Triptych (34 page)

Basil felt himself colour, at once pleased that the program he’d written had worked and furious that they had gone in and hacked his personal computer.
Well, of course that’s what they were going to do
, he chided himself.
You were missing. Besides, everyone on base is a paranoid bastard, lately.

Gwen flipped the page. The next one was filled with military speak written with so many dense abbreviations and code words that Basil could barely follow it. Gwen’s eyes skimmed over it and she nodded to herself, apparently approving of the plan that Basil couldn’t even decipher.

“And for the non-grunts in the room, that translates to…?” Basil asked, looking up, exasperated.

Aitken’s eyes flashed angry for a moment, then she went back to scowling at her own red folder. Shelley told them about the warehouse in a rural, half-dead community just outside of the metropolis, and the report that had gone to both the British government and local constabulary in the wake of the warehouse’s discovery. The military had been called into service, asking for a squad of Institute Special Ops soldiers and a van-full of geeks to help them take the place out. The sooner, the better, which was why this meeting had originally been convened with Shelley and his corps in the first place: they were waiting for the head of the military squad to come in and debrief them. Gwen and Basil’s presence — return — had just been convenient timing.

The operation was set for ten-fifteen in the morning.

“And you’re not coming,” Shelley added, closing his folder with a note of finality, his ink-black eyebrows squiggling down into a look of determination that Basil had seen quite frequently back when Shelley was helping him build the Array. Determined and bossy.

A hot flash of anger pressed at Basil’s sternum, but was dampened almost immediately with sleepiness and mental exhaustion. He looked down at his nearly complete device and sighed. The fun had gone out of tinkering with anything months and months ago — after Gareth, if he was going to be honest with himself.

Work, work, work, and all of it just leading to…what? Not much of anything but more killing, more violence, more pain. Disgusted, Basil pushed his screwdriver away. He had joined the Institute to
make
things, damnit — alien toys and better technological solutions and bridges between cultures, not for black ops raids and ways to track down people like animals.

No, no, these assassins, these bigoted assholes were not “people.” They had killed Kalp.

Basil picked up his screwdriver and went back to work.

“Excuse me?” Gwen said.

Basil felt all the little hairs on the back of his neck and arms stand upright. Uh-oh.

Gwen licked her lips. “Because we broke the rules but came back with a crap load of valuable intel, or because you’re embarrassed that we gave you the slip when you were supposed to be watching us?”

Shelley went red around the ears and glowered. “You’re fatigued,” he finally answered, eyes cutting around the room to the tight gazes of all of the other agents. Basil’s stomach tightened. Really, Gwen needed to stop picking battles in front of her co-workers. “You’re mourning.”

Basil cleared his throat. All eyes turned to him. “By which you mean that you don’t want us there because we’re ‘too emotionally involved to be objective.’” The splotch of colour crept inwards across Shelley’s cheekbones, flagging over his nose. “Which is exactly why you need us. We know things you don’t.”

Shelley snarled a “Dismissed!” at them, and Gwen and Basil had no choice but to obey it. Of course, they took their sweet sauntering time while they collected up their files and tools and trays, to make it very clear that they had no respect for his authority even if they still had to obey.

Aitken reached out to help Basil pile all of his mechanical bits onto his discarded lunch tray. One piece, something burnt and melted beyond any use, he thought, might have rolled onto the ground, but when Aitken bent down after it, she came up empty handed.

“I need more sleep,” Basil decided.

Gwen left the room first, head high and face closed. Basil shut the door behind him. They exchanged a glance. In unison they turned towards Addis’ office, and Basil smiled.

He reached out, ran his fingers down the inside of Gwen’s wrist and tangled his fingers with hers. “I totally love you, sometimes.”

“Only sometimes?” Gwen echoed with a snort. “I’m losing my touch.”

But it was good to hold Gwen like this again and he would not let her make light of his very real need for a connection right now. Basil tugged her to a stop in the hallway and folded her close and kissed her forehead gently. Gwen wound down a bit, her shoulders descending from around her ears. The hyped-up adrenaline shivered across her skin as her anger dissipated and her weariness weighted on her back. Basil knew exactly how she felt. The urgency of the debriefing and the rush of finding out about the sting operation could only do so much to fight off the pull of sleep and grief.

They reached Addis’ office suite and didn’t bother to knock. His assistant stood to berate them, took one look at their faces and sank down into her chair silently. Basil let Gwen go towards the inner office first, deploying her like a weapon, a calculated strike. Gwen, blessedly stubborn Gwen, pulled up her shoulders and straightened them and stormed in, slammed her hands down on the desk and then pointed to the scar on her own forehead.

Director Addis jerked backwards, eyes white all around his irises, startled. He dropped a mug of coffee into his lap and winced. Basil flinched in masculine sympathy. Ouch.

“They did this to me,” Gwen said very, very calmly when she was sure Addis’ attention had been drawn to her scar. Basil stood in the door, leaning against the jamb. He watched and tried not to grin. He knew that tone, that look, and knew from experience that Addis would eventually have no choice but to capitulate. “We went back and found me, there. A baby me. That’s where we went, okay?” Basil was only slightly shocked by her method of admission; he knew that Gwen was saving that particular tidbit only for the most potent blackmail. Apparently, she felt strongly enough about being a part of tomorrow’s mission to lay it out now. “I’ve been waiting twenty-nine years for the payback. I will be a part of the squad whether you authorize it or not.”

Addis sighed.

“Also?” Basil added, and held up the small cell phone that he’d been tinkering with since their return. “Mobile Flasher Tracker.” Addis’ eyes sparkled. “But it’s encrypted, innit.” The sparkle faded.

“This is blackmail,” Addis pointed out. Which…
duh.

Gwen smiled, but her tone stayed grim. “Is it working?”

“Officially? No,” Addis said. “I know you two are way too involved and I don’t even know everything that’s happened. Unofficially?” He looked down at his folded hands, clenched and dark against the slick surface of his creamy leather blotter. “My wife was killed by a drunk driver. Report to Agent Shelley tomorrow morning, Specialists. Get some sleep. Good night.”

***

They couldn’t bear to go home.

They were told that Specialist Wood had taken their chickens to live in her own back garden for a few days. A service had been called to clean the blood out of the carpets, and someone had packed up all of Kalp’s personal belongings, probably as evidence. The house was safe to return to, now; no grim souvenirs remained.

But they still couldn’t go.

Kalp was…Basil didn’t ask where Kalp was. Probably the Institute morgue. Basil didn’t know if the Institute had a morgue; but it had to, right? The Institute had performed autopsies on Ogilvy and Lalonde and Barnowski, so surely there was a morgue.

Somewhere.

He hated thinking about it, about Kalp far below his feet, quiet and cold and…not moving. Downstairs somewhere. Alone. Not sleeping. Just…just
not.
Basil curled up in a ball in his borrowed bed in the building’s private suite — reserved for visiting dignitaries and officials, usually, but put at their disposal — and tried very hard not to think about it. About, about
anything
.

The adjoining bathroom door opened and Gwen padded out, naked save for the water droplets that still clung to the back of her bowed shoulders, the steam that followed from the shower, the faint drifting scent of a cloying floral shampoo. Gwen snapped the bedside lamp off, sinking the room into complete darkness, and pulled back the covers. A blast of cold air crept along Basil’s spine, licked the bottoms of his toes, but then Gwen was there, shower-warm and damp. She tucked herself against him in silent misery, hooked her chin over his shoulder and said into his ear, with minty breath, “We should bury him beside Gareth.”

Basil nodded and squeezed her as close as he possibly could and replied, “You should call your mother.”

Gwen didn’t react as if she’d heard, except for a quick tightening of the skin right between her eyebrows.

Seized by the notion, Basil said, “C’mon, it’s the right thing. Right now.” He steered her first out of the bed, then into clothing, then out into the hallways, then into their office.

The whole room had been tossed, probably in an effort to figure out where they had disappeared to. Basil snorted; it wasn’t like even
he
had really believed that they would reappear where they had.

Basil ignored the minefield of scattered beads from their torn privacy curtain, clicking and sliding under the soles of their boots; he ignored that the contents of the drawers had been dumped all over the drafting table; he even ignored that his computer was off and he
knew
that he’d left it on before they departed.

What he couldn’t abide was that Kalp’s chair was lying on its side, futile and helpless as an overturned turtle, and looking just as sad. Basil paused and lifted it carefully upright, set it down gently on its feet as if it really were a living thing. He ran his palm across the backrest once, searching for…he wasn’t sure. Residue? Body heat? A fine dusting of turquoise hair?

The chair offered him nothing.

The hollow thing inside Basil echoed once, a low pang in the place where Kalp used to be. Where he still was, sort of, but not…filling the space any more. There, but not there
enough
.

Basil looked up. Gwen was already sitting on her own pilfered desk, watching him quietly with sad eyes. Then she turned to the phone. She picked up and dialled.

Basil moved around the chair, giving it a ridiculous and yet respectful distance, as if the ghost of Kalp was really sitting in it and Basil didn’t want to rudely bump his knee.

He’d give anything to be able to accidentally bump Kalp’s knee right now.

Looking up at Gwen, hesitating before she dialled the last and fateful digit, Basil amended that thought.
Almost
anything.

Gwen held the receiver tight against the side of her face. Her knuckles were white. Basil longed to reach out and brush his fingers across them, remind her to relax. Instead he slid one arm around her shoulders, kissed the dusting of white hairs that clustered around the puffy end of her scar.

He was close enough that he could hear it when the phone began ringing on the other side of the planet.

There was a muffled click and then a voice that he knew, oh, so well, said: “Piersons, Evvie speaking.”

Gwen sucked in a breath, sharp and a little scared sounding. A little
young
sounding, and Basil could hear it now; the pain that the rift between them caused, the child that Gwen had been when she’d shut her mother out of her life forever.

“M-mom?” Gwen said. Her grip strangled the handset.

“Hi, baby,” Evvie said. “I’m so, so sorry about Kalp. I wish I’d met him.”

Gwen sucked in another breath and heaved it out again in a wrenching sob that Basil could tell surprised them both.

“Come get your space ship, baby,” Evvie said, so softly that Basil almost didn’t catch it. “Come home.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Gwen whispered and turned her face against Basil’s neck. “Soon.”

“See you soon,” Basil echoed, and took the handset from Gwen. He hung it up and wrapped his arms around her.

They sat that way until Basil’s ass went numb.

He stood, punching his sleeping butt in an effort to bring back sensation, and Gwen turned away, pretending she wasn’t scrubbing ferociously at her cheeks so nobody could see the salt stains there on the way back to their room. They returned through the lesser-used hallways, Gwen leading the way; Basil followed and didn’t comment on this deliberate choice.

When they got back, there was a note on the door. Agent Wood had come by. She wanted to tell them that she’d transferred the chickens and their strange blue coop into the Institute’s courtyard that evening, thought Gwen and Basil would be comforted by the sight of their pets.

Gwen and Basil stood together in the private room, Gwen’s back pressed firmly against his front, her arms clasped backwards across his waist, his like bands around her shoulders. They stared out the window at the chickens two floors below them, fuzzy little fluffballs down in the Institute’s courtyard.

They were no comfort at all.

A yawning ache swallowed everything underneath Basil’s skin and even Gwen’s touch felt too cold.

The chickens pecked at the grass that had gone to seed between the cobble stones, looking lopsided and lonely now that they were just two.

***

“Agent Pierson, report!” came the staticky hiss over the headset. Basil had to resist the urge to tap his own earpiece and demand a response of his own from Gwen.

Being the smart bloke left behind in the surveillance van
sucked
.

It reeked of B.O. and gun oil and overheating electrical doodads. The air conditioning had quit before they’d even gotten past bloody Whitechapel, and being cooped up in a small space filled with whirring computers and twenty geeks and grunts had been no picnic. Basil had envied Gwen and Shelley and the rest of the Agents over in the military transport wagon, luxuriating in the cool breeze of a functioning fan.

Basil sat back in his chair in the far corner of the van. There were five different screens arranged in an alcove of computer banks around him, each with their own interface keys and ports. One was a radar that tracked all of their GPS tagged ops and military combatants, one was a sort of Google-Earth-on-steroids meant to work in tandem with the first, and one was for Basil’s necessary split second calculations and computations just in case he detected some Flasher activity while en route. One was devoted to the computer chatter between the different units of the operation, and the last was an early warning system for the initiation of a Flash, should one of the targets choose to try to escape in that manner. So far, that station had been silent. On the console beside that screen, the cellular phone that had been altered into a Mobile Flasher Tracker lay waiting, a funny little dog spinning in circles on the screen saver, ready to jump into action to point its user to the centre of the temporal phenomenon.