He limped on in the dark, until he collided bodily with what he 
supposed to be the reception desk, and was suddenly able to 
navigate by a dim, smoky light shining through the shirt. Blinking 
against the smoke that was still managing to permeate the weave of 
the garment he pressed on until he encountered and felt his way 
around the glass frontage before finding egress. After removing his 
head from the shirt he found himself amidst absolute bedlam, 
visitors mixed up with arrestees evacuated from the cells, all milling 
around inside a notional cordon created by equally confused-looking 
police and community support officers. There was still no indication 
of a fire alarm and half the police appeared to be on their mobiles, 
presumably making 999 calls ("What services do you require?" "This 
is the police. We need the fire service."). What the hell just 
happened, he thought? It took him a moment to realise no-one 


seemed to be looking in his direction, and began moving off towards 
the edge of the car park. 


The lack of attention didn't last long. "Hey," shouted a PCSO. "Were 
you inside? No-one leaves until everyone's accounted for!" 


No use denying it, with his smoke-blackened shirt and watering 
eyes. "I'm an engineer," he said, gesturing expansively as if to 
indicate that given a moment he could go get his tools and pitch in. 
The PCSO seemed unsure how to take this declaration, but at that 
moment Mr Mohawk, a kindred spirit, it appeared, of Ronny 
Feldspar, started shouting ‘lawful rebellion!’ and bit a police 
constable's ear, and Keagan took the opportunity to walk—calmly, 
confidently, not attracting any attention at all—out of the car park 
and onto the thoroughfare. The remaining two pound and forty-nine 
pence in his pocket sufficed to purchase a garish British Bulldog 
shirt from a street vendor; he rolled up the one he had stolen from a 
washing line on the Isle of Wight, wiped his face with it and threw it 
in a dog litter bin. The sensation of a pursuer had resumed and he 
looped around a tenement block to ensure one of the PCSOs had 
not taken it upon themselves to re-apprehend him. At one point he 
thought he saw someone ducking back into an archway when he 
turned—hardly police behaviour. But if he had been erased so 
thoroughly by 554, did even the Foundation retain any record of his 
existence? He thus almost managed to persuade himself he was 
being paranoid. 


Keagan had no means of telling the time as he approached 
Bermondsey Street (short of asking a policeman, which he thought 
might be pressing his luck), though the reader may be interested to 
know it was 17.47. Urbanity was a sleek, stylish vegan café slightly 
set back from the street with silver lettering on a black banner and 
rich purple furnishings around glass tables. He saw Sam Deloitte, 
kicking her legs under a slightly oversized bar seat and tucking into 
a large bowl of spring greens with a grim expression. He was about 
to enter when something drew his eye to the large men seated at 
two opposite corners of the café, sipping soy shakes. Something in 
the way they glanced at each other and Sam made Keagan uneasy. 
Police, or just friends brought along in case of trouble? He doubted 
anyone could connect the dots between the obviously disturbed man 


who had engaged in a street brawl earlier in the day and the 
informant Sam Deloitte was due to meet—based on everything he 
had learned thus far, she likely no longer even knew what he looked 
like—but still, he found he dare not go in. 


The persistent presence in his peripheral vision suddenly forced 
itself in on his awareness and he focused on it in the Urbanity 
storefront glass. Someone was standing a good distance away, 
constantly changing angle but always keeping Keagan in their field 
of view. Black beret, red Guerrillero Heroico T-shirt, pretending to be 
listening to music on his iPhone. The fucking college kid on the bus! 
Keagan turned away from the café and began walking towards the 
kid, who tried to wander off to one side and let Keagan pass. 
Keagan changed direction. Keagan saw the kid pale as he realised 
he'd been made and try to slip off into the crowd, but Keagan 
sprinted after him as fast as he dared moving against the flow of 
pedestrian traffic, and pursued him up a back street. Keagan 
rounded a corner—there was no sign of his tail, but it was a narrow, 
cobbled street, with no offshoots, and as he approached a 
substantial awning in front of a closed antique store he heard the 
sound of someone sucking air, trying to get their breath back. 
Keagan swung left as he passed the shop and barrelled into the kid, 
who had been crouched in the doorway. The kid pushed back with 
surprising strength and tried to squirm away around the edges of the 
awning, but Keagan reached out, grabbed his ankle and unbalanced 
him, bringing him down painfully on the cobblestones. Keagan 
hauled the tail up and grabbed both his arms behind his back, 
pushing him against the storefront. 


"Why were you following me?" he asked through clenched teeth, 
wrenching at the kid's shoulders. 


"Wasn't—| swear—OH SHIT—’ the kid broke off into whimpering as 
Keagan held his forearm a couple of millimeters short of dislocation. 


"| think we both know that's untrue. Did you do something back at 
the police station? Set off a smoke grenade or something?" A 
startled look in the kid's eyes made Keagan loosen his grip slightly 
and the kid retaliated by kicking Keagan in the chest. Keagan 
staggered back but found he still blocked off the kid's exit from the 
awning, spreading his arms wide like a rugby player. 


"Are you with the Foundation?" he asked. 


"I'm not with the guys who abducted and experimented on you, if 
that's what you mean," the kid said with sudden fierceness. "We're 
the real Foundation. The good Foundation. We're trying to help you." 


The 'safe house’, as the kid described it, was a shabby Georgian 
two-storey that might once have been a linen bleachers. Lime had 
soaked its way into the pale, peeling walls, and the smell lingered, 
even a century on. There was no handle or lock on the door—from 
the outside one might have taken it for one of the many derelict 
period buildings littering Southwark's streets. The kid rapped out 
‘Shave and a Haircut’ on the door and thirty seconds or so later it 
was opened to them by a rangy older man who in a more flattering 
light—say, lying on a street corner—might have passed for a 
member of the unhomed. The ground floor was unlit, dingy narrow 
hallways littered with discarded pizza boxes. 


The kid led Keagan upstairs, where, set back from the street, a 
number of more orderly rooms had been lit with desklamps, a distant 
chugging betraying the presence of a generator. 


"The building's officially empty, so we can't be seen drawing power 
from the grid," the kid explained. He pushed open a door. "This is 
the situation room." 


The ‘situation room' had once been a parlour, and later, perhaps the 
location of the bleaching vats, as the smell of hydrogen peroxide 
was almost overpowering. A number of mismatched tables had been 
pushed together into the centre of the room, on top of which was 
spread a wide array of papers, books, CDs and mobile phones. 
"Burners," the kid explained when he saw Keagan looking at them. 
"Any communication with other cells has to be completely 
untraceable." 


Other than the shabbily dressed individual who seemed to act as the 
doorman, there were three other men in the building other than the 
kid and Keagan. He quickly began to think of them as Walrus—the 
professorial gentleman with the Wilford Brimley mustache and 
elbow-patches, Jitters—the twitchy guy in a City suit, and Bones, a 


gaunt, clean-shaven man with a thin mouth, who occupied himself 
by picking his fingernails with a knife. Though not a lot of import 
actually seemed to be taking place in the situation room, the three 
men did their best to give the impression of uninterrupted activity, 
plotting points on road maps, scribbling notes, and occasionally 
making phonecalls on the burner mobiles and taking brief status 
reports. Certainly no-one seemed to have time to spare for the new 
arrival, with the result that the kid was left to find Keagan a seat and 
fire up the camp stove to make a pot of tea. 


"I'm Renton," the kid said once the saucepan of water had boiled 
and been poured over the Tetley's packets in the chipped mugs he'd 
fished out of a cardboard box. "Mark Renton." 


"Keagan O'Neill," Keagan responded. "Look, this is all rather 
confusing. You said you were with the real Foundation?" 


"Yes," Renton nodded furiously. "The original SCP Foundation, the 
one before the war." 


"If you don't mind me saying, this doesn't look a lot like the place | 
was in. It looks a lot less ... well funded." 


Renton had the good grace to looked embarassed. "Um. Well, you 
see, | should probably clue you in on the situation here." He 
gestured to a large and slightly dog-eared map Blu-Tacked to the 
wall, made up of numerous printed pieces of A4. It was a map of the 
world, divided into various semi-regular quadrilaterals delineated by 
dotted lines. Each had a number—the lowest numbers started from 
the US eastern seaboard, spiralling more or less counter-clockwise, 
taking in the rest of the Americas, Europe and Africa, then Asia and 
the Far East and lastly Russia and the former Soviet Union states. 
The British Isles, Iceland and Greenland occupied a distorted 
wedge-shape that comprehended most of the North Sea, labelled 
2D - 


Most of the world was coloured in a vivid red. Spots of blue stood 
out in the sea of red, almost hidden by a forest of pins pushed into 
them. The Baltic, central Africa, Cuba and Central America. 
Paraguay. Papua New Guinea. 


"Blue countries are the ones that still recognise and work with us. 
Red countries have switched to recognising the reactionaries." 
Renton pouted, as though offended that his favourite colour had 
been used to denote the enemy. 


"Reactionaries?" Keagan asked. 


"Guess they didn't tell you any of this while you were at the 
Sector-25 facility, huh?" 


Keagan looked blank. 


"That's the place on Salisbury plain. Wow, they seriously don't 
believe in letting people know what they're getting into, huh? 
Anyway, the Foundation is the successor to a whole bunch of 
societies and trusts set up to investigate and contain the 
preternatural. You've probably seen some of the stuff that gets 
hushed up." 


"Sure." 


"One of those precursors, ASCI—” he pronounced it 'asskey’, like 
the web coding language “—that's the American Supernatural 
Containment Initiative—goes back to before the American Civil War. 
The Foundation itself was formed in the early 1900s and in the early 
years it was mostly American. There's a long story behind the 
Foundation's involvement in the First World War, and it has a lot to 
do with what happened in 1911 and something called the Feypact, 
but to cut it short, a /ot of good people in the Foundation weren't 
happy with the way we'd handled it, including several members of 
the O5 Council." 


"The what?" 


"The Overseers. The people with the top level clearance in the 
Foundation. At least, they used to be, and still are in the real 
Foundation. Anyway, in 1924 one of our guys anonymously 
published a memorandum that argued we couldn't just keep the stuff 
we found in dark rooms and experiment on them—we had to use 
them for the benefit of mankind. That kind of set off a shitstorm." 


"Other people actually disagreed with that?" 


"Well, there was a little more to it, but yeah. These guys—what we 
call the reactionaries, real totalitarian hardcases—banned owning 
copies of the memorandum and tried to demote members of the O5 
Council who supported it. All the way down to D-Class." 


Keagan thought for a moment. "But | thought the O5s were 
supposed to be the highest authority. You're talking about a coup." 


"Damn right. It all came to a head on 10" June 1924. Our O5s knew 
the reactionary O5s had no support so they called for a vote of no 
confidence in the whole Council. If successful, it triggers new 
elections for every Overseer position except the one who called for 
the measure—and everyone with level 5 clearance gets to vote, not 
just the Overseers. Well, everyone voted, and they started counting. 
It got to 53% in our favour, then they—the reactionary O5s— 
stopped the count. Just straight up had security guards march in and 
take the ballot boxes away at gunpoint. Well, our guys declared the 
reactionary O5s traitors and ordered them arrested, except they'd 
already run off to facilities loyal to them when they got wind the 
count wasn't going their way. Then they sent the task forces loyal to 
them to take over Foundation HQ." 


"What happened?" 


"Civil war is what happened. We had the upper hand until 1925—I 
mean, we outnumbered them three to two. Then the reactionaries 
suckered in most of our forces by leaking evidence they were going 
to weaponise—well, we knew it was probably a hoax but we couldn't 
take the risk. Basically they were threatening to use this thing to 
destroy human consciousness—everywhere—unless we showed. 
They keep it in Pyongyang now in co-operation with the North 
Korean government, which should tell you something about the sort 
of people we're up against. We went in and basically we got 
slaughtered. Since then, the reactionaries have taken back almost 
all the pre-war sites and assets—at least, the ones they knew about. 
The reactionaries say the civil war ended in 1926, but as far as 
we're concerned, we're still here and still fighting!" Renton raised his 
voice to a passionate shout at the end of this summation as though 
he had been personally involved, which Keagan thought was rich 


coming from someone who probably wasn't alive 20 years ago let 
alone 60. Walrus looked over and gave a thumbs-up. 


"Since then, world governments have been steadily shifting to 
supporting the reactionaries. | guess you can't really blame them— 
the other guys got the bases and most of the supernatural stuff. But 
all that's gonna change, pretty soon." 


"What do you mean?" 


But before Renton could elaborate, the thrum of the generator, 
which Keagan had all but tuned out, choked and stuttered, and the 
lamps around the room began to flicker. 


"Oh, for god's sake, not this again," Walrus exclaimed wearily before 
the entire room was cast into pitch blackness. After a couple of 
seconds Keagan's eyes adjusted enough to pick out the faint traces 
of light shining through from the side of the building that faced the 
street, but not enough to see with. 


"Renton, get the stove on for light," someone else—probably Jitters 
—called. 


There was a lot of blundering and crashing around near Keagan 
before Renton called, in solemn tones, "I think I've just broken it." 


Keagan exhaled. "Look, just turn on some of the phones and use 
the screens as torches so we can see what we're doing. Where do 
you keep the generator?" 


In a few seconds, enough of the burners had been flicked on to 
provide a low level of radiance and Walrus, carrying a Blackberry 
before him for light, led Keagan further into the depths of the 
building where the generator sat lifeless on the floor of what had 
probably been a bedroom and, given the sleeping bag in one corner, 
apparently still was despite the racket the thing must output. A 
snaggled mass of splitters and extension cables spilled out into the 
corridor, strands snaking off into the four rooms used by the cell. 


"| try to keep it going, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or 
reason to when it goes out," Walrus complained. "As far as | can see 


Denied by O5-