#plausible decodeability

[aye-went-splat]

As much as I like them, some people just make me feel like a tottering new-born giraffe when talking. I can't read them, don't know what makes them laugh, how to dance with their conversation. It's not that they're brick walls, but each button push yields a result 2 ft. left of what I was expecting.

[dedalvs]

Hey! I'm David Peterson, and a few years ago, I wrote a book called Create Your Own Secret Language. It's a book that introduces middle grade readers to codes, ciphers, and elementary language creation. The age range is like 10-14, but skews a little bit older, as the work gets pretty complicated pretty quick. I think 12-13 is the best age range.

Anyway, I decided to look at the Amazon page for it a bit ago, and it's rated fairly well (4.5 at the moment), but there are some 1 star reviews, and I'm always curious about those. Usually they're way off, or thought the book was going to be something different (e.g. "This book doesn't teach you a thing about computer coding!"), but every so often there's some truth in there. (Oh, one not 1 star but lower rated review said they gave it to their 2nd grader, but they found it too complicated. I appreciate a review like that, because I am not at all surprised—I think it is too complicated for a 2nd grader—and I think a review like that is much more effective than a simple 10+ age range on the book.) The first 1 star rating I came to, though, was this:

Now calling a completely mild description of a teenage girl who has a crush on another girl controversial is something I take exception to, but I don't want to pile on this person. Instead I wanted to share how this section came to be in the book.

The book is essentially divided into four parts. The first three parts deal with different ciphers or codes that become more complicated, while the last part describes elementary language creation. The first three sections are each built around a message that the reader can decode, but with language creation, the possibilities are too numerous and too complicated, so there isn't an example to decode, or anything. It would've been too difficult.

For what the messages to decode are about, though, I could do, potentially, anything, so at first I thought to tie them into a world of anthropomorphic animals (an ongoing series of battles between cats and mice), with messages that are being intercepted and decoded. My editor rejected that. Then I redid it so that each section had an individual story that had to do with some famous work of literature. My editor rejected that as well. He explained that it needed to be something that was relevant to kids of the target age range. I was kind of at a loss, for a bit, but then I thought of a story of kids sending secret messages about their uncle who eats too many onions. I shared that, my editor loved it, and I was like, all right. I can do this.

The tough part for me in coming up with mini-stories to plan these coded messages around was coming up with a reason for them to be secret. That's the whole point of a code/cipher: A message you want to be sure no one else but the intended recipient can read in case the message is intercepted. With the first one, two kids are poking gentle fun at a family member, so they want to be sure no one else can read what they're writing. For the last one, a boy is confessing to a diary, because he feels bad that he allowed his cat to escape, but no one knows he did it (he does find the cat again). For the other, I was trying to think of plausible message-sending scenarios for a preteen/teen, and I thought of how we used to write notes in, honestly, 4th and 5th grade, but I aged it up a bit, and decided to have a story about a girl writing a note to her friend because she has a crush on another girl, and wants her friend's opinion/help.

Here's where the point of sharing this comes in. As I had originally written it, the girl's note to her friend was not just telling her friend about her crush, it was also a coming out note, and she was concerned what her parents would react poorly.

Anyway, I sent that off with the rest of my draft, and I got a bunch of comments back on the whole draft (as expected), but my editor also commented on that story, in particular. Specifically, he noted that not every LGBTQ+ story has to be a coming out story, the part about potential friction between her and her parents because of it was a little heavy for the book, and, in general, not every coming out story has to be traumatic.

That was all he said, but I immediately recognized the, in hindsight, obvious truth of all three points, and I was completely embarrassed. I changed it immediately, so that the story beats are that it's a crush, she's not sure if it'll be reciprocated, and she's also very busy with school and band and feels like this will be adding even more busy-ness to her daily life as a student/teen. Then I apologized for making such a blunder. My editor was very good about it—after all, that's what drafts and editors are for—and that was a relief, but I'm still embarrassed that I didn't think of it first.

But, of course, this is not my lived experience, not being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. This is the very reason why you have sensitivity readers—to provide a vantage point you're blind to. In this case, I was very fortunate to have an editor who was thinking ahead, and I'm very grateful that he was there to catch it. That editor, by the way, is Justin Krasner.

One reason I wanted to share this, though, is that while it always is a bit of a difficult thing to speak up, because there might be a negative reaction, sometimes there is no pushback at all. Indeed, sometimes the one being called out is grateful, because we all have blindspots due to our own lived experiences. You can't live every life. For that reason, your own experience will end up being valuable to someone at some point in time for no other reason than that you lived it and they didn't. And, by the by, this is also true for the present, because the lives we've lived cause us to see what's going on right before our eyes in different lights.

Anyway, this is a story that wouldn't have come out otherwise, so I wanted to be sure to let everyone know that Justin Krasner ensured that my book was a better book. An editor's job is often silent and thankless, so on Thanksgiving, I wanted to say thank you, Justin. <3

[artbyblastweave]

The Fallout 3 Numbers Station Creepypasta is interesting to me, because it swings wildly from being fairly effective to cartoonishly inept, for reasons that are both easy and illustrative to pinpoint.

(For those unfamiliar, the premise is that through an opaque and poorly documented series of in-game actions, it's possible to turn the in-game radio in Fallout 3 into a numbers station; analysis of the numbers produced by that station reveal dated snippets of information about events yet to come, with an abrupt cutoff point for the dates that implies something apocalyptically bad is coming down the tubes.)

The setup of the thing is actually very effective, because it's written with intimate knowledge of the two relevant idioms- the online fallout fandom, and conventions of online walkthroughs. Part of it is that a numbers station of any kind is extremely compatible with the apocalyptic tone and tenor of Fallout 3 in particular, which already uses abandoned, looping broadcasts as exploration hooks at multiple points, so something like this being buried or dummied out is at least somewhat plausible. There's further verisimilitude in that the supposed triggers for the broadcast station involves killing fan-favorite NPCs and bypassing content in a way that harkens to the banging-rocks-together mode of experimentation that players do in bethesda sandboxes when they've gotten bored. The information about how to trigger the worldstate is written with the familiar cautious uncertainty of someone who's been crowdsourcing information from an online community- certain and uncertain triggers, a difficulty distinguishing between intended steps in the process, unintended bugthesda jank, and normal game states that only seem relevant because you're currently over-scrutinizing everything. All-in-all, written from a place of clear familiarity with how these kinds of easter egg hunts tend to go.

Where it fucks the dog, of course, is that the decoded messages about future events are entirely too on the nose, tip their hands too readily that the world is going to end, and generally don't in any way resemble actual human communications. The only remotely effective component is the closing detail about how there appears to be a specific cutoff date past which there are no new communications to pick up on. The potential tension of which is taken out back and shot by the fact that one of the decoded transmissions involves someone staring into the camera and exposition dumping about how scientists fucked up and the universe is unravelling. It's also delivered in a different register from the front half of the piece- they don't stick the landing on marrying the more believable GameFAQs-speak with the clunkier narrative descriptions of the decoded messages.

All this to demonstrate that being able to construct a framing device with verisimilitude is actually a largely different skill than being able to give whatever's behind the curtain verisimilitude. DrB0sch is an example of a project that sticks the landing much more effectively, initially presented within the familiar idiom of low-rent early-oughts youtube walkthroughs about idiosyncrasies that are almost plausible before spiraling into deepcut creepypasta insanity that's nonetheless in strong conversation with the source material. It probably helps that it's got no prose to trip up on

[daisyswift3]

KAYLORS I JUST DECIPHERED THE PR MESSAGES FROM PRESENT 🎁 ANON AND AM NOW VERY CERTAIN THEY’RE LEGIT TOO. So we started receiving these very interesting anon messages exactly 2 months before the release of TTPD (release was 4/19)

We were told to keep our eyes peeled for a present or gift we would be receiving and well we got it

There are P's and R's repeated in the messages. "The hint is in the words." P = PETER. R = ROBIN. Those songs are a gift to us kaylors. They're separated by just one song, the Bolter (which I'm 99% sure is related to the 8th 🎃 message bc Taylor almost drowns and a bolter is a coward which was the main point of the message); and Taylor mentions CPR in So Long, London which means they're all related. Bc Cassandra = Taylor, Peter = her second kid, Robin, = her first kid. They're related bc they're a family. I think it's possible those are the actual names of her two kids

"This is not the manuscript" i.e. the manuscript (closing track) is not the gift, it's the songs right before it! Robin is the 2nd to last song, Peter the 4th to last, and Cassandra the 5th to last. "It has been hidden well, look where the above may find you." They can be found in the track titles themselves. "Plausible deniability. Think of the one we continue to revisit"--K and T have plausible deniability since everyone thinks those are JK's kids. BUT "the volcano will soon rupture, whoever is to defame" which means that one day all the truth will come spilling out regardless of the defamation that will happen. "Restful, reticent, restraint. And PUBLISH!"--perhaps a tell-all memoir??

"The predecessor was the crumb" in other words peace "I'd give you my wild, give you a child" (see this post) was just a faint hint but now she's getting really close to revealing everything which is what the volcano 🌋 represents! THE DANDELIONS IN THE ROBIN LYRIC VID. Robin is the single dandelion floret (secret) she was so worried abt sending into someone else’s yard in the 7th 🎃 message (see this post). She was afraid that sending this song out into the world could expose the truth she’s worked so hard to protect before she’s ready but she did it anyway. “Once you blow a dandelion, you never get it back. It isn’t yours anymore.” “But the story isn’t mine anymore.” 🎃 mentions how the recipient of the dandelion would also blow and spread the florets which might mean kaylors would catch on and spread the secret. The 8th message also mentions a dandelion that the enemy has and spreads but I’m not yet sure who this person is—also this person could be the “recipient” and not kaylors but I’m not sure. And I’m not sure if this means they’d like us to kinda keep this to ourselves and not use Robin as a gotcha since it’s meant to be more of a seed planted for future use (no pun intended). But it definitely seems like they aren’t ready to reveal everything just yet

"As the neighbor holds the lamp to witness her Goodbye" = "Now you're in my backyard turned into good neighbors" and "But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light"

"Reach those lanterns a little bit higher for you shall receive a metaphor so dire"--a jack-o-lantern like pumpkin anon? These metaphorical messages will help us to understand K and T's entire complicated situation?

"When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me"--"breath of fresh air through smoke rings." Haven't quite figured out what this part means yet but it reminds me of blowing smoke which means to deliberately confuse or deceive (lavender haze mv)

This is as far as I've gotten w decoding the messages. This all adds a lot of context to those 🎃 messages and makes them a little more clear. There’s definitely more clues in there we have yet to decipher so pls share your thoughts

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender

When a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer's.

In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, USA, and cohost of the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. We talk about Emily's work trying to formulate a list of rules that a computer can use to generate grammatical sentences in a language, the differences between that and training a computer to generate sentences using the statistical likelihood of what comes next based on all the other sentences, and the further differences between both those things and how humans map language onto the real world. We also talk about paying attention to communities not just data, the labour practices behind large language models, and how Emily's persistent questions led to the creation of the Bender Rule (always state the language you're working on, even if it's English).

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

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Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane’

Bonus with Janelle Shane: we do a dramatic reading of the funniest auto-generated Lingthusiasm episodes

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This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[hmshermitcraft]

Lizzie is a critically acclaimed actress. Gem is the lead singer of an extremely popular band. Cleo is a not very well known author.

Lizzie and Gem come up with a plan to give Cleo the spotlight they deserve. Which does not involve saying "hey guys this is my girlfriend, you should go check out her work" to their millions of followers across multiple platforms. No, it involves having other people see them reading Cleo's books, and trying to decode what it means, giving them plausible deniability when people try to claim that Cleo's only famous because of them.

Now, Gem is making her acting debut as Lizzie's love interest in the movie adaptation of Cleo's book. Cleo is working closely with the directors to make sure Lizzie and Gem get the spotlight they deserve, just like they once did for her.

- 💜

It's nice as well, because often their jobs mean they don't get time to spend together. They all have tours, press, signings and it keeps them apart a lot.

But with this? They get to work together, they'll get to do the press together. It's exciting!

[dulu0z0427]

fun fact, this keyboards part of ctte might be morse code（begin in 4:52/7:13）

to prove it, i found a video on youtube that try to break the code, here's the most probative comment:

@tonescape1

I may have figured it out, but also see my other comments about this. Wakeman’s Morse code message is this, repeated 8 times (breaking off in the 9th) at its first appearance, and repeated 4 times (breaking off at the end of the 5th) in its second appearance:

.--....-..--..-.----

It has been stated that this is "Abraxas", the name of an ancient Gnostic deity, and also a symbolic character in Hesse's novel "Demian". Because Hesse's later novel "Siddhartha" was the actual inspiration for the lyrics of this song, the connection makes it very plausible. However, this is not “Abraxas”, because the last letter would need to be s (3 dots) not o (3 dashes). Wakeman plays the dots and dashes without leaving any silence between letters or words, which is what makes so many different interpretations possible. I just finally deciphered it. It’s actually a very clever pun, because it can be interpreted as “Abraxao”, which doesn’t mean anything, but will lead people down this incorrect path. I tried dozens of arrangements of spaces between the dots and dashes, which of course produce totally different letters or numbers, even thinking that maybe he was making a joke and that it was a London postal code beginning with E7 or W4. But there was only one interpretation I found that made sense. With spaces between letters, and slashes between words, it would be arranged thus:

. - / - . … / -. .- -- ..- .- -- -

It’s actually the Latin phrase “Et tes natuamt”, which Google translates into English as “And you will be born”, and which fits perfectly into the context of the song's lyrics. Comments from those who know Latin better than I would be appreciated. Or maybe someone can get Wakeman to comment himself

secondly, from MY own perspective, the decoding of Abraxas has been widely discussed among netizens, and as mentioned in the previous comment, it is an important symbol throughout the book of Demian, which i have read before, i scanned the first few pages, the text about Abraxas caught my attention (p1-2), and the corresponding lyrics in morse code are as follows (p3 is the first appearance, p4 is the second), considering that jon said that ctte was inspired by reading Siddhartha and Demian, i feel that both explanations are valid.

additionally, Abraxas is also a metaphor for evil and decay in mythology, and in Demian, it represents temptation and seduction. personally, I think it fits quite well in the lyrics of ctte, especially when the keyboards voice hidden behind jons singing, and the morse code typed out, hinting at temptation. alternatively, if the second translation is adopted, "And you will be born," it is more in line with the theme of Siddhartha.

idk if rick had some Latin lessons so that he could write these code, or it's just jon wanted to add something mystery in ctte,

im not so sure about my conjectures, but it's exciting to re-understanding my fav song.

enjoy!

[none-shall-caricature-me]

Kuras's Atonement + His Past with the Senobium - A Theory

So the latest Kuras character lore came out, which hints at Kuras or one of his fellow angels being the 'otherworldly teacher' who taught humans stuff like writing, art, WAR, etc. Inventions that can be used for good, bad or in between. Hence there are differing views of this entity - as benevolent or a harbinger of ruin.

Moreover, the caption states (it's highly plausible that Kuras says it) - “Hope. A strange concept, after so long seeing myself as the agent of ruin.”

This, plus an earlier stats post that puts his empathy at 2 / 5 lead me to the folllowing conclusion -

We know that Kuras is atoning for a past blunder by entering the human world and setting up his charitable interventions. That catastrophe was probably the event of him introducing all these new concepts to humans WHILE lacking the lived human experience to truly foresee, understand and empathise with the consequences. For example, war happens for resource access, profiteering, ideology, punitive 'destroy those sinners' rage etc. Perhaps Kuras introduced war hoping to elevate the humans he considered righteous or wiser over those he thought evil, lesser or dangerous, but this judgemental aloofness meant he overlooked the reasons WHY people do evil, overlooked moral greyness. And then this spiralled out of control because he failed to grasp and predict humanity's vices.

It's like how less intelligent animals commit atrocities ultimately for survival and genetic lineage, but more intelligent animals like dolphins, otters and above all, humans will commit atrocities and shape exploitative systems for non - strictly essential reasons.

But why didn't he correct his mistake ? Maybe he lost hope for humanity out of disgust and left them to their sordid devices. But that fixed nothing and only led to more suffering. Or maybe his specific kind of inhuman purity (and I mean 'pure' in a very NEUTRAL sense) prevented him from understanding humans enough to do anything about it all. And then he went into exile in the mortal world to finally try to decode and dialogue with humanity through with an open mind instead of an untouchable omniscience.

Perhaps that's why he hates the Senobium. They seem to pursue knowledge and innovation for all kinds of reasons at ANY cost, treating living creatures as a lab simulation. Earlier he had good relations with them, back when he stuck to his original path. But now it's just a reminder of his biggest sin.

Possibly a stretch, but what if he had a hand in the Senobium's initial establishment + growth ?

REFS FROM RED SPRING STUDIO'S TWIITER -

[katuschka]

Olalla Chapter Twelve

Josh Kiszka x f!OC x jake Kiszka 7.480 words

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, intended for adult readers. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental. Also, if you're under 18, go find some other entertainment elsewhere.

Warnings (are spoilers): deception, emotional cheating, secrets and insincerity, petting, light dom play, oral sex (m!receiving), including rimming, very light breathplay, a brief mention of sex toys, a brief mention of war, and as always, an unhealthy dose of heavy emotions and feelings, crying

(Oh, and yes, Cody Bowles has been my inspiration fro Christopher.)

If you like the story and want to get notifications, you can join the Taglist

Previous chapter Olalla masterpost

In every corridor that shifted the maze No single part of you was ever the same Now we're so tired by the things we have seen All we've forgotten only visits in dreams How I misunderstood Here I stand undressed Here I confess my doubt Did you know that I would? From this fractured lens We're unveiled again and again

Jake

He felt trapped. He fucked up, and he knew it. This was not how he wanted it to end, despite all the secrets and circumstances that had led them all into this exact situation. 

Now, with three pairs of eyes boring into him, Jake’s mind started racing in a desperate attempt to come up with a plausible explanation that would hurt no one. Yeah, it seemed to be an impossible task, and he felt like the universe had brought Veela’s sister there simply to make it even harder. Her previously friendly smile quickly transformed into a fierce glare that was so disturbingly familiar. Same room, different woman, different time. What a deja-vu. She-wolves, both of them. Fuck this shit. 

Maya was a stranger to him. She knew nothing about this, at least seemingly, and he simply didn’t want her there. 

But one look at Agnieszka’s hand holding her sister firmly by the shoulder for support reminded Jake that he was a mere visitor here, and Maya had every right to be present and ask questions. He, on the other hand, had no right to lay down conditions. 

While obviously younger, it was also immediately apparent which one of them possessed more strength and innate authority. From what Josh had told him, she had also played the role of a matchmaker at the very start. So the bitch was also fond of his brother. Great. Jake missed Sam all of the sudden. Sam would know what to do. He’d insult everyone in the process, but at least he always somehow knew how to soothe disturbed hearts and prevent any further damage. Ok, what would Sam do… 

“Jake? What is going on?” Agnieszka’s voice broke the silence, and he cringed at the sound. Not commanding. Pleading. And containing all the previous questions. She was trying to stay outwardly calm, but he could see the self-consuming storm raging behind her eyes. If only she learned how to let it out more often. They’d get what they both rightfully deserved and she’d stop destroying herself. 

Jake looked into Josh’s eyes again and found a silent plea there, followed by a simple gesture that only Jake knew how to decode. He answered in the same manner, by brushing the back of his hand across his chin. He made up his mind then, and took a deep breath. She would be angry, but Jake knew Josh was no hypocrite, so no real harm would be done… 

“I’m sorry Veela, but I told him we kissed. We had an ugly fight then, he wanted me to cancel this trip and threatened to leave the band…” In his peripheral vision, he could see Josh raising his eyebrows in astonishment, but it was gone a second later. He knew he could count on his brother being a good actor. Perhaps too good… Let’s worry about this later. Neszka, on the other hand, looked shocked and hurt, but that was the price he was ready to pay.  “So…yeah…that’s kinda how that happened,” he continued, referring to Josh’s injury.  “Yesterday evening I told Lisa, because things got tense again on the way here.”

Agnieszka’s horror-struck stare quickly transformed into a mask of vigilance and Jake wasn’t entirely sure she really bought his explanation. In his mind, he was quickly calculating whether it covered and clarified everything that was said. Meanwhile, she looked at Josh, wondering if he’d confirm the story. To Jake’s mild astonishment (and great relief), Josh returned her gaze with a soft, sad smile and blinked slowly. He looked almost relieved. Really…?

“I’m sorry…,” she said, taking the blame just like she always did. Jake felt instantly bad and regretful for putting her in that position, while still knowing that the truth would be much worse. Before he could say something, Josh beat him to it. 

“No babe! I already said this has nothing to do with you… I mean… it kinda does, but… there’s nothing you should apologize for.” 

Maya looked like she was just about to say something when a cute little sprite with two long braids danced into the room. “Mama, jesteš tutaj!” She started tugging at the hem of Maya’s sweatshirt impatiently. She looked no older than four. 

Maya replied in a sweet voice, but quickly added something that sounded like a commanding reproach, making the little girl turn towards him and Josh bashfully. “Dzień dobry,” she squeaked, while batting her eyelashes at them, making Jake smile. She reminded him of young Ronnie and he suddenly wondered how Lulubean would have looked like. This Christmas was supposed to be completely different, but the safety of his arms was now just an empty cradle. The sudden pang was very unwelcome. 

Meanwhile, Maya whispered something to Neszka, to which the latter only shook her head. Grabbing the girl’s hand, Maya kissed her sister’s cheek and shot an ambivalent glance at Josh, who responded with a tentative pat on her shoulder, but averted his eyes immediately. 

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Jake,” Maya nodded towards him on her way out, sounding like it was the least pleasurable thing she had experienced during the whole week. Honestly, Jake couldn’t care less. He was more concerned with the oppressive silence that engulfed the room the moment she left. Suddenly, they had nothing left to say, even though the situation was far from resolved. Josh sat down on the nearest chair and rubbed his still a bit puffy eyes. Apparently, Lisa must have woken him up with her call. 

Without a word, Neszka poured him a large glass of orange juice and he drank it down immediately, thanking her weakly. Jake felt like he overstayed his welcome and immediately chuckled at the thought, considering that he had come uninvited in the first place. 

“What’s so funny?” Josh looked up, annoyed. 

“Nothing…I… think I should go back,” he sighed, then grimaced immediately, remembering his phone was dead. “Although I have no idea how to get there. Jesus Christ…”

“I’ll drive you,” Neszka chimed in with a stoic tone. Josh looked like he was going to protest, but stopped himself the moment he saw her face. “Just let me change into jeans and grab a coat.” She left without giving either of them a second glance and Jake had a feeling that she probably wanted to be alone for a second, while giving them a chance to talk. He returned back to his coffee and cake opposite to Josh and took a small bite. 

“Thank you,” Josh murmured at last. 

Jake ignored this. He didn’t do that for Josh and it wasn’t anything anyone should be thankful for, anyway. I didn’t change a thing. It certainly didn’t make anything better, only worse. And, it raised new questions. “You didn’t seem surprised. Either you’re good at pretending, or Lisa already told you about the kiss.” 

Josh shook his head. “Yeah, she told me. But I wasn’t surprised, because while I might be good at pretending, you’re not. You think I hadn’t noticed? You two had been almost inseparable during the first week. Then suddenly, she comes to my room in the middle of the night, her shirt reeking of Sauvage. And I also heard you talking on the stairs later that night. But even if I hadn’t, Jake… Do you think I’m stupid? With you suddenly avoiding her? Or reeking of booze half of the time… I’m your twin!” 

Jake felt a huge lump in his throat. Really?! His twin would have said something. Who is this person? He pursed his lips and looked at Josh defiantly, while the latter shook his head with a pained expression etched on his face. 

“So now that we settled this,” Josh sighed. “Tell me, Jake, why are you here?”

“We didn’t settle shit. And I already told you. At least now you know why I don’t wanna let you hurt her. Oh, wait, you’ve known all along. My bad.”

“I wasn’t lying, Jake. I know you don’t believe me, and I have no idea how to make you, but nothing happened!” 

“Why the hell did he kiss you then? Why did you both look so reconciled?”

Josh scoffed. “As if sex could ever make it right.” 

Jake didn’t respond to that. He had told Lisa he knew Christopher… so now he had to admit to himself that Josh was right. However, his brother was also obviously still not telling the whole truth. “Fine. Ok. But something happened, Josh. If you think that I can’t fool you… well, brother, let me remind you that it works both ways. If nothing happened, why do you look so uneasy?” Leaning on his elbow with his head resting in his palm, Jake raised his eyebrows and looked intently at Josh, daring him. They just stared at each other for a few more seconds, unmoving, before Josh finally sighed and leaned back on his chair. 

“It’s a bit complicated.”

“Naaaah, definitely not the answer I was looking for.”

“What do you want me to say, Jake?!?” Josh’s voice suddenly sounded unusually hoarse, and Jake knew that usually happened when Josh was choking on uncomfortable emotions. “Taffy just doesn’t believe that this will last.” He made a sweeping gesture towards the door behind him. “And he told me that he would be there once I got back home and wanted to call him…” Josh let out a shaky breath and looked past Jake, staring at the wooden ornaments on the wall and looking like he didn’t even believe what he just said. His lower lip started to quiver slightly, and Jake suddenly felt almost sorry for him. Almost… Also, Taffy what?

“And you?”

Josh looked back at Jake, frowning. “Huh?” 

“You believe it? You must have said or done something that made him not believe it, and we both know Taffy’s not an idiot. So, what did you tell him? Why are you here, Josh?” 

“I…”

“Ok, I’m ready.” 

The sound of Agnieszka’s voice right behind him made Josh visibly tense. Eyes wide in horror, he looked at Jake and his nostrils flared. Another silent question only the two of them understood. In response, Jake placed two fingertips on his lower lip. No. No, she probably didn’t hear them. She was smiling, albeit weakly. 

“Fine, let’s go,” he stood up, grabbed his own coat and followed Neszka back into the hall, leaving Josh alone with his thoughts. 

The drive was not long, just a few minutes, but they spent it in silence, so it seemed like an eternity. Only when she parked in front of the small row of private chalets, she spoke. 

“I wanted to say that I wished you had been sincere, but that would be hypocritical.” 

“What do you mean?” Jake looked at her, frowning. She didn’t return the gaze; instead she kept looking at the wild, snowy horizon in front of her. 

He waited patiently for the answer, but she didn’t give him any. Instead, her face suddenly twisted slightly and she squeezed her eyes shut, but all her attempts to calm down only resulted in a shaky sob. Jake panicked. 

“Hey! No…” He reached out and pulled her in an embrace. “Shhh. What did he do?”

“Eh? What? No…nothing. He didn’t do anything. Wrong, I mean… That’s not…,” she sobbed with her face buried in his shawl, before she collected herself enough to pull away and take a deep, calming breath. “Don’t you think we’re all behaving like complete idiots?” She smiled mournfully, with her eyes now completely red and puffy. Jake desperately wanted to stroke her damp cheek, but stopped himself almost in mid-motion to rub his own lips instead. 

“A bit, maybe, yeah…” You have no idea, actually. “What are you trying to tell me, Veela?”

“I should be mad at you. For telling him, and for hurting him. And I should be asking you why you did that in the first place, but…”

“Veela, I…”

 “I’m glad you’re here, Jake,” she cut him off, sighing. “I really mean it. I missed you.”

She wasn’t making it any easier for him. Just a second earlier, it was almost impossible to breathe. Now the creature inside his chest roared with delight, and he had to remind himself to be sensible. He felt like there was a huge, unpronounced “BUT” lingering at the end of her last sentence. Besides, seeing her like this was making his stomach clench. He didn’t want to keep this unresolved, but what could he possibly say to resolve this? He wished he could lighten the mood, at least. It was, after all, almost Christmas. Before he could come up with anything to say, she spoke again, almost as if she could read his mind. 

“I hope you two are still coming tomorrow.” 

“Yeah, sure,” he answered quietly, almost in a whisper. “Of course.”

“Good. Family needs to be together. That’s the most important thing,” she looked at him intently, a silent “tell me you understand” written all over her face. He nodded, his throat constricting. Sincerity be damned, then. Fine. He was already used to it. 

“The dinner starts as soon as the first star appears, so around four, but you can come earlier. Cooking is part of the festivities, really. We usually have so much fun, and I’m sure mama will be delighted to see you,” she added, sniffing, and he quickly searched his pockets for tissues, before handing her one. She blew her nose, while thanking him, and stuffed the tissue into her pocket, but her cheeks were still wet. Against his better judgment, he took another one to wipe the tears away. 

He was perhaps too gentle about it, and looking directly into her eyes while doing so probably wasn’t a very good idea either. She let him do it, though, returning his gaze as if hypnotized. He shoudn’t…

The moment was suddenly interrupted when the door in front of them opened and Lisa stepped out, holding a phone. 

“Yeah, they’re here.” Jake could see, rather than really hear her saying that. There was also no mistaking who was on the other side. She ended the call and stepped forward, huddling in just her cardigan. Jake groaned internally and opened the door, mentally preparing for the confrontation. He hadn’t thought about it up until now, accidentally making the situation even worse. At least judging by her face. Agnieszka made a move to get out of the car as well and he looked at her in alarm before he could consciously stop himself. 

“I think I should…” she motioned towards Lisa, confused. 

Of course, she was right. It was a natural thing to do, especially if they were going to spend Christmas Eve in Eulalia the next day. Still, Jake felt like he’d vomit any second… 

Lisa, however, shot one stone-cold glance her way and then continued to act as if Neszka was nonexistent, leaving her standing there awkwardly like an ice statue, frozen in an awkward welcoming gesture. “Where have you been?” she barked at Jake, her eyes teary. It was, in a way, a very stupid question, considering she knew the answer very well, as well as why. She wanted him to say it out loud. 

Jake was not going to play this game. He just hoped she wouldn’t want to destroy her opportunities, whatever it meant, by exposing him here and now. 

“Could you please calm down? I just went for a walk and got a bit lost.” He couldn’t hide the irritation in his voice, no matter how he tried. He expected the storm to get worse, but her next move surprised him. Lisa simply threw herself on him, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shawl, just like Veela did a moment ago. He returned the embrace reluctantly. 

“I was just worried! I woke up completely alone and you weren’t answering the phone!” 

“Shhh, I’m sorry, that was shitty of me.” He had to admit that. He already had a history of leaving her alone because of Neszka. In the bed, in the room… and this was a whole new level. This vacation… simply didn’t start well. At the same time, Lisa was a pretty independent and capable woman. This was still a game. And it worked…

“I think I should go,” Neszka said weakly and made a move to get back in the car. 

“No, wait,” Jake broke the embrace and turned towards her. “Let’s settle this first. It was a bit rude.” While still looking at Neszka, the last sentence belonged to Lisa, who however made no indication that she was going to back away and show some decency. 

“That’s ok, Jake. I’ll see you tomorrow. This is obviously not the right time for unnecessary pleasantries.” She even tried to smile at Lisa, who did not reciprocate. 

“Yeah, I’m quite freezing. But he’s right. Uuum, Olalla, right? It was nice to meet you and I’m looking forward to tomorrow, she blurted out, while shaking violently in her sheer cardigan. Perhaps too violently… “Please, let’s go inside,” she turned to Jake. He had no other option but to obey, nodding irritably. 

“Ok, tomorrow then. Nice to meet you too,” Neszka muttered. Lisa successfully made her feel like a third wheel and utterly out of place, and Jake wasn’t going to let it slide. She was just reaching for the car door and he stopped her. 

“Wait. Thank you for the ride. You ok?” he asked and ran his hand down her arm. She smiled, but shrunk back from his touch, albeit as politely as possible. It didn’t go unnoticed. Lisa saw it and Jake noticed a glint of satisfaction in her eyes. 

Neszka excused herself once again and drove off, leaving Jake utterly miserable and frustrated. Back in the chalet, he threw his dead phone on the table with a clank. 

“You wanna play games? Fine! Let’s play. Get naked. NOW!”

Knowing what was to come, Lisa shot him a wicked smile. 

Josh

He put the phone down and remained sitting there unmoving for a few more minutes, staring stolidly at Jake’s abandoned piece of cake, the knot in his stomach refusing to loosen. 

He had woken up with a gnawing hunger, only to lose all appetite again as soon as he heard Lisa’s words, feeling like the whole universe plotted against him. How was he supposed to figure it out in this constant state of fear and anxiety? 

“He won’t tell her, but I might. Just make sure he doesn’t get near her, ok? It’s in your own interest, after all. We don’t want to ruin the holidays, do we?”

Yeah, well, he failed… and now he had to sit here and wait, wondering what the fuck was going on there. She sounded as if this was some sort of a game, but it was fucking not! I’m fucking uneasy because your fucking girlfriend is fucking nuts, you fucking idiot! And it was Jake’s fault. Again. 

Josh’s head was spinning, his hands were shaking, and the lack of sugar in his bloodstream only made it all worse. The orange juice helped a bit, but not entirely. So, with reluctance, Josh reached out across the table for the remaining chunk of poppy seed roll and crammed it into his mouth, regretting the decision almost immediately. It took all his remaining willpower to swallow the mouthful. 

As soon as the last wave of nausea subsided, he got up and returned back upstairs to Olalla’s private apartment. 

He had never been there completely alone before, never really paid attention to the pictures on the wall above her work desk. It was like a small, private exhibition, depicting different stages of Olalla’s life. A little girl with two ponytails sitting on a seesaw, or two slightly older cuties with toothless grins, standing in the kitchen next to an older woman wearing a headscarf with a colorful floral pattern. Their grandmother, no doubt. The next picture was a bit smudgy, but he recognized them both thanks to the previous photo. They were playing soccer with four other boys, their long braids flailing in the wind. 

There were also several pictures of her and her dad, hiking. Small, pre-teen, adolescent. She truly loved this. The last two frames contained snapshots from university days. She looked almost the same, and yet so different, with her hair cut in an asymmetric bob and her eyes full of life and mischief. He touched the picture with his fingertips, tracing the contours of her face just like he had done a few times before in the middle of the night. 

It took him a while to find her in the middle of a group of lively people in the second picture, all dressed in costumes. There she was, on the left, dressed as a pirate. His heart sank. A subconscious reaction, but a strong one nonetheless.

There was no photo of Dominik; instead, she had framed a small handwritten note. Josh couldn’t understand a word, but he had no doubt it was important. It was accompanied by a small pressed flower, attached to the piece of paper with a small band-aid… as if she could bear to see his face, but she wanted to remember the feeling. Broken love frozen in time, forever cherished. 

His eyes traveled down to her desk. There was another tiny standing photo holder placed right next to the monitor, containing an older picture of him and Jake in their stage outfits. Black and white, day and night, and huddled together, with Josh’s arm wrapped around Jake in a brotherly hug.

Josh sighed. Oh, you do, baby, don’t you. What are we gonna do…

In an attempt to keep his racing mind occupied with something else, he focused on the contents of Agnieszka’s small bookcase. Most of the volumes there were in Polish, so he chose a huge traveler's guide for climbers full of beautiful photos. 

Sitting on a couch, he just leafed through it absentmindedly, not really paying attention to what he was looking at, until his eyes fell on a double page image of Hala Gasienicowa and he stared at it for several seconds until the pain in his chest reminded him that he was holding his breath. He exhaled, while closing his eyes, but the pain didn’t go away. It kept sitting on his chest, squeezing it tight. In his mind, he could hear her sing again while his whole body felt as if it was on fire. The air smelled of pungent mountain grass and sweet coconuts and blood and love and fear, all mixed together in a peculiar sensory cocktail. It still felt like a strange fever dream from which he remembered only bits and pieces. 

He longed for comfort and his traitorous mind led him back to a dimly lit wooden cabin in a place where there was no fear, only love. This love smelled like palo santo and toffees and hair oil infused with herbs. It had made Christopher’s dark, thick curls shine so bright and Josh had been playing with them, wrapping the ringlets around his fingers as if they were real rings. It used to mean something, before he threw it out of the window without thinking. 

He deserved nothing. 

Maybe Jake was right; he just kept hurting people. 

A few stray tears slid down his eyelashes and he blinked a few times to get rid of them. He had been crying way too many times lately, with all the important people either too far away or otherwise unreachable and distant. A few times he’d been considering calling mom, but shame always prevented him from doing that in the end. He had no idea how to make this right. 

The sound of the door opening freed him from his racing thoughts momentarily and he quickly wiped the remaining tears away before he gave her a questioning look. Olalla smiled back. Thank god for small mercies. 

She sat next to him, looked at the open book on his lap and sighed knowingly, before taking another deep breath. “I really am sorry. I guess I should have told you right away.” 

He looked at her, confused, before he remembered Jake’s half-arsed substitute story. “It doesn’t matter at all.” It really didn’t. He never cared. It’s not like they were a pair back then. Besides, there were more pressing questions right now. He closed the book and put it on the table. “So… you met Lisa? I hope she wasn’t rude…”

“Yes, I did. She’s a pretty girl. And, well… we’re not going to be friends,” she answered, pushing her lower jaw forward theatrically. It made him laugh and his face immediately squeezed in discomfort. 

“Your lips are completely chapped, Joshua. No wonder it still hurts. Wait a second,” Agnieszka breathed out while getting up from the couch and leaving him in the room alone again. Josh let out a long exhale. He was relieved, even if only slightly. Not great, not terrible. Could have been worse…

Olalla  was soon back from the bathroom with a small plastic jar containing some yellow ointment. 

“What’s that?”

“Marigold,” she answered as she sat back next to him before smearing some on his lower lip with her fingertip. She tapped carefully around the half-healed gash, careful not to graze the scab. “You’re awfully pale. Have you eaten?”

“Yeah,” he lied, closing his eyes while she applied some more on the upper lip. She then applied some more on the irritated skin above the bruise. It really was soothing. “Thanks, that’s much better.” 

“It matters to me, though,” she picked up on their previous conversation, referring to the kiss again, while screwing the lid shut. He really wished she would just drop the subject, but obviously, she had more to say. Much more to say… “I could be a bitch about it and just say that it was him kissing me, but the truth is that I didn’t stop him at first. And… I’m done with pretending,” she took a deep, shaky breath, as if bracing herself, “so I’m not going to say that it meant nothing.” She paused for a few seconds, letting the words sink in. Josh swallowed hard and waited patiently, while not really knowing what for. She continued after that brief pause. “I had promised myself not to do these things anymore. You know how I used to be. I just want you to know that…”

“Shhh.” He grabbed her cheeks in both of his hands and pressed a quick, gentle kiss on her lips. He could feel her relax.  “I know, baby. But our fight was about much more than just that. None of it is your fault, and I really don’t want you to worry about that.” 

“I figured. It’s true that I had asked him not to tell you, but a lot of things have happened since then; I got to know you a little bit more, and I’m quite certain you wouldn’t say or do anything harsh just because of one stupid kiss. Jake, on the other hand… but he always has his reasons, and I know you two are not telling me everything, but as long as you can figure it out, I don’t care anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re here,” she answered, looking deep into his eyes, smiling. With his hands still cradling her cheeks, he traced slow circles with his thumb over her flushed skin. Without breaking eye contact, she continued: “I made a decision that night, and nothing has changed since then, even though I do need to admit that I missed you both. And also, part of me didn’t even believe that you’d ever come back. But you’re here. And last night… you…”

Her confession almost broke his heart again and he made his decision too, while the voice at the back of his head screamed ‘coward’. Wasn’t she just honest about her feelings for Jake? Shouldn’t he do the same? But he couldn’t. The last time he had been completely sincere and open about his complicated feelings, Taffy grabbed his jacket and left the hospital room without another word. And just a few days ago, he dismissed Josh’s feelings for her once again. For Taffy, love was always either-or, absolute and uncompromising. Josh had been right thinking that Olalla would probably understand him, he was not almost certain, but he was too much of a coward to risk it. So instead, he just kissed her again. It was a feather-like touch, but this time he let it linger for a little bit longer. 

“Last night should have been much better, actually. This is torture. You deserve more.”

Sighing, Agnieszka returned the kiss, just as lightly. “How long?” she asked, looking down at the stitches. 

“These are dissolvable. Should be gone by Friday. Monday tops.” 

“So I guess it’s mostly up to me until then.”

“What do you m…” Before he could finish the question, she straddled his lap and attacked his throat hungrily, licking a long stripe up to his earlobe, before she grabbed the earring with her teeth and pulled at it playfully, sending shivers down his spine. 

“What are you doing, Neszka,” he moaned. 

“You shush now. What does it look like?” she murmured against his skin and wrapped her left hand firmly around the other side of Josh’s throat. It was unexpected, but very exciting. “I’ve waited too long for this, so just let me play a bit, will you!” she hissed, while grazing his jugular with her bared teeth. 

Overwhelmed with her sudden attack, he tilted his head back, closed his eyes and succumbed to her touch completely, while she sucked on the tender skin behind his ear, making him whimper. In response, her grip on his neck only tightened. 

The effect was immediate, and her appreciative hum told him she could feel it too. Always responsive and always teasing, she moved her hips slowly a few times, grinding on his growing erection. Letting go of his throat, she straightened and grabbed a handful of his curls with her other hand, while looking down at him intently. He could see untamed wilderness in her eyes. It was dizzying, almost overwhelming. 

In a vain attempt to regain at least a semblance of dominance, he grabbed her hips and tried to steady her, and in response, she applied more pressure on his windpipe. “No!” She commanded hoarsely, her piercing stare now almost savage. He let out a strangled whine and his dick twitched. 

Emboldened, Agnieszka grabbed the hem of his long-sleeve and motioned to him to lift his arms up. He immediately obeyed, letting her pull the shirt over his head. “Jaki posłuszny chłopiec,” she crooned approvingly. “What an obedient boy.” Pressing her palms on his bare chest, she dug her fingernails into flesh below his collarbones and leaned forward, licking into the right corner of his parted lips. “I’m going to suck you dry now,” she whispered in his right ear. His response was almost involuntary; he thrusted his hips up, chasing the sensation elicited by her previous movements. 

Laughing softly, Agnieszka slid down on her knees and tugged at his waistline. Getting the hint,Josh lifted his hips a little and in one swift motion, she pulled his sweatpants down. His dick sprang up, the tip already glistening.

She grabbed his knees and spread his legs apart, making him yelp. Josh wasn’t even trying to fight it anymore; the sudden power that emanated from her kept him glued to the couch. Her warm palms gliding slowly up his inner thighs towards his crotch robbed him of the last feeble remnants of resistance. From now on, he was just putty in her hands, and he wondered if she had been planning this. 

Josh could feel her hot breath on his balls, and braced for whatever was going to follow, but instead, Olalla straightened up again, hooked her arms under his knees and pulled his whole body lower towards the edge of the couch, putting him in an even more vulnerable position. 

“Here, make yourself more comfortable.” She grabbed two cushions and stuffed them under his back for support, before she stood up and took off her own shirt and sports bra. “I’m leaving the jeans on, because this…,” she reached between her legs and cupped her clothed pussy, giving it one languid stroke, “is off limits now. But I might let you play with these if you promise you’ll be good.” To illustrate what she meant, Olalla bent forward, cupping her tits right in front of his face. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath and stuck the tip of his tongue out mindlessly, being drawn to those hardened, rosy buds like a magnet. Impatient, she grabbed one of his wrists, planted a gentle kiss in the middle of his palm and pressed it on her chest. “Touch me,” she breathed out with urgency. He obeyed, cradling the soft mass almost hesitantly, as if he saw and touched it for the very first time. His own visceral reaction to the whole new situation almost startled him. Meanwhile, Olalla was really putting on a show, swaying gracefully above him. She tilted her head back and moaned. Like a siren. 

He watched her, mesmerized, with his lips slightly parted, and she returned the gaze. “God, you’re so pretty,” she whispered and let her fingertips slide down his chest, while still hovering above him. She did it again, and he could feel his cheeks getting hot. 

“Pretty…?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not…”

“I said shush,” she threatened and snaked her hand down between their bodies. Wrapping her hand around his hard dick, she gave it an appreciative squeeze, before she slid down to cup his balls, making him moan lewdly and loudly. He kept kneading her breast; it was so soft and plump, like a giant marshmallow, and he wished he could just stuff it in his mouth like a huge piece of soft candy and suck on her nipple hungrily like a babe. The fact that he couldn’t was almost maddening. Either he would have to do something soon, or she would. “Please…,” he whined. 

Olalla just smiled knowingly and got back on her knees, took a deep breath and blew hot air in between his legs. “You’re a tease, woman.

“I know.” 

She said something more, but Josh no longer heard, because she got dangerously close and a split second later, and she pressed her hot, flattened tongue at the base and his brain short-circuited. A few more languid catlicks, before she wrapped her lips around his balls, gently sucked them both in her mouth and he cried out in earnest. “Oh my god, that’s so…” 

“Good? 

Nonono, please don’t stop. Don’t talk. Just…

He wrapped his hand around his cock frustration, immediately expecting retribution. But not only she let him stroke himself, it seemed like she could read his mind again, because the velvety tip of her tongue was soon back where he desperately needed it. This time, though, she wandered in the opposite direction and he almost bit his wounded lip as a sudden surge of panic washed over him. 

It was too good, too familiar. Two worlds colliding. “Olalla, please…,” he whispered. 

“Not pleasant?”

“Too pleasant. Just… please…” 

She understood. Swatting his hand away, she wrapped her lips around his head this time and started sucking it like a lollipop. It felt wonderful…and safe. Soon after that, she swallowed him whole, changing pace and intensity just the way he liked it. She could do everything. Deepthroat, pressure, tender licks; she could play with him until he was a whimpering mess. 

Finally, he let out a telling, strangled moan. “Neszka…”

She blinked, telling him she understood, before she cupped his balls in her right palm and slid all the way down one last time, letting him shoot his cum down her throat. 

Finally, he relaxed, and his mind too. He stroked her hair as she rested her head on his thigh, smiling up at him. 

he closed his eyes, willing his heartbeat to calm down too, and his stomach rumbled. 

Maya, 24th December

Christmas Eve dinners in our house had always been lively. It’s hardly ever just up – the family. Every now and then, there’s someone naive enough to think that they could get a last-minute reservation somewhere in town. Sometimes, there are those solitary mountaineers intending to spend the evening alone in their room, but…well… They don’t know our mother. She would never allow it, not under her roof. 

Then there was Svetlana, a woman from Kharkiv who was helping to take care of the willa. 

This year, we had two vloggers from Ireland. A lovely couple; and the naive kind. It doesn’t matter. There are always enough chairs in our dining room. 

And, of course, the Kiszkas.

I have to admit, I had my doubts after the incident the previous day. And surely, while they were both outwardly friendly and civil towards each other, something wasn’t completely right. I could see it in Neszka’s eyes, too. Well, as long as she’s smiling, it’s not really my business. I’m always on a watchout, though.

The house was literally buzzing from the early morning. Most of the guests, including Josh, slept left. However, me, Neszka, mama and Svetlana, we started early, because mama insists on the traditional fifteen courses. You can imagine that’s a lot of work. 

Jake and his girlfriend arrived shortly before two in the afternoon. 

Jake was all smiles from the very start, but it was also quite obvious that he was trying to avoid his brother. He greeted my parents heartily, grabbed a spare apron and got to work almost immediately. It was a bit unusual, though very welcome, and I could finally see why mama liked him so much. 

Lisa joined the Irish couple by the table and spent most of the afternoon in their company. I could tell she was just suffering through the day. Personally, I wouldn’t care, but the way she was talking to, or even looking at Neszka made my blood boil. 

Shortly before four, we were almost finished; and all of us hungry as wolves. I helped myself to my second glass of mulled wine, while watching the hum. Neszka was playing with the kids and dad insisted on teaching Josh his favourite game of cards. 

“That’s quite bold.” It was Jake, pointing at my half-finished glass. “On an empty stomach, I mean.” I have to admit that the man has a charming smile. 

“No, it makes it all much more interesting,” I laughed. “Cheers.” He was drinking lemon water, but we clinked our glasses anyway. I returned back to observing the room and he followed my gaze. You know, I really couldn’t help but notice how he was looking at her. Men are simple creatures. When they’re longing, you can spot it from a mile away. I simply didn’t understand how she couldn't have noticed. Or maybe she did. Well, as I said, not my circus… 

Everytime she made the kids laugh, he smiled too. There was something dark in it, though. Tinged with sadness. The whole situation was making me more and more uneasy. 

“She’s a great aunt,” I remarked, breaking the silence that was getting rather uncomfortable. 

“I can see that,” he replied hoarsely. “It looks like she really loves them.”

It only reminded me of a rather difficult task that had yet to be done. “Oh yeah, she will miss them greatly,” I sighed.

“Miss them…?”

“Yes…uum, will you excuse me?” I left Jake standing by the main kitchen counter and approached Agnieszka slowly, telling the kids they should go play with daddy for a while.

“I have something to tell you. Mom and dad already know, and I want you to know before the dinner starts.” 

Neszka looked at me quizzically, but urged me to continue. 

“We’re moving to Frankfurt in January.” 

“Frankfurt? For how long?” My Jacek worked for a German company that offered both short and long term positions in a few cities outside Poland. Quite a few of his colleagues already made use of the opportunity and Agnieszka knew it, so I guess the news didn’t really come as a surprise, but… this was different. 

“We already sold the apartment in Katowice, Neszka. This is not temporary.” 

“What are you talking about? You’re moving moving to Frankfurt? Why?”

“You know why. He’s worried, and so am I. We have two small children. I couldn’t make it without him.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.” 

To that, I said nothing. How many people had thought that, only to lose everything? I’m sure Svetlana must have thought that too at some point; and a few days later, she arrived at Eulalia with one duffle and two plastic bags. It had been almost four years now since she had last seen her husband. At least she was safe. For now. 

I hate having such thoughts during times and days that are supposed to be happy and festive, but here we are. Neszka tried not to show her emotions. She reached for my glass with mulled wine and I offered it to her without hesitation. 

She took a healthy swig and sighed. “Well, but I’ll come visit at Easter. Probably not summer, but I’m not celebrating my birthday without you this time. You won’t get rid of me,” Neszka smiled mournfully. 

“Of course I won’t. Sounds like it won’t be any different from how it is now,” I laughed. “But we’re yet to see where the wind takes you.”

As always, she dismissed my hint. 

The rest of the evening was quite pleasant…well, if you don’t count violent stomach cramps and one insufferable, loud bitch. Maybe I’m biased, but that was my impression. Sue me. 

She and Jake stayed for the whole dinner, but excused themselves soon after. I think that he wanted to, and would have stayed longer, but I for one was rather glad that they did not. 

Agnieszka, 25th December

They woke up early that day. Agnieszka was up way before dawn, taking the opportunity to watch his relaxed face in silence. It was a peaceful morning, disturbed only by his light snores. 

Joshua had fallen asleep almost instantly the evening before. He had managed to just shed his clothes and was asleep before his head hit the pillow. So naturally, as soon as he opened his eyes, he excused himself and disappeared in the bathroom to take a “quick shower”. Quick is actually a bit of a stretch. In his case, fifteen minutes was the lowest limit. 

Agnieszka took the opportunity to prepare everything. It was Christmas morning, after all, the time when he was used to getting his presents. 

It had not been an easy task – to come up with a good gift. He had everything he needed or wanted, and when he didn’t, he simply bought it without thinking twice. 

There was one thing she could do, though. Maybe a bit of a cliche, not really very original, but still better and more sensible than some other options. Men, huh? 

He had seen her in a sundress a few times, but otherwise, her wardrobe was pretty boring and essentially “practical”, including her underwear. She had a few pretty pieces, but it all reminded her of her previous life, and she did not want that. She wanted to try something new, and to surprise him, too. 

The body ouvert seemed like a lacy monstrosity when she first saw it, but Maya finally convinced her to buy it. And sure enough, the woman looking back at her in the mirror was a pretty one. She watched her reflection for a few minutes, and finally smiled encouragingly, before she slid into a satin bathrobe. He should unwrap his gift first, shouldn’t he. 

Almost ready, she quickly checked the rest of the contents of the special box, brushing her fingers over the purple strap-on. Maybe it was a huge mistake, but she wanted to ask, at least. Carefully, she put the lid back on when Joshua’s phone lying haphazardly on the bed lit up and started buzzing. She glanced at it, frowning slightly, before she quickly brushed her hair again because she could no longer hear the water. The phone rang again. The same number. 

Joshua emerged from the bathroom a minute later, completely naked and with water dripping from his hair. Chaotic, as always. His face lit up when he saw her wrapped in satin and he smiled charmingly. “Hey! I heard the phone. Someone called?”

“Yeah,” she smiled back and put her hairbrush down on the dresser. “Someone called Taffy,” she replied matter-of-factly, but soon became alert when she saw how quickly the smile vanished from his face.

@thewritingbeforesunrise @fleet-of-fiction @writingcold @lvnterninthenight @its-interesting-van-kleep   @takenbythemadness   @edgingthedarkness @myownparadise96   @gvfstuddedmajesty @josh-iamyour-mama @jazzyfigz @tripthelightfantastix @sanguinebats @wetkleenex-gvf @peaceloveunitygvf @kiszkas-canvas @fleetingjake @lizzys-sunflower @hollyco @emojakekiszka @gvfmarge @Dayumclarizzel @lipstickitty @clownstarr @musicislove3389 @i-love-gvf @blankvz @psychedelectable @allof--mylove @joshylanefleet @thewaythatshebreathes

[opalsiren]

i am not a 'what if lewis or zane became mermen' girlie by any stretch of the imagination BUT if that were to happen what do we think their powers would be. since lewis has a brief moment of clairvoyance in canon that is never expanded upon, i could totally see this for him in a greater capacity, having visions of the future that he has to decode with the help of the girls

zane is an engineering king in canon so i could definitely see him having some metalbending powers if he were to become a merman. he also narrowly escapes death or serious injury multiple times, so something akin to a strong sense of self-preservation could also be plausible, like having a sixth sense for danger before the mermaids are ever actually at risk of exposure

[aye-went-splat]

Recurring element through my dreams was that guy who’d killed Vzlfixg. We were walking through a parking garage when she saw him and instantly knew. He pulled out a knife, she asked how he knew (?) and he said it was because she wasn’t wearing her usual claw clip. I tried to text 911 but spelled things wrong and it wouldn’t work. He stabbed her in the chest and I killed him. In later iterations it was in a daylight-exposed roundabout not the parking garage. The news went around school so some people saw a killer but then plenty of people had no idea, so it was still a “they don’t know I killed a man” feeling.

[goawaypopup]

Here's an AU I've had in my mind ever since reading the side books.

When he sets out into the continent in the original books, Lief is almost completely unprepared. The Shadow Lord's regime has cut off information flow between population centers, and Del's recorded history is almost all in the off-limits library, so there really wasn't a lot he could have done to avoid this. All he has is his memory of his father's copy of The Belt of Deltora, a vague little pamphlet that he keeps forgetting at bad times, and which helps not at all with dealing with the dangers of the continent itself.

Unless... Jarred chose a different book to steal from the palace library all those years ago.

Secrets of Deltora, an in-universe guide to Deltora's locales by Doran the Dragonlover, was also hidden away in that library. It was far more richly detailed and practical than The Belt of Deltora, and in its writing Doran expressed his distrust of the advisors and his fear that the Shadow Lord was preparing to strike - also containing a hint at the location of Withick's Belt of Deltora booklet in one of its illustrations. And it has a similar narrative recounting of Deltora's founding, the powers of the seven Belt gems, and their combined ability to ward the continent against the Shadow Lord. It would be an entirely plausible choice for Jarred if he had had some extra time to find and read it, and conceal it about his person (seeing as it was, in fact, extremely forbidden to touch).

If, growing up, Lief or his father managed to decode the secret message in Secrets, he would have lacked no information from not having The Belt, up to the urging to ignore the tradition of keeping the Belt locked up. Indeed, he would have a distinct advantage, knowing that the complete Belt was capable of waking and summoning the dragons, as well as all the travel advice and recorded dangers found elsewhere in the book.

What does this mean for him when he finally sets out to recover the gems?

This time, considering the question of which hotspot to visit first, Barda and, ahem, Lief's father are confronted with a very different picture. The elaborate, detailed descriptions of all the ways plants, bugs, snakes, and wild animals can kill you in the Forests of Silence, and the terrifying undead telekinetic armor guy, plus the sheer scale of how many places a gem could conceivably be in the three forests. Versus: nothing at all in the guide for the Valley of the Lost, which was the only site formed AFTER Doran's time. Just some rumours of a valley cloaked in mist. So it seems clear that Barda's bravado will not prevail with better information at hand - the entire journey is going to be in reverse.

Starting at the Valley may be for the best, as it is comparatively harmless for a party with their wits about them. Forewarned of the region's Grippers, they do not fall victim to any embarrassing incidents, though they might be shocked by the Jalis' absence.

Unfortunately for Lief and Barda, they will not have the aid of Jasmine or any mind-clearing gemstones this time. And god knows whether the Belt is still capable of burning the Guardian with 0 gems present - let's hope it doesn't come to that. But honestly, I think they could pull this off, with the assistance of their usual excellent luck. Especially if they manage to guess the name without completing the clues. This does mean... they're going to be thinking that Endon was a corrupted traitor the entire time. Oh boy! Time for Deltora to buck the bonds of monarchy entirely?

The diamond is an excellent first gem. Its courage will probably do at least as well as the topaz did at suppressing Lief's burgeoning PTSD, and its added physical strength will come in extremely handy for the fights ahead.

The Maze of the Beast will be much, much more straightforward with the Shadow Lord's forces not yet on alert. There will be far fewer Ols in the area and any that remain will be much less on guard against the duo. The whole ordeal with Tora and Dain and the Resistance and the pirates probably won't happen either, so rather than being shoved into the Maze, Lief and Barda can adequately prepare for it. They could ideally leave a rope ladder or something and avoid having to leave though the blowhole.

The Dreaming Spring is clearly described in the guidebook, along with its status as a much-needed source of scarce water in the north, so they're quite likely to visit it on the way to Dread Mountain. The incident that gained them the Kin's assistance, however, is unlikely to play out the same (the Rithmere Games have probably not occurred yet, Doom has not freed the Karn pod's captured finalists, and the Grey Guards do not pass this way for another while yet.) They might have to trudge through horrible cold woods for weeks instead of being carried by warm women.

Unless they had their own incidents with Doom, they won't glean anything in particular from the Kinrest and Dread Mountain writings. Despite Doom having been swept up in the changes in this timeline, it seems likely he's still in similar places at the same times. He could have been near Amethyst territory in books 1 and 2 prior to visiting Tom's shop.

Dread Mountain is where I'm going to leave it as having too many divergent possibilities to make a solid prediction. Jasmine and likely Prin are absent, the Lily nectar is absent, the Ruby is absent, there may or may not be Spring water for the using. If they happened to take the exact same path up the mountain, Lief is dead at the bottom of the very first gnome trap if nobody tripped him before he could step in it. There are roughly twelve hundred deadly poisonous arrows killing alternate timeline versions of them left and right. It's pretty rough.

From there, if they live, they're probably going all sorts of exciting directions away from canon. Perhaps the illustration of the Belt of Deltora in its proper order will clue Lief off that he's doing it wrong sooner. Perhaps Lief drops the book in Glus water, or didn't bring it with him, and has to start using his exceedingly unreliable memory for many more, more vital pieces of information. Perhaps the perceived perversion of the monarchy that Barda served so early on in the quest causes him to snap and throttle Lief with his bare hands. Perhaps, at some point, Doom will receive a smack upside the head and regain his memory, and remember about the kid he left in the deadly, deadly jungle over a decade ago.

But most importantly, this time they will have dragons at their disposal immediately if Lief manages to assemble the Belt correctly.

[siderealscribblings]

Subject Lohefalter made contact with one of the agents from the Tsaritsa's new state department. A heated (pardon the pun) battle was anticipated, but Subject Lohefalter appears to have left the area shortly before or at the same time as the Snezhnayans.  Will monitor the situation closely, but Subject Lohefalter may have found a new allegiance with the Snezhnayans.  Awaiting new orders,  - A 

Neuvillette ran his fingers over the note thoughtfully, disappointed that it raised more questions than it answered. Egeria had once sent the Oceanids throughout the world to keep her informed on the other nations; Furina had to make due with maintaining a spy network of mortal ex-soldiers and intelligence officers. Not as stealthy as Oceanids could be, but at least the mortal spies could follow orders.  

The Witch is going to Snezhnaya, Neuvillette thought, leaning back in the window seat overlooking the dark waters below. What does this mean ?

It was close to two in the morning when the messenger bird rapped on his window with a scroll attached to its leg. Against his better judgment, he took the note to decode in his private study next to his bedroom rather than save it for the morning. Of course it wasn't good news; Neuvillette had rarely heard anything but bad news where the so-called Crimson Witch of Flames was concerned, but her new connection to Snezhnaya was particularly troubling. The Tsaritsa had been assembling a small army of monsters for years and Neuvillette was no longer convinced that she was as peaceful as she claimed to be. Though he could never tie the assassination attempt a few years earlier to the Snezhnayans, it was hard to imagine who else would arm a man with an elemental blade and send him running at an Archon in the middle of the street. 

This is going to be a problem, Neuvillette thought, rubbing his eyes as sleep seemed to be far out of reach.

"What's all this commotion?" Neuvillette snapped out of his musing as a soft voice called from the doorway. Furina's hair was still tousled from sleep, sticking up in odd angles as she pulled a dressing gown over her thin blue nightgown and stuck her head in the room. 

"I don't believe I said anything," Neuvillette said, pushing himself up as Furina entered his study. 

"Then you must've been thinking so loudly that you woke me," Furina chuckled, wiping her nose on the corner of her dressing gown. The closer she got, the more he could see her red, puffy eyes and tear-tracks dried on her cheeks

"Is something wrong?" Neuvillette asked. 

Furina waved her hand dismissively. "Oh…just a stupid dream; nothing all that exciting." 

Liar , Neuvillette thought. Furina hadn't heard anything; she just wanted to come to him after a bad dream but needed a plausible reason first. As much as he made himself available to her, she still took the effort to concoct reasonable excuses to conceal any hint of neediness whenever she asked something of him. He had been pulled into plenty of “late night strategy sessions” that turned out to be thinly veiled asks for company after an unsettling dream or challenging day in the forum. Neuvillette didn’t particularly mind…he just wished she could afford him a little honesty by now. 

Furina acted for everyone; Neuvillette just happened to be the one she acted the least for. But she still acted fine when she very clearly wasn't; she still acted like each setback and heartbreak they faced in their rebellion against destiny didn't affect her. He was beginning to see the toll it took; the optimistic spark in her eye had melted away over the years until he could barely see a glimmer. The human heart was only built to be strong for so long, and Furina was quickly reaching the limits of its intended design. 

"Mmhmm," Neuvillette hummed. "Bored you to tears by the look of it." 

"Ha ha," Furina deadpanned, wiping her cheeks. "Kindly stick to practicing law; the Opera is not prepared to host a comedian of your biting wit."

"Every genius is underappreciated in their time," Neuvillette said. "I'm sure history will judge me more kindly than you do." 

"Archons write the history of their nations; don't count on it," Furina said, her smug smirk dropping as her eyes drifted to the opened wax tube on Neuvillette's desk. "Did we hear from Mondstadt?" 

Neuvillette held the note between his fingers as Furina quietly locked the door and shuffled over to the window seat. "Good news?" 

"... news," Neuvillette said, tucking his legs up against his chest as Furina took her seat on the opposite side of the window seat. He watched her hold the note up to the light to read it, moonlight reflecting off her still dewy cheeks. It felt almost cruel to add to her unhappiness, but Furina had no patience for being coddled or treated with kid-gloves.

( "I will be one hundred years old before the decade is out, Neuvillette," Furina huffed, channeling Focalors in all her indignant fury after she discovered that he had softened a casualty report out of concern for her reaction. "Do not think I am so fragile that you need to hide things from me !")

It wasn't that he thought her fragile; it was just that watching her eyes droop as she read the note stung him terribly. He detested being the cause of her shoulders sagging, responsible for yet another chip out of Furina's battered heart. Furina was going to bounce back; she always did.

He just hated that she had to fall in the first place.

Read More...

[yourlocalscallywag]

KinitoPET theory (spoilers)

So I’m still obsessed with Kinitopet and there’s been these small theories I’ve had on it. But lately I’ve been trying to connect some things and I think this could be a plausible theory.

So, when we start up the game for the first time (and sometimes afterwards) it has a power button on the screen as many of you know. Seems pretty strange, right? And once you click it, your screen fades to black, showing an old 1990’s-early 2000’s computer. It will ask for you a password, This makes me think we are entering another world in a way, a web world one could say. But here’s the thing. That computer we put the password in is not our computer, like the one we are playing on. It seems like it is someone else’s.

So let’s think. Not our computer. We enter a “different world” (on our true computer). What does this allude to? Sonny.

So, if you don’t know the Sonny lore, here’s what I personally think it is/means. Sonny seemed to be the one who made Kinito. He started with one line of code, but that seemed to spiral out of control for some reason. Soon, it became Kinito. Now, I am unsure whether Kinito and Sonny were ever good friends, but I like to think they were. In the odd email you receive titled “IT’S NOT TOO LATE”, you will find that, once decoded using a scramble decipher, there’s something of interest at the end of the email. It says, “I fear that when we delete the server. . . you. . . you will delete me?”

Hmm, delete? That’s sure interesting. Speaking of deleting, does deleting things pop up again in the game? Yes! In the true ending, you delete Kinito and the world in that computer that isn’t ours. Speaking of that computer, isn’t it odd that we “know” the password (as it works every time)? My conclusion to this is that we play as Sonny, and that the computer at the start is his, we know his password, and we can delete things like him

Now wait, you’re probably thinking, “why would he leave emails for himself?” Simple. Everytime he finishes the game on choosing to stay or not stay with Kinito, the cycle resorts, making him forget everything, so he left clues for himself, like the emails.

So, we, the player, are Sonny. But what about Kinito? Well, I think I know who he actually is, as well as his friends.

Kinito fourth wall breaks a lot, that’s for sure. He also tries to stop and distract you from finding clues to the true ending, aka trying to stop you from hurting him and his friends. He is aware you delete him in the true end, and obviously knows how to code, so he knows he’s in a “game”.  Also, speaking of his friends, something is very interesting about them. Jade is a scientist, so nerdy and whatnot. She builds things, and is green. Sam is, well, Sam, and orange. Notice how when you click on the body bag in the decor section of the mini game, your mouse moves on its own, and that it’s constantly moving.  Remember this for later. Now, I believe it is Jade who, when going through the Factory Frenzy scare, says “I’m here again, aren’t I?” She seems to be aware she is also in some sort of cycle, or game.

Last but not least I want to point out that they all seem to know they are trapped in their own world. In the hidden area when interacting with the fountain in the Web World, it will get all dark and gloomy, and a track from the OST will play called “Deep Below the Code.” Notice how it says “below”. Keep that in mind.

So, I have my conclusion. Think about all the points discussed. They forget but remember small things every reset cycle, they know they are trapped below the code, Kinito knows he’s in a simulation/game, Jade is green and is a scientist, Sam is orange and your cursor constantly moves during the body bag scene, you befriend all of the characters, and, during the true ending, you help them all “escape” (even if it’s in death).

My last point is the creator’s name, troy_en. Counting the letters. There are 7 including the underscore. What other name has 7 letters? Toby Fox. What else has 7? The 7 human souls in undertale. So, my theory is that Kinito is actually sans in an alternate timeline, and that you are the player who can free them from being trapped below the surface, aka the code. Or, if you choose to play again, you can reset the cycle. Jade must be the alternate alphys, being a scientist, and that she has a kind soul, hence her being green. Sam might be another character, maybe papyrus, who has a brave soul, hence the constant moving of your cursor, just like you have to constantly move through orange attacks in undertale. Anyways, I hope you liked the theory and feel free to discuss, and I wish you all a happy april first and whatnot. This theory has gotten very long and now my fingers are falling off.

[beatrice-otter]

Fic: Wachet Auf

Title: Wachet Auf Author: Beatrice_Otter Fandom: Rivers of London Characters: Thomas Nightingale, Peter Grant Written For: Quasar in Heart Attack Exchange 2024

Summary: In 1940, Nightingale has to catch a Nazi spy armed with a magical device. In 2016, Nightingale and others fall into a magical coma, and Peter Grant must figure out why it happened and how to end it.

At AO3. At Squidgeworld. On Dreamwidth. Rebloggable on Pillowfort.

2016.

I learned something was wrong when I got a call from the Folly, and there was silence on the other end.

"I'll be there quick as I can," I told the expectant stillness, and swigged the rest of my coffee in one gulp.

"Something's up at the Folly," I told Bev, who was not a morning person but had perked up to listen to me.

"Was that Molly?" Bev asked, and I nodded. "Wonder why she didn't text?"

"Because then we'd know for sure she had a phone," I said. "She likes her air of mystique. And also, I might not have checked it right away. She knows I'll always pick up for the Folly." But usually when someone from the Folly landline called me, it was Nightingale. Molly didn't use phones often, for obvious reasons.

I called Nightingale on the way out to the car, just to be sure; if he were at the Folly and in any condition to do so, he would have been the one to call me in, but he might just have been out on some early-morning call-out. No answer.

I told myself he might just have had it off. He didn't like the modern notion that one should be reachable at all times.

I spent the drive to Russell Square trying to think of reasons for Molly to be the one to call me like this.

Only one seemed plausible: something was wrong with Nightingale.

1940.

I learned something was wrong when I was called in, not to the Foreign Office for a new mission, but to the Home Office.

I made my way from the Folly across a London digging itself out from the damage of last night's bombs, and was directed to a nondescript office in a back corridor, inhabited by an equally nondescript functionary and a slender blond man in a sharp suit and a careless air who was polishing his monocle.

"Thank you for coming, Mr. Nightingale," the functionary said. "I'm John Lewis, and this—" he gestured at the man who was now putting in his monocle "—is Lord Peter Wimsey, whom I'm sure you've heard of."

"Of course," I said, giving Lord Peter a closer look. His cricket playing had been legendary at Oxford in my time there, and then of course there was his hobby of detective work, which was often splashed all over the newspapers. I had no particular interest in his hobby, but I did greatly enjoy his wife's books.

"How d'ye'do," Lord Peter said with a nod. "Very pleased to meet you, Johnny here's been telling me all about your recent adventures in Tibet. Very exciting thing, what?"

"Rather," I said, shooting a look at Lewis. Someone had been telling tales out of school; that was classified. It had not escaped my notice that Lewis had given his name but no rank, title, or position. Just who was he, and was he really a part of the Home Office, I wondered, or was that merely a convenient cover? "What can I do for you gentlemen?"

"An acquaintance of mine was recently killed while fleeing from the Nazis," Lord Peter said. "He lingered long enough to pass on some rather … disturbing information which, if true, puts it straight in your bailiwick. The Nazis apparently have some sort of occult device for communicating across long distances. Unlike radio, it cannot be intercepted or decoded, at least not with any technologies we have. Your chaps might be able to do something with it."

"I know I don't need to say what a difference such a device would make … and not for the better," Lewis said. "We're on the defensive and losing ground every day. Even the slightest edge might be crucial to our survival and, hopefully, to turning the tide. Regular radio we can intercept and eventually decode. This … we've no idea even where to start. The Germans cannot be allowed to have some sort of supernaturally undetectable means of communications."

"I'm not much for research or the technical end of things," I pointed out. "You'd be much better served to call in David Mellenby."

"Yes, Mellenby," Lewis said slowly, flicking open a folder. "Studied at the Weimar Academy of Higher Insights, still in regular correspondence with a number of German magicians. Used to be a close friend of Max Günther, who now is in Hitler's inner circle."

"The most important part of that sentence being 'used to be,'" I said, not liking Lewis' implications. "Mellenby's current project, outside his research, is the Academic Assistance Council, helping Jewish academics flee the Nazis and establish themselves here and in America. He's quite bitterly disappointed in most of his former friends, letting politics and prejudice get in the way of the advancement of knowledge."

"You vouch for his loyalty?" Lewis asked. Lord Peter watched with hooded eyes, and said nothing.

"Absolutely," I said.

Lewis nodded, which meant their analysis agreed with me. "Then you can consult with him as need be. But this is no theoretical exercise; we have reason to believe the occult device is being field-tested in London as we speak."

"Here?" I said, in some surprise. "Surely they'd want to keep such a new development somewhere safer."

"It would be easier to conceal than a radio," Lord Peter pointed out. "Nobody who saw it would know what they were looking at. Perfect for espionage. And besides, given the tensions between the practitioners and the main bulk of the German armed forces …." He gave an eloquent shrug.

I nodded, being intimately familiar with those tensions (and having used them to my advantage on a few different occasions). Hitler liked the occult, but many of the rank-and-file found it uncanny and suspect from a religious point of view. As for the officer corps, a good share of them blamed Germany's defeat in the last war at least partly on the magicians having sat the whole affair out. "Still, I wouldn't have thought they'd be willing to dispatch practitioners on a long-term espionage mission such as this."

"They haven't," Lewis said. "The device does most of the work; it does not require a fully-trained magician to use. Which makes the spy harder to catch, of course; they won't be on any student list from Weimar, and there's little chance of someone like Mellenby recognizing them."

"In any case," Lord Peter said, "if we find them and stop them here and now, we can either use them to provide misinformation, or convince them that such devices are unworkable for future use, depending on which would be most convenient for us. But that depends on us finding them … and that's where you come in."

"Your job," Lewis said, pushing a folder across his desk, "is to find the spy and, if possible, a method of listening in on or tracking the device. You are authorized to consult with Mellenby if you think it necessary, and others if you find it absolutely necessary, but we rely on your discretion. Loose lips, and all that."

"Of course," I said, hoping that there was at least a starting point in the information they'd given me. "London is rather a big city; do you have anything to narrow down where the spy might be?"

Lord Peter grimaced. "'Fraid not. You're being sent on rather a wild goose chase."

"I see," I said, heart sinking.

"You've been sent out on minimal intelligence before," Lewis said. "Why should it be a problem now?"

"Magic is usually subtle and hard to detect at a distance." I spread my hands. "Which is one of many reasons why practicing magic is a rare skill. London is large. Without some way to focus my investigation, it will not be like looking for a needle in a haystack; it will be like looking for a needle in an entire city's worth of haystacks."

"Well then, I suppose you'll have to see if you can find a magnet, what?" Lord Peter said. "And if it can't be found through magic, only ferreted out by normal intelligence—that's important to know, too."

"If you need anything, talk to Lord Peter," Lewis said. "He'll be your contact, so if the spy is watching government buildings you'll not be seen traipsing in and out."

Lord Peter handed over a card. "Do come over for tea sometime soon. My collection of incunabula has been moved outside of London for the duration, of course, but I have a rather interesting folio regarding magical rituals from the 1480s, and I've always wondered if it was actually magic, or just the sort of mystical wishful thinking one finds so often in previous eras. I could easily have the volume sent up, if you're interested."

"That's very kind of you," I said, "but I'm no scholar. There are several other chaps at the Folly who'd be much better able to give you an opinion; as for me, I'd be more interested in getting Lady Peter's autograph."

"A fan, are you?" Lord Peter said. "A sign of excellent taste."

"All the information we have is in that folder," Lewis said. "Don't lose it. Good luck on your investigation."

2016.

"Have you rung Abdul and Jennifer?" I asked Molly, staring down at Nightingale's motionless form. His chest was moving—very slightly—but other than that he was as still as a corpse. And just about as responsive as one.

Molly shook her head violently and made it clear that she believed his sleep to be magical in nature.

"Look, he's not got any enchantments on him that I can sense, and there's no vestigia in the room that's not perfectly normal for the Folly," I said. "And the wards haven't been breached, there's been no outside attack that I can tell. Even if you're right that it is magical, I don't know enough to fix it, and scans may be able to tell us more about whatever's going on. And even if they can't … if we don't wake him up soon he's going to need fluids, at the least, and a hospital will be better equipped to do that." I tried to sound confident. After all, he was only sleeping—how bad could it be? It was a bit unnerving that neither loud shouts nor shaking him nor sticking him with a pin had made any visible difference, but surely the hospital had stronger measures.

Molly was unhappy, but she didn't try to stop me from calling Abdul and explaining the situation.

"Call 999, I'll meet you at the hospital for tests," was Abdul's response.

1940.

My first step was to return to the Folly and consult with David. He had no need to see the source of the intelligence, or any of the scant information concerning where it might be used, but there was no one better suited to comment on the technical aspects of the case.

Walking through the Folly's front doors was strange, as it always was now; the glass ceiling of the atrium had been covered to prevent light from shining through to alert the German bombers that prowled our skies. It made it gloomy even on a bright and sunny day, like today. But the preparation room off the lecture hall was the same as it had ever been—shelves full of basic supplies, the remnants of the last few lectures not yet tidied away. And, crucially, it was a place where we could lock the door and not have to worry about anyone being inconvenienced or overhearing our discussion—most teaching had been moved out of London for the duration, along with all the practitioners who weren't strictly needed here and who had somewhere else to go.

"Hmm, yes," David said as he looked over the documents. "Not much to go on, is it? Freddy—that is, Friedrich von Hake—spent a lot of time speculating on whether something like this would be possible, but I always thought it was a load of rubbish. Freddy was never very practical."

I raised my eyebrows. For David Mellenby to call someone 'not very practical,' well. The mind boggled at what this Friedrich von Hake must be like.

He rolled his eyes at me.

"Why didn't you think it possible?" I asked.

"Haven't you ever noticed that magic's effects tend to be fairly short-ranged? Regardless of how powerful the formae or the wizard."

"Not really," I said.

"Consider the old raining spell the masters at Casterbrook used to use," David said. "Science couldn't hope to match it! Actual clouds and rain called at the practitioner's whim! But not enough rain to, say, water an entire field. A garden, perhaps; but not a field. Lux makes a light near the practitioner who calls it. Impello can throw things quite a distance … but the practitioner must be able to see it. And so on and so forth. One doesn't stand in one city and call down effects on another city. One doesn't even call down effects on the other side of the same city you're in. One does things one can see and hear."

"But how much time have practitioners spent trying to create formae that work at a distance?" I asked.

"That was Freddy's argument," David said. "I think I still have some letters from him arguing about it; I shall have to dig them out and see if there's anything I missed. Also, he was wondering if any of the fae or demi-fae might be able to power such a thing."

"I should think a demon trap might also do it." The Germans had started using them in the last few years, vile as they were. "They can power an effect far away from the practitioner."

"Yes, well," David said. He pursed his lips and looked down. "Yes. That might also work. I suppose I should remember that our enemies do not always hold to common decency, these days." He'd always had grand ideas about the power of science and magic to uplift all of humanity in common cause, and to be proved otherwise was distressing to him.

I nudged him. "It would explain how they don't need a practitioner present on this end," I pointed out. "And if that is how they're doing it, it might be possible to track it; demon traps are not … subtle."

"The problem would be harnessing it for repeated use," David said, gathering himself and returning to the problem. "They're not exactly designed for their power to be used a little bit at a time." He stared off into space, frowning, and I got up to leave him to it.

2016.

Once we were at the hospital and Nightingale had been whisked away for tests, I notified the Commissioner's office that Nightingale was in hospital, and then DCI Seawoll, just in case something came up.

"How long do you think he'll be out?" Seawoll asked.

"He's just sleeping," I said. "Nothing happened to him. Can't be too long before we figure it out."

Seawoll grunted disbelievingly and rang off.

Then I rang Bev. "Hi babes," she said. "I hope whatever Molly called you in on wasn't too bad, because we've got a bit of a problem and Effra needs me."

"It's tough to say how serious it is," I said. "Nightingale doesn't seem to be injured or ill, but he won't wake up. Didn't even stir when we loaded him into an ambulance to take him to hospital."

There was a pause. "Oberon won't wake up, either."

"But he seems fine, other than that?" I asked.

"As far as I know," Bev said. "I haven't seen him myself, and neither had Fleet when she called me."

"Molly thinks it's something magical, not medical," I said. "And I think she's right. Two cases on the same day? And I don't think Nightingale and Oberon have seen each other in person since the last Spring Court, so it can't be a contagion. We should ask around, see if anyone else in the demi-monde is in a coma this morning. Particularly the Old Soldiers and the like."

"Yeah," Bev said. "I'll … see if I can get Ty to give you a list of people to contact. She likes having things to do that aren't just emotional support."

"I'll tell Abdul and Jennifer," I said. "They should know this might not be an isolated incident. Has Oberon been examined by a doctor?"

"I don't know that, either," Bev said, "but I'll tell them about Nightingale, and to get in touch with Abdul."

"Thanks, babe," I said. I started jotting down next steps in my notebook. Had this been a crime of some sort? Should I run it through HOLMES and police procedure? Or was it a public health concern, to be handled by the world's foremost cryptopathologist? Or was it something purely magical? And if so … what did that mean for my investigation?

"I don't know whether Effra will find it comforting or not, to know that Nightingale's out, too," Bev said. "But I'm not sure I want to know what could take out the Nightingale and Oberon—they're both pretty tough."

"Can't be an attack," I said. "I can buy that someone we don't know about could get through the Folly's wards without a trace, and I can buy that someone could get past your sister when she was asleep to do something to Oberon without her knowledge. But I don't buy that it could happen to both of them on the same night." I wished my gut believed what my head was saying.

"I hope you're right," Bev said.

I wasn't sure I hoped I was right; an attack at least I could do something about. If it was some sort of illness, it was out of my hands. And if it was some sort of magical contagion … with Nightingale out of the picture, I was the most experienced Newtonian practitioner in England.

There had been times I hadn't been able to consult with Nightingale before, but … not many. It could be something simple and easy to fix, and I would have no way of knowing it. So much of my training had been focused on what I needed to know to go up against Martin Chorley, and Nightingale had only started to go back and fill in the gaps. This could be caused by something simple, something the Folly knew about, and I wouldn't have a clue.

I had a lot of practice in ignoring the sort of hollow feeling in your chest that you got when things were going sideways and people you cared about were hurt or in danger, but my therapist says that's a bad thing. Which just shows what he knows, because if I didn't ignore it I'd just curl up in bed and be no use to anybody.

"What are you thinking, babes?" Bev said.

"That with Nightingale down, I'm the most experienced practitioner in the UK," I said.

"Don't be stupid," Bev said. "There's loads of practitioners that aren't from the Folly. You know Michael Cheung, and then there's Caroline and her mum—and Caroline's mum knows a lot about magical healing, more than you and the Nightingale put together. And it's not like magicians have a monopoly on magical knowledge, either, and you can just bet Effra will be calling in the best."

"Yeah," I said, closing my eyes and nodding. I gave myself a few seconds to take comfort in her words—I wasn't alone, and everything did not rest on my three and a half years of training. "Thanks."

"No problem," Bev said.

I gathered my thoughts. "Obviously, if you and your sisters are investigating Oberon, you have to tell them about Nightingale. But I'd rather it not become general knowledge that he's incapacitated, if we can help it. Even if it wasn't an attack, I don't want to tempt anybody." With Chorley dead, the Folly didn't have any major enemies that I knew about … but given our experiences over the last several years, I wasn't sure there wasn't one I didn't know about.

"Sure," Bev said. "Though anybody who attempts to attack the Folly with Molly and Foxglove guarding it deserves whatever they get."

"Yeah," I said.

1940.

While David tried to piece together what little information was in the file with his years of discussing esoteric magical possibilities with German academics, I reviewed the mundane aspects of the case.

Not that there was much I could do with it; everything that might have led to identifying the spy or their target had already been investigated by Lewis's people, and from what I could tell they'd done a decent job of it. If there was an angle they'd missed, I couldn't find it.

David came through, of course, he always did, when he found the problem interesting enough; he had a habit of diving into a problem and only coming up for air weeks or months later when he'd solved it. (Of course, more than half the time the 'problem' was so esoteric—or so firmly theoretical—to be of little interest to anyone other than himself and his fellow boffins.)

"I think you're right about the demon trap," he said. "And also, I don't think Freddy is the only one working on this; he mentions Lukas Schmidt a number of times. In my last few letters with Lukas, before I stopped corresponding with him, he was … hinting at experiments that probably involved demon traps. I know he'd taken some sort of post at a hospital near Limburg, which I thought extremely odd as he was no kind of medical man, but … it would give him easy access to victims, wouldn't it." He swallowed and pushed his glasses up his nose.

"I suppose it might," I said quietly.

"At any rate, he's done work with magical resonance—that is, pairing objects so that what happens to one is reflected in the other—and I know he and Freddy had several ongoing arguments about the practical limits of how far away the objects could be and still work. Piecing together the hints the two of them dropped with what you brought me, I think that what they're working on is—"

There followed a technical discussion of which I understood slightly more than half. The gist of it was that if the Germans had figured out how to get a demon trap to release its energy a little at a time, instead of all at once, a pair of devices powered by demon traps might be able to punch through to one of the fae realms, and connect that way even though separated by several hundred miles. The good news was, it would probably produce the sort of powerful flare of vestigium that any demon trap produced in operation. The boundary-crossing of the fae world might even amplify it; chances were, if such a device were used in London, we would know it immediately. Unfortunately, when it wasn't transmitting a message, it would probably emit no more vestigium than a dormant demon trap, which is to say, one would have to be practically touching it to notice it.

"Would we be able to read the messages?" I asked. "If the flare of sending them is so powerful?"

David made a face. "That I really can't tell you until they do use it; it depends on a great many factors. Even if they're using Morse code or something like it, there's a good chance that without a paired device we simply wouldn't be able to detect the pulses amidst the wash of energy."

I nodded, having expected that, and thought through what David had just told me. "If they're using demon traps as batteries, that implies that the power would eventually run out. I assume they would need a fresh victim to recharge the device?"

"If the device can be recharged," David said. "When I saw him demonstrate the pairing effect in 1935, the enchantment had to be laid with the devices in close proximity, and the power imbued during the process of enchantment. This would suggest that even if one did use a fresh victim here, it wouldn't work. They would need to either receive a replacement, or have been equipped with several to begin with. And Lukas always did like redundancy; I should think anyone he sent out would have … several such devices, for testing purposes if nothing else. But that is pure speculation—as is much of what I think I've managed to figure out. I'm working with very little, you know, and could easily have misinterpreted or missed something."

I waved that off. "I'm sure you've done as well as anyone could; there's nobody on either side I'd rather have piecing things together."

"Thank you," David said with a smile.

"So we'll know when they use it, but won't know what they say, and probably won't be able to track the spy through their transmissions," I said.

"Yes," David said.

"Any idea what size the devices might be?"

"I'm afraid not, but I shouldn't think they'd need to be large—it's not like there are any tubes or moving parts needed."

"So they would be easy to conceal," I said. "And the city is much too large for me to search by myself. Lewis wants this done in complete secrecy, and I'd prefer it myself, but … it's simply not practical. If there's any chance of catching the spy, I'll need help." I considered the possibilities. "If we say there is a possibility the Germans might smuggle demon traps into the city—or that some of the bombs the Germans are dropping on us might contain demon traps—we could ask our people to be on the alert for them and report it if they find anything."

"It would still be looking for a needle in a haystack," David said. "But at least you wouldn't be the only one looking."

2016.

"We've run every test we can think of," Jennifer said. "Not all the results are back, yet, but the results of the ones we have are all completely normal. Exactly what I would expect from a sleeping adult. But we can't wake him. Loud noises, physical sensations, stimulants … he responds a little, and then sinks back into sleep." She frowned. "Even blaring a mix of grime and metal, like my uni housemate did during all-night study sessions, and I'd have thought that could wake the dead."

"Except he's been in REM sleep this whole time, and if it were a normal sleep he should have cycled in and out of it a few times by now," Abudul said.

Jennifer nodded.

"What's the next step?" I asked.

"Wait for the last of the test results to come back, and hope one of them shows something that will let us know what the matter is," Abdul said.

"Molly thinks it's something magical." I'd been hoping she was wrong.

"Even if it is magical, magic has measurable effects," Jennifer said. "If we can quantify those effects, we'll have at least something to go on."

"What about the other victims?" Not that we knew they were victims, actually; there might not have been anything done to them, which I needed to remember in order to make sure I didn't overlook any possibility. Once I'd heard Oberon was the same as Nightingale, I'd called around to all my contacts in the demi-monde, and had Postmartin contact the survivors of the Old Folly. The Rivers had also put out feelers, and while I couldn't be sure we hadn't missed someone, word was getting around.

"Thomas was the first we knew of, so we haven't had the time for the same depth of tests on the others," Abdul said. "And some of the ones we know about, their loved ones have decided to keep them at home, for various reasons. But so far, we haven't found any big discrepancies between him and the rest."

"We don't even know if this is confined to people with magical contact," Jennifer said. "I've spread the word—if anyone calls an ambulance for someone who can't be woken up, we should hear about it."

"Good." I flipped open my notebook. "I've been collecting information about the sleepers. No smoking guns, but some interesting correlations nonetheless. Nine found so far. All of them are old—the youngest is eighty-six. Three are Old Soldiers. The rest all either are magical in some way, or use magic—they're not just people who hang around the demi-monde because it's cool or they like listening to my dad play his trumpet when the Rivers throw a party. None of them, besides Nightingale, are Newtonian practitioners. None of them have had any contact with Nightingale that we know of in the last week. Some of them have had contact with him before—Oberon teaches painting, and Nightingale took classes with him for a while in the sixties, for example—but nothing recent."

"No connections," Jennifer said. "That'll make tracking down the vector of contagion harder."

"There is one connection, but it's tenuous," I said. "All of them have spent most of the last century living in London."

"So whatever it is might have happened any time in the last eighty-six years," Abdul said.

"I'm going to try for more in-depth interviews of the friends and family of the other sleepers, see if I can pin down anything else that might be relevant," I said, "and have Abigail searching the library for anything relevant when she gets out of school for the day."

"Surely the research should be first?" Jennifer asked.

I shook my head. "I have a pretty good grasp of the Folly history, and it's not something that's come up before to my knowledge. If it has, it's been among the demi-monde—and they haven't historically been too keen on consulting the Folly with their problems, for very good reasons. And even when they did, the Folly was too posh to listen. So if it's happened before, and if it got written down and put in the Folly library, there probably won't be much information. I'm more likely to learn something useful from talking to people or consulting with the Linden-Limmers."

"Ah," Jennifer said.

"Speaking of Lady Helena," Abdul said, "she reached out to me and said she'd never heard of anything like it, but she'd see what she could do. She'll be here tomorrow morning."

"Good," I said, and ticked "following up with Lady Helena" off my list of things to do. I'd called her earlier, but went straight to voicemail; I'd left a message explaining the situation and given her both my number and Abdul's. "And with Oberon one of the victims, the Rivers are doing their own investigation. I can leave the medical side of things in your hands, and start looking for connections among the sleepers."

1940.

"How far away would you say this … vestigium, you call it?" Lord Peter peered at me through his monocle

I nodded. We were in his library, which was still a handsome room, though the shelves were mostly bare. Lady Peter and the children were in the countryside, which had spared me the dilemma of whether or not to ask for a book to be signed for David. He was a great fan of hers, but to explain how I'd gotten her autograph would require me to explain the connection with Lord Peter, and David was only authorized to know the technical details.

"How far away would this vestigium be detectable?"

"Difficult to say," I said. "Given the amount of power the device would need to be imbued with, and the fact that it is by nature designed to transmit energy, it might be noticed by a trained observer as much as thirty feet away even while dormant. I doubt it, though. A regular demon trap—the ones that merely power magical bombs—usually can't be felt more than a foot or two away."

"A foot or two?" Lord Peter shook his head. "'Close beside the Thorn' you must be indeed. Even at thirty feet, you'd hardly be able to search the whole city."

"Indeed," I said. "Hence my request that my fellow practitioners to be on the alert for it, and report it if they find it. I told them that there'd been a report of someone smuggling a demon trap—the regular kind—into the city. We should probably be on the alert for them, anyhow; I've run into Germans using them twice before, and the first time, the device killed thirty people."

"And the second time?"

"I defused it," I said. It had been quite possibly the most harrowing thing I'd ever done, and I hoped never to have to do it again.

"Would whatever spell you used then be able to stop the device from transmitting?" Lord Peter asked.

I considered this. "Possibly," I said, "but I would have to be fairly close and also prepared ahead of time to do it. If I understand Mellenby's theory correctly, merely disrupting the resonance between the device here and its mate in Germany should be enough to make it useless."

"'A hush of peace—a soundless calm descends'! That's good news. Would the spy then know his device was not transmitting properly?"

"I've no idea," I said.

We discussed the practicalities of the search, before returning to a few questions Lord Peter still had about how the whole thing worked. I wished I had brought David with me, because I couldn't answer all of them.

"And is it something we could duplicate? Make our own magic spy radios?"

I stiffened. "No," I said, voice as stern as I could make it. "I do not believe I have explained how exactly a demon trap is made, my Lord."

Lord Peter raised his eyebrows. "I take it from the name and your reaction that it is … questionable?"

"No, my Lord," I said. "It is not 'questionable.' It is the blackest of the black arts. It requires that a man be tortured to death and his spirit trapped in the device to power it with all his pain and rage and fear at what was done to him. And it is my sworn duty, as a Fellow of the Society of the Wise and an agent of his Majesty, to ferret out all who practice such arts and execute them for their crimes."

Lord Peter's face had grown grim. "And quite rightly, too; I am pleased to hear of your devotion to that duty. But are there no white arts which might power such a device instead?"

"Yes," I said. "The Sons of Weyland use expert smithcraft and mastery of spellwork to imbue items with magical power. However, it takes time and a great deal of magic. In many cases, especially if one wants a device in large numbers, it is quicker and easier to make a purely mundane device. They would be the ones to answer if such a thing would be possible and practical, perhaps in conjunction with Mellenby's research."

"A device that the average German soldier wouldn't recognize as a radio could be worth quite a lot, to our intelligence networks," Lord Peter pointed out.

"True," I said. "But it's Mellenby's opinion—which I share—that the device will broadcast quite loudly when it is in use. One's enemies might not be able to decode what you were saying, but they could hardly fail to not that you have said something. Which is hardly good spycraft, and will probably be what leads us to our man, if anything can."

"That's what I don't understand," Lord Peter said. "If it's so dashed conspicuous, why try in the first place?"

I shrugged. "That I couldn't tell you without rather more intelligence on the practitioners making them and the spymaster sending them out." I paused, but Lord Peter didn't offer any; I hadn't much expected it. If they were trying to get someone close enough to Schmidt and von Hake to learn more about their experiments, they wouldn't wish to share the information too freely or it might endanger the spy. "But having tangled with German practitioners a few times in the last seven years or so, I have a guess. Part of Hitler's popularity is based on his blaming of Jews and others for 'stabbing Germany in the back' and causing them to lose the last war. Well, practitioners on both sides had a gentlemen's agreement not to contribute to the war effort through magical means. Which leaves many of them … eager to prove their loyalty to Germany now by providing what they did not then. The practicality of their efforts can almost be a secondary concern, at times."

2016.

I'd collected a lot of information by the time I came back to the Folly for my last interview of the day, but none of it seemed relevant. I was used to that; the beginning phase of any investigation is about hoovering up as much data as you can in the hopes that somewhere in that haystack will be a needle that will point you in the right direction.

Still, it was a bit discouraging. And none of the sleepers had awakened.

Molly was waiting for me at the Folly's back entrance, hands clasped in her apron, Foxglove hovering behind her.

"There's been no change," I said.

She flinched.

"Nightingale isn't the only one affected," I said. "Ten other people in the demi-monde won't wake up, either. I've spent the day interviewing the people close to them to try and figure out what they've got in common and see if we can trace things back to whatever caused this."

Molly nodded.

"We think it might have been something that happened here in London, possibly quite some time ago—the youngest sleeper is eighty-six. Now, for things that have happened to Nightingale in the last four years or so, I know as much as anybody. But if it happened longer ago than that, you're our best witness."

Molly hesitated, then nodded again.

"Could you write down—or type—anything you remember that could be relevant? Any unexplained magical mishap, or attack, or anything odd? I'll give you a list of questions and the names of the other sleepers, and I also need any connections you know of between them."

Molly stared at me. I don't know why she so rarely used the written word to communicate; in her shoes, I'd be desperate for some way to talk to people, and over the years I'd suggested things like sign language or some other form of alternative communication. But Molly had always resisted any such suggestions, and avoided writing things down if she could possibly help it. And, whatever her reasons, it was her choice.

But her loyalty to Nightingale won out. She turned and led the way out towards the coach house.

1940.

I spend the next week carefully combing through various secured locations, hoping for any significant vestigia and coming up empty. (Though I did find two ghosts, and wrote them up out of nostalgia for my schoolboy days.) I had other duties, of course, and given the odds of finding anything it was hardly my most pressing concern. After all, we weren't even sure the damn thing was in London. It was the most likely place for it if all our intelligence were correct, and I had been on the wrong end of too many intelligence mistakes to be quite as certain as Lewis and Lord Peter were.

But then my doubts were rather forcibly purged.

I was meeting a friend, John Chadburn, for dinner at a small pub near Baker Street; he had arranged for me to tour the inside of the SOE main headquarters after the day shift was gone, with the proviso that he made sure I saw no classified information, and that I understood just how dire the consequences would be if I breathed a hint of anything I saw.

John had just arrived and we were exchanging the usual pleasantries when I was hit with a hammer-blow of vestigia so powerful that it almost drove me to my knees. A woman screamed, though I recognized dimly that I was not hearing it with my ears, and there was the smell of burnt flesh, and rotting fish. For a moment, I half-believed that I was being killed by a demon trap, for it felt a little like what I had felt when the two I had encountered before had gone off, if that had been multiplied by a thousand. For a moment, I could see the woman, as clear as if she were standing beside me. Her hair was dirty and bedraggled, and her face was twisted in agony as she howled. And then she was gone. But no, I realized, my body was fine; I was still standing, though slightly hunched, and John was staring at me; it was only my mind that was buffeted. I stared at the place she had been, half-convinced she would materialize again.

"Tom, are you alright? Should we call for a doctor?"

"No," I said, straightening, conscious of other eyes besides John's. "Our business tonight will have to be put off, as will dinner, I'm afraid." I strode towards the door.

"What? Why?" John said, scrambling to follow.

"The device has been used," I said, stepping out of the doorway and closing my eyes to orient myself on the vestigium I'd felt. "If I follow it now, I may be able to track it, or at least where it was used."

"Um. Alright," he said. "Should I … should I call for a car?" Petrol was closely rationed, but this was a war use, and thus acceptable. Both the Folly and the SOE would have cars available.

"I've no idea," I said. "I've no clue how far away it was."

"Do you have a direction, at least …?"

"Oh, yes," I said, turning down the street. I pointed south-west. "That way."

John sucked in his breath. From here, that included Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, Parliament, and a good share of the London Docks. "We should call it in," he said. "Let people know—"

"No need," I said grimly. "Everyone with any training at all within a five mile radius will have felt that, and possibly further out." But a few minutes to confer with them and possibly co-ordinate a search might be useful.

The nearest phone we could use privately was in the SOE headquarters, so I did end up there after all, albeit merely to an office close to the front doors.

"This is Nightingale," I said once the porter on duty had picked up. "I've information about the … the magical explosion that just happened."

"Good God, that was vile, sir," said the porter on duty. Like many of the Folly servants, he had picked up a knack for sensing vestigia, after long exposure to it.

"Indeed," I said. "And nothing of ours, I can tell you that; we'll need to track it down. Is Master Pontleby in?"

"No, sir, he isn't," the porter said. "But Doctor Chadburn is."

"Good," I said, though really it wasn't. Chadburn was old and set in his ways, and far more likely to be offended by one of the younger men—even an experienced agent of His Majesty's government such as myself—suggesting a course of action instead of waiting for his wisdom. Still, once he was convinced, he had the authority to turn out the entire Folly to the task at hand. "Would you please see if he is available?"

"Certainly, sir," the porter said.

But I was wrong about Chadburn; the blast had him hopping mad. "First the Hun drop bombs on London, and then our brethren—" the word dripped with scorn "—do this in our own back gardens! It's indecent!"

In the end, instead of having to convince him to turn out the Folly members in residence, I had instead to convince him not to call in every CP, rusticated practitioner, and hedge wizard in our books to scour London. With the vestigium this clear, we should have no trouble finding it, and it was already starting to fade. We couldn't afford to wait.

2016.

Eighty-six years was a long time to cover, and it took Molly some time to write it all up. While she was doing that, I checked in with Abigail.

"Haven't found much," she said. "Nothing that seems useful, anyway." But digging her way through the County Practitioner reports took time, and she'd only just scratched the surface. I told her to keep at it, and she nodded.

Molly's report was interesting, and she'd finished it in far less time than I'd expected; she knew how to type, not just hunt-and-peck like I did. I wondered if she'd learned some things from the Folly's typing pool back when it had one.

If I'd been looking through it as a historical report, there were many details I'd have lingered over and asked questions about. But as none of them seemed relevant, I skimmed them and moved on.

To the best of Molly's knowledge, Nightingale had come into contact with several of the other sleepers at one time or another over the last century, but not in ways that seemed likely to be our culprit. It was hard to see, for example, how Oberon's painting class could have resulted in catatonia some fifty years later. And while Nightingale had many encounters with magic in general, most of it was quite well-documented as to the results. It was only in the last few years, with the Folly expanding and getting more involved in the affairs of the demimonde, that he'd started coming into contact with things like fae magic and other universes … and if that were the trouble, surely I'd be the one affected. I had more exposure, after all.

But there was one incident that involved a novel magical effect felt across London, Nightingale at the center of things, and at least one of the other sleepers as well: a Nazi magical transmitter from World War II.

1940.

"The problem is," David said as we scoured central London, "that now we've gone from famine to feast."

And he was right; the remaining vestigia, while fading quickly, was covering many smaller signs. It made the blast location fairly easy to narrow down, but also meant we were in grave danger of missing anything else of note.

"We'll just have to hope we don't overlook anything important," I said, and sent him off to search while I stayed to co-ordinate the searchers.

We'd narrowed things down quite a bit from the original area of effect and determined that it had been triggered somewhere along the riverfront, when someone unexpected turned up: a Negro I'd seen before at the sort of parties in Bloomsbury where artists hung out and everyone talked about the latest avant-garde poet. His name was Oberon, and I was fairly sure he was connected with the demi-monde in some way. Instead of the sober suits I had seen him in before, he was wearing a dockworker's coveralls.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"I take it from the number of your boys crashing around the area that the Isaacs are not responsible for whatever abomination was set off here tonight?" he said.

"Certainly not," I said. "Do you have any information to share that might help us in finding the culprit?"

He had no useful information, but I took it down anyway, along with his address and employment details. I handed him my card with an admonishment to contact me if he found anything or sensed anything unusual.

He took it and raised his eyebrows. "You think this is likely to happen again."

"Not if we catch the culprit," I said.

"Was it the Germans?"

"I really couldn't say," I said.

Oberon gave me a disbelieving look. "I see." But he chose to pursue a different line of thought. "Whoever it was, they can only have done it through some horror," Oberon said. "Did you see the woman?"

"I did."

"What will you do with them if you capture them?" Oberon's voice was challenging.

"Interrogate them to find out what exactly they did and how they did it," I said. "Then execute them for their crimes." Unless, of course, Lewis and his people wanted to try to run some sort of double-agent game, but I would be strongly arguing against it.

"I'm not happy with anyone knowing how to do that," Oberon said. "German or English. They should simply be put down, like the animal they are."

"We at least need to know if they were acting alone," I said. "The person who constructed the device and the person who used it might not be the same person." I should have watched my mouth more closely; now Oberon knew that a device had been used. "If you find anything, let me know immediately."

I was just turning to continue the search when young Higginbottom came puffing up.

"Sir!" he said, "they think they've found something!"

"Lead the way," I said, and followed him.

The spot they'd found wasn't terribly far, but the area had been hit by several German bombs recently, and there was a great deal of rubble still strewn around that we had to pick our way around and sometimes through.

It was an inconspicuous niche formed by an odd junction and shielded by crumbling brickwork. Anybody could walk down the street, duck in for a short while, and be completely concealed while setting off the device. Then simply walk out and down the street with no one the wiser.

I looked around. The whole area was deserted. While untutored people might not be able to identify vestigia, the stench of this one would certainly be enough to notice at close range. But without knowing what you were feeling, the chances of anyone noticing the person who set it off were slim even if we could find witnesses.

"Thank you, gentlemen," I said to the practitioners gathered around, "your help has been invaluable. I shall call in someone to dust for fingerprints and the like. We'll need to thoroughly sweep the area to ensure we haven't missed anything."

"You there, old fellow! What d'you think you're doing, hanging around here?"

I turned. Oberon had followed us to the site. "It's a public street," he said mildly to Smalley, the practitioner who had challenged him.

"He sensed the blast earlier and was looking for its source," I said. "I've already interviewed him. Thank you for your time, Oberon."

Oberon looked between me and Smalley, snorted, and walked off.

2016.

"There's good news and bad news," I told Abdul and Jennifer the next morning. "The good news is, Molly's helped me identify an event in 1940 which involved an unknown magical device of Nazi manufacture that could be sensed over the whole of London, and Oberon at least was involved in some way. And the Folly has a whole library of reports on Nazi experiments."

"Sounds like a good shot for our culprit," Abdul said. "What's the problem?"

"The problem is, that library's sealed away," I said, "and I don't know how to get into it. If I did manage to get in, I wouldn't know how to find anything useful in it; I'm pretty sure it's not been looked at since it was brought back as spoils of war. And even if I did find what we're looking for, I don't speak German … and this isn't exactly the sort of thing I'd want to bring in strangers to translate."

"Isn't there anyone in Germany who might have records?" Jennifer asked. "Because I'm telling you now, we haven't found anything on our end."

"Lady Helena keeps saying it will be something simple and easy," Abdul said. "But if she's got any theories on what it might be or how to counter it, she hasn't shared."

"How simple can it be?" I asked. "Something that affects the human body like that—gets past the natural defenses?" It was actually very difficult to use magic to directly affect a living body or brain.

"Sometimes simple is best, for that," Abdul said. "A battering ram, with all your force behind it, rather than something complicated with more moving parts to go wrong."

"If this is the delayed result of a Nazi bomb or what have you," Jennifer said. "Surely there are people in Germany who might also have records?"

"Probably," I said, "but I haven't a clue who to even contact. Nightingale sat alone in the Folly for decades and didn't talk to anybody, near as I can tell. He doesn't even know what practitioners there might be in Germany these days, let alone what would have been done with any records of Nazi magic that didn't get swept up by the Folly." I thought about it for a few minutes. "But if anybody would know, or know how to find out, it would be Lady Ty." I hated to ask her for help, but with her own brother-in-law on the line, the price of the favor she'd ask in return might not be too steep. I added that to my list of things to do.

1940. Nothing of significance happened for another two weeks. Finding the spot where the device had been triggered led us no closer to who had done it or what they had sent; Lewis' men found no evidence that I had not, and no witnesses could be found who had noticed anything. Every member of the Folly knew what to look for, and word had spread among the demi-monde as well; nobody liked the idea of something like that happening again. I received a steady stream of tips, none of which amounted to anything.

"Perhaps the device broke in some way," David said thoughtfully.

"More likely, the spy is trying to operate it as seldom as possible," I said. "I can't imagine what it would be like to be next to that thing when it went off. In which case, they'd want to wait and collect as much information as possible before sending off the next batch, especially for things that weren't time-critical."

"I can't imagine what it would be like to sleep next to it," David said. "Surely it would be detectable at close range, even when it wasn't activated."

"Perhaps not on a conscious level, if the spy is not a practitioner," I said. "Which might be even more disturbing, of course, if you felt that all the time but didn't know why."

David shuddered.

But our wait continued until one day at breakfast that awful screaming came again, filled with burnt meat and rotten fish. I was in the Folly dining room, and when the wave passed it was succeeded by the smell of vomit; young Brown had lost his kippers.

"That's dashed unpleasant," someone muttered. "Couldn't he have waited until after breakfast?"

There was a general hubbub as we made our way out in the hopes that this time we should catch our man. I nodded to Molly on my way out; she was hovering, with a rag and a slop bucket, probably waiting until we were gone to clean up Brown's mess.

Sadly, our prompt response availed us nothing. After about half an hour, we found the spot; as with the last time, it was a concealed area that one could quickly and unobtrusively duck into for a few moments before heading on one's way.

Unlike the last time, someone got there before us.

"Oberon," I said. "How did you find this place so quickly?"

"I was closer," he said. "Clocking in at work." He jerked his head in the direction of the St. Katherine Docks, half a mile or so east of us.

I nodded, making a mental note to check that he had been. I didn't think he was the spy, but better safe than sorry, and he had been in the area both times the spy had called home.

"I knew I was closer this time, thought if I was fast enough I might be able to catch him," Oberon continued. "No luck."

"Too bad," I said.

"And now I've got to go see if I've still got a job," he said with a sigh.

I nodded to him, and began organizing my men to see if there was something to find, but I had a terrible feeling it would come to nothing.

As it happened, I was right.

2016. A quick call to Beverly established that Lady Ty was at Effra's, so I got in the ASBO and headed to Brixton. Effra lived in a Victorian terrace on a quiet residential street, with brown brick and white door and windows. I'd been here yesterday to pay my respects and dig into Oberon's past, so I was not surprised to find Mama Thames and her court ensconced in the living room. Bev wasn't there—since she couldn't do anything that her sisters couldn't, she'd opted to go to uni today.

"Ah, Peter!" Mama Thames said. "Have you found anything?"

"Not yet, Mama," I said. "Have your people?"

Her lips pursed, which meant no.

"I do have a possible lead," I said, "but I need Lady Ty's help."

Mama Thames nodded. "She is upstairs, with Effra."

Given the number of nurses and doctors who worshipped Mama Thames, Effra had opted to keep Oberon at home. The master bedroom now boasted a whole host of portable monitors, and Oberon's still form had an IV port for liquids and nutrition. Like Nightingale, he looked as if he could wake up at any moment.

Effra was seated on the bed, holding his hand. She looked up at me, eyes pleading for help. Tyburn was ensconced in a chair in the corner, working on a tablet.

"Nothing yet, I'm afraid," I said. "How are you holding up?"

Effra gave a bitter laugh. "How do you think?" She patted his hand. "Marrying an Old Soldier was supposed to mean I wouldn't have to worry about him dying."

There was nothing I could say to that. Bev and I weren't married, but with the twins on the way we might as well be.

"Is there anything we can do for you, Peter?" Lady Ty asked, her tone inviting me to leave if there wasn't.

"Actually, yeah," I said. "Can I talk to you, Ty?"

Ty nodded and stood up. I backed out of the bedroom to let her past.

"Well?" she said once we were out in the hall and the bedroom door was closed.

"We've got what may be a lead. It's not much, but it's the best anyone's found so far," I said. "Molly tells me that in 1940, Nightingale was investigating some sort of German spy ring, which had a device that periodically put out blasts of a pretty nasty vestigium that covered the whole city. She's not sure what the device was, but she does know that Oberon was involved in the investigation somehow. Nightingale broke up the ring, but he was knocked unconscious and was in hospital for two days before he woke up."

"Sounds promising," Ty said. "What do you need me for?"

"We can't find Nightingale's case reports," I said, "or any other reference to the incident in the Folly's library. I'm hoping some of the German records survived. Even just knowing what the device was supposed to do would help."

"Sounds like a question for the research department of the Abteilung KDA," Ty said. "Why don't you ask them?"

"Because I don't have any contact information for them," I said, filing away the name.

"You don't—" Ty stared at me. "What the hell has Nightingale been doing for the past seventy years?" she hissed. "No, don't tell me, I don't want to know. The Abteilung Komplexe und Diffuse Angelegenheiten, the Department for Complex and Unspecific Matters, are the people who handle both magical law enforcement and cleaning up after Nazi messes in Germany. They are vastly better run than that dinosaur you call the Folly. I'll get you their contact information. I'm sure you can learn many things from them." She whirled and stalked back into the bedroom.

1940.

"So," Lewis said. "Our German spy has made three reports in as many months, and we are no closer to catching him than we were when we started."

We were gathered in Lord Peter's library again. The spy had to know that the Folly was looking for him, and if he knew anything about us he had to know that I was one of the most likely people to be heading the investigation. Having our meeting in a place the spy was unlikely to be was only prudent.

"I'm afraid that's correct," I said. "It only takes a short while for the spy to send his report, and by the time we've found the location he's long gone. To find him, we'd need to be closer when he triggers it … and he's been smart enough never to send his reports from the same neighborhood twice."

"But always within a few miles of Whitehall," Lewis noted. He studied the map with incident locations on it; there were far too many tempting targets for a spy withing easy walking distance of them all.

"And to find him when he is not calling his handlers back in Germany, you would need to be in the same room as him," Lord Peter said.

"To find the device," I said. "If he hasn't got it on him, I could walk right past him and never know, if it was more than a day or two after the last time he made his report. Human bodies don't absorb vestigia at all well. It could linger in brick or stone for years … but will dissipate from the human body in hours or days."

"So if he's smart enough to leave it at home while he's snooping, there's little point in having you sit at the entrance to, say, the War Office for a week." Lewis sat back in his chair, frowning.

"What effect will the vestigium of the device have on the places he's used it?" Lord Peter asked.

"It's hard to say," I said. "Nothing good, as unpleasant as it is, but … vestigia is rarely strong enough to influence people deeply. It will have little more effect than if those smells and sounds were truly present in a physical way."

"Violence, rot, and burning," Lord Peter said. "I've been to all three of the sites, and I think I've figured out how to feel the vestigium. Terribly unpleasant, what? I'd not want to live or work near it. Though of course I could be imagining it."

"You probably were sensing it correctly, Lord Peter," I said. "One of the most important factors in distinguishing vestigia from one's own fancies is a precise attention to what is, and not what one assumes should be there. Anyone with as long a list of successful cases as you should be quite practiced at that."

Lord Peter nodded.

"Can anyone learn to sense vestigia?" Lewis asked.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Some are better at it than others, of course, but anyone can learn. It merely takes time, exposure to a wide variety of it, and a master to help you distinguish between the real thing and your own imagination."

"How much time?"

"I've no idea." I shrugged. "I learned it as a boy at school—it was one of our first subjects, magically—and I've never had to teach it."

"Find out," Lewis said. "We cannot have a spy running loose in Whitehall. The situation is bad enough as it is, without Hitler having a mole in the government somewhere."

I nodded. "Yes, of course."

2016.

A woman was screaming. A wail of terror and rage, and I could feel her pain. But I couldn't find her—the sound came from everywhere, and any time I thought I knew what direction it was coming from, I fell into a bomb crater. Hands grasped at me, as others tried and failed to climb out of the crater.

There were fish and eels everywhere, lying dead or dying in the rubble, and it took me forever to climb out of each crater because I kept slipping on the fish.

The hands weren't holding me down—they were lifting me up, helping me climb.

If I could only find the woman, I could escape.

Her screams grew louder, mixing with the bomb blasts, and I felt myself shaken by the concussion.

Except it wasn't bomb blasts shaking me, I realized muzzily, it was Bev.

"Peter! Peter, wake up, I swear on Mum that if you don't wake up I will kill you and flood all of London—" There was real fear in her voice, and it was that which brought me up to full waking more than anything else.

"I'm awake," I said.

"Don't scare me like that, babes," Bev said, flopping back down in bed.

"Sorry." I rubbed a hand over my face, trying to drown out the way the woman's cries were still echoing in my head. "Just a check. Can you hear a woman screaming?"

"No," Bev said, eyeing me. "Are you hearing something?"

"Maybe," I said. "Might just be remnants of my dream. If it was a dream."

"What do you mean, 'if it was a dream'?"

"It didn't feel like a dream." I considered. "Parts of it didn't, anyway. They felt like the times the boundaries between realities have been thin, and I've slipped into the past or some other place."

"Do you think that's where Oberon and Nightingale and the others are?" Bev asked. "Trapped in some other reality?"

"Maybe," I said.

1940.

Charlatans and stage magicians and spiritualists often bragged about their supposed abilities to see or sense things from afar. As far as Nightingale knew, there was no formae that would allow a human practitioner to do such a thing.

However, that did not mean that other people—such as the fae—might not have other abilities.

And there was a fae living in the Folly right now. Molly the scullery maid.

He'd never paid much attention to her; one didn't, to maids, and then there was the way she lurked. Some of the members complained loudly about her, while others—including Nightingale—took it as a point of pride to be unmoved by her.

Still, there had always been rumors of what she could do, and he knew enough about fae to know that some of them, at least, might have a kernel of fact in them.

The study on the first floor was empty, so I invited David to join me, and sent for Molly.

Molly entered, hands clasped behind her back, and stood respectfully before them. She was the very picture of an efficient servant from the days of his youth, except for the hair, which was neither pinned neatly up nor curled fashionably. And of course, the uniform was at least ten years out of date; none of the other maids still wore floor-length skirts.

"Thank you for joining us, Molly." I knew she wouldn't sit while either of us were in the room, and as I was asking something entirely outside of what one might normally ask of a servant, and something which might bring up bad memories of the charlatan she'd been rescued from, I remained standing as well.

Molly bobbed a bit of a curtsey.

"You know, I trust, that someone has been doing … rather unsavory things here in London? And that we here at the Folly have been searching for him?"

Molly nodded.

"We haven't been able to trace him," I said. "By the time we reach his location, he's long gone. I understand that fae can sometimes—see things at a distance, or things that mundane eyes cannot."

A furrow developed between her eyes, but she nodded again.

"Can you do that?"

The furrow deepened, and her nod was slower.

"Could you give a vision to another person?"

She looked down, but nodded.

"You're obviously reluctant," I said. "Would it be painful?"

Another nod.

"To you, or to the person you were giving the vision to?"

She pointed at me, which was fair enough; obviously, I was the one doing the investigation, I would be the one who needed the vision.

"Would it be dangerous?"

Nod, eyes still firmly fixed on the floor between us.

"To you, or to me?"

She pointed at me again.

"Would it be less dangerous if you did the scrying yourself?" David asked.

Molly scrunched up her face.

"Could you do the scrying yourself?"

She shook her head vigorously.

"How dangerous do you think it would be?" I asked. "Would it kill me?" If there was a good chance of it, then of course we wouldn't; the situation was not that dire. If nothing else, perfectly mundane security methods might catch the spy, or prevent them from learning anything important.

Molly gave a series of fidgets, the upshot of which was that it would probably not be fatal, but she couldn't be sure, which I confirmed. Further questioning revealed that it should not leave me permanently debilitated, and that a short period of recovery would be quite sufficient to resuming my normal activities.

"I don't see that it's any more dangerous than learning and practicing magic," I said at last. "That, too, can be quite fatal."

"Yes, but by all means, let us manage the risk properly," David said. He turned back to Molly. "How, exactly, would you do it?"

Molly bared her teeth at us, which I took as a threat against prying too deeply into her arcane nature, and David took as something else.

"Oh? Oh! Haemomancy! I've always been curious, this should be quite edifying!"

Molly and I both frowned at him.

"Haemomancy!" he said impatiently.

"Blood magic?" I asked, figuring it out from its roots.

"More specifically, scrying using blood," David said. "Well, that makes everything quite simple. Have someone around who can see when too much blood has been lost, so that Molly doesn't have to worry about accidentally taking too much, and a nurse on hand to stitch up the wound. Simple."

Of course nothing was ever quite that simple in practice, but David wasn't wrong; and the idea of simple blood loss—even if it came from teeth as sharp as Molly's—quieted the half-formed fears I'd had of what, exactly I was getting myself into. It couldn't possibly hurt as much as being shot had, and unlike my last mission overseas this one would be in a safe, clean environment with a proper nurse standing by.

The hardest part, of course, was not getting the nurse; the hardest part was finding a place to do it. The nurse could not come into the Folly proper, being a woman, and Molly would not leave the Folly, leaving us with a pretty puzzle. (Master Pontleby refused to relax the prohibition on women even for war work, arguments that the nurse was working in the same way as the maids and secretaries of the typing pool did and should be allowed the same access falling on deaf ears.)

The Visitor's Lounge was too public, so that was out. Finally David suggested the coach house attic. Molly cleaned it thoroughly, and at the appointed day the nurse Lewis had found showed up exactly on time, despite heavier than usual bombing the night before.

2016.

Since they'd run out of medical leads and were just spinning their wheels at the hospital, I invited Abdul, Jennifer, and Lady Helena to tea at the Folly, and when Molly served I invited her and Foxglove to join us. "You're the only eyewitness we've got to things that happened before my time," I said.

So we sat in the Visitor's Lounge with tea and an assortment of pastries, and I told them about my dream.

Well, first I explained to Lady Helena about fae being actually from parallel dimensions, and that I'd been to one, and that we were pretty sure there were other dimensions out there too, and the odd things that happened when boundaries between them were crossed. That took a while, because she had a lot of questions, most of which I couldn't answer.

Then I told her about the fact that I occasionally had visions under extenuating circumstances, and the strong evidence that whatever else happened in them I was at least able to speak to and interact with ghosts and revenants.

Once she had the proper background, then I told them about my dream.

"You should have come in for a checkup, Peter," Abdul chided me.

He wasn't wrong, but I'd been trying to downplay it for Bev's sake, and also, I'd needed time to think through my dream and figure out what I thought about it.

"I'll come in when we're done here," I said. "But the thing is, I'm not sure that what I experienced actually was a dream. It felt being in faerie, or the visions I've had, or brushing up against another allokosmoi. And what's more, waking up felt more like surfacing from a vision than just waking up out of sleep. I've had a lot of practice at that over the years, more than I want, but I know how to handle myself, and I know what to do when I find myself in that situation. What if the problem is that Nightingale and the others are in that state, and they don't know how to get out of it?"

"There are a lot of assumptions in that," Jennifer pointed out. "None of which can be tested."

"True," I said.

"It would fit with what I've found, though," Lady Helena said. "Their bodies are almost completely unaffected by whatever is doing this to them. I don't know I could say the same about their minds."

I turned to Molly. "You're very convinced that it's a magical thing, not a medical problem, and you were from the start. You would have told us if you knew anything specific, so it must be something about how it … feels to you. Would you know if their minds were trapped in your home dimension?"

Molly nodded vigorously.

"Would you know if they were trapped somewhere else?"

That got a more ambiguous response.

"Alright," Jennifer said, "so what are you proposing?"

"In 1940, Nightingale found what he was looking for using Molly's haemomancy," I said. "I think we can at least figure out if I'm right with it."

1940.

Haemomancy was surprisingly easy; it required no further preparation than finding a place to do it and a nurse to oversee it. I took off my jacket, tie, and shirt, and nodded to Molly.

She stepped close to me, her movements graceful and delicate as always. Like a snake. It was harder to suppress the usual frisson of danger, because this time I could not tell myself it was irrational.

I stared fixedly at the window across the room. We hadn't thought to put up curtains; I didn't think anyone could look in and see, but the last thing we needed was any rumor to spring from this, either of Molly attacking me or the two of us in some sort of tawdry affair.

She bent her head down to my neck. I did not turn or flinch.

She struck.

The world dissolved into a confusing jumble of sights and sounds, buildings I didn't recognize mixed in with ones I did, people wearing funny clothes, people wearing clothes I recognized. Some of them could have been walking around London right now, others in styles I hadn't seen since my childhood. Still others were entirely foreign: women with their hair down, but left as straight as Molly's, people with wide-legged trousers and women in trousers, or in skirts so short as to be indecent. Oberon was there, in a morning suit.

Above it all, a haze of vestigia that felt all too familiar: rotting fish and burning meat, and screaming.

Many voices screamed, this time, not just the woman.

I turned towards the sound, and headed towards it, ignoring everything in pursuit of my quarry.

"Sir?"

An unfamiliar voice called.

"Inspector Nightingale, is that you?"

I turned at my name. A Negro in a cheap suit stood before me.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"What?" he said. "It's me, Peter. Peter Grant. Your apprentice."

"I have no apprentice," I said, and turned back to the chase.

"Inspector, what are you doing?" he asked.

I gave no answer, for I knew not what or who he was. Certainly he was not authorized to know about the spy I was chasing.

"Inspector, it would really help if you would just tell me—" he grabbed my arm, and I shook him off and knocked him down. Stories of fae tricksters danced through my head, along with more prosaic training in counterintelligence. I turned back to follow the sound, and he troubled me no more.

I've no earthly—or unearthly—idea how long it took to track the sound, nor any clear memory of it, but as I ran the world warped and melted all around me, and the reek of rot increased. At last I stood before a building and knew my quarry was inside it, knew where I was and where it was, and opened my eyes to see the coach house ceiling, a woman—the nurse—hovering over me.

The pain hit; I'd never had a serious throat injury before, and I would have cried out if I could make noise.

Off to the side was a commotion, and I turned my head to see—

"No," the nurse said. "No, keep looking at me, sir, that's very good, you have lost some blood but nothing dangerous, I am dealing with your wound now, you will be right as rain very shortly."

I stared fixedly at the ceiling, trying to ignore the smell of copper in the air—at least it was a change from rotting fish, I thought.

The commotion ceased, and I wondered what had happened.

It hadn't been too bad, I told myself. A little pain, a little blood—I'd had that before. I'd gotten what I needed. And now, once the nurse was done patching me up, I'd be right as rain, and fit to take on our spy.

David came and stood over me. A low keening came … from Molly, I realized, the first sound I'd ever heard her make.

"How are you?" David asked.

"He'll be fine, Doctor Mellenby," the nurse said. Whittier, that was her name. Nurse Whittier.

Whittier finished and sat back. "There, sir, we're done. How do you feel?"

"I've felt better," I croaked. "But not bad. How's Molly?"

"Molly?" David collected himself. "She's fine. Did you get it?"

"I did," I said.

Once Nurse Whittier had satisfied herself that I was fit to be on my feet, I called Lewis, and informed him I was about to have the location, and would call to let him know once I had it. Then David and I drove off in the Folly's Morris Eight.

"If you know where we're going, why can't you just give me the address? Or the neighborhood, at least?" David complained good-naturedly.

"I don't know it," I said. "But we need to go west for a ways."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it," I said. "It's like there's a bright string tying me to it. And I can smell it, the vestigium is … strong." I was having trouble telling it from a normal sensation, which was a problem I didn't usually have.

"I can't sense anything," David said. "Fascinating. I wish we had time to go over all your experiences in detail, before you forget anything."

"If we knew how long this connection would last, I'd be happy to postpone the dénouement," I said. "It's taken us this long to find him, an hour or so more would hardly make a difference. But to have done this and then failed to catch him—"

"No, you're right," David said, soberly.

2016.

The smell of rot filled my nostrils, and the people and buildings around me whirled in a kaleidoscope of every time period from the Edwardian age to my own. Every period, in short, that Nightingale had lived through.

I turned, trying to orient myself, but there was something in my way. Some sort of … haze, or film, or gauze, between me and the world.

I reached out to touch it, but met nothing substantial—but as if I was the insubstantial one, as if I wasn't truly there to touch it.

I turned to the figures, to see if they could help me, and saw a familiar face. "Sir?" I said. "Inspector Nightingale, is that you?"

He turned and frowned at me. "Who are you?"

"What?" I said. "It's me, Peter. Peter Grant. Your apprentice."

"I have no apprentice," he said, and turned away.

"Inspector, what are you doing?" I asked. If this really was Nightingale, perhaps he had could tell me something useful.

He ignored me, and started walking away.

Two long strides caught me up to him, and I grabbed his arm. "Inspector, it would really help if you would just tell me—"

He knocked me down. I opened my eyes, back in the Visitor's Lounge, where the medical professionals were discussing the procedure.

Molly and Foxglove were staring at me, twin stares of shock.

Abdul was the first to notice. He followed their gaze. "Peter, lad, are you alright?"

"Yes," I said. "Only, I just had a vision. I was … I was trying to clear my head a bit, get ready, because once you're in that place, your wits are the only thing you've got. Thinking through my times in those other worlds. And I just … I found myself in one. Everything smelled of rotting fish, and there was some sort of … veil or shade over everything that I could almost touch, but not quite. Nightingale was there, and he wouldn't listen to me, and when I tried to get him to stop and talk to me, he hit me. Then I woke up again."

Abdul was shaking his head. "I don't think we can do this, ethically," he said. "We already have ten people who can't wake up. If you're slipping in and out without even falling asleep, there's too great a chance you won't wake up."

"If that's the case, I can't go to sleep, either," I said. "Bev already had trouble waking me up this morning. What if, tomorrow morning, she can't?"

"What if injecting you forcefully into that allokosmoi is the difference between you being able to fight yourself awake, and you not being able to wake up?" Abdul countered.

"What if we don't ever find a way to wake the sleepers up without him practicing haemomancy?" Lady Helena said. "What if it gets harder for him to awaken the longer we wait? Even with the best medical care, the longer the sleepers are asleep, the more problems they'll have. And there's no one with half as much experience of other worlds as Peter has."

Lady Helena was an accomplished witch—to use her own preferred term—but I don't know that her medical ethics were really the ones I wanted to emulate. But this was me. If I wanted to take the risk, surely it was my choice.

"Jennifer, what do you think?" I asked.

Jennifer shook her head. "There are too many intangibles. Too many factors we simply can't know one way or the other. Too many risks we know nothing about. Your plan could be genius and solve the whole thing, it could make things worse, it could be barking up the wrong tree completely. We don't know, and we can't know, which is the case. So there's no point arguing as if we do know what the risks and rewards are." She rubbed the side of her head. "Peter, what exactly do you think you'll be able to do in that allokosmoi? And if you're slipping in and out without Molly, why do you need the risk of blood loss and all the germs a mouth contains?"

I took a moment to collect my thoughts. "There's something there," I said. "I don't know what it is or where it comes from, but it's forming a barrier. I think it's what's keeping Nightingale and the others trapped. If I can tear it away, I think they'll wake up. But I couldn't get a good enough grip on it—not because it was insubstantial, but because I was. I think haemomancy will push me through solidly enough to grab it … and I think I've got a better chance of knowing what to do and how to do it if I go in awake, than if I slip in while I'm dreaming."

"How so?" Lady Helena asked. "You've described it as similar to a dream state."

"It's like dreams in that it's not physically real," I said. "Things can be metaphors, things can be symbolic more than literal. But you're not sleeping, and it's not your own subconscious making it up out of bits of things you've seen that day. It's got its own substance. If you know what you're doing, you can manipulate it. You can do things there that have real, tangible results in the real world. But if you're sleeping, if you think it's just a dream…." I shook my head. "You can't do anything if you don't know it's possible, can you? If they just think this is a regular old dream, how would they know to escape? I want to make sure that I go in knowing it's an allokosmoi and not a dream. That'll give me the best shot of breaking it."

"All right, then, Peter," Jennifer said. "We're flying blind. You're the one with the experience."

1940.

It was good we hadn't waited for David's questions, I reflected, because the thread connecting me and my target was thinning palpably by the time we parked outside a lodging house in a run-down neighborhood.

I wrote down Lewis' number and handed it to David. "Please go ring this number and let them know the address so they can send someone to pick it up. I'm going in to make sure I can tell which room is the right one before it fades."

"Alone?" David said. "What about backup?"

I stared at him. "David, this isn't the movies, or a detective novel. Spies are not generally prone to violent heroics. Their entire modus operandii depends on going unnoticed. And if they get caught, what do you think one person by themselves could do? Could he fight his way out of England and across the Channel single-handedly? No. Chances are, he'll come quietly. And if he fights, I've spent quite a lot of the last several years in sticky situations of one sort or another, I'm quite certain I could take him. Meanwhile, it's the middle of the day, he's probably not even in, and the sooner you go away and make that phone call, the sooner I will have backup." David didn't count; he hadn't even boxed since leaving Casterbrook.

"Right," David said.

I got out of the car and walked up to the building. It was the sort of building I was more likely to step foot in overseas than here in London: shabby, neglected, the furnishings either cheap or old or both. I paused just outside the door, and closed my eyes; even without Molly's haemomancy, I thought the vestigium would have been noticeable to someone with training. But it wasn't the sort of neighborhood any of the chaps from the Folly would have any reason to visit. No wonder we hadn't found it.

I entered, and paused inside to get my bearings. It was coming from above. As I climbed the stairs, I found the reek of the vestigium growing again. I was tempted to cover my ears or my nose or both, but for the certain knowledge that it wouldn't do any good.

I stopped outside the room it was emanating from, but I couldn't feel anything over the devices. There was no light on in the room, which on such a dark day likely meant nobody was in. I started a formae for a basic shield, just in case, and tried the door handle slowly.

It was locked. I popped it, and swung it open.

Oberon was sitting on the bed.

"This is not your address," I said, because it wasn't. I'd checked and he did indeed live at the address he'd given me. "And you can't be the spy, your alibi for the second incident checked out."

Oberon raised his eyebrows. "So it's a spy, eh? I'd have thought saboteur, all the reek and mess he leaves around. Not very discreet, for a spy."

"How did you find his room?" I walked in and shut the door quietly behind me, and began a cursory search of the room.

"Even a person with all the sensitivity of a turnip would find this place hard to be around." Oberon watched me rifle through the bureau drawers. "People have been complaining about it. The landlady's scoured this whole building top to bottom three times, and nothing worked. I heard about it, and decided to check it out."

"You didn't call me to report what you'd found." The drawers being filled with nothing but clothes, I moved to the washstand, and opened its drawer.

That had to be them. Four stone discs, perhaps four inches across and half an inch thick.

I closed the drawer. It did very little to ameliorate the vestigium. But even the little it did do was welcome.

"Having seen—and, more to the point, felt—those things, I didn't want them in anybody's hands." Oberon said. "Not the Germans, not the Isaacs, not the Army. He's murdered at least four people, and turned them into weapons. I want to destroy them and put those poor souls to rest. And then I want to have a little chat with our friend the spy, to see if he's told anyone else, and lay him to rest. And possibly the people he's told."

"He didn't make the devices," I said. "I'm afraid there's no containing the information."

"Damn." Oberon shook his head.

"You might as well leave the whole thing to me," I said. "He'll be handed over to the proper authorities."

"And the stones? Will they be destroyed, or will they be studied?"

I hesitated.

"You know they're abominations," Oberon said.

David was dying to know how it had been done, and Lewis would want it examined to see if a countermeasure could be determined. I couldn't say they were wrong. But … neither was Oberon.

The door opened.

A non-descript white man in coveralls stood in the doorway, staring at us.

"You'd better come in," I said.

"Who're you?" he asked, walking in and shutting the door behind him.

"I'm Thomas Nightingale, with the Home Office," I said, that being the relevant information.

"And I'm Oberon, here on behalf of the neighbors you've been dripping your filthy magic residue all over."

Something hardened in the man's face. "So you know," he said.

"We do," I said. "There's no hope of escape. Even if you could overpower the two of us, my superiors know all about you and the police should be here shortly." I wasn't sure it would be the police; it might be the SOE, or military intelligence. But that didn't matter now.

His face hardened. "You're right. There's no hope."

He charged me, drawing a knife. I knocked him down with impello, but we were so close his momentum bowled me over.

The knife went flying, and Oberon lunged for it.

The man grabbed the washstand and yanked open the drawer with the stones. I kicked him, but he managed to grab the stones anyway.

Something magical was happening—I wasn't sure whether it was him or the stones, but either way it couldn't be good. I reached for sīphonem, trying to drain power from the stones before he could use them.

Oberon stabbed him.

A pulse of power went out from the stones, all of them at once, quicker than sīphonem could compensate for.

The world went black.

2016.

I was back in that weird, shifting London, but this time I could make out peoples' faces. This time, nobody was screaming, and there was no smell of burned meat. But the rotting fish smell was much stronger.

I recognized some of the people walking by—that blonde woman who looked like she should be in a costume drama on the BBC was Emma Montmorency, one of the sleepers. She was walking and holding a basket, and talking to thin air.

"Excuse me, ma'am," I said, stepping in front of her. "I'm looking for Nightingale. Do you know where he is?"

She sniffed. "I don't go hanging about with the Isaacs, young man, and if you're smart you won't either."

"What about Oberon?" I persisted.

"Oh, Effra's young man!" she said. "He's over that way, I believe. Do give him my greetings."

"Actually, why don't we go say hello together?" I said. I didn't know that people being close to me in the dreamscape would make a difference to whether they woke up when I was done or not, but … I didn't know it wouldn't, either.

"All right," she said, and off we went. Along the way, we collected anybody I recognized as a sleeper, and I realized they felt differently than the rest of the people I saw. They were more real, more present, than the rest. One or two I didn't recognize felt real as well, and I gathered them along with us. I was half expecting the ghosts of old rivers to show up, but they didn't. Neither did Punch.

Oberon and Nightingale were together when we found them, fighting a shade. No magic, just pure brawling—I think I saw Nightingale bite him, though I wouldn't swear to it.

Emma tisked disapprovingly. "And them supposed to be gentlemen!"

"I don't think he's real," I told them.

They didn't listen.

"Nightingale, stop!" I called.

"Peter, I'm a bit busy!" he replied.

"He's not real," I said. "You're dreaming."

I walked up to them—cautiously, I've broken up my fair share of brawls in my time as a copper—and grabbed the man they were fighting. Sure enough, he dissolved into mist.

"Oh," said Nightingale.

"We're dreaming?" Oberon said. "That explains …" he trailed off.

"You and all the rest of these people have been asleep for four days," I said. "I've come to get you out."

There was a general commotion as people tried to ask questions all at once.

"Something's made a hole between our world and some other world, and you all fell through it," I said. "This is the other side, or at least partway between. If I can tear it apart, we can all go back and we'll all wake up." That was the theory anyway, but I wanted to keep things simple. There was never as much time as you needed before it got dangerous to be away from your body for too long.

The shroud was indeed more tangible this time. Everything was filmy, as if I was watching through a veil. It reeked of rotten fish, slimy and slippery. I grabbed at it, and tried to tear it.

As I pulled, the smell got worse, and Nightingale dropped to the ground.

I stopped.

"I don't think we want to tear it," Oberon said. "We want the barrier to be strong. We just want to be on the other side of it, right?"

"Right," I said, feeling a bit stupid. I thought for a second. "Maybe if I hold it up, you can slip under it?"

Oberon shrugged. "Worth a shot."

"You okay, sir?" I asked Nightingale.

"I am functional," he said, which wasn't the same thing. "Do we know for sure we're the only ones affected?"

"No," I said, "But all the ones we know are asleep are here."

"You might call out, see if any others come."

"Right," I said. "Anybody out there?" I shouted. My voice echoed louder than I could ever have made it in the real world. "If you want to get out of this nightmare, now's your chance, we're making an exit right here!"

We waited, but there was no sign of life outside our little group. All the shades had disappeared, and we were alone.

I could feel the weakness that meant I didn't have much time. They were all asleep, but I wasn't—I was in a trance caused partly by blood loss.

I grabbed the shroud again, and this time I tried lifting it up. Emma helped, as did Oberon and two of the others, and between us we got an opening sufficient for someone to crawl under.

"Oy, don't just stand there," I said.

One by one, the sleepers crawled out and away. Nightingale tried to go last, but Oberon wasn't having it. "And just how will you manage to hold the barrier up, you're weaker than a kitten!" he said. "You were the one at the center of that blast, not me."

Nightingale went, then Emma and Oberon crawled half-way under and stopped, holding the way open for me with their bodies. I ducked under with them, and out we went.

I opened my eyes to see the coach house ceiling. Abdul was tending my wound, and Bev was holding my hand so tightly I could swear I felt the bones twist. Beyond her, Lady Helena was watching.

"You did great, babes, you did so good," Bev said. "I don't know if it worked, but if it didn't, I saw what you did, I think I can do it without Molly's help."

Lady Helena pursed her lips, which I took to mean that she hadn't sensed enough to say the same. I wondered if she'd be asking Molly for her own experience with haemomancy.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Stay quiet, Peter, and let me finish," Abdul said.

Bev's phone rang. She dug it out of her pocket one-handed. "What's the news?"

"It worked, Bev, it worked! Oberon's awake!" Effra shouted through the phone. "Tell your baby-daddy I owe him."

I almost laughed in relief.

Abdul's phone dinged with a text. He finished his sutures, wiped his hands off, and reached for it. "Jennifer says they're waking up at the hospital, too."

1940.

I woke up in a strange place, the private dining room on the ground floor of the Folly. The table and chairs had been shoved to the side, and a bed brought in.

"What?" I tried to say, but all that came out was a croak.

"Oh, good, you're awake, we were beginning to worry." It was Brown, sitting in a chair by the window with a book. "It's been almost three days since—well, since whatever hush-hush thing happened that knocked you out. Though we all felt it, it was worse than the other three put together, so I don't see why they're trying to keep it quiet. Scary Mary has been hovering over you like you're the last cut of meat at the butcher shop—are you having it on with her? Brave man, if so."

I tried to deny it, but my voice still wasn't working.

He poured me a glass of water from the pitcher and handed it to me. "I'll just go announce that you're awake, shall I?"

I took a sip, and it was balm to my parched throat. I wanted nothing more than to drink the whole glass at once. Still, if it had really been three days, it would make me sick, even if they'd been giving me things to drink.

(You can get a little bit of liquid down an unconscious person's throat, if you're careful about it and take your time; I know, because I've had to do it, out in the field. But you can't get much down them.)

"Thomas, you frightened us all!" David said, bursting through the door. "We weren't sure you were ever going to wake up. Your backup got there just as … whatever it was kicked off. They got into the room, and found the spy dead, and you and the Negro unconscious. The hospital couldn't find anything wrong with either of you, and sent you home."

"Oberon?" I asked.

"He woke up overnight," David said. "But his friend who was taking care of him was ferociously protective of him, wouldn't let me in to examine him. He only agreed to let us know when Oberon awoke if we agreed to do the same with you."

"Ah," I said. "The stones?"

"The devices, you mean?" David shook his head. "I'm not sure what all you did to them—or them to you, for that matter—but they're not enchanted any longer, I can tell you that. They're just so much gravel, now; all of them broken, with no more vestigia than grass. Your man Lewis wasn't pleased, but on the other hand, he said it was unlikely the Jerries would try this again; only three reports, each of them putting a target on their man's back, and then we found him? Not good odds, they'd do better parachuting a man in with a radio."

I was curious about what the spy's job had been, what sort of information he had access to, but while Lewis would undoubtedly know, he wouldn't have told David.

There was a knock on the door. "Come in!" David called.

It was Molly, with a tray and a bowl of soup. Between the two of them, she and David helped me sit up and propped pillows behind me.

"Why am I in here?" I asked.

"What, you think we should have carried you up two flights of stairs to your bedroom, and then down three flights of stairs to the cellar if there was an air raid? No, thank you," David said. "It didn't hurt anybody to have to use the breakfast room or the small dining room instead, and this way if there was an air raid you were right by the stairs to the cellar."

Molly handed me the bowl and spoon. She was tense, hunched over.

I took a spoonful. Beef broth, just the thing for someone who hadn't eaten in a few days.

"Nothing that happened to me was your fault," I told her. "You did exactly as I asked you. You were honest about the risks. The haemomancy worked perfectly and caused no lasting harm. What happened to me when I found the devices was because of the Germans who designed and used them, not you."

She relaxed a little bit, and nodded.

I took another spoonful of broth.

Molly curtseyed, and left.

"I'd better go ring Lewis, and Oberon, as I promised to do," David said. "Will you be alright if I just step out to the telephone?"

"Of course," I said.

I slowly ate my soup as the other chaps came in to congratulate me on awakening, and pump me—with varying degrees of subtlety—for the story.

Young Higginbottom, in particular, was incensed. "You won't tell us anything?"

"Careless talk costs lives," I said.

"Yes, but we're trustworthy," he said. "And we certainly deserve it after having endured all those blasts!"

"No, Higginbottom," I said. "The affair is over, and you need think of it no more. I certainly intend to forget all about it."

Notes:

Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme is a 16th Century German hymn, later turned into a chorale cantata by Bach. It can be literally translated "Awake, the voice is calling us," but the cantata is usually called "Sleepers Awake" in English, and the most common English translation of the hymn in current use has the first line as "Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying"

Thank you to walldecor for britpicking and Lavender Threads for betaing

Lord Peter quotes "The Thorn" by William Wordsworth and "The Prisoner" by Emily Brontë

The hospital near Limburg where the German practitioner works is, of course, the Hadamar Clinic (aka "Hadamar Killing Center"), main site of the Nazi eugenics program Aktion T4.