Convergence - scotchplaid - Warehouse 13 [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Prologue

They had gone to the seashore, an unusual, and welcome, day trip. Papa didn't ordinarily take time off from work, and it was expensive to ride on the train, but he had come home in good spirits declaring that it was "someone's birthday, I wonder whose?" and Helena had clapped her hands, saying "Mine, Papa, mine," until Mama had shushed her for shouting. Charles had sulked. Papa hadn't taken a day from work to take them to the seashore for his birthday, but Charles' birthday was in February, not in September when it was still nice enough to walk along the beach, if not wade in the water.

Very early the next morning they took the train, Helena still half-asleep and thinking the seashore didn't sound nearly as inviting as it had yesterday. Papa carried a hamper filled with food, Charles labored with a couple of blankets rolled tightly and tied with string, while Mama held baby Robert, or Bob as he was already called, to her chest. He was waving his arms excitedly, as if he knew he was going to see the ocean for the first time. Although Helena had intended to stay awake to watch all the people in their car and wonder about where they were going and where they had come from, the rocking of the train lulled her to sleep. Papa had had to shake her shoulder to wake her at their stop.

The walk to the shore wasn't long, which was good, because Mama was tiring. She tired more easily than she used to, which Charles said was nothing to worry about, because she had had the baby only a few months ago. He had said it with all the authority of a brother who was four years older, but Helena never gave much credit to what Charles said. She was already better with sums, and she didn't struggle over the words in the Scriptures as he did. Papa said that she should give her brother the respect he deserved, which, in her mind was none. Charles wasn’t any more deserving of respect because he was a boy and older. And he was wrong about Mama because she coughed now and she hadn't before Bob was born, deep, wracking coughs that left her struggling to breathe. She didn't wash the rags she held to her mouth when she coughed, looking at the stains on them and then throwing them into the fire. Mama wasn't coughing today; she was smiling down at Bob as he waved his arms. Today was a good day and not just because it was her birthday.

Other people had decided to spend the day at the shore as well, and Papa had had to search the beach for a spot big enough for the four of them, but he found one, a little farther up from the ocean than Helena wanted. The ocean was so big, however, that it didn't matter where they sat because the water was still so near, so wide and blue that she wanted to draw it around her shoulders like a blanket. But blankets didn't ripple, didn't roll like this, what she saw wasn't water but hide, covering the muscles of some huge, powerful animal whose head and tail were far beyond her sight. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to ride that animal, whatever it was; it would be so strong that it could carry her into the sky. Then she giggled, she knew there was no animal, only water. There was nothing magical about water, but that didn't make the ocean any less special.

She and Charles played in the surf until he tried to drag her into the waves and dunk her head beneath them. But she was stronger than he realized, fighting him until he was forced to let her go. As he gave her a push, he lost his balance and fell into the water, his knickered bottom hitting the sand with a thump. Papa shouted at him, very sternly, and pointed Charles to the blankets that had been spread out, and Charles scowled as he sat next to Mama and Bob, forbidden to go down to the water again until Papa said he could. Papa came down instead, taking her hand and walking with her along the shore. She loved the times when she had Papa to herself, and he seemed to enjoy them too. As they walked, he pointed at unusual-looking stones in the sand and drew her attention to the birds that were diving into the ocean.

"They're looking for lunch, pet. Why don't we go back to the blankets and have our own lunch?"

After lunch, Papa napped under a rented parasol with Mama and Bob. He had relented and allowed Charles to take Helena back to the water's edge, cautioning him to keep an eye on her, but Charles had seen a group of boys playing farther up the shore, and he had dropped her hand, saying threateningly, "Don't get into any trouble and wake Papa, or I'll tan you when he's not around." He had run off then to play with the other boys, but Helena didn't mind being left alone. She knew better than to walk too far into the waves and, besides, it was too cold to stay in the water for long, even if it only covered her feet. Head bent, she looked for interesting stones she could show Papa, and her search took her far down the beach, far enough that, when she looked up, she couldn't tell their umbrella from the others.

Afterward she was never sure if she had seen the girl or the stone first because it seemed to her that she had seen them at the same time. Crouching to free the stone from the sand, she had seen feet in front of her, although she could have sworn that they hadn't been there a moment ago. Slowly rising, she took in the shift the girl was wearing, much like her own, and the dark hair that was braided and bound with an identical blue ribbon. The girl had dark eyes, and she was viewing Helena with the same curiosity with which Helena was looking at her, her head inclining to the side in exactly the same way.

"I didn't say you could pick up that stone," the girl said. She didn’t sound angry. The girl sounded like Charles did when he dared her to do something that would get her into trouble.

"It doesn't have your name on it," Helena said boldly.

"No, it doesn't," the girl conceded. "Pretty isn't, it?"

Helena nodded. It was pretty, turning different colors in the sunlight, and it didn't feel like a stone. It felt light and smooth, more like metal than rock, and its color, when she wasn't twisting her wrist this way and that, was a gray that looked more like metal too, shiny, not dull. She attempted to give it back to the girl. Maybe she had seen it first, Helena grudgingly admitted to herself. But the girl shook her head. "You can keep it until I come back for it, and then you must give it to me."

"Must I?" Helena repeated saucily.

The girl looked at her soberly. "Yes, when I come for it, you must give it to me. If you can't promise me that, then I won't let you take it."

This girl was beginning to sound even more like Charles. "You can't stop me from taking it," Helena declared.

The girl's expression remained just as sober, but her lips were beginning to twitch into a smile. "Yes, I can, but I'd prefer not to. Will you promise to give it back when I ask for it?"

Helena was beginning to think the girl was as slow as Charles, too. How would the girl know where she lived? She hadn't even told her her name. "Yes," she said flippantly, "I promise to give it back."

"Don't lose it," the girl admonished her, but Helena wasn't listening, fascinated by how quickly the colors changed as she held the stone. When she thought to look up, the girl was gone, although Helena could spot no other little girl in a white shift among the children playing in the water, and she could pick out no dark braid flying and bouncing on the breeze. She turned around and began to walk toward the umbrella she thought was theirs, only realizing halfway there that, although the waves had washed over the girl's feet as they had her own, the girl's feet had never looked wet.

Papa was angry that she had wandered so far away from them, and he had barely looked at the stones she held out for inspection. He hadn't even noticed the special one, and as she tried to describe the girl she had met, he overrode her bubbling about how much the girl had looked like her to shout at Charles, who was only then sauntering up to their blankets. Papa's face was red, and he grabbed at Charles' ear to drag him to where he and Mama were standing, the hamper packed, the blankets rolled and tied, and baby Bob crying piteously against Mama's shoulder. Charles started sobbing, and it was a much less happy family boarding the train to go home than the one that had taken the train to the shore. Mama started coughing in the car, and despite her hurried tucking of the cloth into a pocket of her dress, Helena saw the blood on it.

Eventually Helena lost the stones she had gathered from the shore, all except the special one, which she hid under a corner of her mattress. The mattress was so thin that for the longest time she thought she could feel it under the ticking when she crawled into her bed at night. But as Mama's coughing grew worse and baby Bob began to sicken as well, she began to believe that their day at the shore was the cause of their illness. That's what her grandmama and aunties said, blaming Papa for letting Mama breathe in all that damp air. They wouldn't have gone to the shore if it hadn't been her birthday. It was her fault that Mama coughed all the time now and that Papa had to hire a woman to help with the house, although Mama would say through all the coughing that they couldn't afford it. Helena would have thrown the stone away but for the promise she had made to the girl. The promise hadn't seemed ominous at the time, but it weighed on her now. Maybe the girl did know where she lived, and if she threw the stone away, Mama would become even sicker. So Helena kept the stone, hating it but unable to part with it, and she would lay awake, listening to her mother cough and feeling that the stone was burning through the mattress her skin felt so itchy and hot.

There came a day, much later, when Helena got rid of the stone. Much had happened before that day; Mama had died, and Papa had married the woman he had hired to care for her. Papa's new wife insisted that Charles and Helena call her "Mama" because she was their mother now, but at least in this, Helena and Charles were united; this woman, with her pinched, sour face, would never be Mama. Bob, however, seemed not to notice the difference, staggering after their new mama on unsteady legs. He was still sickly, running fevers and developing spots, and his nose never seemed to stop running. Helena disliked him almost as much as she did the stone, but he wasn't responsible for Mama getting sicker and dying ("going to heaven," their new mama would insist they say). Not only did they have a new mama, they were going to be living in a new place as well. But the new place wasn't any nicer than the new mama. Helena had seen the rooms; they were smaller, grimier, cheaper. Papa had lost his old job, and his new job didn't pay him as much. Or so she had heard him tell their new mama.

Their few belongings were already strapped in the wagon, and she could hear Papa call for her, his voice angry-sounding. He was always angry now. Helena was at the back of the house, standing over a small hole she had scooped out using a spoon. Mama had planted flowers in this little strip of earth when she had been well, it seemed as good as any place to leave the stone. Helena dropped the stone in the hole and hastily brushed the dirt over it. If the girl wanted the stone that badly, she could come here and dig it up herself. Her father shouted again, and Helena ran to the wagon. He would take the belt to her later. The welts on her legs from the last time he had struck her with it weren't quite healed. It would be a very long, painful night for her, but she was finally free of the stone.

Myka

The call wasn't an unwelcome interruption, and it should have been. It really should have been. She and Pete had taken a very rare vacation - a full week - and gone to Vermont to see the fall colors, walk the hills and ride bikes on the trails, cuddle together under quilts, and make love in front of a roaring fire. It was the stereotypical romantic getaway for a not-so-stereotypical couple, a pair of agents who worked for an organization (if the Warehouse could be called such) that no one except those in the highest reaches of the government knew about and who, until recently, had been more Greg and Marcia in their interactions than Scully and Mulder, or Castle and Beckett, for that matter. But things had changed, she and Pete had changed, although they had been slow to recognize it, and it was working, this new romantic relationship of theirs. Admittedly, it had been weird at first, they had felt they needed to be more respectful of each other. Myka didn't punch him in the shoulder every time he said something stupid or irritating (which was most of the time), because that was something Myka the buddy, not Myka the girlfriend, would do, and Pete didn't pull nearly as many practical jokes on her as he used to (no more switching out her secret stash of Twizzlers for a package of red coffee stirrers or persuading Claudia to load a screen saver onto her Farnsworth that had the U.S. Olympic men's swim team in their butt-hugging, aerodynamically superior trunks) because that was something a work partner, a pal, not a boyfriend, would do. They had found their rhythm, it just was different from their old one, that was all.

But still good. Very, very good. Which was why Myka annoyed that her heart had skipped a beat, eagerly skipped that beat, when the Farnsworth buzzed. They shouldn't have taken one on their vacation at all, but when Pete had showed it to her before putting it in their bag, she hadn't said no. After all, you never knew when another Helena Wells would be on the verge of destroying the world, and first and last, they were Warehouse agents. She hadn’t actually said it to Pete, but she had thought it. She still thought about Helena, and though it might have seemed strange to be thinking about her minutes before they were to drive to Rapid City to catch their flight to Burlington, Helena was inextricably part of the Warehouse no matter how hard she tried to free herself from it. Thinking about Helena no longer caused her heart to beat a little faster than it should, and she could thank Pete for that. If nothing else, this relationship with him was showing her how it never would have worked, her and Helena.

So if she had found her true love, why was she flinging herself across the bed to retrieve the Farnsworth? Shouldn't she be groaning and complaining at having to move from the nest of quilts she and Pete had constructed in front of the fire? Furthermore, shouldn't she be just a little bit peeved that Pete was beating her to the nightstand? He yanked open the drawer that served as the Farnsworth's home when they were sleeping, or otherwise occupied - "It is our vacation," he had explained, "and I love Artie as much as anyone, but the brows and that voice do not make Not-So-Little Pete want to come out and play” - and flopped on the bed with it, opening the lid.

Artie was speaking through fingers, his face averted. "You better have clothes on. If you don't have clothes on, put them on."

"We're dressed, Artie," Myka said, pinching the material of her sleep shirt between her fingers and pulling it away from her chest as proof.

Artie cautiously spread his fingers, looking from Myka to Pete. "Put on a shirt or something, Pete."

"Hey, I've got on sweatpants," Pete protested. "It's a little warm in here with the fire and everything."

"God," Artie groaned, "you've now ruined charming country inns and fireplaces for me forever."

Myka punched Pete in the shoulder. "TMI," she whispered in his ear. "He didn't need to know about the 'roaring fire.'"

Pete tossed Myka the Farnsworth and slid off the bed, taking his t-shirt, draped over the back of the desk chair, and pulling it on. Rejoining her on the bed and thrusting out his chest, he motioned to Myka to hold the Farnsworth close to the t-shirt. "Better?" he demanded sarcastically.

"Too close," Artie grumbled. "I can count his chest hairs." He paused, looking off to the side. "I didn't want to interrupt your little getaway, believe me," he emphasized, "I didn't want to call you. I want to know about what goes on with the two of you only from the neck up. But something's happened, and we need you here. Tonight preferably but I'll settle for tomorrow."

"Did something happen to Claudia? Or Steve?" Myka asked, concerned. Artie seemed beset by no more than his usual level of irritation, and if either Claudia or Steve were in jeopardy he would tell them, albeit begrudgingly. But Artie made people work to get information out of him, especially if he loved them and especially when the news was bad. It was counterproductive to make her and Pete pry this latest development out of him, it delayed their ability to help fix the problem, whatever it was, but this was part of the Warehouse manual too, the “unwritten rules” one that Myka carried in her head. Artie seemed reluctant to realize that his attempts to shield them were a way to shield himself.

"They're fine. I've had to call them in, too." He hesitated again, then said softly enough that Myka felt her stomach flip, "We've asked H.G. to come because it concerns her."

Pete's hand was already on Myka's back, rubbing, stroking, and she rolled her shoulders away from his touch. She didn't want the comfort, didn't need the comfort. Artie wasn't saying that H.G. was dead. "What's going on, Artie?" she asked coolly.

"It'll be easier to explain once you're here." And with that, he ended the transmission.

And just as she had wondered, uneasily, why they had both been too eager for the Farnsworth's interruption, Myka thought that maybe they were complying with Artie's order too quickly. Pete had no sooner dropped the Farnsworth on the bed than he was reaching for his phone and reserving two seats on the next flight out of Burlington. Factoring in the plane changes and the overnight in Atlanta, they wouldn't get to Leena's (Myka suspected that she would always call the bed and breakfast Leena's no matter how many managers it had or how long Leena had been dead) until mid-morning at the earliest. They could enjoy what little time they had left in Burlington instead of spending it on a cramped flight to Atlanta. But if Pete had been too rushed in his decision to put them on a 9:30 p.m. flight to Atlanta, she hadn't tried to talk him out of it. In fact, she had them completely packed, all Pete needed to do was to change his sweatpants and t-shirt for jeans and a pullover, and they could leave. Maybe this was something they should talk about, this mutual willingness to be distracted from each other. They hadn't talked about their relationship since their confessions to one another during the whole is-the-Warehouse-moving-to-China crisis; they had accepted their almost offhand acknowledgments that they loved one another as basis enough. Basis enough for what? The sleeping together that had followed soon thereafter, the assumption that, eventually, there would be rooms that they would share, permanently, and, later down the line, a ceremony in which Pete would have to dress up in a tux, again. But there hadn't been anytalkingabout it. Except the sex. And that wasn't quite what she had expected either.

"Hey," Pete said, touching her arm. He had stuffed the sweatpants and t-shirt into their bag's outer pocket. "Ready to blow this joint?"

Myka tried to suppress the flicker of irritation she felt at him not taking the two seconds it would have required to put the clothes inside the bag. Two seconds, that was all. "Sure, let's go." Then, without thinking and with an anger that surprised her, she said, "Let's go take care of yet another mess that Helena’s made."

They were quiet on the flight to Atlanta, and they were quiet in the airport hotel room they shared since there were no series of flights that would get them to Rapid City until morning. She thought that Pete might start kissing the back of her neck and shoulders once they were in bed, one of his signs that he wanted to "get busy" as he invariably called it. Another minor irritant. But after a business-like kiss on her cheek, he rolled over - taking most of the bed covers with him - and fell asleep almost immediately. She had been reading on her iPad a scathing account of the Syrian civil war, her hair a wiry mess and her glasses sliding down her nose. They were new glasses with frames that were stylish and lenses that weren't three inches thick; she had gotten them shortly after she and Pete had started dating. Of course he had seen her wearing her 1980s-era monstrosities, but it was one thing to wear them when they were friends, and another when they were sleeping together. She didn't want him to think that he was making love to his third-grade teacher when she had them on and they were in bed.

She continued to read or, rather, her eyes continued to move across the screen, but she wasn't taking in the words. While they had waited in the gate area to board their plane, she had scrolled through the headlines, wondering if one of the endless national and international crises had had ripples that were affecting the Warehouse. Normally their work prevented a crisis, but, on occasion, an artefact had had a role in a testy dispute between nations or in a prison break that had resulted in a nationwide manhunt. None of the headlines had seemed a promising clue, however. As a last resort, she had searched the Los Angeles media; since the problem had some relationship to Helena, maybe it was local, and Helena had made Los Angeles her home after she left Boone.

After she left Nate and Adelaide in the lurch, Myka thought acidly. She blinked at the iPad's darkened screen. After several months when there had been no contact, Helena had called her to let her know that she and Nate had split up and that she had accepted a position as a forensics investigator in Los Angeles. There had been another call a few months after that and Helena had told her that she was seeing someone, Giselle was all the information about the woman that Helena had seemed willing to divulge, and she had sounded so curt and closed-off that Myka decided not to tell her about the biopsy. It didn't matter anymore, none of it, although Myka wasn't sure she could articulate all that "it" encompassed. When she and Pete had decided to act on their feelings, she had initially decided that it was too soon to tell anyone, but now, several months into their relationship, when she had told everyone who hadn't already figured it out, she still hadn't told Helena. Despite all their promises to keep in touch, something had happened to them in Boone; sometimes Myka thought some residual resentment at Helena's leaving the Warehouse and settling down with a widowed attorney and his daughter when she should have . . . Myka always pulled up short when she thought about what Helena "should" have done. There were no "should's," Helena had done what she wanted to do, and there was nothing wrong with her having fallen in love with Nate and his daughter. And if Myka felt an unwarranted spurt of resentment every time she thought about it, that was her problem. So, yes, she worried on occasion that her resentment had created a coolness to which Helena had responded by holding back, and their friendship had disintegrated from there. But sometimes she thought something else had been at work in Boone, and she suspected during moments late at night, when she looked at Pete's sleeping form and feared that this wasn't what she wanted, that whatever it was that had happened during the few days she and Helena had had to forge a partnership to retrieve the jawbone artefact, it had not only been a factor in her turning, eventually, to Pete but in Helena's . . . aban- no, yes,abandonmentof Nate and Adelaide as well.

She put the iPad and her glasses on the nightstand. The brief clatter woke Pete, and he raised himself on an elbow, muttering "What?," and then Myka, who rarely took the initiative because, to be honest, she never had to, pressed herself against his back and let her hand drop down to his boxers. She hesitated at the waistband and then his hand guided hers through the fly. It didn't take long to tease him out, and Pete, with few preliminaries, pushed up her sleep shirt. She wrapped her legs around him, and they began a rhythm that she quickly urged him to increase because she didn't want to think and when they went slow - which she ordinarily liked - her mind . . . every once in a while . . . drifted. He came with a brief cry, and she followed a few seconds after, her cry softer and even more abbreviated. Pete curled himself around her, hand rubbing her stomach. "It could be our kid growing in there right now." He kissed her behind her ear. "I know this isn't the best time to bring it up again, but I want you to go off birth control, Mykes. Hell, I'll marry you tomorrow if that's what's stopping you. You know I love you, and I'm ready. We can make it work with the Warehouse and everything, I know we can. Can't you picture it? A little boy or girl with your green eyes and my . . . okay . . . my sense of humor." She could feel him grin against her neck. "We'd make the best parents ever, I know it."

The best parents, not the best lovers, not the best spouses. Parents. And just as she sometimes looked at him and suspected that she had been looking for a refuge in him more than a lover, she wondered if his repeated desire for a child with her was his way of evading a recognition that he didn't love her as much, or in the way, he wanted to. If they decided to have a child together, more accurately, if she let him wear her down, that would put an end to it, the self-doubt, the questions. Yet she that wasn’t true. Helena had finally found a child to whom she could be a mother, but there had been a flaw in her relationship with Nate. Hadn't she sensed it in the short time that she had been in Boone, had seen Nate and Helena interact? Children didn't fix a relationship that wasn't working, they only further complicated it. She wasn't ready for a child right now. She would tell Pete that, again, in the morning, and she would bury deep within her what she was frightened to think was the bigger truth, that she would never be ready for a child with him.

They arrived at Leena's mid-morning, yawning and tasting the staleness of airports and airplane cabins in their mouths. Claudia greeted them at the door. After looking at their exhausted faces, she said in a sarcastic sing-song, "So sorry that your romantic getaway, well, got away." At Pete's glare, she moved to the side, and they shouldered past her with their bags.

"Where's Artie?" Pete was halfway up the stairs to the bedrooms.

"In the sunroom, waiting for you," she shouted after him. Opening the French doors to the room, she disappeared behind them. Myka still stood in the foyer, bag at her feet. Claudia's attitude toward them changed day by day; one day she seemed to accept their relationship as a natural outgrowth of their friendship, and the next, she was convinced they were committing a kind of workplace incest. Early on she had attempted to talk to Claudia about it, which, since Claudia found talking about emotions as difficult as Myka did, perhaps even more so, made for a conversation largely made up of silence and sighs. Myka only clearly remembered two sentences, possibly because they were the only two complete sentences spoken. She had said, haltingly, "It surprised us, too, Claud, but Pete and I really do love each other . . . like that," and Claudia, after what felt like minutes spent frowning and staring at the floor, had said in turn, "I don't get how you can be surprised by something you're saying is so big that it 'had' to happen." Myka hadn't had an answer for her.

Ten months later, the answer continued to elude her. She picked up her bag and followed Pete up the stairs. For the first time in forever as she passed the room that had been Helena's, she stopped outside the door. Maybe Helena was in it or her bags. She could have beaten them here. Or she could have refused to come. She heard the squeal of a door opening behind her, and Pete poked his head out. "Hurry up, they're waiting." The bag rolling behind her, she went on to her room, which was two doors farther down. Claudia occupied the room next to Helena's and Steve's was across from Claudia's. The room at the very end of the hall, which used to be Leena's, remain unoccupied. Abigail chose to live in a rented house in Univille. If Helena had arrived before them, what had she made of the changes?

But Helena wasn't in the sunroom, and when Myka asked where she was, Artie said, "I wanted the opportunity to brief all of you before she arrived." An older TV on a cart had been wheeled into the sunroom, and Artie was feeding a DVD into a player. As Myka took a seat at the table she smiled a hello at Vanessa. Usually Artie flew to Atlanta to see Vanessa, and Myka was surprised to see her here. Steve scuffed in from the kitchen in the bunny slippers that Claudia had gotten him as a jokey Christmas present one year but which he continued to wear because they were, he said, "crazy comfortable." He was sipping from a mug. Hooking a thumb back over his shoulder, he said to Myka, "Want some? The teabags are still out."

She shook her head. Pete was eating from a bag of Doritos that he had bought at the Rapid City airport. He held the bag out to her and shook it invitingly. "You like Cool Ranch." She shook her head again. Not at 10:30 in the morning. With a satisfied grunt, Artie reached back for the remote on the seat of his chair and turned the TV on; the DVD was already playing. Grainy surveillance footage appeared, and Pete hooted through a mouthful of Cool Ranch crumbs. "You called us in for a convenience store robbery?" Artie flapped a hand at him to shush.

Men in uniform - they could have been women, Myka supposed, although it was hard to tell with the helmets and the bulky kevlar vests and poor quality of the video - were opening a door to a cargo container, semi-automatic rifles at the ready. As soon as the people, all women, emerged, their frightened faces turned toward the men, their arms automatically rising in a needless gesture of surrender, the men lowered their rifles. There wasn't any sound, but Myka could tell that the agents - Border Patrol? ATF? - were trying to identify the ones who could speak English. The women's clothes were ragged, and their hair was unkempt. They were blinking and shielding their eyes, and though there seemed to be no light other than daylight and the light from a row of suspended fluorescents, the women ducked their heads as if the agents were shining flashlights on them. All except one woman. She blinked, but she held her head high, and she viewed the agents pressing around them with a steady, curious gaze. Her hair was as dirty and lank and her clothes as stained and torn as the other women's, but she didn't share their fear. Helena.

Myka didn't realize she had said it aloud until Artie nodded, his hair waving in agreement. "That's what we thought, although how she would've gotten swept up in a human trafficking ring uncovered in Houston when she was supposedly living in Los Angeles . . . ." He lifted his shoulders and dropped them.

"Undercover?" Pete hazarded.

"If she had been working undercover, would I have called you back here?" Artie demanded testily. "She works in the LAPD's forensics science laboratory. They're not going to send her undercover. And she was in Los Angeles at the time this video was taken. The woman you're seeing is not H.G. Wells."

"Who does she say she is?" Steve asked, sipping his tea.

"At last, a halfway intelligent question." Artie pressed the fast-forward on the remote. "She says she's Helena Wells."

Everyone stirred a little in his (or her) chair at that. But just a little. They had all encountered far stranger mysteries. Artie stopped the fast-forward, pushing himself up from the floor with a grunt and reclaiming his chair. The video was clearer this time, footage from an interrogation room. The woman was seated at a table. She was in different, cleaner clothes, and her hair looked like it had been recently washed. The clothes weren't a jail jumpsuit, but they were too large for her. She was being held, wherever she was, and this wasn't the first round of questioning, Myka suspected. A pair of investigators entered the room, a man and woman, professionally nondescript. A low buzz issued from the TV and Artie leaned forward to adjust the volume until the buzz separated into words. The investigators were asking her why she had been found with the other women. She was the only one who had been able to speak English; the rest of the women had spoken Chinese or Spanish or Russian. Her story didn't match the others' either, the investigators said; the other women had all responded to ads on the Internet promising jobs in the United States, she had said she couldn't remember what happened, only that she had woken up to find herself in a cargo container crammed with women and a few teenage girls. Whenever the agents asked her where she lived, what jobs she held, if she had any family, her response was always the same, "I don't remember." They showed her pictures of the traffickers who had held her and the other women; she pointed to one, indicating that he was the one who had brought food and blankets into the cargo container and took their pails of waste and emptied them. She didn't recognize the other men. Changing tactics, the investigators asked how long she had been working with the traffickers, if she had been put in the cargo container with the other women to keep them calm, to ensure their docility when the container's doors were opened and one or two were removed, never to be seen again. The woman hadn't expressed shock or disgust at the accusation; instead, she rolled her eyes, asking quite clearly, "You truly believe that I voluntarily dressed in rags and spent 24 hours a day in a container that smelled like sh*t?" The investigators had looked at each other and then one of them reframed the question, suggesting that, possibly, her collusion with the traffickers hadn't been voluntary. Maybe they had blackmailed her or threatened a family member. And so it went on until, during a pause as the agents reshuffled the papers in their files, the woman looked directly into the camera and enunciated carefully, "I want to speak with Irene Frederic."

Artie froze the picture. "That's all we have. We don't know how long the ATF sat on her, days, maybe a week or two. Finally it went high enough up the chain that someone knew who Irene was, and the regents were contacted."

"Has Irene talked with her?" Myka stared at the face looking up at the camera. There was no distress in the features, just a growing impatience. For a woman who claimed she remembered nothing except her name - and Irene's apparently - she was remarkably composed.

"Not yet." Artie hesitated, giving Vanessa a go-ahead glance from underneath the unruly border hedge of his eyebrows.

"We have . . . Helena . . . at the CDC in Atlanta," Vanessa said, looking at each of them in turn. Myka had never been able to reconcile the elegant remoteness she projected, the product of the marriage of the debutante she must have been decades ago with the medical researcher she became, with Artie's saturnine disposition. Yet whatever they had together - and Myka was never going to inquire too closely into that - appeared to work for them. Like Claudia, she would have to learn to accept what she didn't entirely understand. "We're taking every possible precaution."

"What? You think she's been artefacted into existence?" Claudia was incredulous.

"We don't know what's happened," Vanessa said calmly, "that's why we're taking every possible precaution."

"But you must have examined her," Myka pressed. "You must know something, otherwise you wouldn't be here." At Vanessa's amused arching of her eyebrows, Myka added, flustered, "I mean here with us, in the sunroom, now."

"We've examined her and, genetically at least, she's H.G." Vanessa spread her arms out in a gesture that seemed uncharacteristically helpless. "Not only that," she paused, "she's the same age, as far as we can tell. She's not a clone, not a recently engineered clone, anyway."

"Holy crap," Pete and Claudia said simultaneously. Pete tried to do the math in his head. "She's like a hundred and thirty, forty?"

"You don't have enough fingers and toes, dude," Claudia said. "I think we can leave it at 'She's pretty damn old.'"

Artie pushed himself up from his chair, pointing a finger at Myka. "You're on the morning flight with Vanessa to Atlanta. H.G. will meet you at the CDC. Irene will . . . Irene will get there however she gets there." He glared fiercely at her. "Find out what's going on, and keep in mind that it wasn't all that long ago when H.G. was our adversary. You're Secret Service, at least you used to be. Treat her like a suspect."

His mumbling, head-shaking exit was the end to the meeting. Claudia had run around the table to sit beside Steve, and they were whispering excitedly, or, rather, Claudia was while Steve sipped his tea and wriggled his bunny slippers, the floppy ears flopping. Vanessa touched Myka's arm, telling her that they would put their heads together later about coordinating arrivals and trips to the CDC to see Helena. Feeling Pete's eyes on her, Myka refused to meet them, first keeping her attention on Vanessa until Vanessa left the room and then staring at the still frame of Helena looking up at the camera.

It was hard to shake the illusion that Helena was looking at her, and although this woman couldn't be her . . . their Helena, until Myka knew who she was, she would continue to refer to her as Helena, it made things simpler. Impatience and fatigue dominated this Helena's expression but there was also confidence, confidence not co*ckiness, in those eyes, which had fixed themselves unwaveringly on the camera, and in the tilt of her chin, as if she were ready to take a blow launched at it. She was going to get out of that room, one way or another. Myka fought not to smile at the image, responding to the woman's confidence in spite of herself. Yes, for all any of them knew, this Helena had a plan as mad as the other one's to destroy the world and the will that the other Helena had lacked to carry it out, but Myka didn't think so. She didn't have many special talents besides a formidable recall, but she still liked to consider herself a bit of a Helena-whisperer, and this new Helena wasn't here to destroy the world. She was pretty sure about that.

She spent the rest of the day washing clothes and packing for the trip to Atlanta . . . and avoiding Pete. She had slipped out of the sunroom before he could catch her, and when he tried to flag her in the hallway, she had held up her laundry basket, asking "Can it wait?" In the basem*nt, there were a couple of commercial washers and dryers, and she had perched on the dryer while she waited for her clothes to dry, reading on her iPad. It didn't serve as the best distraction from thinking about the Helenas, but short of going on a retrieval, it was the best of her alternatives. But her respite from Pete was only temporary as he managed to corner her in her room before dinner, which, since Leena's death, had become a largely ad hoc affair. If someone felt like cooking, she or he made enough for the others, but otherwise they made do from the stack of TV dinners and pizzas in the freezer or, if they were desperate, they went into Univille. As Pete closed the door behind him and leaned against it, crossing his arms, she made the decision then to go into Univille by herself and have a burger and a beer, which she would nurse as long as she could.

"I want to talk about this Helena 2.0, and even if you don't, you should." He paused and looked down at the hardwood floor, an original part of the bed and breakfast's nineteenth century construction, in need of a good repolishing. "I asked Artie to send me with you, but Vanessa doesn't think it's a good idea. She thinks contact should be limited to you and Irene because she's afraid Helena 2.0 might freak out. I guess H.G.'s going to have to hide behind a curtain or something."

"She's not going to freak out," Myka said, carefully placing a pair of slacks in the suitcase.

"I don't think so either. She looked way too at ease in the interrogation footage."

Myka looked at him sharply. "Did you get any vibes from what we saw?"

"No, I'm just remembering that's how H.G. looked when we caught up with her in London, like she knew how to handle any curve thrown her way." He looked at her from beneath brows that had knotted together in concern. "I'm not talking to you as your boyfriend, Mykes. I'm talking to you as your friend and your partner. Whether she's the original or a copy, that woman messes with your head, even when she's not trying to. I know you, you already want to trust her, and I'm telling you, don't."

"Listening to what someone has to say is not the same as trusting her."

Pete shrugged at that, but he didn't say anything more, and he left her to her packing. She took a deep breath and folded a dress blouse with especial care and laid it on top of another one. She liked to engage in rote activities when she was angry; the mind-numbing repetition tended to calm her. Maybe she would pack another bag. First Artie, then Pete. It wasn't their suspiciousness of the other Helena that annoyed her because it was crazy, right, that another Helena existed in the first place? Only in the Warehouse's universe could you have a woman who was well over a hundred years old passing herself off as a woman in her late 30s and then be faced with her double, who, apparently, was also well over a hundred years old. It was what their suspiciousness said about their feelings toward the first Helena. Maybe Helena had understood the Warehouse and its agents better than she did and realized that, on some level, she would never be able to get past the distrust. Once a madwoman bent on ending the world, always a madwoman. Her self-sacrificing act to save the Warehouse and Artie and Pete as well was proof, in the final analysis, that she would always gravitate to the extreme. And the part of Myka that was still a Secret Service agent, asked the rest of her, slyly, didn't Helena's moving in with Nate and then out, all in little more than a year, lend credence to the belief that, at best, she tended to act on impulse?

Of course, engaging in rote activities sometimes didn't work to calm her at all. She quashed the temptation to upend the suitcase on her bed. It was time to find the keys to one of the Warehouse's cars in the bed and breakfast's parking lot and head to Univille for dinner. Thundering down the steps to the foyer, she refused to look into the parlor, which was on the other side of the foyer from the sunroom. She could hear the sound of the TV, but she couldn't tell whether Pete had the History channel on or was playing a video game; all she could hear were gunfire and explosions. She turned to go down the hallway to the kitchen; the keys were kept on a coat rack nailed to the wall for the purpose. Steve was heating a pan of soup on the stove, and he waved at her as she took a keyring from the rack. She wondered what he thought about Helena 2.0. He wasn't the type to make snap judgments, and he hadn't had the history with Helena . . . 1.0 that the rest of them had, but she didn't want to talk about the Helenas with him, either.

She had planned to stay at Univille’s one bar only long enough to eat her burger and drink a co*ke. At the last minute, she amended her order, thinking that tonight wasn't perhaps the best night for her to be drinking alcohol. She and Pete and Claudia frequented the bar enough, usually to play pool or darts, that the bartenders and the few regulars recognized them, and she had responded to the nods of greeting in kind as she had taken a seat in one of the booths. Although business looked slow, there were a few new faces, and as she had forgotten to take her iPad with her when she rushed out of Leena's, she glanced at them more often than she would have otherwise. She had finished her burger and was waiting for the check when a man and woman approached her booth and asked her if she would like to join them at the pool table. They were tired of playing each other, they said. They were some, actually the majority, of the new customers she had spotted earlier, and her instinct was to politely decline. She didn't sense any threat from them, mainly just boredom, but the woman had a level, almost piercing way of looking at her, and Myka heard herself saying "Sure, why not?"

There were any number of reasons why not, Myka argued with herself as she followed them to the pool table. Just because she didn't sense a threat from them didn't mean that they weren't a threat, and she had no desire to be jumped as she went to her car. Also she wasn't so blind to her emotions that she didn't realize that the reason she had accepted the offer was because the way the woman had looked at her reminded her of how Helena 2.0 (and a big thank you to Pete for putting that tag into her head) had looked at the camera in the interrogation room. Thankfully that was the only resemblance, although the woman was striking in her own way and flirtatious. Myka had thought she was simply flirting with the man she was with, her boyfriend Myka had presumed, until one of the regulars joined the game and they split into teams, the regular and the boyfriend forming one, she and the girlfriend, Tori, forming the other, and the woman's flirtatiousness didn't diminish. Myka eventually recognized that the glances and the laughs and the occasional brush of Tori's hip against hers weren't incidental, and though nothing was ever going to come of it, Myka let herself respond to it, just a little. She had found women attractive before Helena and while she had never chosen to act on the little fillips she had felt upon meeting certain women, she hadn't felt compelled to deny them. So she laughed more readily at Tori's remarks and held her eyes for longer than she should, and, if anything, the boyfriend approved, from what she could judge, as he occasionally slid both her and Tori knowing smiles. The regular playing with them seemed unaware of the other game they were playing and eventually put his pool cue back in the rack, saying it was time to go home. There were just the three of them then, and Myka knew it would take only a "Yes" from her, or maybe only a nod, and she would find herself with Tori and her boyfriend in a motel room or the bedroom of whatever farmhouse Tori and her boyfriend called home. It wasn't just that there was Pete, or that she didn't do threesomes, or that she didn't sleep with strangers, although all of that was true, it was also because she couldn't be sure that Helena somehow, someway wasn't mixed up in it, and she wouldn't risk seeing her face in Tori's.

In the end, she said, "It's been a long night. Thanks for the game." If Tori and her boyfriend were disappointed, they didn't show it, except that Tori didn't look away, even after her boyfriend started back toward their table, and Myka, turning toward the door, felt she had done so too late, that Tori had seen something she still refused to acknowledge.

Safely in her car, Tori and her boyfriend not having followed her out to mug her, Myka was too restless to return to Leena's. It was late and she and Vanessa had an early flight, but she knew she wouldn't sleep if she tried to go to bed. She could always visit Pete's room and she could lose the remaining hours with him. He would be amused that she had turned down a threesome - when he had been single, he had never turned down a "lady sandwich," or so he said - but she didn't want to hear all the cautions that would come in the morning, about how she needed to be on her guard, about how Helena 2.0 might be like the old Helena and try to play her with her own tragic tale. When she came to a stop outside the Warehouse, she wondered if this was where she had meant to go all along.

Artie was still up; she knew he would be. When she entered the war room, he was hunched over the "ping machine" as Pete and Claudia called it, mumbling about a jade elephant that had been unearthed in India. There were no electrical cords connecting the computer to any power source, and if it had a battery, it apparently never needed to be recharged. She assumed the computer ran off all the artefact-generated energy that the Warehouse tried and, with dismaying frequency, failed to contain. She wouldn't elevate his connection to it to the kind of connection that Mrs. Frederic had with the Warehouse as its caretaker, but it was true that the computer wouldn't respond as readily to other users. It seemed to know when it was Artie researching or locating an artefact. Vanessa wasn't in the room with him. She was probably in his bedroom behind the office or back at Leena's. Myka supposed that they did normal couple things like loll in bed of a morning or watch TV spooned together on a couch, but she never caught them kissing or even touching one another in an affectionate way. Not that she wanted to see them acting like lovers, but she thought it might help to remind her that Artie was still worthy of being loved, that he was still Artie.

Funny how he and Pete couldn't seem to get over the fact that the old Helena, the original Helena, had done terrible things to them and to others, but everyone, and that included her most of the time, conveniently forgot that he was responsible for Leena's death. The people Helena had killed, the men who had murdered her child, MacPherson; Myka didn't want to say they deserved to die, but she didn't find it especially horrible that Helena had killed them. As for the students who had died helping her to implement her plan, the only thing Myka could say in Helena's defense was that she hadn't meant for them to die. And even though Helena had wanted everyone in the world to die when she was poised to strike the trident a third time, she hadn't struck it the third time; even in her madness, she had been able to listen to another voice. Myka understood that there was a difference between succumbing to your own rage and grief and succumbing to a power outside you. Intellectually she understood that there could be a difference, anyway, between an organic madness and the madness caused by an artefact. Sometimes, however, especially when she was suffering through one of Artie's grumpier, more misanthropic moods, she would feel that there was no difference, and that Helena had proven herself to be the stronger of the two.

She knew that he grieved for Leena, as they all did. He had taken to playing the piano at Leena's more often, the music frequently an improvisation on a familiar melody, and when the melody began to sound like it was alone on the prairie in a thunderstorm, she, as well as everyone else, had learned not to interrupt him. He took more trips to Atlanta to see Vanessa than he had before, and Myka wondered if it was easier to be with Vanessa because she hadn't lived with Leena day in and day out as the rest of them had, or because he could get a refill from her for the anti-depressants they all pretended not to see him take. But there was no madness, no raving, no obsessive planning to make the entire world feel as he did. Artie's guilt, and Myka wasn't so unbending as to refuse to believe he felt guilty, was a guilt that could be assuaged, if not entirely erased, by the knowledge that he had murdered Leena without wanting to, without intending to. Helena would never have that consolation.

Ultimately, however, whether he meant to kill Leena was beside the point, she was gone, and he was the reason why, and the fact that he couldn't seem to understand that he and Helena were not poles apart in their actions but separated only by the thin excuse "I never meant for it to happen" was enough for Myka to draw in a shaky breath and sometimes leave a room they shared. Otherwise she feared she would explode at him, shouting words that she would never be able to unsay. She had spent too many years feeling the impact of words said without thought or care for their power; she wouldn't allow herself to be that cruel. Tonight she wasn't afraid that she might blurt out something hurtful, but she felt no rush of affection as she watched Artie track the artefact's trail on the screen.

Without acknowledging that he knew she was there, he rolled himself away from the table and swiveled the chair so that he could face her. Then, with the insight and the gentleness that continued to surprise her, even after all the years they had worked together, he said, "You're here to tell me that I shouldn't still be so suspicious of H.G. I'm not, actually, but my first duty is to protect the Warehouse, and I can't ignore the fact that, in the past, she wanted to destroy it."

"She also saved it," Myka said quietly, the desire to battle Artie deserting her. He looked like a teddy bear suffering from gout.

"That's true." He peered at her. "I'm depending on you, Myka, more than ever this time. You've always been able to see sides to Helena that have eluded the rest of us. You need to keep being her champion because I can't afford not to be suspicious of her, and the same goes for Mrs. Frederic and the regents. Pete, for obvious reasons, won't be tempted to give her the benefit of the doubt, and Claudia, her feelings about H.G. have always been all over the place. You've always been . . . fair." He said the last with such a long sigh that Myka flushed as if he had just presented her with a criticism of her performance.

"You make that sound like a bad thing, and, if I'm being perfectly honest, my feelings about Helena are all over the place as well."

"Not as much as you may think," he said with a certainty that unsettled and irritated her in equal measure. "Sometimes you're a little too fair, don't you think? It's okay to get carried away, to let your emotions get the better of you." He removed his glasses and used the bottom hem of his shirt to clean the lenses. "I want you to trust your emotions, about H.G. and this . . . other one." He held his glasses up to the light. "I know that you'll do the right thing if you sense either one of them is a threat, you always have." He turned his chair around and, with a Flintstone-like paddling of his feet, launched it toward the table. "Now get out of here. I'm about to assign Steve and Claudia to a retrieval in Mumbai. He'll love it. Her? Big cities, heat, foreign languages. She’ll hate it. Hell, she grew up in New York, what's the problem?" He shrugged and started humming to himself.

Myka wished she had had the beer when she was at the bar, maybe it would have made the import of the conversation they had just finished, that Artie had just finished for them rather, clearer to her. So Artie saw her as a Helena-whisperer as well? She narrowed her eyes and stared at him. Did he know something about this situation that she didn't? And what gave him the right to tell her what she felt about Helena? He wasn't even shooting a glance at her from the corner of his eye. The conversation over, he no longer had to notice her. She might as well go back to Leena's. Leaving the war room, she halted at the railing and looked out over the expanse of the Warehouse. What artefacts did it hold that might have caused this? When had Helena accessed them, if she was the one behind this? Who had accessed them if she wasn't? Myka realized she would stay up all night thinking about the possible answers to those questions if she didn't find a more productive use of her time. Back at Leena's, there were her books on her iPad and Pete, not necessarily productive in their different ways but absorbing. Or she could go down into the Warehouse and start looking up some of the artefacts that could have blessed - or cursed - the world with another H.G. Wells.

Chapter 2

Chapter Text

Helena

Although she was supposed to be concentrating on the woman, her genetic double, in the room below, Helena found that her eyes kept straying to Myka. Where they stood watching this other Helena Wells was reminiscent of an operating theater's observation deck, and Helena wondered what normally went on in the room when it wasn't being used to board - and secure - the woman whom Vanessa and the other doctors tended to treat with a strange genial suspicion. Flicking another glance at Myka, Helena squelched the smile that threatened to spread across her face as she recognized that Myka desperately wanted to chew on the end of her pen. She had a bit of a chewing compulsion, especially when she was absorbed in trying to figure something out. Myka's favorite object to worry was a strawberry Twizzler, or at least it was when Helena had been partnered with her, but a pen would do.

Myka instinctively moved closer to the windows, but a voice issuing from a corner of the room warned her to stay back. "They're not one way, Myka."

"She's not going to see me," Myka protested.

"She knows she's being observed. She keeps looking up here to see who it is. We can't give her that, not until Vanessa or Irene says it's okay." The woman stepped out from her corner, but not too far. She was dressed more formally than either of them, in dress slacks and a blazer, but there seemed to be something inherently relaxed about her, as if she could spend all day just listening to them talk . . . if they had been talking. Perfectly natural for a therapist, which was what Abigail Cho had been and was now, among other things. Pretty, Helena thought, which wasn't a new thought by any means since it had been the first word that popped into her mind upon meeting her. The set of Abigail's mouth suggested she liked to smile, but the well-defined chin suggested she could be stubborn, and she was making her point clear about standing too close to the windows.

Helena could see all she needed to. She didn't want a better vantage point. It wasn't as unsettling as she had feared, seeing someone who looked exactly like her, walk like her, gesture like her, and sound like her too, but that didn't mean it wasn't unsettling at all. It wasn't the same as seeing her mirror image come to life, because the woman in the room below, which was part examination room, part jail cell, didn't perfectly mirror her. She had tics and expressions that, if not exactly foreign to Helena, weren't ones she had adopted; Helena couldn't remember having developed the habit of folding in her lips when she was frustrated, something the woman had been doing, on and off, all morning. She was probably biting the hell out of her bottom one. Nor did Helena think she squinted at people as much as this one did, as though screwing her eyes up in disbelief would restore some much needed common sense to a situation her double thought was increasingly absurd. And that was another difference, Helena had never in her life, and it was a long one, said "absurd" or, more to the point, "Absurd!" as much as this woman had in one morning.

In Helena's view, her life, for the most part, had been one colossal absurdity, occasionally a tragic one, so to call something "absurd," and scathingly at that, seemed not merely redundant but a waste of time. Her double, however, must have led a life exempt from the consequences of capricious misfortune and ruinous error to sound so outraged. The woman exclaimed, "Surely in the four days you've had me under microscopic examination and the two weeks before that when I mingled with the general populace, or a sample thereof, were I to be incubating a deadly foreign virus, it would have made an appearance." Helena saw the woman raise her arms in frustration as she stomped around the room much like a child having a tantrum. The woman disappeared from Helena's view, apparently marching directly underneath the observation deck, but her next words came out clearly enough. "Given where I was found, that I might be a carrier of cholera I could believe, but the only thing I carried with me from that hellacious place was a case of head lice."

Myka was grinning. It wasn't the first time she had been amused by something the woman said. "She's not nearly as amusing as she thinks she is," Helena sniffed.

Myka's grin turned sly. "I was thinking how much she reminds me of you when she sounds off like that."

"I had no idea I was such a self-dramatizing windbag," Helena said ruefully.

"You're not a windbag, but you do have a certain theatrical flair." Myka tempered her grin, and something that might have been affection showed in her eyes before she stepped closer to the windows, craning her neck, first to the right and then to the left, in an attempt to spot the other Helena Wells.

Helena expected Abigail to issue another warning, and she glanced toward the corner of the room only to find that Abigail was looking at her, an expression both thoughtful and curious crossing her face. Helena gave her a cool stare before turning to look out the windows again. She had expected some stiffness when she had encountered Myka in the hotel lobby that morning; it was the first time they had seen each other since Boone, but other than an overly bright "Hi" and "We'll have to catch up while we're here," Myka had spent the time waiting for the car the regents were sending for them in quiet conversation with Vanessa, who apparently had chosen to ride with them to the CDC rather than meet them there. Surprised and a little dismayed by how quickly Myka had dismissed her, Helena had paced the lobby, feeling the room service coffee and gummy blueberry muffin that she had had for breakfast slosh uncomfortably in her stomach.

During the ride to the CDC, she and Vanessa had traded the casual, high-level summaries of their lives that acquaintances who hadn't seen each other in a while did when sharing a cab or, in this case, an older model Lincoln Town Car, complete with liveried chauffeur. Helena had never been very adept at that kind of conversation when she had lived in an era in which prolonged civilities had been the norm. She had never been very adept at more intimate conversations either. She hadn't revealed many of her secrets or feelings to Myka, and Myka was, or had been, her closest friend. The last time she and Myka had spoken honestly had been during the retrieval in Boone, and Helena knew that she hadn't been all that honest with her even then. So she had revealed very little to Vanessa during the ride other than that her work with the LAPD was "challenging" and that she had "hardly any time for a social life." Myka had shot her a quick look at that particular piece of information before returning to whatever she was reading, or pretending to read, on her phone. Helena hadn't been lying; the work was challenging and she didn't have much in the way of a social life, except that "challenging" didn't quite cover the unhappy developments in her career and her lack of a social life was part of the fallout. But, if she were honest with herself, the professional choices she had made weren't the only reason that she and Elle had grown more distant.

Once they arrived at the CDC, Vanessa had taken them to a floor, which if it didn't actually house laboratories in which extremely dangerous viruses and bacteria were kept, had the level of security one would expect such an area to have. It had taken them several minutes to clear the various screening measures, and by the end of the scanning, Helena was half-expecting that she and Myka would be told to disrobe and put on some sort of sterile, protective suiting. But that didn't happen, instead Vanessa had led them to this observation room and left Abigail Cho, who had been waiting for them, to explain what was to come next.

Which had been and continued to be an almost desultory inquiry of this alternate version of herself - Helena would have called it an interrogation had the questions not been so unfocused. Perhaps if this other Helena were truly like her, it helped to answer for her increasing frustration. Why wouldn't they just get to the point? "They" included Vanessa, of course, who was mainly quizzing the woman about her medical history (although surely she had gotten that information from the woman earlier), two other doctors or scientists who listened more than they spoke, and Irene. Irene was as impeccably dressed and as annoyingly ageless as usual. While Helena felt that every day a new line around her eyes or mouth appeared or there was another gray hair for her to pull out, Irene looked the same, somewhere between 50 and 65, no more, no less, although Helena estimated that Irene had at least ten years on her, which would make her . . . damn old. She was wearing a conservatively cut formal dress suit in a dusty rose with matching heels and the weaves of her hair had been sculpted - frightened was probably closer to the truth, Helena thought - into a halo commonly seen in medieval paintings of the Madonna. Irene never had lacked for self-confidence.

Irene's questions had ranged from the simple, and apparently unanswerable, "How did you arrive here?" to the equally unanswerable "What do you expect from us?" She had seemed less interested in the woman's answers than in the amount of time it took the woman to respond. On the face of it, the woman was surprisingly forthcoming, astonishingly forthcoming, really. This other Helena Wells claimed that she was a Warehouse agent, but not of their Warehouse, Myka's and Pete's and Claudia's and Steve's, even Irene's, Helena grudgingly conceded. This other Helena Wells believed she worked for a Warehouse in a different time . . . and place. Hearing it, Helena had rolled her eyes. An alternate reality, she had expected more of her double. An hour spent in front of a television with decent cable or streaming access could have given her that idea.

While Vanessa and the other doctors had looked intrigued, at least Irene had remained skeptical. But then who really could tell what Irene thought? She had asked the other Helena about her Warehouse, who was its caretaker, served as its regents, directed its activities as the senior agent. Initially, the other Helena had answered the questions without hesitation and with a great show of sincerity, and then the pauses between her responses grew longer and the responses themselves shorter and less detailed. Perhaps the woman had grown tired of trying to elicit a reaction, any reaction, from her interrogator. Someone should have done the kindness of telling her that Irene's expression never changed, was never any more or less revealing, regardless of what was being confessed.

"From what you've described as this other Warehouse's mission," the skeptical dip in Irene's voice was unmistakable, "it sounds remarkably like ours, yet you mention that there are anomalies you're responsible for capturing or, as we say, neutralizing, that seem to have no corollary here. Are we supposed to understand that's why you've ended up in our reality, you were pursuing one of your anomalies?"

The other Helena emerged from the shadows or corner or wherever she had been hiding. Helena noticed that the woman's hands kept sweeping her hair off her shoulders; if she were truly of the time she said she was, she would be used to putting her hair up, but she wasn't going to ask for a clip or comb now, not if that scowl on her face was anything to go by. "It's my best guess at this point," the other Helena said quietly, the scowl moderating. "They're not artefacts, what we call relics, the personal objects that have absorbed their possessors' energy, although they often are ordinary, everyday items." She walked, slowly, toward the center of the room, her hands searching for the pockets in the baggy pants of her scrubs. "They seem to embody disruptions, discontinuities, in the universe itself. I have chased them through time in my . . . reality . . . but I've never followed one into another reality."

Irene's eyes flicked up at the windows, as if she wanted to confirm that they hadn't missed the import of what the other Helena had just said. "How do you know that you haven't chased an anomaly into a future in your reality that you haven't yet visited?" Irene was asking the other Helena, and Helena half-expected another sly glance up at the window. She wasn't disappointed as that complexly coiffed head turned ever slightly up, and the lenses of Irene's glasses (she had taken up wearing half-moon granny spectacles) seemed to glitter under the lights.

Yes, the thought had occurred to her as well. It was possible - because the existence of the Warehouse made anything possible - that her so-called double was no double at all but a younger Helena Wells, a younger her who had somehow solved the insoluble problem of time travel. But then why the creation of a reality in which a Warehouse had relics instead of artefacts, elders instead of regents, and intercessors instead of caretakers? Unless this younger her were only smarter, not any less obsessed, and here not by accident but by design.

"Because I know," the other Helena said.

"Why don't you tell us how you know?" Irene pursued, a smile that Helena knew well making her expression warmer than Irene's psychological make-up - imperious, withholding, occasionally ruthless - naturally was.

"Why don't you tell me who you have hiding up there?" The other Helena waved at the observation desk. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, "You can come down. I promise I won't bite." She laughed and added, "Even if I do, what's going to happen? We're already in the CDC."

Another grin from Myka. Someone was charmed though Helena had yet to fathom the woman's appeal. "I can understand why Helena's being hidden away," Myka said, looking over her shoulder at Abigail, "but why me?"

Abigail shrugged. "Irene didn't say." She turned the focus of her gaze from Myka to Helena. "Do you know why?"

Because she thinks that, somehow, someway, my double and Myka might be connected, that this woman hopes to manipulate Myka as I once did, Helena answered silently. Or Irene thinks I'm responsible, me, the Helena who's a sad little government functionary, for this woman's existence, and Myka is here to see if I give myself away, because she knows me better than any of the others do. Aware that Myka's eyes were on her as well, Helena shrugged and spread her hands for good measure. "I'm as much in the dark as you are."

The puzzled light in Myka's eyes turned cool, and she brought her pen dangerously close to her lips. No teeth edged out to nibble it, however, and she chose to concentrate on the woman in the room below. The other Helena had stopped waving, and she had crossed the room to sit on the edge of a hospital bed that, by the looks of it, hadn't been made since she had gotten out of it in the morning.

"Just as every relic or artefact has a signature, so does an anomaly," the other Helena was explaining, drawing up her knee and resting her chin on it. "We have devices that can isolate an anomaly's signature and once it's isolated, we can hitch a ride on it, you might say -"

"That's how you travel?" Irene interrupted. As the woman nodded, Irene drew closer to her, much like a watchful teacher might stroll to the back of the class, suspicious of what the troublemakers were up to. "How do you ever get back?" The tone was light, the needle of disbelief in it small but very sharp.

The other Helena didn't miss the prick. Even from the observation deck, Helena could see her double's eyes narrow and her lips fold in. "Not always easily. The devices we use to track anomalies aren't mobile like a cell phone, they're quite large. We have to rely on the anomaly's compulsion to return." One of the doctors was frowning, and the woman's glance settled on him briefly. "There's a symbiotic relationship between our Warehouse and the anomalies. One can't survive without the other, just as order and chaos give meaning to each other. The anomalies escape, yes, but they always return."

"Then why not wait until they come back, why chase them?" He was sitting with the other doctor and Vanessa at the kind of round table that might be found in a company cafeteria, and the other doctor was watching their exchange with a heavy-lidded disinterest that an employee might display at the cafeteria's lunch options. Vanessa, on the other hand, was observing the other Helena with the baffled fascination that had been her constant expression since the "inquiry" had begun.

"Because the longer they remain free, the more damage they can cause. They're disruptions in time, matter . . . ." The woman restlessly rose, a hand sweeping and twisting up her hair before letting it fall. "I've traveled to the future, I've traveled to the past, living there weeks, months, even a year or more before I've found an anomaly and was able to return it."

"And it just rolls over for you when you've found it?" Irene had taken the woman's spot on the bed and was watching her pace the floor.

"It takes to time to find one. It has a world to hide in, and the devices we use to locate it, they have their limits. They deposit us in the location in which the last traces of its signature remain, but the anomaly could be anywhere by the time we arrive, on a farm, in a large city. You have to know what to look for, and the clues are subtle. On the other hand, when you land in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1947, and half the town is blinking out of existence, you can be fairly certain you know where the anomaly is." The other Helena's tone had become wry. She stopped her pacing and co*cked her head as she looked at Irene. There was a challenge in the way she had it tilted, and Helena recognized the gesture as one of her own. She was even more familiar with the cool pride in the woman's voice. "It doesn't exactly roll over, but an anomaly recognizes an agent sent to retrieve it. We've yet to understand how it works, but just as it's in the nature of an anomaly to disrupt, it's also in their nature to repair." She said wonderingly, amused. "Perhaps they're the universe's quality control, they test but they don't complete tear the fabric that holds all of this," she raised her arms high, as if she were encompassing the room and everything beyond it, "together."

Helena thought Irene wisely chose not to offer an opinion on the doings of the universe. "You must be expecting that the anomaly that you followed here will, eventually, come looking for you."

"Hoping is closer to the truth." The woman laughed, but it didn't mask the undercurrent of anxiety. "It's my ride home." She wrapped an arm around her chest and, with the hand that wasn't pressing against her ribs, rubbed her forehead. Looking pleadingly at Vanessa, she said, "Don't you have another series of invasive tests to run on me? I'm tired of talking."

"Actually, we do," Vanessa said. "Can we call it a day, Irene?"

Irene pushed herself from the bed, and, automatically it seemed, began smoothing the tangle of sheets she had been sitting on. "One more question. I don't recall if we asked it yet. In your reality, what year is it?"

"1907. The last day I spent in my time, in my reality, was September 28, 1907. I had just returned from a six-month absence, and little did I know I'd be sent the next day to pursue another anomaly that had left the confines of the Warehouse."

1907. Charles had been in between books, and she had been in bronze for several years, while this woman was off saving her world from being swallowed by a black hole or something as catastrophic. Or so she would have them believe. Helena watched her leave the room with Vanessa and the other doctors. Her double would have what remained of the afternoon and all evening to shore up her origins. She and Myka, on the other hand, would spend the time to make sense of the nonsense they had just heard. Myka, by all appearances, was more than eager to go over it, not pausing the movement of pen over paper as she hooked a foot under a rung of one of the chairs and dragged it closer to her. She didn't look up when Irene came into the room, through the doorway, for once. She stopped writing only when Irene suggested that they reconvene in the morning. "Aren't we going to talk about this?" She pointed at her notebook, the paper covered in her strangely cursive print, readable because, of course, this was Myka's handwriting, but each letter flowing into rather than standing separate from its neighbors.

"Not tonight," Irene said. "I'm sure she'll have more to say tomorrow."

Myka flushed, as if she had been deputized to respond on the other Helena's behalf. "You don't believe her."

"I'm considering all possibilities." Irene smiled, or grimaced, at her small joke. "I have some matters for the regents to attend to, Myka, so tonight's not a good time, in any event, to discuss who this woman is." The smile became more pronounced than the grimace. She had always had a soft spot for Myka, Helena recalled. Maybe it was the potential for Myka's commitment to her job to become a non-ecclesiastical version of taking vows, the Warehouse her one and only god. Helena could tell her from experience that the sacrifice wasn't worth it.

With that they were dismissed, and although it was still a couple of hours short of the dinner hour, Helena forced herself to approach Myka, once more absorbed in writing her notes, both feet tapping a rhythm on the rung. "I thought we could catch up over an early dinner?" She had wanted to offer the invitation more confidently, but she knew she sounded hesitant.

Myka raised her head, but her eyes wouldn't quite meet Helena's. "I'm sorry, I have all this to type up and finalize, and, um, I need to check in with Pete . . . I was planning to do room service." She glanced toward the windows. "How about breakfast in the hotel restaurant tomorrow morning, say around seven?"

Breakfast. She didn't even rate a lunch. "Aces," she said too brightly. The word didn't prompt a response, not even the weakest of smiles, and Helena thought that when they couldn't share a joke about her musty British slang, their friendship was in worse repair than she feared.

Myka closed her notebook and leaped up from her chair so quickly that she almost knocked it over. Perhaps she was in a hurry to prevent another strained effort at conversation. Muttering that she needed to arrange rides for them back to the hotel, Myka gave Abigail a little wave and then seemed to cover the length of the room in two strides. Abigail observed her clumsy departure with a smile so enigmatic that it wouldn't have looked out of place on Irene's face. "I'm free for dinner if you don't want to eat alone," she said to Helena, her dark eyes expressive of more sympathy than the smile.

Once the Lincoln Town car dropped them off at the hotel and she and Abigail arranged to meet in the lobby in an hour to try one of the restaurants that Vanessa had recommended, Helena took an elevator empty of other guests to her room. She dropped her bag on the desk, fishing her phone from it. Kicking off her shoes and stacking the pillows against the headboard, she flopped on the bed, scrolling through her email. There were relatively few from the lab, although one was from her supervisor, curtly notifying her that she had been assigned to analyze evidence retrieved from the site of a gang shooting. Tierney wasn't the warmest of men to begin with, and their relationship had only cooled further in recent weeks. She was sure if it were up to him, she would never again represent the lab in a trial. Assigning her to a gang-related shooting was one way to help ensure it; more than likely, the accused would agree to a plea bargain before the case went to trial. She noticed she had a voicemail, too. She warily stared at the phone; she had been leery of voicemails ever since she had received the one, several months ago now, from a friend in Boone telling her that Nate had gotten serious about a woman he was seeing "because I thought you ought to know." There had been no mistaking the note of glee in the woman's voice, and her comment that "Adelaide's wild about her as well" had been more gossipy than informative. Helena hadn't needed a passive-aggressive voicemail to tell her what she already knew, which was that Nate and Adelaide were doing just fine without her. In the end, like so much of what had been her and Nate's, the friend had really been Nate's.

She pressed play and heard Elle's voice, strong, clear, confident, the type of voice that carried well in a room without being loud. It was a perfect voice for an assistant district attorney, and though she knew Elle's voice could be just as compelling but softer and more intimate, she knew they would have to work hard to return to a closeness that ensured she heard the lover's voice more often than the assistant D.A.'s. "We've decided to retry Vance Newcomb for murder." The DA had issued statements after the mistrial declaring the same, but Helena understood there had been as many arguments for dropping the idea of a second trial as pursuing it. The case had never been a particularly strong one, trials were expensive, and the DA's office couldn't afford the embarrassment of another hung jury. Elle's voice became uncharacteristically tentative, "But you're not going to be our expert on the stand, Helena. Tierney's going to have someone else in the lab review your work." A pause. "For what it's worth, I know you're the best. Tierney knows you're the best. We need . . . we just need a different outcome." Another pause. "I hope the thing you had to wrap up is, ah, wrapping up like you expected. Call me when you get back."

Helena had been deliberately vague with both Tierney and Elle about her reason for asking for the time away, saying only that a former employer had requested her help related to work she had completed years ago. Tierney had been more than happy to approve the time, grumbling, "If it puts you in a better frame of mind, I'd approve more days," while Elle had been more noncommittal, saying only, "No one's chasing you away, Helena," as she dressed for work that morning, opening the closet in Helena's bedroom and taking out the pantsuit she had brought with her the night before. Helena blinked and deleted the message from her phone.

The restaurant that she and Abigail went to was a short cab drive from the hotel and confirmation that opposites could do more than attract, they could forge a relationship for the long term because this was not a restaurant that Arthur Nielsen would enjoy, at all. No barbecue, no burgers, no fried chicken. This was a Vanessa Calder restaurant from its formal table settings to its undoubtedly faint-inducing wine list. Proof - if she were looking for any - that Myka and Pete had a shot at something lasting, but it wasn't a thought she especially wanted to dwell on, so she cast a glance about the dining room as the waiter led them to their table, trying not to stare too openly at what other diners were having. She appreciated good food but she was no gourmand; its availability would always trump its quality for her. She found few activities more relaxing, or pleasurable, than grocery shopping. She didn't even have to buy any food; she could satisfy herself simply by pushing a cart up and down the aisles. There had been far too many days in her childhood when she had gone to bed having had no more than a few slices of stale bread to eat. Once she had become more skillful at nicking food from shops and street vendors, meals had become more regular, but her petty thieving skills had taken time to develop.

They stayed through dessert, and Helena, although she enjoyed chatting with Abigail, decided she had found someone her equal or better in deflection. Her questions hadn't been numerous or probing, but Abigail had managed not to answer most of them while never letting the conversation falter. Other than finding out that Abigail had worked for some years as a photographer and that she had been married, Helena could say with confidence that she knew no more about her now than she did before. She hoped that she had been just as unforthcoming. Abigail had asked her about her work, and other than providing an abbreviated description of her duties, Helena had said little about her workplace or her coworkers, and nothing about the outcome of the Newcomb trial, which had had an effect on her relationship to both. In response to Abigail's teasing query about Giselle, she had limited her comments to how a tough-minded prosecutor handled an over-the-top name. "She prefers to go by Elle, and even so, she says that Giselle is an improvement over the names her parents gave to her sisters." She hadn't as gracefully kept the conversation flowing while she had provided the nonanswers, and in the pauses as she had tried to shape her responses, she felt the gaze that Abigail had turned on her earlier in the day when they had been observing the other Helena, thoughtful and curious.

Abigail had selected a tart, while she had opted for a small brandy and coffee. Stirring cream into her coffee cup, Helena heard herself asking, "Is Myka happy with him?" She couldn't really blame the wine she had had with her entrée for it, a single glass, and she hadn't yet started on her brandy. It just popped out of her, as questions she didn't know she wanted to ask often did.

"Yes, I think so." Abigail wasn't surprised by the question, and Helena wondered if there was anything she might say or ask that would catch her off guard. "But then I don't know her as well as the others do, I haven't been around as long. I missed out on seeing the evolution of their partnership."

It was the most that Abigail had revealed about what she truly thought about anything. While she hadn't explicitly said she found Myka and Pete an unlikely romantic couple, she was implying it. Helena almost dropped her spoon in her cup, but she said as smoothly and casually as she could manage, "People can be compatible on different levels. Arthur and Vanessa, for instance."

Abigail laughed. "He's a gifted amateur pianist, speaks several languages, and is knowledgeable about art and literature. She's one of the few people who can beat him at chess, and she's one of the best poker players you don't want to meet. They have much more in common than you'd think." She lifted one shoulder. "Couples can get by without talking for a while." She paused, her smile becoming wicked. "You can't discount the hot monkey sex." She laughed again at the expression on Helena's face. Sobering, she said, "I know nothing about any of the agents' sex lives, just in case you're wondering. But speaking generallyandpersonally, sexual chemistry can make up for a lot." Looking down at her tart, she picked up her fork and worked it through the pastry. "It was the engine for my marriage, and when the hot monkey sex ended, so did the marriage."

"Myka's not one to make decisions based on her hormones. I have to trust that there's more to her relationship with Pete."

"Like I said, I came in late." Refusing to be drawn out further on the subject of Myka and Pete, Abigail nibbled at the piece of tart on her fork. With studied innocence, she asked, "Their relationship didn't have anything to do with your choosing to stay in Boone, did it?"

"I think you've misconstrued my and Myka's friendship." Helena knew she sounded stiff and hated it, but the conversation was making her uncomfortable. She was trying to keep her drinking of her brandy to sips, but she was tempted to down the rest and order a few more. "There was nowhere for it to grow, and she and Pete share a bond that we never did."

Abigail only smiled gently at the rebuke, as if she had heard something else, and Helena realized, with a spurt of irritation, that it was the smile that Abigail might give her during a therapy session, the smile she had seen during the few, very few, couples therapy sessions that she and Nate had attended - at her urging, no less. The smile had always appeared on their therapist's face when she would say that she had left her old life behind, that she was completely committed to Nate Willis.

"Perhaps you're right, I never saw you and Myka together at the Warehouse," Abigail conceded smoothly. She cut off a bigger slice of tart, letting a sigh of appreciation escape her as she gazed at it. "My only exposure to the two of you has been today." She ate the bite, closing her eyes. When she opened them, the wickedness of the smile that she had flashed at Helena moments before lit them, and she said unapologetically, "But if someone had asked me what I thought seeing the two of you interact, I would have said you were former lovers who still harbored a lot of feelings for each other."

Helena drained her brandy then and motioned for a waiter so she could order another, but Abigail relented and redirected the course of their conversation. Dinner didn't end quite as easily as it had begun, but since she hadn't thrown Abigail to the floor or held her up against a wall with her forearm pressing into Abigail's throat, Helena had to consider the evening a success, given where the conversation had wandered. But she was glad to settle on her bed again after a quick change of clothes, and as she turned on the TV, she hoped there was something she could find to lull her to sleep. Programs on the Food Network were her go-to when nothing else worked.

She could have sworn that her eyes hadn't fluttered shut, but one second there was no one in front of her TV and the next there was, Irene in her dusty rose suit. Keenly aware that she was at a disadvantage in her worn camisole and stretched-out yoga pants, Helena struggled to sit up against her pillows, but Irene brushed aside her efforts with a casual wave of her hand. "Don't bother, I won't be long." She primly sat on the corner of the bed. "You need to be prepared for tomorrow and what will happen afterward."

"Which is?" Helena said with an indifference, more presumed than real, that provoked nothing from Irene other than a long, equally bland look.

"She'll be released into the regents' care, which, in this case, means she'll be a guest of the Warehouse."

Helena laughed, a sarcastic bark. "I'm well acquainted with the regents' gulag system and, of course, the incarcerative delights of the Warehouse itself, so you'll have to excuse my utter lack of conviction that she'll be treated as anything other than a prisoner."

It was possible that Irene's shoulders slumped a fraction as she said, "It will be a gilded cage, at least. Perhaps you recall that the bed and breakfast has a caretaker's cottage. It's typically been used by a regent when he or she has had need for an extended stay, but it will be given over to our 'guest' for as long as she remains under our care. Since we're making changes to the current room assignments in the bed and breakfast, it will be less disruptive to her and, no doubt, less confusing for everyone else." And it was possible, although unlikely, that just as she might have fractionally slumped, Irene was now straightening and stiffening her back. "Speaking of changes at the bed and breakfast, the regents are requesting that you take a leave of absence from your job and rejoin the Warehouse, on a temporary basis, until we can resolve the situation with your double." She held up a hand to forestall any protests. "I emphasize temporary, and youwillhave a job to return to." Her mouth curved up, and Helena thought the movement suspiciously resembled a smirk. "Especially since it was one of the regents who helped get you that position." Thankfully she didn't say "Just as it was one of the regents who found you a job in Boone." Which was also true, although Helena resented being reminded of it. She knew her abilities and her skills, and she also knew that she had no true work history or record of education that didn't have to be falsified, and no references who didn't have their own agendas for recommending her.

"I see," Helena said wryly, "I'm to be a guest of the Warehouse too, while you figure out whether my lookalike and I are in this together."

"A paying guest. You always were an exceptional agent, that is, when you were focused on the Warehouse and not on your own obsessions. You'll be assigned to retrievals, as needed, and you'll have a room in the bed and breakfast, just like the other agents."

"Probably the one next to the room that Pete and Myka share."

"They don't share one yet, to my knowledge, but there are always certain . . . accommodations . . . that adults sharing a common space have to make. If you have issues with their relationship, I expect you to work those out with them." The smirk had disappeared, and, for once, Irene's feelings were stamped on her face. She was clearly annoyed. "I said the regents are requesting your cooperation, which they are, for now, but you will provide it, Helena, or we'll take measures to ensure that you rejoin the Warehouse."

"She scares you . . . and the regents," Helena murmured.

Irene rose from the bed, and just as she had attempted to straighten the sheets of the bed in the room in which the other Helena was being kept, she patted and pulled at the sheets before she walked to the head of the bed and stared down at Helena. "Vanessa and her team completed their tests today. This other Helena Wells is and is not you. She has your DNA, and she has the elevated levels of lead and mercury and other toxins one might expect to see in someone who lived in the late nineteenth century, but there are traces of other elements in her blood, in her cells that no one at the CDC has been able to identify. She's never given birth and she's never been exposed to tuberculosis, unlike you. It would take a manipulation of artefacts such as I've never seen for this to happen, and yet I believe it could have been done. That it was done, in fact. Someone who was sufficiently motivated, sufficiently skilled could do it, and while there are very few who would meet both requirements, you're among them."

"You can't think the person I am now would have either the motivation or the access to the technology necessary for such a scheme, and that's assuming the technology exists. As for the person I was . . . ." Helena let her head thump against the headboard. She didn't think often about the person she had become after Christina's death. The eternity she had spent alone in a virtual universe of silence and darkness had effectively severed her ability to think her way back into that mind. The grief that was the source of all the misery she had caused she still felt, would always feel, but the rage . . . . The rage that had consumed her once MacPherson released her from the bronze had, in the end, very little to do with the loss of her daughter.

"I would like to believe you're no longer capable of that duplicity, but I don't know it for sure, Helena." The weak glow cast by the lights above the nightstand etched the shadows more deeply into Irene's face. She looks tired, Helena thought, and she felt a rare flash of sympathy for her. "I don't know that she's capable of it either." Irene chuckled. "So I have one more little test for her. Even if the other Helena believes the story she's given us is a true account of how she showed up in Houston,someonehas sent her. The only way to lure her, or him, out is to give the other Helena what she seems to want -"

"Which is access to the Warehouse, this Warehouse," Helena finished for her softly.

"Precisely. If you're the innocent you claim you are, you can help us figure out what she's after. And if you're not . . . you may be the fox in the hen house, but we've caught you before." Irene, with another chuckle, tugged a bedsheet over Helena's waist. "Get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow's going to be another long day."

Helena bent to flip the sheet off her, and when she looked up to scold Irene for treating her like a child, she was gone. Groaning in frustration, Helena searched for the remote. Was this how Irene sent her children to sleep? Her collection of Grimm's fairy tales must have been the unexpurgated version, complete with the beheadings and bloodletting. Or, had she been the type to make up her own, she would have likely spun stories of the world ending or supervillains appearing out of the ether to champion the cause of evil. Surely there had been a Mr. Frederic to counteract all the tales of dystopian terror . . . before Irene's iron sense of duty had driven him away. She clicked through the channels; Food Network it would be.

Myka was late to their breakfast. She scooted into a chair at the table Helena had taken for them, her long-sleeved V-neck top clinging damply to her, her hair still wet at the ends. She had overslept, although Myka never overslept, and when she had gone out for her run, she had gotten turned around and ended up farther from the hotel than she had intended, although Myka never got lost. She blushed as she said the last, as if she recognized two such mistakes on her part said more about her reluctance to have this breakfast than if she had come down in a sulk wearing her bathrobe. But Helena shrugged away the excuses and suggested they focus on the breakfast menu, they still had plenty of time to catch up. Given how the rest of the breakfast went, 30 minutes of excruciatingly casual questions and painfully short answers, a conversational experience unsettlingly close to a dental cleaning, Helena was left with two thoughts. The first was that Myka could have been 45 minutes late and they would have lost precious little, and the second was that Abigail's ability to say nothing while never once awkwardly pausing or filling the air with um's and ah's as she searched for words would be a marvelous skill to possess.

The breakfast over, although neither had eaten much of what she had ordered, Myka slung her satchel over her shoulder and muttered that she needed to run up to her room. Helena took refuge in the lobby, glancing at the windows occasionally for the Town Car. When Abigail joined her with an irritatingly cheerful "Good morning," Helena thought about dropping an offhand remark about the breakfast she and Myka had shared, just to let Abigail know there was no awkwardness between her and Myka, none, but when Myka exited the elevator, so intent on reading the information on her phone that she banged her shin against a coffee table, Helena let the impulse die. Myka's obliviousness, regardless of whether it was an act, said enough about how well the breakfast had gone, that and her beeline toward the other side of the lobby.

They went through the same tedious screening process once they arrived at the CDC, and a lab technician, her lab coat looking two sizes too big for her, escorted them to the observation deck. What were they afraid of, that the three of them might start flinging doors open and setting lab animals free, unstoppering test tubes and removing petri dish covers? In the room, she and Myka went to the large central window overlooking the floor below, while Abigail reclaimed her spot in the far corner. Myka set her satchel down, taking her notebook from it, and Helen saw a corner of what looked very much like a neutralizing bag peeping over the top of the satchel's pockets. She frowned. Had Myka identified an artefact that she believed could be responsible for the other Helena's existence? Then she ought to be bloody well sharing that information, Helena silently growled. But as Myka opened her notebook to the page that had the last of her notes from yesterday and unclipped a well-chewed pen from the notebook's cover, Helena suddenly understood why Myka might have overslept and uncharacteristically lost sight of how far she had jogged from the hotel. While she and Abigail had been fencing over dessert and brandy, Myka had been reviewing her notes and chewing her pen, trying to find the overlooked clue that would, in time, explain everything. She had probably been up most of the night. Helena rubbed her forehead in vexation. It hadn't been all avoidance, Myka's tardiness to their breakfast; she could have given her a tiny bit of credit.

With a smothered sigh of frustration, Helena looked down into the room in which the other Helena was. She was standing by her bed, which had been made, in a fashion - if drawing a blanket over mussed sheets counted as making the bed. She was dressed in street clothes, a pair of jeans that rode low but tight over her hips and a brick-red spread-collar shirt that was more shirt than blouse, but at least it gave a hint of color to her skin. Today her hair was up, far more neatly gathered and bound than the making of her bed suggested she would be inclined to do. She was alertly scanning the room, and Helena had the impression that if a door suddenly opened, she would be through it before anyone would think to stop her. A door must have opened because the other Helena's eyes momentarily went wide and she leaned forward, but a second or two later, her eyes returned to their normal size and she rocked gently on her heels, which were covered by a pair of ankle boots, plainly styled but also plainly expensive.

Helena saw the skirt, a cream knee-length before the rest of Irene came into view. She greeted the other Helena, who returned the greeting with a cautiousness that had a hopeful, questioning note. She couldn't be so foolish or naive as to believe that there were magic words she could say that would result in her release. Yet the hope flared so nakedly in her face that Helena was briefly filled with pity for her. There was good reason for those associated with the Warehouse in this reality to view with suspicion a woman who looked like her and had her name.

Instinctively Helena glanced at Myka, who seemed completely caught up in the getting-started exchange of civilities and paper-shuffling below them, as if what they were witnessing was the last day of a three-day conference on innovative business processes rather than an examination of a woman who claimed she was from the world next door. Her eyes were pinned to the other Helena, but there was a softness to her regard, although Helena would have been hard pressed to say what the telltale signs of that softness were. Yet it was there. While Myka might not believe a word of the other Helena's story, her skepticism didn't prevent her from liking the woman or wanting to help her.

Myka stumbled backward, and Helena saw the other Helena looking up at the observation deck, eyes narrowed. Suddenly impatient with Irene's decision to hide them away, as if she and Myka were to be sprung on the woman like the leering clown in a jack-in-the-box, Helena moved closer to the window, hearing a sharp, aggravated intake of breath from Abigail's corner. The other Helena's attention remained fixed on the observation deck. Then, clear and hard, Irene's voice cut through the silence. "Are you ready to tell us how you know that we aren't some version of your reality's future?"

The other Helena stared at the observation deck, and Helena felt those dark eyes so like her own - not like, theywereher own - burn into her, before they dropped to gaze, with amusem*nt, at Irene. "Do you really want me to start listing all the ways in which this reality differs from mine?"

"How can you be so certain, when your reality is beset with 'anomalies,' as you call them, that threaten your reality's integrity?" Irene tugged at the sleeves of her suit coat, the braided dome of her hair precipitously tilted as she appraised the other Helena. "How do you know when you get up of a morning what world is outside your door? Is the year 1907 or 751 or 2543?"

"You won't believe me, but there's always been a fundamental balance between our Warehouse and the forces that threaten to tear it apart; for millennia, we've been able to maintain that balance. The anomalies are exceedingly powerful, but there's never been a significant disruption that their capture hasn't corrected. That's why I can get up of a morning and know that it's September 28, 1907." The woman joined Irene in the center of the room, walking a little less naturally than she had the day before, finding the newness of her clothing and shoes a constraint. She wagged her head at Irene's raised eyebrow. "But you're unconvinced." Gesturing at the room and giving an ironic bow to the observation deck, she said, "To realize that I stumbled into a world completely different from my own, all I have to do is look at this room and remind myself that I haven't been allowed to venture from it, except for various tests. When I was rescued from the cargo container, I said I was an agent of the Warehouse and that I wanted to speak to an intercessor or elder, thinking at first, as you do now, that I had been deposited in some future I hadn't previously visited. But my rescuers only laughed, pointing to the building we were in, asking if I meant this warehouse. I said of course not, and they only laughed harder. The more I pleaded with them and then with the people who interrogated me, the more incredulous everyone became. Finally I stopped trying to explain and I demanded to speak to you. Irene Frederic was an intercessor in the future I last visited, and I hoped that her counterpart existed here and in a similar role. I repeated your name for days before I was taken from my holding cell in the middle of the night and brought here, where, again, I'm treated as a lunatic."

Irene dismissively twitched a shoulder. "The Warehouse's existence is known only to a few."

"Your Warehouse," the other Helena said pointedly, "not mine. Its existence isn't secret. In fact, the Warehouse holds pride of place among our civic institutions. Just a few hundred years ago, people worshipped at it. That veneration may be fading, but it's in the language we use to describe our work and in the titles we give to those entrusted with the greatest responsibility. Our mission is still respected, and far more seek to be chosen as agents than there are agent positions to fill. I have never been to a time when I said I was an agent of the Warehouse, and no one knew what I meant."

A reality in which the Warehouse and its doings were models of transparency. No, not transparency. The Warehouse in the other Helena's reality remained shrouded from view, but with the trappings of mysticism and miracle-working. Relics, intercessors, elders. All her Warehouse lacked was virgin sacrifice, and that probably happened every other Tuesday. Helena had an image of Irene in a white robe sharpening a knife while some luckless soul strapped to an altar gaped at her in horror. She would have found it more amusing had she believed that the Warehouse didn't batten on those who served it. You gave your life over to it, one way or another.

"Helena," Abigail was repeating her name quietly, "Helena, Irene wants you downstairs." Myka looked both confused and disappointed, but Abigail slowly shook her head when Myka gave her a beseeching glance. "Not yet."

Was she reward or punishment? That was a bigger question than this moment deserved because the woman she was descending the stairs to surprise, if she really was Helena Wells, wouldn't be surprised at all to see her; she would be expecting her, in fact. Entering the room, she saw the other woman's eyes dart toward her, and while they seemed to grow both rounder and longer as the woman began processing what this meant - surely her own eyes didn't flare open like that, like a child's at a magic show, surely she had seen too much to ever be truly surprised again - the other Helena started to laugh. "So that was where they were hiding you."

The other Helena looked her up and down, and Helena realized that they were dressed similarly, except that her jeans were faded (though no less tight), her boots worn and in need of a good polish, and her shirt - blue rather than red - was layered over a scoop-necked top because she ran cold. That was something the bronze had left her with, the feeling that she could never get warm. Her double would have no personal experience of the bronze . . . supposedly. In 1902 or 1907 or whenever it was that she had last been in her reality, she had been hunting anomalies or relics whileshe,shehad been in the coldest, loneliest place she had ever not imagined - because no one could imagine something so desolate - and she hadn't known the year or the day or her name.

"What did you do, cousin," the other Helena was murmuring, "for them to have treated me like this?" Her eyes were tracing every feature on her face, or so Helena felt. "Were you preserved in a cryogenic tube? Do people here commonly live past 100?" Helena searched the woman's face, in turn, for some mark, a mole or scar, that wasn't on her own face, something that would make their likeness flawed, imperfect. "No," the other Helena answered her own question. "Your world doesn't have the technology required for the one or the abstemiousness necessary for the other." She touched the skin below her right eye, where, Helena recalled, she had a faint scar, a memento from a less than successful attempt to snatch a few apples from a street vendor. She had dropped most of them in her hurry to get away, and the vendor had scraped the street for a handful of grit and rocks, flinging them at her. One of the rocks had struck her on the cheek, and the cut had become infected, oozing pus for days. That and one sour, wormy apple were what she had come away with. Apparently her double had never resorted to stealing food, or she had been better at it, because she had no scar.

" . . . you said you had just returned from a long retrieval when the anomaly you believe brought you to us disappeared." Irene was standing only a few feet from them, watching them with a rare open curiosity. "Where had you been or, rather, what time had you been in?"

"Early 21st century, close to your present, I believe. That's why I thought to ask for you." She hadn't once taken her eyes from Helena. "You're going to have to tell me how you arrived here in the future, cousin, and why you stayed."

"It's a long tale . . .cousin," Helena said, smiling maliciously. "Let me know when you want an uneasy sleep, and I'll be happy to share it with you."

In another departure, Irene didn't mask her irritation with Helena, unmistakably glaring at her, before softening the look, somewhat, as she turned to the other Helena. "Indulge me. Who were the agents at this 21st century Warehouse?"

The woman shrugged, stepping away from Helena, her inventory complete. "Claudia Donovan. Peter Lattimer." She mentioned two other names that Helena didn't recognize, but Irene had resumed her normal impassivity, showing no reaction to the names.

"Was Arthur Nielsen the senior agent?"

The other Helena frowned at the question, clearly wondering why Irene was asking her to identify the Warehouse staff. "He had been, but he had retired a few years ago." She volunteered nothing more, and her face, as she regarded Irene, was beginning to stiffen, as if she were preparing for additional questions that she knew she wouldn't like.

"Who was the senior agent?" Irene pressed, ignoring the other Helena's increasing apprehension.

"The position was temporarily unfilled," the other Helena said curtly. "Your counterpart asked Arthur to return until a new senior agent could be chosen."

"That must have been unsettling," Irene said with the mildness that, in Helena's recollection, often presaged the revelation of something that was going to be unhappy for someone, "no senior agent in charge."

"It was a distressing situation." Anger and an emotion that was even rawer thinned and sharpened her voice. But it wasn't distress that was at work in her voice, it was more powerful, more intense. It was more like - and Helena barely registered the click of a door closing as she tried to imagine what might be threatening the other woman's self-control. She had just begun to realize what the emotion was when its opposite suddenly flooded the other Helena's face. The tense set of her muscles relaxed, and her mouth creased into in a curve so dramatic that Helena's mouth ached in sympathy. It had been years, a hundred or more in fact, since Helena had feltthisemotion, a joy so deep and yet so buoyant that it seemed to carry her above the clouds and she had only to lift her head to press her cheek against the sky.

Her first, shameful instinct was to strike the joy from the other Helena, literally score that radiant smile with her fingernails, because no one should be so vulnerable, so exposed. It was foolhardy, it was dangerous. One couldn't afford to let down her guard, not even for a second. Her second, equally shameful impulse, was to continue raking that face with her fingernails, not because she was afraid but because she was jealous. Consumed by it, she was shaking, actually shaking, and looking away because she couldn't bear it, the joy. From the corners of her averted eyes, she saw the other Helena rush past her, her face queerly alight, and her voice trembling as she said, "I wanted for so long to meet you, Myka Bering. You can have no idea how very, very good it is to meet you."

Myka, puzzled, asking, "But wasn't I there, at the other Warehouse? With Pete and Claudia?"

Helena knew without having to look that the other Helena was touching her in disbelief, fingers skimming over Myka's cheeks, her chin, and the other Helena was gazing into those green eyes, thinking she would be just as happy if she never resurfaced, and Helena knew what the other Helena would say before she said it. "You had died of cancer six weeks before I appeared on their doorstep." A long, uneven inhalation and then a laugh just as uneven, a fragile joining of uncertainty and relief, as she stammered, "Everyone was devastated, and yet she . . . you were all they wanted to talk about. When I finally returned to my own time, I felt as if I had lost you, I mean, lost her too. Silly, isn't it?"

Not so silly. For the first time since she had seen the other Helena in someone's extra pair of scrubs, pacing the room and fuming at her imprisonment, Helena was afraid of what her double could do. Cold, although the room was warm, she wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself tightly.

Chapter 3

Chapter Text

Myka

Myka surveyed the living room/dining room/kitchen area of the other Helena's assigned quarters. She was staying here, in the guest cottage, until she returned to her reality or the regents decided to hold her somewhere else. She was a prisoner; she might not have an ankle monitor, and there weren't any bars over the windows of the cottage, but the other Helena knew it, everyone knew it.

Irene had arranged to have the cottage cleaned before the other Helena arrived. The last time a regent had stayed in it was over a year ago. Myka could smell the tang of bleach. A small space, little more than a studio, but it featured newer appliances and furniture, newer than what Leena's had. A perk of being a regent, Myka supposed. You didn't have to share a bathroom with the agents, and you could heat water in the microwave without worrying about blowing a fuse. She had wanted to check out the cottage before the other Helena saw it, in case the cleaning crew hadn't given the bathtub a good scrub. But they had, and they had washed the windows and put new sheets, not just clean sheets, on the bed. There was nothing particularly homey about the cottage – it resembled a hotel suite - but it practically sparkled and was free of clutter. Pete's 13,000 sneakers weren't presenting 13,000 tripping hazards, and Claudia hadn't left laptops and tablets on every surface like doilies. Discontented that she hadn't brought anything to make the cottage look a little more lived in, not that she had anything to bring, really, other than books, Myka restlessly began to open cupboards and drawers in the kitchen. Not even a box of tea bags. Irene could have had a few things delivered.

The other Helena was at Leena's, getting the grand tour and being introduced to everyone she hadn't met, which was pretty much limited to Steve and Claudia (an earthquake in the Kashmir valley having postponed their snag-and-bag in India). Pete and Artie had left on a retrieval early in the morning, well before she and Abigail and the other Helena had returned from Atlanta. Pete had sent her a text in the faux military code he used with her, "Artie plane peanuts whiskers," which, sadly, she could translate easily: I have to listen to Artie's complaints during the entire flight. There aren't any good snacks, only peanuts. Why do I have to share a hotel room with another guy? Her translation didn't sound like Pete; it lacked all the faces he would be making, his pronouncement that peanuts were the brussel sprouts of snacks, and the theatrical shuddering he would display upon having "glimpsed, Mykes, just glimpsed Artie's ass. I can't unsee it." If they were in his room, he would probably squeeze his eyes shut and then swing his arms toward her like Frankenstein and touch her breasts, moaning "Help me unsee it. Take your clothes off and help me unsee it." She grinned, but she had to ask herself whether it was an entirely good thing that they knew each other so well. Shouldn't there be some mystery?

Pete knew everything there was to know about her, not just the inner scars she bore from her father's anger and Sam's death but the outer ones, too, the bump in her collarbone that had been caused from her fall from a tree, the long, wandering scar on the sole of her foot, which had unhappily memorialized a day trip to a Colorado state park when she was a child. He knew that she sometimes clipped her nails while she was in bed, just as she had found out that he sometimes picked his nose and then wiped his fingers on the sheet. He knew what foods gave her gas and what songs made her cry. She knew that he examined his hairline every morning and didn't mind wearing the same briefs for two or three days in a row. It was perfectly fine to know all these things about the person you were involved with - after you had been so completely swept off your feet that, no matter how many times you saw him with his finger up his nose, you could remember how gobsmacked by him you had once been. She and Pete had never had that . . . magic . . . with each other. She had never had that magic with anyone, not even with Sam. The only time she had had the exciting, frightening, absurd thought that she could fall into someone, like diving into a pool, had been with Helena.

It was better if she kept her mind on the other Helena, although that one had her own special brand of mystery. She claimed that she was from another time, another place, though the time and the place seemed remarkably similar to Helena's late Victorian/early Edwardian England, more socially progressive perhaps - the other Helena had been shocked to discover, or so she said, that her counterpart had been the first female Warehouse agent - but not particularly progressive in other ways. The advances in technology and other areas of science that made the 20th century still seem futuristic rather than fusty had happened no sooner in the other Helena's world. Which was all the more surprising since that world had its "anomalies" that allowed Warehouse agents to travel back and forth through time. Or so she said. Surely one of them would have forgotten to take his cell phone from his pocket before he was zapped back to 1897.

When she had asked Helena why her world had developed no faster than this one, why 2016 "there" was no different from 2016 "here," the other Helena had laughed and shaken her head and ruefully said that she and the other agents who retrieved anomalies frequently asked each other similar questions. Why hadn't someone gone to the moon by 1935? Why were automobiles still a novelty at the turn of the century? They weren't forbidden to talk about the marvels, relative to their time, that they had seen, their memories weren't erased by a relic upon their return from the future, and they certainly weren't incurious. Yet when she had heard Vanessa - or was it Irene? - use the word "Promethean" about this woman who looked exactly like her, who was her in this reality that she hadn't known existed, the other Helena didn't recognize it. She had had to ask Vanessa . . . yes, Vanessa (Myka found it perhaps the strangest of all the strange things about this other Helena that she could so easily confuse Vanessa and Irene. It wasn't just that one was white, the other black. It was that one was Mrs. Frederic . . . .) to explain who or what Promethean was. Vanessa had only smiled and then later in the day given her a book of Greek myths, the ones about Prometheus and Icarus helpfully marked for her. Having little else to do in the time when she wasn't being unmercifully prodded, both physically and mentally, the other Helena read the entire book, not just the stories Vanessa had marked. She discovered that she was familiar with most of them; they were part of the cultural heritage of her reality as well, but their myths had no Prometheus, no Icarus, no intrepid souls who courted disaster in pursuit of an ideal, no violators of the forbidden. Entrusted with a mission, she and her fellow agents were soldiers, not pirates. The other Helena had smiled charmingly as she said it, with not a hint of the pirate about her but, just possibly, a touch of impishness.

They had held this conversation near a clearance rack of tops in a department store in an Atlanta mall. The regents had provided the other Helena a clothing allowance, not overly generous, for what could become an extended stay in what she insisted was a new world to her. Abigail and Myka had taken her to the nearest shopping center, and though it could have been set down in Idaho or Iowa with no notable adjustment made to the goods offered or the clientele, the other Helena had looked about her with intense curiosity. Having finally been convinced to focus on clothes, she was flicking hangers on the rack. She pulled out a long-sleeved shirt, holding it against her chest and asking Myka for her opinion. Taking the see-sawing of Myka's hand as a no, the other Helena put the shirt back on the rack.

"When you're allowed to see the future, to mingle with your descendants, perhaps you become more cautious about risking it." The other Helena flicked a few more hangers to the side, glancing at another top. "There were always those within and without the Warehouse who believed that we should harness the power of the anomalies to bring the future closer to us, to give it a tweak or two, but it didn't happen." The smile didn't disappear but its impishness faltered, and she didn't quite suppress a shudder. "All that chasing and retrieving of what threatened to but never quite succeeded in tearing our world apart, it wasn't the adventure we loved most but the stability that bringing an anomaly back ensured."

That might be true of other agents, but Myka didn't believe it was true of this one. Maybe she was viewing this Helena through the prism of the other one, but she didn't think so. It didn't matter much at this point, anyway. The other Helena could yearn for a chair at the hearth and a blanket spread over her lap, but she wasn't going to get the peace she said she desired. Here, she was the anomaly, the adventure, and she would be interrogated and surveilled until the danger she presented was neutralized. Besides, what stability would she find in a world that would always be foreign to her? She had only to look at her counterpart to see how elusive a sense of belonging could be.

But if this world could be no true home for her, the other Helena should have no confidence that the anomaly that brought her here would come winging back to her like a boomerang. Myka had brought with her to Atlanta two artefacts, relatively innocuous. One was a plastic egg containing a special, artefacted Silly Putty that would reveal the imprint of any other artefact in the holder's possession. She had placed the putty in the other Helena's hand and told her to squeeze it. The other Helena, still a little stunned and wet-eyed at meeting her, mutely complied, which had sent through Myka a quick, vicious shot of guilt. At least it had the virtue of being unambiguous, which was more than Myka could have said about the other emotions flooding her. Opening her hand, the other Helena held out the putty for Myka's inspection. The only marks on it were of her fingerprints.

Myka had then taken from her bag a ballpoint pen and a pad of paper. The artefacts wasn't strong enough to work without being touched, but now that she was holding it, she was already doodling, which was its effect, constant doodling. Maybe it had once been owned by a CEO who had been aimlessly scrawling figures on a scratch pad when he was informed that his accountants had uncovered a massive fraud, an actress when she learned that she had lost the role of a lifetime. For once Myka hadn't cared about an artefact's history, why a simple object had become so invested with emotion and whose emotion it had been, she had cared only that its effects had never been determined to be more harmful than a cramped hand. The other Helena had been watching her, sudden comprehension in her eyes, and when she exchanged the Silly Putty for the pen and paper, she had held the pen motionless over the pad, waiting for the compulsion to overtake her. It didn't. After a few minutes, Myka had put the pen and paper back in her bag, making sure she dropped them into the neutralizer bag she had tucked in the interior pocket. She didn't try very hard to keep the smug look off her face as she gazed first at Irene and then Helena.

Irene had said nothing, only raising an eyebrow that expressed the skepticism she wasn't putting into words. Helena, as usual, wasn't hesitating to use all the words at her command. "It means nothing, Myka," she had said rapidly, forcefully. "Whoever was clever enough to have introduced her as someone from another reality," she theatrically fluttered her hands in a rising motion, dismissing the possibility that her double was from another reality as so much stage smoke, "would have been clever enough to counteract any artefact test we would want to perform." Seeing that Myka was about to object, she had added, "Even if no special measures were taken, you know as well as I that not all artefacts work the same way on everyone, or work at all."

"It's not a meaningless exercise. You can't argue that the fact that the artefact didn't work on her means she's lying."

"There are no alternate realities, Myka. It's science fiction." Helena's had mouth twisted in a pained smile. "Not even good science fiction."

The other Helena had watched them, pensively folding in her lips before unfolding them in an almost sputtering exhalation. "My cousin will not be convinced today, or any day, it seems," she said, looking at Irene with resignation, "so what do you propose to do with me?"

"Since you don't pose any imminent threat, as far as we can tell, we can't keep you here any longer. You'll be our guest . . . at the Warehouse." Irene never sounded especially welcoming, Myka thought, but her skin prickled unpleasantly at the warning expressed in those last words.

The other Helena hadn't missed it either. "You'll understand why I say I wish I had alternative accommodations."

Irene had said only, "As do I."

Since there were no alternative accommodations, none that the regents would entertain, there was nothing for it but to kit the other Helena out, clothes and shoes mainly, which Myka and Abigail had done, primarily in Atlanta but there had been a stop at a sporting goods store outside Rapid City too. The other Helena probably didn't need her help settling into the guest cottage, but Myka felt that leaving the other Helena to unpack and put away unfamiliar items in an unfamiliar place, a virtual prisoner in a reality she had never imagined, too cruel to tolerate. There was making a statement about power and who wielded it, and there was acknowledging that whoever the other Helena was, she was, to all appearances, a human being. Who just might be more responsive to a show of kindness.

Myka felt her heart beat faster as she heard the door open. She turned to see Claudia wrestling a dolly stacked with boxes over the threshold. "Some help here," Claudia yelled, and Myka helped her pull the cart into the kitchen. Helena followed her, yanking a roller bag behind her and trying simultaneously to keep a large duffle bag on her shoulder. The roller bag had come with them from Atlanta; the duffle bag had come courtesy of the sporting goods store. It was October in South Dakota, which could mean anything from temperatures peaking in the 70s to a blizzard. The other Helena would need something more than the windbreaker she was wearing. Packed in that duffle bag were mittens, scarves, boots, and a parka designed to withstand wind chills reaching -30 or colder.

The other Helena's face was flushed, from the warmth of Leena's kitchen, which was by far the warmest room in the bed and breakfast, or by the wind's sting. The color intensified when she saw Myka. Myka was pretty sure she was blushing too, if only because Claudia, having them both in view as she unloaded the dolly, was dramatically rolling her eyes. Though she had tried to put it out of her mind, understanding that the other Helena's reaction had had everything to do with the other Myka, the one who had been the senior agent, and nothing to do with her, Myka couldn't forget the play of emotions in the other Helena's face, the delight and sorrow, the abject gratitude, as if she were the other Helena's most treasured wish come true. To believe, if only for a moment, that she could evoke such powerful emotions in someone . . . . Sam had never been so carried away with her, and while Pete had risked the Warehouse itself to save her, she hadn't been sure how much his desperation owed to their relationship and how much to his inability years ago to save his father.

The other Helena's almost palpable emotion had dizzied her then, it still did - when it wasn't embarrassing her. That was why she was blushing, she reassured herself; she was embarrassed. She felt she had stolen something that wasn't hers, unintentionally, as someone might take a coffee from the pick-up counter in a Starbucks thinking she had ordered a mocha Frappuccino with extra whipped cream when, in fact, she had ordered a plain coffee, black, no sugar. The other Helena would be embarrassed too, more conscious every day that this Myka wasn't that Myka.

The other Helena said something inaudible, and Myka realized, belatedly, that Helena was cutting a wide path around her to get out of the kitchen. Of course she would want to take her bags to the bedroom, and Myka, feeling even more in the way now that she was no longer in the way, began blindly to put cans of soup and boxes of pasta and, yes, tea bags in the cupboards. Claudia gave her a look under lowered brows but didn't say anything, opening another box and placing on the counter dishes Myka recognized from Leena's, plastic cereal bowls, mismatched juice glasses, plates, cups, and a few bent pieces of silverware.

The other Helena returned to the kitchen, hands crammed halfway down her jeans pockets, clearly ill at ease. "Tell me how I can help."

Claudia squinted at the open cupboards and then at the mixed assortment of dishes on the counter. "Guess you really didn't need these." She pointed with her foot at the last unopened box. "Probably don't need the dishwashing soap and laundry detergent in here either. Do what you want with them - keep them or bring them back to the B&B." Myka noticed that Claudia wasn't looking at the other Helena as she spoke. "You might want to bring back the Superman cereal bowl, though. It's Pete's favorite, even though Myka's been looking for an opportunity to get rid of it."

Myka felt another wave of heat beating in her cheeks and caught the other Helena's puzzled glance at her, but Claudia had already moved on to another topic. "It's taco night," she said, darting a look at Helena that caromed from her face to the stove to the floor. "We set out shells and fillings, and everybody builds their own. You're welcome to join us."

It was an invitation offered with little enthusiasm, but Myka sensed more confusion behind the reluctance than suspicion. Every time Claudia looked at the other Helena she would see H.G., and yet this Helena wasn't H.G. Myka had had the advantage of knowing the other Helena a day or two longer, but she had recognized the difference from the moment she had been introduced to her, hadn't she? H.G., the original Helena, the First, whatever the distinction in name, in reference, the difference from her had been in the other Helena's eyes, the other Helena's touch. The other Helena had loved her Myka, whether or not she realized it. This reality Helena's, "her" Helena hadn't. Myka understood then, feeling the other Helena's hand cupping her face, hearing her joy battle her disbelief, that it hadn't been (only) jealousy that had had her jeering at Helena's avowals of devotion to the Willises in Boone, it had been her conviction that love would be what continued to elude Helena's grasp. Rage, grief, despair, guilt, remorse in spades, but love no. To love you had to have the capacity to feel lighter than air, to believe your next step would take you to the stars; this reality's Helena could no more free herself of her fetters than she could change time.

"Myka, you coming? Helena's passing on the tacos." The name sounded stilted coming out of Claudia's mouth. She was at the door, hunching her shoulders under her long-sleeved tee, already feeling the chill of the walk back to Leena's.

"Sure, yeah, I, um -"

"Myka, would you mind staying behind for a moment?" The other Helena's smile was as faded and tired as her voice was faint with fatigue. God, how she must want some time to herself. She hadn't been left alone since they had met her, under escort, in the lobby of the CDC that morning, and she had probably been allowed precious little privacy before then. There was no frame of reference any of them had for what she must be feeling, except Helena, and she wasn't here. Even if she were, she wouldn't afford her "cousin" much sympathy, judging by her behavior toward the other Helena thus far. She believed the other's appearance was intentional, part of a scheme they had yet to figure out. Whatever disorientation or unreality her counterpart might admit to feeling, it couldn't be genuine.

Myka wanted to offer this unlooked for, unwanted Helena the courtesy of believing her confusion was genuine, even if nothing else about her was. The other Helena's feelings were sincere, Myka couldn't doubt that, not after the way the woman had first looked at her, still looked at her when she thought Myka's attention was directed elsewhere. She felt that wonder and incredulous joy press against her, like their bodies were continually touching, even now, although the other Helena remained on the opposite side of the breakfast bar. The joy and wonder weren't meant for her, the lesser Myka she already felt herself to be in comparison to the other Myka, but that didn't mean the feelings weren't real. "Of course." She smiled more widely, more evenly than she normally did. It would look warmer, more receptive than her typical slant of a smile, which was less friendly than wary.

The other Helena waited for the door to close behind Claudia, but she wasn't appreciably more relaxed with Claudia gone; her hands were still crammed into her pockets and she was rocking slightly on her heels. "I'm exhausted," she admitted, "but I'm not quite ready to be alone. Would you mind staying long enough to have a cup of coffee or tea with me? I need to settle in a bit more, and then I'll be fine."

Myka learned soon enough that even though the other Helena had said coffee or tea, she preferred coffee, which was another difference from her counterpart. In the boxes brought over from Leena's, there were coffee filters, a small bag of coffee (which Myka realized was one of her own), and a bottle of nondairy creamer. The coffee maker found, she poured the water into the carafe while the other Helena measured the coffee into the filter. The kitchen was smaller with the two of them moving around in it, and Myka realized how tensely she was holding herself, trying not to accidentally bump against or back into the other Helena. Once they were able to escape into the living room area with their mugs and take seats within conversational range, the other Helena in the armchair and Myka in the matching loveseat, which were at right angles to each other and, furthermore, separated by an end table, she felt more comfortable, even going so far as to remove her shoes and tuck her legs up under her.

The conversation was halting at first, the other Helena asking her relatively innocent questions about the Warehouse and the bed and breakfast ("How far apart are they? Do you drive to the Warehouse? Do you all have to live at Leena's?"), with Myka being unsure whether an answer as simple as "We share cars to drive to the Warehouse or into Univille" wasn't, in fact, a security breach that would have Artie grabbing at his hair in anxiety. Then the conversation turned to Myka herself, why she had become a Warehouse agent (or, more to the point, how she had become one), what she enjoyed most about the work, questions that, like the ones the other Helena had asked her about the Warehouse, were innocuous only on the surface. The danger in these Myka all too readily recognized; they touched on her own uncertainties about why she had accepted Mrs. Frederic's invitation (was it really because of the promise of "endless wonder" or was it because, regardless of the inquiry that had cleared her after Sam's death, she continued to feel an overwhelming guilt?) and why almost five years later she was still here. Other than becoming the senior agent there was no career advancement, and unlike Pete and Claudia, and even Steve with his freakishly accurate ability to spot a lie, she had no skills or talents that were uniquely suited to the Warehouse. True, she had a memory that was better than most people's, she reluctantly confessed to the other Helena, and sometimes she was able to recall an attribute that proved to be helpful in retrieving an artefact, but mainly she exercised her memory on sections of the agents' manual, a quirky document written in the '70s and only sporadically updated since then.

"There's a section on when agents should use their guns instead of their Teslas followed by a section on when it's permissible for agents to use illicit drugs in the retrieval of an artefact, which, because this section hasn't been updated since the '70s, is all the time." The other Helena drew her brows together, puzzling over something she had said. Myka asked, "You don't have Teslas in your Warehouse? Your 1970s were drug free? You don't use manuals? Tell me when I stopped making sense."

"You'll have to explain to me what a Tesla is, but your 1970s don't sound dramatically different from our own, although my reality's attitude toward mood-altering substances," the other Helena's lips quirked up in a wicked little grin so reminiscent of her counterpart's that Myka felt a sudden flutter in her chest, as if her heart had skipped a beat, "is, shall we say, more relaxed than yours." Her face resumed its thoughtful expression. "You'd fit in quite well at our Warehouse with those who spend their time pondering what the relics and anomalies mean. They're agents because they have to go through the same selection process, but they're far more like scholars. An agent-scholar is what you are, Agent Bering." The smile returned, more indulgent than wicked, and possibly a smidgen flirtatious, too.

Myka shook her head, though she wasn't sure what she was shaking it at, an image of her with a monk's robe and tonsure seated in front of a table-sized agents' manual or this real-life scene of her and a Helena having a conversation that wasn't filled with tension. Even before the other's betrayal of her, of them all at Yellowstone, had made conversations difficult, talking with Helena had always had a strange energy, the kind that made her feel they were on the verge of arguing even when they were in agreement. And when they were arguing, about nothing particularly important, say, for example, Great Expectations - she had a soft spot for the crowd-pleasing ending, Helena detested it - Myka always sensed that their argument was about something larger and probably anguish-inducing, given the intensity of their bickering about Pip and Estella. Yet here she and this Helena were talking about the differences between their separate worlds, worlds for Christ's sake, with a distinctly growing ease that seemed better suited for a discussion about . . . books.

Talking over coffee turned into talking over a hastily prepared supper of Campbell's Chunky Soup (Pete would be wondering where his cans of chicken corn chowder had gone) and saltines. The other Helena didn't remind her that it was taco night at Leena's and Myka didn't remind her that she was exhausted. A few uncertainly asked questions about the other Helena's family, which her counterpart had always deflected, sometimes charmingly, sometimes brusquely, elicited more detail than Myka had expected, "more than you wanted," the other Helena later joked. Hers was a working class family, her father a mechanic in a factory, her mother content to raise the children, of which there were three, Helena, her older brother Charles, and her much younger brother Bob, and manage their small household. A happy family, in the main, until Charles drowned while swimming in a quarry when he was 14. "It shattered my parents. Until then, I had had no intention of applying for one of the openings at the Warehouse. The training is long and arduous, and of the few selected, even fewer complete it, but I needed to escape their grief." She stared down into her coffee, her fourth cup by Myka's count. "The competition for available slots is always fierce, but I was among the ones chosen." Her tone became dry, ironic. "Perhaps my desperation to leave gave me an advantage."

"You were 12," Myka said softly, struck by how momentous this difference was between the two Helenas. The other Charles had died while still a boy, whatever promise he might have had left unfulfilled. Helena's Charles, on the other hand, had lived to die an old man, a literary lion.

For a moment, the other Helena was startled, then she nodded. "The other one, she has a brother Charles as well, I take it. I hope he had a happier, longer life than my Charles."

It was Myka's turn to nod. "He did." She didn't elaborate; that would be Helena's task, to explain to her double the true origins of H.G. Wells and how her brother, over time, assumed the identity of their creation as his own. "Twelve seems young to decide on a career with the Warehouse," she prompted, steering the conversation back to what she hoped was a more neutral subject.

"The training starts very early. At 12, I was already old to be starting." A lift of a shoulder, a weary half-smile. "I had much to make up."

A subtle cue to leave. Maybe it hadn't been such a neutral subject after all. Myka got up from the loveseat, where she had been literally sprawled, feet crossed on the opposite arm. "Let me help you clean the dishes and then I'll go."

The other Helena almost fell from the armchair in alarm. "No, no, that wasn't a signal . . . ." She distractedly tucked behind her ear a strand of hair that had worked its way out of her chignon. "I didn't want to bore you with the classes in history and religion, the excruciating physical regimen, but I can." She vaguely gestured toward the small gas fireplace. "I thought we might light that or turn it on, whatever is necessary to get it to operate. I believe that Claudia included some packets of hot cocoa in my supplies. That is, if you're not too tired."

Helena didn't like being alone at night either, at least she hadn't when she had been with the Warehouse. She would watch old movies with Claudia well past midnight or claim the sagging sofa in one of the bed and breakfast's old sitting rooms, a book in one hand and a mug in the other, prepared to read the night away. Myka cautioned herself that she was seeing a likeness that didn't necessarily exist. Unless the other Helena had been effectively interred for a century, her uneasiness with the strangeness of her new lodgings would pass, and her intense desire for company, her company, would pass as well. "Sure," she said.

They talked more, over hot chocolate laced with whiskey from a bottle of Jim Beam that Myka had found shoved into the recesses of a cupboard, the gas fireplace doing a fair imitation of burning logs. Although they skipped lightly from topic to topic, the TV shows and movies their realities had in common, the fads and fashions that had captured their worlds (yes to Game of Thrones and social media, no to The Walking Dead and American football), what they talked about most was Myka. Myka couldn't recall ever having talked so much about herself to anyone, not even Pete. Pete knew about her dad and Sam, about how she felt that she had never measured up to whatever imaginary son her father had held closer to his heart than his two daughters, and how she blamed herself for Sam's death. She had never told him how the other kids in school had described her father as "the crazy old guy who lives in the bookstore" and how the parents of her friends had made fun of him to her face thinking she was too young to catch on. Yet she told it all to the other Helena, saying wryly, "I read every book in the store. We weren't the richest family, and Dad would never win any awards for ambition or business sense," or cordiality or parenthood, she added silently, "but, by God, I was the best read kid in school." She hadn't told Pete how ambivalent she had been about a future with Sam, but she confessed it to Helena. "We were together, but I couldn't see myself as his wife or having his children. I had always imagined that I'd be 'Crap-the-wheels-have-come-off-this-car' in love, crazy in love, out of control, but that wasn't how I felt about Sam." It also wasn't how she felt about Pete, but there was only so much self-disclosure she could allow, and she wasn't going to start admitting the truth about her feelings for Pete to someone else when she wasn't ready to admit it to herself. Besides, first she would have to tell the other Helena that she was involved with Pete, and she hadn't just avoided the question, she had uncharacteristically lied. When the other Helena asked her if she had found someone since Sam, then prettily, very prettily blushed and fussed in embarrassment about her hot chocolate having grown cold, Myka had answered, "No, not really."

Why had she done that? Had a finger or two of whiskey splashed into a mug over the course of an evening thrown her for that much of a loop? It was past midnight and the other Helena's eyes were so red-rimmed with exhaustion that they were beginning to look jellied. Myka needed to get back to the bed and breakfast before she started saying some truly stupid things, on the order of "I was half in love with your counterpart before she left the Warehouse." She backed out of the cottage's door, still talking, encouraging the other Helena to join them for breakfast at Leena's. "It may be only cereal, but you'll get to see Steve in his bunny slippers and me with some serious bedhead going on and -" she stopped at the other Helena's blank look. Where had she lost her, at the bunny slippers or "bedhead"? She hugged her chest. It wasn't chilly any longer, it was cold and she could see her breath. "Just come by around 7:30, okay?"

Myka didn't run back to Leena's, but her strides were scissor-quick. The cottage wasn't a huge distance from the bed and breakfast, but it was beyond the garden, almost hidden in a grove of trees. There wasn't much that could be called picturesque in this part of South Dakota, the Badlands, which were only a few miles away to the southeast, were awe-inspiring rather than picturesque, but the cottage, surrounded by the trees and a creek (which ran with water when it rained and ran with brush and weeds when it didn't), was picturesque. She turned around to see if she could still spy a light; unfortunately, her feet were still in motion as well, moving her in the opposite direction. She tripped, stumbling and violently windmilling her arms to save herself from falling. Her tongue felt like gauze and her head ached; she would have to take a few aspirin with a glass of water and pray she wouldn't wake up with a hangover. She was drunk, but not on two fingers of Jim Beam. She was drunk on the other Helena Wells.

Helena

She had caught an afternoon flight to Los Angeles after the rocky introduction to her double, indulging in a drink at one of the airport bars and another one on the flight. The alcohol relaxed the muscles in her shoulders and her abdomen, but they would be sore the next day; she had been clenching them since she had arrived in Atlanta. Her mood didn't lighten as she drove the network of freeways to her apartment, thinking they resembled nothing so much as a failed cardiac bypass. She had no desire to return to the Warehouse, but she had been its employee too long, its creature if she were honest with herself, not to know that if she didn't willingly comply with the regents' "request," as communicated through Irene, that they would have their ways of forcing her. They always did. She hadn't needed Irene's warning to know that. A long time ago, before the bronze, before Christina died, she had sickened of the Warehouse and its unrelenting demands and she had left . . . for a time . . . until the Warehouse decided it needed her. She had come back because the Warehouse, unloving, unforgiving employer/parent/god that it was, had been the one constant in her life, other than Charles, since she was 12 years old. When Irene had given her the astrolabe and told her to disappear, to make a new life for herself, Helena had almost demanded, "Until when?" But she had complied, and so inured had she been to the life, she secreted in Nate's garage the Tesla and the devices she had been quietly working on all the while she had been dating him. Because she might need them when the Warehouse called on her again.

She unlocked the door to her apartment, a drab one-bedroom affair that cost more than she could comfortably afford, but it was close to the ocean, hence its astronomical rent. She paid it uncomplainingly. She had always loved the ocean; it was the one thing that made Los Angeles better than Boone or South Dakota. That said, it was no more a home to her than either Boone or the bed and breakfast had been; Myka had been wrong about her "belonging" with her and Pete and Claudia and Steve. Belonging in the sense of having a home, a family, that was an understanding of the word she had lost faith in more than a century ago. She had tried, or thought she had tried, to make a home with Nate and Adelaide, but she hadn't known how in the end. When Nate had once suggested that she could make over his, now their home to feel that she was a part of it, she had laughed, a little uncertainly, and said she would give the idea some thought, but the truth was, she felt no desire to impose a new style. She liked the layout of the rooms, the furniture, even the paint on the walls; she knew that its every feature carried some trace of Rachel, but she didn't suffer from any compulsion to supplant the remnants of Rachel's presence with her own. It wasn't just the inside of the house that spoke of Rachel, it was the outside too. She had sensed it even before Nate told her that Rachel was the one who had wanted the house. Although she had flipped through interior design magazines and bent the corners of pages for future reference, Helena had never decided upon a new look for any of the rooms, a decision of a sort and one that had clearly disappointed Nate. Later, when she had fancied that she might like the addition of a sunroom, it was too late, the jawbone artefact and Pete and Myka's retrieval had happened, Nate's partial, and always ever partial, discovery of who she was had happened, and her time in the house was entering a countdown phase.

Looking around the apartment after she unpacked, she realized that she had no particular style, which, albeit retrospectively, supported her decision not to make over the Willises' house. The furniture, which wasn't of the best quality to begin with, had few redeeming features, and other than a picture of Adelaide (she was surprised that Nate hadn't demanded she give it back) and a few books, her living room said nothing about her. Her devices, her plans for more uniform, more precise crime scene investigations were locked away in the shabby space she had rented in a dubiously located warehouse. She would need to do something about them, both the work and the space, before she left. Tomorrow she would talk to Tierney about an extended leave of absence, but tonight, what was left of it . . . . There wasn't any use in putting it off, so she called Elle. It turned out to be easy to talk to her since she reached Elle's voicemail. It was only just past 8:00, so Elle was probably still at work. Helena's message was brief; she was back, and they ought to get together for dinner. Maybe tomorrow night?

Had their relationship been on a more solid footing, she would have expected Elle to call her back later in the evening, but they weren't comfortable enough with each other any longer to trust that a late night call wouldn't be an intrusion. Elle would call her, or text her, tomorrow morning. Helena tossed one of the books scattered around the apartment onto the sofa. Somewhere in the depths of her freezer she had a TV dinner. She wouldn't spend the rest of her evening thinking about her awkward conversation with Tierney tomorrow or what would likely be an equally awkward dinner with Elle. She also wouldn't spend the rest of her evening thinking about her double, there would be plenty of time for that later. So with sturdy resolve, she heated her TV dinner and ate it while reading her book, one of the novels Charles had written without her help, Ann Veronica. It would have been a very different book - it certainly would have had a very different ending - had she been able to exert her influence.

Carrying on an argument with a dead man, however, wasn't the most absorbing of distractions, especially if it was an argument she had had with him many times before. She always won. She turned on the small TV she had forced herself to buy, but all she saw on its screen was the near embrace that the other Helena had drawn Myka into, the other Helena cupping her face. Myka had been stunned, at first, but then her expression had subtly changed, seeming to reflect the joy that animated the other Helena's. Irene had been forced to cough to break the spell, not discreetly but impatiently, and both women had blushed, automatically stepping away from each other. Myka was so flustered she had almost dropped the artefacts that she wanted the other Helena to handle but recovered sufficiently to shoot the rest of them a look of triumph when the artefacts had no effect upon her. The experiment had proved nothing, but Myka didn't want to believe it because she wanted to believe that some Helena somewhere was better than the Helena she already knew. Surely there was a Helena not hell bent on destroying the world.

Helena rinsed the plastic tray and put it in the recycling container. She was tired; her body was still on Eastern time and thought it was midnight. She checked her phone, although she hadn't heard it buzz. Nothing from Elle. Nothing from Myka either, though she wasn't sure why the possibility had crossed her mind. She wondered briefly what her double was doing now, sleeping, plotting, maybe even thinking about Myka. Oddly, the last disturbed her more than if her counterpart were reviewing the next stage in a plan to take over the Warehouse.

###

She started off the next morning by talking to Tierney about a leave of absence. Tall and reedy where Artie was short and pudgy, displaying a rough horseshoe of neatly trimmed gray hair where Artie wagged a head thick with unkempt curls, Tierney only seemed Artie's polar opposite. To Helena, they were virtually interchangeable in their distrust of her. At least Artie had cause, although Helena understood that Artie's wary, begrudging acceptance of her was simply a more concentrated display of the general skepticism in which he held the world. Tierney had had no such excuse until her poor showing at the Newcomb trial confirmed all the doubts he had about her. Strangely, he now allowed himself to be almost genial with her on occasion, as if having his initial impressions of her proved right freed him to be pleasant with her. However, this morning wasn't one of those occasions.

"I know I said I'd give you more time if you wanted it, but I meant a few days. It's not the best time for an extended absence right now since Martinez'll be going on maternity leave." He scowled and rubbed the bare helipad of his head. "What you're requesting isn't a standard leave . . . I can give you six weeks."

Six weeks, six months. She would be done when the Warehouse said it didn't need her any longer. Irene said she would have her job back, assuming she still wanted it, once they solved the riddle of her double's existence, but Helena had learned not to put much faith in the regents' promises. People wouldn't stop dying in Los Angeles simply because Helena Wells wasn't there to gather the evidence, and Tierney would need to find a new investigator sooner rather than later. She might come back to the lab, as a lower-level technician, an administrative assistant . . . a member of the cleaning crew. The regents had a bully's sense of humor about such things, rigidly complying to the letter of an agreement when refusing to honor it altogether would be the kinder course of action.

"If it's easier for me to submit my resignation, I will." She didn't want to quit. While it was difficult to become fond of a job that required a steady supply of violent deaths to justify its necessity, like the similar position she had held in Boone, it was a job that played to her strengths, a desire for precision, a faith in scientific explanation. While she didn't let herself dwell on the recognition, it also served as a form of atonement for the violent deaths she had caused and the millions more that she had entertained. On a purely selfish level, she didn't want to quit because it would be another short-term entry on an already skimpy resumé. At her age and given the life she had led, her dreams, other than the ones that she pursued in her lab, were few, but among them was the desire not to have to rely on the regents calling in favors and twisting arms to ensure that she was employed. Even though her release from the Warehouse would always be provisional, she wanted to be as free of it as she could. Not having to ask the regents for a reference or a good word whispered in someone's ear would only bolster her sense of independence.

"No, it's not easier," he snapped. Relenting, he acknowledged, "You're good. Hell, you must know you're overqualified for what the work requires, but you're good. Very good." He uttered a small groan and reached for his travel mug of coffee. "Six weeks?" He asked it hopefully, which sounded almost as odd coming from him as it did from her, hope as foreign a concept to her as home.

"I'll keep you apprised." She spent the rest of her day, her last, completing paperwork associated with cases that she had recently completed, taking a few minutes to drop off her files on the Newcomb case with its new investigator. Her files were both numerous and large, indicative more of the failure of the police first on the scene to secure it and follow procedure than any inherent complexity. She had never questioned the likelihood, based on their troubled relationship and his questionable alibi, that Vance Newcomb had killed his ex-girlfriend, just the capacity of the evidence to support it. In her opinion, the evidence had been so compromised, from the inadvertent jostling of the murdered woman's body to the outright contamination of some of the blood samples, it couldn't help but admit of other explanations and suspects. That hadn't been Tierney's opinion or Elle's, and while she hadn't been told to lie on the stand, she understood how she would be expected to shade her explanations, present as fact what was really only a theory. Who was she to balk at misleading the jury? She had committed far worse deeds with far less guilt. Staring at Newcomb in his Tom Ford suit as he flashed her a George Clooney smirk, she saw in him the same arrogance and stupidity she had seen in the trio of petty criminals who had so bungled a simple robbery that they had completed it only by murdering an eight-year-old girl and a maid. She had killed those men without compunction or remorse, yet she could not bring herself to skew her findings to send to prison someone who had murdered another woman's daughter.

Before she left, Helena said quiet good-byes to the few co-workers to whom she had given more than a fleeting smile in the morning. A run for coffee, a lunch here and there, that had been the extent of her sociability; in return, there was little curiosity about what was taking her away and less expressed about whether or when she might return. All the same, it was a better departure than the one from the lab in Boone, which, while it hadn't been in the proverbial dead of night, had been early enough in the morning that no one had been a witness to her throwing her personal items in a box and tossing her badge on her supervisor's desk. She hadn't made the mistake this time of bringing any personal items to her station in the lab, no mugs with funny sayings or photos of friends; she would willingly lap her tea from a dog's water bowl before she owned a mug with a funny saying, and any photos of the friends she had made in Boone, mothers of Adelaide's classmates and couples Nate knew through work, remained in Boone with Nate and Adelaide. She had never entertained the fantasy that she would make a home in Los Angeles; Los Angeles was a marker on her road - wherever it led - not its destination.

Which made seeing Elle all the harder. Someone else would have recognized that with Elle she could make something more of Los Angeles than a spot to rest before she gathered herself and moved on. Even that bogus copy of her would have recognized it; she seemed the starry-eyed type with her high-flown talk of relics and anomalies and her practically worshipful regard of Myka. Perhaps because she wasn't that someone else, Helena changed into a nicer dress than the restaurant they were meeting at would warrant and took more care with her make-up, that is, actually wore it. Elle deserved a Helena worthy of her on the inside; failing that, she would get a Helena who looked good on the outside.

Elle greeted her with a noncommittal kiss on her cheek and a wistful smile that said far more. She had come straight from her office. Although her pantsuit was expensive enough to have a truly flattering cut, emphasizing Elle's swimmer's build, its wrinkles betrayed her long workday. It would have yawned had it a mouth. Elle was one of the first people Helena had met upon joining the lab; she was being briefed by one of the investigators when Tierney began introducing Helena to the staff. Helena had recorded the sun-streaked blond hair and the tan that seemed dyed into her skin and silently dismissed Elle as a California surfer girl. She hadn't been far wrong. Elle was a surfer girl despite having spent most of her childhood in Virginia, but Helena didn't learn that until months later when, after a long period of briefings and strategy sessions for trials during which she learned there was a brain under that restlessly finger-combed sweep of blond hair, they awkwardly, carefully negotiated their way to a date.

Helena hadn't been sure it was wise to start dating - how much could be fairly ascribed to Elle's attractions and how much to a need to put Nate firmly in the past? Elle had been unconcerned, claiming that feelings didn't go by a clock. If Helena felt ready to start seeing someone less than six months after leaving Boone, she wasn't going to question it. She also wasn't put off by the fact that there had been a Nate. "How does leaving me for another woman instead of a man make me feel better?" Elle had demanded scornfully before her face cleared with the sunniest of grins. Helena, completely undone by that smile, hadn't cared that they were standing in the middle of the lab's parking lot, kissing her with a passion that surprised them both.

If it had stayed like that, when she kissed Elle in the parking lot, feeling unburdened and eager for what might happen next, she wouldn't be looking down at a cooling entrée and searching for words to explain why she was leaving. After joking that Helena's former employer must be the Mafia to have such a hold on her, Elle flicked the shaggy strands of her hair, which she had started to grow out after years of an easy-care cut, outside the collar of her blouse. It seemed to give her the time she needed for a more serious response because she said with a weary humor, "I do sort of get it, my father used to work for one of 'those' agencies. Cloak and dagger, upon pain of death and all that. Really, I understand."

Maybe she didn't want Elle to understand, maybe she wanted Elle to protest and issue ultimatums, but Elle wasn't the type, and even if she were, then Helena obviously wasn't going to be the woman Elle would bare her heart for. The attraction had been slow to gather strength on Helena's part - it had so many obstacles to overcome - but it had grown, and Helena had allowed herself to have hopes for it that she had never had all the months she lived with Nate. Yet no matter her and Elle's intention to keep things light between them, their relationship became weightier and more complicated; juggling schedules to arrange time together, meeting Elle's family and friends when they grew tired of only hearing about the "new woman," they inevitably started building . . . something . . . regardless of how ill-defined they insisted to each other it was.

The lightness had begun to disappear well before the Newcomb trial; however, the tension and the feeling of being not so much at odds as being utterly helpless to understand the other's point of view had its parallels in the investigation preceding the trial. The multiple analysts assigned to review the evidence, Helena being only the last in a long line tasked with repeating the tests and analyses, the conflicting results and conclusions, all of it made presenting a coherent argument that Vance Newcomb, beyond any reasonable doubt, was the killer virtually impossible in Helena's opinion. But it was her job, once her opinion was heard and dismissed, to support the prosecution, which meant downplaying evidence that could lead to a different conclusion. When investigators were called to the stand, they were to open no doors for Newcomb's attorneys.

The differences in opinion she and Elle had about the Newcomb investigation began to turn into shadow arguments about their relationship, as if the head-scratching over the one's inability to trust and the other's demand for unquestioning loyalty had nothing to do with Vance Newcomb. Helena wasn't afraid to argue; it was another form of conversation to her. She and Myka had argued endlessly about books and retrievals and whether the Warehouse was a force for good; they had waged days-long battles about Pete (was there intelligent life?) and Univille and whether Myka should tell her father he had been a complete bastard for most of her life. At times it had been exhilarating to see Myka's jaws grind and her shoulders stiffen and then hear her voice tremble with the effort to remain steady and controlled. Once Claudia had peered into the bed and breakfast's study, curious to find out what their exclamations and intermittent shrieks of indignation were about only to groan in despair, "Just do it, please. Just screw the living hell out of each other and be done with it." They had barely waited until Claudia left before bursting into laughter. If their laughter had a slightly hysterical edge to it, that was to be expected - they had wound themselves up arguing. No need to go hunting for subtext.

Arguments with Myka had left her tired but rarely drained. She might still be buzzing hours afterward. Not with Elle. Helena didn't know if the difference meant that Elle was more important to her or less. Every disagreement about the Newcomb case pushed them farther away from each other. So here they were, six weeks after a mistrial had been declared, having a dinner suggested through a voicemail and responded to by a text message, as though they had been trying to set up a first date.

Despite their stiffness and distance over dinner, which, if this had been a first date, would have guaranteed that there would be no second one, Helena went home with Elle, which was frequently how their dinners had used to end. There was no stiffness between them in Elle's bed, and as Helena let her hands and lips rove over Elle's body, she acknowledged once again the difference she felt with her compared to how she had felt with Nate. She couldn't define the difference in terms of enjoyment; sex, for so much of her life, had had little to do with pleasure and even less with intimacy. It was just that with Elle she knew her ground. The greater confidence wasn't reducible to the body next to her being a woman's - she didn't "naturally" know Elle's body any better because of it - she simply felt more attuned to her own. Her responses quicker, stronger, she felt she was all flesh and all but flesh at the same time, and the lightness she and Elle had lost everywhere else, she rediscovered here. If she took nothing more from Elle, she would take this - there would be no more Nates.

The stiffness had disappeared, but not the distance. When Elle finally turned away from her, it wasn't to sleep, Helena knew, but to reassert that a gap still existed between them, regardless of how they had cried out to each other, bodies intertwined. Helena lay next to her for a while, not sleeping and not hearing Elle's breathing even out or slow. She rose, attempting to dress quietly but realizing that Elle would mark the sounds of her zipper as she closed the back of her dress, the small clicks on the polished hardwood as, her feet squeezed back into her heels, she walked to the door.

"Are you coming back when it's over?"

Helena considered her possible responses, but she resorted to the one she used most often in this new life of hers, in this world still so new to her. It was also the most honest of the responses she could give. "I don't know."

Chapter 4

Chapter Text

Myka

Myka couldn't have explained how she spent the time between the other Helena's arrival at the Warehouse and Pete's return. She would have sworn that she had gone to bed the night after the other Helena had been moved into the caretaker's cottage and had come down the stairs the next morning to find Pete at the kitchen table, discontentedly eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch from a plain cereal bowl and bemoaning the loss of his Superman bowl to Claudia. Yet days had passed in between. On one of those days, Helena returned from her hurried trip to Los Angeles, but Myka had seen her only in passing, as Helena was leaving for the Warehouse or coming back from it. The most tangible evidence of her return was the smell of her shampoo in the bathroom. Helena wasn't the only one spending large chunks of time in the Warehouse, not if Myka wasn't imagining that she had glimpsed an African-American woman wearing a burnt orange skirt suit and dark brown pumps disappearing into a black SUV - not one of their own because it was newer and nicer - in the parking lot. Only a glimpse, however, as Myka had been too busy herself to try to track down Helena and ask her what was going on with all the top-secret doings in the Warehouse. As the other Helena's more or less official guide in her new world, Myka had taken her on trips to Univille and Rapid City to buy groceries and, to make her stay more bearable, various electronics. The other Helena was familiar with DVD players and Kindles and tablets, at least with her reality's versions of the devices, although she viewed, and handled, the ones in the stores with the amused condescension that someone in this reality might pick up the receiver of a rotary phone or frisbee-flick a floppy disc. There also had been sessions in which she and Claudia had briefed the other Helena on recent assignments, more to give her an idea of how, under this Warehouse's aegis, artefacts were identified and retrieved, than with the expectation that she would be assigned to a retrieval anytime soon.

There had been sessions with Abigail as well, though they had been private, one-on-one; much to Myka's dismay, Abigail had insisted that she meet with her too. "I'm making everyone check in with me," Abigail had explained during their first meeting. "It's one more crazy, inexplicable situation in a crazy, inexplicable environment. We'll meet as much or as little aswe," Myka couldn't miss the emphasis, "decide is necessary." When Myka had shrugged with the resignation born of the employer-mandated therapy she had undergone after Sam's shooting, Abigail had added with gentle concern, "Next to the Helenas themselves, I think this may be hardest on you."

"Because I ran away after discovering that Helena, our Helena, wanted to do away with us all?" Myka had hoped her jeering would disguise her fear that Abigail's response would unerringly target her ill-defined feelings about both Helenas.

Abigail had only shaken her head, although her smile had become disturbingly bland, as if she had acquired some insight that she wasn't quite ready to share. "Because you tend to assume responsibility for things that are out of your control." She had hesitated a moment before saying softly, "It can't make being a Warehouse agent easy."

"We're all like that, to some degree," Myka had protested.

"But you more than the others."

Now as she watched Pete as he shoveled in spoonfuls of cereal and continued his lamentations about his lost cereal bowl, she couldn't believe the better part of a week had passed since he had texted her about the trials of a retrieval with Artie. "You know, with a kid-size bowl I could have, like, ten bowls of this stuff and convince myself I was having only two normal-size servings. Plus, how can I believe that I'm fortifying my superpowers without my Superman bowl?"

"Talk to her about it," Claudia said, pointing at Myka. "I told her she needed to bring it back from H2's place, but it's all part of her grand plan to de-Pete-ify you before you get married."

As was still frequently the case when Claudia snarked about their relationship, Myka couldn't figure out how much of the hostility was assumed. This morning it especially rankled because . . . because she didn't really know why. Maybe her dislike of the nickname that Claudia and Steve had created for the, yes,secondHelena was feeding her horror of "de-Pete-ify." But she didn't have time to dwell on it, pick at it, obsess about it because Pete had his arms around her and was burying his nose in her neck. "I missed you," he mumbled against her skin. He smelled of milk and, even more cloyingly, of cinnamon, and though part of her resisted this display of affection, part of her craved it. She wasn't used to someone who hugged and cuddled so freely, so easily. Her father was better now than he used to be about showing affection, but he preferred winks and pats to kisses and hugs. Her mother, as usual, tended to follow his lead. As for Sam, there had been sex and then there had been all the other, less important "stuff" that a man needed to do to show a woman that he loved her. Snuggling together on the sofa as they watched a movie had been up there with taking out the trash and flossing - something that had to be done.

It was wonderful not having to extort tenderness from a man, and yet . . . . Without wanting to, because her mind had been going back to it every day and finding some new way for her to re-experience it, Myka remembered how the other Helena had looked at her in the room in which she had been living in quarantine at the CDC, as though she could never fully take her in, never stop touching her face, her hair, her arms, her hands, never stop counting every cell, every atom, every proton and neutron of her. If the other Helena could have inhaled and held her in her mouth as smokers savored a plume of nicotine before releasing it into the air, she would have. Myka hadn't known what it felt like to be devoured until then. She felt light-headed whenever she thought about their first encounter, although her practical side was reminding her that she hadn't eaten anything more substantial than some Twizzlers and a dollar pack of dry-roasted almonds since yesterday afternoon.

Pushing Pete away, but not before giving him a kiss that she feared was less than fair value for his monster hug, she said, "Think you can spare me some of your Cinnamon Toast Crunch?"

If Pete was disappointed that she hadn't hugged him as hard or whispered how much she had missed him, he didn't show it, taking her hand and dragging into her the kitchen, listing with his weirdly charming avidity, "There's some of that left and an entire box of Frosted Flakes. We got a package of those waxy-looking chocolate doughnuts and tons of frozen breakfast sandwiches." Feeling like Gretel to his Hansel as he enumerated all the edible delights of Leena's kitchen, Myka suspected that he was more eagerly anticipating his mid-morning snack than he had been her "Welcome home" kiss. Loving, without a doubt, burning with hunger, probably not. The only thing he wanted to devour this morning was General Mills.

She ate a breakfast sandwich warmed with four others in the microwave because Claudia had decided she wanted one and Pete said he would finish the box by eating the three remaining. After giving Myka the dregs of the coffee carafe - "You want more, you know where everything is" - Claudia had scurried out of the kitchen to collect her laptops and tablets for her continuing tutorial of the other Helena in the Warehouse's multiple systems. Listening to the bangs, thuds, and curses issuing from the sunroom, Myka wondered at the logic of Irene and the regents' plans. Show the other Helena all the systems, educate her on how the Warehouse worked, and yet allow her just one half-hour visit. As the other Helena had later told her, much of the half-hour had been spent with a regent, or so he had been introduced to her, in the Warehouse's war room being instructed on visit protocols. She had been on the floor among the shelves of artefacts for all of ten minutes. What had happened to Irene's bold talk about giving this new Helena what she wanted? If the other Helena had arrived in their world to steal artefacts or otherwise wreak artefact-induced havoc, better to find it out now. Why give her the opportunity to seduce any one of them into assisting her? No, "seduce" wasn't what she had meant, "deceive" was the word she had been looking for, definitely deceive. Why allow the other Helena the time to continue deceiving them about why she was here?

"What's she like?" Pete was licking at his upper lip, trying to remove his chocolate milk mustache. In the refrigerator were a gallon of skim milk and a half-gallon of almond milk (the latter was for Steve, who was cautiously and methodically becoming a vegan) and three gallons of chocolate milk. Three gallons was Pete's standing weekly order. "H2, I guess we call her." He brightened. "Let's all have quasi-Star Warsnicknames." Grinning at Claudia as she rushed back into the kitchen, he said to her, "You can be Clewie, the faithful sidekick to my Man," pointing to his chest, "Solo."

"Just like Chewie, I'm about 12 times brighter than you, dude," Claudia gibed in response as she pulled out a power cord that had been inexplicably stored in a utensil drawer. "You can satisfy your curiosity about H2 tomorrow night. Abigail said we're having a pizza party and attendance is mandatory. Even H.G. has to show up."

"We need a Darth Vader in the crew. She's the yin to our yang, or is it the other way around?" Then he yelled to Claudia, who was already flying down the hall again to the sunroom, power cord bouncing behind her. "Isn't the world going to explode if the two of them are together in the same room?"

"That would rock," she shouted, "but since it hasn't happened yet, I wouldn't bet on it happening tomorrow night."

There was one more colossal thump, which was the front door slamming shut, and then there was silence for a second or two before Pete filled it. "So, how's it been with H.G. being here?" His expression was serious, or at least he meant it to be. Myka conceded that it would be hard to appear serious with half of a chocolate milk mustache still on your face.

"Fine," she said curtly, annoyed that he felt he had to ask, as though she were convalescing from an illness and Helena was the return of the virus. "I've not seen much of her."

He moved his lips from side to side, like he was swishing chocolate milk in his mouth, trying to digest her attitude. He changed the subject. "Want to help me unpack? And I don't mean that in a slu*tty way." He wagged a finger at her. "I'm beat. You share a hotel room with Artie for four nights, listening to his grumbling, his snoring, and seeing him in his baggy briefs. I'm telling you I couldn't sleep for the horror of it." Pete was standing up, stretching, putting his fist to his mouth as he yawned. "C'mon, Me3P0. Or do you like Mykaleia better? It sounds kind of Polynesian, you know." His laugh was almost a giggle. "How about Mykea, like the store? Or . . . ."

She left him asleep in his room, curled up in his bedspread. Even though he had said he was too tired for sex, he had slung his arms around her waist and drawn her down onto the bed with him, murmuring "Maybe we can get a little busy, if you do all the work." It hadn't been difficult to fob him off with excuses, not entirely false, that she was worn out herself; he was already half-asleep as he unsuccessfully tried to unzip her jeans. She had gently pushed him away and he had rolled over in the bedspread without a protest. He blamed Artie for his exhaustion, but she had seen the softball-size bruise on his lower back when his shirt had come untucked as he bent over his travel bag. He had been limping a little, too. Retrievals were often physical, even when they weren't dangerous, and Artie would have been no help in running down someone with the artefact or overcoming any obstacles the artefact itself would have set in their path. While sometimes Artie could pull amazing things out of the old-fashioned valise he carried to help capture an artefact, at other times, they were duds. Now that they were together, she didn't worry any the more about Pete's safety when he was assigned to an artefact retrieval without her . . . because she couldn't. She had always worried about him. Regardless of what happened to them as a couple, that wouldn't change.

But nothing was going to happen to them as a couple, she told herself as she went down the stairs. Nothing bad, anyway. At the bottom she hesitated, unsure of what she was going to do. Today wasn't a day she had off, but she also had nothing scheduled for the next few hours. The other Helena would be tied up with Claudia the rest of the morning, and Artie hadn't scheduled any inventory. Besides, she couldn't be at the other Helena's disposal if she were doing inventory. She hadn't gone on her usual run this morning; she could do that, but she would have to go back upstairs to change into her running pants and top. Restless and, strangely, bored, Myka wandered into the sunroom and out, into the kitchen and out, before running back upstairs and changing into workout clothes. In the basem*nt, off the laundry room, was an area that held weights, a weight bench, and other assorted exercise equipment. She could do some crunches and work on her triceps if she didn't feel like running.

Someone else had had the same idea. Helena, H.G., the name the others called her slipping unbidden and unwanted into Myka's mind, was going through a mixed martial arts routine, interspersed with street fighting moves, at the punching bag. After aiming a kick at the bag's middle, Helena swept low, scooping up a wooden baton from the floor and jamming it, at the end of her arc, into the bag below its top seam. Her hair was held back from her face in a ponytail, and as she spun away from the bag only to lunge forward, jabbing the baton into her imaginary opponent's eye, the ponytail snaking over her shoulder and her hair fanning against her tank top, Myka thought she looked as much like a college sophom*ore pissed off about a break-up as she did an agent. Helena's arms and face were shiny with sweat, but she was breathing no harder than if she had run up a short flight of stairs. Myka couldn't stop her eyes from following the curve of muscle, well-defined muscle, giving Helena's shoulders breadth and her a-; she hurriedly refocused her gaze on the punching bag. Helena was fitter than when she had last been with the Warehouse, and that sleekly muscled body lent the fierce concentration she always adopted when she was practicing kenpo or any one of the other disciplines she followed a power that Myka had to admit was as sexy as hell. Objectively speaking, of course, because whether she found Helena sexy was irrelevant, it was like finding a movie star or pop star sexy. She and Helena were no more going to throw each other down on the mats and have at it than she and . . . she couldn't get Helena out of her head to think of a movie star she found sexy. The point was, the only sexy body she would be getting into bed with was asleep two floors up.

"I'm finished," Helena said, dropping her baton into a gym bag and taking out a towel that she slung around her neck.

Still tangled up in her completely useless reassurances to Pete, who, first of all, couldn't hear them and, second, would be all too vocally appreciative of Helena's new hard body, Myka could only gesture vaguely at the equipment and say, "You don't have to leave on my account."

"I have a meeting with Irene and Adwin. I imagine they'd rather I shower first." Giving Myka the same brief, distant smile that she would give to a stranger in a fitness club's locker room, Helena wound her way around the equipment toward the stairs.

"What's with all the secret meetings, Helena? Why won't Irene and the regents share what's going on with the rest of us?"

"You think we're devising all sorts of schemes to trick our visitor into divulging why she's here?" Helena slowed and turned, wiping her face with a corner of the towel. "You actually believe that Adwin and Irene have been taking me into their confidence? These 'meetings' have been interrogations of me and how I might have been responsible for this." As she lifted her shoulders and let them drop, Myka's eyes were caught once more by the play of muscles, and she forced her gaze up until it met the bleakness of Helena's. "I can't blame them, given my history. But repeatedly going over my experiments and then having to read, and reread, all the journals I kept . . . ." She paused. "I had forgotten how I once sought truth in self-expression." Her tone turning sarcastic, she said, "Much like a 'tween writing in a diary, I couldn't suffer a slight or a disappointment without filling pages about the injustice of it all. Still, regardless of the embarrassment, it feels invasive, a different kind of torture to have your most intimate feelings and experiences perused by the regents." Another shrug, another sinuous swell of muscle, the suggestion of force relaxed, at rest, contrasting with the grimness of her expression, it evoked another response besides pity in Myka. Maybe she should have encouraged Pete's earlier fumblings because there was objectively finding someone sexy and moving on from it and then there was this, feeling that the room was much too small and the sexy person much too close, even though Helena was at the foot of the stairs. On her part, Helena seemed to take no notice, which Myka, feeling her inappropriate surge of attraction begin to dissipate, thought pretty well summed up how things had stood with them since Boone.

Cutting at the air with her hand, Helena said, "No need to feel sorry for me, quite clearly I'm awash in self-pity."

"It seems like when we meet anymore, the Warehouse is on course to wreck the life you've created for yourself." Myka meant the little laugh she had stuck on at the end to sound resigned and ironic, but it sounded more plaintive than either. It wasn't such a stretch to consider the two of them and their friendship, whatever it was, cursed.

Helena wasn't bobbing her head in enthusiastic agreement, but she wasn't disagreeing. She was looking at Myka soberly, intently. "Do you believe I've done this, brought her here?"

The woman she had broken at Yellowstone, the one who had been most at peace in the few seconds before the Warehouse exploded (and Myka would always carry that particular memory of a past that didn't otherwise exist), the one who had then fled to Boone and, later, Los Angeles in search of something that kept eluding her, she had had nothing to with the appearance of the other Helena, that much Myka knew. It wasn't impossible that a younger version of her, in thrall to her sense of her superiority, had labored in a crude nineteenth century laboratory for months, perhaps years, to achieve exactly this result, but Myka didn't think it was likely. Of the many incarnations of Helena she had encountered over the years, the co*cky adventurer, the grieving mother, the mad - and maddened - genius, the humble penitent, and, strangest of all, the suburban housewife, it was this Helena she saw now, the embattled survivor, the stronger, harder body more a donning of armor, Myka decided, than a testament to the benefits of a healthier lifestyle, that might be the truest Helena of all. "No," she said, "because the woman in the guest cottage, fundamentally she's nothing like you."

Helena tilted her head, as if she were trying to literally view Myka's response from a different angle. "I suppose there are many ways I could interpret that, but I think I'll take it as a statement of fact."

After Helena went upstairs, Myka worked out her triceps with ten-pound weights, then slid a mat on top of a square patch of carpet, which provided some additional padding against the cement floor, and did her crunches, but her heart wasn't in it.

Helena

Univille didn't have a pizzeria, and the Domino's and Papa John's in Rapid City wouldn't deliver this far out, so their pizza would have to be frozen . . . unless they ordered online. That way Jinksy could have his vegan pizza, Claudia cried. In response, Pete flipped over the box of Frosted Flakes, a few flakes scattering across the table, and declared they could make him one now by pouring tomato sauce over cardboard. Steve made a face but continued reading on his iPad. The familial squabbling at mealtimes hadn't changed, Helena reflected as she waited for her English muffin to pop up from the toaster, although its volume had been cut in half when she walked into the kitchen. Steve had pushed out a chair for her and offered her a smile, but Claudia and Pete had only looked up from their cereal bowls to glance at her before digging their spoons back into their Frosted Flakes, exchanging their childish and child-like insults, "You're the least funny person I know" and "You're the quadruplest least funny person I know" (the latter coming from Pete, of course).

Bringing her muffin and cup of tea to the table, Helena noticed that Claudia's and Pete's muttering had trailed off, and she wished she had acted on her impulse to take a book or her tablet with her to the kitchen, but she had scolded herself into leaving them in her room, deciding that she should engage with whoever was in the kitchen while she had breakfast. The past few mornings it hadn't been a chore. Steve had been in the kitchen her first morning back and they had stitched together an only mildly awkward conversation about the benefits, and drawbacks, of living in southern California; the second morning Claudia had dashed in only to dash out, and yesterday she had been alone. This morning could test her resolve; Pete had begun - and ended - a conversation with her that was limited to sharing the information that Myka was on her morning run, under the assumption that the only reason she had come downstairs was to have breakfast with her. The assumption annoyed Helena. She wasn't here because of Myka now, and she certainly hadn't resumed working for the Warehouse after her release from the bronze because of her. There was disingenuousness in both claims, Helena recognized, but she had had enough of accounting for every mistake, every prevarication, in front of Irene, Kosan, and whatever regent he had chosen that day to accompany him. She had yet another "meeting" with Irene and Kosan in the afternoon, and then she again would have the opportunity to acknowledge that despite her efforts since the debacle at Yellowstone to be honest and straightforward with others, she was, at heart, a manipulator, a wearer of masks, a teller of the convincing tale -

"What do you want on your pizza, H.G.? There's a website that promises it'll have our pizzas to us in two hours or less, no matter where we are." Claudia was squinting at her phone.

"No need to do that," Abigail said merrily but with a note of command as she shouldered open the back door, several plastic grocery bags dangling from her fingers. A gust of cool air came in with her, and Helena shivered, wishing she had worn more than a long-sleeved thermal tee underneath her sweater. She had always found this part of the United States especially charmless, notwithstanding the fact that the Badlands and the Black Hills were practically on her doorstep, and she numbered the region's endless winter among its many failings. Depositing the bags on the nearest of the counters, Abigail said, with an enthusiasm pitched to do battle with any resistance, "We'll be making our own pizzas. Pre-made crusts, toppings, cheese, they're all here. There are more bags out in the car. Believe me, I haven't missed someone's favorite. Pineapple, anchovies, green olives, you name it." Adopting a doleful, little-girl expression, she asked Pete, "You wouldn't mind being a hero and getting them for me, would you?"

"Of course not," he sighed, hitching up lounge pants patterned with Cleveland Browns football helmets. Stuffing his feet into a pair of shower clogs too small for them on the shoe mat by the door, he let another gust of air swirl in while Steve and Claudia started sorting through the bags' contents. Helena, feeling obliged to help out, joined them in taking cans and packages out of the bags. The English muffin she had half-consumed was beginning to roll uneasily in her stomach as she stared at a can of sliced black olives in her hand. It was difficult to countenance pizza this early in the morning; she had had the progenitor of this century's Americanized cheesy mess with its mulch-like spread of toppings on a retrieval in Naples in the 1890s and much preferred it. A simple flatbread to which only marinara and, if the cook felt so inspired, basil had been added.

Abigail placed in front of her a cellophane-wrapped package of focaccia and a small plastic container of fresh basil. "You strike me as old-school about certain things."

Storing the multiple bags of pizza cheese in the refrigerator, Claudia asked, "Are we going to listen to records on the turntable and play Twister too? I think I have an old Ouija board in my room."

"I've found that when you're not standing around feeling forced to make conversation but working together on something, it's a lot easier to feel comfortable. There's a reason why most people hate co*cktail parties. We don't know how long this other Helena will be with us or why she's really here, but until she demonstrates that she's not to be trusted, I don't see why we can't treat her as a fellow human being." Abigail was leaning her back against the counter, ready to engage Claudia all morning, if necessary, about how to interact with their visitor.

Shutting the refrigerator door with more force than necessary, Claudia said, looking steadily at Helena, "Once bitten, twice shy kind of thing. Now, speaking of getting to know our fellow human being, I have another session with her."

Steve watched Claudia leave, then turned with his hands spread out in a helpless, I-can't-do-anything-with-her gesture. "She's not fond of change, and this is a big change for her to deal with," his glance unerringly locked onto Helena, "having two Helenas at the Warehouse, but I'll make sure she plays nice tonight."

Abigail waited until they were alone before she softly said, "That there would be so much mistrust of your double, I expected. But not about you." Then she smiled knowingly. "We'll get to talk about that later, after your meeting with Irene and Adwin. Your first . . . um . . . status check, we'll call it."

She didn't wait for Helena to respond before crossing over to the back door and opening it for Pete, who lumbered in, bowed with the weight of multiple bags hanging from his hands and arms. Helena reminded herself that she had chosen to kiss him once. There had been other means of diverting his attention, but she had learned not to be slow about taking advantage of her effect on men, certain men, anyway, and she had decided that kissing him would be the surest and least harmful way of distracting him. It had worked, and it hadn't been unpleasant as those things went, but she had never felt any desire to repeat it. For a moment, she imagined Myka kissing him; more to the point, she imagined Myka wanting to kiss him, letting his mouth suck at hers, groping for his hairy cheeks beneath those lounge pants, and she felt not sickened (as she thought she might) or jealous (as she feared she would) but, oddly, bereft, as though their embracing underscored an opportunity she had let slip by. A strange feeling to have, she and Myka never, in their rather star-crossed friendship, having neared the line, let alone crossed it, that separated friends from lovers. While Helena's experience with truly intimate relationships was limited, her experience in recognizing when a situation could (quickly) become sexual was both broad and deep, and she would have known, she wouldn't haven't let the possibility . . . .

"Hey, my arm's about to fall off. Take some of these." Pete impatiently thrust his arm toward her. Helena silently slid two bags off it and took them to the counter. She stopped thinking about Myka, she stopped thinking about pizza, she stopped thinking about anything at all.

Unfortunately she couldn't simply switch her mind off when she was in the room in the Warehouse that she had privately begun to call "All H.G. Wells All the Time." Adwin, without a fellow regent in train, stood across from her, arms folded over his chest, with Irene next to him. The room still stunned her every time she entered it. She had had no idea that she had left so much behind. She had encountered a few of her inventions and personal items when she had been searching for artefacts (rummaging was closer to the truth) that would assist her in bringing the world to an end, but this, this was incredibly . . . dismaying. Books, furniture, tools, even clothing, all carefully preserved despite the less than ideal condition of many of them. She had never been one for taking care of things, taking care with things, except for Christina, and there would be some who would say she had taken precious little care of her daughter either. Helena had learned the hard lesson early on that there was no permanence in this world, and she had seen no reason to treat her sketches of devices, her jottings, any of her creations or leavings, with the thought that future generations might have an interest in them. If she had been thinking at the end, if she had been more than the crazed, nearly gibbering creature who had almost sent the Warehouse up in flames on her last journey back in time, she would have burned everything she owned.

Adwin walked to a bookshelf and pried a worn leather-bound journal from the shelf. "You kept writing even after your brother claimed the identity of H.G. Wells for himself."

"Charles always had a reforming bent; he wanted to use science for the betterment of man. I was more interested in the possibilities of science itself." Helena wanted to slap the journal from his hands, but she kept the mocking smile on her face and in her voice.

"Because you knew that man could never better himself? That even his noblest gestures were too self-interested to succeed?" Irene's voice was just as quiet and mocking. "Can you tell which unfinished work of yours Adwin is holding?"

Helena shook her head. She had written in dozens of journals over the years, waiting for the results of an experiment to manifest, tiding Christina over any number of childhood illnesses, chicken pox, measles, endless colds. As H.G. Wells's fame had grown, she and Charles had collaborated on the writing less and less. He shamelessly used the ideas she had given him years before and, when he found himself utterly unable to make progress on a work, he would ask for her help, but he began to announce, to her face, that he was H.G. Wells. She spent all of her time on her inventions and "errands" for some obscure government agency that seemed to have neither a name nor a location, he argued; he was the one who wrote the damn books and met with the publishers, having, somehow, to incorporate their small-minded criticisms and unceasing demands for revisions, some of which were utterly contrary to the spirit of his, their creation. She found his insistence that Wells's writings should address contemporary issues tiresome; he found her insistence that her newest scientific theory inform their next book unacceptable. So, as she had when she was a very young woman, she took to writing fiction on her own. She had finished precious little of it, and the little she finished she hadn't tried to publish. It was too raw or too clumsy, in need of editing and then more editing once the revisions were completed. One of Charles's virtues, she had been forced to recognize, was his ability to decide when something was good enough. It had served him well when he had made his living as a journeyman writer, selling articles and stories to newspapers and weekly magazines. Don't start it until you have the advance in hand, then finish it and seek your next buyer.

Kosan placed the journal in her unwilling hands. His thumb was pressed between the yellowing pages, exposing the stitching that kept them bound together. She had stopped writing anything other than her plans for improvements to her time machine once Christina died. Whatever it was they wanted her to read, she had written it before then, which still left her trying to place its origin in the 15 years that she had been among Warehouse 12's most valued agents, that is, if she didn't count the year she had left the Warehouse vowing never to return, an emotional rejection of the Warehouse and its mission that Caturanga, in what he would have considered his greater wisdom, had recorded simply as a leave of absence. It wasn't arrogant of her to believe that she had been better than the other agents, it was the truth, in the main. Before her emotional, and moral, collapse after Christina's death, her significant failures had been few, and the one that was the most wounding had been the assignment that was the primary cause of her leaving the Warehouse. It remained her belief even now that the regents and the government ministers who had demanded that a comely young woman be dangled like so much bait had had far more to answer for than she.

Kosan suddenly stepped back from her, and Helena had to clutch at the journal or let it drop to the floor, which would be satisfying and childish in equal measure. Being childish would only further irritate him, however, and Helena's desire was not to give him any cause for extending these sessions. Without care for how fragile the pages were, she flipped to the front of the journal and began skimming words she had written more than a century ago. Her breath caught in her throat as the story unfolded, and she knew when she had written it and why it had excited Kosan's and Irene's suspicions. It was after she had fled the Warehouse, taking Christina with her and hoping to bury herself, only sometimes figuratively, in a desolate stretch of coastline north of Inverness.

Christina, displaying at the age of four an ability to weather sorrow with an equanimity that eluded her mother, loved their tumbledown cottage as she had loved their various drafty flats in London, giggling at the "funny talk" of the crofters whom they lived among and chasing the sheep that could be found, on occasion, grazing outside their front door. While Christina giggled and gave chase, Helena wrote, destroying what she had written as soon as she finished it, because it all, in one way or another, recounted the failure of her last retrieval. Sometimes she wrote a confession, scourging herself for every mistake she had committed; at other times, it was an accusation, in which she attributed the retrieval's failure to others' errors of pride and poor judgement. Late at night, after she put Christina to bed, her writing would turn into what she dreaded most, a love letter to one who was no longer alive to read it. Eventually, as weeks passed into months, her writing became more disciplined, less obviously grief-stricken, and she had begun this story or novel - she had never given much thought to its length because she had never been sure how long she could bear to continue it. The strength of her commitment was ultimately answered by the fact that, returning to the Warehouse once it beckoned, she had thrown the journal, the story unfinished, into a cupboard of the hutch in her and Christina's newest drafty London flat.

She had taken a figure much like herself, an agent of the government, a man, of course, since readers would hardly believe a woman could be employed as an agent of any kind, who, sickened by a career that was as full of violence as it was futility, stumbled upon a method by which he could create a replica of himself. The replica was superior to him in all respects, in intelligence, physical strength, and morality, and the agent had the replica take his place on the missions to which he was assigned, convinced that the replica would ensure a better, more just outcome than he himself could. The results had exceeded the agent's hopes until the replica had demanded the freedom to exist apart from his maker - and Helena had gotten no further than that before she had packed the journal into the trunk along with a few other items and placed it, herself, and Christina in the back of a farmer's wagon for the return trip to Inverness.

"Aside from how disturbingly it reads in the context of all the horrors of the twentieth century, it's particularly alarming in light of this . . . replica . . . of you in our midst now," Kosan said.

"It is not some eugenicist tract," Helena replied hotly. "It was an intensely personal response to a retrieval that had gone horribly wrong." She swallowed, looking down at the journal, seeing only the words "My dearest Helena," which had never been written in it, being the intimate address of a letter equally as anguished as her own outpourings and which, thankfully, didn't exist in this sad, adhoc museum. Because she had burned it almost as soon as she had read it. Another futile gesture in one of the bleakest episodes in her life since she could recite it virtually word for word even now. Trying to regain her composure, she closed the journal and as aggressively pushed it back into Kosan's hands. "Is there nothing here or in the Warehouse's official archives that mentions this retrieval?" Kosan's and Irene's expressions remained equally blank. "Considering how ingloriously it ended, in the deaths of two people, one a diplomat in Her Majesty's government, and the loss of a reputed artefact, I'm not surprised. Regardless, however, of what led me to write that, I had no interest in pursuing the creation of clones." Smiling tightly, she added, "One of me was quite enough."

"We expected you to say nothing less. It doesn't take away from the fact we have proof that, at one time, you were interested in the possibility of human replication." Glancing at the journal with distaste, Kosan placed it on top of the bookcase.

"Even if I had pursued it, do you really think I would have been satisfied withher?" Helena infused her voice with contempt. "She babbles of elders and relics as if she were an initiate in a religious order, which, perhaps, it is for her. She venerates her Warehouse. With the exception of her obvious devotion to it and a schoolgirl crush on some idealized version of Agent Bering, she exhibits no passion and certainly no determination either to break into this Warehouse or to escape from her cage."

"You think she lacks your fire, your . . . genius . . . let us say." Irene wasn't smiling, but the derision was clear in the dryness of her tone and the steepling of her fingers over her abdomen, like a boarding school headmistress who had just caught a student returning after curfew.

If she were supposed to act like a guilty student ready to accept chastisem*nt, then Helena was ready to stay in this room for yet another eternity before she ever offered an apology to Kosan and Irene. "I'm not saying she's not a replica of me, only that I would have done -"

"A better job," Kosan finished for her. "If not you, then who?"

"I don't know." Impatiently Helena said, "If you would quit interrogating me and let me work, perhaps we might find out. Just as first steps, we need to reexamine all the security systems, ours and the Warehouse's own, as well as complete a thorough inventory. As second steps -"

This time it was Irene who interrupted her. "We conducted an audit of the Warehouse, every system, every inventory record as soon as we knew of her presence. There has been no intruder, no loss of an artefact. That's not common knowledge outside this room, but there's been no breach, Helena."

Helena had to will a confidence that was no longer second nature to her before she let herself speak. "That you were able to detect. I would like to do my own audit my own way as well as initiate some actions you might not have taken. If you don't trust me, take Claudia off retrievals and make her my watchdog. And let me do the interrogations of this other Helena Wells. If she really is some version of me, I'd have a better chance than anyone else of divining what she's up to." Delivering a jab at Irene, she said, "Do what you said you were going to do and let the fox into the henhouse."

"We are, we are," Irene said mildly, Helena's jab no more than the blow of a feather against that rock-like impassivity. "You'll get to talk to her soon, so long as Agent Bering is present."

Helena frowned. "You're not thinking I would attempt to harm her?" Then she recalled how frequently Myka had been with the other Helena, mostly taking her on various shopping trips, if she had correctly pieced together the tag ends of the conversations she had overheard. She heard again Myka's words from yesterday, said so flatly, "Fundamentally she's nothing like you." Shaking her head with a resignation that wasn't entirely devoid of anger, Helena answered her own question, "No, that's not it. You're playing the three of us against each other. Am I supposed to figure out how my double's attempting to manipulate Myka or is Myka supposed to be on the watch for what I'm signaling to my co-conspirator?"

"Both, either, neither." Irene shrugged. "Maybe we're just going by the adage 'Two heads are better than one.' It starts tonight, with the get-together Abigail has planned. As for the other things you've requested," she sent Kosan a meaningful look which he reluctantly returned, "come to Artie's office with Claudia tomorrow morning, and you can begin your 'audit.'" The lips briefly quirked up. "As for now, I believe you have an appointment with Abigail."

From the frying pan . . . but Helena shrugged in response, just as casually. Kosan glowered at her. "None of this means that you're off the hook, Helena. You will continue to meet with me and the other regents as we request. Do you understand?"

Helena sighed. Kosan could take it as an affirmative. She did, and didn't, want to be in this room again. It had her journals and sketchbooks, designs for inventions that had existed only in her mind, mementos of a sort. It had been a life that had had small promise at its conception but, nonetheless, had achieved so much more than her circ*mstances could have possibly warranted. Then she had fulfilled that small promise by bringing her life, this first one, to a premature and ignominious end. She didn't yearn to be in this room because it was a testimony to greatness betrayed, she wanted to be in it because it also held a child's table and chairs with a chipped and incomplete child's tea set, a rocking horse that she had built herself, children's books, the brush she had used to brush Christina's hair, which, unlike hers, had had a tendency to curl. She could try to sneak into this room, but she doubted that she would ever be able to find it. Each time she had come to meet Kosan and Irene here, she would no sooner emerge from the umbilicus than she would find herself spirited to the room's center. They hadn't explained to her how that was happening anymore than they explained who had preserved the room's contents.

She could always ask again. It never hurt to try, or, rather, as she had learned to tell herself after she experienced the painful result of a failed experiment, it never hurt enough not to try a second time. "You haven't told me yet who collected all of this, or why. Some of it I can understand, but Christina's things . . . ."

"Caturanga." It was the only logical answer. Caturanga, her fa*gin, her spiritual father, her mentor, her adversary. As if Irene sensed how the answer still held the power to sear her, she said more gently, "He believed that when you were released from the bronze - and, for him, it always remained a matter of when, not if - you could find your center here, if the world into which you emerged was too foreign or inhospitable." She must have also heard the question Helena had yet to ask. "Had you been released by anyone other than James MacPherson, we might have told you about this room then, but we deemed it too dangerous."

And we were right. Irene had the graciousness to leave that unsaid. "I think I'm ready to meet with Miss Cho, if you don't mind whisking me out of here." Helena hoped the sarcasm masked the unsteadiness in her voice, but she couldn't be sure.

The session with Abigail had been, in its own way, no less unsettling, although Abigail didn't view her as a potential threat, or, if she did, she hid it better than Kosan or Arthur . . . . Shutting the door to her room, Leena's old room, behind her, Helena tried to close off that line of thought. There was one other empty bedroom on this floor, albeit a smaller one, more of a size with the others, to which she could have been assigned, but Irene or Arthur or Abigail - maybe it had been a decision made by committee - had assigned her to Leena's. Perhaps they thought she might find it peaceful, as Leena had been a tolerant, gentle, compassionate person. Perhaps they thought she might be at home among the dead, considering that she had miraculously escaped the graveyard at least twice. Perhaps they thought that something of Leena's extraordinary ability to read "auras" still existed and that, somehow, if she were planning something nefarious, Leena's spirit would find a method of communicating it to them. If the latter, Helena would quickly point out that for all her so-called aura-reading, Leena had tumbled to her plans no sooner than the others. In fact, though she wouldn't willingly admit it to anyone associated with the Warehouse, even Myka, Helena suspected that Leena possessed no supernatural abilities. Auras were about as reliable and authentic as mood rings. What Leena had, much like Steve Jinks, was a superior ability to read people, and, Helena grudgingly admitted, an undeniable talent for working with artefacts.

In addition to the standard queen-size bed, bureau, and desk, Helena's room was big enough to include a sitting area, which encompassed two rather old-fashioned-looking wing back chairs and a side table between them. She sat in one of them, kicking off her boots and crossing her ankles, her feet, warm enough for the moment, in a pair of unbecoming but thick wool socks. She had had to buy them as she had the thermal tops she wore under her sweaters; one didn't have to layer in southern California. She would probably also have to invest in a space heater and an electric blanket before too long if this matter about the other "her" weren't resolved soon. She had expected Abigail to prod her with questions about she felt about the other Helena. Or the Warehouse. Or Myka. Helena was certain that her dismissal of her friendship with Myka during the dinner she and Abigail had shared in Atlanta was given all the credibility it deserved. But what Abigail had wanted to talk about was Nate and her 13 months in Boone.

"Why? What does he or the time I was there have to do with what's going on now?" They were meeting in a room off the sunroom, which had apparently been given to Abigail to do whatever it was she did, exactly, for the Warehouse. It was cheerful, catching a good deal of the afternoon sun, but poorly insulated and poorly constructed, with a definite slant to the floor. An add-on after the home was built. Perhaps the missus had wanted a sewing room. There was a square, unsanded patch of the wooden floor that looked like it might have been covered by a pot-bellied stove. Bring it back, Helena silently cried, hugging herself for warmth.

"I'm thinking that if things had worked out between you and Nate, you wouldn't be here." Abigail was cold too, seated in a chair next to her but slightly angled away (a carefully calibrated, friendly-but-professional distance), a hip-length cardigan belted around her. "You wanted to be shut of the Warehouse, and he was your best bet. Why couldn't you make it work with him?"

There were any number of things wrong with what she had said, not least the way she had said it, but Helena knew that the provocation was deliberate. Although Abigail looked nothing like the marriage counselor she and Nate had seen, the air of skepticism was familiar. "First of all, you're never 'shut' of the Warehouse once it has its claws into you. You'll find that out should you ever decide to leave. Second, I wasn't as nearly cold-blooded about becoming involved with Nate as you seem to think. Third, I did try to make it work, much harder than he did." Despite her intention to remain dispassionate, Helena heard the increasing edge in her voice.

Having succeeded in getting a reaction from her, Abigail let her expression soften and her tone, correspondingly, became less brisk. "We've got time for a story. Why don't you tell me how you and Nate met, what first attracted you to him."

Helena had her responses at the ready. She had first tried them out on Myka, then honed them on the therapist, and as she repeated them to Abigail, she almost believed them herself. She had met Nate in a cooking class, they had bonded over their losses (she a daughter to a tragic hit-and-run, he a wife to cancer), and after-class coffees had become dinners had become dates had become her meeting Adelaide had become her moving in three months later. There had been no immediate attraction, no fateful looks across a crowded room, just a friendship that had grown into something more. Abigail didn't interrupt and she didn't write anything down; in fact she had no notepad with her, no computer. She only listened, and Helena might have thought she had convinced her that what had happened was how it had happened, except for the fact that sometimes when Abigail met her gaze, her eyes would narrow, as if she could hear the truth beneath the fiction.

But how do you explain falling in love with a house and with the idea of the family that lived in it? To while away a Sunday afternoon - she would have had to invent crimes in Boone to keep herself fully occupied in the crime lab and returning to anything like tinkering was out of the question for the time being - she would drive meanderingly through the town, and one Sunday she had driven down a lane with exceedingly well-tended lawns and older homes. The house had looked nothing like the house that was stamped in her memory, but it called to her all the same. She had slowed the car and admired the trimmed shrubs, the flower bed, even the flagpole with its flag. She had hoped that its occupants might venture outside at that moment, if for no other reason than to dispel the fantasy she was creating of a husband, older, genial, but more invested in the distractions he pursued outside his work and family; a wife, younger, beautiful, and dangerously bored; a son, the composite of them both, whose indifference to his studies was a source of frustration. Her charge had been to make a place for herself with them, but it had become more than an assignment; the months she had spent with them were among the happiest she had known, and the love she had found there had been real.

She drove past the house on more than one Sunday and with the same guilty, shivering pleasure that a stalker might, she had asked her co-workers if they knew anything about who owned it. It might have been left at that, heads shaking no, except for her supervisor, who had volunteered that Nate Willis lived there with his daughter, who happened to be in the same third grade class with her daughter. Sad story, his wife dying of a brain tumor almost two years ago now, after having survived breast cancer. And with those facts, no less heartbreaking for being ordinary, Helena's fantasy had dissolved, and she no longer drove her car down the lane. Assiduously avoided the neighborhood, in fact. Deciding that healthier ways of passing her time were necessary, she had signed up for a cooking class. She was tired of eating TV dinners, and she could learn now the skills that she had had no mother to teach her and no interest in adopting when she had become a mother herself. The class met on Thursday evenings, and the students had been randomly assigned to the various kitchen stations. Her station mate was a man approximately her own age, not especially handsome, but he obligingly laughed at the small jokes she made. He said his name was Nate and he was a single parent. The light of his life was his nine-year-old daughter, Adelaide.

Helena stiffly pushed herself up from her chair. She might have fallen asleep for a little while. She turned on the lamp on the side table and walked to the window that looked out on the garden behind the bed and breakfast. It was too dark to make anything out, but she could see the lights in the guest cottage. Soon her 'cousin' would be arriving for the pizza party. Had that Helena been dreaming of a place where she felt she had belonged? Was she praying for the anomaly to make an appearance and take her back? Good luck with that, Helena thought wryly, because there is no going back, not really, not even in memory. Your mind will make a different landscape of it, add a feature here, take away a feature there.

Before she took the flight from Boone that, multiple connections later, would land her in Los Angeles, she had had the taxi drive her down that lane she had lived on for a handful of months, no more than a brief, bittersweet moment in time in a life as long as hers. No one would be home, Nate was at work and Adelaide in school, and she told the driver to stop in front of the house for a minute or two. No longer than a minute or two because she didn't want the neighbors telling Nate about the strange car that had been parked outside, which would whip up his paranoia about her and her former employer to even greater heights. But whatever magic the Willis house had once exercised over her was gone, and it was just a house, attractive and spacious and set in a lawn as well tended now as it had been 13 months ago, yes, but just a house. Nothing more.

Chapter 5

Chapter Text

Helena

They were similarly dressed again, skinny jeans, forest green jumpers, except that the other Helena's was a cardigan, cashmere or cashmere-like, over a turtleneck, while hers was a bulky, completely unfeminine affair. Not that she usually cared about such distinctions, she took note of them because dressing in a manner others thought was consistent with your gender - if you were consistent with your gender, Helena smiled wryly to herself - had its advantages. But she had seen Myka's eyes flick over the other Helena when she shyly entered the kitchen, and Helena acknowledged, for the first time since she had put it on, that her choosing this fisherman's sweater, if a practical, body-heat-preserving choice, was also an unflattering one. A blush surged up into the other Helena's cheeks upon meeting Myka's gaze, and Myka, flustered, backed into the refrigerator. Helena could tell herself that Myka was easily flustered, that the clumsiness signified nothing because Myka was frequently clumsy, but she sensed a charge in the room that hadn't existed a moment ago.

The blush retreated from her double's cheeks as she glanced at Helena. "Hullo, cousin," she said coolly.

Helena nodded, and, after giving her the “Be nice” look that Helena remembered using on Christina, Abigail took the other Helena's hand and led her to a counter on which pizza makings were meticulously spread. "I'm assuming pizza exists in your reality, and if not, consider this your introduction."

The other Helena took in the smorgasbord of toppings with a wide grin, one that Helena was fairly certain she would split her lips trying to form, and said, "I spent ten months in the late 1970s on an anomaly retrieval, and I was introduced to many things." The grin curled mischievously, and Abigail playfully slapped the other Helena's arm.

"Everything about tonight will be within the bounds of the law," she said mock sternly.

Pete bounded in and opened the door to the oven. Closing it, he rubbed his hands. "Just a few more minutes." Eyes darting to Helena and then the other Helena, he completed a dramatic double take. "How are we supposed to tell you two apart?"

The other Helena touched her hair, neatly swept up into a chignon. "Unlike my 'cousin' over there," she said with ironic emphasis, "I usually wear mine up. I've never quite decided whether it's how I remind myself of the time I actually live in, or whether I think it's more efficient."

"You two have been introduced already?" Abigail looked from the other Helena to Pete, and while Pete was already turning his attention back to the oven, the other Helena was observing him and blushing once more.

"Claudia did the honors," the other Helena murmured.

Interesting. Out of the corner of her eye, Helena noticed the speculative expression on Myka's face. If she were to guess - and, really, unless she wandered into the parlor that served as the TV room and joined in whatever video game Steve and Claudia were playing or sat with Artie at the piano (which was how he was opting to limit the togetherness of this get-together), she had little else do with her time other than spin theories about her double - she would guess that the other Helena and the other Pete Lattimer had known each other quite well. It didn't tell her anything more about why or how the other Helena was here, but she would file it away in the event that it would become useful knowledge.

Grabbing a pair of oven mitts, Pete opened the oven door and began taking cookie sheets from the rack. Three cookie sheets, three pizzas piled high with goo, and apparently all his. Helena shuddered as he brought the pizzas over to the table. With a few swipes of the pizza cutter, he sliced the pizzas into gargantuan slices, which he then piled three- and four -high on a plate. "All yours," he announced to the room at large. Passing Myka, he stopped long enough to kiss her on her cheek. "I'm saving you a seat."

The other Helena had watched the exchange, one brow crooking up her forehead as she glanced at Myka. The smile she flashed was only mildly teasing, yet it seemed to cause Myka to backpedal once more. Helena thought that she hadn't seen so much blushing and discomfort about matters sexual since she had attended a lecture given by a temperance league when she was with Warehouse 12, the good ladies taking a completely unnecessary pleasure in describing how "evil spirits" brought out the "lowest of animal urges" in even the most God-fearing of men and women. It so happened that one of those women was in the possession of an artefact that - Helena put the memory aside. Nothing could dampen the energy of a social gathering, especially if it didn’t have much to begin with, like an old woman's reminiscing.

Abigail followed Pete out of the kitchen to call to Steve and Claudia and Artie to come make their pizzas. Myka gestured at the other Helena. "Shall we put ours together?" She looked over her shoulder at Helena. "Want to join us?"

"Go ahead, I'll do mine later."

She wasn’t a few minutes late joining everyone else. She was a half-hour late, and the parlor was crowded. Even Artie was eating his pizza in the room. Helena squeezed herself into a corner of the sagging sofa, elbow-dueling with Steve as they tried to lift their pizza slices from their plates. She had been crowded out of the oven by Pete when she had been too slow about claiming the free oven rack for her flatbread. Pete had spun one of the pre-made crusts on a cookie sheet and slathered it with pizza sauce and cheese, sliding it into the oven before she had finished sprinkling basil over her mozzarella and tomatoes. Since Steve had just put his vegan pizza on the remaining rack, she had had to wait until one of them was finished. She had noisily sighed and glared at Pete, but he had only rubbed his stomach and said, "I gotta feed the beast, H.G."

Seeing him sit cross-legged among the remains of his first three pizzas, a fine layer of crumbs and bits of cheese surrounding him, tearing at the last half of his fourth pizza, she could be easily convinced that he was a beast. Put him inside a cave and substitute bones for the crumbs, and he wouldn't look at all out of place. Myka had corkscrewed herself into the armchair against which he was leaning his back, ignoring both his slavering and the deliberate nudging of her legs with his head, the latter an act not so much of possession, Helena thought, as of contentment.

The other Helena was sitting at the opposite end of the sofa, which made it difficult for Helena to observe her unless she leaned forward and craned her neck. If she were going to do that, then she might as well announce that she was observing her double and would the other Helena mind assisting her by moving to a spot that was easier for her to see? Having finished as much of her flatbread as she cared to - it wasn't nearly as good as the ones she had eaten in Naples over a hundred years ago, nineteenth century standards of sanitation apparently adding a special piquancy to the taste - she waited in a near-stupor, disgruntled and overheated, for Abigail to suggest that someone bring out the board games.

"So what do we call you?" Pete asked the other Helena abruptly, putting his plate down. "Myka says H2 is 'demeaning,'" he curled his fingers in air quotes, "and H.G. has H.G. and Helena covered." He paused, co*cking his head to the side and giving Helena a sardonic look. "Unless we only call you H.G. and save Helena for the other Helena."

The gender-neutral H.G. had never been neutral. Oh, Charles had tried to argue that it was, pointing out that their collaborations could have been published under a decidedly more masculine pen name, Henry Wells or Harold Wells, for instance, and he had rarely failed to underscore that his name was represented by neither H nor G, unlike hers. But as they began to disagree more vehemently over plots and characters, even sentence structure, H.G. became less a pseudonym than an alternate identity for her brother. Charles Wells was a scribbler, a penny-pinching domestic tyrant who shoveled in food at the table with a butter knife always clutched in one hand, at the ready, she had supposed, to attack anyone who attempted to take his food from him. Conversely, H.G. Wells was a lauded author, something of a ladies man despite his spindly frame and crooked teeth, and always willing to underwrite a dinner for his admirers at his club (and he did belong to one, regardless of his natterings about social and economic justice). H.G., over time, became Herbert George and the fact that the letters had once stood for something else ("To our Readers, with Humility and Gratitude, we Offer this First Endeavour" had been the acknowledgement in their first published work) and someone else, Harriet Gardiner, their mother, slowly faded in Charles' mind. H.G. had never beenhername.

"I don't mind H2. You can also call me Helen or Wells or Elena - we have a Spanish great-grandmother - or Diane. It's my middle name." The other Helena had stood up, empty plate in hand, and was looking at each of them in turn. Her tone was casual, but her smile was a little too winning.

Since when did any Helena Wells, no matter what time line or reality she claimed to come from, seek others' approval? "My parents were too poor to give me a middle name," Helena said dryly. "They could ill afford the 'a' as it was." The smile she bared at her double wasn't in the least winning.

"What the frak?" Claudia sputtered. "The G's bogus?"

"The G stands for grandiosity," Artie growled from his chair.

"I vote for 'Givin' it up' or G-spot," Pete cracked, "for Ms. 'Many of my lovers have been men.'" He tilted his head back and grinned up at Myka, who had turned more sober than the moment merited.

After a shuttered look at her, which Helena couldn't interpret, Myka directed her response to the other Helena. "Diane's pretty, it suits you."

Maybe it was the sincerity in Myka's voice or the indirect compliment she was paying, but the other Hel -Diane- pinked when she finished, and Helena didn't fail to catch the knowing glance that Claudia and Steve exchanged. Myka did rather sound like a schoolgirl with a crush, Helena acknowledged sourly, and Pete said with a laugh, "Should I be jealous?"

The silence grew awkward until Diane said, "This is about the time, if it were 1978, that we'd all be sharing a joint."

Abigail laughed and clapped her hands, while Artie looked furtive. Well, that explained why Helena had sometimes found him in the bed and breakfast's kitchen late at night with open bags of cookies and potato chips. Abigail's lips were pursed in a playful pout. "Alas, this is considered federal property, so there will be no dabbling in illegal substances. However," she looked at Claudia, "maybe we can indulge in one of my other favorite things from the '70s."

Claudia sighed and left her place beside Steve to open the drawer in an end table and take out a laptop. "You so owe me for this."

In a few seconds, the speakers placed around the large flat screen began to boom with the unrelenting beat of a song from the disco era. Artie groaned and, covering his ears with his hands, walked with the lumbering gait of a bear in pain toward the doorway. "It'll take three hours of Bach to get rid of the sound of this." He turned and scowled at all of them. "Tomorrow morning, all of you, even her" a stubby finger at Diane, "at the Warehouse, 8:30 sharp."

Abigail was trying to entice a reluctant Steve onto the crowded floor. She was nudging chairs and ottomans away with her foot as he shuffled to her. Myka made herself small in her armchair as Pete, brushing crumbs from his jeans, pushed himself up. When she shook her head at his extended arm, he held it out to Diane. "Aw, come on, you gotta know a few steps, right?" He struck a Travolta pose fromSaturday Night Fever. She looked at Myka beseechingly, and when Myka shrugged and offered only a crooked smile in consolation, Diane responded with a half-helpless, half-accepting bobble of her head and, blushing violently yet again, began following Pete's version of The Hustle, which included more strutting and pointing than Helena remembered from her single late-night viewing of the movie with Claudia.

"Hey," Myka was calling to her, "let's start cleaning up while Tony Manero here gets his dance on."

The dishwasher was a cranky 20-year relic that would shut off during cycles out of spite, so they cleaned the plates, cookie sheets, and utensils in the sink. Myka had volunteered to wash, attacking spots of burned and congealed cheese with a vigor that had Helena asking her, "Are you releasing some aggression?," knowing she was doing it to needle her. The music, still disco, still throbbing, had grown louder, and she felt she had practically shouted the question at Myka. The vibration of the floorboards was traveling up her legs and she reflected that whatever country dancing had been popular at the time of the bed and breakfast's construction had likely been relegated to barns. The parlor now suffering rolling grapevines and . . . jumping? . . . would have been reserved for teas and polite conversation when it was new.

Myka dropped the scrub brush and held up the plate up to the light. "No, just making sure it's clean. My dad would always take the dishes out of the drainboard and inspect them. If they weren't clean, he'd call me and Tracy back to wash them again."

"Your father was an arse," Helena said bluntly, "although I think 'asshole' captures it even better."

"He's been mellowing." She hesitated, then said quietly, "They live with Tracy and Kevin now. Mom's beginning to have memory issues, and Dad . . . I think he's finally realized how much he's depended on her all these years."

Helena had no difficulty understanding her, although she wasn't sure, given the hammering ofDisco Inferno, how that was possible. She very thoroughly wiped dry a glass and put it in a cupboard. She heard Myka wryly chuckle. "Do you think Hel-. . ." she caught herself, "Diane and the Pete in her reality slept together?"

"Would it bother you if they did?" Helena idly twisted a fork that she had plucked from the silverware holder.

"Of course not," Myka said, her glance at Helena surprised. "I'm not in any danger of confusing Pete with an alternate version of him."

"That's not the part I think would bother you."

Myka didn't blush. Instead the line of her jaw grew stiff and her eyes narrowed in anger. "You and Artie and Irene and the regents don't have to worry about me. Just because I can understand how alone and overwhelmed she might feel doesn't mean that I also don't realize that she could be a threat. There's no security risk in treating her like a human being." Then, with a quick twist of her lips, as if she were admitting to something that pained her, she said, "Let me be clear about something. I was never so dazzled by you that I wouldn't recognize everything that makes her different from you."

Dazzled. They were talking about it or, more accurately, on the verge of talking about it, that friendship of theirs that had seemed to fracture so badly and so inexplicably. Helena stared at the tines of the fork, although, with Myka's meticulous cleaning, no fragment of food dared stick to it. That bitter little pull of Myka's mouth, the sarcasm with which she had said "dazzled," she was challenging her to deny that their feelings hadn't pushed against the bounds of friendship. Or challenging her to confirm it. Helena dropped the fork into the silverware drawer. It didn't matter anymore, what their feelings had been. She was here to solve the riddle of her double's appearance, and then she would be gone . . . until the Warehouse decided that it needed her again.

"The fact that she would have slept with Pete Lattimer at any time, in any reality, is proof enough that she and I are not the same," Helena said lightly.

The eyes that she had narrowed in anger slowly shut and when they reopened, the look Myka gave her was so blandly unreadable that Helena had the unsettling impression that she was drying dishes next to a stranger. "I think Irene and the regents are looking for more trenchant observations than that from you," Myka said just as lightly, but Helena didn't fail to recognize the steely thread running through it. The moment when the conversation might have become about them had passed, and Helena, with a regret that was sharper than she had anticipated, followed the course that Myka set.

It touched on what Artie might have in mind for them at tomorrow morning's meeting, how Helena was settling back into the rhythms and routines of the bed and breakfast, the kind of professional small talk that colleagues exchanged in the workplace and which Helena had had to learn to endure. It was the grease for the wheels of collegiality, but knowing it didn't make Helena appreciate it the more. That she and Myka had sunk - temporarily she hoped - to this level made chatting about whether Irene and Adwin were of one mind about Warehouse matters nearly unbearable.

Myka wiped the counters then tossed the sponge behind the faucet. "I'm going to rejoin the party."

There were only a few dishes left in the drainboard, but Helena felt no compulsion to dry them in a hurry. The music thundering from the parlor had changed, the beat as unrelenting but slower and the bass more pronounced. It wasn't disco any longer; they had skipped decades in just a song or two. As the floor continued to shake with the throbbing of the bass and the predictably rhythmless movements of a handful of agents, it occurred to Helena as she idly ran her towel across a plate that she had never danced, not once in two centuries. There had been dancehalls in London, but they had been considered a "low" form of entertainment, suitable only for the working class and working men at that. Balls and galas had been reserved for the upper class. She had never been invited to either, dancehall or ball, and hadn't registered the snub. When so much of the world still waited to be discovered - and manipulated - dancing was a waste of time. Although her investigations of how the world worked had been vastly reduced in scope and number, Helena's opinion of dancing hadn't correspondingly improved. A good cardiovascular routine would do more for one's physical health, and if it were just a prelude to . . . f*cking . . . then why bother with the prelude?

Helena stopped outside the parlor, uncertain whether she would dare the sonic assault of Katy Perry or take refuge in the solitude of her room. The music changed again, the beat even more insistent but slower, seductive, as if an adult had grabbed the mic from the always girlish Katy. Everyone except Myka was dancing, Claudia crowing "Mary J. is in the house" and elbowing past Pete, whose dancing was still mainly represented by arm thrusts and whoops, to take her place next to Steve. Helena was about to abandon the party for her room when the fixity of Myka's gaze caught her attention.

She hadn't known that her body could move like that. She registered it with the same shock that had visited her whenever Caturanga beat her at chess, as though his understanding of the game existed on a level she could never reach. She could predict the moves on the board with an almost mathematical accuracy, but he saw it as an actual battle, in which men and ultimately kingdoms were lost, his logic, no less impeccable than hers, willing to flirt with a mysticism that apprehended in the vanquishing of her bishop churches ransacked and relics plundered. Her "cousin," her twin,Dianeor whatever she called herself, inhabited her, their body with visible delight; her hips swung back, side to side, brushing up gently against Abigail and then falling away, her motion synchronized with the beat and, even more remarkably, with the movement of Abigail's circling, thrusting hips. Her hands rested lightly at Abigail's waist only to flutter away and then flutter back. She seemed completely absorbed in matching Abigail's steps, her eyes virtually closed, lashes fanning against her skin. Yet Helena had no doubt that she was aware that Myka was watching her. Her eyes, Diane’s eyes, could look closed, but their shape and set, long and slightly angled, allowed them to observe people while their focus seemed entirely inward.

Diane made her recognition of Myka's attention explicit, beckoning her to join them, but Myka only shook her head while Pete whooped at the top of his lungs, "It's a lady triple-decker, babe. You've got to do it, Mykes. I won't ask for a birthday present ever again."

Myka summoned a grin, frazzled, beleaguered, and completely unconvincing, before dropping onto the sofa. Diane nonchalantly transformed the beckoning into a lifting and dipping of her hand, as if she were pushing the invitation, now that it had been refused, away from her, never to be acknowledged again, Helena thought wryly. She turned away from the room, toward the hallway, the stairs, but not before her double, her eyes unmistakably open, fixed on her as the music faded to its end. What did she see, her cousin? Envy? Regret? Loneliness? Diane's face, however, was impassive, even if her own wasn't.

"Jesus, let's open some windows," Claudia was exclaiming.

"Hydration," Abigail was crying.

"Dessert," Pete was demanding.

Diane dropped her head, hair unraveling from what had once been a neatly wound chignon. Her hands were at work, gathering it, twisting it up. No longer a siren of the dance floor, she looked ordinary enough, if somewhat sweaty, a woman who, despite all the suggestiveness of her hips only moments ago, was probably in search of no more than a glass of cold water. Helena left the others milling, stretching, aimlessly making requests at the ceiling for soda and ice cream. Reaching the cooler sanctuary of her room, she leaned against the door, never more aware of the leadenness, the inertness of her body. It didn't play, it didn't dance, it didn't have demands that weren't subject to her will.

As a child she had learned that letting her body's needs drive her pilfering was the surest means of getting caught. Hunger made her too eager, too clumsy; she couldn't swipe an apple from a basket without knocking the basket over. She was most successful stealing food when food wasn't the only thing she could think about. As she became both more sure-fingered and sure-footed, her grabs not grabs but planned thefts, she taught herself how to steal items that could buy her more food than she could make herself sick eating, watches and coin purses, reticules and fancy shawls. But it was Caturanga who had transformed her thinking, who had caught her at the age of 12 attempting to relieve him of a money clip and, after showing her every error she had made, promised her that there was work, good work, work prized by the highest levels of Her Majesty's government, for clever and audacious street urchins like her. Everything was a tool, her mind, her body . . . other people. She had only to learn how to control them, direct them when they least wanted to be directed. The greatest joy was to be found in discipline, all else was self-indulgence, and, in the work she would someday be doing, self-indulgence was usually fatal.

She hadn't known then that no one could promote such a philosophy without a weakness for the pleasures it renounced. She had cared only that her next meal and the meal after that one and the meal after that meal were assured. All that was required of her was to do as he said.

Myka

The party ended late, well after both Helenas had left it. That alone should have helped to relax her, but she was tired and edgy both. Abigail was on her way back to Univille, and Steve was in his room trying to meditate away Meghan Trainor and Bulldog and Drake and Twenty-One Pilots or, conversely, trying to find a hook-up on Grindr. Even though Abigail and Hel - . . . Diane's bump-and-grind had pretty much put an end to the dancing because no one could follow that, the music had continued to pound, loud and in service to Claudia's desire to torture. Myka would have escaped to her own room but for Pete's insistent hand, squeezing her thigh, kneading her neck, and, from her neck, reaching up into her hair to massage her scalp. His other hand was firmly wedded to a controller as he warred with Claudia through countless games ofGrand Theft Auto. Eventually he would win enough, or lose enough, to lose interest altogether and then his hand would be pulling her upstairs and into his room. Myka wasn't exactly dreading having sex with him, but she wasn't looking forward to it. She could blame it on being tired or not being in the mood, but the problem was that she was in the mood. She felt incendiary, explosive, needing just a single scrape of a fingernail against her skin to set her alight. She wanted to be pressed against a wall and f*cked so hard that she would scream when she came. Knowing it was more fantasy than reality, the few times she had had sex standing up having led to nothing like an ear-splitting org*sm, didn't make the image any less provocative. She wanted to have an org*sm like that; in fact, she wanted nothing more, but she wasn't sure that Pete was the one who could provide it.

She hadn't been alone in finding Diane's dancing a revelation, even Steve had looked a little glassy-eyed for a few seconds. There was nothing wrong in finding a colleague's, a fellow agent's, dance moves sexy, was there? In a nonwork setting, of course. The confusion, the complicated parsing out of what she was feeling, what she wanted to feel, and what she believed she should feel, only dominated her thoughts when Helena had stopped in the doorway to watch Abigail and Diane, and then it became all too uncomfortably present to her that Diane's body was Helena's as well. Their dressing so much alike and Diane's hair escaping the prison of its chignon only heightened the illusion that it was Helena dancing. The body that Myka had seen the day before attacking a punching bag, which she remembered being on the attack or on the alert but rarely at rest during their time together at the Warehouse, was offering itself, playfully, teasingly.

Yet she had only to see Helena's eyes, the interest as analytical as it was . . . resentful . . . to realize that it wasn't Helena dancing. All right, good, Myka had reassured herself, at least she didn't have to worry that it was a latent attraction to Helena resurfacing. Diane was just a very attractive woman dancing very, very, very seductively. She would forget about it as soon as the music ended. Then she met Diane's eyes and Diane's hand, as sinuous as a snake, glided toward her, coaxing her to join them. Everything Diane's hips and butt were doing was in that look, and Myka felt herself soften and part, letting that look pierce her, plumb her so deeply and intimately that it made of all those other moments when she had parted - for Josh, Rick, Sam, Pete - the mockery. But in a blink, a flicker of her eyes elsewhere, it was gone, and when Myka next met Diane's gaze, it was friendly, perhaps slightly embarrassed, but no more than that. The song had ended, Claudia was opening the windows, and Diane was sheepishly confessing in response to Pete's "Whoa! Where did you learn to bust moves like that?" that she had spent three weeks in Miami in 2008 on an anomaly retrieval. "It seemed to be hiding out in South Beach," she said with a laugh.

That moment might have ended for Diane, but it hadn't ended for her. She didn't have to close her eyes, she could stare at the TV screen on which the characters in the video game were moving like the computer-generated images they were - awkwardly, stiffly, unlike the fluid swiveling and stretching of Diane's and Abigail's bodies - and imagine her back rubbing up and down against the wall and her voice, half-cry and half-demand, begging Diane to go faster. Not Helena, her double, her other. It was Diane who was gasping against her neck for her to come, her breath hot and harsh-sounding. She knew that she only had to reach out and press her hand against the crotch of Diane's jeans for Diane to come, too. She was that close because she wanted her, Diane wanted her and wanted her every bit as much. Then they would stumble to her bed because Myka was tearing at the button and zipper of Diane's jeans as they staggered, wanting to get at that wetness . . . .

She launched herself from the sofa. "You guys carry on. I'm going to bed."

There was the clatter of a controller being dropped to the floor, and Pete was saying, "I'm declaring you the winner, Claud. Grand Theft Auto wizard."

Claudia snorted. "Try to keep it down, will you? I'd like to get some sleep tonight and hearing you in the throes of passion - dude, I can hear you through my headphones."

"Then maybe you better sleep down here," Pete wisecracked.

In a preemptive run of shame, Myka took the stairs two steps at a time, but she had barely cleared the last before Pete was beside her and dragging her into his room. She didn't want foreplay, she didn't need foreplay, she just needed to come - now - to drive the image of Diane coming under her out of her head. Wrapping her arms around him, she sucked at his lips sloppily, urgently, digging her hands beneath the waistband of his jeans to grab at his butt. Although Pete was untucking her shirt, she sensed, to her frustration, a hesitancy as he eased the material out. He turned his head, stopping the kiss. "Maybe a little less black widow spider and a little more, I dunno, romance?"

"Huh?" She stopped running her hands over his butt. "You said if I joined them it would be a 'lady triple-decker,' that you would never need another birthday present. You quit in the middle of Grand Theft Auto, Pete, to chase me up here."

In an attempt at amends, he kissed her in the crook of her neck. "I'm not saying I'm not up for getting busy, I'm just saying maybe we could take it a little slower. Yeah, there was some girl power in Abigail and H2 dancing together for, like, two seconds. I just said that crap because it was me being me. Actually it was kind of," he jerked his shoulders and arms back and forth as if he were trying to shake something off, "creepy. I mean, Abigail's Abigail and H2, maybe there's a three-headed alien under her skin, we don't know."

His jerking and fake shivering had introduced a space between them, and Myka, her hands slipping from his jeans, stepped backward. "Now,now, you're creeped out by workplace incest?"

"We weren't just pals. There was always something between us, Mykes, from the beginning. We let the Warehouse and our friendship smother it for a long time, that's all." He passed her to root around in his nightstand. He held out a strap-on. "I'm all up for you being a dominatrix tonight." As she rolled her eyes, he dropped it back into the drawer. "Or, if I'm supposed to be the 'dominator,'" he said in possibly the worst Arnold Schwarzenegger impression ever, "we can try these." He dangled two black velvet ties in front of her. "Or, if you want to keep me going all night -" he held up a penis ring with an attached vibrator, "for your extra listening pleasure."

She shook her head. She must be the most plain vanilla girlfriend he had ever had, sexually speaking. Maybe she shouldn't bother to qualify it. She was the most plain vanilla girlfriend he had ever had, period. She wouldn't deny that the toys could occasionally be fun, but she didn't need them. The majority of the time she wasn't interested in them, she just wanted . . . she just wanted . . . . If there had always been something between them, then why had it been so easy to lose sight of it? Pasting a smile on her face that she didn't feel - yet another thing tonight, with him, that she was faking - "Let's keep it simple, you, me, and the bed over there. That's all I need, Pete."

Yet it wasn't. They had gone slow, they had gone fast, they had tried position after position. Pete's erection was beginning to soften from sheer exhaustion. He could have come several times, but she hadn't been close, and when he had offered to "snack on you 'til you come, and you know I like my Myka snacks," she had tensed up all the more. They had gone back to missionary, and that wasn't working either. She was lying next to him, his penis wet and rigid, and she thought the metaphor of "a soldier at attention" had never been truer. It had been thrown into combat over and over and was still willing to do its duty. It really was a miniature Pete, and then she thought of the one thing they hadn't tried. Straddling him, positioning herself over the head of his penis, she began to ease herself over it, and he grinned.

"Junior's pretty sore," he grunted, "be gentle." He lifted his hips slightly, and she felt herself stretching to encompass him. More than any other position, this was what made the difference, wasn't it? Him filling her like this, something that a woman couldn't do unaided. This was taking him in in all his Peteness, not so much being on top, although she was, as it was impaling herself on him, accepting his mighty sword. All she needed to hear from him now was a wistful "We could be making babies" to make her surrender complete, and she panicked for a few seconds before she realized she had another month to go before she would need another implant. Pete was moaning, and his moaning was becoming guttural, the way it did when he was close to an org*sm, and though she still wasn't close, she wasn't going to try to delay him. He had been a good soldier long enough. It was harder to move this way, but she needed to move more actively than she had been. Images were beginning to dominate her thoughts, images she didn't want, but they weren't of Diane. She saw Helena riding Nate, just as she was riding Pete, and her hips began to piston faster to match Helena's rhythm. Helena's mouth was open and her eyes were closed, and while she was making no sound, the pleasure was clear in the way she was letting her head fall back, in the soft swollenness of her face, the stiffness of her nipples. Helena was aroused and she was coming. Her head snapped back, the eyes opening, and Myka no longer saw Nate underneath her because she was underneath Helena. She was holding Helena's hips down as Helena was trying to work them up, and Helena, her teeth set, trying to stave off the org*sm, was saying with fond frustration, "Don't tease your betters, darling." Myka was laughing, not just because she knew Helena wouldn't be able to hold back much longer, but because she couldn't; the slap of Helena's moist ass on her skin, the incidental (and not so incidental) rubbing of her vulva against whatever of Helena's she was rubbing it against. She was going to come, and she was going to come big. Naturally Helena knew it, had always known how much she had wanted her.

"Oh, baby, Jesus, you're so close and I'm . . ." The words lost themselves in a choked groan, but Myka didn't register the bass of the groan, she registered only "baby." Helena would never call her that, and then Pete drove into her as he climaxed. She seized up, tightening in spite of herself, and Pete was saying, "Baby, you sucked it all out of me, I can't . . . " and, encouragingly, "Do you need my fingers? Do you want me to go down on you?" He was already withdrawing from her, his soldier literally slinking back to barracks.

Her legs were trembling, she was that close. A puff of air, a stray touch, and none of it would be about him. She scrambled away to the opposite side of the bed, trying to keep her ass from touching the sheets so that the friction couldn't set her off. "No, no," she mumbled, "I don't need anything."

"Are you sure?" He was actually looking concerned.

"Yes, I have to pee, Pete." It wasn't untrue. She found the pajamas she kept in one of his dresser drawers. "I'll be back in a little while."

"Are you okay?" He was sitting up now. His hair was askew, and in the light of the one bedside lamp they had left on, she could spot the multiple red patches on his chest that would turn into the itchy welt of hickeys. Jesus Christ, was she sixteen? No, she had been eighteen and a freshman at the University of Colorado when she had covered Josh's chest with hickeys as a poor effort at foreplay on her part. He had been hardly more adroit. Two former high school band players (Myka - saxophone, Josh - trumpet) trying to deflower one another. That they had succeeded had been due more to luck than to anything else.

"I'm fine. I just need to take care of some . . . feminine . . . things." She had no idea what she meant by that, but it was an even greater mystery to Pete, and he only nodded wisely.

"I'm here if you want some cuddling after," he said.

"Go to sleep." Her lips skewed up in a resigned, slanted smile. "You've earned it."

She had stood under the shower for a half-hour, at least that was what the shriveling of her fingertips told her. Usually a shower made her feel better, but this time it didn't. It left her feeling wet - and sore and exhausted. She dressed in the flannel pants and thermal henley that served as her pajamas at Leena's for all but four months out of the year. Sexy. But Pete wouldn't care, he was already asleep. Maybe she wouldn't disturb him, maybe she would go to her own room. Exhausted but not the kind of exhausted that warned her she would fall asleep the minute she got between the sheets - and then who knew what would happen. She might try masturbating herself to sleep, and she didn't want to think about what she might think about. She had books and her iPad in her room, but she might have a better chance at relaxing if she perused the books in their library. She had read most of them, but Steve and Claudia and even Artie added to the collection occasionally. Pete's contributions were graphic novels. Nothing wrong with them, just like the edible underwear and the gels and the penis rings in his nightstand, but she didn't prefer them.

The light was on in the room, and she frowned, wondering who had forgotten to turn it off. Then she saw who was standing in front of the built-in bookshelves, dark hair falling over her shoulders. Helena. The woman heard her footsteps and turned around to greet her. No, Diane. The look of welcome, the friendliness, those were never Helena's. Myka saw the parka draped over the armchair and the boots on Diane's feet. She was in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, too large for her, which made her seem slighter than she was. Myka felt taller and rangier by contrast, except the perception, skewed though she knew it was, didn't make her feel correspondingly clumsy. It made her feel . . . Jesus Christ, not again. The flannel pants and the thermal henley weren't see-through, weren't clinging; they were shapeless and faded, but Myka was convinced that every square inch of her skin was visible.

She blindly crossed to the other end of the bookshelves. "Did I wake you?" Diane sounded apologetic. "I couldn't sleep, and I thought I might find something here."

Diane didn't think every square inch of her skin was visible, and even if it were true, she wouldn't care. Taking a careful breath, Myka said, "Me too." She finally met Diane's gaze. It was gently inquiring, asking her what might be keeping her up past 2:00 in the morning. Myka was pretty sure it wasn't the reason that Diane was still up.

"I see there's a special H.G. Wells section," Diane said wryly, pointing to a motley assortment of paperbacks and second-hand hard covers. "Claudia's been tutoring me in all things H.G., more, I suppose, to test me than to inform me. I understand, I would be doing the same if Helena were to appear in my reality." She stopped, her gaze become abstracted. "But I think my Warehouse and my colleagues would be more curious, overall, than suspicious."

"You didn't try to destroy your world. Unfortunately, there's a reason why we have to assume the worst case."

Myka had smiled as she said it, more to blunt, uselessly, futilely, the hostility with which she knew Diane was being treated, but Diane was prying one of the H.G. Wells books from the shelf, her expression strangely sober. "Yes, but we're not the same. I thought one of you would've figured it out by now. I didn't invent anything like a time machine or what you call a Tesla - though I'm still not sure what it is - I didn't write novels that people still read a hundred years later." She burst out in frustration, "I wouldn't know how to combine artefacts in such a way as to end the world." Then, calming and offering her own weak smile, she said sadly, "I'm really quite unremarkable, you know."

Myka wanted to cup Diane's jaw, let her thumb stroke away the self-deprecation that pinched her nose and pulled at her cheeks. She wanted to kiss those lips crimping into a grimace. Most of all, she wanted to start banging her own head against the bookshelves. "I disagree," she said to a volume of Dickens'Pickwick Papers. "You're not her, but that's not to say you're not remarkable."

Her comment seemed only to deepen Diane's sadness. "You've been kind to me, but sometimes I think you see me more through her prism than anyone else."

Myka felt a flash of anger. "Because you know that I was the one who didn't see what she was, who stood up for her when Artie and Pete kept saying that we couldn't trust her?"

"No, you misunderstand. Because you think I'm remarkable, because you've shared confidences with me that, in the end, I believe were meant for her." Putting the book down, Diane came nearer. Her hand was the one to cup a jaw, stroke a cheek. "I haven't yet earned your friendship, Myka, your affection. It's what you feel for her."

The dark eyes were full of concern for her. Myka wondered what would change in them if she turned her head to kiss that palm. She wanted to kiss that palm; even more she wanted to kiss that mouth. "Not for her, for you." She grasped Diane's hand, moving it out of the range of her lips, but she continued to hold it. "How do you know that you're not seeing me through the prism of the other Myka? It's not easy to become a senior agent at her age, my age. I'm sure I don't measure up."

Diane laughed. The wryness was Helena's, but the undertone of bitterness was absent. "It's not the same; I never met her. All I have are the memories of others. I assure you, you're very impressive in the flesh, Myka." She didn't try to take her hand away, and what was in her eyes . . . Myka hadn't been imagining that look hours earlier when Diane had invited her to dance. Myka felt herself opening up to it once more, answering its invitation by letting it see what it would, take what it would. She had only to take a few steps backward and she could close the door. The sofa was old but serviceable, and at last she could do what she had been aching to do most of the night. What Diane equally wanted her to do. There was no music, no sensual play of hips to suggest a desire that wasn't there or that would last only the length of the song. Myka felt their hands, still interlocked, grow sweaty, and she wanted Diane's hand to -

"Did you sleep with Pete? The other Pete?" She said it almost brusquely, releasing Diane's hand and retreating to her end of the bookshelves. She had finally told Diane about this world's Pete and her relationship with him. Myka could tell herself that the lie she had told Diane about not being involved with someone had begun to weigh on her, but really it was the get-together that had pushed her to it. She had tried to explain, not very well, why she hadn't been more forthcoming about Pete, but Diane had brushed her excuses aside, saying only, "I understand not wanting to reveal more about the relationships here than you have to." How strange Diane must think it that she was acting the jealous girlfriend. Although she had asked the question to refocus herself on Pete, she was jealous, Myka realized. About the wrong person . . . .

Diane had wrinkled her forehead in confusion, but as she murmured, "Pete?," the confusion died and the wrinkles disappeared. "Yes, Pete," she said quietly, in full comprehension. "There was a night . . . . He was taking her loss especially hard, and it was so easy to talk about her with him. We got carried away, but ultimately nothing happened."

"Were they together, that Myka and Pete?"

"No, I asked him once, and he told me that he had loved her but like a sister. Her work as an agent was everything to her. There wasn't room for anything else." Another wry laugh. "I think I sensed a kinship with her because of that. In my time, the Warehouse still had the expectation that its agents would limit their, ah, attachments, especially the agents who retrieved anomalies. The thinking went that if you could be gone from anywhere from a few days to a few years, why subject a spouse and children to all that uncertainty? I couldn't disagree, so I decided that I wouldn't form any romantic relationships while I was an agent. Perhaps it was simply an excuse for something lacking in me because I never yearned for a lover."

"Still, it must have been lonely." Diane had retreated from the bookshelves, drawing farther into the shadows, and they lent her a mournfulness that Myka wouldn't normally associate with her. With Helena, yes, but not with her.

"It wasn't that the Warehouse, the elders didn't recognize that we wouldn't have needs." Myka sensed the blush more than saw it. "In my time, there remained vestiges of the old religion. Fellowships and followings that had sprung up, spiritual in character, loosely associated with the Warehouse. Some of them, the adherents or followers, whatever you call them in this reality, they would offer the agents . . . comfort . . . treating it as part of their rites or rituals. The elders didn't encourage us to seek them out, but they didn't discourage it either. Later, when even the followings died away, the elders liberalized the code of conduct for agents. They were permitted to marry and to raise families." She softly cleared her throat. "I sought comfort twice, Myka, once with a woman, once with a man."

"And?"

"It was pleasant, both experiences, but I felt no compulsion to continue seeking such comfort. The work was all."

Was. Not "is." Myka scolded herself that she was making too much of a word choice. Besides, it didn't matter. She had Pete, and Diane, in fact, might turn out to be a three-headed alien. Nonetheless, she heard herself say, "It's more than pleasant when you're with someone you care about." She sounded more assertive than she felt because, to be honest, while she had had glimmers of what it might be like to be fully invested in a relationship, she wasn't that much farther along the path than Diane.

Diane stepped back into the light, regarding Myka silently. Finally she spoke, saying lightly. "I'm in a whole new world. I'm bound to have a whole new set of experiences." Picking up the book she had dropped, she said, "Perhaps I'll start with this,The Time Machine."

"It's very good. But then I'm prejudiced, I grew up reading H.G. Wells."

Diane smiled down at the book's cover. "I was perhaps exaggerating when I said the work was all. I did do a little scribbling in my free hours. Adventure tales, suitably fictionalized versions of some of my retrievals. I'm afraid that my cousin would think them beneath her notice, light fiction for the light-minded." Her smile turned into an impish grin. "I'm afraid you'll come to think of me as Jules Verne next to her."

In a stage-whisper, Myka said, "We won't tell her, but I enjoyed reading Verne, too."

Myka pretended to consider books as Diane put on her coat and zipped it up. She touched Myka's shoulder as she left the room, and once she left, Myka bounced her head gently against a shelf. At least she hadn't thrown Diane down on the sofa and ravished her. Not tonight, anyway. But it was there, the attraction, it was mutual and it was growing. She bounced her head on the shelf again. She couldn't even blame it on Helena because the whole time she and Diane had been talking, she hadn't once thought to call her Helena.

Chapter 6

Chapter Text

Helena

Over the next several weeks, Helena divided her time between two equally uncomfortable places, the Warehouse and Abigail's office. There must have been time for eating meals with the agents who weren't out on a retrieval, just as there must have been time for her work-outs, various video game contests with Claudia and Pete, and a few late-night conversations with Steve over mugs of chamomile tea. But if she had been asked, Helena would have said she went between Abigail's frigid office, which even the addition of a tricked-out space heater (courtesy of Claudia) couldn't warm, and Artie's war room in the Warehouse, which was equally as frigid, in the metaphorical sense of the word, without interruption. She couldn't even describe the work she did in the one as more satisfactory or pleasurable than the other because she was as stymied by the lack of answers from the analyses that she and Claudia were conducting in the war room as she was by the purpose of her conversations with Abigail, very few of which had to do with her double or how she was "getting on" with Helena or H2 or Diane or whatever name the woman was encouraging people to call her this week.

The morning meeting Artie had required them all to attend after the pizza party had been the occasion for a formal re-division of duties. He, Steve, and Pete would be the primary agents to go on retrievals; Claudia would assist Helena in the investigation of how and, presumably, why a perfect genetic duplicate of H.G. Wells had been found in a cargo container in Houston. While Myka's assignments to retrievals weren't completely eliminated, they were reduced; her primary responsibility going forward was to help acclimate Diane to this Warehouse, its artefacts, and the processes for acquiring, neutralizing, and storing them, making of Claudia's online tutorials a practicum. Thus, Helena had thought listening to him, was the fox introduced to the henhouse. Irene's eyes had met her own at that part of Artie's announcement, and her lips had twitched in a barely perceptible smirk. As Irene and Kosan had promised her, Helena had also been allowed to have the first of her "interviews" with Diane that day, unchaperoned by Myka despite Irene's earlier requiring it as a condition. Myka had thought it might be more fruitful if she weren't a part of it, and Irene had reluctantly acquiesced. The interview had turned out to be an unsatisfactory 30 minutes filled with questions to which Diane had generally produced only vague answers. They had gone over the details of the anomaly retrieval that Diane claimed had brought her here, but Diane had shrugged off her inability to describe the anomaly, claiming, again, that "it's the inherent difficulty in retrieving them, we're never sure what form they've taken until we're practically on top of them." She had been somewhat better about describing the events that had preceded her disappearance, taking Helena through her assignment to the retrieval, her preparation to follow the anomaly's energy trail ("which includes taking care of any bills or birthday presents or such things, since you never know when you'll be coming back"), and then the sudden loss of consciousness ("not out of the ordinary in these pursuits") and finding herself in the midst of dozens of virtually naked, frightened women "tightly congregated in some sort of container, something like a railroad car, except without windows or seats or soot."

Diane had had questions she wanted to ask as well. Having learned that there were H.G. Wells-related artefacts and files, segregated from the other artefacts and archives and under additional security, Diane wanted to know if she would be willing to discuss them, giving her a speculative look, heightened or minimized, Helena couldn't decide which, by the folding in and nibbling of her bottom lip. "At some point, your regents will decide to tell me what they are and why they're considered significant, if only to determine whether I was already acquainted with them. I would prefer, however, to hear about them from you first." As Helena maintained the blandly inquiring expression that she had adopted from Abigail, Diane more haltingly added, "I'm not pretending that I know you or understand you, cousin, but if our roles were reversed, I would want to explain my history to you, rather than let the elders' and intercessors' explanations stand in its place." Helena watched how Diane let that lip worm its way past the upper yet again. "However I mightn't like it, they would at least be fair; I'm not sure that the same can be said of your regents."

Helena didn't answer, returning the conversation to Diane's last retrieval, but she thought about the request afterward. Surely Diane already knew the bleak outline of her history with the Warehouse. What did she expect her to add? The weepy apologies and half-hearted excuses that would provide "context" and normalize what should remain forever outside normal behavior, human behavior? She aimed an especially vicious kick at the punching bag, imagining her foot landing square in Diane's abdomen. That was childish, she acknowledged, as she spun around and walked away from the bag. If she were to believe in the woman that Diane was presenting herself to be, this alternate version of Helena Wells had an uncomplicated relationship to her work, committing herself, seemingly without question, to the Warehouse's mission. Nor did she appear to resent her Warehouse's expectation of monastic devotion. Had she never once questioned whether her retrievals and those of her fellow agents were for the sole purpose of preventing humanity from magicking itself into oblivion? Had she never seen men from the government disappearing with the "intercessors" and the "elders" of her Warehouse into a meeting room for hours? Had she never rushed to inform her version of Caturanga of an artefact's disappearance from its assigned slot only to be rebuked with an uncharacteristic coldness by him that "if I'd known you had the instincts of a charwoman, I would have apprenticed you to a ragman instead." As for monastic devotion, had she never been expected to spread her legs to help ensure a retrieval? And had she never wondered as men, old and young, rich and poor, flailed on top of her what it would be like to touch someone with desire?

Except for the fact that she came from a different reality, Diane was hardly to be distinguished from the sheltered, gently brought-up young women Helena had passed on sidewalks or saw entering churches on a Sunday morning. Their sole purpose was to marry well when they came of age and to subordinate their existence to that of their husband. That there might be something larger, better, or, at the least, different to which they might choose to aspire was beyond their comprehension. Helena had never been that kind of young woman, younglady, she -

"It seems crowded in here. Should I come back?" Myka was standing almost close enough to touch her. Automatically, Helena moved back a step, causing a painfully wry smile to cross Myka's face. "Don't worry, you weren't talking out loud, but I could hear the argument going on in your head." She carefully rounded Helena to take two 10 pound weights from the rack. Putting them down to roll out an exercise mat, she nodded toward the punching bag. "I saw that kick, Helena. You looked as though you wanted to send the person the bag was standing in for halfway to the moon."

"Beyond the moon," Helena said as lightly as she could.

Myka had loosely bunched her hair into a scrunchie, but it was threatening to burst from the band. She turned to face Helena and began to lift the weights in a bicep curl. Tall, rangy, Myka didn't put on bulk, she just became leaner. Helena didn't think she was normally attracted to a certain physical type, but the women with whom she had been intimate in one way or another - there weren't many - tended to have builds similar to Myka's. Maybe she enjoyed the contrast their bodies presented to her own. She didn't become leaner when she lifted weights, she put on bulk. She was more solid, compact, whatever word people used to avoid saying, what in her day, was both more honest and more genteel, "inclined to stoutness." Not that she was stout or even beginning to incline in that direction, but her breasts were bigger, her waist thicker, her hips . . . she sighed and grabbed a towel, rubbing her face with it. All the better to erase images of Myka's body from her mind. First she had been consumed by thoughts of her double, and now she was dwelling on the differences between Myka's figure and her own. Perhaps she should surrender to the necessity and fill her mind with music when she worked out.

Trying to avoid looking at Myka again, Helena slung the towel around her neck, catching a glimpse of Myka bending low. It wasn't as though she could see down Myka's tank top, but she noticed, not for the first time, that while Myka might be tall and rangy, she definitely had a nice set of -

"Diane wants me to tell her about my history with the Warehouse," Helena said bluntly. Myka put the weights down and took a seat on the bench on which Pete did chest presses (three days a week), or so he had been bragging in Helena's hearing. "I'm assuming she already knows the high points," she said sarcastically, the sarcasm all the thicker for the image floating through her mind of Myka admiringly counting how many presses Pete completed. It was a better image than the one that followed, of Myka licking the sweat from his chest.

"Not in any detail, or if she does, she hasn't let on to me." Myka frowned, more thoughtful than concerned. "You realize, don't you, that you're the closest to family each of you has in this world?"

"Identical twins separated at birth?" Helena sat heavily on the stairs. "She said she wants to hear my side before Irene and Kosan attempt to poison her mind. That's what I understood her to mean." Helena pulled the towel from her neck and wrapped it around first one hand and then the other. "There are things in the Warehouse, my things, that I didn't know Caturanga had collected. I'm not sure I'm ready for that amount of self-disclosure, not to her." She paused, then added quietly, "Maybe to you."

Hardly above a whisper, Myka asked, "Why didn't you tell me you were planning to leave the Warehouse?"

"The easiest answer is also the honest one. I wasn't planning to leave. I had left before and come back, so when Irene said I should make a life for myself, my first thought was 'For how long?'" Helena laughed with more bitterness than humor. "If I had been planning to leave, don't you think I'd have picked a better place than Boone, Wisconsin?"

Myka was silent, and when she spoke, it wasn't about Boone or why her leaving the Warehouse almost three years ago was still so difficult to talk about. It wasn't even an acknowledgment, Helena recognized with a surge of embarrassment, that she had opened up, however briefly. "If Diane wants to forge a connection with you, encourage her."

There was a coolness to her advice that unsettled Helena. "Because she may allow me a glimpse into her nefarious plans? Give my double credit for being cleverer than that."

"Because if she's truly just a version of you, her weakness will be that she cares. We weren't smart enough to stop you, Helena, but you weren't damaged enough to let yourself hurt us."

####

Helena found herself repeating Diane's request during her next session with Abigail. Abigail's eyes widened and she mimicked collapsing from shock by falling against the back of her chair, arms flung out. Then she giggled. "You're honest-to-God asking me what I think? I'm not supposed to think this is a dig masked as a rhetorical question?"

Helena glared at her. "I've often wondered how you made a living as a therapist."

"I told you, I discovered that I wasn't suited for it, but, let's face it, the regents didn't have much to choose from." Her merriment died, and she looked quizzically at Helena, the eyes much sharper, much keener, and Helena, despite her claim that she wondered frequently about Abigail's competence as a therapist, wondered more often if there was nothing about her that Abigail hadn't already figured out. "Have you talked to anyone else about this?" Abigail asked her neutrally, like a true therapist might.

"Myka," Helena tried to say it just as neutrally.

A tiny mischievous smiled turned up the corners of Abigail's mouth. "What do you really want to talk about, Helena? Diane's request, although I suspect you've already made your decision, or Myka's response?"

Of course talking about Myka's response necessitated talking about their history, or so Abigail claimed, but she was less interested in its more recent developments, wanting to talk instead about the months leading up to their confrontation at Yellowstone and the confrontation itself. "You still seem struck by her pressing your gun to her head and daring you to shoot her," Abigail observed. "Was it her bravery? Her foolishness?"

Helena shook her head, remembering the fright in Myka's eyes and the determination. She had had only to pull the trigger, yet she hadn't felt so helpless in . . . in more than a hundred years. Those eyes had seemed to burn through her rage, her despair, the vertigo that overcame her whenever either lessened enough for her to realize that she was in a world foreign not to the one she had lived in but to the one she had dreamed of, hoped for. Yet those same eyes had held no condemnation. Myka had looked at her the same way that Caturanga had, as if there were no disguise she could wear, no madness she could suffer, no alteration of her features she could endure such that he couldn't penetrate it. "No, nothing like that, it was like she was telling me -"

" - that you were in it together, even something as awful as what you were preparing to do," Abigail interjected. "Still partners, still friends, still . . . ." She shrugged and arched a suggestive eyebrow.

"I thought the way this worked," Helena said stiffly, "was that I was to come to such revelations on my own."

"I'm a bad therapist," Abigail said negligently, giving her another shrug, "you said so yourself." She stared down at the notebook that was more prop than tool, giving the impression that she was deep in thought, but Helena was sure that Abigail already knew what she wanted to say next. "Myka worked the president's detail for a while, didn't she?" At Helena's slow, wary nod, Abigail continued, "She's trained to do that, to put herself in the line of fire, sacrifice her life if necessary. Maybe all that moment was in Yellowstone was her training taking over. She wasn't in 'it' with you, you weren't her partner or friend anymore. She wasn't sharing some special connection with you. She was doing what she would have done had you pulled a gun on the president. If her dying would stop you, she was prepared to die."

"You," Helena said, her voice dismayingly unsteady, "are a bloody poor therapist."

"Why did her response about showing Diane the 'everything Helena' stash in the Warehouse bother you?" There was nothing mischievous or arch about the smile that Abigail was giving her now. It was so gentle that Helena wanted to turn her head to block her view of it. "I don't know all that was going on between you at Yellowstone, but it affects how you feel about her today, and it may color how you view her relationship with Diane." Becoming more brisk, she advised, "In fact, why not show the items to her first? It might make a good dry run for showing them to Diane, practically speaking, of course. If it got you two to really talking, there could be some additional benefits as well."

For the Warehouse or for her and Myka? How much of this, these sessions with Abigail, wasn't an attempt by Irene and the regents to shape the way she thought, the way she would react to a future assignment? Not trusting herself to speak for a moment, fearing the suspicion and paranoia that might burst forth, Helena decided to communicate her answer with another shake of her head. Abigail's lips parted, and Helena thought she heard a frustrated sigh before she said, "I understand what Myka meant. Engaging with Diane, even if she has an ulterior motive for wanting to know my history, may still work to our favor. If nothing else, it may make her more reluctant to do us harm, if that's her intention."

"Yes," Abigail agreed. "But don't minimize the risk. Forging a connection can also make you overlook things you ordinarily wouldn't and, conversely, invent things that aren't there."

"I made that mistake only once," Helena said. "It's not likely that I'll make it again, and not with a woman who, quite frankly, shouldn't exist under any law of science."

Abigail tipped her head against the back of her chair. "I hope you mean by 'mistake' trusting someone who posed a threat to the Warehouse, not trusting people in general, especially those who care for you."

Helena looked at the clock on the end table between them. "Our time's almost over, and I have a meeting with Claudia at the Warehouse."

She had her hand on the doorknob when she heard the space heater whirr into life and Abigail's voice barely rising above it. "For what it's worth, I believe in what you saw at Yellowstone. It wasn't just training with Myka. It rarely is but with you, Helena, she's vulnerable in a way she is with no one else. I think any risk you might take with respect to her would be amply rewarded." The laugh was as mischievous as her smile. "Here I am leading you again, but it's good advice. I urge you to take it."

####

Helena drove one of the shared SUVs to the Warehouse. It was one of the good things that had come from her time as Emily Lake. Whether Emily had learned how to drive or whether it had been one of the memories that had been implanted to replace the ones taken from her, Helena had retained the skills when Emily disappeared. She wasn't sure whether driving in Los Angeles had improved them or made them worse, but she was taking the road from the bed and breakfast to the Warehouse faster than she should. To the casual observer, the road looked like little more than tracks, but it was always visible and always drivable, no matter the time of day, no matter the weather.

Like the road leading to it, the Warehouse was hard for the uninitiated to discern, rising from the edges of the Badlands as a less weathered, less eye-catching rock formation, yet immediately visible to anyone who knew what to look for. Warehouse 12, which had presented the most unremarkable masonry among a line of unremarkably designed buildings, had seemed to her to shout its importance by so grandly insisting upon being inconspicuous. Even the most plebeian of architects would have added some feature to distinguish it from its neighbors. However, at least the organizers of 12 had known enough not to locate it in the middle of nowhere. What potential enemy wouldn't think to search for 13 in one of the most desolate places on Earth?

As always when she entered the Warehouse, Helena smelled apples. She had been told that it was a mark of favor, but her Warehouse career hardly justified the preference. In fact, the apple smell was always a little too fermented for her taste, as though at some point the Warehouse had decided she wasn't worth the effort any longer but, like a doddering grandfather or great uncle who forgot to amend his will, it hadn't remembered to revoke her privileges, thus the faint vinegary tang to the scent.

Claudia was in the war room, mumbling to herself in front of a computer as decrepit-looking as Artie's ping machine but which, underneath its 1980s-era dirty white plastic carapace, was even more advanced. Empty snack bags and cans of Red Bull and Mountain Dew littered her work space. Helena had never known her to eat a vegetable that wasn't also a pizza topping or a piece of fruit other than a banana, yet Claudia exhibited no ill effects from a diet that primarily consisted of caffeine and food preservatives. A grimace and a disgusted exhalation were her only acknowledgment of Helena's presence, and Helena wasn't sure how much of it was owed to the frustrations they were continuing to encounter in trying to find an explanation for the existence of two Helena Wellses and how much was owed to her.

In many respects, her relationship with Claudia had been the least complicated during her time with 13, or so Helena had thought. She had had more in common with her than anyone else; they both had had abbreviated childhoods, older brothers who inspired resentment as much or more than love (although Helena was willing to concede that Claudia felt less ambivalently about Joshua than she had about Charles), and senior agents who also served as foster fathers. Their aptitudes for mathematics and science had seemed the least of what they shared, mainly because Claudia really was a genius. A good head for numbers, a knack for working with machines, and an openness to unconventional ideas (spurred largely by her contempt for convention) might, in combination, look like genius to some, but Helena knew better; she was, at least had been, talented and innovative, but no genius. Entering the seventh week of her return to the Warehouse, she felt that their interactions were no less awkward, however, and every one of her 100+ years seemed to insert itself between them.

Claudia rolled her chair away from her computer. "Why don't you look at the patient's chart, doctor?" The sarcasm was lessened somewhat by the exhaustion and anxiety that were multiplying the worry lines at her eyes and around her mouth. A review of the security assessment confirmed that there had been no intrusions into the Warehouse in the months preceding Diane's appearance in Houston and no theft of any artefacts. The additional security analyses that she and Claudia had devised, tracking such minute details as the occurrences of failed neutralizations and the number of times artefacts had been misplaced, gave them nothing either. Stymied in their hunt for an external cause, Helena had decided to investigate whether there could be an internal cause. She had suggested to Claudia that they create a program for monitoring what Claudia would come to derisively call the Warehouse's "temperature."

The Warehouse's equilibrium was always only perilously maintained, subject to the unpredictability of the artefacts it housed and the seemingly fragile Eldunari. If there were a method by which they could track the irruptions that beset the Warehouse, they could identify abnormal activity that might suggest when and perhaps how Diane had first . . . manifested. The problem was that they had yet to find a method that would capture the workings of a system that no one completely understood. "I mean, it's the Warehouse, so there's always something going on with it," Claudia had complained when Helena broached the idea. "How do we separate the noise from what's significant?"

"We don't," Helena had said bluntly, "we don't know what's significant and what's not, not yet. So we track the noise."

What Claudia had been able to cobble together from energy spikes, the spontaneous activity of certain artefacts, the behavior of the Eldunari, and any other anomalies that could be caught on surveillance cameras or recorded by sensors was plotted onto a graph. Backtesting was necessarily patchy and incomplete but she and Helena continued to compare those results with the results of their current monitoring, and what they had discovered was -

"The Warehouse, it's like it's been having a . . . frak . . . 2,000-year-old cold or something. I mean our data doesn't go back that far, but I can extrapolate. On really bad days, its sniffles become full-blown pneumonia," Claudia had concluded after the first few analyses.

Looking at a line graph that showed an almost constant series of peaks and valleys with occasional peaks rising to nearly Himalayan heights, Helena had a different analogy in mind. "It's someone talking to herself, whipping herself into a frenzy and then calming herself down."

Claudia had laughed. It wasn't entirely unfriendly. "You would know what that looks like, wouldn't you?"

Today, first crouching to view the monitor and then pulling up a chair, she thought Claudia's calling the Warehouse a "patient" was more apt than her own description of an agitation resembling madness. In her case had been madness. The spiking had been less pronounced than in recent days, although if she were to walk over to the window and look out into the Warehouse, it wouldn't appear remarkably different from how it had appeared last week when the lines had had the contour of a roller coaster ride. A low grade fever, a reversion back to sniffles was what the graph was telling her this afternoon. Abruptly she said, "I'm bringing Diane here, tomorrow or the day after. Let's see what the Warehouse makes of her then."

"Probably the same thing when Myka brought her here the other day and they did inventory. Nothing, no reaction."

Helena spun her chair around to face Claudia, who had flopped onto a battered sofa that had been both a witness to and a participant in things Helena preferred not to imagine. Entering the office during her early days at 13 and seeing Pete sitting on the sofa only in his briefs (the cause of which remained a mystery) had been enough to make her give it a wide berth ever after. "I'll be introducing her to my artefacts. The Warehouse may have a different response."

Claudia seemed absorbed in readjusting one of her socks. "I know you think the Warehouse is, like, this brilliant alien mind, but take a good look at this place, does it really seem that organized?"

"I have never said that the Warehouse is a 'brilliant alien mind,'" Helene protested with more than a touch of frost. "What I've said is that it's clearly sentient. I don't think we can discount the possibility that the Warehouse might have played a role, if only inadvertently, in her being here."

"You know, H.G., it's just possible that H2 is telling the truth." Claudia went to work on adjusting her other sock.

"It's not possible. Time isn't a subway. We can't get on and off wherever we want." Helena hugged her chest, wishing she had worn a thicker turtleneck. The Warehouse, whose heating and cooling systems were yet another mystery, was always about five degrees too cool for her. "Honestly, if I had engineered any of this, I wouldn't be bothering with another reality. Why don't the bloody regents give a thought to my history? I was only ever obsessed with this timeline, this reality. And why?" She flung her arms out in exasperation. "Because even if I were to concede the existence of other timelines, this is the only one I know to have Christina in it."

Something akin to sympathy softened Claudia's expression. She stopped tugging at her sock and pushed herself off the sofa. "I'm taking it on faith that you've not gone batsh*t crazy again and replicated yourself a million times over to try to bring Christina back." Her smile, small but genuine, blunted the harshness of her words. "And in that spirit, I have some ideas about trying to communicate with the Eldunari. Maybe if we could speak their language, whatever the hell it is, they could tell us what's going on and we could shortcut this whole process and return to what passes for normal around here."

####

Although Diane continued to spend much of her time, when she wasn't being interrogated by the regents or shadowed by Myka and Claudia, in the discreetly monitored confines of the guest cottage, she had begun to take most of her meals at the bed and breakfast. That small change resulted not only in the disconcerting effect for Helena of seeing herself "in stereo," as Claudia called it, at breakfast and dinner but also the more pleasant one of eating meals that didn't have the faint aftertaste of microwaved plastic. It was as if having a semi-permanent guest, with Diane being in the role of a nineteenth century grandmother or maiden aunt whose extended visits could last months or years or a lifetime, had inspired, or shamed, the agents into dusting off their cooking skills. While Pete's efforts remained those of an undergraduate (spaghetti and store-bought sauce), Steve, Claudia, and Myka all tried out recipes they had found online or in the yellowed cookbooks piled at the back of a bottom cupboard. Opening the door to the kitchen after her meeting with Claudia, which had ended after an hour or more of composing bars of music to be broadcast into the area of the Warehouse that the Eldunari inhabited, an idea that owed more to Claudia's recent viewing ofClose Encounters of the Third Kindthan any belief that the Eldunari would respond to music, Helena wanted nothing more than silence and a meal sufficiently portable that she could take it upstairs with her to her room. She recognized as soon as she saw Diane and Myka crowded around a pot on the stove that she was likely to be disappointed on both counts.

Myka turned to her, hand cupping a ladle. "Would you taste this? We need the opinion of a disinterested third party."

"I'm hardly disinterested if it's tonight meal," Helena countered in a mild grumble. The kitchen was warm and smelled invitingly, sweetly of squash. Although her first impulse had been to decline, she found herself draping her coat over the back of a chair and taking the ladle from Myka. "It's good," she conceded, "but on the bland side." Helena was surprised, the combination of Myka and cookware thus far having produced nothing more venturesome than baked chicken. Homemade soup, in this context, was a daring move. Then Diane's disappointed "Ah, I feared as much" explained the mystery only to introduce another, namely that any version of Helena Wells in any reality was a competent cook. As Diane reviewed the cluster of spices on the counter, which claimed precious space among the mixing bowls, baking sheets, and, yes, a food processor covered with bits of squash, roasted and puréed, Helena wondered if this, even more than her double's stories of a Warehouse that could have come straight from Verne had he been an agent proved, despite their shared DNA, that they were not identical.

"When did you have the time to become a cook?" She took a seat at the table and loosely rested her arm over her coat, ready to listen to her counterpart's tale of her culinary development. "I never learned how, and I wasn't chasing artefacts that threatened to tear the world apart." She twitched a shoulder and presented an expression both mocking and rueful to Myka and Diane. "Well, not then and not for my own purposes."

"I can sew and replace flat tires, too," Diane said. "It helps to have basic survival skills when you're an agent, no matter the reality, no matter the Warehouse." She shook a small amount of a spice into her palm and then rubbed her hands together. The woodsy tang of sage filled the air. "Who cooked for your daughter, if not you?"

Myka, who had been desultorily stirring the soup, straightened her back at "daughter" but kept her eyes on the pot. The question wasn't casual; Diane had sensed, divined perhaps, that Christina wasn't a frequent topic of conversation. Helena had heard no malice in it, but she couldn't mistake the challenge. How much do you dare tell me, cousin? "Sita, Caturanga's wife. Your reality has a Caturanga, doesn't it?" She hadn't said Sita's name aloud since . . . since before she was bronzed. It came easily as did the memory of long dark hair in a braid falling to the middle of her back, brightly colored saris, and a love for Christina that almost surpassed her own. Anayah, that's what the other agents would have called her seeing her with Christina, which was perhaps the reason that, as far as Helena knew, she was the only agent to whom Caturanga had introduced his wife. She wasn't sure, even now, how many at 12 had known that Caturanga was married. Sita had been no one's nursemaid or nanny . . . .

Diane was talking about her Caturanga, Helena dimly realized, and she pushed away thoughts of Sita and Christina in a kitchen warmer and sunnier and far more spacious than this one, her daughter as comfortable speaking in Hindi as she was in English. "He was one of my teachers, brilliant but unapproachable." Diane was looking at her with unabashed curiosity. "You had to be able to pass his courses to advance as an agent -"

"And what did he teach at this Hogwarts of yours?" Helena interrupted sarcastically. "Charms to subdue your anomalies? Incantations to locate your relics? Spells to insure the collegiality of your fellow agents?"

"Helena." Myka didn't issue a plea so much as a warning. She wasn't quite brandishing the ladle as a weapon, but with a flick of her wrist, Helena realized, Myka could send a spray of butternut squash in her direction.

Diane briskly wiped her hands with a dish towel. "My training may have been different than yours, I grant you, but it was no less rigorous in its way." Training. Rigor. Helena suppressed a derisive huff as Diane removed a loaf of French bread from its plastic wrapping. Her training had amounted to reluctant - and spotty - attendance at a day school that Caturanga had paid for from his own pocket and continued nicking and filching, filled out with eavesdropping and shadowing, like a regular Baker Street Irregular. Until she was 16, and that was when Caturanga decided she was old enough to officially begin working for the Warehouse. Placing the loaf on a cutting board, Diane selected a knife from the mismatched assortment in the block and began drawing it through the bread in quick, firm strokes. "He taught mathematics and philosophy. The failure rate in his classes was over 80%, and he was not a believer in second chances. More candidates were turned away from the Warehouse because of him than because they failed the psychological assessments or physical requirements. To be invited to play, and lose at, chess with him was a signal honor."

"And did you play chess with him?" Helena heard her stomach growl. She would meet Caturanga at street corners in the seamier areas of London, and he would have with him a sandwich or an apple for her, or she would meet him at a café in the more prosperous areas, and there she would eat, voraciously, in return for whatever information he expected her to provide. Very little of it had to do with any investigation to which he was assigned; he had been testing her, trying to gauge the development of her skills. I asked you to steal the pocket watch of a certain attorney who lunches at a certain pub. Show it to me. Repeat to me three conversations you overheard today. There were no leisurely games of chess, not then.

"Yes." Diane gestured toward the pieces of bread she had cut and looked questioningly at Myka, who pointed her to a cupboard. "He told me that he had enjoyed our game." Diane glanced at Helena over her shoulder as she took a ceramic bowl from the shelf. "I subsisted on that praise for months." She gathered up the slices of bread and put them in the bowl. "I can't imagine him having a wife and family. I would've more easily believed that he vanished into the ether at the end of each day."

No family, not in London, anyway, unless she and Christina were included. Caturanga and Sita had had no children and the relationships with uncles and aunts and cousins of all degrees of separation that sustained other immigrants in a land and culture different from their own were absent. Sita had made friends with the Indian women who lived nearby and it was their cheerfully commingling voices and children that filled the modest home to which Helena brought Christina most mornings. Although Christina would have had some cobbled-together breakfast of leftover ham, hard-boiled eggs, or bread and jam, after a kiss and a hug from Sita, she would run to the platter of parathas, which never seemed to diminish no matter how many children were gathering around them. Caturanga would have long since left for the Warehouse, wearing an expertly tailored linen suit if it were summer and a woolen one if it were winter, several of Sita's parathas buried deep in his ever-present attaché case. Helena remembered him at his desk fastidiously unfolding the napkin in which they had been wrapped, a cup of tea, likely his third or fourth of the morning, within easy reach. He would never fail to share the parathas with her, and they would eat in companionable silence. Not a family and yet a family . . . .

"I can tell you more about this reality's Caturanga and my 'illustrious' career at the Warehouse." Helena's voice had thinned to brittleness at "illustrious," but she pressed on in sardonic invitation. "Would you care to join me tomorrow for a tour of one of 13's little-known recesses?"

"As long as you don't plan to murder me and leave my corpse to moulder in that recess, I'd love to," Diane said just as sardonically. She brought over to the table the bowl of sliced French bread. "Have one." She co*cked her head, appraising Helena. "Have several. You look like you're starving."

That wasn't entirely off the mark. Helena had had breakfast but she could remember only a glass of Pete's chocolate milk serving as lunch. She grabbed a slice, enjoying the yeasty scent of fresh bread. Dinner didn't look to be far off, given Myka's abstracted stirring of the soup. Perhaps she could get in one of the two calls she had been putting off making before they would be called to troop into the kitchen and serve themselves. Grabbing another slice of bread for good measure, she remembered to stop before she completely exited the kitchen. Turning around, she spoke to Myka's back. "If you'd like to join us tomorrow, you're more than welcome. Striving for lightness, she added, "There must be something about the young H.G. Wells you're dying to know."

Myka faced her, showing her the tentative smile that pulled down one side of her mouth and, strangely, was more suggestive of tears than if her eyes had been brimming with them. "I don't think I'm needed, but I'd like to hear more about Sita, Sita and Christina, sometime."

"It's a date," Helena said awkwardly, hating the word as soon as it was out of her mouth. She passed Steve on the stairs, who was rubbing his stomach appreciatively.

"Don't be too long," he cautioned her.

"It's squash and there's no meat to be found. Even if Pete were here, there would be plenty left over," she rejoined. Then she gave him a mock warning glance. "But make sure you save a couple of extra pieces of bread for me." It was a welcome change to think she might be missed - a little bit - if she didn't show up for dinner.

In her bedroom, she restlessly paced the floor. The decision had already been made; in fact, because nothing still was known about why or how Diane had appeared in their world, there had been no decision to make. She wouldn't be returning to her job or her life outside the Warehouse (such as it was) anytime soon. The knowledge that she remained the Warehouse's creature continued to grind at her, but active resentment had dulled over the intervening weeks, and as her anger cooled (but only cooled having yet to disappear in over a hundred years), she realized that she had no desire to go back to Los Angeles.

It wasn't even 4:30 there, and Tierney had at least two more hours. On a busy day, he would have three. He answered, as was his habit, on the fourth ring. Unless he recognized the number as his supervisor's, he would hold out as long as he could, hoping that it was a wrong number. Their exchange of greetings was brief and their small talk nonexistent; his desire to get to the point in all circ*mstances was one of his greatest virtues, in her opinion. Other of his employees simply found him rude. She had thought she might need to remind him that her six-week leave of absence was up, but he grunted "Yeah, four days ago. We already posted the position."

Helena held the phone away from her ear and smiled wearily at it. Of course he had, Tierney wasn't a sentimentalist. She could hear him bark, "Helena, are you still there?" Of course she was. She had trouble remembering that the Warehouse was unlike most employers; most employers, when they said that your position had been filled or that you were no longer needed, meant it. "If you get done with that assignment in the next month or two, give me a call. Hendrickson's retiring, and we'll be looking to fill his position. It's a grade below yours, but we could -"

"Thanks, but . . . ." She blew out a breath, making sure that she blew it away from the speaker. No need to let him know that she was, well, touched by the gesture, offhanded and provisional though it was. But that wasn't what had her heart beating too rapidly for doing nothing more than lying on her bed and tucking pillows between her head and the headboard. "I'm not coming back."

"Okay." It was the equivalent of a shrug. There was no closing exchange of pleasantries, no well wishes, no expressions of appreciation or gratitude, on either side. No frustration or disappointment either, just an "Okay" and then the call was over.

That hadn't been bravado on her part, saying she wasn't coming back. She was pretty sure, anyway. If this most recent summons from the Warehouse ever ended, while she likely wouldn't return to Los Angeles, she wouldn't be staying here either. She would go somewhere else, the "where" being less important than the act of going. For a moment she imagined that this time she might actually tell Myka before she left, give her a chance to . . . Helena shifted impatiently on the bed, wanting to ease the pressure on her hip. It could get stiff if she weren't moving. A retrieval of an artefact that, in its former, non-artefact life, had been a part of the Globe Theater had resulted in her falling to the stage in a decidedly less noteworthy theater after a backdrop to which she had been clinging gave way. She had landed on her hip, and it had never been the same since. When she decided to leave, she would leave; if she thought she would be making up for not telling Myka the first time . . . Myka wouldn't care. She would probably be married to Pete by then.

She debated about making the second call. It probably wasn't necessary; her "I don't know" when Elle asked her if she were coming back had said more than enough. Maybe she was calling in the hopes of having Elle change her mind, of promising her there was something to come back for. She shifted again, but it really wasn't time yet to switch back to her other hip. Biting her lip and realizing as she did so that maybe it was one of her tics and not unique to Diane, she found Elle's work number among her contacts. She, like Tierney, was at her desk, and there necessarily passed a few minutes of catching up. Helena had sent her a few emails early on, but there had been no contact between them for weeks; she asked after Elle's cases, although she studiously avoided asking about Newcomb. Elle then asked in general terms about her assignment, knowing that Helena could say little. Helena's responses were even briefer, and eventually they were reduced to keeping the line open but neither one saying what needed to be said.

After another long exhale that she blew to the side of the phone, Helena said, "In case you were waiting for me -"

A dry laugh, and then Elle said, "I'm not on the hunt, but I'm not exactly waiting. My parents . . . they've invited me to dinner to meet 'the nicest woman.'" She laughed again, and it held more humor. "They have awful taste. The last time they tried to set me up, she took a call from her ex before we had finished dessert. But you never know, maybe she will be the nicest woman."

Helena wanted to feel more than the pang that caused her, briefly, to stiffen her stomach muscles at the thought of Elle dating again. Surely the end of a relationship that had lasted a year deserved more than that. While they had both had difficulty conceiving of their relationship as anything other than a higher-order task in its later stages, oftentimes a less interesting responsibility than the ones that came with their jobs, in the beginning, it hadn't been that way for them. Maybe that was what happened to all relationships, even the better ones, at some point. She had had so few that she didn't know whether to believe that her experience wasn't outside the norm, so little else about her life had been ordinary. Yet she had always liked Elle, she liked her now, and that was no small thing, not for her. "Good luck." She hesitated. "If I were to visit LA one day, would you be interested in going out to dinner? That is, of course, if your wife will let you."

Elle laughed gently. "I will always have time to go out to dinner with you, and my wife, whoever she is, she'll understand . . . 'cause she's the nicest woman, you know."

For a long time after the call was over, Helena continued to lie on her bed, the day having stirred up more memories than she knew how to repress. Christina, Sita, Caturanga, Yellowstone, Myka holding the gun to her forehead. She needed to banish them because she couldn't afford to be distracted when she showed Diane "everything Helena," particularly the items Caturanga had been at such pains to collect. She had to treat them as she would artefacts, her interest being in the effects they produced, not their histories. When she finally crept down the stairs, the first floor was dark except for a faint glow from the parlor. The floorboards protested under her feet, announcing her imminent arrival to anyone in the kitchen, but no one shouted to her. She flicked on the light and opened the refrigerator. Nestled among ketchup bottles and jars of pickles and mayonnaise on the middle shelf were a bowl and a plate covered with plastic wrap. Soup and bread. Someone had been thinking of her. She heated the soup and the bread in the microwave, locating the tub of margarine hidden behind a stack of yogurt cups and slathered the bread with it. At the table, she ate without hurry. Yes, she was eating yet another meal alone, but she had had far lonelier dinners. Someday she might learn how to build a home for herself that she would always want to return to, but until then, this one that the Warehouse provided for her would have to do.

Chapter 7

Chapter Text

Myka

When Helena had been with the Warehouse, her Warehouse, 13, the first time, the bet had been between Pete and Claudia: when, who would initiate it, how many times the first night, whether it would be the occasion for Myka's first true org*sm. The pot - not money, a month's supply of snacks for Pete, a month's worth of household chores for Claudia - grew or declined depending on how well she and Helena were getting along that particular week. Pete and Claudia hadn't been betting or egging each other on in front of her, but they hadn't tried to hide it much either. This time it wasn't between Pete and Claudia but Claudia and Steve, or, at least, Claudia was doing her best to persuade Steve to make a bet with her, not about when, where, or how many times with Helena but with her double. Myka overheard them late one night, not long after the pizza party, when she came downstairs for a glass of water, Claudia insistent, faintly jeering (whether the jeer was directed at her, her and Diane, or Steve for being such a wuss, as Claudia called him at one point, Myka couldn't tell) and Steve, mild (as always), faintly admonishing (as he could be with Claudia, more big brother, in the end, than buddy). You saw the way she was looking at H2, it's just a matter of time, dude. Claud, you don't bet on relationships busting up. Pyka, Claudia had snorted, it's doomed to bust up, Steve. I love 'em, but there's always been something wrong about them together. Eh, Myka imagined Steve shrugging, maybe they're not for the long haul, but I can't go in with you on this. Standing on the second step from the bottom, Myka could see the shaft of light from the TV room. If she continued to the kitchen, she would be bound to step on a creaking floorboard. It was embarrassing enough to overhear them, she didn't want to add to it by announcing the fact that someone else was up and potentially listening in. She crept back upstairs.

She had thought that things between her and Diane, especially after their middle-of-the-night encounter in the library, would become increasingly awkward, the attraction that had seemed so undeniable at the time becoming an impediment to their interactions. Oddly, however, the reverse had seemed to occur. Even if only tacitly acknowledged, the attraction, now that its existence had been confirmed, seemed to find its place among all the other adjustments that had to be made, a source of tension and discomfort, yes, but only one of several. Of the many extraordinary things Myka had witnessed and experienced since she had joined the Warehouse, seeing Helena's genetic duplicate every day remained unnerving. The questions about who she was and why she was here hadn't gone away; in fact, they were all the more pressing each day that Diane was still there. Yet each day Myka also was more convinced that Diane was Diane, a person separate from the woman she had been cloned or artefacted from. The uneasiness never disappeared but it did begin to lessen. It was a lot like living next door to an entity that, logically, shouldn't exist but did and which could blow you to smithereens at any moment but obviously hadn't . . . yet. If she could accept the Warehouse, she could accept Diane, and the attraction would pass. It was a temporary infatuation, a crush, a momentary resurgence of feelings she had once had about Helena fanned into life because Diane, unlike Helena, seemed to return them, but they weren't going to act on them. That had been tacitly acknowledged as well.

Even sex was back to normal, which, Myka sensed, was something of a disappointment to Pete but a relief to her. It was undisturbed by fantasies of Helena or Diane and she welcomed the occasional annoyance she felt when Pete reached over to his nightstand and pulled out the toy drawer, saying "Let's try this." Sometimes they did, and sometimes it was fun enough or novel enough for her to come a little harder, and then the sweat between her breasts and the louder volume of her cries were reassurance that this relationship was the one. It really was. She and Pete weren't siblings at heart; they were lovers. Work wasn't the driver of their intimacy; they fundamentally "got" one another, and it wouldn't matter if he had stayed in the Marines or she had gone to law school. They would have found each other somehow. Which was why when she admitted to Abigail - stupidly admitted, she would bitterly characterize it later - that she had overheard Claudia trying to interest the others in betting on the odds that she would sleep with Diane, she felt all that hard-won certainty and confidence vanish at Abigail's "What odds would you give?"

Abigail wagged her head slowly, repentantly. "Sorry, I was being needlessly provocative."

"The odds are zero," Myka said sharply. "I'm not telling you this because I have doubts about my relationship with Pete. In fact, I wouldn't be telling you this if I had doubts. I'm telling you because it's a sign that, nearly two months after Diane popped up in Houston, everyone thinks she and Helena are the same person. They're not. They may share the same DNA, but they are not the same."

Abigail's head was still bowed but tilted at an angle, the fall of her hair a curtain obscuring her face. She might seem to be daydreaming or otherwise only pretending to listen, but Myka, having had a number of sessions with her by now, knew that it wasn't true. She was listening all right, but only to what wasn't being said. "I don't think that Claudia's betting on the likelihood of you sleeping with Diane says anything about whether she thinks Diane and Helena are the same. It says something about how she feels about you and a lot more about how she handles stressful situations." Abigail shivered in her cardigan and bent down to adjust the thermostat of the space heater between their two chairs. It came on with a roar, almost drowning out her next words. "You really want me to believe that you led off with overhearing one of your friends betting on whether you're going to cheat on your boyfriend because you think it's a sign of a conceptual error? Let's leave Diane and Helena out of it for a minute. How did you feel when you heard Claudia?"

Suddenly Myka was back in an office just as ad hoc and shabby but warm, so warm that Dr. Jacobson had thrown open all the windows. His office was in a building old enough that the windows still had screens. Myka could imagine a secretary in pumps, a bouffant, and a missile cone brassiere opening the windows to thin out her boss's cigar smoke, her ass still smarting from the pinch he had given it. The HVAC wasn't working, it rarely worked, and while the temperature outside was barely in the 40s, inside it was 80. Dr. Jacobson, a grizzled-looking, potbellied man (not dissimilar in appearance to Artie, she would later think), was distracting Myka from the 1952 television serial she was creating by asking her how frequently she had been having nightmares about Sam's death. One nightmare, she had mentioned one nightmare, and somehow, once she had admitted it to him, it had mushroomed into her having nightmares every night, which wasn't true. Most of the time she wasn't sleeping long enough to have nightmares. She would lie in bed trying to isolate the critical mistake she had made when her team had rushed in or she would go even farther back in time, to when they were planning the takedown, and try to find the error there. It had to be correctable, what had happened, because she couldn't go through a loss like that again. One more thing not to tell Dr. Jacobson. If talking about feelings solved problems, she would be all for it, but talking about feelings only led to more talking about feelings. But just as she had invented nightmares for Dr. Jacobson, she would find a response that would satisfy Abigail.

"I felt awful. How else do you feel when someone thinks you're capable of that kind of betrayal?" Myka added, for good measure, "Sick at heartandangry."

"That's the real reason why you mentioned Claudia's bet, because you're angry with her?"

There was something in Abigail's voice, stronger than skepticism, that needled her. "No, thereasonI told you is that it's more proof to me that we're not handling the situation with Diane to our best advantage. We're too suspicious. But you also asked me how I felt, so I told you that Ifeltsh*tty about Claudia thinking the worst of me."

"It doesn't seem reasonable for Claudia or Pete or Artie to be so suspicious of Diane? Although she's a genetic duplicate of Helena, although her origin story is preposterous even by Warehouse standards, although Helena has murderous tendencies and the skills to employ them, although Helena lived for a year among you, partnered with you, shared her secrets with you and none of you were the wiser?" Though the almost sarcastic disbelief was gone, Abigail's voice was no less needling, hammering Helena, Helena, Helena. "By Claudia's lights, you might be the unreasonable one, on the verge of being seduced a second time -"

"Shut up." She hadn't even sounded like herself. How could so much rage, so much venom, so much of her father be injected into those two words? "I'm sorry, so sorry," she said, in a rush to get the apology out, to put some distance between her, Abigail, and that dollar store version of Warren Bering she had temporarily become. "I don't know where that came from."

Abigail belted her cardigan and shifted in her chair as if to announce that they had finally gotten to the meat of the session and she was ready to tuck in. "I was jabbing at you with the equivalent of a stick. Maybe a little too hard, but you understand what I'm saying, right? Claudia turning this situation into a game isn't all that different from you pretending that you're more rational about Diane than the others." She held up her hand to forestall a protest that Myka, still hearing that harsh "Shut up," was too distracted to voice. "Not that you don't have a point about how she's being treated, but what are your reasons for believing that she isn't, at best, a tool that someone's using to assault the Warehouse?"

Dr. Jacobson had asked her something similar. They had been talking about her obsession (his word) with the findings of the Secret Service's internal investigation into Sam's death. What are your reasons for believing that it was your fault? The report clears you and your team. Why can't you accept their conclusions? And he had hammered and hammered and hammered at her about the significance of chance and luck until she had erupted. Shut up. Shut the f*ck up. At her outburst he had only picked at the knees of his pants. Why does it upset you that Sam might have died as the result of factors beyond your control? Because if I made a mistake that killed him, she told him, it means that I could have saved him, if things had gone differently. If I had gotten there earlier, if . . . . Her voice had died away. If it's all chance, she told him quietly, I can't save anyone. I could have been five minutes early, and he still would have died.

Myka felt that she was folding in on herself, Abigail's poking her with the equivalent of a stick, as she had described it, actually succeeding in poking a hole in her. "I have no reasons, I just . . ." her hands rose from her lap just high enough to drop, "know."

"Like you knew with Helena." Abigail hadn't phrased it as a question, but she hadn't said it with all the attendant irony that the track record of Myka's "knowing" deserved.

"It was different with Helena. I went from not trusting her to feeling sorry for her to wanting to give her a second chance to liking her." The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. "It was more of a progression."

"With Diane, the connection's more immediate?" Abigail might have phrased this one as a question, but she knew the answer. It was in the way those dark eyes seemed to see not her, but her evasions, her little lies, even the things Myka sensed she wasn't ready to tell herself. They were like Helena's eyes in the curiosity they could so rapidly assume but unlike hers in that the curiosity never hardened into judgement.

Myka could still recall every detail of that first encounter, down to the awkward way Diane had held herself in her new, never-been-washed outfit. She had watched as Diane crossed the room toward her, amazed that someone who so looked like Helena could be tearing up from joy, joy, furthermore, at seeing her. She could still feel that hand, cold and trembling, cup her chin, and she had felt a desire to thumb away Diane's tears in turn. That encounter had been followed by their long talk in the guest cottage, when she had confessed to Diane feelings she hadn't told anyone else. Diane had said to her later that those confessions had been meant for Helena, but Diane had been wrong. There had been moments when she could have told Helena everything she had told Diane, and more, but she never had. Then there had been the party and seeing Diane dance and believing, or wanting to believe, that the desire had been a temporary resurgence of . . . whatever it was she had felt for Helena. But that wasn't true either. Everything with Helena had been buried or disguised as something else, but with Diane, it was out there, in full flower. Jesus, she was in trouble.

"Yes."

Abigail, of course, understood all that her "Yes" implied. "So tell me, Myka, what odds would you give Claudia?"

"On a good day, 50-50." She closed her eyes and, after a long, shaky in-drawn breath, she said, "And on a bad day, like this one is turning out to be, it's all I can do not to go down to the cottage and pound on the door."

"What do you think she would do?"

"She'd let me in."

Myka's bleak reassessment of the "new normal" into which she had tried to fit Diane's disturbance of her routines, not to mention the Warehouse's, followed her the next several days. What had seemed quiet and despairing confessed in Abigail's tiny office became loud and aggressive and hectoring outside it. Every time her eyes met Diane's or she was graced with that smile, which like Helena's - of course, like Helena's - could curve so deeply yet, unlike hers, was even fuller, readier to dissolve in a burst of laughter, she could hear next to her ear, Toughen up. Don't give into your feelings. Don't be a crybaby. Don't be weak. Her father's usual words of encouragement.

"He was so full of bullsh*t," she muttered to herself.

"I'm sorry, what was it you said?" Diane was standing too close to her, which was always the case now, though they weren't touching and Diane was actually three feet farther down the aisle.

"Nothing," Myka said and blushed, which also was always the case now.

They were in the "Miscellaneous" section of the Warehouse, which, Myka thought, given that the Warehouse was nothing but a miscellany of objects, only imperfectly suggested just how hard to categorize and unpredictable the artefacts in this section were. Some had variable effects, and others could invest their power in a number of objects. She had had the vague idea that these artefacts, because they were outside the "standard Warehouse artefact," might be the ones to evoke some response from Diane, if, in fact, she was what Artie and Pete and Claudia and Irene and the regents (Myka wasn't sure which side of the fence Steve was on) suspected, the tool of someone bent on assaulting the Warehouse, as Abigail had put it. Even someone as familiar with the Warehouse and artefacts as H.G. Wells would have difficulty creating a counteragent, whether ingested, injected, or implanted, that could handle this assortment. Despite wearing gloves and liberally applying extra goo as she handled the artefacts, Myka had been whammied twice already. First by a kaleidoscope that developed a new effect every time its barrel was twisted, today's being continuous, violent sneezing. Without putting on gloves or shaking out a neutralizing bag, Diane simply took the artefact from her and gave her a wadded, but clean, tissue from a pocket of her jeans. Holding the kaleidoscope to her eye, Diane twisted the barrel, admiring the patterns. "Lovely to look at, but what it's supposed to do?"

The second whammy had involved a "combinatory" artefact, in this case, a child's toy chest and the toys in it. Steeling herself, Myka began taking out the toys, unsure which one would be invested with the artefact's energy. When she reached for a mesh bag containing plastic soldiers, she felt a familiar tingle, and she was helpless to prevent herself from marching up and down the aisle, hand raised to her forehead in a permanent salute. Diane unsuccessfully tried to stifle a laugh and, for much too long, simply watched her parade through the section. Giving in, she picked up the mesh bag and, with a mock frown of regret, dropped it into the neutralizing bag.

Groaning as her arm relaxed and her hand swung down, Myka glared at her. "Took you long enough."

"If I didn't have an appreciation for the absurd, I couldn't survive my current predicament," Diane said, "and it was deliciously absurd, seeing you march with such . . . crispness." Her lips were parting as the deeply curving smile broke into a laugh; the gleam of teeth and eyes made of Diane something both impish and faintly predatory, and Myka, captured by the contrast (or the complementarity, she couldn't decide which), was seized by the nearly ungovernable impulse to kiss her.

She ran her hand through her hair and knotted her fingers around the roots, giving the strands a hard tug. Searching for a more effective distraction, she pivoted toward the end of the aisle in which they were standing and spied the "Summer of Love" bus, which was a VW bus that had actually been abandoned in a field at Woodstock, not on a street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in 1967, but the "Summer of Love" bus had a panache that the "Woodstock" bus didn't. "This way," she said curtly and beckoned to Diane to follow her. Nothing like refocusing on purpose, being an agent, being someone who had no thoughts of kissing anyone but her boyfriend to create a necessary distance.

With more force than was necessary, she yanked at the handle of the side door of the bus and pushed it back. She was assaulted by the commingled smells of old clothes, old dope, and sweat; they had never dissipated in almost 50 years. The bus itself acted as a neutralizer; unless the objects inside it were taken out, they didn't have any effect. While Myka had been willing to risk being whammied by any one of the toys in the toy chest - perhaps because they were a child's toys, their powers were also on the smaller end of the scale - she wasn't going to touch anything in the bus. Diane flicked a glance at the interior of the bus, but she looked more frequently at her, the laughter, the deeply curving smile, the impishness all gone. Had this been Helena, the predatoriness would have only increased; the more uncertain she felt, the more aggressively she would act, operating on the principle that the best defense was a good offense. Diane was an agent, a time-traveler, and, at heart, an explorer, but she wasn't a hunter. The change in the ease between them confused her, but it wouldn't provoke her into lashing out.

Myka expected to feel a pang of disappointment at the difference, but it was a relief, she had to admit, to look up at the top of the Warehouse and see only the random energy strike, not storm clouds. She didn't want to kiss Diane this time, just hold her close . . . and then kiss her.

Purpose, purpose, purpose. "Did your reality have a Woodstock? Love-ins? Hippies? It sounds like your reality experienced something like our '70s, which was long on drugs and sex and short on idealism -." Myka was talking too fast, anxious to barrel through the awkwardness that was between them. Diane's confusion had only deepened, and helpless to stop herself from further ramping up, Myka charged on. "In the '60s, there was the hope that we could create a society that was more progressive, more just, and to do that we needed to be free to experiment, to try new ways of acting and being in the world . . . " she trailed off, wondering if she was talking about the 1960s or if her emphasis on "experiment" and "new ways" said more about her own preoccupations. "We," it was a "we" only if she wanted to argue that her conception, some ten to 12 years off in the late '60s, existed as a premonition in her parents' minds. Warren Bering and Jeannie Monaghan didn't even meet until 1972. Good job there, Myka, utterly trivializing one of the most eventful decades in American history.

Diane passed her to crawl into the bus. "We had, or will have, depending on your position in time, a period when we questioned the purpose of our civic and religious institutions, including the Warehouse. It wasn't as marked by discord and violence as your 1960s." The bus squeaked and rocked on its wheels as she moved around in the back, stooping to examine the objects. "But a number of 'alternative belief systems' and 'lifestyles' sprung up as people searched for other things to believe in." She carefully backstepped toward Myka, holding a bong in one hand and a necklace of love beads in the other. She held them out to her, wrinkling her nose. "Are these relics, or was the bus not properly cleaned?"

Pointing to the bong, Myka said, "That leaves you in a permanent stupor." She more reluctantly considered the love beads. "They leave you in a . . . um . . . constant state of arousal."

Diane tossed the bong into the back of the bus, but, with a return of her impishness, she slipped the necklace over her head as she stepped down to the Warehouse floor. "Am I going to throw myself on you?"

Myka swallowed hard. "If you had stayed on the bus, no. It acts as kind of a giant neutralizing bag."

"You should've told me that before I got down." There was no reproof, however, in Diane's voice, and she held Myka's gaze steadily. "Let's give it a few minutes and see what happens." They looked at each other until Diane dropped her eyes to search the floor. "Perhaps I should find you a stick to beat me off with."

"Maybe I wouldn't resist." The words hadn't come out as a joke, Diane immediately stopped looking for a nonexistent stick and raised her eyes until they met Myka's again.

"Maybe I don't need the love beads to have the compulsion to throw myself at you." Those words hadn't come out as a joke either.

It was an exercise of control that she would ordinarily exult in, not to push Diane into the bus and, on the irregularly cut square of shag carpeting someone had placed in the back and, in the middle of all those artefacts, take off everything she was wearing, except the love beads. Exult because it was yet another opportunity to prove to herself that she wasn't as emotionally erratic as her father. For too many years she had witnessed her father's outbursts about everything from his customers' shoplifting to politics to her grades ever to believe that giving in could be freeing, or enjoyable. The one time in her life when she had been so overwhelmed by her emotions that she could think only of escaping them, as panicked as a cartoon bear fleeing a cloud of angry bees, had been the debacle with Helena at Yellowstone. And she had run all the way home. Because there, among the echoes of her father's rages, she could guiltlessly let it all out, the anger and the hurt but mostly the shame, because she should be too smart for all this pain. Just as she should be too smart to be so infatuated with this simulacrum of Helena Wells. But it physically hurt, letting her heart leap and plunge, feeling the sweat bead at her forehead and under her arms, and acknowledging that she was so f*cking engorged, so ready after hearing those words, the faltering joke, that if Diane were, in fact, to throw herself at her and press a hand or knee against this, this vesuvial center of her, she would come, bucking and shouting.

It hurt too much not to say something, some kind of anti-release release. "This doesn't make sense, you, me, us," Myka said, flicking her finger between the two of them in needless definition, although perhaps not so needless because Diane might not seem them as an "us" at all. She was the one who had called her sexual experiences "comfort" and tepidly characterized them as "pleasant." She might not have experienced the past few seconds as two tectonic plates, one being I want to give in, the other I can't give in, grinding against each other. "I live with chaos, I work with chaos, but I'm not chaotic."

Diane's smile was tremulous but relieved as well. "At least I know now that I'm not mad or that I'm not the only one going mad." She took off the necklace and began it running it through her hands, love beads turned into prayer beads. "It's impossible, for so many reasons." She suddenly clenched the necklace. "I shouldn't have been teasing you like that, but it wasn't teasing, because I want . . . I want -"

"Like you said, it's impossible." Who said that behaving and speaking rationally couldn't be as effective as a cold shower? Maybe if they had said things like "I want to f*ck you" and "Take off your pants," they would be going at it in the bus right now, but they hadn't because this was where she and Diane met, where she and Helena never would. The job came first, they were agents, first and foremost. "Today's not the day when the love beads are the artefact." Her voice gaining strength, although she felt a blush gaining power as well since she could feel that cooling wet spot on her underwear touch her as she shifted, she said, "The bus is like the toy chest, the power skipping from one object to the next. We've cataloged seven effects altogether, but we've never been able to detect a pattern in when or how a particular artefact is 'activated.' It seems to be completely random." As Diane leaned into the bus to drop the necklace onto a heap of t-shirts designed with crudely drawn peace signs in what looked like permanent marker, Myka added, "It's one of the reasons we keep the artefacts on the bus. We never know which one of them is going to be in play."

Legend had it that a particularly argumentative group of agents in the '80s had worn the t-shirts to stop their quarreling. They had been found four days later in one of the more isolated areas of the Warehouse dreamily gazing up at its ceiling and asking each other what shapes they thought the energy strikes made. Myka thought about telling Diane the story, but she was already wandering away from the bus, headed toward an aisle of artefacts bordering the Miscellaneous section. She stopped at the end of the aisle, craning her head to look up it but not venturing any farther into it. When Myka reached her side, she gestured toward a mannequin clothed in the remains of the Imperceptor Vest and an enormous Tesla-like weapon mounted on a low-slung carriage like a cannon.

"Is this the H.G. Wells section? Is this what my cousin's going to show me?"

"Possibly, but there are other things, too, things the rest of us haven't seen. And other of her artefacts that we do know about, like the Time Machine, are stored elsewhere." Myka picked up a child's silver hairbrush, so badly tarnished it looked black. Christina's. "The ones we have occasion to use aren't here. In fact, some of these may not be artefacts. They were what were collected at the time, from the Warehouse, her home, and her various laboratories, when she was bronzed."

Diane nodded at the hairbrush in her hand. "Is it wise for you to be holding that without gloves?" She smiled to remove any note of reproach in her question. "If I have to rescue you from a relic's spell, who knows what may happen if I touch one of hers?"

Myka shrugged but put the brush down, gently. "I don't think any object connected with her daughter would have adverse effects."

"Claudia has told me about what it means to be 'bronzed' and why Helena chose it, but I have to admit that I still don't understand it, that form of imprisonment or why she willingly accepted it."

"What do you with the people who are so obsessed with using a 'relic's' power and so," Myka lifted and spread her hands wide, "capable of defeating any conventional means of imprisoning them?" As dismay crossed Diane's face, she said, "I'm not saying that I believe in bronzing, and the regents haven't bronzed anyone in decades, but they haven't forbidden it either."

"Our preference is always to rehabilitate, by re-educating them about what the relics mean and what they're to be used for. It doesn't always work, I admit, and oftentimes even when it does, it's only because we've threatened them with a worse punishment." Diane's expression had clouded, as if she were struggling not to concede that Myka's question had identified what, in her reality, was an intractable problem as well. "If we can't rehabilitate them, we exile them."

"Where? To the Phantom Zone?" The comic book analogy had leaped to the forefront of her mind with disquieting speed. Thanks, Pete.

But Superman was alive, okay,knownin Diane's reality because she simply gave Myka a scowl. "It's a word that still has meaning in my reality." Then the scowl faltered and her hand traveled up to her chignon from which a few strands of hair had escaped, and she tucked them behind her ears. "If they return, we send them to . . . a different place." Sighing, she said, "There are anomalies that seem meant to transport . . . people. We outfit our worst offenders with devices - the technology has advanced over time - that these anomalies can recognize."

Myka tried to think it through. "But you talk about having to follow an anomaly's energy trail, not actually traveling with it. Yet you let criminals . . . . How do you know that they won't be as disruptive in the past or the future?"

"I've also said that there's a symbiotic relationship between anomalies and our world. We've never known anyone who was 'sentenced' to be taken by an anomaly to return, and there's never been any evidence that they've posed a threat to the Warehouse in any time into which the anomaly deposited them." Diane was tightly hugging her chest, her pullover, a mock turtleneck sweater climbing up her neck, heightening her resemblance to a turtle trying to pull its head back into its shell.

"For all we know, you could be a criminal that one of these special anomalies decided to 'deposit' here. Christ, Diane." Myka began pacing the aisle. "Have you told the regents this?"

"Of course not." Diane's mouth crimped into an even unhappier line. "For what it's worth, most of us in the Warehouse suspect that these anomalies don't survive their transit into another time. They 'burn up in space,' so to speak, along with the criminal. We call it 'exile,' but it's really just a form of execution."

"But you don't know. You think, you believe, but none of you know." Myka stopped pacing, spinning around to face her, hands on hips. "Did you tell me this now because of what . . . happened . . . I mean, what we talked about at the Summer of Love bus? Do you think because of what I may feel that I won't tell the regents?"

"No." Diane had sucked in her lower lip and she seemed bent on crushing her ribcage with the hold she had of her chest. "I forgot for a moment what we are to each other, really. Not . . . that," one arm snaked away to fling itself backward in the direction of the bus, "but a prisoner and her jailer. And deservedly so, you're thinking. Tell the f*cking regents, I don't care."

She sounded so much like a moody teenager then, her teeth biting into that bottom lip hard enough that it was practically bloodless, Myka could have laughed. Actually she did, although the laugh was closer to a rough couple of hiccups. For one thing, it was shocking to hear Diane use the word 'f*cking,' 'bloody' was as close as she generally came to swearing. For another, she had been in almost the same exact situation more than four years ago, trying to determine just how dangerous H.G. Wells was.

She and Helena had been driving back to the Warehouse from Bozeman, Montana, where they had originally gone with Pete to retrieve John Bozeman's "lucky gold nugget." The nugget was in a neutralizing bag in the trunk, along with their luggage. Pete they had dropped off at the Bozeman airport to catch a flight to Seattle to retrieve a Jimi Hendrix artefact, which was just as well since the Bozeman retrieval had marked another low spot in Pete and Helena's relationship, which had been in steady decline since the infamous London kiss.

The Bozeman nugget had been missing from the Warehouse for decades only to recently resurface in the town he had founded. Bozeman had been wearing the nugget on a leather cord when he had "discovered" the Bozeman Trail (or successfully remarketed one of the preexisting trails, as some contemporary historians had it), and at the time he had been murdered. Warehouse agents had long believed that Bozeman had been killed for the nugget but not because of the purity of its gold. In the late nineteenth century, the possessor of the nugget was able to see viable trade routes where others saw only impediments - mountains, deserts, canyons, waterfalls. In the twentieth century, the possessor could "see" the most commercially viable way of finding, extracting, or harnessing natural resources. Some thought fracking had become viable only when an engineer had acquired the nugget. The downside to the nugget had been an overwhelming desire to murder one's business partners. Bozeman had been murdered - many believed by his business partner at the time - not long after his trail helped to open western Montana for settling and, cynics would say, exploitation.

"I wouldn't have done it, I wouldn't have killed him," Helena had said without looking at her, her head fixedly turned toward the passenger's side window.

She and Pete had found her, the nugget on its ancient cord wrapped around her wrist, a gun, not a Tesla, pointed at the nugget's former possessor, a used car salesman possessed by the idea that Montana's gold fields could produce again - if only one knew where to look. He had murdered his father-in-law and his wife, both partners in his car dealership, in pursuit of his compulsion.

Myka had called to her, but Helena hadn't responded, hadn't moved. It wasn't until Pete had pressed his Tesla into the back of her neck that she had surrendered the gun. "You had no protection from the artefact, Helena."

"I had misplaced the bag, but that deadweight you call your partner thought I intentionally left it behind. He needn't have threatened to fry my nervous system." Helena had whipped her head around, and Myka could feel the intensity of her stare. "He thinks I'm beyond saving, that I've been so warped by Christina's death and the bronze that I can't change. Do you?"

Myka asked herself that question every day. Sometimes she could easily answer "No," and then there were times, like today, when all she could sense from Helena was rage. "I don't think you're intrinsically evil," she had said carefully.

"Not a ringing endorsem*nt. Are you beginning to doubt me again, darling?" Helena's voice was brittle. "He shot his wife in front of their ten-year-old daughter, you know. He had the gall to tell me that he loved his family and then he cried,he cried," she had said with loathing. "A monster I may be, but I would never have done to Christina what he did to his own child."

And Myka had believed her. Because underneath that rage was sadness, and more than a hundred years later, Helena was still fleeing it. The rage was a wall she had built against it, yet the grief was always pressing, surging, and Myka had heard it, submerged, under that contemptuously said "he cried." Comparing her loss and Helena's was a zero sum game; it was no less than Helena's since she would always have some stricken, desolate place in her that Sam and her failure to save him would inhabit. She respected its boundaries, but she wasn't afraid that she was destined to live in it. It wasn't bigger than . . . than her job, which, was in the end, rescuing people from their own worst impulses - temporarily exaggerated by objects with extraordinary powers - and maybe someday, if she were lucky, it wouldn't be bigger than her desire to fall in love with someone else.

Then Helena had gone back to looking out the window, at one point saying almost musingly, "Yellowstone National Park isn't very far away from here, is it? I'd like to see it one day."

That had been a clue, Myka thought wryly, noting the mixture of defiance, confusion, and regret that Diane was exhibiting. It wasn't wholly unlike how Helena had looked at her after she had surrendered at Yellowstone. Did she do what she hadn't done then? Act rationally, logically, and tell the regents about the "special anomalies" and the possibility that Diane was what they suspected she was, a criminal on the order of Helena Wells? She had been right about Helena's sadness, but she had underestimated the power of her rage. Closing her eyes, she tried to sort through the welter of what she felt about Diane, what she sensed from her, the latter, in this context, more important than the former but, unfortunately, not nearly as intense. Anger, yes, but not rage, and it was more anxiety about not returning to her reality than grief that she had already lost it. But stronger than either was confusion. And curiosity. And . . . Myka felt breathless at the recognition, her own desire, attraction, whatever it was, just as strong and reflected back at her.

She opened her eyes. Diane had started pacing in the interim, but she stopped as Myka began shaking her head. "Let's go," she said tonelessly, her chignon half-undone and her fingers still picking at it. "Let's go find your Mr. Kosan and be done with this."

"No. There's no sense in increasing their paranoia since they'll clamp down the harder. If we don't give you the chance to get your skulduggery on," Myka said with a weary attempt at humor, "how will we know what you're really after?"

The smile that Diane offered her was less relieved than she expected. "I'd rather heighten the regents' paranoia than yours, but it's a little too late for that, isn't it?" With a frustrated huff, she freed her hair; sleek and intensely black, it seemed less to spill over her shoulders than to glide over them like a cat. Though Myka was descending into the misery of second guessing and anxious recriminations that she knew would keep her sleepless for the foreseeable future, she was still mesmerized by the cascading of Diane's hair. She could bury her face in it. Her deciding to withhold - for now - the possibility that Diane had been deliberately exiled would make her complicit in whatever she was planning, at least in some minds (if,ifDiane was planning, the inextinguishably hopeful part of her was saying), but the realization did nothing to dull her attraction. In fact, she felt it only the more strongly, imagining how she would nose aside the strands and blow gently on the back of Diane's neck -

"It's almost time to meet Helena," Diane said. "Are you sure you don't want to come along, especially now that you know I might be as evil everyone fears?"

With her hair down and the mocking note in her voice that turned her question into a dare rather than an invitation, Diane could have been Helena, and Myka had to concede that there was more predator to Diane than she had thought. She motioned for Diane to go ahead of her in silent, unenthusiastic assent. Diane began walking toward Artie's office but turned around, her expression beseeching and her hand searching for Myka's. Helena would have given her a tiny, sour quirk of her lips, which would have underscored the setback, the reintroduction of doubt. She wouldn't have tried to bridge it as Diane was doing now, fumbling at her hand and then squeezing it.

"I'm sorry. I didn't intend to complicate things between us any more than they already are, but you have to know that you're the last person I'd ever want to hurt, Myka." Diane stepped closer, releasing Myka's hand to cup her face, thumb stroking the soft line of her jaw. It was how Diane had caressed her when they had met for the first time, when they had stood in that depressingly sterile room in the CDC surrounded by Irene, Helena, Vanessa and her colleagues, yet aware only of each other.

Helena had never touched her so intimately, but Myka remembered her saying, not long before Yellowstone, much the same words.

Chapter 8

Chapter Text

Myka

Helena was waiting for them in Artie's office, although "waiting" suggested that she was sitting on a chair, maybe even the sofa she had vocally - and vociferously - sworn never to sit on again, drinking a cup of tea she had brewed in the much-used Keurig. Instead of seeing one of her exaggeratedly slow eyerolls or the disapproving arch of one of her eyebrows, Myka saw only her profile as she and Diane entered the room, a profile that was twitching and grimacing in concentration in front of a computer screen. Hearing the noise of their entrance, Helena rolled her chair away from the computer and glanced at them almost with disinterest. "I suppose it's that time," she said.

Myka gestured at the computer. "We can wait if there's something you need to finish."

"There's nothing to finish. It's ongoing surveillance." Helena looked at Diane, smiling sardonically. "I keep waiting for the Warehouse to erupt in the equivalent of a sneeze or break out into hives, but you . . . it registers nothing."

"Should it be registering my presence?" Diane asked the question curiously, not defensively.

"I don't know." Helena stood up, pushing the chair closer to the desk. She was dressed in all black today, and Myka wasn't sure whether it was because she needed to do laundry and had nothing else to wear but black jeans and a black wool sweater or she was indulging in a bit of mordant humor about the Wellsiana tour she was about to give. Or both. She turned to Myka, her eyes narrowing. "Are you joining us after all?" At Myka's shrug, Helena's face relaxed and her smile grew warmer. "Good, it will lessen the feeling that I'm talking to myself about myself. Though Charles frequently claimed that I believed I was the only audience who could truly appreciate me." The smile stiffened and then disappeared when she turned back to Diane. "Where would you like to start? We can do it chronologically or by import to the Warehouse and its mission or by what's best known about me or by -"

"I prefer to start with whatever you've not had time to rehearse your lines about, cousin," Diane said.

It was almost perfect, their resemblance, particularly as Diane hadn't yet taken the time to gather her hair up and bind it in a knot and heightened even more by the mockery in her reply. Almost perfect, but Myka could pick out the differences, the tension that had Helena holding herself with the straight-backed posture of someone armoring herself against a display of any vulnerability and the frustration that had given Diane's gibe an extra edge. She had said on more than one occasion that she understood Helena's hostility, but Myka wondered how true it was. On some level, she suspected, Diane hoped that Helena would become her ally. Who could ever understand her better?

"If you want the unscripted me then let's visit the artefacts from 'Helena, the Early Years,' although I doubt they merit the designation," Helena said, leading them out of the office and down the stairs to the main floor. Myka had anticipated that they would be walking straight into the heart of the Warehouse, where the Dark Vault was located, but Helena soon veered off to the left, past the aisles of artefacts created by comedians, clowns, and circus performers. Maybe not so incongruous, after all, Myka thought, if the room were here, as Helena had more than once referred to her pre-Bronze life as "tragic farce." Yet Helena turned down an aisle only to walk unhesitatingly toward the wall that ended it.

"Helena, where do you think you're going?" Myka finally called out in confusion.

"This is the Warehouse, remember?" Helena looked at her over her shoulder. "All things are possible."

Exhaling in frustration, Myka followed, Diane at her side. Diane's fingers gently tangled with her own. "Hardly the end I pictured for myself," Diane whispered, "being immured in a wall."

When they arrived at the wall, however, the aisle seemed suddenly to curve to the left, banking like the track of a roller coaster, and deposited them into an area of the Warehouse that Myka wasn't sure she had seen before, wasn't sure, in fact, if it had existed before. Helena was waiting for them, standing in a dark recess, darker recess, to be more accurate, since there was little light in the space. "If you ask me where we are, I can't tell you because I don't know. Think of it as a Warehouse-created wormhole," she advised in a tone more weary than wry.

"Did the regents have Claudia set it up this way, to make it impossible for you to find it on your own?" Myka approached the door that was set into the recess, wanting to inspect it. The doorknob and its plate were blackened with age and use. The keyhole was made for an old-fashioned skeleton key, and the door's wood, though it been subject to several coats of varnish, still betrayed dozens of nicks and scratches. It was a door that might have once belonged to a rooming house or a hotel whose clientele were country merchants and farmers traveling to the city for a day. The room behind that door would have been sparsely furnished and none too clean. It would have held, at most, a bed, a chair, and a washstand. The occupant would have likely shared it with others, sleeping two and three to a bed.

"Never impossible," Helena replied with more than a hint of self-mockery, "but difficult. Claudia didn't engineer this, the Warehouse did." She loosely grasped the doorknob. "I think this may be the door from the room I rented when I first became an agent." For a moment her expression was uncertain, and Myka felt a rush of sympathy, thinking that there was little in Helena's life that the regents and the Warehouse, then and now, hadn't laid claim to. The uncertainty vanished, and Helena was inviting them to enter with the sarcasm she brandished when she had no other weapon, "To say my origins were humble would be a vast understatement."

Myka expected to step into a room that would be a facsimile of the one that a young, unmarried female agent might be permitted to rent in Victorian London, given the mores of the time. But she saw no sagging bed, no row of hooks in lieu of a wardrobe, no stained and peeling wallpaper. They were standing in an attic, complete with peaked roof and exposed rafters, exactly what one would expect to find at the top of a late nineteenth-century home. Around them were all the things that a great-great-great aunt or grandparent would have left behind for future generations to discover and treasure as heirlooms - or discard as junk.

Helena surveyed the room, a rare incredulous smile, sincere in its disbelief, creasing her face. "I've not seen this particular presentation before. The times I've been here with Irene and Kosan, it's been, shall we say, far less homey. But this . . . ." She lifted an arm only to let it drop. "I wonder which one of you the Warehouse is honoring by the redesign."

Myka had remained just inside the door, reluctant to wander among Helena's possessions like they were up for auction at an estate sale, but Diane didn't suffer from the same constraint, letting her fingers trail along bookcases, the backs of an assortment of shabby chairs. She stopped at a rocking horse. Its saddle had once been red and its mane once thick enough for a child to clutch, but that had been over a hundred years ago. "Your daughter," she said softly. "There's no mention of her father in the archives."

"Probably because I didn't know who he was," Helena said dryly, so dryly that Myka felt the burn of the words against her skin. Diane's expression of unabashed curiosity hadn't changed, and Helena seemed to find the absence of shock or concern freeing. "It's either a clerk in the Admiralty, who had an artefact-enhanced talent for skimming thousands of pounds from the Royal Navy or a stationmaster who had an uncannily similar ability to 'disappear' entire railroad cars. Caturanga thought they might be sharing the same artefact, so I worked them both to discover if," she laughed at the absurdity of it, "there were some artefact-sharing ring."

"Your Warehouse expected you to . . . become intimate . . . with suspects in pursuit of a relic?" Diane had turned her face away, giving the rocking horse a closer inspection, but her voice betrayed her distaste.

"My Warehouse expected me to successfully retrieve artefacts, preferably in a manner that didn't draw attention or cause bloodshed. If playing the whor* would get me the artefact, I played the whor*. Boredom was usually the worst consequence." The dry mockery had returned, but Myka noticed how tightly Helena's arms were crossed over her chest. "Unless you were a woman who didn't track her menses very well and forgot to find the special little artefact that Caturanga had unearthed for precisely those situations. Add an exceptionally long retrieval in the hinterlands of Russia, far away from even the village quack, and you end up with Christina."

Diane left the rocking horse for a table painted over so often that Myka could count five different colors, and no sign of the original wood, where it was scraped or gouged. On top of it were scattered several notebooks and journals, and as Diane began to leaf through them, Helena's voice followed her, its mockery intensifying. "Tell me, are your criminals as docile as your anomalies, meekly surrendering after giving you a good chase? Do you never have to make difficult choices,cousin? Are the lines always so hard and fast for you?"

Myka wanted to tell her to stop, that her attempt to provoke Diane was just another way of punishing herself. She closed her eyes, wanting to shut out the images of a young Helena inching her hand up a man's thigh - it didn't have to be the government clerk's or the stationmaster's because Myka knew there had been others, many others - and asking with a soft wonder that owed nothing to the sincerity of her interest and everything to her ability to playact how he had managed to amass so much money or influence or . . . anything. Because someone with an artefact could do almost anything, agents were expected to stop at nothing to retrieve it. Virtually nothing, Myka amended. She had never been asked to prostitute herself, although on more than a few retrievals she had flirted and teased and promised to give a suspect the ride of his life if only he would tell her one tiny little secret. The lines had been blurred but they had still been visible.

Helena had been encouraged to ignore them so often that eventually they disappeared. It was rage, a rage not just at having crossed a line, or several, but at no longer knowing where they were to cross that Myka heard buried in her scorn. It was a rage so old, so tarnished by time that Myka recognized its presence only when Helena's derision took on a particularly savage edge. She had heard traces of the injury that animated the rage, the sense of a grievous wound, only a few times, when Helena spoke of Christina's death, when she had been holding the trident at Yellowstone, and now in this room, this laboratory that the Warehouse had made of her remaining possessions, the living laboratory that it had made of Helena herself.

"The decisions aren't always easy, and those who acquire a relic aren't always willing to surrender it, but we're not expected to debase ourselves, to betray what the Warehouse stands for." Diane had picked up a notebook from the table. "If people can't trust that we represent the best that is possible, the potential to be better tomorrow than we are today, why should they trust us at all?" Her look at Helena was direct and unapologetic. "If we don't have people's trust, we can't do our jobs. You know that."

"How high-minded of you. Does your Warehouse issue the idealism along with the badge and the gun?" Helena impatiently waved away the objection that Diane hadn't yet voiced. "Yes, I know there are no badges and no guns. No doubt you and your intercessors think a smile and a 'Please, pretty please, give it back to us' are enough." Helena was no longer clutching herself as if she thought she might start flying apart. Avoiding one of the upholstered chairs with a moue of distaste, its fabric bald with wear in some places and stained in others, she sat on a straight-backed wooden chair, an arm slung over the top of it in an unconvincing display of indifference. She gestured to Myka to come farther into the room. "Take a look around, and if you find anything you like, bring it to the cash register."

"Helena," Myka said, shaking her head with resignation, remaining where she was.

Diane opened the notebook and smiled at what she saw on the page. "The first lines ofThe Time Machine, practically verbatim. I come by my idealism naturally, it seems."

"If you'd read it all the way through, you'd understand that the future is hardly paradise regained," Helena said witheringly.

Diane put the notebook down. "At the risk of sounding like the high-minded ninny you take me for -"

"Hardly a risk, darling," Helena interrupted.

"Even the bitterest disappointment can strengthen hope," Diane finished.

"When it's not crushing it," Helena countered.

Helena

Diane blew out her breath in something between a huff and a sigh, unsure which Helena deserved more, her annoyance or her pity, and it was such a picture of how Helena herself had felt when working with the agents of 13 (with the exception of Artie, so young, so untried) that she almost laughed - in genuine amusem*nt, which was a response she wouldn't would have expected in this room crowded with these items and their, her histories. With forced patience, Diane said, "I don't want to argue with you, I want to work with you to understand what happened, how I 'happened' here."

Helena was even more amused by Diane's attempt to be reasonable; it wouldn't have been her first response. She would have tried to carry her point home, spent herself on battering down the opposition. Myka knew; for the first time since she had entered the room, the pinching that had drawn her features into a virtual knot of tension relaxed, and she let her lips curl into that crooked smile Helena had always found so disarming. "Arguing with Helena is part and parcel of working with her."

With a rolling of her eyes that Helena also found familiar, Diane abandoned the table with its notebooks and journals for a closer inspection of the shabby furniture, in particular what had once been an overstuffed armchair, its stuffing now spilling from rents in the upholstery. Helena remembered settling Christina next to her in it and reading to her, sometimes fairy tales, sometimes the latest effort of H.G. Wells (more and more often penned by Charles and only edited by her), sometimes lurid accounts of crime from the penny press. Christina had especially liked the latter, mainly because Helena would adopt different voices and gesture wildly as she read them, enacting the crime. Back then, it had been only theater . . . .

" . . . lived alone?" Diane was looking at her expectantly. "All this furniture. The Warehouse didn't provide housing?"

"The Warehouse, my first Warehouse," she corrected herself with a sidelong glance at Myka, "was an office building in the heart of London's commercial district. There was no room for dormitories. Besides, most of the agents were married men with families. Coming to the Warehouse was their escape from them."

First thing in the morning the other agents, all male, would congregate in the meeting room in which Caturanga assigned cases, drinking coffee or tea and smoking. She didn't miss that, the fog of their smoke; as she shyly edged in behind them, the men seemed to suck all the more aggressively on their pipes and cigars, and then they would release their resentment at her presence in a great billowing gray cloud. Their conversation, which had been about topics no more impolitic or unfit for mixed company than recent fishing holidays in Scotland or the lateness of the trains, turned cruder with her in the room. They compared the "virtues" of the barmaids at a local pub with much winking and shifting of their feet. They talked of what they did to serving girls who needed to be reminded of their place or urged to work faster or harder. It wasn't subtle enough to be code; all Helena had to do was substitute her own name for "that saucy one, Alice, who needs a man to teach her a little respect" or "Anna, our kitchen maid, appreciates a good pinch and a squeeze" to know what they were imagining doing to her, in this office, against that wall, on the table. She was an abomination in their eyes. Her place was at home or, if she had to earn a wage, then her place was in the "front offices," the public face of the Warehouse, in which harried clerks kept the books and attended to the correspondence of a large - and largely imaginary - manufacturing business in the north of England. Most of the clerks were men, but a few were women, oftentimes tasked by the agents to make their coffee and run their errands. She should have been one of them and not another damnable "innovation" of a dark-skinned man who never should have been chosen by the regents as senior agent.

"I didn't miss a closer acquaintance with many of the agents at 12," Helena said.

Diane left the armchair to open a wardrobe set apart from the other furniture. Helena couldn't recall it and wasn't sure what was in it. Caturanga wouldn't have gone to the effort of saving for her the paltry collection of dresses she had owned. The vast majority had been workaday and most stained with the chemicals she had played with after the other agents went home for the day. When Diane pushed the doors back, Helena's first thought was that the dresses were too gaily colored to be hers, not to mention too small. Of course they were, they had been Christina's.

Helena took a small, steadying breath. When Irene and Kosan had first shown her this collection of odds and ends from a life that had been itself little more than a collection of odds and ends, things that didn't fit, didn't belong elsewhere, she had been stunned into silence, her loud complaints of being taken away from her analysis of the Warehouse's surveillance systems dwindling to a few wondering sounds. But she had wandered among the furniture, the books, the random objects she had bought, or bartered for, as souvenirs of her travels like she might wander through a particularly fascinating museum exhibit, interested, at times awed, yet mainly unmoved. Not even those items that had been Christina's, or ones that she associated with her, had touched her with any immediacy, but this assortment of dresses, some made for a very little girl, others, with more mature lines and trimmings, for a girl who was beginning to entertain the thought that someday, still far in the future, she would be a young lady, was so unexpected, so beyond what Helena would have imagined surviving some 125 years after her death, that she felt the sting of tears. Since she had been released from the bronze, she had cried from rage and then from remorse, but she hadn't cried from grief.

She wouldn't today, either. With a toss of her head that she suspected didn't fool Diane or Myka, especially Myka, Helena carefully separated the hangers and gently pulled out the skirts, noting the fine, straight stitching, the quality of the material. It would be sentimental claptrap to say that the dresses smelled of Christina, they smelled like clothes and old clothes at that, but she remembered her daughter in some of them. Caturanga hadn't gotten them from the rooms she had last occupied before the bronze. She hadn't kept any of Christina's clothes once she had been buried; she had come of age in an age when little would be let go to waste. There would be children who could wear Christina's dresses, play with her toys, lace up her shoes. Some of those children had been her nieces, the daughters Charles had had with his wife as well as the daughters he had had with his mistresses. These were dresses that Sita had made. She had been a clever seamstress, and though she wasn't fond of English fashions, she had made many proper little dresses for Christina. There had always been several of them in Caturanga's home because if Helena was on an extended retrieval that was where Christina stayed. Charles would look after her on occasion, but as he was an unenthusiastic father, he was even less enamored of the opportunities to play the doting uncle.

"Not many places would let to an unmarried woman with a child, and while I might have employed a convenient fiction about an absent husband, I never liked the idea of marriage." She paused before admitting grudgingly, "There were times I would've welcomed a Warehouse-subsidized boardinghouse, but only if I were guaranteed that I would never have to socialize with my colleagues in the common rooms or eat with them at the dining table."

She heard a snicker next to her and realized that Myka had joined her and Diane at the wardrobe. "That's pretty much how you have it now at Leena's." Like she herself had done a few minutes before, Myka ran her hand down one or two of the dresses, fanning out the skirts, her expression becoming more somber. "They're lovely dresses. I'd always pictured your sewing being more utilitarian. The Imperceptor Vest comes to mind." The mild teasing didn't disguise the sadness in her voice.

Ordinarily Helena would have been bridling at the offered sympathy, suspicious that behind it was pity, pity that, so crippled by her daughter's death, she had thought only to make the rest of the world feel her anguish, pity that she had led a life so emotionally impoverished, so barren that an eight-year-old girl had been her only solace. But she never sensed the condescension always implicit in pity in anything Myka said to her about Christina. Maybe it was because Myka saw the child first, not the symbol she later became of all that had gone so wrong for Agent Helena Wells.

"I made gunnysacks with arm holes and neck holes for her. Sita was the one who ensured that she didn't look like an urchin from a Dickens novel."

"You really are going to have to tell me more about Sita," Myka murmured, brushing past Helena with a fleeting, affectionate touch on her arm to guide Diane over to a bookcase. It was filled with more notebooks and yellowed scientific journals, the latter a compendium of the most exciting discoveries and theories of the day, which, Helena thought, would now have the amusing fustiness of the so-called wonders in a Verne romance.

Diane briefly studied the bookcase's contents but didn't take out one of the notebooks or journals for a closer view. She glanced back at the wardrobe as if she were trying to understand the unconventional, unrooted life her "cousin" had led within the context of her reality. "After our training ended, we were expected to live with the other agents. We were each assigned a more senior agent as a mentor." Even more quietly, she said, "We were encouraged to visit our families often, to maintain ties, but we were also to understand that this was our new world and the agents and intercessor our new family. I took to it eagerly." She sent Helena a cautious look, as though expecting that what she had to say next would give offense. "I won't pretend that my loss, my suffering is the same as yours, but my family was so broken after Charles's death, the training, the years of schooling so punishing in their way, that I embraced my new family. I had been lonely for so long and then, at last, to find welcome . . . it's been one of the most powerful things in my life, that sense of having found a home. You question why I have such allegiance, that's why."

It sounded sincere, she sounded sincere, and Helena, if she were honest and if she put her mind to it, could remember the excitement she had felt when she heard Caturanga offhandedly declare, over weak tea and stale biscuits, that she was ready to join the Warehouse. She was 17, and she had been picking pockets and loitering near alehouses and brothels for wind-tattered scraps of conversation for him since she was 12. She had tramped across the better part of London, searching trash bins and flirting with stableboys and footmen, collecting information where and how she could, to deliver it to him over the cheapest of meals in the grimiest of hotel dining rooms and cafés. He had bought her for the price of a bun and still she had flushed with pleasure and straightened her shoulders under a dress a size too small for her when he said, "You've been doing an agent's work for years. Maybe it's time you become one." It had been more than the price of a bun, his investment in her; he had paid for lessons for her though she had quickly outstripped the abilities of those who taught her, and he had tided her over with small gifts of cash as Charles tried newspaper after newspaper, looking for steady work. Most valuable of all, he had taught her how to shadow and trail, eavesdrop, pilfer, ensnare, deceive, disarm, disappear and, if necessary, disable. She didn't question Diane's allegiance, she questioned why Diane, in turn, hadn't yet asked herself what she was receiving in return. Caturanga had cared for her, but he also used her, and the caring and the using had become so bound together that he, and she, could no longer distinguish between them.

"My mentor was one of the older agents, highly regarded by the elders. It was a mark of distinction, I was told, that he had specifically asked to mentor me." Diane was beginning to talk,prattleabout her Warehouse again, and Helena closed the doors of the wardrobe, steeling herself for a boarding school fantasy straight from one of those nineteenth-century children's stories that other children had gotten to read. She rested her head for a moment against the doors, all too painfully aware that more than a century later she was still putting her daughter aside, shutting her out, the Warehouse's call always the one she answered first.

Myka

In years past she would have missed it, the tiny twitch, like one too many blinks. Myka would never have called that face impassive; it was built for drama, the pronounced cheekbones, the firm chin, the narrow, slightly canted eyes. She could have played Medea or Clytemnestra or Lady Macbeth on stage. Hell, she could havebeenany one or all of them, suffering and causing suffering alike. Yet at times that face was practically unreadable, and it had been at its stoniest around Diane. Diane was describing her mentor, a veteran agent and one of the select few who were chosen to retrieve anomalies. She had been partnered with him her first three years as a Warehouse agent. Laughing almost wryly, as if she recognized too late just how special his selection of her as his trainee had been, she confessed, "He was very good-looking in a raffish sort of way, something not lost on the other novices, but I was too afraid that I might embarrass or disappoint him by my performance in the field to take notice."

"That doesn't surprise me. Was he a paragon of virtue as well? Celibate and abstemious in his habits?" Helena had left the wardrobe to walk in a roundabout direction toward them, Myka noticed, listing around trunks and curio cabinets like a ship tacking into the wind. Seeing what was in the wardrobe had unsettled her, and whereas before she had moved confidently among her old possessions, she negotiated her way more carefully now, putting as much distance as possible between her and the next object in her path.

"Tom was a good man," Diane said firmly, "and an excellent teacher. That was all I ever needed to know about Thomas Clemmons."

Helena blinked, as if some nonexistent dust in this simulacrum of an attic, realistic except in its utter lack of dirt, dust, and cobwebs, had gotten into her eye. "How were you effective at all, you and your fellow agents? Model citizens, but each time you talk about your Warehouse, I'm always struck by how deficient in curiosity you are."

"Deficient to you, maybe." Diane's tone sharpened. "But our curiosity is tempered by other considerations, such as a concern for the safety and well-being of others." She worked her mouth, trying to rein in her annoyance. "This is absurd, cousin. I know better than to let you provoke me." Drawing in a long breath, she said, "Actually I am curious about whether there's anything here that relates to the gap in your service to the Warehouse. There's a two-year period in the archives in which all reference to you and what you may have been doing is redacted. Was Christina ill? Were you? The gap precedes your bronzing by a number of years, so whatever it was, it wasn't so horrible that you weren't allowed to return."

Stopping a few feet short of the bookcase, as though she couldn't come any closer despite the fact that the space between them was uncluttered, Helena said, "That's why, you and I, we'll never truly understand one another. Why do you assume that gap exists because of something I did? Maybe it exists because of something the Warehouse did to me."

Later, when Myka and Diane returned to the guest cottage, Diane flopped onto the loveseat, twisting her hair up and then letting it fall back over her shoulders. "I'll never learn how to talk to that woman. She rather rapidly brought things to a close after I asked her about the two years she was absent from the Warehouse, didn't she? She maligns my Warehouse and clearly thinks I'm an idiot, and yet when I ask her why there's a gap in her history, she acts as if I plunged a knife into her heart." Diane gathered her hair into one last messy bunch and released it with a growl of frustration.

Myka observed her from the kitchen, where she was making coffee. While it was true that Helena hadn't volunteered anything more than a suggestion that her two-year absence from the Warehouse wasn't a punishment of her but, rather, a punishment by her, Myka wasn't as convinced as Diane that Helena had been offended by the questions. She recalled Helena's double blink when Diane had referred to her mentor. Something Diane related had had meaning for her, and Helena's increasing restlessness and eventual offhand apology for having to get back to her work seemed to have as much or more to do with a recognition she wasn't willing to share than anger about being asked about what had amounted to a leave of absence from the Warehouse. Either that or the sight of those carefully preserved dresses that Christina had worn had shaken her even more than Myka suspected.

Diane looked adorably frustrated, scowling and fidgeting with her hair, and Myka was reminded that she had her own issues when it came to working with the Wells women. While she liked to think that her problems varied by the Helena involved, they were, in the end, the same problem. Seeing Helena touch the dresses in the wardrobe as if she were trying to recall the last time Christina had worn them, Myka had wanted only to pull that figure all but huddling for protection in her black turtleneck sweater to her. Yet she would no sooner acknowledge that she was being drawn into the current of the one than she felt the powerful undertow of the other. She poured the coffee into mugs and carried them into the living room, giving one to Diane. It should have been a simple transfer, but as their fingers touched and their eyes locked, the contact lengthened, their fingers playing over and rubbing against one another. Myka hadn't previously experienced handing a drink to someone as an erotic act, but this moment was undeniably erotic, the look even more than the touch, Diane's eyes seeming to see through hers to the images charging through her mind, none of them having anything to do with coffee or what they had just witnessed in the Warehouse.

"On the other hand, I'm finding it all too easy to talk to you," Diane murmured, retreating by gazing down into her mug. "Did it appear to you that I recognized anything in that room or knew something about Helena's past that I shouldn't? That's why I was there, wasn't it?"

The attraction between them was growing stronger than the roles they were forced to assume with each other, the prisoner and her jailer, the anomaly and her neutralizer. It was harder to act the wary agent with Diane because Myka believed there was increasingly little to be wary of. She wouldn't deny there was a threat, but she didn't believe that Diane was a knowing participant. As for Diane, her ill-treatment couldn't entirely dampen her natural curiosity about why she was here in a reality that imperfectly mimicked her own. These weren't interrogations, they were conversations, and though Myka knew she should harden her tone and quit slouching in the armchair, her legs hooked over its opposite arm, she couldn't be the coolly analytic observer of Diane that she should be, not when what she wanted to do more was to stop talking about the Warehouse and Helena, stop talking altogether. Consequently her "Why are you so curious about Helena's 'missing' two years?" came out much too idly.

"Aren't you? Perhaps I'm less deficient in that quality than she thinks," Diane responded. She took a sip of her coffee. "Two parts cream to one part sugar. Youaregood to me, Myka Bering." The indulgence in her voice suggested that she might welcome a change in subject as well. "You're going to have to tell me someday how you reconcile it - being an agent and a friend."

If only she did know how to reconcile it. It was how she had reacted to, and sometimes treated, the other Helena, lurching from wariness and suspicion to sympathy for the transition Helena was having to make and a not-so-frank fascination that bordered on -

"Doesn't it strike you as strange that her record literally ends with her returning from a retrieval in Amsterdam and then the next reference is more than two years later, 'Agent Wells has returned from Scotland to resume her duties,'" Diane mused, interrupting Myka's train of thought. "Complete silence about what she was doing during those two years, and that's highly unusual from what they've let me see of this Warehouse's archives, not to mention highly unusual for Cousin Helena herself." Diane took another sip, flashing an appreciative smile at Myka only to let it turn cynical as she grumbled, "Have you never read her many amendments to the case files? 'I did this, I did that, I invented the device that made the retrieval possible, I was the one who figured it all out.' At least God rested on the seventh day," she finished sourly.

"If she didn't tout her accomplishments, nobody was going to do it for her," Myka said mildly. "In that Warehouse, in that time . . . ."

"Yes, I know," Diane said no less sourly, "first woman agent." She corrected herself. "First officially recognized woman agent. I realize that not all of her difficulties were of her own making, but her assumption that because I tried to follow a code of ethics, because I considered the ramifications of my actions, I never had to make difficult choices . . . ." Straightening until she was sitting up, only to hunch forward, ready to propel herself from the sofa or, as she tensely continued to speak, to implore mercy from a judge invisible to Myka, Diane wore an expression of remorse that could have been Helena's. "I had to take a relic from a young woman, a girl no more than 15 or 16, who was using its powers to control what she called 'waking nightmares.' In my time, my cousin's time, we had little effective remedy for the dissociative episodes she was suffering. She would be committed to a government-run asylum before much longer; the relic wouldn't cure her, it would only delay the progression of her illness." Diane laughed dryly and, lifting her head to look at Myka, the anguish and guilt in her eyes could have been Helena's as well. "The agent I was partnered with had a softer heart, and he was willing to leave the relic in her possession. It wasn't significant, and she was the sole support for her mother and five younger children. But we had always been taught to put the safety of a relic first, and who could say what would happen to it, who would come to possess it? I prevailed over my partner's wishes, and I convinced the girl to surrender the relic to us by assuring her that I could provide her with a medicine that was much stronger. Of course, I couldn't . . . and didn't." Diane slanted an even more guilt-ridden look at Myka. "I couldn't get her out of my mind, and eventually I tried to find her. She was in the charity ward of a madhouse. She was in restraints and didn't seem to recognize me when I was brought to see her, but as I left, she began shouting, "You lied! You lied!," over and over. Maybe she was hallucinating, but I think she knew who I was and she remembered what I had promised." Diane took a long breath, held it, then slowly let it out. "The next day I applied for the training program to become one of the special agents who retrieved anomalies. They were infinitely more dangerous to retrieve than relics, but at least I didn't have to worry about risking my soul."

"Diane," Myka said softly, "we all have retrievals that we wish -"

"That's not what I'm trying to say, or not the only thing, at any rate." Diane got up from the loveseat to kneel in front of the armchair. She locked her hands over the end of the arm and rested her chin on them. "I swear to you I'm not someone so dangerous that the Warehouse had to send me into exile. I am not what Helena became. But I'm also no angel. I have lied and manipulated, for what I thought was a noble purpose, but that doesn't make them any the less lies and manipulations. This friendship of ours, as unpromisingly as it started out, it's become very important to me. So important that sometimes I fear it's becoming something else, and it frightens me because I don't recognize that woman, what she might say or do because of it. I need you to understand that this Warehouse and its regents, this world in which I've found myself don't unnerve me nearly as much as what's between us. Since the day that girl's screams rang in my ears, I have never again had cause to think that I could lose my way, until now. Do you understand, Myka?"

Myka didn't speak. She didn't nod. She made no gesture of any kind; her silence was answer enough.

Helena

When Diane and Myka left the attic space, Helena didn't follow them out. Instead, with hardly a grimace of distaste, she sank onto the chair nearest to her, not the one in which she had read to Christina - that she couldn't have borne - but another just as dilapidated. Thankfully, it held no memories for her; in fact, she couldn't remember having owned it, although its arms bore traces of having many, many cups and saucers balanced on them. One of her many bad habits, resting her cup of tea, with or without a saucer and accompanying biscuit, on an arm of a chair as she curled up against its cushions, lost in a book or in sketches and measurements of her newest device for the Warehouse. The chair arm would end up with more of the tea than she did, her elbows and knees, as she shifted for better positions, causing the tea to slosh over the rim of the cup.

Despite the lessons in etiquette and comportment that Caturanga had deemed as much a necessity as her lessons in composition and rhetoric and mathematics, she had remained at heart a street urchin, an Eliza who stubbornly refused to become a lady. No matter how much care she took with her appearance - which had happened only at the beginning of her career at the Warehouse when she was anxious to make a place for herself - she would always arrive with her hair coming loose from the hasty bun in which she had gathered it and her clothes dotted and stained with the remains of her breakfast. She had had illusions that she would win over the other agents with her intelligence and her willingness to work retrievals day and night, but she was still a woman and a slatternly looking one at that.

Of course, just as she wasn't the average Warehouse agent, she wasn't the average woman. She was young and married to her youth was a handsomeness that surpassed what the married agents returned to each evening and what the unmarried ones paid for in brothels and alleyways. Her dishevelment failed to hide how striking she was, which suggested to most of them, or so they hoped it suggested, that she was as carefree with her virtue. She was well aware that they all to a man thought she was Caturanga's whor*, and she hadn't grown up on the streets of London without learning that you never gave away anything. Somebody somewhere would always be willing to pay for it. She needed only to find the right man among them, the one whose opinions mattered to the rest. She wanted the senior agent in the estimation of those white, mainly middle-aged men. Caturanga might have the title, but he didn't have their allegiance.

The man they all admired was John Merriman. He wasn't the oldest agent among them or the smartest, but he was the most effective. His retrievals were proof to the budget-minded regents (bureaucrats at heart despite their sententious reminders about the Warehouse's "sacred mission") that a high rate of success could be achieved with the minimum of time, labor, and money. He had little imagination; he calculated the straightest path to the artefact and followed it. Naturally he and Caturanga despised each other. The one prized creativity and subtlety; if an artefact could be retrieved with no citizen the wiser that his everyday world was riven with magic, for lack of a better word, so much the better. The other prized speed and efficiency; if strong-arming a citizen or breaking down his door would get an agent to the artefact faster, the citizen could be "persuaded" to forget what he saw and heard.

Merriman was in his late 30s when Helena formally joined the Warehouse. He was 20 years her senior, but he was still remarkably athletic and both his vigor and his confidence lent his features, a trifle too sharp, an additional attractiveness. He treated her no more kindly than the other men, and she saw in his eyes the same combination of hostility and desire that she saw in theirs, but she assumed that, as his mistress, she would receive at least a weak reflection of the respect that they so willingly gave him. It was one of her worst mistakes. Torn between their jealousy that he was the one who had "won" her and their equally irrational disappointment that he had lowered himself to choose a woman so odd, so lacking in the graces and refinement that made a woman a lady, they resolved the conflict by hating her all the more. What before had been limited to cutting glances and mumbled insults became louder, cruder, and even violent rejections of her. As long as Merriman was with her, they kept their mouths shut and their hands to themselves, but when he was away . . . she learned to avoid being alone with any of them.

Caturanga had had to come to her aid one evening when two agents trapped her in the meeting room. One locked the door while the other steadily backed her toward the table. When they ignored his calls to open the door, he came to her rescue, not by applying an artefact to the lock, but by taking an axe to the door. The application of the artefact came later as, silent and his expression cold and remote, Caturanga led her into the cavernous expanse of the Warehouse, its true size beyond the capacity of any map of London or schematic of the building to represent. He stopped in front of the shelves that held a variety of fertility-related artefacts and gave her a small bottle made of brown glass.

"Drink from it," he instructed her icily.

She held it upside down. "There's nothing in it."

"Drink from it," he repeated.

"Is it going to kill me?"

He glared at her. "While you've been exceedingly stupid, you're still of value to this Warehouse. If you insist on having relations with Merriman, you should use this frequently. It has excellent prophylactic powers."

Matching his glare, she put her lips to the bottle and tipped her head back. She was surprised that something thick and treacly and nauseating dripped from the bottle onto her tongue. It tasted like sweet coal tar. Shuddering, she swallowed it. "What's its aftereffect?"

"Your next courses will be particularly bloody and painful, or so I've been told."

Helena shrugged and handed the bottle to him.

He placed it back on the shelf, saying suddenly, "He's not worthy of you, Helena. He has no feeling for what we do, for what artefacts are. To him, an artefact is just another form of treasure or plunder. I spent my boyhood among men like that, men who believed that simply because they could claim a land as their own, order its people like pack animals and treat them worse, they understood it. They had no respect." Caturanga bit off his words. "He has no respect, and you dishonor yourself and all that I've tried to teach you by consorting with him."

Consorting with him. That was one way of describing what she did with Merriman in the cheap rooms he rented or in the back of a carriage returning from a retrieval. She was never certain if he had realized that she was a virgin, but he wouldn't have cared in any event. Her feelings, her pleasure were irrelevant. When they were together, he expected her world to narrow to the width of his fly and her attention to be solely fixed on what was behind its buttons. He set the template of her sexual experiences for years to come - an activity she could proficiently manage while she thought of something completely removed from it. She worked out some of her best inventions while her mouth or her hand was otherwise occupied. But she couldn't admit the joylessness of her "consorting," not to Caturanga. Not because he was a man but because she had learned early on with him never to defend her mistakes or to explain her failures. She was to accept his criticism or punishment and then never repeat the error.

"The agents will never trust you, so you'll have to figure out how to profit from their ignorance and fear instead." As she looked at him, bewildered, he said, with a good measure of exasperation, "Do what the others can't, do what they won't."

She trailed him to his office and there he wrote a few lines on a scrap of paper and gave it to her. "Go see this man. He can teach you how to defend yourself." His smile was chill. "And when you're ready, you'll demonstrate to Ames and Montague why they should never touch you again."

So she learned kempo, finding it far more enjoyable and useful than sex. Several months later, she dislocated Ames's knee with a sweeping kick that sent him hard to the floor. He had been the one to lock the door. She broke Montague's jaw and almost ruptured his testicl*s. He had been the one planning to assault her first. During this time, she had also begun work on her first invention for the Warehouse, a tool that would make scaling buildings a much less dicey effort. She called it the grappler.

By the time she turned 20, many of the agents who had been at the Warehouse when she started were gone, replaced by others who were younger, cleverer, more open to innovation, and more accepting of a woman agent. Though they were more personable and, on the whole, more attractive, she never again made the mistake of sleeping with a fellow agent. And as for her "consorting" with Merriman, that was also over. Caturanga had assigned him to a retrieval of a very dangerous, very complex artefact. The retrieval required careful study and planning and the ability to think on one's feet, none of which played to Merriman's strengths and begged the question of why Caturanga had assigned him in the first place. Not surprisingly, he was seriously injured in the attempt and retired from the Warehouse with full pay.

But all of that was a year or more in the future. To manage the tumult she felt about the Warehouse, Merriman, the other agents, even Caturanga, as they all had shown themselves, in one way or another, to be more than she had anticipated and yet less than she had hoped for, Helena wrote. Copiously, sometimes incoherently, as grammar would desert her under the onrush of her ideas and disappointments, the former virtually inextricable from the latter. She hadn't remembered the journals she had filled those first few years until she heard Diane talk of Agent Clemmons. That had been her name for Merriman, and in those gauzy fictions she had devised to bury her bleakest thoughts about the Warehouse and its mission, he had been everything in his imaginary form that he failed to be in reality: virtuous, thoughtful, fatherly. Her young narrator would no more think of sharing his bed than she would think of "borrowing" an artefact for her personal use, both of which Helena spent precious little time moralizing about in her real life.

It might be no more than a coincidence. Diane talked about agents at her Warehouse 12 that had no counterparts at Helena's. Conversely, there were agents whom Helena had known well, Crowley and Wolcott immediately came to mind, who didn't exist in Diane's reality. She launched herself from the armchair and began pacing - or she would have paced had she not started tripping over the items that the Warehouse had placed on the floor in its apparent enthusiasm to create a realistic-looking attic space. Caturanga and Myka and Pete and Mrs. Frederic weren't her creations (had they been, she would have written Pete an early death); if someone had deliberately created Diane and then just as deliberately peopled her "reality" with figures that Helena would recognize, why include a Merriman who was called something else? Most importantly, how would that someone know to name him Clemmons and to transform him into the father, for all intents and purposes, whom she had lost as a child? Clemmons and his fondly protective guidance hadn't existed outside her imagination, and she had burned all those journals. She was sure of it. They were unpublishable, not just because they were an unmistakable portrait of the Warehouse, albeit a highly romanticized one, but because they were, quite simply, awful. She hadn't burned the journals from fear that the Warehouse would discover her secret scribbling; she had burned them out of embarrassment.

She had told no one of those stories, not even Charles. The collaboration that would lead to her greatest invention, H.G. Wells, hadn't yet begun when she was writing about the Warehouse. Although she was still sharing rooms with him, they hardly ever saw each other, and while they sometimes talked vaguely of "capitalizing" on some of her ideas during the few meals they shared, those ideas were already speeding away from the Warehouse and toward realms even more fantastical, ones in which people traveled through time and witnessed spaceships landing from Mars.

Helena sat heavily on a table that rocked and threatened to buckle under her weight. It had been cheap and poorly constructed when she purchased it; the passage of time hadn't improved it. Much the same could be said about her, she supposed. Certainly Diane seemed no less disapproving for the glimpse into her "formative years." Yet it hadn't been a waste, this excursion into her past. For the first time since Diane's arrival, Helena had found a clue that might, might explain who her double was and how she had come to be here. But she needed confirmation of her belief that there was no record - anywhere - of Agent Thomas Clemmons, and for that she needed to search the archives of H.G. Wells himself.

Chapter 9

Chapter Text

Helena

She had no desire to visit Champagne, Illinois. She had no desire to visit Illinois at all. For her, Illinois was simply an extension of Wisconsin, which, in turn, was an extension of Boone, and she had few good memories of her time there. However, if she wanted to search Charles’s papers, she needed to go to the Urbana-Champagne campus of the University of Illinois. Charles would have appreciated the association of the Wells collection and “Champagne,” but that was the only thing he would have found charming about the location. Her reluctance to go made her decision not to tell Irene and Kosan about the link between her earliest years in the Warehouse and Diane all the easier. Besides, there was nothing yet to tell, only the merest whisper of a suspicion, as if someone had cupped her ear to tell her a secret in a language she didn't know. Did the existence of an Agent Clemmons in Diane’s world mean that she was real, or was there a player involved in her appearance who was far more powerful -- and capricious -- than anyone had guessed?

She could claim that it was the questions raised by Diane’s further reminiscences of her world’s Warehouse or the unappealing prospect of having to steal away to the middle of Illinois that had blotted all else from her consciousness, but, somehow, she had managed not to realize that Myka and Pete’s relationship had come to an end until he announced over breakfast that he was taking a six-month rotational assignment with the ATF. Myka wasn’t anywhere to be found when Pete made his announcement. If Helena hadn’t already known that she was on a retrieval with Artie – which was a little unusual since her primary responsibility was supposed to be Diane -- she would have thought that Myka was up in her room, chewing on guilt and embarrassment for breakfast. Or seeking consolation from Diane in the guest cottage since Diane was nowhere to be seen either. If Myka or Diane had been present, the uncharacteristic terseness with which Pete spoke might have been interrupted by the emotion he was clearly trying to suppress. Hearing him explode in bitterness would have been no less awkward than having to endure the silence that followed the news of his leaving the Warehouse. Claudia was masticating a gummy ball of sweet roll so large that it made her cheeks look like each had developed a goiter. Steve, never one to take the coward’s way out, was groping for a response but couldn’t get past ‘’Pete . . . are you sure about this? Jeez, I don’t know what to say . . . .”

Helena didn’t either, but she was affected, in spite of herself, by the signs of his suffering. He had showered and shaved, but his eyes looked even more sunken under the steppe-like expanse of his forehead, and he had almost violently pushed away the sweet roll Claudia had offered him (which she had then crammed into her mouth whole). His hands were locked around a coffee mug, but he had yet to drink from it. “I’m sure it was a hard decision to make,” she said softly, “but you’ll be a valuable addition to their team. Sorely missed here, of course.”

He tilted his head, his eyes, feverishly bright, assessing her sincerity. She was appalled by the possibility that he might start to cry. “Thank you, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. I’ll keep those warm words close to my heart.” The sarcasm was half-hearted, and if it hadn’t been Pete, Helena would have thought he even sounded grateful.

Claudia managed to swallow the hamster-sized gob of sweet roll, and Helena was unpleasantly put in mind of how a snake ingested its prey. Wrapping her arms around Pete, Claudia mumbled, “Yeah, dude, we’ll all miss you. Six months okay? Not a day longer,” before she ran from the kitchen. Steve was only slightly more composed. “Keep in touch, and if you need to decompress, I’m only a call away. They’re good people you’ll be working with,” he said with a ghost of a smile.

Helena and Pete were alone. She busied herself blowing across the surface of her already-cooled tea. He took his mug to the sink and dumped it. “I can’t decide if, for her, it really is all about H2 or if it’s still all about you. What do you think?” His voice was steady, but he hadn’t turned around.

The “her” didn’t need clarification. Helena’s heart was pounding so hard that she thought Pete could hear it. “I don’t . . . think about it, that is. Diane is of interest only insofar as she poses a threat to the Warehouse. Myka . . . Myka and I, we don’t talk about Diane as . . . .” What had happened to her own composure? Her voice was as steady as Pete’s but dismayingly thin. “Myka and I don’t talk, not really,” she finished, all but throwing her hands up in the air.

“Maybe you guys ought to try it.” He wiped his hands on a dish towel, turning, finally, to face her. Leaning back against the counter, he laughed soundlessly at what he saw in her expression. “She hasn’t slept with her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Myka never said her name. For that matter, she never said your name. She said she was questioning her feelings.” He lifted a shoulder. “But coming from Myka, that’s like somebody else saying ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ If she can’t commit 100 percent, she won’t do it at all.”

“I’m sorry.” Helena didn’t know what else to say.

“The kicker is, she’s right. What we have isn’t what it could be. But I’m more of a glass full kind of guy. She’s a perfectionist.” He pushed himself away from the counter. “Look out for her while I’m gone, okay?”

She didn’t respond, didn’t give him so much as a nod, but he seemed to take her silence as consent. He left her sitting at the table, staring sightlessly into her tea.

The funereal atmosphere of the bed and breakfast the day of Pete’s announcement and the day following when he left for his assignment with the ATF was enough to make Helena look forward to her trip. Not to her time in Champagne but at the prospect of leaving the glumness behind. She would enjoy the drive to Rapid City and she would enjoy even more the flight to Chicago; being surrounded by the, ah, artefacts of Charles’s overweening self-regard she would simply have to endure. Yet she had no sooner finished stowing her overnight bag in the cargo area of one of the Warehouse’s SUVs and closing the doors than she saw Irene standing opposite her. Thirty seconds ago Irene hadn’t been there, and while Helena was all but shivering in her wool coat, mittens, and ear muffs, Irene was wearing nothing warmer than a mustard-colored skirt suit. She gestured toward the SUV’s front seats. “I thought we could chat on the way to the airport.”

There were no preliminaries once they were seated and Helena had turned on the heater. “What are you looking for?” Irene bluntly demanded.

“I’m not looking for any one thing,” Helena temporized, debating how much she wanted to tell her. “It’s probably more accurate to say I’m looking for confirmation that certain things that shouldn’t be there aren’t there.”

“Such as?” Irene persisted.

“Things of mine that shouldn’t be part of the H.G. Wells collection, journals, early drafts of stories. Juvenilia, I believe it’s called.” Helena drove faster than she normally would have. If she couldn’t dislodge Irene without killing them both, she could make their road trip together as short as possible.

“Please don’t force me to force the regents into prying it out of you. They would enjoy it far too much.” Irene sighed and dialed the heat down.

Utter isolation had both color and temperature. Black and cold. Nightfall wouldn’t be for several hours but, in the meantime, Helena intended to banish the chill of the SUV. She dialed the heat back up, and Irene sighed again. “She . . . knew . . . something about me she shouldn’t know. It’s not a completely accurate description, but it should be good enough for the regents. It’s possible that she or whoever is responsible for her existence gleaned it from my brother’s papers, but I don’t remember ever telling him, and he would have been the only one I told.” She sidled a look at Irene, who was minutely loosening the patterned scarf gathered at the base of her neck. “Is it too warm for you?”

Irene ignored the last remark. “Your files suggest that you and your brother became estranged. When the agents interviewed Charles before you were bronzed, he told them that he hadn’t talked to you since your daughter’s death. What Diane knows, it happened earlier in your life?”

Her files. Two sets, one captured on microfilm, the original paper, what there had been of it, destroyed after the transfer, and the other entirely electronic, both laughably incomplete. The first was from 12, of course. It betrayed the gaps and inadvertent destruction common to a recordkeeping that wasn’t automated and relied primarily on memory. There was the deliberate omission of the months she had been on that disastrous special assignment, but the file also lacked virtually any record of her earliest years at the Warehouse, when she had been more dogsbody than agent. She had still been sharing lodgings with Charles then. They had been mutually dependent, but more like littermates than brother and sister, as liable to turn on each other as to seek the comfort of the other’s presence.

Her file with 13 would have fingerprints and retinal scans, surveillance footage and activity logs. There would be recordings of her interviews with, and interrogations by, the regents and psychological and medical assessments by hired experts. Yet that file would have captured her no better. If Christina and Charles and Sita and the few others whom she had loved were largely absent from her earlier file, the victims of the fallibility and bias of memory, there were no friends or lovers to people her later file. Her anguish at the inferno the world had become in a mere century was her constant companion, and no technology had divined the depths of her obsession.

“Yes,” she said flatly, “it was something that happened early on when I joined the Warehouse.”

Irene was content to let them ride in silence for a while, thinking over what she had said or, perhaps, running through the various confessional artefacts in her mind, choosing which would be the most effective. Helena said sarcastically, “May I have a day or two, without your astral hovering or the regents clamoring for blood, to determine whether it’s a ‘curiosity,’” her lips crooking sardonically at the old term, “worth reporting?”

“I would prefer that you tell me what, if anything, you find. Then we can determine whether the regents need to be informed.” Irene gestured toward an exit sign. “You can drop me off at the BP that’s up there. I’ll find a ride back to the bed and breakfast.”

Helena knew better than to object at her “preference” to be informed. While Irene had been the one to suggest that she leave the Warehouse, Helena had wondered since how much of it had been prompted by the recognition of the toll serving the Warehouse exacted and how much by the recognition of her diminished usefulness. If Irene wanted a list of every item in the collection that she touched, then she would bloody well provide it. The SUV roared up the exit ramp and Helena turned into the gas station with a spray of gravel. Braking sharply and feeling the SUV rock to a halt, she experienced no twinge of shame at her pettiness. “Here you are,” she said. “Do you need a quarter for the pay phone?” The snark died on her lips; Irene was already gone.

Myka

Retrievals with Artie were always trying. She didn’t have to share a room with him, so she was spared the sight of him flossing or digging his pinky in his ear and then inspecting it for earwax, but traveling with him was trying all the same. There was never any consultation or invitation to offer an opinion. He set the plan for the retrieval, picked the hotel (if they had a choice), determined the meal breaks (if he allowed any), mapped out the directions, and chose the rental car. The only thing he didn’t do was drive; that was always the chore of the agent who accompanied him. Usually she didn’t mind driving, but she was having to navigate downtown Boston at rush hour, and she was not being the defensive driver she knew she should be. She was exhausted and distracted, and she had forgotten until he made a dramatic and unnecessary lunge at the dashboard – she hadn’t been that close to hitting the car in front of them – what a backseat driver he was, especially when he was sitting in the front seat.

“Can we get back to the hotel in one piece? I’m half-blind,” he was furiously polishing his glasses with his shirttail, “and I can see the traffic better than you.”

“We’re almost there,” she said grimly. “I’m not getting in the car again tonight, so it looks like it’s room service for dinner.”

“Getting a burger delivered to your room for $20 is not a good use of the taxpayers’ money,” he grumbled.

They were actually funded by tax dollars? The section in the manual describing the Warehouse’s governance, basic operations, and funding made it sound fuzzier, as though, periodically, the regents authorized the use of one of the money-making artefacts. (There was even an artefact that laid the proverbial golden egg.) “If you’d prefer,” she said with the complete seriousness she used to combat his peevishness. “I can double park in front of that Subway and dash in for a couple of sandwiches. I think I can do it without getting us rear-ended.”

Artie didn’t so much glare as bristle his eyebrows at her. “Room service it is but don’t go hog wild, okay?”

Food generally wasn’t a stress reliever for her. Twizzlers were an exception; eating them was like worrying a six-inch pen in her mouth, only sweeter. Twizzlers weren’t on the room service menu, however, so she made do with a grilled chicken sandwich and a side salad. Her plan was to eat, review her notes on the artefact they were retrieving, watch 20 minutes of whatever mindless television she could find (sports, or TVLand, if the hotel had it) and then sleep. She needed a week’s worth, but she would make do with a solid six hours.

She didn’t get six hours; she was still awake at 3:00 am, thinking about Pete. She had never though so much about him in her life, not even during the blood rush of their first weeks together. Maybe if she had, she wouldn’t be thinking about him now, and he wouldn’t be on his way to Washington to work with the ATF. It had been just a week ago, though it seemed longer. She wasn’t sure whether the uncharacteristic haziness of her memory owed more to the claim her growing attraction to Diane had on her or the shock of seeing Pete sitting on the end of his bed, the drawers of his dresser pulled out and the closet door open, their contents dumped into the suitcases on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you, but . . . .” He shrugged. “The ATF is looking for an experienced agent to help them out on an undercover assignment. They’ve always felt we owed them for Steve, so they went to Artie to see if he would be willing to spare anyone. I volunteered.”

“And why would you do that?” Myka was surprised at how cool and steady she sounded. She noticed that she was standing just inside the room. She hadn’t gone to sit with him on the bed, and he hadn’t asked her.

“Because you need the space, and maybe I do, too.” He leaned over and picked up a balled-up pair of socks. He started tossing it in the air, alternating which hand he used to catch it. “Since H.G. and H2 rode into town, we haven’t been the same, and that’s because you haven’t been the same. I’d tell you to go ahead and get it out of your system, but you don’t even know which one you want.” He snatched the sock ball on its arc up and held it. “Unless you have figured it out.” His voice became very quiet. “Is it something you can get out of your system, Mykes?”

She shook her head and then forced herself to look at him. “I don’t know what I feel, so I don’t know how to get it out of my system.” Truer was the fact that she wasn’t sure she wanted to get it out of her system, but he probably already knew that.

She was used to being the wronged party. She was the one who held on when the others let go, who believed when she knew better than to believe. If Sam were alive, he would still be promising her that he was going to file for divorce once he and his wife worked out that one last detail. If Helena hadn’t left the Warehouse for parts unknown, she would still be waiting for her to make the first move. This time she was the one who had failed, and it struck her so raw and sharp that she said, “It’s more about us than it is about Helena or Diane. I keep thinking I should feel more, that we should be more, don’t you? You can’t honestly say that what we have is everything you expected.”

He shrugged again. “Maybe it’s just different circ*mstances. We were friends first and partners. That’s what we bring to it. It’s good in its own way, and you seemed happy enough with it. If H2 hadn’t popped out when somebody rubbed a magic lamp and if H.G. had stayed in Los Angeles, would you be thinking that what we have isn’t enough?”

“I don’t know. But if it really were enough, if we were really right for each other, would you be giving up so easily?”

He couldn’t hold her gaze. They were silent, and then he said, “I’ll get over it.” He smiled wanly. “I have to, you’re my best friend.”

She hadn’t been able to recapture the fragile peace of that moment. Instead, she couldn’t stop telling herself that she had hurt him and she couldn’t honestly say what it was she had given him up for. It seemed even more inexplicable this late at night, and as she rolled from one side of the bed to the other, she saw her phone on the nightstand. They would both be up; that was yet another thing Helena and her double shared, they didn’t sleep. Sometimes on returning from a midnight trip to the bathroom, Myka would look out her window (or Pete’s), and she would see that the lights were still on in the guest cottage. She didn’t have to go out into the hallway to see the light under the door of Leena’s old room. She rolled back to the side which had the nightstand next to it. Which one would she call?

Myka reached for her phone . . . and threw it into the drawer, next to the Gideon bible.

Helena

Helena carefully opened a leather-bound journal, the seams in the covers indistinguishable from the cracks. The paper was yellowed, with a tendency to crumble at the edges – she was sure it had been a luxury purchase for Charles a hundred years and more ago, but it was cheaply made. Its age couldn’t disguise that. The ink had faded, making her brother’s handwriting that much harder to read. She had patiently listened to the special collection librarian’s lecture on how to handle fragile objects, silencing her impulse to cut the woman off with a brusque “I’ve handled items more delicate and volatile than you can imagine,” suspecting that she might find her appointment suddenly terminated. Charles, however, would have visibly swelled with pride to hear his drafts and false starts, his unpublished stories and correspondence described as “treasures” and “wondrous gifts left to us.”

When the earliest documents in the collection had been brought out, Helena realized that she remembered none of them with any clarity. The years during which she and Charles had first conceived and then fought over the ideas that would grow into H.G. Wells’s greatest works were compressed into one impossibly long evening, a lamp smokily guttering on the table that still held the remains of their meal as they wrote down dialogue and descriptions of characters, neither hesitating to scratch out the other’s contributions. Likewise, the assortment of journals and tablets and, when money was particularly dear, the paper wrapping she had saved from the grocer’s or butcher’s had so blurred in her mind that she couldn’t look at them and say to herself “That one was the one we used to outline The Island of Dr. Moreau and that pad of paper was what we brainstormed The Time Machine on.” As a result, she could remember nothing of what was in the journal she had just opened. Even Charles’s handwriting seemed foreign to her, the hand less formed, less sure of itself. She had been told that this was the earliest item in the collection, chronologically. If Agent Clemmons had ever made an appearance, it would be in here.

But as she frowned over the lines, the words written closely together because paper, like ink, was a precious resource, she was reading the history behind them. It was a wonder, really, that she and Charles had ever had a thought beyond surviving since survival had often been a precarious matter. Their father had succumbed to consumption little more than two years after their mother died but not before he had managed, with his second wife, to produce two more children, as crusty-nosed and prone to fevers as her brother Bob. But Bob she would allow a slight claim on her sense of responsibility if not her affections. Her half-sisters were competitors for food and shelter, both of which were in short supply. Her stepmother was unable to provide for them. Though she hadn’t proved herself to be a particularly skillful nurse, hastening rather than delaying her mother’s death, so the adult Helena came to believe, she was strong and hardworking, but with five children and no sisters or sisters-in-law to look after them, she had few opportunities to look for work. She would have had to pay someone to watch the four youngest, Charles having gotten a job as a printer’s devil. They desperately needed what few coins he dropped on the table, which had probably been fewer than the number he left the print shop with. More than once, Charles had come home with pastry crumbs in the corners of his mouth. Even then, he had been unwilling to share.

Eventually a succession of men took up residence with them. At first, her stepmother would refer to them to as her “gentlemen friends,” but they weren’t gentlemen and they weren’t friendly. They were quick to cuff the children who weren’t quick enough to leap out of the way of their hands, and their tempers grew worse the more they drank. In time, her stepmother would indifferently introduce the men as “your new father,” though none of them stayed long enough for Helena to distinguish between them. Not by their faces, at any rate. Some of the hands that slapped her had hair on the back of them, others burns and scars, and still others warts and scaling skin. Charles, always priding himself on being the older by two years, understood the reality of the train of “fathers,” bluntly informing his sister that their stepmother was a whor*. Helena, at nine, wasn’t sure she understood what it meant, but she couldn’t mistake his scorn. Although she tried to affect the same scorn, she was visited by a rare pity for her stepmother. As brutal as her “fathers” were to her and her brothers and sisters, they were even harsher toward her stepmother. This couldn’t have been the life she had envisioned for herself when she married Helena’s father.

Yet her pity lasted only so long. She sensed that the danger inside their rooms, dingier with each successive father, was greater than the danger outside them. The unforgiving East End lanes and alleyways became her playground, her school. If she were lucky, they also served as her dining hall, and on occasion, they were her bed. The more leering and threatening the father, the farther and longer she strayed from her home. When Bob died during one of the epidemics that periodically swept through the city’s slums, Helena felt the fragile tie that bound her to her stepmother and sisters snap, and she began staying away for so long that when she returned one morning to their most recent lodgings, she discovered that her family had decamped.

All but Charles. She had turned 11, and her rescue by Caturanga was still a year away, although she would have stoutly declared that she was in no need of rescue had a time traveler told her that, very soon, a middle-aged Indian man would change the course of her life. Yet some part of her must have recognized the precariousness of her situation because, when Charles reluctantly offered to secure a bed or, more likely, a spot on the floor for her in the hovel he shared with a clerk and his family, she had submissively slipped her hand into his. She let him pull and jerk her along, much as he might a hand cart and with as little care for whether his roughness caused her to collide with lampposts and, worse, other people. It would be the last time she allowed him to take charge without argument.

At night he would whisper to her of the wondrous machines he would invent, the miraculous cures he would find, the far-off lands he would explore, the famous novels he would write. When he was older, of course, and free of his obligations. Free of her, he meant, but she didn’t say it, just as, for a time, she didn’t tell him how she embellished, no, improved upon his fantasies as he spun them. She gave his inventions dimension and mass; when he talked of rockets to the moon, she tried to envision how large they would be, what would power them, what would keep them on course, how many space travelers they could carry. For Charles, rockets were little more than metaphors for his flights of fancy. For Helena, they were objects subject to the same physical laws, whatever they were, that kept her leaps over the puddles and refuse on the streets from sending her unstoppably into the sky. She gave his far-off lands latitudes and longitudes, furtively removing maps from books and planning, in rather remarkable detail for an 11-year-old, Helena thought, the itinerary of what Charles in his boyish enthusiasm referred to as “adventures.” On the maps, she circled the cities he would visit, trying to pronounce the most trying combinations of consonants and vowels. When he boastfully promised to follow the Amazon to its source, she traced its wandering course with her pencil, imagining animals as large as houses and as bright as the sun hidden under the jungle canopy.

The masterpieces he intended to write also had their germination in those midnight whisperings or in the even humbler soil of the East End. What ultimately became The Time Machine was the dream he whispered so softly that it barely stirred the hair over Helena’s ear. He wanted to find the cure for death, he said, so no other children would grow up without their parents and suffer the hardships he did. He wept a little at the miseries he had endured, but Helena didn’t try to console him, not because he ignored the fact that she had endured the same miseries – with greater fortitude – but because she was caught up in the working out of the device or potion that would take a person back in time, not only to the years in which his parents were alive but to the time when Caesar ruled Rome or the dinosaurs ruled the earth. What if such a thing could send someone forward in time as well, to the future of her children’s grandchildren, when one might pilot a rocket to the moon every day? The Island of Dr. Moreau sprang from the recollection of their stepmother’s “gentlemen friends,” more accurately her shuddering wonder at how easily men could become beasts, and The War of the Worlds grew out of her recounting to Charles the assault of a gang of street urchins upon a helpless group of smaller boys.

So much of what she and Charles later became was already present in embryonic form in these years, when they scrapped and struggled, as often with each other as with the world at large. It didn’t seem so unusual now that the most striking connection between Diane’s “reality” and hers should reach so far back into her past. The jottings in the journal had been ideas and notes for stories, observations about what he saw, snippets of dialogue. Some of it seemed familiar but only because the observations and dialogue had resurfaced decades later in works published long after she had entered the bronze. Weaker efforts. He had always been a better writer when she had been there to jeer at his sentimentality and mock his belief in man’s moral progress. But she hadn’t needed to travel to Champagne, Illinois, to be reminded of that.

Myka

It was a spyglass, the kind you saw in every movie or TV series about the Revolutionary War or the 18^th century in general. You could put a tricorne or mobcap, a spyglass, and a dress with an Empire silhouette in front of a camera and you could pretty much let the narrative unfold – dashing British soldier falls for heiress engaged to another, battle-scarred naval commander leaves young family at home for one last battle against Napoleon’s navy. You were covered from Jane Austen to Patrick O’Brian. She unsuccessfully stifled a yawn as she drove them to the latest house that had been burgled. The spyglass she and Artie were attempting to retrieve had extraordinary powers of magnification; supposedly it had been a crucial factor in the Continental Army’s successful sorties against the British. A field officer or scout wouldn’t see only the dim shapes of tents or the shadowy forms of sentries, he would see through those tents and into the sentries’ barracks, able to count the number of solders and, if he were very lucky, the notes on the maps and battle plans strewn across a table. Centuries later it had fallen into the hands of thieves who were using it to locate in upscale residences across greater Boston the hiding places of jewelry, rare coins, and, yes, literally the family silver. It made a grab and bag, the illicit kind, that much more efficient – and harder to stop.

As Myka pulled into the curb, carefully allowing for the maximum possible convenience in opening the passenger side door (too close and the door dug into the ground, too far and you had a canyon of pavement to cross), Artie mumbled around the last of his Egg McMuffin, “I can talk to the Pattersons alone. Why don’t you talk to him? Maybe he’s a regular around here.” Sucking a spot of egg and cheese off his index finger, he used it to point to a man swinging a leaf-blower over another manicured lawn four houses up the street. Myka glanced at the pick-up truck parked at the end of the driveway, Joe’s Landscaping Service.

“Okay. I’ll join you at the Pattersons’ when I’m done.”

The noise of the leaf blower would have drowned out the sound of her coming up the driveway even if he hadn’t been wearing head phones. He was young, mid-twenties, and wearing just a t-shirt and jeans, although the temperature was in the 50s. He didn’t sense her presence until she was close enough to touch him, so when he whirled around in surprise, she could see the black eye behind his safety visor without any difficulty. Sometimes it really was that easy. Virtually all artefacts had a side effect, the energy that went into their making having a vicious recoil, like a gun, when it was released. Some side effects were worse than others. Casual use of the spyglass resulted in a black eye; prolonged use resulted in blindness. This guy would be lucky; he wouldn’t be both blind and serving a prison sentence.

The clincher was that as soon as he saw the recognition in her face he dropped the leaf blower and started running. He was younger than she was, and she was exhausted, but she was in better shape, and she was pissed. Mainly at herself and for how things had ended with Pete, but a little bit at having to chase down this idiot. She lunged and caught the waistband of his jeans. They went down in a tangle, but she knew what she was doing while he was in a panic. A cool head could better brute strength . . . for a time. She didn’t think she had been congratulating herself on the take-down – she had been busy getting her Tesla charged and aimed – but there was really no excuse for why she missed the elbow flying at her face.

She could still see out of her eye, but even under the icepack Mrs. Patterson had given her, she could feel the skin around her eye and over her cheekbone continue to swell. The landscaper was in the back of a police cruiser, and the spyglass was safely neutralized in Artie’s bottomless valise. Once he had seen the barrel of the Tesla pointing at him, Joe, Jr. of Joe’s Landscaping Service had stopped resisting, and Myka, although her head was throbbing with the force of the blow, had had the presence of mind to ask him as she began marching him toward the Pattersons’ house where the spyglass was. He had mutely pointed at the toolbox in the back of the truck. Their haul at the Patterson house had been so profitable that his father and uncle had been eager to try the neighborhood again; Joe, Jr. was just as happy to spend his time on a riding lawnmower. Yardwork was far less stressful than stealing, and it didn’t give him black eyes.

Artie was sitting with her at the dining room table, eating a slice of coffee cake, the valise on the floor beside him. The Pattersons, a semi-retired investment broker and his wife, a former state representative, were talking to a police officer in the living room. The police had shown little interest in Myka and Artie’s presence, which, Artie would say if asked, was as it should be. On this retrieval their cover story was that they were quality assurance specialists from the Pattersons’ insurance company, ensuring that the couple’s claim for coverage on the loss of $25,000 in stolen rings, watches, and necklaces was being appropriately handled. Their ID cards looked real, and Artie had been able to casually refer to the Pattersons’ insurance agent by name. Claudia had undeniably upped their game when it came to creating plausible cover stories; she had the kind of information-gathering and counterfeiting skills that would have made her a world-class con. Thankfully, for the Warehouse, she had hungered for a sense of family, not money. Myka had had to flash her Secret Service credential on far fewer retrievals and she only rarely had to provide the standard refusal to answer questions – “We’re not at liberty to discuss a matter pertaining to national security” -- which, perversely enough, seemed designed to alienate rather than enlist the people whose help they needed most.

Their old method of approaching retrievals wasn’t wrong. The Secret Service credential was still valid (and would be for as long as she remained with the Warehouse) and artefacts frequently were a threat to national security (when they weren’t threatening the continued existence of humankind). An old amplifier from the Altamont concert that could emit soundwaves strong enough to collapse buildings was a national emergency. But the deception that she and the other agents more routinely engaged in now to complete their retrievals resulted in much less resistance. Odd how people became less frightened and more willing to cooperate when you were weren’t telling them that you were from the federal government and that the disaster about to befall them was on a need-to-know basis only.

Sometimes they even gave you coffee cake. Artie had finished his slice and was midway through hers. Myka hadn’t surrendered her coffee, however, which she was managing to drink while holding the icepack to her face. It was very good, barista quality, and Mr. Patterson had beamed at the compliment, remarking that he found the risks involved in getting the perfect grind, the right brewing temperature, and the optimal coffee-to-water ratio all working together at the same time as rewarding as investing a client’s money in a promising but underperforming stock. It was the same thrill of victory, he had said with a grin.

“With Pete gone, we’re down an agent,” Artie said through a mouthful of coffee cake.

Myka didn’t have any trouble understanding him. Although half of her face was frozen, the other half reddened with shame. His silence about Pete’s departure had been too good to last. This was supposed to have been Pete’s retrieval, but she had been the only one available, Steve and Claudia off retrieving a Mountie hat in Saskatchewan and Helena burying herself in the papers of H.G. Wells for a reason she had refused to disclose. “We have Helena,” she said flatly.

“For now.” He tilted his coffee cup and then craned his neck to peer into the empty kitchen, which, as they had been shepherded into the dining room with their coffee and coffee cake, Myka thought bore an unsettling resemblance to a coroner’s examination room, white with lots of gleaming metal. “But she’s with us to find out why we have a duplicate of her.” He leaned back in his chair, brushing his lips with a napkin, a large cloth one that, before Artie had crumpled it, had been painstakingly folded like a fan. The material was so thickly woven that Myka had felt she was wiping her fingers on one of the drapes at the window. “It’s been almost two months, and we know no more about how or why Diane appeared than we did at the beginning, but,” he tossed the napkin on the table, “I don’t like annoying the regents without cause, so I don’t want to distract her with retrievals unless I have to. Which still puts us an agent down.”

Obviously Artie was trying to direct her toward a conclusion that he had already reached. If he wasn’t willing to send Helena on more retrievals, it left just one possibility, the only person left at the Warehouse who had experience in handling artefacts. “Diane,” Myka said in an even flatter voice.

“Two months and she’s tried nothing. She’s observed all the rules and answered the questions we’ve thrown at her. Hell, she even cooks for us. She’s done what we told her to do when we told her to do it and nothing more.”

“Helena waited almost a year. She helped us on our retrievals, she treated us as her friends.” The angry flush had retreated from Myka’s face, but the smile she gave Artie was sardonically angled. “She took me into her confidence, or so I believed.”

He didn’t smile, but he bobbed his head encouragingly. “You’re saying this, but you don’t believe it. You don’t think this particular H.G. Wells has an ulterior motive or, if she does, it’s a benign one.” Myka didn’t hide her surprise, but he lifted a shoulder as if to suggest he had expected nothing less from her. “You want to give her the benefit of the doubt, but you’re always aware why you shouldn’t. I don’t know why she’s here, Myka. What I do know is that we need an experienced agent, and we’re never going to find out what’s she up to,” he held his hands up in surrender, anticipating an objection from Myka that didn’t come, “if we keep her cooped up in the guest cottage. It’s a risk, but we have a mitigating factor.”

“Which is?”

“You. Like the original, she cares about you.”

“The ‘original’ as you call her left me to die in Egypt, remember?” But her correction didn’t carry much outrage. She had told Helena much the same thing, that her weakness was that she cared, but she hadn’t expressed it quite so personally.

Artie chuckled. “She left you to figure a way out. When she had to kill you, she couldn’t. Diane won’t hurt you.” He looked abashed. “Okay, she won’t want to hurt you, which is different, I admit, but if you really object to the idea, we won’t do it. I’d send her on retrievals only if I could partner her with you.”

Myka didn’t object. Instead she let her eyes drift from his as she took a long, savoring swallow of her coffee. The prospect of being alone with Diane for days – and nights – was daunting, and not only because she wasn’t sure Diane wouldn’t take the opportunity to fry her with a Tesla when her back was turned.

Helena

They were going to kick her out of the special collections room in a minute. She had already prevailed upon them to keep it open for an extra 20 minutes. She wasn’t sure why, because if there had been nothing in the oldest of Charles’s notebooks, she wasn’t going to find anything helpful in the later works and papers of the “father of science fiction.” Yet she had skimmed through the metastasized accumulation of correspondence, the pontifications on issues great and small, looking for . . . some offhand acknowledgment of how much ‘H.G. Wells’ had been an invention, her invention? Maybe it had been no more than the frail hope, to which she had been no more immune than ordinary mortals apparently, that someone remembered her. While the Warehouse had a veritable archive of her doings, there was no record of her existence outside it. No descendants, not even a gravestone for people to take a rubbing of her name and the dates of her birth and death.

She had found a letter from one of her half-sisters, written in the late 1920s when her sister would have been well into middle age. She hadn’t recognized the name, Henrietta Martin, but something had made her read this particular plea for financial assistance out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that Charles had received. There had been the usual recitation of misfortune and bad luck and then, in the middle of the letter, Henrietta Martin had forsworn politeness, writing with an increasingly illegible hand that attested to the strength of the emotion that had led her to beg for a pittance from the great author: You’re my brother Charles, I’m sure of it. Don’t you remember your little sister Hattie, Hattie Wells? For the love you had for our father, please consider sparing a few pounds for my family. It would be nothing for you, but it would make the difference between us having a roof over our heads and having to call the streets our home. It seemed that Hattie shared in the Wellsian flair for the dramatic, but that was all she apparently shared in; Helena had been able to find no evidence that Charles had ever responded to her. He had always hated reminders of his origins.

She eyed the notebook. She wouldn’t be coming here again, so she needed to make sure. If anything in this collection bore a trace of her, it would be this crumbling miscellany of Charles’s thoughts, dreams, and ideas for novels. It covered several years, unlike later notebooks. For much of his youth, he hadn’t had the leisure to think, let alone write, and he didn’t firmly resolve to make his living at writing until he was in his twenties. She gingerly opened the notebook, this time working from back to front. Six pages from the end, she found it, a single line, boy drowns in quarry. It had been easy enough to overlook the first time through. Helena would have preferred to have her earliest life open up for her by eating a madeleine, but, as she always did, she would improvise with what she had at hand.

She had returned to their lodgings battered and sore from a retrieval. She was getting better at them, incorporating what she had learned from her relationship with John Merriman – be decisive, isolate and attack the possessor’s weakness – and what she had learned from Caturanga – be smart, anticipate the other’s move and have an answer for it – but being smart and decisive, anticipatory and aggressive wasn’t always proof against a steel-toed boot and well-aimed kicks. She had kneeled to assist the woman who had staggered out of the pub’s back door and collapsed in the alley. That had been her first mistake, because the woman hadn’t collapsed but strategically fallen; her second mistake had been to miss the man whose foot landed in her ribs as he yanked at her head to bare her throat. She had made no additional mistakes. The artefact, a factory die, which pressed to a circle of ordinary metal could transform it into a gold piece, was on a shelf in the Warehouse. The woman who had helped to entrap her was . . . somewhere . . . likely nursing her own set of bruises, having fled as soon as she realized their attack had failed. The man was lying on his back in the alley, his eyes forever fixed on the smoke-shrouded sky. Helena had managed to rescue herself, but it had been bloody and violent. She didn’t have to shut her eyes to see the knife she had managed to pull from her boot plunged to its hilt in the man’s gut. It was all she saw. Spreading her hands in front of the coal stove, she examined them closely, although she had washed and scrubbed them raw in the Warehouse. She wouldn’t be able to rest until she was sure that no speck of blood remained. Someday agents would have something better, and safer, to use on retrievals than the guns, knives, billy clubs, and razors they usually armed themselves with. She had been thinking lately of a . . . .

Charles emerged from the one bedroom, which, with his habitual lack of generosity, he had claimed upon their taking this newest set of rooms. He needed his sleep, and he couldn’t afford to have it broken by his sister’s coming and going at all hours. That there was some justice to his having the bedroom since his hours were more regular than hers only added to her resentment. He stared at the stains on her dress, her shaking arms, the hair spilling wildly over her shoulders. “I had no idea that couriering letters for the government was so rough and tumble,” he said, placing a notebook, her notebook, on the table.

“I was set upon by thieves thinking I carried something more important.” She snatched her hands back from the stove and tried, fruitlessly, to pat her hair into order. Her scalp hurt where the man had grabbed her hair; she would have to be careful when she took a brush to it before bed. She steadied herself as much she could; she had killed a man no more than an hour ago. It would help her cause and distract Charles from his suspicions if she could change the subject. “I don’t believe I gave you permission to read that.”

“I’m having trouble making progress in my story.” He pulled out a chair and slouched against it. “I thought you might have some ideas I could use.”

She poured water from the pail she had used that morning at the communal pump into a kettle and set the kettle on the stove. It was more a heating than a cooking stove and a poor one at that, but if she could get the water warm it would do for tea. “But your ideas,” Charles was drawling, “are worse than mine.” The sound of a match scraping against the table, and soon Charles was eyeing her through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Your hero decides to devote his life to bringing back people from the dead after his brother drowns in a quarry? Mary Shelley already wrote about the perils of resurrection, Helena, and much better than you’ll ever be able to do.”

Although she had gotten little further in her tale than the death and her narrator’s fervent determination never to learn of a promising life cut short again, she had no plans for a Frankenstein monster. She was imagining something much darker instead. For every life the narrator saved, he would owe a life. The story would be the conflict in the narrator’s breast between his desire to save the men and women who would potentially change the world and his obligation to sentence a corresponding number to death. Until tonight, she had been consumed by the moral dilemma. If one could resurrect the person who had been meant to stop a war or end a famine at the cost of another’s life, would the purity of the desire cancel out the evil of the act? Would it be more acceptable if the one to lose his life was a hardened criminal? Helena resisted the desire to hold out her hands. She had killed a hardened criminal tonight to retrieve an artefact that others had murdered to acquire, including the man she had killed, but she felt no sense of vindication. She had killed a man to save her life; it had been more instinct than training that had her grabbing the knife and stabbing it at the man’s abdomen. There had been no time to think of ethics, and if she had seen the man’s future in the flash of a second, a future in which he would seek redemption for past sins by dedicating his life to the service of others, she still would have stabbed him. She had had no care for the virtue of her mission or the selfishness of his in that moment. She had wanted to live, that was all.

“You’re right,” she said bleakly, “it’s not a good idea.”

Charles drew on his cigarette. “You’re agreeing with me? How much did those thieves knock you about?” He opened the notebook and fingered the first few pages. “But it’s an image that has some staying power, a boy diving into a quarry. Maybe the water’s too cold or too shallow. His muscles cramp or he’s hurt, and he can’t swim to safety. His family’s distraught at his death, the parents nearly suicidal in their grief, and his sister . . . she turns mute.” He grins at her. “I wonder what that would be like.”

A thin tendril of steam escaped from the kettle’s spout. Warm enough. She poured water into two cups and gave him a cup and the tea ball. She would use it after he had finished steeping the leaves. “You’ll never know.”

She remained at the table after he returned to his room. Her bed was the lumpy sofa, but she likely wouldn’t be using it tonight. She couldn’t bear to dream about what had happened tonight. Sometimes she pretended that the Warehouse was more church than agency, its guiding spirits benevolent, its leaders inspiring, its methods peaceful. If she could be guaranteed that her dreams would be of that other Warehouse, she wouldn’t hesitate to sleep. But that other Warehouse was as elusive when she slept as when she was sent on a retrieval. She had already committed so many cruelties in her brief time as an agent that she would have to be another Helena to deserve that other Warehouse.

Chapter 10

Chapter Text

Myka

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and instead of standing in line at a cash register in Macy's or Best Buy, which, to be honest, was low odds in any given year but particularly this year, or burrowing deeper into her bed to block out the flinty light of a November morning, which, like Black Friday shopping, was also normally low odds but something she had been in the habit of doing of late, she was sitting shotgun in one of the Warehouse's SUVs as Diane drove them toward the North Dakota state line. It was a four-hour drive to Dickinson, and Diane was the kind of driver, cautious, constantly scanning the traffic on the highway – not unlike she would be doing if she were driving, Myka had to admit – who would shave nothing off the drive time. Pete would have driven much faster. Faster and with seemingly little care for whether he was rubbing the bumper of the car ahead of him. Music would have been blaring from the speakers, classic rock usually, but if it were a long drive, he would sample '80s pop, grunge, hip-hop, disco. And he would be talking about anything, about everything – football, basketball, movies, celebrities who were hot, celebrities who weren't hot but whom he would probably still have sex with "if, you know, it was me and her and the light hit her just right and I was in a lovin' mood," celebrities whom he wouldn't have sex with if the two of them were the last people on earth "because of who they look like, like that actress on that Syfy show a few years ago who resembles H.G. and the one who looks like my mom," and, of course, any celebrity who was old "because what's the point of fantasizing about it then?"

Maybe she was hearing Pete's voice so clearly because it was so silent in the car. Other than asking her if she had the heater on too high, Diane hadn't spoken to her. She knew Diane's silence was about Pete, too, but she couldn't allow herself to think too much about that, about Diane and Pete and her. She could think about Diane or she could think about Pete, but she couldn't have them occupy the same space in her head at the same time. Because he was so frequently in her thoughts, sometimes it was hard for her to believe that Pete had been gone from the Warehouse for almost three weeks. And because he was so frequently in her thoughts but nowhere else to be found, it was hard for her to believe that he had been gone for only three weeks. It could have been three months, three years. Myka couldn't enter a room at Leena's without expecting to see him in it. She felt Claudia's glare when Claudia wasn't glaring or even looking at her, and Steve's calmness, in which she had frequently taken comfort because it was so different from Pete's unrelenting need to be distracted, seemed cooler now, remote, as if he were having to remind himself that she didn't mean to send Pete away. She hadn't; it was the last thing she had wanted to do. They could have made it work – not the relationship, she wouldn't lie to herself about it anymore – but the "decoupling." She thought the term was ridiculous but also, frustratingly enough, accurate. It didn't convey any of the sorrow, or guilt, but it got at the mechanics of a break-up, not just "the dishes and cat are mine, the futon and PlayStation are yours" aspect, but the reconfiguring of virtually every other relationship your coupledom had touched. If "decoupling" brought to Myka's mind the grinding sounds of railroad cars being uncoupled, some to be left on the track and others shunted to different tracks to form new trains, it had resonance with what she saw as the painful chore of resetting her friendships with just about everyone at the Warehouse. Except Helena.

Strangely hers was the one face she could meet without embarrassment, her eyes the eyes whose gaze she didn't try to avoid. She had never sensed with Helena, as she had with the others, that she and Pete were an indissoluble pair, the yin to his yang, the logical, analytical Spock to his brash, intuitive Kirk. For virtually everyone else in the Warehouse, with, perhaps, the exception of Irene, they complemented each other's strengths and balanced each other's weaknesses. Without Pete, she wasn't logical and analytical as much as she was closed-off, out of touch with her feelings, and compulsive about following rules. Without her, he was loud, thoughtless, needy, a child to be managed. Together they formed a likable, attractive person, alone they were messes.

After she had returned from Boston and before Helena set up camp in the Warehouse's war room, they had shared, unplanned, a pot of glutinous oatmeal that Myka had set on the stove and then promptly forgot for an hour as she had gone through a punishing series of squats, pushups, sit-ups, and presses. Feeling sore and wrung out without the accompanying pride in her virtuousness, Myka had collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table as Helena excavated the oatmeal from the saucepan and split it between two bowls. T-shirt and hair wetly clinging to her as she defiantly broke her self-imposed rule of one teaspoon of sugar by covering her oatmeal with it, she hoped she looked a picture of such misery that Helena would think better of trying to talk to her.

"He knows that you're right," Helena had said quietly. Unlike Myka who was dripping sweat onto the table, Helena was showered and dressed for the day, a black cashmere turtleneck emphasizing the winter-white of her face and hands, while the hair that lay in such a smooth wave over her shoulders was almost indistinct against her sweater. "It won't take him as much time as you fear to come to the same realization." She had said it without any judgment or, for that matter, sympathy. She had said it as if it were a fact, like she might say "You overcooked the oatmeal," without implying that it was any the better or worse for it. Holding up a spoonful of oatmeal and watching the milk she had just poured over it drip slowly back into the bowl, Myka let out a breath she felt she had been holding since Pete had told her he was leaving. Pete was gone, that was a fact, and whether she was any the better or worse for it Helena was going to leave up to her to determine.

Sneaking a glance at Diane, she forlornly wondered why Pete's departure couldn't be settled between them as easily. Diane hadn't exactly gone into hiding since Myka had returned from Boston; she could be seen at Leena's doing yoga in the mornings with Steve or seeking help from Claudia on a program she had developed to identify the path of the anomaly she believed was responsible for bringing her here. Diane was the one who had prepared the Thanksgiving dinner they had all grouped around yesterday, sharing startled and uneasy glances at something that had so obviously tasked the kitchen's limited facilities and supplies: turkey and dressing, sweet potatoes, cranberries, the traditional Thanksgiving offerings (even if the sweet potatoes and cranberries came out of cans and the turkey, just a breast, from the depths of the freezer). Growing up, Myka had eaten Thanksgiving dinners of hamburgers and fries, tuna fish sandwiches and chips, soup, spaghetti or macaroni and cheese from a mix. She had only ever eaten a traditional Thanksgiving dinner when her father had driven the family in their decrepit sedan to her grandparents' house. Jeannie Bering might be marveled at for suffering her husband's unpredictable temper and his all-too-predictable inability to keep a job because of it, but she excited no similar wonder in the kitchen.

But as Diane poured the wine and ensured that the serving dishes smoothly made their way around the table (helped, in no small part, by Pete's absence), she rarely looked at Myka and their conversation was limited to requests to pass the sweet potatoes and cranberries and her spurning of Myka's offers to help clean up afterwards. If she and Diane and Artie hadn't met earlier in the week to set the parameters for this trip to North Dakota, Myka wouldn't have believed that the next day she would be on her way to Dickinson to spend up to a week – but absolutely no more than that, Artie had declared – conducting an investigation with Diane that might or might not turn into a retrieval.

The purpose of the trip, at least how it was to be accomplished, was still pretty much locked up in Diane's mind as were her thoughts about why Pete had left and what that meant (or, Myka acknowledged, didn't mean) for the two of them. The program that Diane had been running performed a data search of every media outlet in the Midwest, from weekly county papers to the dailies of the larger cities identifying reportage of the bizarre and supposedly supernatural, her theory being that if the anomaly that had brought her here remained active, it would likely be trying to disrupt the natural course of things in this reality. If she could locate it, then there was a chance that it could return them to their own reality, and if it couldn't, the Warehouse agents might be able to study it in its weakened state. If they could somehow, someway reproduce its ability to subvert the laws of the universe, she might be launched, much like one of Helena's rockets, back into her own world.

"Because," she had said to Myka with a brittle, angry laugh that could have been her counterpart's, "it's about time that I go home, don't you think?" Their meeting with Artie finished, in which he had been receptive to Diane's argument that the anomaly might be next door to them in North Dakota, they had stood on the platform outside the war room, looking out over the vastness of the Warehouse's inventory, which, to Myka, presented unimaginable power in the guise of an endless prop room and which, to Diane, she assumed was only so much junk, rusted bicycles, threadbare quilts, battered chests of drawers, the detritus of thousands, millions of lives lived, some happily and others not.

She hadn't answered then, unsure of whether Diane expected a response and even more unsure of what her response would be. She wasn't sure what it was now, as Diane pulled off the highway to park in front of a convenience store with a few gas pumps, which was on the outskirts of yet another Univille-like town. "I need more coffee," Diane said. Her voice warming slightly, she added, "I imagine you do, too."

They visited the restroom, poured themselves large coffees, inquired of each other whether she wanted a snack as well; exiting the store as a family of four entered, the parents' faces ashen with an hours' long struggle to keep two preschool age children in their car seats, Myka thought that in a different reality – and she had to smile at the turn of phrase – she and Diane could be that couple, on their way to or from a visit with family. The parents were exhausted, but their nods at each other as one held onto the kids' hands while the other sprinted toward the restroom, somehow managed to convey a history of traveling together, of being together in the tip of a head – I trust you to keep an eye on them, I'll be right here, Why didn't you tell me you had to go two towns ago? The gas station back there didn't look clean. She and Diane didn't quite communicate like that yet, but despite the tension and the atypical silence between them, there was something couple-y in how closely they stood next to each other, smiled at the other's habits (Myka at Diane's assiduous stirring of creamer and sugar into her coffee, Diane at Myka's grabbing of dozens of napkins). The force drawing them together was stronger than the guilt driving them apart. Myka didn't know exactly what to call it, but it had her putting her hand on Diane's arm and saying, "I can think of reasons for you wanting to stay, can't you?"

Helena

She had done what she had promised herself she would never do. She had slept on the sofa in the war room. She had stretched out more than once on its inhospitable cushions, but how many times she refused to count. As she stretched, one hand pushing her up to a sitting position, one hand automatically combing through her hair, she realized that an afghan had been draped over her as she slept. Now it pooled at her feet. It was always possible that Artie had done it, assuming he ever emerged from his lair – the only thing distinguishing it as a bedroom instead of a storage room for superseded Warehouse devices being an always unmade king-sized bed – but it was possible in the way that Irene Frederic dancing at a hoedown or Adwin Kosan being anything other than an unmitigated arse was possible, which was not very possible at all. Artie visibly suffered her presence; he would never voluntarily attempt to make her feel welcome. That left only Myka, who would have had to have driven from North Dakota for a middle-of-the-night visit to the Warehouse. Myka had been known to make midnight trips to the Warehouse, unable to sleep for fear an especially powerful artefact had been put back in the worst possible place (usually because Pete had been the one to put it there), but the thought that Helena might be shivering on the war room sofa wouldn't be enough to send her flying from . . . . Dickinson, was it? If not Artie or Myka, then it was a Warehouse sprite –

Like the one who was thrusting at her two powdered sugar donuts on a napkin. Claudia's not entirely unfriendly voice was informing her that if she wanted a "cuppa," she would have to make it herself. Her gratitude sincere since dinner the night before had consisted of a turkey sandwich she had brought with her to the Warehouse, Helena hungrily bit into one of the donuts as she lurched to the alcove in which there was a jury-rigged coffee machine from the 1970s. Only one of the warmers worked and sporadically at that, but the hot water dispenser was dependable. She took a semi-clean mug from the assortment on the table and a teabag from the box of Twinings Irish Breakfast she had donated to the collection of chips, candy bars, six packs of Red Bull, and packages of peanut-butter crackers.

Claudia was unabashedly reading the notes Helena had scrawled before collapsing onto the sofa at 2:00 a.m. "Some pretty old artefacts you've got here, H.G. They've been gathering dust on the shelves since you or the Pete and Myka of your day retrieved them for 12. What gives?" She stuffed the remaining half of a donut into her mouth, then wiped her hands on the front of her hoodie.

Helena joined her at the "desk," which was the opposite end of the table on which the artefact sensor rested. It was such a ramshackle collection of parts that Helena always imagined a good puff of air would knock it down. Her devices had been no less homegrown, but they had looked sturdy, at least. If prone to locking up at the most inopportune moments, which wasn't a failing of the ping machine. Thankfully it had been silent for the last few days, except for a near-constant chittering as it culled its information streams for signs of artefacts at work. The last time it pinged, she had been dozing on the sofa. Rolling off in befuddled alarm, she had almost collided with Artie, who had raced out of his bedroom in a thin robe patterned with Yoda faces. They had stopped just short of impact, aware that it would have been a greater calamity than whatever disaster the machine's trilling was designed to forestall. The memory, which always occasioned a shudder, prompted her to look toward the back of the room. She could pretend to be respectful of his desire for sleep or fulminating or whatever else could keep him in his room for hours, using it as an excuse to defer responding to Claudia's question. Her curiosity was never idle, and Helena didn't trust that what she told her wouldn't make its way to Irene and the regents.

"Maybe we should have this conversation another time." She tilted her head in acknowledgment they shared the war room with a man too old to wear such short robes.

Claudia smiled knowingly. "He's already out of here. He has a flight to Atlanta to catch." She took in Helena's fly-away hair, the wrinkled jeans and sweater, and, no doubt, the crust of powdered sugar at the corners of her mouth. "I don't know who'd be more likely to give away the store, you or our dearly departed Trailer. How could you not wake up with Artie banging out of here with a roller bag?"

Helena shrugged, hoping to take advantage of Claudia's pleasure in her jeering and ease the list into a messy stack of aging print-outs, but a hand clamped onto the back of hers. "Not so fast. These are all wish-fulfillment artefacts. What did you find out on your field trip to Illinois?" As Helena remained silent, Claudia pressed, complainingly, "You have me taking the Warehouse's temperature every day, which, let me tell you, would be a whole lot easier if I could just stick a thermometer up its ass. What's its temperature, these artefacts, and your family reunion with the H.G. Wells collection have to do with H.2?"

Ironically, the most truthful answer, which was that she didn't know, would be the one that Claudia believed the least. She didn't have any theories, only ideas and incomplete ones at that. It was possible that the Warehouse had known of Diane's presence before they did, which would lend credence to the argument that someone or something outside it was responsible for bringing her here, maybe, as Diane consistently maintained, an anomaly of some sort. It was also possible, Helena was reluctantly coming to acknowledge, that she was responsible for Diane's appearance . . . existence. Not intentionally, but intentions mattered very little in the Warehouse universe. Her involvement, if true, would confirm what everyone, except Myka, already believed about her, that she was causing trouble even when she wasn't trying to cause trouble. The suspiciousness in Claudia's face certainly didn't suggest otherwise. Helena wanted to smooth it away, the tension that had worry lines radiating from Claudia's mouth, her eyes, corrugating her forehead. She was 24, but the distrust was that of someone who had never been young.

It was one thing to be skeptical, to take any profession of innocence (or ignorance) with a grain of salt, Caturanga had tirelessly preached at her, it was another to let her distrust show. If she let her quarry discover that they or, rather, the artefacts in their possession, were her object, then she had already lost. If she couldn't flirt or amuse or distract, she needed to be sympathetic and supportive, she had to convince her target that no one was worthier of her attention. An agent of the Warehouse was no more essential to its mission than the lowliest tool and whose well-being was no more deserving of consideration than the condition of a knife or a revolver. She had no gift for acting; her thieving had depended upon quickness and agility, not deception. But she had practiced smiling – coyly, archly, mysteriously invitingly, sensually –for hours in front of a mirror, and Caturanga had arranged for lessons for her at a high-end brothel, whose clients included lords of Parliament as well as lords of industry. Her education in how to please and seduce didn't take place in the brothel's bedrooms –Merriman was teaching her what he thought she needed to know there, which was the unintended lesson that men were a simple lot –but in its parlors and dining rooms. The brothel was as much a salon as it was a whor*house, and Helena was schooled in how to express just enough knowledge about a topic to encourage an admirer to correct her and explain all that she, being of the weaker sex, couldn't be expected to understand.

She hadn't been a perfect pupil. She became skillful enough to lean in and look up through her eyelashes at a man as she ventured an opinion about the "Irish question" and to parry suspicions that she was one of "those damnable suffragettes" who clamored for the vote with an arch response that a woman's vote could be cast only once, while a woman's charm could change many ballots. But she would never mask her intelligence, and she would not suffer being lectured by a man who knew less about a subject than she did.

Seeing Claudia's scowl deepen, Helena conceded that Artie's sometimes Pygmalion-like efforts to tutor her had never led him to counsel Claudia to be less than she was, not even for the Warehouse. "I have to entertain both theories, which are that someone introduced Diane to us for a reason, not necessarily evil, and that I 'created' her, also, just possibly, for no nefarious end. If the second theory is true, then I need to pinpoint when it would have most likely happened. The wish-fulfillment artefacts are only one avenue I'm planning to explore."

It was no more than she had told Irene when Irene had "appeared," uninvited of course, in her bedroom the night after her return from Champagne. To the blunt question, "Did you bring her here?," Helena had answered almost helplessly, "I can't rule it out." Her early disillusionment with the Warehouse had had her dreaming of how an institution less susceptible to the conniving of the powerful (inside the government and out) and less willing to employ men who were more vicious, by and large, than the people they pursued might operate. Yet the disillusionment had subsided over time as she found herself becoming more implicated in the "by fair means or foul" philosophy that guided the agents' retrievals. What had taken its place had been far more corrosive, a self-loathing that she had ultimately projected onto the world at large. While she had had the technical proficiency to attempt cloning a human being in her last years at the Warehouse, she hadn't had the desire. The world didn't need more of her; in fact, it could probably do with less. Her younger self, what she had lacked in know-how, she had made up for in fervency. It was possible that she and a wish-fulfillment artefact had had an unfortunate encounter, but even if Diane had been conceived in such a fashion, where had she been for the last 125 years, give or take?

"I know a more promising area to explore," Claudia said. "How about the year you were gone from the Warehouse? No reason given for why you left and no reason for why you came back." She smiled sarcastically, her eyes bright with angry accusation. "I can't say that for sure, though, since any reference to that time in the archives or what you were doing the year before you left, it's been blacked out or torn out. Hell, this is the same place that has the artefact that helped the second shooter from the Kennedy assassination escape center stage out there." Claudia flung her arm in the vague direction of the larger Warehouse, which, even now, was erratically lit by surges of energy. "But there's nothing on what you did during those two years." Her smile changed, turning smug. "Good thing, I've got some friends who like nothing better than –"

"Hacking into systems?" Helena dryly interjected.

"Researching," Claudia said, "specializing in government documents." Looking even more pleased with herself, she leaned over to take another donut from the box she had set on her laptop. She tapped the laptop with a finger coated with powdered sugar. "Despite the efforts of your contemporaries – is that the right word? – to cleanse the files, I was able to put together enough of a lead for my friends to follow." She hooked a foot under one of the chairs with casters and rolled it to her. Plopping down on it, she woke her laptop and turned it so that Helena could see the screen. "I brought this up while you were snoring over there on the sofa."

At first glance, the yellowed document on Claudia's screen seemed like the usual turn-of-the-century reports published by government offices on agricultural production, the type and amount of goods exported, military readiness, political unrest in the reaches of the Empire, and the number and causes of railway service delays on an annual basis. If nothing more, they were the justification for the thousands of employees who labored at desks under the portraits of rulers and prime ministers long dead to present the current His Majesty of His Majesty's Government a portrait of his realm painted in words and numbers. Then she read its title in faded typescript, An Assessment of the Effectiveness of Domestic Espionage Investigations, 1890-1905.

"It's been completely scanned. Most of it's really boring, enough so that I think I'll give it to Myka as a Christmas present, but around, say, page 57, it gets interesting."

Helena tasted her tea, noticing only then that the teabag was still in her mug. The tea would be too strong, which seemed of a one with her waking up to find herself on a sofa permeated with Pete's hair products, his saliva, his mucus, and, if she inspected the cushions closely enough, the sweat from his balls, only to be confronted with the greater indignity of having Claudia snoop through the few secrets of her life that she alone possessed, the rest having been excavated, documented, analyzed, and filed for perpetuity in the Warehouse's archives. With a deliberateness that she hoped showed Claudia she had no fear of what was in the report, she put her mug down and scrolled through the pages onscreen until she came to page 57, which had the unsettling chapter heading of "Risks Associated with Relying on Extra-Governmental Agencies."

Caturanga had assured her – no, they had been long past the stage in their relationship when he felt he had to assure her or reassure her of anything – he had informed her, the neutrality of his voice made colder by the care with which he pronounced certain words, the sounds foreign to him even after 30 years in England, that the "Comfrey affair," as it had become known internally, would never be a part of any official record, not in the Warehouse and not in Whitehall. The Comfreys themselves could never be snipped out, their existence elided by the careful application of correction fluid, not Hubert with his years of capable, if not particularly distinguished, service in the Foreign Office, or Judith, his wife, with her bright, provoking conversations and her even more provocative smiles and glances, or David, their son, whom they had tried to spare from the consequences of their mistakes. Yet their deaths and the events that had led to them would be excised wherever possible and mischaracterized when reference was unavoidable.

The summary of the investigation wasn't long. The main actors, although never named, would have been known to anyone familiar with the worlds, professional and social, that the Comfreys had inhabited: the "bon vivant" diplomat; Lord "X," his superior; their "German counterparts in the diplomatic corps," and the "German industrialist." The espionage was described as "the exchange of military secrets, including the preparedness of His Majesty's forces, for certain favors, including the repayment of debt," and the denouement was just as blandly encapsulated: "Discovery of the communications did not result in the successful detainment of the German spies. The prime minister, after thorough consideration of the risks involved, permitted Lord X to retire his estate in -shire, following the suicide of -, which occurred shortly before formal charges would have been brought." Only when the author discussed the role of the "extra-governmental agency" did his tone become biting. Noting that the agency in question was a closely guarded secret, the author waspishly commented, "Rather than assisting in the investigation of whether highly classified information was being transmitted to a foreign government, it should have been encouraged to continue its inquiries into the 'dark arts' and supernatural phenomena. It should never have been entrusted with an assignment that required a delicacy and expertise beyond its capacity." He reserved his greatest scorn, however, for the agents tasked with intercepting the communications and identifying their source: "The error was further compounded by the bungling of the agents selected for the investigation. Had they been told to blacken the name of one of the peerage, to drive an able diplomat to suicide, and to permit the actual miscreants to flee to their homeland, they could not have performed more admirably."

It had been so long ago that the Comfreys, even David, were no more than weathered gravestones in a cemetery, yet the author's words, those of an obscure clerk or assistant long since dead himself, could make her flinch in shame. "The timeline's right," Claudia was saying, "and then there's this." She laid a photocopy of a newspaper's front page on the laptop's keyboard. The headlines were readable, but much of the news beneath was not. An article toward the bottom of the page had been circled several times in red ink, "Diplomat's Death Remains a Mystery." Helena didn't have to strain her eyes to read the smaller print; she didn't need to read it at all. She hadn't been the one to find the Comfreys, but Caturanga had moved swiftly to ensure that Warehouse agents, and not the police, were the ones to "investigate" the deaths, which, as was not uncommon for the Warehouse then, involved destroying as much evidence as possible, intimidating the live-in staff, who had seen the bodies, from talking to the police or the press, and attempting to suppress any accounts "until all facts are known." They were words she knew well, Caturanga having impressed upon her early in her career that Warehouse agents never explained their presence or their activities: "Always say that you're not free to comment until all the facts are known and then make sure that the facts are never known." His efforts to stymie interest in what had caused the deaths of a well-regarded husband and his wife had been effective, but not perfect. The Comfreys had been rich and Judith beautiful; that was enough to keep the public's curiosity piqued.

"Did you have to kill them to get the artefact?"

It was a logical question to ask, considering what they did and, more to the point, who she was, but Helena was still shocked by it. "There was no artefact," she said flatly.

"Then why were we involved?" Claudia kicked back her chair and went over to the alcove, popping the tab on a can of Red Bull.

"Because the prime minister, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, insisted that there had to be one. It would have made things so much easier. No bad actors, only bad magic." The skeptical expression on Claudia's face wasn't budging. "Even if there had been an artefact, or more than one, they wouldn't have been capable of producing a genetic duplicate. They would have turned the most commonplace phrases into code or bestowed on the possessor the ability to divine the deepest secrets. They would have promised powers of invisibility or impenetrable encryption. This was the Great Game that we were playing, Claudia, a chess match that became a war."

Claudia sauntered closer to her, a prosecutor circling in on a hostile witness, though, unless impatience for a shower and a change of clothes could be mistaken for hostility, Helena wryly reflected, she was interested less in stonewalling Claudia than in cutting her interrogation short to get back to the bed and breakfast. "I'm supposed to believe that this old dude offed himself and his wife because of some cloak-and-dagger stuff gone wrong, and you and the Warehouse had nothing to do with it."

"On the contrary, the Warehouse and I were in it up to our ears," Helena said. She closed her eyes, seeing the letter she had received after it was all over, hearing Judith's voice, My dearest Helena. "But you have it turned around. It was Mrs. Comfrey who murdered her husband . . . ."

Myka

She had clicked through the hotel TV channels with the distraction-seeking rapidity of Pete or Claudia. She had unpacked and organized her clothes in the half of the closet and one drawer that she had allotted herself. Similarly she had lined up in tight formation on the tiny bathroom vanity her cleanser, toothpaste, toothbrush, and other personal care items (travel-sized). She would have performed some basic reconnaissance with Google Maps or drawn up a provisional schedule, but this was Diane's retrieval . . . pursuit, whatever she chose to call it, and Diane wasn't here. They had had the same thought, Myka knew, when they entered the room they were to share (because chasing down an anomaly wasn't to be counted as a retrieval, Artie had been even more parsimonious and insistent about what he wouldn't approve as travel-related expenses, such as separate hotel rooms). It was too small, much, much too small, and the two queen-sized beds seemed to be squeezing her and Diane against the door. They had put off the awkwardness of the enforced intimacy by going out for dinner almost immediately after they had dropped their bags, but lingering over a meal at a nearby Applebee's had seemed so painfully obvious an excuse not to return to their hotel room that they had settled the bill and left in defeat.

They had no sooner returned, however, than Diane had said she was going to take a walk. Myka didn't remind her that the temperature had dropped into the teens or that it was dark or that there was no place to walk to, nor did she invite herself to go along. Instead she had tried, mainly unsuccessfully, to focus her attention on something else besides the fact that she and Diane would be undressing and showering just feet away from each other. The inability to focus by itself was anxiety-provoking because it was rare that she couldn't lose herself in something to pass the downtime on a retrieval. It also niggled at her that more than half-an-hour had passed, and Diane wasn't back. The hotel was on the same highway they had taken into Dickinson, bordered by a gas station on one side and a string of small businesses on the other. There were no sidewalks, only the shoulder of the highway and the dimly lit road that connected the gas station, hotel, a lot that sold used ATVs and other recreational vehicles, and a small engine repair shop. Irritated with herself, Myka jumped up from the bed. She didn't need to worry about Diane. Anyone who could hop an anomaly like a freight train could take care of herself.

Restlessly, Myka sorted through the print-outs of the news stories that had caught Diane's attention. They were stories of miraculous escapes from death, a man falling from a grain silo only to get up after he hit the ground and casually brush chaff from the knees of his pants, a woman who ran her car into a tree emerging unbloodied and unbruised, claiming with mild surprise, "And I hadn't been wearing my seat belt," a child who disappeared through the thin ice of a pond only to be seen by his friends swimming to shore "as if it was summer out," one of them told the reporter. There had been unlikely survivors of a house fire and a hunting accident, too, the man shot in the latter pulling the bullet from his arm "like it was a splinter," his amazed brother-in-law had recounted. Fighting for space with advertisem*nts for weight-loss pills and debt-relief, pleas by law firms to let them take the insurance companies to court, and promises that hair loss can be reversed, the news stories would have seemed just another scam. Yet Myka saw the similarity in the words that Diane had circled in each story, each survivor recalling an unshakeable belief that he or she would somehow be spared: "I kept thinking I was going to flap my arms like wings and fly away before I slammed into the ground," "The tree couldn't hurt me, it was only a tree," "The water was cold, but I didn't think I was going to drown or anything," "I was like Superman, I was going to catch that bullet like a baseball." It was striking, but certainty that you were going to survive was easy enough to adopt once your survival was no longer in question. Moreover, just as the survivors' accounts had been shaped by the fact of their survival, the witnesses' accounts of what they had seen were influenced by the high bar of the miraculous. Falling 15 feet was one thing, falling 150 feet was another. Myka still didn't understand what made Diane think that an anomaly had been at work. Had there been more commonality between the accidents themselves or if they had resulted in some apocalyptic danger threatening North Dakota or the Midwest at large, she might have thought an artefact was responsible. But the strangeness wasn't freaky-assed strange, and Myka first smiled and then winced as she heard Pete's voice in her mind. She was surprised that it had been enough to convince Artie. Maybe it hadn't, maybe he had wanted the opportunity, as he had said in Boston, to see what Diane would do in the field.

The click of the door unlatching was a sound that simultaneously reassured her and set her heart stuttering as it started a faster beat. Diane had unpinned her hair to slip a cap over it before she went out on her walk, and as she tried to shake it into order as she took her cap off, Myka was struck once again by how utterly like and unlike Helena she was. The slightly startled, cool look that Diane had given her as she entered was completely Helena's; Myka had seen it time and again when she had surprised Helena at the kitchen table or in the "library." Helena never expected to see a friend enter a room, apparently, which had made Myka muse uneasily about what kind of a family life she had known. Diane's coolness was both more recent and more understandable. It was also a coolness that Diane didn't like to display; the downturn of her mouth suggested that the she didn't want respond to Myka from a distance. She didn't want to impose barriers. Helena had always sought protection behind them.

Myka's voice sounded loud and falsely teasing. She could hear the bite of disbelief, about the anomaly, about how they were with each other now, in it. "I was starting to think you'd been whisked away by the anomaly, that you were right about what was going on around here."

Diane had stepped out of her boots and was hanging her jacket up in the closet. "I wanted to stretch my muscles after the drive. I don't want to wake up sore tomorrow."

Inadvertently Myka glanced at the queen bed that was Diane's. Visions of Diane's legs interlocked over her shoulders as she . . . . Myka took a steadying breath. That was one way of stretching after a long car ride but not one that they would be employing. Just the one stray thought, a brief, tantalizing glimpse had been enough to make her breath come harder. She had never wanted to jump Pete's bones like this on a retrieval. She stared at the photocopies, willing herself to turn her mind to their plans for identifying whether an anomaly was the link between these so-called miracles. Or, rather, to demanding from Diane what her plans were. That was something that rarely, if ever, happened to her on a retrieval either, having to force herself to think about an assignment. "How do we start tomorrow? Where do we start?"

Diane joined her at the flimsy desk, surveying the news stories. "I thought we could call the newspapers in the morning. We're potentially interested in making a faith-based documentary – if the news accounts are what they seem to be – and we're hoping the editors will act as go-betweens for us. We would include them in any filmed work, of course, cite them as primary sources." She tipped her head questioningly at Myka. "I think you've used this story before on retrievals, an advance team, checking facts, ensuring cooperation for a special or documentary. Claudia created some business cards for us. I have them in my suitcase." Looking up, she seemed caught by their blurred reflections in one of the room's windows. "While they're making calls, I hope, I thought we could plot out where the accidents happened. I doubt that the pattern, if there is one, would tell us where the anomaly is now, but it might give us a clue."

Great. Their cover story was that that they were representing a Christian production company intent on confirming the reality of the miraculous. It was a deception that felt more awkward than others Myka had assumed on retrievals, although, oddly, closer to the truth of what she did. As an agent she routinely confirmed the reality of the supernatural, and the Warehouse, in its uncompromising otherworldliness, was both revelation of and shrine to a power, an energy, a . . . something . . . that eluded definition. Yet despite its alienness or, maybe, because of it, Myka had never felt that the Warehouse judged her. She was pretty sure it didn't know her name, and though sometimes she felt that the Warehouse was regarding her as she inventoried artefacts, she felt the regard as nothing more than a casual curiosity. If she were to die tomorrow and another agent were to take her place, she didn't assume that the Warehouse would register a difference, nor she did think that the Warehouse's inability to recognize her in her individuality, her uniqueness, her very Myka Beringness, a moral failure. It was freeing. She much preferred the Warehouse's arbitrary energy surges and capricious refusals to monitor itself to strictly enforced principles or rules of behavior.

That was for the real world, the world outside the Warehouse, the world in which humans reigned. She hadn't memorized the agent's manual to make sense of the Warehouse; she had memorized it to help her make sense of the difference between the world and the Warehouse. She needed an aid to help her negotiate the "endless wonder" represented by the Warehouse and the endless small, and not so small, cruelties of the world in which she lived the better part of her life. Here, in this town, in any town, really, were the laws and cultural norms that segregated the possible into good and bad, praiseworthy and shameful, acceptable and deviant. She didn't have to see a reflection of herself in the Warehouse for her to promise to serve it. In fact, it was much easier to place her faith in something that looked nothing like a Bering. She knew when she and Diane started speaking to these survivors the faith that she would see in their eyes would be a faith in "Our Father" dismayingly similar to the baffled belief she had clung to as a child that surely her father would see that she had tried to be good . . . .

"What aren't you saying, Myka?"

"I guess I'm still not seeing what makes you think an anomaly's at work here." Myka hesitated, hoping her voice sounded more neutral than she felt. "Could you be reading too much into this?"

"Of course I could," Diane said irritably, gathering and straightening the photocopies and putting them into a folder that she jammed roughly into a satchel she had brought with her. "But there's something . . . ." She continued more firmly, "I know what you're thinking, that what these people describe, it's the resistance every one of us has to the inevitability of her own death. 'This can't be happening to me' or 'It's all going to work out in the end.' I understand that line of thinking. But what if it's not their perception of reality that's gone haywire but reality itself? That's what I need to find out."

"If you're right, is the anomaly going to coming winging back at you like a boomerang? Are you going to be immediately teleported back to your reality? Tell me how it works, Diane, so I know what to expect." Myka heard the anger behind her words, and she flushed. She needed to act like Diane's partner, not as a spurned lover.

"I don't know how it works. I know I've found the anomaly only when I'm back in my own time. One minute I'm in Paris during the Ancien Regime and the next I'm in turn of the century London. I've never known what others have seen, and most of the time when I'm returned, I don't give my returning or what I've left behind a lot of thought."

"But you would this time?"

Diane glared at her and then the look softened. "Just because it's time for me to go, time past for me to go, doesn't mean I won't have regrets."

"Then we're back to what I asked you earlier. If you're going to regret leaving, then why can't you think of reasons to stay?"

Again, Diane didn't answer her. With the question hanging in the air between them, Diane silently went into the bathroom. She was in there long enough that Myka started to wonder whether it was more than a stalling tactic. When Diane finally came out, Myka had already changed into her pajamas. Without once looking at herself in the mirror, Myka applied her nightly facial cleanser, flossed, brushed her teeth. She didn't take nearly as long in the bathroom, but the light on the nightstand next to Diane's bed had been turned off, and she was under the covers, turned away. Myka got into bed and turned her light off. She could hear the occasional whine of traffic on the highway and the creak of Diane's bed as she shifted in her sleep. Tomorrow they would begin their anomaly hunt and maybe even before the end of the day, Myka would see Diane vanish in a glittery shimmer, like a surpassingly beautiful alien visitor standing on the Enterprise's transporter, returning home with both her virtue and her mystery intact.

Chapter 11

Chapter Text

Myka

Claudia had managed to find them addresses for two of their survivors, the man who had fallen from a grain elevator and the woman had crashed her car into a tree. Looking down at the text message that Claudia had sent, Myka thought they were names you would expect to find in this part of the country, the last names German or Nordic and the first names as unadorned as the prairie surrounding them, Tom Bruns and Marge Christiansen. The day hadn't had a propitious start. Diane had changed her mind about their approach. Instead of visiting the newspapers and talking to the writers and editors, she wanted to visit the survivors without any prior introduction - or warning. "I don't want them to expect us. What we know has already been filtered and edited, and I don't want more of it. I want us to come as close as we can to what they experienced at the time."

Baffled, Myka found herself arguing the opposite. "Like you said last night, it wouldn't hurt to get their thoughts and, better yet, see if they wouldn't provide us with introductions," she had suggested. Showing up on the survivors' doorsteps wouldn't necessarily result in a warm "Howdy, strangers!" welcome. They could just as easily be shooed off a doorstep by a broom – or a gun. In an area this isolated, friendliness was no more the default reaction than suspicion – and Myka had been assigned to retrievals in the rural Dakotas that were more memorable for the reception she had received than for the artefact.

Diane sighed. "It would take more time, and I want to get this over with. If there's an anomaly at work here, the quicker I find it, the quicker things can back to what passes for normal in our respective Warehouse universes. Besides, where's your faith in midwestern hospitality?"

Gone the way of civil discourse, affordable higher education, the liberal world order, and moderate Republicans, Myka thought but didn't say. For all she knew, Diane believed that Theresa May was unfairly maligned and that Brexit was long overdue. Even if that were true, Myka couldn't deny that Diane made for a very attractive Conservative. Her mood seemed to brighten as they drove on a county highway to Tom Bruns's home, the tension between them that had roared back as soon as they awoke and registered that the other was in a bed only a few feet away dissipated by cold, crisp air, or at least put aside. Diane was in jeans, a lilac-colored turtleneck, and a brown leather jacket that Myka couldn't remember them buying on their shopping trip, but her memory was frequently failing her when it came to Diane. There were lots of things she had trouble recalling when Diane was near, the last time she had felt an attraction this strong, the last time she had felt so confused, the last time she had considered, if only for a moment, that there might be something or someone worth giving up the Warehouse for.Mightshe reminded herself, hoping that the emphasis would stop the sudden plunging of her stomach. She was a long way from submitting her resignation.

On their left was a modest, ranch-style house, separated from its nearest neighbor by a scrubby pasture in which a horse was nosing a clump of weeds. This was the grandeur of the Plains, Myka thought mockingly and then was ashamed of the thought. She missed mountains, but she had grown to admire a horizon barren of forests or snow-capped peaks. The vista was no less majestic for its starkness. Living in Colorado Springs, she had had only to look up to realize how tiny and insignificant she was. Living here, she had had only to look around, twist her head like she was a panoramic camera to recognize how vast the land was and how small she was by comparison.

Theirs was the only car in the driveway, and as they got out, Myka sensed a stillness about the house that told her no one was home – and hadn't been home recently. Curtains were drawn over the windows and scraps of old flyers skittered across the walk and concrete apron that fronted the door. "Doesn't look like anyone's been home in a while," she ventured.

Diane eyed the curtained windows, shrugging. "If he's not home, we'll leave a note and see if we can't find Marge." They went up to the door, and she rang the doorbell. After a couple of minutes, she rang it again, and then, after an even longer pause, she knocked. "Should we go around to the side door?"

Myka shook her head. "I don't think anyone's home, but in case somebody just doesn't want to come to the door, let's leave a note. We don't want to be too insistent yet."

From a side pocket of her handbag, Diane took out a stack of business cards rubber-banded together. After more rummaging she produced a pen and, flattening a card against the door, wrote a few words on the back of it. After wedging a corner of it into the crack between the door and the frame, she silently walked back to the SUV, Myka just as silently following her. Heading toward them across the pasture, a dog trotting at his side, was a man wearing an expression that had nothing of Diane's hoped-for midwestern hospitality. Instinctively stepping in front of Diane, Myka put out a warning hand to slow her.

"We're looking for Tom Bruns," she said pleasantly, her eyes scanning the man's coat pockets for the telltale bulge of a gun. At least he wasn't carrying a rifle and his dog didn't seem vicious, loping over to sniff them. Diane patted its head, and the dog sidled closer to her for more attention. "Do you know where we might find him?"

"He's kinda hard to find these days," the man replied, giving their SUV a once-over. Myka wanted to groan; large, black, and with tinted windows, it was probably giving birth this minute to dozens of conspiracy theories in his imagination. "But wherever he is, you can't do much to him," he added cryptically.

Without looking at Myka, Diane rounded the SUV to shorten the distance between them, the dog trotting as familiarly at her side as at its owner's. "We want to do something for Mr. Bruns, not to him. We understand that he miraculously survived a fall from a grain silo. My business partner and I," Diane dipped her head in a backward nod at Myka, the chignon still tidily in place despite the random icy gusts of wind, "we're on the hunt for good news. There's so much confusion in the world right now, so much attention paid to what's wrong, what drags us down, when, really, there's only one kind of news we should be opening our hearts to –"

"Sure as hell shouldn't be those fake news outfits," he agreed. He slapped his thigh. "C'mon, Josie, get over here and quit bothering the ladies." Josie didn't budge. "Looks like you made a friend," he sighed.

"I hope I can make more than one," Diane said, her smile an acknowledgment that she was hoping to charm Josie's owner as well. "We're not out to take advantage of Mr. Bruns. We'll compensate him for sharing his story with us. We think it's important to affirm that miracles do happen, that we're still cared for, that our lives have a deeper meaning."

The man tucked his hands in his jeans' pockets. "If you're who you say you are, then it's too bad you didn't show up here earlier. Tom died a week ago."

"I'm sorry –"

"What?" Myka said sharply, frustrated that Bruns's neighbor had held back the information, whether because he wanted to determine what a pair of strangers in an SUV that could have been part of a government motorcade wanted or, just as possible, because he wanted to tweak them (for the same reason).

Diane repeated politely, her refusal to give Myka a withering look no less a rebuke, "I'm sorry, you said that Mr. Bruns died a week ago? Was it related to the fall?"

The man lifted a shoulder. "Not that I heard, but I'm not a doctor. Tom had a lot of heart problems. I'm kinda surprised he didn't have a heart attack as he fell, his ticker was that bad. When I last saw him, maybe a couple of days before he died, he said he felt like he was carrying an elephant on his back. I told him he probably ought to see his doctor. He said he would if the elephant decided to sit on his chest. Guess he waited too long." He slapped his thigh again. "Josie," he said sternly, "get over here. Time to get back home." The dog registered the change in tone and meekly trotted over to him. He began to walk away from them, the dog occasionally twisting her head as if to ask Diane why she wasn't coming with them.

"Thank you for your time," Diane called out to him.

He lifted his hand and waggled it, in what might have been a wave or a waving away of them. Myka shouted, "Can you tell us where we might find Marge Christiansen?"

She didn't expect him to answer, but he stopped and pointed vaguely northeast. "She works at the gas station in New Lebanon, about 15 miles away from here. You might find her there today." He half-pivoted toward them, grinning knowingly. "She'll be willing to sell you her story, but there's no miracle why she survived. She's half-co*ckeyed most of the time. She probably floated out of the car before it crashed."

Helena

She knew she hadn't satisfied Claudia's curiosity. The gap in her service, the absence of pertinent records, the damning yet cryptic post-mortem analysis – in this case, truly post-mortem. Her by turns sarcastic and dismissive claims thatthatwas not related tothiswere hardly persuasive. It wasn't surprising that Claudia had gone running to Irene and Kosan and yet somehow it was surprising in that particularly painful way one could be surprised when people one liked and respected didn't return the feeling. Helena knew she and Claudia had . . . issues . . . but for Claudia to tattle to Irene and, especially, Kosan was wounding. Was it tattling, however, when what Claudia had to reveal was information that she had discovered on her own? The only part of it that Claudia hadn't discovered was the fact that Judith Comfrey had killed her husband and then herself, not the other way around. While it had mattered a great deal to Helena that the Comfrey who had committed the murder-suicide was Judith and not Hubert, it was a trivial piece of information to Claudia.

She reread the text she had received from Kosan, telling her (not asking) that he would be meeting with her tomorrow afternoon to discuss the "latest developments." There were no latest developments in a case that had been closed for over a century. One might think a regent might use another form of communication, one unique to the Warehouse (a Farnsworth, say, or Irene) or at least more secure than a text transmission. But there it was, a text she had received via a phone number that hadn't changed since Boone. Kosan had been away from the Warehouse for a few weeks on "other business," which she assumed had to do with his day job, running a small but well-respected private investment company. All the regents had day jobs, although they also had some shadowy connection to government. The vaunted Warehouse independence – she curled her lips in disgust. In the end, power answered only to power, no matter the Warehouse, no matter the century, no matter the government.

"Enjoying your favorite past-time, I see." As Helena looked up from her phone, Irene sat down in the other wing-back, inspecting a bald spot in the upholstery with a critical eye. "Brooding."

"Did you pop in on Leena without knocking?" Helena demanded, more from habit than annoyance.

"I never had to keep an eye on Leena."

Helena made another face and tucked her phone in the gap between the seat cushion and the chair arm. "Am I supposed to give up my last shred of privacy? The 'Comfrey Matter' or whatever spy novel title you want to give it didn't end in my spiriting away an artefact that clones its possessor."

"I know," Irene said quietly.

Helena took in a deep breath and spread her fingers wide, like spokes from a hub. She found it transfixing, perhaps because for more than a century she hadn't been able to see her fingers. Or her arms. Or her feet. Prison cells punished by making the absence of freedom visual, tactile, the door that never opened at your volition, the walls that hemmed you in. In the bronze, you were aware of nothing but space. It was an illusion, of course. You were entombed in a polymer of no human creation that was the color of bronze. It shaped itself to your form, but you never felt it. You felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. For all you knew or were able to sense, you had been cast adrift in the universe, and you realized only then that what made you human wasn't your fine mind or your noble emotions but, now that you could no longer feel it, the breathing, secreting, excreting shell that housed you. So Helena had learned since her release from the bronze to spread her fingers and toes, to count the lines in her palms, to focus on her imperfect, aging body to calm herself. Because if she didn't manage to control the rage those two words had set off in her, the Warehouse was likely to lose its reigning caretaker. "If you know, then why are we going through this charade?"

"Because it's a gap in your history, because the regents don't trust you, because, at this point, we have no other answers."

"And if I bare my soul about what happened then, will the digging stop?"

Irene negligently waved her hand, brushing Helena's concerns aside. "Airing all those old secrets – it might be good for you."

Helena stared at her in scornful disbelief. "You already have me in therapy sessions."

"Talk to Adwin. Relieve his mind." Irene rose and smoothed her skirt. "I'm more interested in other parts of your history, especially the part you revisited when you went to Champagne."

"My brother's papers weren't very illuminating."

"So you've said."

Irene was taking her time to leave, Helena irritably recognized, smoothing her skirt yet again, touching her hair, adjusting her glasses. She came to stand in front of Helena's chair, feet planted apart, arms folded across her chest. Helena might have felt like a student caught passing notes except for the fact that she had rarely been in a classroom long enough to cause trouble. There had been the day school to which Caturanga had sent her, but, though she had needed more intellectually demanding learning than it could provide, he was willing to subsidize her classroom education only to a certain point. Agents didn't need literature or higher mathematics to do their job, only a good hand and a basic ability to read and do sums. So, she had ended up teaching herself, spending classroom time roaming London's streets when it was warm and huddling in the odd nook or alcove when it was cold, reading and writing out problems and then reading more. Had Irene ever been one of her teachers, she might have gone to class more often. "You haven't told me how you know about that . . . retrieval," Helena said finally, aiming for a casualness that she knew was beyond her ability to assume. She couldn't be casual, couldn't pretend indifference, not about this, not even after all this time.

"Because I knew David Comfrey."

Myka

"She doesn't work here anymore." He said it with the clipped assurance of one who believes that will be the end of the conversation. He had adopted the same tone with the older man ahead of them in line who complained that the men's restroom was out of hand soap. "When I have a minute free, I'll get to it," he had said, handing the man a fistful of lottery tickets and punctuating his words with a shrug. The clerk was tall, gangly, old enough to work in a convenience store that sold cigarettes and alcohol but young enough to let his boredom shade into impatience. His hands were large and clumsy. He knocked over as many items as he scanned, and although Diane tried to propitiate him with two dried-out looking turkey and Swiss sandwiches and two bottles of water to be rung up, he failed to be moved by them into offering more information. Her follow-up questions, "Did she get another position? Did she say what her future plans were?," elicited only additional shrugs and the less-than-helpful "You'll have to ask Ron, and he won't be here until 6:00."

As the people behind them shifted their feet and started muttering, Myka was tempted to turn around and fix on them the cold stare she had learned, not as a Secret Service agent but as Pete's long-suffering partner. Diane went with a softer approach, giving the other customers a lovely and apologetic smile. She gathered up what would be their rubbery and tasteless lunch – Myka already foresaw the coughing fit that would follow her trying to force down a chunk of stale bread – and headed toward the door, only to stop and hand the bag to Myka, saying with more cheerfulness than the interior of the gas station, the clerk, or their lunch warranted, "I believe we've forgotten something." Myka thought that whatever it was, it was probably better left forgotten, given the fine layer of dust on the canned goods and the cloud of fruit flies hovering over the basket of bananas, but she didn't object as Diane disappeared down one of the aisles, and she shuffled away from the door, resigned to waiting for Diane to find the item they apparently couldn't leave without.

A few minutes later, the clerk having dispatched all but a teenage girl who was trying to talk him into selling her a case of Miller by promising him it was for her dad, Diane called out, "Do you have any other crisps?"

"Huh?" The clerk had been half-flirting, half-remonstrating with the girl, and Myka had all but decided to intervene and send her home, without the beer and without the clerk's cell phone number, the girl being too young for both of them.

"Crisps. Do you have other kinds in addition to these?" Diane had returned to the beginning of the aisle and was gesturing with more disappointment than frustration at the profusion of brightly colored snack bags.

"Crisps?" He echoed uncertainly, his attention wavering between Diane and the girl, who, seeing that her chances of buying beer from him were rapidly diminishing, breezed past Myka and out of the store. With a last, dismayed look at the door, he said, "I don't know what you mean by 'crisps.' Is that, like, British for something?" It was clear that, given a choice between stringing along a teenage girl who was at least three years too young for the beer she wanted to buy and a customer who demanded more service than a scowl at the register and a "Did you get gas with this?," he preferred the former, but Diane's foreignness was sufficient novelty to break the monotony of his shift. Tempted though she was to end his confusion, Myka was able to deny her inner nerd the pleasure and let Diane continue her efforts to engage him. He had come out from behind the counter, as if closing the distance between him and Diane would allow for a better view of the Britishness that had previously escaped his notice.

"Chips. Potato chips," Diane said, pretending to regret not having found the right word earlier, "crisps" having unfairly terminated his flirtation and all but dragged him away from his command post. "I keep forgetting that Americans don't say 'crisps.'" She spread out her arms as if the few feet of worn tile between them stood in for all the barriers that had kept Americans and the British from understanding each other for centuries – oceans, wars . . . spelling.

"All we have is what's in that aisle and in the racks at the counter." He stole a quick look over his shoulder at Myka to make sure he wasn't caught in a con and that she wasn't tiptoeing out of the store with her arms full of sunglasses, knit hats, and cell phone accessories. "What did you come all the way to North Dakota for? Just to talk to Marge? You're pretty far from England."

"What else is a person who's consumed with curiosity about the mysteries of life supposed to do except travel to find them? In fact, it's a mystery that has brought me to North Dakota, to visit with Marge and a few others." As the clerk frowned, imagining, Myka thought, the lurid crimes that could be happening a mile down the highway, Diane lightly laughed and said, "Not those mysteries, we're not police although we consider ourselves detectives of a sort. We chase the unusual, out of this world, once in a lifetime events . . . like what to happened to Marge," she finished softly. When the clerk didn't immediately respond, nervously realigning Hostess fruit pies on a nearby display rack, Diane came closer to him. "She should have died in that car accident, yet she opened her car door and got out as if she had turned into her driveway instead. Remarkable." She peered into his face. "We may drive funny to you Americans, but we wouldn't have expected anyone to walk away from a smash-up like that on a country road in Sussex." The clerk started realigning Twinkies, and Diane watched him in silence for a moment or two. "What did she tell you about it?" She asked it so softly that Myka could barely hear her.

The clerk blinked and stepped back, dropping a package of Twinkies on the floor, as if he were trying to duck a spell that Diane was weaving. Feeling her own body jerk awake, Myka was aware that the increasing intimacy of Diane's tone and her slow but steady elimination of the space that existed between her and the clerk was hypnotic, all the more hypnotic because the gentle indirection of her conversation didn't disguise the relentlessness of the question that it had been leading up to. "How was she able to walk away . . . Cody?" Her eyes had flicked to the left breast of his shirt, its Kelly green polyester shouting that it was a uniform, and then back to his face. Even that tired trick of fostering a connection was elevated by the sweetness of her smile, but the relentlessness remained as she asked, "How did Marge describe it to you?"

"She claimed that angels must've been looking out for her that night," he said hoarsely. "She claimed she was lifted out of her car by some . . . force . . . she had never felt before. She said that angels must have been beating their wings 'cause all she could feel was wind."

"Yes, it can feel like that," Diane murmured, and Myka knew that her concurrence encompassed more than the metaphor of angels' wings, that Diane was recalling her own encounters with anomalies, and Myka felt a surprisingly intense stab of jealousy. It wasn't as though she hadn't had her own encounters with the extraordinary; she had seen and experienced the power of a variety of artefacts, some, in the destructiveness of the energy they unleashed, harbingers of the apocalypse rather than of angelic intervention. But seeing in Diane's expression the remembered wonder of an encounter in which she hadn't shared, hadn't been able to share, Myka was shaken by the possessiveness that gripped her. When had she ever been jealous of the experiences Pete had had without her? It was like being jealous of Amanda or Kelly. It was creepy and not like her, and Myka, instinctively backing away from the feeling, collided with display shelves full of king-sized Reese's peanut butter cups and Twix, and she grabbed the ones that fell to the floor and threw them on the counter. She was jealous of something that she wasn't sure even existed and its ability to evoke an expression on Diane's face that she could only sourly characterize as dreamy.

"You said that Marge doesn't work here any longer," Diane pursued, her voice louder, her tone matter of fact. "Has her experience made her want to change her life, try something new? Is that why she left?"

Cody shook his head. From where she stood, Myka couldn't tell whether the downward slant of his mouth was a frown or an effort to remember. "Marge drank a lot," he said hesitantly, "I mean, she never showed up for work wasted but she spent a lot of time at the Rough Rider on the weekends and on the nights she didn't work, and everyone just sort of knew that she had a, uh, problem. Anyway, after the crash, she said she was going to take the second chance that God had given her and clean up her act. She was going to stop drinking, and I guess she did. When she hung out at the Rough Rider, she'd get a plain co*ke, not a whiskey co*ke."

Diane shifted her gaze to Myka, the look in her eyes inquiring, asking Myka what she made of this. Myka responded by arching an eyebrow, an unhelpful 'I don't know what to make of this.' Although she didn't know what to make of it, she sensed, no, feared that the end of Cody's story wouldn't be a good one. She felt the same half-suspicion, half-conviction she had felt walking to the front door of Tom Bruns's house, that they were following a trail gone too cold and that Cody would tell them what Bruns's neighbor had, that they had arrived too late. If Diane shared her suspicion, however, she wasn't showing it. "It sounds like Marge was turning her life around, which is why second chances are so precious, don't you think?" She was coaxing, gently prodding Cody to continue.

He seemed to rebel at the verbal nudging, spinning away from Diane and retreating to his spot behind the counter. He looked at Diane and Myka, each in turn, clearly trying to decide which would get them out of the store faster, silence or answering Diane's question. "For a while it looked like she turned things around, and then she started missing shifts like she would when she had a hangover. It got so bad we thought Ron was going to fire her, but she quit before he could do it. I guess she was telling people that she was too sick to stand on her feet eight hours a day and was going to move in with her daughter in Bismarck." He pronounced Bismarck with air of finality that indicated he had given them all he was going to give them. His curiosity about Diane also appeared to have ended as he rang up the miscellany of candy that Myka had tossed on the counter as well as the can of Pringles that Diane brought to the counter. He made no comment on her choice of "crisps."

"Sick with what?" Myka hoped her bluntness and the change it represented from Diane's patient drawing him out might startle Cody into responding.

It did, to a point. "I don't know. Like I told you before, you'll need to talk to Ron if you want details." When he started to shake another bag open for their additional purchases, Myka held out the one she was holding. It was one less plastic bag to end up floating in the Pacific, plus she could stare him down as he placed the items in it. "He said she told him that her liver had become a rock." His eyes slid away from hers, and after he tossed in the last candy bar, he went to the opposite side of the counter and pretended to count the cigarette cartons stored on the shelf underneath. Diane offered him a quiet "Thank you" as they left the store.

They ate their lunch in the weedy parking lot of a boarded-up family restaurant, the Bull Moose Café. Some of the letters were hanging loose on the siding, but it wasn't difficult to make out the name. They left the SUV running, heat on full blast. Diane didn't have much appetite, only nibbling at her sandwich. "This isn't turning out quite as I expected," she said with an embarrassed laugh.

"Sometimes it happens that way." A comment neither comforting nor reassuring, but Myka's mind was busy turning their conversations with Bruns's neighbor and Christiansen's co-worker over and over and she had needed to temporize, to say something. It was better than sharing with Diane her current thoughts, which were ones that would only dismay her. She had opened the can of Pringles and breaking off tiny pieces of a chip, the deer-hunter orange of the cheddar cheese coating staining her fingers. She rubbed them on her napkin. "Pete would eat a whole bag of Cheetos, and then he would be sure to wipe his fingers on you and get the cheese dust all over your clothes." Myka had volunteered it without thinking about the fact that she was volunteering it to Diane, that she was talking about him to her for the first time in weeks. She couldn't help but smile at the memory, but seeing the orange spots and streaks on her shirt had driven her crazy. She could never completely brush them out, and the coating would settle deeper into the material, forcing her to consign her shirt to the laundry. She would have killed him except that then she would have been partnered with Artie.

"You miss him," Diane said, and she pressed Myka's hand. It was more comforting, Myka acknowledged, than the limp "Sometimes it happens that way" she had floated to ease Diane's worries. "You don't have to hold that back from me, Myka. His taking the rotation . . . even I can feel the hole it's left behind."

"I thought I was going to marry him and then I didn't know how I could." Strangely, the recognition hurt more now than when she had confessed it to Pete. Maybe because she had had no premonition of how fast and dramatic his reaction would be. She had expected arguments, cold silences, avoidance, a temporary end to their partnering on retrievals, and lots and lots of awkwardness, but she hadn't expected that he would leave. The shock and attendant self-recriminations were all the more painful because he had made the decision before they talked, beforeshetalked, and what she said had left room for her to be wrong. She hadn't told him she didn't love him only that she didn't know what her feelings were, and he had continued packing his suitcase as though she had told him "Never, not in a million years." The shock had worn off, and as for the recriminations, she could keep them at bay until the late hours, when she was too tired to read but not tired enough to sleep, but what she couldn't stop from eating at her in a very Pete-like way, incessantly and voraciously, was the humiliating realization that, for all his faults, Pete understood her better than she understood herself. For all her analytical prowess, she had been blind to what was fundamental about him. Honesty he could handle, no matter how hard it was to hear, but denying, holding back, building a wall even he couldn't tear down, that was what he couldn't handle. Wouldn't handle.

Here was an opportunity to show she had learned from her mistake with him. She could tell Diane what she thought about the anomaly. Really thought. "Is it possible that what we're chasing isn't your anomaly?" Myka asked, taking care to funnel the potato chip fragments in her napkin into the plastic shell that had held her sandwich. She had taken cover in a question instead of declaring "This isn't an anomaly," but this was Diane's ride home she was talking about, the only way she had back to her reality - unless Helena could devise an alternative - and Myka wasn't willing to crush her hopes. While she didn't want Diane to leave, indulging in the illusion that the charms of this reality (herself being foremost among them) might dim the luster of the other, she had only to think of Helena and her less-than-successful efforts to adapt to admit that Diane might never reconcile herself to living in this reality. As hard as she found it to believe at times, Myka knew that if she were never to see Warren Bering again she would miss him, terribly, and if she would miss him, she could only imagine how bereft she would feel if she were never to see the ones whom she unreservedly loved. Trying to make her glance as casual as possible, Myka noticed that Diane had partially turned her head to look out the side window, although there was a blankness about her gaze that suggested she was seeing something other than the empty parking lot. If she had been as unceremoniously dumped into Diane's reality, with as little assurance that she would be able to return to her own, would Diane be enough to make up for all that she had lost?

Diane restlessly shifted in her seat and switched her attention back to the interior of the SUV. As she tucked a stray hair behind her ear and then reflexively touched her chignon to reassure herself that it wasn't coming apart, her face, in profile, was balanced between strength and sensitivity. The straight, clean lines, in particular the high thrust of her cheekbone, spoke to resolution and commitment while the soft curve of her chin and the set of her mouth, which could be so expressive of the emotion animating her at the moment, spoke of an openness to compromise. It was Helena's face, but it lacked both her guardedness and her predisposition to mockery. Myka took a steadying breath, which she hoped went unnoticed. Yes, Diane might be enough.

"Have I managed to string together what are only a series of coincidences, is that what you're asking?" Diane didn't sound offended. She sounded resigned, as if she had been asking herself the same question.

"It's more than that. There's definitely something going on here." Myka bent over and rifled through the convenience store bag until she found a bag of M&Ms. When she had been with Pete on retrievals, she had sneaked candy out like it was a Baggie of pot, and she had crammed it into her mouth with an equally furtive pleasure. Reminded of him again, she noticed how her thumb had automatically tried to cover the name, as though hiding it made the candy something else. Own up, she admonished herself. She tore the plastic noisily (another departure for her) and rattled the bag. "Want some?" She poured a stream of M&Ms into Diane's outstretched hand, visited by the image of licking them up from her palm. It was as unsettling as it was arousing. She rarely needed to focus on work. Usually it was the other way around – retrievals were the distraction from foreplay. "This is beginning to feel like an artefact retrieval."

Tilting her head back to drop a few M&Ms into her mouth, Diane drew her brows together in a sign of agreement – or objection. Meditatively crunching the candy, she said, after a swallow, "Claudia double-checked and then triple-checked the findings from your reader . . . your ping machine. There was nothing indicating that the occurrences were being caused by a relic."

"The ping machine doesn't always get it right. It's also possible that the artefact is new." Myka sucked on a red M&M, trying not to visualize her tongue gliding inside Diane's mouth, seeking melted chocolate. "Do your relics or anomalies have side effects? With a lot of the artefacts we hunt, there's a kind of reverse energy to them, too."

"Anomalies seem to be quite content with tearing holes in the universe. Unlike relics, their energy isn't channeled through people, which is why it can be so difficult to isolate them. But I am familiar with what you're describing since our relics can exhibit what we call a delayed effect, somewhat akin to the recoil of a gun." Diane grimaced at the analogy. "Tom Bruns's death, Marge Christiansen's illness, you think –"

"Pete calls it getting double whammied. You have an artefact that turns vending machines into slot machines, and you daydream about hitting a jackpot every time you select a bag of Fritos or trail mix. The next thing you know, you're being buried alive by millions of quarters."

"That's rather grim." Diane waved off the offer of more M&Ms.

"I've seen it happen."

"We need to go back to the hotel and establish a timeline for when these 'divine interventions' happened and when our first two survivors started getting sick. We're already too late to help Mr. Bruns and, I fear, Ms. Christiansen." Diane turned eyes made even darker by worry on Myka. "We don't want to be late on the scene again."

Helena

She shouldn't have been surprised. Irene had a way of knowing things – and people. It didn't appear to be a benefit of serving as the caretaker. Like many unaccommodating patients, the Warehouse, when under stress or, as was sometimes literally the case, under attack, was less interested in describing where it hurt than in giving vent to its discomfort as often and as visibly as it could. In those situations, Irene seemed hardly more attuned to the source of the Warehouse's ills than the agents. Irene knew things because she was old. If you were reasonably intelligent, a long lifespan guaranteed that you would learn from some portion of your mistakes and the mistakes made by others. If you were more than reasonably intelligent, your superiors would offer you opportunities to make even more mistakes, which only increased your knowledge. Irene had been an employee of the Warehouse for a very long time; she had had a wealth of opportunities to carry out the regents' directives and the time to realize how few of those directives had saving the world from the next disaster as their main objective.

Helena shouldn't have been surprised, but she was, and Irene read it in her face. "The war made for any number of twists and turns. It would be less surprising to you had you experienced it."

"I'm sure it was better for everyone that I remained bronzed. Worldwide annihilation wasn't likely to improve my outlook." She pointed to the chair Irene had only recently vacated. "If you think you're going to spirit out of this room with only that as an explanation, you're sorely mistaken." Her finger trembled, and Helena was thankful that her voice hadn't quavered as well.

She tried to calm herself by calculating how old David would have been when Germany invaded Poland, an old man for the time, 60 give or take, although 60 was younger than she had been in 1939, or Irene. She couldn't picture him with an old man's stoop or thickened middle. He was frozen for her at 12, then 13, with Judith's thick, fair hair, her willowy build, her features. There was Hubert in him, too, less visible but still present in the occasional deliberateness with which he spoke, which lent an odd, elderly man's charm to his shyness, the courtesies he never failed to extend, his delight in competitions of all kinds, which, in his father, had developed into a passion for betting on their outcomes. A boy not long graduated from short pants, he had been diffident, awkward, lacking his parents' self-assurance. The money that had bolstered Judith's self-worth and the assumption that a Comfrey would always have a role in the Empire's affairs that underlay Hubert's had no meaning for a child whose first waking thought was of how his schoolmates would choose to torment him that day. She had done what she could to help him, and she had believed she was making progress, until encouraging David and completing her assignment, her mission, were surrendered to a greater, overmastering demand upon her loyalties.

"How did you know him?" She would concentrate on the David she couldn't picture because the one she could was becoming too painful to remember.

Irene had retaken the other chair, but she was leaning forward, clasping her hands over one knee in the attitude of someone meting out a finite resource. She was willing to give Helena more of her time but only to a point. Helena expected her to say that she had met David in a government office carefully removed, both in location and function, from any vital part of the war effort, an office that would have all the earmarks of one involved in crucial but very delicate negotiations – scurrying assistants, constantly clacking typewriters, meetings running long past their scheduled end, all of it undertaken in a hushed air of secrecy as humid and oppressive as a tropical front – but one, in actuality, that would have no true significance, the office, say, for ensuring compliance with South American trade protocols. It was the type of work, dotting the Empire's i's and crossing its t's, to which David's father had been assigned and which he had conducted with all the seriousness of a government secretary giving his final approval to war plans.

And Irene surprised her again. "I met him late in the war when he and a number of other physicists were studying the V-2 rocket. He was alarmed by its destructiveness but intrigued by its potential for space flight. He would tell me that while he had one eye on London –"

"David became a physicist?" Helena exclaimed incredulously. "I was fobbed upon his parents by the Warehouse and Her Majesty's government as a tutor because he was so poor at maths," she said, recalling one of her first encounters with him, his head bent over a series of equations, the paper scratched and erased until holes had appeared in it.

"He had one eye on London, he told me," Irene repeated, her irritation undisguised, "and the other on the moon," she finished softly. As Helena's eyes flared wide with understanding, Irene added, "He said it was something one of his tutors used to tell him, and he adopted it for himself. 'She would say that she had to keep one eye on her daughter, but that her other was fixed firmly on the moon.'" Irene looked at her intently. "I didn't know then that you were the tutor, but I heard the fondness in his voice, and I recognized that you were more to him than just a tutor." She paused. "There were other things he told me, but I'm not sure you're ready to hear them."

"They've all been dead for decades, even David. If I can't bear to hear it now, when will I?" Helena was aware that she was all but curling into a self-protective ball, but David's voice was already sounding in her ears, not as Irene would have heard it, a man's baritone reedy and thin with age, but a boy's tenor, reedy and thin under the onrush of puberty. A boy's tenor but far colder in tone than David had ever used with her, it was the voice of boy a realizing just how much he had been betrayed by his beloved Helena.

"He was a widower, childless and lonely. We would share a cup of tea in the evenings when our work permitted, spiked with American bourbon. It was the only thing that kept the chill off in late '44." If Helena hadn't known Irene as she did, she might have thought there was a melancholy, nostalgic note to the description. "We all had our ghosts, and their numbers were only multiplying. He talked at great length about his parents. He talked, of course, about how they died, but he preferred to dwell on happier times." Irene briefly stopped, appraising Helena's level of discomfort. Helena stared at the thumb she had been chewing without even noticing. Discomfort level, high, but with a slight shake of her head, Irene continued, her tone turning dry. "That's when he would talk about you. You may have been his tutor, but he came to believe that you were his friend. 'My only one for a time,' he said. You made of math and science an adventure. You would take the ancient histories of empires and armies or stories of treasure and exploration and make them live in his mind. Staging a mock swordfight with him, you would ask him how far a legionnaire could march in a day. Sailing model ships that you had built across a pond, you would ask him how fast Drake's ships could cross the ocean. You even had him calculate the present-day value of Ali Baba's treasure. He said he rarely had the right answer, but you made him want to figure it out. To teach him science, you had him climb trees, observe ant colonies, and, to the horror of the kitchen staff, bake a cake. He loved you, and he said he had rarely felt so bereft as when you left without warning or goodbye."

Helena could only nod, the block at the back of her throat, a twin to the one at the back of her eyes, preventing her from speaking. She had tried to teach him the laws of gravity by teaching him the basics of cricket. David had been far more interested in hitting the ball as hard as he could, and she had taken solace in the fact that it had been a rare, clear day in London and that David had been free to play, like any other boy, for a few hours. Yet later that day, when he had locked hands with Christina and swung her around in a circle, Christina's feet beheading more than a few flowers in the Comfreys' garden, he had shouted to her, "Miss Helena, Christina is defying gravity!" He had been winding her up, yes, but at least it showed that some part of the lesson remained with him. Apparently more than she had thought.

"When he was older and wiser, he believed you left because you were having an affair with his father, but his father preferred the women he dallied with to be jolly and plump, like the maids, and you were neither." Irene couldn't smother a sardonic laugh. "David also remembered that you rarely spoke favorably of men, so when he was, as he said, even older and slightly more wise, he developed a new theory. You had been 'fascinated' by his mother." She steadily looked at Helena over the tops of her half-moon lenses, her amusem*nt fading. "Despite the euphemism, he was quite comfortable talking about his mother's ability to 'fascinate' both sexes. Certain glances he had caught between the two of you, what seemed like private meanings to certain words, it all took on a new significance, and he regretted that he had been too young to tell you the one thing he knew about his mother that you couldn't have known –"

"That Judith Comfrey played with fire but was never burned?" Helena demanded harshly, her voice thick with emotion. "David was wrong, about the depth of his mother's feelings, about," she hesitated, before saying with an effort that pulled her from her chair, "about her vulnerability." She hesitated again, trying to adopt some version of Irene's impassive mask as she said, "But he was spot on about the fascination that she could exert."

Irene's voice was appreciably cooler. "Did you let your feelings for his mother compromise the retrieval?"

"It wasn't a retrieval. There was no artefact," Helena burst out, the memories of David and Christina giggling as he spun her around and around, of how unfathomable but so beguiling Judith's eyes could look in candlelight, the guilt and grief inextricably bound to those images spurring her to pace the room because if she stood still for a moment longer she would start to cry, and that she would never do in front of Irene Frederic. "Judith Comfrey was a very clever woman and instead of acknowledging how clever she was, everyone believed that an artefact had to be involved." She shakily inhaled. "As for my being compromised, I was compromised long before I met the Comfreys. Service to the Warehouse is inherently corrupting, Irene. Don't deny it."

For once, she had managed to surprise Irene. "I'll agree that we're oftentimes forced to make difficult decisions, but that we make immoral ones because the Warehouse forces us to do so?" She shook her head. "Choosing to be less than what we are or what we can be is in violation of the Warehouse's purpose, not in furtherance of it.Wemake that choice, Helena."

Helena's pacing had ended in front of Irene's chair, and while she was ready to stare her down all night, that steady, unblinking gaze had her retreating, slowly, to her own chair. Only after she slumped against its cushions did Irene stand, placing the flat of one hand against her skirt, smoothing out a nonexistent wrinkle. "Though you might believe your misadventure with Judith Comfrey has no bearing on why we have your genetic double among us, don't be in such a hurry to rule it out. The Warehouse isn't devious, despite what you want to believe, but it is subtle." Irene began walking toward the door, their time at an end. "David had developed a great interest in genealogy, particularly concerning his mother's family. Maybe it was the result of going to live with one of his father's brothers after the . . . tragedy. He said he was never allowed to talk about their deaths or about his mother. Since many of her family had remained in Germany, he was more than a little afraid to find out that they had become Nazi sympathizers. He was far more at ease hunting for baptismal records from the 16th century. However, one of the family stories he unearthed was more recent, having to do with his mother's aunt, who had thrown over her fiancé, a rich and well-connected landowner, to elope with an impecunious scholar. Her family disowned her, and she and her new husband emigrated to the United States to try their fortune." Irene shrugged her shoulders, but Helena knew better than to interpret it as a sign that this was an unimportant tale, a nugget of ancient gossip. Perhaps Irene was also shrugging at the incomprehensibility of an overwhelming but ill-advised passion. Surely she had never let herself succumb to one. "Eventually David lost their trail, but what he did find suggested that their fortune was no better here than in Germany. One of their sons headed west, to Colorado, to try his luck. David had located a Walter Bering who lived in Colorado Springs and was tracing his family tree. They both thought that the Behring who went west might have eliminated the 'h' from his name to make it less German." Irene's smile was faint but unmistakable. "If I remember correctly, Myka has said her grandfather's name was Walter." She quietly closed the door behind her.

Chapter 12

Chapter Text

Myka

It still involved too much guesswork, but when she and Diane plotted out a timeline from when Tom Bruns's and Marge Christiansen's "miraculous" escapes from death happened to when the first signs that their health was deteriorating appeared, they concluded that four to six weeks had passed. Finding Bruns's obituary online, Myka estimated another two to three weeks passed between his complaints of feeling an elephant sitting on his chest and his death. "If I hadn't gotten so excited when Claudia and I found those stories, I would have researched them more carefully . . . I made a faulty assumption," Diane said mournfully.

"You would've found Bruns's obit and decided that an anomaly might not be involved after all, which would've meant that this artefact could have gone on hurting people." Myka barely suppressed the impulse to tuck a strand of Diane's hair behind her ear. The chignon was unraveling, mainly because Diane's hands kept flying to her head in frustration, to rub her temples, to knead the muscles at the back of her neck. "We have an opportunity now to find it because of your anomaly hunting." The table seemed even smaller since they were sharing the view of Myka's laptop screen. They weren't actually touching, but one of them only had to lean in a couple of inches closer to the other.

"Thank you for trying to make me feel better." With a smile that was bruised by disappointment, Diane carefully pushed away from the table, avoiding an accidental touch. "Still, it was the work of a novice. Caturanga would be mortified."

"It's as fair to ask why these articles didn't set off the ping machine. All the emotion generated by a series of near-death experiences . . . it's imperfect what we do, Diane. We're bound to overlook things, mistake the work of an artefact for a string of coincidences. We let our own emotions get in the way, too. You've been away from your Warehouse and your world for two months. It's understandable that you wanted this to be an anomaly."

Diane looked at her quizzically. "Of course I miss my home, but I want to understand how I ended up here, if only to better understand how anomalies work. It's not an excuse for being sloppy."

"'Sloppy' is harsh, especially since we still have time to find . . . " Myka toggled between browser tabs, "Clint Early, our Superman hunter, and Kevin Johnson, the boy who fell through the ice, and warn them." She glanced up at Diane, hoping she sounded upbeat and confident. With Pete, she was the one being reassured. She was the designated worrier, and, if the situation merited it, agonizer. This pairing with Diane was awkward all the way around.

A touch of frost entered Diane's voice. "I'm fine. You don't have to keep consoling me." With what Myka was tempted to characterize as a flounce, Diane spun away from the table and headed toward the bathroom. "I'm perfectly happy with a TV dinner from the little shop in the lobby."

"I'm not," Myka muttered under her breath as the door closed behind Diane. Their hotel room was shrinking by the minute. She wasn't hungry, but she wanted space, and people, between her and Diane. What she would have to eat to justify those necessities didn't matter. Pizza, wings, she would deal with the fat and carbs later. "Let's go to the Rough Rider," she loudly suggested. "A bar's the next best thing to a church if you want to know what's going on in a small town. Maybe we'll get some clues as to the artefact's identity."

"Tomorrow's Sunday. Maybe we should go to services in the morning instead."

Myka couldn't tell whether Diane was being serious. "There's no reason we can't do both," she said. She had, in fact, attended church services, Bible groups, Christian fellowship luncheons, and more pancake breakfasts to raise money for church youth trips than she wanted to remember, all to retrieve artefacts. While it was senseless to dread the prayers before they ate and the hymns she sang off-key, she didn't enjoy the experience. Some might find the Warehouse proof of a higher plane of existence, and though she was more than willing to concede there were phenomena beyond her ability to explain them, she believed that whatever explanation there was would not involve a messiah who resembled the lead singer of a '70s country rock band and gathering with long-dead loved ones in a heavenly mansion as if it were a family reunion on a cosmic scale. The Warehouse had taught her that whatever might exist outside human existence was, as Pete would say, weirder than sh*t.

When Diane emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, her face wore the moist, scrubbed look of someone who had tried to wash the disappointments of the day away. "After what we discovered talking to Tom Bruns's neighbor and Cody at the convenience store, I was feeling particularly useless, and I took out my frustration on you. I'm sorry," she said.

Myka shrugged and, careful not to sound too sympathetic, casually replied, "Relics, anomalies, artefacts, they're all the same in that most of the time, we fall flat on our faces chasing them. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off –"

"And start all over again," Diane murmured. With an eyebrow arched in amusem*nt, which was so Helena that Myka felt her skin prickle, she said, "We have," she corrected herself, "or will have Astaire and Rogers, too." She shook out her hair, fluffing it out with her fingers. Then, with a grin that was nothing like Helena's, causing a hitch in Myka's breathing that was as disturbing as the goosebumps, she said, "I could do with a pint of Guinness."

Teddy Roosevelt was both a safe and appropriate subject of conversation for the drive to the Rough Rider. In Diane's reality, he had also been the United States president in the early years of the 20th century, but she admitted that the term "rough rider" wasn't one she recognized. She had assumed that it referred to his adventures when he had lived in this part of North Dakota. Informed by Myka that it was the name given to the cavalry unit that Roosevelt had led in the Spanish-American War, she grew more confused, there having been no outbreak of hostility between the United States and Spain in her reality. "Cuba? Spain allowed its colonies self-determination decades ago. Cuba, the countries in Central and South America, they're all part of a Spanish commonwealth."

"I'm beginning to think your reality is more peaceful than ours," Myka said, observing Diane's face in the glow of the dashboard as she tried to sort through the differences between their histories. The look of intense concentration was similar to Helena's, but Helena rarely devoted her energy to understanding history, at least the history of nations, dismissing it as "conquest, enslavement, famine, repeat."

"I'm starting to think so, too," Diane said, reaching out her hand as if she might give Myka's arm a comforting pat, then apparently thinking better of it and turning on the radio. Static filled the SUV before Diane found a station. A country song about unrequited love boomed out of the speakers, and Myka found herself pressing the accelerator harder. Noticing the increase in their speed, Diane asked, "Not a country music fan?"

"Not a heartbreak fan," Myka replied.

"I'm so sorry," Diane apologized, embarrassed. "I didn't think about . . . Pete leaving." Her voice trailed off, but she straightened and leaned forward to find a new station.

Not Pete. You. However, Myka said only, "Don't change the station. You probably won't find anything else, anyway."

The Rough Rider's parking lot was full, but Myka found an empty slot at the far end of the lot. They were closer to pasture than they were the bar, and Myka hunched her shoulders protectively under her ears. Diane put on a cranberry-colored stocking cap, complete with a fuzzy ball of yarn at the top, and cable-stitched mittens in the same color. She looked equally ridiculous and adorable; Myka was pretty sure that someone looking at her, with her head drawn down into the collar of her jacket, would think she only looked cold. The blast of heat that greeted them when they opened the doors was welcome, and though Myka expected everyone to turn around in their seats to stare at them, making any welcome, even that of the HVAC, seem provisional, the place was too busy, too crowded. It was as much a grill as a bar; booths and tables were to the sides of the large, horseshoe-shaped bar. A sign told them to seat themselves, and when Myka's stomach growled painfully at the scent of grilled beef, she instinctively headed toward a booth that was just emptying. Diane touched her elbow, saying in a pause of the song issuing from the speakers, "We'll have better luck finding out what people may know if we sit at the bar." There was truth to that, and they could eat at the bar as easily as they could in the booth, although the only empty stools were between two people who didn't seem likely prospects, one talking on his phone and the other chatting up a man sitting next to her. The song became louder and the singer more vengeful-sounding, a jilted lover declaring, in impeccable songwriting logic, that "sorry" was a four-letter word. It was the counterpoint to the heartbreak song they had listened to in the SUV, a he-done-her-wrong-she'll-do-him-worse song. Somewhere Pete could be listening to it in a bar much like this one, imagining Diane or Helena or both of them stomping on her heart.

The bartender was friendly, although she could do little more between the drink orders pitched like fastballs at her than nod at them and promise that "Chris" would be back soon to take their orders. A dog-eared laminated menu was weighed down by two bowls of off-brand mixed nuts, the kind that was mainly peanuts. Myka thought to start a conversation with one of their barmates by asking what they would recommend, but the man talking or, rather, yelling into his phone and the woman chatting up the man on the other side of her were giving off "Don't interrupt" vibes so strong that even Myka could read them. Passing by on her way to snatch a can of mixed nuts from underneath the top of the bar, the bartender glanced at the menu. "Bison nachos," she shouted. "A Rough Rider specialty and way more than two people can eat. Best bang for your buck." On her return, she asked, "What can I get you to drink?"

"Guinness."

"Water."

Both the bartender and Diane stared at Myka. "Live a little. I guarantee the nachos deserve better than that," the bartender said.

"Perrier, if you have it."

Sensing that this was as adventurous as Myka was going to get, the bartender said, "Coming right up."

Within a few minutes, a tall, gangly man arrived to take their order, his limbs ill at ease with one another and his shock of hay-colored hay still in staticky thrall to the cap he had worn over it. They went with the bison nachos, though Myka would have preferred the grilled chicken sandwich. Genetically, present-day bison were barely distinguishable from cattle; she and Diane were paying an extra $7 for something that would taste remarkably like hamburger. Recognizing that she was channeling Artie, Myka told herself to forget the cost and concentrate on finding a local likely to talk to them.

Spotting a group of men, half of whom were standing at the bar, the other half sitting at a table they had pulled close, Myka thought they were her and Diane's best targets. The camouflage baseball hats and pants some of them were wearing didn't tell her anything about them in particular, other than, perhaps, that they had a limited definition of masculine dress, but the scraps of their conversation that she could make out through the music and the muted roar of a full house, which included "took my shot," "a nice buck," "it was just a yearling," suggested they were hunters. Not that it would be difficult to find hunters in this bar or anywhere in the area, but this group was close by, and at least one of them might know Clint Early. She was about to suggest to Diane that they go over and try to insert themselves into the conversation when she heard Diane say, "I'm going to the washroom. I'll be back soon."

Myka waited. And waited. When she stopped being puzzled about what was taking Diane so long and started being concerned, she saw Diane in the ring of hunters. She was responding to a joke one of them must have made and lifting a glass of Guinness to her lips. Catching Myka's eye, she gave her a minute nod, as if to say "I've got it covered." Myka turned her attention back to her side of the bar and the plate of bison nachos that had been deposited in front of her. When the bartender stopped long enough to gaze appreciatively at the cheese-covered pile of tortilla chips, black olives, green onions, tomatoes, and ground bison, Myka ordered another Perrier. Seeing that the stool that had been occupied by the man talking on his phone was empty of any potential target and that the woman on the stool next to Diane's was still flirting in hyperdrive, Myka decided to draw out the bartender. The professional friendliness seemed to have a real core, even if she were too busy to answer many questions.

"A friend of mine who knows Marge Christiansen asked us to look her up while we were here. He said they used to run into each other at the Rough Rider. Does she still come around?" Myka couldn't tell if she had struck the right note. She wasn't sure if she had sounded sufficiently casual, but she was sure she had sounded loud. She had had to shout over the thunderous guitar chords of the next country song on the playlist. This was where Pete shone, the goofiness, the (not always pretended) inarticulateness, even the unrelenting hunger for snacks – it all worked together to elicit information that Myka's more businesslike approach could drive to the back burner of their interviewee's mind, when it didn't outright convince the interviewee to volunteer as little as possible. She had watched him extract from an exchange about the superiority of wavy Lays potato chips over regular Lays potato chips the location of an artefact, not only where it was but who possessed it.

"Not recently," the bartender replied, "I've heard she's been sick." She handed Myka a glass filled with ice and Perrier and, with the other hand, the half-empty bottle of Perrier. If you need anything else, just shout out 'Suze.' I'll hear it." Suze pointed to an arm that had shot up from the other end of the bar, signaling her. It was Diane's. "What's she doing over there? I thought the two of you were. . . you know. . . together."

Myka blinked, her eyes widening. "In a . . . I'm not sure what you. . . she and I . . . ."

"Better get her before Bart starts getting handsy," Suze advised. "Unless that's what you're here for," she said, a mildly curious glint in her eyes.

"No, no, no, we're not . . . that," Myka stammered. "We're here because people have been walking away from things that should've killed them – falls from silos, shooting accidents. Do you have some 911 to God or something? It's truly miraculous."

It wasn't a very coherent version of their cover story, but Suze didn't appear to be the critical type. The good-natured laugh reassured her. "Oh, you're here to talk to Clint Early." She tilted her head toward the group of hunters with Diane. "Your friend is with his friends. He should be along pretty soon." Walking backward with utter confidence that no obstacle, human or inanimate, was behind her, she said, "You should eat the nachos while they're hot. Otherwise, honestly, you've got a wad of mushy tortilla chips and stringy ground buffalo. Clint will probably be here by the time you're done."

Helena

Her meeting with Adwin took place via video conference. On one of Claudia's laptops and not the newest or cleanest among them, either. There had been a time when the regents considered her so dangerous that most of her, the most interesting part, existed only as a hologram. The less interesting part – she tried not to think about Emily Lake. At least this much could be said about Diane, she wasn't boring.

However, the video quality, wherever the cameras were located, including in her unprepossessing-looking laptop, was impressive. Without any difficulty, she could see that he was standing at a window overlooking a hazy but still breathtaking view of lower Manhattan. She could tell from the pull of his suit jacket across his back that his arms were folded. He wasn't happy, surprise, surprise. Was he going to make her wait before he turned to face her? Or was he going to start their meeting keeping his back to her, his attention on more important matters . . . and a pleasanter view? A far cry from being honored with an artefact unearthed from storage that would have her communicating with Adwin telepathically or sharing the fourth dimension with him. She rated only this video conference call, and she knew he would manage to make of this meeting a burden she had placed on him rather than the other way around. Losing patience, she loudly cleared her throat.

He turned away from the windows and walked back to his desk, leaning over it to peer at his monitor. He didn't bother with a greeting. "After further consideration, the regents have decided not to pursue investigating the matter that precipitated your leave from Warehouse 12. They . . .we," he clarified, with obvious reluctance, "don't believe that it's a factor in the existence of your clone." He sighed in aggravation. "I suppose I ought to have said 'genetic double.'

"She prefers to be called Diane," Helena said dryly.

He glared at her. "We may revisit our determination if more information becomes available. However, for the moment, it appears that the mess you made of an undercover assignment has no bearing on our current situation."

It would be a cold day in hell before she would sound grateful that the regents had decided not to pry into her life any more than they had already. "Understood."

"Tell Claudia that I want to talk to her." He was busily adjusting his cufflinks. Real gold, she noted, as she rose from the table. She was being dismissed like a servant. Wasn't this the moment that she was supposed to rail at the humiliation she had had to endure? Having literally held the fate of the world in her hand, she was reduced to shuffling out of the study, slope-shouldered, hoping only that she could eat her soup in peace.

Her soup was out of the can, lentil, low sodium. She had begun to take more care of her body in recent years, but it was over a hundred years old. Low fat, low sugar, low sodium, best not to tax a heart that some would maintain had always been defective. If Diane and Myka hadn't driven off to some equally godforsaken place in the other Dakota in search of an anomaly that she would have told them didn't exist if they had asked her, she might be eating homemade turkey soup. There was little she could embrace about Diane, either as concept or in actuality, but she appreciated her cooking skills. The sudden clatter in the kitchen startled her, and she looked up from a copy of theUniville Union(two sheets of newsprint devoted to high school athletics, feel-good stories about children, rescue dogs, winsome senior citizens, and ads published weekly). Irene was making herself a sandwich from the leftover turkey, cranberry sauce, and dressing. Her skirt suit and pumps matched the cranberry sauce. She pulled out a chair across the table from Helena and set her plate down.

"I wasn't sure you ate," Helena observed. "Aren't you too advanced for that?"

Irene only raised an eyebrow in response. "How did your meeting with Adwin go?"

"Not as I expected . . . not as you led me to expect it would go." Helena deliberately slurped her soup. Not a muscle moved in Irene's face.

"I eat, I misjudge on occasion, so call me human." One suit-clad shoulder lifted nonchalantly. She bit into her sandwich with more heartiness than Helena expected, but Irene thoroughly swallowed before she next spoke, a demonstration of etiquette that only Myka among the Warehouse crew might equal. "You have Abigail to thank for the regents' leniency."

"I might have thought I could trust common sense, but I sometimes forget where I am."

"Since we still have no evidence of who Diane is, where she came from, and what she means to do here, it's common sense to inquire about gaps in the Warehouse's record, just as it's common sense to pursue any line of inquiry that might give us answers."

Helena was unsure if Irene was defending the regents or offering a veiled criticism of her thus far unsuccessful efforts to discover Diane's true origins. Deciding that, with Irene, it was probably both, Helena said defensively, "Claudia and I are poring over the data we've collected about the Warehouse's energy levels, intrusion alerts, anomalous activities, anything and everything that could indicate why Diane's here and whether she's operating alone or with others. Trust me, the minute we find something significant, you'll know."

"You still haven't talked about what you found when you went to research your brother's papers." Irene took another bite of her sandwich. A little bit of the cranberry sauce squeezed out from the side of the sandwich. Irene used the side of her finger to catch it and then she licked her finger. She caught Helena watching her in amazement. "You should understand better than anyone how hungry we were back then. In some ways, a sharecropper's cabin in the Mississippi Delta isn't very far from –"

"A hovel in a London slum, yes." Helena stirred her soup. "Are we bonding over our miserable childhoods?"

Irene looked at her curiously. "Mine wasn't miserable. We were desperately poor, and there were moments of sheer terror whenever the Klan decided they had to remind us of our place, but our parents loved each other and they loved us. Aunts and uncles and cousins lived all around us." She closed her eyes and tipped her head back. "I can smell the holiday meals my mama and her sisters used to make. Wonderful, wonderful meals. I miss my family, I miss those meals." She brought her head level, her eyes open, but they met Helena's directly and without sentimentality. "But I don't miss that time, and I haven't been back to the Delta in over 80 years. Happily, sometimes the past is past, Helena."

"I wasn't overcome with nostalgia reading Charles's notebooks and his unpublished writings. He always did need a lot of editing." She ate a few spoonfuls of soup. "I told you then that there wasn't anything worth sharing unless I had corrobative evidence. I still don't have it." Her voice growing harder, Helena added, "Without evidence, it's all just speculation. Much like what Claudia and the regents have been engaging in regarding the Comfrey matter." She pushed her soup to the side and leaned forward, clasping her hands and bracing herself on her forearms. "Despite the long line of agents I have been partnered with, fundamentally I prefer to work alone. If I were to partner with someone in yet another misguided attempt to wreak havoc, a genetic duplicate would not be my first choice. Let me put it to you a different way. The twaddle you and the regents peddle about the Warehouse being full of endless possibilities . . . I know better. I've found it full only of regrets. What wasn't done but should have been, what was done that can't be undone. Diane is a walking reminder of my failures, and there hasn't been a day since I've been released from the bronze that my regrets haven't threatened to crush me."

Irene regarded her with a sympathy that seemed . . . Helena narrowed her eyes . . . laced with guilt. That couldn't be. "I had hoped the outcome would be different for you when I sent you away."

"For that, you would have needed to intervene more than 120 years ago," Helena said.

Irene cleared her throat and nibbled at a chunk of turkey that had escaped her sandwich. "You don't believe she's from another reality, you don't believe she can travel through time, you claim that nothing you've done, recently or in the past, would've led to her appearing from out of the ether, and you're doubtful that parties inimical to the Warehouse are responsible for her either. So where did she come from?"

"The only place that's left." Other than the mind of a 19-year-old, very junior agent.

"The Warehouse," Irene said. "That's not a very satisfactory answer."

The severity of her look could have matched Caturanga's in one of his most disapproving moments. "Hypothesis," Helena corrected, "and being disappointed by the Warehouse is the only thing I've learned to count on."

Myka

Deciding to follow Suze's advice, she picked up the nachos and her Perrier and carried them over to where Diane stood, completely at ease with Early's friends. Myka held the plate out to her. "I didn't want your dinner to get cold."

"Thank you, love," Diane said, with a beaming smile that appeared to be at least partially in debt to her all but empty pint glass. "Put it down here." She pointed to a spot of polished wood between two of the hunters. "We can all share."

Myka anticipated the nachos being devoured in two large handfuls, but she dutifully edged between two of the men. Bearded and with similar blunt-cut features, they were distinguishable more by what they wore, one in a sleeveless outerwear vest over a Broncos t-shirt, the other in a faded flannel shirt, but both wore Carhartt plants and well-worn workboots. They didn't move to ease her path, and Myka ended up reaching between them to slide the plate of nachos onto the bar. She held a brief internal debate over whether to attribute it to their being assholes or to their being captivated by Diane until she decided she didn't like either answer. She grabbed a few tortilla chips before launching herself more assertively on a return course, not hesitating to collide with a hip or step on the side of a foot. It was like shooting through a rapids only without any of the exhilaration. In the meantime, Diane's empty pint glass had been exchanged for a bottle of a local product, Roosevelt Red Ale. Diane gamely took a swallow, declaring that it wasn't bad for an "American" ale. The men groaned with exaggerated disgust, and Myka could foresee the evening passing in beery exchanges of patriotically colored insults and sexually charged jokes until she would have to assume a protective stance in front of Diane and whip out her Secret Service credential. Or she could put all of them on a new footing by saying, "We're hoping to talk to Clint. Suze said he comes in about this time and that you're friends of his. We're interested in learning more about the day he was shot. Or, so we've heard, the day he miraculously saved himself from being shot."

She had been mulling over the costs and benefits of being direct about her and Diane's desire to talk to Clint Early. She hadn't intended on actually saying it, the costs and benefits columns still incomplete in her mind. Diane immediately assumed a winning smile, but Myka noticed how tight it was at the corners of her mouth, the ends of her lips curved into little arrowheads digging into her skin. The men were more concerned than suspicious. "What for?" One of them asked. "He's tired of talking about it. He don't know how he did it - he should be dead."

"He may be tired of talking about it, but people aren't tired of hearing about it," Diana said encouragingly. She flicked an uncertain glance at Myka.

"There's a market for these kinds of, um, supernatural events," Myka said. "We ought to know. We track them for a living."

"You on a reality show, likeGhost Hunters?"

"Not yet . . . ." Myka hesitated. "But we have something in the works, more like a cross betweenGhost HuntersandThe Curse of Oak Island. Sometimes we find objects that have . . . powers. Maybe Clint found something that saved him. If that's the case, we might be interested in buying it." She was deviating from their cover story, but she wasn't someone who could talk about miracles, at least those attributable to a Christ figure, without letting her skepticism show through, especially in front of this group of good ol' boys. The deviating wouldn't be a problem unless Suze came over to listen in.

"Maybe it was God who saved him," another of the men said quietly, but Myka had no difficulty hearing him.

"That's why we want to talk to him, to find out more," Diane said hastily.

The man nearest Diane shone upon her a pouty smile that he obviously thought had sown destruction among the ranks of women before. "And I thought you came over to talk to us because you found me irresistible."

"I can multitask, Bart," Diane said, almost flirtatiously tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

Pivoting toward the bar and looking covetously at the nachos, Bart snapped his fingers at Suze. "Can we get two of those snack bowls over here?" Unlike his friends, he groomed his facial hair. His was a carefully trimmed goatee compared to their neck beards and soup strainers, and the smooth, shining curve of his scalp suggested he pampered it with skin care products. He was the ladies man of the group, and though Diane's pleased reception of his attentions would make her pumping him for information about Clint's escape from certain death less blatant, with any luck, Myka had to concentrate on the other side of the room to keep from glowering at him. "Handsy," was he? If he . . . Myka closed her eyes. She didn't know when she had become the resentful, jealous wanna-be lover of romcoms and, more disturbingly, Lifetime movies with titles likeI Love You to DeathandA Killer Friendship, but she needed to get back on track. She needed to locate this goddamned artefact.

Her glance fell to the entrance and what she hadn't noticed when she and Diane entered the Rough Rider, a waist-high post with a saddle fixed to its top. It was an old saddle, the leather well-tended but scarred and scratched in places. The seat was lighter in color than the rest, and as she was trying to puzzle out why, she saw a couple leaving the bar run their fingers down the middle of it, the man even giving it a hearty slap. The seat wasn't a different color, it was simply more worn, thousands of touches gently abrading the leather. Her heart beating faster – rarely did artefact retrievals happen so easily – she was about to pilot her way through the crowds to the post when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She reluctantly turned around, expecting to face the friend of Clint Early who believed God had saved him and wanted to argue against mere, and possibly irreligious, supernatural intervention. It wasn't him but the friend in the down vest and Broncos t-shirt.

His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders were drawn in toward his chest, and he even looked from side to side before he said, "Those, um, 'objects of power' you said you were interested in, are you serious?" He leaned in too close for Myka's comfort and said in an undertone, "How much would you pay for one?"

Did he think they were on some kind ofX-Filesversion ofPawn Stars? Not that people hadn't tried to hold out for cash before surrendering an artefact, but usually witnessing one in action and experiencing the pants-wetting terror it inspired was a sufficient return on their investment. "There can be some delicate negotiating involved," Myka temporized.

"See," he bulled on, "my family has had this hope chest, I guess you'd call it, in our possession for like a hundred years. There's nothing in it anymore, the lady it was built for, my great-great-great aunt I've been told," he scratched at his beard speculatively as he did the math in head, "died before she could get married, but every time we've tried to get rid of it, something, like, really bad has happened. Crops'll fail, livestock'll get sick, barns'll burn down, and one time –"

"Why are people touching that saddle?" Myka interrupted, pointing to the post. She thought about mentioning coincidental strings of bad luck, explaining the difference between causation and correlation, but she didn't have the time or, frankly, the patience.

"For good luck. The story is that it's a saddle Teddy Roosevelt used. Don't know if it's true, but people claim it works. A friend of mine said he won $2,000 off a lottery ticket a couple of days after he touched it. One of my aunts swears that she'd been lookin' and lookin' for a recipe book of my grandma's, and they go home after having dinner here one night, and there it is." He hooked his thumbs into two of the belt loops on his pants and rocked forward on the balls of his feet. Myka couldn't tell whether he was simply adjusting his stance or ready to launch into his own testimonial. "Can't say that it ever worked for me, though. Maybe I haven't touched it enough." He rocked back down onto his heels and shuddered. "All those fingers on it, makes me a little sick, you know?"

Myka watched a family on their way out slide their fingers along the saddle, the youngest child leaping as high as he could to touch its knob. Half the county or more should be dead if the saddle alone were the artefact, but that didn't mean it couldn't be acting in tandem with another object. "Let me think about the chest," she said, with a vague, distracted smile at Clint's friend, and working her phone out of her jeans' pocket, walked away to put a period to their conversation. She texted Claudia, asking her to research Teddy Roosevelt artefacts. Using a phone raised fewer questions than a Farnsworth, and Claudia never ignored a text.

She hazarded a look back at the bar. Diane and Bart were eating the nachos, Diane holding a chip by a corner, twirling it until the string of cheese holding it to the nachos broke and then dipping and twisting it until the string wrapped around the chip. A dainty way to eat nachos, and Myka wouldn't have used "dainty" to describe Diane, but it might have been the only defense she could muster since Bart was shoveling the nachos into his mouth with the palm-to-lips smack of a greedy toddler – or Pete. Seeing her dinner disappearing into Bart's goateed maw, Myka wormed her way back to the bar and flagged Chris down, ordering a grilled chicken sandwich. Always go with your first choice. His arms were lined with plates destined for other customers, but he nodded as if to suggest that Myka's order were implanted in his brain. She fully expected him to have forgotten it by the time he completed his circuit of the bar and nearby tables, but she could always hit Suze up for extra helpings of the nuts.

No one was coming into or leaving the Rough Rider, so Myka had a clear shot at examining the saddle. She walked over to the post, using her phone to take a couple of pictures of the saddle and inspecting it like she knew something about saddles and horses. Tempted to touch the buttery-looking leather, she stopped herself by stepping back. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone approaching her and suppressed a spurt of annoyance at having to allow someone who wanted a lucky touch before heading off to buy a lottery ticket to stroke the saddle. Indeed, a hand was already outstretched, and it confidently swept the saddle from end to end. The hand, with nails better cared for than her own, looked familiar, and her gaze traveled up the arm until it met Diane's dark eyes, in which amusem*nt equaled curiosity.

"It's called a cantle." Diane lightly tapped the back rise of the saddle and then tapped the knob at the front end. "This is the horn." She smiled. "I can tell when you're trying to figure out how something works. It's how you used to look at me . . . and still do, on occasion."

Myka wasn't sure whether she should apologize, acknowledge the truth of what Diane had said, ignore the remark, or deflect it by making a joke out of it. Refusing to look away from her in embarrassment, she said simply, "I don't know the best way to respond to that."

"I'm not looking for an apology. In fact, I sympathize. I'm not sure anymore how I work. I can't credibly explain how I appeared in your world, and, apparently, I don't have the means to leave it." The uncertainty and unhappiness that crossed Diane's face didn't linger, and, with humor that sounded genuine, she observed, "But I can tell when someone's not been around horses very much. In my reality, knowing how to handle horses remains an occupational necessity."

"Despite growing up in Colorado, I have no talent for skiing and no interest in horses." Myka stepped farther away from the saddle as a group of college-aged men were obviously intent on clustering around it. Diane followed her.

Each of the men slapped the saddle with force, and the last of them, the most powerfully built, playfully tried to lift the post from the floor. "My dad remembers when it wasn't bolted down. They carried it back to their dorm room, thinking it had to work better if it was with them night and day." The others laughed. "They returned it after a month – my dad was still going to fail calc, and his roommate ended up getting his girlfriend pregnant."

"Didn't his roommate knock your mother up, too?" One of his friends needled him as they went out the main doors.

"Say that to my face, f*cker," he shouted good-naturedly. "Say that -." The doors closed, and the shouting and hooting diminished.

"Wouldn't seem to be the relic – I mean, artefact – we're looking for," Diane said. "A month in two men's possession, and the only ill consequence was an unplanned pregnancy."

"I probably would have found the F in calculus more upsetting," Myka said dryly. "Doesn't mean it couldn't be part of the artefact we're looking for. Maybe for the full effect another artefact has to be involved." Myka surveyed the room, noting the number of items displayed on the walls. "It's not like there isn't more memorabilia here. Turn of the century Americana. What's real and what's not might be time-consuming to determine, though." She nodded toward the hunters, who were looking forlornly in their direction. "What about them? Have they told you anything useful?"

"No, none of them were with Clint at the time. The brother-in-law who was with him is in Texas with Clint's sister visiting family. He's not back until the end of next week." Diane blew out a long, frustrated breath. "Bart keeps promising me that Clint will show up 'anytime now' and pressing me to have lunch with him in Dickinson tomorrow."

"I may need the SUV, but we can work out –"

Diane silenced her with an exasperated look. "I don't date when I'm on a retrieval, and even if I did, he's not whom I'd fancy." At Myka's grin, she added, "I knew you were just joking, but please give me the courtesy of treating me like a professional."

"You're right. That was childish of me."

"You could sound a little more repentant," Diane grumbled. "How would you like it if I teased you about Joey?" Myka gave her a blank look. "The friend of Clint wearing the orange t-shirt."

"He wasn't hitting on me. He was trying to sell me a family heirloom that has 'powers.' I would've preferred him hitting on me – I could've cut off the conversation sooner." Diane chuckled, and Myka admitted, "Your work standards are higher than mine. I wouldn't say I've dated on a retrieval, but . . . ."

Diane held her hands up in surrender. "Say no more. Your occasional failings while on duty are safe with me."

"It's hard to have normal interactions in this business," Myka mock protested. "You can't just have coffee with someone, not if they're about to whammy you with an artefact. That's why we tend to fall for each other." She lifted her shoulders in a helpless gesture.

Diane responded softly, sympathetically, "Only another agent understands, yes."

The doors flew open, and a man, big but more pudgy than bear-like, hallooed the bar. "Suze," he bellowed, "my usual." Over a slight dip in the noise level, his voice boomed, and Suze waved in response. She mimicked pulling taps as he swaggered to the bar. Meeting Myka's startled look, Suze mouthed, "He's here."

Helena

She dropped the journal onto a curio cabinet she had once owned, and that Caturanga, seized by remorse or guilt or, equally as likely, his passion for attending to details, had included among her other possessions to be stored in the Warehouse, ready to welcome her when she emerged from the bronze. She had filled it with odds and ends of machinery and assorted devices instead of the trinkets that a middle-class Victorian woman would display. When she had put Christina to bed, she would take out a cylinder or cog, the parts of a scale or telegraph machine and attempt to reimagine them, identify the new uses they could be put to. She noticed that her careless toss of the journal had further split the binding. Such ill usage would have had her thrown out of the collections room of the University of Illinois, but then H.G. Wells was a literary treasure. Her words were mere scribblings. In this journal, they really were just that. She hadn't been able to find anything among the poems, half-finished stories, and ideas for future novels to confirm her suspicions that Diane, much like Athena leaping from Zeus's forehead full grown, had been spirited from hers. It helped to explain the splitting headaches that threatened when she thought about Diane and how – and why – she came to be.

Still, she shouldn't have dropped the journal like that, not only had the desiccated leather binding split, fanning out a third of the pages, but dust had risen like a mushroom cloud. It hung, suspended, in front of her, until she waved it away. Helena surveyed the room with a detachment that both surprised and relieved her. As long as she didn't let her eyes linger on those things that were inextricably associated with Christina, she was learning to view this rummage sale display of her life with the same cool appraisal she might give a victim's home on a retrieval. And what conclusions was she drawing? For one, she had been a negligent housekeeper. The dust settling on her lungs wasn't only the dust of things long disused, it also was the dust that someone who couldn't be bothered with cleaning (and who could rarely afford a cleaning lady) had allowed to accumulate. Her workshops had been neat, tidy, and, when essential, scrubbed. Her living quarters had been disease- and, as much as it could be achieved in late nineteenth century London, vermin-free, but that was about all that could be said of her efforts. When she would return from a retrieval, sometimes with Christina in tow, sometimes not, she would drop her valise on the floor, leaving where it fell until the next retrieval. There were always more important things to do than unpack and organize – feeding her child and putting her to bed, editing Charles's latest drafts (that is, when she and her brother were talking to each other), writing up the results of her most recent experiments. Of course, nothing could excuse the cheapness of the furnishings. Working for the Warehouse was remunerative only in the technical sense. In an era before universal health care and 401(k)s, Warehouse salaries barely covered necessities. Visits to a physician (if you could find one who was competent) were to be undertaken as a last resort, and retirement wasn't so much an impossibility as an irrelevance. Long before you needed to worry about what you would live on when you were too old to work, you would have died on a retrieval or during an inventory of the Warehouse's artefacts. Before Christina's brutal, wasteful death, Helena would imagine dying spectacularly (if not in a manner that advanced the cause of science) as a consequence of one of her experiments. It was the one romantic illusion she had harbored, and then it failed her, too.

"The therapist in me says you shouldn't be spending too much time in here." Abigail looked smart . . . and very woolen in dark wool slacks with a houndstooth check and a gray cashmere sweater.

"Why are you listening to her? You keep telling me she's a terrible therapist," Helena countered. She moved to what served as the main aisle between the clusters of furniture and books and swept her arm in an arc like a game show model. "I'm here conducting research, not brooding."

"With you, it can be hard to tell the difference."

"Did you come here with a purpose or just to needle me?" Helena looked at her more intently. "I find that there's a different way here every time I visit. How did you get here so easily?"

"My best guess is that the Warehouse – or you – wanted me to be here. Otherwise I'd be lost among the artefacts." Abigail came farther into the room. She warily eyed a kitchen chair that had all but one of its spindles and perched herself on the edge of the seat.

"Our next session is tomorrow afternoon. I can wait until then." Helena spotted a notebook that wasn't with the others, lying askew on a shelf in a child-sized bookcase that she had built for Christina one afternoon after her daughter had announced to Sita when she was being dropped off for the day that she wanted to know the "names of all the stars like Mama does." Helena had assumed that the notebook was Christina's and, consequently, hadn't dared to open it. Now she wasn't sure. If she could work up the courage, she would look through its pages. Feeling Abigail watching her, worse, feeling that Abigail knew the thoughts running through her mind, Helena looked away and pretended to be interested in a horrible statuette that Charles had given her as a birthday gift, a geisha smirking behind a fan, the kitschy kind of Japonisme that lined mantles and cluttered occasional tables when she was a young . . . younger . . . woman. As untutored as she had been back then, she had all but rolled her eyes when Charles had presented her with it. She had kept it only because it was one of the very few gifts he had ever given her. Learning later he had repurposed it as a birthday present when one of his mistresses was discarding gifts given to her by other lovers, she had grown fonder of it. So like Charles.

"My husband and I talked about having children, but by the time we should have been growing serious about it, our marriage was falling apart." Abigail had been looking at the rocking horse, and when she turned her head to look at Helena, Helena was stunned to see the shininess of tears in her eyes. "You have made some awful mistakes, Helena, but your daughter . . . she never could have doubted that she was loved."

"Parents want their children to enjoy what they never had. I was no different." Helena said it quietly, matter of factly. "Typical Dickensian childhood," she added with an ironic smile.

"Do you think Diane was loved?" Abigail passed the back of her hand quickly over her eyes

Helena co*cked her head, her expression questioning. "Notwithstanding the 'spare the rod, spoil the child' child-rearing practices of the time, I'd have to say yes. Do you think I'm jealous?"

"Are you?"

Helena started to scoff, then stopped. "I don't know," she said finally. "At times I've felt envious, at times I've thought if I had to live her life, I'd kill myself out of boredom." She paused before adding almost chidingly, "We're talking about her as if she were real."

"She seems very corporeal to me . . . and Myka." Abigail regarded Helena blandly.

Helena's countermove was to change the subject. "Irene told me you were the one who spared me the humiliation of having to explain the reasons for my leave of absence from Warehouse 12." Her mouth twitched in an evanescent smile. "Adwin and the regents will have to find their entertainment elsewhere, at least temporarily." Her head dipping in gratitude, she added, "Thank you."

"I know that your relationship to the Warehouse is. . . complicated, but I'm confident that if you thought what prompted you to leave the Warehouse was also involved in Diane's appearance, you would've said so." Abigail rose from the chair and took the kind of long survey someone did when she didn't think she would be returning in a long time. "You're very much like her . . . in some ways," Abigail finished with a gentle laugh. "You sneer at her veneration for the Warehouse, but it's not dead in you." As Helena responded with an impassive stare, Abigail said, "Maybe it just came down to feeling that your life has been picked over enough. It's a small privacy you've been afforded, but whatever happened to you, Helena, it's your secret to keep."

"For now," Helena said with grim qualification

"For now," Abigail acknowledged. She started walking toward the door but slowed, making a half-turn. "Did he ever tell you how much he loved you? I feel it beating at me, coming in waves."

Helena shook her head. "Even if that had been culturally acceptable back then, it wouldn't have been his way. The only time I saw Caturanga close to breaking down was when I convinced him that I should go into the bronze. He told me that it was a brutal punishment, worse than I deserved." Her voice trembled. "He said that if I went into the bronze, he wouldn't be able to see me to berate me for my idiotic mistakes." She remembered his face beginning to work, but before she could offer him a consoling word, he had spun away from her, walking rapidly toward the door of her Warehouse cell.

The silence that stretched between her and Abigail was long, but it felt, oddly, warm, and Abigail's "Don't stay too long" sounded barely louder than a whisper.

Chapter 13

Chapter Text

Helena

The notebook was hers, not Christina's. Helena sat on top of an old trunk and gingerly leafed through the pages. She didn't remember starting a diary, but this was what the notebook was. She would have been a true agent for less than two years, not long enough to have accrued much knowledge – based on the number of complaints and self-pitying comments about how unfairly Caturanga was treating her – but long enough to have made her ill-fated decision to embark on an affair with John Merriman. Trying to decipher the illegible scrawl she wrote as a young woman, she couldn't decide what annoyed her more, having to guess at words that had been run into others or transformed by haste and impatience into a language of their own or, once deciphered, having to plug on through girlish flutters about how handsome John was, how virile, how misunderstood at home and at the Warehouse. Had she truly been infatuated with him, or had she covered up her disappointment in how poorly she had chosen by inventing virtues for him that he had rarely, if ever, displayed? Foreplay had amounted to him letting her undress first before pushing her onto the bed, and his affection for her – had he any – had been an occasional, begrudging "You look right smart, Helen." She had forgotten that, too, until now, his habit of calling her Helen, thinking "Helena" too rarefied for her.

Eventually she had forced herself to write more carefully, taking her time with forming letters and writing evenly across the page. It was her inability to read the results of her experiments more so than the other agents' complaints about the state of her case files that had been the impetus for learning to write like . . . well, a lady. Or as much of one as she could aspire to be, but that had happened much later than the time captured in the notebook. She was about to put it down, unable to tolerate this version of herself, until she glanced down at the next entry.

March 21, 188-

Charles was in a sulk last evening. His latest story had been rejected. I had told him that it was[indecipherable],but he didn't believe it, arguing that the moral import of the tale would[indecipherable].Bloody nonsense, but I couldn't convince him otherwise. He gave me a rather murderous look when I returned from a rendezvous with John. He hasn't called me a "whor*" out loud but he thinks it. He can fornicate with drabs and bar maids and consider himself quite a gent but when I[it wasn't indecipherable but Helena skipped the next several sentences, unable to bear the gushing of her younger self about the irresistible charms of her middle-aged lover]. . . .He asked me if I remembered when we went to Brighton. I shrugged. I can remember bits and pieces of the day, but I don't care to reminisce about it with him. He always says it was the darkest day of his life and then he glowers at me fiercely. He blames me for Mama's death. That's yet another thing he won't say out loud – he's such a coward! – but I can feel it.

Sometimes he goes on to something else, but last night he pressed me, telling me that I was Papa's favorite and that Papa risked Mama's health to give me something nice for my birthday. I put the kettle on, hoping that some tea and a pastry I had been intending for myself would put him in a better mood. He was quiet for a time, eating my pastry and slurping his tea, but he became surly and maudlin both, saying that if I hadn't been such a stupid, selfish brat, Mama and Papa would both be alive, and he wouldn't have to be writing for a pittance for editors too blind to recognize genius when it was in front of them. I knew better than to tell him that Mama and Papa would have died whether or not we had gone to Brighton that day. She was dying from consumption, though we were too young to know it, and while Papa wasn't coughing and spitting blood like she was, he was more tired when he came home from work and no longer joined in our games and nonsense.

To pacify him, I told Charles that I remembered he had been the best of brothers to me, taking me down to the water and holding my hand as I skipped in the waves at the shoreline. "Should've let the tide take you out," he growled and held out his cup for more tea.

[Indecipherable] . . .said I remembered meeting a girl dressed just like me when I was collecting stones and seashells. Charles swung his head in disagreement. "No, you were with Mama and Papa. I was the one collecting stones and seashells, and I was the one who met the girl. She wasn't dressed like you, and she was much prettier."

If Charles hadn't so obviously wanted to quarrel with me, and if I hadn't about to fall to the floor with exhaustion (John says, teasingly I know, that he wouldn't traffic with a chit like me if only his wife would do her wifely duty more often), I would've challenged him about his lies. But I said only, "You must be right, Charles. Your memory is better than mine." He wasn't satisfied with it, of course, but he contented himself with glaring at me and ordering me to keep our rooms "less like a pig sty." He stomped out in a short while, probably to drink and fornicate, but I was blessedly alone. I would be asleep by the time he came home.

One of the few memories I have of our day at Brighton is meeting that strange little girl and noticing that though she stood in the water just the same as I, her feet weren't wet.

Helena resisted the impulse to throw the notebook across the room. She had thought it was a dream all these years, encountering the girl who was the mirror image of herself. There had been a seashell, no, a stone, an odd-looking stone that she had collected that the girl claimed was hers. She had kept it, the girl making some absurd promise about returning for it, a promise that didn't seem so absurd now. She had lost the stone, perhaps even that day, although she had an image of herself frantically digging a hole in the dirt with a spoon and putting the stone in it. Maybe that had been true, too. Helena got up from the trunk and stared at the notebook with mingled feelings of shame, fear, and loathing that felt as ancient as the day the family spent at Brighton. The trunk's latch was broken, but she could still lift the lid. She put the notebook in it and closed the lid, rapidly walking away. Abigail was right; she needed to spend less time in this room. It wasn't good for her.

Myka

They didn't need to introduce themselves to Clint Early; the friend who had the supernatural chest to sell hooked a thumb over his shoulder at them and shouted at him, "Clint, they want to buy your story." Clint, fruitlessly trying to clean beer foam from his beard, glanced at them with merry disbelief. "Hell, I've already given it away to half the state." He took a long swallow of his beer and grinned at Myka. "I'll listen to your pitch. If you offer me money, I'm not going to turn it down."

"No pitch, but we are interested in hearing what happened to you." She slipped onto a bar stool next to him, while Bart, perking up at Diane's return, gallantly shoved another of the hunters off his stool and gestured for Diane to take a seat.

"I've told practically everybody I know and a lot of people I don't know. Why not you?" Clint sighed, apparently resigned to his inability to negotiate to his advantage. He dug into the mixed nuts and fisted a handful into his mouth.

With interjections from his friends about all that made it an auspicious day for a miraculous event ("The sky was this strange, almost icy white color," "My mom said she felt shivery all day, like something big was going to happen," "Yeah, my dogs were running around, whining, like they sensed something was up"), Clint described walking with his brother-in-law across a field, a grove of trees to their left and, far off on their right, a cluster of hunters animatedly talking. One was unwisely gesturing with his rifle. "I didn't trust that idiot, and me and Don picked up the pace, thinking we needed to get the hell away from them. I don't what made me stop, but I raised my arm and positioned my hand over my chest, like I was ready to catch a baseball. Then I felt something sting against the base of my fingers and I closed my hand, like I was trapping a bug, you know? I opened my hand, and there it was, a slug. It would have opened me up if it had hit me." He shook his head. "I don't know what made me do it because if I hadn't, I'd be dead. Why the hell it didn't tear my hand clean apart, I'll never know."

The friend who had argued for divine intervention solemnly pointed up at the ceiling of the Rough Rider. "Maybe so," Clint said. "You better believe I got my ass to church service the next morning. Shocked the hell out of my wife. She was used to just having the kids with her."

Myka frowned, thinking over Clint's tale. She saw Bart clap Diane's shoulder and then snake his arm around her other shoulder as he pointed at someone or something across the room. Trying not to let her frown deepen, she asked Clint, "Was that a normal day for you? Did anything unusual happen to you before you went hunting? A break from the routine, maybe?"

He shook his head. "Naw. Not that I can think of."

"The night before, Friday night. Did you come here?"

He looked at her quizzically then shrugged, deciding that humoring her was less effort. "We pretty much spend every Friday night at my in-laws' place. Give our kids some grandpa- and grandma-time. I don't remember exactly, but I bet that night was the same."

"You were prol'ly here on Thursday night," one of the friends helpfully volunteered.

"My wife calls this place my second home. Not a break from my routine to end up here. I drive for a foodservice wholesaler, and the Rough Rider is one of my stops. Itismy routine."

Myka tried a new tack. "Do you know Tom Bruns or Marge Christiansen?"

Clint laughed, motioning at Chris who had taken over the running of the bar, at least momentarily. "You come here just about any night of the week, and you practically trip over Marge." He colored and rubbed uneasily at his forehead. "I shouldn't have said it like that. She's not doing well, or so I've heard –"

"But it's true," Bart interrupted, his arm no longer resting on Diane's shoulders but below the level of the bar, and Myka tried not to imagine where his hand might be resting now. "She was what . . . a hard drinker, I guess you'd call her if you didn't want to outright say that she was an alcoholic."

"As for Tom, I didn't know him well, but I saw him around. He was the guy who fell from the grain silo." Clint looked at her speculatively. "Are you collecting us or something? Marge had something weird happen to her too."

"Did you see him here?"

"You see everybody here sooner or later."

Myka learned that if she wanted to ask more questions, she was going to have to earn the privilege of asking them. Clint would have preferred to shout at the TVs and affectionately insult his friends. With the kind of shoulder roll that could have indicated his shirt was too tight or, more likely, that he was getting tired of talking about snatching a bullet from mid-air, he challenged Myka to a game of pool. "You make a great shot you get to ask me another question."

"Who decides whether it's a great shot?" Myka dryly asked.

"Me." The shoulder roll was more decisive. "Those are the rules."

Considering that she not infrequently had to ask questions when she had a tesla in her hand, Myka thought the deal Clint was striking wasn't bad. She much preferred a pool cue, whose primary purpose wasn't as a weapon, although she had needed to make use of one to defend herself now and again. She didn't doubt that he fancied himself a pool shark, but he didn't know she just looked bookish. A bank shot that was easier than it appeared to be earned her a question. "Do you know Kevin Johnson?"

After a measuring look at her and a shake of his head at the pool table, Clint said, "The kid who dropped through the ice? My stepdaughter's 15 and my son's six. The one's too old and the other's too young to be his friends. I wave to his parents when I see them, but that's about it."

"Have you seen him and his family here?"

"That's two questions, and your shot wasn't that good."

She missed her next shot, but Clint couldn't take advantage and left her with a pretty sink-in shot. "That's worth two questions right there." When he gave her another it's-not-worth-my-time-to-argue shrug, she asked, "Have you seen Kevin and his family at the Rough Rider?"

"Like I said, you see everybody here sooner or later. So, yeah, a few times." He waited more or less patiently for her next question.

She didn't know what it would be. How many times have you touched the saddle? Have you touched any other memorabilia in the Rough Rider? What might you, Tom Bruns, Marge Christiansen, and Kevin Johnson have in common besides the Rough Rider? Do you share birthdays? Are you related? She had thought normal retrievals – when she knew what she was looking for – were difficult. She and Diane didn't even have that much. No wonder Diane could spend months on an anomaly retrieval. Myka rapidly reviewed what they knew; four people engaged in normal activities, working, driving, hunting, playing, had had a tragic accident averted, yet one of them had since died, and another had fallen ill. There appeared to be no other commonality among them, except, of course, that they spent time at the Rough Rider. But everyone in the area spent time at the Rough Rider, so if the artefact was here it wasn't something everyone had access to.

"Who owns the Rough Rider?" It burst from her so quickly she thought she might have spoken it before she thought it.

Clint's eyes widened, and he barked a disbelieving laugh. "That's what you're asking me?" He turned and pointed at the bar. Suze was behind it once more, and Chris was out circulating among the customers. "You need to talk to her. Her uncle owns this place."

Myka surrendered her cue stick to one of Clint's friends, who had wandered over to watch them. Although the crowd had thinned out a little, Suze's hands, mouth, and feet weren't stopping for a rest. She was serving drinks, refilling snack bowls, and joking with the regulars as she efficiently covered one end of the bar to the other. Myka had no desire to stay longer at the Rough Rider – unwillingly she turned her head to confirm that Bart still hovered irritatingly close to Diane – but she would have a better chance of getting Suze to focus if she waited. Her sigh was cut short by the buzzing of her phone. She worked it out of her jeans' pocket, a text from Claudia that consisted solely of a link. The link opened onto a seemingly endless list of Teddy Roosevelt artefacts. Myka perched on the end of a padded seat in an empty booth and scrolled through pairs of eyeglasses, books, guns, boots, taxidermied specimens of big game animals and birds, canoes, campaign memorabilia. . . so many, many items imbued with the energy of this one man, a man undeniably flawed but also larger than life. Unfortunately, all of the artefacts were accounted for. While it was possible that the artefact she and Diane were seeking would turn out to be another Teddy Roosevelt artefact, this list made it seem less likely. The ping machine wasn't perfect, but Roosevelt was far too seminal figure for it to miss out on an item that might be linked to him.

She looked up from her phone. She would have guessed she had spent only a few minutes reviewing the list, but it must have been longer because the number of people in the Rough Rider had dwindled to a few customers at the bar and at the tables. Even Clint's group of buddies had suffered desertions. Clint was back at the bar and was sitting on the stool next to Bart. Although Bart clearly preferred to flirt with Diane, Clint was in the middle of a story that demanded an audience larger than the person occupying the stool on the other side of him. Tapping Bart on the shoulder, leaning around him to engage Diane, he was recalling, in the hoarse shout that subbed as his normal speaking voice, his indignation at the something or someone who had intruded into his man cave at a crucial moment of the game. As Myka approached the bar to take advantage of what appeared to be a quiet moment for Suze, who was wiping down the bar top, Diane gave her a slow wink.

It might be silly, but the wink gave her a little lift, and Myka slipped onto a stool within Suze's line of sight feeling that she could be on the verge of a break, just possibly. There was no other reason to take heart in Suze's weary smile and "What can I get you?"

"Another Perrier and a few minutes of your time."

Suze's snort was brief but expressive. With a fluidity that Myka admired, she uncapped a Perrier and poured it into a tumbler she had just as swiftly filled with ice. "I don't have any tale about escaping death. Nothing miraculous has ever happened to me." She grinned. "That's why I'm still here. Believe me, if I was Clint, I'd be latching onto you two and asking when I was going to be on theTodayshow."

Pete would have had a joke or several to bridge the distance between Suze's belief that they were here to shine a light, if not money, on this corner of the Great Plains, and her own hope that Suze would be the one shining the light, but Myka didn't have his stockpile of corny riddles nor did she have his bar trick of cramming his mouth with whatever was nearest – nuts, pretzels . . . co*cktail napkins. "What we do, it's a lot more boring than you think, and as for money, there's not much of that either." When Suze only blinked at her, Myka did what came naturally to her, which was to mentally punch Pete in the shoulder and remind herself that the shortest path to getting information was simply to ask for it. "The four who did experience a miracle, what they appear to have in common is that they all come here. I've heard that your uncle owns the Rough Rider. Do you think he would be willing to meet with us? Maybe he knows what else they have in common."

"Too bad you didn't get here a few days earlier. My uncle and aunt spent Thanksgiving with their daughter in Fargo, and then they hit the road for Florida." Suze held her head at a quizzical angle. "What do you think Gordy knows?"

"He'd know what's in this place." Myka turned and pointed to the saddle. "Everyone touches that for luck, right?" She gestured at the items crowded on the shelves along the walls. "Maybe there's something else that's lucky." Pete wouldn't get all agent-y, as he called it, at this juncture; he would still be relying on charm and affability to get the information he needed. Myka spread her arms, hands palms up, in the universal sign for "What else can I do?" "Some of this stuff looks genuine, not something you'd buy online."

"Most of it is. My aunt and uncle love going to flea markets. That's where a lot of it comes from." She hesitated, looking closely at Myka. "He keeps more in back, supposedly to swap things out, keep it fresh, but I think he just likes having his stuff where he can look at it. Some of the more valuable things are in his office. People go back there all the time to talk to him, or if he's got something he wants to show off, he'll invite them into his office." She paused again, then rolled her eyes. "Okay. Here's the deal. While Gordy winters in Florida, his son Joe and I run things. I'm opening tomorrow morning, getting things ready for the lunch rush. Come 'round here by ten, and you can look at everything you want. Joe'll be here by noon. He'll know stuff about his parents that I don't."

Myka grinned behind the tumbler she had lifted her to mouth. She took a sip and set the glass down. "Ten o'clock. Got it."

Worry crossed Suze's face, dimming the answering smile. "I don't know what's going on, but Tom dying and Marge getting sick . . . and then you two showing up. No offense, but I think I'll feel better once the weirdness stops and you guys are gone. All I want to worry about is how much of an asshole my ex," she pointed to Bart, "is going to be when he drops in."

"Ouch," Myka said sympathetically. "If Bart is the best this place has to offer . . . "

"Yeah," Suze agreed. "Maybe I ought to consider greener pastures. In the meantime, however, I want my boring old hometown back."

By the time Myka finished her Perrier, Diane had managed to extricate herself from Bart's semi-possessive hold of the back of her barstool without causing him to drop his preening expression. She looked tired, and Myka, after gathering their jackets and Diane's ridiculously cute knit cap, followed her to the entrance. They didn't talk until they were in the parking lot, and Diane bumped her shoulder. "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"What were you and Suze talking so intently about?" Diane stopped, and, even in the dark, which was unrelieved by the sole lamppost in the lot, listing on its pedestal, Myka couldn't mistake the frustrated dive of her eyebrows. She felt a sudden fluttering in her chest and told herself to ignore it. Diane was tired, and the only thing driving her was the fear that their time at the Rough Rider hadn't gotten them anything. There was nothing remotely personal in her frustration. Nothing at all.

"About all the memorabilia in the bar. She says her uncle collected it. If we show up before the grill opens for lunch, she'll let us take a look."

Diane's grimace was equally apparent in her voice. "I can't join you. I promised Bart that we would have lunch together. Afterwards he's going to introduce me to Kevin Johnson's family. It turns out that he works with Kevin's father." When Myka didn't respond, Diane stepped closer. "It's not safe for you to go over the items in the Rough Rider. We don't have neutralizer to protect you. Would Suze allow us to come back at another time?"

"All I have to do is text Claudia. We'll have neutralizer by tomorrow morning. Trust me on this." Their foreheads almost touching, Myka held her breath when Diane lightly cupped her jaw, her thumb stroking the fine hairs next to her ear. "I'm more worried about you and Bart."

"If I have to trust that you'll be safe with what may be multiple relics . . . artefacts . . . hiding in plain sight, you'll have to trust that I'll be safe with Bart. I can handle myself – and him, if necessary. Deal?"

"Deal." When Diane dropped her hand, Myka caught it on the downswing and linked their fingers. They walked to the SUV in a silence that was warm despite the cold.

...

Myka thought she was leaving the hotel room for her run far earlier than people were typically out and about on a Sunday morning, but just as she opened the door, a man who had the air of a deliveryman but not the uniform entered the corridor from the stairwell a few doors down. He held out a package in her direction. "Agent Bering?" She nodded, wondering at the suit and, as he neared her, the earbud. He looked like he was fresh from the Secret Service detail assigned to the president, and not for the first time she suspected that Irene's connections in Washington D.C. went higher and deeper than she would have guessed. Myka tried to be quiet when she reentered the room. When she had been pulling on her insulated track pants and thermal henley, Diane had started moving restlessly in her sleep, so she had put on her running shoes in the bathroom, but now Diane was sitting up in her bed, the thin pillows bunched behind her back for support.

Myka held up the package and then placed it on the table. "What did I tell you? The neutralizer's here." She positioned herself so that it would be awkward for her to look at Diane without turning entirely around and started tearing at the package. It wasn't that it was harder, with her hair down, to see her as Diane and easier to see her as Helena; it was that it was hard to see her, period, in a fleece pajama set, tousled and scrolling through the news on her phone. Myka wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed next to her and bury her face in the deep vee of Diane's button top. She stared very hard at the neutralizer bag she was taking out of the package. "I've never asked you how you neutralize your relics. I've assumed you use the same things we do." Not much of a conversation starter but it was a hell of a lot better than "Can I get into bed with you?" Funny where your mind went when you were desperately trying not to think about something. For the first time in her career at the Warehouse, Myka was giving thought to how much neutralizer was in the bag. It had never occurred to her that there might be a finite amount or that the neutralizer might weaken if it had to nullify the energy of several artefacts. She had never had to test a building full of objects that could be artefacts. She didn't like the idea of the bag running dry.

"Not bags like you have but containers. However, I prefer the glove," Diane said. "It resembles a woman's opera glove, long, tight fitting, and it complete neutralizes relics on contact. You don't have to worry about transporting a relic afterward. It's completely inert."

"On the other hand, you have to remember to take it with you." Myka held out the bag. "With this, you drop the artefact in and don't have to think about it until you're back at the Warehouse."

"I suppose it's all in what you're used to." Then, with a smile that was clearly a concession, she added, "I miss my glove, but I could get comfortable with a bag . . . should I ever need one." Her smile turned arch.

"Braggart." Myka placed the bag on the table. "I'm going to take my run. After I shower and eat, it'll be time to head over to the Rough Rider."

Diane's smile faded. "I know you have the neutralizer, but I don't like the idea of you trying to pick out the artefact with no more protection than that." She sighed at the stubborn cast of Myka's face. "I know that you'll be careful, but I worry. What would I do without my guide in this not-terribly-friendly reality of yours?"

"Choose as your new guide someone who's not afraid to bare her fangs at it. Helena can pass along her hard-earned wisdom."

There was a mournful note to Diane's chuckle. "You don't see it? My cousin has lived coiled in fear all her life."

In the harsh November sunlight, the Rough Rider looked a little rough. The siding needed a fresh coat of stain, and the parking lot was pitted with pot holes from winters past. Myka had left Diane in the hotel room with a travel container of hot tea as her companion while she explored the internet with Claudia's long-distance help, searching for any information she could find about the Rough Rider and its owner. The breakfast they had shared in the hotel's cramped eating area, a bowl of cold cereal for Myka and a limp mini-pastry of unknown origin for Diane, already seemed hours ago. When Myka tried to open the Rough Rider's doors, they only jiggled in the frame, and she pounded on them until Suze came to let her in. Holding one wide for Myka to enter, Suze said apologetically, "If we didn't keep them locked until noon, we couldn't keep out the idiots who can't tell time."

The tang of cleaner couldn't disguise the odors of old beer and old grease. Myka blocked them from her mind and followed Suze into the main seating area. A step-ladder had been opened next to a wall. "Have at it," Suze said. "I'll be in the kitchen if you need anything. Just holler."

Before she had gotten too far, Myka had had to holler for gloves and rags. Everything she touched on the shelves, including the shelves themselves, was coated with a layer of dust and grease. Suze had handed several rags to her with a grin. "I can bring out a bucket of soapy water if you have time to clean them. Free lunch in it for you."

Her hands looked like they had been stuck in an air duct and she wasn't sure how many showers she would need to take before she would stop smelling like a 20-year old hamburger. On the other hand, she didn't know where she would find her next meal on a Sunday in the middle of nowhere, so Myka was careful not to burst into laughter. "I'm not sure I'm going to make it around the room before the lunch crowd arrives as it is."

"Don't worry about it," Suze said nonchalantly. "Ordinarily I'd say someone holding an old Mason jar over a bag would raise some eyebrows, but most folks'll be backbiting about the friends they saw at church or watching the football games."

Myka wasn't as confident, but if Suze herself was anything to go by, there might not be a lot of curiosity about why a woman was on a stepladder pretending to drop objects into a bag. Initially she had dropped the jars, washboards, signs, farm implements, tin dishes, collectible salt and pepper shakers, and every other flea market "find" into the bag. The bag never expanded and never grew heavier, that much Myka knew from experience, but what she didn't know was how many times she could fish for objects in the bag without her hand shriveling to a claw or altogether falling off. She couldn't feel the neutralizer, which didn't reassure her. She had no idea whether prolonged exposure could hurt her; she had no idea what the neutralizer consisted of. Ultimately she decided she didn't have to drop the items into the bag; holding them for a few seconds inside the bag was enough to tell her whether any were artefacts. The neutralizer would start sparking if it encountered an artefact. So far she, and it, hadn't. She had even dipped one of the saddle's stirrups into the bag, no sparks.

By the time, Suze's cousin Joe appeared next to the step-ladder, she had covered less than two-thirds of the room. Myka hadn't realized until she was nose to nose with the items that the shelves held so many of them. "Bunch of junk, isn't it?" The man had asked sympathetically. She had been about to shoo him away until she realized that, unusually for cousins, he shared to a remarkable degree Suze's sandy blond hair, broadly planed face, and pleasant features. "Joe LaFleur. Gordy's son." He held out his hand, and Myka awkwardly twisted around to shake it. He kept his hand outstretched in needless assistance as she descended the ladder. "Suze said you think my dad might have latched onto some supernatural object." He continued lightly, "Hey, if you find anything like Harry Potter's wand, let me know."

Myka strove for a smile as light in response. "I suspect anything as powerful as that wouldn't be out here. It doesn't look like any of these things have been touched in ye—a long time," she amended tactfully.

"You don't have to tiptoe around me. Dad probably hasn't changed any of 'em out since his knees got bad."

"Suze said your dad tends to keep the greater value items in the back?" At Joe's nod, Myka said, "If I could get a look at them, that would help."

"Sure." Joe started walking toward the hallway next to the kitchen. In her eagerness, Myka was nearly treading on his heels. Past the restrooms and a door marked "Employees Only," there was another door marked "Office." He retrieved a key ring from his pocket and searched for the key before finding the right one. "You can probably tell already that Suze is really the one who runs this place." The light he flicked on illuminated a second-hand office desk with an ancient desktop computer. Cheap, do-it-yourself shelving, the kind her father had put up in her and Tracy's bedroom, lined the office walls, and every one was crammed to the edges with objects that didn't look different in kind or value than the ones out in the main part of the bar and grill.

"Suze said your dad keeps the more valuable part of his collection in here. Could you –"

"It's all junk to me," Joe hastily interrupted.

"I was hoping you could tell me what he particularly treasures."

"God, this stuff is so dusty and dirty it makes me sneeze. I don't like to get anywhere near it. Sometimes it's even too much for my mom." As if in emphasis, Joe sneezed and wiped his face with a handkerchief the size of a dinner napkin that he took from his back pocket. "The only one who truly shared my dad's passion for collecting was Bob Warriner. Maybe 'collecting' is generous, Bob was a hoarder. Half the crap in this place was originally Bob's."

Myka was gingerly lifting an old wooden pull toy from a shelf and trying not to knock down an equally old collection of beer bottles. She wasn't sure how long or how far Joe's generosity – or Suze's, for that matter – went. Some people could roll with the whole "It could be a supernatural object that's making you throw bolts of lightning" up to a certain point but no farther. Almost smoking their next-door neighbor, their boss, even their spouse didn't faze them, but when they shook their finger and nearly fried their child – that was what broke them. She and Pete had counted themselves lucky when they were driven away only with curses; knowing they were likely to face a shotgun when they came back the next day always made it that much harder to return. Not that she expected Joe and Suze to chase her from the Rough Rider with a cleaver, exactly, but they could quickly become less accommodating. Maybe her drawing Bob Warriner into the hunt would be the invisible line she crossed, but she had to cross it.

Briefly dipping the toy into the bag, she said as casually as could, "Tell me more about Bob Warriner. How does your father know him, aside from their mutual love of collecting?" She put the toy back and took one of the beer bottles, repeating the process.

"It's a cliché, but everyone knows everyone around here. Bob was the crazy old dude. He was probably only in his 70s, but he looked like he was in his 90s. His family owned a lot of land around here and farther north, up close to Bakken. They ran cattle, grew small grains." Joe leaned against the desk, crossing his ankles. So far their conversation wasn't making him nervous, which was all to the good. Talking to her beat checking in on the kitchen or running the customers' credit cards, Myka supposed. "He lived by himself in a ramshackle old farmhouse on a property that his family still owned. They had sold or lost most of their other land, but that little pocket square was his. Harmless, but he had a one-track mind. The land they owned up near Bakken? He was convinced that there was oil on it, though the geological reports said there wasn't enough worth the money it would cost to take it out. His family ended up selling the land, the mineral rights, everything - they got in a bad way in the '70s and early '80s. Then fracking came along, and a whole bunch of people who hadn't sold their land, or their mineral rights, got really rich."

"And it drove Bob crazy, is that what you're saying?" Myka had noticed the old-fashioned typewriter stand in the corner, but she had been too absorbed by the crowded shelving to take a closer look. There was a dingy cloth spread over the top of it and fragments of . . . something.

"Crazier. He railed about the money they could've had. Over and over. Mom hated going over to his place, 'cause it was so full of junk. She'd always say you needed a tetanus shot after you visited Bob, but Dad got great stuff from him, or so he said."

"You talk about him in the past tense. When did he pass away?" Myka found her attention increasingly drawn by the stand and what was on top of it.

"Quite a while back, don't remember exactly. Bad heart. Broken heart, my dad says."

"And a lot of the objects here and in the main room were Bob Warriner's at one time?"

"Yeah, the stuff in the office, it's more recent. Bob didn't really leave a will, but he left some of his, ah, collection to my dad."

Bob Warriner was sounding increasingly interesting. When she first joined the Warehouse, Myka had gravitated toward the artefacts created by the famous. It took a lot of energy to forge an artefact, and those who had large personalities had energy to spare. The more retrievals she had gone on, however, the more she had come to respect and even, oddly, appreciate the artefacts created by the ordinary. Their power was no less, and the stories of their origin were as moving. It wasn't difficult to hold an old-fashioned alarm clock (one with the bell on top) or sit in a worn-out recliner and imagine her father's frustration at the course his life had taken, the intensity of his disappointment, supercharging an everyday object into an artefact. A first-edition ofThe Great Gatsbythat turned every financial boon into a bust, a battered paperback copy ofMoby Dickthat transformed a hobby into a monomania.

She wandered over to the typewriter stand. Spread out on a white dishtowel that had grayed with age were fragments of rock. A handful of pieces had been fit together, and Myka discovered that what she had thought were markings on the rock was the outline of a fossil of some armor-plated crustacean. Pete had his vibes, Steve his inner lie detector, Claudia was a caretaker-in-waiting, and she . . . she had a good memory. Sometimes, however, Myka thought she had a true superpower; she could divine an artefact without having to have its history on a Farnsworth or dropping it into neutralizer and seeing the fireworks. It was a harmless fantasy; she was probably making a million calculations based on things she wasn't even aware that her eyes were taking in and coming to a logical conclusion that the object in front of her was an artefact. She picked one of the larger pieces of rock and dropped it into the bag. She was turning her head even before the sparks started flying out.

"Jesus Christ, what was that?" Joe exclaimed, shielding his eyes. "Are you trying to burn my bar down?"

"The bar's safe, and so are you," Myka said. The geniality in his face had fled, and his eyes and mouth were tightening in suspicion. "Do you know the story behind this fossil?" She allowed her tone to harden, not enough to frighten him further but enough to show him that she was in command of the situation. "It's important."

"Bob collected fossils, too. It was probably in some of the crap he left my dad. Anyways, Dad let a kid take the fossil to school for show and tell. He does that sometimes, loans out some of his collectibles to people for parties and such. Kid dropped it and the rock shattered, at least that's what Dad said. He's been trying to see if he could put it back together somehow. He said it was special to Bob." Joe began edging toward the door. "Have you seen enough?"

"Do you know who the kid was?"

"God, I . . ." Joe passed a hand through his hair. "I think he said he gave it to Kevin Johnson. Kevin and his dad came around a while back asking if they could look over the stuff."

Myka gathered up the dishtowel by its corners and carefully placed it in the bag. "I'm sorry, but I'll need to take it with me."

"If it shoots out sh*t like that, I don't want it in here."

He opened the door, sending a message that was neither subtle nor friendly at this point. Myka scanned the office, her eyes glancing at all the objects she hadn't tested. There might be additional artefacts here, but she was beginning to believe it wasn't likely, and even if there were, Joe clearly wasn't willing to have her linger. "Thanks for your help," she said.

He only nodded. He followed her so closely that Myka felt she couldn't stop and look for Suze, not without agitating him, and she didn't want his fear to turn into something uglier. She thought she heard a woman cry out in dismayed surprise from the kitchen, but she walked without pausing to the entrance. She thought she could feel Joe's eyes on her even after the doors swung shut and, after placing the bag in a hidden compartment in the SUV's cargo area, she spun the car out of the lot, jolting through the potholes. A gas station that had gone out of business was only a mile ahead, and she waited until she had parked behind it – she didn't actually think she was being pursued but felt better parked behind the building instead of in front of it – to call Diane. When the call went to voice mail, she texted Diane to meet her at the hotel and drove back, detouring to go through a McDonald's drive-thru for a sandwich and celebratory fries. She deserved the fries. Then she would feel guilty for thinking she deserved the fries and do a longer run in the morning. Myka knew the way her mind worked.

While she waited for Diane and ate her fries, Myka searched the internet for Bob Warriner's "pocket square" of land. She didn't precisely find it, but she found an address for a William and Lenore Warriner that was about a half an hour's drive west of their hotel. She also found a three-month old obituary online for a Robert Gerald Warriner; it fit the timeline, though the accompanying picture of a solemn-faced young man in a Navy uniform told her nothing about the man Bob Warriner had become. That wasn't unusual. Pictures of Warren Bering as a high school then college graduate showed him smiling and clowning in front of the camera, not simply a younger version of her father but a different man altogether. If she were to have children someday, they would likely be asking themselves the same question about how the girl they were seeing had become the mother they knew. Hopefully loved, but she was as much her father's child as her mother's and she couldn't discount the possibility that her children would struggle with their own ambivalent feelings. With satisfaction and an "At least your mom was smart" rejoinder to her future children, Myka noted the "survived by brother William (Lenore) Warriner" in the obituary. She and Diane would be making a visit to the Warriner home. Probably not today, she wanted an opportunity to visit whatever remained of Bob Warriner's house and his collections, and the afternoon light was already dimming. She and Diane had at least one more night here—in this ever-shrinking hotel room.

She heard the door lock click, and Diane entered the room with an almost breathless, "You found it. Is it the fossil?" Myka's eyes widened, and she completely forgot to hide the shame of her weakness, leaving the empty McDonald's bag on top of the table. Diane tossed a small shoulder bag onto her bed and perched on the end of the mattress. "I'll fill in the details in a minute, but when I asked Kevin if anything strange had happened to him in the days before he fell through the ice, he said a fossil that he had brought to show and tell 'blew up' in the classroom. When I asked him if he had dropped it, he said he had just placed it on the teacher's desk when it 'exploded like a bomb.' He found it quite exciting. He insisted on dramatizing the explosion for me." Diane mimicked putting the fossil on the bed beside her and then made whistling noises and shielded her face with her hands. "Far more interesting to him than surviving an immersion in freezing-cold lake water." Her smile grew uncertain. "Kevin's father said they brought all the pieces of the fossil back to the Rough Rider. You found it, it's the artefact, but . . .?"

"It was only one of a number of items in the Rough Rider that came from the same person, a friend of the owner." Myka turned her laptop so that Diane could see the screen.

Diane leaned forward, squinting. "Maybe I'm beginning to need reading glasses," she murmured. "Robert Warriner. He died . . . a little over three months ago." She looked up at Myka. "So, you think there might be more? At the Rough Rider?"

"Possibly, although I think we've, I've, worn out my welcome. You know how people get," Myka bowed her head and wearily dug her thumb and index finger into her forehead, pinching the skin, "even the ones who manage to take it all in stride, objects with supernatural powers, strangers who show up with flimsy background stories and weird sci-fi tools, they have their breaking points, you know. The minute Joe LaFleur saw all the sparks coming out of the neutralizer bag, he began to believe it all, really believe it, and he couldn't get rid of me fast enough." She straightened, meeting Diane's eyes. "I'm hoping there aren't anymore. It takes so much," she paused, searching for the word, "so much force, energy, whatever you want to call it to create an artefact. A lot of people, they're never going to experience the kind of highs and lows that fuel the creation. The ones who do, it's one, maybe two things, that have the most value to them. Not everyone is –"

"A Helena Wells," Diane said dryly.

"I was going to say Teddy Roosevelt, but Helena's an exception, too." Myka looked down again. "When I started at the Warehouse, sometimes I was jealous of the people who made the artefacts we were chasing down. It's twisted, I know, but I was. I've had my share of sadness. I didn't have the greatest of childhoods, and I watched someone I loved die in my arms, but I'm not going to be written up in the history books, no one's going to write biographies about me, my face isn't going to be on t-shirts. Then Helena blew in, and that's the first time I think I truly understood what artefacts were, what theymeant, and I haven't been jealous since. I witness extraordinary things all the time, but I'm pretty ordinary, Diane."

"You are far from ordinary, Myka Bering." Myka jerked up, but now Diane was the one looking away. "We've had this conversation before, remember? About the other Myka." She sounded so warm, so loving that Myka wanted to bathe in her voice, stand up under it like it was a shower and let it drip from her hair and pool under her feet. "Sometimes I wonder if I was brought here to meet you." Their eyes finally met, and Myka, still holding onto the image of a shower saw two naked bodies under it instead of one, kissing, caressing. She grabbed at the table, whether to prevent herself from toppling over or launching herself onto Diane, she didn't know. "But," Diane was saying briskly, "that's a question for another time. We have something far more practical to address."

Myka fought the impulse to clear her throat. "I've got contact information for a brother, William Warriner. He doesn't live far from here. He should know what's happened to Bob Warriner's things, and, according to Joe, there are a lot of them. Joe called him a hoarder, so" she gestured vaguely at Diane, "don't wear something like that. Wear some of your dirty clothes. If what I saw in the Rough Rider was any guide, we'll be rooting around in the equivalent of a junkyard."

Diane bent her head and evaluated her cashmere turtleneck and wool slacks. "This was a uniform of sorts, I'll have you know. Bart was a lead, and I had to treat him like one – to a point." Myka made a face, and Diane laughed. "Don't worry. I think he was hoping for something more provocative, less a date at a book reading and more a 'let's crawl into the back seat of your truck in the parking lot.' He didn't ask to see me again as he was dropping me off."

Myka drew her hand across her forehead in an exaggerated sign of relief. "I wasn't wild at the idea of you being in his truck." At Diane's reproving look, Myka hastily amended, "But not too concerned. You said you could handle him if you had to, and I figure, given all the time-traveling you've done, you can handle just about anything in just about any situation, any century, for that matter."

"I can handle myself inallsituations, Agent Bering." The archness of her tone, the roguishness of her smile, were very much Helena, but the intensity of Diane's look, the sudden heat Myka felt as she opened up to the look, she had never experienced with Helena, not with anyone before, not like this.

"I look forward to seeing you put to the test someday." She wasn't entirely weaponless when it came to flirting, although seeing Diane's eyes turn darker, if that was even possible, made her feel as if she were trying to breathe and bench press 300 pounds at the same time. "In the meantime, trying to find dinner in this place on a Sunday night may be challenge enough."

Myka could still taste last night's dinner as they drove to the Warriners' house, which had been a Casey's pepperoni pizza eaten in the hotel's deserted lounge/free breakfast seating area. It had halted somewhere along her digestive tract, and she had felt sludgey as she ran a circuit of access and back roads, morning just a suggestion on the horizon. She wouldn't have been out that early except that she and Diane had agreed to meet the Warriners at 7:30, a time that fell between the couple's breakfast and coffee break. Myka hadn't bothered to spin a fiction about their interest in Bob Warriner's collection. She said only that she and her partner had heard from the LaFleurs that there might be some hard-to-find items available for sale. Bill Warriner had spoken in a low, rumbling monotone that revealed neither interest nor disinterest, and Myka hadn't been certain that he was open to letting them look at his brother's things until he had said, "We'll consider a reasonable offer."

She picked up her to-go coffee from the console. A banana was all that she had trusted on her stomach, and she was beginning to regret the coffee, but she hadn't slept much. She could blame it on the pizza, but she hadn't slept well since they had arrived. Yes, she found even Diane's little snores and mutterings sexy and, yes, it was dismaying but more unsettling was the realization that it felt natural to listen to her sleep, too natural for the length of time they had known each other. She had never felt entirely comfortable sharing a bed with Pete or, if she were honest, with Sam. She might have attributed her sense of comfort with Diane to having shared so many hotel rooms with Helena, but she had learned early on that Helena never slept. Myka knew that factually it wasn't true, but every time she had woken in the night, Helena's bed would be empty and the thin line of light under the bathroom door the only confirmation of her presence. She would be in there reading, anything at hand, from a Gideon bible to their SUV's owner manual.

"I think it's on our right." Diane was eyeing the map on her phone and pointing to a ranch house set far back from the highway. She rolled her eyes and clutched the grab handle as Myka executed a sharp turn and they began jouncing down a poorly paved two-lane road.

They cut to their left and followed a long drive that ended in an apron in front of a multi-car garage. A figure detached itself from a shadowed bay and approached them. He was a tall man, although bent with age, but his walk was firm, and his eyes were keen as he appraised them.

"Bill Warriner?" Myka got out of the SUV.

"Yup." His handshake was more expressive, firm with a decisive second shake before he released her hand. "C'mon in. Lenore's got coffee going. Coffee cake, too, if you haven't had breakfast."

He reminded her of old ranchers she would see pottering around their garages and gardens, the running of the livestock handed over to the kids and grandkids. While her Grandpa Ryan hadn't been a rancher, he had owned a couple of acres outside Colorado Springs, and she remembered him always being in his vegetable garden or among his fruit trees. He had had the same spare frame as Bill Warriner and would sometimes sport a cowboy hat, although the closest to a cow he had ever been was "when it was on my plate." He had never tired of that little joke. He had also never warmed to her father, and she and Tracy had always been "Warren's girls" not "Jeannie's girls." The milk of human kindness ran sour in the Ryan family, too. Myka hoped for a better outcome with the Warriners.

The welcoming smile Lenore gave them was a start. A small plump bird of a woman, she shooed them with quick flutters of her hands to a table in the kitchen's nook. Seeing them move in front of and behind each other with the silent accommodation of the long-married, Myka couldn't get the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife out of her mind. The coffee cake was moist and lemony and thick with blueberries, and the coffee wasn't as strong as she had feared. Lenore joined them with a mug that announced "Grandma is spelled L-O-V-E"; Bill's mug was a plain white diner mug, and he remained in the kitchen proper, resting his back against a counter. "You can take the coffee cake home with you, if you'll take Bob's stuff away," she joked.

"We've got other people interested," he countered mildly.

"Well, you're the only ones who've made it out here," she said, leaning toward Myka and Diane conspiratorially.

"How much stuff is there?"

"Too much," Lenore sighed. "Bob was . . . ." She turned her head to look at her husband. "I think the kindest explanation is that Bob remembered growing up poor. He felt safer with things around him, I guess." If she were seeking concurrence, Bill's impassive expression gave nothing away. All she received was a tiny hitch of his shoulder.

"Are you looking for anything in particular?" He gazed at them in turn across the lip of his cup, his eyes coming to Myka last. They were a light blue and their keenness all the more remorseless. Myka wouldn't have found it difficult to believe that he had already divined who she and Diane were and why they were here.

"We're interested in the items that were most important to him."

"You mean the most valuable?" He was frowning, and Myka imagined him rapidly flipping through a mental catalog of his brother's collections.

"Not necessarily," Diane said, answering him before Myka could. "The things he would have found the most difficult to part with. They don't have to be treasures, just what he treasured most." At Bill's skeptical expression, she added, "Our clients aren't interested in reselling what they collect. They like the associations . . . the energy . . . of things that have been meaningful to their owners. Our clients appreciate the personal history of objects rather than their monetary value."

This time the look that Bill and Lenore exchanged was one of mutual understanding. "I don't mean to give offense," he said, "but your clients are nuts."

"They are somewhat eccentric," Diane pleasantly agreed.

"I'll do my best, but my brother had a lot of stuff. Lenore's been at his house for weeks trying to put it in order." He set his mug down and crossed his arms, clearly waiting on them. Murmuring her appreciation to Lenore, Diane picked up her nearly empty plate with an abashed expression that was more assumed than real. Myka had hardly touched her slice of coffee cake as the banana continued to body surf waves of stomach acid, but her coffee mug was empty.

"I'm going to wrap this up for you," Lenore said with a grandmotherly air, motioning Diane away from the sink. "You girls stop back in before you go, and I'll send some coffee cake with you." At Myka's protest, she said, "You'll save Bill and me from eating all of it, and if you don't mind my saying so, you look a little too pale for mid-morning."

Mid-morning? Myka checked her watch. It was 8:15. She was an early riser herself, but she would never think of 8:15 as mid-morning. She said something about a "late night," which caused Diane to turn her head, the dark eyes searching hers before turning to Bill. "We're following you, I presume?" She heard Diane say to him.

Bob Warriner's house was on the "pocket square" of land that Joe LaFleur had described. It bordered Bill's property to the west and was virtually hidden by a grove of trees. Although their limbs had been stripped bare of leaves, the trees clustered together so intimately that Myka would have had to stop on the highway and peer at them before she would have been able to make out the roofline. Instead of taking them back down to the highway and over, Bill had led them across a former pasture that the prairie was slowly reclaiming, the snow deep but packed into a rough trail that the Warriners' trucks had created going back and forth. Myka wasn't sure whether an eagerness to be rid of them, a desire to challenge, or an assumption that their SUV could weather the ride, or a combination of all three, had been behind his choice, but she guided the SUV as gently as she could over the dips, Diane clinging to the grab handle and looking murder through the windshield.

Bill had pulled up to the side of house, a story and a half farmhouse that looked like it had stood empty for more than a few months. The windows were intact but grimy, and the trim around them last painted a half-century ago. Myka parked the SUV on a barren patch of what, in the spring, would be a scrubby front yard. Bill was waiting for them inside the doorway. "Not much in the way of amenities here," he said as they scraped their shoes on the cracked cement steps. "We keep the utilities on but at a minimum. I suggest you keep your coats on." He flicked a light switch on the wall, and an old-fashioned glass globe overhead offered a weak glow. To Myka's left was a room that Bob had used as a living room. A sagging couch and a metal TV stand with a portable 1970s era TV took up a third of the space. The rest of it was given over to boxes and plastic storage bins. Written in marker on the boxes and on pieces of paper taped to the bins were descriptions of the contents. "Lenore's been sorting through the things, putting like together and inventorying them." Diane had tried, discreetly, to put her hand to her nose. The smell was a combination of closed-up house, dust, and the compacted odors of old objects held, worn, and used by generations of people. Myka supposed she should thank the Warehouse for that small kindness; at least the world's largest flea market, as Helena like to call it, didn't smell like one. "Lenore can only take so much of it at a time," Bill said. The words indicated sympathy but the face was no less expressionless.

Diane had opened the door to the room on the other side of the hall. "His bedroom?" She ventured.

"Our great-uncle and his wife lived here. That was their bedroom." Then Bill pointed at the ceiling. "They managed to fit six children upstairs."

"Where did Bob keep the things that were special to him?" Myka hoped a hard stare from her might get him to give her something.

Bill remained unmoved. "He and I, we never really talked about his collecting. Different outlooks, different priorities. You're on your own here, ladies."

"I heard that he liked fossils. Gordy LaFleur is trying to put one back together, one that I was told had meaning for him."

Bill grunted, in what Myka could only guess was acknowledgment. "He didn't like fossils for fossils. He liked them because of what they represented, all the oil in the ground that he thought our family missed out on. Don't know anything about the fossil you're talking about."

"I heard that when fracking made the Bakken profitable, it drove him crazy."

"He was always kind of crazy. Bob was 12 years older than me, and he was at college by the time I was in kindergarten. We were never close. I don't waste my time brooding over shoulda beens." The hard stare he concentrated on Myka had enough force that she felt herself stiffening and wishing she had packed teslas in their overnight bags. She could learn something about hard stares from this man. "You seem awfully interested in my brother."

"Like my partner said, our clients have a unique interest in collectibles. They would be very interested in what made Bob tick and why he collected what he did."

Diane touched Myka's arm, and Myka noticed that she had stepped into the space between her and Bill Warriner. "I'm going to see what's in the kitchen. You'll find me there." She paused, turning her head to give Bill a look that, by the tightening of the muscles along her jaw, must have been as frosty, Myka thought, as the interior of the house. The floorboards groaned as she passed between them down the hall.

"Well, 'fraid I'm going to have to disappoint your clients." He glanced over Myka's shoulder at the living room. He almost imperceptibly shook his head. "I never knew what was in his head. Probably a lot of self-pity. The way I figure it, the past is only as important as you make it." One long stride took him to the door. "You used to be military, didn't you?"

Myka wasn't quick enough to cover her surprise. "Secret Service."

"Thought it was something like that." His mouth creased. She decided to take it for a smile, albeit a small one. "State trooper, 30 years. Don't miss it but wouldn't have changed anything, either. The way you came up to the door, just the way you were carrying yourself. You were alert, you were scanning for trouble." A note of curiosity entered his voice. "How did a former Secret Service agent get into antique hunting for a living?"

"Fraid I'm going to have to disappoint you on that."

The crease grew wider. It really was a smile. "Call me when you're through, and I'll come out to lock up."

Chapter 14

Chapter Text

Myka

It was when she entered the kitchen and saw the stack of boxes on the floor, on the counters, and on the kitchen table that Myka knew how very little she and Diane would be able to get done, and this was assuming that they would have the day. She doubted that Bill Warriner would give them that long. "Any ideas about where to start?"

"I've been thinking about that. We tend to keep the things we hold dear close to us, don't we?" Diane pointed at her chest. "I used to wear a locket that held strands of Charles' hair, and when I went to bed, I would put it on the nightstand next to me." She opened the flaps of box and grimaced at its contents. "I rarely let it out of my sight, but I ended up losing it on an anomaly retrieval several years ago. To this day, I'll get up in the morning and automatically look for it. Maybe the place we should start searching in the time we have is Bob's bedroom. The things we carry with us every day, put on nightstands and bureaus, we want to see them, know that they're near." She lifted the box and tilted it so that Myka could see old silverware separated by utensil and rubber-banded together in bunches like scallions. "I have a hard time believing these were special to him."

Bob Warriner's bedroom was as full of boxes as the kitchen. They had had to create a path for themselves around the twin bed and narrow dresser by putting boxes outside the door. These were items that Lenore hadn't yet catalogued; there were no helpful descriptions written on the sides of the boxes, and dust and other . . . things . . . filled the air as soon as she and Diane reached in to pull the items out. They were mainly photo albums, and Myka had marveled at the Warriners' interest in home photography until she realized the families differed by album. Nonetheless she held each album inside the neutralizer bag for a few seconds, and each time there was no reaction. The same happened with the boxes of alarm clocks, hats, wristwatches, crumbling paperback mysteries and westerns, and assorted pocket combs, key rings, money clips, and ballpoint pens. Myka tested them all, until her hands were streaked with dirt and she couldn't feel her fingers any longer. Diane had put on her mittens and her cranberry-colored stocking cap. The end of her nose matched it in color.

"It's almost noon, Myka," she said, "and my feet are frozen." She had wandered into the living room and started working on the boxes and bins in there. Sniffling, she took off a mitten to search her coat pocket for a tissue. Myka noticed that Diane's hands were as grimy as her own. "Also, surprising as it may seem, given our inhospitable surroundings, I'm starving. I could eat the rest of Lenore's coffee cake all by myself."

Myka automatically dropped a pen into her neutralizer bag. Nothing, which had been true for everything else. She stretched. "Let's make a quick run-through the other rooms. Especially if there are fossils, we'll have to ask for more time from the Warriners." At Diane's brief grimace, Myka said, "You disagree?"

"Like you said, it would be unusual for Bob Warriner to have created multiple relics. Maybe there's just the fossil." Diane visibly hesitated. "On the other hand . . . did you look out the kitchen window and see the barn? You know that every square inch of it's filled with more of this . . . ." She gestured, almost despairingly, at the boxes and bins around her.

"Stuff," Myka groaned. "You're right. It would take us far too long." She threaded her way between two stacks of boxes to sit on the twin bed. "I'm just . . . we don't know what's going to happen to Clint and Kevin. Of course, we can hope that the fossil . . . ." Her voice died away, and she was silent. After a few moments, she quietly added, "Artie likes to tell the story about having to neutralize an entire airfield. I don't know how they did it, except that it involved declaring the place a toxic waste site and bringing in earth-movers and teams in hazmat suits. I don't want to have to do something like that here."

"In my reality, all agents have to complete an exam at the end of their training. It's not a final cull. Instead, our answers determine how long we remain in our probationary period. All of the questions are based on actual Warehouse history, or so we're told." Diane smiled skeptically. "One of the questions has stuck in my mind. 'An architect fell so in love with a palace he designed for the king that it was transformed into a relic, which caused anyone who entered it to become entrapped by the stone. The king refused to have the palace destroyed and insisted upon living in it. How was it neutralized?'"

"Did we ever talk about whether your reality hadStar Trek? This sounds like the Kobayashi Maru."

Diane's Spock-like arching of an eyebrow was undercut by her soft chuckle. "No, you can't cheat. Besides, since there's no right answer, cheating's meaningless."

"Yeah, but I bet some answers are more right than others." Myka plucked at the thin bedspread. "He must have been so lonely," she murmured. After a slight shake of her head, she said in a louder voice, "If I were Helena, I would be inventing a gadget that would neutralize the palace in one fell swoop." Another shake of her head, clearly affectionate. "Definitely out of the Kirk mold, if the world were populated only by Kirks, Spocks, and McCoys. She'll invent the right answer if it doesn't exist."

"Spock's mind but not his detachment . . . or his control. She'd put the entire village in peril to save the palace." Diane sounded more sad than disapproving.

"So, what was your answer?"

"The question was presented like a puzzle, but it wasn't, not really. I didn't think the solution was a practical one. In my world, my Warehouse still has vestiges of its religious roots, so equations and gadgets aren't always the solution. I tried to think of an even more powerful magic that the king could wield. My answer was that at each of the four corners of the palace he needed to grant clemency to one of his enemies. Forgiveness washes away error."

"But the king had to forgive four of his enemies, enemies who wouldn't necessarily forgive him in turn."

"While my solution isn't as risky as my cousin's might be, it still comes with a price. Sometimes the answer does."

"I get it." Myka pushed herself off the bed. "I'll talk to Artie. He's done a hell of a lot more retrievals than I have. If he neutralized an airfield, he'll have some ideas about this." She regarded Diane with a sardonic half-smile. "You're not the Original Series. You're more Obi-Wan, sage mentor, master of the Force."

"At least you didn't say I was Yoda. 'Myka, when gone am I, the last of the Warehouse you will be."

It was a more than credible imitation, and when Diane made that funny little Yoda hum, Myka laughed. Freezing cold and grimy hands be damned, if they didn't get of this house, Myka knew she was going to kiss her. Taking out her phone to call Bill Warriner, she flexed her fingers to type the number when the front door rattled open. She leaned around the doorway of the bedroom and saw Bill Warriner rubbing his hands and stamping his feet. "Lenore sent me out here to make sure you hadn't frozen to death."

Diane waved an arm towards the living room, from which she had just emerged, greeting him with the eagerness of a stranded polar explorer. "Not entirely, but we're appreciative of any reminder that civilization in the form of food and a hot bath still exist."

Bill Warriner allowed her a smile that was more a flexing of his facial muscles. "Found anything that caught your eye?"

"There's too much," Helena said mildly, "to take in all in one day or, possibly, several days."

He nodded, his eyes darting toward Myka and then fixing on her. "Is that what you think, Secret Service?"

"We're not going to have an offer for you today. We'll talk to our clients about what we've seen so far and find out what they're thinking." This was close enough to what she and Diane would actually do that Myka didn't feel she was lying. That those clients would likely think the house and barn should be razed to the ground and every item inside of them moved to the Warehouse she didn't have to mention.

"I was thinking over what you were saying about fossils. I recall the one you were talking about. I don't know where Bob got it, but he liked the critter not just because it represented the oil our family lost out on but because, I don't know, he saw it as some sort of talisman. He'd say sometimes that you need a suit of armor to get through life, and that little crab or crawfish or whatever it was had a shell like a Sherman tank." He made a noise that sounded vaguely like he was blowing his nose, but which Myka belatedly realized was a sour laugh. "He'd never have loaned it out to kids like Gordy was doing, but he knew he was failing and he liked Gordy, so he wanted him to have the fossil, to remember him by. A couple weeks back I ran into Gordy, and I could tell by the hangdog look on his face when he saw me that a kid or one of them that hangs out at the Rough Rider had walked away with that fossil. Didn't expect it to break, but I knew something had to have happened to it – that's always been Bob's luck."

A life shaped – and marred - by disappointment and regret. A suit of armor would have been necessary to survive it. Myka shivered inside her coat. "How did your brother pass away?"

"Heart failure. Toward the end he couldn't leave the house he got so out of breath. He said it was like he was buried in concrete and trying to suck air through a straw." The noise he made now was clearly a sigh. "Like I said, with Bob, it was always the hard way. Dying was no different."

Though they turned down Lenore's offer of lunch, relayed by Bill with complete indifference to their response, they waited by the house, the SUV's heater running full blast, as he loped into the house to grab the coffee cake she had insisted, so he said, that they take with them. When he came out with the cake wrapped in foil, he walked it to the driver's side of the SUV.

"Secret Service," he said when Myka opened the side window, "those clients you talk about, they're not interested in antiques or old-timey stuff now, are they." He spoke it like a statement, not a question. "My brother stumbled onto something he shouldn't have, lost somewhere in that godforsaken mess out there, and you're here to take it back."

They weren't . . . what, not strangers roaring into town in a black SUV with a constantly shifting backstory about who they were and what they wanted? We're not like . . . those words, too, didn't sound nearly as convincing in her mind as they should have, because they would, like the others who also came in their government-owned black SUVs with a mission discernible behind their polite smiles, take what they wanted. She would like to step out from behind the smile and the SUV (if only metaphorically) and say "Yes" because Bill Warriner carried himself like a man in uniform even when he no longer wore it. He might not like it, but he would understand, and it was close enough to the truth that she wouldn't be lying, not really. He was holding the coffee cake out to her and she took it, passing it over to Diane. Close enough to the truth wasn't the truth, however, and he would never believe that his brother's disappointed hopes and resentments had transformed at least one object into a relic, artefact, call it what you will, that, like armor, could save a life and then, with the powerful recoil of so many of the artefacts she hunted, like armor, could later crush that life. "We'll talk to our clients about what we've seen so far, and then we'll get back to you. Tell Lenore thanks for the coffee cake."

He didn't immediately go back into the house. He watched them as Myka turned at the end of the apron to drive out, and she could still feel his eyes on them even after she could longer see the Warriners' property in her rear-view mirror. Myka felt Diane looking at her, too, as, dirty hands notwithstanding, she broke apart chunks of the coffee cake and stuffed them in her mouth. But Myka felt no judgment in those looks. A napkin from the glove compartment spread over the console served to hold the chunks that Diane had reserved for her. "We need to talk to Artie when we get back to the hotel."

The Farnsworth was located in the same secret compartment as the neutralizer bag, and, feeling like she was an extra from a 1950s-era sci-fi movie, she tucked it into a pocket of her coat as they hurried from the SUV to the hotel entrance. The wind had picked up, biting through her jeans, and Myka wondered if a winter storm that had been predicted for mid-week wasn't arriving early. Diane ran a hot bath as Myka tried to raise Artie. He finally appeared, looking more bleary-eyed than usual, off-handedly admitting that he and Steve had flown to San Francisco over the weekend for an emergency retrieval. The red-eye flight that had deposited them at the Rapid City airport at 10:00 a.m. had left him more distracted than grouchy, and Myka, in an unusual departure for her, found herself wishing that grumpy Artie was in command. This one kept asking the same questions over and over and was disquietingly confused about the best solution.

"You're not sure you've gotten the artefact?"

"We're not sure we've gotten the only artefact. The guy was a hoarder, and he has a farm full of what he's collected over the years. Diane and I would be here weeks trying to get through it all."

Artie was silent. "Who has possession of his things now?"

"His brother, mainly. Some of the stuff a friend is holding. I wasn't able to test everything the friend has. The friend's son got spooked by what I was doing and all but threw me out."

"Why were you testing things in front of the son?" Artie had become reassuringly testy, at least for the moment. "You know better than that, Myka."

"Because I didn't know what we were looking for, and I thought he would get more suspicious if I asked him to leave." Myka couldn't roll her eyes but saw that Diane, safely out of Artie's view, was rolling her eyes in sympathy. "Artie, we didn't come up here thinking this was a retrieval." As soon as she said it, Myka knew she had made a mistake. Artie hated excuses.

"You always plan like it's a retrieval." Disappointed, he cradled the side of his head in his palm and blew out a long breath. When he didn't say anything after several seconds had passed, Myka wasn't sure if he was still thinking or if he had fallen asleep. With a sudden jerk that didn't give her confidence that he had been mulling over the situation, Artie righted himself. "I'll talk to Adwin. The brother is anxious to get rid of the stuff?" Seeing her nod, he said, "We can probably just buy him off. What about the friend?"

"That could be a harder sell." Smarting from Artie's disapproval, she struggled to sound sure of herself as she said, "I don't believe there are any other artefacts among the things that the friend has. If that had been the case, there would've been a larger outbreak. The friend owns a bar and grill, and half the county spends time there."

"I want to trust your judgment, but I'm too tired to think. Once I've had some sleep and I talk to Adwin, I'll let you know what we've decided." The Farnsworth screen went dark. Artie never was big on the conversational niceties.

"He's not an easy man to work for."

Myka stretched. She was cold, grimy, and, now, deflated. Actually it wasn't all that atypical after the end of a retrieval. If this was the end of their retrieval. "Doesn't your Warehouse have its shares of oddballs, cranks, and geniuses? In mine, they're often the same person."

"I suppose some of my colleagues would find Artie's bluntness refreshing. Caturanga could be remote."

"I thought Caturanga was still your senior agent." Myka turned around the chair in surprise.

"Emeritus status, you would say. He'll be consulted on an especially difficult case, but he doesn't actively manage agents any longer. Angus MacPherson does."

"MacPherson? Any relation to James?" Myka stared at her.

"Great-grandfather, I believe."

"How could I have known you this long and not known that?"

Diane shrugged. "It's in the debriefing." Her mouth curled in a cynical smile. "Yet another reason your Warehouse doesn't trust me." She closed the bathroom door behind her.

As much as the prospect held little appeal for her, Myka thought that she and Diane would need to make another visit to the Rough Rider. With any luck, Joe LaFleur wouldn't be running the bar this evening, and Suze would. She couldn't count on Suze's continued willingness, but she would rather try to convince her than Joe that she needed to get back into the office. The memorabilia in the main part of the bar didn't concern her, but Myka wanted to test everything she could in Gordy's office. She wanted to be sure when she next talked to Artie that the only objects that raised concern were on Bob Warriner's land. Pacing the room, she struggled not to imagine Diane sinking blissfully into the warm water of the tub. Quickly stripping, she found the running clothes she had worn earlier in the day and put them back on. Her hands could do with another washing or two, but she would take a shower after her run. Maybe she could pound her frustration with the way this retrieval had gone into the pavement. Like any other agent, she wanted her retrievals clean, with a single, easily identifiable artefact that could be removed with little disturbance. So far, it hadn't worked like that very often, but rarely had she had to worry that the retrieval was incomplete.

She didn't run long. Daylight was rationed at this time of year, and the sun already had a low angle on the horizon. Traffic was heavier on the access road today, but she didn't have to worry about dodging cars as she had when she had lived in Denver and, later, in Washington D.C. Nothing, of course, could beat the run routes she had at Leena's, but this one was almost as quiet, if not nearly as scenic. When she returned, Diane was sitting cross-legged on her bed, bent over her phone. Lifting her head up, she greeted Myka with an undeniably smug smile. "I was looking at places for dinner."

"I was thinking about that," Myka began, "and we should –"

"Go to the Rough Rider," Diane finished for her. "I called the bar, and I spoke with Suze. She'll let us do what we need to do in the office." Her tone turned wry. "There's the advantage of surprise and there's the benefit of . . . wheedling."

Myka took off her running shoes and went about gathering the clothes that she would need after she showered. She couldn't put on the clothes she had worn out to the Warriners'. They were covered in dirt and dust and smelled of musty quilts, although that was one of the very few things she hadn't seen in Bob Warriner's house, quilts. She sighed and put together a less objectionable outfit from the dirty clothes side of her travel bag. The last clean sweater and pair of jeans were for tomorrow, her going-home gift to herself. "How much wheedling did you have to do?"

"Not as much as I was prepared to do. Unlike her cousin, Suze seems more annoyed by the prospect of having an artefact in the Rough Rider than afraid of it. She asked only that we be discreet – and that we not burn the bar down."

"You didn't promise her, did you?" Myka carried her clothes into the bathroom but left the door open a crack. While she could say with absolute truthfulness that none of her retrievals had caused a fire, a fire was about the only thing they hadn't caused. Retrievals were messy and often painful, much like the emotions that had gone into the artefact.

"Of course, I did. I'm not a novice," Diane said in mock outrage. "No one would ever let us in if we told the truth."

"I thought yours is the kindler, gentler Warehouse that people love to assist." She was wasting water, but she couldn't resist the mild jab, leaning around the doorway.

"Love is too strong. 'Feel that it's their duty' is closer to the truth. But a sense of duty lasts only so long, and eventually it gives way." Diane's voice dropped at the end, and the steady look with which she had regarded Myka wavered.

Gives way to what? Myka knew they weren't talking about the Warehouse anymore, but she didn't have the courage to ask.

The Rough Rider was less busy than it had been on Saturday night, but there were still a good number of people at the bar, and several booths and tables had been claimed. Instead of overseeing things from behind the bar, Suze was on the floor, which left her free to intercept Myka and Diane as they came in and take them to the office. After she unlocked the door, she waved them in, and Diane cast quick, surveying glances at the crowded shelves on the wall. She pointed at boxes on the floor, and Suze wearily nodded. "Take the time you need. I'll send some dinner back here for you."

"There's no need -" Myka started to protest.

"Joe spoke to his dad about the 'exorcism' stuff you were doing back here. His word, not mine." Suze frowned thoughtfully. "I think he was betting on his dad getting all worked up, and he did, only not the way he thought. Now Gordy thinks the office is haunted. So test all you want." Shrugging, she added, "I don't understand what you guys do, but I don't have to. If you can declare this place ghost-free, it'll make my uncle happy." Shrugging again at Diane's assurances that they would try to finish as soon as they could, she said, "It's what I told your partner the other night, I want my town back to normal."

Feeling freer after Suze left, Myka walked to the center of the room. Faced with the length and number of the shelves covering the walls, Myka realized she hadn't covered as much as she thought she had. She had gotten distracted by the pulverized fossil, which, all in all, had been a good thing, but she had lost the opportunity to test any more of the objects. "We've got one neutralizer bag, and a hell of a lot of things to test. Let's split the room in half, and we'll put the neutralizer bag," she walked back to the desk and dropped the bag on it, "here." She grinned at Diane. "First one to finish gets a fabulous prize."

"What's the fabulous prize?"

"That's for the winner to decide," Myka said co*ckily. "I'll let you know."

Despite having a slight advantage in having tested some of the objects on her side, Myka discovered that Diane was moving faster than she was. Looking down at the child's piggy bank in her hand, an old-fashioned locomotive, Myka thought the difference might be that Diane didn't pay much attention to what she grabbed, focused more on getting it to the neutralizer bag. Sometimes she juggled several things in her arms as she fast-walked to the desk. About half-an-hour in, there was a timid knock at the door, and then the door opened, one of the kitchen staff pushing a small cart through. All but cringing away from Myka and Diane, eyes resolutely on the cart, he set plates of hamburgers and fries on the desk, far away from the neutralizer bag, followed by bottles of Perrier and Diet co*ke. He followed them with tiny bottles of ketchup and mustard. "Ifyouneedanythingelseletusknow." He spun the cart around and slipped with it through the doorway, the door, as it was closing shut, catching one of the ties of his apron. He yanked it out without turning around.

Hungrier than she had expected, Myka was ready to ignore the state of her hands (they weren't as dirty as they had been in Bob Warriner's house), until Diane, with a scolding shake of her head, left the office only to return with packets of moist towelettes. Wrinkling her nose at the scent, Myka hastily wiped her hands and tossed the towelette in the wastebasket. Diane was sitting on the desk chair, and she was sitting on a none-too-sturdy metal stepstool. Not exactly how she imagined their last dinner in this corner of North Dakota, sitting in a cluttered office surrounded by potential artefacts. To be honest, most of the last dinners she had had on a retrieval were far worse, fast food or Twizzlers or, in one instance, a stale candy bar split with Pete, but the settings had been better – the cabin of a plane or an SUV's reclining seat, the artefact safely grabbed, bagged, and tagged.

Diane had eaten as quickly as she tested objects. She placed her silverware on her plate and pushed her chair back from the desk. "Let's get back to it."

They tested even the office products, the pens with their bitten caps, the food-stained mousepad, the jokey eraser in the shape of a giant piece of Bazooka bubble gum. Nothing. With a broom that she found half-hidden by a file cabinet, Myka swept the floor around the old typewriter stand that had held the broken fossil. She spied nothing more than a few miniature dust bunnies and rusted staples. There were no artefacts in this office, unless Gordy had stored some collectibles in the locked file cabinet. No, he liked looking at them – those overcrowded shelves with the sag in their middles told her that much – and nothing she and Diane had seen in Bob Warriner's house had been expensive. Without thinking or noticing what she was about to sit on, Myka was scooting her butt onto the corner of the desk when she heard a clatter of silverware. Diane had swooped in to rescue the plate, if not the knife and fork, from falling to the floor.

"Sorry," she said, "I'm just trying to make sure we're not missing something obvious."

"There's the file cabinet," Diane said, "but I doubt what we're looking for is in that. Maybe the fossil is the sole artefact."

"Maybe. But we don't know how Tom or Marge or Clint came into contact with it."

"I think I may know how Clint did. When I was talking with Kevin and his parents, Bart said something about Clint's son having wanted to take the fossil to school but that Clint came home with something better, a game bird that a friend had . . . preserved . . . himself." Diane made a moue of distaste at the preference for a taxidermied pheasant over a fossil. "Clint could have been here to see the fossil for himself. The better question is why Gordy LaFleur wasn't affected by the fossil."

Myka spread her arms, palms up. "It's unusual, but I've seen it before. It's like the sniffly kid in the family, the one who should come down with the cold the rest of them got but doesn't." She slid off the desk. "I've also encountered artefacts that seem to target people. They're just a teapot or toolbox until the right person comes along."

Diane nodded and picked up the plates. "There's nothing more to do here, is there?" The tone of her voice suggested that she wasn't talking only about the office.

"Artie will have to decide about the rest of Bob Warriner's things, him or the regents. I don't think there's anymore we can do, not without exciting more suspicion than we already have." Myka searched Diane's face for an objection. "At this point, we just have to hope that neutralizing the fossil will be enough to save Clint and Kevin."

"It's the feeling that I've done more harm in retrieving a relic than the relic itself caused that eats at me." Diane watched as Myka folded the neutralizer bag and slipped it back into her coat pocket. "Retrieving an anomaly, you can pat yourself on the back and say you've saved the world." Quietly she added, "And the harm you've caused finding it, you always leave behind you." The weariness that stole over her features was ages-old, like Helena's. "This is the loneliest business, isn't it?"

When they re-entered the main room, booths and tables were empty, and only a few die-hards were sitting at the bar. Suze was behind it, and she looked relieved at seeing Myka and Diane. "School night, work night, fun ends early." More seriously she asked, "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"I don't think we'll be bothering you again."

"If you don't bring your magic show with you, you're welcome anytime." Her head turned as one of the die-hards held up a finger for another beer. Distracted, she added, "Have a safe trip home, ladies."

The wind had picked up, and Myka could almost taste snow in the air. She huddled into her coat, and Diane pulled on her tasseled cap and mittens. Snow was forecast for tomorrow in the western Dakotas. The drive back to Leena's would be long and potentially treacherous. All in all, though, Myka preferred it to staying another day. Slick roads, bad visibility, those were dangers that she knew how to control. Messy retrievals like this one and even messier feelings about her retrieval partner were what scared the hell out of her. The SUV had only begun to warm by the time they had returned to their hotel, and Myka concentrated on the image of herself diving under the covers and sleeping until it grew light. No sense in leaving when they would have difficulty seeing the road ahead of them, snow or no snow.

She didn't have much to pack in her bag. She tossed in the few toiletries she wouldn't need for tomorrow morning, realizing that, despite the earlier morning start, she wasn't ready to go to bed. She prowled the room, turning the TV on and off, checking the Farnsworth, wondering what Diane could have found in the hotel's mini-mart alcove that was keeping her so long. Hearing the click of the door lock, she whirled around to see Diane enter, holding a couple of bags of snacks. "Is this when I'm supposed to hear the gnashing of Artie's teeth, hundreds of miles away, as he counts the money the agency's lost by my spendthrift ways?" She carefully moved around Myka to place them on the other side of the TV, the area of the dresser that she had claimed as her own. "Little enough to do tomorrow other than eat and try to stay on the road." She glanced at the Farnsworth. "No word from him yet? Do we still leave if we haven't heard from him?"

"He didn't want us here any longer than we needed to be."

Diane had walked to the window. It didn't provide much of a view, the access road and the small businesses that lined it. Even when the sun was out, everything looked gray – cheap, worn, and cold. "In every way, this hasn't turned out as I'd expected, but the only thing I can feel is relief. Down deep, I didn't want it to be an anomaly," she said to the pane of glass.

"Why's that?" It came out as a croak, but Myka could barely speak over the hard lump of fear and longing that had suddenly formed in her throat. It was like she was crying, her throat felt so tight, but her eyes had never been so dry, so wide open.

Diane half-turned toward her. "You have to know why."

It would be more romantic to believe they had met in the middle of the room, but Diane had barely moved away from the window. Myka knew it because she had to plant the hand that wasn't cupping Diane's face on the wall for balance, but she didn't swoop in for the kiss. Instinctively she waited, she had to be sure that this was what Diane wanted, so Diane needed to take the next step. Diane did, leaning into her and gently feathering her mouth with a kiss. Myka rocked back, afraid she would take more than Diane was ready to offer, but Diane leaned in closer, looping her arms over Myka's shoulders. "Work with me," she whispered against Myka's lips. "I'm a bit at a height disadvantage with you, you know."

First kisses were awkward; it was a wonder anything nice ever followed them, all the adjusting and murmured apologies, the slight shock of smelling someone else's breath, the guessing where your hands and arms were supposed to go. Here? No, there. Faster? Slower? Rarely had Myka ever been ready for much beyond a first kiss than more kisses. She wanted to get it right, figure out what she liked about this potential lover and what he liked about her. They had always been he's. . . until now. It wasn't hard to figure out if they wanted substantially more than a first kiss. Sometimes their erections had been confirming but sometimes they had been merely annoying. Not yet, not now. I have to think about you . . . overnight and maybe for the next few days. With Sam and Pete both she had hesitated. Sam had matched her hesitation, drawing back after that first kiss, which had been only so-so (he had been something of a lip-smasher), telling her he would call her. She hadn't believed him, but he had. The second date he had been more assertive, but that was when she found out he was only separated, not divorced as she had assumed. They had continued to go out but they hadn't actually slept together until they had returned, late, from a surveillance. She had offered to let him crash at her place, he had accepted. Pete had always been all hands, all urgency. She couldn't suppress the niggling question, Why isn't there more?, even when she had followed him to his room after their second "date" in Univille (a dart game at the bar).

Yes, there was awkwardness with Diane, their noses bumped, their teeth scraped, but Myka knew what she wanted, and she wanted all of her. Preferably not here in this hotel room in a bed that had endured more masturbatory fantasies triggered by online p*rn than she wanted to imagine, but if it was all they had, so be it. Her hands still didn't know quite where to settle but they loved how Diane arched against them and when, still standing, stumbling around but still standing, Myka had managed to guide one of them up the smooth skin of Diane's abdomen and over the gentle bumps of her ribs to touch the cups her bra, and Diane had moaned, quietly, as much a pleased release of breath as a moan, they loved that, too. Was it too early to think that she had never felt as comfortable and as aroused as she did kissing Diane for the first time? She had been waiting for so long. Her whole life? Was it too stupid to think that? Her hands traveled down from under Diane's thin silk t-shirt and sweater and went up, up into that glorious hair, almost expecting it to snap and pop against her fingers, like the sparks from a neutralizer bag. She was as mysterious as any artefact, as the Warehouse itself, this self-described time traveler, yet she could whip out a better Yoda imitation than Pete. She had never encountered anyone like her, except, of course, Helena –

And then the moment ended. Diane stepped back, took several steps in fact, took enough steps that she was sitting on the far bed, which wasn't hers, and she looked confused and unhappy. "I can't," she said. "I have to know that it's me." Her hair was half in its chignon, half out. Frustrated, she pulled at her hair until it was all uncoiled.

"Of course, it's you." Myka slumped against the edge of the table. "It's been you since you looked at me like you would never let me go again. How could I not fall for you then and there? I didn't know I could feel like that, and Pete, he -"

"Not Pete," Diane said quietly. "It's never been about Pete." The smile she gave Myka was a reflection of what Myka knew was her own, twisted in recognition that what seemed funny was actually pretty damned sad. "It should be, but it's not. I like him. Different from the Pete Lattimer I met but a good man. I'm sorry that I caused him pain."

"Hurting Pete's like kicking a puppy. Despite what just happened between us, there are days when I can't stand to look at myself in a mirror. I was all but engaged to him. I wasplanningto marry him." Myka stared at her feet in order to stop herself from glaring at Diane. She noticed an incipient hole in one sock. She would start worrying it with her toe. That's just what she did. "Helena and I . . . well, there is no 'and.' We started out as enemies, became friends, went back to enemies, and then became friends again. We've had a complicated relationship, and I won't deny that, initially, I was fascinated by her, but . . .what I feel for you has nothing to do with her." Swiftly she looked up. "Is it because I wanted to see your hair down, is that it?"

Diane's smile was genuine. "I'm not that fragile. No, it's because. . . because this is overwhelming for me, this reality, and you're the only thing in it that makes sense to me. It scares me, the strength of what I feel." She tilted her head, her expression becoming solemn. "I need to be sure that when you're looking at me, you're not seeing her."

"How will you know that, Diane?" How do you know that you're not seeing your fear instead? But Myka knew better than to ask it.

Her smile grew tentative. "It'll be like finding an anomaly . . . one day it's just there."

One day. . . after six months, a year, two years. Myka didn't say that either.

She must have slept, although she would have sworn she looked at the ceiling all night. Her phone's alarm woke her, although perhaps it was the sound of the shower running that had started the process. Myka rose and went to the window. She peeped around the blackout blind. Outlines were indistinct, but whether that was due to the snow or how early it was, she wasn't sure. She hoped it was the latter. Behind her the Farnsworth started vibrating on the table.

Artie appeared, unshaven and unsmiling. "The regents are going to buy out the Warriners."

"Buy out?" Myka rubbed her forehead. She didn't need more to work through. She was at her limit. "I don't get it. We're talking a house and a barn."

"They're going to buy all of it, lock, stock, and barrel. The property owned by the hoarder and his brother. They don't want to take any chances."

"I don't think Bill and his wife are looking to sell."

"It's not up to them." With a particularly sour look, he said, "I don't suppose you're on your way already."

"No, Artie. It's snowing up here."

"Too bad. You and your partner have a debriefing with Kosan and the rest of the regents at 5:00 this afternoon." He unsuccessfully stifled a yawn. "Weather is not an excuse for showing up late," he growled and ended the transmission.

Myka pulled back the blackout blind again. The snow was thicker, bands of it driving diagonally to the ground. Snow and a stiff wind. Great. She sent a silent prayer for forgiveness to the Warriners. This was a retrieval that had spawned more messes than it resolved, including the one with both Diane and Helena at the heart of it.

Chapter 15

Chapter Text

Helena

She hadn't been on a retrieval in so long that she had almost forgotten the tedium of it. There was the travel, the cheapest of seats on the cheapest of conveyances at the most inconvenient of times. There was the lodging, the bare minimum of amenities at budget rates. There was the company, the most reactionary or, alternatively, the most juvenile of agents partnered with her. Even the work was sometimes less than inspiring, the artefact in the hands of some knob who had no idea of the history, the import of what he held, knowing only that it made him the most successful merchant of woolens in Leeds. The food, however, you could get wonderful food even on the Warehouse's stingy per diem. Alas, she had to exercise twice as hard now to burn the same number of calories, and there were some foods she had to eat sparingly. While her arteries had been in a metaphorical deep freeze for a hundred of her 130-odd years, they were still 130-odd years old. What would never be true about a retrieval again, what hadn't been true for over a century, was seeing the joy in Christina's face when she returned home.

Very much unlike the expression she saw in Artie's face this morning. Today was the first morning of the retrieval, and Artie's expression was six times more bilious than it had been when they left – and it hadn't been one to fill her with love of her fellow man then. Steve was supposed to have been his partner, but after their last retrieval, he had been felled by a vicious cold that left a trail of empty cough medicine bottles and tissue boxes throughout the rooming house. Helena was surprised that Artie had taken pity on him because she knew she was the last person Artie wanted to partner with. Nevertheless he had taken no small pleasure in blasting an air horn next to her ear in the war room, where she had slept after another long night studying the Warehouse's vitals, and announcing, after she had shakily raised herself from the floor, "You have until 9:00 to breakfast, shower, and pack a bag. Then we're leaving for the airport." Thankfully he had been dressed. Had he been so near to her in his baggy briefs, she might have sunk to the floor again, completely insensible.

The artefact they were hunting was in Boston . . . possibly. There was been no alert from the ping machine, only a late night meeting with Kosan and Dr. Kim, one of the newest regents, a doctor at Mass General, the day after Artie and Steve had returned from San Francisco. Helena had been able to worm only that much from him over the course of their three-and-a-half-hour flight from Denver. She hadn't even found out what the artefact was until they checked into their hotel, part of a low-end chain that promised penthouse service at basem*nt rates. When she had grimaced at the lobby's décor, Artie had said, "If you want better digs, you pay for them. This is the second retrieval I've been on in Boston in just the past couple of months, which makes it two too many for the budget. We're not here to pamper your offended sensibilities." She had fared only a little better with him during their elevator ride to the fourth floor. After she had demanded to know what was worth the loss of the better part of her hearing to the air horn, Artie had grunted and said, "One of Edison's fluoroscopes, a prototype that was so dangerous he swore he had dismantled it and buried the pieces."

"A fluoroscope?" Helena had repeated incredulously. "How difficult can it be to find a 19th century prototype? It would take up the better part of a room."

Artie had shrugged and shifted his valise. "We meet with Dr. Kim tomorrow." With a dour look at her, he had added, "Be nice. Remember, she's a regent."

"They always bring the best out in me," Helena had replied, baring her teeth in a carnivorous smile.

As regents went, Lydia Kim was . . . tolerable. Although by tradition more than by-laws, regents were supposed to come from all professions, educational levels, and political persuasions, many of them were leaders in their fields or held positions of power. In that sense, Dr. Kim was no different, being a prominent oncologist specializing in blood cancers. Yet she carried herself with none of the self-importance that so many of the regents did, and she was young. Not much older than Helena herself, relatively speaking, early 40s at the most. Her office was utilitarian, and Helena received the impression that she spent little time in it. Other than framed pictures of her husband and two children, there were no personal touches on the walls and desk. Her personal manner was just as unfussy, composed and straightforward. She described a professional relationship that had made a lasting impact on her when she started at Mass General, a mentor, an oncologist loved and respected by his peers. "Which doesn't always come easy to us doctors since we can be a competitive bunch." Then he had abruptly left, his life shattered by his wife's death from a cancer that neither he nor anyone else could stop from spreading. Years had followed with no news from him and then only a few months ago he had resurfaced, advertising services that Dr. Kim and her colleagues could never have imagined.

"He said he could cure cancer." Dr. Kim slowly moved her head from side to side, as if she were still stunned by the news. "The Tom Oliver I knew never would've said that, but this Tom Oliver, he promises that he can identify malignancies practically before they begin."

"Why are you so sure an artefact is involved? More to the point, why do you think it either is or is related to Edison's fluoroscope?" Helena asked. "I understand why your colleague's turn would be disturbing, but it wouldn't be the first time that someone otherwise eminently sane and practical was driven mad by grief. No artefact necessary." She disliked the mocking tone of her voice, but it was hard to live with, the knowledge that strangers would learn so much about her without knowing her – and new regents lost their Warehouse milk teeth gnawing at the bones of her history.

Dr. Kim's look at her sharpened, but Helena didn't feel she was on an exam table. There was understanding in that look. Yes, it seemed to say, I know your story, but I'm not judging you. "Because Tom has always had an interest in old-fashioned medical equipment. He used to have 19th century surgical tools decorating his office. And also because in a small one-man shop, where his nurse barely has a place to sit and the waiting room is the size of a closet, he's installed a state of the art fluoroscope." She directed another look, no less sharp, at Artie, who nodded knowingly.

Helena demanded irritably, "Only the cool kids get let in on the secret of what's so horrible about Edison's fluoroscope? How can it be any more horrible than his other artefacts we have in the Warehouse?" Surely the regents of the time hadn't taken him at his word that he had destroyed the fluoroscope. She had promised that she would destroy her time machine after her last disastrous effort to change history, but not even the dullest of the regents had believed her. Failures were the best teaching lessons, and no inventor thought she couldn't do better the next time.

"Because we don't have it. Because Edison said he buried the parts in different places so no one could ever find enough of it to put it together again," Artie said with the air of a professor about to enlighten a recalcitrant student. Enlighten her with a long, boring story, Helena sourly reflected. At least Caturanga's stories had been brief. Artie reflexively toed his valise. Unlike the other agents, Helena had no curiosity about the artefact-busting artefacts he carried in it. Virtually every artefact could disrupt the power of another artefact; the trick was discovering which ones were on the same wavelength, so to speak. She preferred to drop them into the neutralizer bag rather than marshal them as a countermeasure that, ultimately, seemed to promise only mutually assured destruction. It was so much easier to work with an artefact when it was no longer an artefact.

She rolled her eyes. "Like they hadn't heard that story before." At Artie's impatient growl, Helena reluctantly conceded to the task at hand, "All right, there's a fluoroscope, or bits of one, on the loose. It's just hard to imagine it as an artefact. Magic light bulbs and movie cameras, yes, medical imaging devices, no."

"Edison decided not to work with x-rays anymore after the death of one of his assistants, or muckers as he called them. Clarence Dally worked with him on developing the fluoroscope. Died of cancer from his exposure to x-rays, and Edison decided to turn his genius to other things." Artie adjusted his spectacles before adding, "That's the story you read, anyway." His eyebrows bristled over the bridge of his nose as he frowned. "I'm surprised he didn't try to recruit you as one of his 'muckers.' You weren't one to hide your light under a bushel. Or maybe," the frown turned into a sly smile, "he didn't think you were as good as you thought you were."

"Or maybe I didn't think his factory-style approach to innovation was a good fit for me." Helena matched Artie's smile-as-weapon with a supercilious one of her own. "Those who can, do; those who can't, admire Edison."

Dr. Kim stared at each of them in turn before muttering, "And I thought we had a collegiality problem."

"Helena and I have what you might call a 'unique' relationship. She killed my best friend."

"Former best friend who had turned against the Warehouse," Helena corrected. "You might also mention that I saved your life."

"It's complicated," she and Artie said in unison.

"Adwin warned me about the traveling show the two of you would put on." Dr. Kim gave each of them the kind of exasperated look she probably reserved for talented but clownish residents. She didn't make a production of pushing back the sleeve of her lab coat and checking her watch, but Artie got the signal. "The point I was trying to make before you distracted me," he glowered at Helena, daring her to contradict him, "was that Edison's explanation for why he abandoned x-ray technology wasn't quite true. Yes, Clarence Dally's death upset him, but it wasn't why he turned away from fluoroscopes. He turned away from fluoroscopes because he invented one that didn't just picture what we look like from the inside," Artie made a circling motion over his stomach, "he invented one that pictures what we want to see."

"An illusion of reality," Helena said, her voice dropping as she thought through what Artie had said, "like a motion picture."

Artie's hair, always in need of a trim, bobbed violently in agreement. "There's speculation that he adapted techniques, possibly even equipment, that he used for his work on the kinetograph and other early motion picture cameras for the fluoroscope. He never disclosed exactly what happened, except that he promised the first regents of Warehouse 13 that they would never have to worry about it ending up in the wrong hands."

"Except that he didn't succeed in destroying it," Dr. Kim interjected, "at least not completely." She looked down at the top of her desk. "I hope I'm wrong," she said softly. She lifted her head. "I know Tom. He has to believe he's helping people, but I'm afraid of the danger, the damage that he may be inadvertently causing. When I first heard about what he was doing, I thought maybe he had developed an experimental therapy, which, in its own way, could be no less dangerous. I went to see him." Helena noticed that Dr. Kim had stopped looking at her and Artie and instead seemed to be looking through them, at a scene that was painful for her to witness. Her eyes filled with tears, and she busied herself with opening desk drawers, her desktop giving her nothing to fiddle with in distraction. "It didn't go well. He seemed. . . possessed. An overused word, but I can't think of a better one. He interpreted my concern as professional jealousy. He was convinced that I had come to claim his 'cure' as my own. He threatened to call the police if I didn't leave. He only calmed down after Ed came in."

"Who's Ed?" Artie had lifted his valise into his lap and was rubbing the clasp with his thumb, as if, at the slightest invitation, he would open it to display to Dr. Kim his assortment of fluoroscope-defying artefacts.

"His son. He's a . . . the term is 'radiologic technician.' He's not a doctor, but he's trained to read images from a number of medical devices. He's a nice guy from what I can tell, maybe just had to struggle too much to get out from under his father's shadow." Dr. Kim glanced up at her door, expecting or, perhaps, hoping for an interruption. "Ed managed to persuade him not to call the police and then he walked with me to the office's entrance. He told me that his father hadn't fully recovered from Karen's death, but he was finding hope in the advances he was making with his patients. When I tried to get him to open up about what these advances were, he shut down, but I sensed he wanted to speak more freely. I think if you could get Ed away from his father, he might tell you what's really going on." The expected knock came, and a young woman craned her head in, the mixed expressions of awe, curiosity, and apprehension telling Helena that this was one of Dr. Kim's acolytes. She wondered if she had looked the same when she had had to interrupt Caturanga in a meeting.

"I'm sorry, I have to run to a session." Dr. Kim rose, and Artie and Helena followed suit. "Please let me know if there's any way I can assist you. Don't hesitate to call me, day or night." She allowed herself an ironic smile. "I actually mean it. I'm a doctor, I'm used to it."

"Is it only cancer patients he treats?" Artie asked it with an interest that might have seemed neutral to Dr. Kim but which struck Helena as too casual.

"I don't know, but if he's found some part of Edison's fluoroscope, he may think he can cure other diseases with it as well. Nothing's more seductive than the belief that you can defy death."

Waiting on their Uber in the hospital's lobby, her eyes firmly fixed on the low-hanging clouds outside, which were threatening something cold and wet and thoroughly nasty, Helena asked, "Why were you asking Dr. Kim if Tom Oliver saw only cancer patients? Aren't we going to do a B&E?"

"The older I get, the less I like doing that. Too many risks. No, my plan is to get inside, see how he's running things. Maybe we'll find out it's not the fluoroscope." Artie was intently observing the clouds as well. "I'll be a patient who's heard of this miracle treatment. You'll be my devoted daughter, coming with me to every appointment."

She had done even less palatable things than play a loving child of Artie Nielsen. She could handle it for a few days, although she really would have appreciated an opportunity to exercise her cat burglar skills. "Aren't we going to need Claudia to invent the appropriate medical history?"

"Not necessary. I have congestive heart failure. Vanessa will send my records."

Helena stopped looking at the clouds. Artie didn't. "Arthur . . .," she said softly.

"Oh, for God's sake, I'm not going to drop dead. Not yet, anyway. I'm on medication, and I have every intention of outliving you, but it's going to serve as our 'in' to Dr. Oliver. And if he says he's booked, Vanessa promised me she'd see to it that I got an appointment." He turned his head, and Helena was relieved to notice that the derision with which he greeted virtually everything she said hadn't lessened. "You need to hold up your end. You need to brush up on your American accent, and you'll need to start pretending that there's someone's well-being you care about."

Even with Vanessa's influence, the earliest appointment Artie was able to get was Thursday morning. That meant they had at least three full days in Boston . . . together. Helena was determined to make their togetherness as theoretical as possible, and so, evidently, was Artie, since she saw him in person only once. Otherwise he communicated with her through the Farnsworth or by text. If he was communicating through the Farnsworth, occasionally she caught glimpses of what was in the background, enough to guess that he was spending a lot of his time in coffee shops and libraries. He was searching public records for sales of medical equipment and having Claudia search the Warehouse records for any reference to Edison. His use of Claudia's time cut into her availability for the projects that Helena wanted her to work on, which Claudia all too readily found opportunities to emphasize.

"Do you know much we have on Edison? He helped to freakin' build this place," Claudia complained during a call on Helena's third night in Boston. "I haven't had time to read the metaphorical thermometer we have up the Warehouse's metaphorical ass, let alone search every Victorian-era periodical for references to wacky sh*t going on in Brighton."

"I did not describe it as 'wacky sh*t.' I said 'supernatural sightings.' I amnotinterested in 130-year-old advertisem*nts for palm reading and articles on a two-headed calf born to Farmer Brown." Helena shifted on her bed. The mattress had wallows, one on the right side and one on the left. If the sheets had smelled of unwashed bodies and displayed traces of bedbug feces, she might be in a London rooming house circa 1890.

"There's some wacky sh*t going on here right now," Claudia said, with the kind of leading delivery that all but invited Helena to beg for more. Helena remained silent. She didn't beg . . . not for gossip. "Aw, come on, H.G., I've got no one to talk to here. Jinksy shuffles around wrapped in a comforter and drinking herbal tea, Abigail's off Abigailing, and you have Artie. I love Mrs. F. but she's not . . . I mean, I can't just tell her like I would Jinksy that I think Myka and H2 got it on up in Whoville. They've got that weird thing going where they can't look at each other and they're as jumpy as cats if they accidentally touch each other. I'd feel sorry for them if it wasn't so hilarious." The response only Helena's continued silence, Claudia blew out a long, exasperated-sounding breath. "You've chosen today to be all Sensitivity and Let's Show Some Discretion?"

"No, I've chosen today – just as I choose every day – to be someone who doesn't speculate about her fellow agents' personal lives." Of course, one could speculate about the wisdom of sleeping with a person whose origin and origin story were dubious at best, but then the one engaging in such speculation probably shouldn't be a woman who had slept with a spy for imperial Germany.

"Shut up and let me speculate then. Do you think they got down and then Myka was all 'Sorry, that I cried out H.G., do me again!' or that Diane whipped out some moves they know only in her reality and Myka was freaked out? Let's face it, missionary style probably puts her on edge. Myka's not —"

"Stop. It. Now." Helena had used that very tone with the junior agents Caturanga would have her train. They would prod her, provoke her, unable to believe that she wasn't part of an initiatory test dreamed up by the regents because, of course, no woman could be an agent. A threat didn't have to be explicit or said loudly; it just needed to promise that utter destruction hung in the balance. Only once had a junior agent continued to provoke her. He had lived to leave the Warehouse that day, but he never came back.

Claudia quieted but not before issuing a sulky, "Jesus, did you have another bronzer?"

Bronzer. When she had first been with Warehouse 13 that had been Claudia's term for the nightmares that would have her bolting from bed, screaming as she ran to the door. Leaving a light on wasn't enough some nights. She had to be able to find a way out. Once in the hallway, she would stop, the screaming dwindling to deep, shuddering breaths. The only one she never woke was Pete. The nightmares faded as she developed her plans for gathering the artefacts that would bring her pain – and that of billions of others, not coincidentally – to an end. Ironically, the vision of being hurtled into the coldest, deepest, and most eternal of all sensory deprivation tanks had calmed her. Surrendering to Myka at Yellowstone had brought her a different peace. An uncharitable person, such as Artie, might call it the numbness of being broken, but she hadn't had a bronzer since.

"I'm sorry. I know you're worried about Myka, but whatever happened between them . . . my double won't be spiriting her off into the ether. Myka may let her head get turned, but her feet are always on the ground." Who had said that about her? Artie? Irene? Helena figured that it would come back to her later. At the moment, she had the lonely, overtired future of the Warehouse to soothe. "I know we've, I've been asking a lot of you lately, but the sooner we can figure out why Diane's here, the sooner we can get things back to normal."

"That's right. Back to normal, meaning Myka pining over you instead of screwing your clone and you running away to wherever you've picked out next, H.G."

Myka

She wasn't hiding out in her room. Leena's was an old, old house with all sorts of drafty corners, and her room was a warm corner. Of course, she would choose to spend time in her room rather than in the parlors, the sun room, or the kitchen. They were colder . . . and populated. She rolled off her bed in self-disgust and went to stare out the window. She couldn't see anything beyond her reflection, which was just as well. She didn't need to be searching for something, aparticularsomething, such as a light shining from the guest cottage. It wasn't as though Diane would be anywhere else. No driver's license, no unaccompanied visits to the Warehouse. She hadn't been in Leena's since Myka, returning from her morning run, had had to cross the length of the kitchen when Diane was fixing breakfast for Claudia and an ailing Steve. Steve had been too miserable, blowing his nose and shivering in the quilt he had brought down with him, to notice how awkwardly she and Diane greeted each other. But Claudia hadn't missed one stumbling step, one listlessly said word. Myka felt Claudia's eyes following her everywhere. She wasn't proud that a sprite, even a snarky, child prodigy one, could chase her out of a room, but Myka had no defense, no counterattack. How could she? She had never felt this way before. Pulled in opposite directions, yes, when wasn't she? But she had never hungered for someone like this and, at the same time, felt so helpless to bridge the distance between the two of them. This was no morning-after awkwardness. For one thing, there had been no morning after; she hadn't even the transitory pleasure of a release to feel ashamed about. For another, "awkwardness" didn't come close to capturing the combination of frustration, confusion, tension, and guilt that her one failsafe, her morning runs, failed to let her outpace. She had felt both guiltier (see Lattimer, Pete and Martino, Sam) and unhappier (see Martino, Sam; see also Wells, Helena, specifically "betrayal by"), but she had never felt so miserable without being able to point to a cause. Diane thought she wasn't "over" Helena, but she didn't know what it meant. The half-formed question of what she and Helena were to each other, which hadn't preoccupied her but clouded her view, like fog, from time to time, had vanished like fog under the sun of what Helena, free of the Warehouse and, apparently, of the burdens she carried, had chosen for herself. Maybe more than vanished, maybe burned to a cinder under one of those big, blindingly yellow suns in a children's picture book. The point was, it was gone. In fact, if Diane's resemblance to Helena hadn't basically stopped at their appearance, Myka knew she wouldn't have been so strongly attracted. Yet she hadn't found a way to convince Diane of that.

She wheeled away from the window at the knock on her door. This late it would be only Claudia or Steve. Helena was on a retrieval. She almost did a double-take upon seeing Irene. "Mind if I come in?" Irene inflected the words into a question, but she entered the room before she had finished. Past 11:00 at night, and Irene was still in a skirt suit, which bore no wrinkles, no sign that she hadn't just put it on. Her expression provided no giveaways either, but her eyes were watchful. "Did something happen with Diane when you were looking for the anomaly?" If the Warehouse weren't the Warehouse and Irene weren't Irene, Myka would have concluded that Claudia had been gossiping. Claudia may have been gossiping, but Irene wouldn't be here solely because of that. Irene tilted her head, her eyes no less watchful but her tone amused. "Let me rephrase. Did something happen with Diane that we should know about?"

"I wasn't aware that anything involving Diane would be granted privacy." Myka fought the temptation to cross her arms over her chest.

"I think it would be unwise for any of us to forget that we know very little about her, but it's also unwise to forget that, apart from the Warehouse, there are only us humans here."

"Some more enhanced than others," Myka responded wryly.

"Did you sleep with her?"

The directness caught Myka by surprise. "No," she paused, then audibly inhaled, "but I wanted to . . . want to." She had never understood why she so readily told Irene the truth. She didn't like lying, but she did it, had done it with everyone at the Warehouse upon one occasion or another. But not Irene. Maybe because there was no judgment from Irene, not in the usual sense. Irene was quick to offer her opinion on whether something was helpful, or the contrary, to the Warehouse, confident in her belief that something was wise or unwise, but she almost never couched things in terms of bad or good. At least not with her. It was as if she knew that Myka would unhesitatingly apply those labels herself and that what she needed to emphasize with this particular agent were the practical consequences.

Irene settled herself on the bed and patted the mattress. Myka obediently sat down next to her. "If you were Pete, I wouldn't be here." She chuckled at her own joke. "If you were another woman, I wouldn't be here, but you're you. You have feelings for her."

"Isn't that what you and Artie and the regents were counting on? My feelings? Artie said it was because I was the one who was always open to giving Helena a chance, but he was buttering me up, wasn't he?"

"Fairness, sympathy, call it what you will, but yes, we were relying on it, and we knew the risk." Irene looked at her over the half-moons of her glasses. "It's a situation custom-built to appeal to the best and worst in us, the appearance of a stranger in our midst. Suspiciousness, distrust, and cold calculation on the one hand and, on the other, generosity, friendliness, curiosity. You were our counterbalance."

Post-Yellowstone, she and Helena hadn't had the time or the opportunity or, to be honest, the unblemished trust she needed for the hours-long conversations they used to have, but they managed to have a few, and in one of them, Helena had railed against precisely this, the manipulation, "the bloody experimentation they subject us to, as if we were a prototype in my lab." Myka hadn't tried to deny it, offering only "It's to protect the Warehouse." Helena had barked that angry, sarcastic laugh of hers. "It's always in 'protection' of something. That's how they get away with it." She felt it more strongly, the sense that her strengths and weaknesses had been tallied like a quartermaster might an army's supplies and that, like a poorly equipped draftee sent to the frontlines, she had been placed in the room in the CDC where Diane had been both inventoried and interrogated to see how she survived. It wasn't quite that simple, though, nor so one-sided. Irene and Artie and the regents might have rolled the dice with her, but they wouldn't have needed to if they had been able to control the outcome. They didn't know any more about how things would turn out than she did, and that did give her some power over her situation.

"This isn't a crush, Irene, and she has feelings for me. I don't know what it all adds up to, but I'm not going to run away from an opportunity to find out."

Irene's gaze didn't waver. "I know."

"What happens if Diane and I do become involved? Are you going to fire me or loan me out to a Secret Service detail?"

"That wouldn't be my preference." Irene's tone became amused again. "She might try to follow you, and we wouldn't want that to happen." She sobered. "I don't think it would be wise, entering into a relationship with her. But as to preventing it, that's not something, ultimately, that we can do." Finally she glanced away only to fix an even more intense look on Myka. "There were concerns that you had grown too close to Helena. Of course, these were all expressed after Yellowstone. Some of the regents believed that we had grown lax and let ourselves be lulled by your trust in her. Another agent, they argued, would have divined her plans earlier and stopped her long before." Myka felt heat build within her chest and spread up into her face. "While the regents have always had a healthy appreciation for Helena's cleverness, I don't think they have ever appreciated how lonely she was. Another agent might have discovered her betrayal earlier, but Helena would have simply sped up her timetable or disappeared altogether, and we never would have been able to find her. She was stopped at the only time she could have been stopped by the only agent who could stop her." She gave a grandmotherly pat to Myka's knee. "I believed it then, and I believe it now. Regardless of what this other Helena Wells may have in store for us, I trust you, Myka."

Myka stared at her knee for a moment before she looked up, not entirely certain whether she was going to thank Irene or accuse her of evading the question about what would happen if she and Diane were to get beyond their impasse and . . . start something. It didn't matter, because Irene was no longer there.

Helena

Dr. Kim hadn't been exaggerating. The waiting room was the size of a closet. She squirmed in her chair, her shins all but banging against the coffee table occupying most of the space between the row of chairs she had chosen and the row opposite. Two rows of four chairs, one coffee table with six-month-old magazines fanned out on it, and one end table with a lamp. Only a few feet away was the nurse-cum-receptionist-cum-medical secretary, staring blankly at a computer monitor. Helena checked her phone. Artie had been in with Dr. Oliver for over 20 minutes. In addition to the scant furnishings and the tiny nurse's station, there were two doors in the far wall. Dr. Oliver himself had emerged from behind one of them to take Artie back with him, telling Helena with a paternal smile that she would be brought in later, after he had had a chance to talk with her father. He had been wearing pressed khakis and a plaid shirt; he might have been a part-time sales associate at a DIY big box, enlivening his retirement with some extra cash and social intercourse. His hair was white but still thick, and he had greeted them without having to fumble for their names, "You must be Arthur Nielsen," he had said, shaking Artie's hand and nodding courteously at Artie's corrective "Artie," and then turning to her, shaking her hand as vigorously. "It shouldn't be too long before you're called in, but please help yourself to coffee and donuts." He waved toward a slender stand next to the in-take counter that managed to hold a 2-cup coffee maker, cannisters of sugar and powdered cream, a stack of paper cups, and, somehow, a box of half-a-dozen donuts.

He had seemed exactly how his former neighbors had described him, hale, confident, reassuring. "The very picture of a doctor," one of them had described him. While Artie had been researching sales of medical devices and ordering Claudia to ransack the Warehouse's archives for any reference to Thomas Edison, she had been conducting her own investigation, making the kind of door-to-door inquiries more common on TV shows about cops than in most police work. After a quick call to Lydia Kim and a morning spent searching public records, Helena had taken an Uber to Newton, where the Olivers had lived for many years. In fact, Tom Oliver had continued to live at that address until a couple of years ago. Given the most recent tax-assessed value of the property, someone who hadn't lived in Los Angeles might think, as the Uber pulled in next to the curb, that it was a surprisingly modest-looking home, a two-story white clapboard house with a barn-like roofline. Helena guessed that it would have been assessed at twice the value or more in Los Angeles. The homes on either side were equally as modest, but Helena's gaze skipped over their features. She didn't care about what they looked like; she cared about who lived inside them and how helpful they would be. She really couldn't have called ahead for this, she had to hope that Tom Oliver's former neighbors were home. From what she had been able to glean, both the Frobishers and the Taylors had owned their homes for decades. With any luck, not only had they been neighborly with the Olivers but they would extend a similar friendliness to her as well. The backstory she had was thin, but she had worked with worse.

She fixed a bright smile on her face – it had been so much easier 110 years ago –and walked toward the house on the left. When a child opened the door, she felt her smile sag as she wondered if her information on the neighbors had been wrong, but when he turned his head and shouted "Mimi, a lady's at the door," she hoped she was looking at a grandchild. He was too old to apprehensively put a finger in his mouth, but he shuffled backwards from the door. When "Mimi" approached the door, he slid sideways behind her, but her expression, if not friendly, was at least mildly inquiring. Although she invited Helena in, they never left the foyer. Nancy Frobisher offered the excuse that her youngest grandchild was asleep in the living room, which, as she never spoke above the volume of someone sharing an explosive secret, might have been true. Even the rebuke she issued to her grandson when he brushed against an ornate mirror was no louder than a church-volume hiss. However, standing in the foyer limited the amount of time she was willing to spend talking about her former neighbors. Relieved of having to pretend she was uncomfortable, Helena let herself indulge in a few nervous tics, twisting her gloves and flicking her hair over the collar of her coat, as she explained that she and her husband were house hunting in Newton and had "heard, incorrectly it appears, that the house next to yours was for sale." Mrs. Frobisher sympathetically confirmed that a "lovely family bought the house a little over two years ago" but offered nothing more. Helena tried again, adding that "our agent said this was a great family neighborhood. The family who owned the house before, did they own it long?" That elicited a few comments about the Olivers, but after vaguely noting that Tom Oliver was "sociable but always busy, very busy" and that his wife, Karen, "bought Girl Scout cookies from my daughters every year," Mrs. Frobisher looked off toward the living room and then back at Helena. Helena took the hint, thanking her for her time and looking with determination at the house on the other side of the old Oliver home. She had to do a better job with the Taylors.

Walking up to the Taylors' door, she glanced back at the Frobisher home, making sure that Nancy Frobisher hadn't emerged from the foyer to track where the stranger with the British accent was going. She didn't want to come up with yet another story to answer for why she was in the neighborhood asking about the Olivers. The Taylors, Gary and Pam, let her past the foyer. In fact, they all sat at the dining room table and Helena politely sipped at a cup of coffee, but, as it turned out, the Taylors and Olivers had had little occasion to socialize. "You're too young to remember Marcus Welby, but Tom just had that 'doctorly' air. He wasn't your typical G.P., though. If he wasn't at the hospital, he was flying to conferences. He was a rock star oncologist, if that isn't a contradiction in terms." Pressed for more, the Taylors looked at each other helplessly. "We were running our own consulting business. We were working 14-hour days, and so was he. Karen worked, but she didn't have our crazy hours or Tom's, so our kids spent a lot of time at their house with their son, Ed. But other than to say hi and retrieve our kids, we didn't really get together. No barbecues, no co*cktail parties." It was with the Taylors that she had embellished her backstory to give her husband a name, Nate, and the both of them a daughter, Adelaide.

She didn't question herself about it until after she had left the Taylors', and she was about to call for an Uber back to the hotel. It was natural that those were the names she had thought of since, however briefly and incompletely, she and Nate and Adelaide had been a family. Yet the assurance with which she had said, "My husband Nate wants an older house, one that's full of family histories and memories," had more often than not been absent when she referred to the real Nate and his preferences. The fact that she knew he didn't like dark beers, rooted for the Cubs rather than the White Sox, rose with the sun, and shuddered at cauliflower was meaningless. Which she had learned all too well after Pete and Myka had descended upon Boone and her not-quite-forsaken former life had been revealed. Everything she thought she had known about Nate wasn't wrong – it was superficial and pitifully small next to all of the things that, frankly, she hadn't committed to finding out about him. She had told herself that she had time to get to know him, but when had she ever willingly allowed time to dictate how quickly or how much she would learn? She had scrabbled for every scrap of knowledge about Judith, devoured it with a hunger that she rarely brought to food. For that matter, she had found Myka more interesting than she had thought she would be, the seemingly compliant, rule-abiding agent not so compliant or rule-abiding on closer acquaintance . . . Helena switched her attention to across the street, anything to change the direction of her thoughts. Only a matching series of older family homes with narrow lots, but at least one displayed a weathered, partially melted snowman in its yard. A fedora was co*cked on its head and a men's plaid shirt, square-bottomed with short sleeves, hung off its shoulders, figuratively speaking. Sunglasses had been poked into its face, and a cardboard sign was pinned to its chest.I'd rather be in Florida. Helena stowed her phone and walked with purpose across the street. She had nothing to lose.

She knocked. She waited. She was about to knock again when the door was flung open, and a man, one child locked around his right ankle, another tugging at the bottom hem of his Howard University sweatshirt, greeted her a little breathlessly. "Sorry, you caught me in the middle of making their mid-morning snack." He cupped his hands around his mouth and said in a stage whisper, "If I don't get back to it soon, they're going to devour me." The children, a girl and boy, giggled but didn't deny it.

"I don't want to keep you," Helena said, but her attention and her smile were directed at the girl, dressed in corduroy pants and a fuzzy pink sweater. Her brown eyes gleamed with mischief, and the pink ribbons in her hair waved in agreement. Christina had been like that, too, at this age, unafraid of strangers and ready to break out into giggles . . . because there was no one like a child to whittle a grown-up down to size. Glancing up at their father, Helena said, "I was going to ask if you knew much about the Olivers. I understand that they lived across the street for many years." She paused, ready to discard the fake Nate and fake Adelaide. "I'm writing a story about some very experimental cancer treatments, and Tom Oliver figures pretty large in it. I'm here trying to fill in the background."

"Tom and crystals that cure cancer?" The man asked incredulously. "He was a pretty solid doctor when I knew him."

"That's changed." With another smile at the children, Helena turned as if to leave. "Maybe there's a more convenient time to talk."

"If you like hot chocolate and Teddy Grahams, you can join us. My wife and I always wondered what would become of Tom with Karen gone. Sounds like there may be a good story here." He rubbed his son's head. "The twins are entertaining, but I'm dying for some adult conversation."

This time Helena directed her smile at him. "Yes to the hot chocolate, but I think I'll leave the graham crackers to the children."

He laughed. "They don't eat them either. The kids like running their trucks over them." Stepping back from the entrance, the children, unpersuaded by Helena's promise to leave their Teddy Grahams alone, continuing to cling to him, this friendly and, with any luck, forthcoming neighbor welcomed her in. "Mike Garrett, and these hostage-takers are Daria and Devin."

"Twins?"

"Eight minutes apart." He gently peeled them from him. "And that's the longest they've been apart from each other. Daria was running a temperature this morning, and Devin refused to go to daycare without her." He sighed. "It's easier for me to work from home than my wife. Of course, a couple of hours later, Daria's temperature was normal and they've been hopping around the house like rabbits." Hearing the word "hop," the twins immediately began hopping, and their father mock sternly said, "Hop into the kitchen and take a seat at the table."

Maybe it was the reception she was being given by the Garretts, but she found the house brighter and warmer than the Frobishers' or Taylors', although the floor plans were similar. Paintings and family photographs decorated the walls, and rugs festooned with toy trucks and cars softened the gleaming hardwood floors. Helena enviously took in the comfort radiated by, first, the living room and then the big kitchen in its creams and greens. She sat down at a table that could snugly fit a family of five (the family photos had told her that Daria and Devin had an older brother) in an eating area, which had surrendered the lion's share of the space to the working part of the kitchen. The twins had climbed into booster seats and Devin had turned around, balancing himself on his knees, to watch his father as he reached for mugs in a cabinet.

"How long have you lived here?" Helena asked.

"A little over eight years." Mike shook his head in disbelief. "Levi was just learning to walk. Carmen had gotten a job offer she couldn't refuse, and we came up to Boston one weekend to house hunt. We liked this house the minute we saw it." He reached in another cabinet and took out a cannister of hot chocolate mix. "The neighbors . . . ." His hand made a waffling motion. "Not a lot of Black families here, and I think there was some, ah, discomfort." His smile turned lopsided.

"But the Olivers were different," Helena said quietly.

He nodded. "They were the only ones who came over to welcome us. A lot of people, they might come over with brownies or cookies, but Karen brought over an entire meal." He filled a tea kettle that was on the stove and turned on a burner.

"Dad-dee," Daria said impatiently, "crackers."

"Coming, princess," he mock growled. He opened and shut several cabinets before finding the box of Teddy Grahams. Grabbing a couple of child-sized plates from the dish drainer, he placed them in front of the twins and shook out a small pile of crackers on each one. "We didn't see a whole lot of Tom. If he wasn't at the hospital, he was at conferences or seminars, but Karen, she babysat Levi, she was interested in art like Carmen. They became friends." He gestured toward the photographs in the living room. "The paintings are Carmen's, but Karen took some of the photographs, the ones with Carmen and Levi when he was little." His fingers curled tightly around an object materialized from a pocket or a corner of the chair, Devin, who had turned around to stare at the graham crackers with a calculating expression on his face, held his hand over his plate. He opened his hand, and a Matchbox car dropped onto the Teddy Grahams.

Mike groaned and rubbed his goatee. It was shot through with gray as was the hair that was slowly receding from his forehead. It was possible that there had been no gray before the twins. Redirecting his focus, Helena said sympathetically, "It must've been especially difficult for your wife when Karen became ill."

"It was weird. She hadn't been feeling well for a long time, and Carmen, we both really encouraged her to talk to Tom or go see a specialist, but she kept saying it was nothing, and Tom, it wasn't that he was oblivious, but he wanted to pretend that it was nothing, too." The teakettle started to whistle, and Mike went to the stove to tend to it. After moving it to a cool burner, he spooned out the hot chocolate mix and poured the steaming water into two ceramic mugs. He more judiciously poured water into the two plastic mugs, with lids, that were for the twins. "It was really hard for Carmen, seeing Karen grow weaker. By the time they diagnosed the cancer, it was too late, we all knew that, except for Tom." He stirred the hot chocolate in the mugs and added ice cubes to the plastic mugs. He stirred again.

"What makes you say that?" Helena asked, watching Devin pulverize Teddy Grahams with his car. Daria looked on with equal interest.

"He was pushing all sorts of treatments on Karen. She'd tell Carmen about them. She went along with them for a while, but we'd go over with food or a book for her, and she never looked any better. Eventually she put her foot down with Tom." He gave Helena a sad smile as he brought over the mugs. "In a manner of speaking, she could barely lift her foot by then. We'd taken some dinner over to her, chili that we had made that weekend. She didn't each much, mainly just moved her spoon in the bowl, but Tom was there, talking about some experimental treatment in, I don't know, France or Germany, someplace, and she said, 'No. I'm okay with letting go.'" Mike pulled out the chair at the head of the table and collapsed into it with a sigh. "Tom made the mistake of arguing with her, and she shouted – Karen wasn't a shouter – 'No, I'm tired. I want to spend what time I have left with my family and my friends.' She reached out for Carmen's hand, and Carmen just about lost it. Tom shut up, and that was the last we heard about any exotic treatments." He stared unseeingly down the table. "She died a couple of months later."

Devin released his car long enough to eat a Teddy Graham, which gave his sister an opportunity to take it. Making car noises, she stacked Teddy Grahams in a row and floated the car above them only to drop it on the crackers at the end of the row. They skittered off the plate in pieces, and Daria clapped her hands and giggled. Helena reminded herself that she was in the Garretts' house to learn about Tom Oliver not to watch Daria and her brother play. She had always been bored by infants, including her own, but once they grew old enough to walk and talk, she admired the way their minds leapt to the most outlandish of games and fantasies and the abandon with which they threw themselves into the effort of making what their minds saw a reality. There were no lines for them between facts and magic; everything was possible and everything was true. A number of her inventions had had their roots in Christina's explanations, for why the sun and moon rose at different times of the day, how frost appeared on her bedroom window, and why her Uncle Charles, in the language she had heard her mother often discuss him, was "such a bloody bastard." The latter explanation had led to no wonder treatment for improving Charles' character, but it had cut down on how frequently Helena swore in front of her daughter.

There was joy in science, but Helena had learned, as Tom Oliver himself had discovered, there was desperation, too. The fantastic could be equally fueled by both. "What happened to Tom after his wife died?"

Mike shrugged, leaning over to grab the box of Teddy Grahams. He dug his hand into the box. "He seemed to disappear. We saw him a couple of times, but, after that, nothing." He frowned at the Teddy Grahams in his hand, shrugged again, and tossed them into his mouth. He crunched them, a ruminative expression on his face. "We would've thought he moved, except there wasn't a For Sale sign in the yard. It was like that for a couple of years, and occasionally we'd see people drive a car into the garage or water the flowerbeds. He must've been renting out the place. Eventually he did sell it."

Helena sipped at her hot chocolate. It was warm, that much could be said for it. Now, a hot chocolate made with whole milk, cocoa, and a generous splash or two of brandy . . . . "You've not seen him since then?" At Mike's shake of his head, she asked, "Did you know their son, Ed?"

"Just to say hi. He was over a lot when Karen was sick but not much before or after. Nice enough, but he had the look of someone who was trying to find a purpose. Like he's always hunting for a place at the table." Mike grunted softly. "Reminds me of my cousin Ronnie. His dad, my uncle, played pro football for a few years until an injury ended his career. Ronnie was good enough to play for Texas, but he wasn't pro caliber. He could never get his balance after that, drifting from job to job. I couldn't hang onto a football for the life of me, but I was always good with computers. It didn't seem like such a great trade-off when I was 18 and 19 years old, but it feels pretty good now."

Helena noted the similarity in Mike Garrett's and Lydia Kim's assessments of Ed. She would ask Claudia to take a deeper dive into information on Ed Oliver when she got back to the hotel. Maybe he had more of a role in his father's self-reinvention than she and Artie had been inclined to credit him with. She took another sip of the hot chocolate. It hadn't improved on the second taste. "Do you remember Tom Oliver expressing an interest in Thomas Edison?" She hazarded.

Mike shot her a baffled look. "Edison? Tom played golf, and he worked. Those were his interests. Where is Edison coming from?"

Helena tipped her head and let a smile quirk her lips. "One of Tom's friends said he talked about revolutionizing medical science, claiming that it needed someone like Edison, capable of inventing devices that completely transform our lives."

"He wasn't handy. If there were repairs around the house, Karen did them, or they hired out. He didn't have a workshop – or a secret lab."

Secret labs weren't the stuff of pulp science fiction or, even worse, Verne. Sometimes they were a necessity, when you needed time to work out the plans and drawings in your head and an employer, say, supranational and unaccountable to any government, wanted the prototype before you had even finished testing it, before you knew whether it was effective or safe. "Wouldn't have pleased the neighbors, at any rate."

Mike laughed appreciatively. "They're not too keen on anything, or anyone, that would drive property values down."

She would have liked to stay longer, make herself a proper cup of tea, maybe join the children in their games, but this wasn't her home or her family, and Mike was beginning to show signs of restlessness. Like her, he had a job to do, and she should let him get back to it. When they slowed in front of the front door, she repressed a shiver at having to venture out in the cold again. "Who built the snowman?" She zipped her coat, wrapped her scarf tight.

"My father-in-law, Cesare. He lives in Miami, and that's where Carmen grew up. He was with us for Thanksgiving." Mike tucked his hands in his jeans pockets; the twins, having lost interest in their guest, were playing in the living room. "She hates winter, and she says the kids would see more people like us if we moved there. I grew up in Philadelphia, and I like the change in seasons. Newton isn't the most diverse place in the world, but it's getting better. In fact, the Olivers' home? The Nguyens live there now." He moved to open the door but stopped. He looked at her quizzically. "Are you really a reporter?"

"What makes you ask that?"

"Maybe just the spidey sense Black and brown people get when a white person comes around asking questions." His smile remained friendly. "No offense."

"None taken." She paused. "Why did you invite me in?"

"Because you looked cold, because I was curious, because the twins can't really hold up their end of a conversation." His face grew serious. "If Tom's out there selling the equivalent of snake oil to sick people, he needs to be stopped, but he's a good man, remember that. He just got . . . something must've snapped in him after Karen died. You understand that, right?"

She only nodded since it would take a lifetime to tell him. Outside, she took a deep breath. Lots of people who ended up doing bad things were good in the beginning. If they were lucky, they got the chance to make up for the damage they had done. But it never felt like enough.

Briskly she walked to the curb. That kind of thinking . . . she didn't have time for it. She had a job to do. If nothing else, she could always count on the Warehouse for that. She took out her phone and called for a ride. It wasn't noon yet, and to quote Conan Doyle, who had been almost as insufferable as Charles, the game was afoot.

Chapter 16

Chapter Text

Helena

It was neither Dr. Oliver nor the nurse who came over to her, but a tall, thin middle-aged man whose resemblance to Tom Oliver would have been stronger had he carried himself with more confidence. He didn't stoop and he didn't shuffle, but Helena couldn't rid herself of the impression that it was how he moved in the world when he wasn't acting as a representative of the renowned Dr. Oliver, late of Mass General and currently the presiding authority in this cramped office, which was in that nether category between budget-conscious and cheap. "I'm the other Oliver who's been looking at your dad's heart" was how he had introduced himself, extending a hand that glided over her palm in instead of clasping it in an obligatory handshake. "Let's go in and hear what the expert has to say."

Willing her anxiously hopeful mask to remain in place, Helena looked at the button-down collar of his shirt. If she didn't, she suspected that he would see the derision – and pity – in her eyes. He had initially put himself on par, or close to it, with his father and then as quickly resumed his subordinate role; clearly he wasn't the expert. "You must mean my father. He's an expert on everything." She finally let her eyes travel up to meet his. Even the most dutiful of daughters could be permitted a moment of levity at her father's expense, and even the most admiring of sons could acknowledge the burden of such a parent, as Ed did by saying, lightly, "Then they'll need to square off for the title."

Dr. Oliver's office wasn't any more spacious, comparatively speaking, than the waiting room. It was larger than a typical office cubicle but not by much. The two visitors' chairs were placed uncomfortably close to the desk, and Ed, having no place to sit, chose to stand by the door. Dr. Oliver was laughing politely at what Helena guessed was one of Artie's so-called witticisms. Sitting next to Artie, she sandwiched his left hand between hers, holding it with a tightness the Olivers would likely mistake for concern. Dr. Oliver smiled at her reassuringly. "We can help your father. I'd like to put him on a different drug regimen and try some new treatments." He lifted his shoulders in a self-deprecating shrug that wasn't in the least self-deprecating. "They're a little off the beaten path, but they've been effective with other patients, and I'm confident they can work for Artie. However, I would need to see you frequently," he looked at Artie, "and that's a commitment I would need you to make before we can go forward."

Artie flexed his hand as a warning sign for Helena to release it. "That won't be a problem. I can travel here as often as necessary. Money's not a problem."

Dr. Oliver's face tightened momentarily, as if Artie's mention of money introduced an annoyance rather than a consideration. "I understand that there may be some inconveniences involved, but our sole concern, Ed's and mine, is not to manage your condition but reverse it. The sacrifice is temporary whereas the benefit . . . ." He let his voice trail off and spread his hands in supplication to the heavens. "I can't say it'll be eternal, but you'll be looking at a much better prognosis."

Helena let a hopeful gasp escape her. She was tempted to clutch Artie's hand again, but the thought that it might be overkill and Artie's sideways look stopped her. "That's far better than what any of his doctors have told us."

"Doctors tend to be conservative, and they're reluctant to try promising but unproven treatments. You can blame it on the ills of a for-profit health care system. I've suffered from it, just as you have." His expression turned gloomy and inward but only briefly. He straightened and his jaw firmed in determination. "But I've learned since then that sometimes only risk delivers reward."

Helena turned an importunate face to Artie. "If this new treatment and drug regimen will keep you here with me longer, I'm willing to chance it. Are you?"

Artie's gaze was frankly curious as it met hers. With a side grin at Dr. Oliver, he said with a laugh, "I never knew she cared so much. If my daughter wants me to hang around longer, who am I to say no?"

"Wonderful," Dr. Oliver said, springing up from his chair in enthusiasm. "Let's you and I go out and confer with the nurse about future appointments. We'll also need to get new prescriptions sent in to your pharmacy." With less grace, Artie pushed himself up from his chair and followed Dr. Oliver out of the office.

Ed had had to flatten himself against the wall to make room for Artie to leave, and he unpeeled himself with a flush of embarrassment. "Obviously my dad and I aren't in this for the money."

"Otherwise you'd have a larger office," Helena supplied dryly. Casting about for a comment or question to keep him talking, she fastened on Dr. Oliver's reference to having also suffered. "Your father seems to take it personally, the failures of our health care system."

Ed squinted at her, unsure how to respond or, raising his hand to his forehead as if to brush away a fly, bothered by the harsh glare of the office's lighting. "My mom died of cancer several years ago. My father was helpless to save her, so, yeah, he has a personal stake in increasing people's options and making those options better." He perched awkwardly on the desk, near his father's chair but not choosing to sit in it. As someone who hadn't disregarded authority so much as she had tried to supplant it – with her own, of course – Helena stifled a huff of impatience. She was no longer that Helena, but the instincts hadn't completely atrophied. She smiled as encouragingly as she could. If she couldn't get him to talk to her unprompted, she wouldn't succeed in establishing a rapport. "He's excited about your father's case. He thinks the options he's developed, ones that his colleagues are afraid to try, will work for your dad."

"My mother died when I was child," Helena said softly, "so Dad became father and mother both. I want him around for as long as possible." When she had started out as an agent, she had been able to break into tears whenever the lies she spun on retrievals called for them. Just like she had been able to cry out her pleasure under her mark of the moment when she had been counting, instead, the number of rosettes in the bedroom wallpaper. Then Christina died, and she had become incapable of feeling or expressing anything but anger. Long before she became an outright danger on retrievals, she had become a liability, raging at her partners for the smallest of mistakes and alienating the people willing to assist them on their retrievals with her sarcasm and disdain. Her release from the bronze hadn't miraculously wiped out her difficulties in acting the part when and as necessary, but pretending interest and sympathy, even affection, was easier when she could convince herself that it was necessary for the accomplishment of her goal, which was to feel nothing, to be nothing, her atoms and those of several billion people spreading outward into nothingness. The true weakness of her plan hadn't been its insanity – she had nearly brought it off, after all – but her growing realization that she was no longer pretending, that, somehow, she had started caring again. Not about the billions of people she intended to take with her, but the one person, out of all those unknown billions, whose death she couldn't contemplate. She might do worse than adopt the tactic Myka had used with her, a surprisingly intuitive one for a woman seemingly rule-bound and wedded to detail, and play on the ambivalence about his father that she sensed in Ed. "Your father was lucky. He was able to channel his grief into something positive. I've known others who have been so consumed by it," she smiled sadly at him, "that they've let it cloud their judgment."

If she had been expecting him to twitch or dramatically look away, her ploy failed. He only nodded and blinked at her sympathetically. Maybe he wasn't listening to her at all. Maybe he was calculating how much it would cost to replace the lighting. He wasn't so much perching on his father's desk as crouching a millimeter above it, as if he were anticipating having to spring up as soon as the door opened. She counseled herself to have patience. Sometimes the hooks she set took time to work their way in. A few well-chosen words, a smile, they could reap rewards many times the effort they cost her. But this wasn't 12 and she was no longer the agent who, with Caturanga's not-so-hidden support, could largely dictate howherretrievals were operated. She was restrained by 13's budget (and she had thought 12's regents were tight-fisted) and subject both to Artie's timeline and his whims. He would want the artefact in hand before their return flight at the end of the week, and his refusal to entertain the option of simply ransacking the place, which, she supposed, was more risk aversion than whim, put greater pressure on their ability to manipulate, seduce, frighten, or, laughably, persuade the Olivers into surrendering the artefact.

"After my mom died, there were times when I wondered whether he was going to -." The admission came suddenly, and, in order not to appear too invested in what would follow, Helena reminded herself not to lean forward. She wasn't Elle on cross-examination, almost twitchy with tension and avidity, the surfer girl casualness apparent those times only in the finger-combed waves of her hair. Looking at Ed Oliver like he was a calf that had strayed too far away from its mother would not be encouraging, not with him, anyway. With others that feral hunger had been surprisingly effective . . . . . Only Ed never got a chance to finish his sentence, the office door opened, and his father bounded into the room, success at having gotten yet another patient hopeful for a miracle onto his calendar adding an unnecessary extra bounce to his step. Artie plodded, duck-footed, behind.

Ed hurriedly, gracelessly slid off his father's desk. A leg wobbled as he rose, and he put his hand against the wall to steady himself. Helena caught the muttered "excuse me . . . a klutz" as he straightened and stepped backward to ensure his father could easily get to his desk chair. Ed stood like an extra groomsman at a wedding, ill-at-ease and anxious to be put to work. Not sparing a glance for him, Dr. Oliver advanced toward Helena, extending his hand for a handshake that would both put an end to the appointment and underscore their new partnership. "We've managed to get your father in the calendar for next week, which is wonderful, and we've lined up a couple of appointments for later in the month. We'll do a status check then and see if the new treatment is working as I think it will. If it is, I may need to see him only for a follow-up visit, and wouldn't that be marvelous?" Unlike his son, Dr. Oliver gripped her hand firmly, yet Helena sensed not confidence but a kind of feverishness in the grip. His hand had an old man's dryness but she thought she could feel an underlying heat, as if there were a stoking in his core and the fire was radiating out. He ushered her toward the door and, as she joined Artie, he pumped Artie's hand as well. "Get the prescriptions filled, follow the instructions I gave you, and think positive thoughts. You'll see a change soon, I promise." Before the door closed, she glimpsed Ed's face, unsmiling and too somber for someone who was witnessing yet another success story in the making.

Artie was silent until they left the office. Calling for a ride on his phone, he looked at her over the top of his wire-rims. He would look at Myka and Pete and Steve, even Claudia, the same way, wary and ready to be disappointed, but when he looked at her, Helena always believed he added an extra dash of scorn. The other agents would make mistakes on retrievals, which, in Artie's view, was only to be expected when the likes of him and the younger, uncorrupted version of James MacPherson were dwindling in number, but her? It wasn't a matter of being a lesser agent than the gods who had gone before. She hadn't f*cked up the mission, she had perverted it. That was what he would never be able to forgive. "Make any headway with Junior?" he demanded gruffly.

"I'm not sure," she said. "He's not all right with what his father's doing, that much seems obvious, but he may not have the strength to stand up to him."

"How susceptible is he to your charms?" Artie seemed to be making a show of studying his phone.

She could pretend to be outraged, but just as he saw her through a lens that magnified her self-centeredness and her belief in her superiority, she saw him through her own, which, with only a very few, very rare exceptions, identified those who governed (or pretended to govern) Warehouse activities as mendacious, hypocritical, soulless bureaucrats. "Are you trying to pimp me out?"

His eyebrows lifted so high that they were almost lost in the equally wiry mass of his hair. "I define 'charm' when it comes to you very loosely. I would rather get closer to a rattlesnake than you, but there's no accounting for taste." With scornful emphasis, he said, "How many morevisitswould it take?"

His show of derision didn't convince her that she was wrong. Not lessening the implacableness of her glare, she said, "He wants somebody to confide in, but it might take more time than you're willing to give this retrieval."

"You won't know unless you give it a try. Why don't you come out here again tomorrow, tell him how concerned you are, how much you're relying on this new treatment? Then let's decide how much more time we need."

"My acting skills have never been so taxed, pretending to be your loving daughter. You're asking me to keep it up tomorrow, too?"

He grinned evilly at her. "Just think if our cover story was that you were my wife."

"I'd take a knife to you."

"Coming from you, that's not an idle threat." Then they both laughed.

She had a cooking show playing on the TV, something about braising tough cuts of meat. Braising. When they had meat when she was a child, it was nothing but tough cuts, which were then fried to the point of petrifaction or thrown into a pot with a handful of soft turnips and rubbery carrots and stretched out in a stew over the next several meals. After the appointment with Dr. Oliver and Artie's suggestion (so-called) that she "work on" Ed Oliver, she had needed a pint or two, so she had looked up the closest thing to a genuine pub that Boston could offer. O'Malley's was in a still largely Irish, largely working class neighborhood, and she had drunk a Murphy's while she ate shepherd's pie, feeling less British than she did an extra in an American commercial about beer. . . .or cars. Advert, she reminded herself, that was what she would be expected to call it, not commercial. She had brought a can of Murphy's back to the hotel with her, and it was making condensation rings on her nightstand. She had her phone in hand, ready to call Claudia for an update on Ed Oliver. She needed to know something about him, an interest, a pet, an ex-wife.

Susceptible to her charms.Many of my lovers were men. She had been so full of sh*t, swashbuckling her way through retrievals with 13's team, wearing a wardrobe, her waistcoats and trousers, that she had filched largely from watching episodes ofDr. Whoas MacPherson had tirelessly and tiresomely educated his Eliza about the big, bad 21st century. She had presented her years at 12 as a chapter fromTom Jones, a frolic in every sense of the word. When she hadn't been tumbling men and women in her efforts to repossess curiosities, she had been tumbling them for the pleasure of it, and if she could saddle a member of the gentry, metaphorically speaking, and ride him (or her) until he (or she) collapsed from desire, or exhaustion, as the case might be, who was she to say that it wasn't a political act? In reality, sex had been nearly indistinguishable from the other methods she chose to employ in the work. It hadn't been a leap, not even much of a step, from satisfying Merriman with her hand or her mouth to applying the same to the men who could give her and, by extension, the other agents a lead on a curiosity. In fact, it had probably been Merriman who had suggested that she try a form of persuasion that the male agents couldn't or, in a few cases, wouldn't do.You've got a talented tongue, Helen, and not just for speakin'. You could get a man's willy singing "God Save the Queen." It means nothing, girl, and would help us out. Just a few minutes. Close your eyes and pretend it's me. Over time she had become quite proficient, because the better she was, the less time it would take. Caturanga knew and disapproved, but he never once told her not to do it.

On more difficult retrievals, when there had to be relationships established, well, that required more than her mouth or her hand. She had long since stopped pretending that the man over her, under her, or behind her was John Merriman. Most of the time she worked out experiments or equations in her head, remembering at appropriate intervals to moan or shriek, whatever excited him more. On very, very rare occasions, the labor had been pleasurable, but she hadn't truly known what an org*sm was or, more accurately, felt like until she met Judith Comfrey. But their joining had had an incandescence, even a ferocity, about it that had left her with no workable frame of reference, so that when she had had sex with Nate the first time, the awkwardness and fumbling that any other woman would have put under the category of Gets Better with Practice, she had attributed to a shameful degradation of her skills. As if the success of a retrieval had depended on it, when Nate was ready for a second effort, she had taken him into her mouth, and though he had gasped out, "Don't think you have to . . . you don't have . . ." his words had dissolved into groans and then a cry that had imploded in her more powerfully than her own responses. She could still make a man's willy sing. It had been the fundamental pattern of their relationship. When all else had failed between them, she could give him great head.

She more than hoped, she suspected, that the only work her mouth would have to do with Ed Oliver would be to give voice to his doubts and fears. She would need to get him away from the clinic otherwise his father's presence would be too strong. An invitation for coffee or lunch or dinner would have to be finessed, however, as she also suspected that Ed would retreat from anything overt. She could chalk up the skittishness she sensed in him to whatever ethical standards he might have regarding interactions with a patient's family; on the other hand, he was abetting or, at the least, acquiescing in a far worse betrayal – of the care a physician owes his patient. So, how dare this wanker turn down a lunch invitation that was, at this point, completely imaginary?

Helena laughed at herself, took a long swallow of Murphy's, and called Claudia.

Myka

Of course, when things with Diane were especially tense, she would have an appointment with Abigail. She huddled in her chair, arms wrapped tightly around her chest. God, no, it wasn't defensive, she was freaking freezing in here. Abigail was looking a little pinched herself despite the continual running of the space heater, so this could be a shorter session than previous ones. "This anomaly hunt or retrieval with Diane, I've gotten the impression it didn't go as planned. Shall we talk about it?" Abigail's "shall" was more of a "will," as in "we will talk about it," so there went the hope, always faint at best, that her baring of her soul would be expedited this time. No express checkout for those having fewer than ten items to unburden themselves of.

Myka forced herself to uncross her arms. "They often don't go as planned, but Diane was disappointed that the anomaly she thought she had identified wasn't, and the retrieval . . . we weren't sure at the end if we had gotten all the artefacts." She crossed her legs and clasped her knee to keep from shivering. "Sometimes it happens like that. You're not sure that the artefact you're retrieving is the right one or that it's solely responsible for what's going on." The corner of her mouth pulled down briefly. "You feel like you haven't finished the job. What's worse is that Artie will have Adwin call in the reserves. Secret Service, FBI, Homeland Security, I'm not sure, but they come in, evacuate people from their homes, shut down businesses, cordon off neighborhoods. They'll vacuum up everything, and if that's not enough they'll raze buildings to the ground. This time they're only going to do a forced buyout of a couple's farm." The downward angle of her lips was reversed as Myka quirked them into a sarcastic smile. "The Warriners were lucky."

"You're a perfectionist, so I can see why you might feel retrievals like that are unfinished."

"It's part of the job. I just try not to lose sight of the good parts of what we do."

Abigail leaned over the side of the chair, and the space heater roared into a higher gear. "And Diane, how did she seem to feel about the fact that the anomaly was actually an artefact?"

Her face was turned away, so Myka couldn't see her expression. It was hard to tell anything from the tone of her voice, which was mildly curious, but Myka sensed a trap and tried to step around it. "Initially, she was disappointed, but she's a professional, alternate realities aside, and she knows how to handle a retrieval."

"So, her stories about having worked for her reality's Warehouse, they're borne out by her work with you on the retrieval?" Abigail had righted herself, and she was stretching out her arms, uncurling in the blast of heat from the space heater.

Myka didn't buy her cat-like reveling in the warmth. "I never thought she was lying," she said quietly.

"Sounds like a frustrating trip all around," Abigail observed. "The anomaly that wasn't an anomaly, the retrieval that seemed only half-finished, a partner experiencing a personal disappointment, and you," her voice became softer, "the break-up with Pete was just a few weeks ago." She let her arms drop and relaxed against the back of her chair. "There was a lot going on."

Myka struggled to keep herself from reacting. "Sometimes the retrieval can be an escape."

"And sometimes the retrieval can compound the problem." Abigail let the words hang in the air between them.

Myka would have preferred to sit in silence for the rest of the session, but she had always been the kind of student who continued to raise her hand even when the teacher cast about desperately for someone else to answer. She couldn't help herself sometimes. "Pete calls artefacts the Tide pods of emotion. One's more than a normal person needs for his monthly laundry, and two are a calamity."

Abigail laughed in amused disbelief. "I'm not sure whether to be impressed by his laundry habits or appalled."

"Yeah, well, that's Pete, for you." She barely felt the pressure before she was releasing it, not in a rush of words, but in confused-sounding bursts. "He said things that didn't make sense on one level and yet you understood them on another. We worked . . . in so many ways. Of course we belonged together. Only we didn't. I knew it and didn't want to know it. Then I saw her, and it wasn't magic, I know that, but I saw her, and everything else just fell away."

"By her, you mean Diane?"

Myka couldn't help but glare at Abigail. Who else? Abigail wanted her to open up, and when she did, Abigail asked for clarification as if she were confirming her next salon appointment.Cheri's available for a trim at noon, did I hear that right?Unembarrassed, Abigail said, "Given the history, I wanted to make sure."

"Helena and I have a lot of history . . . but that was never part of it."

Ordinarily when she was miserable, ransacking the Warehouse's archives and scouring the Internet could keep the misery at bay. She had researched a lot of things after Yellowstone – and Boone – Victorian mores, medicine, and childrearing; late nineteenth century British politics and economics; utopian and protest literature. None of it explained Helena, but often the information was interesting in its own right. She had helped Claudia when Artie demanded everything the Warehouse had on Thomas Edison, which had been a manic dive into a sea of distracting, if entertaining, facts, stories, speculation, data, gossip, and analysis, because even limiting their research to Edison's importance to the Warehouse didn't reduce the enormity of the task. While his connection to the Warehouse had ended after 13's construction, that was only if you looked at the contributions he had made during his lifetime. If you considered his impact, it was immeasurable. It was hard to find an artefact in the Warehouse that wasn't related to one of his inventions. Overwhelming, exhausting, a relentless drain on her energy and concentration, nonetheless digesting and then regurgitating everything they had found about Edison had kept her from brooding about Diane.

Ed Oliver was no match for Diane. Ed Oliver was no match for the earwig that Abigail had implanted in her brain,Given your history, I wanted to make sure. Even Claudia's last-minute plea for help, "H.G.'s going to be calling and asking for this tonight, and I've done sh*t about it," wasn't enough to drive her into such an information-gathering frenzy that she could block all else from her mind. It was all there, needling her, mocking her, sneering at her as Myka dutifully hared down every unpromising tangent. Who was Ed Oliver? An apparently divorced, apparently childless medical technician who had no recent social media postings or interactions. He supported liberal causes, had started (but not finished) the Appalachian Trail, and, at least not publicly, never expressed any abiding interest in Thomas Edison. However, if his profile on a dating site she had visited was honest, he liked women with an offbeat sense of humor and wasn't scared off by emotional baggage. Maybe when the retrieval was over, he and Helena could start a long-distance relationship. He seemed more suited to her than Nate had been. Myka was willing to admit that, possibly, her disappointment and wounded vanity had unfairly colored her view of Nate, but he had struck her as essentially humorless and lacking in imagination. You needed humor and empathy, and a lot of other things as well, to take on Helena. How had Pete described their relationship on the ride back to Univille? "It's like if that Supreme Court dude and Lindsey Lohan shacked up together."

"Scalia."

"No."

"Thomas."

"No."

"Alito."

"No."

"Roberts."

"No."

"Kennedy?"

"No, the other one."

It wasn't an entirely on-target analogy, but, as things nearly always did with him, it made sense. Myka wondered how long it would be before she could think about Pete without wincing. She glanced at her iPad. It was almost midnight in Boston. Helena hadn't forgotten, and she wasn't asleep. The old Myka would have held on for another hour, but the new Myka, the Myka she was now, anyway, was going to give it up and go to bed. She turned off the lamp on the end table. The overhead light had never done much to penetrate the library's shadows. She and Helena were alike in that way, finding gloomy, shadowy caves of rooms more comforting than eerie. Claudia said the library creeped her out, but then she wasn't much of a reader. Steve preferred the brighter rooms, too, claiming that it was easier to be negative in a poorly lit room. Pete had never spent time in the library because it didn't have a TV. The sofa was comfortable, and you could be reasonably assured of privacy. If only she had had the courage, she could have bedded both Wellses in here, not at the same time, but there had been moments with each of them . . . and if she had, maybe the uncertainty and the misery would be gone.

Her phone had to buzz at that moment, Helena sensing, even thousands of miles away, that she was thinking about her. Helena had always been good at capitalizing on that. "Got your text that you had information for me," Helena said without preamble.

"Some, not much. He's an average guy in a world filled with billions of them," Myka said dryly.

"Not that average if he has an artefact."

Helena listened silently as Myka explained what she had found, uttering only one old-fashioned harrumph at the mention of the dating site profile. "What does that mean?" Myka asked.

"Good to know that he's straight and single. Makes it easier."

"You can't convince me that Artie's told you to seduce him. He can push the line sometimes, but that one he's never even gotten close to."

"Potato, potahto," Helena said wearily. "You can take the old girl out of 12, but you can't take 12 out of the old girl. Hard to look simperingly at a man who's willing to cheat on his wife, or at least it was when I was a young fool about romance. Thankfully, I grew out of it instead of doing something unwise, such as marrying a perfectly decent man. Like most things, I made a game of it. Over time it was less of a chore trying to bang a man who preferred the waiter at our table than the man who wanted to get into my knickers. Gave me an opportunity to practice my powers of invention . . . in a social sphere."

"Helena, don't." Myka paused before asking uncertainly, "Have you been drinking?"

"Just tired, just bored." A hint of malice entered her voice. "Speaking of romance, I've heard that you and my double have hit a rough patch. Even the skim milk version of me, darling, presents challenges."

"You've been hitting the mini-bar. We'll talk tomorrow." Myka moved her thumb over to end the call.

"No, no, no. I'm being a bitch for no reason. That's not true, I do have cause for unhappiness. Arthur wants to bring a swift end to this retrieval, keep us on budget and all, and yet he's refusing to simply take the damn thing. We know where it is. Yet I'm supposed to charm Ed Oliver into surrendering it. 'Charm' for me has ever meant only one thing, and quite frankly, I'm willing to do it, if I don't have to spend a minute longer here." Helena bit off a sigh. "Run through the interests he listed on his dating profile again, please."

"Hike, golf, cook, take romantic walks on the beach, typical 'what would a woman look for' kind of stuff."

Helena laughed sardonically. "A 56-year-old woman."

"She'd still be less than half your age," Myka teased.

"Did he say what he likes to read?"

"Not in the profile. But in an old Facebook post, he recommended some books on World War II and biographies of Eisenhower and," Myka picked up the notebook next to her and squinted at it "Benjamin Franklin." She either needed to get new glasses or stop handwriting her notes. She added mock sorrowfully, "No H.G. Wells that I could find."

"Only the early works are worth reading," Helena said dismissively. "The book recommendations are interesting, thank you." After a silence that Myka didn't feel was uncomfortable, Helena said, "I'm sorry about what I said earlier, about you and Diane. It's none of my business."

But that was the problem, part of it, at any rate, it was Helena's business, and Abigail's, and Artie's, and Irene's. Myka knew that a relationship with Diane would change her relationship with everyone at the Warehouse. Romance? Hell, it was part science experiment, part science fiction fantasy, part disaster recovery planning. She and Diane would either be banished to some as-yet-unknown chamber deep in the Warehouse or they would subject to constant surveillance. Cameras in the bedroom? Not funny at all when you worked for the Warehouse. "It was a stressful retrieval," she said in nonanswer. Changing the subject, she said, "Don't let Artie's timeline affect the retrieval. He'll back off if you explain why it'll take more time."

"I think I'd rather sleep with Ed Oliver than have a prolonged discussion with Arthur." In a clear signal that she was ready to end the call, Helena said, "I've kept you up long enough."

"How many times, Helena?" Myka was embarrassed to realize she had asked a question she had had often in her thoughts since learning of the circ*mstances of Christina's conception.

"I'm sorry, what?" Helena didn't sound confused. She sounded wary.

"How many times did you have sex with someone because Caturanga or a regent told you to, for the good of the Warehouse?"

"I did many things for 'the good of the Warehouse' that I wouldn't now; prostituting myself was, I have to say, not the worst of them. Don't trouble yourself about it, Myka. They're long dead, Caturanga, the regents, my fellow agents, and the sins they committed are long dead, too." She laughed, and though Myka recognized in it traces of the scorching bitterness that Helena's laughter had sometimes held when she first came to 13, it was softer and, oddly, forgiving. "It was a rare that a woman of my time appreciated herself as a sexual being and rarer still that a man could appreciate her desires without exploiting them or making her ashamed of them. I was no different. My first lover did far more harm to me on that score than any poor sod I enticed into bed because he had information about an artefact."

Myka looked down at her hand and unclenched her fingers; her nails had made crescent-shaped impressions in her palm. "If nothing else, I hope the 21st century has undone some of that damage."

"Are you asking me if Nate and Elle liberated my desires and made me whole?" Helena's laughter changed again, becoming impish. "Not all of my liaisons in the first half of my life were drudgery, although if I'm perfectly honest, one of the most erotic experiences I've had since I've returned to the world has been at your hands, Myka. So to speak, of course."

Helena couldn't see that she was blushing, but she would know.

"I knew it wouldn't be difficult to outwit your partner or turn his head, but you were the unknown quantity. Were you by the book, a plodder, your eyes only on advancing, or did you have some spark in you? Where was your fire, Agent Bering? And then I felt it, when we met again at Tamalpais. I can't deny the all too regrettable truth that when a woman has me at her mercy it's arousing."

"It was only temporary," Myka said.

"But memorable." Helena hesitated. "For me." With the same gentleness, she said, "Goodnight, Myka."

Myka put her phone on the end table and hung her head over the back of the sofa. Memorable for her, too. There had been that instant after she had pushed Helena against the wall and the dark eyes had stared up at her daring her to do more when she hadn't known what she would do. It had been vertiginous looking into those eyes and seeing reflected back at her everything she was capable of, good and bad. Myka had never had a moment like that before or since, and she was thankful for it. Thankful, yes, but it didn't come without a pang.

Helena

Three o'clock and she had yet to fall asleep. She set her alarm forward to eight. She wasn't thinking so much as she was remembering, but not sustained as in a narrative, more in flashes, like slides in an old-fashioned slide projector. Which was, by the way, an artefact stored safely on a shelf in the Warehouse. Nasty thing, if the slides weren't inserted in the proper order, it disarranged time. A gang of thieves had used it to freeze a Monday morning for a couple of hours so they could steal the inventory of several jewelry stores. Unfortunately she and Myka had been "whammied" by it and lost a day and a half in their pursuit. They had eventually found the thieves in a rented house in the suburbs, most of them gibbering at each other and a few in corners with their faces turned to the walls, crying. A rather fast-acting side effect was that the artefact would disarrange your memory, leaving you helpless to recall the simplest thing, where you were, what you last said, what your name was.

Myka pressing her into the wall, angry and a little heady that she had caught her. Elle kissing her at sunset on Venice Beach, a more recent memory than the one of Tamalpais but already far more faded. Judith, before they had become lovers, flirting with her, "Being demure doesn't become you, Miss Wells." She hadn't known it was flirting then. A provocation, certainly, because Judith Comfrey liked being provoking, but no more than that because Mrs. Comfrey flirted with her male admirers, she didn't flirt with the female help. Judith, after they had become lovers, desire making her vulnerable and triumphant both, her skirts hiked above her hips, her voice still teasing but catching with urgency, "Stop inspecting me like a specimen and f*ck me, Helena." Ladies never admitted vulgarities, never admitted that they knew what they meant, never came with cries and laughter as Judith did, never came.

She hadn't been inspecting, she had been marveling, at the smooth, unblemished expanse of Judith's skin, which, descending from the soft ridge of her hips into the gently swelling plain of her abdomen, ended in a delta of wiry dark blond hair. It was as if Judith's skin defined the course of her own desire, leading Helena to what she craved most, a refuge fissured and riven, capable of defeating any attempt to secure purchase but, of its own volition, capable, it seemed, of swallowing her whole. There had been other bodies under her hands and mouth, revelatory of many secrets had she cared to learn them, but she was fired by only one purpose, and once the voices in those bodies had gasped or shouted or whispered what she needed to hear, she was finished, and she would rise and dress herself with the same efficiency that she dressed of a morning, her mind already fixed on more important matters. Yet here with Judith, whether in a bed, on a rug, or struggling to remain on a jouncing carriage bench, she could literally suck every secret from her and still not know her. It was maddening and exhilarating in equal measure.

Helena's hand crept beneath the waistband of her sleep pants. More than a century later, the thought of Judith could still make her wet. How pathetic was it that, after being released from the bronze, she had had to teach herself again how to masturbat*? Never to memories of Judith because the memories she started with weren't the ones at the end, which were of Judith as she had last seen her, and no one should see another human being as she had seen Judith that early morning. But her climaxes weren't as intense if she thought about other lovers, real or imagined, and tonight, just to get to sleep, she would take the risk and indulge herself. They had first made love in one of her makeshift laboratories, which, no matter how often she cleaned it, always looked grimy. There had been an old sofa she had brought in to sleep on, and in its tangle of blankets that smelled of mildew and chemicals and horses, Judith had resumed the lessons that John Merriman had begun with her but had never been able to finish. Helena had recognized his limitations, in every arena, long before he had left the Warehouse on disability pay. That afternoon in the Warehouse had promised Helena there was little, when it came to intimacy, that Judith wasn't already a skilled practitioner of and, of that little, nothing she wasn't willing to learn. It wasn't a matter of mechanics. What Helena knew outstripped Judith's knowledge, but she was a novice when it came to experiencing how her desire could heighten her and her partner's sensations. While there had been much about Judith she hadn't understood until it was too late to take action, to save her or to stop her, she had never doubted the attraction between them. The fears and jealousies that had marred their relationship left undisturbed the universal law that when one of them was present, the other was the catalyst that would start the reaction.

Helena pictured it as it had been that afternoon, the two of them almost tumbling off the sofa in their eagerness to touch each other. She heard her breath, harsh and rapid, as she thrust her fingers into her vagin*, and then the memory changed. She was against a wall, Judith pinning her, roughly and with more power than Helena was aware she had. Judith's free hand was tearing at the buttons of her trousers and then slipping in through the fly, searching, seeking. Helena squirmed, not against the restraint because it excited her, but to provide Judith easier access. It was awkward, this, being f*cked against a wall, especially by a woman, but Helena was aroused to a pitch she couldn't remember feeling before. Judith smiled, the smile oddly lop-sided for her, but Helena felt herself almost lifting her lip in a responsive snarl. This wasn't f*cking, this was rutting, and she had never wanted Judith inside her more than she did now. Judith was close to coming, too, her breath coming in grunts, and Helena had the stray thought that Judith would have a hard time explaining why she smelled like sex when she joined the other agents outside.

Helena grabbed at the thought. Judith had never worn jeans, there were no agents outside the laboratory. She looked into the eyes that alternately bored into hers and closed in concentration, in rhythm with the movements of her hand; they were green like Judith's but not gold-green, they were more flecked, more hazel-colored. "Myka," she said wonderingly before her climax hit her hard, her back arching before she collapsed into the mattress's wallow. Helena wheezed out a surprised chuckle, too grateful for the lassitude and the sleep it invited to be dismayed. Her last thought before she fell asleep was that if she would have guessed that Myka could evoke this response in her, she would have made far better use of their time together.

She hit her the snooze on her phone twice before she got of bed, not refreshed not with . . . four and a half hours of sleep, but she had the tasks she needed to accomplish, task rather, firmly set in her mind. She found Artie hunched over coffee and a copy of USA Today. At her cool hello, he growled something unintelligible but clearly unflattering in return. She waited in line behind some obvious business travelers to spoon scrambled eggs and two sausage links on her plate. The nineteenth century didn't haven't much to commend it these days but forcing yourself to indulge in a hearty breakfast when you felt like sh*t was a tradition she tried to honor. You couldn't always count on your next meal. A good mug of tea was also a tradition she liked to honor, no matter the state of her head, but as her choice was between a generic black tea and an herbal tea, she opted for coffee, well dosed with sugar and cream.

Artie reluctantly looked up from his newspaper. "We haven't got much time left here."

"Only because of your absurdly arbitrary timeline." She sawed at one of the sausage links. "Are you any closer to finding out how the Olivers found the artefact?"

"About as close as you are, apparently, to charming the truth out of Ed Oliver."

"I'm about to make a run at him, so don't count me out yet. Just because I haven't chosen to work my powers of magnetic attraction on you doesn't mean I don't have them." She skeptically observed her eggs and sausage. "I could do with a decent pot of beans and a nice chutney about now."

Artie theatrically held the back of his hand to his mouth, miming a surge of nausea. "If that's your opening gambit, it needs work."

Helena slipped into an American accent. "Don't worry, Dad. I'll keep my foreignness at bay." At Artie's grimace, she added in her normal voice, "There have been times and places, dear Arthur, when the promise of a decent meal would have been the only aphrodisiac required."

He took off his glasses and polished them with a napkin. "You've been living in the 21st century for, what, going on six years? Yet you still act like you're on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum."

"The better part of my life was in the nineteenth century." She was intrigued by his comment, not offended. He almost sounded like he cared.

"Yes, was, Helena." He put his glasses back on, adjusting the fit of the temple pieces over his ears. "Except that's not really true. You spent the better part of your life in the bronze because you couldn't accept that the past is the past. Against all that's holy, you were given a second chance and then, when you messed it up, Myka gave you a third one." He leaned forward over the table, but his intensity was the insistence of someone trying to impart a moral. He did mean well, in his own blundering way. "Embrace it." Then with an awkward lurch he pushed himself away from the table. "I've got a lead on a collector of medical 'antiquities,' or so he advertises himself. Maybe we'll both luck out today." With only a hint of mockery, he said, "All things are possible in our work."

When Helena entered the nonexistent vestibule of Tom Oliver's office, she saw only one person in the waiting room, an older woman who was flicking through a magazine with the well-practiced patience of someone who spent a good deal of time waiting to see a doctor. The nurse behind the intake counter recognized her. "Dr. Oliver has a full schedule today, but if it's urgent, I'll see if he can step out for a few minutes."

Helena resisted pointedly turning her head to look at the all but empty waiting area. "It's Ed I'm hoping to see."

"He's going to be in and out today. Do you want to leave a message for him?"

All things are possible when you're a Warehouse agent, but never the one thing you need. Helena's law. "Will you please tell him I stopped in to see him and give him my number?" She scrawled it on the pad of paper the nurse offered her.

She was almost to the door, calling for another Uber, when it opened and Ed Oliver all but stumbled into her. Apologizing, he stepped backward, and Helena noticed that he was more slumped than he had been the day before. It wasn't hard to imagine him completely bowed by the end of the day, like a plant deprived of light. When had Ed stopped trying to escape from his father's shadow and resigned himself to whatever life he could have within it? Hers was a weak sun in comparison, but she beamed as a bright a smile as she could at him. "I came here looking for you," Helena said.

The smile he returned to her was more puzzled than pleased. "I'll try to answer whatever questions you have, but if they're about your dad's treatment, then my father is the one you should really talk to."

"It's not about his treatment per se, it's . . ." She looked up at him pleadingly. "Could we step outside for a minute?"

He rezipped his jacket and held the door open for her. She walked down the sidewalk, Ed following just behind her. She noticed that he was limping, his left foot dragging behind him, and she abruptly stopped in front of the adjacent retail space, an H&R Block office. Death and taxes, irony in concrete form, although she supposed Tom Oliver wouldn't see it that way. He thought he was saving his patients.

Ed was looking at her expectantly, although one eye was beginning to blink in defense against the harsh December light. "Your dad's in good hands." The closing eye began to blink more rapidly. The sun wasn't particularly strong but the air seemed filled with particulates, tiny, diamond-white, diamond-hard flecks of silica that refracted the light into shards.

The bleakness of the day, of this strip mall entered into her, giving her a chill as much emotional as it was physical. Maybe she had it to thank for lending her words a brittleness that she otherwise wouldn't have been able to manufacture. "I know, but you understand, he's all I have. No husband, no child, and the few friends I have, scattered about, living their own lives. I have to be sure that your father's treatment will work."

He winced and cupped his hand around his blinking eye. "Tom Oliver is a renowned oncologist, a brilliant doctor. Kings and presidents have been among his patients. There's no one better to help your father."

Tom probably would have liked his praises sung rather than spoken as if his son were reading them off a teleprompter, but Ed was all but swaying on his feet. "Ed," Helena lightly put her hand on his arm, "are you all right?"

He looked down at her hand and then looked at her, smiling faintly, "I always get headaches this time of year, but I should be getting back in."

"Of course," she hesitated. With a diffident flick of her hair, she said haltingly, "I know it's an imposition on your time . . . but could we talk more? Over lunch or a coffee, perhaps?" Biting her lip would be too much, but an awkward retreat might be just as effective. "I'm sorry, what am I thinking? I'll make an appointment. I don't want you to think –"

"I'll be happy to meet with you over a coffee. Having conversations like this can be difficult, and a warmer, more informal setting can make them easier. I don't have time today, but if you're available tomorrow, around noon, there's a decent little coffee shop at the end of the mall." He turned and pointed past his father's office. "My father and I want to make sure that you and your father are completely confident that this is the right next step."

"Thank you, that sounds wonderful." She stepped closer to him, placing her hand on his arm again. He hadn't appeared to mind it before. "I know of your father's reputation, but you seem so down to earth, so understanding. I feel that I could open up and tell you everything." She laughed softly and let her hand drop. "Now I've scared you. I don't mean to. I think if you can tell me a few more times that 'Everything's going to be fine,' I'll be all right."

"Whatever you need. I'm here to help you."

She nodded, gratefully she hoped. She thought his voice might have lowered, as if he were imitating doctors he had heard on TV or maybe only the one doctor whom he heard day and night. It didn't matter. He had agreed to meet with her and meet with her away from his father's office. Not far away but away. She knew that he might be no less inhibited in the absence of any tangible presence of the renowned Dr. Oliver, but she would make do with what she had. She waved at him as he started his slow, limping return. Dr. Kim believed that, under the right conditions, Ed would confess the truth about his father's "cure." Helena didn't know what the right conditions for Ed would be, and she didn't have the time to figure them out. She had an hour, maybe a little more if she were especially charming, to convince him to betray his father, and she had only sustainably sourced coffee and her powers of persuasion to assist her.

Chapter 17

Chapter Text

Myka

She didn't find out until Saturday morning, when her Farnsworth buzzed as she collected fresh clothes and her shower carryall. Unless she was on a retrieval or on one of her rare vacations, she kept her Farnsworth stowed away in a drawer of the secretary's desk she had refinished herself and tucked into an elongated corner of the room, a corner that she stubbornly insisted had been deliberately constructed rather than ineptly measured. It wasn't a mistake but an "alcove." Her running pants clung unpleasantly to her legs as she bent in front of the desk. Either their unparalleled moisture-wicking performance was a fraud or repetitive use had worn it out. She felt the material grip her knees, and she rued her passion for organization, which had insisted upon one drawer, a bottom drawer, allotted to unsorted miscellany – how else was organization to thrive unless it had fertile soil? – and it was there that she scrabbled for the Farnsworth. The last time a Farnsworth had gone off when she wasn't expecting it was in September, when she and Pete were still together, when thoughts of Helena and the chaos that always seemed to accompany her were only a smudge of smoke on the horizon, a threat so distant that it seemed almost invented, designed solely to confirm that the present she enjoyed now, so filled with meaningful work, her friends, and the man she loved that it had no room for Helena, was her future, too. God, hadn't that call from Artie given her happiness the lie. Her heart beating as fast as when she had ended her run, Myka sat on the desk chair, waiting for the static to clear and Artie's face to come into view. f*ck waiting. "What's up, Artie?"

She wasn't sure if the annoyed-sounding snapping of the Farnworth's static was really the Farnsworth or Artie. His grumbling "Why do you always assume it's me?" didn't completely provide an answer, but it was intelligible and an octave lower than the static.

"Helena would've called me on her cell. Claudia would've texted."

"The Farnsworth provides the only truly secure transmission. How many times do I have to tell people to use it?"

You'll always be telling us to use it. It's boxy-looking and clumsy to operate and it looks like it's a leftover prop from a 1950s sci-fi movie. There's no talking discreetly on a Farnsworth, which tends to cancel out the security of the communication. Myka let the thoughts run through her head without giving voice to any of them. "What's going on?"

"You and Diane will be meeting with the regents this afternoon. They want to talk about the retrieval in North Dakota."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Believe it or not, I'm not always in the regents' confidence, and sometimes they make decisions without telling me," he said sarcastically. He rubbed his hand over his face, and his tone moderated. "Adwin informed me about 30 minutes ago that you and Diane will be meeting with the regents at 2:00 Eastern today. That's all I have for you, and while I can speculate about why they want to talk to you, your own guesses are probably as good as mine." He sighed. "You'll take the meeting in the sunroom. A secure web conference, so bring a laptop. They don't want to do it in the Warehouse."

On rare occasions Myka had physically met with the regents, a diner in Iowa, an office conference room in Atlanta, but more often, and those meetings hadn't been much more frequent, she had met with them in the Warehouse. She would hardly have exited the umbilicus before she found herself in a Venetian palazzo, a medieval castle, a 1970s-era 747 complete with lounge. She wasn't sure who had decided on the setting, the regents or the Warehouse, but Pete maintained that if the two of them concentrated hard enough the setting would switch to a deluxe box at Cleveland's FirstEnergy Stadium or backstage at a late '80s Metallica concert "when they were hitting their peak, Mykes." It had never worked, but maybe their failure owed less to the inherent power dynamics between regents and agents and more to her inability to fantasize that she was standing next to Lars Ulrich. Not that the regents would explain their preference for a non-Warehouse-aided virtual meeting, but their continuing paranoia about Diane's proximity to the Warehouse was likely reason enough.

"Have you told Diane?"

"No," Artie said, "I'm leaving that to you."

Great. She didn't throw the Farnsworth back into the drawer; years of her father warning her to "Handle them gently because books are money" had taught her better, but she let herself stomp off to the shower in high dudgeon and not a little anxiety. Her stomach was sour enough once she toweled off and dressed that she was afraid she wouldn't keep any kind of breakfast down if she didn't talk to Diane first. She resisted looking in the cottage's windows for a glimpse of Diane but wished she had after a third series of knocks failed to bring her to the door. She raised her reddened knuckles for another series when Diane opened the door, hastily removing a pair of earbuds.

"Sorry, I didn't hear you." Myka thought she could detect the familiar strains ofStairway to Heavenissuing from the earbuds. She couldn't repress a grin, and Diane said, a little stiffly, "Educating myself about seminal figures in –"

"British heavy metal?"

"I'm not that chauvinistic or limited," Diane said mock loftily. "Seminal figures in your reality's rock music. Yesterday it was Jimi Hendrix. Tomorrow I plan to sample Bob Marley." She gave Myka a puzzled look as she stepped aside to let Myka enter. "Your popular music, it's very, ah, anglophone."

"Your reality's isn't?"

"No," she said simply, "it isn't."

"That's what we call 'world music.'"

"And Led Zeppelin isn't a part of world music . . . or am I supposed to think it's superior?"

"You'd probably get a different answer if you asked a Led Zeppelin fan." The kitchen smelled of brewing coffee, and Myka realized that it wasn't very long ago that she wouldn't have hesitated to invite herself to sit down and have a cup.

"So, you're not a Led Zeppelin fan?"

"I'm not aStairway to Heavenfan. If you listen to it backwards, it's about Satan." Myka adopted a grave expression.

"What?" Diane exclaimed and stared at Myka. Her mouth curled into a knowing smile. "Oh, oh, that. I read about it, trying to immerse myself in all things Led Zeppelin. Let me guess. My cousin spun the record backward, and Robert Plant is actually singing about me."

"Some around here would say Helena is Satan. You're just . . . ."

"Her henchman." Diane went to a cupboard. "Do you want any coffee? I'm having a cup."

"I would love it," Myka said gratefully, but she hoped not too gratefully. If their banter was indicative of a thaw, she wanted to keep things light and casual. She took off her coat and draped it over the back of a chair at the table. The cottage was warm, but her hands automatically wrapped themselves around the mug after Diane set it down. She was nervous, not cold. Diane sat across from her and set a plate with sweet rolls between them. "Fresh from Univille," she said.

"The grocery mart?"

"The bakery."

As Myka's eyes widened in surprise, Diane laughed gently. "Your illogical and, I'll note, inconsistent avoidance of sweets has left you unacquainted with what may be Univille's one treasure, Cookies, Cakes & Cream. The owner used to work as a pastry chef for a cruise line. Came back to South Dakota to be closer to family." She picked up a giant cinnamon roll and took a bite, running her tongue over her upper lip to catch all of the icing.

Are you trying to kill me? Myka silently asked her. She looked down at her mug. Better to introduce the moodbuster now, before Diane started moaning her appreciation of the cinnamon roll. "We have a meeting later today with the regents. They want to talk to us about the retrieval."

Diane grimaced and all but dropped the roll on a napkin. "That's not a good sign in any reality."

Helena

Years, no, decades ago when she had had a retrieval-related assignation she would arrive late, sauntering toward her would-be lover with the confidence that the desire that had brought him there and then kept him there would lead him to forgive her as well. That the frustration of being toyed with often keyed his desire to a higher pitch, making him impatient and incautious, only assisted her. She would get the necessary information or, if she were lucky, the artefact itself without having to surrender more than an apology for cutting their night of bliss together so terribly short. Sometimes, however, she would need to surrender more. Those occasions became fewer as she grew more experienced as an agent, but they never disappeared entirely. In fact, the last time she hadn't been able to avoid sleeping with someone to get a lead on an artefact was the retrieval in Paris the summer that Christina had been murdered. The retrieval hadn't gone well from the beginning, and her growing pessimism about its success had almost made her cable Caturanga with the demand that it be called off, but she had decided to soldier on and spend a few extra days in the city to try to bring the retrieval to a conclusion. The woman she had hired to look after Christina was unwilling to extend her employment even at double pay, and Helena, in desperation, had turned to acquaintances of Charles, "cousins," he had called them, based on some nonexistent blood tie between their families. The puzzling family sentiment in a man who had little sentiment and who had cut himself off from his family (with the exception of the sister who was the other half of H.G. Wells) was explained when she met Madame Delaroche, a buxom blonde who tittered whenever Charles's name was mentioned. She had turned out to be harmless as had her long-suffering cuckold of a husband, but an afternoon spent boating with an important client of Monsieur Delaroche, an outing that would have been far less entertaining if a sniffly Christina and her nurse had been allowed to join them, had been a self-indulgence that, in Helena's eyes, was nearly as heinous as the killing of her daughter and the nurse.

Helena shifted in her chair and checked the time on her phone again, almost wishing it were an assignation. Almost. The downside to arriving early was that it gave her time to think, and often her thoughts would wander down fruitless paths like these. She hadn't murdered the Delaroches, as she had Christina's killers, but she had destroyed them, all because they had prized a potential business opportunity above staying home with the niece of a man who had equally gifted husband and wife with his favor, although only Monsieur Delaroche's had been in the form of money. The possibility that the course of events would have turned out no differently except, perhaps, in there being four murder victims rather than two, she had brushed aside. She understood only too well the obsessiveness that served at first to relieve and then to replace the pain of grieving. The Delaroches had operated a rare books and antiques business, which Charles was fond of frequenting on his trips to the Continent and not only because of the complaisant Madame Delaroche. Within 15 months of Christina's death, as the result of some well-placed whispers of fraud and debts that were unexpectedly called in, it had been auctioned off to repay Monsieur Delaroche's mounting liabilities while Madame Delaroche had gone back to live on her family's farm in Alsace-Lorraine. Helena had frequently wondered if she wouldn't have taken the farm away from Madame Delaroche, too, if she hadn't become completely absorbed with the time machine.

"Helena?" Ed's voice was gentle, but she jumped at it all the same. He pulled out the chair across from her and lowered himself into it. He was a tall man, but not so tall that he should move so awkwardly. He appeared to be favoring his leg again, but that didn't answer for all of it. His height would draw attention, and Ed appeared to be a man uncomfortable with attention, unlike his father. His setting his mug down was a two-handed job. Helena noted it but slid her eyes up and away, smiling at him in gratitude that was only partially feigned. His arrival had stopped her from thinking about the even sadder end to the Delaroches' fall from respectability, if not grace.

"I'm so glad you could meet me." If there were a faint hint of desperation to her words, so much the better. She would be battling ghosts while she talked to him. While she might like to think that in the 130-plus years of her existence she had learned to accept responsibility for what she had done and live with the burden, her crimes refused to be passively shouldered. They were noisy with remembered terrors and pleas for mercy, cries that she would have the same done to her someday and recriminations whose origin – whether they were those of her victims or hers alone – she could no longer distinguish. Most of the time she could keep them to the volume of the white noise in an office setting, an unceasing mutter at the back of her mind, but today, today she had to stir her ghosts, wake them.

"Like I've said, I'm happy to help. What can I tell you that will reassure you that this new treatment for your father will work?" He lipped at his coffee, decided it was too hot, and set his mug back on the table.

"I'm interested in any . . .metrics . . . you might have on the treatment's performance. Actually, any data at all, on how many patients have shown progress, the length of time between diagnosis and remission or cure." Helena smiled and widened her eyes. It was harder to keep her tone light. Mockery gave her voice its richness. "Obviously your father's reputation . . . well, it's what brought my father and me here, but I'm a hard facts girl when you get right down to it."

"We're beginning to build a body of data, but the treatments are still too new. We need more time – and more patients." Ed tried to smile as broadly, but he looked away from her too quickly.

Helena debated whether she wanted to get another cup of tea. She wasn't sure how long or how deeply she could probe before Ed invented an excuse to leave. "When I told you my father is all I have I meant it. Once upon a time I had work that was important to me, friends, a child, and then I lost all of them. My daughter died senselessly and violently, and, while it may sound theatrical, I literally went mad." There was no shrinking away from her now. Ed's gaze was level and unwavering. "I lost my job, I drove my friends away, the only one who stood by me was . . . ." She tried to picture an Artie Nielsen unlike the one she knew, more like her own father, but all she clearly remembered of him was his shuffling walk and his wheezing rages at her and her half-sisters, which wasn't all that different from Artie's shuffling walk and bursts of ill temper. The only one she could picture was the only one who had stood by her, or tried to. But she could hardly introduce Myka's name into the conversation. "Was my father."

"You won't lose him" Ed said. This time he didn't look away, but he blinked, as if the intensity, or need, with which she regarded him was too much. He took refuge in his coffee, taking a long drink and then carefully patting his mouth with a napkin. "My father and I know what that's like. My mother . . . her cancer was aggressive and not responsive to standard treatments. He was helpless, and my father wasn't used to feeling helpless. Like you, he retreated from his friends, resigned his position at the hospital. My mother's death changed everything for him, and he had to start fresh."

"Your father was a lucky man," Helena said. "The sense of powerlessness is corrosive. You spend every waking minute trying to pinpoint what you did wrong, where you failed her. When that's not enough, you hunt down those responsible and make them pay. And when that's not enough," her voice dropped, "you try to bend reality itself to your demands. 'Bring her back, don't let her die.'" She paused before saying softly, "Are you so sure that's not what your father's doing?"

His blinking increased. "I don't understand what you're talking about, Helena. I'm very sorry about your daughter, but it's not the same thing –"

"I understand your father better than you do. The belief in our own omnipotence . . . the loss of that's harder for some of us to endure than the death of those we love." She couldn't stare him into submission, but she could keep her voice soft and conversational and let it beat at him like rain. "Before I lost everything that mattered to me, I still had one friend, someone I worked with. He was junior to me, and as the more experienced employee at our . . . firm . . . I was supposed to teach him everything I knew. I did, and then some. He was privy to all my obsessions, my vengeful schemes, and though I knew he was disturbed by what I was letting my daughter's death turn me into, he remained my most loyal supporter. He shouldn't have. He should have gone to my superiors, but he didn't. He thought he could save me." She didn't have to stage how she would say what was coming next. She saw Woolly's open, friendly face, the faith that, yes, this time the time machine would succeed, heard his boyish giggle at his pun. His screams followed only minutes after. The memory of them unsteadied her words. "I ended up losing him, too." She paused. "You can't save your father by denying what he's doing."

"So, this is what it's about? He has his detractors. Are you and the man you call your father working for them? They think he's running a scam, but he's not. They're small and petty and jealous because they don't have his vision." His outrage, necessarily conveyed at low volume, was further undercut by his now-incessant blinking, which Helena found dizzying to witness. Or maybe she was suffering the vertigo of seeing poor Woolly's face superimposed upon Ed's, though Woolly had never been hangdog like him, because Woolly had always believed. This man in front of her had stopped believing, long before the advent of Edison's magical fluoroscope in Tom Oliver's life, she suspected.

"I can talk like this about your father because we're cut from the same cloth." She shook her head at Ed in the fond admonishment she used to reserve for Woolly and his unsullied faith that what was wrong could be put right. Even her. "How many times did you put yourself under the fluoroscope before you knew it was a lie, that your father's 'treatment' wasn't curing anyone?"

Myka

Claudia had spent her lunch finding them a functioning monitor for the web conference with the regents. "Good luck," she grunted after plugging the monitor into the laptop. She grinned at Diane. "Got your Depends on?"

"What?"

"Agents have been known to pee their pants when the regents do a post-retrieval review." Claudia hooked her thumb at Myka. "Just ask Agent-Who-Needs-To-Do-Her-Kegel-Exercises here."

"Ha." Myka swatted at her.

"I feel that I'm well prepared for this. When was the last time the regents reviewed your medical records and asked intimate details about your sexual activities because they wanted to know how closely your history dovetailed with that of your genetic double?" When Claudia uncertainly scoffed and muttered "HIPAA" under her breath, Diane lasered her with a glare that reminded Myka of Helena. "If you're a potential threat to life as it's lived on this planet in this reality, then HIPAA is the least of the laws you have to worry about being ignored."

"Did she just throw shade at me?" This time Claudia's thumb hooked toward Diane. "Maybe I'll have to rethink my decision about not letting her into the clubhouse." She turned on the laptop and typed in a web address. "Once Adwin logs in, you should be able to join. I'm going to motor before the regents get a glimpse of me."

She didn't literally run out of the room, but she pulled the French doors closed so hard they rattled. Diane sat down next to Myka and crossed her arms. Then she uncrossed them, moved her chair back, and propped her legs on the table, slouching down in her chair for good measure. "Think this works?"

"Only if you want to be sent back to the CDC."

Diane chuckled as she pushed herself up and put her feet on the floor. "As embarrassing as it was to hear the doctors talk to them about the results of my pelvic exam, it was worse having one of the regents ask me, when I had to tell them about the intimacies Warehouse followers would offer agents, if more than one agent participated because," she lowered her voice and said in a passable Southern accent, 'in ancient Rome, the temple of Dionysius held bacchanals.'" Myka recognized the regent, a judge from the Eleventh Circuit court. "He was visibly disappointed when I said that wasn't how it worked, that whatever happened between an agent and a follower it was private. For the follower, it wasn't sex or only sex, it was an observance. Completely sailed over his head." She sighed. "My reality missed its purpose in not being his personal stag film."

"Your reality has p*rn?" Myka felt she was channeling Pete, but she was curious.

Diane glared at her in exasperation. It was only slightly less intense than the glare she had given Claudia. She was about to say something, likely withering, when the monitor flickered and Adwin Kosan came into view. "We'll talk," she stopped, bewildered by what she was about to say next, "we'll talk about that later," she hissed.

Myka suppressed a smile as more regents began to join the meeting. Smiling, especially anything that resembled a smirk, could send the regents the wrong message. Powerful people, not surprisingly, often wanted their power acknowledged. Smirking was a challenge, not an acknowledgment. She took a breath and met Diane's eyes. "Ready?" At Diane's nod, she turned the laptop's camera on.

Adwin was under no such constraints, greeting them with a tiny, frosty smile. Tiny and frosty, but a smile. The meeting couldn't become too hostile, not if he was smiling at them. All 12 regents were in attendance, which was even more of a rarity since they were meeting virtually; a few of the regents lived in countries with time zones that were several hours ahead. The initial questions were the basic, information-gathering ones that Myka expected: how did the 'anomaly' come to their attention, when did they decide that they were dealing with an artefact and not an anomaly, how did they identify the artefact. Some of the regents even took notes.

"Agent Bering, did you believe that this object was an anomaly?"

Myka thought that her and Diane's responses thus far had made that clear, but she knew better than to betray a reaction. The regents usually entered these reviews convinced that the agents had screwed up. She wouldn't be able to convince them to arrive at a different conclusion if she couldn't keep her temper. The regent asking the question wasn't the circuit court judge but a Silicon Valley CEO. Among the other apps his company had developed was an app that reviewed online reviews, identifying which seemed authentic and which were likely fraudulent. Of course he would be skeptical. "Initially, yes."

"Initially," he repeated. "What made you change your mind?"

Myka resisted the impulse to look at Diane. "I started to question what we had when we learned that the first person to have witnessed . . . experienced the anomaly had died. My understanding of how anomalies work is limited, but from how Diane has described them, I didn't think they had an artefact's 'recoil.' When we heard that the second person to have miraculously escaped death was seriously ill, we both were considering that what we had was an artefact, not an anomaly."

"You both were?" Another regent asked with disbelief. She co*cked her head and stared at Diane. "My, it sounds like you were quick to give up on the idea of it being an anomaly."

"I may have been a little slower than Myka to conclude that the anomaly was really a relic, but, in the end, that's what it was." Myka could see Diane's jaw muscles stiffen. "I was too eager to see it as an anomaly," she admitted.

"'Eager,' that's an interesting word," the circuit court judge mused. "You've been with us for almost three months, and this was the first time we've heard of something thatmightbe an anomaly. Why so eager now?" He took off his glasses and made a show of cleaning the lenses. "Wouldn't have anything to do with Agent Lattimer's abrupt departure, would it?"

Myka leaned forward. "Agent Lattimer volunteered for a temporary assignment. He hasn't left the Warehouse, and our search for the anomaly was completely unrelated."

One of the newer regents cleared her throat. "I'm not sure where we're going with this line of inquiry, Duane. Let's not invent a conspiracy where one doesn't exist." Dr. Kim focused her attention on Myka. "You've said you initially believed that the artefact was an anomaly, but did you understand how Diane came to that conclusion? Did she explain her thought process? Was there any kind of independent analysis that was done?"

"I knew she had been working with Claudia to develop a program that would filter news media and social media for potential leads on anomalies. I read the articles she found about a series of unusual events in southwestern North Dakota. I could understand why she found them intriguing."

"'Intriguing' doesn't tell us whether you or Artie Nielsen or anyone else in the Warehouse tried to arrive at the same conclusion using other methods," Dr. Kim said.

Myka hoped she wasn't betraying the irritation she felt. "We've never encountered an anomaly, so we have no 'other methods.' We had no advance information that there were artefacts in the area," she said, avoiding the use of "ping machine," which Adwin thought was unprofessional. "It's not unusual for us to be sent on a retrieval when it's not clear that there is an artefact. We operate on the 'better safe than sorry' principle. Since we didn't have anything telling us that an artefact was involved in these near-death experiences, it seemed plausible that the cause might be an anomaly."

"Still, you simply took the word of this woman, a genetic duplicate of Helena Wells, who claims, with virtually no evidence, that she comes from an alternate version of this reality, that you were dealing with an anomaly? At the very least, why were you the only agent to accompany her on the trip? Why weren't more agents assigned?"

Duane, the circuit judge, chimed in with "Unacceptable breach of basic security protocols. Adwin, we can't let this stand. I know you respect Nielsen, but the lack of discipline, it's intolerable." A number of regents nodded in agreement.

"I'll speak to Artie and Irene about this," Adwin said smoothly, "but to keep the meeting moving along, will you please address Dr. Kim's questions, Agent Bering?"

More agents weren't assigned because we don't have more agents, but let's put aside the chronic lack of resources at the Warehouse.Ididn't want any other agents with us. But Myka knew she couldn't say any of it. "We haven't been able to discover any plot, any confederates, any indication that she's sprouted from the mind of Helena Wells. Yes, to take her at her word, to treat her like a Warehouse agent was a risk, but it was a risk we've been willing to run. To find out whether she's a fox, we've had to –"

"Let her into the hen house," Dr. Kim finished. "I believe that's one of Irene Frederic's favorite turns of phrase."

Diane didn't look at Myka, but she sat straighter in her chair. "Looked at that way, either I would reveal my malevolent intentions or, if there were an anomaly involved, I'd be returned to my reality. It was a win-win from that point of view, despite the danger to Myka." With a dryness that had Myka's cheeks burning, Diane said, "On the other hand I was partnered with the Helena-killer, so to speak. Who better to go up against me?"

"Admirable effort," Dr. Kim said dryly, "but I'm not sure I can give you the save." She looked down at a sheaf of papers and turned over only the top one. "I want to better understand why you weren't able to retrieve the artefact. Your report says it had 'shattered.' How does a fossil shatter? How did you know that was what actually happened to it? How –"

Myka felt an unwelcome pressure at the base of her skull. She was going to have a monster headache when this was over.

Helena

"What?" Ed exclaimed, then lowered his voice. "What are you talking about? Why would I have used the fluoroscope on me?"

His right eyelid began to twitch, and he impatiently rubbed his eye. But Helena didn't need the tell, she knew she was right. She was 99% sure she was right. She was highly confident that she was right. Bollocks, she had gone all in on what was, at best, an educated guess. It had had support from Dr. Kim but no confirmation, unless she wanted to rely on Ed's eyelid. She had returned to the hotel after meeting Ed and arranging to meet this afternoon, rapidly assessing what she knew about him to identify her best option for persuading him to tell the truth about his father. The son of a father who was a giant in his field, the seeker of true love on a dating site, the reader of "great men" biographies. She had turned them over and over in her mind, shuffling them with her and Artie's suspicions about the fluoroscope's imaging power, hoping each time she would deal herself a better hand. Glumly she had concluded that she might have to resort to the kind of book club conversation that reduces a book to a series of events that mirrors the reader's experiences ("So, Ed, how would you say Winston Churchill's relationship to his father might be similar to your relationship with Tom?"). Yes, that was precisely the stroke of genius that made her such a valuable agent.

Pushing the bed pillows behind her head, she cleared her mind and reviewed, as if she were watching a movie, her first meeting with the Olivers and her trip back to the clinic to talk to Ed. Of course, before there were movies, she had likely had another analogy for it, although she couldn't remember what it was. The slow, detailed recreation of a scene, it was something she had taught herself to do when she had started experimenting with time travel. She had had to minutely picture the room that had been Christina's bedroom when she had been left with Charles's mistress, everything from the frayed carpet on the floor to the pillowcases, yellowed with age. At least inSomewhere in Time, Christopher Reeve had had a coin to focus his thoughts. She had had only her obsession. Picturing Ed, she revolved him in her mind, noting his resemblances to his father and the details that differed. Unlike his father, he shuffled, he blinked, he held himself as if he carried a burden that might crush him at any moment.

Helena had reached for her phone on the nightstand and called Claudia. Claudia, as usual, had bemoaned the additional work. How was she ever to meet someone when she was babysitting the Warehouse like an overprotective mother with her first child? She hadn't had a weekend off in . . . she couldn't remember when. At least Helena could give her Friday night. She had a standing online date with a reformed hacker who had Fargo's skillsets and more and was way sexier – if she could trust the picture he had sent her. And if she couldn't, he was more interesting than what Helena was asking her to do now. Find out everything she could about Ed Oliver's medical history . . . legally.

"You're putting me on, right? There's no way I can give you what you want in the timeframe you want it without breaking into things. You know that, H.G."

"I can't afford to have you hacking into systems and news getting back to the regents. You do remember the last time you stumbled over a tripwire when you hacked information?" Claudia's growl was audible, but Helena ignored it. "Your chances of doing it cleanly in less than 24 hours are too small." In a retrieval that had targeted an artefact thought to be at a military base, Claudia had hacked into a database of personnel records that had actually been set up to infect a potential hacker's computer with malware. The regents had had to endure a long, unpleasant conversation with top officials at the Department of Defense, including the Secretary of Defense. It had been part of the "retraining" Helena had had to undergo when she was brought back to the Warehouse. Of the do's and don'ts lectures she had been given, the don'ts had far exceeded the do's.

"Don't try to pass this off as thinking of me. You're just too chickensh*t, H.G.," Claudia said scornfully.

"You're right. I respect your genius, Claudia, but you're not infallible, and when I leave the Warehouse again, I would like the regents to want to be helpful in my job hunt. At Claudia's snort, Helena said, "I rail at the regents, I speak of them with derision, I even speak to them with derision, but there is nipping at the hand that feeds you, and then there is taking the hand into your mouth and savaging it. They are what I have instead of a job history and sterling references. I have a 401(k) to grow. People my age worry about things like that."

"People your age are dead." And with that, Claudia ended the call.

Helena had stayed up late enough researching illnesses whose symptoms included headaches, lack of balance, vision problems, and fatigue (she couldn't be sure that Ed suffered from it as well, but he was what Elle would have described, disapprovingly, as "low energy") that every miscellaneous noise of the hotel and its guests settling down for the night was amplified – a toilet flushing in the room above, the rattling of the elevator. Eerily amplified, she might have said if she had been prone to fearing sounds, but sounds in the night were welcome. It was the silence deep into the night that could still terrify her. She broke around three o'clock, having narrowed down a disturbingly large number of possible maladies to the few she thought most likely, given the particularities of the situation, including the artefact. She slept until six, when she got up, put in her time on the treadmill, breakfasted, and cruised a few more websites before calling Claudia.

She asked in lieu of a greeting, "What do you have?"

"In store for you?" Claudia laughed evilly, or tried to, before complaining, "It's 6:30 in the f*cking morning out here, H.G."

"I wanted to call you half an hour ago."

"Bitch," Claudia mumbled.

"I heard that."

"You were supposed to." She sighed, and Helena heard the squeak of one of the office chairs in the war room. "God, I don't know how long I data-mined sites, until I said 'f*ck this sh*t' and contacted Marcus."

"Marcus."

"As in Aurelius. That's what he goes by, you know, my online guy. Anyway, he got you what you wanted, H.G."

"I said legally, Claudia."

"I didn't hack it or buy it on the dark web. Marcus helped me out because he wants to get in my pants."

"Please say no more – about any of it."

"Which I would happily let him do, if I could get a f*cking vacation away from this place." Claudia was quiet for a few moments. "Marcus sent me a file from a clinic billing database that had been hacked a couple of months ago. Ed Oliver was a patient, and the doctor was a Paul Agnelli."

"What are the charges for?"

"Diagnostic services, various tests, exams." The pause was significant. "Do you want me to send the info to you."

Helena's pause was also significant. "Yes," she said finally.

That had been more than six hours ago, and Helena would have gladly suffered an eternity of Claudia's sarcasm if she hadn't had to do what she was doing now. She watched the battle in Ed's face between outrage and something twitchier, which might have been guilt. Eventually he pushed himself away from the table and less than gracefully stood up, using one hand on the table for balance. "I'm not going to listen to any more of this."

"You're losing your sense of balance, the headaches are getting worse. You hoped your father's fluoroscope would shrink the tumor, didn't you?"

"I don't –"

"You've been seeing Paul Agnelli." Helena found it more difficult to say what was next than she had anticipated. She looked down at the table, trying to ensure that her composure would hold. "He's a specialist in brain cancers, especially glioblastomas." She had called Lydia Kim after she had finished with Claudia, figuring "any time" meant any time, even if it was before nine on a Saturday morning. Twenty minutes later, having received a thumbnail summary of Dr. Agnelli's professional background, a mini-lecture on brain cancers, and confirmation of the pronunciation of "glioblastoma," she had called Artie, begrudgingly providing him with an update. The rest of the morning she spent trying to anticipate Ed's response – and dreading their meeting. His face had blanched, and she wanted to look anywhere but at the eyes that were the same eyes, no matter their shape or color, of anyone who had hoped for too much from an artefact. Anger, disappointment, and, even more painful to witness, a residual eagerness to be convinced that it had all been a mistake, and only if he tried harder . . . . "The prognosis is grim, isn't it?"

Ed sagged, folding down, rather than lowering himself, into the chair. "If I'm lucky, 12 months." He offered her a surrendering smile that was more relieved than pained. "I could do with another cup of coffee."

In addition to the coffee he had requested, she brought back a second cup of tea and two scones. She wasn't hungry but sipping tea wasn't sufficient occupation. She needed more distraction than that. Dimly she remembered the feeling of satisfaction, often intensified by a completely unmerited surge of triumph, when she knew she was on the verge of retrieving an artefact. Her superior intelligence, diligence, effort, whatever she chose to call it that day, had won out, yet again, against someone who had depended on an artefact to reward him with what he didn't deserve. There wasn't a little reverse snobbery in her attitude because so often, in her day, the ones who acquired the artefacts were the ones who least needed them. They already possessed privileges of status, education, wealth, which those whom she had lived among would need artefacts to achieve. The loss of Judith had had her questioning just how clever she was, and the loss of Christina had only pointed up how hollow her successes were. Now she felt only nauseous and very, very tired.

She didn't have to prompt him. Ed anticipated and answered her questions before she asked them. In the lost years after Karen's death, his father had sought guidance from so-called self-help gurus, "Charlatans, quacks," Ed said bitterly, "but some of them spoke of amulets and magic powers, crap my father once would have refused to hear." But he had listened, showing interest in the most heterodox of cures, including one that was reputed to reverse even terminal cancers. Its origin was obscure, but there were rumors that it had come out of Thomas Edison's laboratory. "My father sold almost everything he had, liquidated his investment accounts. I begged him not to, but he said he had had a dream about my mother, and she told him it would've saved her."

"So it powers what must be that enormous fluoroscope in the office."

Ed choked on a piece of scone. Mainly he had been crumbling it between his fingers. "It's not in the fluoroscope. It's in a drawer in my father's desk. When we tried to put in the fluoroscope, it nearly exploded on us. Couldn't even keep it in the same room. Sometimes the building shakes as it is."

"You'll have to show us."

"Right, you and your . . . father." He squinted at her, although the lighting in the coffee shop was what could be described as "warm, full-bodied, with a deep amber tint." However, Helena suspected it wasn't the quality of the light but rather the Medusa-figure he must believe she had turned into. "I wouldn't have let it go on so long if I hadn't thought that my father really had stumbled on a miracle cure. I mean, people were getting better."

"The placebo effect. If your doctor tells you your cancer is in remission, you're going to start feeling better." Helena took a sip of her rapidly cooling tea. Just once when she was on a retrieval, she would like to finish it when it was still warm. "For a time."

Ed nodded. "When they started reporting symptoms again, my father and I tried different things, more of the drug regimen, less of the drug regimen, more time under the fluoroscope, less time, but every scan showed the same thing, the tumors and malignant cells dying. We didn't understand." He balled up the rest of the scone, a large pile of crumbs, in a napkin. "Then I started falling, tripping. I couldn't see straight. Numbness, weakness. I figured it was something neurological, but I didn't want to tell my dad. I made an appointment with Paul. He was one of my father's many mentees." He finished a little bitterly, all but asking why his father always found time for his students but none for his family. "I had an appointment with Paul a couple of weeks ago. I had been zapping myself with the damn thing every day. Christ, I'd even come in late at night, just so my dad wouldn't know, but the tumor had grown."

"I'm sorry," Helena said.

He responded with a derisive huff. "Don't bother." He waited a few seconds, then said with a sigh, "That was rude." He blew out another sigh. "What now?"

She had been sorry. She was sorry. She would still be sorry after they had retrieved the artefact. It was her belief, experience, fundamentally, that if things were going as well as they could be, then people wouldn't need artefacts. It was that simple. Artefacts were dodgy. Unreliable, unpredictable, dangerous. They made an often unhappy situation worse, and when Warehouse agents swooped in to claim an artefact, the possessors returned to a reality that, if it were more tolerable than it had been before, was only because they were thankful they were alive to experience its disappointments.

Myka

"That was brutal." Diane slumped against the chair with a long, weary sigh.

Myka rubbed the back of her neck. Kneading the muscles wasn't making her headache go away. Brutal, yes, but compared to the meetings she, Pete, and Artie had had with the regents after Yellowstone, not soul-crushing. She probably would have retreated to the safety of her parents' bookstore even if she hadn't had to endure the regents' scathing appraisal, but the condemnation in their faces had been fuel to her flight. Until the day Irene had arrived with Helena or, rather, her hologram, Myka had daily expected to be fired, and she had survived the tension that built from the moment she got up in the morning until she went to bed at night by planning her post-Warehouse life in detail. She would work with her father and take over the running of the bookstore after he retired, she would run marathons, she would volunteer. After successive professional failures, Sam's death and Helena's betrayal, she wouldn't seek fulfillment in work. After successive heartbreaks, also represented by Sam's death and Helena's betrayal, she wouldn't look for fulfillment in personal relationships either. Moderation, caution, discipline, she thought she had respected those qualities, but she would embody them now.

She was such an idiot at times. Granted, she had been an idiot about Helena, but she had been an even greater idiot in her overreaction. As though she could have survived six months working full time in the bookstore, and while running in marathons and committing to more volunteer work remained worthy goals, she could no more play the field when it came to relationships than she could resist learning a procedure to its last detail. If she couldn't give her heart to it, it wasn't a relationship she wanted to pursue. Her place was with the Warehouse and if that meant subjecting herself to the regents' withering and, at times, unfair criticisms, she would accept it as part of the experience. "They did go overboard on how much money the retrieval ultimately cost." Myka rose, stretched, and shut the laptop. She surveyed the clutter of coffee mugs, Perrier bottles, Monster Energy cans, a half-empty package of chocolate Twizzlers. It had been a three-and-a-half-hour meeting. They had had to find a way to survive it. "As my dad always says,' 'The table won't clean itself.'" Actually her father would yell, "How are you girls going to get anywhere if you don't work? The table won't clean itself. If you want to be a worthless lump on the couch, Myka, go ahead." Her father always sounded better after a little editing.

Diane pulled a chocolate Twizzler from the bag. Meditatively chewing an end, she said, gazing at the mess "I look at it, and I think something grand should have been birthed, like the United Nations. OrStar Wars."

"No, only the right to keep working our jobs." Myka gathered up an armful of cans and plastic bottles.

Diane collected the mugs and followed her into the kitchen. "Six million dollars to pay for a broken artefact," she growled in her spot-on imitation of the circuit court judge, "the average taxpayer would be up in arms if he knew what his money's being spent on. Shoulda looked a little harder for it before you called on Mr. Nielsen."

"He's an ass," Myka said dismissively. "Artefacts self-destruct, it's in the archives." She started lining the counter next to the sink with the cans and bottles.

"More frequently than I would have guessed," Diane said, placing her mugs on the counter. "You were on a roll, citing all the artefacts that have disintegrated or exploded, seemingly without cause. I wasn't sure what was more impressive, how incendiary these things are or the amount of research you were able to conduct in a short amount of time."

"I knew they were going to harp on the money that went to the Warriners and accuse us, in so many words, of 'breaking' the artefact." Myka widened her eyes and gave Diane a look she hoped was innocent rather than glassy. "I had to defend us, didn't I?"

Diane's laugh was brief. "What was the purpose of that meeting? There were no helpful explanations of how we could have done better. No thorough consideration of other potential outcomes. No additional training recommendations. No identification of what we did well and how it might benefit agents on future retrievals. However, if the purpose was our utter humiliation, I would say they succeeded."

"No cranky, budget-conscious regents, sorry, elders in your post-retrieval reviews?"

"We don't have to defend the value of what we do. Our elders want to make us better agents, not drive us away. All of it's a learning process, what relics and anomalies are, why they exist, what they tell us about ourselves and the world we inhabit." Diane leaned against the counter. "Your regents seem to be completely unaware of what a privilege it is to be associated with the Warehouse, in any capacity. Or maybe they're indifferent, which is even worse." Absent-mindedly she loosed the knot of her hair, which had steadily been unraveling through the meeting, and combed the strands with her fingers, shaking them free.

Myka tried not to stare at her and diligently focused on rinsing out the bottles. Her headache was threatening to halve her skull in two, she felt both waterlogged and bloated, and yet she could acknowledge that Diane's simple actions were intensely erotic. Or they would be, if her head weren't killing her.

"I'm starting to sound like the old agents, the one who retire but never leave. They still live in the dormitories and they lecture the younger agents about how much better things were when they were young. The elders were nobler, the intercessors more spiritual, the agents superior." She grinned at Myka. "Handsomer, too."

"Some of the regents can be jerks. I'd like to believe they're all selected because they bring something special to the Warehouse, but a few," Myka shrugged, "I've figured they were appointed as a favor." She rinsed out the rest of the cans and bottles. "But who am I to say things like that? I'm just a lowly agent. Adwin Kosan isn't asking my opinion about anything."

"He seemed interested in your opinion about whether I was a help or a hindrance on the retrieval." The tone was light, but there was wariness in Diane's eyes.

"Are you fishing for a compliment?" Myka registered the wariness but hoped her joking response would lessen it.

"Not at all. Call me paranoid, but he was asking whether you thought I had tried to sabotage the retrieval in any way." Diane moved away from the counter and began restlessly circling the kitchen. "It's been three months since I found myself in that freight container, but the regents and most of the people here still can't seem to decide whether I'm the first salvo in an unknown enemy's attack on the Warehouse or one of my cousin's experiments gone horribly awry. No one wants to believe that, just possibly, I'm neither. Surely I would've done something by now if I had evil intentions."

"You wouldn't be the first to play the long game." Myka flung open a cupboard door. The axe that was cleaving her head in two had sunk in deeper. She dry swallowed a couple of ibuprofen, then thought better of it and poured a glass of water and drank it down. "Doesn't your Warehouse have to deal with those who fear it or want to possess its relics? It's not only those on the outside, it's the former agents, former regents, scientists, doctors, contract workers. They're the ones who come closest to doing us in."

"Occasionally there are threats, but," Diane stopped her circuit of the kitchen, "my Warehouse is a fortress, a very public fortress, but a fortress. A special division of the United Nations peacekeeping force is assigned to guard it, and, though we're never to acknowledge it, a special division of the host country's armed forces guards it as well. Yes, we do, on occasion, have a rogue agent, but it's nothing like what you have – a Helena Wells or James MacPherson. The people who serve the Warehouse are devoted to it."

Nettled by the sarcasm in the last remark, Myka snapped, "We're not all plotting the Warehouse's ruin, you know. Some of us are as devoted to our work as you are. In fact, so was Helena . . . once. She didn't go rogue. She was driven –"

Diane held up a hand to stop her. "I've been treated shabbily, but not by you. I've never questioned your loyalty to the Warehouse." With a gentleness that Myka found harder to hear than the sarcasm, she said, "It was a long, stressful afternoon, and, obviously, I need to relax and not think about it for a while. I'll see you later." With an apologetic smile that made Myka feel they were separated by a universe, or an alternate reality, rather than eight feet, Diane opened the back door and slipped out.

Myka remained rooted to the floor until she realized that she didn't want the day to end like this, feeling that she and Diane were further apart now than they had been after the retrieval. Swearing softly at herself and, for good measure, the regents, she chased after Diane, feeling her shoes slip on the icy walk. The motion lights outlined Diane against the black backdrop of the night. Coatless, she was huddled against the cold and walking very fast. Deciding that rushing up on her from behind wasn't the best approach, Myka called out to her to slow down. Diane turned, watching Myka slide to an arm-flailing stop inches from her.

"I don't want to argue," Myka said breathlessly, "but I'm feeling worse now than I did during the meeting. Was it what I said about Helena –"

Diane violently shook her head. "No, yes, maybe a little bit. It's not just Helena, it's beinghereand looking like her. The success of my work in my reality is fitting in no matter where pursuing an anomaly takes me, and I'll never fit in here. Listening to your regents, all I could think was 'They'll never see me as anything other than a threat because they will only ever see me as H.G. Wells, the 'father' of science fiction, agent extraordinaire, and monster, all rolled into one.Iwasn't on trial. She was, yet again. Do you recall how many times they referred to your retrievals with her, her leaving you and Pete for dead in Egypt, Yellowstone?"

Myka felt the cold bite through her sweater. It was in the teens, and the temperature was dropping fast. They wouldn't be able to stand out here much longer. She recalled the snide remarks about the "girl power" she and Helena supposedly exulted in, the pointed emphasis of her failure to read the clues about Helena's real plans. Maybe there had been more about her and Helena's partnership than she remembered, but she had absorbed it as only one thread of criticism about her performance among many. "It wasn't about Helena, it was about me, and my mistakes as an agent."

"Or maybe they were just making plain the truth of the matter – there's no talking about Helena without talking about you. You're the light to her darkness." Diane had begun to shiver, the tremors beginning to enter her voice. "You may not want to admit it, but you respond to that utterly unpredictable, utterly frightening side of my cousin. I don't know if you find it a challenge or a call to save her or both, but you're wedded to her, Myka." An unhappy chuckle escaped her.

"It's too cold to argue, so even if I do want to save her and even if she does want to be saved, I'm not the savior she's looking for." Myka jammed her hands into her jeans pockets. Is this all it took, standing in below-freezing temperatures without any protection, to squeeze the truth out of her? "I wasn't madly in love with Pete, and he wasn't madly in love with me, but I was enough for him. For the first time in my life, being enough was good enough. Then I saw you and I wanted –"

"You didn't see me. You saw her and you wanted her," Diane finished for her.

"Quit talking over me. I saw you and I wanted more, more than I had with Pete, because no one had ever looked at me like you looked at me. To you, I wasn't someone to best, I wasn't just enough, I was what you were looking for, me, Myka Ophelia Bering. How could I not be bowled over –"

Myka didn't get to finish that sentence either because Diane grabbed a fistful of her sweater and pulled her in for a kiss. Their lips were cold, and it was more a hard smack of lips than a kiss, but they weren't a universe apart anymore. When Diane drew back, Myka whispered, "Of course, I wasn't really the Myka were you looking for –." Diane silenced her with another a kiss, a softer one. "Are we in a better place now?" Myka asked, when Diane took a careful step backward.

"I know that you've given me more to think about," Diane said, "but something in me says that you still haven't reckoned with everything Helena meant to you, continues to mean to you." She took another hesitant step backward, and Myka hoped it was because she was searching for a reason to return to the kitchen with her instead of an ice-free spot on the pavement. Yet Diane found her footing and pivoted away, hurrying toward the cottage.

Kisses followed by more cautions. Myka wasn't sure which she should take to heart more. She walked carefully back to Leena's, her headache pulsing with every step.

Helena

Helena sighed, working herself deeper into the leather of the chair. One more sip of her Irish Breakfast, and then she would allow herself to doze. She had arrived at Logan at 4:30 a.m. to catch an early Sunday morning flight to O'Hare and had been rewarded with a free upgrade to first class. She could never predict when or how she would achieve a few hours of sleep except when she flew first class. A recurring fantasy was imagining herself sleeping on a first class flight from New York to London, Seattle to Tokyo, or Los Angles to Sydney. Perhaps she should arrange for a vacation during which she did just that, flew first class around the world, soundly asleep. She could have taken the same flight that Arttie had, a 9:30 p.m. flight to Denver with a connection to Rapid City that would result in him arriving at the Warehouse only a couple of hours before she left the hotel for Logan. But leaving later guaranteed an Artie-less flight. He hadn't minded, accepting without comment her suggestion that she stay overnight to provide Lydia Kim with an update the next morning. She would provide the update during her layover in Chicago.

He hadn't minded because secreted within the depths of his damnable valise was a neutralizer bag with a glass fragment from Edison's original fluoroscope. From the time Artie's Uber left him at the curb outside Dr. Oliver's office to the time another Uber took him away, artefact safely retrieved, no more than 20 minutes had passed. Did he ask her how she had managed it? Of course not, he had said only, under his breath, that "you were pushing the timeline." They could have finished this days ago had they taken the course she had recommended, which was stealing it. But no, there had been the farcical charade of visiting the office as father and daughter, her tortured conversations with Ed - the last had been torture, wringing painful admissions from them both - and then the pathetic reveal, the oblong of almost iridescent glass nested in cotton batting in a box in Tom Oliver's desk drawer, as if it were a baby rabbit the Olivers were trying to nurse back to health, not an artefact so powerful that it couldn't be in the same room as a fluoroscope. With a gruff "We'll debrief when you get back to the Warehouse," Artie had left her to attend to Ed, who had sat, wordless, in one of the visitor chairs in front of his father's desk as she and Artie, after they had secured the artefact, searched both offices to make sure there wasn't another "miracle cure" that Tom might have obtained without his son's knowledge.

Helena had sat with him for a long time, neither speaking. At last Ed had asked, "What will happen to him?"

Agents didn't clean up after a retrieval. The damage they caused in retrieving the artefact, the damage the artefact caused, the legal ramifications (civil and criminal), the political ramifications, the ethical ramifications, those were the regents' problems. In theory, that was how it was supposed to work. When the regents were incompetent or, as was more often the case, implicated in the corruption that frequently attended the surfacing of an artefact, the problems were blamed on the agents. She had witnessed it, she had experienced it. "I imagine there will be charges . . . and lawsuits. You'll likely be accused of defrauding the desperate, not to mention the insurance companies and the government." She said slowly, "If we had been able to leave the artefact behind or admit to its presence, you and your father might have a defense, if only to claim that it was all done in error. But after tonight, Ed, Artie and I won't exist, there will be no record that we were ever here, and anything that your father might point to as proof that he had possessed a part of Edison's original fluoroscope will either be erased or treated as a falsification."

"So, we're evil or we're crazy."

His hands were resting limply on his legs. He didn't resist when she lifted the one closest to her and interlaced their fingers. "You need to prepare your father."

"For the fact that he'll be spending the rest of his life in prison?"

"No," she said, leaning in and looking at him until his eyes met hers, "for what's going to happen to you."

He didn't look away. Instead his eyes filled with tears. "If I can convince him . . . he may never believe that the – what did you call it? – artefact didn't work as promised."

"The truth is going to be hard for him, but don't let him squander what time together you have left."

He let go of her hand and brushed at the tears. "You don't understand, not completely. He's not you. He won't surrender his belief in his omnipotence for anyone, not his wife and not me."

Recalling moments like that wouldn't ease her into sleep. Helena sat up straighter in her chair and flagged an attendant to ask for another cup of tea. When the plane landed at O'Hare, she had enough time to make it to her gate and provide Dr. Kim with a very brief update. She tried her at home, but Dr. Kim's husband shouted over the noise of a football game and children fighting over which Christmas cookies they got to decorate that his wife was at her office. It would have been a brief call had Helena been able to leave it at just an update. Dr. Kim made appropriate clucks of sadness and relief at the appropriate times as Helena relayed what happened, but she was clearly distracted and noted that the regents meeting yesterday had consumed more of her time than she had anticipated.

"I don't want to keep you," Helena said, "but I've been wondering, what made you think that this wasn't the onset of dementia or a psychotic break? Why did you see Tom Oliver in his new guise and think 'artefact?'"

"I'm a regent. Why wouldn't I?"

Because most regents are deeply uncomfortable with them. Regents in the 21st century, that is. The regents of her own time were still, by and large, God-fearing; they might detest curiosities, think them an invention of Satan, but they weren't unsettled by the fact that there were curiosities. Victorian-era regents didn't view them as an affront to the laws of science because science had yet to supersede the laws of man, which were, in turn, only a reflection of the laws of God. Curiosities were a part of the greater reality to which all living beings, sooner or later, would be introduced. "Typically a new regent has, shall we say, a period of adjustment."

Dr. Kim laughed. "Do you have time for a story?"

Helena surveyed the gate. The gate attendants were getting ready to announce the start of boarding. "Is it one with a moral?"

"No."

"Then I have time."

Dr. Kim's laugh was louder. Quickly sobering, she said, "My mother and father emigrated from South Korea, but my mother grew up in North Korea. When she was a teenager, a family friend, more of an acquaintance, gave her a hair pin. It was inset with a good luck charm, and he said he had decided to give it to her since he didn't have a wife or sister or daughter to give it to. He told her that she would know when to use it. She thought it was a strange thing for him to say just as she had thought it was strange for him to say he had no sister. He had had a sister who had tried to cross into South Korea years before, but no one had heard from her or of her since. One day she used it to pin her hair and discovered that she was virtually invisible. She understood then the gift she had been given." Dr. Kim cleared her throat. "Cutting to the chase, shortly thereafter my mother made her own escape from North Korea. She managed to make her way to the Joint Security Area and crossed over, literally sight unseen. Maybe my mother made up a tale about a magical hair pin to hide the truth about how she successfully entered South Korea. It happened more than fifty years ago, and most of her family, not to mention the family friend, are long dead, but that wouldn't matter to the North Korean authorities. On the other hand, my mother, despite having a 30-year career as a mechanical engineer, appreciates all that science and rationality can't explain. Maybe the magical hair pin was really a magical hair pin. I'll probably never know. She says she took it out one night when she crept into a farmer's hayloft not too far from the demilitarized zone and couldn't find it the next morning. She was afraid she might be discovered so she couldn't afford to spend much time looking for it. She bound her hair back with a strip she tore from her skirt and continued on her journey to Seoul." Dr. Kim stopped, then resumed in a softer voice. "I like to think that, having served its purpose, the hair pin transported itself back to North Korea, to help some other young woman looking for a better life."

"Stranger things have happened with artefacts." Helena was pacing the gate. There had been no free upgrade for her to first class and the last of the passengers in coach had disappeared down the jetway. She needed to get on the plane before they shut the door to the jetway. "Thank you for sharing that with me."

"Question for you. What do you make of your double? We had a post-retrieval review with her and Myka. I wasn't involved in a lot of the early interviews or meetings so this was my first extended experience with her."

Helena found her strides automatically lengthening as she charged down the jetway. One of these days she was going to lose her balance and roll down it like a barrel. She would prefer it to having to justify every item on a Warehouse travel voucher or defending every decision she made on a retrieval. Phone still to her ear, she nodded a greeting at the flight attendants and tried to wheel her carry-on down the narrow aisle without blundering into the aisle seats. Oh, wasn't it aces that she was at the very back of the plane? Maybe it was that extra concentration she had to devote to not ending up in the lap of the man in 16C, who truly made "hair suit" of hirsute, which had her saying, "She's not a threat."

"You sound pretty definite."

"Who better to know whether a Helena Wells poses a grave risk than Helena Wells?" She had arrived at her row, and she was the middle seat. The flight attendant who had been on her heels since she had started wheeling down the aisle lifted her roller bag and wedged it in the overhead bin. Then he slapped the bin door down and levelled a hard stare at her as she squeezed between the back of the aisle seat in the row ahead and the unforgiving knees of the passenger in the aisle seat in her row. She slumped in her seat, the cream in this annoy sandwich of a seating assignment. "She's not here to hurt the Warehouse."

"Then why is she here?"

"Wouldn't we all like to know?" The flight attendant gave her an even flintier stare and motioned to her to shut off her phone. With a hurried good-bye, Helena ended the call and turned her phone's airplane mode on. She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the fact that she was essentially jacknifed into a seat for the next two and a half-hours.

She's here to remind me of who I used to be. She's what I could have been had everything that created Helena Wells happened differently or not at all. She's a woman whom Myka can love without reservation. She's my past, present, and future all in one, my reset button, my wake-up call . . . if only there were a reset button to push, if only I wanted to wake up.