Stakeouts, Chase decided, were some bullshit.
Granted, this wasn’t exactly a revelation. Every cop show he’d ever seen had emphasized just how mind-numbingly boring stakeouts could be. Also granted, this wasn’t really a stakeout. He was just waiting for Jess a short distance outside Bobby’s security office, not peering through binoculars in the dead of night hoping to catch the Marduzzi crime family smuggling cocaine through their private dock or something like that. Still, he imagined the emotional cocktail was similar. Three parts boredom, one part stress, and a shot of worry shaken over ice and garnished with a desire to never have to do this again. A bitter drink, but one he couldn’t stop sipping.
After what felt like hours but his phone assured him was only fifteen minutes, Jess emerged from the security office, pausing to gently shut the door behind herself with a minimum of noise. She gave a quiet sigh of relief before setting off back towards Chase, who fell into step beside her as she passed the hallway intersection. She gave him a smile and the pure trust he could see in her expression nearly made his heart melt on the spot. Such 24-karat sincerity should be illegal! She opened her mouth to speak, but Chase shushed her with a gesture and took another look behind them at the firmly closed security office door. Turning back to Jess, her expression now was the much more familiar mixture of affection and annoyance he’d come to know, capped off with a raised eyebrow.
“He’s asleep again, you know. Parasite must have really done a number on him.” Jess said sympathetically.
“Honestly doesn’t surprise me. But we can’t be too careful, right?”
“That’s rich coming from you, Mr. Taunt the Ceiling.”
“Sheesh, you make one ill-advised dramatic gesture… frankly, I blame Echo.”
“How even? We hadn’t even found the picture frame then!”
“Echo works in mysterious ways.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Keep telling yourself that, maybe someday one of us will believe it. It won’t be me.”
Chase shook his head with a smile. “Maybe I will. Anyway, you get the keys?”
She fished them out of her pocket and twirled the lanyard around her finger. “Of course, I’m not a scrub. It was like taking candy from a very large, very sleepy baby.”
“We best watch out for the inevitable tantrum when he wakes up to find them gone, then. Invest in earplugs now.”
Jess frowned. “That’s actually a good point. It’s not like he’ll have a long list of suspects when he does notice they’re gone, and the camera recordings are right there. How are we going to deal with that?”
Chase paused mid-step, then sheepishly rubbed the back of his head. “I may not have thought that far ahead yet?”
Jess gave him a flat look. “You hadn’t thought that far ahead yet?”
“In my defense, this whole operation came together very quickly and none of you pointed it out either!”
She sighed. “That’s an annoyingly fair point. Burn that bridge when we come to it, I guess.”
“Arson would probably solve the problem. By creating an entirely different problem, but by then it would be future-Chase and future-Jess dealing with it. You know those two have their shit together, they could handle it.”
“We’re doomed, aren’t we?”
“I suppose from a certain point of view, we all are born just to die. Didn’t expect you to get existential on me here, Jess.”
She buried her head in her hands and mumbled something Chase could barely make out. It sounded like “you’re lucky you’re cute”, but that was probably just wishful thinking on his part. Still, it was a definite hitch in their plans of avoiding discovery if the pilfered keys were discovered. Chase would just have to hope that one of the others had succeeded and they could return them before Bobby even realized they were gone. Maybe even before he woke up at all.
The two of them reentered the dorm to find Kayla already sitting at the kitchen table, sketching away furiously in a notebook. She looked up as they entered, gave a curt nod, and returned to her scribbling for a few moments before tossing the notebook aside. Moving to read over her shoulder, Chase discovered that it was a map and a series of notes in the margins, like she had been watching a group’s movements and noted down everything they did. Chase made a mental note to ask her for stakeout advice, it looked like she was practically a pro.
“Take a look.” Kayla said, pushing the notebook to the side so both Chase and Jess could see the full map. “Found some researchers taking supplies from a storeroom around here. Seems like whatever they’re doing, it’s taking a lot of materials that aren’t resetting for them. Could be an in.”
Chase nodded. “Good stuff! I didn’t even think about that being an issue, it’s definitely an opportunity for us. We had some luck too, Jess snagged Bobby’s keys.” On cue, Jess dumped the keyring onto the table and flashed a thumbs-up. Kayla gave an appraising look before nodding and gesturing back to her hand-drawn map.
“Looks like we’ve got options, then. There’s a couple other places where they’ll probably scavenge from next, we can either hope they cleared out that storeroom and use that path now that they don’t have a reason to or try to get ahead of them. The keys should work either way, right?”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Jess waggled her hand uncertainly. “I mean, probably? We haven’t exactly had a chance to test them yet. Still trying to avoid attention, even though we’ll be just about the only suspects once Bobby finds them missing.”
“Shit, good point. Puts us on the clock.”
“How likely is it that he actually realizes they’re gone though?” Chase mused. “That guy conked out within minutes of two strange college students asking to see probably restricted security footage last time, and apparently was out like a light today too. He might be so out of it he forgets those keys even existed.”
Kayla shrugged. “Would be great if it works out that way, but plan for the worst, right? Means we’ve probably got a day or so to make use of em, maybe just the rest of today if we really wanna play it safe.”
“We could probably sneak in and return them without him noticing,” Jess said. “It just feels like a waste.”
The conversation petered off there, and Chase went into the kitchen to make some thinking tea. It was true that they’d all been wired on the promise of further discovery and hadn’t considered those pesky little things called consequences when putting together the plan, and he would need some good thinking tea to come up with something workable before Bright and the others cottoned on to their investigation. Or maybe they wouldn’t end up caring at all, not seeing the student group as a threat. Chase barely understood Echo, he was far from an expert on interdimensional ghost parasite psychology.
He handed off a cup of tea to Jess and got a smile in exchange, an absolute bargain of a trade. The cup he handed to Kayla was met with a simple nod of acknowledgement as she turned to a new page of her notebook and began jotting something down. The dorm settled into comfortable silence punctuated only by pencil scratching across paper and the occasional sips of tea. The door opening broke the slight reverie, as the remaining three members of the group returned all at once.
“Yo, pull up a chair.” Chase called out, raising his mug in a mock toast. “Hope your mission were just as successful as ours.”
“Yeah… weirdly so.” Tom muttered as he sat down, stretching his hands across the table. “It was like Marcus had been waiting for me to ask about it. Feels almost like I got set up, but I’m not sure how.”
“Well, let’s add that to the list of things to maybe worry about! What about you, Miles, Ellie?”
“Our experience was shockingly similar.” Ellie began, frowning. “For all our efforts in the past, we could not convince anyone to give us more than a scant overview of what comprised their various experiments. Today Ashok and Marianne seemed almost eager to share after only a bit of prompting.”
Chase frowned. “And Kayla just happened to stumble across some researchers raiding a storage closet, and Jess easily lifted the keys from Bobby at the security office. Far be it from me to complain about things going well, but doesn’t this seem too easy?”
“Yeah.” Kayla’s trademark scowl was back. “Yeah it does. I was expecting one or two of us to find something useful, not success on all fronts. Something’s fishy.”
“Do you think they already realize what we’re doing?” Miles asked nervously, turning to Chase. “You said they see the world differently than we do, could they have seen this coming and set it all up?”
Chase mulled it over. “It’s possible.” He admitted. “From what Echo showed me, they tend to see everything at once, but only if they’re watching out for it already. I was counting on us to be something unexpected, but if one of them was specifically watching for any potential disruptions, we may have shown up on their radar. Bright isn’t an idiot.”
“Who is Bright?” Ellie asked, eyes widening.
“It’s what Echo is calling the parasite probably attached to Dr. Redmond and heading things up here. They don’t really have names for themselves, but we needed a shorthand.”
“I see.” Ellie looked contemplative. “It would make sense for this Bright to set up some kind of early warning system. The last thing you would want in any kind of delicate experiment is an uncontrolled variable.”
“And we are nothing if not uncontrolled.” Chase agreed. “Problem is, there isn’t another way to do this. Good news, we don’t have to worry about Bobby discovering the stolen keys and tracking us down that way; bad news, it’s because they already know exactly where we are and what we’re up to.”
Tom looked ill. “So all of this was pointless, and they’re just about to break down the door and take us all somewhere to get pumped full of alien parasites?”
A pointed silence followed Tom’s words as Chase and the others slowly turned their heads to the door. Only after ten long seconds when it didn’t open did they let out a collective breath as Kayla smacked Tom in the back of the head.
“Idiot! Don’t tempt fate even more! That’s something I’d expect from Chase!”
“To be fair, it was definitely something I would have done with that setup.”
Kayla turned her glare on him. “That doesn’t make it better!”
“Let’s calm down a bit here.” Jess implored. “Take a deep breath, take a step back. The situation’s far from hopeless, we just need to do some proper planning.”
“Jessica is correct.” Ellie said. “While the theft of the keys is out of the ordinary, the rest of us should now have aroused much suspicion. Only the fact that Ashok and Marianne finally agreed to accept Miles and myself as assistants is out of the ordinary, and that could possibly be explained by a general expansion in the scope of the research.”
Tom heaved a sigh of relief. “That makes me feel a lot better.”
“Yeah,” Miles agreed. “So how are we going to do this? We’ll be split up again, and only three of us have an excuse to spend time in the central labs.”
Chase rubbed the layer of stubble on his chin. “I need to talk to Echo again, see what we can manage. I don’t want to risk them being found out by Bright and the others, but Echo’s almost guaranteed to have a better understanding of what Bright’s trying to accomplish than we will. I’ll be counting on the rest of you to interpret whatever Dr. Redmond is contributing to this grand experiment.”
Miles blinked. “You want us, a bunch of undergrads, to interpret the experiment of the most brilliant particle physics researcher of the past three decades, guided by an unfathomable alien intelligence as she attempts something unprecedented?”
“Yep!”
“While your faith in us is inspiring, that does seem a touch ambitious.” Ellie hedged.
“Nah,” Chase waved away their concerns. “You guys can definitely do it, and I’ll see if Echo can help. Many hands make light work and all that, right? Though I don’t think Echo really has hands in the traditional sense.”
“You’re really expecting us to do this?” Miles asked, halfway between nervous and excited.
Chase met his eyes with uncharacteristic seriousness. “It’s this or spend the rest of our lives here slowly wasting away until we get found out and made into alien parasite food.” He forced a grin. “So, y’know, no pressure.”