

They sat that way in silence for another eternity, this one a little more real. The light from the cave mouth was much brighter before Yésica spoke again.

"He was asking for you to sing him a song."

She wanted to cry. She wanted to cry. But it wouldn't come. "Did you sing him one?" she asked, very softly.

"I tried." Yésica's voice was thick and hoarse. "I couldn't remember the words."

Outside, a bird chirped. Once.

"I don't think he knew I was here, anyway."

It dawned on Fina, very slowly, that what she had taken to be her brother's sleeping form was instead…

She stood up.

"Where are you going now?" The mixed bitterness and fear in her sister's voice affected Fina even more than had the transformation of her living, breathing brother into a loathsome corpse.

"Not far." She took a deep breath. "I brought some water. You can make him look pretty again."

It had finished raining by the time Yésica was done. The ground outside the cave was soft, and Fina could dig with her bare hands. They buried their brother surrounded by the scent of wet earth, plant oil and worms.

2003

31 October

The tunnels all seemed to lead here; there were apertures all over the wall she'd emerged from. But now the road was straight and narrow and sloping gently downward, like a concourse in a convention centre. An approach. There would be no hiding now, no socking away of supplies. So, she walked.

Half an hour later, the decline stopped. The tunnel widened out far ahead, and there was a curious band of pink on the horizon. As she drew closer…

oh god oh god oh god oh god oh

Taking the Lead

The Breach Goes On: Wrong Tomorrow

Fire in the Hole