The first thing Sarah did after she left the parking garage was figure out Tim's last name. It was Pennant, to be clear. Timothy J. Pennant. Born: 05/19/1986; dead: 09/21/2023. He didn't know how to drive a stick-shift, judging by the restrictions on his license. He'd also been an organ donor since approximately 2019. Somehow, between all of the voyeuristic minutia, it was this last fact which bothered her the most. Killing him was... not fine, per se, but there were enough mitigating factors to justify her role in his murder. Knowing that half a dozen patients would suffer because of where they'd dumped his body? That hit closer to home. It was easier to acknowledge the loss.
"I wonder how many of my siblings would have flayed themselves to live your life?" Sarah stared at Pennant's portrait and flipped the laminated card between her fingertips. Up ahead, past the yellow grass and the tired grandeur of the once great and mighty, there sat a three-story brick building. A pair of hexagonal towers protruded from the worn facade and jutted out across the wild lawn. Between these buttressing spires was a half-dismantled veranda and the doors to the lower apartments. Meanwhile, around back, Sarah could make out a narrow staircase, which led to the two on the second floor.
A sign on the wall announced who was renting each of the four units. Pennant had signed the lease for 'apartment C,' so Sarah waited until the street was clear before she wandered over to peek inside his mailbox. She lifted the iron flap attached to the dented caddy. The receptacle was empty. It was honestly just as well. The area had grown rather rundown since its heyday, and Sarah wouldn't have been surprised if someone had burgled the bin to make a quick buck.
Her hazel eyes speared the forlorn container while the thought played through her head. She... probably hadn't been beaten to the punch. It'd certainly be a strange twist of fate for events to line up in such a manner. Fitting, though; there'd be a cruel poetry in their conspiracy being unraveled by an act of petty theft.
The parasite closed the lid as laughter swelled within her chest. She shook, bent over and then gulped desperately for air. Sarah felt everything save amused. What a joke. She'd question why Pennant had been the one living in this shithole, except the answer was all too clear. It was because he'd had no say in the matter - no choice. Not like Sarah and her kin. After all, why worry about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth when you could just take it out of someone else's? If you were going to steal a life, it might as well be a good one. Rich; unwary; well-connected. The priorities changed, depending on who you spoke to, but they all had a type.
Sarah's had been minimalistic. She'd never wanted to lie more often than the situation had required. Poverty was a distraction - as was maintaining a personality that had been shaped by an unfamiliar zeitgeist. Thus, a rich, young orphan had truly been the platonic ideal. Especially, since she was already expected to be traumatized; surely, her new guardian could excuse a few, extra foibles?
The ghostly sensation of piss-strained sheets clung to her skin as Sarah recalled the first few weeks spent learning to puppet her host. She'd been told what to expect, and trained in the act itself; however, second-hand memories had never been enough to compensate for the subtle incongruities. Those had required more 'bespoke' fine-tuning until the endless shutters had finally ceased.
Her lisp had been the hardest flaw to correct. The elements which had benumbed her tongue had never been physical in nature. Not really. How could they be when she'd spent the first year of her life swimming through the ocean as a starving mute? At least, human children got to cry; Sarah couldn't even bite her tongue until she'd taken one by force. In that light, was it any wonder why she'd been struck dumb by Amelia's unthinking largesse? The food had been too inexplicable - too outside of her ability to anticipate. Later, once she'd internalized the idea that this would become her new normal, it'd been easier to maintain her composure. During their first awkward family dinner, though? That had been the moment when she knew she could never go back. It was either this or death: she'd be Sarah Fields or a corpse.
A drop of fuel exploded through a passing Ford and pulled Sarah's mind back to the present. She glanced over her shoulder at the truck's smoking muffler and then searched the nearby windows to see if any had been thrown open along the desolate road. How long had she been standing in the middle of the street? Was anyone growing suspicious? She couldn't tell. More to the point, she wasn't in a position to do anything about their curiosity even if someone had stuck their head through the frame.
There was an order to intrusion - a checklist if you will. First, she had to make sure no one was home. Then, depending on whether or not the apartment was empty, she'd need to make sure the entrance wasn't booby-trapped like Sarah had arranged for Amelia. Pennant was paranoid. Worse, he'd been the type to wake up and choose violence. It wouldn't have been beyond the pale for him to have hidden more than a camera. Say... a tripwire leading back to a shotgun?
Sarah stood next to the threshold and pounded on the peeling wood. A few, quick blows using the bottom of her fist rattled the splintered frame, but no one was summoned by the knock. The door wasn't perforated, either. That meant she'd have some leeway. 'No time to take advantage of it, though,' Sarah acknowledged while sweat broke out across her brow. If peering through the windows would be incriminating, then busting through a wall would be worse. It'd be better to just risk the door.
Sarah reached into the pocket of her jeans for the small ring of keys she'd stolen from Pennant's corpse. One of the metallic slats would be for his car; another would've been issued by his landlord once he'd signed his lease. Sarah wasn't sure what the other three unlocked, but she also didn't need to when she could just jam each of them into the keyhole until she found the set of teeth that fit.
It ultimately took three tries. After the cylinder turned, and the handle slid down, Sarah knew it was time to roll the dice. 'Please, don't blow up. Please, don't blow up. Please, don't blow up.' The chant echoed in her ears as she inched the door forward. A crack appeared in the entryway without her muscles feeling a pinch of resistance. She worked the gap a little wider and then ensured there'd be enough space for her shoulder to slip through the hole. While she lined up her arm, a few rays of afternoon light played over her shaking hand. Sarah hoped they'd illuminate more than her manicure but failed to have much luck. If a wire had been suspended between the door and the frame, it wasn't reflecting the sun.
She ran her fingers along the edge to double check. Praying that the tripline's absence meant the way was genuinely clear, Sarah slipped through the narrow aperture and then shut the door behind her. "One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi..." She let the count climb into the twenties before concluding there wouldn't be a response. Not a mechanical one, anyway. Magic-wise... Sarah let her tendrils pick through the musty air. Magic-wise the apartment was fine. There was a seed nearby - some amorphous, social mass - but it wasn't worth remarking upon. It certainly wasn't enough to conceal a spell from her questing senses.
"I wonder if he went for detection over deterrence. There must be something in place."
Sarah got down on her hands and knees. She ran her fingers over the floor to see if anything had been knocked loose from the door. A piece of string, perhaps? Or a sliver of wax, designed to scrape against the boards? When her search proved fruitless, she examined the ceiling, instead. Nothing. Just a few cobwebs and an old chandelier that was sporting a bit of mold around the bracket.
"This is going to drive me nuts."
It might even throw her more out of sorts than Pennant's cluttered foyer. He really had just tossed everything by the door, hadn't he? Knickknacks; old clothes; a replica 1957 Harley Davidson with the front wheel mount missing. The rest of his apartment was clean, minus the visible wear and tear; however, that just meant there was more room for his conspiracy paraphernalia to spread out along the wall.
Sarah eyed the nearest corkboard with keen disdain. The porous wood was positively covered in a layer of annotated, black-and-white printouts. Most of them were too far away to be fully legible, whereas a couple stood a touch closer and had enough crooked lines for her to identify them as half of a map. "I bet there's a method to this madness. A place for everything and everything in its place."
The apartment didn't deign to reply. Sarah refused to begrudge the building its secrets, though. It was already uncomfortable enough to step into her tormentor's shoes; there was no reason to invite a hallucination while she picked through his scattered junk.
And it was junk, Sarah decided as she peered around a discarded Erector Set. There was just too much dust stuck to the refuse to let Pennant ever claim otherwise. It must have been a good three months since he'd last investigated the pile. At this point, any attempt to do so was likely to collapse the whole rotten edifice.
...That or remove the dirty film covering the outer edge. "Yeah, these are decoys," Sarah concluded before rising from her crouch. "The corkboards probably are too. Nobody who believes the government's been suborned would be so careless about tipping their hand. I'd have better luck looking for a zip drive concealed behind the insulation."
Sarah chuckled at the mental image. It was funny because most infiltrators would've burned his house down before they'd bothered to conduct such a search. Sarah... wasn't at that point quite yet. Maybe if his neighbors didn't live in the same building, she would've had fewer compunctions. Sadly, the other units were occupied, and that made arson a complicated recourse. Morally speaking. Practically, it'd be the easiest thing in the world.
'Let's save that for Plan C,' Sarah mused, mindful of her own callousness. 'Plan A still has some meat on the bone.' Besides, she was curious about how much Pennant knew. Or perhaps more specifically, what Simon had done to give himself away. Had it been his behavior; his associates; some physical marker unconcealed by his host? She had to know. If it required her to risk being discovered, she was willing to put in the time.
Unfortunately, time alone was insufficient since noon soon passed without further edification on the matter. Sarah uncovered a lot about Pennant's obsession, but details regarding his comrade's thought process continued to remain out of reach. It was actually a bit of a pickle because the more she pried into the mystery, the more Arnold seemed to have been fabricated wholesale. This was not all Carl's idea like Pennant had tried to purport. Instead, the lanky bastard had possessed a ton of opinions on who they should recruit, how they could arm them and what they should be doing with those guns. The material on display could be fake - the details and procedures all wrong - however, that didn't change the fact that the illusion had been thoroughly constructed.
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"Honestly, officer, these aren't my drugs; I'm just holding onto them for a friend! Tch. We should have shot that asshole in the head." Sarah stared at the floor plan for the Massachusetts State House with growing exasperation. Part of the map was guess-work, since some of the rooms weren't open to the public; however, the rest had been covered in diagrams describing where each security camera was located. The entrances and exits were also clearly marked as were the number of guards stationed beside them. "How's that go: 'every accusation is a confession?' And people claim we're the threat."
Sarah tossed the crumpled cardstock onto the floor and then thumbed through a novelty calendar that was missing every entry prior to August. On the current page, an overenthusiastic elephant was roasting marshmallows above a reminder to buy a bag of quick lime. Sarah wondered if the powder was supposed to help Pennant brew a bucket of concrete or destroy the evidence of a crime. The answer was probably both; the man seemed like the type to plan his felonies around what he'd seen on Law & Order.
The iconic tone echoed through her head at the same time someone knocked on his apartment's front door. Sarah stared at the grinning pachyderm, unable to believe the sound wasn't a hallucination brought about by studying Pennant's murder map. Then it came again. Finally, with a faint crackle, she heard someone wipe their feet on his plastic mat. "Yo," their owner called out. "It's three o'clock, man. You done getting ready or what?"
A long nose poked its way into the hall. Followed by a bushy mustache and a pair of rectangular frames, the intruder carried himself with a certain, lax gaiety even as he adjusted the backpack thrown over his shoulder. His companion wasn't quite so sanguine. Nineteen, give or take a couple of years, she was wearing a long-sleeved blouse and had a cloak wrapped around her neck. The latter fluttered fitfully while the three of them froze by the corkboard.
Sarah recovered first. "You must be Timothy's friends," she greeted them as a facade of affability slid across her mien. "I'm afraid, he's running a little late, today. Sorry about the delay."
'They know each other,' she quickly deduced. 'You do too. Girlfriend - no - awkward one-night stand. He made you breakfast but had an appointment he couldn't miss. He offered to let you take a shower and then told you to lock up when you were done.' Sarah tucked a strand of hair behind her ear while the lie settled into place. "Do you... want a cup of coffee? I was thinking of making myself a pot before I headed out."
The hipster blinked and closed his gaping mouth. "Uh, sure? ...Yeah? Yeah, that'd be great." He found his manners not long after his wits. "I'm Adam. This is Kaitlyn. Are you Tim's sister or...?" The question slowly petered off.
Sarah pretended not to sense the lingering distrust as she showed the two her back. "Let's hope not, it'd make last night rather awkward if that turns out to be the case." The kitchen was more well-used than a mess, so it wasn't hard to squeeze past the crooked table in order to reach the smoke-stained cabinets. "How do you take it: black; decaffeinated; with cream and sugar?"
"Whatever's fine," Adam replied before glancing at his companion. "How about you?"
Kaitlyn bit her bottom lip. "I'll pass. I'm not comfortable raiding someone's pantry while they're not here to okay it."
"Are you sure?" Sarah asked. "I promise he won't mind."
The young woman crossed her arms beneath her bust. "Yes. It's a 'me' thing. Please don't worry about it."
The way Kaitlyn stood as she made the request struck Sarah as vaguely familiar. The parasite had seen an echo of her sullen stance before. It was her silhouette, she decided. The pronounced curve of her collarbone couldn't help ringing a bell. Sarah bounced a can of Folgers against the center of her palm while the deja vu prickled like a burr. No matter what she did, she couldn't quite place where they'd met. "This is going to sound weird, but do we know each other?"
Kaitlyn winced. The expression on her face twigged Sarah's memory. "No, wait. Don't tell me. You were on the news. That thing with the van." She had been the telekinetic - the one who'd nearly gotten fried by the ash elemental, duking it out with the police. Unlike the rest of her team, she'd been fairly close to the construct, so when they'd accidentally blown the vehicle, she'd avoided the worst of the shrapnel. What a small world to run into her here.
"See," Adam whispered while nudging her in the ribs. "I told you we were famous. You gotta flaunt that shit. Play it up."
"Let's not go too far," Sarah warned him after she sensed the woman's distress. "It did take me a minute to recognize her." She cracked the lid on the can and sniffed the sandy grounds. "Still, that's no reason to vacate the stage yourself. Activate your swag if you think you have any. Show me your moves." The young man struck a pose. Sarah gave it a four out of ten. "I like the low-angle lean. It's got a very distinctive flair."
Adam removed his hand from in front of his face and carefully straightened up. It was difficult to soothe the pair's conflicting personalities, so Sarah was relieved the compliment went over well. "Thanks," he said, a broken snaggletooth slipping past his lip. "I put an embarrassing amount of practice into staying on my feet. I don't suppose you have any tips?"
"Nah, I just know what I like." Sarah set the expired beans on the counter before groping around for a pot. "How about you? What did you do before your fifteen minutes of fame?"
"Data entry," he confessed, his shoulders rising in a sheepish shrug. "I gotta tell you, being an action hero feels a lot better."
Sarah checked the pale green kettle for rust. "I bet. Movie stars get paid, though: when you do it for free, you're an extra."
Adam laughed. "True enough."
The knot of tension, which had been wedged between his brows, slowly began to unravel. Much like a strand of fishing line, set below the eponymous rod, Sarah sensed his attention dart to and fro until it finally settled on his companion.
Kaitlyn bit the inside of her cheek. "What?" she asked him while he endeavored to communicate with her via his gaze alone. "Just spit it out already."
Adam sighed at his teammate's obstinance. "Don't you think we should say something? About the thing we had planned?"
Kaitlyn shook her head. The tiny shudder attempted to convey her disagreement without drawing Sarah's attention.
The warspawn caught the subtle shiver, anyway. "Is this a magic thing?" she interjected while struggling to project disinterest. "If so, then I'm not sure I really want to know. I played around with learning how to throw fireballs at the beginning of the month, and I have - like - zero talent when it comes to pyromancy. It's honestly a little hilarious."
Kaitlyn cleared her throat. "It's not a magic thing," she insisted with almost unseemly haste. "We just need to talk to Tim."
Sarah glanced at Adam to see if he stood by the same assertion. He wasn't having any trouble meeting her gaze, so that reduced the number of things this could be about. "Let me guess, he asked you to preview his latest History Channel special."
"You know," she continued when they didn't quite get it. "...Aliens?" Sarah held her hands up like Giorgio Tsoukalos.
Adam got the joke. Kaitlyn didn't, and Sarah suspected her incomprehension was due to their age gap. It was honestly a little demoralizing. On the bright side, her attempt to lighten the mood shook the sorceress out her funk even as the jest expired on the kitchen floor. "You're killing me," Sarah complained with a wry twist of her lips. "I might literally die in the next few minutes. The least you could do is fake a chuckle."
Kaitlyn tried. Sarah was reassured by how bad she was at it. "Sorry," the young woman apologized after her half-hearted spasms died down. "I haven't been in a laughing mood lately."
Sarah empathized; the reasons for her own solemnity weren't so selfless, though. 'They've seen me in Pennant's apartment,' she noted idly. 'They're also close enough to just walk in. When 'Where's Waldo' doesn't turn up, they'll mark his absence and assume I had something to do with it. He may have spoken to the cops after we allegedly parted ways, but I'll still be heavily exposed.' Sarah filled the pot with water and hunted down a couple of cups. 'It's probably for the best if their lives end here.'
"You sure I can't interest you in Timothy's pet project?"
'Please say yes,' Sarah silently begged them. She knew she wouldn't feel guilty if her identity was at risk. The way her brain was wired simply wouldn't permit it.
"Nah," Adam admitted, inadvertently dashing her hopes. "We're just here for a friends and family thing. I should be able to say that much without stepping on any toes."
Sarah set the water to boil. "I see."
And she did. 'They're recruiting,' the infiltrator concluded as she leaned against the counter. 'They took casualties against the elemental and now need to refill their ranks. Pennant's a radical. He's also used to taking action. They might not know what he's been up to, but his temperament's bound to have colored their interactions. Can I use their interest to kill two birds with one stone?' Sarah ran through their conversation in her head. 'Yes. Yes, I can. It's going to fucking grate, though.'
None of Sarah's peers liked to talk about the Offal Sea. Even when they were forced to acknowledge what they'd done, it was easier to just leave the room and let someone else explain the particulars. There was a... distaste to the proceedings... which none of them could quite ignore. It wasn't knowledge of the Network that unsettled them, nor the shame of their crimes, but rather a visceral aversion to breaking the masquerade. With that being said? The full weight of their reluctance only ever applied to themselves.
"I understand," Sarah reassured them, her eyes lidded with self-absorbed sympathy. "Some things really do feel like they should never see the light of day. Getting together with your friends to form a neighborhood watch? I understand how your concern can come off as legally fraught."
"Hey!" Adam laughed while Kaitlyn flinched at the accusation. "We prefer to be called 'vigilantes.' The other's a loaded term."
"Because Batman beats up fewer brown people?" The pot began to whistle, causing Sarah to take it off the stove. She stared at the rising stream until the water had mixed with the grounds. "Sorry, I'm being unfair. Anachronistic too. My ex told me that fighting criminals hasn't been a thing since the seventies. These days, the comics all deal with more fantastical issues, instead."
Adam canted his head towards Pennant's crazy wall. "Like aliens, for instance? Darkseid, the Reach and all that?"
None of those names were familiar. "Maybe. Would you permit me to give you the fifty-cent tour? I'm afraid it's something you're going to have to come to grips with if you mean to execute your duties."
"Of course, she's a conspiracy theorist," Kaitlyn muttered to herself. "Why else would she be fucking him?"
Sarah took the backhanded compliment in stride as she settled on which of Mannly's associates would be most likely to remove them from the board. "Believe me when I say, 'I'm not going to enjoy this conversation.' I don't want to tell you these things - I need to. It's imperative. Both for your sake as well as the public's."
Adam was willing to play along. "Why? Are you going to tell me it was E.T. who gave us our magic powers? That it's all just sufficiently advanced bullshit?"
"I think the nature of mana is tangential to the crux of our problem. There are hostile forces out there, and they're willing to throw their hat into the ring. You've fought one. I know there are others."
"Sure," Adam agreed easily. "I believe it. I won't even claim to be surprised. Running across another by accident, though? Surely, our luck's not that bad."
Sarah was too upset about their conversation to be amused. "I don't think luck plays a factor once you've made a decision to run towards danger. At this point, all you can do is prepare for the worst and mitigate the consequences when you mess up."
Adam swayed towards his companion and bumped her with his shoulder. Kaitlyn suppressed a sigh. "Fine," she bit out. "We'll listen to your spiel. It can't be any worse than picking aluminum splinters out of Julien's back."
Sarah faked a wince; it'd be expected of her persona. "I'll get the printouts. It'll be easier to explain with some aides."