The man named Cameron was bundled tightly in warm, thick fleece, with stylish black leather gloves, an extra topcoat, and a pair of bright green earmuffs that he had burgled from a locker in the airport. He was firmly out of his comfort zone here -- Iceland was very, very far from his typical stomping grounds -- but this was where the trail had led, and Cameron was nothing if not persistent.

Getting to the facility had been less unpleasant than expected -- he had anticipated a long, rough drive into wilderness, possibly also followed by a frigid hike across some tundra. Instead, he found himself strolling through sleepy city streets barely five miles from the airport, then slipping into a trapdoor leading to an underground tunnel which led to what might be the most unlikely place for a top-secret data center imaginable: a hidden facility at the bottom of Lake Hamarkotslækur. He reflected with a smirk that "leak prevention" probably took on an extra meaning in this facility.

There were cameras and keypads and all the usual gestures in the general direction of security, as usual, but those were no barrier to him. A few secret override codes, a scrambler emitter, and the secret little whistle that caused security systems to reboot -- easy as peach pie. There were a few guards on duty, of course, but his directive badge ensured that they saw and remembered nothing at all. And then, almost before he was prepared for it, he was inside.

Very much despite himself, he'd expected the sorts of things he'd seen in movies -- vast, arching vaults of computery monoliths, stretching to the ceilings and away into the horizon, covered with pristine walls of glass. The reality, of course, was nothing like any of those things, because this was a black-site facility for storing the most secret of data, not a place for photo-ops. The datacenter was a bunch of claustrophobic little concrete rooms, each with its own intimidatingly secure flood door and ultra-high-tech watercooling system, and each rack of servers was separated from its roommates by several feet of empty space to prevent electromagnetic seepage (whether accidental or malicious). The racks themselves were squat steel structures, ugly and utilitarian, and had clearly been designed with engineering, security, and redundancy in mind rather than any aesthetic consideration. Heavy shutters surrounded each one, and he tapped them in disbelief, chuckling. "What, somebody gonna have a shootout in a server farm?"

"It has been known to happen." The answer, as unexpected as it was, startled him slightly -- a thing which did not often happen to the man named Cameron. He whirled, drawing his guns, and pointed them in the direction the words had come from.

Facing him, with his own pistol drawn, was another agent -- but this one looked very different from the ones he was used to. Instead of the typical G-man costume, this one wore aviator sunglasses, a leather jacket, and jeans over tough hiking boots, and its hair was cropped short instead of being slicked back. Cameron grinned. "Well, ain't you a trendsetter. Ain't seen a model like you before."

The agent slowly stepped closer, keeping its -- his? -- pistol trained on Cameron. "Technology marches on, you know. America never stops innovating." Its other hand, he noticed with interest, was gripping an old-style combat knife with a serrated back edge in a reverse grip.

"So it do seem." Cameron circled him, playing for time. Agents were never this chatty. Is this a human? he wondered. "But that don't explain what you're doin' here."

"What you should be doing." The agent circled him in turn. "Defending the nation. Serving the cause of freedom. Mom and apple pie."

Cameron snorted. "Robots don't have mothers."

The agent scowled. "Neither do traitors."

There was a pause, exactly the length of an inhalation. Then their guns spit fire.

Cameron dove for cover as he pulled both triggers, the loud blast of the reports deafening in the enclosed space. The agent, moving so fast that his form blurred, dodged around the bullets and closed in with the speed of a striking snake, and Cameron blinked -- this was another surprise, and he grimaced as he remembered the automaton's knife. Blindly, he spun and whirled a backhanded blow into his blind spot, and the shock of the impact numbed his arm as he deflected the unseen blade; his blow, continuing on, struck his opponent squarely in the jaw. The agent, knocked back by Cameron's greater weight, crashed into a server and bounced off with a tinny k-pangg! sound before disappearing into the shadows.

Cameron dashed behind another rack, listening intently for footsteps as he turned and scanned for his opponent. "Y'all been upgradin', I see!" He shouted out, hoping to elicit a taunting reply that would reveal his foe's position. "Gettin' angry seems like a useless function for a machine, though!"

To his dismay, three voices echoed back in unison. "Contemplate what purpose it serves in a human."

Cameron blinked, then dropped to one knee. From all three sides, identical agents appeared -- the guy from Top Gun, that's what they look like, he thought to himself weirdly -- guns and knives raised. Cameron's teeth and his sphincter both clenched involuntarily, and before he could stop himself, he played his trump card. His hands opened, dropping his guns, as the agents fired.

Three muzzles flared, three bullets erupted -- and went right through him, ricocheting with a spang off the steel cabinet behind him as his form became unsolid to all forms of metal and plastic. Reaching into the chest of the first agent, he gripped its clockwork heart and squeezed -- there was a jolt, a smell of burnt plastic, and a small puff of blue smoke. The agent shuddered, then dropped, but Cameron had no time to gloat -- two knives passed through his jugular and sternum without so much as an impact, but their wooden handles were not so ephemeral to him. He took two blows and went flying, crashing into the floor and sliding a goodly distance. Hot damn, the new models are even stronger, he thought as he skidded to a halt. The other agents fired a few shots into his prone form, but lead was a metal whether most people thought of it as one or not, and they passed through him like smoke and burrowed into the concrete floor. Shaking off the stun, he rolled and rose to meet the two remaining foes as they rushed him.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He considered trying to grapple them, but thought better of it -- they'd be watching for that move now, and the device rendering him cthonically permeable wouldn't operate for much longer. Instead, he ducked under their blows and fetched up against a wall, grinning cheerfully at them as they turned to follow. "So, tell me," he asked conversationally, "seein' as how we're under a lake and all, they get around to waterproofin' you fellers?"

The two agents looked at each other -- an anomalous event Cameron did not miss -- and started to scramble away, but they had been caught too off-guard. Reaching into a pocket, Cameron turned off the device and grabbed the item next to it: a small but powerful pistol loaded with armor-piercing rounds. With uncanny marksmanship, he shot right through his own pocket without bothering to draw; the bullet leaped directly between the two agents and struck unerringly at the water reservoir of the server rack behind them.

The spray of high-pressure distilled water, of course, did absolutely nothing to the agents themselves (possessing as it did the conductivity of a block of wood, which was the entire purpose of using it in a computer system) but it did provide enough of a distraction to get the job done. The long, narrow SLAP rounds took the agents through the heads as they turned and ducked reflexively -- one through the left eye, one through the right -- and they crashed to the ground like broken toys. Cameron breathed, shuddered a bit, and rose to collect his revolvers. Technology marches on indeed, you damn robots, he thought with satisfaction as he strode over the twitching automata.

His objective, two racks over, had truly formidable security on its terminal, but to Cameron it was the work of less than ten seconds to crack its encryption and locate the desired files. Many of them were irrelevant to his search, but one was not -- a small plot of land, surrounded by idyllic cottages and fields, with intricate geometric shapes only visible from a great height. Cameron quickly memorized GPS coordinates, did a little mental math, then smirked. "Well, now. I always did want to visit the old country."

----------------------------------------

To everyone else on Orton's flight, his trip had been highly unremarkable; he'd dozed for much of it, and spent what time he was awake mostly reading a magazine and eating pretzels while ignoring everyone around him. To anyone who actually knew him, this behavior would be highly unusual, but in this case it was because his body was operating almost entirely on autopilot, governed by something resembling a simple servitor process while the rest of his mind was elsewhere on planes (of the metaphysical variety, rather than the sort concerned with aviation) that his fellow passengers could not even contemplate, much less perceive.

His re-ascension to the third stratum of enlightenment had regained him a significant range of new capabilities, many of which were quite esoteric but nevertheless exceedingly useful when applied judiciously. He spent much of the trip reassembling fantastical castles and libraries inside his imagination -- memory palaces for the storage of intricately detailed recollections and facts -- and re-familiarizing himself with their contents, which contained further lore and arts he could combine to create yet more constructs to extract and recollect. By the time the plane landed, his powers had nearly doubled in breadth and scope (though not strength, regrettably). Still, he was confident that he would be able to use them effectively.

He glided through customs effortlessly, rode unnoticed on the backs of a few trucks and cable cars, and made his way into the sewers with unerring purpose. On the physical plane, his position and Enna's were deeply obfuscated from each other, but on the mental planes their communication had been as though they were adjacent; normally these two things might have had nothing to do with each other, but Orton could track the congruencies between them in much the same way a baseball player could deduce the trajectory of a pitch from the motions of the pitcher's arm. He slid airily down a ladder, turned a few corners, and sighed with relief as he arrived at his destination.

From Enna's perspective, the last few hours had been exceedingly dull; she'd managed to spend the first half of it reading her grimoire, but eventually her concentration had been exhausted and she'd been reduced to wiggling her feet idly and remembering, with increasing discomfort, exactly how poorly things had ended between the two of them six years previously. She was beginning to wonder if she had, in fact, made a terrible mistake when the circle of runes around her dissolved to reveal Orton's trenchcoated frame. Startled, she scrambled to her feet.

He looked good, she realized; the tall, scrawny, and wild-haired teenager of her previous acquaintance was gone, replaced by a tall, rangy, and wild-haired man. His body was toned and muscular, but with that peculiar sort of sinewiness one tends to associate with long-distance runners; he had a short beard that she quite liked, a hideously ugly knapsack that she didn't, and a new pair of boots that had clearly seen a lot more of the world than she had. She hesitated, then waved half-heartedly. "Um. Hey, I guess."

Orton nodded in response. "Hey. Hope you weren't too bored." Their reunion had been significantly less shocking to him; he'd already seen twenty-three-year-old Enna on the previous loop. "I got here as fast as I could; Lhasa is nearly halfway across the world from Zurich."

Enna blinked. "Wait. That's, like, at least a day of flying. How'd you get here in only a few hours?"

"Um." Orton shuffled his feet apologetically. "I didn't. You contacted me two days ago. I, uh, put you inside a..." -- he struggled for a way to phrase it -- "...slow... time... field. You basically didn't exist for nine out of every ten seconds, which was one of the ways I was keeping you safe from Gentry."

"Oh." Enna wasn't quite certain how to respond to that. "Uh, thanks, I guess."

"Don't mention it." Orton gestured at her grimoire. "Grab your stuff. We need to get moving."

Enna did so, looking around nervously. "How are you warding us now? Is he going to come back?"

Orton knotted his brow, trying to think of a way to communicate the current situation in a way that wouldn't be deeply misleading, and failed spectacularly. "We're safe," he hedged cautiously, "as long as we stick together."

"Trying to get back together with me, huh?" Enna smirked, then darted forward for a hug; to her shock and confusion, Orton stepped back involuntarily. "Wha...? What is it?"

Orton sucked his teeth. "Shit. Sorry. I, uh, just went through something pretty intense and I'm still a little twitchy." This was not remotely true; he had flinched, totally unexpectedly, upon catching sight of Enna's aura.

He had expected her essence to be different, certainly; she'd just spent six years on her own and had recently survived a rather upsetting turn of events. But his expectations paled before the reality, and he was very much struggling to handle his automatic reaction. Her aura was downright stygian, roiling with chaotic lashes of turbulence and degeneration; she was more Faded than even his greatest fears, inches from becoming a Shade. Worse, despite its lack of definition, he could feel its power -- she was easily more powerful now than Nej had been, even on the verge of a breakthrough to the third tier. He shuddered. "It looks like you've been through a lot."

Enna flinched, then shook her head. "Not before today, no. I mean, two days ago. Shit." She scowled, then smiled. "Why do you always complicate things, Orton?"

"It's a talent." He gestured for her to follow him. "I know you need rest, but it'll have to wait a little bit longer. The trail's already getting cold."