Tim is an unexpectedly good cook. Whether because of that or because everyone is still mulling over the little bits and drabs they’ve got from the Primes, breakfast is a rather silent affair. Martin doesn’t think he’s hungry until the plate is under his nose, and he’s not sure why it’s so hard for him to eat until he chokes down enough that Tim declares it can count as “with food” and Jon hurries out to get Martin’s pills for him. It’s only after they’ve started to work and he’s mostly done with his plate that he realizes it’s pain making him nauseous. Jon Prime gives him a knowing, understanding look and he has to look away.
Sasha offers to help Tim clean up, but he does most of it while they’re still eating and insists the rest of it can wait until later, so once everyone has finished and the stuff that won’t last sitting out is put away, they all head back into the living room. Martin supposes they could have this conversation in the kitchen around the table, but he also acknowledges that the seating in the living room is more comfortable, and he, at least, won’t last long in Tim’s kitchen chairs.
He starts to sit in the recliner again—it’s definitely the least comfortable seat in the room, not that it’s uncomfortable, just that it’s not exactly the best seat in the house, so Martin automatically assumes it’s his—but Jon stops him with a touch to his arm and a shake of his head and steers him towards the sofa. Sasha and Jon are both thin; Tim is a bit broader than them but not so broad as Martin, but they all manage to squeeze together onto the sofa somehow, Jon on one end and Sasha on the other and Martin sandwiched between Tim and Jon. The Primes sit on the love seat opposite them. Jon Prime rests his hand on top of Martin Prime’s without seeming to realize he’s doing it.
“Well,” he says. He sits up a little straighter, leans forward slightly, and looks directly at Jon. “Before we begin, I have two questions for you, and I’m fairly certain I know the answer to at least one, but…well, no one ever actually asked me these questions.”
Jon tenses, but says evenly, “Go ahead.”
“First question. How much do you want to know?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I can tell you everything I—we—learned in the two years between this point and when the world ended, but the more knowledge you have, the more dangerous things will be for you. Or I can tell you nothing more than you already know, and leave you to figure out what you can on your own. Or I can tell you something in between the two, in which case you would be trusting me with the decision of how much to tell you now and how much to let you discover for yourself.”
Jon is silent for a moment. Finally, he says, “Tell me—tell me everything you wished you’d known at this point.”
Jon Prime nods, as if that’s the answer he was expecting. Martin guesses that was the one he was fairly sure of. “Second question, then. How much do you want them to know?”
“Hey,” Sasha says, sounding offended.
Jon Prime doesn’t take his eyes off of Jon. “As I said, the more knowledge you have, the more dangerous things will be for you. The more people who have that knowledge, the danger will grow as well. And I can’t promise that some of these things won’t change the way they look at you. The way they react to you. Knowledge once given cannot be taken back.”
Jon looks down the sofa at the three of them. Martin tries to keep his face neutral, but he’s worried, and he knows it shows. Not so much about what might happen to him if he knows, but about what might happen to Jon.
“What about them?” he asks softly. “You said that the more people know, the—the more dangerous it is for me, but what about for them? If they know…will it put them in more danger?”
Jon Prime hesitates. “No,” he says at last. “The opposite. The more they know, the better able they’ll be to keep themselves safe.”
Jon straightens and looks his counterpart square in the eye. “If you’d led off with that, it wouldn’t have even been a question you needed to finish asking. I want them to know whatever they need to know to be safe.”
Jon Prime turns his attention to the assistants. “How much do you three want to know?”
“We have a choice?” Martin asks, surprised.
“Yes,” Jon Prime says simply. “There’s…so much you never had a choice about in our timeline. I refuse to do that to you again. Any of you.”
Sasha crosses her arms over her chest. “Call me curious, but I don’t think I can walk away from this without knowing more.”
“Yeah, screw it,” Tim says. “I’ve had enough fumbling around in the dark, and I want to know what the hell’s going on here. I’m not walking into anything else I don’t understand without a damned good reason.”
Jon Prime shifts his gaze. “Martin?”
Martin hesitates. He’s genuinely torn. On the one hand, he’s with the others; he hates not knowing what’s going on, and he’s more than a little afraid of getting into another situation like finding Jane Prentiss in that basement because he doesn’t know enough to steer clear. But at the same time, if it keeps Jon safe for him to stay ignorant, it’s a risk he’ll gladly run.
But will it actually keep Jon safe?
He looks, not at Jon Prime, but at Martin Prime. Martin Prime keeps his sightless gaze trained steadily in Martin’s direction, and there’s a pinched look on his face, like he knows what’s tearing Martin apart. Well, he probably does. As if he feels Martin’s eyes on him, as if he can sense the question Martin wants to ask, he gives a small, subtle nod.
“Whatever you want to tell us, I’ll listen,” he says, looking back at Jon Prime.
“All right,” Jon Prime says, exhaling hard. He nods and repeats, “All right. Well. Now that we’ve settled that…honestly, I’m not sure where to start.”
Martin worries at his lower lip. He runs through the dozens of questions he’s accumulated in the last week, every time Martin Prime has said it’s a long story and promised to explain when—he now knows—Jon Prime arrives, and tries to pick which one is the most pressing, the most important. Which one will be the easiest to answer. From the way the others are sitting, they’re probably thinking something similar. But Martin’s the one with the most pieces, so he knows that unless he wants Tim to break the ice with a borderline wisecrack, it’s probably on him to ask the first question.
At last, he looks at Martin Prime. “You mentioned…beings. Things that thrive on fear?” He turns to Jon Prime. “He said you could explain it better than he could.”
“I suppose the beginning is a good place to start,” Jon Prime says on a heavy exhale. His eyes flick from one of them to the other. “Right. What do you all know about Robert Smirke?”
Both Jon and Sasha give small sighs as Tim sits up a bit straighter. “The architect? One of the foremost proponents of Gothic Revival in the early nineteenth century. He was one of the first to use concrete and cast iron. He retired in—1845, I think, but he kept his hand in a bit. A lot of his work, in London at least, got destroyed somehow, but what’s still standing is brilliant in its symmetry. A master of subtle stability. And it’s interesting that his buildings have a higher percentage of paranormal sightings than any other architect of that school or style, I think. Might be why he rarely got taken up on his bids to design churches. His name cropped up any time an especially weird cult or sect popped up for a couple decades after his retirement. There were all sorts of rumors about what he might be involved in.”
They’ve all heard this before, Martin thinks, at least in bits and pieces. Architecture is one of Tim’s particular areas of expertise, and Robert Smirke in particular is something of an obsession. There’s not a lot of information out there about Smirke, though. Martin should know; he usually got the thankless tasks when he worked in the library, and he’d been the one assigned to pull any books on Robert Smirke for the new research assistant who was vague on what, exactly, he was trying to research. It’s one of the things he and Tim bonded over when they were first assigned to the Archives, those books. Tim will go off about Smirke any opportunity he gets, and Martin’s pretty sure that even Sasha tunes him out these days.
“Most of them false,” Jon Prime agrees. “Smirke himself wasn’t actually involved in any of that sort of thing, but his ideas got used—or misused, as he would have it.” He takes a deep breath. “Smirke designed a taxonomy of fears, and—well, it’s inaccurate, really, far too simplistic, an attempt to understand something that he never could have understood, but—”
“But if you’re learning your colors, you start out with the primary colors and branch out into shades and blending later on, once you know what you’re looking at,” Martin completes.
“Exactly.” Jon Prime smiles, briefly. “Smirke’s theory was that there were fourteen…entities, creatures of fear. They don’t just thrive on it—they are fear.”
“There are more than fourteen things to be afraid of in the world,” Jon says, in a rough approximation of his skeptic voice. “Where do you draw the line?”
“God, you are me. I said the same thing when I first found out about all this.” Jon Prime worries at the cuff of his sleeve, then seems to consciously stop himself and press his palm into his leg instead. It’s only then that Martin realizes he’s wearing the blue sweater, the one Martin Prime wore yesterday and Martin himself has taken off because he’s comfortable enough in his shirtsleeves, and Martin Prime is wearing the dark green one Jon Prime was wearing when he came in. It fits him perfectly, which is how Martin realizes that Jon Prime was evidently wearing one of Martin Prime’s sweaters.
He has no idea what to do with that information, so he decides the safest thing to do is ignore it before he blurts out something and makes a complete tit of himself.
“As Martin says, they’re like colors,” Jon Prime continues. “You can look at something and call it ‘indigo’ or ‘lilac’, but it’s still purple. There may be infinite colors, but we tend to lump them into bigger categories. Sky blue and navy are both considered blue, but pink is an entirely separate color from red. Of course, with the fears, it’s not so much a spectrum as an amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in all directions. I think I summed it up at the time I learned all this as ‘like colors, but if colors hated me.’”
“You, specifically,” Tim says. His voice is as deadpan as it usually is when he’s making a joke, but like Jon’s, it’s shaky. Martin suspects that none of them want to believe any of this, but it all makes too much sense for them not to.
“Yes, well, I’d spent two years getting kicked around by them before I got all this information,” Jon Prime shoots back. “Forgive me if I took it a little personally.”
Martin Prime rubs his thumb over Jon Prime’s in a comforting gesture. “Where Smirke comes into the weird…cults and whatnot is that most of those sprung up around the worship of these beings. Like they’re gods of some kind. They’re not, and they’re certainly not benevolent in the slightest, even to the people most devoted to them. You really can’t—nobody comes away from them in one piece. The ones who make statements? They’re the lucky ones. The ones who walked away, at least for a while. Not always forever.”
Martin doesn’t have to ask if that includes them. “So—w-what are they? I mean, not ‘what are they if they’re not gods’, but what are they, specifically? You said—one of them has something to do with spiders?”
Jon flinches. Jon Prime exhales. “The Web. Spiders, yes, but also…loss of control. Being manipulated. The fear of being trapped in something you can’t see. Addiction falls under its auspices, too.”
“Other insects…” Tim’s voice trails off. “Jane Prentiss. She’s one of them?”
“She wasn’t an entity herself, but she’d definitely been claimed by the Corruption,” Jon Prime confirms. “Insects, disease, rot. Filth. That creeping feeling of things burrowing under your skin, filling you full of holes…”
“Stop,” Jon says through gritted teeth. He squeezes Martin’s hand. Martin’s almost positive he doesn’t know he’s doing it and bites the inside of his cheek to keep from yelping in pain as his thumb digs into one of the worm holes.
“What, you think I don’t know what that’s like?” Jon Prime holds up both hands, backs towards them, letting the sleeves slip down towards his elbows, and they can all see the scars dotting his forearms. So Martin has that to look forward to, at least. “It’s a damned lucky thing you—we—knew how to stop her.”
“Michael.” Sasha leans forward. “He’s one of them. The fear of—confusion?”
Martin Prime nods quickly. “Madness. The fear that your mind isn’t your own. The entity as a whole is the Spiral. Michael—he’s just one aspect of it, the Distortion.”
Jon eases his grip on Martin’s hand, and Martin tries not to sigh audibly with relief. “The Dark, of course.”
“Of course,” Jon Prime agrees. “Who isn’t at least a little afraid of the dark?”
“And fire is another?”
“An aspect of the Desolation. The fear of pain, of loss, of unthinking or cruel destruction.” Jon Prime snorts. “I started calling it the Church of the Lightless Flame at one point, but it’s the Desolation.”
“The Lightless Flame,” Jon repeats. “Christ, that was—which statement was that? Th-the nurse, Ms. Saraki, with the burn victims. The second time Gerard Keay came up.”
Martin remembers, and just like that, he realizes that they must have dealt with all the entities, over the course of the statements. They’ve done too many real statements for them not to have hit all fourteen by now. He racks his brain, trying to figure out the ones they haven’t come up with. They’ve got five now. The People’s Church of the Divine Host, they’ve had a couple statements dealing with that, that’s probably the Dark…and maybe the one about the woman whose sister got lost caving, but—hang on.
“Claustrophobia’s one, isn’t it?” he guesses. “Or…small spaces? Being enclosed or—or buried alive?” He tries not to let his voice shake when he says it, but like Jon and spiders, that’s one he’s never been able to handle.
From the look on Jon Prime’s face, he knows that—of course he does. “The Buried. Being crushed alive, not able to breathe—not having enough space.”
“A-and then there’s having too much space,” Martin says quickly, trying to push the mental image of being trapped in a coffin or a cave out of his head. “Heights and—and empty spaces, that sort of thing? Like—hang on, which one was it—that first statement we looked into where someone found a Leitner, Ex Altoria—”
“The Vast,” Martin Prime supplies. “Vertigo, agoraphobia, deep water, fear of your own insignificance in the universe. Any time you come across the name Fairchild, especially Simon Fairchild, that’s definitely a sign you’ve come across the Vast.”
Tim counts on his fingers. “We’re halfway there…I guess death is one of them, huh? I mean, a lot of people are afraid of that.”
“Terminus. The End. Simple, but always there.”
“War’s part of that, I guess?”
Jon Prime shakes his head. “War is the Slaughter. Not unstoppable like the End, or targeted or premeditated. Just pure, unpredictable violence.”
Sasha sits forward a little. “We keep—there have been a lot of statements about…meat. What’s with that?”
Martin’s wondered that himself. Jon Prime grimaces. “The Flesh. The fear of being eaten, or…twisted.”
“The Boneturner’s Tale,” Jon murmurs. Martin wishes it didn’t hurt so much to hold someone’s hand, because he wants to comfort Jon somehow. He knows how much he hates those Leitner books, which makes sense if he encountered one once. “Hang on, though—how is that so common that it’s one of the major fourteen? There can’t be that many people afraid of it.”
Jon Prime gives a soft huff of laughter. It doesn’t sound particularly amused, though. “You think only humans feel fear?”
Martin’s eyes widen as he thinks about the statement they spent the last week looking into, the man who worked at the abattoir and the man who disappeared. It’s almost enough to turn him vegetarian. Almost. “Is that why those statements are all so…weird?”
“More or less. You start mixing more primitive, animalistic fear with a complicated human brain, and things get twisted.”
“Hunting’s not part of that, though,” Sasha says.
“No,” Martin Prime says quietly, and something flashes across his face. “The Hunt is its own entity. It’s another one that started with animals, but it still touches plenty of humans.”
Tim scans Martin Prime’s face, eyes flicking back and forth. “You don’t like that one much, do you?”
“It’s definitely one of my least favorite, yes.”
“So…” Tim glances at Martin, and there’s genuine worry in his eyes before he looks back at Martin Prime. “You’ve encountered it? Did it…do something to you?”
“Yes,” Jon Prime says, at the same time that Martin Prime says, “Not to me.”
They look at each other, or at least in one another’s direction, since Martin Prime can’t see—at least Martin is assuming he’s really blind, he’s still wearing his glasses, although Martin’s worn glasses since he was two years old and at this point he probably feels naked without them—and then Martin Prime amends, “Not directly. Not before the world ended.”
Jon Prime rubs his throat absently, but doesn’t say anything. There’s a long silence before Jon speaks, a single word that drops into the middle of the room like a lead balloon. “Isolation.”
“The Lonely,” Jon Prime says softly. He turns to look at the others, and Martin flinches at the pain in his eyes. “The feeling that you’re…alone. Maybe because there’s no one there, maybe because you just can’t connect. Maybe because you aren’t worth that connection.”
Something twists deep in Martin’s chest. He knows that feeling all too well; it basically encapsulates his strange, unhappy childhood. Tim’s arm drops lightly onto Martin’s shoulders, his hand brushing Jon’s beyond it, and when Martin glances Tim’s way he sees that his other arm is behind Sasha—like he’s reminding all three of them that they’re not alone, that they’re all here together. “Why do you look like you hate that one so much? I mean…that one doesn’t sound too dangerous, compared to the others.”
“I’m not fond of anything that tries to take someone I care about away from me. And the Lonely very nearly succeeded.” Jon Prime’s eyes flick over to Martin Prime, just briefly. “In truth, the only one I can honestly say I hate more than the Lonely is the Stranger.”
Martin Prime nods, his lips pressed tightly together. Sasha looks back and forth between the two of them. “That’s…fear of the unknown?”
“The unknown, the uncanny, the creeping sense that something isn’t right,” Jon Prime confirms. “The fear of someone who might be following you. Masks, mannequins…clowns.”
A shudder runs through Tim’s body. Sasha exhales. “Well, that’s…that’s thirteen. Funny, you’d expect there to only be thirteen fears, right? I mean, that’s a bad luck number to a lot of people.”
“Yeah, but this is Robert Smirke we’re talking about,” Martin says absently. “His big thing was balance—” He stops as the words leave his mouth and straightens. Balance. Everything has an opposite, something that counters it. You can’t fear being buried alive if you don’t know there’s such a thing as open space. You can’t fear random, purposeless violence if you don’t know that there’s another way of dying violently. Which means…what’s the opposite of the Stranger?
“Knowledge,” he breathes. “That’s the fourteenth fear? The fear of—of being known, of being watched? Or of knowing too much?”
“The Beholding,” Jon Prime says. “The Ceaseless Watcher. It Knows You. It’s got a lot of names.”
“We usually just call it the Eye,” Martin Prime adds.
I should have realized that whatever hid you from the Eye would mean I couldn’t see you either. Martin recalls Jon Prime’s half-frantic spewing of words when he first arrived. He thinks about the sensation they all get in the Archives of being watched, the near-compulsive way they prod into things that…really ought to be left alone, the way Jon gets twitchy when he reads the statements aloud, the sick feeling in his stomach when he couldn’t find anything on Ex Altoria and the headache that hadn’t gone away until he’d gone back to Carlos Vittery’s old apartment. “That’s the one that runs the Institute, then.”
“What?” All three of the other members of the Archival team stare at Martin with varying degrees of incredulity. He blushes.
Jon Prime nods. “More accurate, I think, to say that the Institute was set up for its benefit, but yes. The Institute is the Eye’s pedestal. And you are all bound to its service. I’m sorry.”
“No. No, no, no, I did not sign up for this.” Tim looks seriously upset. “I’m here to stop this sort of thing, not to join it—”
“So quit,” Jon Prime says, a bit sharply, looking Tim square in the eye.
Tim freezes. “What?”
“Quit. Walk away. Lean around and give your notice, right now. Tell him you’re done.”
If anything, that just makes Tim even more upset. Martin has never seen him so agitated—he looks almost like he’s on the verge of literal tears. “What the hell happens to me?” he blurts out. “First you think I’d actually make tasteless jokes about Martin being blind, now you think I’d just—walk away? Abandon my friends—my family? What the fuck did I do to make you think I’d just leave the only people I have left in the world at the mercy of some gigantic spooky fear monster?”
Jon Prime jerks back as if Tim has slapped him. He looks genuinely taken aback. Now Martin is wondering what happened to Tim in their timeline. Why he didn’t come back with them, why they both seem to simultaneously miss him and expect him to just up stakes and vanish.
“Tim, no, it’s not like that,” Martin Prime intervenes, his voice gentle. “Trust me, if you did quit, the rest would be right behind you. The point is that you can’t.”
“Damn right,” Tim mutters.
“No, literally. You can’t quit. You’re bound to the Institute—well, to the Archives really. You can’t quit, you can’t get fired. You can’t even leave for too long or you’ll start to get sick. Physically, mentally, literally, you cannot quit.”
That, Martin thinks, might be the most surprising thing he’s learned in the last week. He thinks this rather distantly, since it’s hard to focus through the white noise seeming to fill his mind. He remembers the resignation letters he typed up but deleted without even saving, let alone printing. Remembers, too, Sasha muttering about looking for another job and then never bringing it up again. It’s not like there’s no evidence for what Martin Prime is saying, but it’s still out of the clear blue sky and he’s not sure what to do with the information.
This time, it’s Jon that breaks the silence, his voice choked and shaky. “Oh, God.”
“There’s no way out?” Sasha demands. “Truly? There has to be something—something other than dying, I mean. You can’t honestly be saying we’re inevitably stuck until we die.”
“There’s—well, for you all there are two ways out,” Martin Prime says slowly. “Neither one is particularly pleasant, and, well, one of them does involve death. If—if the Archivist dies, then the Assistants have the option of leaving.”
Nope. No, Martin is not going to consider that an option. Jon is not going to die just so the rest of them can be freed. “And the other way out? The one that doesn’t involve dying?”
Martin Prime tips his head to one side, as if he’s studying Martin. “You have to remove your connection to the Beholding.”
Martin snorts. “So, what…gouge your eyes out or something?”
Jon Prime and Martin Prime both simply look at him, or at least in his direction. Jon Prime still looks haunted; Martin Prime just looks serious. Ice water floods Martin’s veins. “Fuck off.”
“Yep, he’s me,” Martin Prime says to Jon Prime. He rubs his thumb over the back of Jon Prime’s again. “Jon, breathe. It’s all right.”
“It’s…” Jon Prime closes his eyes and shakes his head slowly. When he opens them again, they’re wet with unshed tears as they flick back and forth from Jon to Tim. “God, I thought this part would be easier. I don’t know why. It’s never easy. But I thought…I am sorry.”
“You didn’t do this,” Martin protests. He looks at Jon, their Jon, and back to Jon Prime. “Either of you. It’s not—I mean, you didn’t set this up to be like this. And, and you didn’t force us to do this—”
“I requested you,” Jon protests.
“You didn’t request me,” Martin says. Jon looks away, evidently uncomfortable with the reminder. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have said no even if Elias had actually given me a choice, so—”
“Hang on, what?” Jon Prime blinks, then turns to Martin Prime. “You—you didn’t get a choice?”
“No,” Martin Prime says. His eyes widen. “Christ, I never—how did that not ever occur to me? He called me into his office and told me he’d finally appointed a new Head Archivist and that he’d decided to send me along as one of your assistants, that I would be down there first thing on Monday. I don’t think I even had time to say thanks before he sent me off to pack up my desk in the library.”
“Oh, God.” Jon Prime turns to Tim and Sasha. “What about you? Were you asked or told?”
“I—” Sasha frowns at him. “I didn’t—”
“Answer the question, Sasha.”
Static crackles in the air, and Sasha answers immediately. “Told. Elias said that he’d decided to go in a different direction than hiring me as Head Archivist, but he was sure I could still be useful to the Archives and that Jon would need me as an assistant. I told him if I wasn’t going to get the job I had applied for I’d be happier staying where I was, and he replied that wasn’t an option.” She presses a hand to her mouth, her eyes widening as she looks over at Jon. “Oh, God, I—Jon, I don’t—I’m sorry, I—”
“Jon,” Martin Prime says, exasperation and disapproval and maybe a bit of worry in his tone. It sounds like a five-minute lecture condensed into a single word.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t mean to do that, I wasn’t thinking…” Jon Prime inhales sharply and rubs at his face with the hand not now gripping Martin Prime’s so tightly his fingertips are going white. “I-it’s been so long since I’ve dealt with—it, it’s not the same, I’ve gotten so used to—I am sorry. I swear I won’t do that again.”
“What did you do?” Martin asks. He probably shouldn’t, but it sounds like it’s genuinely upsetting Jon Prime, and if they can stop Jon from having to do it as well, it’s probably not a bad thing.
“I—I compelled her. It’s one of the abilities I have from the Eye. I can—make people tell me things. Force statements out of them, that sort of thing.” Jon Prime uncovers his face, and he looks almost as upset as Tim did at being told to try and quit. “It’s invasive, and I try not to do it more than I have to and—I am so sorry, Sasha.”
“Wait, you can do that?” Tim leans around Martin to frown at Jon. His eyes are red-rimmed and his face is still pale, but he looks at least a little calmer.
“No,” Jon says, sounding genuinely distressed. “Of course not.”
“Not quite to that extent,” Martin Prime says. “It’s something that…develops, I guess?”
Jon Prime looks at Martin Prime in worry and confusion. “No, no, I—I didn’t start being able to do that until after—”
“Jon, I wasn’t going to tell you Gertrude Robinson had been shot until they confirmed that was what killed her,” Martin Prime says quietly. “Or at least until you’d slept some. You looked like hell and—last thing I wanted was you panicking that someone was running around gunning for you, literally. I didn’t realize it then, just assumed I was, I don’t know, trying to make you less agitated. That maybe if you knew for sure you wouldn’t be up all night torturing yourself or whatever. But…well, later on, I started learning what to listen for, and I realized what it was. I don’t know if it would have worked if I hadn’t been so tired, or if it was something I really didn’t want to tell you, but you did compel me to answer you. At least a little.”
“You never told me.”
“It never really came up?”
“God. All this time I thought—Martin, you—you know I’d never—I d-didn’t ever want to—I wouldn’t have—”
“Okay, you are starting to spiral.” Martin Prime turns his hand over and squeezes Jon Prime’s, then reaches forward like he’s going for the other one. “Maybe we should stop for a few minutes and—”
“No, I-I’m fine. I’m fine.” Jon Prime takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, then looks back up at Jon and the others sitting on Tim’s sofa. “We need to…there’s more we need to discuss.”
Martin thinks to himself that he’s never seen someone obviously less fine, and at first he assumes Jon Prime is only getting away with it because Martin Prime can’t actually see the look on his face. But a quick glance at Martin Prime shows otherwise. Martin Prime is absolutely aware of Jon Prime’s condition, maybe better than anyone else in the room, but he’s letting him get away with it for reasons of his own. He’s sure that won’t last long, though. They’ve got to speed this up, but the trouble is that the whole situation is taking on the aspect of a hydra. For every question answered, three more questions pop up, and Martin no longer knows where the thread is going. If he ever knew in the first place.
“Okay, so…wait. W-wait. Let me make sure I’ve got everything straight so far,” he says, more to give everyone else a bit of breathing room than anything else. He’s just as confused and off-balance, probably, but he’s not going to show it. “Fourteen fear beings, each with their own…followers and paths and all that. One of them is in charge of the Institute. We’re all trapped in its service as long as it can…use us. Jon—I’m guessing since he’s the Head Archivist, he’s…closer to it than the rest of us are, which is why he’s got some of its powers. Most of the statements, the real statements, the ones that won’t go on the computer, they’re somehow related to at least one of the entities. And it’s only going to get worse from here on out. Have I got all that right?”
“Basically, yes.” Jon Prime manages a smile. “Although hopefully we can keep it from getting too much worse.”
“Right, okay.” Martin tries to think of where to go next. “So, ah, so—Elias. How—how much does he know? I mean, he’s the head of the Institute, but…does he know about…all of this? The fears and the Archives and—everything?”
“He said he usually knows what’s going on in the Institute,” Tim says, his voice tight. He draws his arms from the back of the sofa and clenches his fists, resting them on his thighs. “And you sounded a lot like you hated him when we talked earlier. It’s because he knows all this crap, isn’t it? He knew all of it and he let us walk in blind. Ah, no offense.”
“That,” Martin Prime says, “is barely scratching the surface. And none taken. But yes. He knows all of it.”
“That’s…” Martin swallows hard, fighting down the resurgence of nausea. “That’s kind of messed up.”
Jon Prime lets out a bitter and brittle laugh. “Oh, you have no idea.”
“So tell us,” Sasha says. “You said you’d tell us what you wanted to know.”
“Yes. And Gertrude Robinson did attempt to leave a warning for me, it—she just wasn’t able to.” Jon Prime takes a deep breath. “Elias. He—was originally known as Jonah Magnus. Before he was Elias Bouchard, he was James Wright.”
“What?” Martin’s voice jumps to a pitch he hasn’t hit since he was sixteen.
“No. No, that doesn’t make any sense.” Sasha presses her fingertips to her temples. “Elias Bouchard was hired at the Magnus Institute by James Wright. He’d been here for five years when Wright died and Elias was promoted directly from filing clerk to head of the Institute. They were in the same place at the same time, they were both there. They can’t be the same person.”
“Unless Wright killed him and took his place,” Tim mutters.
Martin Prime winces. “That’s…kind of close to what happened, actually. Jonah Magnus has been body-hopping for generations, to keep himself alive. Finding a new vessel every time the old one starts getting…well, old. It’s the eyes. I mean, Elias’ eyes, they’re actually Jonah Magnus’ eyes. That’s how he takes over.”
Yeah, okay, Martin is definitely going to be sick now. He presses a hand to his mouth. Jon’s entire body goes rigid. “My God, how deep did he go into servitude to this…thing?”
“All the way,” Jon Prime says grimly. “In addition to whatever it is he does to transfer his…essence to his new bodies…and believe me, that is not something I have ever wanted to know in detail…he has some powers of clairvoyance. He can see out of any eye, real or symbolic. He can also read minds, to a limited extent, and implant images in the mind.”
“What, like…make you hallucinate?” Sasha sounds almost as curious as she does concerned.
Martin Prime shakes his head. “Not exactly. More like…he can make you picture things in your head. Events, memories…perceptions.”
Martin has to swallow twice before he can speak, in a voice much smaller than usual. “Is…is that what you meant? When you said…” He trails off, hoping Martin Prime remembers the conversation without him having to repeat it.
“Yes,” Martin Prime says quietly. “Mind you, I don’t know how much of what he showed me was based on reality and how much of it was based on…I mean, she’s not well. But yes.”
It doesn’t take a huge leap of logic for Martin to figure out what his counterpart means. Whatever Elias showed him, it’s something to do with his—their—mother. Tim’s the one who speaks up next. “Can he see us now, though? Like, if he can see through any eye, read minds…can he see us?”
“In theory, possibly. In practice, no,” Jon Prime answers. “I’ve…taken precautions. Besides, the Archivist is very closely tied to the Eye, so it’s possible that there being two of us here will create enough of a feedback loop that the room will function as a—a blind spot, so to speak. Too much interference for him to See properly in here.”
“But ordinarily?”
“If he tries…yes. I think the three of you are safe, more or less. You’re not his focus. And since he’s deliberately keeping your Archivist in the dark, obviously he doesn’t think any of you know anything.”
Sasha nods slowly. “So that feeling we get in the Archives, like we’re being watched—that’s Elias? Excuse me, Jonah?”
“No, that’s the Eye itself,” Martin Prime answers. “We’re…pretty sure Elias can only see out of one set of eyes at a time? And he has to be able to give it some attention. When he’s focused on something else, you’re safe. That feeling of being watched, though, that’s the Beholder. I mean, they don’t call it the Ceaseless Watcher for nothing.”
“Is it watching us now?” Sasha asks. “Or does it only watch us at the Institute?”
“I—” Jon Prime hesitates. His lips part and his eyes go slightly unfocused.
“Jon, no—” Martin Prime begins, his face going pale.
There’s another crackle of static, like when Jon Prime asked the question that Sasha had to answer, but it rapidly increases in pitch and volume until it’s more like a squeal of feedback. Martin screws up his eyes and tries to cover his ears, but the noise seems to be transmitted through his very teeth and bones—
And then, abruptly, it vanishes, leaving an almost ringing silence in its wake. Martin opens his eyes to see Jon Prime gasping heavily for air, his eyes closed, his whole body trembling.
“Oh, God, that hurt,” he pants.
“You know an eye can’t see inside itself, Jon,” Martin Prime says sternly. His expression immediately softens, though, as he reaches over tentatively and places his hand on Jon’s back, rubbing gently. Martin swallows down on no small amount of jealousy, which is a stupid and totally inappropriate reaction under the circumstances. “Okay. I’m putting my foot down. Now we have to do the statement.”
“Yes, I…I don’t think I can…last much longer if we…don’t.” Jon Prime’s voice is a mere thread, and he’s slurring his words.
“What are you talking about?” Jon frowns.
“I…” Jon Prime flounders for a moment, then looks up at Martin Prime in mute appeal. After a second, he seems to realize that won’t work and touches Martin Prime’s thigh.
It can’t be that much force, but Martin Prime evidently feels it. Something flickers over his face briefly, and Martin knows with utmost certainty that he wants to wrap Jon Prime in a hug and hold him until he stops shaking. Martin’s felt that desire with Jon more than once, but he also knows it’s a desire that isn’t going to lead anywhere any time soon; Jon seems to avoid physical contact like the plague. They’ve touched more in the last twelve hours than Martin thinks they’ve touched in the entire almost-year they’ve known each other and he’s sure it’s going to stop as soon as the shock of seeing the chaos at the Archives wears off. And despite the relieved way Jon Prime and Martin Prime clung to each other when Jon Prime first showed up, Martin’s pretty sure a protective cuddle is still out of the question.
“The statements feed the Ceaseless Watcher,” Martin Prime explains slowly. “He’s tied very closely to it, which means…well, to a certain extent, they feed him, too. At any rate, the longer he goes without a statement, the—the weaker he gets? And using his powers drains him faster. What he just did, in addition to being incredibly ill-advised to begin with, pushed him way too far. If he doesn’t get a statement, now, it might actually kill him.”
“I—I don’t actually—I mean, it’s not like we just keep those on hand,” Jon stammers. He looks shaken, which, well, Martin can understand that. It’s not easy staring down your own future, and this isn’t exactly something to look forward to.
“Too stale,” Jon Prime says hoarsely. He takes a deep breath and sort of manages to straighten up, but frankly, he looks like hell.
“He hasn’t had one since he got back, a week ago now,” Martin Prime elaborates. “And the old statements, they—don’t have the same power to them? It’s like trying to live off of granola bars. It’s possible, but it really sucks, and they don’t keep you going as well as a good meal. He needs a live statement.” He taps his temple lightly. “Fortunately, I have one on hand.”
“What, you’ve just been hoarding them?” Tim asks.
Martin Prime actually smiles a little, obviously not offended. “My journey back here wasn’t exactly straightforward, you might say.” The smile vanishes as he adds, “M-maybe we should…try to go into the other room, Jon. Or you all should leave. This might be a bit…much.”
“We’re staying,” Jon says firmly. “Tone it down if you have to, but—I can’t walk away from this, I don’t think.”
“He’s right,” Jon Prime says. He turns his exhausted eyes onto Martin Prime. “They won’t…don’t make them try to imagine it.”
Martin swallows, but tries not to visibly react otherwise. Jon Prime is right. Knowing the little bit that he knows…he won’t be able to stop himself from coming up with dozens of possible scenarios, and all of them will probably be way worse than just knowing the truth.
Martin Prime sighs heavily, then nods. “All right. Let’s go.”