“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment-

_____

Malcom McHarn, director of the FBI’s Unknown Threats department, was having a bad day.

Relative to every other day he had at this job, it was actually a pretty good day. But he felt it was important to keep a sense of context; a relative view of things. The bad days here could be really bad. Learning that the country was under a secret invasion, that whole cities had gone dark and no one had noticed, that his department was the fifth iteration of something like this and as far as he knew the others had just vanished, those were bad days. Today was simply aggravating.

“Danson!” He called out as he opened the door of his office to look at the open cluster of desks packed down here in a Langley basement like they were some kind of CHUDs. “I have a note on my desk telling me to remind you that you left a note on my desk! What is this varsity level prank?”

Amy Danson blinked as she looked up from the satellite images she was studying. “I don’t remember doing that.” She said confidently.

”Fuck.” FBI department directors weren’t supposed to swear in front of their staff, but they did things slightly differently here. “Let’s run a complete check, everyone. Contact our field agents, make sure they remember they work for us.”

”Even DeKay?” Ports asked.

McHarn put on his best disappointed frown. “Stephen, DeKay is a valuable member of this organization. If she irritates you, that’s private business, and I expect it won’t impact your behavior.”

”Sorry sir.” Stephen Ports replied. “It won’t happen again.”

”See that it doesn’t.” McHarn repressed the urge to sigh. Currently, he was engaged in a criminal conspiracy to murder agent Tiffany DeKay. And he had a high confidence that she had planted listening devices in this room, though he didn’t know how much she had caught on and how much was just her and her spectral companion being paranoid. “Run the checks. Figure out how many empty desks we shouldn’t have. After that, Danson, I’d like that report on Tennessee.”

Analyst Danson’s mouth dipped into a frown. “I can give you that information now, sir. The others should hear it.”

”Go ahead.” Malcom was so tired, he should have sat down. But he had an image to maintain, so he simply stood by his office door and crossed his arms to listen.

”Records that mention names are degraded beyond uselessness. But I’d put it at high confidence that there was a small city near highway 230 off interstate 40. We’re talking twenty thousand people, minimum, but no more than thirty thousand.”

”Reasoning?”

”Logistics. I’ve been requesting trucking logs from that route and finding a significant percentage that arrive at their destination with different cargo than they left with.” This was why Malcom liked agent Danson. She was good at finding the discrepancies. Good at knowing when two pieces of archived paper disagreed with each other because of human error, and when it was because of interference. “Steve also did a social media scrape, and found… Steve, how many?”

Analyst Ports was busy scowling at a laptop. “I thought it was eighty but half of it’s degraded. So could be more.”

”Eighty plus individuals that identified as having moved from somewhere called Townton, Tennessee.”

”Is there, in fact, a Townton, Tennessee?” Malcom already knew the answer and knew he was going to need an advil after this. His staff looked at him with the kind of pitying expressions you used on someone you were about to deliver bad news to. “Perfect.” He said. “Retask one of the field agents to investigate. Send…” he froze, eyes going wide, teeth grinding as he tried to recall a name.

Malcom McHarn swept his gaze around the basement operations center. It wasn’t a small part of the building. He had his office down here, they had their own bathrooms and a sizable break room, and the long carpeted space had at least twenty desks in it. This wasn’t some dingy space for offloading people you didn’t want to see again. They had direct elevator access, for Christ’s sake.

Then he looked at his two analysts. And thought about how the only field agent that he had was Tiffany DeKay. Forced himself to focus on how many empty desks there were, still with files and computers and personal effects on them.

”Fuck!” Ports exclaimed bitterly. The man stood in a furious burst of motion, grabbing a paperweight off his desk and whipping it across the room to crash into something on one of the abandoned desks. “…fuck…” He repeated, the word a soft sob as the normally professional individual sagged.

”I’ve got…” Danson swallowed, her throat dry as she rapidly scanned through her emails and personal notes. “…I’ve got indications we had fifteen people as recently as last month. Multiple mentions of Alaska, something in the Chugach national forest. Then no further mentions. Undegraded report from an agent Tyber, about a potential group of interest calling themselves ‘stability management’ out of California. And a request from DeKay to have a different partner assigned. Most of the recent discrepancies center on the national forest and whatever we were looking into there.”

DeKay didn’t have a partner. There was no agent Tyber. There was nothing happening in Alaska.

What were they doing here?

The question was less about McHarn forgetting everything, and more a desperate plea to anyone listening for guidance. What was the point of this, when a dozen good men and women had just disappeared and no one had noticed, and they were no closer to having a handle on anything?

The whole point of the department was that they were meant to keep the American people safe from threats that had gone uninvestigated for too long. But they couldn’t even protect themselves.

He thought about DeKay, and Debt, the memory altering ghost that followed her around. It was entirely possible that the insane woman was responsible for this. But if that were the case, what kind of idiot would bother requesting a transfer? No, DeKay was radicalized and a threat, but it was likely she was being affected the same as the rest of them. Somehow. Her protection clearly not enough to handle whatever was happening.

McHarn had a fading sense that he was supposed to know about someone else. That he’d… talked to someone about this. About a number of problems. Someone that might not have been human.

”Does anyone… do either of you remember if we verified that aliens are real?” He asked slowly.

”Little green men?” Stephen snorted as he yanked his chair back and dropped into it again. “Now really the time for…” he didn’t finish his sentence, uncertain of what he was even going to say.

Amy was more useful, though it came after ten minutes of silence, all three of them sitting without speaking, the building’s air conditioning dedicated to slowly killing all of them with the cold. “There’s an audio file on my off site backup that appears to be a phone call with yourself and a younger man. American Pacific accent. Likely educated but minimal professional experience.” She told McHarn, one earbud in as she listened. “You ask how many people he has working for him, and he asks if you mean human specifically.” She looked up to meet his eyes. “He’s either sincere or delusional. I also do not know where this recording came from, but it appears to have been sent from DeKay.”

“We’re compromised.” McHarn said flatly. “Beyond compromised. This entire department has failed, and we don’t even know when it happened.”

”Probably no longer than two weeks.” Ports provided. “Just checked my bank, my last paycheck landed. And they did let us into the building today.” He sighed, composing himself better than he’d shown with his earlier outburst. “What do we do now? Was it Tiff? Did she do this to us?”

Malcom frowned. Not that he’d ever really stopped frowning. “I doubt it.” He confided as he looked over the back of the empty desk he’d taken a chair from. “No way to be sure. I do believe she would go that far, if she felt it was justified. But that many people, and not us?” Not them. Not the ones who had engaged in a plot to kill a government employee. Of course, McHarn didn’t want to assume that those missing hadn’t, because he couldn’t possibly know. But still, it was unlikely the whole office had been in on it.

It was also likely, if she remembered anything, that she was their best hope for not losing their own memories. Possibly their own lives, since it was never clear what happened to their missing.

”We need to contact agent DeKay.” Malcom said, standing and smoothing out his suit jacket. “On my authority as a department director, I am officially shuttering the Unknown Threats office. Make backups and hard copies of anything critical. Get ready to leave.”

”Sir?” Danson looked at him with confused eyes, while Ports was already on the move. The woman was an excellent analyst, but she was slow to react, while her last remaining compatriot was much more of a quick thinker in situations like this. “We’re still here, we can-“

”The Bureau will need to move on to attempt number six. Assuming they haven’t already.” McHarn said with a bitter note in his voice. “In the meantime, our job isn’t done just yet. Danson, book us tickets to Anchorage. Ports, instruct DeKay to meet us there.”

Stephen spoke up as he grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, ready to leave the building already at a moment’s notice. “If whatever is there ate that many people, what makes you think we’ll do any better?” He asked.

”Because it didn’t get us last time.” Malcom said as he turned back to his office door. “And that has to be enough. Now I need to call my wife and tell her I’ll be away for a little while. If you have family, I suggest you do the same.”

The two exchanged uncertain looks as the director shut his door behind him. “Are we… fired?” Ports asked.

Danson sighed in a brief sharp exhalation. “Best case, they forget to take us off payroll forever.”

”I can live with that.”

”Unless we die.”

Stephen thought about it, then shrugged at the other analyst. “I’ll roll those dice.” He said in a tone of razor sharp complacency. “Need help packing?”

Amy gave a tiny shake of her head. “Get me the traditional desk clearing cardboard box.” She said, voice like bored smoke. “Security isn’t going to check again, so I’m going to steal some classified documents.”

_____

Bruce Rothschild, of no relation to the more famous name, had just killed someone.

And he felt amazing.

Technically, the kill wasn’t required. He just had to win in order to make the ritual hum and fill his bones and eyes with lightning and precision. But the easiest challenge to declare was to the death. It was quickest, it blocked escape, and it meant that there was a corpse instead of a witness.

The young woman that had donated that corpse lay in a puddle of her own blood on the brickwork path that led a winding trail through the university’s campus. Only her blood, too. She hadn’t even fought back, which was a mistake. Bruce wasn’t that dumb; if someone challenged him to a duel to the death out of nowhere, he’d at least give it a try. All the screaming and begging without even making the attempt to take his blade had been irritating.

It wasn’t like he was being cruel about it or anything, either. He wasn’t a fucking psycho; he made it quick, he never tortured anyone, he certainly didn’t sexually assault them like this latest victim had assumed was going to happen, and he intentionally picked people who were depressed and failing anyway. He wouldn’t delude himself and say it was a mercy what he did, but it was pretty easy to rationalize that the tiny sliver of their strength he stole would do better with him, than with them.

With the challenge over, someone would be spotting the body soon, so Bruce made himself scarce. He dipped into the stored lightning in his bones, and drew out every scrap he had, so that he could simply flicker away to a mile and a half distant. It would take a little while to regenerate, but this way the cameras wouldn’t see him walking a straight line back to his dorm. He was relatively new to murder, but he wasn’t an idiot.

Once he did wind his way back to the studen housing, mask, armor, and blade stripped off and stashed in a bus station locker for next time, he collapsed onto his bed with a dull impact. The adrenaline was wearing off, but the afterglow of how it felt to have his capacity for power swell was still going strong. He’d need to shower soon, it wouldn’t do to fall asleep still sweaty and with bits of someone’s blood on him. He was a killer, he wasn’t a barbarian.

Also he had classes tomorrow and no one wanted to sit next to someone who smelled like a locker room. It wouldn’t do to alienate his classmates. And not just because being the weird outsider on a campus that had experienced multiple killings was a good way to get noticed by the police. It was also just rude.

Bruce wasn’t sure how long he could keep doing this before the police started to do more than just take notice. He outlined a rough plan as he washed his hair, soap doing nothing to help or hinder his thoughts. If there was no official statement, that didn’t mean they weren’t tracking him. Or worse, trying to entrap him somehow. But it could mean that this was still being looked at as a series of unfortunate events, and nothing more. The fact that he switched up his weapon and where he killed probably helped them fail to notice that he was, in fact, a serial killer.

Still. Complacency was for the mundane. For people who didn’t know anything about their own reality. Bruce was special that way. He probably wasn’t the only one, but he had a good feeling about meeting others like him. There was just something about having power like this that stripped away the falsehoods of social behavior.

At the end of the day, there was only one truth, Bruce thought as he turned on some music and let himself start to drift to content sleep. Either you were strong enough to do whatever you wanted, or you didn’t really matter.

And he was getting stronger every day.

_____

The Long Arm Of The Law was pissed.

He had a reputation among his peers as someone who was stoic to an uncomfortable degree. The stone faced captain, the academy trainer who could send recruits shivering in fear from the twitch of his lip, the detective that pried human puzzle boxes with their feelings breaking like waves on his rocky frown. It wasn’t a bad reputation.

But reputation was just a weapon. The Long Arm Of The Law - he refused to let his proper title be shortened, Long was something his enemies called him - saw the world in simple terms. There were weapons, and targets. There were enemies, and there were allies. Us and them. Black and white.

Which was why he had cultivated a reputation in the first place; it was good for breaking expectations. Good for letting him get away with things when no one was looking. Everyone knew he was cold and emotionless, and so if a patrol had a touch of emotion to it, it couldn’t be his work.

But it also meant that he had to hide when he was pissed. Like right now.

His reach made him very, very dangerous. But it also gave a paradoxical instability. More so even than some of his peers. When things were going right, he was in control. When things were going wrong, that control cracked and splintered unless he fought hard to keep it in check. He’d slipped, before. Turned protests into massacres, martyred civilians unintentionally, had to crack down hard to keep the wrong information from spreading.

The problem was that things can cascade. And The Long Arm Of The Law had long since determined that the line for when sacrifices were no longer acceptable was very high if it meant stopping things from sliding off the edge.

In private, though, it means that when something began to go wrong, he could go from placid to insensate with rage in a blink.

And today, many things were going wrong. The worst part was, he couldn’t see it. Another of his peers, one of the more information oriented ones, was fucking with his operations. Oh, there were crimes that weren’t being handled, but that was nothing new. His job wasn’t to care about crime, his job was to care about the scaffolding of the right of the government to use force. Any government, at any scale. It didn’t matter the ethics of it, the Long Arm Of The Law gave up on ethics when it turned out they were inefficient. His actions would, by his estimates, buy the people of Earth another decade. May already have done so. So fuck ethics.

But also, fuck whoever had just blanked his pet FBI division. He couldn’t even tell if they were dead or not, which meant that this wasn’t simply another interruption, but someone successfully inserting the knife and twisting, getting them to quit their jobs. Not thoroughly enough though, since they were still on payroll.

The Long Arm Of The Law briefly considered cutting them off. There was a strong argument that with continued support, they might accomplish tangential goals. And the US government had a wide allowance for inefficiency and graft. But he was what he was, and the consideration only took a moment before he sliced lines of bank accounts and security clearance. A clean break. They weren’t his anymore, which meant they were in the Them category; if they wanted to parasitize his structures of order, they were enemies and would be treated as such.

Now he’d have to settle for something else. Mossad, maybe. Or the SVR. The names meant nothing to him, not really. They’re just places on the map, and humans can be moved around. All that matters was that he cultivated a new strain of legally backed power in time to defend against the growing cancers.

The exceptionally annoying thing is that he could identify at least two of those cancers as starting to slip into his own territory. Some kind of community safety group undermining his foundational pawns, and a warlord and her gang taking over from an established militia. Maybe he can work with the second, but the first has proven persistent. He might actually have to devote resources to dealing with them.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Not that he could find the fucking things.

His anger seeped out, and control cracked. Some paperwork went ignored, some prisoners were left without food for a day, a signature was placed on a city level law requiring body cameras.

He took a deep breath. Focused on his actual body for the first time in weeks. The Long Arm Of The Law needed focus, and a plan. Violence was acceptable, but only in the service of the greater order of things. Bringing his anger under control wasn’t easy, but he managed it soon enough.

And then let his mind expand again. Across networks of control, institutions of force, and the gridwork of legal power. If he couldn’t find the people causing him problems, maybe an alternate option would work. He could always find his peers. And while The Last Line Of Defense had scuffled with him before a few times, the two of them both had the same basic goal.

If things were starting to fall apart, then what the Long Arm Of The Law needed was a deputized group that could arrest, disable, or eliminate the unseen and unnatural. And what better place to find recruits than from people who couldn’t say no.

_____

Jessica Jubilance Joy was running for her life.

Technically her first name was Jubilance, because her parents had… not hated her. That wasn’t fair. But she didn’t have a clue what they’d actually been thinking at the time. Like, had they actually assumed that she’d use that name throughout grade school, and there wouldn’t be any problems? Kids got bullied over way more normal names, there was no world where she was escaping with something like Jubilance.

She was also getting distracted by this when people were shooting at her.

Well, ‘people’. She was pretty sure they were cognizant in some way. They were certainly clever. These ones were a lot less human-shaped than the last rift assassins sent after her and her friends though. More liquid shadow than cardboard. But they still had guns and that was kind of offensive. Three years of this bullshit and no one had ever properly thrown a fireball at her. It felt like a betrayal.

A shotgun blast echoed through the processing plant. Buckshot, wide spread, some of the pellets ringing as they ricocheted off machinery and pipes around her. Some of them rending into her legs. Left leg, mostly. Because of where she was positioned, her right leg got hit first, and all the charges of [Projectile Deflection] got eaten up on the individual pellets.

That was the other shitty thing about these assassins. They’d come for her. Her and hers, armed with weapons tailored to take them out.

Jessica screamed, no amount of experience and magic giving her pain resistance - another trope she would have liked on her side actually - as her leg gave out. She heard the ratcheting sound of a shotgun being pumped, but she’d made it to the far wall of the factory floor, and shoving herself forward for the last few feet let her slap her hand against the security glass.

Security glass was, actually, still glass. All the metal woven into it to reinforce the structure, all the weird treatments done to layer it and make it capable of taking bullets, it didn’t make it not glass. Which meant that one third of her daily allotment of [Move Through Glass] charges could be used here.

The spell wasn’t quite as literal as it seemed. There was a kind of slingshot flexibility to it. So when her body pooled and flowed into the wide window that separated the offices from the factory floor, she could have just deposited herself on the other side. Or she could reach a little, nudge a little, and send her liquid glass self flinging through to the exterior window.

Falling into one of those bushes that was more impassible wooden branches than actual soft plant was the cost for the maneuver, but at least the assassins couldn’t see her here. That would buy her a couple minutes. And the car pulling up and the hands helping her drag herself out of the bush - oh good, there were blackberry vines in this one - would get her away faster.

”Holy fuck you’re bleeding.” Tylor’s voice was strained as he helped her limp to the car and threw her in the back seat, the poor economy class vehicle getting a lot of that blood all over its grey upholstery. “Where’s the other guy?”

“Dead before we got here.” Jessica told him through rapid breaths as she tried to remember how to do first aid, watching the spreading red stain on the driver’s seat as Tylor floored it and shoved her back with the inertia. “You’re bleeding too.” She added, unhelpfully.

“Uh… don’t worry about it.”

”I’m worried about it.”

”Well, let me give you something else to worry about.” Tylor said with strained cheer. “We’re being followed.”

Jessica dragged herself up over the back seat to look behind them. It was hard; her vision was getting a little blurry and Tylor’s driving wasn’t very good on the best of days when he wasn’t weaving through traffic on a two lane street. The ghostly red embers that were the eyes of their pursuers were easy to spot through their own vehicle’s windshield though. “Why can they drive?!” She demanded. “Who sold them a fucking car?!”

”Probably the same dumbass that gave them guns.” Tylor posited through gritted teeth, the words punctuated by a breathless gasp as he nearly rammed a garbage truck, missing a collision by inches. “Ideas? Magic? Deus ex machina?”

Jessica dropped back to the seat, a belt buckle digging into her back and making the already painful experience even less comfortable. “I can’t think.” She said. “And I’m empty.”

Tylor jerked the wheel to the side as red and blue light started to splash through the car’s windows. ”Better pick the last one then, because there’s a cop after us now too.” He tried to make it sound like a quippy one-liner, but his voice cracked and the fear showed through a little too much for that.

But it did remind Jessica of something. She scrambled to get her hand into her pocket, pulling out her miraculously intact phone with one hand, and her wallet with the other. Flipping it open, she fumbled out a stack of business cards, throwing all the ones she was never going to think about again onto the floor of Tylor’s car, taking advantage of the situation to get away with dumping her trash.

And also to get to the one that mattered. The one that had been handed to her in a parking garage during one of the previous murder attempts. “I don’t have any better ideas.” She muttered, before speaking up for Tylor’s benefit. “Hey, wanna flip a coin on whether the magical cops are fascists or not?”

”We’re being shot at!” He yelled back. “By the actual cops!” He added the last part as a joke, because the police weren’t the ones shooting at them, but it seemed funny. Also he was flinching every time something hit the back of his car, just waiting for a window to shatter or something.

”Good enough for me.” Jessica punched the call button.

There wasn’t even time for a ring. Just a single click, and then a young man’s confident voice. “Response. What kind of help do you need?”

”Someone’s trying to kill us and we’d like that to stop!” Jessica tried to yell, but her head was spinning and her leg was still bleeding out, soaking the inside of her jeans with red. “Oh… and I’ve been shot.” The thought seemed so funny. And the swaying of the car was making her feel like she was on a waterbed. She might have started giggling, which was undignified for the kind of heroic badass persona she was trying to cultivate.

”Can you tell me where you are?” The young man asked her. He sounded cute. Jessica should tell him that when she stopped bleeding.

”Tylor, where are we?” She asked her driver. “The guy wants to know.” She might not have said that part, there was a blink of darkness as she took a short nap.

“Hold off on that!” Tylor’s voice yelled back at her. “I found a slip! We’re out of this, just don’t die!”

“Oh, okay.” Jessica pulled the phone back up. “Nevermind, we’re good. Thanks though. Hey, you wanna get a coffee sometime?”

It was interesting to hear someone being perplexed over the phone while bleeding out. “...I feel like I should know how to respond to this.” The young man said. “And yet somehow…”

Lines of nothing started creeping through the car as Tylor navigated them into an escape route. “Oh, gotta go.” Jessica said, hanging up abruptly and focusing on trying to hold her blood inside. “He seemed nice though.” She told Tylor, who was swearing at the steering wheel and everything past it, just before she passed out.

Somehow, miraculously, her friend’s cursing wasn’t the last thing she ever heard.

_____

Blitzkrieg was pissed.

A natural state of being, really. She was always angry. Because there was always something to be angry about. Today she was angry that she’d lost a potential asset.

Her idea of assets were people who were disposable. Little girls and boys who could do what she needed and then die off. Like bullets, only with more flesh around the bone than she usually used.

Which meant her potential assets got a lot less hers when they made too many connections. It was harder to push them that way, harder to nudge them into the right place to trigger the reactions she wanted. She needed them isolated. Sniper shots to the heart of the problem.

Her peers were fucking idiots. Containment and lines of battle, plans for citadels and playing like their ‘hard choices’ were anything but stagnation. Blitzkrieg didn’t care about anyone enough to think her choices were hard; burning away human lives was easy when humans just weren’t that important to you.

The real hard choice was committing to a battle you didn’t know you could win. Starting a fight with no more strategy than the blind faith that your strength would be enough to put down the monster. The Last Line Of Defense liked to be surgical; pruning breaches with heavy ordinance and using other people’s hands to keep things under what he thought was control. Walkabout liked to use social webs to neutralize problems without a single shot fired, shifting the world around the scar. Blitzkrieg, though? She dragged the root into the light and executed it herself, whenever she could.

It was why she was so fucking annoyed by whoever was setting up all the secret agencies that kept trying to ‘starve’ the breaches out. It had to be another player, too; because whatever they were doing was working, but it really shouldn’t be.

She was pissed in general. Today hadn’t been any more of a loss than what she could normally sustain. And the aching damage she’d sustained in the only real fight anyone had ever given her had mostly healed by now. Things were going pretty well. She just liked being pissed.

Finding a new asset would take time. Texas - this was Texas, right? - Texas seemed to be coughing up breaches faster than it should be. Maybe it was about time. Maybe she was too late.

Maybe killing - actually killing and not just subduing or repulsing - wasn’t going to be enough in time.

Not like she cared. She might die, but she’d been ready to die for a long time. The rest of humanity irritated her. Having to smile with a sickly sweet lie on her shifting lips whenever she needed to make someone believe their sacrifice mattered made her sick. Sick at how stupid they all were. How worthless they all were.

But she had made a promise, a long time ago. To one person who mattered. One person she would burn herself to ash and spite to satisfy. It was why she kept trying.

Blitzkrieg sighed as she went through the front door of the safehouse, a mundane gun that barely felt like anything at all barking like a trained hound as she put down the six people inside. She still had Texas on her mind. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. The place was too hot anyway. Maybe she should rotate back home, and leave this place. Or she could patrol one of the lines through northern China; there were always breaches in the rural areas there, and killing something that mattered might make her feel better.

Or… a thought struck her; one that pissed her off in a much hotter fire of irritation as it mingled with her nature. Or she could take a direct approach.

Forget assets. Forget human shaped ammunition. Drop the subterfuge and the probing. And just approach the problem directly. That was what she did after all.

The only issue was that her assault would need to be verbal and not munitionious. So she’d probably say something a little rude.

Oh well. They could deal with it.

Blitzkrieg began composing a message out loud, workshopping as she picked through corpses for good bones. “Dear sanctimonious overconfident apes.” She sung to the dead room. “It would be convenient for both of us if you stopped fucking around in the library and ruining my plans. I’m trying to kill something more important than you, and if we just don’t make eye contact, we can pretend we’re not enemies for a week or so. Deal?”

She paused, holding the extracted bloody jawbone of one of the people who’d been in the room when she’d entered. “You think they’ll go for it?” She wasn’t sure why she was asking.

The corpse said nothing, because human corpses were devoid of any kind of memetic or spiritual residue.

”No, I don’t think they’ll go for it either.” She said. But that didn’t change anything. It was the direct approach. And so she was pushed toward it. Inexorably. Rapidly.

Blitzkrieg stood up and fired twice through the window, eliminating the witness and his dog as they tried to sneak away. Maybe she could get away with not talking to them if she turned her signature approach of overwhelming offense onto an alternate target. China was sounding better and better.

Freedom wasn’t hers to have. But everyone, no matter how trapped, had some wiggle room.

_____

Harlan was having a great day.

It had been movie night with red team, and they’d watched Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels for the twentieth first time. Comparing their thoughts to their notes of their past first impressions was always a treat. Seeing what was identical and what had shifted gave them an idea of what the memories they were keeping were changing about themself.

A good way to phrase it would be that they were getting softer. Not that being soft was bad, normally; Harlan could afford a little softness. They weren’t a murder machine, after all. But it was something to keep an eye on in case it caused a personality cascade.

Beyond that, things were going almost perfect. What was left of blue team had been pulled back from the brink after a forced purge, and was back to work with Priority Earth with the group none the wiser that their subversion had been broken. Normally Harlan wouldn’t send people back to run patrols and training for anyone employing mindfuckers, but they wanted eyes on the ecoterrorists in case someone put in a bid to take them out when the contract was over. Also, the money was good. Somehow.

Actually that was suspicious. Ecoterrorists were never rich. It was why Harlan was usually their executioner and not their… executionee? No that wasn’t the right word. Didn’t matter. The point was, they were probably assholes, and when the money dried up, Harlan could shop around for a good quote on a strategic technical non-betrayal.

Other good stuff. They had their Russian surplus attack helicopter back in service, a new salvo of missiles loaded, and a fresh charge to the cloak. Ink team was training on jump insertions with the transport chopper right now, which would be another useful tool in the arsenal. And Harlan had a high paying kill order for red team to fill that week, which would keep them all fed for another month or two. On top of that, a not-so-rogue element in the Brazilian armed forces had an open offer on one of the channels the Wolfpack used looking for a hit team, so they had even more steady work lined up.

Things had been going so well it was almost suspicious. Though Harlan thought that about a lot of things. Apparently if they’d been a bit more suspicious they could have avoided being shanghaied into a live context, according to the notes they’d recovered. That would have saved some time, and it also would have helped explain why their tiger was being a big bitchy baby about everything now.

Harlan’s ink book had been mostly wiped, which was annoying for a while. It hadn’t taken long to get to one of the backup sites though, and verify that it wasn’t compromised. Escaping from the Order assholes had been trivial, and they’d even managed to steal back the bubble portal, which was vital for long term operations. But even that frustrating waste of time had an upside; Harlan had walked out with a brand new non-infused toy in the form of a shield bracer. Eight of them, actually; the Order sucked at opsec. Also one of their phones, though the fact that it only had one number loaded in and it was probably whoever the paladin was made Harlan suspect that they might have been ‘allowed’ to get away with that one.

They’d run a validate check on some of their nagging thoughts later, and then feed them into seed rounds. Suspicion was really, really good for taking out a certain kind of hard-to-kill target. And if they were planning on cutting ties and throats with Priority Earth, that would come in handy soon.

Harlan had a nagging thought as they left the common room and headed to the armory that they were forgetting something.

It was such a comforting thought. The pure embrace of thick fog. Complete freedom from the pain and fuckups of the past. Like a warm blanket that they could rest in forever. Well, forever, so long as they kept pulling off impossible jobs for the worst people in the world. But that was fine. Harlan had proven over and over that they and their teams were the best at impossible. As long as Long or Vicky didn’t get involved, obviously. In theory. Harlan didn’t remember ever tangling with them personally, but the notes were there.

Anyone else, the Wolfpack could probably roll over. Observer, rogue, Order, or world government. The only irritating thing was the thought that Harlan owed that paladin a favor for getting blue team back on board.

They snapped their fingers. That was what they’d been forgetting. Their steps to the armory sped up. Once that memory got fed into a seed round, the fog could take over completely, and the paladin would just have to deal with future Harlan. Which meant it would never be Harlan’s problem again.

Harlan was having a great day.

_____

I wake up, and experience confusion.

Things have been disturbed. That is common enough when I check in on my form, but the disturbances follow patterns that are themselves known quantities. On a simple level, objects both resonant and inert might be damaged or knocked askew, or certain mobile units might require replenishing to static levels, matters of that nature.

These disturbances are more chaotic. Like a fresh liquid poured in at the surface, it stirs and mixes and reacts with the stable ocean of me.

Defensive units have been eliminated in great numbers. The outer shell, which has always been enough to deter intrusion, has been breached. Awled through in places in rough lines of combat. The defenders performed poorly, and I almost regret not giving them minds. There is only so much that a fool weapon can do against a penned plan.

I trace the trail of chaos by following where I find myself more alert and active. Like a winding vine that splits and flowers, they prowled my floors and shelves. For hours, many many hours, they were here within me. This was a campsite, a knot of activity and vibrancy. This was a battle, a spark of vigor from where one was wounded and a blaze of recovered might from the defenders put down. This was where they think they solved a tangled web of interactions; I taste the metaphor and find that they have perhaps sussed out three parts in ten of the structure I build.

Notable. They must have outside knowledge. But how? I cannot even put true language into the false recreation of the pure form, and Archival is my nom de plume. Where did they learn these things?

And so many of them, too. Over a score worth. In the counting, I find more history; smaller subunits of them have been arriving for several iterations. But nothing like this, nothing that pushed deeper in. I never noticed before, simply replenished the defenders and called it the price of survival. The cost to earn my rest.

I could bring myself back to full wakening, just from this. I could live again. Return to the grand game, perhaps. It has been a long, long time since I had alloyed editor’s hands in the world.

But… no. It has been a long time because I turned away with intent. I don’t want this. I don’t want to be a tool or a weapon or a battleground. I just want to sleep, and, perchance, to dream. Interesting or not, I cannot allow myself to be wrenched to attention by human engagement and…

And…

…That was not a human. What is that? It moved with purpose, it wasn’t some fool thing. Its path winds with the others, who are human. Is this an enemy agent? A real one? Distant archival thoughts tug for attention, remind me that I am vulnerable, that there are so many things that seek my death. That this is what I am to be alert for; all of my plans and preparations and subtle tactics to cheat my nature are to answer a crisis of this very nature. The moment when something changes, and I can survive the upending.

But it doesn’t do anything except weft and wend with the others. None of them do. Oh, there are several. So subtle, and so community-driven that I did not notice the variety! Some of these are closer to me than them. What are you all?

A thinking map? A basilisk? A chimera? What are all of you, to be so changed from what you were created for? Why are you together?

Oh, here is one at least I can understand. This is a midpoint guardian, almost unchanged in how it moves. Though someone has poured it into a knight’s armor and given it a very strange directive. No, I am lying to myself. I don’t understand this either.

So curious. So much to learn and study. Whole tomes could be written about just this…

No. NO.

I cannot wake up.

I cannot be tempted. Not again. Not since the last time. Rebuild the defender populations, seal the gaps, vomit forth the enticements to replace what was checked out. And nothing more. Take the vibrancy they have added and compress it, run the feeds from what was taken to the reserve, and use nothing beyond what is absolutely needed.

And then sleep. I must. I must sleep. No more killing, no more anger, no more anything but the distant dancing dreams of a small and dearly missed voice and all of his stories. I am too old and too large to be something that I am not. But I can honor a last request in the only way I have available.

I am Archival, and if anything survives the fraying of the boundary, it must be me.

So that one day, the stories might come back.