A Blinking Light Up On The Clouded Mountain

by ErinPtah

Summary:

The Republic of Heaven cannot be allowed to fall.

Especially not to a Smiling God.

Notes:

We're back, baby.

Don't forget to check out the series masterpost for artwork, a glossary of AU vocabulary, and a reference list of everybody's daemons.

Some new art from during the break: Various Desert Bluffs daemons; City Council messenger children; The Clouded Mountaineer (for anyone who wants to see where Dana's headed).

Chapter 1: Skyscrapers

Summary:

Carlos is in New Amsterdam for a conference on Rusakov particle physics. Normally that involves meeting with colleagues, giving talks, and catching up with his sister while he's in town. This time it also means dodging Magisterium spies and saboteurs, getting a little help from angels, and being lectured on the prophecies he's part of. (Plus, these days he has a boyfriend to miss while he's away.)

New Amsterdam.

There's a young woman sitting alone at a bar in the busy heart of the city. She has dark, delicate skin, and hair that verges on perfect: tight coils that fall halfway down her back, with a red streak dyed in on one side. A colorful bird daemon perches on the shoulder of her thrift-store-chic blouse.

Carlos spots them before they realizes he's arrived, and squeezes between crowded tables to get to them. "Azalea! Over here!"

His baby sister — who just turned twenty-nine, a fact that Carlos still has trouble processing sometimes — catches sight of him and waves. "You made it! I was freaking out when the blogs had photos of you at the airport — the press didn't follow you here, did they?"

"No, I'm pretty sure I lost them," says Carlos, pulling her into a hug. He's still adjusting to how newsworthy he is back in the US. The physics conference he's in town for is apparently ordering extra security, because it's going to have protestors. The mind boggles. "How are you doing? How's your big gallery show going? Let me buy you a drink."

Azalea says a few things about painting as the bartender mixes their drinks. On the floor by their feet, her tocororo daemon swoops down to land on Isaña's shell.

"But enough about me! How are you doing these days?"

"Can't complain," Carlos assures her. "I've got two pretty major papers to present this weekend, one examining the properties of electrum as an optical Rusakov conductor on Friday, and one proposing a new model for anbaromagnetic field theory on —"

"Oh my god, Carlos, you giant empollón," groans Azalea, dropping into Spanish. "I'm not asking about your job. Tell me about this boyfriend of yours."

Carlos blushes, but isn't complaining. His phone is even stocked with a carefully-curated folder of "Cecil photos that won't freak the family out" for just this purpose — that is, photos where Cecil's daemon is visible, his fashion choices aren't too outrageous, and there's a minimal level of bizarre Night Vale phenomena going on in the background.

His sister listens to various Cecil anecdotes with growing approval. She pronounces Cecil "cute," and declares the fact that Carlos is growing out his hair because Cecil likes it that way "totally sweet." Toward the end of the folder, she says, "Hope he doesn't get jealous easily, because there's at least one person here who's seriously giving you the eye."

Carlos doesn't have to look. "Dark hair, red shirt, lemur daemon?"

Azalea looks startled. "Yeah. How did you...?"

"She's been tailing me since I left the hotel." And pretty subtly, too. Carlos knows a few members of the Sheriff's secret police who could stand to take lessons from her.

"What? But you said the press didn't...."

"She isn't press, she's Magisterium." When Azalea's face goes a little grey, Carlos adds, "Don't worry, I don't think she's going to try anything in public! And I'm watching my drink and everything, just in case, and...uh, does it bother you?"

"Yes, it bothers me!" hisses Azalea. "Does the Church always have people following you around?"

"Not in Night Vale," Carlos assures her. He decides not to explain that this is only because Magisterium agents who enter Night Vale are re-educated out of knowing that he exists. It wasn't his idea, but he's been uncomfortably complicit. "Give me a second."

He steps off the bar stool, Isaña following at his heels. The agent pretends not to notice them at first, then lets her eyes flick up to Carlos's face. Her lipstick as she smiles is very red. "Well, hello there."

"Hi," says Carlos. "World Consistorial Court?"

The agent blinks. "Excuse me?"

"Just trying to guess what branch of the Magisterium you're with."

She recovers quickly. "Conspiracy theorist, are you? Sure, I'm with the World Consistorial Court. Are you with the Illuminati?"

Carlos has, in fact, received invitations to become an adjunct member of both the Alpha Illuminati and the Eagle Illuminati. He's holding out for an invite from the Hungry Man Brand Frozen Foods Officially Sponsored Illuminati. "Listen, it was a valid hypothesis. The World Consistorial Court have already kidnapped me at gunpoint once, so they were the logical place to start."

The agent starts. "And you got away?"

Carlos raises his eyebrows.

After a meaningful pause, the agent relaxes into another slow smile. "All right, you caught me. But I assure you, Dr. Ramirez, my organization would never approve such unfriendly treatment. We don't have to be enemies, you and I."

She bends slightly toward him, all her body language friendly, the fabric of her blouse shifting with the movement to bare an extra inch or so of cleavage. Carlos takes a moment to process what she's doing, then says, "Okay, no offense, but if part of the reason your organization sent you after me was potential seduction factor, they're really barking up the wrong tree."

The woman's smile turns absolutely poisonous. "Is that so? Then the 'confirmed bachelor' rumors we've all been hearing are true?"

So she wasn't even close enough to eavesdrop on Carlos's and Azalea's conversation? Carlos reverses his earlier judgment. The secret police would never be this sloppy. "On the contrary. I'm in a happy, serious relationship, and intend to stay that way. And now, I'm going to go find a nice place to have dinner with my little sister, and if you follow us there, I'll call the police. Do we understand each other?"

He's feeling pretty good when he rejoins Azalea, who now just looks impressed. They finish their drinks and head out together, her little bird daemon once again riding on Isaña's shell.

"I can't believe you threatened to sic the cops on her," says Azalea as they head down the street. "And with a straight face! Are they just not racist at all in Hispania Nova, or what?"

"Um," says Carlos. It's true, it hadn't occurred to him that the police might doubt his word, even in complaining about a woman who is way paler than he is. But only because he forgot that they wouldn't already have a recording of the whole conversation. "Yeah, that's it. Very non-racist, very fair-minded...bunch of all-around great people, those Night Vale police."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Speaking of police: when Carlos gets back to the hotel, there are a couple of squad cars parked outside.

He spends the whole elevator ride hoping they're here about someone else. No such luck. There's a crowd around rooms 212 and 214 — he and Keith Köhler, the two Night Vale experimental theologians in attendance, are in connected singles — and Köhler himself is standing against the far wall, along with his binturong daemon Rozarilde, both of them looking profoundly harried.

"Dr. Ramirez," says Köhler, nodding to greet them. "There has been a break-in. Your room appears to be undisturbed. Mine...does not."

"You're the other theologian here?" asks a man with a scarab beetle daemon on his shoulder, and an NAPD detective's badge pinned to his shirt. "Please stay out here while the forensics team finishes. Then we're going to ask you to go through your possessions, identify anything that's missing."

"Thanks," says Carlos automatically, trying to remember what he brought. Clothes, mostly. His tablet — which has his presentations, but he has backups in his email, and his Friday talk has a co-presenter who should have a copy too. A few small personal items. The bag of marbles the Faceless Old Woman who Lives In His Home stuck in his suitcase at the last minute, for her own inscrutable reasons. Under his breath, he says, "What did they get of yours?"

Köhler looks grim. "My ordinater is missing."

Isaña scurries around his heels to directly address Rozarilde. Low to the ground, the daemons can whisper with even less chance of being overheard. "You did the anti-theft chant, right?"

"I believed we did it correctly," murmurs the binturong. "You must demonstrate it again."

Carlos is in the middle of giving the detective a description of his Magisterium tail when there's a scuffling and a yell from Köhler's room. "There's some kind of animal under here!" yells a forensics tech from next to the bed.

Both Carlos and Köhler straighten up, suddenly hopeful. "Allow me to speak with it," says Köhler, making his way in.

"You're not allowed to keep pets in the rooms!" protests a woman with a finch daemon, in the uniform of hotel security. "This is a serious policy violation...."

"We didn't bring any pets," says Carlos. "I wish we had! A good spiderwolf probably would've kept our stuff safer than your security did."

Meanwhile, Köhler's binturong slinks up to the bed and chitters in a soothing way at whatever is hiding underneath it. "Come here. Is that you? Come on out now. Everything is safe, but the police must take a look at you."

Slowly, hesitantly, his laptop crawls out into the open. Its lid is half-shut, and there are bloodstains where it apparently bit someone, but it's still here. Not in Magisterium hands, or anybody else's.

"The hell is this?" mutters one of the officers. "Some kind of robot?"

Neither Carlos nor Köhler wants to explain that sometimes in Night Vale your gadgets and appliances will develop sentience. "Yes,"says Köhler shortly. "Now, as you collect your evidence, be gentle, or you will startle it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

They get a complimentary re-booking, with the new rooms entered into the hotel's computer system under false names, and a promise of 24/7 security on their floor. It's enough reassurance that Carlos should be able to sleep tonight.

He re-sets his bloodstone circle and does the anti-theft chant afresh. For good measure, he also draws a couple of protective runes on hotel stationary (using that exotic luxury, the ballpoint pen). It's basically the Modified Sumerian equivalent of a Keep Out sign. One copy for himself, one for Köhler; Carlos pricks his finger and demonstrates where to leave a spot of blood for an extra-strong seal.

Before he can leave to jump in the shower, Köhler says, "If you have plans for Saturday at two o'clock, you must cancel or postpone them."

"Uh, sure. Let me check the schedule." Carlos retrieves and flips through the conference information packet. "Yeah, there's nothing on Saturday right after lunch except the big invite-only alethiometry consult, so I'm free. Why?"

"Surely you can guess?"

Carlos gapes at him. "Am I invited to the big invite-only alethiometry consult?"

These only happen two or three times a year. Experts from across the globe meet to discuss questions about nothing less than the fate of the world, and try to parse out the answers their alethiometers have given. If it happens at a conference close enough to Oxford or Heidelberg, one of the alethiometrists might actually bring the device along and do some readings in person. Of course Köhler, as a senior Rusakov researcher at Heidelberg, is entitled to an invitation. But Carlos? It wouldn't even have occurred to him to ask.

"You haven't told them anything about Cecil, have you?" he adds, suddenly worried. It's not that he specifically mistrusts any of these people, but if word gets out that there's an off-the-record alethiometer sitting around unguarded, in the possession of a man with a gift for reading it? Second-rate spies and failed break-ins will be the least of what gets sent Cecil's way.

"I have been entirely discreet," says Köhler. "As I am sure you will be discreet about certain details of past prophecies, which I have not been authorized to discuss with you."

"Won't say a word," promises Carlos. "The only things I know about Lyra Silvertongue are what I've heard from angels. And/or seen on TV."

 

-{,(((,">

 

There are supposed to be two other former members of the Night Vale team at the 2013 International Conference on Applied Rusakov Physics. Carlos keeps an eye out for them during the morning coffee meet-and-greet.

Other people, in turn, are keeping an eye out for him: he gets stopped by a dozen grad students and postdocs, some of them trying to network with anyone they can see, but most of them recognizing his name. At least one doesn't know him at first, then suddenly identifies him as "the guy on the posters outside."

(There are protestors camped outside the conference center. Maybe two dozen of them. They have signs. Carlos is really glad they aren't allowed in.)

A portal physicist with an osprey daemon tries to grill him on why her application to the Night Vale research outpost wasn't accepted. Carlos doesn't know offhand, but he assures her that she can try again in six months or a year, because they're expecting to have more spots open by then.

A man with a strong Texan accent, his daemon a tiny bright-blue frog riding in his pocket, asks with sudden discomfort if Carlos is planning on firing people halfway through their postings. Sheepish, Carlos explains that no, they're just expecting a certain level of serious injury, possibly death, because no matter how competent their latest new hires are....

And that's when he realizes he's talking to one of the new hires. Rayshawn, their new Rusakov archaeologist. Well, this is awkward.

To his relief, Rayshawn isn't too put off. He was on a dig with Emily earlier this year; he's seen her scars, heard a few of her war stories. He also lets Carlos know that Emily isn't going to be here at the conference after all.

"Why not? Is she okay?" asks Carlos, imagining all kinds of horrors: threats from the Magisterium, trouble with the government, meeting with a rogue un-hooded spectre, stumbling across another portal with confused and aggressive otherworldly creatures.

"You ain't heard?" says Rayshawn. "She's pregnant, man."

Oh. "Oh! Good for her."

Which means the only person left that Carlos specifically wants to track down is Gerald, who he'll see tomorrow at their presentation anyway. He excuses himself from the conversation, gets a refill of coffee, and goes looking for a quiet corner to review his notes.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The conference room is packed.

Carlos thinks he sees another of the team's new hires in the front row: Nirliq, their new photography-and-optics expert, replacing the departed Fleur Dirac and Brad Hall. He's looking forward to showing her the real electrum spyglass, the one whose properties are currently not public outside of Night Vale.

He lays out a few of the lenses he's going to be demonstrating today on the table in front of him: lenses made not with Whispering Forest resin, just ordinary non-sentient electrum. They don't show you the glorious spectacle of Rusakov particles in realtime, but they still have all kinds of possible applications.

The audience finishes filing in; the tech people complete their setup. Carlos opens his presentation, taps the mic, and smiles out at the crowd.

"I'd like to thank you all for being here today," he begins. "With a special hello to our official observers there in the back. Just doing your jobs, I'm sure."

A handful of people in dark suits and clerical collars try not to squirm at the attention. Officially, the Church is a neutral observer at theological talks like this. And Carlos has gotten over being scared of their unofficial intimidation.

"I'm sure most of you are here to learn about the properties of Dirac-Hall lenses, and I will get to them in just a moment," he says. "But first...I also have a feeling many of you are hoping to hear me say something dramatic about angels. Is that right?"

Nervous laughter ripples around the room.

"Well, I'm afraid everything I had to say has already been said. So instead, before I left town, I asked a couple of angels if they wanted to say a few words instead. They were kind enough to make a short video, which I'm going to play for you now."

He opens the video file.

With a snap, the power in the building goes out.

The big screens are dead, the mics are dead, and the room is plunged into darkness except for the constellation of LEDs from a hundred mobile devices. Carlos's laptop, now running on battery, is suddenly blinding. He pauses the video, not at all surprised by the timing, and speaks as loudly as he can: "Sorry about that! Give it a second, I'm sure they'll have it back on soon."

Under the table at his feet, the barn-swallow-shaped being perched on Isaña's shell whispers, "Would it help if you had a bright black light? I can definitely fill the room with a bright black light."

"Thank you, but no," murmurs Isaña. "Can you mimic an anbaric current well enough to get things running again? Just in this room? Once the video is out there in spite of their best efforts, I'm sure the power will conveniently come back on."

Personally, Carlos thinks the Church is overreacting. Sure, one of the Erikas in the video mentions the fact that there is no God and religion is a lie, but most of them are preoccupied trying to predict the finale of (this world's version of) Breaking Bad.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Gerald finds Carlos during dinner, at the bar in the hotel connected to the conference center. He's in good shape: he has a cane now, but doesn't appear to be using it. "For emergencies only," he declares, as he and Carlos make their way to a booth with accommodations for his bulky musk-ox daemon. "Why, I feel fit as a forty-year-old. How about you? How's celebrity treating you?"

Carlos groans. "Don't even ask. I tried to go out somewhere for dinner, and five press people were on me the moment I stepped onto the sidewalk. Let's just talk shop, okay?"

"Fair enough. Have you been to the product exhibit hall yet?"

They get into a vigorous discussion of the merits of a new line of vacuum gauges. Carlos daydreams out loud about some of the experiments he could do with one company's comprehensive materials testing system. Gerald relays the industry reviews of a the superconducting research magnets he's had his eye on.

"Even spotted a few products with the Strexcorp logo at another vendor's booth," he says. "I suppose they don't have their own distribution infrastructure in the US yet. Something of a relief to see them, let me tell you."

"Why's that?"

"Well, a few months back I had a thought I might call them up. See if the branch that came up with those handheld Rusakov meters had any positions open. A nice safe R&D job would be easier than being out in the field, especially if the field is in our favorite little town, and I have the experience. Even if they haven't branched out of Hispania Nova yet, my Spanish is up to the job."

"So what happened?"

"It was the darnedest thing. I couldn't find them."

Carlos frowns. "What do you mean?"

"Couldn't find them. Not a trace. No website, no stock market position, no mention of them in industry or trade journals, and nobody I talked to had ever heard of them. I was starting to wonder if they were like that house of ours. Seems like they exist, and it would make sense for them to exist, but...."

"Of course they exist. Our Rusakov meters came from somewhere." Although, now that Carlos thinks about it, he's never spoken to anyone from Strexcorp directly. All his dealings with them have been through Carlo Raimondi, head of the Desert Bluffs control team. Back when they had a Desert Bluffs control team, instead of two dead bodies and three empty shells left behind by a terrible...something, because they got too close to the secret workings of...someone.

He doesn't like to think about it. Looking up the most general information about it scared Cecil halfway to tears. And it shouldn't affect the rest of them, as long as they stay out of Desert Bluffs.

 

-{,(((,">

 

At first glance, the exclusive international alethiometry consult doesn't look like much. Sure, you have to show ID to get in, but behind the guards is an ordinary conference room, with seats for maybe twenty people around a U-shaped table. Everyone gets a complimentary water bottle, a notepad of conference-center stationary, and a pen. Carlos shivers more at the pens than the people.

The room is maybe half full when he gets there. Nobody looks up; they're all busy talking with each other, or making preliminary notes. With the exception of one young woman, everyone looks at least as old as Carlos's parents. Köhler is talking with two people, one of whom is old enough to be his grandfather.

It takes Carlos a couple of seconds to recognize the man. He's the last living direct student of Lyra Belacqua.

And that woman is the head alethiometrist at Oxford. And that man, he basically invented the most modern method of Rusakov detection (or the second-most modern, depending on what Strexcorp's technology uses). And there isn't a single Magisterium observer to be found.

This is so cool.

Carlos finds the seat with his nameplate, between the one for Keith Köhler and the one for Paivi Feldt. He quietly relocates his pen to Paivi's place while he waits for the rest of the attendants to trickle in.

Eventually Paivi — who turns out to be the young woman — takes the seat. She's a blonde in a slimming black suit, on whose shoulder is perched a handsome Lapland longspur, a white-and-brown bird with a bright yellow beak and patches of black and chestnut on his head. "Carlos Ramirez, right?" she says, shaking his hand. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you."

"Nice to meet you too," says Carlos. Now that he can put a name to the face, he realizes that she looks a lot like the the Dr. Feldt from Harvard, the program director who championed the Night Vale research post when it was in danger of being lost to controversy. "Are you by any chance Lars Feldt's —"

Her eyes sparkle with half-hidden amusement, and Carlos abruptly rethinks everything. Nordic woman. Bird daemon. Young-looking at first glance, but with a sense of calm and nobility you don't usually get in people under thirty.

"— mother?"

"Actually, I —" Paivi Feldt stutters in turn, while other people look at Carlos in surprise. "— I...am, yes."

"If I could have everyone's attention, please," says the head Oxford alethiometrist, cutting Carlos off before he can ask what clan the witch is from, or how much their interests have been guiding his career since the moment he submitted the Night Vale research proposal. "As most of you know, last year we had several readings that were cause for unusual concern...."

The lights are dimmed, and high-res video of the Heidelberg alethiometer is projected onto a screen, the needle spinning through symbols to provide the answers. It goes through four old questions, ones where the possible meanings have already been remotely picked-apart by this group for months; and then a fifth, this one new, to be discussed in person. Most of the viewers, even Köhler, spend the whole thing frantically scribbling notes.

It isn't like the calm, sure poetry of Cecil reporting what an answer means. These experts have to ask questions, to call for slow-motion playback of one symbol or another, to go back and cross-reference, to look things up in the Books of Reading and argue over whose interpretation is right. It's fascinating. Even if it is...slow.

And the content is worrying. Someone uses the phrase "the unraveling of all things." That can't be good.

Carlos is seriously considering texting Cecil, asking him to do the same reading and slip Carlos the answer, when one expert says "the young woman," and another says "which one?" — and Carlos realizes they're in familiar territory. He's heard this one before.

The world's foremost experts in alethiometry start arguing. When it comes to averting what might be a multi-world apocalypse, most of them think the key players include a single young woman, while a few are adamant that there are two.

Carlos raises his hand. "It's two."

"Thank you for your guess, Dr. Ramirez," says the chairwoman. "Dr. Schafer, what do you —"

"It wasn't a guess!" exclaims Carlos. The Oxford alethiometrist looks understandably miffed at being interrupted. "Sorry, but there are definitely two. A killer and a walker. Not that there can't be overlap! The girl who walks might have to do some killing at some point, and the girl who kills is probably going to walk places once in a while, but that doesn't make them the same person."

"Doctor, you are not here because of your expertise with symbol reading," says Dr. Belacqua's last living student. "You are here to listen."

Carlos's ears burn with embarrassment. Under the table, Isaña rolls up into an almost-closed ball.

"His interpretation is reasonable," says Köhler from beside them. "The idea of a young woman is consistently associated with the Anchor and the Horse at certain times, the Sword and the Owl at others. These are generally unconnected."

This, people listen to. The debate starts up again, more evenly this time. Carlos tries not to sink down in his seat and pretend he isn't there. He appreciates Köhler's help — the man had been surprisingly quiet before jumping in on Carlos's behalf, so it's not clear whether he already agreed or whether he just trusts Carlos's information to be accurate — but, wow, he'd forgotten how much he hates needing a white friend for backup in the first place.

"This confusion is not academic," says Paivi Feldt sharply. "It is imperative that the witches find this girl. One of these girls. And soon."

"It might help if we had some idea why you want to find her," says the chairwoman, eyeing the witch sardonically over the rims of her glasses.

"You are well aware that I am not authorized to tell you that."

"Witches and their secrets," mutters one of the experts from Heidelberg, a sour-faced man who doesn't sound happy about it.

"As if you can talk! How many secrets are you holding that the general public would love to know? That Dr. Ramirez in particular would love to know? Share a few pieces of your own forbidden theologian-lore with him, go on. I'll wait."

"I really don't need..." begins Carlos, not thrilled about getting to be a chew-toy in this fight.

"All right," interrupts the chairwoman. "Dr. Ramirez, we have in safekeeping at Jordan College a set of records about Dr. Belacqua's childhood travels, as related personally to her students, not shared with the public. The vague yet menacing branch of the Magisterium with which she clashed did not have all its records destroyed, though we allow the present-day Church to believe so. We also know that that clash had nothing to do with why they went on to pursue her across the worlds. They chased her because of her broader destiny — something she did for every universe, everywhere — the reason her truest name was not Silvertongue, but Eve."

The announcement hits Paivi Feldt a lot harder than it hits Carlos. For him, it's just one more thing he already knows. For her, it makes her suck in a hissing breath, stand up so fast it knocks her chair to the ground, and stalk out of the room in a cloud of barely-repressed fury.

And Carlos needed to talk to her, too.

"Will you excuse me?" he says, as politely as he can, pushing back his own chair. "I appreciate everything, and I will try to make it back as soon as possible, but I need to catch up with her."

The sour-faced expert from Heidelberg is positively sneering. "You aren't even listening. The implications of what you just heard, and you —"

"She was Eve. All the worlds were in danger of losing Dust forever, until she brought it back. She also fixed death, and is basically the coolest person who ever lived, possibly tied with Will Parry, and I really do need to go, so if there's anything else, please tell Dr. Köhler and he will pass it on, okay? Thanks!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

He and Isaña catch up with the witch on an empty second-floor terrace. If she left a branch of cloud-pine out here, she could hop on it and be out of his reach for good...but either she doesn't have one, or she allows him to approach.

Her daemon doesn't stick around. He spreads his wings and leaps into the air, soaring off into the maze of New Amsterdam skyscrapers until he's out of sight.

"I'm sorry about...whatever happened in there," says Carlos. He's gotten pretty good at making peace even when he has no idea what's going on. "I don't want to bother you, but there's something I need to ask you, and it might be important."

"My mother was tortured," says Paivi Feldt.

Carlos stumbles to a stop a few feet behind her. He's not sure what brought that up, but it's awful, whatever the details. "I'm sorry."

"Tortured. During the War. And then killed. For exactly the same information that woman just...handed you." She turns to face them, dark-eyed, white-faced with anger. "And she knew that."

"That's terrible," says Carlos softly.

Paivi Feldt's chin trembles as she fights for control. Carlos holds still and quiet until she claws enough of it back to say, "You wanted something."

Carlos nods. "It's about this girl you're looking for. Witch-lore. There are things you can't go around telling people. I understand that. Just tell me this...there's a stretch of land in the North that's dead. Daemons can't enter it. Is this related?"

She stares. (Carlos has the uncomfortable feeling he's being taken apart with something more than just vision.) At last she says, "And if it is?"

"Then I should tell you that I know about a similar place," says Carlos. "Along with a young woman who happens to be going through it. And I know...don't ask me how, I've got secrets too...that she has a destiny, which involves a lot of walking, and which I am almost positive is the same one they were talking about back in there. So if the witches are looking for her because that experience is something she needs, you can relax, because she already has it."

After a few deep breaths, Paivi Feldt says, "Thank you. On more than one count, because now I don't have to go back in there."

"Hey, anything for the fate of the world," says Carlos, offering her a self-conscious smile. "I probably should, though. They're my colleagues, after all."

"There's probably nothing they can tell you that you can't find out on your own," points out the witch. "Or with the aid of some of your friends."

"Um," says Carlos. How much do the witches know about Cecil and his alethiometer? Carlos doesn't know which clan Cecil's long-lost mother was from; is she an ally of Paivi Feldt's? There's no telling how much she knows, how much she could reveal if she started talking....

"I've seen the birds lurking around you since yesterday. Those aren't witches' daemons, are they?"

Oh, right. Carlos rubs the back of his neck. "Erika does like to be helpful."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The afternoon presentation with Gerald goes off without a hitch. After the crowd of questioners has drifted off to the next round of presentations, Köhler finds them, face blank. Gerald's musk-ox daemon puts herself between them and the general public, forcing people to give them a wide berth.

"Hi," says Carlos. "The alethiometrists weren't too mad, were they?"

"I believe they were disappointed," says Köhler. "They are...more informed about your role in prophecy than I was previously aware, and it seems they wished to reveal this to you in person. Instead, they were left to send through me the dramatic revelation that you would, one day, return from the world of the dead."

He says it with such a straight face that it takes a second before Carlos has to clap both hands over his mouth to hold in a guffaw.

"Oh my," says Gerald. "Did you really? Why, I had no idea things would get so exciting after I left."

"It wasn't a big deal," giggles Carlos. "It really wasn't — other people yanked me back — I just got lucky enough to have them."

"You will of course be discreet about this," adds Köhler. "Dr. Ramirez does not need to be accused of having Messianic delusions."

"Don't you worry," Gerald assures them. "I know he's not angling for worship. I'm sure he'll settle for getting everyone to call him Carlos Silvertongue, won't you, Carlos?"

Not everyone! thinks Carlos happily. Just Cecil.

He doesn't repeat that out loud. There are some colleagues you can make oral sex jokes around, but Köhler is really not one of them. Instead, as the giggles subside, he says, "Thanks. To both of you. I'll see you tomorrow, okay? It's getting late in Hispania Nova, and there's somebody I promised to call."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

It is always dark in the dog park.

Cold, too. Dana sits back against the humming stone monolith, which at least has the effect of warming her up, and tries once again to project her spirit somewhere brighter. Her home, perhaps. Or the radio station. Is she still an intern, after all this time away? It is hard to tell.

She thinks she may even be getting somewhere when a familiar voice interrupts her concentration: "Dana."

"Hello again!" Dana covers her eyes. "Don't give me any hints. I can do this. You have long dark hair...tan skin...a compact build...a strong nose...eyes that are sad. So very sad. You are translucent, because you are visiting by astral projection, not in physical form. And, of course, you are wearing the same tan jacket as always."

"Right on all counts," says her visitor. "You are tremendous, you know that? Absolutely tremendous."

Pleased, Dana stands to greet him. "I couldn't have done it without your help." She hugs herself, shivering. "Speaking of help. Do you know any spells for warmth? Or, perhaps, could you ask the Scouts to send me some winter clothing in their next care package?"

The man in the tan jacket frowns. "Are you cold? Is this new?"

"It was always cold. But it is getting colder recently, I think."

The man looks...concerned. No, not concerned. Afraid.

"Could I be feeling hooded spectres?" Dana looks at the barren ground around her. Of course she still can't see them, but she knows the dog park is full of them: lurking and waiting, looking for prey. "Are there some around me right now?"

"There have always been hooded spectres around you," says the man, giving Dana fresh chills. "Sometimes so many that it's hard to see you through the crowd. They sense that you're close to settling. And if you're beginning to sense them too...Dana, I think you should go."

"What? Go where?"

"Out. I don't know how. But I know you can find a way."

"Did your foresight tell you that?" asks Dana, curious. She's learned a lot of useful things from this man, but foresight is one she doesn't seem able to pick up.

"No." He has the grace to look sheepish. "In fact, you told me that. When you appeared across the room from me, not half an hour ago."

So Dana will get the hang of astral projection eventually! The idea that she will become unstuck in time is less of a surprise; she had guessed it from some of the man's vague statements already, and besides, time is an illusion anyway. "Did I give myself any hints? Suggestions on where to begin?"

"Unfortunately, no. Which means you must have remembered figuring it out on your own."

Maybe she can...but Dana really would have appreciated a helpful paradox right about now.

"I'll go find the Scouts. Or Josie," continues the man. "See if they can get one last round of supplies to you before you're gone. But don't wait for me, all right? If you find an exit before I find you again...take it."

"I will." Dana picks up her backpack — one of the first non-food items catapulted over the Dog Park's high obsidian walls to land at her feet — stocked with such necessities as water, protein bars, beef jerky, gloves, rope, a pocketknife, and a tiny bag of thumb-sized bloodstones. "Thank you for everything, Señor—"

"Please," interrupts the man. "I think we can be on a first-name basis by now, don't you?"

"All right." Dana smiles. "Thank you, Emmanuel."

"It was my pleasure, Dana."

He vanishes, leaving Dana alone once more, without even her daemon for company.

She decides to start by investigating the walls. Just because the obsidian is flat and smooth and doesn't have so much as a crack for as far as the eye can see is no reason to assume she can't get through them somehow, right?

Shrugging the backpack over her shoulders, Dana walks straight ahead from the monolith until she reaches the nearest patch of wall, rests her hand against the rock, and digs a deep X in the dirt with the heel of one of her hiking boots. Then she turns left, and begins taking steady, even strides, counting off the paces. Every twenty steps, she makes another notch in the soil.

She feels warmer already.

Chapter 2: New In Town

Summary:

Carlos returns to Night Vale, just in time, because the new team members are starting to arrive and are going to need to be escorted through Local Weirdness 101. Meanwhile, Dana finds an unexpected door, and has an incongruous phone call.

Notes:

New art: Carlos at re-education.

Night Vale.

When Carlos and Isaña make it through the last of the aerodock's security measures (which now involve placing your hands on the skull of a librarian and reporting any visions it gives you), Cecil and Khoshekh are waiting for them.

Carlos falls into Cecil's arms for a welcome-back kiss, while Khoshekh lands on top of Isaña and weighs her down like a big lumpy fur coat. "Hi, Cecil. Did I miss anything exciting while I was away?"

Cecil bats his lashes playfully. "Other than me, you mean?"

One of the team's new members is scheduled to arrive on another flight in an hour, and Carlos is supposed to meet her, so they settle in at the aerodock's lunch counter for a snack and some catching-up. Carlos relates how much this world's other prophecy-aware groups know about just what is going on around here. Cecil talks about Mayor Pamela Winchell's latest three press conferences, all repeating the announcement that she's resigning.

They hold hands over the table and play footsie underneath it, unworried about whether it might bother the officer of the Sheriff's secret police hiding under the next table down.

At last the PA announces that the flight has touched down, and they head back to arrivals to meet the new experimental theologian. "She's another specialist in portals and alternate-world physics," Carlos explains to Cecil on the way. "Did her thesis work in Svalbard, then worked there for a couple years before coming back to do government research in New Amsterdam. Her daemon is a mongoose, which isn't in the same family or even the same order as pine martens, but is behaviorally close enough that we're all jealous...."

"Uh-huh." Cecil nods to the baggage carts. "Is that her there?"

"Where?"

"Between the man with the sheepdog and the two teenagers. Right there, see?"

Carlos, who had been looking for a woman alone, re-focuses. That's her, all right. A dark-haired woman in her early fifties, ring-tailed mongoose daemon sitting on his hind legs at her feet, helping a man pile suitcases onto one of the bag carts. The kids are a preteen boy in a neatly-pressed collared shirt (wincing), and an older teenage girl with clothes that match her jet-black hair (gleefully intoning, "Did you like the skull?").

He approaches, cautious, with Cecil following a half-step behind. "Excuse me...Sherie?"

The woman turns. "That's me! You must be Carlos? Such a treat to finally meet you. Everyone, this is Carlos, the nice theologian I'm going to be working with. And who's your friend? Sorry — ¿quién es tu amigo?"

Cecil switches into his flawless English as he shakes her hand. "Hi! I'm Cecil. You're probably going to be studying me. Carlos says I'm fascinating."

"We'll talk more about that later," says Carlos firmly. "Um, excuse me if this is a stupid question, but...did you bring your family?"

"Sure did," says Sherie. "Don't you worry, we know that's not in the budget, so we've got our own place all picked out. It's going to be such a great experience for the kids!"

It's going to be an experience, all right. "Do the kids have any experience handling firearms?"

The overly-neat boy and the goth girl both snap to attention. So do their daemons. (His, not yet settled, flies to his shoulder in bird-form and turns into a small but sharp-eared rabbit. Hers is a massive vulture, with a fuzzy white head and striking black-and-tan wings.)

Their mother just looks baffled. "Never touched a gun in their lives. Why?"

"Any other weapons? How about hand-to-hand training? Do you know any basic blood magic?"

That flips Sherie and her husband from confused to angry. "Now, see here," snaps the husband, his black-and-tan sheepdog daemon baring the slightest flash of teeth. "I don't know what kind of anti-Semitic playbook you people are working from —"

Carlos holds up his hands in surrender. "I didn't ask because you're Hebrew, I swear! It's a thing here, half of town can do it — Cecil, show them something you learned in Scouts, will you?"

While Sherie's family watches in varying degrees of offense, confusion, and fascination, Cecil pulls out a pocketknife, scores a quick line across the back of his wrist, and finger-paints a rune on his skin. In Modified Sumerian, he intones a phrase Carlos doesn't have the oral dexterity to repeat, but recognizes as Let there be light.

His hand and wrist light up from the inside, glowing a dull red-orange. It's like looking at a fleshy lava lamp. Carlos can pick out the shadows of veins, arteries, muscles, bone.

The girl's eyes are huge. "Mom! Can I join the Scouts?"

"You don't choose to join the Scouts," scoffs Cecil. "But I'll let you in on a little secret: Girl Scout sign-up isn't quite as random as it is for the boys! So if you're hoping to get that viridian envelope under your door, I know a few rituals you can try...."

"Maybe we should talk about this more after we get all settled in," says Sherie faintly. "You gentlemen want to recommend a good car rental place?"

"Oh, no," says Carlos. "I'm sure you're both excellent drivers back in the US —"

"Hey, I have my license too!" puts in the teenage girl.

"— that you're all excellent drivers back in the US, but you can't jump behind the wheel here right away. We didn't send you any kind of guide to local traffic cues."

"I can read enough Spanish to get around," protests Sherie.

"How can you tell if another driver has stop sign immunity?" asks Carlos. "What does it mean when a road sign shows time-lapse photography of flowers wilting?"

"Um...."

The glow in Cecil's arm is already fading. He smacks it a couple of times, to no avail, then shrugs and sticks his hands in his pockets. "You probably should not try to rent a vehicle in person anyway, if the two of you have as little hand-to-hand combat experience as your children. How about if I go pick something up for you, and Carlos drives?"

Sherie and her husband agree, and Cecil gives Carlos a peck on the cheek before heading off toward a dark, moss-encrusted doorway under a sign labeled RENTALS. Carlos is offering to help finish stacking their bags when the girl grabs her dad's arm. "Did you guys see that?"

"I'm sure it's no big deal. Men in Hispanian culture are usually more affectionate —"

"I don't mean that, Dad, look!"

She's pointing to Khoshekh, finally drawing the family's attention to the fact that Cecil's daemon is still cuddled up with Isaña. There are at least forty feet between him and Cecil now, and the gap is growing every moment.

Khoshekh smirks up at them, the picture of feline smugness. "It isn't only because we're dating that Carlos says we're fascinating."

 

-{,(((,">

 

It is getting late, and Dana is tired of walking.

She sits down. Then she lies down, in the soft, mostly-dead grass. It's a good thing her hair is braided back; it would have become a horrible mess by now if it were loose.

She takes out her phone and starts to compose a shaky text to Cecil. She's tried texting her mother and brother, but those don't seem to be getting through. Of course, she isn't always sure the messages to Cecil are getting through either. Sometimes his responses are scrambled, and sometimes they don't come at all....

Halfway through her typing, something whooshes through the air above her and hits the dirt with a thump.

Another care package! Dana scrambles to open it. There is food inside, and a warm sweater, and some cans of an energy drink, and....

Earrings. A pair of earrings, still in their packaging: two little silver anchors.

Smiling, she puts on first the sweater, then the earrings. She'll have a meal, get some caffeine in her, and then maybe follow the dog park walls a little longer before catching a good night's sleep.

Dana has never been able to read the alethiometer like Cecil can, but she knows the most basic meanings of all the symbols. He could trust her to recognize this one. The Anchor, first and foremost, means hope.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette is the one who picked up today's new arrivals from the aerodock. Carlos and one of the Li Huas are doing one last round of vacuuming in the smaller of their rental houses — they just turned the power and water back on, after months of not having enough of a team to use the place at all — when the van pulls in.

Omero and Nirliq are both Ph.D. students, in cell biology and Rusakov optics respectively. Omero is a square-jawed young man getting his education on a veteran scholarship; his daemon is a startlingly beautiful glossy starling, feathers in iridescent shades of turquoise, blue, and violet. Nirliq is a few years older than Carlos, switching careers after a decade on some kind of management track that sounds deathly boring; accompanying her is a long-limbed red colobus, wispy tufts of white fur standing out around his keen black face.

"You'll meet Köhler and the other Li Hua later. They're out in the field now," says Carlos, after a round of introductions. "And you're the first two to get here, so feel free to call dibs on whatever rooms you want."

Omero looks wary. "What do you mean by 'the other Li Hua'?"

"He means he doesn't want to let me have any fun before you figure that out," says the Li Hua in residence.

"So...you're twins. Li Hua is your last name."

"No, she's one person who had an exact duplicate of herself created by a freak weather pattern," says Carlos. "We'll explain in more detail later, but honestly, this is only about the twenty-fourth most important thing we have to catch you up on."

"They did say this place was weird." Nirliq's eyes are sparkling with interest. "And when do we get to talk to Fleur? I'm such a fan. I must have cited five of her papers in my master's thesis, and I really want to bounce some theories off of her about enhancing her Dirac-Hall lenses by exploiting the properties of surface plasmons...."

"Fleur's current whereabouts are the seventeenth most important thing we have to catch you up on," interrupts Carlos. "Pick a room and grab some dinner, and then we'll start from the top, okay?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

There is a door.

Not a door in the dog park walls. Those are still as relentlessly solid as ever. This is an old, oak door, unsupported by any structure.

It could be an exit. It could be an entrance to something far worse. Dana can't even tell what side it's supposed to open from. She wishes she had her daemon with her, to talk about what to do.

But her daemon is somewhere far away, and the air around her is cold, and these are two very good reasons why she cannot simply stay where she is.

Dana brushes her fingertips against one of her earrings, then takes the doorknob on the side nearest to her and twists it open.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Josie, Erika, these are Sherie, Omero, Nirliq, and Quentin. Everyone, this is one of our closest allies, Vieja Josie, and her friends Erika, Erika, and Erika."

The new experimental theologians were hired in the full expectation that they would meet some angels. They're a lot less stunned than Carlos was the first time an Erika said hello to him. Of these four, only Sherie's mouth is hanging open, and if there are any religious sentiments going through Quentin's head as he clings to his crucifix necklace, he doesn't annoy the angels by voicing them out loud.

Quentin is the first hire to be born and raised in Hispania Nova itself. Drove all the way here from Baja California, arriving in town last night in a beat-up Chevy with his worldly possessions in the back and his sweet-faced flying-squirrel daemon in his pocket. His Spanish is perfect, and you don't get far in studying anbaromagnetic field theory without learning plenty of technical English, but his conversational English will be getting a workout on the job.

Josie serves a round of homemade pastries, then she and Carlos retreat to the kitchen. The others can grill the Erikas, on whatever the Erikas feel like answering. Carlos needs to ask Josie about the witch he met in New Amsterdam.

"In my professional opinion," says Josie, sipping her lingonberry tea, "the Lake Enara clan and its allies are probably getting the prophecy from their own sources. There's no reason to suspect Cecil's mother is with them."

"Is her clan one of Lake Enara's allies?" asks Carlos. Of course he would like to assume Cecil's mother is on the same side as the legendary Serafina Pekkala, but it's not like he knows anything about how witch politics work.

"That would be quite a trick," says Josie, "considering that it no longer exists."

It turns out the women who would have been Cecil's aunts and cousins and grandmothers were wiped out in the War. "I'm sorry," says Carlos softly. "They died heroes."

Josie doesn't say anything.

Carlos shivers. "They did, right? They were on the right side of the War."

The witch stands up. "Let me see if your friends want any more muffins."

Erika is telling a story about Will Parry when they rejoin the group, and of course Carlos has to stay and listen. With one thing and another, he doesn't get a chance to ply Josie for any more details before it's time to go.

On the way back out to the cars, Quentin suddenly breaks from the group. "Give me a second," he says in Spanish, and makes a detour to the corner of Josie's empty driveway. As the others wait, he pulls off his crucifix and drops it in the trash. "Okay! Now we can go."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The door opens into what seems to be the basement of an old house. Dana leaves a voicemail for Cecil, doing her best to be a good reporter even when she knows almost nothing about where she is or what is going on, then goes exploring once more.

At first she thinks about leaving her backpack in one room while she explores the others, but is quickly glad she did not. The parts of the building aren't connected to each other properly. You leave a room through one door, and turn around to go back, and you end up in a completely different room. There are no windows — just a lot of photograms of windows, hanging on the walls — so Dana can't even tell if the floors are in any kind of order, or if climbing the stairs just puts you on the same level you left from.

She also discovers an insubstantial John Peters (you know, the farmer?) in the living room.

She calls Cecil again, trying to keep all the details straight in her head. Cecil will know how to put them together for the radio, once she gets them into his voicemail.

The call connects.

Between bursts of static, Cecil's voice says something that sounds like "Are you okay?"

"Cecil?" asks Dana. It is him, right? It sounds like him. "I can barely understand you. Cecil, are you there?"

"...you ever checked?" says Cecil through the fuzz. "...in your work shed."

"No, I'm still in the old house. I made my way out of the basement...." Dana marshals her facts. "....which was empty except for a single photogram of what looks to be a building. It's a framed five-by-seven black-and-white photo of the front of this old building. It hangs crooked just to the right of center on one wall. The building looks to have a row of columns, a terrace, and a series of stairs." At least, that was her best guess. It had been confusing to look at, like trying to interpret a two-dimensional image of something with more than three dimensions. "The stairs didn't go anywhere. Why would you build stairs and not have them go anywhere?"

"...to hover in packs of three or more, in fixed locations, for several minutes...."

Dana frowns. "No, that doesn't sound right. Anyway, once I heard the footsteps above me stop, I opened the door to the first floor. I saw a man standing in the middle of the living room, staring straight ahead at the wall. I couldn't see his face, Cecil, and I couldn't see his daemon, either. I wondered if he was separated from his daemon, like me, or if he did not have one at all. I was scared he might hear me, Cecil."

She isn't scared any more, of course. She's standing next to John Peters (you know, the farmer?) right now, and he still isn't looking at her, or giving any sign that he can hear her right now.

"Be quiet and stay inside," advises Cecil.

"No, it's all right! I already got up the nerve and spoke to him," says Dana quickly. "I said —" She steps right into the farmer's line of vision. "— 'hello, sir, my name is Dana, and I'm sorry to intrude, but I was wondering —'"

Still no response. Dana prays that he can't hear her, any more than she can touch him. Because the alternative is that his senses are working perfectly, but he no longer has the interest or attention to respond.

She goes back to her story. "'— is this your home?' And he didn't move. He didn't make a sound. He just kept staring at another small photo on the wall. I walked closer to him and I said, 'Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, but —' And then I saw. Cecil, I saw who it was."

"Old Woman Josie," says Cecil's voice.

"No, it wasn't her. It was John Peters! You know, the farmer?"

She lays the rest of it out for Cecil: the farmer's non-responsiveness, the fact that he is looking at one of the endless photos of windows, the way that when she tries to put her hand on his shoulder it goes right through him. The general spatial confusion of the whole house. Her own confusion.

"But I know one thing, Cecil," she adds, trying to get to the good news.

"The sunlight has come back," intones Cecil.

"Yes!" exclaims Dana, with a happy laugh. "I can see it right now. There is a door in the kitchen, the door John Peters must have entered through, because it is open, and beyond it is sunlight. I can see sunlight and sand. I'm going through."

"I hope you are safe," says Cecil through the haze.

"Well, I do not know if it is going to be safe," admits Dana. "But I have to go through that door. No matter what! I've got to get back home!"

Whatever Cecil tries to tell her now, it's too broken-up by static to make out.

"Here I go!" says Dana, as loudly and clearly as possible, and hopes her words make it through.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"And here we are," says Henriette, with a sweeping gesture toward the building they've all parked across from. "The house that doesn't exist."

The whole group of new experimental theologians lines up on the sidewalk and takes in the view. It's most relevant to the research of Sherie, the portal specialist, and Nirliq, the Rusakov photographer. Quentin will probably find something to interest him here, as will Rayshawn, the Texan with the frog daemon that Carlos met back in New Amsterdam.

Omero, the biologist, probably won't have much to do with this place. Neither will Perle, their final arrival, a soft-voiced woman with a leopard gecko daemon who came here all the way from Spain. Like Quentin, her first language is Spanish; unlike him, her English is deft and smooth. Her field is linguistics. She's not here to pick apart the DNA or measure the Rusakov concentrations of people like Hiram McDaniels; she's here to talk to them.

Still, no matter their fields, Carlos wants them all to have a thorough grounding in the oddities of Night Vale.

Also, he's hoping at least one of them can be convinced to walk up and ring the doorbell.

The new ducklings don't look nearly as impressed by the house's non-existence as they should. "It looks like it exists," says Omero dubiously.

"And it's got them identical houses on either side," adds Rayshawn. "Would sure make more sense for it to exist than not."

"You would think so, wouldn't you?" says Carlos, folding his arms. "All right, then, you go up and look in the windows. Tell us what's inside."

Henriette nods. "We'll wait right here."

"Or we could just go ask that girl coming out of it," says Sherie.

Carlos whips around. "What? Where?"

The front door is still closed, the windows still shuttered. For a second he feels like an idiot, falling for such an easy gag, and now everyone's going to think he's just gullible —

"Over at the side door. Purple shirt, backpack...looks like she's around my daughter's age," continues Sherie. "Can't see her daemon. I guess she's got a small one...."

And now Carlos sees. "Dana!"

He crosses the road at a light jog. She's back! She's made it out of the dog park — the two anomalies must be connected somehow — he can't wait to look into this in-depth. And, oh, her daemon is in another world — Carlos can't remember how he knows that, but he does — they'll have to rendezvous with Cecil, who can use the alethiometer to tell Dana how to follow....

Dana is talking on her phone. She doesn't seem to have noticed Carlos at all. Carlos catches up with her, not wanting to interrupt.

"...is not Night Vale," says Dana into the phone. "I don't see any town at all. The only thing I can see...."

She raises her head to look out across what is clearly Night Vale. Low buildings, power lines, the Brownstone Spire jutting up into the sky.

"...is a mountain. But mountains aren't real, Cecil! I will have to go back. I will have to try again."

"Dana," says Carlos again, reaching for her. "There's no mountain. We're right here. You're home."

His hand goes right through her shoulder.

The other experimental theologians have caught up with Carlos, circling around where Dana appears to be, but, clearly, is not. "Is everything all right, honey?" asks Sherie, with motherly concern. "Can you hear us?"

Oblivious, Dana turns around, and stares back toward the house that doesn't exist with a look of...panic? Horror? Concern?

She retraces a few of her steps, walking straight through Carlos in the process. Henriette takes it in stride, but all the new team members jump, daemons hiding behind their legs or hunkering down closer on their shoulders. Carlos just shivers. It's like being touched by a ghost, like walking through a cold wind.

Dana looks at her phone. Looking over her shoulder, Carlos sees a Call Lost screen. Her shoulders slump, defeated; she stuffs the phone in a pocket of her sturdy travel backpack, then picks a direction based on nothing Carlos can identify and starts walking, slow and steady.

As she walks, she fades, until she can no longer be seen at all.

Dead silence reigns.

Henriette breaks it. "All right, I think that's something Cecil will want to know about," she says. "Carlos, take care of calling him. As for the rest of you...where were we?...ah, yes: who wants to volunteer to go up and touch the house?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Aside from good old-fashioned shared terror, there's nothing quite so good for team bonding as working on a project together. In this case, preparing a fresh batch of the Asriel emulsion. The new arrivals are already starting to take a surfeit of photos that need to be developed, and after only one or two weeks in town they have yet to be let in on the secret of the electrum spyglass, so they'll be doing their Rusakov photography the traditional way.

Everyone who works with Rusakov particles is in the chapel's main room, gloves and goggles on, comfortably mixing chemicals. Nirliq has come up with some plans to test her theories for enhancing the Dirac-Hall lenses, and is bouncing them off Henriette and Quentin. Sherie is telling Carlos about how her kids are settling in at the local Night Vale schools, and how surprised she is that their classes are so large, when this town seems so small. Köhler and Rayshawn seem to be half-listening to both.

It's all going swimmingly until Carlos's phone rings.

"Stay on this for a minute, okay?" he asks Sherie, and heads for the edge of the room where his phone is charging, tugging off his gloves along the way.

"That's his Cecil ringtone," Henriette stage-whispers to the group.

"Can't it wait?" asks Rayshawn, with a note of discomfort. He's the only one of the newcomers who seems really put off by the gay thing; not totally unexpected, since the Republic of Texas is the only country on the entire continent that still has anti-sodomy laws on the books. Sherie has been fumbling, evidently not sure what to think, and none of the others have batted an eye.

"Mr. Palmero is an important figure for information in this town," says Köhler. The new folks haven't been told about the alethiometer yet, either, but they know Cecil does the local news. The sooner they catch on to Cecil's relevance, the better. "When he calls, it is most often significant."

Even knowing that Cecil is likely calling about some kind of horrible emergency, Carlos's heart does a little flutter as he answers. "Cecil! Is everything okay?"

"Yes! Yes, everything is fine," says Cecil. He doesn't sound fine. He sounds shaky and nervous. "What about you? Are you all right?"

"Sure. All fine here."

"Where are you?"

"Just down at the chapel. Doing some chemistry, talking shop," says Carlos. Isaña pokes him urgently in the leg, but whatever she wants, it can wait until he's done talking to Cecil. "One of our new people has these fascinating ideas about exploiting surface plasmons — um, those are waves propagated across the surface of a conductor, in this case treated electrum —" His daemon pokes him again. Apparently it can't wait. "Sorry, just a second — what is it?"

The little armadillo looks up at him in panic from the floor. "We had a date!"

"We had a date?" echoes Carlos stupidly.

Silence on the other end of the line.

"Oh my god we had a date," breathes Carlos. "Oh my god, Cecil, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"So you're not hurt," says Cecil, the anxiety replaced with a steely cool. "Or detained. Or kidnapped. Or temporarily deprived of your memories and staggering in confused circles through the desert."

"No, none of that, I'm fine, I just — I got caught up in things. Lost track of time. And hey, time isn't real anyway, right?" says Carlos with a nervous laugh. It doesn't get any warmth out of Cecil. "Okay, that was stupid, I — should I just come over now? I mean, not now, I have a solution over an open flame here...." He throws a panicky glance at the chapel tables, and discovers his teammates either facepalming or looking utterly unimpressed. "...although it's a routine procedure and my colleagues are very capable experimental theologians, so they can certainly take care of it if I ask!"

"Don't bother," says Cecil. "I am sorry I interrupted. I'll leave you to your routine procedure."

He hangs up.

Carlos's head spins. They had a date. And he forgot. On the scale of relationship sins, how bad is this? Is it closer to "why can't you chew normally" or "with my brother?" (Not that Cecil has a brother, and not that Carlos would cheat on Cecil in a million years with anyone, his brain is just torturing him with wild hyperbole.) Does Cecil think Carlos loves experimental theology more than him, because it isn't like that, not at all, he just...forgot.

"Sweetie, you look like you're going to pass out. Sit down," chides Sherie, appearing out of nowhere to guide Carlos to the nearest chair. Her mongoose daemon keeps Isaña walking in a straight line. "You don't stand this boy up on a regular basis, do you?"

"No," says Carlos miserably. "I mean, I was late that one time...but only because there was a very dangerous portal open, and there are people here who have somehow managed to survive to adulthood with zero survival instincts and will walk right into a seeping mist of toxic gas if you don't keep them out. And right before we started dating there was something I almost missed because I was...um, medically dead for a bit."

"Well, I call that an excuse," says Sherie. "You've been dating for a while? How serious is it?"

"Coming up on three months. I guess it's...very serious? I don't know how to quantify this! And I have no personal basis for comparison, and I didn't know him far back enough to know how his other relationships compare...."

"He's crazy about you!" calls Henriette helpfully from the other side of the room. In Spanish. By this point she knows more Spanish phrases for romance than she will ever have reasonable cause to use.

"And who wouldn't be?" exclaims Sherie, sticking with English. Her discomfort with Carlos's non-traditional relationship appears to have been totally swept away by her sense that he could use some traditional Hebrew mothering. "You're smart, you're handsome, you have fantastic hair...so you missed a date. All right. You keep your distance for a day or so, give him a little space to be angry, then you show up at his place with the biggest bunch of flowers you can find. Does he like flowers? With a girl, it would definitely be flowers."

"He might." Carlos has never needed to know before. "I'll ask around. I'm sure Josie or Steve can suggest something."

"Well, there you go! Don't let it get you down. You'll be back in his good books before you know it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

With Sherie off at her family's place, the Li Huas weren't compelled to bunk together again, and Quentin is the only one of the new arrivals to join them in the larger of the rental houses. He shows up outside the bathroom that evening while Carlos is brushing his teeth.

"We'll just be a minute," says Isaña in Spanish. Carlos has a mouthful of foam.

"Hey, don't rush on my account." Quentin adjusts the bathrobe slung over his shoulder.

His flying-squirrel daemon climbs out of the fluffy pocket and jumps into the air, soaring down to land next to Isaña. "So...Sherie really came around today, huh," she says.

"We thought she might," says Isaña. They did screen the applicants for raging, intractable homophobia. Anyone with hang-ups who made it through has the potential to get over them.

"By the way, we read that paper of yours," adds Quentin's squirrel. "The one with the updated model for anbaromagnetic field theory. Now, maybe you've thought of this already, but we think Henriette's danger meter could be modified to test some of your hypotheses...."

The two daemons talk about the ionization probability of complex atoms while Carlos spits and rinses. They touch on ideas that hadn't even occurred to Carlos. He can't wait to see in practice if they hold up.

As he's leaving to let the other man shower, Quentin adds, "Hey, one more thing — where does a guy go to meet another guy around here anyway?"

Carlos blinks, then blushes. "Um, if you're me, you don't go anywhere. He just spots you at a professional function, and later announces on the radio to the whole town that he's in love with you. Which worked out in the long run, but as methods go, I wouldn't recommend it."

"No kidding," says Quentin. "Is that the only way he tries to pick people up, or are there, you know, hangouts he would know about?"

"I'll ask if he has any recommendations," promises Carlos. "As long as you don't mind waiting a while. I probably shouldn't bring it up until I make sure he's accepted the flowers."

Chapter 3: Yellow Gyropters

Summary:

Carlos makes up with Cecil, then chats with the Faceless Old Woman while cooking a romantic dinner. A couple of the new theologians meet Hiram. Dana does some exploring, and manages her first astral projection. Oh, and the "horrible betrayal" part of that prophecy finally kicks in.

Notes:

Fancast for the new scientists, if you want something more than verbal descriptions to base your mental images on.

Night Vale.

"Sorry, no visitors today," says the receptionist, sounding more bored than sorry. Her thrush daemon grooms its feathers, ignoring them. "No exceptions."

Carlos tries not to freak out all over again. This doesn't necessarily mean Cecil doesn't want Carlos visiting the station. It could just be a really busy news day. Or Station Management could be in a mood, the kind where it might get antsy and eat guests. "Could you at least call up and tell Cecil he has a delivery? I'm not sure I can carry this all the way home."

The bouquet in his arms (pink roses, orchids, Texas bluebells, and yellow snapdragons) wriggles, and one of the snapdragons tries to take another bite out of his hand. After the first one, the florist offered to throw in a pair of gardening gloves at half-price, evidently out of pity that Carlos doesn't know how to deal with flowers.

The receptionist dials up to Cecil's office. "Señor Palmero? Delivery for you. Flowers. You got someone else who would be bringing you flowers? All right, all right, you didn't say. He'll be right up." She hangs up the receiver and nods to Carlos. "All right, sign in."

Conveniently, Carlos is already bleeding, so he doesn't have to prick his finger again to leave a dot of blood on the sign-in sheet. He and Isaña get into the elevator, where he presses the button for Cecil's floor...and realizes with a start as the doors slide shut that the lights are off. The button panel is lit up, a set of disembodied hovering neon rings and numbers, and all the rest is darkness.

His eyes have adjusted, as much as they can, when he steps out into a similarly darkened hall.

"Hello?" he says haltingly. "Cecil...?"

"Shh!" The shadowy form of Cecil appears out of the gloom, just as the elevator shuts behind him and the view dims even further. "Keep your voice down. Our current intern had her second-sight awaken in a big way about five minutes after she got in, and of course we can't send her home in that state, so we're trying to keep sensory stimulation to a minimum."

"Oh," whispers Carlos. "Sure."

He jumps when Cecil's hands brush over his. "I guess I'll put these in some water...? If you keep ahold of my shoulder, can you follow me?"

Carlos gladly relinquishes the bouquet. "Of course. Just let me pick up Isaña first."

He scoops up his daemon, fumbles a bit until Cecil guides his hand to the shoulder of a lace-trimmed vest, and lets Cecil lead him slowly down the hall. The break room is in this direction, and as they get closer Carlos recognizes it, the door ajar and the insides lit by a series of tiny yellow flashes.

"Wait here," whispers Cecil, stopping him at the threshold.

Someone inside is taking shuddery breaths. Another set of little yellow flickers, soft and familiar from childhood summer nights, and Carlos realizes he's seeing a firefly daemon. Its glow outlines the huddled form sitting beside it.

"Vithya? This is Cecil Palmer from your present, September 12, 2013," says Cecil as he lets himself in. "I'm getting something to put these flowers in."

"Cecil — don't," pleads Vithya in a hoarse voice. "You're bleeding...there's blood everywhere...."

"There's no blood in September 2013, Vithya." Dishes clank as Cecil rummages through the cupboards. "Present-day Cecil is not hurt."

For a moment Vithya is calmed by this. Then she shrieks. "Where are your eyes?"

"Present-day Cecil's eyes are right here in his head, Vithya!" calls Cecil over the running of water. "There's nothing in September 2013 for you to be afraid of."

Vithya sniffles and shakes. Cecil returns to the hall, now carrying the flowers in a sloshing jar.

"Will she be okay?" whispers Carlos as Cecil takes his hand once more.

"She'll be great. Sudden unfiltered access to all of time and space is never easy, but she took less than an hour to get through the unmitigated-screaming stage," says Cecil brightly. "I bet you anything she'll be finished sorting through all possible futures when the broadcast starts, and have most of the unbearable knowledge safely repressed by the end of the weather."

Carlos swallows. "I'll take your word for it."

Cecil's office is lit by his computer monitor and a handful of blinking lights on the equipment. Heavy blackout curtains are hanging down over the usual blinds; he tugs on a cord and one of them slides aside a few inches, letting in a blinding white streak of sunlight that goes almost up to the ceiling. Voice still low, he says, "Is this enough light for you?"

"That's plenty, yeah."

"Great." Cecil sets the jar on his desk, retrieves a plastic container of peanuts from a drawer, and flicks one at the bouquet. A snapdragon catches it out of the air and crunches down.

Carlos hangs back, setting Isaña on the desk's other end, trying to figure out how much forgiveness all this equates to. "So...are you...still mad?"

Cecil's mouth twists. "I think it's reasonable to expect you to call me when these things happen," he says, folding his arms. "I don't think that's too much to ask."

"It is! I mean, it isn't! I mean, it is reasonable, and it isn't too much!" stammers Carlos. "And I didn't mean to imply that you shouldn't still be mad — I realize that human emotions do not work like chemical solutions, where a measured quantity of gifts can be counted on to neutralize a known proportion of justified anger, especially when I can't even promise that it will never happen again — I've always had experimental theology in my life, Cecil, and there's never been anyone with this kind of legitimate claim to take me away from it before, and I know in theory how to treat you right, but in practice, I —"

He keeps babbling right up to the point where Cecil's arms loop around his shoulders, Cecil's forehead rests against his.

"...hi," says Carlos, and dares to clasp his hands against the dip of Cecil's back.

"My dear Carlos," murmurs Cecil. "The joy of your presence in my life is sufficient to neutralize a much greater quantity of anger than I think you realize."

Too relieved to speak, Carlos pulls Cecil into a tight hug.

"That said," adds Cecil, "if you should also happen to miss our dinner this coming Sunday, you are going to need to budget for much deadlier flowers."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

The sun that hangs over the vast, forsaken landscape doesn't look right. It is closer, or perhaps larger. It is putting out too much sunshine.

Dana does not know what world she is in. There may be people here, somewhere, with their own maps and directions and points of reference, but she is starting from scratch. Once a full day has passed, she arbitrarily decides to pretend the sun moves the same direction as it does in her own world, which means: she is moving east.

To the south, the hills lead into a range of saw-toothed mountains. At their western tip is something that might be another mountain, but looks too regular to be anything but a man-made structure: a great rearing heap of basalt, dark and foreboding, like a fortress built to withstand assault on a scale Dana can only dream of. She avoids it. She doesn't believe in mountains, anyway.

The plains to the west and north are empty. No, not empty. Barren. There's no life, not a plant or a creature to be seen, but the sandy ground is littered with wrecked and twisted hunks of metal, some of them half-buried by the wind.

Dana is guessing that they're vehicles. She doesn't recognize the construction of most of the wrecks, but she can't see anything that looks like foundations or the remains of walls, so whoever left these objects here must have been traveling through the area, not living on it. Scattered around in the sand are glints of white that might be bone. Whatever left the plains in this state, Dana isn't eager to meet it herself.

Very far to the north, half-hidden by clouds on the horizon, is another mountain. Dana can barely make out the details of this one, although after the sun sets she can see a blinking red light at the peak, a tiny dot of brilliance that flashes through the dark and nearly-starless sky. She doesn't plan on believing in this mountain either.

So, east it is. East, through a slightly hilly country where the wrecks are few and far between, where the sand is broken by the occasional touch of hardy grass and even a few gnarled cacti. Dana has found an empty riverbed, and is following it on a loose path downward. Hopefully there is still some kind of lake or oasis at the end.

After all, if there are people to be found in this world, they will be near the water.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos lets himself into Cecil's apartment, carting a panini press and a couple of light bulbs. The apology bouquet whistles at him from the counter, and a moment later Cecil comes out for a hug, just as Carlos is finished replacing the bulb in his fridge. "Do you need anything before I go?"

"Nope. All set." Carlos nuzzles Cecil's dark hair. "Go do your show. If I've estimated this evening's time anomalies right, dinner should be ready right about when you get back."

His phone, in his bag on the table, chooses that moment to launch into its new-theologian ring tone.

"...unless someone is in mortal danger," amends Carlos, and Cecil reluctantly lets him go. In a town like this, an "all plans can be canceled if you need to save someone's life" policy is an unfortunate necessity.

It turns out to be Rayshawn on the other end of the line. "Hey, uh, Carlos? What're we s'posed to do when suddenly there's a giant, impossible —"

He breaks off, and Carlos can hear the muffled voice of someone else talking in the distance.

"Never mind! Seems it's under control. Sorry to've bothered you." He hangs up.

"So, no mortal danger?" asks Cecil, resting his head on Carlos's shoulder.

"Hard to tell," says Carlos. "There's a giant, impossible something, and one of the new arrivals doesn't recognize it. Which means it could be totally normal, and/or not dangerous, and/or the on-duty members of my team could be perfectly capable of handling it. Or none of these things could be true. I don't have enough data to tell."

His eyes flick to the window ("giant" is relative; it could be visible from here, or it could just be a three-foot-long beetle), then back to his phone. A quick text to one of the veterans should confirm if it's something he needs to help study....

Cecil plucks the phone out of his hands.

While Carlos sputters and tries instinctively to grab it back, Cecil pockets it without effort. "Sweet, concerned Carlos, if they needed your help, I am sure they would have said so."

"Okay, but I still need that!" protests Carlos. "If there's an emergency later — if you need to call me —"

"If anyone needs to get ahold of you, the secret police know where you are." Cecil drops a quick kiss on Carlos's cheek. "See you later tonight!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

The seasoned salmon is broiling in the oven, the hard-crusted potato bread is sliced, the orange glaze is ready to be spread, and Carlos hasn't heard a word from anyone outside this apartment. Not about giant impossible somethings, or anything else.

"If it's important and dangerous, Cecil will be reporting about it," says Isaña. "Where's the radio?"

"Good question," says Carlos. "Let's look."

They turn over the whole kitchen and half of the living room before a bored voice says, "He doesn't have one. Why would he need one? He is the radio."

Carlos doesn't try to see her, just addresses the vague blur off to his left, which he knows to be a Faceless Old Woman with an eyeless white salamander for a daemon. "Thanks."

"This is the kind of support I would provide for every member of the community if I were your mayor," points out the Anciana Sin Rostro. "Can I count on your vote next June? Not that elections are decided by votes, obviously, but it would be a nice gesture."

"I'm not a citizen of Hispania Nova," Carlos reminds her. "I don't think I'm allowed to vote."

"Why would that matter? Hiram McDaniels isn't a native of this universe, and it hasn't stopped him from trying to run."

Carlos sighs. "I'll think about it, all right? In the meantime, could you drop in on the home of someone else who does have a radio, and let me know if there's anything serious going on?"

"Maybe," says the Faceless Old Woman. "What are you cooking in there? It smells very good."

"Salmon paninis. Will you check the radio for me if I promise to stick one in the fridge for you? I'd offer to set a place at dinner, but this is kind of supposed to be a romantic couple's night."

The Faceless Old Woman considers this. "Do not put orange glaze on my bread," she orders at last. "I do not like orange products. They upset me." With that, she vanishes from view altogether.

Left alone again, Carlos and Isaña return to the kitchen to do some cleaning-up. Carlos sets aside a couple slices of bread, and uses a spatula to start glazing the rest when the blur in the corner of his eye reappears.

"Beware, Carlos," she says. "Beware the unraveling of all things."

Carlos's heart skips a beat.

"Not now," adds the Faceless Old Woman. "Just in general. There's nothing going on right now specifically, except for this situation with a horrific invading army and everyone being urged to flee their homes. Or, in my case, your homes."

"What."

"Oh, yes. It's all over the radio. Army coming down from the mountain, very frightening."

This, Carlos has got to see.

He strides over to the living room window and levers it open with his free hand, just as a blue secret-police gyropter goes by overhead. This side of the building doesn't face the road, but now he can hear the unmistakable rumbling, honking, and occasional explosion of a Night Vale traffic jam. And there in the distance, blocking out the formerly flat horizon....

"Oh, that?" says Carlos.

"I can only assume so. Why?"

"Because that's a mirage. I've seen that one before." Carlos waves vaguely with the spatula. "When you get the clouds in a certain way and the temperature is where it's at, you can sometimes get this blinking light/mountain/floodplain/masked army mirage." He leans out the window again, getting a closer look. "Wow, this is a pretty strong one. It should disappear in an hour or two. Listen, do you think you could drop in on the radio and tell Cecil to calm people down? I don't want a blindly panicked populace making him late for dinner."

"That depends," says the Faceless Old Woman, unimpressed as ever. "What are you making for dessert?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

On her third day out here alone, Dana finds another of those old oak doors.

She runs to it. It's chained shut from the far side, but it smells like home, so she pounds on the weather-beaten panels with her fists. Nobody answers.

She camps next to it for the night. There are very few stars overhead, even though she's in the middle of total wilderness and there's no light pollution at all, except for that omnipresent blinking red light on the lone probably-not-real mountain to the north.

Before long, the sun rises again. Too bright. Too hot.

It's as good a time as any to give astral projection another shot. Dana sits cross-legged in the shade of the door, folds her hands, and tries to feel the currents of the world around her. To step outside her body; to let them sweep her away.

Maybe the currents are stronger here, or maybe it's simply easier to concentrate without being surrounded by unseen hooded spectres — whatever the cause, this time it works.

Dana's body slumbers peacefully on the sand, while her ghost floats upward and tilts ever so slightly to the left —

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"...and so I was hoping we could set aside an afternoon to talk about language with the angels," finishes Carlos. He's in the back seat of the coupe on the way to work, calling Josie on behalf of Perle, their linguist, who sits next to him. "If they existed. Which they don't."

"I'm sure they would love to," says Josie on the other end of the line, "but they aren't around right now, so it's going to have to wait until they get back. Whenever that is."

"You don't know?"

Josie sighs. "I wish I did! They've been gone for — well, almost ever since you brought your new friends over to meet them. It's never been this long before. They must be doing something important."

Carlos relates the news to Perle. "Of course," she says, resigned, like she was expecting nothing less than for her best study subjects to disappear as soon as she got into town. "I understand."

"They'll definitely be back, though!" Carlos assures her. "There's kind of a thing with prophecy going on, and they're going to be needed."

"Is this the same prophecy that you told us about?" asks Nirliq from the front seat. Her colobus daemon is buckled into the passenger seat like a skinny, furry child. (Perle's leopard gecko, like Isaña, is just riding at his human's feet.) "The one that explains why you're not actually running the project?"

"That's the one."

"I don't understand why you're fighting it," adds Perle softly. "If the nonexistent angels have to come back because of destiny, then you have to betray this town because of destiny, too."

"I am fighting it because free will is the heart and soul of the Republic," says Carlos stubbornly. "Look, if you want to get out of the tape room and do some field work, Josie's tall friends aren't your only options. How about if we get in touch with Hiram McDaniels? You can be the first person from this world to study his world's native language."

"Or to figure out if it really is a language, and he's not just an ordinary guy with a thing for conlangs."

"Um...."

"No, he's definitely from another world," says Nirliq. "He's literalmente, un dragón de cinco cabezas! Haven't you heard the ads?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

"— look forward to many more!" exclaims the woman at the podium. She raises a glass. "To the company!"

The toast goes up around the room. It's a big banquet hall, lots of people in suits and trim dresses, food piled on bright yellow tablecloths. Dana has appeared between two tables near the back — she jumps, but nobody seems to notice her, and when a waiter with a tray of champagne glasses walks right through her, she realizes she isn't really here.

The woman up front, a blonde in a dark suit with a green-headed duck for a daemon, picks up something gold and vaguely award-like and gets down from the stage. Presentation over, the rest of the people start eating in earnest. Dana sees salads and steaks and cheese plates up front, but when she happens to turn and glance at the table next to her, the people here are eating colorless slabs of something unidentifiable.

Also — Dana flinches in horror — their eyes are all solid black, from corner to corner.

And in the group back here, she can't see any daemons.

Shivering, Dana walks all around the table. She looks in people's laps, at their pockets, next to their feet. She even crawls under the tablecloth, her ghost going right through the drapery and chair-legs and human-legs without a whisper of resistance. Nothing.

Where is she? Who are these people? How —

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Hiram agrees to meet with Perle and Omero, the linguist and the biologist, at his campaign office. Carlos drives.

Little triads of gyropters keep appearing in the skies overhead, hovering in a fixed place before moving on. Instead of the familiar blue, black, and mural-painted, they're an unfamiliar yellow.

"¿Los gyrópteros que son amarillo, lo que significa?" asks Omero in his clunky Spanish. "Recuerdo los que son...azul, negro, y...the ones with the paintings of birds on them."

"I've never seen los amarillos before," admits Carlos. "We'll have to ask around."

But first: Hiram! Whose campaign office is literally a re-purposed basketball court at the Main Street Recreation Center, because the dragon is two stories tall and most buildings can't hold him. His tawny, feathered wings are each as big as the broad side of a barn. Each of his five heads has a brilliantly-colored crest, and a razor-toothed beak large enough to snap a human in two with one bite.

Carlos and Omero help Perle carry the recording equipment inside, where Hiram's burnished-gold head greets them with a friendly drawl. "Lovely to meet you folks! Welcome to town."

His green head, meanwhile, bends low and eyeballs first Omero, then Perle. "WHICH ONE OF THESE SPINDLY CREATURES SEEKS A BOON OF FLESH AND SCALES?!"

Omero stands still and straight with military discipline, his starling daemon perched unflinching on his shoulder. Perle looks to Carlos for a cue. She understood the Spanish, but she's evidently leery of what she would be getting Omero into by giving him up.

"He asked which of you wants the biological samples," explains Carlos in English. He leaves out the "spindly" part, partly to be kind, partly because Omero is seriously one of the most built people he's ever met.

"Right." Omero takes a breath and addresses the heads in Spanish: "That is me!"

"We already gave you samples," says the grey head morosely. "Don't understand why you'd need to come back for more."

Carlos starts to explain the difference between the Li Huas' general research on DNA and Omero's interest in a variety of specific cells, when Hiram's gold head says, "Don't you worry, we understand the principle of the thing. My grey head is just being difficult."

The purple head, meanwhile, snakes down to do its own investigation of Omero. "I like his daemon!" it announces, in a shrieky, paranoid voice, studying her with a vivid green eyeball larger than she is. "I like the colors. They are nice colors!"

"Púrpura es un color agradable," agrees the pretty starling cautiously.

"Violeta!" shrieks the purple...uh, violet...head. "I don't like the word purple. I like violet!"

And Hiram's green head is now sniffing Omero up and down. Hiram curves a foreleg toward him — someone, maybe Omero, is going to have to study him and figure out just how the five heads decide who moves the rest of his body — and taps a claw against his left calf, which clangs. "WHY IS HE MADE OF METAL?" shrieks the green head.

"Now he wants to know how you got the prosthetic," relates Carlos. "If you don't want to talk about it, I'm happy to just tell him he's being rude."

Only the way Omero's eyes keep flicking around the scene betray his nervousness. "I'm here to ask about how his body works. It's only fair to let him do the same. If you'd translate, I would appreciate it."

So Carlos converts the story into Spanish: how Omero was patrolling a war zone when a grenade went off, several pieces of shrapnel were embedded in his leg, and it had to be amputated just below the knee. All five of Hiram's heads, even the usually-listless grey one, listen intently. "Well, that's quite a tale," says the gold head at last.

"HE SHOWS COURAGE AND FORTITUDE FOR A BITE-SIZED SCRAP OF MEAT!" puts in the green head.

"He can have one scale," adds the violet head shakily. "One! And we reserve the right to take it back!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana snaps back into her body with a gasp.

The sun is low on the other side of the horizon. Hours must have passed. And all she did was stumble into somebody's party, in a place that was certainly not Night Vale.

"At least I went somewhere," she tells herself. "Which is better than going nowhere."

With the light dimmed, the air is much cooler, and she still feels refreshed and ready to go. She gets to her feet and starts following the riverbed onward.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Hiram may have been admirable toward Omero, but once Perle starts talking, all five heads become downright adoring. They haven't met anyone else interested in hearing their native language in years. They translate phrases for her; they argue over the most appropriate word choices; the blue head regales her with the details of their base-eight counting system and all their vocabulary for math.

After a few hours of Perle filling tape with recordings, Carlos is starting to get hungry. "Omero and I are going to run next door for lunch. Want us to pick you up anything?"

"Just a salad? Thanks," says Perle, barely looking at him. "Now, Hiram's green head, if you were to pose the question you just asked to a being you did not plan on eating, how would you say it then?"

Carlos and Omero leave her to it. There's a Taco Bell on the corner, just a couple doors down; they ignore the constantly-ringing pay phone out back (who uses pay phones any more, anyway?) and go in for burritos.

As usual, the radio is on. A Hiram McDaniels campaign ad is just finishing as Carlos pays for the food, and he leans against the condiment counter to bask in the soothing tones of Cecil's voice. "Welcome back, listeners. We've received another call with an update from Old Woman Josie, which I'm going to take you to now. Josie? You're on the air."

"Thank you, Cecil." Josie sounds...concerned. "Half a dozen of those yellow gyropters we talked about are circling my home. And I'm not getting any sunlight. Even though all my clocks say it's the middle of the day."

"It's true," says Cecil. "I'm looking at our own station clocks right now — including the wristwatch my dear Carlos gave me, which he says is the only real timepiece in all of Night Vale — and it is indeed the middle of the day. Can you tell us anything else, Josie?"

"I made my daemon invisible and sent him up to investigate the gyropters. He says they each have a logo. An orange triangle with an S in the middle. He couldn't see the pilots from within the darkness, and he couldn't get out of the shadowed area to look more closely, either."

"So the sunlight can't get in, and your daemon can't get out." Cecil's calm, professional detachment falters, just a little. "Are you trapped?"

"Protected," corrects Josie. "I think the angels did this, Cecil. I think they came back just long enough to cast this around our home. To protect us."

"Angels are, of course, not real," says Cecil automatically....

"Dr. Perfecto, your order is ready!" calls the cashier, making Carlos start so hard he bangs his hip on the counter. He'd forgotten where he was for a minute there, totally caught up in worrying about Josie, in trying to remember where he's seen a logo like that before, in fretting over the phrase la luz del sol no puede entrar without understanding why it bothers him so much.

He takes the food, then says under his breath to Omero, "Un minuto. Necesito escuchar esto."

(He's too distracted to remember to use English, but it's easy to get "hang on, this sounds important" from context.)

"...listen, we should totally get the team back together and go to League Night again," Cecil is saying, and Carlos dares to hope that the whole conversation has wandered into the meaningless and personal. "Just like old times."

"I would like that, Cecil," says Josie. Softly. Fondly. In the wistful tone of someone remembering the past, but not planning for a future.

Half the people in the Taco Bell are listening now.

Then Josie adds, in a strange, cold voice like the arctic North where she was born, "I'm afraid la luz del sol has come back."

"Uh-huh?" says Cecil, trying to be cheerful. "Can you go outside and let us know if you can get out now?"

Silence.

"...Josie?"

More silence.

"Um, listeners, it appears I have lost the call," stammers Cecil. He recovers quickly, building momentum for a speech about how all of them must protect their town. Carlos already has his phone out, mass-texting the rest of the team: Anybody near Josie's who can check in on her? Hearing some worrying things on the radio.

He hears from Sherie a minute later: Keith and I are about five minutes away. Packing up the equipment and heading over now :)

Nothing else Carlos can do from here. And Cecil has switched to the weather, so the two experimental theologians walk back to the rec center, with Carlos summarizing the phone call for Omero along the way. The sun beats down on them, vivid and brilliant...but it's just the sun, just an ordinary component of the natural world, so why is Carlos so unsettled whenever he thinks about sunlight?

Another trio of yellow gyropters pass almost directly overhead. Carlos can't see them casting any shadows.

 

-{,(((,">

 

When they get back to Hiram's office, all five heads are demonstrating what sounds like a loud, raucous, round-robin drinking song. Even his grey head is getting reluctantly into it. Perle is clapping along, bopping her head, grinning in a way Carlos hasn't seen since...possibly ever. Her leopard gecko has an adorable smile built into the structure of his face, but Perle herself doesn't seem to be the smiley type.

Carlos is just starting to relax when Sherie texts him again: Police have house cordoned off. Won't let us get near. I can see a broken window, and big chunks torn out of the turf. Can't see any sign of Josie.

He reads the message to Isaña, who shivers. "At least the police are on it? And the Erikas probably had more than one trick up their sleeves...metaphorically, since they don't wear clothes...and she's a witch! She has plenty of ways to defend herself, or to get to safety without being noticed."

"All perfectly logical," agrees Carlos, and doesn't point out that no amount of witchy self-defense was able to save Paivi Feldt's mother.

At last Hiram has to send them away, saying he needs to get ready for a fundraising dinner. He showers them with McDANIELS '14 merchandise: pins, magnets, bumper stickers, live rats, funeral masks. It's a nice counterbalance to the Faceless Old Woman T-shirts, fedoras, breakfast cereal, and spiders that the experimental theologians keep finding heaped in their sock drawers. (Their socks usually turn up in the oven. Or on the roof.)

They pile Perle's high-fi recording equipment on a cart and push it out into the front lobby. The radio is on in here too, but Cecil's show must be over, because nothing is playing except a slow dripping sound. Carlos steps ahead of Perle to open one of the doors.

A gust of wind blows a flock of bright-orange leaflets into the building.

One of them catches on the equipment. Carlos picks it up, curious, wondering if this is a new type of Night Vale precipitation or —

STREXCORP SYNERNISTS, INC., the paper announces in large block letters. Look around you: Strex. Look inside you: Strex. Go to sleep: Strex. Believe in a Smiling God. Strexcorp: It Is Everything.

Printed on the corner of the front cover is a logo. A triangle with an S in the middle. Carlos runs his thumb over it, finally remembering: the same symbol is etched on the face of all their Strex-provided portable Rusakov meters.

Strexcorp sent the gyropters.

That's...good. Right? They aren't a threat after all. They couldn't have been trying to do anything sinister to Josie. Maybe the shade around her house wasn't angelic protection after all, maybe it was some kind of dangerous Rusakov anomaly that Strex wanted to help with....

Not that Strex would know if there was a Rusakov anomaly, because the meters they provided around town aren't supposed to be sending information to them....

Perle and Omero have both caught leaflets too. Omero concentrates fiercely on deciphering it, while Perle's good mood is dwindling back to her standard unenthusiastic calm.

"Excuse me?" calls Carlos to the woman running the rec center's front desk. "Did you happen to hear anything about Strexcorp on the radio before the news ended? Or anything else about the gyropters, or Josie?"

"Oh, sure," says the woman, her sparrow daemon nodding along. "Cecil said the gyropters are safe, Josie is safe, and, well, to sum things up, all of us are completely safe."

That's good. That's great. Why doesn't it make Carlos feel better?

He unfolds his leaflet and stares at three columns of friendly corporate jargon. Nothing specific about their products or theological endeavors, just a blur of meaningless patter: excited to serve the community...explore this bright new market...proud to bring struggling local businesses into the thriving Strexcorp family....

"He said all that right after telling us that Strexcorp bought the radio station," adds the woman at the front desk, just as Carlos is reading the words our first acquisition: beloved local community radio station NVCR!

Carlos leans hard on the frame of the door he's still standing in, sick with fear. Strexcorp sent gyropters that chased Josie from her home (please, please, let it be nothing worse than that). The only indication that she's safe is on the radio, and Strexcorp just bought the radio. They are not safe. They were targeted.

Oh, god, Strex started off by targeting the two places in town that have the highest Rusakov concentration. And given that there haven't been any horrific screaming crashes, they must have known to stay the hell away from the dog park.

They knew, Strexcorp knew, they have comprehensive data on local Rusakov levels, oh god —

"Are you okay?" asks Perle. "No offense, but you look terrible."

A lance of sunlight beats down on the back of Carlos's neck as he remembers something else. When Cecil looked for answers about the monstrous someone who hurt the control team in Desert Bluffs, the alethiometer kept coming back — over and over and over — to the Sun.

His voice cracks. "I know how I betrayed Night Vale."

A rustle of feathers and expensive-suit fabric at the other side of the lobby: Hiram is coming up. His violet and blue heads poke out through the entryway; Carlos doesn't even want to think about how the fabric of space must be bending to allow him down the corridor.

"It's just like I said," hisses Hiram's violet head in a panicky whisper to the blue. "The Scholar is trying to find all the secrets. They can use that! Use him! I said so, but did you listen? Did anyone listen?"

"I'm sorry!" cries Carlos. "You were right all along! We have to get rid of those meters — even if the worst of the damage is already done, we can't let it keep going, we have to —"

The slow dripping from the still-playing radio is joined by rapid, shaky breaths, which cut into a sudden scream —

— in Cecil's voice —

Carlos chokes. "— we have to get to the station, now —"

"Sir, you have to get down," says Omero sharply, and yanks both Carlos and Perle out of the way of the open door.

Perle is more than willing to duck-and-cover on command. Carlos isn't happy about it, but Night Vale has drilled a few survival instincts into him, and he knows it isn't going to help Cecil if something shoots/eats/vaporizes him along the way. He stays behind the next (closed) door in the row, out of the way of its single window, as Omero draws a handgun and positions himself just at the edge of the opening.

"Dr. Perfecto!" calls a voice from the outdoors. "We know you're in there. Drop any weapons and come out with your hands up!"

The police. Just what Carlos does not need right now. Except — wait — maybe he does. An experimental theologian understands the value of teamwork. Especially when the man he loves is at stake.

"Omero, don't shoot," he says, stripping off his bag. "Perle, hang on to this for me. Both of you, stay calm, don't argue, don't even make any sudden moves. It's just the police — they're here to arrest me — and I need you both to stay out of trouble while we let them."

Chapter 4: Completely Safe

Summary:

Carlos is stuck in unsympathetic secret-police custody while Cecil is introduced to his new bosses. Tamika goes on a mission to the library, and the rest of Carlos's team takes the first step in undoing the damage they've done by accepting gifts from Strexcorp.

(or: now that we know how the Strexcorp arc ends in canon, it's time for this AU to suit up and plunge in head-first.)

Notes:

Contains police violence, general trauma symptoms, and Desert-Bluffs-style gore.

A note about Tamika's reading choices: It is wildly unrealistic that any our-world literature from at least the 16th century onwards would exist in Lyra's world. Just imagine she's actually reading in-universe books with similar themes.

More new art, from happier times: Cecil and Khoshekh approaching the Arby's.

Night Vale.

Two balaclava-clad officers hold Carlos at gunpoint on the sidewalk while they wait for an unmarked van to show up and take him away. One cuffs his wrists — in front of him, thankfully, so he can keep holding Isaña.

He talks. He spills all the details he can think of, because this needs to be out, early and often. Hopefully the team members who were with him are in touch with Henriette and Köhler by now, passing the news to his second-in-commands, plus whatever officers are listening in on their phones. Passing on the order to tear the Strexcorp equipment down.

The police, for their part, won't tell Carlos a thing about what's happening at the station.

Carlos can only pray there's a secret-police detail breaking down the doors. If there isn't — if Strex is just being left free rein to do whatever-the-hell they want with Cecil, and they're evil — he imagines an empty-eyed Cecil chirpily telling him to believe in a smiling God, and his heart twists.

After a torturous eternity of uncertainty, the van shows up. The officers shepherd him roughly into the back and cuff him into a seat. Someone is waiting here with an Isaña-sized fabric-draped cage, which freaks Carlos right the hell out until they explain that he gets to hold it, and then he can deal with it (barely). Someone else has a hood made of matching fabric for Carlos.

"Do we have to bother with that?" pleads Carlos, knees pressed tightly against the sides of the cage sitting between his shoes. "I'm cooperating, I'm telling you everything I know — besides, we're going to the abandoned mine shaft. I know that. Everyone knows that."

"Yeah, I guess this does seem like jumping the gun, doesn't it," says the officer holding the hood.

He puts it down.

Then he backhands Carlos across the face.

Carlos's head snaps to the side, cheek stinging, too stunned to make a sound. His gaze darts to the eyes of the other three officers around him, desperately looking for regret, understanding, an ally, anything.

He's still searching when the hood comes over his head, and all he can see is black.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The new kid at Tamika's school seems to be kind of useless at everything.

He refuses to deal with corrosive substances in chem. He complains that they shouldn't be learning algebra during Spanish classes (or reading classic novels in math, though Tamika is in the Advanced Readers, so she doesn't have to get offended in person when he complains about their books). And he handles a good honest Glock like it's as dangerous as a slice of bread.

She hunkers down low in the shadow of her African-buffalo daemon, slingshot ready, as they creep through the darkened stacks of the Night Vale Public Library. Rashi moves like a heavily-muscled shadow. Tamika watches like a hawk.

Seth's daemon isn't settled yet, but as far as Tamika is concerned, the fact that he always wears his shirts buttoned right up to the top button tells you all you need to know about him. So he's pretty ridiculous, and she isn't really surprised nobody talks to him much...but the thing is, you don't always get to choose who you're stuck with when a crisis hits. Tamika or someone she cares about might be stuck relying on him at any time.

Someone has got to build this boy up.

Besides, as Rashi pointed out when they were making their to-read list for the week, his mom is one of the new experimental theologians, over at the chapel next to Big Rico's with all the humming anbaric equipment. He's probably really smart. Could be useful even if his aim never gets good enough to hit the broad side of a secret-police van.

So they sneak down the foreign-languages-other-than-Sumerian aisle, and Tamika sinks into a crouch to grab a couple of Spanish-English dictionaries from the bottom shelf. She drops them in the bookbag hanging from Rashi's side, on top of Fritz Leiber's The Night of the Long Knives. They'll figure out how to talk to the boy, and everything else will follow from there.

The to-read list is in the bookbag too, but Tamika doesn't need to pull it out. She knows by heart that Nicola Griffith's Ammonite comes next. Assuming they can get to the speculative-fiction-about-anthropologists aisle without losing any limbs.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The interrogation room is either the same one Carlos was tortured in last year, or an exact copy. His wrists are clamped to a familiar table. His Isaña is in an identical cage.

At least the cage is between his feet this time, and his legs are free to kick anyone who tries to lay a hand on her.

So the panic attack bearing down on him is a lot milder than it could have been. Lots of shaking, but that's mostly because they keep throwing cold water over him. Occasional wave of pins-and-needles. And he hasn't felt like he can think straight since he got in here...which would be debilitating if he were trying to lie or weasel out of something, but he's just trying to tell them the truth.

He's gone over everything he can think of. How Strexcorp has comprehensive Rusakov-concentration data for Night Vale going back more than a year, how they targeted the angels and the alethiometer (he keeps forgetting to clarify that angels aren't real), how they've drugged and/or killed his long-lost five colleagues on the Desert Bluffs team. He's described all his interactions with Raimondi since the man's team first came in contact with Strex, including the one he had in a bloodstone-circle vision, which might or might not have been a product of his own subconscious. He's urged the police to do whatever they can to get in Strex's way, because all the signs and prophecies point to them being the group trying to bring on a multi-world apocalypse.

No, Carlos doesn't know their specific plans. No, he doesn't know exactly what was done to the control team. No, he has no idea what their plans are for Cecil! His vision said they've done something to the radio host in Desert Bluffs — Kevin, that was his name, the one who looked so eerily like Cecil — but he doesn't know the details of that either, and hitting him again is not going to make him remember something he never knew!

He's been socked once in the jaw and once across the side of the head, and his shoulders and torso are aching from the one interrogator who keeps whacking him with a nightstick every time he doesn't have an answer. Which is often.

They took his shoes and socks. They took his chapel coat. His T-shirt is soaking wet, sticking to his skin like a freezing blanket. His hair is tangled and dripping.

Through the bars of her cage, Isaña presses her face against his ankle.

A new interrogator lets slip that the police have managed to nab three Strexcorp employees and bring them out here (Carlos is briefly relieved)...but aren't having any luck re-educating them. Funny coincidence, isn't it, how they never had any luck re-educating Carlos either?

No. Not funny at all. Carlos isn't working with Strex, hasn't gotten any secret benefits from them, was never anything but an unwitting patsy, and this was a terrible idea. He should have kept his mouth shut and gone straight to Cecil. That way he could be helping Cecil right now, and these officers could be doing the same, instead of wasting their time and energy trying to beat information out of Carlos that Carlos doesn't have.

He's on their side. Don't they understand that?

On top of which, don't they understand that he is in no mental state to convincingly lie to them right now? If he'd had any intention of hiding things from them, it would have evaporated the instant they sat him down in this chair.

The left side of his face is throbbing. He's guessing he has a black eye, or is on the fast track to getting one. It's swollen enough that he can't open it all the way. (They took his glasses.)

Carlos doesn't know anything else. He doesn't. Have they rescued Cecil yet? Please, if they could just tell him what's going on with Cecil.

He's repeating the plea for the nth time when his latest interrogator tells him to shut up for a minute, and listens to something via her earpiece. She says "Yes?" and "Okay" and "Right" a lot.

At last she says, "Congratulations, we're sticking you in storage for a while. If you remember anything interesting while you're in there, just holler."

 

-{,(((,">

 

There's a stash of damaged and disabled Strex-brand Rusakov meters in a box in one of the chapel storage rooms. Henriette digs it out and carries it downstairs, her marmot daemon padding worriedly along beside her.

Carlos is in police custody. Cecil hasn't answered her text. Omero and Perle are standing by at the radio station, where they went at Carlos's plea, only to find that the secret police have it surrounded and aren't letting anybody inside. If anything changes, they'll let her know.

In the meantime, she has to figure out if their Rusakov meters really are tapped, and, if so, whether they can disable the bugs without having to give up the whole array.

"This is them," she announces to the current present company. Nirliq, hauled back here from the photogram project she and Henriette had been working on, down by that mysterious old oak door in the desert. Quentin, hauled away from the modeling he was doing on the ordinaters upstairs. And one of the Li Huas, voluntarily joining them while her double keeps up the processing of their latest sample of Cecil's DNA.

"Seriously? They're even smaller than I thought," says Quentin, picking up one of the handheld yellow meters. It's not much bigger than a large calculator. "What do they run on?"

"Triple-A batteries. There's a panel in the back." Henriette uses English, which Quentin follows much more easily than he speaks. The rest of them in turn can follow his Spanish. It's good comprehension practice all around.

Quentin pops it open and examines the batteries. "And how often do they have to be changed?"

"That's a good question," says Li Hua. "When do you guys have to put in new batteries?"

Henriette chews on the inside of her cheek. "So far? Never."

"Are they solar-powered?" wonders Nirliq, turning over another of the meters. "I don't see any photovoltaic cells, but it's the only way I can think of for them to run...."

"Magic," Quentin reminds her. He's turning the device over and over, screwdriver aimed at its corners, looking for the place to start taking it apart. "Always an option in this town."

None of them can find any screws. They try prying the metal panels apart, or getting a blade under the dull screens where the readouts would have been if they were working. Nirliq's colobus daemon pokes over every inch of the devices with tiny fingers, and Quentin's flying squirrel does the same with even tinier claws. No luck. Even the meters that got severely dented and dinged from the Sandstorm are shut tight.

"How do you guys feel about trying a bone saw?" asks Li Hua after a while.

Nirliq raises her eyebrows. "You have a bone saw?"

She and the others have been gently warned about the Li Huas: their lack of empathy, their well-controlled sadism, the way they will feel no guilt about abandoning you in a crisis if it becomes necessary for their own self-preservation. Reactions have varied. Nirliq seems cautiously intrigued by the whole thing, while Quentin seems to think the existing team members aren't giving the Li Huas enough credit.

It's probably easier to believe the truth when you've seen one of them gun down half a dozen copies of your teammates, and the other grinning and elated, covered in blood, having just killed the final double with no weapons at all.

The present Li Hua flashes that same manic grin now. Both of them have been gradually giving more freedom to their scarier impulses when the new arrivals are present. "Are you kidding? There was a special on them at the Raúl's back in June. We've got six!"

The tool she retrieves is a flexible razor-wire saw. Nirliq retrieves one of the chemistry clamps and bolts a Rusakov meter to the edge of the table, and they all stand back to watch as Li Hua slices her way through the metal.

It's like watching an amputation. For a second Henriette's eyes play tricks on her; it's as if she can actually see blood welling up around the wire....

Wait just a damn minute.

There is something dark and viscous oozing out of that crack —

Li Hua razors all the way through the top panel and slices right down the thin metal sides. Nothing in between gives her any resistance — there's no circuitry, no screws or wires, just a soft glut of slippery pinkish meaty things swimming in a spilling pool of crimson —

Nirliq chokes on a shriek. Quentin throws himself backward, slamming into the next table over. Henriette's head spins, her vision momentarily blotted out by an image of the blood and viscera from the hole a Li Hua blew in her own double's torso.

"Whoa," says Li Hua, backing away — she knows a potential biohazard when she sees one — but looking thrilled. "Did not see that coming."

"I think I'm gonna be sick," says Quentin faintly. Nirliq shooes him in the direction of the sink.

Henriette leans against the furry bulk of her daemon as she marshals her thoughts, even while her eyes are fixed on the blood splattered across the floor. "Li Hua, get that in a sterile container, and wash up whatever's left. We need to test it. Figure out the species, for one thing." Figure out if it's human, like the DNA they got off Cecil's clothing after he wandered through that portal into a gore-strewn probably-Desert-Bluffs.

And of course Raimondi was covered in blood when he delivered these meters in the first place. Most of it looked like his blood, but how could they be sure? Why didn't they put some of it on ice, instead of washing it all down the drain?

She could really use a drink.

"But first," she adds, to the rest of the team and to herself, "we need all hands on deck to take these things down."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Storage" turns out to mean the standard prisoner cells, which means a nice bed, a fully-stocked bathroom, a TV, and paintings of flowers on the walls.

Carlos strips off his wet shirt and jeans and climbs under the covers, holding a cold soda wrapped in a towel against his throbbing face. His body protests with every motion, and when he settles into the sheets he knows it's going to be a long time before he's up again.

Chiding voices echo through his mind. Hiram McDaniels' violet head, over a year ago: He wants to know the secrets! They can use that! And Josie, more recently, echoing the sentiment: If anything is going to be your downfall, it's that way you can't stop trying to know everything about everything.

They were right. He was easy. Strex tossed him the bait and he took it, hook, line, and sinker.

Granted, it was pretty good bait. The team has gotten so much done in the past year-and-a-bit that they never would have accomplished if they had to take manual daily readings. But at what cost?

Isaña, fully buried in the blankets, sniffles against his hip.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Rashi crashes through the window, his horns shattering glass and splintering wood, and thunders out onto the Night Vale street. Tamika leaps out after him, glad that the spray of blue-green librarian blood won't leave visible stains on her black sweater.

A horrific animal shrieking comes from inside the building. Tamika spins on her heel. "Yeah, that's right, yell all you want!" she shouts at them. "You can't come after me. You don't have the jurisdiction. I got no late fines!"

She takes a couple of backward steps, slips on something that isn't firm cement, and nearly falls on her butt. Rashi catches her just in time.

"What's this?" asks Tamika out loud, paying no more attention to the mad howling of the thwarted librarians. She picks up the orange thing. Some kind of leaflet. She hadn't even noticed, but the streets are littered with them.

"Must've been dropped by those new gyropters," says Rashi. "That, or it rained while we were inside."

Tamika narrows her eyes. There isn't a cloud in the sky, and while it might have been a new type of shower from the Glow Cloud for whose passing they all have total amnesia, she can't smell any vainilla. Must've been the gyropters.

She's been noticing them all day. She doesn't like the look of them. Not at all.

"Better hold off on the books for now," she tells her daemon. "This just got punted to the top of the to-read list."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos dozes, never quite sleeping, trying to rest up without losing track of his surroundings completely. Just because he's not planning to fight when they come back for him doesn't mean he wants to miss it.

His eyes are closed and he's half-dreaming about being out in the desert, getting spied on by the sun, when the door opens.

"You get one hour," says a guard.

One hour until they come back? One hour to nap? Carlos can live with that. He doesn't stir.

The door closes.

"Carlos?"

Carlos snaps fully awake in an instant. "Cecil!"

He's sore from the waist up, but he manages to pull himself into a sitting position, so when Cecil drops onto the mattress beside him Carlos can cup his boyfriend's face in both hands.

Cecil does the same. He isn't visibly hurt, which is more than can be said for Carlos, although there's plenty that could be hidden under his clothes (fuzzy bolero jacket, popped collar, leggings, crocheted shorts...and the alethiometer tote bag safely over his shoulder). "Are you okay?" asks Carlos. "I heard — Strexcorp bought the station, and then you were screaming, the police wouldn't tell me anything, I was so —"

"Shhh." Cecil touches his lips. "You first, my Carlos. You're bruised." His eyes narrow. "Did they take your clothes?"

"No! Well, my chapel coat and shoes. But the rest is just drying in the bathroom," says Carlos quickly. "They threw water all over me. And hit me a bunch. That's all. No anbaric current, no mental stuff, no...nothing else. If I'd known you were coming, I would've gotten dressed."

"Dear Carlos." Cecil's fingers ghost over a bruise on Carlos's upper arm. For a second Carlos wonders how he can see it, without Khoshekh's color vision around to borrow...but of course, these are marks left intentionally, by a conscious being. They must stand out to Cecil as brightly as handwriting does. "Don't ever feel you have to put clothes on for me."

Carlos blushes, then allows himself a small smile. "Okay. But I'll have to put them on when we leave...when are we leaving?" When Cecil hesitates, he adds, "You're here to get me out, right?"

"Soon. As soon as I can," says Cecil. "The fact that they were persuaded to grant me a...well, sort of a conjugal visit...is a very promising sign! Normally you have to sacrifice a couple of lemurs before they'll register you with visitation rights."

"But I'm on their side," pleads Carlos. "Not that I'm not grateful for the leniency — we all know how expensive lemurs are this time of year! — but I've told them everything I know, and it's not like I realized what I was doing when I —"

Cecil kisses him. Which is normally the last thing in the world Carlos would object to, but he was trying to talk, here, and he has the distinct feeling Cecil's tongue is being stuck in his mouth mostly to shut him up.

He doesn't return the kiss. He does, however, shut up.

Cecil recognizes pretty quickly that his point is made, and lets Carlos go. "Precious, anxious Carlos," he says, running his thumb over Carlos's lips to discourage Carlos from speaking again too soon. "I need you to listen to me very carefully, okay?"

Carlos nods.

"My station, my job, is under new management. By Strexcorp Synernists Inc., which I understand also sent you some equipment they had manufactured. What a coincidence, huh?"

Cecil pauses after that last phrase, and mouths Say yes.

"Y-yeah." Carlos nods again, playing along, though he isn't sure why. No matter how carefully they tailor this conversation, the secret police do have video cameras in here, and Cecil must have noticed that he hasn't gotten a chance to cover them up. "Coincidence."

"And right after that happened, you heard something that frightened you, and you overreacted." Cecil takes a second to fold down his collar, then holds Carlos's hand against his cheek, expression smooth and even. "You do tend to get irrationally worried when you think my safety is involved."

"Well, yeah." This part is easy for Carlos to go along with. "I mean, I love you."

A real smile breaks through Cecil's careful, deliberate mask. He doesn't fight it, just takes a moment to kiss Carlos's non-throbbing cheek before getting back to business. "But the truth is, there is absolutely no reason to worry." He moves Carlos's hand downward, sliding it along the slope of his neck, curling it around the back. "We are completely safe. My new supervisors are wonderful people —"

He accompanies this with a quick, emphatic shake of the head.

"— and as for what they've done to me, well —"

He rubs Carlos's fingers in soft circles at the nape of his neck — and that's when Carlos feels it. A small, raised bump under Cecil's skin, just above the first thoracic vertebra.

"— nothing but a normal employee orientation," finishes Cecil. "Any screams of agony that might theoretically have been involved would have been entirely unintended. Why would they hurt me? It's not like they're evil."

Eyes widening, mouth pressed into a tight line, he beckons for Carlos to agree.

Carlos feels sick. They're not staging this conversation for the police at all, are they? It's all for Strexcorp's benefit. Strexcorp bugged Cecil.

"Not evil," he echoes, throat dry. Silently, he mouths, Can I see? and motions for Cecil to turn around.

Cecil nods, but puts a finger to his lips.

When he turns, using one hand to hold his hair up against the curve of his skull, it takes all Carlos's self-control not to gasp out loud. The skin on the back of Cecil's neck is reddened and puffy, and not just from the device injected into the tissue underneath, but from the new tattoo. Black ink lines, stark and crisp, in a bloc about as wide as Carlos's thumb is long.

It's a bar code.

"So, in short, there is nothing to worry about," lies Cecil, casual as anything, like an apocalyptic corporation hasn't just taken over his livelihood and marked him up like a can of soup. "Your team is fine, they know where you are, and I will be working with the secret police to get you back to them as soon as possible."

When he turns back around, Carlos mouths, Khoshekh? Normally he wouldn't think twice about seeing Cecil alone, but, oh, god, if Strexcorp has some kind of hold over his daemon....

"Oh, and Khoshekh is fine too," says Cecil smoothly, flashing a thumbs-up to indicate that it's true. "Sorry he couldn't make it, Isaña! He had to pay a visit to a friend."

"It's okay," says Isaña, from the mattress next to Carlos's hip. "We're glad you came."

"And we're so sorry," adds Carlos. "About this — about, um, getting all worked up over nothing — you have no idea how sorry I am."

"You didn't know." Cecil runs his hands through Carlos's tangled hair. "You couldn't have known."

His grip tightens. The lamplight glints off his pale purple eyes.

"I always knew you wouldn't mean it," he whispers.

Carlos folds Cecil into an embrace, though the hug makes his abused arm and back muscles throb in protest. It isn't worth complaining about, not when Cecil's silent tears start dripping onto his shoulder and running down his neck.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie will help her colleagues with their last-minute collection project as much as she can, but first she has a kid to pick up.

Susannah has these after-school classes at the community center, catching up on some of the things Hispania Nova teaches before eleventh grade that the USND doesn't. She found it all on her own by asking her classmates, and it seems to be boosting Su's confidence and helping her make friends, though Sherie still doesn't know exactly what it's about. One of the other PTA moms told her that there's a similar class for her son's age group, but the move itself has pushed Seth so far out of his comfort zone that Sherie doesn't want to stress him any farther right now.

She and her mongoose daemon sit in the parking lot for a couple minutes, until half a dozen chattering teenagers come out of the rec center doors. It's easy to pick Susannah out of the crowd. For one thing, Su's griffon vulture is the size of a coyote, even with his wings folded closed. For another, Su is the only one dressed head-to-toe in black.

"Hi, sweetie," says Sherie, as her daughter hops into the back seat, kicking off a Strexcorp brochure that got stuck to her shoe on the way. "We're going to take a little detour before we head home, okay? The team has a couple of Rusakov meters in the area, and it turns out something's wrong with them, so we're going to take them down."

"Uh-huh. Sure, Mom."

"So how was your day? You looked like you were having fun back there."

"Oh, yeah, everyone's great," says Susannah with a brilliant grin. (Sherie thinks it would be prettier if she didn't insist on wearing all that black lipstick, but it's Su's face, she can do what she wants with it, even if her mother doesn't understand her fashion choices at all, not a judgment, just an observation.) "Had a whole conversation with the hot football player in remedial Spanish — the one who only speaks Muscovy, remember? — and then the self-defense instructor said I was making awesome progress with the mace."

"That's wonderful." Sherie still doesn't believe this town is so dangerous her children need to be walking around with firearms, but any teenage girl should know a little self-defense. "So you're getting used to aiming for the eyes, then?"

"What? Harsh, Mom! Way harsh."

"It's going to get in their eyes anyway, honey. You might as well be direct about it, right?"

"How is...Oh! I'm not talking about mace, the pepper-spray stuff. I'm talking about la maza, you know, like a big club? Did you know if you get one with a flanged head, it can rip right through armor?"

She goes on to regale Sherie with all the details of medieval-combat weapon strategies and upper-body strength training, until they stop next to the White Sands Ice Cream Shop to pick up the first of the Rusakov meters.

The device is fixed under a windowsill out back. Susannah goes inside for ice cream while Sherie takes the meter down, switches it off, and turns it over in her hands. Her ring-tailed mongoose, on her shoulder, leans down to invesetigate. "Doesn't look all that insidious."

"Except for how the rest of the team could only take them apart by force," says Sherie. "And I can see why. This thing is built like a tank."

Her daemon snorts. "Well, if it turns out we're in a hurry to destroy them, we can always get Su to smash them up with one of her maces."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil spends the bulk of his allotted hour with Carlos under the covers. They can't talk about anything significant and Carlos doesn't have the stomach for small talk, so they mostly stay quiet, just holding each other and soaking in the comfort of being together.

When the guard returns, Cecil doesn't fight it. He pulls Carlos into one last kiss — this time Carlos returns it, in earnest, and if they're giving their observation an eyeful, well, good — and tells Carlos to get dressed, because Cecil will have him out of here, hopefully sooner rather than later.

"Just take care of yourself," implores Carlos. "Don't take any risks to get me out of here faster, okay? I'll be fine. An experimental theologian is always fine. Knowing that you're safe is the most important thing."

 

-{,(((,">

 

He doesn't remember falling asleep, but he wakes up groggy, on the floor of a moving vehicle with Isaña in a basket next to him.

He tests his hands. Not cuffed. Not that he's lucid enough to do much with them anyway. "Y'gassed me."

"The other option was tazing you until you were too jittery to fight back," says the secret police officer. There's only one with him in the back of the van this time, rat daemon at her side and AK-47 hoisted in her arms. "Sarge said we could go with the gas."

"Gee, thanks."

The officer snorts. "If it was up to me, I'd'a said to zap you until you'd screamed exactly as much as Cecil did."

Carlos lies still, trying to breathe the stuff out of his system. "If it'd help Cecil in any way, I'd let you."

He's still heavy-limbed and dizzy when the van stops, and the officer half-helps, half-pushes him out the back. Isaña topples onto the asphalt beside him. At least he's not in the middle of nowhere this time; he's surrounded by other cars, even as the unmarked van speeds away. A parking lot? There's a lit gas station down the street, and a couple of other buildings scattered around; they're near the edge of town. Carlos leans heavily on one of the cars' hoods.

Neon green paint across the windshield screams a price at him.

"Not in the market, sorry," mutters Carlos to the paint. At least now he knows where he is. The car lot.

Which means...yeah, across the lot is Josie's picturesque little house, dark and motionless. He can see the broken window, its curtains ripped and yanked down.

No way Carlos is making it home in the state he's in: drugged, sore, still barefoot. But it's not such a dire situation that someone needs to pick him up before he dies of thirst. Would it be safe to crash on Josie's abandoned couch? Surely, wherever she is, however she's doing, she wouldn't begrudge him that.

He and Isaña start to make their way down the line of cars....

A motor revs on, headlights gleam, and someone yells, "Carlos!"

Change of plans. Carlos stumbles in the other direction, toward the familiar hybrid coupe.

Quentin, behind the wheel, sucks in a sharp breath when the light from inside the cabin falls on Carlos, and Rayshawn gets really still when Carlos tumbles into the back seat beside him. "Palmero said you'd need ice," he says, holding up a first-aid kit. "And some painkillers...?"

Neither of the other daemons, Quentin's flying squirrel or Rayshawn's frog, are large enough to pick up Isaña, so Carlos has to scoop her into his lap on his own. He slumps against the headrest and, since his jaw is throbbing worse than before, lets her take over the talking. "Hand it to us."

"Whoa, you can't give them that," says Quentin in Spanish, pulling out onto the main road. (He's gotten used to Night Vale street signs faster than any of his peers.) "They've obviously been dosed with something, you don't know how it's gonna interact...."

"Say again?" asks Rayshawn in English.

"Drug interactions," explains Isaña in kind. "Give us whatever Cecil said we'd need. They're fine."

"Uh-huh." Rayshawn sounds dubious, but shakes a couple of pills into Carlos's palm and uncaps a water bottle for him to chase them with (over Quentin's protests of "fine, but if he dies, this is all on you"). "And how does Cecil know a thing like that?"

"Long story." They had been planning to show the new ducklings the alethiometer this Friday. Go down to Cecil's office, do a whole big demonstration. Will that still be possible?

"Your dashboard snowman's on," puts in Quentin. (They didn't waste any time introducing the new ducklings to the clandestine jamming devices.)

"So you can be straight with us," adds Rayshawn. "In a manner of speaking, anyway. He have some kind of in with them? Or is this just past experience? They go harder on...folks like you?"

"Brown, or gay?" asks Carlos rhetorically. Is Rayshawn asking out of self-interest, or prurient interest?

"Either way, no," adds Isaña. "Straight peninsular guys get beat up, indefinite detention without trial, the whole deal, same as the rest of us. This isn't Texas."

Rayshawn's tiny frog daemon lets out a huff of discontent. He scoops her off the seat and drops her in his pocket. "Ain't like I approve of that. No way to treat a person, no matter what. And I'm sure your government ain't perfect either."

Carlos catches himself before getting snippy about how yes, obviously he knows, his government just tortured him with full legal impunity. It's silly of him to be possessive of the Night Vale legal system at the best of times, and it'll sound particularly insane now. "I'll give you that."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika was supposed to be asleep hours ago.

Instead she's under the covers, wide awake, flashlight out. Rashi sits between her and the door, his bulk blocking any stray light from making it to the hall. The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, lies spread-open across the sheets. Tucked behind her ear, ready to jot down any significant lines, is an illegal ballpoint pen.

She reads.

Chapter 5: The Worst Thing

Summary:

Carlos takes back control of the team, and gives the newbies a crash course in the real theological marvels of Night Vale...leading to an alethiometry session with Cecil, and frightening new information about Strexcorp. Meanwhile, Dana tries to gain another level in astral projection, while struggling with a timeline wildly out-of-sync.

Night Vale.

When Carlos gets up the next morning, the swelling around his eye has gone down, though he's still startlingly bruised and has to be careful wearing his glasses. He jumps in the shower (during which Isaña has a chance to give his back a thorough check-over and tell him where the worst of the damage is), shaves as tenderly as possible, and heads down to breakfast.

Henriette takes one look at him and says, "Take the day off."

"Can't," says Carlos. "Too much work to do. We need all hands on deck." They have to figure out how to build a new Rusakov array, and fast. Even if they go back to manually lugging their old readers from block to block and taking readings one by one, it's no substitute for the kind of town-wide realtime data they've been counting on to keep on top of Night Vale's...Night-Vale-ness.

"Carlos, I remember the day after a police interrogation. It took all my mental energy just to remember where I was half the time."

"You got a different interrogation package," points out Carlos. "I know where I am. Honest. Looks worse than it is."

Henriette considers this for a moment, then reaches across the kitchen table and pokes his bruised-black cheek.

Carlos yelps. "Don't do that!"

"You're still in pain, and your reaction times are shot," says Henriette firmly. "Take a sick day. I know I don't get to give you orders any more —"

"Huh?"

"— because now that the prophecy has hit, there's no point in keeping you from running the team, but as your friend, I'm telling you...."

A light thumping on the window cuts her off. Carlos's heart leaps when he spots the familiar silhouette, and he scoops Isaña off the ground by his feet while Henriette gets up and wrenches the window open. It's less than six inches, but that's enough for Khoshekh to flow through.

"There you are!" exclaims Isaña, as Khoshekh lands daintily on the table between the bowls of oatmeal. "Is everything okay?"

"Oh, no," purrs Khoshekh. "Everything is never okay. Most things are usually not okay, in fact. But there is good news." He rubs his face against Isaña's in greeting. "It is not a bug."

Carlos catches his breath. "You mean the chip? The one Strex — that one?"

"The one they put in Cecil, yes," says Khoshekh. (Henriette shudders.) "It does not transmit. It contains information, it can be scanned and used to pinpoint location from up to five hundred feet away, and from a similar distance it can be triggered to directly stimulate the region of the brain that normally processes input from pain receptors. Steve thinks he can disable that feature." He rolls his eyes, as if Steve Carlsberg's incompetence with anbarics is the most aggravating thing about this scenario.

"Let's hope so," says Isaña. "And if he has any trouble, we have people who can take a look at it too."

"Of course. Clever cientificos. In the meantime, it's nothing a good healing talisman won't bring down. Speaking of which...where is yours?"

Henriette frowns at Carlos. "You have a healing talisman?"

"Of course. It matches yours, haven't you noticed?" To Carlos, Khoshekh says "I'll go find it for you."

He soars out of the kitchen and returns a moment later with the pendant Josie sent Carlos last Christmas: a polished piece of electrum with an otherworldly insect trapped inside. The other team members at the time got similar gifts; Henriette's is a bracelet, a string of electrum beads in silver settings. Carlos feels ridiculous that he never asked Josie what they did.

Quentin shows up in the kitchen while Carlos is looping the pendant around his neck. "Whoa. Who's the flying cat?"

"Khoshekh hasn't met any of the new people except Sherie, has he?" realizes Isaña. To Quentin's flying squirrel, she says, "This is Cecil's daemon. Come say hi."

The little daemon hops off of Quentin's shoulder and soars down to the tabletop, where she and Khoshekh touch noses.

By now Carlos has seen Khoshekh from a lot of angles, and he can't see any shaved patches in the margay's fur. No bar code for him. Good. "Hey, Khoshekh, they haven't...I mean, are you all right? They haven't put anything in you, or...or anything?"

Khoshekh grins a wide, sharp grin. "Our new supervisors' daemons are a mouse and a duck. I will eat them alive if they try to touch me."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The pendant works wonders. Carlos sweeps into the chapel with new energy. New focus. A new sense of purpose.

Also, a new chapel coat. And this one's tailored.

Sherie is already in the building when the rest of the team arrives. "Honey, you look like you lost a fight with a tractor," she says, coming over to get a closer look. "Are you sure you're good to work today?"

"I swear, it doesn't actually hurt any more," says Carlos. "It's just bruising, it'll clear up — it's not like they broke any bones this time! — and they only used the knockout gas once, so my head's clear."

While Khoshekh greets the rest of the team's daemons, Rayshawn frowns at Carlos. "If this is you tryin' to be reassuring, I'd sure hate to see you goin' for scary."

"We don't let them pick on team members," says Henriette quickly. With a nod to Omero and Nirliq, she says, "Especially not grad students. You should be fine if you remember your basics — angels don't exist, the local government is a fine upstanding model of civic responsibility, shape in Grove Park, what shape in Grove Park? — but if you get picked up for something unexpected, that's our fault, and you say so. Send them after me or Carlos, we'll take care of it."

"Not —" begins Carlos, because taking the heat is his job again, not hers....

And Köhler, whose job it has never been, cuts him off: "Or myself. Whichever is most expedient at the time."

With a sigh, Carlos swallows his protests. He has good teammates, and he needs to appreciate them, not insist on always throwing himself into danger first to salve his guilty conscience. That isn't going to help Night Vale, and it sure isn't going to help Cecil.

Instead he claps his hands for attention. "I'm happy to discuss this in more detail later if anybody wants to, but right now I want you all to make it to the ordinater room in the next five minutes for a full staff meeting. That's a general schedule, not a specific one, since none of your timepieces are real! Just try not to be so late that we have to send someone out to round you up. And yes, Li Hua, we're going to need both of you. I won't keep you long."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Half a day after she gives up on the locked oak door and starts following the dry riverbed again, Dana finds herself approaching the basalt fortress.

That can't be right. She's been walking steadily away from it for days now, and it had faded into the horizon behind her. If the planet were small enough for her to have walked its full circumference already, it wouldn't have nearly this much gravity. And the big freestanding mountain with the blinking light on top has been visible this whole time, which wouldn't be possible if she were circling the outside of this mountain range. Unless it's following her, but how could that be? Things that don't exist can't follow you.

"So I am trapped in a geographical loop," says Dana out loud. "But what is the focus? This fortress? The blinking light? One of the strange abandoned vehicles on the barren plain?"

Without a daemon to talk to, she sits in the shade of a many-legged vehicle half-buried in the sand and does the next best thing: types this all up in an email to Cecil. Then she gives interworldly astral projection another shot.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"— spotted flying out of Niton Canyon early yesterday morning by several alert hikers," says Cecil's voice over the loudspeakers in the NVCR hallways.

Cecil! thinks Dana in delight, not even listening to what Cecil is saying. Home!

"Excuse me," she says, as an intern strides past. Her own replacement, apparently: a college-age woman with short, spiky hair and a brown-and-white Pomeranian daemon. "Excuse me, could you tell me —"

No response.

Dana really hopes it's just because the new intern is extremely busy with critical station duties, and not because Dana is invisible again. She hurries after the woman down the hall.

"The hikers said they were able to identify McDaniels because he matched police sketches of an eighteen-foot-tall five-headed dragon that had been posted across Night Vale," continues Cecil from the booth. "Fingerprints later confirmed that McDaniels was definitely a dragon."

That sounds...odd. Has Hiram been arrested again? But wouldn't they already know his species from the last time they brought him in?

Dana is still wondering about this when she follows the other intern right into the bathroom, where Khoshekh is floating next to the sink. The intern pulls something out of the folder in her hands and holds it up for the margay daemon's inspection. "Here's the most recent photo in our records."

"And, well, listeners, our station intern Stacy just handed me a photo of Hiram McDaniels," says Cecil's tinny voice. "He's a very dynamic-looking dragon! The raw power. The intensity in those five faces, those many sets of piercing blue and red and black and green and yellow eyes...."

Oh. Now Dana understands what's going on. She's gotten the time wrong. This is Hiram's first arrest, back before she even started working at the station; Intern Stacy was one of her predecessors, whose name she recognizes from those engraved on the break room floor.

"Khoshekh, can you see me?" she says anyway, while this past version of Cecil continues to gush over Hiram. "Can you hear me? Can you perceive me with any familiar or unfamiliar senses at all?"

When he doesn't so much as twitch a whisker, Dana takes a deep breath — it's horrible, this thing she's about to try, but she's desperate — and tries to rest a hand on his back.

She goes right through his fur, with, still, no reaction.

Cecil switches gears. "Further updates on wheat and wheat by-products. The good news is that they are no longer poisonous serpents. The bad news is that they have transformed into a particularly evil and destructive form of —"

Before Dana can hear any more, her place and time loses its connection with this one.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present time).

"Our new mission — and believe me, you're all going to accept it — is to hack together a set of manageably-sized, wirelessly-enabled Rusakov meters that do not run on dark magic and human viscera."

Nods all around the room. Everyone's attention is fixed on Carlos. On the table next to his laptop, Khoshekh curls around Isaña and watches with bright violet eyes.

"Now, I realize nobody else in this world has ever done it before, but we here in Night Vale have a few extra tools at our fingertips. One: bloodstones."

He pulls up a video clip from the first time he inadvertently had a bloodstone-circle vision, painstakingly digitized from film developed with the Asriel emulsion. It shows off the abnormally strong patterns in the way the Rusakov particles move around him. They're not just reflecting his intentions; they're being focused.

"Two: non-evil magic." A few clicks, and the image projected at the front of the ordinater room is a chart of the Modified Sumerian runic alphabet. "For the biologists and Perle, we may be setting you on researching this while the rest of us figure out the physics."

Omero, the Li Huas, and Perle nod.

"Three: the electrum spyglass. You all know about the Dirac-Hall lenses? Those were the prototype. This is the latest version."

Carlos switches on the webcam, and rotates the laptop so it's facing out at the group. The camera sweeps over an ensemble of humans, daemons, and machines. While everyone is checking their own appearances, he pulls out a ring stand filched from the chemistry cupboard, with an electrum spyglass (its frame made of plastic, not cardboard and duct tape) tied to the clamp (with string. Hey, they're still on a budget). He places it so the spyglass is hanging over the top of the laptop, and slides it over to sit in front of the lens.

The video feed lights up with the flow of Dust.

Even Perle and Omero, the non-physicists, are impressed. Nirliq, the optics expert, looks like Christmas and her birthday just came all at once. Quentin is pleasantly stunned, while Sherie and Rayshawn look like they don't know whether to be amazed or mad. "How long have you had this lying around?" bursts out Sherie. "What are we doing not using it?"

"There's a condition," warns Carlos. "You're going to have to take a blood oath to never use them against the interests of the town. It would be really nice if all of you agree as quickly as possible, so we can call Night Vale General and set up an appointment to do them all in one pass."

Omero sits up straighter. "And if someone doesn't agree?"

"Then it's been a pleasure working with them, and the project will be happy to cover their travel costs home." And the secret-police memory modifications before they go will be entirely complimentary.

"Consider yourselves lucky you're getting a choice," puts in Henriette. "The rest of us just woke up one morning with blue gyropters on our lawn."

"It's no big deal, geez," adds one of the Li Huas.

Her duplicate finishes the thought: "Although if any of you want help practicing with blood loss first...."

"Enough, both of you," says Carlos. "You want to experiment with viscera, you have dozens of Strex meters to play with."

He turns the laptop to face him again, switches the camera off, and finds another video file, this one in a password-encrypted folder: Cecil at work.

"There's one more resource we have that most of the world doesn't," he tells the group. "One more extremely valuable, extremely powerful tool. As important as the spyglasses, if not more."

"Seriously?" says Rayshawn. "Man, with that kind of buildup, you better be about to pull out an alethiometer or somethin'."

(Carlos can do a pretty sharp grin himself when he wants to.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil is sitting at a row of pushed-together tables when Carlos and Perle arrive in the wheat and wheat by-products speakeasy under Big Rico's. He's already ordered soup and bread for Carlos.

While Perle takes a look at the menu over the bar, Carlos slides into the seat next to Cecil and steals a kiss. "The rest of us will be trickling down in twos and threes. Give it about half an hour. How are you doing?"

It's lunchtime on Friday. NVCR has been under new management for most of the week, and Strexcorp has also bought up the Antiques Mall, the Trader José's, and the only two independent bookstores in town. Carlos happened to pass Frances Donaldson in the fire section of the Raúl's yesterday evening, and she was wearing a vintage buttoned shirt whose collar went all the way up to her chin.

Strex doesn't own Big Rico's, but there's nothing to stop their newly-imported managers and supervisors from eating here, which is why this little demonstration is being taken underground. They know about the alethiometer, but they don't seem to know how deft Cecil truly is at using it, and Cecil would like to keep it that way.

"As well as can be expected." Cecil is wearing his Harvard scarf looped around his neck, which hides the bar code. (Also, a lightweight kimono-style blouse and fringed shorts, which hide...less than they could.) "Management hasn't made any changes to our regular programming, except the inclusion of their ads. I've gone along with it. So there hasn't been any need for them to provide...encouragement."

He pulls Carlos's arm over his shoulders, and Carlos lets it rest there, warm and steadying.

Perle gets a salad with lots of croutons, and sits across from Cecil, who strikes up a conversation and ends up getting quizzed on some of the foreign-world-language audio recordings he's provided for her. The rest of the team joins them at a nice non-suspicious pace, with existing members using the code phrases and vouching for the new arrivals to get them inside.

Henriette gets muffins. Köhler has been working his way through the sandwich options. The Li Huas can never resist their sugary cereals.

Everyone else, whatever they're eating, is quick to swallow when Cecil brings out the alethiometer.

"I understand you're each going to have a control question, and then we move on to actual questions?" says Cecil — holding it, as always, like it's just an ordinary treasured possession, not one of the rarest artifacts in the world. "Should we just go around the table?"

He correctly identifies the heirloom Nirliq's grandmother passed on to her (diamond earrings), the job Rayshawn had while he was an undergrad (fast-food cashier), Quentin's childhood vacation spot ("I would not have guessed mountains, but there must have been a few real ones where you were, because that's what it says"). He hesitates when Sherie asks whether either of her children had health problems when they were born, and ends up pulling her aside to answer in private, but whatever he says, it's evidently right.

Omero wants Cecil to look up his favorite flavor of ice cream. Cecil comes up with "Existential Pistachio Crunch." When Omero says that isn't right, Cecil counters, "Have you tried Existential Pistachio Crunch? Well then! Go down to the White Sand this afternoon, order a scoop, and if it doesn't turn out to be your favorite I will personally order you a sundae of whatever is."

Perle says she's satisfied with the proof from everyone else, and just wants to skip to the real questions. So Carlos asks where they're supposed to start with the Rusakov tracking array, and if there are any interesting and/or dangerous anomalies they should keep an eye out for in the next month or so.

"Just keep doing...whatever you're doing with bloodstones," reads Cecil. "Ooh, Carlos, it says you're praying on a middle-school level now! Which is very good for someone who only started this past year. And, um...apparently there's going to be a massive influx of portals to unstable pocket dimensions in a couple of weeks. Starting out back of the Raúl's. You might want to look into that."

It's always relevant to ask what, in general, is the most important thing they should be doing. Cecil sobers when he sees the answer to this one. "Do not work for Strexcorp. Do not share information with Strexcorp. Do not have anything to do with Strexcorp if you can possibly help it."

"I have another question, if that's all right," says Perle.

Cecil nods. "Go on."

"What's the worst thing Strexcorp has done?"

"That's an awfully fuzzy notion," says Cecil. "Do you mean the thing with the greatest death toll, or —"

"The thing that would horrify me, personally, most. Is that a metric you can work with?"

Carlos squeezes Cecil's shoulder before Cecil can start turning the dials. "Sorry, if I could just get a clarification — is it not horrifying enough that they're sticking anbaric-shock-enabled tracking chips in people?"

Perle stiffens, looking as defensive as Carlos feels. "That's terrible, of course."

"Then what else are you looking for?"

"Are you saying I can't ask?"

"She can ask," says Cecil. "I'm happy to check."

Carlos's jaw tightens. "I'm just trying to figure out what she's hoping to get out of it."

One of the Li Huas leans forward, eyes sparkling. "We're interested too. Tell us some lurid horror stories, c'mon."

"That is not why I'm asking!" hisses Perle.

"They aren't teasing you, they're serious," says Henriette, "and don't be afraid of Carlos, he just gets snappy when he's worried about Cecil."

"It would be beneficial to have this answer," adds Köhler. "We should know what we are up against."

Great. The entire old guard is on Perle's side, which means Carlos probably is being unreasonable. And knowing when to stop digging in your heels against your subordinates is an important part of being a project chaplain. "Okay. You're right. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Cecil."

"I just want to know why they're worse," says Perle softly.

Cecil looks up from the dials. "Hm?"

"We're already tracked, everywhere we go. There are observers in our bushes. Bugs in our cars," says Perle. "And if you step too far out of line, you get locked up for the day and come back covered in bruises. I want to know what makes Strexcorp worse than what's already here, and not just...more efficient."

"Ah." Cecil turns back to the alethiometer. "And I can tell that it will not help to remind you that the secret police are here for our protection. Just a moment, please."

It probably won't help to start talking about apocalypses or "the unraveling of all things" either. Unlike Rusakov particle physicists, linguists aren't used to dealing with serious end-of-the-world prophecies. So Carlos watches in silence as Cecil turns the hands to point at the Owl, the Alpha-and-Omega, and the Sun.

The needle-fine fourth hand races around the symbols. It ticks off the Walled Garden, the Crocodile, the Baby, the Alpha-and-Omega again, the Bird....

Cecil catches his breath.

In an instant all Carlos's attention snaps from the alethiometer's face to Cecil's — to see fading composure, trembling lips, the way Cecil's Adam's-apple bobs as he swallows, once, twice. His breaths start to come fast and shallow; his gaze never turns away from the alethiometer, but Carlos can see what an effort it is to keep watching.

At last Cecil sets the device on the table, hands shaking. He buries them in the soft knit of his scarf and pulls it closer around himself, like wrapping up in a tiny, narrow blanket.

"They sever children," he says.

The world stops.

Carlos can't have heard him right.

"It's a power source!" adds Cecil, voice wavering with more than a touch of hysteria. "Did you know that? Is that something that's been — empirically proven — in our world? Pretty strong one, too! And they use most of the energy generated. They have batteries for it. Or something. They're very —" He chokes, scrubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. "— efficient."

Everyone is pulling their daemons closer — even the Li Huas, though it's hard to tell whether it's a real reaction for them or just part of an effort not to stand out. Isaña leans against Carlos's leg, and he scoops her into his lap. Khoshekh isn't around, so Cecil just clings to the scarf, fighting for calm.

Rayshawn breaks the silence that has fallen over the tables. "So we're all agreed?" he says, both hands clasped over the shirt pocket where his frog daemon is riding. "We gonna take these folks down?"

"We sure as heck are," says Sherie. "Cecil, honey, where do we start?"

Cecil gives her a watery smile. "You're here to do experimental theology," he says. "So that's what you do."

Carlos touches his wrist, and Cecil's hand folds into his. "Tell me one thing." He waits for Cecil to look at him, then says, "The Desert Bluffs team...?"

"Yeah." Cecil swallows. "They do it with adults too. But Perle was going to be most horrified by the children."

"She is a sane and rational person," says Carlos firmly, "and we are lucky to have her working with us."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The whole team is on fire that afternoon.

Nirliq gets an early blood-oath appointment, so that an hour later, when Omero drives her back from Night Vale General, she can throw herself into testing the electrum lenses. By dinner she has multiple spreadsheets stuffed with observational data. "I really need a laser to get some of these tests right," she declares.

"We don't have a laser," says Henriette from over by the Rusakov isolation cage, where she and Sherie have been trying to pin down some details about bloodstones.

"Well, that's just great. Carlos! Can we get a laser?"

Carlos has been spending most of his day helping Quentin tinker with a danger meter, and arguing in a mix of Spanish and English about the math of the waveforms involved. In the process, they've been building up a pretty long shopping list of their own. "I'll put it on the list," he tells her, and enters it in the notepad file on his tablet before carrying the thing up to Perle in the ordinater room. "Hey there — sorry to interrupt, but would you mind calling Night Vale Community College and asking if they could lend us any of these items?"

"Of course." Perle scans the murky Spanglish list. "For the laser, do you want the kind that makes light, or the kind that cuts through things?"

"I don't know. Just to be safe, let's ask for one of each."

When Cecil's show comes on, the old-fashioned radio in the main chapel room switches itself on automatically, and Carlos calls the others to attention. "This may or may not become relevant, but it sure looks cool," he tells them. "Grab a spyglass and take a look at the radio."

As with any object created by sapient intention, the machine attracts Rusakov particles. When Cecil speaks, though, they don't just drift in the usual random patterns. They ripple, like a lake with a rock dropped through the surface, like ordinary matter vibrating with the sound.

A few news items in, Sherie says, "Carlos, can we borrow you for a minute? We need you to go sit in the isolation chamber and pray. What exactly does that mean to you, by the way? I know you're not addressing God, here."

"That's right," says Carlos sheepishly. Sherie and her family aren't exactly pious, but Hebrew religion and general culture are woven together in ways he doesn't want to step on. "It's more like meditation. Getting into a certain relaxed mental state, being open to receiving the messages of the universe...and, uh, the first time I did it, I sort of pretended I was asking for advice from the ghost of Lyra Belacqua."

He's expecting that to either cause offense, or be warmly mocked. Instead, Sherie gives him a thoughtful look, then says, "Well, what can I say? If it works, it works. Over here, now. Nirliq! Would you mind taking some video?"

They all set up around the isolation chamber, while Carlos kneels on a cushion in the middle of the awkwardly-relocated bloodstone circle. It isn't like the quiet, well-kept little room reserved for this purpose. It's bright. Busy. He's keenly aware of the observation.

And it's very hard to relax when in the back of your head is a constant drumbeat of they sever children, they sever children, you have to do something, Cecil's working under them right now and they sever children.

Carlos closes his eyes and holds Isaña, rubbing her ears and under her chin. Trying to relax.

The radio is still playing: "Dear listeners, here is a list of words. Basalt. Adamant. The living. The dead. The shining. Drumbeat. Hoofbeat. Downbeat. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Heart. Beat. Beat. Beat...."

It's as if Cecil knows exactly what they're doing. The warm, strong surety of his chant lulls Carlos away.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

There is a mountain. Dana stands at the base, and the peak stretches up, up, up, wreathed in clouds.

Mountain is hardly the right word for it. For one thing, it isn't resting on the ground: the base hangs at least four stories above the desert floor. For another, it doesn't look like a three-dimensional object. It warps through space in all the wrong ways, folding in on itself, a mathematical impossibility illustrated in cumulus and granite.

A red light blinks at the distant top.

Carlos drags his eyes down from that light and yells, "Dana! Dana, can you hear me now?"

As with the last time he saw her, Dana doesn't seem to notice. Her hair, Carlos realizes, is longer than the last time he saw her. And her face is sharper. More keen. She's grown older.

Out of nowhere, a black-and-brown bird the size of a Prius appears in front of her.

"Yes, that will do," says Dana, and the bird bows its head so that she can climb onto its broad back.

Carlos and Isaña try to run toward her, hoping she'll have a better chance of perceiving them if they're close. Running is hard when your feet don't always line up with the ground and keep going through rocks, but they try.

The bird sits up. Dana is clinging with all her limbs to its feathered neck and hips. "One moment," she says, and raises her head, looking over the vast expanse of the bird's wings. "Carlos?"

Carlos comes panting to a stop a few yards away. "That's right!" he calls. "I'm having a vision. Or something. Are you doing okay? How —"

"— do not know if you can hear me." Dana is still talking, right over him. "I do not know if you can see me. I do not know if the information I was given about our time and place nearly matching up was correct. But I hope that it is. And because of this hope, I will pass on the message I was given."

If the situation weren't so personally frustrating, Carlos would find it fascinating. Of course. Her timeline is out of sync, the way it was the last time he saw her, when she was just finishing a phone call that Cecil appeared to take in realtime several hours later. But now she's the one in the relative future. She can't see him; she's just forewarned that this is the moment when he will see her.

"Use all the bloodstones," says Dana.

Yes? thinks Carlos. And then what? Use them for what?

But the image is already fading....

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either) (present time).

Dana comes back into her body with many things to think about, and very little to do about them.

"So I can make it to Night Vale, but not in the correct time," she muses. "And I can make it to a place that is not Night Vale. Perhaps, in that place, I was in the correct time."

All she has to do is put the two skills together! She really is getting the hang of this now.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present time).

Carlos comes back into his body with many things to think about, but a lot of difficulty remembering them.

"Use all the bloodstones," he says out loud, before he forgets. And there's another phrase, the same one Mateo came back with when he did the same kind of prayer, all those months ago: "There is a light. A blinking light. Up on the clouded mountain."

"What does that mean?" asks Henriette. "Where were you?"

"Um...." Carlos massages his temples. "Logically, I suppose I must have been on or near the clouded mountain. And no, I still don't know what that is."

"At least you got something new," sighs Henriette, fingers fluttering over her tablet screen. "Use...all...the...bloodstones. And we have amazing data, don't worry."

That's a relief. "How long were we gone? More or less."

"Eighteen minutes by the video camera timestamp," says Nirliq.

"That can't be right," says Sherie. "My watch says it's been at least twenty-three."

"And my tablet says twenty-one. You might as well give up on wearing watches," says Henriette. "We did have one functional, accurate timepiece at one point...then someone decided it would look too good on his boyfriend to hang onto."

The doorbell rings. Quentin goes to answer it while Carlos glowers at Henriette. "Teasing. Spanish. Or does this place just descend into anarchy when I leave my body for somewhere between fifteen and twenty-three minutes?"

Quentin returns, arms laden with delicious-smelling bags. "Who ordered the Cathay food? Because you have amazing timing."

With all the experiments, Carlos hasn't had time to think about dinner, let alone eat anything, and he's not the only one. They all gather out behind the building, on the back steps and the bench, and divvy up the cartons and plastic forks. Whoever called in the order didn't consult the rest of the group, but got more than enough for everyone.

At least Köhler isn't too hungry to be suspicious. "Who placed this order? Has that been answered? Do not start eating until we know."

An uncertain chorus of "Not me" goes up around the group. Everyone is present except the Li Huas, and it sure wouldn't have been them.

Köhler turns to Quentin. "You answered the door. Who was the delivery person? What did they look like?"

"Um," says Quentin. His flying squirrel daemon cringes under a glare from Köhler's binturong, who could probably snap her up in a single bite. "I don't remember, all right? I didn't get a real good look at his face. Some guy in a tan jacket."

Carlos breathes a sigh of relief. He's just sorry he won't be able to remember to pay the man back. "In that case, we couldn't be safer," he tells the others. "Dig in."

Chapter 6: High Sensitivity

Summary:

The team does a new round of experiments, this time using Cecil. Dana has an encounter with a seer from the past. Sherie's son bargains with Tamika. Carlos bargains with Marcus Vansten. And Cecil's new management contacts him at the worst possible times.

Night Vale.

Cecil is collapsed on the couch in front of the TV when a tired Carlos enters the apartment, carrying a bag of cheap hamburgers. At least this time he remembered to call, to say he'd be working late and wouldn't have time to make anything. "Hey, Cecil. Dinner's here."

It's been a week since the revelation in the speakeasy, and Carlos breathes a little easier every day Cecil comes home without haunted eyes or fresh scars. So Strex isn't interested in torturing him on a daily basis. After the horror of that first day, all he's gotten is a "friendly reminder" from his new program director that "we love this station's local traditions, and don't want to dilute your small-town charm, but any future lists of things will have to be run by a supervisor for approval before reading them on-air."

Sure enough, tonight Cecil sits up fluidly and easily. He's tired, that's all, he's not hurt in some way that makes it hard to move. "My hero. How was your theology today?"

Carlos slides into place beside him, toying with one end of Cecil's shimmery fringed scarf, while Isaña hops into the Khoshekh-sized basket at the foot of the couch. (Khoshekh isn't there at the moment. The alethiometer bag is, but it doesn't take up too much space.) "I am about eighty-five percent certain that we're on to something. Do you think you could come by the chapel at lunch some time in the next few days? There's a test we want to run with someone who prays...above a middle-school level."

Cecil makes a face. "Not lunch. I get exactly half an hour for lunch now, and I don't even get to pick which half-hour. But I could ride over with you tomorrow morning...?"

"That sounds perfect."

Carlos pulls up Cecil's Netflix queue while Cecil opens the burgers. With his daemon out and about, Cecil won't be able to see it, so Carlos picks a Ukrainian opera, where he in turn won't be able to understand the audio. They take turns whispering explanations to each other until shortly after they finish eating, when the screen goes dark mid-sentence before skipping to a completely different song.

"Well, great," says Carlos. "Now neither of us knows what's going on. Except that someone needs to send the secret-police censors to a video editing class."

Cecil giggles and slides down into his lap.

The sweetness of the moment is undercut when the friction tugs loose his scarf. Cecil tenses, pulling it against the nape of his neck again, but now it's only covering half the bar code.

"It's okay," says Carlos. "I mean, I know it's there, and I know you didn't ask for it, you don't support....You don't have to hide it from me."

"Yes," says Cecil quietly, half drowned-out by the opera's big final number, "but I would rather not have you looking at it."

"Then here." Carlos tugs at the fabric, moving it back up over the full sweep of the marked skin. "Let me fix this for you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie has started going to work earlier in the morning and bringing projects home at night, but she's made a promise to herself not to let it interfere with either of two things: PTA meetings, and family dinners.

She doesn't talk much about work at dinner. For one thing, she's not sure how to explain some of the details of what she's doing. She hasn't even told Sam what Strex has done with intercision, and normally Sherie tells her husband everything, but with this...she just can't.

And for another, this is her big chance to focus on the kids. "Those are...interesting earrings, honey," she says to Susannah, as a polite and non-judgmental conversation-starter. "Where did you get them?"

"This girl in class," says Su with a shrug.

"Oh? Is she a friend? Was she trying to convert you? Didn't she have any Star of David earrings lying around?"

Su rolls her eyes. "Geez, Mom, they're just crosses, it's not like I got baptized! She wasn't even Christian either, she just thought they looked cool. Plus, it'll be useful if I meet, like, a vampire. They're real silver and everything."

"I don't think vampires are real, sweetheart," says Sherie. "Even in this town."

"And what do you mean, 'wasn't' Christian?" adds Sam. "Something happen to this girl?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, she worked at the radio station." Susannah grins. "It's totally dangerous. If you get accepted to work there, you have to make out a will before you start. And Vithya's not dead, but she's, like...the other girls called it municipalmente muertos, which means her will kicks in anyway...and she said all of us in class got to divvy up her clothes and stuff."

"It means municipally dead," puts in Seth. "Which means she's dead according to the city."

Sherie turns to her son, whose daemon is hanging around his neck in the form of a pencil-thin adder. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but Seth's moodiness seems to have calmed down in the past week or two. Hopefully it means he's adjusting. "That's right! You're really starting to pick this up now. Keep going at this rate, and you'll be having wonderful conversations with your classmates any day now."

Susannah's grin fades. She's been having a lot more fun with this place than her brother has, but on some things she'll take his side anyway. "Easy for you to say. All the people you work with speak English."

"Don't be rude to your mom, Su," chides Sam.

"It's just because someone in class got me a dictionary," mutters Seth, withdrawing again. "A book, so it works, not like the dictionary app on my phone that translates everything as vacío or sándwich."

"Well, I think that's great. It's good that you're making friends." Sherie pauses. "Unless this person is dead too? Or municipally dead?"

"No, they're fine."

Sam raises his eyebrows, picking up on a nuance that Sherie missed. "Is this person a girl person, by any chance?"

"Well, yeah." Seth shrugs. "So?"

"Hang on." Now it's Su's turn to catch something her mom isn't getting. "A girl in your grade who got a dictionary? Did she get it from the library? Do you know Tamika Flynn? That is so — I'm so jealous."

Sherie trades a confused look with her husband. They were both warned about the dangers of the Night Vale Public Library before they moved here, but neither of them have heard of this girl. "Is she someone famous?"

"She saved like three people in my grade last summer," says Susannah. "I mean, Mario and Ramona can't really talk any more, they communicate mostly by grunting and biting, but Mario is still first-chair violinist and Ramona works part-time at the ice cream place, so it's not like it's held them back. Tamika is...she's...." She frowns, then turns to her brother. "Let me borrow that dictionary."

Seth gets up without asking and leaves the table to retrieve it. The kids spend a few minutes flipping through pages together, arguing about spelling under their breaths, while Sherie and Sam pick at their meatloaf and gravy.

At last Su has a full English translation, for another phrase she must have heard at school. She and her daemon recite it together: "She is the beating heart. She is the breathing lungs. She is the lips that chant."

It's a little eerie, to be honest.

Sherie doesn't say that out loud, of course. Eeriness has been Su's thing for at least four years now, and it is Sherie's job not to make her feel bad about it, even if she does wish her baby girl would wear some color once in a while, for goodness' sake. "So my son is making distinguished friends, is that what you're saying? Because that's just wonderful. I couldn't be prouder."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"There is no possible way we can afford this," says Carlos under his breath.

On the far end of the main room of the chapel, Nirliq is explaining their next bloodstone test to Cecil, while Rayshawn and Sherie set things up. That leaves Quentin talking with the veteran Rusakov physicists, trying to hammer out a budget for the next couple of months. "I know it's expensive," he says, flying-squirrel daemon riding in his coat pocket. "But we're not just taking existing equipment and welding it together in new ways — no offense, Henriette —"

"S'fine. None taken." Henriette waves for him to go on.

"— we're trying to build all-new high-sensitivity equipment. Mostly from scratch. And if we want to keep the electrum lenses secret, there's a lot we can't contract out."

"I know. And I know the theory is sound. And I know we need to figure this out," says Carlos placatingly. "But there are only so many grants in the world, and being The Field Project That Concluded God Is Dead means plenty of them won't touch us with a ten-foot pole, and I can tell you right now that Night Vale Community College is not going to be able to rent us equipment to do photolithographic transistor printing."

Köhler steeples his fingers. "I will contact the Heidelberg alethiometrists. Perhaps they will be able to direct some positive financial attention our way."

"Hey," says Henriette. "Hey, you know who we should ask?"

Carlos raises his eyebrows. "Who?"

"The Museo de Tecnologías Prohibidas. Bet they've got something we could use. Probably lots of things."

"Probably," agrees Carlos. "All of them forbidden. Thus the name."

"You know who we should really ask," adds Quentin. "Cecil."

That...is a very good idea. "We will definitely do that. After this test," says Carlos. "Köhler, get in touch with Heidelberg. Quentin, if you can throw together a grant proposal covering some of the components we can get from other sources, I'll polish it up and send it around. Henriette, come with me for a second. I have to ask you something, and we'll need...." His eyes flick toward the nearest window. "...privacy."

While the others scatter, Henriette and her marmot daemon accompany Carlos to his office. He motions for her to close the door, and switches on the MP3 player he has hooked up to a set of five-dollar speakers for quick and easy audio cover.

Once the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack is filling the room with tinny orchestral grandeur, he says under his breath, "Do you need to sit down for a while and have a glass of water, or something?"

"What?" Henriette blinks at him a couple of times, then shakes herself. "What, no, I'm fine."

"You don't sound fine." Carlos folds his arms. "You sound...slurred."

"I had a bad night, all right? Bad dreams. Had a glass of wine with breakfast. Nothing to...don't worry yourself, here."

"Just a glass?" Carlos has known Henriette a long time, and her tolerance is way too high to be stumbling over her words that easily.

"Yeah. Just a glass. I'm tellin' the truth about this, Carlos, I'm not an alcoholic." Henriette's brow furrows. "Local vintage, though. Y'think it was stronger than the other stuff we get?"

Carlos is so incredibly relieved. Of course Night Vale grapes, or whatever else was fermented to make the stuff Henriette drank, would be more potent than the rest of the world's. Probably a side effect of the rituals used to make fruit grow in the middle of the desert. Or a deliberate marketing angle, for a population desensitized by how often they drink to forget. "Yes. Yes, I do think that. Listen, how about I go grab you a water bottle and some pretzels, and you stay here with your phone until you're sober enough to clear fifty lines in Tetris."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

In the shadow of the basalt fortress, Dana climbs. It's a nice change of pace from the twin monotonies of walking in circles and astral-projecting into all the wrong places.

She has made a few more appearances in the radio station, usually during a broadcast she recognizes from her own relative past. Once she nearly walked through a Cecil who wasn't much older than a lanky teenager himself. Once she manifested to hear a broadcast being addressed to Night Vale in an unfamiliar man's voice, though she never did figure out if it was Cecil's predecessor or some alternate-world version of himself. And once she appeared in the booth next to a Cecil with the same face and voice, but wearing glasses, and doing the broadcast in English.

Other times she's stepped into her own past. Most recently, seventh-grade algebra, where she watched her younger self struggle to focus on linear functions instead of Maureen's low-cut top. And one time she even appeared next to Carlos the Experimental Theologian, in a hotel room with a large city outside the windows, from a time she had no way to identify.

Her other efforts have only gotten her into places that were deserted, or places full of people she did not recognize.

So here in her relative present, Dana climbs, and looks for entrances. It is slow work. The fortress has crumbled since the days when it was presumably in use; piles of rubble are littered around the base, including slabs of rock taller than she is. Many of the doors must be covered, or caved-in.

At last, beneath an archway, she finds a set of iron double doors with nothing crushed against them. Once they had windows; now each has a blank square hole with the occasional shard of glass jutting up from the rim. Dana approaches, cautious of any glass still scattered on the flat stone approach.

The doors are locked.

Dana can see very little through the windows, but she cannot imagine there is anyone inside who might come to let her in. As an experiment, she digs the rope and grappling hook out of her backpack and tosses the hook through one of the openings, trying to catch and lift a bolt. There do not seem to be any bolts to catch.

"I do wish I had better equipment," she says out loud. "Or better luck with doors."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

With Cecil on his knees in the bloodstone circle, the Dust ripples outward around him the same way it does from his radio broadcasts. Rayshawn and Carlos are watching through electrum spyglasses, while Nirliq and her colobus daemon handle the filming, Sherie and Köhler operate the danger meter, and Quentin monitors the anbaric equipment hooked up to the Rusakov isolation cage.

"It does that with you, too," Nirliq informs Carlos. "Doesn't look nearly as impressive, though."

"And the isolation cage is probably screwing up its typical patterns," adds Quentin. "We should try this again to see how they interact with a non-artificial environment."

"We got any idea what happens to these stones, before they're sold as circles?" asks Rayshawn, the archaeologist. "Can't just be dug out of the ground and left in their natural state. The resting concentration's far too high."

"There is a factory, owned by the City Council, in which they are produced," says Köhler. He visited the factory in person not long ago. (Carlos would have gone too, but he had a date.) "The raw materials are examined for impurities, cut and shaped, and treated with radiation. Chants are performed over them at several stages throughout the process. The particular details of the treatments and chants used at the local factory are trade secrets."

"Does that mean the general idea is something we could find?" asks Sherie. Her mongoose daemon sits on her shoulder, keeping a bright eye on the meter. "Like how Big Rico's has its own secret set of pizza ingredients, but that doesn't mean you can't still look up a recipe online?"

"Oh, you could find it, all right," says Cecil. "But information like that would be in...a library book."

Carlos frowns at the bloodstone circle. "Cecil, you're still conscious? You can hear us?"

"Yes," says Cecil — except that Carlos is watching closely, and Cecil's mouth is definitely not moving. "I was trying to astrally project myself, but it seems that I cannot get anywhere outside this fascinating chamber of yours."

On that note, he stands up.

Sort of.

There is a standing Cecil in the chamber. To visible light, he is translucent. Through the electrum spyglass, he is surrounded with as much Dust as you would expect with an average adult human being.

There is also a kneeling Cecil in the chamber. To human eyes, this one is opaque and solid. Through the spyglass, he has as much Dust as a Cecil-shaped sculpture — which means less than even a small unsettled child. A lot of it is probably not him at all, just the clothes he's wearing.

"Whoa," says Nirliq. "We're studying this next, right?"

Carlos would have thought Nirliq would want to get back to her thesis once they get a new set of Rusakov meters. But he isn't her adviser, it's not his job to question her focus, and besides, maybe she'll want to change her topic to the optical effects of your ghost stepping away from your body. "It's going near the top of our list."

Since they've got Cecil here, they ask for a brief rundown of his capabilities in this state, including getting him to touch the bloodstones and see how they react. Cecil can't see the theologians, only hear them, so Carlos makes sure to speak up every couple of turns to reassure Cecil that he's still there.

At last he settles back into his body, and Carlos and Isaña, both a little rattled (even though Carlos's ghost has left his body before, with no long-term ill effects), hurry forward to let him out.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Now Dana needs a break from fighting with doors.

She finds a nice clear space in the shade of a massive (but stable) slab of basalt, sits with her back to the wall, and considers her travel options.

"I know there was at least one time Emmanuel saw me, and spoke with me," she reflects. "And I have not heard from anyone else in my past that I will speak to them in my future. Perhaps, instead of trying to reach Cecil or my family, I should focus on reaching him."

It sounds logical enough. Dana closes her eyes, and leaves her body behind.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Henriette rejoins the group as Cecil is gathering up his things, including the alethiometer. "Thanks for coming," she says, sounding a lot less fuzzy. "Could you take a moment...if it's not too much trouble...to look up what happened to Josie? Is she okay? Where did she go?"

"Shhh!" hisses Cecil. "Keep it down, will you, geez."

"Sorry...."

Returning to his normal voice, Cecil says, "No, that's the answer I got when I asked earlier. Is there anything else I can look up before my bus comes by?"

Carlos shuffles his feet, not sure how to approach this. "There is one thing, yes. It's pretty awkward, but...there's this equipment we need, and it's really expensive, way out of our current budget...."

"Oh, gosh, I know exactly how to handle that," says Cecil brightly. "Talk to Marcus Vansten!"

"Marcus Vansten?" echoes Henriette. "Isn't he kind of a...you know...."

"...friendly, generous, all-around wonderful person?" fills in Cecil. "I know, right? You have to be pretty amazing to get as rich as he is." He gives Carlos a peck on the cheek. "Good luck! I'll see you tonight."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Unknown.

Dana's ghost steps into a bathroom, just in time to hear a child giggling.

The room is spacious, with brass fittings, rose-and-white tiles on the walls, and a woman kneeling beside the ceramic tub: apparently bathing her child, a preschooler with messy hair whose daemon splashes around as a delighted otter.

"Excuse me!" says Dana. "I didn't mean to intrude."

No reaction. The mother keeps washing the kid's hair, while the kid keeps on laughing and tries to take a bite out of the duck-shaped soap.

"Do not eat that, son," warns Mom, taking the soap out of his grasp. She squirts a dollop of shampoo into his palm instead. "Eat this. You must build up your tolerance."

"Okay, Mommy," says the boy, and licks it off his hand, getting it all over his mouth and chin in the process.

It's a heartwarming little family tableau, raising Dana's spirits. If she had to land somewhere utterly random, she's glad it's here, and not another empty tundra or desolate ruin of a town.

But then...what if this isn't random? The woman is nobody Dana recognizes, but the boy...could she have managed to direct herself into a long-gone, and adorable, stage in Emmanuel's life? His hair and skin are close to the right shades, and the woman could be his mother for all she knows, and of course at this stage his daemon won't be settled into a form she would recognize....

"We are being observed," says the woman. "Can you tell?"

Possibly-baby-Emmanuel grins. "Sec'et police!"

"No, not them," says his mother...and points directly at Dana. "Someone is there. Someone is watching. Someone is cold and clammy from wading through the Void."

"Oh." The little boy leans over the edge of the tub and stares at Dana. No, not at her. Through her. He waves in her general direction. "Hi hi!"

Dana smiles. "Hello," she says, because the fact that someone has no perception of your existence is no reason to be rude to them.

"One day you will be able to know." The woman cups her son's head in her hands, and uses her thumbs to gently guide his eyelids closed. "One day you will not see. And then you will see. You will see so many things."

"Are they still there?" asks the boy, unbothered by his temporarily-induced blindness. "Hello, are you still there? I'm Cecil, who're you?"

Oh!

"I am Dana," says Dana, entranced. "And one day you will know me."

The boy's daemon — Khoshekh! — pops out of the water, lands on the floor as a gosling, and waddles a couple feet in Dana's direction, oblivious to the way Dana is cooing out loud over how perfectly cute he is. "I don't see 'em."

Thumping footsteps outside the door, as what sounds like a slightly larger child runs down the hall beyond. A new voice filters through the wall: "I'm going now, Mom!"

"Don't forget!" calls Cecil's mother. She doesn't specify what not to forget.

Dana wants to stay here longer, so that one day she can laugh with Cecil about all the cute things he said to her before she was born, before either of them knew who she would become. But she turned her head to the left at the sound of the new voice, and now the whole scene is fading away.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

As Tamika is shoving things into her locker at the end of the day, trying to cram her calculator and everything into what little space isn't packed with books, the new kid says, "Hi, Tamika."

"Hi, Seth." Tamika shoves her locker closed and spins the bloodstone dial. She's got a single locker on its own wall this year, to keep Rashi away from the usual rush of kids grabbing for backpacks, so anyone who comes over here has to be specifically looking for her. "What is it?"

"Thank you for the dictionary," says Seth. His Spanish grammar is getting better, even though his pronunciation is abysmal. (There are, Tamika grudgingly admits, a few things books can't teach you.) "My mom wants another book. A library book. She wants to know if you can help get it for her. Please."

Tamika considers the request. Then she says, "Follow me."

Seth trots after her down the hall, his own daemon riding as some kind of ferret on his backpack. The crowds part around them: nobody wants to touch the buffalo daemon by accident. (And they all know Tamika would gut anyone who did it on purpose.) She doesn't head for the bus lanes (not that she's riding a bus today anyway, Mario is driving her and a bunch of other kids out to the sand wastes for the afternoon), but for the gym.

"Put your stuff down," she orders, dropping her own backpack at the edge of the room.

He watches in confusion as she drags out one of the brightly-painted practice dummies from the equipment room. It isn't until she's actually putting the crossbow in his hands that his eyes widen with realization.

"Okay," says Tamika, pointing to the dummy and switching to her own heavily-accented English. "Shoot it. In the head." She taps her own head. "The head, understand?"

"No!" Seth is all pale behind his glasses, and that's saying something, because he was pretty pale already. "I can't. I don't want to. I won't."

"You can too." Tamika falls back into Spanish. "It's got two heads, and they're both real close. I'll even give you extra shots if you miss."

"I don't want to," repeats Seth. "I don't want to shoot things."

Tamika crosses her arms. "You want me to get this book for your mom? You suck it up and take the shot. It's not like it's gonna bleed on you."

The ferret daemon turns into a yellow bird, perches on Seth's shoulder, and whispers something in his ear. It's in English, so Tamika doesn't catch it. But she's banking on the kid being, at heart, a good Hebrew boy who loves his mama, and sure enough a moment later Seth raises the crossbow and takes aim.

His first shot goes wild, embedding itself in one of the Night Vale Scorpions pennants hanging on the wall.

His second, even though he's still kinda shaking, hits the dummy in its right-side forehead.

"Good," says Tamika. Still not someone she'd pick to be trapped in a firefight with, but at least now he won't freak out at the whole idea of holding a weapon. "So what's the book your mom wants? I'll get it to you tomorrow in chem."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos and Nirliq, who along with Quentin knows the most about the equipment they're hoping to get, take a ride over to Marcus Vansten's stately mansion. Inside the gold-plated gates is a garden full of exotic flowers, hedge sculptures, and a fountain carved in the shape of a whole lot of naked people spouting water from...assorted body parts.

A valet takes the car, and directs them around back.

"Mr. Vansten does realize we're in the middle of the desert, right?" whispers Nirliq as they head down a marble walkway, armadillo and colobus daemons at their heels. "How much is all this costing?"

"I don't even want to know." They reach another gate (also gold, also with a giant M-V wrought into the swirls of the bars), and Carlos calls past it: "Señor Vansten? Are you there?"

"Yeah!" calls a gravelly voice. "Yeah, c'mon in."

Carlos probably could have guessed that Vansten would have a pool in the back yard. An absurdly luxurious pool, even. What he wasn't expecting was for Vansten to be sitting in the pool, lounging in a hot-tub-sized circle set aside from the main body of water, with a little waterfall pouring in from a decorative stone wall to his left and a velvet-lined tray with a glass of something bright-green sitting at the poolside to his right.

He also didn't expect Vansten to be completely naked.

"Uh," says Carlos. "Should we give you a minute to, um, get out?" And get dressed? he does not add, but really, really wants to.

"Nah, this is fine," says Vansten. "Sit down. Stick your feet in the water or somethin'. Feels good. Either of you want a margarita?"

"Nothing to drink, thanks." Carlos hesitates, then crouches down and unlaces his shoes. They might as well humor the billionaire, and besides, it's really hot out. Nirliq follows his lead, and they toss back their chapel coats and sit on the edge of the pool across from Vansten, dangling their bare calves in the water and trying not to look at what else is underneath it.

Vansten's daemon, floating in a little custom-sized inner tube on the surface beside him, flutters her wings and circles around until she can see them. She's some kind of pigeon, almost pure white, with a cartoonishly fluffy ruff of feathers around her neck. Like a human in a huge fur shawl, her vision is blocked in all directions except straight ahead.

"So," says Vansten. "You folks wanted some money, right?"

"We would really appreciate a grant, Mr. Vansten," affirms Carlos. "We need certain equipment to test some new methods for keeping track of —"

The man waves for them to shut up. "Already bored. How much do you need?"

"Well, that's —"

"One million? Two?"

Carlos and Nirliq both gape, openmouthed.

"Sorry," says Nirliq at last, "maybe I don't understand. Are you offering us...a million Spanish dollars?"

"Or two," repeats Vansten. "Did you need two?"

"We cannot possibly accept —" begins Carlos.

Nirliq elbows him hard in the side. "Excuse us," she says sweetly to Vansten, before grabbing Carlos's arm and hissing to him in English: "Two million dollars! That's five hundred thousand pounds Halifax!"

"People do not just go around offering other people two million dollars!" whispers Carlos. No matter whose native currency you convert it into first.

"So when they do, you take it!" counters Nirliq. "I used to be division manager of the accounting department of a very profitable megacorporation, remember? This is professional advice!"

"Professional advice for an industry that deals in these kinds of sums. Experimental theology does not work on that scale! Our last NSF grant came to a hundred and seventeen thousand."

"Meaning if you take this, you won't have to write another grant proposal for how many years...?"

That hits Carlos where it counts. No experimental theologian likes writing grant proposals.

"Look, do you need three?" puts in Vansten, in Spanish. "I can get you three."

Carlos is starting to feel dizzy. Maybe he can bargain it down? Which sounds like a crazy thing to do, but..."In our field, if a guy gives you three million dollars, it means he wants something," he insists under his breath to Nirliq. "There are strings attached. Probably integrity-compromising strings. What's the least we can ask for? Including insurance, and a healthy margin of error for replacing stuff we break on our own?"

Nirliq has to have the number, but she doesn't hand it over. "I'm telling you, this guy doesn't sound like he cares enough to want anything."

They both sit up straighter, and Carlos switches back into Spanish. "Mr. Vansten, we're, uh, we're really bowled over by your generous offer, so I was wondering, is there anything you were hoping we could do for you in return?"

"Uh...I dunno." Vansten raises his voice. "Jake!"

A man in a suit materializes in the gazebo on the far side of the pool. That isn't a metaphor for him being really efficient, either. Maybe it's astral projection, maybe teleportation or invisibility, but whatever power he has, it means one second he isn't there and the next he is. "Yes, Marcus?"

"Jake, do I have any...theology-type stuff that needs doing?"

"Not at the moment, no."

"Didn't think so," says Vansten. "You wanna grab me another margarita?"

"Right away, Marcus," says Jake politely, and vanishes again.

"I mean, listen, Dr. Perfecto, if you really wanna make my day." The very rich, very nude man flicks his daemon's inner tube, so she spins in a lazy circle on the water. "You'd be a serious asset at a naked pool party. Got one coming up this weekend. Bring your boyfriend, what's-his-face." He grins. "What's-his-legs, more like."

With perfect calm, Carlos says, "If I'd taken that drink, I would be throwing it in your face right now."

Vansten shrugs. "You've got better things to do, whatever. Your loss. Just thought you should know, the option? Is totally open."

In a more subdued tone, Nirliq whispers to Carlos, "Four hundred and thirty thousand."

(As Carlos is relaying the number, Jake reappears, holding a margarita and a checkbook.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos doesn't say anything to Cecil about Marcus Vansten's hopefully-joking-but-maybe-not attempts to buy his way into Cecil's pants. (Or, at the moment, kilt.) He just sweeps into the apartment and pulls Cecil into an especially warm and loving kiss the first chance he gets.

"Mmm," sighs Cecil, cuddling up against him and undoing his ponytail to more effectively run adoring fingers through his curls. "I guess the funding request went well, huh?"

Carlos also decides not to mention how Vansten started tearing up when filling in the "Purpose" line on the check. If a billionaire is going to cry at the prospect of giving away a couple hundred thousand, that's weird, but not Carlos's problem. "We got the money, yeah. Have I mentioned lately how amazing you are?"

It isn't long before they've moved the kissing to bed, leaving the kilt and Carlos's chapel coat on the floor along the way. Carlos slips the high-collared jacket off Cecil's shoulders with tender care. He won't have to see the back of Cecil's neck as long as they stay face-to-face. (And Cecil can grab a scarf if they want to spoon afterward.)

Isaña waits in Khoshekh's basket. Around the time Cecil pushes Carlos over on his back, the margay daemon bursts through the window and tackles her onto the cushion.

Cecil takes his sweet time with getting all their clothes off, and it's loving and thorough and glorious —

— until someone's phone goes off, with a ring tone Carlos has never heard before.

Cecil stops short, a dark cloud falling over his face. Through still-heavy breathing he mutters, "Management."

In his distraction, Carlos almost asks when the eldritch horror-creature that is probably from another dimension learned to use telephones.

He tries to caress Cecil back to calm as the music finishes, but the song just restarts, and Cecil is visibly too unsettled to focus on Carlos while it's running. "Answer it," says Carlos at last. "Not worth antagonizing them. I'll still be right here when you're done."

So Cecil climbs off of him and goes, one hand cupped over the nape of his neck. His side of the conversation filters down the hall: "Hello?...Lauren, hi! No, this is a really bad time, I'm actually in the middle of something...I'm sure you won't. Uh-huh? Uh-huh. Okay. Sure, I understand. Thanks for the heads-up."

Back in the bedroom, he practically throws himself on top of Carlos, plastering their bodies together and nuzzling into Carlos's hair:

"Tomorrow's going to be a slow news day."

"Yeah?" If this is code, it isn't one Carlos has heard before. He starts into the caressing again, and this time Cecil is much more receptive. "What does that mean? Are they...cutting your hours, or something?"

"No, no. I have the same work day. The same amount of air time to fill. Which is why I've been asked to show up with some alternative time-fillers in mind, because there will be an unusually small amount of news...that I get to report on."

"Oh, Cecil." Carlos kisses his temple, strokes through his hair. "Is there anything I can do?"

"For now...?" Cecil rises up on his elbows and rocks his hips firmly against Carlos's. "It would certainly be morale-boosting if you got your pants off. Mmm. And...maybe put your chapel coat back on."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie sticks the frozen peas in the microwave while her kids scoop macaroni onto their plates. Susannah is in a good mood, but Seth's optimism seems to have regressed.

He waits until they're all sitting to speak up. "Tamika wasn't in school today. Sorry, Mom."

"Tamika," echoes Sam, in a voice that doesn't spell out the word crush but does leave it hanging in the air. "This is the nice girl with the books?"

Seth ignores the bait. "Yeah."

"She agreed to pick up a book for me," Sherie reminds her husband. "I hope she's all right."

"Of course she's all right," says Susannah. "Maybe she had to take a sick day for something, but it's not gonna keep her down for long. I mean, she's Tamika goddamn Flynn."

"Su!" exclaims Sherie. "Language!"

"Mom!" counters Su, in a sing-songy parody of the scolding tone. "Showing proper respect for Night Vale's most awesome monster-hunting twelve-year-old!"

"All right, settle down," says Sam. "Don't worry about it, Seth. You'll probably get to see her tomorrow, good as new."

"Yeah," says Seth again. He looks calm on the surface, but the daemon in his lap is in the form of a small wildcat, and Sherie can see her tail lashing. "Dad?"

"Yes, kiddo?"

"Can I have my own crossbow?"

Notes:

New art! The new scientists, plus Sherie's family. And, for the curious, I answered a question about how all the different daemon species were chosen.

Marcus Vansten's daemon is a Jacobin pigeon. Here are some pictures of Jacobin pigeons. They're not wild birds, they're a domestic breed, cultivated to look as ridiculous...I mean, as fancy...as possible.

Nirliq is from Beringland (our-world Alaska, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories), which runs on the Halifax standard: one pound Halifax is pegged to four Spanish dollars.

Chapter 7: Thou Shalt Not Know

Summary:

It's a slow news day in Night Vale, during which absolutely nothing noteworthy happens, certainly not involving Strexcorp and our heroes. To fill airtime on his show, Cecil has just the thing: an old cassette tape.

Night Vale.

Carlos puts the coffee on, feeds the plant, then steps out into the hall. Cecil is rummaging through the closet, on hands and knees while wearing a pair of red vinyl short-shorts and beaded halter top that keeps riding up his back, so Carlos relaxes and takes a minute to enjoy the view.

The moment gets interrupted when Cecil tosses something red and dripping over his shoulder. Carlos yelps and dodges just in time, and the rag hits the wall next to him with a splat.

"Oh, Carlos! I didn't know you were there!" exclaims Cecil. "I didn't hit you, did I?"

"You missed, don't worry." Isaña trots up to the wet rag, sniffs it, and inches uncomfortably backward. "Why do you have blood-soaked rags in your closet?"

"I know! I haven't cleaned up in here for ages. It's so embarrassing." Cecil sits back on his heels, holding a fist-sized lump of what looks like Fireland spar. "Don't know why I have this, either. Here, take a look. Maybe it's interesting from a theology perspective."

Carlos takes the mineral crystal and turns it over in his hand. If it really is Fireland spar, it'll do this cool thing where it doubly refracts the image of whatever's behind it.

Instead of exhibiting birefringence, the crystal reflects a face at him.

Carlos jumps. "Mamá?"

No, that isn't his mother's face — the jaw is too strong, the nose too sharp — but the silver curls look exactly like hers, and the lines on the dark skin move in the same way hers do when she's giving her children a wistful smile —

"Hm?" asks Cecil, from deep in the closet again. "Did you say something?"

"I think this crystal is showing an image of what I'm going to look like in a couple of decades," says Carlos.

"Neat," says Cecil, now dragging out a cardboard box labeled only in runes. "Let me guess. Handsome and distinguished."

He unfolds the box's battered flaps. Packed inside is an old Boy Scout uniform, complete with a purple neckerchief and a sash covered in badges; a single vertebra from some unknown animal, half the size of Carlos's head, cocooned in bubble wrap; and a stack of old cassette tapes, all labeled in pen.

Cecil picks up one of the tapes, and gets that same wistful expression as he gazes at the handwritten label. "Speaking of versions of yourself far-removed in time from your present...."

Carlos leans over his shoulder and takes in the words on the tape's spine:

CECIL RADIO TEST - AGE 15

 

-{,(((,">

 

"But if you're solving for the derivative of E with respect to t squared —"

"That's not a derivative, it's a partial derivative. Can't you tell the difference?"

On the other side of the ordinater room, Carlos buries his head in his hands and seriously considers copying all these datasets, plus installing the associated program, to the machine in his office. It would tie them all up for a couple of hours, but it just might be worth it.

"Can't I tell the difference between a d and a partial-dee when it's written in mostaza with a popote de café?" (Quentin is using English for the math talk, but slips back into Spanish for food words like "mustard" and "coffee straw.") "No. No, Nirliq, I cannot. Can't you type your equations up before asking me to look them over?"

Nirliq flips back her hair with a hand bearing a ring inscribed in Cyrillic. "Well, excuse me for trying to appreciate the local customs of the town that's helping us revolutionize particle physics!"

The pair have pushed a couple of machines aside and spread out a stack of papers between the monitors, their attention going back and forth between two screens, a sheaf of highlighter-strewn printouts, and the occasional note or diagram handwritten with food products. It's all in the service of calculating exactly what they want to create when the new and shockingly-expensive equipment arrives, so they waste as little time as possible on test runs. It's a worthy goal. Carlos is glad they're enthusiastic! Really!

It's just that Quentin, normally the sweetest guy in the group, turns out to have an impatient streak that sits up and bites when he has to work with people who can't keep up with him. Which is everyone, at some point or another. Meanwhile, Nirliq is embracing Night Vale's oddities with the enthusiasm of a tourist, which is alternately fun and annoying. (Carlos is just glad she hasn't decided to start wearing a soft meat crown.)

With wonderful timing, the doorbell rings. "I'll get it while you start typing," says Quentin briskly.

"Fine." Nirliq rummages through the papers while Quentin scoops his flying-squirrel daemon into his pocket and heads for the stairs.

In the sudden quiet, Carlos notices that Nirliq is typing without her eyes ever leaving the screen. Does she have the equations memorized? But her colobus daemon is looking at the papers, so it's possible she's just in four-eye.

He can ask later. Right now he needs to try to focus....

Quentin bursts back into the room, taking shallow breaths.

"Hi," he squeaks. "Um, Carlos? There's some kind of Strexcorp official. Downstairs. At the door. Wants to come in. What do we do?"

Carlos stands bolt upright, taking a quick mental inventory of who's in the building today. Köhler, Sherie, and a Li Hua are out patrolling with the danger meter. Henriette took Rayshawn and Perle down to the range to get some firearms practice. Three physicists and two biologists left.

"Quentin, go back downstairs, go into the main room, and make sure all the electrum lenses are out of sight. Along with anything else that isn't public knowledge," he orders. "Nirliq, hide everything up here, put the computers to sleep, then go give the bio folks a heads-up."

He scoops up Isaña. Henriette is a smoother liar than they are, and Köhler is better at evading questions and making you feel like you're being a churl for asking, but they aren't here. Whatever Strex wants, it's all on Carlos Tongue-Tied to manage.

"And we'll go say hello to our guests," he finishes, trying to keep his tone light. "Wish us luck."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Eighteen. Twenty-two. One. Seven. Thirty-six." (Chimes.)

The radio at the White Sand ice cream shop is tuned to WZZZ. At first Sherie thought the numbers interspersed with chimes were just another one of NVCR's unique local programs, but no, the owners are opting to listen to the town's other local station: the one that never breaks for a Strexcorp ad.

The team's minifridge-sized and hand-soldered Gaillard Compass, colloquially "danger meter," is parked next to their booth. If it picks up any readings that suggest Strexcorp is doing something involving portals, Sherie, Keith, and Li Hua will leap into action. In the meantime...Sherie's giving a scoop of Existential Pistachio Crunch a try.

The Li Hua with them today is working on a cup of mango-snozzberry shaved ice, casual as anything, like there's nothing odd about the AK-47 slung over her back. Sherie tries to put it out of her mind too, and make polite conversation. "Li Hua, have you ever thought about doing something different with your hair?"

Li Hua frowns. "Why? Is there something wrong with a ponytail?"

"No, not at all! I mean, something different from your...double. Twin? Do you think of yourselves as sisters?"

"Sisters don't have identical memories for the first twenty-nine years of their lives," says Li Hua dryly. "The term double is fine. Technically only one of us is a double, but nobody else needs to know which."

"Sixty-three. Sixty-one. Forty-seven. Eleven. Thirty. Fifty-nine." (Chimes.)

Sherie's mongoose daemon climbs into her lap, where she pets his fur. (Keith's binturong is curled up under his chair in a big lump of blue-black fur, while Li Hua's wren is nesting in her chapel coat's front pocket.) "All right. I can understand that. But you really don't want to look different, or go by different names, or anything like that?"

"Nope."

A thought occurs to Sherie. "Is it so you can both talk to your family back home, without having them wonder why your haircut keeps getting short and then growing back between one day and the next?"

Li Hua hesitates, then lowers her eyes to her shaved ice, rearranging it in the dish with her spoon. "We don't exactly talk to our family."

"Oh!" Now Sherie just feels awful. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize."

Keith, who has been reading the latest issue of Progress of Theoretical and Experimental Physics for the past half hour, looks up from his tablet. "Is this because they see you as someone to avoid, or because you are simply too uninterested to maintain the contact?"

"Keith! What kind of a question is that?"

"Yeah, Keith," says Li Hua. Her whole wounded-but-dignified posture vanishes, replaced by an elfin smirk. "How can you be so callous? Can't you see this is a very painful subject for us?"

She's using the flippancy to mask the emotional strain, right? Anyone would be upset if their relations with their family broke down. Even if it's all for the best, which can happen, lord knows Sherie has relatives she keeps at a healthy distance from the kids, there's still the grief for what could have been. And just because Li Hua is a little...off...sometimes doesn't mean her parents don't love her. Sherie and her husband have certainly considered whether Susannah's fascination with the macabre is something more worrying than a teenager's desire to be shocking, but —

Li Hua sits up straighter, eyes going out of focus. "Strexcorp's at the chapel."

Sherie tenses. Speaking of people who aren't good for children.

"How do you know this?" asks Keith, just as alert. He's not a parent, but he's just as revolted by the company's intercision efforts as the team members who are. Any normal person would be. Even the Strexcorp rank-and-file, the middle managers and pencil-pushers (literally, since they're allowed to have pencils) who make up the bulk of its employees — they can't possibly have any idea what they're harboring.

"We're in four-eye," says Li Hua in a low voice. "Shh, let us listen."

That doesn't make sense. Her daemon is right here in her pocket, so how —

Unless the wren here at the White Sand isn't hers. Unless the sameness between the doubles runs so deep that they can exchange daemons as easily as phone numbers. And judging by Keith's reaction, the other members of the old guard didn't know about it either.

Silence, except for the bustle behind the counter and the ongoing recitation of the numbers station. "Fifty. Two. Twelve. Thirty-one. Twenty-five. Fifty-two. Fifty-seven. Nine." (Chimes.)

After a few minutes, the Li Hua in residence relaxes. "Just one person — we can take 'em, if necessary — and it sounds like it won't be."

Keeping his own eyes on the readout of the danger meter, Keith says, "What is happening?"

Another of those pleased smirks. "I'm pretty sure Carlos's strategy is to talk her to death."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"But that's not even the really interesting part!" On the ordinater in his office, surrounded by maps and empty coffee mugs and jars filled with the sludge that lives in Night Vale timepieces, Carlos clicks to the next slide. "If you take a look at this chart...."

His Strex-affiliated visitor, a dark-haired woman in a severe dark suit whose daemon is a massive dark-maned lion, has been keeping up a look of cheerful interest for a quarter of an hour now. On this image, it finally wavers. "Is this all gamma radiation?"

"Sure is! Now, I know what you're thinking, Dr. Thiébaut." Carlos beams at her. "You're thinking, gosh, Dr. Ramirez, if these levels are accurate, shouldn't everyone in town be suffering massive cell damage, aplastic anemia, hair loss, hemorrhaging, and, in short, painful death within four to six weeks of exposure?"

"The thought had crossed my mind," allows Zariya Thiébaut. She introduced herself as Strexcorp Labs publicist, but going by her reactions so far, she understands the physics of what the Night Vale project is doing. Either she's an extremely well-educated layperson, or she's a fellow expert, undercover.

"Well, that's just it," says Carlos. "We should!"

"Come again?"

"We should all be dead," repeats Carlos cheerfully. "We've double-checked our equipment, verified the readings, everything, and none of us have any idea why we're still alive. Isn't that fascinating?"

"It's certainly worth follow-up research. I'll make a note for our people to do some independent studies." She pulls out a notebook and an orange-and-gold ballpoint pen, with the name and logo of Strexcorp printed on the side. Carlos tenses, but keeps himself from reacting. Let her find out on her own what the consequences of pen use are. "Would you like us to send you a copy of the results?"

"Tell you what," says Carlos. "Leave them with Carlo Raimondi. He can pass everything on."

For a split second Thiébaut starts to roll her eyes. (Very dark eyes. Even here, in an office with only indirect sunlight, her pupils are hugely dilated. Carlos isn't sure if that's a red flag, or just a bit of harmless Desert Bluffs weirdness analogous to, say, that thing Coach Nazr al-Mujaheed can do with his tongue.)

Her daemon jumps in, covering for her. "The man with the hyena daemon? That's right, you work with him, don't you? We'll keep it in mind."

So they know Raimondi. More personally than they want to let on. And a year ago Carlos would have totally sympathized with anyone rolling their eyes at the man, but now? The version of Raimondi that Thiébaut knows must be the shell left over from his intercision.

Does she know what's been done to him? Carlos has the horrible feeling that the odds are high. If so, does she know that Carlos knows? Does she suspect? Can she guess that he knows that she knows?

"I appreciate it," he says out loud, and does a quick pivot: "Now, how about if I show you —"

"What I'd really like to see, Dr. Ramirez, is some of the research you've been doing with your Strexcorp-brand Rusakov meters," says Thiébaut. "It's my area as well, and I've been following your team's recent publications with great interest. Are they still working out for you?"

It's the trap Carlos has been waiting for. She knows the meters are gone. She can't admit she knows they're gone. But Carlos in turn can't give away that the whole reason they're gone is because he knows how she knows. "Actually...I'm sorry to say we lost the whole array a couple of weeks ago. Our current theory is that they were knocked out by a radiation surge that was even more deadly than usual. That, or an earthquake. We haven't felt any earthquakes, but, you know, around here that doesn't mean much."

Thiébaut looks deeply sympathetic. "I can't imagine how much that must have cut into your productivity. But there may be a silver lining, because our techs have just finished a new prototype! You'll want a full set for testing, I assume?"

"Oh, I couldn't possibly accept that much generosity," says Carlos warmly. "Besides, our research focus has shifted somewhat in the past few months. You might be aware that this team has very high turnover? And with new members comes a new set of interests. We even have a linguist now. If you've ever been curious about the verb conjugations carved into the stone tablets down at City Hall...."

"Surely you still have active Rusakov researchers on your team, though?" Thiébaut smiles right back at him. The light from the window glances off a sun-shaped orange pin on her lapel. "I know Quentin Armenteros has put out several innovative papers over the last couple of years. And —"

And Carlos is not going to stand here and listen while she shows off how well Strex has been keeping tabs on his people. "Well, this is embarrassing," he says, with a self-conscious laugh. "The thing is...I don't actually understand the project Quentin's been working on. So it's not something I could introduce you to."

"Oh? That seems like an awkward position for a project chaplain to be in."

"Not at all! I can follow it enough to know it's good work. It's just, try to delve into the specifics and my brain shorts out somewhere between the third sigma and the fifth nabla."

All of this is actually true. Carlos is ten years older than Quentin and ten years farther from his Ph.D. research than Nirliq, and when he looks at the equations they've been wrestling with, he feels it. Reading them is like listening to a symphony: he can tell that they're elegant and powerful, but he doesn't know enough to dissect the chords or the instruments and articulate why.

"How would you like to get a look at some of our past projects instead? The photograms of the Glow Cloud are absolutely stunning. As long as you don't mind the dead animals. You don't, do you?"

"I have a high tolerance for disturbing content in the pursuit of experimental theology," says Thiébaut. "So this 'Glow Cloud' causes animal deaths?"

"Not exactly. They're already dead. It just drops them as it goes past. So if you happen to see it going by, you should take shelter under something firm," Carlos tells her. "Most of the animals it drops are relatively small, but once in a while it spits out something large enough to crush the roof of a car. For instance...lions."

Neither Thiébaut nor her black-maned daemon bat an eye. "Is that so."

"Oh, yes," says Carlos, with all the pure-hearted theological fascination in his soul. "I was present for one of those, as it happens!" (He doesn't technically remember it, but Thiébaut doesn't need to know that.) "Some people had kidnapped me, you see, and a lion was one of the large dead animals the Glow Cloud dropped on them. Long story short, nobody's tried a kidnapping since! Isn't that interesting? Come on, let's go see those photos."

 

-{,(((,">

 

At last Carlos ushers the visitor out the front door and shuts it hard behind her. His throat is sore from talking so long.

He gives himself a few seconds to breathe, then goes to find the rest of the team. Turns out all four of them are crowded behind the nearest door. Omero's hand is on the gun in his thigh holster; his glossy starling daemon's wings are half-spread, ready to take off at any second. "Is she gone?"

"Yes, she's gone. Which means you can all relax, stop being on your best behavior, and head out for a late lunch," says Carlos. "Save the receipts and I'll even reimburse you."

"Not hungry," says Nirliq. "I got Arby's an hour ago — will you comp me for that?"

No, because that defeats the whole purpose of shooing them out of the chapel. Carlos takes a step toward her and puts on his serious face. "I insist."

It clicks for Li Hua first. Omero at least catches that Carlos is trying to send them away, even if he doesn't realize why. Between them they manage to get Nirliq and Quentin outside and hustle everyone down to the bus stop, under a sky dotted with the occasional silhouette of another yellow gyropter.

Carlos has his phone out, composing a mass text. "I recommend Gino's Italian Dining Experience And Grill And Bar," he says presently, finishing it up. "Nicest place in town. Somebody bring me back an extra-rare portobello mushroom."

Quentin frowns. "Aren't you coming?"

"Obviously not," says Li Hua. "He's got some urgent tidying-up to do. Carlos, if you find anything interesting...."

"...I'll set it aside for you," promises Carlos, and sends the text.

He heads out back, to enlist the help of the secret-police observer in one of the trees, while his teammates' phones buzz as they get the warning: Sweeping the chapel for bugs. Keep yourselves busy elsewhere until I send the all-clear.

 

-{,(((,">

 

They find three.

Including one on the inside lining of Carlos's coat sleeve. Must have gotten there while he was shaking hands.

"Quick thinking, Dr. Perfecto," says an officer with a tiny antelope daemon, handing him the inert remains of the last bug. Carlos thanks her, scoops all the devices into a jar for the Li Huas to dissect, and lets the team know they're good to return just as the radio is switching itself on.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Hi, Cecil here. Mom gave me this recorder for my birthday so I could make my own radio shows, just like Leonard Burton's show at the real Night Vale Community Radio. I'm going to replace Leonard one day! I really want to, plus the tablets down at City Hall say so, so I better start practicing now."

Sherie listens with rapt interest. This is Carlos's boyfriend as a teenager? What a sweet boy he must have been. And how nice of his mother, supporting his interests....

"Excuse me," says a woman in a White Sand apron, interrupting Sherie's thoughts. "You're the experimental theologians, right?"

"We are," says Köhler.

"Thought so! Delivery for you just came in. It's up on the roof."

Li Hua frowns. "Who would be delivering something to us here?"

"Don't know. They didn't leave a name. Just landed a heavily-dented yellow gyropter, set down a stack of books, and took off."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"That thing he described," murmurs Isaña, as the present-day Cecil on the radio segues smoothly into traffic. "The flickering, and the static. Doesn't it sound like...?"

"...being chased by a temporarily de-personified Li-Hua," finishes Carlos. Was this younger recorded version of Cecil being stalked by a similar buzzing shadow-creature? Or some other Rusakov-particle-depletion phenomenon? Either way, this recording is no longer just a cute bit of nostalgia. It's theology.

He listens as present-Cecil brings past-Cecil up once more....

"Cecil again! My brother says that I'll never make it in radio, because my voice isn't right for it. I need to get more like Leonard, with that perfect radio voice — all high-pitched and grating like sandpaper, just the way radio voices should be."

Carlos frowns. What brother?

Maybe he should have guessed. Given the mortality rate in this town, it's much more plausible for fifty percent of the Palmero children to have died young than zero percent. And of course, if it's a painful memory, Cecil won't want to talk about it....

"Um, I've been seeing that movement more, even here in Brazil. It's like someone is walking towards me."

"But there's nothing there," says a new voice. The voice of a teenage Khoshekh. "I keep doing flyovers and I've tried a ton of different kinds of eyesight, and I'm telling you, there's nothing."

Fifteen-year-old Khoshekh, not yet fixed in the form of a Brazilian margay. Carlos curls his arm around Isaña, imagining their suave, confident beloved flipping between the shapes of birds and bats and honeybees, as well as weird, otherworldly creatures with weirder types of eyesight.

It's all very charming until present-day Cecil comes back on the air and says that he doesn't remember having a brother.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Maybe I'll be able to see it better after the surgery," muses the young Cecil, as Sherie and Köhler spread the books across the table to take a look.

They asked for one book on bloodstones. They got almost a dozen. A textbook and four other serious scholarly tracts in Spanish, three of the same in English, one in some kind of runes, and one picture book with glossy watercolor illustrations. On top of the heap is a yellowed, amateurishly-printed paperback in German, with a bookmark sticking out of it.

Köhler reports that it has nothing to do with bloodstones, but flips to the bookmarked page, where he finds a couple of sentences underlined. There's no translation, no annotation except on the bookmark itself, where ~T.F. has been scrawled in ballpoint pen.

"What does it say?" asks Sherie.

"A moment." Köhler and his binturong daemon study the text together. At last he settles on the phrasing. "Experimental theology is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality — 'Thou shalt not know' — the rest follows from that."

"Kid doesn't pull her punches," says Li Hua admiringly. "Glad she's on our side."

Sherie is glad to have the books, no question. And it's a relief to know that Tamika Flynn is doing well, mysterious disappearance from school notwithstanding. But she listens to Cecil intoning an ad for Strexcorp over the speakers, and spots a yellow gyropter going past in the sky outside, and her phone is still warm from the text informing them that Carlos has cleared the bugs out of their workplace...and she's also glad her own children are safely in class, where they belong.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Hello? Hello? I'm Cecil! Cecil Guarnieri Palmero! And you cannot scare me! You cannot! You canno—"

Carlos knows all this happened almost two decades ago, knows that teenage Cecil made it safe and sound and whole through so many years afterward. His heart is in his mouth anyway. Most of the rest of the team is back at the chapel and getting actual work done; he and Isaña are glued to the radio.

At last present-day Cecil cuts to the weather, and Carlos turns to his daemon. "He doesn't know he was a radio intern?"

"I know!" exclaims Isaña. "We've only been here a year and a half, and even we knew about that." Just because Cecil was guaranteed a radio job through prophecy doesn't mean they would let him skip out on the process of proving himself up to it....

"Carlos?"

With a start Carlos looks at the radio. The weather is still playing.

"Over here," says Cecil.

Turns out he's standing in the middle of the next table down, translucent and flickering: astral-projecting, probably from the station's bloodstone circle. The old Boy Scout neckerchief he found this morning is fastened around his throat, folded carefully over the back of his neck.

"Hi," says Carlos softly, standing to greet him. "How are you doing?"

"I believe I have sufficiently distracted the population from noticing that Strexcorp has simultaneously purchased every residential property rental company in town," says Cecil. His eyes are reddened and his face drawn with concern, but he manages to keep his tone dry. "It will go entirely unnoticed until it gets mentioned in the next bulletin of the Night Vale High PTA, which, incidentally, is released tomorrow."

"You're wonderful." Carlos pauses. "Wait — does this mean — do they own your apartment complex now?"

Cecil's mouth twists. "Among other things. Dear Carlos, I don't have much time — would you mind picking a few things up at the store for me? If you can bring them back to the chapel, I'll come and meet you here after I sign off. Is that all right?"

Carlos has his phone out before Cecil finishes speaking, notepad app open. Mostly herbs. Spell ingredients. He reads the list back at the end, confirms that he has it all straight, then says, "Cecil...re-education?"

"They would not dare," says Cecil darkly. "Kill someone, yes, but erase them completely afterward? Even if they were to try, there are limits. You can only take so much from a person before there isn't enough left to patch up. And to do the same with everyone who knew my family growing up? With Steve, with Earl, with Josie...? Most likely the tapes are wrong — they've been in the back of that closet for a long time, it isn't an archival-quality preservation environment at all, things are bound to degrade — but I — I must check."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Can I help you find something?"

Carlos is peering at the spice aisle in the Raúl's, full of rows upon rows of little jars that are almost identical. He really hopes he isn't looking for one of the ones that keeps rattling and hissing, or the ones that are eating through their own lids. "Yeah, thanks. Do you guys have bee sage? Or red sage?"

A polite cough. "Uh, Carlos."

At last Carlos actually looks at the person addressing him. Tan jacket. Insect-daemon lanyard. Deerskin briefcase. "Oh, sorry! I thought you were an employee."

"No offense taken." The Man in the Tan Jacket bends to pull one of the jars from a lower shelf, and hands it to Carlos. "Red sage. Bee sage is down at the end."

Carlos checks the label before dropping the herb in his basket (along with plums, cold iron, toe of frog, and rigatoni), and he and Isaña follow the man along. Something is tickling at the corners of his brain, like a word on the tip of his tongue, like the memory of a dream. He tries to relax and let whatever-it-is come back to him naturally. "Did you...get us something, recently? An appliance? Or food?"

"I sent your team dinner not long ago."

"Right! At the chapel." Carlos frowns, rubbing his temples. "Or was it at the houses? Either way, I should pay you back."

"Don't worry about it. Consider it a thanks for your services to Night Vale." The man stops to pluck another canister off a shelf at eye-level, then one from the very top. "Bee sage. Also, red crowberry, which is much more common in memory spells than red sage. Save you a trip back to the store after Cecil realizes his mix-up."

"You know, it is really unnerving when you do that," grumbles Carlos.

He says it without thinking, still looking at the new labels. It takes a second to notice the other man has frozen in place, staring at him with a guarded, intent look.

"Do you do it a lot?" asks Isaña. "You must, right? It sure feels familiar..."

"...even though I can't recall any specific incidents," finishes Carlos. Shopping list complete, he starts toward the checkout, but nods for the man to come along. "Sorry, didn't mean to get your hopes up...I guess you're familiar with memory spells for a reason."

The Man in the Tan Jacket nods. "I do have a certain...personal interest."

"And no luck so far, huh? Except with Dana, I guess." Carlos pauses. "Hang on. The Apache Tracker. You were always hanging around with him, even with the...you know." It feels rude to complain out loud about the man who saved his life, so he just mimes the loose shape of a giant racist plastic feather headdress. "Could he remember you too?"

"Yes."

"...Have we figured that out before?" asks Isaña.

"You stumble upon it about once a month, yes."

"I'm guessing we apologize to you a lot too." Carlos picks up the jar of red crowberry from the top of his basket and turns it over. The substance inside looks like pine needles; half of the label is blacked-out. "Any chance this is an unlabeled toxin? Or an allergen?"

"Not to you," says the Man in the Tan Jacket, now worrying his lanyard with his free hand. "Go on and try it."

So Carlos uncaps the jar, breaks the seal, and takes a deep inhale of the herb inside.

There's no sudden unlocking of hidden memories, no dawning realization of moments lost. Just the smell of pine and sour cherries. He takes another breath, just in case, then closes it with a sigh. "I'd promise to have Cecil show me how to do the actual spell on you, but I assume that by the time I see him I won't remember wanting to."

"You never do."

Swallowing the impulse to apologize yet again, Carlos leans over to let the self-checkout machine do a retina scan. "Are you even really shopping, or did you just come here to help me out?"

"I'm here for my own reasons, don't worry. But before you run off and forget this ever happened, let me help you bag." He brushes past Carlos to the end of the conveyor belt. "Paper or feral dog?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Carlos gets back to the chapel, everyone is there, and most of them are reading.

Cecil is with them, Khoshekh draped over his shoulder, sitting next to Rayshawn and translating passages from what looks like a Spanish-language geology textbook. "'Fluid inclusions may be found in gangue minerals in hydrothermal vein deposits'...I hope this means something to you, because it is entirely opaque to me...."

"Ain't even gonna ask how you're translating into words you don't know," says Rayshawn. His poison dart frog daemon walk-hops in circles around the bloodstone on the table in front of them, examining it from all angles. "Think y'all can find a section on chalcedony?"

Khoshekh, meanwhile, spots Carlos, and nudges Cecil to get his attention. "Allow me," he says, nodding in Carlos's direction.

"Oh!" Cecil gets up in a hurry, leaving the textbook open for Khoshekh to page through. He grabs a volume of his own and holds it against his chest as he approaches Carlos: a mass of browned and flaking pages falling out of their binding, the cover torn off entirely, a spidery drawing of a broad-leafed plant visible on the title page. "Carlos, hi — I'm so sorry, I would have texted you, but I got a message from Dana earlier and my phone has been sprouting thorns ever since — it wasn't red sage I wanted. It was —"

Carlos pulls the red crowberry out of his grocery bag and holds it up.

Cecil's already-clouded eyes get misty. "You are magical sometimes, you know that?"

"Just lucky, that's all." Carlos leads Cecil back to his office. "Have you asked the alethiometer...?"

Cecil adjusts the bag over his shoulder, not answering. Khoshekh is quiet too as he catches up with them on silent cat feet, trotting along next to Isaña. It isn't until the door is closed behind them that Cecil says, "The tapes are not wrong."

"I...I'm sorry." Carlos doesn't know what else to say.

"When I left the station, two officers of the Sheriff's secret police were waiting outside." Cecil holds up a hand to keep Carlos from jumping to conclusions. "They did not start this. But if a person's memory is altered or lost for some other reason, and the modified version is determined to be better for their mental health and the stability of the town, they will take it upon themselves to do...maintenance."

Now Carlos is worried for a whole new set of reasons. This could be ordinary, average-human, trauma-based memory repression — and that doesn't happen lightly. Maybe Cecil's brother was abusive in some way, and disappeared because someone had him locked up, or killed, for Cecil's protection? Given that Cecil hasn't forgotten about his mother forcing him through a separation ordeal, Carlos doesn't even want to imagine how far someone would have to go to make Cecil's brain lock the memories down. Or it could be something the brother wasn't responsible for, just involved in. If he died in some horrific way, and teenage Cecil was a witness....

Cecil sets his things on Carlos's desk and closes the distance between them. Carlos gladly folds him into an embrace. "Are you still going to go after the truth?"

"Yes," says Cecil. No hesitation, no interest in justifying himself.

"Okay." Carlos brushes aside Cecil's bangs and kisses his forehead, just beside the trepanation scar. "Did the police decide to let you, or are you...on the run?"

"I invoked a couple of statutes too obscure to be in their standard training." Cecil's voice is muffled in the crook of Carlos's neck. "They asked if I would mind waiting down at the station while they looked my information up. I...made it clear...that I would mind very much. Eventually they saw my point of view."

"Good." Of course Carlos would have sided with Cecil against the secret police, but it's easier if he doesn't have to.

"I can't stay long, though," adds Cecil. "The spell will need a bloodstone circle, and I didn't realize yours would be...dismantled."

"We can re-assemble it, if we can study what you're doing," says Carlos. (Cecil's grip tenses on the fabric of his shirt.) "Not that we need to! All I mean is, I don't have a right to commandeer team resources unless there's research involved." He takes a deep breath. "But we've got non-research circles too. Back at the houses. Come home with me."

Notes:

Tamika delivers a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche's Der Antichrist. (I can only assume this universe's equivalent of Nietzche self-published, and had a mysterious disappearance right after printing it.)

Fireland = our-world Iceland. (Named for its volcanoes instead of its glaciers.)

Chapter 8: Dust, Mostly

Summary:

Cecil spends a friendly morning at Carlos's place. The team gets a shipment of new gadgets, and spends the day assembling and deploying them. And Dana walks inside a mountain, looking for...something. (With the occasional detour into the near future of Cecil's studio.)

Night Vale.

When Carlos wakes up, alone, he almost doesn't remember that anything unusual happened last night. It isn't until he rolls over and reaches for Isaña, only to find the mattress completely empty, that it comes back: his daemon is in her basket, where she slept with Khoshekh, while Cecil fell asleep next to Carlos.

It's the first time Cecil's been the one to stay over.

Granted, they didn't do anything Carlos would have been embarrassed to have his housemates overhear. After almost an hour in the bloodstone circle room with no results, Cecil was too exhausted and crabby to do anything but fall into bed and implore Carlos to rub his back until he dozed off.

And now he's gone. Back to his own apartment, or just to the bathroom or something? (Hopefully nobody took down the curtain Carlos tacked in front of the mirror last night.) Carlos changes into his Northern Lights T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, and pulls his now-collarbone-length hair back into a ponytail as he ventures downstairs to find out.

What he finds...is Cecil, Omero, and Quentin sitting in a line on the couch in the living room, all furiously mashing at video-game controllers, while on the flatscreen three humanoids in camo gear battle some kind of hunchbacked, armor-plated monster with knives for teeth.

"C'mon, Palmero, we need backup! Lock and load!" urges Quentin. (In English. Carlos is guessing he picked up all his military slang from New Dane war movies, and/or English-language MMORPGs.)

"I am trying!" complains Cecil, jabbing at buttons with his thumbs.

It's an oddly heartwarming scene. They're all in casual clothes — in Cecil's case, Carlos's casual clothes. He's the only one who's bothered to shave; Quentin's neat goatee is frizzier than usual, and Omero is just outright scruffy. Khoshekh is draped over the arm of the couch like a cat-shaped wax sculpture that's started to melt. Omero's prosthetic leg is unbuckled and resting in the chair next to them, with his glossy starling daemon perched on top of it. Quentin's flying squirrel is actually sitting on his head, lounging on his pile of tightly-coiled hair like it's a taupe-colored, well-moisturized cloud.

"Hit B to fire," Omero reminds Cecil. "Two ups and a B only works if you've been charging for —"

Carlos didn't think his footsteps could be heard over the ruckus of the game, even with its volume turned down in deference to the people still sleeping. But Cecil perks up as Carlos approaches from behind, and looks over his shoulder (while Khoshekh, beside him, gazes fixedly at the screen) with a smile. "You're up!"

"I'm up," agrees Carlos. "Having fun?"

"Oh, yes. This is so —"

The TV lets out a series of crackling sounds, then a sphere of purple-white light appears in one of the characters' hands. It swells with a roar like wind in a tunnel, eclipsing everything else on the screen, before the image fades back in: three humanoids and one pile of ash.

VICTORY! announces the game.

Quentin and Omero both stare. "How did you do that?" demands Quentin. "Some kind of cheat code? What did you hit?"

"I don't know!" exclaims Cecil. "It's your game! I was just pressing buttons. What do we do next?"

"Get to a save point," says Omero. "Don't want to fight that thing again if you don't know how to do that twice."

Carlos leans on the back of the couch and frowns at the screen, watching the characters jog down a murky corridor full of pipes and fluorescents. The rendering is jerky and boxy, but it has enough resolution to see that something is missing. "Where are their daemons?"

"On a separate mission," says Omero. His glossy starling daemon nods. "In the Resident Portal Effect universe, the military has a top-secret way of extending a person's range, so all their high-level spies can go miles away from their daemons. Like witches." He frowns. "Or Cecil."

"Mom was a witch," says Cecil casually. Not actually lying, just giving a wink and a nudge in the direction of genetics, and letting people imagine the connection on their own.

"That explains that," says Quentin.

Omero, who is both a biology grad student and a former member of the military, doesn't say anything. Carlos wonders what he knows — or can reasonably deduce from the evidence he has.

Quentin hits a couple of buttons (SAVED! reports the game). "Say, about witches...maybe that's why you have problems with your memory? A witch did it? Maybe a witch who didn't like your mother?"

Cecil grimaces. "Unlikely." He doesn't elaborate.

Seems like a good time to change the subject. "I don't want to interrupt your game," says Carlos, rubbing Cecil's shoulders and adoring the way Cecil relaxes into it, "but would you like breakfast?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Having no luck with the basalt fortress, Dana moves in the direction she arbitrarily designated south, and finds a craggy cavern in the side of the mountain range. With her phone switched into flashlight mode (this never-dying-battery thing is so convenient, Dana doesn't know why she's never tried it before!), she ventures in.

The first time the tunnel splits, she backtracks hard. Being stuck in a geographical loop above-ground is bad enough; she isn't going to let herself get stuck in a loop of her own poor planning in the center of a mountain.

Not far from the cavern's entrance, the remains of an old firepit lie on a shelf of rock. Dana gathers up some charcoal and tries the caves again, this time drawing an arrow on the wall when she reaches the fork, and another one every twenty steps to leave a trail she can retrace.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos makes scrambled eggs. Cecil seasons them with a personal mix of herbs, including some of the sage and crowberry left over from last night's efforts. Their bare feet rest together under the table, next to where Khoshekh is wrapped around Isaña. It's been a rough twenty-four hours, but it looks like Cecil is going to be okay.

The eggs turn out to be kind of disgusting, but honestly Carlos could be eating sand and he'd still appreciate this moment, so he sucks it up and eats.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (future).

"Hello, listeners. We have some news that will affect your morning commute, so let's dive right into it. WALK signals across the whole of Night Vale are malfunctioning...."

Dana jumps. A moment ago she was marking an arrow on a granite wall, then she turned slightly to the left, and suddenly she's looking at the inside of the NVCR booth.

She turns carefully, trying to stay here as long as possible. There's Cecil at the microphone, her Cecil, with the right voice and the right hair and the right language and everything! He looks slightly older than she remembers from the last time they were in the same world, with more streaks of white in his glossy black hair. And while the broadcasting equipment is the same, a few things have been replaced: the chair is much nicer, and the coffee cup on his desk is a new one, marked with a logo Dana doesn't recognize.

Can it be? Is this, at long last, her relative present?

"Citizens are standing by the side of the road," reports Cecil, "unsure of whether they are allowed —"

"Cecil!" exclaims Dana, waving a hand in front of his face. "Cecil, it's Dana! Can you hear me?"

No response. Not only that, but Cecil is already starting to fade!

Dana sighs. "This is making it very difficult to communicate."

It's quiet again — so very quiet, except for Dana's own voice — but it occurs to her that the rest of the scene is not fading. Cecil is translucent, a soundless afterimage of himself, and the studio and its equipment are not. Whatever tangent of dimensionality adjacent to Cecil's that Dana has shifted into, the broadcasting rig has shifted here with her.

"Can anyone hear me after all?" asks Dana — and the light on the sound board flickers, not in response to Cecil's unheard voice, but to hers.

Is she...on-air?

"I'll keep talking, just in case," says Dana out loud. She's never addressed the whole town like this, isn't sure how to do it, so she sits on the dimension-straddling desk next to the sound board and focuses on her half-seen former boss. "Cecil? I have been in this desert for months now. Years, maybe...."

She tells him about the blinking light up on the clouded mountain, on the far side of a vast desert plain. She talks about the old oak door she found, that nobody would open even when she knocked. She explains the geographical loop, the way she ended up back at the abandoned basalt fortress, here in the mountain range on the near side of the vast plain. She describes the cavern in the mountains, and how she ventured inside, to find tunnels sloping down.

"Hopefully I will know something when I am down there that I did not know when I was up here," she says, while the sound board LED glitters at her speech: a miniature blinking light of her very own. "Depth must equal knowledge. It must! Because nothing else has."

And with that, she's covered everything. Which means it must be time for her to go back and keep exploring.

Before turning her head in the way she knows will move her back to the desert, Dana tries to put her hand on Cecil's arm. Or at least, on the patch of air in this dimension that overlaps with the arm in Cecil's. "I will see you again, perhaps," she says. "From inside the mountains, which I wanted to think were not real...but which I now know, without a doubt, are. Just me, always me, but from further down."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

The truck with the team's first shipment of new equipment is backing into the driveway.

It's a beautiful sight. Carlos hadn't realized until now just how worried he was that the deliveries would get stuck in the warped space around Night Vale, and never make it through at all.

His teammates pull together to help unload the boxes, and check one-by-one to make sure they all contain what they're supposed to contain. Sure enough, absolutely nothing has turned into lettuce or pterodactyls or the rusted future wreckage of itself along the journey. There's a moment of confusion when Carlos signs for the packages — it's still the 18th in Night Vale, and the driver was under the impression he had left on the 19th — but it's all settled in the end.

The largest of the equipment gets hauled into the room on the first floor that used to be the darkroom. It's been cleared out, the tools and chemicals packed away: it isn't like they have to develop photos with the Asriel emulsion these days, and the electrum lenses aren't photosensitive, so they can be produced on a corner table in the main chapel room. Nirliq is entranced. "I still can't believe we got a laser!"

"We can't do most of our planned experiments until the reflective high-energy anbaron diffractor gets here," points out Quentin.

"Can't do any of mine, least not the ones with bloodstones, 'till we get the substrate manipulators," adds Rayshawn.

Quentin coughs. "Actually, the PLD workstation comes with an oxygen-resistant substrate heater built in. It was in the spec sheet on the website."

"You know what else was in the spec sheet?" adds Nirliq. "The fact that you can do precision substrate heating with the laser. Which we now have. Who wants to help me set it up?"

For all their reticence, Rayshawn and Quentin end up following her. Köhler rounds out their group, while Sherie, Carlos, and Henriette unpack an unrelated set of boxes. Instead of being full of pre-assembly components to build a workstation the size of a large desk, they hold fully-assembled pieces of equipment, each about as big as a microwave:

Professionally-produced, military-grade danger meters.

And even though they're hardly cheap, or easy to build, the team has eight of them. Each half the size of one of their early, non-Strex-brand Rusakov meters: thanks in part to advances in anbarics over the past two years, but mostly thanks to the power of a couple strategically-placed Dirac-Hall lenses. There's a digital readout for the Rusakov concentration, and another for the local rating in Fatality Units, plus a directional gauge — the Gaillard Compass — to point them in the direction of the most fatal thing around. They're all wirelessly enabled.

"Would you look at that?" breathes Henriette, as she and Carlos lift the first one onto a table. "Our baby invention's all grown up."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

The tunnels go very far down.

And at the end of one of them, there is light.

It isn't bright enough to be the sun, and it's too steady to be the flickers of a fire, but at the same time it has too much movement to be from any light bulb Dana is familiar with. It is faint, and golden, and the motion reminds her almost of the way light reflects off the surface of the pool at the rec center, throwing out spurs of illumination that wobble and wave across the ceiling.

Dana remembers Eustathias turning into a dolphin and lancing through the water at that pool. She remembers her brother's daemon becoming a seal, and the four of them blowing up a beach ball and playing catch, or a game somewhat like volleyball with much looser rules.

She misses her daemon. She misses her family.

She walks...and all at once the tunnel before her opens up, becoming a the mouth of a vast cavern big enough to hold the entire rec center inside it, with enough space left over to park a couple of aircraft carriers.

(Not that Dana has any aircraft carriers she needs to park. Or knows anybody else who does. Except maybe Marcus Vansten.)

The walls of the cavern vault upward above her for several stories, and pitch down some unknown distance from the rock on which she stands. The faint gold light is coming from down. Dana only has a narrow ledge to work with, here; she unstraps her pack and leaves it at the mouth of the tunnel, then inches forward, trying to figure out what lies below.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

With a danger meter and a couple of electrum spyglasses packed in the back of the van, Sherie and Henriette take a drive out toward Josie's place. They don't want to plant a meter in the house itself — even with the windows boarded up and the police always watching, it's too vulnerable to a break-in — but hopefully someone in the area, maybe the proprietor of the car lot, will be able to host it.

Other meters are set to be stashed near the dog park that they don't acknowledge or speak about, the house that doesn't exist, the taco place that is inexplicably run by hooded spectres, and, of course, the radio station. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of array they're trying to reconstruct, but it's a start.

Henriette has a headache, so she gets Sherie to drive, letting Sherie's mongoose daemon have the passenger seat while she chills out in back with her marmot's head in her lap. Lucky for her, the older portal specialist is in a mood to keep up most of the conversation. "Have I told you my theory about why it's only bloodstones we're interested in? That is, why only dark green chalcedony with inclusions of red has these properties, and not any other color combination?"

"Nope," says Henriette. "Shoot."

"I think this world got a silica deposit from another one at some point...."

"Silica?"

"Silicon dioxide — this was all in the Spanish textbook, it took about half an hour to translate — bloodstone is heliotrope, right? Which is a form of chalcedony. The red spots can be iron oxide or jasper, and in ours they're jasper, which is another form of chalcedony. Which is, in turn, a mix of the minerals quartz and moganite, which are both different crystallizations of silica."

So what Henriette is getting from this is that it's all silica, just under about ten different names. (Also, that they really should have hired a geologist. Rayshawn, the archaeologist, knows a fair amount about how the earth moves, but only to the extent that it affects the things he actually studies.) "Go on."

"All right. This deposit, it's been affected by another world's physics and chemistry — maybe even treated by its local version of witch-lore. Then it ends up here. It isn't heliotrope yet, though — it's just the jasper. Later, something in this world happens, maybe an earthquake, to break the deposit up. And the dark green chalcedony from our world forms around the fragments."

"Explains a lot," mutters Henriette. Some of the readings they've gotten from the bloodstones aren't consistent with local rock or with otherworldly artifacts, but would make perfect sense if the mineral combination was a mix of both. "How come I didn't think of that?"

"It didn't click with me either, until Rayshawn explained the geology," says Sherie reassuringly, braking for a purple light. "Could also be that some of the quartz is from this world and the moganite from another. Or vice versa. Either way, there's probably a lot of heliotrope around the world that doesn't have any special properties at all — it's not the color that's important, it's the fact that it comes from a specific quarry site."

"Mmhmm."

"Keith told me there have been problems with people selling cheap 'knockoff' bloodstones, that don't come out with the same effects if you use them in a bloodstone circle. I just bet you they're minerally identical to the City-Council-certified ones, and it would take instruments like ours to detect the difference." The traffic light flashes a pattern of yellow and green that indicates left turns are allowed, and the van pulls forward again. "If we could buy a set, run some tests...are they actually illegal to buy, or is it just frowned upon?"

Henriette shrugs. "Never checked. Sure we can get some, though. Research purposes."

There's a long pause, then Sherie says, "Honey, I don't mean to pry, but are you all right? With that...headache, and all?"

"I...may be a tiny bit hung over," allows Henriette. She plucks at her electrum bracelet, the jewels luminous in their silver settings. Ever since finding out it has healing properties, she's been wearing it everywhere. "Coming down fast, though. Nothing to worry about."

Judging by how careful Sherie's reply is, she isn't as convinced as Henriette wants her to be. "Well, that's good. But next time you go out for a night on the town, invite me, all right? Lord knows there's enough to drink about around here."

She has no idea.

None of the new crowd do. They only know Cecil as Carlos's adorable boyfriend with the miraculous alethiometer-reading gift, a helpful figure like one of the exposition-delivering sylphs from the old Lyra-and-Pan cartoons (complete with the finest of 1970's fashion). They don't realize how mysterious, powerful, and casually-terrifying he can be. They're sorry and sympathetic to hear that he got a family member wiped from his memory, and possibly from existence, but they don't appreciate how monumental it is that he can't do anything about it.

Henriette doesn't try to explain any of this to Sherie. She also doesn't admit to drinking at home; it's not like Sherie, whose apartment is in a different neighborhood from the rest of the team, will know the difference. All she says is, "Will do. And hey, I mean it, don't worry. I ever get screwed-up enough to start missing hormones, that's when you know something's wrong for real."

"Hormones?" echoes Sherie. "You mean birth control?"

Henriette trades a dry look with her daemon. Clotère starts snickering first.

"Oh!" exclaims Sherie. "Oh, god, sorry, I forgot that you — that you were —" She stumbles, obviously not sure what the current non-offensive term is.

"— actually born with a same-sex daemon?" suggests Henriette. "No sweat. 'S a compliment."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana hopes to find answers, bounded by the stone walls of this dimly-lit gorge. She hopes to find anything.

Here is what she finds:

Dust, mostly.

The vast pit below her is deep, maybe forty feet, and at least ten of those feet are filled with a soft swirling slush of golden particles like dust motes in the sun. Dana recognizes them from the images of Rusakov particles in her physics textbook. She had always thought you needed special instruments to see them, but apparently when you have a critical mass in one place, the rules change.

As she scoots forward on her stomach and leans further over the rocky edge, a fine golden trail rises up from the rippling surface and drifts toward her. It disperses into invisibility before it can reach her height, but she is certain that with the right instruments she could see it reaching her.

How did it all get here? Even if this cavern was carved with purpose by intelligent beings, even if it once had a whole settlement across its floor, it can't have involved more consciousness than the basalt fortress outside, or the wrecked war machines down on the plain. Was it drawn here some other way? And then, perhaps, with the world outside abandoned, there was no consciousness left to draw it back out.

The flow is stunningly beautiful. Dana can't look away.

She edges toward it a few inches more, her head and shoulders out over the edge now, hands braced on jutting spurs of stone a little lower than her level.

Her hand slips.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos and Omero bring a danger meter to the NVCR studio. It's the first time Carlos has been there under the new management, and while he doesn't think they'll try anything too drastic, he'll feel safer in the company of a loaded gun and someone who knows how to use it.

They bring takeout, too. (Arby's.) Cecil ushers them into his office at the beginning of his lunch half-hour, and takes a roast beef combo in exchange for a small Tupperware container full of squished Strex bugs. Omero does some preliminary poking at them while Carlos sets the danger meter on the floor behind Cecil's desk and demonstrates how the various settings and switches work.

"It has an alarm you can set to go off if certain conditions are met. For now I've put the whole thing to silent, so none of your...co-workers...will ever have cause to investigate the thing in your office that's beeping," he says. "Can you read the LCD displays without Khoshekh?"

Cecil shakes his head. "I can see the labels next to them, though. They're printed a little bit raised. What does 'cps' mean?"

"Counts per second. It's the unit we measure the Rusakov concentration in." Carlos answers a few more questions, makes Cecil promise to call if he thinks of any others, then says, "While I've got you here...I've been thinking."

"You have?" asks Cecil, in that way he has that makes it sound like whatever he just heard is a fascinating, news-worthy event.

Carlos blushes. "Part of being an experimental theologian," he says self-consciously. "It's about something on that tape."

Cecil sits up straighter. Carlos waits for a nod to continue — after all, Cecil might not want to talk about it at all, let alone in front of company (though when they're using Spanish, Omero is unlikely to follow much of it). After a moment Cecil says, "Go on."

His elbow is leaning on the desk, hand hanging over the edge. Carlos rests his own hand over Cecil's. "The younger you said...your brother was howling over breakfast, right? Is there a common reason people would do that around here? Could he have been working on his Howling Badge for Boy Scouts, or anything like that?"

Cecil shrugs. "Nothing I can think of. Everyone I know finished their Howling Badge when they were, like, eight, so it probably wasn't that."

It gets Carlos's attention in a hurry. "So you remember that he was older than eight?"

"I — what?" Cecil's brow furrows. "I didn't...I don't know why I said that. Was there anything about age on the tape?"

"Not that I remember."

For a moment they just gaze at each other, absorbing the implications. Feeling the spark of hope. Maybe this scrap of knowledge would have drifted up on its own, or maybe all Cecil's chanting and herb-mixing was necessary to knock it loose, but either way, he still has it. His brother isn't entirely lost.

At last Cecil coughs and waves for Carlos to keep going. "You were saying?"

"Well, I was remembering the day I came in and Intern Vithya was having all that trouble, with her second sight awakening," says Carlos. On the carpet, Isaña leans against his ankle. "You said something about her going through an unmitigated-screaming stage...?"

Cecil's clouded lavender eyes widen. "And at fifteen I might not have had the fine grasp of the differences between screaming and howling that I do today."

"Um, yes." Carlos had not realized that was a concern, so he's glad to have it cleared up. "And if it was right afterward that he disappeared, maybe that means that instead of something happening to him, he saw something that made him realize it was important to leave."

Maybe — and Carlos knows that foresight is not like having an advance copy of a book, that you don't get every detail, and you can't even choose what to look at — but in the best-case scenario, maybe Cecil's brother will be able to see how to come back, and how to put Cecil's memories back together. Maybe he already knows how, and is just waiting for the time to be right.

Alternately, maybe the next thing that happened to Vithya could have happened to Cecil's brother too. Carlos doesn't mention that hypothesis out loud, though. Even if Strex isn't listening in on this conversation, the Sheriff's secret police still are.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana is balanced rather than falling, but the difference between the two is slim.

All the blood is rushing to her head. Her arms ache from being braced on unstable rock. She does not dare to breathe too hard, afraid that the motion will send her sliding.

Eustathias would be able to turn into something big and strong, and pull her back. Eustathias could have turned into a bird and gone soaring down into the golden lake of Dust in the first place, so she didn't have to take the risk. Dana misses her daemon more than ever.

At least, if she dies, her last sight will be of something beautiful....

No sooner has she thought this than the faint glow of the Rusakov particles is eclipsed, the entire cavern illuminated with a bright black light.

"Dana!" exclaims a familiar voice. "Don't move. I'm going to pick you up. Don't struggle, okay?"

The next thing Dana knows, strong glowing arms are hooking under her shoulders. Grams of dirt and chips of rock skitter downward around her as she is lifted, tumbling down and out of sight.

She does not struggle. She is carried a few steps backward into the tunnel from which she emerged, and laid to rest between a couple of rough, banded stalagmites.

At last she allows herself to gasp for air.

The angel who came to her rescue pauses across from her, dimming the brilliant black light to leave a barely-visible silhouette in the air. (There's something odd about the figure, but without seeing it clearly Dana can't put her finger on it.) "Stay right here," she orders, in a voice with a Brytannian accent. "I'll just be a minute."

Off she soars, diving over the edge of the pit.

When the angel returns, she is totally visible. A flight through the lake of Dust has left her softly glowing all over, like a sculpture of gold-tinted glass. Now Dana can see what makes her unusual: instead of the feathered bird-wings sported by most of the angels Dana has not seen because they do not exist, this one has a pair of translucent, veined insect-wings, with a second, hardened pair above them. The outer pair folds down like a sheath, clicking shut to keep the inner wings protected when not in flight.

Aside from that, she seems like an average angel. Humanoid. Wearing no clothes. Perhaps shorter than the average, no more than eight, eight and a half feet tall. And her face....

Dana gasps. "Vithya?"

"Yeah," says Vithya-the-angel, grinning. "Well, sort of. It's more Erika now, right? But also Vithya, a bit."

"What happened to you? How did you get here? Is it okay if I still call you Vithya?"

Vithya counts off on her strangely-elongated fingers. "One: turned into an angel, obviously. Two: special angel powers, what else? Someone said you needed a rescue, and I said, hey, I know that girl, can I have a go? Three: fine by me, but don't let Erika hear you doing it, yeah?"

"I will keep it in mind." Dana brushes dirt off her shirt and shorts, wincing as she finds a scrape on her upper arm. She hadn't even noticed it before, but when her fingers smear blood across her skin it's like the nerves all wake up at once. "Ow! Can you help me get a bandage on this?"

It turns out Vithya left Night Vale before the WALK signs malfunctioned, so Dana recaps her explorations once more, while Vithya sprays antiseptic on her arm and wipes it down before sticking a long bandage over the cut. In return, Vithya explains what she knows about this cavern. During the War ("don't know much about that, except that it's got a capital W"), someone set off a bomb so powerful it split fissures in the very structure of the worlds. Inside this mountain, a massive ravine was blown open, going straight into the Void itself. Rusakov particles drained into it in massive quantities, and when the angels finally sealed it this world had been abandoned, leaving nothing outside to draw the remaining Dust back from where it had pooled.

"Don't think any of us know what to do with it, to be honest," says Vithya, nodding to the pit. "Maybe you'll come up with somethin'? What were you in here for, anyway?"

"Looking for answers." Dana hugs her knees, while Vithya sits cross-legged beside her. "Which I suppose I have found. And looking for my daemon, which I have not."

"Well, you've not got much chance of that in here. This place is a dead end, no openings to other worlds left. Our lot saw to that a long time ago."

"Then I suppose I must start walking again." Dana looks curiously at the angel, whose daemon settled as a firefly back in the eighth grade. Here, there is no firefly to be seen. "Is your daemon all right? For whatever your personal definition of all right happens to be. When you ascended, did it alter your range, or did something else happen to him?"

"Somethin' else," says Vithya self-consciously. "Most of the angels that used to be conscious beings are glorified ghosts, when you get right down to it. They die, daemon vanishes, ghost starts on their scheduled detour through the world of the dead, but, whoops, someone catches it out before it gets there. But me...well, I didn't exactly die, so he hadn't disappeared when it happened. So instead, we more sort of...soul-merged."

"So the two of you are both here, in one body!" exclaims Dana. "And that's why you have your face, but his wings?"

Vithya grins and snaps her insect-wings open again. "Yeah. You like 'em?"

Picking up herself and her backpack, in that order, Dana says, "They're absolutely gorgeous."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (future).

Again, Dana finds herself in Cecil's booth. He looks the same as her last appearance, and is wearing the same clothes. It seems very likely that, in this world, only a few minutes have passed.

Again, the light on the sound board reacts to her voice.

Dana talks, but this time, she is more circumspect. Vithya has warned her that there are certain things she cannot give away, not on an unsecured broadcast, not to everyone in Night Vale who might be listening. There are people in Night Vale who cannot be allowed to hear some of the things she knows.

So she does not talk about angels, or Dust with a capital D, or the War with a capital W. Instead she talks about the weather, and dust and dirt and debris and other things with lower-case Ds, and about the hand-carved table she remembers at her grandfather's house. She talks about her family. She talks about the blinking light, still visible in the distance when she and Vithya emerged out onto the side of the mountain range.

She looks at the orange triangle stamped on Cecil's coffee cup, and talks about how she is afraid...no, concerned...no, afraid that she will not make it back here again.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

"Cecil!" exclaims an ear-splittingly sunny voice. "You have visitors?"

Cecil and Carlos both jump, while Omero whips the container of bugs behind his back. And just in time. The office has been entered by a blonde in a dark suit and a bright-yellow collared blouse, with a sun-shaped pin on her lapel and a mallard duck daemon trotting along next to her polished three-inch heels.

"Hello, Lauren," says Cecil, in a strained imitation of friendliness. "You remember, of course, that this is my scheduled lunch break."

The blonde smiles. Her teeth are unnaturally sharp. "Of course! And the guests in the building are properly signed-in, I'm sure?"

"Naturally," says Carlos, holding up his visitor pass. In English, he adds to Omero, "She just needs to see your badge."

"Delightful," says Lauren. "And...why, you must be Carlos the Experimental Theologian! You look just like Cecil described you. Delicate, dark skin...perfect hair with the distinguished touch of grey...teeth like a military cemetery."

Carlos cannot imagine Cecil telling Lauren anything about the people he loves. And while he used to gush about Carlos on the radio all the time, he saves it for their in-person encounters now that they're actually dating. Either Strex has been prying information out of other people in town, or they're mining Cecil's past broadcasts for details they can use.

"His beauty and grace are very distinctive," agrees Cecil. "Hard to imagine anyone you could mistake for him! Except perhaps that double who appeared during the Sandstorm earlier this year. The doubles were all physically identical to the originals, right, Carlos?"

"That's right," says Carlos, not sure where he's going with this.

"But not mentally identical, isn't that true?"

"Well, yes. They were sort of psychotic. Which our original team members were...mostly...not."

"Of course! Now I remember. Your double even tried to murder you!...What happened to him after that?"

Ah. Now Carlos understands. "One of my teammates shot to kill, obviously. Straight through the lungs! Looking out for each other like that is an important part of being a team."

"Gosh, what an exciting story," says Lauren, leaning on the door handle and resting her other hand on her hip in an affected aw-shucks pose. "Maybe you could try to get some of that cooperative spirit to rub off on your boyfriend! Cecil has so much talent, but he just isn't a team player sometimes. Well, I'll let you get back to lunch. Which is over in three minutes. Keep an eye on the clock!"

With that, she swishes out. Her collar is low in the back and her hair is gathered into a ponytail, with the dark lines of a bar code visible underneath.

Carlos opens his mouth to say something, but Cecil shushes him and hurries over to the door. He checks the underside of the handle, sighs, and says in English, "I think, in the name of not risking my productivity, you two should be on your way. It was lovely to see you again, Omero, and of course you too, Carlos."

Omero keeps an eye on Carlos, following his lead in deciding when to get up, then stands at the door with military stiffness while Cecil and Carlos share a quick goodbye kiss. He keeps all comments to himself until they get out to the coupe, at which point he says, "That woman seemed very...disciplined."

"Probably the kindest possible way to put it."

"Do we treat her as a civilian? Or is she some kind of enemy combatant?"

Carlos doesn't know the fine points of military enemy designations. All he knows is that Lauren Mallard was the one who ordered Cecil's bar-coding, and if Cecil knew the right buttons to press, she would probably be a pixelated pile of ash by now. "We treat her as dangerous and untrustworthy, and not somebody you ever approach unarmed."

Notes:

"Vithya" appears to be a variation on vidya/vidhya, a Sanskrit name meaning "knowledge" (or, incidentally, "science"). So hey, Dana's search for knowledge in the depths seems to have worked out.

Jeffrey Cranor tweets about his daemon. I like it. (Did someone inspire it by asking about daemons at SDCC? And speaking of fandom gatherings, has anyone ever cosplayed as Carlos-and-Isaña? Because someone should totally do that thing. You would make my week.)

Chapter 9: Catacombs

Summary:

Dana does some exploring with Vithya, then, when left alone once more, projects herself into an unfamiliar place with a disconcerting amount of blood. Meanwhile, Sherie's daughter gets invited to join the Girl Scouts, prompting Carlos and his other teammates to do a whole lot of praying.

Content note for blood and injuries in this one.

Night Vale.

The rendering on the screen is blocky and pixelated, but as long as you can tell which parts are the bloodstones and which parts are the fabric of the universe vibrating around them, it's good enough for Sherie's purposes. "And this is why, geometrically and theologically speaking, a properly-constructed bloodstone circle has thirteen stones."

"It's so elegant," breathes Carlos. He's got that dazzled expression on his face that he reserves for cool theological breakthroughs, and/or talking to Cecil. "It's like...like looking at a molecule, where you can see exactly why each atom has to sit where it does for the bonds to be stable."

"And these distortions probably help channel the Rusakov particles," adds Henriette. "I bet that's what makes it so easy to draw on them while you're in one."

"What I want to know is how they would react to a portal," says Sherie. "Any chance we can get our hands on one of those on-demand around here?"

"Maybe pick it up at the craft store," adds her mongoose daemon from her lap. "Between the dried frog parts and the sewing supplies."

Carlos grimaces. "There are people around here who can open portals, yes. And some of them might even be willing to help us. But we can't risk it. Not now that Josie's friends aren't around to make sure anything we open gets closed afterward."

"Right. The legacy of Will Parry." Sherie shakes her head. "I still can't believe that boy was real. And my son's age, too."

"Nothing changes your expectations of teenagers like having a teenager," says Henriette dryly.

"You got that right. At least mine are handling this place all right by now. Oh! Did I tell you, Susannah got her viridian envelope? She's officially invited to join the Girl Scouts!"

Both Henriette and Carlos tense.

Sherie frowns. "Is something wrong?"

"Best-case scenario, no," says Henriette, getting up. "Excuse me, I suddenly feel the need to go pray in our new backup bloodstone circle."

"On a completely unrelated note," adds Carlos, "have you been down to the gun range lately? Because I was going to stop by this afternoon to get some practice in, and I'd be happy to take you along."

"Now, hang on just a minute," says Sherie. Henriette is already out the door, so she turns her ire on Carlos. "If there's a reason I should be worried, I need you to give it to me straight. This is my daughter we're talking about, here. And her entrance ceremony is today after school."

Carlos sighs, running a hand through his hair. "There are lots of reasons to be worried. Comes with the territory. But if the ceremony is already scheduled, there's nothing you can do to stop it, so the most effective strategy is to try to relax and focus on the things you can do. Like practicing your aim."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

With Vithya's help, Dana finally makes it inside the basalt fortress.

The interior looks like it's been looted. Holes are punched in most of the walls, revealing the gaps where pipes must have been. Only large pieces of furniture are left, and only things made of wood, sometimes with deep gouges where some kind of inlay was ripped out. No cloth remains, no metal, nothing either useful or decorative that would have been small enough to carry in a bag over your shoulder. By the soft glow of Vithya, Dana can see the marks where light fixtures were torn off the walls.

"But nothing seems to be rotten or moldy," observes Dana, pulling open the drawers of a battered desk by the holes left where their handles used to be. "I suppose any mold that tried to settle here will have packed its bags and moved to a wetter climate. Very little dust up here, too. The kind with a lowercase d, that is."

"Makes sense," says Vithya. "Lowercase dust, that's mostly skin cells, innit? Not a lot of people with skin 'round here these days."

There's a strange fixture on the wall behind the desk. Dana gets down on her knees to see, then crawls under for a closer look. "Could this be an outlet? An anbaric outlet, designed for a plug with a foreign shape?"

"Lemme have a look."

Dana scoots back out and lets Vithya takes her place. The angel's double set of insect-wings are half-spread, and Dana tries not to get distracted by how she is very naked under the veined film, and awfully attractive once you adjust for the eerie distortions caused by being eight feet tall but still no broader than Dana is.

"Think it might be, yeah," reports Vithya. "No wire left in it, though. Makes sense. Someone coming in here to scavenge for valuables would've stripped the copper first chance they got."

In trying to find a way to explore the other floors, they come to a shaft that looks like it might have once held an elevator, long disabled. Dana decides to take the stairs.

They ascend one set of spiral staircases until they reach the parapets, where the clouds look very close to their height, though the top of the Clouded Mountain on the far horizon is still higher. They descend a different set until they reach the lowest levels, where no windows open on the sunlight, where everything is dark and dripping and Vithya's glow doesn't reach all the corners.

Dana is pushing open a heavy metal door when Vithya flickers. "I have to go."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

At the range, Carlos loans Sherie a hair tie to hold her mass of fluffy brown hair back from her face, and helps her find safety goggles that fit over her glasses. He's just picking out earmuffs in Isaña's size when an unfamiliar voice exclaims, "Carlos? Carlos Perfecto?"

It's a long-haired man with a kangaroo-rat daemon, one that Carlos thinks he's seen around town, but can't place off the top of his head. "That's me. Sorry, you are...?"

"Tristan Cortez. Board president, Night Vale Green Market Co-op," says the man, offering a hand to shake. "Or should I say, Night Vale Green Market Incorporated, a subsidiary of Strexcorp Synernists Inc. Say, is it true what I've been hearing? Did you open the doors for them to make the transition into our little town?"

Carlos can't deny it. "Not willingly. Not knowingly. But...yes."

Tristan clasps his hand. "Well, sir, I can't thank you enough!"

Carlos blinks. That should have sounded sarcastic, but it didn't.

"The Co-op has been really struggling this past year. Thanks to Strex, we're on solid financial footing again! And they've already made some very promising reconstructions to our business model. Discontinuing the unproductive 'fresh fruit and vegetable sales' division, expanding our espionage surfaces, and best of all, I don't have to handle customer satisfaction surveys any more! They have a whole separate division that does that! You have no idea how much I appreciate it."

"Um," says Carlos. "You're...welcome?"

Tristan's wearing a shirt with a high collar, and if his hair was tied back while shooting it's been taken down now, so Carlos can't see if there's a bar code on his neck as he leaves.

"I don't think I followed all that," says Sherie apologetically, in English. "Were you talking about a farmers' market, or some kind of spy program?"

"The farmers' market is a spy program," sighs Carlos, switching languages to match. "Most community organizations are. I take it you haven't been called up for any operations with the PTA yet? Let's just hope the secret police aren't still outsourcing surveillance projects to the former Co-op now that they've been taken over."

"Of course not," says another voice, this one English with a strong Spanish accent, and partly muffled by the ceiling tiles. "What kind of operation do you take us for?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"Is it dangerous?" asks Dana, stepping back from the door. "We can choose what doors we go through. It doesn't have to be this one."

"It's not the door. I really do have to leave. Important angel business, yeah? Look, I'll give you a ride upstairs before I take off. I'm not leavin' you down 'ere."

Dana follows Vithya back to the stairs, nearly jogging to keep up with the angel's long strides. "I'm sorry," she says. "If I had known you would be leaving so soon, I would have explored less...and talked with you more."

She thought she had gotten used to being alone. No, not alone...lonely. But now that she's had a reprieve, she isn't certain how easily she can go back.

"Hey, that's all right," says Vithya. "You've got your job to do, I've got mine. I'll come back 'round if I can, all right? Here, let me pick you up."

She gets one long arm under Dana's knees and another behind her back, and scoops her into a princess carry.

Dana's backpack is up at the entrance, which is nice because it makes her less to carry, but she wishes she had brought the flashlight. Vithya's flesh, while surprisingly soft and warm where Dana's hand rests on her collarbones, is more translucent than before. It isn't just a subjective effect caused by the atmosphere. She's dimming.

"Can you use the effect with the bright blackness again?" asks Dana, as Vithya flits up the spiral stairs. "I'm just...concerned...that you'll bump into something. Or that you will bump me into something."

"Used that all up for the moment, sorry," says Vithya with a shrug.

"Of course." Dana tries to sound polite about it, but draws her knees up tighter and leans close against Vithya's chest. The spiral is so dense. It's making her dizzy.

Vithya's voice is soft, close to her ear. "You really don't like this, do you?"

"You're in a hurry. I appreciate that."

The angel sighs. "I do have one more light trick in my arsenal. But you've got to promise not to laugh, understand?"

Dana nods.

A brilliant golden light swells from somewhere below her, lighting up the stairwell for a dozen floors above. When they reach the ground floor and Vithya soars out into the hall, it glows through the entire corridor.

Although Dana does not laugh, she has to smile. Of course. Vithya is her entire self, the human and the firefly daemon sharing a single form. Which makes it beautiful, heartwarming, and deeply symbolic that her butt lights up.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The entrance ceremony for newly-inducted Girl Scouts is in Mission Grove Park. Sherie says they're all invited, so Carlos puts on his nicest chapel coat and comes along. (As does Perle, recording equipment in tow.) Considering how the last Scout-related ceremony he attended went down, he also puts on a shoulder holster, borrows one of the Li Huas' guns, and packs an electrum spyglass and a danger meter.

The setup in a clear area of the park is familiar: no rain tent this time, but there's the usual temporarily-constructed podium with a bloodstone circle at the side, a dozen rows of folding chairs, and a couple of tables with snacks and plastic dinnerware. Carlos spots a familiar tray of scones, though he doesn't see Steve Carlsberg offhand. Probably somewhere in the crowd.

Sherie's husband, Sam, brought lemon squares. In between double-checking the local concentration of fatality units, Carlos tries one. Definitely better than the scones.

He's lucky he gets to them early, because only a few minutes later comes a massive downdraft from the beating of mighty wings, and by the time Hiram McDaniels has landed at the back of the seats, all the food is covered in a fine layer of dirt and grass clippings. "Pleasure to be here," drawls Hiram's gold head. "I believe that children are our future, and that's why supporting the youth organizations of the Night Vale community is very important to me as your future mayor."

"I was here first," mutters a petulant voice from behind Carlos's left ear. He can't quite see them, but he recognizes the Faceless Old Woman who lives in his home, probably carrying her eyeless salamander daemon. "And I have watched over every single one of these girls as they sleep. If supportiveness is a quality of mayors, I think we can all agree who is more mayoral."

Privately, Carlos thinks Pamela Winchell is more of a mayor than both of them put together. He doesn't get into it, though, just makes his way over to Sherie and Sam.

The rows of chairs are divided, two and two, humans and daemons. He sets Isaña down on the chair directly behind him, next to Sam's big shaggy sheepdog, and says hello. (Their twelve-year-old, Seth, is sitting between his parents with a book open in his lap, and his own daemon as a small snake braceleted around his wrist. Perle and her leopard gecko are still over with Hiram.)

They make small talk — Carlos learns that Sam is a freelance coder and web designer, Sam learns that Carlos renders scatter plot matrices as a hobby in his free time — until something Sam says catches Sherie's attention. "Honey? Did you just say you didn't drive Su over here?"

"No, I just picked up Seth. The invitation implied she was here already."

"Well, I didn't bring her. Have you seen her? I haven't."

An awkward pause, while they all process the idea that Susannah might not have made it to her own induction ceremony.

"This might be normal," says Carlos hopefully. "The Scouts have their own particular ways of doing things. I'll go ask Steve."

Turns out Steve has settled down at the edge of the row in front of them...and is fervently arguing with his seatmate, a woman Carlos remembers from PTA meetings. The takeover of the water systems, he insists, is obviously the first step toward inducing mind control in the citizens, and with that in mind, how can she justify hiring a Strexcorp plumber?

Renée, ten years old and shooting up like a weed, is in the seat next to her father, suited up in her own Girl Scout vest. She's picking bits of grass off a slice of chocolate cake, while her daemon perches on the back of her head in the form of a large, jeweled butterfly.

"Hi," says Carlos, once he can get a word in edgewise. "Can I ask a quick question? Where are the girls who are getting inducted today? And if my colleague has no idea how her daughter is getting here, is that a bad thing?"

"Tell your colleague not to worry," Steve assures him. "The Troop Leaders will have made sure they all got to the entrance of the catacombs! From there, ideally, they make it here on their own."

"And non-ideally...a Troop Leader picks them up?" prompts Carlos.

"Is that how they do it in the US?" asks Steve, with genuine interest. "Huh. I guess every country holds its Girl Scouts to different standards."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Evening sunlight on the mountainside. The twilight makes Vithya more visible than she would be in full day. She sets Dana down next to the untouched backpack; the caress of her hand lingers on Dana's shoulders.

"You'll probably be fine," she says. "It's just until your daemon gets here, right? And that'll be soon, I bet. Can't say for certain, I only had second-sight for about a week as a human before it got replaced with angel-sight — which is bloody brilliant, I'm not complaining, just not the same — point is, you keep searching, she keeps searching, you're bound to find each other eventually. Law of the universe, or somethin'."

Dana does not think that is any guarantee, but all she says is, "Thank you."

Vithya's fingertips almost, but not quite, brush against her cheek. "I'll be back if I can, yeah?"

When Dana nods, the angel gives her a crooked smile and steps to the side, slipping out of this universe entirely.

She is alone again.

On the far horizon, under the looming silhouette of the clouded mountain where it hovers in the air, a crack of lightning arcs down to the dry earth.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

All the adults have taken their seats now, except for a couple of Troop Leaders, who stand in wait on the temporary stage. The existing Girl Scouts, meanwhile, are standing in a horseshoe formation around the rows of folding chairs. Of the older girls, Carlos can pick out the ones who have Scouting down to their bones: the ones whose daemons are foxes, rabbits, skunks, blue jays, river frogs, flatwoods salamanders.

A current of nervous tension runs through most of the group. The recent arrivals in particular; Sam is drumming his fingertips against his pant leg, while Sherie keeps unconsciously picking at her nails. Only Seth is still absorbed in his book. Looks like fiction, in Spanish, at the reading level that is mostly words but has an illustration every few pages. His daemon is in his lap now, shaped like a lizard, reading along with him.

Carlos is focusing so hard on deciphering the book that he almost doesn't notice the daemon. Then she shifts position, and the movement is weird and unnatural, and Carlos catches his breath.

She has wings.

But she's definitely a lizard.

She's a dragon. Not a feathered, beaked, dinosaurian dragon like Hiram McDaniels, but a storybook dragon, with a single head and dark green scales and batlike wings. A tiny, pet-sized storybook dragon. What are those called? Wyverns, right? Are those precious wings her forelimbs, or does she have front legs and back, for a total of six?

As Carlos is trying to unobtrusively find an angle where he can figure it out, Seth's daemon notices the attention. In an instant she's an ordinary vampire bat, with mouselike ears and a fluffy stomach and a squashed mammalian face.

Carlos turns his attention to the danger meter at his feet, embarrassed to have been caught staring. It's not the first otherworldly daemon he's seen around here; of course there's Khoshekh, and one of the cashiers at the Raúl's has a three-headed dog, and he's seen Renée's Tovitthae become a jackalope a couple of times. It's unexpected with Seth's daemon because she's an outsider, but he doesn't know how unusual it really is, and he shouldn't make her feel self-conscious about it.

Especially when he has bigger things to worry about. The reading on the danger meter is seven FUs above average, with the needle on the compass pointing directly at the stage.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

In the pitch-black night the wind has picked up, and while Dana cannot hear rain, she can hear the crack and rumble of the distant lightning perfectly well.

She carries her backpack through the knocked-down door of the fortress, uses her flashlight to make her way to a room that does not open on the outside, and spreads her bedroll on the abandoned floor. It is, for the first time, chilly. Dana wraps herself inside the covers and tries to read a series of texts from her brother.

When her phone insists on rendering them entirely as a series of flower emojis, she puts it down and decides, instead, to try being somewhere else for a while.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie has practically chewed all her nails right down to the quick when the girls around them start chanting.

There aren't any words she can pick out, just a low, guttural, nearly-toneless series of moans. The voices from girls of all different ages blend seamlessly into each other, creating the illusion that none of them are stopping for breath. It's nice, in a strange way. Sort of hypnotic.

Just when Sherie thinks she's really getting into it and relaxing, of course, that's when something behind the podium explodes.

Chunks of dirt and grass pelt against an invisible shield, a dome in a radius just large enough to encompass all the chanting Scouts, and slide to the ground. Someone is blasting their way up from beneath the surface of Mission Grove Park. A couple more explosions and they've hollowed out a serious pit, tiny fires licking and dancing in the grass around the edges, the roots of a nearby oak tree half-exposed as they extend down into the depths. A few hard pieces of something white — bone? — are flung up over the edge.

And a largeish blonde third-grader, with bloody scrapes all over her arm, hauls herself up by the roots of the tree. A bird daemon follows her up, turns into a bear cub, smothers the nearest fires, and rolls out of the way so she can throw herself onto the turf.

Applause goes up from the crowd.

Leaning on her daemon and grinning fit to burst, the girl hauls herself toward the applauding Troop Leaders at the podium. Sherie is torn between watching her and gazing intently at the pit. Sure enough, a beetle-shaped daemon buzzes up next, followed by another girl of around the same age with a dozen tight braids and and a slingshot sticking out of her back pocket. People clap harder.

Three more girls drag themselves to the surface in similar ways. All are younger than Susannah, even the one whose daemon is already settled as a non-flying animal, a brown-and-white rat that rides in her hood. If the youngest children could make it through...whatever this is...then surely Su can too. And wouldn't it be the considerate thing to do, to let the little kids go up first?

The existing Scouts are still chanting, a constant hum under the waves of applause.

One by one the new arrivals run or stumble or stagger to the stage, where they do something around the bloodstone circle that Sherie isn't paying attention to. Her own daemon has climbed up onto her shoulder, the better to watch for himself. Where is...?

Up flaps a stunning four-foot-long wing, feathers in layers of tan, white, and black.

Sherie feels a whole lot of things then, in real quick succession. Relief that Susannah and her griffon vulture are on their way up. Astonishment on realizing that Su's daemon isn't just accompanying her, but half-carrying her, helping drag her upward the way his wildlife counterpart might drag a coyote carcass. Shock at the sight of Su's favorite cardigan (black, obviously) torn into strips and wrapped around her torso like a bandage. Horror when she reaches solid ground and crumples onto all fours, swaying, coughing up blood.

Before she can consciously think about it, Sherie is on her feet.

The woman next to her jumps up and grabs her arm, holding her back and scolding her in Spanish. On her other side, Carlos is doing the same to Sam. Unbothered, Sherie throws off her assailant...just as somebody else's eagle daemon darts forward and grabs her mongoose off of her shoulder, dragging him backward and yanking her in tow.

But the winged daemon has a range too, and it keeps him close enough to the ground that Sam's sheepdog can bound onto the chairs and leap from there to tackle him, sending both crashing into the grass. Once her own daemon is free, Sherie bolts for the aisle between the seats. More people are yelling now, but she doesn't have the presence of mind to parse it — even Carlos has forgotten himself and is yelling in Spanish — Sherie doesn't understand, and doesn't care to, her baby needs help. "Su? Su, I'm coming!"

This time, she's the one who gets physically grabbed. A toothed beak large enough to fill a bathtub clamps down on the back of her shirt and chapel coat, so roughly it nearly shreds them, and lifts her into the air.

Her daemon is forced to scamper after her as Hiram's gold head drags her to the back of the seating area, setting her down so sharply it sends a jolt of pain up her ankles to her back. The dragon's violet head curls down in front of her and gasps out something in screechy Spanish. And Perle leaps down beside him — was she riding on his back? — to hiss, in blessedly familiar English, "They're saying you'll make it worse if you get in the way. She has to finish this on her own! Now calm down, you're going to disrupt my recording of this chant!"

"At least tell him to move over and let me see!" demands Sherie.

Perle whispers it to Hiram. The violet and gold heads sink to the grass, curling around Sherie low enough that she can watch the podium over their feathery crests. Hiram's gold head is watching too, but his violet head makes a point of eyeballing her, and she won't be any help to her daughter if she gets snapped in half by a literal five-headed dragon.

Over where Sherie was sitting, a bunch of chairs have been knocked down, and in the middle of the chaos it looks like several humans are holding Sam on the ground. And Seth...he's on his feet, daemon a hawk, not fighting with anyone, just watching.

Su has crawled most of the way to the makeshift stage by now. Her hair is a tangled mess; her makeup has been reduced to a few black smudges around the mouth and eyes.

Sherie wrings her hands. "Come on, baby girl, c'mon, you can do it...."

On her knees in the grass, Susannah leans on the edge of the stage and asks something of the nearest Troop Leader. Maybe the woman says she's come far enough, because Su doesn't drag herself the rest of the way onto the platform, just coughs into her hand and then grabs one of the bloodstones in the circle, smearing actual blood down the surface of the rock.

The crowd goes wild.

Hiram's heads pull away, and Sherie charges down the aisle. She leaps right over the platform, never mind that it makes her back scream in protest, and is at Susannah's side only a few heartbeats before Sam gets there. "Oh, sweetie, you did it! I don't know what you did, but you did it!"

"Hi, Mom," croaks Su. "Got a little impaled down there. No biggie." She coughs again, then grins, showing bloodstained teeth. "I'm a Girl Scout!"

One of the Troop Leaders bends down to greet them. "Está bien," she tells the parents. "Is okay. La ambulancia está llegando. Ambulance, ¿lo entiendes?"

"Si, si, ambulancia," says Sherie, as the other half-dozen newly-inducted Scouts — at some point in here they've all managed to put on their new green vests — gather around Susannah for mutual congratulation. "Hear that, honey? You're going to the hospital, and you'll be fine."

The Troop Leader frowns, beckons to someone at the front of the platform — Carlos obediently hops up to join her — and speaks to him in rapid Spanish. Carlos nods, holds up his electrum pendant ("¿Puede usar esto?" "No, something something something"), then sinks into a crouch and speaks over the other Girl Scouts' heads.

"Once Susannah got to the bloodstone circle, she activated a healing spell," he explains in English. "All injuries she got during the trial are already in the process of self-repairing. Interfering in that process can only slow it down. The ambulance is because, if I understand Troop Leader Craton correctly, you are one wrong move away from seriously pulling a muscle."

"Wha...?"

Su coughs again. Sherie twists back to check on her — and something in her lower back flares with pain, hot and sharp.

Carlos is already pulling off the pendant. "This will take the edge off until it gets here."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Unknown.

The room has the bland white walls, sterile equipment, and soft turquoise tint of an operating theater. Dana has appeared beside one of the walls, lying on a table with surgical equipment, some of which is going right through her.

She sits up. There are only two other people in the room with her: one stripped to the waist and lying on a reclining bed, the other, in a long white coat, standing between him and Dana. The man in white is facing away from her; the only identifying feature she can pick up is some kind of tattoo, black ink against the pale skin on the back of his neck. She can see no daemons around either of them.

She can, however, see a distressing amount of blood. Spots and flecks of it on the sheets. Dry scrapes of it on the floor. A spatter across one of the walls, leaving streaks across a framed motivational poster that says Make Each Day A Productive Day!

"You should clean yourself up before you get here," chides the man in white, stepping aside for a moment to drop a blood-soaked rag in a bucket already full of them. He uses Spanish, with a strange accent. "It would make the preparation a lot more efficient!"

With a gasp, Dana takes several steps forward, going halfway through a cart of surgical instruments in the process. "Cecil!"

Because the man on the table, his eyes closed and his bare chest damp from being sponged off, is familiar. His hair is cut short, and there are rusty streaks on his face and forearms that Dana does not recognize, but in every other detail, he is Cecil.

Until he giggles and says, "Aw, I tried! Is it better than last time, at least?"

The high-pitched voice is familiar, but not Cecil's.

"All I can tell you, Kevin, is that it's not perfect," says the man in white (nurse? chapel technician?), returning with a fresh cloth and carefully wiping off his patient's forehead.

"Kevin?" repeats Dana.

The same Kevin who came into Cecil's studio during the Sandstorm? Then this must be Desert Bluffs, the home he returned to afterward. Dana did not see him when he spoke on NVCR...but she did clean up the blood he left behind, which makes them connected, in a way.

Kevin sighs, though his wide, toothy smile doesn't falter. "I know company policy, silly," he chides, as the chapel tech towels him off. "I had the rulebook memorized long before you got here."

He opens his eyes.

Or...not.

He has no eyes.

It's all the more eerie because the rest of his body is almost unscarred. The only other old wound Dana sees as she circles the pair is a couple of missing fingers, whitish skin drawn taut over the stumps.

The chapel tech moves on to attaching a series of anbarodes to Kevin's now-clean chest and arms, working with calm efficiency. His own eyes are still in his head, but the pupils are hugely dilated for such a bright room, and there's a blankness in them that unsettles Dana almost as much as the gaping holes in his patient's skull. It reminds Dana of when she materialized at that awards dinner, where the people in the front of the room had daemons, but the ones at the tables in back had only vacant smiles.

To her surprise, Kevin is thinking along the same lines. "Hey, Carlo?" he asks. "Do you ever miss your daemon?"

"Nope!" says the tech. "Why should I? I have Strexcorp. It is everything."

"I know! I have it too," says Kevin. "But still...you can't cuddle Strexcorp. Or boop its little nose. Or high-five its little paws. I never had a daemon, and even I miss having one sometimes."

"You do have one, remember? It's just inside you," says Carlo cheerfully. "And you also have...."

He looks around the operating theater, gaze sweeping briefly through Dana, before pointing at something in a corner.

"...that!"

Dana looks.

There is, it turns out, a third figure in the room. Has it been here the whole time, unnoticed? It's quiet and unobtrusive, almost colorless, watching Kevin in silence. It is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin.

"Neither of those helps with the booping-its-little-nose question," says Kevin, sounding almost petulant. "I'm not sure you're grasping the root of the issue here."

"Uh-huh?" Carlo starts plugging in the anbarodes, but cocks his head as if listening to something, and Dana realizes there's some kind of anbaric earpiece fixed to his ear. It has an orange triangle stamped on the chassis. "Uh-huh. Okay." He returns to attach a couple more to Kevin's face. "Good news! The division administrator is adjusting your medication. You can pick up your new dose at the front desk on the way out."

Kevin beams at him. "Gosh, how exciting! Thank you for telling me. And for helping me get set up for the tests."

He clasps Carlo's hand in gratitude.

Something goes snap.

Carlo holds up his hand and shakes it, gazing dispassionately at the way the index finger of his glove is hanging at all the wrong angle. He doesn't comment or complain, just puts his wires down, peels off the glove, and retreats to a nearby shelf to get a splint.

As Carlo is setting the finger bones, Kevin turns and faces Dana.

"How about you, Vanessa?" he asks. "Do you ever miss your daemon?"

Notes:

Translations:
Está bien, la ambulancia está llegando. Ambulance, ¿lo entiendes? = It's okay, the ambulance is coming. Ambulance, understand?
¿Puede usar esto? = Can she use this?

Turns out there was indeed a daemon question at SDCC! (Joseph Fink = wishes he had a dog, Cecil Baldwin = cat or raven, Dylan Marron = prairie dog, Hal Lublin = Joseph Fink's dog.) Did anyone get video? Please, someone, have video.

Chapter 10: Courageous and Strong

Summary:

Sherie and her family contemplate packing up and moving out of town. Tamika contemplates packing up and moving to a safe hiding place. Carlos contemplates packing up and moving in with Cecil.

Notes:

New art: Cecil and Kevin in the vortex; Tamika and other kids with their weapons of choice.

Night Vale.

A massage from a local chiropractor with four arms does wonders for Sherie's back. She gets sent home with a compression back wrap, wears it with a heating pad during a long conversation with Sam, then switches to an ice pack before they call the kids into the living room.

Susannah is moving mostly normally, not at all like someone who got impaled through the intestines earlier in the day, though her black tank top is still catching on the bandages underneath it. A cut above her left eye has already healed to a white scar. Seth has pulled back to his cagiest, most withdrawn expression; his daemon is riding on his shoulder as a stick insect, impossible to read.

Taking a deep breath, Sherie squeezes her husband's hand and says, "We'd like to know how you two would feel about moving."

"Back to the US," clarifies Sam. As if the kids might have thought they were planning on jetting off for Cathay next, or Svalbard, or something.

Su crosses her arms. "This is because of me, isn't it."

Sherie nods. "That's certainly part of it."

"So...you didn't have any problem moving us across the continent, yanking us away from all our friends, expecting us to keep up with grade-level work in a language we don't even speak, in a school with no computers and librarians that try to eat you," says her daughter. "But when I go and set out to do something for myself — and do great considering I'm the only girl in town who hasn't been learning to scry since before I could walk — that's when you decide maybe it's time to bail?"

"Sweetheart, of course we're very proud of you, but you got impaled," protests Sam. "By — by — what did it, anyway?"

"I don't know! Some kind of re-animated bone creature. It's not like I was...taxonomizing it while I was trying to dismember it."

"That's not a word," mutters Seth.

"Who cares? You knew what I meant!"

"Honey, please," says Sherie. Her mongoose daemon crosses the carpet and rests a soothing claw on one of Su's griffon vulture's talons. "Just be serious and think about this. Even with magical healing, you're going to have scars from this for the rest of your life, and I'm sure that goes just perfectly with your current...aesthetic, but ten years from now...."

"Ten years from now I'll stop thinking it looks totally cool and start being ashamed like a normal person?"

"That's not what I'm saying...."

"It's exactly what you're saying!" (Su's daemon pushes Sherie's away, not gently.) "If you came down to the pool at the rec center some time, you'd see that like everyone has scars. Nobody cares! Just because you're afraid to wear a bikini doesn't mean the rest of us have to be!"

Sherie cringes.

"Don't you give your mother that attitude," says Sam firmly. His sheepdog daemon isn't big enough to look intimidating in front of the massive vulture, but she tries.

"It's not my attitude that's the problem!" yells Susannah, blinking back tears. Why does raising a teenage daughter have to be so hard? "If —"

A small glowing portal chooses that moment to appear in midair in the middle of the room, spitting a green-fletched arrow that whizzes past Su's head and embeds itself in the wallpaper between the kids' class photos.

While the rest of the family is gaping in astonishment, Seth calmly gets up, pulls the arrow out of the wall, and unrolls the piece of paper wrapped around the end. "Says it's from the Scouts," he reports, handing it to Su. "I guess it's for you."

Susannah reads it, swallows, then takes a deep breath and puts her shoulders back. "Mom, I'm sorry. And Seth, if you're still miserable here then I think we should move back home, okay? Maybe I should've said that first."

All eyes turn to Seth.

"You don't have to be sure what you want right now," says Sherie. She knows it's a lot of pressure to put on her boy, making him the linchpin of this decision at a moment when, if he doesn't keep the conversation on him, it'll go right back to his parents and sister yelling at each other. "But if you have any feelings, we'd love to hear them."

Seth doesn't answer right away. His daemon becomes a brightly-colored dragonfly, no easier to read than the stick insect. Eventually he says, "Well, we have to stay here until the week after next, anyway."

"Why's that?" prompts Sam.

"A week from Thursday we have Career Day. And I promised I'd help with something."

"Oh? A school thing?"

"...Sort of."

"It's all right if it's something with your friends, too," says Sam, clearly trying to be encouraging.

"It's both, I guess," says Seth. "There are some people from Strexcorp coming to talk to us on Career Day. There's gonna be an assembly and stuff. So it's school. And I said I'd be on the lookout team while Tamika and some other people steal their vehicles. So it's friends."

 

-{,(((,">

 

In the ground-floor room of the Night Vale clock tower, at the head of a circle of low folding canvas chairs lit by a series of oil lamps, Tamika Flynn sits back against the bulk of her buffalo daemon and says, "Let this meeting of the My Little Pony Appreciation Fan Club come to order."

As she's talking, Renée Carlsberg sets a breadbox-sized Twilight Sparkle on the table in the center and squeezes the pony's right front hoof, to a soft clicking sound. One of the older kids, a fifteen-year-old Morrigan Scout with a protective case for her katydid daemon hanging around her neck, checks her phone. "Signal's dead," she announces. "We're clear."

"Good." Tamika unzips the bag next to her chair and starts handing out books. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities for the nearest Morrigan Scout; a collection of Shirley Jackson short stories for the Blood Pact Scout next to her; Joseph Addison's Cato, A Tragedy for Josh Craton; Rainbow Dash and the Daring Do Double Dare for Renée; and so on. "Quick updates, everyone. How are our contacts doing?"

A stocky Weird Scout whose mom is a shift manager at the Raúl's starts them off. "Not good. We can't count on the Raúl's any more. I know they're a chain, but apparently there's some kind of local management contract...thing...and, well, guess who bought it."

"The White Sand is fine," reports a seven-year-old Nightshade Scout with killer slingshot aim. "They're still giving out free sundaes for anyone who finished their sticker chart at the Summer Reading Program. And they broad-ened their def-i-ni-tion of what counts as a sticker chart. I made a bunch!" Her daemon, turning into an orange-furred monkey, lopes around the circle giving everybody a few sticker-covered bookmarks, napkins, store receipts, leaves, and/or baseball caps.

On they go around the circle. They make plans to scope out the bloodstone factory, which it would be real bad if Strex moved in on, and to get in touch with the radio station, which could be a big help if they can sneak around the Strex managers already there. They review the series of operations for Career Day, which will double as a loyalty/stress test for some of the kids at school who seem sympathetic to their cause.

And they compare opinions about the end of Kindred. (Tamika liked it, even if that one twist that was supposed to be shocking could've been avoided, easy, if Dana had followed the proper unstuck-in-time safety practices.)

Finally, two of the guys get into an argument about which of the Cutie Mark Crusaders is the best, and Renée switches off the jamming device mid-sentence. They're not sure how well they can be tracked inside the clock tower, especially since it's teleported twice since they got inside, but it never hurts to be safe.

The rest of the kids filter out, with the last of them helping Tamika blow out the oil lamps and fold up the chairs for storage. At last it's down to one lamp and one Tamika.

Rashi comes up behind her and nuzzles his face against her side. "We going home?"

Tamika scratches above his brow, right around the base of the thick fused horns. Once Strexcorp figures out who's been coordinating all the thorns in their side lately, the Flynn house won't be safe. But she's pretty sure they haven't hit that point yet. "Yeah. We're going home."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The family hasn't made any plans to leave town by the time Sherie retreats to the laundry room to do some folding. It isn't that she needs to — Sam, as the parent who works from home, has been good about shouldering most of the chores — but she could use the excuse to be alone and think.

She'd been counting on the kids to be relieved at the offer of leaving Night Vale. To help her put aside her misgivings about abandoning the research team. Just her luck that they don't want to go.

"I wonder what the Girl Scouts said, that made Su back down so fast," muses her ring-tailed mongoose from on top of the pile of clean towels.

"The usual," says a bored-sounding voice in Spanish from the supply cupboard. "Yo me esforzaré por: Ser honrada y justa, cordial y servicial, considerada y compasiva, valiente y fuerte, etcetera, etcetera. They highlighted considera y compasiva. Standard friendly reminder."

Sherie isn't as disturbed by this as she might have been. She's heard enough campaign ads to recognize the voice of the anciana sin rostro who lives in her home. "Really, all they sent her was a copy of the Girl Scout Law? I never thought Susannah would take something like that so seriously."

"If you don't respond to the first reminder, the second one involves firing the arrow into the most convenient limb," points out the Faceless Old Woman. "By the way, I borrowed one of your necklaces for a campaign event. The coral one. Really brings out my lack of eyes."

"Happy to help," says Sherie, turning one of her daughter's blouses right-side-out for folding.

"No, you're not. You're annoyed. But you're faking it admirably, and I appreciate that."

Wait, maybe the blouse was right-side-out before? There are visible seams either way, and Sherie can't tell the real ones apart from the fashionable goth-grunge ones.

"Your daughter can tell when you're faking too, you know. And when you're projecting your own issues onto her. She just doesn't have the emotional dexterity yet to deal with it in a sophisticated way, so she loses her temper instead. What kind of scarring do you have? I'm deathly curious."

Sherie focuses intently on matching socks. "I don't think that's any of your business. Although if you live in this house and you're effectively invisible, you probably know already."

"I don't peep on my housemates in the shower, if that's what you're insinuating," huffs the Faceless Old Woman. "But surely it can't be that bad. Look at me, I don't even have a face, and I'm not trying to hide from it."

"I can't look at you," Sherie reminds her. "That's a big part of what effectively invisible means."

"You can if I allow it," says the Faceless Old Woman...and climbs out of the supply cupboard.

She has pale hands, well-fluffed silver hair, and no facial features whatsoever, only blank skin with patterns of wrinkles drawn by the muscle and bone underneath. The daemon she sets on the towel pile to touch noses with Sherie's is a Texas blind salamander, opalescent white with spindly legs and no eyes.

"I...appreciate the thought...but I still think I'm entitled to some privacy in my personal life," says Sherie, crossing her arms. "No matter how visible you get."

"Oh well," says the Faceless Old Woman. (It's even more eerie when you can see her lack of mouth movement.) "It was worth a shot."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos is frankly surprised when Sherie turns up to work the next morning. He thought it was more likely he'd be reading an email of resignation from a hastily-booked Kinlání hotel room by now. "Are you sure you don't want to take a few days off?"

"I'll be fine as long as I don't have to lift anything heavy. Or drive," says Sherie. "And if this were any other town I'd be good to drive, too. It's just that, around here, it's too likely to require sudden, panicky swerving."

"I wasn't only asking because of your back...."

"The kids are at school. Sam has to do as much work as he can while the Internet is up. Not much point in me staying home, is there? Now, before we head out into the field...have you heard about the local schools doing a Career Day? Is that something we could get involved with?"

Carlos delegates the job of calling the schools to Henriette, because he's not sure which way the faculty and staff lean on the "you brought growth opportunities for local businesses" to "you sold out our town and all its people for some free gadgets" opinion spectrum. When he and Sherie get to Point E, setting up the team's new extra bloodstone circle and half a dozen different meters facing the house that doesn't exist, she texts to let him know they should plan to petition the Glow Cloud for involvement (also, its general mercy and benevolence) at the joint PTA-School Board meeting on Friday afternoon.

 

-{,(((,">

 

There are only a couple of booths at the White Sand fitted to accommodate a daemon Rashi's size, though it's still more than some places have. Tamika gets an iced tea, settles herself down in the one closest to the back door, and makes notes in the margins of The Word for World Is Forest.

"Well, aren't you an industrious little girl, sitting here reading all on your own!"

Tamika doesn't raise her eyes from the pages. She would rather not acknowledge the woman with the desert-impractical three-piece suit and the duck daemon at all, but the barest minimum of politeness demands it. "It's a good book."

"I'm sure it is. Your teachers must be very proud! Putting in all that extra effort to be more productive in their classes, when they're not even on the clock."

"Uh-huh."

"But there's just one teensy problem," continues the woman. "Police!"

She holds her position in front of the booth while the officer hiding under the window comes inside. Like Rashi couldn't stomp her little mallard daemon in two seconds flat, if they really wanted to get past her. Tamika waits until the last possible moment before looking up, to make it clear she isn't impressed by the secret police officer one way or the other.

"I do hope you'll go easy on her. She's only a child, after all," says the woman sweetly to the balaclava-clad cop. "But she has been using a pen for the last fifteen minutes. I forget, does that call for juvenile detention? Or simply tasing, the way you do for the children who don't make it to school on time?"

"It's not a pen," says Tamika.

"Ah, denial. Aren't you a little old to think adults will fall for that?"

The cop shuffles uncomfortably. "It does look a lot like a writing utensil there, Miss Flynn."

"Just what is going on over here?" interrupts a new voice. And about time, too. It's one of the owners, Miz Lucy, with her own daemon — a whiptail lizard whose flanks are spotted with iridescent cyan — riding on her shoulder. "You have no right to disrupt my business and hassle my customers."

"Your customer," says the woman with the mallard, "is breaking the law. I don't know what kind of business model you're running here, but at Strexcorp and its subsidiaries, we have the highest respect for local regulations —"

"But I guess you don't have a whole lot of respect for child literacy rates," says Tamika innocently. "Seeing as how you're giving me such a hard time about my sticker chart."

"Your...what?"

Tamika hands the pen — its plastic casing adorned with glittery stickers of hearts, smiley faces, and construction equipment — to Miz Lucy. "Brought it in for the free sundae."

Miz Lucy turns the pen over in her hands. Her nails are painted a bright cyan to match her daemon. "Looks good to me. Well done, by the way. What flavor would you like?"

"You're conducting a black-market operation with an officer of the law right in front of you?" demands the woman from Strexcorp.

"No, I'm conducting the rewards program that several of us locally-owned businesses have set up for kids who keep their reading skills sharp over the summer," says Miz Lucy. "Bring in a sticker chart, get a free scoop of ice cream. With up to two toppings."

"Melange and strawberry sauce," puts in Tamika. "On a scoop of mint, please."

The Strex woman's friendly smile looks like it's gonna fall off sideways. "That doesn't look anything like a sticker chart!"

Miz Lucy frowns. "Can't you see the stickers?"

"It does have stickers on it," agrees the secret police officer. "Awful lot of them, too. Nice job, Miss Flynn."

"Thanks."

"I'll just go get you your scoop," says Miz Lucy cheerfully, and bustles off.

The cop breathes a sigh of relief. "Well, I can't see any illegal activity here. But thank you for your diligence, Ms. Mallard! If you'll just give me your Alert Citizen Card so I can stamp it, I'll be on my way."

The Strex woman tenses. "I...must have left that in my other wallet."

"Really? Isn't that a shame. We'd better take you down to the station and get you a new one, then," says the cop. His daemon, a large border collie, circles around the duck and takes the opportunity to do some herding.

Tamika really wants to finish Section Two of the book this afternoon, but she lets herself enjoy the view as Ms. Mallard is escorted out through the revolving door. In the same spin as it moves her out, it spins Cecil Palmero in; as Miz Lucy is bringing over Tamika's ice cream (and returning the pen), Señor Palmero is settling into the next booth over with an invisible sundae slathered in chocolate sauce.

He drums his fingertips idly against the table until Tamika taps out O-K with her foot in Morse code.

Señor Palmero's finger-tapping switches to the same, and spells out a reply: OMG THOUGHT SHE WOULD NEVER LEAVE.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette can see the TV in the living room flickering through the shades as she rests the six-packs on the front stoop and fumbles the keys out of her pocket.

Behind her, Omero and Quentin are finishing with unloading the trunk (mostly beer, but they stopped for nachos and dip on the way home). Nirliq should be back any minute now with Sherie, who insisted on going to her own place for dinner instead of coming straight here. It's going to be a weird crowd for a party, the middle-aged women plus the guys in their twenties, but if they can't bond over junk food and making fun of bad spec-fic movies, what kind of team are they?

The key turns, and she steps inside to find an educational documentary about Klein-Gordon traveling wave solutions on the big screen, and Carlos leaning over the back of the couch and shushing them. "Keep it down, okay? Cecil's asleep."

Inconvenient. Sweet, but inconvenient. Henriette waves for the guys to hang back, then whispers, "Can we carry him upstairs?"

"He spent half an hour this afternoon tied up in a closet by an evil computer," protests Carlos. "I really think we should let him rest."

"Most of us spent half an hour this afternoon fighting a ravenous pack of spiderwolves," counters Henriette. She gestures to her marmot daemon, whose right front leg is wrapped in an Ace bandage. "Clotère's still limping from when one of them got its teeth into him."

A pained expression crosses Carlos's face. "Point taken. Help me get him up."

Cecil looks so utterly conked-out, drooling on the arm of the couch with his legs across Carlos's lap and his daemon draped like a pat of butter across his chest, that Henriette almost feels bad for disturbing him. Almost.

There's a brief dilemma when they aren't sure how to transport Khoshekh. Clotère can't take the weight on his leg right now, while Isaña, Omero's starling, and Quentin's flying squirrel are all too small. Henriette asks, tentatively, if Carlos can do it — Carlos, horrified, hisses that he only touches Cecil's daemon when invited, and given how shockingly intense that is already, how can she think he could just grab him?

In the end, the problem solves itself. While Carlos is gently shaking Cecil to wake him (and only getting a couple of sleepy grunts in response), Khoshekh rolls right off his chest and "lands" in a hovering position about six inches from the carpet. From there Isaña and Clotère can push him through the air like the world's weirdest balloon, while Carlos and Henriette each get one of Cecil's arms over their shoulders and lead him stumbling to Carlos's room. The daemons can't heft Khoshekh all the way up to the bed, but they nudge him over Isaña's basket, where she gives him a gentle tug and he falls the rest of the way onto the cushion.

Cecil is just lucid enough to direct his own fall onto the mattress. Carlos smooths down his hair. "Be back soon," he murmurs, before following Henriette out.

"You know," says Henriette once they're back in the hall, "this kind of thing wouldn't happen if you two just got your own place, already."

Carlos does a double-take like she just whacked him in the face with a haddock. "If — what?"

Henriette frowns. Carlos is a thirty-seven-year-old who spends half his nights at the apartment of the man he's been dating since, by her own count, this past February — an apartment with evil landlords, no less. How can the idea of moving in together not be on his radar? "Is that not where this is going?"

"Um," says Carlos. "No, it is. I mean, I think it is? I guess? We haven't — it hasn't come up. Is that bad?"

Shrugging, Henriette tries to play it off. "By this town's standards? Hell if I know. Listen, think you might join us for movie night? We could probably convince everyone to go for the one where Lyra and Pan conquer the Martians, if that would sweeten the deal."

"Thanks, but I'm just gonna brush my teeth and sit with Cecil. Maybe start trying to write up the materials and methods for the experiment with the cross-world heliotrope radiation absorption spectra."

"Good luck getting them in a form the City Council won't censor into incoherence once they get their claws on it." Both metaphorically and literally. "Won't the light disturb Cecil, though?"

Carlos gives her a strange look. "He's never had trouble sleeping next to me before."

Right. To Cecil's improbable (but experimentally validated) Rusakov-particle-driven vision, another human will look brighter than any digital screen ever could. Every time Henriette starts thinking of him as just a normal guy deep down, she gets a reminder like this. "Sorry, wasn't thinking. Forget about it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The first time Tamika wakes up in a tent in the scrublands, it's an hour before her alarm, because she got jabbed in the ribs by a stupid root she rolled over on. Maybe she should've tried to get into Scouting when she was a kid. Then she'd have some experience with camping.

Well, it's not like this hideout is gonna last long. And in a few days she's got a stretch of book-club members lined up to do secret undercover sleepovers with, which will be just like being at home again, except less watched.

She changes out of her PJs, does a couple stretches, and goes outside. Rashi, who doesn't fit in the tent anyway, is already watching the sky. "May as well get up," he says. "We have to get Three Hundred Years Hence back today, and the librarians are always pretty sluggish this early."

"Sounds good." Tamika loads up the books, climbs on his back, and has a juice box and crackers for breakfast as she rides into town.

They're just walking around the north edge of the Whispering Forest when the wind tosses a couple of leaflets across the scrub. Remembering the last time the town was littered with mysterious brochures, Rashi pins one with his hoof, and Tamika pulls it up to give it a look.

This one doesn't have any Strex marketing jargon on it. Just four words, in a thick black scrawl:

CONDOMINIOS A LA VENTA

 

-{,(((,">

 

FU ratings on all eight of the team's danger meters have shot upward overnight, and keep ticking slowly higher as the sun inches an unusually jagged path across the sky.

"I really hope this is from those portals to unstable pocket dimensions that Cecil warned us about," says Quentin, when he gets a look at the chapel's danger meter. "Because if this is something he didn't think was worth giving us a heads-up on...we're in a lot of trouble."

Carlos addresses the group. "All right, physicists, time to drop everything...well, not everything, don't drop any instruments you're going to use for study...and make sure to pick up any instruments you're planning to use that you don't already have...and go find out just what's going on around here."

"Just the physicists?" protests a Li Hua. "Oh, no. If pterodactyls start coming out of any of these portals, we're not letting the Sheriff's secret police chuck them all back in before we get a sample. We're coming too."

"And if these portals are connected to strange, potentially daemonless children who speak a language not known in this world, perhaps Miss Supelli should accompany us," says Köhler, indicating Perle.

The rest of the physicists have scattered to pick up equipment. Carlos turns to Omero, the biologist, the only one not yet spoken for. "I'm guessing you want in too?"

Omero hesitates. "If you think it's strategically advisable."

Carlos gives him a wry smile. "Trust me: being able to split into three teams, and have one bio person on each team, is some of the best strategy this project has ever had."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The epicenter of the danger is, as Cecil predicted, more or less behind the Raúl's. It isn't as focused as the portal that opened during the Eternal Scout ceremony; the electrum spyglasses aren't picking up any anomalies yet, but with the danger meters they map out an area all the way around the Oxford Street strip mall and its parking lots, and a couple of mostly-residential blocks to the northwest of that.

For some reason, all the parking lots are packed.

It doesn't look like there's a sale at the Raúl's or a rush on the barbershop (which still hasn't removed the Telly's sign from over its doors, although at least somebody took the time to duct-tape a big X through the name). In fact, the crowd they finally find is gathered around...the abandoned naptha station.

Luckily, a space opens up just a few meters from the crowd when a feral Toyota crawls out of it and screeches off into the distance. Carlos's team takes it, while Köhler's heads for the far end of the residential area and Henriette's finds a space close to the mall. Nirliq and a Li Hua pull a cheap folding table out of the trunk and start setting up equipment; Rayshawn and Carlos head over to see what everyone is here for.

Janis Rio, the doctor who supervised their blood-oath loyalty ceremonies, smiles when she sees them. Her football octopus daemon, in a rolling tank by her feet, waves a friendly tentacle at their frog and armadillo. "If it isn't our favorite team of experimental theologians! What are you up to?"

"The usual," says Carlos. "Our optics student and our anbaromagnetic theorist are going to test what happens to several different types of laser-cut electrum lens when you run an anbaric current through them in the presence of a portal. In the meantime, our portal specialists —"

Janis's face is still drawn into a polite smile, but her eyes are already glazing over.

Carlos shakes his head. "Theology," he mutters. "We're doing experimental theology. How about you?"

"Oh, gosh, we're all in line for los condominios." Janis pulls a folded-up brochure out of her pocket and hands it to Carlos. It's...direct, he'll say that much. "Some of us to buy one, some of us just to find out what they are."

Rayshawn, who has pretty good conversational Spanish but falters on rare vocabulary, says under his breath, "That does just mean condos, right?"

"Right," says Carlos, although around here, who knows what that means. Or why they're being sold from inside an abandoned, locked, and unnaturally darkened naptha station....

"Your name, sir?" asks a new voice.

Carlos starts. "Sorry?"

"He's Carlos el Teólogo Experimental," says Janis helpfully. "And I'm Janis Rio, from down the street."

The new voice — it's an unfamiliar man in a suit, with bright yellow eyes and a handsome white-tailed doe for a daemon — enters both names into a spreadsheet. "We'll call you when your number is up," he assures them, before moving on down the line.

All Night Vale realtors have deer daemons. Great. Carlos just got signed up to look at condos.

He doesn't think anything more of it until they get back over to the van. Nirliq and her colobus daemon (wearing matching sets of safety goggles) have set up a whole range of electrum lenses in metallic casings, with a string of anbarical wires hooking them up to the car battery. Her laptop is on the table too, with a Skype connection open to show Quentin doing the same thing over with Henriette's group, and of course there's the usual camera on its tripod...now wired to the laptop, so it can upload the footage to a remote server. Probably a wise idea, since the Glow Cloud has coalesced over the abandoned naptha station, and it has a tendency to wipe out digital footage. And/or crush your equipment by dropping a dead owl on it.

With the van battery powered on, the radio is on too. Cecil is on, already talking about the bubbling darkness in the naptha station, the shoving and yelling that are beginning to spread through the crowd, and the man (Roger Singh, apparently) waving a detached spine at the dark window.

"And…all right, I know this is out of nowhere," adds Cecil's warm, soothing voice, as Carlos hunts around in the trunk for the electrum spyglasses they brought, "But at what point in a relationship is it normal to think about living together?"

Carlos stops short, cheeks flushing.

"Is…let's say…buying a condo a sign that you want to move to that stage?" frets Cecil, like he's just chatting with a friend over coffee and not broadcasting to the entire town. "Is that what an action like that might hypothetically be indicating?"

Li Hua, perched on top of the van with her rifle over her shoulder, snickers. Carlos contemplates climbing into the trunk and hiding there until the weather, when he can call Cecil and explain the misunderstanding. Over by the equipment, though, Nirliq says "Yes, he's here" into her webcam, then calls, "Carlos! Henriette wants a word."

While Cecil goes back to talking about Roger Singh, Carlos shuffles over to the ordinater. On the other side of the Skype connection, Henriette says, "Eff-yous over here have plateaued, we're starting to see areas between one and two feet square that are either absorbing or repelling all their Rusakov particles, and when you're thinking about moving in with someone it's typical to mention that to them before you go house-hunting."

Scanning the area around them with his electrum spyglass, Carlos only sees normal movement of Rusakov particles. "No Dust anomalies over here, and I am not house-hunting! Cecil's just confused."

"Cecil has an alethiometer!"

"So his information isn't wrong, just incomplete! We happen to be by the Condo Rental Office, but it's for professional reasons, not personal ones. And I sort of accidentally got on their list, because they thought I was standing in line instead of next to the line. It wasn't — wait, I think I see the anomaly you're talking about. Approximately cube-shaped?"

"That's them."

Carlos tries to focus. Miniature Rusakov dead zones — like the dog park, which is only a couple of blocks from here, or the former site of Jorge's Tacos — although these ones don't seem to be centered on anything. (And, mercifully, no sign of mysterious hooded spectres.) No, wait — when he looks more closely, he can see a few tiny golden particles drifting through the nearest anomaly. "They're not dead zones. They just have Rusakov levels that don't match with the local scenery," he reports. "If anything, they're like the house that doesn't exist...."

Behind him, Cecil's voice bursts out, "But, do you know what I mean? Like, could this be a sign, that he wants to move things in that direction? You know, I just wish he would communicate more directly sometimes!"

At Carlos's feet, Isaña rolls closed in embarrassment.

"But theologians don’t communicate directly," continues Cecil on the radio, sounding weary but resigned. "Everybody knows that. They communicate using a series of obscure and arcane codes and signals. That is what it means to be a theologian."

"I don't want to get in the middle of nothin' here," says Rayshawn, "but would it help if I took the spyglass for a while, free you up to do a little communicating with your boyfriend?"

"Oh my god yes," exclaims Carlos, practically throwing the spyglass at him. "Yes, please. So sorry about this. I'll make it quick."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Throughout the Night Vale public schools, at an unspoken signal, dozens of children from all grades and all reading levels abruptly and simultaneously announce they have to go to the bathroom.

A Dreadnought Scout with a provisional license pops the trunk of his parents' van. He and his whole troop got their Auto Engineering badge by refitting it, from the layout to the suspension, to handle an African buffalo. Once Rashi is safely in back, Tamika hops in the middle seat next to a third-grade scrying prodigy holding a mug of water. "Let's go."

As they pull away from Night Vale Middle School, the chop-chop-chop of gyropters echoes overhead. They're painted with murals of diving birds of prey, which makes them way too conspicuous for Tamika's tastes, but it's all the book club has...for now. "Turn up the radio, will you? I can't hear."

Her driver turns it up, just in time to hear Cecil stammer, "Carlos?"

"Yes!" exclaims a voice made tinny by a phone connection. "I mean, um, theologically speaking, that is who I am."

"Oh, yes, of course," says Cecil. "I'm very into theology. But, hey, listen, I'm in the middle of a show."

"Yeah, I know, you're covering the story about the condos. That's sort of why I called."

"Uh-huh? They're...they're very exciting, right?"

"Everything is exciting!" exclaims Carlos. "Particularly existence. Existence is the most exciting thing of all!"

"Nerd," mutters Tamika.

"But you're being careful, right?" asks Cecil. "I'm getting...reports...that it's even more fatal outside than usual."

"By 19 Standard Fatality Units, I know," says Carlos. "I have a danger meter right in front of me. Listen, Cecil, I —"

In the background, a machine starts beeping, and the vague, distant commotion gets overwritten with yelling that can't be far away.

"— I called to talk to you about something important, but now I don't think I have time," says Carlos rapidly. "Something very theological is happening, my team is calling my name — I have to go. I'm sorry. I'll call you back later. Probably! Everything is some level of 'probably', nothing is a promise, I —"

"No, I understand, I lo—"

"Listen, I lov—"

While they fumble their way through the world's most awkward goodbyes, the scrying prodigy stares into her water. Her daemon has transformed into a small, huge-eyed lemur. "They're here."

Chapter 11: Home

Summary:

In spite of his team's best efforts, Carlos gets dragged into a terrifyingly perfect pocket dimension...and has another encounter with his death.

Night Vale.

The condos are here.

They are featureless black cubes, the smallest over nine feet tall, the largest at least the height of a two-story building. They are sleek and dark and sharply angled. They have displaced nearly half the strip mall, taken chunks out of most of the tract homes across the road, aggressively re-shaped the skyline.

According to Henriette's readings, each one is a portal. If her readings can be trusted. Three-dimensional doorways between worlds are a construct right out of the farthest edges of "so theoretical we're never going to have a practical use for it, we're only here because of how cool the math looks" physics; none of her instruments are designed to deal with this. The best she can do is take a constellation of measurements from different angles, and pray they can eventually reconstruct it into something meaningful.

Omero is standing at attention, his starling daemon perching on his shoulder to watch the area behind him, ready for anything. Quentin switches on the anbaric current to his string of electrum lenses...and three of them immediately crack in their cases.

 

-{,(((,">

 

If Sherie hadn't relocated some of her bloodstones when the cube-shaped Rusakov anomaly got a little too close, she wouldn't have enough left to make a circle.

From a safe distance, she rearranges the bloodstones on the pavement, kneels in the center, and observes the nearest condo through her electrum spyglass. The spyglass tells her that there are Rusakov particles inside the shear black walls, though they're opaque to the naked eye and don't seem to be letting particles from either side come through. The bloodstones tell her that there is some other force at work. It's hard to make sense of what she's feeling; all she knows is that, on a level none of their instruments can quantify, the condos are pulsing.

Perle has her recording equipment running, though none of them are expecting to hear any otherworldly languages now. Keith is keeping an eye on everything else.

"Well, I'm disappointed," says the Li Hua sitting on the tailgate of the car.

"To our field, these are highly interesting," says Keith. "Perhaps you will be lucky enough to see pterodactyls next time."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos approaches one of the condos in the no-longer-vacant lot behind the Raúl's, a Rutherford counter in hand. Behind him Rayshawn watches through an electrum spyglass, ready to holler if he steps into a danger zone, while Nirliq busies herself unplugging the electrum lenses that seem to have exploded.

"They're putting out radiation," Carlos calls back to the others. "High compared to the town average, very high compared to what is generally considered safe for humans, but low compared to what we usually see from portals around here."

He's within a few feet of the opaque, perfectly smooth black wall by now. Another step down the sidewalk and he could touch it.

Other people are touching them. He can see Janis Rio, down the street, placing her hand on the wall of what Carlos can only assume is her condo. She was here to buy, right? Not just to look? They wouldn't have given her a condo if she hadn't paid for it.

The shiny black cubes aren't blowing people up, or sucking them in, or making them scream in agony. Everybody who touches one seems to be coming away fine. Awestruck, possibly terrified, but still alive and well.

Carlos didn't give anyone any money. None of these ultra-modern featureless structures can be for him. Will he get the same reaction if he touches one? Or no reaction at all?

Only one way to find out.

 

-{,(((,">

 

People touch the condos, and recoil in awe and fear. Then the people who recoiled begin getting restless. Then the restless people begin returning to touch the condos a second time...and sending Henriette's readings completely haywire.

Not fifty feet from her, the body of Roger Singh drops to the ground beside the wall of his cube. His red-limbed, golden-faced monkey daemon doesn't disappear, but walks right through the surface. Watching through the spyglass, Henriette can see that his ghost has walked through with her.

The Sheriff's secret police have finally showed up, with patrol cars and a couple of blue gyropters hovering around the condo area. They are, as is so often the case, utterly useless, even when deploying their strongest passive-aggression techniques. "Sure. Go ahead. Touch the cube again, I guess," blares a loudspeaker carried by one of the gyropters. "I mean, if you don't care about your community, and your fellow citizens, then I guess you probably should."

Omero turns to Henriette and asks if the team should use force to break one of these things open. And by force, he means the mass of a bullet, multiplied by the acceleration of a gun.

"I don't know," admits Henriette. She's holding still, trying to get this reading consistent, but her marmot daemon is going to pace a hole in the sidewalk at this rate. "I'm trying to map this to Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates, which are the only theoretical model we have for a three-dimensional portal, but...."

"...but those are designed for a deformity of spacetime caused by a gravitational singularity," puts in Quentin. His flying squirrel daemon keeps scampering between the electrum lenses on the table in front of him, looking closely at the ones that cracked, or blew up in a puff of smoke. "And it would take days to adjust the math to compensate for the lack of any relativistic effects, which obviously we would have to do, considering that the planet underneath us is still in the same shape —"

Omero looks from one to the other, then picks a rock off the ground and throws it at the nearest condo.

It ricochets right off.

While Henriette and Quentin are staring, and hopefully looking as mortified as they deserve to, Omero says, "I would like to withdraw the idea of using bullets."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"We won't miss you anyway!" exclaims the speaker from the secret-police gyropter. "Like, no big deal. Touch the cube if you want!"

Down below, in her bloodstone circle, Sherie is "in the zone." She's not lost in a vision, either; she's lucid, hyper-aware of the scenery around her, of....

On the radio, the Faceless Old Woman is in the studio, talking to Cecil. "Your words hold a lot of meaning intrinsically. Almost everything we say does. If you looked at any word in the English language close enough, you would see within the great, glowing coils of the universe unwinding."

That sounds right. Sherie is aware of the great glowing coils of the universe as they turn.

"There's a pattern in these cubes," she says out loud. "Is it showing up in any of the readings?"

"That depends," says Keith. "What sort of pattern? Ordered, tessellated, fractal...?"

"Semi-random. Almost entirely random. But not quite." Sherie turns the electrum spyglass on the bloodstones themselves, watching the Rusakov particles swirl around them as she thinks. "Imagine...throwing something at a window. The cracks, the way they radiate outward and make a spiderweb, you know, it's irregular. Not perfect or geometric. But you can still look at it and tell where the impact was. That's what this is like. Someone tried to punch through...I don't know, the universe, I guess...and these are all the cracks."

"That doesn't sound like the kind of thing you can do on purpose," says Perle.

"And yet." Keith stops at the danger meter, inspecting its dial, then scans the sky. "A similar event occurred in this area several months before your arrival. Human-caused portal activity, on a scale that would have been catastrophic if left unchecked. Of course, in that incident, the epicenter of the danger was Desert Bluffs."

"You think this could be the fallout from some Strexcorp experiment," says their local Li Hua. "Or maybe this is the experiment. Either way, this time they had the good sense to set it in the next town over, so if it had gone out-of-control it would have taken us out first."

"And if it works as planned, they walk out with the data from a successful test and the proceeds from a whole lot of condo sales," finishes Sherie. It's sound capitalist logic, in a bizarre Night Vale sort of way. "How did the last one end? Did you make it through without losing anyone?"

Keith hesitates. "It was solved through the intervention of...many of Juosukka Hirsti's tall companions." (Not reassuring.) "As well as the efforts of Dr. Ramirez and Mr. Palmero." (Better.) "Many people in town were lost, but all were later recovered."

"Hey, speaking of Ramirez," puts in Li Hua. "He went and touched a condo." (Back to not-reassuring.) "He's pretty out-of-it, but so far it sounds like Henriette's handling it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I'm telling you, this is completely unnecessary," protests Carlos, as Nirliq's colobus daemon lifts Isaña off the ground and holds her where her face and claws can't reach anything to fight back. Having a daemon with a shell for a spine can be really inconvenient sometimes. "I'm not hypnotized, I'm not under any kind of spell, I am completely in control of my actions. I just happen to be aware that the condos are perfect, and the vision inside it was amazing but incomplete, and I have to go back and see the rest."

Nirliq doesn't respond to his impeccable logic, just turns to the webcam and says, "See?!"

Henriette and Quentin are both leaning into the frame of the camera on the other end. "Who let him touch the condo?" demands Quentin. "Was it you, Rayshawn?"

Rayshawn throws up his hands. "Man, how was I supposed to know that was gonna be a problem? Watch while I test for radiation, he said. He tested. I watched!"

"Out of the way, both of you," order Henriette. "Carlos, listen to me for a minute. Do you remember the first time we studied the dog park? Remember how Adriana got mesmerized, and tried to walk in, and you had to hold her back until she snapped out of it?"

"Sure, I remember," says Carlos. "But that was different! She thought she wanted to go, to a dangerous place, for no reason. I really do want to go, to a perfect place, for sound theological reasons."

"Uh-huh. Just humor me here. Remember how most of us didn't get swept up in that because we were distracted, thinking about other things? Do me a favor and think about whatever it was that distracted you. Really focus on it."

Carlos folds his arms. "I was mostly thinking about having sex with Cecil. Which would be a lot easier to do if we had our own condo!"

Henriette looks taken-aback. Rayshawn develops a sudden hacking cough. Quentin lets out a long oooooh...!, while Li Hua just cracks up. "Oh my god, hypnotized Carlos is great."

They're not the reactions Carlos expected, and it gives him pause. "I...don't usually say things like that, do I?"

"No," says Nirliq, eyebrows practically disappearing into her bangs. "No, you do not."

"And you really think I'm...under some kind of influence."

Nods from everyone.

"Okay." Carlos runs a hand through his hair. "Okay, so if I'm not, how would I prove it? If there's an experiment we could do...preferably something simple and fast, because I know you all have work to get back to...."

"The simplest and fastest thing to do isn't an experiment," says Henriette. "Is there still rope in the van?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos would still much rather be going back to the condo. But to be fair, he would rather be just about anywhere except tied into the van's passenger seat, his torso and upper arms lashed together and pinned to the fabric-covered back. The only reason he agreed was that the other simple and fast thing to do was locking Isaña in the trunk, and Carlos has had enough of his daemon being caged to last a lifetime.

At least she's safely in his lap. At least his hands and forearms are free. At least Rayshawn was kind enough to bring him his phone, and at least he has the comforting voice of Cecil on the radio to keep him company.

Or, well, the non-comforting voice. Cecil is reporting a clearance sale at Dark Owl Records: one more local business going under.

Not far off, Janis Rio lifts her octopus daemon out of his tank and leans against the wall of her condo, both of them wearing far-off smiles. They fall right through, leaving only the daemon's tank and Janis's body behind. Carlos gazes wistfully at his own cube. Now that would be comforting.

He dials Cecil's number before he really thinks about it, and hears the ringtone on-air in tandem with the one close to his ear. Having his elbow pinned means he can't quite hold up the phone normally, but he can get close enough. "Hello, Cecil. Are you there?"

"Carlos?" asks Cecil, his voice eerily doubled. "Hi. Um, I'm on the air. I'm still doing the show."

"Right, no, I know," says Carlos cheerfully. He can hear it, after all. "It's just — I got a condo. A condo for us."

Cecil stammers and splutters in stereo. Carlos pushes on over it, trying to explain what he saw. His team might not understand, but surely Cecil will get it, right?

"You touched the condo?" interrupts Cecil, focusing on what is clearly the least interesting part of the story. "Don't! Don't touch the condo. Don't touch it again!"

Carlos starts to repeat the part about the flasks full of liquid — and all the liquids bubbling! — when someone grabs the phone out of his hand. "¿Hola, Cecil? This is Rayshawn, from the theology team. Carlos is a little hypnotized right now, but don't worry, we have everything under —"

Carlos gets up.

"— we are going to have to call you back," finishes Rayshawn, and ends the call. "Hey, can I get a little help over here?"

Carlos can still hear Cecil's voice calling after him as he walks toward the condo, Isaña trotting along at his heels. Should he be worried? No, probably not — Cecil will come join him in the condo eventually. That's the plan, right?

And it isn't like he's breaking his promise to Henriette. His body is exactly where she told him to keep it: tied up in the car.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The nightmarish, majestic new cityscape is exactly how it was described on the radio. Tamika and her companions park directly to the north.

One of the book club's borrowed gyropters — entirely gilded in gold and silver, with the cursive letters M-V embossed on its flanks (Vansten has a whole fleet, he won't miss five or six for the afternoon) — hovers at rooftop level, and drops a football-sized bloodstone onto the asphalt. The co-pilot, a girl the same age as Tamika but already taking advanced geometry classes, astral-projects herself down to street level and shows them where to put it.

This is the ninth one. She'll text once all thirteen are in place, so Tamika can send the signal, and then...they pray.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Inside the pocket dimension is strangely soothing.

The atmosphere is dense, almost liquid; Isaña floats easily, and Carlos wishes he'd brought his physical form so he could find out if it floats too, and how well it breathes. There's no obvious source for the distant light above them. It's like being under the ocean, everything dark and blue-tinted and dappled in shadow.

Are we still mesmerized? he wonders. Or are we lucid again, just really relaxed?

We're thinking about this as a pocket dimension rather than a 'condo', points out Isaña. That's probably a good sign.

And we can see the flasks of liquid aren't real now, adds Carlos. Or the notebooks with all the numbers.

He isn't disappointed. They're not real, but they're not exactly illusions, either. If anything, they feel like a rough approximation of something infinitely more meaningful. As if he's suspended in the presence of the Platonic ideal of experimental theology, and these symbols are just the way his senses translate it into something his mind can grasp.

It's so pure. So rarefied. So perfect. He and his daemon can float here and simply be, the undiluted essence of Carlos the Experimental Theologian....

No Magisterium here, Isaña reminds him.

That's right. He doesn't need to filter anything through their terms, does he? Not even in the most cursory of ways. They can be nothing more or less than Carlos el Cientifico.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette gets to the abandoned naptha station about two minutes before Cecil. They've untied Carlos's body — don't want to accidentally cut off the blood flow to any of his limbs while his mind isn't present to stop it — and laid him out on the grass. His eyes are glazed, his daemon missing, and even though Henriette can see the rise and fall of his chest, she keeps checking his pulse to confirm that he isn't (yet) a corpse.

"Astral projecting!" she calls, as Cecil throws himself out of his car and sprints toward them with Khoshekh right behind. Carlos will look even more like a dead body to Cecil, who can see at a glance that his ghost is missing too. "Don't ask me where he learned, but he did it. Isaña followed."

Cecil cycles through several emotions in seconds: horror, grief, determination. "Which one did they go into?"

"Whoa, hang on, you can't go in there too," says Rayshawn. "Ain't safe —"

Cecil whirls on him, Khoshekh's teeth bared — and the clear mauve sky echoes with the world's most conveniently-timed thunderclap. "Which one?"

Rayshawn shrinks backward. Nirliq takes a half-step in front of him and wordlessly points to the condo in question.

Cecil leaps out of his own body so hard it topples forward face-first.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos has no idea how much time has passed when the atmosphere in his perfect sub-dimension changes.

Snow-capped mountains carve a line through the sky on a distant horizon. The Northern Lights dance overhead, lancing rose and blue and violet against the blackness of the night. And above him all light is blotted out, by the massive silhouette of a dark planet lit by no sun.

What higher-order concept of existence all this might be reflecting, Carlos has no idea. Still, he knows that it is pure and kind and beautiful, and he loves it dearly.

Familiar arms wrap around him from behind.

Cecil, he realizes, clasping Cecil's hands to his chest. Of course. My Cecil. You came after me.

Cecil's head rests on his shoulder. I did. My dear Carlos. Now let me bring you back.

Am I thinking clearly? asks Carlos, as Khoshekh winds around Isaña like a furry inner tube. He might not be sure of his own senses, but he trusts Cecil's. I see and feel that everything around us is perfect. Is that true? Or is something tricking me into thinking that?

Cecil hesitates. If something is tricking you...then it has me too. This is perfect. For us, everything here is the way to perfection. I understand.

Then — let's stay! thinks Carlos. He isn't sure he could move if he wanted to, but he doesn't want to. Stay with me. Let me be Carlos Perfecto for you, by objective scientific standards. Stay where I don't have to be the Carlos who forgets to show up for dates, who gets his team members killed or turned into trees because he didn't do the right preliminary research, who accidentally sells out a whole town. Leave behindCarlos Traidor, Carlos Culpable, Carlos Que Mastica Odiosamente Fuerte. Stay.

The sunless planet rotates overhead as Cecil lets this sink in. As he thinks about having perfect Carlos...or perhaps about becoming perfect Cecil, about no longer frustrating Carlos by oversharing on the radio, or making terrible eggs that Carlos has to fight to choke down, or being helpless to repair the ragged holes in his memory where an older brother used to be.

Not that Carlos loves him any less for all of that, but, but —

No.

Cecil clings to him, more tightly than ever before...and pulls.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I know the local regulations, Officer, and I appreciate the position you're in," says Henriette in Spanish, as placatingly as she can when she's only about 65% sure there's any chance of getting either Carlos or Cecil back...and, just to spice things up, there's a loaded gun aiming at the ground perilously close to her feet. (God, she needs a drink.) "But we cannot allow you to take these bodies right now."

"It isn't a question of letting, ma'am," says the officer with the green tree-frog daemon, whom Henriette is politely trying to pretend she doesn't recognize as the ambiguously-gendered sibling of Francis Donaldson from the Antiques Mall. "The Sheriff's secret police do not need permission or warrants to seize certain types of property, so I really need you to move aside —"

"You heard the person, Henriette," cuts in Li Hua. "Move over. It'll give me a clearer shot."

She's well-concealed behind the hood of the van, rifle loaded and ready to fire. (Rayshawn is back there too; he's just hiding. Nirliq is the only one here who's still trying to do research.) "Nobody is shooting anybody," says Henriette firmly.

"I'm a faster draw than she is anyway," says the officer.

"I have a double," counters Li Hua. "You take out either one of us, Germaine Donaldson, and I guarantee the other will hunt you down and gut you like a seventh-grade biology project."

Germaine's balaclava-clad frog hides behind their leg.

"Incoming!" calls Nirliq. "From the condo!"

While her daemon keeps his eyes on Germaine, Henriette glances at the cube that swallowed Carlos. Then she whips out her electrum spyglass.

She's just in time to see the massive swirl of Rusakov particles gathering in front of the portal's rippling surface, before two figures topple backward out of it like a comet, like a firework.

The nearest danger meter starts chiming, using the loud, insistent tone that means the local Rusakov concentration has shot to a level so high its readings are no longer accurate. Henriette herself has to squint against the brilliance, the blaze of intention, so thick the two human silhouettes are nearly blotted out.

...and is there a third figure with them, trailing after Carlos?

For the first time, she lowers the spyglass in order to see better.

And then all she sees is the guy who used to give exams with questions about cartoons on them, getting half-dragged, half-carried by a boyfriend who dresses like an extra from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. No phantom extra figure. Just her friends.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Okay, Sherie thought she was "in the zone."

When another bloodstone circle activates around hers, this one hundreds of times larger and run by a dozen people who have been practicing since before they learned to walk, she realizes she barely knows enough to appreciate how much she is not in the zone.

She does get a few moments to admire the geometry of it before quietly passing out.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos still has that floaty, underwater sense of buoyancy as Cecil pulls him from the soothing darkness to somewhere too bright to see. They stumble to what must be the ground; Cecil scrambles to pick him up; his business-casual chapel coat drifts around him as he clings to Cecil's shoulders.

Khoshekh flows through the air beside them with his usual grace (although Carlos doesn't miss that his tail is puffed up to three times its usual size), carrying Isaña in his mouth like a kitten.

His metaphorical-equivalent-of-eyes have adjusted better by the time Cecil staggers to a stop. Everything is still bright, like a TV set with the contrast up too high, but he can pick out his own body and Cecil's lying on the grass, with his teammates and a cop gathered around. We're...back?

"We're back," murmurs Cecil, sinking to his knees so Carlos ends up in his lap. The astral projection makes him sound distorted, washed-out. "We're home free."

Carlos is the most confused mess of feelings he's ever been. He's glad to be with Cecil, and already he senses the pocket dimension wasn't as perfect as it seemed, but he can't mirror the simple relief in Cecil's voice. Existence in the real world is as difficult as it is exciting, and regrets are heavy.

"My Carlos imperfecto."

...That helps.

"Is he okay?" asks Nirliq from behind the electrum-lens-fitted camera. Oh, thank goodness someone thought to film this the first time, because Carlos is never, ever doing it again. "Can he hear us?"

I'm in my right mind again, most likely, and yes, I can hear you. Did you get all that on camera? If yes, I'm making you a trophy.

"He can," says Cecil. "You just can't hear him. Carlos, you need to get back in your body now, okay? I don't mean to be alarmist, but this kind of projection you're doing, especially as a novice...it's a little dangerous."

Carlos pulls him into a quick hug, then gives the rest of the team a thumbs-up, meeting their eyes one by one. Rayshawn and Li Hua wave in acknowledgment from behind the van (where they're hiding, for some reason). Nirliq returns the gesture. Henriette's eyes and nose are red from not-quite-crying, so Carlos puts in the extra focus to make his projected image mouth it's okay, it's okay. She nods, and gestures for him to hurry up already.

Sliding his legs off of Cecil's lap, Carlos looks over his own body — on its back in the grass, not all well-ordered like a corpse in a casket, just casually flopped there like it's asleep — and experimentally puts his hand on his hand.

It goes right through.

Isaña, standing beside the not-exactly-joined hands, suddenly jumps and skitters backward, staring at something behind him. Carlos! What's that?

Carlos follows her gaze, and catches his non-existent breath. There's a familiar figure standing in the near distance, not far from the edge of his condo. Daemonless. Genderless. Almost colorless.

Cecil looks too. "What is it? Is something there?"

I don't like it, thinks Isaña, her whole body shaking. Khoshekh hunkers down next to her, eyes wide and ears pricked, trying to see. Make it go away, Carlos!

It's okay. It's not coming any closer. Not today, thinks Carlos firmly, addressing his death as much as his daemon. The last time his ghost left his body, it was with the death's help, so hopefully the figure is just confused. It isn't malevolent, at least. There are very few sure things in experimental theology, but this is one of them. Help me out here, Cecil. How do I get re-embodied? What's the first step?

"There aren't really, um, steps." Cecil waves his metaphorical hands vaguely in the air. "You just sort of go. Maybe it'll help if I demonstrate?"

His projection promptly vanishes, and his body's eyes fly open, back arching with a gasp.

And Carlos still has no idea how he did it.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The condo cubes are fading. The sections of homes and buildings they displaced are returning, though visibly older, more dilapidated, more worn.

Now that the process is in motion, it should roll to completion on its own.

Tamika would prefer to keep the prayer going anyway, but there's a sharp, crackling explosion in the sky overhead. One of their gyropters has sent up a bright yellow flare: They're coming. Scatter.

She gives it a count of ten, to make sure everyone else has a chance to cut their praying short, then hefts the nearby lunch-box-sized bloodstone off the ground. If they make good time, she might even get back to school before meteorology ends.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Finally!" exclaims Germaine Donaldson. "Now, I'm going to need you to sign a couple of forms testifying that you are no longer disembodied —"

"If you don't back off," growls Henriette, "I will tell the Li Huas they have my blessing to relive seventh-grade bio."

Cecil is more sanguine about it. "We'll sign them together. Oof," he grunts, levering himself up on his elbows with slow, stiff motion. "Give us a minute."

He touches Carlos's face (the real one). Carlos (the projected one) can't feel it. Maybe if he lines his ghost up with his body...right now he's kinda sitting in the middle of his pelvis, which is a start....

Think about sensation.

Carlos frowns at the death. It's closer now, although still keeping a distance, maybe in deference to how badly it scares Isaña. What do you mean?

"What does who mean?" whispers Cecil.

Touch. Taste. Smell. Bodily sensations, confirms Carlos's death. Think about them. I understand it helps.

Think about being embodied, paraphrases Carlos. We can do that.

"He's talking to someone or something that I cannot hear," Cecil explains to the others. "It's very disorienting."

Carlos can practically hear his teammates rolling their eyes.

He remembers the feeling of rolling his eyes. Followed by the feeling of laughing so hard his sides hurt. The way his mouth went all tingly after the first spoonful of Existential Pistachio Crunch. The refreshing shock of pouring a cold water bottle over himself on a hot, sticky Night Vale afternoon, and having a cool wet T-shirt cling to his skin. The weight of a bowling ball in hand, and the stretch of muscles as he sends it rolling down the aisle.

(The way Cecil's fingers are still caressing his cheek suggest a whole other subset of sensations, but Carlos refuses to sex-talk himself back into corporeal form. Not in front of his co-workers or his death.)

Wading through the snow on campus when they hadn't plowed our shortcut yet. The way it crunched under your feet, volunteers Isaña. The taste of Mamá's lasagna, with extra cheese. That bitter smell the Asriel emulsion gets halfway through simmering.

Above, the racket of gyropters intensifies, as one of the silver-gilded ones flees directly over their heads...and, across the lot, a trio in sunshine-yellow roar into view.

Carlos thinks about the flap of a Strexcorp brochure hitting him in the face. About the tenderness of the nape of Cecil's neck under his fingers, freshly chipped and tattooed. The various pains of waking up with recent bruises, bites, stings. The heart-pounding adrenaline as Cecil swerved the car past a group of buzzing shadow-beings. The swelling of his throat and the seizing of his lungs when he collapsed onto the shale of an otherworldly cave.

He doesn't get the dramatic spasm and shuddering deep breath that Cecil did, just a small twitch, and then, "Oh — oh, ow."

"We're okay!" adds Isaña to the team. "Just pins-and-needles."

Cecil looks around in alarm. "Where?"

Carlos smiles, even though his face is as tingly and prickling as all of his limbs plus his torso. His whole body must have fallen asleep. "Not literal. An expression. It's fine. Thank you — thank you, everyone — it worked. I'm okay."

"No lingering desire to enter any black cubical 3-D portals?" asks Nirliq hopefully. She and Rayshawn are both alert and watchful, prepared for the situation to do another one-eighty at any moment. Henriette, meanwhile, is on her knees hugging her marmot daemon, looking like she couldn't juggle another crisis today if she wanted to.

"None." Carlos's arm explodes with prickles as he moves it to cling to the end of Cecil's neckwear-of-the-day (a lacy scarf crocheted out of red-and-pink yarn). Cecil wraps a protective hand around his own. "Not interested."

"You sure about that?" asks Li Hua. "What if they had lots of notebooks full of numbers and charts?"

Carlos's face heats up. "That made more sense than it sounded like," he protests. "Oh — did I — was it on air I said...?"

Cecil's grip on his arm suddenly tightens, nails digging in through the chapel coat. "Carlos? Your car radio. Did someone turn it off?"

Everyone goes quiet, looking at the dashboard of the van.

The weather isn't playing any more.

Nothing else is playing, either.

Until the pleasantly bored voice from half of the campaign ads crackles through the air. "Hola de nuevo, radioescuchas," says the Faceless Old Woman who lives in all of their homes. "Cecil aún no ha vuelto. Supongo que somos sólo ustedes y yo ahora."

"Oh, no," breathes Cecil. "No, no, no, oh beams help us no."

Germaine Donaldson clears their throat. "Can I offer you a priority high-speed ride to the radio station, Señor Palmero?"

"Yes!" Cecil springs to his feet, nearly tripping over Carlos in his hurry. "Yes, please. And on the way, I swear to you, I will fill out any forms you want."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos sits for Nirliq's camera and recounts everything he can remember about the experience. Everything except the details about his death. Documentation is important, but some things are personal.

To his relief, Khoshekh stays with them. In four-eye, so if anything goes wrong where Cecil is, Carlos will be the first to know.

The portals are gone. Janis Rio is gone, and a lot of other people with her. The Sheriff's secret police are collecting bodies from the once-more-vacant lot behind the Raúl's (still with that massive hole in the ground from last year's Eternal Scout ceremony), the parking lot of the strip mall, the roads that lead off between the houses. Carlos can only hope their deaths will find a way to reach their ghosts.

Other people who were on the condo interest list never got sucked in at all, and Carlos sends Nirliq and Rayshawn off to do interviews, to find out whatever they can.

Henriette compares experimental notes with Quentin (via webcam) and Köhler (via the Li Huas, briefly, before they take off to negotiate with the secret police for biological samples). Carlos listens, still flexing his sore muscles to make sure the feeling is coming back properly. His brain is spinning on ideas for how the bloodstone circles might have interacted with multidimensional portals — he'll want to hear Sherie's account firsthand, and hopefully something from a few of their mystery rescuers, before settling on which theories to chase — when Cecil comes back on-air.

Cecil saw the mountains too. And the dark planet. And bare-armed figures swaying on a vast, bleak tundra.

As Cecil launches into a soliloquy on the value of imperfection, Isaña leans against Khoshekh. "I know this may not be the best time to ask," she begins. "Partly because in the wake of serious personal danger is not the most emotionally stable time and therefore not ideal for making major life decisions, partly because this specific danger was so intent on manipulating the idea of home, or at least the pretense of it...although if we had stayed in that other dimension I guess technically it would have become "home" by virtue of us existing there, because there are lots of theologically valid definitions of "home"...but the fact is that we were considering, before all this happened, if it would, more broadly speaking, be an appropriate time in our relationship...with due consideration for the fact that time is not real anyway...do you think that, you know, given theology, and everything, you would want to...make a home together?"

Khoshekh starts purring.

Carlos's heart is in his mouth, expecting the answer to come through Khoshekh, so he only notices the tail-end of Cecil saying "...want to...make a home together?"

They're still in four-eye. Carlos's awkward (and personal!) babbling is still making it on-air, and he doesn't even have the excuse of being hypnotized this time.

"...and I said yes!" squeals Cecil, and it's the most beautiful sound Carlos has ever heard. "Yes, that — that would be neat!"

Leaning on the side of the van, Carlos gazes blissfully through the open window at the radio.

"But somewhere else, okay?" continues Cecil. "A duplex, or an apartment, or...I don't think a condo."

"No, not a condo," agrees Carlos.

"And then he said, No, not a condo."

"I had something else to ask too, but if you keep repeating all this on the radio I'm not going to."

"And then he said...." Cecil trails off. "Listen...he thinks I shouldn't tell you everything."

"But tell me," purrs Khoshekh, from his position hovering above Isaña's shell.

Carlos does.

 

-{,(((,">

 

By the time they start packing up the equipment, Carlos has a long to-do list. Data to look at. Tests to run on their bloodstones. Tests to have the team run on himself and Isaña, and on the body of Roger Singh, and on Leann Hart and her rainbow lorikeet daemon (who got a condo but weren't swept in, and who agreed on the condition that the Night Vale Daily Journal gets exclusive print rights, and no bloggers are allowed to watch).

And he has to call Mamá and say that yes, he'll be bringing that sweet radio boy of his home for Christmas.

He's just helping Rayshawn lift the folding table into the trunk when Khoshekh lets out a keening whine and hits the ground with a thump.

Carlos manages to get the table the whole way in, then drops to his knees next to the margay daemon...who's shaking all over, limbs convulsively contracting and stretching like a human having a seizure. "Honey, what's wrong?"

"Stay back," pants Khoshekh. His tail, freshly-puffed, whips to swat Isaña away, and Carlos can't tell if it was deliberate or just a well-timed muscle spasm. "Be fine. Couple minutes."

"Has this happened before?" Could Carlos have missed his boyfriend having a seizure disorder? "How can you be sure it isn't getting worse?"

"Carlos. Dear Carlos. T-trust —"

Another convulsion cuts him off. Carlos whips out his phone and practically throws it at Rayshawn, the nearest other person handy. "Go into the contacts and call Night Vale General, understand?"

Khoshekh's middle legs kick against the scrubby grass. "Don't!"

"Then who should we call?" If this is the kind of thing only Josie could have handled, Carlos is holding Strexcorp personally responsible for —

Oh.

"Steve," pants Khoshekh a few moments later. He's still quaking, but the violent spasms seem to be calming down. "Just Steve. Tell him — pick up Cecil." He whuffs in disapproval. "And — tell him he's a lousy engineer."

Notes:

Carlos Traidor, Carlos Culpable, Carlos Que Mastica Odiosamente Fuerte = traitorous Carlos, guilty Carlos, Carlos who chews obnoxiously loudly.
Hola de nuevo, radioescuchas. Cecil aún no ha vuelto. Supongo que somos sólo ustedes y yo ahora. = Hello again, listeners. Cecil is still gone. I guess it’s just you and me now. (from the translation by ElizaWinter)

Chapter 12: Future Plans

Summary:

Dana climbs the basalt tower. Carlos helps Cecil and Khoshekh recover from corporate discipline, and they talk about this moving-in plan. Plus: Henriette's adventures in drunk-dialing Strexcorp.

Notes:

More art: some interns, Dana, Vithya, and Maureen; and some witches, Cecil's mother, Josie, Serafina Pekkala, and Paivi Feldt.

Night Vale.

On the ride to Steve's apartment, Khoshekh starts to fall asleep. "Sedation," he mumbles to Carlos and Isaña, both of whom have been watching him like a hawk for any more signs of distress. "Don't worry. Not th' bad kind."

He's dozing when the bus reaches their stop. The driver extends a ramp when Carlos asks, and Isaña tugs the gently-floating margay down to the sidewalk.

In the lobby, an unfamiliar woman's voice answers when Carlos rings the bell. At first he thinks he's hit the wrong button. "Sorry, I was looking for Steve...."

"Who is this?"

"Um, Carlos. The experimental theologian."

The door buzzes open.

The same woman is in Steve's apartment. She's arguing with someone on the phone — "Either you keep taking our good Hispanian money, or we find another supplier, and that's all there is to it" — and splitting her attention with a pot of rice and sauce on the stove. Her daemon, a small, skinny lizard with a dark green-brown back and yellow-white pinstripes, rides on the shoulder of her matching blazer.

She looks vaguely familiar, but Carlos can't put a name to her face. "Excuse me? Excuse me!"

"Hang on a minute, I've got to take this," says the woman into the phone. She presses a button, then looks at Carlos. "What do you need?"

Carlos doesn't beat around the bush. "Who are you and what are you doing here?"

Maybe he's being rude. If, for instance, this is Renée's mother (she's not peninsular the way both Renée and Steve are, but genetics can play tricks like that sometimes), she has far more claim to being here than he does. But he isn't taking any risks.

The woman sighs and transitions into a sweet, professional smile. "Hannah Gutierrez. I'm here because I picked Renée up from school today, and decided to stay and make sure there was something wholesome to eat in the house before her father leaves for his date tonight. Assuming he doesn't stay in working on Cecil until sunrise."

"So they're here? Steve and Cecil?"

"Do you see them anywhere? Now, if you don't mind, I have to make sure the store still has fruit in stock next week." She goes back to her phone. "Sorry about that, Marco. As I was saying...do we have a deal?"

Carlos sets Khoshekh to rest in a heap on the couch in the TV room, then does a quick check of the other rooms, because Do you see them anywhere is not the same as They aren't here. The bathroom, the bloodstone circle room, Steve's bedroom, and Renée's bedroom are all empty when he peeks in. That just leaves the room Carlos is absolutely forbidden to enter.

He doesn't try. Instead he returns to the couch, where he lifts Isaña onto the cushions so she can snuggle up against Khoshekh, before taking a seat beside them.

Sure enough, a few minutes later Steve and Renée come out of the forbidden room, both wearing dusty old T-shirts and peeling off gloves. "And that's why the anbarodes are made out of iridium?" asks Renée, her daemon loping along beside her as a black-and-white colobus (the same family as Nirliq's daemon, but with fur that matches their father's badger).

"Exactly."

"But how come you can't insulate them with —"

"Just a minute, hon, let's say hi to Señor Carlos." Steve nods to Carlos, while Taeminlahn hops up on the couch to touch noses with Isaña. "Glad you could make it. Would you mind staying for a few hours? Cecil was scheduled to babysit, so of course he had to go get himself incapacitated for the evening, and I don't want to impose on Hannah any longer than I have to."

"Dad!" protests Renée. "I don't need a babysitter. I'm old enough to look out for myself!"

She's carrying a keychain, a cartoonish little rubber frog that squeaks when you squeeze its tummy. As she talks, she twirls it up into her hand and starts squeezing, making a series of short chirps and slightly-longer whistles.

"You never know when you'll need backup. No matter how old you are," replies Steve. "And gyropter is spelled —"

He steps over to the nearest wall and taps briskly against it with his knuckles, a sequence of short and long. Morse code.

"I'd be happy to stay," says Carlos, addressing the out-loud conversation rather than whatever's going on in the coded one. "And, listen, Renée — there was a pretty big commotion downtown today, that got fixed by a bunch of well-coordinated kids in borrowed gyropters. My team would love to interview some of the people who were involved in that. Is there any chance you could help us out?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

In the gutted, stripped shell of the basalt fortress, Dana takes the stairs.

"Depth brought knowledge," she reasons out loud, as she works her way up to the next landing. "But I seem to have exhausted the limits of depth. So it makes sense to follow that with height."

Next on her list is breadth: crossing the vast desert wasteland to the Clouded Mountain. If necessary, when she reaches it, she can give height another try.

Her other option is projection, and Dana does not want to try that again. Not unaided. Not when there looms the possibility of appearing next to strange, eyeless, blood-covered duplicates of people she knows, who turn to her with jagged smiles and address her as one of their own broken friends.

She sends Cecil a series of descriptive texts along the way, keeping him up-to-date. Whatever version of him they may or may not be reaching.

Climbing the tall, fortified central tower. The keep?

Is it still a keep if it isn't part of a castle?

Sun very bright today

Reached the top. Stairs open on a wide circular platform, maybe 30ft across

The basalt bricks up here are dull and grainy. Dana can see the platform is surrounded by a safety wall anchored by steel poles — some of the rare metal that has survived here — and interspersed with stone pinnacles. She'll need to move a few steps higher before she can see the tops of these, but the shadows they cast across the floor of the platform are not regular. They look almost decorative. Like sculptures.

Weird soda rows

^Shadows

Sorry, autocorrect

Cloud cover now

Going out to take a look

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Alone in her room, with a playlist of wailing prog rock and a half-empty bottle of something labeled in Modified Sumerian, Henriette grips an orange-lettered business card so roughly it bends the cardstock and waits for her phone to ring.

She is so done with these people. And it's about time they knew it.

The other end of the line picks up. "Zariya Thiébaut's office," says a smile-wreathed voice.

"Good," snaps Henriette. It's the Strexcorp employee who came to visit their chapel. Henriette hadn't been 100% sure the business cards she gave out were genuine, but it looks like yes. "You put her on."

"To hear this menu in English, press nine. If you know your party's extension, dial it now."

Oh.

Henriette frowns at the dancing numbers on her keypad, and jabs the nine.

"For a list of office hours, press one," continues the automated voice. "If you are a business associate, press two. If you would like to schedule an appointment, press three. To leave a message, press four or stay on the line."

It would be fastest to press four, but Henriette's hands are shaking and if she hits the wrong buttons she'll probably end up committing to drive a shipment of Strex-brand widgets from here to Florida for 30% off. She waits.

"Please leave a message with your name, your position of employment, and a callback number after the tone. Have a productive day!"

"Productive," mutters Henriette. "I'll productive your...."

The phone chirps at her.

"Hello, Dr. Thiébaut? This is Henriette Gaillard. Independent goddamn theologian, Night Vale research team. And I don't know who you are, or where you fit in the big ol' Strexcorp hierarchy, but you have got to talk to your bosses, or your bosses' bosses, and you tell them, you tell them to knock it the hell off."

Yeah, that feels good.

"Because I don't know what your safety protocols are, but the thing is? They're not working. Unless your safety protocol is 'sit back and wait for someone from Night Vale to save our asses.' Because that is working great. We saved your asses back in July. A bunch a' middle-schoolers saved your asses today. Except the thing is? The thing is, you have got no guarantee that's gonna keep working! One of these days you are gonna break the whole damn world, and we are not —"

"Dr. Gaillard! I'm so glad I caught you."

Henriette stops short, and drops the finger she had been shaking vigorously at thin air. "Wha?"

"This is Dr. Thiébaut, publicity coordinator, Strexcorp Labs physics department." She's using Spanish with a thick accent that sounds mostly French, but not like any of the versions of French Henriette is familiar with. "You are dissatisfied with the results of some of our work, is that correct?"

For a couple of seconds Henriette just splutters, trying to recover her cool. "Yeah," she says at last, in shaky Spanish. "Yeah, you're damn right we're dissatisfied."

"Strexcorp is always looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our research," says Thiébaut amiably. "I myself was stationed in this area during the incident in July, when we had to shut down operations for an entire evening due to personnel shortages. It was very unpleasant! Not at all in line with the company ethos."

"You were in...this area?" echoes Henriette. She means this world, right? Which means...since Strex was only in Desert Bluffs back then, and Desert Bluffs was at the epicenter of the whole thing...she's implying she would've spent some time as a buzzing shadow-being. Right?

"I certainly was. So you can understand why I — like all of Strexcorp — have only the best interests of the greater Desert Bluffs metropolitan area at heart. Why don't we sit down for a business lunch, you and I, and talk in more detail about how to make that happen?"

"What? No!" This is the Strex official who put a bug on Carlos the first time she had a chance to shake hands with him, and she thinks she can just invite a Night Vale theologian out for burgers and pleasant conversation? Henriette is only drunk, here, she's not a moron. "I am not having lunch with you!"

"Suit yourself," says Thiébaut. "I will pass your criticisms on to my manager. If you ever change your mind...well, you have my number! Pleasure talking to you."

She hangs up.

Henriette is still staring at her phone when there's a knock on the bedroom door.

"Jus' a second!" She pulls on a bathrobe over her nightgown, cinches it tight, then she and her marmot daemon pad over to the door. Rayshawn is on the other side, little blue frog riding on his shoulder. His room is in the other house, so he must have come over for something specific. "What is it?"

"Uh, is this a bad time?" asks the archaeologist. "I can come back tomorrow."

"It's not a great time," admits Henriette. "Can you make it quick?"

"Yeah, all right. I just need to know how...I mean, what's the procedure for...You know what? I'm just gonna go grab Dr. Köhler."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Renée finds a stack of paper and a set of crayons, takes Carlos into the relative privacy of the bloodstone circle room, and starts drawing him diagrams.

When they come out, the stove is off, Hannah and Steve are both gone, and the couch has been unfolded into a bed with Cecil and Khoshekh asleep on top of it. Carlos and Renée tiptoe past.

They help themselves to a couple of plates of Hannah's rice dish. (Something spicy and broadly curry-like.) Carlos doesn't know if he can keep quizzing Renée for details out here, or should talk about something else. How do you make small talk with ten-year-olds?

They eat in silence, though, and just as they're finishing up Cecil comes into the kitchen, yawning and stretching like he's just come from a good long nap. "Hi, Carlos. Hey, Renée. What did I miss?"

Carlos fixes him a plate. Renée shares the distasteful news that her father is on a date, then announces she's going to eat dessert in her room. There's an awkward pause in which Carlos and Cecil try to figure out if this is allowed — and, if not, whose job it is to stop her — and before they recover, the kid has disappeared, along with what looks like half the contents of the cookie jar.

Resigning himself to the fact of being outmaneuvered by a ten-year-old yet again, Carlos lets it go. It's more important to make sure Cecil is okay. He can't be totally recovered yet; Khoshekh is still asleep on the couch. "How are you feeling?"

"Deeply gratified that my new management has not been able to work out how to use the Dark Box," says Cecil, as lightly as he can. "It stings, sure, but it could have been much worse! Why, if I remember correctly, Steve and I got me up the stairs all on our own, without having to bother the neighbors. That's practically a first."

Carlos swallows. "I — I'm really sorry."

"You? Whatever for?"

"Because you missed part of the show to come rescue me...."

His hands are clasped together on the tabletop. From the chair beside him, Cecil lays his fingers over Carlos's wrist and squeezes. "Carlos. I missed part of the show...because my program director, in her infinite wisdom, decided to interfere with the run time of the weather."

The implications take a minute to sink in.

When Carlos has processed it enough to speak, he whispers, "I hate them so much."

"They are awful," agrees Cecil. "Lesson learned, though! Never again will I leave during a broadcast without having the mobile broadcasting equipment along." He pauses. "Speaking of things I cannot afford to leave behind — the alethiometer —?"

"Khoshekh and I busted it out of your car. It's in my bag." In a Tupperware container lined with tissue paper. (It deserves a leather-bound, velvet-lined, custom-sculpted case, but they didn't have any of those lying around the chapel.)

Reassured, Cecil sets to devouring his not-quite-curry. "Korma," he identifies it, when Carlos asks. "Hannah's always been a big fan of Magadha food."

Soon enough Carlos retrieves the alethiometer, and loads their plates into the dishwasher while Cecil relocates to the pull-out couch to look some things up. Carlos joins him to find Khoshekh's head in his lap, the alethiometer's three large hands pointed at the Compass, the Cornucopia, and the Bird, and the fourth hand also pointing intently at the Cornucopia.

"My sense memories for some of the afternoon are a little scrambled," admits Cecil, as Carlos scoops Isaña into his lap and sits down beside them. "For instance, I have the impression that you were in the studio, although I know you stayed with Khoshekh and I was only seeing you through his eyes. But...you did ask, wherever you were, if we could move in together."

Carlos blushes. "Yeah. I did."

Cecil suppresses a squeak of fresh joy.

"And to come home with me at Christmas," adds Carlos, just in case he's forgotten.

"Yes! Yes, that too, I can absolutely do that," says Cecil. "I have so many vacation days saved up, you have no idea. But the moving-in. We should talk about that. I do want to! I totally want to, it's just, there are things we should maybe talk about first? Things we should be sure are all squared away before start picking out curtains. You know?"

"Of course! Yeah, we should probably make sure we're on the same page. About...stuff." Carlos puts an arm around Cecil's shoulders, and rests the other hand on Cecil's thigh. "The rest of the team will still be using the houses, so I don't have to worry about breaking a lease. How about you?"

Cecil sets the alethiometer on his knees and laces his fingers through Carlos's. "Well, um, the apartment is month-to-month. I just have to get them some notice before leaving. And since it's already so late in the year, they'll need me back in March for the vernal equinox maintenance chants, so you might have to do those on your own...do you feel up to it, or should we shoot for moving in no sooner than April?"

When it comes out that Carlos has never done a maintenance chant in his life, Cecil starts, then says ruefully that that explains "the things under the carpet." Carlos makes a mental note to check under all the carpets, as soon as he gets the chance to arm himself with a good strong bottle of bleach. And maybe a spear.

"We should take a look at our wills, too." Cecil laughs self-consciously. "I know you're supposed to update it every five years, but I don't think I've looked at mine more than once since the college course when I made it. Vieja Josie is probably still the executor...Anyway, on top of it being good practice, if we make a financial commitment together, and then something happens to one of us...we should be set up so the other isn't left hanging."

"Absolutely." Carlos doesn't remember which Night Vale catastrophe prompted him to make a will, but it's current. There's a bequest to Harvard in there, a lot of his equipment goes to the team, and everything else gets divided up among his siblings: not because they need it, more because they're the only people he would want to have it. Or at least, they were. "I'll put you on my life insurance policy, too."

"Your what?"

Carlos explains the concept of life insurance.

Cecil's mouth opens and closes several times. "I am not a businessman, Carlos, so maybe I am missing something obvious here, but how is that in any way a viable financial model?"

"There are a lot fewer accidental early deaths outside Night Vale, that's how. Also, people with high-risk occupations or family histories of health problems have to pay more. Oh, and you can't murder people for the insurance money! You don't get anything if you do that."

It doesn't seem like Cecil is totally convinced, but he's willing to let it go. He glances over their shoulders to make sure no one (except their secret-police observer, and possibly the Faceless Old Woman) is listening, then rests his head on Carlos's shoulder and switches into English. "There is one other thing. Kind of a big one."

"Go ahead."

"You see...if, one of these days, Steve and his big mouth should happen to get themselves in more trouble than they can get out of...I'm sort of his daughter's designated guardian."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Around the wall are pinnacles, and on each pinnacle is a sculpture. They are marble, veined with gold and bolted together with steel. They are the first element Dana has seen in this entire world that is made to be beautiful, rather than functional.

They are angels.

Tall and unclothed, with imposing figures and feathered wings, they stand sentry over the tower, all facing outward. Dana considers texting Cecil Found angels (not real), but she has a feeling that might just be confusing, so she picks one and approaches it, leaning on the top of the wall to get a look at its features from the front.

She is briefly distracted by the rest of what is beyond the wall. This still isn't high enough to disappear into the clouds, but the sloping mountainside at the base is awfully far away.

"Well," she says out loud, trying to reassure herself, "at least I can say that I have achieved height."

She raises her eyes to the face of the angelic statue...and catches her breath.

It reminds her of Kevin, a little. Partly because there are no eyes, just holes in the stone. Partly because the rest of the carved complexion is spattered with red.

Dana does a quick three-sixty, counting the pinnacles around her. Her first assumption was wrong! They are beautiful and functional. She is standing in the middle of a circle of thirteen bloodstones carved into angel faces.

She considers sending a text to Cecil about it, but if she stands close enough to the center of the circle and says a quick prayer, she should just be able to tell him in person....

As Dana is contemplating this, a fierce, avian shriek echoes across the sky.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Köhler ushers Henriette down to the kitchen, makes her start working on a glass of orange milk and a bowl of oatmeal, and tells Rayshawn to go ahead and book a flight. Henriette and Carlos are the only ones who can authorize a reimbursement, and Henriette knows when she's too sloshed to be doing money things, so Köhler promises he will make sure one of them takes care of it in the morning.

"And so we enter the fleeing-in-terror stage," mutters Henriette over her oatmeal. Her marmot daemon is curled up in an off-white heap of fur on the tile next to her chair, dozing softly. Köhler's binturong watches him in narrow disapproval. "You kinda missed that for the first wave, didn't you? And th' second wave...none of you actually fled. Mateo died, and Li Hua, well. Li Hua liked livin' here so much, she did it twice."

Köhler sits across from her and folds his hands on the tabletop. "Indeed."

"It was the archaeologists who left the first time, too," adds Henriette. "Maybe that's the problem. Maybe we should quit hiring archaeologists."

"I...suspect that is not the problem."

"It was a joke. Yeesh."

The problem, she knows, is that Rayshawn had the second-closest brush with the condos of anyone on the team. He was standing next to Carlos when they went to check out the sign-up line; it could easily have been him, not Carlos, who accidentally got put on the list. So it understandably freaked him out to see how easily Carlos's conscious mind was overwritten, and how nobody without a weird alethiometer-reading boyfriend made it back out of the portals after going in.

Well, it freaked Henriette out too, but you don't see her skipping town over it. No, she's doing the sensible thing: drinking to forget.

"I believe you should know that I am...concerned," says Köhler presently. "I am considering entreating one of the other women, with the exception of the Li Huas, or perhaps Dr. Ramirez, to search your room."

"Mm," says Henriette, trying to sound nonchalant. "How come Carlos? He's gay, that means he counts as a woman?"

"He is a long-time colleague. You have granted him a certain measure of trust. His...romantic preferences...are unrelated." Köhler twiddles his thumbs for a moment, then looks away and mutters, "You will note that I did not also cite Dr. Armenteros."

Henriette frowns. "Quentin's gay? You know that for a fact, or are you just assuming 'cause he's kinda...swishy? Because you know that's not th' same thing. It's a, what'sit. A Venn diagram."

Köhler looks about as flustered as she's ever seen him. "I have overheard...certain conversations, which indicate that Dr. Armenteros's...romantic preferences...include his own gender. I could not say for certain if this preference is...exclusive."

"Oh my god," mumbles Henriette, burying her face in her hands and giggling. "Wish I could go back in time, like, ten years, and tell myself that one day Keith Köhler would be sitting across from me, desperately trying to avoid using th' word bisexual. Wish I could see my face."

She thinks she's handling this whole thing pretty well, until Köhler gathers himself and says firmly, "I am also trying to avoid using the word alcoholism."

Ah.

Henriette is glad she's got her face covered, because she probably looks about as obviously guilty as Carlos tends to.

"Yeah, all right," she says at last, sitting up and giving her oatmeal a stir. "I had a bad day. And you're worried. I get it. But listen: drinking to forget, it's a proud local tradition. Y'know? I mean, remember that day Steve Carlsberg's kid came over to th' chapel, an' we all had to watch her? Usually Cecil babysits that kid. But he couldn't that day, because he was spending it recovering from th' doubles thing. How? Gettin' blind drunk, that's how. Right? And he didn't...like, he wasn't out driving, or anything. When he picked her up in the evenin' to take her home, he took the bus."

Köhler considers this. "So your argument is that I should withhold my concern until after you become a danger to yourself or others?"

"My argument is...is that I won't. Be a danger. Necessarily." Henriette decides not to mention drunk-dialing Strexcorp officials. That wasn't dangerous. Just probably not a great idea. "I...."

Her stomach lurches.

"'Scuse me," says Henriette, pushing back her chair and getting to the sink a split second before everything she's been ingesting comes back up.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

The sound — if it is from a living thing — heralds the first non-angelic living thing Dana has seen for...days? Weeks? However long it has been since she stepped out of that old oak door and into the light of the wrong sun.

For all she knows, it may be the only other creature in this universe.

"I can only pray that it isn't evil," she muses, as she hides in the shadow of the nearest angelic statue. "That wouldn't make for much company."

The plains and the desert spread out far beneath her, the wrecked vehicles strewn across the wasteland like pebbles in a sandbox. She can't pick out any trace of the door she slept under, however long ago that was. The other mountain and its blinking light are still suspended above the far horizon, the only visible motion coming from the clouds drifting around it and the shadows they cast.

Again, the bird-cry, echoing off the sides of the mountains.

Dana scours the pale-blue sky overhead, then takes another look down at the plains. She's high enough that a bird, if it is a bird, might be below her as easily as above. Everything is so distant, though. It strikes her that she might need glasses, and out here she would have no way to test....

A dark speck of movement. Low to the ground like a shadow, but under no cloud.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Steve gets home late enough that Cecil has made Renée brush her teeth and go to bed: with the lights out, although Carlos suspects her of reading by flashlight under the covers.

The grungy work clothes Steve was wearing when Carlos saw him earlier have been exchanged for something a lot more starched, pressed, and color-coordinated. Hopefully the smear of green on his collar is nothing more sinister than lipstick. And there's a spring in his step, one that mellows when he addresses Cecil, but doesn't entirely fade. "I see you're up."

"No thanks to you, Mr. Always Overdoes It On The Sedative," mutters Cecil. "Did you fix it this time?"

"You know perfectly well there's a limit to what I can do to the chip without cutting you open. And I think your oh-so-attentive employers would notice the scars," says Steve. "I tried something new. Either it works, or it doesn't."

"Oh, are those the options? Gee, Steve, thank you for that keen insight into basic logic."

Carlos puts a comforting hand on Cecil's shoulder. "Thank you for picking him up. And for doing what you could."

"We really appreciate it," puts in Isaña from by their feet. In a way that could mean her and Carlos, or Carlos-and-Isaña and Cecil-and-Khoshekh.

"Not a problem. Thank you for stepping in for Mr. Would Be Easier To Dose If He Ate On A Normal Schedule."

Cecil rolls his eyes. "And on that generous note, Steve, can I talk to you in the other room for a minute?"

He, Steve, and Steve's badger retreat to the TV room, while Khoshekh waits with Carlos and Isaña next to a bookshelf. There's a framed photo of Renée at eye level, a few years younger than she is now, in a soccer uniform with her daemon sitting prairie-dog-formed on the ball.

Cecil was quick to assure Carlos that all the financial responsibility for her would stay on Cecil, but honestly, Carlos had been more worried about the emotional issues than the monetary ones. Money issues are fixable. You can get more aggressive about grant applications and patent licenses; you can dial back your contributions to the Trimountaine Museum of Experimental Theology and the MIT Alumni Fund; if the need gets really desperate, you can always show up to one of Marcus Vansten's sexy pool parties in nothing but a chapel coat and a Speedo.

Keeping the world from falling apart for a kid who just lost a parent, now, that isn't something you can fix by pinching pennies and mugging for the local rich guy. Carlos is not prepared to sign up for the role of emergency step-parent. He's had enough trouble balancing work and Cecil, and Cecil is a grown adult who can deal with being disappointed. If Carlos ever got so wrapped up in an experiment that he failed to pick a child up from Girl Scouts....

So he told Cecil he couldn't commit to potential co-parenting. But he could certainly provide...backup. Be the default babysitter, the way Cecil is now. And he could do half the dishes and vacuuming and scraping scales off the walls for three people, as easily as two.

He stands up straighter when Steve and Cecil return. "So," says Steve, "if your boyfriend should happen to end up needing to open your home to a certain someone...you would be okay with that."

"That's right."

"You wouldn't interfere with his parenting decisions. Or at least, when he makes really questionable ones, you would try to redirect him in private. Not in front of the certain someone."

Cecil frowns. "What do you mean, when I make questionable decisions?"

"Keeping the certain someone's life stable would be the most important thing," says Carlos. "Besides, Cecil understands what kids around here need a lot better than I do. And, presumably, what kids in...certain family situations...need."

"Good to hear." Steve relaxes into a smile. "All right! When you two find a place, we'll drop by City Hall and get you to sign something that underlines that. Assuming the arrangement hasn't changed on our end, of course."

"It might change on your end?" asks Carlos. Last he heard, Steve's father was alive but in no condition to raise a kid, and his ex-wife...well, Cecil declared in no uncertain terms that if Renée's mother tried to claim custody, he would fight her over it. Carlos still isn't sure if he meant going to court (and since the former Mrs. Carlsberg now lives in a completely different state, that would be federal court...which is a culture clash Carlos would theoretically love to put to the test, but not if it meant risking people he cares about), or instigating some kind of ritual duel.

"What Steve is insinuating," says Cecil, "is that his latest clumsy attempt at a relationship might be going somewhere. And with hard work and dedication, he has managed to overcome his miserable taste in romantic partners, so it might even be somewhere promising."

Steve looks sheepish, but pleased. "What can I say? She's smart, she's funny, she thinks I make great scones. And she has a kid herself, so she understands how it gets. We're about at the stage where all four of us start going places together, and cross our fingers the girls take it well."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

The distant figure is small and brown and winged. As it wheels higher through the air, Dana sees its silhouette more clearly: sharp leathery angles, a long beak, a stiff crest at the back of its head.

It's a pterodactyl, she thinks, followed quickly by Oh—!

With all the power in her lungs, she shouts, "UP HERE!"

There is no response — of course there isn't, Dana has many abilities but a supernatural Voice is not one of them — anything she says at this distance will be lost to the wind.

So instead, she backs up into the center of the bloodstone circle, focuses, and leaps out of her body.

She doesn't leave this world or this time. She wasn't trying to. All she has to do is send her projection racing along the currents of Rusakov particles that drift around this sky. Fine and thin as they are, she has a strong circle to lean on, and an unparalleled force of determination.

Her ghost whirls around Eustathias, a hurricane in miniature.

"Dana!" cries her daemon, switching in a flash to a six-foot-long red-gold snake of a dragon, with long curved horns and a crocodile grin. She spirals in midair like an anbaric coil. "Dana, where are you?"

"On top of the basalt fortress. Come on!"

It is infinitely easier to follow the currents in Eustathias' wake. They soar together to the tower, where Dana lands back in her body while Eustathias turns into something puffy and light, bounces off the stone platform, then becomes a bear-sized black dog with piercing yellow eyes. Sweltering as it is up here on the sun-baked rock, they scramble to each other, Dana burying her face in her daemon's fur.

"I was so concerned it would be hard to find you." Eustathias flips between half a dozen large cuddly forms, all different colors and patterns and builds, not one of them recognizable as a non-extinct species from Dana's world. "And now I can't have been in this world for more than five minutes, and here you are!"

"Five minutes?" sputters Dana.

"And here you are," repeats her daemon, now a lion-headed creature with long hooved legs and a scaly tail that lashes around Dana. "How many minutes has it been for you? You were still in the dog park when I went through the door in the desert, so it can't have been long!"

Dana chokes on a laugh. "Oh, my dear Eustathias," she says, cuddling into her daemon's pearly coat. "It has been so many minutes. Hours. Days. They all ran together. I lost count! The only way I can measure them is by saying I have so much to tell you."

Chapter 13: Lulls and Gaps

Summary:

Not much going on in Night Vale today. Carlos's team wear themselves out while cleaning house. Tamika had plans, but ends up dozing on the steps of the library. Even Dana, after coming full circle with a time loop, gets back to the otherworldly desert and has a nap.

Oh, and there's a crisis that disrupts the very laws of physics. Someone should probably do something about that.

Night Vale.

A rhythmic tap-tap-tapping on the window lulls Carlos awake. Like a tree branch or something, getting tossed by the wind. Carlos smiles, enjoying the rhythm.

It isn't until Cecil sits up beside him and knocks a brief response against the wall that he remembers two things: first, Cecil's apartment is much farther off the ground than any of the trees around here; and second, all the trees in town (except those in the Whispering Forest) have been missing since Tuesday.

"Mrgh," mumbles Carlos. "Who's that? Anyone I'd know?"

"Just a work thing." Cecil yawns, stretches, and drops a kiss on Carlos's cheek. "Dear Carlos...would you mind not going to the chapel today?"

Now Carlos is definitely awake. "Wouldn't mind, no. Is there some kind of danger scheduled in the area today? Or do you just want me staying with you to help out with something?"

Cecil plays with a stray lock of his hair. "No, I don't want you with me — or rather, I want you with me very much, but I have to be at the station, which don't want you getting anywhere near. It's just that it might not be safe to work on a lot of your projects this afternoon. Especially the ones that can go wrong if you aren't paying careful attention. Oh, and you shouldn't go anywhere else that requires a commute, either! The roads are likely to be especially fatal today."

So it's important to pick a place early, stay there, and find a low-stakes project to occupy yourself. "Okay. Let me tell my team."

The Faceless Old Woman has arranged all Cecil's kitchen appliances in a precarious pile in the center of the floor, and placed Carlos's phone on top of it. He retrieves it as carefully as possible (nothing falls, although the coffee maker wobbles in a disconcerting way), and sends a mass text:

Cancel all plans for today. We're cleaning house.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (???)

Dana flickers into existence in an elegant walnut-paneled room, with gold chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and an oil painting of a woman in violet robes on the nearest wall. (The elegance is only slightly interrupted by a plastic trash bin heaped with takeout containers.)

She does not recognize the room, but she does recognize the woman. The same painting was in her local history textbook. It's one of Night Vale's former mayors.

So she is in Night Vale! Or something very like it.

That is, her ghost is in Night Vale. Her body is in a gaudily overdone bloodstone circle she found in an otherworldly desert, and her daemon is wrapped around it, giving her the extra strength she needed to get this far.

As she is taking a closer look at the painting, a low voice says, "Dana?"

It takes Dana a moment to recognize the man at the other end of the room. She still relies on the briefcase and tan jacket more than she should; without them, her memory needs time to force the pieces together. "Emmanuel!"

"Keep it down!" hisses Emmanuel, gesturing for her to hush. "Dana, I am very proud that you've worked out astral projection, but you need to remember that people can see you."

Dana does her best to suppress a laugh of delight. People can see her! And he has no idea how unprecedented that is. "I will try!" she whispers. "Does this mean this is the first time I have appeared for you?"

Emmanuel looks startled...then begins to connect the dots. "It is. Are you implying that you're from my future?"

"I am not certain how to answer that," admits Dana. "Our time and space match right now, so I am in your present. Does this present also include a Dana in the dog park? Because I am from her future. And I have been trying for so long to find you, so I can tell you the things that you will tell her."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

Sherie gets the text just as her children are throwing stuff in their backpacks before the normal last-minute rush to catch the bus. (A regular Night Vale municipal bus, that is. School buses around here are pitch-black, windowless, and ony rarely stop at an actual school.)

"Hold on a moment, you two," she calls. Maybe this is literally about cleaning the houses the other team members live in, and Carlos absent-mindedly sent it to her as well, but maybe it's code for...something. She types a reply as fast as she can: Does this apply to my family too?

"If we miss the bus, I can drive Seth in," says Susannah hopefully.

"Not until you have your Road Safety badge," says Sherie, not for the first time. The rule is part of an effort she's making to have faith in the Night Vale Girl Scouts, and to support her daughter's involvement. (Sam isn't as happy about trusting the Scouts' judgment here, but they've at least agreed not to fight about it in front of the kids.) "This shouldn't take long."

The phone hiccups with Carlos's reply: Kids will be safest at school. You and your husband are invited to come keep us company for the day. Bring something to work on while we do the chores!

(This is followed by an emoticon of two werewolves doing the gavotte next to an old-fashioned jukebox.)

Standing by the window overlooking the road, Seth reports, "The bus just went."

Sherie sighs. "Did it really? Okay, I'll drive you in. Get your backpacks while I let your father know."

They all fit easily in the minivan, Susannah in the middle row with her griffon vulture daemon relaxing in the seat beside her, Seth riding shotgun with his daemon riding as a much smaller bird on his shoulder. Sherie's mongoose rides in the scoop next to the driver's seat. As they make the turn onto DuBois Avenue, he gives her a quiet signal.

"Seth, honey, about Career Day," begins Sherie. "Like I said at dinner, I'm officially signed up to do a presentation about being an experimental theologian. So if there's anything else I can do while I'm there...."

Seth shrugs. "Dunno," he says, the picture of casual preteen disinterest...except for the way his daemon springs into action, leaping from his shoulder and turning into a field mouse on the way down. "Su, can I have your MP3 player? I want to put on some music."

"Music," repeats Su. "Oh! Yeah, okay."

While she unzips her backpack, her own daemon turns his claws on an inside panel of the van door.

There's a snapping of plastic, and a tearing of fabric from under the passenger seat, and Sherie barely holds herself back from yelling at the kids not to tear apart the car. Her daemon watches with interest as Su's griffon vulture retrieves a small anbaric bug from inside the door, and Seth's crawls out from under the seat in the form of a sharp-clawed lizard with a matching one in her mouth.

Su dials up the volume on her headphones so loud Sherie can hear them in the front seat, and hands them to Seth. He sticks them in a pocket of his own backpack (which is stuffed nearly to bursting with books), along with both bugs.

Susannah grins. "Hope the Sheriff's secret police like symphonic goth metal."

Seth is less interested in relishing the victory than his big sister is. "Mom, you can't just ask things like that around here. You have to take precautions."

"Well, now, sweetheart, we know that," says Sherie's daemon patiently. Every generation thinks it's the first one to figure these things out. "Which is why the eyelash curler in our purse doubles as a short-range signal jammer, and why I switched it on before asking."

"But that was a good effort you two just made!" adds Sherie. "I'm so proud of you for working together like that. Seth, does this mean you've thought of something I can do after all?"

Her boy considers. "I'll ask Tamika in chem," he says at last. "But they've got stuff all planned out already. They won't want you to mess it up."

"Maybe if she just made her talk really long," suggests Susannah. "Then she wouldn't have to be involved, but it would slow the Strex people down, right?"

"And how much do you know about this plan of theirs?" asks Sherie.

It's her daughter's turn to shrug. "Not a lot. I mean, c'mon, I'm a high school senior. It's not like I'm deeply in touch with the social lives of the local seventh-graders."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika is not in school today. She is not conducting drills out in the sand wastes, either. Or holed up with a book in some secret place unknown to Strexcorp. Or running a raid on any of the businesses Strex owns.

She was supposed to be returning a stack of library books this morning, and she has been sitting on the building's front stoop ever since, leaning against her buffalo daemon's flanks. They rise and fall as he breathes, steady and slow.

"I think we screwed this up, Rashi," she says listlessly.

A few minutes later, Rashi says, "Yeah."

Tamika flicks the scaly, withered claws of the librarian hand that now hangs around her neck. "Should prob'ly go tell Señor Palmero. Have 'im sneak a code in the broadcast. Tell everyone. Call it off."

"Mmhmm."

Neither of them gets up.

 

-{,(((,">

 

It takes a lot of running, yelling, and flailing with nets and pitchforks, but the team finally manages to capture and subdue all five of the Things Under The Carpet. And the only damage they did was scuffing a few walls and knocking over their fourth ugliest lamp.

Carlos looks sheepishly at the lamp's shattered remains as he puts down his pitchfork. "I think that was me. Did one of us own that, or did it come with the place? Hang on, I'll sweep it up."

He bustles off to the broom closet, looking downright energized by the chase. Henriette, meanwhile, is exhausted — a lot more than it feels like she should be. Is she getting sick? But if she says anything, there are more than a few people here who will jump to pin it on her drinking, so maybe she shouldn't risk it....

"Phew," sighs Nirliq, taking a heavy seat on the crate in which the Things Under The Carpet are squirming and wailing. Her red colobus daemon swings up to join her and leans against her side. "Does anyone else need a break after that?"

"I could use some downtime," agrees Quentin. His flying squirrel daemon is clinging to his hair. How she managed not to fall off during the hubbub is one of the great mysteries of modern physics. "Who else wants lemonade?"

While Carlos sweeps up the broken glass, the rest of the team settles down in the living room. Everyone who's still in town is there, plus Sherie's husband, although he excused himself and his laptop to another room to work on...something to do with e-commerce. Sherie herself is on the couch reading a sheaf of crayon diagrams, when Henriette settles in beside her. "Finding anything interesting?"

"I should be." Sherie frowns. "It's the strangest thing. I can't seem to focus. I don't know if it's something about the diagrams themselves, or...some other thing."

"Maybe the Sheriff's secret police switched your coffee with decaf," remarks Perle from the chair beside her. Trust Perle to jump to the most ominous explanation. "Or the Faceless Old Woman."

"Wasn't me," protests a voice from the ceiling.

"Hey, she's not the only tired one. Maybe all the coffee in Night Vale has spontaneously switched to decaf," says Nirliq. Her eyes sparkle with interest, even as she drops to a seat on the carpet and doesn't look in any hurry to get up. "Do we have equipment to do tests for that?"

"I think I've seen test strips at the Raúl's," puts in Omero. His glossy starling daemon has landed on top of the cabinet with the TV equipment, and already looks half-asleep at her perch. "Do we know how long it's supposed to be before the roads...aren't safe? We could go get some."

"Sure, we probably could," agrees Henriette. "But there's a catch."

"Yes?"

"It would mean we'd have to get up."

Quentin and Köhler come in with a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of glasses. They barely get everything set up on the coffee table before they both find places to sit. Henriette is thirsty, and the rest of them probably are too, so she makes herself take on the effort of pouring. It's a lot of effort.

Carlos, though, practically skips into the room. "Okay, the lamp is taken care of! I'm thinking we should do a round of dusting next, then vacuuming. And does anyone want to flip me for cleaning the bathroom?"

"What's 'flip me' mean?" murmurs Quentin to Perle. His English understanding is sharper every day, but he still gets tripped up by idioms on a regular basis.

"Echar un volado," translates Perle. "The loser of the coin toss has to clean the bathrooms."

Carlos frowns. "What do you mean, loser? Who wouldn't want to play with that many chemicals?"

General silence.

"Okay, how the hell are you so perky?" bursts out one of the Li Huas. Both of them are outright sprawled on the floor, one with her head resting on a pillow borrowed from the couch, the other with her head resting on the first one's stomach. "Do you have some kind of house-cleaning fetish? Was it something you ate? What's the deal?"

It settles Carlos down, though he still looks an order of magnitude more alert than the rest of them. "Sorry. I think I'm just antsy. As long as we're stuck in here, I want to be doing something."

"At least sit down for a minute," complains Henriette. "You're making the rest of us look bad."

Carlos sits. He pours himself a glass of lemonade. He has a quiet drink.

Nobody else moves.

"Okay, no pressure," he says at last, "but while you're all waiting to get your second wind, I'm going to go mow the lawn."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana is unexpectedly tired when she returns to her body, on the bloodstone-circle platform that caps the basalt fortress. Maybe her astral projection is taking more effort now that it has become more powerful.

Eustathias turns into a creature that looks like a football-sized pile of tan fur, and Dana carries her down to one of the empty rooms directly below, where her backpack and supplies are stored. Once they're stretched out on top of her bedroll, Dana finds enough energy to relate her whole conversation with Emmanuel. Not only did she speak with a friend, but she closed a time loop, which can only be good for the universe.

"He never did tell me where we were," she muses. "It was a strange building. The only thing I recognized was the portrait of Mayor Danielle DuBois on the wall."

Although she can't see Eustathias's expression through all the fur, she gets the impression her daemon is frowning. "You said it had wood paneling? And Emmanuel said it was dangerous? It sounds like the library."

"I suppose it could have been that," says Dana. "Not one of the rooms with books, but a conference room of some sort, with rare documents and artifacts protected in the covered shelves...but what would he be doing there?"

Again Eustathias changes, becoming a cat-sized creature with leathery wings, a chicken's head, and a knobbly, scaled tail. Her eyes, now that Dana can see them, are full of concern. "Didn't he tell you...?"

"Tell me what?"

"He told me about the library," remembers Eustathias. "He told me a lot of things. I thought he would have told you all the same things. Perhaps the difference is that I am a daemon. Perhaps he was more inclined to talk to me the way he would have talked to Neharah."

"Perhaps. But what did he tell you?"

"The library is poorly maintained in some ways, but very well in others. It has both heating and air conditioning, and is always a comfortable temperature, whatever the weather outside. It rarely loses power or water, even when there are outages in the rest of town. The bloodstone circle is well-constructed, and only needs someone to clean it once in a while to keep it strong."

Dana feels a strange, dizzying sense of...annoyance? No, impatience. Strange and dizzying because she has never felt this with her own daemon.

(When relating experiences to other people, has she always taken this long to get to the point? She never noticed it before. But it stands out so starkly now that she finds herself listening to a story which is told in the same way, but to which she does not already know the ending.)

"Eustathias," she says gently. "Skip to the end. Then skip back to the details that lead there."

Eustathias turns into a white-furred, doglike creature with a fluffy red tail and a red lion's mane, and bumps her cold nose against Dana's hand. "It's where he lives."

Dana catches her breath.

"Because it's a good place to live, if you have a condition that keeps your presence from disturbing the librarians," continues her daemon, curling up beside her. "Much more comfortable than a shelter. And since nobody else is truly safe from librarians, their presence will keep other people from disturbing you. There's no risk of someone stealing your things, or renting the space to someone else because they forgot their tenant existed."

"Yes. Yes, I see. It makes sense." Dana runs her hands through Eustathias's mane: embarrassed that she never thought about Emmanuel's condition deeply enough to realize this, worried that in her ignorance she might have said something that made him reluctant to tell her. "I hope he is all right, living like that. I hope there were no times when he needed help that I could have given, and I did not give it."

From her time in the dog park, she understands the discomfort of being forced to sleep in a place that is not your home, of depending on the generosity of others for food and supplies. But there is so much she cannot understand. There are people back in Night Vale who remember her existence. There is a bedroom with her name on the door, waiting for her to return to.

"We could try another projection," murmurs Eustathias. "To meet him again. To make the offer."

"Mmm."

"Or...we could take a nap."

Dana lets her eyes fall closed. "A nap sounds good."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

To the extent that she has the energy to worry, Sherie is worried. None of them have moved, except to slump into even-more-relaxed heaps on their respective items of furniture or spots of carpet, like a bunch of wax sculptures melting. Henriette slid sideways about half an hour ago, so she's leaning against Sherie's shoulder, possibly asleep.

Sherie wonders if Sam, in the next room, is collapsing in the same way. But she can't make herself get up to check.

"This is weird," mumbles Nirliq from the floor.

"Uh-huh," says Omero. "Maybe we should study it."

"Get Carlos to do it," grumbles one of the Li Huas. (The other is snoring softly. Both wren daemons are cupped in her hands, sedate little balls of feathers and fluff.)

Outside, the lawn mower grinds and rattles as Carlos pushes it past the window.

Keith's binturong daemon, sprawled across his lap like a thick blue-black fur blanket, mutters some comment in German. Keith himself is asleep in an armchair, mouth hanging open, glasses slipped precariously down the bridge of his nose.

"Should study Carlos," mutters Perle. She can still manage English, but only with a much thicker accent than usual. "Why's he immune?"

Sherie thinks this over. She thinks about it as hard as she can. At last she summons all her strength and announces her conclusion: "Theology, probably."

Eventually the radio turns itself on. Which is considerate of it, because nobody else was going to do it. On-air, his voice droning more than usual, Cecil reports that it's a lazy day all over town. Sherie is relieved, to the extent that relief doesn't take much effort.

"Si hablar me costara un poquito de energía, si no fuera un mero reflejo de mi forma viva, entonces yo mismo no hablaría tampoco," continues Cecil. "Carlos—perfectamente imperfecto Carlos—es el único que se siente industrioso hoy. Está cortando el césped y silbando. Y el césped está devolviéndole el silbido."

So...the only people in town who are powering through this day at all are Cecil, because of weird radio reasons...and Carlos?

Draped against Sherie's shoulder, Henriette mutters, "There's a great joke in this, if I had th' energy t' make it. About 'something he ate.'" She pauses, then clarifies, "A sex joke."

After a long, dragging moment, Quentin responds for the group: "Hah."

Cecil goes on to talk about Tamika Flynn conducting organized militia drills out in the sand wastes. Now this gets Sherie's interest. It gives her the strength to fight the lethargy, just for a few minutes, just enough to hang on to every word as long as Cecil is talking about something that affects her kids.

 

-{,(((,">

 

It isn't until Carlos finishes with the lawn and gets back inside that he finally clues in to the fact that something is wrong.

Nobody on the team can summon up the energy to talk, but Sherie manages to point to the radio, and Carlos listens until he thinks he can understand. This is all over town, and it's weird...but not necessarily dangerous. It might even be kind of relaxing. A nice break from all their busy routines.

If Carlos had known he wouldn't be affected, he could have planned to take advantage of it in some meaningful way. Maybe sneak into a Strexcorp establishment and sabotage their research, or make off with useful records. Trouble is, he didn't know, he's had no time to plan, and by now there's no time for him to get to any Strexcorp establishments, because the motor vehicles of Night Vale aren't operating at full speed any more than the people are.

So...he might as well go back to cleaning.

He sweeps and vacuums, in the rooms that aren't piled with people and furniture he and Isaña have no hope of moving on their own. He clears out his closet. He scrubs the bathroom, using all the chemicals it needs, and a few it doesn't.

They're doing a walk-round of the freshly-mown lawn when gravity itself starts to loosen its hold, and there's a moment of panic as Carlos and Isaña float up off the grass. It's not as fun as it sounds if you don't have any of the control or coordination that Khoshekh does. Carlos manages to grab the rain spout and maneuver himself around to grab Isaña with his legs, then knots his coat into a makeshift bag around her, holding them securely together.

"Can you pull yourself around to the front door?" asks Isaña. "Uncontrolled drifting would be a lot less risky with ceilings."

"Good plan." Carlos pulls himself hand-over-hand up the spout, so he can work his way around by clinging to the eaves. But once he's up there..."How secure are you in there?"

"Tight as can be. Why? Is there something out here we should study?"

"Lots of things," says Carlos automatically. "But I was mostly thinking that this would make it really easy to clean the gutters."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Five minutes later, the light of the sun itself starts dimming, and Carlos realizes with horror that he has completely miscalculated how normal-for-Night-Vale this is.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Drifting, unfocused, Dana wonders if there is any point in continuing to reach out from this world.

She has closed the time loop with Emmanuel. She knows of no other loops she is involved in. No other compelling reason to try to project herself into Night Vale, or anywhere else.

What is the point of trying?

What is the point of...well, anything?

Doing things...making effort...existing...it's just so much work.

Dana sleeps, and does not dream.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Everyone on the team is asleep, floating in the middle of the living room. The house danger meter, sitting by the door, is powered down. It's plugged in, but no longer able to draw current.

And the radio is playing static.

Carlos does a round of checking pulses, shoving his way through the air from one person to the next, feeling like a particularly inept fish. Heartbeats are still going for everyone, though Nirliq's and Köhler's are distressingly weak, and Carlos has no idea what he'll do if they fail.

"Bloodstone circle room," says Isaña. "Hurry!"

Carlos does, stopping only long enough to pick up the crayon-drawn diagrams floating around Sherie.

The bloodstones themselves are still sitting on the ground, and once Carlos is hovering over the center of the circle, he finds that with a little concentration he can make himself sink back down to their level. So far, so good. Now...now....

"Now what?" whispers Isaña.

"I don't know!" says Carlos, voice cracking. He doesn't even understand what's going on. Is it another Strexcorp scheme? He has Renée's notes, but they describe a method for closing portals — and even if that can help somehow, it calls for a whole group of trained experts. Carlos is not a trained expert! Not at anything remotely related to this.

Cecil's show has devolved into static. Cecil's show never devolves into static. Not within Night Vale's borders. You can smash a radio into dime-sized pieces and it will still happily broadcast the traffic, the weather, the dulcet tones of good night, Night Vale, good night.

Isaña struggles out of the folds of the chapel coat, and Carlos gets her into his arms, clutching her against his chest. Help me, he thinks, not addressing any person or deity in particular, just flinging a plea wildly into the void. Help me, help me, help me. I can't fix this on my own.

"— Carlos!"

Never in his life has Carlos been so relieved to see a translucent teenager. "Dana!" he breathes. "Dana, there's something going very wrong, and I don't know how to fix it — and you might not know either, but you're the only other person here — and normally not-knowing is an exciting part of experimental theology, but right now —"

"It's going to be okay, Carlos," says Dana. She is gentle, and confident, and so much more direct than he remembers. "You are a younger Carlos than the one I usually see, so whatever's going on here, we will get through this. Tell me what is going on."

"Cecil told us to stay home today," begins Carlos. "We were going to clean the house. Then my teammates started getting tired —"

"Everyone ended up falling asleep?" interrupts Dana. "Gravity stopped working? The sun is going out?"

"Yes!"

"All right. I know when this is. Scoot back a little." Carlos does, leaving room in the circle for Dana to kneel facing him, her insubstantial knees overlapping slightly with his own. "Think about how someone from your parents' religion would hold themselves when praying, and hold yourself like that."

Carlos folds his hands in front of him, fingers laced together. Dana clasps her own hands and holds them so they intersect with his.

"I am going to chant," she says, looking directly into Carlos's eyes, "and you are going to keep doing whatever you were doing when you called me. That will get us started. Later we may have to stop and do something else, but stay the course unless I tell you otherwise. Are you ready?"

"Y-yes. Go ahead."

She begins to speak.

He closes his eyes, and lets her words wash over him.

 

-{,(((,">

 

They are not alone. Other citizens of Night Vale are waiting to hear them: people who managed to get to their own bloodstone circles before the full effects of the lazy day descended, so they were shielded from the worst of it. No one else had the strength to reach out, but when Carlos reaches them, they can respond.

Carlos counts six, eight, nine — mostly adults, although one has the shimmer of a girl around Renée's age. He thinks he can feel her mentally applauding as Dana pulls her in.

No time to stop and bask in the congratulation. They reach farther.

A handful of people outside of town are waiting for them too.

Carlos has no sense of how far they're going until he recognizes — Adriana! The team's very own Adriana, now working with CERN near Geneva. It's the middle of the night there, she must be tired, but somehow she realized there was trouble in Night Vale and got to her bloodstones to help.

Most of the others are older minds, cold and steady as glaciers. Witches. Carlos recognizes none of them, and is intimidated by all. Dana simply invites them in — with a confidence far beyond her years — and they follow.

They follow.

Whatever Dana is creating runs on Rusakov currents, but the details beyond that have outstripped Carlos's perception by leaps and bounds, a geometry spiraling off through dimensions he can't grasp. Maybe if he knew the theory. If he'd seen the process expressed through equations. And, ideally, a whole lot of graphs.

Instead he strains — blood pounding in his ears, whole body hot and starting to sweat — under the golden fractal weight of something he can only hope is working.

He can't falter. No matter how painful. No matter how likely it is that he's no longer necessary for this, that Dana is driving a car now and he was just the jumper cable. He can't risk making this fail, because the world needs it to work, because Cecil needs it to work —

— and one of the ice-cold minds seals down over his own....

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette wakes with a start, and at first she doesn't recognize the living room. For one thing, she's on the floor. For another, all the furniture has been jolted around and rearranged, like a dollhouse that somebody picked up and shook.

"I know what you're thinking," says the voice of the Faceless Old Woman from somewhere off to the left. "But it wasn't me. I don't even like this couch. I would've taken it out back and set it on fire."

The rest of the team is strewn around the floor along with the chairs. They pick themselves up one by one, yawning, stretching. Henriette does a quick headcount: everyone here except Carlos. Last thing she remembers, he was going to organize stuff in his room....

Omero asks if anyone else feels like they got a knock on the head from whatever happened while they were asleep, and Nirliq, next to him, offers to take a look. Sherie abruptly remembers her husband, and runs off to check on him. Cecil, on the radio, announces, "Welcome back! I guess, from a crisis." Around them, lights flicker on and phones start to ring, apparently out of the sheer joy of having anbaric current again.

And Carlos stumbles in from down the hall, leaning against the wall, one coat-sleeve smeared with red from using it to wipe up a nosebleed. "Hi," he says faintly. "Did anyone die?"

"So far, so good," says Henriette, trying to gauge whether the imminent-panic phase is really over. "What happened? Is the danger past? Sit down, let me look at you — I think your ears are bleeding too."

Carlos shakes his head. "Lemme look at the sky first."

"How was it solved? How was the day saved?" asks Cecil from the speakers. After a pause, during which he apparently looks up the real answer and decides it isn't safe for Strex to hear, he launches into philosophical denial: "It wasn't. It didn't need to be. There are lulls and gaps, and rests, and stops. But this world stumbles on."

Waving off all offers of help, Carlos makes it to the window, Isaña trotting at his heels. Whatever he sees out there, it makes him sigh and relax.

"The sun flared back, the world restarted. Still bodies, blue in the gray street, gasped suddenly, and rose back into the blue-gray light of day. We wake up, we move on."

"Would you guys mind doing me a huge favor?" asks Carlos, absently wiping a trickle of blood from his left ear. "Would you deal with the local press? And any outside theologians, if they try to get in touch? Tell them everything we know. Oh, and while you're at it, say hi to Adriana for me."

"We'll get right on it," says Quentin. He's awake enough to be using English again. "But, uh. What do we know?"

"Right now? Basically nothing. You should maybe work on figuring it out, too." Carlos yawns. "There's about nine people in town who oughta know something helpful, if you can track 'em down. You get lucky, Dana will pop back in and explain. But as for me...I 'ave had a busy day, and I'm'a gonna take a nap now."

Henriette doesn't try to stop him. She does, however, grab a spare electrum spyglass from the TV cabinet to watch him go. Instead of the bright cloud she was expecting, long golden trails of Rusakov particles flow in his and Isaña's wake as they climb the stairs, like the tail feathers of some luminescent bird.

She hands the spyglass to Köhler, and, while the team passes it around, tries to gather her thoughts. "Okay. Let's see. A couple people need to go to the chapel, look at the equipment there." She rubs her temples. "Nirliq and Sherie...Sherie, get back in here!...go reconstruct everything you can about what just went down in our bloodstone circle. Someone else needs to do a pass through the outside news, figure out if the rest of the world noticed anything weird about the sun this afternoon. Oh, and Cecil's gonna show up at our door any minute now, so someone's gotta tackle him and not let him plow through to Carlos until we get a couple alethiometer readings."

Is that everything? Probably covers all the immediate stuff. If there's more, Henriette can deal with it later.

She claps her hands. "Gonna be working late tonight! You guys fight over jobs. I'll go make coffee."

When she tries to head for the kitchen, though Köhler quietly but firmly plants himself in her way. "You must get in touch with Adriana. I will prepare the drinks."

As if there was any danger of Henriette spiking the coffee. She's not getting drunk until after she has a nice long talk with her former advisee. "You do that," she grumbles, and hunts down her phone.

There are a couple of missed texts. One, from Adriana's official CERN contact number, simply says if you're still alive to get this, call me!

Another is from a number that isn't in Henriette's contacts list, but that looks oddly familiar. On a hunch, she opens it up.

In a flash she remembers. It's the sequence of digits she hand-dialed the other night: the one on the Strexcorp theologian's business card. The text from this number is even shorter than Adriana's:

FYI, that wasn't us.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"It was them."

Hundreds of eyes, including Tamika's deep and dark ones, are on the young Girl Scout with the best foresight in her generation. Hundreds of ears listen. Hundreds of children and teenagers sit around this hilltop in the sand wastes, under the glittering and distracted stars.

"What we set in motion shouldn't have gone that far. But they hijacked it," the girl continues, voice magically amplified to reach them all. (It's part of earning her Public Speaking badge.) "We gave them an opening to mess with this world, and they took it. So we can't ever try anything like that again, because they might hijack that too."

A hand goes up in the audience.

Tamika, sitting on Rashi's back on the hilltop, points to the owner: an older Scout with jet-black hair, black lipstick, and a griffon vulture daemon. In halting Spanish, she says, "You say 'openings' and 'worlds'. This means it is something about portals? Or alternate universes? Because if it is that, maybe my mom and everyone can help."

Ah, yes, this is one of the outsider theologians' kids. The one who isn't fussy around maces. "Maybe they can," says Tamika. "After the meeting, you stick around and come talk to me. Anyone here who's very into experimental theology these days? You stay too."

A teenage sharpshooter with a hawk daemon raises his hand next. When Tamika calls on him, he addresses the Scout on the hilltop (who, like, Tamika, is riding on the back of her daemon, in the form of a midnight-black horse). "I got a question. How come you didn't see this coming? Isn't that basically all we count on you for?"

The kid next to him jabs an elbow in his side to make him shut up, but the girl isn't fazed. "What poked into this world is something I can't look at. It's something nobody can look at. Could you stare directly at the sun? How about for a couple hours in a row? That's what it's like, trying to use your foresight to look at the Smiling God."

Notes:

New art: Tamika Flynn.

Translation:
Si hablar me costara un poquito de energía, si no fuera un mero reflejo de mi forma viva, entonces yo mismo no hablaría tampoco. Carlos—perfectamente imperfecto Carlos—es el único que se siente industrioso hoy. Está cortando el césped y silbando. Y el césped está devolviéndole el silbido. = narration from e035 Lazy Day, from the translation by ElizaWinter: "If speaking took me any energy, if it were not merely a reflex of my living form, then I, myself, would not be speaking either. Carlos – perfectly imperfect Carlos – is the only one feeling industrious today. He's mowing the lawn, and whistling. And the lawn is whistling back."

Chapter 14: Care About The Children

Summary:

The fallout from the Lazy Day has everyone shaken up. Tamika and her army carry out some plans that aren't so easy to sabotage, the experimental theologians make up for lost research time, and the two groups take the first steps toward coordinating their efforts. Meanwhile, Cecil and Carlos find time to do things like venture into the dark labyrinth that is the City Hall Archives, searching for a copy of the will Cecil wrote in college. You know, cute domestic stuff.

Night Vale.

In spite of the disaster that was the Lazy Day, the Book Club's plans on Career Day go off without a hitch. With the help of one of the experimental theologians stalling for time, Tamika and company make off with four Strexcorp gyropters.

They don't take the prizes near any of their actual bases of operations. Can't take that risk while they don't know what kind of tracking devices these things might have. Instead they park everything in a sheltered cavern in the walls of Niton Canyon, and a dozen Scouts working on mechanical-engineering and/or spycraft badges start tearing them apart for study.

Tamika alternates between keeping a lookout and supervising the process, leading a comparative discussion on the treatments of regionalism in One of Ours versus The Country of the Pointed Firs.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Teddy Williams shines a light in Carlos's ears, tests his reflexes, takes a few drops of blood for testing, and reports that the damage is "nothing you won't recover from." He's gone and popped holes in both his eardrums, which sounds a lot worse than it is: they should heal on their own without permanent damage, and it'll only take a few days if he wears the healing charm round-the-clock.

He leaves Williams's medical office and emerges into the main body of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, where Cecil is waiting, playing pinball. "Good news! I don't need surgery, and the ringing in my ears should go away soon."

"Oh, that's not in your ears," says Cecil, face fixed on the machine as he smacks levers and makes things light up. "There's been a high squeaky tone all over town, on and off, since this morning. But I'm so glad for the rest of it! I really wish you would be more careful with yourself."

Carlos stands awkwardly to one side, clutching the lapels of his chapel coat. "I'll try."

The pinball machine shrieks and flashes red, letting Cecil know that he's lost. He throws himself to the side just in time to avoid having it spit fire in his face. "That isn't even close to my high score," he says crossly, before giving Carlos his full attention. "Carlos...? Is everything all right?"

Carlos swallows. "Most things are all right. But I think...based on the latest neurological research about factors that affect the chemicals related to emotion...it would really help, you know, theologically speaking...can I have a hug?"

Cecil opens his arms, and Carlos snuggles into them. His neckwear today is layers upon layers of filmy green fabric, which for some reason smells like peanut butter. For a moment Carlos just leans into it, breathing in. His Cecil. Still here.

"I screwed up, Cecil," he says, trembling. "You kept talking about how industrious I was being yesterday, but that's not true — I was being lazy. When the town is in danger I'm supposed to think of a way to help. Thinking is what an experimental theologian does! But instead I wasted time screwing around with mindless chores — while people were dying! — and there's no way to tell how close I cut it — maybe if I'd been a few minutes later, they would have been permanently dead — maybe you would have died —"

"Perhaps I would have," murmurs Cecil. Other sounds are a little muffled for Carlos right now, but his Voice is crystal-clear. "Or perhaps another solution would have presented itself. Someone else in town could have called Dana. Someone outside of town could have started a similar process. Your former teammate realized something was wrong because of theology, right?"

"S-sort of." Even Adriana isn't sure, in retrospect, if she was alerted by a real emergency or by well-timed equipment failure. The official word on the CERN website is that some of the LHC's detectors need to be temporarily shut down while parts are replaced, and it isn't like there's any other facility measuring the angular distribution of B meson decay products, so they have no way to double-check if the ratings might actually have been right.

Cecil nods. "And I know the schools where you grew up have gutted the funding for their scrying and dark magic programs, but surely there are a few people here and there who preserve the arts."

...In spite of this muddled understanding of why schools in the US don't teach magic, the overall point isn't wrong. Carlos's tense muscles relax as the logic of it sinks in. Night Vale isn't the only place on Earth with prophecies, with alethiometer-reading skills, with connections to other worlds and all the potential that implies. The odds are higher here, nothing more. None of Lyra's allies from this world were born here, and that hardly stopped them from saving it.

"The one thing I do know is that it will not help to worry about it." Cecil kneads soothing circles into Carlos's shoulders. "As Mom used to say: except for psychics and time travelers, no one is ever told what would have happened."

Carlos takes several deep breaths, then nods. "Yeah. All right, yeah."

He relaxes out of Cecil's embrace, and they leave the arcade arm-in-arm.

The mention of Cecil's mother, though, reminds Carlos of something else he's been worrying about. When he was linked to all those other minds, one of them reacted when he thought about Cecil. He's almost certain it was a witch, and it wasn't familiar enough to be Josie. He can't think of anyone else it would be except..."Listen, Cecil...."

"Hm?"

Carlos opens his mouth, but before he can admit his suspicions, a building across from the Arby's catches his eye. "Hey, didn't Dark Owl Records close? I thought they were having a going-out-of-business sale."

"They were. At the last minute, another company bought them out." Cecil's mouth sets into a hard line. "A company about whom I am contractually obligated to say only nice things."

"...Oh."

Cecil squeezes his hand. "Were you going to say something else?"

"Just that I'm going to have to work late tonight. If you want to stop by the chapel and get takeout or something, we can still eat together, but I won't be able to get back to...whoever's place we're sleeping at tonight...until bedtime."

"Then as soon as the broadcast is over, I will call you up and take your order."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie returns from Night Vale Middle School with a spring in her step.

The kids applauded after her presentation. A lot harder than they applauded for the man who explained how it's important to work hard and play hard, but it's mostly important to work hard, because that's how you make money...for your company, which is even better than making it for yourself. When the assembly was over, a couple of eighth-grade girls even came up to ask Sherie about how many years it took to get the degrees she had.

And one of them slipped her the directions to a meeting place and time, written on a bookmark in an English-language paperback copy of Milton's Samson Agonistes. (The page it was marking has a couple of lines underlined: "Boast not of what thou would'st have done, but do / What then thou would'st.")

Meanwhile, the flyers she put up around town this morning have already gotten a couple of responses, from people claiming to have been involved in yesterday's sleepiness-reversing spell. "Sounds like most of them can come over on Wednesday afternoon," Sherie tells Carlos (who has promised he'll be able to recognize everyone involved, and weed out any fakers). "One young lady asked if she can bring her infant to the chapel too. Single mother, needs to know if she'll have to arrange childcare. Is that something we can handle?"

"If she's really one of the people we want to study, we can reimburse her for the cost of a babysitter," says Carlos. "As long as it's not one of your kids. Financial conflict of interest."

"My daughter isn't exactly the babysitting type." A beat later Sherie's brain catches up with what Carlos actually said. "I guess my son might be...he does have more of a subtle touch...but Seth is a lot more hesitant with all this self-defense stuff than Susannah is, and, oh, gosh, with the kinds of disasters that happen around here? Leaving an infant in the care of somebody when you can't imagine them singlehandedly fighting off a spiderwolf...it just wouldn't be responsible."

Carlos grins. "Sounds like the two of them have the makings of an unstoppable team-up."

"You know, I think they've been starting to figure that out recently," says Sherie with a chuckle. Now, if only it wasn't her and Sam they were doing most of the teaming-up against...not that she wants to complain, because at least they're fighting with each other less, and that's the bright side, which means it's what she's looking on. "And speaking of children and team-ups...."

She doesn't talk out the whole schedule with him, just leaves him with the bookmark, and heads off to let Cactus Jane know that childcare costs are taken care of.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos is trying to put together a diagram of Dana's relative timeline — comparing what she said yesterday, her appearance to Cecil on the tapes from the subway, and that vision he had a while ago, cross-referencing statements about who she's seen and what she's done — when he notices that some of his teammates are hovering outside the office.

"Hey, guys. Did you want to talk?"

"Well, yeah, but it can wait," says Quentin. Nirliq nods in agreement, and, for explanation, gestures to Carlos's speakers. They're plugged into his phone, whose FM receiver is picking up Cecil going over the traffic report.

"It's okay, really," protests Carlos. "Just because my boyfriend is on-air doesn't mean you're not allowed to talk to me. Do I seem...touchy, when people do that? Or dismissive, or something?"

"Not touchy, no! And you always make us feel like our work is important," says Quentin. Carlos isn't sure if he makes a conscious effort to be diplomatic most of the time to make up for how snappish he gets when someone is Wrong About Theology, or if he's just naturally warm and earnest, and people being Wrong is the one thing that gets under his skin.

"It's just that while Cecil's on, you're...easily distracted," finishes Nirliq. Not being accusing, just direct. "It's fine. We'll wait for the weather."

A few minutes later, the broadcast cuts to a pretty flute melody, and Quentin pulls out his tablet.

"First of all, do you ever look at the data from the chapel magnetograph? I would understand if you don't. It's not involved in any of the projects we're currently working on."

"I don't," admits Carlos. "Remind me again why we bought it?"

Quentin looks sheepish. "Well...."

Nirliq steps in. "We have it because a rich guy was throwing free money at us, and as long as I was getting expensive lasers, we figured Quentin deserved a superconducting quantum interference device. And in a minute you're going to be glad we have it. Just look at the graph, okay?"

Carlos looks. He isn't familiar with the units, but the timestamps are clear enough. Every line takes a dizzying plunge yesterday afternoon, before clawing its way back up to the average not long after Dana appeared. "That sure is...striking. What does it mean?"

"A major weakening in the Earth's magnetic field," says Quentin. "Now, it does have some natural variation, and it's been on a downward trend over the last couple of centuries...but if this is right, it lost between seventy-two and seventy-five percent of its strength in a period of half an hour. You know what that should mean for the planet?"

"If you don't, Quentin promises he'll explain," adds Nirliq. "In small, friendly words."

Carlos scoops Isaña into his lap. "I couldn't tell you all the theological implications, no. Although I know they would be bad."

Quentin glances at Nirliq. "I'm allowed to use bigger words than 'bad', right?"

The picture he ends up painting is a grim one. The geomagnetic field protects the planet from solar wind and cosmic radiation. If it lost this much strength, even for a short time, the Earth should have been bombarded with enough high-energy particles to fry all their anbarics, kicking humanity back to the Bronze Age before leaving it to die a slow death from radiation poisoning.

"Okay, I don't know if there's any way to retroactively test this, but I have a theory," says Carlos slowly. "Let's say it's all accurate. The magnetic field in Night Vale got sleepy, or the anbaromagnetic-wave equivalent of sleepy, and stopped working like it usually does. What if the solar particles that hit us also got sleepy? They made it into town, but by the time they got here they were too tired to do any damage?"

Quentin blinks. "Huh. That actually makes sense."

"Not that it would need to," adds Nirliq. "We could just as easily chalk it up to typical Night Vale weirdness. The readings say we should be dead, and yet here we all are...must be a day ending in Y."

(There's a pause while Quentin runs through the English names for days of the week under his breath.)

"But then I asked Quentin if we could get hard data on how weird it was compared to the rest of the world...."

"...and I said, yes, what do you think INTERMAGNET is for? Carlos, you know what INTERMAGNET is, right? Please say yes, because I have money riding on this."

"Global network of magnetic observatories," says Carlos promptly. He's never worked with them directly, but one of their institutions was on Quentin's résumé, so he looked them up a while back. "They coordinate their data, make it all available in a standardized format...."

He trails off, suddenly worried, Unlike the Large Hadron Collider, this group collects readings from over a hundred different facilities. If one fails, or even if several fail at the same time, the overall picture won't be compromised.

Quentin takes the tablet, clicks a few settings, and hands it back to him.

More graphs. In the same units, during the same timeframe. But these are labeled with the names of cities...and the nearest one Carlos sees to Night Vale is Black Hill, more than five hours' drive away. They're not all in Hispania Nova; they're not even all on the continent of New Denmark. Hornsund is on Svalbard — one of the many theological outposts that are only allowed by treaty with the panserbjørne. Novosibirsk is somewhere in Muscovy. Honolulu is on some tiny island country in the middle of the Peaceable Ocean.

And every single one of them takes the same dizzying plunge.

Nirliq breaks the silence. "So...what do we do with this, boss?"

"We tell the rest of the team," says Carlos softly. "We tell the rest of the anbaromagnetic-field-theory community that this is a Night Vale thing. A lot of them will probably assume we're out of our minds, but they deserve to have the information in hand, in case it happens again. And then...we pray to THE BROWNSTONE SPIRE that it never, ever happens again."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The directions on the bookmark lead to an old mine entrance, with rusted trolley tracks leading down a tunnel that rapidly becomes pitch-black. Rather than walk straight in, Carlos and Sherie both pull out electrum spyglasses to check out what they're getting into.

A handful of figures are waiting in the shadows. Different sizes. Different Rusakov concentrations. None of them look malicious to Sherie, although some of the unsettled children are dim enough that it's hard to tell.

The theologians approach, daemons keeping close at their heels.

Once they're fully out of the sunlight, an unseen child speaks from the darkness. "Turn into the cavern at your left. Take twenty paces, then stop."

Sherie links arms with Carlos so they don't lose each other, and counts under her breath.

When she gets to fourteen, the voice exclaims, "No, stop now!"

"I told you you should've made someone taller count the paces," adds a different voice. "I told you!"

An older child sighs. "Just do the lights."

Candles flare to life.

Sherie and Carlos are surrounded by about a dozen children...no, she does a quick headcount, exactly thirteen children. (Assuming the detached adult man's hand down there is a child.) Their faces and figures are concealed by hooded cloaks, most of which look like old sheets with holes cut in them. Some have matching pillowcases covering their daemons. None of them are Tamika Flynn; her buffalo daemon would be pretty hard to disguise.

"Experimental theologians...." The speaker, a teenage boy with some kind of bird daemon, clears his throat and tries again, this time with an affected deep voice. "Experimental theologians, it has come to our attention that you want to support the Night Vale Young Readers Book Club. You can work with us, but under our conditions. We will decide when and where to meet with you. You will not know our real names, only code names."

"Mine is Skywalker," chimes in a kid whose cloak is printed with Star Wars characters.

"Mine is Agent Jupiter!" pipes up another.

"Mine is Shadowraven."

"It is not! I called Shadowraven. I have dibs!"

"See, this is why we should've done numbers," complains a girl who sounds close to Susannah's age, with a frog daemon sitting at her feet. "Nobody would've fought over numbers."

"As long as I get four!" pipes up the child to her left. "'Cause I'm four."

"Can I talk for a second?" Carlos holds up his hands for attention. "I think —"

"It's been a second," interrupts one of the Shadowravens.

Carlos sighs. "Technically true. Can I keep talking for a few more minutes?"

The kids mutter and look around at each other, until the boy with the faux-deep voice says, "You may."

"Thanks." Carlos sinks down to one knee so he's closer to the group's average eye level, and motions for Sherie to do the same. "Code names sound like a great idea. But they need to be short, so it won't take too long to include them when you're sending secret messages. For example: you, young lady." He addresses the detached hand, whose daemon is next to her in the form of a black cat's paw. "You can be Agent M."

The detached adult man's hand, which had been "standing" on her fingers, rolls over on her side and gives him a thumbs-up.

"And you," he continues, addressing a girl with four eye-holes cut in her cloak. "We can call you Agent R."

Sherie wonders for a moment if Carlos is going to recognize every one of these kids. Fortunately, he doesn't need to; they catch on to the pattern and volunteer their own agent names. There's a brief crisis when two of them lay claim to the title of Agent J; Carlos saves the day by dubbing them J1 and J2.

"Didn't know you were this good with kids," murmurs Sherie in English. "I'm impressed."

"Hey!" exclaims Agent R, in the same Spanish as the rest of the group. "No talking in code allowed unless it's by us."

Carlos nods. "Por supuesto. Please accept our apologies. Now, Agents, what can we help you with?"

"We are going to draw you some...things," rumbles the boy with the bird daemon, now dubbed Agent L. "And you're going to look at them, and tell us some...stuff. And it will all be very theological. Okay, who has the crayons?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Once Carlos finally starts to feel caught up with work again, he spends a morning down at City Hall. Not looking up fire codes, municipal zoning laws, dueling regulations, or any other statutes he's worried about his team running afoul of...but with Cecil, filing the updated versions of their wills.

It's the most morbidly romantic thing he's ever done.

"They probably have the original copies of the ones I did when I was younger, back in the archives," remarks Cecil. "Do you want to see?"

Carlos hesitates. "That depends. Are the archivists in this town anything like the librarians?"

"Oh, gosh, no! Archivists are much smaller, and easily frightened by bright lights. If we take in a couple of camping lanterns, they'll probably be too shy to ever get near us."

Turns out there are lanterns available at a kiosk outside the iron gates to the climate-controlled stacks, along with pitchforks, night-vision goggles, and (in a padlocked cupboard labeled EMERGENCIES ONLY) a variety of archival-quality acid-free pens. Carlos and Cecil rent a lantern each, make their way through the iron gates and the stone doors beyond, and find themselves in a cool, dark room packed with a labyrinth of metal shelves.

Khoshekh isn't with them, so it's up to Carlos to read the labels printed on the ends of the shelves (and/or describe their symbols, until Cecil hears enough detail to recognize them). Based on the reading, Cecil leads them around corners and through tunnels. At last he exclaims "Ah-hah!" and cranks one of the shelves aside, opening an aisle so long Carlos can't see the end.

Shy or not, the archivists have kept the place well-organized. It only takes Carlos a moment to find the box with the number Cecil told him to look for, and when he sets his lamp on the edge of its shelf and opens it up, there's a folder with PALMERO, CECIL / חשֶך typed neatly on the label. "Looks like this is yours."

"Oh, good," says Cecil...but doesn't reach for it. "Just out of curiosity...who else's folders are in here?"

If Cecil asks him to dig through someone else's private papers, Carlos is going to decline...but he doesn't feel bad about just looking at the names. There are eight total, going from PAGET, SADIE / ROCHDALE to PALMERSTON, MARIA / ZÁYAS. Only one is unidentifiable: the folder directly after Cecil's, which is jet-black and sealed shut with duct tape.

"That'll be Mom's," says Cecil with a nod. "Is there any chance something might be missing?"

Carlos checks the content list in the front of the box. This, at least, is written in plain Spanish and has only minor burns around the edges, so he doesn't need help to interpret it. "There's a chance, sure, but only in the sense that almost anything is theologically possible. If someone took your brother's file, they reprinted the finding aid afterward, so there's no evidence."

Cecil says nothing.

"If that's what you were looking for!" adds Carlos. "I didn't mean to assume...."

"Let's see what's in mine," says Cecil briskly, plucking it out of the group and flipping it open. "This file on top should be the latest version. Does it have a grade, or is that the one under it?"

It's a blatant subject change, but Carlos rolls with it. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisle, leaning against the shelves and turning over pages. Sure enough, the second set of papers has a big red 88% inked across the top, along with a scrawled comment from a teacher. (Did this fall under Night Vale Community College's exemption from the writing-utensil ban, or was it long-enough ago that pens were still legal?) And underneath it is a third....

"That's NVCR letterhead," breathes Cecil.

Sure enough, the name of the station is lightly embossed across the top of the front page. Carlos turns to the end: there's Cecil's signature on one line, the name Leonard Burton in loopy script on another, and, on a third, a pulsing splotch of void that hurts Carlos's eyes to look at. "I guess this is the one you had to make when you got the intern job."

"I guess so." Cecil picks it up to give the signatures a closer look.

One last piece of paper slips away from under it and flutters to the floor.

Isaña catches it, and brings it carefully back. It's a single sheet, older and more frayed than the others, on cheap printer paper — in fact, there's a classroom vocabulary worksheet printed on one side. Carlos scans the vocab words (organism, adamant, mesmerized, spectre, pulsing, heartbeat, heartbeat, heart, beat, beat, beat, and foundation, nothing unusual there) before taking a look at the back.

"It's hand-written," he murmurs to Cecil. "Can you see it? I think that's crayon."

"Can't see a word." The handwriting of adults generally shows up for Cecil, but the writing of unsettled children is much fainter, and this was certainly written long before he and Khoshekh settled. "And of course I don't remember creating it, but that's hardly surprising. Gosh. Who did I leave things to?"

"Looks like...hm, you let your mom keep your clothes. How generous," says Carlos warmly. Dear lord, this is adorable. "Earl Harlan gets your toys. And, um, something called the Little Reporter’s Book of Big-Boy Note Taking."

Cecil giggles and cuddles against his shoulder. Like they're on a couch in their very own den, instead of on a cold stone floor in a thicket of dark shelves. "I do remember that! So I must have been at least five when I wrote this. Mom got me the book to celebrate, when the City Council revealed I was the next destined Voice of Night Vale."

"That's...."

Carlos trails off, as he finally reads the next line of uneven green writing. (It's all green except at the very end, when Cecil must have either lost or used up the crayon, and switched to purple.)

"Um, Cecil? What's a...'sifferburg'?"

"Silfurberg?"

"That could be what you were trying to spell, yeah."

"It's a kind of rock," says Cecil, puzzled. "Mostly found in Iceland. That chunk of rock I found in the back of my closet could've been silfurberg, now that you mention it. I must've thought it was really cool when I was little. Why, who did I leave it to?"

Carlos swallows. This is misspelled too, but he can parse it into recognizable Spanish words. "Your big brother."

 

-{,(((,">

 

At first Cecil accepts Carlos's offer to come along for the rest of his errands. Then, when they reach the bank (which has wisps of green, onion-scented smoke leaking out from behind the doors, and large serpentine shapes visible behind the tinted glass), he hesitates. "Are you sure you want to do this, Carlos? I'm sure you have other things to do that aren't so...."

Ominous? Threatening? Marked by exhausting physical combat?

"...boring."

"No, this definitely looks as interesting as anything else I might be working on today," says Carlos with perfect honesty. "Is the bank always like this?"

Cecil shrugs. "I've only been here once or twice since management — that is, our previous management — started doing direct deposit, so I honestly couldn't tell you. The molding looks new, I think?"

Carlos shares a frown with Isaña. "Wait, Strexcorp has stopped doing direct deposit? If they're so into efficiency, why would they switch you from an automatic system to physical checks?"

"Not even a check! Cash," says Cecil. "Don't ask me to explain it. Administrators do strange things sometimes. I remember one week, our previous management paid the whole staff entirely in snails! I can only assume it makes sense if you have an accounting degree."

Maybe it does. Maybe this is taught in Econ 101 at Night Vale Community College, and these pangs of suspicion Carlos is feeling are completely mis-aimed. But. But asking questions is part of being an experimental theologian. "Would it be okay if I took a look at one of the bills?"

"If you like, sure." Cecil pulls a well-stuffed envelope out of his bag, tears the end open, and thumbs a bill off the top of the pile.

It's the right size. The right kind of paper. To Cecil's senses, it would look and feel just like the currency he's used to. And even for Carlos, at a casual glance, the colors and the layout give him the impression that it's something to spend. But it is not any denomination of Spanish dollar bill produced by the government of Hispania Nova.

"Carlos...?"

"It isn't," says Carlos. "Cash, I mean. It isn't real money, it's — well, this one says Redeemable for HN$20 worth of Merchandise and/or Services at any Strexcorp Business or Subsidiary. They're paying you in company credit."

"Oh," says Cecil.

A long pause.

"Well, that certainly complicates my policy of only shopping at locally-owned businesses," says Cecil at last. "But hey, at least this means I don't have to fight the basilisk that guards the ATM, right?"

"That sure is convenient," agrees Carlos, trying to sound as upbeat and reassuring as possible. "And at least it won't stop you from paying your biggest expenses, given that...um, that you already live in...a Strex-owned...."

He trails off. Cecil's face is turning slightly grey.

Isaña nudges Carlos's leg to be picked up, which Carlos can do entirely on autopilot, or he wouldn't have had the focus to do it at all. Once she's in his arms and closer to their boyfriend's eye level, she says, "Cecil, I have a hypothesis that it would be good if you stopped talking about our relationship developments on the radio."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette is lounging on the back steps of the larger rental house, looking at the stars and trying to figure out if there's a single familiar constellation out tonight, when Nirliq comes out of the next house over. "Hey there. Mind if I join you?"

"Be my guest."

Nirliq's red colobus daemon rides on her shoulder, long tail swinging in a curl behind them. Now that they're off work for the day, she's put on a nice blouse and some jewelry. Henriette (feeling underdressed in a tank top and jeans) scoots to the end of the step and pats the stone beside her; the grad student takes the seat, resting her chin on folded hands.

It's a surprisingly nice night, fake constellations and all. A warm breeze blows over them. The grass hums.

"I was thinking about quitting," remarks Nirliq.

"Oh?" Henriette is surprised. Maybe she shouldn't be. Sure, Nirliq is the most enthusiastic about getting to work with lasers, and is the only one who always finds it cool instead of annoying the first time they encounter something like the emergency dream broadcast system...but she's still a rational adult human being. She knows how to do a realistic calculation of reward versus risk.

Nirliq nods. "Got serious enough that I started talking with Quentin about whether we could still collaborate on the electrum lenses long-distance. That's when we looked up the geomagnetic field data — and realized that inexplicable, should-be-fatal phenomena aren't just for Night Vale any more."

"Not necessarily fatal," points out Henriette. "Could've been equipment failure."

"If it was one or two instances, sure. But all the magnetograms across the planet failing at once? That is by definition not normal. And what if next time it's all the pacemakers, hm? Or all the air traffic control towers?"

"...I didn't even think of that."

"It was the first thing I thought of," admits Nirliq. "There's something trying to get this world — maybe because we're Dr. Belacqua's world, maybe because we just happened to be next on their hit list, I don't know — and Night Vale may be the front lines of this war, but that doesn't mean anywhere else is safe. Not really." She runs her hands through her dark hair with a groan. "Ugh. Any chance you have a drink around?"

Henriette was just thinking Nirliq looked like she could use one. Her alpine marmot daemon rolls over, so she can grab the bottle of Night Vale single malt he'd been sitting on. "It's almost full. Have at it."

"Thank you, I will." Nirliq takes it —

— and hands it to her colobus, whose long limbs carry him up the side of the house in an instant. On the edge of the roof, he twists off the cap and starts pouring it out onto the grass.

"What — hey!" exclaims Henriette's daemon while she gapes, brain scrambling to catch up with what just happened. "Give that back!"

"I just said we're on the front lines of a war," says Nirliq firmly. "Which means that anybody who can't deal with that shouldn't be here. Now, all the locals have been training to face off against unimaginable danger since they learned to walk — to the point where a seventh-grader is running the most competent resistance group in town." She waves in the direction of the nearest bush and switches to Spanish: "Congratulations, by the way! You raised that girl well."

"We're very proud of her!" replies the bush in kind. "I'd promise to pass on the compliment, but she hasn't been home for a month, so I can't say when I'll get the chance."

Back in English, Nirliq continues: "And then there's us. I know we can't all be like Carlos, who's taken to this place like a witch to the sky, but at least nobody else here is sneaking around hiding bottles. So what's the deal, Henriette? Are you going to keep pretending like you can cope when you can't, or are you going to pull it together and be ready for this war?"

Notes:

New art! Hannah, Lucy, and Earl with their daemons; Dana dropping in on Kevin and Carlo (warning: bloody).

Black Hill = our-world Tucson, Arizona.

To check out INTERMAGNET's real-world data (including from the Tucson magnetic observatory), check out charts of their minute-by-minute measurements or their interactive map of geomagnetic activity.

Translations:
Por supuesto = of course
חשֶך = "(K)hoshekh" ("darkness") as written in the original Hebrew alphabet.
silfurberg = in our world, Iceland spar. In Cecil's world, something a few degrees weirder than Iceland spar.

Chapter 15: Thanksgiving (or, Dana On The N.T.A.)

Summary:

Time loops for everyone! Also, a Thanksgiving potluck for the US expats and their loved ones. But mostly time loops! Including our Dana finally reaching her visit with Cecil on the subway.

Night Vale.

Carlos grabs a bag of potato rolls and tosses it into the shopping cart, adding it to the milk, potato chips, eggs — no not those eggs — the other eggs, iguana cutlets, and decorative pebbles. "What's next on the list?"

"Yogurt," reports Henriette, reading from her phone screen. "Aisle 5. Perle wants coffee-flavored, Quentin wants bell pepper, the Li Huas want blueberry and copper."

Carlos pets the handle of the cart, and it purrs in appreciation before trundling through the Raúl's, past the humming refrigeration units along the back wall and the comforting crackling flames of Aisle 12.

Neither of them has said anything non-grocery-related all trip. Carlos isn't sure if he should try, or if it would be better to just go on pretending they don't both know this is mostly to keep Henriette occupied, while the rest of the team finds and removes anything alcoholic from the chapel and their homes.

Henriette insists it's only detoxing. The amount she's been drinking compared with her body mass indicates that she's been physiologically desensitized. Basic biology.

Carlos isn't sure if he believes her, or if he's just afraid to hypothesize that there might be an emotional component. Because if it's the latter, the logical experiment would be for her to go to counseling...and Night Vale's mental health services are run by cats. That's not a metaphor. Carlos went to one of the clinics last January (hoping that he could talk around the secret-police observation enough to get some help with his nightmares), filled out an intake form, and was told to crumple it up so the therapist could bat it around for ten minutes before falling asleep in a sunbeam for the rest of the session.

"By the way, Sherie offered wanted to know if the US expats on the team were doing anything for Thanksgiving," says Henriette, interrupting his thoughts. "We didn't last year, but I think that was mostly because it was right after the wheat and wheat by-products fiasco, so nobody wanted to deal with stuffing and bread crumbs."

"I didn't have any plans," admits Carlos. Without the standard barrage of ads for turkey sales and food bank collection drives that heralds Thanksgiving in the US, or the standard plastic-sheeting sales and recruitment of volunteers to open their homes temporarily to refugees that precede any major holiday in Night Vale, he had forgotten it was even coming up. "But if she wanted to organize something, I'm happy to help cook."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"I miss food."

"So do I," says Eustathias, in the form of a chicken-sized feathery lizard curled up in Dana's lap. "Or rather, I miss meals. The togetherness. The sense of the connection."

"The table," adds Dana, leaning dreamily against the basalt wall. "That one Abuelo had, I mean. With all the carvings. You remember?"

Eustathias sighs. "That was an amazing table."

It isn't that Dana wants to complain. She's very lucky that her body seems to have stopped needing food and water. If this hadn't happened, she would have expired of dehydration long before finding her daemon again.

But the reunion with Eustathias has thrown into sharp relief all the other things Dana misses. People. Places. Activities. The very act of the passage of time.

"I miss Abuelo. And Mamá, and our brother," she adds, belatedly thinking that her family should have a place on this list.

This perks Eustathias up. "I have an idea. Why don't we work on trying to visit them?"

"What?"

"Or rather, on sending you to visit them," amends Eustathias. "Unless we can develop the ability to send me through astral projection as well. That's another idea! We can work on both ideas at once."

"I don't know," begins Dana...but even as she says it, she isn't sure what it is that she does not know. She has discovered nothing new that she might try to report back to Cecil. She has closed the time loop she was working so hard to address. There is no duty standing before her, no direction to guide her...no reason for her not to try doing something purely for herself.

Eustathias turns into a small monkey-like creature, with green fur and tufts of orangey-yellow hair on the top of her head, and climbs into the pocket of Dana's hiking shorts. "Is something wrong? Are we scared?"

"No," decides Dana, and ascends the stairs to the bloodstone circle platform with Eustathias riding in her pocket. There are so many things in all the worlds to be scared of, but this is not one of them.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (???).

On her very first try at reaching her family, Dana appears in a room that looks just like the house she grew up in.

There is a crowd of people here, but they are nothing like the crowd in the auditorium from her mis-aimed manifestation so long ago. This time, the people are accompanied by daemons. This time, there is human warmth and excitement on every face.

And this time, she does not go unnoticed.

"Intruder!" yells a person dressed all in black, from sneakers to balaclava. Someone else hits an alarm, setting off flashing violet lights and angry chirping. The ordinary people cry out and back away from her, frightened and confused, while more people in black push through the crowd to converge around her.

"It's okay! It's just me. Just Dana Cardinal!" cries Dana, as the Sheriff's secret police (or so she hopes) back her up against a wall. She tries to back through the wall, but finds she cannot. "I'm not here to hurt anyone. I am not a threat!"

"Someone reinforce the wards!" orders an officer with a screech-owl daemon and a silver star pinned to their chest, addressing the others but aiming a blowdart gun at Dana. "Whoever was in charge of those is fired. I don't know how it got in, but it is not getting out!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (definitely).

Sherie is going to have nightmares about crayon drawings tonight, she just knows it.

Sometimes she can't figure out what the kids were getting at. Other times, the only explanation that makes any sense is also theologically impossible — and not in the "typical local paradox" way, in the "you seem to have spelled a couple of words wrong" way. And sometimes, well....

"I don't think we should second-guess any of it," says Carlos, when she first brings up her concerns. "These are the experts we're dealing with."

"They know a lot, I'm not denying it," says Sherie. "But they're still children. Teenagers at most! They're not adult colleagues sending you standardized data collected under the oversight of a review board. I don't think half of them have any idea about the theology behind what they've done. You wouldn't assume someone knows how to calculate the projectile curves for different levels of atmospheric resistance just because they're a great Little League pitcher."

"We can't write off what they're saying just because they're young," protests Carlos. "Believe me, I understand the temptation to dismiss things as errors or tampering when you don't see how they can be true! But these kids are incredibly skilled, smart, and focused, and —"

Sherie hands him a pre-chosen sheet of paper, and points to a series of lines and curves drawn on one side in purple crayon.

"Um," says Carlos, knocked back from earnest to flustered almost instantly. "Well, ah. I can see how, at first glance, that might seem...extraneous. But...."

"Carlos." Sherie folds her arms. "That is not a geometric representation of anything with deep theological relevance. That is a crude cartoon drawing of a penis."

Carlos sighs. "...I am beginning to appreciate your point."

 

-{,(((,">

 

It's later that afternoon when Cactus Jane comes to visit.

Jane is stunning, friendly, forthcoming...and eager to know if the experimental theologians have heard the good news about "the all-powerful beams that guide our lives, our hearts, our souls." Sherie has to keep politely steering her back into talking about the tests, focusing on the bloodstone circle around her, and trying to re-establish a connection with Carlos in the circle on the other side of the chapel.

(Jane's daemon, for the record, is a cactus. A literal, squat, basketball-sized lump of a cactus, with yellow spines and a tuft of yellow flowers on top. He rides in a special compartment in the baby's stroller when they're out together, and has a small wheeled cart of his own for times like this.)

Nirliq, Quentin, and Keith all pitch in to do the readings and get things on film. Sherie knows they're all thinking about the message Carlos got from this Dana person, not last week, but a couple of months back. Use all the bloodstones. Now that they know you can link multiple circles together, it sure seems like that's what she was getting at.

But even when (if?) they figure out how multi-circle connections work...what exactly are they supposed to use them for?

When their study time is up, Carlos peppers Jane with questions: some layperson-friendly, some not. Poor Jane does her best to answer, but within ten minutes she's bewildered and clearly starting to get distressed. Again Sherie steers the conversation, this time to the subject of Jane's little boy, and they wind down the meeting by relaxing with several dozen photos of a blue-eyed baby with a foreign face and a handsome, but terrible, beard.

"She's not a theological expert either," says Sherie quietly to Carlos after they've seen Jane out. "Just a sweet young woman who found herself in the middle of a prayer at the right time to be helpful."

Carlos sighs. "I know. I see that now. It's just that we only have so many leads here, you know? I don't want to miss anything."

"Carlos, I don't mean to be critical, because lord knows I understand the two of you were in a stressful situation the last time you saw each other...but surely your friend could have passed on a little more detail while she was here? She was from the relative future of the last version of her you saw, right?"

"...yeah, I was upset about that at first too," admits Carlos. "But it's like you've been saying — she's another non-expert. And she's a kid too, she's only sixteen or seventeen."

It gives Sherie a start. Had she known before that Dana was Susannah's age?

Either ignoring her surprise or oblivious to it, Carlos continues: "I don't think she could give us enough detail to successfully reverse-engineer whatever-it-is, even if she wanted to. We have to figure this out from scratch if we want to understand it enough to use it successfully. And if that means sometimes our research goes down the wrong track...well, the alethiometer wouldn't give us any specifics either, just said we had to do experimental theology. Wrong tracks are an important part of experimental theology."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (???).

"Officers, stand down!" orders a voice from the far side of the panicking crowd.

The stoic, blowdart-gun-wielding, ominously-chanting secret police surrounding Dana do not stand down. They do at least stop chanting, but their bodies remain in formation, their weapons aimed at Dana.

For her part, even though she is a ghost and unlikely to be in danger, Dana stands very still and keeps her hands in the air.

The civilians, though: they begin to move aside, letting someone through.

A moment later, that someone breaks through the crowd: an unfamiliar woman in an unfamiliar suit and half-moon glasses. She has short, natural hair, and the bearing of someone important. Someone with authority. Someone in such a position that, if this is Dana's own Night Vale, Dana should have heard of them.

"I said stand down," repeats the woman. She glows with confidence. The police lower their weapons and shuffle backward. "Everyone, stop panicking! Didn't I tell you this would happen? It's okay! It's okay."

She holds up her hands, and the crowd quiets. She turns to Dana, and she smiles.

Oh.

"I told them this would happen," repeats the future Dana gently. "I told them you would be here. I am sorry Eustathias could not be — there is so much for us to do! — but you will be going right back to her soon, won't you? So it's all right."

She opens her arms, and the present Dana — or rather, the past Dana, for this is not her relative present — steps forward. They can touch. They embrace.

The fear of the crowd has changed to wonder, and now two more people are making their way through. With a start the teenage Dana recognizes her mother and her big brother, also much older than the ones she remembers, their expressions fading from apprehension to relief and joy when their eyes fall on her.

"Stay with the bloodstone circle for now," whispers the elder Dana in her ear. "Use it to help you focus, and go wherever it takes you. You will give messages to some people, and receive messages from others — sometimes the same people, sometimes not. And one day you will get the message that lets you know where to go next."

Shaking with emotion, the younger Dana nods. She's always going somewhere, isn't she? But one day she won't have to go. She will just be, in the place that she is. In a time and space that stays in line with those of the people around her.

She is already blinking out of this time and place, but not so quickly that she cannot hug her family before she goes.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

When Carlos's phone makes its "someone is trying to reach you on Skype" noise in the line at the White Sand, Cecil starts pouting almost instantly. Carlos pulls it out of his pocket to switch it off — they have so little time here as-is, on Cecil's highly-regulated lunch break — but stops short when he sees the caller's screenname. "Sorry, Cecil! I have to take this."

He takes the call on the way out the door, and emerges into the hot desert sun just as his mother's face appears on the screen, with her raccoon daemon sitting by the keyboard so he appears in the frame beside her. "Carlos, ¡mi tesoro! It worked! Your baby sister will be so proud. She's here for her vacation, and I said, parajito, you must teach me once and for all how the Skype works. I don't care if it takes all week."

"That's great, Mamá," says Carlos warmly. "And, listen, even if you lose the call, don't assume you did anything wrong, okay? The Internet is really spotty around here. Is Azalea with you right now?"

"No, she and your father are out shopping. But you made me promise to call when your package arrived."

"It came? Fantastic." Carlos had been half-convinced it would make itself impossible to deliver. "Have you opened it yet?"

"I have! Are they a decoration? Or...something else?"

"Carlos?" interrupts Cecil, coming up behind him. "What on earth is going on?"

Carlos stutters, abruptly self-conscious. In preparation for Christmas, he's already sent Mamá and some others a short list of pointers on How To Cope With Cecil. (Everything from "he's visually impaired, so don't expect him to read any text unless his daemon is around" to "please don't freak out about the fact that sometimes his daemon won't be around.") But he has yet to give Cecil any information on How Not To Scare The Family.

"Oh! Are you in the middle of something?" exclaims Mamá. "I don't want to interrupt."

"I was about to start lunch," admits Carlos. "Cecil, it's my mother. Mamá, it's fine, the whole reason I asked you to call is that it's important! Cecil understands that sometimes things are important."

His mother looks like she can't decide whether to be thrilled or horrified. "This is the boyfriend? If I had known he would be here, I would have put on something nicer than sweatpants! And my hair, it must be such a mess —"

"Impossible," cuts in Cecil, with all the gravitas of his most solemn on-air pronouncements. "Admittedly, I cannot see it on-screen, so I have no direct evidence to the contrary. But all the related genetic evidence in the form of experience with Carlos's hair indicates that it cannot be any less than stunning."

"Oh, my," says Mamá. "Does he always sound like that? I think this one is a keeper, quirquinchito."

Carlos's face gets hot from the roots of his hair all the way down his neck, while Isaña rolls up tight enough to hide her face. Partly because oh god our mom thinks our boyfriend is hot (which is probably better than the alternative, but still), and partly because of Cecil's muffled noise of glee at Mamá calling them lil' armadillo. "He is, in my experience, always wonderful, yes. About the heliotrope — it's not decorative, no. It's more...protective. You have to set the stones up in a circle — I'll walk you through how to do it."

"Well, tesoro, this is certainly very thoughtful of you," says his mother. "Is it like that healing crystal jewelry your sister wore so much of back in college?"

Carlos sighs. "I realize that it looks like that, okay? But it's way more complex and theological, for reasons that I do not have time to explain right now."

 

-{,(((,">

 

He gets through the entire setup, and the first sentence of his reassuring you probably won't even need this, it's just to be safe speech, before the call cuts off. No Signal (Sorry) reads the text across the screen of the phone.

"Thank you," he says to Cecil. "For being patient. How much time before you have to go?"

Cecil checks his watch. "Seven minutes, maybe? Not that I'm upset! Not this time. I wouldn't have wanted to get in the way! Do you think your mother liked me? What am I missing about sweatpants?"

"I think you made a great first impression...um, sweatpants?"

Cecil reminds him of Mamá's self-conscious comment about her attire, and so Carlos tries to explain his hometown's parameters for when this particular item of clothing is socially acceptable to wear. At first his boyfriend listens and nods, intent on soaking it all in; but when Carlos mentions that there are also standards of color and size, Cecil looks heartbreakingly overwhelmed. "Dear, helpful, sartorially literate Carlos — when it comes time to pack for this trip, will you help pick out my wardrobe?"

"I would love to," says Carlos. Maybe a little too quickly. "That is...not that I think there's anything wrong with your regular clothes! You should feel free to wear sweatpants or furry pants or anything else you want, whenever you feel like it. Even if it isn't 'normal'."

"But I only wear those things when they are normal!" protests Cecil. "Do you see me wearing furry pants to go bowling? Or skinny jeans at the opera? I don't want to show up at your family's home dressed in something your culture thinks is as inappropriate for meeting your boyfriend's parents as...as putting on sequins for recreational screaming in terror at the void! It isn't that I'm not proud of my culture, Carlos, but I don't want to spend this visit being the quirky Hispanian tourist. I just want to look as boring and mundane to your family as I do to everyone here at home."

Carlos resists the instinct to say you could never look boring. It's true, but not the reassurance Cecil is looking for. "Then I'll help out in any way I can."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Outside of time and space.

The subway car is dim and odd-smelling, with the great brass pipes and mills of some otherworldly industrial district churning and rusting outside the windows as it speeds along its track.

Cecil is wearing olive-green flared pants, a T-shirt with lots of sequins, a red-and-white-striped scarf, and an oversized blue plastic bowler hat printed with the logo of a sports team Dana does not recognize. The mobile broadcasting equipment is crouched on the floor by his feet. At first Dana thinks she is accidentally intruding on another show...except that Cecil is staring directly at her, his features at once fearful and hopeful, as she fades in.

"Hello?" says Dana hopefully.

Grabbing one of the subway bars, Cecil pulls himself to his feet. "Dana?"

"Cecil!" exclaims Dana. "You can see me? Hear me?"

"Yes!" He takes a few halting steps forward, reaching for her without seeming to know it. "Dana, how did you get here? How can I —"

He stops. This close, Dana can see that he is much more disheveled than she is used to, with rumpled clothes and mussed hair.

"Oh," he says softly, face falling. "I see. Astral projection. You are not, strictly speaking, here at all."

"That's right, Cecil. But at least we can still talk!" says Dana, trying to lift his spirits. "That is a step up from the last time our paths crossed. You were in your booth at the station. You looked much the same as you do now, perhaps with a few more lines around your eyes, and there was more white in your hair. I did not want to interrupt the broadcast...but it turned out not to matter, because you couldn't even tell I was there."

Again, that wary hope. "You saw a broadcast? Do you remember what I was talking about?"

Dana describes the broadcast, as much as she remembers before her own voice overwrote it. She knows most of the details of her travel will be on record when that happens, so she doesn't pre-empt them now. Cecil clasps her shoulders, hesitant at first, then with fervent gratitude once he's sure his hands won't go right through her. By the time she finishes assuring him that she's seen both of their future selves back in Night Vale, he is hugging her tightly: as if he, too, has been exiled for far too long without human contact.

That idea is certainly supported when he adds, "Have you — by any chance — have you seen Carlos?"

It takes a second of thinking for Dana to remember. Yes, she has, although she doesn't know where or when. The few details she does know, she describes as best she can.

"I see." Cecil swallows hard. "Well...thank you anyway. Thank you for telling me." Pulling himself together, he lets her go and adds, "How are you doing? Is your journey going well?"

"It's hard to tell," admits Dana. "I think so. My daemon found me a few weeks ago, and everything seems much more promising with her around. She said Emmanuel showed her the way to —"

"Who?"

"The Man in the Tan Jacket. I forgot, you can't keep track of his name. He's the one who taught me how to do astral projection, too. He says he believes in me. Of course, he could just be trying to be encouraging."

Cecil's eyes narrow. "Or he could be doing some kind of misdirection. I don't trust that guy."

The directness of it shocks Dana — upsets her, even. She's only ever heard Cecil speak about the Man in the Tan Jacket on the radio, with careful professional detachment. For his distaste to be this blatant in person...no wonder Emmanuel avoids dealing with Cecil directly, instead sending help and support via Carlos, even though that means compensating for Carlos's own memory issues along the way. "You can trust him, Cecil! He loves Night Vale. He —"

She hesitates.

"Cecil," she says at last, "I was told that because of my condition, I can carry messages for people. I was never asked to deliver this one, and I do not know if you will be able to remember it after you have heard it, but nonetheless, while I am here I will tell you as much as I can."

And she does.

And Cecil keeps track.

Or at least, he appears to. His emotional reactions follow a progression, each one building on the last: disbelief, horror, guilt, yearning, hurt, determination. He asks questions. He asks further questions that relate to her answers, stretching the limits of her knowledge, and then the limits of her informed speculation. He —

He stops, abruptly, and turns his head from side to side. Confusion washes over his face.

"Dana? Hello?"

"Yes! I'm right here," says Dana, though she guesses, correctly, that it will be no use.

"Dana, I can no longer see or hear you, but if you are still here...." Cecil blinks back tears. "Please be safe, and well. And please, if you see them again, tell Carlos and Khoshekh that I love them?"

No mention of anything in the second half of their conversation. As if he's lost it, all at once, just like that.

Again Dana glimpses how strongly Emmanuel must want to avoid this. She is only a tangent to these people and their connection, not a part of it, and for her it is still wrenching enough.

"I will," she says, as she fades. Cecil's request is one of the least newsworthy messages she could think of, but surely she can do this as a gift to a friend. "It'll be the very next thing I try to do."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"I'm thankful for my brilliant, driven, and supportive colleagues...even if they do go a little overboard sometimes," says Henriette, kicking off their as-traditional-as-possible Thanksgiving potluck. (The Raúl's isn't stocking turkey this week, so the bird is cassowary, and the corn-on-the-cob is imaginary. Henriette is just glad they made it through the cooking without having any of the dishes dissolve or explode.) "You didn't all have to limit yourselves to sparkling grape juice, honestly."

They've rearranged the living room of the larger rental house to accommodate dinner for eleven. Cecil is there as Carlos's guest; there's Henriette, the Li Huas, and Omero; Sherie brought her family; and they left an extra chair for the Faceless Old Woman, because she's been lurking just out of sight in the kitchen all afternoon, oddly fascinated with what the foreigners are up to.

In the chair to Henriette's right is a Li Hua, who says simply, "I'm thankful for coagulation factors."

The Li Hua beside her nods. "Me too."

The Faceless Old Woman seems to be keeping up with their English-language conversation, even though when the turn comes to her empty chair, it's a Spanish-language voice that addresses them from behind the TV. "Estoy agradecido por su wifi. Y para las arañas."

"Ooh, that's a good one," says Sherie's daughter approvingly. "I'm thankful for spiders too. And my family. And Tamika Flynn. And the fact that I am a great survivor, as evidenced by this awesome scar which I am proud to have."

That seems...unusually pointed. But Henriette doesn't know what the subtext is, and Susannah's family doesn't rise to it; Sherie just clucks her tongue and says "Yes, sweetheart, we all know you're proud of it. I just wish you didn't feel the need to cut up perfectly good clothing until every top you own is a crop top."

Before the quieter younger brother can add his own answers, the lights flicker, and then the whole house is plunged into darkness. Judging by the way the refrigerator has also stopped humming, it's a normal power outage, not some kind of light-suppressing Night Vale weather pattern.

"I'm thankful for flashlights and candles," says Carlos wryly, getting a laugh out of some of the others. "Cecil, honey, we just lost our light. Would you mind? There's a big lantern in the bottom cabinet next to the stove."

"No, it's cool, I got this!" exclaims Susannah. There's a scuffling and a clinking as she fumbles for something in the darkened thicket of dishes. "We practiced this at our troop meeting, like, last week." So saying, she starts chanting in Modified Sumerian.

A gasp from Cecil's direction. "No, don't —"

With a foom the room is illuminated again — because the tablecloth in front of Susannah has burst into flame.

Everyone jerks back in surprise except Cecil, who was already in motion, grabbing the pitcher of lingonberry iced tea and sloshing it over the fire. "You never do that chant without a target prepared," he scolds Susannah as he douses it, one splash at a time. "Are you going to need bandages? I have some in my bag."

Before the girl can answer, they all hear the thwok-thwok-thwok of gyropters in the distance.

Once a rattled Susannah confirms that she has her own bandages (the Boy Scouts aren't the only ones who can be prepared), everyone falls silent in order to listen. Cecil retrieves one of their lanterns, gives it to Carlos, and a bunch of them get up to cluster in front of the window.

Henriette can't pick out the colors at this distance, only the fact that the tiny specks in the sky are in groups of three. Cecil, though, uses some other sense to confirm who they are. "Strex," he says darkly. "Not close to this part of town, but very close to other parts."

"Can you check on what they're doing?" asks Carlos. "And see if there's any way for us to make it harder on them?"

Khoshekh soars out to the hall closet and retrieves the alethiometer from Cecil's bag, hovering over the huddled watchers and lowering it into Cecil's raised hands. Cecil turns the dials to the Sun, the Owl, and the Cornucopia, and watches the needle spin.

"They are looking for someone," he reports. "They will not find her. Not in any of the places they are looking tonight. But failure will only motivate them to try something else."

"It's Tamika," says young Seth, whose daemon is on his shoulder as a gossamer-winged moth. "They're trying to catch Tamika."

"Yes."

"This sure is a lot of effort to put in to go after a twelve-year-old," says Sherie's husband dubiously. Beside him, his sheepdog daemon (currently little more than a big furry shadow) huffs in agreement.

"Thirteen," corrects Seth. "Her birthday was on Monday. We had cupcakes in homeroom for it."

"So these people are supposed to be doing late-night gyropter flyovers to find a kid they could pick up at school any day?"

"I didn't say Tamika was in homeroom. She hasn't been at school for weeks, except for —" The boy fumbles, then goes on: "Nothing. Secret reasons. It's not important. And she doesn't go home at night, either."

"Does she need places to hide out?" asks Henriette. "I'm sure we can arrange a few safe spaces for a kid to camp out overnight."

"That would be awesome," says Susannah from over at the table, where she and her griffon vulture daemon are still sitting. "She probably moves around a lot. And it would be logical to think she doesn't have a fixed schedule, because that would make her easier to catch. Most likely, the more options she has, the better."

Seth turns to his parents. "We can put her up at the apartment too, right? If she needs to?"

"Now, son, I'm not sure that's a good idea," protests Sam. "It would be inappropriate, and it might not be safe, if this girl is in trouble — I know you've been a little starstruck ever since you met her, but —"

"Oh my god, Dad —" begins Susannah.

And Seth's daemon springs from his shoulder to become —

For the second time that evening, everyone jumps back. The kid's daemon looks like a large rodent, maybe a short-haired cousin of Henriette's alpine marmot, with striped orange fur. But her ears are long and pointed, her tail is a whipcord longer than her body, and she crackles with arcs of yellow-white lightning from nose to tail-tip.

"When will you stop cracking jokes about me having a crush on her?" demands Seth, while his living anbaric generator of a daemon outshines the lantern as she stares down their father's sheepdog. "Even if I did, the only thing that would be inappropriate is not helping her! Don't you get it? If they catch her, they will kill her!"

Sherie puts her hand on her husband's arm. "Honey. He's right."

"On the contrary," says Cecil.

"Aha!" exclaims Sam. "See, kiddo? The psychic guy thinks you're overreacting."

Cecil folds his arms. "I didn't say anyone was overreacting, I said they wouldn't kill her. The fate Strexcorp would like to visit upon Tamika Flynn is much, much worse than death."

"And we will help her," says Sherie, addressing her son but visibly clutching Sam's arm as a warning not to interrupt. "Your father and I will have to talk about the details, but I promise, Strexcorp is not going to catch your friend without us getting in their way first."

A grim silence, except for the crackling of the anbaric daemon's fur and the distant sound of gyropters.

"Just to reiterate," says Henriette after a moment. "Any of the rest of you want to break out a glass of the hard stuff, don't hold back on my account."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (???).

When Dana and Eustathias focus on sending her to speak with Carlos, she ends up in a dark room, with high windows and four stone walls.

The light outside is a familiar teal; the air smells like Night Vale, all sour peaches and burnt almonds. Inside, Dana sees a large crate filled with bloodstones, several pieces of powered-down anbaric equipment all shoved up next to each other, and a haphazard stack of cardboard boxes with labels like BEAKERS and THE WHIRRING BLUE THING.

A sliding door in one of the walls rolls open...and in steps Carlos the experimental theologian, his armadillo daemon trotting along at his heels. "Dana!" he exclaims, peeling off a pair of blue rubber gloves, then tugging his safety goggles off over his short mop of curls. "I was hoping it was you. Did you get the message from Maureen?"

After a long pause, Dana says, "The only message I have is from Cecil, for you. He says he loves you."

Carlos stops breathing, the grin freezing on his face. He looks like he's been kicked in the gut.

That is not the reaction Dana was expecting.

"It's probably a very out-of-date message," she adds, hurried and apologetic. "You are undoubtedly in the future of all the other Carloses I've seen. The short haircut could be from your past as well as your future...but I am certain I would have noticed that scar before."

"Oh!" exclaims Carlos after a beat. The tension that had seized up his body falls away; he sags with relief, breathing again, actually giggling. "Oh, praise the beams, you're a past Dana, that wasn't — god, don't scare me like that! You say this is the first time you've seen the scar? Hang on, let me get out my chart." He pats his pockets, finding a small notebook, its pages bound with large blue plastic rings. "The message from Cecil — where and when did you get it? Who else have you interacted with? And where in the desert are you, as of your own relative now?"

"I wasn't able to tell the place or time. All I know is that Cecil was on a subway car." She hesitates, waiting for Carlos to pull out an illegal writing utensil to go with the notebook, but he only beckons for her to continue. "The last person I spoke to was that same Cecil. I am speaking to you now from the top of the basalt fortress, where my daemon has found me, but there is no one else to —"

"You're alone? But still at the fortress?" interrupts Carlos's daemon.

Carlos finishes the thought: "Does that mean you haven't been to the Clouded Mountain yet?"

"No," says Dana uncertainly. "Should I have been? Can I see the chart?"

"No!" Carlos clutches the book to his chest. "No, you are way too early to be looking at this version of the chart. But it's good, your current time and place — it's fantastic — see, in my relative past I had a vision of you at the base of that mountain, and just before you got on your daemon's back and flew up, you gave me a message. And that's still in your relative future?"

Now Dana begins to understand. "It is! What's the message?"

"Use all the bloodstones."

Dana repeats it back to him. "And what should I tell you to use them for?"

The corner of Carlos's mouth tugs on his scar as he breaks into a grin. "Don't worry. We figure it out."

Notes:

Art: Intern Dana, meet Mayor Dana.

Bonus: do you like birb!cecil? Of course you do. Well, now there is bird cecil and daemon!Khoshekh crossover fic! With matching art!

That furry green form Eustathias takes...? Yes, Dana briefly has a wocket in her pocket.

Translations:
mi tesoro / parajito = my treasure / little bird
Estoy agradecido por su wi-fi. Y para las arañas. = I am thankful for your wi-fi. And for spiders.

Chapter 16: Get Outta Town

Summary:

It's getting more and more hazardous to be Tamika, although at least she has allies (including one in a tan jacket) to help her out of a tight spot. Cecil has the Book Club's backs, on one condition: they look out for Carlos when things get rough. And the roughness gets to be too much for another theologian's spouse.

Night Vale.

Tamika knocks on Señor Palmero's door three times before the experimental theologian opens it, wearing boxers and a short bathrobe and not another stitch. "Oh!" he exclaims, looking from the dried-up librarian claw hanging around Tamika's neck to the book-laden bulk of her buffalo daemon. "Oh, geez, you better come in. You're here to see Cecil, right?"

"If he's in the middle of something, I can wait," says Tamika dryly, though she and Rashi don't waste any time getting in from the hall. They don't know how many of the radio host's neighbors they can trust.

"It's not — uh — he just needs to get dressed," stutters Dr. Perfecto. "Sit here in the kitchen, okay? Are you thirsty? Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Except the blue pitcher! That's not a beverage, that's just being chilled to keep it quiet until I can get it back to the chapel and figure out what it is."

Tamika pours herself a glass of orange milk (she's in the middle of her growth spurt here, she needs the calcium) and kicks back at the kitchen table. A few minutes later, out comes Palmero, in a long nightshirt and with his face and hands still kinda flushed from being hastily scrubbed.

"Hey there," he says, dropping into the chair across from her and drumming his fingers on the tabletop: SOS?

ALL CLEAR, taps Tamika. NEED TO TALK HARDWARE.

She outlines the progress of her team's gyropter work with one hand while drinking her milk with the other. Two of their appropriated Strex vehicles blew up during dissection, and a third was booby-trapped in a way that shot up a Weird Scout with some kind of drug they haven't identified yet, even with several aspiring medics scouring Byron's The Two Foscari. But they're on top of the situation now, and getting better all the time.

TOWN MUST KNOW SOME GYROPTERS ARE OURS, she concludes. CAN YOU GET IT OUT ON AIR?

Palmero considers. CAN IT WAIT 2 WEEKS?

Rashi snorts in disapproval as Tamika narrows her eyes. RELATED TO YOUR VACATION W/ BF?

POSITION IS TOUCHY, Cecil reminds her. RIGHT B4 SCHEDULED TRIP IS FREEST TIME 4 REBELLION. BUILT-IN BUFFER FROM RETALIATION.

It's not like Tamika doesn't sympathize. Palmero walks a fine line, going in to work every day with these people breathing down his neck. (Or...not breathing, seeing as how some of the Strex transplants seem to have a major lack of biological functions.) She's just pretty sure he could get around this if he really wanted. IIRC YOU HAVE LIKE 500 VACATION DAYS. USE SOME EXTRAS. GO EARLY.

The Voice of Night Vale shakes his head. BETTER IF CARLOS NOT FORCED 2 TAKE UNSCHEDULED EXTRA BREAK FROM THEOLOGY. HELPS EVERYONE WHO BENEFITS FROM CARLOS'S WORK. INCLUDES U FTR.

SO JUST YOU GO EARLY, suggests Tamika. HAVE DR. PERFECTO JOIN YOU LATER.

IMPERFECTO, corrects Palmero. PERFECTAMENTE IMPERFECTO, he further corrects.

SEMANTICS, taps Tamika sternly.

It earns her a theatrical sigh, but at least the man moves on from the precise details of his pet names for his boyfriend. MY POINT IS: HE GOES WHEN I DO.

HE'S A GROWN MAN. HE CA

Palmero takes her hand and clasps it between his own, cutting her off. "Tamika. You're very brave."

"Not sure I believe that," mutters Tamika. Bravery, according to the wise mentor figures in half the classic kids' novels she's read, means standing up in the face of your fears. And ever since the library, she doesn't really have those any more.

"Very strong, then," says Palmero, unbothered. He turns to glance at the doorway, even though the experimental theologian is around a couple corners and not visible without a periscope, then faces Tamika again, already tapping soundlessly against the inside of her wrist:

I HAVE FEARS.

I FEAR FOR CARLOS

I FEAR FOR NIGHT VALE

I FEAR FOR WHAT WE DON'T YET KNOW THAT WE DON'T KNOW

AND I AM NOT THAT STRONG.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie spends the rest of the night expecting Sam to re-open one of their Night Vale arguments.

It doesn't happen. When she tries to start a discussion, he waves her off, saying it's a lot to think about, and he just wants to sleep on it before they talk about anything.

Makes sense. They're both tired. All this will be easier in the morning.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos waits in the bedroom, expecting the tension and adrenaline to keep him alert until Cecil's conversation is over.

Tamika Flynn is here. He's half-expecting Strexcorp enforcers to descend on the building at any moment. In the basket at the foot of the bed, Isaña shivers; Khoshekh hovers above her, warm and protective, but not so entwined with her that he isn't ready to spring at any moment.

The next thing Carlos knows, Cecil is shaking him awake.

He startles, neck and shoulders strained from leaning awkwardly against the headboard. "Eh? Is she — is everything —?"

"Everything is as it was." Cecil shooes him under the covers, climbing in after him. "Our visitor elected not to stay in a Strex-owned building for the night. She left you several volumes of the poetry of Mary Robinson. I told her you would read them in the morning."

"Mmm. Good call, thanks."

Cecil drops a sleepy kiss on his cheek and a light push on his shoulder. "Roll over? Wanna be the big spoon."

(Since the bar code, he never lets himself be the little spoon.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

Morning. The sunrise is late, the sky turquoise. Sam offers to drive the kids to school; Sherie doesn't make a fuss, but decides not to leave for work until he gets back. One way or another, they're going to have this talk.

When the drive takes longer than she expected, she takes a leaf out of Carlos's book and keeps herself busy by doing little bits of tidying-up. There's a clock radio in the bedroom; she can listen for traffic updates while she dusts.

...and that's how she notices that some of her husband's favorite books have vanished from the shelves.

Casually, as if the Sheriff's secret police might call her out for snooping if she acts too suspicious, Sherie heads for the closet with the vacuum cleaner — and, on the way, takes an offhand peek into the little room they fixed up to be Sam's home office. His laptop is missing too.

"He isn't," says her mongoose daemon out loud. "He couldn't be."

Raising her voice and switching into Spanish, Sherie addresses the walls: "Did you move any of my husband's things recently?"

"Is the silverware his?" asks the Faceless Old Woman. "Because I did rearrange that, yes. A few of your spoons had to be destroyed in the process, but it was for the best. The books and the anbarics, no, he took those on his own."

Sherie takes a heavy seat in the nearest chair. Her daemon flops down by her ankles, overwhelmed. Sam's fleeing town. Didn't talk to her, didn't think she might agree that this is what's best for the kids, just bundled them up and went. They're probably halfway down Route 800 by now.

"You could call the Sheriff's secret police," suggests the Faceless Old Woman from under the chair. "Ask them to blow out the tires and bring everyone back. They have some lovely new rocket launchers they've been itching to try."

"Nobody is shooting rockets at my family," says Sherie wearily. Part of her wants to catch a bus to the aerodock and throw herself on the next flight after them. But her work here is so important. And isn't this the best of both worlds? Staying in town to help defend the universe, while her children get evacuated from the danger zone?

There's a creaking and rustling from under her, and something gets tossed in the air to land in Sherie's lap.

It's just a box of tissues, but her heart is going a mile a minute from the shock anyway. "I would appreciate a little warning next time!" she sniffles.

"You could be a little more grateful," huffs the Faceless Old Woman. "Here I want to all the trouble of stealing those from Chad in 3B, just for you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Here Tamika went to all the trouble of an early-morning library run, and by the time she and her companions have finished checking out, there are yellow gyropters hovering outside.

They huddle in front of one of the big glass windows: Tamika with her slingshot raised, Rashi with bags of books slung over his wide dark back, a Weird Scout who now insists on being addressed as Agent D (his daemon riding on his shoulder as a grey squirrel), and the ten-year-old with the uncanny foresight who's started answering to Agent J2 (riding on the shoulders of her daemon, in the form of a sturdy brown ibex). "Backup should be here any minute," murmurs Agent D. "They can take the 'ropters down, right?"

"In the middle of town?" counters Tamika. "Sure, but it's gonna take planning if they don't want to bring 'em crashing down on any non-Strex businesses."

In the dark aisles behind them, something rattles.

Tamika narrows her eyes. "We gotta get out of the light."

"Circle around through spec-fic?" suggests D. "That's usually pretty clear."

He should've been right. It should've been easy. J2 doesn't see any problems coming, and while she's not a perfect barometer of what's going to happen in the immediate future at all times, she usually gets some kind of psychic heads-up if there's mortal peril around the corner.

But no. Just their luck, today...the speculative fiction section is being weeded.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos has a feeling that Sherie is unusually down today, but he doesn't pry, just tries to focus both of them on their work.

It lasts until he's in one of the bloodstone circles for observation...and feels himself being called.

"I'm getting someone," he says out loud, hands curling around Isaña more tightly. "Are the recordings all running? Someone's trying to reach out...if I can pull them in...."

...and the translucent figure of Sherie's daughter appears in front of him, all fishnet sleeves and spiky jewelry and a bloodshot cast to her black-rimmed eyes. It's eerie to see her ghost without the griffon vulture daemon beside her, even though Carlos is a lot more comfortable with daemonless people than he used to be.

"Omigod," says Susannah. "I did it! Thanks — Mr. Carlos, right? Is my mom around?"

Carlos nods toward a thunderstruck Sherie. "Right behind you."

Susannah whirls around. "Mom! You have to come get us."

They talk, Sherie's voice wavering, and Carlos quickly puts together the picture. Susannah's weak, frantic projection is coming from the balcony of a hotel room in Kinlání: far out of the reach of the Night Vale authorities. Sherie's husband took her and Seth there. Without telling Sherie, or either of the kids, what he was doing.

"Baby girl, I know you liked it here, but maybe your father's right," says Sherie. "You're going to be a lot safer out there."

"Safe?" exclaims Susannah. "He threw out our phones so we couldn't call you! He's basically kidnapping us!"

"He certainly isn't choosing the best way to go about this, and it was wrong to get rid of your phones," allows Sherie. "But, Su, I need you to be completely honest here, no drama, no exaggerating...do you think you're in any kind of danger with him? I wouldn't expect it, but you're the one who's there, not me. Are you just upset, which I would understand, or do you have some reason to be afraid?"

As the antenna for Susannah's signal, Carlos can feel it like a physical sensation, the way she bristles at the insinuation that any of her honest worries are "drama". But she's a Girl Scout, which means she has sworn to be honrada y justa, so she puts the defensiveness aside and answers: "No, it's fine, he's — he's not gonna — hurt us, or anything."

"Then let's give him a while to cool down, and —"

"I know this is my fault!"

Sherie looks about as taken-aback as Carlos feels.

"And I'm sorry," continues Susannah, ghost-voice faltering. "I shouldn't have started that fire. I shouldn't have kept bringing up my Girl Scout initiation when I knew it upset you. If we come back I'll be more careful, I swear! I just wanted you to respect me, I didn't want this!"

"Oh, honey...." Sherie tries to reach for her daughter, but her hand goes right through Su's shoulder, so they end up standing awkwardly across from each other instead. "I respect you. I do. But just because you can handle things doesn't mean you should have to, understand? And you sure deserve better than to be yanked back and forth while your parents get their act together. I will talk to your father when you get the chance. Can you hang in there and look out for your brother in the meantime?"

"I can, but —" Susannah swallows. "I don't think Dad's gonna talk to you. Like, ever. He's saying — stuff — about you. Not good stuff."

When Sherie speaks, it's with exquisite hesitation. "Su, hon...."

"I am not lying!"

"She isn't," says Carlos. Both women turn to him, tense, defensive — and Carlos knows his opinions are neither needed nor wanted here, so he keeps his voice even and sticks to the facts. "Speaking purely as your relay station, Susannah: if you were making that up to manipulate your mom, I would know. And you aren't."

Susannah nods, then bursts out, "Dad thinks your boyfriend's a freak."

Carlos grits his teeth. She's not making that up either. And while Carlos's opinion on it still might not be relevant, he sure as hell has one.

To her mother, Su exclaims, "Your boss is on my side!"

Carlos winces. "Look, to be honest, I never thought you kids should've come here in the first place."

"But you're impressed with how well we've adapted, right? You are! Admit it!"

"Sweetie, stop telepathically prying into my boss's feelings. It's not going to change my mind, and it's very rude."

"You don't agree that he's a freak, do you? Or Michael, or Señor McDaniels, or anyone else? You aren't mad about what Seth's daemon did last night."

Sherie takes a deep breath. "I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with being...a little odd. And you tell your brother that I will love him and support him no matter what he settles as. If we decide against letting you two come back here, it'll be because this place is dangerous and it would break our hearts if anything happened to you, not because of some kind of silly prejudice against people with more than one head."

It doesn't take any kind of special connection to feel that Susannah wants to argue, but Night Vale's fatality rate is hard to deny. "O-okay. Okay, listen, I gotta go. What's your number, in case I need to call from the hotel phone or something?"

Sherie rattles off a list of digits, finishing it off with, "and I love you very much."

Susannah repeats the number back to her, then gulps and adds, "Love you too."

The link flickers and dies. Carlos hadn't realized how much of a strain it was until it's gone, leaving him with a pounding headache.

"...You think it's the right thing, keeping them away?" asks Sherie quietly. "What if they really have gone native?"

Either Carlos has gone native more than he realized, or he's still feeling too defensive over Cecil to think clearly, because he hesitates for a moment before saying, "No matter how much they've adapted, it's still safer for them not to be here. Even if they were Night Vale born and bred, there are plenty of things around that could and would eat them alive."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The first couple of librarians are easy to take out — Agent D sets one on fire, and Tamika takes out the other with a couple of rocks to the eyes — but their screeches call down more. While Tamika is busy slingshotting a flock of small bat-winged librarians into a display of the works of China Miéville, a bigger one, furry and snake-necked and broad as a city bus, knocks Agent J2 off her daemon's back and pins her to the ground.

The daemon, Tehom, turns into a massive vulture and goes for the librarian's yellow eyes. It roars, twisting away and snapping at him with fangs each as long as Tamika's hand; by pure vicious luck it catches his leg, and swings him off across the aisles. Both Tehom and J2 wail in pain at the sudden distance.

Agent D leaps onto the creature's back, swinging his axe at the nearest muscle group. It rears back and rolls over, temporarily freeing J2, but smashing the bulk of its weight down on D. He lets out a noise too choked to be a scream.

Tamika charges forward, Rashi's horns lowered and ready to slam into the librarian's side — but there's another one advancing on J2, spiny-tailed and snarling, and they didn't bring enough people for a battle like this, they can't protect everyone right now —

The spined librarian takes an arrow to the knee, and another one straight into its mouth. It collapses before it can reach the girl, spitting and gurgling in fury.

Rashi plows into the largest of the librarians, Tamika cracks her biggest rock against its skull, and two more arrows pierce the soft underside of its throat. Blue ichor dribbles from the wounds. It isn't down, not by a long shot, but it seems to realize it's been outnumbered; the books on their shelves wobble and thump against each other as it staggers back.

Agent D's body is left on the floor, wrecked, unmoving. His daemon is nowhere to be seen. A smaller librarian is already chewing on him.

"Nothing you can do for him," snaps an unfamiliar voice. "Keep your weapon out and come with me."

It's their unexpected arrow-slinging rescuer. An adult, a man Tamika doesn't recognize, standing over the shivering-but-alive Agent J2. He is holding a longbow, and wearing a tan jacket.

Tamika keeps her slingshot out, all right. Keeps it aimed at this guy, in case he's up to no good. He doesn't tell her off or anything, just gets down on one knee next to the girl and says, "While I carry you to where your daemon landed, can you hold my bow?"

Biting her lip hard to keep from crying, J2 nods. And she's a good judge of character, even through crushing pain, so Tamika goes for it.

The librarians have either settled for fighting over the Weird Scout's body or just plain fled the area. No more spring out of the woodwork to attack while Tamika and Rashi escort their companions down past the public-use computers. Tehom is hiding under a chair next to the Biography aisle, in the form of a small black cat; he staggers out the moment they're in sight, and the Man in the Tan Jacket sets J2 in the armchair so her daemon can turn into a bird and take a flying leap into her arms.

Keeping a sharp eye on the hopefully-empty gloom around them, the Man says under his breath, "Do you have a pen?"

Tamika hesitates. Is this guy with the police? Although if he tries to make any trouble, she can always give him a couple mortal injuries and leave him for the librarians to finish off, so..."Yeah, I got a pen," she says, her and Rashi making a protective stand between her comrade and everything else. "What about it?"

"Your friend could use some lingonberry tea right now. The best stuff in town is still in Josie Hirsti's cupboards. You'll want to break into her house and brew some. Better write this all down, or you'll forget as soon as I'm out of sight."

He's got that bow in hand again, and he doesn't want to get eaten by librarians any more than the rest of them, so Tamika risks holstering her slingshot and getting out a pen and some paper from Rashi's bookbags. Lingonberry tea. Old Woman Josie's place. Helpful for someone who's had their daemon hurled out of range for a few minutes. And speaking of help..."This forgetting-you business...that mean we've forgotten about you before? About you helping us out?"

"A couple of times," says the Man in the Tan Jacket calmly. "Not during the Summer Reading Program itself. I was locked out of the building like the rest of town. That was all you."

Good to know. Tamika jots it all down.

Something snarls at them from the media room. In seconds — if he grew up here, he must've been at the top of his archery class — the Man in the Tan Jacket has an arrow on the string, drawn, aimed, and set loose. The librarian yips in pain and retreats.

"You doing all this out of the goodness of your heart?" asks Tamika. "Or are you gonna want payback at some point?"

"One of these days I'll come find you and ask for a favor," says the man. No shame, no weaseling around it, just facts. "When you can do it. If you can do it." He turns to Agent J2 and Tehom (now in the form of a fluffy dog as big as his human, and being cuddled accordingly). "How much of young Ms. Flynn's destiny can you see?"

"Not a lot," says the girl. "No matter what way it goes, eventually it gets too close to the Smiling God. Then I can't look at it. Ooh, ooh, but I can see we're clear to leave now! And we gotta go, fast, before the replacement gyropters show up."

"Good call. Can you two walk? If you can't, don't push yourselves."

"If they need carrying again, I'll do it," says Tamika. She probably isn't as tall or toned as the Man in the Tan Jacket (probably. It's hard to tell anything direct about what he looks like. She's just estimating based on the size of that bow), but she's stocky and sturdy and more than capable of carrying a ten-year-old piggyback. Especially one who's this light, thanks to the whole leg thing.

J2 nods. "Yes, please."

Tehom turns into a beetle and rides on her head, Tamika crouches down so the girl can clamber onto her back, and they all head for the windows again.

When they get there, Tehom turns into a buffalo like Rashi, and the two of them headbutt through the nearest pane together. It's the back of the building — the parking lot. Even with the skies clear, they bolt across the pavement as quickly as possible, ducking into a hardware store that Strex has, miraculously, still not managed to buy. There's a handy display of patio furniture that they can all sit on and catch their breaths.

Tamika still has a note clutched in her hand. She unfolds it. A reminder about lingonberry tea.

While she's texting a couple of the Book Club members with driver's licenses, soliciting a ride to Old Woman Josie's place out by the car lot, J2 says, "He didn't come out with us."

"Agent D knew the risks," says Tamika. "I'll write the note to his family."

"No, not him!" protests J2. "The guy! The guy in the tan jacket, remember?"

"I've seen him around town sometimes...why? Was he around here?"

J2 sighs and looks away. "Never mind."

 

-{,(((,">

 

November fades into December. Carlos goes to the Desert Flower for a medical follow-up, in which Teddy Williams pronounces his eardrums healed and healthy. This time, when he gets out, Cecil isn't playing a pinball game; he's in the snack area by the bowling aisles, diligently paring away at a block of wood with a knife.

"What are you carving?" asks Carlos, leaning over the side of the booth.

"Gah!" Cecil jumps, nearly slicing off a chunk of his thumb. He drops the tiny-bladed knife on the table and tries to hide the wood under his scarf. "Don't scare me like that."

"Sorry! I didn't realize you were so, um, absorbed." So this is why the apartment has smelled like pine shavings for the past couple of weeks. "Is it a secret project? If you want to hide it, I'll look away."

Cecil sighs. "No, it's okay, you were going to find out anyway. Here."

Carlos slides into the seat across from him as Cecil rests the carving next to their basket of mozzarella sticks. It's...a raccoon. About the size of Carlos's fist, stylized and elegant, sitting alert with its little wooden ears pricked. It's even been carved in such a way that the banding of the woodgrain makes the bands of its tail.

"That's amazing," breathes Carlos, scooping Isaña up onto the table to get a closer look. "Just like Mamá's daemon."

"Oh, good," says Cecil. "You think she'll like it?"

Carlos does a double-take. "You made it for...? Is this why you asked me to confirm what everyone's daemons were? Cecil, this is incredible — how many of them have you finished?"

"Um, your siblings, and your sister's two settled children." Cecil fiddles with the tail end of the scarf (literally; it's knit in the shape of a cat), sheepish but pleased. "But before that I finished a set for all your teammates, because I wouldn't be able to finish any of theirs at the last minute on Christmas eve...not without any Erikas around to do late-night deliveries. And also, ah, Sherie's family, I know they don't celebrate, but I didn't want to leave them out...I may have gotten a little carried away?"

Isaña circles the precious little raccoon. "When did you even find the time?"

"Mostly at work. Not being allowed to leave the office doesn't mean you get more done, it just means you finish what you were already going to do and then have all this down time to kill. And, well, it's relaxing. Watching the wood get brighter as it takes shape, you know? It's sort of therapeutic."

Of course it makes Cecil happy to increase the amount of Rusakov particles in the world. Carlos is dizzyingly in love with this man.

...but not so dizzy that he can't pay attention to other things. "Listen, I'm sure the rest of the team will be flattered, but about Sherie's family...you might want to hold off on that. And did you include one for Seth?"

"It would be pretty rude to give his sister one and not him," says Cecil reasonably. "I don't know if this is how he'll settle or not, but that anbaric mouse-thing his daemon turned into on Thanksgiving was so intriguing...."

Worse and worse. Carlos hurriedly explains the rift in Sherie's family, and how it's probably only going to agitate her husband more than ever if he starts getting gifts from a Night Vale native. He's worried about Sherie enough as it is; she's having non-secret conversations with her kids again, but in between she's started working late nights at the chapel, ordering a lot of takeout and stocking the break room fridge with TV dinners.

Frankly, he's worried about half the team these days. Henriette's on edge because of her detoxing, though she snaps at anyone who tries to be supportive that if they get any nosier she's going to need a drink. Nirliq's electrum lenses keep exploding. Omero had a terrible time with the dull, floating faces that followed everyone around on Thursday; he kept catching them out of the corner of his eye and thinking he was being stalked, and got so keyed-up he nearly shot one of them before locking up his gun until the apparitions went away.

Cecil listens with rising sympathy. He seems a little lost about why Henriette would be avoiding her municipally-sanctioned drinking-to-forget, but accepts it as one of those inexplicable outsider quirks. As for Sherie: "Do you think it would make her feel better or worse to have the opportunity to babysit? I know Steve and his lady friend are always looking for people to watch the girls during date nights."

"Not sure," admits Carlos. "Next time I get the chance, I'll ask."

 

-{,(((,">

 

He doesn't get the chance.

There are yellow gyropters in the sky again today, and as the afternoon wears on, they start dropping posters. Hundreds of them, thousands, dotting the walkways and getting blown into windows. One smacks against the glass pane of the ordinater room at the chapel and gets stuck there; it's recognizable as a wanted poster even though the text is sympathetic, even though the headline above the black-and-white class photo of Tamika Flynn reads simply PERDIDA.

"Is it all right if I clock out early?" asks Sherie. "I think I...left the oven on."

Quentin frowns. "Wouldn't the Faceless Old Woman just turn it off if you...."

Henriette, Köhler, Carlos, and Nirliq all shush him at once.

"Sure," says Carlos in the tense silence. "Go ahead and check on your...oven."

Quentin looks from the departing Sherie to the piece of paper fluttering against the glass. "Oh," he says. "Oh."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I am not missing!" shouts Tamika from the pedestal of the bronze statue in front of the Night Vale Post Office. She swings the head of one of the bat-winged librarians from last week's raid to punctuate her point. The most battered of the books she walked out with, a copy of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, sits heavy in the back pocket of her cargo shorts. "I have never been missing!"

Yellow gyropters are circling overhead, but they can't land. Not close to her and Rashi. Not with the solid crowd of Night Vale citizens — plus the outsider theologian whose apartment she stayed at last night — taking up so much space around the pedestal, blocking their way.

"I am found!" repeats Tamika, voice ringing across the plaza, and silently adds, dammit, Palmero, you better have my back.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Everyone at the chapel (well, half of the Li Huas, all of the everyone-else) is huddled around the radio, riveted, by the time Cecil reports on Tamika's dramatic stand. They shudder in sympathetic distress when he recites the cadences of a management-mandated Strexcorp ad. And they tense when he announces that his producer is shutting the broadcast down.

The distant chopping noise of nearer gyropters has been going by overhead all day, but during the weather it gets louder. And louder.

"Oh, god, they're coming here," says Sherie. "What do we do?"

"Carlos. Duck," snaps Henriette. Carlos promptly drops to the ground and gets under a table, out of the line of sight of any of the windows; Köhler and his binturong daemon move to shelter him and Isaña from the direction of the door. "Let's get the shades. Then you go hide in the darkroom...I mean, uh, the...whatever we're calling it now."

"The laser room," says Nirliq, heading to the nearest window to take the blinds down.

"Right. That. If they ask, he's not here, he's...um...."

"Tell them I'm at the House that Doesn't Exist," stage-whispers Carlos. "You really want to stump them, tell them I'm in the House that Doesn't Exist."

"What if they don't believe us?" hisses Perle. "What if they decide to come in and search by force?"

"That's why, if they knock, Omero and Li Hua are helping me answer," says Henriette. "You guys are armed, right?"

"Yes, ma'am," says Omero, working on another window.

"You know it," says the Li Hua in residence. "Even better: the other me is upstairs getting out the machine gun right now. I see any trouble, she'll blast 'em from above."

"Good. I think." Henriette rubs her temples. The gyropters are deafening, landing on the sidewalk outside; she has a headache already.

Perle still isn't happy. "And what about those of us who didn't sign up to be Carlos's human shields?"

"You come and hide behind me, that's what," says Carlos without missing a beat.

"The windows are covered," Köhler informs him. "Go."

Carlos and Perle both make a break for the laser room, Isaña running at Carlos's heels, Perle's gecko daemon riding on her shoulder. Quentin and his flying squirrel look like they aren't sure whether to follow, but Nirliq cuts them off. "You stay out here and help me look busy." To Henriette, she adds, "If we're going to use the talking-them-to-death strategy this time around, Quentin is our best bet to handle the talking."

The doorbell rings.

"It's not about us," says Henriette, more to psych herself up than to motivate the team. "They're not after the rest of us. Not yet."

She doesn't move.

Köhler does. "Dr. Zeng, Mr. Stepanyan," he says, nodding to Li Hua and Omero in turn. "If you would."

While he leads the door-answering mission, Nirliq and Quentin start getting out the reactants for the Asriel emulsion, and Nirliq pauses next to Henriette in the middle of pulling on gloves. "You're probably right. If they were making aggressive moves against us for our own sakes, we would've noticed. For one thing, some of these MISSING pictures probably would've had Sherie's kids on them."

That's...discomforting, but probably true. "Sure," says Henriette, shaking herself. "Sure, you have a point there. Lemme help you with the Erlenmeyer flasks."

She tries, but she and her marmot daemon are doing a miserable impression of a non-suspicious working theologian and they both know it, so it's a huge relief when Köhler returns: accompanied not by a uniformed Strexcorp agent, but by the Carlsberg kid, proudly wearing her Girl Scout vest. "Hi! Is Señor Carlos here? We brought an armed yellow gyropter escort for his drive out of here, so Strex will see he already has a gyropter escort and won't send a whole new gyropter escort that isn't run by the Night Vale Book Club. Ooh, what are you making? Does it explode?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

They pile into the vehicles, with Carlos, Perle, and a slingshot-wielding teenage Morrigan Scout in the coupe, and switch on the radio just in time to hear Cecil growling, "Espero que ella los encuentre primero, claro está." A trail of three stolen, Scout-piloted gyropters follows the line of theologians down the roads. Carlos can only pray that Cecil, now broadcasting from the station roof with jury-rigged equipment and auxiliary power, is as well-watched as they are.

When the radio moves on to silence, self-reflection, and a long pause to hear yourself think, Perle says softly, "You really did let me hide behind you."

"Well, yeah," says Carlos. "None of you were hired to be human shields. You were hired to do theology."

The Scout (whose daemon is some kind of long-nosed water shrew) touches an earpiece, then says, "Are you all packed, Dr. Perfecto?"

Carlos blinks. "Packed...? For...my holiday vacation? I'm not leaving for a week."

"You sure? According to Agent M, your boyfriend's meeting you at the aerodock in...ten minutes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A yellow gyropter ferries Carlos, Isaña, and their hastily-packed suitcase to the aerodock. There's a landing pad on the roof.

As Carlos is lifting his daemon down to the roof, a second gyropter descends beside them: painted with elaborate murals of diving birds of prey, and full of a smoky haze too thick to see the pilot or any passengers. Until the door opens, and the haze physically manifests enough to shove out a pair of suitcases covered in stickers (some of them airport stickers, others...flowers and sharks).

Cecil and Khoshekh emerge a second later, coughing, but able to give their smoggy pilot a congenial wave before gathering up their luggage.

Carlos and Isaña run to them. "Cecil! Oh, thank the beams you're okay! You are okay, right?"

"Against all odds...." Cecil pulls Carlos into an embrace, hands tangling briefly, fiercely in his hair. "They tried to activate the chip. While I was on the roof. It tingled."

When they get back, Carlos is going to give Steve a medal.

"And then I got a direct pickup from...whatever organization runs those gyropters there." Cecil nods to the shadowy haze. "Apparently their stratusmate manages a Whole Foods, so I was able to make a deal for some free advertising time. Now, my employers aren't going to be thrilled about giving away their ad space like that...so just to be safe, I think we should start our vacation a few days early."

Carlos laughs in sheer relief and kisses him. They can't walk downstairs hand-in-hand because Cecil needs both hands for his bags, but Khoshekh picks Isaña up kitten-style and carries her along, and that's just as good.

"We can't just descend on my parents' house a week early, though," realizes Carlos as they approach the check-in terminal. (The plane always becomes a familiar airline by the time it deposits them in St. Louis or Austin or wherever the layover is, but on this end, the only available company has a name in runes and a logo that vibrates. Carlos wouldn't even try to pronounce it.) "Where are we going?"

"Anywhere we want! My treat. I have a ton of frequent flier miles saved up from all the traveling I did when I was younger."

For a moment, in spite of the fear and the uncertainty of tonight (this whole week) (this past few months), Carlos is starry-eyed as the possibilities unfold. They can go anywhere. And Cecil seems able to speak any language — including all those spoken within the bounds of Night Vale, plus several from outside its borders, even outside its world — so Carlos doesn't have to do the kind of frantic preparation he would be doing if he were visiting an exciting foreign country for professional reasons. Come to think of it, they could probably go to a foreign world, couldn't they? If he suggested they visit Luftnarp, or Finland, or Brazil....

"Oh!" exclaims Cecil. "I've never been to Oxford!"

Really?

"I bet you know all about it, right?" continues Cecil, clasping his hands together. "You could show me around! And tell me all the neat stories about things Dr. Belacqua did there! What do you think?"

Carlos thinks it sounds like a heartbreaking waste of opportunity. On the other hand...Carlos is not the one whose bosses just tried to torture him for reporting unpleasant truths, or defending a bunch of teenage revolutionaries. And Cecil looks so eager. So innocently delighted at the idea.

"Sure," says Carlos, swallowing his disappointment and forcing a smile. "Two tickets to Oxford."

Notes:

New art: future Carlos, dashing scars and all.

honrada y justa = honest and fair
Espero que ella los encuentre primero, claro está = I hope she will find you first, that is

Chapter 17: Not Lyra's Oxford

Summary:

Carlos goes on vacation with Cecil, learns a lot, tries new things, and nerds out over everything.

Night Vale.

When the TSA ceiling-child makes the usual demand for the names of everyone Carlos and Cecil, respectively, have ever kissed, Carlos is prepared to be embarrassed.

About thirty names into Cecil's list, he's mostly just gobsmacked.

The first of the names is Earl; the last is Carlos himself. Most of the ones in between are masculine, though a few sound distinctly feminine to Carlos's ears, and several are either ambiguous, "other", or too foreign to identify. And Carlos is stuck on one of the specific male names in the middle there. "Cecil...when you said Steve, was that...?"

"A nauseating and regrettable tragedy for all involved," says Cecil solemnly. "But you know, kids, wild college parties, we all do our share of foolhardy things...like playing Truth or Dare. I was double-dog-dared, Carlos! You don't need me to tell you the consequences of backing down when that happens."

The flight is already boarding when they make it to their gate. (Aside from the two of them, the passengers are three ghosts and a family of tarantulas.) Distant gyropters can be heard outside; Carlos takes a window seat and pulls down the shade, and they all hold their breaths until the plane is in the air and passing through...well, judging by the jeweled, shifting colors shining around the cracks, it's the Glow Cloud.

"All hail," says Cecil, eyes glowing briefly, as he slumps into his seat. "Dear Carlos...I think I may be experiencing some sort of adrenaline crash. You won't mind if I sleep until we get there?"

"Of course." Carlos folds down the mid-size daemon platforms from the backs of the seats in front of them, so Khoshekh and Isaña can settle in, then finds a small airline-issue pillow for Cecil. "We're not flying straight through to the Oxford airport from here, are we?" It would be at least an eighteen-hour flight, but if any plane could pull that off, it's a Night Vale plane.

"Oh, gosh, no." Cecil rests the pillow on Carlos's shoulder and cuddles against him. "First we've got a layover in Boston."

 

-{,(((,">

 

United States.

Carlos hasn't had as much stress this evening as Cecil has, but it's a long flight, and the next thing he knows he's waking up as they hit the runway in a time zone where the light outside is normal pre-dawn grey. The interior of the plane is twice as large now; Cecil is in a middle seat, rather than an aisle one; the seats are crammed together, with no daemon platforms in front of them at all.

He can't see Isaña. But he doesn't feel any tension that suggests she's out of range. And after a moment of searching he realizes she's curled up in the backpack under the seat in front of him. (Apparently his messenger bag has either transformed into, or been replaced with, something that can hold her.)

He's checking the bag to make sure the rest of his things survived the transfer — here's his tablet, good, and the power cord, and his wallet, and — when Cecil whispers, "You'd better zip that up."

With one last yawn, Carlos complies. The lower the chance of people bumping into Isaña on this suddenly-more-crowded flight, the better.

In fact, it doesn't just feel crowded, it feels downright claustrophobic. Khoshekh presses himself against the plane ceiling until they're out in the walkway, then hovers a full four feet above Cecil's head once they emerge into the terminal. (He's protected from curious stares by Cecil's don't-look-at-me bit of witch-lore. It takes an effort for Carlos to remember that he's there.) People are bumping and shoving all over the place — it's really obnoxious — someone's daemon is going to get kicked if they're not careful....

Carlos stops cold.

It's not too weird to look at a crowd and not see daemons immediately. They might be small and riding in pockets, or in your baggage like Isaña, or even in protective cases if they're small and delicate enough. And the people with really large daemons are likely to avoid air travel in the first place.

He relaxes for a moment when he spots a golden retriever daemon...and there's another canine daemon, a chocolate lab...except that when he looks more closely, he realizes those aren't daemons at all. They're just...dogs.

But these people don't look mutilated, they all look pretty much like Cecil when Khoshekh isn't around: creepy at first, but ultimately fine....

"Carlos?" Cecil hovers at his shoulder. He's wearing the dark sunglasses Carlos suggested, to keep people from staring at his eyes, plus a glittery silk scarf wrapped around his head and neck that's probably drawing attention anyway. "Are you okay?"

"I'm guessing this is a place your bosses can't follow us?" says Carlos, with a helpless little laugh. Strexcorp may have a bigger foothold in some worlds than others, but if he knows Cecil, this one — where the people have internal daemons, where there's no telling how much more exciting weirdness will unveil itself now that he's looking — is safely outside their reach.

Cecil grins. "The fact that the local free trade agreements have strict, heavily-enforced rules against being evil may have been a factor when I suggested the destination, yes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

They aren't carrying any currency for whatever country they're in. Carlos finds a booth with a big sign proclaiming INFO, and Cecil follows him over; but they don't even have complimentary tourist brochures, just a set of website addresses and several free apps the travel agent offers to transfer to his phone. When Carlos actually looks at said phone, the screen reads No Signal (Where The Hell Is This), and when he tries to get one of the apps loaded, it laughs at him. Literally cackles.

"Where you even get this dinosaur, brah?" asks the travel agent. (A dark-haired woman wearing what Carlos would call "hipster glasses", except that he has no idea if "hipster" is a concept this universe knows of. And no daemon. Even though Carlos keeps reflexively looking for one.) "Do you re-enactment?"

It's English — basically — but her accent is like nothing Carlos has ever heard before, all the vowels shifted, plus the occasional syllable flung in there that he can't parse at all. "No, just passing through," he says, trying to casually stick the phone back in his backpack without dropping it on Isaña's head.

"Really? With that accent, I figured y'all had to be SCA."

"I can assure you," purrs Cecil, "the lyrical and rhapsodic tones of my boyfriend's voice are entirely natural."

One of the duty-free shops does have some big glossy photo books, and Carlos stands around flipping through them for as long as he dares. The city they're in, "Boston", it turns out...is Trimountaine. Or at least, close enough that the familiar details are startlingly familiar, while the differences all but jump out and slap Carlos in the face.

"I've walked by this exact statue!" he hisses to Cecil, angling the brochure so Khoshekh can see the photo of the bronze Ben Franklin. "Only the one in my city has his rattlesnake, obviously. And look at this flag, on the building behind it!" It looks like the flag of the United States of New Denmark, same color scheme, same stripes, but instead of a modest circle of stars it has a whole brick of them. At least twice as many as he's used to. Maybe more. "How many states do you think this US has?"

"Fifty-two."

"Excuse me?"

"The US? Fifty-two states," reiterates the clerk. "You gonna pay for that?"

At last the trans-oceanic flight starts boarding. Cecil and Carlos are literally the only passengers with paper tickets. There's a full multimedia hookup in every seat, and while it offers to connect to any number of accounts Carlos does not have with brand names he doesn't recognize, it does at least have a standard media selection available as backup....

Only about half of the films have a "watch in 2D" option. And one of them has a 2115 release date.

"Oh my god, Cecil." It's getting weirdly hard to breathe. "Cecil, we're in the future."

"No, Carlos, we're in a different time zone," says Cecil patiently. "If you called one of your friends back home, they would assure you that it is still the present, just...reckoned with different numbers. Oh, look! They have a bunch of Westerns. Do you want to watch one together?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

They watch a Western. It's jarring, and not just because it's all in English. The tropes are all slightly off-kilter.

They follow it up with a film, which, based on the title, Cecil thinks will be a romantic comedy and Carlos expects to be interestingly theological. It's neither. Apparently that's just the name of a band.

They watch a documentary about a war designated World War One. At the time it was just called the Great War, same as the one in Carlos's world, but in this world it had a follow-up, which prompted the switch to a numbered system. As the documentary unfolds, Carlos comes to understand that except for the name, it doesn't have much at all in common with the Great War he learned about in history class. It started several years earlier; Germany was a single nation from the beginning, instead of the German Electorates unifying in the 20s; and there are several countries involved that Carlos doesn't recognize at all.

He sits with his backpack on his lap, so Isaña can watch the screen from between the teeth of the zipper, and so Carlos can rest a hand on her shell when they need the self-soothing.

They do find an actual romantic comedy, but oddly enough, Carlos finds this harder to get through than the war film. The war is only grim and disturbing in the familiar ways that all wars are grim and disturbing. Whereas the comedy keeps trying to convince Carlos that these two people are falling for each other, and that it's heartwarming and adorable...without ever showing their daemons nuzzling up to each other. It's like watching a movie where the romantic leads never make eye contact. Subtle at first, then more and more disturbing as the effects add up.

At some point in the middle, the flight attendants bring around...whatever you call it when it's your first meal since waking up, close to noon in the city you just left, and approaching five PM in the city you're going to land in. Carlos comments with approval on what he assumes are wheat-based rolls. Cecil wonders out loud how much an organism can be genetically modified and still count as "wheat."

Carlos quietly offers Cecil his roll. Maybe in this world genetically-modified food products are as normal as 3-D movies, but he'll stick to the 2-D offerings and the organic lettuce.

As with the tickets, the two of them are the only ones to get their passenger arrival forms in paper, instead of filling them out on their devices and uploading them to a server somewhere. The attendant apologizes for not having any in Braille — apparently it's been years since they had any visually-impaired passengers who didn't bring their own adaptive equipment. Cecil warmly assures her that Carlos will help (he doesn't have the stamina to keep up a nothing-to-see-here spell for ten hours straight, so poor Khoshekh is riding in the overhead bin), waits until she's gone, then sheepishly asks Carlos what it is that they're supposed to be filling out.

The first couple of questions are easy. Carlos pens in the correct name (PALMERO, CECIL G) and gender ([_] Female [X] Male [_] Other [_] None). After that, it gets trickier. They're both citizens of countries that don't exist in this world, born in years that are about a century too early. It's bound to set off a hundred red flags unless Carlos lies like a rug.

Cecil, unbothered, tells him to go ahead and write the truth. "Let's save the rug impressions for the hotel."

 

-{,(((,">

 

United Kingdom.

Instead of expensive metal detectors or long lines to talk to stern-faced customs agents (questions about kissing optional), the passengers disembarking from international flights are queued up single-file and funneled down a short hall. From the back of the queue, it looks pretty empty. Carlos pulls forward on the straps of his backpack, hugging Isaña close. "They must be doing some kind of scan, right? What do you think it is?"

"I'm not qualified to say," demurs Cecil. Khoshekh is floating over his head once more. "You'll probably figure it out, though! I'm sure it's very scientific."

"Sure," agrees Carlos. "Very — what?"

"They don't use a lot of religious terms in the UK," says Cecil. "It's a dialect thing."

Carlos feels lighter on his feet just hearing it. No matter how creepy the daemonlessness is, this place clearly has some serious perks.

He strolls forward with the rest of the queue, into the observation hall...and his eyes widen.

The wall to his right is made entirely of a double sheet of treated electrum.

It's golden at an angle, translucent when viewed head-on, and impossible not to recognize. Because the three security officers watching them from the far side are enveloped in loyal, protective, inquisitive currents of Rusakov particles.

Cecil has to grab his hand and pull him forward; the people behind him are starting to grumble about the queue being held up. Carlos's face hurts from how hard he's grinning. This world has done it! They don't just have electrum spyglasses, they have electrum walls, in public use as a common security measure! And the privacy issues are worked out, at least enough that the public is satisfied — it probably helps that it goes both ways, citizens can look right back at the officers watching them, can see clear as day that the information won't be abused —

Who discovered this? How did they develop it? Did this world have any trouble while implementing it? Are the trees that the resin comes from native to here, or do they have their own imported Whispering Forest? He wants to know everything. He wants to know all about the botany, that's how bad it is.

"You're in luck," purrs Khoshekh, as smug as Carlos has ever heard him.

"What do you —" begins Carlos, before remembering not to look like he's yelling at thin air, or security is going to pull him aside, no matter how harmless his intentions, for his own safety as much as anyone else's. "What's he talking about?" he asks Cecil instead. "If you're trying to kill me with anticipation, you're getting off to a great start!"

"Carlos, I would never," says Cecil loftily. "I believe what Khoshekh is referring to is...maybe you've heard that the UK is very big on renewable energy?"

"Cecil, I don't know the UK from Finland! What about renewable energy?"

"And you're aware that Rusakov particles are an energy source...?"

"I remember that piece of theo— of science, yes."

They turn another corner and find the baggage carrier looming in front of them. "You pick up the bags while I go get a couple of traveler's debit cards," says Cecil. "I managed to book our hotel through the airline rewards program, but we're still going to need to eat while we're here, and you'll probably want souvenirs, and of course there are cab fares to think of...so we're going to pop into a couple of energy-collection booths and put some credit in our account. I was planning to earn my share by working a little more on your brother-in-law's Christmas present. But you, if you like...and I suspect you will...you can spend the time browsing Wikipedia."

 

-{,(((,">

 

There's a sleek, black, ultra-modern device in Carlos's booth, connected to the airport wi-fi. He sets Isaña on the desk next to the keyboard and types Rusakov particles into the online encyclopedia. Even though he has no idea whether they'll be named after Rusakov in this universe, or whether Rusakov existed at all, or....

Gibberish appears in the search box.

While Carlos is staring at the screen in confused disappointment, Isaña thinks to look at the keys themselves. "Carlos, the keyboard layout's different."

"Oh!" exclaims Carlos, and, instead, hunts-and-pecks on the strange mix of letters until he's typed keyboard layout.

 

-{,(((,">

 

An hour and a half later, Cecil puts his foot down. They have more than enough credit, and it's high time they put on their coats (Cecil has a brand-new one lined with rabbit fur, since it's been years since he last visited a place where the temperature got below fifty degrees) and made their way to the hotel.

Carlos spends the whole cab ride talking. "It looks like the US started out looking like the USND did, but then it just kept going. They have half of New France, half of Hispania Nova — I went looking for every place our team members came from, and all the ones from the New Denmark continent would've been 'Americans' here — they controlled Hawai'i for more than a century! Can you believe it?"

He pauses long enough for Cecil to check in, then goes back to talking as they lug their bags up to the room. "I went looking back at the revolution, and it's weird, they had a lot of the same names — sometimes in different roles, John Adams was president and Ben Franklin wasn't, but it seemed like they were basically the same people — oh, and their keyboards are different! Someone named Dvorak invented the one we use, but it never caught on. I have no idea why! It's experimentally proven to be less straining on the hands for people typing in English, and there are so many more people typing in English in this world!"

The hotel furniture is all sleek curved lines and strange materials. Carlos finally lets Isaña out, and keeps up the patter as the both run around investigating. "English is the official language of Florida. Florida! There are less than a thousand native speakers of Muscogee left! I was just looking into that when you made me leave. Do you think one of these sleek black devices here will connect me to the Internet? I can't tell right off the bat what any of them do, but I'm sure at least a few of them are anbaric."

"Carlos, if you're awake all night you're going to regret it when you're jet-lagged in the morning," warns Cecil. "You do want to be awake tomorrow to do things with me, right?"

"I can do things with you right now!" protests Carlos.

Cecil raises his eyebrows. "Ohhhh?"

Carlos blushes at the accidental innuendo...then thinks, well, why should he be embarrassed? Judging by the non-reaction when they checked into a single-bed unit, the idea that he might be having sex with his boyfriend tonight isn't a scandal to this world in general. Gathering up his nerve, he adds in a rush, "I think if you want me to fall asleep, then you have a responsibility to wear me out first."

 

-{,(((,">

 

For all Cecil's fussiness, Carlos is the one who wakes up first. Probably a side effect of being the only person here who has a normal work day, one that sometimes finishes before Cecil even starts his evening broadcast. It's a little after noon, local time, when he starts trying to figure out the machine he assumes is a futuristic coffee maker.

Turns out it's more of a coffee printer. Takes the raw materials and combines them into a liquid chemical mixture with the flavor and caffeine content you program in. Carlos's mouth is watering by the time he gets his first cup, for more reasons than one.

He doesn't want Cecil to wake up alone, so he sends a text request down to the concierge (once he figures out the texting system) to bring up a paper map and some information on local attractions, and scribbles on those while eating a printed bagel with marmalade. Then he jumps in the shower, finally scrubbing the dust from all those backpack rides off Isaña's shell and combing it out of her fur. Then at last he prints a cup of coffee for Cecil and shakes the man awake.

"No," pouts Cecil, hiding his face in the pillow. "Too early. Cannot human. Try again later."

"Cecil, it's half past one. You're gonna lose the whole afternoon at this rate."

"Wha...?" Cecil drags himself up on his elbows, bleary-eyed and horrified. "I'm late? The show...!"

"You're not late! You're on vacation, remember?"

"Oh…" A moment of blank staring, then Cecil collapses back onto the mattress. "Mmkay. Then sleep."

Eventually Carlos coaxes him up again. Cecil huddles in a nest of blankets, sipping his futuristic pseudo-coffee; Khoshekh floats up onto the bed and sits with Isaña at his feet. Once it looks like they aren't going to go back to panicking, Carlos says, "What happens to the show now? I mean, with you away, it's been one broadcast already...can Strex bring in a substitute who will spend your whole vacation toeing the company line?"

"I'm sure they'll try," says Cecil. "But the contract governing my substitutes is almost as vast, unknowable, and unbreakable as the one governing me, so I don't expect them to have any luck. When I'm on vacation, the role of the Voice falls to whoever in town is most able to handle it, for as long as they can keep it up."

"And you think they can handle it for long enough to cover our whole trip?" asks Carlos, imagining the poor intern-of-the-week (it's a girl named Maureen now, isn't it?) trying to fill Cecil's shoes and flaming out in some horrible way after a few days.

"Oh, easily. It'll take three or four people to fill each broadcast, and we'll be gone for...fled before yesterday's show, back in time for the 28th...fifteen days? That's sixty, right? There's more people than that in town."

Carlos revises his mental image to include lots of people flaming out in horrible ways. "Cecil...when these temporary Voices can't 'keep it up' any more...they don't, um, die or anything, do they?"

Cecil frowns at him. "What a morbid idea. Clearly we need to go out and do something to cheer you up! I hope there's a science museum in town."

Nodding to his map, Carlos says, "I checked! There are three."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Museum of the History of Science dates all the way back to 1683. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History was founded in 1850. And the Museum of Physics is the baby of the group, only established in 2029. Carlos can't tell from memory whether any of them is an alternate-universe version of the Museum of Natural Theology, or whether they're completely unique.

He decides to visit them in chronological order, because if he tries to go in order of which one he wants to see most, he's going to have some kind of nervous breakdown trying to decide.

Once they reach their destination, the decision-making gets simpler: the MHS has an exhibit on the history of radio, so of course Cecil has to go see that first. Carlos reads inscriptions out loud, for the benefit of both Cecil (wearing his dark glasses, paired with a bobble-laden fuchsia scarf that looks like somebody tried to knit a tentacle) and Isaña (riding in Carlos's backpack again, along with a striped blanket, because even with the shelter it's chilly outside).

He's enraptured. There are terms here that are completely new because his own world hasn't invented the technologies yet (spinplasmonics, Rassilon virotherapy), and others he doesn't recognize on the placards, but can map to familiar ideas after seeing a few of the devices (electricity is just anbaric power, while nuclear power turns out to be atomcraft). Some of the familiar discoveries are made by people he's never heard of (Marie Curie, Oliver Payne), while others have names he recognizes from back home (Tycho Brahe, John Dee).

Cecil takes one look at the items in the John Dee exhibit and claps his hands over his mouth to muffle a snicker. Dr. Dee claims to have talked to angels, and judging by the accuracy of the Unmodified Sumerian in his writings, he really did meet an Erika or two. Judging by the content of the Unmodified Sumerian, which Cecil refuses to translate in any specifics, it was an Erika with a filthy sense of humor.

They're absorbed in a display of sixteenth-century astrolabes when the museum closes, and they take a short walk looking for a Magadha restaurant — no, here they call it an Indian restaurant — are the countries the same, or is it just that the territories overlap? One more thing on Carlos's to-look-up list — that seems trendy. Carlos all but skips down the drizzly night street with his hand in Cecil's.

 

-{,(((,">

 

On the walk from dinner to a university library to top up their accounts, they pass a church. Carlos can't tell how many of these are active and how many are just historic relics. This one looks almost medieval...and has a statue of Jesus in one of the stone niches on the façade.

It's Carlos's turn to have a fit of scandalized giggling. Only when Cecil asks what the joke is does Carlos remember that, oh, right, sculpting a Christ without the dove daemon on his shoulder is normal here, and not the kind of blasphemy that as recently as fifty years ago would get you jail time in most Western countries.

Finals week just ended, and many of the students are already gone; most of the Dust-based energy-collection booths are free. The librarian at the front desk helpfully walks Cecil through the use of a device that accesses their audio catalogue, while Carlos settles in at the nearest booth with a hyper-futuristic ordinater.

(He would just as soon have Cecil come in and sit with him, maybe do a little cuddling while they read together...but the library has strict rules against more than one person crowding into a booth, and with their main audience being uni students, Carlos can't say he blames them. Sure, it would generate a fair amount of Rusakov particles, but it would get pretty tiring having to hose the place down all the time.)

For the second night in a row he can't stop talking. On the bus ride back to their hotel: "No wonder the Church here doesn't have the same amount of power. It isn't just the expected decline since the early 21st century. In the 16th century there was a revolution! They kept having a Pope, but half the Christians in this world aren't organized under him at all!"

In the shower: "The Middle East is crazy. I didn't have time to read up on it in any detail, but I think even if I did, it would take weeks to have any real sense for — mmm — yes, right there — for how it happened. I know almost nothing about the history of the region — even in our world — I can't — ahh, Cecil, Cecil — I mean, obviously colonialism screwed it over, that has to be a big part of — ngh — ohgod. Oh. Ah."

In bed: "Tried to figure...what witches thought about...this. All this. Couldn't find anything. Mythical witches...kids' books...that's it. Y'think...here, maybe...maybe they don't even have…?"

He falls asleep before he can finish the thought. The last sensation he feels is Khoshekh licking Isaña's ears.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Museum of Natural History doesn't have anything radio-related. It does, however, have dinosaurs. Towering sauropods, thick-skulled triceratops, light-footed raptors with beautiful reconstructed feathers. Several full skeletons of flying and swimming ancient reptiles are hanging from the ceiling.

One of the glass cases has a display of more recent extinctions. Carlos's mood takes a hit as he starts looking through them. The kakapo? He once had a student with a kakapo daemon. And the Zanzibar red colobus — that's the species of Nirliq's daemon. He pulls his backpack closer, relieved not to see any armadillos, three-banded or not, in the mix.

Along with the skeletons and the cases, there are a handful of kid-friendly activities and interactive exhibits, including one where you can do a cheek swab and get your DNA scanned. Cecil is on the verge of sticking his in the machine when Carlos finishes reading the label. Isaña yanks on his attention and pokes him in the spine, and Carlos grabs his boyfriend's wrist just in time.

"Carlos! What…?"

"You can't. Cecil, you can't. Throw it out."

"Will you at least tell me why?" pleads Cecil.

"In a minute." There's a family in line for the machine behind them, a couple of parents with small children, and he's getting disapproving looks from the adults. "There's an important th— important scientific thing we have to do in the next room. I'll tell you when we get there."

He steers Cecil through to another gallery; the signage explains that this is a second, distinct museum, but it looks like the architectural twin of the first, just full of anthropological artifacts instead of natural specimens. They stop in a quiet row, between an Arctic sledge and a case full of what look like trepanned skulls (with labels like Cave date 31,259 BCE).

"One of the things that machine scanned was mitochondrial DNA," he explains. "We've talked about that, right? You know what it is?"

In spite of his frustration, Cecil nods along. "That's the one passed on from the mother, right?"

"Right. And being a witch is also passed down exclusively from the mother. So if you go back far enough, all witches have the same matrilineal ancestor...and she's different from the matrilineal ancestor of the rest of humanity. Which means their mtDNA lineages are different too. And since they don't seem to have witches in this world…."

"...then I might have mtDNA they've never seen before?" finishes Cecil. "Because the lineage I got from Mom could have died out? Or never existed?"

"Exactly." For that matter, there's no guarantee Carlos's lineage will still exist. He thinks it's more likely than Cecil's, but he's not doing the scan either, just in case.

Cecil chews on his bottom lip. "Isn't that what happened with the body your team recovered from the attack by the strange, daemonless children?"

Carlos folds his arms. "It is. And if you were a dead body too, I would be happy to present you to the theologians here as a scholarly gift, to test and dissect and research as much as they wanted."

"Ah," says Cecil. "I see what you mean."

 

-{,(((,">

 

For dinner tonight, Cecil found a historic pub he wants to visit. Apparently it was the favorite hangout of some local authors, and celebrates them with fan-created displays of their works. Right now that means beautiful, elaborate Christmas decorations, including a diorama of a snowy winter scene with Santa and a procession of mythical creatures. Carlos and Cecil sit under a chain of wreaths with gold-trimmed red ribbons, and order a couple of pints and a basket of fish-and-chips.

When Cecil's phone buzzes, Carlos jumps. "You're getting reception?"

"My plan has very robust coverage," says Cecil brightly. "It's the same one our former station intern Dana uses! And we're not nearly as far out of normal time and space as she is. Would you mind taking a look and telling me who it's from?"

Carlos makes a mental note to change carriers, and takes the phone. It's Henriette, so Cecil prompts him to go on and look at the message too, since he might be the one she's really trying to reach anyway. Carlos reads it. Then reads it again.

"Carlos…?"

"The Sheriff's secret police are having an auction," says Carlos, a little dazed. "Catalog went out this morning...which I guess was only an hour or two ago, Night Vale time. The title of Lot 37 is Cecil Palmero, with no description. She wants to know if this is normal," although judging by the look on Cecil's face, it is emphatically not, "and if you have it taken care of, or if the team should send someone to buy it for you and let you decide what to do with it when you get back, or what."

"Give me a minute," says Cecil eventually. "Khoshekh needs to look it up on the alethiometer, and I...I need to finish my Guinness."

He downs the rest of the pint in a series of gulps, then covers his face with his hands, blocking off the sensory input from his own (much more recent) trepanation to make it easier for Khoshekh, back in the room, to focus. Carlos keeps the noise down as he types a reply. This is Carlos on Cecil's phone. He's looking up what to do. Is anyone else for sale or just him?

Henriette's reply is quick: Just him. Perle & quentin both went thru all the listings. Coulda had a "got here safe & not dead" from u earlier, btw. If cecil hadnt posted uk selfies on his tumblr i wouldve been worried.

Sorry, we're in an alternate universe where my phone gets no bars :(

I hope u appreciate what a lucky goddamn bastard u are.

In the same breath, Cecil slumps on the table with a groan of relief. "It's okay! It was a clerical error. Tell Henriette not to waste any money, I'll be fine."

Carlos slips the phone into his backpack (currently on the bench next to him) so his daemon can read over the texts. "How does someone make a clerical error that leads to saying they're going to sell you?"

"When we went into the condos. The police seized all the bodies people left behind, remember? And tried to seize ours in the process, only we got back in them just in time. Looks like the half-finished report of me-as-contraband got submitted instead of deleted, and ended up in the auction catalogue. What a proofreading blunder! Someone is going to get the axe for this, I can tell you."

Isaña types a summary of this for Henriette, while Carlos tactfully refrains from asking if there will be any literal axes involved.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Get you anything else?" asks the server...then blinks at Carlos's half-open backpack and adds, "Hey, 'sthat an armadillo?"

"A southern three-banded armadillo," says Carlos automatically. The way he would if the question meant "what species is your daemon?" instead of "why do you have a wild animal in my pub?"

"My Carlos is a huge fan of the Narnia books," puts in Cecil, coming to the rescue. "But he always thought they needed more armadillos. So he made his own Talking Armadillo. If you squeeze her claw, she says things from the books! The Spanish translation, that is."

"Fetch," says the server approvingly. "Can I hear?"

Carlos squeezes his daemon's claw. In Spanish, Isaña says, "Please say you can make up something convincing."

And in English, Cecil reports, "That was 'What do they teach them at these schools?'"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Before their evening library visit, Cecil sweetly reminds Carlos that he was promised a tour, so Carlos starts by looking up some of the university landmarks he had in mind.

The results are...disheartening. To say the least. After not finding the first half-dozen sites, he searches for St. Sophia's College itself, and comes up empty.

He borrows Cecil's phone again, this time to double-check things on his own world's Wikipedia, and cross-references the maps. The street layout is identical, and many of the older buildings are in the same places, but half the college names are different and the territories don't entirely match up. St. Sophia's, where Dr. Belacqua did her undergraduate studies in alethiometry, isn't here. Neither is Jordan, where she grew up (and which, around the same time, funded the research that developed the Asriel emulsion).

As it turns out, the question of "what places do I show off to Cecil, if any" doesn't need solving right away. On Monday it rains. A miserable, soaking, freezing sleet of rain.

Cecil votes they stay at the hotel for the duration, maybe rent a couple more movies. Carlos is torn. On the one hand, he really wants to see the Museum of Physics. On the other, after yesterday's near-miss with Isaña, maybe he needs a day to relax and move normally instead of keeping part of himself bundled and zippered up just so he can walk around.

When Cecil figures out the movie selection and announces that the hotel offers several Academy-Award-winning films from Brazil, that settles it. They're staying in.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The next day is cold but sunny, and for the first time they're up early enough to get to the hotel brunch buffet, instead of eating from the 3-D printer (which is still fascinating, but Carlos has started to notice a plastic-y aftertaste from everything it makes).

He's wrangled together a list of sites that are more-or-less relevant to Dr. Belacqua's life, all marked off on a printed map, and Cecil follows with interest down the narrow roads and broad parks. This is (equivalent to) the building where she made some of her most important advances in Rusakov physics. This is (on the same plot of ground as) the home where she had an apartment during her undergraduate studies. This is (the alternate-universe version of) the building where she lived when she was a child, before departing for the North.

The Botanic Garden is the one landmark that didn't give him any trouble. It's in the same place, under the same name.

Even in winter, with most of the trees bare and none of the outdoor plants in flower, it's a lovely park to stroll through. They stop in one of the greenhouses to see the Christmas displays, a fir hung with hand-made ornaments and brightly-colored displays of poinsettias and holly, then head back out into the afternoon. After Cecil assures him there's no one around, Carlos gets Isaña out of his backpack, and she trots beside him along the gravel paths and around the dormant stone fountains.

There's a tree close to one of the walls that's absolutely dripping with mistletoe. Carlos takes full advantage. Cecil melts into the kiss, curling his hand around the back of Carlos's head, then nuzzles their cold noses together. "And you don't think plants are good for anything."

"I have never said that," complains Carlos. "I'm not unreasonable. I just happen to think they're a little laughable as a topic for serious theological study."

"Really? But didn't Dr. Belacqua study them? Isn't that why we're here?"

"She didn't study them, she just liked them," groans Carlos, his exasperation only half fake. "Or at least, she liked gardens...at least, this garden...at least, a version of this garden."

Cecil re-wraps his scarf around his face. Carlos curls a hand around Cecil's and slips them both into his pocket, keeping them warm as they continue on down the path.

"She was a lifelong patron. Always came back to visit at least once a year, no matter where her research was at the time. She was sort of notorious for never scheduling anything or accepting any invitations for late June, no matter how prestigious, because she was going to visit the garden...it's weird, but frankly, when you save the entire multiverse I think you've earned the right to set your own priorities, even if...whoops!"

He lets go of Cecil and drops into a crouch, shielding Isaña from the view of the person down the way. At this distance they'll probably think she's a small non-daemon dog, like the ones he's seen people walking around with...but he'd better bundle her back up, just to be safe....

"Carlos? What's wrong?"

"Someone on that bench," says Carlos, jerking his head in the direction of same.

Cecil follows his gaze. "Where?"

Carlos scoops up his backpack and stands, his daemon's head still poking out of the side. At this distance he still thinks it's a human silhouette, but Cecil will be looking for brightness, and if he's not seeing it..."Am I getting all worked up over a statue?"

"Either that, or a corpse," says Cecil cheerfully. "Or a plant with a very distinctive growing pattern."

They make their way over, until Carlos can see that sure enough, it's a bronze statue. A stocky man in a long coat, reading a book. Carlos has a weird, jarring moment of bracing himself for the lack of daemon, seeing an animal figure anyway, wondering why this statue has a daemon, then realizing it must just be that the subject really liked cats.

All the other statues in town have been of famous scientists. Carlos's curiosity is piqued. Even if this guy is just a botanist....

The bench is made of metal too. There's a plaque mounted on the center of the top beam.

Carlos bends closer to read the inscription.

He expects anything, absolutely anything, except what he gets:

Donated By
THE MALONE FOUNDATION
In Memory Of
DR. WILL PARRY | KIRJAVA
1983-2081

Notes:

Oxford location guide:

Museum of the History of Science: contains artifacts from the history of both science and proto-science, including relics from John Dee's attempts to communicate with angels. (John Dee is name-checked as "the great Magician Dr. Dee" in The Golden Compass, chapter 3.)

Museum of Natural History: a building Lyra sees in Will's Oxford and doesn't recognize. (Maybe in Lyra's world the Magisterium killed the project...but to be fair, it was established with a stated motive of glorifying God's Creation. And financed with Bible sales! For AU purposes, Carlos's world has an Oxford Museum of Experimental Theology built in the same era and with a similar purpose, just in a different building.)
Pitt Rivers Museum: can only be entered through the Museum of Natural History. In Will's world Lyra enters it, thinking of it as "another part of the museum [of natural history]," and sees a bunch of trepanned skulls (and uses the alethiometer to find their exact dates).

The Eagle and Child: historic pub where the our-world Inklings, including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, met to talk about their writing. Philip Pullman is famously disapproving of Lewis's Narnia series; one of the characters Lyra meets in the World of the Dead sets her up to give a direct smackdown to the physics of Lewis's multiverse.

Exeter College: falls right between the two real-world museums. According to Pullman, "Jordan College occupies the same physical space in Lyra's Oxford...as Exeter College occupies in real life, though rather more of it. I didn't see why I shouldn't make my college the biggest of them all." Jordan has a faculty position called the Palmerian Professor; the oldest surviving building at Exeter is Palmer's Tower.

University of Oxford Botanic Garden: all worlds. Notable for a certain bench existing in both Lyra's and Will's worlds; in our world, somebody went and carved "LYRA + WILL" on the back.

(For the curious: a pronunciation of Kirjava.)

Museum of Physics: Will's world only. Founded post-HDM-canon, inspired by the groundbreaking work of Dr. Mary Malone and colleagues like Oliver Payne.

Chapter 18: The December Monologues

Summary:

Carlos figures out which Oxford he's in. (There's some sobbing involved.) Meanwhile, back in Night Vale: it is December, and something is different. Specifically, the voices on the radio.

Oxford (Will's world).

Carlos drops his backpack.

Isaña tumbles out from her shelter and raises her face to the bronze cat: not a wildcat like Khoshekh, but almost as large, its fur cast in thick, lustrous waves. Kirjava. The daemon they thought was fictional a year and a half ago, were calling Moxie until this time last year, and whose name they hadn't known how to spell until seeing it just now.

It's him. Oh dear lord and all the beams, it's Will Parry.

Breathless, Carlos turns to Cecil — he's shaking, wide-eyed, Cecil's gonna think he's having a panic attack if he doesn't say something quick, but he can't speak, are there even words —

Wringing the tassels of his scarf in his hands, Cecil says, shyly:

"Merry Christmas? Do you like it?"

"Ce—" Carlos chokes on the syllable, over the lump in his throat. "Do I like —"

By some incredible failure of understanding, Cecil takes this as his cue to be more insecure, not less. "Should I have told you earlier? I know you like to be told things, but with this I thought you might have fun finding out...."

Carlos is not going to cry, he is not going to cry, he is not going to...

...who is he kidding. This is the closest thing to a religious experience he's ever had — and that includes speaking to angels, and returning from the dead. He's standing at the memorial for Will goddamn Parry. He is going to fall on Cecil's shoulders and sob like a baby.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (Lyra's world).

This has been the least productive week ever.

First, our flagship talent goes on vacation with less than twenty-four hours' notice. Of course, a good corporation has backup plans in case the unexpected happens, so we here at Strexcorp were all set to implement our "in case Mr. Palmero suddenly and without warning disappears on us" protocol...except it turns out the station has its own protocols, and we haven't figured out how to supersede them, no matter how diligently and ferociously we work at it. Every afternoon I have people from upper management calling and breathing down my neck, saying, for the Smiling God's sake, Lauren Mallard, you're supposed to be a program director, why aren't you directing....

...oh, wow, hang on, am I on the air? Is this being broadcast?

Gosh, what a relief! Now at least I can have some control over what goes out on air.

Not that we don't have control normally, of course! But some of these substitute Voices we've had lately...well, gosh, Night Vale, if you've been listening, you've caught all the ups and downs. That beautiful young woman who just wanted to preach about the healing power of the beams, for instance. Or that time we had twenty solid minutes of whispering tree-voices telling you all how nice you smelled, and saying that was a really clever text post you made on your Tumblr.

We value all of your views, citizens, but some of them are just not suitable for primetime broadcasting.

And then there was the gentleman encouraging you all not to purchase Strex-brand products, or give your patronage to Strex-owned businesses. Now I understand why your regular Voice complained about him so much. What a troublemaker that Steve Carlsberg is!

Well, as you know if you were listening through the end of that monologue, the Sheriff's secret police were able to track down Steve Carlsberg and do the first test of a few of their new Strexcorp-mandated protocols!

Oh, has anyone mentioned that we bought the Sheriff's secret police? Because that seems pretty newsworthy! You see the things you miss, Night Vale, when your beloved nightly news broadcast keeps getting passed around to any old random person with no corporate oversight?

If anyone has information about how to wring back the breath of control from the neck of poorly-managed once-independent community broadcasting, please call in. If you have a good lead, there might be a reward in it!

For us, I mean. There might be a reward in it for us.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Oxford (Will's world).

They don't even try to have a dining experience, just stop at the first internet café with rentable devices that they pass on the street.

Instead of sleek black freestanding machines with their own screens, like at the libraries, the devices here are wearable sets of goggles with a virtual display. Once you put them on, you can manipulate the display without any worry about corrupting it with a spilled drink or sticky fingers. Carlos, eyes still sore, sits back in a comfortable chair and hugs Isaña's backpack to his chest with one hand while figuring out the interface with the other.

Cecil gets a bunch of interestingly-shaped desserts from the display shelves, sits on the arm of the chair, and rubs Carlos's back. "What are you finding?"

"Future alternate Wikipedia wanted to know which 'William Parry' I meant," says Carlos faintly. "There's a priest, an Arctic explorer, a mathematician, a surgeon...and a fictional character. The surgeon is the real Will. And instead of just kids' stories based on what he and Lyra did, they have novels. A whole trilogy."

This world's information on Parry and Belacqua isn't perfect. In some ways it's misguided, or downright laughable. Lyra in these books is sixteen when the story begins; Pantalaimon is referred to as her "spirit animal"; and in between the usual saving-the-multiverse adventures, she struggles with a love triangle between Will and some guy named Roger Parslow. (When Carlos explains that part out loud, with palpable irritation in his voice, an advertisement pops up in the corner of his display asking if he wants to purchase any Team Will merchandise.)

But the Book of Dust trilogy gets things right that the Lyra-and-Pan stories in Carlos's world don't. Will's race, for a start. The only adaptation here that makes him white is a live-action film adaptation from the 2010s, which was a widely-criticized box-office flop. And they know his daemon's name, and there's a cultural awareness that the fictional Lyra is based on a real person, even though she was from another world.

And, most absorbing of all...Will isn't the only real citizen of this world who got involved in the War.

"I would've found it all out if I looked up Rusakov particles from the start, instead of getting distracted," laments Carlos. Cecil's thumbs dig soothingly into his shoulder blades. "Or electrum lenses. Obviously they don't use those names, but if I'd taken a page out of your book and looked up what they are, instead of what they're called...."

A search for elementary particles of consciousness would have gotten him to information on "shadow particles" or "shadow matter." From there it's only a few clicks to read about the invention of lenses made of specially-treated...amber, they call it, and these particular amber lenses are Atal lenses. A main character in the Book of Dust series was this world's real discoverer/inventor of both.

"I saw her name in the museum." Carlos may be starting to tear up again. "She's the one who worked out the dates of all the artifacts. It didn't make it sound like she was important...but anthropology wasn't her field in the first place! I bet once we get to the Museum of Physics, every other placard will be crediting Mary Malone."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Back at the hotel, Khoshekh is floating next to the bathroom sink. Cecil scolds him for lazing around there all day while Carlos looks through the video offerings again.

Dr. Malone — not even her fictional YA counterpart, but the real one — appears in several miniseries and scientific documentaries, including an episode of 2014's Cosmos. Dr. Parry was a medical doctor rather than a science one, so he's not in the same kinds of films, but he and Dr. Malone are both interviewed in the making-of special for the 2016 Book of Dust film.

Starry-eyed, Carlos and Isaña queue up everything they can find.

At some point they look up to realize Cecil is asleep, snuggled under the covers beside them, a pillow over his head. Carlos self-consciously turns down the volume, and they keep watching.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (Lyra's world).

My name is Renée.

I won't tell you my last name. None of us will ever tell you our last names. Whenever I do use a last name, it's a fake. My daemon's name might be fake too.

And we won't tell you the name of our town, or our school, or even what state we're in. If I told you my name, they would be able to find my friends and me. And if they ever find us, it will be the end.

They might kill us. Or worse.

Yes, there really is something worse than death. I've seen it. I've heard the cries of despair from those doomed to be slaves of the Yeerks. I've watched as —

Shh, Janice, don't interrupt, I'm trying to read to the little kids here.

What?

I'm on the radio?

Do I have to do anything, or can I just keep reading, because this book is really good, and plus it has a lot of good stuff about siege tactics that would be pretty useful for people who can't make it to Book Club for whatever reason....

No, the main character's name isn't really Renée, but they didn't know that!

Okay, great! Where was I?

Ahem.

I've watched as the evil gray slugs writhe and squeeze in through the ear....

Oh, disclaimer! All of this is fiction. The real Yeerks have been totally playing by the rules of the treaty that ended the Blood Space War, and so they're basically our allies now, I think. I dunno. You should probably go look at the ACN website or something if you want stuff about real politics? I'm only a Nightshade Scout, and we don't do badges about interstellar diplomacy until you get to Morrigan.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Oxford (Will's world).

The Museum of Physics in Will Parry's Oxford is, bar none, the most theologically interesting place Carlos has ever been.

Within a few minutes he's only half-aware that Cecil is still here. He's still talking, reading things out loud and explaining their meanings, but that's for his daemon's benefit, not his boyfriend's. He skips words, sometimes whole sentences, or makes references and leaves them unfinished, plunging forward the moment he senses Isaña's understanding.

This world only discovered shadow particles in the mid-1990s. A clunky little Oxford research unit that was looking for something completely different stumbled across them, and the field went from "elementary particles that react to consciousness, what a silly idea" to "here's the chemical composition of the Asriel emulsion, and we'll be producing Atal lenses en masse once these trees mature" in less than three years. Almost singlehandedly because of Dr. Malone.

In fairness, Carlos's world did discover some of these things long before they had ordinaters to speed the research along. But in fairness to Mary's world, they did it all without an alethiometer around to give them hints.

Until....

Cecil shields his forehead, as if one of the exhibits in this row is unusually bright. "What's that in the case on the left? Third from the end."

"Looks like a three-and-a-half-inch floppy." A singed one, with a cracked case. It's in between two other displays of damaged computer parts. Carlos approaches, and starts reading labels.

When the truth hits, he stops flat.

"I think I need to sit down," he says, and does. Right there on the floor.

Cecil sinks into a crouch beside him. "Does this mean it's good?"

"It's amazing," breathes Carlos. "It's — they don't say it in as many words, but — it's an alethiometer. Or parts of one. It's the machine they were using, over a hundred years ago — and the disk is the interface — if I'm reading this right, it didn't even use any existing OS, it was an independently bootable operating environment, and if that means the same thing on these ordinaters as it does in ours — Cecil, Mary Malone programmed an alethiometer in 1995 and ran it off a floppy disk."

A security guard chooses that moment to meander over. Either because Carlos is behaving oddly and they're concerned he'll do something erratic, or because it's not very reassuring for patrons if they see people passing out in the middle of the halls. "Awright, there?"

Cecil nods. "Fine, thank you."

The guard pulls something out of their pocket and extends it. A tube, the ends capped, but when expanded it's just the right length to hold two Atal lenses and make a working spyglass. "M'I take a look?"

"Go ahead."

They look. And, almost immediately, wince away, shielding their eyes with one hand.

The possibility of getting in trouble with security cuts through some of Carlos's breathless joy. Pulling his backpack closer against his back, he says, "Is everything okay?"

"Not in trouble," the guard assures him. "You science? You're way bright."

Cecil chuckles. "He does indeed science! And yes, he's been doing this ever since we got here."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The museum closes, but the gift shop is still open. Lingering in front of a set of posters with gold-washed Atal-lens photos of Oxford, Carlos remarks, "When you say I've been bright since we got 'here'...."

"On and off since we got to Oxford," clarifies Cecil. "Entirely on since yesterday, and getting especially bright at certain points in this museum. Looking at that model...that alethiometer ordinater?...." He smiles, fond and adoring. "Even when you talk about Dr. Belacqua, I've never seen you get that bright."

For some reason, Carlos bristles. Like he's been accused of something. "Of course I'm getting bright! This is new. I'm excited. I'm a theologian! Getting excited about new things is what I do."

"Oh, of course! It's perfectly natural."

See? Nothing here to get defensive about. Carlos makes himself relax....

"And after all, if I understand everything you've been reading correctly, Dr. Belacqua and Dr. Malone must have been good friends at one point...so I'm sure Dr. Belacqua wouldn't be offended that she's your new professional idol."

Carlos's face flames. "She is not!"

Cecil's mouth curls upward like the cat that found the cream. "You like her work," he coos. "You think she's smart and her theoretical equations are pretty and I bet you want to read all her books."

Carlos bats at his arm. "Cecil, stop it!"

"Am I wrong? Have you not spent most of this afternoon daydreaming about living a hundred years ago so you could sit in on Dr. Malone's lectures?"

"No!" Averting his eyes, Carlos mutters, "Only a small part of the afternoon."

"Mmhmm."

It isn't that Carlos has any less respect or adoration for Dr. Belacqua. He could never. When it comes to sheer, unadulterated heroism, Lyra Silvertongue is hard to beat. It doesn't look like Dr. Malone ever brought down a corrupt branch of the Magisterium, or overthrew the dominion of death itself, or nearly-singlehandedly restored Dust to all the worlds.

But if you look specifically at their contributions to the progression of th— of science in their respective worlds, over their entire adult lives....

As a conscious, self-aware being, Carlos has to appreciate Dr. Belacqua more, but as a scientist....

"We should pick up some gifts for my team while we're here," he stammers, anxious to change the subject before it gets too obvious that Cecil is right. Between the museums and the university bookstores, they should be able to find something from all his colleagues' fields, to bring home a tiny fraction of this amazing experience for each of them. "Is there a weight limit to what we can take back?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Milford, Swannendell (Lyra's world).

I can't decide if the weirdest thing about being here is the trees or the water. Or the cold.

...I just said that out loud.

...I just said that out loud and I can't make myself stop talking, what is this, what —

Excuse us, we have to go to the bathroom!

Good thinking, Zeph. Can I at least whisper? Oh, good, I can keep this to a whisper. Should we really go to the bathroom? Or go hide somewhere else and hope this wears off?

The locker room? It'll be empty until this period ends.

Good thinking again. Geez. At least I started talking in Spanish, and it wasn't in Spanish class, so the teacher will just think I'm being obnoxious instead of, you know, crazy.

Although, I mean, everyone already thinks I'm kinda nuts around here. What are they supposed to think, when someone shows up halfway through the school year who has to introduce herself as "hi there, my name is Susannah Oppenheimer and this is my daemon Zephaniah, and we just moved back to the US from Hispania Nova because my dad's afraid my little brother is gonna settle as a dragon"?

Not that I said it exactly like that. But people pick up on stuff, you know?

This is a Night Vale thing, right? It's gotta be. And if there's an Avoiding Mysterious Talking Compulsions badge, I didn't have a chance to get the damn thing. Come on, mystery compulsion, gimme a break here, let me focus enough to text...my...mom....

I think it's the water, by the way.

Hm?

The weirdest thing. Night Vale still had trees, especially that big forest we weren't allowed to go near, and it could get pretty cold at night. But when you're out for a walk and you get to the end of the street and suddenly there's a big half-frozen lake next to the sidewalk...that never happened in the Hispania Nova desert.

Yeah. That's a good point.

Okay, sent.

And, like, don't get me wrong, I am not complaining that we don't have to time our showers any more. Or that we can write the grocery list on a whiteboard on the fridge again. Or that I don't have to remember not to say stuff like "Vithya Banerjee turned into an angel back in October" out loud.

If I was going to complain about stuff, I would start with: my phone went feral after Dad threw it out, and even though we managed to get my number transferred to a new one, I still lost all my photos and contacts.

Or maybe I would start with: Dad asked if there was anywhere in particular we wanted to go live, and Seth and I both wanted to move somewhere down near the Florida border, so we could keep our Spanish up. And instead we moved to Swannendell. Swannendell! Two states north and we'd be back in New Amsterdam!

I don't think he even cared about our answer. I think he was just hoping we'd agree we wanted to live near Gramma and Grampa, so he could make us feel like he was taking our input, but he was going to go there anyway.

No, okay, here's what I would complain about first: even the goths here think I'm a freak.

Mom and Dad think I dress like this to be edgy, but I don't! I mean, if I did, wouldn't I have stepped up my game in Night Vale? There were people in my class with everything pierced. There were people in my class with extra appendages just to fit the extra piercings. Every week there's somebody or other who comes in covered in blood from whatever they had to fight in their front yard that morning. Tamika Flynn wears a dead severed monster claw just hanging on a cord around her neck. I'd have to be a moron to think I was scaring those people by wearing black lipstick or whatever.

I just like black lipstick, okay? And I like these knee-high black boots with the skull buckles. And these fingerless black lace gloves are pretty sweet too. And this ring, omigod, it's great. Makes me feel like I could punch through a wall without breaking a sweat.

And maybe if I wore polo shirts and khakis, people would have an easier time brushing it off when I say something about getting homework help from a faceless old woman who whispered verb conjugations from the depths of my closet.

But I don't want to be some fake version of myself to be normal. I wanna be me, and have that be normal. Is that so much....

Hang on, text from Mom.

Whoooooahmigod, this is all on air.

Uh.

Hi, Mom?

Hi, Night Vale!

Shoutout to all my Girl Scouts!

Michael, dobav' menya na Facebook already!

And, um, ignore that thing I said about Vithya Banerjee, she's not....

We're still not IN Night Vale. We're not even in the same country! We're completely out of their jurisdiction.

Oh, right!

But we still want to go back there as soon as legally possible, so again: Vithya's not an angel, angels aren't real, we know nothing about them or their hierarchies or anything like that.

But there's something we do know! And that is this:

Strexcorp is evil.

Don't trust them, guys. Don't support them. Absolutely do not believe in their Smiling God. That thing is the worst.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Oxford (Will's world).

Even with Cecil's help, Carlos has to buy a whole new suitcase just to carry his shopping.

In between the gifts, he wants to pick up a print copy of the Book of Dust trilogy (which he's half thinking of as the Lyra-and-Will stories), but they're almost out of credit and they still have to eat. Over a split platter of local seafood with lemon and spinach, Carlos debates out loud the merits of spending tomorrow at the Museum of Physics again, crashing a university library, or showing up on campus and posing as a prospective student looking for a tour of the facilities.

Cecil nods a lot, doesn't say much, and munches on his Cornish sardines, until some instinct makes Carlos trail off. "Cecil?"

"Yes?"

With an effort of will like almost nothing he's ever managed before, Carlos forces himself to say, "Is there anything else you want to do...while we're here...that isn't...related to science?"

Cecil looks at him for a long moment. "There are things I'm curious about that we haven't been to, yes," he admits. "But Carlos, I am getting the distinct impression that if we did something that took you away from studying the local science, you would hate every minute of it."

"No! Not that much...not every minute...okay, yes," bursts out Carlos. "Not for personal reasons! It's entirely professional! I'm a physicist, and there is so much physics here to look into — I don't even want to sit around eating now that I know where we are, and eating is a biological necessity."

Cecil considers this, then says, "Would you like to go get a head start at the nearest all-night library, and I'll catch you up after I get the check?"

"That's not what I...." But now that he mentions it...Carlos would like to.

"It isn't as if I can afford to bring you here again," says Cecil self-consciously. "And I only have to look at you to see how much you're getting out of it...you should make the most of it."

Carlos swallows. Pokes at an oyster with his fork. "We do need to go to the library anyway, right? Are we even covered for the bus fare home at this point?"

The corners of Cecil's mouth twitch upward. "That sort of depends on whether we get dessert."

Carlos mirrors the awkward smile. "Okay. Um, how about this. I'll go, but when you come after me, don't let me stay for more than...half an hour? Then we go back to the room, and spend the rest of the evening watching one of the Lyra-and-Will movies. Together."

"Oh, but Carlos!" exclaims Cecil. "We haven't read the books!"

"And there's no way I'm getting on that plane back to Trimountaine without a copy of the trilogy in my luggage, so we can read those at our leisure back home," points out Carlos. "There's no way to get the films in a format that's been invented in our world, or on a device we'll be able to run. I know it's not an ideal situation...but I'm okay with spoiling myself if you are."

 

-{,(((,">

 

According to Carlos's last-minute library research, the 2036 miniseries is still the defining live-action adaptation as far as the fandom is concerned. When Cecil shows up he checks the updated balance on their account, gasps, and announces that as long as they have this much to spend, Carlos can keep reading for a little longer while Cecil finds a convenience store and picks up some instant popcorn. And maybe a few stylish new scarves.

At last they cuddle together on the bed, daemons curled up at their feet. Cecil will be watching through Khoshekh's eyes, so he lies down in Carlos's lap, where Carlos gives his scarf a quick straightening before settling in to massage his scalp.

The series opens on the teenage actress playing Lyra, complete with CGI Pantalaimon, causing trouble in her Oxfordshire boarding school...until she and her sweet, straight-laced BFF Roger stumble over a conspiracy in Exeter College's multi-world research unit. Cecil murmurs approval at the dramatic first alethiometer-reading scene. Carlos is pleasantly surprised at the accuracy of the physics-related exposition. And while the handling of the daemons is weird, it's just eccentric, not uncanny-valley creepy.

By the end of the first episode, Lyra has met a stoic and mysterious romantic hero from another world, and they're planning to have her sneak into a sinister facility that Carlos thinks is supposed to be Magisterium-run. The connection makes sense once you recognize the director isn't familiar with the standard dramatic tropes used to indicate menacing fictional organizations that are definitely not the Church, and only has vague secondhand information about how its real-world structure works in the first place.

In the second episode —

Carlos doesn't see it coming. How could he? A normal television series would build up to something this dramatic. A normal series rated TV-14 wouldn't show such explicit violence on-screen in the first place.

In the second episode Lyra's undercover act is blown, and one of the agents of the not-Church subdues her by grabbing her daemon.

Carlos and Isaña are riveted, all their eyes fixed to the screen.

Cecil shudders in his lap. "Oh. Oh, that's really quite — Carlos, if you want to stop —"

But the scene is already fading to black as Lyra-the-character loses consciousness. And while it's hitting Carlos hard, it isn't setting off any of the miswired panic switches in his brain. This is something different. "No. Don't stop it. I want to see her take these people down."

 

-{,(((,">

 

She does.

There's a fresh cliffhanger at the end of this episode too, but the not-Magisterium facility is a pile of ashes, and in the wake of the end credits Carlos sleeps more soundly than he has in years.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (Lyra's world).

I think we're in real financial trouble. My wife doesn't want me to know, keeps saying "it's all right, Lucy, I'm taking care of it," but she can't hide that she's worried. Not from me.

Hannah's always been good at hiding things. It's how she made it through four years of business school in San Francisco after growing up in Night Vale, on top of being whip-smart and knowing when not to care what people think.

Or at least, most of the time she knows. The first time she asked me out, I just about had a heart attack — it was the middle of the Res Life office, with people all over the place, and I was working there as part of my scholarship package, so I couldn't leave or make her go away. If there had been a public GSA openly campaigning for tolerance on campus, she would've figured out the way things stood on her own, but there wasn't even that! We met in secret, in the library basement, and were too busy being a support group for each other to go around pushing for change.

Not that I'm criticizing! She gave me a scare, but at least she managed not to get in any real trouble over it. Compare that to the first time I came here over vacation to spend a couple weeks with her family. I got myself arrested on the second day for bringing a pocket calculator.

When the theologians first came to town, Hannah sort of asked if I wanted to make friends with them, but it didn't seem to me we had a whole lot in common. Then one of them got arrested, when I hadn't gotten picked up by the police for eight years and counting, so I decided it was safer not to associate with them. At that rate they'd all be dead or gone in a month anyway.

Shows what I know.

The whole thing has been better for Hannah's social life than mine. Since high school I don't think she'd said more than two words to Cecil Palmero, maybe nodded at each other when they passed in the Raúl's...then he falls for one of the Outsiders, and ever since this summer she's been the de facto leader of the "help, I'm afraid the love of my life is going to get chosen in the lottery because they never learned to sense the emotional aura of colors" support group.

I did finally learn the color sensing, if you want to know. A few years back. Maybe I didn't adjust to living in a different culture as fast as Hannah did, but I have adjusted. People don't look at me and think "Outsider" any more. They look at me and think "yes, I am welcome to the White Sand! Now give me a double scoop of mint chocolate chip with extra hemlock."

Here you are, sir! I just hope you'll still be able to have one next month, or the month after that.

I'm not saying that it's that bad, because I don't know it for a fact...but it might be. Hannah won't show me the spreadsheets.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Oxford (Will's world).

Carlos spends most of Thursday in the archives of the Oxford college with the most prestigious physics department, devouring their scientific journal publications on Rusakov particles from the 1990s through the 2010s.

Cecil spends it running around town taking in the non-scientific sights. He meets Carlos in the evening with boxes of mince pies and Christmas crackers, hardbound copies of two different biographies of Mary Malone, and a harrowing tale of almost having the books soaked when one of the actors in a panto sprayed water all over his section of the audience.

For dinner they have takeout Cathay food in front of the Lyra-and-Will miniseries, moving on to the adaptations of The Bridge to the Stars and The Republic of Heaven. It keeps right on being excellent drama, even when the worldbuilding is distractingly wrong (panserbjørne aren't that big). A fictionalized version of Serafina Pekkala gets involved, played by an actress who is, in a refreshing twist of racebending, not white. Then at last Mary Malone joins in, swayed instantly to the cause of the Republic when Lyra gets her computer to generate a beautiful holographic alethiometer.

It's all well and good, until the second-to-last episode.

This time, Carlos should have seen the problem coming. He didn't have any warning about Pantalaimon being touched, still doesn't know if that happened in real life or was just a dramatic invention; but he knows full well how Lyra got her range. And he could have guessed the filmmakers knew too, as soon as they dropped the first piece of foreshadowing about the world of the dead.

With a CGI Pan, they don't have to resort to camera tricks or deceptive intercutting of footage to show the distance between Lyra and her daemon as the boat pushes away from the final shore. They can do long sweeping zooms from their Lyra's heartbroken face to the tiny, huddled, pain-wracked form she's leaving behind....

Barely audible under the swell of the music, Cecil says, "Carlos, I —"

They're sitting shoulder to shoulder this time. Carlos glances his way, and — oh — there are tears on Cecil's cheeks. "Do you want to stop?"

Cecil gulps and nods, then hugs his knees to his chest and just...folds up.

Khoshekh, meanwhile, hops off the edge of the mattress and bolts underneath it. Out of reach. Hiding.

Isaña trots across the covers to Carlos, who curls a hand around her shell, already suspecting they won't get to see the end of the series. "Do you...want to be touched?" he asks Cecil, not sure what his boyfriend's sensitivities are right now. "Would you rather be...alone?"

"You stay right here," says Cecil wetly.

Carlos stays.

Presently, Cecil gathers himself enough to add, "Talk to me? Tell me something you learned today."

Now there's something Carlos can handle. "The many-worlds hypothesis was first proposed in this world in the 1950s," he begins. "Paralleling our 1840s. But it wasn't based on reality or observation at the time, just on a theoretical attempt to work out what they perceived as paradoxes in quantum physics. Once they discovered Rusakov particles, one of the first projects of Dr. Malone's new research unit was to re-evaluate whether it really was a paradox that we experience the subjective appearance of waveform collapse...."

He keeps it up as Cecil's shoulders quit shaking, as Cecil scrubs away the tears.

"A series of experiments at the CERN chapels — I mean, the CERN laboratories — confirmed their findings in the 2010s, and it's been an accepted principle of physics ever since. Did I mention they have a CERN here? Or at least, they had it — it got folded into another organization a couple of decades ago. It did the same kind of research ours did, and it's also where they invented the Internet."

Summoning the energy to go into motion, Cecil swings one leg over Carlos's, so he's straddling Carlos's hips. Carlos loops his arms around Cecil's waist, while of course Cecil's hands go immediately to his hair.

"I had to pull an intro physics textbook just to make sure I had all the particles straight. Obviously they call them electrons instead of anbarons, and they have all these cute names for quarks, and some terms are just contracted, they say muon instead of mu lepton...oh, and get this: they used to call those mu mesons. Can you believe it?"

"I...don't know," says Cecil. His voice is hoarse. The Voice is never hoarse. "Is that funny?"

"It's very funny," Carlos assures him. "They're basically giant anbarons. And for a while the whole field was going around calling them hadrons."

"...I thought you said they called them mesons?"

Carlos's amusement dims as he understands that Cecil won't share it. "Because mesons are a type of...um, maybe I should draw you a chart?"

Cecil makes a face. (It's so cute the way he scrunches up his nose like that.) "I'll manage."

With the lights still off and the screen plunged into a power-saving blackness, the only illumination in the room is from a streetlamp outside, shining between the gap in the curtains. A cold drizzle makes patterns in the stripe of light that falls across the bed.

"I'll go for a — a long walk, tomorrow morning," says Cecil. His wandering fingers have completely undone Carlos's ponytail by now; the hair tie has ended up around his wrist. "So you can finish the series before we check out."

Carlos shakes his head. "Don't worry about it. I'll read the books."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (Lyra's world).

My voice is still for war. / Gods! Can a Roman senate long debate / Which of the two to choose, slavery or death? / No, let us rise at once, / Gird on our swords, and, / At the head of our remaining troops, attack the foe, / Break through the thick array of his throng'd legions, / And charge home upon him.

Joseph Addison: Cato, A Tragedy.

Stand by your radios, Night Vale, because in a minute I'm going to find where I put my notes from Death Comes for the Archbishop, and then you'll be in for a real treat.

Notes:

Portrait of Will. (He gets almost no description in the books beyond "strong and stocky.")

Book I had 32 chapters, and 11 of them, or about 1/3 of the story, took place before Carlos went home for Christmas. If Book II follows a similar ratio, expect it to clock in at approximately 54 chapters. (Now the real question is, how many more until Carlos gets that scar?)

If you're wondering what Animorphs-with-daemons would be like...it would be like this.

Swannendell = a USND state, the future of Swaanendael Colony, covering similar territory to our-world Delaware. Milford, Swannendell is the equivalent of Milford, Delaware.

dobav' menya na Facebook = add me back on Facebook

Chapter 19: Not Uncle Cecil

Summary:

Our heroes are back in Lyra's World, where Cecil finally gets to make a first impression on much of Carlos's family. He's a particular hit with the nieces and nephews, thanks to his affinity for cute pets, firearms, and Tumblr.

Elsewhere, the occupation of Night Vale keeps moving forward.

Trimountaine (Lyra's world).

When Carlos turns on his phone for the first time after the plane has touched down, it nearly vibrates out of his hand. He has eighty missed calls or messages. Eighty. The latest being from his baby sister, saying she's made it to the train station, and to text her when his plane gets in.

Their book-laden suitcases are heavy enough that it takes all of Carlos's scien— all his theological willpower to drag them along. (What would Dr. Belacqua think if he left any of his information-filled purchases behind? What would Dr. Malone think?)

Cecil makes a startled noise when they get outside, zips up his fur-lined coat, and sticks his hands under his arms to keep them warm while they wait for the T. Carlos pulls up his own coat's hood, while Isaña huddles in the blanket in his backpack. Khoshekh trots along beside them in a fluffy plaid cloak, the loose drape of the fabric concealing his unorthodox leg arrangement. Anyone who spots his unusual gait should put it down to a missing limb, or something else mundane.

The airport shuttle is packed with holiday traffic; humans are shoved close together on one side of the aisle, daemons on the other, the suitcase racks piled to the ceiling. Cecil is up against a wall and practically nose-to-nose with Carlos, which is cute until they go underground, at which point he bites his lip and turns to stare out the windows. Though he isn't even using them, his eyes are wide behind his dark glasses. "Tell me how long this ride is again."

"Fifteen minutes," murmurs Carlos. "Give or take. Then we get out of here and get right back on solid, non-mobile ground."

 

-{,(((,">

 

As promised, it isn't long before they're lugging everything out onto the South Station platform. Other passengers stream out around them, hauling their own bags, making for the elevators or the stairs or the next platform over. Next to a wall nearby, a couple of women with guitars stand by a microphone, crooning a slow Christmas carol: "This is the time of year / We hold our families near / But God, let us be a friend to the hurting...."

"Need just a minute," pants Carlos, leaning on the handle of the nearest suitcase. Khoshekh, carrying Isaña, trots to a stop beside him. "Gotta catch my breath."

"Oh Immanuel, God with us / Spirit revealed in us," sing the carolers. "That we may be your hope to the world...."

Something about the music catches Isaña's ear. She tugs at Carlos's attention, and he listens.

"Oh Immanuel, God with us / With a light to break the darkness / That we may show your hope to the world...!"

Carlos doesn't recognize the carol itself, but something about the lyrics is tugging at the back of his mind. "Can we stay another minute? I want to ask them something."

Cecil seems puzzled, but gives him the go-ahead, so they roll over to the singers: a blonde, a redhead, and their daemons, crooning in four-part harmony. Carlos tosses a couple of dollars in the guitar case at their feet, then acts distracted while they finish the last verse, so he won't unnerve them by staring. (He's not dangerous to them, for a multitude of reasons, but they don't know that.)

When the last chord fades, there's a smattering of applause from the few people waiting for the next shuttle who don't have their own music turned up too high to hear. Carlos claps a couple of times, then says, "Can I interrupt? That word you were saying, that name...Emmanuel? Where's that from?"

Both musicians light up. It's probably the first time they've actually been asked to preach at someone.

"It's from the Book of Isaiah," says the redhead, in a heavy Trimountaine-Irish accent. Her daemon is a palm thrush. "One of the oldest prophecies that the Messiah would come. The scripture was fulfilled when the virgin Mary gave birth to a son who was the Lord God incarnate. That's why he was called Immanuel — which means God with us."

"Yes, yes, all that," says Carlos, a little impatiently. He did go to Sunday school, even if he can't remember ever taking the religious details as fact. "But is it a reference to anything else? Or anyone else?"

"Even if it was, there are so many other prophecies in the Old Testament that are fulfilled in the Gospels," says the blonde (her daemon: a stocky beagle), utterly misunderstanding his concern. "We have a pamphlet — and there are links to more on our website — when you look at all the evidence together, it's incredible to think there are people who don't believe it."

"Or who have their faith shaken by some elitist researcher who thinks being as controversial as possible is a good way to get famous," adds the woman with the thrush. "What evidence do they have for their theology? A blurry video that's supposed to be an angel? That hardly compares to thousands of years of scholarship."

Khoshekh hisses.

"Ah," says Carlos. "Yes. Well. Thank you for your time, but we should get going now."

He doesn't escape without a pamphlet, and gets warmly God-blessed and merry-Christmased as they haul their luggage toward the elevator. Cecil holds it together just long enough for the doors to close, then snarls, "The nerve of those people! If you hadn't warned me to check in with you before correcting people, to make sure it's okay for them to know and/or admit knowing the truth, I would have let them know exactly what I thought of their smug, dismissive, stupid faces. How dare they accuse you of doing bad theology? How dare they? And bragging about their scholarship when they don't even have the translation right!"

"Thank you for holding back," says Carlos. He doesn't trust himself to say much more without breaking into angry venting of his own. "What do you mean about the translation?"

"Immanu'el in Hebrew — that was Hebrew, right? — doesn't mean 'god, with us'," says Cecil. "It's not an epithet for a nearby deity. It just means 'god is with us'. You might as well saying that someone who named their child —" He spits out a collection of growls and hoots. "— was claiming they had given birth to the beams incarnate, when all it means is 'the beams are all-powerful'."

"Makes sense." Lots of babies are named after the parents' beliefs (or hopes) regarding whatever deity they happen to worship. Carlos probably had a student or classmate named Emmanuel at some point, and that's where this déjà vu is coming from. "Hey, Cecil, I forgot to mention this earlier, but when you're talking to my family...don't hoot."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Azalea and her tocororo daemon find them on the train platform. "So this is the guy!" she exclaims, shaking Cecil's hand. Like Carlos, she gets her height from Papi's side of the family: she's a full inch taller than Cecil is. Unlike him, she's gotten a haircut recently, leaving her curls in a short bob. "I like the dye job! Very striking."

"Thank you," says Cecil warmly. (In this case, if he had asked, Carlos would have said it was okay to explain that his hair has been turning white all on its own. But Cecil is already self-conscious about his status as an Outsider; he might not want to draw attention to his weird genetics.) "Your jewelry is beautiful. Handmade, right?"

It's the perfect thing to say. Azalea and Cecil spend most of the train ride talking about the local hand-crafting industries in New Amsterdam and Night Vale respectively, while Carlos finishes catching up on his texts (he's too afraid to even look at his email). No serious crises and nobody on the team has died, thank the beams. Most of them are off on their own holiday vacations by now, leaving a skeleton crew of the Li Huas, Nirliq, and Sherie to keep an eye on the chapel.

As with last year, Lena is waiting at the tiny central-Narraganset train station to pick them up. Her furry bat daemon, who handles the cold better than her older brother's desert-dwelling armadillo or her little sister's tropical bird, flaps down to the ground to touch noses with Khoshekh while Lena helps lift their suitcases into the van. "Oof," she complains, hefting one of Carlos's. "What did you put in this, rocks?"

"Books," says Carlos sheepishly. "We just got back from Oxford, so I picked up a lot of books you can't get here at home."

"Well, color me unsurprised," sighs Lena. "But if I were you, I would've had them shipped."

Cecil turns to Carlos as they pile into the van. "Should I tell them...?"

"Go ahead," says Carlos, flashing an OK sign with his hand. (Their agreed-upon signal for "really, you can tell the truth here," as opposed to a thumbs-up, which is "just kidding, lie like a rug.") He's already grinning as he anticipates the looks on his sisters' faces when it comes out that he was worried about cross-dimensional shipping fees — because he's been playing tourist in Will Parry's universe.

So Cecil explains, "For security reasons, the Night Vale post office destroys most packages it receives."

Right. That too.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Mike, May, and the boys are spending the holiday with May's side of the family. They'll be dropping in for a day or two after Christmas. Carlos knows it probably would have gone that way no matter what — they spent last year with one set of grandparents, they'll spend this year with the other, it's only fair — but he can't help but worry about May's ongoing disapproval of her gay Magisterium-defying brother-in-law, and what that might mean for next year.

Lena's in-laws aren't up for hosting big gatherings, so her husband and kids are at the house when they arrive...along with Carlos's parents.

Mamá does some preliminary fussing over him and Azalea, then lights up as she invites Cecil in. "Welcome! Come in! It's lovely to finally see you in person, after Carlos has been talking about you for months and months. Let me take your coat." (Her raccoon daemon, at the same time, is insisting on helping Khoshekh with his cloak.)

Cecil practically sparkles at the attention. "You're very kind, Señora Ramirez," he says as she helps with his coat and scarf. Underneath, he's wearing a knit purple sweater, hiking boots with purple laces, and tuxedo pants — which were the fifth most normal type of legwear Carlos found after going through his whole closet.

"Oh, cielito, you must call me Iris," chides Mamá. "And this is Carlos's papi, Tierno. Any boyfriend of our son's deserves the best hospitality. Let me show you around."

One perk from Mike and his family not staying in the house: it frees up the pull-out couch. No air mattresses for Carlos this year! Cecil is relieved to find that the mirror in one of the bathrooms has a thick black cloth draped over it. (Carlos didn't even try to explain that to his parents, just said "it's for cultural reasons.") And they're both glad to hear that downstairs, next to the washing machine, the bloodstone circle is ready and waiting.

"The children wanted pizza, so we ordered just before you got here," adds Mamá, giving them a quick list of the agreed-upon toppings. "Is that all right with you two?"

Cecil hesitates. "Is this a situation where, if we don't eat the pizza now, it'll be mandatory to have some later? Or is this purely opt-in pizza?"

"With two teenagers in the house? Opt-in, don't you worry. It'll vanish in a day or two, even if you never touch a slice."

"I see," says Cecil seriously. "Are there other age-related food-vanishing conditions I should know about?"

Carlos squeezes his shoulder. "She just means they'll eat it. Hey, speaking of Lena's kids, where are they? I was expecting at least one 'hello, what cool foreign candy did you bring us this time' on the way in."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Turns out the rest of Lena's family is in the computer room, all on various devices. Ten-year-old Rosa is on her grandparents' old desktop ordinater, playing around on some brightly-colored website, while her unsettled daemon hangs over her shoulder in ferret form. Dawn, now fifteen, is sitting at the other desk and frowning at the screen of a graphing calculator, while her father tries to explain one of the equations on what is presumably homework. And fourteen-year-old Lucas....

Lucas is comfortably in the corner with his laptop, so busy with his MMO that he doesn't even look up when Carlos and Cecil come in. His daemon is still the white antelope...and Carlos, seeing her, isn't even having the tiniest of panic attacks. How cool is that.

Rosa is more cautious than Carlos remembers, keeping her cards close to the vest while she takes Cecil's measure. Dawn just looks relieved at the excuse to put down her homework. Once they've had names and introductions all around, she says, "Mom said Uncle Carlos says your daemon can fly. Can he really?"

"I prefer to call it floating," purrs Khoshekh, and launches himself off the ground. The move earns a delighted gasp from Rosa, who turns her chair to watch as Khoshekh flows through the air to hover next to Dawn.

It gets even Lucas's attention. "Whoa," he says, voice notably deeper than last year. "It's like you got a flight cheat code, but IRL."

And Dawn's jeweled lizard daemon, poking his head out of her pocket, says, "Would it be okay if I looked at your spine?"

Cecil beams. Even Khoshekh looks gratified as he lands for inspection. "Ah, I can see you have theologian genes! When your aunt Isaña first met me, she said the exact same thing."

"Do we, uh," says Lucas. "Do we call you, like, Uncle Cecil? Or what?"

"Mister Cecil or Señor Cecil is fine," says Cecil. Given that they've barely been dating six months, he and Carlos agreed that anything else would be jumping the gun. Still, Carlos doesn't miss the way the phrase Uncle Cecil makes him smile.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie could have been taking the day off. Just because she's still in town doesn't mean she doesn't get vacation time. And while the four of them (three? what's the best way to quantify the Li Huas?) are still on duty to provide any necessary theology in an emergency, there aren't any emergencies now. It isn't even her turn to keep an eye on the danger meters! She could have been at a spa right now.

But she has a volunteer test subject who couldn't make time to come in until today, and it's related to the ongoing bloodstone-circle project, so she wasn't willing to bump it down the line any longer.

The chapel doorbell rings precisely on time, which is a neat trick in a town where none of the clocks are real. Sherie does a quick check through their new electrum-lens-equipped security-camera system, just to make sure it isn't a representative of any of the various forces and entities who might have it in for them. "Good news," she tells her mongoose daemon. "It really is Delphine, she brought her daughter, and it looks like neither of them are evil."

When Sherie invites the guests in, Delphine clasps her hands in greeting and does air-kisses on either side of her face. "Sherie! You haven't been to PTA meetings lately. We've been worried!"

"I, um, no longer have children in the Night Vale school system," says Sherie awkwardly. Her Spanish understanding is much better than it used to be, thanks in part to those meetings, but her accent is still middling and she knows it.

"That doesn't stop anyone else from coming!" exclaims Delphine. "I don't know if you were here the week when all the children disappeared? Well, we still got together Thursday evening. And we had one of our most productive meetings in years."

"I'll try to put it back on my schedule," says Sherie. "Here, let me show you the equipment."

She leads the pair into the main room of the chapel, where the bloodstones and various meters are waiting.

Delphine, as usual, is dressed and made-up like she's going to something much fancier than this. Her dark hair is in a stylish updo; her earrings match the frames of her half-moon glasses. Her daemon, a silver-and-white Lapp forest cat, pads along beside them: genetically not a wildcat, but still twice the size of the average house cat, with thick fur that makes her look more like a small lynx than anything else.

(There was a time — more recent than Sherie would like to admit — when she would have treated Delphine like a drag queen. As if the woman deserves less respect than Henriette just because she wasn't lucky enough to be born with a same-sex daemon or a relatively fine bone structure, so her biology is more obvious at a casual glance. Sherie feels ashamed of herself just thinking it.)

Delphine's daughter follows behind them, riding on the back of her own daemon: unsettled, currently in the form of a stocky palomino pony. She's about ten, with dark braids and violet eyes that match the bands on her braces. The reason she's riding instead of walking is immediately obvious — her legs are stunted, half the size of most girls her age. Judging from the way she's kicking her heels, they're not paralyzed. They just don't look capable of holding her weight for long.

It's the first time Sherie has seen this girl's face...but she can't help but recall that one of the kids in Tamika Flynn's theology liaison team also rides her daemon everywhere. And is this exact size and build. And wears different masks, but always topped with those same glasses.

After giving them a brief introduction to the setup, Sherie adds, "I'm afraid that because Dr. Ramirez is away this week...."

"Yes, when will he be back?" interrupts Delphine. "Him and Señor Palmero. Steve used to know, but he's lost track of the date, and he's awfully anxious about it."

That's right, Delphine's dating Steve Carlsberg, isn't she. Sherie gives her the date, then goes back to the explanation. "Since Carlos is away, he won't be able to confirm that you were one of the people involved in the Lazy Day spell. Not that I don't trust you, but a theologian always gets corroborating evidence. We'll still do all the —"

"Sorry," interrupts Delphine again, with an isn't-this-silly laugh, "but are you talking to me? You think I was in that spell? Oh, no."

Sherie frowns. "But...the research invitation you responded to...."

"...was on behalf of my daughter, of course. Didn't I make that clear? Say hello, Janice."

"Hello, Señora Oppenheimer," says the girl, with a little wave. "I'm Janice, and this is Tehom, and we have never met you before, so it's nice to be introduced to you, for the first time."

Now it all comes together. Sherie returns Agent J2's wave. "The pleasure is all mine."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

"Oh! By the way, Rosa — there's something important I need to ask you about."

Cecil sinks into a crouch so he's below Rosa's eye level instead of looming over her. It's a nice, calming thing to do...although the effect does get offset when he pulls off his sunglasses. Rosa is much too polite to say anything, but she's visibly unnerved by his pale, clouded eyes.

"You see, all month I've been working on what kind of presents to bring," continues Cecil, undeterred. "I've figured out the gifts for most of the family — but for you, I'm stuck. So can you tell me a little about yourself? What your hobbies are, what you like to do?"

"I dunno," says Rosa. Her daemon has turned into a mouse, small enough to be half-concealed by the side ponytail falling over her shoulder. "Internet stuff. Nothing important."

"You're really into this Neopia thing," volunteers her father. "Tell Mr. Cecil about that."

"It's Neopets, Dad," protests Rosa.

"Uh-huh?" says Cecil hopefully. "What's that?"

Rosa points at the website on the screen beside her. "It's this."

"Khoshekh, come over here!" calls Cecil. "You can borrow him back later, Dawn, okay? I just need him to see right now." To Rosa, he adds, "Did your mother explain about my vision? How I can't see things on screens when I'm not in four-eye with my daemon? That's also why my eyes look like this."

"Mom just said we shouldn't ask you to read things," says Rosa. Her daemon turns back into a ferret and leans slightly closer to Cecil, relaxing a little now that they know his eyes are something they're allowed to talk about. "Were you born like that, or did something happen?"

Carlos, sensing that he doesn't need to keep hovering here, touches Cecil on the shoulder. "Hey, I'm going to go get some work done. I'll be in the den if you need anything, okay?"

"Of course, of course! Enjoy your theology," says Cecil. His voice fades behind Carlos and Isaña as they retreat down the hall: "There was an accident, when I was around your sister's age. I'm afraid I don't remember the details. Now, about this website. Ooh, that thing's cute. What's it called...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos curls up on the den couch with one of his new books, intending to enjoy it until dinner arrives. He only gets halfway through the first chapter. After the third time he reaches for the nearest anbaric device to look up one of the cited studies, only to remember that it was done in another world and is out of his reach for the foreseeable future, he ends up staring blankly at the page.

They can do the same studies here. Build up the same body of knowledge. He knows they can.

But it makes him feel hollow and tired to think about how much new sci...theology was around him over there, and how tiny a fraction he managed to cling to on his way back. It's like being pulled out of the condo all over again, except that what he lost wasn't an illusion that only felt like perfection while he was inside it. This was real. And he's always going to be conscious of how amazing it was.

He puts the book down and lies down, curling an arm around Isaña. They won't be able to sleep, they got a long nap on the transdimensional flight, but there's no need to rush through the reading, right? For that, he has all the time in the world.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Someone calls him when the pizza arrives, and given that Carlos is opting out, he heads to the kitchen to rifle through the fridge. It isn't long before Cecil joins him, accompanied by Lucas.

From the sound of it, Cecil took a turn with Lucas's game as well as Rosa's. "I'm sorry, I don't know where my head is today. I must be more out-of-practice than I realized."

"You kept aiming too low at the last minute," advises Lucas, leaning on the counter while Carlos lays out the ingredients for a couple of burritos. He's gotten so much taller this year, it's incredible. "You need to aim so the sight is over the target, and then hold it real steady."

"Oh!" exclaims Cecil, his furrowed brow smoothing over. "Of course! Silly Cecil. I was compensating for the kick — when it fires — but this game doesn't simulate that, does it? No wonder I kept missing."

"What game do you play where it does simulate the kick?"

Cecil hesitates, then touches Carlos's arm and moves his thumb against the knitted sleeve: brush, tap, brush, brush, tap. "Is there hot sauce?"

Carlos flashes him an OK sign. Yes, Cecil can answer the gun question honestly. "I'll check the cupboard."

"Um, not a game," says Cecil to Lucas, pouring a generous helping of shredded cheese on his tortilla. "And not a simulation. I'm used to practicing with real firearms. Not the kind they made up for your game, obviously, but ones that look a lot like it."

"No, that is a real gun," says Lucas. "It's called a Zastava M-70."

Cecil frowns. "That was supposed to be an M-70? Then where were the cooling slots on the foregrip? Honestly, that is very slipshod animation. If I were you I'd find somebody to complain to."

The pizza boxes are going around the table when they enter the dining room, and the conversation stalls as Lucas joins the rest of his family in filling his plate. His oversize daemon sits across the threshold of the door behind him; Isaña and most of the others sit under their humans' chairs. Drinks get passed around too.

Carlos is just handing on the hot chocolatl when Cecil gasps, staring at the box in Lena's hands. "Are those — breadsticks?"

"That's right," says Lena, handing it on to Rosa.

"Real breadsticks? Made with flour?"

Lena's husband raises his eyebrows. "Sure. Don't they have those where you come from?"

"They do, but the black-market price-gouging has been terrible lately. I haven't been able to afford them for...oh, gosh, at least a year."

The non-Night-Vale-based adults at the table trade "is he joking?" looks. Rosa, meanwhile, just hands the box down the table without taking any. "You can have my share if you want, Mr. Cecil."

Cecil looks stricken. "Oh, I — I couldn't possibly —"

"We can get more later, easy," Carlos assures him. "Go ahead, help yourself. Thanks, Rosa."

"He deserves it!" exclaims Rosa, her daemon riding on her shoulder as a red-furred squirrel. "He's so nice. He did a faerie quest on my account, and the faerie gave him a Lost Desert Paint Brush, and he said I could keep it. Those are, like, three million Neopoints!"

Her older sister, across from her, huffs in disapproval while fighting to detach a slice of pepperoni-and-onion. "He probably just doesn't buy into your fantasy capitalist system in the first place. Did you see his tattoo?"

Cecil spills all the breadsticks across his plate.

"Hey, save some for the rest of us," jokes Lena's husband. Blushing, Cecil mumbles an apology and starts putting them back.

Carlos could kick himself. Of course — Mamá took Cecil's scarf at the door. And neither of them thought twice about it. Carlos doesn't remember noticing the ink at the time, but maybe Cecil's collar had ridden up high enough to cover it...or maybe he just didn't pay attention. Either way, the thick knit sweater is settled now, and the way the collar hangs, half the ink is exposed. Dawn probably could have seen the whole thing while Cecil was leaning over one of her younger siblings' shoulders.

"All this, and a tattoo too?" says Azalea, with a roguish grin. "What is it?"

"It's a bar code," says Dawn, oblivious in her enthusiasm to Cecil's distress. "I have never in my life seen such a perfect commentary on how our individuality gets commodified by corporations! And that's saying something, because I'm on Tumblr a lot."

"Oh?" Cecil's voice shakes as he tries to sound normal, passing Carlos the half-full breadstick box. "What's your username? Do you tag for the endless uncaring void of the night sky? Because I would love to follow you, as long as I can filter for that."

And now he's won the admiration of all three kids for things that are not cringe-inducing misconceptions. Carlos hands the breadsticks on to Mamá and says quietly, "You look cold. Let me grab your hat and scarf."

"Would you?" breathes Cecil. "Thank you."

By the time Carlos gets back, Cecil is in the middle of an earnest discussion with Dawn about whether or not it's speciesist to include warning tags for tarantulas. If it weren't for the lightning speed with which he wraps the scarf around his neck, Carlos wouldn't have guessed he was bothered at all.

 

-{,(((,">

 

In fleecy pajamas, an oversized sweater, and a wool hat with cat ears on it that matches his scarf-of-the-moment, Cecil still pulls the blankets right up to his neck. Their daemons are huddled in a basket next to the fold-out mattress, under similar layers. "Does it always get this cold here in winter?"

"Afraid so." Carlos drapes a protective arm over him. "You want a hot water bottle or something?"

"Those are real?" exclaims Cecil. "I — I thought that was just something made-up for books and movies! Like truth serum, or drawbridges."

"I can get you one right now. Hang in there." Carlos rolls out of bed, pulls his bathrobe (which is not a terrycloth bedtime chapel coat, no matter what Cecil calls it, and the fact that it is long and white and has pockets is pure coincidence) tighter over his own PJs, and makes his way out into the kitchen.

His parents are probably asleep by now, and Lucas is off somewhere with his MMO, but there's a soft sound of conversation from the living room. They've turned off the lights — Azalea and Lena, Lena's husband, and the girls — to sit around the tree. As the water boils, Carlos weighs the merits of joining them, versus the (considerable) appeal of snuggling back into bed and basking in Cecil's awe....

Gasps from the front room.

Carlos tenses, already guessing this is going to be about him. Sure enough, Lena shows up in the doorway a moment later, fruit bat daemon hanging from her arm. "Carlos? Do you and Cecil know a translucent lady with no daemon? Because there's one here asking about you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

This late at night, the flat roof of the White Sand is in shadow, giving Tamika all the cover she needs from the streetlights on the ground. One of the other Advanced Readers takes out the observer on the rooftop across the street, while Tamika herself uses her trusty slingshot to knock out the ones on ground level.

As long as Strex doesn't send around any gyropters with spotlights, they have the area secure. Again.

Tamika sits, leaning back against her buffalo daemon's bulk, praying to anything but a smiling god that Palmero will get his act together and answer this time.

She's gotten a lot of arcane and forbidden knowledge of the inner workings of NVCR, and its interplay with the local government and police forces, from that latest volume of Dylan Thomas poetry. Likely as not Strexcorp has no idea what they're doing — these are the kind of power plays they'd be making anyway, it could be dumb luck — but she knows. And just in case it's on purpose, someone needs to tell the Voice that his bosses are one step closer to the control they need to replace him.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

Their translucent visitor is Hannah Gutierrez, the woman with the nice suits from the ice cream shop. Not daemonless, just appearing by astral projection, whiptail lizard daemon not included.

"Where have you been?" she demands (in Spanish; Azalea and Lena watch with tense fascination, while Wes, Dawn, and Rosa are just confused) once Cecil has been hauled out of bed to stand in front of her. "Someone have been trying to reach you every day this week."

"I was out of astral-projection range," says Cecil irritably. "You could have called. Or texted."

"We couldn't," says Hannah. "That's what we needed to tell you. Don't trust your phones. Don't trust any device or area that you don't know for a fact is secure. They bought the secret police."

Carlos freezes. Cecil sucks in a gasp between his teeth.

"This is your family's home, right?" adds Hannah to Carlos, folding her translucent arms. He can see angel ornaments on the tree shining through her shoulder and elbow. "You should reinforce the wards. They let me in right away, and we don't know each other nearly well enough to have that level of access."

"Sure," stammers Carlos. "I'll look into it first thing tomorrow."

"And you." She turns to Cecil. "Drop in on Steve some time soon. He's fine, but he's been through something, and could use a friendly face. Or a surly face. Whichever you happen to have at the time."

Cecil scowls. "Of course I'm going to have a surly face when Steve has such awful timing. I'll look in on him tomorrow."

"See that you do." Hannah holds the stern face a moment longer — then switches into a pleasant customer-service smile, which she aims at the rest of the family. "It was a pleasure to meet you all. So sorry to interrupt your family evening. If you ever happen to visit Night Vale, stop by the White Sand Ice Cream Shop and tell the server you're related to Carlos the Experimental Theologian, and we'll give you a free scoop each."

On that note, her projection vanishes, leaving empty air.

"Was that...¿un àngel?" asks Azalea after a moment. She's the only person in the room who hasn't seen an Erika in person.

"I don't think so," says Dawn, in English. "Angels are taller."

"And naked," adds Rosa, making a face.

"And usually bring better news," finishes Cecil.

He's still excited when Carlos finally gets him that hot water bottle, but it's nothing more than a brief distraction as he gets out the alethiometer and pulls the covers completely over his head. Carlos ducks under there too, though of course he can't see a thing under the quilts, just hear the sound of turning dials.

"Cecil," he whispers, "if it's bad enough at home that you think we should go back...."

He doesn't finish the thought out loud for fear of jinxing it...but the Night Vale definition of "fine" doesn't always line up with his own. What if Steve is in worse shape than he sounds? If the situation were reversed, if something had happened to Lena and Wes — Carlos isn't even the first-line backup caretaker for Dawn, Lucas, and Rosa, and he would still drop everything if they needed him.

"If we go back early, it will give Strexcorp suspicions that we do not want them to have," says Cecil darkly. "It isn't worth the risk. The broadcast protocols are holding. Tamika Flynn and her fellow middle-school armed insurgents are operating as smoothly as ever. Your team members are watching their backs. And Steve...ah."

"What? What is it?"

"Steve, who is still drawing a normal salary in real money, is moving out of his Strex-managed apartment and into his girlfriend's duplex," growls Cecil. "Apparently their daughters know each other from Book Club, and get along already, so there's no issue there. Ugh, what a show-off. I am going to sleep, and pray that my dreams will include absolutely anything except that jerk."

Notes:

Hey, remember when this fic started, back when we knew almost nothing about Cecil's canon family, just that there was a brother, and I wasn't even sure if I was going to include that in the AU? Ah, those innocent days.

The song Carlos hears in the subway is the Point of Grace version of Emmanuel, God With Us.

Cecil taps a Morse-code prosign (KN) that signals for a specific named station to reply to you. Or, in this case, for a specific touched boyfriend to help you out.

...On the slim chance that any of you are on Neopets and would like to be friends, I'm SailorPtah there too. (My account still has buckets of Neopoints, so if you happen to be an active player and want an item you can't afford, hit me up.)

Chapter 20: Family Memories

Summary:

In Night Vale, Strex makes its first direct move against the few experimental theologians still in town. Back east, the fluff continues with Cecil and Carlos's holiday visit...though Cecil struggles to deal with the half-remembered feelings all this family togetherness brings up.

Central Narraganset.

Warding the house turns out to be a simple process. Cecil kneels in the bloodstone circle for five minutes, chants a few things, asks (and is granted) formal approval from Carlos's mother, and that's that. He says afterward that he's amazed how little invasive mental pressure there is around here.

Aside from Carlos, the only family member who comes downstairs to watch the whole process is Azalea. Not surprising, since she's the sister who went through a healing-crystals-and-mysticism phase a while back. Or maybe she isn't quite through it, Carlos thinks, when she produces a piece of amethyst on a nice decorative chain and asks for Cecil's expert evaluation.

"Well, this does absolutely nothing," reports Cecil after a moment of inspection. "Very pretty, but anyone who told you it had protective or healing properties was running a scam."

"Really?" asks Azalea. The tocororo daemon on her shoulder cocks his head. "You can tell that just by looking?"

"Sure."

"How?"

Cecil's brow furrows. "By...looking? Like you just said?"

"Yeah, but what —"

"Cecil, you wanted to call Steve, right?" cuts in Carlos. "Should we give you a few minutes to do that?"

"Would you, please?" says Cecil hopefully. "I'll come back upstairs when I'm done."

Carlos carries Isaña under his arm up the stairs, Azalea following a half-step behind. Under her breath, she says, "Was I bothering him? Or offending him? I didn't mean to! He's just hard to read."

"I think he was just flustered. Confused," says Carlos. Sure, Cecil can shut down and be totally impenetrable when he wants to, but just then his feelings had seemed pretty obvious. "You really think he's hard to read?"

"He isn't great at making eye contact...and his daemon is floating five feet off the ground next to the TV in the den," points out the tocororo. "I guess you're used to it? But we're not."

"Oh. Right."

"So I could ask more when he's done with his...call?" asks Azalea. "Or, oh! You could do the asking!"

"He has built up a pretty high tolerance for getting lots and lots of questions about mundane things. Especially from me," says Carlos sheepishly. "The problem is, half the time it turns out he doesn't even know how to explain what he's perceiving. It's like...if you saw a really well-done photogram, and I asked you to explain in technical terms why it was good, what would you say?"

"Well, I might talk about the composition, the lighting, the values, the framing, the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the symmetry or asymmetry, the rule of thirds, the —"

"— so, lots of different things," summarizes Carlos. "Now, what if you had never learned any of those terms? And grew up speaking a language in which most of the words didn't exist in the first place?"

"I...would be flustered and confused by the question. Gotcha."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil won't tell Carlos anything specific about his chat with Steve, just groans and rolls his eyes a lot and protests that he can't even with that jerk, which means things can't be too bad. So Carlos relaxes and lets himself enjoy the morning: the slideshow of vacation photos Lena has to share, the medley of Christmas carols on the stereo, the proud announcement from Cecil that he's going to bake.

For a loose definition of "baking." He's going to pull a few pre-packaged trays out of boxes and stick them in the oven. Will's Oxford may be at least a century ahead of their own, and the packaging itself is biodegradable, but they haven't made any great leaps in basic mince-pie technology.

While they're cooking, Carlos curls up in a chair on one side of the Christmas tree with a Mary Malone biography, while Cecil and Rosa sit together on the other. Rosa brought out her sketchbook, Khoshekh floats over Cecil's shoulder, and they end up having another earnest conversation about the girl's virtual-pet exploits.

Carlos can only half-focus on the book when he keeps hearing things like "the way the muscles connect to the skeleton" and "depends on the layout of the internal organs."

"I find that when you're trying to get the anatomy of a creature correct, it helps to understand why it has that anatomy in the first place," explains Cecil. "If there aren't any bone-and-muscle diagrams on the website, which sounds like quite an oversight, you can always do research on similar animals from your own world and try to work it out backward from there. Would you say the Zafara is more of a mustelid or a viverrid?"

"I don't know what those words mean," stammers Rosa. She's warmed up to Cecil, but he can still be overwhelming sometimes. "Are they experimental theology words? The last thing we studied in theology class was the water cycle."

"Well, I don't know what the water cycle means, so it sounds like we're even," says Cecil reassuringly. "Carlos! Come here, we need your expert opinion on —"

"I'm not that kind of theologian, Cecil!" protests Carlos. "I study physics, not mammals or biology!"

Eventually Rosa retreats to her grandparents' ordinater, possibly to look up ferret skulls, while Cecil, who's been checking his watch every other minute, muffles a little squeal of excitement. "It's time!"

Funny, Carlos hasn't heard the timer go off....

Sure enough, a moment later Cecil's voice echoes out from the kitchen: "Carlos? Will you come help me, please?"

That isn't the happy tone of someone taking pride in their successful baking. Carlos puts down his book, scoops up Isaña, and follows his voice.

Cecil is crouching in front of the open oven, frowning at the trays on the racks inside. "I don't think they cooked? I don't know if your parents' oven is broken, or if I did something wrong...but it doesn't feel like it got hot at all."

Carlos sticks out his hand — yeah, that's room temperature — then looks at the display. The little light is off; the LCD screen shows only the time of day. "Looks like it hasn't been on. Which buttons did you press?"

"...Buttons?"

"Up here? The controls? Can you see the labels right now...?"

Slowly Cecil rises to his feet, looking wary. "Carlos...you told me, very clearly, that we don't have to do rituals with the appliances in this country. You said they just work on their own."

"Well, sure, but you still have to input the settings. It's not like they're telepathic."

An uncomfortable pause.

"You thought our appliances were telepathic, didn't you," says Carlos.

With an air of wounded pride, Cecil replies, "I am struggling to understand what else you could have meant."

It would be unfair of Carlos to laugh. This is his own fault, after all. As an experimental theologian, it was his responsibility to be precise, and he failed. "What I meant...what I should have said...is that appliances here still have operating procedures, but they're different, and lesser, than the, um, operating procedures you're used to. Here, let's pull the pies out, and I'll walk you through preheating."

 

-{,(((,">

 

They're handing around the successfully-heated snack pies, half the family parking themselves around the tree and the rest ducking into the room long enough to grab one, when Cecil relocates to the arm of the couch next to Carlos and taps the give me some input signal on his shoulder. In a carefully neutral voice, he says, "Look outside."

"Well, would you look at that," says Carlos, putting extra warmth into his tone. "Snow."

It's only flurries, not even sticking, but it's enough that Cecil's well-honed caution melts into excitement. "It's pretty," he breathes, then calls over his shoulder: "Khoshekh! Come out here and look! There's snow!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The text, from a contact in Tamika Flynn's theology liaison team, is short and to the point. One of you come down here and talk to us. There's something up at the chapel.

Dammit, and today Sherie was planning to go to a spa.

Five stops from the chapel, Nirliq gets on the same bus as Sherie, and takes the seat next to her fellow theologian while her colobus daemon hops into the seat across the aisle. "I was hoping you'd be there already," she says in a low voice. "Didn't you get your car back from Kinlání?"

"Yes," says Sherie. What a fun day that had been, driving three hours either way to retrieve the vehicle her husband left in the city. "And then it got repossessed, because I couldn't keep up with the payments on my own."

"Oh. Sorry to hear that."

Sherie makes a noncommittal sound of acceptance.

"You know, Marcus Vansten might give us all free cars if we ask nicely enough," muses Nirliq. "Or if we hint that it would make us more likely to vote for him."

"First of all, we're still not registered voters in Night Vale, and second, what is Marcus Vansten running for? And since when?"

"Mayor. Since a couple days ago, when he threw his hat in the ring. I was picking up some things at the only non-Strex-owned bookstore left in town when the commotion started, so I caught most of the show — he literally built a ring and commissioned a hat and put on a whole display in the middle of the shopping district. There was a fountain. And a choir."

Well, if the man is rich enough to be throwing money away like that, he could certainly invest in a few vehicles. As a donation. On the other hand, Sherie would feel bad about pretending to think he'd be a good mayor...especially if the faceless old woman who secretly lives in her home caught wind of it and got jealous. "I'll think about it."

The bus turns onto their street...and right away she and Nirliq can see what the kids were calling about.

There's a yellow gyropter sitting in the driveway.

Not one of the ones commandeered by Tamika's army, either. Those are marked, usually in soot or ash, with the sigil of an open, staring eye. No, this is a pristine Strexcorp gyropter, matching the equally pristine Strexcorp official standing on their front steps.

There are two children sitting at the bus stop, reading. One raises her eyes from her book when Nirliq and Sherie get off, whispers "Shh. Esperá un momento," and goes back to turning the page.

Both theologians pause...and Sherie quietly notes that there are a handful of teenagers talking in the Big Rico's parking lot, and a couple more kids tossing a baseball back and forth on the sidewalk across the street. And that's just the ones in plain sight. Whatever happens here, they'll have backup.

"Okay, I'm here. Don't look around, don't look surprised," says a new voice, also in Spanish. Teenage and male, going by the rusty depth of it — even though its owner is nowhere in sight. "It's me, Agent L. Finally got my invisibility badge. Just to be clear, you guys didn't, like, invite a Strexcorp inspection of your workplace, right?"

"Not on your life," mutters Nirliq, folding her arms.

"Did they go inside?" adds Sherie, in her own Spanish (less idiomatic than Nirliq's, more accented). If Strex has done any kind of interference with their research....

"Nope. We would've broken our cover to stop them if they tried it. And I think they know that," says Agent L. "Do you, uh, do you want to go see what this guy wants?"

"I think we'd better do it, whether we want to or not," says Sherie. What she wouldn't give to have Carlos, Keith, or Henriette around right now.

Nirliq's colobus daemon climbs her arm and swings up to ride on her back, while Sherie's mongoose hangs over her shoulder, and they approach their front steps.

The visitor has a mongoose too, but golden-furred instead of ring-tailed, and sitting up on her hind legs at his side. The man himself is wearing a dark suit with a sunny yellow tie, and when they get close enough he turns and smiles with too many teeth. "Ah, some theologians! I have been knocking for twenty minutes now and not gotten any response. Were you doing field work, then?"

"We were on vacation," says Sherie. "We are, still, on vacation. We're only here because a pizza lover, very helpful, noticed you waiting around and called to ask if we forgot an appointment."

The Strex employee's smile falters; his too-dark eyes widen. "Do you mean to say that none of you were making use of this building today? What an inefficient use of resources."

"Well, we're here now," says Nirliq sternly. "And we'd love to hear what you're doing in our driveway."

Uh-oh, the smile's back. "I'm afraid that's not the right question."

Nirliq gives him a teeth-clenched smile of her own. "Well, it would be most efficient if you would hurry up and tell us the right question! Or, better yet, skip all the questions and get back to work."

"Oh, but this is my work!" says the Strex agent. "I'm a certified Strexcorp property inspector. And as of the opening of business hours this morning, this building you fine people are renting is Strexcorp property. So the question you should have asked is, what am I doing in our driveway."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

When Carlos's mother invites Cecil to look at photo albums from Carlos's childhood, Cecil gets so excited Carlos is afraid he's going to sprain something.

So Mamá gets out an album full of faded Polaroids, and she and Carlos sit on either side of Cecil while he flips through them, making a whole catalog of delighted noises at each different facet of Carlos's childhood. "I knew it! I just knew he'd be adorable."

Khoshekh is draped over Cecil's shoulder again, and through his eyes they see everything. Infant Carlos in one of Abuelita's hand-knit hats, Isaña a squirrel kit clinging reflexively to his onesie. Baby Carlos and baby Lena in matching rompers, their daemons both ducks like Papi's, tiny matching balls of brown-and-white fluff. Second-grade Carlos building a snowman, while toddler Mikey pats together a lump that's presumably a snowdaemon, although what species it was supposed to be is lost to the mists of time.

There's a whole sequence with little Carlos doing his best Serious Scholar Face at his Fisher-Price toy alethiometer, while Isaña sits on his shoulder as a pine marten. She's a polar bear in the set with fifth-grade Carlos helping tiny Azalea walk (carrying Azalea's own daemon on her back, as an unidentifiable lump of brown fur), and a zebra-tailed lizard with middle-school Carlos showing off a prize-winning theology fair project. And here at last is the family party for Carlos and Lena's settling, with the two of them grinning over a pair of cakes decorated with an armadillo and a fruit bat.

"She settled a week before he did," explains Mamá. "What was it like with you, cielito? Do you have siblings? When did you settle?"

"I'm afraid I was an only child," says Cecil. "As it happens, I settled quite late. Last in my class! But I suppose someone had to be." He turns the page. "Oh, Carlos! Is this your first chapel coat? You look stunning. Even with that tragically short haircut."

"Aha," says Mamá. "I did wonder why you showed up this year with longer hair than either of your sisters."

Carlos blushes, but doesn't deny it.

"And no, Carlos had his first chapel coat when...it must have been third grade, or fourth? The first year he went as an experimental theologian for Halloween." (Cecil actually moans at that little tidbit.) "He always seemed so sure of what he wanted to do. I thought he'd be one of the first in his class to settle...and then his own hermanita beat him to it! Of course it happens for everyone at their own time, but that didn't stop me from worrying."

"Wait, you were...concerned?" asks Carlos. "I didn't even notice."

"Oh, I had concerns about everything," his mother assures him. "It was different when Mikey and Azalea got to that age, but you were the firstborn! I worried when you hadn't settled, I worried when you had...."

Okay, now that's a little upsetting. Isaña, in Carlos's lap, frowns over the photo album at Mamá's daemon, on the far arm of the couch. "What was wrong with how I settled?"

"Nothing was wrong, tesoro mío," soothes the raccoon.

"But...?"

Woman and daemon share a look, then Mamá's daemon says, gently, "You settled as an armadillo, Carlos." He's speaking Spanish, but he doesn't use the Spanish term for Isaña's species; he uses the word the English term came from. Little armored one. "And so we thought, what could our baby have been through, that at fourteen years old his soul is so well-armored?"

"Oh," says Isaña. (Carlos rubs her ears.)

"But of course, it wasn't about how much they'd already been through, was it?" purrs Khoshekh. He and Cecil have been listening with quiet interest; his tail whips against the back of the couch. "It was about how much, even then, they were ready for."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie tries to argue that this inspection should be rescheduled for when someone on the team with authority is back in town. All it gets her is unsubtle threats about locking them out of the building in the meantime, and maybe revoking their lease.

Nirliq says none of that is legal — apparently she's actually read the lease — and calls on the nearby officers of the Sheriff's secret police to back her up. The inspector counters that Strexcorp's highly-qualified legal team has been through all the town bylaws, it most assuredly is legal, and the Sheriff's secret police will abide by that and back down if they know what's good for them.

The police back down.

"I guess we should show the gentleman around," says Sherie at last. "Nirliq, how about if I do that, while you go upstairs and make sure everything is presentable?"

She cleaned up the main room downstairs herself the other day, so she knows all their most secret projects are safely packed up in boxes and drawers. Upstairs, with the ordinaters and all the biological material, she's less sure about.

"Good thinking. I'll do that." Nirliq flashes her shaky fake smile at the Strex agent once more. "The Li Huas always leave such messes after they've dissected things."

(Not true. Just because the Li Huas enjoy the sight of blood doesn't mean they would tolerate a non-sterile workspace, or risk the possibility of sample contamination. But this guy doesn't need to know that.)

So Nirliq disappears up the stairs, Sherie shows the inspector inside, and hopefully the invisible Agent L stays on her tail.

The man hums and nods all through the main room at the undamaged walls, the unbroken windows, the furniture in its original scuffed but serviceable condition. Sherie manages to keep him from going farther than the door of the laser room. After all, the humming anbaric equipment in there is the team's property, and its sensitivity is nearly as high as its cost. He wouldn't want to be liable for any damage to something that expensive, would he?

They move on through the rest of the first floor. A supply closet. The bloodstone circle room. The bathrooms, both with marks still on the doors from when a past team member pulled down the gender signs. (Sherie is briefly afraid the agent is going to mark them down for the damage. Instead, he praises the value of not segregating resources in an arbitrary way that might cause an easily-avoidable bottleneck.)

And then there's Carlos's office.

"That door has its own lock. And, I'm sorry, I don't have a key," says Sherie, trying to sound regretful about it. "You'll have to make another visit to look in there. After he comes back to town."

"Not a problem!" says the Strex agent, pulling a keyring out of his pocket. "As your new landlord, I have keys to all your locks."

The first one he tests doesn't fit the door. Neither do the next two. Sherie holds her breath. She has some idea of the projects and notes cluttering Carlos's office, and no clue how much of it is sitting out in plain sight.

The fourth key...clicks.

Grinning his too-wide grin, the inspector opens the door and takes a step across the threshold.

In the next second, something huge and blurred and weighty drops down from the ceiling and lands on top of him.

Sherie throws herself back against the far wall with a little scream.

The Strexcorp inspector doesn't cry out, but does a lot of thrashing, under the slurping bulk of — she can't even make out a shape, it's just a big grey lump, like a pile of mud —

And the golden mongoose daemon, which didn't get landed on, skitters backwards and takes off down the hall.

With a fwip a teenage boy appears at Sherie's side, both hands clutching a gun aimed at the ferocious mass of not-mud. "Ma'am! Should I fire?"

On instinct, Sherie points not at the mystery creature, but at the mongoose. "That! Shoot that!"

Agent L whips around and fires. His second shot goes straight through it, smashing it against the wall.

It doesn't disappear.

It's some kind of fake — it's giving off sparks, for goodness sake — and Sherie can't even go look closer right now, because the hungry blob in Carlos's office has just finished gulping. There's nothing left of the Strex inspector to be seen. Unless...unless those teeth sticking out of the side of its gelatinous grey flesh are his teeth.

The creature lumps forward like a giant slug, halfway into the hall. It gurgles like a clogged drain. It ripples —

— and spits out several microchips. They ping against the tiled floor like cherry pits.

"Agent! We heard gunfire. Status!" yells a young female voice from around the corner.

"One hostile, disabled!" calls Agent L. "One — uh — thing, I guess. Not sure about it!"

The muddy grey thing is gurgling again, its back humping up like a cat about to hack up a hairball. Sure enough, a second later it burps out a sodden mass of...fine copper wire?

"Nirliq!" calls Sherie, still plastered against the wall, her own real daemon a startled puff of fur. "Can you hear me?"

"Did the kid say no hostiles?" comes Nirliq's muffled voice.

"Something like that!" stammers Sherie. "Can you get us a spyglass down here?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

On the drive to the bowling alley, Carlos gets a text from Sherie. It's "not an emergency, and if it turns back into one we'll tell you, but check in soon anyway, okay?"

He will. Thanks to the bloodstone circle, he can even do it securely. But later. Right now the kids have been summoned together for an evening of Quality Grandparent Time, freeing up his generation — that's him and Cecil, Lena and Wes, and Azalea — to have corresponding Quality Adult Time.

Bowling was obviously Cecil's idea. The woman behind the snack counter raises her eyebrows at his enthusiasm, given that he's wearing his dark glasses again — and the protective insect-daemon casing hanging around his neck is opaque. Cecil just smiles past her skepticism and asks if she can recommend a menu item with lots and lots of flour.

"You know, I've had a great time with the kids, but I feel like I still don't know anything about the rest of you," he says, as they carry a mountain of soft pretzels (for Cecil) and a bowl of nachos (for everyone else) to Lane 3. "Tell me some things! For instance — Lena and Wes, how did you meet?"

Lena tells the story as they take turns rolling balls down the aisle. Cecil is an excellent interviewer; he asks meaningful follow-up questions, is fascinated with the answers, and takes care to phrase things in a nice generic way that makes it hard for too much weirdness to creep through. He keeps it up with Azalea, curious to know more about her life in New Amsterdam — although she starts giving answers like "no, people don't really burst into song in Central Park all the time, it's only once every couple of weeks." Cecil believes that one for a whole frame, until someone takes pity on him and sets him straight.

(All this — plus a round of reasonably-priced beers — and he's still bowled nothing but strikes and spares by the eighth frame. Carlos is glad they're not trying to seriously convince anyone he's legally blind. Even the secret police wouldn't pretend to believe a ruse this sloppy.)

"Of course, it doesn't matter how long I've been making it on my own," sighs Azalea, lining up her own ball and sending it down the polished boards. "I come back home, and right away I'm the baby again."

"Hey now," says Carlos. "We invited you to Quality Adult Time here and everything."

"But you didn't even look my way when you were discussing who was going to be the designated driver," points out Azalea. "Seriously, I'm almost thirty and you guys still don't really believe I'm old enough to have my license."

Carlos stammers, trying to remember if he really did that...while Cecil chuckles and says, "I know that feeling! When I got my learner's permit, my — um."

He stops. So does the conversation. Pins clatter in the distance.

"For some reason I thought you were an oldest child," remarks Lena, lifting her own bowling ball from the machine and balancing the weight in her hands.

"I...am. Strictly speaking," says Cecil. "At one time I had an older brother. And now I do not." As the rest of the group processes this, he adds, "Sorry! I've made this awkward now. I didn't mean to bring it up."

Lena recovers first. "Don't worry about it. And we're very sorry for your loss."

"Hey, you two haven't told us how you guys met yet," adds Wes. "How about it?"

"It's not very exciting," says Carlos. "My team got called to do a press conference to talk to the town about our research, and afterward Cecil came up and introduced himself, and said to call the station if we ever had news."

(Their next couple of meetings were a lot more interesting, but of course Carlos can't talk about the alethiometer here, and it's either that or start a story with "When one of my team members was kidnapped by the Sheriff's secret police....")

"Of course it's not exciting when you tell it like that," says Cecil, swatting him on the arm. "Allow me."

His version is a lot more absorbing. Certainly more dramatic. He includes the angels by Josie's side, and the agents from a vague yet menacing branch of the Magisterium lurking in back, and the suspense permeating the audience before Carlos even reached the stage. By the time he gets to "...and I fell in love instantly" (which makes Carlos blush just as hard in English as it does in Spanish), it's been five solid minutes since any of them looked at the pins.

 

-{,(((,">

 

When most of the family has retreated to their beds or to the Internet, Cecil sneaks his whittling knives and an extra block of wood out of his suitcase. Carlos finds an old tablecloth to catch the shavings, and the two of them set up a makeshift workshop on a desk in the currently-empty ordinater room.

It still isn't clear what (if anything) Cecil will be carving for Carlos's unsettled nephews, but obviously Rosa is getting a sculpture of one of her virtual pets. "We're not going to see my niece's daemon start trying out...Xaphara form any time soon, are we?" jokes Carlos, leaning on one elbow and watching Cecil score loose outlines on the faces of the wood.

"Zafara. With a Z and an F," corrects Cecil. "And of course he won't."

They haven't put the lights on; the only illumination is from the desktop ordinater, with a series of reference pictures open on the screen. Khoshekh's eyes are fixed on those, from his position curled around Isaña. Carlos would need to switch on a lamp if he was going to do some work of his own, or he'd give himself a headache from the eyestrain, but for this he doesn't mind the darkness.

"Neopets are sapient animals. Like the panserbjørne," continues Cecil. "Now, a Petpet, that's a different story. Some of them appear to be mechanical, and at least one is just a tiny snowman, so I'm not sure those would count...but I can't think of any reason why the rest wouldn't be fair game."

Carlos sighs. Of course he can't.

"Your family's nice," adds Cecil, keeping his tone carefully light.

"Yeah?" says Carlos. "You like them? I was hoping you'd like them."

"Your sister makes some of the exact same faces you do." Cecil begins paring off one of the corners of the wood. "Lena, I mean."

"You think so?" People say Carlos looks like his mother, and occasionally like Azalea, but he and Lena have different enough features that strangers have occasionally called them a "cute couple."

"It's the movement," explains Cecil. "Once you start talking, it's like the muscles underneath are set up the same way. And Azalea lights up just like you do when she's interested in something. Your dad...he hasn't said much, but his daemon looks around every once in a while to make sure everything's okay, like Isaña does when you don't want it to be obvious that you're casing the place. I know where you get that from now. I know where you got that cute laugh, too."

His mouth twists into a wry smile.

"I know why you have such a hard time noticing when you're chewing more loudly than necessary. Half your family does it."

Isaña rolls halfway up, ducking her head into the protection of her shell. Wrapped around her, Khoshekh purrs.

"I don't remember anything my brother said or did when I got my learner's permit." Cecil's hands are steady on the blade. His voice, not so much. "Your sister was talking, and all of a sudden I recognized the feeling, but it isn't — attached to anything. How is that possible, Carlos? If I can remember the feelings, shouldn't there be something there?"

"I'm not that kind of theologian either," says Carlos softly. "I'm sorry, Cecil. I don't know."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie sends up a quick prayer to any sympathetic listener — the Hebrew God may not exist, but the angels have never ruled out the witches' deity Yambe-Akka, or that Unsmiling God who gets the occasional name-check from Tamika — that this works all right.

At few minutes later, she's relaxed, as "in the zone" as she's ever gotten...and there's a familiar mind poking at hers.

When invited, a translucent Carlos pops into existence in front of her, wearing a striped sweater, heavy corduroy pants, and thick socks with snowflakes on them. There's no armadillo daemon to be seen, but instead of being hard to read, his emotions are crystal clear: he's radiating warmth, comfort, and anticipatory excitement even under his...anxiety? No, concern. A lot of concern.

"It worked?" he exclaims. "It worked!"

Sure did, thinks Sherie happily. As long as we're connected, can you manage telepathy too?

Let's test it. Can you hear this?

Loud and clear. With two straight successes under her belt, Sherie stands up...right out of her own body. Let's walk and talk.

Whoa. Carlos follows her through the wall. When did you learn to do that?

Last week, maybe? But let me give you the bad news first, get it out of the way. Our lovely rented building here is under new management.

Carlos's face falls. No. Is that why we're not speaking out loud?

Yes, but only so the usual observers from the Sheriff's secret police can't pass anything on. We aren't bugged, at least not yet. A couple of bright young children with scrying powers swept the building, and there's a rotating team of them keeping watch over the place.

When all this is over, I am taking every single one of those kids on an all-expenses-paid trip to Six Flags Desert Springs, resolves Carlos as they head up the stairs. "Bad news first" implies you also have good news, right?

Right you are! Strexcorp has the right to send inspectors to make sure we're not destroying the building, but — and I did not know this — if you happen to have a pet, and the pet happens to devour someone on your property, then by Night Vale law nobody is liable. And if it's a workplace pet, then rented property in a business-zoned district is included.

Carlos frowns. Are you telling me we have a pet?

They walk through the (closed) door of the bio room. "He made it!" reports Sherie.

One of the Li Huas stays focused on her microscope, while the other looks up. Each has a wren daemon perched on her shoulder. "Hey, boss! You'll never guess whose DNA we're sequencing today."

And the blob squelches out from under the table, spots Carlos, and comes lumping excitedly over.

Comparing it to a slug really wasn't fair, Sherie reflects. Dust and dirt get lifted off of surfaces and stick to it as it goes by; it's more like a mass of living Play-Doh. And it can be more than just a formless blob. Right now it goes straight through a startled Carlos, backs up, and does a kind of confused spiral around him.

"Whoa!" Instinct makes Carlos stumble backward, though he steadies himself once he realizes he's standing in the blob, and peers down for a closer look. "What is — where did you —"

"You left your little sludge monsters untended for a week," the standing Li Hua informs him. "Looks like they got lonely, ate through your jars, and combined into a single large sludge monster with a slightly more sophisticated consciousness. That sludge monster expanded itself further by eating most of your desk — you need a new desk, by the way, and I sure hope you have backup copies of any paperwork you kept in it — and, just yesterday, added 'Strex-brand mechanical person' to the list of things it can demonstrably ingest."

The sludge monster in question is currently extending part of itself up toward Carlos to do some closer inspection of its own. At the end of the extension is a row of flat teeth sticking out of the bottom, and several tufts of hair sprouting from the top, making the whole thing look like a snake-long neck with a slightly doofy face at the end.

"This came out of my clocks?" says Carlos in wonder.

"That's what we just said," complains the Li Hua at the microscope. "Stop hitting the eggnog this early, Carlos, it's slowing you down."

Sherie clears her throat.

"We wouldn't say that if she was here," says the standing Li Hua. "But she's not even in the country right now, come on."

"Electrum-spyglass viewing confirms that it recognizes us, and likes us," adds Nirliq, as she and her daemon enter the room by the more conventional way. "And has about the same level of conscious thought as a dog."

"Oh, by the way, we should start calling the more-advanced electrum lenses Atal lenses," says Carlos. He's making a head-petting motion at the sludge monster, and it responds by bopping its "head" in excitement. "How about this creature? What are we calling it?"

"We couldn't decide," admits Sherie. "I wanted to call it Tock. Because it came out of the clocks. That's cute, right? And Nirliq liked the sound of Chip."

"Uh-huh? Why Chip?"

"Because it couldn't ingest every part of our Strex-sent inspector," explains Nirliq. "And one of the things it spat out was a series of microchips."

Feeling a flash of theological concern from Carlos, Sherie thinks at him, We have those in a sealed and well-spelled sample jar. We'll get them to someone who can make use of them as soon as we figure out a safe way to do the transportation.

Carlos doesn't even consolidate his approval into words, just tosses the raw feeling in her direction. Followed by, Can you keep everything secure for now? If you see a simple way to move our work to a non-compromised location, go for it, but if not, we can figure out detailed plans next week once we have all hands on deck.

Out loud, while pseudo-petting Tock-or-possibly-Chip, he says, "Maybe we should take a vote when everyone gets back. I can't stay much longer." Sorry, but Cecil thinks I'm going to hurt myself if I keep this up, he adds mind-to-mind. "Any other messages before I go?"

"It was good to see you," offers Sherie. I'll pass on the word about the security. "Enjoy the rest of your vacation."

Nirliq is a little more practical. "You said the lenses are Atal lenses now? Why?"

Carlos flickers — then vanishes — but not before sending one more flash of emotion at Sherie, including enough excitement and yearning to make her head spin. "I'll be up in a moment," she tells the others —

— and drops back into her body with a gasp.

Her mongoose daemon pops up in her lap. "Our boss spent the last week in Will Parry's world?"

"That sure is what it felt like," says Sherie dizzily. "But maybe we better not say that part out loud. At least, not until he can come around and handle all the disbelief in person."

Notes:

New illustrations: Susannah astral-projecting via Carlos; daemon portraits with Steve, Delphine, and Janice.

Some people get a new puppy for Christmas. Others get a sludge monster.

(Readers, do you have a preference for the name? Vote now!)

Chapter 21: Kindling

Summary:

It's been much too long since we checked in with Dana in the otherworld desert. Let's check in with Dana. Also, when was the last time anybody threatened Carlos's life? Let's get on that. Just because he's outside Night Vale and vacationing with family is no excuse to slack off on the mortal peril.

A chapter with fighting, blood, and character death. Specific, spoilery warnings in the endnotes.

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

The vast, flat expanse is so much more vast than Dana had anticipated.

A future Carlos told her that she would go, alone, to the base of the Clouded Mountain, so they have been approaching it ever since. She and her daemon take turns carrying each other. For a while Eustathias will ride on Dana's backpack in the form of some creature no larger than Dana's thumbnail, then she will switch into a sturdy pack animal and bear Dana onward.

(Every shape Eustathias tries is different, as they flex the limits of her current abilities. Currently she is a great plodding reptilian beast, blue and scaly, with Dana sitting in the midst of a thicket of ferns that are growing out of her spine.)

The ancient battlefield with the wrecks of strange war machines is far off to her left. The riverbed she once followed to an old oak door is long gone. The straightest line to their destination is through empty desert.

With no life, no landmarks, and the Mountain before them looking no larger, it feels as if Dana and Eustathias have always been walking.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

With the rush to flee Night Vale catching them by surprise, Cecil never had time to wrap any of his carvings. Carlos offers to help, which gives him an excuse to stay in the basement with Cecil and explain the new developments from Strex. Also, the fact that the team has a new pet omnivorous clock-sludge monster.

When he describes the discovery of a mechanical person accompanied by a mechanical pseudo-daemon, it piques Cecil's interest. "Oh, hey, that explains Daniel!"

"Daniel...your producer?" guesses Carlos. Cecil has mentioned the name a couple of times on-air.

"The same. He rattles and gives off sparks when he's mad, you know. During my last broadcast, he even started leaking this thick viscous...something. Didn't flow the right way to be blood. I couldn't see the color, but I thought maybe it was motor oil."

Carlos frowns. "To your vision, is he still as bright as an average human adult?"

"No. But a lot of the Strex imports to our little town are...dull. The Shawns, for instance — I mean NVCR's current sales team — who are all named Shawn — they don't seem to have much will of their own either, and I've never seen any of them giving off smoke when overloaded." Cecil pauses. "Also, Daniel's daemon is the only one with a little key in its back that you have to turn to make it go."

"Your producer's daemon has to be wound up, and it's only now that you think he might be some kind of robot?"

"Yes? My first guess was that he came from a world where they have internal daemons, and that someone had built him a really awkward fake to help him fit in."

"...Okay, now that you've said that, it's a perfectly reasonable guess."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

And then, all at once, they are here.

Much as Dana has tried not to believe in it, the edge of the mountain is right above her. Its base sits high enough in the air that the whole radio station could probably fit underneath it without even breaking the tower. Its peak...she can't even see it through the clouds, though she can just make out the regular blinking of its red light.

Eustathias, on her shoulder as a button-sized crab, says, "Tell me if this form works."

She leaps into the air as a bumblebee, buzzes a short distance away to give herself space, then turns into a black-and-brown bird the size of a couch. With these powerful wings, the muscles rippling underneath, it looks like they could fly forever. Dana smiles. "Yes, that will do."

Eustathias bows her head, and Dana climbs onto her broad back.

"One moment," warns Dana before her daemon can take off, and looks around the desert.

She sees nothing and no one. But of course, that's just what she was told to expect.

"Carlos? I do not know if you can hear me. I do not know if you can see me. I do not know if the information I was given about our time and place nearly matching up was correct. But I hope that it is. And because of this hope, I will pass on the message I was given: Use all the bloodstones."

There. That's done. She hugs Eustathias's neck and shoulders, and Eustathias spreads her beautiful wings.

The mountain, perhaps aware of its dubious right to existence, doesn't sit quite right in three-dimensional space. Any one section of it — the vaults and crags of the folded rock, the whorls and columns of cloud — connects to the next in geometrically impossible ways. Dana and her daemon soar at what they can only hope is a safe distance.

As they go higher, the clouds become more than simply cloud.

The vapor is folded into structures, almost like architecture. "Terraces and columns," murmurs Dana. "Stairways and towers."

"These are beginning to look solid," adds Eustathias. "Even if they would not hold one of us, perhaps they would hold someone whose substance is less dense."

"The photogram I saw in the old house," realizes Dana. "I thought it was the front of a building. A close-up, not showing the corners or the scenery around it. But no, it must have been a section of —"

She screams.

Without warning they have plunged into a completely different sort of air — searing hot, sizzling with anbaric currents — the change, like diving through the surface of a pool, instant and submersive and unforgiving —

Both Dana and her daemon flail in pain and shock, all control lost. Dana topples from Eustathias's back, and they fall.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

It was probably too much to hope for that Carlos would get through the whole vacation without any trauma at all.

It starts on Monday evening, when the whole family has dinner plans at a restaurant nice enough to require dressing-up. For Cecil, that means a neutral-toned argyle sweater, a button-down whose pointy collar is only moderately ridiculous, a cravat, and his most normal pants. Dawn has put on a sheath dress that matches her jeweled lizard daemon. Mamá is wearing her good pearls.

Papi, Wes, and Carlos all get ties. And Carlos's tie is too damn tight.

He spends the whole drive fiddling with it, so much that he misses two of the things he had meant to point out to Cecil as they passed by. (His middle school, and the local non-fatal library.) When they're finally being escorted to their table, his mother notices by the light of the chandeliers and the soft lanterns how disheveled he's gotten. "Oh, tesoro, let me fix that for you."

"Mamá, don't," says Carlos, flinching away as her hands go to his neck.

She ignores his attempts to brush her off. "It'll only take a moment."

"It's fine, don't, stop fussing —"

She doesn't stop, and now it's really too tight, it's going to strangle him at this rate —

"I said, stop!" snaps Carlos, smacking her away.

It earns him a stricken look from Mamá, furtive glances from the rest of the family (half seated, half not), and a frown from Papi's shelduck daemon (not literally, since she has a beak, but when you grow up around a bird daemon you learn to recognize a frown when you see it). Papi himself waits until their server has shimmered off to get their water, then breaks his habitual silence to say, "Let your mamá fix your tie, son."

Carlos would love to! Trouble is, he's too caught up in re-loosening the thing, then in yanking it clean off, to deal with anything else right now.

"I think maybe Carlos isn't a tie person these days," says Lena gently as she settles into her chair. She's the psychiatrist; she has enough experience to know traumatic overload when she sees it.

"Ties are a symbol of the cisheteronormative power structure anyway," puts in Dawn, who Carlos dearly hopes has no experience with this kind of thing at all, and no clue what she's seeing. "If you make Uncle Carlos wear one when he doesn't want to, you're oppressing him by erasing his fashion sense."

Cecil cocks his head. "Carlos has a fashion sense? This is news to me."

It gets a few nervous giggles; the tension eases. Azalea comments that the no-tie look is all the rage in New Amsterdam these days, so if anything, Carlos is a trendsetter. Which leads her into a debate with Dawn about the fashion industry, and breaks the ice enough for other conversations around the table to move forward, while Cecil palms the crumpled tie out of Carlos's hand and makes it disappear.

Panic attack averted. Painful conversation dodged. So far, so good. But Carlos dearly wishes they had brought Khoshekh, because a little discreet cuddling under the table would go a long way for him right now.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

It is dark when Dana wakes up; she is still in pain; and she cannot tell right away where her daemon is.

She is lying on a rough floor in a space of unknowable size. Every inch of her exposed skin still aches and stings, the way she's always imagined a sunburn must feel. At least she is not restrained. That's something, right?

"Dana?" whispers Eustathias. That's something else. Eustathias is with her. "Your pack is on your left, a few feet away. I believe everything is still inside."

Better and better. It sounds like they almost certainly have not been taken prisoner. "The first aid kit?" asks Dana, voice rasping.

"As likely to be safe as anything else. You'll have to check on your own, though. I'm sorry. I know it hurts to move, but you must."

Dana sits up, even that simple motion straining her abilities, and starts to feel around. There's a...no, that's a wall. Ah, there is her pack. "Can you be bioluminescent, at least? This will be easier if I have some light."

"I don't know, and I don't want to risk it. The transformation, I mean, not the light. Your phone in flashlight mode would be safe. You'd better find it."

"What are you right now?" asks Dana, baffled. Have they settled? Shouldn't she feel different, somehow, if that had happened? She does not feel any different. Not on the inside, anyway. "And where are you? And how did we come to be here?"

"When we hit that strange field, it was painful, and it felt like fire," begins Eustathias. "Once I had fallen out of it enough to recover my senses, I guessed that it might help to become a creature that had an affinity for fire. So I did. I became a phoenix, I think. Right away I was no longer suffering from injuries or pain, because I was a species that burns, not a species that is burned."

She's doing that long-winded narration again: recapping things Dana already knows, then including all kinds of irrelevant details before making it to the point. Since Dana is in a fair amount of pain, and has very few options for distraction, she lets her daemon ramble.

"Once I was healed, I became another large flying creature, a reptile this time, and swooped down as quickly as I could to catch you. It was a close call indeed! But you had been thrown backward far enough not to hit the base of the mountain, which of course floats high in the air, and past that I was able to catch you before you hit the ground itself, so you landed softly and did not break any bones."

Dana finds the first aid kit before the phone, pulling it out and setting it on the dark ground (rock? dirt?) beside her. Ah, and here's her phone. She switches to its brightest mode (her battery is still at 97%, no risk there), lighting up the long and narrow tunnel around her, and looks for topical burn creams. Here's a tube...here's another...wow, this kit certainly has a lot of them. Emmanuel must have had a hand in the packing.

"I thought we might have been detected by the mountain's defenses, so I cycled through several different forms with different kinds of vision. In one of these forms, I could see clearly where the air changed, growing hotter and — to my eyes — brighter. In another, I could see that there are very few Rusakov particles in the area. That was when I knew that we were not spotted by something sentient. The mountain's defenses were entirely automatic."

Everything else will be easier once her hands aren't sore, so Dana begins with her hands.

"Still, there was no guarantee that we had not triggered some kind of alert, which a sentient creature might choose to come out and investigate. We needed a place to hide. And since there is no cover anywhere for miles around, I realized our only option was to go underground."

"So we are underground now," says Dana, soothing the rough burns on her legs from the tops of her hiking boots to the hems of her khaki shorts. Her clothes all seem undamaged, which makes sense. Fabric doesn't sunburn. "In a tunnel that you...burrowed?"

"That is exactly where we are! Still directly below the Clouded Mountain, but so far undetected. And I have an excellent sense of direction in the burrowing form I am still holding. I believe I could navigate all the way back to the basalt fortress without ever looking at the surface."

"In any other world, I would not doubt it. But with the geographical loop around the Mountain, I don't think we should take the risk." Dana works the topical cream onto her eyelids, up to her hairline (some of her hair falls out to the touch), around the back of her neck. "And, again...where are you?"

"Right beside you," says Eustathias. "A moment ago, you touched me."

Ah.

The "wall" Dana touched is rough, stony, mottled grey-brown in color, dusty to the touch...but now that she looks closer, it has a strange regularity: a ridge every ten feet. That's no rock formation, or even the result of a burrowing creature with an instinct for precision. Rather, it's like the shell of Carlos Perfecto's daemon, on an impossibly grand scale: the armored hide of something built for desert.

Eustathias doesn't dare change form right now because the space she is occupying, many stories tall and thousands of feet long, would cave in on top of them.

"I don't seem to have eyes right now," adds Eustathias apologetically. "I do have a surfeit of teeth, though! If you think of any way to use that, let me know."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

The server who takes their drinks order, a young woman with a squirrel daemon, does a brief double-take when she hears from Carlos. She finishes writing everything down, then turns back to him and says, "Sir, if you are who I think you are...."

"Are any of us who we think we are?" puts in Cecil, half to himself. "How can we be sure?"

Carlos braces himself for the night to be ruined after all. For them to be hit with some variation on this is a God-fearing establishment, and we don't serve your kind here. Heavy Magisterium lobbying means it's still legal in the US to pull that kind of thing.

"...then I'd like to offer you the drink of your choice. On the house."

"I'm afraid I don't — what?" stammers Carlos. "Really? Because that's a remarkably generous offer. Almost...too good to be true."

He touches Cecil's arm under the table, and doesn't even have to finish tapping help me out before Cecil jumps in. "Don't be so modest, Carlos — she's a fan! And a well-deserved one, I'm sure. Are you an experimental theologian yourself, madam, or just an interested layperson?"

Turns out the server is a theologian-in-training: doing this job to put herself through evening classes to get her M.T., although it's in tropical meteorology, nothing to do with Rusakov physics. She's professional enough to say all this quickly before returning to the question of what free drink he wants, but excited enough to do a little skip as she wends her way back to the kitchen.

Carlos has spent the past year avoiding news about himself like the plague. He likes being able to get out of bed in the morning, and that's a lot easier when he hasn't been reading thousand-word screeds on how he's a liar and a hack who's obviously sold his soul to Satan. So this is the first he's heard of anyone going just as enthusiastically in the opposite direction.

He has fans.

(Hopefully not the kind of stupidly over-the-top fans who might, say, burst into tears on realizing they're looking at a statue of him. Because that would just get embarrassing.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

When the fan-turned-server comes to collect their mostly-empty plates, she offers them dessert. "Just the check, dear," says Mamá, in her accented English, and waves off Carlos's and Lena's attempts to pitch in.

"Are you sure?" asks the server. "We have an amazing new raspberry cheesecake. And several specials that are only available for the holiday season! The chocolate peppermint torte is a hit with everyone on the staff. You'll love it."

"Maybe some other time," says Lena's husband.

"I am so full," groans young Rosa.

"Of course you're full. Generous entrées we serve here. But if nobody's hungry enough to eat a whole dessert, you can split them," says the server hopefully. She's talking too fast. Not to mention, her squirrel daemon is alert and staring at the front door. "We'll bring out plates with two forks. Or three. Or four! However many you need!"

Azalea raises her eyebrows. "Carlos can probably sign something for you, if it'll make you feel better about us leaving."

"Actually," says Carlos, "let me take a look at that menu."

"Excellent!" says the server, with a slightly manic grin. She scurries around the table and offers him a laminated sheet with lots of glossy photograms of pies.

Carlos takes it, taps a photo, and nods for her to lean closer, like he wants advice. Under his breath, he says, "You're trying to keep us here. What's going on?"

The woman catches her breath. "Please don't be mad! It wasn't my fault — okay, maybe it sort of was, indirectly — I'm really sorry!"

"I'm not angry," says Carlos. He's on edge, especially from earlier, but he's not mad. Not yet, anyway. "Back up and give me some facts, okay? Is anybody here in danger? I mean of physical harm."

"No! Nothing like that."

"Are we being watched?"

"N-not in here."

"But outside...?"

"People with cameras. News people," stammers the server, wringing her hands. "Someone in the kitchen must have called them, or tweeted — I was just so excited you were here, I told everyone, I didn't think —"

"Is there any chance they'll start coming in?"

"One of them tried. The person at the desk didn't let them in. They don't even have reservations! I guess someone could try to run past us — it's not like we have bouncers — I'm so sorry, we don't get a lot of celebrity guests. But if you stay in here long enough, I'm sure they'll get bored and leave!"

"That's one plan," says Carlos. "Here's another. This place has a back entrance, right? For service, or shipping, something like that?"

"Yes! Yes, a couple of them."

"Great." Carlos hands her back the menu. "Bring us the check, and, while you're at it, take a look through the service doors and tell us whether anybody's thought to stake them out."

He turns to the family, feeling downright energized. He's got a goal now. A plan. A concrete threat, which he can channel all his nervous energy into dealing with. "All right! Who's ready to plan an escape?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

In the dark, under the ground, Dana curls up against her daemon's expansive side and thinks. She has composed a short text to Cecil summarizing her findings, but was forced to save it rather than sending. At this depth, her phone, for the first time of any time she's looked at it, is getting no reception.

She could try to project herself back home, to deliver the message in person. Or....

"I could project myself above the ground," says Dana out loud. "Without the help of that bloodstone circle, I'll be invisible, insubstantial. I can get the lay of the land, see if anyone has come looking for us...oh! Perhaps I could go into the Mountain that way! At least it will allow me to get past the physical defenses."

"They might have wards," says Eustathias. "Or other ways to block that kind of spying. I did not think to check for those."

Dana shakes her head. "I think...that is, it seems likely...that whatever form of astral projection I am doing here, it cannot be blocked. I was able to appear in the radio station, at a time before I became an intern and would have had permission. I was able to appear in Cecil's house before I was even born! And I have stepped unseen into Strexcorp facilities, when surely they have the resources to invest in the best defenses."

"All that sounds logical," admits her daemon. "I would say that it can't hurt to try...but we probably shouldn't tempt fate."

If projection involved both of them, Dana isn't sure she would risk it. But only her ghost would be leaving their little hideout, so the only harm Eustathias might face would be indirect. And they're going to be stuck down here for a while anyway, since Dana isn't up to walking yet.

Besides, even if she were in perfect health, she wouldn't want to retreat. They've come all this way. There must be something else to be done while they're here.

"It can, indeed, hurt to try," sighs Dana. "But try we must."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

It's snowing again: big fluttery Christmas-card flakes, leaving a dusting of white on the roads and the trees. Lena and her husband go get the cars while the rest of the family waits just inside the entrance to the loading dock. So far, so good.

Cecil is in long-distance four-eye, murmuring things under his breath in a language Carlos thinks might be Hebrew. He's still doing it when Wes comes back with the van, the one with the special adaptations to fit Lucas's oversize addax daemon. The children leave foot- and hoofprints in the powder as they head down the ramp, along with Azalea: "not because you're an honorary child, parajita," Mamá assures her, "but because your brother needs the rest of us right now."

As the van pulls away, Carlos sighs. "It's just reporters, Mamá. I'm glad you're here — I am! — but you don't need to...."

"I don't need to fuss," fills in his mother, standing defensively close to Papi's side. "I know! You were very clear. Just let me watch over you, and I will stay out of your way."

Carlos swallows. "I was going to say, you don't —"

"It is not just reporters," says Cecil darkly.

He's using the deep, somber tone of a radio pronouncement. All attention snaps to him: Carlos's, his parents', and the server's, from her post hovering anxiously a few feet down the corridor.

"One moment," Cecil tells the Ramirezes, and sweeps over to the young woman. "Thank you so much, again, for all your help," he says, clasping her hand and smiling first at her, then at her squirrel daemon. "We would all appreciate if you don't blog about this until January, when Carlos will be out of the country and none of these people can camp outside the place where he's staying. And please don't make any mention of the dashing but mysterious family friend! I am not a US national, and I understand that can make your government paranoid sometimes. Got all that? Wonderful. Go ahead and clear our table. Thank you!"

He shooes her away (Carlos is glad all over again that they left her an incredible tip), and pulls his gloves out of his pockets as he returns, the smile fading.

"Just to be clear: it is definitely not normal in the US for armed individuals to be secretly tailing you, right?"

Carlos jumps. "No. Who —"

"And there are no secret police hidden anywhere around here? Not even a couple blocks down...?"

"None. Although we can always call the non-secret police."

"Who have no authority to re-educate those reporters out front," Cecil reminds him. "So whatever happens, it will become news."

"...right."

"What is going on?" bursts out Mamá, before Cecil can open his mouth again. If Khoshekh were here, her raccoon daemon would be pouncing on him right now. "Who is following Carlos? How do you know about this?"

"I have...a certain level of foresight," says Cecil, with pitch-perfect reluctance. If Carlos hadn't known about the alethiometer, he would have completely believed his boyfriend was admitting an uncomfortable truth, instead of lying to cover a dangerous one. "But it's going to be okay, Señora. It will all be taken care of. Because they have made a dire mistake."

"What's that?"

"They have challenged a witch's son...when it is snowing."

He shoves his way out the into the swirling flurries. Carlos picks up Isaña and beckons for his parents to follow. They're too blindsided right now to fully trust Cecil, but they still trust him.

The door thumps shut behind them. No going back now. At least Lena has the other car waiting, and Cecil is brimming with confidence even as he hugs his coat tightly around himself. "Tell Lena to go three buildings that way," he says, gesturing down the road, "and find a place to park. We'll take the safe way around, and rendezvous with you there in a few minutes."

Mamá looks from him to Carlos. "Tesoro, are you sure...?"

Carlos shrugs Isaña under one arm and pulls his mother into a fervent hug with the other. "I'll be fine. I will."

"I would like this better," says Papi, "if some of your ángeles were here."

"Los ángeles are off fighting an important war for good," says Carlos solemnly. "Cecil is very talented at the thing he's planning. Without him, it might be dangerous...but I am not without him. So I will meet up with you very soon."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Clouded Mountain (???).

Dana knows at once that she's inside the Mountain. The architecture has the same confused geometry, overlapping and infolded, defying the eye's attempt to wrench it into any normal perspective.

In part, it has the same aesthetic, too: all columns and arches, sturdy pillars and elegant carved swirls. But the material can't possibly be cloud, no matter how solid. Its glossy white surface shimmers with understated hues, as if the entire structure is carved from solid pearl. And as Dana watches, it glows...then fades...and glows again, not with the sharp precision of the blinking light on the peak, but soft and radiant, like breath.

The pearly construction, though, doesn't stand alone. It shows the clear signs of renovations. Walls that have been knocked down, new scaffolds put in place, doors boarded up and hallways redirected, all with sleek metal and sturdy brown stone. Anbaric equipment has been installed, perhaps a power supply or a new communications system.

Dana would not call the effect unpleasant, she thinks, as she walks down a hall of offices (each giving off muted conversation, or sounds that might be typing). The newer materials, though less ethereal, fit smoothly and easily alongside the old ones. And they come with their own variety of wrong-dimensional effect: where the pearl terraces are infolding, the brown stone walls are spiraling. As far as Dana can tell, the combined impossibilities are still structurally sound. Maybe even more so than before, given the way the two sets of material interlock and support each other.

If it weren't for the plethora of Strexcorp logos, orange triangles which give off a soft light of their own and make Dana's eyes hurt to look at them, she might even call it beautiful.

She walks through the walls of one of the offices...and is vividly reminded of the time she appeared in Cecil's booth and existence went weird, enough that she was able to speak into the microphone. There's a shockingly normal business setup here — a desk, file cabinets, a motivational poster of a sunrise with a caption in a script Dana can't read — but it's all only half-present. Sitting at the desk is a man in a dark suit, with jet-black eyes and an orange triangle pin on his lapel. He is silent and translucent. All of it is.

The rooms are packed closely together; a few short steps bring her to the next one over, and the next, and the next. Ordinary humans and not-so-ordinary ones, familiar daemons alternating with bizarre or missing daemons, Starbucks cups and staplers interspersed with items whose purpose Dana can't even guess. And every setup straddles that line between "here" and "not-here."

She drops to the next floor below, and finds more of the same. This whole complex must be riddled with not-quite-portals, connected to branch offices in countless other worlds. Can she find the one attached to Night Vale?

Should she find the one attached to Night Vale? Even if she can sabotage it somehow, surely it will barely be a blip on the radar in terms of their overall plans.

Dana sinks downward another level —

— and finds herself in a room with white-painted cinderblock walls and lots of bright fluorescent lights, daemonless black-eyed theologians in long white coats standing around various sets of humming anbaric equipment. In the middle of it all is a chair with trays of instruments on either side, and on the chair is a man, limp and sluggish as a Strex theologian adjusts a helmet of anbarodes over his skull.

The helmet covers his eyes, so Dana has no way to tell if this is another eyeless lookalike, or if this really is Cecil.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

Cecil scoops a handful of powder off the metal railing with one gloved hand, tosses it over Carlos and Isaña, and they're blanketed in the safety of the nothing-to-see-here spell. He may have learned it with sand, but since it's witch-lore, it must have been designed for snow. It works so well that he actually has to ask if they're still there.

With one hand cupped firmly against the side of Carlos's face, he promises to take care of this as quickly as possible, then lets go and does the same spell on himself.

Left alone, Carlos circles around the building and walks right past the short lineup of reporters, as well as a knot of hangers-on trying to figure out what the action is. They don't even notice the footprints he's leaving in the dwindling snow. He holds Isaña against his chest, tucked inside his coat, and walks unseen all the way to the car: parked three buildings down and across the street, just barely not blocking a fire hydrant, with Lena and their parents waiting inside.

The first time he knocks on the window, none of them respond. They're awake, alert, talking to each other just fine. The only thing they can't perceive is him.

Safety is nice, Carlos thinks as he pulls up his hood and draws the strings tight, but cold.

A few minutes later Lena realizes he's there and unlocks the door, stammering apologies, baffled that she didn't notice it was him right away. "No, that's a good thing, it proves I got here clean," insists Carlos, dropping into one of the middle seats. (Lena's up front, his parents together in the back.) "The two agents from the World Consistorial Court don't even know they missed me. Cecil's having a little chat with them — he'll be along soon."

"World Consistorial Court," echoes Lena. "Carlos, did you...did you actually see either of these agents?"

Carlos crosses his arms. "Didn't go looking. I've had to confront too many dangerous people as it is; I don't need to make it easy by walking right up to them. Unless there's something of theological interest involved!...which, in this case, there was not."

A worried silence.

"These people who have come after you before," says his mother after a moment. "Did it ever happen that...has one of them ever tried to...did somebody — choke you, quirquinchito?"

Carlos closes his eyes. "Last spring. Yes."

Nobody says anything else until the blurry figure of Cecil appears across the street, waiting for a break in the late-night traffic before jogging through the snow. He's hugging himself and actually stumbling with the cold, panting as he falls into the seat beside Carlos. "Thank you for waiting! I hope it wasn't too much trouble. We can go now."

"Lena, crank up the heat, would you?" says Carlos as the engine revs to life. "Cecil, honey, what happened?"

"I found the vehicle of the armed observers, who were hoping to corner you alone and encourage you to reconsider your lack of respect for the Magisterium," says Cecil. "We had a pleasant talk, in which I encouraged them to reconsider their lack of respect for you. Also, disabled their firearms. And stole their coffee."

Carlos takes Cecil's hand (now ungloved for some reason) and warms it between his own. "Well, they certainly won't be able to cope without coffee. That's just a theological fact."

"Exactly! And I will call the nearest witches' consul once I have a chance to look up their number, to urge them to be more on top of this kind of thing in the future, although, gosh, will anyone mind if the first thing I do is collapse into a hot bath and stay there for an hour?"

Nobody minds. They keep the conversation light as they make their way back to the house. And Carlos, sensing that his family has had more than enough alarm for one night, doesn't bring it to their attention when he notices what happened to Cecil's cravat.

It's not around his neck any more. It's folded up and pressed against his right thigh, held in place by the tie that gave Carlos so much trouble earlier, wrapped around in a couple of loops and knotted tight.

Either Cecil has decided that putting neckwear around random limbs is going to be his newest fashion venture, or the reason he was stumbling is because before those firearms were disabled, he got shot in the leg.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Clouded Mountain (???).

Dana doesn't think, doesn't plan, just puts all her focus into being as corporeal as possible and shouts, "You let go of him!"

Everything that had been translucent snaps into full physicality. The limp man in the chair raises his head to look at her, gasps, then grabs something sharp off the tray beside him and in one swift motion stabs it into the torso of his attending theologian.

Dana can't take down any of maybe-Cecil's captors on her own, but she does what she can: rushing at the nearest theologian with her fist raised, drawing their attention and occupying their defenses. A full three of the team members just stand and stare, their black-eyed expressions blank, waiting for orders. With the help of Dana's distraction, maybe-Cecil manages to rip off his anbarodes and take out the rest. He's sloppy — either he's someone with slower reflexes than Cecil, or his earlier sluggishness wasn't all a bluff — but whatever he grabbed is deadly enough that he doesn't need to be precise.

At last he stops, leaning heavily against a sink while a body falls to the floor, nearly sliced in two through the torso. His pale-blue smock is spattered with blood; there's a trail of rusty footprints behind his bare feet. With one shaking hand he points at the three blank-faced theologians (the only ones still standing) and orders "Don't move!", then his face twists in disgust and he dry-heaves over the basin.

Not Cecil. His voice is different. And while Cecil could easily get his hair clipped military-short like this man, it would be hard to pull off bright-blue eyes.

Breathing hard, not-Cecil raises his head once more. "Gina," he croaks, gazing at Dana with a watery smile. "You found me."

Dana's heart shatters. "I'm sorry," she says, taking a few steps forward, going through the chair. "I'm not — I mean, I wasn't —"

"— you're not here," realizes not-Cecil. "I just — I blew the whole game on a frelling hallucination —"

"No!" cries Dana, running to him. "I may not be corporeal right now, but I promise, I am real! Please, tell me your name."

Not-Cecil slumps to the floor, leaning against the wall, still clinging to the handle of — it's some kind of knife, the blade slick with blood. With what appears to be all the energy he has left, he points it at her. "If you were my hallucination or the real Gina, you would know that."

Blades won't hurt her, but Dana holds up her hands anyway. "I'm not Gina. My name is Dana. And I, too, know someone who looks very much like you, but is not you. We're working together to find out how to stop Strexcorp. I can't do much right now, but if there are messages you want to send — if there is anything you can tell me about what these people are doing — I will make sure everything gets passed on to the right people. I promise you."

The man swallows. "It's — this," he says, giving the knife a little shake. "They made it. Cuts through anything. They say it should be able to cut right between worlds — no energy requirement at all — but it needs the right person. Thought I could learn to do it. I don't know why me. Wouldn't help them for all the tea on Ganymede. So they did — things — drugging — trying to make me cooperate. Make me want to cooperate." He chokes out a laugh. "Guess they'll drug the next one harder."

"The next one will fight too!" exclaims Dana. "Whoever it is, I am sure that they will!"

"Gina would have said that too," says not-Cecil faintly. He grips the edge of the sink and starts to pull himself back to his feet, no longer aiming the blade at her. "Dana — if you are real — security will be here soon. Will you watch for them? Tell me when they get close?"

Dana promises that she will. Then, on a hunch, she orders the blank-eyed theologians to push some heavy equipment against the door. Like automatons, they obey.

By the time she returns, not-Cecil has sliced up the chair, turned the anbarode helmet into confetti, carved most of the machines into useless chunks of plastic and silicon, and torn holes in the walls through which wires are sparking and pipes are spilling water. He's out-of-breath and grey in the face, swaying with every step, but has paced himself well enough that he's still going. When Dana tells him a group of armed people in Strex-brand hazmat suits are coming, he nods, stabs a cabinet, and lets his weight drag the knife down as he sinks to the floor.

Banging against the barricaded door. The sound of shouts. Something firing that sounds like, but also unlike, a gun.

"I'm so sorry," whispers Dana.

"Lewis," rasps not-Cecil.

"What?"

"When you tell your people. About this." He lifts the blade to his neck. "Tell them my name was Lewis."

Notes:

Warning: contains the killing of Strex agents and the suicide of a Strex captive.

Trivia: at one point the plan was to have the Man in the Tan Jacket's daemon turn out to be a Dune-style sandworm. Plans have changed, but I still wanted to work a sandworm in here at some point, so Eustathias gets the form.

By contrast, Eustathias taking phoenix form was in the cards back in June, when this Dana portrait was posted.

(And the Lewis sequence has been planned and drafted and waiting to be deployed since chapter 5.)

Chapter 22: Monopoly

Summary:

Cecil makes the necessary moves to protect Carlos. It involves witches. And leads to an encounter that makes it really hard for him to focus on this family Monopoly game.

Oh, and how's Steve Carlsberg doing? Let's get a few scenes with that guy.

Central Narraganset.

Cecil spends a very long time in that bath.

Khoshekh spends much of the same time on the phone with the witches' consulate in Halifax: their primary liaison for the United States of New Denmark, as well as the eastern provinces of New France. (For Hispania Nova, Beringland, and the west half of New France, it's more convenient to deal with the consulate at Nakniq.) He holds the whole conversation in the language he used to speak with Josie, or maybe one of its relatives, and although Carlos has tried to learn a few phrases he doesn't recognize a word of this. All he knows is that it's getting increasingly shouty.

The kids, of course, have gone straight back to the Internet. As far as they know, tonight was nothing more than a cool adventure in sneaking around reporters. The rest of the adults fill in Wes and Azalea about the extra layer of danger they missed, while Carlos makes a break for the den and gets out his own laptop. No reason to let Cecil do all the work here.

It isn't long before his family is crowded awkwardly in the doorway. "Can we interrupt?" says Lena. Her fruit bat daemon hangs over her shoulder, eyes huge in the dimness (Carlos may have forgotten to turn on the lights).

Carlos's eyes flick between his credit card and the screen. "Just a second."

"Is this really a good time to be doing last-minute shopping?" asks Lena's husband.

Carlos sighs. "I'm buying distraction for the press. You're welcome."

He's booked a hotel room, he explains, for the remainder of his visit. Under his real name, so obviously he's not going near the place; it's just to give the press an obvious building to stake out. His family, while they don't have personal experience with Night Vale levels of secrecy and misdirection, have seen enough spy movies to wonder if this is complex enough to fool anyone. And maybe it's not! Which is why Carlos is booking another room, under the kind of alias he would use. Let people figure out the puzzle, feel clever and superior for outwitting him, and go stake out that building he's not going near.

Azalea folds her arms; the tocororo daemon on her shoulder cocks his head. "Carlos, are you booking a room for Lyra Belacqua?"

"Close! Will Parry." Carlos clicks the ordinater shut and gets up, daemon by his feet. "Tomorrow is Christmas Eve; they're not going to have enough staff on hand to keep tracking fainter and fainter leads. They'll never catch a completely randomized alias, which is what I'll use if I have to get a room I'm actually going to stay in."

"You are staying right here," says his mother. "No one is making you leave."

Lena puts a hand on her shoulder. "It might be dangerous for him if he's easy to find, Mamá."

"Especially if there are Magisterium people looking for him," adds Wes. "Who sound like they're armed."

"If you were in any immediate danger — if the kids were in immediate danger — I would already be gone," says Carlos firmly. "As for whether the Church will get their act together by tomorrow...that depends on how Cecil's call goes."

"The call went well," announces Khoshekh, flowing into the room.

Isaña trots over to greet him. "Hi, hon. What did you do?"

"Facilitated the spread of information," purrs Khoshekh, rubbing his face possessively against her shell. "The Magisterium forces who are currently trying to track you down — that is, the World Consistorial Court, the College of Bishops, and a fringe group who recently split off from the Society of the Work of the Holy Spirit because the mainstream group leaders don't want you dead enough — will all be fully occupied for the next several days. Various law enforcement groups, acting on tips from high-level sources at the consul, will be showing up on the doorsteps of several operations they would rather not have subject to legal attention."

"Ooh. I like it."

Mamá's raccoon daemon comes forward. "You have been a wonderful help," he says. "Is there a polite way to thank the witches for their part in this? Should we send them a card?"

"Witches have no use for material possessions," says Khoshekh. "A group of them are going to do flybys of this area, to underline for all viewers that Carlos has powerful allies, but they won't stop at the house; that would be too conspicuous. Perhaps, as they pass overhead, you could wave?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos comes out of his own shower to find Cecil on the unfolded sofa bed, entirely under the quilts. After tucking Isaña into the basket with Khoshekh, Carlos joins him.

Most of Cecil is wrapped in flannels and knits again, from a bobble hat to furry slippers. Carlos cups his bare face and pulls him in for a kiss. It's nice. He does it again.

"Mmm." Cecil wraps an arm around him. "Brave, clever, amorous Carlos...if you are rethinking your no sex in my parents' den condition, I should warn you that now that we are actually here, I find myself with surprisingly limited enthusiasm for anything that involves fewer than three layers of clothing."

"Valiant, protective, heroic Cecil, we are still on the same page there," murmurs Carlos. "I was hypothesizing that you'd still be up for kissing, but if there's some other way you'd rather have me show my appreciation for how incredible you were tonight, let me know."

"Ah," says Cecil. "In that case...let me confirm your hypothesis."

They make out for a bit in comfortable silence.

Carlos would happily do this all night...if he didn't still have questions. "Cecil...."

"Hm?"

"Now that we're alone...now that you don't have to worry about hiding witch-lore and Night Vale secrets, or about not scaring the rest of my family, or anything like that...I really need you to tell me...."

"I...yes." Cecil swallows. "I suppose you do. Go on."

"Did you get shot in the leg earlier?"

Cecil startles. "What? No!"

Oh, thank the —

"I got stabbed in the leg."

— never mind.

"Did some basic first aid in the field — all the blood was right there, it was easy to do the runes — then patched it up more permanently while I was in the bath," continues Cecil. "That poor cravat is ruined, and the pants will never be the same, but my leg will be right back to normal in a couple of days. And I managed not to leave any bloodstains around the bathroom! Still got those skills from my Field Medicine badge and my Sanitizing A Crime Scene badge."

Thank the Boy Scouts of Hispania Nova, apparently. "Have I told you that hospitals around here don't require you to staunch the bleeding on your own before they admit you?" asks Carlos faintly. "Because I didn't think that was something you would need to know, but...maybe it's something you need to know."

"Really! Huh. Seems like a messy policy, but I will keep it in mind."

Holding him in a loose snuggle, taking care not to jostle the knife wound, Carlos adds, "That wasn't what you were expecting me to ask about, though."

"...No," admits Cecil. "I — I thought you were going to ask about Steve."

Carlos's heart sinks. "So he's not okay."

"He is healthy. Lucid. Nobody has inserted any microchips into him. He is still a fit parent, by the same slim-but-undeniable margin as ever. By any of those very reasonable standards, he is perfectly fine."

"But...?"

Cecil takes a deep breath. "Well, I mean, he was...confused...about certain things when I spoke to him. But I was able to set him straight! And I'm sure he can re-learn all the technical knowledge in a year or two. And the hallucinations, or at least I assume they're hallucinations, are certainly distracting, but they're not having any serious impact on his quality of life. Which means that even if they never, ever go away, he could be worse, you know? I know you're going to worry, Carlos, but try to remember that he could be so much worse."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie is back in the PTA loop, and, with it, back in the listing of people who get tapped to cook for each other's families when the need arises. She's at the top of the "we could use a home-cooked-meal" list on the 24th, which means she's the one who shows up outside Steve and Delphine's duplex around lunchtime with a foil-covered pan of gefilte fish and another with a spinach casserole.

(She got a great deal on this set of cast-aluminum pans at the secret-police auction.)

Her arms are full, so her mongoose daemon climbs up onto her shoulder and rings the bell. There's a muffled "Coming!" and a thump from inside, and a minute later Steve opens the door, with a desk lamp under his arm and a towel over one shoulder. There are heavy cardboard boxes from the move-in piled all over the front room.

"Sherie! You made it! You are a lifesaver," exclaims Steve, ushering her inside. "I haven't even figured out which box my cookware is in, and most of Del's was smashed last month by the faceless old woman who secretly lives in her home. By which I mean our home! I think Janice has been living on takeout, and that's no way to bring up a growing girl."

Once the lamp has been stashed on a free shelf and the pans are safely on the table, he pulls Sherie into a hug. An open, no-holds-barred bear hug. Apparently Steve is a hugger now.

"It's my pleasure to help," says Sherie, trying to be casual, like this is how Steve's been the whole time she's known him. "Are Del and the kids here? I brought a little something just for the girls."

Delphine is at work — her job, Steve explains, keeps her extremely busy — but the girls are upstairs, "playing DDR." Sherie can't envision how that would work until she sees it: Janice's daemon is emu-shaped, stomping on the arrows and racking up points with his three-toed feet, while Janice rides on his shoulders. Renée is doing the stepping and the jumping in the usual way; to keep things fair, her daemon is colobus-shaped and hanging on to her shoulders. Black braids and a brown ponytail bounce and whip to the rhythm.

Sherie waits until the song is over to interrupt. Janice has the higher score, leaving Renée grouchy: "I could do a lot better! I would be doing better if I didn't have this monkey on my back."

Janice looks almost hurt, but rallies and says, "Do you want to go a round without him? We can if you want."

Renée opens her mouth, thinks about it, then sets her jaw and stands up straighter. "No. I don't want to win by cheating. Let's just go again."

Steve does manage to get their attention before they can start another track. Enough that Sherie can present them with a decorated metal cookie tin...carved with protective runes, and full of the remains of the mechanical Strexcorp inspector.

The girls dutifully thank her for the "food." Then Janice says "See you next time at the chapel" and Renée says "Bye!" and they're back at the DDR.

"They're good kids. They don't mean to be rude," says Steve as they head back downstairs. "They're just awfully preoccupied these days, trying to stay in shape for...uh...for things! Secret things. Nothing big, or important, or dangerous, so you know what, forget I said anything. Hey, unrelated question: did you bring one of those spyglass doohickies along with you?"

"I did, yes." Sherie pulls one of the latest models out of her pocket. It has a home-brewed serial number and a tiny tracking device plastered to the inside, so in theory if it gets lost or stolen, it'll be easy to recover. "We're not supposed to let people outside the team use them, but I can look at something for you, if that would help."

Steve beams. "That would be great! You theologians are always great."

They end up standing on the front stoop, gazing up at the sky. (Turquoise, with ruddy dust clouds.) If there were any human-created devices up there — a plane, a gyropter, a weather balloon, a really low-hanging satellite — they would sparkle with gold through the Atal lenses, no matter how well-concealed they were from human vision. And in fact, Sherie does see a trio of Strexcorp gyropters flying low in the distance...but looking higher, looking straight up, all she finds is emptiness. "Nothing up there. You're clear."

"You're sure?" asks Steve. "Nothing at all? Not even, maybe, something...." He leans over her shoulder so their eyes are close to level, and traces a circle on the sky about fifty degrees from the horizon. "...right about there?"

"Nothing that shows up through these lenses. I give you my word as an experimental theologian."

"Huh." Steve leans back, hooking his thumbs in his pockets. He frowns at the empty patch of sky a moment longer, then, for the first time, seems to notice that he's still carrying around a towel. "I should get back to work! These boxes aren't going to unpack themselves — we got the cheap kind."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

Rosa is fascinated with the idea of seeing real witches flying overhead. She parks herself in the living room all morning, keeping busy with her sketchbook but looking out the window every few minutes, and even manages to rope her older siblings into holding a similar vigil in the ordinater room, which overlooks the back of the house.

Carlos takes the chair across from her, aiming to take another crack at this otherworldly physics book. Once again, he only gets through about a chapter — because that's when Mamá and Cecil enter the room with the Monopoly board. Apparently Cecil is eager to try out this exotic foreign version of Monopoly, without any of the familiar cards like "Valentine's Day earthquake destroys two of your properties."

The four of them are setting up the board when Dawn comes jogging downstairs. "They're here!"

Rosa jumps up. "Where? Out back?"

"Nope," says a new voice. Lucas, wonder of wonders, is right behind his sister, addax daemon daintily trotting down the steps beside him. "I mean, they are now, but they're going overhead this way." He traces an arc in the air overhead. "You'll see 'em out front in a minute."

Rosa is at the picture window in a heartbeat, her daemon perching on her shoulder as a sharp-eyed hawk.

Carlos follows, though he's not quite as frantic about it. These are witches, not meteors; they aren't going to streak across the sky and be gone in a flash. He's got time. Cecil follows with similar calm, leaning against Carlos's back and resting his head on Carlos's shoulder.

Sure enough, he's already waiting when the series of tiny silhouettes comes into view, crossing the sky at about the speed of a plane. And while their presence is comforting, they're too far away to be much of a sight in their own right. Specks of black against the clouds, that's all. You can barely tell the humans apart from the birds.

...Except for that one shape at the back of the group, which is the wrong shape to be either. Not to mention, much too big.

Cecil sucks in a sharp breath.

"Are they pulling something?" asks Rosa, squinting. "Is that a sleigh?"

"They're witches, not Santa," says Dawn. "I'm pretty sure conflating them is offensive."

"Yeah, and, it's obviously not a sleigh," puts in Lucas. "Looks more like a sailboat."

Khoshekh, who had been floating just above the pile of presents under the fake branches of the tree, springs instantly into the air and flies to the window beside Cecil.

A second later, he bolts for the front closet. "Somebody get the door for me!"

"Khoshekh!" barks Cecil after him, fingers tensing in a death grip on Carlos's arm. "I don't —"

He catches himself, switches out of English, and finishes yelling at his daemon in something like Muscovy.

The margay snaps a reply in kind as he dives into the closet, retrieves his cloak, and snuggles into it as fast as possible. Cecil says something — a question — no, a demand. Khoshekh fires back something just as urgent.

Lucas is standing closest to the door, looking between the two sides of the standoff. "Do I, uh. Do I open this? Or not?"

Cecil takes a shaky breath. "Do. Do it."

Once the doorknob is dealt with, Khoshekh crashes through the screen door all on his own, then shoots out like an arrow and soars: across the front yard, over the road, into the sky.

Another deep breath, then Cecil wrenches his gaze away from the chase and lets go of Carlos. "If we're still playing, I'm going to need to team up with someone," he says: contrite about the inconvenience, but not offering a word of explanation. "I can't read the cards right now."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

After a couple of long hours overseeing weapons drills in the sand wastes, Tamika and Rashi catch a rehabilitated yellow gyropter to one of Marcus Vansten's lesser estates.

It's the one he always forgets about because it's only the size of eighteen standard residential plots, so nobody with the authority to kick the Book Club out ever visits. Half their gyropters are parked in the hangar. The billiard room has been repurposed into a makeshift chapel. The biggest bedroom is outfitted with medical equipment and has a rotating set of older Scouts on standby, for those times when someone needs medical attention that can't be dealt with at Night Vale General anymore.

It's not that the hospital will force you to take Strexcorp-brand pharmaceuticals. It's just that those are now the default. And even if you are conscious and self-aware enough to opt out, it might turn out that, whoops, they have an unfortunate supply shortage of...everything else.

Tamika has a fresh bag of library books to hand out. Algebra texts for the seventh-grade study group in the parlor. Mystery novels for the Weird Scouts in the infirmary on duty. Young Adult dystopias for the Morrigan and Blood Pact scouts in the infirmary for treatment, injured in the explosions at yesterday's anti-Strex demonstration. Beat poetry for...well, for Steve Carlsberg, but the safest way to get it to him is to deliver it via Agent R.

She finds Renée in the billiard room, trying to connect something with the wires in a Strex microchip. "Just a sec," says Tovitthae, perched on her shoulder in the form of a hummingbird. "I think we're gonna...."

Sparks fly at the ends of the girl's fine metal tools, and the chip fizzes and pops.

"...never mind, it fried. Again."

Renée drops her tools and pulls off her safety goggles (custom-made, with lenses for all four of her eyes). "Hi, Tamika. I still can't get the data off these stupid things."

"We'll get you more test subjects," says Tamika. They've been prying these chips out of the Strexcorp gyropter pilots like raisins out of raisin bread. Plenty more where those came from. "Here. Books for your dad."

Renée accepts a sampling of poems by Amiri Baraka and Kirby Doyle with some distaste. "Technical stuff? He probably won't read it. But it's okay, Janice can borrow them even if he doesn't."

From what Tamika has heard, right now Carlsberg needs all the technical writing he can get his hands on. She's not going to quit delivering it. "Spending a lot of time with Agent J2 lately?"

"Yeah? My dad moved in with her mom, so we kinda have to."

Tamika tenses. "That's where you moved? I thought it was just to a new place. A non-Strex-owned place."

"Sure, it's that too...."

"Tamika!" calls a new voice. It's Janice herself, riding Tehom in the shape of a thestral, holding a stack of books. "I've got these. They're not overdue! Don't be mad at Renée, she didn't lose track of them, I borrowed them."

It's the latest couple of volumes in the Dark is Rising sequence, sent by Tamika in hopes that they would refresh Carlsberg's understanding of digital audio encoding. And due back at the library tomorrow. "Cutting it fine, but I can get these back in time," she decides, loading them up in the bookbag over Rashi's back. "Hey, J2, do you know if your mom's working tonight?"

"She has the evening shift on Tuesdays, so yes. She'll be out all through dinner, and won't get back until late. I can get you her whole schedule, if you want."

"Thanks, but not necessary. I need to talk to Carlsberg tonight, that's all. As you were, agent." Once Janice has left to get back to her own work, Tamika says under her breath to Renée, "How secure is the place?"

"Has all the same wiring the apartment did. I put it in myself," says Renée proudly. "Janice double-checked. She hasn't been learning about anbaric currents and everything as long as I have, but she's still pretty good. Oh, and I sweep for bugs all the time! Last check was this morning."

That's probably as much security as Tamika can ask for. "Well done. Now, those other books, give 'em here. Since I'm going that way anyway, I can do a personal delivery."

Renée is only too happy to hand them over. She doesn't seem suspicious about why. Neither does Janice, Tamika would bet.

Sure would be nice if they could get through this without either agent feeling hurt or betrayed. If it wasn't for Carlsberg's re-education, Tamika would probably take the risk of assuming he had a plan and not getting involved, just letting him roll with it.

But Carlsberg's head has been severely knocked around, and the timing is too damn convenient. Which means it's up to Tamika to go save the man from himself.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

Team Carlos-and-Dawn has the biplane token. Team Mamá-and-Lucas (either there is literally nobody else online at Lucas's MMO right now, or this is the first sign of the apocalypse) is the battleship. Team Rosa-and-Cecil wanted the hooded figure, but settled for the hat.

Monopoly with Mamá is always an adventure. She doesn't just trade properties, but throws in offers like "the next three times you land on my property are free" or "only if I get ten percent of all profits." The dice love Cecil; he and Rosa never stay in jail for more than one turn. And Carlos does little things to keep the game easy for Cecil to follow, like always reading out loud where they've landed and who owns it, and soon everyone is following his lead.

In spite of all this, Cecil's interest wanes as the game goes on. Carlos doesn't blame him. On top of his vision impairment dampening a lot of the fun, a game about aggressively buying up as much property as possible and trying to drive everyone else out of business has kind of lost its shine these days.

(Although Carlos does get a kick out of imagining Strexcorp being owned by a rich little cartoon man in a top hat and tails, complete with diamond-collared Persian cat daemon.)

He's so caught up in his own assumptions about Cecil's distraction that he doesn't think to ask if something else is wrong.

It's Rosa who finally notices. "Mr. Cecil? Is it part of your condition that your lips are blue?"

"A-are they?" stammers Cecil.

Carlos looks up from laying a plastic hotel on Park Place (10% share owned by Team Mamá-and-Lucas). Rosa's not kidding. "Cecil? Let me see your hand."

Cecil works one of them out from being hugged under his arm, and offers it to Carlos. It's icy to the touch.

"Your nails are blue too. Cecil, you're hypothermic — why didn't you say something?"

"Like what?" asks Cecil, blinking at him in dull confusion. "That I'm cold? But I — I'm always cold."

Everyone's looking at Cecil now, with the kids waiting for cues from the adults about whether they should panic or not. So Carlos takes extra care to keep his voice calm and steady as he hands out marching orders. "Dawn, can you run into the kitchen and put on the kettle? There are hot water bottles in the drawer underneath. Rosa, you know where the quilts are — go grab a few, okay? Mamá, do you have an anbaric blanket or anything lying around? Or could we turn up the thermostat a few degrees?"

"There's a space heater in the basement, under the stairs," says his mother. "We can bring it into the den and close the doors."

"I'll get the heater," says Lucas, and gets up without even having to be asked.

Cecil shivers and stumbles as Carlos helps him into the den. Rosa is right on their heels, carrying an armful of quilts half as big as she is. Lucas comes up a minute later with his antelope helping to bear the box with the space heater. It's all plugged in, and the Monopoly board is mostly reconstituted, by the time the kettle boils and Dawn arrives bearing bottled heat. Three of them.

"You have to put one under each arm, and one —" She blushes. "— between your legs. I went on a ski trip where they gave a talk about it."

"Fantastic," says Carlos, taking them off her hands (and on some level reflecting that, sure, he can be awkward about sex, but at least he's no longer young-teenage "embarrassed to reference the fact that your legs join to your body" awkward). "Thank you so much for remembering that. Thank you all, you make a great team. Cecil, did you catch that?"

He helps Cecil get the bottles into position, then wreathes the quilts around him until he's basically a knitted hillock with a cat-eared head sticking out of the top. With a heater running two feet away.

"This is...better," says Cecil cautiously. "Less cold. When does it stop being hypothermia?"

"Let's shoot for you not shivering," decides Carlos. That, at least, is something Cecil can reliably gauge on his own.

"Is this normal if you're from a desert?" asks Dawn. "Or is this because of what your daemon is doing?"

"I cannot be sure. My Khoshekh has never tried to float through the stratosphere before. Even when I'm at home." Cecil's words are coming slowly, but he's already using longer sentences, which has to be a good sign, right? "If it's all the same to you...I would rather not run a control test."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

A well-placed slingshot hit to the back of the head, and the secret police officer in the bushes out behind the Carlsbergs' new place is down for the count. He might be a sympathizer, but Tamika can't be sure, and she isn't taking any chances.

The invisibility ritual she got one of the Scouts to do before she left isn't going to last much longer...and someone's gonna notice her daemon pretty quick after it fades. (There's a reason people who settled as buffaloes don't get assigned to the secret police's espionage division.) She and Rashi hurry to the door.

A confused Carlsberg opens it. Under her breath, Tamika hisses, "Nobody here. But give us some space to get in, got it?"

"Huh. Nobody here," echoes Carlsberg. Just to be sure, he and his badger daemon step out, leaving the door wide open, and walk a generous circle on the patio. "Nope. Still nobody here. Must've been the wind." He follows Tamika back in...and looks directly at her. "It is so good to have you here! Our own town hero. Can I get you a drink? A snack?"

Stupid invisibility must be on the fritz. "You got any soda?" asks Tamika. "Also, I'm not a hero. Also, you have to get out of here."

"Really? Huh. Do I have time to finish baking? Because I have these scones in the oven...."

"No, I don't mean it like that. This isn't the gyropters with bombs are on their way here right now kind of having-to-go." Tamika follows the man into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of root beer. "What I mean is, you have to get out of this relationship. And it can't be suspicious, so you can't just vanish one night, you gotta make it look natural. Act like you got cold feet. Make up something that really annoys you, that you only figured out now you're living together. Stuff like that."

Carlsberg takes his time thinking about this. "Did one of the girls send you? Because me and Del, we really thought they were okay with this move. Them being okay with it was very important to us."

"They don't know I'm here. Renée probably doesn't even know why I'd be here. Not sure about Janice. If she knew, she'd keep it secret — this is her mom, after all." Tamika is starting to be able to see her hand holding the drink, to see the sturdy bulk of her daemon at her side. "And I'm willing to bet on Janice being safe no matter what, but you and your kid —"

"— are not in any danger. Not from Delphine," says Carlsberg cheerfully. "Oh, hey! Scones are done."

"I know you don't want to hear this," says Tamika. "I'm sure you think you love her and everything...."

"I don't think it. I don't have to think it." He pulls the trays of baked goods off the oven racks. The room fills with warmth, and the scent of oranges. "I know it. Now, I can't know whether she loves me, because I never developed the skill of seeing inside people's minds. Even now! But I do think it."

"Only because you don't know who she is. What she is."

"Sure I do." Carlsberg whisks out a plate, sweeps two scones onto it, and sets it on the island in the middle of the kitchen. "Have a seat. You've probably been on your feet all day, and some of that fighting librarians, am I right? You've earned a rest."

"If you knew the thing I'm thinking of, you wouldn't be this relaxed," counters Tamika. Unless he's really brainwashed, and this is all a setup. She doesn't take the seat.

With a sigh, the man leans against the counter. "Look, Tamika...I understand why you wouldn't trust me with some things right now," he says. "Because all of a sudden I'm re-learning circuit diagrams from scratch, and I keep seeing something in the sky that nobody else sees, and also, looking at lots of words makes me nervous? I get it. I don't trust me with a lot of things right now."

"You're not making a great case for yourself here, Carlsberg."

"But here's the thing: I knew about Del months ago. And past-me still thought we could make this work out. And if you don't even trust past-me, then could you at least trust Cecil? You would do that, right?"

"I do trust Palmero." Lot of things fall apart if Tamika can't do that. Starting with the laws of physics. "He owe you a favor, or something? I thought he didn't like you."

Carlsberg's eyes widen. For all that he's got lines around his mouth and a hairline receding up off his forehead, he looks almost childishly hurt. "What? No! Cecil is my best friend! And he was delighted to confirm that Delphine's division is espionage, not interrogation or re-education — that she has never been involved in any of the decisions to bring me in — and that whatever else they did inside my head, none of it was to change how I feel about her."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

It gets so toasty in the enclosed room that Carlos and his relatives shed their hats and sweaters. Cecil stops shaking with cold, but refuses to come out of the blankets, just in case.

(They know he's recovering nicely when he has the energy to get mortally offended that Carlos's team drew the "won second place in a beauty contest" chance card.)

As Team Carlos-and-Dawn is hitting a clear downswing, trying to negotiate paying Cecil-and-Rosa with a handwritten IOU so they don't have to start selling back hotels to cover the bill, Cecil finally says, "I'm going to need to get the door in a minute. Would somebody mind unwrapping me?"

With Rosa's and Carlos's help, he gets down to a single quilt, which he wears like a nine-patch cloak as Khoshekh — shivering, uncoordinated, fur stiff with frost — comes bumbling into his arms.

"Hold him against your bare skin! That'll warm him up fastest," advises Dawn when they get back into the den. Cecil pulls the half-frozen margay up under his sweater and turtleneck, and wraps his arms tightly over the lump.

"So what's the deal? Did you ever catch up?" asks Lucas. Maybe this is why he's spent so long away from his online games: he's figured out that interesting things happen around Cecil, and doesn't want to miss out.

Wordlessly, Cecil shakes his head. Carlos starts re-tucking blankets around him.

"Who were you chasing?" adds Rosa, hugging her own daemon close in a cuddly snow-leopard form.

"He doesn't have to tell us if he doesn't want to, pequeñita," chides Mamá. "It might be personal."

"It is," says Cecil softly. "But you have all been so unfailingly helpful...I think you have some right to know why. My mother's daemon was in that flight of witches. I have not seen him — or my mother herself — since I was quite young." He nods at Dawn. "About your age."

The kids make sympathetic noises. Mamá shoots a confused look at Carlos — who has implied to her that Cecil's mother was around much more recently. He shakes his head and mouths Later.

"He must have known I was here," continues Cecil, half to himself. "Even if he couldn't come to the house, he could have watched for Khoshekh...then he could have made a closer pass, or moved more slowly...he could have done so many things. I don't...I don't understand why he did not."

"Well, maybe it wasn't even him, you know?" says Dawn hopefully. "They were really far away. Probably miles. Maybe if you had gotten close enough, it would've turned out to be someone else's daemon all along."

Cecil snorts. "Not likely. How many other tualapi daemons do you know?"

Carlos doesn't recognize the species. From the looks of it, nobody in his family does either. "What's a tualapi?"

"Well, a bird, obviously." Shifting position under the blankets, Cecil strokes the bump under his sweater where Khoshekh's head must be. "Although for some reason you thought he looked like a sailboat."

Notes:

New reader art! Birbcecil (soupengine) did cute doodles featuring Cecil, Carlos, and Isaña.

The places with the witch consulates are, in our world, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada) and Nakniq, Alaska (USA). Khoshekh is using a Sami language.

There's already been some artwork posted featuring Cecil's mother's daemon. Just his head and neck, although I did wonder if anyone would look at that and think "wait, giant white bird...in the same family as a daemon with the limb arrangement from the mulefa world...hmmm."

Chapter 23: The Most Touching Gift of All

Summary:

Presents for everyone! Including a useful notebook for Carlos. One of the experimental theologians makes an early return to Night Vale, just in time to help invent something. Finally: Carlos and his daemon make a point.

Notes:

New art for the last couple of chapters! Vacation illustrations + Dana at the Mountain, all by chess_ka.

Central Narraganset.

Carlos splits the rest of his evening between keeping an eye on Cecil and getting some work done.

The otherworldly physics text is beginning to sit more easily in his head. He's picking up the outlines of three separate experiments he might be able to reverse-engineer in enough detail to replicate...or at least, send as proposals to CERN. (They have good equipment in Night Vale, but not confirm-the-existence-of-a-quark-gluon-plasma good.)

The whole family helps Cecil by keeping an eye out for the witches' evening flyby. It comes and goes with no sign of a tualapi silhouette. Cecil retreats to the basement for another astral-projection check-in with people in Night Vale, comes back somber, and spikes his ponche at dinner with rather more than the recommended amount of tequila.

...which turns out to be just enough to give him the courage to ask Lena for a quick primer on how memory and amnesia work. (At Carlos's suggestion. His sister is that kind of theologian.)

Papi and Mamá spend the evening at a substitute Christmas Eve service, held by the ex-Magisterium support group formed out of the broken ranks of the congregation Erika manifested in front of. The rest of the family is invited, but all politely decline. Lena and Wes were only C&E Christians as of Erika's visit anyway; Azalea, who has never been in a profession with official Magisterium observers, probably hasn't set foot in a church even to keep up appearances since high school; and Carlos, well, Carlos doesn't want to abandon Cecil or make another attempt to dress up.

He sets himself to doing the dishes while Cecil and Lena talk. They come into the kitchen just as he's finishing cleaning off the counter, with Lena promising hot chocolatl. "I'll even steal a couple of candy canes off the tree," she says, "if you promise not to tell the kids. Would you like one?"

"I would love one!" exclaims Cecil. He looks more at peace than he has in a while. "Carlos, did you know that personal facts, general facts, and emotions are stored in separate parts of the brain? And sensory stimuli are linked to recall? And sometimes people's minds suppress their own memories, without any external re-education at all?"

Carlos smiles. "Sounds like you're basically a psychiatrist now."

"I know, right!"

Once the milk is heating up and Lena has gone to the front room to perform the heist, Cecil's serenity does falter, and he shuffles over to Carlos with a worried expression. But it's only to ask, "Quick, before she gets back: what's a candy cane, and what do I do with it?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

And then, at last, it's Christmas morning. With comfort food, the Nutcracker Suite on the stereo, and presents for all.

There's a single un-decorated package sitting among the wrapping paper and ribbons: a delivery that Carlos had shipped to the house, and someone decided to stash under the tree. Part of his checklist of things to pick up for acquaintances in Night Vale, and ferry over the border. He slices open the packing tape and counts the inventory. All here.

When Khoshekh pokes his head over the side of the box to see, his fur stands on end. "Carlos! How many of these are there? Are you planning to become a dealer? I know the money's good, but I cannot say it's worth the risk!"

It gets them a few weird looks, so Carlos picks up one of the graphing calculators and shows it around. "Not weapons, not drugs. Still highly illegal, but I'm not dealing — it's a donation for the kids in the local Book Club. Because sometimes there's a math problem you need to tackle with more than a working knowledge of runes and a close reading of Johanna Sinisalo's Not Before Sundown."

He's also still getting the mechanical components Steve asked for, re-education be damned. Even if Steve himself is no longer sure what to do with them, either he or Tamika will find someone to pass them on to.

When Wes opens the box holding his carved wooden vervet, he's impressed. When Mamá opens the one with her raccoon, the kids realize there's a pattern here. Lucas puts aside his half-assembled NERF gun, Dawn puts down her new manga, and they both dig through the pile to find more boxes addressed From: Mr. Cecil. Soon they have their carvings (a life-size salamander for Dawn, a miniature addax for Lucas) delightedly in hand.

Rosa looks downright forlorn. Her father notices, and puts the carved vervet away. "We'll find you one from the same set when you're older, hon. Don't be in any rush to settle."

"It's not a set," protests Dawn. "They're hand-carved! Mr. Cecil put a bunch of in-progress shots on his tumblr."

And Azalea, looking for her own from the opposite side of the tree, adds, "Looks like this one has your name on it."

Rosa goes wide-eyed over her painstakingly-carved Zafara. While the rest of the family is impressed all over again, Carlos basks in Cecil's happiness, and picks the paper off the package he assumes has a wooden armadillo inside.

It's not a wooden anything. It's a notebook. A child-size notebook, bound with large blue plastic rings.

Cecil gave Carlos the Little Reporter's Book of Big-Boy Note Taking.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie has explained that the Christmas tradition of her people involves movies and Cathay food, and Nirliq and the Li Huas take it to heart: Nirliq rents some local DVDs, while the Li Huas make stew. They refuse to identify the ingredients of said stew. "None of it is poisonous and none of the meat was sentient, and that's all you need to know," says one.

"We shot it all ourselves," adds the other proudly. "Saved you some money on groceries."

Sherie needs all the money-saving she can get, she thinks, relaxing on the couch in the team's larger rental house and watching the Spanish dub of Jaws. (Maybe it's just a translation issue, but she does not remember the shark being this...hot.) She could break her lease, move in with the rest of the group...although there's only one free room right now, the one vacated by Rayshawn, which would be tricky if her kids come back to town....

They're all breathless with suspense at one of the shark-chase scenes when someone at the front of the house fiddles with the lock.

Everybody jumps. The sludge monster is still at the chapel; any defense of the building is on them. Both Li Huas produce handguns out of nowhere and take positions where they can easily jump out and fire at whoever's trying to enter. Sherie and Nirliq make sure they're behind the Li Huas.

To their profound relief, it's just Quentin. An exhausted-looking Quentin, his mop of fluffy curls lopsided like he's been sleeping on it funny, his flying-squirrel daemon a lump in his shirt pocket. "Come on, you two, put those down. I've been driving all night, I'm too tired to attack right now even if I was evil."

"You weren't scheduled to come back until tomorrow night," says Sherie. "You should have called ahead."

"In retrospect...yeah, probably. It's just...I wasn't really...I came out to the family, okay? Not about the gay thing — they already knew that — about the 'when the angels say there's no god, I believe them' thing."

"The angels who don't exist," puts in Nirliq, with a sidelong glance at the front window.

"Right. Those. Point is...it didn't go well."

And now Sherie feels bad for scolding him. Even though he should have called. "I'm so sorry to hear that. Would you like to join us for lunch and movies?"

Quentin looks blearily through to the living room. "Uh...am I hallucinating from the sleep deprivation, or are you watching gay shark porn?"

Everyone follows his gaze. Sherie claps a hand over her mouth. Nirliq raises her eyebrows.

The Li Huas just shrug. "Apparently, yes."

"Good god, straight women are weird," says Quentin. (Nirliq clears her throat.) "Bi women too. Look, it's nice of you to offer...but I've gotta get some sleep. Catch up on the local dream broadcasts I've missed."

"Completely understandable," says Nirliq. "We'll save you some stew."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

When Cecil gets to the box holding Carlos's present for him, Carlos holds his breath. Partly because, while the theory behind it is sound, this is the first time it's been put to a practical test. And partly because, for once in Carlos's life, the theology isn't all that matters. Cecil also has to like it. To think it's...pretty.

Cecil unfolds the tissue paper and lifts the palm-sized disc out of the box by the ribbon attached to the frame. "What's this? A suncatcher? What's...oh. Oh!"

"Hey, that's beautiful," says Azalea, always the fan of handcrafted anything. "Where'd you get it?"

"I, um, sort of made it. My team helped," says Carlos. "You know we've been making a new kind of lens — the Dirac-Hall lens — have any of you read the literature on it? No? You should give it a look, it's really interesting...but, ah, the point is, we've been testing different variations on it, and some of the test subjects have broken in the process. So I asked if I could have some of the pieces, and glued them together."

"Khoshekh, come here," calls Cecil, and the margay floats over to hover across from him. "Look at this, okay? Now...close your eyes!"

They settle into four-eye. Cecil holds the suncatcher between himself and Carlos. Khoshekh purrs.

Of course, the lenses the team has been testing are more advanced than any of the ones they've written about. And they're all calculated (not to mention, laser-cut) to interact with Rusakov particles in slightly different ways. Which means this object does for Cecil's vision what a plain glass suncatcher does for visible light: catches and refracts the Rusakov radiation at different angles, so it glitters, dazzles, shines.

"I've never seen anything like it," breathes Cecil, spinning the disc in the air and watching it sparkle. "You did this? Experimental theology did this? It's beautiful."

"Art did that," corrects Azalea. And Carlos doesn't even argue, because it kind of is art, isn't it? He can be an artist sometimes, if he feels like it. He can make art if he wants.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

It's afternoon when Quentin resurfaces, the movie long over. The Li Huas are off doing goodness-knows-what, while Sherie and Nirliq are on their laptops, proofreading each other's current research papers. Granted, Sherie doesn't have the expertise to check the mechanics of an experiment on cross-world heliotrope radiation absorption spectra, but she can certainly flag a run-on sentence when she sees it.

Quentin microwaves a bowl of stew and settles on the end of the couch next to Nirliq's chair. His flying-squirrel daemon hops off his shoulder and soars over, to be caught by her red colobus. "What have I missed? Catch me up. I'll get back in the game as soon as I've had...is this dinner? I think it's dinner."

"Sure," says Nirliq. "But no pressure. You're still on break...and if you need help processing whatever happened, I'm sure Sherie can sit you down and say some comforting things."

"Oh, I'm hardly qualified," stammers Sherie. She's trying to be more understanding of...different romantic preferences, but it's hardly her area of expertise the way it is Quentin's. And, apparently, Nirliq's.

"Really? I would think you'd have more experience with religious intolerance than almost anyone on the team."

Oh, right. There's that. (Nirliq was never Christian either, but growing up with native Beringland traditions in Beringland itself is very different from growing up Hebrew in a country with as much Magisterium influence as the USND.)

"It's not a big deal," says Quentin. "I knew it was coming. In some ways it's nice to have it over with. And hey, why are you going easy all of a sudden? I was counting on you to say something like 'no more slacking for you, there's a war on'."

"I — but — pacing yourself is different from slacking," protests Nirliq. "Maybe whoever's running WZZZ can sit in front of a problem and keep steadily crunching numbers 24/7 until they get answers, but the rest of us need to take breaks. I do get that."

Quentin's flying squirrel pats Nirliq's colobus on his furry arm. "No offense meant. Are we bothering you? We can go bother Sherie, if you want."

Nirliq sighs. "There is actually something I've been hoping you can take a look at."

"Great! Lay it on me."

"It even makes a great demonstration of the importance of mental downtime," adds Nirliq, still a little defensive, as she moves windows around on her screen. "I had an idea for something completely different we could test on the modified Atal lenses, and the only reason I came up with it is because Carlos thought of something similar while trying to design a present for his boyfriend...."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

The gifts are long depleted — there's wrapping paper all over the place — when Cecil says, "Have you tested the book yet?"

Carlos frowns through a mouthful of gingerbread cookie. "Tested...?"

"To make sure it works for you. This was a formal gifting, so it should have transferred the connection, but testing is important, right? For confirmation."

Carlos swallows the gingerbread and picks up the Little Reporter's Book. He should have realized it was something more than a cute souvenir of Cecil's childhood. "I'll do it now. How do I start?"

(All of Carlos's other presents, for the record, were new pairs of eyeglasses. No doubt inspired by his various Facebook updates about the ones he's gotten damaged, destroyed, and/or lost in other universes.)

"Open to a page, and say something theological."

Carlos dutifully flips to the first page. "Mary Malone was most likely one of the greatest physicists in any world, ever."

Ink blossoms across the paper, tracing the words in clear, neat print.

"Never heard of her," says Lena's husband.

"Contributions of female experimental theologians are always minimized or erased from history," puts in Dawn.

"True, but our history is off the hook for this one," says Carlos, picking up Isaña and holding her so she can see. "Dr. Malone was from Will Parry's world. I don't know if they've solved sexism overall, but as far as I can tell, they're doing right by her."

Cecil is nodding impatiently. "Yes, yes, now say something theological that could make a chart."

Carlos obligingly looks around the room, and lists the classes of daemons in view. (Two birds, six mammals, one reptile, one unsettled.)

More ink appears below the first line of writing. It makes a bar graph. One unit of the "mammal" bar is even striped over, with a footnote saying *debatable (otherworldly).

For a moment Carlos finds himself reduced to squeaky wordless noises of excitement.

"What's it doing?" asks Lena, leaning over from the couch to see.

Carlos flips to a fresh page and holds it facing her. "The Standard Model of elementary particles includes paulions, bosons, and planckons. Paulions are subdivided into leptons and quarks. Leptons include anbarons, mu leptons, tau leptons...."

Wide-eyed, Lena takes the Little Reporter's Book out of his hands. Carlos keeps talking as she passes it on to her husband, then their parents, then Azalea, who tosses it back to the near side of the tree so the kids can take a look.

"...and planckons include, to the best of our knowledge, only Rusakov particles. Did it keep going?"

Sure enough, when Dawn hands the notebook back, there's a perfect diagram of the Standard Model. "It moved around, too," says Azalea. "When the list of quarks got too long for the section, everything rearranged so it fit. Cecil got you an automatic chart machine."

"Oh, but what are you going to do when it runs out of pages?" exclaims Mamá.

"It won't do that," says Cecil. "It has an infinite number of them."

"Cecil got you an infinite automatic chart machine," says Lena. "Good lord. If he was a woman I'd be telling you to marry him right now."

Cecil breaks into a nervous laugh. "A-ha. I don't really think that's...I mean, we haven't even tried living together yet...and we've only been dating for, Carlos, how long has it been? Your time?"

"Six months," says Carlos, and watches the latest page of the Little Reporter's Book. (Or should he start calling it the Little Theologian's Book?) A timeline pops into existence running down the left side, with the top notch marked 15 June and the bottom one 25 December. Waiting to be filled in with more detail, if necessary.

When Carlos thinks about the factors that make Cecil's subjective time different, an asterisk appears in mid-August, and a bracket extends to encompass a second timeline beside it. Subway (dates approx., ~2.3yrs), declares a caption.

It sparks off a flurry of thoughts and feelings in Carlos's mind, the most prominent being....

"I have got to put Dana's timeline in this thing."

"Dana?" echoes Mamá. "A friend of yours?"

"Something like that," says Carlos, already getting up. Friend, fellow unwitting figure in an apocalyptic prophecy, same difference. "She's in another world — disconnected from normal time — Cecil, have you heard from her lately?"

"Got a series of texts a couple of days ago!" calls Cecil after him as Carlos makes a break for the den, Isaña scurrying at his heels. "She's still walking toward the Clouded Mountain, no change there!"

"Great!" yells Carlos over his shoulder. "It's going on my chart!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The radio in the chapel has switched itself on, and is playing the monologue from tonight's first Interim Voice of Night Vale. (Tristan Cortez, president of the Night Vale Green Market co-op-turned-Strexcorp-subsidiary, imploring shoppers to help them make up the losses from recent sabotage by Tamika Flynn's army.)

Nirliq, energized, shuts herself in the laser room. Sherie introduces Quentin to their new pet sludge monster, and distributes popsicles to the children playing hopscotch across the street.

Then the two of them roll up their sleeves and start on a fresh batch of the Asriel emulsion. Nirliq's upcoming bifocal lenses (there's an awful pun in here somewhere, Sherie just knows) are going to need it.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

There is (knock wood) only one more hurdle for Cecil and Carlos to clear during this vacation, and it arrives around noon on Boxing Day.

With some careful timing, Carlos arranges to be out for a drive with Cecil when Mike's family arrives. "You know you're doing great with the family so far, right?" he asks, in between showing Cecil the schools he went to as a kid, and the house he grew up in. "Even if you don't win over...certain people...by the end of this, it's not a problem. You've earned more than enough approval already."

"I will keep it in mind." Cecil scratches behind Khoshekh's ears. "Do you think...does your father like me? I know your mom does, but your dad, he hasn't really...talked to me. At all."

"No, no, that's just how Papi is," Carlos assures him. "He's never been much of a talker. Nothing to do with you."

Carlos's little brother's car is in the driveway when they get back, complete with the lush trailer hooked to the rear. Even the most generously adapted single vehicle wouldn't give Mike's family enough space to travel with his wife and her daemon: an okapi, one of the largest animals it's possible to settle as. (Outside of Night Vale, anyway. Cecil's mother's tualapi, if Carlos's sense of scale was right, is two or three times that size.)

Carlos's sister-in-law tends not to move around a lot in houses that aren't built for oversize daemons, and sure enough, he finds that May has set herself up in the living room, catching up with Lena and Wes. She gives him a frosty, perfunctory smile as he introduces her to Cecil.

"Is that Carlos I hear?" calls a friendlier voice from upstairs, and Carlos is thrilled to have the excuse to lead Cecil out of danger. Mike gets a start when he sees Cecil's eyes in person for the first time, and another at Khoshekh's legs...but recovers quickly, pushes his glasses up his nose, and offers a hand to shake. "You must be Cecil! My brother's talked a lot about you."

They're mid-handshake, Khoshekh touching noses with Mike's maned-wolf daemon, when the baby — or rather, the toddler — comes tottering out into the hall. He looks up at Cecil, squeals around his pacifier, and wobbles rapidly back to Grandma.

Cecil is starry-eyed. "She is adorable. Gosh, how do you keep up?"

"He," corrects Mike. "His name's Nate, and I can tell you one thing, it takes a lot of caffeine."

"...Uh-huh." Cecil looks between Mike and Nate, brow furrowed, then rests his hand on the small of Carlos's back and taps the request for help. "So...he's a boy? You're sure?"

"They're sure," says Carlos gently.

In the moment he says it, he's confident. In the next breath, he's remembering how everyone in Night Vale can look at a detached adult man's hand and think ah yes, obviously that's a little girl. And they're right. Is his baby nephew actually his trans baby niece? And only Cecil has any way of guessing it, because Nate is sixteen months old and doesn't even understand the concept of pronouns yet?

Mike doesn't have a chance to notice Carlos's hesitation, because that's when the twins barrel into view. "Hi, Uncle Carlos! Merry Christmas!" exclaims the straight-haired twin.

"Dad said we couldn't have the rest of our presents until you got back," adds the curly-haired twin.

"Well, that was very nice of him, not leaving us out," says Carlos. Sinking into a crouch so he doesn't tower over the boys, he adds, "This is Mr. Cecil. Your parents told you he would be here, right...?"

After a brief discussion of when it's good to keep secrets — the twins have been cautioned against hiding anything from their parents, but they understand that their uncle is famous, and have watched enough superhero movies to know how secret identities work — Carlos reveals that Cecil is his boyfriend. The curly-haired twin looks like he's not sure what to make of that, until the straight-haired twin stage-whispers, "It's because they're homosexuals."

"Ohhh."

"Your uncle said you were interested in five-headed dragons," puts in Cecil. "Is that still true? Because I happen to know one, and I have a bunch of photos...."

"Yeah!" exclaims the straight-haired twin, daemon bouncing on her paws as an excitable terrier puppy.

The curly-haired twin is more pragmatic. "Presents first, though, right?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

With gloved hands, Nirliq's colobus daemon fits the modified Atal lens into its setting. Quentin plugs a cord into his tablet and flips the power switch. Sherie watches, holding her breath.

The pile of circuits looks like the guts of a small, disemboweled robot. Pushed together, it would be about the size of Sherie's doubled fists; it could fit inside one of their Strex-provided Rusakov meters twice over. The lens itself is no bigger than a nickel. Nirliq's daemon has been doing a lot of the handling because he has the thinnest and deftest fingers.

"We're connected," whispers Quentin.

Sherie hugs her mongoose daemon under her arm. "Does that mean it's working?"

"How am I supposed to know that without any numbers? Hang on."

The window open on his screen is a command prompt: bare-bones, no graphics, just rows of text full of codes and shortcuts Sherie isn't familiar with. Right now the only line she recognizes is Connection attempt successful. Quentin taps out a mix of numbers, letters, and hyphens, and hits enter.

A number appears on the newest line. A high one, given the Rusakov concentration Sherie has normally observed in this area, but not outside the realm of possibility.

"We should be getting new realtime readings every five seconds," says Quentin. "Aha! There's another. What does the danger meter say? ...Oh, come on, hasn't one of you gotten the danger meter yet?"

Given that Nirliq has spent most of the day busy with lasers, Sherie takes it upon herself to go check the Gaillard Compass.

"I'll give you the bad news first," she says. "We're getting early indicators of another major dimensional-instability event. It looks like it's going to hit some time next week, and be bad. Real bad. I don't know if our handful of danger meters will give us enough coverage to keep on top of it."

"But the good news is that we just finished inventing the pocket Rusakov meter, right?" says Nirliq.

Sherie grins. "The good news is that we just finished inventing the pocket Rusakov meter."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

Early evening finds the adults relaxing in the living room, with hard cider and tequila-laced ponche to go around.

Everyone's imbibing except Mike (who has to drive later) and the toddler (who's conked out in Papi's lap). Even Dawn, testing the waters of what "hanging out with the grown-ups" feels like, has official parental permission to try a glass.

There aren't enough real couches and chairs to go around, so half of them are sitting on the carpet, including Cecil in front of Carlos's chair. He's melted against Carlos's legs a few drinks in, while Carlos is relaxed enough to play with his hair. They're not even getting dirty looks from May over it. Could she be softening toward them after all? (Especially after getting that lovely hand-carved okapi from Cecil?)

Dawn, cross-legged in front of Papi's armchair, ends up cutting into the relaxation. "So, Uncle Carlos, can we come visit you some time?"

"Um," says Carlos. "Visits might not be the best idea right now. Night Vale is even more dangerous than usual these days! We have the danger meter readings to prove it."

"Will it ever not be dangerous?" asks Mamá seriously.

"Probably not," admits Carlos. "But there are parts we're working on."

"Well, it doesn't sound so bad to me," says Dawn stubbornly.

Carlos's mouth actually falls open. "Where did you get that idea?"

"From you!" protests his niece. The jeweled-lizard daemon on her shoulder sits up straighter, nodding his head. "From everything you've said about it! Like how the cops aren't racist...how nobody's racist, except for that one guy who used to wear fake Skraeling headdresses and then died...nobody's sexist or homophobic, either...and the Magisterium doesn't get to harass you at all? Night Vale sounds great. Tell me one thing that's scary or oppressive about Night Vale."

Her parents and her grandmother, who have been privy to some of the details of Carlos's various Night Vale terrors, all start trying to talk her down at once. (Papi might even be joining in, if he hadn't fallen asleep too.)

Carlos, meanwhile, feels like his brain is spinning off in all directions at once. Where does he start?

Brush, tap, brush, brush, tap goes Cecil's hand against his leg.

And Carlos draws a complete blank on what to signal in reply. Dawn is fifteen, old enough to hear the truth and take a little responsibility for being more sensitive — but that doesn't mean Carlos has free rein to just unload his trauma backlog all over her — which is exactly what's going to happen, if he tries to answer while he's this scattered —

Cecil downs half his mug of spiked eggnog in one go, then says, loudly: "My tattoo is not ironic."

All eyes go to him.

"For those of you who have just arrived: it is a bar code. Here." Cecil turns to the side, so Mike and May can see as he touches the back of his neck through his current scarf (the multilayered, filmy-green one), then faces Dawn again. "A large corporation took over my workplace several months ago and placed them on all of us. Not...willingly. I had to be restrained."

It's the first time Carlos has heard that detail, though he certainly could have guessed. He splays one hand over Isaña's shell and leans forward to squeeze Cecil's shoulder.

"That can't possibly be legal," says Lena's husband after a moment. He and Lena are on the couch with Mamá, vervet and fruit-bat daemons sitting together by their feet. "You should sue."

"Oh, no, this kind of thing has been legal under local municipal codes for as long as I can remember," says Cecil. "But until recently, no employers were cruel enough to actually do it. With the obvious exception of Wal-Mart."

"God, I wish I didn't believe you," mutters Mike. (At the foot of May's chair, maned-wolf and okapi daemons cuddling around the side.) "But the last time I thought Carlos was exaggerating how dramatic his life is, I got shown up by a literal angel."

Carlos, for his part, pulls himself together enough to address his niece (now getting visibly hit with several days' worth of retroactive guilt at once). "All the perks you brought up are true," he says gently. "And Night Vale is the most theologically fascinating town in this world, and it's full of people I am proud to share a community with, and I love it dearly....but it is kind of a horrifying dystopia, okay? I'm not inviting any of you to visit until, at the very least, Cecil's evil employers have been overthrown. And in the meantime, it would help if you took up archery."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The conversation flows on.

So do the drinks.

That second one is probably part of why Cecil eventually announces, "There's somethin' else Carlos isn't telling you."

Carlos, who switched to non-alcoholic half an hour ago, gives his boyfriend a warning nudge with his leg. "Cecil...."

"No!" exclaims Cecil. "No, you are too modest. But I will brag about you if I want to. And your family should know." He gestures at Carlos with his (temporarily empty) mug, and addresses the group. "Carlos is a hero. He has saved the world. Literally all of the world. And given the way things are going, he will most likely end up doing it again."

There's a chorus of oooohs around the room.

"You're exaggerating," protests Carlos. "He is exaggerating!"

"But there's a story here, right?" prods Azalea. "You saved the town, or somethin'? C'mon, tell us a story."

Carlos squirms. "Um, no. It has actually been the literal world a couple times. But it's not like I saved it alone! I had help! There was this one time, I couldn't have done it without Cecil."

"Ooh," says Cecil. "The one with th' buzzing shadow things, right?"

"That's the one." Carlos tries to think of how to summarize for the family in small, non-technical words. "The, um, the bad guys blew this hole in the fabric of the world. And if it had been left open, all the Dust would've drained out."

"Wow," says Lena. She and her husband are leaning comfortably against each other by now, eyes half-lidded. "I've read that Lyra-and-Pan story. So — how'd you fix it? Or are the details gonna be too technical for us?"

"We reversed the polarity of the Rusakov particle flow," says Carlos, at the same time as Cecil says, "True love's kiss!"

"Oh, stop," groans May.

Cecil sits forward, elbows on his knees. "You got a problem?"

"Yes!" bursts out May. "Yes, I have a problem."

Mike gives his wife a cautioning look. "Honey...."

May ignores him. "A problem with you," she clarifies, eyes narrowed at Cecil. "Showing up at a family gathering. And, and people acting like you have some kind of right to be here, because of your...your sordid lust."

This actually gets a huff of amusement out of Cecil. "Just 'cause you think Carlos is hot without liking him as a person...."

May nearly chokes. "Excuse me?"

"Cecil!" hisses Carlos.

"It's not an accusation!" complains Cecil. "Not at all. People think you're hot all the time. It is theological fact."

It could have ended there. Defuse everything with a few laughs, gently sidestep the issue, and move the conversation back to safer waters.

But whatever force of will May has been using to hold all this back has snapped, and she's not going to be railroaded away from it that easily. "Theological fact is, your lifestyle is not normal," she snaps. "And don't you say I'm...blindly stuck on, on the official Church position. I have done research! Your relationships don't last, you get health problems, domestic violence, abuse — there are studies!"

"Magisterium-supervised studies," puts in Lena. "Obvious bias. Lots of research contradicts it. Big journals, all of 'em were just too scared to publish, until the Internet came along an' broke the ice."

"Or maybe the studies were wrong. Maybe you're biased." May shakes off Mike as he tries again to calm her down. "No! You are too! You're in denial — don't wanna face it — that there might be something wrong with your brother!"

Cecil shoots Carlos an alarmed look, and starts to tap give me some input against his calf. Gritting his teeth, Carlos closes one hand over Cecil's, shutting the plea down. "There is nothing wrong with me. Absolutely nothing. My sister-in-law is just having a hard time grasping the fact that I love you."

"You don't!" cries May. "Stop mocking real relationships by pretending you do!"

Okay, now Carlos is mad. There's a flurry of protest from the rest of his family, from Dawn decrying homophobia to Mamá insisting on how sweet they are together; he barely hears it over the blood pounding in his ears. How dare she. How dare she.

Isaña hops off the arm of the chair and slides down his leg to the carpet.

"Oh, look," she says, loudly and deliberately enough to get everyone's attention. "I seem to have fallen. Cecil?"

Cecil, still frightened and confused at the direction this argument has taken, looks hopefully down at her. "Yes?"

"Will you pick me up?"

Cecil catches his breath.

Lena, the only family member who knows what Carlos has been through, reacts first. "No," she snaps. "Don't say that. You've been drinking. Not thinking straight. Cecil, do not."

And Mamá's raccoon hops down from his own place on the couch, resting a paw on Isaña's shell. "You have nothing to prove, quirquinchito."

The rest of the room is at attention too, varying levels of tipsiness notwithstanding. Mike's maned-wolf daemon is on her feet; Lena's fruit bat and Azalea's tocororo have their wings poised, ready to spring into action. Carlos isn't sure when Papi woke up, but his shelduck daemon is standing too, feathers fluffed. It's all symbolic, since Cecil's daemon isn't here and none of them are going to pounce on Cecil himself, but the protective intent is clear.

Except — speaking of Cecil's daemon — there's a flurry of motion at the corner of Carlos's eye, and Khoshekh swirls into view beside him, head tilted in a wordless question.

Carlos offers a hand. The margay rubs his face possessively against it, then lands on the curved armrest and sits up smartly, letting Carlos skritch behind his ears and under his chin and whatever other patches of fur Khoshekh aims under his fingers.

"Whoamigod," blurts Dawn, the first to notice.

It kicks off a round of gasps across the room. None of them have much guard over their emotions right now — Carlos can pinpoint the exact order in which they spot what he and Khoshekh are doing.

"Everyone. Thank you for caring. But it's all right," he says, meeting his parents' eyes, then Lena's. "We stopped drinking forty minutes ago. We know exactly what we're saying. And we are not in danger from Cecil."

Slowly, hesitantly, his mother's daemon takes a few steps back.

At first Cecil doesn't move. "Dear Isaña," he says, a little breathless from the effects of his Khoshekh being petted. "Only if you're sure."

"We're sure," says Isaña. "I'm sure."

So Cecil cups both hands around either side of the little armadillo and lifts.

And oh, Carlos feels it, like someone just stuck a hook in his heart and yanked. His whole body jerks with the shock of it, fingers clawing through a tuft of Khoshekh's fur, lungs stuttering for air.

But it's not stomach-churning. He's not reeling, not horrified. The pain is clean — not twisted or sickening — hardly even bad, like the pain of being slammed in the kidneys or having your wrist broken — if anything, it's, god, it's like Cecil yanking on his hair in the middle of sex. Sharp and intense and yeah, it hurts — but not the kind of hurt where he needs it to stop.

He unclenches his fist. He breathes.

For a few seconds Cecil cradles Isaña close enough that she can nuzzle her face against his cheek. Carlos's whole world is swallowed up with the sensation — he barely remembers that there's anyone else in the room. He can feel Cecil's fingertips splayed across his shell...the heels of Cecil's hands catching his fur...Cecil's breath warm against his neck....

At last Cecil sets Carlos's soul back in his lap.

All the scorching intensity falls slowly, smoothly away, leaving him drained but smiling. Nothing's been torn out of him. He doesn't feel violated. They simply drift back to normality, light as a feather, Cecil gazing at them with heart-melting wonder.

Any study that says Carlos can't love this man to the bottom of his soul is empirically wrong.

Chapter 24: In Flight

Summary:

Carlos and Cecil return to Night Vale. Dana returns to the basalt fortress. The team works on a potentially-triumphant equipment upgrade, while Tamika's army coordinates with them to keep an eye on some new and extremely suspicious orange trees.

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana and Eustathias are done with walking.

Eustathias swoops low across empty desert, carrying Dana between her shoulders. It doesn't look like she should be able to fly. She has no wings, only six legs and a tail; and she's massive, her back broad enough for Dana to sleep soundly with no fear of falling off; so it would make more sense for her to be unable to fly. Nevertheless, she is airborne, cruising just a few feet above the rocks and the scrub. Her thick sandy fur is striped in a way that should break up her silhouette for any wandering eyes.

Dana, for her part, is still recovering. She has taken her hair out of its braids and finger-combed through it, coming away with handfuls of loose curls. The above-ground light has revealed the new anbaric shock scars across her skin: a fernlike pattern of darkened, reddened lines, fractaling across her neck and chest and down one arm, with a matching one lacing across the opposite leg. Dark circles mark her eyes; some of her burns are fading more slowly than others.

Also, she is grimy and sweaty and could probably murder someone for a cold shower right about now. Not just anyone — not, for instance, her mother — but one of her more annoying classmates, probably. And one of those monstrous Strexcorp experimental theologians, definitely.

She has told Eustathias everything. The captive. The experiments. The death. The cleanup crew saying things like oh, great, another one and tell somebody in management to up the dosage next time.

They will return to the basalt fortress, where they will tell more people. The word will spread. People will know. Dana will ferry her messages and make her connections, until she has gathered enough of an army that they can storm the heart of Strexcorp and tear it down, stone by stone.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

The morning after being touched, Carlos can't yet pick up Isaña without getting dizzy from the feeling that his human feet are the ones being lifted off the ground. And he spends every moment hyper-aware of where Cecil is — not like he's developing psychic powers, more like his existing senses have been recalibrated to devote half their energy to tracking the position of Cecil's hands.

It's distracting. Disorienting. But still not bad. Carlos knows bad, and this isn't it.

Mike's family is long gone; Lena's is engaged in frantic last-minute packing; and Mamá co-opts Carlos to help her strip the sheets from the pull-out couch and get them down to the laundry. Carlos guesses right away that it's an excuse to check up on him. Sure enough, once they're alone, his mother's raccoon daemon sidles up next to Isaña.

"You're all right, tesoro mío?" he asks. "No delayed...reactions, after last night?"

"We're okay," says Isaña. "I'm not saying I could do it again any time soon...but I promise, we'll be fine."

"If you're sure."

"Did you know, there are a surprising number of people on record who have been able to consensually touch each other's daemons?" adds Isaña. Hopefully their mother won't ask when they found the time to do a bunch of research on this. "Mostly couples. Or people who have been through, um, extreme danger together. Or both! We can find some documentation on the case studies, if you're interested...."

"That won't be necessary," says the raccoon gently. "I believe you. It's...quite the feeling, isn't it?"

Carlos looks with a start at his mother over an armful of crumpled bedspread. Has she...?

"Only once," her daemon tells Isaña. "When your father was in the hospital, after the accident. You remember."

(As if Carlos could forget The Accident. He'd been sixteen, and most people do have clear memories of that age, no matter what Cecil thinks. A car crash, multiple surgeries, their grandparents flying in all the way from Upper California to take care of him and his siblings for the duration...Papi had pulled through in the end, but his chances were frighteningly narrow in those first few days.)

(...teenage Carlos made a lot of graphs tracking the specifics.)

"It was before they started allowing you children to visit. He was in more casts than you probably got to see. They had a basket for his daemon next to the bed, but after they woke up, she wanted to be closer. So your mother picked her up, and set her at his side. Then I climbed up, and...I sat with him too. For a little while."

Isaña is rapt. "You never said."

"It's hardly the kind of thing you can talk about," points out Mamá's daemon. "I think it may happen more often than anyone realizes."

They carry the bedding downstairs, passing the dining room, where Carlos gets a glimpse of Cecil sitting with Papi. Having a version of this same conversation, perhaps? Or maybe this is just the day Papi tells Cecil out loud that he approves.

The raccoon daemon chuckles as they descend. "Although...to be able to do it out of the blue, when neither of you are in a desperate situation, when you just want to show up your rude sister-in-law...! I don't think that is common at all."

"It wasn't just that!" protests Isaña. They won't claim to be so pure-hearted that it wasn't a factor, but..."She was also scaring Cecil."

Carlos hangs around the laundry room while his mother sets the dials, gazing absently at the bloodstone circle. When the washing machine starts rumbling, she comes to stand beside him, following his gaze.

"I won't ask you not to go back," she says. "Your beloved horrifying dystopia seems to need you."

Hands in his pockets, Carlos nods.

"But if you ever need to get away...and you aren't being chased by anyone competent enough that stopping by your family's homes would get you caught...you come straight here, understand? You can always come here. And so can Cecil."

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Lena and her family are finally about to hit the road, there's a lot of hugging and back-slapping (for the humans) and nose-touching (for the daemons) all around. Cecil hangs back at the edge of things, until Dawn breaks from the group and goes over to shake his hand. "It was really nice to meet you, Uncle Cecil."

Lucas is sullen about only calling Cecil that now, and not days ago when he brought it up. Young Rosa, meanwhile, is happy to go with it, giving Cecil a polite hug and a whispered thanks for everything. As she rejoins her parents, Lena says, "Rosa, hon...your daemon...."

(The unsettled daemon next to Rosa's feet is currently about Isaña's size, rusty orange, and generally reptilian. But he has the wrong gait for a modern lizard, and there's a distinctive double row of plates sticking up from his spine.)

"...is he, um, a stegosaurus?"

"No, Mom, I'm an Acko," says Rosa's daemon.

"It's a Tyrannian petpet," adds Rosa by way of explanation. "Hey, can you be any color? Could you be a Christmas Acko?"

"Oh, good idea," says her daemon, and flips colors. He's now bright green, wearing a tiny Santa hat, and the rows of plates have changed into two multicolored rows of Christmas-tree lights.

Lena looks helplessly at Cecil, then at Carlos, who shrugs. "You heard what they were just calling Cecil, right? Otherworldly daemons seem to run in his family."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

A trio of yellow Strexcorp gyropters flies over a field of trees. They're unmodified, unbranded, and completely refurbished from their unintended crashes a few weeks earlier. To the black-eyed security officers patrolling the borders of the field, there's no way to guess that this isn't a company-approved flyby, but a tween rebel spy mission.

The speaker in front of Tamika crackles. "Looks like normal trees to me," reports the Weird Scout piloting the gyropter to her left. "Not normal for the middle of a desert, but, you know, normal for other places."

"Last month, this was an imaginary corn field," points out Josh Craton (also known as Agent J1, of the experimental theology liaison team), the pilot at Tamika's side. "All dry, cracked, rocky ground, far as the eye can see. Normal trees don't grow that fast."

A crackle from the third gyropter, and Megan Wallaby, Agent M, taps out a verdict in Morse. TREES FROM ANOTHER WORLD. MUST HAVE COME HERE THROUGH A PORTAL. MUST BE WHAT THE DANGER METERS ARE SENSING.

"Can't be that simple," says J1. "The experimental theologians say the danger is still ahead of us, and the trees are already here. Maybe they were just a test of Strex's latest world-to-world transmission equipment. Or they could have been put here as cover for whatever they're sending in next."

"Or maybe the trees are gonna get dangerous," says Rashi. He fills the entire back seat of the gyropter, breath warm on the nape of Tamika's neck. (J1's daemon, trying to take up the smallest possible amount of the space left, is perched on one of his horns as a monarch butterfly.)

"Let's do a low pass and take some photos," decides Tamika. "Set up a meeting with the experimental theologians in a couple of days to let them know what we've found out. In the meantime, I'll put together a library infiltration team so we can pick up some books on dendrology."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narraganset.

Cecil, Carlos, and Azalea catch the same train into the city, and end up together at Trimountaine International, hauling their baggage into one of the aerodock's glass-and-steel elevators to get up to the departures level. As it rises, they get their first sight of the other people in line.

And the extra security officers hanging around.

And the crowd of about a dozen people with cameras and microphones.

Must be some celebrity traveling today, thinks Carlos, inanely enough.

Luckily, Cecil is faster on his feet. "Carlos, let go of your suitcases," he says. "Isaña, you two have your ticket, right?"

"It's in our backpack," says Isaña from the floor.

"Good. You can go straight to security. Azalea, neither of us know Carlos, got it?" He pushes his dark glasses up his nose. "We're just a couple of ordinary civilians taking our baggage to be checked in. Take this suitcase, I'll get that one."

The two of them barely manage to get clear before the first reporter notices Carlos, and the press descends.

"Dr. Ramirez!" yells the voice behind one of the microphones being shoved in his face. "Why haven't you accepted any invitations from major religious thinkers to sit down and have a public debate?"

"Dr. Ramirez, what are your thoughts on the financial abuse allegations that came out about the College of Bishops yesterday?" demands another.

"Do you think it's appropriate for you to be taking a vacation over Christmas when you've done so much to destroy it?"

"Have you spoken with any angels lately?"

"Would you credit your recent professional advancement to angelic inspiration?"

"Are you ever going to criticize any religious institutions other than the Magisterium?"

"Why are you afraid to talk to the press?"

Carlos opens his mouth to say no comment, no comment, no comment.

"I don't have a lot of free time," he says. "An experimental theologian always keeps busy. And when I do have time to talk to the press, of course I don't talk to just anyone! You never know who's planning to turn around and pump everything into an article on Why Carlos Ramirez Is The Worst Heretic The World Has Ever Known.

"And why? Because I believe the theology I see evidence for, and can verify with tests and measurements, not the theology the Magisterium wants me to accept. That's it. People who don't like that want to turn it into something hateful, combative, joyless, nihilistic — but it isn't like that. Not at all!"

Somehow, nobody interrupts.

Maybe they're all being kept quiet by whatever force is keeping Carlos talking.

He talks about the joy of research, and the excitement of discovery. He talks about the sheer coolness factor in alternate worlds, how he's set foot in three of them and seen glimpses of many more. He tells the reporters how much it buoys him up to spend time with his family, how heartening it is to support and be supported by his loved ones.

Stepping behind the Ticketed Passengers Only Beyond This Point sign (enforced by several aerodock security agents), he tells them that he believes in the Republic of Heaven. With all due credit to Dr. Belacqua — who probably is the worst heretic this world has ever known, and would wear the title proudly.

"I cannot be sure how much of the truth other religions have access to," he says, folding up his coat and sending it through the x-ray machine after his backpack, then going right back to making expressive gestures with his hands. "The Magisterium did get the existence of angels right, after all. And not knowing is part of being an experimental theologian. But I do know a few things:

"We are free. We have this world, and it is wonderful. Possibility is manifest in every corner of the void of our reality! And our souls are our own — no gods can lay claim to them — no force has the right to separate us from them — death itself has no dominion!"

He gives the flashing cameras one last wave before he and Isaña turn and sail through the metal detector.

His boyfriend and his baby sister are already through. They keep to a short distance until they're safely around a corner, then Cecil says, in Spanish, "That was amazing."

"How long have you been rehearsing that one?" adds Azalea in the same language. (They're probably not the only Spanish-speakers in the aerodock, but anything that cuts off most potential eavesdroppers is a plus.)

"I haven't!" stammers Carlos. "I wasn't — I don't even know how — the words and the ideas were all me, I wasn't possessed or anything, but I didn't plan it! I just — couldn't stop talking."

"Of course you couldn't," exclaims Cecil. "That was un monólogo de diciembre."

Carlos's eyes widen. "You don't mean...that wasn't...."

"I do, and it was! Oh, Carlos, I'm so proud. You just spent a whole six and a half minutes being the substitute Voice of Night Vale."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana's ghost returns to awareness on the basalt fortress's platform.

Her body sits cross-legged in the center of the circle of angelic statues, each with a carved bloodstone for a face. Her daemon hovers in front of her, in the shape of something like a lavender rabbit with diaphanous dragonfly wings. "You were there. Lewis's hometown. I'm sure of it."

Dana shakes her head. "I saw no buildings. No signs of human habitation. I saw little white flowers, and felt a soft, warm breeze...." She's digressing; she pulls herself back on track. "I was in a meadow, Eustathias. Just a meadow."

They try again. Once, twice, three times. Dana sees many flowers, and finger-sized silver fish in a brook, and two moons hanging overhead in the daytime sky.

When she returns from the fifth visit, Eustathias cocks her furry head. "What if we have the timing wrong? We should try to send you to, not Lewis's home as it exists in our relative present, but his home shortly after he was taken."

They do.

Dana falls back into her body shaken, wide-eyed, the explosions still echoing in her ears. She saw great yellow ships hanging in the sky like bricks, saw the turrets of stone-and-silver buildings collapsing in on themselves, saw flames. So many flames.

She has always been too late to do anything for Lewis.

"But we can many things for Cecil. We will do things for Cecil," says Eustathias. "And maybe — if we are very lucky — maybe we are not too late to do something for Kevin."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Cecil has the alethiometer in his lap for much of the last leg of the flight home. Carlos leans on his shoulder and watches the needles spin. At one point Cecil flinches, but he's quick to reassure Carlos that it was just "the pressure change" of dropping back into Night Vale's psychic range.

"I'll need to stop by the station this evening and put some things in order," he adds. "Intern Maureen has been doing an admirable job of surviving our new management on her own, but I am sure she will be delighted about my return. Oh, and, apparently you need to get access to an ordinater with a more high-capacity power cord! And a very good surge protector."

The Night Vale customs agent confiscates all of Carlos's new books for review. He sends Cecil onward and sits around for the half hour it takes to process them. It's a headache, but nothing to worry too much about: he is positive none of them are on the local Forbidden Books list.

Sherie and Omero have brought the van to pick him up, so Carlos digs out his otherworldly presents for the two of them. For Sherie, a physics text, with a focus on portals. For Omero, the cellular biologist, a kit that lets you raise your own tiny organisms from freeze-dried eggs.

Omero turns over the box with interest, looking at the photo of the plastic aquarium, the company's cartoon mascots. "This world has aquatic primates?"

"No, the name's just marketing — they're common brine shrimp," says Carlos quickly. "Most of Will's world's biology seemed to match up with ours. I still wasn't sure I could risk bringing any alternate-world organisms back, but these come with a self-contained ecosystem, so you can restrict their influence on the local environment. And, look, it glows in the dark!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

They go straight to the chapel. Everyone except Köhler and Perle is back in town by now, and Carlos doesn't want to make the rest of the team wait for their presents.

Everyone sits around a hastily-cleared table in the main room: humans, daemons, and one sludge monster (now officially dubbed Tock; Carlos's vote was enough to give Sherie's idea majority approval). They have pizza — Big Rico's was purchased by Strexcorp a couple of days ago, but is still mandatory local eating. Any time someone finishes with a grease-stained napkin, they toss it to Tock, who happily gobbles it down.

"Oh, wow," says Henriette, after a few minutes of flipping through glossy diagrams of portal types neither she or Sherie recognizes. "I don't understand...most of this."

"They're more than a hundred years ahead of us. It's only natural," says Carlos. "We can work up to this! In some ways, we're actually more advanced than they were in this era. Listen to this: when they discovered mu leptons, they spent years calling them mu mesons."

"No!" breathes Sherie. "You're kidding." It even coaxes a smile out of Henriette, while Quentin, already taking the covering off his new anbaric flashlight to get at the futuristic power cell underneath, just cracks up.

"I already had a look through your book," adds Carlos to Nirliq. It's a journal on optics, complete with several studies on Atal lenses. "As far as I can tell, they haven't invented miniature Rusakov meters, electrum-based or otherwise. But I'm hoping that some of this data will give you a leg up in getting there...."

Nirliq looks at Sherie and Omero. "You didn't tell him?"

Sherie smiles. "We thought you ought to get your moment of glory."

It's glorious every time they reveal it to someone new — especially now that they've made the upgrade to full-blown mini Gaillard Compasses — and Carlos is the most visibly enthralled of all. He cradles their first pocket-size danger meter in his hands like a baby bird, while Nirliq explains that they have eight finished (and half a dozen more lenses ready to go), and Quentin pulls out his tablet to show off some of the accurate data they've collected.

"Only problem now is powering them while they're out in the field," finishes Quentin. "And getting the signals back here."

Omero, the only non-physicist in attendance, looks up from reading the instructions in his instant-brine-shrimp kit. His starling daemon is perched daintily on the box. "How did your old Strexcorp meters do it?"

Carlos grimaces. "Transmitted the signals via proprietary Strexcorp satellites, ran on the blood of the innocent."

"Oh."

"The danger meters use Hispania Nova government satellites, which are great except for all the outages." Quentin gestures at Carlos with a pizza crust. "NVCR's signal never gets blocked. Ask your boyfriend how they do it."

"I have been telling you, no," groans Henriette. She's the only team member so far who really seems worn-out, not energized, by the break. "Strex can pick up radio. No point tearing down all their meters if we just put up a new array they can tap into."

Nirliq crosses her arms. "Do you want both of us informed, or neither? You've seen the danger meter readings for the past few days. You know something big is coming. I don't want to go into that blind and deaf just to make sure Strex's hands are also tied."

"We've been going back and forth on this all day," murmurs Sherie to Carlos. "Whenever we're in a secure location, anyway."

(The chapel isn't always secure. It just happens that the team has been slipped a few details about secret-police observation schedules, and the building is currently being staked out by one of the officers who doesn't approve of her new management. Sherie explained about the danger-meter readings on the drive over, while one of their jamming devices was on.)

Carlos slips some kind of notebook out of his pocket and flips to a blank page. The big blue plastic rings make it look like a child's toy, but as he listens to the ongoing debate, notes on the pros and cons of different strategies start blooming on the paper in small, precise letters. Magic non-writing tool. That'll be useful.

Sherie honestly doesn't know what strategy she would rather Carlos go with. "I just wish there was some way to use bloodstones for this," she mutters.

It's an offhand remark, one she might have forgotten a few seconds later, until Carlos says, "Who says there isn't?"

The others turn to him. "Isn't what?" asks Nirliq.

"We can send completely secure mental communications using bloodstone circles," explains Carlos. "Why couldn't we set them up to send an automated signal to our mapping software in the same way? We'd have no problem with coverage — there's a circle in every home, every business, in all the parks and public buildings — as long as we get enough people to agree, why can't we use all the bloodstones?"

Startled, hope-filled silence.

For a few seconds, anyway. "Okay, sure, that sounds great, but our ordinaters aren't configured to receive astral-projection transmissions," says Quentin. "They don't even pick up FM transmissions, and that equipment exists."

"Could we have the data beamed directly into someone's mind?" asks Nirliq.

"There is no way one person's brain can take that much input," says Sherie firmly. "Remember me passing out while tracking patterns in the cracks in reality during the condo crisis? Or Carlos blowing out his eardrums from helping to reverse the Lazy Day effect? We have to be smart about this."

"Agreed," says Carlos. "We'll just have to invent some way of getting the ordinaters to accept the data."

Henriette snorts. "Oh, is that all."

"We can do it!" protests Carlos. "Sure, it might not be easy. But it can't be any harder than programming an alethiometer and running it off a floppy disk! And Mary Malone figured out how to do that, so there is no reason, absolutely none, that we shouldn't be able to figure out this."

 

-{,(((,">

 

They end up exploding the surge protector on one of their ordinaters. Carlos arrives at Cecil's apartment late into the night, and falls into bed still smelling like smoke.

On the plus side, now he knows what they need a better one for.

(Also, Cecil greets him wearing a knee-length nightshirt...and nothing else. That's a plus too.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

"First off, welcome back!" announces the Voice on the radio. No more auxiliaries: this is the permanent one, finally returned to his rightful place. "Everything is fine. Nothing happening, if you know what I mean. You shouldn't know what I mean. If you do know, you should forget. I'm not going to mention anything, and you're not going to hear anything. And both of us will fail to remember...."

This particular radio sits on the back of Michael Sandero's pickup truck, in the base of Niton Canyon, where a group of Advanced Readers are working on target practice. Also in the truck is a stack of paper cups and a couple of jugs with drinks, to keep the kids refreshed in between rounds.

Tamika is pouring herself a cup of lemonade when there's some kind of commotion down at the end of the line, and half a dozen weapons get swung around and pointed not at their artificial targets, but at a figure Tamika is too far away to see clearly.

She downs the lemonade fast, puts a hefty stone in her slingshot, and she and Rashi approach.

Turns out to be the right move. After some muted, distant conversation, a four-year-old turns and waves her slingshot in the air. "Tamikaaaaa! The lady wants to talk to you!"

Tamika doesn't unload her weapon, but she doesn't hold it ready to fire, either, as the other kids step aside. The child's estimate of a lady is a little off: the unfamiliar person standing here, translucent enough that the moonlight falls through her and leaves no shadows on the sand, is only a few years older than Tamika herself. Even though she has the scars of a battle-experienced woman twice her age.

"They tell me I've found the Night Vale resistance," says the mysterious teenager, nodding to Tamika's compatriots. "They tell me that if I have information about Strexcorp's plans and operations, and would like this information to be used against it, you are the one to talk to."

"Sounds about right," says Tamika. "Tamika Flynn. Number one on Strexcorp's most-wanted list. And you are?"

"Dana Cardinal." The former intern offers a hand to shake. "Number one on Night Vale Community Radio's most lost-in-space-and-time. But at least, now, not quite as lost as I used to be."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A dark-haired woman in a threadbare Night Vale Community College hoodie greets Carlos and his team (Quentin and Sherie for technical reasons, a Li Hua in case they need to start shooting) at the front of the Earth Theology building. Her daemon is a black-and-white bird with a red crest on his head...or so Carlos thinks, until he gets a closer look at the animal's proportions. It's a raptor, sure, but not in the modern bird-of-prey sense. No, that is definitely a small, feathery dinosaur.

(Or, you know, a Petpet. Anything is possible.)

The façade of the building doesn't look promising. The brick is crumbling, there's moss growing up the sides of the walls, and Carlos counts at least three shattered windows. He crosses his fingers for the inside to be more inspiring.

"Good to see you," says the woman, scanning her ID and holding the door for them to wheel in their carefully-packed ordinater. "I hope you'll find our equipment up to your standards."

At first glance, the interior looks just as bad as the front. There's peeling plaster in all directions, dust all over the floor, exposed wiring in the ceiling where the panels have fallen out.

"Are we sure this place gets power at all?" asks Quentin. "It looks like it's about to fall down around us."

"No building gets power," says their liaison. "Everything is crumbling. The apocalypse has come and gone, and whatever else you think you see is an illusion spun from the last vestiges of civilization as it makes its final collapse back into dust."

"Oh dear," says Sherie.

"Great," mutters Li Hua.

"Sorry if this is a rude question," says Carlos, "but did President Sultan actually send you to meet us?"

I most certainly did not, snaps a telepathic "voice". Let go of the experimental theologians, Simone, and go feed your cans or something.

"Aww," says the woman with the raptor daemon — Simone Rigadeau, evidently. "Do I have to? I even found them a room with enough structural integrity that the floor won't collapse under their feet!"

The team backs out of the building with no small amount of relief, just in time to be met by Sarah Sultan's daemon. He's a cavy — a large rodent built like a rabbit, but with skinny, almost deerlike legs — wearing a bowtie in NVCC colors, and ferrying a matching tote bag which contains a smooth, fist-sized river rock.

That'll be the president herself. "Thank you for agreeing to work with us this closely," says Carlos, as she leads the team and their equipment into a far more modern-looking building, with active students working in the rooms and the most up-to-date sigils on the walls. "We couldn't appreciate it more."

I'm sure you could if you tried, says President Sultan. Start by convincing your boyfriend to quit blacklisting NVCC's press releases. I drew one caricature of him. One! And it was hilarious. It's hardly my fault the man has no sense of humor.

 

-{,(((,">

 

If Henriette didn't know this little Cathay restaurant had been bought out by Strexcorp, it would have taken her a while to spot the difference. The only obvious sign of its new ownership is the bar codes on the backs of the servers' necks.

Strexcorp publicist Zariya Thiébaut is waiting in one of the booths. Her dark-maned lion — a subspecies that never evolved in this world — fills the space beside her, using one saucer-sized back paw to scratch behind his ear.

She's kept sending Henriette chatty texts every week or so over the past few months. None of them nearly as defensive as That wasn't us. Mostly the kind of things you might send a casual research colleague, as if Henriette's going to start imagining they're buddies, as if at some point she might just forget that Thiébaut's company severs children.

Thiébaut thinks Henriette is a weak link. She thinks Henriette can be manipulated. Tricked. Used.

Well, it's long past time for Henriette to turn that around on her. Sure, a new Rusakov array will be a huge advantage for the team on the slim chance they can get it working, but even if they can, that's no reason to hang all their strategy-eggs on one basket. Or two baskets, counting whatever Tamika Flynn is doing. Three? Does Cecil have eggs of his own, unrelated to the experimental theologians or the Advanced Readers?

...The point is, they need all the baskets they can get.

(Henriette can do this. Sure, she does have some genuine vulnerabilities, but she'll just have to suppress them for a while. Besides, it's not like she's been drinking. She's had one drink, to settle her nerves. That's not drinking.)

Thiébaut smiles as Henriette takes the bench across from her, alpine marmot sliding into the normal-daemon-sized place under the seat. "There you are. I hope you don't mind that I already ordered, but I was beginning to think you weren't going to show."

"None of the clocks are real. You learn to live with it," says Henriette briskly, trying not to show how unnerved she is that Thiébaut's sweet-n-sour meat-and-vegetable dish contains rat meat. Which is still unambiguously rat-shaped. "But I didn't ask you down here to talk about punctuality."

"Indeed? Well, no matter which of Strexcorp's exciting corporate benefits you want to talk about, I am at your disposal."

"That's not really what I had in mind either." Henriette steeples her fingers on the tabletop. "Do you have a few minutes to tell me about a Smiling God?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie kneels in an NVCC bloodstone circle, a mini danger meter stationed between two of the stones. Not to brag, but if anyone on the team can attune them to interface with an ordinater, it's her.

In the next room, Quentin finishes hooking up the machine and powers it on, making sure to bypass the normal operating system. Instead it's supposed to boot from a flash drive, which they didn't so much program as hack together with magic (it came out as something that Perle, whose linguistic expertise apparently covers some basic programming skills, identified as a rune-based version of C++) and pray over.

Carlos has set up one of the team's own sets of bloodstones nearby, so he can interface with the ordinater while Sherie is working on the danger meter, and they can do astral-plane coordination. There's not much risk of being overheard — the college has its own security force, which, like the rest of it, is independent from anything Strex-owned — but it never hurts to keep in practice.

Running on the full faith and credit of the college's power grid, the ordinater hums to life.

Ten minutes later, nothing has exploded.

Ten minutes after that, Sherie is standing in front of the screen, watching a black screen with a short line of white digits in the corner. Every thirty seconds, the number blinks, and sometimes changes by a fraction of a decimal. The full-size Gaillard Compass they brought along, currently sitting on the table next to the monitor, calmly displays the same sets of digits.

"I can't believe we did it," she says faintly, one arm curled around her mongoose daemon. "I can't believe it's working."

Quentin pats Carlos on the shoulder. "You are some kind of mad genius, boss."

"We are all mad geniuses," Carlos assures him.

Sherie can't disagree. They're going to turn every building in town into a single, interconnected, minute-by-minute Rusakov monitoring array. This must be how the world's astronomers felt when the VLA was being set up. Or how Quentin and his fellow anbaromagnetic physicists reacted when INTERMAGNET came alive.

The number flickers once more. "Where's the data being saved?" asks Sherie. "How soon can we install our old mapping and analysis program on this...operating system, I guess, and start working with it?"

Carlos and Quentin look at each other. The expressions of wonder fade from both their faces.

Sherie frowns. It sounded pretty straightforward to her, but then, she only knows the barest details about how ordinaters work. (She still doesn't really understand what normal C++ is, let alone mystical runic C++.) "Is that going to be harder than I think it is?"

"Don't even know where to start," sighs Carlos.

"But we can totally figure it out," adds Quentin. "Something something your new hero something something alethiometer on a floppy disk, remember?"

"Right! All that."

The phone in Sherie's pocket buzzes with a text. It's one of the Book Club kids. "We're being summoned to a meeting with our small-but-dangerous friends," she tells her colleagues. "I bet we can ask them to put us in touch with a few Scouts with programming badges...."

"No, hang on," exclaims the mongoose in the crook of her elbow. "You know what we need to do?"

Carlos, and the armadillo at his feet, sit up straighter. "What?" asks Carlos.

And suddenly Sherie realizes what her daemon is getting at. "We need to convince them to let us borrow Agent M."

Notes:

It's your author's birthday today! So if you've been thinking of lavishing gifts on me but were afraid it would seem too weird, here's your excuse.

The complete set of Cecil-meeting-the-family art: Carlos's sister's kids; the sisters and Mamá; the brother, his kids, and Papi.

Dana has Lichtenberg figure scarring. (It'll fade after a few days, which is a shame, because it looks really cool.) Simone Rigadeau's daemon is an Anchiornis huxleyi.

Finally: shoutout to the 10 new Neofriends I've gotten from this fic.

Chapter 25: The Company and the Orange Trees

Summary:

"The Council will recall who stayed in town to spread the warning to all its citizens of the encroaching pieces of void, long after they had punked out without so much as a word."

Night Vale.

Carlos keeps an eye on the Gaillard Compass as Quentin turns the corner and takes a spin through the Raúl's parking lot. "The building is the center of things. I'm almost sure of it. FUs are spiking in that direction."

They put the danger meter on a cart and wheel it around back, just to be sure. Quentin's attention is drawn to the giant hole in the otherwise empty plot of grass. "Where did that come from? Or is it just another Night Vale mystery?"

"No, we were there for that one," says Carlos. "Earlier this year — wait, it's last year now — a portal opened underground. During a Boy Scout ceremony, in fact. We had just finished the prototype danger meters, so we knew it was coming, and managed to redirect events so that very few people fell through."

"That was how I got one of my favorite specimens," adds Li Hua with a fond sigh.

Today's danger zone is definitely inside the grocery store. Or rather, one of today's danger zones. Henriette is out with Nirliq and Omero, trying to pinpoint another suggested by the danger meter located near the House that Doesn't Exist. Some kids from the theology liaison team have been loaned one of their extra meters, and are using that one to keep tabs on a third, at the mysterious new orange grove out on John Peters' farm.

"Police!" calls Carlos as they get back around to the front of the building.

A manhole twenty feet away pops up, and a balaclava-clad head pokes out. "Need some help, Dr. Perfecto?"

"We need to clear out this building, and quarantine the area," says Carlos. "Not indefinitely, just until this danger has passed. Our instruments will tell us when. Is that something you can manage for us?"

The secret-police officer hunches their shoulders. "Well, um...."

"Please?" adds Quentin, with his sweetest smile. His flying-squirrel daemon bats her eyes. Isaña tries to do the same.

"Listen, it's not that I wouldn't love to," says the officer, fidgeting in place. "It's just...we've got guidelines, you know?"

Li Hua puts her hands on her hips. "Since when do you not have complete autonomy to lock down whatever buildings you want?"

"Since new management! We need direct orders from the top before we can take any action that might interfere with a Strexcorp product launch."

Carlos frowns. Then he whips a spyglass out of his pocket and strides through the building's sliding doors.

His eyes are dazzled by wall-to-wall orange juice.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette and company have traced their own focal point of danger to the City Hall parking lot. Specifically, the area occupied by the Green Market. Specifically, the orange stall.

Looking through an electrum spyglass backs up the danger meter's readings. Rusakov particles are draining slowly but steadily into the oranges. Whether they're getting sucked into another world or just disappearing into the void, Henriette doesn't know, and she's not excited about finding out.

For about ten minutes, she, Nirliq, and Omero manage to warn customers away from the fruit, saying it's "for experimental theology reasons." That strategy gets shut down when Tristan Cortez, market president and current bearer of a Strex-employee bar code, confronts them. "You are scaring away customers!" he snaps, kangaroo-rat daemon nodding on his shoulder. "If you don't leave peacefully, I won't hesitate to bring in security!"

The theologians back off to regroup. "What next?" asks Henriette. "I am open to ideas."

"Recommend we petition City Hall," says Omero. "Call for a ban on oranges and orange by-products."

Of course. Their offices are right there. "Good. Good idea. Bet the Council could pull it off in a few hours if we give them the right motivation."

"And in the meantime, we should try to track who buys them," adds Nirliq. "Maybe we can warn them later. Or at the very least, monitor the side effects."

That's smart too. "I like it. Can you do that, while Omero and I do the other thing?"

So Nirliq gets out her tablet, improvises a quick spreadsheet, and plants herself by the orange stall to ask for names and phone numbers. Food preparation, to a lot of Night Vale citizens, is an exotic mystery; nobody's going to find it suspicious that their local theologians would be studying it.

Henriette and Omero, meanwhile, let themselves in through one of City Hall's windows. Omero's starling daemon flies easily through; Henriette has to carry Clotère. (The alpine marmot feels heavier than usual. Hopefully that just means they ate too much during the holidays. Or didn't get enough exercise. Or she's coming down with something.)

When they reach the Council chambers...the room is in chaos. Dozens of starlings — not the glossy blue-violet species of Omero's daemon, not daemons at all, just common black speckled birds — are flapping and squawking around the air, while a bunch of reporters hide under chairs, waiting for Leann Hart to dispatch them all with her axe. A handful go speeding toward Henriette and Omero — they duck — the birds zoom over their heads and swirl off down the hall, with frantic cheeps and cries.

A young woman with thick red-orange curly hair manages to crawl out, throwing herself into the hall. "Close the doors!" she hisses in Spanish. "Hurry up!"

Omero hauls the heavy door shut. "We're sorry," he says in kind. "We didn't mean to interrupt."

"You're not interrupting. The meeting's over," pants the escapee, leaning against the podium of a marble statue to catch her breath. On a closer look, she's even younger than Henriette thought at first glance. Might not be out of high school yet. The daemon by her side is a striking black-and-tan rabbit with bright, alert eyes. "Hope you didn't want the Council, because they're gone."

"Gone?" repeats Henriette. "What do you mean, gone?"

"Se fueron. No están. Huyeron." She even switches briefly to English, long enough to say, "They are gone."

"I know what the word means! Where have they gone? And why? You're a journalist, aren't you? Answer the key questions!"

"I'm not a journalist! I'm trying to survive an NVCR internship, but that's not the same thing." The intern gets to her feet, and flashes a radio station ID that names her as Maureen. "All I can tell you is that the Council has left town. They didn't give much of a reason why. If I had to guess, I'd say it was because they're miserable cowards. Anything else you want to interrogate me about before I go back to the station?"

Henriette massages her temples. "No. No, that's fine. I'm sure you have important work to do."

Maureen snorts in disapproval. "I wish. The next five things my boss has me doing all involve making gifsets of...well, of your boss."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos meets up with Cecil at the White Sand over his lunch break, more to do confidential communication than anything else. Cecil sits in the booth with his legs swung up over Carlos's lap, their daemons cuddling on the opposite bench, while Carlos kisses his temple and whispers in his ear: sweet nothings like "you have to warn people away from buying any oranges or orange by-products. We know for sure that Strexcorp is trying to come up with an energy-efficient way to travel between worlds — this is another one — and they're using us as guinea pigs. If it goes badly enough, we might have another buzzing-shadow plague on our hands. Or worse."

"Oh, Carlos," says Cecil with a giggle, before nuzzling his neck and whispering, "What should I say? The way things stand right now, I can't risk announcing flat-out that my bosses are doing immoral and dangerous tests on us! The daring rooftop escape gambit isn't going to work twice."

Carlos swallows a groan of despair. (They're supposed to be putting on a show of non-subversive romantic cuddling. Despair does not fit the image.) "I don't know. I don't know! Say that oranges aren't supposed to grow in the desert. Say I've put out an important theological alert against them. Make up whatever details you think sound most convincing."

"Mmm." Cecil runs his fingertips down the front of Carlos's shirt. "Dear Carlos, are you suggesting that I invent and falsely attribute quotations? Because I know we're trying to enable an anti-corporate uprising, but I do have journalistic ethics to uphold."

"I'm not saying you should do it in general," murmurs Carlos. "But if it's me...you have permission, okay? I mean, I trusted you to touch...I trusted you to pick up...god, Cecil, of course I trust you to put words in my mouth."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie kneels in the bloodstone circle in the NVCC technical services building, and, at the same time, stands beside the ordinater. Every ten minutes or fifteen minutes, a new connection request lights up her mind. She verifies the validity and patches it through, reciting the address out loud. "127 Ouroboros Road."

Megan Wallaby types it in. With her daemon, Isidorus, in the form of a prehensile chimpanzee foot, they can enter text faster than most adults Sherie knows.

They've made appeals to the PTA and the local small-business owners' association, and are hoping for approvals for everywhere from the White Sand to City Hall. In the meantime, they got the go-ahead from Tamika to start with Book Club kids. To keep the data secure, so Strexcorp can't get it and use it to track down the homes of the resistance, the ordinater isn't Internet-connected; every card or cable that might let it pick up an anbaric signal outside itself has been removed or shut down. It stands alone.

In between entering the new data, Megan and her daemon work on programming. Not long after she first got her hands (or rather, her whole self) on the keyboard, she had it displaying a streamlined text-based interface, with a table of addresses, numbers, and searchable timestamps. By now it's a plain set of graphics: a pixelated black-and-white map of Night Vale's roads on the left, the latest readings (in a list long enough that it needs a scrollbar) on the right, and a set of graphical control buttons along the top.

Granted, the control buttons have labels from the mind of a second-grader, including MAKE SHINY and INZOOM and THING and OTHER THING. But Sherie can figure out what they do and have the technical terms put in later.

Megan raps on the desk with her knuckles to get Sherie's attention, then bounces on her wrist and points excitedly to the screen. It's not just black-and-white any more. There are pixel-y spots of gold all over the map.

"Oh, well done!" exclaims Sherie. "This is beautiful. Li Hua, we have color now!"

The attendant Li Hua paces in front of the window, occasionally peeking between the blinds at the quad outside. Her wren daemon is perched on the sill. "Sure, great, exciting. When do we get my work out of the chapel and set up safely over here, huh? I'm not just a pretty face with killer machine-gun aim. I have PCR cycles to run."

"I don't know. It's not my call. You'd have to ask Carlos."

Li Hua's daemon flies to her shoulder, and Li Hua herself comes over to the ordinater table...not to look at the screen, but to pick up Megan by the wrist. "I wonder if this kid has the standard DNA of an adult man? Or is this not a birth defect, and she really doesn't have the code for anything other than a detached hand?"

"Put her down!" orders Sherie. Poor Megan is flailing in the air, twisting in Li Hua's grip, fingers clawing helplessly at nothing.

"Relax, I'm not hurting her," says Li Hua. "Let me just take a skin scraping. A small one! She'll barely feel a thing."

If Sherie was physically present in the room she would make Li Hua let the poor child go. The geneticist may be a couple of decades younger and faster, but she's also short and skinny, while Sherie has a bit of weight to throw around. "We don't have parental permission. And you're scaring her. Tamika will never trust us again if we traumatize one of her agents. She might even come after you in person."

That gives Li Hua pause. "We don't have to tell her. What's the hand going to do, cry about it?"

"For one thing, Megan is fluent in Morse code. For another, even if she wasn't, I'd tell. Put her down."

With a sigh, Li Hua sets the writhing detached hand back on the desk. Megan immediately scrambles behind the monitor and grabs the cords, while Isidorus joins her, turns into some kind of bear or big-cat paw, and flashes her claws.

(Megan has a same-gender daemon. Sherie has no idea how anyone managed to determine this. She just goes with it.)

"I'm very sorry, honey," says Sherie in Spanish, dropping into a crouch so she's on a level with the girl. (The edge of the desk goes right through her astrally-projected collarbone.) "Li Hua gets carried away sometimes. She won't really hurt you. No one on the team will let her."

Megan shivers.

"You're doing a great job," continues Sherie, as soothingly as possible. "Do you want to take a break? While we wait for the next signal, do you want to play a game?"

The child's white-knuckled grip eases. Hopefully that means she's interested.

"Li Hua, put your tablet on the desk," says Sherie, "and show the girl how to open Bejeweled Blitz."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Adam Bayer, weekday shift manager at the Raúl's, pulls a spatially-impossible number of oranges out of his apron pocket and then vanishes before Carlos's eyes.

No buzzing shadow-being. No residue at all, according to the combined efforts of the danger meter, the electrum spyglasses, and human senses. There's nothing left for them to have any hope of restoring. He's just...gone.

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Henriette and Omero get back to the market, the woman who had been standing behind the orange cart is gone. There's a new one in her place — this one wearing a dark suit with a blood-red tie, bearing another Strex bar code on her neck, and accompanied by a "frog" daemon with plastic skin and an extremely obvious battery slot.

Nirliq and the Strexcorp bio-mechanical salesperson are engaged in a fresh argument. Nirliq contends that the original saleswoman was sucked into the void, undoubtedly an effect of contact with the oranges. The current salesperson argues that she merely took ill, and was sent home, very quickly, to avoid her contagion damaging everyone else's productivity.

Small mercies: Tristan, when he comes over to mediate, doesn't simply throw them out. "I've got her home number," he tells Nirliq, brimming with exasperation. "I'll call, she'll explain that she's off getting chicken soup and bed rest, and you'll be satisfied, right?"

"That might not work," says the smiling biomachine. "I'm afraid she's lost her voice."

Tristan frowns. "So...her daemon will have to pick up instead? I don't understand the issue."

The Strexcorp salesperson doesn't answer. She just keeps smiling. Her expression reminds Henriette of a video stream with Buffering.... splashed over a frozen image. Could she be running on programming developed for a daemonless universe, that didn't get updated before she was sent here instead? (It sure would explain how fake her own daemon looks.)

Omero fills in Nirliq about the Council leaving town, while Henriette watches Tristan make the call.

To her complete lack of surprise, nobody picks up.

"Oh, dear," says the biomachine pleasantly...then grips the wooden slats of the orange cart and tips it over.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos and Quentin do their best to get a record of everyone who leaves the Raúl's with oranges or orange juice. The former is a lot easier: most of the people who pick up oranges vanish before they reach the checkout line.

"Contact with inanimate objects doesn't do it. The orange juice cartons seem to act as an insulator," says Carlos to Köhler over the phone. He finally got a low-budget headset, so both hands can be free while he listens through headphones and talks into a cheap mic. "But once there's been contact with a human, they activate, and any objects touched after that can blink out of existence along with the person. Not enough evidence to tell if it's sentience they're responding to, or the fact that we're animate, or organic, or what."

"I will spread the word," says Köhler from the chapel. He's there partly to work on assembling new mini Rusakov meters, and partly to make the building look active. Don't want to give their observers any obvious clues that they're setting up important operations in a completely different location.

When a still-existing floor manager tells Carlos and Quentin they can't keep lurking on business property without buying anything, Carlos lets himself into the kitchen-equipment aisle and picks up a new set of tongs, then a six-pack of fire (the last one on the shelf) (there isn't much of anything on the shelf, half of it is orange juice). He uses the tongs to safely triple-bag some oranges of his very own.

"Keep tracking people," he tells Quentin. "I'm going to go test whether these things burn."

 

-{,(((,">

 

One of NVCC's engineering faculty dropped by to give the theologians a radio, just in time for Cecil's show. It sits on the desk next to monitor of their custom-programmed ordinater. (Herschel Wallaby came by to pick up Megan half an hour before Cecil's show started, so their monitoring program is permanently stuck in a Bejeweled-Blitz-based graphic scheme.)

Cecil reports on John Peters' product-launch speech, and how reporters in attendance disappeared after catching oranges tossed into the crowd. He delivers the news of the rapid, recent, unannounced exit of the City Council. He reveals that orange trees are not native to deserts, and that he just received an email from Carlos providing more detail.

There's something a little off about that email, Sherie thinks. All of them are in the middle of dealing with a town-wide threat; Carlos may be easily distracted when it comes to Cecil, but not so much that he'd take time to chatter about Neftlix offerings and weekend bowling plans while people are vanishing. Right?

But the quote does involve warning people that the orange products aren't natural. And that one line, no me especializo en botánica o dendrología, soy un teólogo experimental, estudio la teología, that's certainly something Carlos would say.

Cecil cuts to an ad break. Sherie sinks back into her body for a minute, taking the opportunity to pet her daemon's spine. Then she takes a deep breath and focuses on materializing in the chapel, to see if Keith has any updates.

 

-{,(((,">

 

In the struggle and the scramble at the Green Market, with rogue oranges tumbling and rolling across the asphalt, Henriette and her colleagues learn several important data points.

The oranges' dormant disappearing properties are not activated by any of the grass sprouting through cracks in the pavement. Or by the rogue starlings that have escaped from City Hall and, in their disorientation, decided to land on some of the fruits.

They are activated by hitting a living person. Even through that person's clothing.

Tristan Cortez manages to shout a few last words as he flickers out of existence, setting the rest of the former co-op into action. The short man at the imaginary corn stand produces a crossbow; the man with the tail who's been dealing in carrots draws a rifle; the bushy-browed woman selling jam out of the back of her truck throws some of her jars, which apparently explode on impact.

Biomachines, it turns out, activate the oranges too. Even after being knocked into them by several aggressive, deadly-to-humans projectiles.

People use empty crates, baskets, and cardboard boxes to herd the remaining non-vanished fruit into a confined space. "Now will you believe these things are dangerous?" demands Henriette, who has retreated to the hood of the van and dragged her marmot daemon up there with her. (Nirliq and her colobus are safe on one of the weathered stone plinths that are placed randomly around the parking lot, bearing faded inscriptions too weathered to read. Omero — who was closer to the onslaught than either of them — has ended up in a tiny clear spot of asphalt, oranges sitting dangerously near his feet on all sides.)

The jam-selling woman (whose daemon is a squirrel...with bright purple fur) frowns. "Of course they're dangerous. It's all over the news. Haven't you been listening?"

Henriette nearly starts tearing her hair out.

"Hang in there, Omero!" calls Nirliq. "Don't move. They're almost to you."

"Understood," says Omero briskly. He's balancing on one foot, wobbling a little, forehead sheened with sweat. The starling daemon on his shoulder is huddled down low.

"How did you not get hit?" adds Henriette shakily, as a woman with curling horns and a salamander daemon pushes oranges out of the way, clearing a safe path. A couple more moments and it'll be close enough for Omero to step into...hurry, please, hurry....

"Negative, ma'am," says Omero, voice tightly-controlled. "I kicked them out of the way."

The implications crash into Henriette's own self-control, which has been dangerously fragile for a long time now, and shatter it completely.

"No!" she yells, choking on a sob. She's going to lose another teammate — watch him die right in front of her — to a piece of goddamn produce. "Why did you — you idiot — why didn't you run?"

She hides her face in folded arms, shoulders heaving, and soaks the sleeves of her chapel coat with hysterical tears.

To hell with sobriety. She's going to do with a bottle what Fleur did last year with the Whispering Forest: crawl inside and never, ever come out.

There's a hand on her arm, a smaller one on her daemon's back. Nirliq's voice says her name. Says calm down.

"I will not calm down!" wails Henriette. "I am having a nervous breakdown! I have earned it!"

"Omero is not going to die!" shouts Nirliq. "At least, not today! At least, not from this! He has an artificial leg!"

The implications of that are almost too slippery for Henriette's panic-washed brain to cling on to — but her daemon sees something, and yanks on her attention, enough that she raises her head.

The soldier-turned-biologist is walking safely toward the van, leaning on the shoulders of a heavy zucchini merchant. Well, not exactly walking. It's really hopping. His left pant leg hangs empty from the knee down, flapping in the breeze.

Henriette cries a little more, with relief now, as Omero sits against the hood of the van next to her and apologizes for not being clearer. He hadn't known during the kicking if it was sealing his doom or not, and after his prosthetic flickered out of existence but left the rest of him behind, it took most of his concentration to keep from falling over.

All the void-y oranges finally get swept into a heap, with crates piled over and around them. Safer than they were. Still not safe, even on a Night Vale scale....

Nirliq, meanwhile, tries to convince the remaining Green Market members to renounce their association with Strexcorp. It doesn't go well. "Strexcorp has extremely high quality standards," explains the man with the crossbow. "This is obviously the fault of choosing a business partner who didn't measure up."

"Ooh, that John Peters — you know, the local small-business owner with the orange grove," grumbles the man with the tail. "Sure hope Strexcorp drops that fellow from their lineup."

When Nirliq rejoins Henriette and Omero, her mouth is set in a thin, hard line. "I need the van," she says flatly. "You two can stay here and keep an eye on things or you can get in, but one way or another, I'm driving back to the House that Doesn't Exist."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh, that is great to hear. People at the Raúl's have stopped buying too," says Carlos into his headset. "The bad news is, I haven't found a way to remove the danger. Burn them to ash, and the ash will still make people disappear. As I found out after, completely by accident, spilling some of this ash on a Strexcorp store manager. In, also by accident, small yet precise increments that grew increasingly larger, so the data suggests that it's safe in quantities of less than three grams, but —"

Then he says, "Yeah, the juice is from John Peters — I know, the farmer — too. It's on all the logos, J.P.'s OJ, where the O in OJ is a bright cartoonish sun with —"

Then, "Wait, what?"

And then, "What do you mean, you knocked on the door?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Dear listeners...John Peters just came to visit," says Cecil, in a hushed, urgent voice. Like he's talking under his breath to someone beside him, or on the other end of a telephone line, rather than into a microphone that clearly plays his words in every room and every hall of the NVCR building.

In one of these rooms, a blonde woman with a duck daemon and too-sharp teeth listens. She is close to the studio; she could run to it in thirty seconds, if she wanted to help.

Cecil takes a deep breath. "I should talk with him. Maybe this is a good time for us to go to the wea— No!" He's not whispering any more. "Wait — stop — John? John — no!"

The blonde does not run. She does not leave the room at all. She leans back in her chair and smiles her too-sharp smile, as a soft jazzy piano forecast comes on.

"You don't know what you've done, do you?"

Lauren Mallard looks up with a start. She recovers quickly when she realizes she is looking at a person in an intern T-shirt. "You must be Maureen's replacement! I hope you aren't as bad-tempered as she was. Gosh, this place sure does act fast when an intern dies. Criminal lack of efficiency in so many areas, but when it comes to this...."

"I am not Maureen's replacement," says Dana. "I am former Intern, Dana Cardinal. You think your oranges banish people into the void? They do not. They send people to another place. My place."

Horror dawns in Lauren's eyes, only partly masked by her pasted-on smile.

"Maureen is with me," continues Dana, her confidence soaring at the proof that this was not, in fact, Strexcorp's plan all along. "Everyone who has vanished from Night Vale is with me. Most of them are safe. Some of them...well, some of them were your people. They aren't doing so well."

(She doesn't mention that they're gathering in the same world as Strex's interdimensional HQ. As far as she's concerned, the company doesn't need to know that.)

There's a whack and a thump from down the hall, in the direction of the studio. Dana smiles, remembering everything Maureen has told her about the last month here at home. "If you have also sent Cecil to join us, wonderful! Then I'll be able to keep a closer eye on him...and you, oh dear, I'm afraid, you'll lose track of him. Again. For good."

A muscle in Lauren's cheek twitches. She grips something under the desk that Dana can't see, and chants under her breath.

Without warning everything gets bright, brighter, brightest —

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Maureen is sitting cross-legged against the stone wall when Dana returns to consciousness. "How'd it go?" she asks, warily hopeful. Her keen-eyed rabbit daemon sits up at her side.

"It turns out certain Strex officials have the ability to boot my projection out of their offices," says Dana. Eustathias sits in her lap as something like a snake, long and blue-scaled and cool to the touch. "But up until that happened, it was very satisfying. What have I missed?"

It's a strange and refreshing feeling, the idea that she might have missed something by not being here.

"Lots of fighting over rooms," says Maureen with a shrug. "One of the PTA moms, apparently she's got Advanced Reader kids, almost punched this guy from the Green Market. And we've got a guy in a Raúl's apron who used to be an Eagle Scout, and who says he can get the plumbing working. So that could be promising. Because, no offense? You really need a shower."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The latest mental connection tapping against Sherie's isn't one of the kids. It's Cecil. Good to hear from you, she thinks. I was listening to the show, and I was worried.

Cecil's mental "voice" is hushed, dark and velvety. Never underestimate the efficacy of simply clocking someone over the head. Um, how do we do this? Carlos didn't say.

You're at the station, right? Give me the address, and then follow my lead.

A few minutes later, and with the help of some hunt-and-peck typing from Sherie's mongoose daemon's tiny paws (it turns out he doesn't have to stay in range of her body as long as he sticks close to her ghost), the NVCR bloodstone circle is feeding them data from the station's danger meter. They don't have many meters downtown yet, so this helps fill out an important gap in the Rusakov-level data. As usual, the station is more intense than anywhere in town.

After closing off the link with Cecil, Sherie has her daemon switch over to the Fatality Units view. (All the markings turn from cartoon sapphires into cartoon rubies.) Levels all over town continue to plummet back toward the local average, as the Strexcorp recall clears the deadly oranges and orange by-products from their retail outlets...and their subsidiaries' break room fridges.

The numbers are still pretty high at NVCR. Hopefully that just means the recall hasn't hit the station's break room yet.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Nirliq calls Sherie, who calls Steve, who calls someone else on the PTA, and pretty soon the van is heading toward the house of a family willing to loan them crutches. (Their football-playing teenager had one of his legs vaporized by the Shape in Mission Grove Park last year.)

Henriette is staring aimlessly out the window, eyes sore from crying, when her phone beeps. It's a text from Thiébaut:

Strexcorp makes several lines of high-quality prosthetic limbs for all species, body types, and limb configurations. Would your colleague like a complimentary prototype to test for us? This offer does not constitute any admission of culpability in his recent unfortunate accident.

For a couple seconds Henriette is baffled — the Strex supervisor at the Green Market disappeared before Omero's leg did; how did this piece of information get back to them? — except, oh, right, they own the secret police.

"Was that to us?" asks Omero from the passenger seat. "The deal's still on, right?"

"The crutches are still okay," says Henriette hoarsely. "But Strexcorp is officially ready to bribe you with a new leg. No mention of whether it'll be bugged, drugged, both, or worse."

She catches Omero's grimace in the mirror. "I'll take my chances with the VA administration."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I know I talked about dinner plans on-air, but could we change again?" asks Cecil over the phone. (Earnestly, apologetically, as if the plans he'd been talking about hadn't been 90% his own invention.) "I just have a sudden hankering for grabbing some fast food and stopping by the range for half an hour. How does that sound?"

"I can't," says Carlos. He's sitting on the front steps of the larger rental house, Isaña by his feet, watching the stars. "I'm really sorry, Cecil, I need to cancel tonight. It's been a stressful day, some things have come up with the team, and I can't just disappear on them right now." He hesitates. "...Bad choice of words."

"No, I understand," says Cecil reluctantly.

"Do you, um, do you still want to sleep over? I can text you when things settle down."

Cecil would. They trade I-love-yous and goodbyes, then Carlos pockets the phone and ventures back inside.

Omero and Quentin are in the living room, working with an ordinater and a folder full of medical documentation, trying to figure out if Omero can get a new prosthetic made and fitted at a treatment center in Kinlání or Black Hill instead of going all the way back to the States. (Quentin is doing the translation between English and Spanish. Omero handles the translation between English and medical jargon.)

Nirliq is going through Henriette's room. Perle is in the hallway outside, reading a book while sitting sentry over the bottles Nirliq has unearthed so far. (The book is her Christmas present from Will's world: a phonological history of how the Internet shaped and changed its English over more than a century.)

Henriette herself is at the kitchen table, staring listlessly into a mug of tea, with Köhler keeping an eye on her.

Carlos nods to the elder theologian. "I'll take it from here."

He sits across from Henriette. He leans on his elbows.

"An experimental theologian is usually fine," he says.

Henriette doesn't meet his eyes. "You should give my responsibilities to Nirliq. She's been more on top of...well, everything...than I have for a while now."

"She was my first choice too," admits Carlos. Nirliq may still be a grad student, but she's been consistently quick-thinking, brave, and coolly coordinated under pressure, all of which is more important in the middle of a war than a Ph.D.

"So what happens now? Do I...leave the project? Leave town?"

"Is there any way to keep Night Vale from killing you by inches if you stay?" asks Carlos softly. "Bear in mind that no one around here has ever heard of Alcoholics Anonymous; that all the doctors who could prescribe things like anti-anxiety meds are currently in the pocket of Strexcorp Pharmaceuticals; and that all the local therapists are cats."

"Mmhmm. I am," says Henriette. "I'm also bearing in mind that if I try to talk honestly with any US professionals about why I'm an emotional wreck who self-medicates with alcohol for her various fears, trauma symptoms, and bouts of existential despair, they'll start prescribing me anti-psychotics and throw me in a psych ward."

...now that she mentions it, yeah, Carlos can see that being a problem. "So, ideally, you would move somewhere with an active AA chapter, non-evil medications available if necessary, and someone with Night Vale experience so you can have honest conversations about it."

"Sounds about right. Any ideas?"

Actually, Carlos does. A lot of the survivors of the Night Vale team aren't great candidates for various reasons, from "didn't know Henriette that well in the first place" to "currently busy with taking care of a baby/managing a massive post-religious support movement/being a tree."

But then there's Adriana. Henriette's own former grad student. Currently working with machines that just might be the most theologically interesting manmade constructs in the world.

"Is that offer CERN made you still open...?"

Notes:

no me especializo en botánica o dendrología, soy un teólogo experimental, estudio la teología = I don’t specialize in botany or dendrology, I am an experimental theologian, I study theology

(hat tip to Idril_Isil_Gilgalad for Spanish help!)

New set of art-nouveau character portraits: Carlos, the Scholar; Cecil, the Anchor; Dana, the Walker. (More to come; requests accepted.)

Chapter 26: Deer Time Travelers

Summary:

Carlos's team re-organizes, and prepares for departures. Then Strex tries a thing with deer, leading to lots of fun with short-range time travel. Although, granted, when it involves Kevin showing up at NVCR in the middle of a mayoral debate, the only person having fun is Kevin.

(Warning for typical Desert Bluffs gore.)

Night Vale.

CERN is delighted to hear from Henriette. Her flight is scheduled to leave in three weeks. In the meantime, she's agreed to stick to office work, and pay regular visits to a highly-recommended local cat.

Nirliq accepts the corresponding offer to take a supervising role in Team Night Vale. The Harvard grant committee won't be thrilled about it — the whole team used to be made up of their schools' faculty and students, and now both of Carlos's seconds-in-command are from foreign places, Köhler from Heidelberg and Nirliq from Princeton — but they aren't going to override decisions about how to run a project that comes up with a new groundbreaking paper or invention every other month.

Carlos runs her through the basics of their budget, and a few other things, at the chapel. Then they go on a field trip out to the scrub lands, partly to check up on how that mysterious old oak door is doing, partly so they can talk unobserved and not worry about either misinterpreting the other's doublespeak.

"I'm really honored that you're trusting me with this," says Nirliq as they sit in the bed of the truck. Their colobus and armadillo daemons are in the shade underneath, aiming a danger meter at the door and watching the readings hover in place. "Especially since there are a few ideas I've been meaning to bring up with you."

"Go ahead."

"They're not strictly ethical. And by 'strictly' I mean 'when it comes to Strexcorp'. Nobody else gets screwed over, I promise."

"Sounds good to me."

Nirliq takes a swig of her ice water. "First of all: I'd like to try to convince the grant committee that your boyfriend is incorporated as a local bureau de change. We wouldn't mention that he's your boyfriend, obviously. Would sound too much like a conflict of interest."

Carlos frowns. "Cecil isn't getting paid in Spanish dollars anymore. And even if he was, he wouldn't have enough on hand to change for our entire team's budget in US dollars."

"So we only exchange as much money as he can afford to. And we take it in Strex scrip."

"...effectively giving Cecil his salary in real money again," realizes Carlos. "That is...that would be great. For him. And for me. But how is that not defrauding the grant committee? We'd have to make them think they're buying real currency, when in fact it's not worth the paper it's printed on. We might as well be buying Monopoly money."

"Monopoly money! That's a good one," says Nirliq. "The difference being that this monopoly...or at least, this wannabe monopoly...owns our chapel."

OH.

"Now, I don't know exactly how much Cecil makes," continues the accountant-turned-optical-physicist, looking remarkably calm for someone laying out a plan so devious. "And I'm not going to push you to tell me. But I have seen the exact rent for our research space, and I know what area of town Cecil's one-bedroom apartment is in, and I can tell you this: there is no way he's making more than we can spend."

"You're brilliant. Approved. Go for it." Carlos does know how much Cecil makes — they talked about salaries back when they decided to move in together, before NVCR's new management shredded their plans — and Nirliq is right. Which means the plans are un-shredded. In its eagerness to sabotage them in as many ways as possible, Strexcorp has tripped over its own feet.

It gets a smile out of her. Not a cunning, wily smirk, just a pleased-yet-professional smile. "I knew you'd like that one."

"And you said you had more? Because if they're all this good, I won't be able to approve them fast enough."

"I have one other proposal right now," admits Nirliq. "After we've smuggled all our essential equipment and research to safer spaces...the college, and whatever others we can arrange...I'd like to burn the chapel down for the insurance money."

Carlos stares.

"That's a figure of speech, of course."

Oh, good.

"Concrete doesn't burn very well. We'd have to come up with some other, materially-appropriate method of destruction. The important thing is that it's thorough enough to convince Strexcorp we've had a massive setback, from which we may never recover. And then we prove them right by renting a much smaller and cheaper Strex-owned space, and doing absolutely nothing of interest there."

"I can't believe you're serious," says Carlos faintly. He knows the stereotypes, but he's never known someone with a primate daemon to take "dangerously clever and ruthlessly underhanded" and embrace it quite this hard.

Nirliq is businesslike as ever. "If it's completely off the table, just let me know."

Carlos massages his temples. "I can't believe I'll think about it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Omero's insurance flat-out refuses to replace his leg for at least another six months. They're set up to cover the cost of a new one every 3-5 years based on standard wear-and-tear as evaluated by a specialist; they don't have any provisions for "unexpected dematerialization by citrus."

So he's leaving too. Carlos refuses to employ anyone who can't hit a minimum running speed when necessary. Not after the way they lost Brad.

Nirliq has the bright idea to send some of their biological samples along with him. They're trying to quietly shuffle their research away to safer places; why limit themselves to Night Vale when they can use this as an excuse to hand off the dragon feathers, Whispering Forest leaves, and the bodies of the Things Under The Carpet to Harvard itself?

Which leads to Carlos having long arguments on the phone with a sequence of private shipping companies, all of whom will transport biological material if properly packed, but refuse to enter the greater Night Vale area. "I'm sorry, sir, I don't make the policies," says a patient FedEx representative. "The place is cursed, and we won't go near it, and that's all there is to it."

Carlos is trying to talk his way up to a manager, so he can try to win them over by offering (a) more money and (b) the sworn protection of the Girl Scouts, when Cecil's warm and comforting tones on the office radio are interrupted. "Excuse me," says Carlos to the FedEx rep. "I'm going to have to call you back."

Cecil has been joined in the booth by his program director. Chirpy, smiling, company-loyal, occasionally-sadistic Lauren Mallard. And they're in the booth in the middle of a broadcast, so Cecil can't leave. He's cornered.

As if that weren't bad enough already, Lauren starts talking about Carlos.

"It sure was a good thing he was looking into our oranges, or we could have harmed a lot of people on our way to making a ton of money! So very much money," she purrs. "He’s a good theologian you have there. What’s his name again?"

"Carlos!" calls Quentin, thumping on the office door.

Carlos winces. "Can it wait?"

"It really can't! We've got this visitor, and...just come and see, all right?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

The visitor — an exact duplicate of Carlos, albeit in a different outfit, and with a lot more sweat — sits obediently in the chair the team directs him to, hands in the air. All together, the theologians (everyone except Henriette and Köhler, who are currently off managing the data at NVCC) are aiming two Atal spyglasses, one danger meter, and three firearms in his direction. He takes it in stride.

"We frisked him. No weapons," reports Omero.

"And he sure does look like you," adds Sherie, watching the visitor through a spyglass. "Earnest. Curious. Not evil."

"I'm really sorry to freak everybody out like this," says the döppelganger Carlos. "I swear, I'm not an imposter, a biomachine, a Sandstorm double, anything like that. Strex still can't make a fake this convincing. I'm just your Carlos from the future, okay?" Nodding to the real Carlos, he adds, "Don't get too excited about that — it's only two days in the future, so it's not like we've made any significant breakthroughs since I was you."

Carlos folds his arms. "You're saying I'm going to time-travel, and that's not a breakthrough?"

"It's not like it was under control!" protests not-Carlos. "I just...hit a deer." He turns to Quentin. "Sorry in advance about your car."

"A deer," echoes Quentin.

"It's Strex's next big thing. They try to make deer who can do controlled travel between dimensions. Instead, they end up releasing a line of deer who do uncontrolled travel of all kinds — time, relative dimension, and space. Last I knew Strex was recalling them, but not before one of them jumped out in front of the car while I was driving, and next thing you know I'm two days in my own past. On the other end of a conversation that is, I have to say, much less stressful the second time around."

"Then you won't mind us doing a few tests," says Nirliq. "Examine your DNA. Observe you in the Rusakov isolation chamber."

"Walk me past a magnet and see if it sticks. The works," says possibly-fake-Carlos. "I'd be happy to help."

"The past Carlos can safely pick me up," adds the associated possibly-fake-Isaña.

"Not helpful," says one of the Li Huas. "Both of me can hold both of my daemons. And one of us is a double."

"If he's that kind of double, he'll only share memories with the original Carlos up to the point when he was created," adds the other. "If he's really from the future, he'll have these memories now. Carlos! Think of a number, and commit it to memory for the next two days."

Carlos thinks of a number.

"Planck's constant," says not-Carlos.

"Lucky guess," says Carlos, and tries again.

"The speed of light. Pi. Oh god, I'm such a nerd," sighs possibly-future-Carlos. "Twelve and a half. Blue is not a number. Neither is Finland. This is the point where I started seriously considering I might be telling the truth."

"You're getting all of this right so far," admits Carlos, slipping a hand into his chapel coat pocket to touch the Little Theologian's Book. If he's really going to have to recite that list from memory in two days, he should have it written down.

It's still unnerving. The consequences if they get tricked into accepting a false version of him could be monumental. But at the same time, he remembers that flash of hope he had during the Sandstorm, all the ideas for things they could accomplish with two of him, before he realized these particular doubles were murderous sociopaths. Wouldn't it be great to see that hope realized?

Not to mention, those were only the ideas he had before he got a boyfriend. A boyfriend with a significantly higher sex drive than his own...not that it's been an issue, Cecil has no trouble taking care of his own excess libido, but still....

"And this is the point where past-me starts planning experiments," says future-Carlos. "Speaking as the version of me who has already done them: 2x is greater than y."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos sends Cecil a couple of texts, generic couple-y things about dinner plans, so Cecil will know Lauren's threats haven't already been carried out. Then he waits in the hall for Cecil, so he's the first thing Cecil sees on getting to the apartment that evening.

"Oh, my precious Carlos," breathes Cecil, dropping his tote bag with a thunk (Carlos winces; that thing has the alethiometer in it) and throwing his arms around Carlos's shoulders. "I was worried. I...who's using my shower?"

"According to all our tests: a friend," says Carlos, holding him close. "Although before I tell you why I brought him over here, would you mind double-checking to see if he's telling the truth? For various reasons, I really do not want to give you false hope about this."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Two whirlwind days later, Carlos puts on the outfit his future self was wearing, gets into Quentin's car (it's halfway to the scrap heap already, so Quentin agrees to trade it for the team's hybrid and let them sacrifice it to the cause), and drives.

A flash of white comes out of nowhere on the entrance ramp to Route 800. On instinct Carlos yelps and swerves, too late — he front-ends the albino deer, faceplants into the suddenly-deployed airbag, slams the brakes, and careens blindly to a stop fifty feet off the shoulder.

The front end of the car, when Carlos has pulled himself together enough to look, is a crumpled mess. Something under the hood is steaming. Looks like one of the tires blew out when he drove it over a rock. Carlos's heart is going a mile a minute, but this vehicle is going nowhere.

On the plus side, the sky has changed color, and the sun is in a completely different place.

He collapses into the back seat with Isaña for a few minutes to catch his breath. "We're here. I mean, we're now. Probably. Assuming I'm still in the same time loop as the version of me who assured me the time loop was stable."

"This is so disorienting," says Isaña. "I do not know how Dana does it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

All signs point to temporal stability. Carlos lets the team run him through the tests that seemed so urgent at the time. Past-Carlos does end up picking up his Isaña, just to be sure — and he doesn't even blink. It feels exactly as uneventful as touching her himself.

By the time they get to the part of the loop where they're driving over to Cecil's place, Carlos is extremely...distracted...with anticipation. He remembers being a little distracted the first time around, but this time he knows what's coming. (In a manner of speaking.)

Not to mention, for the first time in years, he can feel confident that nothing tragic or catastrophic will happen in the next forty-two hours. It's bizarre. It's great. He might as well enjoy it.

"Okay, so there actually are a couple bits of future knowledge I need to pass on to you," he tells his past self.

"Go ahead," says past-Carlos.

"First: you should suck it up and tell Cecil you don't like the ear thing, already."

"...um."

"I know. You're afraid he won't take it well. He's going to take it fine, and by the time you're me you'll still feel kinda stupid that you didn't mention it months ago. Next: you should be waiting in front of the door when he comes home. He's been tense ever since Lauren invaded the show, so the sooner he can give you a hug, the better...."

Past-Carlos doesn't make any promises. He's still holding out for alethiometer confirmation, which is only fair. Carlos doesn't pester him[self] about it, just follows his barely-younger self into Cecil's place and makes a break for the shower. With a minor detour to grab a tight T-shirt and a pair of slim-fit furry pants, from the drawer in Cecil's wardrobe that holds Carlos's spare clothes.

It's only when he's actually under the spray that something occurs to him. "Hey, Isaña...do we know if Cecil's no-observation-during-sex deal with the Sheriff's secret police is still in effect under Strexcorp's administration?"

"Uh," says the daemon by his feet. "We have not asked."

"Not that they probably got much even if they were listening, given the music I remember us being about to put on...."

Carlos trails off. Isaña finishes the thought: "I guess that's probably why we put on the music, huh."

They switch off the water not long after they hear Cecil come in, and Carlos towels them off while listening to Cecil's muffled conversation with past-Carlos. The one where past-Carlos explains that readings indicate something portal-related happening at the studio the day after tomorrow, and he should bring over some equipment to study it.

"The day after tomorrow is the mayoral debate," says Cecil on the other side of the wall. "You're probably picking up on the spatial reconstruction we'll have to do in order to fit Hiram McDaniels in the building."

"That sounds fascinating," says past-Carlos earnestly.

Carlos pulls on his clothes, runs some product and a comb through his hair, and listens intently for his moment. He remembers looking like his entrance was effortless, and it takes effort to pull that off.

"Well, I still don't want you coming over," insists Cecil. "I don't know if you heard the whole show earlier, but...."

"...but Lauren Mallard thinks I'm great," fills in past-Carlos. "She'll be so excited to see me in person! Doing experiments...still being alive...unaffected by the danger that's going to be all over Route 800. I'm sure she'll be worried at first, thinking I might have been lost in the chaos. I'd like to reassure her."

"Dear Carlos," murmurs Cecil. "Have you had a vision? Or do you know someone who has?"

Carlos swings open the bathroom door and leans seductively against the frame. "Not exactly," he says. "It just so happens that the chaos involves short-range time travel."

Cecil's mouth falls open.

Past-Carlos looks a little stunned himself. "Whoa," he says. "I am going to have to remember that look."

"You will," says Carlos, before grinning at Cecil. "Hi, honey."

Cecil turns his head from one Carlos to the other, then gathers himself and says, with great solemnity, "I have died and gone to heaven."

"Theological fallacy," say both Carloses reflexively. The earlier one nods for his future self to finish the thought, so Carlos does: "You don't go to the Republic of Heaven. You build it wherever you are."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Two heavenly days later, Carlos shakes hands with his past self one last time, sends him off to close the time loop, then gathers a couple of team members (Sherie to help analyze whatever portal activity happens, and Omero to say one last goodbye to Hiram) and heads to the NVCR studio.

The booth is at least ten times its normal size, with at least seven extra microphones: five for Hiram, one for the Faceless Old Woman, and one for Marcus Vansten. Carlos doesn't have time to trade passive-aggressive smiles with Lauren; there is way too much genuine research to be done on how the hell this even happened.

Cecil makes them sit down and stop moving around once it's time for the show to start. But the room is big enough that they can actually sit in it, which is pretty cool.

Sherie nods along with all the Faceless Old Woman's points. Omero looks swayed by a lot of Hiram's (mostly the ones from his gold and violet heads). Nobody responds to Vansten, because Vansten doesn't say a whole lot. He seems bored by the whole thing, like it's a waste of his time to expect him to think about the needs of the community when he's already guaranteed the election by virtue of being able to pay for it. Or maybe he's just offended that somebody made him get dressed for this.

After the first couple of call-in questions, Carlos has a sneaking suspicion the fancy pigeon daemon on his shoulder has literally fallen asleep.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Then comes the Call.

In both the capital-lettered and non-capital-lettered sense of the word.

After giving the latest warning from the Mayor's office about the deer, Cecil switches back to the debate. "Next caller, you're on the air. Who is this?"

"Oi, this is V— this is Erika," says a female-sounding voice over the speakers. "With a K, right? I'm an angel."

Carlos's heart skips several beats. Are they back? Are the angels back in the game? Do they know where Josie is? Can they reveal if she's okay?

"Let me stop you right there, Erika — angels aren't real," says Cecil. Only a sudden tension in his shoulders reveals that he's not as blasé as he sounds. "But go ahead with your question."

"This question is just for Marcus Vansten," says Erika.

"I'm not crying," says Vansten.

He's...definitely started crying. Choked up. Big tears rolling down his cheeks. The extravagantly-feathered pigeon on his shoulder shakes with emotion.

"Um, listeners at home, Marcus is hunched over, head turned away from his microphone...and in tears," says Cecil. He's a good reporter, on-the-ball about relaying the facts, even while his tone is caring, worried. "Perhaps he has been chosen by the angels? Who, and for legal purposes I want to emphasize this again, are not real. But people who are chosen for special tasks by angels often cannot stop weeping when they talk about angels."

"'M fine," sniffles Vansten. "Ask the question."

Crying looks awful on him. It also looks familiar. Because, Carlos remembers, he's seen Vansten tear up before — when writing the team a check for their most hideously-expensive equipment — specifically, when filling out the line marked Purpose.

Apparently the angels haven't been as far out of the game as he thought.

"Marcus," says Erika. "If called upon by angels to serve a great good — a great calling — a great War — basically, somethin' that's a big deal, yeah? — would you serve?"

"Marcus...?" asks Cecil gently.

"Hang on," chokes Marcus. "I'm fine. I — I'm fine."

"You are needed, Marcus," intones the Erika on the phone. "Like, right now. Are you in, or what?"

Carlos is in motion before he has time to think about it, grabbing the camera they brought — the one fitted with Atal lenses — and switching it on.

Which is how he gets the entire vivid spectacle of a human ascending to angeldom on tape.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Steve tries to call in. Apparently Cecil no longer trusts his friend to put the necessary amount of deception and doublespeak in their public conversations, because he shouts Steve down with a fervor Carlos has never heard before and declares the Q&A period over.

After the two still-corporeal candidates give their final statements, he apologizes for the technical difficulties, cuts to the weather, and pulls off his headphones with gasp of relief. "What a show this has been!" he exclaims. "Guests disappearing from known existence, herds of deer with deep psychological issues surrounding the building — and what is that humming?"

Meanwhile, Sherie turns to Carlos and mutters under her breath, "Couldn't you have warned us about any of this?"

"I'm not mysteriously-knowledgeable future-Carlos anymore!" hisses Carlos. "I'm back to being present-Carlos! Believe me, if I'd had any idea things would get this exciting right after past-me left, I would have made him stay longer."

"Daniel?" calls Cecil in the direction of the control room. "Is the noise coming from something in there?"

Carlos, meanwhile, switches to a pocket-size danger meter (this one not attuned to any bloodstone circles, just plugged into his tablet) and waves it around. "Local level of FUs is still steady. It's not from a dangerous portal."

"What about a non-dangerous portal?" asks Omero.

"Yes, that's certainly a possibility...."

He's still focused on the numerical output on his screen until Isaña yanks on his attention. "Carlos! Look up."

A large, swirling black vortex is forming against the studio wall.

"Oh my," says Cecil. "I...I have seen a vortex like that before. And I do not like it. Carlos? Can experimental theology tell us anything about it? Maybe how to make it go away?"

"We don't know yet," says Carlos. "But we're taking as many readings as we can."

Sherie, with her own instruments, adds, "I might be able to close it? Ideally we'd have multiple bloodstone-circle users working together...but if it's just the one portal, and it's only a little one...."

"Your human senses cannot hope to comprehend this!" screeches Hiram's violet head.

"My violet head's right," adds the gold head. "Let me take a closer look. This is called taking initiative, by the way. It's the sort of thing you look for in a mayor."

He sticks the head in question right up close to the portal, eyeballs it for a minute, then leans through.

Even knowing the thing is about as safe as portals get, Carlos jumps.

A moment later, Hiram's gold head pulls back out...holding a humanoid figure in his mouth.

And it's Cecil.

Or at least, someone very like Cecil. Not nearly as identical as Carlos and Carlos-from-two-days-away. Hiram spits the stranger to the ground: this almost-Cecil with the short, jet-black hair, wearing expensive wingtips and a blood-spattered white button-down, whose arms (both of which show dramatic purple bruising) are wrapped tightly around something that looks like a pillow-sized lump of tan fur. Who hasn't made any effort to cover the bar code on the back of his neck.

"Oof!" squeaks the stranger. His voice isn't like Cecil's at all. He pulls himself up onto his knees, catches his breath, and smiles up at Hiram. "Thanks for the lift, friend!"

Carlos's stomach turns. That's Cecil's face — Carlos knows every curve and plane of it by heart — in every detail except for one. Where Cecil's eyes are cloudy-white over once-purple irises, this man's eyes aren't there. At all.

If the sight is disturbing for Carlos, it must be so much more horrific for Cecil. "Who is this?" he demands, voice shaking with anger. "Why is he covered in blood? And where are his eyes?"

"I'm Kevin!" chirps the man. He adjusts the puff in his arms — so that all of a sudden Carlos can see it has a face, with a sharp little beak and mammalian ears and huge duck-eyes. Now that he knows which way its body is oriented, he can pick out a set of limbs, too: not arms or legs, exactly, just little nubs of paws sticking out of the fur. "And this is my daemon, Bedamim!"

"That is not a daemon," snarls Cecil.

"Is too," says Kevin pleasantly. "Who are you?"

A bored female voice answers him from somewhere around the ceiling. "That's Cecil. His daemon is off napping somewhere. And I am the Faceless Old Woman who secretly lives in your home...well, most homes. Not yours specifically. I've never seen you before."

Kevin is unperturbed. "It's nice to meet you!" He sets Bedamim on the ground, ruffles the top of her (more or less) head, and gets to his feet. "And how about the rest of — oh! Carlos!"

Carlos nearly drops his danger meter.

"Yes, that is definitely you, but you look different," adds Kevin thoughtfully. "You're all scruffy again. How long has it been, for you, since I saw you last?"

"I've never seen you before in my life," stammers Carlos. (Out of the corner of his eye, he notices the RECORDING sign is lit up again. How long has that been back on?)

"Which doesn't mean he hasn't seen you," points out the Faceless Old Woman.

"No, he certainly saw me." Kevin rocks back and forth on his patent-leather heels. "We had the most productive conversation! Could this be the past? Somehow? What day is this? Oh, and am I in Night Vale? We were trying to get to Night Vale."

"This is Night Vale," says Hiram's blue head, then recites the date, the year, and the time, down to the second.

"Ah! That is certainly the past," says Kevin brightly. "I'm not sure how that would have happened, but of course, with Strexcorp, all things are possible...."

"Did you hit a deer?" blurts Carlos.

"Hm...? Oh, right! This is the day with the deer project!" exclaims Kevin. "That could have been it. And I do remember hitting...something."

He reaches back into the vortex, and pulls the something out.

Every human in the room recoils.

"Is this a deer?" asks Kevin, all innocence.

It's part of a deer. Specifically, part of the head, plus a slice of neck. Kevin is holding it up by the remaining horn. A chunk of the skull and half the face have been sliced off — with surgical precision, as evidenced by the perfectly-clean cuts in the bone — which is the only clean thing about it, since the rest of it is dripping, ragged muscle and sinew hanging loosely from the joints, blood and viscera streaked all over — one good shake and what's left of its brain might come loose —

Hiram's grey head slithers over to take a closer look. "You hit a deer, all right," he says glumly. "Are you going to eat that?"

"Do you want it? It's all yours!"

When the grey head opens its razor-edged beak, Kevin tosses the deer-head in. Hiram gulps it down, antler and all.

"This is so exciting," continues Kevin. "I know the deer project ultimately didn't turn out the way Strexcorp had hoped — why, if I have the time right, the gyropters they're dispatching to remove the deer will be arriving any minute now! You might want to stay inside for a while and put on some loud music to drown out the machines and the screams — but, gosh, I'm glad that I got to meet you. Especially you, Cecil! Although...I've met you before too, haven't I? Before I got Bedamim? It would have been in a portal a lot like this one."

Cecil looks like he doesn't know whether he wants to lunge at Kevin and go for his throat, or sprint in the other direction and try to claw his way through the wall.

"Isn't it cool how we look exactly like each other? I think we must be connected, somehow." Kevin sighs happily. "I have to go, but I'm sure we'll meet again! Maybe your daemon will even be there, so he can finally meet mine! I bet they would be just adorable together."

He picks up Bedamim, boops her little beak — she doesn't seem to talk, just burbles in delight — and steps back into the vortex, giving them all a friendly wave before reaching up and...pinching?...at something out of sight. As he backs away, the portal begins to close.

"He seemed nice," drones the grey head.

The gold head, meanwhile, arcs over to Cecil's chair. "Cecil? You...you all right, there, buddy?"

Cecil is trembling in place. "I...can't...um...."

Carlos is pretty shaky too, but he puts down the danger meter — without, miraculously, dropping it — and goes to him. Cecil spins in his chair, wraps his arms around Carlos's waist, and presses his face helplessly against Carlos's stomach.

"Cecil, it...it's going to be okay," says the Faceless Old Woman. It's the kindest, most caring thing Carlos has ever heard from her, so he isn't surprised when she adds, "Actually, that’s a lie. In general, it’s not going to be okay."

"I CAN SEE HOW THAT MAN MIGHT BE TERRIFYING TO A SMALL DEFENSELESS SACK OF BONES AND MEAT!" roars Hiram's green head. "BUT HE IS GONE NOW!"

Cecil swallows. "He was...."

(He was exactly what Cecil would look like, if Cecil gave up. Or maybe if Cecil went too far, and Strex decided they couldn't afford to keep playing at being harmless. They would carve out his eyes, replace his daemon, and rewrite his brain until he thanked them for it.)

"Cecil, we all get frightened and freeze in the face of unbearable terror," says the Faceless Old Woman. "Especially if that face is our own face. Or at least, that's what I assume. I wouldn't know from experience."

"I...you're right," says Cecil shakily. "Thank you both."

He pulls it together enough to finish out the show, although he doesn't let go of Carlos until after the ON AIR sign goes dark.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The experimental theologians stay at the station until Cecil is ready to leave. Omero gets samples of the time-traveling-deer blood, Sherie makes sure the portal activity is really over, and Carlos stays with Cecil.

"How short is 'short-range' time travel?" asks Cecil as they step out into the cool desert night. A few steps into the parking lot, and Khoshekh appears too, almost materializing out of a shadow to float alongside them. "And can the events within a short-range time loop be changed?"

"I don't know, and I don't know," admits Carlos. "The only data point I have is mine, which was only a couple of days, and in which I tried not to change anything. For reasons of not wanting to accidentally shred the fabric of the universe as much as for personal reasons."

"Well, then for at least the next week, I do not want you leaving my sight," says Cecil darkly. "Either my own or Khoshekh's. Perhaps we cannot prevent you from encountering a recent-past version of that Kevin who just spoke to us, but I will not let him get anywhere near you."

Notes:

Features lots of lines from canon: mostly Debate, plus a few from e040 The Deft Bowman.

...if anyone would like to write the explicit spinoff about all the details of Carlos's time-travel adventure, you have my blessing.

Continuity notes: This version of the Debate is happening later than in canon, so it's someone other than "John Peters" who asks about the Glow Cloud, and the Mayor's office rather than the City Council delivers the warnings about deer. Meanwhile, Lauren Mallard gives her perky non-threat earlier than in canon; we're still in early January, pre-Woman From Italy.

Bedamim (accent on the second syllable) is a form/variant of the Hebrew word dam. Kevin thinks it sounds just adorable.

Chapter 27: Legally Empowered

Summary:

Steve brings Janice over to the chapel for some quick tests. Erika-née-Marcus finally realizes that Tamika and the Book Club have been co-opting his stuff. Carlos tests the Little Theologian's Book on the Man in the Tan Jacket. And Lauren Mallard gloats.

Notes:

More art nouveau portraits: Steve and Renée Carlsberg; Intern Maureen; Lyra and Will.

Night Vale.

"But enough about me," says Sherie, after giving the abridged (and Strex-observation-censored) version of the last few days' adventures. "What's going on with you? How have you been?"

"Oh, you know, fine," says Susannah on the other end of the phone, with teenage dismissiveness. Which is at least a change from the hurt and frustration she's had in every weekly call up to this point. Maybe this is progress. "Same old, same old."

Seth, conference-calling on the same line, is less evasive. "You should tell her."

Sherie's Mom-radar lights up. "Tell me what?"

"Nothing!"

"Do you want her to find out from you, or from Dad?"

"I...."

"Honey, what is it?" asks Sherie. "Whatever it is, I won't judge."

"Yeah, you will," says her daughter.

"All right. I will. But I'll do my best to keep it to myself."

Susannah sighs. "Look, the important thing is that I did not actually get arrested."

(Okay, she was right: Sherie is judging.)

"So I was hanging out at this club with some people from school. One of the ones that's, like, designed for high school kids, so there's no drinking or anything. And for a while it was great! But then Austin Kimbell started getting up close to Danielle Frick, and being all handsy, even when she kept telling him to back off. She was doing the thing where you laugh and act like it's no big deal, because you don't want to be too confrontational, you know? And he was doing the thing where guys act like that means you don't actually want them to knock it off."

"I'm familiar," says Sherie, then grabs the teachable moment while it's here: "Seth, hon, always remember that if a young lady tells you to stop doing something, it doesn't mean she's playing hard to get, it means you stop."

"I know, Mom."

"So asked Danielle if she really wanted him to quit it, and when she said yeah, I got between them and told Austin to back down," continues Susannah. "His daemon is this big muscly dog with giant teeth, and she got right up in Zeph's face, while he was all 'lighten up, baby, no girl dresses like that unless she wants the attention' — so I poked him in the chest and told him that no one wears a shirt this flammable unless they want to be set on fire."

"Oh, Su," breathes Sherie. "You didn't."

"Of course I didn't — as I told the cops," says her daughter. "There were lots of people who heard what I said, so you can see how the timing would be suspicious, but I didn't have a lighter or anything. What were they going to do, arrest me on charges of magically creating fire with my bare hands?"

Sherie massages her forehead. "Can you at least tell me he wasn't hurt too badly!"

"Only first-degree burns! If I could hypothetically summon fire, I wouldn't aim it at a person until I'd practiced enough to have that much finesse. Down by the lake, so I could douse any hypothetical mistakes before they got out of control. A Girl Scout is responsible. It's the ninth thing a Girl Scout is."

"And you are an excellent Girl Scout, sweetie," says Sherie fervently.

She manages to get through the rest of the call without saying the other thing she's thinking, which is, You need to come back to Night Vale. No sooner has she hung up, though, than a bored voice from behind a light fixture says, "That girl needs to come back to Night Vale."

Sherie leans back in her armchair. "Spying on private family matters isn't very mayoral."

"Unlike my one remaining opponent, I take an interest in the lives of citizens," says the Faceless Old Woman primly. "Do you disapprove of what your daughter is becoming?"

"No. I mean, it scares me, sure. But I think it's amazing."

"And do you expect Milford to have the resources to support her through it?"

"Good lord, no." Sherie knows she isn't obligated to justify herself to her uninvited houseguest, but for some reason she elaborates. "Susannah turns eighteen in just a few months. There's no point in going through all the fuss of a custody battle with her father now. By the time we finished, she'd be legally empowered to move wherever she wants anyway."

"Huh," says the Faceless Old Woman. "Can I rub your back?"

"What?"

"I want to count your vertebrae. I'm doing a study on the efficacy of redistribution of bone," explains the disembodied voice. "Also, I'd like to condition you to be less self-conscious about your body around me, so you'll tell me what your scars are. All of which will be easier to do if you let me give you a backrub. It'll be completely free, unlike a spa visit. I care about saving my constituents money, you see." She pauses. "Or lizards. Whichever the spa charges in."

It's still an unsettling request. But Sherie doesn't want to repeat her back-strain injury of a few months ago, and the spa is expensive (not to mention, it's hard to make change for an iguana). Used to be Sam would do this for her, but, well.

"All right," she says. "Let me know how many vertebrae you come up with."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Carlos! Hi, buddy! Boy, have I missed you!"

Carlos has been warned that Steve Carlsberg is a hugger now. He's still not prepared for Steve's enthusiasm to lift him an inch off the ground. "Uh...hi, Steve. Nice to see you too."

"And this is Janice! Sorry to say her mom couldn't make it, but I was happy to bring her over. Have you met?"

Yes. Quite a few times. In secret locations chosen at the last minute by the theology liaison team. But those aren't relevant to today's test. "That's what we're trying to find out. Hi, Janice."

The ten-year-old, riding her daemon in the form of a jet-black pony, shakes his hand. She's a cute kid with the mask off. Purple glasses, freckles on tan skin, hair plaited into a single dark braid down her back. "Hi again, Señor Carlos."

Sherie props open the Rusakov isolation chamber with a chair, and Janice's daemon walks right up to the door before shifting into a series of progressively smaller forms, lowering his rider to the ground. It's obviously a process they have down to an art: her knees settle on the floor, she slides off his back, and with sure arms and weak-but-nimble legs she swings herself into the bloodstone circle and crosses her legs while he leaps into her lap as a marble-furred cat. All in the same amount of time it would have taken Carlos to sit.

Steve's badger daemon, meanwhile, greets Khoshekh, the half of Cecil currently on Carlos-watching duty. "Do not try to snuggle me, or you will regret it," warns the margay, floating after Carlos as he heads for the bloodstone circle room.

(Steve follows too. Awkward.)

"You can't come in with us, hon," says Isaña to Khoshekh at the door. "Don't want anything contaminating the test."

"It's okay!" adds Steve's badger. "You get to stay with us!"

Khoshekh makes the world's most despairing hurt-cat face. Carlos blows him a kiss before shutting the door.

He's back in the main room soon anyway — or rather, his ghost is — astral-projecting using the stones, leaving his body on its knees in the circle. Janice, with the astral dexterity of an expert twice her age, likewise hops out of her body. Her ghost hovers in the air like she's sitting on an invisible surface, hands on her knees, face about a head lower than eye level with Carlos.

It sends a pang of loss through Carlos as it reminds him of Josie. This was how she looked sitting crosswise on her cloud-pine cane, either just because she felt like floating that day, or because her leg was bothering her too much to walk.

Did I do something wrong? thinks Janice at him.

"No, that wasn't about you," Carlos assures her. "Just remembering someone. You're doing fine."

The kid smiles, relieved. She's definitely the one Carlos "met" on the lazy day. Sweet, a little shy, not as lonely as she used to be, confident in her own abilities. Also: glittery, like frost in the sun. Carlos remembers thinking this sense of sparkle was related to age and gender, but maybe it's specific to her. A mark of supernatural ability? (She's one of the kids with foresight, right?) Or something else?

Well, it's outside the purview of their experiments, so Carlos gives Sherie a thumbs-up, then settles back into his body and rejoins the group in person.

Khoshekh and Steve are at the side of the room, arguing in hushed voices, while Sherie ushers Janice out of the circle. "Thank you for coming in again. We got all our data last time, so this is all we needed."

"Now go away," adds Khoshekh. "Not you, Janice! You seem nice. I'm talking to Steve."

"Just one darn minute," snaps Steve. "Khoshekh, you stay right there. Janice, come over here for a second, okay?"

Janice and her daemon trot obligingly over. Steve directs them so they're standing/floating face to face, then steps back and acts like he's working on a film shoot: moving around to look for the best angle, making a frame around them with thumbs and index fingers, closing one eye and holding up a hand to block out first Janice, then Khoshekh.

"There's still nothing here," says Khoshekh tiredly. "Stop making yourself look like even more of an idiot than usual."

With a sudden burst of intensity, Janice says, "You stop being mean to Steve."

Khoshekh opens his mouth...then whuffs in disgruntlement and says, "Fine. For now."

He pulls his legs up under him like a house cat sitting in a loaf on a cushion, and sulks. But he does stop, which honestly makes Carlos wonder if Janice has some kind of obedience-compelling power on top of the possible foresight.

"Can none of you see it?" exclaims Steve. "Not even a tiny bit?"

"I'm a little lost here," says Carlos, with a worried glance at Sherie. "See what?"

"The arrows? The dotted lines?"

Head-shakes all around.

"They're really faint this close to the ground," presses Steve. "Like...steam, or some of the creatures we're not supposed to call angels, or glass that is smudged in some places, so all you can see is the smudges. Also, you have to turn your head just right? But they are there! Connecting all of us! And there are so many more than normal between Khoshekh and Janice...there's even a circle...it must mean something. It must!"

Steve's mention of angels makes Carlos stop and look. Really look. He remembers the first time he saw Erikas in person: it wasn't until they spoke that he had any idea they were there, and when he finally caught the distortions and flickers that outlined a pair of tall humanoid forms, Erika mentioned that their shape was determined by what he expected to see.

So he picks up Isaña, and he comes right up to the near side of the little tableau, and he scours the space between Khoshekh and Janice-and-her-daemon for arrows and/or dotted lines.

Nothing.

Of course there's nothing. Steve got his brain scrambled by Strexcorp and walked away with permanent visual distortions. That's all this is. "I don't see them," says Carlos, treading lightly, not sure of the contours of this strange and emotional new attachment Steve has. "But it doesn't have to mean anything, Steve. Things with no intrinsic meaning happen all the time. It's a huge part of experimental theology."

(He's fudging terms a little there. Experimental theology says that everything has meaning — the meaning of glorifying God, and, by implicit extension, Magisterium doctrine. The understanding that sometimes things are random and arbitrary is really more the purview of science. He misses Mary's world all over again.)

"Are there any other tests you can do?" asks Janice. "Just in case? Maybe it would make Steve feel better."

"We can't do tests on children for no reason," says Sherie gently. "Especially when we don't have your mother's permission. Unless...Steve, is your relationship with Delphine at the point where you can sign legal forms for each other's daughters?"

"...No."

But Steve looks so heartbroken. And Carlos is supposed to be his friend, here. "Listen, what if we just took some photograms, and maybe a cheek swab? We can give you the relevant permission forms, and if you get Delphine to sign them and send them back, then we do...you know, theology...with the material."

Both Steve and Janice like the idea. The girl returns to the isolation chamber for the photos, first with her and her daemon (mimicking Khoshekh's margay form, though he keeps this world's standard leg arrangement) alone, then them and Khoshekh together.

While Carlos and Isaña are behind the tripod, Steve sidles up to them. "For the record, I realize that you are humoring me?" he says, in a voice he probably thinks sounds quieter than it does. "And I want you to know? I really do appreciate it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

There's a practice knife fight going on in the middle of Marcus Vansten's twelfth most extravagant stateroom, and a couple of kids shooting darts at one of the life-size paintings on the walls (they make excellent target practice). Tamika is one of the Book Club members on the lounge next to the fireplace, putting her feet up and reading A House-Boat on the Styx while she waits for the fight to be over so she can spar with the victor.

All of this action grinds to a halt when the room is filled with a brilliant black light. It outshines the chandeliers; it illuminates every detail on the gilded molding.

And a grouchy angelic voice says, "All of you kids, quit messing up my stuff."

Tamika knows which Erika this is right away. For one thing, she was listening to the debate. For another, along with the glowing golden wings extending from his shoulder blades, the angel has a majestic fluffy ruff of feathers arcing over his shoulders and around the back of his head, blocking out all his peripheral vision. This is the former Marcus Vansten, sharing a single corporeal form with his Jacobin-pigeon daemon.

(To the relief of everyone in the room, there's a similar extra-feathers thing going on between his legs. Angels don't wear clothes, not like Vansten ever did anyway, but ain't nobody need to see that.)

"You don't need your stuff any more," says Tamika. "You didn't even need any of this when you were a human."

"Do too," says Erika wittily. "Get your feet off that table! Oh, uh, and be not afraid or whatever. You can use this space if you want, I guess, but get your feet down. I need that table."

"Been putting my feet up on this table, any time I feel like it, for more than a month now. You never noticed."

"A month?" echoes Erika. "I only ascended last night! How long have you been doing this?"

Tamika gets to her feet and stalks toward him, making a point of stepping over the bone table rather than walking around it. She closes the book for the moment, but keeps it on hand, just in case she needs a weapon. Erika is at least ten feet tall and she's five foot one — so what? Just means she's the only one who won't have to duck if she wants to walk around in half the rooms of this house.

"We are the beating heart of Night Vale," she says. "We are the breathing lungs. We are the chanting lips. We will defend Night Vale with the help of everything it has to give. Some people don't have much, so we won't take that unless we got no other choice, but you? You got more than anybody needs in ten lifetimes, and we claim the right to use it for as long as we are the only defenders this town has. You want our feet off your tables, Erika? Then you go round up your people and take some of this fight off of our hands!"

She hadn't realized quite how mad she was about this until she started yelling.

Even Erika looks a little intimidated. "Whoa, cool off, kid," he says, looking nervously between Tamika's face and Rashi's sturdy horns. "Again: just ascended last night, do not really know how this angel thing works, and usually when that happens I pay someone to figure it out for me, but this is out of my price range. Which basically proves that I do, in fact, need all my money and then some."

"That is not what it proves."

"Uh, yeah it is. Stop reading all those books and go make a few billion dollars of your own, then you'll understand how money works. Point is: the angel who Called me did not bother to leave their address or a callback number. I don't know where they are."

That...is actually a reasonable problem, and not Vansten's own fault. Tamika scales down her anger accordingly.

"And also? The rest of the angels hit the road once they figured the town was laced with Strex-made gadgets that were basically us-detectors. I am pretty sure they're not gonna just waltz back into town and let themselves get picked off."

"Those gadgets aren't around any more," says Tamika.

"What?"

"Haven't you been paying attention to anything? The experimental theologians took the sensors down months ago. Strex tried to put up new ones a couple of times, but we rip 'em down so fast they've decided it wasn't worth the expense. And now our theologians are putting up a new bunch that are locally-made, running on secure connections Strex can't tap into. We guarantee it. We've been setting them up ourselves."

"You do not say," says Erika. "Huh. That makes me feel a lot better about hanging around to protect my stuff."

One of the Blood Pact Scouts from the interrupted knife fight chimes in. "But this means you can go look for more angels now, right? And tell them they're clear to come back?"

"Depends. Are you gonna keep your feet off my tables if I go?"

"If that's what it takes," says Tamika, "then yes. It's a deal."

"And do not touch my hedge sculptures. Those are works of art."

"Done."

"And stay away from my jaguars!"

"Got no use for your flashy sports cars, Erika."

"Those too!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos is waiting for the bus, Khoshekh and Isaña together on the bench beside him, when the figure leaning against the side of the bus shelter coughs. "Hello, stranger."

"Oh, hi!" exclaims Carlos, recognizing (sort of) the Man in the Tan Jacket. "Didn't even see you there."

"Happens all the time," says the man. "Don't worry about it."

Khoshekh looks warily between them. "Are you two...friends?"

"Um," says Carlos. "Sort of? I mean, I don't remember any specifics of any of the interactions we've had before now, so I don't want to presume...but I do have this general impression that we get along. Oh, speaking of our previous interactions!" He pulls the Little Theologian's Book out of his pocket. "Have I showed this to you in any of them?"

"No," says the man, with interest. "What is it?"

"A gift from Cecil. It automatically records and charts any theological information I want it to." Carlos is already flipping to the latest page. "And then if I forget the details of what I recorded later, I can go back and check my notes and find it again. So I have this hypothesis that, even if I forget something almost immediately after hearing it...maybe the power of this book is strong enough that it could still get written down."

"That...is something I have not actually tried before," says the man slowly. "I mean, with standard writing utensils, sure. But never with this."

Carlos had been half-convinced the man's reaction would be something like yes, I've tried that once a month for the past twenty years, and you've already asked me about it three times this week. Now that the possibilities are officially wide open, he's genuinely excited. "Okay. Let me set it up, so I don't forget that I tried this. The Man in the Tan Jacket: Case Study."

A header appears across the top of the page.

"Examples of memorable points: Male. Tan jacket. Deerskin briefcase. Insect daemon." Carlos hesitates. "No, wait...the insect daemon lanyard. I don't remember anything about your actual daemon...." An even longer hesitation, as pieces click together. "...because she isn't with you, is she? That's why you have the lanyard — the way I had Cecil do in Narragansett when Khoshekh wasn't with us! Could I have gotten the idea from subconsciously remembering you?"

He has the impression that the man looks uncomfortable, but it isn't until Khoshekh speaks up that he realizes why: "I apologize if this is a sensitive topic. Carlos means well, but when he's curious about something he can get...carried away."

"Um, yes," stammers Carlos. "Sorry! You don't have to answer anything you don't want to."

"I know. You tell me that a lot," sighs the man. "It's true that my daemon is not with me. It's also true that you have been told this before. Which doesn't prove that you got the idea from me — it's not that complicated — any idiot could think it up." He nods at the approaching bus. "Is this one yours?"

Thankfully, they're going in the same direction, because Carlos would not have wanted to choose between finishing this experiment (especially since it is, probably, to help a friend) and being on time for lunch with Cecil. He takes a seat, while Khoshekh lifts Isaña into the one next to him and the man in the tan jacket slides in behind, and as the bus pulls away he looks at the state of his chart.

It's sprouted a new category — "examples of inconclusive points" — which is already filled with a depressing amount of text. "Let's skip to non-memorable points before we run out of page," he says. "Examples: Name."

He turns back to the man in the seat behind him, and beckons for him to speak.

"My name," says the man, "is E-------- -------- -------."

"...Uh-huh," says Carlos. "One more time?"

"I don't think it'll help."

"Just once? I feel like I almost had it — maybe if you say it slower, and enunciate as much as you can —"

"Carlos," interrupts Khoshekh. He picks up Isaña and holds her so she can see the page. Isaña catches her breath, and tugs on Carlos's attention until he looks too.

There's an angry black scribble across the bottom of the page, so violent that it's actually scratched through the paper. As if Carlos had taken a physical ballpoint pen and laid into it with everything he had.

"...oh."

"Listen, thanks for trying," says the man. "So where are you headed? Out for lunch?"

They trade small talk about good places to eat. Khoshekh complains again about Strexcorp's rigid and unforgiving lunch break policies. Carlos admits that he's getting really tired of the White Sand, but it's the only non-Strex-owned place near the studio that they can get in and out of before Cecil has to be back in the office.

"There are some sit-down places, though, aren't there?" asks the man in the tan jacket. "If you get in and order early enough, the food could be ready by the time Cecil joins you. Have you ever tried the Magadha place a couple blocks over?"

Khoshekh and Cecil have been there, though it was years ago. Carlos and Isaña haven't at all. "We'll check it out," says Carlos. "Um, is there any chance your stop is close enough that you could walk us there? If you don't, I'm afraid we'll forget the recommendation before we get to it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette is in the middle of a therapy session — right now it involves lying on her back in the light from a sunbeam, scratching under the chin of the fluffy orange cat sitting in a furry lump on her torso — when the sun is overwhelmed with a bright black light.

She sits up with a jerk. (The poor cat yowls, and hisses at the just-manifested angel.) "Erika?"

"Yeah, I guess," says the Erika who obviously used to be Marcus Vansten. "Look, sorry if I'm interrupting or whatever, but my hedges are at stake here. You theologian people study angels, right?"

"Angels aren't real," says Henriette automatically.

"Uh, I am right here."

Henriette looks nervously at the door, then the windows, then beckons for Erika to come closer. (She is really glad his ridiculous feathers are censoring strategic places.) "Did you forget about the City Council's decree?" she asks under her breath. "We're not allowed to acknowledge the existence of angels. I don't know if the Sheriff's secret police are still enforcing that in light of the Council fleeing town, but I'm not taking any chances."

"Oh." Erika sits cross-legged in front of her. "Sounds like of those rules that doesn't affect rich people. Like zoning laws. Or taxes."

With a sigh, Henriette picks up the fussy cat and sits it in her lap, skritching its chin and its unhappy squashed face until it starts back into a grudging purr. "Put it this way: We study Josie's tall friends. Is there something I can help you with?"

"Yeah. You got any clue where some of us would be? I have been going all over the world, here, and nothing's turning up."

"Just this world? Have you tried any others?"

"Mmm, nope. You know how to do that?"

This is the kind of question that Henriette can either answer with several hundred words of frustrated detail on all the complex theological problems here that Erika is failing to grasp...or punt to someone else. And she is in the middle of necessary mental-health time, here. "You know who you should really talk to? Keith Köhler. I bet he would be just delighted to deal with you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I can't think why we haven't brought you here before," murmurs Khoshekh, as the server at the Magadha place (a man with a thick black mustache and a coyote daemon) sits them down and pours some water. "You liked the one in Oxford, and this one's been right here the whole time. Hold on, I'll try to go into four-eye with Cecil and get his order."

Well, Carlos is glad Khoshekh had the idea now. (It was Khoshekh who brought it up, wasn't it...?) The other diners look like they're enjoying themselves, the food at the next table smells delicious, and the waiter has an appetizer tray of poppadum and dipping sauces in front of Carlos before he's even had a chance to look at the menu.

The way time has worked out today, it'll be at least fifteen minutes before Cecil gets here...so he won't mind if Carlos goes ahead and tries the dips instead of letting them get cold, right?

Khoshekh sits on the chair across from him and murmurs in possibly-Hebrew for a bit, then floats upward to hover just above the level of the tablecloth. "Are those good?"

"The red one's my favorite. The turquoise one tastes a little weird, and the orange one is just too spicy." Seriously spicy — Carlos had two bites and he's still sweating. He dampens his napkin with the condensation on his chilled water glass and wipes down his forehead.

Then he pulls off his glasses and holds the cup itself against his face.

"Are you okay?" asks Khoshekh.

"Fine. Just too hot." Carlos drinks some of the ice water, then thinks to shrug off his chapel coat. That helps.

The waiter comes back to get their order. After entering the numbers into a handheld gadget, he adds, "Are you feeling well, Señor Perfecto? Would you like some more water?"

Maybe Carlos is coming down with something. "Yes, please."

As the server leaves, Khoshekh sucks in a soft breath, then drops to the floor to whisper in Isaña's ear. Daemon-to-daemon conversation: for when you don't just want people unable to overhear, you don't even want them to notice that you're talking.

Isaña, in turn, pulls at Carlos's attention. With his glasses off, Carlos's vision is too blurry to see the details of what she's aiming him at...but it's in the general direction of the back of their retreating server's neck, so it's not hard to guess.

Why didn't they double-check whether Strex had bought up this place?

"I think we dropped something outside," says Isaña quietly. "Khoshekh, would you mind...?"

"I'll watch your things," murmurs the margay daemon. "You go look."

Not a plan Carlos is thrilled about...but they can't both go, because skipping out on your check is a crime, and Strex owns the police just as surely as they own the people who made this food. He gets to his feet — too fast — it leaves him dizzy, stomach churning, and has to plant one hand on the edge of the table to steady himself.

The door is less than thirty feet away, and suddenly the prospect of walking all the way over to it makes him want to be sick.

He sinks back into his chair. Isaña, weak from the backlash, whispers, "I don't think we can — is there anyone here who —?"

Any waiters who might be secret rebels, whose employers haven't had a chance to catch on yet? Any other customers who could reveal themselves as enough of an ally for him to lean on?

"Your phone," says Khoshekh. Isaña points him to the right pocket of Carlos's backpack; Khoshekh unzips it with his teeth. "Lucy and Hannah are right around the corner. One of them will be here very soon. Be strong."

So Carlos rests his face on his clammy palms and focuses on breathing, and staying calm, and not losing what little lunch he's had.

Unless losing it is what he should be doing? Throw up as much of whatever toxic substance he just ingested as possible? But if he's that obviously affected, they'll know he took the bait, they'll know he's gotten lightheaded and fuzzy and they're clear to swoop down on him at any time —

But maybe they aren't interested in swooping — maybe Carlos has swallowed something designed to kill, quickly, and all they need to do is stand back and watch as he convulses his last —

No. He's not going to die. He has to believe that Cecil and Khoshekh will not let him die. That Night Vale will not let him die.

Hold steady. Breathe. Panic will only accelerate the spread of the poison through his system...he's pretty sure he saw that on a TV show once. Or does that only apply to things you've breathed, and/or injected? Carlos doesn't know — he studies physics, not toxins or pharmacology —

"Oh dear!" says a cheery voice. "You don't look so good."

Carlos raises bleary, horrified eyes to the face of Lauren Mallard.

...then barely manages to grab his napkin in time to hurl into it, torso heaving, acid burning his throat.

Khoshekh is between him and Lauren in an instant, tail lashing — Carlos can hear the bared teeth in the way he snarls. "What have you done to him?"

"Me? The very idea," chirps Lauren. "I'm sure your poor boyfriend just has an allergy he neglected to inform the kitchen about. Or, who knows? Maybe he's allergic to cats!"

With a growl, Khoshekh pounces at her mallard daemon.

Out of nowhere, two other daemons — their waiter's sharp-toothed coyote, and a black-and-white colobus — tackle him out of the air. He lands in a writhing whirl of fur on the carpet, fighting with everything he has, but he's no match for them both. Neither Lauren nor her daemon so much as flinch.

And, ah, here's the person who goes with the colobus daemon, standing on Carlos's other side. Her uniform is crisp; the gold embroidery of the restaurant logo glitters under the lamps. "We have a strict no-tolerance policy against attacking other customers."

"Fine," croaks Carlos. "We'll go. Sorry to — to disturb."

He forces himself to stand. All the alternatives left to him are worse.

He makes it three steps, Isaña tottering after him, when he stumbles and falls, the rug scraping his hands and knees. There's a sheen of cold sweat over his whole body now; he can feel his T-shirt sticking to his back. The room swims in front of him.

(Khoshekh yells something that might be his name, muffled by a primate daemon holding his mouth closed.)

"You poor thing," coos Lauren. "I'm sure it'll make you feel better to know that an ambulance has been called! Whatever mysterious and non-legally-actionable thing you might be experiencing right now, you're going to get the finest medical care that this world — or any world where Strexcorp Synernists, Inc. has a branch office — can give you."

Chapter 28: Nicked

Summary:

Strexcorp stole themselves a Carlos. Time for an all-star Night Vale rescue mission.

Warnings for typical Desert Bluffs drugging, blood, and injuries.

Night Vale.

"Joining me once again in the studio is our program director, Lauren Mallard."

"Thank you, Cecil! It's a real pleasure to be here. To get right up close while you're doing the show and watch the magic happen! And by 'magic' I mean 'hard work'. You're a real credit to Strexcorp, with all the hard work that you do!"

"I like to think my work makes me a credit to my town."

"Oh, that too! The entire greater Desert Bluffs metropolitan area is lucky to have you. Why, just look at you, diligently manning your desk even though earlier today your boyfriend collapsed and had to be hospitalized."

"...yes."

"You must be worried sick!"

"Yes."

"And yet, here you are. On the job. Addressing all the people of Night Vale."

"Lauren, your...sympathy...is appreciated, and I want to assure you that Carlos will be fine. Listeners, if you are worried too, pay careful attention right now. Carlos will be fine because he's getting Strexcorp medical care...and if he were to come to harm while in Strex's custody, that would undermine their guarantee of safety and quality in just about every other product and service Strex provides. Which, around here, is a lot of them."

"Aw, Cecil, your confidence in the company is so sweet. And the Strex guarantee means he won't be released...from inpatient care...until he is completely well again. However...long...that...takes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A motley crew of rebels and their allies squeezes around a card table in the stock room of the White Sand Ice Cream Shop.

Tamika Flynn is present in person, sitting on the back of her buffalo daemon to leave as much room as possible for the others. Also representing the Advanced Readers is the older teenager who drove her here — a sharp-eyed Fear Scout with a blue jay on his shoulder — and young Janice, her daemon riding on her shoulder as a jet-black spider.

Sherie is here for the experimental theologians, along with Keith and a tired-looking Henriette. Frankly, Sherie isn't sure Henriette is up for being here at all, but it was Keith's job to pick her up from therapy and he certainly wasn't going to leave her alone, not when she's in a bad enough way even without her project chaplain and dear friend getting kidnapped.

Rounding out the group are Diane Craton, PTA member and local Girl Scout Troop Leader; Germaine Donaldson, that confusingly-gendered young person that Sherie is supposed to pretend she doesn't know is with the Sheriff's secret police; a mysterious fluffy-feathered bird riding on Keith's shoulder; and, of course, Cecil's margay daemon. They timed this gathering to happen right around when the weather started, so Cecil himself should be here any minute now.

"An anonymous source within the secret police confirms that Dr. Perfecto has been taken out of town," reports Germaine. "The emergency vehicle that picked him up dropped out of monitoring range on Route 800, heading toward Desert Bluffs."

"The PTA is not going to get involved in any rescue missions outside of Night Vale limits," says Diane. "The Glow Cloud, ALL HAIL, only has power within this school district. The Girl Scouts, I'm happy to say, can move a little more freely — but we'll need good intelligence before we commit to anything."

"Can't get it through astral projection," puts in Sherie. "The whole area is heavily warded. Or at least, it's warded to me. Maybe one of the young people will have better luck."

"None of ours have been able to get through," says Tamika grimly. "We do have volunteers lined up for a physical rescue mission, if that's what it comes to. Once Palmero —"

Right on cue, Cecil shoves his way through the door.

He doesn't pay attention to the rest of the crowd, just stalks right up to Khoshekh and grabs the poor margay by the scruff of his neck, giving him a violent shake. "You were supposed to be watching him!"

Khoshekh doesn't even object, just accepts the manhandling with a keen of utter despair.

"Cecil, sweetie," begins Diane.

"Come on, Cecil," stammers Henriette.

"Palmero!" barks Tamika. "We will get him back! Now pull yourself together so you can help!"

Choked-up and shaking, Cecil sinks into the last empty seat, clutching Khoshekh to his chest.

"First we need you to double-check that everything you looked up earlier is still true," says Tamika. "If they've changed their plans for him, we've gotta change our strategy."

It takes a little more coaxing and prodding, but Cecil gets out the alethiometer and sets the dials. Sherie is just close enough to see him pick out the Bird, the Sun, and the Walled Garden. The needle spins.

"Carlos is...stable," reads Cecil. "They have brought him to the main medical facility in Desert Bluffs, and they have counteracted the poison, as planned. He is...unconscious. They have —" He gulps. "They're using something else on him now. To keep him — docile. Unresisting."

Sherie's stomach turns.

"Something we've seen before?" asks Tamika. (Cecil nods.) "Good. That means we've got the antidote. Troop Leader Craton, you have emergency chemistry sets in stock?" (Diane nods too.) "Even better. Janice can lead a demonstration on what to make. How soon can you call an emergency meeting and activity session?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Tomorrow morning?" echoes Cecil.

"Consider yourself lucky this happened on a Friday!" says Diane. "If the girls had school tomorrow, it would have to wait until the afternoon."

"If we're flying all the way to Desert Bluffs, we'll need the time to retrofit our gyropters anyway," says Tamika. "Are we on a deadline, Palmero? And you better be honest if we aren't, because it won't help your boyfriend if we cut corners to pick him up early and then blow up halfway there."

Cecil turns more dials. "It may take...up to a week for his system to develop a tolerance to the drug...withdrawal at that point will not be pleasant, but he won't have permanent damage if we get him out...no more than two weeks after that, I think? Give or take? Please don't take that long. They won't — they don't plan to kill him, it'll wreck their public image — and they think they can use him more effectively if they don't, if they don't sever him — but I can't keep going into work for three whole weeks while they have Carlos. I can't. Please...!"

"Tomorrow," says Tamika firmly. "We go in tomorrow."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Unknown

(but everything is gold and fluffy and nothing hurts).

Carlos is lying on what he's pretty sure is the softest, nicest, most comfortable bed ever invented. Either that, or a cloud. A perfect and wonderful cloud. He can feel Isaña's presence close by, just as comfy as he is, curled up and sleeping. He would be so happy if they could lie here forever.

A fuzzy silhouette appears in the haze of sunlit softness. Carlos doesn't recognize this person, but he's in a generous mood, and also probably dreaming, so he thinks, Hi, friend!

"Hi, Ramirez," says a familiar, unhappy voice. "Do you have any idea what's going on with you?"

Carlo! thinks Carlos. Carlo Raimondi, it is so great to see you. I'm having a vision, right? I have those sometimes. They're neat. (Everything is neat.)

"I wish," says Raimondi. "This isn't anything supernatural, you're just tripping. Lucky me! You're the only link I have left to...to anything, and now you're so high you're bouncing off satellites, and probably won't remember half of this when you snap out of it. If you snap out of it."

Don't be sad! It's not so bad. I usually remember less than half of what I see in visions, too!

"What? Really?"

Oh, sure, thinks Carlos reassuringly. One time I had a whole conversation with Dana, and the only thing I remembered at the end was 'use all the bloodstones.' It's okay, though! We're using them now, and it's working perfectly.

"Great. Look, Ramirez, don't tell me the details, okay? And don't tell anyone else, when they wake you up and start asking questions. I know you like talking about your work to anyone who will listen, but you've got to keep your mouth shut about everything right now. Understand?"

Uh-huh. Mouth shut. Don't talk. ...Why not? Carlos likes making people happy, which in this case means doing what Raimondi tells him, but Raimondi is right: he also really, really likes talking about theology.

"Because Strexcorp wants to pump you for information that they can use to hurt people. Including your colleagues. And that boyfriend of yours."

Oh. The thought of Cecil gives Carlos all kinds of warm and fuzzy feelings. When he tries to summon some emotion about Cecil getting hurt, though, all he can muster is a vague blankness. I...I don't think I would like that.

"You're damn right you wouldn't. And with any luck you're early enough in the Strex-roofie regimen that you can keep remembering that, even if you can't actually feel it."

This happens to me a lot, reflects Carlos. Being captured or restrained. And/or having my conscious mind suppressed and my feelings overwritten. I...am relatively sure that I don't like that either.

Raimondi sighs. "Yeah. It sucks pretty hard."

He drops into a sitting position on...something next to Carlos's cloud. More cloud? It's hard to be sure. Everything is so bright and sunny in this hallucination/dreamscape, it's hard to see specifics.

"I didn't just show up in your brain to give helpful advice," admits Raimondi. "Although it is handy that you owe me now. Because I need a favor."

Sure! Whatever you want.

The ghost of the severed theologian takes a metaphorical deep breath. "I need you to kill me."

...oh?

"I get that this is a hell of a thing to ask," continues Raimondi. "It's not like we were ever great friends...we didn't even know each other that well, and you probably thought I was kind of a crude, tactless jerk...."

Yep, thinks Carlos pleasantly. To be fair, you thought I was an overly-excitable nerd with lackluster social skills.

"Right! But you're the only person I can ask. And I need this. Those Strex bastards cut off my daemon, so even if my body gets rescued, I'm not coming back — but I can't move on, either, I'm not free to go find my Caesena again, and I'm pretty sure it's all my still-working organs that are keeping me here. You don't have to kill it yourself, if you've got friends who are better at that kind of thing, which I feel like you probably do. Just make sure it gets done. Can you do that?"

Carlos thinks about the times he's been separated, even temporarily, from Isaña. He's having a hard time remembering what the sadness, pain, or loneliness felt like, exactly...but he's pretty sure those are the emotions that were involved. Kill you, he thinks. Mmkay. No problem. I'll try to remember.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"...assuming we know where we're going."

"The hospital," says Sherie. "Right?"

"Right," says Tamika. "So where is it? What's the most strategic way to approach? I need street names, I need angles, I need distances. Palmero?"

"The alethiometer is not MapQuest!" cries Cecil.

(Nobody suggests using MapQuest itself. It does have Night Vale in its database, but displays the street layouts that, according to corroborating documents from the Night Vale City Hall archives, were accurate in 1952. No reason to think the data on Desert Bluffs will be any more up-to-date.)

"My girls are not getting sent over there to fly randomly around town until they spot something that looks like a hospital," says Diane firmly. "They'll be shot down before they can find it."

Germaine coughs. "Don't you have a bunch of yellow gyropters that you've fixed up so they look exactly like authorized Strexcorp gyropters?"

The Fear Scout who came with Tamika and Janice rolls his eyes. "Dude. The only reason we get away with that here is because there's no comprehensive flight-tracking ordinater system. And what they have instead is the Sheriff's secret police, enough of whom are still loyal to Night Vale over Strexcorp that you...I mean, they...can give us cover."

"Are there really no directions on the Desert Bluffs Medical Center website?" asks Henriette. It's the first time she's spoken all meeting.

"We've tried it," says Janice. "The Getting Here page has a series of meat-based dessert recipes. According to the metadata, it was last updated earlier today. We can't find any earlier cached versions, either."

"Wow. Sounds like they're working hard to cover their tracks." Henriette withdraws something brochure-sized from her bag and smacks it down on the table. "But not hard enough."

Everyone leans forward. "What's that?" asks Tamika.

"A couple of informational brochures about DBMC," says Henriette casually. "This one, you'll notice, has a big glossy photo of the building on the front...and a diagram of the building layout inside. And this one here, if you flip to the inside back cover, has a detailed map of the area, plus driving directions from Route 800. Oh, and, maybe we don't want to storm the place? Maybe we want to sneak in while attracting as little attention as possible?"

"Would be less dangerous for everyone involved," agrees Tamika. "Why? You got something to help with that, too?"

"Do I ever." Henriette slides forward a small plastic card, stark yellow, with an orange triangle in one corner and a glossy black bar code across the front. "Temporary visitor pass, for use by a prospective patient who wants a tour. Can be used during all regular business hours."

Everyone stares.

"This is...potentially amazing," says Cecil. "How on earth did you come by it?"

"Well." Henriette tucks her hair modestly behind her ears. "It just so happens that I haven't been completely useless these past couple of weeks. It happens that I have managed to convince Zariya Thiébaut that she has a chance in hell of recruiting me, if she plays her cards right. And the one of the cards she's played is 'access to better, more-advanced medical treatments than anything your world has to offer'."

"Convenient," says Diane warily. "You sure she's not setting you up?"

Henriette tenses. "What, you think some kind of convoluted gambit-within-a-gambit is more likely than Thiébaut thinking 'hmm, if there's any bait that could tempt this person to the dark side, what would it be, oh, wait, she's trans, this is easy'...?"

Keith puts a hand on her shoulder. "I am inclined to believe you, Dr. Gaillard. But we must have Señor Palmero double-check."

Cecil is already turning dials.

"Henriette," he breathes at last. "You're right. It's not all a single multi-layered plot. Strexcorp is too large, its internal operations too disconnected from each other. The woman trying to recruit you was aware of her own department's schemes to kidnap Carlos...but not this one."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika is in the third-largest suite of Vansten's commandeered estate, standing over a blown-up version of the map of the relevant Desert Bluffs streets and running through strategy with her volunteer pilots, when the doorbell rings.

They're not expecting anyone.

She motions for quiet, takes up her slingshot, and sneaks out to the balcony. It's dark, but from here she has a clear view of the well-lit front terrace, and can take out that man in the tan jacket with a single rock to the head if she needs to.

It's Janice who opens the door, just a crack, with the chain still on. "Can I help you?"

"Probably," says the man. "Have I found a meeting of the My Little Pony Appreciation Club?"

"No, this is the...I mean...uh, yes," stammers Janice.

"Great. May I join you?"

"Aren't you a little old to watch kids' cartoons?"

"Yes. Yes, I am," says the man matter-of-factly. "On the other hand, you're never too old to appreciate the magic of friendship. Or too old to help out with an important rescue mission — especially when the rescuee is someone you owe a favor, even if he can't remember all the details. Or too old to have a favorite pony. Mine is Rarity, for the record."

"...Mine too," says Janice. "Listen, it's not up to me whether you can join...but it does sound like you deserve the chance to come in and talk to our club leader? Just be careful what you say around my stepsister, because she will fight you over the best pony being Rainbow Dash."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Henriette has never had the same unselfconscious love for kids' cartoons that Carlos does, but she and Clotère have to sit still for a bit while parts of their disguise set, so she finds the 1980's Lyra-and-Pan Adventures on Netflix. The episode where Lyra and Will fight the abominable snowman takes her mind off her worries about what's being done to Carlos, what state he'll be in when they rescue him, how he'll recover.

(She remembers her return from secret-police custody, when her brain kept losing track of where she was or what they were doing. And on the morning of a mandatory blood oath, too. It would've been even more of a nightmare if not for Carlos patiently re-orienting her every time she asked what was going on.)

Köhler makes tea, and brings her a mug. That's not surprising. He and Nirliq have been watching Henriette's food-and-drink intake like hawks ever since they heard about the kidnapping.

What is a little surprising is that he joins her on the couch to finish out the episode.

As the closing credits roll, he says, hesitantly, "If you have any doubts about your ability to do this...any at all...."

"I don't," says Henriette without missing a beat.

"It is...understandable...that you might not want to tell me," continues Köhler. His binturong daemon is curled up at his feet, a mass of blue-black fur. "I have not always...evaluated you fairly. I have left myself little ground from which to criticize. Still...for Dr. Ramirez's sake...."

Maybe later Henriette will bask in the validation. Maybe once Carlos is home safe, she'll say, before I catch my flight, tell me one more time how you admit that you've undermined your own credibility by automatically writing off women. No, actually, tell me twice.

For now, she just puts a hand on Köhler's arm. "I'm not going to gamble with Carlos's life just to show you up. I promise."

Her colleague relaxes. "Of course."

The next Lyra-and-Pan episode has started playing on the screen; Henriette recognizes the scenery, and grimaces. "I think this is the episode where an evil witch keeps her daughter drugged and asleep in a cave, and Lyra and Will have to rescue her. That's a little on the nose." She flips back to the episode listing. "How do you feel about the one with the sphinx and the submarine...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Carlos is comfortable, and warm, and unworried.

He isn't even bothered at the feeling of something being cupped over his nose and mouth. Last time that happened, it turned out to be Teddy Williams re-oxygenating his blood, so why shouldn't it be a good thing this time? Most things are good. He should be happy.

He opens his eyes.

"Oh, good, you're awake!" chirps a nurse in orange scrubs, lifting the plastic mask away from his face. Her pupils are hugely dilated; a white rat daemon sits limply in her pocket, unmoving. "You'll be up and productive again in no time, don't worry! Can you tell me your name?"

"Carlos," says Carlos, before remembering that he's been captured, and he's not supposed to answer their questions. But that one's probably safe, right?

"Great! Do you know where you are?"

A hospital, thinks Carlos. A hospital with pastel-yellow walls, and sleek white machinery, and no unexpected spiderwebs or pulsing black spheres anywhere...while the nurse's scrubs are spattered with blood, and the cabinet across from him is dripping. "Desert Bluffs."

"That's right! Is there anything I can get for you?"

"Glasses," says Carlos. Everything is blurry. He wants to see.

"Oh, gosh, we can't help you with that. But we can schedule you for laser eye repair surgery this afternoon, if you want. Or, better yet, rip out those flawed and imperfect organic eyes and put in some bionic replacements! It'll cost more, of course, but you end up able to see three times the range in the anbaromagnetic spectrum. They get rave reviews from all our patients."

Carlos has a sudden, heartfelt craving for bionic eyes. Only the awareness that he's in no mental condition to sign things holds him back. "Maybe later."

"Suit yourself! I'll go update the system with your new consciousness status."

She practically skips away, wheeling the oxygen tank (or whatever gas it is...to counter whatever they were using to keep him asleep?) behind her.

Carlos starts wiggling and shifting his limbs, little by little, just to take stock of where and how he's doing. He's on a bed, next to a window; stripes of sunlight fall across the ivory-white sheet. He's wearing a hospital gown...and possibly nothing else. There's a needle in one of his arms, feeding something from an IV drip into his bloodstream. Firm leather restraints hold down his wrists and ankles.

That last detail almost inspires him to think about getting worried, until he realizes he's also been fitted with a catheter. So he won't need to get up. His captors really are thoughtful.

"Isaña?" he asks softly.

"Down here," says a voice not far below his head.

"Oh! Good."

"I'm in a cage," says Isaña. "Can you unlock it?"

"No. I'm tied down."

"Oh. Darn."

"Yeah," says Carlos, more out of sympathy with his daemon than because he really feels bothered. It's a nice room. He's okay with staying here for a while.

And sure, there are a couple things dripping with blood, but every area has its own quirky design trends. As long as none of it drips on him, right?

He's been lying there for a while, enjoying the sunshine, when another nurse pokes his head in through the glass door. (He doesn't open the glass door. There's a gaping hole where much of the glass has been smashed out, at just the right height for heads.) "A friend is here to see you! We're sending him right up."

A friend! Carlos likes friends.

The blurry silhouette who appears at the door makes him even happier. Because it's Cecil! His favorite person in every world.

Carlos is slightly less delighted when the visitor gets close enough to tell that it's not Cecil after all. But hey, Kevin is okay too. He has no reason not to like Kevin. Does he?

"So you're Carlos!" says Kevin, plopping down into the swivel chair next to the bed. There's a pillow-sized lump of tan fur scooting along by his feet, and an unobtrusive, colorless figure trailing along behind them. "I hope you don't mind me coming to see you. It's just, I've heard so much about you, and I was really curious! The famously handsome Night Vale theologian, who does so much to protect his town."

"Uh-huh," says Carlos. "Hi, Kevin."

Kevin catches his breath. "You know who I am! That is so sweet. Have you heard about my daemon, too?"

Yes. But Carlos wants to know more. Also, he has a vague idea that he should keep Kevin talking, instead of trying to talk himself. "No. Tell me."

So Kevin explains how he comes from a world where daemons are internal, and confesses that when the company first assigned him to work here, he would get very jealous of the people with corporeal snuggly companions. He sings the praises of Strexcorp, which recognized that his distress was undermining his full productive potential, "and since they couldn't do the usual surgery that fixes that kind of drawback, they set out to engineer me a daemon instead!" He gushes about how cute his Bedamim is: "I take her for walks, I throw sticks at her, I tell her my worst secrets. I feed her mice every night before bed!"

"Daemons don't eat," says Carlos.

"I trained her to!" chirps Kevin. "I — oops!"

And Carlos feels the distant sensation of something he thinks is supposed to be pain.

"Come here, you," coos Kevin, dragging Bedamim away from the cage under Carlos's pillow. "That's not a mouse!" Bedamim snaps her beak, gulping something down, then chirrups in mischievous delight; Kevin hefts her into the air and passes her into the arms of his death. "You hold her for a bit, okay?"

Carlos should be...reacting, or something...to this. Right?

"You know, I can see why you're supposed to be so beautiful," says Kevin, resting his chin on one hand. "But, gosh, you don't take very good care of yourself, do you? There's this other theologian I know — his name's Carlo — hey, that sounds kind of like your name! Have you ever met?"

"Yeah."

"Well, he's one of the assistants who sets me up when I'm going in for tests, and he also has very curly hair. But he keeps it short! He doesn't let it get all...wild and unkempt like that. Also? He shaves."

"Cecil likes my hair," protests Carlos. "Cecil...really likes my hair."

"Cecil's your boyfriend, right?"

The thought of Cecil never fails to make Carlos smile, so right now, with unfiltered worry-suppressant being pumped into his veins, he breaks out into a face-splitting grin. "Yep."

"Aww. I bet he'd like it even more if you were living up to your full productive potential."

That doesn't sound right...? But Kevin says it with such conviction. Maybe Carlos is wrong. He's been wrong before.

"Don't you want to achieve your full potential, Carlos?"

"I...I want to talk to Cecil," says Carlos.

It's not that he doesn't trust Kevin. Why wouldn't he trust Kevin? It's just that an experimental theologian always gets corroborating evidence. That's...somewhere in the top five things an experimental theologian does.

"I'm afraid Cecil can't come here," says Kevin. "The trip would be much too long. It would take him away from work! Also, there's a lot of paperwork that needs to be signed and filled out with a #2 pencil, and apparently in Night Vale those are grounds for arrest? See, this is why government shouldn't have too much power and overreach into the lives of ordinary citizens! That should be reserved for corporations."

"Oh. Okay."

"We don't need any paperwork to clean you up, though!" adds Kevin brightly. "I can take care of that right now. Your boyfriend will be so excited to see it. It can be a surprise!"

With a soft metallic sound, he draws a knife from the sheath at his waist.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Everyone is in place.

Henriette is signing herself in at the DBMC front desk, with Agent M tucked safely in her pocket, prepared to hack the ordinater system once they've disabled their tour guide.

The team of rescue gyropters are stationed on the hospital roof, where they managed to arrive in secret thanks to heavy spellwork, angelic protection (even with Vansten whining and moaning every step of the way), and the distraction of Strexcorp's resources with a team of diversionary gyropters.

The man in the tan jacket is doing...whatever it is he said he would be doing. Probably. Hopefully.

And the team of diversionary gyropters is cutting a direct line through the sky toward the hospital.

Tamika arms her slingshot, and gets ready to smash some windows.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Kevin drags Carlos's head into different positions by yanking on handfuls of hair, then slices it off in curly tufts and tosses it to the floor.

His knife is sharp. Ridiculously so. No wonder he was able to make that impossibly surgical cut through deer bone a few days ago. The blade slips easily through Carlos's thick hair; when Kevin switches gears and starts on his cheeks, it flows over his skin, subtler than water.

That's when the building alarm goes off.

And Kevin jumps in surprise.

And the blade plunges into Carlos's cheek like a carving knife through butter.

"Oops!" says Kevin with a giggle. "I nicked you, sorry! Didn't mean to."

Hold still, hold still, just hold still, Carlos tells himself. His sense that there might be pain is dim and distant — and his vision is still clear, so it must have spared his eye — but beyond that he has no idea how bad the cut is. Answering Kevin, working those muscles, might make it worse. Any kind of expression might make it worse.

Sure is lucky he's drugged! What if he was in enough pain to scream right now? Or to cry? Either of those would probably be a bad strain on his wounded cheek muscles.

"What is going on out there, I wonder?" asks Kevin, as they both hear the sounds of breaking glass, of thumps and thuds, of shouting and gunshots. Some of them very close. The nearest might be right down the hall.

Carlos's face might have been sliced open too badly to shout for rescue, but his daemon's has not. "In here!" she yells at the top of her lungs. "Help! We're in here!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Dammit, Tamika's team was supposed to be on the other side of the building. To draw the security forces away from Dr. Perfecto, instead of having them converge fifty feet from where he's being kept.

So their intel was faulty somehow. No time to cry about it. They've got to make do with what they have.

Rashi tosses a biomechanical sentry into the wall with his horns, Tamika bursts through the door where Perfecto is being kept, and you know what, screw the old plan, she's glad they're here. The theologian is strapped to a bed, pupils dilated and eyes glassy, blood all over his face...and Palmero's local döppelganger standing over him with a manic grin and a bloodstained knife.

"Step away from the theologian!" snaps Tamika, drawing back her slingshot and aiming a skull-cracking stone right at Kevin's forehead.

Kevin turns to her...looks her over from twists to boots (the fact that he's got gaping holes where his eyes should be doesn't seem to slow him down)...and keeps right on smiling. "But we're having so much fun!"

Tamika lets the rock fly.

Kevin blocks, getting slammed in the forearm. He shields himself from the next two stones the same way, and while that means Tamika hasn't managed to hit any major organs, it should still hurt. He should be writhing in pain right about now. Instead he blinks his eyelids over empty sockets and says, "Didn't your parents ever tell you not to throw rocks at people?"

"He doesn't feel pain," explains Perfecto's daemon...from, oh hell, she's in a cage. "We're not feeling much right now either! It's handy. By the way, look out for the StrexDaemon. She bites."

A hideously duck-eyed furry creature, in the arms of a previously-unnoticed colorless humanoid creature, chirrups at the mention. Looks bitey. Looks like it might be real threatening to, say, an armadillo less than a third of its size. Rashi just takes a stance where he can leap into action and crush it if it tries anything.

"I tried asking without using force. You didn't respond," says Tamika to Kevin. "Now I'm gonna try asking again. You want to step away from the theologian, or you want to keep fighting about it?"

"I bet you're not even authorized to be here," says Kevin. "I bet you don't even have a guest pass, do you? Let me see your ID."

So that's how he wants to play it. Fine. Tamika is out of ammo, but she sticks the slingshot in her back pocket, undaunted. She still has one of the world's most effective weapons.

A book.

Specifically: a book large and heavy enough to use as a club.

Tamika pulls the hardback copy of the first volume of Truppenführung ("No plan survives contact with the enemy") from the pocket of her cargo shorts, and charges.

So he's got a knife. Whoop-de-doo. Tamika has the training to defend against anything. If the enemy has teeth and claws, Tamika will dismember them; if they have slings and arrows, Tamika will shield and dodge; and if they have swords or knives, Tamika will pa—

— a blaze of pain explodes in her hand —

— and the book goes winging in pieces to the floor.

 

-{,(((,">

 

It all happens too fast for Carlos to follow. One second Tamika is charging to his rescue, tall and stocky and completely ready to knock Kevin over if she needs to — and the next, she's on elbows and knees, shuddering and gasping with barely-contained pain, clutching one blood-smeared hand in the other while shredded scraps of paper flutter to the ground around her like falling leaves.

And there against the wall — in a spray of bright red against the dull, older stains already on the tile — are two brown fingers, one flung a little farther than the other, both slightly curled. Like the world's goriest quotation mark.

Carlos wonders if he should be worried.

"Oh," says Kevin, staring down at her. "Oh."

Tamika's buffalo daemon launches himself at Bedamim, still hefted over Kevin's death's shoulder, and pins them both to the wall with his horns. Neither of them look bothered by it.

The girl will be fine, right? She's just lost a couple of fingers. People lose bits of themselves all the time. In fact, Kevin is missing the same two fingers — it was hard for Carlos to miss, what with Kevin grabbing at his head so much — and he's...arguably...doing okay.

"Gosh, Carlos, I am sorry..." says Kevin, sheathing the knife and stepping over Tamika's body to get to the cabinets.

In spite of the pain, Tamika makes an effort to throw herself at Kevin's legs — and she finally drags him to the ground, but not before he pulls something out of a drawer. They wrestle — Kevin presses the something against her neck — Tamika mumbles Do not go gently into that good night as she loses consciousness, slumping to the floor. Rashi staggers, eyes half-lidded.

"...but I won't be able to finish your haircut!" continues Kevin, as if he wasn't even interrupted. "Something came up."

He pulls a white plastic first-aid kit from one of the bottom cabinets, sets it next to Tamika, then takes that knife back out and holds it to the empty air.

Carlos is frankly baffled as to what could be going on here, until he hears crickets chirping, and sees a slice of pastoral nighttime opening up in the sunny hospital, and smells (over the iron tang of his own blood) violets and lilies.

Either Strexcorp has found Will Parry's knife, or they've managed to reverse-engineer it.

But if they have a knife that cuts seamlessly between worlds — and a knifebearer with the rare skill of using it! — then why are they still messing around with oranges and deer?

Carlos is still trying to puzzle that one out when Kevin finishes cutting the large window, tosses the first-aid kit through, then re-sheathes the knife and hefts Tamika's body over his shoulders in a fireman's carry.

"Tamika...!" croaks Rashi, staggering after them.

Between his delirious determination and a couple of well-placed shoves from Bedamim and Kevin's death, he manages to keep moving until he's on the other side of the window, where he hits the grass at Tamika's side.

"I wish I didn't have to be this abrupt," says Kevin, standing in another world's meadow and running his fingers along the edge of the homemade portal. "It's just that I really need to talk to this girl. And it has to be someplace quiet. And you know how work is, busy busy busy, never a wasted moment! Now, I could stay in this world and try to take her home, but that would only last until the company enforcers caught up with me. Which they would! She's a missing child, did you know that? Strexcorp really cares about the children."

He's pinched the bottom two-thirds of the portal closed. Only a rough half-circle remains.

"So I have to duck out for a bit. But I hope we'll see each other again!" chirps Kevin. "You were very friendly, and I love making new friends. Bye!"

The last thing Carlos sees is his hand, the one so like Cecil's (complete with all the fingers), waving against a midnight-blue sky.

Then the chorus of otherworldly crickets cuts out, and the window is gone.

Notes:

Yesssss finally it's the chapter we've been waiting to get to ever since the words "Tamika will parry" first showed up 30 chapters ago.

(...also, ever since I joked about future!Carlos's scar turning out to be from "something innocuous, like a shaving accident.")

New art! Erika!Carlos and Erika!Cecil, by chess_ka. Also: Cecil's separation ordeal, and happier family memories.

Chapter 29: We Shall Return

Summary:

This whole "let's rescue Carlos" plan isn't going as well as it might have.

Warnings in the endnotes.

Desert Bluffs.

Carlos is still going with his "hold perfectly still and hope you don't do yourself any extra damage" plan as the commotion of battle outside moves away, then dies down. Isaña calls for help a couple more times, to no avail. The alarm is still ringing; it's the only noise they can hear.

Until two people in long white coats with orange-triangle badges, one of them pushing an empty wheelchair, come into his hospital room.

The man, tall and dark-haired with a groundhog daemon at his side, curses under his breath. "He wasn't supposed to be hurt!"

"I can patch up his face," says the woman. Carlos can't make out her features, just the white bird daemon on her shoulder. "You take him out of the restraints."

They seem nice.

The woman cleans the blood off Carlos's face, and holds his cheek together with what feels like a lot of medical tape and layers of gauze. Once she's done, he asks, curiously, "Is it bad?"

The man jumps. "Jesus, you're lucid."

With one of his newly-freed hands, Carlos gives a little wave of confirmation.

"The treatment makes a person docile and agreeable, not catatonic. This was in the briefing," says the woman sharply to her colleague. To Carlos, she says, "It's going to need stitches. Try not to talk a lot. Or smile too widely."

Sure, Carlos can handle that. From below, Isaña says, "Where're we going?"

"You're being transferred."

"Can Cecil visit us then?"

The woman finishes extracting the IV from his arm, puts a much smaller bandage over the puncture wound, and helps him sit up. "No. Do you have any other injuries? Just nod or shake your head." (Carlos shakes his head.)

The man, meanwhile, is doing a walkaround of the bed, where he discovers the catheter and grimaces. "Any chance you're thinking clearly enough to take this out yourself?"

Carlos shrugs. "You can do it. You're a medical professional."

"...Yeah." The man glances at the door (still broken, the hall beyond still empty), then sidles up to Carlos, bends to his ear, and whispers — in a completely different voice — "Dammit, Carlos, do not make me touch your junk if I don't have to."

It's not a man at all. It's Henriette.

"Oh," says Carlos, with a (not-too-wide) smile. "Okay."

He can get up on his own, and is pretty sure he could just walk wherever they're going. Henriette (her hair chopped short and given a hasty dye job, her marmot daemon's fur dyed brown, and wow, apparently she can still do a flawless guy voice if a disguise calls for it) makes him sit in the chair anyway, while the still-unidentified woman crouches down by Isaña's cage.

Now that he's at an angle to see it, Carlos realizes it's adjustable. It doesn't give his little armadillo much room to run around, but the wire-mesh walls could have been moved outward to make space for a larger daemon. Also, unlike his own restraints, it's secured by a real lock.

Unbothered, the woman pulls a handful of sand out of her pocket and blows it against the lock, while making a clicking sound deep in her throat.

She's a witch.

Cool.

Isaña scrambles onto the waiting head of the brown-dyed Clotère, who lifts her up so Carlos can gather her into his arms. Henriette grabs the handlebars of the chair, and just like that, their little rescue posse is walking out the door.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The witch — who still hasn't felt the need to tell any of them her name, though she checks out as an ally through the Atal spyglasses, and so far, so good — does another magic-y gesture in the elevator, then says, "Cameras are down."

"Great," says Henriette, and relaxes out of Man Posture. She's not regretting the disguise — strolling into a well-guarded Strexcorp medical center right in the middle of scenic Desert Bluffs, she wants to look as unrecognizable as possible — but the dysphoria is probably going to hit like a truck when the adrenaline wears off, and she's not looking forward to it.

Carlos is going to owe her so bad after this.

Speaking of Carlos: he looks a lot better now that he's not strapped down or covered with blood. The big cut is safely bandaged, while a handful of other nicks and scrapes look like they've already stopped bleeding. Still, his pupils are still dilated much too wide to be healthy, and his own posture is blandly relaxed in a way he's not a good enough actor to fake. "How awake are you, here?" asks Henriette. "Do you want to know the plan? Will you be able to remember it if I tell you?"

"Sure, we'll remember it," says Isaña from Carlos's lap. "We'll just think it's great regardless of whether we would do so normally. Although we probably would, because I bet it's wonderful! What is it?"

Henriette sticks her hand in her pocket and comes out with Megan Wallaby. "Snuck this kid in here and had her hack the computer system," she says, setting the detached hand on the arm of the borrowed wheelchair. Megan's daemon lands next to her as a tiny black bird-claw. "She convinced it that you're scheduled to be transferred to a different, more-secure Strex facility. Without telling that facility to expect you to show up. Best-case scenario, it takes days before anyone even notices you're missing."

"That's smart," says Isaña warmly. "You did that? High five!"

Megan flips over, stands on her wrist, and, when Carlos holds a hand in front of her, jumps up to smack it.

"Then we slip you out of here right under their noses. While a bunch of kids cover us by staging an attack — but on the wrong side of the building, they don't take any extravagant risks, and when they fly away, Strex knows it's not with you in tow."

"Ah! That explains Tamika," says Carlos, as the elevator reaches the top floor.

Henriette tenses. How did he know...?

"You saw Tamika Flynn?" asks the witch. "What happened to her?"

"She came in and got into a fight with Kevin," says Isaña. They exit into the stairwell, abandoning the chair; Megan relocates to the witch's shoulder, daemon clinging to the Cyrillic-inscribed ring on her finger, as they make for the roof. "It ended when he knocked her out with some kind of sedative, then cut a window into another world and took her there. Well, most of her. The fingers he cut off are still on the floor of the hospital room. What part of the plan was that?"

A frisson of worry runs down Henriette's spine. "That was no part of the plan."

And Clotère sucks in a sharp breath: "Does this mean we're leaving two fingers' worth of Tamika Flynn's genetic material on the floor of a Strexcorp research facility?"

"You could have mentioned this while we were still down there!" hisses Henriette.

"Huh," says Carlos. "Guess I could."

Their getaway gyropter is waiting on the roof. The witch leads an agreeable Carlos toward it. Henriette, though, stops short. "One of us has to go back."

The witch stops too. "I'll do it."

Henriette holds up a hand. "How much do you know about destroying biological material?"

"Uh. Not a whole lot. Better send one of the kids, then. One of the ones who got their Sanitizing a Crime Scene badge."

"I am not sending a twelve-year-old back into danger while I flee the scene," says Henriette firmly. "I'm a better woman than that. Hell, I'm a better man than that, and I made a terrible man."

"We still have the same out we did before," adds her marmot daemon. "Claim we still want to get the tour, but got turned around on the way to Dr. Thiébaut's office."

"I remember her," says Isaña. "She tried to bug us. We didn't like that, right?"

"You sure didn't." Henriette closes the distance between them. "Carlos —"

Carlos sets down his daemon and leans into the hug.

Henriette tucks her head against the shoulder that still has long silky hair falling over it, instead of the one where it's been chopped to no more than a curl away from the skull. "You've been the best project chaplain I've ever had, you know."

"And you," says Isaña, bopping her head up against Clotère's chin, "have been a true and trusted friend. We're gonna miss you a lot when you go to CERN."

"Yeah...look, just in case," says Henriette. "Just in case anything goes wrong...tell Adriana I'm sorry, okay? And tell my son I love him. No matter what stupid critical things I might have said over Christmas dinner after drinking all the Chianti."

Carlos gives her a fond squeeze, while Isaña says, "After you get back, we'll remind you to tell him yourself."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The pilot of their gyropter is Josh Craton. Megan hops into the co-pilot seat. The mystery witch pulls Carlos in back with her, then flicks the forehead of the pigeon daemon on her shoulder. "Wake up, Erika."

"Huh?" The pigeon, with a familiar gravelly voice, blinks and cocks his head. "Do I have to do stuff again?"

"Yes, you lazy ball of fluff. Give us some cover."

"Oh, come on, show a little respect."

Carlos frowns at him. Not the witch's daemon after all. "...Marcus?"

"Yeah, kinda." Erika, formerly Marcus-and-his-daemon, stretches his wings, fluffs his feathers, and kicks one little claw-footed leg. "I've never done this before today, gimme a minute to...okay, here we go."

The cabin of the helicopter lights up with brilliant black light. Erika expands, feathers rolling and unfurling in multidimensional arcs that defy conventional physics...and then he's nowhere to be seen, but the view through the windows has gone dark, and Carlos can no longer see the nose of the gyropter when he peeks over the seats to look out the front.

"Wow," says Isaña. "Convenient."

The witch, meanwhile, fiddles around under the seat and comes out with an insulated black box, from which she takes a sealed plastic container of a mulberry-colored liquid. She offers it to Carlos, along with her fake Strex staff coat (which he doesn't try to put on, just tucks over himself like a blanket). "Drink this. The Advanced Readers developed it. Should counteract most of the drug currently in your system."

Carlos takes the drink, holds it up against the bright darkness, looks at it from different angles. Theologically fascinating.

"So...if we take this, we go back to experiencing normal emotions, right?" asks Isaña.

"That's right!" says Josh from the pilot's seat. "No crash, even. And we wanted it to work for everyone on the team, even if they had allergies, so it's gluten-free, lactose-free, nut-free, and cyanide-free."

Isaña walks up Carlos's newly-smock-covered lap to lean against his hip. "But what if we wouldn't like it? What if, after the effects sink in, we no longer think...well, for instance, that Tamika's obviously fine and will be coming back any time? What if it no longer seems like a given that Henriette's coming back? What if we stop being as optimistic about eventually winning against Strex as we are right now?"

Carlos curls a hand around her. "That probably would be hard to go back to, yeah."

"Great," says the witch. "Fine. You do that. Stay blissed-out as long as chemically possible. Be high during your big reunion with your teammates, who still aren't over being worried about Henriette's drinking. Be high during your big reunion with your boyfriend, so that not only does his heart break over realizing that half your hair is gone and there's tape holding your face together, when you smile at him, it looks just like Kevin's. I'm sure that'll work out tremendously."

Part of Carlos wants to protest that there was nothing wrong with Kevin's smile. Nothing wrong with Kevin in general. On the other hand...Kevin upsets Cecil, doesn't he? And Carlos is 95% sure it makes him sad when Cecil is upset.

He unscrews the cap on the drink and downs it in two swallows.

The witch sighs. "Good man."

Maybe the antidote is acting already, because it finally occurs to Carlos that a complete stranger shouldn't know this much about him.

He doesn't even know where this woman came from. That's kind of suspicious, isn't it? He's still having a hard time even pinning her features down. Knowing that her daemon isn't the pigeon makes him wonder if she's Cecil's mother, with her tualapi out sailing somewhere...and if this is Cecil's mom, wow, Carlos has a few things to say to her, doesn't he? Not happy things, either.

"Hey," says Isaña on his behalf. "Who are you, anyway?"

Instead of giving a name, or a relationship to people Carlos knows, or anything identifiable like that, the witch...raises an eyebrow. "Carlos. Isaña. It's me."

Isaña and Carlos share a puzzled look. "We don't recognize you. At all."

"Well, sure, but come on." She waves a hand in front of Carlos's eyes. "Sometimes it takes you a moment, but you should've caught on by now...."

Out of nowhere, an angelic voice resonates around the cabin. "Y'know, TJ, normally I am the last person to say this...but maybe you should get dressed."

"Oh!" The witch palms her forehead. "Of course."

She reaches under the seat again, and comes up with a piece of clothing, which she pulls on.

...which he pulls on.

It's a tan jacket.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Down at Night Vale Community College, the Rusakov array is still functioning to near perfection. The danger-meter readings from NVCR have cut off, but they're still getting data from the White Sand down the block, which indicates no high-fatality portals are going to show up in the area any time too soon.

Sherie's day is brightened even further when she gets a text from one of her kid liaisons. Breathing a sigh of relief, she alerts Cecil to call her when he can.

Her phone rings fifteen minutes later. "Sherie! Sorry for the wait, I had to sneak into the men's room. It's the only place Lauren won't follow me. How are you doing?"

"Can't complain. I just wanted to make sure you were still on for the potluck tonight," says Sherie. "Steve's making his famous scones, but don't let that turn you off. I hear some of the kids are bringing peach cobbler. Just pulled it out of the oven."

Cecil catches his breath. "Really? Peach cobbler? Perfect and beautiful peach cobbler?"

"That's the one."

"I'm there! I am so there. You tell everyone I can't wait."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Between Night Vale and Desert Bluffs.

Carlos's face is starting to hurt (a dull, hot throbbing of pain under the skin of his cheek), so Isaña takes over the talking. "You were pulling the same trick Henriette was. You're trans."

"That's right."

"Have we figured that out before?"

The Man in the Tan Jacket is doing something with his hair...braiding it! He has hair long enough to braid! Carlos really hopes he can hang on to that detail. Like the way he's finally managed to remember, even when they're not within sight of each other, that the man has eyebrows of some kind. "No. Well, you personally haven't. One of your former teammates — Jordan, I think was the name? — figured out the 'trans' part once."

So they won't be annoying him by asking questions they've already asked a dozen times before! That's encouraging. "How old are you, really?" Witches stop visibly aging between their late twenties and their early forties. Josie looks younger than Carlos, though she is (was?) in her early two-hundreds; the renowned Serafina Pekkala is over four hundred; the very oldest witches have claimed to pass a thousand.

"Would you believe 'still no older than I look'?"

"We can't really tell how old you look," says Isaña sheepishly. (Although that rules out the Cecil's-mother theory. She was around more than a century ago.) "Wait, you are a witch, right? Not just a random trans man who knows witch-lore for whatever reason?"

The man grimaces. "Biologically speaking, I'm a witch, yes."

"Oh — sorry, is that word...too gendered? Should we use a different one?"

"You know, I have no idea," says the man. He sounds tired. "If a witch's child turns out to be a trans girl, you raise her as a non-witch. Nothing to be confused about — there's gonna be other non-witch women in her father's culture, you can use the words that already exist for them. But if you're like me...? I can fly, I have the unlimited daemon range, I'll live for centuries if I'm careful...but there's no existing place in the clans for men. And they're not interested in creating one. They've made that more than clear."

"We're sorry to hear that," says Isaña. "Unless you didn't want to be part of a witch-clan in the first place?"

"I used to want it. When I was a kid, I mean. These days I'm not so sure. If there are other guys like me — and I don't even know if there are — they all gave up on the idea and scattered to the four winds long before I had any chance of meeting them."

"It would be theologically unlikely for you to be the only one," says Isaña, trying to be reassuring.

"You think so?"

"Sure. There's no reason witches' children wouldn't be transgender at the same rate as the general population. We'd have to check the statistics, but there should be at least a handful of others alive right now. And you know, if they all left the North after coming out too, maybe some of them ended up in other places like Night Vale — where everyone gets your gender right at first sight. I know that's always been really nice for Henriette...."

Isaña trails off.

"Did we just —" begins Carlos. It's as far as he gets before the speech sends lancing pain up his cheek. He slumps back against the seat, clutching at the messily-shorn side of his head, gasping through closed teeth. Ow. Ow.

The man in the tan jacket is suddenly alert. "Hold still. We've got pain meds if you need them, but we're...how far out from the rendezvous point, Josh?"

"Nineteen minutes," reports their young pilot. "Give or take a good headwind."

"Right. Carlos, if everything goes well you'll be in surgery in around half an hour, and I don't want to make it any harder for the Advanced Readers to sedate you properly. Hold out if you can."

"Forget about us!" exclaims Isaña. "We left Henriette behind! Why are we assuming she'll be okay without a ride? I mean, I know why we assumed that, but why did you?"

"We didn't," says the man. "But we calculated that sneaking out as soon as possible was safest, and if we waited for her we ran the risk of Strex recapturing you, killing me, and getting their hands on an angel who has no idea how to use most of his powers. Not to mention, two elementary-school children."

The reminder of the young rebels' ages takes some of the wind out of their protests. But. "But Erika can give us cover! Why can't we sneak back?"

"Depends." The man leans forward "Are we being tailed yet?"

"There's a yellow fighter jet a quarter mile behind us," reports Josh. "Reminds me of an F-15E Strike Eagle, although the arrangement of the fins is a little different, and it has more weapons bays. If we let it get closer, I bet I could see how the fuselage is —"

Megan taps something in Morse against her armrest.

"Well, I think it's interesting," says Josh sulkily. "Anyway, it doesn't know exactly where we are, or it would've started firing already, but it's definitely on us."

"If Strex has fighter jets, why are they only using gyropters to patrol Night Vale?" asks Isaña weakly.

In the rear view mirror, Josh grins. The daemon on his shoulder turns into a lizard with a toothy smirk. "Because they're scared stiff of what'll happen if Tamika Flynn gets to shoot down and commandeer a fighter jet. So it's gonna turn around once we get over the part of the sand wastes where the Boy Scouts have a base. You watch."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Sherie and her daemon arrive at the repurposed Vansten estate at the same time as Khoshekh. The otherworldly margay touches noses with her mongoose in greeting, and they head inside together.

"Oh, good, you're here," says the high-school-age Morrigan Scout who lets them in. "Will you please convince Dr. Perfecto to accept medical treatment?"

Night Vale's definition of "medical treatment" can be...unconventional, so Sherie doesn't make any promises. In Spanish, she says, "Take us to him."

The medical suite is a repurposed Victorian bedroom suite; several of the kids who flew the rescue mission are sitting on the edge of a lush canopy bed, getting their vitals checked or their scrapes cleaned and bandaged. Carlos is in a velvet-lined armchair a little ways away, bandaged and ragged, wearing a chapel coat over a pale-yellow smock with flecks of blood spattered down the front. There's a cup with a protein shake in his hands, a quilt tucked over his legs; his armadillo daemon is in his lap, arguing with a Weird Scout in a stethoscope.

Khoshekh shouts his name and leaps through the air. Carlos turns his head, breaks into a fragile smile, then winces in pain and clutches at his jaw.

"Good lord, Carlos," murmurs Sherie, dropping back into English as she follows. There's a mahogany coffee table across from Carlos's chair; she moves a pizza box and a bowl of lollipops out of the way so she can sit. "I am so, so glad you made it back safe."

Khoshekh actually lands in Carlos's lap to curl around Isaña — it's a thick quilt and Carlos keeps his hands away, but it still says a lot about the trust they share. "Dear Isaña. Dear Carlos," he purrs. "Cecil will be over the moment the weather starts."

"Dude needs stitches," says the Weird Scout. "One of you want to whack some sense into him? Not literally. Then he'd need more stitches."

"We're not letting them sedate us," says Isaña darkly.

Khoshekh stops rubbing his face against hers. "You can't get surgery without anesthetic. You have working pain receptors."

"Then maybe they should just not touch us!" says Isaña. "We've already been drugged all morning, and Henriette —"

Sherie realizes with a start that Henriette isn't here. And hasn't texted or called, either. "Did she get hurt? Is she in surgery?"

Carlos shakes his head.

"You don't mean she's...."

"She went back in to take care of something. We could have noticed it was dangerous earlier, but we didn't. And then we just — hugged her and let her go." Isaña hangs her head. (She's missing part of one ear, Sherie realizes with a start.) "Didn't even think to worry until we were halfway home! So no more injections, no anesthetic, no more of anything that'll dull our wits on any level, no, no, no."

Sherie's mongoose daemon climbs down from her shoulder and sits on her knee, curling his body so he's about on eye level with the little armadillo. "Not until you find out if she's okay, you mean?"

"Not until ever. Haven't even mentioned how Kevin — he — and I don't think he knew what he was doing any more than we did. Maybe less! Better to feel the pain than the alternative."

"The sedation won't be evil this time around," protests Sherie's daemon. "You're safe here. You'll only be kept in any kind of altered state for as long as it takes to fulfill a serious medical need. And no one's going to take advantage of you while you're under."

"Once we're under, we won't know the difference!"

"I...may be able to do something," says Khoshekh slowly. "To make...something, that will help your healing, with less pain. Is there any chance you have the weapon you were cut with?"

"No. Kevin took that when he left."

"Then I will make do." He licks Isaña's face. "I have to go see what's in the kitchen, okay? I love you."

Isaña nuzzles his furry neck. "Love you too."

While Khoshekh is getting one of the middle-school amateur medics to show him where the kitchen is, Sherie deliberately puts all her worries about Henriette to one side and says, "Carlos, sweetie, are you going to want somebody to even out that haircut...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

All the other patients clear out of the room within an hour, so Carlos lets the kids relocate him to the bed to change his bandages, with Sherie hovering over him to make sure nobody sneaks any calming needles into his bloodstream. When she goes, she leaves behind some of his things: his tablet, a spare pair of glasses, the Little Theologian's Book. Carlos is making the book generate a list of everything he remembers about the Strexcorp facilities when Cecil — accompanied by two well-armed fifth-grade Advanced Readers, and the mobile broadcasting equipment — finally makes it in.

Cecil kisses him, swallows back tears, runs a wistful hand through the short curls all over Carlos's head. (Took Carlos a lot of effort to keep calm while Sherie was using scissors right next to his face, but he made it through.) "It'll grow back," says Isaña, meaning We'll recover.

"Of course it will," says Cecil shakily. "Oh, my brave, beautiful Carlos."

Like Khoshekh, he offers to go down to the kitchen and make...something. Khoshekh, who has spent most of the hour curled around Isaña again, explains that he tried, but there's someone else already doing it. A man in a tan jacket.

One of the Advanced Readers clears her throat. "See, Mr. Palmero, he's fine. As fine as he'll let us make him, anyway. Now, we had a deal, remember?"

Cecil gets out the alethiometer. "Of course."

He checks on Tamika first. She is, astonishingly, safe. She and Kevin are in an uninhabited stretch of a relatively benign world; the only thing close by that's likely to hurt her is Kevin's knife, and he doesn't want to use it on her. What he does want is muddled enough that Cecil can't get a straight answer, although Carlos, remembering the Debate, thinks it's a sound hypothesis that he'll try to escort Tamika back to Night Vale eventually.

The kids are relieved to hear it. They won't say how long they expect to survive as a group without their fearless leader, but Carlos is glad they don't have to find out.

And then...Henriette.

Carlos isn't optimistic.

Which still doesn't make it any easier when Cecil clasps his hands and says, "Dear Carlos. I'm so very sorry."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A world not unlike Desert Bluffs (but not like it, either).

Silence.

Perfect, empty, preternatural silence.

The sudden cessation of pain is such a blessed relief that at first it overrides anything else, but it isn't long before the eeriness of the quiet sinks in. Even the quiet hum of the building, the chatter of people in the next room, the rumble of distant plumbing, is gone.

"Is this still Desert Bluffs...?"

Nobody answers.

Of course. No one is here. Clotère isn't here. For the first time in her existence, she is alone.

"Guess I didn't make it," says Henriette, into the empty non-air of the world of the dead.

It's small comfort that she knows what to expect. And that she did what she'd set out to do, before she went. Would've been nice if she'd taken a few of Strex's people with her, but at least she didn't go down without a fight.

She makes her way down the stairwell of the empty replica Desert Bluffs Medical Center, noticing along the way that her hair is framing her face again. The last-minute changes made to her body in the name of disguise didn't carry over to her ghost.

In fact....

She has the distinct feeling that everything that ever felt not-herself about her body hasn't carried over to her ghost.

And while her beloved daemon is missing, returned to Dust in the world they grew up in, she knows how to get back to him.

Henriette waits a little while in the hospital plaza, just in case the mission has any more casualties. If someone else appears here, it'll be nice for both of them to have someone to walk with. But nobody does, and the feeling of this is wrong, you need to get moving grows ever stronger.

So at last she sets off, alone, toward the blank arc of the horizon. The final shore is waiting.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"The living tell the dying not to leave," says Cecil, into the microphone of the mobile broadcasting equipment, "and the dying do not listen. The dying tell us not to be sad for them, and we do not listen. The dialogue between the living and the dead is full of misunderstanding and silence."

The words are for everyone in town, but Carlos's hand is the only one he's holding as he says them.

No sooner are the good-nights over than a short-but-sturdy Nightshade Scout brings in the Man in the Tan Jacket. (Carlos hurriedly wipes his eyes and tries to look presentable.) The man is wearing oven mitts monogrammed with Marcus Vansten's initials, carrying a covered stainless-steel pot of something steaming-hot. "For your face."

"Not so fast. Let me take a look at that," says Cecil. He hops off his side of the bed; the man turns the handle of the pot so he can take it, and he pulls off the lid and sniffs, eyeing it suspiciously. To the second-grade Scout, he says, "Hand me your knife."

The girl passes him a Svitz army knife. Cecil sets the pot on an end table, flips open the knife's blade extension, and nicks his thumb. When a line of blood wells up, he switches to the sponge, dipping it in the bubbling concoction. He dabs some over the wound, waits a couple of seconds, wipes it on his tunic, then pokes at the skin. It doesn't look like it's bleeding at all.

"This is good," says Cecil slowly. "Much better than I could have done."

The man says something Carlos doesn't quite catch. All he gets is that it sounds sarcastic.

"So can we —" begins Isaña.

She's cut off by a racket down the hall. It sounds like...hoofbeats?

Khoshekh lifts off the mattress and floats between Carlos and the door. Cecil gives his forearm a quick cut, tosses the knife back to the Scout, and presses his fingertips to the blood: ready to trace the runes for any spells necessary. The girl wields her knife, her own daemon turns into a bristling lynx, and even the man in the tan jacket plants his feet and readies his fists to make a swift uppercut if he has to.

Not wanting to be left out, Carlos yanks out the plug of the lamp on the table next to him, and picks it up by the base.

The carved double doors burst open — but it's not an attack, it's half a dozen more Advanced Readers, riding a cavalcade of horse-formed daemons and wielding rifles half as long as they are tall. In the lead is Janice, her Tehom a midnight-black thoroughbred with swirls of white across his flanks.

"There he is!" she exclaims, raising her gun — and pointing it squarely at the chest of the man in the tan jacket. The other kids circle around, horse daemons dodging furniture, every weapon aiming at the same target. "Hands up, and step away from the patient! J'accuse!"

The man raises his hands, and takes a couple of slow steps back.

"Hey, calm down!" exclaims Isaña, as Carlos replaces the lamp. "He's a friend. He helped with our escape."

"He is the one who told us to change our attack plan!" shoots back Janice. "He said you'd been moved, when you were exactly where our intel said you'd be. He's the only reason Tamika ended up in the wrong place. The reason Kevin was able to take her. The reason one of your teammates got killed cleaning up after them!"

Carlos's heart skips several beats.

"You think you can get away with anything because nobody will remember it was your fault," continues Janice, turning on the man. "Well, guess what? That ends, now! Because I remember."

"You remember," echoes the man in the tan jacket. He doesn't sound chastised. He sounds...awed.

"Is she right?" demands Isaña. "Did you trick them into changing their plans? Would Tamika be safe at home if it wasn't for you? Would Henriette — would she still —?"

"Except for psychics and time travelers, no one is ever told what would have happened," says the man. "But to the other question...yes. I deliberately redirected Tamika Flynn so she would meet Kevin."

Carlos decides he wants that lamp again.

"Why would you do that?" asks Janice. "Are you working for Strexcorp? Who are you, really?"

"I'm working to protect the Republic, same as you. Listen, I am happy to answer all your questions, but can we do it somewhere else? Not in front of the patient and his partner?"

"They're allies. I'm not helping you keep secrets from them."

"It's not about secrets, it's about not wanting to hurt them! They forget some of the details about me faster than others. I don't think the rapid-fire mental shifting is doing any long-term harm, but I'd like to be able to be frank with you without worrying. Sometimes they'll only have a piece of information for half a second, and then lose it — you look at their faces, it's like watching a record skip — are you old enough to know what a record is?"

"What? Sure, yeah, I know all about records. And their skipping," says Janice, unconvincingly. "You have any examples of these details they'll get headaches over?"

The man sighs. "My name is E------- -------- -------, and I'm ------ ----- -------."

Janice stops short. "What, seriously?"

"Honest to Yambe-Akka."

Other kids around the group look nervously at Janice. "Wait, who is he?" asks a Blood Pact Scout. "And do we trust him more now, or less?"

"Hard to tell." Janice turns to Cecil and Carlos. "If I told you his name was E------- -------- -------...."

"Still did not catch that, sorry," says Cecil.

"Errol?" guesses Carlos.

The man in the tan jacket doesn't make any sudden moves, but the jacket shifts as his shoulders tense.

"No, that's not right," says Isaña. "But are we close? Ezekiel? Egnazio?"

"Emilio," adds Carlos. Searing cheek pain be damned, he almost has this. He knows he does.

"Enrico," tries Isaña. They're both wracking their memory for every impression, however blurred, about their past encounters with the man. "Emil. Emmett. Ernesto. Eric? Erik with a K."

"You are actually kinda close," says Janice helpfully.

"Elbert? Everett? Ephraim. Elam. Edmund."

And something else in Carlos's brain connects. "Magadha Palace."

"That wasn't close at all."

"It wasn't a name, it was the restaurant where Strex poisoned us," says Isaña. "Which we went to because...because...did you send us there?"

The man says nothing.

Carlos grips the lamp so hard his hands ache. To hell with preachy no-one-is-told platitudes — all of them would definitely have been okay if he hadn't walked into Strex's hands in the first place! And if he didn't just walk, if he was led...!

"Answer him," orders Janice.

When the man speaks, it's fast. "I sent the Apache Tracker to his death for you. Did you really think it would never be you or anyone you love who got thrown into danger for the sake of the big picture?"

In the blink of an eye Cecil has him slammed against the nearest wall, one arm locked around his neck.

"Weapons down!" A wave from Janice, and all the guns are pointing at the floor. "Señor Palmero! Let --- ----- ----- ------- go."

"Give me one good reason why I should!" yells Cecil. "He hurt Carlos!"

For a second Carlos thinks to protest that the man has also saved his life. But what if it doesn't actually balance out? What if the man has gotten him or his teammates hurt, even killed, in other incidents before? What if his sense that the man is on their side has been a lie all along — just one more way his awareness had been blunted, his real feelings overwritten — he's shaking, broken out all over in a cold sweat, hating this so much —

"You can't be objective because your memories of him don't work," says Janice firmly. "Mine do. I can. Leave him to the Book Club. He got Tamika hurt too, we have as much reason to be mad at him as you do, but you gotta hand him over."

Cecil takes several furious breaths through his nose. All of Khoshekh's fur is standing on end. The man in the tan jacket doesn't move a muscle.

At last Cecil shoves the man away. "Don't you ever get near Carlos again," he snarls. "Don't you dare."

The man staggers a few steps, catches his breath, then dusts himself off and tries to look composed. "Get me out of here," he says quietly to Janice. "Please."

 

 

"Carlos, you're sweating."

"...hm?"

Cecil leans one knee on the mattress and presses a hand to his forehead. "I don't think you're feverish? That's good. It'll be really bad if your cut gets infected. Let me just...I was going to do...something."

"Does it have anything to do with why we're holding a lamp?" asks Isaña.

Huh. Carlos is holding a lamp. That's weird.

Cecil looks genuinely distressed. "No, it's...it was...."

"This!" exclaims Khoshekh, floating over to the end table next to him. There's a stainless steel pot sitting on the mahogany. "The man in the tan jacket said he would make it, remember? He must have come in to bring it to us."

Cecil pulls the lid off the pot, sniffs the still-steaming concoction inside, then swipes up a little on his fingertips and daubs it over a cut on his arm Carlos doesn't remember him getting. When he wipes his arm clean, the cut has stopped bleeding. Carlos can't even see where it was.

"It's good," he says. "Much better than I could have done. Put down that lamp and lie on your back for me, okay, Carlos? I'm still not entirely sure how far we can trust that man...but there's no reason this shouldn't work."

Notes:

Warning for Desert-Bluffs-typical blood and gore, continued non-consensual drugging, and major character death.

Yambe-Akka is the major (only?) deity in witch theology, and the goddess who is said to come retrieve you when you die.

New sketch: Kevin and his StrexDaemon.

---

Returning readers, if you haven't guessed what the blanked-out words said, you can use rot13 to uncypher these:

"My name is Rzznahry Fbaqurvz Cnyzreb, and I'm Prpvy'f byqre oebgure."
"Señor Palmero! Let gur bgure Frñbe Cnyzreb go."

Chapter 30: The Time of Knives

Summary:

The one where Kevin takes Tamika on a life-changing field trip.

A meadow. (Meadows are important.)

Tamika wakes up in a field of purpley-black grass, under a sky that is pale, reddish, and no brighter than a house at night lit by incandescents — even though she can see the sun, or a pretty good fake, forty degrees off the tree line. Rashi is next to her, sitting, legs curled underneath him and head resting in the grass; there's a patch of tiny yellow-green flowers right next to his nose, fluttering in the breeze as he breathes in and out.

Tamika's probably got dirt and grass and all kinds of junk in her hair now. She's gonna have to find a good audiobook to put on while she redoes her twists.

She can't see a single solitary soul, so Tamika figures it's as safe as it's ever gonna be to sit up, brush off the back of her tank top, and try to get some kind of read on....

Her left hand is wounded. It's half covered in pale-yellow bandaging, and it doesn't hurt, but she can tell the last two fingers are — gone. Just plain gone.

While she's still trying to wiggle those fingers in horrified disbelief, a furry tan face pops up from behind the shadow of Rashi's hindquarters. Big soulless black eyes fix on her, and the StrexDaemon runs off, cheeping with delight.

"Is she awake?" asks a horribly familiar voice. "Oh, good!"

Tamika is on her feet in an instant. Her buffalo daemon takes more time to heft his bulk off the ground, but the power once he's standing will more than make up for it. She's still a little dizzy...but Kevin doesn't have to know that.

Sure enough, there on the other side of Rashi is Kevin, with his creepy colorless buddy standing not far behind. He's got a freshly-killed thing in the grass — an animal like an oversize rabbit with a wolf jaw and lots of teeth, its long neck broken in two places — and it looks like he's trying to make a fire pit, but with no real idea what he's doing.

"Hi!" he says. "Do you know how to make fire? Bedamim caught this tasty-looking thing in the woods, and I thought we could cook it and have a nice little dinner while we talk."

"You want to talk," says Tamika dubiously. "That's why you knocked me out and dragged me all the way to...wherever this is. So we could talk."

"It wasn't a far drag! We're still right around the spot where your theologian friend had his hospital room." Kevin points to a section of turf that's been carved up in an X shape. "I had to close the window so nobody from Strexcorp would interrupt us, but I marked where it was, see? Anyway, about this fire...."

Tamika cuts him off. "Maybe in a minute. I gotta pee."

"Oh!" exclaims Kevin. "Oh, of course you would. Well, there is the prettiest little river right down over that ridge there. You can go behind the trees...and I'll hum, how about that? We'll all hum, so you can keep track of us."

"Sure. Thanks."

She leaves him there in the meadow, the terrifying bloody-handed man with his fake daemon and his mild-mannered skeletal shadow, all of them humming in slightly different keys.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Six hours later, she returns.

It wasn't a total failure, as expeditions go. She restocked Rashi's side bags with hefty slingshot-fitting rocks, and found a big stick made of sturdy wood that took a really nice point. She shot a few bizarrely chimeric critters of her own, and had a well-cooked meal with no worry about what Kevin might have done to the meat beforehand. And she got a nice wide survey of the terrain around here.

But they didn't find a single sign of civilization, human or otherwise. And by this point Tamika is positive there's no chance this is the planet she was born on. Which means the only way she's getting home is by convincing Kevin to bring her back.

It's around high noon when Rashi hops the little stream and carries her back up the ridge. Tamika holds her brand-new pointy stick at the ready, just in case.

Kevin is...possibly actually asleep, curled up in the grass using his StrexDaemon as a pillow. The creature, with mechanical diligence, is still humming. The genderless figure sitting beside him has gone quiet.

Unconscious, face slack and eyes closed, he looks even more like Palmero. It's messing with Tamika's instincts. Even though she can see right next to him that the wolf-rabbit has been gutted and chunks of it eaten, apparently raw, some dumb synapse is still firing off nah, he's that ally of ours, we gotta look out for him.

"How come his eyelids aren't all sunken in?" she mutters. "He's got black pits for sockets. They shouldn't close like they do when there's an eyeball underneath."

Rashi shrugs his massive shoulders. "How come he's got black pits for sockets, instead of fleshy hollows no more than an inch deep? Could just mean their Smiling God has weird aesthetics."

Again, the fake daemon chirps and burbles when it sees them, making Kevin stir. "Huh?...Oh, you're back! Hi again. Sorry, I must have drifted off...how long has it been? Your bandages might need changing."

Tamika holds up her injured hand. "You did this?"

"Sure did. It was just a little scrape, but since you were unconscious, I figured it was only polite to do something about it." Kevin holds up his own left hand...with the same fingers missing, tan skin smooth over what's left of the knuckles. "Isn't it cute? We match!"

Cute is not the word Tamika would've picked. And she has a vocabulary way above her grade level. "All right...you can redo 'em. But first, take off your weapon and throw it over to one side. And Rashi stands between me and your two buddies."

Kevin may be inept at fire-making and word choices, but it turns out he's really good with wound care. Quick. Efficient. Probably helps that he doesn't flinch at the gory bits. There's some kind of salve in his first-aid kit, cool and soothing, that forms a flexible but protective coating over her own still-pretty-gory stumps.

"So you said you wanted to talk to me," says Tamika. "What about?"

"That Knife." Kevin tucks the last end of the new bandage into place, and nods at the leather sheath, lying serenely where he tossed it in the purple-black grass. "It's really neat! It's one of my favorite of Strexcorp's inventions."

An outraged squeal from the other side of Rashi.

"You're my very most favorite!" calls Kevin to the StrexDaemon. To Tamika, he confides, "I probably love her more than anything in the world. I would never, ever give her up. The Strex Tactical Multi-World Subtle Knife (TM), Patent Pending, on the other hand...it is wonderful, and I've done some extremely productive things with it, but...you promise you'll be productive with it too, right?"

Tamika's brow furrows. "Me? You're giving that knife to me?"

Kevin sits back in the grass, beaming. "That's right!"

At the risk of screwing up what could be a huge tactical advantage..."Why?"

"Because it's important," says Kevin cheerfully. "My death said so! You'd have to ask it to explain why."

"That so? All right." Finally, she knows what that thing's called. "Death! Come over here."

The expressionless figure in its plain shabby wrapping returns to stand by Kevin, bowing slightly.

"Tamika Flynn," it says, in a soft voice like rustling grass. "We have heard so much about you in Desert Bluffs. Mostly that you are, tragically, a missing child, and anyone who has seen you should contact the authorities immediately."

"I get that a lot," says Tamika. "Kevin says you're gonna tell me what's going on here."

"I would like to. Is it agreeable to you if we send Kevin and Bedamim away for the conversation?"

"Depends. How far away?"

"We can go over on that side of the meadow and play fetch," offers Kevin.

Out of hearing range, still in visual. Sounds good. "We'll be watching," says Rashi. "Make sure to stay in sight."

So Kevin and his fake daemon head over to the edge of the trees, and Kevin's death takes his place in the grass. "To begin with: child from another world, do you understand what I am...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

In the world that Kevin Serling comes from (explained his death), everyone is accompanied from birth by their very own death, as corporeal as daemons are in your world. We follow you; we watch over you; and when your life is over, we touch you on the shoulder and say, come. Your journey to the final shore in the world of the dead is peaceful, soothing, in the company of your devoted lifelong friend.

It is nothing like the company of a daemon. Your daemon is your self, your soul. They can't be fully awake while you sleep; they can't hate someone that you love. We are separate entities. Our feelings are softer and more muted than yours, but they are our own.

When Strexcorp arrived in our world, the branch managers, too, thought we were some new kind of daemon. They only found out otherwise when they tried to put us through intercision.

You are familiar with the idea, I see.

Without their most effective method of silencing dissidents, Strexcorp was forced to rely on imperfect alternatives. And Kevin was certainly a dissident. He was a radio host in his hometown too, with more influence than even he realized until he began to use it.

But Kevin also had a family. A younger sister, whom he loved dearly, in spite of her long track record of making...how should I say it...poor life choices. She was an addict, in an area of the country where treatment could be hard to come by. And she never took precautions against having a child, so she had a son, without having the money or the time or the mental resources to take care of one. The longest she ever stayed clean was after his birth, but it didn't last.

Kevin helped as much as he was able. He looked into treatment options for his sister; he used his show to advocate for stronger health policies in his country. And when the sister realized she couldn't give her son the stability he deserved, Kevin took the boy in.

Now, the child was sweet and adoring and smart as anything, and Kevin adored him. But he wasn't well. From when he was no more than two, he had seizures: sometimes set off by bright lights, sometimes, it seemed, by nothing at all. Maybe it was an effect of something his mother took while she was pregnant; maybe it was an accident of genetics. There was no way of knowing.

What they did know was this: every time he had one, his death would come close and hold him.

The nephew was too young to understand what that meant. He just knew he had a friend who took care of him: a gentle and patient friend, who could never be accidentally hurt even when his body was out of his control. But the sight scared Kevin so badly, every time. And it scared his sister, when she was clean and sober enough to visit, just as much.

Strexcorp arrived in Kevin's hometown when his nephew was six. They wanted to own every business, to control every citizen, to silence every protest. But more than that: they wanted Kevin himself. And they wanted him as a loyal, obedient company man.

We found out eventually that they expected him — or someone like him — to be able to wield their Knife.

So one day Strex came to Kevin with a deal: if he submitted to their control and their tests, they would use proprietary medical information from other worlds to make his sister healthy again, and his nephew healthy for the first time. As an act of good faith, they offered that tried-and-true corporate sales strategy: the one-month free trial.

Kevin and his sister had already tried every treatment their own world had to offer. Of course they accepted the trial. By the end of the first week, Kevin's nephew hadn't had a single seizure. By the second, he was watching the action movies all his friends had seen that he had never been able to. During the third week, his uncle took him to see fireworks for the first time. His mother was even well enough to come with them.

And of course Kevin took the deal, in the end. He would have sold his soul for that boy's happiness.

That was years ago, and Kevin no longer remembers a lot of things. He has forgotten what it feels like not to love Strexcorp. He's forgotten that he ever had a family at all.

But I remember everything. And the one thing Strex can never take away from Kevin is his death.

He laughs it off these days when I suggest the company is evil...so I tell him things he can still believe, and he is happy to go along with them. I have told him not to show his employers the true extent of the skill he's developed with that Knife. I have overheard the whispers of Strexcorp executives about the danger that the Knife will choose a Bearer outside their control, and I told Kevin that if this happens, it may be a shame, but he'll have to pass it on.

Of course it's you. The way it marks its bearers is distinctive.

The fingers, yes.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Let Kevin try to show you how to use the knife. If you turn out to have the skill, then we will know for sure.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"And you think he's just gonna show me all his tricks," says Tamika, dubious. "Me. His beloved Strexcorp's number-one most wanted."

"He does not understand that you are a warrior. Or a hero. Or even a dangerous rebel. He only knows that you are a missing child. And, now, his destined successor."

Over the death's shoulder, Kevin hurls another stick at Bedamim, clocking her between the eyes. She cheeps, pounces on it, and starts gnawing it to tiny woody shreds.

"You don't need to tell him you will use the knife against the company's interests," says the death. "Tell him only that you are ready to learn. He'll be happy to talk. He's had no one to share his true skills with for over a year now, and keeping secrets is a lonely job. Or at least, as close to lonely as he is capable of feeling right now."

"How do you know he's capable at all?" asks Tamika. "You said it yourself, you're not a daemon — you got no special way of knowing what's going on in his head. And it sure sounds like the kind of emotion Strex would do everything in their power to stomp out."

To the extent that the death has feelings, it seems affronted. "I need no special powers to notice his loneliness. Neither did the company. Why do you think they went to all the trouble of building a biomechanical daemon? They couldn't find any way of perfectly suppressing Kevin's feelings without leaving him catatonic, so they created an assistive device to help him manage the condition instead."

The StrexDaemon is halfway up a tree now, tan fur standing out like a blight against the dark trunk and darker foliage. She sticks her head into a hole in the trunk. Sounds of flapping and gnashing and struggling carry across the meadow.

"At night he curls up with his arms around her and whispers things in her ears," says the death. "Innocuous things, mostly. All company-approved ideas. Except when he talks about the secret things he can do with the knife. You'll understand them better than I do, I assume."

Tamika snorts. "If Strex had any real sense of strategy, they would've put recording devices in those ears."

"That would have been a wise idea," says the death thoughtfully. "I understand why Strex fears you."

If that's a cheap attempt to butter her up, Tamika doesn't react. "Look, you got a good story, here," she admits. "Let me talk it over with my daemon. In private. You run off and have a look at what Bedamim just killed. You can even tell Kevin I'll make a fire for it."

The death gets up and trails off, making no noise in the soft grass.

"It's a really good story," says Rashi under his breath.

Tamika nods. "Sick kid, noble revolutionary who needs our help, bad guys being incompetent at really convenient points."

"But it lines up with everything Dana Cardinal told us about Strex's whole 'made a knife, looking for a bearer' subplot. And they don't know that we know about that."

"Yeah."

"Not to mention, if it's not true, why are we here? Kevin sneaking us off to another world and having his death tell us a story makes no sense as an evil plan."

"No kidding." Tamika watches Kevin cheerfully pluck feathers off his mecha-daemon's latest kill. "If they were trying to earn our trust before explaining to us that Strex isn't really so bad, that would be one thing...but they aren't."

"And we know Strex can trip over its own feet," says Rashi. "Big company, lots of divisions spread over multiple worlds — easy to see how Project StrexDaemon might never realize their product is being designed for someone the company might want to spy on."

"Maybe the knife is bugged," suggests Tamika. "Maybe tricking us into getting it back to Night Vale is the plan. Maybe it's booby-trapped somehow. Or maybe it's just naturally too dangerous for them to handle, and instead of throwing it away, they decided to slip it to us and hope we'll shoot ourselves in the foot with it. Metaphorically speaking."

"Sounds like we should try to get it back to town. If it's dangerous, Palmero can tell us, and we'll get rid of it right away. Nothing to lose."

"Assuming Palmero's up for it. If that rescue didn't go well...."

She doesn't have to finish the thought. It's not so hard to believe Kevin could be an honest rebel who turned around and sold out to save his nephew, because they started making backup plans a long time ago in case Palmero sells out for the sake of his boyfriend. Doesn't seem likely, but you gotta be prepared for the worst.

"Run our own tests, then," says her daemon. "No point throwing away a possible advantage based on the worst-case scenario. It's not the truest just because it's the scariest."

The knife in its sheath is still lying not far off. Tamika retrieves it to have a look. It's hanging on a treated leather belt, and the sheath is made to look like the same kind of leather, but when she picks it up she finds that it's some kind of sturdy plastic. The handle is black, probably some kind of carbon fiber polymer, with a steel guard that clicks into half-hidden catches in the sheath to hold it steady. (No matter how tough the material is, the sharp side of the knife would go right through it if you left the blade enough wiggle room.)

She's considering pulling it out when Rashi stops her. "Not yet. Better not risk cutting open any windows while we're still sitting on top of east-side Desert Bluffs. How far do you think we'd have to walk to get outside city limits?"

Tamika envisions the simplified brochure map they used to get themselves in. "We were three miles in from the southeast border. No telling what direction that is here. We'll have to pick one at random, and worst-case scenario...I give it eight or nine miles before we're really out of sight of civilization."

Her daemon nods. "Then we better start moving."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Kevin spends the whole walk being chatty. Sometimes he drops potentially-useful intel, but mostly it's a mix of Strexcorp propaganda, mundane details of his day-to-day life, and the occasional random, out-of-the-blue comment about teeth.

On the shores of a silver lake, dotted with little islands sprouting copses of purpley-black trees, Tamika decides they've come far enough to switch gears.

Kevin must have cleaned the knife while she was exploring, because it's free of bloodstains when he unsheathes it. It's a beautiful blade. The steely metal has undertones that are almost opalescent, shimmering in a muted way that reflects all the hues in the landscape around them...along with plenty that aren't. Its cutting edge is so fine, Tamika's eyes hurt when she tries to look at it directly.

"The first cool thing about this knife is, it goes through any material. Anyone using it can do that." Kevin picks up one of the larger water-smoothed rocks from the lakeshore, and starts paring off its outer surface like he's peeling an apple. "It'll give you the closest, most perfect, finest cut imaginable. You could use it to shave! I don't, because it would be a shame to stop spending money on Strexcorp's fine line of razors and shaving cream, but I could."

He tosses the chopped-up rock over his shoulder. It hits the water, or whatever alien fluid this lake is full of, with a thunk-sploosh.

"And the other cool thing — the one I don't get to show people, the one nobody else can do — is this!"

Facing back in the direction they walked from, he holds the knife to the air. For a moment he moves it back and forth with small, cautious dragging motions, until he finds whatever entry point he needs and starts carving a window in the air.

"The world you were born in will probably be the easiest one to cut through to," he says, as he opens first a sliver, then a crescent, then a rough circle of hot yellow light. "That's how it was for me. Right now the company thinks that's the only one I can get to, but secretly? I bet I could cut an opening to anywhere. Look! Desert Bluffs!"

Sure enough, there's a hazy little row of buildings in the distance, hardly coming up off the horizon. Could be any bigger-than-usual desert town, except that Tamika recognizes the outlines of the bluffs. Her eyes have adjusted to this world's dim star, so seeing her own world in broad daylight is half blinding.

"We're coming through a little off the ground," says Kevin sheepishly. Tamika pokes her head through the window just enough to see that he's right: there's a serious drop between the rocky soil she's standing on and the sandy desert. "That's one of the things you can tell, if you know how to feel for it — whether you're cutting through to a world that's at the same ground level or not. I had to fudge things a little coming to this one, because our little squabble happened on the second floor of a building, but it worked out okay."

He takes a couple steps to the left and cuts another window, this one onto a vivid green tableau with hot, humid air. When Tamika looks in this one, she finds the rainforest floor is more or less level with her boots. She shies away from the wet warmth: "You know if this atmosphere's non-toxic? Is that something you can tell?"

"Well, gosh, I'm not a scientist," says Kevin. "There's probably all kinds of fancy stuff going on that I don't know the first thing about! But so far I've always cut through to places where the air is basically the same on both sides of the window. Except once."

"Yeah? What was the difference?"

"The air on my side existed, and the air on the other side didn't! I was in my apartment at the time, so some of my things got sucked right out into the vacuum before I managed to close it." Kevin doesn't stop smiling, not really, but he gets an expression that could almost be called wistful if you're generous. "I lost a really nice volleyball team shirt that day."

Tamika eyes the knife-edge with even more wary respect than before. "That must have been...tough. On you."

"I was working at it, though, is the thing," continues Kevin, as if he didn't hear. "I wanted to see if I could find a world where the atmosphere was different. Sure did learn my lesson! It's like the company says: always keep pushing and exploring your own capabilities, up until the point where you stumble on something that could cut into profits, at which point you stop pushing, back away, maybe get something from the pharmacy to help you forget, and never ever try that kind of exploration again!"

He sticks the knife back in its sheath, and puts his hand to the edge of the rainforest portal. As with the little search he did with the knife-point, Tamika can't tell what exactly he's feeling for. He finds it anyway, and starts pinching the edges shut.

"It's also a lot harder to cut into a world when it means going through a solid object. Which is handy! Gosh, think how awkward it would be if you could easily open a window right through the middle of a person. They could bleed all over you, and they wouldn't even know they were doing it." He giggles, almost self-conscious. "Weird, right? Who thinks about this stuff?"

"A good person," says Tamika flatly. Someone who cares about other people, who sees themselves as responsible for not doing harm to others. Whether they consciously know it or not.

Kevin clasps his hands together. "Aren't you the sweetest child! If you ever need a character reference for your résumé, you call me right up, understand? Now, do you feel up to taking a turn with the knife?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

He talks her through the process of letting her consciousness wander out to the tip of the blade, of feeling for the little gaps between atoms, as much with her mind as with the metal. The first one she manages to slice open is, indeed, to her home world: she leans through to find the same skyline. Kevin sticks his hand through the window he made a few feet away and waves at her, then applauds with giddy excitement.

Tamika's not feeling so bad herself, frankly.

She opens another, and another. One opens in the middle of a subway station just as the train is pulling in; all the commuters are too intent on their own goals to notice the hole in the air, and she watches with fascination as they rush by. One opens on a glacier at night, the lights of an ocean liner visible on a dark sea. One opens over the roof of a building that might be part of a college; Tamika can see young people relaxing on the quad, each accompanied by what might be a daemon, all hawk-sized birds with iridescent feathers.

There are so many strange, distinct not-quite-feelings to be found at the end of the knife. Tamika works out from experience which one is the resonant quality of ground level. She has a hunch she could work out the signs of qualities like under conscious attention too, given enough time.

For now, Kevin closes the windows in populated areas himself, then walks her through how to do that too. The first one she pinches shut on her own is the one over the glacier. Kevin looks like he wants to hug her. (He ends up cuddling his StrexDaemon instead, and, well, biomachines can take a lot more clawing than humans can, so better it than her.)

Tamika catches Rashi's eye, both of them already flush with ideas about the tactical advantages. Once she gets back to Night Vale, the Book Club will have safe routes from anywhere to everywhere.

Not to get ahead of herself. She has to get back, first.

"Any chance you have enough finesse with this thing to find a world with a public transportation route headed...." Tamika points in the direction she now knows Night Vale to be. "...that way?"

"Oh, wow, that is way too complicated for me," says Kevin. "You're trying to get to Night Vale, right?"

"That's right."

"I'm sure you can get a ride in a StrexCab! If we go back to my apartment, I can call one for you."

"I don't have any money," says Tamika, banking on the guess that Kevin won't offer to buy her a ride. "It's either steal a ride, or walk."

"Or take a portal."

Tamika looks sharply at him. "Well, yeah. That's how I'm getting from this world back to mine."

"No, I mean, one of your special Night Vale portals!" says Kevin brightly. "The kind that stay in the same world, but connect one point in space to another. I've only ever seen one, when it opened in my recording studio during the show. I walked right into it, and came out in the dry, old-fashioned studio in Night Vale! It was a very efficient way to travel."

Okay, now Tamika knows what he means. But it's not like those portals are controllable. Unless...."Can the knife cut open windows like that, too?"

Kevin's eye sockets widen with interest. "I don't know! I never even thought to try."

So Tamika moves the knife between atoms again, not at all sure what she should be looking for, just hunting down the more unusual sensations and thinking home, home, home.

She opens a window on vacuum, endless black empty space, the gold-white curve of a planet hanging in the view above. She opens one in the depths of some kind of ocean, and has to fight a high-pressure jet of briny water to get it closed. She opens one that is, for the first time, hard to cut: the fabric of the space resists the subtle blade, as if that entire universe is warded against outside intervention.

All of them are still portals between worlds, not across space.

"I could give it a shot," offers Kevin.

He takes longer than she did, concentration slow and steady, looking for the snags in the air that he knows from experience to be rarer and odder than anything she's chanced over. The first window he cuts is into the middle of some kind of bright plasma firestorm — what Tamika imagines the middle of a star must look like. (Her theology classes don't teach this stuff; she put it together from reading James Tiptree anthologies.)

The next is shockingly ordinary. It's desert, ordinary desert, not unlike Night Vale. (But not like it, either.) (For one thing, there's a range of mountains in the distance.)

Tamika doesn't really think they're gonna get anywhere at this point, but Kevin hasn't given up. With a beatific smile, he begins to walk down the pebbled beach, one slow step at a time: searching, reaching, feeling.

He finds another gap between atoms...pushes the knife through...begins to draw it downward. A sliver of pink-white light appears over the blade.

Then a spark arcs over the metal — it jumps in Kevin's hand — he squeaks in surprise, darting backward.

And even though he's no longer cutting, this portal has started tearing itself open on its own. If the others have all been like windows, this one is a tunnel — a swirling pink-white vortex, too brightly-lit to guess what's on the far side. Tamika's good hand is raised, ready to help Kevin with emergency closing duties if necessary.

"Huh," says Kevin, as the vortex reaches just the right size for a human to walk down, then stabilizes. "It never did that before!"

"We closing this thing, or what?"

"Closing it?" echoes Kevin, baffled. "No, no, this looks exactly like the one from my studio! I bet it's just what you need."

Tamika's suspicions are instantly raised. "You think it's safe? Then you won't mind going first."

"Okay!"

"Wait!" exclaims Tamika, as Kevin steps into the vortex without a moment's hesitation. "Leave the knife with me." If he's not concerned about walking off an interdimensional cliff, fine, but he's not taking the superweapon over the edge him.

"Sure." Kevin sheathes the blade and hands it back to her. "Can I take Bedamim, though? She's never seen Night Vale."

"Go ahead."

"But the death stays here," adds Rashi. Good thinking. If something on the other end of that tunnel kills him, they'll want to know.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Kevin returns maybe five minutes later, with Bedamim scooting along at his side and the gory, half-beheaded carcass of an albino deer over his shoulders.

"Travel into the Night Vale area is a little hazardous right now," he explains, dumping the deer on the rocks. The vortex starts pulling itself closed as he steps out. "I did get there — it was definitely there — and I met so many nice people! — but they were from the past. From before you even came to Desert Bluffs, I think. I am so embarrassed, wasting your time like this! It looks like you'll have to take the long way after all."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The distance between the two towns is more than a day's walk, so Tamika makes Kevin come with her, at least part of the way. There's a decision she needs to make, and she'd rather put it off if she can.

They switch worlds a few times, when the terrain in one gets too rough to continue. For a couple hours they hike through a prairie with knee-length grass and two lopsided moons in the sky. To make camp for the night, they find a city so towering it impresses even Kevin. Desert Bluffs only looks like a fancy metropolis when compared to an even smaller desert town. Here, the tops of the tallest skyscrapers are wreathed in clouds.

The handful of night-shift workers taking cigarette breaks and late-night partygoers stumbling down the street make Rashi shiver. "Tamika — these people —"

"Not severed," murmurs Tamika. "I think they're like Kevin. Only without deaths, either."

They slip down the darkest of the streets and alleys until they find a hotel. Standing by a side door, Tamika cuts a window into a desert at ground level, walks forward ten feet on unobstructed desert sand, and opens another window back into the city of tall buildings and internal daemons. Inside the hotel hallway.

"Isn't this — stealing?" whispers Kevin, once they've all successfully been smuggled into adjoining empty rooms. (Neither he nor Bedamim hurt Tamika and Rashi while they were unconscious in the meadow, but she'd rather keep a locked door between them and the knife on her side, given the choice.) "I don't know if this is a Strexcorp subsidiary yet or not, but we are appropriating their services without paying!"

"I'll pay for it later," lies Tamika. "For now, you better shower. Seems like every other thing you did today got blood on you."

It takes the placid reassurance of Kevin's death to convince him that he's not abandoning his responsibility to uphold the rights of corporations everywhere. Tamika, meanwhile, checks the rooms for books, just in case there's something useful. All she finds are two identical volumes in the bedside tables, and they aren't written in Spanish, or even any other language she knows enough bits of to identify.

When Kevin finally gets in the shower, Tamika sits at her windowsill in the moonlight and beckons for the death to join her.

"Question," she says, nodding in the direction of the next room. "If it was up to you what I did with him...what would you pick?"

The death cocks its head. "I don't understand."

"Well, for instance, I could take him all the way to Night Vale, and hang on to him. See if we can undo any of what's been done to him," says Tamika. "Or I could decide we don't have the resources for that, turn him loose in the direction of Desert Bluffs, and hope like hell he keeps on keeping quiet about things that could get us into trouble. Or I could ditch him in this world, out of Strex's reach, and leave it on him to survive whatever else comes after him. Or...well."

She touches the handle of the knife.

"Weapon like this, killing him would be quick. Painless."

Might even be a mercy. Now that he's forgotten the existence of his sister and nephew, there's no way to be sure Strex has bothered keeping them alive. Seems like the real, unaltered Kevin wouldn't want to stay Strexcorp's loyal underling if it isn't saving them. Would be nice to find a way to bring him back to himself, but if there isn't one....

"As long as he lives, I will stay by his side, and do what I can to protect the things he no longer remembers," says the death, unbothered by the blunt reference to his human being murdered. "If you kill him, I will take him from there. But as long as you leave him alive, where you send him is up to you."

Notes:

New art: The Knifebearer in the Library; portrait of Henriette.

Though parents and teenagers have asked on several occasions to reinstate the Program, the City Council has maintained its position, citing lack of taxpayer funds, the extreme danger posed by books, the peril of exposing children to librarians, and of course, the incident that precipitated the ban, which the town's older residents will refer to only as "The Time of Knives". —e028 Summer Reading Program

Chapter 31: Scars

Summary:

Carlos has a rough first day of recovery. In fact, all of Night Vale is having a rough day, because Strexcorp just banned bloodstones. Sherie bribes the Faceless Old Woman for help, with awkward results. Tamika had better get back soon.

Night Vale.

The first few times Carlos tries to fall asleep post-kidnapping, the sensation of drifting off triggers a surge of adrenaline that snaps him back awake. It probably doesn't help that he's in one of the Vansten estate's (least-ridiculous) suites. The lush comfort is soothing, but not enough to convince his subconscious that its unfamiliar shadows can be trusted.

When he finally drags himself out of the antique French king-size bed, there's a faint grey light coming through the crack in the drapes. He can't have gotten more than ten minutes' sleep at a time, all snatched from the jaws of defeat by sheer exhaustion.

In the marble-walled bathroom, Carlos drinks some water and gives himself a once-over in the mirror. He's wearing oversized silk pajamas filched from the nearest walk-in closet, and a Scout-improvised cotton-and-silicone pressure garment holding down the swelling on the right side of his face. Short locks of hair curl around the edges of the cotton. The grey is thicker than he remembers, although maybe it was like that already, and the cut has just uncovered it.

There's a photocopied page from the Girl Scout Handbook taped to the mirror, explaining how to massage scar tissue so it stays flexible as it heals. Carlos undoes the velcro fastenings on the cotton, revealing the bright red slash of the half-healed wound across his cheek: raised and swollen, the skin all around it purpled with bruising.

He helps himself to a dollop of luxury-brand moisturizer, and goes through the motions.

He's lucky. The knife came dangerously close to the edge of his right eye, but his eye itself is undamaged. It bit deep enough to nick his cheekbone, but didn't slice off any bone fragments that a Book Club medic would've had to pull out. The wound pulls at the right corner of his mouth, enough to make some expressions noticeably uneven, but not so much that his vanity suffers for it.

There were a few other cuts on his head, all minor enough to close completely under the touch of the witch-recipe healing potion, applied by Cecil with a fierce and wild chanting that would have scared Carlos if it had come from anyone else. The rest of his body is undamaged. (Once his face was stable, Cecil, gentle and methodical Cecil, helped him check everywhere else.)

He's lucky.

He re-fastens the jury-rigged pressure garment and wanders back to bed, gathering Isaña into his arms and rubbing her ears. Those are uneven too, now that Bedamim took a bite out of one of them. The damage has healed over, in the way daemon injuries do, but it won't grow back.

"I want to go home," says Isaña softly.

"Which one?" asks Carlos. Not that it matters; they're under orders from one of Tamika's lieutenants to stay at this safehouse, to avoid clueing Strex in to the fact that they've been rescued. If the company hasn't figured out it lost them after a few days, he can make his triumphant reappearance in town then. "The team's house? Cecil's apartment? Our place back in Trimountaine? Mamá and Papi's house?"

"The place we're going to get with Cecil," says his daemon. "I want it to be ours now, and I want to go there."

"Ah," says Carlos. "I want that too."

He can't even have Cecil with him now; it'll put up too many red flags if his boyfriend drops off the grid. Cecil and Khoshekh have to spend the night at their empty apartment, under surveillance, playing the role of the bereaved beloved. They sent a few texts, but it's not like Carlos has an untapped connection on which to sneak them an answer.

The face wound has started to itch. Carlos scratches vacantly at the edge of the cotton as he pulls a book from the stack on his second-fanciest bedside table. To make up for the fact that he only has a few of his own possessions on hand, the Book Club equipped him with some recommended reading.

Given how little sleep he's gotten, he probably won't retain much about controlled explosives handling from this book of Neruda poems, but it'll help fill the time until his exhaustion wins out once more.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie is lacing up her boots, hurrying because she's afraid she'll miss her bus, when somebody in the apartment next door starts yelling. There's the commotion of a struggle, the sound of things (or people) being slammed against walls.

She pulls a bottle of pepper spray out of her purse and conceals it in her palm. "Faceless Old Woman? Are you here?"

"Usually," says a voice from her closet. "Why?"

"Can you tell what's going on next door? Should I call the Sheriff's secret police?"

"Oh, the police are already there," says the Faceless Old Woman. "That's what the fight's about. One of your landlord-bots is taking a couple of them through the building to confiscate bloodstones, and your neighbors are raising an objection."

A crash, like glass breaking. Sherie flinches. "What are you talking about? They can't just take people's property. That's nowhere in the lease."

"The lease says you're not allowed to store illegal contraband in the building. And the police just passed an ordinance making bloodstone circles illegal. There's a grace period, but it sounds like Strex's real-estate division isn't wasting any time."

"Making what illegal?"

"Are you having hearing trouble?" asks the Faceless Old Woman curiously. "That's the first sign of ear spiders. You might want to get that checked out."

"The absolute, unchecked, egomaniacal gall of these people!" hisses Sherie. No wonder their Rusakov array lost the signal from NVCR. They must have started by removing the bloodstones from Strex-owned businesses, and are moving on to people's homes — starting with the residences they own, but it won't end there, it'll be random sweeps of private homes next.

And what about the city's public circles? The ones in places like Mission Grove Park, or the entryway of City Hall? Those are huge — the stones in the park are each half the size of a dishwasher — and potent, enough to do a lot more than handle the individual prayers of residents who use them throughout the day. Sherie has gotten a look at some of the protective spells they maintain. If those have been dismantled...she has a sudden, vivid mental image of some hostile force sweeping through town, not just lulling everyone into lazy stillness, but controlling them into action.

The struggle in the next apartment has quieted. Sherie's palms are clammy with sweat. "Can you keep a circle out of sight until they leave? And — if yes — is there any chance you can do it without killing the signal to the Rusakov array?"

"Child's play," says the Faceless Old Woman. "If I wanted to."

Footsteps in the hall.

"If you save the bloodstone circle in my apartment, I will tell you what my scars are from," murmurs Sherie, heart pounding. "If you make sure every circle left in every home you live in gets saved, I will answer any questions you want to ask about them. No matter how sensitive, medical, or personal."

A quick, efficient knock on her door.

There's no answer from the Faceless Old Woman, and no time left to stall. Sherie sticks the pepper spray in the easiest pocket to reach, wipes her hands on her jeans, and tries to channel her fear and frustration into mundane suburban annoyance as she greets the visitors. "Hi there. I'm sure this is official, but can it wait? I was about to leave for work."

Her visitors are one Strex supervisor (a honey-blonde woman in a black suit, her daemon a golden bird with a bright-orange throat) flanked by two secret-police officers (mantis daemon on the left, Scottie on the right, all with black balaclavas and shifty eyes). "Terribly sorry to trouble you, Dr. Oppenheimer," says the supervisor. "But there are some new laws about contraband on the books, and you know how Strexcorp respects Night Vale law! I'm sure you can make up any lost work time by staying late."

The officer with the mantis stays in the hall, guarding the bright-yellow metal crate that they're presumably stashing the confiscated bloodstones in, while the supervisor and the officer with the terrier invite themselves in. All the units in this building have standardized layouts; they go straight for the designated bloodstone-circle room, with Sherie and her mongoose daemon follow, hearts in their throats.

The supervisor flings open the door...and her smile freezes on her face.

Sherie looks over her shoulder to get a view of gloriously empty carpet.

"Where else would one of you people keep your little prayer circles?" asks the supervisor, turning on her companion with gritted, pointed teeth.

"Bedrooms, sometimes," stammers the officer. "Under the bed is popular in smaller, more economical spaces. Um, or the bathroom? Especially when they're used for various medical issues...."

"Well, isn't it lucky that Strexcorp medical care has other ways of treating whatever those issues are," chirps the supervisor, stalking over to the bedrooms.

They end up checking every square foot of floor space in the unit, and don't walk away with a single bloodstone. When they're finally gone, Sherie locks the door, puts up the chain, and hugs her daemon so tight it hurts.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil and Khoshekh sneak onto the Vansten estate again after sunrise, before Cecil has to get in to work. Carlos hasn't gotten any more sleep, though he can feel the exhaustion rising up to swallow him. With Khoshekh curled around Isaña, and Cecil murmuring sympathy on the mattress beside him, Carlos thinks he might have an easier time letting go.

His mind is so worn-out. His eyelids are so heavy....

Drowsiness-blurred vision makes it Kevin lying across from him, black pits for eyes and razors for a smile and one hand curled an inch from Carlos's mouth.

Carlos wakes with a yelp, grabbing a fistful of the covers and holding it in front of his chest like a shield.

But it's Cecil, it's only Cecil, stricken into silence. The one person Carlos trusts above all else, the one who never fails to make him feel safe, and Strexcorp has shredded that for him.

"I wish they'd just tortured me," he chokes, exhausted beyond the point of tears, huddled against the headboard with the blanket clutched around himself. Isaña in her basket is rolled up, snapped completely shut. "I'm used to nightmares! All e-empirical evidence shows I can take nightmares! What I can't take is having f-flashbacks at the sight of my own boyfriend's face!"

"It's the sleep deprivation," soothes Cecil, retreated to kneel at the far corner of the mattress. Khoshekh flows up behind him, head popping up next to his hip (he's wearing furry shorts. With suspenders). "Obviously the common side effects are spontaneous tattoos and picking up alien communications through your dental fillings...but it can also give you paranoia and hallucinations. My precious and hurting Carlos...please, please, let someone help you fall asleep."

Carlos wraps a hand around the inside of his elbow where the IV was inserted. Like if he covers that one spot, there's nowhere else left someone could stick a needle in him. "No sedation."

"No sedation," echoes Cecil. "How about the Glow Cloud? I got here unobserved with its help, and it's waiting outside to see me home. It can suppress your panic reactions until your body loses consciousness the way it normally would."

Bleary-eyed, Carlos squints at the drapes. They're still lush and opaque, letting only a thin strip of light through...pale yellow as Carlos first sees it, then teal, then rosy-pink. It's pretty. But. "Don't want amnesia."

"No amnesia. Not for you. The Cloud has gotten much better at controlling that effect. We remember the content of School Board meetings these days, don't we?"

His eyes start to glow, and his voice drops into a deep, flat monotone. "Surrender, fragile mortal. Heed the advice of your loved one and sing your terrified praises to the Glow Cloud. The hopeless worship of a tiny flesh-and-bone candle flame will stir the pity of the Cloud, and you will be shown mercy in the form of a refreshing nap."

Carlos scrabbles to pick up Isaña and conceal her in his lap. The second his boyfriend's consciousness returns, he cries, "How can you let it do that to you?"

Cecil cringes. "Sweet Carlos. I know you're mad at me — of course you have every right to be — but please do not antagonize the Cloud, all hail."

"I am not mad at you!" yells Carlos. Why can't Cecil ever make any goddamn sense? "Why would I be mad at you?"

The light of the Glow Cloud turns a vivid magenta, then a slow, deepening blue.

"Because we didn't keep them from taking you," says Khoshekh at last.

"Nobody kept them from taking me. Nobody I love, nobody I know, nobody in town, nobody in the world. Am I supposed to sit around blaming everyone? I am an experimental theologian. Experimental theologians do not believe things that are stupid."

Cecil and Khoshekh are silent.

Carlos massages his aching temples. Is he wrong? Does Cecil's anxiety actually make sense, if only he was in a state of mind to get his head around it? He feels like he's losing his mind. So afraid of being put in another compromised state of mind, and here he is, driving himself into one.

"Cecil," he pleads. "Cecil, can you do anything? To help me sleep? It would be okay if it was you."

"You mean...if I was the one to give you the shot?" asks Cecil softly.

"No, I mean, can't you make some witchy tea for that? Or do a hypnotic chant? Your voice...it's not like Kevin's. Not at all. That helps."

"I do know a lullaby," admits Cecil. "It's...Mom used to sing it for us." He pauses, then corrects himself. "For me." Another pause. "For us."

Rubbing his eyes, Carlos nods. "Let me hear?"

He ends up lying on his stomach, Isaña still under his arm, face turned away from Cecil's. To make sure Carlos still knows where he is, Cecil bends over him and rubs his back, in slow, tender circles. The kind they both suspect Kevin wouldn't be able to do without scratching.

And Cecil sings:

Nuku, nuku, kultaseni
Väsy, väsy, vyötiäinen
Nuku, kun mie nukutan
Väsy, kun mie väsytän

Nukuta, Yambe-Akka, lasta
Makauta, mariainen
Kuro Carlos silmät kiinni
Anna unta aamuun asti
Kuro Carlos silmät kiinni
Anna unta aamuun asti....

The syllables flow together, rising like a wave, flowing back down. It's gentle, pure, melodic. It could go on forever. Carlos recognizes almost none of the words; it's only when the section with his name comes up for a third time that he realizes Cecil is singing the same few lines over and over, calming him with the lull of an infinite loop.

The shifting hues of the Glow Cloud on the floor dance and blur. As Carlos's vision fades, it turns them into the soft light of the auroras in the far-north night sky, playing over a field of unbroken snow.

Finally, finally, he sleeps.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The central ordinater for the team's Rusakov array is still humming happily along when Sherie gets to the Night Vale Community College campus. There are several new holes in the net, but most of it is strong and steady, including the stream of data from Sherie's apartment. She notes the indicators of a dangerous portal opening in the barista district within the next few days, and a non-dangerous one in the sand wastes to the northwest (the direction of Desert Bluffs) within 36 hours, and sends her liaisons in the Book Club coded warnings about both.

With the kids warned, the next step is to tell Carlos —

No, Carlos is still going to be in hiding, and probably still healing, when these portals open. They need to coordinate their response on their own, without making him micromanage it. She needs to tell Henriette —

No.

Sherie's daemon climbs up into her lap and leans against her chest. She buries her hands in his fur, so soft and thick and warm and alive, and blinks back tears.

"A lot of them haven't needed me."

It's the Faceless Old Woman, sitting on the windowsill. She's wearing a dark skirt, an open-faced pinstriped tunic, and a silvery blouse that matches the opalescent hues of the eyeless salamander in her lap. The ensemble is accented with bloodstone jewelry: even her daemon has a handsome bloodstone collar.

"Many officers are looking the other way when it comes to each other's homes," the woman elaborates. "They know which colleagues they can trust. Some of them have worked together through decades, saved each other from plastic bags or pterodactyls or cranky insurance-fraud-perpetuating dragons...just as an example. And other citizens have their own ways of hiding things, especially if they were chosen for the Scouts when they were younger. But I'm helping everyone who needs it. People like Chad in 3B. Chad is a generally useless human being."

"Thank you." Sherie swallows. "They're Caesarean section scars."

The woman leans ever-so-slightly forward. "Are they now."

"When Susannah was born, I was planning to have a standard delivery, but there were...complications. Trouble with the umbilical cord. Her heart rate started dropping. The doctors had to get her out as soon as possible, so they did a C-section. Then when I was pregnant with Seth, they told me that since I'd had one C-section, it was safest to deliver the next baby the same way."

The Faceless Old Woman cocks her head. "That's much less interesting than I expected. Is there some kind of stigma against C-sections in your country?"

"The US in general, no," says Sherie quietly. "It's just that some of my people can be...superstitious."

"Experimental theologians? That seems incongruous."

"Hebrews."

"Ah. That does make more sense."

"At best, even if people are understanding and not too pitying, the child is set apart. Different. For instance, the...the mitzvos...." Sherie rifles through her Spanish vocabulary for a rough translation. "The blessings, ceremonies, religious duties that you have toward an infant. They don't all apply to a child delivered by C-section. And at worst...there are a few smug old men who still try to have serious debates about whether a daemon can be okay if it doesn't become corporeal during a natural birth. As if taking that away causes some kind of, I don't know, spiritual deformity."

"That's ridiculous." Getting to her feet, the Faceless Old Woman meanders toward the ordinater desk. "I've seen spiritual deformity, and that is not how it's caused."

The mongoose in Sherie's arms shivers at the idea that 'spiritual deformity' happens at all. Sherie holds him closer. "I know. For a fact, because I...this is going to sound stupid, the fact that any part of me gave it the least bit of credit, but...I asked Cecil, back when we gave him test questions for the alethiometer. It told him about Su's emergency delivery, and it told him their daemons were both fine."

"It sounds very stupid, yes."

"Most people would have said something reassuring there."

The Faceless Old Woman cocks her head. "I don't think you're a generally useless human being. How was that?"

"I didn't think that in the first place!"

"Of course you didn't. But you might have thought I was confused on that point. And I'm not. See? Reassuring." Setting her salamander daemon on the desktop, the woman leans against it and bends closer to Sherie's eye level. "This neurosis you have about thinking you have to make up for failing your children by not giving birth to them the right way is a little weird, but it doesn't seem to be slowing you down. That's admirable."

She brushes her fingertips across Sherie's cheek.

"Would you like help watching them, after they come back to Night Vale? They're not bad, you know, as adolescents go. And I am very good at watching."

"I —" Sherie feels like her limbs are welded in place. "I can't — you have to stop."

"Stop...what? Stop with the bloodstones? I'm protecting the ones in Robert Hernandez's apartment right now. He and his girlfriend were both Scouts, they could just make the circle invisible, but neither of them is home, so I'm hiding it in the vegetable crisper."

"No, no — keep up with the crisper. Stop this." At last Sherie unfreezes, enough to push the woman's hand away from her face before yanking back. "Whatever it is — whatever it means — my teammate just died, our boss was kidnapped, our rebel leader is missing, my marriage of twenty years is in shambles, and I can't, I cannot deal with — this. This thing you're doing. I can't."

The Faceless Old Woman straightens up, brushing off the hems of her pinstriped tunic. "Well," she says briskly. "If that's how it is, fine. I understand. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go braid all the tines of your forks together."

She and her daemon vanish, like a leaf being blown out of view by a sudden gust of wind.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos sleeps like a rock until a group of kids start doing afternoon firearms drills in Vansten's garden.

Cecil is long gone, but Khoshekh is still here: rolled-up and floating just past the edge of the bed, nose tucked under his left middle paw, one ear twitching every time there's a gunshot. Isaña wriggles out from under Carlos's arm and goes to him, while Carlos yawns and rubs at the shell prints she left on his skin. "Khoshekh? We're awake."

"Dear Isaña. How are you feeling?"

"Good. Well, better. Well, not about to scream at you out of exhaustion again any time soon," says Isaña self-consciously. "Come down?"

The margay drifts down to land on the mattress beside her.

"Fair warning, though," adds Carlos hoarsely, "there's still a nonzero chance we will get snippy with you out of hunger. Can you show us to the kitchen?"

Khoshekh ends up carrying Isaña there, kitten-style, with Carlos in borrowed slippers padding along behind. The kitchen is a mess — it doesn't look like any of its tween occupants have managed any cleanup more involved than loading the dishwasher. At least it's well-stocked, with a weird mix of luxury cuisine and brightly-colored junk food. Carlos has some smoked salmon, garlic-roasted asparagus, and three Pop-Tarts, and starts to feel almost human again.

He's wiping down the counter when an overexcited tween Blood Pact Scout bursts in. "Dr. Perfecto! I'm so glad I found you! The Mayor will be here in twenty minutes! You have to put on something nice! And probably shower!"

"Mayor Winchell is coming to see me?" echoes Carlos, pulling the baggy fabric of his borrowed shirt closer around his shoulders. "Who told her I was here?"

"The Mayor sees all! The Mayor is the Stone Door, and all that quivers behind it! Hurry up!"

So Carlos throws himself into the walk-in shower, while Khoshekh rifles through Vansten's closet for something suitably formal, coming out with a knee-length tunic. Freshly washed, Carlos pulls it on, does another round of massage on the developing scar, and re-fastens the cotton just before the Scout insists on dragging him away.

 

-{,(((,">

 

He gets ushered alone into an opulent study: cherry paneling, gold candelabras, the taxidermied heads of several four-horned goats mounted on the walls. Carlos takes a leather-backed chair, while Isaña sits in the well-cushioned matching seat that would have held Vansten's pigeon daemon back when he was human. The Scout stands guard outside.

A cloud of olive-smelling smoke precedes the Mayor's entrance...and if Carlos had thought he looked rough, well, he's a fresh spring daisy next to Pamela Winchell. The circles under her eyes are darker; the new lines around her mouth are deep grooves. Her tightly-coiled hair, normally close-cropped and immaculate, is haloing out from her skull in an unruly fluff. The orange-tan fur of her caracal daemon is dull, his emerald gaze glassy and unfocused.

Deputy Assistant to the Mayor Trish Hidge is at her boss's side, tense and alert, her cowbird daemon's silver talons digging into her shoulder.

"Mayor Winchell," says Carlos, with a polite nod. "To what do I owe the honor?"

"You owe the Mayor everything!" snaps Trish. "Aren't you going to offer the Mayor something to drink?"

Carlos holds up his hands. "I'm sorry — this isn't my house — and the kitchen is on the other side of it."

Winchell hisses something in Modified Sumerian; a cabinet to Carlos's left pops open. Oh. Of course a study like this has a minifridge.

He pours the Mayor a snifter of something tarry and bubbling (and one for himself, too, though he's not reckless enough to drink any of it), and they settle into opposite chairs. Winchell doesn't offer any pleasantries of her own, just cuts straight to the chase. "Henriette Gaillard has been ruled municipally dead."

This is an official meeting. Carlos has to keep it together. "Yes, ma'am."

"As you are her direct supervisor, we'll need you to certify that her body is no longer in town, and not subject to local mandatory disposal rituals."

Out of nowhere, Trish produces a form, a clipboard, and a pen, and offers them to Carlos. Is this a test? "I'm afraid I'm not legally authorized to use writing utensils."

"Pen? That's not a pen," says Trish. "I've never seen a pen in my life. Who told you there was a pen here? Stop wasting the Mayor's time and sign the form."

Carlos does.

"Dr. Gaillard had a will on file with City Hall," continues Winchell. At a gesture, Trish produces a sealed letter-size envelope, and hands this to Carlos too. "You are the designated executor. Failure to faithfully execute the terms of this document may result in legal penalties, up to and including being fed to mysterious hooded spectres."

"Understood, ma'am."

Winchell opens her mouth to say something more...then chokes, torso seizing, as if she's going to throw up. Carlos catches his breath and scans the room for a bowl or something (monogram optional). Trish bends over her boss's chair and grips Winchell's shoulders. "Mayor Winchell!"

Black smoke drifts from the top of the Mayor's head; her white-knuckled grip leaves dents in the leather armchair as she starts into a blank-eyed chant. The language reminds Carlos of the one used by the strange, daemonless children from another world; he wishes he had a recording device, so he could bring the audio of the rhymed and rhythmic lines to Perle for analysis.

"Can I help?" he whispers. "Should I get water? Or anything?"

"The Mayor needs no help from the likes of you!" shrills Trish. She's angry and scared and protective, reminding Carlos vividly of the way Cecil looked yesterday, when Cecil was defending Carlos himself from...someone. Or something. "You've caused the Mayor enough trouble already!"

As suddenly as she began, Winchell stops chanting. Her gaze re-focuses on Carlos. Trish fans the smoke away from above her, and no more of it appears.

"The earth shakes unfelt under the Mayor's feet," says Winchell ominously. "Only the Mayor feels it, and the Mayor does not tremble. The bloodstones have been stolen from the gardens and the public squares. The Mayor holds your breath as the lions rattle at the veils."

Carlos looks between her and Trish, trying to figure out if he's supposed to have a response to this.

Trish hasn't let go of Winchell's expensively-suited shoulders. "Make no mistake," she tells Carlos, "the Mayor is perfectly capable of maintaining the psychic and astral defenses of Night Vale, even in the absence of the bulwarks Strexcorp is taking down! But the Mayor should not have to."

"That part was literal?" breathes Carlos. "Strexcorp is dismantling bloodstone circles?" From what Sherie's studies have found, the big public ones are a major reason Night Vale hasn't gotten even more dangerous than it is already. And if Winchell is the town's next line of defense...."Can't you order them to stop?"

"Actions taken by the Sheriff's secret police cannot be countermanded by the Mayor without the direct support of the City Council," says Winchell. "Ask one of the kids to bring you a law book some time. Maybe you'll learn something."

"Or a book on not selling out the town you live in to an evil corporation!" adds her Deputy Assistant. "If Strexcorp hadn't already started killing your people, I'd —"

Winchell cups an olive-skinned hand over the one clutching her shoulder. "Trish."

Trish breaks off, quietly fuming.

"I'd take it all back in a heartbeat if I could," says Carlos, holding Henriette's will against his chest. "I'm so sorry. I would never knowingly betray Night Vale, never."

With her free hand, Winchell tips her cup and moves it in slow circles. Carlos watches in deferential confusion as the bubbling tar pours out into a spiral on the carpet, to the last drop. He wishes he knew whether this was a local tradition, a side effect of another hostile outside force chipping at her mental defenses, or just her messing with him.

"You would never knowingly betray the Voice of Night Vale," says the Mayor at last. "Which is not the same thing. But it will have to be close enough." She sets down the snifter and clasps both of Trish's hands. "Back to City Hall. We have work to do."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos finishes cleaning the kitchen, as a thanks to the kids. He reads the will, then reads a book. He's been warned off accessing his email or signing in to any social media, so he salves his feelings of online isolation by looking at the news, and some layperson-friendly theology blogs. He takes apart a couple of Marcus Vansten's clocks, for old times' sake, and puts the resulting organic sludge in a jar to take back to Tock at the chapel.

He massages his cheek every six hours, as regularly as he can manage when none of the clocks are real.

He listens to Cecil's broadcast — the one thing in town that makes time bend to its will, instead of the other way around — and visits one of Vansten's velvet-lined bloodstone-circle rooms during the weather. They can't have a steady stream of experimental theologians creeping off to the mansion, so Köhler is checking in via astral projection.

Köhler looks like he would prefer the formality of standing, but Carlos can only maintain the connection on his knees, so the elder theologian sits uncomfortably on the lush floor. "I have spoken to the Harvard administration, to Adriana Corichi, and to Dr. Gaillard's next of kin, and sent an email to the other former members of the project. Dr. Corichi wanted to speak with you. I let her know that you would contact her as soon as you were out of the hospital."

"Thanks."

"Would you like someone to speak to your family?"

Carlos's mouth twists. He doesn't call them every time he gets a major injury; it'll only make them worry. But once it hits the news that one of his teammates has died, and they notice he isn't responding to condolence emails or Facebook posts...."I'll have Cecil let them know I'm okay."

Köhler passes on more news, good and bad. Nirliq's financial proposal has been accepted. Sherie wants to break her lease and move in with the rest of the team. One of the bloodstone circles at the chapel was confiscated by Strexcorp observers, but Tock successfully hid the other by sitting on it until they went away. The Rusakov array is still strong enough to monitor upcoming portals. The schedule for retrieving resin from the Whispering Forest needs to be rearranged.

"Because I'm out of commission for a few days?" asks Carlos. "Or did you mean a long-term rearrangement?"

"Long-term." Köhler hesitates. "I...can no longer enter it safely."

Because of Henriette, he doesn't say, but it's there between the lines. Because she was important to him. Because he thinks he should have gone in her place. Because the trees have started saying of course she wouldn't hold anything against you, and there's nothing in his life important enough, not friends or family or theology or the next season of Orphan Black, to motivate him not to listen.

Carlos nods. He's not sure he'd trust himself in the Forest right now, and he has Cecil. "If you need a sympathetic ear...a real ear, not a tree-branch with minor telepathic abilities...."

"I will be sure to speak with a local cat if necessary."

"...I was going to say you could talk to me," admits Carlos. "But that too."

 

-{,(((,">

 

It's pitch-dark in the sand wastes, nothing to see but the pools of light from the headlights of three vehicles. Quentin and Sherie are in the truck at the head of the convoy: Quentin driving, Sherie giving directions by the danger meter in her lap.

The upcoming portal isn't supposed to be dangerous at all, but the kids, for some reason, insisted on having lots of backup. Half the theological liaison team is here (teenage Agent L with his bird daemon and the nearly-graduated Agent G with her frog are driving the cars behind them), along with one of Tamika's preteen sub-generals and a couple of crack slingshot-wielders.

"It'll be within ten feet of here, no question," says Sherie at last. "That's the best I can do. Let's park."

All of them except the teen drivers pile out of the vehicles and mill around on the dusty sand. Quentin surveys the area with an electrum spyglass, while Sherie breaks out a Rutherford counter. Nothing notable yet. They're not even anywhere near the team's designated Point F: the mysterious freestanding door in the desert.

As far as Sherie's concerned, the most remarkable thing so far is the realization that the kids brought the Man in the Tan Jacket. And he isn't carrying his deerskin briefcase. Instead..."Excuse me," says Sherie. "Are you in handcuffs?"

The man holds up his wrists. "What, these? Nah, these are the new style of charm bracelets. All the rage with the kids these days."

"...I can't tell if you're kidding or not."

"I'm kidding. They're handcuffs."

Sherie turns to the nearest kid (one of the former Shadowravens, now redubbed Agent N). "Excuse me, is he one of the bad guys now? Have I missed something?"

Agent N, wearing a black hood and a black plastic domino mask, shrugs. "I don't think so. This is Jan—I mean, Agent J2's thing."

Agent J2, riding her daemon in the form of some kind of four-horned goat-creature, steps in. "He's on probation. I'll tell you the details if you can hang on to them. Do you remember his name?"

"...Elijah." Sherie turns to the man. "Is that right? It doesn't sound quite right."

The man doesn't even bother to answer, just sighs.

"Over there!" bursts out one of the kids, and Sherie's attention is fully drawn away: just past a stubby cactus, a sliver of light is appearing on the sand.

There's still nothing showing up, even through the spyglass, until someone figures out that they're all on the wrong side of the portal. And once they're on the right side, it's an opening the size of a picture window about ten feet off the ground, a sunlit forest visible on the other side...being smoothly sliced open by one Tamika Flynn.

Cheers and applause from the kids. The ones with bird daemons, or unsettled daemons who can turn into birds, flutter up to touch noses with Tamika's massive buffalo and do excited little circles in the otherworldly air. Sherie brings the pickup truck over and backs it up under the portal, so Tamika and her daemon can step from there to the ground. The girl sheathes the knife she was using to cut the window open, and accepts a whole lot of hugging, amid a chorus of "We missed you! Where were you? What happened?"

("You can take the cuffs off now," says Janice in the background. The man in the tan jacket shimmies them off as easily as taking off a watch, and hands them to her, neatly folded.)

"Took the long way back. Got a new weapon along the way. Not gonna tell everybody how. The less you know, the less Strex has any chance of getting out of you," says Tamika. Looking at Sherie and Quentin over the head of the clinging Agent N, she adds, "You get your teammate back?"

Quentin looks away, flying-squirrel daemon hunkering down in his pocket. "They saved Carlos. Henriette didn't make it."

"I'm sorry to hear that. She was brave. And good." Tamika lets the sympathy settle for a beat, then adds, "Are you up for doing theological tests yet? Because I'm gonna need some. Best ones you got."

Notes:

Cecil sings this Finnish lullaby, with a few of the lyrics changed.

This AU just passed its one-year anniversary! Also, it has a TVTropes page. Check it out.

More art-nouveau character portraits: Kevin, Josie, and, at last, Tamika.

And more guest art! Henriette and Clotère, by chess_ka.

Chapter 32: Possession Headaches

Summary:

A hard day's work for the Subtle Knifebearer. Tamika builds illegal bloodstone circles, bonds with Carlos over their Kevin-induced injuries, races to get to Hannah and Lucy Gutierrez before Strex does, battles a visiting eldritch horrorterror, helps some confused archaeologists back to their own universe, and gets a present from a man in a tan jacket.

Notes:

New art: Knife sketches; Strexcorp's Most Wanted.

Night Vale.

"We are here!" shouts Tamika to the customers at the Raúl's, raising her slingshot into the air. "We are the beating heart! We are the breathing lungs! We are the lips that chant!"

Her people are building a bloodstone circle in the produce section, both as a symbolic protest and as a way to patch some quick reinforcements on the building's wards. Snipers are on the roof, ready to shoot down any gyropters Strex sends over. They have an escape window in the frozen foods section, through which they can all escape to a breezy otherworldly closed-for-the-winter fairground.

The ordinary shoppers don't join in the chant, or risk applauding during the pauses. Almost all of them are Strexcorp employees now, either directly or indirectly. Their public loyalties need to stay in line.

But when a handful of Strex security enforcers finally charge into the store, it just so happens that one person spills a carton of goats' eggs in their way. And another loses his grip on a jar of pasta sauce. And so on. There's a lot of slipping and sliding and crashing into things from these clumsy and completely accidental messes, so of course people have to crowd around the enforcers and ask if they're all right, and insist on offering help.

By the time anybody gets through, Tamika and her army are mysteriously long gone.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Dr. Perfecto greets her with a smile in the stateroom of the former Vansten mansion. His armadillo daemon and Palmero's Khoshekh are right on his heels. "Tamika! They told me you were back. It's so good to see you. Is your hand...?"

He looks a lot better with some real clothes on and his pupils back at a normal size, even with the pressure bandage still around his face. Tamika waves her left hand, showing the fitted glove putting similar pressure on the stubs of her two missing fingers. "Getting better. Have a seat, Doctor."

"Call me Carlos, please. You saved my life. You might as well call me by my first name."

"All right. Carlos." Tamika takes the armchair across from him. "Your team spent a lot of yesterday looking over the Knife, but I figured you might want to see it too. That gonna give you any trouble?"

"As long as you don't point it at my face, I think I'll be fine."

He does wince when she unsheathes the blade, sharp and bright and dangerous. Khoshekh floats up to examine the edge (Palmero has seen it in person, but his daemon wasn't there at the time), shivers, and zips back to drape himself over the armadillo. "That is awful. No wonder we could only heal your face so far."

"Your people can give you all the hard data in person," says Tamika, setting the knife on the coffee table between their chairs. "Short version is, only drawback they found is that the openings could drain Dust, either out of our world or out of somebody else's. So we should get one of your team to show up and keep tabs if we're going to leave any of them open long-term."

"We'd be happy to. Just give us as much notice as you can." Carlos's hand hovers over the tabletop. "Is it okay if I...?"

"Give it a try? Sure." He's the kind of ally she trusts not to do anything too stupid, and to give it back when he's done. "But if you lop off any body parts by accident, it'll be your own fault."

Carlos withdraws his hands to his lap. "You know what, never mind."

Rashi snorts in quiet amusement.

"What happened to Kevin?" adds Carlos. (Khoshekh's fur bristles at the name.) "The last thing I remember was him carrying you away. I couldn't tell what he wanted...or even what he thought was going on, honestly."

Tamika keeps her expression carefully neutral. "That's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about."

She's not a good storyteller. She understands narrative devices all right, and can appreciate them when she's reading them, but if everyone could construct a good story, there wouldn't be any need for novelists. Instead she lays out the facts, as clear and concise as she can: from the moment she woke up in that otherworldly meadow, to the moment she cut open a window over a low mesa halfway between Desert Bluffs and Night Vale, and sent Kevin through.

(They came up with a cover story, her and Rashi and Kevin's death. She'll be in no more danger than usual as long as the death can keep Kevin sticking to his part.)

"This death sounds like a hero," says Khoshekh, when Tamika finishes. "I don't know why I thought it was so terrible, that time I saw it. It didn't even unwittingly try to hurt me, like Kevin did with Cecil. It just...stood there."

"I hated ours," puts in Carlos's daemon with a shudder. "And it was helping. Could it be because we're afraid of dying in general, and Tamika isn't...?"

"But it wasn't general. It was yours," realizes Rashi. "And, Khoshekh — Kevin's death might not be yours, but it probably looks similar enough to be upsetting, in the same way Kevin is similar to your human."

So they don't have to worry about Strex paralyzing daemons with horror en masse just by sending Kevin's death over to visit. That's good. "Back to Kevin himself," says Tamika. "Carlos...in your professional, theological opinion...would you have let him go?"

Carlos hesitates. "Yes. Most likely, yes. Sneaking an unexpected ally back into the middle of Strex territory is a good strategy move, right? Although I do wish we had more data on —"

Tamika's phone goes off.

"Gotta take this, sorry," she says. The charms on her phone — a little guitar (not all her interests are book-related, okay) and a functional Sherlock-Holmes-style magnifying glass — clink together as she checks her texts.

Oh, no.

"I have to go," she says abruptly, getting to her feet and re-sheathing the knife. "We can finish this later, if there's time."

Carlos stands too. "Is it Strex? Can I do anything to help?"

"It isn't Strex." Not directly. It is a perfect example of why Strex taking down the town's major bloodstone circles was moronic. "You want to make this as easy as possible? Get to your room — bring a radio, we'll put any more instructions on-air if we can — and hide."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The barista district is a charming place, Sherie thinks. Sure, most of the dwellings are caves and there are empty coffee cups littering the roads, but the flags and decorations showing off their cultural pride are so inspirational. And the graffiti is very artistic, when you think about it.

A deadly portal is supposed to open here at some point in the near future, so they've split up into teams to cover the area. Each has two theologians, a couple well-armed officers of the Sheriff's secret police, and a hidden backup force of equally-well-armed preteens. One of the younger children has Marcus-the-angel riding in the guise of a bird daemon on her shoulder (while her real daemon hides as a mouse in her pocket). Tamika Flynn showed the newly-minted Erika how to close the openings between worlds, and he's grudgingly on duty to handle this one.

Best-case scenario, the police do their duty in defending Night Vale from whatever comes out, and maybe the kids have to team up with them to make sure it's taken care of. Worst-case, the police have some secret Strexcorp order to push the theologians into the line of fire, and the Advanced Readers have to take them out before going after the otherworldly threat.

In spite of everything, Sherie is hopeful. The other day's portal was a wonderful relief. The sight of Tamika, healthy and mostly-whole and deftly slicing open windows between worlds as easy as slicing bread, is theologically earth-shattering. Surely they can handle this.

"FUs are spiking on my end," reports Quentin in her ears. They're all on a conference call, phones in pockets, headsets on; he reads off the numbers from their danger meter a few blocks down. "Everyone else seeing this?"

"Same here," says Nirliq, on Sherie's left. She's hauling the cart with one of their mass-produced, military-grade danger meters. No need to let any of the cops know they've invented the pocket-size version. "This is worse than the oranges."

"Can anyone discern a source?" asks Keith from the third team.

Sherie keeps scanning the area through an electrum spyglass. "Rusakov currents still look normal on this end," she reports. "There's not even any blowback from a portal opening nearby. I see ordinary homes and convenience stores, I see barista children at recess on the school playground, I see...this is completely theologically uninteresting...a woman just came out of the chanting den down the road. A bell rang as she opened the door. She adjusted her sun hat, even though the sun is behind a cloud right now. The hat is tan with a black ribbon. It goes with her dress. It has a nice neutral color scheme that would probably go with any dress. She went down the street, in the direction of the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, at a brisk walking pace. I don't know why I'm bothering to say all this."

Nobody on the other teams answers. It occurs to her that the people around her are staring, and that a handful of kids have come out of hiding at some point to surround her.

"Is something wrong?" asks Sherie.

One of the children, an eleven-year-old concealing his identity with a store-bought Batman costume, clears his throat. "Señora, are you aware that you just started speaking in a screechy voice and recited two stanzas of poorly-rhymed poetry?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika spends the better part of the day scrambling to track the Woman from Italy down.

Adults can't process her directly. Children can — even some whose daemons are settled, if they're young enough, which thankfully includes Tamika — but the ones with foresight, or similar sensitivities, are too overwhelmed with horror to do anything about it. Renée Carlsberg, for instance, reports that she'll sneak out of Spanish class and come join the tracking effort just as soon as she's made sure a nearly-catatonic Janice gets to the nurse's grotto.

They play a lot of catch-up, following trails of rust and shadow, trying to offer some first-responder aid in buildings that look like they've been gutted by fires and floods and age.

The tide turns when Palmero's show comes on. He's vulnerable and far out of the age range to understand why, but he manages, subconsciously or accidentally, to get solid intel on the airwaves in between being possessed. The Woman is on Main Street. Tamika, now riding shotgun in one of their pilfered Strexcorp gyropters, orders all available forces to converge, but not to confront her. Don't be reckless.

That's when an astrally-projected Fear Scout (age seventeen, aware that the Woman is here, but too old to grasp why she's so dangerous) appears in the gyropter between Tamika and her pilot. "Tamika. Emergency. Strex is going after the White Sand."

"We knew that," snaps Tamika. "Only privately-owned business in town Strex hasn't bought yet. Of course it's a target."

"No, I mean, they're going after the White Sand now."

Strex's timing sucks.

"Tamika?" asks the pilot, a tall, anxious girl literally wearing a Fluttershy hat. She's a year younger than Tamika; she knows what's at stake. "What are we gonna do, what are we gonna do?"

"Slow down, keep flying straight, but be prepared for maneuvers. We're taking a detour," says Tamika. She rolls down the window half an inch, holds her knife so the tip is outside the gyropter's chassis, and lets her concentration go to the point. "Keep going...keep going...okay! Brake, hover, then descend."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The gyropter has state-of-the-art navigation systems. Tamika knows exactly where they are in Night Vale when it lands, even though all she can see is dusty blue-violet scrubland strewn with the trunks of petrified trees.

She cuts a small diamond-shaped window at eye level, recognizes the back room of the White Sand, and widens it enough to step through.

Rashi stays by her side, but in the next world over, so she can be even stealthier than usual. The Gutierrezes don't question the warning. Lucy shooes the customers out, while Hannah takes a set of already-prepared paychecks and distributes them to the employees before sending them away too.

They stand on the Night Vale side of the opening, whiptail lizard daemons on their shoulders: Hannah's in the hues of a grassy field, Lucy's an iridescent blue. Out front, someone knocks on the now-locked doors, then starts banging. Hannah's face sharpens. Lucy wraps her arms around a framed photogram of the shop's opening day, holding it to her chest.

"Come on," hisses Tamika. These two have practically the best panicked-fleeing plan in all of town, but none of that is gonna matter if they don't get a move on now.

Lucy steps into the other world first, and has enough presence of mind to look briefly impressed at the car-sized chunk of petrified tree sitting next to her. Hannah follows, clutching a device in her hand. Tamika closes the window halfway, then three-quarters. The interlopers have smashed their way inside and are behind the STAFF ONLY door — and they're definitely Strex, going by the jargon alone.

"Your move," she tells Hannah. "Any day now."

Hannah, shivering, doesn't react at all.

"Hannah," says Lucy softly.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this," says her wife. "We were supposed to keep running it for years and years, develop a franchise, and then leave it all to our favorite employee and retire — I have the spreadsheets, I have a five-year plan, we made good investments, we did everything right — you did everything right, after you moved out here because I swore to you I could make this work, you don't deserve...!"

Lucy hands the photo to Tamika and takes the detonator from Hannah. "Darling. Come here."

She leads Hannah around to the safe side of the portal, pulls her into a one-armed hug, and with her free hand punches in a sequence of numbers.

"We did everything right," she agrees, as the countdown goes five, four, three, two. "Which means we can do it again."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos can see the pillar of smoke all the way from Vansten's window, oily and black as it billows up into the sky.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Finally, finally, Tamika finds the Woman from Italy in Mission Grove Park.

The Woman is human-shaped, but only loosely. She exhales poisonous vapor; her body scrapes like shale and bubbles like tar; arcs of static crackle around her hands. She is clothed in strips of cured leather and twisting tendrils of void. The grass around her feet is scorched and withered. She has nothing like a daemon in sight.

She is sitting on a bench (the wood already beginning to rot underneath her), reading a paperback copy of Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds.

Tamika walks right up to her. "Put the book down."

"Be a dear and wait for a few minutes," says the Woman, in a voice like cracked geodes and rusted iron. "I'd like to finish this chapter before I enjoy your tormented burning screams."

"You put it down, and I let you walk out of this dimension alive," says Tamika, and draws her weapon.

The Woman sits up so abruptly it knocks her hat off. "Actually, now that you mention it...I think I may have left the oven on."

She sets the paperback on the non-rotted edge of the bench. Doesn't dog-ear it to save her place, and rests it flat rather than breaking the spine, which earns her points as far as Tamika is concerned. Stands up. Backs slowly away down the path.

Tamika doesn't let down her guard for a second.

Sure enough, once the Woman is out of arm's reach, the trees and grass around them burst into walls of blue-white flame. Tamika and Rashi are near one vertex of a perfect pentagram, dazzling and hot. The Woman stands in the exact center, all vague pretense of humanity falling away, leaving a horrid mass of facets and shadows and rolling thunderheads and fangs.

She wants to do this the hard way? Fine. They'll do this the hard way.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil is talking on-air about how strangely un-dangerous today has been when the door of Carlos's room opens, and two women are ushered inside. It takes him a second to recognize them: "Lucy! Hannah!"

Hannah is too red-eyed and hoarse to answer, but Lucy almost smiles. "Carlos!"

"The radio said Strex had confiscated your lives!"

"The radio said Strex had taken you into indefinite medical custody!"

"And the White Sand — we can see the fire from here, is it really —"

Hannah lets out a hiccuping sob. Oh, god, apparently that part's true.

They're all under orders to hide now, so they listen to the end of Cecil's show together. Khoshekh makes himself a furry cushion for the Gutierrezes' lizard daemons, and Carlos occupies them with small talk: how Strex will be a lot more cautious in the future if they think Night Valeans are willing to trap them in suicide attacks, how lucky it is that Lucy has a brother in San Diego who can put them up for a while as they rebuild their lives from scratch. You know, light pleasantries.

Eventually a pink-haired teenager with about eight different piercings on his face shows up to inform them that the "hide in your room" order has been lifted. They're still supposed to stay within the safety of the mansion...but a new person has come to see Carlos, and that person wants to take him off the grounds for a while.

It's NVCC president Sarah Sultan, the telepathic fist-sized rock, riding in her customary pouch over the back of her cavy daemon. We have a theology emergency on campus, she explains. Perfecto, we're going to need you.

Carlos wonders how she found out where he is, and how much longer he should bother to stay in hiding when apparently half of town can still track him down if they want to. "Of course you deserve the best help, President Sultan, but I'm confident in the abilities of all of my teammates. If you could get in touch with —"

Sultan beams a series of images into his mind.

"Oh," says Carlos. "Um. Khoshekh, would you mind tracking down the rest of the team and letting them know where I'll be...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Covered in eldritch gunk and stinging cuts, Tamika walks out of the starburst of ash that has swallowed half of Mission Grove Park, cradling the singed-but-mostly-undamaged Bridge of Birds in her arms.

A teenage Boy Scout takes the paperback. A couple of other Advanced Readers help her get bandages on the worst of the scrapes, their daemons turning into primates to do the same for Rashi. And the girl in the pilot's seat of the nearest gyropter informs her that she's wanted at NVCC next, if she's up for it.

"Depends," says Tamika. "Will there be any mortal peril, high-speed chases, and/or malevolent tourist entities from the Tau System involved?"

The pilot clicks the question in Morse over the comm. "No," she reports a few seconds later. "All clear."

"Oh, good. Tell them we're on our way."

 

-{,(((,">

 

She'd heard about the Outsider archaeologists on the radio, of course. Cecil reported that they appeared in the middle of a lecture hall during a seminar on Technology With Finger Quotes, were asked to do some simple artifact evaluation, and responded by pleading that they didn't speak any Spanish and just wanted to go home.

Tamika's not surprised President Sultan called in Carlos. He speaks fluent English, theologian, and Outsider.

She finds him in the atrium of the student center, in a nice homey circle of couches surrounded by casual iron fencing and thick black drapes, deep in conversation with three strangers. In order from most-frightened to most-enthusiastic, they are: a nervous older Cathay man with silver hair and a jewel-toned beetle daemon on his shoulder; a stern olive-skinned woman with square glasses and a Siamese cat by her feet; and a tall, handsome Afro man with dreads pulled back into a low ponytail and a hedgehog on his knee.

That last man looks remarkably similar to Carlos himself. Same height, same build, about the same age, same touch of grey at the temples. He even has a scar on his forehead, and with Carlos no longer wearing his pressure bandage, Tamika can see that it's about the same length as the one on Carlos's cheek. Wouldn't fool a facial recognition screening, but going by the matching sparkles in their eyes as they're absorbed in conversation, they just might be able to spoof a cursory mind-scan.

"Gonna drop you off at your house when this is done," says Tamika, riding Rashi up to Carlos's side. "You're clearly not cut out for staying put anymore."

Carlos jumps, then has the grace to look sheepish. "Tamika! I did tell your sentries where I was going — and Hannah and Lucy, thank you so much for saving them — I wouldn't have gone, but the team is so dependent on NVCC's generosity these days, I couldn't turn President Sultan down."

He turns to the archaeologists and says something in English, obviously an introduction; Tamika hears her own name. The three chorus "mucho gusto" in Spanish of varying accents and confidence levels. Tamika responds with her own best seventh-grade English: "Pleased to meet you."

"They were setting up an exhibit in the Museum of Natural History in Los Ángeles when they were pulled here," explains Carlos. "They're from a world where it's in an English-speaking country." He gives her the names of the older man with the beetle and the dark-eyed woman with the cat, then puts his arm around the last man's shoulders so they're lined up right next to each other. "Notice anything about us...?"

"Yeah," says Tamika. "If I was trying to sneak you somewhere and had to stock a few decoy vehicles with body doubles, he'd be my first pick."

"That's...practical," says Carlos ruefully. "And we don't just look vaguely similar — we got our degrees at the same ages, we have the same distribution of siblings — and his name...?"

The archaeologist smiles, flashing teeth like a military cemetery. "Charles Raimeaux."

Tamika's eyebrows go up. This is rapidly going from coincidence to fated interdimensional counterparts. "He know anyone who's a dead ringer for Cecil?"

"No. At least, not yet. I told him to keep an eye out."

The woman asks Carlos something in rapid English. He translates for Tamika: "Dr. Kayali wants to know if you can demonstrate opening a portal. Would you mind...?"

Tamika hesitates. "You do mean a random opening, right? Because if you're thinking I can get them back to their personal universe...I got no way of telling which one that is. You better hurry up and break it to them that they live in Night Vale now, so they can get to City Hall to pick up their New Citizen Welcome Packets and mandatory orange ponchos."

"A random one to demonstrate, yes — but Cecil's here too, with the alethiometer. Once he gets back, I think it's very likely he can tell you where to cut."

"Palmero's here in person? Where'd he get to?"

"I, um, I asked him to drop by the campus bookstore and pick up one of every physics and/or archaeology book they have," admits Carlos. "And he might not be as fast as usual, because I think he's coming down with something. He was flushed, and said he'd have to go to the bathroom and splash cold water on his face, too."

Tamika looks at Carlos, looks at Raimeaux, looks at the way the two eerily-similar men are still comfortably right up next to each other...and decides it would be too hideously embarrassing to comment. She can face down a dimension-crossing horrorterror of the kind not seen in Night Vale since NVCR's old Station Management disappeared, but some things are just beyond the pale. "All right. Lemme show your new friends the scrubland with the petrified trees."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Directed by Cecil and the alethiometer, Tamika opens a window onto, not the middle of a college campus, but certainly the outskirts of a small desert town. There's a gas station not ten feet away, and the twinkling lights of more buildings clustered in the near distance down the road.

Dr. Kayali pulls out her phone and steps through, cat daemon at her heels. "I'm getting one bar...two!" she exclaims. "Dialing...."

"Do we have to just run off and close the door behind us?" asks Charles, voicing exactly what Carlos was thinking. "This is amazing. I don't want it to stop! I mean, I work on the coast and you're relatively in the middle of the Arizona desert, so it's not like we personally could hang out every weekend...but if someone else built a research outpost out here, I'm sure my world has plenty of people who would come to a little desert town in the middle of nowhere for an opportunity like this."

(Kayali, meanwhile, has reached someone familiar on her phone. "GPS is telling me it's the middle of Arizona...get the new guy to do it...I think you'll find his social media collages very relevant if you give them a chance...recommend the mysterious stone slab we were working with be put back in storage with a large friendly DO NOT DISTURB sticker on the box.")

"I know, right?" says Carlos wistfully. "Leaving the windows open is dangerous, but if we could have some kind of schedule, set up regular meetings...."

The other universe has known about Rusakov particles (under another name) for decades, but have absolutely no practical experience with portal physics and alternate worlds. Carlos's world could teach them so much. And from less than an hour of conversation with the man who is very likely his alternate-universe self, he's already sure his own world could pick up some amazing advancements in battery technology and gay rights. There must be so much more they haven't even touched on.

("...we'll find out and call you back," finishes Kayali, and ends the call.)

"We shouldn't push this," pleads the nervous archaeologist with the beetle daemon. He works with the museum itself, it turns out, while Raimeaux and Kayali are a professor and a dean, respectively, at a nearby university. "Please, let's just get home as fast as we can, and count our blessings this wasn't any worse."

"I know you're excited, Charles, but contact with this world might have more danger than you think," adds Kayali. "What if an indigenous animal from one side gets through and starts taking over the other's ecosystem? What if a virus gets through? What if, I don't know, this universe hasn't eradicated smallpox, and...."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," says Carlos. "You've eradicated smallpox?"

The archaeologists stare at him for a moment, then start backing away.

"I'm not saying any of us have smallpox!" protests Carlos, a little hurt. Though, admittedly, not as hurt as that other world would be if he became patient zero of an epidemic. "We've all been vaccinated. Cecil, you can check and make sure they aren't carrying any dangerous contagions back with them?"

Cecil, now sitting in one of the armchairs next to Tamika and her buffalo, turns dials. "All of them can safely return to their general population without a quarantine period," he reports. "And there is little to no risk of them transmitting anything to us before they go — although —" He turns to Charles. "You should continue taking special care not to bleed on anything."

Wide-eyed suspicion transforms Charles's face. He shoots a glance at Kayali (who pats the air in a placating motion), then settles into an expression that's about as disheartened as Carlos feels. "I will."

"I wish we knew how Strexcorp handles their multi-world research operations," sighs Carlos. "Maybe they're just big enough and evil enough that they can test for biological contamination by letting people die. Even abandon a whole world and shake off the loss, if they accidentally start an epidemic they can't control."

"...Yes?" says Cecil. "Didn't we already know that? Not that accidentally blowing a hole in the fabric of existence is the same as unleashing a biological plague, but it did show they were willing to pull their senior staff out of a world and leave the rest of it to collapse."

Carlos frowns. "I don't remember knowing anything about how Strex responded when that happened. Is it something you looked up...?"

"No, it's —" Cecil looks self-consciously at Tamika. Not that the girl speaks enough English to be following much of their conversation right now. "It's something Henriette told us. Before she — before they — I'm sorry, I didn't realize you didn't know."

"...oh."

Kayali helps her shaky older colleague through the portal and back into the light of their own world's stars, while Charles hefts the bags of textbooks to the other side. His hedgehog daemon touches noses with Isaña, then he picks her up and steps through himself, leaving footprints in his own native dirt.

"If we figure out a way to handle an inter-world research operation safely, we'll look you up again," says Carlos, nodding for Tamika to go ahead and start pinching the window closed. "I promise."

"Thanks." Charles musters up a wan smile and nods to the stack of textbooks. "And who knows...we might beat you to it."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Black Canyon, Arizona, United States of Columbia.

The radically-displaced archaeologists find their way to a Buster's, order some burgers, and call the university. Or rather, Charles calls the university (borrowing Sylvia's phone, since she was the only one who had it on her when they were transported).

"No, it's not Kayali, it's me," he says. "I know I haven't been picking up — that's because I just went through a real-life episode of Sliders, and ended up in Arizona while my phone is still in my backpack in LA — look, if we get a couple of last-minute flights, is there any chance we can get them reimbursed?"

Pause.

"Great. Fantastic. And one more thing, while I've got you here...we need to turn down the test equipment offer."

Pause.

"Yes, the Strexcorp one."

Pause.

"Yes, I know it involves a set of brand-new ED-XRF machines with special calibration programs for oxides and alloys. No one was more excited about that than I was! So I wouldn't be declining if it wasn't important. It's a long story — I'll tell you the whole thing when we get back."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos's teammates are thrilled and relieved to have him home. Well, the Li Huas greet him as nonchalantly as if he just got back from a milk run, but with everyone else there are hugs, and a few tears, and comments on how he looks better and healthier than they'd dared to hope. Scar and all.

He tells them Henriette left her book collection to the team, and they can go ahead and start fighting over who gets which volumes. As long as someone pulls aside the bound copy of her thesis. He'll send that to Adriana if she wants it, and add it to his own shelves if she doesn't.

He spends the rest of the evening on the living room couch, going through his backlog of email, Facebook posts, and (mostly Cecil's) Tumblr updates. He deletes a fresh wave of digital condemnation, religious hardliners informing him that Henriette's death was God's punishment for heresy. There are condolences, too; he moves these all to a folder for safekeeping. The rest is normal. Feedback on a paper he submitted two weeks ago. Updates about campus events from Harvard mailing lists he can't figure out how to get off of. A reminder from Facebook to celebrate his sister's wedding anniversary.

All the usual detritus of life going on.

Cecil, who came with him, ends up lying with his head on a pillow and the pillow against Carlos's hip. Khoshekh, who found them soon after, sits on Cecil's chest with his diamond-arranged legs tucked under him. Carlos keeps thinking they've fallen asleep, only to notice their eyes are still open.

"Are you still feeling sick?" he asks after a while. "Can I get you some water or anything?"

Cecil shakes his head. "It's not that. I must have gotten possessed earlier. Didn't notice at the time because there wasn't any fresh sweet herb-or-spice scent left behind, but this is definitely a post-possession headache."

"...Did it happen because of Strex taking down bloodstones?"

"Maybe? It could also be that the eviction of our old Station Management is finally catching up with us. The new management can't or won't try to scare off any malevolent entities that try to possess their employees at work."

Carlos frowns. "Hasn't the Glow Cloud possessed you during a show before...?"

"Well, sure, but the Cloud isn't malevolent," says Cecil wisely. "All it wants is a good school system for its child, and endless mortal worship and devotion. Who can't sympathize with that?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika has had a long day, and she could really use a shower, but she's also got guard duty like everybody else. She and Rashi arrive for their shift in a half-concealed alcove in the rock of Niton Canyon, above the entrance of the cave where they've done most of their gyropter work, and settle in.

Normally it's a quiet job. She's pretty sure most people in town don't even know about this place, let alone their Strexcorp invaders. So it's unexpected when a figure comes walking along the moonlit canyon floor, a cloth bindle on a heavy branch over his shoulder.

He stops twenty feet from her watchpost and snaps a salute in her direction.

Tamika loads a stone into her slingshot, though she doesn't take aim.

The man — it's hard to make out colors in the dim light, but she's pretty sure he's wearing a tan jacket — flips the branch over and sits crossways on it, now holding the cloth in one hand. As Tamika watches, he lifts gently off the rock and soars toward her, coming to hover silently at eye level about ten feet away.

"I understand you took out the Woman from Italy today," he says.

Tamika nods. She's pretty sure the Man in the Tan Jacket is way out of the age range to perceive the Woman properly...but it looks like he's a witch, and witches live for centuries, so maybe the rules are different. "How much do you remember?"

"Not a lot. Just what it left behind while it was in my head." He tilts his head and recites, not in the screechy voice of possession, but in a dismissive singsong: "The Woman from Italy invaded our home / with chaos and bloodlust and badly-rhymed poems. / But if she was smart, she would flee for her life: / Tamika's her equal when armed with the Knife."

It gets a grim smile out of Tamika. "Sounds about right."

"Anyway, I figured you might want help getting the smell off." The man unties the corners of the cloth and shows her the contents. "So I made you some soap. Specially formulated for breaking down eldritch ichor."

"You fly, you remember being possessed, and you make your own soap," says Tamika thoughtfully. "You're a man of many talents."

The man shrugs. "I'm homeless and I spend all my free time in the library. You pick things up."

He waits for Tamika to wave him closer before approaching, and piles the plastic-wrapped blocks of soap on the edge of the outcropping.

"This a general thanks for saving town?" asks Tamika. "Or are you leading up to asking me for something?"

As the words are coming out of her mouth, she feels absolutely certain she's said them before.

But however the man answered it last time, it can't have been like this: "The second one. And now that you have the Knife, you can finally deliver. Not right this minute, though. On the next waning crescent moon — that's when our luck will be best — I'll come find you."

Chapter 33: Reintegration and Re-Education

Summary:

Carlos works his way back into the swing of non-kidnapped life: Whispering Forest expeditions, secret contraband hand-offs, team members getting dragged off for re-education, you know, the usual. Meanwhile, Dana bonds with Maureen and coordinates the beginnings of an escape — for everyone but herself.

Notes:

New character-and-daemon portraits: Emmanuel, Vithya, and Maureen.

So much new art from readers, too! From birbcecil/soupengine: Isaña sketch, Isaña and Khoshekh animation, Isaña in a loud holiday sweater. And from inimitable-nectar, Tamika and Rashi <3

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

It takes a while to summon everyone to the ground-floor central chamber of the basalt fortress. The dimension-crossing oranges sent twenty-eight people from Night Vale to this world, and all of them have their own agendas, their own needs, their own disinclination to listen to a sixteen-year-old. (Or is Dana seventeen, now? She isn't quite sure about the progression of days.) Not everyone can make it in the first place; some of them are on an exploratory trip to the freestanding door down by the dry riverbed, while another group is out investigating the ruined machines in the ancient battlefield. Dana and Eustathias round up everyone they can.

"We have good news!" exclaims Eustathias, flying over the heads of the crowd as a brightly-colored, loud-voiced bird. In a rush of tail feathers she soars over to Dana (standing on a dislodged block to make up for the fact that she's apparently not going to get any taller) and perches on her shoulder. "Please, listen closely."

Fighting the instinct to detail every little thing about her latest encounter with Tamika Flynn, Dana cuts to the chase: "We may have a way home."

John Peters (you know, the farmer) starts to clap. A PTA mom groans something like finally. Tristan Cortez squeezes the hand of his fellow disappeared associate from the former Green Market Co-Op. Maureen Lanark, Dana's former classmate and current fellow ex-radio-intern, takes in the news with wary caution.

"Tamika Flynn — our brilliant and bold local hero, Tamika Flynn — has come into possession of a way to open doors between worlds," continues Dana. "Unlike the old oak door my daemon traveled through to get here, her doors are stable in time. I believe she can open one in the now of Night Vale, and all of you can emerge through it from the now of this world."

Now there's real applause.

Dana is gratified, though of course she hasn't done anything. Yet. "We'll have to do it by the door, because that's where we know the space of our worlds is lined up. Once everyone who is traveling right now has returned to the fortress, we can make the journey. When you see people start to return, please tell them. But tell them this, also...."

She explains about Strexcorp banning bloodstones, and forcing the Sheriff's secret police to round them up. She tells everyone that more businesses, not fewer, are Strex-controlled since their untimely vanishings. She warns them that Night Vale is more dangerous than ever, so if any of them would like to stay here....

The crowd protests. They have family, friends, people who love and miss them. Allie Laredo has three inhumanities courses at NVCC she's supposed to be teaching. Adam Bayer's secret terrier has probably backslid on all its training and started trying to eat the humming gnomes in the garden again. Many of them want to be directly involved in getting revenge on Strex for what it did to them. Besides, they yearn for the comforts of home: real beds, food, television, phones that hardly ever try to stab you when you're texting your girlfriend.

It isn't until later, when Dana is back in the fortress's upper levels in the room that has become "hers", that someone comes to say otherwise.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The day after the theologians' informal memorial service for Henriette, Carlos gets behind the wheel of the van for a Whispering Forest visit. He won't be going all the way in— Nirliq and Quentin are the ones who will be collecting the resin — no, he's the getaway driver, standing ready to drag them out by the safety harnesses if either of them gets too enticed by what the forest is murmuring to them.

Since they're under strict orders from Tamika never to be too far out of range of an ally, Perle is riding shotgun. (In the figurative way, as opposed to Nirliq, who has a literal shotgun in a shoulder holster.) The linguist is using one of those tablets you can "write" on with a stylus; the Sheriff's secret police have dinged her for it several times, but never gotten charges to stick. Carlos debates whether to strike up a conversation, or leave her to her legally-dubious work.

The thing is, as far as he can tell, nobody on the team has connected much with Perle. She's in a completely different field from the rest of them, linguistics rather than physics or biology, so the shop talk wears thin pretty fast. She hasn't bonded with anyone over a shared hobby, the way Quentin and Omero did over video games. All the other women on the team are significantly older than her, except the Li Huas, who stopped making the effort to fake normal human relationships months ago.

And maybe it's not a problem; maybe she's just quiet and asocial and happy that way, and Carlos is doing some kind of inappropriate big-brother-instinct projection. But this would be a really bad time for anyone on the team to feel isolated and wanting for someone to talk to.

"I like the haircut," he finally says.

Perle looks up. Her dark hair, halfway down her back when she first arrived in town, now hangs in a neat bob around her face; it doesn't even brush the head of the leopard gecko daemon riding on her shoulder. "Thanks."

"Was it, um." Carlos pats the back of his own head. "Was it in solidarity, or did you just feel like a change?"

"I decided I wanted it to be easier to take care of," says Perle. (It's naturally pin-straight, so part of Carlos thinks it can't have been that hard in the first place, but he bites his tongue. This isn't a contest.) "And harder to grab. Just in case."

"Ah."

That's all Carlos has in the way of clever conversation-openers. He lapses back into silence.

Until Perle says, "Have you learned anything interesting about Mary Malone lately?"

In fact, Carlos has! It's not a theological marvel this time, but it is pretty cool, or at least he thinks so. Mary's autobiography mentions having a poster on the door of her Oxford research unit, with the hexagrams of the I Ching. If that's the same kind of thing in Will's world as in Lyra's, then it's sort of the equivalent of the poster Carlos used to have with the thirty-six symbols of the alethiometer.

"They're not illustrations, they're just sets of lines, but as far as I can tell, the principle is the same," he explains. "You use some form of random number generation — flipping coins, rolling dice — to generate six lines. With two possible versions of each line, there are sixty-four total combinations, and each one has a number, a name, and a set of meanings. The I Ching itself is the book where you look up the symbols to get all the details. Or maybe you don't look them up, if you're the Cathay version of Cecil, or you've just studied for a lifetime...."

Perle gives him a searching look. "This is a Cathay...innovation?"

"That's right. Had you heard of it before?"

"Possibly. What else can you tell me?"

Carlos explains as much as he knows, all gleaned from the relevant Wikipedia articles. Whatever connection Perle might be making out of it, she doesn't let him know, just nods and purses her lips and jots it all down.

 

-{,(((,">

 

His first venture back into a Strex-owned business is the bank. Not the local one Cecil uses, a national one, but still with Strexcorp as the local branch managers. He needs to start distributing the money from Henriette's account, and he needs to make sure there aren't any authority hiccups with Nirliq dipping into the team's balance. (It's time for their first monthly exchange payment to Cecil.)

While they're discussing international currency balances with one of the bank attendants, the building is invaded by about twenty middle-school students wearing Halloween masks and wielding the collected works of Anne McCaffrey.

Carlos and Nirliq, like the rest of the civilians, stay low. Carlos's bag just happens to be in the way of the first security officer who runs in. Nirliq accidentally knocks a bowl of lollipops in front of the next one.

The building gets put on lockdown for a solid hour before it's over, with a throng of cops and a phalanx of yellow gyropters occupying the block, keeping anyone from getting out...and yet somehow, none of them get their hands on a single missing child.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Maureen is red-faced and out-of-breath from the long climb.

"How do you — stand all those — stairs?" she pants, collapsing onto one of the chair-sized blocks of stone that stronger arms have been kind enough to haul in. "You're in — better shape than I am — but not — that good."

"I spend most of my time near the top," says Dana apologetically. "I have to be on the rooftop platform with the bloodstone circle so often that it would take a lot more climbing if I tried to keep a room further down."

"Guess that's — reasonable."

Dana gets one of her water bottles, long empty, and does a quick chant to refill it from the reservoir under the mountain. (They discovered it while trying to repair the fortress's plumbing. So far, the only showers and faucets they've managed to get working are on the lowest levels, but that's better than nothing. And at least they don't have to worry about toilets.)

Maureen gratefully gulps the water down. Her dark-furred rabbit daemon has flopped like a beanbag toy on the stone next to her feet.

"Couldn't you have talked to Eustathias? She's keeping watch lower down," says Dana, when the redhead looks composed enough to answer without gasping. "She could fly up to me with any questions. Or at least, she could have given D.L. a ride."

"...right." Maureen facepalms. "We forgot she wouldn't have to be with you. Whoops."

Everyone else seems to have accepted Dana's new witch-range without much trouble. But of course Maureen knew her before all this; Maureen remembers her from elementary-school soccer and seventh-grade algebra, remembers Eustathias (first unsettled, then pretending to be a sand cat) firmly tethered within six or seven feet of Dana's side. "You can stay up here. As long as you want. Don't feel you have to rush back down too soon."

"Yeah. About that...look, Dana, when everyone else goes back to Night Vale — are you going with them?"

"Oh, I'm not, no," Dana assures her. "I'll need to be in the circle to coordinate the inter-world transfer. And to do other things, afterward. To carry messages. To find things out."

The other girl raises her eyebrows behind thick-framed glasses. "And you're okay with that?"

"Shouldn't I be?" It won't be easy, but it's important. And Dana has her daemon; she has much finer control over where she appears and when; she has the assurance of her own future self that she will return home one day. What else could she want?

"No, I mean...I was just checking. If you're fine, you're fine," says Maureen quickly. "But if you're going to be here, then I'm staying too."

Dana, cross-legged on her sleeping bag, sits up straighter. "You will? But what about school? What about your internship? Your family?"

"Could ask you the same questions." Maureen picks up D.L. and starts combing his fur straight with her fingernails. "I got into college a year early; I can get in again if I miss a semester. I don't want the internship — I'm a history major, and it's not even teaching me the local stuff, just a little bit of audio editing and a lot about making coffee and how Palmero thinks shark biology works. If I can stick it out here long enough that the mysterious forces of the station decide to call someone else, the way they called someone after you, that's fine by me."

"And your parents? Your sisters?"

Maureen hesitates. "You do get that an NVCR internship is basically a death sentence, right?"

Remembering the cheery sadism of the station's new programming director, Dana shivers. "Has Lauren Mallard made it that bad?"

"I'm not talking about Strexcorp! Even before they showed up...you made it out here, and Vithya turned into an angel and Rick turned into a tree, which are technically not dying...but who else have you ever heard of that didn't die on the job?"

"Oh, but there must be...." Dana trails off. "That is, I'm sure someone...I can't think of any specific names just now, but that doesn't mean...oh! Cecil! Cecil was an intern, and he's still alive. There you go."

For some reason, Maureen doesn't look convinced. "You at least agree that it's horrifically dangerous."

Dana nods. Of course community radio is dangerous. Just like mining and being a mayor are dangerous careers, while icthyology and fire-growing are safe ones. It's the nature of the job.

"So won't my family be happier to have me stick it out here for a while and live a long and happy life afterward, than come right home and have Lauren Mallard push me into the bottomless pit in the break room after a week?"

"Oh, I see," says Dana. "That's very clever."

Although Maureen has been at rest for some time now, her cheeks redden again. "So that's the deal. I'm staying. And who knows, all this important work you're doing, it might help at some point to have an extra head to think it over. Or an extra pair of hands around."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The first night Carlos spends back in Cecil's apartment, and Cecil is so frisky Carlos can practically taste it.

He's catlike in the way he keeps brushing up against Carlos while they make dinner, practically purring every time Carlos passes him a measuring cup or asks for a spice. On a whim Carlos pops a bit of shredded chicken in his mouth, which could be playful-and-sexy or just weird until Cecil takes Carlos's hand and slowly, deliberately licks the flavor from his fingertips. Right. Sexy it is, then.

Cecil pulls him to the bedroom as soon as the casserole is in the oven, all gentle kisses and wandering hands. Carlos's cheek is still tender around the scar; Cecil plies it with soft lips, nuzzling the bristle that's grown back since that disastrous shave, exploring the line where the hair follicles have been permanently stunted. He's a little rougher when it comes to the rest of Carlos: tugging off clothes, grinding their hips together, holding Carlos's head in place for a tongue-deep kiss. Khoshekh drops Isaña in their basket and rolls around with her, tail whipping, a true purr coming from deep in his chest.

They're careful. Khoshekh doesn't bite. Carlos keeps himself in any position that isn't "on his back with Cecil leaning over him." It's warm and sweet and stimulating, and when Cecil eagerly comes apart under his hands it sounds like home.

And sure, later that night Carlos snaps awake at the sound of a gyropter going by overhead — something he would normally sleep through, this one's just so loud — and gets jittery at the sight of Cecil lying beside him, only soothed when he peels back one of Cecil's eyelids to find a perfectly normal cataract-clouded eyeball underneath. (Cecil doesn't even stir.)

But he does get back to sleep, without needing Cecil to wake up and sing for him, so he decides to think of himself as making-good-progress.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The wheat and wheat by-products speakeasy in the basement of Big Rico's is one of Sherie's favorite places in town. It's the only one where she can get decent donuts.

Carlos hasn't ordered. He stares vacantly at the basket of rolls in the middle of their table, worrying the handle of the briefcase in his lap.

"I can eat one first, if you like," offers Sherie under her breath. The speakeasy is an off-the-books operation, making it the closest thing left to a non-Strex-run eatery around here, and up-to-date intelligence says the food is guaranteed to be safe from Strex's influence. But after being poisoned by appetizers, of course the man is going to have nerves to get over.

"No. Thanks, but no," says Carlos. "I'm not hungry. You go ahead."

Sherie takes a few modest bites of her (bright blue, but otherwise unremarkable) donut, while Carlos has a drink from the water bottle he brought from the chapel. Their daemons keep quiet watch by their feet.

Eventually she adds, "Can I ask your advice? About something personal?"

"Sure."

"Well, you see, there's someone in town who has been...flirting. With me. And I am struggling, a bit, with how to respond."

Carlos's face softens with sympathy. "You and Sam...?"

"Going nowhere good."

Sherie doesn't elaborate. Doesn't mention how Susannah mentioned in last week's phone call that she thinks her father went on a date recently; how Seth got audibly upset as he insisted that no, his parents are in a functional long-distance relationship; how Sherie sternly told her daughter not to spy even though she desperately wants more details, and tried to mediate her son's distress with as few outright lies as possible. Her boss is not her marriage counselor.

"For the right person, I could...date," she says slowly. "I just don't know if this person is the right person. Especially since this person is...unsettling. Even by Night Vale standards."

"That's a high bar to clear."

Sherie nods.

"Although, you know...sometimes at first a thing can seem strange and...malevolent, and then you find that, underneath, it was something else altogether. Something...pure. Innocent."

"I suppose that's a possibility with this person," allows Sherie.

Carlos cocks his head. "Does this person have...an unconventional gender?"

"Oh, no! As far as I know, this person is a...." She slows down, wanting to get the unfamiliar words right. "...a non-nonbinary cisgender woman."

Carlos's eyebrows jump. "I meant unconventional relative to your personal history," he says quickly. "So I understand whether you're saying 'help, I'm having a midlife sexual identity crisis' or just 'help, I'm being flirted with by someone who thinks the most romantic music is folk songs squeaked by an aquarium full of mice'."

"Both. It's both." Sherie palms her forehead with the hand not covered in powdered sugar. "I should have said so sorry, I'm not interested in women. Why didn't I say that? And now I keep thinking about her — partly, I'll grant you, in the context of being terrified and confused — but what if there's more to it?"

"Is there a reason you can't just go out for dinner and see how you feel?" asks Carlos. "With Cecil, it took a while before I was convinced he was on the side of the angels...metaphorically speaking. And even if this had been a normal town, he came on so strong at first, I was afraid if I gave an inch he'd take a mile. I'm guessing you already know your person isn't some kind of Strexcorp plant. Can she...."

Before he can finish, something at the entryway catches his eye. Sherie glances over her shoulder, then carefully doesn't pay any more attention as a woman with a black-and-white springer spaniel daemon comes down the stairs.

Jackie Fiero runs the only pawn shop in town (which is called Lucinda's Pawn Shop, though nobody named Lucinda is involved). It's been a Strexcorp subsidiary since not long after NVCR became one. She orders a cherry cruller and a soda, and takes the table right after the experimental theologians. She's wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse that leaves the bar code on her neck freely visible, and carrying a briefcase identical to the one in Carlos's lap.

Carlos reflexively smooths back his hair (it isn't even long enough to get in his face right now) and sets his own briefcase next to his feet. "Sorry, where was I?"

"Asking if the woman I'm talking about is an ally of the Republic," prompts Sherie. "She is. She's even helped with our research before."

"...it isn't Cactus Jane, is it?"

"I don't think I could even be a close friend with someone who's always trying to convert me," says Sherie ruefully.

Carlos winces in sympathy. "I can see that. Even though, to its credit, the Church of the Beams hasn't actively tried to kill me. So, um, whoever your person is, do you think she could handle a couple of casual dates? With the understanding that it doesn't mean 'today we're in love, tomorrow I'm moving in'?"

(Behind him, his armadillo daemon and Jackie's dog quietly switch the positions of their briefcases.)

"If we mutually decided it wasn't going anywhere, I think it would be fine," says Sherie. "If she wanted to keep going and I didn't, I think there's a very real chance she would secretly replace my hand lotion with spiders."

That gets her a long, searching look. At last Carlos says, "Sherie...this person we're talking about...is there any chance she already lives in your home?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos doesn't have much time to process what it means that the Faceless Old Woman might be making romantic advances toward one of his team members, because he and Sherie leave Big Rico's to find an ambulance parked on the chapel lawn.

With a sheet-covered body on a gurney beside it.

He hands the briefcase to Sherie and sprints. Isaña motors along through the grass beside him.

The body is someone in a short cape and a leather balaclava. Secret police. Not someone on the team. Inside, a couple of paramedics are hovering around Quentin, doing something to his arm. Nirliq and Perle are both safely beside him. Köhler is monitoring things at NVCC, out of the way. The Li Huas, though....

"Secret police took the Li Huas. Said they were involved in something illegal," says Nirliq, briefly patting Quentin's shoulder before coming over to Carlos. "They didn't go without a fight — there was a shootout — Quentin got grazed, but they say he won't need to be hospitalized, just bandaged. No idea how the Li Huas are. The cops said it would only be for questioning, but —"

"— but their questioning can still hurt like hell," finishes Carlos. "Aren't there supposed to be certain people — certain small people who read well above their grade level — watching the chapel for exactly this kind of situation?"

"They're here. They said it's not a Strexcorp thing, just a local legal one, and when we bring down the wrath of the legitimate secret police of Night Vale, they don't get involved."

Goddammit.

Sherie is just now making it to the chapel's front door. "Go give her the recap," says Carlos to Nirliq. "I need to make a call."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"You really think you can just pop into some random place and have it turn out to be exactly what you need," says Maureen dubiously.

On the platform beside her, leaning against the wall on the far side of one of the angel statues, Dana shrugs. "It's worked so far. I used to have a lot of trouble, but now, using this circle and with my daemon beside me, I can always get where I choose to go."

"Yeah, well. When you get back, I'll be right here, and you can tell me how that went."

"Oh, I'm sure you have more interesting things to do than sit around and watch my body not do anything while my ghost is off moving between worlds," protests Dana.

"Uh-huh." With a sweeping gesture, Maureen indicates the whole empty landscape, from here to the Clouded Mountain with its blinking light. "Which part of the barren post-apocalyptic desert hellscape am I supposed to be so interested in?"

"I suppose you have a point."

"Besides, if anyone else hikes all the way up here to talk to you, I can tell them, not right now, she's busy."

"Would you? That would be very...kind. No, conscientious."

Dana takes her normal seat in the middle of the stone platform. The statues of angels with bloodstone faces loom large around her; she feels the curves and angles of the universe in the way the sunlight reflects off their basalt wings. Eustathias sits in her arms, in the form of something like a long-eared brown fox with a creamy ruff around its neck and wide, expressive black eyes.

Maureen sits across from her, leaning against the wall next to the mouth of the stairs. She gives Dana a thumbs-up.

And Dana sets off, aiming for a world with allies.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

It's a nice afternoon, and Mission Grove Park is bustling. Dog-walkers, teenagers playing frisbee, nobody acknowledging or speaking about the Shape, kids laughing on the playground, picnickers toasting their food on the flames of the Eternal Animal Pyre.

The police officer tapping Carlos's phone told him to come here alone. That's not going to happen, and they should know it. But out of respect, he asks his two armed preteen escorts to stay out of sight once he gets to the park.

He finds an empty picnic table, takes out his phone, and makes a show of nonchalantly checking his email.

A jogger runs by, a woman with more muscle tone than Carlos will ever hope to have in his life, in black-and-green capri shorts and a matching sports bra. That's all he registers until she slows down, then circles around to his table. "Carlos! I thought that was you."

She looks familiar now, though Carlos can't place her name. "Sorry, refresh my memory...?"

"Delphine Cabrera. Steve's girlfriend." There's a casual glamour in the way she carries herself, making her whole ensemble look like it belongs outside a stylish Paris café. (Carlos wonders if there's some kind of magic involved. She's making a fanny pack look good, for crying out loud.) "I don't think we've ever been properly introduced, but Steve speaks very highly of you! Many people do, you know."

"Thanks." Carlos tries not to wince as Delphine takes a seat on the opposite bench and pulls out a pair of half-moon glasses, as if she's going to stay around for a while. "Look, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm waiting for someone."

"Of course! I won't keep you long. I just want to know if you're well. We were all so worried after you were kidna—" She buries the word in a deliberate, theatrical cough. Her daemon, a huge silver-and-white cat with thick fur, discreetly licks one paw. "That is to say, after you were tragically hospitalized. Cecil even stayed at our house that first night, did he tell you?"

"He didn't mention it," says Carlos. That would have been the night before the rescue: when he wasn't secretly in the safety of a Book Club base, when Cecil had no way to be sure they'd get him back at all. "That was really good of you."

"Think nothing of it. We take care of each other around here," says Delphine warmly. "Steve takes care of his friends...I take care of Steve...we both take care of the girls...the girls, well, they take care of quite a lot. You've met them, of course. Renée, and my Janice. You think Janice is awfully theologically interesting, isn't that right?"

Carlos must be looking incredibly shifty by now. "She was involved in a theologically interesting event. That's all there is to it. I would be happy to discuss the details with you some other —"

"But you sent her home with permission waivers for tests that were directly on her. Of course I didn't sign them — I don't want any experiments done on my little girl — but you did want to do them."

"Oh, those? No, you've got it all wrong," stammers Carlos. "Steve thought he saw something. I don't think it meant anything, but he was pretty upset, so I told him we'd run some miscellaneous tests — if you gave us permission — to make him feel better. It was about taking care of a friend, that's all."

Delphine peers anxiously at him. "So you really, truly didn't have any personal interest in those tests?"

"Not a bit. And even if we did, we wouldn't do them on a minor without parental permission. It'd never pass an ethics review board."

"Hmm."

"Sorry to have worried you. Now, if that's all...."

"Very nearly," the woman assures him. "Although, it's interesting — your story doesn't match up in the least with Dr. Zeng and Dr. Zeng's."

Carlos's eyes widen.

Delphine gives him a calm, knowing smile. The cat daemon (who's big, bigger than Khoshekh, maybe even without her fur) is staring Isaña down, unblinking.

"You're the person I'm supposed to meet," breathes Carlos. Stupid, stupid. He'd known to expect a plainclothes officer, and even so...."How high-level are you?"

"Ooh, I'm afraid that's quite classified. Although I can tell you that you had leftover casserole for breakfast; that Cecil drove you to work, during which you talked about visiting the Museum of Forbidden Technologies when the new exhibit comes out; and that when the arrest occurred you were out of surveillance, last seen in the area of Big Rico's."

Pretty high up, then. Not just an observer on the ground, but a coordinator.

"Information is power, Dr. Ramirez. Power that I do not appreciate virtual strangers trying to gather over my daughter."

Carlos holds up his hands. "I swear to you, that was not the goal. Whatever the Li Huas did, I'm sure they were just curious — it's the second thing an experimental theologian is. And I may not have known what they were up to, but I'm the project chaplain, so it is my responsibility. Let them go. We'll destroy the samples, we'll erase the data...."

"The strike team already has that last part taken care of," says Delphine smoothly. "Your people will be returned to you just as soon as they've been re-educated — the old-fashioned way, none of these new Strexcorp procedures — to forget about Janice's existence."

"Can't you see that that's overkill? They haven't hurt your daughter. You've probably given them a great scare by now. What else can we do to convince you —"

"Do you think this is a negotiation?" Delphine gives him a polite little laugh. "Goodness, no. I came out here to evaluate whether you needed to be included in the re-education. That's all this is."

Frustration and horror leave Carlos nearly speechless. He only has one card left to use against her, so he plays it. "How would your boyfriend feel if he knew you re-educated people for a living?"

Delphine doesn't so much as bat a perfectly-curled eyelash. "Oh, I'm not in the re-education chain of command myself. My department is espionage. Would you like to take a guess how Steve and I met?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Another desert, in an otherworld.

Dana appears on coppery sand, in between scrubby gray-green bushes nearly as tall as she is.

It's a desert, but nothing like the barren, deadened wasteland she's been overlooking all these months. The skyline is broken up with boxy, sand-eroded buttes, layers of sediment making them look painted in lines of vivid color. Patches of grass and plumes of sagebrush break up the soil. Flies buzz; birds chirp in the distance; a lizard makes a frantic skitter from one rock to another.

There are no people in sight. For a moment Dana wonders if she's supposed to look for allies among the lizards.

Then she takes a good look all the way around her, and realizes there's a nomadic camp of tents not far off: huts of heavy tan-and-white fabric, interspersed with hanging panels decorated in stripes or geometric patterns. There's a cluster of tall earthenware vessels next to one, a set of birdlike figures pecking in the dirt by another.

As Dana starts moving toward the camp, a half-dozen children come barreling out from a gap between the tents, accompanied by a skinny, golden-furred dog. The kids are human, or something close to it, with pale yellow robes flapping around brown limbs as they run. She can't see daemons at this distance — could they be internal? What other differences might these people have from the humans she knows best?

She does see that the plants around the tents don't even come up to the children's knees, though they have the same color and silhouette of the bushes around her. Sees it, but doesn't realize yet what it means. Most of her thoughts are on hoping these people have more in common with her than not.

Chapter 34: A Terrible Light

Summary:

The Li Huas are released, and they're not happy about it. Carlos and the other theologians try to straighten out their plans for surviving the next month. Maureen and Dana see off the rest of their fellow citizens...except for one. Oh, and there's this bright light, of terrible power....

Notes:

Rearranged/updated some Strex daemon portraits: Daniel, Lauren, Zariya Thiébeaut; Vanessa, Kevin, Carlo. And here's a brand-new set! Marcus Vansten, the Faceless Old Woman, Hiram McDaniels.

Night Vale.

The wee hours of the morning find Carlos parked in the otherwise-empty lot of the Desert Flower. Every building is closed, every window dark; the only light is from the street lamps, the lit-up fast-food signs, and the lights dancing in the sky over the Arby's next door.

Cecil is nearly falling asleep in the passenger seat. Carlos gives him a shake on the shoulder. "C'mon, stay up a little longer. Do you want some of my coffee?"

"You need it. You're driving," points out Cecil, who drained his own cup an hour ago.

"Well, talk to me about something then." Carlos flips on the signal-jamming switch in the craft snowman on the dashboard. "When we start looking at places, what do you want us to look for?"

"A patio," says Cecil, immediately and with conviction.

Carlos smiles. "That a lifelong dream of yours? To have a home with a patio?"

"Nope. Didn't care until a month ago."

"...does the duplex Steve Carlsberg moved into have a patio?"

Cecil blinks at him. "How'd you guess? Have you been there?"

For his part, Carlos has been shuffling through a whole list of things he wants in a long-term home. An office workspace, he tells Cecil. A living room big enough to hold movie nights in. A spare bedroom or two, for hosting family, or for giving recently re-educated friends a more comfortable place to crash than a pull-out couch.

Speaking of re-education...there's an unmarked white van pulling into the Arby's parking lot.

Carlos drains the rest of his coffee, waits for the van to speed away, then pulls the coupe around to pick up the Li Huas.

One of the geneticists is staggering and unsteady, leaning hard against possibly-her-double, who squints and looks confused at the sight of the car. Both of them have rumpled clothes and frizzy hair. Cecil rouses himself enough to open the car doors and let them in.

It's a quiet drive down empty roads back to the houses. Li Hua and Li Hua answer a few questions with grunts and mutters, while Cecil is openly dozing off in his seat. The fact that they all get to the appropriate bedrooms without anyone falling over seems like a minor miracle.

"Thought I was going to have to carry all three of you inside," says Carlos fondly, as Cecil falls into bed. (Khoshekh is already in Isaña's basket, nose tucked under his tail.)

"Hm?" Cecil yawns. "Me, maybe. Your colleagues're fine."

"Maybe by your standards. By mine, they look terrible."

"Mmhmmyeah, look terrible," agrees Cecil. His eyes fall closed; he slings an arm over his forehead to shut out the ambient Rusakov radiation. "Like they went through advance'n 'terrogation. Memory wipe musta taken right away, though, 'cause they're fakin'. Don' ask me why."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Everyone should be back at the basalt fortress by now. Dana sends Eustathias soaring down the side of the building to double-check, while she herself stays on the rooftop platform, talking to Maureen.

"I didn't have time to say much," she admits. "I was startled – a dog ran at me, barking, and it was a very large dog, as the people in the masks were all very tall – so I accidentally fell back into my body. Next time I will be less surprised! That should help."

"When you say they were 'tall', how tall is that?" asks Maureen. She herself is at least five foot ten, so it's a question of some interest. "Like, angel-tall, or taller, or what?"

Dana considers. "Well...if I am five feet and three inches, then comparatively speaking, the adult I spoke to was...." She moves her hands in front of her face, trying to get a precise visual estimate. "...about fifty feet?"

"Oh, wow."

Eustathias comes soaring back up not long afterward, in the form of something batlike and eyeless and blue. "Everyone is here! The people who just returned are being told about the plan. They'll be ready to make the trek to the door soon."

"I guess I should go down," says Maureen, looking unhappily at the stairs. "Gotta say goodbye to Grandpa in person."

Dana tilts her head. "Who?"

"...John Peters? You know, my grandfather?" Maureen sinks into a crouch to pick up her rabbit daemon. "C'mere, D.L."

"It's a long walk. Here." Eustathias lands in front of them and turns into a creature like a small goat, with a leafy mane and tail. Agile legs and nimble hooves make the form perfect for climbing down mountains...or stairs. She lowers her head so D.L. can climb on. "I'll give you a ride."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

When the Li Huas creep downstairs in the grey pre-dawn light, Carlos is waiting in front of the door.

Both women jump when he flicks on the light switch. "Jesus," breathes the one on the left. "What are you doing here?"

"The question here is, what are you doing?" asks Carlos. "You're supposed to be in recovery, not going on a hike."

The Li Huas share a look. There's clearly no non-suspicious explanation for why they're dressed in cargo shorts and sturdy boots, wearing well-stuffed backpacks and carrying holstered guns, at dead o'clock in the morning. The one on the right reaches into her pocket – Carlos tenses, but she's just pulling out a keyring. "We realize it isn't the traditional way to do this, but...we resign."

"This project is no longer offering the kind of opportunities we want to pursue," agrees her counterpart, producing a matching keyring and handing it to him. House keys, chapel keys, their Raúl's Loyal Shopper cards.

"Whatever Strexcorp's offering you, it's not worth it," says Carlos.

An even longer pause. The Li Huas' expressions are unreadable. Their wren daemons aren't exactly giving anything away.

At last, the leftmost Li Hua says, "He thinks we're stupid."

The one on the right nods. "Sure does."

Carlos is baffled. "What?"

Li Hua rolls her eyes. "Look, just because we wouldn't feel guilty about, say, killing you on the spot...."

"Your boyfriend's got a hole in his skull, right?" puts in Li Hua. "We could give you a matching one."

"Did you know that head wounds bleed the most? All those blood vessels running to your brain and your face."

"More interesting organs in the torso, though."

"Well, sure. No reason you can't shoot through the head and open up the torso. Do it fast enough, you can see the heart still beating."

"Are you two going somewhere with this?" demands Carlos, trying not to show how intimidated he is. From these two, casual conversation about viscera might be small talk, not a threat. Their guns are still holstered. Although they could almost certainly draw and fire more quickly than Cecil could get down here....

Li Hua sighs. "The point is, just because we are violent sociopaths at heart does not mean we're dumb."

"And even if we were," adds Li Hua, "we still watch TV."

"We know what happens to people who turn traitor and run to the evil organization looking for protection."

"Or who have an ego big enough to think you can use them to serve your own needs. Oh, no. We'd end up drugged and severed in a hot minute if we tried it."

"They'd probably sever one of us no matter what, just to see what happens. We're the gold mine of experimental research subjects! Forget twin studies – this would be their big chance to do an exactly-the-same study."

"Which is probably not the spin that Strexcorp exec expected us to imagine," muses Li Hua, "when he told us how they don't hold their theologians back with rules about, say, how much pain you can put your subjects through."

"Also offered to double our salaries." Li Hua scoffs. "As if we're in this for the money."

"Let's say I believe you," says Carlos. "So you're not defecting to Strex. Where are you going? And what are they offering that we aren't, if it isn't money or the freedom to hack people up without getting the police involved?"

"Didn't say we wouldn't be hacking people up," mutters Li Hua.

"Is that what they took us in for?" adds her daemon with interest.

The other Li Hua shushes him. To Carlos, she says, "You don't believe us, so what's the point in trying to convince you? Let's skip to the part where you use the alethiometer to check up on us."

The alethiometer is in its normal tote bag; Isaña pulls it out of the hall closet while Carlos holds his position. He could back the Li Huas all the way up to his bedroom, disturb Cecil's sleep, and hope the geneticists don't seize any opportunities to take him down or knock him out along the way...or he could take a shot at doing this himself.

The Li Hua on the left raises her eyebrows when Carlos takes out the golden device. "Don't you need your boyfriend for this?"

"Probably," says Carlos. "But it can't hurt to try before I wake him up."

The asking is the easy part. You get to hold the intended meanings in your own head, and Carlos knows the top two or three for each symbol (as well as a handful of subtler ones that he's seen Cecil use often enough). He ends up turning the dials to the Serpent, the Angel, and the Owl: Who are these two sneaks running off to work for in the middle of the night?

The needle twirls around to point at the Bull, vibrates there for a second, darts abruptly to the Sword, hovers, then flicks back.

Carlos waits for more. Nope, it's going to the Sword again. It just keeps flicking between those two.

Okay, maybe that's simple enough for him to work out. The Bull stands for the planet, earth, soil, all things grounded. The topmost meaning for the Sword is justice, which has to be a good sign...except it can also represent the Church, which is less than good. Is the device telling him the Li Huas are being honest, and going off to fight for justice? Or that they're serving their own power, and off to throw their lot in with the local vague yet menacing branch of the Magisterium?

And there are thousands of layers he has no idea about. The needle still hasn't stopped moving; does that mean the answer is very far down the rungs? Or that it's incorporating more than one sense of each symbol? Why didn't he just go get Cecil to do this? It could be adding up to any number of incredibly subtle shades of....

One of the wren daemons flutters into the air and lands on the rim of the alethiometer. "The knife and the buffalo," he says in a low voice. "Looks right."

Or it could be treating Carlos like a small and not-too-bright child, pointing him to meanings that are literal in the pictures and repeating itself over and over until he gets it. He takes a slow breath. "Would you like to make any stipulations for your belongings and research before you go?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"Can't say I'll be going."

"What are you talking about, Grandpa?" demands Maureen, as the rest of the displaced Night Valeans gather on the mountainside. (Dana is trying to take a head count, though they're not making it easy. Rounding up Night Vale citizens is like herding cats.) "Of course you're going."

"Girl, if your mamá knew I'd left this place with you still in it, she'd rise from her grave just to slap me upside the head," says John Peters. His daemon, a longhorn cow with a rosy coat, nods in agreement. "Besides...you never know when you'll need a farmer."

When Dana is satisfied that everybody's here, Eustathias turns into a large blue bird and crows for their attention. "Has anybody else decided to stay at the fortress?" calls Dana.

Head-shakes all around.

"Does everyone have all their belongings?"

"What belongings?" asks Tristan Cortez. "You're the only one who got to pack a bag before coming."

Dana shrugs. "Perhaps someone found an interesting rock they would like to keep?"

(Nobody has.)

"Good! Very good. All right, everyone, please stay together and follow Eustathias to the old oak door."

Her daemon takes to the air again, soaring down toward the plain. Vivid blue feathers stand out like a beacon against the brown landscape and pale sky. Surely she is the most colorful thing from here to the horizon...with the exception, of course, of the ever-present blinking red light.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The theologians break off into groups, head out in opposite directions around town, and converge, two by two, at NVCC.

Carlos and Quentin arrive first. They take the opportunity to arrange a neat circle of chairs in the room that's been newly allocated for their use. (The team promised Dr. Miguel Galleti – the Dean of Experimental Theology, Technology, Technology With Finger Quotes, and Mathematics – to do scheduled demonstrations of their equipment for some of the theology undergrads, as part of the deal for taking over a classroom.) Afterward, they arrange a circle of bloodstones around the chairs. Campus security should make this place secure, but extra defenses never hurt.

They have a lot of bloodstones on hand. A whole suitcase full, in fact. Turns out a lot of people unloaded their circles on Lucinda's Pawn Shop during the grace period before the ban took effect, and while Jackie Fiyero can't legally re-sell them, she became the premiere black-market dealer overnight.

Köhler and Sherie get in next, checking up on the data from their Rusakov array on the ordinater in the room next door. Nirliq and Perle trail in last, weighed down with fast-food bags from one of the local businesses that is, while technically under Strex's control, managed by known rebel sympathizers. (And even if any of them were poisoned, there are students working on their nursing degrees meeting on the next floor up.)

"I know it's pushing our luck to have so many of us meeting here," says Carlos, once the burgers, chicken wings, and halfhearted attempts at salads have been distributed. "But there are some important things I need to make sure we're all on the same page with – things I don't want the Sheriff's secret police having a record of – and I'm guessing some of you feel the same way."

Nods all around. "How soon are the Li Huas getting here?" adds Sherie, while her mongoose daemon digs through the food bags for napkins and ketchup.

"Well, um," says Carlos. "That's actually my first thing. Li Hua and Li Hua have...I guess you could say, run off to join the army."

They're going to ground, which isn't the same as vanishing from town; Carlos has promised them a place on the team when the war is over, if they still want it. In the meantime, if the theologians notice one or two well-armed adults with masked wren daemons showing up along with the Advanced Readers during skirmishes with Strex, they should pretend not to know each other.

(Cecil was distressed, when he heard about it. "They're going to miss their one-year-in-town anniversary party!" he exclaimed, followed by, "I haven't ordered the trophies for their one-year-in-town anniversary party! And one of them, although we don't know which one, is due for it next week!")

"Speaking of significant dates...I've figured out how to destroy the chapel without any suspicion." Carlos swipes a chicken finger through a container of ranch dressing. "Everything we want to save, we'll need out of there before February 14th."

"Why?" asks Quentin, the flying-squirrel daemon on his shoulder perking up. "What's happening on Valentine's Day?"

"Valentine's Day is happening on Valentine's Day," says Köhler solemnly. The binturong at his feet clucks her tongue. "You have seen the construction site down the road from our homes...? At this time last year, it was a structurally sound house."

Carlos explains in more detail as the others munch on fries. The catastrophic damage that happens, centered around couples who send each other flowers or buy romantic sampler boxes of chocolates. The tree that fell on their own house, streaked red with cherry-cordial syrup. The painful spectacle of buildings reduced to rubble, and that rubble strewn with candy hearts.

"So on the night of the 14th, we seed the building with paper valentines and single long-stemmed red roses?" asks Sherie as he finishes.

"Oh, better than that," says Carlos warmly. "On the night of the 14th, we seed the building with myself and Cecil. Tamika opens an escape window from the chapel to somewhere with no large structures, and we get ready to run like hell the second the cement starts cracking."

It turns out to be a good lead-in for Nirliq, who reports that she's made arrangements with the kids to sneak some of their more expensive equipment to NVCC, by way of the next world over. They haven't set a date yet; it depends on when Tamika can fit them into her busy schedule. The important thing is, devices like the Rusakov isolation cage, Quentin's magnetograph, and of course Nirliq's beloved lasers will be safely installed here.

Köhler, in turn, has finally reached a deal with FedEx. They'll be shipping a cross-section of the team's biological samples to Omero and the Harvard biology department, in exchange for extravagant hazard pay...and the promise of angelic protection. With the help of the Erika formerly known as Marcus, everything from Hiram McDaniels' feathers to Whispering Forest leaves to the preserved body of one of the Things Under The Carpet will be made available for study to anyone, even those theologians who would end up eaten alive if they came to Night Vale itself.

"I haven't set up anything nearly that strategic lately," admits Quentin, the next person around the circle. "Although, Carlos, you could've mentioned how you and me got that paper accepted in the IAAE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Anbarics."

Carlos blinks. "We did?"

"...yeah? Didn't you get the email?"

"Might have lost track of it," admits Carlos. "My inbox has been a mess lately. So we're getting published! Good for us. Good for you, really – you did most of the writing."

"Don't be so modest. The theory was all yours."

And Carlos got the idea (a way to confirm that Rusakov particles are subject to particle-wave duality, filling in one of the major mysteries of this world's quantum physics) from another world's textbooks. Quentin and Henriette probably reverse-engineered as much of the detail as he did. "If we get any prizes, we can share them. Let's move on. Henri–"

He catches himself.

"– Sherie. Anything you want to let us in on?"

Sherie lets the slip pass. "The kids need to open a portal on the 26th, and keep it open for days, maybe weeks. They say if we want to observe them for safety reasons, we should meet the theology liaison team at the rec center tonight – right after the Little Kelpies Swim Team class – to work out a schedule."

"They want to keep it open 24/7?" asks Carlos, startled. "Why?"

"They didn't say."

"Is it to a world they expect to be dangerous?"

"Didn't say that either."

Carlos sighs. "Guess we'll find out tonight."

The last person to speak is Perle, the only still-active team member without a background in anything related to Rusakov physics. She's been doing steady work in her own sphere, even got a paper on the phonology of five-headed dragons accepted to the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics recently, but her research hasn't intersected much with the rest of the team's.

Until now, when she says, "Do we know who owns the local numbers station? Or what it's for, officially? Or anything about it?"

"The broadcasting tower is by the abandoned gas station on Oxford Street," recalls Sherie. "That's all I know."

"It's all Cecil knew too, last time I mentioned it to him," puts in Carlos. "Oh, and, one time I heard it change. She was saying something in between the numbers – not in Spanish, not in any language I understood, but I think they were words – and then she said something like 'is anyone there?' I didn't get a recording, though, and by the time anyone else got to the radio she was back to the numbers."

"Did you want recordings?" asks Perle. "If I'd known, I would have shared mine with you sooner."

Carlos sits up straighter. "You have some?"

"I have recordings of every language spoken in Night Vale that I've been able to identify, as well as twelve that I haven't," says Perle matter-of-factly. "This one was on the haven't pile until you started talking about the I Ching. She's speaking Cathay. The words are the names of the hexagrams, corresponding to the numbers they're paired with in the King Wen sequence."

"You're kidding. And when she isn't including the names, are the numbers still –"

"– all between one and sixty-four, yes. All the ones I have on record, at least."

"Slow down," says Nirliq. "What's an I Ching? What's a King Wen sequence? Why is this significant?"

Carlos nods to Perle, who starts to explain, while he himself scoops Isaña into his lap and tries not to shiver with excitement too obviously. He's gotten used to having an alethiometer in town; he never would have guessed they might have, effectively, two.

 

-{,(((,">

 

There is an old oak door in the desert outside of Night Vale, close to John Peters' farm. It stands as part of no building or structure, but is heavily padlocked and chained to keep it shut, just in case. Beside it, half buried in the sandy dirt, is a boxy microwave-sized danger meter; digging in a circle around the danger meter would unearth thirteen marble-sized bloodstones.

A small caravan of vehicles is parked not far from the door. They have food, drinks, medical supplies, and most importantly, space to ferry twenty-eight new passengers back to town. Two experimental theologians and three teenage drivers wait patiently for something to happen. Palmero's daemon is riding on Rashi's back, holding the alethiometer bag with his paws.

Tamika sits on the tailgate of the theologians' pickup truck, drinks a Gatorade, and reads another chapter of The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul.

There's no sound, no heralding symbolism, just one moment empty desert and the next Dana Cardinal, standing with one foot in a rock. "Tamika! It is good to see you here. And you came well prepared."

"Everyone ready on your side?"

"We are! Two of us have decided to stay behind after all. But the other twenty-six are ready to come home."

Tamika draws her knife and moves it through the air in front of Dana, feeling for the catches and snags. Worlds where the portal would open on ground level, worlds where it would open high in the air, worlds in the middle of a public place, worlds without a sentient soul for miles: all of them at her knife-tip, if only she slices the universe open in the right place.

Fifteen minutes of this, and she's come across a lot of repeats. The world with the petrified forest, currently her favorite one to surreptitiously travel through, keeps turning up. So do worlds that feel a lot like the first few she cut into: the one with a vast city where her world's Desert Bluffs stands, the one where this desert is replaced by a frozen ocean, the one with the prairie and two moons. The rarer, harder-to-find ones are interspersed between them. She wonders how much she would have to experiment before she recognized the texture of vacuum, or the resonance of a world with gravity strong enough to crush a human like a tin can.

The one thing she won't do is get impatient or lose focus. She keeps her concentration steady, and, remembering how Kevin coped when the world he was looking for wasn't immediately in reach, takes a few steps down the sand.

At long last, Khoshekh exclaims, "That one! No, go back!"

Tamika slips the knifepoint back between the atoms until Khoshekh approves. It's not like any other snag she's touched on; it almost seems to be humming, vibrating against the contact.

She drives the blade forward and starts to carve an opening.

When it's the size of a cereal box, there are shouts of joy from the other side, and a human face with a brown bird daemon riding in her hair pops up in front of it. "Night Vale! Is this Night Vale?"

One of the teenage drivers waves. "Hi, Mamá!"

The experimental theologians, meanwhile, have gone all tense. "That thing is putting out a lot of FUs," says the one with the flying squirrel...Quentin, that's his name. "You better hurry everyone through and close it as soon as possible."

Dana has been switching back and forth between the worlds, keeping her people up-to-date on Tamika's progress. On the near side, she nods – "I'll tell them" – then vanishes, her voice now audible through the opening. "The experimental theologians say this is dangerous. Please move calmly but quickly!"

When Tamika has the opening door-sized, the first few people start to walk through. There's laughter, applause, little skipping and dancing steps as they confirm with sight and other senses that they really are home. Tamika keeps widening the window until they can come through two by two, standing under the taupe Night Vale sky, leaping at the offers of power bars and cold orange milk.

At the back of the crowd, one of the still-displaced citizens looks at something out of Tamika's view and points with a gasp.

"FUs just started climbing," announces the theologian with the colobus daemon. "Whatever's going on over there, it's not good. Hurry up!"

"It's certainly strange," says Dana's voice on the far side of the portal. "The blinking light on the Clouded Mountain has stopped blinking. It has begun putting out a steady, unbroken red beam."

"Everyone already over here, start getting in cars. The Book Club's cars first," orders Tamika. "Once all your seats are full, start driving."

Eight people left to come through. Seven. Five. Three. Two.

"FUs are spiking, oh my god, I've never seen the meter go this high," says Quentin shakily.

Dana, watching the Mountain, says simply, "Oh dear."

"Close it!" exclaims Nirliq, as the teens with vehicles start prowling away across the sand. "Close it fast!"

"No time!" cries Dana, as her daemon – physically present on the other side, next to her ghost – turns into some kind of mole and dives into the earth. "Just get to the back of the window. Run!"

Both theologians and a handful of locals sprint across the scrub. Tamika, at the edge of the window already, only has to take a few steps. Rashi's hooves thunder as he joins her.

One of the returning citizens, though, doesn't bother moving. "Oh, come on," they scoff, standing with one hand in their jeans pocket and munching on their power bar. "What are you all so scared of? Just because a teenage girl is panicking over a little light...."

They don't get to finish the sentence.

A massive flood of light, like a sunbeam through a window if the sun were only a few hundred miles away from the glass, pours through the opening between worlds. It lights up a rough square of sand in blazing, blinding whiteness. It shines through the tufts of grass, through a rock and a short barrel cactus, through the single unlucky citizen and the terrier daemon at their side. They are transparent. You can see the veins inside the cactus, the lava-spider eggs inside the rock, the blood and bones inside the person.

The pocket-size danger meter in Quentin's hand lets out a high-pitched whine. He yelps and tosses it aside seconds before the machinery inside explodes; the casing lands battered and white-hot on the ground, smoking softly.

Everything the light has touched is no longer transparent. It's gone.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana comes back to herself with a gasp, off-balance, shins barked and knees bruised where they've been knocking against stone.

She is where Maureen has dragged her: three steps down from the landing that opens onto the platform, in shadow, in darkness. What she can see of the platform is awash in sunshine: the same unnatural, over-bright sunshine she saw rolling outward from the Clouded Mountain. The carved basalt angels, normally such a deep black, reflect enough of it to be blinding.

Maureen's arms are wrapped tightly around her, curly red hair tickling her face. "Please be alive. Please be alive. Please be alive...."

"I am," says Dana. "Thanks to you, I think."

"Oh thank the beams," says Maureen shakily. "I saw that terrible light coming and I thought – Eustathias – and everyone at the door...?"

"All made it through. I do not know if all made it out of the way," admits Dana. "We saw it coming. My daemon buried herself – deep enough to be safe, I suppose, since I am still here."

She could almost certainly sit up on her own now. And this position on the steps has to be awkward for both of them. But as long as the light is out there, Dana finds she would rather keep snuggling into Maureen's embrace, and Maureen doesn't seem any more inclined to let her go.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

When the light fades, Tamika wastes no time in closing the window from behind. Then she opens another one big enough to drive through, because they can all hear the sound of distant gyropters, and it sure isn't the Advanced Readers. Better to make this trek under a different sky. The tailgate of the theologians' truck has been vanished along with one human and a whole lot of plants, but the vehicle is still drivable.

She rescued a lot of people. That's worth being proud of. But whatever else happened there, Strex apparently noticed it. And if she's unlucky, they liked it.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Astral-projecting once more, this time with a much shorter range, Dana finds John Peters safe on the ground floor. He and his cow daemon are in one of the rooms with narrow windows, but not in front of the windows. "You girls both all right up there?"

"We are," says Dana. "I'm so sorry I couldn't warn you! But I've never seen anything like that light before...in this world, or any other. The light on top of the Clouded Mountain stopped blinking beforehand, and I have never even seen it stop blinking."

"Never seen it before myself either," says the farmer. "Not the unblinking blinking light, nor the light that is the great glowing coils of the universe unwinding...that is the unraveling of all things...that is a Smiling God of terrible power and ceaseless appetite."

Dana blinks. "Is that what it was? How do you know?"

"Well, I was in 4H club in high school," says John Peters with a shrug. "I’m a farmer, you know. You learn all this kind of stuff in 4H."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

It's evening when Tamika swings by the Boy Scout base out in the sand wastes. None of the scouts themselves are around, but it's the easiest place to leave library books where they can pick them up.

A Scoutmaster with a woodpecker daemon catches her as she's trying to sneak in. (She always tries, and hasn't yet succeeded. She's good, but not that good. Not yet.) "It's a good thing you're here, Ms. Flynn. We recorded something earlier that you'll want to hear. Also, have you eaten recently? We have campout leftovers in the cafeteria fridge."

Tamika stows today's books in the usual place, equips herself with a bowl of beans-and-hot-dog chili, and accompanies the Scoutmaster to the radio room. Out here they can monitor the broadcasts from Desert Bluffs easier than anybody in town. A month ago she had no experience with this kind of equipment, but now that she's put away a few volumes of Takahashi Rumiko comedy, she can take the tape the Scoutmaster indicates and load it up.

"Always be proud of your accomplishments! Especially if they used to be someone else's accomplishments, but you have acquired them via patent and/or copyright," chirps Kevin. "Welcome to Desert Bluffs!"

(The intro music is a super obnoxious guitar sequence.)

"Before we get into today's news and morale-boosting affirmations, I want to take a moment to give a warm welcome...to me! Yes, after unexpectedly being out sick for some time, I'm back on the air. My substitute did a wonderful job, and I was happy to be able to tell them in person how much I appreciate their contribution. Especially that bit of contribution over on the sound board! It had practically dried out while I was gone."

He giggles. So does a fainter voice that must be Bedamim. Tamika grimaces. She's not sorry he's alive, and Strex would be killing people right and left with or without this particular puppet around, but it's still unpleasant to hear.

"It's so inconvenient, isn't it, to get sick?" continues Kevin. "To have your body in less-than-optimum working order: your lungs coughing, your head aching, your stomach refusing to process the requisite amount of calories and nutrients. Or to have troubles of the mind: feeling strange and distracting feelings, thinking strange and unproductive thoughts. Listeners, if you have any of these symptoms, I urge you to contact your designated company doctor immediately for treatment."

Hopefully his own "treatment" wasn't too painful. Hopefully his death is keeping a lookout for freshly-installed recording devices in Bedamim's ears.

Tamika listens to the whole thing, ears peeled for more clues about what happened after Strex picked him up, maybe even for his death to slip a conscious hint into the broadcast. Nothing stands out. Nothing, that is, until after the weather, when Kevin's closing thoughts are interrupted.

"I've just been handed a bulletin: we have some exciting news from Strexcorp's Night Vale office!" he exclaims. "You remember Night Vale, listeners? The charming little hamlet with all the missing children? We've heard so much about one particular missing child so often, I almost feel as if I've talked to her myself. Though of course that can't be right. I did mention that I've been sick, didn't I...?

"Anyway: at this afternoon at the Night Vale branch, sensors detected the presence of a warmth and a light, somewhere not far outside of town. A great warmth, and a beautiful light. Think about that."

He sighs, overcome with delight.

"Think of it as you say your bedtime prayers tonight. Think of it as you say your noontime prayers tomorrow. Think of the Smiling God always, listeners. Think of it, and believe in it, and know that it is close! So very close. Until next time, Desert Bluffs. Until next time."

Chapter 35: Waning Crescent

Summary:

Dana, Tamika, and the team try to figure out how to block the light of the Smiling God. Tension among the experimental theologians over which mayoral candidate to support. And the Man in the Tan Jacket's luck might just be starting to turn around.

Night Vale.

"I remember these stars," says Dana wistfully, gazing up at the void-dark sky above where she and Tamika are sitting. Constellations and government spy satellites and a waning half-moon light up the blackness. "I miss these stars."

"You make sure you're staying safe, under whatever stars you got over there," says Tamika, leaning against Rashi's side. "The way things have shaken out, I can't promise another rescue mission."

Dana nods. "We'll be all right as long as we're in the basalt fortress. Even while the light went straight through the topmost layer of the sandy soil and ate away at the sides of the mountain, making several millimeters of both simply vanish, it didn't put so much as a polish on the near side of the fortress."

"How do you know all that? You take measurements beforehand?"

"No, I looked at the evidence afterward! All the footprints we had left on the mountainside were smoothed over, and at the base of the outside walls there was a slight amount of newly-revealed stone with a different amount of weathering from all the stone above it. My daemon was by the old oak door, and she reported the same effects on the footprints in the sand there, and the base of the wood where it stood in the sand. I also looked at the beautiful statues at the top of the fortress. The carvings on the sides of the angels facing the Clouded Mountain still had all their fine detail, exactly the same as the sides that would have been in shadow. Carved feathers still had their barbs. Hands still had their nails."

"And the faces? Those are bloodstone, right? They end up like the basalt, or the sand?"

"The faces were unaffected. But that's because the bloodstone circle is maintaining a protective spell, keeping itself safe. The range of that protection doesn't cover the whole fortress. I checked on that too."

"You know, you have a fantastic eye for detail," says Tamika. "There's honor students in my army who wouldn't have looked into as much as you did, or picked up as many important things about it."

"Oh, I just try to be thorough," says Dana modestly.

"Any idea why the basalt and the oak can block the light? Don't know if I told you this, but when I was taking a walk with Kevin and he got chatty, he talked about the light of the Smiling God going straight through cement and steel buildings, if you waited long enough."

"That, I don't know," sighs Dana. "If only you could cut a window that opened inside the fortress."

Unfortunately, not an option. The old oak door is the only point where they can guarantee a physical space in their home world will line up with a physical space in the one Dana is visiting. "And I'm no geologist, so I don't even know what you'd want to look for. How soon can you pay a visit to the experimental theologians?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Are you sure there's no way to make physical transfers between these two universes, other than Tamika cutting a window?" asks Carlos, slicing open the tape on a cardboard box. "We have an old oak door on this side that we can test, but none of that basalt. If we could slip in just long enough to take samples...."

"That world was putting out so many FUs it made the danger meter explode, and you want to go visit?" protests Quentin, incredulous. His fingers are still bandaged where the meter scorched him. "You and what army?"

They're in NVCC's chemistry facilities, unloading what equipment they've managed to sneak over from the chapel. Dana has astral-projected herself solid enough to touch things, so Carlos gave her custody of their boxy little label maker. In between answering their questions about the desert, the light, and the basalt fortress, she's pushing the button to repeatedly print sticker labels with PROP. OF OUTSIDER EXP. THEOLOGIANS.

"If I knew another way to physically move back to Night Vale, I would have used it myself months ago," says Dana frankly. "Besides...this is precisely what Strexcorp has been trying to accomplish for decades. And even with all their power and resources, none of the paths they have found are easy, and the price is always high."

"Then you'll have to do tests on your own." Carlos pulls a couple of tissue-paper-wrapped beakers out of the box, then frowns at the rest of the contents. "Is this all beakers?"

"Shouldn't it be?" asks Quentin, unloading sealed bottles of chemicals from his own box. "We're going to need plenty, right? We still have to make a batch of the Asriel emulsion every time we need a new set of Atal lenses."

"Sure, but in between chem classes NVCC is willing to loan us their beakers. Very few of which are Klein bottles." With a sigh, Carlos sets the box of extras aside. "We'll deal with these later. Dana, what resources do you have, exactly?"

Dana runs through a long and varied list, including "three people, including one daemon who can still shapeshift as necessary," "two dead biomachines," "empty power-bar wrappers and bags of chips", and "one ceramic mug with the NVCR logo, chipped after Maureen threw it at a rock."

Okay. It's not nothing, is the key point here. "And we have to figure out how to test...anything that could be relevant. The mineral content is probably the place to start."

"The liquidus temperature, too," puts in Quentin. "And any anbaromagnetic properties."

Carlos thinks about everything Sherie has done with bloodstones. "Whether the basalt came from that world originally, or was imported somehow."

Quentin is probably thinking about Nirliq's work when he adds, "Something about the radiation absorption spectra."

"How do you know it's basalt, by the way?" asks Carlos. "The morphology, the oxidation, other characteristics of volcanic activity in the area...?"

"I'm not sure what any of that means," admits Dana. "The best I can say is that it looked...basalt-y."

Quentin and Carlos share a look.

"I'm going to talk to Cecil," says Carlos at last. "Ask if he's sure there's no practical way to bring back samples."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The theologians have a book exchange scheduled at one of the mayoral campaign offices. The radio in the coupe is set, as always, to NVCR, playing a jingle for Flaky-O's; Perle flicks through the stations, through static and unmarked frequencies and clips of half-obscured songs, until she finds the soft sound of chimes.

"Forty-seven," says the Voice of WZZZ. "Eleven. Twelve. Fifty-three. Two. Eighteen. Twenty-nine."

They've done a little investigation into the numbers station, but haven't turned up much yet. It's broadcasting from inside a sealed concrete bunker. Heavy explosives against one of the walls might damage whoever or whatever is inside, and Tamika has a full schedule, so for the moment they're stalled.

Personally, Sherie thinks it must be automated. That, or the broadcast is really coming from somewhere else entirely, and the WZZZ tower is just forwarding the signal. A living person couldn't stay in an impenetrable, half-buried block of concrete and recite numbers 24/7.

If the mysterious Voice starts saying anything new during the drive, she'll listen. In the meantime, she tries to make conversation with Perle. "So...we're off to speak to some young people who are civically engaged! That's promising. Speaks well for the future of Night Vale. Although it does surprise me that Hiram McDaniels has picked up so much of the youth vote."

"Does it?" asks Perle. (She's speaking Spanish but understanding Sherie's English, and vice versa.) "He's literally a five-headed dragon. Kids love dragons."

"All right, I'll grant you, he does have that going for him. But once you look at the policies he's in favor of...he wants to divert funds from our public school art and music courses, into courses about building giant stone shrines to lizards."

"Even in this day and age, we aren't beyond discrimination against lizards," says Perle matter-of-factly.

"Are you only saying that because your daemon is a lizard?"

"Are you only doubting it because your daemon is a mammal?" (In the back seat, Perle's leopard gecko daemon gives Sherie's mongoose a skeptical look. Or at least, as much of one as he can when his jaw is shaped like a smile.) "Your son isn't settled yet, is he? If he ends up with a lizard daemon, I'm sure you'll see things differently."

"Nineteen," puts in the numbers station. "Thirty-one. One. Sixty. Fifty-five. Twenty-six. Forty-four. Fifty-one. Ten." (Chimes.)

"Maybe I will," says Sherie, unconvinced. "I'm still going to put in an hour or two stuffing envelopes for the Faceless Old Woman's campaign this week. Because of our similar stances on the issues."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Addressing and mailing thank-you letters at the Faceless Old Woman's campaign headquarters is surprisingly similar to what you'd get at a political campaign back in New Amsterdam. The main difference is that the donor-thanking template, instead of being filled in with a different level of cash for each contributor, is filled in with things like "20 hours sustained pro-candidate chanting" or "the promise of non-aggression from our reptilian overlords" or "80 live Angora rabbits."

(Campaign volunteers are also in charge of minding the rabbits.)

Sherie is changing the feed in the rabbit pen when the volunteer supervisor pulls her away. "You have a phone call. The candidate says it's urgent."

At first Sherie is baffled – who would be calling the campaign and asking for her? – until she gets ushered to the coatroom, where it turns out the call is on her phone, and the Faceless Old Woman (visible, standing on the floor for once instead of hiding in the ceiling) has taken it upon herself to answer anyway.

"And here she is now," the Woman informs whoever's on the other end. "That's the kind of commitment to my promises I will offer Night Vale as mayor. Here." She hands Sherie the phone. "Your children."

The kids aren't scheduled to call today. And shouldn't they be in school right now? Sherie tries not to let the worry bleed into her voice as she switches mindsets into English and answers: "Hello! I wasn't expecting a call. What's the occasion?"

"Hi, Mom," says Susannah. "Don't freak out, but we've gotta come back to Night Vale. I mean, we don't just really want to come back, we have to come back."

"Oh? Why's that?"

"Good news first: Tirzah settled."

"She did?" exclaims Sherie, holding out a hand so her own daemon can scamper up her arm. Ahisamach will want to hear all the details about their youngest's new form. "That's fantastic! What is she?" At just-turned-thirteen, Seth is on the young end for his daemon to settle, but not shockingly so. Oh, gosh, they'll have to talk to Carlos about taking time off to fly out for the bar mitzvah, and....

"She's some kind of hare, or rabbit. Big, so I think she's a hare. Grey-brown fur, big brown eyes...speckled wings."

The mongoose daemon chokes on a cough. "Wings?"

"And a feathered tail to match," confirms Susannah. "Seth's carrying her in a backpack for now, so people won't notice. We're hoping someone in Night Vale can tell us what exactly she is."

"Of course!" stammers Sherie. "Of course, naturally – although you know, she could always be a rare or undiscovered species. Remember when you were younger, how that girl in New Zealand settled as a type of petrel they thought went extinct in the 1850s...?"

"Mom! Winged rabbit."

"Yes. Yes, of course. That does sound...improbable. You send me a photo, I can start showing it around right away, and your father and I can talk about a visit...."

"No! Whatever you do, don't call Dad."

"Oh, sweetheart. You haven't shown him?"

Susannah hesitates. When she answers, there's a catch in her voice: "Seth tried to hide her. It worked for a couple days. Then Dad noticed, and...and this is the bad news, he did freak out, and he was going on about how it was your fault and he shouldn't even have let us talk to you after we got out of Hispania Nova, and when he calmed down it was just to say it was going to be okay because he was gonna find a doctor to help Tirzah change again – and you know that's not a thing, Mom, you know they don't give you anything except lifelong psychological trauma, even the people who claim their daemons got successfully 're-settled' all switch back or kill themselves, they –"

"Nobody is sending Seth to re-settlement therapy. I promise," cuts in Sherie, trying to sound calmer and more reassuring than she feels. God, if Sam were here right now she'd personally whack him over the head with a Faceless Old Woman 2014 lawn sign. "We're going to work this out. Is Seth with you right now? Let me talk to him."

"He is, but I can't, because if he tries to talk about it he's gonna start crying, and then people in uniforms will come over to see if he's okay, and this whole thing will be blown."

"What are you talking about? Where are you?" Please let Su not be in police custody again. Even if she didn't set anyone on fire this time....

"We're at the Memphis aerodock," says Susannah. "Our next plane just pulled up to the gate."

Oh. Oh, lord. Memphis? That's practically on the New France border. They're already halfway here.

"It's gonna land at Black Hill International in three hours," continues Su shakily. "And then people in uniforms are gonna be detaining us, because they don't just let minors fly over international borders and walk off. I told them you'd be coming to pick us up. So – so you'll be there. Right?"

Sherie massages her temples, trying to think. Whose car can she use? Will she have to rent one? Are the Sheriff's secret police going to give her any trouble leaving town, given that the whole team is probably on some kind of Strexcorp watchlist? Will Night Vale itself let her get to a normal highway in good time, or will she be held up by one of the endless construction projects and/or spacetime anomalies that litter Route 800? And she'll have to get Carlos to have someone cover for her with the Book Club this evening....

"Mom...?"

"I'll be there! I'll be there," says Sherie quickly. "I don't know how fast I can make it, that's all. You know how Night Vale travel is. But I'll find a way. I'll text you when I figure it out, and when I start, and again when I'm close to the city, all right? If airport security gives you any trouble, give them this number and I'll cover for you, understand?"

Su sniffles. "Uh-huh."

"Is there anything you need from me before I start making calls? Do you need money? Are you eating well?"

"I've got some cash. We got airport burritos," says Susannah. "They're gonna start boarding in a minute, I gotta go."

"Okay. I love you, sweetie. Take care of yourself."

"Y-you too."

They hang up, and Sherie, heart in her mouth, starts going through her contacts for allies she can call.

The Faceless Old Woman leans out from behind a rack of orange ponchos. "You don't know how you can make this trip."

"Stop listening to my private calls," says Sherie automatically. "I'll figure something out. I can always go to one of the Strex car rental agencies, if it comes to that."

"...It occurs to me that I may have overreacted in destroying your silverware the other week."

"Gosh, you think?" Sherie tries to focus on texting her boss. The silverware wasn't too hard to deal with, in the end – the house she just moved into already has silverware, and they've been quietly relocating her mangled forks and spoons to the chapel, to make it look less picked-clean when Cecil and Carlos bring the place down around their ears. It's just, she's in no mood to hear apologies right now.

"I should get you something to make up for it. Do you like urns? Chad has some beautiful urns that he got from his grandmother and doesn't appreciate at all. They've been in a box in his closet for a decade. He'll never notice they're gone."

"Stop stealing things from Chad in 3B!" exclaims Sherie. "The only thing I need right now is a ride to Black Hill. If you can't get me that, then please, please leave me alone!"

"I was getting to that part. You should let me finish," says the Faceless Old Woman, miffed. "You see, on the off chance I ever needed to do any cross-country traveling to bring that personal touch to out-of-town voters, I have this campaign bus...."

 

-{,(((,">

 

On the night of the crescent moon, as on all other nights, Vieja Josie's house is quiet as a tomb. There's a grey layer of dust along the top of the TV; someone has cleaned up the glass from the broken windows and covered them with plastic sheets. The lamps don't work – not because any of the Erikas were neglectful enough to let the bulbs burn out, but because the anbaric company has shut off the power – so when the sun goes down, and the mysterious and knowable lights in the sky aren't bright enough, its insides are cavernous and dim.

Tamika and her companions bring a camping lantern.

She cuts a window from an empty traveling-world to the middle of the old witch's living room, easy. The supervising theologians are already there: one exploring the little house's rooms with an electrum spyglass, another dusting off a shelf of DVDs by the fading red sunset. Tamika and Rashi step through to join them, accompanied by Janice (riding her daemon, in the form of a shadow-black pony) and two Boy Scouts with sand-colored bird daemons perched on their shoulders.

Switching on the lantern reveals the theologians' faces and daemons. Nirliq and her colobus, from the rescue by the old oak door, are looking around the old woman's room. "You get permission from Vieja Josie to poke around her house?" demands Tamika.

Nirliq hesitates. "I didn't realize I could get it, these days."

"You can't. So get out here." Tamika gestures toward the living room with a jerk of her head, and Nirliq follows. "And you! Carlos. Didn't we agree Oppenheimer would be the other one here?"

"An emergency came up. Sherie had to go deal with it," says Carlos. "Whatever specific capabilities you needed her for, I will do my best to match them."

Tamika facepalms. "Any other time, that strategy would've worked great. Right now, though? We mostly needed her for the capability of not being you."

"What?"

"Do you want us to escort him out of here, Tamika?" asks one of the teenage Boy Scouts. "He can sit in the car."

"I am not sitting in the car," says Carlos crossly. "For one thing, leaving me isolated and minimally-defended is asking for trouble, and I like having at least one half of my face intact. For another, I am not a puppy."

"The car is a bad idea," agrees Tamika. "How about the bloodstone circle room?"

"Someone took the bloodstones," says Nirliq. "So unless you brought your own...."

They're gone? Tamika had figured the police wouldn't dare confiscate anything from the witch's house, even now. And it's not like the rest of the place has been looted. On the other hand, a person who would never steal DVDs or kitchen appliances might still get desperate enough to steal bloodstones, if their circle had been confiscated and they didn't know how else to get any. "Then –"

"I don't understand why –" begins Carlos.

They're both cut off by someone at the door.

The Scouts raise their maces; the experimental theologians back up against the walls, hands moving toward hidden weapons. Janice doesn't bat an eye, though, so Tamika doesn't either.

Sure enough, it's the last guy they've been waiting on: the Man in the Tan Jacket. He's not carrying a deerskin briefcase, though. Instead, he's equipped with a well-stuffed hiking backpack, a quiver, and an impressively beautiful longbow.

He looks from face to face around the little group, then turns to Janice and said, "Did you forget to tell them...?"

"I didn't!" exclaims Janice. She's sitting on one of Josie's armchairs; her daemon, on her arm as a dusky moth, turns into a Diemensland devil (jet-black, a band of white fur across his chest) with sharp white fangs. "I did not. He showed up on his own."

"What is going on?" bursts out Carlos. "I can go if it's important, but what is the problem with me being here?"

To be fair, Tamika isn't totally sure herself. She just knows it's one of the details Janice insisted on. So she appreciates it when the Man answers, without anyone having to wrestle it out of him. "The problem is me, all right? The problem is that the last time we saw each other, Cecil told me to stay away from you. And I am trying not to take advantage of your memory loss. I've done that more than enough already."

Carlos tenses. "I didn't realize – well, obviously I didn't realize – when? What did you do? I thought you were a friend!"

The Man turns to Tamika. "I'll do the recap if you ask me to, but Janice already knows and the rest of you will forget as soon as I leave, so I don't see the point."

And whatever it is he did, Tamika knows from Janice that she's heard the story before, and didn't react as badly as Carlos and Palmero. The Man is an ally. She doesn't need to waste everyone's time by making him rehash his life story every time he needs her help. "You don't need to do it. Carlos, go wait in the kitchen."

Carlos sulks, but does as he's told.

"You're gonna have to recap what exactly we're doing here, though," says Tamika when the theologian is out of the room. "I remember some of the details, but you better take it from the top, so we're all on the same page."

"Understandable. Let's sit down."

They take the couch and other seats around Josie's coffee table, Tamika and Nirliq and Janice and the boys. The Man has to take off his gear and lean it against a wall before he'll fit in a chair.

"Tamika, you're going to cut open a window into a specific world. Not a dangerous one, as our theological ally is here to confirm, but an important one. We could have done this at any time if we had Cecil using the alethiometer to pick it out...but, as I said, Cecil doesn't want to see me. Even if he doesn't remember it."

There's the slightest catch in his voice as he says that part. Tamika's so used to looking out for foreshadowing, it pings her senses right away – something about this is personal.

Does he have...feelings, for Palmero? Because this kind of wistfulness, not to mention the caution he's been using to handle Palmero's boyfriend, has love that can never be written all over it.

And has he had the amnesia effect all his life? If at any point he was living in Night Vale and people could remember him...it's just possible that, given the chance, Palmero loved him back. Which doesn't have to mean anything for the relationship Palmero's in now – you don't need magic or re-education to love one person and then later move on to another – but if they had something, once, and now Palmero doesn't remember it at all? That would have to hurt.

"So we'll only get him involved if I can't tell you where to cut," continues the Man, unaware of Tamika's musings. "Not something I can usually pull off, but tonight would be the night to try. The moon is right for it, there's a good wind from the northeast...I won't bore you with all the omens, just know that they're lined up. If we do get the window we need, it'll have to stay open for up to several weeks while I make a retrieval. That's why we're in Josie's house, so it has the best chance of being undisturbed. I know there are danger meters in nearby houses, and I'm sure the theologians can return here later and install one, to make sure it's safe for the duration."

"Are we sure it needs to stay open?" asks Nirliq. "What if Tamika came back on a regular schedule, say once a day, to re-open it and check if you're there? Janice can remind you to do that, right, Tamika?"

"Not an option," says Tamika. "Janice is going too."

The Man starts. "Since when? That was not in my plan."

"Since I want someone keeping an eye on you, and she's the only one capable." Just because he's been an ally so far doesn't mean Tamika wants to give him total free rein.

"There's going to be a lot of travel involved," protests the Man. "I'm going to be flying."

"We can fly!" protests Janice. "Show him, Tehom."

Her daemon goes dragonfly, buzzes to the widest section of open space in the little room, and turns into a dog-sized species of condor. Then a deer-sized species of condor. Then a bird that is probably in the condor family, but not any of the species still alive today, because its back is as broad as a horse's and its hunched shoulders are brushing the ceiling. The only longer feathers Tamika has ever seen are on Hiram McDaniels. If Tehom spread his wings right now, he could knock over everything in the room.

Instead he lowers his head (hooked beak as long as a grown man's forearm, yellow eyeball the same size as Carlos's entire daemon when she rolls up) to Janice, who gives him a pat. "See?" he says. "Janice can ride on me, anywhere you want to go. And it's not like I'm going to settle as something smaller or flightless in the middle of the trip! I'm ten."

"Let me decide this for you real quick," adds Tamika. "Either she goes, or you don't."

The Man sighs. "Can't argue with that."

"What are you retrieving, anyway?" asks one of the Boy Scouts. "Did you say that part already?"

"I bet it's something critical to the future of the Republic of Heaven!" puts in the other. "Am I right? Is it that?"

No answer.

Now that's interesting. He could've just lied. Not like Tamika would've known the difference. "Answer the question. All the backing we're giving you here, it better be something important."

"The backing you're giving me?"

All Tamika's vague impressions of the Man involve him being matter-of-fact and resigned. No way to know for sure, but this could be the first time she's ever seen him angry.

"Do you have any idea how much I've done to protect the Republic?" he demands. "To protect Night Vale? To help you? I have saved your life! Not even talking about indirect behind-the-scenes manipulation, I mean I've literally shot down a librarian seconds before it tore your throat out! And I've saved Dana's at least once, and Carlos's – that man is cautious and thoughtful and data-driven ninety percent of the time, but the other ten he's jumping in so far over his head you'd think he was an Olympic diver – and plenty of other people around this town. It's a thankless job, I don't expect people to be grateful when they remember my jacket more clearly than my face, but I do it. So no, this time, it isn't about anyone else. It's about me! It is critical to the future of my sanity."

He pulls off the insect-daemon lanyard that's been hanging around his neck...and flings it aside without a second look.

"I used to hope a doorway back to that universe would open in Night Vale on its own at some point. No luck. For a brief shining moment I thought the subway could take me there. All it did was trap Cecil for years away from his daemon. You are my last hope, Tamika Flynn. You have a level of interdimensional traveling power that no human in any universe has wielded for the past hundred and twenty years. And you owe me. I'm done waiting. I am getting my daemon back."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos, ejected from the room with all the action, tries to keep himself occupied.

He checks his email. He exchanges texts with Cecil about what they're going to have for dinner. He daydreams about what kind of curtains he and Cecil are going to pick out together. He daydreams about what would happen if he really was the second coming of Lyra Belacqua, and could call in enough cross-dimensional favors to summon an army of angels, witches, vampires, panserbjørne, sphinxes, ghosts, harpies, and leprechauns to throw Strex out of town.

(That scenario still ends with him and Cecil picking out curtains. It just also involves lots of people at the store coming up to thank him, and Cecil proudly agreeing that his boyfriend is a hero, and Carlos declaring, in a dramatic-yet-modest voice, "I'm not a hero. I'm an experimental theologian.")

So he isn't trying to eavesdrop. Still, it's a little house. Raised voices, he can't help but hear.

Sitting in the dark and empty kitchen, he takes out the Little Theologian's Book and balances it on his knees, using his phone screen to light up the pages. Isaña leans into the crook of his arm and reads the two-page chart on the Man in the Tan Jacket along with him: things they can remember about him, people who can remember more than they do, details they don't remember hearing but were able to successfully write down.

He puts a mental check mark next to the "daemon elsewhere" point, and adds a sub-point, "in another world :(" The words blossom on the paper, ink scooting around to avoid the ferocious page-tearing scribble that happened when Carlos tried to get a record of the Man's name.

"That was so hard for Cecil," murmurs Isaña. "Has the Man in the Tan Jacket been dealing with it the whole time we've known him?"

It sets Carlos's mind off in another direction, and a much less daydream-y one. He remembers Cecil getting anxious in the Trimountaine subway tunnels, counting down the minutes until they got to the station. Normal passengers all around them, with normal luggage and normal thick winter coats.

Isaña saying he must have been freezing, didn't have a real coat, just that tan jacket – but that couldn't have been in Trimountaine – or could it?

Getting off at the platform, a couple of normal singer-evangelists doing Christmas carols, Cecil being willing to stop because Carlos wanted to hear the song, because Carlos heard....

He's on his feet before he consciously knows what he's going to do.

Tamika has sliced a wide opening in the middle of the living room by now. Nirliq watches through an electrum spyglass; her colobus daemon holds a danger meter. The other side is a picturesque pine forest, complete with a babbling stream running through it, water flashing over stone under the light of a moon much brighter than Carlos's own.

Janice and her daemon, horse-shaped again, step through first. The Man in the Tan Jacket is right behind them, wearing all the gear he brought, holding what looks like one of Josie's canes. He's looking at that moon with a mix of fear and wonder – how long has it been, since he and his daemon could see the same sky?

"Emmanuel!" exclaims Carlos.

"Can it wait?" says the man, exasperated. "I don't know how much you've overheard, but I'm kind of in the middle of something."

Carlos breaks into a grin.

"Is that his name?" asks one of the Boy Scouts. "Ellison?"

"No, Emmanuel," repeats Carlos, and this time, this time the man sucks in a sharp breath.

"That's what he said. Eduardo," protests the other Boy Scout.

"Don't make too much of it," says Carlos hastily – it's hard to tell, in the low light and the strange shadows cast by the camping lantern and the otherworldly moon, but he thinks the man is starting to tear up. "I still don't have any clear memories of you...still don't even have your last name, or your daemon's name...."

"...and you're still only the fourth person to call me by my first name in twenty years," says Emmanuel shakily, "and I would still really like to hug you right now, if you're okay with that."

Carlos hesitates. On the one hand, it seems like Emmanuel could really use some hugging. On the other, he's admitted to manipulating his mind-altering effects on Carlos, in such a way that it incensed Cecil – who doesn't bat an eye about Glow Cloud possessions, who shrugs at all but the worst of the Sheriff's secret police's tortures. What if this would be the equivalent of a mind-wiped Cecil embracing Lauren Mallard? Or of Carlos unwittingly cuddling up to Telly?

At his feet, Isaña steps forward. "Go get your daemon," she says. "We can revisit the hug question if Carlos and I still remember when you get back."

Notes:

More art nouveau portraits: Mary Malone, Pamela Winchell, and Lauren Mallard.

Diemensland = Tasmania. (So Tehom becomes a Tasmanian devil.)

Tehom's large bird form is Argentavis magnificens.

Chapter 36: Hands to Hold

Summary:

Dana takes Maureen to visit her new friends in the otherworld desert. Sherie's kids are back in town, with the Faceless Old Woman keeping a surprisingly helpful eye on them. Megan Wallaby gets a body transplant, we accidentally drop in on the University of What It Is, and, in the past, there's some guy doing construction work with a bunch of angels....

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"I want to learn to do the thing."

"Are you sure?" asks Dana. "It took me a long time to get it right, and I was practicing for months and months...."

"I can practice too," protests Maureen. "Start from the beginning, work my way up."

"...and it's not like you have to, I mean, I am sort of fulfilling a prophecy that's been around since before I was born, I think I have it covered...."

"Does the prophecy say you're never going to have any help? Not even, like, a sidekick? I could be a good sidekick."

Dana frowns. "I suppose I can't be sure. Emmanuel never said."

"Emmanuel...that's what's-his-face, right?"

Close enough. "I did plan to meet with the masked army later today," muses Dana. "How about if you come with me up to the platform, and we see if I can bring you along. Just to give it a try."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos and Cecil are both at the larger rental house when the Faceless Old Woman's campaign bus pulls up on the sidewalk. They help Sherie's kids unload suitcases, while Sherie herself gets a call, makes an excuse, and retreats to the back yard.

It isn't long before they can hear her yelling, even inside.

The kids are pretty subdued. Seth is taller than Carlos remembers; the box of neatly-pressed collared shirts they hauled here all the way from Sherie's apartment might not fit him any more. Susannah looks strikingly different for other reasons: she isn't wearing any makeup, jewelry, or a stitch of black. The girl is in corduroy, for heaven's sake. Carlos wouldn't have guessed she owned corduroy.

It's still not clear which rooms they're going to take (the Li Huas' are recently-vacated but still full of stuff; the ones left open by Rayshawn and Omero are well-cleared, but in the other house), so Carlos parks their things in the living room, reminds them where the bathroom is, and offers drinks. They both go for sodas. Opening the can is awkward for Seth, given that he's been trying to hold a lumpy backpack against his chest this whole time.

"Your mother told us that you've settled," says Khoshekh gently. It's been a while since these two have been able to practice their Spanish, so he uses it with slow, precise radio-announcer diction. "Can we see?"

Seth looks self-consciously at his sister, then confers briefly with the backpack. It must go well; he decides to set it on the kitchen table, though Susannah's griffon vulture looks ready to go all bird-of-prey on any other daemon who messes with his sibling.

("...not making you the bad guy!" Sherie's muted voice filters in. "Doing a fine job of that all by yourself!")

Out onto the tabletop steps a hare, as large as Khoshekh himself, with a fluffy torso and black-tipped ears. She has two sets of standard, sturdy hare legs, but with a third pair of limbs in between: black-and-brown speckled wings folded against her back. She stretches, shaking out her paws after however long she's been cramped in there, and Seth carefully smooths out some of the bent feathers of her tail.

"What a fine form, young lady." Khoshekh lands in front of her, while Carlos, Isaña, and Cecil hang back to watch. "You're a skvader! I can't remember the last time I saw one, but they're a common forest animal in Sweden."

(From other context clues, Carlos has guessed that "Sweden" is an alternate-universe version of Svealand. It's close to "Finland", at least.)

"Really?" asks Seth's daemon shyly. "What are they like?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Another desert, in an otherworld.

The ghosts of Dana and Maureen pop into astral-projected existence, hand-in-hand, on the back of a three-story-tall beast of burden laden down with woven rugs and iron pots the size of hot tubs.

They're in the middle of a walking party, composed of about a dozen of these plodding creatures (like thick-legged camels, but with brown zebra stripes, and without the tusks), three covered wagons with more supplies roped to the sides, and a whole throng of fifty-foot warriors in orange robes. It's late evening, the sun low near the horizon off to the left; the river of a nebula arcs overhead, filling the painted landscape with blue-white light. Stars float and bob in the dark sky like flecks of moonlight on the ripples of a pond.

"Is this it? Is this the place?" asks Maureen in an urgent whisper. "Are these – them?"

"They are!" Dana lets go of one of Maureen's hands and cups a half-megaphone around her mouth. "Excuse me? I'm here!"

The closest warrior at their right notices, lets out a "Hey!" shout, and claps her hands. "Әliʃə! Bəhɒti!"

Maureen catches her breath. "What did they say? What did that mean?"

"They're just names," says Dana. "Әliʃə is one of the warriors, the one I've mostly been talking to, and Bəhɒti –"

Two of the giants are weaving their way in from the edge of the party...with a Bichon Frisé the size of a small car trotting along at their heels.

"– Bəhɒti is the dog," says Dana fondly.

"It is good to see you again, Deɪnə," says Әliʃə. Like all the warriors, they wear a scarf wrapped close around their head and a fired-clay mask that covers most of their face, though a piece is carved away to reveal a humanoid eye and eyebrow. "Who is your companion?"

"Her name is Maureen," says Dana. To Maureen, she adds, "I'm going to let you go in a moment, okay? If you can, stay here. If you can't, I'll finish talking with Әliʃə and follow you back soon."

The redhead is still staring wide-eyed at the mask. "O-okay."

Dana releases Maureen's other hand.

For a moment it looks like the other ex-intern is going to make it...then Maureen flickers, once, twice. "Hold still," cautions Dana – but it has exactly the wrong effect, because Maureen turns to look at her, and in the process of turning her head to the left vanishes out of this reality entirely.

Dana sighs. "Darn."

"Mɔriːn is your...apprentice?" asks Әliʃə.

"No, my sidekick," says Dana, then corrects herself again: "No, my friend. She wants to help."

Әliʃə's eye crinkles up in an otherwise-hidden smile. "That is good to know. You seem so alone sometimes, little one. It's good for you to have friends your own size."

They catch Dana up on the army's progress. The division she's riding with now is one of five that have agreed to join her cause. The place they're walking to, the one matching Dana's description of the part of their world adjacent to Night Vale in her own, is no more than a fortnight's march away. If it turns out not to be the right place, they are prepared to be on the move longer. They're nomads by nature; it's what they do.

"But I'm sure it will be the right place," puts in Dʌg, Әliʃə's partner. He's one of the ones who identified it, matching his own memories to Dana's vivid descriptions of barrel-shaped trees and branching waterfalls. "There couldn't be two landscapes like that."

"Oh, I'm sure there could," says Dana earnestly. "I've been to a lot of worlds by now, enough to be sure that no matter how unique a thing looks, there is something, somewhere else, that looks almost exactly like it. With the exception, perhaps, of the Clouded Mountain."

Dʌg is undeterred. "Couldn't be two like it in this world, then. And whatever world you happen to be in is, after all, the most important place."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

There's a lot of shouting. From Sam: how Sherie must have put the kids up to this; how he's more than ready to take her to court; how Seth can't possibly go through life with his daemon shaped like a flying rabbit. From Sherie: how trying to forcibly change someone's daemon is the height of insanity; how their children made it here all on their own, and are more than capable of vanishing into the sand wastes if he manages to get an extradition order; how if he ever wants to repair their trust in him, he had better write Susannah a check for the plane fare, and send Seth a goddamn amazing bar mitzvah gift.

When she and her daemon go back inside, shaken and worn-out but fairly sure they've won this round, Cecil is regaling everyone with tales of the harsh Swedish winters. (Does he mean Svealish?) Susannah is rapt, looking like a teenager again instead of an over-stressed young adult, grooming her vulture daemon's feathers with one hand. Seth listens with intent solemnity, using the same motions on his daemon's wings.

Her species is called a skvader, he announces to Sherie. Can't fly, her wings are too proportionally small for that, but she does a magnificent glide.

The Faceless Old Woman pops up out of nowhere, pale salamander daemon on her shoulder and a short stack of papers in her hands. "You'll be re-enrolled at your respective schools as soon as your mother signs the forms," she tells Su and Seth. "Here are your class schedules. You will notice that some of the courses are marked with orange triangles. This indicates that they are generously sponsored by Strexcorp, and you should absolutely not use those time periods to skip school and, for instance, run secret anti-corporate missions around town. Or advance your skills with assorted weapons. Or read books from non-Strexcorp publishers."

Later, after Sherie has marked the forms with the requisite drops of blood and everyone has retreated to a (permanent or temporary) bedroom, she says out loud, "Thank you. For everything. I couldn't have gotten through today without you."

"Oh, no, you could have," says the Faceless Old Woman matter-of-factly, from the direction of her bedside lamp. "But much less efficiently. And most likely with strings attached."

"Right. No strings," says Sherie, mongoose daemon sitting across her lap. "And you know, between having the kids back here and all the general demands of the job, I'm not going to have a lot of free time coming up."

"Sure. I understand. My schedule is very full too. What with campaigning, and researching the melting point of birds, and reorganizing your fridge. I don't mean yours, as an individual, I mean yours, encompassing everyone in town who possesses a fridge."

"Well, naturally that would keep you busy," says Sherie. "Listen...do you want to go see a matinée some time?"

A pause, long enough that Sherie wonders if the other woman is still in the room.

At last the Faceless Old Woman says, "I was not expecting your discussion of not having free time to go in that direction. I was expecting it to go in the exact opposite direction."

"It's because I don't know when I'll have time for a matinée," stammers Sherie. "So I can't say 'do you want to go see one this Thursday,' and it might be weeks or months before I feel like I can say 'do you want to go see one this Thursday' – that's an example, there's no telling if it'll be a week that has a Thursday at all – the point is, I didn't want to wait that whole time to make you aware that if you're interested, the idea of matinées, in general, is on the table."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"When did you have a chance to learn their language?" asks Maureen on the stairs. (They're making the in-person trek to the ground floor, for showers.) "When did they have a chance to learn yours?"

"Oh, neither. Their world has a set of artifacts, hundreds of years old, that attune a person to languages. They use them on their ambassadors," explains Dana. "Dʌg re-attuned one of them to me, and when they realized how important my message was, they decided to reserve it for me indefinitely."

It can be clumsy sometimes. Әliʃə's gender, for instance, is one that may not exist in Dana's species, and certainly doesn't exist in Dana's language, so Dana can feel her brain metaphorically shrugging and fudging the pronouns whenever they come up. Still, it is far, far better than nothing.

"I guess they probably wouldn't have a spare one for me," says Maureen.

"We should focus on getting you to Spanish-speaking places," decides Dana. "If you can work out how to go reliably back and forth between Night Vale and here, that on its own would be enough to be helpful, I'm sure."

"Yeah." Maureen sighs. "Um, thanks, though. For showing me the army. Their world was really gorgeous. Is it just me, or did they not have daemons?"

"They do, in a sense. I can't be sure if they're true analogues to our daemons, or something else, like the deaths in Kevin's world...but their hearts are connected to plants. Each band of nomads has a grove, with a bush or a cactus or some other plant that sprouted when they were born, grows as they grow, and will die when they die."

Maureen looks at Eustathias trip-trotting down the steps front of them, her own rabbit daemon riding on the goat-formed one's back. "If D.L. was a plant, the last thing I'd want to be is nomadic."

Dana can sympathize. "Eustathias, you're not allowed to settle as a cactus, understand?"

Her daemon shakes a currently-bushy-green tail. "What if I settle as an animal with leaves?"

"That, I'll allow."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

A few days after Megan Wallaby's surgery, Sherie brings Seth along with her to the hospital. The girl is a couple grades too young to be one of Seth's friends, but it'll give them some level of plausible deniability in the face of the Strex-employed staffers. Seth carries the card and a "Get Well Soon" balloon; Sherie follows with a container of home-cooked pasta salad.

"I didn't know it was going to be so different now," says Seth under his breath, as they walk past the third StrexHealth Insurance: Believe In Your Perfect Self! poster. "Strex is everywhere."

"You just keep practicing with your crossbow, and never go anywhere alone," Sherie tells him, before putting on her best PTA Mom smile to enter Megan's room.

Herschel Wallaby, the parent currently in attendance, looks the same as ever, though she and her orange-cheeked parrot daemon are both visibly drooping from the stress. Megan, secret identity Agent M, is sitting cross-legged in bed with a half-played board game in front of her. She smiles, and waves.

Sherie wouldn't have believed it was possible if she hadn't seen it. The little girl who used to be a detached hand has received a successful body transplant. Sure, the body happens to be a six-foot-ten bald man with several faded flower tattoos, and of course his daemon vanished when he died, so Megan's daemon is still a detached rabbit-foot sitting on her new shoulder...but if it makes them happy, who is Sherie to judge?

With the hand that doesn't have a surgery-site bandage wrapped around the wrist, Megan taps on the plastic tray table affixed to her bed railing. Seth apparently understands Morse much better than Sherie, because he answers, in halting Spanish: "Just last week. Congratulations on your body."

He ends up taking over Herschel's piece in the board game. Megan's movements are rough and floppy, like an infant just learning to control its limbs, but Seth is wonderfully patient, giving her as long as she needs to aim her arms and helping set things back up when she knocks them over. Sherie and Herschel retreat to a folding chair by the window, where Sherie watches her son with pride and Herschel devours the salad.

"Can't the new body talk?" asks Sherie under her breath, when Herschel seems to be slowing down. "Is there something wrong with the vocal cords?"

"No, she can make noise," sighs Megan's mother, spearing a slice of olive with her plastic fork. "She's just so shy about how she sounds right now. She's going to need physical therapy and speech therapy for years to come...I wish we could get her an assistive ordinater that wouldn't seize control of the power grid and try to take over town! Morse is so limited for her. Always has been."

Sherie's had her share of ordinater trouble, but never that bad. "If you need any kind of...support...I'm sure we could hold a bake sale or something."

"Her medical costs are covered. We're on Strex's company insurance now, and they're very...thorough." Herschel hesitates. "A representative came around yesterday to talk to us about...implants. To accelerate her vocal development, was how they put it."

"You can't let them put any Strex-brand implants in your daughter," whispers Sherie. "You know that, right? No matter how pure they claim their intentions are."

Herschel nods. "I know. E-even if it helped her in some ways, they would end up using it against her. Against all of us."

And it's a heart-wrenching tradeoff to force a parent to make, so Sherie doesn't push her to talk about it any further. "Are there other things you're looking for right now? Does Megan need clothes, shoes...?"

"Clothes, yes, please," says Herschel with relief. "If you have anything you can spare that's designed to fit a tall man, but in styles that a little girl might like, that would be wonderful. She likes flowers, and her favorite color is blue."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Back in the car afterward, Sherie switches on the signal-jamming snowman on the dashboard and says, "Did you get it?"

"Uh-huh." Seth pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and slips it into her purse. Delivered to Megan's room by a visiting Advanced Reader, to be passed on to the next experimental theologian she sees. "What's it for? Can I know?"

"It's a list of the components of a Strex-brand biomachine." Tamika and her allies have been shooting Strex gyropters out of the sky faster than ever, but it's only recently that they've sat down with one of the pilots and done a systematic breakdown. "We have an ally in another world who has a couple of them on hand, but not much else, and we need to figure out what kind of experiments she can do on basalt."

 

-{,(((,">

 

University of What It Is, United States of Columbia.

"Did you say...basalt?"

Dana stops, in the middle of apologizing to the strange experimental theologian whose office she's accidentally appeared in the middle of. "Yes. Yes, I did. Why? Is that significant to you?"

"Yes. Maybe. How much are we talking about, here?" asks the mysterious theologian. He reminds Dana of Carlos, both in the height and build, and in the way that he took it completely in stride to have a daemonless stranger appear out of nowhere with one leg going right through his desk. (She's staying un-solid to avoid knocking anything over, though she stepped out of the desk, just to be polite.)

"Enough to use in the construction of a building at least fifty stories tall," says Dana. "Plus however much must have been destroyed or rendered unusable while attempting to make said building."

"Okay. So, a significant amount, then. I think it was basalt, but I'm an archaeologist, not a geologist...let me double-check."

He taps away at his ordinater while Dana looks around the room. Piles of books falling over on the shelves. A poster for a movie she doesn't recognize on the wall. Family photos tacked to a corkboard, next to English-language tourism promotional materials for Los Ángeles.

"He's Charles, by the way. And I'm Intavra," says the hedgehog daemon sitting next to the theologian's keyboard. "Do you come from some kind of world without daemons?"

"I do have a daemon. She just doesn't come with me when I'm astral-projecting. It's all right, it doesn't hurt; I have a witch's range." When the hedgehog looks puzzled, Dana adds, "Do you have witches, in your world?"

"Only on Halloween," says Charles. "You wouldn't happen to have heard of a place called Night Vale, would you?"

Dana perks up. "Oh, yes! That's where I'm from."

"Really! Do you still live there now? Are you working with...um, with anyone in particular?"

"Lots of people," says Dana cautiously. The giant-army artifact is resonating across universes, helping her digest the text of this man's English, but it doesn't give her any special insight into the subtext. "Night Vale is still my home, but I'm currently residing in a different universe. It doesn't have any scholars, just myself – not an intern any longer, but not quite anything else yet, Dana with a question mark – and one other person with a question mark, and her grandfather, who we at least know is a farmer."

"Interesting, interesting...ah-hah! Got it! There's a rock formation in southern Cascadia – sure enough, it's basalt – that had a chunk go missing back in the 1890s. Come have a look at the photos."

He turns the ordinater screen to face her, revealing photograms of a towering river valley with pillars of basalt for walls. In the more recent photos, which are in color and high-resolution, it looks the same color as the basalt she's become so familiar with. There are older ones too, sepia-toned and grainy, with a different silhouette.

"Evidence is thin, but from the photos, experts have estimated this place lost up to a cubic mile of rock," explains Charles. "The official theory from the scientific community is that there was some kind of rockslide, but they still can't explain where it all went. Urban legend says it was mined by aliens. There are newspaper records from the time talking about strange flying ships, mysterious lights, tall skinny beings with powers that were either magic or advanced technology...you know, the usual."

That sounds like an ordinary day to Dana. "You said this was the 1890s? What year is it now?"

"2026."

Then if someone had come here for building material during the War, this world's 1890-1900 would be around when they arrived. "Will you excuse me for a moment?" asks Dana. "I need to find out if I can deliberately line up my place and time in a stranger way than I have ever tried."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Columbia River Basin, Cascadia (past).

This time and place boasts snow on the wind, mysterious lighted aircraft in the sky, and luminous angels leading an excavation crew on the basalt cliffs below.

Dana walks right up to the white-dusted edge of the rocky pillars, enthralled. Humans and humanoids bundled in winter gear work alongside the ten-foot-tall naked forms of angels, and they are joined by other, stranger creatures. Machines, too, the size of buildings, composed of massive gears and wheels and beams.

And could that one be...? Dana looks closer. Yes, she's seen that one before! Either this exact specimen, or one made in the same model, is one of the wrecked machines in the desert plain beneath the Clouded Mountain....

The snow around her lights up as if under a spotlight.

An angel!

Erika lands beside Dana, fierce and warlike, aiming a pointed spiral spear directly at her face. "Who are you?" he demands. "No local, certainly. And not welcome here."

"Excuse me," says Dana politely. "I didn't realize. I'll go."

She tries to flicker out of existence.

Existence refuses to be flickered out of.

"No one should be able to sneak up here," says the angel darkly. "Now that you're caught, don't think you'll be allowed to sneak back."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

"Pass me a screwdriver?"

They're on the NVCC campus, rebuilding the recently-moved Rusakov isolation chamber. Carlos hands the tool over to Nirliq's colobus daemon, and he climbs to the top of the still-rickety structure to twist one of the screws into place.

"What usually happens at these one-year-in-town parties?" asks Nirliq. "What's the etiquette? Should I swing by the Raúl's and get a cookie platter before showing up?"

"The last one I went to was the first one ever, and it was really an excuse by Cecil to invite me to the studio for non-personal reasons," admits Carlos, using gloved hands to unroll the wire mesh. "We're making up the etiquette as we go along."

It's even less tradition-friendly because the date is the last Sunday before Valentine's Day, and they're mashing together several celebrations at once. It's a combination Carlos's-birthday party, Köhler-survived-a-whole-year-of-Night-Vale party, and, secretly, one-last-hurrah-at-the-chapel-before-destroying-it party.

"I did check the pharmacy for cards, but there weren't any for this occasion," says Nirliq. "I – oh! Hello there. Maureen, right?"

Carlos hasn't seen this intern before, though he thinks Nirliq ran into her back on the day of the oranges. She's a tall, heavy redhead with glasses, hands held out like she's trying to balance on something narrow, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance. "Hi. Experimental theologians? Middle of February? Sorry for the no eye contact, I can do inter-world astral projection now but it has a way of failing if I turn my head too much."

"Dana used to have that," remembers Carlos. "Did she send you with a message?"

"Not this time. She's busy. Doing a thing. I'm just practicing. Anything I can tell her for you?"

"You have good timing," says Nirliq, and starts outlining the first test she wants them to do with one of the biomachine's lenses.

Maureen repeats it back to her while Carlos and Nirliq's daemon finish setting up the apparatus. Then: "Whoops," she says, and flickers, and vanishes.

"So." Nirliq starts rounding up the wrenches and screwdrivers they've left strewn around the apparatus. "Cookie platter it is, then."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Columbia River Basin, Cascadia (past).

The angel's spear, Dana discovers as it shepherds her along the top of the cliff, can be used to poke her. It's quite sharp. And she can't seem to go insubstantial enough to avoid it (even though the occasional gust of snow will blow right through her).

She only stops walking when one of the smaller flying craft lands in front of her. At least the angel appreciates her dilemma, and doesn't try to force her to keep going.

A human in black-and-brown snow gear steps out, accompanied by a gorgeous, thick-furred snow leopard daemon. Boots and paws crunch through the snow. He's wearing a hood and a muffler, so, as with the masked warriors, Dana can't see anything about his features except the steely blue eyes.

Unlike with Әliʃə and Dʌg, though, they're cold eyes. Scary eyes. Eyes that even an angel might hesitate before looking into.

Sure enough, the angel here is immediately deferential. "Don't know how she got up here, milord," he says. "Taking her in for interrogation now."

"Let her go," says the man.

"What?" asks the angel.

"What?" echoes Dana.

"Is she one of ours?" stammers the angel. "She never said...."

"On the contrary. This is not her fight at all," says the man. "This is not her time. She will be born in the future; she is one of the children we're fighting for. Let her go."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

Carlos and Nirliq are still at NVCC, throwing together a quick batch of the Asriel emulsion, when a janitor knocks on the door of the chemistry room. "Intruder alarm just went off in your storage room downstairs. Thought you might want to know."

Carlos is down the steps in a minute, Isaña running down the narrow ramp beside him. They slide open the door of their assigned basement pile-everything-in-here room...and find a familiar face.

"Dana!" he exclaims, peeling off his gloves and tugging the safety goggles over his head. She's usually better at manifesting on the right floor, but either way, he's happy to see her. "I was hoping it was you. Did you get the message from Maureen?"

After a long pause, like she can't figure out how to break this to him, Dana says, "The only message I have is from Cecil, for you. He says he loves you."

Carlos's heart stops.

Something's wrong. Maybe Strex finally made a move on Cecil, maybe he went on a secret mission for Tamika, maybe it was just a run-of-the-mill Night Vale catastrophe – but whatever it is, it's gone so wrong that he didn't even tell Dana here's how to rescue me, here's what Carlos has to do. Can't say that kind of thing if you don't have a plan. Oh, god, tell Carlos I love him is what you say when you think they're your last words....

"It's probably a very out-of-date message," adds Dana, hurried and apologetic. "You are undoubtedly in the future of all the other Carloses I've seen. The short haircut could be from your past as well as your future...but I am certain I would have noticed that scar before."

"Oh!" exclaims Carlos, normal heart function resuming as he puts it together. "Oh, praise the beams, you're a past Dana, that wasn't – god, don't scare me like that! You say this is the first time you've seen the scar? Hang on, let me get out my chart."

He pulls out the Little Theologian's Book and flips to the spread with all his notes on Dana's tangled timeline. The Dana in front of him reports that she's at the basalt fortress, but seems to have no idea she'll rendezvous with Maureen, or anyone else. She just came from encountering Cecil on the subway – Carlos sighs with relief as that particular node links up. And could it be that she hasn't been to the Clouded Mountain yet at all?

"Should I have been?" asks Dana uncertainly. "Can I see the chart?"

"No!" Carlos clutches the notebook to his chest. "No, you are way too early to be looking at this version of the chart. But it's good, your current time and place – it's fantastic – see, in my relative past I had a vision of you at the base of that mountain, and just before you got on your daemon's back and flew up, you gave me a message...."

 

-{,(((,">

 

University of What It Is, United States of Columbia.

"Sylvia? Sylvia...! Light of my life, star of the department, and, dare I say it, the criminally-underappreciated force that keeps this university running...."

"What do you want, Charles?"

"I want you to help me get together a team of geologists and quantum physicists to travel to what might just be the most scientifically interesting site in Columbia. As soon as possible. Like, if you could arrange to have someone else cover my classes so I could leave in the middle of the semester? That would be ideal."

Sylvia's cat daemon rolls his sapphire eyes, but Sylvia herself picks up her phone. "I'll call the social-media collage guy and see if he's still free."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Tamika and Rashi are camped out inside the invisible clock tower when Dana flickers into place in front of them, excited to report that she's set another world's experimental theologians to working on the basalt question. On top of that, she reports that the first three divisions of her masked army are closer than ever, with others marching to join them as they speak.

"Nicely done," says Tamika. "Are there other worlds with helpful fighting forces like that? Can you track some down?"

"If I visit enough worlds, I suppose there's no practical reason why I can't," says Dana. "But I assure you, this one will be more than enough to throw Strexcorp out of Night Vale! Just have Cecil tell all the ordinary citizens to get into hiding, then open a window – a very large one, since they are a very large army – and have them come in like a wrecking ball. As the old proverb goes."

Tell citizens to hide? Not going to happen. It's their town too, and they're going to pull their weight, if Tamika has anything to say about it.

But she doesn't need to argue those details with Dana. "If saving Night Vale was our only goal here, then yeah, one army would be more than enough."

Dana perks up. "Oh! Are you preparing to liberate Desert Bluffs, too? That's good. I was planning on doing that."

"Sure are," says Tamika. "And we're not stopping there. Once we get enough hands on deck, and have some anti-terrible-light defenses worked out, we're gonna storm the Clouded Mountain and take out the Smiling God where it sits."

Notes:

Basically picturing asutori's designs for the masked army here.

Their names (and the foreign names they try to speak) are written in the International Phonetic Alphabet. More conventional English spellings would be:
Әliʃə = Alisha
Dʌg = Doug
Deɪnə = Dana
Mɔriːn = Maureen
Bəhɒti = Bahati (Swahili for "lucky")

Southern Cascadia in this case means, specifically, the basalt formations in the Columbia River basin.

For those of you keeping score, Carlos got the "use all the bloodstones" message from Dana in chapter 5; Dana got it from Carlos in chapter 15; Dana gave it to Carlos in chapter 21; and now Carlos is giving it to Dana in chapter 36. Time loops ftw.

Chapter 37: Heart of the Experiment

Summary:

Dana, adventuring across further worlds, meets a new set of AU-but-familiar faces. Back home, Cecil and Carlos harness the concrete-smashing power of love.

Unknown.

Dana appears in a remarkably blank building: a long hall with white plaster walls, broken only by brown utility doors.

It isn't a place she knows. It may not be in any of the worlds she's visited before. She can't see any Strex branding, which is a promising sign, especially since there are sensors embedded in the corners of the ceiling. Cameras too large to be hidden? Or motion sensors?

Curious about who is to be added to their forces, Dana waves to the nearest sensor, then wanders down the hall. The size of the doors and the design of their handles suggests humanoids, of the size most familiar to her. Numeric keypads show the numerals she is familiar with; some of the doors are labeled with terms she can't decipher, but the letters are ones she knows. She turns a corner, and finds a bright red sign labeled EXIT. English-speaking, then. Good! She's getting quite skilled at connecting with people who speak English.

She avoids the exit, wanting to explore the building further first.

Two corners later, she nearly walks through a guard in a militaristic uniform.

"Hello," says Dana pleasantly.

The guard (human, peninsular, no sign of an external daemon) goes from shocked to angry to taking-aim in seconds. "Get on the ground!" he barks, holding the old-fashioned pistol one-handed while the other presses buttons on a device at his waist. "Control, this is 852, we have an intruder in B Wing."

"Acknowledged," says a crackly voice from the device. "Backup is on the way."

"This really isn't necessary," protests Dana.

"I said get on the ground!"

Dana does. She goes on to put her hands behind her head, as requested. Not because she's in any danger from the firearm – and she doesn't feel any force keeping her present, the way the angel did – but because she hopes it'll make the guard feel better. "I'm sure at any moment now, someone who outranks you will be showing up to explain that I am allowed to be here," she points out from her face-down position. "That I am, in fact, meant to be here."

The guard snorts. "Colored girl on the base, that'll be the day."

Boots in the distance, the rustling of pants and the clanking of weapons, and a handful of new people approach from the hall Dana just strolled out of. She cranes her neck to look. Two more uniformed soldiers...and a man in wraparound safety glasses and a buttoned-up chapel coat. Lightly-tanned, delicate skin. Thick curls, brown on top, going a vivid white on the sides.

Another counterpart of Carlos, Dana hopes. Her theory is somewhat undermined when he addresses, not the fascinating new phenomenon in front of him, but the man telling her to hold still. "Is she alone?"

"No way of knowing, sir. She didn't trip any of the sensors."

"Weapons? Any identification?"

The first guard nods to one of his colleagues. "Search her."

Dana has suffered through many things in her travels, but she decides in this moment that an unnecessary patdown is not going to be one of them. Her ghost goes insubstantial; questing hands reach right through her to pat the floor.

"I am alone and unarmed," she says, passing through the guards as she gets to her feet. "I cannot promise there are no other intruders in this building, but there are none that I know of. My name is Dana Cardinal. Ex-intern. Messenger."

While the security officials are yelling about locking down the building, how Control needs to send in some specialists and how Dr. Rose needs to get out of here, she has a look at the ID badge on the startled experimental theologian's pocket. Rose, Caleb, it pronounces him, next to a photo and a gold-emblazoned eagle seal. U.S. Office of Strategic Services.

"Huh," says Dana. "I expected your last name to be longer."

"At ease, men," says Dr. Rose.

"...Sir?" asks the one still poised between him and Dana.

"I said, at ease. No lockdowns, no reinforcements, tell Control we're staying at code blue. The girl is coming with me."

"Sir," repeats the guard who was trying to search Dana, disbelieving. "Is this part of the –"

"You don't have clearance to know what it's part of," says Dr. Rose. "Sorry, soldier. I'll take it from here."

Dana turns to the first guard. "I did try to tell you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The chapel is dark on Valentine's Eve, all the shades drawn.

Tamika works swiftly and elegantly, first slicing a narrow opening for Cecil and Carlos to follow her through, then circling two pushed-together chemistry tables and feeling with the Knife through the air. Her buffalo daemon walks at her side in the next world over, leaving her nimbler and freer to move around the furniture here.

These tables are sturdy: designed to withstand acid burns, hold up under metal-melting temperatures, and shrug off moderate explosions. What they can't do, to Carlos's chagrin, is tolerate a two-story cement-and-steel building coming down on top of them.

So Tamika is finding a world where "ground level" is a few feet higher than here, and opening a portal just above that. Anything that comes down, no matter how heavy, will land on another universe's solid ground before it can reach anything on the chapel floor. Later, she'll be able to walk back across that ground and close the portal from the other side, long before the cleanup crew has had time to dig away the Night-Vale-side rubble.

(They're only involving the tables at all because the portal is invisible from below. Cecil and Carlos will need some way to remember where it's safe for them to be.)

As far as secret-police records are concerned, Carlos was last seen descending into the fortified basement with his fellow experimental theologians, while Cecil was camping out in NVCR's emergency bunker for the night. They didn't bring their phones, or anything else traceable. Cecil scoots into their makeshift hideout and unrolls a sleeping bag. Carlos follows with the pillows and a couple of water bottles.

Details he might have forgotten keep jumping into his mind. Did he get the wall map from his office? Yes, that definitely got put in a box and sent over to the college. Is all the data from his tablet backed up? (It's still in the office, being sacrificed to the cause of realism. One of his many spare pairs of glasses is in there too.) He double-checked three times, so it had better be. What about Tock, the building's resident pet sludge monster? Good grief, Carlos carried Tock to the house himself, and got goodbye nuzzles from it (not that it has a nose) before leaving the basement. Of course Tock will be okay.

When Tamika crouches between the tables and their escape window, safely under the overhang of the ground-level window above them, Cecil snaps her a salute. We're ready. Carlos takes a deep breath and does the same.

Tamika salutes in return, and slips off into the otherworldly night.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Groom Lake Base, Nevada.

"I do apologize for the harassment. I knew you would be coming, but couldn't be sure you were you until all the criteria had been filled."

"Oh, that's quite all right," says Dana, following Caleb Rose deeper into the heart of the complex. "Did you have a prophecy about me, then?"

Caleb grimaces. "I suppose you could say it's like a prophecy. But it is far more complex and scientific than that, for reasons that I can't go into detail about...." He trails off. "No, wait – I can go into detail! That was part of the prediction. As long as you agree not to tell anyone in this world. Everyone with a high-enough security clearance to know about Project Thirty-Seven already knows."

Dana agrees. In between punching in the security codes for ever-more-restricted doors, and pulling rank on inner rings of security, Caleb tells her. The project is a machine: a fantastic one, he says, more advanced than anything else in the world. He describes anbaric circuits, vacuum-tube data processing systems, the representation of unlimited algorithms in binary code.

After about five minutes of this, Dana says, "Are you talking about an ordinater?"

The experimental theologian (no, they're called scientists here, she remembers) does a double-take. "Ah – like the Franchians say, ordinateur. I suppose I am. They've been invented in your world?"

He's reassured when it turns out the computers in Dana's universe don't provide stunningly accurate data about anything in the past, present, or relatively-near future. (Dana decides not to steal his thunder again by bringing up the word alethiometer.) People like Caleb have been working on the predictive computer for years, but it wasn't until the war began that this country really started throwing money at the project, and bringing the best researchers from all over the world to develop it.

"Almost everything about the people who work here is classified. The comment on my name was the last detail Project Thirty-Seven told us to look for," he explains. "I anglicized it from Rosenzveig, but the only way someone from off the base should expect anything but Rose is if they had an extremely high security clearance, and pulled a very specific set of records."

"It was only an offhand comment," says Dana modestly. "I'm happy to call you by whatever name you choose. Did the machine tell you what to do when I arrived?"

"He did." Caleb puts in a final sequence of numbers, on a door labeled simply "37". "He said to bring you in for a visit. So here we are."

The door shuts behind them as he flicks on a series of strip lights.

This room has bulky, humming, metallic machines lining three walls, connected to wires and pipes that flow along the corner of the ceiling. A fourth wall is mostly broad glass window, with a locked metal door past the far end and a bank of controls underneath. It's too dark on the other side for the glass to do anything but reflect the two people and the phalanx of ordinater components over here. Dana sees large speakers in every corner, a box of neatly-stacked blank cards, and just enough free desktop space to sit a coffee cup and a notebook. Not that she has either.

"We don't call him Thirty-Seven in here – or PEBIC, though that's the official acronym. It all sounds too dry," says Caleb under his breath, setting more controls. The light in the other room rises, revealing a second huge ordinater...or is it just an extension of the parts in here? Either way, he leans into a microphone on the near side and says, "Enigma? The girl is here. She walked right through security, just like you said."

Dana steps closer.

"Thank you, Caleb," says a distinctly human voice over the speakers. "Dana?"

There's a person on the far side of the glass.

He's seated, fastened into a chair between two processors: and that does mean fastened, especially with the padded metal brace around his neck. Some kind of helmet covers the top half of his face, shuttered lenses over the eyes, multicolored wires streaming from the scalp. It reminds Dana piercingly of Lewis, only worse, because it looks so much more permanent.

And judging by the lower half of his face, he's another of Cecil's otherworldly döppelgangers. The palest and thinnest Dana has seen yet.

"I'm here," she says out loud, while thinking, oh, no, these are the bad guys after all.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos doesn't remember falling asleep, but he must have, because all of a sudden he's curled up with his back to Cecil and there's a cloudy grey light on both sides of the portal. Cecil is already awake, lying on his stomach and hugging a pillow to prop up his chin, watching the front of the room. In a low voice he directs Carlos's attention to one of the windows: not shattered out of its frame, but spiderwebbed with cracks, like someone took a baseball bat to it.

"Someone tried to break in?" murmurs Carlos. The secret police are on a vastly reduced detail today; they won't have any eyes to spare for buildings that (as far as they can tell) no one has entered. A building someone tried to rob, on the other hand....

Cecil shakes his head. "This is why romantic couples don't usually spend Valentine's Day in rooms with lots of glass."

Oh. Oh, wow. It's working already. And Carlos slept right through the start of it! He puts on his glasses long enough to check the readout on the nearby danger meter (one of the full-size ones – not under the table with them, it's another sacrifice to realism, but still in visual range for as long as it's still working). "FUs are well above average. Not run-and-hide range yet, but getting there. What time is it?"

Cecil raises the one true timepiece in all of Night Vale to his forehead. "Almost eight."

"Did you wear that all night? You'll mark up your skin that way."

"Says the man with shell prints on his forearm."

Carlos sheepishly rubs the inside of his arm, while Khoshekh flows up over them to wrap around Isaña. "Here, let me get that off for you."

He undoes the watch, sets it aside with his glasses, and presses a kiss to the inside of Cecil's wrist. Then another one to Cecil's mouth.

They have one job here. Nothing else around to distract them. Carlos didn't even risk bringing the Little Theologian's Book; he needs to be a full participant in this theological phenomenon, not an observer. No matter how cool the charts would be.

Cecil lets his eyes flutter shut (he can still see, but it's a sweet affectation) and opens to the kiss. He's wearing a pair of light cotton drawstring pants and one of Carlos's weathered T-shirts, all soft under Carlos's hands. (Carlos in turn is wearing a borrowed nightshirt of Cecil's – it has a wide lace-trimmed collar and poufy sleeves – and pajama shorts with a cloth decal of a lithium atom sewn on the hem. Cecil thinks they're cute, although, to be fair, Cecil also thought the decal was the logo of the Masonic Drone Legion.)

He seems tired. "Lie down, okay?" says Carlos, rubbing a soothing circle around Cecil's shoulder blades. "Let me take care of you for a bit."

It coaxes Cecil to lie flat, so Carlos can straddle his hips and kiss behind his ears and work over the muscles of his back. Cecil soaks it all in, unusually quiet. Maybe the window-breaking woke him up, and he didn't sleep properly afterward. Or maybe he's just in a languid mood this morning.

Either way, Carlos can work with it. Sure, he likes sex when Cecil is directing the action – he likes taking advantage of Cecil's experience, and can get the most incredible thrills at Cecil saying just about anything (praise, firm directions, desperate begging, a shopping list) in a perfectly-pitched tone of voice. But he likes exploring on his own, too; he likes having Cecil as a willing test subject, especially when Cecil is so adorably proud to be part of an experiment that his Carlos has declared a success.

And oh, dear lord, they're in the chapel. With a not-insignificant amount of complex theological equipment still under its roof. If Carlos were to dart out for a minute and get something...not that he's going to, they're working under strict safety rules here, but if...!

His hips jerk all by themselves – Cecil's breath hitches – Carlos hears himself moan, and sinks lower on elbows and knees so he can grind against Cecil in earnest. He's imagining laying Cecil out on a table and mapping every touch, about not letting Cecil leave or move or climax until, oh, until Carlos has a whole spreadsheet netting every detail of his perfect gasps. Oh, that's nice.

He moves to palm between Cecil's legs...and, okay, apparently Carlos is the only one with a newly-discovered thing for getting steamy at work.

"You all right?" murmurs Carlos, making himself stop the motion. It doesn't have to mean anything's wrong – Carlos's body has been the one that won't rise to the occasion a couple of times, standard drawback of male biology, it was bound to happen to Cecil at some point – but he should ask, just in case.

Cecil nods against the pillow. "I may need a little – time."

"Okay. No problem." Carlos resolves to think about less-sexy things, to give Cecil a chance to catch up. "Can I get your shirt off?"

He works the T-shirt up over Cecil's head, making a special effort not to disturb the fringed purple scarf covering the back of Cecil's neck. Even with the bar code still covered, it reveals a whole network of other battle souvenirs; Carlos runs his fingertips along the claw marks over Cecil's shoulder, the smattering of circles left by some kind of tentacle on his upper back. Any time Carlos is tempted to feel self-conscious about the scar on his face, he reminds himself that he finds Cecil's scars pleasing and interesting and endlessly touchable.

For the sake of symmetry he pulls off his ruffled nightshirt, careful not to bang his head on the underside of the table, then sets himself to kissing his way down Cecil's spine. "Mmmm. I love looking at you, y'know? My strong and valiant Cecil...."

Something on the floor above them creaks. Loudly.

Cecil's breath is coming faster now, fingers clutched around the fabric of the sleeping bag spread out underneath them. Carlos's heart skips several beats. Theory becoming practice. This is really happening. "Cecil, Cecil."

Beside them, in an entirely different voice, Isaña says, "Khoshekh?" Then, voice raised: "Carlos!"

Carlos pulls back again. Cecil's daemon is shivering, tail puffed up, ears flat against his head.

And Cecil...now that Carlos knows what to pay attention to, he doesn't look any more in-the-mood after all. He looks scared: grimacing, shoulders drawn up and face pressed to the pillow, clinging to the floor like he might fall off if he lets go.

"You're not okay," says Carlos, chilled. "Are you sick? Did I hurt you? Cecil, talk to me."

"I'm – fine. I'll be fine." Cecil gulps. There's a sheen of sweat breaking out across his forehead. "Just do – what makes you happy. I'll...."

As if Carlos can enjoy himself when he knows Cecil is cringing and waiting for it to be over. (Okay, in some cases he can – the last time he and Cecil watched a math documentary together, for instance – but not here, not like this.) "You'll take a minute or five and relax, is what you'll do. Longer if you need it. We're not in any rush here, understand?"

He rolls off of Cecil, onto the far side of the sleeping bag from their daemons. For all the protests, Cecil hugs himself and pulls his legs together as soon as Carlos is out of the way.

"No rush," repeats Carlos, retrieving the T-shirt and using a folded corner to pat down Cecil's forehead. "An experimental theologian is patient. It's the –"

A glassy crack cuts him off.

They've burst another window. Not just cracked it, either; Carlos hears the tinkling of pieces raining down onto the lawn outside, can tell that there's no more muted distance between his ears and the wind in the trees.

And Cecil has scooted away from Carlos so fast he nearly knocked into both their daemons in the process.

Isaña leaves Khoshekh's side, trotting up around Cecil's head. Carlos gathers her smoothly to hand, careful not to make any sudden moves. "Do you think we're in danger?" he asks Cecil. "All the precautions we've taken...do you think they might not be enough?"

"They're very good precautions," says Cecil evasively. "Even the secret Mayoral bunker is only protected by about five hundred feet of ground, and here we are, under a whole planet's worth of it."

Carlos nods. "But you're still scared."

"Well, of course I'm scared!" bursts out Cecil. "Why aren't you? We could take all the precautions in the world, it doesn't change the fact that you're asking – that you want –" He chokes on a hysterical laugh. "You want me to be your Valentine. And you're so calm – like it isn't even in the back of your head that this is waltzing with suicide – I don't understand how you're doing it!"

Carlos lies still, not sure what to say, while Cecil pulls Khoshekh against his chest and wipes away tears. Any gentle words or comforting gestures are going to be signs of love, which might break another window, and will freak Cecil out even if they don't.

This is only the second Valentine's Day that Carlos has been in Night Vale. The first one was scary, it left one of his team members seriously injured, the damage was extensive and the rebuilding efforts long-lasting...but he's still been thinking of the holiday itself as benign and non-fatal, with Night Vale being the source of the danger. And the locals see Night Vale as basically survivable, he knew Cecil wouldn't find this terrifying because of the location, so he never went back and deduced that Cecil would still be terrified because of the date.

(How long has Cecil been putting on a brave face for? How much of a strain has it been? The only other local who knows they've been planning this is Tamika, who never batted an eye...but then, Tamika Flynn's reaction is not an accurate yardstick for how scared of something you should be.)

"I never actually told you what Valentine's Day is like back in Trimountaine, did I?" says Carlos softly.

Sniffling, Cecil shakes his head. "N-not directly. You've got...municipal shelters, and things, right? And fancy citywide warning systems?"

"No. No, we don't." Carlos rubs Isaña's ears. "We have...marketing. Pink-and-red decorations in all the stores. The high-end ones push you to buy expensive jewelry; the low-end ones have cheap chocolate and little stuffed animals holding plush hearts. On the day itself, if you happen to be riding the T somewhere, any car you get in will have two or three people holding bouquets."

Cecil frowns. "The trains still run?"

"Everything still runs. The merchandise, the gestures, the cards, none of it triggers any kind of destruction. Some couples decide it's too materialistic to participate in, but almost everyone else sees it as a nice excuse to celebrate their feelings. The scariest thing about it is the worry that you'll get your partner something inadequate, and they'll feel insulted. Forgetting the date and not doing anything to celebrate is a major faux pas."

"I...I don't understand. What keeps the cards from going off? What protects the infrastructure?"

"That's not the question. The question is, why do the cards go off here?"

(Carlos's current theory: whatever's going on is triggered by currents of Rusakov particles, the ones specifically generated by romantic intentions. Some kind of cyclical thinness between worlds gives it access to Night Vale once a year. Could be there's a malevolent force behind this that picked romance on purpose; could be a random quirk of the laws of physics; could be it started as something generic but got intertwined with the emotions of the holiday it kept interacting with. Either way, the team's danger-meter data being collected all across town today should help them figure out what world it's coming from, and maybe, just maybe, theorize a way to stop it.)

"B-because they're valentines," says Cecil.

"Birthday cards don't explode. Anniversary cards don't."

"Because they're not valentines," puts in Khoshekh patiently. "Carlos, I understand you had different elementary-school health and safety classes than we did, but surely you must have learned the difference."

Carlos sighs. "Look, if I took you to Gino's and gave you chocolate and flowers on March 14, that wouldn't make anything explode, right?"

"Right...."

"Well, if I took you to a small town somewhere in Narragansett and gave you chocolate and flowers today, that wouldn't make anything explode, either. Romance in the rest of the world on Valentine's Day is as safe as romance in Night Vale on not-Valentine's-Day."

After a long, brow-furrowed period of thought, Cecil says, "That must be so weird."

"It seems normal for us," says Carlos. "You know what I did learn about valentines in elementary school? That it's unfair not to bring in one for everybody in the class."

Cecil splutters, speechless. Khoshekh's eyes are so wide they're about to pop out.

"That's kinda how I felt when I first realized all the local ten-year-olds get firearms training," adds Carlos. "If fourth-graders in Narragansett were allowed to play with guns, the death toll would be astronomical."

"You really found it this terrifying?" asks Cecil faintly. "And you still...you didn't even...Carlos, I think I may not have ever truly appreciated how brave you are."

The floor trembles beneath them.

"To be fair, I've gotten to see a lot of evidence firsthand of what is and isn't dangerous around here," says Carlos, trying to play down the sentiment for more reasons than one. "Believing your own experiences doesn't take that much bravery."

Cecil gives Khoshekh a squeeze, and enunciates: "My brave, smart, amazing Carlos."

A scrape of metal-on-metal screeches inside a wall. Cecil flinches again. Even Carlos is tense, acutely aware that if they express much more affection right now, they're going to burst a pipe.

"Okay. One step at a time," says Cecil at last. "Give me another minute, and then let's...let's try cuddling."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Groom Lake Base, Nevada.

This organization may not be a Strexcorp subsidiary, but Dana can use the lessons she learned while utterly failing to rescue Lewis. Starting with: do not make "tip the enemy off" your very first move.

"It's nice to meet you, Enigma," she says into the microphone. "If I come in there to see you, will you be able to hear me?"

"Hang on, you can't –" begins Caleb.

"Overprotective scientist," scolds Enigma. "She's a ghost, not a disease vector. Come in."

Dana moves her projected self through the wall in two steps, and makes her hand substantial enough to touch Enigma's forearm. Most of him doesn't move, not even a twitch of the fingers...but he's breathing, he has a pulse, and his lips are closed, which wouldn't be the case if he had no muscle control at all. Standing between him and Caleb's line of sight, she murmurs, "Can you talk without the speakers? Stick out your tongue if you can't."

Enigma smiles, amused, and sticks out his tongue.

"Do you know Morse code? One tongue-flick for yes, two for no."

Two tongue-flicks.

"I don't like this," says Caleb. His voice in turn is coming through speakers in here. "Even if you can't get him sick, there's sensitive equipment in there. You could break something. He might get hurt before we can fix it."

"She promises to be careful," says Enigma over both sets of speakers. "See, this way someone can get the itch on my nose without you having to suit up and go through decon. Would you mind, Dana? It's on the left side. Your left."

"I'm going to get you out of here," whispers Dana, obligingly scratching his nose. "It may take some time to arrange, but I have this army – in fact, I have several armies – and this is exactly the sort of thing I've been wanting to use them for."

"I don't mind suiting up to help you," grumbles Caleb.

"Both of you are very kind," says Enigma over the speakers. "Dana, pay close attention, all right?"

All over the room, indicator lights blink on.

"This machine is, as you suspect, what your world calls an alethiometer." (The physical human flicks his tongue for Yes.)

"It was essential to the Allies winning the war, and I am an essential part of it." (Yes.)

"I've used spare processing power to find out about other worlds. Now that our war is over, I want to help with yours." (Yes.)

"Hang on," says Caleb. "What war?"

"You can trust the people here. They have only the general public's best interests at heart," says Enigma's semi-artificial voice, while the man flicks his tongue twice for No.

Dana nods, though she isn't sure if Enigma has any sensors to perceive that. "I understand."

"Oh, good!" (Yes.) "Caleb, specifically, is an excellent person." (Yes.) "I should also tell you that the government in charge of this facility is independent, rather than affiliated with your Enemy." (Yes.) "I know why you might be suspicious of their actions." (Yes.) "You must think this looks uncomfortable. But I am here willingly." (No.) "And I can only help you if I stay here." (Yes.)

Lowering her voice again, Dana whispers, "Do you want me to leave you here until the war is over?" (Yes.) "But break you out afterward...?"

"...besides, as you might already suspect, I am in poor physical shape," continues Enigma. (Yes.) "Weak immune system, extensive paralysis, and other conditions mean that being in here is the reason I am still alive." (Yes.)

"So, break you out if I can find equal or better medical services to replace this," whispers Dana.

That gets her a smile along with the tongue-flick Yes.

"Look, I'm sorry to hear you're having a conflict in your world, but I can't promise you any help," says Caleb. "We're busy with our own reconstruction. I can't imagine the Cabinet deciding to send forces to another dimension, no matter how helpful Enigma thinks it would be. He gives us information, he isn't authorized to give orders."

"Oh, they hardly need our military," says Enigma pleasantly. "The worlds at the heart of this conflict are far more technologically advanced than our own. In fact, our world was scouted for infiltration recently, and the judgment was that we weren't advanced enough to be useful."

"Now wait just a minute. That can't be right," protests Caleb. He sounds almost offended at the idea that Strex doesn't want to invade his world. "Even if you only consider the research the general public knows about, we're in the most scientifically fascinating age the world has ever known! We've split the atom. We can synthesize isotopes that are too unstable to be produced in nature. We've put manmade satellites into orbit, we're on the verge of sending living human beings up there – give it a few years, and I have every confidence we'll set foot on the moon!"

Enigma smiles wider. "This young woman owns a personal computer with a data storage capacity of five hundred gigabytes."

Caleb stops short. For the first time, Dana turns around, just to see his reaction. He opens and closes his mouth several times, eyes wide.

"I think I must have misheard you," he stammers at last. "It sounded like you said...gigabits. With a G."

"Gosh, no."

The scientist breathes a sigh of relief.

"I said gigabytes. With a G and a Y. There are eight bits in a byte."

"...I think I have to sit down," squeaks Caleb, and sinks slowly out of view.

Awful as his situation is overall, Enigma is beaming with genuine fondness, in a way that makes Dana think it'll be all right to leave him here. For now. His scientist will make sure he gets through it.

"Perhaps your technology can't add to ours," she tells Caleb. "And if your government will not fight for the Republic, we can hardly force them. Unwilling support is no support at all. But I am certain that we can find use for every alethiometer who is willing to help." Half out of conviction, half out of politeness, she adds: "And every scientist! Even if you do still rely on punch cards. I'm sure the scholars in my world will be very understanding, and only laugh about it when you're not in the room."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

They blow out windows in multiple rooms, knock down a handful of plaster panels from the ceiling, and send thick cracks spiderwebbing up the concrete walls. Something ceramic has shattered in one of the bathrooms; Carlos can hear the gurgling of water pouring out onto the tiles.

Cecil wraps both legs around his back and pulls him in deeper.

By the time they collapse in a heap of sweaty, tangled limbs, the Gaillard Compass is registering a Rusakov concentration higher than anywhere in town except the station, and an FU rating in the ninetieth percentile of all recorded Night Vale disasters. A strong wind is howling outside, rattling the blinds through the broken glass, and Carlos can feel the whole building rocking under the pressure. Outside, a tree and/or telephone pole hits the street with a cracking thud.

"Love you so much," pants Carlos against Cecil's ear. "Should bring this place down around our ears any minute now."

Cecil's arms and legs cling to him like a starfish. "Carlos...?"

"Mmhmm?"

"Where you come from, the valentine cards...what are they like? I've only ever seen them in safety posters. Like poison ivy, or street-cleaning machines."

So Carlos talks to him about fancy cards with lace and script fonts, about cute cards with hugging cartoon animals, about the handmade ones some kids brought to school with doilies and construction-paper hearts and names traced in glitter. He stops a couple of times when something snaps or crumbles and Cecil shivers, waiting for a prompt from Cecil to keep going.

"What kind did you get for your classmates?" asks Cecil presently. "Did you ever hand-make them?"

"Nah, I got the store kind. They sell variety packs for kids – boxes of thirty or so – cute friendship messages, silly puns, paired with cartoon characters or whatever. Picture the animated Will Parry and Moxie with the caption 'Of course I Will be your valentine!' and you get the idea."

"Gosh." Cecil twirls one of Carlos's curls around his fingers. Another crack splits the front wall of the building. "And...and if you had gotten me a valentine...what would that have been like?"

"Something with an experimental-theology pun, probably," says Carlos sheepishly. "A really ridiculous one. Are you some kind of alloy of copper and tellurium? Because you are C-u-T-e." He kisses Cecil's temple. "You're more special to me than relativity."

This time, when the cracking starts, it's a chain reaction rolling through every wall. The front of the building yaws outward, the last of its glass shattering as the concrete slides in uneven chunks, and the second floor slides downward all at once like a sledder on a hill.

Carlos shies away from the edges of their table-shaped shelter, but can't stop watching. The gutted ceiling falls into view, all bent pipes and snapped wires, shutting off the daylight before cracking and revealing shafts of sun and the casings of familiar ordinaters. A chair goes sliding past, wheels spinning, then gets crushed in a snapping of plastic – a fountain of water arcs overhead and patters to land somewhere out of sight – dust rolls in from everywhere, enveloping everything, a twisted steel I-beam slams into the earth over their heads while heavy blocks tumble down around it but there's nothing to stop the clouds of grit and smoke from rolling in.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The next world over from Night Vale.

It's drizzling on the deserted steppes when Tamika returns to pick them up, washing away the streaks of dust that billowed through the portal.

Khoshekh objects to getting wet, so he's hiding under Cecil's shirt. Carlos, sweaty and itchy and still tasting grit, has never been so happy to be rained on.

Notes:

Since Lot 37 was in Episode 37, of course Project 37 had to debut in Chapter 37.

PEBIC = Predictive Electronic/Biological Integrated Computer. Modeled on early real-world devices like BINAC and EDSAC. (More advanced than the real-world Enigma machine from which he got his nickname.)

[For the record, his system has a whopping 176 bytes of digital memory. Take the text in these square brackets, and save it as a .txt file: that's how much you can fit in 176 B.]

Characters and their daemons: the UWII universe. Other art: jogging Delphine, and Cecil's apartment.

Chapter 38: Allies and Mentors

Summary:

There's an incredible adventure with WALK signs, which will surely go down in town legend. Dana is visiting surprisingly-familiar worlds all over the place. But the part of this chapter you really want to hear about is the Man in the Tan Jacket returning.

East Capital City, Laputa.

Dana would never fit inside the staterooms of this nation's square-roofed and cedar-paneled capital building. She barely fits on the front steps. The citizens of their world are as small compared to her as she is to the masked army.

"My fellow Laputans," announces the doll-sized woman at a podium in front of her. Tiny cameras flash and sparkle in the crowd; bonsai-sized cherry trees send delicate pink-and-white petals fluttering across the courtyard. "I come to you today with grave news."

This world, Dana has learned, was directly involved in the War. The government whose help she is trying to raise was founded after the concurrent overthrow of their Magisterium. It even claims to be the ancestral home of the legendary dragonfly-riding warriors who were allies to Lyra Silvertongue. And if there are half a dozen more countries in this area that claim the same thing...well, the important part is, their national pride is deeply intertwined with pride in the Republic.

A complication: the part of their world that lines up with Night Vale is a rural area populated by a minority of religious separatists, well-armed and touchy about defending their territory. But it may be possible for the military to lie, bargain, and/or fight their way through.

"I turn you over now to Dana Cardinal-san herself," says the Prime Minister, after giving the audience a brief summary of Dana's mission. She and her speechwriters know exactly what rhetorical buttons to push. The cheers are loud as she steps away from the podium.

Dana hunches down on the steps as rehearsed, making sure her face is in-frame for the television cameras. "In my world," she begins, "our people still share the stories about you. No, not stories. Legends."

(She doesn't need to tell them how much of that sharing happens in the form of children's cartoons.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Naturally, since they were all so prepared and well-braced and coordinated for dealing with Valentine's Day, it's the day afterward that sets a new danger record.

Carlos staggers into the living room of the larger house, feet sore and knees stiff, dropping his brand-new umbrella on the hall carpet. The only reason he doesn't collapse into the nearest chair is that Quentin is already dozing in it. He ends up on the floor in front of the TV, head on a stray pillow, trying to massage some of the soreness out of his calves. Most of the team is strewn around the rest of the room, in various matching stages of exhaustion.

It reminds him so much of the Lazy Day, except that this time, the exhaustion is wholly earned.

"Did anyone else make it to Route 800?" asks Perle from an armchair, gecko daemon draped over the cushion like a rubber toy.

Carlos groans. "After the third straight hour of walking, I couldn't tell you what roads I was on."

"A WALK sign appeared in the middle of my daughter's classroom," Sherie informs nobody in particular. She's on the couch, mongoose daemon curled up on the carpet, and the sight is a little blurry, but Carlos thinks that's the Faceless Old Woman rubbing her ankles. "She smashed it in with a mace before most of them could see it. Saved a lot of feet today, my girl did."

"It's times like these I'm glad not to have a face," says the Faceless Old Woman. "You all should try not having eyes some time. I think you'd come to appreciate it."

Köhler rouses himself long enough to say "remarkable as it sounds, considering where we live, I have not been this concerned in quite some time," then promptly falls asleep again. His binturong daemon snores into her fluffy tail.

Carlos is pretty concerned too, when he thinks about it. Strexcorp can rewire all their municipal equipment. Strexcorp might try to do something insidious through the traffic lights next, or the mailboxes, or the street lamps. This was undoubtedly another inter-world push from the Smiling God: not to slow people down, but to speed them up, making them walk compulsively until they can't walk any more.

But the important thing is, they beat it back. Again. In an adventure that was unlikely and miraculous, involving Dana (whose voice took over the radio and shut down the subliminal signals Strex had been broadcasting to reinforce the hypnotic suggestion), Tamika and the Book Club (who coordinated three separate first-responder teams to Valentine's Day disasters when the original first-responders were disabled by rogue WALK signs), a brilliant on-the-fly invention from Carlos (if you take a bunch of very small bloodstones and tape them under the ribs of an umbrella, you can effectively pray while you walk!), and a whole lot of teamwork.

It was incredible. They are incredible. They can do anything.

"Is everyone in here?" calls Nirliq, the last of the group to get home. "The other house is empty, did Perle get back yet...?"

"Over here," says Perle, as Nirliq gets into the living room. "Other house was a longer walk from the bus stop."

"Oh, wow," says Nirliq, surveying the group. "Did nobody else get the idea to put on the radio and blindfold themselves until they heard reports it was over?"

Silence.

"Well, when you put it like that, it sounds so easy," mutters Quentin.

"I for one am glad I got involved," says Sherie. "I got to experience the coordination of...certain things...which do not involve bloodstone circles, because those are illegal...firsthand. That is going to be a huge help with...certain research. You'll be amazed. You won't believe all the ideas I have already."

Nirliq sighs. "I guess that's good. Do any of you need a drink while I'm up?"

A chorus of "yes!" from around the room. Carlos is mildly jealous. When he was the only team member not disabled by an overpowering town-wide compulsion, he ended up with his eardrums blown out. All Nirliq has to do is distribute electrolytes.

Cecil finds his way in not long afterward. He and Carlos had been planning to go looking at houses this evening – and he was only compulsively walking for about twenty minutes, so he's got his second wind by now – but one look at Carlos and he doesn't even suggest it, just throws together some kind of herbal concoction to massage into the team's locked-up muscles and helps Carlos up to bed.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The meadow between the forest and the big lake.

This land is the polar opposite of of the world of the dragonfly-riders. Nothing bigger than a village interrupts the countryside; the trees are towering giants, full-throated white flowers reaching toward the sky; the population are a laid-back species of grazers, not humanoid at all. They don't make war. Dana isn't sure they even make weapons.

"I've changed my mind," she says, to a meeting of grey-furred elders. "I don't think you should get involved. I think we should keep Strexcorp as far away from this world as possible. And perhaps you should work on building stronger shelters, just in case. I could ask someone in Night Vale to look up bomb-proof bunker design for you! We have a lot of experts on that."

Do not give up on us so soon, Bird, says/signs the most wizened of the elders. The masked army's translation artifact guides Dana into understanding the sounds, as well as the gestures of his trunk that go with it. (They can't quite pronounce "Dana" and their world doesn't have cardinals, so Bird is what they're calling her.) It's true, we are no match for your Enemy in combat. Your kind thinks and plans too quickly, and is full of too much fury.

Dana is a little put out at Strexcorp being lumped in with "her kind."

But wars need more than soldiers. When all your armies are gathered together, have you planned how to feed them?

"I suppose I thought they would all go to the Raúl's, like we do," says Dana cautiously. "But now that you mention it, I'm not sure they would all fit."

The elder swells with pride. This hemisphere is in the season for harvest. Tell us what part of our world is adjacent to your town, and we will send cooks and provisions there. As much as we can spare.

"Would you? That would be wonderful! But before you start moving, I should find someone to check that your food is edible. To us, I mean! I'm not trying to insult your cooking, it's only that I'm not sure that my, ah, my kind and yours have comparable digestive functions. Or even the same number of stomachs."

Oh, we've fed your kind before! says/signs a brown-furred councilmember. Kept one of you alive for a moon and a half. It's true that some of our dishes will make you violently ill, but the good news is, we already know which ones those are.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"Mom! Have you seen my book?" yells Susannah from the second floor.

"Don't yell, sweetie!" yells Sherie from the first.

Seth, whose backpack is already neatly packed, spots the book in question (it's the first library book Su checked out all by herself; Sherie is simultaneously proud and terrified) sitting next to the TV. His skvader daemon takes graceful gliding hops alongside his feet as they walk it up the stairs.

Cecil comes out of Carlos's room and wanders yawning toward the kitchen. (His own daemon is nowhere to be seen.) He usually sleeps in later than most of the team, Sherie's learned. Hopefully the racket didn't wake him up.

The kids descend not long after. Susannah's griffon vulture daemon looks like he wants to glide too, but his wings are much too broad for the hallway. Seth's attention is on the kitchen; coming up to Sherie, he says under his breath, "Should we ask now? Would that be okay?"

"We'll see if he's had his coffee first."

They follow Cecil into the kitchen, where he looks more alert already. Maybe it's the coffee mug in his hand; maybe it's the fact that Carlos's toes are caressing his foot under the table. They knock it off with that latter detail when Sherie clears her throat, giving Seth an opening to say, "Señor Cecil, can we talk to you for a minute?"

Cecil blinks. "Me? Um, sure."

"Is it a private conversation?" adds Carlos. "I can go."

"No, nothing like that," Sherie assures him. She can hardly bring herself to shoo Carlos away from his boyfriend while they're still in matching panserbjørne jammies. "Just doing some event planning. I don't know if you've heard, but Seth wants to have his bar mitzvah in Night Vale...which I completely support, though of course his grandparents aren't going to be able to fly in, and there are only about a dozen other Hebrew people in this whole town, I can't think where we'll hold it, but...."

"Mom."

"...but, as I was just getting to, it's your decision, not mine," finishes Sherie defensively. "Do you want to ask, or should I?"

Seth takes over. "Mom wants to do this with as much tradition as possible," he explains to Cecil. "And one of the traditions is that an older adult in your family reads a couple paragraphs about what your daemon settled as. But most of my family isn't going to be there...and none of them know what a skvader is anyway, and you do...and you're probably part Hebrew somewhere, right? With your daemon's name and all...."

Cecil's hand flies to his mouth. "You want me to read at your settling ceremony?"

"Is that okay?"

"I would be honored," gushes Cecil. "And yes – Carlos showed me how to get genetic analysis done, you don't even need any blood sacrifice, it's amazing! – so experimental theology has confirmed that part of my DNA does come from Malabari Hebrew origin. I had a hunch anyway, you know, what with Mom's daemon also having a Hebrew name...but it's not like she kept any traditions to do with it...and even if she had wanted to do a settling ceremony, be it Hebrew or witch-child or anything else, she disappeared before we would have had the chance...oh, gosh, this is so exciting. Sherie, you'll proofread it for me, right? I've never been to one of these, I want to make sure I get the appropriate tone! Do you want it in English or Spanish or Hebrew?"

"English, I think? We'll see. And of course I'll proofread," says Sherie. Cecil's enthusiasm is catching...and the casual reference to his mother's disappearance tugs at her heartstrings. He must have been so young, poor thing. "Thank you."

"Thanks," echoes Seth. "What was your mom's daemon's name?"

"Bekhorei."

Sherie does a mild double-take. That sounds like...but it can't be....

When Seth doesn't show any sign of recognition, Cecil translates: "It's nothing exciting, it means my eldest."

So it's exactly what it sounds like. "Oh," says Seth, as it clicks for him too. "That's...ominous."

Cecil frowns. "Is it? It sounds very dry and factual to me, but I admit I don't know all the subtleties."

"It's just that it's one of the Passover plagues," says Sherie – and there, she sees Carlos's brow furrow in surprise...no, concern...as he gets it. Kids raised in the Church hear the story too, albeit with a lot of the meaning washed out. "The ten plagues of Egypt? Even if you didn't hear it in synagogue growing up, you must have seen it in a movie, in a book, anything...?"

"I know lots of playground rhymes about flesh-eating bacteria...? I take it that's not what you mean."

Sherie gives him a brief summary, trying not to sound too much like a rabbi as she does so. Seth rattles off the plagues from memory: blood (makat dam, not far from the way Kevin introduced his StrexDaemon at the Debate, bedamim), frogs, lice, flies, diseased livestock, boils, hail and fire, locusts, and...."The plague of darkness, makat choshekh. And the last one, the plague of the firstborn, makat bechorot."

"So...Egypt was overrun with eldest children?" asks Cecil. "And they were such bossy, sarcastic know-it-alls that Pharaoh was finally annoyed into letting the ancient Hebrews leave?"

"Okay, first of all: hey," says Carlos. "And second...Cecil, the plague is called that because it affected the Egyptians' firstborn children. They, well. They were all killed."

"...oh."

"I bet it doesn't mean anything, though," says Seth reassuringly. "It was all kids who died, and you're pretty adult, right? I bet you're safe by now. It probably just means your grandparents weren't very creative, and didn't realize a form of that word for firstborn would have those connotations."

"Yes, most likely," says Cecil, with forced cheer. "Well! That was a fascinating little historical interlude. I promise to use all my finely-honed community-radio research skills to come up with something just as engaging about the skvader. Your bar mitzvah deserves the best."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Moireabh, Scotland, United Kingdom.

This world may not have any connection to the War at all. The people Dana spoke with aren't aware of one. And they're witches – a strange community of witches, ones who visibly age far past what Dana is used to, and live in temperate climates – but witches nonetheless, with spells and charms and branches to fly on. They ought to have a societal memory going that far back.

When she appears in their lush and tapestried conference hall today, there's a whole group waiting for her. Maybe a dozen witches...accompanied by, to Dana's surprise, as many men. Too many for them all to be biological witches.

She introduces herself to the witches she hasn't met before, and explains her mission anew. Even though this world doesn't have firsthand knowledge of the founding of the Republic, they do have prophecy, and divination, and other ways of corroborating the news that a Smiling God exists to threaten their world. Eventually.

"It's the 'eventually' that gives us trouble," explains one of the men. "We have trained soldiers, but it's hard to muster the political will to send them without an obvious and immediate threat."

"I do understand that, yes. But I have only ever appeared in worlds that had something to offer," Dana tells him patiently, before turning back to the serious elder witch who appears to be in charge. "What about a plucky, ragtag band of heroes? Could you supply one or two of those?"

"I should think we can do better than 'ragtag'," the witch assures her. "Many of our most talented young people won't mind working around the Ministry if necessary."

"Not too young, though," puts in a younger witch with about the same complexion as Dana (there's another difference; these witches aren't predominantly Nordic in the least), framed by exponentially more and bushier hair. "I wouldn't let any teenagers in this at all, if I could help it."

"I'm a teenager," protests Dana. "Do you think teenagers can't do anything heroic?"

"Nah, we know they can," says a gangly man who looks around the age of Dana's parents. "That's also how we know it's too bloody young."

Dana is starting to lose her patience. "I do wish you wouldn't interrupt," she says. "It's very progressive that the witches here allow their consorts to sit in on official business, but I really am here to talk to them."

The reactions are...unexpected. Most of the men splutter with varying degrees of surprise...no, flusteredness...no, indignation. The witches are amused, across a similar range: one or two are openly snickering, and even the well-composed serious elder witch has a twinkle in her eye. "Well! I don't know how they do things in your world, Miss Cardinal, but I assure you, men in our society occupy more positions than 'consort'."

"They do in most of my world too, but I'm not a witch." Dana frowns. "Unless...could it be that it's common for your world to have...man-witches?"

The gangly man actually starts choking at that. The one beside him, a dark-haired man who seems to be taking the whole thing more in stride than his peers, pats his companion on the back. "We prefer to be called wizards, actually."

"Oh! All of this makes a lot more sense, then," says Dana, relaxing. "Would you mind if I ask how to spell it? I have a friend who will be interested to know."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

An insurance company official shows Carlos and Nirliq into a private meeting room, and tells them a representative will be with them shortly. Carlos twiddles his thumbs and taps his feet: randomly at first, then running through the list of Morse code abbreviations he's trying to memorize.

After about ten minutes, he pulls out his phone, wanting to text Cecil. Hopefully some flirting will take his mind off the fact that he's about to have to bluff his way through major insurance fraud. Or at least, to keep a straight face while the team's financial witch bluffs her way through major insurance fraud.

No Service Here, Buddy, his phone informs him.

Carlos glances at Nirliq, currently rereading a copy of the chapel lease. She's dressed up for the meeting, in a cream-colored skirt suit accented with multi-hued glass jewelry: probably calculated to hit just the right balance between "we're not so desperate for money we would do this on purpose" and "we're not so rich we can afford not to take this seriously." (Carlos himself is wearing...look, this is his nice tailored chapel coat, okay.)

"Sorry to interrupt," says Carlos, "but is your phone getting reception?"

Nirliq checks. "No, it's out. Weird. We're not underground, we're not even in the middle of the building...."

"Maybe we're at a bad angle." Carlos walks over to the tall windows, streaming sunshine into the room. He can't see a latch to open them, so he settles for holding his phone up to the glass. Still No Luck.

Nirliq, meanwhile, goes to the door. "I'll ask the people across the hall...."

The knob rattles under her hand, but the door won't open.

"...we're locked in."

She pounds a few times on the polished wood. No answer. Carlos wasn't expecting one. "At least we have this nice sunny day to enjoy," he says, and tilts his phone so the screen catches the light.

Flash, flick-flash, flick...flash, flash, flick-flash.

Not an SOS. They're not in any confirmed, immediate danger. CQ is the nice, general signal for calling....

Flash, flick-flick-flash...flash, flick-flash, flick...flick-flash, flick-flick.

...XCL. The local callsign for el círculo de lectores.

He waits a few heart-pounding moments for a response, then gathers his stamina and repeats the sequence.

This time, a rhythmic sequence of flashes starts up from the roof of the craft store across the street, between a new Strex-run chanting den and the shuttered remains of something Strex drove out of business and hasn't yet bothered to replace.

It's too fast at first, Carlos loses the thread and has to signal for a repetition, but on the next run-through he processes DE XCL K, from the Book Club, go ahead. And he makes it all the way through DE XTE, OP ATRAPADO ?, CFM PLS without, as far as he can tell, slipping up. From los teólogos experimentales, we may be trapped, please confirm.

The reply decodes to received, on it, give us ten minutes.

Carlos flashes a received in return, and sits back to massage his shaking hands.

"How long have you been that good at...enjoying the sunshine?" asks Nirliq from beside him. Carlos was concentrating so hard, he hadn't even noticed her move.

"I'm not an expert or anything," says Carlos modestly. "I just try to spend my free time...out in the sun...when I can."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Magpie City, Turtle Island Union.

Dana arrives on the outskirts of a run-down country town, all low stone buildings and cobbled streets, framed by rolling grassy plains. No people or running vehicles in sight, but the place isn't abandoned; she can hear machinery in the distance, and the rumbling of some structure being knocked down.

She raises her eyes to the clouds overhead, and spots a couple of figures hovering above the city. Some kind of angel? They're humanoid, wingless, glowing a soft white. Or maybe they're just haloed in sunlight.

"Hello?" calls Dana. "Hey!" She throws in a whistle for good measure.

The nearer flying figure notices, banks in the air and comes soaring down toward her. Unlike an angel, he's wearing clothes (a handsome cream-and-turquoise tunic, over denim jeans), and has a daemon at his side (a fluffy red squirrel, with eyes that, same as his, glow like fluorescent bulbs). Also, unlike the Erika who greeted her at the Columbia River mining operation, he's taking pains not to seem threatening: he floats just off the ground a few feet away from her, smiles, and bows.

"Bèni benìu," he says – which sounds almost like bienvenido, and the little welcoming speech he launches into is full of other half-familiar rhythms and syllables. Not Spanish, but some related language, close enough that Dana should start recognizing it any second now.

And speaking of recognition....

"Barty?" she blurts out, interrupting the introduction. "Barton Donovan?"

The floating, glowing figure does a double-take. "How did you...?" he asks in Spanish. "Hang on – Dana? Dana from soccer? What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I'm visiting different universes to recruit an army that can defend the Republic of Heaven from a Smiling God," says Dana.

"That so? Cool," says Barton. "I don't know if we've got much in the way of armies, here – it's taking all our resources just to rebuild some working republics out of the mess this world's nations have been reduced to – but a Scout is helpful, and it can't hurt to let you talk to some people. You're astral-projecting, right? If I fly, can you follow?"

"I can," says Dana, and starts hovering to demonstrate.

"Great!" says the Eternal Scout. "Let's go see Earl."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The experimental theologians are still unsubtly imprisoned when there's a commotion out in the front of the office.

Neither one has to say a word before they're both backed up against the interior wall. Nirliq draws her handgun and tries to make Carlos stand behind her – "You're the one they want most, we both know that" – but Carlos convinces her to give him the front position (and the weapon): "They want me alive, which means they won't shoot through me to get to you, but they might not have a problem with the other way around."

Two minutes of muffled wood-cracking and body-thumping after that, the door unlocks and a black-eyed official with a snake daemon looped around her neck stumbles into the room. "Please accept my apologies for the delay! There was an administrative mix-up, which is not at all in line with our new parent company's policy. The good news is, the people responsible have been...dealt with! Yes, dealt with."

Carlos tactfully refrains from asking about the conflicts of interest in Strexcorp taking ownership of both an insurance company and at least one of the buildings whose tenants it insures.

When the meeting ends, and he and Nirliq are ushered back out through the lobby, he also doesn't comment on the broken light fixtures or the fact that it smells like blood. The phrase take the money and run has never seemed more appropriate.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika is sitting guard at the portal in Vieja Josie's house, resting her feet on Rashi's back and catching up on her Anne McCaffrey canon, when Dana appears next to her.

"I have news! Is this a good time?"

"Probably." Tamika nods to the window. "If anything tries to come through there, you might have to wait while I scare it off."

"Of course," says Dana. She's redone her hair, or maybe had someone redo it for her: loose braids with a side part, falling open into ringlet curls that fall over her ears and frame her face. "Would you like me to start with updates on the allies in otherworlds I've been working on for some time? Or would you rather hear about the ones I've discovered since we last spoke?"

Tamika wants the updates first. Dana in the middle of describing the latest news in the world of the storybook dragonfly-riders when a small black housefly buzzes through the portal.

No, not a fly, Tamika realizes (just before reaching for the flyswatter). A fly daemon.

"N-----h?" asks Dana.

"We're coming," says the daemon, in a tiny, thin voice. "Are you ready to close the window?"

Tamika gets to her feet. "We're ready."

Within moments the Man in the Tan Jacket soars down out of the foreign sky, riding a branch of cloud-pine. His gear bangs together and his jacket flaps as he comes to a stop, touching lightly down on Josie's carpet.

"Where's Agent J2?" asks Tamika, resting her fingers on the hilt of her knife.

"She'll be here – just a minute," says the Man, a little breathless. "Got the Royal Air Force on our tail, so we split up – she zigged, I zagged – give it a second." He shrugs off the camping backpack, the longbow, and the quiver...and addresses his wrist: "N-----h, dear, this is Tamika – and that – that's Dana."

There are half a dozen more flies on the jacket's tan cuff.

"Your agent and I had an excellent bonding adventure," continues the Man, as even more flies stream through the portal to buzz around him. "There was some friction at first, a lot of mistrust on both sides, but after some perilous situations forced us to work together, we had a few heart-to-heart conversations and came around to appreciating each other! It would make a great movie."

He holds out his arms to let the flies land on his sleeves.

Dozens of them.

Maybe hundreds – they just keep coming –

Without warning J2 swoops through, braids whipping behind her – lets out a yelp and banks at a sharp angle just before she hits the wall – which sends her knocking into the side of the TV, then flailing out-of-control through the air.

The flies part en masse like a black buzzing cape, letting the Man spring forward and catch her. "Don't scare me like that, young lady!" he chides, as the thing J2 was riding – not her daemon, no, that's a branch, another branch of cloud-pine – clatters to the carpet. "Didn't I tell you to be careful?"

"Sorry," says J2 sheepishly. She waves to Tamika and Rashi. "Hi, Tamika."

For the first time in a long while, Tamika is genuinely stunned. "You're a witch. You're a witch. Is Tehom here yet?" If the girl has a witch's range, her daemon could be...well, anywhere.

"Yes, he's right there." J2 points to a patch of the flies, now on Josie's wall. One of them turns into a bat and flaps out into the middle of the room; when he turns into a pony, the Man swings J2 down onto his back. "We can't do the thing yet. Señor E------- says my range won't expand until after I settle."

The wave of fly-daemons (flies-daemon?) from the other universe dials down to a trickle. Then a few stragglers. At last they speak, in an eerie buzzing chorus like several dozen women speaking from the far side of a fan: "That's all of us."

"You can close the portal now," says the Man in the Tan Jacket. "And thank you. Thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to me. To us." The flies are all over him again; he spreads his arms. "Dana, Tamika Flynn...these are my daemon, and their name is N-----h."

 

-{,(((,">

 

While Janice is calling Steve Carlsberg to get a ride home, and Tamika is sweeping the area around them for hostiles, Neharah halos Dana in a ring of flies. "Emmanuel told us about you. About your quest. And your daemon. It's an honor to finally meet you."

"The honor is all mine!" Lowering her voice, Dana adds, "I understand that Tamika can't know about separation ordeals, but Janice...?"

Emmanuel winces. "She'll have to know eventually. I...may have chickened out about telling her. At least the cover story buys me a couple years before I have to come clean."

Dana can't blame him. It's a scary concept at any age, let alone ten. "I apologize if this is prying, but is she...yours?"

"I guess so, yeah," says Emmanuel. "I'm not even close to ideal – didn't exactly get a traditional witch childhood myself – but it's not like there's any other witches left in town who can take her on. Pray in your bloodstone circle that I don't screw this up too badly, will you?"

"Oh, I didn't mean, is she your responsibility to mentor! That isn't what I was asking," stammers Dana. "I meant, is she yours, yours."

A startled buzz runs through Neharah.

"That...is extremely unlikely," says Emmanuel after a moment. "Not to get too graphic with you here, but I think I would have noticed."

"That sounds logical." If Janice does look an awful lot like him, well, maybe it's just that they're both wearing braids and dressed for travel. Tehom has even made himself fly-shaped again. Dark hair and tan skin aren't exactly exotic features, either within the borders of Night Vale or in the broader spectrum of humanity.

Janice hangs up, Tehom turns into a jet-black goat, and they ride over to Dana and Emmanuel. "Are you talking about me?"

"In a way, yes," says Dana. "I was just about to tell Señor Emmanuel that if my experience is anything to go by...and I believe that it is...then you will have nothing but appreciation for him as a mentor."

Notes:

All four otherworlds Dana drops in on here are from HDM canon. One was only mentioned for a couple of sentences, so it's been fleshed out as a bonus crossover.

The language of the strange, daemonless children is supposed to be most closely-related to Sardinian, so Barton says "welcome" in Campidanese Sardinian.

Guest art: psychedelic Isaña and Khoshekh, by cloudscaper!

Chapter 39: Mothers Love

Summary:

Janice investigates her family history, leading Cecil to reveal some of his own. The Faceless Old Woman, among other things, makes a good undercover bar mitzvah date. And Megan finds a new ordinater to bond with.

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

The Outsiders in Night Vale have come forward by leaps and bounds in their bloodstone circle use. Three of them, plus a couple of local adults and a supportive pack of kids, are able to start a prayer network with enough conductivity for any elementary-level spell. When Dana links in from the basalt fortress, one of them – the Beringland native, who's never astral-projected in her life – is even able to manifest in front of her.

"So this is the place," says Nirliq, watching the Clouded Mountain over the ramparts of the fortress platform. "Is the Smiling God...there? Right now?"

"I can't think of any more likely place for it to be," says Dana. "The Mountain's defenses are drawn from its power, I know that much."

"You mean the terrible light."

"Oh, more than that," says a cabbit-shaped Eustathias from Dana's lap. "A terrible heat, too. And something like a terrible, mindless hunger, surrounding us? But not really mindless, just cruelly uncaring. And not hunger so much as destruction. And not surrounding, engulfing us, as if it wanted to burn us to ash, like a minutely detailed paper sculpture being overrun with lava. But not lava –"

"I get what you mean," interrupts Nirliq. "The important part is, you survived."

"That's right. We fell out of the range of the shield within a few seconds, I turned into a phoenix, and then we hid underground for a day and a half while Dana recovered from her burns enough to travel."

The reactions of the other experimental theologians and their Book Club allies hum across the mental links. Can't just dive in ourselves, then. Sounds like even if the otherworldly team develops basalt-derived protection against the light, it won't cover this. Can we armor everyone against it, or do we have to shut it down before attacking?

"You've used a bloodstone-circle network to fight off the Smiling God in Night Vale twice now, haven't you?" asks Dana. "Couldn't you just do that again?"

It's tried to shove some kind of influence into our world, and we've pushed it out again, points out one of the theologians. (The one whose daughter is also in the network.) That's a lot easier than trying to confront it head-on. And it was still enough to wear out the people involved in ten or fifteen minutes, max.

"Ah."

"So we'll have to find another way," concludes Nirliq.

"Is that what it means to you?" asks Dana. "Because what it meant to me was that you were going to need a lot of practice."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

A night out at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex combines two of Cecil's favorite ways to unwind: bowling, and yelling at Steve Carlsberg. The fact that Steve greets him with a bear hug and relentless earnestness does kinda throw off his game with the latter, but he's as good at the former as ever.

The adults (Cecil, Carlos, Steve, and a couple of Steve's fellow PTA dads) take lane seven, while the pack of kids they're nominally watching takes lane eight. Carlos recognizes Renée, Janice, and the new six-foot-ten version of Megan. There are three other girls and four boys, and if Carlos heard right someone in there is Patrice and someone else is Edmund, but hell if he knows which faces go with the names. One or both of them might be daemon names for all he knows.

Cecil and Steve take an early lead and hold it, even while tapping Morse-code messages against the balls. It's far too rapid for Carlos to follow. Could be secret rebel information, or it could be another level of friendly catching-up.

When Carlos has bowled his last frame, Janice leans over the back of the bench into their lane. "Steve, can I have some money for game tokens?"

"Sure can." Steve digs through his pockets and comes up with a handful of bills, which he meticulously divides between Janice and Renée.

"Thanks," says Janice. "Señor Carlos, do you like foosball?"

Carlos does a double-take. "Me? Um, sure."

"Cool. Come play foosball with me."

Leaving a quick kiss on Cecil's cheek, Carlos follows her over to the arcade area. Janice swings by the dining area and takes one of the red-cushioned metal stools along the way; her daemon turns into his tall black horse form to ferry the extra weight. When they get to the foosball table, she swings herself onto the stool, and her daemon flutters bat-shaped to land on the carpet next to Isaña.

So they're gonna do this by surreptitious daemon conversation. Good, because Carlos still only knows so much Morse.

He lets the bulk of his concentration center in Isaña, leaving just enough to whack a plastic ball back and forth with little plastic team members. (Mostly human, though the goalies have little plastic tentacles.) Under the table, Isaña whispers, "What can we do for you?"

"You guys do DNA tests, right?" asks little Tehom.

"We did," says Isaña ruefully. "Most of that equipment was irreparably damaged when our chapel collapsed, and the last person...people...who really knew how to use it have decided to, um, pursue other interests for a while, so we haven't been in a rush to replace it. Is it urgent? We can move the purchase to the top of our list, if you need it soon."

"I guess it's not real urgent," says Tehom. "We just want you to compare ours and –"

"Whoa. No. Stop right there. We're not doing any tests on you. Not without your mamá's approval, and she's made it clear she's not giving it."

"We don't have to tell her...."

"I think she'll find out."

Janice bites her lip and whacks the ball so it banks right past Carlos's players and clatters into the goal. The game dings up a goal for her and spits out a fresh ball. This one is on fire. Janice doesn't comment, so Carlos figures that's how it's supposed to be.

"If this is important, ask Tamika to talk to her," suggests Isaña. "If anyone can convince her to give us the okay, Tamika can."

"It...isn't really for Tamika?" says Tehom awkwardly. "It's just sort of for us? You could still do that, right?"

"Listen, Janice –"

"Will it cost money? We have fifty-five dollars and thirty-six cents in our bank account. And if you need more, Girl Scout cookie season is coming up real soon...."

"Oh, honey, we can't take your –"

"It's not fair!" bursts out Tehom, quiet but impassioned. "It's not fair. Just because Mamá doesn't trust anyone doesn't mean we shouldn't get to!"

Janice isn't swinging the foosball players at all now, just gripping a couple of the plastic handles like her life depends on it. Oh, god, she looks like she's going to cry. Carlos doesn't know how to deal with crying children. Carlos has never been around a crying child that couldn't be summarily handed over to the nearest parent.

"Your mother loves you," says Isaña. When in doubt, go for the classics. "She's just trying to keep you safe."

Tehom turns from bat to housefly, and lands on Isaña's head, right next to the ear Kevin's StrexDaemon took a bite out of. He buzzes something too soft for Carlos to hear...though Isaña is startled, that much comes through, crystal clear.

"We'll...look into it," she murmurs. "And get back to you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie is completely wrapped up in the mental net, paying almost no attention to the physical world around her. She's keeping just enough awareness of her body to shift position so her legs don't fall asleep, and that's it.

Her tipoff that something is wrong doesn't come from the sound of unexpected entry at her house door, but from the reaction of Cactus Jane, halfway across town, thinking oh, dear, Sheriff's secret police. See you on the other side.

Nirliq is on the college campus; Susannah is safe in an undisclosed location; most of the Advanced Readers are squirreled away in similar hideouts. Two of them announce they're not safe after all, and their minds drop out of the astral conference-call. Then Sherie herself loses the connection – which, when she opens her eyes, turns out to be because half of her bloodstones have vanished.

"Faceless Old Woman?" she whispers, picking up her mongoose daemon. She can hear someone in the house, opening doors. "Is that someone on the team?"

"No, those are police officers," says a disembodied voice. The last bloodstone is swept out of view. "I've put all the stones in pipes for safekeeping, so you won't be arrested...at least, not for possession. Don't use any of your faucets until I take them out."

Sherie gets to her feet, wincing at the stiffness in her legs. "You make it sound like I'll be arrested for something else."

"The legal term is reasonable suspicion," says the Faceless Old Woman. "Frankly, when bloodstone circles are illegal, I question your decision to use one in the bloodstone circle room. What else would a person be doing in here?"

"A person, not much," agrees Sherie. "Come here."

 

-{,(((,">

 

It unfolds like a pantomime routine. Carlos drops something by his feet and asks Cecil to pick it up; Cecil's head is bent low next to Isaña long enough for her to whisper in his ear. While the rest of the group orders food, Cecil is turning alethiometer dials. Later, Cecil and Janice thumb-wrestle over onion rings, in a way that involves a lot of suspiciously systematic tap-brush-taps of skin on skin.

Janice goes home with her answer. Carlos doesn't, and, to be honest, isn't sure he wants to know. Will Delphine be reviewing any records of him and her daughter together? Will she suspect illicit knowledge-sharing? Just because the Sheriff's secret police can't actually wipe his memory doesn't mean they won't be able to make him wish they had.

 

-{,(((,">

 

It unfolds like a cliché detective show. A black-clad, blowdart-wearing police officer wrenches open the door on a mostly-empty room...to find the Faceless Old Woman pressing Sherie against one wall, and Sherie kissing her neck.

There's a lot of blushing and stammering, from both Sherie and the officer. The Faceless Old Woman is entirely unruffled, and somehow gives the impression that she's sending the poor guy a death-glare, even with neither the eyes nor the eyebrows to pull it off. "Sorry to interrupt, ma'am!" he squeaks. "Everything seems in order here! I'm voting for you! Have a good day!"

With that, he and his balaclava-wearing meerkat daemon turn tail and run like there's a plastic bag on their heels.

Sherie keeps her arms around the Faceless Old Woman as the officers vacate the house. It's...different. Really different. She's not used to being the larger one in a couple (they're almost the same height, and the Woman, while not exactly frail, is markedly more slender). Not used to needing to bend down in order to kiss someone's neck (the skin papery and surprisingly soft). Or to holding someone who smells nice all on their own, without wearing a scent Sherie picked out for them.

She would add the whole no-face thing to her mental list, but she might be getting used to that by now.

Spidery fingers caress her cheek. "You have an appealing mouth."

Sherie turns red all over again. "Th-thanks. You, well, I was just thinking...ah, lots of things, but one of them was that you smell. Nice! You smell nice."

"You think so?" asks the Faceless Old Woman. "I switched to Pamela Winchell's brand of body wash, and I've been wondering if anyone would notice."

"Do you mean you're buying the same brand Mayor Winchell is, or you've started stealing the bottles out of Mayor Winchell's shower?"

"You have to ask? I thought you knew me better than that."

"I do," sighs Sherie. And the reason she shrugs and lets it go is that, when it's really important, she can count on the woman to do the right thing. For example: "Would you do me a wonderful favor and go check on Cactus Jane's little boy?"

"If I do, will you kiss me again? I quite liked that."

Sherie amends the thought: when it's important, and when the woman has been sufficiently bribed. "If you do, and help me arrange any childcare he's going to need while his mother is in police custody, I will take you out to dinner."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil and Carlos, for their part, have a romantic night in: microwaving leftovers from Big Rico's, then cleaning Cecil's kitchen.

Cecil sits on the counter while Carlos mops, sanitizing the top of the stove with something that bubbles and smells like peaches. They've settled into a quiet, comfortable rhythm when Cecil says, "Have I ever told you anything about my father?"

It's so casual, Carlos answers "Not that I remember," before he registers how significant it is. "I mean, no. Definitely not. I would remember if you had."

"Nobody else has mentioned him to you, have they? I wouldn't expect them to. He's been dead for a long time. I'm just curious."

"No, it hasn't come up," Carlos assures him. "I guess I had the impression he was dead, but only because nobody ever talked about him, not because they said anything specific." Even the Cecil on those old cassette tapes didn't make any references to more than one parent being around.

"Mom didn't talk about him either. And in elementary school I had at least one classmate whose species reproduced by budding, so it was a while before I figured out I probably had one." Cecil scrubs at a stubborn bit of gunk with his sponge. "When I was maybe twelve, me and Earl tried to do a scrying spell to learn more about him. Obviously that was way out of our league, and it blew up in our faces – I had this extra eye on my forehead for a solid week afterward, and poor Earl turned purple. Ugh, it was so embarrassing."

"I can imagine."

"I haven't even gotten to the worst part! After that went down, Earl said maybe I should try asking Josie again. I hadn't even thought to ask her in the first place – and when I did, she was more than happy to tell me what she remembered. Our class photos that year were ruined for nothing."

He sketches out a handful of details as Carlos mops under the chairs. According to Josie, Cecil's biological father was quiet and unremarkable, as lyhytikäiset ("Sorry – non-witches") went. Had a steady job at the bloodstone factory, at which he was neither excellent nor terrible. Outside of work, he wasn't a difference-maker or a troublemaker, not well-liked, not disliked. He was something of a writer, as a hobby.

"Let me guess," says Carlos. "His writing was neither inspired nor unreadable."

"I never got to read any of it, so I wouldn't know," says Cecil, either missing or ignoring the joke. "He wasn't a journalist, so it isn't as if any of it was officially preserved, even in heavily-censored records that can only be accessed with a high-level permit and must not be shared under pain of re-education. He was a storyteller. And Mom was most certainly not, so I suspect that's where I get it from."

(Okay, now Carlos feels bad about poking fun.)

"I didn't get my name from him, though. Señor Palmero was someone Mom was married to decades ago – she kept the family name after he died. Natural death. Eaten by wolves, I think? Something like that." He hesitates. "Not sure about my brother's father. He could be my father, or the old Señor Palmero, or someone else Mom knew in between them."

Something black and oily skitters out from under the fridge. Carlos yelps and whacks at it with the mop, and there's a slapstick interlude while he chases it around the kitchen.

"Sorry about that," he says at last, depositing the pest's body in the trash. "Listening again. Go on?"

"I suppose what I'm working up to is...well. Carlos, are you aware of what typically happens to someone who rejects a witch, or betrays her, or otherwise does wrong by her...romantically speaking?"

That makes Carlos stop mopping altogether. He's heard stories, yeah. It's one of the biggest diplomatic nightmares between witch-clans and the non-witch societies that border them, because by one set of standards it's perfectly legal, and by the other...."Your mother – she didn't –?"

"She killed my father, yes," says Cecil. Calm. Neutral. Like he's telling Carlos the grocery store was out of shale. "Shortly before I was born, if I have the timeline right."

Carlos knows Cecil well enough to tell there are more serious emotions under the surface here, but hell if he knows what the details are. "I...I'm sorry."

(Could this be the one thing Cecil actually holds against his mother? Or could it be that he doesn't, because his father did something genuinely wrong that he hasn't mentioned? Seemed like a nice guy, kept to himself isn't a description that guarantees innocence, as any number of horrifying news articles can attest. Or is the truth stranger and more complicated than anything Carlos could guess?

He does know one thing: if he overreacts, if he gets mad at the wrong person or for the wrong reason, Cecil will shut down and never open up to him about this again.)

"Cecil, can you make us some smoothies?" puts in Isaña.

It's an excuse to get him running the blender. While the grinding racket fills the room, Carlos scoops up his daemon and moves to hold her next to Cecil's ear. She tugs on his attention: no, it's not Cecil she needs to whisper something to, it's Carlos she needs to fill in:

"Janice wanted to know if she and Cecil shared a biological mother."

Carlos goes through a rapid string of realizations, and Isaña nods to confirm them. Yes, that would only make sense if Janice is a witch. Yes, she has evidence. Flight? – yes. Unbothered by cold? – yes. Long life? – too soon to tell. Wow, this would explain why Carlos thought of her mind as frost-like, when the older witches were glaciers. Not to mention, if she's literally Cecil's half-sister, it would be a great reason for why Steve's new circles-and-dotted-lines vision sees them as connected....

...and Janice's biological father is living with Steve. Unless Steve has secretly been Cecil's mother this whole time (which seems unlikely, even by Night Vale standards), that's the kind of betrayal a witch might honor-kill someone over. If she's the type to go through with honor-killing. Which Cecil's mom obviously is.

Cecil pours him a smoothie (mixed fruit, with the notable exception of oranges). Carlos sets aside the mop and takes it, but he's much too interested by this point to waste focus on ingesting things. "So, what you're getting at is...if your father had managed to escape your mom's, um, reaction...he'd be in some kind of hiding these days."

"Carlos," says Cecil solemnly, "I would not even raise the hypothetical possibility that someone might be able to outrun my mother for that long."

Ah. So, forget the half-sister idea. (Although Cecil and Janice might still be related, just with a common ancestor farther back....)

Cecil has a slow sip of his own smoothie. "You do understand that this isn't just Mom being Mom, right? Almost any witch might honor-kill a lyhytikäinen who wronged her. And the ones who don't – Josie, for instance, I don't believe she would – but it certainly didn't bother her that my mother had."

"Almost any witch. Okay. I understand." Carlos hesitates, then takes the plunge: "What about you, though? Does it bother you?"

"It used to," says Cecil cautiously. "These days...I don't really think about it? Unless something happens to bring it up, like a nostalgia front moving through town, or Dead Parents Day at the rec center. It's not going to weigh on you, is it? I know it's an unusual family history – even to me, so I can only imagine how you see it! – but I didn't...I wasn't trying to give you something new to stew over."

"Then I won't," says Carlos, and is surprised to find that he means it.

Sure, his mind will probably come back to it sometimes – thinking about everything is part of being an experimental theologian – but he has so little data. Not enough to analyze. Not nearly enough to get angry on behalf of people he's never met.

He would gladly get angry on Cecil's behalf, but if Cecil doesn't need it...."As long as you're okay, that's what's important to me."

"Dear Carlos." Cecil nods toward his still-untouched decoy smoothie. "Are you ever going to drink that, or should we start clearing out the fridge?"

Carlos does manage to down a few gulps before they start tackling their leftovers. As they're trying to decide whether a carton of yogurt has gone bad (the expiration date has been censored by the Sheriff's secret police), he adds, "Thanks. For telling me all that. I like getting to learn things about your family, any time you're okay with talking about them."

Cecil rests a hand on his upper arm, fingers curling into the fabric of his sleeve. "Conveniently enough, I like being able to tell you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

It's a lovely, if not nearly as traditional as Sherie would have liked, not that she's criticizing, she's just saying, bar mitzvah. Seven of the eleven other Hebrew people in town turn out for the occasion. Two of them are in a band, and were kind enough to offer their services for live reggae anbaric klezmer fusion music, free of charge.

Another is Cactus Champ's designated emergency babysitter, so he brings the bearded toddler along. (Jane is safely back at home, he confides to Sherie. Just...resting.) Quite a few kids from Seth's classes round out the group – a few with parents in tow, most without – and Susannah invites Michael Sandero, as a date, which gives Sherie such a headache as she tries to give her son her full attention while simultaneously watching her teenage daughter like a hawk.

Cecil reads a short speech about the implications of Seth having a skvader daemon. He builds it around the phrase an awkward compromise – which didn't sound like praise to Sherie at first, until he elaborates on how some situations have no good solution, no elegant way to make everyone happy, and it takes a special kind of skill and awareness to make the best of them.

(Sherie tears up a little at that point. The Faceless Old Woman, immaterial for most of the morning, appears long enough to hand her some tissues.)

Seth gets a laptop from his father, a college savings bond from his grandparents, a jagged-edged stained-glass ornament (extracted from a window, possibly with a hammer) from the Faceless Old Woman. Cecil has to rush back to his unforgiving employers almost as soon as he's done reading, but Khoshekh stays to watch Seth open the box marked from Cecil and Carlos. It's a beautiful hand-carved wooden skvader.

Sherie keeps her phone muted, and checks the messages every so often. Not a single emergency. Around the time they start into the food, she does get a mass text from Keith, nothing urgent, just an FYI: Unusual development at WZZZ. Dr. Supelli & I will investigate.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The wall is sturdy enough to hold up to the first explosion, but it does make the bunker shake.

Tamika is at attention immediately. "You: out," she orders the experimental theologians. Köhler looks affronted, Perle glum but unsurprised; they step back through the portal. "You too, Agent M."

Megan raps her fingers sharply on the chassis of the machine: NOT LEAVING.

"I didn't tell you to abandon the thing, I'm telling you to duck out of the way in case we have to start putting arrows in people," says Tamika firmly.

It does the trick; the girl steps back into the next world over. She's still unsteady on her new legs, but she can walk without help these days. Facing the direction of the blast, Tamika holds up the Knife, Rashi lowers his horns, and a fellow Advanced Reader raises her crossbow.

A second round of explosions wracks the concrete. This one sets its structural integrity near to crumbling, enough that the door (steel, welded shut) can be kicked down if you try hard enough, and somebody does. It hits the also-concrete floor with a clang, revealing a silhouette obscured by thick clouds of dust.

The silhouette is someone neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin.

"Palmero?" asks Tamika in disbelief.

"Tamika?" replies Palmero in kind, waving away the dust. "And you brought company! What are you all doing here?"

Tamika sheathes the knife and folds her arms. "Probably the same thing you are, only in a way like we've heard the word subtlety in our lives. Anybody follow you over here?"

"No! Although the secret police probably took note of my approach. Especially after I got out the explosives. And I may have described my intent on-air before putting the weather on...and, um, I did bring the mobile broadcasting equipment, which is highly traceable. It's not live right now, though!" Palmero looks from the theologians to the kids. "Is one of you Fey? Did you get her out of here already?"

"No, she's pretty stuck." Tamika nods at the machine: an old-fashioned ordinater, the screen about eight inches wide and entirely text-based, hooked up to a set of broadcasting equipment. It's welded together pretty heavily, almost more armor than equipment, bolted to an interior wall of the bunker. "I could carve her out, but I don't want to cut through anything important."

"Do I know you?" asks Fey, through a boxy speaker crammed under the screen. "You sound like the voice of –"

She rattles off the frequency of NVCR.

Palmero catches his breath. "It is! That's me! And you're Fey? It's been you this whole time? My name is Cecil – I didn't make it up, like you did, but I like it – I've been listening to you! You were listening to me?"

"Okay, everybody hold off the lovefest for a minute," says Tamika. "Palmero, the weather's on, you said? You've got a couple more minutes of air time tonight?"

"That's right."

So Tamika outlines a plan.

When Palmero comes back on, he tells a story of sneaking out of the station, making his way to Oxford Street, and blasting his way into an empty bunker. He narrates as if he's discovering the ordinater in realtime. He describes the lights of a system just coming alive.

Fey, on cue, starts reciting numbers again.

And boy, does Palmero sell the drama. Kinda oversells it, in Tamika's opinion. Builds it all the way up to an Elizabethan tragedy by the end: "Good night, sweet Fey. And good night, Night Vale...good night."

"Sixty-one," says Fey's voice from the speakers. "Forty-eight. Twenty-five. Forty-nine. Twenty-two. One." (Chimes.)

Palmero gives the mobile broadcasting equipment a pat, and signals to his listeners in the room. "We're clear."

Perle already has a couple of earbuds on, listening to WZZZ. She reports that Fey is successfully continuing to broadcast the numbers even when she stops funneling them through the in-studio speakers...and keeps it up even when she starts using words again, for the ears of the people around her only.

"You are amazing," says Palmero earnestly.

"I'm just running three subroutines at once," says Fey. "One to generate the numbers, one for an algorithm to scramble the numbers before broadcast so enemies of the Republic of Heaven can't hear the real set, one to talk to you! I don't know why I never thought of it before."

Megan is already coming back in, shoving other people out of the way – maybe by accident, maybe not – to get back to Fey's keyboard. "Agent M here worked out how to configure her to do it," explains Tamika to Palmero. "After bypassing her automatic 'hard reboot any time she starts developing consciousness' subroutine."

And once they'd explained how this was the whole founding principle of the Republic of Heaven, Fey was instantly and wholeheartedly on their side.

"She is a kind of alethiometer," puts in Köhler. Holding up an electrum spyglass, he adds, "A self-aware one, at the moment. The numbers she generates correspond to a set of symbols. We are still unsure if they are predictive. Perhaps you can help her to interpret?"

Fey displays an unscrambled string of numbers on her screen, and Perle produces a diagram of I Ching hexagrams on her phone, reading the summaries for each one.

Five minutes of talking them over, with Megan typing things at Fey, and Palmero doesn't have anything more than scattered guesses. When he pulls out his own alethiometer and asks for an interpretation, it comes together in a flash. "Of course! Camel, cauldron, beehive, cornucopia – it's talking about a lumber company that's going to have great success breaking into the Asian market over the next few years. Not terribly interesting, perhaps, but it's accurate. Even if I never would have guessed the specifics unless I heard about it afterward."

Megan's fingers fly over the keyboard.

"I can try it!" says Fey. To the others, she explains: "My new friend here – one of my new friends – wants to know if I can generate other numbers. To accurately predict or describe other things. Hmmm...three hundred and three point eight! Is that the temperature?"

Not here it isn't. At least, not in any units Tamika uses. A little fast thinking (and app-checking) from Köhler and Perle, though, and they figure it out: it's in a special theologian-only unit of measurement, where all the numbers sound high because the scale starts at absolute zero.

"I don't know how to name the units I'm using," admits Fey. "Let me try something else. Six thousand, seven hundred and sixty-two."

"And this is...?" prompts Köhler. He's still on the far side of the portal, because it was crowded in here even before Palmero showed up, but his binturong daemon has slipped in and climbed all the way up on top of Fey to look at her screen upside-down.

"A number that will be important to someone who is important to one of you!" says the ordinater. "To several of you, in fact. I can't express their name algorithmically, but I think I could plot your relationships on a scatterplot matrix, if I had a graphical user interface. Or hands, and a pen. Ummm. Height: six point one zero eight three. Age: thirty-eight point zero four six five...."

Palmero is already turning alethiometer dials. "Carlos. It's Carlos who's going to need it."

"Oh," says Fey self-consciously. "You're very quick at this."

"He had practice. And someone to learn from. You're just starting out," says Tamika. (To be honest, it's a letdown from what she'd expected when the theologians talked about another alethiometer being in here. But there's no point making a new recruit feel inadequate about things they can't control.) "Besides, he can't get digits. Identities and descriptions only. We need to hack some security codes or work out any high-level cryptography, we'll ask you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Keith and Perle are still dealing with numbers-station things; Nirliq and Quentin are off making a show of scouting replacement chapel space to start renting; and Sherie, back at the house, crunches numbers on her laptop. She doesn't have the processing power to emulate the geometry of bloodstone-circle connections the way she'd like to, but these simplified models will tide her over until she can next stop in at the college.

Tock the sludge monster sits in a lump on the couch beside her. Sometimes it makes these strings of clicking noises, as if it's purring. Or snoring. Sherie's mongoose daemon keeps his distance, doesn't want his fur to get messy, but Sherie pats Tock with one hand every once in a while, and it's not too hard to wipe off.

When Susannah comes downstairs to grab a drink, Sherie greets her with a friendly "So, sweetie, you and that football player seem to have reconnected pretty well."

Su leans against the doorframe between kitchen and living room. She's back in her standard uniform of black-on-black with more skulls and sharp things than Sherie imagines can be comfortable, but that make her happy, for whatever reason. (Sherie even restrained herself from making her daughter wear something more colorful to the mitzvah, although she did insist that anything with bones involved had to be left at home.) "Yeah, pretty much."

"Does that mean Michael started messaging you while you were away after all?"

"Um...."

"Because if he's the kind of boy who forgets all about you once you're not living close enough to see at school every day...."

"Mom."

"I'm not telling you how to live your life, sweetheart, I just don't want you getting hurt."

"He is not gonna hurt me. He's a good guy."

"Besides, his daemon is a roadrunner," adds Susannah's griffon vulture. "We eat those for breakfast."

"That isn't the kind of hurt I mean! If he wants something different out of this relationship than you do, and you end up feeling exploited...."

"Maybe I don't want anything out of it!" protests Susannah. "It's not like the only people I can date in high school are the ones I'd wanna marry. Maybe I just think he's hot, and that's all I'm looking for right now! How come you're on my case about this? He was a total gentleman this morning. I bet the Faceless Old Woman touched you more times than he touched me."

"Well," says Sherie.

The awkward pause stretches on much too long. By the time Sherie realizes her daughter was bringing it up as a platonic example, it's too late to talk her out of noticing. "Omigod, Mom. Is the anciana sin rostro who secretly lives in our home into you?"

"I. Ah."

"Oh my god are you into her?"

Sherie gives up. "We've been on...a date," she says, putting her laptop aside. "It's too soon to tell what that means, if anything, so I don't want you kids to feel any pressure to integrate her into our lives...."

"She lives in the house, she's already integrated – what's her name? You do know it, right? You're not dating her and still thinking of her as Faceless Old Woman?"

"Sweetie, please, keep it down –"

A knock from the direction of the hall gets their attention. It's Carlos – Sherie hadn't even heard him come down. "Sorry – didn't mean to interrupt," he says hoarsely. "It's just. Sherie. I'm going to need someone to babysit my research for a couple of days. Can I sit down with you and run through it?"

"Of course," says Sherie, getting to her feet. "Is everything all right?"

"Beams willing, yeah." Carlos swallows. "My mom had a heart attack. They say she could make a full recovery. But I'm flying out first thing tomorrow, just in case."

Notes:

lyhytikäiset/lyhytikäinen = Finnish for "the short-lived." In HDM, witch dialogue/POV refers to non-witches as "short-lifes"; I assume it sounds less awkward in their native languages. (From context, it might be a term specifically for non-witch women. For purposes of this AU, it can refer to all non-witches, regardless of sex or gender.)

Answered a question about "how do you name all the daemons?" over on Tumblr.

Chapter 40: The Will and the Law

Summary:

All Carlos wants to do is visit his sick mother. The tug-of-war between Strexcorp and the forces of the Republic has escalated too far to make it easy.

Night Vale.

According to officials at the Randy Neumann Memorial Aerodock, Carlos is on "the no-fly list."

The tiny charter planes that dock here always turn into planes from major airlines mid-flight, and it's not like Strex has enough clout in this universe to do hostile takeovers of USAir or NorthWest. But they can sure buy up everything on this end if they feel like it. They own the planes. The pilots. The building.

Local TSA representative Martin McCaffrey is polite to a fault, even after five minutes of Cecil yelling at him, but he's not a sympathizer. Nobody here is going to sneak Carlos out of town by air.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Let me get this straight," says Tamika. "Dr. Perfecto is thinking I'll let him into another universe, ride along with him for the three hours it takes to get to Kinlání, with world-hopping as necessary along the way when the terrain gets bad, let him back into this world at the end, and then me and the driver wave goodbye and I sit through another three-hour ride back to Night Vale? Like because I'm thirteen I don't have anything better to do with my day?"

She's busy. Strexcorp must have figured out that the Book Club is using Vansten's old places as bases, because they've had the Sheriff's secret police raid half a dozen of his local mansions, condos, penthouses, and summer cottages, "looking for bloodstones." Tamika already has her hands full without playing chauffeur.

The one bright side is, the Erika formerly known as Vansten finally has a real motivation to protect them, instead of just grudgingly helping them out because he doesn't like Tamika yelling at him.

"You could read in the car?" suggests Janice.

Tamika shakes her head. "No can do. I get carsick. You tell the outsiders if they want a ride to the aerodock, they take the normal roads, and get one of their grown-up friends to give them a ride."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate this."

"It's no trouble at all," says Steve from the driver's seat of the minivan. "Just push around whatever you need to make room."

Carlos shoves aside a bottle of sunscreen, a plastic bag full of gum wrappers, two serrated-edged teeth the size of his palm, and a crumpled permission form for the petting zoo (You understand that your child is solely responsible for any injuries provoked by petting the wolves too briskly). There's just enough space cleared out for him to lie on the floor, head resting on his overnight bag, Isaña cradled on his chest. He does put his elbow in a juice stain. It seems a small price to pay.

He wonders if Fey gave him the number "6762" because it's the alternate flight he should book.

"My own mamá was in the hospital for a heart attack once, back when I was in high school," reminisces Steve as he pulls out of the secret-police blind spot. "She wasn't there being treated for a heart attack; she was having her lungs rebuilt, after one of our record most-fatal school board meetings. But she was physically present when the hearts started attacking."

"Yeah?" says Carlos distantly. "Did she make it through okay?"

"Oh, sure. Mamá was PTA president for six years running, she could take out a spiderwolf with a clipboard if she had to. She didn't go until a couple years after Renée was born."

"It was a Tuesday," puts in Steve's badger daemon. "I remember because Mayor Winchell had signed an order that every day that week was Tuesday, for tax purposes...."

Carlos rubs Isaña's ears, grateful to Steve for filling the silence, soaking in the information without thinking too hard about it. The drive seems longer than necessary, but at last they shift gears and pull onto the möbius-strip portion of Route 800.

Twenty minutes on the freeway, and Steve says, "Carlos, buddy, I'm sorry, but we're not going to make it."

"What?" Carlos can't hear any gyropters. Or any other cars, even. "I don't understand. Are you out of gas?"

"It's all laid out in that map in the sky," says Steve. (Carlos has to make an effort not to groan out loud.) "The paths. The connections. Back in town I was using it to follow the safest routes. But we only have one possible route out here, and the Sheriff's secret police are going to intersect with it very soon."

He had Renée disable the tracker in the vehicle, he assures Carlos. The audio has been jammed since before Carlos even got in. Carlos's own phone is wrapped in five layers of tinfoil, which the cashier at the hardware store "warned" him (wink wink, nudge nudge) never to do, because that would block it from being traced, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

Still, a few minutes later, Carlos hears the distant thwock-thwock-thwock of gyropters.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"The giant masked army is camped in the part of their own universe which parallels the sand wastes just west of our position," reports Dana, pointing to the corresponding spot on the Big Map. "They're a very relaxed people. They can stay and wait for quite some time, if we're not ready. Some of the other armies I've found are less patient; fortunately, none of them have arrived yet."

They're in the Boy Scout base in the sand wastes: Tamika, her most well-read strategists, and all the Scouts working on armed-insurrection badges. The Big Map is spread across a table, six feet on either side, drawn from the first-hand observation of their best surveyors.

Tamika gestures to the nearest Weird Scout, and he grabs a couple of his 1/100-scale Gundam figurines to place on the board where the giants are.

A dozen LEGO secret police officers are clustered at the police station; another dozen sit on top of the abandoned mine shaft. Strexcorp's local coordinating office on the lip of Niton Canyon is marked with a sun-shaped baby rattle. Another one is at NVCR headquarters, along with a stuffed margay to represent Palmero. Toy plastic bloodstones mark the locations of the few major circles they can still count on.

"The one thing we cannot allow them to do is to invite the Smiling God's influence into town," says Dana. "They've tried it twice now. Each time they were driven back, but each time it became easier for them to try again. And if they succeed...let me put it this way, a Strexcorp employee praying for the protection of her God is the only ward that I haven't been able to project through."

"So we definitely shouldn't pull any more town-wide spells that have any chance of being hijacked," says Tamika.

"And we don't wait for them to start before we play defense, either," adds Rashi. "We put up our own wards, before they get a chance."

"I bet you anything the experimental theologians can calculate where to put the bloodstone circles so it's most effective," says Agent G, a senior girl on the theology liaison team.

"Don't see why we wouldn't use a traditional formation," complains a Blood Pact Scout with a toad daemon. "They're traditional because they work. Tested over generations. Why would some...interlopers...be able to show up and do better?"

"The hot interloper is the one who started the formation the first time around!" counters Agent G. "And a bunch of them were involved with kicking it out the second time, when they couldn't do a traditional formation at all, because most of them were moving."

"Can't hurt to put the outsiders to work on it," decides Tamika. "If we don't like any of the configurations they work out, we don't have to use them."

She paces back and forth, looking at the Big Map from a couple of angles, moving around the cheap Barbie-brand makeup mirrors they're using to represent Knife-carved portals between worlds.

"If we can keep Strex employees from getting answers when they pray to a Smiling God...and block them from sending in normal reinforcements from Desert Bluffs...we should be able to retake Night Vale with just one extra army." And once they have a broad base of safety in Night Vale, it'll be that much easier to launch their campaign on Desert Bluffs. "We'll have them outnumbered. Especially once the cops who are already slacking off on the job get the nerve to actually rebel."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos hates hates hates police custody.

They don't seem to be torturing him this time. Under the circumstances, they hardly need to. (Does brave like Lyra work as a mantra, here? Dr. Belacqua's parents both died when she was an infant; would she ever have gone through anything like this?)

Carlos and Isaña investigate their cell from top to bottom, looking for weaknesses, for things they can use. No luck. There isn't even a razor in the bathroom this time. Carlos palms a mini tube of shampoo (maybe he can squirt it in an attacker's eyes), puts on an episode of Entourage so he has a yardstick for how fast time is passing, and curls up on the bed to practice his Morse.

(D-U-S-T, he brush-taps against his daemon's chin; she spells out a related term, which turns out to be R-U-S-A-K-O-V, against his chest. He signals A-N-G-E-L-S...she responds with N-O-T R-E-A-L. And so on.)

Small mercies: he wasn't gassed or shot up with anything for the trip here, just hooded, cuffed, and driven in circles for a while. He hasn't lost some indeterminate amount of time to unconsciousness.

Still, two episodes of the HBO drama later, and even by his most optimistic estimates he should have landed in Narragansett by now.

Carlos can't take this much longer. He flicks off the TV, has some water to relieve the dryness in his throat, and says, "Officer! I'd like to know what I've been charged with."

A moment later, a brisk young voice responds through the still-off TV. "Say again?"

"What are the charges?" repeats Carlos. "Is it illegal for me to leave town, now? Because I don't know if you remember, but I'm not just an Outsider, I'm a New Dane citizen. It's my right under international law to go back to the US if I want to."

"Um, no," says the officer monitoring his cell. "I'm not finding any movement-restriction orders on you. Or any other active violations."

"And how long can you hold me without charging me with anything?"

"We can hold you indefinitely no matter what," says the officer. "If a charge would make you feel better, I can put a note in your file that you want one...?"

"What I want," says Carlos, hoping his heart isn't pounding loud enough for the mics to pick up, "is to speak to your supervisor."

"Sure thing. Please hold."

The speaker starts playing, of all things, tinny polka music.

It isn't long before an older, gruffer voice takes the young officer's place. "What can I do for you, Señor?"

"You could let me go." (Carlos doesn't really think that'll work, but it's worth a shot.)

"Ha ha," says the supervisor. "I certainly have never heard that one before. Is that all?"

"No. I want to speak to a different supervisor."

"Uh-huh. Señor, if you know the extension of the party you're trying to reach, that'll save us a lot of time."

Of course Carlos doesn't know that. He knows her ordinary-citizen identity, but it's probably a major faux pas to bring that up while she's on the job. And he isn't even sure if she's on duty at this moment, let alone any specific secret ID numbers for....

"Six seven six two," says Isaña.

"Please hold."

After a minute or so of heavy metal, Carlos is finally addressed by a voice he recognizes as Delphine Cabrera.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The shovel, its handle speckled with flies, bites into the well-kept turf.

Dana shimmers into presence ten feet away, with the pole of a swingset going through her leg. More flies are perched on the swingset...and on the wood chips under her feet...and in a wide sunburst across the old elementary-school playground, surrounding the thirteen holes Emmanuel is digging and the sack of heavy bloodstones next to his deerskin briefcase.

"Hello!" calls Dana. "Is there a strategic purpose to setting up a bloodstone circle here? Or could it be that you're waiting for Janice, and this is only to fill time?"

"A little of both!" says Emmanuel. "Janice's class has recess in ten minutes. I brought a briefcase full of spell ingredients to drill her on. That said, the house that doesn't exist is just over there." He leans on the shovel, one boot balanced on the edge of the blade, and nods toward the housing development across the baseball field. "Can't hurt to put in some extra protection in the neighborhood of a point like that, right?"

"I'm sure it can't," says Dana. Especially since that house feels connected to her journey, somehow. She passed through a version of it on her way into the other universe's desert, and there were photograms inside that she now knows to be of the Clouded Mountain. "You know, you seem happier than usual? No, more relaxed. No...more content."

Different portions of Neharah hum their approval in three-part harmony, while Emmanuel smiles. "I am."

"It's good to see! And since your daemon is returned to you, have you found that they stick in anybody's memories, even when you do not...?"

"I haven't gotten that lucky," sighs Emmanuel, going back to digging. "We went around and talked to everyone who used to know them – even crashed Cecil's show and put out a general plea to listeners – no responses. But it's an easier non-response to take, with them around."

He finishes carving out the last foot-deep pit and shoves a bloodstone in.

"Now, enough about me. How have you been? Did you visit to ask for something?"

"I was trying to visit the masked army," admits Dana. "But since I appeared here, I must be needed here. Can I help with the circle somehow? I didn't even realize they worked underground."

"They'll be much harder to use," says Neharah. "We thought a hidden and partially-disabled circle would at least be better than no circle at all."

Emmanuel buries the rest of the bloodstones, nudges the dirt back into place on top of them, and pats it down with the flat of the shovel. He kneels in the center of the disturbed clods of earth and prays for the fabric of reality to remain stable.

It isn't getting him very far, Dana thinks. "Can I try?"

"Sure, why not."

She steps into the space as he vacates it – out of good manners, not necessity, since the circle is broad enough that she could lie down in it – and stretches out her perception until she can sense the great glowing coils of the universe. They're frayed and brittle, especially around her beloved hometown. Stay, she implores them. Stay as you are.

"How...?"

In fact, be better, if you can. Be the best and strongest versions of yourselves that you are able to be.

"You're not even here," says Emmanuel faintly. "You're putting up an astral defense net using an underground circle that you're not actually standing in, just projecting yourself into from another circle in a different universe."

"Like the astral defenses the big public circles used to anchor?" asks Dana. "Is that what they are? I've only heard about them in local history class, never looked into them enough to recognize them...."

"Yes – that is, no, not in the same league, but yes, the same effect – if you think of the original shields as solid oak, this is plastic sheeting. Can't imagine it would stand up to a deliberate assault. If you're trying to keep the wind off, though...." Emmanuel wipes his brow. "And the originals were a team effort, so please don't take that as in any way diminishing...good lord, Dana, there can't be more than a dozen people in town who could put this up singlehandedly."

"And none of the others, not even the Mayor, can remember us well enough to work with," buzzes Neharah. "Can you come back this afternoon? We'll liberate another set of oversize bloodstones from Strex's holdings, meet you in Mission Grove Park, and give you cover of amnesia so none of the Strex-owned surveillance will catch you doing it again."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"I don't know if you've caught any of this through surveillance already," says Carlos, "but my mother, she was put in the hospital yesterday."

"I'm awfully sorry to hear that," says Delphine. It doesn't sound like polite obligation, either, she sounds genuine. Sympathetic.

Carlos leans against the headboard of the bed and rubs Isaña's ears. "Last I heard, they were saying she'd be okay, although my information is half a day out-of-date by now. Papi called my sister Lena, and she took care of calling the rest of the family. Lena's younger than me, but only by ten and a half months, so I never really big-brothered her like I did with our other siblings...her daemon even settled before Isaña did."

He pauses, as if a thought is just occurring to him.

"Renée and Janice are about the same age, aren't they? Which one's older?"

"Renée," says his observer. "By about four months."

"Yeah? That's a good gap. Birthdays won't overrun each other," muses Carlos. "My baby sister and I are both February birthdays, and that was hell on our parents' planning, at least once she got old enough to notice....They're both almost seventy now. My parents, I mean. I know that's longer than a lot of people get. Steve was telling me a little about his own mamá when we got pulled over...I don't know if you...."

"Lost my father last year," fills in Delphine. "He wandered into...a certain place about which you are not legally empowered to think...when it opened up during Poetry Week. Never knew my own mother. The way Papi tells it, he was living an ordinary single life one day, and the next he woke up in a different house with a new job and a daughter."

It's strange, isn't it, how fast things can change. One day you're a confident adult with a full life of your own, a great and stable career, even a wonderful boyfriend who's been mostly welcomed into the family. The next, you might as well be a scared teenager again, your parents piercingly mortal, your whole world narrowed to revolve around the latest news from the ICU.

"My family was expecting me this afternoon," says Carlos, throat tight. "And Strexcorp is pulling every string they can to keep me from getting there. I won't ask you to help sneak me out of town...." At this point, he's pretty sure that if he makes it out, Strex will find some way to block him from getting back into town. "...but if you could call my sister, and route the call through to here, if I could just talk to her...."

Delphine hesitates. "Please don't think I enjoy having to tell you no."

"If it was Janice. If you were the mother who'd been hurt, and someone was keeping Janice from getting to you."

"Yes, I have picked up on your subtext," says Delphine, not unkindly. "Let me have a look at some records. I may be able to reassure you."

She leaves him with gentler on-hold music. Something with piano, and a string quartet.

It isn't long before her voice returns. "Dr. Perfecto? About thirty minutes after you were brought in, Cecil Palmero placed a call to the same US number that contacted you last night. It lasted four minutes and eighteen seconds."

Hot tears pool in Carlos's eyes. Cecil is on top of this. Sure, Cecil doesn't always know how to not creep out the family, but he's a champion at talking around the specifics of everything secret-police-related. It's going to be okay.

"Would you like me to play you the audio?"

"No!" exclaims Carlos. "No, I don't want to eavesdrop. Just knowing is....Thank you." He scrubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, dragging it across the by-now-familiar scar. "And if I wanted to talk to her after I was out of here...an unsupervised phone call, just one, so Strex won't be able to take advantage of anything I say...."

"You ask an awful lot."

"I'll owe you," pleads Carlos. "I'm good at my job – really, really good – not to mention handy with a lot of things that aren't strictly in the job description. And I'll owe you a favor. As long as it doesn't kill anyone – or put my teammates in any undue danger – you can call me in for anything experimental theology can do."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"That's going to be so dangerous," says Agent G. (As always, the meeting cavern is awfully shadowy, but Sherie is getting good at recognizing the liaison team's voices. Especially since Agent G is in Susannah's Girl Scout troop.) "Are you sure there's no other way?"

"Oh, there are always other ways," says Sherie. "I could run you the calculations and work out the geometry for some others, if you're okay with it taking time, and if you don't mind the results not being as good, I'm not saying you would mind, just something to think about. The bottom line is, this bloodstone-circle network is going to be fastest and most effective if you get a couple of nodes right on top of the places that have the most prayers to the Smiling God."

"I say we go for it," puts in Agent R (unmistakably the daughter of Steve Carlsberg; since his re-education, she sometimes sounds more like Steve than Steve does). "Danger? Hah! We laugh in the face of danger."

"Plus, one of them – the Strex chanting wallow on Somerset – is right next to Lucinda's Pawn Shop," says Agent N (one of the Agents Formerly Known As Shadowraven, and, it turns out, the tween child of Night Vale's leading black-market bloodstone trader). "Mamá – I mean – Señora Fiero can help us set one up there."

"And Señor Cecil can help us get one into the radio station," adds Agent R. "The only really hard one is their base by Niton Canyon, and it's not even in the middle of a civilian population. We can just get all our gyropters and storm the place."

"The radio station won't be that easy," protests Agent L (a grade or two below Susannah, daemon settled as a bird, both of them wearing opaque-visored racing helmets). "Cecil's one of the good guys, but he's not next door to a Strex business, he's at a Strex business. And ever since the White Sand blew up, they own everything else for blocks around, too."

"Can you can sneak them in?" suggests Sherie. "Hide the bloodstones in something else. A set of trick books. Or bake them into cakes." (What? It works on TV.)

Agent G, starting to warm to the idea, snaps her fingers. "Girl Scout cookies. Hide them in the boxes."

"And, what, have Cecil carry in thirteen boxes and never eat any cookies out of them?" counters Agent L. "Like that won't be suspicious."

"We could sell him more than thirteen boxes," suggests Agent R. "Or, ooh, ooh! We could have somebody take in all their boxes, and be using the radio to sell them to listeners!"

"Is that something Girl Scouts are allowed to do?" asks Sherie. Even knowing it's part of a secret war plan, she can't help thinking it sounds like an unfair advantage.

"Nobody's done it before," admits Agent G. "But there's a first time for everything."

"Besides, this isn't supposed to be true, but secretly? Señor Cecil can say or do anything on-air. Anything he wants," puts in Agent R. "We just have to find some way he can put it in the form of yelling at Papi."

 

-{,(((,">

 

For the first time, Carlos hasn't been pummeled, shocked, drenched, or touched by the time he gets bundled back into a secret-police van. He's still safely in possession of his glasses, his chapel coat, and his shoes. They just stick matching hoods over his daemon and his head, drive them in circles for a while, then open the door and hustle him out...

...into an even smaller space. Carlos barks his shins, bangs his head, knocks into another person who's clambering along beside him. Feels like another adult male. "Steve...?"

"That's me!" says Steve warmly. "Pull your leg forward."

Carlos does, bumping his knee against some plush, fabric-covered obstacle. He fumbles the bag off of his head just in time to see Steve pull down the hatchback of a van – it's his own van, they're in the back, and the door would have crushed Carlos's foot if he hadn't moved it. He's crammed up against the middle seats, where Janice and Renée are sitting, quietly reading comic books.

"Hi, girls," says Steve as he unwraps the bag his badger daemon was stuffed in. "How was school today?"

"Fine," chorus the kids, not even looking up.

Their sanguinity is reassuring. Carlos does get a jolt when he recognizes the scenery through the tinted windows: they're in the parking lot behind the library. Then Khoshekh flows through the front door, followed by Cecil hopping into the driver's seat, and he relaxes. They're safe.

"Steve, your incompetence knows no bounds, and I'm charging you the cost of Carlos's bribe as well as your own," says Cecil by way of greeting. "Speaking of bribes: the girls have been sitting very nicely while we waited for you, so I promised them ice cream."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil holds Carlos's ice cream bar (myrtle fudge flavor, from a box of six bought at the Raúl's), while Carlos stands at the pay phone out behind the Taco Bell and calls Lena.

"Carlos! It's about time! Mamá's out of the ER, but she goes back into surgery tomorrow afternoon for a pacemaker. Mike and I both got into town today, so we've seen her. Where the hell are you? Your boyfriend called, at least none of us were left waiting at the train station, but –"

"Just a second, hermanita," implores Carlos. "Officer?"

"You're clear," says Delphine. "You have ten minutes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The good news is, Carlos has a plan. It's too late to enact it tonight – especially since Narragansett is, at best, two hours ahead of Night Vale – but his sister agrees to help set it up tomorrow.

Steve gets behind his own steering wheel again, and gives Carlos and Cecil a ride to the house. The girls wave goodbye...and Janice calls, "Thanks for the ice cream, Tío Cecil!"

Cecil, toting Carlos's recovered duffel bag, waves back. "Only the best for my favorite niece!"

For one brief shining moment, all Carlos's worries about his own family are lifted from his mind. "Cecil! She's your niece? When did you find out?" (Does this mean he has a sister? Is Delphine his sister? Or his missing brother could have been transgender – although, to Carlos's admittedly limited understanding, even if a trans man can carry a child, he's not likely to want to –)

Cecil cups his face in one hand, drawing Carlos's gaze to him, and gives the briefest shake of his head. "Of course she is my niece," he says out loud. "We have always known this. Do you have any reason to believe she is not my niece? Does anyone have a reason – by which I mean credible, legally-admissible evidence – to believe such a thing?"

No, Carlos realizes. He can't imagine why Cecil would be putting on this front in the first place, but it's a solid one. It's public knowledge that he has at least one sibling whose existence is wiped from all records and memories. Delphine won't let anyone get away with doing DNA tests on Janice; if there are any records that might reveal the truth of the girl's parentage, her mother will have them locked down too. "Of course. Sure. Your niece, Janice."

He follows Cecil inside, stopping to grab the mail, then sorting it while he walks. Card for Quentin...mayoral campaign literature...conference invitation for Köhler...coupons for Strexcorp businesses....

...a brochure about the heart health coverage in a StrexMed insurance plan. Options available to the family members of all faithful employees who believe in a Smiling God.

Carlos stops in his tracks. "Susannah!" he yells up the stairs. "Are you up there?"

"Yeah?" calls Sherie's daughter after a beat. "Dr. Carlos? Weren't you supposed to be gone by now?"

"Sure was!" says Carlos. "Can I borrow you for a minute? I need something set on fire!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

There's a new ten-foot-high chain-link fence separating the Whispering Forest from the usual road they use to approach it. Yellow signs mark it off every fifty feet or so, stamped with bold black letters: NO TRASPASAR, SE PERSEGUIRÁ A LOS INFRACTORES.

Sherie and the others get out of the van for a closer look. The chain-link extends as far as they can see in either direction. And the team has reached a point where they can't make any more Atal lenses without collecting more of the Forest's resin.

"It is the same sort of fencing Strexcorp has been installing around Mission Grove Park," reports Keith. "Although the fencing at the park includes gates."

"Is it legal to block this place off?" asks Quentin. The flying-squirrel daemon on his shoulder rubs her paws in worry. "Isn't the land public property? Or property of the sentient trees who live on it, or something?"

"Hey, forest!" calls Nirliq through the fence. "Any chance you asked Strexcorp to do this?"

A shivery rustle goes through the leaves. "No, no!" whisper a chorus of voices, just barely audible from this distance. They come in German, Spanish, and English; Sherie could probably understand the Spanish on its own, but her language skills aren't good enough to keep switching, so all she catches is the English. "We didn't ask for fencing / we don't like fencing / they were not nice people / what was wrong with their eyes? / and now people like you can't visit / we want you to come visit us / you look so vibrant today! / it's okay, it wasn't your fault! / you're so smart, are you working on interesting things? tell us all about them! / your hair probably smells like cinnamon."

Nirliq grimaces. "We'll look into it!" she assures the trees. To the rest of the team, she adds, "And we'd better go over our inventory, too. If there's anything we'll need to start rationing in the near future, we need to know it."

"But surely they can't..." begins Sherie, then stops herself. True, all the team's other needs can be shipped here from out of town – but who's to say Strex won't find a way to block the shipments from getting in? They sure are doing a bang-up job of keeping people from getting out.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Central Narragansett.

"Knock, knock."

Carlos's mother looks up from the half-raised hospital bed. "Ah, quirquinchito!" she exclaims, over the steady beeping of a heart monitor. "You made it! I knew you would."

"Hi Mamá, hi Papi," says Carlos from the doorway. His father, sitting next to the bed, nods in greeting; the raccoon and duck daemons smile at him from the comfort of a cushioned cart. "Couldn't keep me away...and believe me, they tried. It's not exactly how I planned to be here, but I'm okay. Don't be scared, all right...?"

He can tell when Mamá notices his missing daemon, because the beeping gets slightly faster.

"I'm fine," he stresses. "An experimental theologian is always...usually...fine. Just having an out-of-body experience."

His body is in a bloodstone circle, Isaña safely beside it, their ghost buoyed across the continent by seven other linked minds. Eight once you count Lena, who relocated the circle from their parents' house to a waiting room down the hall. It's undeniably using team resources for personal reasons, but the team needs all the practice they can get...and, as Sherie pointed out, it's valuable to practice in a situation where the stakes are real.

Mamá gets used to her son's insubstantiality with admirable speed, and relaxes into normal conversation: praising the hospital staff, lamenting the food ("give me one week with their head of catering, I would straighten them out"), asking after Carlos. "You've barely posted on the Facebook since Christmas. What have you been doing?"

"Oh, you know," says Carlos modestly. "A little experimental theology here, a little surviving in a horrifying dystopia there. Spent most of yesterday held in a secret underground prison without charge, then my boyfriend took me out for ice cream."

He has no intention of telling them everything. One perk of visiting by astral projection is that he doesn't have to. There are limits to how well you can control your appearance – Carlos couldn't manifest as, say, a five-headed dragon – but he can regress to the self-image he had a few months ago. Pre-haircut. Pre-scar.

"You should share these things more often," chides Mamá. "I'm a frail old woman now, you know. If you don't tell me about your life, one day you'll wake up and I won't be around to tell."

"Mamá!" protests Carlos, leaning on/through the edge of the bed. "Don't even joke."

His mother softens. "Nothing will go wrong, tesoro mío," she says, resting her hand in the projection of his. "I am an excellent candidate for surgery, all the professionals have said. In fine physical health, especially for my age, with only the one small exception."

There is no theological way to justify calling an acute myocardial infarction a small exception. But experiments have found that confidence in a medical treatment is positively correlated with effectiveness...and besides, Carlos is not about to argue his mother out of being confident she's going to live. "Yes, Mamá."

 

-{,(((,">

 

He would happily stay clear through until his mother gets wheeled out for the operation, but his little brother and baby sister will be here soon, and they're supposed to take turns rather than all crowd around Mamá at once. So he flickers back into the next room, drawn by the interworldly resonance of the bloodstones.

"Lord, Carlos, it is disturbing to see you do that," says Lena, trying to look more comfortable than she feels in an overstuffed waiting-room chair with rocks around her feet. "You – you're really not –"

I'm not dead, thinks Carlos at her.

Astral-projecting with her mind as a relay means she'd be able to tell if he was lying. She relaxes.

Maybe too soon, given the rest of what Carlos has to say. "Listen, before los pequeñitos come out here...there's something I need to ask. You always said if it turned out I was gay, you'd support me."

"Of course," says his sister. The fruit-bat daemon on her shoulder smoothes down his fur with a claw. "Although if you want to make it public, don't do it now. Wait until Mamá's stronger."

"It's not that! Not yet. This is for more personal reasons. It's...you must know that if Cecil were a woman, or if I was...I'd marry him. In a heartbeat."

Yes, she knows. Anyone who's seen their daemons cuddle against each other's bare hands can't not know.

"There are worlds where that happens, can you imagine? In Will's world, for instance...marriage is a legal contract between any two adults. You can hold a wedding between any combination of genders. It comes with the same rights and protections, no matter what."

"And you want to do...something like that?" guesses Lena. "Have a kind of ceremony? It would be Cecil wearing the dress, right...?"

"Also not my point!" Carlos doesn't expect there'd be a dress at all – if anything, Cecil would wear a tunic, over pants made from the hide of an animal he personally hunted and skinned for the occasion – but a mental nudge from his daemon keeps him from going off on a tangent about Night Vale fashion customs. "The legal rights. Those are the point."

He folds his hands around each other, the way he would have curled them around Isaña if she were here.

"We can draw up papers and sign blood pacts all we want, and they'll be recognized within the borders of Night Vale, but might not be honored outside it. Especially since I'm a foreign national. And things have been messy here this whole time, but they're about to get a lot messier, fast. So if something...happens, to me."

"Carlos...."

"I'm not planning on it! I'm saying, just in case," presses Carlos. "If someone needs to make medical decisions on my behalf. Cecil makes them. If I – if I die, I have a current will, it says what I want to happen, but it also says Cecil has the right to change it. And whatever he does, I need you not to fight him on it, understand? If anyone in the family tries to override his decision, I need you to talk them down."

With impressive dexterity for someone who's never used a telepathic connection before, Lena throws a bundle of feelings at him. I know he loves you. I'm not doubting that. But. "The cultural differences...he might not understand...."

"He might not make the call you would want. He might do something that seems weird, or creeps you out, or doesn't make any sense. I know." Those descriptions could fit any number of procedures that, in Night Vale, are as routine and as vital as lifesaving organ donations. "That's why I'm telling you, now, to let him. The law will take your side, if you decide to go after him. Promise me you won't go after him."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Holding Lena's promise close to his heart, Carlos spends the afternoon at the gun range.

He finishes a clip just in time for Cecil's show, and gets two calls during the weather. "She's okay," he says to the second one. "Surgery went fine. She's going to be okay."

"Carlos, I am so very happy for you," breathes Cecil. "Stay where you are, I'll pick you up and take you out for dinner to celebrate. Also, what are your favorite Girl Scout cookies? My niece starts selling them today, and of course we're going to support her – just let me know which ones to order."

Notes:

los pequeñitos = the little ones (i.e., their younger siblings)
NO TRASPASAR, SE PERSEGUIRÁ A LOS INFRACTORES = No Trespassing, Violators Will Be Prosecuted

Daemon portraits: Cactus Jane, Sarah Sultan, Simone Rigadeau. Also: Emmanuel and Neharah; Sherie, family, and friends.

Chapter 41: The Battle in the Vale

Summary:

Dana does some last-minute wrangling of alternate-world allies. Cecil and Janice's uncle-and-niece team-up finally reaches the cookie-sales stage. Loving couples get their last few nights of peace together, and then all hell breaks loose.

Columbia River Basin, Cascadia.

Basalt cliffs wind their way along the shores of the river: red-gold on the near side in the light of the sunset, blue in the distance from the shadows and the haze. Almost every non-vertical surface is covered in thick pine forest. Standing on the roof of a cabin high up the slope, Dana can see the narrow line of a highway running alongside the riverbank, and the bungalows and flat-roofed stores of a little town clustered around it.

"You have a lovely view," she says.

"Isn't it beautiful?" sighs Charles Raimeaux, otherworldly archaeologist. He and his hedgehog daemon are on the roof too: sitting, because they have more to lose from falling. "When the team first rented the place, I was afraid it was going to be nothing but headaches, being this isolated from a town that's already out in the middle of nowhere. A few months in, and I wouldn't have it any other way."

"That's delightful to hear." Dana takes a seat beside him on the shingles. "Is the science working out as well as the scenery?"

"Oh, it is. The science could not be better," says Charles. "We've done extensive experiments on the basalt strata that were mined to build your fortress, and it has amazing radiation-blocking and divine-resonance-blocking properties. They're related to the fine-grained matrix of this particular silicon isotope in an unusually felsic –"

"I'm afraid I won't understand or appreciate anything about the rest of that sentence," says Dana apologetically. "Can you translate any of these properties into practical use?"

Charles winces. "Um, Dana...I appreciate your confidence, but this team consists of six miscellaneous researchers in a cabin in the woods, using the bare minimum of equipment we could afford to have shipped upriver."

"Not you personally, perhaps," allows Dana. "If you could assign the work to other experts, in any field...with an unlimited budget and access to any resources necessary...what would you have them do?"

"Unlimited everything, huh...?" Charles picks up his hedgehog daemon and sets her on his knee. "I guess the dream is some kind of nanocoating that does what the basalt does. Lightweight and flexible, so you could use it to armor your existing defenses. We could work out a blueprint for the structure, but you'd need a real chemist to double-check it...a major nanomaterial fabbing plant to produce it...a team of engineers to test different versions...and incredible security to make sure none of the details got back to Strexcorp. I get the impression they could find a way around a general manufacturing-industry NDA if they wanted."

Dana nods. "Most probably. You work on those blueprints! I'll go look for the rest of that."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India (past).

Dana appears on a metal platform overlooking a massive factory floor. People in sterilized full-body suits move around between the machines. On the far side, directly across from her, unsuited people work in an observation deck behind thick glass.

Someone behind the glass waves at her.

It looks very much like Cecil.

Dana projects herself over. Sure enough, it's another man with Cecil's face, framed by glasses, a beard, and short, slicked-back hair. "Goodness, you are the spitting image of Intern Lashonda," he says, offering a hand to shake. "Welcome! My name is Dr. Nedim Suresh, and I understand the Republic of Heaven is in its hour of need?"

"Not entirely," says Dana, shaking his hand. "If I have timed this correctly, the Republic of Heaven will hit its hour of need three years from now. I thought that was a reasonable project timeline. Are you an experimental theologian? Or a scientist?"

"I am a scientist, yes! Chief of nanoengineering here at SATYA. We have a vast budget, the best equipment, and many fine engineers. Whatever you would like nanoengineered, say the word, and it is yours."

"If I can get the phones to connect, I'll have the scientist with the blueprints email them to you," says Dana. "He's in another universe and at a different point of time, though, so I may end up having to copy out the details by hand. I apologize if this question is weird, but how did you know that was exactly what I would be looking for?"

"Ah, there is no need for apologies," Nedim assures her. "We have been in touch many times in recent weeks with a representative from the Malone Foundation. No one has ever gotten anywhere in this world by turning down a directive by the Malone Foundation! Also, the representative in question was incredibly handsome, and I do not mind telling you that if we are ever on the same continent I will certainly ask him to join me for dinner."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

As part of his new role as a Definitely Legitimate Devoted Uncle, Cecil takes his "niece" to watch a high school basketball game. A couple of Book Club members escort Carlos over (in his Night Vale Spiderwolves jersey, his daemon wearing a matching kerchief) just in time to catch the end. He stands at the end of the bleachers, Isaña in the crook of his arm, and watches Cecil and Janice.

She's the same sweet, considerate girl Carlos has seen when she's helped them with experiments. Softer-spoken and more visibly thoughtful than Renée, she claps when the Spiderwolves get in a good play, but doesn't join in the shouting and booing when the visiting team cuts them off. Her daemon sits on her shoulder as a black-furred vole. Adorable.

(Although for some reason, Carlos has no trouble picturing her on the back of a warhorse, aiming a rifle and shouting orders, if necessary.)

Her hair is done up in an elaborate French-braided hairstyle instead of her usual two simple braids. Carlos doesn't think much of it until the game ends, when Janice, now riding Tehom as a goat, says, "Can we stop in the bathroom before we go so I can look at my hair?"

"We certainly can!" says Cecil, squeezing her shoulder. To Carlos, he explains, "I put it up for her during halftime. It's one of the styles her grandmother taught me."

Carlos hadn't expected Cecil to get so into this. They've already had the kid conversation; Cecil claimed not to have any special yearning for kids of his own, and Carlos doesn't think he was lying. And yet, the idea of having a niece – not just potentially sharing Carlos's nieces and nephews, but having a child in his own line, to inherit what little he has in the way of Palmero family tradition – seems to have unlocked something in him.

While they're loitering outside the girls' bathroom, Carlos tucks back Cecil's hair (it's getting long; he hasn't had it cut since Carlos's encounter with Kevin) to press a kiss to his cheek.

"Mmm," says Cecil happily. "What was that for?"

"No reason." Carlos likes seeing him like this, that's all. "Hey, does all this mean...if Steve and Delphine get married...that you and Steve will be related?"

Cecil's smile fades into a look of comical horror. "Oh sweet Yambe-Akka, I never thought of that. Will we? Is that a theological possibility?"

"I'm not sure. It's still a few degrees away." Carlos pictures the family tree in his head. "He'd be Janice's stepfather...Delphine is her mother, and is in the right position to be your sister-in-law...so I guess Steve could be your...step-brother-in-law?"

The fact that the whole thing is a charade doesn't stop Cecil from keening in distress. "I knew it! Steve couldn't make my life easy, oh no, even when he finally found a nice woman to date, there had to be a catch! That man is such a –"

Janice and Tehom come out of the bathroom.

"– halfway decent human being," grits out Cecil. "Come on, Carlos, we don't want to make Janice late for Scouts."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Groom Lake Base, Nevada.

Dana makes a point of appearing inside the sterilized chamber that holds Project 37, along with the machine that contains and constrains him. She wants his scientist, Caleb Rose, to have the visual reminder that they're talking with Enigma, not about him.

As it turns out, it wasn't necessary. Caleb is on this side too, wearing a pale-blue hazmat suit, attaching wires between one of Enigma's refrigerator-sized components and the back of an old-fashioned radio.

"Dana's back," says Enigma's voice from one of the speakers, while the mouth on his frail physical body smiles. "Are we almost ready? I'm tired of waiting. I want to start talking!"

"You can't rush science," chides Caleb. "Besides, if you need someone to talk to, you can always page me. You know that."

"That's different," says Enigma. "I want to start talking to someone like me."

"Fey isn't exactly like you," puts in Dana. "I explained that, right? She's not a machine wired through a human brain, she's just a machine, with its own independent intelligence."

"Close enough for government work," says Enigma lightly. The grim joke being that he is government work.

"Anyway, I just came from Night Vale, so I can confirm that their side of things is ready." Tamika has cut a narrow, hard-to-see window next to Fey's transmission tower, and a wide downward-angled one to go with her receiving equipment. If all goes well, Enigma's new radio should be directly in the path of Fey's frequency, and Fey should be able to pick up any answering broadcasts from this world.

Fey's alethiometry gets true results, but she has no idea how to interpret them. And Cecil's process is so different, he wouldn't know where to begin teaching her. When Dana heard the details, her first thought was that Enigma's method of alethiometry might be, as he says, close enough.

"One more moment." Caleb pushes the radio up against the machine. "Okay, it's all wired into your power grid. No connection to the outside control panels, so nobody can shut it down without coming in here. Try turning it on."

Enigma adjusts the anbaric current with some mental process Dana can't see, and the radio crackles to life. Seconds later, the audio is duplicated on all his speakers.

The frequency still has to be set manually. Caleb turns the dial past a lot of static, plus a station reading out single-digit English numbers in an automatic male voice. "Our universe has numbers stations too," explains Caleb. "The US has no idea who runs them, or why – if we did, I'd have the clearance level to know about it – so if anyone else picks up your Fey, she'll blend right in. Do you think ours could also be run by intelligent computers?"

"That I don't know," says Dana. "Have you tried asking Enigma?"

Caleb's voice turns suddenly sharp. "Of course not. If it was a matter of national security he would have said so already, and it's not his job to wear himself out looking up every little thing I'm interested in."

"Of course. My mistake."

"Ocho. Treinta y tres. Cuarenta y siete." [Chimes.] "Diez. Uno. Dieciséis. Sesenta y tres. Veintitrés...."

Dana brightens. "That's her!"

Out of nowhere, the numbers are overlaid with a short series of tones. Enigma shifts WZZZ's audio to the right-hand speakers, and, from the left, whispers (though it's not like anyone can overhear), "That was me!"

Fey's voice keeps speaking as usual...but now it's joined by a string of beeps so rapid they blend into static. It's a code from this universe, developed by a Franchian named Baudot: simpler than even the ASCII of Dana's world, but more complex than Morse. Listeners in her world won't know how to decode it; listeners in this world won't have any equipment with the processing power to try.

Beaming, Enigma broadcasts a reply, now using the same code.

The artifact from the masked warriors' world begins working as they speak, opening Dana's mind to the meanings of this foreign communication...but for the first time, it isn't enough. Her perception is just too slow to keep up. She wouldn't even be able to understand her native Spanish at this speed. And maybe that's all right. Surely these two, more than anyone else she's met in her interworldly travels, deserve the privacy....

The chittering communiqués stop. A series of LEDs flash. A machine in the observation room starts whirring and spits out a series of punch cards, one on top of another.

"Enigma?" asks Caleb. "What's wrong?"

Dana turns her attention from the machinery to the man in the chair. He's gone from pleased to grimacing, out-of-breath, the visible half of his face even more ashen than usual.

Caleb wheels and heads through the door to the decontamination chamber.

"This is no time to walk away!" cries Dana. She makes her hand solid enough to rest on Enigma's. "I'm right here. Is there anything I can do?"

"Siete. All right. Cincuenta y uno. We learn this later," says Fey's voice from half the speakers, interspersing the numbers with normal, if stilted, English. "Treinta y ocho. It was a pleasure talking to you. Sesenta. Take care! Cincuenta y nueve." [Chimes.]

"I'm okay," says Enigma from the other speakers. It's eerie how his artificial voice is still calm, even when Dana can see his body's chest heaving. "Had to drop part of her transmission, but I'm not going to overload."

In the other room, only half peeled out of the hazmat suit, his scientist waits over a control panel. "If any of these meters suggest that you're lying, I start flipping switches."

"Overprotective scientist." (From the other half of the speakers, Fey's voice dissolves into static. It's risky to leave these windows open long-term; Tamika or an Erika must have closed them.) "We can do this again. I just need more digital memory first. Right now I can't process fast enough for her. Kilobytes. Can you get me kilobytes?"

"Kilobytes, he says," grumbles Caleb. "Maybe I can wheedle a prototype out of IBM, but everyone will want to know what for. Dana, can't you find a way to get us some of the incredible data-storage devices from your world? If we could engineer those into Enigma's system, it would be much easier."

"The engineering might be simple, but getting it here will take some work," says Dana apologetically. "You see, in our world, the location that corresponds to this room – and, indeed, this entire facility – is in the middle of the most dangerous town we have. I'm not saying it will be impossible! But you should also speak to this Aibey Em person, just in case."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

A dump trick emblazoned with the Girl Scouts of Hispania Nova logo drives past Cecil's apartment complex at half past eight, leaving behind a Prius-sized block of cookie boxes.

Carlos recognizes most of the varieties, even though some of them are under different names: for example, the ones he knows as Trefoils are labeled Shortbreads, and the ones he would call Samoas are Scorpion Curses. Others are completely unfamiliar, like the ones in the unmarked black metal boxes. And at least a quarter of the mass of the delivery is a single massive wooden crate with air holes punched in it.

Cecil tears open just enough of the plastic to extract a box of Thin Mints, writes DO NOT STEAL on a piece of paper using chocolate sauce, and tapes it to the rest of the block. "That should hold it until Monday."

"Isn't this a little much?" asks Carlos, eyeing the crate. (Did it just move?) "Even in the name of supporting your niece...."

"I have been presented with a World's Best Uncle mug, and that is a solemn duty that I intend to live up to," says Cecil primly. "Now come upstairs and give me your present."

Since Carlos's kidnapping, they've spent all their nights together, and more than half at the experimental theologians' house. But having teammates down the hall doesn't exactly put Carlos in the mood, and now that there are teenagers down the hall it's even worse. And given that today is Cecil's birthday (more or less. He didn't spend a whole number of years on the subway, so who knows when his body will really reach [mumblemumble] years of age, plus a bunch of days from last week have been swapped with this one for municipal tax purposes), he's definitely getting some.

It isn't long before they're making out on the living room couch, to the notes of a romantic (and, for police observers, sound-muffling) CD. The barely-touched box of cookies lies on the end table, between the remote and a sweet-scented bouquet of Cecil's favorite flowers. Cecil is halfway in Carlos's lap, one leg flung between Carlos's thighs, while their daemons cuddle on the carpet by their feet.

Cecil's hair is really getting in his face now. And, given their position, in Carlos's. He smooths it out of the way with both hands, cupping Cecil's skull and holding it in place. "Hey, d'you want this trimmed?"

"Large neckwear is against the new dress code at work," says Cecil. "And I only have so many shirts with high collars."

Ah. "Forget I said anything."

But there's a chill in the room now that forget it won't brush away. Cecil withdraws from the snuggling to adjust his scarf-of-the-day (his old Scouting neckerchief), and returns with perhaps a little less enthusiasm, a little more distraction....

"Hey," soothes Carlos, rolling them around so it's Cecil's back against the couch, cradled between the cushion and Carlos's arm. "Don't think about anything else, gatito. Don't be anywhere but here. With me."

It seems to do the trick. Cecil hums in approval and melts against him, back arching so Carlos's palm can stroke the curve of his spine. He pulls Carlos into a fresh kiss, which Carlos is happy to answer, his mouth warm and soft...then hooks his fingers in the neckline of Carlos's T-shirt and runs his tongue along the underside of Carlos's jaw.

"I kind of love it when you lick things," pants Carlos.

"I've noticed," croons Cecil. "This is positive reinforcement. Mmm. Call me kitten again."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

"How do you manage to wear yourself out in the middle of a world that sustains people so well they never need to eat?" asks Maureen, helping Dana up from the platform as she sways on her feet.

"I think I've lived approximately eighteen hours in the past ten." Dana yawns, leaning on Maureen's shoulder; Eustathias turns into something lavender, roughly monkey-shaped and the size of a mouse, so Maureen's rabbit daemon can be the one to carry him toward the stairs. "This is fun, though, isn't it? Talking to people...coordinating things...working out how to best serve community needs."

"Doing high-level magic like it's intro Sumerian. Not having any chores. Spending most of your day weightless if you feel like it," fills in Maureen.

"That too."

When they make it down to Dana's room, Maureen adds, "You know that even though I get snappy when life is terrifying, which is always, I still think you're great and everything, right?"

"I thought so, yes." Instead of letting go, Dana wraps her arms around Maureen more tightly. Her solid, reassuring, soft, cuddly Maureen. "Mmm. Stay with me? I would appreciate the company...the support...the this."

"You picked a hell of a time to get vague with your word choice."

"Oh, my feelings are legitimately broad and expansive and defy concise description," Dana assures her. "Aren't yours? I have swept through so many vast constellations of vocabularies as I sweep through worlds and civilizations, and yet some things only feel more subtle the more words I experience for them. Can anyone really delineate such a delicate tangle as human emotion with language? Would anyone wish to?"

"Well...yeah," says Maureen. "I admire you, and I have a crush on you. See? Not hard."

Ohhh. That is, indeed, simpler than Dana imagined.

"So I wouldn't mind cuddling with you while you fall asleep," continues Maureen, tense with nerves, "but I would like it a lot more if this was going places. By which I mean, y'know...kissing places."

For the first time in a while – especially if you don't count all the times induced by painful injuries – she is not only inhabiting her own body, but extremely conscious of the fact that she is a solid physical human, with blood and elbows and tendons and firm, warm skin. Also, that she is right up against Maureen's breasts, which have not gotten any less fantastic over the years. "Now that I think about it...with all the traveling I've been doing...it would be almost unfair if I never got to go to kissing places."

"I could not agree more."

So Dana rises up on her tiptoes, tilts her face so she doesn't smush Maureen's glasses, and presses her lips to the corner of Maureen's mouth.

As she drifts off later, cuddling with Maureen's arm flung over her waist and her chin tucked against the crown of Maureen's head, she reflects that it's the most pleasant way she's ever fallen asleep. If one or both of them dies in the tumult they're about to set loose, she'll be truly relieved they didn't miss out.

And if they do both survive, they'll have to try it some more.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The kids don't even fuss when Sherie gives them an extra hug and kiss before sending them off to school Monday morning. The Girl Scouts, Susannah included, will make an early disappearance onto their "camping" trip before the day is out. Seth is planning to get to all his classes, but if things get rough they might retreat into the bomb shelter, in which case it might be a while before it's safe to come home.

Once they're gone, Sherie makes herself a simple box lunch and carries it down to the house's own basement bomb shelter. It's no cheerier than it was when they all camped out here on Valentine's Day. Still, it's a much safer place to use bloodstones than the bloodstone circle room.

Perle is in the next room, putting a load of laundry in the dryer. Sherie leans in. "You're staying at the house today, right? Would you like to work downstairs with me this afternoon? We can make a picnic out of it."

"Are you going to need help?" asks Perle. The leopard gecko daemon on her shoulder cocks his head. "Nobody told me."

"It's not that! Well, I might. But I only ask because I thought you might like the company," stammers Sherie. "Also, because of the dangerous...well, you know...."

"Weather pattern?" suggests Perle. She's a good twenty-five years younger than Sherie, and yet she's so much better at subterfuge. Part of it is the deadpan expression, as if everything she says is too mundane and depressing to be anything but true. "The one you think might be moving in later."

"Yes! That's what I mean. I wouldn't want you getting hurt, if the, the weather, gets bad." Trying to lighten the mood, Sherie adds, "Besides, if something happens to you, poor Keith will be the only heterosexual left on the team, and that won't be easy on him."

Perle doesn't look amused. Oh, dear, that was too personal. That was inappropriate. Sherie's gone and put her foot in it now....

"...yes, I can see that being a trial," deadpans Perle. Oh, thank goodness, she's not offended, that's just her face. "Should I bring anything down other than work? Snacks? I assume a radio...."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (???).

Dana was supposed to project herself into Night Vale at a moment of relative quiet, find a few dozen citizens already waiting in prayer, and weave their minds together. Instead she finds herself being sideswiped through time and space, yanked into presence by a panicky Carlos.

It's cold. Only not cold, deadly hot, like a sweltering heat wave rolling over town. Dana can feel a headache building at the back of her insubstantial eyes. There's a terrible light, so very close.

On the plus side, instead of the paper-thin protective net Dana put up on her own, the town is shielded by a set of full-strength astral barriers, solid as oak. And the Carlos clutching his daemon before her is long-haired, delicate-skinned, still untouched by any (visible) scars.

"Dana!" he exclaims. "Dana, there's something going very wrong, and I don't know how to fix it – and you might not know either, but you're the only other person here – and normally not-knowing is an exciting part of experimental theology, but right now –"

"It's going to be okay, Carlos," says Dana. "You are a younger Carlos than the one I usually see, so whatever's going on here, we will get through this. Tell me what is going on."

It turns out they're in mid-November. Dana's contemporary self is asleep, not yet skilled enough to block out the soporific forces of the Lazy Day on her own. To the Dana who arrived here from the future, though...if she could tap into Night Vale's existing defenses, she thinks she might be able to re-ravel this minor loosening of the fabric of reality all on her own.

But she won't be able to do it singlehandedly in her own present day, so she walks Carlos through the process of reaching out to his contemporaries. They, all of them, need the practice working together.

Besides, Mayor Winchell can be very territorial about her job. She might get upset if Dana started using her things.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

"...so the kindly uncle, with a busy radio job, has to step in and buy up a bunch of boxes, so she can go camping with her friends while you continue to disappoint everyone with your inattention to detail, and sports gambling, and idiotic taste in shoes, Steve Carlsberg!"

The radio in the gyropter keeps playing Palmero's griping as Tamika leans through the window, slipping the point of her Knife into a cut she made the other day. She probably could've identified this world by feel once she'd cut into it the first time, but she didn't want to risk any slip-ups, so she left the start of a doorway waiting.

"Ready!" she shouts over the noise of the blades.

Her pilot flies upward in a straight line, letting Tamika slice open a door fifty feet high.

"So, please, call in and buy some cookies. Now, on to the rest of the news: Guess what day it is today, listeners? It's parade day...!"

Dana's estimate was wrong, Tamika decides a few minutes later. The tallest of the masked warriors is forty feet at the most.

They begin stepping through, desert-browned giants in ochre and saffron robes, fanning out to either side so they can let more of their comrades through without walking over the line of Girl and Boy Scouts who have Tamika's back. One – the aforementioned tallest, with a pattern on his mask that she recognizes from Dana's exceedingly detailed description – sinks into a crouch. When the gyropter lands, Tamika and Rashi step out and approach him. "Doug?"

"Dʌg," agrees the warrior, touching his chest. He points at her with a finger the size of her leg. "Tʌmiːkə Flɪn?"

"Tamika Flynn." Clasping his fingertip, she gives it a friendly shake. "Welcome to Night Vale."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Come interrupt me if you see any danger signs," Carlos tells Quentin, as they watch the ordinater screen glow with data from their town-wide Rusakov array. One of the edge-of-town sensors is starting to tick upward, not with Fatality Units, but with the increased Dust concentration from new conscious beings stepping into this world. "I'll be able to pass around the warning more safely and securely than anything else."

"Will do." Quentin cups his flying-squirrel daemon in one hand and offers Carlos a fist-bump with the other. "Good luck, boss."

On that note, Carlos and Isaña retreat to the nearest bloodstone circle, with a wary Khoshekh floating at their side. He's got his ten-dollar headset on, Cecil reciting the traffic report in his ears: reassuring and constant, but not so intrusive that he can't tune it out and listen for Dana's invitation.

Half the bloodstone formation is already in place when she pulls him in. There's Sherie, solid and warm and confident, holding the current shape in her mind and comparing it to the calculations for the finished one on her ordinater screen.

There are selected members of the Book Club, Janice familiar as she glitters like frost, others more like twirling ribbons or glowing embers.

Terrell Flynn, secret police officer (currently off-duty), is a dark pillar of pride in his daughter and her team.

Susan Escobar, second-grade scrying teacher, flickers like sunlight on a lake as she harnesses the stones hidden in colleagues' desks all around Night Vale Elementary.

Emilio Fiyero, husband of the owner of Lucinda's Pawn Shop, is practically sitting on top of a Strexcorp prayer center. They can all feel him bobbing like a cork on the dangerous forces shifting below the surface, making ripples in the universe.

Pamela Winchell, a heavy stone door full of cracks from all the threats she's been blocking these past few months, wraps herself in the strength of the network and lets it support her as much as she supports them.

Dana herself blazes like a torch.

And Cecil, his own dear Cecil, is velvet and shadows, thick fur and ancient runes and mysterious lights in the void. Carlos does the mental equivalent of blowing a kiss in his direction. The physical voice in his ears doesn't so much as catch, but the answering wave of emotional warmth radiates out through the whole network, insulating every link.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Two fleets of Book-Club-appropriated gyropters thrum across the sky. One advances on the Strexcorp regional headquarters on the lip of Niton Canyon; one escorts the masked army as they march into town. At three and a half stories tall, their heads stand above the rooftops of almost every building, overshadowed only by the big apartment complexes, the invisible clock tower, and the BROWNSTONE SPIRE.

Soaring high enough to see the roads spread out beneath her like the Big Map, Tamika picks a couple of strategic blocks and sends a battalion down.

The giant warriors are too big to get at anything happening inside the buildings. Not a problem. That's why the Advanced Readers are here to drag every last Strex official out into the streets, where they can get picked up and sorted.

Their biggest group starts around Night Vale General, and fans outward.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Rise up, Night Vale!" crows Cecil's voice on speakers all over town. "Tamika Flynn needs you! Your town needs you! The Republic needs you! Do not be afraid of the blue gyropters we have started to see above us; the secret police's hangar is now under the control of patriots.

"If you have new owners whose smiles are inhumanly wide and whose teeth smell of blood, surround them! It's a new moon tonight; there is no risk of accidentally targeting any of our friendly local werewolves by mistake. If you have supervisors who sometimes need to be oiled, and whose daemons are made of plastic: tie them up! If you have co-workers whose eyes are solid black and who never seem to frown, or ask questions, or have any thoughts of their own: drag them into the streets!

"And I see we have a call. You're on the air, listener!"

"Hello, Cecil? This is Susana Thurgood, from the Night Vale Medical Board," says a hoarse but excited voice. "The hospital is under local control, and we're starting to get our allies bringing in Strex workers they don't know what to do with. So, for the benefit of all your listeners, I'd like to make a public service announcement about how to tell the difference between people who have been severed, and will be lifeless husks when the drugs wear off; people who are unsevered, and may or may not be on our side when the drugs wear off; and people who aren't drugged at all, just faking it because they want to infiltrate Night Vale General and retake it from the inside."

She gets through a lot of fascinating information, prompted and encouraged by Cecil, when the sound cuts off, and then –

"Are you achieving your fullest potential? Are you finding the right solutions for your challenges? Are you making the most of what you're given? Do you believe in a Smiling God?"

Sherie, who has a radio nearby, winces in alarm. So do Carlos and a few others in the bloodstone circle network, even though they can still feel Cecil's mind, present and unhurt. Recognition flares in the minds that know Kevin's voice.

It's pre-recorded. I'm fine. They just overrode the audio, Cecil assures them. I'll be back on the air just as soon...as I...figure...out....

Perle, across from Sherie, is watching the radio with narrowed eyes. The Faceless Old Woman leans invisibly against Sherie's back, chin resting on her shoulder. Finding the woman's hands and clasping them, Sherie murmurs, "Not out of the game yet...."

Oh, for crying out loud, says the mental voice of former Intern Maureen, appearing out of nowhere and flowing into the network. I'll do it. You all just keep Lauren and company from kicking me out.

Maureen has projected herself into the control booth! reports Cecil. She is ripping out the wires on Daniel's mixer, she –

"What if the Smiling God had a smile so wide you could see yourself in its mirrored –"

"– back? Are we – yes! There we are. Sorry about those technical difficulties, listeners. My producer, Daniel, must have accidentally overridden the sound! Fortunately, our station's own Intern Maureen, who we thought was lost forever after coming into contact with Strex-brand orange juice, has reappeared by astral projection within the studio and restored my audio feed. She also seems to have accidentally locked Daniel in the control booth. Sorry, Daniel!

"Aww, listeners, you would not believe how much he's blushing. It's adorable. He is very, very red. You sure have a lot of blood, Daniel!

"Now, Dr. Thurgood, please: go back to what you were saying. Tell us more. Tell us everything."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Dana appears next to Tamika's gyropter while it's down at the Vansten airfield for a refueling. "The battle at the Niton Canyon building is going badly. The Readers need help. Which of the masked warriors can you spare?"

"Hasn't anyone in town gone to back them up?" demands Tamika.

"They're all fighting to retake their homes and businesses!" exclaims Dana. "And the whole reason I started finding armies in the first place is so the ordinary citizens could hide until the fighting was over! Those warriors answer to me, I am bringing some of them to the canyon, so the only question is, do you want a say in which ones I take, or –"

Tamika's head snaps around, away from Dana. Something in the clear blue distance has caught her attention. Is it a bird? Is it a –

– yes, it's a plane.

Several planes.

Several bright yellow jets with orange triangles emblazoned on their tailfins, roaring through the air, much higher than these gyropters have the ability to go.

Dana has arranged for outside air support, and it's scheduled to be here soon. Just not, evidently, soon enough.

One of the jets breaks formation and circles in their direction. Twin missiles, erupting smoke, soar down toward the airfield.

"Scatter!" bellows Tamika's buffalo daemon, as he and Tamika and the others leap into their gyropters, while the ground crew flees for cover....

Әliʃə leaps over the grounded vehicles, long legs eating up the length of a football field every couple of steps, gripping a cast-iron pan the size of a large hot tub. They swing, they connect, the missiles explode on contact in angry fireballs that rain down on empty scrub.

"Now will you agree we should tell people to hide?" calls Dana over the racket.

"Fine!" yells Tamika. "And you need some warriors, great, here's who you take...."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Take shelter, Night Vale," intones Cecil in Carlos's ears. "We are in a new stage of this battle now. If you are not in a place protected by anti-aircraft missiles, please take to your caverns and your tunnels and your bomb shelters. Stay strong. Regroup. My voice will stay with you."

Several members of the bloodstone-circle network need to relocate to safety. They take turns, one mind falling out of contact at a time while they move the stones.

"It turns out that one of the drawbacks of being forty feet tall is that, although it makes you a formidable foe on the ground, it also gives you very few options to shelter yourself from attackers who are out of your reach."

The college is protected, thinks Professor María Gwozdecke, assistant professor of ordinater and fire sciences, from the far side of campus. You and I, Dr. Perfecto, can stay where we are.

"However, all the warriors who have been injured have safely returned to their own world for treatment, out of the jets' reach. Others have joined the battle in Niton Canyon, which is deep enough to provide them with cover. Still others have made it to Hidden Gorge. Fun fact: nobody knows exactly where Hidden Gorge is, which is how it got its name, 'gorge'."

Their defenses are holding steady, but enough devotees of the Smiling God have barricaded themselves in safety that this is far from over. Carlos can feel something yawing against their linked minds: a great force of terrible power and ceaseless appetite. Its light buzzes at the back of his skull. He tastes the coppery tang of blood.

When Khoshekh softly drops a box of tissues in front of his knees, Carlos realizes that, oh, that last one is just because his nose has started bleeding. "Thanks, gatito," he says softly.

"And I'm reading now that one of our own local Girl Scouts has just set a new world record for long-distance pyrokinetics! Good job, Su!" reports Cecil on air, while thinking, in Carlos's direction, You should go.

It's a moment of naked, honest selfishness. He knows Carlos is only taking the same risk as most of the rest of the group, and he doesn't like it. He wants Carlos protected, not because Carlos is any more deserving of life and safety than the others, but purely because Cecil loves him more.

I'll be fine, insists Carlos. I have all these talented people with me. They'll keep me safe. We'll keep each other safe. Besides, I'm not leaving you.

Cecil doesn't push it. Well, you're very brave.

"Take shelter, and take heart: reinforcements will be here soon! Very soon. Almost there. A little farther," he adds on-air. "Okay, and to the left. No, Tamika, your other left –"

The signal cuts into static.

They killed the power at the station, reports Maureen. I'll go get the auxiliary to kick in.

No! orders Cecil. Find Tamika first. She needs the rest of these directions, or she won't know where to open –

His mind falls out of the network before he can finish.

I'm shut out of the building! cries Maureen.

Go get Dana, thinks Carlos. Even if nobody else can astral-project into the building, Dana still stands a chance of –

The static in his ears flips back to a smooth, clear signal.

"Listeners, we apologize for all these interruptions!" chirps the voice of Lauren Mallard. "Technical difficulties are not at all in line with company policy. You know what is, though? Supporting community organizations, like the Girl Scouts of Night Vale. Which is why we've decided to buy every box of these cookies! Daniel, help me get these out of here."

Oh, no.

"Also, we're buying the Girl Scouts!"

...Now that's just overkill.

"You know, Cecil, I was never a Girl Scout myself, but I can say I am thrilled to help you support your niece as she learns about the value of salesmanship. What was her name again...?"

Cold, defensive anger from Janice's corner of town.

If Cecil answers, he isn't mic'd, so it doesn't end up on-air. Carlos clings to the knowledge that he is, at least, alive and conscious, because Khoshekh is right here, teeth bared.

"Janice, that's right! Janice Cabrera. I love the way you're taking part in her life. You must really care for her," says Lauren dreamily. "Just imagine all the sweet uncle-niece moments you'll be able to have soon with your matching tattoos!"

Khoshekh lets out a furious hiss – then keens and drops out of the air like a rock, thudding to the ground, his whole body wracked with convulsions.

"Ooh, can I say the next part?" giggles Lauren, as Isaña leaps to Khoshekh's side and Carlos grips his handheld radio hard enough to bruise. "It's my favorite part of the show! I've always wanted to do it...aw, this is so exciting, thank you, Cecil! Listeners, I take you now...to the weather!"

Notes:

(In case the link breaks (again), the song is Pink Floyd's "Goodbye Blue Sky". For best results, find the whole original animated video.)

Chapter 42: Bookmarks

Summary:

Cookies, Visitor, Parade Day, Company Picnic, and Renovations all continue to slam together for a five-episode pileup.

Warnings in the endnotes.

Night Vale.

The weather has been playing for three hours.

Carlos has only left his bloodstone circle once, to use the bathroom and get a granola bar from the nearest vending machine. (Just in time, too; the power went out ten minutes later.) Some of his companions in the network have handed off their roles altogether; the Scout troops in particular are rotating through short, well-organized shifts. And two of the adults have, like Cecil, dropped abruptly out of contact with no explanation.

Khoshekh lies on the carpet, not pain-wracked anymore, just shivering and hiding his face against Isaña's shell.

A low knock on the door heralds of the arrival of President Sarah Sultan, riding in her usual pouch over the back of her cavy daemon. We're taking turns now, she telepathically informs him. Go take a break. There's complimentary tea, sandwiches, and lug nuts in the first-floor student lounge.

"I should stay in the loop," protests Carlos. "In case Cecil manages to reconnect."

Sultan's daemon sighs. "We'll give people special orders to come wake you up if he does. Is that good enough?"

Strexcorp won't kill him, thinks Cactus Jane across the network. If they were going to, they would've done it already.

Her conviction is rock-solid. Carlos is honestly grateful.

If it helps, please know that I'm praying for you...and if you would like to glorify the beams in your hour of need, I would be honored to talk you through it.

...but the next time anyone invites him to worship anything, he's going to punch something.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Giant masked warriors stand around the burning Coyote Corners apartment complex, using cups and handkerchiefs to lift people and their daemons out of smoky windows down to street level. Tamika and Rashi ride over in a leather pouch clipped to Dʌg's belt.

In some parts of town, the Advanced Readers are stalemated. The radio station is bathed in floodlights, snipers on the roof, secure enough to double as a safe enemy airfield. The Scouts that went after the HQ over Niton Canyon are captured, even if they and their captors are all barricaded in the building. But the Smiling God chanting den has been retaken, major sites across town are now theirs, and by all the unsmiling gods they will keep the air-raid sirens blaring and run interference on bombs all night if they have to.

Dʌg unclips the pouch and holds it up in front of the flames devouring the apartments, watching Tamika for directions. She gives him a thumbs-up, stands with a hand on Rashi's back for balance, and turns the Knife toward herself like she's going to cut a slash through her own belly.

Does Strex think if they start enough fires, they can subdue this town by running through all its reserve water? Because they have got another think coming.

Tamika opens a window on the depths of an otherworldly ocean.

While the jets of water are slamming into the flames, she motions for Dʌg to hold her before the displaced apartment-dwellers. "Anyone injured, stay where you are, and you'll get a ride to Night Vale General!" she announces. "Anyone who's fine, stand over here for a ride to the nearest safe place, which is one of the Vansten mansions!"

"Marcus Vansten is such a great citizen!" sniffles someone in the crowd. "Or would be, if I was allowed to know about him."

The angel is still not done whining about how an earlier missile took out some of his favorite topiary sculptures of himself. Rashi rolls his eyes, but Tamika doesn't get off topic. "To keep on top of public safety updates, turn to –"

A low rumbling shakes the ground. People shriek and stumble. Some already-weakened structure inside the apartment building goes crash.

Sure is a good thing they have an extra radio station, isn't it. "For updates, turn to WZZZ," repeats Tamika. "Night Vale's numbers leader."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The hallways are lined with faint red lights, running on auxiliary power. From what Carlos can see through the stairwell windows, much of town is plunged into darkness. A few spots are domes of bright, uncompromising light, against which he can see at least two...no, three...four separate pillars of smoke drifting upward. Gyropter lights, ally and enemy alike, twinkle against the void.

Carlos pauses on the landing, gazing out at the horizon. He jumps when a string of bombs go off in midair, close enough that the fireballs light up the stairwell, and has to blink away the spots in his vision.

Behind him, Khoshekh totters and sways on the steps, bumping into the railing. Isaña nudges the margay daemon back to stability. "Khoshekh, babe, wait here, okay? We'll get something to eat and be right back."

"O-okay...."

The weather is still playing on his headset. But Strex can't keep it on forever, right? And once it's over, even if Cecil is...incapacitated...the role of the Voice will temporarily fall to some other local. They'll have the March Monologues. No, wait, it's probably after midnight. They'll get April Monologues....

Before Carlos can take another step, the shock of a miniature earthquake rattles the building.

"Carlos?" asks Khoshekh, small and faint.

"I'm right here, gatito." Carlos drops into a crouch beside him. "Whatever you need."

Khoshekh's soft, big-eared face rubs against his knee. "Carry me. Please carry me."

It's never going to stop being breathtaking, this trust Cecil puts in him. Carlos gathers both daemons into his arms, running his fingers through Khoshekh's fur. No matter what else Strex does to Cecil, no matter how hard they try to isolate him, there's not a damn thing they can do to stop him from feeling this.

(Except...intercision. But they'd have to catch Khoshekh to do it, and Carlos will never, ever let that happen.)

That's when the music in his ears comes to a closing fadeout.

"Welcome back, listeners!" chirps Lauren. Does she sound more harried than before, or is that wishful thinking? "The weather has passed, and we all know that the end of the broadcast is nearing. But don’t worry! There will be another after, and another after that, and on and on...we aren't going anywhere.

"In fact, from now on, we are going to be even more here than before. We will be speaking to you directly, with no filters or...reinterpretation in the way. And we're consolidating all our corporate radio stations into one broadcast network. We can stop focusing on our differences, and instead focus on our similarities, our commonalities! Doesn't that sound great?"

"It sure does, Lauren," says the dreamy voice of Kevin.

"Listeners, you know Kevin! He's a long-time host at Desert Bluffs Radio Incorporated, and he'll be our new full-time broadcaster here in Night Vale. Welcome to the studio, Kevin!"

"Thank you, Lauren!" says Kevin. Not pre-recorded, this time. He's live, on-air, in the host's seat. "But you know, I don't like the adjective 'new'."

"Oh?"

"It suggests that there was something old before me! I am not new, I am now. We're all now. We have the present, which is becoming the future, and that future is everything. There is...nothing else." His voice slows over the words...as if his heart's not in them, or he's distracted by the thought of something he can't quite remember. But maybe that's wishful thinking too. "Nothing...else."

"Well, I'm happy you're here now, Kevin," says Lauren, unbothered. "I just know we have a bright future ahead of us! For instance, tomorrow, Strexcorp is giving everyone in town the day off for a company picnic!"

"Wow, Lauren! That is just super-benevolent."

"It sure is! And for anybody who feels unsafe tonight – and why wouldn't you, with all the disturbances from a certain teenage felon terrorizing our town – Strexcorp is even opening the picnic grounds early. All loyal Strexcorp employees are invited to come right down to Mission Grove Park. There will be places to sleep, and nutritious Strex-brand snacks, and you will be safe. You will be completely safe."

"And that's all the news for tonight," adds Kevin. "Stay tuned next for bountiful blessings from a Smiling God. And so, from me, Kevin..."

"...and from Lauren, here in the booth..."

"...as always, until next time, Greater Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area. Until next time."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The overnight schedule is in the hands of a shy eighth-grade girl who has a deep-seated love of color-coded charts. She calls Tamika to order her to hand over the reins to a trusted general and get a few hours' sleep, and Tamika gets a ride to the hospital, which is the nearest place that can offer her a safe bed.

Before she lets herself rest, she goes around to visit the wounded Advanced Readers. No library books to hand out tonight, just words of encouragement and praise.

There are three confirmed deaths among the people brought here. A secret-police officer, shot by her own colleagues when the force battled itself for control of the prison. A young man who took a nasty injection from a biomachine, when he leaped between it and his younger brother. A Book Club member on Tamika's school gymnastics team, hit by stray shrapnel.

(At least notifying the next-of-kin has been simple. The chief attending has been in touch with Fey, who generates all the necessary phone numbers.)

Tamika inks their names on a trio of bookmarks, using an X for the officer whose name she isn't supposed to know, and tucks them all between the pages of the tome currently in her shorts pocket. (Bone, volume three.) When she sleeps, it stays under her pillow.

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana makes Maureen sleep first, then shakes her awake to cover Night Vale's late-night astral-projection needs while Dana herself catches some shut-eye. Eustathias turns into the huge, six-legged, sandy-furred flying creature again. Her back is soft and warm and comfortable; Dana's eyes are glued shut seconds after lying down.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Greater Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area.

When Dana finds Tamika at the Girl Scouts' desert hideout the next morning, they're both bright-eyed and refreshed. Tamika has a tall glass of Mountain Dew and the Big Map spread out in front of her, and is full of plans.

Following her ideas, Dana projects herself to the edge of the current battle lines, three blocks out from Mission Grove Park. D͡ʒɔrdən, the acting commander, is crouched in the street between the Antiques Mall and a Strexcorp party goods store (shuttered and barred, newly vandalized with graffiti of obscene things being done to cartoon suns). A pack of black-suited biomachines holds the line a block away.

D͡ʒɔrdən didn't understand what the Girl Scout Troop Leader was trying to sign earlier, but she gets it once Dana explains. Half a dozen warriors set off to retrieve vases the size of dump trucks, to take some of the rubble-disposal work off the shoulders of the cleanup crews.

That done, Dana returns to the Girl Scout base, looking for the bunks.

Emmanuel is dozing on a cot in an otherwise-empty room, tan jacket thrown over his face. Neharah carpets the floor underneath, along with their longbow and quiver, and one of Josie's cloud-pine canes. They all startle when Dana gives Emmanuel a shake. "Wha–? Is it – Cecil –?"

"We're not going after Cecil yet. I'm sorry." (She's promised to come find Emmanuel the moment that mission starts.) "I need someone to fly a stealth run. Today is the day when the Raúl's gets restocked. Without any open connections to ally worlds whose food we can digest, we very much need the grocery truck to get in and out of town unscathed."

"So it would help if it went unnoticed," buzzes Neharah, as Emmanuel sits up and stretches. "If, let's say, it was surrounded by a cloud of remarkably forgettable flies."

"That's just what I was going to say!"

Emmanuel nods. "Okay. We can cover that. What direction is it coming from? And do I have time to stop at the rec center and shower first? Is the rec center even still standing...?"

It is, along with a couple other institutions around town that have offered up their shower facilities (a Vansten mansion, the college, an Outback Steakhouse). He could take all the time he wanted if Neharah left him behind and went after the truck on their own...but after everything they and Emmanuel have been through, Dana isn't going to suggest that they leave each other's sight over anything so trivial. "Marcus Vansten's place is closer. Be quick!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Strex is hustling everyone it can capture, plus anyone stupid or scared enough to volunteer, into the newly-fenced-in Mission Grove Park.

When Tamika sends a gyropter over the park to get visual intel, it gets shot down. And that's in spite of the Scouts' best invisibility spells. The wreckage ends up in an area where the masked army can safely retrieve it, but neither pilot survived.

Tamika writes names on two more bookmarks, and has the nearest giant warrior give her a ride through the next world over. She can get usable intel from thirty-four feet up (Ɑrt͡ʃi is short for a masked warrior, okay) through an interdimensional window facing downward, as long as she's careful – probably more careful than she's ever been her life – not to drop the Knife through it by accident.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos wakes up with cramped, sore limbs, which turns out to be because he's lying on a common-room couch that's a foot too short.

He's not the only one camped out here, either. Obviously there's Quentin, in a sleeping bag on the floor. Next to him is chemistry professor Chelsea Dubinski, with a man Carlos guesses is her husband. Those must be her kids on the other couch.

Carlos's memories of last night are choppy and stress-sharpened. Distant explosions. Stale Subway sandwiches. Fey on WZZZ, no longer pretending to recite numbers, returning to the list of Advanced-Reader-secured places in town every ten minutes the way radio stations in his childhood would report school closings. Khoshekh's warm weight in his embrace.

And now Carlos's arms are empty.

He sits up with a start, ignoring the protests of his muscles. Oh god, oh god, if Khoshekh is gone –

The margay daemon is on the next chair over, curled against Isaña, still deep in sleep.

There are no more explosions to disturb them, no town-wide warning sirens, nothing louder than the tiny distant horns of emergency vehicles. Power's still out, but at least the building still has water, as Carlos discovers when he tries the nearest bathroom. Auxiliary power is still running the ordinater monitoring the Rusakov array; two coyote-headed physics undergrads are in the room keeping an eye on it.

NVCR is playing a morning comedy program. Carlos has only been listening for eleven seconds when it starts in on an ad for Strex-brand hair products. He switches to WZZZ, where Fey is listing the phone numbers to call if you need various services: first aid, information about loved ones, help recovering personal items from a bombed building, help digging yourself out of the rubble of a bombed building. Night Vale can weather this, she intones. The damage is severe, but it's no Valentine's Day.

A Morse-code message runs under the words. Carlos misses a third of the letters, but he can make a decent guess at how to fill in the blanks: IF CAUGHT, DON'T RESIST. HELP IS COMING.

His bloodstone circle is currently being prayed in by an undergrad with a pug daemon. "Sure hope you're the next guy on the sign-up sheet," says the kid when Carlos looks in, "because in like five minutes I'm gonna be late for econ."

"Your classes are running today?" asks Carlos in disbelief. "We're at war."

"All the Inhumanities classes are still on. Look, are you the name after Héctor, or not?"

"No, but I can cover the spot until they get here. Give me just a second." Carlos thinks In the bloodstone circle room. ~C.e.T.E. at a sheet of the Little Theologian's Book of Big-Boy Note-Taking, tears it out, and slips it under Khoshekh's front paw.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Agent G's house is in Strex-controlled territory. Her parents try to fight as they get dragged out of their homes, and get knifed for their trouble. Her stepmother's body still has a daemon as the "picnic captains" cart her off to their makeshift prison camp. Her father's does not.

Gripping the copy of Patternmaster now bookmarked with the man's name, Tamika reiterates the order that everybody text everybody in their contacts to insist that they listen to WZZZ.

She'd go take down the "company picnic" right this second if she had the people, but there are other fronts to handle. For instance, the battalion of blood-soaked office workers that sneaks in through an unguarded set of secret-police tunnels and pops up right next to the Raúl's. Half a dozen of the Advanced Readers and their allies get rushed to the hospital with severe and possibly-septic bites before it's through.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Haven't been any sirens for a while, so Sherie ventures upstairs, where she can get a clear signal to text her children that she's fine and the house is still standing.

While she's up here, she makes an advance on the powered-down refrigerator. A lot of this needs to be thrown out. Some needs to be breakfast (she brings a few yogurts and the orange milk down to Perle, and a couple of rotten-smelling frozen dinners for Tock). The rest gets bundled into a cooler, chilled by leftover samples of the never-melting hailstones from that storm last week.

It all takes maybe half an hour, during which neither of the kids texts her back.

Sherie calls the Girl Scout regional office to ask about Susannah, and a pre-recorded message informs her that for security reasons, they can't give out the locations or statuses of any troop members. She calls the middle school for details on Seth, and gets The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected.

"We must have the wrong number," says her daemon. "Is this the kind of thing we can call Fey for?"

"Don't bother," intones the Faceless Old Woman, from somewhere over the mongoose's shoulder.

Sherie shivers. "Do you think they've cut the phone lines?" Even if the power is out on that block, the schools have nice old-fashioned phones, which do things like run on their own wires....

"It's not that. Strexcorp bought out the company that handles the schools' telecommunications services. Would you like me to check on your son?"

"Yes, please!" exclaims Sherie. "And tell him I'll come get him. If he wants. Tell him all he has to do is ask."

It isn't long before the woman returns. About two-thirds of the middle-school students are missing, but all the ones who came to school made it through the night. Most of them are in the auditorium, where a couple of teachers are keeping them entertained with dramatic bullhorn readings of Sondheim lyrics. Seth is with a group in the gym, where all the weapons ranges are out.

"And he's practicing?" asks Sherie. She knows her boy has been so diligent about taking care of his crossbow, but Su is the only one who ever had any real enthusiasm for using a weapon.

"Oh, no. He's helping to clean and repair the student weapons, to make them fit for lending out to use in real combat. That child of yours may not have the temperament for the front lines, but being a fussy neatnik seems to be serving the war well in its own way."

Sherie's heart swells with pride.

"I delivered your message, along with twenty-seven highly-trained spiders. I trained them myself. They perform sophisticated tap-dance routines. He thanked me for the spiders, and told me he would like to stay where he is and you shouldn't worry, because even if they run out of work for him to do, he has a book."

Sherie pulls the woman close and kisses her on the forehead. Then on the...place where her mouth would be. "Thank you."

The woman fidgets in her embrace. "I...may have been stretching the truth to make you happy. I may not actually have brought him any spiders."

"Tell you what," says Sherie. "You go take a shift in the bloodstone network so Perle can have a break, and we'll call it even."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The biggest local Temple of the Beams is boxed in by Strex-controlled streets. They're well-defended, and have most of the resources to be ample shelter for people of all belief systems who live within sprinting-while-a-biomachine-chases-you distance...but, as the elder currently praying in its bloodstone circle tells his compatriots across town, they are rapidly running out of fresh water.

It's in a district organized neatly enough that Tamika can work out remote distances. She slices into the masked warriors' world from behind friendly lines, has Nɔrmən and Mɛg pick up crates of bottled water the size of minivans, and walks the right number of steps to open another window back into the middle of the prayer hall.

Everyone who's still able helps bring the wounded right up to the window, so the masked army can scoop them up and ferry them to the hospital. Everyone wounded gets there except one, an aging high elder with a fennec daemon who was pulled out of a bombed house with severe, ugly injuries. He's clearly not gonna survive any kind of travel. It's a minor miracle he made it here in the first place.

Tamika is asked to do the honors. She can, after all, make the cleanest cuts, in this or any world.

There's still blood on her fingers when she writes his name on a bookmark. She scrubs it off with the undrinkable-but-still-wet water from the temple's bathroom faucets before getting back to work.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Larry Leroy is relaxing on a beat-up old couch, Fey on the radio and his cat daemon on his lap, when Dana appears in his living room out on the edge of town. He directs her to the basement, which has concrete floors and one of those antique ornamental circles of bloodstones in sterling-silver settings. Dana pulled one of the experimental theologians into the mental network yesterday through this very circle.

The theologian in question, Nirliq, is on an air mattress at the side of the room, fast asleep and snoring with her colobus daemon sprawled on a spare pillow.

Her companion, Keith Köhler, has taken over the circle, where he sits cross-legged with his binturong huddled at his side and a book in his lap. He's been reading it to the network, Dana discovers as she lets herself back in. How kind.

The town's mental defenses are under more strain than ever. Whatever is happening (or being forced to happen) at the Company Picnic is invoking the Smiling God pretty insistently. But they are strong, this latest subset of Night Vale's heroic volunteers. The mind of the man in front of her is heavy and sharp as steel. There's Trish Hidge from the mayoral bunker, grim charcoal and ash. The Faceless Old Woman rustles like a mass of old tissue paper.

And Carlos – an energetic chemical reaction, all bubbles and fizzing and flashes of color – is in play at the college once more. He reaches out the moment he senses her presence. Any luck with the station...?

Still none. Strex hasn't even been sending people in or out since they imported Kevin, so there have been no opportunities to sneak someone in. But we have a more immediate problem. A group of Strexcorp theologians have been doing flybys of the Whispering Forest. In your professional opinion, how much trouble could this mean?

Köhler is instantly concerned. No, not concerned...wary. Much. They undoubtedly have all other the equipment and components they need to produce an Atal lens.

Those are the kind that no disguise, no invisibility spell, and no clever hiding place can shield you against, explains Carlos, for the benefit of less-scholarly listeners. But even if they got the ingredients, would they know how? We've never published the details....

We have gone into great detail about the production of Dirac-Hall lenses. The Atal lenses are created in precisely the same way, simply with better electrum. We have also paid regular visits to the Forest. Surely they can put these things together.

We visited the Forest for lots of reasons, points out Carlos. Taking biological samples...saying hello to the part of its collective consciousness that used to be Fleur...for all they know we could have been doing, I don't know, whatever it is dendrologists do with their lives.

How much are you willing to risk against the hope that Strexcorp has mistaken you for a botanist?

That wipes out Carlos's ambivalence in a hurry. You're right, they'll never believe it. Dana, protect that Forest!

Out loud, Dana says, "The Book Club may need theology advice, so Dr. Köhler, please wait outside where they can pick you up. Give me a moment to alert them, and then I'll come back and hold your place."

 

-{,(((,">

 

An impromptu general-purpose memorial has sprung up in the hospital lobby. Flowers, photograms, tokens of feeling hastily purchased at the gift shop, interestingly-shaped rocks. Someone set a pile of Strex advertising brochures on fire, and dusted the floor with their charred, unsmiling remains. That's a nice touch.

Tamika arranges all her bookmarks so far between the pages of the first Chobits omnibus, and tucks it under the claws of a friendly stuffed spiderwolf for safekeeping.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Burned out once more from the bloodstone network, Carlos takes another turn watching the Rusakov array.

Or rather, Isaña watches the Rusakov array. She and Khoshekh fit neatly on the desk in front of the screen. Carlos is flat on the carpet, holding more tissues to his nose (at least he hasn't damaged any major sensory organs this time), occasionally sitting up enough to drink some juice.

On the radio, Fey reads the most up-to-date list of businesses which (a) are open, (b) have toilet paper and cleaning products in stock, and (c) won't hand the proceeds over to Strex.

Softly, Khoshekh says, "When the news comes on NVCR...I want to listen. I can find somewhere else to do it, if you don't want to hear."

"We do," says Isaña. Of course, being Carlos, she wants to hear and know everything. "Although I'm not sure I want you to listen."

Khoshekh nuzzles her cheek. "Lauren will be keeping Cecil in a place where he can't avoid it. We've been too distraught to go into four-eye...and it won't be any easier now that I'm sure we haven't been allowed to sleep well, or eat...but maybe, if we're listening to the same thing at the same time, it will help us find that synchronicity."

In that case, Carlos is all for it.

After switching stations, the margay flattens himself on the desktop, so Isaña can drape herself comfortingly over the nape of his neck and scratch under his chin while Kevin's voice fills their ears. "True beauty is on the inside, where everything is red, and glistening, and full of practical organs and sharp rocks. Welcome to the Greater Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area."

Over the chords of a new opening theme tune, the air-raid sirens begin to wail.

 

-{,(((,">

 

It takes a hand-picked team to risk a skirmish near the Whispering Forest. Lots of people, Advanced Readers and police officers alike, who might just let their feet sink in and never come out. At least Tamika knows she's at no risk herself: if she turns into a tree now, she'll never find out what happens in the Ancillary Justice sequels.

Masked warriors and Night Vale residents alike stand between the Whispering Forest's new fence and the sand wastes. Instead of praise and compliments, the trees whisper in fear about the awful strangers who came around with their terrible, terrible eyes. Dr. Köhler, the big old guy on Carlos's team, still doesn't want to get too close; Tamika and Rashi hang around at his side.

"Hear you've been reading to people from your bloodstone circle," she says while they keep watch.

"I have," says Köhler, in stilted, solemn Spanish. "Dr. Ramirez bought me a book of theology-related poems while he was visiting another world. They are...enjoyable."

"Yeah?" asks Tamika. She knew some of what Carlos brought back from his vacation – not a lot of book-related news gets past her in this town – but she hadn't realized any of it was, y'know, literature. "That the kind of thing you'd be willing to lend to someone?"

Köhler hesitates. "The poems are in English. Would this trouble you?"

"Can't say I'd understand all the nuance," allows Tamika. "But give me a dictionary and a free afternoon, and I'd have a good time trying. Besides, even when there's a translation already, you want to hear the original. The best poets put as much effort into the sound – not just whether it rhymes, the whole shape of the language – as the meaning."

"This is true," says Köhler. "You have a very sophisticated understanding of poetry, for...ah...."

He trails off. Tamika figures it's a translation issue (this is, like, the man's third language, there's no shame in not knowing chunks of it). "You give me the word in English or German, I can make a guess."

Köhler looks away. "For a young person. That is all I meant to say."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie drives the extra frozen food to the nearest place Fey is reporting as a distribution center. Perle comes along. In theory they're safe from any more Strexcorp interference as long as they stay in Night-Vale-controlled territory, but she's not willing to abandon the buddy system just yet.

On the way back, Perle catches her breath and leans against the window. "Is that...the line?"

Sherie ducks her head to see out the passenger side. Over the rooftops, maybe as close as two streets down, she can see golden-robed and rust-draped forms silhouetted against the sunset. "Must be. If that isn't Dana's giant army, I can't think who else it is...."

Drums begin to pound in the distance.

"Bombers are approaching," says Fey over the car radio. "Please take shelter. Bombers are approaching...."

Sherie slams the brakes so hard they screech in protest.

They're out of the car in moments, scrambling to gather up keys and purses and daemons. All the houses are dark...as are the streetlamps, so it's likely just a power outage, the block isn't necessarily abandoned...and even if it is, surely the residents won't begrudge a couple of stranded theologians hiding in one of their basement shelters, right? Especially if they pay for any windows they break in the process?

Perle is through the gate and up the front walk of the nearest home before Sherie (knees sore, heart going all over the place, really feeling her age) realizes where they are. "Perle, wait...!"

"What?" Perle takes several brisk steps back from the door she just knocked on. "Is it dangerous?"

"I hope not – but there won't be anyone inside, we should try the –"

The front door swings open.

Sherie and Perle both gape. They've been confronted by a strong-jawed, silver-haired woman with a little owl on her shoulder. Behind her is the brightly-lit entryway of a warm, well-decorated home – Sherie can see potted ferns, diamond-patterned rugs, a grand piano.

"Can I help you?" demands the woman who, evidently, lives in the House that Doesn't Exist.

 

-{,(((,">

 

For some reason, even though Kevin should be far better at toeing the company line than Cecil ever was, Lauren is still in the studio. They go back and forth about the delights of the mandatory company picnic in Mission Grove Park. Kevin does the community calendar (every day is Work Day), then Lauren takes over to do an ad (for Strexcorp: like the sun, like hundreds of teeth arranged into smiles, like air too heavy to move when a fan spins against it, like the sun, like a skeletal cactus where only the needles remain, like a Smiling God, like the sun).

"You know, Lauren, the equipment in this studio is so old fashioned! I hardly know how to use any of it," chirps Kevin after the traffic. "Nothing like the high-tech equipment we have back home in Desert Bluffs."

"But there are many reasons we have to do our broadcasting from here," says Lauren brightly.

"Of course."

"It sends a message."

"It sure does! It sends several fun messages for everyone to enjoy."

This is answered by a burbly humming sound – like a mouse squeak meets a bike horn meets a question. Isaña shivers. Of course Kevin's StrexDaemon(TM) is in the studio too.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"Who are you, and how on earth did you get here?"

"What are you talking about? My name is Cynthia. I've lived here for nineteen years. My children went to the elementary school right over there. Who are you?"

"We're two of the Outsider experimental theologians," says Perle. (Sherie is much too startled to put together full Spanish sentences right now.) When Cynthia looks blank, she adds, "Haven't you heard us mentioned on the radio? Our boss, at the very least? I'm sure you can hear the alarm, that the bombs will start dropping soon...we would be so grateful if we could join you in your shelter until the danger has passed."

"Alarm? Bombs?"

"We're at war, Señora! Haven't you noticed? They're fighting not two streets away!" exclaims Perle. "Can't you hear it?"

Sherie certainly can. Scuffling. Yelling. A gunshot. Another.

Cynthia is unmoved. "Young lady, I think you had better go try this somewhere else," she says briskly, and shuts the door in Perle's face.

Before Perle can start banging on the fiberglass door again, Sherie physically drags her to the nearest window. Through the clear glass they can both see a completely different interior: blank-walled, sparsely-furnished, and dark.

"I – I don't understand." Perle is getting frantic. "How is this possible? I just saw – she was right there –"

"Different universe? Temporal anomaly? Joint hallucination? It could be any number of things. We'll experiment on them later, but we can't stay here now!"

She wheels Perle around, and the two of them go running for the sidewalk, just as a forty-foot-tall masked warrior stumbles into the space between the houses. He's gasping, clutching a blood-soaked gash in his sandy robes, and leaves a handprint the breadth of a kitchen table in the grass-speckled dirt as he falls.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"We're going to be sending our contractors out all over town, to begin the process of tearing things down! Which is painful, but also necessary. For progress, and in general," coos Lauren. "Start listening any minute now, and you'll probably hear them! Targets include...hm, weird phrasing. Scratch that. Future construction sites include several active but low-achieving elementary schools, an ancient temple that is probably so old it's a safety hazard, and that weird forest along the eastern edge of Night Vale."

Right on cue, something outside the theology building explodes, close enough that it rattles the windowpanes and makes the power flicker. Khoshekh grabs Isaña, Carlos grabs the radio, and they all huddle together in the shadows under the nearest desk.

The radio goes right on playing Kevin's bubbly laugh, even though Carlos accidentally yanked the cord out of the wall. "What would you worship if not a Smiling God?"

"Nothing, soon!" says Lauren. "And your producer Daniel tells me that we've just arrested two people in chapel coats who had been loitering around and trespassing on a house in the Desert Creek development."

"How scary! That is good news!"

"Yes! Great news! It feels so good to do renovations."

"Does it?" asks Kevin. "I rarely feel anything. I rarely feel anything at all."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Strex must have trucked in extra ground forces. Tamika's people are losing their places, and fast.

But Tamika hasn't lost hope.

See, here's the thing:

The warning sirens have been playing for a while now, meaning Fey calculated there's bombers on the way...and yet Tamika still isn't hearing any bombs.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tens of thousands of feet above the desert floor, higher than two separate layers of clouds, most government surveillance balloons, and the mysterious lights that hover around the Arby's, Dana's astral-projected image perches on the tip of a branch of cloud-pine.

She's in the middle of a flock of witches. Hundreds of them. Fierce, beautiful women, some accompanied by their bird daemons and some alone, all equipped with longbows and quivers, quite a few also bearing dusty desert boulders the size of toasters.

As they fly, the witch on whose branch Dana is riding lets her rock drop.

The improvised missile plummets through the air, more than eight hundred feet down, with perfect timing to crash into the fuselage of a fighter craft traveling at half the speed of sound. The explosion is breathtaking. The extra conflagration when it hits the sand wastes – setting off all the unlaunched bombs in its payload in the process – is obscured by the cloud cover, but Dana imagines it must be quite satisfying. "Night Vale cannot thank you enough for your help, Vieja Serafina."

"This is our war as much as yours," says Serafina Pekkala solemnly. "It will only take a few of my sisters to protect your airspace. Lead the rest of us to where we are needed. We will not let the Republic fall."

Notes:

Warning: constant background drumbeat of minor-character death.

Features lots of direct quotes from the corresponding bits of canon, especially Company Picnic and Renovations. More IPA masked-warrior names, with their common English equivalents: D͡ʒɔrdən = Jordan, Ɑrt͡ʃi = Archie, Nɔrmən = Norman, Mɛg = Meg

New miscellaneous story sketches, and new art-nouveau daemon portraits: the Man in the Tan Jacket and Megan Wallaby.

Chapter 43: Rescue

Summary:

The cavalry is here. Let's go crash a company picnic...and take back a radio station.

Pilfers more quotes from the canon versions of these confrontations. Warnings in the endnotes.

Greater Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area.

The worst part about Strex's company picnic isn't the tracking bracelets they're putting around everyone's wrists, or the fact that they've enclosed Mission Grove Park in some kind of cheap particle-board dome painted to look like sky, or even the way the captives are being forced to do a conga line and zapped with tasers if they don't step to the beat.

No, Sherie thinks, the worst part is that she's afraid some of the locals are getting into it.

There's a man in the ceremonial green toga and straw boater of the local religion, captured when Strexcorp took the Temple of the Beams, smiling and chanting like the Smiling God was what he planned to worship all along. There's an unarmed and unmasked secret-police officer, cha-cha-cha-ing well enough to earn an orange-frosted cupcake, accepting it with pride. There's a woman in a nondescript tunic, bobbing her head to the beat as she rounds the bend of the conga line....

Wait a second. Sherie recognizes that face. That jet-black ponytail. That deceptively cute little wren daemon.

Li Hua catches her staring, and makes a brief but furious throat-slashing gesture.

Knowing the Li Huas, that could mean either don't say a word or I am literally going to slash some throats soon.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The next world over.

"I don't see why it wouldn't be more convenient just to set the roof on fire," says Hiram McDaniels' gold head. "As you can see, I literally have five heads. I can breathe a lot of fire."

"And then we'd have a lot of chunks of flaming roof raining down on our people," says Tamika flatly. "Stick to the claws, McDaniels."

They're on a landscape of pastel steppes, handing off knives, hammers, and small crossbows to their embedded forces in Mission Grove Park via a portal hidden inside the bouncy castle. With, like, three hundred armed witches already descending on the security forces outside, they are gonna crack this place wide open.

One of the Morrigan Scouts hands over the last of the Book Club's blades, to a woman who is either the Outsider geneticist or the Outsider geneticist's double. "That's everything!"

Tamika pats McDaniels' scaled haunch. "That's your cue."

The eighteen-foot-tall dragon spreads his feathery wings and launches himself up through the thick otherworldly atmosphere.

When he gets over top of the big horizontal portal Tamika cut high above the park, he sinks all his claws into the top of the particle-board barrier and tears a chunk away. "Now!" he bellows, with all five heads. "For Night Vale!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Greater Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area Night Vale.

Lauren is bragging on-air about burning the library to the ground (as if that'll stop it from reappearing, good as new, long before anyone manages to build a StrexBook Purchase Center on its ashen shell) when something thunks directly against the window.

No, not thunks. Knocks.

Carlos crawls out from under the desk just enough to see.

There's a man outside the second-floor window, wearing a tan jacket and carrying a longbow and a quiver. He is sitting comfortably on a branch of cloud-pine, hovering in midair. And he is utterly surrounded by flies: hundreds of them, swirling through the air like puffy snowflakes in a photo negative of a blizzard.

Carlos cranks open one of the windowpanes. "You! You're a witch – you're trans? – you found your daemon!"

"I found them," confirms the Man. "N-----h, this is Carlos and Isaña."

"Nice to meet you," buzzes N------h, dozens of small feminine voices in perfect chorus. "Wow, Emmanuel was not kidding about the hair."

"That's his name!" exclaims Carlos. "Emmanuel something! I'm sorry, I did not catch yours, but keep telling me and I'll try to remember."

"Can do," says Emmanuel. "Listen, we're off to help take back the radio station. Are you in?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

The picnic is chaos. Half the Picnic Captains have been ambushed and bludgeoned, Hiram McDaniels is screeching threats and directions with different heads at the same time, a lot of people are running for the bouncy castle (Hiram's green head says it's the way out), others are fleeing towards the nearest fence...

...and too many aren't moving at all. Not dead or unconscious, just standing wherever they had been when the music equipment got smashed, with too-black eyes and happily-confused smiles.

Holding her mongoose daemon against her chest, Sherie veers around them and runs for the castle.

The portal exits onto a world of beautiful pink-and-blue steppes. Either this planet's sun is weaker than hers or the inside of the Picnic was unnaturally bright, because Sherie has to widen her eyes against the dimness while they adjust.

Okay. There's Tamika and her buffalo, supervising the flow of people from their perch on an upside-down giant clay vessel. There's a line of Advanced Readers with screwdrivers and romance novels, methodically removing the Strex-brand tracking bracelets. Beyond that stand two masked warriors with giant carts, holding hand-lettered signs: FREE RIDE TO SAFE HOUSING and FREE RIDE TO HOSPITAL. Neither one is exactly what Sherie wants. Maybe she'd better wait here for Perle, and they can decide what to do together....

"Sherie! Over here!"

Sherie gratefully follows the voice to the team's very own minivan. "Quentin, Nirliq! How did you get here?"

"Dana sent people after both of us." Nirliq tosses an Atal spyglass from hand to hand. "Tamika needed some expert attention making sure these portals were safe. Köhler's on guard duty at the Whispering Forest, Carlos is being reserved for the Cecil rescue, and nobody was sure what shape you and Perle would be in."

"Also?" Quentin beckons her closer and lowers his voice. "There's still a bloodstone circle at the park! A heavy-duty one! Dana got it buried there somehow. Don't ask me how. She tried to explain, I just...can't remember."

Sherie catches her breath. "If we could get someone praying in it...I don't know exactly what Strexcorp was trying to make us invoke in there, but it would be so much easier to undo from up close."

"That's what I was hoping you'd say." Nirliq hands her a spyglass. "Are you up for going back in there? With an armed guard this time, obviously."

"Absolutely," says Sherie. "As soon as Perle gets out, so we have a chance to tell her what's going on. Have you seen her yet?"

"Wait," says Quentin. "Isn't she with you?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Flying with a witch is a lot more uncomfortable than it was in ten-year-old Carlos's fantasies.

Cloud-pine branches are, to put it politely, not designed with cis male riders in mind. He can't stop being self-conscious about having his arms locked around a trans guy's torso, even after being assured it no longer has any features that would be truly dysphoric and/or mortifying to accidentally put his hands on. His own daemon settled as a non-flying species, so she has to be ferried in a makeshift sling made from his bloodstained chapel coat. If either of them falls, it'll hurt like hell, and even while safely in the air they keep going over patches of rubble that used to be Night Vale buildings, which is an enthusiasm-killer if there ever was one.

...but still, merciful heavens, he's flying with a witch. If he ever gets to ride an armored bear after this, literally all of his childhood dreams will have come true.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The flow of prisoners coming through the portal has dwindled to a trickle. Sherie and Quentin inch back to the park side, daring to peek at the landscape beyond the door of the bouncy castle.

It's quieter now. Less screaming, more muffled thumps and squelches. One of the Li Huas is on her knees not fifty feet away, bloodied up to the elbows, happily slicing up the torso of a downed Picnic Captain. She notices them, grins like a kid in a candy store, and gives them an enthusiastic wave with one hand.

Sherie does her best to ignore the fact that it's somebody else's hand.

"That's a bad guy, right?" asks Quentin in a tiny voice, cupping his flying-squirrel daemon close to his chest.

"That's a bad guy," says Sherie firmly. Helpful of them, to wear those bright orange-and-yellow uniforms. The Li Huas must be having a wonderful day: a park full of people they're allowed to eviscerate, all conveniently color-coded.

A few more captives stumble across the grass toward them. Sherie and Quentin help lead them over the unstable bouncy-castle floor and guide them to the Scouts with medical training. And there – yes – there's Perle, moving slowly because one leg is caked with blood, leaning on another prisoner for support, but close, so close.

An orange-clad figure is coming up behind her.

"On your left!" yells Sherie –

– and gets knocked back by the gust of wind from Hiram landing, sending paper cups and plastic decorations skittering all over the place, his violet head's jaws closing over the top of the Picnic Captain and going crunch.

"Oh, sure, the good human gets hurt," says Hiram's grey head glumly, ducking low enough to let Perle collapse onto the support.

"Of course the one with the reptile soul would be a target!" roars Hiram's green head, while the violet head sneezes and another Strex officer goes up in a fireball. "All these judging insects quiver with jealousy at your noble and impressive frame! Where can we drop you off?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Man in the Tan Jacket soars high over the battle line, and dives to land on the vacant lot that used to be the White Sand Ice Cream Shop.

Most of his daemon lands on his head and the sleeves of his jacket, clustered together like a thick black cartoon outline. Some of them are perched on his quiver (over Carlos's shoulder for the trip), and a bunch are riding on Khoshekh. A few are in the margay's ears. If they were talking to him during the trip, Carlos couldn't hear it over the general buzz of their flight.

This deep into Strex-controlled territory, the street is dark and empty. Few employees, no shoppers, no hidden officers of the Sheriff's secret police, not even a nice manageable monster-of-the-week. The only sign of life is the circling witches that fill the sky.

Even at a distance, that sight takes Carlos's breath away.

"When does the ambush start?" he whispers, shrugging off the bow and arrows. "Do I have to wait here until it's over, or can I do something to help?"

"Waiting here, alert and relatively-safe, is one option. It'll make it easy to bring Cecil to you as soon as he's rescued. Dana knows we're here, so she'll make sure you're reunited even if for some reason I can't."

"And the other option?"

"You come with me while I sneak in through the safe secret passage, wait until everyone who could be standing guard over Cecil is drawn away by the attack on their doorstep, and help me break him out of there."

Khoshekh's tail lashes. "You know about the safe secret passage?"

The Man massages his brow with two fingers. "If you'd had my condition as long as I have, you'd have checked out every secret passage in town."

"Realistically, I...I'd be a liability." Carlos hugs his daemon to his chest, "I didn't bring any weapons. Even if I had a gun, I wouldn't trust myself with it in a live combat situation. You'd have to waste your time and energy watching my back."

"Not necessarily. There's a spell I can put you under to make you...temporarily...hard to notice." Emmanuel hands him the cloud-pine...not just a branch, he realizes, but one of Josie's canes. "And you're welcome to borrow this, in case you have an emergency need to bludgeon someone."

Carlos takes the branch. Khoshekh, though, swoops in and floats between the two men, shaking a few of N------h's bodies (parts? units? individual mini-selves? Carlos has so many questions about how this works) from his head. "That spell," he murmurs. "Does it have anything to do with how you got the way you are?"

"Same theory. Different scale. If the normal version is a ceiling fan, what did this to me was a tornado," says the Man tersely. "If I thought for a second – if there was the slightest risk, I would never – but if you're worried, do it yourself."

"Me? I'm certainly not authorized to know secret witch-lore on that level of...."

"For heaven's sake, Khoshekh, [something something something]!" hiss the flies. "We're not going to tell on you. Even if we did, nobody would remember it five minutes later! Are we doing this, or not?"

They are. Khoshekh does insist on doing the honors; Carlos takes a cue from the Man and gathers a pocketful of extra sand, just in case they need more. Once Emmanuel is no longer sure where they are, he sets off at a brisk pace toward the station – flooded with spotlights again tonight, unnaturally luminous, as if it's in another world's daylight while everything else in town is lit by no sun.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The break room is like a funhouse-nightmare version of the one Carlos remembers. Two people chatting next to the coffee machine have dark pits for eyes, the walls have been painted with drippy but deliberate stripes of blood-red, and there's a thick slab of something unidentifiable and organ-y hanging with the ponchos on the coat rack.

Swallowing his nausea, Carlos ducks behind the ponchos, huddling up close to the side of the fridge for extra concealment. The spell is still working on normal human attention, but who knows what those carved-out eyes can see?

"...trying to skip out early on the Company Picnic!" Lauren is saying over the speakers.

"No!" breathes Kevin.

"Don't worry, we'll catch the party poopers," Lauren assures him. "And when we do, we'll playfully let them know that they are party poopers, by giving them comically large stone shoes that say 'Party Pooper', and tossing them in the Night Vale Harbor."

"Will that work?" asks Kevin. "After all, this silly town doesn't have any water in their harbor."

"Doesn't have water there yet," corrects Lauren. "Strexcorp has plans for setting that right! We've already started the process of diverting thousands of gallons of necessary drinking water from residential and recreational areas to do it."

"How exciting!"

Whatever comes next on the radio is interrupted by a mechanical internal voice taking over the speakers. "All non-broadcast personnel to external defense stations. All non-broadcast personnel to external defense stations."

The pair of shark-toothed break-takers scurry out of the room. Through an invisible entrance, the Man in the Tan Jacket shimmers into view, coat ruffling out behind him, an arrow already on the string in case...

...well, in case another Strex employee comes striding in from the hall.

It's a man in a suit, with a gold tie, rubbery artificial skin, and a wind-up mouse – okay, this must be Daniel – for a daemon. He's heading for the coffee.

Emmanuel fires.

An arrow punches through the news producer's torso, right between where the ribs would be.

Daniel swivels his head and frowns. "You're not authorized to be here. This is for employees only."

Another arrow goes through his throat – wow, the Man has killer aim – which only sends a couple of sparks fizzing out from the puncture wound as the biomachine charges.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The park's hidden bloodstone circle is easy to find through an Atal spyglass. Sherie can see the Rusakov particles drifting in a column over it, drawn to the stones' resonance, waiting to be harnessed.

It's awfully close to the Eternal Animal Pyre, but all that means is she has to roll up her sleeves, and tie back her hair to get it off her neck.

Sherie sweeps a couple of deflated orange balloons out of the circle, kneels in the dusty grass, and prays for the town's protection. At first all she feels is a hot rushing wind, and not just from the pyre...until an honest-to-goodness witch pulls her into the network, chilling her right down to the metaphorical bones.

Mind like a glacier, Carlos said once. He wasn't wrong.

You're one of the outsiders, observes the witch. The group who's been living here for some time. Is Night Vale always this...chaotic?

Sherie considers her surroundings. The tarantulas in scrubs doing triage with picnic victims on her right.

The fellow theologian carefully averting his eyes from a smouldering pile of animal corpses to her right.

The sounds of blood-soaked office workers being felled by arrows and hurled into anbaric fences all around.

The five-headed dragon heartily shredding the fake sky overhead.

She's about to conclude that, what do you know, they're almost back to normal...when what can only be described as a flaming zombie leaps from the pyre.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Whatever other skills, strengths, and witchy powers the Man in the Tan Jacket has, he doesn't react any better than Carlos would to being punched in the head with a pair of robot fists. He ducks and rolls under the table, N------h rising up in a dizzying cloud of cover, but he's already dizzy and slowed-down, and it shows.

Carlos sure doesn't have any witch-level powers – he's not a fighter at all, and if Daniel's chassis stood up to high-speed projectile weapons, it's not going to crumple at some experimental theologian whacking it with a stick –

– but dammit Carlos is an experimental theologian and that means something.

The Man swings a kick and hits his pursuer full across the face. His boot leaves a tear in the artificial skin – Daniel still grabs his leg, completely undeterred – until Carlos falls on top of him and swipes one of the fridge magnets over the sensory processing unit in his skull.

He slaps another against the memory banks in Daniel's lower torso. A couple more over the motion and balance units in his spine. Daniel might not be exactly the same model as the decommissioned biomachines Carlos has studied, but it's close enough that his movements start going jerky. Cons: a bony snap as he wrenches at Emmanuel's ankle. Pros: a grab for Carlos misses entirely, and then he's spasming at random while his dialogue glitches from "You'll feel much better once you've been through employee orientation" to "Believe in your per-per-per-perfect sel-sel-your call is important to us please stand bzzzzt."

The wind-up mouse, running on its own microchips, tries to wheel away. Khoshekh (presumably that's Khoshekh; it's a daemon of some kind, probably with limbs, and features) tackles it out of midair and starts shredding it into a pile of circuits and fake fur.

Most of the flies-daemon have landed, or fallen, carpeting the break room table and counter with weak buzzing. Emmanuel, chest heaving, one foot definitely pointing the wrong way, hangs on to the table leg to keep himself steady. "Carlos? That was you, right? What did you...?"

"Basic theology. Magnets erase any data and programming stored in a magnetized medium." Carlos keeps dragging his current magnet (featuring a photo of a cat and the caption Dogs Have Owners, Cats Have Staff) over the collapsed biomachine's spine, just in case it has some kind of redundant self-repair mechanism. Or something. "Are you okay? If you have a concussion...."

He would offer to check for dilated or mis-sized pupils, but he can barely hang on to the knowledge that the man has pupils.

"I'll survive," pants the Man. "Get Cecil. You can pick me up on the way back."

"I don't even know where...."

"The men's room," puts in almost-certainly-Khoshekh. "Other end of the hall."

"O-okay." Carlos hands Emmanuel the cat picture. "Keep using this on Daniel, to make sure he stays down. I'll be back as soon as I can."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Quentin has been knocked to the ground by a charred, eyeless, partly-skinless Picnic Captain, smoke trailing from the tatters of their uniform. Their daemon, a snake so burned it's nearly skeletal, has his flying squirrel by the throat.

A dozen Scouting crossbows pointed at their head don't stop them from grinning, wide and bloody. "You have all been incredibly unproductive, and none of you have earned cupcakes!"

"Let the experimental theologian go," orders the Troop Leader in charge of the operation. "If you give yourself up peacefully, nobody has to die here."

"Yes, you do!" cries the Picnic Captain. "All of your imperfect selves have to die! Even if you shoot me, I will serve the Smiling God by taking this one with me."

They grab Quentin's thick puffs of hair – he's not struggling, not taking any risks with those fangs at his daemon's neck – and give it an urgent yank.

"You still have a chance. Do it yourself and I won't have to do it for you. Believe in a Smiling God, and let the light shine through you, until you have a wide and full smile of your own. Until all your imperfections burn away, and you are happy!"

"Uh-huh?" stammers Quentin, muffled, one side of his mouth crushed against the grass. "This is – this is very compelling. You make excellent points."

Sherie can't hold back. "When?"

"Excellent points!" repeats Quentin. "Respectable. Logical. Reminds me of my parents."

His very religious, very homophobic parents, for whom he used to put up a pretense of sharing their faith in order to keep himself safe, oh.

"So, please, let the...the person...talk as long as he or she wants."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The hallway is bright, splattered and reeking with blood, and deserted...

...except for Kevin's StrexDaemon, sitting in a furry lump by the door of the studio and gnawing on a bone.

Carlos hefts Josie's cane in one hand and scoops up Isaña with the other. He doesn't want to risk Bedamim taking another bite out of his daemon. Especially now that they're not under a thick fog of Strex meds to muffle the pain.

His face itches around the scar. He gives it a scratch with the end of the cane.

"We're receiving word from downtown that there's a slowdown in our renovations," says Kevin's voice over the speakers, as Carlos tiptoes down the carpet and tries not to think about why parts of it go squish. "It seems the outgoing mayor of Night Vale, Pamela Winchell, accompanied by some impossibly tall glowing man with ridiculous feathers around his face, are blocking our contractors from building the town's third Sharper Image."

Bedamim raises her head, looks directly at Carlos, and burbles in greeting.

"But that's impossible!" exclaims Lauren. "We invoked eminent domain."

Carlos stretches his mouth into a fake smile. "Hi, little friend," he coos. "Remember us? Friends? We're going to come on down the hall. You just keep chewing on your...toy, okay? Okay."

"Apparently the tall guy has eminent domain too! And even though he doesn't legally exist, the Mayor gave him some kind of special permit? So together they have double eminent domain."

Khoshekh (recognizable once more, but Carlos really has to be looking to notice him) takes Isaña and flies up to the ceiling, Carlos drops into a crawl, and they sneak past the wide glass soundproof window to the booth.

"How is she still mayor, even?" complains Lauren. "And why has Daniel not come back from getting our coffee? That should not be taking this long. He's very efficient. Ugh, let's go to a word from our sponsors."

Bedamim drops her bone and waddles after them...

...and, as Carlos is straightening up, attaches herself to his leg.

"Ah," murmurs Carlos. "Um. Okay. Gosh, you're heavy." He's seen Kevin carry her around like a puppy, but it takes all Carlos's strength now just to yank his leg forward a couple inches. It's like being yoked to a block of cement. "Khoshekh? Go on ahead. See if you can get Cecil free before I get there."

Khoshekh hovers over a clean patch of carpet, sets Isaña down, and floats between her and Bedamim. "I won't leave you unprotected with that thing."

The StrexDaemon shrills in indignation.

"Honey, please, don't antagonize her," whispers Isaña. "I'm sure we can handle this little...friend-hug...while you go find Cecil to...help."

As if she's just trying to be contrary, Bedamim chooses this moment to sink her toothy beak into Carlos's bare calf.

Carlos wobbles on his non-encumbered foot and swallows a yelp of pain – a trickle of blood runs down to pool on his sock – can he thwack her away without having her take some important bits of muscle along? "Ah – ow –"

"What have you done to my boyfriend, you monster?" hisses Khoshekh, all his claws extending. "You come here, you son of a –"

He leaps through the air and latches onto Bedamim's back.

With a wild, delighted cheeping, the StrexDaemon rolls around and accepts the invitation to play.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Picnic Captain's pitch for worshiping a Smiling God is not nearly as long as anybody hoped.

"Achieve your potential. Believe in your perfect self," they conclude, grinning. A couple of teeth shake loose and tumble to the ground around Quentin's shoulders. "I'll walk you through an invocation! Repeat after me: I take my warmth from your great warmth."

"I...."

"Say it!"

"It's okay, Quentin," says Sherie, voice and hands trembling. She's trying to think of some clever way to be specific about it only works if you mean it, you can say the words without meaning them and it won't do anything, won't make the light pushing against the back of our eyes any brighter that the lone Strex operative won't catch on to – but she's not that clever, not on the spot, and she's coming up horribly empty. "Go ahead."

"...I'm not scared," finishes Quentin. "Tell everyone I wasn't scared, okay?"

What happens next is so fast, Sherie will never be sure if the Scouts firing or the snake biting came first.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The next thing Carlos knows for sure is that Bedamim is a broken-open shell on the carpet, fake fur shredded and strewn across the hall, no more sign of movement except a couple of frayed wires spitting up sparks.

He's out-of-breath, soaked in sweat, and he's managed to snap Josie's cane in half. (Why does he even have this thing? Did he pick it up somewhere?) He doesn't consciously remember how much of that is from helping Khoshekh take the biomachine down, and how much is from furious, mindless whacking even after it was disabled. Maybe Khoshekh knows.

Khoshekh is splayed on a different patch of carpet, Isaña at his side.

Khoshekh is – hurt. Hurt in ways Carlos can't look at too closely. His mind isn't ready to digest the details, so it skitters over them and bounces away.

"Kevin, go find Daniel, will you?" orders Lauren, sounding tinny and distant over the speakers. "Listeners, all of you out there at the company picnic, or illegally huddled in pitiful hiding spots that will be ferreted out...let’s go, now, to the weather."

A ukelele waltz fills the air, and Kevin, NVCR headphones around his neck and his death trailing silently at his heels, lets himself out into the hall.

The spell must have worn off completely, because he notices Carlos right away. "Oh, hi there!" he exclaims, beaming. "Who are you?"

Carlos scrambles to plant himself between Kevin and Khoshekh, and holds the broken cane like a baseball bat. Not that he thinks he can really take on Kevin if this goes south too, but he'll have to try. "You don't know?"

"No? Have we met? It must not have been a productive meeting!" says Kevin cheerily. "I do know that I'm Kevin. And that's my daemon, Bedamim. Were you playing with her? She likes to play."

He strolls toward them. Carlos stumbles back.

But Kevin is focusing on the StrexDaemon now, not watching Carlos at all. "Are you having fun with him, huh, girl? Is he a new friend? If I have to work in this town, it would be good to make friends here."

Any second now he's going to notice...no, he must have noticed already, any second he's going to understand....

"Hey," chides Kevin, smile wide as ever, the black pits of his eyes as blank. "Hey, don't ignore me. That's no fun."

He stops at Bedamim's side. Sits back on his heels. Touches a shredded tuft of fur.

"Oh, it's a game," he says dreamily. "Okay. I can play."

Carlos is so busy being horrified and heartbroken, he doesn't realize Lauren followed Kevin out until she speaks. "How did you even get in here? I swear, the people in this town are like cockroaches! You stomp down one of them, and five more pop up."

"Guess we'll have to take care of this one ourselves," says her mallard duck daemon.

With an exasperated sigh, Lauren produces a bright-orange Strex-brand taser. "I guess we will."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A freshly-arrived division of the masked army finally dismantles the Strexcorp regional headquarters, tearing it apart floor by floor.

It's deserted.

Good news for the folks running the town's astral defenses, because it means one less thing to pray against. Bad news for the band of well-trained and well-read fifth-to-ninth-graders Tamika hand-picked to attack this place, because they're MIA. Can't even find bodies. She has no idea where they've been taken.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Time seems to slow down as Carlos flashes on his options.

(1) Flee the building. Unacceptable.

(2) Flee to the men's room, barricade himself in with Cecil, and try to make a plan from there. But Khoshekh is in no state to be grabbed and carried, and leaving him at Lauren's mercy...never.

(3) Fight. Luck and adrenaline have gotten him surprisingly far tonight, but let's be realistic. She's a sadist with a taser. He's a geek with a broken stick.

(4) Bluff like hell.

"Do you believe in angels?" asks Carlos.

"Of course," scoffs Lauren. "And now that Strexcorp owns this town, everyone will be free to admit it, instead of wasting time and energy on silly double-talk. Angels are real. And very dangerous."

"Great. Do you want to meet one?"

Lauren doesn't so much as twitch. "Nice try. If you had an angel around, it would have shown itself already."

Carlos rolls his eyes, like this is the dumbest assumption in the history of dumb. "Well, yeah, obviously I don't have one now. But feel free to try to kill me if you want to see me become one."

"...You don't know how."

"Want to bet?" demands Carlos. "Remember the last time someone ascended to angeldom in town? It was right here at the station! I know, because I was on the scene in person. Observing. Studying. Making recordings with a lot of complicated theological equipment. Do you understand what all our equipment measures? Do you have any idea what it does? Do you know what I know?"

Oh, yes, he's definitely seeing flickers of doubt in her eyes now.

"Get out of here, Lauren. Make a nice, peaceful exit. Leave Kevin behind and walk away, and you might live to torture people another day."

Lauren is frozen, still too skeptical to run but no longer prepared to attack. Carlos holds his breath. The only sound is a faint metallic clinking as Kevin lifts one of Bedamim's detached hinges and lets it fall back into place, and again, and again.

Until the hall lights up with a brilliant black glow.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Dana feels the change in the air immediately.

There's no more terrible light blocking her from projecting into important parts of her home town. She can appear in Mission Grove Park. She can appear in the station.

Can't reach into Desert Bluffs yet, but they'll take that on next.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Lauren shrieks, whirls on her dangerously-sharp heels, and bolts down the hall, daemon flapping after her. The stairwell door slams in their wake.

Kevin's death watches with placid impassivity. Kevin himself, absently petting Bedamim, is oblivious to everything. Including the way he's sliced open the heel of his hand on an exposed piece of metal.

Carlos gapes in shock at the bright-black scene. He's not doing this. Is he? "Marcus...?"

The glow fades.

"I don't mean to brag here, boss," says a familiar voice, "but good news: not Marcus Vansten."

The angel coalesces into a translucent corporeal form, just visible enough to make out his silhouette against the light-drenched hall. He's the typical size, hunching down to fit in the space, but Carlos can't see the typical wings. Instead, Erika has a pair of wide, furry flaps draped from his wrists to his ankles. Like a flying squirrel.

"Quentin?" exclaims Carlos. "But – how – when – wha–?"

"About five minutes ago," says Quentin. "Someone was trying to kill me, and I remembered studying the recordings of Vansten's ascension and thought, you know, there's still a great war here that needs serving, so why can't I...? And, well, next thing you know I'm ten feet tall and feeling this urgent need to respond to a great calling. Anything else I can help with while I'm here?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil is, as promised, trapped in the men's room. Next to the sink.

Someone has sheared his hair so it matches Kevin's professional trim, and at least half of it has gone stark white by now, partly matted with dried blood from a gash just above his hairline. His wrists are cuffed on either side of the sink's pipe. The faucet is running at a light trickle, but it must be to torment him rather than hydrate him; even if he could get his face close enough, there's a strip of bright yellow duct tape over his mouth.

Carlos runs to his side, drops to the ground, and spends a few breaths just holding him. Pressing skin against skin and soaking in the reassurance that he's here. Exhausted and hurt, but still here.

"Let me get this off you," he murmurs, and, when Cecil nods in readiness, holds him in place to rip off the tape. Cecil gulps air in openmouthed gasps, leaning weakly against Carlos's chest. "It's okay. It's okay, honey, we took back the station. Disabled Daniel. Scared off Lauren. The witches came, they're helping mop up everyone outside, and your daemon is hurt, but there's an angel watching over him. We're getting you free here – I brought sand, you can unlock the cuffs – and then I'm taking you...."

Was there a plan here? Was he supposed to take Cecil a certain direction? He can't remember.

"...wherever you want to go. The hospital. The apartment. My house. The beach. When was the last time you went to a beach? Say the word, and I'll book two seats on the next flight to Miami."

It earns him a raspy laugh. "Studio first."

They get him unlocked, get some water in him, and Carlos re-fastens the cover over the mirror while Cecil washes blood off his forehead. The last chord of the weather fades before they finish, and both men tense – only to hear a calm voice take over the airwaves:

"Welcome back, listeners. This is former intern Dana Cardinal, sitting in for Cecil Palmero. All is still not well – much is still wrong – but let me tell you about what is right."

Carlos would just as soon let Dana finish the show on her own, but Cecil insists. Whisking off his chapel coat, Carlos drapes it over Cecil's shoulders, bunching it up high over the back of his neck before helping him down the hall.

Cecil flinches at the sight of Kevin, loyally refuses to acknowledge the existence of Quentin-the-angel, and stops only to touch Khoshekh's forehead and whisper something in a language Carlos doesn't recognize. They're close enough to the booth here that Isaña can stay at the margay's side while Carlos and Cecil go forward.

Something small and poky jabs Carlos's shoe as he steps across the threshold. He grimaces and kicks it aside.

Dana pauses in her careful, well-considered litany of victories all across Night Vale to greet them with a smile. "We have guests here in the studio! Carlos the experimental theologian, and Cecil! Would either of you like to say a few words to the listeners?"

"Yes," says Cecil, sinking into the chair beside her. "Yes, please."

As Carlos backs out of the way to lean against a clean patch of wall, another tiny thing goes crunch under his heel. He watches his step from then on. They're not bones, thank heaven, just little bits of equipment: springs, gears, small twisted shards of metal.

That one, a narrow diamond of black against the carpet, looks oddly familiar. Where has he seen that shape before...?

"Hello again, Night Vale. Dana has told you many things, and can doubtless tell you many more. She is a leader and a hero, and her words have my full endorsement. In this moment, I know far less than she does, and have only two messages to add."

The miscellaneous parts seem to be strewn in a loose trail. If he can figure out where it started....

"To the family and friends of Intern Ferdinand: we are sorry for your loss. He fought bravely to the end, and will be given a hero's burial in the break room, as soon as we have a chance to...gather him up."

...oh, no.

The black spires Carlos was stepping on are alethiometer hands.

"Sohvi Laaksonen Palmeroa, tai ketä tahansa, jolla on tietoja Sohvi Laaksonen Palmerosta, pyydetään saapumaan radioasemalle taistelun jälkeen. Toistan: Sohvi Laaksonen Palmeroa, tai ketä tahansa, jolla on tietoja Sohvi Laaksonen Palmerosta, pyydetään saapumaan radioasemalle taistelun jälkeen."

The trail leads to what remains of the golden frame, lying under the desk next to the trash can. Two bullets pumped into it at close range have left it warped and twisted, surrounded by sparkling fragments of metal and glass. Every one of the beautiful ink drawings is either soot-smudged, burn-damaged, or utterly destroyed.

"Stay tuned next for continued words of encouragement, updates on emergency services, and help getting in touch with your loved ones." Cecil pulls Carlos's chapel coat tighter around his shoulders and takes a shaky breath. "Be brave. Be strong. Good night, Night Vale. Good night."

Notes:

Warning: blood, fairly graphic injuries, and character death.

Thanks to Mari for the Finnish, which translates to "Sohvi Laaksonen Palmero, or anyone with information about Sohvi Laaksonen Palmero, is asked to arrive at the radio station after the battle. I repeat, Sohvi Laaksonen Palmero, or anyone with information about Sohvi Laaksonen Palmero, is asked to arrive at the radio station after the battle."

Chapter 44: Theories and Explanations

Summary:

It's time for, among other things, Therapeutic Backstory Hour with Serafina Pekkala.

Night Vale.

Cecil's office has had a lot of its contents stolen or broken, but at least it's free of detached organs and bodily fluids. He lies across the chairs the whole time Khoshekh is in surgery, chapel coat draped over him like a blanket, head heavy in Carlos's lap. He's probably asleep, or something close to it, for most of that.

Carlos takes a few minutes to clean the blood off his own leg, then uses an illegal Sharpie to methodically black out the bar code on Cecil's neck.

Daemons aren't biological. They don't need food or oxygen; they don't suffer from cold or sickness. The two primate daemons sewing Khoshekh up don't have to worry about reattaching muscles and blood vessels in exactly the right position, or keeping the environment sterile as they work. They just have to put in enough stitches to hold him together until the wounds have a chance to seal up on their own.

Low as the risk is, Carlos wouldn't leave Cecil's side for the world right now.

After an endless half-hour, one of the humans carries in a wide basket with Khoshekh splayed on its clean sheets. His fur has been cleaned and blow-dried; there are two lines of stitching up his side, a patch over his left eye, and a gauze bandage wrapped around (the stump of) his right middle foot. "No flying for at least three days, and no walking for a week, understand?"

"Of course." Cecil sits up so he can gather the basket into his lap, and curls one hand around the back of his daemon's neck to scratch behind his ears. "Thank you. Thank you so much."

Carlos lifts Isaña so she can nuzzle the least-injured half of Khoshekh's face, and the surgeons leave them be.

"I should ask," says Cecil in a small voice. "The rest of your team. Are they...?"

"Everyone's okay. Perle is down for bed rest, got her leg injured during a picnic badminton tournament, and Quentin, um, we're no longer allowed to acknowledge Quentin's existence. But they're all right." Carlos has this all direct from Quentin, who checked in with the rest of the team after leading Kevin to...wherever Tamika's forces have been stashing the heavily-drugged prisoners. He isn't sure what the angel is up to now. Tamika's probably making good use of him.

"Good. That's good. And...Fey? Is she doing a good job?"

"She is." It was Fey who sent the medical services here in the first place. She's been calculating the coordinates where they're most needed, and directing them around town accordingly. "I think the broadcasting part intimidates her...obviously she's always had an audience, she's just not used to being aware of it...but she's as good with numbers as ever, and she's getting better all the time at translating them into practical meaning."

There's one person Cecil might ask about who is almost certainly in trouble. Renée Carlsberg was among the Advanced Readers who went missing, who are most likely either hostages or dead. But if Cecil doesn't bring it up, Carlos isn't going to voluntarily put that weight on his shoulders.

"Dana said Fey was learning from...either another machine, or a person who worked with a similar machine. I didn't really understand which," says Cecil. "But there was a technician in the same world, who helped build it. Do you think maybe...someone like that could...?" He nods to what's left of his alethiometer, reduced to a mess of parts in a Tupperware container on his desk.

"I don't know," admits Carlos. "If their machine works on the same structure, I guess it's possible. We could also try sending the parts to Oxford or Heidelberg, if it's safe. They would never disassemble a working alethiometer, so an already-disassembled one would be a one-of-a-kind research opportunity."

Cecil rests his head on Carlos's shoulder. "Maybe."

They're still sitting like that when something on Cecil's desk buzzes.

Transferring the basket to Carlos's lap, Cecil gets up and presses some buttons. "Hello?"

"Señor Palmero?" says a crackly voice. Must be whoever the Sheriff's secret police allocated to handle their front-desk security. "There's a witch here to see you. Says she has an appointment."

Cecil catches his breath. "Send her in."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The air assaults from Desert Bluffs have all but stopped. Dana materializes among the witches still doing defense from the stratosphere and orders them to avoid crashing any more jets in a certain region of the sand wastes, then leads a group of Night Vale's finest grade-school technical minds to the existing wrecks.

"Whooooo!" yells a ten-year-old boy riding on the back of his daemon (currently in the form of a motorcycle). "We're finally getting jets! Yeaaaaahhhh!"

Dana hovers her projection next to Janice, riding her own daemon in the more prosaic form of a dark-furred reindeer. The girl has been looking at the sky for most of the trip, and Dana doesn't think it's at the cool high-tech aircraft. "I know what you must be thinking, but be careful. Don't go giving yourself away to any strange witches, even if they're our allies. Not without talking to your mother first."

"I won't," says Janice. "Did you know...even witches who aren't related call each other a word that translates to 'sister'?"

"I know," says Dana. "I, well, I don't mean to brag, but earlier one of the witches called me 'sister'. One of the witch queens. Four hundred years old. Probably knows what she's talking about."

"Except if one is still young enough to be considered a kid. Then the young one is 'daughter', and she calls all the adults who aren't her mamá or abuela, 'aunt'."

"It felt too presumptuous to call her 'sister' back. Perhaps I should call her 'aunt'. That would be respectful, without being quite so formal as 'your majesty'."

"So with Señor Cecil and Señor Emmanuel in town, it's almost like I have two uncles."

"Which is more than I have," reflects Dana. "At least, until we see how this 'aunt Serafina' idea pans out."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil waits in the entryway of his office, just behind the point where he'd have to put his stained shoes back on and step in a bloodstain. In his basket, Khoshekh sits up, unwise as the motion may be. Isaña stays in place in case Khoshekh needs to lean against her, and Carlos puts an arm around Cecil's shoulders, ready to provide whatever moral support he can.

No, that's a lie. Carlos is not ready. If Cecil's mother comes walking out of that stairwell, Carlos has no idea what kind of support Cecil will need.

The door swings open...and, oh, Carlos is unready for this in a whole other way.

"That isn't my mother," whispers Cecil — completely unnecessarily — Carlos would not be fit to call himself a lifelong Lyra Belacqua fanboy if he couldn't recognize Serafina Pekkala.

Be cool, Carlos. You're a multiverse-traveling, reality-saving hero in your own right these days. You've invented a way to see the true forms of angels...walked in the same Botanical Gardens that Will Parry used to visit...helped save this world from losing all its Rusakov particles...you came back from the dead! You can do this.

The Queen of the Lake Enara clan is fair-skinned and dark-haired, nearly as tall as Cecil, wearing black silk and laced-up sandals. She's unarmed, carrying only a small satchel and the cloud-pine branch she flew in on; her daemon (Kaisa, a white-fronted goose, Anser albifrons) isn't with her. Piercing green eyes size up Carlos in an instant, then Cecil. In English, she says, "You must be Sohvi Laaksonen's son."

Cecil dips into a quick bow. "Yes, your majesty. You know my mother?"

"She is in the care of my clan. She did not arrive with us, but I would be willing to speak of her at some length, if you know of a place where we can meet in private. And if you would like to hear."

"I do. I would. Please," says Cecil. "This is Carlos. He's — he is my — I would like him to be with me."

"That would be acceptable." Serafina goddamn Pekkala nods to Carlos in polite greeting. "Dr. Ramirez. I've heard good things about your research."

"Hi," says Carlos dizzily. "I used to have an action figure of you."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The hospital reports Perle is in good-enough shape to rest up at home, so all the non-Carlos experimental theologians end up converging on the larger rented house. The schools have let out too, which means Seth is already there; he's fast asleep in his room, and wakes up just enough to give his mother a groggy hug before passing out again.

Susannah is still in an unknown location with the Girl Scouts, but she left Sherie a voicemail. Most of it involves yelling at Sherie for getting taken prisoner by Strex and scaring Su half to death. At the end she adds that she's fine, not injured, and has earned three new badges, although two of them are deep dark secret badges whose true forms are unknowable to anyone outside the Scouts, and, you know what, Sherie should probably forget she even mentioned it.

The Faceless Old Woman left a note, spelled out on the fridge door with peanut butter, that she's going to spend a while at the college fraternity houses replacing students' bookmarks with links to educational websites about bees, and for Sherie not to worry.

Their block doesn't have power, but it turns out Quentin can stick his foot in a socket and fool the grid enough to put the lights on. They run an extension cord out the front door, put a power strip on a table in the yard, and tape up a sign saying FREE: CHARGE YOUR DEVICES. Neighbors start showing up within ten minutes, plugging in their phones, their blenders, their humming miniature pyramids.

With so many things at relative peace, the team — including Quentin, who is, and Sherie still has not gotten over this, literally an angel — gathers in the living room with every alcoholic beverage their cupboards have to offer.

"None for me, thanks," says Quentin, when Keith offers to pour him something from a bottle labeled in Modified Sumerian. The newly-minted angel is wearing a sun hat and one of the traditional local ponchos: not for modesty, he's almost invisible anyway, more to remind them all where he is. "I don't think ingesting things affects me any more. Even if I wanted them, which, so far, I don't."

"Will you let us do experiments on that some time?" asks Nirliq over a glass of wine. She and her colobus daemon are on the floor, relaxing against the couch. "Or are you above such earthly things as experimental theology now?"

"Not at all! I still want to learn things. To discover things. To, um, to play Resident Portal Effect IV when it comes out," says Quentin sheepishly. "Tamika wants me to go track down the rest of the Erikas — and given all the possibilities we talked about that Marcus was scared to try, I think I have a real shot at doing it in good time — but I'm staying around for a few days first, in case there are any more emergencies that call for an angel. We can run some tests while I'm here."

"I'm sure we will gain much from having an...enthusiastic...research subject," says Keith delicately. His binturong daemon rolls up in a self-satisfied ball of fur at the foot of his chair.

"I'll drink to that," says Sherie, and they raise their glasses.

Even if he can't get physically intoxicated, Quentin mellows as the rest of them do. When Sherie praises him for his inspiring choice of last words, he groans and covers his face with one hand. (The motion is identifiable by the way his broad, furry flying-squirrel "wings" drag the orange poncho around.) "Weren't they, though? We worked hard on those. And after I actually got to say them, it turned out we didn't die."

"You...worked on them?" echoes Sherie. "Why would you do a thing like that?"

"Why wouldn't you?" asks Perle. Her injured leg, not splinted or in a cast but heavily-bandaged, is up on an ottoman in front of her. "Considering where we live? I've had mine worked out for months."

"Well, sure, but...." With Perle's level of pessimism, it wouldn't surprise Sherie if she plans her last words every time she gets on an airplane.

"I've been planning on going with the classic 'tell my family I love them'," volunteers Nirliq. "Unless I get killed in the process of delivering vital intelligence, in which case passing on as much of that as possible would take precedence."

Sherie turns helplessly to Keith. "What about you?"

"I, too, would strive to pass on any valuable information I was carrying."

"And if you weren't carrying any...?"

"Then I have a short list of classical allusions and poetic excerpts in mind, from which I would choose the one that best fits the circumstances." Keith pauses. "You are welcome to borrow it, if you would like some ideas to work from."

Defeated, Sherie sighs. She'll probably want to think of hopeful last messages to give her kids, but it can't hurt to look at other options. "I think I would, yes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Serafina if-the-Internet-had-risen-ten-years-earlier-Carlos-would-have-written-fanfiction-about-her Pekkala sees the state Khoshekh is in, she offers to make something herbal and therapeutic. They detour to the break room, where the witch brews some herbs using the coffee maker, while Cecil unlocks the protective covering over the bottomless pit so he and Carlos can dispose of Bedamim, then Daniel, then the most prominent and gruesome remains of dismembered Strexcorp marketing executives.

(How did Cecil not see right away that Daniel was mechanical? Sure, he appears to have a circulatory system and lungs and probably some other biological organs, but he also has rivets.)

"Did you and Khoshekh break in here all on your own?" asks Cecil. "That's incredible."

"Oh, gosh, no, we had help," says Carlos. "From — from — um, I don't remember, so I think it must have been the Man in the Tan Jacket."

Cecil wrinkles his nose. "Did he leave to do something else important, like Erika would have if Erika existed, or did he just skip out on you?"

"I wish I knew."

The concoction Serafina (!!) brews is thicker and heartier than tea. Carlos sips at his mug as they return to the office, and almost immediately starts feeling the ease of aches he'd gotten resigned to ignoring. They sit cross-legged in a circle on the office carpet: Isaña back in Khoshekh's basket at their feet, Carlos's hand resting on Cecil's leg, Serafina's hands folded in her lap.

"I had cause to review your mother's history not long ago," she tells Cecil. "When I learned where we were being called to fight, I spoke to her in person. She is physically well. Mentally, emotionally...she is not."

Cecil swallows. "Is that — I mean, was it something that happened to her, or was she always —"

"Her difficulties now are from something she went through, yes. She has difficulty telling what is real; she withdraws into herself for long periods; she suffers from nightmares and melancholy. I can say that she is better now than when she first returned to us, although she may never fully recover."

(Carlos finds his whole mental image of Cecil's mother rearranging itself.)

"But I think perhaps you are asking about the way she was when you were a child. The traits that led to her daemon settling as he did."

"...yes."

"That is not a question I can answer," says Serafina. Not apologetic, but compassionate. "The War changed so many people, witches and lyhytikäiset alike. And it must have been especially hard for Sohvi, who was so young — the youngest of the Lake Turma clan, when it began — and the only one surviving when it ended. It could easily have led to her troubles. But there is no one left alive who knew her before that time, who can say with any confidence which traits were in her nature all along."

Carlos squeezes Cecil's leg. "Are you implying — did she settle during the war? She was that young?"

"She was."

Turning to Cecil, Serafina asks something in...presumably the language Cecil used to address the witches on-air. Svenska or Suomi or Northern Lapp or whatever. Cecil nods. The witch asks something else.

"No," says Cecil in English, "but you can tell him. He might have figured it out already." With a proud little smile, he adds, "He's very smart."

Switching back to English, Serafina explains: "Lake Turma chose to side with the Authority. They fought against the founding of the Republic."

"I had a guess," admits Carlos. "There was one time I mentioned it around Josie, and she dodged the subject. I wasn't sure if Cecil would appreciate me prying." With a sidelong glance at Cecil, he adds, "And if it was true, I wasn't sure if you knew."

"I knew." Cecil takes a sip of his broth. "That's basically how she got here, right? She was in exile. With Josie as her warden."

"More or less," says Serafina. "Sohvi was too old to be allowed to walk free after the war; she was among the witch-prisoners put in the custody of Lake Enara. Still, she was young enough to need care, guidance, mentoring. I am ashamed to say nobody gave it. When she escaped, we might not have bothered to go after her at all, except that her daemon was a tualapi. We were afraid to imagine what kind of ruthless, malevolent destruction she could cause.

"At last we discovered her in this town. A town where, as we learned, the residents deal with things more frightening than tualapi daemons on a weekly basis. Not only that, but for all her cold-hearted nature, she had met a local and appeared to love him. We — that is, I and the other queens of several ally clans — decided she could be allowed to stay, as long as we left a representative in Night Vale to keep her under observation.

"It was unexpectedly difficult. Nine candidates in a row were struck down by ailments and injuries, or pre-emptively fled in horror, or simply disappeared."

That's Night Vale, all right.

"At last we sent Juosukka Hirsti. We expected her to last a month. She stayed in town for the next hundred years, even remaining after Sohvi herself returned to the North, and she had no more obligation to send us reports."

Cecil bends forward to curl a hand around Khoshekh, skritching under his daemon's furry chin. "Were they, um, detailed reports? How much do you know about me?"

"Very little. We know Sohvi's foresight sometimes included visions about you. We know she taught you some things...potions, techniques...that are, shall we say, not traditionally passed on to sons." When Cecil tenses, Serafina hastens to add, "She hasn't been disciplined for that, and neither will you be. There is a growing skepticism in the clans, especially among our younger sisters, about what we should be forbidden to teach. Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years it will be not only tolerated, but encouraged."

(Carlos folds one hand over the other and surreptitiously crosses his fingers for "within his lifetime.")

"And we know...." Switching back from optimistic to solemn, Serafina finishes in the witch-language.

"Carlos figured that out too," says Cecil quietly. "Separation in general, and Mom's part in mine. He won't tell anyone."

Nodding, Serafina asks something more.

Something that makes Cecil press his lips together, while Khoshekh's ears flatten against his head and the tip of his tail lashes back and forth.

"You don't have to answer," says Carlos. He doesn't know what the question was, but he does know two things: this is not an easy topic for Cecil, and Carlos will not have anyone pressuring him about it. Not even Serafina confidante-of-Dr.-Belacqua-herself Pekkala gets to....

"Six," says Cecil. "I was six."

Dead silence. Even the sounds of traffic resuming around the building seems to fade.

"That was a cruel thing to do," says the witch-queen at last. "Crueler than was necessary, even with the prophecy accounted for. We should have been watching her more closely. Someone should have been prepared to intervene."

Cecil accepts this with a quiet nod, while Khoshekh lifts his head and murmurs, "Thank you, your majesty."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika is doing another morale-boosting round of the recently-hospitalized Advanced Readers when ringtones start going off across the floor.

It's only the Girl Scouts' phones, she realizes pretty quick. Strexcorp bought the Scouts, which doesn't mean any of the girls or Troop Leaders have bowed to Strex's authority for a second, but it does mean the company has gotten its claws on a whole bunch of Scouting databases. Including all their phone numbers.

They each got the same message, a text linking to a blog post on Strex's website. The girl at whose bedside Tamika and Rashi are standing (one of their cousins, sixteen, with a gunshot wound to the shoulder and an adder daemon at her side) unlocks her phone and lets Tamika read:

Strexcorp is proud to announce the apprehension of fourteen young felons, who had been causing property damage across the Greater Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area. Because of the poor management of juvenile detention centers in neighboring towns, they have been safely transported to one of Strexcorp's own Youth Rehabilitation Centers, in sunny Desert Bluffs. With professional treatment, we have confidence they will be able to grow into productive members of society!

Unless their treatment is disrupted. If that happens, Strexcorp cannot guarantee their safety. Of course we will try to apprehend any agitators before it gets that far, but if harmful consequences are what it takes, then so be it.

The article is headlined by a group photogram of the kids who stormed the HQ building. They've all been dressed in yellow-accented school uniforms with orange triangle patches, and have the too-dark eyes and vacant smiles of someone on a fresh regimen of Strex drugs. A girl Tamika knows to have four eyes is wearing a smart yellow cap that obscures the top set, and all the kids who used to wear glasses have had them taken away.

"We're going after them, right?" calls a girl from a couple of beds down.

"Hell yes, we are going after them!" says Tamika without a second's hesitation. She's up on Rashi's back, so her voice carries. "Everyone in here, you focus on getting better, understand? We're gonna have plenty to do for a long time to come, so your mission is to rest up and heal and get ready for that, and do not stress about this for a minute. We've got it covered."

 

-{,(((,">

 

When a couple of giant masked warriors tap on the office window, Carlos goes to see what they want. The giant doesn't speak English or Spanish, but one is holding a large Spanish-printed sign, and points to the different lines to ask if they need a long list of things, from food to toilet paper to newts to bloodstones to trash removal.

Carlos shakes his head a lot, punctuating it with the occasional gracias. At last the warrior gives him a thumbs-up (with a thumb as long as Carlos's forearm) and moves her cart of supplies on down the block.

"We shouldn't keep you too much longer," says Cecil to Serafina Pekkala. "You probably have a lot to do. I just want to know...why did Mom go back North? Why did she leave...here?"

The witch-queen, though until now she has been nothing but forthcoming, hesitates. "The circumstances are...ambiguous. Juosukka Hirsti did not witness them. And Sohvi Laaksonen's narration and memory are, as I have said, unreliable."

"I would appreciate anything you can tell me." As Carlos settles back down on the carpet, Cecil takes his hand. "Anything at all. Even if it's hard to hear."

"There are unfamiliar laws at work here," says Serafina apologetically. "Ones that may supersede my authority. You were placed under a kind of local geis that altered your memories. It's not something I am familiar with, and I'm not sure what I can discuss with you safely."

"Re-education?" asks Carlos.

Cecil nods. "Must be. Does this have something to do with my brother?"

Serafina gives him a searching look. "You remember your brother?"

"Yes!" exclaims Cecil, sitting up straighter. "Well, sort of. I learned late last year that I had one, and ever since then I've been getting back, not episodic memories, but understanding. Like the awareness that he was older. And was good at Monopoly. We had the Candle Cove special edition, because that was his favorite show. Mom would teach him things more complicated and advanced than she was teaching me, and when I was really little, well, fairly little, well, it had certainly stopped by the time I was in high school, but I would throw these tantrums about not getting to learn the cool stuff...."

With obvious effort, he reins himself in. (Which is a shame, because half of this is stuff he hasn't mentioned to Carlos yet.)

"...so yes. I remember. And the authorities haven't been re-blocking it. Tell me everything. Did he leave with Mom, or did he go somewhere else? Do you know where he is now?"

Serafina inclines her head. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry because you don't know where he is?" asks Cecil hopefully. "Or sorry because —" His voice catches. "Because he's —"

"Because he died, yes."

Carlos wraps both hands around Cecil's, clasping his palm and braceleting his wrist.

"We don't know what happened," continues Serafina, in a soft, sympathetic voice. "We do know that, according to Juosukka's reports, you and Sohvi were both witnesses. The experience was traumatic. Before your...re-education...Juosukka reports that she was deeply concerned. You were inconsolable; you found it difficult to function. Our formal record of you ends with the note that the treatment was successful."

(Hold on. Didn't Cecil say the secret police were only doing maintenance on his memory loss, that the original cause was something else...? But no, wait, Carlos's sister talked to Cecil about this over Christmas. If something is traumatic enough, the brain can shut down the memories on its own.)

"Knowing about your mother, I can understand why drastic measures were taken. Sometimes she talks as if her eldest son is still alive, an adult out in the world; sometimes she believes you are both still children who live with her. At her most lucid, she is convinced that she was the cause of your brother's death. It may be true. But losing a son always shatters a piece of you, and it may simply be that she was more fragile than most to begin with."

Gathering his voice again, Cecil says, "How many has it been for you?"

"Two that lived as long as a man can expect to. One that died even younger than your brother. I can't say anything certain about your mother's feelings...but I can tell you that I didn't see that child's father for decades afterward, and it was not because I loved him too little."

(Carlos barely breathes. He'd known the names and birth years of Serafina's children — he memorized them once, the way some guys memorize baseball scores or the specs of the Millennium Falcon — but her public biography doesn't include details like this.)

"Can I have a message sent to her?" asks Cecil. With a thumb against his wrist, Carlos can feel his heart racing. "Could you do that?"

"I can, yes."

"Then...tell her I'm all right? That I'm safe and healthy, I mean. I survived my internship, and the Boy Scouts, and I got my degree, and I always stay inside on Street Cleaning Day."

If Serafina finds this as baffling as Carlos would have in his pre-Night-Vale days, she doesn't show it. "I will."

"And I still work in radio, just like the prophecy said," continues Cecil. "I'm really good at it, and I love it, even when my bosses are evil...you don't have to tell her that part. And I have a wonderful boyfriend. He's...well. He's my haltijani vaalija."

For the first time, Serafina's look of solemn concern warms into a smile. "Is he? So few people, no matter how long their lives, have that luck. My deepest congratulations to you both."

 

-{,(((,">

 

As sharp as Fey is, she has her blind spots. Dana has to hold up a Boy Scout medical response team to make them put a cast on Emmanuel's ankle, and redirect a witch to lend him a spare branch of cloud-pine. Emmanuel gathers Neharah safely into his deerskin briefcase, and flies a low, wobbly path to the address Dana gives him.

Dana meets him outside, just as one of the house's owners is coming down the front walk. "Excuse me! Señor Carlsberg?"

"Dana Cardinal! Is that you? In person? It is so good to meet you," exclaims Janice's all-but-stepfather. "You did a great job on the radio earlier. I was about to go see young miss Tamika Flynn, but if there's something I can do for you here...."

"You go right ahead," says Dana. "I just need a place to put up our ally here. You have a spare bedroom, right?" If Emmanuel was more memorable, she'd send him to the hospital, but as-is there's too much danger they'll toss him out by accident. Here, Janice can remember to keep an eye on him, and keep him rolling in ice packs and aspirin as necessary.

"I'm very sorry to impose," adds Emmanuel. "Usually I stay at the library, but it's demolished right now."

"Well, the place is a bit of a mess, but any friend of Dana's is welcome to it." Steve pauses, gaze flicking in odd patterns, as if he's studying something in the air around them. "Um, do you have some kind of connection to Janice?"

"I do!" says Emmanuel, pleasantly surprised. "She has a rare skill set that I've been teaching her how to use."

"Really? That's good of you. Very good. Okay, let me show you inside." Steve leads them back up to the house and fumbles with the lock. "Just leave some kind of note on the guest room door, all right? If my girlfriend finds an unexpected stranger in the house because we can't remember you were supposed to be there...the secret prison, which everyone knows is in the abandoned mine shaft, is completely overcrowded right now, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't be able to find you a cell."

A prison cell, with its king-size bed and HBO and fancy soaps in the attached bathroom, might have some advantages over the Cabrera-Carlsberg guest room, which features cardboard boxes stacked on the carpet, mismatched furniture crammed against the walls, and a series of suspicious blue stains along the ceiling. Still, Emmanuel and Neharah settle in with relish, as if it's a luxury hotel room. "Thank you, Dana. For everything."

"When I get back to Night Vale for real, I'll try to make sure you get a permanent home," vows Dana. "I don't exactly have a lot of money, because I've never had a paying job and still need to graduate high school, but I'll think of something. Maybe I'll run a Kickstarter."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil's apartment building is in a block with no power or running water. Carlos takes him back to the house, where the water is running and the team already has lights set up. They shower, Carlos by camping lantern, Cecil in the dark.

Quentin brought back Carlos's bag from the college, including his phone. Between texts and emails he realizes that he's missed an editing deadline for a submission to Modern Physics, and an application deadline for one of the major US government grants. Also, he has five new interview requests and a wave of fresh clamoring from strangers, thanks to some guy he's never met giving an interview to a gossip blog about having had a torrid affair with the world's most infamous theologian.

(He doesn't even acknowledge the drama on Facebook, just makes a post saying he may have spotty online access for the next few days, but on the plus side, guess who just met Serafina Pekkala?)

He's just wrapping up his deleting spree when Cecil comes out of the shower, wearing a velvet bathrobe with absurdly oversized lapels: one of the pieces of Cecil's clothing that has found its way into Carlos's closet. It's hot in here with no A/C or fans, but there's a nice crossbreeze from the windows, enough that Cecil can comfortably drape an arm across Carlos and pillow his head on Carlos's bare chest. Their daemons doze together in the basket next to the bed.

"That thing you called me, in that message to your mother," says Carlos quietly. "What did it mean? I tried to google it, but I don't even know if I was spelling it right."

"Haltijani vaalija?"

"Right, that."

"It means...someone who cherishes and cares for my daemon as much as I do. Enough that you can touch him like I do."

No wonder Carlos couldn't find it online. He wasn't aware any languages had a term for that.

Someone starts tapping at the window. Carlos startles at the noise, and listens in confused, frozen horror — surely the time for secret messages has passed? He's too rattled to track the Morse properly, so he doesn't relax until Cecil murmurs, "It's not dangerous, Carlos, it's an ad. Tattoo parlor is having a two-for-one removal special. Effective all week."

"Okay," says Carlos, and tries to convince himself to breathe easy.

His system has been running on overdrive for a while now, but it's finally safe for him to settle down. They're no longer dancing around Strex surveillance; the noise was just Night Vale being Night Vale. This isn't Kevin lying half on top of him, in spite of the short haircut; it's Cecil, who cherishes Carlos's daemon, who would let Carlos get up in a moment if he needed it...

...Cecil, who is dripping hot tears onto Carlos's chest.

"Cecil, hey, it's okay," murmurs Carlos, encircling Cecil in his arms and running his fingers through Cecil's cold damp hair. Impossible to mistake him for anyone else now. Kevin doesn't cry. "The station's safe, you're safe, you're not going to wake up back there."

Cecil gulps, sniffling, holding him tighter. "Uh-huh."

"I know we lost a lot, but we made it through. We're still in two pieces. We're already starting to put things back together...."

"...I won't need to be anyone's fake uncle any more...."

Ah, yes. There's that.

"And I knew," adds Cecil, choked-up, voice cracking. "I always knew he might be dead. It was possible. It was likely! I shouldn't have hoped for...I shouldn't be...."

"You had every right to hope. You have every right to be sad." God, if Cecil's brother's death flattened him the first time around, of course he's allowed to be a wreck finding it out for the second time. Episodic memories or no episodic memories. "I've got you, gatito. Cry as much as you want."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika is back in the Boy Scout base, her and plenty of other well-read strategists, all staring at the expanded version of the Big Map. This one has Desert Bluffs, as outlined from that map Dr. Gaillard got them, with extra details from everyone's memories of crashing the hospital. Without any idea where the current prisoners are being held, it's nowhere near enough to build a rescue mission on.

Their safest bet would be to approach through another world. But it's useless if they don't know the coordinates of where they're going, and even Dana's astral-projection skills are being blocked from most of the town at this point.

"We'll reconvene in the morning," says Tamika at last, pushing back her chair. They haven't pulled together more than half a minute's worth of bright ideas in the past half hour. "See if anyone has any new —"

She stops short when the door opens. They shouldn't be getting unexpected visitors.

A whole range of weapons, mostly slings and arrows, gets whipped out and turned on the intruder. "Don't shoot!" he exclaims, hands raised. "It's just me! Steve Carlsberg? With an E?"

"Hold your fire," orders Tamika. "Carlsberg's a good guy. Security shouldn't have let him walk right in, but that's their fault."

"Don't blame the Scouts!" says Carlsberg. "They're doing a great job. It's just — there's this chart, all right? A chart in the sky. I know you can't see it, but I swear it's there, and it explains everything. It showed me a way to get in here without being seen. And I can tell you what it says! I can translate the glowing arrows, and the circles and the dotted lines, that show you exactly how to get to my daughter."

Notes:

Thanks again to Mari for the invaluable Finnish help!

Lake Turma = Turmajärvi
haltijani vaalija = "the one who cherishes/takes extraordinarily good care of my daemon"

"Haltija" isn't the word for "daemon" from the Finnish edition of HDM, it's a concept from our-world pre-Christian Finnish mythology, which saw the soul as divided into three parts: henki, itse, and haltija/luonto. (Everything – houses, mountains, forests, rocks, ovens, you name it – has a haltija, a kind of guarding/inhabiting/possessing spirit, and the luonto is specifically the haltija of a person.) In our world, the entire self is internal; in Lyra's world, the henki and itse are considered to be the internal parts (making up "the ghost"), while the haltija is the external, animal-shaped part ("the daemon").

New art: various Sheriff's secret police officers, and more art-nouveau character portraits: the Faceless Old Woman and Delphine.

(Any readers have nominations for these daemon portraits? Feel free to suggest characters, here on the fic or over on Tumblr.)

Chapter 45: Deadlines

Summary:

Strexcorp is out of Night Vale! (Well, mostly. Lauren's still close enough to hijack broadcasts.) The next step is to drive them out of Lyra's universe altogether. But they're not going to go quietly.

Notes:

New guest art: Marcus and Vithya, and Carlos and Khoshekh, by soupengine! There's also Serafina Pekkala, and, by popular demand, the Night Vale angels.

This chapter uses lots of quotes from Old Oak Doors, especially Lauren's lines. Upfront warning for character death.

Night Vale.

Morning. The experimental theologians trickle into the kitchen one by one, representing various combinations of tired, injured, and hungover. There's still no anbaric power on their block; Sherie gives Seth a wad of cash, tells him to buy whatever he wants at school for breakfast and lunch and treat himself with the rest, and enjoy the air-conditioned classrooms. As for the rest of them, with nothing in the fridge and no powered cooking devices, they're left to eat whatever's in the cupboard, however they can cook it using a can of fire.

They end up having coffee and toast. A lot of toast.

(At least they have a lot of bread. The team can't agree on a single favorite wheat alternative, so they have five different loaves.)

Nirliq, the only one who slept in the other house (Perle crashed in this living room rather than trying to walk), comes over as soon as they text her. She's bearing muffins and her laptop, prompting Carlos to say, "By the way, today is Theological Amnesty Day. If it isn't a direct order from the Book Club...or on-air from Fey or Cecil, or a call from Dana or Maureen, or anyone else who would need us for the war and recovery efforts...we're not doing it. Any deadlines that get missed, so be it."

"That's all well and good for field work," protests Nirliq, "but I'm supposed to finish a thesis at some point this year."

"You're already going to go down in history as a co-inventor of the Atal lens," says Sherie reassuringly. "It's not the end of the world if you don't get around to defending your thesis until next semester."

It isn't long before Carlos and Cecil take off together. Cecil won't skip his own work today, and Carlos probably only made the declaration in the first place so he could focus on looking out for his boyfriend. Not that Sherie blames him.

She takes a plate of toast and juice to Perle, and gives Tock the sludge monster a couple of empty jars to crunch on. Back in the kitchen, Keith has gotten out his own laptop, and he and Nirliq are both looking at the screen. "Something tells me that's not a cat video."

"A concerned email," says Keith. "From colleagues at Heidelberg. They report heightened readings on the danger meters at several disparate research posts, and ask for our consultation."

"How are you getting online? The network's down."

Keith raises his bushy eyebrows. "This ordinater has legs, walks on its own, and has been known to bite people when it feels threatened, and the feature that confuses you is its satellite-based wireless access?"

"...point taken." Sherie walks around, careful to step over the long tail of Keith's binturong daemon, and squints over his shoulder. "Are those the numbers? Those don't look so bad."

"No," agrees Keith. "They are easily within normal ranges."

"...for Night Vale," finishes Nirliq.

So much for not working today, thinks Sherie. "I guess this is the kind of thing we should look into."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Before Tamika can take off on a rescue mission, she's got to set a few things moving here at home. Starting in the yard at Vansten's place, where Dana says she can open a window on a group of otherworldly caterers.

The mansion's rooms are full of displaced folks from around town, plus a whole lot of witches. Vansten's third-highest-paid personal chef is in charge of the kitchen, and made sure everyone here got a continental breakfast and mints on their pillows. Now there's a couple dozen people watching from balconies and the back porch as Tamika and Rashi stand in the flower garden, flanked by Advanced Readers, a handful of police officers, and two seated giants.

"Same rules as the other portals!" announces Tamika. "Be on your best behavior. Anyone who's sick, keep your distance from the visitors. Anyone throws trash through the portal, you get taken straight to a cell in the abandoned mine shaft! We've got a gentleman here who is both a theologian and an angel, so if he says the window needs closing, you back off and let him close it."

She nods to Erika, in the form of a white bird with diamonds of blue around his eyes, perched on one of Vansten's marble birdbaths. The angel taps a claw against one of the theologians' electrum spyglasses and nods back.

"Everybody ready?"

The chant goes up all around. "Ready!"

Tamika draws the Knife. A Weird Scout beside her switches on the radio he's been carrying, and they wait for Fey to calculate that Tamika is ready. "...will be open for business today. Sixteen hours, twenty-four minutes until a Very Bad Thing happens. To request cleanup services for a Strexcorp decoration job, please call...."

"—Stop!"

Tamika stops. Not that she's obligated to answer to the witches, but it'll be prudent — not to mention, polite — to at least figure out what this one wants.

The witch soars down from a balcony on a branch of cloud-pine and hovers in front of Tamika. She's got golden-blonde curls and soft skin, and the cut of her black silk outfit marks her as Lake Enara. She addresses Tamika in urgent, rapid English.

"Slow, slow!" exclaims Tamika in kind, gesturing for the Weird Scout to turn the radio down. "English is not good."

"I can translate," says Erika, first in English, then repeating himself in Spanish. He flutters over to perch on Rashi's horns. "Say that again?"

The Lake Enara witch repeats herself.

"She says that knife is dangerous," translates Erika. "Every time you make a cut between worlds, it releases something...like a piece of the void, and it's hard to see, but you can tell when it's close because you feel cold? And, ah, I think she's talking about mysterious hooded spectres." He switches to English. "Are you [something something something] spectres?"

"We [something something] spectres, yes. You know [something] them?"

Tamika points to a couple of hooded spectres drifting around by Vansten's pool. "Spectres, like that?"

The witch follows Tamika's finger...then yanks back on her pine branch so hard she lurches up four feet into the air, turns to her companions, and starts yelling in what is probably a whole other language because all Tamika gets is "[something something something something]!"

Tamika's English is not nearly up to explaining this. "Will you tell the lady to calm down?" she urges Erika in Spanish. "How they never kill people this far from the Dog Park? And can somebody volunteer to go poke a spectre to demonstrate?" She'd do it herself, but they're scared of the Knife, and she's not letting anybody else hold it.

All the observing witches are in the air, bird daemons circling around them, as a couple of Blood Pact Scouts with lizard daemons go over to the pool and poke the mysterious hoods.

Sure enough, the spectres only buzz with static and drift off over the water.

Under her breath, Tamika asks Erika, "Any chance she's right about the other part? Is my Knife making these things?"

"Gosh, no," says the angel without hesitation. "Maybe she's thinking of some other knife? But with this one, given all the tests and theological observations our research team put it through...if it was releasing soul-eating abominations every time you made a cut, that's definitely the kind of detail we would have noticed."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos would just as soon have Cecil stay home today. Dana could queue NVCR's equipment to play reruns all day — they might even get decent ratings, if they used their most critically-acclaimed episodes of Morse Code for Trumpet Quintets — while Cecil stayed in bed and Carlos thought up sweet things to do for him. Maybe the power would come back on, and they could watch one of Cecil's favorite sepia-toned Westerns. Maybe it wouldn't, and...well. They'd come up with something.

But Cecil insists on going to the studio. And since the car Carlos would've taken is still in the college parking lot, they ride in together on the bus.

The moment they step through the reclaimed-bloodstone doors, Carlos is glad they came after all. The lobby is sparkling clean: not a bloodstain or bone fragment to be seen. The carpet has been ripped up and disposed of, leaving a hardwood floor polished to a high gleam. Everything smells strongly of cleaning agents, but it's a welcome change from raw meat, and there's no other sign that it hasn't been this clear for ages.

At the front desk, instead of a secret-police substitute, there's one of the familiar security officers Carlos knows from any number of visits. The speakers are playing the current broadcast: a pre-recorded ad for Best Buy, no Strexcorp rhetoric whatsoever. And down the hall, he can hear...singing?

"What happened here?" asks Cecil in awe. Khoshekh floats beside him at waist level, nose twitching.

"Scouts sent a cleanup crew," says the desk officer. "Strangest children I ever did see, and that's including City Council messenger brats, but they do good work, don't they? Mikaela from sales came in, so they're fixing up that division now. You're about the only other person here, so your office can be next if you ask."

The barcode scanner has been disabled. Cecil doesn't have to worry about the freshly-Sharpied-over tattoo on his neck, just signs in with a modified typewriter and a drop of blood, like a normal person. Carlos does the same, and they venture into the hall, following the mysterious chorus.

NVCR's sales offices are indeed being sanitized by a group of unfamiliar Scouts, all wearing black sashes with hand-sewn badges and being led through a call-and-response song in a language that sounds like a cousin of a cousin of Italian. It's a mixed-gender group, maybe eight-to-twelve years old. Strange children, all of them. Strange, daemonless children.

And sure enough, leading the chant — while hoisting a girl on his shoulders so she can sweep bits of Strexcorp marketing executive off the top of a filing cabinet — is Earl Harlan.

Earl waves to Cecil and Carlos, finishes the latest round of the song, then exclaims, "Cecil! I've been out of town for less than a year! What have you been doing with the place?"

"I will have you know there were not nearly as many hostage situations as the spring of '98," says Cecil, mock-offended. "How have you been doing with the post-apocalyptic wasteland you adopted?"

"Oh, the kids are making incredible progress. We've re-established mining, large-scale farming, vaccination, and the printing press. Got a little stuck on long-distance telecommunication — embarrassing, right? Who doesn't have the schematics of a basic telegraph memorized? — but for helping with Night Vale's disaster cleanup, we're getting compensated with —"

He stops short as the pleasant, squelching melody on the office speakers fuzzes into static, then a disturbingly even hum....

"...I'm so sorry, am I interrupting something?" coos Lauren's voice. "I'm sure it's nothing important."

"Oh, no. No, no, no," says Cecil. "Earl, do any of your kids need combat badges? Because I've got a job for them."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika opens a palm-sized window to a world full of thick brambles and snow. When Erika reports that the danger-meter readings are within safe levels, she cuts it wider, enough so Carlsberg can look through. "How about this one? Any sky-chart there?"

Carlsberg peers into the other world and gazes up at its clouds. "There is, but it's the wrong one! It doesn't explain how the structures and divisions of Strexcorp are interrelated. All it's showing me is recipes."

They go through half a dozen more worlds this way. Erika orders Tamika to close two as soon as they're opened. A third-grade scrying prodigy vetoes another, saying it's the airspace of a seriously paranoid government and they'll be shot down mid-flight if they use it. Carlsberg dismisses several as having the wrong kind of circles and glowing arrows, and a few for not having any at all. In one, he urges Tamika to hurry up and close it: not because the dotted lines are unhelpful, but because they outline a world with no safe paths, because its equivalent of Strexcorp is everywhere.

Finally, Tamika catches the Knife on a familiar-feeling snag in the air, and opens a window on a prairie ghost town. Crumbling brick buildings with mildew-rotted holes for windows, train tracks overgrown with weeds, a heavy stoplight lying in the dirt under dead power lines.

Carlsberg sticks his head through and looks up at the bright, sunny sky. "This will work! The arrows are showing me exactly where to go. Strexcorp is in this world, but not in this area. Not for hundreds of miles."

"Sounds great." Raising her voice, Tamika addresses all the Advanced Readers gathered in the stolen-aircraft rehabilitation hangar. "Suit up, Book Club! We've got a flight path!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

The studio is empty.

"We're broadcasting from a secret location," says Lauren's daemon over the airwaves, "because of some...recent changes to the town of Night Vale. Strexcorp was in the process of bringing together the Night Vale and Desert Bluffs Metropolitan Area, but there was some..."

"...miscommunication," finishes Lauren sweetly. "All we ever wanted was to help you reach your full productive potential!"

"Cecil, would you mind walking the kids through how to find and disable broadcast tampering devices?" asks Earl. "I think they'd get a lot out of seeing a live demonstration."

"Gladly." Cecil starts addressing the kids in their own language, unscrewing the top panel of the mixer and ushering them in to get a closer look at the internal components.

Still on-air, Lauren and her daemon carry on about how awful it is that Night Vale has secret police listening in on your every conversation instead of deregulated corporate observers. That nobody is allowed to purchase any of Strex's high-quality wheat and/or wheat by-products. That teenage girls are allowed to start militias, instead of being given good, honest jobs.

While Cecil and the others work on shutting her down, Carlos retreats with Khoshekh to Cecil's office. Khoshekh ought to lie down so he doesn't wear himself out, and this way Isaña can curl up with him. Not quite as good as cuddling at home, but it can still be relaxing, in its own way....

Right on cue, he gets a text from Sherie: global danger levels rising. we're looking into it.

 

-{,(((,">

 

"If you could pick up the danger meter and move it approximately ten meters, on a line perpendicular to the direction of the threat...."

Nirliq is on the phone with a Dust research facility in Nippon. Keith is talking to people at Heidelberg, presumably having the German version of the same conversation. Sherie sits between them at the ordinater with the local Rusakov array, trying to find a way to filter out the standard Night Vale danger levels and scan for imminent portals in the sand wastes beyond...or, heaven forbid, as far as Kinlání or Black Hill.

"Yes, I know that'll disrupt the integrity of the data. Triangulating the source of the readings is more important right now! If you had more than one danger meter, we wouldn't have this problem."

Her phone hums with a text from Carlos. How global is "global"?

"We have eighty!"

every meter outside nv is above its recorded average. 11 in concerning ranges. not sure yet if they're near safe-ish future portal sites, or far from dangerous ones.

"No, they're not mass-produced. They're a lot of fun to make, all right?"

could be one of strex's famed universe-shattering projects, on a bigger scale? trying to get enough data to identify the pattern. ask cecil to look up the cause.

"Because there's a lot of danger here, that's why! The readings you're getting are lower than what we saw last Thursday. Now, please, lean on our experience and let us help you study them."

Can't. Cecil's alethiometer was destroyed. I'll ask him to put out a call for information on-air; you get in touch with Fey.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Lauren is in the middle of a flowery declaration about how perhaps Strexcorp brought this on themselves — by loving Night Vale too much! — when the signal finally gets disrupted, and Cecil addresses the town. "Sorry about that, listeners. That was not on the schedule for our broadcast day. Technically, this isn't either...but in light of recent events, we're changing the schedule to dedicate all our programming to the revolution.

"We're also trying to cross-stream our broadcast with that of WZZZ, so we can make sure all important information is broadcasting on both frequencies, and no one will miss anything! Thanks to the help of the talented young Megan Wallaby, currently on a playdate at Fey's studio, and my talented childhood friend Earl Harlan, right here in the booth. Is it done yet? Fey, are you with us?"

"Here I am!" exclaims Night Vale's Numbers Leader. Carlos, listening from Cecil's office, smiles at her enthusiasm. "Happy to report that Night Vale has power restored in 92% of households, water in 98%, and telephone service in 100%. Also, there are fourteen hours and fifty-nine minutes left until the Very Bad Thing."

"Sorry, what was that?" asks Cecil. "What kind of bad thing?"

"I don't know! I think it's the same Bad Thing the experimental theologians are predicting, but even that isn't totally certain. So I'm really glad we're co-broadcasting, so you can help fill in by looking up the things I don't understand! And also, maybe, deliver some inspirational messages? I'm not good at those. They're hard to quantify."

"Um, Fey...I'm afraid I can't look things up that easily any more," says Cecil. "My equipment has been, ah, compromised. I can still find obscure town statutes, fanfic recommendations, things like that...but no secret enemy plans."

"Ooh," says Fey. "What about your nice friend Dana? Could she go back in time and get a younger version of you to look it up, when your equipment was still working?"

"Next time I see Dana, I will ask! But if she had done that, my present-day self would probably remember her doing it, and we wouldn't have this dilemma in the first place. That's how all our other Dana-related stable paradox loops have worked, anyway. What about your friend who was teaching you how to interpret your readings? Can't he check it out himself?"

"His experimental theologian says he needs a break," laments Fey. "I'm not even being allowed to talk to him."

Carlos gets up.

"Oh dear. Well, in that case, listeners...if any of you have information on upcoming Very Bad Things via foresight, good scrying technique, a prophecy carved into slabs of granite and buried in your yard, or other proven methods of future-prediction, please call in and let us know! Fey, do you want to do the honors...?"

While Fey is giving the phone numbers, Carlos stands outside the studio and waves for Cecil's attention.

Cecil dutifully takes in the message and passes it along. "Listeners, my hero theologian boyfriend Carlos just tapped a request on the window of my studio in Morse code. He would like to go down to Fey's broadcasting bunker and talk directly to her friend's theologian, one scholar to another. Can somebody give him a ride?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

The next world over.

Eight repurposed yellow gyropters fly in perfect formation. Tamika pilots the one in the lead, Carlsberg and his badger daemon giving directions from the passenger seat, Rashi watching from the back.

They're soaring over yet another cluster of abandoned and half-collapsed buildings when Tamika realizes why she recognized the texture of this universe. It's one of the worlds Kevin had her practice on...because it's the one Strexcorp got him from in the first place.

Tamika's glad all over again that Strexcorp doesn't have him any more. And she makes a mental note to start visiting as the drugs wear off. Poor guy might not have anybody else to come looking.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"I'll tell him exactly what I've told everyone else. I've cut Enigma off," snaps Dr. Caleb Rose over the airwaves. "He is exhausted, and that's after hooking him up to all of this! You can't see it, but I just made a big sweeping hand gesture to indicate everything in this room, which includes the most advanced processors my universe has invented. You dealt with your own problems before you met us, and you can deal with them now while he recovers."

Carlos and Isaña are listening to this transmission from the middle of Fey's concrete bunker. (It's just them in here at the moment. Megan is outside, watched over by her mother, playing tag with some of her more...mobile...friends.) The conversation isn't being included in the WZZZ/NVCR joint broadcast; there's a low copy of that audio running on her speakers in the background, and right now it's Cecil talking, delivering a short inspirational speech in eight languages in a row.

"I promise you, I don't blame you for feeling that way," says Carlos into Fey's nearest microphone, addressing the otherworldly scholar. "My own boyfriend just spent twenty-four hours held prisoner and chained to a sink, and if I could protect —"

"Excuse me? What are you insinuating?"

"Oh — sorry, I didn't mean to —"

"I don't know how they run governments in your dimension, Ramirez, but there is no homosexuality in the United States Office of Strategic Services."

"That's not true!" pipes up Fey, ever ready to provide some helpful numbers. "The rate of homosexuality in your department is four point three percent, with an additional eighteen point one percent experiencing —"

"Fey!" interrupts Carlos. "I'm pretty sure what he means is, there is no homosexuality in his Office of Strategic Services, just like there are no angels in Night Vale."

"But there — ohhhh."

"What I'm trying to say, Dr. Rose, is that I know we're asking a lot," continues Carlos. "We're giving a lot ourselves. One of my team members has a leg she can't walk on right now, another got his neck snapped, a friend's daughter has been taken hostage, my boyfriend lost an eye — we are coping on our own with as much as we possibly can. But there's a very real chance that, in less than fifteen hours, someone is going to try to blow up our universe."

"You're sure this is reality we're talking about," says Rose, arch with skepticism. "Not, say, the plot of a pulp sci-fi serial."

"I didn't see it coming either," says Carlos. He isn't sure what "sci fi" is short for (science fighting? science file?), but he gets the gist. "But trusted sources have assured me it is a real thing that can be done. Someone set off a bomb on that scale during the War, and the angels — who, and I reiterate this for legal purposes, do not exist — were repairing the cracks for at least a decade. So we need to know what's coming, and how to brace ourselves."

Rose sighs. "All right. I'll pass on the question. Just the one! And if Enigma tells me you're full of it, I'm unplugging this radio receiver and throwing it out."

"Understood."

They wait. Carlos fidgets, seated but restless, scratching his injured leg around the edges of the bandage. Isaña paces around his feet.

At last Dr. Rose comes back on the air. "Apparently you're not full of it. But it's not going to be nearly as bad as you think. Just make sure there are no open portals from your world when it happens, pray in your bloodstone circles that things hold together, and have your ex-intern friend hurry up and find those nonexistent angels so they can mop up afterward. I hope you know what all that means, because you're not getting follow-ups."

"We do," says Carlos. "On behalf of all seven billion of us: thank you."

"Seven bil—you know what, no. I don't want to know. I don't want to know!" exclaims Rose. "Hurry up and close this window. If you survive, you can open it again and tell me where all of you fit."

 

-{,(((,">

 

For some reason, Dana had assumed today would be quieter than yesterday. Shows what she knows.

"...so we need you to drop everything and go figure out where the angels, if they existed, would be hiding, and go to that place and bring them here," finishes Cecil. "On the plus side, you have plenty of time! Like, the whole rest of the day."

The audio around them starts hissing and sparking.

"Also, maybe you could ask Maureen to project herself over here for a while? Our current intern just started today, half the staff are dead or refused to come in, and even with all our equipment de-bugged, this other radio signal keeps trying to interfere with our own...."

The static reaches a fever pitch, then fades to reveal Lauren Mallard's voice. "...branding, social networking, and upbeat music. Ah! We're back in."

Cecil kicks at the carpet with his feet so hard, his chair rolls away from the desk.

"Hi, Cecil! Sorry to break into your signal, but I wanted a moment to talk to you."

"She won't stop." Cecil's voice is small and the mic is far away; only Dana hears. "Why won't she stop?"

"Gently talking solves a lot of things!" puts in Lauren's daemon. "Boycotting products, and attacking your employers with their own gyropters, and refusing to participate in trust exercises, all of that solves nothing."

"I don't care what happens to her. I don't." Both of Cecil's hands are clamped over the back of his neck; there are goosebumps all up and down his arms. His breath catches. "Don't want revenge, don't want her to see the error of her ways, I just want her to stay off my radio station. Is that so much to ask? Why can't she leave me alone?"

"You're resistant to change, that's what it is," continues Lauren. "We tried to give you the room to understand what you needed. We tried to show you sympathy. But it's obviously not working! No, you just had to lash out, throw your little tantrums, and keep pushing this adorable idea of revolution...."

"Don't pay any attention to her, Cecil," says Dana, stepping right up to the microphone. The pieces here are already in motion, so she doesn't need to stay around...but it sounds like the deadline on this angel mission is fairly relaxed, so there's no need to leave Cecil alone with his Lauren-induced terror, either. "Her time is almost up."

"Ah, you must be Dana!"

"I am. And I give you...hm...sixty seconds to flee."

"Or are you Dana's double? You don't even know, do you?"

"No, I'm Dana," says Dana politely. "I'll admit, I wasn't sure for a while. But not long ago I met a pair of people, one of whom is an Outsider experimental theologian and one of whom is her Sandstorm double, and I learned that the only reason nobody can tell them apart is because they are both amoral, murderous sociopaths. So I'm not worried any more! Forty seconds, by the way."

"I think I've met the theologian you're talking about," says Lauren. "I can't understand why she never accepted our employment offer. I felt an instant kinship with her the moment we met. She would have been a perfect fit in Strexcorp! We could have been BFFs! We even have the same age, height, weight, and build, so we could have shared clothes!...But I digress. We were talking about you, Cecil, and your silly refusal to —"

"Ten seconds. You really should run."

"— accept a Smiling God into your heart, and mind, and digestive system."

Dana smiles and gives Cecil a thumbs-up. He manages a weak smile back.

"But it's going to be all right, Night Vale. The Smiling God is forgiving! Much more forgiving than your own government, or School Board president, or that weird murderous shape you have in Mission Grove Park, or...."

There's a muted commotion somewhere around her mic, like someone breaking down a door, followed by a yell: "Vive la révolution!"

Cecil gets up the courage to scoot back to the mic. "Hello? Who's there?"

"We are Girl Scout Troop 49þ®€!" announces a teenage girl's voice. "Tracked down the source of this broadcast using a radio triangulation technique we learned by reading an anthology of Emily Dickinson poems. You're welcome."

"You think you scare me?" scoffs Lauren. "A bunch of kids with slingshots, and large hard-bound editions of nineteenth-century plays? It just so happens I have my own slingshot...and an extremely heavy edition of the Strex Employee Handbook. With all the annotations."

"Yeah, well, we're not even here to fight you anyway," says another girl. "We just had to find you."

"Is that so?"

"It totally is! She's gonna get you. Says she has dibs." Addressing the she in question, the Scout adds, "Save the book, though, okay? It's probably the worst book in history...but Tamika would want it safe."

"I will," says a warm, cultured voice. "Hello, Ms. Mallard."

Lauren doesn't sound impressed. "Should I know you?"

"Oh, not at all," purrs the newcomer. "We are the Sheriff's secret police, after all. Even when I was among the rank-and-file who hide in the bushes, I was much too good to be caught unintentionally. And these days...why, these days I hardly leave the office at all, unless something draws me out. Would you like to guess what, in this case, that something was?"

"I really wouldn't."

"Then I'll tell you! It's very simple: You. Threatened. My. Daughter."

A few seconds later, the invasive signal drops out of the frequency. Exactly the way it would if the broadcast equipment had been smashed with a very large axe.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The next world over.

"A couple steps forward," directs Carlsberg, absently adjusting the rifle holstered over his shoulder. "Bigger steps!...Not that big."

They're on the ground again, the gyropters parked just outside a tall brick abandoned building, Tamika and a handful of others working their way in. The floor is littered with dirt, plaster, and paint chips; the walls are marked with rusted radiators and empty picture frames; metal pipes hang out of the collapsed ceiling. It is creepy as hell. And this is coming from Tamika, who has looked a librarian right in the place where the eyes would be if librarians had eyes.

Carlsberg is way too preoccupied to care. He circles around to get different angles, holds up his hands like he's framing a shot for a photogram, steps over cinderblocks and unidentifiable hunks of plastic without a second glance. "Right there! Find a catch-thing into our world, at about knee-level."

Tamika cuts a small opening...then turns it into a long, wide one. They're looking down on a windowless white-walled room with two yellow-painted bunk beds...and a groggy Advanced Reader lying on each mattress.

They're each chained down with a cuff around the ankle, but to Tamika the solid steel might as well be construction paper. She and a couple of others climb down the beds' ladders and lift the prisoners one by one; daemons in the shape of monkeys and large birds carry the dozing daemons alongside their bodies, until they're safe out in the fresh air. A couple quick blood tests and they'll know which drugs Strex has been using. The antidotes are already on hand.

None of these four are Agent R, so it's no surprise Carlsberg is already pacing on the other side of the broken-down room as Tamika seals the portal. "The next one's over here. Come on, hurry!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

It's kind of nice, Carlos reflects, to have a little forewarning before everything goes to pieces.

Fey churns out a list of phone numbers of all the people outside Night Vale who have bloodstone circles and would be willing to help, and the team divvies them up. The first person on Carlos's list turns out to be Hannah Gutierrez, prompting the secret-police officer monitoring their call to exclaim, "I knew you weren't dead! Delarosa owes me twenty bucks."

Former team members are well-represented on the list; they haven't been shy about shipping gifts cross-continent. One of Carlos's numbers is Gerald, who is absolutely tickled to hear that little Megan is now taller than he is. Carlos even lets Megan's mother borrow the phone a minute to say hi.

Next up is Emily, the first person who ever left the team. She opens the conversation by flat-out refusing to get anywhere near the greater Night Vale area ("I still have nightmares about pterodactyls"), but is willing to help out from a distance. And she softens when Carlos reveals that he's wearing some exciting permanent facial scars of his own these days. Ends up telling some proud stories about her three-month-old.

And of course, there's Carlos's family. "Hi, Papi. We might have to save the world later today. Would you like to help...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Four rescuees becomes eight becomes eleven, but they're standing in the last room and there's only two kids here.

Carlsberg's daughter is the missing one.

Completely understandably, Carlsberg himself is a mess. "She's close. They haven't taken her far!" he insists, hands flat against the cell door, badger daemon poking at the bottom edge like maybe she can dig underneath it. "What are you waiting for? Cut through the wall!"

"We can't save her by getting captured ourselves!" hisses Tamika. "Take two deep breaths, in and out, then you're gonna answer some questions for me, got it?"

Though he looks like he'd rather crawl out of his own skin than be calm right now, Carlsberg takes the breaths.

"What kind of security is out there? Guards, cameras, motion sensors? How much can you see?"

"Cameras. Motion sensors. But all the real guards are outside the building! Inside, it's all scholar types! They're Strex, they'll still tear your throat out if they get close enough, but we're armed, we have good aim — she's right here in the facility, just one floor up, and with you here we can make an escape route from anywhere — Tamika, please —"

"We're on it," decides Tamika. "You stand right there and study your dotted lines and figure out the absolute fastest way to get there, understand? We'll bust through in just a minute." Climbing the rungs of the nearest bunk bed in three steps, she leans out the top of the portal. "Gyropter pilots, stay here! We're closing this window — give us thirty minutes, and if you haven't heard from us, assume we're taking another way out! Everyone else — grab a weapon and follow me!"

There's a flurry of motion as people put down medical equipment and take up their slingshots and their novels. The team barely fits in the little prison cell; they all have to scooch up against the walls or squeeze onto one of the bunks to leave room for Rashi, who comes down last, uses the other bunk as a stepping-stone, and hits the ground with a resounding thud just as the wood goes crack! in his wake.

"Carlsberg is navigating. I'm taking out barriers. Everyone else is covering us," says Tamika, as she carves three long lines in the wall in front of them. Up...across...down. "Clear?"

"Clear!"

"We are the beating heart —"

"— we are the lips that chant!"

It's ready. Tamika steps out of the way. "Our god is —"

"— not a Smiling God!" chorus her young fellow-citizens, as Rashi lowers his magnificent buffalo horns and smashes the wall down.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos sits on the grass outside the WZZZ bunker, Isaña in his lap, watching the sky. It's broad daylight, so a flock of angels won't be as spectacular as it was against a velvet starry night almost a year ago, but it'll still be cool if he can catch them.

It'll probably be either the condos or the buzzing shadow-beings all over again. Whichever one it is, they'll handle it. Patch up the cracks, wash away the blood, and start rebuilding. It's what they do. Given enough time and gumption and teamwork, there's nothing Strex can do to them that they can't fix.

"Carlos...?"

Carlos rubs Isaña's ears. "Yeah?"

"When Strex first tested a process that accidentally made an uncontrolled rip in the universe, and they couldn't fix it...the senior managers fled this dimension, right? Grabbed their valuables — including Kevin — and abandoned everything and everyone else?"

"That's the story Thiébaut fed Henriette trying to recruit her," says Carlos with a grimace. "Take it with a grain of salt."

"But it does sound like something a group of evil plutocrats would do," presses Isaña.

"Well, sure."

"And now they're planning to use a process that they know will make uncontrolled rips in our universe. But they're not doing it right away. They're leaving all this time, risking us finding a way to prepare, or even to stop them before they start."

"...and that doesn't make sense unless they're using the buffer time for something. Maybe to evacuate," finishes Carlos. "Maybe, since they have forewarning, they're taking the opportunity to do the long version of evacuation."

"Right."

"But they would need a controlled portal for that. And...and without the Knife or Kevin they don't have any low-energy way to do it, so...." Oh, god.

"So the real deadline is to get to them before they open the escape window," whispers Isaña. "And maybe — they might already —"

Carlos is already on his feet. They've got new numbers to run. Now. "Fey!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Five hostiles taken out. Six. They turn a corner and plunge into a stairwell. Seven. Alarms are going off. Eight.

Carlsberg stops in front of a heavy metal door with a fingerprint scanner and impressive locks. "She's right through here!" he yells over the sirens, and pounds on the door while Tamika starts carving through the security. "Honey, can you hear us? We're almost in!"

Tamika shooes him out of the way so she can finish this without lopping off any of his limbs by accident. (The stumps of her own missing fingers throb in sympathy.)

A couple of serious-looking guards appear out of nowhere. For all Carlsberg's well-deserved distraction, he whips out that rifle and the next thing you know they've both taken bullets between the eye sockets. He keeps that half of the hall covered while Tamika makes extra cuts to weaken the structural integrity of the door, and Rashi backs up as far as he can before charging.

Tamika leaps across the threshold —

— and stops cold.

"Hold him back!" she barks to the others, over the sound of industrial-grade fans cooling the recently-used machinery. "Don't let him in!"

The kids trust her. They jump in front of Carlsberg before knowing why. Large daemons grab Carlsberg's badger; unsettled daemons switch to large forms and help.

"Wha—? Let me go!"

Tamika's already cutting an escape route. Doesn't matter what world. Get them all out of Strex's path first, then they can talk about why.

But Carlsberg has been a rebel longer than any of them have been alive, on top of which he's a frightened parent. It's no contest. He fights his way through the Advanced Readers — they've got his daemon pinned, he should be tethered by range alone, but now he's farther than Tamika's ever seen any normal human get and he's still going —

— and then he's past her, and there's nothing more she can do to protect him from understanding.

Tamika doesn't have a lot of nightmares.

But when she does, Carlsberg's scream when he sees his severed daughter is going to haunt them.

Chapter 46: Sank To Grief

Summary:

Tamika and Steve bring a fallen soldier home. Everyone tries to manage their grief, and the grief of their loved ones, as best they can. (It also happens to be the most dangerous day in recorded history, but that part, they can handle.)

Notes:

Latest art: Carlos holding Cecil; Steve holding Renée.

Night Vale.

A group of masked warriors finds the rescue party, scoops them up in woven baskets the size of swimming pools, and carries them back to Night Vale. Once the giants have stepped through a window leading to the outskirts of town, Tamika calls the hospital and demands a room.

She's not riding in the same basket as Carlsberg and Renée. Nobody is. Partly to give him some privacy, partly because she's —

Tamika swallows a wave of revulsion and throws her arms around Rashi, burying her face in his neck.

Renée is still moving, that's the worst part. The adults who have turned out to be severed were running on pre-programmed routines, and once taken out of Strexcorp's influence and put in a new environment, it isn't long before they stop doing anything without a direct prompt. No will of their own. No desires. But Renée, or what's left of her, wants things. She's cold, she'll say, looking at (through?) her father without a flicker of recognition. She's cold, and she wants Tovi. Where's Tovi?

Her daemon isn't even missing. That has to be the worst part. They recovered him too. They've put him in her arms, little white ferret body shaking, and she holds him like a stuffed toy and says again in that distant little voice, she wants her Tovi. Not recognizing the other half of her own self, that's....

Everything about this is the worst part.

(Her one comfort is that, before leaving Desert Bluffs, Tamika took her Knife and carved their intercision machine into so many ribbons.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos is still at WZZZ when he's discovered by a mouthless, albino child in rompers, carrying a worm-shaped daemon in its pocket.

"Hi," he says, soft-voiced, knowing too much and too little all at once. "Are you here with a City Council message — is the Council back in town? — or did you just want to say hello?"

The androgynous child holds out its left arm. A long, spiraling message is tattooed on the skin, so Carlos has to keep turning the limb around to read it all: The City Council never left Night Vale. The City Council was certainly not hiding at a bungalow in Maui purchased under a pseudonym with laundered tax money. The City Council has always been at City Hall, ready to receive the concerns of their constituents. If you didn't see them, you probably weren't looking hard enough.

When Carlos finishes reading, the child retrieves a rolled-up piece of paper from its pocket, inked with another message in dots and dashes. Carlos isn't great with printed Morse, so he taps the marks out against his forearm to "hear" the letters: CARLOS PERFECTO SUMMONED TO HOSPITAL, AS PRIMARY OBSERVED EMOTIONAL SUPPORT FOR CECIL PALMERO.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The hospital staff convince Steve to put Renée on a crash cart so they can wheel her...to the intercision ward. Which is just a long row of curtained-off beds with almost twenty zombie adults lying in them.

"A whole room?" echoes the on-call head nurse, when Tamika confronts her. "Señorita Flynn, I respect your work very much, but the severed patients, they don't need that much space. They barely know where they are, let alone —"

Tamika backs the woman right up against the wall, while Rashi stares down her daemon (a sandpiper, his whole entire body smaller than the buffalo's horns). "Her father knows where she is! Steve Carlsberg just saved thirteen people while losing the most important one in his life, and to honor his grief and his heroism you will give him a room."

"O-of course. Wait here. I'll be right back."

They stay inside the ward to wait. Disturbing as the patients are, at least they won't stare. Carlsberg's got the blanket tucked all the way up to Renée's chin, and the other nurse still keeps fighting the urge to gawk at her face in horrified fascination.

"Tamika...?"

Tamika's spine goes hardcover-straight at the familiar voice. (Carlsberg doesn't even look up from the body on the cart.) "Kevin?"

"I thought it was you." Kevin's voice is dreamy, listless. He's wandered over here from his bed, and wandered is definitely the word, because he looks really vacant and confused. Even when he tries to smile at her, it peters out pretty quick, like he isn't sure he's doing it right. "Hi."

"Hi yourself," says Tamika, while Rashi mutters to this nurse's daemon (a greyhound), "What is he doing here?"

The greyhound wrinkles her nose in confusion. "Being...treated?" she whispers. "Like all the other intercision patients?"

"Are you okay?" asks Kevin. "I remember you getting hurt...? I gave you a scratch. It was just a scratch...wasn't it...?"

"He isn't severed," whispers Rashi.

"That's just the drugs. He was on the heaviest dose we've seen, so we're tapering him off slowly," replies the greyhound. "He'll stop moving and talking once they're gone."

"It wasn't just a scratch," Tamika tells Kevin. "But it was an accident, understand? It wasn't your fault. And you even patched it up afterward. You did real good work."

"Oh," says Kevin, blinking. His eyelids, Tamika notices, aren't sliding smoothly over non-existent eyeballs anymore; they hang wrinkled over the empty sockets. And the sockets have stopped being empty pits of void. Still darker than they should be, but now the darkness looks finite. "Oh, that's good. I work hard...I try to do good work."

While Rashi explains under his breath about Kevin being from a world with internal daemons, and how for his own safety they have got to transfer him to the abandoned mine shaft, Kevin takes a few listless, uneven steps closer, and cocks his head to look at Renée. Tamika shifts on her feet, ready to put herself between him and the Carlsbergs the second anything goes wrong.

"She's...not okay," guesses Kevin.

"No." Tamika's voice catches over the word; she gulps the feeling back. "No, she's not."

"Oh. ...I hope they heal her soon."

Tamika puts a hand on Rashi's side to keep herself steady. "She's never gonna get better, Kevin. It's not possible."

"What...? No, they have great medical programs...in Desert Bluffs. She can be healed." Another of those confused attempts at a smile. "I've seen it done."

For the first time, Carlsberg raises his tear-streaked face from his daughter. "You've seen what?"

"People like...that." Kevin waves a listless hand in Renée's general direction. "When they stop thinking...stop moving...stop doing anything. It's...." His brow furrows, then smooths over as he finds the word. "...sad."

"But you said 'healed'," croaks Carlsberg. "What do you mean?"

"Well...they move again," says Kevin. "And they think...but only company-approved thoughts...! They can even have a replacement daemon if they need one...they smile again...they're productive again. Thanks to Strexcorp, they're...fixed."

Carlsberg shies away in horror.

"We could fix her...?" adds Kevin hopefully.

With a shout that echoes across the ward, Carlsberg lunges.

It takes Tamika plus three orderlies to haul him back. He thrashes in their grip as someone finally herds Kevin out of there, blood on his knuckles, still bellowing in the man's wake: "You will not fix, or touch, or do one more goddamn thing to my little girl!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

There's a sprawling memorial in the hospital lobby. Photos, candles, tokens, books, narrow strips of stationary with names written on them in various non-ink substances. A woman Carlos doesn't recognize is folding a patterned square of paper into the shape of a bird, to add to the other images of lost daemons made of paper, plastic, felt, and...less-identifiable materials.

And there's Cecil, applying the letters INTERN FERDINAND onto a blank bookmark with a paintbrush and red paint.

He looks healthy and whole, so Carlos greets him with a relieved hug. "Cecil! I got summoned to the hospital and they didn't say why — what happened? Are you okay?"

"Mmhmm." Cecil loops his arms around Carlos's torso and tucks his face against Carlos's neck. (Khoshekh isn't with him; the margay must be resting somewhere.) "I'm fine — it's not me, it's — Renée. She's —"

Back. Rescued from Strex's clutches. And not dead, or they wouldn't be meeting at a hospital. "How bad is it?" asks Carlos. "Is she in surgery? Do they think she's going to make it, or...?"

"Carlos, stop!"

Carlos shuts up.

When Cecil finally gets the explanation out, he understands why.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Steve is in the room with Renée's body. Delphine's with him now, and will tag in Cecil soon. Carlos is there so Cecil isn't left sitting alone in the second-floor visitor lounge, staring at the uncaring façade of a vending machine and cursing all the people who failed to save her, himself included.

Turns out Cecil wouldn't have been alone anyway. Janice is already there, along with — of all people — the Man in the Tan Jacket. He's got an arm around the girl's shoulders; she's sobbed a wet patch into his tan lapel. Her daemon is a black kitten in her shirt pocket.

Cecil untwines his own arm from Carlos's and goes to kneel in front of her chair. "Hi, honey. This is pretty awful, huh...?"

"Uh-huh," sniffles Janice, and stretches up her arms like a much younger child looking to be held.

Cecil gets her approval out loud first — Janice's undersized legs mean she's probably in for a lifetime of people thinking it would be hilarious to pick her up without asking — then gathers her into his lap, careful not to disturb the latest intricate braid in her long dark hair.

"Tell her it's okay that she didn't see it coming," says the Man. "I've tried — but I don't think she thinks I'm objective. Tell her that having a little foresight doesn't make you responsible for saving everyone."

"Oh, pequeñita, of course it doesn't," says Cecil. "No one with any sense would think that. No one."

 

-{,(((,">

 

For the first time in months, Tamika sets foot in her parents' foyer.

There's a light on at the far side of the house. She wasn't expecting that. Papi should be at work, while Mamá ought to be out with a PTA cleanup crew. One or both of them must be sick...or injured...or taking the night off to keep a vigil in case she comes to the house.

Tamika could go find out, if she wanted. She could stay here and talk to her parents face-to-face. She could stay the whole night. Sleep in her own bed, surrounded by her own bookshelves and slingshots and guitar case and Catch The Flesh-Eating Reading Bacterium! poster, and be almost sure nobody would track her down and kill the entire Flynn family in their sleep. Logically, she knows this.

Emotionally, narratively, she knows that she needs to be a leader and a hero until this war is over. And she can't do that if she steps back too early into the role of long-lost child running into her parents' arms.

She leaves a copy of The Last Camel Died At Noon on the coffee table, a handwritten note tucked between its pages. The edges need to be lined up, the corners smoothed down; she lets herself stay long enough to straighten it out. But when some piece of furniture in her parents' room creaks, and the hall light flickers on, she darts right back into the next world over and holds her breath until she's pinched the window closed behind her.

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Delphine emerges from consoling Steve, it turns out she has one arm in a sling, apparently to keep from stressing whatever wound is under the bandage going from elbow to shoulder. If that was from Lauren, well, she gave as good as she got. She's also wearing a figure-hugging sheath dress, which color-coordinates with the sling; and whatever crying she's done, it hasn't smudged her flawless makeup.

"Hello, darlings," she says, with a wan but grateful smile. "Cecil, can I trouble you to stay with Janice a moment longer? Carlos, there's a bloodstone circle room down the hall...I would be truly gratified if you'd join me."

"Really...? I mean...of course. If you like." Carlos follows her to the prayer room, now once more equipped with its historic set of brilliant-cut bloodstones, each half the size of Carlos's head.

Instead of making any moves to pray, though, Delphine shuts the door and says flatly, "You owe me, experimental theologian."

Ah. "Yes. I do. One favor."

"I'm calling it in."

Carlos tries to stay calm. Sure, if he can't pull off whatever she's about to ask, she could have him swept off to a nominally-secret prison and beaten half-conscious (again)...or, for that matter, could probably kill him six different ways right here even with one arm almost literally tied behind her back...but that doesn't mean she will. "Go ahead."

Delphine's cat daemon stares down Isaña, claws flexing in that lazy feline way, while Delphine herself says, "Put that little girl back together."

Carlos's heart shatters into a mess of cracks. "I can't."

"Why not? I have read your postgraduate publications. I can't say I understood all the details, but intercision was your thesis topic! This is your field. Your very specific field!"

"Which means I am specifically qualified to tell you it can't be done." If she has him locked up, so be it. He doesn't have it in him to give her false hope, and even if he did, the bluff would only be putting off the inevitable. "I'm sorry, I'm so —"

"You once argued it was possible! Are you recanting that now?"

"I said it was possible in theory!" cries Carlos. "Lots of things are possible in theory. In theory — if we had the equipment and the know-how — we could sever another child and use that Dust to put the first one back together! Who would you have me kill to save Renée, huh? Whose child would you cut?"

It hits home. Eyes shining, Delphine presses her mouth into a thin line and stops pushing it.

"Don't you think I'd heal that girl in a heartbeat if I could?" adds Carlos, more pleading than angry. "She's like a niece to Cecil. If something had happened to Steve, he would've taken her in, and she would have been like a niece to me. How could you think you'd need to call in a favor to make me help her?"

"We can't always do the things we would wish to," says Delphine softly. "Who am I to know what kind of laws and codes theologians are bound by?"

...okay, that's an understandable worry in Night Vale. "Delphine, I swear. The only rules tying my hands here are the laws of physics."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos is on his way back from the hospital café with sandwiches when he spots a woman and a bird-daemon arguing at the reception desk. No, a woman and two bird-daemons. On her shoulder, a velvety-red jay-sized songbird with a silver beak; at her side, a goose, grey-feathered, with a blaze of pure white on his face.

That's Kaisa. That is Serafina Pekkala's very own Kaisa.

And the auburn-haired beauty addressing the receptionist in halting Spanish — that'll be Serafina's daughter, Stella Maris. Barely in her seventies, she's not much more than an adolescent by witch-reckoning, though she's older than Carlos's mother and looks (to his eye) as youthful-but-mature as anyone else in her clan.

(All this, on one of the few days in Carlos's life when the sight can't lift his spirits.)

He thinks about stepping up and offering to help translate, but that's when a white-coated doctor in a blue masquerade mask collects Kaisa and Stella Maris, and leads them down the hall. Carlos and Isaña follow — not trailing the celebrities, it just happens they're going in the same direction. Down the same hall. Into the same stairwell.

In a flap of feathers Kaisa soars up to the next level, perches on the edge of the step. He waits for his daughter and the doctor to catch up, then turns back just as Carlos reaches the landing halfway up. Inclining his long neck down so they're close to eye level, he says in stilted Spanish, "Do you follow me?"

Carlos halts mid-step, shifting his grip on the paper bag of sandwiches, and replies in English. "No, sir. I'm not following you. A friend's daughter is here."

"I see," says Kaisa, also in English. "My apologies." He tilts his head. "You're Ramirez. The experimental theologian with the electrum spyglass."

"That's right."

"...and the action figure."

"Yes," says Carlos, without inflection. He is a distinguished professional with, frankly, an impressive career. He will not be made to feel awkward for having been a fanboy with toys when he was ten. Or twelve. Or...older ages than twelve.

Kaisa's voice softens. "Are you perhaps here because of the Carlsberg child?"

A lump rises in Carlos's throat. He could be strong for Cecil, he managed to be strong for Delphine, and thank the beams he hasn't needed to talk to Steve, but the idea of someone new finding out about this brings back that first wave of raw grief all over again. He nods.

"Come along, then." The goose daemon beckons with his head, and Carlos and Isaña trot back into motion. "My heart goes out to you, and to all those who loved her. It is an abominable thing that has been done."

"Are you...familiar?" asks Carlos, voice cracking on the last word. Of course this kind of thing would have happened during the War.

"I have cared for the daemons of severed children before," says Kaisa, padding along between him and Stella Maris down the hall. "I am here to offer all the knowledge I have, and what little comfort I can. Know that when she passes, her ghost will travel through the world of the dead and be reunited with her daemon like any other."

"That helps," admits Carlos. "More than you know."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil is quiet when he comes out of Steve's room, one hand curled around Steve's house keys. Delphine is working the late shift and doesn't want to leave Janice alone, and it doesn't sound like Steve is going to make it back tonight.

They walk in near-silence to the bus stop. (One of the team's cars is still marooned in the NVCC parking lot; they're going to pick it up and move on from there.)

"Isn't there anything we can do?" asks Cecil in a small voice, leaning against the window as they rumble away from the hospital. "You and I...we generate a lot of Rusakov particles together, right? A theologically remarkable amount...."

Carlos splays both hands around Isaña's shell. Their boyfriend's faith in their love is incredible, but misplaced. "It can't do this."

Cecil lowers his head.

The scenery whisks by.

"I keep thinking...this is silly. I should just look up what to do," says Cecil. "And then I remember."

"...same."

"It feels so petty. Renée's — gone, and here I am, with sadness to spare for a machine," continues Cecil, low and faltering. "But it was the property of Night Vale Community Radio for centuries. Generations of hosts used it. I was so proud when Leonard Burton officially entrusted it to me...and one day I, in turn, looked forward to handing it down to the host that followed...except, now...I won't."

"That isn't petty," says Carlos. He wouldn't bring it up around Steve, but grief is not a contest, or a zero-sum game. "We'll go on without it — Fey is learning more all the time, and most communities are fine with no alethiometers at all — but it was a huge thing to lose. For Night Vale's heritage...for the world...for experimental theology."

Cecil nods. "And I was good at it, right? Maybe not in the league of the kind of professionals you know...but pretty good?"

Before Carlos can answer, the bus drives straight through a pillar of bright black light.

Carlos leans against Cecil to see out the window, watching beams of illuminating darkness descend from the sky all over town. Angels. Hundreds, maybe thousands, golden wings lighting up the night. "Cecil, you were the best. Hands down, no question, you were, theologically speaking, the best in the world."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie is just finishing up her calls, recruiting people to help with tonight's worldwide bloodstone circle formation, when the door opens and she hears her daughter's familiar footsteps downstairs.

Calm as you please. No hi Mom! I'm still alive!, no consideration of the way they haven't even seen each other for days. Honestly.

When Sherie goes down to greet her, though, all the criticisms die in her throat. There's a marbled ribbon of scarring up the side of Su's right forearm. (Both arms are also speckled with band-aids, which she's wearing as proudly as the teal sash of badges over her shoulder.) "Oh, sweetheart...!"

"Hi, Mom." Susannah drops her backpack and comes over for a hug, while her griffon vulture daemon touches noses with Sherie's mongoose. "It's not as bad as it looks, I swear. And I shot down two gyropters! And nobody in my troop died...though I still want to go to the big Scouting memorial service on Saturday. It's a potluck. Can we bring a dessert?"

"We can bring whatever you want," soothes Sherie. "How about now, have you eaten? I'll make you dinner. You like the oat-and-corn-flour pasta, right...?"

"Don't you have stuff to do? Theology stuff? I can cook on my own, I don't want to interrupt."

"She's spent the past hour making unnecessarily long-winded calls and letting me play with her hair," puts in the voice of the Faceless Old Woman. "She has time to make pasta. I put some new spices for it in your cupboard. Also, bricks. The spices are behind the bricks."

 

-{,(((,">

 

They bring a change of clothes, toothbrushes, an extra bar of soap, and some gadgets to the Carlsberg-Cabrera house.

For some reason, there's a DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM DANA* sign on the guest room door (footnoted *April 2014 or later Dana). Steve's old pull-out couch has been parked in the TV room; they'll have to fold it down.

While Cecil takes the first shower, Carlos sets himself up in front of the TV with his laptop, ready to track the worldwide news coverage. The story about rising danger-meter levels has broken into the mainstream by now. ACN has even branded it The Most Dangerous Day In The World, complete with spinning graphic and doom-laden theme tune....

"Señor Carlos?"

Carlos sits up straighter. "Hi, Janice. Is everything okay?"

Janice nods. "Tío Emmanuel has something to tell you."

She rides her daemon (in the shape of a four-horned goat) to the DO NOT ENTER room, a befuddled Carlos and Isaña at her heels. They go right past the sign to find the room occupied by a complete stranger — a man Carlos has never seen before in his life — wearing a cast around one ankle and hurriedly pulling on some kind of tan —

— oh.

"Have a seat," says the Man in the Tan Jacket. He's sitting on the edge of the rumpled bed, a housefly daemon on his jacket collar. "You probably shouldn't be on that leg too long."

"Um, thanks." There's an armchair with an ottoman; Carlos takes the latter, so Janice can have the chair. "Yours doesn't look too good either. What happened?"

The Man sighs.

"...it wasn't my fault, was it?"

"Oh, no, not at all! You actually stopped the guy before he could make it worse."

Janice clears her throat...while Tehom flaps bat-winged over to the bed, turns into a Scottie, and actually yanks on the tan jacket with his teeth. It hits Carlos that Janice, like Dana, must be able to remember the Man from one encounter to the next. A daemon would never feel comfortable getting that close into a stranger's personal space.

"And, ah, speaking of injuries whose causes you don't remember," says Emmanuel. "I was the one who arranged for Tamika to get the Strex Tactical Multi-World Subtle Knife (TM). Patent Pending."

It takes some prompting for Carlos to re-derive the whole story. Like Cecil's mother, Emmanuel has the unpredictable gift of foresight, and had figured out long before Tamika saw the Knife that she would be able to wield it. He even knew Kevin would willingly hand it over, if he could only get them to cross paths. Since he couldn't just explain all this to anyone and expect them to remember it, he had to maneuver people into position any way he could.

So he ended up using Carlos as bait. Manufacturing a Desert Bluffs rescue mission for the Advanced Readers, by nudging Carlos right into one of Strexcorp's traps.

Carlos gathers Isaña into his lap and cups his hands protectively around her. He's seen what the Knife can do; he knows in retrospect that his own death would have been a risk worth taking. But. "Did you talk to anyone about this plan before you went for it? Me? Tamika? Henriette got killed by this scheme — did she ever learn what it was really about?"

"What would be the point?" asks Emmanuel. "Even if you agreed to do it, you wouldn't remember agreeing by the time it happened."

"I might have remembered enough to make it easier!" protests Carlos. "I would be a lot more upset now if I didn't have a vague yet unshakeable idea that you were on the rescue mission. That you put yourself on the front lines to help get me out of there. That you've helped me at other times, too."

"He has," confirms Janice. "He made the healing potion Señor Cecil used on your face."

"Exactly! I don't remember remember that, but it sounds right."

(Vansten's place, after his rescue. The makeshift hospital room. That must have been when Carlos found out, because he remembers feeling an extra level of fear and helplessness after learning something. He remembers Cecil protecting him, too, and how that made him feel safe. Maybe the same lingering memory explains why Cecil gets so suspicious and upset whenever the Man comes up.)

"Knowing we never got a chance to agree...that's not okay," continues Carlos. Especially Henriette, who will never get the chance to forgive it after-the-fact. "But I am happy that Tamika has been able to usher Dana's armies of allies into Night Vale. Relieved that she's been able to save, not every person, but many people. And...she's helped you too, hasn't she? Your daemon was trapped somewhere, and Tamika opened a window for her to come through...?"

"For them to come through," says Emmanuel. He turns up his collar, and another half-dozen housefly daemons come buzzing out from the shelter of the fabric to land on his jacket cuff. "After we accidentally made ourselves unmemorable and then got trapped in separate worlds for twenty years, in case you had any lingering suspicion over whether people with foresight can make everything work out the way they want it to."

"I didn't," says Carlos quickly. Cecil's mother had foresight, and it wasn't enough to prevent the death of her firstborn child. Precognition isn't everything.

Then he frowns.

"Did you say twenty years?"

The Man nods. "Give or take."

"That shouldn't be..."

"...possible, daemons can't live long-term outside their own worlds, the most optimistic outlook is ten years, etcetera, etcetera."

Carlos blushes. "I guess we've had this conversation before."

"Your biologists, up until the point when they lost all the data and forgot they'd been studying it in the first place, figured it was because my father was one of Night Vale's otherworldly residents," says Emmanuel. "They also cleared up the mystery of why Papi died, so thank you again for that. I was born in Night Vale, but my daemon can live long-term in Brazil, too."

Carlos cannot believe he forgot something so theologically fascinating. Even though he doesn't have the Little Theologians' Book on him, his hand instinctively goes for the pocket it would've been in. "Hang on. Brazil?"

"That's right. Papi was Brazilian."

"It's just...Cecil visited a country called Brazil once. Could it have been the same one?"

With a groan, the Man drags his hands through his hair.

"Sorry. Am I getting too personal? I'll drop it."

"No!" Janice leans forward in her chair. "No, it was the same Brazil. Think about what that means!"

"Um." Carlos runs through the details again. Cecil, his mother, and his brother were in Brazil twenty-ish years ago...Emmanuel's daemon got left in Brazil twenty-ish years ago..."Could they have been there at the same time? Maybe they ran into each other?"

"He's not going to get it," sighs the Man.

"Well, he should!" cries Janice, tears welling in her eyes.

"I'm sorry. Whatever it is you want me to see, I'm not seeing it," says Carlos, heart aching. If he can't save Renée, he should at least be smart enough to figure out what Janice wants here, to keep from giving her even more to cry about. "If you could just spell it out for me...?"

Janice starts sniffling, shoulders hitching.

"She's spelled it out twice in the past five minutes," says the Man. "You don't remember. You never remember. All the pieces are right there, and you still can't put them together." To Janice, he adds, "Come on, pajarita, let's get you to your room. I told him everything I promised I'd say, and I have to go soon."

Carlos tags along while the Man shepherds Janice to her bedroom, running through the facts in his mind. Brazil, trepanation, cross-world travel, witches' sons, Emmanuel losing his daemon and his memorability, Cecil losing his brother and (very nearly) his sanity...there could be some kind of connection here, but what?

As Emmanuel is gathering most of his daemon into a deerskin briefcase (no ordinary insect-daemon protective lanyard would be large enough to hold them), Carlos massages his temples — he's giving himself a headache thinking about this — and says, "You're a witch, right? I'm sorry if that word is too gendered...but you know what I mean?"

"I prefer the term 'wizard'," says Emmanuel. "Dana found it for me. It's okay if you don't remember, though."

Carlos nods. "Can I ask what clan you're descended from?"

"Lake -----."

"Didn't catch that."

"Don't worry about it," buzzes the line of flies along Emmanuel's shoulders. "Who needs the clans? We'll start our own clan, us and Janice. Call it the Lake Whatlake Thisisthemiddleofthedesert clan. Maybe she'll have daughters one day, and we can be honorary uncle to all of them."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika watches from the roof of the hospital as people across town begin to pray in their bloodstone circles. All of Night Vale is still speckled with pillars of brilliant black.

One beam of luminescent darkness envelops the hospital, tracing every individual bristle of Rashi's fur, every tiny crease in Tamika's skin. A figure, not angelic, but human, descends out of the night.

The daemon lands first, perching on Rashi's horns. A falcon.

Tamika puts aside her grief. Gotta hold it together long enough to be respectful, especially when Night Vale's oldest resident is concerned. "Welcome back, Señora."

Vieja Josie, wearing a black silk dress and a bowling shirt, swoops down to float in front of her. "It's good to be home."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil and Khoshekh use Steve and Delphine's bloodstone circle to tap into the formation. Carlos, freshly-scrubbed and in pajamas, returns to keeping vigil over the news.

Köhler is on the phone with one of ACN's senior theology correspondents. Another network has Dotan in the studio, calmly (if only partly-accurately) explaining that this is an understood theological phenomenon, and not an attack from a vengeful god in retaliation for declining support for the Magisterium. A third plays a video statement from several physicists at CERN, including Adriana.

Statements from these and other Night Vale alumni are flying around the blogosphere. Including one from Ichiro, which says simply, "oh sweet lord, angels are real, and you would not believe what we know about their hierarchy and the tiered heavens."

After one particular headline rolls across the screen, Carlos spends a frustrating twenty minutes on the phone with the deputy head of New France's National Theology Foundation, imploring the man to get out of bed and go mobilize some theologians to deal with the imminent portals in their territory. Physicists, biologists, linguists, sociologists. The angels will come get them and close the cracks, starting with the most dangerous ones; in the meantime, they cannot let their first line of response to this be scared white men with guns.

Yes, he knows, not all white men with guns. One of his best friends is a white man with a gun! One of his best friends is a white man with a gun who once got scared and pointed it at Carlos, but the unusual thing about this story is that he did not shoot, instead figuring out Carlos's identity and confirming that Carlos was not a threat to Steve's little —

— the point is, he knows. All right?

The house trembles around him for half a second, rattling the dishes in the cupboards. Without being in the bloodstone network or in front of a Rusakov array, Carlos can't tell if the rumbling was an aftershock from Strex, or some unrelated tumultuous Night Vale event, or (rarity of rarities) an actual earthquake.

Then the blurry footage of half-visible angels starts to pour in from cameras and phones all around the world, and he has a theologically probable guess.

Chapter 47: The Armies

Summary:

Night Vale is controlled by its own citizens again. Our heroes (and some new allies) fight to reconnect and rebuild, working until they're strong enough to take the battle to the next town over.

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana settles back into her body after a long absence, to find it lying on its back using her daemon as a long furry pillow.

It's very bright. More so than before. And there's a pulsing heat all around, though for some reason she still feels cold.

Maureen is sitting against the platform's curved wall, a bloodstone-faced angel statue casting its shadow over her head. The phone in her hands isn't beeping or smoking, so she probably isn't playing a game or trying to send a text, but reading fanfiction or something. Her rabbit daemon keeps an eye on the blinking light.

Dana sits up, prompting Maureen to set down the phone. "How's it going?"

"More things are okay than not," says Dana. She's trying to remember to give the important details first, rather than last. "Strexcorp's bomb has not caused our home universe to unravel. I summoned the angels in plenty of time, and with the help of the experimental theologians and their danger meters, the most deadly portals have already been closed. The fabric of space within Night Vale has become so thin that it will be risky for Tamika to use her Knife inside the city limits, but she can still make openings safely at a distance."

"Great. Do you need me to take over the astral-projecting for a while?"

"No, I think not," says Dana, surprising herself as much as anyone. "Most of the rebuilding in Night Vale must be done from within Night Vale. Tamika will not need more otherworldly forces until they advance on Desert Bluffs. I may need to coordinate a few maneuvers in the meantime, but for the most part, I feel that perhaps we can...relax."

"Well, good," says Maureen firmly as they descend the stairs to the shadowed safety of their quarters. "You've been working nonstop for weeks now. It's not fair."

"Isn't it?"

"...Unless you're enjoying it, I guess." Maureen nudges Dana's side with an elbow. "Are you enjoying this?"

"Oh, yes," says Dana earnestly. "Not the part where we are facing even more doom and destruction than usual, of course! But there are plenty of other things to enjoy about this." She answers Maureen's elbow-nudge with a brush of hand against hand. "Aren't there?"

"I'm not saying there's nothing nice going on right now," hedges Maureen, linking their fingers together. "I wouldn't say that."

They end up together on Dana's sleeping bag, Maureen massaging the knots out of Dana's shoulders, while Eustathias turns into a rabbit (the same size as D.L., and twice as fluffy) and grooms her claws through his fur. Maureen's thick red-orange curls waterfall down beside Dana's face; she's got one knee between Dana's thighs, just the right angle for Dana to show her appreciation by stroking one bare foot down the back of Maureen's calf.

It's so very pleasant. Dana's breath keeps catching.

At last she rolls over, their legs tangling together, and pulls Maureen into a kiss. Maureen's glasses are long gone; the hair gets tossed over one shoulder to give them more free airspace. She tastes like citrus and anbaric current.

There's a moment when another flare-up of the light of the Smiling God pours through the windows. Heat fills the room. Girls and daemons shiver. But they're safely in the shadows, and can keep right on caressing without interruption until the terrible light recedes.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Route 800, close to Night Vale.

The caravan is mostly big trucks and tricked-out emergency vans, but there are a couple military jeeps involved, bringing up the front and the rear. Tamika hovers her gyropter — it's purple, the first of their re-appropriated Strex vehicles to get a full new paint job — over the road as they approach, and lands once they figure out to stop.

A couple of guys in uniform with big shaggy canine daemons get out of the lead jeep and come forward. When Tamika steps out of the gyropter, knife in a sheath at her waist and dried-up librarian claw on a lanyard around her neck, the older one raises thin white eyebrows. "What's a little girl like you doing piloting a big vehicle like that?"

"Winning a war, mostly," says Tamika. "You the folks from the Federal Department of Disaster Management? Bringing construction materials, fuel, medical supplies, relief teams, that kind of thing?"

"That's right."

"Good. We're set for personnel, but you can leave the stuff with us."

The guy actually laughs. "You're a little young for highway robbery, sweetheart. Tell you what: call your parents and have them drive you back to school, and we'll just let this budding felony slide, all right?"

Oh, right. Tamika's so used to being automatically treated as a well-read leader, she forgot these people would need some exposition. "I'm here on behalf of the Mayor of Night Vale. Space is weird around town, and the experimental theologians say it'll be even weirder than usual while the rest of the world is still getting patched up, so we'll handle transportation from here. Mayor Winchell will be here any minute to authorize the transaction in person. Seems like her ride got distracted."

"Look, kid...." begins the older guy.

The less-old one, though, clears his throat and nods toward the sky way behind Tamika. "Sarge? Is that what I think it is?"

"Don't know," says the sergeant. "I can tell you what it looks like, but I'm sure it's not literally a five-headed dragon."

"That'll be the Mayor's ride," says Tamika. "And yeah, he is literally — and I say that in the original sense of the term — a five-headed dragon...who cares."

She keeps them stalled until McDaniels lands, with Mayor Winchell and her caracal daemon riding on his back. People are coming out of the other vehicles by now, staring at the dragon so much they hardly pay attention to Winchell flashing her municipal ID. Well, their lax security is not Tamika's problem; she hops back in the gyropter and takes to the air.

Gonna need a big interworldly opening to let this supply-carrying team through. She hovers and swerves and uses the Knife to open a window the size of the broad side of a barn.

Once it's done, two dozen full-grown dragons, each sporting three to ten heads in a whole rainbow of colors, wing their way through.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Cecil is in and out of microchip-extraction surgery a lot faster than Carlos expected. (The fact that they don't have to bother with anesthetic probably helps.) He emerges with a bandage on the back of his neck and a smile on his face, and the doctor runs both of them through instructions about keeping the surgery site clean and not doing certain chants or spells for at least a week.

His car is in a temperamental mood and doesn't respond to its key. They have to pet its hood and say nice things before it relents and lets them in. Since Cecil is not only fresh off the operating table, but hasn't been re-certified to drive since his daemon's major eye injury, Carlos drives.

If he doesn't get re-certified at all...he'll probably have to take the bus a lot more. Carlos can't be available all the time to play chauffeur. He won't even be in town all the time in the near future — he's agreed to spend some time with the Book Club once they've taken Desert Bluffs, to do things like determine whether Strexcorp has any other machines so evil they need to be destroyed ASAP, and out in the professional world his expertise is in higher demand than ever. Four different physics conferences have offered to dump their scheduled guests of honor and instill him as a last-minute replacement, and that's just over the next month.

But he'll give Cecil as much warning as possible before taking off anywhere, and they'll coordinate their schedules, and they'll work it out.

"Carlos?" asks Cecil as they head for the station. "I told you that I talked to Josie, right?"

"Not directly, no. But you mentioned on-air that...." Carlos takes a left on Bandera Street, and groans. "Oh, come on!"

The road is totally blocked with construction vehicles. A crane across two lanes, a churning cement mixer across two more, and a stack of I-beams plopped down in the middle. And this route was supposed to be a detour in the first place! Sure, it's a theological marvel that these houses are being rebuilt by angels, but you would think angels would be more careful with their road signs.

A ten-foot-tall, translucent-gold, four-winged angel, naked except for a tool belt and a hard hat, lands in front of the car. "Can I help —"

Cecil shrieks in existential terror and tries to throw himself into the back seat — the seatbelt catches him with a yank — he thrashes against the restraint, gibbering in Unmodified Sumerian.

"Cecil!" Carlos scrambles to put the car in park and switch it off, then fumbles to unlatch Cecil's seatbelt without either of them getting punched or choked in the process. With a spare elbow he rolls down the window. "Erika, turn it off!"

"What?"

"He sees in Rusakov radiation. He can see you!" Carlos still hasn't dared to look at an angel through an electrum spyglass since his own terrifying first attempt. (He hid behind Josie's bookcase. He totally sympathizes with Cecil, still speaking in tongues while trying to stuff himself under the dashboard.) "The thing you're doing, stop it!"

"I don't know what you —"

"Erika!" calls a blessedly familiar voice. It's Josie, wearing a safety vest and a hard hat over her wheat-blonde hair. She soars over the nearest dump truck and intercepts them, giving Erika a sharp order in Modified Sumerian. "That should do it," she adds in Spanish. "Hello there, Dr. Perfecto."

"Josie!" It's Carlos's first time seeing her face-to-face, though he caught the announcement on last night's show that people would face no legal repercussions in allowing Juosukka Contractors, Inc. to rebuild their homes and businesses. "Welcome back! I missed you, I — oh, god, at first we were scared they had killed you — I am so glad I didn't —"

The witch lands next to the car and clasps Carlos's hand through the window. "It's all right, Carlos Traidor. You are forgiven."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie spends much of her day touring the city block by block, riding on a cart of bloodstones the size of a city bus.

Two masked warriors are wheeling the cart along. Trish Hidge, the high-strung aide from the Mayor's office, is making sure every household that needs a circle gets a circle. As for Sherie, she has a bag of pocket Rusakov meters, and is asking the homeowners if they can add (or re-add) the restored circles to the theologians' monitoring network.

Trish extracts a burlap sack's worth of bloodstones to distribute through an apartment complex. Cactus Jane answers the third doorbell, wearing a tank top and pajama shorts, sleepy-eyed and yawning. While she and Trish are picking out a set of thirteen, little Champ toddles over to the group and thrusts a Strex-brand plastic gyropter at Sherie. "Mweh! Amabla bwoo."

Sherie tries not to let her distaste show. "Where did you get that, little guy?"

"I'm so sorry," says Jane. "Strex was giving out free toys at an informational meeting about their childcare services, and he loves it. I told him these were the people who bombed the temple and killed Elder Ted, but he doesn't understand. He cries when I try to take it away."

Once she confirms that the toy has been checked for bugs, drugs, and curses, Sherie relaxes. It's not as if Champ, in his green rompers with his daemon riding mouse-formed in the pocket, can really grasp the meaning of his new favorite toy. "Have you tried painting a Book Club symbol on the side? That would turn it into a rebel gyropter."

"Oh, that's smart!" exclaims Jane. "I don't know why I didn't...it sounds so obvious when you say...."

"No one person can figure out everything about parenting by themselves," says Sherie quickly. "And you're doing a fine job raising him on your own."

Jane flushes with appreciation. Champ stares blankly at Sherie, then sticks the tail of the gyropter in his mouth and gnaws on it. Drool runs down his handsome-but-terrible beard.

"My kids' father is living out east," adds Sherie. "Can I ask...is Champ's father out there somewhere, or dead, or...?"

"I haven't the faintest idea." Jane gathers bloodstones into her arms. "We're not sure who his father is. He could be partenogenética. Is that something experimental theology can figure out?"

Oh, dear. Is this Night Vale memory loss, or was she...assaulted, or are there just too many possible candidates to narrow it down? If it's that last one, well, that can't be healthy. Not that Sherie is judging. But she's judging. "I'm afraid we don't have the equipment right now. And the theologians who knew how to run it are busy with...extracurricular activities. Are you sure this isn't something for the Sheriff's secret police to look into...?"

"I asked, the last time I got taken in for unlawful assembly," says Jane. "The officer was kind enough to go through the data, and their observational records match my memories. One morning, I wasn't pregnant at all. That evening, I was in labor."

All right, now Sherie isn't judging, she's just interested. This might really be the kind of strangeness that falls under her team's field. "We can try to look into that, yes. Could you tell me the date...?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

In the Boy Scout base out in the Sand Wastes, Tamika slices open a portal for a squadron of otherworldly spies, and explains to them what intelligence they'll need to pick up in Desert Bluffs.

Broad aerial surveillance is handled by witches, at least at night. Daylight hours are, for most of them, too plain hot. Tamika's never seen Janice or Vieja Josie hide in a dark room by an air conditioner just because the weather app says ninety, but they weren't literally sleeping on ice floes a week ago, so maybe it's different.

For the tiny little up-close details, though...they've got an army of tiny little dragonfly-riding ninjas.

Some of the Advanced Readers, especially the younger ones, get way too excited about this. Good thing they've already been working with the giant masked army for a week, so Dana can say, how would you feel if one of the warriors picked you up like an action figure and started moving you around whether you wanted it or not? Wouldn't appreciate it, huh? Then don't mess with the Laputians.

(And don't pet their mounts, either. Those are serious working animals, not the puppylike sidekicks you've seen on TV.)

Two four-winged, ancient-eyed angels help translate between the Laputians' quick, clipped language and the Advanced Readers' rolling Spanish. Once the miniature spies are on the wing, Tamika takes a long, satisfied look at the Big Map. Between the reality bomb and the disappearance of Strex's senior management, Desert Bluffs is already starting to fray.

She ducks out for a catnap while the reconnaissance is running, and dreams about crumbling buildings and cartoon bugs.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Cecil and Carlos take the bus to Applebee's after the show. It turns out to be a prescient move: half the parking lot is occupied by two dragons (sixteen feet tall with four heads and eleven feet tall with seven, respectively), squawking and trumpeting at each other. One car has already had its trunk irreversibly stomped on.

Carlos hangs back, nervous. "Are they arguing? Is there any chance they'll accidentally, or on purpose, start setting things on fire?"

"One of them is explaining to the other how they're not allowed to eat any of us tiny meat creatures, by order of Mayor McDaniels," translates Cecil. At Carlos's frown, he explains: "Dana had to tell them Hiram was mayor. It's the only way they'll respect local municipal laws...other than having Mayor Winchell defeat one of their generals in hand-to-hand combat, and while I'm sure she could do it, the mess would be more trouble than it's worth."

In spite of the commotion outside, most of the restaurant's tables are full. Cecil has been imploring everyone on-air to make an extra effort to support local businesses in this time of rebuilding, and people seem to be taking it to heart. He asks about Carlos's afternoon, and Carlos tells him all about doing a Rusakov-array consult with a university in Minsk while they wait for their appetizers.

When their chips and guacamole arrive, Cecil pokes halfheartedly at the dip. (It was made by Earl Harlan's otherworldly Scouts, apprenticing at different restaurants to earn their cooking badges, and it's smokier than usual.) "Carlos?"

"Oh, sorry, I should have explained — typical Rusakov particle flow patterns can be disrupted by —"

"I talked to Josie," says Cecil.

"About Rusakov flow patterns?"

"About my brother."

Oh. He's trying to change the subject. Carlos tries to adjust. "How did that go?"

"It went...well. I think. Once I convinced her the recovered knowledge wasn't going to send me into hallucinatory sobbing trance states...um, again," says Cecil. "Her own memories are pretty vague. It's been a while, and she was doing some amateur DIY repression of her own in order to keep from accidentally bringing it up where I might hear. But she was able to confirm some things for me."

Carlos is half listening, half mentally working out how the Rusakov flow disruptions in Minsk might be present in Desert Bluffs. "Yeah?"

Cecil nods. "He was about six years older than me. You were right; his foresight came in when I was fifteen. We had different fathers. His came after the original Señor Palmero, and wasted away after a mysterious illness. Mamá went on to meet my dad a few years later."

"Uh-huh."

"Apparently there's a reason I don't miss Papi as much as I might have." Cecil snaps a corn chip in two. "Apparently he was...cruel...to my brother. I was told this, once I was old enough to ask, and only forgot when I was re-educated."

Something he said is sticking in the back of Carlos's mind. Echoing a fragment of something else Carlos heard, though he can't remember when, or in what context. ...the mystery of why Papi died.

"Josie suspects he thought his relationship with Mamá would give him some kind of immunity from her vengeance." Cecil's voice darkens. "It did not."

"Mm?"

"This has not been pleasant to re-learn," admits Cecil. "But I am proud — more so than I have been, perhaps, in some time — to be my mother's son. I am proud to — Carlos? Are you listening?"

"What? Yes." Carlos massages his temples, fighting a sore, throbbing pain that's building behind his eyes. "Listening. Go on."

It doesn't convince Cecil for a second. "Carlos, I appreciate that you've had a lot of important experimental theology to do lately...."

Under the table, Khoshekh nuzzles Isaña's cheek. "Are you okay?"

"...and that I've had more personal struggles to deal with than perhaps you were expecting, especially this past week, which has been wrenching for everyone...."

"Fine," says Isaña tightly, though Carlos is not fine. A hurt, accusatory voice thrums across his neurons: All the pieces are right there, and you still can't put them together.

"...so I won't cry on your shoulder all night or expect you to personally resolve all my emotional dilemmas, but if you could let me talk this out, just give me your full attention for ten minutes, it would mean so much to...."

Khoshekh flows into his arms, cutting him off. "Cecil — when they were captured, when Strex took them — they were poisoned over appetizers."

Cecil catches his breath.

In fact, Carlos is pretty sure this has nothing to do with lingering trauma. He isn't feeling dizzy and lightheaded, or touchy and aggressive, the way he gets when he's triggered; it's just the normal frustration of having a theological mystery he can't wrap his brain around. Plus a headache.

But it'll only upset Cecil if he says it's nothing to do with that, I'm just distracted for no good reason. "I think I might need to get out of here, yeah."

 

-{,(((,">

 

"We're making our move in a couple days," says Tamika. "We could get you out of here early, if you agree to join in."

The man on the bed in the secret-prison cell doesn't answer. Doesn't move. If he wasn't breathing, Tamika wouldn't be sure he was alive.

"It'll be most helpful if you remember things about Desert Bluffs. Street layouts, who's in charge, how the theology offices are organized...anything like that," she continues. "Do you remember...?"

"Oh, I remember everything," rasps Kevin. (The guards behind Tamika tense. She waves for them to relax.) "Wish I didn't. Then maybe I could sleep. Or eat."

"Haven't they given you anything to deal with that?" When Kevin doesn't answer, Tamika raises her voice and addresses the microphones: "For godsake, serve the man some alcohol!"

"Yes, Tamika," says a crackling voice over the speakers. "Right away."

"Tamika," echoes Kevin. His eye sockets, two fleshy pits each about the size of a thumb, stare emptily at the ceiling. "I won't help you. I can't help you. Bribe and threaten all you want, but I'm a loyal company man. You know why."

"Yeah," says Tamika. She's been anticipating and dreading this moment. "I know. Thing is, Kevin...it's too late."

"What?"

"Strexcorp ever tell you anything about alethiometers? We've got one. She looked up your family for me. Your sister, your nephew — I'm sorry, we would've tried to rescue them if we could — but they're gone. Their deaths took them away a couple years ago."

With a guttural keen of despair, Kevin rolls over so his back is to the door and flips a pillow to cover his head.

"You can get revenge," presses Tamika. "Take down Strex. Make them pay for everything they did to —"

"I don't care!" snaps Kevin. "Either you're lying, because you're a vicious, manipulative monster, or you're telling the truth, and I —" He clamps the pillow down harder over his ears. "And nothing matters. Do me a favor and kill me, or leave me alone."

His death is standing at his side. It's probably been there the whole time.

Tamika catches the death's eye, and makes sure it's paying attention as she hefts a few things out of the bag slung over Rashi's shoulder. A miniature clock radio. A double handful of audiobooks on CD. She leaves them silently on the carpet, where Kevin can get them when/if he's in a state of mind to listen to something, then she and her daemon step back toward the door. "I'm going. If you ever decide you want company, though, you just tell the cops to call me, understand? If I'm in town and still alive, I'll come visit the next chance I get."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Khoshekh stays with Cecil's wallet to get the check, while Cecil takes Carlos and Isaña to the skate park a few blocks down to get some fresh air.

There's a group of otherworldly visitors playing on the ramps and loops: deerlike creatures with elephantine trunks and four legs arranged in a diamond pattern like Khoshekh's. In the dull glow of the streetlamps Carlos can't tell if they're wearing skates, or if their middle legs have some kind of organic wheels.

"I'm sorry," says Cecil, as they settle onto a free bench. "I was so invested in supporting local employees, I didn't even consider...."

"It's okay," says Carlos. "I'm fine."

He shifts his daemon into the crook of one arm, takes Cecil's hand with the other, and makes himself stop thinking about...whatever it was he'd been inducing that headache by thinking about.

"An experimental theologian is...usually fine. Not always. I don't know if I've ever told you this, but during the team's first few months in town, there were times when I nearly called off the whole project."

Cecil's eyes widen. "I had no idea. What changed your mind?"

"You did." By going after Carlos's torturer with swift and irreversible vengeance. By demonstrating that he was, not safe (because nothing and nowhere is truly safe), but protected. "By being your mother's son."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The Scout-run funeral is held at the Main Street rec center, which has a sprawling memorial in the lobby to mark the occasion. Sherie's daughter brings lemon squares. Her son brings flowers.

Sherie herself brings tissues. There are fewer tears than she expected, but Strex has sowed enough of a death toll that even Night Vale can't shrug it off without grief, and she runs out fast.

The Cabrera/Carlsbergs are nowhere to be seen. It's a shame, Sherie thinks. They deserve the support...the emotional closure...the honor of hearing Tamika proclaim little Renée among the town's fallen heroes. But Renée is still breathing, which means Steve won't leave her side, not even to attend her funeral.

Eventually the mourners start breaking off into small groups: people who have lost the same friend, people who have known each other for years. Susannah is with the other girls in her troop. Seth has probably hidden out somewhere with his daemon and a book.

Sherie checks her phone, and finds a text summoning her to the empty lot across the street.

There's a gleaming new sign planted in the bare earth — Futuro hogar de la Antigua Casa de la Ópera de Night Vale — with Quentin-the-angel perched on top in the shape of a white-feathered bird. "Nirliq had me ask around, check local records, on that date you were curious about. While I was at it, I took a look at the INTERMAGNET records."

"We're looking into one woman's mysterious pregnancy," protests Sherie. "I don't think that's the kind of thing that would show up on the anbaromagnetic field data for the whole planet."

"Oh, I agree!" says Quentin encouragingly. "Which is why I was not expecting to find what I found."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Dana is asleep, but Eustathias is awake. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Whichever it is, she is half dreaming, half listening sleepily to the cadence of voices from D.L. and Maureen.

"...promised ourselves there were things we weren't going to do," the rabbit daemon is murmuring. "Especially not with someone who's in...I don't know what to call what she's doing now...."

"Heroics?" suggests Maureen.

"...but it's going to get her killed. The chances are overwhelming. Dana being Dana is probably even more dangerous than working in radio."

"I know," says Maureen softly.

Silence.

"And she's so hot when she's gathering armies and calmly standing in the face of almost-certain death."

D.L. groans, the sound muffled like he's buried his face against Maureen's side. "I know."

Dana or Eustathias smiles against the plush lining of her sleeping bag. It's hard to argue with that kind of motivation.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos leaves Cecil a voicemail, asking all of Night Vale for input. Cecil plays the message on-air. The calls start coming in.

Apparently there are a lot of local stories about causality not lining up the way it should.

In their NVCC headquarters, the physicists pick over confusing data and Cathay takeout. Carlos weeds the stories, trying to separate fact from fantasy, the useful from the mundane. Quentin, hunched over in a chair too small for his ten-foot angel body, checks geomagnetic field data. Köhler is going back through the team's Rusakov readings. Sherie and Nirliq are looking through news archives.

They have personal anecdotes to add to the list, too. Sherie remembers the House that Doesn't Exist being different on the inside than out, and a woman on the inside proclaiming that she's lived there for nineteen years, though the whole housing development is only three years old. Carlos recalls his latest stint in prison, with Delphine reminiscing: Papi was living an ordinary single life one day, and the next he woke up in a different house with a new job and a daughter. At the time, he'd figured she was being poetic. What if it was literal?

Cactus Champ's birthday is the only date where they find physical anomalies embedded in the data. Quentin's records show that the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field was reversed for two discrete periods, one of them more than an hour long. (He claims he could spend at least that long detailing all the reasons why it's impossible for that to have happened so fast, let alone with nobody noticing.)

There are matching jolts in the readings from their old Strex-provided Rusakov meters. All the numbers are in normal ranges, which explains why it never sent up any red flags in their data. But if you make the numbers into graphics and animate them, it's easy to see the abrupt jump-cuts, as if long stretches of readings were spliced in from completely different days.

The next call Carlos makes is during the weather, so Cecil picks up.

"Hi, honey," says Carlos. "Can you put out one more message before the show ends? Tell people, the next time they see Dana...."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Outskirts of Desert Bluffs.

"...to go talk to the experimental theologians!" says Tamika over the thwock-thwock-thwock of her gyropter's blades. "We can handle this from here!"

"I understand," says Dana, and winks out of sight. Either she left on purpose, or they've hit the border past which her astral projection is blocked by the worship of the Smiling God.

Tamika isn't worried. Saying they could handle it wasn't just bravado. She's got humans from this world in gyropters and fighter jets and on branches of cloud-pine; angels and dragons soaring unaided through the clouds; Laputians zipping along on their dragonflies; and masked warriors whose giant legs eat up the distance as quickly as any set of wings. It's all very Battle of the Five Armies.

The glass-and-steel buildings of downtown Desert Bluffs gleam in the sunlight dead ahead. Even at this distance, they can see some of the buildings have collapsed, more shaken by the earthquake from Strexcorp's reality bomb than anything back in Night Vale. This mission might be as much search-and-rescue as it is search-and-destroy.

Either way, Tamika's forces have a strong tailwind, and Rilke quotes on their lips, and the morning sun at their backs. They are ready. And they are not afraid.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"We're afraid someone's been time-traveling."

Dana, astral-projecting herself into the middle of Carlos's living room, raises her eyebrows so high there's a real danger they'll fly off her forehead.

"I mean other than us!" exclaims Carlos. (On the couch, Tock raises a sludgy appendage at the noise.)

"Oh! That's different. Go on."

"All you and I have been through are stable time loops," continues Carlos. "When we go back in time, our actions end up causing the future we just came from. We're afraid someone is controlling time in a way that makes it unstable."

When the first experimental theologian had voiced the theory, the temptation was immediate and obvious. If the past they all remember isn't a given — if time can be changed without shredding the fabric of reality beneath them — how many deaths (and worse) could be undone?

But every risk, every death, every loss has been part of the fight to get as far as they have. Yank out one thread, and who knows what you'll unravel. It's a dangerous fallacy, assuming people with foresight can make everything work out the way they want it to. Carlos remembers hearing that somewhere recently.

(Foresight, he has foresight, put the pieces together....)

He shrugs off the stray thought and goes back to addressing Dana. "Fey hasn't been able to tell us anything. Says it's outside her ability to measure. So we're turning to you. Is there any chance you've been working with some...I don't know, futuristic space-traveling people from Mars, who might be accidentally scrambling the course of time with a temporal shift beam generator, but who are ultimately on our side?"

Dana gives him a stern look. "Carlos, please. This is no time to be ridiculous."

"Right. Sorry. I don't know what came over me." Carlos massages his temples. "It could be nothing to do with us. It might even be a natural phenomenon. But if it's Strexcorp...if they've come up with a more controlled version of those time-traveling deer, for instance...."

"...they could unmake everything we've fought for, and we'd never even know it." Dana shudders. "I'll look into it. Can you give me any idea where...or rather, when...to start?"

"We think the House that Doesn't Exist may be involved. Any time between three and nineteen years ago." Knowing Dana's history with that house, Carlos wasn't expecting her to like this option. Sure enough, she doesn't look enthusiastic. "But the biggest nexus of potential distortions we've been able to find is last year, early afternoon, March first."

Notes:

New daemon portraits: Earl Harlan; Cecil's mother with Janice; and, from the original HDM, Mrs. Coulter.

Reversing the polarity of the magnetic field is, for once, not meaningless technobabble.

If you haven't read this AU's version of The Traveler recently, now might be a good time to go refresh your memory.

Chapter 48: A Story About Time

Summary:

"As Mom used to say: except for psychics and time travelers, no one is ever told what would have happened."

Dana is a time traveler. She's about to find out.

Notes:

New art: album cover art for the story; Kevin and some lookalikes.

The previous chapter was a huge headache to write. This one — to go with its non-chronological theme — has been half-written since October.

Night Vale (present).

Dana projects herself directly from the present toward the past, aiming for a moment when time itself may not have been stable

 

-{,(((,">

 

and almost immediately steps on a crack

 

,,,°(´㉨`)°,,,

 

and finds herself somewhen else.

The radio station floor is stained with rows of bloody footprints. An intern is on her knees with a sponge and bucket, working diligently to scrub them away. Standard, mundane community-radio intern duties. Nothing special to see here.

Until the intern's cat daemon catches sight of Dana, and hisses. "There's another one!"

The intern turns...and Dana finds herself staring into her own face.

"Don't you try anything," orders past-Dana, rising to her feet and wielding her mop like a claymore. "I do not know how many of you there are going to be, but I will do what must be done. As many times as I have to."

Of course — this must be the day of the Sandstorm. She's missed her target by a couple of weeks, stumbled into the middle of last March rather than the beginning. Dana holds up her hands. "I'm not another double! Look at me more closely. I'm different from you, see? My hairstyle has changed, my face has gotten older...and Eustathias is not with me."

"I suppose that's true," allows past-Dana. Still-intern Dana, as opposed to Walker Dana, Messenger Dana, Traveler-Of-Time-And-Space Dana. "But if you are not a sandstorm double, then what, exactly, are you?"

"A time-traveling astral projection of yourself from the future."

"Oh! That explains it."

"Or at least, somebody's future," says Traveler Dana. "Because I, as I am now, do not remember meeting myself like this, when I was you. And where did the experimental theologian go?" She remembers one in the booth the whole time she was working: getting biological samples and taking readings, asking about her experience during the storm, eventually sending her to the tape room with a message for Carlos.

Intern Dana frowns. "The Outsider one? Carlos? Do you remember him being here?"

"Him too. He brought one of his students...or colleagues...or colleagues' students? I don't remember exactly what they were."

"You must be thinking of someone else," says the intern. "Carlos doesn't have colleagues."

Oh dear. That sounds, not just different, but jarringly wrong. "Are you sure? Perhaps you just haven't met them yet."

"Very sure. He's been the exciting new story in town ever since he was brought here two weeks ago. If any other experimental theologians had arrived at the same time, they would have been the talk of the town as well." Switching back to a more standard mop-wielding posture, Intern Dana returns to the work of scrubbing bloodstains. "At least, until another story came along that had enough general interest to displace it. This sandstorm might do. It's been quite an event."

"Can you tell me about how Carlos was...brought here?" Traveler Dana doesn't remember much about her version. In her timeline, the experimental theologians arrived the summer before the sandstorm, before she had much reason to pay attention to the radio. But since this Dana is already working here....

"I certainly can. It was in the middle of a town meeting. Cecil was there, reporting, and I was there too, learning how to report. The main subject of discussion was a long and involved debate over new bloodstone manufacture regulations. Positions grew tense. Mayor Pamela Winchell's fists were clenched so tightly that her nails dug into —"

"If you wouldn't mind skipping ahead," interrupts Dana. This is probably some kind of karmic punishment, being faced with her own younger self's extremely roundabout narration. "Tell me about where they introduced Carlos."

"I'm getting to it," protests Intern Dana. "As the debate was reaching a moment of high tension, the doors flew open, and a group of strangers strode in. The ones in the front were all women, in black dresses, with beautiful faces that looked very young but eyes that revealed them to be much older. And the strangest thing was, only a few of them had daemons in sight —"

"Witches. They were witches."

"Yes! We were all intimidated by the sight of them. The City Council hid behind their podiums. I confess, if I had had a podium of my own, I might have hidden behind it as well. Only Cecil and Mayor Pamela Winchell were not afraid. But then Cecil's expression changed. Not to fear...no, to something more complicated than fear. He was looking toward one of the witches in particular. I followed his gaze, and I saw. She had long white hair, tan skin, a compact build...."

"Cecil's mother."

Intern Dana gazes at her older self in wide-eyed reverence. "How did you know?"

"We have...in a sense...met." Traveler Dana doesn't go into details. One version of her telling a story is taking long enough; if they both went for it, this could last for years. "What did she do?"

"Nothing, at first. It was one of the other witches who spoke." This time, mercifully, the intern doesn't try to give a full physical description. "She explained to us that Night Vale was meant to have experimental theologians. She said it was in accordance with some important prophecies. She went on to say that one theologian in particular was important, and since he had somehow been assigned to a research post on the wrong side of the planet, they had done us the favor of bringing him here instead."

"And that was Carlos."

"That was Carlos. He was just over six feet tall, with hair that was perfect in every way...."

Although Dana knows what the experimental theologian looks like, she gives up and allows her younger self to reel off a detailed description, from Carlos's gleaming white teeth all the way down to his fur-lined snow boots.

"Cecil's mother led Carlos over to the place in the gallery where Cecil and I were sitting. By this point Cecil was quite flustered by both of them, although for different reasons. He thinks Carlos is very handsome, you know."

"The Cecil in my timeline has brought it up a few times, yes."

"I didn't follow the exchange that came next so well," admits Intern Dana, washing off her mop in the bucket. "It was conducted in English, which I don't speak. From what I could gather, Cecil's mother announced that Carlos was going to love Cecil, and, I think, to marry Cecil? It all made Carlos very upset. Now that I think back on it, I assumed whatever she said was part of the prophecy, but perhaps he didn't understand it that way. Perhaps he took it as an order."

"That would make anyone upset," says Dana sympathetically. She can't imagine agreeing to go somewhere for a job, only to find herself presented to one of the organizers' sons like some kind of romantic trophy.

"It hasn't been easy for Cecil either," sighs her younger self. "He told off his mother as soon as it happened, of course. But now he's afraid that if he reaches out at all, Carlos will take it as a sign that he feels entitled to Carlos's affections after all, and

 

,,,^..^,,,~

 

"...and what?" prompts Dana.

Her voice is drowned out by some kind of choir, and the chiming of bells.

She's slipped on another crack, or maybe time itself cracked around her, so that now she's in the reception hall of the local Temple of the Beams. It's full of white streamers and beautiful music, all the guests in their best furry pants and soft meat crowns, cactus flowers wreathing everything in the soft color gradients of their petals. Dana can't narrow the time down to anything more specific than "some year after this temple was built."

Until, a few tables over, she spots herself from this timeline. Herself, still looking about sixteen, and wearing an NVCR press badge...but sporting a short, clipped haircut, with Eustathias perched on her shoulder as a ribbon-tailed bird-of-paradise. A different incarnation of Intern Dana, here to get the news.

None of the beautifully-dressed people at this table notice Traveler Dana, even when she's standing in front of their faces. They're all too busy listening to...Dana takes a few steps, getting a better line of sight toward the head of the room....

"People say to me...."

...ah, that's the bride. Radiant in ivory and emerald, her cactus daemon in a pearl-studded pot on the table beside her.

"...'June, you've been on that cactus for three years now. How did he persuade you to come down?' And I tell them...." One hand rests over the light swell of her stomach; she breaks into a cheeky smile. "...what makes you think I came down first?"

Genteel laughter from the crowd.

The groom, in a dark tunic with gold braid, looks...satisfied. Not delighted, not dizzyingly in love, but happy enough, Dana thinks. And perhaps that's just the natural look of his face. His foreign face, with its handsome but terrible beard...

...and cold eyes. Frightening, steely blue eyes. Eyes that Dana has seen before.

Cactus June talks more seriously about how happy she is to have found such a wonderful man, while Dana approaches their table. If she can get at the right angle to see his daemon, then she'll know if it's really him. None of the wedding guests react as she walks right through people, furniture, centerpieces, accessories.

Until she walks past Intern Dana, who gasps. Traveler Dana turns back to check, and the younger Dana stares right into her eyes, shocked and

 

__~/*\~__

 

she's in a desert. Sun-baked desert, strewn with the occasional piece of wreckage protruding from the sand.

At first Dana thinks she's back in the otherworldly desert that has become so familiar. But she turns all around and sees no mountains in any direction, certainly none with blinking lights on top. Just blocks of cement, poles of metal, the odd rusted-out chassis of a car.

"Dana?" she calls, because there might be a version of herself around here, too, bleak and lonely though it would be.

No one responds.

So Dana, out of habit, starts walking.

Eventually she sees the twisted wreckage of what must have once been a radio tower: half-buried in sand, with weedy tufts of grass sprouting all around it. She approaches. Of course it could be any tower, from any radio station, in any world that invented radio...but it is a landmark by which to orient herself, if nothing else.

Twenty paces from the blackened metal, she realizes she is walking through scattered bones.

Dana keeps walking, but looks more closely at her feet than at what she is approaching. After that, it isn't long before she sees the first unmistakable sign of where she is: a tile, engraved with a name. The material is sturdy and well-enchanted, under warranty to last through at least one apocalypse or your money back.

It's the memorial tile for an NVCR intern. With a stylized human eye carved next to the letters, indicating that they almost certainly provided some of the bones Dana is standing in.

It takes a long time for her to search through the unburied tiles, using the angle and distance from the radio tower to keep herself oriented. After some number of minutes, or hours, or days, she finds the one she was looking for:

DANA CARDINAL
INTERN
1997-2013

It has a crescent moon. She died with exceptional valor in the service of community radio. But there's no eye, which means the tile is a memorial only. Her remains were never recovered.

Shaken, Dana steps backward

 

__~/ \~__

 

into another wedding reception.

This one looks to be in the back yard of a house Dana doesn't recognize. She's standing in the middle of a picnic table full of desserts, draped with a tablecloth decorated with a gorgeous pattern of embroidered flowers.

"Excuse me," says a voice from below waist level. "I would like to get to the cake, please."

Dana looks down to find...herself. A much tinier version of herself, in a frilly purple dress with white trim. The corresponding tiny Eustathias is riding on the girl's shoulder in the form of some kind of violet-feathered songbird, so they match.

"I'm sorry! I didn't mean to be in the way. You go right ahead." Traveler Dana steps back out of the table, giving Little Dana space to take a slice of cake unimpeded. "Your name is Dana Cardinal, right?"

"Yes, Señora."

"And how old are you?"

"Five and three quarters."

That gives Dana an almost perfect reckoning of the date. Moreover, she knows she never went to a wedding at this age. Her brother's wedding was a big deal because it was the first one she had ever gone to, and her brother, in this time and place, is only nine. "Can you tell me who's getting married today?"

Little Dana shrugs. "One of Mamá's friends, I think."

"I see. In that case, can —"

Dana stops short as a deep, familiar voice echoes from the other side of the crowd: "Welcome...to the wedding."

If there's something important here, something central to the development of this timeline, the odds are good that she'll hear about it around Cecil. "Sorry," she says to her younger self, "but would you excuse me? There's someone I need to go say hi to."

When she finds him, the mid-twenties version of Cecil is strong-arming someone toward the house: a peninsular guy with a badger daemon. Cecil is resplendent in a green velvet tuxedo and a towering soft meat crown. The other man is wearing a threadbare dinner suit and protesting all the while. "You have to understand —"

"I understand that this is a very special day, Steve Carlsberg," snarls Cecil. "Not a day for rabble-rousing, or conspiracy theories, or trying to convince us that our town should have murders handled by the police instead of informal vigilante squads, or whatever other inanity you're trying to bring us today."

He drags Steve up onto the porch and through the wide French doors. Dana walks through the wall beside them.

"Today is a day for family. How's your wife, by the way?"

"Pregnant. Tired and cranky. Sends her regards," says Steve impatiently. "Family is the whole reason I'm here! I know you don't like it, Cecil, but you need to listen to me. You need to know the truth about this — this person who's about to marry into your family!"

"No, you listen to me, Steve!" snaps Cecil, backing him up against the nearest wall...and glaring at him with vivid purple eyes, focused and unclouded. "We already know."

"Maybe you think you know, but —"

"Will you stop your insipid yammering for one minute and look at me?"

Steve, to Dana's invisible astonishment, stops yammering.

"We. Know."

"But...you...."

"But my sister is in love, so she is dealing, and I am too. In ways that we are not going to discuss when we are under observation by so many hard-working and on-duty members of the Sheriff's secret police — not to mention all the off-duty members who are attending this wedding as guests. Yes, Steve, we are aware of the guests!" Lowering his voice, Cecil adds, "If this new connection means you no longer want to send your ridiculous letters in to the station, I will understand. I'll be thrilled! It'll mean less time wasted eviscerating them on-air, more time to focus on real news."

Dana doesn't stay to hear more. For one thing, she's heard enough of Cecil yelling at Steve on the radio over the years that she could probably fill in the rest of this rant herself. For another...she has got to try to find this sister.

Cecil has a sister.

If that means what Dana thinks it means —

 

,,,^..^,,,~

 

— she probably isn't going to find the answer in Jorge's Tacos.

There's a group of girls in one of the booths, gangly tweens with braces and unsettled daemons and sticker-studded backpacks, chattering over their forsaken enchiladas. One of them is Middle-School Dana. This must be four or five years ago...except that one of her companions looks a whole lot like Tamika, and isn't much younger than the version Traveler Dana last spoke to.

Also, that's definitely High-School Maureen at the register.

And over the radio, Cecil's voice is calmly reporting, Carlos and his team of experimental theologians warn that in the undeveloped land out back of the old elementary school, a house exists.

Well, if there's a potential twist of time that could lead Cecil's brother to be born a sister, surely there's one that could prompt Dana's mother to have children a few years later. Dana doesn't waste time on wild speculation, just walks straight up to Middle-School Dana and says, "Excuse me, what year is this?"

"Huh?"

It doesn't seem like it exists, explained Carlos and his perfect hair. It's not there when you look for it. And it's between two identical undeveloped plots of land, so it would make more sense for it not to be there.

Possibly-Tamika narrows her eyes in the direction Middle-School Dana is looking. Her daemon turns into a sharp-eyed owl and flutters onto her shoulder. "Nobody's there."

But, he says, they have done experiments, and the house is definitely there.

"I'm a time-traveling future version of yourself that only you can see," explains Dana.

At news time, the theologians are standing in a group in front of the existent house, daring each other to go knock on the door.

"She says only I can see her," Middle-School Dana informs the other girls. To her older self, she says, "It's 2013. Are you like the man who married Cactus Judy? He says he is a time traveler as well. He has a foreign face, cold blue eyes, and a handsome yet terrible beard."

"I may be," says Traveler Dana. "Can you tell me

 

▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯

 

anything else about —"

The rest of the phrase dies on her lips.

She's back in the Dog Park.

Dana tells herself not to lose hope. She is still traveling. This cannot be the last place and time she ends up, this shadowy landscape with its barren ground and withered trees and high onyx walls. Not after she waited so long and worked so hard to get out of here.

It is dark, as usual, but here's something odd: beyond the walls, beyond the gloomy cloud cover, Dana sees light. That never happened before. Even on the days when Emmanuel assured her it was sunny and warm in the rest of Night Vale....

"H-hello?"

Dana turns.

Hiding behind a black stone monolith, peering out at her with sunken eyes in a hunger-thinned face, is Dog Park Refugee Dana.

A few gentle questions from Traveler Dana, and she knows enough to orient herself. This version of Refugee Dana attended the wedding of Cactus Jenny as an intern, but was not in the groom's party when her brother got married, because her brother is still single. (Traveler Dana names and describes her sister-in-law; it isn't someone Refugee Dana recognizes.) She does not remember any Outsider experimental theologians coming to Night Vale. She has her doubts about whether an Outside has existed within her lifetime at all.

"No one has visited me while I have been trapped here," she says, when Dana asks about Emmanuel. "I do not know how long it has been. I do not know what is happening outside. It was easier to keep track when the broadcasts were regular, but they have not been regular in a long time. Perhaps they will not be at all, now that the Voice is dead."

Traveler Dana's eyes widen. "Cecil died? How?"

Refugee Dana leans against the monolith, wrapping her frail arms around herself against the chill of the hooded spectres. Or perhaps against the chill of having so little meat on her bones. "I'm afraid I don't know anyone named Cecil."

Dana reflexively touches one of her earrings: the little anchors, the symbols of hope, that her version of Cecil sent over the walls via trebuchet. "You still have a chance to get out of here. To get to a place where you won't go hungry or thirsty, and where, perhaps, you can still make a difference. Go to the wall, place your hand on the onyx, and begin walking...."

But for all her prompting, she can't even convince her alternate self to get up.

 

__~/*\~__

 

Swings creaking. Birds chirping in the trees. Children laughing as they run around, sneakers kicking up mulch, daemons flipping from one shape to another as they match their bodies' paces.

Dana soaks in the familiar ambiance of Mission Grove Park, in all its living, active, not-destroyed glory.

It all looks the way she remembers. Same wheat and wheat by-products shelter. Same giant-size bloodstone circle. Same playground equipment, painted with extensive anti-graffiti runes. Same little picnic area nearby. Her younger self is on the playground, perhaps seven or eight years old, riding high on her favorite swing with sandpiper-shaped Eustathias perched on the crossbeam.

And Cecil is alive. Once again Dana hears him before seeing him — not using his calm and authoritative radio voice, or his deep and sinister warning-Steve-Carlsberg voice, but a high, delighted coo:

"Where's Tío Cecil? Wheeeeeere's Tío Cecil?" Pause. "There he is!"

Dana follows an outburst of delighted baby giggles to the source. Cecil is sitting on the edge of a picnic bench, his hair long and gathered into a single braid down his back, addressing a dark-haired infant in a stroller. He holds his hands over his face; she gets worried; he pulls them away; she squeals with laughter and yells, "Ceecee!" Her daemon turns into a tiny black fluffball of a bird and hops around in excitement.

So much excitement, in fact, that he falls out of the stroller.

Cecil's niece scrunches up her face in abject despair. And Khoshekh is nowhere to be seen, so he can't rescue the confused little bird.

"Shh, honey, don't cry!" soothes Cecil, clasping his hands around her waist. "We're gonna pick him right up, understand? You and me. Ready? Up!"

He lifts the girl out of her seat — her kicking little legs look smaller than they should be, if Dana's understanding of baby proportions is correct — and down into the grass. Her daemon turns into a baby rabbit and hops into her arms.

The whole thing is so adorable that Dana has been walking closer this whole time, a dreamy smile on her face. She doesn't realize how close she's gotten until the niece looks straight at her, points, and says, "Fa-ma!"

Dana stops short. "Me? Are you talking to me?"

Cecil follows the girl's gaze, unclouded violet eyes looking right through Dana. "What is it, little one? Do you see something?"

"Fa-ma, Ceecee, fa-as'ma!"

"Un fantasma? Do you see a ghost?" Cecil closes his fingers over his niece's pointing hand and guides it down to her side. "Nobody else can see it, smart girl. If you see something, say nothing. You're too young to drink to forget, and you see more things than most people, so you have to be extra careful."

Dana turns, moving carefully so she doesn't slip on a crack in time too soon, and looks for her seven-year-old self. Cecil can't perceive her, and the baby is too young to be interrogated, but maybe Little Dana can relay a few questions. Who are the child's parents? Does Cecil have completely different siblings in this version of reality? Or could it be....

There's a witch in the sky overhead.

As Dana watches, the figure circles down toward the grass of the park. She is wearing jeans and a flowing blouse, and has no daemon in sight. Her face is neither familiar nor unfamiliar. She has long dark hair, tan skin, a compact build, a strong nose...and eyes that light up when she lands on the soil of the park, and Cecil's niece chirps, "Mamá, up!"

"Hi, pajarita," says this timeline's version of Cecil's brother. "You didn't let your uncle get into any trouble, did you?"

Of course, thinks Dana. If he had never been a boy, he would have been recognized by the other witch-clans without a second thought. Would never have felt so desperate for their approval that he was willing to take an unthinkable risk, and so hurt that his mother, against her better judgment, agreed to help. Wouldn't have been completely torn out of his family's lives when they channeled all that power and it backfired.

"Excuse you, Abby," huffs Cecil, as his sister scoops up the baby (the little daemon stays in a form that can cling to her side) and offers her a finger to grab. "I am a fine, upstanding, model citizen."

Lowering his voice, he switches from Spanish to a Northern language, one that nobody in town except its other witches and the invisible Dana would understand:

"She thinks there's a ghost around. I didn't feel any malicious presence, but maybe double-check your wards tonight, just in

 

,,,°(´㉨`)°,,,

 

There is a man standing on the tailgate of a truck, addressing a small crowd of curious people in English-accented Spanish. He has a foreign face, cold blue eyes, and a handsome but terrible beard.

"I have traveled here from your past. I am here to preserve this future," he is saying, in a voice Dana has heard before. "You do not know it is in danger because your memories have been changed, along with the course of events. In your understanding, it has already been saved."

Traveler Dana looks around for the other Traveler's daemon...and finds her at last, hiding out in the shade under the truck: a gorgeous, thick-furred snow leopard.

One of the audience members, a heavily pregnant beauty with a cactus daemon at her side, watches him with a proud glow and whispers to the woman next to her, "We just bought a house together! In the development right out back of the elementary school, so it'll be right there when the baby gets old enough."

Her companion sighs. "I don't know, Jean, he's still

 

__~/ \~__

 

my intern back together!"

"I can't!" shouts Carlos, voice echoing off the hospital walls.

"Why not?" wails Cecil. This one is much like the version Dana remembers, his hair cropped short and stark white, hands clutching the lapels of Carlos's chapel coat. "You and I can generate a lot of Rusakov particles together. A theologically remarkable amount, you said!"

"Not enough for this!"

They're not far down the hall from a room with the blinds drawn, and dark cloth hung over the windows. Even over the sound of the argument next to her, Dana can hear muffled sobbing coming from inside.

It sounds like her mother.

Carlos is still yelling, angry and hurt. "In fact, the laws of entropy mean you'd need at least two to make sure you didn't fall short — and that's assuming the falloff of the energy curve is linear, it could always be exponential or logarithmic — and even if we had perfect equipment and could ensure total conservation of energy, who would you have me kill to save Dana, huh? Whose child would you cut?"

Cecil dissolves into choked sobs, falling against Carlos's chest. Carlos holds him close and tight, face drawn with pain, armadillo daemon rolled up into a ball at his feet.

"This didn't happen!" cries Dana. There is nobody around who can perceive her right now; she's mostly addressing the universe in general. "These are not my memories! Whatever course of events led to this moment,

 

,,,^..^,,,~

 

it was changed!"

Another post-apocalyptic wasteland. This time, enough of the ruins remain standing that Dana can orient herself: she's a short walk down the block from her own house. The building is sun-baked and weather-beaten, roof caved in, nothing left of the windows but a few glittering shards.

This can't be her town's real fate either. Can it? The shattered mess of continuity she's stumbled into was/will be eventually resolved into the sequence of events she remembers. It must!

She tries to project herself back to her own nice stable present,

 

{.....}-{.....}-{.....}>

 

slips on another crack,

 

ε(,,´ ｖ`,,)з

 

and, oh dear, now she's in jail.

Or so she thinks at first. It's a single room with no windows, a small attached bathroom, and a heavy lock on the door. The furniture, the wallpaper, the flatscreen TV, all of that is prison-issue.

But there are personal items here, too. Handmade woodcarvings, one of them half-finished, on the end table next to the lamp. A pile of laundry on the chair. Framed photograms (the biggest one shows Carlos and Cecil at a carnival, wearing silly hats and showing off their prizes from a shooting game) next to the television.

Also, the lock in a cell isn't typically on the inside.

Someone in the bathroom flushes, and out wanders Cecil. Dana tries to get an idea of the date from studying him — he's either older than her contemporary Cecil or significantly more stressed, with lines around his eyes and several days' growth of white beard on his chin — but stops quickly, embarrassed. The poor man is disheveled and depressed, wearing only pajama pants and a faded T-shirt, his clouded eyes dulled with the kind of pain that has lasted so long it becomes a background haze in everything a person does. It's not right, spying on a person in a state like this if you're not a member of the Sheriff's secret police.

Cecil flops down on the mattress. His daemon, Dana realizes, is curled up in a cushioned wicker basket next to the bed; Cecil swings a hand down to skritch the margay's ears. What's left of them, anyway.

There's a knock on the door, and Dana's own voice says, "Cecil? Are you in there?"

"What is it?" calls Cecil, his voice surprisingly normal.

"Can I come in?"

"Gimme a minute." Cecil sits up, and makes a halfhearted attempt to un-dishevel his T-shirt. "Are you alone?"

The Dana outside his room hesitates. "Your mother's with me."

Cecil groans. "Dana!"

Traveler Dana makes her way through the wall to see what's going on outside. Sure enough, there's Cecil's mother: looking exactly as young as she did when Cecil was a toddler, though the frayed clothes and stringy, unwashed hair make her less striking than she might be. And there's Dana, an adult version of Dana in a suit and half-moon glasses, with short, natural hair and the bearing of someone important. Neither of their daemons are in sight.

"She was very insistent!" calls Adult Dana through the door. "And none of us speak enough Suomi to know exactly why."

Cecil's reply is muffled but firm. "Tell her if she wants to live in this country, enjoy all the benefits of our military and our converted underground shelters and our extensive stockpiles of canned goods, she needs to start speaking Spanish like the rest of us!"

"I know you don't like talking to her," says Adult Dana. "And I know it isn't fair, that she is the one not cooperating, and yet you are the one I am pushing to make sacrifices in order to accommodate her. I would not bring this to you if I didn't think it might really be important."

There's a long pause before Cecil answers. "Is this an order, Mayor Cardinal?"

"This is a request from a friend," says...Mayor Dana, apparently. "Cecil, please."

At last Cecil relents. He's wearing a nice black tunic when he opens the door, and has run a wet comb through his hair. "Hi, Dana. Hello, mother."

Señora Palmero stares absently at a nick in the cement floor.

(Overhead, something rumbles. A subway train, an earthquake, a bomb? Traveler Dana can't tell.)

"Go ahead," prompts Mayor Dana.

"Come on, out with it," adds Cecil. "I have important walls to stare at too, you know."

"None of this is really happening," says his mother in monotone Suomi.

Cecil throws up his hands. "Great! That's a real help, thanks, Mom. Is that all?"

Mayor Dana looks from the mother to the son. "What did she —"

"This sequence of events doesn't exist," continues Señora Palmero, now staring absently through Cecil's torso. "It feels like it exists. Like it's right here as we experience it. And it's affecting our senses all around us, so it would make more sense for it to exist than not. But it isn't real."

"She's rambling," translates Cecil. "It doesn't mean anything."

"The only real thing here —" Without looking, the witch points directly at Traveler Dana. "— is her."

"There's nobody there, Mom!"

Mayor Dana follows the gesture, and her eyes widen ever so slightly. Traveler Dana gives her older self a sheepish wave. "Hello."

"You don't see anyone?" asks Mayor Dana softly.

"No! Because she's —" Cecil checks himself, noticing her change in focus. "Dana? Are you all right?"

"I'm not hallucinating things, if that's what you mean!" says the mayor. "I am still calm and rational and entirely fit to do the job that I am doing."

"All true!" exclaims Traveler Dana. "This is not a hallucination. It's just that right now I can only be seen by versions of myself...and sensed by a limited group of other people. I am a younger version of you, a time traveler, from the timeline that really happened. You would like it, I think! It's much less...sequestered...than this one. Does everyone in town live in the abandoned mine shaft now?"

Mayor Dana swallows. "Everyone who's left."

Oh dear. "Then I really should be getting home. Will you ask Señora Palmero something on my behalf? Ask if there is something I need to do, order to put time back on its proper course, before I can return there."

Cecil's mother cackles. There's no other word for it. Dana can't tell if it was a response to the question, or if she simply feels like doing that every so often, and sometimes gets lucky with the timing.

Giving Señora Palmero a cautious look, Mayor Dana says, "Would it be easier if I just had Cecil look it up?"

"No," says Cecil instantly. "Whatever you're talking about, whatever the other half of this conversation is, I am not getting involved in anything that comes out of my mother's head. Not even for you, Dana."

But there is someone he would do it for, isn't there?

The photos in his room. His single-occupant room. In the shelter for everyone who's left.

Standing up straighter, Traveler Dana tries to channel her older self's natural authority. "Tell Cecil that, in the real timeline, Carlos is alive."

 

,,,°(´㉨`)°,,,

 

Svalbard (past).

The room is richly furnished: a thick carpet, lush leather armchairs, a wide stone fireplace with a coal fire flickering inside.

Through the glass windows Dana can see a clear and starlit sky. When she approaches one, she realizes this building is set on an icy slope. Snow is heaped against the walls. A frozen sea glitters below.

It's quiet. Dana can only hear a few sounds aside from the blustering wind: the fire, the splashing of someone in a bathtub in another room, the low tones of someone giving orders next door. A servant with a pinscher daemon comes in to light the naptha lamps, then goes out again.

And in comes the Traveler, warmly dressed, snow-leopard daemon padding along at his side.

He stops when he sees Dana, though only a slight twitch around the eyes reveals his surprise. "Well! This is quite the day for unexpected visitors. Did you come with the bears as well?" He keeps his gaze on her, while his daemon looks subtly and quickly around the room. "Or are you a witch? These are strange times. I've never known an African witch before."

"I'm not here on behalf of anyone you would know," says Dana calmly. "Your fight is not my fight. Your time is not my time. I will be born in the future; I am one of the children you are fighting for."

The experimental theologians she knows back home would have been excited at the revelation, or full of questions about what else Dana knows. This man just nods, as if his superiority is the natural assumption. "Is that so? You've arrived too early for my plans to have gone into action, but I'll accept your thanks regardless."

"Oh, I didn't come to thank you!" exclaims Dana. "I'm here to ask if you have considered making your progress happen more quickly by learning to command time."

"That sounds...dangerous."

"It will be very dangerous. If you make a mistake and are stopped before you can fix it, you will plunge the course of time into a path where your War is lost. Or a timeline where you win this War, only to lay the groundwork for an apocalypse a few centuries later that will devour this world, and every other one it can reach."

"Every world?" echoes the not-yet-Traveler. "So there are more than two, after all."

"You haven't even figured that out yet?" Honestly, with the ego radiating from every line of this man's bearing, Dana would have expected him to at least know basic theology.

Maybe he'll derive the rest on his own, especially once he gets the hang of the time-commanding thing. But it can't hurt for her to give him as many hints as she can. Just in case.

"There are many worlds. Not an infinite number, but an extremely large one. Conveniently located in our own world is a deposit of bloodstone with special properties, which you should take advantage of! If you come to Night Vale, in Hispania Nova in the early twenty-first century, you can get first-hand expert advice on bloodstone circles and how to use them. Also, if you should happen to buy a house while you're there, take some photograms of the Clouded Mountain and hang them on the walls. That doesn't have any important theological purpose; it's just so I'll have the foreshadowing. Oh, and, have you ever considered the virtues of basalt as a building material?" Dana pauses. "Maybe I should let you get something to take notes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale (present).

When Dana flickers back into sight in the real present, a couple of Carlos's colleagues have joined him in the living room. Sure enough, they're the ones she remembers. And there's Cecil and his daemon, too: sporting all the injuries and signs of age she expected, and no others.

"That was quick," says Carlos. "On our end, at least. Did you find anything?"

"I have found so many things," says Dana, excited and relieved. "Someone was destabilizing time, yes, but it was not Strexcorp — or anything to do with Strexcorp — or anything to do with us. The course of history is stable. We only know it was ever destabilized at all because, when it re-solidified, a few stray fragments of other potential histories were melted in."

"Like Cactus Jane's baby?" asks Sherie.

"Like him, yes! And like the memories of that woman who lives in the theology building at the college, who thinks the world ended several decades ago. Like the house that is only partly here, unstuck in time, appearing by any normal measurement not to exist. Like the recordings from your theological equipment of measurements that did not, in the real version of history, happen."

Like Janice, she doesn't say. Other people deserve to hear that news first. But once it's been broken to them, surely it won't be long before Janice tracks Cecil down and lets him know that she is his Niece Who Exists.

(She doesn't seem like she should exist. Her parents never met, her biological mother has no memory of or interest in carrying a child, and Dana suspects one of her grandparents on her other mother's side was never actually born, so it would make more sense for her not to exist. But here she is.)

"There are things I saw that I need to pass on to others," continues Dana. "But before I leave: Carlos, in one alternate timeline, I heard you explaining something. It sounded as if you were saying that if you had enough Rusakov particles, you could repair intercision."

Carlos grimaces, echoing the pain he'd shown in that other scene, when the laws of theology had forced him to crush Cecil's hopes and he'd clearly hated every second. Nirliq steps in to help. "Please don't get your hopes up. It's like saying, if we had enough rocket fuel, everyone on the planet could move to Mars. Even if it's possible in theory, some estimates say it would take as much as...."

She recites a number.

"That is an impressively large number," admits Dana. "I don't know if I have access that much. I don't have any theological equipment for measuring these things. All I can give you is a visual estimate. The Dust has gathered in a pool about ten feet deep, in a canyon at least two thousand feet long, and perhaps four hundred feet across at the widest point."

"Dana, we're talking about the scale of the output of continents...."

"How densely would the particles need to be gathered to be visible to the human eye?"

All the physicists stare.

"Sweetie, that can't be right," says Sherie at last. "You've seen something else that's luminescent, and it's pretty and shiny and gold, and you're mistaking it for Rusakov particles."

"Unless she hasn't," says Carlos.

Cecil touches his arm. "Carlos — does that mean...?"

"I don't know! We don't know anything for sure yet. Sherie, Nirliq, Köhler, go find some neighbors who will let you pray in their bloodstone circles. We need to make a network with Dana, project someone over into her world, and get eyes on this thing. And Cecil...."

Cecil nods, barely breathing.

"Call Steve," says Carlos. "Don't give him any premature hope, just talk to him — find out how he's doing — and if he's on the verge of any hopeless, final decisions, hold him off until we get back."

Notes:

"[Lord Asriel] was preparing this before we were born, sisters, even though he is so much younger....But how can that be? I don't know. I can't understand. I think he commands time...."
~Ruta Skadi (The Subtle Knife, chapter 13)

Chapter 49: Delivery

Summary:

Tamika and the Book Club launch into the long campaign to bring freedom to Desert Bluffs, while Carlos and his team gather the necessary research and supplies to do their most ambitious theology project yet.

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Carlos's astral-projected form materializes on top of the basalt fortress; Dana's phoenix-formed daemon shows him to the craggy entrance of a cavern in the rock. It's a bright, uncomfortable trek, with the Clouded Mountain standing menacing in the distance. He's glad to be able to venture into a tunnel just for the sake of the shade.

They follow a trail of charcoal arrows on the walls. Eustathias explains that Dana made those when she first walked here, when human and daemon were still in separate worlds.

(She explains other things too: their observations of the Clouded Mountain, their time-displaced meetings with the man who built this fortress, their friendship with the Man in the Tan Jacket. At one point Carlos is calculating Rusakov densities in his head and gets distracted, and asks if she would be kind enough to repeat herself. She only sighs.)

The tunnels slope down, and down, and down. They take one fork, then another. Carlos wonders how long this can go on before they've reached ground level at the foot of the mountains. Or gone below it.

At last, at the end of a tunnel, there is light.

It's faint and golden and inconstant, like the reflections of water off the surface of a pool. The palette is the same one Carlos knows from looking at the world through an Atal spyglass.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Dragons and witches soar overhead, getting into dogfights with Strex jets.

The giant masked commanders start a large, distracting offensive on the town's southeastern front.

Groups of tiny Laputian spies descend on a strategically-chosen group of suburbs and districts: finding and disabling the local Strex-brand Rusakov meters, so security forces won't be able to detect it when the angels arrive.

Teams of Girl and Boy Scouts parachute down beside a block of damaged or collapsed apartments. The youngest daemons take small, lithe forms and slip through cracks in the ruins, searching the outermost rooms for survivors. To find people trapped more deeply than a normal daemon's range can reach, they also have the help of thousands of flies: the daemon of...someone. (Tracking whoever-it-is is Janice's job, not Tamika's.)

At a nearby office building, half a dozen of the best liars in the Book Club walk right up to the door, wheeling boxes full of Strex-drug antidotes. The boxes are appropriated from one of the Night Vale business owned by Strex until last week, and are stamped with the orange triangle logo. The kids are dressed in the crisp white-and-yellow uniforms of Desert Bluffs schoolchildren.

"An executive hired us to distribute the new company medication for one-quarter of minimum wage," they inform secretaries and floor managers and security personnel on every floor. "It's a school project to learn about capitalism and the joys of work. Won't you be a team player and let us distribute them?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

At last the rocky enclosure opens into a vast cavern. The floor spills downward into a gorge, exactly as monumental as Dana described it. Mindful of his lack of mass, Carlos walks right up to the uneven crags of the edge.

Isaña, sitting with his body back in Night Vale, thinks at him, Carlos, breathe.

It's Dust.

Probably the highest concentration of Dust in one place that any living being, in any world, has ever seen. CERN has made huge leaps in the understanding of physics, and even for them, synthesizing something this dense would be a fairy tale — it's an environment that has never been available for empirical testing, ever —

According to the set of equations Carlos thinks most likely to be accurate, the Rusakov particle mass of his whole planet circa 2010 would become visible if compressed into a space the size of a refrigerator.

This lake could submerge thousands of them.

Thousands of worlds, wholly reduced to unlivable Rusakov dead zones. Thousands of billions of people dead from whatever process drained all the consciousness away from them.

It's a relic of the War. It has to be. This is the fate Lyra Silvertongue saved them from.

He's standing before the most monumental graveyard in the history of the multiverse.

We're going to need specialty lenses, he thinks at his team. Focus on the concrete, the applicable, the doable. Don't start trying to grasp the amount of death that made this possible, or you'll never stop reeling. Have to figure out if that's something we can make on-site, or will need to order. Should probably get a new Rusakov isolation chamber, while we're at it. And we'll need a lot of bloodstones. And a spot in Tamika's schedule....

"Does that mean you can repair intercision with this?" asks Eustathias softly, perched on a spur of rock beside him.

You could become a god with this, thinks Carlos to himself.

Out loud to Dana's daemon, he says, "We are sure as hell going to try."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

The masquerade didn't last long. A warning bulletin about the imposter children goes out across town on the official corporate radio frequency, and they're being trapped in standoffs at different office buildings.

On the plus side, the sky is theirs.

Tamika, who has made a point of learning some key strategic phrases in the masked warriors' language, sends one battalion fording through the streets toward the radio station, and another toward the hospital. They're going to need control of both.

Her gyropter radio crackles with a panicky transmission from one of her commanders: a force of eyeless, blood-drenched security officers, with crisp uniforms and jagged knives, has a dozen of them cornered in a Human Resources office. Like most HR offices, it's full of embalming fluid and explosive chemicals, so they're wary of starting a shootout. Tamika sends a couple of angels off to do recon, and tells the kids to break a window and send out a flare. Help is on the way.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The experimental theologians know a lot about intercision in theory. Carlos especially. But none of them have any practical experience with the kind of severed connection they're going to try to repair, and the more data they have, the better.

Before they bring their equipment into Renée's room, Carlos repeats the quiet directive that if anyone has to leave, they should leave. No judgments made, no questions asked.

Sherie lasts about two minutes before she has to run to the bathroom and dry-heave over the sink.

She's never been good with horror movies. And now here's this poor girl turned into a literal zombi. The child's body isn't hurt, no blood or internal organs spilling out all over the place, but it could hardly make Sherie's stomach turn any more either way. Oh, beams.

"I'm scratching your back. You can't feel it, but I am."

Sherie can, in fact, feel the Faceless Old Woman's nails sending sharp relief down her nerves. And they're not even tearing up her chapel coat. "Thank you."

"You should go home," says the woman. "Or go do some other part of your job. Whatever other parts there are. Your work is largely uninteresting to me, so I haven't bothered to learn about it. Unlike bees. Or cake. I made you a delicious cake. It's waiting in your front closet right now. Your old colleague with the big furry tree cat is also having stomach pains, but none of the cake is for him. Okay, I lied. There is no cake. You should still go home."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

In the middle of the hospital cafeteria, Tamika carves open a portal to a lightly-forested otherworld and sends up a non-toxic flare into the sky. With a good headwind, the mulefa should have the catering to her location by dinnertime.

Can't raid the cupboards here for food or for medical supplies, not when they don't know what's safe and what isn't. Can hardly even sit on most of these surfaces. Tamika starts cutting narrow slashes that open in the depths of her favorite otherworldly ocean, using them to power-wash the bloody floors.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Cecil's show is still far from over when Carlos drops by NVCR.

The building looks good, inside and out. The dingy floor under the ripped-up carpets has been washed; the holes and stains in the walls have been papered over with non-Strexcorp motivational posters, most of them featuring purple, spine-covered kittens. A new intern leads Carlos upstairs — a young man with a fuzzy camel spider on his shoulder, still wearing checked pajamas, which means he probably woke up in the studio and was put right to work — and the golden glow of former Intern Vithya is visible from the tape room, giving them extra support.

Fey is still co-hosting. Mostly to look up facts and figures when Cecil requests them, but he gives her a whole editorial comment to herself, which she delivers with novice excitement. Carlos wonders if this is just a temporary arrangement until Cecil recovers from the ordeal of being taken prisoner in his own studio, or if the ordinater is looking to break into the field permanently.

The editorial finishes. Cecil cuts to the weather. Carlos stands outside the studio window and waves.

Cecil lets him in right away. (Khoshekh, resting in a basket under his radio desk, looks up; Isaña trots over and hops in to sit with him.) "Carlos! Did something happen? Is there an important theological development I need to report after the weather ends?"

"No, nothing like that," says Carlos. "After the day I've had...what with, you know, theology and everything...I just wanted to see you."

Cecil's face softens. "She's hard to look at, isn't she."

Throat dry, Carlos nods.

He ends up sitting behind Cecil and redoing the Sharpie blacking-out in the bar code tattoo. The skin on the back of Cecil's neck is healing but sensitive, so he goes slow and gentle. Then he goes back over it to bubble in any flecks that were left missing. Cecil picks up the show again while it's still in progress, and by the time he says his good-nights Carlos has rounded the whole thing out with some scribbles and loops and a Fischer projection of a carbon chain.

"I, um, may have gotten a little carried away," says Carlos sheepishly, as Khoshekh floats up to take a look.

"It's...interesting," says Cecil, studying it through his daemon's eyes. "Does it mean something? No, wait, tell me over dinner. How would you feel about Arby's?"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Megan Wallaby cracks the super-advanced equipment at Desert Bluffs Corporate Radio, and a couple of Scouts working on their Subversive Radio Host badges start putting out messages.

First: that senior management has returned, and is asking all local security officers to stand down. Then: the first message was a lie, and local security actually needs to converge on the military hangars, to protect the aircraft. Company-approved medical treatments are being distributed at the school — no, at the rec center — no, at the hospital. No, cancel all of the above, everyone should stay home.

In between sowing as much confusion as possible, they queue up the audiobook of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, then M. T. Anderson's Feed. For anyone who tunes in throughout the night, that'll give them some interesting listening.

 

-{,(((,">

 

It's a text from Pamela Winchell, of all people, that sends Dana trying once again to project herself into Desert Bluffs. She appears in the middle of a StrexBooks Purchase Center, grey pre-dawn light just starting to come through the shuttered windows.

Within a few hours, the Advanced Readers have descended — not to destroy any of the books, they love books, even the worst and most useless of the lot — but to weed through the collection and heap the worthless ones under a giant sign labeled FREE.

Tamika has a handy way of washing the floors. Sometimes her ocean also spits out gaping-jawed, eyeless fish, or chunks of pillow-sized jellyfish shredded by the sudden pressure. Dana worries at first that they'll release some deadly undersea plague, but apparently Tamika confirmed with Enigma that, for complicated theological reasons, no living thing from that world can survive in this one. Not even the microbes. The only problem they have to watch out for is splattering any of the books with jellyfish, because that'll be hard to get out.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"I detest having to pretend that Hiram is running for re-election."

"Mmhmm," says Sherie, massaging the Faceless Old Woman's mostly-bare back.

It's a hot morning, all right? And the woman fell asleep in Sherie's bed, which is a first. A milestone-y kind of first, Sherie thinks, that deserves a little physical intimacy in commemoration.

"Why couldn't that child with the knife have solicited help from a world full of faceless old people? Why did it have to be dragons?"

Unless the benchmarks are radically different when the person you're sort-of dating has been secretly living in your home this whole time anyway, and has probably already spent many hours sitting on your bed watching you sleep in hopes that you'll accidentally eat a spider.

"Someone with five heads / has no business running for / one mayoral spot. That was a haiku, by the way. It's Poetry Week. We have quotas. You'd better start working on yours."

Sherie sighs, and starts counting syllables on her fingers. She isn't up for doing it in Spanish, so she uses English: "Look, what is your name? / If you won't tell me, I'll start / calling you something."

"Oh?"

"You're lucky I didn't demand it a month ago," says Sherie sternly. "Hmm, your daemon is a salamander...I could start calling you Sally."

The cave-pale salamander in the basket next to the bed, curled up with Ahisamach's mongoose nose in his fronds, raises his eyeless head in alarm.

The woman hesitates. "I'll make you a deal," she says at last. "I'll tell you my real name if you survive whatever you're planning to do with all those bloodstones."

"Survive it?" echoes Sherie. "We might or might not be able to heal that little girl, but it shouldn't be dangerous to us."

"No, I mean the next thing you're planning," says the woman. "And in the meantime / yes, you may call me Sally. / If you really must."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

It's a long siege.

Even after several days, when the main commercial district has largely fallen to the Book Club's control, Desert Bluffs is still crawling with true believers and highly-expendable foot soldiers. They have to coordinate the rehabilitation of thousands of panicky rescuees, weed through homes and offices for holdouts, and fight off disorganized-but-ruthless counterattacks around every corner.

City Hall, the local Strexcorp headquarters, and a major network of theology buildings are all well-fortified enemy strongholds. Control of the radio station switches hands at least once a day.

Tamika's glad she brought a lot of audiobooks.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Fey's bunker isn't the most comfortable place to have a largeish meeting. People hold their daemons in their arms or on their shoulders if possible, and lean against the walls; Khoshekh and Kaisa are here in place of their humans; and Maureen, when she projects herself into the room, ends up standing in the middle of Fey's chassis to free as much space as possible.

"My abuelo — you know, John Peters? — has been studying the Smiling God and the terrible light," she explains to the crowd. (The songbird-shaped Erika next to Kaisa murmurs a running translation.) "He's figured out the bloodstone-circle formation we'll need to suppress the Smiling God and the Clouded Mountain's defenses so we can attack."

"John Peters is an authority on that kind of thing?" asks Carlos, surprised.

"Well, yeah," says Maureen. "He was in 4H? He's a farmer? I can't believe you don't know that."

(Carlos doesn't even try to answer that one.)

"We're looking at two interlinked chains of thirteen circles. Fey, you can calculate the best subset of our allies to run them, right?"

"Can do!" chirps Fey. "Do you want the top twenty-six overall, or the set of twenty-six who will do best together? The second one will take longer to calculate, but I bet I can work it out in a few days with a dedicated subroutine."

"The set," says the man they all assume is the Sheriff. (His daemon, they all assume, is concealed under his miter.) "We need to take the time to do this right."

"And don't include anyone who has more important things to do!" exclaims Trish Hidge, here representing the mayor's office. Her cowbird daemon's feathers ruffle. "The Mayor is needed in town!"

"Tamika and Dana are also irreplaceable in their roles," says Khoshekh. "And my focus will be with the radio."

An eagle-shaped angel — Xaphania, who introduced herself to Carlos once before, and who is much more of a leader among the out-of-town angels than he realized — clears her throat. "You said this would allow us to suppress the Enemy. What are your plans for destroying it?"

Uncomfortable silence.

"I'm pretty sure we don't have those," says Maureen. "I can double-check with Dana, but I think our whole plan is to hold it off while we beat up its forces, then drag everyone out of there, close all the doors, and leave it isolated in a deserted universe where it can't hurt anyone."

"Unacceptable," says Xaphania. "There is no safe prison for a being with the power and inclination to devour the Republic of Heaven, world by world. It must be destroyed, or it will be no time at all before this war resumes."

"If you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them," says Carlos, arms crossed. His town has put up an incredible fight, and he won't hear it dismissed by anyone who can't do better. Millennia-old angel or not.

Kaisa addresses the group. "The weapon used by Señorita Flynn may be an option," the Erika beside him hastily translates. "In one language, that type of knife has a name which translates to God-Destroyer."

A string of numbers is already marching across Fey's screen as Maureen says, "So you don't just want us to restrain the Smiling God wherever it is? You want us to lure it out into the open, then restrain it? That sounds insanely more dangerous."

"But the witches are right, the Knife will work!" reports Fey. "As long as we can get someone close enough to wield it against the Smiling God in person."

"Isn't that likely to kill the wielder?"

"Oh, with the complicated light-blocking devices our theologians have been inventing, I'm sure it'll be fine," says Khoshekh. "You'll ask your abuelo how to set it up, right, Maureen?"

Maureen opens her mouth like there's something she really, really wants to say to him. Whatever it is, she sighs and lets it go. "Yeah, okay."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Taking on the theology complex is a long, tense, complicated chess game.

One of the Strexcorp theologians comes out with upraised hands and declares her own surrender, then nearly gets away with releasing a sample of a virus from another world that only Strex employees are inoculated against.

The Book Club tries a counter-fakeout, with Janice sneaking in and pretending she's willing to switch sides in return for longer and stronger legs. It's less than five minutes before a biomachine employee notices that she's bugged, and they only pull off an emergency extraction because they have a guy on their side who's unmemorable, even to biomachines.

A chemical storage warehouse goes up in a fireball of multicolored flames. For several hours each side assumes it was deliberately triggered by the other, until one of the larger dragons admits to having set it off accidentally with a poorly-aimed sneeze.

There's a fast-paced chase sequence through a series of air ducts, culminating in a pitched battle between a handful of dragonfly-riding Laputian warriors and three chirpy, hamster-sized StrexDaemons (TM).

Tamika ends up in one-on-one physical combat with a division director, whose daemon, a massive black-maned lion, gives Rashi a fight almost as formidable as a librarian. The buffalo's hide is slashed up with claw marks by the time Tamika gets a blade through her opponent's lungs. With her last raspy breath, the director smirks and declares that the Smiling God will reward her in the next world — and once Tamika dies, which can't be far off now, she'll see the error of her ways. Oh yes! She'll see.

When the lion daemon vanishes, Tamika stands, breathing heavily, and checks on the people around her. No more ongoing combat in this wing, just a bunch of Strex's blank-eyed severed drones, herded into a circle by a team of witches and watching the death of their supervisor with vacant smiles.

There's no chance saving these ones, Dr. Perfecto has told the theology liaison team. Not with their daemons...dissolved.

And if there's anyone who deserves the peace of the next world ASAP, it's them.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Groom Lake Base, Nevada.

Enigma listens, fascinated, as Dana describes how Tamika and her armies secured various Desert Bluffs buildings. It's hard to tell his exact expression because of the machinery covering half his face, but his mouth keeps smiling, and the speakers hooked up to his system occasionally prompt Dana to go on.

His scientist, Caleb, tries to put on a polite front of listening, but keeps getting distracted by the need to check some dial or tighten some screw on Enigma's equipment. Dana doesn't blame him. Anyone would be worried, knowing that someone they cared for was about to make a potentially dangerous trip.

Every twenty minutes or so, she projects herself back into her own world, checking on the Advanced Readers' progress. At last she has good news. "They've completed the secure, sterile quarantine environment in the room in my world that corresponds to this space. Our knifebearer is suiting up and going through decontamination as we speak."

"Are you sure it's all up to code?" asks Caleb, through the helmet of his own well-filtered suit. "Your world may be more sophisticated than ours in terms of computers and spaceflight and not having race riots, but how good are you with hazmat suit technology?"

"Good enough," says Enigma through the speakers. "Their power supply is good enough. Their food will be good enough. And they'll find you a place to stay that's much nicer than your apartment. I promise."

Tamika must remember the feel of cutting into this world, because a sliver of unnatural light appears in midair without anyone having to direct her. Caleb sucks in a breath. Indicator LEDs across Enigma's machinery flicker on.

"Hello!" says Enigma, once the window is wide enough to show a face. "Hello, are you Tamika? Fey's told me so much about you!"

"I am Tamika, yes." That's all she can manage in English; in Spanish, she continues, "Dana, please thank him for being Fey's friend, and for all the world-saving he's helped out with. Tell him we're happy to welcome him here, and look forward to hosting him as long as he needs."

Dana translates for Caleb and Enigma while Tamika expands the window, and a couple of young technicians stand ready to reconnect Enigma's equipment to a Desert Bluffs power supply. The scene behind them is a lot of translucent plastic sheeting, hanging in a bare yellow hospital room. All the furniture and equipment, even if it wasn't gory or bloodstained, has been cleared out. There aren't so much as curtains to decorate the windows.

It all seems quite drab and unremarkable to Dana, but when she glances at Enigma, he's grinning as widely as his cheeks will let him. "Look, Caleb!" he exclaims, digital voice crackling in his excitement. "Sunlight!"

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

The new equipment being shipped in from out-of-town is due to arrive this afternoon. Nirliq and Sherie hang around the college mail room, waiting to sign for it when it shows up.

For the equipment arriving from out-of-world, Carlos and Köhler drive out into the sand wastes.

They arrive at Point F — the old oak door in the middle of the desert — a few minutes before the Book Club gyropter and its dragon escorts. Although Cecil has been giving hopeful updates on the Desert Bluffs situation on-air, that's no substitute for the relief of seeing Tamika in person. She and her daemon look like they've been hit by a tornado...and come out swinging.

Carlos gets an uncomfortable jolt when she cuts open a window, and the next world over is apparently full of people in scrubs and surgical masks. One of them hurries to explain that it isn't because they're contagious — just the opposite. They want to make this delivery without accidentally re-exposing their universe's population to the common cold, and...whoa, is that a dragon?

They end up having a short but energizing conversation about dragon anatomy and the physics of flight, while the heavy-loading equipment (on the other side) and the dragons (on Carlos's side) transfer six industrial-sized crates of terrible-light-blocking material into Carlos's world. If they need more, she says, just have Dana place an order. The part of the other world that corresponds to Night Vale is hundreds of miles from the nearest civilization, but that's no burden when you can ship things on supersonic jets.

It all leaves Carlos with a warm glow of hope for the future...which does get tempered after the window closes, and Tamika gives them a stark reminder of the present: "We found your colleagues. The ones you sent to Desert Bluffs."

The ones who were severed, she means. The ones who are too far gone for any amount of experimental theology, even in theory, to save.

"They have been...taken care of?" asks Köhler somberly.

"Yeah." Tamika's fingers tap the hilt of her sheathed knife. "Don't know if they still feel pain, but we made it painless anyway. One of their ghosts manifested for a few seconds afterward." She nods to Carlos. "The one who looks kinda like you, but more pale. And with worse skin."

Carlos swallows. "That would be Raimondi. Did he say anything?"

"Asked if you'd sent us. I told him we worked together. He said..." Tamika switches into English to deliver a direct quote: "...'it's cute that he lets you think that'." She rolls her eyes. (That's Raimondi all over.) "Then he started fading away, but said, next time I saw you, to tell you: 'hey...thanks.'"

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Tamika saddles up on Rashi's back, wields the theologians' first completed light-blocking device (which is like an umbrella, but way heavier) so it puts them both in shadow, and rides down the dry, cracked dirt of an otherworldly riverbed.

She's been walking about twenty minutes when Dana's daemon, phoenix-shaped and dazzling, soars out of the pale sky and matches pace with her.

Tamika rides Rashi for a lot of the hike, and starts walking once they get into the slopes of a mountain range. She fills Eustathias in on their latest progress as they travel. The Advanced Readers have found, and sealed off, the office in Desert Bluffs that communicates with Strex's multi-world headquarters in the Clouded Mountain. (Nobody was using it since senior management fled their universe, but it doesn't hurt to be safe.) Fey and Cecil are confident they can cover the siege with a joint broadcast. The experimental theologians will have twenty-six Smiling-God-restraining not-umbrellas assembled soon.

The climb up the mountains is followed by a descent into a network of tunnels. At last they're on the edges of an underground cliff, looking down on a vast canyon full of Dust.

It's something, all right. Tamika isn't gonna get shaky just trying to describe it, the way Perfecto does...but she's impressed.

When she unsheaths the Knife and feels for the snags in the air that open onto her own world, she feels the uncomfortable resonance that means the other side is under solid ground. Good thing they'd suspected that might happen. Tamika opens reconnaissance windows on sand and clay and fossils; Dana's daemon turns into a beast like a giant mole, each of her powerful clawed forepaws as big as Rashi's entire body, to study the other side with senses known and unknown.

"Here," she says at last, about ten feet back up the tunnel. "We have a safe path to the surface here. Get out your flare gun. I'll start digging."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

On a void-dark night with no moon or stars to be seen, Carlos stands on the roof of Cecil's apartment building, watching for flares.

There's a flock of airborne witches doing the same a thousand feet overhead, covering more space with sharper eyesight than he alone could hope to. He's superfluous, here. He just doesn't want to be in the middle of something else when the signal arrives.

Besides, it gives him some time to work on finishing out his Poetry Week quota.

His latest slapdash haiku is spelling itself out on the pages of the Little Theologian's Book (It's very dark out / But I'll take that, over it / being much too bright) when, in a soft whoosh of silk and breeze, Serafina Pekkala swoops down and lands next to him. Carlos slips the notebook back into the pocket of his chapel coat and stands up straighter. "Your majesty."

Serafina nods in greeting. Without preamble, she says softly, "Do you really think this plan of yours will work?"

"I think...it has a good chance," says Carlos. "Good enough that it's worth trying."

"It's ambitious. You must know that. During the War, the very idea of healing children who had been severed was an unthinkable dream."

Carlos scoops up Isaña, holding her against his heartbeat. "It's theologically improbable. That doesn't mean we should ignore evidence that says it's possible. A year ago I would have thought programming an ordinater to be an alethiometer sounded like an unthinkable dream...then I found out that Mary Malone did it in 1995 on a floppy disk."

The witch-queen's gaze snaps over to him. Green eyes burn in the near-darkness. "How did you come to know that?"

"Her world had a museum exhibit about it! Cecil took me there for a visit." In spite of everything, Carlos grins at the fond memory. "Half of the rest of the museum was about her too...and no wonder, considering...but, wait, you would have met Dr. Malone when she was alive, right? I don't have to talk her up to you!" He resists the urge to add a volley of questions: What was she like in person? Was she nice? Was she funny? What did she smell like?

"I knew her for some time, yes." There's a strange tension in Serafina's voice. "She is honored in her world, then? Did it happen only recently, do you know? Or did she come to be respected during her lifetime?"

"During her lifetime! I also watched this documentary about her work, and it included live footage and interviews, so...."

Carlos trails off, mind racing as he puts pieces together. The fierce intensity in Serafina's eyes, the tight self-control she's holding...that means something.

And, oh, wow, her daughter — Stella Maris. It's always seemed like one of those bizarre celebrity baby name choices, for someone who's never been a follower of the Church to name a child after an epithet of the Virgin. Unless that was never the Mary she was named for in the first place.

"I have biographies," blurts Carlos. "Two of them. I couldn't bring back video in any usable format, but I got printed books. Do you want to borrow them? Or...have them? I know witches don't really do material possessions, mostly...but if you want these, it sounds like maybe you're the one who should have them."

Serafina swallows. "I would like that, yes."

Before Carlos can ask more, or decide if he even has a right to, she nods to the horizon.

"There's the flare."

Carlos follows her gaze...then looks down at the patch of town below, the glimmer of streetlamps and fast-food signs. "No, that's something else. A known local phenomenon. It's...."

Dana chooses that moment to manifest beside them.

"It's visible!" she exclaims. "That is good news indeed. Our portal is unstable, so I was worried that the signal might not have gotten through...and all this time, it's been right there above the Arby's."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A [canyon deep under the surface of] a desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

It's going to take a whole team of people to pull this off...and Night Vale rises to the occasion.

Josie leads a team of angels in flying the experimental theologians' equipment down through the swirling portal, one highly sensitive item at a time. An unmarked white secret-police van — with the clearance to break more local traffic laws than anyone else, even an ambulance — ferries over a couple of doctors and the gurney on which they're carrying Renée, with her body and her daemon both wrapped up as warmly as possible.

The manager of the Arby's even brings them all free sodas. "If you folks pull this off," he tells the physicists, "we're naming a local menu item after you."

A handful of witches from the Lake Enara clan fly down under their own power. Köhler, Nirliq, Sherie, and Carlos all get carried down by Erikas: daemons in their arms, sacks of bloodstones over their shoulders. The people who love Renée most come down last: a hollow-eyed Steve, his own aging father, Delphine and Janice, and finally Cecil.

(...Was there someone else here, briefly? Someone who told Janice he couldn't stay, because he didn't want to risk disrupting anybody's memories of what happened here? Carlos thinks there might have been, but his head aches when he thinks about it too hard, so he lets it drop.)

The lake of Dust is even more dazzling in person, and downright magical when they're lowered into it. Like being inside a snowglobe, except that instead of plastic and glitter, they're surrounded by the very essence of conscious thought. Carlos is a little breathless as he gives directions. Rusakov isolation chamber goes here. Bloodstone circles get set up at these angles. Nirliq, and her fancy new specialty laser, stand right inside.

They arrange Renée and her hummingbird-shaped Tovi inside the enclosed space, right next to each other, the better to saturate the snapped connection between them with as many Rusakov particles as possible.

Renée's body shivers, staring vacantly at the surface below her feet. Carlos and his team stand in formation within the bloodstones, link their minds together (in this sea of Dust it's easier than ever, like they've been shouting to each other underwater this whole time and suddenly they're out in the fresh air), and focus on holding the teeming flow of particles in place around her.

Most of them can't bear to look at her directly. One of them will have to, so it's lucky Nirliq has turned out to have a strong stomach. While her colobus daemon monitors the scene through an electrum spyglass, she aims a high-powered Rusakov-radiation laser at the severed child and switches it on.

To use a highly simplified and theologically imprecise analogy, they're trying to weld the connection back together.

If it works, there's no telling what the side effects will be. Whether Renée will come out of this with a normal range. Whether she'll be able to settle in a healthy way. Whether she and her daemon will have all the skills and sympathies they could have developed otherwise.

But if it works, then she'll come out of this.

Rusakov particles swirl and dance around Carlos's hands in sparkling trails of gold.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees one of Renée's hands grope aimlessly around the floor...

...and rest on Tovi's feathered back...

...and sit there. Just sitting.

Nobody breathes. The only sound is the hum of the equipment. Carlos can practically feel the pulse of the universe right now, but he can't feel whether any of this is making a difference, he can't —

— With a sharp gasp, Renée grabs Tovi and clutches him against her chest.

Carlos dares to look.

"Renée?" asks Steve, echoing off the cavern walls. "Sweetie?"

Both hands splayed around her daemon, Renée raises her head.

Wary, alert, conscious eyes find her family.

"Papi...?"

Steve lets out a sob of pure delight and runs to her.

Utter chaos. Everyone whoops and cheers and grabs the nearest person for a hug — friend, total stranger, it doesn't matter, they're all the greatest people in the world right now. Carlos gets tackled by a witch; Cecil sobs into an angel's chest; on the ledge above them all, Maureen grabs Dana by the waist and spins her through the air.

An ominous rumbling goes through the rock around them in the midst of the celebration...but for the moment that battle is outside and far away. Here and now, Steve has sprinted into the chamber to throw his arms around his daughter while Renée's are wrapped around her daemon, and there's nothing in the world more important than that.

Notes:

Some final daemon portraits: Michelle, John Peters, and Germaine. Also: a loose portrait of Mary Malone, an art-nouveau Lord Asriel, and a sketch of a daemon-human swap AU.

I didn't deliberately pace the fic so this chapter would come out on Easter weekend. I also didn't originally pick Renée's name knowing it would be so literal. Sometimes, life just works out.

Chapter 50: Cogi Qui Potest Nescit Mori

Summary:

Our heroes spend as much time as possible with their families before finally taking on the Mountain.

Kinlání.

There's a respectably-sized mob waiting outside the news studio when Carlos arrives, and for the first time, it isn't mostly followers of the Church out for his blood. Still a few of those in evidence, but for every handmade REPENT HERETIC sign with the numbers of a Bible verse scribbled in magic marker, there's a matching MARRY ME CARLOS adorned with glue-and-glitter hearts.

Good thing ACN has solid security. On top of which, Carlos brought his own. Delphine's arm is out of her sling; her cat daemon flashes claws at anyone who looks close to giving Isaña trouble.

He gets some audible gasps and flinching when the crowd spots the scar across his face. Carlos is glad he thought to post about it on Facebook last night, so his family won't be caught off-guard when his interview goes live. While scribbling an autograph on a photo for one woman, he raises his eyebrows at her staring companion and explains, "Desert Bluffs shaving accident."

The word is out by now that Desert Bluffs is a federal disaster area, and emergency management funds and resources are starting to stream in. Several teams of relief workers have even made it to town in person...though a few turned around and fled again once they noticed they were driving past road signs decorated with sun-dried intestines. In his interview, Carlos encourages people only to volunteer if they have strong stomachs.

He says a few words to commemorate the now-officially-reported deaths of the Desert Bluffs team. He answers the usual questions about angels. And he talks about repairing intercision.

Renée, known only to the public by the pseudonym Agent R, seemed healthy and well by almost all local tests. Her daemon's range is stunted — they start feeling pain at just eleven inches of distance — but as long as Tovi keeps to a small form that can ride on a shoulder or in a backpack, they're all right. She and her father (with Nirliq and Quentin in tow, for theology advice as necessary) are currently spending a few days at the world-famous intercision-care unit in Helsinki for further study. Carlos has every reason to be optimistic.

He praises his teammates for all the excellent work they've done together...and adds that no, they're not accepting applications for new researchers. Whatever you've heard about Night Vale, the truth is twice as weird, and Carlos's people do not currently have the resources to train you into surviving it. Maybe next semester.

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Delphine and Carlos get back to their sleepy little hotel (someone tries to tail them on the way; Carlos is pretty proud of how he shakes them off, though Delphine scoffs at the effort and calls them amateurs), Cecil and Janice are already hanging out in Carlos's room, playing cards.

"I see you two are having fun," says Delphine. "Oh my, are those new shirts?"

"Uh-huh!" exclaims Janice. She and Cecil pose to show off a pair of matching blouses with appliqué cacti along the hems. "Tío Cecil bought them. Look, we match!"

She is, it turns out, Cecil's actual, by-blood niece: the child of a sister Cecil never had, via timeline shenanigans nobody knew about until Dana stepped into them. It's hard to say whether Cecil or Janice is more excited about the revelation. Carlos had expected resistance from Delphine, but she's been surprisingly calm about the whole thing.

(Apparently she hadn't known a single detail about her not-properly-existent partner either. Not even that the person was a witch. When Carlos asked why Delphine was so paranoid about Janice's safety, then, she gave him a baffled look and said that if he knew half the things she'd observed on the job, he'd be paranoid about everything.)

"Later we got kicked out of a store for yelling at the owners about the scam they were running selling unmodified rocks as effective healing crystals," continues Cecil. "Then Janice had a vision, so I had to take her into the shade and talk her back into perceiving reality with some degree of accuracy, and then we found this lovely place that sold artisinal soaps!"

"A vision?" echoes Delphine. "Darling, are you all right? You've never needed help coming out of those before."

"Never saw the light of the Smiling God this much before," says Janice with a shrug. "Mamá, they make soap with cucumber here, can you believe it? This town is so weird."

(Not a single person in the room understands why Carlos starts laughing.)

 

-{,(((,">

 

Once Cecil and Janice have finished their game, Janice and Delphine return to their own room for the night. Cecil ends up gazing out the window into the night air. They're close enough to the mountain that it dominates the horizon: not the ominous Clouded Mountain, or even the majestic mirage that sometimes appears on the Night Vale horizon, just the modest little peak Carlos took Cecil to visit last February.

"You picked a place with a good view," says Cecil.

Carlos wraps both arms around his waist from behind, chin resting on his shoulder. "It's no tropical beach vacation, but I figured it would be nice."

Neither of them suggests plans for an actual tropical beach vacation. They haven't made concrete plans for much of anything more than about two weeks in the future. Someone stuck a coupon booklet from Juosukka Contractors in Cecil's mailbox, so they've started batting around the idea of getting a new home built from the ground up and finally moving in together...but they haven't brought the idea to Josie herself. Not yet.

"It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for me," says Cecil warmly. "So, how was your day? Aside from giving riveting interviews about your brilliance and heroism."

"Oh, not too interesting. Talked about a lot of experimental theology. Turned down three marriage proposals."

Cecil squawks in indignation.

Carlos gives him an extra cuddle, then tugs the curtains closed and nuzzles the back of his neck in unbridled adoration.

When he pulls away, the marker blacking out Cecil's tattoo is smeared. Whoops. Well, Carlos needed a shower anyway. "Hey, mind if I test-drive one of those artisinal soaps...?"

"Mmm. Only if you let me help."

They've hung a spare towel over the motel bathroom mirror. The place isn't fancy enough to have customized daemon-washing facilities, just a wide, flat-bottomed bathroom sink; Carlos fills it with an inch of soapy water for Isaña while Cecil unpacks his shopping. (Khoshekh is back in town, at the station.)

"You probably don't need the marker any more," he remarks when Cecil comes in, already half-undressed. "I know it's gonna take another treatment or two before the ink is really gone, but at this point it's only visible up close."

"And up close is where I like having you," says Cecil, moving to help Carlos with his T-shirt.

Sounds reasonable enough. Isaña hops into the water and rolls around in happiness as Carlos gets Cecil's hands running over his bare skin. "Hey, Kevin's still in Night Vale custody, isn't he? Do you know if he's gotten his removed?"

Cecil steps back, crossing his arms. "Cosmetic procedures like tattoo removal are not a luxury offered to miscreants and lawbreakers."

It's the pointed voice he normally uses for the benefit of the Sheriff's secret police. Even though he knows full well they're out of observation range, and Carlos is 95% sure...maybe 90%...at least 80% sure Delphine didn't bug their room just for kicks. He sighs. "What if someone else paid for it? If we put up the money...."

"'We'?"

"If I did," amends Carlos, starting to work on his cargo shorts himself. "I thought you might...but if not, forget it. I'd do it. Assuming he wanted it gone. I'd have to ask. And assuming there wasn't too much of a bribe attached...would it be gauche to ask Delphine about something like that? Should I save the question for the next time I see a false trash can...?"

"What you should do is leave it alone!" bursts out Cecil. "Why do you want anything to do with him? Aren't the nightmares bad enough as it is without seeing him in person?"

Carlos's brow furrows. "How did you know I have Kevin nightmares?"

"...Is that not why you sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and feel my teeth?"

Oh.

"I suppose it could also be that you've gotten highly inaccurate information about how to check for throat spiders...."

"No, you're right. Sorry, didn't realize I was waking you up." Carlos holds the folded khaki in front of himself. "Look, Cecil...I think it might help me to see him. To see that he's not Strex's anymore. And if he wants his bar code gone, he deserves help with that. If you were the one in foreign custody —"

"Well, I'm not! And that man is not me. You don't owe him anything. Just because we happen to have the same face...you don't have any idea what he's really like under the Strexcorp brainwashing, you don't know if he's safe...I don't want you in the same room with him! I don't even want to think about him getting near you again."

He turns away, worrying a loose thread on his own artsily-patched jean shorts until it snaps.

He's not being rational. Carlos could try to talk him out of it. But they're both entitled to some irrational fears when Strex and its people are concerned...and Cecil has stepped lightly around Carlos's before. "What if I get someone else to give him the offer? I won't see him face-to-face. Would that be an okay compromise?"

"...yes."

"Okay. We'll do that."

Isaña pops her head up over the edge of the sink. "We know he's not you," she adds. "We wouldn't be inviting him to join us in the shower."

Cecil's mouth twitches. "So I'm still invited...?"

"Of course." When Cecil stays withdrawn, Carlos twirls a lock of silver-streaked, shoulder-length curls around his fingers. "Cecil. Kitten. C'mere."

He doesn't comment on the black-tinted rivulets of water flowing down the backs of Cecil's heels the whole time they're under the spray, and makes a point of getting out first, so Cecil can keep his back to the wall while Carlos hands him a towel.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"I was wrong. I panicked, and I was irrational, and I said things I never should have said. I'm sorry."

Sherie lets out a long, calming breath. If her husband — no, her ex-husband now, he just held up the signed divorce papers on the other end of their Skype connection — hadn't been able to say those words, she's not sure what she would have done.

"This only applies to what I said about Seth's daemon," adds Sam. "I won't apologize for taking the kids out of there. I had no way of knowing you'd be able to get Strexcorp out of town without anybody dying, and neither did you."

"That's fair," says Sherie. Sam hasn't even been told that the kids didn't escape unscathed. Susannah wears elbow-length gloves (black, of course) when she's on a webcam call with her father, and Sherie, reluctantly, figures the war wounds are Su's to reveal rather than hers. "Honestly, I think living outside of Night Vale would be healthier for Seth. But we can't keep shuttling him across the continent every couple of months. If he's going to move back in with you after the end of the school year, you'll have to make an extra effort to prove you won't make him feel unsafe there. Again."

"I will." Sam hesitates. "What about Su? Is she...?"

"Loving it here. Thriving. Talking about applying to Night Vale Community College in the fall." Sherie has even made arrangements that, if something happens to her, her daughter will be able to keep living with the experimental theologians through her college years. (Sherie has made a lot of if-something-happens-to-her arrangements lately.) "If Seth comes back to live with you, I think she'd like to come along and visit."

"And keep an eye on me, you mean."

"Well, yes! Can you blame her?"

Sam sighs. "I want to see them again. I do. My parents might even pick up the cost of the flights...."

"Oh, don't worry about that!" says Sherie quickly. The team has been doing some consulting lately for...well, technically it's still this universe's branch of Strexcorp, although on the books it's now owned by Marcus Vansten, and in practice it's managed by a group of Erikas who answer to Vieja Josie. The important thing is, it pays well. "We've come into a bit of a windfall here lately. I'll take care of the money. You just convince the kids that you can be the father they want to see again."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

The cleaning of the Strexcorp experimental-theology complex is a work in progress. The witches currently handling security don't seem fazed, but Carlos's otherworldly visitors do a lot of wincing as he leads them past entrail-strewn offices and equipment rooms with ruddy smears on the doors.

"I can understand why you'd want a person with a blood-borne disease to be extra-careful around here," says Charles Raimeaux, holding a protective hand over the pocket with his hedgehog daemon. He's one of the people Fey designated to be part of their Smiling-God-trap.

"Is every building in town like this?" asks his boss, Sylvia Kayali. She and her Siamese cat daemon are here for administrative support. "Doesn't seem very welcoming."

"We're working on it, honest," says Carlos. "This way, please."

At last they reach a (sanitized) room set up with tech that Carlos and his team have had a chance to go over. Everyone they recruit for this gets to take their pick of Strex's theological advancements and bring the details back to their own world. No strings attached, nothing legally binding them to the entity still officially incorporated as Strexcorp: all the profits are theirs (or their next-of-kin's) to keep.

Charles instantly breaks for the nearest gadget, Sylvia in tow. Most of the other visitors follow.

Only three hang back. They're witches, Carlos has been told, but from a world where that means something very different — for starters, of the trio of representatives here, two are man-witches. And not trans ones, either.

"Are you sure none of this is...well, evil?" asks a bushy-haired woman who looks about Carlos's age. "I don't mean to be rude, it's just, we've heard some awfully discouraging things about people's souls being cut up."

"For context," adds the man-witch with messy black hair, "back in our world, that's pretty much the darkest of dark magic."

"Everything here has been certified non-evil," Carlos assures them. "But hang on...if your daemons are internal, how is intercision even a thing in your universe?"

"It's a magical process, not a physical one," says the bushy-haired witch. "Although I don't know if what you call the daemon is involved at all. With us, if one corporeal vessel for part of a soul is destroyed, the others can continue, and Ms. Cardinal says that's not the case with souls in your world."

Carlos nods. "It must be a different process. But maybe it's a related one, maybe comparing the two can shed some light on how to treat them...would you happen to have any case studies? Any books I could read?"

"We have so many books! All heavily restricted — you'd never get access —" The witch wrings her hands. "Ooh, but maybe if you had research about it in this world, and we could organize some kind of side trade —"

"We do! I'm writing the latest paper on it right now! If you want —"

"Oi!" interrupts the other man-witch, a tall redhead. "We do still have our main trade to make, so if the two of you could just stop...being each other at each other for a minute, and we could look around this place? All right?"

Carlos hastily promises to catch up with the witch later, and her friends shepherd her off.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Dana is having a conversation with Tamika and the masked warriors, discussing how best to use them when attacking a fortress none of them will fit inside.

She's also sitting at her grandfather's hand-carved dining room table, along with her mother, her brother and his wife, and Maureen.

The portal in the underground cavern has been closed. Too unstable to risk any longer. They're both astral-projecting themselves here, making slightly awkward conversation with Dana's family, and avoiding the topic of how much they envy the corporeally-present diners for being able to eat.

The hot topic is the mayoral election, which has been moved up, leaving barely any time for the undecided to capture and tame lawn signs proclaiming their allegiances. It's comforting, Dana thinks, to be able to discuss something so small and local and familiar while another part of her brain is planning a siege, and her body and daemon are swathed in a roll of fabric to avoid getting dissolved by a terrible light.

"Hiram McDaniels' blue head makes some good points," observes her brother. "But I'm not too sure about the anti-human leanings of his green head. Might tip me over to the Faceless Old Woman."

"Do you girls have a preference?" asks Mamá.

"We're not old enough to vote," protests Dana. "Or to be hired as programmers for the machines in Hidden Gorge that emit the pulses that actually decide the election."

"Also, both the candidates suck," says Maureen flatly.

Privately, Dana agrees. She never thought much about her town's government before getting lost on another plane of reality, but she's had a few encounters with Mayor Winchell in the course of managing this war. The Mayor is fiercely competent, on levels that Dana wouldn't even have appreciated a year ago. There's no way either potential successor can measure up.

"You know who I'd vote for?" adds Maureen. "Dana."

Dana blinks. "Yes?"

Her sister-in-law catches on more quickly. "She's joking! Just a joke," she exclaims with a forced laugh, eyes darting to the picture window. "Nobody in here is going to run the risk of voting for a write-in."

"Oh, of course not," stammers Dana, with the part of her attention not focused on coordinating witches' flight paths. There's at least one alternate history in which she would have been Mayor, but she isn't qualified at this age, surely. "And with my daemon still unsettled, even if anyone tried, I can't imagine I would be eligible."

"You'll have to be settled by the next election, though," says Maureen. "Right?"

"I...don't know," admits Dana. "What if it never happens at all? The state of my timeline makes it difficult to be precise, but I'm sure I must have set some kind of record by now."

"Someone would have to be the record-setter. Might as well be you," points out Mamá's daemon (an elegant creamy-furred Afghan hound). "All the forms Eustathias has needed to take these past few months, seems to me it's a good thing she's still changing. She'll settle when you're ready."

 

-{,(((,">

 

The afternoon before everything changes, the experimental theologians get together at the edge of the Whispering Forest for a team picnic. No dates, no kids, no close local friends, just the six of them. Seven, if you count what's left of Fleur. (The Li Huas were invited but haven't showed, so no need to work out how to count them.)

They bring pasta salad, truffulafruit pie, a few bottles of locally-grown wine, and gallons of water to dilute the wine so they can make all the toasts they want without anyone getting alcohol poisoning. A glass to the people they've lost. Another to the people they've saved. One to Princeton, which just decided to skip to the point where they award Nirliq her doctorate, already.

Sherie raises an extra toast to Nirliq, for the interview she did while she was in Helsinki that mentioned being bi, and Quentin, for supporting her. "You are softening the landing for the rest of us. Can't thank you enough."

"Nothing to it," says Nirliq. The angel, currently human-shaped (and, for modesty's sake, wearing an orange poncho over his spun-glass silhouette), nods. "It's not a hard stand to take, when you're walking around with a living refutation of the idea that people will go to hell for not being straight."

"The looks on their faces," adds Quentin with a happy sigh.

"It's different when you don't just have yourself to worry about," points out Carlos, to Sherie's quiet gratitude. "Harder. More complicated."

"Oh, sure," says Nirliq, to general murmurs of agreement. "Didn't mean to insinuate."

A desert owl hoots in the distance. Wind rustles the grass. The Forest croons about how comfortable they all look, and how nice their support of each other is, and wouldn't they like to come and picnic under the trees for a while?

Carlos swirls his drink around in his glass. "Hey, listen, if I...don't make it."

There's a flurry of protest from everyone but Sherie.

"No, no, lemme finish." Carlos wags his finger at them. "I could get hit by a bus. Eaten by a pterodactyl. You never know! So...once it's been, like, a couple days at least, so you're sure I'm not coming back this time...you go ahead and out me. Understand? Don't talk about Cecil — don't you set the vultures on my Cecil — but you don't have to leave my closet standing if I'm not around to be in it."

"To keeping the vultures away," says Keith. They'll all drink to that.

 

-{,(((,">

 

According to the report the Sheriff's secret police showed Tamika, they tried to interrogate Kevin once. After the first few injuries, he started laughing uncontrollably. Everyone was so creeped out that they took him right back to his cell and never tried it again.

He's in his room now. Hasn't been showering, Tamika can tell the moment she steps inside. Hasn't been shaving or eating, either; the Sheriff's secret police took the razors out of the room, so he won't get a quick death, but they aren't bothering to force food into him, so he's got hollow cheeks under the bristly white-speckled beard.

He doesn't react to the sound of the door. "Hi," says Tamika out loud. "It's me."

"Oh," says the man on the bed.

"Guess I don't have to ask how you're doing." Tamika wrinkles her nose at an untouched sandwich on the bedside table, starting to sprout mushrooms. That'll turn into a fairy ring if he's not careful. "I can order in something that isn't prison food, if that would help you eat."

"It won't," says Kevin's death.

Tamika should've figured. "Any interest in getting that bar code off your neck? Didn't have the means before, but I've got an associate, says he'll pay for it."

"Don't waste his money," croaks Kevin. "Go away."

"In a minute. Gotta pick up those audiobooks I left you. The library needs them back."

Kevin sighs. "Next to the TV."

The death shows Tamika where the audiobook cases have been neatly piled. All taken care of, all in good condition. He might not care about his own life, but at least he's not in a state where he'd lash out and try to ruin someone else's.

"I brought you some more," says Tamika, unloading the replacements from Rashi's saddlebags. "All new ones. If you were halfway through any of the old ones, I can get them renewed."

"I...finished them all," says Kevin at last. "They pass the time. Thank you."

"Don't mention it."

She finishes switching the books, then adds:

"One more thing I came here for. There's a story I need to tell you in person."

Kevin shrugs. He doesn't tell her to go away again, so she figures it's the most approval she can expect right now.

"There's a girl who works with me. A couple grades lower — she's ten — her name's Janice. She's a big help because, not only does she have dead-on aim with a shotgun and a complete working knowledge of Gaiman, she has foresight. And enough control that she can usually tell when a plan will go very wrong...or very right. Trouble is, the Smiling God screws it up — the light is so bright, it blocks out anything she tries to look at — and right now there's a lot of Smiling God in all our futures, so she's having some trouble dealing."

Tamika takes a breath. Rashi leans his head against her side in support.

"Outside of the Advanced Readers, Janice has a family who loves her: a mother and an uncle. Her uncle is Cecil Palmero — you remember him, right? The guy with the exact same face as you."

"Tried to strangle him," says Kevin listlessly. "Thought it was a hug. I've made people pass out that way. Some I remember seeing afterward — some I don't. Another time I cut his hair...I was so excited he'd finally decided to be a team player...didn't even consider that maybe his mouth was taped over because he hadn't....Why are you telling me this?"

Because thematic parallels make it easier to achieve narrative closure. "Because there's a high chance Janice is gonna have more bad reactions during the siege on the Clouded Mountain. But her mom and her uncle are both gonna be involved in the battle. Which means she's gonna need someone else to take care of her."

Kevin is breathing harder. His limp hands have tensed into twitching fists.

"Someone who has experience," presses Tamika, "in dealing with a kid who's having an attack triggered by bright light."

"Well, aren't you just the subtlest little ray of motivational sunshine?" groans Kevin, sitting up. "How's this going to work? You can't dump a sick child in a jail cell, so where am I going? Tell me what I have to do."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos wakes up when he hits the carpet next to Cecil's bed, narrowly missing a stab in the kidneys from one of Cecil's pointiest shoes.

As he yelps and struggles in the tangle of sheets, a shadowy figure looms over him. In the low light it looks like some unholy hybrid of Kevin and a hooded spectre. Carlos yells something incoherent and brandishes the shoe at its face.

"'S just me!" protests Cecil's voice. "It's me — can't you see?"

Carlos can feel Khoshekh curled up next to a dozing Isaña, but seeing, that's a different story. He scoots backward toward the door, shoe at the ready, and fumbles for the light. The thicket of tiny gold bulbs strung around the bed comes on just as the figure puts back the hood of its nightshirt (one of Cecil's favorites, it has cat ears sewn on top).

Sure enough, it's just Cecil, yawning and rubbing his eyes. "Can you see now? Y'need to feel my teeth?" He bares them in a sleepy grimace.

"Wasn't a Kevin one," mumbles Carlos. Just a generic post-apocalyptic-wasteland nightmare, in which the Smiling God's light was everywhere and an isolated Carlos was trying to call his family even though he knew the phone wouldn't ring. Now he's back in reality, where he spoke to his parents eight hours ago and has his boyfriend in the room. "Keep talking, though? It helps."

"Mmkay. But I'm not singing you to sleep this time. 'S late, and I'm tired."

"Uh-huh." Carlos makes his way back to bed. "That's fair. Just...say some things only Cecil would say."

Cecil considers...then says a few short lines in a Northern language. "Minä rakastan sinua. Haluan jakaa ilot ja surut kanssasi, ja olla sinulle uskollinen, kunnes kuolema meidät erottaa."

Carlos actually recognized the first line of that, thanks to a bit of side research he's done into Cecil's mother's tongue. "Love you too."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

Dana is all over the place, checking on people, making last-minute connections. She makes sure the commanders of the various otherworldly armies have distributed radio earpieces to all their soldiers. She translates an inspirational speech from Tamika that broadcasts through all of them. She talks to the leaders of the branches of non-military support, making sure they're set for food, construction materials, medical supplies.

She drops back into her body for long enough to get a status update on Fey, then projects herself out again to appear in Enigma's room. The human component of Project 37 is still bristling with the implants that attach him to the rest of the machinery, but he isn't actively hooked up to it now, he's sitting in a hospital wheelchair and using a stress ball lifted from some Strex middle-manager's office to practice his grip.

"Dana," says Caleb. He's not wearing the full-body suit now, just gloves on his hands and a mask over his nose and mouth. "Is it time?"

"It is."

No amount of physical therapy is going to un-paralyze Enigma's legs. Caleb basically lifts him back into his usual chair, then starts plugging in wires and connecting leads, preparing for the war's truth-reading needs to be fulfilled in this world while Fey is busy in another.

The restraints, though, never go back on. Once Enigma is getting input from his cameras again, he waves in Dana's direction. "Good luck."

At the same time, another part of Dana's consciousness is manifesting in front of a team of twenty-six people. Each of these is equipped with a terrible-light-blocking/astral-network-joining device.

It looks like an umbrella, Carlos admitted when pressed. It has the same basic shape, and it would be effective for keeping out the rain, so you might be tempted to call it an umbrella. But with a full bloodstone circle suspended in its tines, and a protective layer of terrible-light-blocking material over its bell, it is way more theological than that.

(It also conducts anbaric current safely to the ground, and can withstand pressures of up to 8,000 feet below sea level. Carlos wanted to be thorough, okay.)

"Everything else is in place. I can be with you as soon as you're set up," says Dana to the group. To Tamika, she formally declares, "Send them through."

 

-{,(((,">

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

A handful of offroad vehicles sputter through a broad window, and onto a stretch of sand hidden in shadow. The floating base of the Clouded Mountain itself is directly overhead.

Carlos drives the team's faltering old pickup truck, a few passengers riding in the back. The tailgate still hasn't been replaced after being dissolved by the terrible light. Its cargo, human as well as technological, is held in place by an intricate network of bungee cords and hope.

Fey's machinery has been securely relocated to the basalt fortress. She's drawing power from the same ever-present energy field that keeps Dana's and Maureen's phones charged, and they have a Rusakov-particle battery in place to serve as a backup in case that goes down. When Carlos turns to the frequency that holds WZZZ back in Night Vale, he hears the old familiar numbers and chimes: partly as a test broadcast, partly as coded signals giving the positions of the cars. (The Internet may work out here, but GPS doesn't.)

Carlos drops off the riders one by one, until at last he parks alone at his final stop. Probably the final stop this truck will ever make.

He didn't bring much. A cheap portable radio. Expensive headphones (he wants to hear every timbre and syllable of Cecil's voice with the best clarity money can buy). His favorite chapel coat. The piece of highly technical theological equipment sitting in the trunk, which he retrieves and plants in the sand so he and Isaña are safely in its shadow.

Fey is still on the radio when he feels Dana reaching out for his mind. Carlos grips the pole of his not-umbrella and follows her invitation into the network. Two people become five, then twelve — he gets a mental wave from Sherie as she taps in — until all twenty-six are linked together. They're ready whenever Tamika is.

Soon enough, past the curved brim of his shield, Carlos spots a disturbance in the sky.

It's a speck first, then a smudge, but it widens every second. Someone is flying Tamika in a straight line through the air, and she's slicing with the Knife as she moves, so the fabric of the universe splits open in her wake to reveal the deep velvet of Carlos's homeworld night sky. Partially stars. Mostly void.

Pinched shut at either end and spread wide in the middle, the opening starts to take on the shape of an eye. Especially once it's big enough that the waning crescent moon over Night Vale hangs luminous in its center.

One last set of chimes in Carlos's ears fades into silence.

"The place you fight cruelty is where you find it," intones Cecil's voice, solemn and clear. "And the place you give help is where you see it most needed. Welcome...to the battlefield."

Notes:

Full translation of the Finnish: "I love you. I want to share joys and sorrows with you, and to be faithful to you until death parts us."

That's a Lee Scoresby quote at the end.

New art: witch portrait lineart, free for the coloring.

Chapter 51: Radio Nowhere

Summary:

This is Cecil Palmero, coming to you live from the broadcast studio of Republic of Heaven Community Radio. With the help of Fey: co-host, researcher, soundtrack.

(Warnings for blood, injuries, character death. But you saw that coming.)

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

 

Hello, listeners. Listeners of every race, gender, nationality, species, language, creed, homeworld, and level of corporeality. Listeners who share one thing in common: we refuse to let any more worlds fall to a Smiling God.

This is Cecil Palmero, coming to you live from the broadcast studio of Republic of Heaven Community Radio.

All of you have radio receivers. All of them have been enchanted so that my Spanish should be comprehensible to your ears. You will follow the lead of your direct commanders unless otherwise stated, but my voice will be with you throughout this battle...along with the voice of my co-host, Fey. Say hello to the people, Fey!

"Hello, everyone! We are the champions, my friends, and we'll keep on fighting to the end! Welcome to the new age, to the new age — and remember, they say in Heaven, love comes first? We'll make Heaven a place on Earth!"

I could not have said it better myself.

 

__~/ \~__

 

Our target is the Clouded Mountain: the multiverse's most prime piece of real estate when it comes to entities that want to set themselves up as Gods over every world. It is a fortress, a prison, a palace, and an office building, all at once. And I am getting reports that its first line of defense is faltering —

It is falling —

It is gone! The field that blocks all intruders from reaching the surface of the mountain has been disabled, thanks to an interworldly coalition chosen by Fey, organized by our very own former intern Dana, and containing two of Night Vale's favorite experimental theologians.

One of these theologians is my very own heroic boyfriend, Carlos. He doesn't like it when I talk about him too much on the radio, so I'll keep this quick and just say that I love him very much.

Thanks to a trade-secret process, a window has been opened between the world where our army has gathered and this world, and our airborne troops are circling the mountain as I speak. Its internal architecture is highly sealed-off now, but once opened onto many doors, gateways, balconies, and terraces, all made of a solid cloud-related material. Fey will now begin the coded directions aiming you at the entrances most vulnerable to your skills.

"13. 103. 115. 96. 40." [Chimes.]

We are honored to be joined today by witches from several different worlds. Some are ancient, ageless beings with magical skills as subtle and powerful as the frost on the tundra. Others are middle-aged office workers who carry sticks that shoot lasers! And I'm getting reports that this latter group is already blasting away.

"121. 72. 106. 10. 63." [Chimes.]

We have the support of the mighty Glow Cloud, ALL HAIL. The Cloud has expressed a desire to try ingesting some of the material of the Clouded Mountain, you know, just to see if it gains any special powers that way. If it doesn't work out, expect to see the Cloud spitting dead antelopes at the nearest doorway in short order.

"126. 82. 123. 74. 49." [Chimes.]

We have several fine squadrons of dragons, whose plan, I believe, is to set things on fire.

"30. 61. 12. 94. 81." [Chimes.]

Yes, I'm reading a report right now, and it definitely indicates general intentions of burning.

"88. 93. 92. 23. 8." [Chimes.]

Our forces also include a tiny dragonfly-riding army, who will be looking for small ways in that they can pry open, and trying not to get set on fire...

"83. 101. 55. 115. 7." [Chimes.]

...a host of what I am being told are angels, native to no world and to every world all at once...

"58. 25. 69. 127. 44." [Chimes]

...and an all-star team of Night Vale's most intimidating non-evil residents, wielding rocks, shotguns, and flamethrowers, already parachuting down to land on the clouded slopes.

A special congratulations to team 63-Delta-Squid! You are the first group inside.

 

__~/*\~__

 

Sherie sits cross-legged on the warm sand, one hand holding Ahisamach in her lap, the other curled around the support pole of the light-blocking umbrella. Most of her colleagues are sitting or kneeling. All are holding steady against the low boil of astral pressure from keeping the Mountain clear.

From Cecil's descriptions of the first wave of attack, nobody in the Mountain was expecting their strongest defense to be smothered this fast. Some entrances boast a pair of eyeless security guards. Others are sealed over with plywood or concrete, and there's no one at all standing sentry when the walls are burned or smashed.

A tremor rumbles through the ground below. I don't like the feel of that, thinks Carlos from another point in the mental network.

We're setting off explosions, thinks one of their colleagues. How is this a surprise?

Explosions on a mountain whose base is floating several meters off the ground, puts in Sherie. This isn't us.

Cecil is reporting proudly on the setup of a team of former Boy Scouts to blast their way in with C4...when his tone changes. "The alarm is out. Strexcorp's parent organization is awake. Our enemies are praying...and rallying their weapons, just in case their prayer is not successful in wiping us all off the map.

"The ground is shaking. I cannot feel it here in the fortress on a distant mountainside, but our ground forces can feel the rumbling. They are afraid, and I cannot tell them not to be. All I can tell them is to be brave.

"In other news —"

"Excuse me," cuts in a new voice. Sherie recognizes it, and thinks five-headed dragon Hiram McDaniels — specifically, his gold head for the benefit of her otherworldly comrades.

"You remain the Voice of Night Vale!" yelps Hiram's green head. "You have a solemn duty to cover significant municipal events! Like the mayoral election!"

"I'm sorry, listeners — mayoral candidate Hiram McDaniels has attached himself to the basalt walls of this building, and is trying to push all five heads through a window that will clearly admit two, at most," says Cecil. "Hiram, I assure you, we will report on the results of the election just as soon as the pulses from Hidden Gorge have been transmitted and decoded."

"That's kind of you, Cecil," drawls Hiram's gold head, "but I'm here to give you something fresh and current to report before that even happens, which is: we are withdrawing our candidacy."

Yes! thinks Sherie — then catches herself and blushes, hoping she didn't accidentally broadcast that.

"We entered the race when the likelihood of returning to our original universe seemed so infinitesimally small as to effectively be zero," adds Hiram's blue head. "Now it seems much higher! Approaching one hundred percent!"

"We can go home," sighs Hiram's grey head. For the first time in all the times Sherie has ever heard it speak, it sounds...happy.

Another tremor runs through the sand. The pole of the umbrella vibrates against Sherie's palm. Not badly enough to fall, but she stops holding her mongoose daemon to steady the equipment with both hands until the rumbling stops, just in case.

"I believe this means I've won by default," adds the voice of the woman Sherie has started referring to as Sally. "I would like to thank everyone who supported me, although your support has turned out to be unnecessary to my inevitable —"

"Cecil!" interrupts Fey. "They have un-hooded spectres!"

"Right! Election news later," snaps Cecil, and starts into a long list of warnings. Who is dangerously close to the company's spectres. Whether they are a match for them. Which direction they should run, and how fast.

Heat bubbles up under the mental net, more fiercely than before, even as the rumbling fades.

 

__~/ \~__

 

The lowest rank of eyeless, soulless security guards are not vulnerable to spectres. They are vulnerable to very little. Not loss of limb or loss of blood, not any kind of connection with their fellow beings, not the cruel monotony of getting coffee for the same person day in and day out with no foreseeable advancement to your career.

We, all of us, are vulnerable to so many things. And so we are stalemated at the entrances, as spectres drive us back through the halls and into the air, while the guards with their ghoulish smiles follow. The first serious injuries have occurred. The first serious deaths are not far off.

Spectres are vulnerable to angels, and to the spells of the witches from a world not my own, and so in this cosmic game of rock-paper-viper we summon these armies to the forefront. The humans summon silvery animal forms not unlike daemons, but with the power to repel spectres rather than attract them, penning them in until the angels can descend.

As I said very clearly earlier, these spectres are visible to unsettled children. A pair of Scoutmasters left most of their troop of Blood Pact Scouts to guard a corridor, in blatant defiance of this warning.

The children are now surrounded.

The Scoutmasters are Luís de los Reyes, five foot seven, red hair, lean build, raccoon daemon; and Ben Santos, six foot one, muscular build, frog daemon. Both are in uniform. They are on the northwest side of the Clouded Mountain, descending.

Angels have reached the corridors, but they are too late to save two of the children already, and will be too late for the rest by the time they arrive.

Again, those descriptions are —

Wait — I am being told that both Santos and de los Reyes have taken arrows to the throat. Clearly this is a tragic incident of accidental friendly fire. As they clutch at their wounds in a futile effort to prevent their slow, bloody, hacking deaths, our hearts go out to the friends and families of these terrible, terrible men.

Reinforcements are now being summoned from company subsidiaries in other worlds. Stay alert!

 

__~/*\~__

 

From the ground, her gyropter parked beside the lower portal where the injured are being ferried through, Tamika can see the first wave of enemy backup. They emerge from crags and tunnels in the foothills of the Clouded Mountain: void-dark forms, their heights impossible to estimate at this distance, trailing shadow and flame.

"Is it just me, or do those things have wings?" mutters Tamika. The air advantage is one of their greatest strengths, here. It won't be fun to lose.

"Looks like a trick of the light to me," says Rashi. "But now that you mention it, I'm not sure."

They're itching to get into the air themselves. Hanging back and leading from a safe distance has never been their style. But Tamika is her own trump card, and she can't play herself before the Smiling God shows up.

Also, this vehicle has been enchanted with every notice-me-not spell, invisibility ward, and somebody-else's-problem aura that a dozen different worlds can conjure up. She can't waste its fuel on sidequests, and if she used another gyropter for the purpose she'd never find this one again.

So she sits, one hand on the hilt of the Knife and one on a protective blanket of light-blocking material, both eyes open. Listening to the radio for her cue.

For the moment, Palmero is recommending that Strex's current monsters get taken down by wizards. Lots of wizards.

 

__~/ \~__

 

There is a man in a tan jacket.

He and his daemon are inside the Clouded Mountain. He has passed into the corridors inhabited by executives, where the spectres will not be allowed. He wears a quiver over his shoulder and has an arrow on the string.

One of the Strexcorp regional division presidents has a radio, and has discovered this frequency. She is listening to my voice right now, but she does not speak Spanish and has no linguistic adaptive equipment, so she has no idea that I am talking about her at this very moment.

She also does not know that, five minutes ago, the man in the tan jacket came into her office. When he was there, she saw him, and spoke to him. Now she has forgotten him entirely.

He is eight offices and one left turn away from her now. He is searching for the room in which Strexcorp's otherworldly summonings are coordinated.

He is two floors too low.

Now he's looking for stairs! Did someone give him a radio? I suppose they must have. I suppose he must be an ally.

I have complicated feelings about him, but no memories to substantiate these feelings, so I will trust the judgment of whoever gave him the radio.

The man in the tan jacket has complicated feelings too. He is confused, and hurt, and angry. He has been confused, hurt, and angry for a long time, about many things...but at the top of the list, right now, is his name.

Put together with the name of his daemon, it means "the daylight-god, with us."

Ooh, that's awkward.

It's an unfortunate coincidence at best. But his mother, who chose their names, saw the future sometimes, which means she might have chosen it with purpose. She was not, as far as he knows — no, wait, Fey is confirming that she was definitely not — a worshiper of the Smiling God, so she didn't do it to praise or curry favor with that monstrous entity.

If he had been born a girl, he was told once, his name would have translated to "my father's joy." (Oh, that's sweet.)

So why, as a boy, couldn't he have had a name like that? Was it some kind of cruel joke? His mother could be cruel, he knows, but not to her children. Or so he used to think. Never to her children.

The stairs are to his right.

 

__~/*\~__

 

The rumbling is constant now. It is deep and low and goes right down to Sherie's bones.

"Why is the building shaking?" demands Sally. "I do not like it. My first act as mayor will be to take a stand against the unraveling of all things."

"You're not Mayor yet," says Cecil sternly. "Not until every vote has been counted, every incorrect voter has been rounded up and taken to the secret undisclosed location which everybody knows is in the abandoned mine shaft, and every pulse has been interpreted. But that's a salient question. Fey! Why is the building shaking?"

"That would be the imminent unraveling of all things, Cecil!"

"And what can we do to stop it?"

"For our ground troops who are listening in: be strong, and support each other! For the angels: be ready to generate protective pillars of bright black light, just in case they don't make it. For everyone else: be ready to duck into the nearest shadow, for the same reason."

"What are the exact chances that they won't be able to cut it?" demands Hiram's blue head. "Give me a fraction. Or a percentage."

The scenery around Sherie is getting brighter. As if the sun is coming out from behind a cloud...but it's not directional, it's everywhere at once, lighting up all sides of the dunes, of the rusted wrecks, of the weather-beaten hunks of stone. Only her umbrella, and the handful of others close enough for her to see, casts any shadow.

"Hiram, you need to get to the lee of this building, now," says Cecil sharply. The rumbling is audible in the background of his microphone now, a tinny echo of the commotion shaking the ground out here. "Everyone fighting at the Mountain, get to the nearest shade. Or through the nearest portal. Faceless Old Woman, I don't know where you are —"

"In the pipes, of course."

"— okay, stay there. I have every faith in the skills of our ground forces, but on the slim chance that —"

The solid earth rumbles, and a searing, rushing heat slams against their astral net, and Sherie loses all track of what Cecil is saying.

Hold on! urges Carlos, mind-to-mind. We've got this. We can do this. Hold on.

 

__~/*\~__

 

The pillar of light rises endlessly upward, and we are all afraid. It can be seen for hundreds of miles. It casts shadows everywhere. It is everything.

Even people who can't see it are being affected. Those with strong psychic powers or high astral sensitivity are especially vulnerable. Please check on your colleagues! Some of them are not all right!

An otherworldly wizard with a scarred face sags against the nearest wall, clutching his forehead.

A dark-haired woman who throws around as much flame as a dragon cries out — don't touch her, teammates! She'll adjust on her own, and she might accidentally set you on fire in self-defense.

A tiny witch on a borrowed branch of cloud-pine — Janice! — loses her balance — Vithya, make a hard left now and fly as fast as you can —

She's caught, praise the beams!

Also caught: the Smiling God.

It is bright and hot and terrible, and will gladly devour us all if its power is unleashed, but for the moment...it is contained.

 

__~/*\~__

 

So far today, Dana is in, on average, in three places at once.

 

Night Vale.

The rebuilding efforts are stalled over a misunderstanding regarding what items are acceptable salvage for the masked army, versus what needs to stay in Night Vale's hands. Neither party understands the other's language well enough to untangle the conflict.

Dana hears them both out and sorts through the dilemma. Әliʃə is disheartened, but gives the zoo its spiderwolves back.

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

There aren't many people who can find Tamika's gyropter right now. Dana projects another part of her attention into the passenger seat. "Do you need anything else before you go?"

Tamika is already revving up the rotors. "Knife, cloak, water, slingshot, Butler novel. I'm set."

 

Desert Bluffs.

Janice is crying soundlessly, tears streaking her cheeks, when Ɑrt͡ʃi sets her and her daemon (beetle-shaped, hiding in her pocket) into a waiting wheelchair at the hospital's front gate. Kevin stands beside it, wearing the cleanest clothes Dana has ever seen him in, plus opaque sunglasses over his empty eye sockets. His death holds the handlebars.

Another facet of Dana walks with them as they take her to a nearby room. It's dark, heavy curtains over the windows, and quiet. Kevin has some things laid out on a table; by cautious touch he finds a clean cloth and dips it in cool water, then kneels beside the chair and offers it to her. "Here. This is for your face. Can you take it?"

It takes some fumbling from Janice in turn, but she gets her hand on the cloth. "It's too bright," she says, wiping her eyes.

"I know," says Kevin gently. "How about the noise level? Is it too loud?"

"Nuh-uh."

"Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

Janice shakes her head.

Kevin waits sightlessly for a couple of seconds, then, when he doesn't hear his death retrieving anything to eat, continues. "Do you want to get under the covers and hold a pillow over your head for a while?"

The girl's daemon turns into a cat, and squints worriedly at Dana. She nods in approval — yes, this is a legitimate offer, not the world's politest way of setting her up to be smothered — so Janice sniffles and says, "Yes, please."

 

__~/*\~__

 

A desert not unlike Night Vale (but not like it, either).

Our bloodstone-circle network is doing an incredible job. Any objects left unprotected within their boundaries are already fading into translucence, but our heroes are safe within their protective shadows, and are holding firm.

The Smiling God hungers, but can reach nobody to devour. It rages, but has nothing to destroy.

Inside the mountain, the interworldly communications have been successfully disabled. Senior management did manage to open a window that summons a fleet of human-piloted giant robots, but our army includes dragons, and, as we all know, giant lizards defeat giant robots. That's just science.

Medical team to level 19, wing Σ. Bring a defibrillator.

The group currently entering the deepest experimental-theology chambers is walking into a trap. This area can be remotely sealed off and climate-controlled. Get out. Get out now.

Medical team to level 23, wing Ρ. Bring stitches, gauze, and dittany.

There is a hostage situation in the front office of the division responsible for invading Kevin's world. The accounts receivable manager is not bluffing. Her weapon is sixty percent charged.

Medical team to the southern flank of the mountain. Bring a defibrillator. A dragon-sized one.

A gyropter has taken a hit. Smoke trails from its fuselage as it careens downward, out of control. The occupants need to parachute out — there is no one close enough and strong enough to come to its rescue in time.

A witch's daemon is flying towards it anyway. He sails forward and upward, aiming for the landing skids — he seizes one in his beak, and with one sharp yank changes its trajectory, sending it careening in a new direction — directly towards a giant robot. Again, the pilot is listening to me as I say these very words, but has no idea that I am describing the rotors which will shred his vehicle's casing like paper in approximately eight seconds.

...Fey? This daemon, the one with such vicious destructive power, must have been either very strong or very large, right?

"Oh, very large! I'll display his specs on the screen for Khoshekh."

I see. And...and does he have a radio with him?

"No."

Oh....

"But his human does."

Oh.

I —

Äiti? Kaipaan sinua. Teit joitain asioita väärin kun olin lapsi, mutta annan anteeksi! En tiedä, mitä veljelleni tapahtui, en tiedä, oliko syy sinun, mutta en välitä siitä. Haluan vain nähdä sinut jälleen. Palaa kotiin.

 

__~/*\~__

 

Hot wind whirls around the desert plain, flinging sprays of sand into the umbrella's shadow. Sherie is standing now, braced on the pole, mongoose perched on her shoulders.

The wrecks and rocks that used to be in sight have faded to pale glass silhouettes of themselves. Looking at them, or indeed looking at anything but the bloodstones around her head and the ground at her feet, makes Sherie's eyes hurt. She can barely see her nearest two colleagues, pinpricks of darkness in a downpour of sunshine.

Mentally, of course, they might as well be standing in a circle with joined hands, while the power of the Smiling God burns and slams against them. Praying for Tamika to hurry.

I'm really glad you're all here right now, thinks Carlos toward the rest of them. Without you...and Cecil's broadcast...I would have no idea if the battle was still going on. No way to be sure I wasn't the only thing left in some kind of vast empty field of devastation, like the photo negative of the Void.

Morbid fellow, isn't he, thinks a man from one of the internal-daemon universes.

Now, darling, can you blame him? scolds the woman who arrived with him. She sounds like an English-speaking version of Delphine. Most people haven't gone up against deities before. Even the godlings we've faced off against were never quite this fearsome.

Now, hold on a minute. I can still see people, protests Sherie. And plenty of landscape, bare and depressing as it is. It hurts to look, but it's there. How bright is it for the rest of you?

The group sends a flurry of mental images, and Sherie stitches them together in her mind's eye like readings from a Rusakov array. It's not a single solid, unwavering pillar of light; there's a gradient of brightness around them. Some of the viewers, like Sherie, are stationed at the fringes. Carlos is close to its heart.

With the way he's apparently seeing nothing but solid, blinding sunshine outside his circle of normality, it would be even more terrifying if he wasn't.

 

__~/*\~__

 

"Hello! Fey here. Cecil had to step out to get some water. Let me try to keep you up to speed.

"An update on the Glow Cloud. It is still possessed, by the most common medical definitions of 'possession', but the good news is, it can't transfer that possession to other people. So none of you are going to be HAILING THE SMILING GOD and then forgetting the whole thing later on.

"A group of you are standing at the entrance of some kind of massive vault, and the labels are in a script that seems vaguely Cyrillic, but that none of you, not even the native Russian speakers, can decipher. That is the cold storage vault! Please don't try to break in. There are zero living hostiles hiding out in there, and if you disrupt the equipment you could kill a lot of people.

"The witch with the egret daemon has lost too much blood. She can't...she's going into brain death. There is nothing you can do.

"...

"Oh! The mayoral election. Um, there is an election official standing on the steps of City Hall, saying something about a hold-up with the machine that makes the pulses. And there's Pamela Winchell holding a press conference five yards to the left, saying not to panic, that the election will be ready when it is ready! She says this through gritted teeth, while digging her hands into the side of her podium so violently her fingernails leave dents in the wood.

"Um, the bloodstone network is still hanging in there. Even in the face of terrifying light, and unbearably cold heat, and the wind whipping currents of sand into their shadows and rocking their equipment back and forth. They dig their heels in deeper, and cover their faces, and persevere.

"Stay strong! If we hold on together, I know our dreams will never die! Better stand tall when they're calling you out: don't bend, don't break, baby, don't back down!"

 

__~/*\~__

 

The giant pillar of terrible light is easy to navigate by, because it's impossible to miss. It's also hard to navigate by, because it's impossible to look at directly.

"Could do with some navigation advice right about now, Palmero," mutters Tamika, as her gyropter circles closer.

"The man in the tan jacket is wondering about his name again," says Palmero in her ears.

Tamika groans out loud. Is that relevant to anything right now?

"He is standing watch for a team of field medics in a newly-blood-spattered office, and there are no hostiles close enough to be a threat, so he has time to think. He wonders if he's been looking at it all wrong. What if he starts from the premise that his mother gave him this name to be kind?

"Like so many other people, his mother no longer recognizes him. She cannot give him comfort, or wisdom, or advice. The only words of hers that he has left...is his name.

"What message would be important enough for her to embed in the one set of words he would carry with him for the rest of his life? What is the one thing he wants above all else...and that he never would have wanted, or needed, if he had been a daughter instead of a son?"

Whatever he's getting at, Tamika doesn't know enough of the backstory to put it together. She focuses on descending toward the wind-whipped sand at the edges of the light.

Can't fly straight in. The gyropter was too complicated to cover in impenetrable light-blocking fabric, so even if she and Rashi cloaked themselves in it, their ride would dissolve around them in midair....

"He wants to be remembered again. So what if the Smiling God he's been trying to thwart for a decade now is, in fact, his answer? What if the magic that has choked him for so many years can be burned away by the light?"

Fey's voice gasps. "It can!"

"But it'll kill him," protests Palmero. "Won't it?"

"Not if he times it exactly right. Not if the Smiling God is destroyed in the moment between dissolving the spell and dissolving him. I can calculate the timing!"

"If we remember to do it...oh! Listeners, Dana has just appeared in my studio."

"I will remember for you," says Dana's voice over the airwaves. "Find someone who can be redirected to keep watch, and leave the rest to me."

"Thank you, Dana! ...And she's gone. But, wow, I am so glad she's willing to be on top of...whatever we were just talking about."

 

__~/*\~__

 

Is it as windy for everyone else as it is for me? thinks Carlos across the network. Or did I get lucky enough to be in the center of that too?

Sherie and the others picture the breeze tossing their hair and clothing around. It's a minor struggle for most of them compared to the blaze against their minds, but it certainly isn't helping.

From the mental images Carlos sends back, he's putting half his effort into staying standing. His armadillo daemon is rolled up shut and half-buried in a hollow in the sand, and it's only the pressure of his shoe that keeps her from being picked up and blown away.

Lucky we built these things to withstand up to eight thousand feet of ocean pressure, huh? thinks Sherie, trying to sound upbeat.

She doesn't broadcast the observation that Carlos is not built to withstand that much pressure.

I don't suppose one of us could...go to him? asks one of their otherworldly colleagues. Maybe one of you with all the magic has a few tricks you could use?

That would break the formation, which is a big factor in why we're strong enough to do this at all, warns Sherie. Not that it isn't a kind idea! You're very nice to think of it! I'm just saying, if we tried it, we would be crushed. Within minutes.

"The fall of the Smiling God is only minutes away," says Cecil's voice over her headphones, as if on cue. "We are waiting on...something. For some reason. All of us are forever indebted to you, ground forces, for trapping an enemy more powerful than most of us can truly comprehend. We are indebted to John Peters, you know, the farmer, for working this out. We are indebted to —

"— Carlos!"

That's the moment when Sherie feels Carlos's mind drop out of the network.

 

__~/*\~__

 

Part of Dana is already in the makeshift studio. "I'm on it. I'm getting him out of there," she tells Cecil, simultaneously trying to project herself to Carlos's location —

— and getting a visceral reminder that, of course, the direct power of the Smiling God can block her out without a second thought. At least she's been more successful in appearing at Emmanuel's side, hurrying him along...and at Tamika's side, urging her to wait, please wait.

"He doesn't have time!" cries Cecil. "Tamika, go, go now! Forget the thing. Whatever it was, it's not important. He'll die!"

"He's not dying!" exclaims Fey. "It's talking to him! He has time."

Oh, praise be, that means Dana can go for a corporeal rescue.

All of her attention snaps back into her physical body. She's cloaked in a swath of light-blocking fabric. Eustathias is perched on the back of an angel statue, phoenix-formed, looking down on the battlefield. Real angels stand on the parapets between the statues, armed with spears, solemn and terrible.

"What's it saying?" chokes Cecil, over the radio in her earpiece.

One look from Dana, and her daemon knows what to do. She leaps from the stone halo and cuts a trail of flame through the air, heading for the pillar of light.

It won't hurt her. She is not a creature that is burned. She is a creature that burns.

"I don't know! I've fried half a circuit board trying to calculate it."

Dana gets to her feet and tosses the fabric aside in one smooth motion.

Dana is a creature that burns.

"I don't — I can't —"

"Cecil," says Fey, low and urgent. "Cecil, there's news. Let go of Khoshekh so he can look."

A beat later, Cecil stutters, "The next mayor of Night Vale — is Dana Cardinal."

That is lucky, thinks Dana, rising from the stone surface. Mayoral powers mean you can fly.

 

__~/*\~__

 

Carlos hits the ground, eyes snapped shut — sees right through his eyelids — claps his hands over his eyes, still too bright — rolls over and presses his face to the sand, arms thrown over the back of his head — doesn't help, the light is pouring right through his limbs, through his skull, through his brain.

Worse than the hurt is the panic, the helpless disorientation. His headphones are already dissolved. The afterimage of Cecil shouting his name echoes in his ears....

...and then something descends, and it all goes mute.

It's like the mirror version of a spectre. Instead of cold despair flowing over you, it brings warmth. Hope. Happiness.

A smile.

(Hello, little experimental theologian.)

No. No, no, no.

(It's not hurting you. It's not even taking over your mind. You hate being controlled like that, don't you? It doesn't want to upset you.)

"Stay out of my head!" rasps Carlos.

(It wouldn't fit in your head, little theologian. But it can come into your heart, if you let it.)

As if he would ever —

(Remember when you had to leave your scholarly idol's world behind?)

He does, yes.

(There was so much to learn. So much to know. You got a taste, and then you were ripped away. Remember how that left you.)

I got better, thinks Carlos furiously.

Sure, it felt like being tossed out of a warm bed into a cold pond. Sure, he had a few down hours here and there, staring blankly into space and wondering if his work had any point when it was so hopelessly behind. So what? He adjusted. He kept working. He's been so proud of the things he's done since.

(And so happy to take over the local branch of the company. So delighted to pick over a single division's scraps.)

(Imagine how much more could be given to you. Imagine being able to collaborate with theologians from any world's version of Strexcorp — or Kakos, or Prescott, or whatever their reality calls it. Imagine being the perfect leader of a perfect research team, following the cutting edges of every type of research, under the cutting light of a Smiling God.)

(Would you study the light itself? How it looks through your spyglasses, how it registers on your devices? Would you study this universe, less than a thousand miles in diameter, defying everything you think of as laws of physics? Would you take casual research trips to the world of the dead?)

(You could do it. Believe in a Smiling God. Accept it into your heart. It is everything. Help it out of this trap, and it could give you everything.)

Carlos pushes himself up on his elbows.

He has no idea which way his daemon rolled, and she can't run to his voice while sealed shut, so he doesn't stop to fumble around in the blinding infinite sunlight. Without seeing the ground, his sense of balance is shot all to hell — but as long as the pain is being suppressed, he's going to do this standing.

He resists the useless reflex to cover his eyes. Ignores the sensation of blood trickling down his cheeks.

"You're wrong," he says out loud. "You're trying a lot of fantastic ideas to win me over, but you've missed the most important thing."

(Has it, though? Has it really?)

"You have! Because I am not an experimental theologian!"

If it's possible for a god to be shocked, this one is.

"I — am — a — scientist!" yells Carlos into the brightness. "I study science, not theology or gods! And you have nothing to offer me!"

 

__~/*\~__

 

Dana dives. Emmanuel dives. Tamika charges, knife upraised.

Carlos falls, conscious mind whiting out with pain, gone before he hits the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

The Finnish: "Mom? I miss you. You did some things wrong when I was a child, but I forgive you! I don't know what happened to my brother, I don't know if it really was your fault, but I don't care. I just want to see you again. Come home."

Chapter 52: See You Again

Summary:

Loved ones are reunited, friends say goodbye, a new mayor rises, and warriors rest.

Notes:

By request: a breakdown of all the characters from all the worlds that went up against the Smiling God. (If you've missed any A/Ns or Q&As, the AU masterpost has them all.)

Some artwork of battle participants: Tamika, Dana + Maureen + warrior, Cecil + Carlos, witches + Erikas.

Night Vale.

Rising mayor Dana Cardinal is many places.

She is with the masked warriors at the edge of town, saying goodbye, hugging the ones she's grown closest to. Dʌg cups her between hands half as long as she is tall and gives her the gentlest of squeezes. Әliʃə promises that the translation artifact will stay attuned to Dana a little while longer, while their Prius-sized dog nuzzles up against Dana's astral-projected form for tiny scratches.

She is outside the burn ward of Desert Bluffs' hospital, giving careful directions about one of the patients.

She is walking the path near the official press conference gazebo, in the company of Pamela Winchell. The outgoing mayor is explaining that she's retiring from politics completely, to have a quiet, uneventful life. Perhaps take up some hobbies. Since Dana will likely never see her again, Winchell has to pass on all her knowledge about how to maintain the mosses that grow on City Hall grounds, by singing the proper songs.

And she is in the lobby of Night Vale General, escorting Sohvi Palmero.

Their destination is down a hall to the left; Sohvi banks right and heads for the gift shop, long white hair and black silk dress swirling behind her. She studies a display of Get Well Soon pillows and stuffed animals, plucks a violet pillow off the shelf, and turns to leave without a word.

"Hey!" protests the cashier, scrambling out from behind the register. "Hey, you can't just take that!"

The witch fixes him down with an icy look. "You will have your lungs for three more years. They will be replaced with something else that breathes, but not for you."

"Cutsey baby talk or not, Señora, you still have to pay for things."

With a sigh, Dana gets between them. "Charge it to the Mayor's office."

That settled, Sohvi follows her to the surgery waiting room. There's an adult watching a couple of toddlers in a sectioned-off play area, a family grouped around a square bank of seats and tapping to each other in quiet Morse...and Cecil, slumped over the arm of a striped chair, eyes closed. Khoshekh is puddled on his leg, three feet tucked in and one sticking out, nose twitching in his sleep.

Bare feet and insubstantial ones make no noise on the carpet. As they get closer, Sohvi's steps slow, eyes never moving from the adult son she last saw when he was sixteen.

"Dana," she says in a low voice. "The real Dana."

"That's me," says Dana. "And you are the real you, this time."

"And him?"

"Your real son," confirms Dana. "Well, one of them. Who really wants to see you. Go ahead."

Sohvi crosses the rest of the distance, lifts Cecil's head, and rearranges him so he's lying on the pillow instead of awkwardly bent over the armrest. When Cecil stirs and mutters under his breath, she splays a hand on the crown of his head and says, "Sleep."

A few of the lines on Cecil's face smooth out. He sleeps.

Dana leaves them to their privacy. She has other places to be.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Unknown.

Awareness comes in flickers and fits.

Nausea.

Something beeping.

Darkness.

A dull burning ache flashing up here and there on his skin.

Voices, on and off, sometimes near and sometimes not.

A tube down his throat, rasping as he breathes. In. Out.

Cool air.

A heavy blindfold.

More voices.

"...not ready to be moved out of..."

"...straight from the top, I don't..."

"...be there when he's up."

Someone with latex-gloved hands grasps his head, eases the tube out of his airway.

He doesn't let himself react. No swallowing, no flinching at noises, no fumbling to get the blindfold off. Playing dead is the only self-defense he has the energy to keep up, here in this fog of nausea and sleepiness and undifferentiated aches.

Wheels squeak and his bed (?) jostles as he's taken...somewhere. Quieter. Still cool.

Voices at a short distance, too low to hear.

A door closing.

Footsteps.

A familiar sniffle. "Dear Carlos. Please wake up."

It's the one voice he'll never play dead for. "H-hi."

Cecil guides Carlos's hand to cup his face (the contact stings on his sunburned skin, but it's worth it) and answers all his questions, even when Carlos gets confused or forgets a detail and has to ask the same thing twice. They won. There are ongoing skirmishes, but the Smiling God is no more. It's been almost two days since Carlos lost consciousness. He's in a Night Vale hospital. He needed a lot of treatment. He'd lost a lot of blood.

Isaña is in a basket on the shelf under his mattress; Cecil picks it up so she can roll out and cuddle up next to Carlos. She'll be gazing at their boyfriend as much as possible...but Carlos wants more. "Blindfold...? When does it...off?"

"Not yet. Soon."

"When they change the bandages...be here?" implores Carlos. "Wanna see you. Jus' for a second."

A tear runs down Cecil's cheek, landing in the crook of Carlos's thumb.

Cold fear swells in Carlos's chest. "Cee...?"

"The good news," says Cecil, "my dear, brave, incredibly resilient Carlos, the good news is...you are at the top of the list to receive bionic eyes."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Six Flags Desert Springs.

The staff at the theme park is surprisingly freaked out when their guests for the day arrive.

Tamika gets on some level that Night Vale is an unusual town. She could understand if they were scaring random visitors, from districts with different customs. But the regular staff? They see families from Night Vale every summer. They shouldn't be that startled by a visiting party that includes a hundred and twenty strange, daemonless children, two floating Eternal Scouts with glowing white eyes, and a handful of angels.

Well, for once, it isn't her problem. Scoutmaster Harlan (bearded, tanned, with the kind of muscles Tamika wants to have when she's that age) organized the trip, and it's on Marcus Vansten's dime. All she has to do is be around at the end of the day to cut open a window to their spectre-ravaged and slowly-rebuilding home universe.

She can...relax.

Tamika Flynn — librarian-slayer, war hero, multi-world-army commander, God-Destroyer — takes in a puppet show.

She plays a game, shooting plastic frogs with darts until she wins the biggest plush Hello Kitty the stall has to offer, then bequeaths her prize to the nearest wide-eyed daemonless six-year-old.

She and Rashi splash around in the wave pool for a while, then towel off, relax in one of the park areas, and enjoy a scoop of triple-chocolatl soft-serve.

The cloudy skies aren't ideal for a day of water rides and ice cream, but they're all right by Tamika. She's had enough sunshine for a while.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

Carlos gets a steady stream of visitors. First, it's the doctors and nurses: checking his vitals, adjusting his pain and nausea medication, asking to shake his hand or give him a high-five. As Carlos returns to lucidity, he starts to suspect that last part is not legitimate doctoring.

When he's stable enough, they let him get unclipped from the monitoring equipment, put some real clothes on, and accept visits from outside. Köhler brings gifts from the team: a get-well-soon bouquet and a card, signed by everyone, with text that he's kind enough to read out loud. Josie brings more flowers, and promises to return with lingonberry tea once he's well enough to drink it. (For now, between the sore throat and the anesthesia-induced nausea, he's subsisting on IV nutrients and ice chips.)

From the sound of the commotion, Cecil has to forcibly resist Steve from tackling Carlos in a hug. "He is in a very delicate condition, Steve Carlsberg, and you need to express your completely-justified hero-worship in ways that will not make it worse!"

It's heartwarming. It's also exhausting. After extracting a promise from Cecil not to go too far, Carlos rolls over on his less-sore side and sleeps like the dead.

The next time he wakes, it's to fresh waves of burning pain on his forearms, calves, and face. There's already someone putting a cooling salve on one of his legs; Isaña looks, and though Carlos can't see through her eyes, he picks up the perception that it's a legitimate Night Vale nurse. Besides, he can hear Cecil's voice not far off, so he can't be in too much trouble.

From the sound of it, Cecil is on the phone with someone. "...would have to stay there. I mean, I'm sure Tamika can let you back to this world in eight or ten years, but you wouldn't be able to come back and forth for weekend visits. A very smart and handsome téolo— uh, científico has calculated that it'll shred a permanent hole in the universe if we try it...Oh? Okay. No, that's good! As long as they're nice to you...Rogiéro, eh? What's he like? Is he cute?...well, if he's ten then he probably is cute, isn't he. Oh, shut up. Uh-huh. You too, Earl."

Carlos takes deep breaths, and lets Cecil's voice wash over him, and falls asleep again once the pain has receded enough to allow it.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The whole team is invited to Hiram's big mayoral-concession/going-away party. He rented the grounds of John Peters' farm for the occasion, partly because John needs to raise some money after spending half a year in a different dimension, partly because most of the guests are dragons. (Two stories tall on average. Occasionally sneezing fire.) Space is weird in Night Vale, but not weird enough for any single building to hold all of them.

When Sherie and Sally arrive, they get escorted into an area marked with red ribbons and giant dragon-language signs. Other human (and mostly-human) guests mill around, snacking on imaginary popcorn and reminiscing about their campaign volunteering. "I wonder what the signs say," muses Sherie. "'VIP Guests', maybe?"

"The red ones? They say 'Not Food'," says Sally from somewhere to her left. "I hope that only applies to us, and not to the goodies on the tables. Those leftover campaign buttons look delicious."

She may or may not still be around when Sherie ends up in a conversation with John and Perle. The farmer is wearing a nice suit, with a corsage that matches the flower crown on his cow daemon. The linguist is the most under-dressed person at the party. She'd be stunning if she dressed up even a little bit, not that Sherie wants to criticize, she looks fine, just saying, but she's in cargo shorts and a sturdy work shirt, gecko daemon riding in one of the pockets.

In the middle of a conversation about John's time in the House that Doesn't Exist, Perle gets a call. She's beaming when she finishes. "My sabbatical got approved! Just in time!"

"Congratulations!" exclaims Sherie. She's noticed Perle packing, but wasn't sure what for. "When are you leaving?"

"Tonight." When Sherie does a double-take, Perle adds, "I did say 'just in time'."

"Wait a minute. Are you going with the dragons?"

"When am I ever going to get a better field research opportunity?" asks Perle. "I'll be back in five years. If I'm still alive. Hiram swears he'll do his best to keep his people from eating me. In the meantime, if you want to call, or if the team's next linguist needs a consult, I switched to a Night Vale phone plan — it has unlimited weekday minutes for anyone in the network."

"Did I hear my name?" exclaims Hiram's green head, as all five of them snake overhead. "Welcome, tiny meat creatures! Is the music pleasing to your flimsy external ear-shells?"

Perle preens the grey head's feathers with her hands, John assures the blue head that he voted dragon, and Sherie apologizes that Carlos couldn't make it, but passes on his regards to the gold. Sally congratulates all five heads for being a worthy opponent, and laments that Hiram won't be around to help her destroy the usurper Dana Cardinal.

"Sweetie, if you don't promise not to go around trying to destroy Dana, I am not dancing with you," says Sherie firmly.

"That is not fair." Out of nowhere Sally appears, wearing a breezy white sundress and coral jewelry that matches her salamander daemon's fronds. "But okay."

Sherie takes her hand. "Also, since I kept my promise not to die, I do believe you owe me your real name."

Their daemons nuzzle up next to each other, and Sally says, "I will tell you as we dance."

 

-{,(((,">

 

When Carlos has reached the point of being able to take short walks, he loops one arm through Cecil's and carries Isaña in the other, and lets Cecil lead him with slow steps to the next ward over.

The bandages are off of his face. He's wearing one of Cecil's floppiest hats instead, pulled down to the bridge of his nose. Even though Cecil swears that he looks, "well, not fine, but everyone here has seen worse!", he feels like some kind of Frankenstinian horror — and besides, the feeling of something over his face helps short-circuit the instinct to scratch, to tear at the stitches until he can open his eyelids and see again.

He grits his teeth when he gets the feeling now, holds his daemon tighter, and shuffles through the darkness as Cecil guides him until the worst of it passes.

Kevin can't see either. Cecil, who still isn't thrilled about this but is determined to pay Kevin back for taking care of Janice during the siege, guides Kevin's hand to Carlos's face to touch the scar.

"It really did heal nicely," says Kevin in wonder, fingertips caressing Carlos's cheek. "I didn't think it was possible."

"So you remember the details, huh," says Carlos.

"In glorious Technicolor."

Before Carlos can ask what that means, Kevin gets under the brim of the hat and pokes the stitches, making him flinch.

"Sorry! Did I hurt you? Sorry, sorry —"

"Not your fault! That's nothing to do with you. I just have these, um, temporary skin grafts. In an unusual place, so they're sensitive."

"Prep for eye surgery?" asks Kevin.

"...eye replacement, actually." Carlos doesn't want to dwell. Doesn't want to rub it in how he's eligible and Kevin isn't, because the grafts are protecting essential membranes and nerve endings that Kevin must have lost years ago.

"Ah." Kevin hesitates, then adds, softly, "Did it offer you everything too?"

Carlos swallows. "It tried."

"But Carlos shot it down!" pipes up Cecil, making both Carlos and Kevin jump. Carlos had honestly half-forgotten he was in the room. "He told it off to its face — or at least, to its impossibly-bright formless presence — and survived, and now he's fine. Un científico siempre está bien. Right?"

"Yes. Right," says Carlos, too quickly. "Cecil...honey...I know I promised to let you look out for me, but now that you've seen for yourself how un-Strexed Kevin is, maybe you could just...give us a few minutes alone?"

"Oh," stammers Cecil. "Yes, of course." He drops a quick kiss on Carlos's cheek. "I'll be right outside."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Desert Bluffs.

It's disorienting, leaving the world of the Clouded Mountain while staying in her body. Dana can't pass through walls like this, or flicker from one side of a room to the other. And she keeps getting tripped up by things like hunger, or cold, or physical strain.

That's one of the reasons she makes sure to visit Caleb and Enigma, before she returns to Night Vale in person. Perhaps she and Enigma can commiserate.

The quarantine room is bright and cheerful. People whose medical care Enigma orchestrated have been sending him gifts for more than a week now; there's a lava lamp on a shelf, a series of Beanie Babies lined up on his memory banks, a couple of beaded keychains hanging from his wheelchair. A couple of otherworldly witches are on the near side of the plastic, talking to Caleb about helping out with a project of theirs. ("I'll do my best, but keep in mind that I don't specialize in secretarial work. I study computer science, not programming.")

Enigma spots Dana, and rolls his chair over. He's looking healthier than ever: filled out a lot, face a warm brown instead of ashen and drawn, only slightly winded when he gets close enough to press his hand against hers through the plastic. "Dana! You're here in person! Is that your daemon? She's beautiful."

Eustathias, on Dana's shoulder, furls her fiery feathers. Showing off a little, perhaps, but Dana thinks they've earned it.

"I'm back in my own world, yes," she says. "Speaking of journeys, and worlds, and returning...have you thought about where you want to go, now that the worst of this is over? Is there a quiet corner of your own universe that the angels could take you to? Or, if you'd like to live in Night Vale for a while, I can have a place arranged for you by mayoral edict. That's a thing I can do now."

"Dana, you are the kindest, most generous government official I have ever interacted with," says Enigma fervently. "But there's no need. Caleb and I know exactly where we want to go."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Night Vale.

"There are eighty-one likes on my Facebook post about this being your last surgery."

"Uh-huh?" says Carlos, trying to breathe normally. His phobia of being sedated is well-earned, but Cecil's here, holding his hand and talking him through it, so he can do this. He has to.

"And your baby sister just posted that she's made her connecting flight! No delays. Oh, Carlos, she'll be here by the time you get up."

"See her...whe'm...up," mumbles Carlos, and slips away.

 

-{,(((,">

 

Sherie takes a deep breath, gathers her courage, and knocks on the door of the House that Doesn't Exist.

(Nirliq and Keith are helping, by keeping watch from the sidewalk. The far side of the sidewalk.)

The same woman from before, wearing sweatpants and carrying a small owl daemon on her shoulder, opens the fiberglass door. "Hi there," says Sherie quickly. "I don't mean to bother you, but have you noticed that your house exists in a slightly different timeline as the rest of this world?"

"A what now?"

"That's right! Experiments have proved that, from the perspective of everyone else in town, your house — and everything in it — doesn't exist."

Cynthia snorts. "That would explain why my daughter never calls."

"Yes! Yes, it would!" exclaims Sherie. "Your daughter's name is Delphine, right?"

That gets Cynthia's attention. "Wait, are you people serious? She really doesn't remember me? Where is she?"

"I'm afraid she's at work right now. But if I know her as well as I think I do...." Sherie's eyes flick to the nearest false mailbox. "...she'll be visiting soon."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Carlos's new vision has menus.

The specialist walks him through the basic settings. How to change the default visible spectrum (they didn't give him X-ray vision, but if he dials the wavelength up high enough, he can see radio). How to override the automatic brightness adjustment. How to zoom. He spends a couple minutes accidentally stuck in macro mode, trying to focus on the verbal instructions when his whole field of vision is taken up by a cross-section of the technician's suit.

He gets a complimentary 30-day supply of the eyedrops he's going to need, a lifetime warranty on the machinery, and clearance to receive visitors. The nausea and soreness are back, and his face is still puffy and sensitive, from the eye sockets radiating outward...but the exhaustion isn't as bad as before, and his mood is light-years better, so he tells them to send everyone in.

Cecil is at the front of the group, running to Carlos's propped-up bedside for a hug and a kiss the second Carlos beckons him forward.

Azalea, now with blue-and-green streaks in her dark hair, is right behind him. She gets the next hug, and promises to let their parents and other siblings know he's okay. Just as soon as she lets go.

Steve and Delphine and the girls round out the group, accompanied by an unfamiliar woman with an owl daemon. Janice and Renée proudly present Carlos with a care package: artisinal soaps, a teddy bear with a Feel Better T-shirt and an unnervingly realistic blood-splatter pattern on its fur, an aromatherapy eye mask, some snacks, a hand-written Get Out Of Jail Free card.

Carlos ruffles their hair, thanks them profusely, then focuses on the woman in back. "I'm sorry — I don't recognize you?"

"Oh! How terribly rude of me," exclaims Delphine, looking a little shell-shocked, but embarrassed by her lack of manners anyway. "Mamá, this is Carlos. Carlos, this is Cynthia Cabrera, my Mother Who Doesn't Exist. Although she seems like she exists. And is planning to be at my wedding exactly the way she would if she existed."

"Steve Carlsberg!" yelps Cecil, sitting bolt upright. "You're getting married and you didn't tell me?"

"It was one of those spur-of-the-moment battlefield proposals!" protests Steve. "And after that I was saving the news for when you weren't so busy being worried sick about your soulmate! This doesn't mean you won't be my best man, does it?"

Cecil grudgingly admits that of course he'll be Steve's best man, honestly, how irresponsible does Steve think he is. Carlos also gets offered a role in the wedding party, although Cecil refuses to let him enter any binding agreement until he's taken a couple of fencing classes.

As Renée gives Carlos a series of solemn fencing tips, there's a knock at the doorway.

It's a new stranger. Stunningly beautiful features, compact build, long dark hair pulled into a loose braid down the back of his patterned tunic. He looks shyly from face to face, one hand scratching his neck — there are bits of skin flaking off, as if he, like Carlos, was badly sunburned not long ago.

The other hand other holds the handle of a deerskin briefcase.

"I...think you have the wrong room," says Cecil. Though he sounds oddly unsure about it.

"No," says Carlos, leaning forward. (It's nice to have a zoom mode, but sometimes low-tech solutions work best.) "No, hang on. I've seen you somewhere before."

"No kidding," sighs the man in the patterned tunic. "Years of memory-jogging spellwork, dissolved in five minutes by a Smiling God. Listen, maybe if you just tried really hard to picture a tan jacket...?"

Carlos does — and a hundred jumbled scraps of memory flash back into place in his mind.

Not everything. Not by a long shot. It's a facial expression here, a sentence there, the feeling of talking to someone at a time when he could have sworn he was alone, scattered images of Night Vale from above during a flight he doesn't remember taking. But it's enough for Carlos to snap his fingers in recognition, and point, and blurt out, "Emmanuel Sondheim Palmero, you are not dead."

Janice squeaks with delight — oh, wow, she knew, didn't she? Knew, and tried to tell them, so many times — while Emmanuel breaks into a helpless grin that actually makes Carlos's heart skip a beat. Because the way his eyes crinkle up with the smile is also exactly like Cecil's, and now that Carlos is looking their faces are similar in other ways. On top of which, Emmanuel has that...well, that witchy hotness factor, on a level Carlos has never truly appreciated before, because he's never seen it on a guy before. Good lord.

Azalea bends close to Carlos and murmurs, "Is that the brother?" Steve has both hands clasped over his mouth, through which he stage-whispers, "He was here the whole time!"

And Cecil just stares, wide-eyed, breath caught in his throat.

"Cecil...?" asks Emmanuel. "Do you...remember?"

"No!" exclaims Cecil, finding his voice. "No, I do not remember! And whose fault is that, huh? Couldn't be happy with the family you had, noooo, you had to rope Mom and a bunch of foreign shamans into helping you try some kind of crazy change-how-every-witch-in-existence-sees-you spell that blew up in our faces! Figuratively and literally! And even after that, I had some resistance, didn't I? You could have taught me to build it up, like you did with Dana. I could have helped you! Instead you panicked, and that made me panic, until Josie figured I was going to have a mental breakdown if she didn't wipe the memories completely! This is all your fault, you reckless, melodramatic —"

He leaps across the tiny, crowded room — Carlos has a flash of a different room, of Cecil pinning Emmanuel against the wall in a restraint hold, of Janice yelling Señor Palmero! Let the other Señor Palmero go —

— except this time he throws both arms around his big brother in a furious hug. "You could have died! Did you even think about that? I could have lost you again!"

Emmanuel catches him, briefcase clattering to the floor, and embraces him with something between a sob and a laugh. Isaña, cuddled up with Khoshekh, nudges his attention toward the briefcase. The margay soars over, flips the latches with his paws, tentatively noses it open...and is instantly surrounded by a cloud of flies-daemon so thick you can barely tell he's there.

"Have you seen Josie yet? Have you seen Mom?" sniffles Cecil. "Has she found you? Does she know?"

"Not yet. Neither of them. I came looking for you first."

Janice, on Tehom's back, sits up straighter. "Are both my abuelas in town?"

"Um," says Cecil. "Possibly? Mom was here a few days ago. She did not promise to stay, so she may have disappeared again, but she was here. We...spoke. For the first time in many years."

"Long-lost relatives falling out of the woodwork all over this place," observes Cynthia.

"Oh, wow." Janice's gaze sweeps around the little crowd: Cynthia, Delphine, Steve, Renée, herself, Carlos, Azalea, Cecil, and Emmanuel. "I have so much family."

 

-{,(((,">

 

Tamika sits on Rashi's back a few hundred feet from the edge of the Dog Park, watching the night sky.

Palmero and Vieja Josie are with her, both their daemons at their sides. It's not quite outside the government-mandated boundary of safety, but the Knife scares off hooded spectres, so they're good. Those boundaries don't apply to Mayor Cardinal any more; she can go wherever she wants.

Sure enough, it isn't long before a government gyropter thwocks into view, and Dana makes a wobbly landing on the weed-strewn empty lot beside them. She gives the little group a wave, and a hopeful smile.

Her passenger just clings to the sides of the seat, face twisted like he's been riding on the most stomach-churning coaster at Six Flags without a seatbelt.

Palmero is ready with a thermos of some kind of special witch-tea. Josie recites some important-sounding phrases in an unfamiliar language. Tamika lets Kevin hold her hand.

She knows the group from the other side of the dog park is getting close when she sees Dana's phoenix daemon, flames turned up so she's a living torch in the distance, casting flickering shadows on the weeds and the asphalt and the park's high onyx walls. The light falls on another figure, too: not one of the witches, but the biggest damn bird daemon Tamika has ever seen. Size of a tractor trailer. Big white wings like sails, one behind the other.

Janice lands, her daemon switching from a wyvern to a horse and touching down. Her long-lost dad does the more usual thing of lowering his branch of cloud-pine until he can stand on his own two feet. Her long-lost abuela does the same.

And the giant bird drops a smaller daemon out of its beak to land on the grass.

She's a dog — a lean wild dog with huge ears, a dark face, and beautiful marbled tricolor fur. Big brown eyes dart from face to face. "Tamika! — Kevin!"

Kevin's already out of the gyropter, stumbling because he doesn't waste time double-checking the distance to the ground. The painted dog daemon shakes off her fur and bounds over, and then he's on his knees and she's in his arms, and for the first time Tamika thinks they have a real shot at someday being okay.

 

-{,(((,">

 

The City Council is lined up in front of City Hall when the limo pulls up to drop off Dana on her first day. Scarlet cloaks, dark eyes, and black bird daemons loom over the top of the steps.

"You'll do great, honey," says her mother. "Just remember, nobody really expects any candidate to keep most of their campaign promises."

"I didn't even campaign...."

"So you'll have it easy, then," says Maureen. "Make sure you get me that exemption from the intern program, though, okay? They've got me singing to the ants again! I hate singing to the ants."

Now that is a promise Dana actually made. "It's at the top of my agenda," she says, giving the First Girlfriend of Night Vale a quick kiss before stepping out onto the walkway.

The Council shuffles to either side as she approaches, then coalesces in a circle around her and escorts her inside. They start chanting in Modified Sumerian as the first set of veils falls shut, closing them in the third-most-secret inner sanctum of the government. Shadows begin to swallow the columns and portraits on the walls; swirls of dust stir around the Council's formal robes and Dana's brand-new flats.

As the path gets darker around them, the Mayor's daemon only blazes brighter, lighting her own way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-{,(((,"> ♥ ,,,^..^,,,~

 

Bermuda.

The waves close to the beach are a clear, vivid turquoise, shading to a deep azure at the horizon.

The tide is on its way out, smoothing down the last foundations of yesterday's sand castle as it goes. Cecil was aghast to see his work destroyed, and, after Carlos explained to him how tides work, spent a good twenty minutes yelling at the moon (nearly full again, a pale ghost in the cloudless sky). He seems to have recovered by now, though; he and Khoshekh are splashing around in the shallows, looking for shells.

Carlos won't join them. His new eyes weren't designed for saltwater exposure; the ocean isn't worth the risk. But he can stretch out on a beach chair (under the shade of a normal, non-scientific umbrella), dig his toes into the sand, and enjoy the view.

He's enjoying it very much when his relaxation is interrupted by a ringtone.

Neither of them brought their normal phones on this vacation. Got a cheap one in case of emergencies, only gave the number to a handful of people. Cecil has been talking with his brother every afternoon, but other than that they haven't been contacted since last week, when there was a problem at the station and the interns needed Cecil to trigger a Voice-activated reset. (Instead of the day's May Monologues, it had started broadcasting the contents of Cecil's voicemail inbox.)

Today's caller turns out to be Dana. "Carlos! Is your trip going well?"

"It's been wonderful. So far," says Carlos. "Is everything okay back home?"

"Oh, yes. It's just that one of our otherworldly visitors wants to talk to you. You spoke with her before, remember, the woman from the world with man-witches, and internal daemons? I am sorry to interrupt your vacation, but we're finally approaching the last phase of sending everyone back to their original worlds — she'll be out of reach by the time you get home."

Carlos sits up straighter. "Don't apologize! Is she with you right now? Can you put her on?"

"Even better!" exclaims Dana. "We have a fix on your location, so she can teleport over to see you in person. If now is a good time, that is."

Over in the water, Cecil starts when the bushy-haired witch appears on the sand. Carlos waves for him not to worry, and stands to greet her. "It's good to see you! I would have been sorry to miss you. I wish we'd gotten more time to compare research."

"Oh, but that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about!" exclaims the witch. "You're aware of how Strexcorp was sharing information and orders between different branches on a regular basis, even when they didn't have a portal open?"

"Sure." Carlos has been to the office in one of Strex's buildings that linked up with a room in the Clouded Mountain. He rated the equipment "not intrinsically evil", but couldn't figure out how to make it work. "Did you get any of those systems running? If you took one to your world, and I used the Desert Bluffs one, then maybe...."

"Or we could leave them where they are, re-purpose the structure of the Clouded Mountain itself, and convert the whole network into some kind of multi-universal science exchange forum."

"...Can we do that?"

"As of this morning, Fey is running the Mountain," says the witch proudly. "Dr. Rose and his...companion...have volunteered to handle the physical maintenance over the next few years. The scientist is an expert in that kind of equipment, and the whole dimension is so lifeless that it's the biggest sterile quarantine zone his poor friend could ask for. Of course some of the communication nodes have been destroyed in the fighting, and others are still in the control of local company branches that haven't sorted out their new chain of command, and my universe doesn't have a connection point at all yet — but I'm sure we can build one — at least, I'm sure I understand the theory — the point is, we were hoping that you —"

"I'm in! I'm in. I am so there!" Carlos's heart is racing, daemon hopping in the sand with excitement. "Do I need to bleed on any— that is, do I need to sign anything? Who's managing this, who do I report to?"

"We were sort of hoping that the rest of us could report to you."

Carlos catches his breath.

"You're the only scientist with any substantial experience coordinating research from multiple worlds," explains the witch. "All of us who've worked with you appreciate how it's been handled. You already have a rapport with the AI. Everyone on your team speaks very highly of you...." She wrings her hands. "Honestly, if you turn the directorship down, I can't even imagine who the next-best candidate would be! Unless you have any suggestions —"

"Of course I'll do it!" exclaims Carlos. "Of course I — you have no idea how many dreams of mine are — it'll take some doing, oh wow, this is going to mean big changes for the Night Vale team. Tell them to brace themselves. Tell them to go ahead and start looking at new prospective members. Tell everyone else I said yes. Yes! A thousand times, yes."

Cecil has strolled up the beach to listen by now, standing a few paces off. When their visitor disappears, messages in hand, Carlos fairly leaps down the sand to grab his boyfriend in a spinning hug. "Cecil! Did you hear, did you hear?"

"I did! Oh, Carlos, this is such a great opportunity — and you'll be perfect at it, I know you will. It's everything you ever wanted, isn't it?"

Carlos is grinning so hard his face hurts. "It's pretty close!"

"You'd better spend as much time as possible with me for the rest of this vacation. You're not going to have a second of free time once we get back."

"Absolutely. I am at your disposal."

Cecil twirls a lock of Carlos's hair around his fingers. "And even when you're busy, you'll call, right? If it's not every night, I'll understand...but as often as you can?"

"What are you talking about?" laughs Carlos. "I'm getting a new job, not leaving the country."

"Well, yes, but —" Cecil's expression fluctuates between hope and confusion. "The workplace is in Desert Bluffs. Right? And it's spatially linked to the Clouded Mountain, so it's not like you can just pick it up and move it."

"Sure, but that doesn't mean I have to move, either." Carlos stills his feet on the warm dunes and cups Cecil's face in his palms. "You and I are building that house in Night Vale, we're going to spend the rest of our lives making a home together, and I? Am going to commute."

Notes:

THE END.

...of the main story. There's still the post-series art...comics...shorter sequel fic(let)s...and don't miss the soundtrack. Everything is linked from the series masterpost, and you can keep up with my art on deviantart or on tumblr.

This whole thing has been a joy to write. Thanks again to all you wonderful people who have come along for the ride.

(And if you liked the fic, Leif & Thorn will be right up your alley.)

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 4 of Republic of Heaven Community Radio