The Stranger

Why were you so surprised
that you never saw the stranger?
Did you ever let your lover
see the stranger in yourself?

“I want you to know, Nora…”

She knows he’s in the room, but can’t tell where in the dim light. Not until she hears that lazy scraping of a chair’s metal legs against the concrete ground as he pulls up a seat closer to her. He’s on her right, but that eye is too swollen-over to get anything other than the vague impression of a figure.

“I want you to know that I know who you are.” His voice isn’t the sandpaper scare that Kellogg’s had been, but it’s something close – if Kellogg had cleaned up his act and gotten a sizeable stick up his ass.

“I know who you are, do you understand?”

She can’t speak, can barely make noise. There’s joy in his tone at this.

“I suspect you know who I am, by now, too. But not as…intimately.”

His hand feels like leather against her arm as he pokes his fingers into and out of cuts, bruises, craters of picked-clean flesh.

“But I want you to know me, Nora. I want you to know the man whose work you so succinctly…demolished.”

She feels the electric hum of something above the back of her hand. Her fingers are flexing, but the straps are too tight. The chair creaks with her effort to move.

“I want you to know my pain, Nora. As intimately as I can express it.”

Fire tears through her flesh, every nerve at the end of her fingertips is alight with electricity and pain. Somewhere, under all the shock of it, she’s aware of the warm stickiness pooling at her palm; she knows she can’t move her hand anymore. But hardly any of this registers. She isn’t aware of her own, strained, prolonged scream until she hears someone else from beyond one of the thick, concrete walls, desperate and sympathetic and just as unable to move.

“BLUE!”

She can’t hold onto consciousness. Her eyes are fluttering. The pain is snaking its barbed fingers through every vein that runs up her arm.

“WHAT. THE. HELL.”

The needle in her thigh only garners notice when its new flame lights her up from the inside, forces her headlong into unbearable awareness. Pain. Pain. Pain. Blood. Rust.

Pain.

“WAKE UP YOU LOUSY VAULT RAT!”

There was a gasp, and Nora shot upright in bed, only to be knocked back again by a heavy-handed pillow hitting her squarely in the face. Someone was screaming and her ears were ringing, but the world was spinning and she couldn’t feel the concrete, the wood of the chair, the voice in her ear--

“YOU THOUGHT –” this was punctuated with another hard smack of the pillow “—YOU COULD JUST –” and another “—COME BACK –” whoever was doing this had one hell of an arm “—AND NOT SAY ANYTHING?”

Nora’s forearms were fighting to gather between her face and the oncoming assault, not comfortable certainly but not anything like the lightning she was expecting to feel in her arm. When she curled onto her side in a more protective, fetal position, her assailant did not relent, merely changed their grip and began bringing the sack of cloth down on her with two-handed, over-arm swings.

The creak of the springs in the mattress. The smell of a room that may as well have been a giant ashtray.

Oh. Oh. She was home. So this was…

“Piper,” she managed, shooting a hand out on one of the woman’s wind-ups in order to catch a descending wrist in a rather vice-like, reflexive grip.

“Oh so now you know who I am,” the reporter barked, attempting to rip herself out of Nora’s clutches in order to continue her attack. The pillow was wrested from her in lieu of the wrist, but this only freed up her hands to slap, open-palmed, across the field of Nora’s shoulders and back.

“Ow – hey – Pipes, listen—”

“Ooooh no, don’t you Pipes me, you – you – you unbelievable, idiotic—”

“Look – ouch – I’m not arguing but don’t you think—”

“—can’t believe you had the guts to sneak in like some kinda—”

“—you could berate me verbally – agh! – instead –”

“—got to be the most monumental moron I’ve ever met—”

“Now that one’s just plain not true—”

“—supposed to be dead!”

Piper was losing steam, her onslaught slowing, and when Nora could risk a peek she could see the frustrated tears threatening to spill.

“Piper…” Nora took hold of those hands gently and pulled the other woman into an embrace, receiving a few more slaps and fist-pounds against her back before the attack ceased entirely, and arms wound their way around her figure so tightly she might have had trouble breathing.

“You – just – are gone,” Piper sobbed into the shoulder of a borrowed button-down, clenching its fabric behind Nora like she was hanging onto a rock in a storm-laden sea, “for a whole year, Blue, and now you’re back and you just – you just – don’t tell me?”

The accusation stung, and it was supposed to. She deserved worse, Nora knew, and she gently patted and rubbed Piper’s back until the reporter was out of heavy sobs and could straighten up, bracing her hands against Nora’s shoulders.

“Your hair’s short,” she laughed wetly, blinking away the last few tears.

“Yeah,” Nora agreed, abashed, hooking her fingers gently around the elbows of Piper’s favorite coat, still as beat up as it had ever been. “I’m sorry, Piper. I’ve only been in town two days – I think – but I should have…I didn’t know what to say.”

“Hey Piper,” the reporter mocked, “I’m alive, thanks for taking care of my kid while I was gone—”

“Piper.” Nora’s voice was sharp, and her grip on Piper’s arms tensed. Piper had enough decency to look a little ashamed, but Nora didn’t seem to be looking for that. “I am grateful. I can’t ever repay you. You, Nick, Ellie…”

“Ellie,” Piper chuckled, voice still a little choked, “yeah, she – you know we—”

“Nick mentioned.”

“Ha. ‘Course he did. Rusty bucket never could keep anything from his partner.”

“Well he got really good at hiding his hooch after a while.”

Again, Piper laughed, and Nora was grateful for the sound. She laughed, too, and it was so pleasant how easily it came. She pulled Piper in to plant a kiss on her forehead and scoop her forward in another hug, the pair of them sitting half-slung on the edge of the bed, basking in a reunion neither had been sure would happen.

“Ugh, Blue, you don’t half smell like—” Piper never had a taste for cigarettes, especially in the quantities her two favorite detectives sucked them down, but when she leaned back to look Nora over, her expression grew uncomfortably sly. “Is that your shirt?”

Nora’s muscles seized for half a second before she held up a warning finger. “Behave,” was her only response as she swung herself off the bed and aimed to slip around the stairs to the miniature kitchen.

“Are those his boxers?”

“Behave,” Nora called a little more sternly, glad that her slight smirk wasn’t visible as she made herself busy at the stove.

“I’m not saying – just didn’t know he wore boxers. Always thought he was more of a commando guy.”

“You spend much time thinking about Nick’s underwear?”

The door was already creaking open, and the devil of which they spoke was filling the cramped doorway with a what-did-I-just-walk-into expression painted on his plastic face. One arm was full of small food bundles – a few tatos, mutfruit, even a small slab of Brahmin steak – and the other was pulling the door closed behind him.

“Piper,” Nick greeted shortly, shifting around her to stuff his haul into the fridge in a rather disorganized fashion. “And here I thought I told you visiting hours were after breakfast.”

“Thank you,” Nora chimed in softly, plucking a tato out of his hand before he could tuck it away. He merely nodded.

“C’mon, Nick. When you’ve got the hottest story right here under your roof? I mean, public opinion was leaning towards briefs. This’ll change the state of the city!”

“I don’t like to chafe,” Nick replied, as haughtily as he could manage. Neither woman could keep the grin off their face or the laugh out of their throat. “I didn’t – really know what you might like,” he added, easing the last, brown-wrapped package out from under his arm and offering it out to Nora, “but I picked you up a few things.”

“You didn’t have to,” she began, taking the package from him with a grateful kind of smile.

“Yeah,” was the whole of his answer and he simply shrugged, pulling his coat off in the humidity of the brightening day and tossing it lazily onto the half-rotted wooden rack. He slid in behind her to relieve her of the pan she’d been warming, ushering her politely but firmly out of the way. “You change.”

She relented with a little laugh, and turned to climb the steps, package lazily cradled in her arms.

When the door of the bathroom thunked closed above them, Piper turned her grin at full wattage onto Nick. Like a cat, she simply waited.

“I can feel you smirking at me,” Nick offered after a moment or two, keeping his hands busy with food preparation. “Gonna burn holes in the back of my head.”

“Mm. Gettin’ awfully domestic there, Nick?”

“No comment, Piper.”

“Aw, Nicky, don’t be like that! ‘Bout time you two—”

“Piper,” he warned, and she threw up her hands with a sigh that clearly said have it your way, party-pooper.

“She tell you what had her off the radar for so long?” It was clear, the innocence with which this question had been asked, but it gave Nick pause all the same. He let the knife in his metal hand rest briefly against the edge of the stove, shuffling through the past day and a half in silence for a few moments.

“She…” He sighed through his teeth, a little hiss of frustration. He couldn’t say what she was, exactly, and that ate at him. “She’s not—”

“You two gossiping about me, now?”

Nora descended in a set of trousers that were a fairly fitting length but far too wide, and a beaten up button-front shirt that seemed to suffer from precisely the opposite problem. She’d split the difference by thieving a belt and tucking in the shirt, cinching the entire ensemble almost empire-style, sleeves rolled up to her elbows.

Neither Piper nor Nick missed the gnarled knots of scars peeking out from those sleeves, disappearing at her covered biceps. Piper grimaced, but – Nick thanked whatever powers-that-be – remained silent on the subject. For now, anyway.

“Why,” she pried in her best Reporter Voice, “you got a scoop I can get a quote on?”

“I feel like I told you to behave.”

“That’ll be the day,” Nick groused over his sizzling pan, but his voice was good-natured enough.

“Hey, I’m not the one who went ghost for a whole year. Where’s her lecture?” Piper demanded, gesturing widely toward Nora as the woman flopped down to join her on the bed.

“Believe you me, it’s coming.”

It was Nora’s turn to grimace, like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She met Piper’s eyes, who just raised her eyebrows in a distinctly what-did-you-expect kind of way.

The door creaked open for the second time, though this time it was flung with far more drama.

“Hey hey hey, room for one more at this little shindig?”

“Deacon,” the three of them said in unison – Nick impassively, Nora with a smile that radiated relief, and Piper with a disapproving purse of her lips.

“Aw, Miss Wright, no love for an old acquaintance?”

Nora was up and at his side in seconds, latching onto the fabric of his plain shirt like she might lose him if she didn’t hang on. He smiled and slung an arm lazily – although, somehow, protectively; possessively, even – around her shoulders, pulling her in just a little.

Piper and Nick shared the briefest of glances, and Nick – well, he wouldn’t be Nick Valentine if he didn’t notice the way Deacon’s fingertips brushed searchingly over the little bulb of a scar on the back of her hand, and her fingers flexed in some kind of coded response. They’d always had a kind of language of their own, those two – they were great in the field together. From the stories they heard (not counting a single one sold to them by Deacon, because of course not), they practically read each other’s minds on ops. Nick could have respect for that, at least. A good partner was hard to find, and when you found one that clicked that well, there wasn’t a thing in the world that could pull you apart. It was rare, that kind of trust, and even if his tongue suddenly tasted like heated copper and his jaw was setting into a small frown, he was glad that Nora had it. She needed that kind of understanding. That kind of friend.

Friend, he found himself thinking, in some sort of self-reminder. Why? He already knew that. But that didn’t stop friend friend friend from flashing aggressive neon behind his eyes.

Nora had settled into Deacon’s side with her arms draped comfortably around him, and no one said anything about it – very pointedly. Nora had always been on the touchy-feely side, but as far as they could tell, no one had ever seen Deacon offer his personal space to someone so freely.

Piper answered with a little harrumph, for which Nora gave her a rather thankful smile – she was, contrary to what her entire demeanor suggested, behaving herself quite well. For Piper, anyway.

“Do I detect the sultry aroma of delicacies a la Detective?”

“Omelet,” Nick answered in a rough, not-gonna-indulge-you-smartass tone of voice.

“Again?” There wasn’t complaint in Nora’s voice so much as curiosity, and this was met with a little laugh from Piper.

“It’s kiiiind of the only thing he knows how to make,” she explained, causing Nick to frown all the more.

“A very singular cook, then, our dear synthetic sleuth.” Deacon’s smile was lazy, and that mouth of his was smart as ever.

“Any’a you three wiseguys can afford to be picky?”

The trio shook their heads and met him with enough emphatic overcompensation that he couldn’t shake a little smirk, waving them down with a roll of his eyes. “Kill the dramatics. Maybe go sit in the office proper, you’re crowding my workspace.”

“A specialist needs room for his art!” Deacon declared, shuffling around to usher the ladies toward the desks. It was still a crowded space, though far less so than what was offered between the bed, stairs, and the world’s smallest kitchenette.

Piper had taken the comfiest chair, with Deacon and Nora pressed close together atop the same desk. It was Ellie’s, naturally. Nick’s desk would require a construction crew to get enough free space to accommodate two. They were exchanging quiet laughs, and Deacon was spinning some new whopper by the time Nick had plates ready for them. Well, two plates. Nora got a proper plate, Piper was given the second, and Deacon was saddled with a saucepan lid that caused his omelet to droop towards the center.

“Ah, and a hint of rust, my favorite seasoning.”

“You wanna be smart with that mouth or you wanna eat with it?”

“Are those so mutually exclusive?”

Nora nudged her partner in the ribs with a sharp elbow, and he gave a little cough and a surrender of a chuckle in response. “I’m eating, I’m eating,” he declared in a tone meant to pacify, using the bent spoon he’d been given (there had only been two forks) to begin harvesting healthily sized chunks.

“Auuuugh, Nick,” Piper’s groan was muffled against the food puffing her cheeks out like a squirrel, “you could give Takahashi a run for his money.”

“One cooking bot’s enough for this town. You only like it ‘cause all you ever have is noodles, anyhow.”

Nick had taken up his seat in his beat up old chair, wheeling back just enough to give them all room to breathe. They ate in comparable peace, joking between bites and making appreciative noises as they shoveled slightly runny omelet bits into their mouths. Nick had been right, they couldn’t afford to be picky, and Nora and Deacon ate like they were afraid the food would disappear if they took too long.

File that one away. Clues everywhere, but no real trail to follow just yet.

“So,” Deacon ventured with mild hesitation, “where’s the kid?”

“Couch at my place,” Piper answered, setting her empty plate on her lap with a satisfied sigh. “Nat and him fell asleep at the radio, didn’t have the heart to wake ‘em up.”

“Lucky them,” Nora groaned.

“Ah, I thought I heard your dulcet, diplomatic tones this morning. You give our vaultie here a little wakeup call?”

“And then some.” Nora’s tone was playful, though Piper still frowned. When Nora crossed her arms and cupped each elbow in a palm, leaning sideways into Deacon’s shoulder, Nick realized the scar on her hand had an exact twin on the other. Like some kind of stigmata.

“All right you two,” Piper declared, sitting up a little straighter and shoving her plate carelessly atop a box of closed case files. “Party’s over. Time to fess up.”

Nora and Deacon shared a look. Nick got the distinct impression that, despite the darkness of those signature sunglasses, both could read one another as plain as a billboard. Well, an in-tact billboard, anyway.

“It’s a long story,” Nora began a little inadequately, but as Piper opened her mouth to recite the riot act, Deacon held up his hands, fingers splayed, as if to hold off the oncoming interrogation.

There were scars on his palms, too. Not as harsh and perfectly centered as Nora’s, but little pairs of dots lined the outside edge of each hand. As if sensing Nick’s unblinking gaze, he quickly dropped his hands, and Nora – as if by instinct – reached over to wrap hers around his nearest set of fingers, giving a comforting little squeeze.

“That’s not a lie,” Deacon explained, and nodded at the stereo eye roll that his audience provided him. “Hey, you can trust it – I didn’t say it.” At least that much was true. “And we can’t really tell you everything, anyway. Not without compromising some important – things. But…”

When he trailed off, Nora picked up the sentence. “It was a Railroad op. It was supposed to be short – maybe a week or two. Three at the outside. Didn’t think we needed to tell anyone because we wouldn’t be gone that long, and it was best for our cover if we didn’t.”

“So you were together.” Nick spoke for the first time in a little while, and all heads turned to the synth. His words were punctuated by the metallic flip of his lighter, and the sizzle of the start of a cigarette.

“Yeah.” Deacon again. “’Course. Bullseye and me? No better team.”

Nora shot him a look.

“For – Railroad stuff, obviously.”

Piper couldn’t shake the feeling that an expanse was suddenly growing between the two detectives. She thought better than to mention anything, if only because she didn’t fully understand it yet, but she got the impression Deacon noticed it too, because he gave Nora’s hand a little squeeze before withdrawing, settling his weight on his palms behind him in a lazy lean.

Nora reached a tentative hand out toward Nick, and he silently obliged her with a cigarette. Both men had lighters out nearly in tandem, both as if by long-standing habit. Though the lighter in Deacon’s hand was Nora’s – Nick could recognize the little scratches she’d dug into the side, from when she used to count the days in little cross-hatches there – the one she chose to accept was Nick’s, and he saw again some quiet message in her face. It was just as unreadable, but it felt almost like reassurance. For some reason, that burned him.

“How do you two manage to run for your lives after all the cigarettes you smoke?” It was Piper this time, waving away a cloud of smoke that had wafted too close to her nose.

“Well it doesn’t stop me any,” Nick provided, tone indicating he thought that would have been obvious.

“If I need to run, I’m not doing my job right.” Nora mimed holding some kind of rifle and looking down a scope, as if to remind Piper of her usual place on any given battlefield. “Anyway, I haven’t smoked in…”

The silence she drifted into was tense and pulled tight, like a rubber sheet testing its breaking point.

“A long time,” she finished at last, taking another, desperate drag of smoke. “I’m making up for it.”

“Clearly,” Piper teased, but she lapsed into relative silence again, giving room for the story to be told.

“What was the job?” Nick this time, and he was looking hard at Nora, though it was Deacon who answered.

“Sorta where we can’t say too much,” he explained, lifting a hand for a moment to see-saw it back and forth in an indication of some sort of gray area, “boss’ll have my hide if I let anything spill before reporting.”

“You haven’t gone back to HQ?” Piper’s eyes were wide under lifted brows.

“No,” Nora answered solemnly, nursing her cigarette and looking with intense focus at the toe of her sneaker. “I wanted to come here.”

“Oh,” was all Piper could think to say, and she couldn’t stop herself from glancing between synth and spy, ducking her head a little lower like a student who hadn’t done their homework and suddenly feared being called on.

“We can say,” Deacon continued, sliding an arm around his partner’s shoulders very briefly, giving her a comforting little shake, “we heard things about some packages going missing. We’d been shipping them out west, get ‘em as far away from the Commonwealth and all our fun Institute rumors as possible. Safest bet for the least bigots out there. Even if it’s only because they’ve never heard of the big bad boogeyman.”

“But?” Nick prompted.

“We thought it had been going fine for months. Biggest export we’ve had in a long time. But then we got word from one of our contacts in the caravans out that way. Nothing had arrived. Not a single one.” Nora’s voice was cold, her brow tight in only just-contained anger.

Piper breathed out a lung-full of air she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. All those people… “How many had you sent?”

“Less than a hundred, more than twenty,” Deacon answered in typical cryptic fashion, and all Piper could do was stare at Nora and clasp a hand over her mouth.

“Always a week or so apart,” Nora continued gravely, still staring floor-ward with worrying intensity, “trying not to put too many in one caravan. Just a few drifters every so often, no different than normal. Word takes too long to travel between coasts, so we couldn’t wait for confirmation. We got lazy.”

“We didn’t know,” Deacon tried to interject in a gentle but insistent voice, but Nora just cupped his nearest knee and gave it a squeeze. He fell quiet obediently.

“We thought we’d won, you know? The Commonwealth was only dangerous in a casual, supermutant-around-the-corner, bigots-in-every-settlement kind of way. Normal.” She shrugged. She had Nick had once known a kind of normal that could never be matched by anything the Commonwealth – or presumably the rest of the world – could offer, but they had both long since settled into a new, albeit far more dangerous, humdrum. “If we could get them out, far out, then there’d be nothing for them that the rest of us don’t have to face. We could get them to settlements that could use them. Engineers, technicians, bioscience specialists – they could help rebuild anywhere. It was – it was supposed to be…”

“It was a good plan,” and this time Deacon refused to quiet down, leaning forward just a bit to assert the solidity of his sentiment. “They get freedom, and the world gets hope. It was a good plan.” He sighed, and Nora fell into the silence of her smoking. “It hit us all pretty hard when we heard from our people. We all needed to know what was going on, and we needed to know as fast as possible. Wasn’t a lot of time for standing at the edges and observing on this one.”

“So what did you do?” Piper was engrossed, and this suited Deacon just fine – a little too well, ass loved to tell his stories – but Nick just sat and watched, and smoked, and considered. He wasn’t shy about watching Nora, specifically, as intently as he was. Deacon was a lost cause as far as reading between the lines – he filled that part of the script for his audience, too, and you couldn’t be certain where the bullshit stopped and the truth started. But Nora – he’d been able to read her, once. They’d been partners. They had that trust.

“So we dirtied up, got a tourist the guards and drovers would know the face of, and got on a caravan.”

Piper seemed a little confused by this, knitting her brows in that way she did while she prepared to ask a probing question, but Nick nodded. Smart move. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to tell anyone. Between the objections and the dead giveaways, they wouldn’t be able to maintain a cover much less make it to the caravan in the first place.

“You posed as synths,” he concluded, and Piper’s eyes looked like they were trying to pop out of her head.

“You did what?” She was revving up that indignant voice good and hard, though Nick gave a waving gesture in an attempt to get her to pump the break a little.

“It was the fastest way we could reliably get the best information. The last package we’d sent was less than a week before. If they were still getting intercepted, it was the easiest way to find out where and how. It was the best option to give us the best options. We could run the circuit, circle back, and report to HQ so we could figure out how to move forward, where our broken link was.” Nora’s voice was deadpan, and she didn’t look at Piper while she explained. She’d looked at Nick, once and briefly, before settling on the cherry of light at the end of her rapidly shortening cigarette.

“Wait, so—” Piper was holding up a hand like she was prompting a teacher for a question “—why are you telling us any of this? This all seems like the kinda thing you gotta keep under wraps, usually. You said you could compromise—”

“Because we got made,” Deacon answered, bitterness building behind his teeth like acid, “fast.”

“Anything we’ve told you isn’t a secret to them. They didn’t just know we weren’t who we said we were, they knew us. They knew – me,” she corrected, faltering slightly. “I think they figured out some things about D, but they damn well knew who I was.”

Deacon shrugged. He wasn’t about to give away anything about himself if he didn’t have to. But the pair of them were leaning a little closer together on the desk, Nora clutching at his shirt again and Deacon absently lifting the cigarette out of her hand to take a drag for himself. They didn’t even seem to notice, it all seemed to run on some kind of unconscious level.

Small pieces of understanding were cropping up for Valentine, though he only vaguely understood their shape.

“We got to the Capital Wasteland,” Deacon continued in a breath of smoke, handing the nearly-spent cigarette back to his partner, “and that was our stop, apparently. They let us think we still had our cover for all of a day, maybe. But something was up. They kept us together.” His face pinched into an unreadable expression at this, and without anyone realizing when or how it had happened, his and Nora’s fingers were intertwined, their grips white-knuckled.

“They separated everyone else,” Nora elaborated, depositing the butt of her cigarette in the too-full ashtray that Nick had scooted forward on the wheels of his chair to hold out for her, “everyone down there was isolated. Except us.”

“Everyone? Down where?” Piper was on the verge of frustrated now. What a time to fall into cryptic half-explanations.

“Synths,” Nick explained, gravel in his voice. “All the packages that had gone unaccounted for.”

Nora looked at him like she was offering some kind of horrible, lead-weight apology. He couldn’t for the life (or – whatever) of him figure out why. What did she have to be sorry for, to him of all people?

“Their facility was in an old subway station. Guess the good doctor liked the underground aesthetic.” Deacon gave a gesture to indicate there might not be any accounting for taste, though his entire demeanor was still hardened, still needle-sharp and made of steel.

“They who?” Piper insisted, crossing her arms against a chill they could all feel despite the warm weather.

“Zimmer.” It was Nora’s voice, but you’d only know that if you saw her mouth moving. Those two syllables were almost inhuman – if a statue could talk, Nick thought it might sound something like that. Hardened and empty.

“Who—”

“Guy who dogged after railroad cargo before Ayo.” Nick was explaining again, wanting to lift whatever invisible weight was suddenly holding the agents down – or at least help shoulder some of it. “Here,” he added, leaning back to shuffle a hand around his desk before picking up Nora’s report and handing it over to Piper. “Used to be head of Synth Retention, so you know he was a regular ray of sunshine.”

Piper whipped through the package of papers with the practiced speed of somewhat who read and disseminated for a living. “Ugh,” she curled her lip in disgust, “this is – what kind of experiments?”

Nora looked away. “Nothing good,” was all Deacon would say. That seemed to be enough. None of their imaginations were out of order, and none of them doubted the extent of the Institute’s cruelty.

Nick kicked open a drawer and withdrew the last half of whiskey stored among the spare cigarette packs. He retrieved the two glasses that were still stacked there, and filled them both rather generously. Both agents took one, but only Nora seemed invested in drinking hers. Deacon, for his part, took a grateful sip, but his glass never seemed to really drain.

Eventually, Deacon spoke again, his voice quiet, like he was trying to be gentle about something – to someone, maybe. “Zimmer gave us a great big speech about the technology we squandered, the world we killed, yadda yadda. He…” As his voice drifted, he glanced to his partner, catching something slight in her hand – a little tremor, maybe; the vibration of her empty glass – and gingerly pressed his unfinished drink into her hands. She downed it a bit faster than she meant to, but sighed in a self-calming kind of way after downing it.

“After a while, he left. Some of the science team stayed behind, but most of them were gone. We only knew because they talked about it, sometimes. Nothing specific, just standard ‘things aren’t the same’ chatter.” The hand that was laced with Nora’s loosened its grip a little, but he never let go. “He’d been holding us a couple months by then, so it seemed pretty sudden. After he split, they seemed kinda directionless for a bit.” His jaw grew tight and twitched with the effort of stopping teeth from grinding. “Then they started selling tickets.”

The silence that fell on the room was thick and freezing, an icicle stabbing through everyone’s train of thought. The pair of agents nearly disappeared, quiet as they were, holding onto each other with renewed effort. Their faces were carefully blank, but their hands gripped one another so tightly they shook ever so slightly.

“What…what do you…” Piper couldn’t find words that wouldn’t shrink away in front of the vile possibilities.

“People will pay if they think they can get away with doing harm to a person.” Nora was smiling with no humor, voice like broken glass. “Tell them it’s not really a person at all? More people will pay. No guilty conscience if it’s just some machine.”

Piper felt her recent breakfast rising in her throat; Nick looked sharply away and let his cigarette ash indiscriminately onto the floor. Deacon was silent, looking more defeated than they had ever seen him. But Nora? Nora just talked, low and quiet and unfeeling.

“That was it, for most of the time we were there. No more packages were incoming, so halfway through losing their product,” she spat the word, poison on her tongue, “they started getting real interested in how to keep everyone alive. Brought in some new people, handful of shady doctors. Lots of chems, some surgery. If anyone died after that,” her teeth were bared in an extension of that humorless smile, “they got charged double.”

There was a beat, and she took a breath. “Then…”

“We got out,” Deacon supplied at last, when Nora seemed to flounder in an attempt to wrap the story up. “And now we’re here.”

There seemed to be a gap between Nora’s last recount and the abrupt end of the explanation, but their audience wasn’t really keen to press them at this point.

Silence came heavy again, everyone apparently falling into some kind of reflection. Nora’s and Deacon’s hands had parted, but they were both leaning against the other’s shoulders, as if suddenly spent of their energy. And who could blame them? To live that even once – and then to relive it…

Normal day, Nora had said, and the thought seemed to cut the bottom out of Nick’s world. His brain freefell, moving parts whirring and clicking, jaw joints giving warning creeks as he tested their resistance against gritted teeth.

Distantly, they became aware of the rise in the hustle and bustle of the market, and Nat’s distinct voice ringing out with practiced paper-pushing.

Nora stood, and didn’t look at anyone. “I’ll see if Shaun’s up yet. He probably hasn’t eaten.”

Nick got to his feet at that, flicking his filter into the mountain on the ashtray and gathering the empty plates – and saucepan lid – in order to haul them to the kitchen. “I can do another,” he offered, gesturing to the supply in his arms a little vaguely. Nora just nodded, and turned toward the door with Deacon at her heels.

“I gotta see my favorite little guy,” he said by way of goodbye, and they were gone, Nick shuffling about in the little kitchen and Piper seated in silence, fingers forming a cage over her mouth. Eventually, she looked at the papers she’d let settle in her lap, flipping through them slowly, barely registering their contents.

“So…they’re out there, somewhere. These people.” She spoke at last, above the sizzle of another round of breakfast.

“Somewhere,” Nick agreed, roughly.

“And – and she wants to find them.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“These people…”

Nick said nothing. He added something to the pan that brought the sizzle to a crescendo.

“We gotta find these people, Nick.” Piper’s voice cracked, and Nick’s shoulders pinched with renewed tension. “We gotta – we can’t – we gotta make sure.”

“Yeah,” was really all Nick could say, giving the handle of the pan a little shake. “Yeah. We do.”