The room wasn’t silent. Silence would definitely have been preferable to the faint but…distinctly organic sounds left behind in the aftermath of everything. There was a wet sucking sound every time someone so much as shifted their weight, let alone tried to pick up a foot and actually move, and an annoyingly intermittent splat as a thick, viscous liquid formed a bulbous drop and smacked into the center of a slowly forming puddle. The air, always somewhat chilly, seemed downright cold, and only long practice stopped Basira from showing how she was feeling.
Fuck, that had been a bad one.
Tim was the only one besides Basira who was still on his feet, but he was leaning heavily on the axe, his chest heaving for air, looking slightly shell-shocked. Melanie was on her hands and knees, streaked and spattered with pink and red, her hand still wrapped around the handle of the knife she had shoved to the tang into the last heap of meat to go down, sobbing for breath or maybe in anger. Sasha knelt next to her, one hand between her shoulder blades, talking to her softly; Basira couldn’t tell if it was having any effect at all, or frankly if it was helping Sasha any—she looked more bothered by the mess on the floor and, in fact, kept picking up her free hand and starting to rest it on her lap before hovering it awkwardly for a few seconds and then gingerly setting it down on the floor again. A few feet away, Martin still sat slumped where he had crumpled after the weird door vanished, back to a stack of boxes they were probably going to have to burn. His face was the color of old putty, and his breathing was shallow and slightly ragged. He was leaning heavily on Jon, his head resting on his shoulder, and Jon gently ran his fingers through Martin’s curls with his cheek pressed against the top of his head, a look of such tenderness and pain on his face that Basira had to look away.
The sound of a door banging open came from somewhere across the Archives. Martin’s head shot from Jon’s shoulder and his eyes snapped open, the green glow rising in them again; Tim straightened quickly, and Jon jerked upwards like he was going to get to his feet. Basira clenched her fists, not sure what she could do—she hadn’t exactly been very effective just now—but willing to try, since she was probably in the best shape out of all of them. In the split second it took her to think about it, though, Sasha fell back on her arse as Melanie’s head snapped up, and she leaped to her feet with a wild cry, yanking the knife out with a squelch as she did so.
“Melanie, wait—” Martin got to his feet with a speed that told Basira he was almost certainly going to collapse again as soon as this moment passed.
“Whoa!” Gerard caught Melanie’s wrist just in time. The knife fell out of her hand and clattered to the floor. “Neens, it’s me. It’s just me.”
Basira crossed her arms tightly over her chest to try and smother the emotions that rose in her chest at the expressions that skated across Melanie’s face—surprise, shock, and a mix of panic and devastation as it hit her that she had very nearly eviscerated her brother instead of an intruder. In typical Melanie fashion, however, she hit him with her free hand rather than apologize.
“You bastard,” she yelled as he gave a startled oomph and let go of her wrist. “What the hell were you thinking, just barging in here? Have you not ever heard of calling ahead?”
“Melanie,” Martin said, as emphatically as he could through tightly clenched teeth. Jon got to his feet beside him and took a breath, but a hand on his shoulder and a sharp shake of the head from Martin stopped whatever he was planning in his tracks. Probably that weird Simon Says thing he’d taken to doing in the last few months; he didn’t do it often, partly because Martin usually stopped him, but occasionally he tried to whip it out. He’d tried earlier to no effect, but Melanie was—theoretically anyway—easier for him to lay orders on.
Gerard held out both hands and looked around the Archives. “Would you have answered if I had? Or would it just have distracted you at a crucial point?”
Melanie looked like she was gearing up for another attack, but Sasha, who was probably going to have to burn her skirt now too, managed to get to her feet and wrapped her in a bear hug from behind. Restraint or embrace, Basira couldn’t say—maybe both—but Melanie only struggled against it for a second before sighing and giving up the fight, for a moment anyway.
Martin exhaled, the glow in his eyes vanished, and his entire body sagged once more. Jon caught him, or tried to, but he was close to a foot shorter and a good deal skinnier, especially these days, and it wound being something of a barely controlled mutual collapse. The second they were on the floor, he practically crawled into Martin’s lap and held onto him as Martin leaned against the desk this time for support to keep him from being completely flat out on the floor. It seemed that whatever he’d done—probably tried to Know who or what was coming—had taken what little of his strength remained.
Gerard looked momentarily torn, then evidently decided that Martin was in good enough hands for the moment and stepped over to Tim, then touched his shoulder gently, as if he wasn’t sure it would be welcome. It evidently was, as Tim let go of the axe and wrapped his arms around Gerard instead.
“That was fun,” he said dryly. It would have been unconvincing even if Basria hadn’t known what they’d just gone through.
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” Gerard swiped at something wet on Tim’s cheek with his thumb. It…probably wasn’t Tim’s. Basira didn’t think he’d got that close. “What the hell happened? And how the hell did it happen so fast? The wards just went crazy all of a sudden and I got here as quick as I could, but…” He gestured helplessly at the mess.
“Flesh,” Basira said succinctly. Gerard’s eyes barely flicked in her direction.
“I don’t know,” Sasha admitted. She risked resting her chin on Melanie’s head; Melanie showed her affection by not immediately removing it, from both her head and Sasha’s. “One minute everything was fine, if, you know, tense, and then suddenly, wham, we’re being attacked by sentient hamburger.”
“It’s only hamburger if it comes from the Hamburg region of Germany. Otherwise it’s just sparkling ground beef.” Gerard groaned dramatically, and Tim continued more seriously. “It was definitely the Flesh. Pretty sure the thing…leading or conducting or whatever was Jared Hopworth. Not that I’ve ever seen him before, but it fit what gets said about him in most of the statements he’s in.”
“It was.” Martin’s voice was a mere thread. Jon looked up at his face, eyes full of worry.
“Martin, Jesus, you sound like hell.” Gerard looked over Tim’s head at him. “What did you do?”
Martin let out a tiny huff of air. “What I had to.”
“You need—y-you need a statement. Or, or something.” Jon made as if to rise, but seemed reluctant to let go of Martin.
“Probably…more than one.” Martin tipped his head back against the desk and breathed slowly. “Give me a few minutes.”
“He was using his abilities to…stay on top of things,” Sasha told Gerard. “Give us as much of an edge as he could. And, you know, survive. Melanie and Tim fought most of them off.”
“Be accurate, Sash. Melanie fought most of them off,” Tim said. “I got like three, and only because Martin gave me a heads-up.”
“Well, look on the bright side,” Melanie said, her voice full of false joviality. “If you need a second income, you can always get a job as a hairdresser.”
Sasha looked slightly unhappy as she touched the back of her newly exposed neck, but said only, “You saved my life, anyway.”
“Maybe.”
“Almost certainly.”
“You did,” Gerard said, quietly but with absolute conviction. “Somebody nearly died, anyway. It’s why I was rushing so hard to get here. I felt—I could sense a death waiting for me, and then it just…snapped. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Jon looked around, as best he could from where he was, anyway. “I-I mean…a lot of things died here.”
“A lot of things stopped living,” Gerard corrected him. “They weren’t aware enough to die.” He blinked. “Or not enough to be satisfying to Terminus, anyway. I…take it Jared Hopworth escaped?”
“Not exactly,” Basira muttered.
She didn’t expect anyone to hear her. She didn’t know if they did or not. Sasha’s statement might have been connected, but then again it might not. “Michael was here.”
“The Distortion?” Gerard frowned deeply.
“No,” Martin said firmly. “Michael.” He opened his eyes, but there was a half-blind look in them, like he had a migraine, or maybe like he’d just woken up. “I mean, the…Distortion was here too, but…it was Michael that helped.”
Gerard exhaled heavily. “Christ, Martin, you had to deal with the Flesh and the Spiral in one day? No wonder you’re exhausted. You’re going to need something stronger than old bits of paper.”
“What do you suggest?” Martin said, as close to testy as he was probably capable of right about then. “That I go…pounce some random person at a Tesco Express? Ask them to…spill their secrets?” He swallowed and closed his eyes again. “I at least need to…start with the paper ones. Otherwise I…won’t be able to get up.”
Jon made a small, distressed noise in the back of his throat and curled closer to Martin for a moment. “I’ll get you something, hold on.”
“Just…let me rest for a minute, Jon. I’ll…be okay.” Martin turned and pressed a soft kiss to the crown of Jon’s head, then groaned quietly and dropped his head back against the desk, as if even that slight movement had cost him dearly. Anyone with half a brain could see that he wasn’t anywhere near the vicinity of okay.
Basira looked around the Archives as Sasha attempted to explain to Gerard what, exactly, had gone down. What a mess. This was going to take forever to clean up. She was almost tempted to ask why bother, since they’d really only just finished cleaning up from the last one, but, well, at least that one hadn’t involved…viscera. This wasn’t just chaos, it was gross, and they couldn’t stay down here in it. They also couldn’t very well leave it, not really. Not for more than overnight or the weekend, and even that was rapidly becoming a luxury. Basira honestly couldn’t remember if Martin had set foot out of the Archives to go into the rest of the building, let alone outside, in the last month. Certainly he always seemed to be there when she came in after an increasingly rare night in her own flat.
They hadn’t had long to believe, or pretend to believe, they’d really won after Elias’s arrest. Basira, for lack of anything better to do, had gone up to Elias’s old office with the idea of…she didn’t know what, getting the tapes maybe, or getting out their employment contracts and burning them to see if that would free them. Manal had been away from her desk, and the door had opened easily enough, but she hadn’t been in more than thirty seconds when a man’s voice spoke from behind and introduced himself as the temporary Head of the Institute “while Elias is incapacitated”. He’d assured her things would continue to run smoothly, and she’d escaped, defeated, to tell the others. Warn might be a better word for that. Martin had gone white when she’d named the man, then gone up to introduce himself as Archivist, or so he said. As far as Basira knew, he still hadn’t been able to do that, or anything else. They knew Peter Lukas was up there—God knew he sent out enough memos about reorganization and policies, and they’d all heard what had happened to the two guys in Research who’d decided to ignore one of them—but it didn’t seem like anyone else had seen him. Just her.
Not that anyone in the Institute was really talking to anyone else. Basira had never really been one for socializing in the breakroom anyway, even with the Archives staff, but now it was like everyone was actively ignoring her when she ventured above the basement level. Even Manal had stopped saying hello when she passed by. She wasn’t sure how much of it was the influence of the Lonely permeating every level of the building and how much was her specifically, or how much of it was the current situation in the Archives and people not wanting to get involved, which was Martin’s theory. His logic—that nobody had seemed to know what was going on down there when Gertrude was Archivist either—was sound, anyway, but there was a part of her that was skeptical, and a part of her that wondered if it was engineered somehow.
If Peter Lukas believed things were “running smoothly”, he either hadn’t paid attention to anything he couldn’t watch on CCTV or had his own reasons for wanting the Archives to be in chaos. It hadn’t been two weeks after they got back from the Unknowing before the first attack happened, all the lights going out at once and the shadows starting to move. They’d fought it back easily enough, but there had been another just before Martin’s birthday, and then another, and then another. All told, the one they’d just survived had been lucky number thirteen, and for a minute, Basira had been sure it would be the one to finish them. If not for Melanie, it probably would have been. And Martin had used so much energy trying to protect them—Sasha had massively downplayed what he’d done, but she was probably trying to keep Gerard from blowing a gasket—that the only reason Basira didn’t think he was likely to die was that Gerard hadn’t called him on it.
They couldn’t keep this up forever. Sooner or later someone was going to get killed. Martin was probably the only person Basira really cared enough about to mind if he died, but she also knew that he’d never get over it if someone else died on his watch. Even if it was her.
She didn’t have much of an illusion that the others would even notice.
“This can’t keep happening,” Tim said, and Basira wondered briefly if he was reading her mind before deciding that, no, he just happened to be thinking the same thing. “They’re getting worse all the time.”
“I don’t control the other Fears, Tim. I…barely have any influence over ours, let alone…anything that could remotely be termed control.” Martin was slowly regaining his breath, but he still sounded incredibly weak. “I might have a few powers, but…I’m not really all that powerful. Comparatively. Just enough to be annoying.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Gerard muttered. He still hadn’t let go of Tim. “There’s got to be a way to make these attacks stop.”
“Open to suggestions, Ger.”
Gerard sighed, sounding exasperated. “Can we start with why? Do we have any idea why all these attacks are happening—or why they’re this bad? They weren’t exactly uncommon under Gertrude, but not like this, I don’t think.”
Martin considered that. “Maybe. Not like we’d have…known upstairs.”
“You know the answer to that,” Melanie snapped. She still hadn’t made any real attempt to break out of Sasha’s hold, and Basira knew she could if she really wanted to. “You said yourself, she disrupted every ritual she could come up with, and the Eye’s one of the only ones that hasn’t attempted yet. Stands to reason they’re trying to stop us from getting one off too.”
“That—makes sense,” Jon said slowly. “If the Eye remakes the world in its own image before the others get a chance, they’ll be rather put out. And how do we know that isn’t why Gertrude kept trying to stop them? Maybe Elias did kill her to keep her from starting the Watcher’s Crown.”
“She was trying to avoid being part of it,” Gerard said, a little uncertainly.
“So she told you. Are you sure she wasn’t lying?”
Martin rubbed his forehead hard, grimacing. “Can we please stop asking questions for a bit? At—at least until I can keep from Knowing the answers better?”
The way Melanie and Jon looked at that was the final straw for Basira. She turned on her heel and strode out of the Archives, secure in the knowledge that nobody was paying enough attention to her to even see her leaving, let alone stop her.
Martin was right. He wasn’t that powerful, in the grand scheme of things, and the powers he did have weren’t really all that helpful in a fight. He wasn’t omniscient any more than Elias was, couldn’t just Know attacks were going to happen, and had to concentrate even to know what a single opponent was doing, let alone all of them. And he didn’t have the skill set to keep things from attacking in the first place.
There was one person that did, though.
Manal wasn’t at her desk when Basira hit the main floor. She didn’t know if it was because she was off on an errand or because it was now so late that everybody else in the Institute had gone home, since she felt like there wasn’t another soul in the building besides her and the crew in the Archives, but she didn’t care. The important thing was the door behind Manal’s desk. If the office wasn’t occupied, she would damn well wait until it was. As she got closer, though, she could sense—no idea how, maybe the same instinct she’d had as a police officer—that there was someone in there. Without breaking stride, she barged her way in.
“You have to stop this,” she said without preamble.
The man who had been scanning the shelves for something turned to her with a benign smile. He looked much as he had the first time she had seen him—tall and austere, with fine white hair and a mustache to match and between them a pair of the darkest blue eyes she’d ever seen—except that he had changed out his vaguely naval uniform for the most inoffensive, boring black suit possible and seemed inordinately delighted by it.
“Stop what, Basira?” he asked mildly.
Basira folded her arms over her chest. “You’re the head of the Institute. That means you have a responsibility. You can stop all these attacks.”
“Oh?” Peter Lukas raised his thick but finely sculpted eyebrows into his hairline, but he didn’t look like he was challenging her, the way Elias would have—more like the idea had never occurred to him before and he found it intriguing. “Can I, do you think?”
“Yes.” Basira took a deep breath—and took a risk. “Elias could have. He chose not to, but he could easily have made the things stop bothering the Institute. Nothing would dare attack the Institute directly if he forbade it, I bet.”
It worked. The look of jealousy and pride that flickered through Peter’s eyes told her she’d judged him right; he was competitive and ruthless and would stop at nothing to be the best. If she lured him in with the idea that Elias might have been better than him at something, he’d instantly do it. The fact that he instantly suppressed it, though, told her that she’d also been right in her thinking. This wasn’t going to come free.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I certainly can protect the Institute…or at least the Archives. I think that may be the most vulnerable part, don’t you agree? But…” He sighed theatrically. “That is the Archivist’s job, is it not?”
“The Archivist is strong enough to protect his people.” Maybe, Basira added silently. For now. “But the Archives? That needs more. That needs you.” She bit her lip, then said the words she knew she would work, but would also commit her to this path. “I’ll do whatever you need me to. Whatever you ask. Just…make it stop.”
Peter studied Basira for a long moment, probably assessing how serious she was. “Well. I could use a personal assistant. Are you prepared for what that might entail?”
Basira shrugged. “What do I have left to lose?”
“Yes.” Peter drew out the word slowly. He looked her over for a moment, then smiled. “Well, then, Basira…we have ourselves a deal. Your assistance—with everything I need at the Institute—in exchange for your, ah, colleagues’ safety.”
He held out his hand.
Basira hesitated. Something told her this would be even more binding than the contract she’d signed under duress. Once more she would be sacrificing herself for someone else, and it wasn’t even the partner she’d depended on, just a bunch of people who probably wouldn’t even have a clue what she’d done for them.
But as she’d said…what did she really have left to lose?
She reached out, making an effort to be absolutely sure she didn’t tremble, and accepted the handshake.
“It’s a deal.”