Chapter Text
“I think this is probably where I’m leaving you. Someone else will pick up the car.”
Bond nodded. “Then I’ll see you later.”
“Thank you.” Q paused. “There’s something I want you to know before I go in. Just in case.”
Bond gave him a quizzical look. Q shoved up his cardigan sleeve, unbuttoned his shirt cuff, and pulled it back.
“Nobody else knows I have this. But if anything happens, I need someone to tell my mum, and if I’m right—you know, with my guess—” Q shook his head. Then he pulled out his keychain, and turned on a miniature blacklight, shining it on his arm.
“My family isn’t originally English,” he said. “We came here from Austria in the spring of 1942. My great-grandparents and my grandfather were on a train to a so-called ‘temporary relocation settlement’ when my great-grandfather pushed the other two off the train in the middle of the night. How they didn’t get shot I have no idea. They never saw him again, but my uncle found him in the records, after. In the 1960s.”
Bond’s response was quiet, grim. “Which camp was he in?”
“Bergen-Belsen. His name was Ariel.”
“You were named after him?”
Q nodded. “They say it’s a blessing. That carrying on the name means getting the best qualities of that person. But it’s never really felt like my name, you know. It’s quite a big shadow to live in. It’s why I’m always using other names. Sooner or later you’d think I’d find one that fit.”
Bond reached out and ran a finger over the glowing number visible among what, in daylight, looked like nothing but a faint scar. Stitches, maybe, or a bad fall from a bike.
“This was his number.”
“Yes.” Q shifted. “My grandfather used to tell me all the time, no matter what I was doing, always have an escape route planned. That the reason his father didn’t make it off the train was because he didn’t plan, he just pushed. I always have. I’ve always, always had a plan. If I’ve ever even come close to forgetting, all I have to do is look at my own skin to know what can happen if I don’t. But the only clue I have to where I’m going is Radish’s last transmission and all it tells me is I’m probably going to Parliament. I have no idea what’s going to happen there. I can’t make an escape plan.” He met Bond’s eyes. “I’m scared shitless, Bond. I never leave myself unprepared. Never.”
“That’s why you won’t take off your glasses in company. Not even to sleep.”
“That’s why.” Q took the light away from his arm. “There it is. The last tattoo. You’re the only person alive who’s seen all five of them. If it goes wrong, if I don’t get out, I need you to tell my parents I didn’t forget. I might not be the most shining example, but I know where I came from.”
“I’ll promise, if you’ll promise to do everything in your power to make sure I don’t have to.”
“Believe me, I will.”
Bond held out a hand. “Good luck, 007. Ariel.” He paused. “Q.”
“Thank you.” Q took the hand, shook it. Then he slipped out of the car. Radish’s last transmission had come in a few minutes after they crossed London Bridge—Natalie Portman’s recitation of remember, remember, the fifth of November. After some brief discussion, they’d agreed the long pause between messages was intel gathering.
Q strode into the gallery, remembering the last time he’d been there with Bond—five and a thousand years ago. They hadn’t met yet. He hadn’t yet killed a man with nothing but a knife, hadn’t traveled to the country that killed his family, hadn’t been witness to casualties he was responsible for. He’d barely established himself in Q Branch and he’d worn a heavy suit jacket under his parka to help obscure the firearm he was still excited to be carrying.
He’d said goodbye, in a way. The Fighting Temeraire had kept silent sentinel company with him for more hours than anyone might have considered healthy during the summer he heard a plane go down and an I love you, don’t you ever forget that played back from a flight recorder, and meeting the first part of his new life there had felt like an appropriate farewell to mourning.
He hadn’t gone to see Sunflowers that summer. Or on his visit to meet Bond.
But he knew where Radish was sending him, and he was completely unsurprised to see a woman in a bright turquoise sari standing in front of the painting, a red purse at her feet, gazing at the flowers like she’d found all the secrets of the world in them.
“Between you and me,” she said, as Q stepped up beside her, “in 100 words, where do you think Van Gogh rates in the history of art?”
“To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.” Q glanced at her. Rao glanced back.
“007,” she said. He gave her a tiny nod.
“Q.”
She put an arm around his waist. “I would like to not be questioned on suspicion of making a drug deal, so I’m afraid for a few minutes I have to ask you to be my boyfriend.”
“As long as I haven’t got to buy you drinks and steal your jewelry,” Q said. Rao laughed. “Good, Bond’s the only one I have to teach some basic proper British culture to.”
“My son loves Eleven,” Rao told him. “We used to watch every week together.”
Q gave her a startled look. “You can’t have a teenager, Rao, you’re not old enough.”
“I was seventeen when he was born. Just after I left India. It’s a very long story. Maybe I’ll tell you, after all this is over.” She looked up at the painting again. “We haven’t been able to find a link to the group you named,” she said. “But we did turn up some very worrying heat signatures below Westminster. Far below Westminster. I spoke with some MI5 seniors today and apparently there are Roman tunnels under there, not completely sealed off. You’ll be making a rendezvous at Charing Cross station with an agent named Jackson. He’ll get you into the tunnels. We’ll need all available information on what you find there.”
“I have to work with Five?” It wasn’t a whine. Q had too much dignity to whine about work.
“I’m afraid it’s protocol. You’re on British soil and you suspect the threat itself comes from a domestic source. I’ve been assured the new head is quite a lot more amenable than C was.”
“But it’s Five.”
“But it’s protocol,” Rao mimicked back at him. “Your kit is in my bag. You have the contacts again. When I leave I’ll be taking the car with Bond. He’ll have the headset.”
“Thank you.” Q paused. “I do feel like I have to caution you about wearing something this eye-catching for a public meeting.”
“No,” Rao said. “Exactly the opposite. I wore this because of you. ‘Let yourself be underestimated,’ you always say. People walking past us will see my clothes and hear my accent and think I can’t be well-educated enough or speak enough English to be any kind of a threat. They will just see a stupid Indian woman who married an Englishman to improve her life.”
Q gave her a one-armed hug. “They’re idiots.”
“You know they are idiots, and M knows, and Q Branch knows. That’s good enough for me.”
“I’d much rather everyone know you’re one of the cleverest women I’ve ever met and I’ve never regretted making you my second, not for a single instant. But you’ve got a point about it being good camouflage.”
Rao smiled at him. “Thank you.” She sighed and reached into her bag, pulling out a pair of cases.
“Your gun,” she said. “The knife you used in Pripyat. I sent it down to R&D and they replaced the brace to get rid of the bloodstains. We’ll need to develop something that doesn’t have to be replaced every time, but for now it’s just the kind you can buy at a chemist’s, it’s too cheap to even be pocket change against the budget. The contacts. And a pair of babelfish.”
“One to you, one to Bond?”
“Yes. Your tracker is still active, but it was damaged in Pripyat. Try not to make me need it, I couldn’t figure out how to get a hypodermic needle in here.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
“Good luck. I’m not so concerned about the equipment in your hands. But try to bring you back in one piece.”
“I will.” Q bent and kissed her cheek, equal parts we’re-just-partners cover and genuine affection. Rao returned the gesture.
“I have to go home,” he said. “Throw the computer in the bathtub. Once this is all over it’ll have to be turned in for data extraction, but let’s get through the mission first. I’d like to see them try to remotely reconnect from a soaked motherboard.”
“How long to meet Jackson? I will pass it on.”
“Half an hour to 45 minutes. Just depends which trains I catch.”
“Good. When all of this is over I expect some very good tea for making me worry, 007. Inshallah we’ll drink it together.”
“It’ll be my pleasure,” he said, and gave her one last squeeze before walking away, stowing the cases in his bag. He stopped off in the toilet to drop the contacts in his eyes and gear up, slipping his shoulder holster carefully under his shirt. He might lose buttons if he had to draw quickly, but he could always shoot through the fabric if the buttons didn’t give. He checked his babelfish— Bond online, Fletcher and Alo online— and slipped back into the gallery.
His hands felt empty, on the train. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten on without two cups of coffee, the previous day’s empty being slid into his bag as Victoria handed him toast, nor when he’d last been on with actual seats available. Still—better empty, the quicker to get inside.
His lock stuck terribly, but he managed it at last, with a mental note to pick up some three-in-one. The first big autumn storm was incoming; people thought humidity only affected wooden doors, but it was Q’s experience that anything that slid, pulled, or unlocked could get cantankerous with a change in the weather. He tossed his keys on the foyer table and made for the living room.
The computer was not off, he noted, as he stepped in. Damned clever—Peter had shown computers could be remotely shut off through the program, but Q’d never thought about the reverse. He slipped out of his shoes, trying not to relish the feel of his own familiar throw rug on his socked feet. He wasn’t home yet, not really, but once this was done—he might even be lucky enough to come back tonight, with the cats, and in time for supper.
His gaming rig was also on.
Q felt his breath catch. The gaming rig wasn’t connected to the work computer. There was no need for it to be—he didn’t even use the internet on it for anything but Steam and his Pandora’s Bag account. It couldn’t have been turned on remotely. And he hadn’t left it on—indeed, he’d pulled the plug on it, because while he’d been correct in telling Radish that a modified CD-ROM drive did in fact work as a third cooling fan, he did have some concerns over what might happen if there was a power surge while he was away.
Someone had been in his house.
Q grabbed the work laptop. It was a tough old thing, hand-built to be better than any standard-issue IBM, but it was still a laptop. One good slam on the desk and they’d be piecing the hard drive together for months.
A familiar click, and a cylinder of pressure at the small of his back, froze him.
“Drop it.”
The voice was feminine, and decidedly English, and colder than he’d ever heard it. Q felt his entire racing train of thought derail horribly just before the station.
“I—what?”
“I said drop it. Gently. Be a good boy, and put it back on the desk, or I take out two 007s with the same gun.”
Q set the computer down with hands that felt like they were decidedly not his own. “Victoria?”
The voice didn’t sound like his either, but the laugh was undeniably hers.
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you? But you’re not. Not at all.” The barrel of the gun dug deeper into his spine. “I was stunned he didn’t recognize me on the train, even from a different angle. Of course, before that he’d only seen me in an evening gown.” She let out a humorless chuckle. “And out of it. But I suppose that part isn’t really news to you, is it? If I say I had him on his back twice in one night?”
Q heard a breathless son of a bitch of recognition through the babelfish. Victoria grabbed his arm just above the elbow in an iron grip.
“The second one was more fun,” she commented. “Although I think he does enjoy brunettes. I was a brunette then, you know. Green eyes. He certainly has a type. Does it still work? I’ve heard conflicting reports on what happens when you’ve been paralyzed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Q tried to put together the pieces, the cheerful blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman from the train with a brunette in an evening dress and a gun and what did she know about Six--
The muzzle of the gun left his back just long enough for its wider, heavier butt to slam into the side of his head. Q stumbled as the gun returned to its spot.
“I was hoping to save this for November fifth,” Victoria commented. “For the symbolism, you know. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen. Instead you’re going to follow my directions, very carefully, if you’d like to keep living. Do you understand?”
Q gave a brittle nod, grateful Moneypenny had the cats. He had the feeling he’d be joining Bond in a wheelchair shortly, if he didn’t bleed out first. Victoria traced the gun barrel almost lovingly up his spine.
“Good. You’re going to pick up that computer you were about to brutalize, and you’re going to very carefully close it. Let it go to sleep, Ari, don’t turn it off.”
Q felt a shiver run down his spine. “My name is Levi.”
He didn’t see the eyeroll, but he could feel it, nonetheless. “Let’s not beat around the bush, shall we? I know your name is Ariel. If I hadn’t been able to get it out of Trevor with a simple question it still wouldn’t have been that difficult. I’m sure you know how much he talks in his sleep.” She tapped his shoulder with the gun. “Of course, Ari is what he called you, not what everyone else does, with your stupid aliases and joke names. Pick up the computer. If I have to kill people to get out of this flat, I will.”
“Comply,” Q heard Bond say in his ear. “You’ve got the babelfish and a tracker and I’ve got video. We’ll find you.”
Q gathered the computer into his arms. Victoria stepped part of the way around him, the gun pressed to his neck, and it was true--the flush-faced blonde he’d known from the train was gone, except for her eyes. She was made up in high fashion, red hair up in a twist, back in the blouse she’d been wearing in Kyiv when he’d seen her only in profile at a distance and identified her as Trevor’s wife.
“Outside,” she ordered. “There’s a white car parked in front of your neighbor’s. You’re going to get in the back. If you try to run, I promise you I will put a bullet in your fruity little brain before you get three steps away. I wouldn’t doubt me, if I were you. You’re not the only one with MI6 training.”
Q went, desperately scanning his memory for faces from Q Branch that might match Victoria’s--Trevor’s wife in expensive makeup, the woman on the train without even a whisper of eyeshadow--and felt a tickle in the back of his mind. She’d worked there, at some point. Not anymore. They’d met no more than once or twice before she was gone.
He slid into the back of the car. Victoria slid in next to him. There was a driver in the front seat, and as Victoria buckled her seatbelt Q watched the driver hit the button for the child safety locks before they pulled away.
Shit.
“It’s been quite an interesting year, don’t you think?” Victoria asked. “All those agent deaths. Department suicides. And now here we are. You as a 00 agent. Six really must be in absolute shambles. Not that I’m surprised. This would never have worked under the old M, you know. Mallory’s an idiot. Of course he kept you on, so that shouldn’t be a surprise.” She reached into her coat. “There is one last thing, by the way,” she said, and moved so quickly Q barely had time to turn his head before the needle plunged into his neck. “It really would take all the fun out of the game to let you see where we’re going.”
Q clawed at the needle. Victoria grabbed his wrist and squeezed as she depressed the plunger.
“Good night, Ari,” she said, and as Q slid rapidly down a slippery path into unconsciousness he felt her lift his glasses from his face.
————————————
The first thing he was aware of was the humming. Quiet and dreamy, it reminded him faintly of Rao singing Bollywood standards softly to herself while she tinkered with things in the lab. This particular hum wasn’t in the sweet and unusual keys he associated with things like Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, though—in fact it was almost familiar in a different kind of way, like he’d heard it growing up, a folk song or some pop standard.
The second thing came as soon as he opened his eyes and realized his glasses weren’t in his hand.
“I can’t see.” The words came out wobbly, broken, and Q was alarmed by how quickly he was on the verge of tears. The humming stopped.
“Of course not,” said a voice to his right: Victoria. “And you can’t move and very soon none of that will matter.” He heard the patter of her fingers on his keyboard. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this. You stood me up last week, after all.”
Q turned his head, trying to find at least her shape, but the room was too dark—too dark by far, lit only from somewhere below them. He glanced back in the other direction, feeling his heart speed up even as his breath shortened.
“I can’t see,” he said again. She ignored him, but a voice picked up in his ear: Bond.
“I can. About time you’re awake. Calm down.”
Q tried. Tried to think about Rao and Fletcher and Alo in the cage triangulating him, gathering data. All hands on deck: the traitor wasn’t among them anymore. She’d left Q Branch, probably five years ago when he’d come on. Maybe she’d been part of the exodus after M died, even. He tried to imagine Radish and Thompson pulling up maps and finding a route to him, Mallory almost certainly beside them. He had no way of knowing how long he’d been out, but they had to be coming for him soon, if they weren’t already en route. And he could feel the press of his gun against his side and the brace on his wrist—he had weapons. All he needed was an opportunity. And his glasses.
None of it helped. Neither did Rao in his other ear: “007, we have extraction en route. You have to get that laptop. She’s using it for remote detonation.”
007. That’s me. It isn’t me, really, but it has to be, because I’m the only one here and I can’t move my hands and I can’t fucking see.
“Are you asthmatic?” Victoria sounded outright mocking. Q thought he smelled smoke even through the haze of hyperventilation. “If you are you might be dead before I’m done here. That would be a shame. I’ve already had to cut short the time I wanted to spend with you.”
“Get her to run her mouth,” Bond urged. “Fucking--do what you used to do, on the comms. You’re good at it. If she’s talking she’s not working. Make her fight to concentrate. And look around. You can’t see, but I can.”
“I can’t see,” Q whispered. “I can’t--”
“Stall for time, 007,” Rao said. “We need fifteen minutes.”
Q didn’t mean to start crying. He wasn’t even sure he was crying, exactly. It might have been the smoke.
“Ariel,” said Bond. “Ariel, I need you to look around. Start to your left and sweep your quadrants.” He paused. “You’re not staying on the train.”
It shouldn’t have been a comforting phrase, and yet Q found himself taking a deep breath and blinking twice before following Bond’s instructions--top left, bottom left, bottom right, top right.
“You know,” he said, grateful the waver was slowly leaving his voice. “I have to say the view in here isn’t fantastic, but from what I can make out I absolutely hate what you’ve done with the place. The lighting’s wretched, no art, not even a life-sized cutout of Pierce Brosnan to be properly distracting.”
“Shut up,” Victoria said. She sounded like his attempted taunt was no more than a fly buzzing past her ear. Q tried again.
“This is quite disappointing, really. I thought being 007 was supposed to be showier than this. I’ve been kidnapped without being allowed a proper fight and being tied to a table is incredibly reminiscent of the worse class of 1960s horror films--”
“I said shut up, ” Victoria said, and this time Q could hear an undertone of irritation.
“You’re in zip ties,” Bond said. “Cheap ones, it looks like. You might rub your wrists raw getting out of there, but you should be able to do it.”
“Focus on getting your knife free,” Rao advised. “The brace will give you added leverage.”
“And to top it all off,” Q said, raising his voice ever so slightly to cover the rasp of the brace against the zip tie, “this is the most boring hideout on earth. It’s tiny and there are no lights and I’m pretty sure there’s not one single minion in here running round to do your evil bidding. Just you and me and a computer. How extremely 1990s hacker of you. All it’s missing is a basket of used tissues.”
“I’ll knock you out again,” Victoria threatened. “Not that there’s much you can do. I know you’re already thinking of how you can get out. You can’t.”
“Then maybe you’d be so kind as to tell me where you’re planning for me to die?”
“With pleasure.” Victoria clicked some keys with a flourish. “You’re in the East Buxton Lime Kiln and I’ll be leaving in about three minutes, before the exit is cut off. You won’t be.”
Q was reasonably sure the sudden tightness in his chest wasn’t smoke. Bond swore.
“007, eight minutes to extraction,” Rao said. “Try to get free.”
Q tried to even out his breathing. You’re getting off the train, Ariel, you’re getting off the train.
“Right,” he said. “That’s not subtle. Any particular reason?”
Victoria’s hands stilled on the keyboard. Q heard heavy footfalls as the zip tie splintered, and then Victoria slammed her hands on either side of his head.
“Because you took my job, you filthy kike, and then you filled my department with people from all over Europe, with Indians, meeting some kind of forced-diversity quota instead of keeping England first in your mind, and it never occurred to you even once, did it, that there was an R who was ready to move into that job? That men who don’t even know where their cocks belong shouldn’t be charged with the security of all of England?”
His predecessor’s R. He’d been there less than a week before her resignation had crossed his desk. She’d been a brunette then, too. One in overlarge glasses and severe makeup even Q had known was well out of date. A complete chameleon, he thought, flexing his wrist. No wonder Bond hadn’t spotted her.
“Bad enough they went outside to hire instead of moving me up,” she hissed. “After I spent eight years training for it. But then you came in, and first thing you had one of those stupid little evil-eye Jew hands hanging over the office door—” She grabbed his wrists and squeezed. Q waited for her to feel the nearly-snapped zip tie, but she was too deep in a rage to notice. “And then. And then. You had that cuntish little coffee girl doing systems setup— I tink dot’s everytink until ze internet is reconnected, kyew,” she said, in a grossly mangled imitation of Rao’s accent. “She already knew her place, and you decided to take her out of it. I’ve seen the files, Ari, you made her R. You walked away from a more than qualified, more than competent, actually-English technician—”
“You walked away,” Q corrected. He turned his head and coughed so hard he thought he might have to spit. “If M didn’t move you up, then you weren’t ready. I would have trained you. You could have been sitting in the cage right now. This was your choice.”
Victoria slapped him, and he let his head roll.
“She’s got some kind of oxygen apparatus,” Bond said. “Oral. She bites down and she can breathe. You have to get it.”
“Five minutes to extraction,” Rao said. “I know who she is.” There was a stroke of bitterness in her voice. “Her name here was Gemma Adams.”
“I won’t be sitting in ‘the cage’,” she hissed. “Some people would give up. I found help. Other people who see you and your little popularity club for what you really are, who want to get rid of the vermin on our streets and make this country what it used to be. I don’t need to be Q. Once the new Parliament is called, I’ll be M. And there won’t be anywhere on earth your freakish little boyfriend can hide from me.”
Q knew deeper breaths were probably a mistake, but shallow ones weren’t cutting it anymore. “You married my boyfriend.”
“And from what I saw in Kyiv, you certainly moved on quickly.”
He didn’t laugh. He couldn’t afford to laugh—his chest hurt, and he could hear the beginning crackles of a fire gone from small to the edges of dangerous. But he did grin, and it was wild enough he heard her gasp.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s why you didn’t become Q. You’ve got to be able to read the room. I’m an absolute shit actor and you still fell for that?”
“What?” It was almost a shriek. “I saw you, I saw you—” Her attention shifted. “Time to go.”
“Yes,” Q agreed. “It is.”
The last few strands of the zip tie split like a tree in a gale as he snapped open the knife and threw his arm around her in what would have been a rib-crushing bear hug if there hadn’t been a razor-sharp blade on his wrist. As it was, she screamed directly into his ear as he felt the slide of metal through skin and sinew. He yanked his arm free and tugged on his still-ziptied hand, pulling it far enough away from the table to snap the tie with the knife and slapping the knife’s edge on the table to snap it shut again before groping rapidly to his right. Victoria was shrieking and staggering away from him, but even without his glasses, she wasn’t fast enough--he tangled his fingers in her shirt, smacked at her face, found her oxygen and pulled it away. He jammed the mouthpiece in between his teeth and inhaled a deep lungful of blessedly-clean air.
And then he stopped short.
Now fucking what?
“Three minutes, 007, get the laptop,” Rao urged. Q felt Victoria claw at him and slapped at her with the back of his arm to knock her away.
“I don’t have my fucking glasses,” he said, and heard the waver creep back into his voice as a trickle of sweat ran down his back. He might be able to destroy the laptop, although it was questionable if that was enough.
I’m staying on the train. I’m staying on the train because she took my fucking--
“Ariel, workstation is at your two,” Bond said. “About three meters. Laptop, three guns. There’s a bag next to the table.”
Q hurried to the table and found the laptop, snapping it shut and scrambling for the bag. He slid the laptop inside and swept his hands over the table, searching for the guns. He’d dumped two of them into the bag when an arm slid around his throat. His fingers splayed, and there-- the last one.
“Good luck,” Victoria rasped in his ear. He could hear the bubble of blood in her lungs. “They don’t shoot. Such high-quality work from our faggot of a Quartermaster.”
Q turned his head to take the pressure off his windpipe. “They don’t work for you,” he said, and threw a leg backward around her to jerk her off her feet. “But thanks for the information, because these darlings sing for me.”
He wondered, in a far-distant part of his mind that was still totally detached and rational, which 00’s gun was in his hands. Too big to be Two’s or Six’s; Eight’s had come home. Nine’s? Perhaps Bond’s? He rather hoped it was, as he snapped the grip forward and slid his thumb against the ID lock beneath.
He had no idea where his first two shots went, but the third one hit Victoria somewhere, based on her screaming. He dropped the gun in the bag and threw the strap over his shoulder.
“Around the workstation, go right,” Bond said. “The only way out is down and you have to be fast as hell. The upper walkways are rusted out.”
“Stairway or ramp?” Q sprinted over the open meshwork of what had to be some kind of maintenance platform with far more speed than anyone who knew his unaided sight might expect.
“Stairs. There’s a railing. Don’t trust it.”
“Got it,” Q agreed, and when his shoulder bounced off a hard piece of concrete he turned and shuffled quickly until he found the steps. “How many?”
“Can’t tell,” Bond said. Q threw himself forward anyway. “You’re four from the bottom now. Walkway goes around the kiln. You’ll hit a ramp.”
“Tell me when I’m close,” Q panted. He heard a creak: the metal beneath his feet, preserved but not replaced, and not ready for the heat of a lit kiln.
“Ramp,” Bond said. “Steep.”
Q made it three steps down and fell. He slid the rest of the way and yanked himself back to his feet.
“There are steps--fuck! Stop!”
Q stopped at once. He could hear Victoria above and behind him--shot, stabbed, but still going--but Bond was his eyes, Rao had the blueprints that spoke of ramps and staircases but Bond was the one with the vision to say no way out but down. It occurred to him that there they still were, 007 and his Quartermaster, but reversed--Q the one running from a firefight, Bond the voice in his ear.
“Missing ramp section,” Bond said. “I think the cables snapped with the heat. You’re too high to jump.”
“How far is it?”
“Probably still ten meters down--”
“How far across?”
“A little more than a meter, but you can’t--”
Q backed up. “Tell me when I’ve got a meter and a half in front of me and don’t fuck up, Bond, I can hear her. It’s hot in here.”
“You’ve got--what the hell are you doing?”
“Thought I told you I learned parkour for an ARG,” Q said. He filled his lungs twice with clean air and ran. “Edge alert!”
“Jump now!”
Q springboarded off the edge and felt metal tear into his hands on the opposite side. Blood ran down his palm, slicking his grip. Bond swore again.
Oh, this is going to hurt.
Q ignored the pain in his palm and rocked his weight--back, forth--and swung one leg up in the kind of arc that had led Radish, once upon a time, to proclaim him as having double-jointed everything. He rolled onto the walkway and staggered to his feet.
“Keep going,” Bond urged. “Another staircase coming up. You have three more rounds to go. Come on, Ariel, you can’t slow down now.”
The bag bounced against Q’s back as he ran. There was a scream behind him, and then below him: Victoria, he guessed, had found the hole.
“Extraction pulling in, 007, get out of there!” Rao’s voice cut in. Q stuttered down the flight of stairs, ran across the walkway, slammed into something warm and solid--Victoria, landed on the walkway rather than falling directly into the fire, probably, he thought. He hip-checked her aside and kept going.
“One more ramp to the ground, Ariel, go on!”
Q had a vague, nonsensical thought--that Bond was watching the world’s most immersive action movie, and then shame it’s got such a shitty star, ought to be Chris Evans or someone--and then he felt his feet settle onto rough concrete instead of metal mesh.
“Follow the wall, follow the wall! The door’s around the other side, don’t go across, the fire--Jesus, Ariel, cover your face,” Bond said. Q seized the hem of his jumper in both hands, ignoring the flare of pain from his torn skin, and yanked it up over his head, slapping at the wall with one hand as he went until the texture changed.
The door.
He threw himself through it just as he heard a pair of bullets--not behind him, he’d taken the guns Victoria had never been able to use anyway, but through the babelfish--and then the slam of something heavy into the door. He yanked off his jumper.
“Turn--shit!--turn left,” Bond said. There was another pair of shots. “You’re coming out the front, we’re at your eleven, get in the backseat.”
Q spit out the oxygen mouthpiece and heard a bullet whistle by him. There was a white-hot flare of pain in his calf.
“In front of you!”
Q slapped forward and found a car door handle, and threw himself inside. A warm body jumped beneath him. Q felt the video headset dig into his arm.
“I said back seat, but okay,” Bond’s voice said. “Get us the hell out of here, Moneypenny. I’ve got your spare glasses in the glove compartment once we’re clear.”
“007! The laptop!” Rao’s voice cut through the bullets. A hand reached between the seats and batted at Q’s shoulder as Bond shoved him toward the floor.
“Here, give it here, I will turn off!”
“Peter?”
“Yes! Give me computer!”
Q scrambled into the bag and yanked it out, passing it between the seats. Above him, he felt Bond trying to crane out the window. Moneypenny shot at something out the other side. Q fumbled for Bond’s seatbelt.
“I need leverage--”
“You’ve got leverage,” Q panted, and shoved Bond’s legs toward his chest. “Fucking turn yourself, Bond, I’m behind you.”
“What--ah.”
Q felt Bond slide an arm under his own knees and pivot, then lean forward--wrapping an arm around the headrest, probably. Q boosted himself onto the edge of the seat and leaned against Bond’s back.
There was a click. “Bullets.”
Q yanked the 642 out of his shirt. “Swap.”
Bond took the gun without protest. Q took Bond’s new Walther and dug into the bag for one of the other 00’s guns, trading the clips on muscle memory and hoping he had it facing the right way. “Here.”
Bond swapped him again. Q heard a delighted noise from the backseat.
“Programming for bomb, I have shut it off--”
Peter’s triumph ended in a sharp, birdlike cry as a window shattered. Q heard Moneypenny let out a loud shit!
“Peter?”
Only soft crying from the backseat, and then silence. Bond took three more shots--across a range of vehicles, Q thought, feeling the twist of his back muscles.
“You’re right,” he commented. “Those radiator shots are a nice little trick.”
“Is your backup there, 007, Bond, Moneypenny?” Rao’s voice. “They should be in sight.”
“Spotted,” Moneypenny said. “We need medical.”
“Right behind them,” Rao agreed. Q heard a vehicle go past them at a wild speed, and then another, and then their own vehicle swerved carefully to the side and slowed.
“Peter,” Q managed, and felt another shift in Bond’s back. He imagined Bond reaching out to touch Peter in the backseat.
“He’s breathing. I think he fainted.”
Q could hear the far-off shouts of extraction. Bond swung his legs sideways again.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll get your glasses.”
It occurred to Q that Victoria was still in the kiln. She’d probably passed out from the fumes, that close to the fire. Or the blood loss.
He didn’t hear the noise he made. He just heard the one in his head as realization finally sank in, and felt himself choke as he tried to breathe and caught on his own tears, and tried to claw his way out of the footwell.
“Okay, not with me in the seat,” Bond said. Q felt a pair of arms wrap around him and lift him out of the footwell, and he threw himself into the body in front of him because he was shaking too hard to hold himself up. Bond put an awkward hand on his back and stroked it with the stiff motion of someone long out of practice.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You’re out. You know that, right? You’re out.”
Part of Q heard the words perfectly. That part was responding to absolutely nothing, buried under the roar of his own sobs and hammering heart.
“No,” he heard Bond say. “Civilian in the backseat. He was winged. I’m fine. Moneypenny?”
“I’m clear.”
Someone tried to pull Q out of the car. He dug his fingers into the fabric in front of him--probably Bond’s jacket. Although it might have been a shirt. What little color recognition he had without his glasses was functionally gone in a mess of tears.
“007--”
“Rosen,” Bond interrupted, as Q heaved an airless breath into his shirt. “Special Service Agent Rosen.”
The person trying to pull him out of the car didn’t question the correction. “Agent Rosen. We need to get you looked at.”
Q tightened his grip on Bond. They’d want him to identify her, want him to walk back in there--
“Ariel. We can’t get out at the same time and the...my chair won’t hold us both. He’s in shock,” Bond said, probably to the someone trying to pull Q out of the car. “Listen, medical are vampires, but you just spent a decent amount of time breathing carbon monoxide, you should probably at least take oxygen.” There was an awkward pause, and then a set of callused fingers ran through Q’s hair. “Come on. There’s injured and then there’s injured and you’re the second kind. I’ll be right behind you.”
Q let his fingers relax in the fabric of Bond’s shirt. The tech--someone from medical, apparently--reached in and folded a gentle set of fingers around his own before sliding an arm around his waist to coax him out. He didn’t protest.
“Extraction in progress, Q,” Q heard Moneypenny say behind him. “We’ll be en route shortly.”
--------------------------------------------------------
“He’s not going to be here.”
“Such a low opinion, after everything you’ve seen him do?” Mallory finished his scotch. “Really, Bond, I’d expect better of you.”
“I’d expect better of you,” Bond shot back. “He won’t be here because he’s probably not coming back at all after that, M. When we’re done establishing he’s not going to be here I’m stopping by his flat. I don’t know how he’s not on suicide watch.”
“I asked him if he wanted me to stay over his first night back,” Moneypenny said. “He asked me if I knew there were 614 holy commandments.”
“I’ve heard this one before,” Bond said. “613 in the Torah and the last one is ‘never give Hitler a posthumous victory’. You hear it all the time in the IDF.” He stretched. “All right. Maybe he doesn’t need suicide watch. But he’s still not going to be here.” He shot a glance at Mallory. “This was designed to break him. You do realize that. It was an attempted coup, yes, but the part he handled was literally designed to find all his buttons and push. There’s only so much one man can take. Especially without training.”
“I’m very aware of the toll it took on him,” Mallory answered. “And I assure you it wasn’t intentional, and MI6 will do everything in its power to ensure he receives the help he needs in order to bounce back. Although he did miss his psych check-in two days ago. I hope that isn’t something he learned from you.”
There was a soft knock at the door. Tanner stepped in.
“It’s 007.”
Q limped in, shoulders down. His voice was quiet.
“I’m sorry I’m late. I forgot how long a walk it is when you’re not taking the Tube.”
None of them said you could have called a car. Mallory took in the kind of deep preparatory breath that normally began a dressing-down of epic proportions. Q held out an envelope.
“I should give you this first.”
Mallory slit the envelope. His eyebrows raised.
“You’re tendering a resignation?”
“In the last year, five 00 agents were taken out of commission. A sixth is expected to require long-term treatment and she may never reenter the field. The entire MI6 network was compromised. Three people in Q Branch died. And it’s because of me.” Q kept his eyes trained on Mallory’s desk, not looking at any of them. “I don’t understand why I haven’t been fired. So--I’m firing myself.”
“Bullshit,” Bond said. The strident tone shocked all of them, Q most of all--enough to jerk his eyes from the desk to Bond’s face. “If you hadn’t picked up the program from the Queen, Adams would have gotten it into the system some other way.”
“Bond, my tech failure is why you’re sitting in that chair.”
Bond’s lips pressed together. “No.”
“I went back over the logs. She shot you right outside the building. If you’d been able to get in--”
“I’m in this chair because your tech success kept MI6 secure.” Bond held up a hand, palm out. “I thought you knew about this.”
Q glanced at his hand. Then he did a double-take, and looked closer.
“Where are your fingerprints?”
“I melted them on the Walther. You never read the after-action report?” He turned accusingly to Mallory and Moneypenny. “You never made him read the report?”
“I thought he did,” Moneypenny told him. “He never misses his paperwork.”
Bond turned back to Q. “Adams asked me to walk her home the night we met. Said she thought she’d seen an old stalker at the party. She had a route planned, apparently, because I didn’t even realize we were at Six until we were literally at the door. I could have let her in and called for backup, but it would have proven a weakness in the building’s defense.”
“So you...what, discharged the gun?”
“We’d already taken a shot each. All she had to do was outlast my consciousness to force the lock. So--” Bond shrugged. “I simply decided not to leave her a password. There isn’t a single 00 agent who wouldn’t have made the exact same decision. Every one of us signed up knowing this might be the price we paid.” He fixed Q with a harsh gaze. “I was sure they would have told you during the investigation. I know you were suspended. If I’d known nobody bothered telling you I would have called you. Whether you wanted to talk to me or not.”
Q gave him a puzzled look. “Whether I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I thought you’d written me off because I got you shot.”
“An understandable idea except that’s the job, and you didn’t get me shot. I got me shot.” Bond paused. “And if I had to do it again knowing what I know now...” Q watched him take in a deep breath. “Knowing I’d never walk again. I would.” He glanced at the letter in Mallory’s hand. “Now, given that this last week you likely saved several million lives from a coup, the resulting civil unrest, and an attempt at mass ethnic cleansing, including locating a bunker of half a dozen political prisoners Six was able to liberate, are you going to take that back?”
Q glanced at Mallory, and then at Moneypenny. Mallory extended the envelope and its contents.
“If you’d like me to call in 008 and 006 to confirm what Bond’s just said, I can,” he said. “Both made similar decisions. Certainly you have some level of responsibility for what’s happened.” He sighed. “But so do I. We both have to live with the consequences of what we do in the name of safety for the majority.” He lowered the envelope a little. “If you do mean to fully tender your resignation, I’d ask you to wait a month. You can be placed on administrative leave. But I’d prefer not to part ways until you’ve undergone psych eval. Contrary to what Bond seems to think, I do actually prefer you alive and well.”
Q bit his lip. Then he held out a hesitant hand for the envelope.
“What happens now?”
“Now, this, if you’ll take it.” Mallory held out a small plastic badge. Q took it, read it over, nodded.
“I don’t know when I’ll be ready for the field again. If I ever am. I know I was scheduled for psych this week, but I--I couldn’t. Yet.” He looked down at the neat line of stitches across his palm. “I really wasn’t the person for this job.”
“Field work isn’t for everyone,” Moneypenny agreed. “But I’m going to say this as a former field agent, I think you might enjoy it. With a little more training and a few less Neo-Nazis.”
“Yes,” Q said. “Fewer Neo-Nazis would be nice.”
“I’m putting you on a minimum of two weeks’ leave,” Mallory said. “I won’t tell you not to spend your time in Q Branch--”
“But don’t try to take it back,” Q finished. “I won’t. I don’t know that I could. Rao has her R now and Fletcher’s excellent. They’ll be okay.” He offered up a smile, pale and crooked. “On the upside for me, no more budgetary meetings.”
Mallory gave him a short nod. “Are you ready to debrief?”
Q hesitated. Then he shook his head. “I can work on a report tonight. But I...I’m sorry. Sorry.”
“The first one’s always a bitch,” Moneypenny said. “Look on the bright side, Bond’s training you, you can always claim you didn’t learn the right way to do your paperwork.”
Q let out the same kind of hesitant squeak of laughter Bond had heard Moorehead give over the babelfish in Kyiv--the one that said this is inappropriate, the one that said am I allowed.
In this case, maybe, just give me time.
“I wouldn’t do that...to Q,” he said. “Filling out paperwork for other people is the absolute worst.”
Moneypenny and Mallory both glanced at Bond.
“If you’re expecting me to apologize, you can forget it,” he said. “You’re the one who kept filling it out.”
“I won’t let you copy off mine, either,” Q told him. Bond snorted.
“Sadist.” He pulled a small case out of his jacket. “Come here.” He paused. “Actually, don’t.” He wheeled forward instead. “You’re feeling that leg enough for both of us. Here.” He held out the case. “Old tradition.”
Q took the case, looked down at it, back at Bond. “Tradition?”
“When you get back from your first successful field mission, your trainer or handler gives you something. Just a reminder, really. You’ve got Six at your back every time you answer England’s call.”
Q looked back down at the box and let his fingers trace over the lid. When he looked up again there was an actual curiosity in his eyes.
“So what did you get? From Trevelyan? The real Trevelyan?”
Bond gave him a roguish smile and shot his cuffs. Q spotted the tiny gold and diamond ornaments through the link holes and rolled his eyes.
“Twenty years you’ve held onto those and you can’t keep a gun in one piece for five minutes.”
“I have a reputation to maintain. Go ahead. You don’t have to wait for Christmas. Chanukkah. Do you even have a holiday for gifts?”
“Chanukkah everywhere that insists on Christmas," Q told him. He took the lid off the box.
“I thought about a tie pin,” Bond said. “But it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d use.”
Q took the pen out of the box. “Is this a fountain pen?”
“Better than ballpoint on all counts,” Bond agreed. “And you can’t tell me you take all your notes on your computer. I’ve seen some of your schematics.”
Q’s smile was still crooked, but more genuine, and he turned it every way around to look at it before his mouth fell open. Moneypenny took a step toward him, distress on her face.
“It’s engraved.”
“Of course it is, what do you take me for?”
Q pulled the pen closer to his eyes, mouthing syllables.
“This is in Hebrew.”
“You’d be amazed what you can find people to do in London.”
“Do you know what it says?”
“I do.”
“What does it say?” Moneypenny asked. She glanced at Bond. “I know how bad your sense of humor is, but--”
“It’s not a joke,” Q said. “It’s--well--” He ran a thumb over it one last time before tucking the pen carefully into his shirt pocket. “It’s perfect, is what it is. Thank you.”
Bond held out a hand for Q to shake. “Congratulations. You were handed the shittiest first mission in MI6 history and you still got through it.”
“Well,” said Mallory. “I do hope you’ll be following up on that psych appointment you missed. And I’ll speak to you again in a few days for a full debrief.”
Q nodded. “Yes, sir.” He turned away.
“There is one last thing.”
Q turned back. “Yes?”
Mallory took a small paper out of the file on his desk. “Moorehead asked me to give you this. It is technically classified information, but you have the security clearance for it. All I ask is that you be sure it’s properly destroyed.” He met Q’s eyes. “And I think you’ll be happy to know ‘disabling a piece of ordnance big enough to destroy half the Thames’ qualifies as ‘a very good argument in favor of granting asylum’. I don’t know that he’ll be settled in London, at least not until the last of Petrenko’s part of this ring is broken up. But he will have a new life as a British citizen. And certainly plenty of legitimate work available to him.”
Q’s smile finally reached his eyes. “That’s enough. Thank you.”
He limped out the door. Mallory gave Bond a look.
“I told you to give him more credit.”
“I might have, if I’d known he wasn’t actively trying to be an ass. Excuse me.”
The carpet at Six was absolutely demonic, but Q was slowed down by the bullet wound in his leg, and Bond was able to catch up to him by the time he’d reached the lift.
“So,” he said. “New badge?”
Q unlooped the lanyard from his neck and let it dangle.
ROSEN, ARIEL, it read. Special Service Agent.
“I’d imagine he got my name from medical,” Q said. He paused. “It doesn’t actually bother me, now, I don’t think. Being Ariel.” He paused. “Do you know we did almost get burned in Kyiv?”
“Adams is dead, so I’d say we’re safe.”
“No,” Q said. “Not that. Trevor showed up at my flat two days ago and said he’d just been on holiday in Kyiv and--” A giggle escaped him as he pitched his voice up half an octave. “‘I saw this couple at a restaurant and one of them looked just like you, Ari, and I realized I made such a mistake. They looked so happy. I threw that away because I was afraid.’ He actually showed up and tried it.”
“Tell me you didn’t say yes.”
“Are you kidding? I told him it sounded like a personal problem and closed the door and then I laughed until I cried. If he was going to try something like that he should have at least picked less of a trite line. Christ.” The lift bell went off, and Q held the door for Bond to get inside.
“So now what will you do?”
Q sighed. “Call psych to make an appointment, I suppose. I’m supposed to go to Mum’s for the last day of Sukkot while the whole family’s there, but I don’t know if I can actually stand the drive right now. It’s three hours and just getting my car home from Six was wretched.”
Bond stared contemplatively at the lift doors.
“You know,” he said. “I got the strangest phone call this morning. From Q. Apparently Six decided it would be in the best interest of everyone, since I’m supposed to be training you, if I had an accessible vehicle.” He looked up at Q. “Someone apparently spent nights this week working on the Aston to put in hand controls. The video’s been wiped.”
“How strange,” Q commented.
“Indeed.” Bond looked back at the doors. “Where does your family live?”
Q let out a sheepish huff. “Leeds.”
Bond chuckled. “Don’t suppose you’d care to help me with a field test on the Aston.”
Q paused. “You actually want to spend three hours in a car with me.”
“It’s been almost a year since I got to terrorize you on the comms. If you’re going to insist on feeling guilty then I’m going to insist on being allowed.”
“I don’t think it’s exactly terrorizing me if I’m terrorizing you right back.”
“Then let’s go to Leeds. Your mother wants to feed you and your sister’s visiting.” The lift doors opened. Bond wheeled down the hall toward the Q Branch lift. “And I can take you home if you’re not taking the Tube.”
Q shook his head. “No. No, I--I don’t think I’ll be taking the Tube for awhile.” He paused. “I--have you had lunch, yet, actually? Because I’ve been living off sandwiches for the last four days. And--if you told the investigations board the same thing you told me, about the keypad, then you kept me out of a court martial. I owe you a meal.”
“I won’t say no,” Bond agreed. “I’ll meet you out front.”
Q nodded, and as the lift opened he made for the front doors. By the time Bond returned he was deep in the paper Mallory had handed him--written in tiny, precise Cyrillic, the slightly cramped and blocky writing of a true technician. Bond honked the horn, and Q slid into the passenger seat.
“You haven’t got a lighter with you, by chance, have you?”
Bond pulled one out of his pocket. Q folded the paper carefully in an arrow shape and touched the lighter to the corner, then held it out the window until the flames grew too high and he had to drop it.
“Anything interesting?”
“Yes,” Q said. He looked at Bond--fumbling a little with the controls, learning where everything sat, but doing it with the same assurance as any other new car--and Bond saw something hopeful in his eyes. Something that said I will come back. Maybe even I will heal. “His real name.”
“I’d tell you not to tell him yours, but I suppose if you end up debriefing with him at any point this week he’ll see it on your badge.”
“You know? I think I’m okay with that now.” Q pulled his pen back out of his pocket. “Am Yisrael Chai. You actually know what this means?”
“‘The people of Israel live’. I can’t read Hebrew script, but I know the words.”
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” Bond agreed. “Now pick a restaurant, Agent Rosen, or I’m going to.”
“Let’s see what kind of obnoxious places you know with really good fish,” Q said.
The corner of Bond’s mouth quirked, and he adjusted the rearview mirror.
“I think I know at least one,” he agreed, and they pulled away.