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hypnoticwinter · 4 years ago

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Down the Rabbit Hole part 13

“Okay,” Makado says, straightening my lapels. “Your name is Roan Merriweather. You’re in Admin but I pulled you because you know how to work a camera and you’ve always wanted to take a trip down into the Pit. Sounds good?”

“This is my cover story?” I ask, giving her a dubious glance.

“Something like that,” she shrugs. “Just play it cool.”

“You still haven’t told me what I’m doing here,” I tell her, trying not to let her hear a note of panic in my voice. We’ve been waiting outside the door of the barracks for a solid five minutes now, while Makado checks her phone periodically and texts Peter. We’d dropped him off at a different barracks earlier; neither of them would tell me why. Finally Makado rolls her eyes and shoves her phone back into her pocket.

“Don’t worry about it,” she tells me. “Just be cool, and we’ll get you into the Pit.”

I can hear rollicking conversation from within the barracks, sounding like a solid six or seven people all having a decent time. “Showtime,” she murmurs to me, and then Makado knocks briefly and saunters in, leaving me to trail along in her wake, the conversation stilling so suddenly that I imagine I can hear crickets.

Inside there are about seven or eight people, all in various states of undress or relaxation; there’s a dartboard on the wall, cots pressed against the sides, an attached bathroom and a general air of levity. I imagine I can smell it, like walking into what I imagined a field barracks somewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq might have been like, the same lazy air of general superiority, the same sense of cagey, feigned easiness that at the first sign of trouble could evaporate into a coordinated machine, each of its members greasing together like fitted gears.

Makado clears her throat and silence falls, with a last subtle clink as someone nudges a bottle somewhere out of sight with their foot. Eight pairs of eyes swing around to meet ours, gazing with mixed curiosity and indifference. I shift uncomfortably, not knowing where to look.

“Gentlemen,” Makado says, voice colored with what sounds to me like a suppressed grin, “I have a couple of late additions to the team.”

“And lady,” someone calls out from the back in a low-pitched but identifiably female voice, and the silence breaks like an ice sheet and everyone laughs, and even Makado rolled her eye, an expression of tolerant levity rising on her face.

“Alright, Elena,” she sas. “And lady. Ladies, I should say, now,” twisting around to nod at me. I don’t understand what she wants for a moment but then I realize and I take a step forward and peer out at the faces peering out at me then raise my hand in a perfunctory greeting.

“Uh, hi.”

Dead silence. My eyes scan over rugged faces, bearded and beardless, all seemingly male. Whoever Elena is she must be all the way at the back. There are grins and chuckles and nudges but I expected that somehow, it doesn’t surprise me. I’m an intruder; this is a team.

Someone wolf-whistles and even though I nearly burst out laughing, from next to me I hear Makado suck in her breath, I could practically feel her temperature shift from tolerably warm to unbearably frosty, and then the woman who’d called out before, Elena, stands up and grins at me.

“About damn time!” she crows, looking around at the rest of the guys. “Too much of a damn sausage party in this team!”

And then everyone laughs again and I’m smiling in spite of myself, I can’t help it. Elena motions to me and I look over at Makado, feeling a little like I‘m a new kid at a playground asking my mom if I could go play with all of these weird kids I’d never seen before. She grins at me, openly then, and again I think I see what Peter saw four years ago. Something in me aches and I think Makado must have seen it as well because her smile lost a couple of molars; she looks at me cautiously for a moment before clapping her hands to regain the room’s attention.

“Everybody,” she says, “this is Roan, uh, Merriweather. She’s from Admin, she’s going to be accompanying you on your expedition.”

Somebody groans and makes a face at me, and someone else from the back yells out “Admin sucks!”

Back to playing a role, I think to myself. Then, a second later, I shrug. Everybody loves an Uncle Tom.

“Yeah, Admin sucks,” I call back. “That’s why I’m here!”

Cheers and scattered whooping. I nudge Makado, lean in towards her. “Thanks,” I murmur. She gives me a friendly squeeze on the upper arm, and then pushes me away gently.

“Don’t fuck it up,” she tells me.

I make my way through the ranks over to Elena, flash a hesitant smile at her, and she grins and makes a space for me next to her on the bunk. She’s talk and slender and very pretty, a messy shock of bleached-blonde hair over a fine-featured face. “Christ,” she says, “it’s been way too fucking long since we’ve had another girl in this outfit. How many trips you done?”

“Sorry?”

“You know,” she says, giving me a look. “How many times you’ve been down?”

I take my eyes off of Makado, now speaking to a tall, shirtless, blonde-haired man with muscles so rippling his chest looks like the start of an ocean, and glance over at Elena. “Uh, this’ll be my first.”

Over on the other side of the barracks the game of darts is starting back up again, and on the bunk next to us a wiry black man with a goatee is reaching down under the cot and taking out a bottle of liquor surreptitiously, his eyes still on Makado. He sees me watching and grins, then reaches out his hand for me to shake.

“Ellis,” he says. “Ellis Hughes. I’m the resident nerd.”

His palm is very warm but also very dry.

“Roan,” I tell him. “I’m the camerawoman.”

“You want some?”

“Maybe later, I don’t drink much –“

“This is your first trip?” Elena interrupts, her voice serious. Ellis leans over, frowning.

“Say what now?”

“What’s the big deal?” I ask. “I’m just there to –“

“What’s the big deal!” Elena laughs, a rough edge of anger lurking beneath it. “Are you serious? This is going to be your first trip?”

“Well, yeah,” I say, feeling myself flushing. “Is there something wrong - ?”

Elena gets up in a hurry and storms over to Makado, pushing the blonde man out of the way, who rolls his eyes and makes a face at her before sauntering over to the dart game and throwing his arms over the shoulders of the two others who were waiting to play. I look over at Ellis. “Did I say something wrong?”

He licks his lips and thinks about it for a moment, clearly trying to decide how best to put it. “Let’s just say that this isn’t going to be a picnic.”

Something in me bristles at that. “I can assure you I’m more than capable –“

“And I’m sure you are too,” he says quickly, flashing another bright grin at me. “But like I said, this ain’t a picnic. Just being ‘capable’ might not cut it. I mean, do you know how to use a personal stent? Or a laser cutter? Or –“

“Oh, give it a rest, Ellis,” someone groans from the floor on the other side of Elena’s cot, and then the speaker sits up and a shaggy head rises into view. He tosses his head, knocking some of the hair out of his eyes, and looks me up and down. “She’s gonna be fine.”

Over near the door Makado’s eyes flick over to mine and then back to Elena, still speaking to her animatedly, talking, I now feel sure, about how unsuited I was for whatever expedition they’re going on. I feel a hard little knot writhing in my stomach but I do my best to quash it; instead I look over at the man on the floor. “So what’s your thing?” I ask him.

“Eh?” he grunts.

“You know,” I shrug, cutting my eyes over at Ellis. “He says he’s the nerd. What do you do?”

“Fumi does maps,” Ellis says. “We get lost, it’s his fault.”

“It isn’t my fault if you lot don’t understand how to read a three-d projection,” Fumi says. “When we got lost in the Village two months ago –“

“See,” Ellis says to me, “Fumi talks a lot of shit, but –“

The door creaked open again and we all quiet, staring over to see who it is, and then Peter walks in and the barracks explode. Even Fumi, who I had initially taken to be the reserved, laid-back type, bursts out a quiet profanity and bolts to his feet to join the crowd gathering around Peter, shaking his hand and clapping him on the back and asking him where the hell he’s been, man, we all thought he was dead!

Mixed feelings. On one hand, good to have attention taken off me, especially if I’m going to have to pretend to be someone else.

I cast a weather eye over at the crowd. Peter’s smiling harder than I’d ever seen him smile before and I feel happy for him. I’d had no idea that he was so loved here. He must have really made friends during the period he worked for the company, after the disaster. And then there’s Makado, standing then, moving closely to Peter’s side and grinning broadly, unable to even pretend to be reserved. They stand side to side there for a long while and while I can’t see through the crowd surrounding them I would like to believe that they’re holding hands.

Eventually everybody crowds out; I think there was some talk of a trip to a pub or bar or something. Either way, I’m left alone in the barracks. I feel distinctly forgotten. I pick out one of the unused cots and lay on it for a long while thinking, until finally sleep comes to me. Later on, when everyone comes back in, loud and drunk and merry, I wake but pretend not to. I watch through slitted eyes as Elena, smelling a little of alcohol, comes and crawls into the cot next to mine.

She watches me for a long while, laying there on her side, staring, her pretty little face knotted in a frown, but just as soon as I decide to open my eyes fully and ask her what she’s staring at, she rolls over and lets out a little huffing sigh and falls asleep.

* * *

The next punch whips out low and fast and I just barely twist out of the way in time. I purse my lips, glare at Elena. “You know,” I tell her, “I thought we were supposed to be boxing.”

“We are boxing,” she says, tossing her head to flick an errant curl of bleached-blonde hair out of her slate eyes, waggling one gloved fist at me.

“You don’t sucker-punch in boxing.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, trailing off. I can see a shift in her movement, see her eyes flick downwards at me, and I know instinctively that she’s going to try something. I let myself roll onto the balls of my feet, let my knees bend slightly. “I’ve never been good at following the rules,” she grunts, snapping out another punch right at my gut. This time I’m ready for it.

The four years of Karate I took in college had never really served me very well, but there was one advantage I’d had that I think Elena wasn’t expecting from me – I went to a hardcore dojo, not a belt factory. Sparring three days a week, stretches and warmups intense enough that I barely was able to stumble my way through the material afterwards…but I adapted after enough time pushing myself and then it wasn’t so bad, once I was able to rely on my body’s newfound strength.

I’d hated it at the time. I don’t know why I bothered to keep up with it once I’d completed that first-year PE credit, but something kept bringing me back. Maybe it was the way one of the instructors, a tall, swarthy man named Ali, would grin at me after he’d cajoled me into dipping down a couple of inches deeper into a straddle split, or raising my leg a couple of inches higher in a kick hold, maybe it was the way that I went from not being able to break a single board, even if I really tried, to being able to break three with a punch and not even feel it afterwards. Something about the tangible improvement tickled some sort of progress-happy funny bone in my psyche and from then on I was hooked.

I made it halfway to a blue belt before I’d graduated and had to move away from Oklahoma. In Karate terms that’s still a little baby, really, but if Elena thinks I’ve never learned to dance she’s going to have another think coming.

I push my arm down and block the blow, deflecting it downwards. Her fist skids off the flat of my thigh and I barely feel it. Then I take a step to the side and spin, whipping out a roundhouse and halting it just next to the side of her head. To her credit she barely flinches, just flicks her eyes over and considers my foot as though it’s something mildly repulsive. The tendon in my groin down the inner base of my thigh is throbbing a little and I know I’ll regret the maneuver later but for the moment I’m alright.

“Didn’t realize you knew MMA,” she snarls, clamping onto my leg before I can react, twisting it and sending us both to the ground. I fall awkwardly and feel the sting as the hard foam mat slaps me in the palms and the chest. Then she clambers over me before I can roll back up onto my hands and knees, getting me into an impromptu sleeper choke. I know how to get out of one while I’m standing but from the ground is a different matter entirely. I squirm a little, trying to work my hands back around behind her, but she tightens her forearm around my neck and I stop.

“You gonna tap?” she purrs into my ear, sounding angry. She smells hot and spicy and aggressive, sweat mingled with a vaguely floral underlying arona. I struggle a little, try and find the weakness in her grip, but there isn’t one, she has me dead to rights.

I reach out slowly ahead of me and tap the mat three times. Elena squeezes a little harder for a moment and then slowly disengages from me and rolls away. I flop onto my back and glance over at her. “You realize I’m just here to work a camera, right? You guys are going to handle all the fighting.”

“I’m not even going to tell you why that’s a fucking stupid sentiment,” she says. “What if something grabs you down there and nobody else is around to help?”

“What, I’m supposed to get it in a sleeper choke?”

“No,” she says slowly, as though I’m stupid, “you’re supposed to fight back however you can.”

“I don’t think I –“

She offers me her hand, the glove hanging loosely from the strap, and pulls me up. “Take initiative,” she suggests. “Be proactive,” she says, and then before I can react she reaches up with the other hand, still gloved, and pops me lightly in the face. It’s clearly not designed to injure, she hits about as lightly as she can, but something about the physics of it tweaks something in my nose and I feel a twinge and then a trickle of fluid down the front of my face. She stares, incredulous, at the blood on her glove, and then shakes her head and gives me a helpless, resigned grin.

“Look at you,” she says. “I didn’t even mean to do that. I’m so sorry, here, let me -“

And then she reaches up and wipes the blood from my lip with the back of her hand. I see it staining her skin red. My heart is pounding in my throat. What if she doesn’t wash her hands before she eats something? What if she rubs her eye, or scratches herself, or -

When I act it feels like time compresses and it seems as though I’m moving a million miles an hour. I step forward and grab her by the wrist and tug her along towards me, or at least I intend to. I was going to drag her off to the bathroom and make sure she scrubbed every last speck of blood off of her skin, make sure that she was safe, but instead she jerks her hand away from me and stands there staring, her fingers half-curled into a fist.

“What the hell is your problem?” she barks at me, and I realize that everyone in the training room is staring at us, squared off again across the mat, my hand trembling slightly. I look down at the bloodstain on her palm and then, not knowing what else to do, I wipe my nose hurriedly, contaminating my own hands. My eyes sweep the floor frantically but I can’t see any telltale carmine drops anywhere.

“Elena, please, please -“ I start, but she spins on her heel and stalks away to the showers, giving me a withering look over her shoulder.

“Fuck off,” she tells me. “Don’t you ever grab me like that –“

Then she’s gone. I can feel my cheeks burning. I avoid a forest of stares and scramble after her, trying not to feel like I’m scurrying off with my tail between my legs.

As I round the corner, trailing my fingers along the inlaid tile, the faint coarse griminess gathering reassuringly at my touch, I realize that the shower isn’t running and I have a brief moment of despair, guessing that Elena’s already been and left, before I turn the corner and I’m staring at her naked back, long and muscular, a curving v-taper nudging downward into the swell of her hips and a whole heap of emotions flutter around me. Before I can tear my eyes away she looks back at me and our eyes meet for just a moment, her sharp-eyed predator’s gaze boring into me, and then I snap mine away and hurry over to my locker and start to change. I can feel her looking at me but I keep my face forwards, don’t meet her gaze.

“You bitch,” she hisses, and I jump, I cringe.

“Elena,” I mutter, cutting my gaze sideways at her, “don’t.”

I can see her hands, the red of my blood deepening as it dries. She hasn’t washed her hands yet.

She gets up, pads past me, the force of her anger practically slamming me into my locker as she passes. She’s naked, heading for the showers, a towel thrown over her shoulder. She doesn’t spare even a glance at me.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt, just before she turns the corner. “I didn’t want to - I didn’t mean to - I’m sorry.”

She stops, looks back at me. Her eyes are very hard but they soften gradually, and she heaves out a sigh, leans her long lithe body against the corner of the tiled wall.

“Is your nose okay?” she asks. I haven’t even thought about it. I reach up and pat at it gently.

“Yeah, it’s still there,” I tell her, and I can see her crack an unwilling smile before she hides it, glances down.

“I’m sorry I gave you a bloody nose,” she tells me. “I didn’t mean to. I was just going to bop you.”

I swallow hard. “Elena, you have to wash your hand. Like, scrub it, I mean.”

She frowns at me. “What’s eating you?” she asks. “It’s just blood. It isn’t like I’m licking it up,” she laughs, miming it, but her eyes sharpen as she sees me practically jump out of my skin. I make it a few steps towards her before I stop myself and try to turn it into some casual gesture or movement, but there’s no way to disguise it. I can see her eyes narrow with the same intensity as my cheeks flush.

“Roan,” she says, “what’s going on? Why are you acting like this?”

“I can’t - look, just make sure you scrub your hand, okay?” I ask her. She shakes her head.

“Tell me why,” she says. “Why’s it so important?”

I stare at her and hope the anguish writ large in my expression is enough to convince her. And perhaps it works, for she shakes her head and pads around the corner. I listen as she takes a shower, while I dab at my face and clean myself off, and she looks mildly surprised to see me when she comes back out again. Her hair is fluffy and unkempt and she has the towel wrapped around her waist and something about the way her messy curls fall over her face makes me want to smile. She holds the hand out to me, turns it over for my inspection.

“Clean enough for you?” she asks, and I nod. We stand there in silence for a while, effectively side by side, rummaging in our lockers, while Elena gets dressed and I change back into my regular clothes.

“Cat got your tongue?” Elena asks me and I grunt, look over at her, then shut my locker.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just thinking.”

“What if you didn’t come with?” Elena says, and I process that for a moment, and I shake my head.

“I don’t understand you,” I tell her. “First you’re happy to see me cause there’ll be another woman in the group, and I can understand that. Then you’re concerned because I’m not a crack special ops Green Beret motherfucker –“

“That isn’t –“

“And now when I’m justifiably worried about goddam blood-borne –“

“Jesus Christ,” she groans. “I wasn’t going to actually lick my hand. I didn’t even mean to give you a nosebleed! I just…” she trails off. “Look,” she says. “You should back out. Reconsider coming on this damn-fool errand we’re stuck with. You can tell Veret no, you know that, right? She’s Sec, you’re Admin, she has zero jurisdiction over you. You can tell her where to fucking stick it and she can’t say shit.”

It takes me a moment to realize that she’s talking about Makado. “What if I want to go?” I ask.

Elena looks me dead in the eyes. Hers are very grey, the same color as a cloudy day. “You’re going to die down there,” she assures me.

I blow an exasperated breath out. “You care that much?” I ask her. “Seriously? You’ve barely spoken a word to me since the day we met. It’s like you’re mad at me for – for just having the misfortune to be here. You think I have control over this? They need someone to run the camera, I’ve got the experience. Between, well, everyone gradually realizing how useless I’m going to be down there and my pathetic performance the other day at the range –“ I wince to myself at the memory of it - “I’ve had a goddam miserable time here and I don’t want this entire expedition to be like that. Do you have a problem with me?”

“No,” Elena says firmly.

“Then what the hell are you treating me like this for?”

She thinks about it for a moment then shrugs. “Trying to scare you off, I guess,” she explains. “If nothing else you’ve got guts. I just don’t want you to get killed because of overconfidence –“

“Oh, trust me, I’m far from overconfident.”

“No,” Elena says, “I suppose you aren’t. There’s some sort of angle you’re working, isn’t there? Did Miller put you up to something? Spying on Veret, or on –“

“Who’s – “ I start, and then stop myself. Clearly this Miller is someone I ought to know. “No,” I tell her. “There’s no angle. I just want to go down there, see what it’s like. I’ve seen videos,” I say, thinking quickly, “I’ve seen footage, but that’s not even close to what it’s really like. Isn’t it?”

“You’re right,” Elena laughs, “it isn’t.”

And then she turns away, sits down on the bench to do up her shoes and I stand there staring at her for a moment before I shake my head and gather my things and turn to leave. I almost make it to the door before she calls after me.

“I don’t hate you,” she says, and I turn and look at her, meet the gaze she’s flinging at me with what I hope is stoniness, trying not to feel like a lonely puppy. I’m tired, I’m fatigued, part of me wants to go the hell back home and get out of Gumption but another part of me wants to see what the hell is down there in the Pit. I’ve barely seen Peter since that first day and I haven’t seen Makado at all, and I haven’t had the guts to pull out my phone and call anybody from work, or any of my friends. I can feel my heart practically flipping over onto its back and begging for belly-rubs no matter how hard I try to stomp down on it.

And then, of course, there’s the little voice in the back of my mind that keeps whispering about whether or not I might be able to get my hands on some ballast…

No, it’s stupid. It isn’t an option. They’ve probably got it locked down so tightly –

Focus, Roan. One thing at a time. Don’t be such a goddam nitrogen queen.

“I know you don’t hate me,” I tell her, taking a step back towards the door. “But you’ve sure been doing your best to make it seem like you do.”

She offers me a slow smile, and as she rises I once again take the chance to admire the wiry strength of her arms, the sloping incline of her thighs, the taper of her stomach. She’s very pretty, after all; I don’t know what it is but I was expecting something more like Vasquez from Aliens, a wiry woman constantly on-edge, not willing to take any shit at all, but Elena is much more –

“You checking me out, Merriweather?”

I blush instantly and reluctantly drag my eyes back up to meet hers. She looks smug. “No,” I tell her, but even to my own ears it sounds like a lie. Was I checking her out? Of course I wasn’t. That’d be ridiculous.

“Riiight,” she says, nodding at me. I think she is looking at me a little differently afterwards, but I can’t tell whether it’s in a good way or a bad way. Then Elena tells me she wants to show me something and we leave the gym together, and she takes me not towards the barracks but out the other way, into the scrub grass and clear wind.

* * *

“What about…” I squint. “Eleanor Kovacs?”

“It’s pronounced Kovacs.”

“Oh. What happened to her?”

“Cratered when a BFR she thought was bomb-proof wasn’t so bomb-proof after all.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

Elena laughs. “A BFR is a Big Fucking Rock. Down in the Pit it’s mostly calcium deposits that that refers to, so they’re not really rocks. It’s just old caving slang left-over from the guys in the 70s that explored the place for the first time. ‘Bomb-proof’ means that it’s secure, if you tie a line to it and let yourself down it won’t drop you.”

“And ‘cratered?’”

“I’m sure you can guess what that one means.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. I liked Eleanor, she was nice, but you never trust a BFR.”

Down here, around the bend and down a ways, over the tiny trickle of a stream that bubbles over dusty rocks and down into a drainage ditch and from there beyond the fence, past another thicket of brush, there is a small cemetery with about eight headstones in it, and green grass, and a few still fairly intact wreaths that look like they’re only a couple of days old.

“How long ago did that happen?”

Elena thinks for a moment. “About a year ago. So probably a little before or after you got hired, right? I think you said you’d been here for a year.”

I did say that. I’d debating going a little shorter, maybe six months or so, but I felt like if I pretended I’d been here for much shorter than a year it’d be suspicious as to why Makado had picked me out specifically instead of someone with more seniority.

“That’s right,” I said. “I think I might have heard something about it? I think it was like a month before I joined.”

“You said you were a photographer before this?”

“Um,” I grunt. I want rather much to get away from talking about my fake history, especially because it’d be fairly easy for me to give away that I don’t actually work here and not even know it. “That’s not entirely accurate, but close enough.”

She looks at me for a moment then shrugs. “Alright, miss mysterious, be that way.”

“What about this one?” I ask, pointing to one of the more weathered headstones. Elena peers at it then shakes her head.

“I don’t know, that was before my time.”

“When did you join?”

“Three years ago. Got out of the Coast Guard and didn’t really know what else to do, somebody here had heard about me and sent an offer my way and I said ‘what the hell’ and signed on.”

“You were in the Coast Guard?”

“Yeah, I was a cave diver.”

I look at Elena, really look at her, thoughtfully this time. She’s staring at the headstone, she hasn’t drawn the long aquiline arch of her neck back up. She’s thinking about something, some inward private musing that, even if I asked her and even if she wanted to tell me, I would never be able to know the length and breadth and depth of.

A sudden crazy impulse makes me want to reach out and touch her hand and hold it in mine but I restrain myself. Her eyes flick over to me and she frowns. “What?” she asks.

“I was just thinking.”

“You do a lot of thinking while you’re just staring at people?”

I shrug diffidently. “It’s a bad habit of mine.”

I can see her trying not to smile.

The radio clipped to Elena’s belt bleeps at her and the moment is instantly shattered. She tugs it out, muttering a muffled curse, and clicks it on. “Yeah?”

“Elena, it’s Fumi. We’re finally getting briefed in ten, where are you?”

“At the gym,” she says quickly. “Just leaving now.”

“You are? I’m at the gym.”

Elena closes her eyes and makes a face at me; I clap a hand over my mouth so I don’t laugh. “Must have just missed you,” she tells him.

“Have you seen that girl from Admin, too? They told me to call everybody but I can’t get ahold of her.”

“She probably left her radio with her stuff,” Elena says, flashing me a little smirk. “Fucking Admin.”

I feign affront. Over the radio Fumi laughs.

“Fucking Admin,” he agrees. “Still, though, Admin or not, have you seen her body? I wouldn’t mind –“

“Oh, shut up,” she snaps. “Keep it in your pants,” she tells him. “Out.”

“Out,” he laughs.

I laugh but it sounds wrong, I sound nervous. Or maybe just awkward.

“Don’t let it get to you,” Elena tells me. “Just guy talk.”

“Mm,” I grunt, then look down at myself. “Not sure what he meant, to be honest.”

“Eh?”

“Well, if he likes skinny little skeletons, I guess…”

Elena laughs again. She has a low, slow laugh, like waves, like granite. “I don’t think that’s how I’d put it.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. I use the upcoming prospect of having to leave for the briefing as a pretense to pat myself down, make sure I have all of my effects (none of which I took out, of course, but even so). I see Elena’s eyes narrow fractionally but in an even-tempered way. “How would you put it?” I ask her.

She looms over me and something about the weight of her presence makes my breath catch.

We’re very close now. I can smell her, something vague and salty and fresh-smelling, like how I imagine a particularly clean crocodile might smell. I can hear her lips draw back in a smile.

“How I would put it?”

“Yeah,” I breathe. I swallow hard and try to think, but the way she smells is making it hard to.

The radio squawks again and I jump slightly. Elena sighs and then turns around and walks away, very deliberately not looking back at me. I stare after her, and then pretend I wasn’t when she turns, radio near her chin. “Yeah,” she says into it, “I found her. Tell them we’ll be there in five.”

“Ack,” the radio crackles, and then falls silent.

“Ack?” I ask.

“Acknowledged.”

“Oh.”

Then there is nothing more to say and we walk back together and I use the time to wonder what the hell I’m doing and how deep a hole I’m digging myself into.

* * *

“This is what we’re after,” Makado says, clicking to the next slide. I frown.

“What the hell is that?” someone asks from up near the front row – I think it might be Crookshank, the heavy-set, bear-faced man that Ellis had introduced to me as the team’s resident medic.

“That, Mr. Crookshank,” Makado says, her eye flashing, “is a resonating pressure crystal.”

“What the hell is a resonating pressure crystal?” he asks, and I hear a few chuckles from the middle rows. Makado grins at him.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s need to know, and…”

“And we don’t need to know,” a half-dozen voices intone simultaneously, prompting more titters afterwards. Some sort of in-joke.

“How big is this thing?” Ellis asks.

“The team that initially discovered it down near Blue Matter reported that it was roughly two hundred kilograms or so. Dimensions are…I don’t know, a dresser? Chest of drawers? Something like that.”

“Are those bits sharp?” someone asks.

“I don’t know,” Makado says, a thin whisper of impatience lurking in the back of her voice. “Probably.”

“Where is this crystal now?” Fumi asks. Next to me Elena uncrosses and recrosses her legs.

“This is the part you probably aren’t going to like,” Makado says. “The team that had found it called for help retrieving it, and one of the cargo IAVs was dispatched down to assist. We lost radio contact with the team halfway down, and when the IAV got there, the team and the crystal were gone.”

“Whose team was it?” Elena asks. Whatever levity might have been fluttering around the room before is long gone by now.

“It was a science team,” Makado says. “Nobody you all would know, most likely. I believe the leader was Nguyen, he’s a researcher.”

“And this crystal is important enough to send us down after it, even if we don’t know what the hell happened or where it is?”

“Yes,” Peter says, squinting against the light of the projector as he looks over from the computer desk up at the front. “It’s that important.”

“But you can’t tell us why?” I call out. I don’t know what makes me do it. Just wanting to be part of the team. Makado gives me a look but a very subdued one.

“No,” she says, “I can’t. You all know me,” she says, her eye lingering on me. “You know if I could I would, if I could bend the rules, even, and tell you, but I can’t. And, the point I was going to make before we got sidetracked, we actually do know exactly where the crystal is. The science team managed to fit it with a tracker before whatever happened happened.”

She takes a breath, blows it out. “We found copepod castings at the site, and the tracker shows the crystal is currently in the barrows.”

It’s Greek to me but everybody else reacts hard. Elena leans forward and puts her head in her hands and half of the rest of them get to their feet, gesticulating, Ellis and Fumi among them.

“Hell no,” Ellis says.

“That’s a goddam suicide mission,” Fumi tells Makado, and when I flick my eyes over to her to judge her reaction I can see that she thinks so too; it’s there in the cast of her face, just for a moment, before she composes herself.

“Everybody relax,” Peter says, and, miraculously, almost everyone does.

“Look,” Crookshank says, still on his feet, pointing at the crystal still on the screen, “even if this thing is so goddam important that we die getting it back, even if we manage to beat off the hundreds of fucking copepods down there in the barrows, how the hell are we going to get it up here? Another IAV? They can’t fit into the barrows, the passages are too tight and twisting. We can’t carry 200 kilograms up here, we can’t –“

“Crookshank,” Makado says, voice icy, “sit down.”

He wavers for a moment but sits. Makado clears her throat.

“You aren’t going to carry it.”

I frown. The crystal on the screen looks damn near impossible to carry anyway. A wicked constellation of dagger-sharp jade barbs and spikes and serrations surrounding a gnarled, crenellated core. Even if it were smaller and lighter I don’t know how you could pick it up without hurting either it, yourself, or both. Elena looks over at me frowning and I shrug; I don’t know where the hell Makado is going with this.

“He is,” she says, pointing over at the door.

As we all turn, it opens softly, and with careful, hissing, precise steps, a machine walking upright on two pistoning, powerful, articulated legs steps inside, one of its immense blocky arms reaching backward and catching the door by the handle and shutting it very softly behind it. Its head is a cube with a few careful angled shavings taking out of it, and in the recesses they create lights blink, but there is nothing so crude as a camera lens to show that it looks at us as it swings its face back and forth, like a lizard tasting the air.

The room has gone so silent that the only sound I can hear is the whine of servos as it steps further in, and a clenching fist of terror closes around my heart and squeezes, the ancient timbre of fight-or-flight peaking in my brain as this animate, impossible thing stomps towards us.

Continue with Part 14

Back to Table of Contents

#mystery flesh pit #alt lit #thriller #Michael Crichton #disaster #caving #Novel #writing #fiction

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dammit-stark · 6 years ago

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good ol’ cousin sam

I‘m rewatching Spiderman: Homecoming and I just realized that the P.E teacher’s name is Mr Wilson so now allow me to present to you my theory that this Mr Wilson is the legendary Sam Wilson’s underperforming cousin... this was originally a head canon but I gotta admit this became not-a-headcanon many, many words ago

no pairing - - 2.3k words

While the family favorite Sam joins the Armed Forces to fight for his country, the other Wilson cousin- let’s call him Raymond, Ray to his friends and family- goes to a local community college and receives a degree in physical education.

Sam’s a few years older, has been climbing the ranks in the military for a few years before Ray even gets into college, and he continues to fight while Ray passes math tests and writes essays that get torn up with red pen. Ray graduates middle of his class.

The whole family comes to the graduation, except for Sam who’s stuck overseas. Sam sends a real nice congratulatory card anyway and Ray tacks it up on his dresser right next to the card from their Nana who passed and above the picture of the whole family ten years prior.

Too soon, cousin Sam gets discharged from the military with full honor for some unfortunate freak accident that leaves him injured and itching to fly. Almost all the details surrounding the accident are classified, leaving all their nieces and nephews guessing after supernatural means or clandestine alien attacks. Their imaginative guesses leave Sam trying not to break out into hysterical laughter and Ray rolling his eyes over and over again. Sam missed being home. Ray just likes that the whole family is back together again, complete and whole and good for the soul.

Ray starts coming back home on the weekends for a few weeks to make sure his cousin is doing alright.

At Auntie Glinda’s, they watch football and eat Uncle Greg's homemade chili as if they were teenagers again. It’s like any other weekend for Ray. It feels weird for Sam, who hates having his feet on the ground and his hands in his lap, but there’s nothing anybody can do about it. He puts on a smiling face, does his best to slip back into the family, but it’s all a little too forlorn to fit right, like the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle had a rip in it and the picture is just barely incomplete.

Sam refuses to watch Top Gun when little Billy so sweetly asks. He helps Auntie Glinda with dinner, but makes himself scarce otherwise. Ray notices, but doesnt know what to make of it.

After a few weeks, Ray stops coming by in all his free time, spends some time at his apartment, gets a cat named Hammy, joins a gym. Sam doesn’t need him. In fact, Sam up and leaves for DC, as independent and ready to move as ever. Before he leaves, he tells Ray that if he was gonna be grounded, he couldn’t imagine not at least trying to help others, whatever that means. Ray just smiles and nods and tries to imagine himself outside of New York. He just can’t see it.

Again, they part ways; things are good.

Then, around the same time that Ray gets his first job at a public school in the center of Queens, Sam meets Steve Rogers.

It’s not the best job in the world, a lot of the kids mouth off and tend to complain when they play anything that isn’t dodgeball, but it’s a job and it pays the bills. On Fridays, Ray orders himself a pizza from the Domino’s down the street and he gets take-out from the Thai place by the school every Wednesday. He’s not saving children in a third world country somewhere like his cousin always did, but he’s happy enough and that’s all that matters.

Out of the blue one day, Ray gets a job offer for a teaching position at a private school for gifted teenagers. He doesn’t remember ever applying for the position, but it comes with a pretty hefty pay raise and an office that doesn’t smell suspiciously like a festering rat problem, so he accepts the offer.

Completely coincidentally, his promotion coincides with the rise of Queens’ Amazing Spiderman on the public’s (and the Avengers’) media radar. Ray had watched in awe as the news revealed the first footage of their local vigilante. Another superhero? A lot of people complain, but Ray doesn’t mind. He never really had a problem with spiders anyway. Birds had always irked him, something about the freakish wingspan and their frail yet powerful little bodies, but spiders were always fine. He spends the night after learning the moniker of Queens’ new hero holed up in his bedroom under the covers watching Spider-Man compilations on his laptop. Late at night, when his brain slows down and he sees that red suit when he closes his eyes, Ray finds himself imagining Sam’s face beneath that mask.

Cousin Sam just so happens to move back to New York around the same time, too. Another complete coincidence. He starts coming around and visiting about once a week or so. Thai night turns into burger night with frequent guest appearances by Sam, food courtesy of the family diner down the street. The nice family have his and Sam’s order down pat within a month.

Once everything settles and Ray gets used to the promotion, he decides the job’s actually pretty nice. The kids are generally less athletic and less enthusiastic than at his old school, most too busy with their nose stuck in a book or worrying over the state of their manicure to go after the dodgeball, but they’re attentive and for the most part are too afraid of failing his class to dare sassing him too much. Once a week he has to supervise a detention, but considering that it’s a school full of suck-up geniuses, detention is usually pretty barren. At the very least his college debt is nearly paid off. That’s cool.

The same day that one of his students, Pete, stumbles into class with a black eye and a wicked limp for probably the third time, Tony Stark shows up at school.

The rumors about his presence flutter incessantly in the Teacher’s Lounge like the words themself has sprouted wings and were determined to bother each and every person in the room. The science teachers sound like they‘re about to pass out from excitement. Raymond himself doesn’t really get what the big deal is- Tony Stark is just another person. Sure, he had a big shiny suit and he fought crime or whatever, but his cousin Sam fought for the people of the country, too, but you don’t see people wigging out over Sam’s sheer presence.

Ray really just wants to eat his lunch, that’s it. He had picked up a chicken salad sandwich from the bodega under his apartment before heading to work that morning and Nancy made the best chicken salad. A quiet lunch unfettered by gossip. That day, Ray learns that history teachers are surprisingly interested in gossip considering their coursework was based on 200 year old facts.

The last thing Ray expects when he gets back to his not-rat-infested office after lunch is for Tony Stark to be waiting for him. It’s quite a turn of events.

“You’re Tony Stark,” Ray says dumbly from the doorway of his own office. He’d just spent half his lunch being forced into a one-sided conversation about the recent advancements of StarkTech upstate, something about unprecedented, unimagined technology that the market itself isn’t ready for. One man did that alone, tinkered in his office at two am and all but broke the stock market with the sheer power of his brain. This man is standing in Ray’s office. It’s weird.

Inside, Tony Stark is leaning back in Ray’s creaky office chair, his feet propped up on the desk next to a precariously tall stack of physicals that Ray hadn’t taken the time to peruse through.

Tony Stark peers over his orange tinted sunglasses to reveal a devilish black eye that he seems entirely unperturbed by. He lets his feet fall to the ground with a thud and his face is entirely serious, “Coach Wilson, right?” He says, “Come on in. Take a seat. I won’t bite.”

Ray inches forward, eyes narrowed. There’s a billionaire in his office, beckoning him in, and he doesn’t know why. This wasn’t something that happened to him every day.

As Ray sits, Tony rises from the office chair to peruse the degrees hanging on the wall. Ray remembers one of the science teachers gushing about how Tony Stark went to MIT or some super fancy college with an acronym or something. Tony flicks the bobblehead on the shelf beneath the frames and Wilson can’t look away.

Neither of them says anything. Tony watches the oversized head bobble on the bookshelf as Ray watches the mysterious billionaire. The quiet aches.

“That chair has awful lumbar support by the way,” The billionaire says suddenly, picking up an old baseball cap and sniffing it carefully. His hands are always moving. Ray sits back in the chair himself, but doesn’t say anything about it. The furniture creaks.

“Mr Stark,” Ray says eventually, “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Actually,” Stark says, turning around, his face serious for the first time since he’d stepped into the office, “I believe there’s something I can do for you.”

Ray realizes then that Stark’s suit is wrinkled, a possible stain forgotten at the hem of the graphic tee shirt. Every description ever given about Tony Stark has provided an image of pristine carelessness, of confidence and ease. Tony Stark’s hands can’t seem to stop twitching. It’s kind of unsettling.

“Have you watched the news lately?” Stark asks.

“I’m more of an ESPN guy myself.”

Tony hums thoughtfully, glances over at the wall of community college degrees for a second time.

“From what I’ve gathered, your cousin is Airman First Class Sam Wilson. He visits you every other Wednesday, checks in on you,” Ray skin prickles. Suddenly, Tony looks like steel, “Is this correct?”

Ray just nods.

“An incident occured in Germany. Your cousin was involved.”

Ray had long been told tales of his cousin’s heroics. Sam usually told them with an air of modesty, a dash of pride. Tony doesn’t spare him the expense.

“Was he injured? Is he okay?”

An out-of-place expression of hilarity traverses Tony’s face And he all but laughs, “No, no. Our, um, friend Sam is fine, scrapefree for the most part actually,” His eyes go weird and unfocused for a moment before returning to Ray like a laser gone haywire, “Unfortunately, he was caught on the wrong side of things. For an indefinite period of time, he will be in prison. Mr Wilson, your cousin is a criminal.”

No. Ray’s cousin was no criminal. No way. Sam joined the army, went off and fought somebody else’s battle instead of getting a degree, instead of living a safe life. He has a big heart with this wretched piece of PTSD shoved between its plates of steel. Sure, things got a little twisted after the whole thing with his friend up there in the sky, but he would always be a good man. Sam Wilson was a hero. Not a criminal. Tony Stark was supposed to be smart, not slanderous, and definitely not wrong.

“I think you’re talking about the wrong Sam Wilson.”

Tony’s hands twitch, “No, no, I think I’ve got the right one.”

A silence befalls them.

“I don’t believe you,” Ray accuses. Just because Tony Stark was a billionaire with an ego didn’t mean he could just waltz into somebody else’s office and defame their cousin right to their face, “You’re lying.”

“Tell me,” Stark says, “How is it you think you got this job? All on your own?”

Ray stares.

“Yeah, no,” Tony wipes a finger along a dust covered bookshelf, circles the office again. It’s a pretty small office. He paces over his own footsteps as he continues, “Sorry to break it to you, but you were all part of the plan. Wilson’s plan. But he- he messed up.”

Tony looks hurt. There’s a crack in the facade, a break in the airwaves. Ray’s so used to coaching emotional teenagers through the inevitable products of sleep deprivation and hormones every day, he spots it from a mile away. Tony continues like it’s nothing, a tendril of something else, not pain or betrayal or some drama that’s far beneath his celebrity status. God, Ray’s so tired.

“Where’s Sam? He demands, leaning forward against his desk, “Did you do something to him?”

“Sam Wilson is currently located in the most secure prison in the world. In the middle of the Atlantic. Otherwise undisclosed. Confidential, you have to understand.”

Ray’s eyes are narrowed dangerously on Tony Stark.

“What could he possibly have done?”

Ray isn’t thinking about himself anymore, he doesn’t care if he got his job through improper means or through hard work or through whispers up a chain of command. He just wants to know what happened to his cousin. He wants to know what happened to the good, caring, hard-working man that he had deigned to call family.

“Look,” Tony supplants, hands waving animatedly as his feet finally remain still, “It’s all very complicated. He broke some laws, defied the UN. It’s where he belongs, he put himself there,” Tony only looks distantly sorry, a regret misplaced from another dimension of time maybe, “In the end, he lost his title.”

“What title? I know for a fact that my cousin hasn’t been in service in years.”

Tony just stares, eyes narrowed, “Do you not know?”

Ray remains quiet, and then Tony’s eyes grow. He takes a seat opposite Ray, hands gripping the ledge of the metal desk as he peers into the confusion flashing across Ray’s express, “Oh my god, you don’t know.”

Ray crosses his arms, and Tony has to hand it to him, he’s certainly an indignant man, “I know everything I need to know about my cousin, Mr Stark. You don’t need to come in here and tell me things that don’t need to be said. I’d like it if you left.”

Tony’s grip tightens. He looks… confused, maybe a little out of place, suddenly uncomfortable or maybe doubtful or maybe they’re one in the same, but he makes no move to rise, “How do you not know?” The silence is enough, “Raymond,” He says seriously, “Sam Wilson is- was- an Avenger. He went by the codename Falcon. He had gone on nearly fifty missions with us. He lived in the Tower most weekends. You didn’t know?”

Ray doesn’t believe it.

While he was here, in the middle of dingy ol’ Queens with a bachelor’s degree from an unassuming college and a neatly laid out weekly menu, Sam was off in Manhattan lounging around with billionaires and saving the world over and over again. Then again, maybe it isn’t so out of the question, it’s just… a lot at once.

“Why are you telling me this?” Ray demands. His head is starting to hurt. Who would have thought that megalomaniac superheroes could be worse to deal with than moody, brainiac teenagers being forced to exert themselves physically for a grade?

Tony shrugs, “Why do you think?” He’s nonchalant, at ease, a line of platitudes expressed over his face before he finally says, “We’re really shorthanded with all the dissenters. I wanna offer you a job.”

“Wait- what?”

Tony looks more than a little smug, “Let me tell you about a kid named Spider-Man.”

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trbl-will-find-me · 7 years ago

Text

Every Exit, An Entrance (14/?)

There are two (and only two) possibilities: either she led XCOM to victory and they are now engaged in a clean up operation of alien forces, or XCOM was overrun, clearing the way for an alien-controlled puppet government to seize control of the planet. She’d really like to figure out which it is, but asking hardly seems the prudent option.

Read from the beginning here

She spends the time between the end of her shift and the memorial service writing and re-writing the letter to Gunda’s family. On the ground, XCOM’s finest do what they can to prop the haven up. Lily’s team finishes repairing the water purifier. Tygan restocks their depleted first aid supplies and does what he can to ward off infection in the wounded. The men attend burial after burial, heaping dirt over body after body. It is a long, trying day, and they all know the evening will bring them no respite.

Her thirty-fifth draft finally leaves her with something that doesn’t make her cringe to read.

The whole of XCOM, small as it is, files into the bar at the appointed hour. They pour drinks and look to her, their Commander, to offer some meaning, some comfort.

She hates eulogies.

She has only ever managed eloquence in debate, and even then, only on a few occasions. Central has always been better with speeches, with inspiring the kind of comfort and confidence she desperately wishes she could give the people gathered around her.

They are still looking.

“We lost a friend today,” she begins. “There’s no way to soften that blow. Asha’s warmth was contagious. You always knew you were in for a good time if she was in the mood to tell stories. You couldn’t hear her laugh and not join in.” She pauses to wipe at her eyes. “Asha wasn’t here for revenge. She wasn’t here to kick ADVENT’s teeth in. She was here because she believed we had the best shot at making the world a better place.” She shrugs. “I’m not gonna give you all some line about making her death worth it because that’s bullshit. You can’t commodify a human life --- and you shouldn’t. No act, no victory, nothing will ever make her death somehow... acceptable. Fair. Whatever word you want to use.” She pauses again, scrubbing at her eyes. “I’d like to think we carry the ones we’ve lost with us, that we honor and remember them in the things we do, the stories we tell. So, if you get a chance to make the world a better place, even if it’s just for one person, take it. I can’t think of a better way to carry her forth.”

She raises her glass and the room joins in. It is the best she can do for them.

Moon sits with Krieger, doing his best to console her. Thomas is uncharacteristically quiet, contemplating his beer in the corner, while Wallace and Royston do what they can to comfort Kelly. Knight and Dynkin, the newest additions to the science team, chat quietly with Tygan while Shen and her engineers huddle over what the Commander can only hope are some kind of improved armor schematics.

She doesn’t see so much as feel Central slide into the seat next to her. She’d be lying to herself if she blamed her hyperawareness of his presence, of his warmth, of his physicality in a space and how it relates to her own simply on Berlin, but it’s a convenient scapegoat and she tries not to think of how long it really would have taken her to develop such an acute sensitivity.

Wordlessly, he hands her his flask, already half-empty. She takes a shot and passes it back, wrinkling her nose as the bourbon burns.

I’m lost, she wants to tell him. I used to know the rules of the game with you, but they’ve changed. Or, maybe I’ve forgotten them. Maybe I didn’t know them in the first place, after all.

“I‘m sorry about earlier,” he says, taking another shot.

“Don’t worry about it. Was a tough day for everybody.”

“It was out of line.”

“Come on, you run the day to day around here. We really worried about rank?”

“Wasn’t what I meant.”

She reaches over the bar, takes a glass, fills it with water, and places it in front of him. “Like I said, it was a shit day. No one’s in a good place.”

He wraps his fingers around the cool of the cylinder. “You were right, though. Better that we bury her someplace she’ll be remembered.”

They sit quietly for a few moments.

“Tygan’s team did what they could to clear space free of dissection specimens,” she offers.

He nods. “They’re good people.”

She looks around the bar, hand rubbing at the back of her neck. “We’re gonna need more help if we want to win this thing. A lot more.”

He nods again. “I know.”

She leans forward, resting her elbows on the bar, and buries her face in her hands. Go back to bed, a voice in her head says. You don’t have to deal with this. It’s probably some bad dream, anyway. Go back to bed and maybe you’ll wake up where you’re supposed to be.

She’s brought back to reality by Central’s hand, warm and solid on her shoulder. “We’ll find it. We’re not out of doors to knock on yet.”

It’s fleeting, gone before she can even really react, and its absence hurts more than it has any right to. She’s lucky he’s even talking to her; with each day, she realizes more and more what a risky move delivering the datapad to him had been.

She’s missed him. She still misses him. She misses their history, the things that passed between them, glimpses of a life they might have once made for themselves. For as much as it’s the same old story, the same song and dance of blood and bullets and dead friends, it is an entirely new one. The players have changed and the plot too, but she is still here, scrambling for what was.

She can’t pinpoint a single source for the tears rolling down her cheeks. Instead, she simply wipes them away and accepts the flask that’s offered.

“Commander,” Central’s voice sounds in her ear. “We’ve got an incoming transmission from the Council.”

Her stomach drops and her mouth runs dry. We did nothing wrong, she tells herself. We obeyed the charter. We did nothing wrong.

“Any idea what’s up?”

“Negative, ma’am.”

Her heart races. This is it. They know. They’ve found some loophole, some detail we overlooked and they know. They heard something, saw something. Someone decided to see what Central was up to. They know.

She stands up from her desk and the world spins. “Alright. I’m on my way.”

She catches a glimpse of her reflection off of the glass set into the laboratory door. Her face is drawn and devoid of color. She shakes her hair loose from its bun, and fusses with it, hoping to lessen the appearance of the panic now gripping her.

Central looks concerned when she passes him in Mission Control, gently squeezing his arm as she heads for the Situation Room. She trusts him to understand what the gesture is meant to convey, even if she herself can’t quite narrow it down to a single message.

“Mr. Spokesman,” she says, frantically working to keep her voice calm and even. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Her heart thuds against her ribs and she fights the urge to pick at her fingers --- they are already ringed with band aids.

“Commander,” the Spokesman intones, ominous as ever as he stares down at her from the screen. “The Council has received word of your recent developments.”

A cold sweat breaks out across her skin. “You’ll have to be more specific, Mr. Spokesman. Both Dr. Shen and Dr. Vahlen have teams at work on a variety of projects.”

She can feel her legs start to tremble, threatening to betray her terror. She hopes the jitter does not carry across the video feed.

��Dr. Shen’s recent AI efforts are of particular interest to a number of our members. They are requesting additional details on the mobile platform you call the SHIV, currently under redevelopment.”

She wants to laugh or cry or scream or maybe some combination thereof that she can’t properly imagine right now. Relief courses through her veins, and her heart begins to slow. “Yes, absolutely. I’ll have Dr. Shen compile a dossier on the most recent work.”

The Spokesman nods. “We will be in touch.”

The feed goes dead.

She collapses into the nearest chair, legs turning to jelly below her. She draws in a deep breath and lets it out slowly, trying to quell the terror that had so abruptly risen and been even more abruptly dispelled.

“Dr. Shen,” she says, pressing a finger to her comm link and hoping her voice does not audibly shake. “Please instruct your team to assemble a dossier on the most recent work on the non-weaponized SHIV experiments. Our friends on the Council are very interested.”

“They’ll have it within the week, ma’am.”

“Understood. Thank you.”

She rests her head against the cool of the tabletop and waits for the nausea to subside.

She plays and replays the conversation in her head, trying to determine if the request was sincere or merely an attempt to fish for more information. She’s always struggled to secure an accurate read on the Spokesman, and she suspects that’s purposeful.

If they know, she asks herself, why play the long game? Evidence? Maybe they know, and are waiting for us to make another request before they say anything. Maybe they’re waiting for us to slip up and violate the terms.

Or maybe, they don’t know at all, she counters. Central said he’d relied on backchannels. Maybe the requests have been buried, encoded or lost among intelligence chatter. The Council is powerful, yes, but there has to be a limit. No nation is that forthcoming when it comes to sharing intel.

She is still shaking when she emerges back into Mission Control, though she’s managed to pin her fair back up, some faint air of professionalism restored.

“Central,” she says. “Expect a report from Shen’s team in the next few days. The Council’s taken an interest in ROV-R.”

He nods. “Word travels fast.”

“Doesn’t it just?”

“When you have a moment, I could use a word.”

“I’ll be in my office. Stop by at your leisure.”

He nods, “Ma’am.”

“Central.”

Back in the relative sanctuary of her office, she begins slowly, methodically disassembling the space. She removes the books from the shelves, and the computer from the desk. She runs her hand along edges, under tops, around corners. She pulls the drawers from the desk, the shade from the lamp, the cushions from the chair, looking for anything amiss, anything that should not belong.

She pries the cover from the outlet, the switch plate from the light, the corkboard from the wall. She will take no chances.

She’s reassembled the majority of it by the time he knocks.

“Redecorating?” He asks, surveying the remaining piles and the few drawers upended against the back wall.

“Ruling out a nasty feeling.”

“You find anything?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t really think I was going to, but after that call, I was taking no chances.”

“You think they know?”

She shrugs. “I can’t get a read either way. They’ve always held the cards, and they’ve got no reason to clue us in. Guess they figure it makes us easier to control.”

“If they’ve got all the power, then we’ve got no recourse.”

“…Yeah,” she says, her shoulders sagging. “That’s a pretty good summation.”

“So, flip the table.”

She cocks her head at him. “What?”

“If you want power, control the narrative. Control the narrative and you dictate what happens.”

The realization comes to her slowly. “You can’t really be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”

“The Council has us pinned because they’re our only source of funding. They can do what they want because they have no one to answer to. Why not change that?”

“Because we can’t hide de-cloaking. It’s not --- It’s not covert research. It’s a violation of the charter.”

“We play it right, and we won’t have to. Why did George Marshall rebuild western Europe?”

“Countering the spread of Communism.”

“Hearts and minds, Lizzie.”

“How?” She asks after a moment. “We’d have to be so careful.”

“There has to be a way to make it look like it’s not coming from us.”

She chews on her lip, contemplating. “We could make it look like a system intrusion --- right?”

He nods. “Gotta be a way.”

“If we fuck this up ---“

“We won’t.”

“But if we do?”

“Then, I’ll flip you for the top bunk in the brig.”

I love you, she wants to say. This is crazy, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s you, she almost tells him. I can’t imagine a better partner --- in this, or anything else, she nearly adds.

Instead, she settles for offering him a small smile. “Make it a best two out of three?”

#xcom #fic #every exit an entrance #commander/central #john 'ride or die' bradford

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