They all jump at the sound of the recorder clicking off. Tim sits up straighter and rubs his hands together.
“Well!” he says in what Sasha can tell is a falsely cheerful voice. “I think that’s enough earth-shattering revelations for one night. Who wants that whiskey now?”
“I refuse to get drunk around you again,” Sasha says. It’s a pathetic attempt at their usual banter, but it does get a genuine smirk out of Tim, complete with that unfairly attractive dimple.
Jon exhales heavily. He pulls off his glasses with one hand and rubs at his eyes with the other. “I should…probably get going.”
“The hell you will,” Tim says immediately. “Look at you. If I let you out the door, you’ll fall asleep at the wheel and die before you get to the end of the block. You’re staying the night.”
“Tim, while I appreciate the offer—”
“Nope, not interested in the rest of that sentence. The only thing keeping you upright is the arm of the sofa and the starch in your underpants.”
“And the stick jammed up my ass, no doubt?” Jon raises an eyebrow.
Tim grins. “See? You’re so tired you’re actually joking around with me. Stay the night, and tomorrow we can get answers out of them first thing.” He stands up without waiting for an answer. “One of you can take the sofa, the other one can have the love seat. Unless you want to build a blanket fort on the floor, but it wouldn’t be fair to leave Martin out. We’ll let the old folks fight over the bed.”
“Old folks?” Jon Prime repeats indignantly. He shoots an obviously exaggerated glare at Martin Prime, who isn’t even bothering to hide his snickers. “We don’t look that bad.”
Tim laughs. He’s the only one that doesn’t seem that tired, really. “Come on, you two. I’ll show you where the bedroom is.”
Jon Prime gets to his feet, then hesitates and glances at Martin Prime. Sasha wonders how blind Martin Prime actually is, because he seems to respond to that look; he hesitantly reaches out in Jon Prime’s direction. Jon Prime takes his arm without further comment, and Sasha watches Martin Prime’s shoulders slump in evident relief before the two of them quietly wish the rest of them goodnight and follow Tim down the hall.
Sasha watches them for a moment, then glances at Jon and Martin, who are both avoiding looking at one another. She decides to give them a little space and go gather up the spare blankets and pillows. They probably both need a minute or two to process what they just heard.
Truthfully, Sasha’s not sure what she thinks of it either. She’s impressed that Martin Prime isn’t passively rolling over and taking whatever Jon Prime dishes out, and she’s a little bit in awe of his strength. Could she have survived two weeks alone and blind, let alone in the Archives? That feeling of being watched is creepy enough when she can look over her shoulder and confirm nobody’s actually there; she can’t imagine what it would be like if she didn’t have that option. It must be terrifying, but Martin Prime hasn’t shown it.
She’s also—there’s no denying it—curious as all get-out. She kind of wants to interrogate Martin Prime, find out how he lost his eyesight, if it’s total vision loss or partial, if he thinks it’s temporary or permanent. What it’s like being blind in general, what it’s like trying to maneuver around the Archives blind. How he plans to deal with it if it is permanent.
As she passes the door of Tim’s bedroom, which is ajar, she hears Martin Prime say, evidently mid-sentence, “—put you to any trouble.”
Sasha slows her steps and hovers outside the door, eavesdropping shamelessly. It’s always been one of her fatal flaws, that urge to snoop and spy and pluck secrets out of thin air. It’s part of what drew her to the Magnus Institute over any of the other research or archival jobs she could have taken, the other part being that most of the others would have required her to go too far from London. She hasn’t said anything about that to any of the others, about why she’s so keen to stay in the city. For all she loves ferreting out things about those around her, she’s always been close-mouthed about her own secrets.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Tim says. “Like I said, we were planning to spend the night in the Archives anyway, and I don’t think we’d all have fit on that cot in the back room. My floor’s a lot more comfortable.”
“Yes, but we don’t want to turn you out of your room.” Jon Prime sounds uncertain and exhausted.
“I offered. Look. Martin’s probably going to be asleep before I get back out to the living room, he looks exhausted. And I don’t think the rest of us want to leave him alone right now.” Tim sighs. “Where did we all sleep when we did this before?”
“Hmm?” Sasha isn’t sure which one of the Primes makes that noise.
“You said this happened a lot earlier than it did for you guys, right? If we want to keep an eye on each other like this now, I bet it was even worse two months down the line. Did somebody else put us all up or what?”
There’s a short pause before Martin Prime says, “No, we—we all sort of went our separate ways.”
“Wait, seriously?” Tim sounds genuinely shocked. “No, that’s—if you were hurt—”
“I wasn’t, though. I was the only one who came out of it unhurt.”
“Physically, anyway,” Jon Prime says. “We were all a bit…it was rough for a while there.”
“All the more reason we should have stayed together, then,” Tim says. “Whose idea was it not to?”
“I think we were all just…tired,” Martin Prime says slowly. “You—our Tim, I mean—he was in quarantine for a while, so he just wanted to go home, and Sasha…she wasn’t herself.”
Somebody makes a noise that might be a laugh, but Sasha isn’t getting the joke. Tim has an audible frown in his voice when he speaks again. “And you? What did you do? Go back to the place you’d last seen when you were being toyed with by six thousand worms wrapped in a trench coat and pretend that the idea of sleeping there alone didn’t bother you, then spend the night lying in bed staring up at the ceiling and jumping at every single sound?”
Martin Prime doesn’t answer for a moment. Finally, he says, so quietly Sasha has to move closer to hear properly, “You know, nobody ever actually asked me about that?”
“You know, that doesn’t really answer the question.”
“Martin?” Jon Prime’s voice is soft and laden with concern.
Martin Prime sighs heavily. “No. I went back to the place I’d last seen when I was being toyed with by six thousand worms wrapped in a trench coat and found out that I’d missed the deadline to renew my lease, then spent the night in a waiting room at St. Pancras pretending I had an early-morning train and reading through rental notices.”
Sasha presses a hand to her mouth to keep from swearing out loud. Tim does enough of that for both of them. “When was the lease up?”
“Mid-April sometime? Mrs. Mattson is…I’d been living there for years, but she’s not a sentimentalist. Once that deadline passed, she found a new tenant and arranged to have the place cleared out.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Jon Prime’s voice sounds ragged.
“It never really came up,” Martin Prime says, sounding a bit tired himself. “By the time I saw you again, I’d found a new place anyway, and I just…nobody ever asked me why I moved and it seemed easier not to say anything. There was kind of a lot going on.”
“All right, I—I suppose that’s fair, but…” Jon Prime trails off.
Sasha hears Tim take a deep breath. “Right, well, we’ll do better than that for our Martin, don’t worry. Maybe you can help us convince him he deserves it. Anyway, you two look like you’re about ready to drop, so I’ll let you get some sleep and finish grilling you tomorrow. Bathroom’s right across the hall if you need it.”
“Thank you, Tim,” Jon Prime says softly. “I mean it.”
“Hey, what are friends for?”
Sasha hurriedly steps away from the door and moves to the linen closet at the end of the hallway. A moment or two later, Tim joins her. “Need a hand?”
“I just thought I’d get the spare blankets and pillows,” Sasha says. “You know, so it feels a little more like we’re really sleeping. How were you planning to handle that in the Archives, by the way?”
Tim has the grace to look sheepish. “Okay, so it was an impulse. Sue me. We’d have probably ended up in a pile on the floor or something.”
“I suppose there are worse ways to sleep than in a cuddle pile with my two best friends.” Sasha nudges Tim, who laughs. “Like…alone, on a cot in the Archives.”
“I still can’t believe we let him do that for so long. We are horrible friends.” Tim glances over his shoulder, his expression suddenly pinched. Sasha wonders if she should admit that she heard his whole conversation with the Primes, but decides, on the balance, nah. “I mean, Jon I understand, he was still pretending he hated us.”
Sasha snorts and pulls out an armful of soft things. “Not very well.”
It at least brings a smile back to Tim’s face. “Well, I mean, you and I already knew it was an act. It’s just Martin who probably didn’t know.”
“Martin would have quit if he really thought Jon didn’t like him,” Sasha says, although she’s not altogether sure that’s true. Between the fact that he falsified most of his credentials to get the job at the Institute to begin with and the fact that he’s the sole support for a chronically ill mother, he probably would have put up with a lot worse than a boss that hated him. “Or at least asked to be transferred back to the library.”
“What, and leave us to the mercies of the Archives?” Tim grins. “C’mon, grab the spare pillows and let’s go make everybody comfortable.”
True to Tim’s prediction, Martin has fallen asleep by the time they get back into the living room, although in a way that doesn’t make it seem like he’s under very deep, or at least that he’s not comfortable enough to stay asleep easily. Jon is kneeling on the floor in front of him, carefully working his shoes off his feet. He looks up when they come in, obviously flustered and embarrassed. “I didn’t notice he’d dropped off until a minute ago,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.
Sasha isn’t surprised, considering he was avoiding making eye contact, but she doesn’t say that out loud. “I mean, it’s been a long day, and he’s probably in a lot of pain.”
Tim dumps his load on the coffee table. “Here, you get the lever and I’ll ease the back down so he doesn’t fall too hard. Don’t want to wake him, but sitting upright all night isn’t going to help him.”
Sasha wonders, as she sets down her own burden, how much of this is Tim trying to atone for what their counterparts did to Martin Prime and how much of it is him genuinely worrying about their Martin, but she’s not going to ask because that would mean revealing she was eavesdropping. Instead, she selects a pillow and blanket and starts setting them up on the love seat while she watches Tim and Jon try to ease the footrest out and the back to a reclining position without jostling Martin awake. He must be really tired, though, because although his face screws up briefly and he makes a soft sound, he doesn’t otherwise react. Once he’s lying down, Jon leans over and carefully slides Martin’s glasses off of his face, then folds them and sets them on the end table between the recliner and the sofa.
He turns around, presumably to get a blanket, and starts when he sees Sasha making up a bed. “Here, you don’t have to—you’re taller than I am, you should—”
“Only by a bit,” Sasha interrupts. “Two or three inches isn’t going to make that much of a difference, and I sleep curled up anyway.” She also sleeps like the dead, and judging by the way Tim and Jon are fussing over Martin without making it obvious, she guesses they’re more concerned about Martin than she is. Which isn’t to say that she isn’t worried about him, only that she’s a bit more detached from the situation, for whatever reason. If anything happens to Martin in the middle of the night, she won’t wake up and hear it, and they’re more likely to jump up to do something about it anyway, so there’s no reason for her to stay near him. She doesn’t say that out loud, though.
“I…” Jon hesitates, then glances back at Martin, and his face softens in a way Sasha pretends not to notice so she won’t be tempted to pick at it. “All right. T-Tim, are you sure—”
“Yep. The floor and I are good friends. I’ve done a lot of camping and backpacking and the like, so I’m used to it.” Tim grins. “Pick a pillow and a blanket.”
Jon looks over the offerings on the table, then selects a faded patchwork quilt and unfolds it carefully. Somehow, Sasha isn’t surprised when he drapes it over Martin and tucks him in gently, almost tenderly, before turning back and taking another blanket along with a pillow. The blanket, to Sasha’s eye, looks as if it’s made of fiberglass and horsehair, but Jon runs his fingers over the pattern almost reverently. “Where did you find this?”
“California, I think,” Tim answers. “Maybe Mexico. My grandparents left me a bit of a legacy when they died, with the stipulation that I use it for a gap year in ‘the mountains’. It was that vague. I think my folks expected me to pick the Alps or the Pyrenees, maybe the Sierra Morena if I felt like being different. Something close to home, anyway. But I thought, hey, when am I ever going to get a chance like this again? Spent my whole last year of school planning and budgeting, and two days after graduation I was off to America. The start of the Pacific Crest Trail is right on the border with Mexico, and there was a market there, people selling handcrafts and the like. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have an extra blanket. I was right, too.”
“Does it mean something to you, Jon?” Sasha asks, curious. “The pattern, I mean?” She’s seen people trace the lines of relics and books like that when touching something that looks familiar but isn’t, and there’s an oddly thoughtful look on Jon’s face.
“Sort of?” Jon looks up. He truly does look tired, which is odd, considering he wasn’t the one running from worms. “I—my mother’s sister married an American. Well, he was Mexican-American. My cousin had a blanket like this on his guest bed, he said his grandmother made it for him.”
Tim begins making up a bed on the floor with the remaining blankets. He does so with a practiced ease that tells Sasha he truly has done this plenty of times before. “You’ve been to America, then? Or does your cousin live over here?”
“No, he’s in New Mexico. Or he was the last time we spoke. It’s been a few years.” Jon bends over and begins untying his shoes. “I didn’t—exactly take a gap year, but I did take some time off and go to visit him. He and his parents, or at least my aunt, used to come over and visit for a week or two every summer, so I thought I’d repay him by returning the visit. Ended up staying through to the end of the year.”
“Didn’t make it to New Mexico when I was there.” Tim turns to Sasha. “How ‘bout you, Sash? Ever been to America?”
Sasha shakes her head. “Closest I’ve come was getting to go onto one of their military bases in Ansbach. My family was on holiday in Germany and a boy asked me if I’d be his date to a holiday party. Evidently I was the only girl his age who spoke English he ran into who wasn’t already going with someone else.”
“We’ll all have to go sometime,” Tim says. “Close the Archives down for a couple weeks, the four of us can fly over and do the tourist thing.”
“I doubt Elias would go for that,” Jon says dryly, straightening up. “I barely was able to convince him to let us have a day or two off while the cleaning crews come in and get rid of the worm carcasses. Unless we manage to somehow convince him we’re doing research and that I need all of you with me, he’d likely insist at least one of us stay back.”
“Then we’ll sneak off,” Tim declares. “Leave the Institute on a Friday night, promise to see him Monday. Slip away under the cover of darkness, take a taxi to the airport, buy tickets under assumed names and catch a midnight flight. By the time he realizes we’re not coming in on Monday, we’ll be well dug in somewhere in America. He’ll never think to look for us there.”
“And then we’ll get fired the minute we set foot back in the Institute,” Sasha says.
“Nah, not us. Who’d take our place? Especially now? He’d have to hire from the outside and lie about the conditions. Worst we’ll have to endure is a lecture. ‘I am sorely disappointed in all of you, leaving the Archives in such a state and going on holiday. We won’t discuss this further, but I will have to refuse any further time off requests you make for the remainder of the year.’”
Sasha presses a hand to her mouth to stifle her giggles. “Shh, you’ll wake Martin.”
“What do you say, Boss?” Tim asks, undeterred. “Team Archives in America? Debunking ghosts and solving mysteries? Rent a technicolor cargo van and adopt a Great Dane?”
The corners of Jon’s mouth twitch upwards in a smile. “Actually, the idea of going on a trip with the three of you is, strangely enough, not an altogether unwelcome one. God knows I haven’t taken a holiday in ages.”
“Your enthusiasm is boundless,” Tim says dryly. He kicks off his shoes and sits down on the blanket nest he’s built. “Hey, maybe the Primes will cover for us. They can pretend to be you and Martin and just Sasha and I can take the time off.”
“I think it’s a bit obvious they’re not us. Especially now.” Jon looks over at Martin. “I—I am sorry. I should have been there. I should have…it should have been me. Not any of you.”
Tim sighs, the smirk melting off his face. “Well, according to your counterparts, Martin was the only one who didn’t get…wormed the first time, so maybe you not being there means fewer people got hurt.”
“While I’m not ungrateful that you and Sasha weren’t hurt, Tim, it doesn’t make me feel any better for not…being there to help. Not even knowing.”
“Yeah, well…it was spur of the moment, sort of. And I deliberately didn’t tell you. Figured you wouldn’t…I don’t know, want to stay? Encourage us to stay? I mean, like you told Martin, it is still technically where we work, even if he was living there for a while.”
Jon looks pained. “I…in truth, I probably wouldn’t have wanted you all to stay, but not…Elias thought I was overreacting anyway, having Martin living there. I’d have probably come up with some ridiculous reason why you shouldn’t stay, but really it would have boiled down to the fear that if Elias found out we were all staying, he might order Martin out, and I—I thought that would put him in danger.”
“Well, if you believe what Martin Prime apparently told him, he wasn’t really what she was after,” Sasha points out. The last couple of words are swallowed by a yawn.
“I don’t know what I believe, Sasha.” Jon sighs heavily and takes off his glasses. “Let’s…table this discussion for the morning, shall we?”
“Sounds good. Tomorrow, then.” Tim yawns and burrows into his blankets.
Sasha curls up on the love seat. She figures she’ll lie there until she’s sure the others are asleep, then get up and do some investigating on her laptop, but to her mild surprise, she drifts off almost as soon as her eyes close.